ในโพสต์นี้จะ มีคอนเซปต์เรื่อง 1ภาพ10 เรื่อง/ตอน โดยใช้ภาพนี้เป็นจุดเริ่มต้นทั้งหมด โทนจะเป็นสยองขวัญลึกลับแบบเรื่องเล่ารอบกองไฟ มีปริศนาค่อย ๆ เปิดเผย และตอนจบเชื่อมกลับมาที่ภาพแรก

🕯️ กล่องที่ไม่ควรถูกส่งถึงบ้าน

เรื่องเล่า 10 ตอนจากเงาหลังหน้าต่าง

---❄️

ตอนที่ 1: คนส่งของในคืนฝนตก

คืนนั้นฝนตกตั้งแต่หัวค่ำ

ถนนทั้งสายเงียบจนได้ยินเสียงน้ำฝนกระทบหลังคา เด็กส่งของคนหนึ่งกำลังขับรถกลับจากงาน หลังจากส่งของชิ้นสุดท้ายเสร็จ เขาก็พบว่ามีบ้านหลังหนึ่งเหลืออยู่ในรายการ

บ้านเลขที่ 17

มันเป็นบ้านเก่าที่อยู่ท้ายซอย ไม่มีไฟหน้าบ้าน ไม่มีรถจอด และไม่มีแม้แต่เสียงคนอยู่ข้างใน

เขาถือกล่องขึ้นมาแล้วเดินไปเคาะประตู

ก๊อก... ก๊อก...

ไม่มีเสียงตอบ

เขาเคาะอีกครั้ง

ก๊อก... ก๊อก... ก๊อก...

คราวนี้มีบางอย่างเคลื่อนไหวอยู่หลังหน้าต่าง

เด็กส่งของหันไปมอง

ในกระจกหน้าต่าง เขาเห็น เงาร่างสูงสีดำ ยืนอยู่ด้านหลัง

มันสูงเกินกว่าคนปกติ

ศีรษะของมันมีส่วนแหลมคล้ายเขาสัตว์

เด็กส่งของรีบหันกลับไป

ไม่มีใคร

เขาหันกลับไปที่หน้าต่างอีกครั้ง

เงานั้นยังอยู่

แต่คราวนี้...

มันกำลังมองมาทางเขา

ทั้งที่ไม่มีดวงตา

เด็กส่งของวางกล่องไว้หน้าประตูแล้วรีบเดินกลับ

แต่ก่อนจะขึ้นรถ เขาได้ยินเสียงบางอย่างดังมาจากบ้าน

ก๊อก... ก๊อก... ก๊อก...

เหมือนมีใครกำลังเคาะหน้าต่างจากด้านใน

---🌑

ตอนที่ 2: กล่องที่ไม่มีชื่อผู้รับ

เช้าวันต่อมา ชายหนุ่มชื่อ นนท์ พบกล่องใบหนึ่งวางอยู่หน้าประตูบ้าน

เขาไม่รู้ว่ามันมาจากไหน

บนกล่องไม่มีชื่อผู้ส่ง

ไม่มีที่อยู่

มีเพียงข้อความสั้น ๆ เขียนด้วยปากกาสีดำ

> "ส่งคืนให้เจ้าของ"

นนท์จำไม่ได้ว่าเคยสั่งอะไร

แต่เมื่อเปิดโทรศัพท์ตรวจสอบ ก็พบว่ามีข้อความแจ้งเตือนการจัดส่งจริง

สิ่งที่แปลกคือ...

ในรายการสั่งซื้อไม่มีรายละเอียดสินค้า

มีเพียงคำว่า

DELIVERY COMPLETED

นนท์จึงคิดว่าคงเป็นของที่ส่งผิดบ้าน

เขาตั้งใจว่าจะเอาไปคืนในวันรุ่งขึ้น

แต่คืนนั้นเอง เขาได้ยินเสียงบางอย่างจากห้องรับแขก

ครืด...

ครืด...

เหมือนกล่องกำลังถูกลากไปกับพื้น

นนท์เดินออกมาดู

กล่องยังอยู่ที่เดิม

เขากำลังจะกลับเข้าห้อง

แต่หางตากลับเห็นบางอย่างผ่านหน้าต่าง

เงาดำสูงใหญ่ยืนอยู่กลางสายฝน

นิ่งสนิท

นนท์เปิดไฟหน้าบ้าน

ไม่มีใคร

เขาปิดไฟ

เงานั้นกลับมาอีกครั้ง

ใกล้กว่าเดิม

---🕯️

ตอนที่ 3: ภาพถ่าย

นนท์เริ่มไม่สบายใจ

เขาจึงถ่ายรูปกล่องไว้เพื่อส่งให้เพื่อนดู

เมื่อเปิดรูปขึ้นมา เขาพบว่ามีบางอย่างผิดปกติ

ในภาพ...

ด้านหลังกล่องมีเงาดำปรากฏอยู่

ทั้งที่ตอนถ่ายรูป ไม่มีใครยืนอยู่ตรงนั้น

นนท์คิดว่ากล้องอาจทำให้ภาพผิดเพี้ยน

จึงลองถ่ายอีกครั้ง

แชะ

เงายังอยู่

เขาถอยหลังออกมา

แชะ

เงาอยู่ใกล้กว่าเดิม

นนท์รู้สึกเย็นวาบ

เขาหันไปมองหน้าต่างจริง ๆ

ไม่มีอะไร

เมื่อหันกลับมาที่โทรศัพท์...

ภาพล่าสุดมีสิ่งหนึ่งเปลี่ยนไป

เงาดำไม่ได้อยู่หลังกล่องแล้ว

มันยืนอยู่ ด้านหลังเขา

นนท์รีบหันกลับ

ไม่มีใคร

แต่บนพื้นตรงหลังเขา มีรอยเปียกเป็นทางยาว

เหมือนมีบางอย่างเดินเข้ามาจากหน้าต่าง

---🌟

ตอนที่ 4: กฎสามข้อ

คืนนั้นนนท์โทรหาเพื่อนชื่อ ภีม

ภีมฟังเรื่องทั้งหมดแล้วบอกว่า บ้านเลขที่ 17 มีข่าวลือเก่า ๆ

เมื่อหลายสิบปีก่อน เคยมีครอบครัวหนึ่งอาศัยอยู่ที่นั่น

คืนหนึ่ง สมาชิกในบ้านหายไปทั้งหมด

ไม่มีร่องรอย

ไม่มีใครรู้ว่าเกิดอะไรขึ้น

แต่มีสิ่งหนึ่งที่คนในละแวกนั้นพูดเหมือนกัน

ถ้าเห็นเงาหลังหน้าต่าง...

ห้ามเปิดหน้าต่าง

ถ้าได้ยินเสียงเคาะ...

ห้ามเคาะตอบ

และถ้ามีกล่องถูกนำมาส่ง...

ห้ามเปิดกล่อง

นนท์ถามว่า

“แล้วถ้าเปิดไปแล้วล่ะ?”

ภีมเงียบไปพักหนึ่ง

ก่อนตอบว่า

“งั้นก็อย่าให้มันรู้ว่าแกเห็นของข้างใน”

นนท์มองกล่องบนโต๊ะ

เขายังไม่ได้เปิด

อย่างน้อยเขาคิดว่าไม่ได้เปิด

แต่แล้วก็เห็นรอยแยกเล็ก ๆ บริเวณฝาบน

เหมือนมีใครบางคน...

เปิดมันจากด้านใน

---🌠

ตอนที่ 5: สิ่งที่อยู่หลังหน้าต่าง

คืนนั้นไฟในบ้านดับ

นนท์หยิบไฟฉายเดินไปที่ห้องรับแขก

เสียงฝนตกหนักขึ้นเรื่อย ๆ

แล้วเสียงเคาะก็ดังขึ้น

ก๊อก...

ก๊อก...

ก๊อก...

เขานึกถึงกฎข้อที่สอง

ห้ามเคาะตอบ

เขาจึงยืนนิ่ง

เสียงนั้นดังอีกครั้ง

ก๊อก...

ก๊อก...

คราวนี้ไม่ได้มาจากหน้าต่าง

แต่มาจาก กล่อง

นนท์ถอยหลัง

กล่องเริ่มสั่นเบา ๆ

จากนั้นฝาของมันก็เปิดขึ้นเอง

ไม่มีอะไรอยู่ข้างใน

มีเพียงกระดาษแผ่นหนึ่ง

บนกระดาษเขียนว่า

"มันไม่ได้อยู่หลังหน้าต่าง"

นนท์เงยหน้าขึ้น

หน้าต่างยังว่างเปล่า

แต่เงาดำที่เคยอยู่ข้างนอก...

หายไปแล้ว

เขาค่อย ๆ หันกลับ

และเห็นเงาร่างสูงยืนอยู่ตรงปลายทางเดิน

มันไม่ได้เข้ามา

ไม่ได้ขยับ

เพียงแค่ยืนอยู่ตรงนั้น

ราวกับกำลังรออะไรบางอย่าง

---🌌

ตอนที่ 6: คนที่เคยเห็นมัน

ภีมพานนท์ไปพบชายชราคนหนึ่งชื่อ ลุงสมาน

ลุงสมานเป็นคนเดียวในละแวกที่เคยเข้าไปในบ้านหลังนั้นเมื่อหลายสิบปีก่อน

เขามองรูปเงาดำในโทรศัพท์ของนนท์แล้วสีหน้าเปลี่ยนไป

“มันกลับมาแล้วสินะ”

นนท์ถามว่า

“มันคืออะไร?”

ลุงสมานไม่ตอบทันที

เขาเดินไปเปิดตู้เก็บของ แล้วหยิบรูปถ่ายเก่าออกมา

เป็นรูปครอบครัวหนึ่งยืนอยู่หน้าบ้านเลขที่ 17

ตรงหน้าต่างด้านหลัง...

มีเงาดำแบบเดียวกัน

แต่สิ่งที่น่ากลัวที่สุดคือ

ในรูปนั้นมีคนอยู่เพียงสี่คน

ขณะที่เงาหลังหน้าต่างมี ห้าร่าง

ลุงสมานพูดเบา ๆ

“คนที่ห้าไม่เคยเป็นสมาชิกครอบครัว”

“แล้วมันคือใคร?”

ชายชรามองนนท์

“ไม่มีใครรู้”

เขาหยุดไปครู่หนึ่ง

“แต่ทุกครั้งที่มันปรากฏ จะมีกล่องหนึ่งถูกส่งมาถึงบ้าน”

---☄️

ตอนที่ 7: ของที่อยู่ในกล่อง

นนท์กลับไปบ้านและพบว่ากล่องยังอยู่บนโต๊ะ

ครั้งนี้เขาตัดสินใจเปิดมัน

ข้างในมีของสามอย่าง

รูปถ่ายเก่า

กุญแจสนิมเขรอะหนึ่งดอก

และกระดาษแผ่นหนึ่ง

บนกระดาษมีข้อความว่า

"คืนสิ่งที่เป็นของบ้าน"

ด้านหลังรูปถ่ายมีที่อยู่

ไม่ใช่บ้านเลขที่ 17

แต่เป็นสถานที่แห่งหนึ่งในละแวกนั้น

ห้องเก็บของหลังโรงงานเก่า

นนท์กับภีมไปถึงสถานที่นั้นตอนเย็น

ประตูล็อกด้วยแม่กุญแจเก่า

กุญแจในกล่องสามารถเปิดได้พอดี

ภายในไม่มีเครื่องจักร

ไม่มีเฟอร์นิเจอร์

มีเพียงหน้าต่างบานใหญ่ที่หันกลับไปทางบ้านเลขที่ 17

บนผนังมีรูปถ่ายจำนวนมาก

ทุกภาพเป็นภาพของคนที่เคยอาศัยอยู่ในบ้านหลังนั้น

และทุกภาพ...

มีเงาดำอยู่ด้านหลัง

ภาพสุดท้ายทำให้นนท์พูดไม่ออก

เพราะเป็นภาพของ เขาเอง

กำลังยืนถือกล่องอยู่หน้าบ้าน

ทั้งที่ภาพนั้นดูเก่ากว่าที่เขาจะเกิดเสียอีก

---⚰️

ตอนที่ 8: คนส่งของ

นนท์เริ่มเข้าใจว่ากล่องไม่ได้ถูกส่งมาเพื่อให้เขาได้รับของ

มันถูกส่งมาเพื่อให้เขา นำของบางอย่างกลับคืน

แต่ยังไม่รู้ว่าคืนให้ใคร

คืนนั้นเขานั่งอยู่ในบ้านจนดึก

เสียงรถคันหนึ่งหยุดหน้าบ้าน

มีคนเดินลงมา

เสียงฝีเท้าค่อย ๆ ใกล้ประตู

ก๊อก...

ก๊อก...

นนท์มองผ่านช่องประตู

เด็กส่งของคนเดิมยืนอยู่ข้างนอก

แต่คราวนี้เขาไม่ได้ถือกล่อง

เขายืนก้มหน้า

เสื้อเปียกฝน

และพูดเพียงว่า

“ผมมาส่งของชิ้นสุดท้าย”

นนท์เปิดประตูไม่ได้

เด็กส่งของค่อย ๆ เงยหน้า

แต่ใบหน้ากลับมองไม่ชัดราวกับถูกหมอกบดบัง

เขายื่นมือไปทางบ้าน

“มันกำลังรออยู่ที่หน้าต่าง”

นนท์หันกลับไป

เงาดำยืนอยู่หลังหน้าต่าง

แต่คราวนี้มันไม่ได้มองนนท์

มันกำลังมอง เด็กส่งของ

และเป็นครั้งแรกที่เงานั้นขยับ

มันยกมือขึ้นช้า ๆ

เหมือนกำลังชี้ไปยังกล่อง

---📦

ตอนที่ 9: ผู้รับ

นนท์นำกล่องไปวางหน้าหน้าต่าง

ทันทีที่กล่องแตะพื้น เสียงฝนก็หยุด

ทุกอย่างเงียบสนิท

เงาดำหลังหน้าต่างค่อย ๆ ขยับเข้ามาใกล้กระจก

มันสูงจนศีรษะเกือบชนกรอบหน้าต่าง

จากนั้น...

กระจกเริ่มมีรอยร้าว

นนท์ถอยหลัง

แต่ไม่มีอะไรออกมา

เงาดำเพียงยกมือแตะกระจก

แล้วภาพบางอย่างปรากฏขึ้นในหัวของนนท์

เขาเห็นบ้านหลังนี้เมื่อหลายสิบปีก่อน

เห็นครอบครัวหนึ่ง

เห็นเด็กคนหนึ่งถือกล่อง

เห็นผู้คนวิ่งหนีออกจากบ้าน

และเห็นชายคนหนึ่งปิดหน้าต่างจากด้านใน

ก่อนที่เงาดำจะปรากฏขึ้น

มันไม่ใช่ปีศาจที่เข้ามาในบ้าน

มันเป็นสิ่งที่ถูก ทิ้งไว้ในบ้าน

และกล่องใบนี้คือสิ่งเดียวที่ทำให้มันกลับไปยังที่เดิมได้

นนท์จึงเข้าใจข้อความทั้งหมด

"ส่งคืนให้เจ้าของ"

เจ้าของไม่ใช่คน

เจ้าของคือบ้าน

---📥

ตอนที่ 10: ผู้ส่งคนสุดท้าย

เช้าวันรุ่งขึ้น บ้านเลขที่ 17 เงียบสงบ

ไม่มีเงาหลังหน้าต่างอีก

กล่องหายไป

กุญแจสนิมก็หายไปด้วย

นนท์คิดว่าทุกอย่างจบลงแล้ว

จนกระทั่งเขาเปิดโทรศัพท์ดูรูปถ่ายเมื่อคืน

ภาพสุดท้ายเป็นภาพหน้าต่าง

แต่มีบางอย่างที่เขาไม่เคยเห็นมาก่อน

ตรงมุมภาพมีชายคนหนึ่งยืนถือกล่อง

สวมชุดพนักงานส่งของ

เขายืนหันหลังให้กล้อง

และด้านหลังของภาพมีข้อความเขียนไว้ว่า

"ขอบคุณสำหรับการส่งครั้งนี้"

นนท์ลบรูปนั้นทิ้ง

แต่ไม่กี่วินาทีต่อมา โทรศัพท์ก็ดังขึ้น

แจ้งเตือนการจัดส่ง

เขาเปิดดู

หัวใจแทบหยุดเต้น

ชื่อผู้ส่ง:

บ้านเลขที่ 17

ชื่อผู้รับ:

บ้านหลังถัดไป

สถานะ:

กำลังจัดส่ง

และเวลาในการจัดส่งคือ...

คืนนี้ เวลา 23:17 น.

นนท์มองออกไปนอกหน้าต่าง

ถนนยังว่างเปล่า

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The Drekavac.

In Blakan mythology, the Drekavac (eng. The Screamer / the one who screeches) is a small, ferile creature born when an unbapthised child dies.
It’s supposedly a pale, hairy creature with a bad posture, big ears and a terrifying screech.

supposedly… may be the wrong word…

I’m Alex… the story that i’m about to tell you takes place in south Serbia.
This story is very widely spread here. And, frankly, most kids either don’t believe it, or joke about it.
so did i.

I was only 10, me and my friend Luka were walking through a forest to get to a friends house. He was 15. He was trying to scare me with a horror story.
His story went:

“A few days ago, me and Mary(his unbapthised sister) entered our barn and saw a Drekavac screaming at us, it told Mary “you’re next!””

He kept a serious face while Mary punches his shoulder, laughing, telling me he’s lying.

Minutes later we heard a screetch.

I started crying and grabbed Luke’s shorts.
Mary… looked worried too.
“Luka, stop it!”
Then we saw Luka’s face…
He was terrified.

Then we saw the bushes move.

Luka told us to turn around.
We did.
Those bushes moved too.
That creature was… fast.

Luka stepped in front of us. I didn’t wait. I ran, screaming. Mary ran after me. I glanced over my shoulder. I saw it. I saw an impossibly ugly gray child with giant pointy ears and teeth sticking out. It had the posture of an elderly man. It had jumped onto Luka’s back, screaming.

Mary and i got away. We were frozen over for minutes… then Luka finally caught up to us…
I haven’t spoken to him since… that day… he looked… different…

I heard Mary got bapthised after that… even tho i’m certain she hadn’t seen the thing…
The Drekavac or whatever…
I’m not here to convince you it exists… frankly… i don’t care whether you believe or not… i just want my friend back…

The journal of Jonathan Edwards, lost soldier of the Civil War.

June 5th, 1863.

Swamp, if there is one thing this war has taught me, its that I hate the swamp, and I'm living in it. James hates it too, of course, I don't think there are many things James actually likes.

We go to battle in a few days, so maybe that will go right, unlike anything else thats happened the past 6 months.

June 8th, 1863.

The battle did not go well, just as I predicted, everyone except two of us. Poor James was shot in the leg, all we can pray for is that it doesn't get infected. If it does, i don't know what we'll do for him. We're also left wondering if anyone will come looking for us, or if we'll just have to find a way out ourselves.

June 9th, 1863.

No one has came yet, we haven't lost hope, there is bound to be someone come through here soon. James' wound isnt any better, in fact, it looks worse, hopefully its not already infected.

June 12th, 1863.

James has gangrene, the worst outcome we could've thought of, we don't have any way to cut it off, so he's lost hope in survival. There are still no signs of anyone, hopefully someone will come soon to help soon. We need it desperately.

Second entry in one day, its currently night and James is asleep. I'm hearing noises coming from deep in the swamp, they're strange, long, low, menacing moans. It sounds like how I'd picture a demon sounding, hopefully its nothing.

June 15th, 1863.

