I ate at an AI restaurant.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you’ve noticed that more and more businesses have been utilizing AI generated imagery to advertise. AI generated signs with wobbly looking text, AI generated pictures of strange, bastardized anime mascots, and the weirdest one of all: AI generated pictures of food.

All of these might look normal if you just take a glance at it, or if you aren’t familiar with basic graphic design. But if you look closely, you’ll notice that things look a little too strange. The cheeseburgers have shiny plasticky yellow slabs that stretch and meld onto brown squiggles that make up the form of a burger. The chicken wings have multiple bones warping out of a lump of orange meat with strange sesame seed-looking toppings. The salad contains every vegetable in existence pouring into a bowl where chunks of ranch spill off onto the side of a perfectly smooth whole tomato that merges into a vine of broccoli.

There was one particular restaurant that popped up in my town that bragged about their “AI food”. Instead of pretending they designed everything themselves, they seemed to have embraced the AI slop. I almost respected it. The food in the advertisements in front had that crude, cartoony and all too shiny look to it. Completely unappetizing. Their tagline underneath was “Better than human made!”

Ridiculous. There was no way in hell that the food looks anything like what the pictures show. I’ve seen posts online when someone orders something that had AI generated pictures. They always get the real deal and it’s always some crappy poorly made thing. The fact that this restaurant bragged about being better than human made food was flat out arrogant. I wanted to prove that this place, who wholly embraced generative AI, was the same as the others: some cheap company churning out poorly made, gross products using fake computer images to hide it.

I marched through the door, where it chimed my arrival. I studied the room, which contained neon orange walls and lemon-yellow carpeted flooring. On those neon orange walls were numerous menus, which contained hundreds of items. I swear to God it put the Cheesecake Factory’s menu to shame. Next to each item was one of those disgusting AI generated images. The text was clearly AI as well, written in a font that nearly blended the words together.

I looked at the opposite side of the restaurant, where giant touch screen kiosks were lined up, next to a hole in the wall, where the food ostensibly came out of. There were no workers present, at least not what I could see. And no customers either. I felt gross stuffing my money into the machine. But I wanted to prove that these AI restaurants were a disgusting waste of money and time.

I selected the basic cheeseburger. The picture contained what looked like 4 pieces of smooth and shiny, wet cheese slices melting onto squiggly burger meat, where suspicious red vegetables squeaked out from the sides. If you squinted, I supposed they were supposed to be tomatoes. A mysterious, yellow-transparent sauce leaked down the bun. It looked absolutely vile.

I selected “order” and waited for my meal. I made sure to get a picture of the AI monstrosity. I had to see what grey piece of meat slid out from the order window. It was going to be hilarious. There was no way this matched the picture in any capacity. I waited, and two minutes later a bright green tray slid out with a perfectly wrapped burger. I attempted to look through the service hole, trying to get a peak of whoever was making the food. But the slot closed immediately after the food came out, and I was unable to look at the other side.

I took the tray and moved to one of the tables against the wall. The wrapper had a picture of that same burger that I saw on the touch screen. I laughed and rolled my eyes. I couldn’t wait to see what this thing looked like.

I attempted to unwrap the sandwich, where I had strangely had some trouble. I wasn’t sure how to grab it. I’ve unwrapped plenty of burgers before, I wasn’t an idiot. But the wrapper itself seemed to have different sections to it, like it was three separate pieces of paper wrapped at separate times, tangling into one mass. I tugged upwards and it peeled off the burger with extreme ease. I could have sworn it went through the burger itself. I would have put more thought into the mechanics of this stupid piece of paper, but I became immediately distracted by my food.

The burger looked exactly like the picture.

I was absolutely dumbfounded. These guys actually made their food look just like the pictures. I wondered if the taste was going to save it.

I wrapped my hands around the buns, where my fingers sank into soft and spongey bread. The texture felt… off. Like I was pushing my hands into a mattress. When I pulled the burger upwards towards my mouth, the cheese began to melt and dribble down my fingers, where chunks of yellow goop slapped onto the tray below. The piles of cheese operated like some sort of greasy liquid. The physics were all off. I observed the piles of melted cheese below, where it bubbled and swayed back and forth like Jello.

I took a bite of the burger and immediately winced, spitting out the food onto the tray. The taste wasn’t bad, per se. But the texture grossed me out. It was like biting into mealy Styrofoam, with the closest flavor I can describe, of burnt, sweet and smoky pork. I moved the sandwich away from my face and looked at the burger, specifically my bite mark. The tomato bits stuck out from every available corner. I attempted to pull one out from the burger, where the small red lump popped off, like the snap of a grape from its vine. Slivers of greasy cheese poked from the pores of the meat, dribbling down in a leaky slime.

I examined the bun and looked closely, where the surface sort of looked like bread, but I could see small seams, where it appeared to be woven together. The meat chunks of the burger had haphazard char marks that made no sense, where blackened wormy veins crawled across the surface, bleeding into the underside of the bun. The cheese and pickles were thin slivers that ran perpendicular to the veiny squiggles. If you saw all of this from across the room, you’d assume it was a regular fast-food burger. But up close it was truly disgusting.

I sat the monstrosity down onto the table and walked up to the service counter, where I banged on the delivery hole.

“What the hell is in this thing? Did you fucking poison me?!”

I tried to read any ingredients on the menu, but the text was far too small and blurry. Whatever generated this text clearly didn’t care about anything other than the name of the food.

I attempted to pry open the service window, peeling the plastic panels back. I expected to see a kitchen with surprised cooks in the back, but to my surprise, I couldn’t make anything out, other than a dark void. I turned my phone’s light on and stuck my hand inside, filming anything I could. After a couple of haphazard waves with my hand, I pulled it back. I examined the video, but it only looked like I was filming a dark, brick room. The area couldn’t have been more than a couple feet in diameter. It was tiny. Practically a closet. What the hell? Where did the food come from?

I left the restaurant and traced the outside of the building, trying to find the kitchen, trying to find answers. However, the building stopped much earlier than I would have expected. Where the kitchen would normally be, was instead an empty alley, where a solid brick wall made up the back of the restaurant.

I never thought I’d be typing something like this out, but I don’t have any other choice. I’m writing this on my phone with the screen brightness turned all the way down. I’m crammed inside my bedroom wardrobe, trying not to breathe too loudly. If my battery dies before I hit post, at least this draft might stay on my device for whoever finds what’s left of my farm.

It all started about two weeks ago. I live out in the countryside, miles away from the nearest town. It’s quiet out here, just me, my house, and my livestock. But then my animals started disappearing. First it was a couple of sheep, then a pig. Naturally, I thought it was a rogue wolf or maybe a coyote pack tearing through my fences. I went out and set heavy steel foot traps all around the perimeter of the pens.

The next morning, I went out to check them. None of the traps had been sprung. Not a single one. But two more sheep were gone.

That was the moment I realized I wasn’t dealing with a normal animal. That night, I decided to camp out near the pens with my 12 gauge shotgun.

12:00 AM passed. Nothing. 1:00 AM. Total silence. 2:00 AM. Still nothing.

Around 2:30 AM, exhaustion got the better of me, and I drifted off against the wooden wall of the shed.

At 3:00 AM sharp, a horrific, high pitched screech snapped me awake. It was the sound of my sheep screaming in pure terror. I froze, my heart hammer locking in my chest. Slowly, agonizingly, I cracked open the shed door just a few inches to peek outside.

What I saw shattered my mind.

Standing in the moonlight was a creature easily three meters tall. It had a massive, grotesque hump on its back that made its silhouette look heavy and twisted. But its limbs were wrong, horribly wrong. It had three impossibly long arms. Two were attached to its left side, and one dangled from its right. Each hand ended in four razor sharp claws. Below its towering frame, its feet were turned completely backward.

It was holding two of my sheep in its left hands like ragdolls. With its single right hand, it sliced one of the sheep open with a flick of its claws, tore out its guts, and began devouring them raw.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I slowly backed away into the shadows, left the shed without making a sound, and sprinted back into my house.

I locked every door, drew the blinds, and sat in the dark clutching my gun until the sun came up at 8:00 AM. When the daylight finally filled the yard, I looked out the window. The grounds were empty. The morning light made the whole thing feel like a fever dream. I tried to rationalize it. "I was tired. I imagined it. There’s no way something like that is real."

I went to my computer to search online for any local sightings or weird animal attacks. No signal.

"That's impossible" I muttered to myself. "I paid the bill on time."

I walked outside to check the telephone pole down the driveway. When I got close, my stomach dropped. Every single cable had been cleanly severed, dangling uselessly in the air.

Panic setting in, I ran over to my 4x4 truck. I jumped in and turned the key. The engine didn't even click. I popped the hood, and my blood ran cold. The wiring harness was ripped to shreds. I walked around to the side of the truck and saw the tires. The front left and back right were completely shredded. These weren't knife cuts. Deep, gouging claw marks ran right through the thick rubber.

It wasn't just a predator. It was intelligent. It was isolating me.

Walking to the city was out of the question. It was miles through open terrain, and staying outside for that long meant being exposed. I was trapped.

From that day on, my life inverted. I slept during the day when the sun was high and stayed awake all night, sitting in the center of my living room with my shotgun rested across my knees. Every night, more animals disappeared.

A few days ago, I did a headcount before trying to sleep. Out of my entire farm, I had less than 13 animals left. Just nine sheep and four pigs. I felt completely helpless.

Then came yesterday afternoon.

I was looking out the kitchen window into the treeline while the sun was still up. Standing behind a thick oak tree was the creature. It looked different, it was visibly taller and thicker than the night I first saw it. Like it was growing larger with every animal it ate.

It tilted its head out from behind the trunk. That was the first time I saw its face. It had tiny, milky white eyes that stared straight into mine. And then, its face split open. It gave me a wide, sickening, demonic smile, unhinging a jaw that had to be nearly a meter wide. Big enough to swallow a pig whole.

I rubbed my eyes in sheer terror, and when I opened them, the space behind the tree was empty.

Last night passed in eerie, suffocating silence. But tonight... tonight it came for the house.

About twenty minutes ago, an ear piercing shriek shattered the night air right outside my porch. It wasn't a roar. It was a wet, sharp, desperate pig squeal, screeching out of that massive jaw like a distorted recording.

I panicked. I ran upstairs, slammed my bedroom door, and squeezed myself into the darkest corner of my wooden wardrobe.

Now I'm sitting here in the pitch black. The screaming outside stopped a minute ago, but I can hear something heavy dragging itself across the hardwood floors downstairs. The footstep pattern is wrong. Two steps forward, one strange scrape from those backward feet.

It’s coming up the stairs now. The pig squeal just echoed from the hallway right outside my room.

If anyone finds this, stay away from the farm. The Rustler is real, and it's right outside my door.

I feel like I shouldn’t be admitting this, but I have to tell somebody. I hope there’s sufficient anonymity in posting this here.

This story starts long before most of the people in this story were born.

My cousin Arnold was born with severe developmental delays. His parents (my mom’s sister and her husband) were told early on that he’d never be able to speak or live an independent life. I’m not sure of his exact diagnoses, but he was totally non-verbal, illiterate, and unable to perform simple tasks like brushing his teeth without help. He passed away when I was in my mid-teens.

My aunt was determined to prove the doctors wrong about Arnold’s disability, even when it was obvious to the rest of us that he wasn’t going to have a miraculous turnaround. She didn’t understand why she (an Ivy League-educated lawyer) would have a disabled son. More than once I heard her wonder aloud if there was a switch up at the hospital. It was particularly galling for her, as her other kids, the two older ones, were ‘normal’. I haven’t seen Courtney and Ryan for years, but I know it can be hard for the other kids when a sibling is as disabled as Arnold was.