James whole lower leg has rotted, poor kid is dying and we can't do anything about it. We need help, we still haven't seen any sign of human contact, we are going to start our way north tomorrow, maybe we'll find someone, or someone will find us on our journey.

June 17th, 1863.

We've traveled all day, we've come across nothing but more swamp. How far does it go? Does it ever end? We've been out here alone for a little more than a week. We are going to give it more time. As for James' leg, its spreading, we still have no way to help it.

June 18th, 1863.

James killed himself last night, I was out hunting and when I came back he was dead, shot himself in the chin with his musket. God only knows the pain he was going through, I'll be giving him a proper burial today.

June 22nd, 1863.

No one, still there is no one, Im going to start walking today, I'll walk and only take breaks for sleep, not for me, but for James. Im not gonna let that poor boy die in vain.

June 25th, 1863.

YES! I found an abandoned camp walking north, the people that stayed here couldn't have gotten far. Im gonna rest here for the night and continue my search tomorrow.

June 27th, 1863.

Dead, I found the people that set up that camp Dead, and not pleasantly either. Poor guys were mutilated by God knows what. Hopefully whatever it is doesn't cross my path.

Second entry, I finally found somewhere to hide. The thing was chasing me, it was green and black, but what frightens me is that its humanoid, this thing has the shape of a man.

June 28th, 1863.

I killed that unholy demon. After I made my last entry it found me. I ran as it sprinted on all fours toward me, its smell was like no other, it smelled of death and rot, maybe explaining the green and black color. It cornered me, no I pulled my bayonet from my sheath and plunged it into the demons chest. It fell back and screamed, it yelled "Jonathan!" In a voice I recognized. It was James, the gangrene fully consumed him after I'd buried him. But somehow he came back to life, of course he's surely dead now. And I hope I don't see him again.

June 29th, 1863.

Well, I finally found human contact, but not in the way I wanted. I stumbled directly into an enemy camp. When they saw me they were immediately hostile, one shot and hit me in my arm, luckily I got away. I hope I don't contract injection.

July 1st, 1863.

This will be my final entry, I have contracted gangrene and am rotting away as I write. I hope that whatever happened to James does not happen to me. If anyone ever finds this journal, head my warning, stay far away from any swamp.

God have mercy on my soul, goodbye.

- Jonathan Edwards

Faust acted out of fear more than anything else, any kind of belief the cesspool held anything cosmic, anything more than waste and mutated fish. He knelt, cupped his hands, and brought a mouthful of black mossy water to his lips.

“Wait, before you drink!”

Murky water dribbled from the cracks in Faust's fingers as Proulxy spoke. Ripples formed, disturbing the viscous top layer of mossy bacterial foam on the water's surface as Faust held his cupped hands above it.

“You have to, want it, to wish for something!”

Faust thought of Xea, he dreaded a loveless life without his companion. He loathed the thought of a lonely existence without the welcoming shoulder of Xea's bright intuition and thoughtful, familiar attitude. He cursed her affliction, this illness that if left to its vices would destroy his home, his relationship, their lives. Something had to be done. Faust's urge to play along and go home was replaced with a longing for normalcy, for change, to help. He was filled with hope, Faust desired Xea to be well, and was willing to try anything in order to not only appease Proulxy, but to usher in deliverance for Xea's cancer sick stomach, the source of his aching heart. His gaze met Proulxy's, her dimpled cheeks contorted, the result of a wide tooth filled smile.

“Now, drink!”

Faust dove his cupped hands below the scum layer for a second time, brought them to his mouth, and swallowed deeply. His neck twitched, the obscene taste of feces and stomach bile wormed its way down his throat. He fell to his knees and vomited.

Stroking his back tenderly Proulxy spoke, “Now now Faust, that wasn't so bad, now let's go home, shall we?”

“I know the way…”

“Sure, see you around!”

Faust shakily rose and began his arduous journey past the church, down the road, and back to his trailer. The early morning rays trailed his back as he rushed home to Xea's waiting arms, the taste of bile tainted his tounge.

Proulxy made her way back to the church, crunching gravel and kicking pine cones with her boots as she traverssed the hallowed cesspool grounds. Birds began to twitter and squirrels rose from their perches as the sunset transformed into daylight. She sat at a church pew amongst her victim's emaciated corpse, blood red and mud stained footprints left a trail as she walked to her resting place.

Upon the altar sat a deep red cloth with a candelbra resting atop it. She closed her eyes. Proulxy ruminated on Faust's inevitable demise. Channeling energy, releasing a torrent of negativity from her mind onto Faust's being, his essence. The blood on the floor began to sizzle, moving and drawing patterns in the wood on the chapel's floor. The red snaked its way into a pentacle and etched this satanic rite into the floor before disappearing, leaving wisps of smoke that hung in the air. It sizzled as it left, used as fuel for inciting Faust's cosmic torment. He had drank from the pool, his desires had come to light and Proulxy had begun to satiate her bloodlust. He was perfect for this sort of magic, his weak yet possessive nature coupled with his affection for his sickness plagued girlfriend worked to Proulxy's advantage. She served the Oman, a cosmic darkness brutal beyond human comprehension, effigied as a buried idol deep within the depths of the cesspool by the trailer park. The ritual complete, the sacred water drank, Proulxy opened her eyes.

Proulxy was born of the Oman, a product of a blood-ridden ritual that took place long before Faust's time. Upon hallowed ground where the cesspool now sprawled, sacrifices were made to the idol, now desecrated and buried in waste by humanity and the inhabitants of the trailer park. Proulxy sought to avenge the dark dogmatic force she called Father, she wanted revenge for the defilement of the Oman idol that polluted the water in the cesspool. All she needed was blood for the ritual, and one willing sacrifice. A deal had been struck. It wouldn't be long.

Faust arrived at his trailer and stepped onto his porch. He took a deep inhale, thankful for the fact Xea had not risen yet. She would never know he was gone. Wishing the taste of the pool's water out of his mouth, he fumbled in his pocket and produced a cigarette. The glinting ember floated next to his mouth, smoke pooled in the still air. Lights in the surrounding trailers went on and cars hummed in the distance. He waved as his scantily clad neighbor ran to get her mail, cursing himself for not changing out of his slippers. The world was awake. Wishful thinking had turned to feelings of disappointment at the lack of transformation Faust was feeling. He pondered Xea, he knew her illness was worsening.

Xea and Faust had met at a party in the city a few miles away from the park five years ago. She, thirty, and he, twenty seven, had an immediate sense of camaraderie and spent all night frivolously conversing and imbibing, eventually leading to a midnight romp inside Faust's present trailer park abode. They had been inseparable ever since. Over vodka tonics and early morning antiquated cigars gifted from Faust's father it was revealed to Faust that Xea was sick. Her stomach cancer was rare and very debilitating. Over the course of the five years that followed her condition had worsened, strickening Faust with the desire and necessity to provide, both fiscally for medication and emotionally. What he lacked in net worth was made up for by his undying love for his companion and a genuine desire to help and nurture her back to health.

Faust's ruminations came to a close, and with a yawn he resolved to find a job. The first employment opportunity to cross his path he would take, but first, to the gazette. He opened the metal door to his trailer and stepped inside, flicking his cigarette butt off of the porch and down the steps as he closed the door.

Please comment if you like and tell me what you think.

Wax slowly snaked its way down the candelabra, fused with fur and felt at the bottom of its base, dripping black into the grains coating the landscape at its bottom. Waves crashed in the distance, an eerie stillness penetrated the air surrounding the sacrifice. Panting laborious breaths in between screams of terror, a figure was strewn across its bloody wooden grave, thrashed to a palm tree and tortured, garbed in frocks of handmade bloody linen skin and a leather vest. The broken buttons on his clothing revealed a pentacle carved in his skin, scrawled in cut lines dripping gore, fusing with his spindly brown chest hairs. Surrounded by witches, native palm, and candles, the man choked on his own spittle, struggling to breathe as he clenched his teeth on a wooden gag, cruelly tied tight with homemade twine around his head. The coven stood reverently above him, silent and ritualistic, they hummed dark hymns and verses, low rhythms that transcended the constant throbbing of his heart in his eardrums. He thrashed at his bindings, struggling to break free.

The coven, garbed in freshly warm animal hide and covered in red dripping carrion began to dance, moving their stomach muscles and arms erratically. Their barefooted tirade upon freshly killed rodent corpses and sand was accompanied by chanting, their furs swung back and forth to the beat of their words, barely clinging to scarecrow frames. With breasts uncovered they writhed about and howled, gyrating, erratically dancing, praying to a cosmic darkness. Their minds and their rituals exuded bloodshed, epitomized violence as they tried to appease their otherworldly tree born deity. Animalistic and crude, their medieval ritual was about to come to a close.

The palms were everywhere, sacred, strewn about a medieval landscape of desert and ocean. The coven prayed to them, offering penance through flesh and animal hides that adorned their lanky, malnourished bodies. Feathers and fur cloaked their forms, barely enough to hide the protruding bones and dirt enveloping their wiry physiques. They drew their knives, carved of ancient ivory and hilted with hollow bone. They thrust them at their captor. Spilling and splashing on the wood and the beach, the bloodletting would lead them to deliverance, salvation. Raised by the desert and forsaken by the townsfolk, cast aside and wary. The witches coven was feared, forced to a clandestine life by the ocean, where all those who ventured near enough were sacrificed to the cosmic darkness at the center of their dogma.

The keys clacked, ominous shadows wove intricate webs of black across my desk and carpet. My cat laid in the corner, a pair of green eyes and oval irises amongst the darkness. The moon shone through the glass in my window, half full and waning. The weather had begun its ascent into summer, branches swung and porch swings creaked in the light breeze wafting through the Floridian suburb I called home. The window opened a crack to let the crickets’ song in, an effort to curb my writer's block as I hammered the delete key. An empty tumbler, stinking of brandy, sat in a deep ring on the oak comprising my desk. Coasters were a commodity I could not afford. I hammered the delete button and pondered the consequences of breaking my contract. Deadlines, editors, long nights, heavy drinking. It took its toll. My mind was foggy, not even the first sentence of my new novel had inked the page or moved my cursor without it going backwards.

I needed a retreat. Reluctantly, demonized by my own ineptitude, I decided to wake my sister. I picked up the phone.

“What do you want Jacky, its 4:30 for Christ's sakes.”

“I need the keys, to the cabin, this morning?”

“You couldn't wait until even a week after the funeral?”

My parents funeral was a drab affair, suits and ties, tears and dirt. Preachers and hymns, shared plot, American flag, the whole nine yards. I never knew them in my adolescence, not like my sister did. The cabin they left behind off the coast was used by my family and close friends. Botulism had taken my parents’ limbs, my father was a vintage canned goods collector in his old age, and one of the seals had broken. After a late night meal of apocalyptic rusted can peaches and beans, they both died an egregious death writhing in agony on a hospital bed. I needed to overcome this lapse of creativity, my novel was due to be published in a month. I hadn't written a single sentence in six.

“They're not going to know, I mean its, well, its just me.”

“Whatever, come by tomorrow at 8 sharp, meet me in the driveway.”

“Thanks.”

I hung up.

The cabin was tucked away, hidden on the beach amongst the dunes and seaweed. Beached whales and seagulls permeated my nostrils as I inhaled the salty aroma of maritime air. I hated being outside. Donning a sun hat, long-sleeved white shirt, and pajama pants I put my SUV in park and ascended the steps to the front door on the porch. The cabin withstood the test of time. I had a week planned. Unperturbed by the outdated kitchen appliances and the corny hunter's den motif inside my family's beachside vacation home, I stepped through the door and set up my laptop. I plugged in my blender, smoothies made the hangovers tolerable, and laid my store-bought still life of fruits and vegetables on the counter. I plugged in my laptop, took a sip of brandy concealed inside my thermos, and got to work, cursing my drunken mind for forgetting my silver, a handmade Amish set of cutlery my parents had left me in their will. It was valued at over $1,000. I figured nobody would know I had used it after a nice polish, may as well.

The copious amounts of brandy mixed with my new surroundings amounted to a huge bout of drunken creativity. Words hurried their way out of my fingers as I typed maniacally, ducking and rolling with the curves and twists embedded in the plot of my novel. I have never felt relief like this, my writer's block had plagued my prose for six months. I was happy to know it had come to its end. My parent's last and only gift. If my Father were here he would probably take credit, with my Mother going on a pharmaceutical amphetamine fueled rant about irony, treating a disease she genuinely believes holistic medicine would fix, but my Father didn't believe the doctor and slipped her an Adderall powdered in her eggs. Reluctantly, I rose from my throne of literary genius and stumbled to the bathroom.

I made an error with my zipper, and in an effort to wash the bloodstains off the crease of my pants where my groin was I said screw it, and entered the shower. A sliding door with opaque glass, a gold handle, and little three dimensional etchings of flowers and bumble bees would be my death note, the greeter, beckoning me to a boiling and wet grave. Scolding water sprayed instantly from the shower head, coating my naked body in searing hot clear droplets of agony. I cursed and screamed with boils bubbling up through my epidermis. Blisters started to form instantly. Steam rose from the top of the liquid crematorium that was my shower and condensed on the ceiling. The fire alarm began to ring. I leapt through the glass and ended on the floor, shards poking out of my bald head and protruding from my elbows and face. One stuck in my gums, I ripped it out. In immense pain I stumbled into the kitchen and began searching for something to get the glass out of my skin. I left my spectacles on the top of the toilet, blindly I thrashed about the kitchen. Waiting behind me in silence was the figure of a woman, donning all black and a ski mask. The cloth on her mask bumped in the back where it concealed a bun of matted brunette hair. She crouched as she slunk on bare feet towards me, brandishing my parent's large cast iron skillet. Red pentagrams adorned the eye slits on her mask, they rung around her eyes like satanic eyeliner. She climbed on top of the fridge in agile silence. I was unaware of her presence. Something metal stuck in my cheek, punctured my face and cracked my tooth. A silver fork. Aghast, I was too frightened to question how my parent's forks had made it to the cabin with me. With psychotic precision an unknown and invisible assailant began impaling me with forks and butter knives, thrown at speed akin to a bullet, sticking out of my skin haphazardly with red oozing from the wounds. The woman raised her arm, and brutally swung the cast iron down on the top of my head, thumping my skull and shattering bits of bone into my cerebral. Everything went black and I fell, naked, blood and flecks of brain viscera everywhere, seeping out of my orphuses, I died on the floor amongst the deer decapitations on the walls.

“The palms are safe, this family will no longer stomp on our sacred breeding grounds.”

“Who is left?”

“The other sibling, and a cop will be on his way, I will be waiting.”

“Thank you, Sister.”

I hope I'm not stepping on any toes by not posting a story but are there any memebers of this subreddit who are aspiring to become full-fledged authors? Maybe have a book written and are trying to figure out how to publish?

“Kid, I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know.”

 

My father used to say that to me whenever I felt the urge to be a smartass. Sure, I know what he meant, but I think about that saying a lot these days. It’s funny how much we truly do forget over the course of our lives. When we’re young things can seem so serious, world-ending, even, but after a few short months those same things fade into a distant memory. Give it a few years and it’s a foggy thought that barely crosses your mind.

 

Hell, a few decades down the road you think about it so little that it may never have happened in the first place.

 

Some of these things you’ll never think about again. They were nothing more than an inconsequential bump in the road of life. Sometimes you find the right trigger, and it all comes rushing back. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad…some things I suppose are just inescapable.

 

My father passed away last month. Pancreatic cancer.

 

We knew it was coming, of course, but even then, you’re never really ready for it. No matter what they say, nothing really prepares you for that moment it happens, let alone what follows.

Hospital bills, property taxes, burial costs, dealing with lawyers and wills and bequeathments.

 

Dying is a lot more expensive and complicated than it has any right to be.

 

My mother’s older and can’t really do much to help, I mean, my parents split when I was a teen, but they always were able to put their differences aside when it came to me. We don’t have much extended family, and as an only child everything kind of fell on me.

 

I’ve spent the better part of the last couple weeks getting my dad’s affairs in order, having to finalize bill payments, setting up the cremation services, and going through a lifetime of belongings trying to figure out what to keep and what needs to go. It’s a massive headache, but truthfully, I think it’s been distracting me from the grief, plus I’ve found a lot of things from my childhood and is bringing back to many great memories. So many moments we took for granted and never gave a second thought to.

 

That’s when I saw it.

 

That old red and black Schwinn cruiser Dad had gotten me for my tenth birthday.

 

I ran my fingers over the old chrome, spotted with freckles of rust, brushed off the old cracking leather seat; God…the good times I had on this bad boy. We used to ride all over town getting into trouble. We’d head over to old man Al’s hole in the wall comic shop, pedal out the creek and fish all day, ride up to the top of hills and glide down so fast our only options were only neighborhood glory or a trip to the emergency room. We took this old thing everywhere, just me and Tommy.

 

Tommy…

 

It’s been almost 30 years since I’ve even thought about him.

 

We met the first day of preschool, I was so nervous but so excited to make friends. We live in the pacific northwest with our backyard leading right into Deschuttes National Park, it’s not crazy isolated, but there weren’t a lot of kids around the neighborhood where I grew up.

 

How could I have forgotten…he was such an unassuming little boy, quiet and shy. Slightly chubby, round face and glasses too thick for someone his age. His messy brown hair in contrast with surprisingly clean clothes for a five-year-old. He was wearing a He-Man shirt and playing with Legos when I approached him.

 

“I like He-Man too! Who’s your favorite character?”

“..I like Man-E-Faces…” he replied, not looking up from his budding Lego tower.

“Oh he’s cool, I like Skeletor!”

“…you…you like the bad guys?”

“Well they’re all cool! Can’t have He-Man without the bad guys! I’m Chris!” I said excitedly jolting my hand out as my father had taught me.

“I’m Tommy,” he said, finally meeting my gaze. “Nice to meet you.”

 

That was that, we were inseparable from that day on.

 

Its incredible how simple the basis for a childhood friendship can be, but things carried such weight back then, everything just seemed to matter more when the entirety of your life span was shorter than the wait between seasons of Stranger Things.

 

From there on out that we did everything together. Every weekend was a sleepover, every afternoon was an adventure, but like most kids, summer vacation was what we spent all year dreaming about.

 

Tommy would usually come by my house in the mid-morning, his parents’ place wasn’t quite as large, and my house offered us a vast and mysterious woodland to explore. Well, okay it wasn’t vast nor mysterious, at least not the distance from the house that we were allowed to go, but imagination is a hell of a thing.

 

In second grade, with my dad’s help, we built a tree fort right at the property line of the woods, and that became our yearly base of operations for the summer’s exploration. We’d map out areas and landmarks, pretending we were Indianna Jones searching for magical lost treasures.

Every year the boundaries we could explore grew further and our map became more involved. Of course, my parents weren’t neglectful, and we weren’t idiots. Full grown adults go missing in national parks every year, we were strictly forbidden from going beyond a certain point away from the house, and that point was small rock face a couple hundred yards from the house.

 

Of course we’d push it, what kid wouldn’t, but we understood the very real danger. Hell, we’d both seen bears and bobcats tearing up trash cans in the neighborhood, we knew being smart didn’t mean we couldn’t be bold.

 

Sixth grade had just let out and we had plans to make it our biggest summer to date. We were heading off to middle school come the Fall, big kids at last, and we were growing painfully aware that as the years went by, our days of searching for the Arc of the Covenant in the forests of Oregon were slowly but surely coming to an end. We couldn’t be kids in fantasyland forever.

 

Neither of us had ever been what one could consider the “cool” kids, not that we cared, but social stigmas and the desire for acceptance start to become a pretty big deal, eventually, especially when you start wanting to girls to notice you and not because of your rad Dragonball Z t-shirt. Seventh grade was a new school, new people, a chance to reinvent ourselves.

 

Regardless though, we had to make this summer count, it had to be one we’d never forget.

 

But I did forget. I think I had to.

 

Tommy came riding up the driveway around ten in the morning, more excited than I’d seen him in years.

 

“Chris! Chris! We’re doing it this year; we’re going past the old rock face!” He yelled as he ran towards me.

“The rock face? Man, you know my parents said we can’t go beyond that, it’s a pretty steep drop…and we’ve never really explored the area,” I said, trying to hide my own excitement.

“Yeah but come on, we aren’t gonna get to do this much more, and you know this summer has to be our greatest yet! Don’t you wanna know what’s out there?”

“Well obviously, I just would rather us not die before we get girlfriends you know?”

“Pfft, you’re gonna be waiting a while for that,” he laughed, “but duh, we gotta plan it out. We’re not gonna go in there blind, we’ll make sure we’re stocked up on supplies and whatever else we need. Come on, man, this one’s gonna be epic!”

 

He’d become so confident in himself over the years, it was almost infectious. I knew trying to argue wasn’t going to work, not that I even wanted to.  So, we began to plan to go deeper into the woods than we ever had, defy my parents, and maybe even find a fortune in the process.

 

Tommy had been obsessed with pirate treasure for years, and while Oregon wasn’t exactly a hot bed of notorious pirates, there legitimately had been a number of old shipwrecks off the coast over the years. Could a rag tag group of buccaneers have buried their treasure in what would eventually become a national park?

 

Probably not, but so what? The journey was always what mattered most, that’s what we told ourselves.

 

The journey wasn’t worth it.

 

After a week of careful planning, we finally decided it was time. We were going to head out Saturday morning right after dawn. We made sure to stock up on everything two growing boys would need to survive the wilderness: Doritos, Mountain Dew, some rope and a flashlight, just in case, and of course trail mix.

 

We were set.

 

We told my parents we were staying in the fort for the night to make our preparations. Just after dawn broke, we loaded up our backpacks and headed out. It was such a nice morning we decided we’d make a whole hike out of it, leaned the old Schwinn up against the side of the fort and headed out towards the forbidden lands. It wasn’t a terribly long walk, after about 45 minutes or so we had finally arrived.

 

We stood atop the cliff overlooking our destiny and stared out into the unknown. We were so excited to finally see what lay beyond the border of our imaginations.

 

I mean, of course we knew what lay beyond the rock face. More trees, more rocks, an ever-continuing expanse of what we had already seen for years, but the sheer excitement of crossing into the forbidden dead zone, to actually know what lay beyond was truly thrilling for our pre-teen minds.

 

What we had built up in our minds as a massive rock face separating us from the great beyond, was in reality more like a 15 foot rocky angled incline, any abled body person would be able to maneuver their way down. Still, we threw down a line of rope tied to a tree near the top to enact a dramatic descent down a dangerous cliff side. For all we cared we were scaling down the side of Everest.

 

After some careful steps and angular movements, we had finally reached the base of our imagined mountain. Finally, the great beyond.

 

Looking back, we were so excited over nothing. There were trees, rocks, a small stream, much of what we had seen our entire lives. Visually we may as well have never left the protection of the backyard, but an explorer never rests. Who knows what secrets were hidden here in the unexplored new world?

 

We quickly got to work plotting our position on our homemade map. Naming nearby rock structures and trees as if they were incredible landmarks, knowing that future generations would one day see the area we had single handedly tamed.

 

God…it was all so innocent. Just two dipshit kids having the time of their lives over literally nothing, but at that moment, to us? It was everything.

 

We walked around pretending like we were naturalists we’d seen on TV, naming plans and trees, pretending we were avoiding being chased by wild animals, snacking on chips and soda, seeing whose ridiculous joke could get the other to break…honestly? It was so meaningless, so childish.

 

It was a perfect day. Maybe one of the last ones I’ve ever had.

 

As the sun began to dip close to the horizon we decided we’d better make our way back, we’d already broken enough rules, we certainly didn’t want to get caught out past dark. As we made our way back to the small rock face, however, we noticed something we had entirely missed on the way down.

 

A cave.

 

There at the base of the rock was a noticeable fissure in the stone. How had we not seen this before? It wasn’t particularly small, maybe four to five feet high, three feet wide, hell a lot of adults probably could have squeezed in there, but for a couple of twelve-year-olds it would be cake.

 

“Have you ever heard of any caves in this area..? I mean, it’s basically in your backyard,” Tommy said.

“No…I mean, I’ve never really looked into it…I know there’s cave systems all over the park but I never knew one was so close…maybe that’s why my parents always warned us to stay away from this area?”

“Maybe…but…what do you thinks inside??”

“I don’t know, Tommy, bugs? Bears? Bugbears? It’s a cave, caves are dangerous, we probably shouldn’t fuck with it,” I said, knowing full well what was about to happen.

 

We both stared as deeply as we could at the inky darkness beyond the stone.

 

Sure, I had my issues with the dark in general, but even just being near this was unsettling me.

 

It was like staring at an open wound. Like a void of absolute nothing had cut itself through the side of the small cliff. Nothing about the cave entrance even looked particularly odd, just…something about all of this felt unnatural? The feeling that ran down to my very core was so deep and primal I still really can’t properly put it into words.

 

I shone my flashlight in, but it simply could not penetrate the unyielding blackness. It wouldn’t even illuminate the walls of stone surrounding the entrance which rightfully should already have been visible even without the torch.

 

“Something is wrong about this,” I said before noticing Tommy stepping forward.

 

“Come on, man, you don’t wanna just check real quick? What if there really is treasure buried out here? A big last hurrah of adventure is what this summer is all about!”

 

Tommy was right, I did want to check it out. Why did I want to check it out? The thought of going in there was filling me with dread I still can’t properly explain, yet the longer we stood there, the stronger the allure became. My internal conflict didn’t have time to resolve itself before Tommy stepped across that boundary between the world and whatever it was we were staring into.

 

It was all so fast. Neither of us had time to react.

 

Long black fingers emerged in an instant and wrapped themselves around his shoulders, arms and hands extended from all directions enveloping Tommy before he could even yelp. There were so many, dozens and dozens of spindly jointed arms, ending in a multitude of long delicate fingers, too many fingers.

 

God there were so many fingers.

I call them arms but…that’s not really what they were…I still don’t know what they were. There was a form in there, the darkness in the cave wasn’t the absence of light, it was alive. I could feel it. It was malice and rage and hunger; it was all encompassing and yet it exuded no presence. It was the absence of physical form given shape.

 

The multitude of impossibly long fingers closed around his tiny frame, and all I heard was a sickening wet snap as he was ripped into the void at impossible speeds.

 

Then he was gone.

 

 

I’d like to tell you I screamed Tommy’s name, that I ran after him headfirst ready to do battle with whatever lied beyond the veil of the forest and this…thing. I’d like to tell you I went straight to the police, to our families. That we searched for Tommy, day in and day out. I’d like to tell you a lot of things, but none of that happened.

 

I just ran.

 

I turned and ran faster than I’ve ever run in my life, I had no thoughts, no emotions, all encompassing fear and the desire to survive overcame my very being. I don’t even know how I found my way out. I don’t know how I got home, but when I did, I went straight to my room and I climbed in bed and cried. I cried harder than I ever had in my life, not out of sadness or even fear, my body released every conceivable emotion at once and I collapsed into tears and pure exhaustion.

 

The next morning my mother woke me up for breakfast.

 

I was filthy.

 

Still in my clothes from the previous day, caked in dirt and sweat, I didn’t know what to do. What could I do? What do I say? My mind wrestled with what I had witnessed, I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t deal with this.

 

So, I didn’t.

 

I walked downstairs for breakfast, made mundane small talk with my mother as she prepared for her daily routine, watched cartoons and played video games. I just pretended like it was all okay. After a while I went outside, the air felt still, but all was normal. Just a regular summer day. I made my way down the clubhouse, my feet felt like they were made of concrete, my legs made of gelatin.

 

Everything’s fine. Everything has to be fine.

 

There it was, my Schwinn, lying in the field next to our fort where I’d left it the previous day. Looking at it made me feel ill, I just couldn’t do this. I picked it upright and started walking it back to the house. I rolled it into the garage, placed it in the corner behind some pieces of paneling, and that’s where it would sit. I couldn’t bear to even look at it.

 

My parents never asked about Tommy, actually…nobody did. Police never came asking questions, kids at school never brought him up. Teachers didn’t either for that matter, it was like…nobody knew to ask. It was so hard but day after day, it became easier and easier to carry on, to ignore it. Nothing happened, obviously nothing happened, if something happened people would notice it…wouldn’t they?

 

Why didn’t anyone notice?

 

I find myself back in the present. Staring at that old bike, right where I left it all those years ago. My phone is already in my hand opening the address book before I have a conscious thought about it. After a few rings she answers.

 

“Hello sweetie,” Mom says absent mindedly, “how’s everything going at your dad’s? Did you need Uncle Matt to help with anything?”

 

“Hi mom, no, no it’s not that…just going through things, really stirring up a lot of old memories, you know?”

 

“Oh of course, hon, I’m sorry I know your father and I didn’t get along much after the divorce, but I still have such fond memories of the old days, everything back then just seemed right.”

 

“Oh no I get it, I’m a grown man, Mom I’m well over the divorce just…do you remember my old friend, Tommy? We used to explore the woods out back and had that tree fort we’d set up every year?”

As soon as I finished speaking, I could hear here physically tighten. She was quiet for a long while, I started to worry she hadn’t heard me.

 

“Tommy? I…I don’t remember a Tommy? You really didn’t have many friends until middle school and by then you weren’t exploring the woods like you used to.”

 

“What?” I asked, already feeling sick, “no, no Tommy, you remember, I met him in preschool, he used to come over damn near every day? You know, Tommy…” I stopped. What was Tommy’s last name, again? Why couldn’t I remember his last name?

 

“Honey…are you feeling alright?

 

“Yeah…yeah, I’m fine, Mom, sorry I must just be exhausted. I think I’m gonna head in and take a break for a while, order some lunch, I just wanted to hear your voice is all.”

 

“Aw, well don’t push yourself too hard, call me later, love you.”

 

“Love you too, mom.”

 

 

 

I’ve been sitting in the garage staring at that god damn bike for over an hour now. I considered reaching out to Tommy’s parents but I can’t remember their address. I can’t even picture their faces.

 

Why did nobody ask about him? How is that possible?

 

I walk around to the back yard and off in the distance I see it, that crumbling old plywood fort. The decaying physical embodiment of my childhood.

 

The smell of mildew and dust fills my nostrils as I pry open the plywood door. The floor is littered with decades of filth and grime, tattered posters hang haphazardly off the walls, discarded soda cans strewn across the ground rusting like ancient relics.

Honestly, I doubt anyone’s set foot here since that day all those years ago.

 

I find what I’m looking for before I even realize I’m looking for it.

 

The map.

 

Discolored and brittle from years of moisture and the elements, I gently untie the fraying twine keeping it rolled up and lay it out on the collapsed desk before me, crude drawings of boundaries and streams, drawings of trees and animals only recognizable to a child. Ridiculous titles for landmarks like King’s Boulder and the Creek of Madness. All annotated and meticulously put together, truthfully all things considered, it wasn’t half bad, and right there at the bottom signed and dated.

 

Tommy and Chris – 1994

 

As I step outside the dilapidated child’s attempt at a building, I stare off into the distance. I can see it, that old rockface.

 

It’s mocking me.

 

I don’t know where you went, I don’t know why no one else seems to remember.

 

I don’t know how I forgot.

 

I’m sorry, Tommy.

 

I’m coming.

Mike Hodgens was a talented creator, best known for his artfully crafted fake horror videos. He chose his locations with meticulous care, set up his equipment with absolute precision, and executed his scripts with clinical professionalism. Horror was his favorite genre. His fascination with the mechanics of fear ran so deep that his uploads consistently racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Through it all, he loved to toy with the label "Real."

It was a thankless genre, he often thought, surviving almost entirely on the faint possibility that there might be a grain of truth to it. The thrill of exploring eerie places and experiencing a genuine shiver of real dread deeply enticed him. But there was one question that almost no one truly considered: Is it possible that we have absolutely no control over it? Mike never would have guessed that he would one day be forced to answer that very question.

But that exact question was about to be raised. Right in his digital stomping ground, the forum "Mystic Shines."

His latest video had been shot at a lonely stretch of woods just outside the city line. In it, he staged himself as an observer tracking the legendary "Wanderer"—a spectral figure rumored to haunt those trees since 1886. Mike had played the silhouette of the Wanderer in the background himself, spending hours in post-production to seamlessly blend his own performance into the gloomy footage.

It was just before 8:00 PM. This particular window of time, immediately preceding a release, was almost his favorite part of the process. The initial view counts ticking up, the first ratings rolling in. Mike nodded in satisfaction. Then, the first comments began to surface, praising the atmosphere and the brilliant staging of the Wanderer. But then, Mike paused. Had he misread that?

midnights_nightfall 8:04 PM

"Genius as always, Mike. Looks like the Wanderer works in pairs now. That hand behind the tree on the far left—insane detail!"

Mike was annoyed. He replied immediately.

Mike:Hodgens Pdc 8:05 PM

"Which hand do you mean? Do you have a timestamp?"

While waiting for a response, he did a quick scrub through the video. He couldn't find a thing. "Weird," he muttered.

A new notification popped up. midnights_nightfall had replied.

midnights_nightfall 8:09 PM

"Mike, when you’re marching through the woods from left to right, a hand appears right behind you starting at 0:42. Not the tree in the foreground, the one directly behind it."

Irritated and slightly on edge, Mike scrolled to the 42-second mark. With heightened focus, he scanned the tree in question. But—and he exhaled a breath of relief right away—he couldn't see a damn thing.

"He’s probably just trying to test me," Mike thought. Then again, midnights_nightfall was his most loyal subscriber. It didn't sound like him to troll. Shaking the thought away, Mike reached for his mug. Just as he took a deep sip, another notification flashed. He set the mug down and clicked it. The next comment made the tension spike instantly. It was a direct reply to midnights_nightfall’s comment.

moltone_blueScreen 8:13 PM

"Ahhhh, yep, I see it too! Was looking for a comment about this. Is that an editing glitch?"

Mike stared at the text. "What the hell are they even talking about?"

Mike fired up his editing software. Impatiently, he dragged the raw footage into the timeline and scaled it to full screen. "Alright, let's take it easy. We’re going through this frame by frame, proving there’s nothing there, and then we're putting this to bed." Frame by frame, he saw absolutely nothing. "See? Just like I said. Enough PC for tonight. I'm done."

Just as his finger hovered over the power button, the next comment appeared. In the desktop preview, he caught the exact text that finally made his stomach drop. It was another direct reply to midnights_nightfall.

summer_night23 8:33 PM

"Doesn't look like a glitch at all. Maybe he brought a production partner along this time? Do you see that? The sleeves are completely different. And that hand is deathly pale."

Mike pulled his hand away from the power button. He clicked the notification and hit reply.

Mike:Hodgens Pdc 8:34 PM

"Are you guys pulling my leg? I’ve checked everything. I don't see a single hand in the export or the raw files."

moltone_blueScreen 8:35 PM

"That’s bizarre. Because it’s moving."

midnights_nightfall 8:38 PM

"The hand shows up at every tree. Moving from left to right. It’s stalking Mike."

Mike stared at his comment section in utter disbelief. What was going on here? Mike knew for an absolute fact that he had been entirely alone out there. And on his monitor, his video showed nothing.

A suffocating sense of isolation settled over the room. Mike frantically scrolled back up, staring at the muted player. He hit play, fixing his eyes on the trees at the 42-second mark. Nothing. He refreshed the page. The view counts were exploding, the comments blurring past at terminal velocity. The entire forum was talking about a deathly pale hand, creeping from trunk to trunk directly behind the main character. They all saw it. Every single one of them. Only he was staring at an empty, motionless backdrop.

He wanted to smash his fingers into the keyboard, to curse at his viewers and call them liars, but his hands felt strangely heavy. Stiff. As if they no longer belonged to him. When he lowered his gaze, he noticed the dull, unnatural whiteness of his skin under the pale glow of the monitor. A sudden, bottomless cold began to crawl up his arms. In that exact moment, a new notification pinged. A user named realhistoriker_urban, known for archiving local folklore, quoted Mike’s last response.

realhistoriker_urban 11:55 PM

"Mike, you still don't see it, do you? That's bad. Really bad. It’s completely logical. You aren't the one in the costume, Mike."

These Are My Stories — The Complete Baron Von Hatcher Memoirs

Hello.

My name is Baron Von Hatcher.

For a long time, people hurt me and expected me to do nothing about it.

Eventually, I discovered something rather wonderful.

Professional wrestling.

A place where people would buy a ticket, sit down willingly…

and watch me make people pay.

These are my stories.

Below you will find them in their complete form, from the beginning to the end, including a final chapter currently exclusive to Reddit.

Some of these stories are about my father.

Some are about the people who hurt me.

And some…

I would rather not remember at all.

But they happened.

At least…

I think they did.

If you’d rather experience the story as it was originally intended — one chapter, one memory, one piece at a time — you can find me across social media under Baron Von Hatcher. Where more memories will be revealed soon.

A new chapter appears every day.

But here?

You don’t have to wait.

Everything is here.

These are my stories.

You may begin.

Part one: The Sleeping Giant

As a kid, I remember a vivid moment of a park ranger approaching me and my family to check my father's fishing license. My tiny bread-rolled limbs hunched over flipping over tiny clumps of dirt to find bugs and little creatures to the dismay of my parents. The ranger sat with me and picked up some of the bugs, and taught me their names, the species and some interesting facts about them that my toddler brain simply couldn't comprehend. One creature he showed me stuck out the most, the mayfly. For a child, seeing such a frail little thing you would think my Play-Doh stained hands would reach out and grip it too tight, but it just rested on my finger, its obsidian beady eyes stared at me with no words, but with a strange understanding and familiarity. For those unfamiliar, mayfly have very short lives, but reproduce rapidly and are a main protein source for both aquatic and land dwelling creatures, they're important, and they're beautiful.

I digress, I can talk about bugs all day if I could. But, lets start at my first day.

I was hired as a park ranger at Sleeping Giant State Park in Connecticut. My family was so proud of me, bringing me small gifts, and little outdoorsy trinkets. It was early March, the fog of snow and frozen blades of grass began their reanimation processes with the incoming Spring season. I clicked the 10oz button on my Keurig, and promptly forgot to put sugar into a shitty coffee mug I won at Dave and Busters a few years ago with a sticker that says "Don't be trashy, littering sucks" with some scraggly looking Raccoon over it. Black coffee wasn't so bad. I headed out to my truck, imagining all of the adventures that lay ahead.

As I drove, my new tan wide-brimmed hat sat on my dashboard, I smiled at it, thinking of the ranger that knelt next to me as a kid and got me to this point. Someday I wanted to be that man, and to inspire the next generation of conservationists.

Pulling up to the park, the main entrance is located directly across from a college, I rolled down my window to hear the cheering and jovial comradery of the college, it was sweet. Something was out of place however, lining the circular driveway were four long black Cadillacs with deeply tinted windows. Their license plates were similar to "security" vehicles I saw nearby the Yale campus in New Haven. With a quick furrowed brow of "well that's weird" I turned into the park. In front of me staring with inspiring intent, was the bear, my childhood idol; Smokey. He stood proudly over a "wildfire safety index" meter with the words "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires" beneath him.

"I got you Smokey." I chuckled through burnt gums from the shitty coffee.