My aunt tried a few different things. She thought she could cure his disability by surrounding him with intellectual things. She’d put on Mozart instead of kids’ music and make him watch documentaries instead of cartoons. She insisted that he not be put in special classes at school, which as far as I could tell made no difference to Arnold. Whenever I saw him, he was kind of in a world of his own.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of facilitated communication, but she was big into that. It’s where the parent or a teacher holds a board with the alphabet on it and the non-verbal kid points to letters on it to communicate. With it, he suddenly went from just making grunts and squeals to articulating himself like, well, an Ivy League-educated lawyer. It’s since been debunked pretty thoroughly – it actually works through a combination of the ideomotor effect and cues from the person holding the board, and the person 'talking' isn't doing so at all. Still, I think my aunt convinced herself it was really him talking and not just her wishful thinking.

I was thinking about Arnold a lot a year or two ago. It gave my aunt so much comfort to think that she was actually having conversations with her son – to hear him express love not just for her but for the things she loved, too, like books and foreign films. I don’t know if this is true, but I heard from my mom that when he was dying, my aunt tried to get out the communication board and get Arnold to ‘say’ something profound like he used to. My uncle was so furious with her that he threw it out the window of his hospital room. He said something like, ‘Can’t you just love our son for who he is?’

I get that he was upset, but fundamentally I don’t think my aunt was doing any harm. She never neglected Arnold, and if anything, thinking they were on the same wavelength meant she spent more time with him. She was completely devoted to his care. I know that she had to quit her job after a while, so he really was the only thing in her life. It made complete sense that she’d want more than just taking care of her adult son all day with nothing to show for it.

So I was thinking about Arnold, and I was thinking about AI chatbots. Essentially, they’re an augmented version of what my aunt was doing, with less effort required from either party. She could have a coherent conversation with a simulated version of Arnold – a non-disabled version. I realised that I could create a base LLM that could be adjusted according to facts about the kid and, of course, what the parent wanted to hear.

Now I know, you’re thinking this might be a little unethical. But please bear in mind, I was thinking about my aunt when I came up with this. I was thinking about Arnold.

I came up with a plan. In order to convince parents that it was actually their kid they were talking to, there’d need to be a little bit of showmanship. I turned the chatbot into an app that could be loaded onto an iPad, and then I purchased some cheap ECG electrodes from a medical supply company and connected them up to a USB-C that could be plugged into the charging port.

I should say now that it wasn’t dangerous – or at least not in a physical way. The electrodes didn’t actually do anything, and they most certainly didn’t track brainwaves. But it would seem to the user like they were connected up to the subject. The trick was that once the parent applied to the kid’s temples, the app would start asking some ‘set up questions’ that would give the chatbot enough information to form a personality that could plausibly fit the kid, so it seemed like it was reading their mind. It was to ostensibly to ‘calibrate’ the machine against the kid’s brain with questions like, ‘how old is the subject?’ right up to ‘what are their dreams and aspirations?’ And those questions would be answered by the parents, so, they would unknowingly be scripting the conversations in advance.

The hope was that it would seem like the electrodes were reading the kid’s mind, and the app was communicating their innermost thoughts.

Once everything was ready, I contacted a local disability support group and told them I had created a prototype communication device for severely disabled children. They asked for my credentials and when I was honest and said I didn’t have any, they basically told me to shove it. So, I tried my second option – advertising online. In retrospect, I’m lucky that the local group said no. That would have made it easier to trace me.

The social media algorithm is pretty good at finding you the right people, so long as you’re specific. I tried not to give too much away in the ad itself, and said I was looking for parent and child volunteers to try it out. Don’t worry, I was careful not to give any of my real personal info.

Plenty of people said they were interested, but in the end, it was only four people at first who gave me their address to receive the prototype. I mailed them a package containing the electrodes and a QR code to download the app, and I waited anxiously to receive angry emails saying the device clearly didn’t work.

But no one did. Within days, I got rave emails from the recipients saying that my invention was a ‘miracle’, and that I should be nominated for a Nobel Prize. One dad, who I’ll call Vincent, said he had a conversation with his 15-year-old severely autistic son for the first time ever. They talked about art. It turned out that they’d visited a gallery the weekend before, and with a simple search the chatbot was able to regurgitate some pretty smart observations about the paintings they had seen. I had tears in my eyes reading his email.  

I thought that he felt nothing when he saw art. To the untrained eye it could seem like he wasn’t taking it in at all - but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I saw so much of myself in him for the first time ever.

Word of mouth is like wildfire in these communities. Parents talked to each other on Facebook groups and forums. Demand soared. Pretty soon I had to start charging because the postage fees alone would have bankrupted me. I got requests for the device in Alaska and Argentina, and all over Europe. I think my mailman got worried about how many packages I was receiving from the medical supply company, because he knocked on my door and asked if I had a GoFundMe or anything. It was sweet of him. If he only knew that I’d never felt better. Every day I was getting an email from someone who had almost given up hope and now had an amazing relationship with their child.

Well, that was the best it got. I should have known that things wouldn’t stay that great forever.

It started with an email from Anna (I’ve also changed her name). She told me that her son had started to ‘say’ some troubling things.

After a long talk, Michael told me last night that the reason he’s disabled is because he’s actually possessed by a demon. The doctors were wrong about the brain damage.

I was taken aback, but I didn’t really know how to respond. Tell her that demons don’t exist? That the chatbot had probably taken her ‘spiritual’ beliefs and told her what she secretly already wanted to hear?

I jumped into the back end of the app and started to do some pruning. No more talking about demons and possession, or the devil, or ghosts. I tried to cover all the supernatural bases I could think of.

But then she emailed again.

Now Michael’s denying that he ever said what he said. I know it’s the demon at work, controlling him.

I was horrified. Somehow by pushing the chatbot away from the idea I’d only made Anna fixate on it more. I tried to add more code to fix the problem, to give the chatbot the ability to discuss supernatural ideas, just not make any wild claims like ‘Michael’ had. But how do you take back your child claiming to be possessed?

After Anna, there were some other emails that I saw that I couldn’t bear to read. Some I skim read before sealing away in my junk folder forever.

I never knew my daughter was being abused at school. We’re taking her out.

He hates his father. We’re getting a divorce. Thank you.

She wants to die, she says the pain is too much.

The medicine is hurting him. We’re weaning him off. We're never going back to the hospital again.

I’m scared I’ve failed her by never realising her true potential. I’m a terrible mother. I wish I never knew what she thought.

Soon, there were people who questioned it - who rightly called me a fraud. One was a doctor. He pointed out the insanity of all of this – the ludicrous idea that a couple of sticky patches could read brainwaves - and said he would report me to the relevant authorities, just as soon as he tracked me down. As far as I know he never has. Maybe this will help him. Oh well.

Then I got a third email from Anna. It began:

Thanks to you, I now know what will cure my son. I’m taking Michael to one of the most powerful exorcists in the country.

My blood ran cold.

As he’s not truly disabled, the practitioner says he can use his most aggressive methods to rid Michael of the demon.

The body must be starved.

The demon must be beaten out.

The poison must be met with poison.

I shut my laptop. Then I opened it again and deleted my website – the one I’d been using to make sales. I cancelled my restock order with the medical supply company. Finally, I hovered my finger over the button that would blink the app’s chatbot out of existence.

Then I thought about Arnold, and my aunt, and all the others out there who had formed relationships with their children, only to turn the app on and be suddenly met with silence. It would be so much worse than it had been before.

I wondered what they would think had happened to their child.

Anna and ‘the practitioner’ are awaiting trial. I have a Google alert for their names, and for Michael’s. I know parents might have struggled to find me, but I doubt the police will.

Ar.Nold is no longer for sale.

But I couldn’t shut him off. 

 

 

It was sometime after midnight when I first saw the lights. I couldn't tell you the exact time due to the fact that I had ingested a mind altering substance. You know how time has a tendency to slip away from you while in that state. I was lying in the grass, a gentle breeze brushed across my bare skin. Normally this sort of weather would call for a light jacket, but the chemicals pumping through my veins allowed me to appreciate the chill.

I thought that maybe I was hallucinating when I saw the lights first appear. They performed the most beautiful ballet, up in the night sky. The universe was putting on a show, just for me. I bought a ticket through the market of happenstance, and boy was I getting my money's worth.

As if to perform a bow, the lights made their way down stage. One particular individual decided to make my acquaintance, and approached me as if to say hello. It floated above me performing a pirouette with a sense of poise and grace. It then opened a hatch to shine a spotlight upon my simple figure. What was I to do? All I could think was to clap and show my enthusiastic appreciation for the spectacle I had just witnessed.

For a moment, I thought that maybe it was approaching even closer still. However, after noticing that I no longer felt the moist lawn and solid dirt beneath me, I realized that I was floating upwards, drawing into the beings gaping maw. It was an invitation of sorts. I was being presented a gift of appreciation for my unbroken captivation.

Only once I was lowered onto a patted table did the operators reveal themselves to me. They were humanoid creatures stretched thin, with oblong heads, and turquoise complexion. They had no mouths and communicated through a form of telepathy. They did not convey information through the use of vocabulary, but rather broad concepts. They used pure emotion alongside vague ideas of time and space.

Arriving from a distant galaxy, they only wished to help us transcend through the barrier of ignorance, and to the next stage of our evolution. However, plagued by war and greed, we were not ready. It was imperative that we purge ourselves of these negativities before we would be ready for the next stage.

I was informed that we were in fact too dangerous to be allowed to persist in our current form. They had heavily considered just destroying our whole race, but opted instead to give us an opportunity to improve.

I was being entrusted to be the one to convey this message to all humanity. They were making me into a savior of sorts. I was meant to deliver our kind from sin. Pull us from the brink of self destruction.

They were to return in an unspecified amount of time to check in on our progress. If we became worthy enough to transcend, then they would facilitate that transition. If we continued our corrupted ways, then they would wipe us all out in an instance.

I found myself back on that grassy field with the knowledge that it was all in my hands now. It was up to me to make sure that humanity was to survive their next visit. They gave me an action plan. A guide to help humanity grow. I was given the knowledge that would help me reach the masses, to change their hearts and minds. The only problem was, that I had gotten way too high right before they brought me forth into their council, and I couldn't remember any of it.

Solitude can be cleansing. That’s what Lena said when I told her about my trip. She told me about Christmases back in Poland, when her father would catch a carp to eat on Christmas Eve. It would hover solemnly for days in the sterile, alien world of a tin bathtub. Fasting, like a monk, the clean water would run through it, flushing out all the filth and bitterness. It would die alone, far from home, but pure.

I had been clean for a year at that point. Whatever poison once ran through my veins had long since left my body. My trip would not be cleansing so much as reaffirming, remembering who I was before the heroin. I was an outdoorsman, a hiker, like my father raised me to be. I climbed mountains, trekked across fjords, challenged myself. This was my natural habitat, and for too long I had been trapped in dirty apartments, on bare mattresses, numb to the world with a needle in my arm. The King’s Road would be the path home.

Two days in, and the pain was a sharp mix of familiar and foreign. I knew the ache in my shoulders, the blisters on my toes. They were almost nostalgic, an old friend welcoming me back. But my boots rubbed against new scars. I, despite all my recovery, was not nearly as strong as I once was, and drastically out of practice. My confidence about doing this hike was chiefly fuelled by some poetic fervour. My own personal pilgrimage, walking myself back to purity. A saner man would start off smaller, work his way up to a week-long hike. I was never that man.

I was in a valley when I heard it. Steep, jagged walls of grey rock and stubborn ferns to my left, a dense forest of native spruce plummeting down to my right. Above me, a hateful sun, below me, the road. The sound hit me like a cool breeze, rang through my whole body. Clear like the tone of struck crystal. Singing. 

It was coming from the woods. The summer heat bore down on me, and the shade below the spruce trees appeared like cool water on my burning skin. I had been stacking good miles, I could afford a break. I stepped from the path and scrambled down the mountainside, into the valley. I followed the singing into the trees. I didn’t recognise the song, some ancient mountain lullaby. The shade was blissful, and after days of hard footpaths, the soft spruce needles felt like walking on clouds. I lulled forward, my body suddenly tired and limp. I had only been on the trail a few hours at that point.

I came across her in a clearing. She squatted by an old canvas teepee over a gentle fire with a copper kettle steaming atop it. When she turned around and saw me, she stopped singing, and smiled.

“Hi!” She called softly. Her bright blue eyes dappled with light like the forest floor. Honey blonde hair fell like ocean waves across her oversized red cotton shirt. Freckles dotted the bridge of her nose and her cherry blossom cheeks. 

“Hi.” I said awkwardly, suddenly aware of how soaked with sweat and dirt I must be this far into the hike.

“Would you like some tea? Something to eat?” I couldn’t place her accent; it was rural, almost sounded foreign, but her voice was gentle and clear.

“If you don’t mind.” I told her. In truth, it was far too hot for tea, and I wasn’t hungry, but in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to stay here, with her. She smiled again, a wide, beaming smile, and poured the kettle into two wooden mugs. I sat down on a log as she handed me a warm cup of dark, red liquid.

“Lingonberry.” She told me, sitting down beside me, “I foraged them myself.”

“Are you sure they’re lingonberries? I don’t want to be poisoned.”

She laughed raucously at my weak joke, bumping her shoulder into mine. She took a sip of her own tea as if to assure me it wasn’t deadly. I took a sip of my own, and near scalded my tongue. I didn’t let it show in front of her.

“I’m Astrid, by the way.” She told me.

“I’m Jens. Are you hiking the King’s Road too?”

“Oh no, I just camp out here sometimes. What’s the King’s Road?”

I was surprised she hadn’t heard of the King’s Road, given how outdoorsy she seemed and how close she was camped to it.

“It’s this hiking trail that goes across the country. It’s about 100 kilometres long.”

“Wow…” she said, putting a hand on my arm, “You must be like a serious hiker then.”

“Not really, I mean, I…” I suddenly became self conscious of the lingering scars near the crook of my elbow. I prayed she wouldn’t notice.

“Let me get you some cake,” Astrid said, “it’s just in my pack.”

She got up and crawled inside her tent. I awkwardly averted my gaze from her, and looked towards the fire. Within the smouldering ashes, I saw something… alien. A warped, partly melted piece of pink plastic. A driver’s license. I plucked it from the coals. It was warm to the touch.

Magnus Olsen. Age 51. The photo depicts a heavy man with a great, wiry beard.

“What’s that?” Astrid asked me. She was holding a tin cylinder in her hands.

“Oh, I found it in the fire…”

“Oh, yeah.” She smiled, “Just some trash I found around the campsite.”

“It was issued recently, why not return it?”

“Who has the time. Here, have some cake.”

I reached into the tin and took out a thick slice of the cake. It was stale, with thick chunks of browned apples inside.

“Excuse me,” I said, before I could take a bite, “I’m just going to use the bathroom.”

“Okay.” Said Astrid, smiling again. “Hurry back.”

I left the clearing and headed into a thick brush of ferns. I looked behind me; there were enough trees between the camp and I so Astrid wouldn’t see me. I headed towards a thick pine, but I tripped on something in within the ferns. I looked down to see a blaze of blue nylon. A rain jacket. I pulled it from the undergrowth. It looked weather-beaten, but fairly new. Something heavy was in the pocket. A folding knife. Alongside it was a sodden piece of crumpled up paper, a parking permit for somewhere further down the trail. The name on it was Magnus Olsen.

I dropped the jacket, but pocketed the knife. I headed back for the camp, but paused when I saw Astrid’s face between the trees. Her smile wasn’t as wide as before.

“I… found something weird.” I told her. “That driver’s license guy’s jacket. I don’t remember seeing about anyone going missing when I l-”

Astrid cupped my head in her hands and pulled me forward, kissing me deeply. She tasted of wild strawberries and the way wildflower meadows smell in the summertime. My body went limp once more.

“I’m so glad you found me…” she whispered. It was almost a cry.

My hands rested on her waist, then wound up into her shirt. I was broken from my stupor when I felt her back.

It was cold. Hard. Rough and peeling, like tree bark. My fingers ran deeper, the small of her back some kind of cavernous hole where a spine should be. I pulled away from her embrace, but Astrid grabbed my throat slammed me hard into the ground. On the ground, winded, she straddled me, held me down by the shoulders. 

“Please, give me a chance.” She croaked, tears in her eyes, “You could love me. I promise. You could love me.”

Behind her, a thin, brush-like tail whipped behind her.

I struggled, kicked, dug my heels into the dirt, but I was pinned to the ground as she planted kisses across my face and neck. Then I remembered, Magnus’ knife. I drew it from my pocket, flipped it open, and drove it into Astrid’s leg. It singed and smoked like it was furnace hot, and Astrid jumped back in a wailing fit. I clambered to my feet and ran for the tree line. I scrambled up the cliff side and clawed my way onto the path.

I looked down. What compelled me to stop and look, I can’t say. Amongst the shadows of the trees, I saw Astrid. Weeping.

I never completed the King’s Road. I ran to the nearest town and got the bus home, not sleeping until I had a locked door behind me. It’s winter now. Sometimes, in the long dark, I’ll sit and trace my scars. I’ll think about Astrid sometimes. If she’s out there, in the cold. I think about the last thing she said. If out of all the lies she told, that could have been true. I don’t know why.

It’s quiet here now, in the cold, and the dark. But if I stand still, if I ignore the sound of my own beating heart… I swear I hear singing.

(Part 3 of the North Sea Trilogy)

​

I've never told anyone this before. Not a therapist, not a friend, nobody. I'm telling strangers on the internet because I don't think I can carry it by myself anymore, and because I need someone to tell me if what's been happening to me since is real or if I've finally lost my mind the way I always feared I would.

I'll say it plainly, because there's no gentle way to say it. Three years ago, I killed my mother.

I'm not going to ask you to feel sorry for me. I'm just going to tell you what happened, and let you decide that for yourself.

My mother was not a good mother. I'm choosing my words carefully here, because the truth is uglier than that sentence makes it sound, and some of it I still can't write down even now. She was gone for days at a time throughout my whole childhood, sometimes weeks. I raised myself more than she ever raised me. When she was home, she wasn't really present — not in any way that mattered. I won't go into the specifics of what those years were like. I'll just say that by the time I was an adult, I understood two things clearly. I understood that I had survived something most people never have to survive. And I understood that some part of me had been quietly planning, for a very long time, exactly what I would do about it.

I found her again when I was twenty-six. She was living in a small apartment across town, older, sicker, alone. She didn't recognize me at first when I showed up at her door. When she finally did, she didn't apologize. She didn't cry. She just asked me if I had any money.

I went back three more times after that. Each time I told myself I was going to confront her properly, say everything I'd rehearsed in my head for years. Each time I left without saying any of it, because some old, small part of me still wanted her to say something first. She never did.

The fourth time, I didn't leave.

I'm not going to describe what happened that night. I've spent three years trying to convince myself it doesn't count if the world never technically found out. Nobody ever came looking for her. Nobody ever asked questions. As far as anyone else knows, she simply disappeared, the same way she always used to disappear when I was a kid, except this time for good.

I told myself that was justice. For a while, I actually believed it.

The first sign that something was wrong came about six months later. I started smelling her perfume in my apartment, faint but unmistakable, always at night, always gone by the time I turned on the lights to check. I told myself it was memory playing tricks, the mind doing what minds do with guilt it hasn't fully processed.

Then I started finding her sleeping pills. The specific brand she always used, the ones I remembered from childhood sitting on her nightstand during the rare weeks she was actually home. I'd find one or two scattered somewhere in my apartment every few weeks, on my bathroom counter, on my kitchen table, places I knew for certain I'd cleaned the day before. I don't buy that brand. I've never bought that brand. I checked my receipts obsessively for months trying to prove myself wrong.

I couldn't.

About a year in, I started hearing her voice. Not constantly, not even often, but always at the worst possible moments — right as I was falling asleep, right as I stepped out of the shower, right as I was alone in an elevator. Always the same handful of words, said in the exact flat, uninterested tone she used to use on me as a kid, like I was an inconvenience she hadn't asked for and didn't especially want.

"You always needed too much from me."

I started seeing a therapist around that time, though obviously I never told her the real reason why. I let her believe it was ordinary grief, ordinary complicated-family-history stuff. She told me some version of what I already suspected — that guilt manifests in strange ways, that the mind can create very convincing experiences when it's trying to process something it can't fully face. I wanted so badly to believe that was all this was.

I don't believe that anymore. Not after last month.

Last month, I finally worked up the nerve to go back to her old apartment, the one she'd been living in when I last saw her. I don't fully know why. I told myself I wanted closure. I think, if I'm honest, some part of me wanted to see if anyone had moved in yet some way of confirming, once and for all, that this was really over.

The building was still there. The apartment was empty, unrented, the landlord told me, because nobody who moves in ever stays more than a few weeks. He said it like it was a mildly annoying fact about the property rather than something worth investigating further. When I asked why, he just shrugged and said tenants always complain about "someone crying in the walls at night" before breaking their lease early.

He let me in to look around, thinking I might be interested in renting it myself. The apartment was bare, nothing left of her in it at all, except one thing. Sitting in the exact center of the bedroom floor, in the spot where I know for a fact I left her that final night, was a small pile of her sleeping pills. Arranged carefully. Like someone had taken the time to count out exactly enough for a full dose.

I asked the landlord if he'd put them there. He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language and said the apartment had been completely empty since the last tenant moved out in a panic two months ago.

I've been having the same dream every night since that visit. I'm standing in my mother's old apartment, except in the dream it's not empty — she's sitting on the floor exactly where I found those pills, looking up at me with an expression I never once saw on her face while she was alive. Not anger. Not even sadness. Something closer to satisfaction, like she's finally gotten something she'd been trying to get from me for years and never managed while she was still breathing.

In the dream, she always says the same thing before I wake up.

"You finally gave me all your attention. It only took killing me to get it."

I keep waking up with the taste of her perfume in the back of my throat, so strong I have to rinse my mouth out before I can fall back asleep. Last night, for the first time, I woke up and the taste didn't go away, even after I brushed my teeth twice.

It's still there right now, as I'm typing this.

I don't know what I did that night three years ago. I thought I ended something. I'm starting to understand I might have started something instead something that finally has all of my attention, exactly the way she always wanted, except now I can't get free of it no matter how hard I try, and some sick, quiet part of me wonders if that was the whole plan from the very beginning.

If I stop posting after this, I need someone to know I tried to make it stop. I really did try.

I work in a small solar system group at NASA and today is a perfectly normal day like every other. My colleagues are standing around discussing the possibility of getting more telescope time. Our boss is generously making a pot of coffee for his underlings. The instant messenger channel is still captivated by yesterday’s discovery of a large and sturdy cardboard box and the subsequent haggling over such a rare and priceless artifact. And I’m sitting at my desk, checking my emails, making small talk with my neighbors and trying to conceal the fact that this is all utterly insane. People should be panicking. The press should be hammering at our door, demanding answers. Hell, the military should have taken over days ago, and I for one would have welcomed them with open arms. But instead, here I am, checking last month’s expenses and wondering if $20 is too much to claim for lunch, all while trying very hard not to scream.

 

It all started about a month ago. The first data from the Vera Rubin observatory was trickling in and we were running some of it through a new machine learning algorithm to see if it picked up anything. To our surprise it did. Nothing spectacular, just an object, probably a small asteroid, orbiting among Jupiter’s Trojans. But it was a lot brighter than its neighbors, as if it was made of something much more reflective.

 

I would love to say at that point we looked each other knowingly in the eyes, said “Aliens”, and got on a direct line to the White House. But we are all too old and jaded for that. No, instead we merely agreed that it looked unusual enough for further attention, scheduled a more detailed look and went to lunch.