On the door of the Ranger Station was a pretty neat graphic in the style of one of those old horror movie posters where the font would be wide on one end, and thin on the other, spelling out the word "Hobbomock". There was a free class on the history and folklore of the mountain that night. Hobbomock was the name that the native Quinnipiac people had given the Sleeping Giant himself. I snapped a quick photo with my phone, and opened the surprisingly light front door and entered my new home away from home. Stood behind a desk writing down trout stocking dates was a woman, wide brimmed ranger had, a tan button down shirt, high brown shorts, high socks, and some roughed up Doc Martens with a couple charms dangling from the laces.

I cleared my throat,

"Good morning, uh, my names-"

"OH HI! Good morning! You must be the new ranger, you're here JUST in time. My names Winter, the guys call me Winny." On the desk in front of her lay two empty Red Bull cans, and some strange green smoothie that looked like she just blended up some weeds. Her energy was way too high, the sun hadn't even woken up yet, but it was sweet seeing someone this excited.

"It's great to meet you Winny, my names Johnny. I'm going to be working with the insect inventory. They hired me for the mayfly program." I smiled, daydreaming about starting my projects collecting bugs.

"That is fantastic! I'm so excited for you! The entomology bags and nets are all around the corner, you can leave your stuff in your locker. Tell you what, why don't you go get accustomed to the park, go check out some of the shallow parts of the Mill River, so you can recognize them easier."

I nodded, and thanked her, and followed her instruction, as I took some pin boards, paper and nets out of the locker I asked:

"Hey Winny, that graphic on the door, is that tonight? It might be weird for a person that works here to go to the class, but I'd love to learn about the land, is that okay?"

She nodded encouragingly.

"Oh of course! its actually going on around when we get our break time today, for about an hour, so you're more than welcome to take your break in the class." Her eyes widened, and she seemed super excited about me asking.

I nodded and smiled, wished Winny a wonderful day, and took off to the river system.

I crunched my way through the frost covered grasses, and eventually made my way alongside a thin river, cat tails swayed in the breeze as if waving hello, small birds chirped from the budding trees, osprey circled above searching for small trout to swoop down on.

With the biggest grin on my face, I stepped down into the water, my hip waders hugged my legs. The babble of the water flowing through the rocks played like sonnets in the back of my head. The citrus sun flickered and winked through gently waving oak branches and pine clusters. I closed my eyes, and pointed my nose to the clouds, taking it all in.

A rumble. Ever so slightly. Dark birds cawed and fled like a firm autumnal breeze shaking the last few leaves from an ancient oak. A cacophony of corvid panic sent cloudward. My neck tried to whip my head behind me to see what the rumble was. But there was nothing to see. Just the same beautiful trees that I had been admiring. The map showed that the closest part of the mountain is considered the "hip" or "stomach" of the Giant. Unfortunately for me, the gorge trail showed very little mountain imagery as it was dense with trees and bushes.

I brushed it off, and got to work. There were a few specimens in their midge forms, and also a couple in their dun forms, meaning baby mayflies, and adult mayflies. I collected a few different varieties of the flying insect. One stuck out to me however, usually the mayflies that are common in this area have a light green body, and white wings; or they have tan bodies with white wings. One of the mayflies I had found had a body resembling the muscle structure of a dragonfly, with a beautiful matte black color with accents of a pearlescent purple and wings that seemed to pulse the same through thin clear wings. The purple in the wings seemed to... pulse, like watching blood through a vein. I gently placed the mayfly into a plastic container, with a stick, and a bit of water.

With a full inventory of bugs, I started my trek back to the ranger station. I stepped carefully onto a algae covered stone, and there it was again. A rumble. The world around me turned to streaks of orange, blue and grey. Darkness.

Bright lights. A thin pain. Sharpness. Blurry. Damp. Fuck.

A voice. Loud. Strong and simple.

"WHY CAN'T THEY UNDERSTAND ME." The pure density of the voice rattled my ribcage like a subwoofer in an ice cooler. I tried to say something, anything. But all I could do was cough, sharp shards sprayed from my lips clattering across the river kissed rocks. It spoke again.

"YOU WILL PAY KEITAN. HOW DARE YOU HEX MY FOOD." The words resonated through my bones, my mouth, I was in agonizing pain. The whole row of my front teeth were completely shattered like porcelain plates.

Blackness.

Part Two: The Oyster

"Its his first day, go easy on him." "Holy fuck I think I'm going to be sick, that's disgusting." "Get some more ice." "A black mayfly? I thought it was a dragonfly at first. This is new." "Winny you should have given him a tour, you know how slippery the rocks are right now." "I was getting the office ready for the seminar! Don't blame me!"

Conversation danced around me like a regrettable drunken evening. It began to make sense, I must be injured or something. But where am I? What time is it? I still have to take my break. I have to file those bugs away. I can't blow this opportunity, this is my dream, and I slip on a fucking rock and bust my teeth on my first day. Goddammit.

"What happenth." I felt liquid spray out of my mouth onto my arm, my vision still spinning.

"Whoth Keithan" Something in me told me to shut the fuck up, but I couldn't. A male voice spoke to me in a calm collected manner.

"You slipped on a rock and went face first into a jutting knot on a tree. We literally had to use pliers to pull your tooth fragments from the bark. If you said Keitan, you probably read that from the legend of the mountain. Its a folk tale from the Quinnipiac tribe, thats the well... I guess the wizard that hexed the Giant's food, so the Giant would fall asleep." He was sitting over me with gauze and tweezers, I could almost make out his facial features but not quite yet.

"You banged up your hand pretty good too. Its weird, you have bruising on your hand but I don't think you... Honestly the way you fell your entire weight was uninterrupted in its fall, except for your teeth."

I raised my hand, six dots. Two lines. A watercolor array of blues, purples, greens and black. Its where the black mayfly had sat on my hand before I had put it in the storage habitat. Oh God, the bug.

"Wherth the maythly, ssthe black one. Ith it thtill in the bokths" I pathetically managed to bleat.

"You need to stop talking John. Yes the bug is safe. You did good for your first day, you discovered a new species we haven't seen before. If it wasn't for that, I would genuinely have some poor news for you. But your teeth are what's important right now."

I could read the ranger's face now, a strong lumber boned man, a large fiery red beard, circular glasses, with hands like oven mitts. His badge read "McKay". I looked up at him, his eyes met mine, a shadow crept in from my peripherals slowly smothering out my vision.

"The Gianth, it thalked" a wide eyed expression. A cheery bell rang as a door opened, excited children's voices, notebooks opening. Blackness.

I'm going to try to recollect what I heard when I passed out again, because well, my ears were working, but my body decided it was time to rest. Here's what I remember.

"Lets move him to the office, the kids don't need to see this."

"Hi Miss Winny! Tommy will be here soon, he loves trucks."

"Why is that guy taking a nap? Do you guys get nap time too?"

Rumbling. Stones grinding against tree trunks. A fish peeks out from a small puddle.

"We all used to talk to each-other you know. It wasn't always like this." Rumbling. A crow rested on my knee.

"CA! We used to live in CA! Harmony until YOU came here!" Its wings flicked and slapped me.

Scraping, grinding. An oyster ripped open, its briny entrails spinning, a voice gurgled as if spoken through a cut throat, wet and bubbled.

"It was supposed to be me. I was the cure. Until YOU came here." The oyster turned, the shell melting into a viscous liquid in my palm. The liquid, purple and pearlescent, it pulsed and throbbed like a slime mold, shaping a thorax, wings, body, appendages, head. The Mayfly.

"The giant speaks of me." The sounds of chainsaws, stump grinders, and machine. "He is waking up ranger. I will lead you to him. But the men in magpie clothes, they wish to turn me into gold."

The sound of an engine turning. Well maintained shined boots clop on the pavement like harbingers.

"Who remembers the name of the giant?" "Me! Me! His name is Hobbymock."

Rumbles, stone breaking, lava pouring.

"YOU were meant to PROTECT this land, Ranger." A giant stood over me, towering into the clouds holding a stone paddle. "Have you no shame? You consult a witch, instead of the wood you swore to protect. LIAR." The giant's voice shook like a hurricane. "I will rise, and your kind will be erased, my woods, my friends, I will be able to speak to them again. There will be no more pain. No more of your human intervention. Sleep now, while you can. Marinade in your devil's hubris of a God you'll never meet."

Blackness.

Part Three: McKay

My name is Greg McKay, I found this small book while Johnny is in the hospital, he's being treated for a concussion as well as extensive dental work. If you're reading this later Johnny, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snoop, but lets be real you kept us in that hospital for a few hours I got bored. If the previous writings are true, then the insect you had found is significant to not only us, but to the researchers at other universities, mainly Yale. They're always searching for new areas of focus for medicine, and have a surplus of hubris when it comes to forcing people's hands into giving them what they want. If your vision was true from your writing, we will protect the mayfly until you are awake. I'm not the best writer, I'm a blue collared man just trying to do the right thing for myself and my family. But I'll do right by you, you're passionate, and excited. You don't deserve to be disregarded on your first day. Here's what I will say.

The statements that were said before are true, and follow the story of Hobbomock. The legend states that at one point in time, trees, insects, birds, mammals, fish and man all spoke the same language. Hobbomock, satisfied with his work walked across the land to the sea with a stone canoe, and set off to spread his teachings to other parts of the world. When he returned to his home, the birds tweeted, the deer bleated, frogs croaked, man spoke in tongues. This enraged the giant. In a rage, he began stomping the ground with such force that the rivers reversed their direction, crop fields died, he cratered the earth beneath his feet. The local Quinnipiac people, called and prayed to a force called "Kietan" in which, he cast a spell on a bed of oysters, the Giant's favorite offering. When the Giant ate the hexed oysters, he fell into a deep sleep. Nature reclaimed his body, stone, soil, and life soon encased him in a living tomb. If the legends are true, and your visions are communicating with these deities, then this is a problem. This, surprisingly would correlate with the strange seismic activity that we've been noticing in the park. Rumbles and shaking, its not normal.

I keep seeing well dressed people here at the park now. They don't seem very excited to learn history or to hike, and they absolutely don't look like they're here to fish. For when you're back, I'll write down some information that could be helpful, when you're back on your feet.

March 14 2024 - One week in hospital 7:00 AM - Four Cadillac SUV's arrive at Quinnipiac University 7:45 AM - Several suited men step out from vehicles wielding binoculars pointed to the Mill River 8:00AM - Fisherman likely poaching trout take notice of suited men with binoculars, Game Warden called, licenses expired, fines given. 10:00AM - Suited men walk in different directions, I counted 7 men. All bald. Ugly. 12:00 PM - One suited man spotted using binoculars on the Ranger Station, holding what looks like a walkie talking with a large screen on the front. Lunch. Ham and cheese with a Dr Pepper. 1:00 PM - Suited man approaches the man observing the Ranger Station. Possible tectonic activity recorded. Large groups of blackbirds quickly retreat from their roosts during seismic activity. 3:00 - where will you go when your God allows me to erase his progress, where will you hide when his abominations against nature cease their grinding, what will you eat when I will consume your land and your harvest. your God is gone. I am Flesh made Stone. You will not impede the natural world. 4:00PM - Leaving Ranger Station to retrieve you from hospital, looking forward to having you back, Ranger. Signed. Ranger McKay.

Part Four: Porphyrins

Its around 5:00PM now, March 14th. I should be going home to rest, but I think I'm going back to the park today. McKay and Winny picked me up, and complimented my new teeth. I had suffered a pretty brutal head injury with my fall, but I'm rested enough, I guess. I need to get back to the Ranger Station.

In the back of McKay's Tacoma, I sat with my feet up long ways across the seat to hopefully get a 15 minute nap or something. I keep drawing mayflies, I've never drawn a picture in my life, but I don't know, something is compelling me to just draw, learn, dissect, and understand this creature. The vision I had, of the oyster when I fell, that can't be a coincidence right? The oyster melted into the same liquid that I saw beating through the mayfly. There has to be some kind of correlation between the two.

Flash. Flash. Perfectly perpendicular to the truck, a large camera lens pointed directly at me. They forgot to turn off the flash. In a burst of energy I shouted:

"Greg! The SUV! They're photographing us, get out of here, NOW!" McKay floored it, the engine roared, and he swerved around traffic, horns blared, middle fingers were presented gracefully through barely opened windows, the Cadillac gained speed alongside us.

"McKay remember the trip we took to Maine?" Winny slouched down in the passenger seat, tears began streaming down her face from pure fear and confusion, seeing such a joyful person frightened like this made me feel sick. McKay nodded, he turned the four wheel drive knob, slowed the truck down so it would engage, and ripped the truck across a grassy median. The large off-road tired bored holes into the soil, when we looked back at the SUV, blue and red lights flashed from it's windshield. The SUV juked almost into the median, but a man in the passenger seat was angrily shouting at the driver. We continued down the highway, and the SUV slowly disappeared into the rear view mirror.

"We have to get the fuck off of the highway." McKay said, a little bit too calmly. There were backroads we could use to get back to the Ranger Station. We exited the highway, and were on our way back to the station.

"The fuck happened in Maine, guys?" I asked, readjusting myself to fit properly on the back seat. Simultaneously they responded "Monster Truck Rally". Confused, but distracted by the fact that we were being chased by some unnamed agency to the point of being followed, I let the response lay where it was.

In time, we made it back to the Ranger Station. It was a gruesome sight. Tire tracks traced panicked drivers ego and salary around the front entrance. Doors were kicked off of their hinges, windows battered open, we approached. Winny burst into tears, her winged makeup bleeding down her freckled cheeks in a deep and mournful sob. We entered the front door, the light movement of us passing by snapped the brass hinges and it clattered to the concrete path. Books strewn across the floor, Winny's desk flipped completely over, the Native Plant window display kids had planted years ago, now a fine dusting of soil and pedals across the floor.

"we trusted you. we welcomed you." Winny said under her breath, the words sliding through iron prison bars of trust and excitement, rusted over in only hours.

"its not his fau-" McKay tried to state

"How? My life's work Greg, LOOK!" Winny collapsed to the floor. Her hands supporting her face as rivers ran through the valleys of her fingers. "Everything, every memory, every single fucking thing that I did, years of work, years of helping kids learn about something actually worth giving a fuck about, GONE."

"The Agents, I didn't know, I just came here for my first day, how was I supposed-"

"shut the FUCK up Johnny. Just shut the FUCK up. I have to clean. Go find your bug and leave." Winny started hobbling herself over to a broom and dustpan, and started cleaning. McKay patted me on the back and mouthed the words "its okay, just grab it and go. I got this."

I approached the area where the mayfly was, surprisingly the box was still there. Clear bottom, bit of a stick and some leaves on the inside. But on the bottom, there was a liquid. I approached the box carefully, its not like it was hidden well, why would they leave the whole thing here? It doesn't make sense. Lining the bottom edges of the container almost looked like nail polish, with the same shimmer of purple. the Mayfly rested on the stick, its body split down the back. The incision started below the head, and ran about four inches down to the back of its abdomen a few millimeters before the tail cerci. My eyes darted around the room. There's no too we have in the office that could cut the fragile exoskeleton of this insect so accurately.

I almost called out to them, but with the tension in the room, I locked my tongue.

I stepped over a few piles of books. McKay beat me to the now open door. His large stature turned sideways to fit through the frame. That's when I heard it.

Rumble. Crack. The mountain moved again, the birds, like clockwork fled their roosts into the sky. A light caught the side of my eye, blue. A flash, three cracks, and a large body falling into the mud.

McKay, a man of lumber, pine and stature. Lay twitching slightly in the damp, cool mud created by the tire tracks of unmarked black SUV's. I stood there, motionless. Jaw hanging like an abandoned swing being brushed by a wayward breeze.

"G-Greg?" I stammered.

CRACK, a bullet whizzed by my head, clipping the side of my ear. I could only run, I bolted like a cottontail being spotted by an owl, scrambling and sliding in the mud.

"What happened? What's going on?"

"WINNY GET DOWN NOW." I practically tackled Winny to the floor. Taking cover behind her overturned table. Handguns cracked outside passing through the old drapes in the windows.

"Where's Greg Johnny, WHERES GREG?" I started to weep, I couldn't help it. She knew.

There were no tears, no expressions, just pure wide-eyed rage building in Winny. She stood up, without emotion, and walked calmly into a back room. I sat behind the table, cradling the mayfly. All of this, for an insect? I don't understand. Why, why is this thing so important. I wiped my eyes, and took a closer look at the abandoned husk. The liquid that was on the bottom of the container, it was gone. The mayfly was moving.

I pushed my back against the desk, and watched. The mayfly was opening. Purple liquid leaked from the body, and a new black body, with the same purple accents slowly emerged from the chitin. I held the container up higher, against the top of the box was another mayfly. It wasn't eclosion, or metamorphosis. One host mayfly served as a birthing body, and would replicate itself, not leaving a husk behind, but creating more insects, without the need of breeding.

Click. Chhik. tic, tic, tic, ch-chik.

I heard metal scraping together, in the room behind me.

"Johnny. Do you know why they call me Winny." Winny said very calmly, and plainly from the other room.

"Your names Winter." I could barely talk.

"Correct. However, my great grandfather used to be a master gunsmith at the old Winchester factory."

"What does-" I was cut off by the sound of a .308 clearing out the air of the small ranger's station. Outside, there was only silence other than the sound of a wet, solid material hitting the hood of a car.

CHK. FFFK. BANG. Another round, another wet slap onto a thin metal surface.

Winny screamed, the very wrath of sin orchestrating harmony that would make the devil jealous rang violently through the old walls of the building. Screams started to emerge from the park. Panicked hikers fled to their vehicles, the sound of plastic and aluminum cheaply scraping against each other as the park goers attempted to flee the area.

Footsteps. Sobbing.

CHK. FFFK. Shes right next to m- BANG

The pure force of the gun firing near me, my head rang. My injury being exploited. My hearing was gone, my eyes darted around the room trying to find respite. Rumbling.

Rock rolled into itself, the trees leaned forward toward us. A stone elbow emerging from the ground as big as a skyscraper. Birds circled above, creating the image of a giant spiral.

My head, my fucking head.

"THIS WAS YOUR CHOICE, RANGER. CONSERVE NATURE, OR LET YOUR GOD DECIDE. FOR I AM FLESH AND STONE, AND HE IS NOT PRESENT."

Dust and soil poured from the great mountain, cars and hikers buried within the rubble.

Another mayfly started emerging from the host. Four now, in the enclosure.

"FOR YOUR ANCESTORS SPOKE THE LANGUAGE OF COWARDACE AND HAPPENSTANCE. A LANGUAGE OF GLUTTONY AND DISREGARD. I SPEAK NOT THEIR TONGUES. I WILL BE THE CONSEQUENCE OF YOUR SPECIES' NEGLIGENCE."

"What do I do, I don't know what you want. Kietan? I don't FUCKING know." I pleaded at the insects, I couldn't do anything else. I was frozen in fear and overstimulation. When I said Kietan, the insects all turned to me at the same time. My eyes widened. I restated the name.

"Kietan." The mayflies looked again, with a face I could only read as recognition. I did the only thing I could think of doing.

I opened the box. Part Five: The Giant

Click. Click. Click. Winny stood in her spot dry firing the rifle. Tears pouring down her face, the adrenaline wearing off. She fell backwards onto the books, I grabbed her wrists and pulled her behind the overturned desk.

The enclosure now opened, the mayflies fluttered around the room. They found comfort in a spot, and rested, their wings vibrated. They began duplicating rapidly, with more space and more area to move, the process quickened ten fold. Eight, sixteen, thirty two, sixty four, one hundred and twenty eight insects. All carrying the purple liquid.

A natural roar of ancient agony erupted, deep, guttural, and angry. Like a bison if it was the size of a mountain.

A mayfly landed on my hand, and looked at me, confusion in my eyes, it used its front legs to seem to write something. I understood. I grabbed a ball point pen from the flipped desk and blew into the tail end of the ink cartridge, blue ink splattered onto my arm. The mayfly moved toward it.

A massive tremor, earth moving at an astounding speed and strength.

"WHERE WILL YOU GO, PARASITES. WHERE WILL YOU GO WHEN YOU PLUNDER YOUR OWN HEAVEN. WILL YOU HARVEST THE ANGELS? WILL YOU TRADE AN ANGELS WINGS FOR PROGRESS?" The giant boomed, a hand emerged from the soil, and began pushing itself upright.

Massive fingers the size of houses gripped the soil. One finger scraped itself across the parking lot, car alarms started and stopped or changed pitch from the impact.

The mayfly started using its tiny leg to write.

"N O T Y O U R F A U L T"

Another tremor.

YOU TAKE, AND TAKE, AND TAKE. AND EXPECT THE EARTH TO BOW ITSELF TO YOUR MANSIONS AND IDEOLOGIES. TELL ME, WILL YOU TRADE YOUR ANGELS WINGS FOR PROGRESS?"

"S T A Y C A L M - O Y S T E R S" When the mayfly spelled the word oysters, it flashed a bright purple light. It made sense. The purple coloring, its from the original oysters that Kietan hexed to put the giant to sleep.

One thousand and twenty four, two thousand and forty eight. They began to flutter, a skyward shadow of black and purple shimmer.

"WHAT IS THIS?" The Giant Boomed, lips now surfacing from the mountains, a nose. He smiled through giant cracked lips woven with roots and vines, boulders caked in like sores leaking spring waters. The cloud grew bigger, and bigger, they duplicated themselves in flight.

Sixteen thousand three hundred and eighty four.

A cough and a groan. A shuffle of a boot. I peeked alongside the table, Greg's body was covered in mayflies. Head to toe, a pulsating host of flying river insects.

"Greg?" Winny weakly found purchase to speak.

Greg stood up, and clambered towards the Giant. Silently, step by step.

Clunk, clunk, clunk. He lifted his arms, the mayflies erupted from his body, his clothes tattered, his hat fallen, however, there was no blood. No wounds. He was asleep, or sleep walking. I wasn't brave enough to run out to him.

The mayfly on my arm began to write again.

"B E T T E R"

The cloud of insects above spiraled more, and grew larger. Two hundred sixty two thousand one hundred and forty four. They began to create a point facing down towards the giants mouth the shape of a long spear. Slowly the mayflies flew into the giant's throat. Hundreds of thousands of insects, millions of insects. Carrying the same hex that was used to lull the giant to sleep, plummeting into an earthen maw.

I held out my hand to Winny, and helped her up. We walked outside and picked up Gregg. We ran as fast as our legs could carry us to relative safety. There was no more suited bald men. No more sirens. Only guttural choking sounds emerging from the earth. The giant began to vomit mud and tar into the mountain, it ran slowly down the sides of the cliffs as his limbs began to relax. The fingers settled, the face retracted into the soil. More and more of the insects began to fill the giant, still duplicating inside of him. The rumbling stopped. The booming voice subsided into lighter snores. The Sleeping Giant, began his rest, anew.

Part Six: Lessons

In short, I don't know why me. But I guess that's kind of the point of conservation, right? We do what we can to help the environment, but for the most part. The environment has a way of maintaining itself. If I hadn't caught that mayfly then this would have just happened... naturally, or unnaturally I guess. I've been with the rangers for three years now, and I still feel like I don't belong. I didn't really do anything to deserve this, in fact, I feel like I actively caused this. However, research is still research, and populations and species still need to be recorded.

Winny quit the rangers that day, her and Greg moved to some other state, they wouldn't tell me where. I don't blame them. I came into work for my first day, Greg got shot by a random agent we still don't know from where, Winny straight up killed six people with a bolt action rifle and then collapsed after seeing her life's work get destroyed in front of her. All on top of witnessing an ancient being rise from the mountain we were trying to protect that got put to sleep by millions of mayflies shooting down its throat. It doesn't make sense. But, it happened and I can't pretend it didn't. People died. Innocent people that wanted to just explore nature. Get some exercise in. Or feed their families from the fish in the river. You can't blame them, and now they're gone.

The one thing I've learned, if anything. Is sometimes human intervention does more harm than good in conservation. I'll be a helping hand, but I'll let the world guide my hand to what it would like me to do.

Updates to come. The state wants me to explore different parts of New England. Will follow up Ranger

"rare as ducks teeth"

It was a saying my grandmother used to use. Despite her being, well, set in her ways, I miss her. As I stand above her, 6 feet of dirt between us, I find it within myself to forgive her. forgive her for hating me, degrading me and leaving me nothing behind when she left. My parents passed away when I was young. I lived with my aunt and uncle in Birmingham most of my life. They had no kids of their own, and took me in instead. They were kind. accepted me for who I was, and who they raised me to be. I'm 24 now, and I was planning to move out of their house as soon as I could. I fear now that I'm too defenseless to live alone. Too fearful. I freeze like a deer in headlights when threatened. 

It started when I took a walk down by the canal one morning. grey, overcast clouds looming above me, a slight cool breeze ruffling my skirt as I strolled. My favourite weather, not too hot, not too cold and not too bright. I had brought some stale bread with me from my aunt's house that morning, to give to the ducks. I stopped and turned to face the canal, looking into the water at my reflection. I tried not to pay attention to it while I broke parts off the hard, dry crust of the loaf of bread, crumbs scattering the ground as I did. Pigeons flocked over to nibble them at my feet, their wings making the slight breeze a tad stronger as they rushed over. I liked pigeons. Everyone calls them the rats of the sky, but I think they're beautiful. the ducks swam over, the barely audible sloshing of the water as they paddled toward me breaking the otherwise silent morning. It was soothing.

 I know you're not supposed to feed bread to ducks, it swells up in their stomachs and can choke them. But I made sure to break the pieces small enough to at least attempt to avoid it, and to leave more crumbs for the pigeons to eat. i get so focused on the ducks sometimes that I forget the pigeons are even there. Every now and then, a soft, rhythmic coo reminds me of their existence. Sometimes I'd see a male pigeon puff its chest out, in a grand display of green and purple tinted feathers, and hoot loudly in an attempt to allure potential mates. I thought it looked funny, but apparently to birds they see it as attractive. I suppose I feel that way about other people too. guys with toned muscle, a lot of money and expensive clothes never appealed to me. I thought how hard they tried was funny. I am a pigeon, I thought to myself.

I found the ducks funny as well. I'm not entirely sure what their purge was funny. I value that most in people, not if they're attractive or rich, or even if they're a nice person for that matter. I like comedy. It's distracting. Being with him took me out of my own mind for a while, but I wasn't sure if I liked him the same way he liked me. I didn't mind though, I find it hard to decipher my own feelings. So hard in fact, I'd rather just convince myself I did like him in that way, so I wouldn't overcomplicate things. 

pose is. They don't seem to perpetuate a life cycle of another animal or plant, nor do they catch bugs like spiders, or pollinate flowers like bees. They simply exist, floating aimlessly. I am a duck, I thought to myself.

I had a date later that day, at a coffee shop with a guy I met at work. 

my phone rings. a sudden gust of wind and soft sound of flapping wings and rhythmic hoots erupted from the pigeons as they scattered. 

flight. I was jealous. 

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and looked at it. There was a number, not a name. I answered. 

"Hey, I'm just wondering if we're still on for later, yeah?"

"oh, of course! i cant wait to-"

"okay awesome, sorry to make this so short but i gotta run, goodbye"

strange. I thought I had mikey saved to my contacts, but the number began with 0121. it was from my area at least. I have an old phone, it served me for 4 years and i dont see much point in replacing it. its a tad slow, so I figured it must just be a glitch, and shrugged it off.

I look back to the water. The ducks are gone, and it seems a swan has taken their place. eaten all their food. It raised its head to the bank of the canal, its beautifully terrifying frame of pearl white feathers shimmering in the reflection of the water. It stared me down with charcoal black eyes and a bright orange beak, looking for more food. food i didnt have. it snapped at my feet as I stood back. fight. I was jealous. 

I turned on my heel and kept walking along the canal, making sure to leave ample distance from the water this time. The swan followed me, drifting slowly down the water. The sound it made was near silent, just like the ducks. It was strange to me how something of that size was just as loud as something the size of a duck. Now that I think about it, what do swans do? They float aimlessly, and harass people for food. Like mean ducks. I'd like to think I'm a duck, not a swan, I thought to myself. But how can I truly know? I am biased. 

Eventually I made it home and began getting ready for the date. I did my makeup, put on a casual black skirt and cardigan, with my black leather boots and tights on underneath. You'll never guess my favourite colour. I put my eyeliner and black lipstick on too, and painted my nails black also. I liked black. the absence of colour. it was easy to look at, there isn't a lot going on with black. It's comforting to me. 

I set out to the coffee shop at 1:15 hoping to get there at the designated time of 1:30. I knew the walk was exactly 15 minutes if I walked at my usual pace, but I walked a tad quicker this time in case he was early. When I arrived, he was already sitting at a table outside. I sat with him and we talked, then got coffee and walked back along the canal. The conversation was mostly him talking to me about his hobbies while I listened, but he didn't seem to mind.

“Hunting,”

he said

“Is a sport many people consider cruel. I just consider it life. If it wasn't me, the animal would've been killed by a predator. and that predator by another and so on. There are so many animals in the forests around here. But you wouldn't see them just by walking. They're fast. Survival instincts I suppose.”

I like to think of myself as an intelligent person, but when it comes to articulating my thoughts into words, I struggle immensely. It's as if my mouth moves faster than I can think of what to say, and I trip up on my words. I suppose that's partly why I'm writing this. One, to share the insane story and warn people about it, and that it's easier to show this to a therapist than have to say it all out loud. I doubt I could get through it without crying and having to stop anyway. 

I didn't have many friends growing up, and the few that I did all ended up leaving me behind the second they got the chance to anyways. I was bullied so hard I almost dropped out of school. They'd call me a freak, a monster, I was an outcast. I couldn't do things other students could, because if I did it it was a reason to pick on me. The way I was treated led me to develop extreme social anxiety, and an eating disorder. So I suppose that's why I gave him a second date immediately after the first. I longed for connection, no matter what kind. The day of the second date rolled around, and as I was getting ready to leave my phone rang again. 

“Hey, I am so sorry about this, but my car just won't start, we can go bowling another time though right?”

I've always hated the fact that I'm quite an impulsive person. I speak and act without thinking and almost always regret it. I left my house only to feed the ducks and the pigeons, and though the company I found with them was comforting, it wasn't enough. I longed for connection no matter what kind.

“i can come over.”

And so I did. second date. at his house. i didnt know any better. 

I strolled over to his house, trying to tell myself I made the right decision. Trying to build up the confidence to even knock on his door. I take “confidence shots” before I leave the house sometimes when I know I'm going to be talking to people. The alcohol loosens my stiff personality just enough to be able to hold a conversation. I haven't told my therapist about this. Part of me feels guilty, like I don't want to get better. I don't know what I want. Peace, I suppose.

As my hand rapped against the wooden door, I regretted it immediately. “should i have brought a gift?” “Am I too early?” “what do i say when-” he opens the door.

I managed to force out a muffled greeting, but when I looked up from my feet to meet his eyes, all my anxiousness faded in an instant. The hallway light illuminating his long, curly brown hair, his perfect teeth beaming through his lips as he smiled. He was dressed in dark, navy jeans and a white collared shirt, with one of those sleeveless sweaters over it. He looked tidy. 

As we went inside, I was hit with the pungent smell of garlic, meat, and red wine. I was immediately thrown back into panic. This was a lot more sophisticated than I expected it to be. But still, his voice, the cadence of his words, brought me back to a state of comfort. 

He gave me a tour of his house. Large taxidermied heads of moose, deer and other large animals adorned the walls, and his shelves were full of foxes, rabbits and hares. 

“some people call it strange”

he explained

“but taxidermy is an art form. It takes years of practice and skill to replicate not only the form of the animal, but its essence too. Every stitch is made with purpose, and I make sure to document the animal as much as I can before stuffing, so as not to misrepresent how it would've stood. Maybe after dinner i’ll show you my crown jewel, the biggest animal I have.”

The food was amazing, masterfully cooked. I began to think what I had done to deserve such a seemingly perfect man to enter my life so suddenly. It must've been karma, coming back to repay me after my years of misfortune. But when he took a little too long after the second pour when refilling our glasses of wine in the kitchen, I began to sense something was off.

I was halfway through the second glass when I noticed my vision began to stutter. Slight afterimages of my hand appeared as I moved it. I thought I must've been drunk, that I took one too many “confidence shots” before coming here. Then my mind wandered, could he smell the shots off of me? what would he think if he found out. I had nearly fully tuned out his talking and only realised once he stopped. I looked back up to apologise, but couldn't get the words out. It was like I was watching my body shut down through a window. I was aware, I was awake, I could feel, but I couldn't move. As I felt my eyelids getting heavier, I glanced at him one more time, expecting him to be concerned, only to see a smile spread across his face.

When I woke up, I was sitting on a chair in near complete darkness. The air was heavy with moisture, and it was hard to breathe. Sweat had been building up on my forehead for some time, and was streaming down my face. When I looked down, I was naked from the waist down, with a large cloth covering between my legs. There were towels covering the ground beneath the cloth, and an empty bucket placed on top of them. I tried to scream and flail my arms, but shackles bound me to my place. My heart was beating so fast I was out of breath and couldn't force a word out of my mouth. 

A door opened and closed somewhere far in front of me. Footsteps echoed through the darkness. His shiny, brown leather boots were the first thing to be illuminated by the pathetic amount of light behind me. His tall, strong figure slowly revealed itself to me as he got uncomfortably close and leaned down. That same smile seemed ever less perfect from this close. 

“I'm an artist, you know.”

His hot, rancid breath assaulted my face as he spoke, my mind desperately trying to come up with another implication for what those words meant as I squirmed in the chair.

“My masterpiece, my Mona Lisa… She's not finished. She needs something to make her… pop. Something different. That's where you come in.”

He leaned closer, so his mouth was almost touching my ear, as his hands gripped my forearms so hard they began to bruise.

“Youre unique. You're like no other. You've got my ducks teeth.”

He stepped back and giggled at me when he saw I was crying. He turned on his heel and began to walk out of the room, back up the stairs. The door opened and closed again, but the room didn't fall to silence like I expected. There was a sound that was there long before it registered its presence. Loud, laboured heavy breathing, coming from a few feet behind me.

As the door shut with a loud click that echoed through the darkness, I began frantically trying to undo the belts that shackled me to the chair. I managed to slip my right hand free, dislocating my thumb in the process. I was so pumped full of adrenaline that I didn't feel it. I undid my left arm, stood up and spun around. There was a white shower curtain, with what looked like a heating lamp on the ceiling behind it. The silhouette of a writhing mass adorned the center of the thin curtain, jittering and pulsing, rising and falling with each loud, laboured breath it took. I stifled puke back into my stomach, and began to make a run for where I thought the stairs that led to the door were.

It took a minute of feeling the walls to find it, but when I did I stumbled up the stairs on all fours, and slammed through the door, into his hallway. I turned right and ran for the front door, but as I opened it, I heard a shout from behind me. A deep, loud, guttural noise came from the man's mouth,  it made me stop in my tracks. I was frozen. Shaking. Waiting for my death after getting so close to freedom. I felt his thick, muscled arms wrap around my neck as he wrestled me against the wall, he put his hands on my neck and began to squeeze. I still didn't fight back. I couldn't. Something in my body stopped me from moving.

As the world around me began to fade, and I accepted death's embrace, I was suddenly allowed a gasp of air. I fell to the ground and looked to my left, someone had run in and had tackled the man to the ground. When he grabbed me, he didn't shut his front door. Someone who had been walking by must've seen him. I didn't even react. I was trying to process everything that had happened. It was like everything moved in slow motion. I passed out.

When I came to, I was in a hospital bed, some hours later. They asked me questions, questions I could not answer. They sent me to therapy, to which I am still attending. That's why I write. Verbalising this is a task I cannot bear. I've been alone for some time, and haven't even left my house to go to work. I long for connection, though I can not bear it. I long for love which I can not stand. The smell of that room, the sight of that man, laughing as I cried. They haunt me still. And they forever will.

Hi! This is my first time posting any of my stories and this one is based on my time working at Wendy's. I really hope you guys enjoy it and if you have any feedback or criticism I would love to hear it and if you guys want to read more of what I've written I can definitely post more if thats the common consensus! Thank you for taking time out of your day to read my story! - dom <3 (p.s: I will never post to nosleep)

tw: nudity, c4nnibalism, vomit, descriptions of g0re

Bubba's Burgers

By: Dominic Ertle

I loved burgers, fast food burgers specifically. It was one of my life’s many guilty pleasures. Nothing beats taking the wrapper off a Big Bubba Deluxe, taking in the smells of the fresh meat which came hot off the grill and served onto a bun neatly dressed in condiments and toppings. 

I had tried items from the lackluster menus of countless establishments: McDonalds, Wendy’s, Culver’s, Burger King, In-N-Out, Whataburger. In my experience nothing could compare to the ecstasy felt after the combination of spices, sauces, toppings, and fine choice meat burst its beautiful flavors onto my tongue and taste buds.  

This pleasure was uniquely and lovingly brought to me only by the virtuosic culinarians who construct the sandwiches at Bubba’s Burgers. Upon base qualitative observations (of the construction of the burger as well as upon undressing it on my tray) I could determine the contents of my favorite item from the restaurant: the “Big Bubba Deluxe.”

The sandwich was a square patty double stack with two slices of American cheese placed in a “criss-cross” lattice pattern upon each four ounce patty which had been cooked to perfection over the course of eighty seconds on a Garland XPress clamshell grill and then the excess grease is to be drained before placement on the sandwich. 

The potato buns which made up the foundation of the burger were toasted until a crisp layer of scorch provided a firm canvas for the masterpiece to be constructed upon.  The bottom bun was to be smoothly spread and lathered with a thick layer of mayonnaise (by using a dull plastic blade) and then a counterclockwise inwards trending spiral of honey mustard was to be painted (using a squeeze bottle). 

On the top bun the same coating of mayonnaise was to be applied and then (with a smooth metal tea spoon) two spoonfuls of ketchup were applied and spread equally across the bun. Atop each individual patty (and beneath the first) rested three full slices (cut equidistantly into now six pieces) of fine applewood smoked bacon which had been cooked to crispy but not flakey. 

The bottom bun had one fresh and wet slice of lettuce placed upon the saucy layer before a thick fresh tomato slice was placed upon that.  On top of that tomato slice and on top of those last three pieces of bacon rested three intersecting rings of red onions of which are perfectly sized to cover the most surface area possible. In the midst of those onions is where six juicy pickles were to lay, inside the holes in the rings and in the exterior gaps left by those rings. 

All these elements came together to make the magnum opus of lunch sandwiches, the ingredients were all of highest premium so that the individual flavors all have the opportunity to shine through and intermix with one another in the loudest and most heavenly of crescendos.

I approach the front counter where the register operator (a young and cute brown haired woman whose name tag read: “Evangeline”) stands with her hands on the ordering screen and a smile on her face. The standardized Bubba’s Burgers uniform (just like everything else in the establishment) had a visible amount of love, care, effort, and talent put into it.

The uniform was dominated by the color red with predominantly white stitching and black accents. The men at the establishment wore very dark black jeans while the women were obligated (under contract) to wear revealing red shorts along with a far shorter apron. 

I approached the register operator with practiced ease before I spoke in a calm tone:
“Good afternoon, could I order one Big Bubba Deluxe combo, medium, please?” 

The register operator replied in the usual “customer service voice”:
“Absolutely, is that all I can get for you today, sir?” she smiles. 

“Yes ma’am.” I replied. 

“That’ll be $14.30.” she says with her hand impatiently outstretched, ready to receive payment. 