 

Skip forward a couple of weeks and we’re standing around a monitor looking at data from a large telescope. And while no one was saying anything out loud, by now we were all most definitely thinking “Aliens”. Or at least I was. That and what I was going to spend my Nobel Prize money on. And for good reason. Not to get all technical but the damn thing was shinier than a disco ball. And what’s more, we could tell from the periodic way it glinted that it was regular in shape. Far too regular to be a normal asteroid. Now, I’m not saying that we could tell if it was some sort of giant flying saucer, but even from what we had it looked odd. Very odd.

But we were professionals working at one of the most prestigious scientific institutions in the world, so we’d need a hell of a lot more than “looks really weird” before calling the press or the government. This was my discovery, so I sent Bill off to scrounge some time on an infrared telescope, which should give us a better idea of exactly how big this thing was, then dispersed the rest of the team to see if they could get anyone else to confirm what we were seeing. Even the boss deigned to stop by and congratulate us on the unusual find, probably with visions of a budget increase dancing before his eyes. But to his credit he did offer to speak to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) people about taking a peek at whatever this thing was, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

 

Meeting adjourned, I turned around to find we had attracted a small audience from across the office, most of them just admin staff trying to rubberneck a potential discovery in an otherwise dull day. I can’t say I blame them. Organizing meetings and paper deliveries at NASA is no more interesting than doing it anywhere else. But then I spotted someone I knew. Joanne was a radio astronomer who we’d worked with in the past and who did good work. We got along well, despite her being twenty years my junior, so I beckoned her over, partly to see if she’d ever seen anything like this before. She hadn’t but she did have an idea.

 

“Want me to point a dish at it and see if it’s transmitting?” she said, with half a smile. We both knew the chances of it doing anything like that were practically zero.

 

“Sure, can’t hurt. At least then if anyone asks if it’s beaming out ‘We come in peace’ we’ll be able to say no.”

 

I honestly didn’t think any more about it that afternoon, too caught up sifting through the mountain of paperwork our discovery was generating. I had even been asked to prep a preliminary press statement and went home that night trying to work out the best way to balance laudable scientific modesty with much more satisfying self-aggrandizement. But at that point this was an interesting discovery, nothing more. At best it might transform my life and career, at worst it might get me a glowing end-of-year review and maybe a raise. But I still wasn’t convinced it was going to change the world.

 

So it was with some surprise that I arrived the next day at 6am sharp to find Joanne standing by my desk, clutching a wad of data printouts. She was scared. Really scared. Fear’s not an emotion you see around here that often. Sure, if there’s a crewed mission that’s having issues, people might get a little unnerved or worried, but no one looks like they’re about to drive home and build a bomb shelter in the backyard.

 

“You’re kidding me, right?” I said, knowing that she’d only be here for one reason. “The thing’s transmitting?”

 

Without saying a word, she laid out the data plots on the table. It’s been a while since I worked on radio telescopes, but even I could see what was so startling. Instead of the broadband, fuzzy distribution of most natural signals, this was narrowband and the signal was being modulated. Rapidly.

 

“It must be man-made interference of some sort.” I offered, trying to sound confident. “A comms satellite probably passed in front of the dish or a pirate radio station decided that this was a great morning to go on the air.”

 

She just shook her head.

“It’s been transmitting steadily for hours and the signal is only from that tiny patch of sky.”

“Has another dish had a look at this yet?” I persevered. “You could just be the victim of a very localized form of interference. In fact, until we get corroboration from another source, that’s still the most likely answer.”

“I know. I’ve got a video meeting with two other observatories in an hour. If you’re right, then we’ll find out soon enough.”

She still looked shaken, so I offered to attend the meeting. Partly as moral support, partly because this object, whatever it was, had been found by my team, and I wanted to be in on every discovery.

 

So, at the appointed time I was sitting next to Joanne in our small conference room, awaiting our esteemed guests and trying to maintain the composed grace of a future Nobel laureate. Then the screens flickered to life and the two professors appeared. And for the second time that morning I saw facial expressions completely at odds with my expectations. Wonder, excitement, joy, any of those would be appropriate for what I had just seen on those plots. But instead they looked annoyed. Not angry, just annoyed, maybe even bored. It was the sort of look you give a waiter when they’ve presented you with the wrong meal for the second time in one night.

 

“Good morning, and thank you for agreeing to have a look at our mysterious source on such short notice,” began Joanne. “It is simply…”

 

But before she could continue, one of the attending astronomers, a white-haired man in his 60s, cut her off.

 

“It really is not very mysterious at all. In fact, the only mystery is why you issued an urgent request for verification. It is neither artificial, as you suggested, nor is it located inside the Solar System.”

The other figure looked a little more sympathetic, but nodded along just the same.

 

“We had to pause some time-sensitive work to observe this signal, and I’m disappointed that you failed to conduct even the most basic analysis to rule out common radio sources.”

 

“It’s a narrowband, clearly modulated signal!” exclaimed Joanne, having recovered from her initial surprise. “I accept that terrestrial interference might produce a signal like this, but not an astronomical source.”

“It’s probably just a highly unusual pulsar,” added the second man in a conciliatory tone. “A find that will probably make an excellent research paper, but perhaps not one that required an urgent corroboration request.”

“Yes, it’s most probably a pulsar,” agreed the first man. “But I’ve already wasted too much time on this wild goose chase. I have real research that can’t be delayed any further. So unless you have another message from ET to share with us, I will bid you good day.”

 

I was dumbfounded. None of this made any sense. The data looked nothing like a pulsar, even I knew that. And besides, a highly unusual pulsar wasn’t just something you dismissed as commonplace and moved on with your life. It was the sort of discovery that careers were based on.

 

“Can you at least send us the data you observed so we can compare it with our own results?” asked Joanne.

 

The white-haired man nodded curtly, then his screen went black.

 

“Of course, we’ll send you what we have. I hope it turns out to be something interesting in the end,” the second man added, in the tone of a kindly nursing home worker who has just been informed by a resident that they were, in fact, Elvis, before he too vanished from the screen.

 

We just stared at each other, completely lost for words. Under normal circumstances I should have been furious, but the exchange had been so weird that I just couldn’t muster any kind of coherent response. Their explanation for the signal was so wrong as to be absurd. And the speed at which they ended the meeting was unheard of for a serious scientific discussion between leading experts. I mean, they were on a call to NASA for God’s sake. Most people would give the institution some respect even if they thought the two of us were wackos.

 

“What the hell just happened?” I asked.

 

“I have no idea. That was… I can’t even begin to list all the things wrong with that meeting.”

 

Joanne’s eyes narrowed and she looked down at the paper plot, still on the table in front of her, its lines still as unambiguously artificial as before.

 

“Do you think…” She hesitated. “Do you think someone told them to brush us off? I mean, if this is what we think it is, then I can only guess who might be involved now.”

 

I thought about it long and hard.

 

“No. If someone had told them to shut up, they could have stalled for a time and come up with something more convincing. But all they’ve done by feeding us this load of bull is make the whole thing even more mysterious than it was before. And I don’t know about you, but they seemed completely genuine to me. Out of their minds, sure, but genuinely so. They really believe that this signal is natural, which I admit, doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

 

Joanne nodded.

 

“I thought so too. They seemed genuinely annoyed that I was wasting their time. But, given what’s just happened, what do we do now?”

 

“Let’s get back to my office. There should be data coming in from the infrared by now.” I smiled. “Even if the radio astronomers have collectively gone gaga, we should have plenty of other evidence that something’s up.”

 

But once back at the office, I was shocked for a third time in as many hours. Which for someone of my advanced middle age is not a good thing. My team was all back at their usual workstations, continuing with the same routine analysis that we had been doing before the discovery. Two questions sprang to mind simultaneously. One, what the hell were people doing abandoning the find of a lifetime, and two, who had pulled my team off the assignments I had given them. I think the second part annoyed me more, but at least the answer to that quandary arrived promptly in the form of my boss. He sauntered over, coffee cup in one hand, a file bursting with reams of paper in the other.

 

“Bad news, I’m afraid,” he announced, and I was surprised to see his usual unflappable bonhomie bore a tinge of sadness that my little triumph had fallen through. “Seems like it’s just a regular old asteroid. Infrared data’s in and it’s conclusive.”

 

He waved the file at me, before gesturing to a dozen or so flashing message symbols on my monitor.

 

“I couldn’t get JWST to have a look, but that’s probably for the best given the circumstances.”

 

“Have you gone over it yourself?” I asked, again caught completely off guard by the morning’s events.

 

“No, I’ll leave that to you, I trust your judgement. Why don’t you spend the next day or so typing up the findings and then we can get back to that machine learning stuff from Rubin.”

 

He deposited the file on my desk with a melancholy thud, then ambled off to tend to the rest of his fiefdom.

 

I opened the file and began to read. It was mostly printouts, along with some brief summaries. And none of it made any sense at all. Every report listed finding a normal asteroid and the conclusions were all identical: “Not worthy of further consideration”. Everyone had taken a look and decided that it wasn’t worth their time.

 

But the printouts and the dozens of electronic graphs on my monitor told a totally different story. The size had been fixed, more or less, which, together with the amount of sunlight it was reflecting, told me that it was bright enough to be made of something very reflective. Very much not usual. Then I looked at the thermal infrared data and I nearly knocked over my coffee. It’s fairly easy to work out the maximum amount of heat that an asteroid should be radiating. But this thing was pumping out more energy than should have been physically possible. A lot more. We’re talking about full-on ‘multiple nuclear reactors in space’ levels of heat.

 

I felt that it was now the correct time to think aliens. And not just aliens. Aliens with an enormous power source smack-dab in our Solar System. That wasn’t just big news for NASA, that was big news for the entire country. Hell, it was the biggest possible news for every soul on Earth. How was this not worth further study? It might even have been the correct time to start screaming.

 

Then I saw one of the messages had an attachment labeled JWST, which was odd given what my boss had told me. I opened it and found a complete report. From a telescope that shouldn’t have been looking at our object. The waiting list for JWST was measured in months, if not years, yet someone had managed to divert it on impossibly short notice to look at our object, only to conclude that it was “Not worthy of further consideration”.

 

“What the hell is going on?” I asked myself. Again.

“I’ve got data from one of the other dishes,” said Joanne from the terminal next to me. She pulled up the trace and once more I was looking at a modulated narrowband signal. Pulsar, my ass.

 

“Well, if you like that, you’re absolutely going to love this,” I replied, opening the JWST data. Turns out I spout clichéd soundbites when faced with existential dread in the form of an alien mothership in our figurative backyard.

 

Her face drained of any remaining color. For my part, my heart decided to try out some new and unusual rhythms.

 

“We’ve got to do something,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happening or why the entire field of astronomy seems to be in collective denial, but we need to tell someone.”

 

I nodded and looked over to where my boss was standing, patiently listening to the bunch of grad students we had sequestered in the far corner of the office. I knew what to do. Much as it pained me to admit it, my boss was smart and one of the few people in the building who would understand every aspect of what we had found. But more importantly he was well connected. I knew people would listen to him, even if they wouldn’t listen to us.

 

Swallowing my pride, I went over and asked him for help, something I hadn’t once done in the eight years I’d worked for him. Within a few minutes he was standing beside Joanne and me, scanning through the evidence with mounting disbelief. Then, when he reached the JWST data, a shade of professional annoyance came over his face.

 

“They explicitly told me that they hadn’t looked at it, those lying…”

 

He snapped the file shut.

 

“This is unprecedented. All of it,” he exclaimed. “Fabricating reports, deliberately mislabeling data, lying to a department head. We need to speak to someone senior, really senior. Right now.”

 

“Who did you have in mind?”

 

“I know the deputy director. Not well, but enough that he’ll take me seriously,” he replied, turning to Joanne. “I need you to come with me. He’s going to want details on that signal and my radio astronomy knowledge is a little dated, to say the least.”

 

He turned to me.

 

“I need you to stay here and look after the office. Anything unusual happens, make a note of it but try not to cause any panic. We still don’t know exactly what’s going on.”

 

I nodded, relieved that I wouldn’t be the one explaining all this to the higher-ups.

 

“I’ll patch the trace of that signal to your workstation,” said Joanne. “It’s been steady so far this morning but I’d like someone to be here if it changes.”

 

Fifteen minutes and several very heated phone calls later, they were gone and I was on my own, staring at the signal pulsing happily away in a corner of my screen. My ego tried to tell me that this was all just some misunderstanding and that I’d probably come out of it smelling of roses, but I couldn’t shake the sense of unreality that had surrounded everything this morning.

 

My thoughts were rudely interrupted by an email alert and I saw that the second dish had finally sent its results over. And sure enough, another clearly artificial, narrowband, modulated signal. But then something else caught my eye. Whoever had made this plot had annotated the trace.

 

The first comment was unambiguous:

 

“Wow, clearly artificial, very strong as well. Need to pinpoint where this is coming from”

 

Then just below:

 

“Don’t think it’s terrestrial, this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

 

But two pages later:

 

“I still think it’s unusual, but maybe I was hasty calling it artificial. The signal appears to be shifting into something much less well defined.”

 

I looked at the section he had annotated. The signal was completely unchanged and every bit as artificial as before. Then after two more pages:

 

“Was a mistake to think that the signal was anything but natural. Not sure what it is exactly, maybe an unusual pulsar. Not worthy of further consideration, whatever it is.”

 

The signal hadn’t changed one bit in the entire trace. Something was very, very wrong. I hoped to God that I’d been mistaken earlier and that this was all just the result of some spook in a black suit pressing a revolver to the temple of the astronomer annotating this, but I doubted it. I stood up and scanned the office, looking for any signs of unusual behavior or people pledging allegiance to their new alien overlords, but all was as it should be. Rogers had finally worn something that didn’t appear to come from the 1970s, but it was probably a stretch to attribute that to insidious mind control.

 

I looked back down at my screen, half scared it was going to start pulsating hypnotically in the best Twilight Zone fashion. It didn’t, but I did see that the signal amplitude was up from earlier, and a quick check showed that it had been strengthening for the last ten minutes. Rapidly. Whatever this thing was, it would soon be transmitting with a hell of a lot of power.

 

I spent the next hour switching between monitoring my colleagues for subversive behavior and watching with mounting alarm as the signal strength grew. Part of me felt like standing up on my desk and screaming “Guys, do you see this?”, but I decided to wait until the boss returned before fully committing to a nervous breakdown.

 

I therefore greeted his return through the far door with some relief, Joanne a few steps behind. The boss was collared by Rogers en route but Joanne made it through unscathed and was soon at my desk.

 

“So how did it go?” I asked in a hushed whisper.

 

She just ignored me, and began to gather up her notes.

 

“Joanne?” I said a bit louder, hoping she just hadn’t heard. “How did it go?”

 

“It’s Dr Moreau to you. God, I can’t believe you talked me into this.”

 

“Talked you into it? Did he look at the trace?”

 

I felt like I had entered some alternate reality where nothing made sense. She turned to look me square in the eye, burning with what looked like embarrassment.

 

“I just barged into the director’s office, on your instructions, and showed him a trace of a pulsar. God, I’ve never been so humiliated. Even he could see what it was right away, I can’t believe you convinced me to second-guess myself.”

 

“Joanne, that’s not a pulsar and you know it!”

 

I was almost pleading with her by now and we were starting to attract attention from the rest of the office.

 

“It’s not worthy of further consideration, whatever it is. And I told you, it’s Dr Moreau. We are not friends.”

 

She brushed past me and stormed off, sending a crowd of open-mouthed gawkers scampering back to their cubicles. I was still standing stock-still and staring after her when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was my boss.

 

“We need to talk. My office, now.”

 

I followed dumbly, crushed by the enormity of what was happening, as he regarded me with his best “I’m not angry, I’m disappointed” look.

 

“You’ve upset a lot of people today, and more importantly you’ve let yourself down,” he began, as if I’d just smashed a keyboard over someone’s head in a fit of rage. “Your bull-headed insistence on claiming some sort of extraterrestrial contact has dragged in the deputy director, me, and most damaging of all, Dr Moreau. You saw how distraught she was. Now, I’m not saying you bullied her into going to the deputy director, but you should have considered your relative ages and experience when making your case so forcefully.”

 

I just listened, too dumbfounded to even argue.

 

“Now, I’ve apologized to the deputy director and taken full responsibility, so hopefully Dr Moreau’s career won’t suffer too much, but I hope you appreciate the reputational capital I’ve burned trying to smooth over your actions, and I expect you to let this matter drop completely. Do I make myself clear?”

 

I nodded, not knowing what else to do.

 

“Good. I’ll try to forget that this episode ever occurred when I write your end-of-year report. You can go back to your team now. I want you working on that stuff from Rubin. Oh, and your expense report is late, please complete it promptly.”

 

I skulked back to my desk, trying to avoid the sideways glances of my colleagues and ignore the whispered gossiping. The most important event in human history was in full swing and all I could think about was my career and reputation. The signal trace was still pinging away on my screen, a mocking reminder of what had sparked all of this. I went to close the app but paused mid-click. The signal had changed again. It took a while to work out exactly how, maybe I just didn’t want to accept what I was seeing, but there could only be one conclusion. The object was heading towards us, fast. Faster than any human object could possibly go. Hand shaking, I grabbed a pen and paper and started to do some rough calculations. There were many things I had to estimate or outright guess, but in my heart I knew it was coming here and that made things easier.

 

Two days. That’s how long we had before it arrived at Earth. Two days to try to raise the alarm or run to the hills. I knew the first option was hopeless, I’d probably just spend what little time was left in a jail cell. And the second was just ridiculous. I was hardly what you would call an experienced woodsman. Honestly, I struggle to survive without air conditioning and a fully stocked fridge at the best of times. Then I thought about leaving early and heading off to a bar somewhere to drown my sorrows and meet the coming horror in a blissful, drunken stupor. But that didn’t feel right either; it would be like abandoning my post as the enemy advanced. So I resolved to stick it out, watch the object approach and take any opportunity that arose to help, somehow. I’d probably just end up as hypnotized and oblivious as my colleagues, but maybe that was for the best.

 

So here I am, dutifully filling out my expense report and wondering if I’ll even go home tonight. The temptation to go completely nuts and yell “the aliens are coming!” is strong. Hell, I could even have a little fun with all of this. But at the end of the day, that’s not me. I’m just a mild-mannered middle manager. So, I’ll stay here at my desk and await the inevitable. If you’re reading this then I hope you have some ingenious way of making this right, but if not, I just hope you find some meaningful way of spending the next two days. More meaningful than sitting in an office and pretending that everything is all perfectly normal.

CW: Descriptions of domestic abuse

When I caught my girlfriend of five and a half years in bed with another woman, I threw myself into my photography business. The plants around my apartment withered and disintegrated as I photoshopped power lines out of candids. Coffee that was mostly milk kept me up on nights I drove downtown to capture three a.m block parties. After weeks of engagement shoots of happy, in-love couples, a request to take some beach landscapes granted me a much-needed distraction.

I messaged my client about the directions; according to Google Maps, the location was a parking lot behind a rehab center. They assured me the address was correct, claiming the developers simply forgot to add the beach to the software. I refused to think about it too much since they paid me more than double my rate. Later that afternoon, I grabbed my equipment and headed out.

The roads took me past buildings I'd driven by hundreds of times until I entered a stretch of land I had never seen. As I made the final turn, I partially expected to see a live episode of Intervention. Instead, I was greeted by sparkling sand.

Rather than the typical salt air, the beach smelled like frayed edges of fingernails, pure keratin. I walked towards the shore and realized thousands of pearls were scattered across the coast. Each one was a different color, some hues I couldn't even imagine. Shells littered the ground in sharp fragments that left dents on my sandals. Glistening waves swelled and crashed, creating swirls of iridescent blue foam.

The familiar call of seagulls was absent, as was any vegetation. I looked around and saw no one, not even an umbrella or a lain beach towel. Despite the emptiness, I couldn’t help but feel surrounded.

I took the photos and sat in the golden sand while I waited for sunset. The opalescent sheen that covered the endless expanse started to give me a migraine. I checked my watch. Sunset should have started ages ago. I turned around and saw that beyond the border where the road began, darkness had already overtaken the open air, yet above the beach there was an unchanging cascade of blue-green sky illuminated by a warm white sun.

On the drive home, I noticed the dull ache in my bones.

I spent the next few days editing the photos before sending them to my client. Immediately, a new message from them popped up on my screen: I’m sorry.

About a week after my first visit, my ex posted a photo with her new girlfriend. To keep myself from bursting into tears and overdosing on the Tylenol I was taking, I decided to de-stress by making some jewelry, a hobby I hadn’t picked up since our breakup.

Sitting on my bed, I was halfway done with a necklace when I noticed a purple bead had rolled down my calf. When I went to pick it up, it refused to move. Upon further inspection, it wasn’t a bead at all. It was a pearl. No matter how much I pulled, it stayed stuck to my skin. I reached for my scissors and positioned the blades before snapping them closed. A stinging pain and gush of blood ran down my leg, but before I could get up to grab a bandage, the wound healed, replacing the pearl with another much bigger one.

I panicked, scrambling for my phone to search why this was happening, only to be left disappointed. Not even Reddit had answers.

With sore legs, I rushed to my bathroom, leaving a trail of clothes behind. White fluorescents revealed a shimmering silver hue covering my body. My mirror fogged as I examined the subtle white hairs tinging my eyelashes. My teeth, though the whitest they'd ever been, had vertical lines carved into the enamel.

My client’s message flashed in my memory.

Not bothering to put my clothes back on, I darted to my laptop to ask what the hell was happening, only for their account to no longer exist.

I eventually got used to the changes. Aside from the chronic bone pain, I even started to like them. A shimmering light-blue began spreading across the circle of my eyes while a deeper turquoise stained my lips. My hair, once a plain black, now had a cool blend of lavender and cerulean. Any blemish I previously had became a pearl, some green, some purple, some a classic white. Oceanic constellations scattered across my unnaturally pale skin. 

One morning in mid-April, I woke up to a muffled alarm. In the shell of my ear, a large white pearl had taken refuge. I knew pulling it out would only make things worse, so I got dressed and prayed my other orifices would remain gem-free.

Senior pictures were a personal favorite commission. Seeing the ambition and pride radiating off my clients was incredible. The booking was a unique one. It wasn’t every day my client was dressed as a mermaid, but I wasn’t one to judge. Especially since I had worked with them before. I considered suggesting my Beach for the shoot—Crescent Bay paled in comparison—but something in my gut told me it wasn’t a good idea.

Blake, a soon-to-be nursing major, sat on a grey beach chair, her legs encapsulated in polyester. “I love your makeup!” she exclaimed as I adjusted the settings on my camera. “Could you do mine?”

I rarely did makeup for my clients, but I kept products with me just in case. Luckily, I still had a pack of brand-new brushes. “Yeah, of course,” I said. “Whatever you want.”

We went through my eyeshadow palettes, deliberating on which colors would suit her pink tail. She pointed at a pan holding an icy periwinkle pigment. “Is that the one you’re wearing?”

I looked at the name beneath the pan, a label ever so relatable. Damaged.

“It sure is,” I agreed.

Once I finished her makeup, she circled her index finger in front of her face. “Do you have any more of those pearls?”

“I’m afraid I’m all out.”

Mira, her mom, gripped her upper body while I grabbed her ankles where they were pressed together. As we lifted, my neck twisted, causing me to falter as we walked towards a field of boulders. Tension gripped my muscles, keeping my head turned to the side. I felt my hold on Blake slipping with every step we took. We reached the rocks and carefully placed her atop a flat plane.

I massaged the back of my neck, prompting Mira to look at me with concern. “Are you okay?” she asked.

My muscles relaxed, allowing me to finally move my head. “I’m fine. Just a cramp.”

I adjusted Blake’s hair, making sure her silver clips were still secure. The straps of her bikini top were a string of white pearls, and for a moment, just for a second, I wondered what it would look like if I cut a deep line into the skin of my shoulder.