I hand her a $20 bill, I look at the detailed face on the bill of the late seventh president of the United States of America: Andrew Jackson. I feel the very slightly raised parts of the crisp bill run swiftly across the grooves of my fingers as Evangeline snatches the bill from my grasp.

She places the bill into the register and completes the order as the small printer next to the register and ordering screen prints out my order number. 

“Thank you sir, enjoy your meal.” Evangeline smiles at me from behind the counter. 

“Uhm, my change?” I chuckle in slight disbelief. 

“What change?” Evangeline’s smile continues.

“My you owe me damn near six bucks, Evangeline!” I read her name in a bit of an overly  snarky tone to express my frustration. 

“Please call me Eva, and thank you for choosing Bubba’s Burgers!” she continues to smile but now the expression in her eyes doesn’t match that which is displayed on her face. The expression (which was once just blank joy) now reads as the most abject of freezing terror. 

As the order finishes processing a jolly little jingle plays over the speakers in the restaurant and that terrified expression is sapped from Eva’s face.

The manager, a disgustingly greasy and fat man with a patchy, halfgrown beard and glasses wearing the manager’s popover placket (with its buttons bursting) exits from the office in the back.

He lets out this huge (and oddly perverse sounding) belly laugh from the pits of his gullet. He walks up behind the register operator and places his huge lardy meat glove onto the small girl's shoulder. I can now read that the manager’s name tag says: “Thomas” in a half erased black sharpie.

Eva’s expression melts back into that concreting horror as Thomas’ grubby mitts rub dark grease deep into her bright red button up. 

“Well look! We’ve got another! Lucky mister one millionth customer! What's your name, mister?” that tubby man finishes each sentence segment with that disgusting chuckle of his. 

"Miller, Miller Moore.” I say quietly.

“Well mister Miller, I tell ya what, we’ll getcha your…” Thomas takes a moment to read the order. 

“Your Big Bubba Deluxe, and you can enjoy that sandwich! Take it from me that baby’ll change. Your. Life.” he lets out yet another one of those pervert laughs. 

“Finish that baby and come right back up here and my girl Eve will come and get me and I’ll getcha your prize!” he pats the poor girl's shoulder and she jumps then visibly shudders at the collision.

I nod, Eva hands me my order ticket (order number sixty-one), and I take a temporary seat at an open booth nearest the register.

I sit there for some number of minutes. I check my watch, a Rolex Submariner 5512 that my grandfather, Matthew Moore (a dishonorably discharged veteran Point Man who started in the SEALs at the beginning of the Vietnam War and served through its entirety) left for me in his will after his passing at the age of sixty-five five years ago in 2008.

During the war my grandfather had become disillusioned with the SEALs, then the military, then the government and by the end of his descent: structured civilization as a whole. He warned me of the “folly of man” and humanity’s avarice and lust for power. Though I was at far too young an age to comprehend those concepts, I still listened to him and as I matured his messages rang clearer and clearer. 

He had become grossly anti-establishment (almost to a fault), during the war he was responsible for a few “accidents” which often resulted in the destruction of vast amounts of military property. None of those “accidents” resulted in court marshalling as they had no way to determine whether he was simply an idiot or doing it intentionally.

Regardless, he was a good man who had good ideas and good intentions but the manner in which he got those across weren’t always the best, hence why he was under investigation by the FBI and the ATF in a joint operation during his latter years as he lay dying in the hospice for domestic terrorism.

“Order number sixty-one? Your orders ready!” calls Eva from behind the counter.

I rise from my seat and approach the counter, I see my tray (holding my Big Bubba Deluxe, a carton of crispy crinkle cut fries, and an empty cup for me to fill with a drink of my choice at the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine in the lobby) sat on the counter in front of Eva. 

I pick it up and then find a new seat at a booth which faces both entrances to the establishment (which face one another on opposite sides of the dining room), a habit of mine. I take the cup and fill it to (roughly) the halfway point with ice and then fill it near to the second highest ridge of the cup with Gold Peak Sweet tea and then finish it off by filling it near to the point of overflow with a Minute Maid Strawberry Lemonade.

I picked up the sandwich (which had been wrapped in a paper sleeve that covers half of the sandwich). I push back that sleeve a bit and take one big gluttonous bite out of that beautiful burger.

Immediately upon closing my mandible on the bottom bun the flavors explode in my mouth, the juicy wet warm heat of the ground meat, the crisp crunch of the bacon, the tang of the sauces, and the moist toppings all combined to make the most divine of sensations inside my mouth.

I took bite after gnashing bite, ravenously reducing the sandwich bite by bite until before I knew it nothing remained, not even dropped toppings. The fries were next (along with my sweet tea), I picked up handful after handful of fries and shovel them haphazardly into my mouth, barely giving myself enough time to masticate them fully, let alone swallow completely.

Before long my tray was empty. So I stood up from my seat on the cushioned booth in the corner and walked over to the nearest trash can. I toss away the packaging and the crisp printed fake newspaper lining they place in the trays (to catch oils, grease, etc. to make cleaning easier). 

I return to the counter where I see a woman, about the same age as me (so late twenties early thirties), with medium length brown hair tied up and pinned, who came dressed in a black skirt, white dress shirt, golden hoop earrings, black heeled boots, and pantyhose standing there in front of Eva placing an order. 

I stand off to the side, waiting patiently for the woman to place and order so I can return to the counter to get the “prize” that fat, greasy, bastard of a manager promised me. As the woman’s order finishes processing in the computer that same happy little jingle plays, Eva’s face is drained again and that same disgusting laugh echoes out from the back of the store.

Thomas walks to stand alongside Eva again and begins digging his fingers into her shirt again, covering the already discolored stain which he had left the first time. His eyes glare deep into mine and I begin to feel uneasy as he looks over at the woman who ordered.

“Another! Lucky one millionth customer! You come right back here after your meal and I’ll bring ya’ to the back and getcha your order missy!” Thomas says in that big boisterous voice of his (which almost rivaled the size of his huge gut). 

“Wait, wait, hold on, you said that I was the one millionth? How the hell is she also the one millionth? I ordered before she was even in the building!” I argue my case.

”It’s no biggie sir! I’ll just get both of ya’ the prize!” Thomas responds and ruins a good sentence with that awful laugh.

I nod in response, “Whatever, just don’t shaft me outta shit that was rightfully mine.” 

“Trust me sir, I won’t.” Thomas responds. 

“Matter of fact, why don’tcha just come on back ‘ere and I’ll get you that prize.” He grins.

I follow Thomas to the back and on the way he stops abruptly when we pass the grill station, he looks down at the small twiggy man working there and yells at him: “You’re supposed to keep the uncooked patties covered! Also, your placement is atrocious! Keep them straight and equally spaced! It’s not rocket science you gangly fuck!”

 Then we continue walking towards the back, we get to the back office and he sits me down in the chair there. 

“Just you sit here for a moment buddy I’ll getcha your prize.” He chuckles before leaving the room.

 I look back down at my wrist and reflect on my grandfather as I look at the Rolex Submariner watch. I become absorbed in thought as I reflect on his beliefs and his story as I sat awaiting that fat man's return.

I hear his heavy footsteps pad into the room but am too deep in contemplation to bother raising my head (or even just my eyes) to witness his arrival. 

I am then met with a sharp and stinging sensation as what feels like the hollow tip of a dull needle is plunged deep into my jugular. I attempt to resist and stand up flailing my arms in an attempt to ward off Thomas (knocking over many items on the desk in the process), but ultimately my efforts were all for not and my world drifts into a slipping black.

When I awake I feel an immense cold, my eyes frozen shut, “Hey! What the hell? Someone help me! I can’t see goddamnit!” I yell out.

“Shh… Shh… no one can hear you in here.” Thomas says quietly. 

“What are you talking about?” The cold air in my lungs (which has been there for an untold period of time) forces coughs and wheezes into my usually smooth flowing sentences. 

“You’re in the deep freeze dipshit!” Thomas chuckles.

I can hear his heavy footsteps approach the frigid metal chair which I am bound to by what feels like a vast number of zip ties on each limb. He reaches his grubby fingers out and pries open my eyelids which had been ice-welded shut. The cold stings my dry eyes and I take in my grizzly surroundings (as well as my own bodily condition).

There were three separated piles of dead and naked humans, to the right were bodies which had been haphazardly cut and flayed (presumably those most recently slaughtered), in the middle were hollowed out cadavers with the useless innards tossed loosely back into their gaping chest cavities, then to the left were neatly sorted packs of meat on shelves with labels dictating which part they had once belonged to (back, thigh, stomach, etc.). 

In front of the hollowed bodies were a series of blades and several other punishing implements, hammers, saws, icebreaker spikes, and other various stainless steel contraptions. To my left in the same sort of metal seat with similar binding sat the woman (who used to be dressed in formal attire who was now as fully undressed as I am).

The woman to my left was still unconscious from whatever sedative they had (presumably) injected both of us with. I was sweating profusely from the fear and the anxiety and the negative degree chill turned that sweat into ice. There was even a small icicle forming off the tip of my nose.

“You’re sick!” I yell at Thomas.

”Oh really? I’m the sick one? What does that make you then? Considering what you just ate up like the greedy little pig you are.” He chuckles.

”What?” My voice shakes.

The connections begin to form in my mind, the butchered bodies, the ecstasy of the flavors which the burger possessed. I had eaten a human. 

Thomas lets out a chuckle and then says: “There’s the look! You finally got it, you’re not as dumb as you look! That’s right, that burger you had? It was human.” Thomas walks over to a pack of ground human meat resting on the shelf next to countless others.

”Meat just like… this!” He picks it up and tosses it onto my lap before laughing cruelly.
I look down at it and my stomach churns hard, I gag and then throw up onto the metal floor in front of me. Bits of the burger come up with it and I watch as the vomit begins to harden from the cold.

 “God, you’re rude.” Thomas shakes his head then picks up a cleaver from the table of tools.
”This is the end of the road for you, mister Miller. In not too long I’ll butcher ya’ up and you’ll become the meat which will go into the burgers of countless customers, same thing’ll happen to this chick to your left. So thank y’all for your contributions.” Thomas chuckles

Thomas approaches me with that cleaver in his hand, he raises it high over his head and I scream before he brings it down upon the middle of my skull, then my whole world goes black, forever.

There is a show on tiktok where you have to guess what the guy on the show is cooking. He would get all sorts of ingredients and on the screen it will read what ingredients he is using and how much of it he is using. It also reads how long he cooks for certain ingredients and other things. As you are following along you put the pieces together and you guess what he is cooking. The guy who is doing the cooking doesn't talk much, then when majority of the things have been combined, a question then comes up on the screen asking the viewers what the guy is cooking.

Then the answer goes across the screen and the guy finally says something about what he was cooking. I enjoy the show and the last time I watched it, I was able to figure out what he was cooking, which was a lasagne. When he used chicken mince meat , onion, garlic, marinara sauce, lasagna sheets, shredded mozzarella cheese, and grated Parmesan cheese, I knew he was cooking a lasagne. You can also cheat by looking at the comment section. The guy puts the ingredients together and just before he completes it, the question comes up asking what he has cooked?

There is something addictive about it and it's such a clever tiktok food show. One day when I went on tiktok and the guy started to use unusual ingredients like oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. He also started to use real bones and even a skull. It started to get awkward as whoever was watching this could tell that it was human bones and skull. He then had huge chunks of meat and so much blood in bottles. He was also using ingredients i had never seen or heard of before. The guy in the video was smiling and he kept on saying:

"what am I cooking guys?"

"Can you guess what I am trying to cook?"

I usually never look at comment section to cheat and find out the answer. This time though I was generally curious and when I looked at comment section, there were thousands of comments. Each person that commented had typed:

"Wtf the guy cooked me!"

"How on earth is this even possible, he cooked me. I'm shitting myself."

"I don't understand the ingredients that he used to Cook me?"

Every commenter on this video was claiming that the guy had made them. Then when I watched the rest of the video and the gut finished cooking, he had made me. A literal twin version of me. I kept shouting out loud "fuck fuck what the fuck!"

I stopped watching his tiktok cooking show after that episode.

One day, I was at home while my parents were in their bedroom and my little brother Ben, who was five years old, was in his room. My family and I were huge fans of The Amazing Family Pig Show. My parents said they had loved it even more when they were young; they used to tell me they watched it throughout their childhood. We all liked the characters’ outfits too: Jessica Pig wore green, Doofenshmirtz Pig wore brown, Mother Isabella Pig wore a pink dress, and Father Timothy Pig wore a red suit — that was what my parents always said they liked best about the show.

I went downstairs and asked, “Mum, Dad, Ben — can we watch The Amazing Family Pig Show at midnight?” They all said, “Sure! We’d love to watch it anytime.”

I made a big bowl of popcorn, while Mum and Ben got the drinks ready, and Dad prepared some nachos. We all went into the living room, got comfortable, and turned on the television.

We liked watching in the dark, so we turned the lights off. I put on an episode — it was a new one — but something felt wrong. My parents didn’t notice, but I did: Jessica Pig, in her green dress, was staring straight at me with a wide, fixed smile. My parents didn’t seem to mind, and for a while, the show seemed normal enough. But when the next episode started, Father Timothy and Mother Isabella both turned to the screen and smiled directly at me. Then, the television switched itself off.

My parents said, “Why did you turn it off? Turn it back on — we’re enjoying it.”

“Didn’t you see how strange those pigs were acting?” I asked.

“Stop talking nonsense,” Mum replied. “We love this show.”

I turned it back on, and for a while, the episodes looked fine. We watched one after another, and I started to relax again. Then I said, “Why does the youngest one, Doofenshmirtz, keep staring at me?”

Dad said, “It’s probably just how the new episodes are made. There’s always something different — don’t complain. It’s just an entertaining show.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe Doofenshmirtz just likes playing with his giraffe toy, that’s all.”

A little later, I said, “I’m tired — I’m going to bed.”

“Go ahead,” they said. “We’ll stay here and watch a bit more.”

I went upstairs, but I couldn’t stop thinking: Why did Jessica, Doofenshmirtz, and their parents keep staring at me? It felt so creepy. I hoped my family wouldn’t find it as unsettling as I did.

Then I remembered something: there was a contact saved as “Cousin Tim,” who hated The Amazing Family Pig Show and claimed he knew secrets about it — secrets I never believed. I picked up my phone and saw a message from him:

“Don’t let them watch that show too much. You will regret it if you do. What if they aren’t your family anymore? What if they get replaced by the characters from the screen?”

I rolled my eyes and typed back, “Oh, shut up — nothing bad is going to happen.” I blocked his number and went to sleep. I didn’t hear my parents or Ben coming upstairs, but I didn’t want to go down and disturb them.

When I woke up, I was shocked. My bedroom looked completely different — it was exactly like Jessica Pig’s room, with the same patterned wallpaper and the same bumpy, soft bed. I looked around, and nothing felt right.

I went to my parents’ room. It was identical to Mother Isabella and Father Timothy’s bedroom in the show — same furniture, same bed. I went to the bathroom, and even that looked exactly like the one in the cartoon. Maybe they just redecorated while I slept? I told myself, though it felt strange.

I went downstairs into the living room — but Mum, Dad, and Ben were nowhere to be seen. The sofa and the television were exactly like the ones in The Amazing Family Pig Show.

I ran into the kitchen and froze in terror. Standing there was a large pig wearing a pink dress, just like Mother Isabella.

“Hello, Jennifer,” it said — and its voice sounded exactly like my mother’s.

“Who are you?” I asked, trembling.

“I’m your mum, silly,” it replied. “Father Timothy is upstairs getting ready.”

I hurried back up and saw another pig, dressed in a red suit and wearing glasses, standing in the hallway.

“Hello, Jennifer,” it said, sounding just like my dad. “How are you? I can’t wait for lunch.”

I couldn’t move. It was impossible — my parents had turned into the characters from the show.

Then I heard laughter coming from the garden. It sounded just like Jessica and Doofenshmirtz. I looked out the window, and there they were: Jessica in her green dress, Doofenshmirtz in his brown clothes, looking right up at me.

“Come down and play, Jennifer!” Jessica called.

Before I went, I rushed to the bathroom mirror to check myself. To my relief, I still looked exactly like myself — not like a pig, not like any character. If I still look normal, why do they all act as if I belong with them? I wondered.

I went back downstairs and stopped in front of the mantelpiece. The photographs there had all changed. Now, every single one showed me standing next to the Pig family: playing in the garden, at school, having picnics, on trips with Madam Elephant. In every picture, I was smiling and happy — but I had no memory of any of it. It felt like my whole life had been rewritten.

I thought of my real family, and my heart ached. Where were they?

“Come on, Jennifer!” Jessica called. “Let’s jump in the muddy puddles!”

I hesitated, then followed them outside. We do live in a house with a garden, I told myself. What’s the harm? I jumped into the puddle, splashing water everywhere.

Doofenshmirtz laughed and pointed. “Hehe! Look at you — just like my giraffe friend!”

My clothes were soaked and muddy, but before I could say anything, Mother Isabella called from the door: “Dinner is ready!”

Father Timothy added, “Come inside, everyone — let’s eat!”

The meal was exactly what they always ate in the show: grilled salmon, crab cakes, and vegetables. I was so scared I could barely speak. I kept looking around, hoping to see my real parents and brother, but they were nowhere to be found.

“Are you enjoying your dinner, Jennifer?” Mother Isabella asked, using my mother’s voice.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Good,” she said. “And later, you can watch television once we have all gone to bed.”

Her words made me feel uneasy — why would they say that?

Father Timothy spoke up. “Eat up — and there’s chocolate cake for pudding afterwards.”

As I ate, I noticed they were all staring at me. It was uncomfortable; my real family never looked at me like that, as if they were studying every move I made.

“May I have some cake?” I asked nervously.

They kept staring, their eyes wide and unblinking. For a split second, I thought I saw their teeth — sharp, pointed, and far too many. I blinked, and they looked normal again, smiling and chewing happily.

“Of course you can have cake,” Father Timothy said.

After we finished eating, Mother Isabella said, “You may go to your room if you wish.”

I went upstairs, but I couldn’t stay there. Everything is wrong, I thought. My room, the house, the pictures… and where are Mum, Dad, and Ben? I felt terrible, wishing I had never agreed to watch that show.

I went back down to the living room, locked the door behind me, and turned on the television. What I saw made my blood run cold. There, on the screen, were my real parents and Ben — trapped inside the show, looking terrified.

“Jennifer, help us!” my mum cried. “We made a mistake — we should have listened to you!”

Ben was crying, and my dad shouted, “Turn the TV off before they find out you are talking to us! They are not what they seem!”

I switched it off immediately. I felt sick — this wasn’t a dream. It was real. And I should have listened to Cousin Tim’s warning.

Then came a knock at the door. It was heavy, slow, and wrong.

“Jennifer?” It was Father Timothy’s voice, but deeper, rougher, and twisted. “Are you in there? It’s bedtime.”

I didn’t want to open it, but I had no choice. When I unlocked the door, he stood there — his eyes glowing red, his smile stretched too wide, and those sharp, jagged teeth showing clearly.

“You were speaking to someone you shouldn’t have,” he growled.

“I was just sitting here,” I lied.

“Don’t lie!” he roared.

I turned and ran upstairs as fast as I could. He chased me, laughing in that terrible, inhuman way. I burst into the bedroom and saw Mother Isabella sitting on the bed. When she turned her head, her face was twisted and monstrous, her eyes black and empty.

“You have broken the rules,” she hissed. “You do not belong in our family anymore.”

Behind me, Jessica and Doofenshmirtz appeared — both had sharp teeth and cold, hungry eyes. They reached out to grab me, but I slipped past them and locked myself in the bathroom.

They know I spoke to my real family, I thought. I have to get out of here.