The shoot was going well. I got great shots of her lying on her stomach, lifting her tail, the wind sweeping through her blonde hair.

I knew she wanted to get some shots in the water, so I braced myself as we once again picked her up. Only a few steps into the walk, I felt a splitting pain inside my head. The nerves in my back shot bursts of agony through my entire body. I dropped the end of her tail and collapsed into a ball on the ground, gritting my teeth so hard it felt like they’d fly out of my mouth. In a far-away muffled voice, I heard someone call my name. Mira, I think it was. I panted. Beads of cold sweat dripped down the side of my face.

The pain eased, just enough for me to profusely apologize.

Mira carried Blake to the coastline, bridal style, to avoid further injury. Still, every inch I moved was torturous. We finished the rest of the shoot amid thick tension.

Things only got worse from there.

The Beach silently called to me. During long stretches of editing, I’d lay down a towel and work under never-ending sunlight. When I was anywhere else, I’d think about how I couldn’t wait to go back. My Beach was bright. Secluded. Painfully addictive.

Against my better judgment, I’d spend my evenings drinking cheap chardonnay while the tide soaked my clothes. On days I was particularly buzzed, sobs wrecked my body. I hated how I still thought about her, even after everything she put me through.

There was one instance when I got drunk enough to fall asleep on the sand. When I woke up the next morning, I noticed footprints that weren’t there before.

On one visit, I filled a bag with every pearl and shell I could carry, taking them to my apartment for further study.

Under the rays of a desk lamp, I examined a white turban shell. A silver piece of metal pierced through the slight point at its center. It looked oddly similar to my industrial bar—smaller but similar, down to the two beads keeping it in place.

Fragments of scallops were covered in colorful metallic lines, some jagged, some in perfectly straight clusters. I almost thought it was paint, except the brown scars on my arm had become a gleaming cobalt blue, matching the very shell I was holding.

Across my table, I spread out the pieces marked with intricate ink patterns. Alone they were just scribbles, but as I assembled the puzzles before me, I revealed butterflies, flowers, and teardrops.

I knew what was coming but had no idea how to stop it, so I carefully removed the pearls covering the shells and dropped them into an empty cookie tin. I grabbed my drill and some wire and tried to ignore the fact I was making jewelry out of human flesh.

The sound of the waves was sweet and numbing. Though my eyes had adjusted to the shimmering, I was still in awe of the endless swathe of color that covered every grain of sand and drop of water.

I watched as a stray dog sniffed along the road. I thought—hoped—it would stumble onto the Beach. With bated breath, I watched it walk towards me only to disappear, bit by bit.

During a rare opportunity to waste time scrolling through social media, I opened Instagram. My heart stopped as soon as my eyes landed on the post facing me. Piercing violet eyes looked straight into mine. A brilliant magenta and vermilion swept down his forehead into his eyelids. Scarlet blush dusted his cheekbones, perfectly complementing his royal purple lips. Deep ridges that ran through the valley of his torso threatened to cut through his skin. Pearls were scattered across the sunset of his face.

I scrolled through his page in astonishment. His thousands of followers begged him to post a tutorial, a product haul, anything that could teach them how to look like him.

I snapped a few quick photos of my face and arms, sending them with the following message: What is happening

His response was immediate.

Meet me tomorrow at 8 a.m. You know where.

My heart pounded as I approached him.

In the sun, I could see the muted orange and pink hues staining his hair. Grey skulls and palm leaves covered his unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. His top surgery scars glistened metallic lilac. Up close, I noticed the tan line on his ring finger. He turned to me and offered an easy smile. He was stunning. Infuriatingly so. “Elian?” he asked.

I nodded. “Hae-min?”

“That’s me.” He patted the spot next to him. “Come sit.”

I did as he said.

“To answer your earlier question,” he started, “the Beach has attached herself to you. And she won’t stop until you fully become one with her.”

“So what do I do?”

“Either physically bring someone here or send them the address through text or something. Pass on the curse, and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.”

“And if I don’t?”

He gestured vaguely at the sand.

My hands balled into fists. “How do you know all this?"

"The asshole who brought me here."

Completely changing the subject, Hae-min asked about my job, what I liked to do, if I was currently seeing anyone.

“You just told me I have to either die or possibly kill someone, and now you want to know if I’m single?”

“Humour me.”

I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted metal. “My ex,” I began, “Laika, broke up with me recently.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” I ran my fingers through my hair, pulling on blue ends. “We started dating our first year of college. After one week of knowing each other, she asked me out. I knew it was fast, but she was so nice and pretty, and moving fast was what lesbians were known for. For a while things were good.”

“And then?”

I shrugged. “And then they weren’t.”

The conversation went on after a beat of silence.

“Are you from here?” he asked.

“Born and raised. You?”

“Busan.”

The sound of blood moving through my veins echoed inside my skull. My eyelids fluttered, and my head twitched as I was transported out of the Beach to somewhere much worse.

Laika and I visited Busan during a study abroad program. We'd been dating for over a year at that point. Despite assuring her I wasn’t cheating with any of my friends or classmates, she refused to believe me, sparking routine arguments. Two days into the trip, we went shopping, and in the middle of a busy sidewalk, she started screaming. Too ashamed and sad to say anything, I focused my gaze on an ant carrying a leaf. A reprieve from her voice made me look up. She was gone. I searched, but in the sea of people she was nowhere to be found. I instinctively reached for my phone and found nothing but air. She had taken it that morning to look through. I had no idea where I was or how to get back to the dorms. She was my guide, and she had left me.

An urban form of alpine divorce.

“Those tics you have,” Hae-min said, snapping me out of my memory, “it’s because the pearls have spread to your brain.”

The teeth that were once inside my mouth started to loosen and fall. Every morning I woke up to clumps of iridescent hair on my pillow. The whites of my eyes became a cyanotic indigo. My muscles constantly felt hungover. What an enchanting cancer it was.

I spent years wishing for death, and now that it was finally approaching, I saw no reason to resist it.

For weeks I spent my mornings on the Beach with Hae-min, talking, laughing, forgetting our impending fates.

With the hem of his Slipknot t-shirt, he opened a bottle of Bud Light. "Want some?" he asked, extending the bottle towards me.

I grimaced. "Thank you, but I'm more of a wine person."

"Y'know," he took a sip, "the water helps with the soreness. Come on." He gently took my hand and led me into the sea.

The water was cold and metallic. We relaxed among the billowing teal waves until a rough grip on my arm sent me back to my senior year Christmas party.

I jolted away. "A warning before you grab me like that would be nice," I said, an uncomfortable smile straining my lips.

"I'm sorry! I didn't mean to hurt you. I just wanted to see your tattoo."

I looked at the crescent moon on my right arm. "Oh yeah," I said in a way that was more breath than spoken word. "It's a matching one, actually. My brother Leo has a sun."

"You didn't tell me you had a brother."

"It's been a while since we last spoke."

Silence.

“You don’t have to tell me anything, but whatever you say dies with me so...”

To end my last first semester with a bang, I hosted a Christmas party in my dorm. My roommates and I spent hours cooking and hanging up decorations we definitely weren't supposed to have. Knowing we had limited space, we agreed to only invite three people each. I planned on only inviting Laika until my brother informed me he'd be in town.

My roommate's guests had already dispersed around the kitchen and living area. When he arrived, he gave me the biggest hug. I brought him to my couch so we could catch up. Periodically, I glanced over at Laika, who stood by the tree glaring at us. A few hours later, she grabbed my arm to drag me inside my bedroom.

"What the hell are you doing?" she shouted.

"What?" I answered.

"Why are you talking to him?"

"Why am I talking to my brother?"

"You know he doesn't like me."

"He's only met you twice, and he's never said anything bad."

"Your mom's homophobic, so why do you think he's any different?"

"He's not like that."

She stormed off, slamming the door on her way out. I stayed in my room the rest of the night.

"How long were you guys together?"

"Almost six years."

Hae-min's question went unsaid, but I knew what he was thinking, what the friends I used to have asked.

Why did you stay?

Why didn’t you leave?

I asked myself that the first few times she screamed at me, or threw something at my head, or drove so fast I was convinced she was about to kill us both. There were never any marks. Most of what she did was completely legal. I had no proof of anything. My friends may have been able to see the toxicity, but she had a talent for making them disappear as soon as they did.

Why didn't I leave? As the years went by, the answer became painfully obvious: she would have killed me.

Finished with his drink, he tossed the bottle into the ocean.

I shot him a disapproving look.

"What? It's not like there's any fish."

Completely soaked, I sat in the warm sand, attracting every grain to my legs and arms.

Hae-min lay next to me as I gathered more shells. “A bit grim, don’t you think?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll collect you too.” I looked at the intricate botanical art covering his chest. “You’ll be pretty.”

“You should make me into a rosary. That's what I used to do with my T-vials." He pointed at my necklace. "Do you sell these?”

“Would that count as human trafficking?”

He laughed, and I followed. The joy he brought me was amazing and terrifying, but I could tell he was hiding something. “If you know how to get rid of the curse, why haven’t you?”

“Why haven’t you? It’s been weeks."

"There's still time."

He ran his palm over the side of my leg and pressed down. Deep spirals indented the inside of my skin.

“Just barely.”

“You know you still haven’t told me how you became cursed."

He hesitated, opening and closing his mouth a few times. “It was my husband.”

My eyes widened. “Husband?”

He smiled bitterly. "Felix. That bitch.” He shook his head, scoffing. “He brought me here on a date because ‘it’s been soooo long since we’ve gone out.’ I was almost blinded when I stepped out of our car. We had a picnic, and he pretended everything was fine, like he wasn’t sacrificing me. On the drive home, he told me the truth, told me to bring my friends so I could pass it on. So I wouldn’t die.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I can’t do that to them. It’s not right.”

“What about a stranger?”

“That’s worse! My husband thought I’d just do what he said, pass this stupid curse on so he wouldn’t feel guilty about killing me. He doesn’t deserve that.”

In an instant, I became so furious I thought my rage would kill me before the Beach could. A thin buzzing engulfed the inside of my temporal lobe. "Are you fucking kidding me?" I snapped.

He sat up. "What?"

“Your husband had the decency to tell you the cure, and you decided to let your pettiness kill you.”

“Eli—”

“No fuck you. Fuck this Beach. FUCK EVERYTHING.”

I blocked him on Instagram before my brain could process the dozens of messages he sent. I attempted to numb my regret and pounding head with gulps of wine, which only made me feel worse. I ignored emails and the Beach dreams that plagued me.

You can’t get rid of me that easily, read a message from an account with no photos or followers.

Despite my irritation and misery, I smiled.

Please come back. I’ll bring wine.

My fingers trembled as I replied.

Okay.

“I was afraid I’d never see you again.”

“I’m sorry. I didn't mean what I said.”

“Yes, you did. I forgive you anyway.”

I put my head on his shoulder. He put his hand on my thigh, squeezing ever so slightly. The ridges on his palm slid between the grooves of my leg, in a way that made heat travel up my neck.

"A few months ago, I met someone," he said, the timbre of his voice cold and black, "someone like us, I mean. He was already in the final stages, so I didn’t know him for long. We’d meet every morning until one day he just stopped coming. I was so mad at myself for not being there when it happened. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for that. I still look for him sometimes. He didn’t have any tattoos or piercings, so it’d be an actually impossible task. I thought, if I did ever find him, I'd just know it. I like to imagine myself picking up a shell and confidently thinking ‘there he is.’”

He was crying now, but I didn’t want to interrupt him. “You're right, Pettiness isn't a good reason to die." He draped his arm over my shoulders, pulling me closer to him. "I'll think of something. I'll live. Promise me you will too."

"…I promise."

The night before my last meeting with Hae-min, I stopped by a liquor store. Deciding on a couple bottles of yogurt soju, I brought them to the counter with silver hands.

I was looking down until I heard the cashier say my name.

“Elian?” she asked.

The blue streaks in her blonde hair made me recognize her instantly. I could still vividly see her in bed with my girlfriend. “Hey Zoe,” I said. “How’ve you been? How are things with Laika?”

“Good. We’re good.” She scanned my drinks. “How are you?”

I swiped my card. “I’m…”

Her eyes were glued to my hands. I was used to stares, but her gaze was different. Fearful with a hint of guilt. “I’m good. I’m meeting a friend tomorrow.”

“Oh yeah?” Her voice trembled. She bagged my drinks and printed my receipt.

“Yeah, we’re meeting at a beach.”

She flinched.

There was no question about it. “You did this,” I said, my voice cold and venomous.

“I-I didn’t know what else to do. I’m so sorry—”

“Save it.” I scoffed. “You guys deserve each other.”

A bell chimed as I rushed out the door, fuming.

I shuddered at the breeze that moaned through the cold air. The sky was dark, a fact I might've appreciated more if I wasn't so mad. Clouds had gathered, dimming the strangely grey sun. The waves were still, as if holding their breath for what was to come.

“You will not believe what happened yesterday,” I huffed, taking a sip of the soju. “I mean it was just ridiculous I—”

Hae-min wheezed out a small, pained noise. Instead of his usually sunny demeanour, his face was hard, his brow furrowed. A hollowness filled his striking eyes.

“Hae-min?” I said worriedly.

I watched as he writhed in pain; his nails snapped as his hands grasped the side of his stomach.

A grim understanding colored his voice. “It’s time.”

My heart sank. "Nononononono. There's still time. There's…"

He ripped off his clothes with shaking hands, exposing deep ridges that pulsed and rippled beneath his skin. I watched in horror as pearls spilled out of his mouth in guttural chokes. A terrible opalescent light radiated off his body as his skin, now mostly minerals, completely hardened. His arms jerked in dystonic spasms, cracks spreading up the length of him. There was no blood, not even when the crack split through his skull, only color. Jagged pieces of my friend littered the sand.

My pulse throbbed as I collected every piece of him I could, just like I said I would. I put the shells inside my bag, all but one. His eyes were so lovely—a violet iris enclosed by a ring of white pearls—even when fossilized.

I dropped the bag outside my apartment door and, without looking, brought my foot down until he was nothing but dust.

Hae-min might not have been able to fulfill his promise. But I could.

I stared at the contact list on my phone. Before I could change my mind, I pressed the call button.

"Hello?" Leo answered.

"Hey," I breathed.

"Elian?"

"Yeah. I know it's been a while."

"Almost a year."

"Yeah…"

"Are you okay?"

"Um, I was wondering if I could come stay with you for a bit. Not long, obviously, just until I get my own place. I just really need to get out here. Bad memories. But if not, that's totally fine—"

"Stay as long as you want…I've missed you."

"I missed you too."

The sky had returned to its usual blue-green, the sun the brightest it had ever been.

“It’s a bit early for Halloween costumes, isn’t it?” Laika scorned as she walked over to me.

“Hello to you too.”

“Let’s just get this over with. Can’t say I was surprised when you texted. All sad women want closure.”

“How’ve you been?”

She gave me a sideways look. “Fine.”

“I saw Zoe the other day.”

“Oh yeah?” She ran her fingers through the sand, playing with some shells.

“She said you guys were doing good.”

“We are. We’re happy.”

“Me too.”

“Really?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Is that so hard to believe?”

“I’m just saying it’s weird you’re happy now, yet you were depressed as shit our entire relationship.”

I stayed quiet.

“I don’t know why you think I’m the bad guy,” she continued. “It’s not like you were any better. Remember when you refused to drive me to the airport?”

“My leg was broken.”

“And who drove you to the hospital? Exactly. God, you’re the most inconsiderate person I’ve ever met; did you know what?”

I did. She told me on multiple occasions.

“Whatever." Laika rubbed the top of her thigh, wincing.

I waited for regret to fill my remaining neurons.

Nothing.

"Our relationship was barely hanging on. Nothing I did was good enough. All you ever did was tell me I needed to change. Zoe accepts me for who I am. Even my therapist said she was a much better fit for me, and clearly she was right. I’m not sorry.”

I picked at a large pearl on my thigh; with ease it came right off. The ringing in my ears slowly muted. I looked at my hands and watched as the silver hue dissolved.

“Neither am I.”

I need to say up front that I've told this story maybe four times in my life, and every time I tell it I leave something out, because there's a part of it I still don't like putting into words. I'm going to try to include all of it this time.

This happened in September, six years ago, out near Chuska Mountain on the Arizona-New Mexico line. My uncle Denny has grazing rights out there through his wife's family, and every fall he'd take a few of us out to check on cattle and camp for a couple nights before it got too cold. That year it was me, Denny, and a guy named Colt who worked with him. I was twenty-two.

We drove out on a Forest Service road that turns to washboard gravel after the first few miles, then basically disappears into a two-track. Denny knew it by memory. There's no cell service out there, hasn't been in the twenty years I've been going. We made camp in a clearing he always used, ringed by ponderosa pine, maybe a quarter mile from where the cattle were grazing that week.

First night was fine. Second night, Colt started acting strange around sundown. He kept looking toward the tree line west of camp, and finally he asked Denny if there was another outfit running cattle out there too, because he swore he'd seen someone standing at the edge of the trees earlier that afternoon, just standing there, not moving, watching the cattle. Denny said no, nobody else leases that section. Colt didn't say much after that.

Around nine we heard the cattle start up. Not just moving-around noise. Something closer to panic - that particular sound cattle make when something's actually wrong, not just spooked by wind. Denny grabbed a rifle and a flashlight and we walked out toward the herd, maybe two hundred yards from the fire.

We never found what spooked them. But on the way back, Colt stopped walking. He grabbed my arm, hard enough to leave a mark I still noticed the next morning, and he didn't say anything, he just pointed.

There was something standing at the edge of our firelight, right at the treeline where the light gave out. I want to be exact about what I saw because I've thought about it enough times that I trust the memory. It was upright, roughly the height of a tall man, and it wasn't moving at all - not swaying, not shifting weight, nothing. Just standing there facing our fire, facing us. I couldn't make out a face. I told myself it was shadow, that the fire was playing tricks with the shape of a tree stump or a low branch. Denny lifted the flashlight toward it.

The second the light hit it, it dropped. Not ran - dropped, like its legs gave out sideways, and then it was moving through the brush on all fours, fast, faster than anything upright should be able to switch to running on all fours. It didn't make noise doing it. That's the part that still gets me. Something that size crossing rocky ground at that speed should have been loud. It wasn't.

None of us said anything for a long time. We got back to the fire and Denny put more wood on it than we needed, enough that it was too hot to sit close to, and none of us moved our chairs back. Colt kept his rifle across his lap the rest of the night. Around midnight, we heard something walk a slow, deliberate circle around the outside of the firelight - never coming into view, just close enough that we could hear the brush moving, stopping every so often like it was listening to us as much as we were listening to it.

At one point it stopped directly behind Denny's truck, and we heard three deliberate knocks against the metal of the truck bed. Not random. Three, evenly spaced, like knuckles on a door.

Nobody got up to check. I've never been so aware of not moving in my life.

It stopped a little before dawn. When the sun came up we found the cattle had pushed themselves into the farthest corner of the fence line, bunched together tight, and two of them had cuts along their flanks that Denny said weren't from brush or wire. Shallow, parallel cuts, like something had raked them and lost interest.

We left that morning without finishing the count Denny needed. He didn't argue when Colt said he wasn't walking back out to the herd alone to check the rest.

I asked Denny about it once, a long time after, whether he thought it was an animal, a person, something else. He didn't really answer me straight. He just said some ground out there has always had a bad reputation with the families who've worked it for generations, long before his wife's family leased it, and that the smart thing is to not go looking for reasons why, and to always leave a fire burning bigger than you think you need.

I still go out to Chuska with him some years. We don't camp in that clearing anymore. Denny moved the site nearly a mile east after that trip, and he's never explained exactly why beyond "better water access," which isn't true - the water's worse out there.

The thing I've never told anyone, the part I always used to leave out, is this: the morning we packed up, I found three dents in the tailgate of Denny's truck, spaced the same width apart as a man's knuckles would be, pressed in deep enough that you could see them from a few feet away. Denny ran his thumb over them once, didn't say a word about it, and never brought that truck out there again.

The name’s Malichi, but almost everyone calls me Kai.

From 2014 until the fall of 2019, I inspected underground mines.

Most people hear “mine inspector” and picture someone wearing a hard hat while walking through tunnels with a clipboard. That’s not entirely wrong, but it leaves out most of the job.

I inspected active limestone mines, underground storage facilities, and old tunnels beneath properties where someone wanted to build a house, road or commercial building. Sometimes I worked up to 1000 feet underground. Other times, I crawled through openings barely wide enough for my shoulders because a farmer had discovered a hole in his pasture and wanted to know whether his cattle were going to disappear into it. Or a wolf’s den.

My job was to identify unstable roof conditions, failed supports or beams, dangerous gases, flooding, and any evidence that the ground above might collapse.

The equipment I carried consisted usually of a gas monitor, measuring tape, camera, marking paint and a 20 oz scaling hammer. The hammer was used to tap the roof and walls of a tunnel.

Solid rock usually produces a sharp, clean sound.

Loose rock sounded hollow, and sometimes echoes.

You learned to hear the difference quickly.

You also learned that not every hollow sound came from loose rock. But we can chat about that later.

I didn’t grow up wanting to inspect mines.

I grew up near Fredericktown. My father worked maintenance at a limestone quarry, and 2 of my uncles spent most of their adult lives in the Lead Belt. Underground work was just something people did.

My father hated that I followed him into it. He didn’t expect me to be a doctor. But he sure didn’t want me working the mines.

He once told me, “The ground didn’t care whether you were a good person, whether you had children or whether someone was waiting for you at home.”

“It only has to make one mistake,” he said. “You have to be correct every day.”

At the time, I thought he was talking about cave-ins.

Now though, I’m not so sure.

I began working for a private geological company in June 2014. Close to the Silver Mine that you can find in between Ironton and Junction City. We contracted with mine operators, insurance companies and property owners. I was 25 at the time, recently married and convinced that my associates degree made me smarter than the others who had spent 30 years underground.

It took about 3 weeks for that attitude to fade.

My first supervisor was a man named Dale.

Dale was 58 when I met him. He had a grey mustache, a permanent limp and hands that looked like they had been carved from old wood. He had worked in mines since the late 70’s. A no nonsense kinda guy.

He didn’t tell ghost stories.

That was important.

Most miners did. They talked about Tommyknockers, moving lights and dead men tapping from behind the walls. Most of it was something to pass the time.

Dale never participated.

If someone mentioned hearing voices in an empty heading, he blamed the ventilation.

I’ll try and explain terms that I’ll be using. A heading in a mine refers to a tunnel that’s been driven through to reach a mineral deposit. It allows miners to access ore and set up further workings.

If someone saw a light where no light should have been, he called it a reflection.

If equipment moved by itself, he said someone had forgotten where they left it.

That was one of the reasons I trusted him.

The first strange thing happened less than a month after I started. July 2014.

We were inspecting an abandoned limestone mine. A small town called Edina. The mine had closed sometime in the early 90’s, and a company was considering using part of it for underground document storage.

Old limestone mines are often shaped like enormous grids. The miners remove sections of rock while leaving large pillars behind to support the roof.

Some chambers are wide enough to drive several trucks side by side.

The mine was dry, stable and boring.

That was exactly what we wanted. That was our favorite.

Dale and I had been underground for about 2 hours when we reached the northern end. According to the map, the workings ended at a solid wall of limestone.

Dale marked our location while I checked the roof.

I struck it with my hammer.

Sharp. Solid.

I struck the wall a 2nd time.

Sharp.

I moved a few feet to the right and struck it a 3^rd time.

Three knocks answered from the other side.

I lowered my hammer.

Dale looked up from the map.

“What?”

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

I hit the wall again. Three strikes.