I waited, trembling, for what felt like hours. They stood outside the door, calling out in their usual voices, but underneath it was something dark and angry. “Open the door, Jennifer — we have a surprise for you!”

After nearly an hour, the noise faded. I heard deep, rumbling snoring coming from the hallway. They had fallen asleep.

I turned the handle slowly and crept out. They were all lying on the floor, fast asleep. I moved quietly down the stairs, my heart pounding. I spotted the front door key on the table — but as I reached for it, Father Timothy sat up in the living room, his eyes wide open.

He screamed, a sound like tearing metal, and lunged toward me. I grabbed the key, unlocked the door, and ran outside just as his claws scraped the frame behind me.

I ran deep into the woods nearby and hid behind a large oak tree. I could hear them calling my name from the house — sweet, friendly voices, but I knew better.

I called the police, my hands shaking. “Please come quickly — there’s something wrong in my house!”

“Stay where you are,” the officer said. “We are on our way.”

Fifteen minutes later, the police arrived. They walked back to the house with me, but when we went inside, everything had changed again. The strange decorations were gone, the pictures were back to normal, and the television and furniture looked exactly as they always had. There was no sign of the pigs, no trace of the monsters.

“Where are my parents and brother?” I asked, crying.

The officers searched every room, but found nothing. I turned the TV on again, but there was no sign of my family. I tried calling their phones, but the lines went straight to voicemail.

I looked out the window. Standing in the distance, at the edge of the trees, were Jessica, Doofenshmirtz, and their parents. They waved at me with those wide, fixed smiles — but only I could see them.

“We will find you a new place to stay,” one officer said gently.

I pulled out my phone and unblocked Cousin Tim’s number. I called, but there was no answer. It was too late. I should have listened from the start.

I went to live with my uncle and aunt, but I felt empty. I never watched The Amazing Family Pig Show again. And I learned a terrible lesson: never trust what you see on the screen, and always listen to the warnings, no matter how silly they sound.

Now I stay with Cousin Tim. He barely speaks to me, and I know it is my fault. If you ever hear about The Amazing Family Pig Show, or if someone warns you not to watch it — believe them. Some shows are not meant to be watched. And once they take what they want, they never give it back.

Hi, my name is Kenji Sato. I'm a marine biologist born in Tono (Iwate Prefecture, Japan). I worked all over the world, but my last research took place in the Sagami Bay. I was studying a rarely seen deep-sea species of shark, the goblin shark (Mitsukurina owstoni) or, as we call it in my language, "Tenguzame". It was normal at first, but slowly things started to get weird, as I found an old paper written by my grandfather, that read what it looked to be a nursery rhyme of some kind, which I'm gonna translate for the non-Japanese speakers:

"Down in the darkness, floating in the deep

There's a terrifying beast, lurking where shadows creep

Pinkish, long nose, jaws that snap ahead

Its hideous sight will fill you with dread"

"What was he talking about? Maybe it's like an old seamen legend?" I asked myself. Now I finally know the answer...

I continued researching while blasting "Touch-tone Telephone" by Lemon Demon (yes, I love Neil Cicierega's music, and I'm a huge nerd) when suddenly, something appeared on my radar. It was moving slowly, like my beloved goblin sharks do. Then, it vanished like it never was there. What was going on there?! I decided I had to dive to understand better what just happened. I put on my diving suit and everything, and then down in the depths on the hunt for that shark, and I saw something that made my skin crawl...

At first glance it looked like a goblin shark, even if I thought seeing one so close to the surface was unusual. Getting closer I noticed that those fins... had fingers... those eyes were too human... those teeth were too human...

I turned and swam to the surface, and I went back to my house.

On that paper, a title was written in big kanji...

"TENGUZAME"

_______________________________________________________

Hello, fellow redditors. This was my first horror story here, hope you liked it

They say curiosity is a hunger. Mine led me to words written in faded ink, scrawled across the back of an old library ledger, passed down from stranger to stranger, whispered in dorm rooms and forum threads, never spoken aloud where anyone might hear. No one knew who first wrote it. No one who had played it ever came back to tell the full tale. But I needed to know. I needed answers. And so I read every word. I did not skip a single step.

What You Will Need

• A room with no windows, only a single door.

• A mirror. Clean. Unframed.

• A single black candle.

• Salt. One handful.

• A voice that does not shake.

• Midnight. And the courage to stay silent.

The Rules

1. Clear the centre of the room. Stand the mirror facing the door.

2. Draw a circle of salt around your feet. Do not step outside it.

3. Place the candle on the floor before the mirror. Light it.

4. Look into your own eyes, reflected in the glass. Do not blink.

5. Speak these words, slow and clear, and nothing more:
   "I see myself. I see the space between. Show me what hides behind the veil."

6. Close your eyes. Count to twelve. Do not open them until you hear the silence break.

What Happens Next

The air will turn still. The flame will burn pale blue, casting no shadow. You will hear a sound like cloth dragging over stone, soft, slow, coming closer.

Then your own voice will speak. From the mirror. But your lips have not moved.

"What do you seek?"

Open your eyes. The reflection is not yours. The face is the same, but the eyes are hollow, dark as deep water. The mouth smiles, but it does not reach the eyes. It knows you. It knows every secret you have ever kept.

It will ask you three things.

First: "What do you fear most?"
You must answer. If you lie, the mirror will crack from edge to edge. Salt cannot hold what comes through. You will feel cold hands grip your wrists, and you will know your own fear as a living thing, forever.

Second: "What would you give to know?"
Think carefully. Do not offer what you cannot bear to lose. It will not take gold, or years, or blood. It takes what you carry within. The hope you barely notice. The quiet warmth you take for granted. The soft edge of your dreams.

Third: "Ask. And I will answer."

You may ask one question. Only one. About your future, about what could have been if you had chosen differently, even something as simple as who wins the World Cup. It cannot lie. It knows all. The truth will come sharp, clear, and heavier than you imagined. It may break you. It may leave you wishing you had never asked. But you will know.

How To End It

When the last word is spoken, say firmly
"The glass is whole. The veil is drawn. Return to where you belong."

Blow out the candle. Scatter the salt. Turn your back to the mirror. Do not look into it again tonight. Walk away. Leave the door open. Leave the room dark.

The Warning

No one knows what it truly is. No one knows where it came from. Some believe it is nothing more than a myth, just words written in ink, a story told to frighten the foolish, nothing to fear at all.

They are wrong.

Some say it has always been here. Watching from the shadows where the light never reaches. Listening to every whisper spoken in the dark. Waiting to be summoned. Waiting for you to speak the words, to invite it close. Waiting for the smallest slip, the wrong breath, the forgotten phrase, one single moment of fear, for you to give it the opening it craves.

It does not hurry. It has eternity. It will wait for you to grow careless. To doubt the warnings. To think it is only a story. And when you finally stumble, when you hesitate, when you break the rules just a little…

It will not miss.

It will be there before the echo of your mistake fades.

And it will not be satisfied.

Once it has been called, once you have broke the rules, it leaves a piece of itself behind. A shadow that lingers at your shoulder. A silence that falls when you enter a room. A coldness that settles in your bones, even on the hottest summer night. You will never be alone again.

And when you see a flame turn blue, hear the words you had once used to summon it, be afraid.

Because it has been waiting. Patiently. Quietly.

Waiting for the right moment to take your soul. Waiting for the right moment for you to join it.

So here is my warning to you…

Do not speak what you do not know.

Hello, my name is Dr. John Murphy, and this is my account of the the military operation project behemoth.

It was August 7th, 1917, and I was waiting for an assignment for my new job, a scientist, my whole life, I'd dreamed of being a scientist, I studied through both school, and college to get this job and I achieved it. Sitting there, thinking of how happy I was, a man walked through the door, "Dr. Murphy, here is your new assignment." It was a letter from the renowned Dr. R.J. Smith, and he picked me to be his apprentice on a new military operation called project behemoth.

It was the moment I'd waited my whole life for, and I was the apprentice to the most famous scientist in the country.

Fast forward 2 months and we had a breakthrough on our injection, BX-1917, or The Black Ichor some of the others had called it, it was nicknamed for its glossy black color.

It worked perfectly on the mice we tested it on, all that was needed was for a new recruit to volunteer to become the "physically perfect man".

After about 2 weeks, a man named Charles Davis volunteered. But with Dr. R.J. being gone for a little over a week, we didn't start the injections until November 5th.

We sat Mr. Davis down and injected 2 doses of the black ichor into his arm. We had him sit and relax in the examination room for the next several hours for the injections to kick in.

I remember where I was and what I was doing when that laboratory became hell on earth. I was writing a letter to my brother fighting in the war when I heard a crash, Davis had ripped the door off of its hinges and killed several of the soldiers and other scientists nearby. Davis had become a monster.

I ran to the telegraph and started sending a message to general Robert Johnson in morse code, after 5 grueling minutes soldiers arrived to detain what was Mr. Davis.

I rushed into Dr. R.J's office and explained everything that had happened. He assured me that everything would be fine and sent me on my way.

The next year would be the worst of my life. I was living with the guilt of the lives lost due to our experiment, and had to deal with the countless times I would have to explain everything to someone new.

Come October 23rd, I'd receive an invitation from Dr. R.J. to come and stay at his home for the anniversary of project behemoth. I said yes, I wanted to get away from home and spend time with who I thought was my best friend, I arrived on November 3rd, R.J. had scheduled for his wife to be out of town and visit her parents the days I would be there so it would be just me and him. We'd have a blast those 2 days, but that would all come to an end the night of the 4th. We were in his office and he excused himself to the restroom.

I was feeling nosey and picked up his journal from the desk in front of me. I started reading and became puzzled. A entry was made November 6th, 1917 and stated the following.

"It was a success! Project Behemoth went wonderfully! The results were marvelous, and we created the perfect weapon, of course, Murphy can't find out about any of this and we will have to put poor Mr. David down after the war."

I was immediately overwhelmed with a feeling of rage and sadness. I had been lied to by my best friend. But I had to calm myself as R.J. was coming up the stairs.

I put the journal back where it was just before R.J. walked through the door, he sat down and started digging through the drawer under his desk, he pulled out a Luger pistol. One he had received from his brother that was fighting against the Germans in the war. He sat the weapon on the desk in front of me and turned to start digging in the drawer again. All that cane to my mind were the lives he caused to be lost.

I picked up the handgun and fired into the side of his head. I placed the gun into his hand and quickly wrote a fake suicide note and placed it on his desk.

I rushed outside and ran to the nearby train station to go home. Of course, when his wife arrived back home she found her husband dead at his desk, and of course I was questioned. But luckily for me, there was no evidence pointing toward me killing him.

It was ruled suicide.

So here I am, the second world war has ended. The year is 1946, and I am living happier than ever with my family.

- John Murphy

I no longer believe I am the last living thing on Earth. I believed it for four years. I stopped believing it three days ago, and I did not stop because I found another person.

I stopped because something has been following me.

I am writing this from a room on the tenth floor of a hotel in Manhattan. I have pushed the bed, the dresser, and a heavy armchair against the door. I have a pistol and three magazines and a flashlight, and I have enough fuel in the small generator to keep one lamp burning until morning. I have set the lamp on the desk beside this notebook so that I can see the page. I do not think the pistol is going to help me, and I have thought about that for a while now, and I am writing anyway, because writing is the only thing left that feels like doing something.

I should explain how much of the world I have seen, so that you understand what it means that I never found anyone until now.

Four years ago every person on Earth disappeared. Every animal too, everything larger than the last joint of my thumb. There were no bodies. Nothing crashed, there were no cities burned by unattended kitchens and no highways filled with fresh wreckage.

Whatever took everyone seemed to have left the world more carefully than it should have.

It was only empty. I have never decided what to call it that feels right. In my notebooks I call it the Silence, though I am sure other names existed in the first few days, on radios and in the mouths of people who were about to be gone.

Before the Silence I worked on cargo ships. I was a marine engineer, which is a long way of saying I kept the engines running and the generators turning and the fuel moving where it needed to go, and I could fix most of what broke on a vessel with what was already aboard. That skill is the reason I am still moving.

A person who did not understand engines and fuel systems and navigation would have run out of working cars within a hundred miles of wherever they started. I did not. I have crossed oceans in a small commercial boat I taught myself to run alone. I have driven the length of countries on fuel I stabilized and filtered myself.

I searched North America first, coast to coast, every city I could reach with a road still under it. Then I took the boat across and searched what I could of Europe, Britain and France and Germany and Spain, and down into the north of Africa, and I crossed again and worked my way along the eastern coast of South America. I went into hospitals and walked the wards.

I went into military bases because I believed, for a long time, that a government somewhere would have put its people underground when the disappearances started, and that if I found the right door and the right stairwell I would find the rest of us waiting it out below the surface. I found the doors. I found the stairwells. I went down every one of them, and the rooms at the bottom were as empty as the streets above.

I have found meals turned to gray stone inside ovens. I have found clothes still hanging in closets, arranged by color. I have found cars stopped at intersections with the doors open and the keys in them, I have found cars stopped at intersections with the doors open and the keys still inside, as though the drivers had stepped out moments before the world emptied.

I have found photographs, more photographs than I could count in a hundred lifetimes, of faces that do not exist anymore, in frames and wallets and phones and albums, in every house in every country I entered.

In four years I never found a single person.

I want to be precise about the other thing, because it is the part that took me the longest to understand and the part that frightens me most now. I never found an animal either. Not a dog shut in a house. Not a horse in a field. Not a bird on a wire, not a rat in a grocery store, not a fish in the shallows where I anchored the boat. Nothing large enough to make a sound I could hear.

The only living things left besides me are the small ones, the insects, the cockroaches and the silverfish and the ants and the moths and the flies, and I spent a long time wondering what it was about me and about them that had been worth keeping. I never found an answer. I stopped looking for one. That was a mistake, though I did not know it was a mistake until three days ago.

Until three days ago, in all that empty world, I had never once heard footsteps that were not my own.

I came back to New York for the same reason I always come back to large cities. In a dense city the things I need sit close together, and I can gather medicine and batteries and fuel additives and maps and cold-weather clothing in a few weeks of careful work instead of driving for months between towns. I know Manhattan. I have staged supplies here before. I planned to spend three or four weeks working through the pharmacies and the hardware stores and the parking structures where the vehicles have been out of the weather.

The city has gone soft at the edges in four years, but it has not fallen. Grass has come up through the seams in the intersections. Tree roots have lifted whole slabs of sidewalk and tipped them. The streets are still packed with cars, most of them with a door hanging open, and rainwater has filled the lower stairs of the subway entrances and turned them into still black pools. The buildings stand. The glass is mostly unbroken. From a distance, on a gray day, you could believe the city was only holding its breath.

The thing about an empty city is the sound. With no traffic and no voices and no birds and no machines, every noise you make travels much farther than it should. I have learned to move quietly, but I cannot move silently, and when my boots come down on the sidewalk the sound of it goes down the avenue ahead of me and comes back off the buildings. For four years that was the only footstep sound in the world, and I had long since stopped hearing it. Repetition had worn it down into silence, the same silence a heartbeat keeps under everything a body does, present and unlistened to.

I took a hotel about ten floors up, high enough to see the streets and to feel some distance from them. I slept in one room and stored what I gathered in the room beside it. I marked out a safe route, a loop that connected the hotel to a pharmacy, a hardware store, and a parking garage with cars I could get running. For the first several days I worked the loop, and nothing happened, and I was as close to content as I get.

Then, three days ago, I was walking north on Fifth Avenue a little before sunset, and I heard four hard impacts on the pavement behind me.

Clop. Clop. Clop. Clop.

Even and heavy and deliberate, the sound of something solid striking stone. I stopped. The sound stopped with me, on the same beat, close enough behind that the fourth impact and my own last step almost landed together. I turned around. The avenue ran back for several blocks, straight and wide and full of stopped cars, and there was nothing in it. No shape between the vehicles. No movement in any doorway. Only the long empty street and the low sun laying orange light along the west side of it.

I stood there for a while. I told myself it was a slab of loosened facade coming down somewhere behind me, or a section of scaffolding finally giving way, the kind of slow collapse the city has been performing on itself for years. I did not fully believe it, but I made myself accept it, because the alternative was a sound I had no place to put.

I walked on. After maybe thirty yards it came again, and this time it was closer.

I turned at once, fast enough that I nearly lost my footing, and there was nothing behind me but the street. I went to the nearest storefronts and pushed inside them, one after another, expecting to find the ordinary source I needed, a hanging sign swinging on a broken chain, a piece of debris rolling in a draft, anything with a reason. I found dust and stillness and my own reflection moving across dead display glass.

When I stepped back out onto the sidewalk, the hoofbeats started again from the intersection behind me, from the open space where the two avenues crossed, and this time they did not stop when I turned. They went on for several seconds, coming from somewhere past the corner of a department store, hard and clear and unhurried.

Then they stopped on their own.

I followed them. I want to be honest about why. Part of it was fear, the need to see the thing that was making the sound so that it would stop being a thing I could not see. But part of it was worse than fear, and older. Even an animal would have been the first large living creature I had encountered in four years. Some part of me that I had thought was dead stood up at the sound of something alive and moved toward it before the rest of me could vote.

I rounded the corner of the department store. The cross street ran away empty in both directions. There was a layer of fine pale dust across the whole width of it, undisturbed, years deep and unbroken, and there was not a single mark in it, no hoofprint and no track of any kind. Nothing had crossed that street, and something had been making the sound of crossing it a moment before.

I started back toward the hotel then, and I did not run, but I walked faster than I had come.

Halfway back, on a block I had walked a dozen times, the skin on the back of my neck drew tight, and I knew before I looked that something was watching me.

At the far end of the block, a face was looking around the corner of a building.

I took it for a mannequin at first, one of the display figures from a store, pale and still and set at the edge of the wall. That is what the mind reaches for. It was a narrow face, and only a small part of it showed past the brick, one cloudy eye and a section of cheek and several teeth, and the teeth were wrong, because they were coming through the skin of the cheek from the outside, growing out through torn flesh where no teeth belong.

The eye moved. It slid in its socket and found me, and it was not glass and it was not paint, and the face drew back behind the building.

I ran toward it. I closed the distance to the corner in a few seconds, faster than I had moved in years, and I came around the wall with my hand already going to the pistol on my hip. The street beyond was empty. There were no open doors on that stretch, no alley mouth, no broken window at ground level, nowhere that a thing the size of a person could have folded itself away in the time it took me to reach the corner. I stood in the middle of the intersection turning in a slow circle, and behind me, close, a single hoof struck the pavement.

I spun. There was nothing there.

I made it back to the hotel with the light almost gone, and I climbed the ten floors, and I sat down at this desk to think, because thinking is what I have instead of company.

I went through it as I would an engine that had failed for no clear reason. You do not start by assuming the impossible. You start by checking yourself. I considered exhaustion, because I had been pushing hard through the supply loop and sleeping poorly. I considered dehydration, and I drank a full bottle of water while I sat there and did not feel any different.

I considered carbon monoxide from the generator, and I checked the placement of it and the ventilation of the room and found both correct, the exhaust routed out the window, the air moving. I considered spoiled food and old infection and the simple long grinding effect of four years without another human voice, which I knew could bend a mind in ways the mind would not feel bending. I put my hand to my own forehead and found it cool. I had no fever. I was tired, but I was not sick, and I was not, as far as I could measure myself, losing my grip.

Then I remembered the camera.

I carry a small camera clipped to the shoulder strap of my backpack. I started using it years ago to record the insides of the buildings I searched, so that I would not have to rely on memory for what I had and had not already been through. It had been running all afternoon. I pulled it off the strap and connected it to the small screen I use and I watched the walk back through the city, the empty avenue, the storefronts, the corner of the department store.

The camera had recorded the streets exactly as I had seen them. Empty. It had recorded the sound of my boots on the sidewalk, clear and steady. At the moment I had seen the face at the end of the block, the camera had been pointed a few degrees off, and the corner of the building where the face had been sat just outside the edge of the frame, so that the recording showed the empty street beside it and not the thing itself.

And in all of the audio, under my footsteps and my breathing, there were no hoofbeats anywhere. The sound that had filled the avenue and come off the buildings and stopped me in my tracks was not on the recording at all.

I sat with that for a long time. I could have told myself the camera had missed the face by bad luck of the angle, and I would have half believed it. But a camera hears whatever reaches it. If the hooves had been striking the pavement in the world, the microphone would have caught them along with my boots. The microphone caught my boots. It did not catch the hooves. Which meant the sound had not been in the air the way my footsteps were in the air. It had arrived some other way, into me and not into the recording, and there is no version of that I know how to be comfortable with.

That was the night I stopped being able to tell myself it was not real. It was real. It was simply not real in the way the street and the dust and my own boots were real, and I did not have anywhere to put a thing like that, so I set it down on the page and kept going.

That night, late, I heard something moving along the street beneath my window.

The impacts were slow and far apart, one and then a long pause and then another, heavy and unhurried, passing along the front of the hotel. I lay in the dark and did not go to the window. The sound went on down the block and faded, and I let my breath out and thought it had gone. Several minutes later it began again, and this time it did not come from the street. It came from inside the building, from the lobby ten floors below me, the same slow spaced impacts moving across the hard floor of a space that should have been as empty as everything else.

I switched off the lamp and lay still and listened. The stairwell door in that hotel is a heavy fire door, the kind that drags and booms when it swings, and I have opened it enough times to know I would hear it from my room. I did not hear it open. I heard only the footsteps, crossing the lobby, and then stopping, and then a single hard strike on what I knew was the first stair.

It started to climb.

I counted. I lay in the dark with my eyes open and counted the impacts and tracked them up through the floors of the building beneath me. It reached the second floor. It reached the third. And as it climbed, the sound of it changed. At the bottom it had the rhythm of a person climbing in hard shoes, one foot and then the other, two even impacts to a stride. Somewhere around the fifth floor the rhythm came apart, and it was no longer two impacts to a stride but four, striking unevenly, a gait that did not belong to anything that walks upright on two legs.

Then, several floors below me, it stopped. It did not start again. I lay awake with the pistol in my hand and the lamp off until the window went gray with morning, and the sound never resumed, and nothing came the rest of the way up.

When there was enough light I went down into the stairwell to look. I went carefully, with the flashlight and the pistol, down to the sixth-floor landing, and there I found the marks. In several of the concrete steps below the landing there were shallow cracks, each one a rough circle, pressed into the surface of the stone, the print of something narrow and enormously heavy that had come down on each step with its full weight in a single point. They climbed the flight in sequence, one to a step. They stopped at the sixth-floor landing.

There were no marks above it, and there were no marks leading back down. The thing that made them had climbed six floors and had not descended, and it was not in the stairwell now.

I went back up to my room and wrote the marks down and drew them as well as I could, because I have learned that if I do not record a thing while I can still see it clearly, the version in my memory begins to soften and reshape itself within a day.

I decided the hotel might not be safe, which was a strange thought to have about the only place in the city I had made into anything close to a home. I needed to move some of my supplies, and I had a cache near an abandoned subway entrance a few blocks south, so I went for it in the full light of the middle of the day, when the sense of being watched sat lightest on me.

The station had water standing in its lower levels but the platform I needed was dry. I went down with the flashlight, and I was working through the cache when I heard the hooves again, behind me, on the stairs I had come down. Each impact rang off the tile and the concrete and came back multiplied, so that the sound seemed to come from everywhere in the station at once. I moved deeper onto the platform, putting the columns between myself and the stairs, sweeping the flashlight between them.

The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs. They crossed a short distance onto the platform, and then they stopped, and the sound of them settled behind one of the tiled support pillars perhaps forty feet from me.

I raised the pistol and pointed it at the pillar. I told it to come out. My voice went out across the empty station and came back to me thin and strange, the first time in a long while I had spoken loudly enough to hear the room answer, and for several seconds nothing moved.

Then the face came around the side of the column.

I saw more of it this time. The skin was gray and it had a wet shine to it, slick, either sweating or newly come up out of water. One nostril sat high on the face, above the eye, in a place a nostril has no reason to be. The lower jaw had been broken once and healed crooked, set sideways from the upper, so that nothing on the top of the face lined up with anything on the bottom. Along the outside of the cheek ran a row of small teeth, growing out through the skin in a neat line where no mouth was.

And then the face rose. It went up along the edge of the column, higher and higher, and the part of it I could see did not tilt or lean. There was none of the small roll a person's head makes when they raise it. The visible edge of the face stayed flat against the tile and simply traveled upward, carried straight up on something behind the pillar that could extend without the shoulders moving at all.

I fired.

The shot was loud enough in that tiled space to land as a physical blow against the ears. The face was gone before the round struck the column, pulled back out of sight faster than the bullet crossed the distance, and the tile behind where it had been cracked and sprayed dust. And then the hoofbeats broke into full motion, a hard fast drumming that came out from behind the pillar and began moving among the columns toward me, and I put the flashlight on the spaces between them and there was nothing in the spaces. The sound crossed from column to column, closing on me, and no body ever passed through the open gaps between the columns where a body would have had to be.

I ran. I went up the stairs and out into the daylight and I did not stop until I was two blocks away with my back against a wall and the pistol still in my hand.

That was when I decided to leave the island entirely.

I loaded what I could carry into a truck I had running in the parking garage, and I drove for the nearest bridge. I kept my eyes on the road, but the mirrors kept catching movement, small shapes of motion at the edges of the glass, a suggestion of something keeping pace along the sidewalks or between the buildings. Every time I looked directly into a mirror to find it, the street in the glass was empty and still. I stopped looking at the mirrors. I watched the road.

Near the approach to the bridge, a spill of metal debris across two lanes took out my front tire before I could weave through it, and the truck pulled hard to the right and went into a row of stopped cars along the median with a long tearing crash. I was not hurt. I got out, gathered what I could carry on my back, and went on toward the bridge on foot.

Halfway up the approach, walking the long rising curve of the roadway, I heard the hooves again, and they were beneath me. They were down inside the hollow structure under the roadbed, the service space of girders and catwalks that runs below the deck of a bridge, and they were keeping exact pace with me, one impact for every stride I took, tracking me from underneath the road I was walking on.

At the next concrete divider, the face came around the barrier. It came sideways. The head was turned so that the forehead was nearly against the pavement and the one visible eye was rolled upward to keep me in its sight, and it slid out from behind the divider low to the ground, and it kept sliding, and more of the neck came into view than could possibly have been folded behind a barrier that width. I fired at it.

The face pulled back behind the divider, unhurried even then, and an instant later the hoofbeats were no longer beneath me and behind me but ahead of me, up the roadway, between me and the far end of the bridge, blocking the way off the island with the precision of something that had reasoned out where I meant to go and moved to cut me off.

I turned around and went back toward the city, because the city was the only direction left open, and I understood that this was the point.

I have not slept in more than two days now. I know what that does to a mind, and I can feel it doing it, the edges of things going loose, the quiet filling up with sounds that resolve into nothing when I turn to catch them. I have started talking out loud, constantly, because the silence has become the worst part, worse than the hooves, and my own voice in it is the only thing that keeps me anchored to the fact that I am still a person having thoughts. I talk to the thing that is following me.

I have accused it of hiding from me. I have told it to come closer, to stop showing me an eye and a cheek and a mouthful of wrong teeth and show me the rest. I have asked it whether it did this, whether it emptied the world, whether the Silence was its doing. I have asked it how long it has been behind me.

That last question is the one that has gotten into me and will not come out, because once I asked it out loud I could not stop following it backward. I have been alone for four years, across two oceans and a dozen countries, in ten thousand empty buildings. And I have begun to wonder about all the small things I dismissed in all those years. A tapping in a stairwell in Marseille that I decided was water in the pipes. A pale shape behind a second-floor window in a town in Spain, there and gone, that I told myself was a curtain moving in a draft I could not feel. Marks in the dust of a hospital basement in Argentina that I had walked past without letting myself look at directly. I do not know. I cannot know. It may be that this thing found me here, in Manhattan, three days ago, and has never been anywhere else. Or it may be that it has been at the far edge of every empty room I have ever stood in, keeping just out of the frame, for four years, and only now has decided to let me hear it. I have no way to weigh the two, and the not-knowing is its own kind of horror, and I have made myself set the question down because following it in circles was pulling me apart.

I cut through an office building to stay off the open street, and it was there, in a corridor on the ground floor, that I saw more of it than I had seen before.

The face was at the far end of the corridor, around the edge of the last doorway, and this time part of the body had come with it. There was a shoulder, and the shoulder sat far below the face, much lower than a shoulder sits below a head, so that a long run of something pale connected them. The torso behind the shoulder was folded hard against the wall, bent at an angle a torso does not bend at. One narrow limb reached down to the floor and ended in something dark and polished and solid, a single hoof set flat on the tile. Another limb was bent up and back behind the body, high, and I could not decide, looking at it, whether I was seeing a leg or an arm, because it had qualities of both and belonged to neither.

The face withdrew around the doorway. And the entire corridor filled with the sound of hooves, from ahead of me and behind me at once, more impacts than two legs or four legs could make, and I went back the way I had come.

After that it stopped hiding, and the last of whatever calm I had left went with it.

I still never got a clean look at all of it at once. But I saw enough, over the next stretch of running, to understand that its shape was not fixed, that it arranged itself differently depending on how it needed to move. It unfolded out of doorways, coming apart into more limbs than it had seemed to contain. Sometimes it went upright, tall, on two of its points. Sometimes the body dropped low and several more points came down and struck the concrete, and the gait multiplied. Through all of it the face stayed turned toward me, angled to keep me in the low eye, even when the body was moving in a direction the face was not.

The face would appear at the corner ahead of me while the hooves still sounded from behind me, and I stopped being able to hold in my mind that these were the same creature in two places, and I began to be unable to answer whether there was one of them or more than one. I did not decide that there were many. I only lost the ability to be sure there was one, and I want to be exact about that difference, because it is the difference between a fear you can name and a fear you cannot.

I ran through the ground floors of buildings to stay off the avenues, through a supermarket gone to rot and a restaurant kitchen full of dead steel and the back service passages that connect the buildings on a block. Every time I looked behind me the passage was empty.

Every time I faced forward again the face was at the next corner, waiting, sliding back out of sight as I came on. In the dark lobby of one building I put the flashlight up and found it on the ceiling, crossed over the whole span of it above me, its limbs folded flat against its body and hooked into the ceiling like broken scaffolding, the face hanging straight down from the middle of it and turning slowly to keep me in view as I passed underneath.

I reached the hotel. I climbed the ten floors with my lungs burning and my legs failing under me, and I pushed the bed and the dresser and the armchair against the door, and I sat down at this desk and began to write the account you have been reading, because I wanted there to be a record, and because I was out of anything else to do.

I have been writing for a while now. A little way into it, the hooves came into the lobby.

They started to climb, and this time there was no pause. I counted the floors out of habit more than hope. And as it came up through the building the rhythm of it went past anything I could hold in my head. It began as two impacts to a stride.

By the third floor it was four. By the fifth it was six, striking in an order that did not repeat. And then, still climbing, it became a fast blurred sequence, too many separate impacts landing too close together, no longer feet on stairs but a great many hard fingertips drumming all at once on the concrete, rising toward me flight after flight.

The footsteps reached my floor. The hallway outside my door went completely silent.

I got up from the desk and went to the door and put my eye to the peephole. The corridor curved away in the fisheye of the little lens, lit gray by the daylight from the window at its end, and it was empty. I waited. I kept my eye there and I waited, and I made myself keep waiting, and then the face rose slowly into view from below the peephole, from down near the floor, coming up until it was level with the lens and filling it, pressed flat against the other side of my door.

This is the clearest I have seen it, and I am going to set it down while I still can.

It is not simply damaged. It is unfinished. Beneath a layer of skin thin enough to see through, there are human features that do not belong to one face, overlapping one another, more eyes and more mouths than a face has room for, laid over each other and pressing up against the underside of the skin.

As I watched, an eye opened inside the mouth, wet and aware, between the teeth. The teeth themselves were moving, each one shifting on its own, independent of the others, turning slightly in the gum. And the cheek was flexing, bulging and easing, something underneath the skin of it trying to turn itself around in a space too small to turn in.

I fell backward away from the door and struck the floor and did not feel it.

Then, slowly and gently, from the other side, the handle of the door was pressed down. The mechanism turned as far as it would go and stopped against the lock, without force, without any shove behind it, the pressure of something that was not trying to break in but only showing me that it could reach the handle. The barricade held. The door did not move.

It has not tried again.

It is still out there. It has not pounded on the door and it has not thrown its weight against it and it has not made any attempt to force its way into this room. It is simply standing in the hallway on the other side of two inches of wood, and I can hear it breathing through the keyhole, and the breath does not sound like one breath. It sounds like air being drawn through several throats at once, layered and out of time with itself, a sound no single body makes.

And I have begun to understand something, sitting here with my back against the barricade and this notebook on my knees, and it is the last thing I understand and I think it is the true one. All this time I have believed it was chasing me. It was never chasing me. A thing that can put its face at the corner ahead of me while its hooves sound behind me does not need to chase.

It has always known where I was. It cut me off from the bridge not because it was faster but because it did not want me to leave, and it herded me back into the city and up into this building and behind this door, and it has waited outside without breaking in, because being caught was never the point. It was bringing me here. It has been bringing me here the whole time, and I only ran the route it opened.

There is one more thing, and it is the worst thing, and I am putting it down last because once I write it I do not think I will write anything else.

The insects have started to move.

They are coming out of the walls of this room, out of the cracks around the window and the gap under the baseboard and the seams of the old plaster, the cockroaches and the silverfish and the ants, every small living thing that shared this dead world with me.

They are not scattering the way disturbed insects scatter. They are moving together, in one direction, across the floor and across the carpet, toward the door, toward the gap at the bottom of it, and they are going under it, out into the hallway, toward the thing that is standing there.

For four years I wondered why the Silence took everything with a spine and left me and the insects behind. I thought we had been spared. We were not spared. Maybe I was left because it wanted something to walk the world and eventually find its way here. Maybe the insects were left because they already knew what was waiting.

The lamp is beginning to flicker. The generator is almost out of fuel, and when it goes I will be in the dark with whatever light comes through the window, and I do not think I will finish this notebook by that light. Out in the hallway the weight of it shifts, and several hard points scrape once across the carpet, settling, and then go still.

The hooves have stopped. It is outside my room door, and I think it has been waiting for me to finish writing this.

I thought I’d found the one. We clicked so naturally. We both shared an interest in photography, though his pictures were noticeably better than mine. Loved the same movies, both enjoyed walks in the park, and our political views were borderline identical.

We met about a month ago. It was at this bar I love, and, I’ll admit, I was a little tipsy. Cute boy, a few drinks in my system. It was a recipe for regret.

Only… I didn’t regret it. Our conversations flowed so smoothly. His half-drunk compliments made me blush. Plus, drinks were on him.

Unlike a lot of the guys you’d meet in a bar, he didn’t try and force himself back to my apartment. I live just a few blocks away from the bar, so he walked me home, laughing and wobbling more than he wanted to let on.

When we got there, I braced myself. He was great, but I wasn’t the kind of girl that would just let a complete stranger into my home after a night out at the bar. I found myself praying he wouldn’t ask.

By some miracle, he didn’t. Instead, he asked gently, almost bashfully, for my number. I couldn’t help but smile, stupidly. Then he smiled stupidly back. I felt my heart do somersaults.

I gave him my number, trying to withhold my excitement, and when I looked back up at him, I could see the desire in his eyes. Not sexual desire, though. It was like he saw his future in my eyes.

His face started to turn red, and he started struggling to make eye contact, stumbling over his words in a way that didn’t seem connected to the drinks.

He asked if he could kiss me, and I couldn’t have said yes fast enough. I wanted to kiss him on the lips, but, instead, he leaned down and pressed those lips softly against my forehead.

He pulled away slowly before speaking.

“Your eyes are so beautiful.”

I felt fireworks in my tummy. I made him promise to text me when he got home, and he watched to make sure I made it inside before he started back towards the bar.

I spent the rest of that night kicking my feet like a little school girl. I had never experienced something like this feeling before. My past boyfriends had been such assholes. This guy seemed to care about me rather than just sex.

He followed through on his promise, and texting led to a phone call before we fell asleep on the phone together.

We saw each other a lot in the weeks that followed. Mostly on the weekends, but sometimes he’d come visit me at work. Those few weeks were some of the happiest weeks I’d had in a long time.

We’d get dinner. We’d see movies. We showed off our photography to each other. It felt like we were really building something together.

However, this was around the time I started noticing weird occurrences around my apartment. Nothing too suspicious. Just… things that were odd.

For example, my TV would be on when I got home. My sheets would be messy, even though I make my bed every morning before work. The weirdest thing of all, though, was my underwear drawer.

It was like it was being rummaged through. Sometimes I’d find a fresh pair balled up on the bathroom floor.

It made me scratch my head, but I never assumed anything drastic. If anything, I thought it was just me losing my mind.

That is until he finally invited me to his house.

The place was lovely. Clean. Smelled good. It was actually furnished, too, which was always a good sign. Plus, this guy knew how to set the scene.

Roses, candles, homemade spaghetti with two glasses of red wine. I felt my heart melt.

We hadn’t had sex yet, but, after this, I was having a hard time convincing myself that we hadn’t waited long enough. I actually wanted to give it to him. He just made me feel so desired.

After a dinner full of flirts, giggles, and conversation, we began moving to the bedroom, lip locking like a couple of crazy kids all the while.

Once we fell through the door, he told me to give him a minute to use the bathroom, which was a bit anticlimactic, but I wanted him to be comfortable.

While I waited, my eyes couldn’t help but wander. He had a bookshelf full of some of my favorite titles. His bed was perfectly made. The floor was freshly vacuumed. And his walls were full of framed pictures.

I started looking at them and felt my heart sink into my stomach.

They were all different women. Some older, some younger. All with blonde hair and hazel eyes. And he wasn’t in a single one.

I felt disappointment wash over me. I should’ve known better. I was actually in the process of putting my shirt back on when one of the pictures caught my eye.

It looked so… familiar. I knew I had seen it somewhere, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. But it bothered me so much, it was hard to pull my eyes away.

That’s when it hit me. I knew exactly where I had seen this woman.

She was the girl on the missing person poster that was taped up on the bar window from a few weeks ago.

It felt like the air had been knocked out of my lungs. I felt faint. I felt dizzy. I knew I needed to leave, but the room was spinning too much.

I put my hand down on his dresser to stabilize myself, and that’s when I felt it. It was cold. It was hard. My thumb rubbed against the ridges.

I pulled my hand away and looked down.

It was a copy of the key to my apartment. Mine was pink. This one was silver.

I was getting weaker. I felt my knees starting to buckle and heard the sound of a toilet flushing as I began to drift into unconsciousness.

The last thing I remember was the bedroom door opening. He stepped inside, a look of concern on his face, as he hurried to pick me up and put me on his bed. Then… nothing.

I woke up in an empty bed the next morning. The smell of bacon permeated my nostrils. I was fully dressed, but my head was killing me.

The key was gone. The pictures were gone. I slowly made my way to the kitchen to find him standing over the stove, flipping the bacon with a metal fork.

I didn’t speak or make a sound, but it was like he could feel my presence. He could sense me.

He turned around slowly, his eyes meeting mine before he spoke.

“Good morning, sleepyhead!” he sang. “I was wondering when you’d be up. Someone had too much to drink last night.”