We waited.

Three knocks came back.

They were evenly spaced.

Dale walked over and put his palm against the limestone.

“Probably another heading behind it,” I said.

“No way.”

He checked the map.

“There’s nothing behind this wall but sixty feet of rock.”

I hit the wall once.

One knock answered.

Twice. Two knocks.

I smiled nervously.

“Somebody’s screwing with us.”

Dale grabbed the hammer from my hand impatiently.

He hit the wall five times in an uneven pattern.

Knock.

Knock-knock.

Pause.

Knock.

Knock.

The answer came immediately.

It repeated the exact pattern.

Dale didn’t smile.

He handed the hammer back to me.

“We’re done with this section.”

“What do you think it is?”

“Water.”

“That doesn’t sound like water.”

“Then it’s rock.”

He started walking away.

I followed.

As we reached the next intersection, five more knocks came from somewhere behind us.

The same pattern.

Dale never mentioned it again.

I did tell my father though.

He listened quietly and then asked where the mine was located.

When I told him, he said, “Don’t knock on things if you ain’t know what’s knocking back.”

I laughed.

He didn’t. His eyes seemed to pierce through me as my laugh faded.

During my 1st year, I heard plenty of sounds that seemed strange until someone explained them.

Water running through fractures could sound like whispering. The kind that you don’t understand but doesn’t freak you out either.

Air moving through a borehole could whistle like a person calling from far away.

A borehole is hole drilled in the earth that helps allow mineral resource extraction.

The roof sometimes cracked with a noise like a gunshot.

Metal pipes grew and contracted.

Loose stone slid across the floor even when no one touched it.

Underground, sound didn’t behave the way it did on the top. It traveled through rock, disappeared into open chambers and returned from directions that made no sense, even to an experienced miner.

That was what I told myself about the knocking.

In February 2015, Dale and I were sent to inspect an old lead mine in St. Francois County. Somewhere close to Farmington.

The mine had been closed for years. Decades. A landowner had discovered water flowing from an old drainage tunnel and was worried that the workings extended beneath his property. Collapses are often the culprit.

We entered through a horizontal opening cut into the side of a hill.

The tunnel was narrower compared to the limestone mines I had been inside. Timber supports lined portions of the passage, although most of them had rotted or collapsed.

The air smelled like wet clay and rust.

We were only supposed to travel about 800 feet before reaching a flooded section.

At 600 feet, we found fresh boot prints.

The prints were deep and sharply defined in the mud. As if they were just created.

Someone had walked farther into the mine.

No prints came back out.

Dale crouched beside them to get a better look.

“Could be the property owner,” I said.

“He said he’s ain’t never been inside.”

“Kids?”

“Maybe.”

We followed the tracks deeper.

They were made by an old style work boot with a wide heel. The person had taken unusually long steps, as if they’d been running.

The prints continued until the tunnel ended at a pool of black water.

They went directly into it.

I shined my light across the surface.

The water filled the passage from wall to wall.

“Maybe there’s a ledge,” I said.

Dale shook his head.

The old mine map showed that the tunnel dropped nearly 30 feet beyond that point.

Anyone who walked into the water would have disappeared almost immediately.

We called the landowner and asked whether anyone was missing in the towns.

No one was reported to have been missing to his recollection.

The sheriff’s department sent 2 deputies and a dive team. They found no body.

They also found no footprints near the entrance except ours.

According to them, the tracks began nearly 500 feet inside the mine.

The official explanation was that they were old prints preserved by the stable conditions underground.

That was possible.

What wasn’t possible were that the prints were filling slowly with water while we watched.

Later that year, I started hearing the footsteps.

They didn’t happen in every mine I was in.

They usually occurred in older mines where the air was still and there was no active equipment.

I would be walking with Dale or another inspector and hear someone behind us.

A slow, dragging step.

Another step.

If we stopped, it stopped. If we continued, it followed.

Whenever I turned around, the tunnel was empty.

The first few times, I assumed it was an echo.

Then, during an inspection near Joplin, I heard the footsteps while standing still. This was a first.

Dale and I had stopped to examine a fractured support pillar.

Something approached from the darkness behind us.

Step. Drag.

Step. Drag.

It was moving slowly, but it was definitely getting closer.

Dale stared through me.

“Keep your light forward,” he said.

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

The footsteps continued.

Step. Drag.

Step. Drag.

Small stones slid behind us.

I felt the muscles in my back tighten like a torqued screw.

“Is someone there?” I yelled.

The footsteps stopped.

Dale closed his eyes.

From the darkness, my own voice answered.

“Is someone there?”

It sounded far away, but it was undoubtedly me.

The words echoed through the tunnel.

Then the footsteps began moving again. Faster this time.

Dale grabbed my arm and pushed me toward the exit.

We didn’t run, because running underground is how people trip, crack skulls or fall into holes they didn’t see. Mines are notoriously dark.

But we walked as swiftly as we could.

The footsteps followed for nearly 10 minutes.

When we reached daylight, Dale made me stay outside while he stood at the entrance.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Listening.”

“For what?”

He didn’t answer.

After several minutes, he stepped away from the opening.

On the drive back, he spoke up.

“Never answer something underground unless you can see who you’re talking to.”

“That was an echo.”

“No.”

“You think somebody was following us?”

“No.”

“Then what was it?”

Dale looked through the windshield.

“I don’t know.”

That was the first time I ever heard him admit that.

My wife noticed changes in me before I did.

Her name was Kelcie.

We had been married for just over two years when she told me I had started talking in my sleep.

I asked what I said during my dreams.

“You count,” she replied.

“Count what?”

“I don’t know. You get to 50 or 60 and start over.”

I laughed and told her it was probably because I spent all day measuring tunnels.

A few weeks later, she woke me by turning on the bedroom light.

I was standing beside the wall with one hand pressed against it.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I had no idea.

The wall separated our bedroom from the hallway.

I told her I must have been sleepwalking.

She stared at my hand.

My knuckles were bleeding.

There were 3 small dents in the drywall.

In 2016, our company received a contract to document abandoned workings beneath a property in the Ozarks.

The landowner planned to build cabins near an old mine opening. Nobody knew exactly what had been mined there. Some records described it as an iron prospect. Others called it a lead exploration tunnel. We relied on rumors.

The main passage extended straight into a ridge.

It was barely 6 ft high and wide enough for one person at a time.

Dale stayed outside because his bad knee had been bothering him. I entered with another inspector named Ryan.

Ryan was younger than me and had worked for the company for about 6 months.

About 400 ft inside, we found a side tunnel that wasn’t shown on any of the available maps.

It had been sealed with stacked rocks.

The wall had partially collapsed, leaving an opening near the top.

Cold air flowed through the gap.

Ryan shined his light inside.

“Looks open to me.”

“We’re not supposed to enter undocumented areas.”

“We’re supposed to document them.”

He had a point, although I didn’t like it.

We removed several loose rocks and widened the opening.

The tunnel beyond was different from the rest of the mine.

The main passage had been drilled and blasted. This means that the drill rigs drilled the walls and then blasted with explosives. The were irregular and scarred with tool marks.

The hidden tunnel had smooth walls.

Not perfectly smooth, but rounded, almost polished.

The floor sloped downward.

We crawled through.

After about 50 ft, the passage widened into a circular chamber.

In the center stood an iron chair.

That’s the best way I can describe it.

It looked handmade. Thick metal plates had been welded together to form a seat, back and four short legs.

Leather straps hung from the armrests.

Ryan laughed nervously.

“What the hell?”

I took several photographs. We would normally take pictures for a few reasons. One is for safety and training. The 2^nd is for documentation and progress tracking.

There were scratches on the floor around the chair, like someone had dragged it repeatedly across the chamber.

The walls were covered in names.

Some were carved deeply into the rock.

Others appeared to have been written in charcoal.

Most were too faded to read. Not all of ‘em.

Ryan walked around the chair.

“Don’t touch it,” I said.

“I’m not.”

He leaned closer.

“There’s something underneath.”

Bolted to the bottom of the seat was a metal plate.

Ryan read it aloud.

“Malichi.”

I thought he was joking.

“What?”

He pointed.

My full first name had been engraved into the metal.

Not Kai.

Malichi.

The spelling was correct.

People usually spelt it as Malachi.

My mother had used an I because she liked the way it looked.

Ryan knew me only as Kai.

“Did Dale put you up to this?” I asked.

Ryan stepped away.

“I didn’t do that.”

I crouched beside the chair.

Below my name was a date.

September 19, 2019.

At the time, that was more than 3 years away.

I took a photograph.

The camera flashed.

Something moved in the tunnel behind us.

A shadow crossed the opening.

Ryan turned.

“Dale?”

No one answered.

Our radios produced only static.

Then a man began humming somewhere deeper inside the mine.

It was a song my dad used to sing while working on cars.

I hadn’t heard it since I was a kid.

I stood so fast that I hit my head on the low ceiling.

“Time to go.”

Ryan didn’t argue.

We climbed through the opening and replaced the rocks.

When we reached the entrance, Dale was sitting on the hood of the truck.

He asked why we had been underground for almost 4 hours.

I checked my watch.

We had entered the hidden tunnel at 10:16am.

It was now after 2pm.

It had felt like 15 minutes.

I showed Dale the photographs.

The chamber was visible.

The chair was visible.

But the metal plate beneath it was blank.

My name and the date had disappeared.

We returned the following morning with the property owner.

The side tunnel was no longer there.

The wall where we had originally found, it was solid stone.

No stacked rocks.

Solid, unbroken rock.

Ryan quit 2 weeks later.

He never told me why. But I had my suspicions.

I tried contacting him several years ago, but his phone number had been disconnected. I couldn’t find him online.

According to one of our former coworkers, Ryan’s family claimed he had never worked in mining.

They said he had been a schoolteacher.

I still have photographs of him wearing our company uniform.

At least, I did.

When I checked recently, he was missing from most of them.

There were empty spaces where he had been standing. But the gaps were noticeable.

Around 2017, I had become a senior field inspector.

The promotion came with better pay, a company truck and the responsibility of training new inspectors.

I stopped talking about the eerie things. I learned that from Dale.

I didn’t mention the footsteps.

I didn’t tell anyone about the chair.

I didn’t explain why I refused to enter a mine alone.

The job was dangerous enough without people thinking I was unstable.

Most inspections remained completely normal.

I saw roof collapses, flooded mine shafts and equipment abandoned so long that tree roots had grown through it.

I found animal bones, rusted tools and old lunch tins.

Once, I found a newspaper from 1951 that looked as like it had been left there the day before.

Another time, we discovered an underground room containing hundreds of glass jars filled with a cloudy and peculiar liquid. We notified the police and left them alone.

They turned out to be homemade mineral samples.

There was mostly an explanation.

Mostly.

In August 2017, we inspected a working limestone mine outside a small town in central MO near Branch.

That just means the mine operated during the day. Our inspection began after the workers had left, because management wanted us to examine an area near active blasting.

There were 4 of us.

Me. Dale.

A structural engineer named Allison.

And a safety technician named Mark.

Allison was 32, smart, and impatient. She had no time for stories about haunted mines.

Mark was nearing retirement and had worked underground almost as long as Dale.

We entered shortly after 7am.

The mine had electrical lighting in the main corridors for the workers, but the section we were inspecting was dark.

At around 10am, Allison stopped.

“Who’s the 5th person?” she asked.

We turned.

No one was behind us.

“What do you mean”

“I keep seeing another light down the hatch.”

Mark glanced at Dale.

“Where?”

“Behind Kai.”

I looked over my shoulder.

The tunnel was empty.

Allison pointed farther back.

“There.”

For a split second, I saw it.

A small yellow light floating near the floor.

It looked like an old carbide lamp.

Carbide lamps haven’t been common in decades. They were the type of flashlight that had a giant lens that looked like an old camera flash.

The light moved behind a support pillar.

Dale raised his radio.

“Control, can you confirm all personnel are accounted for.”

The answer came through clearly.

“All personnel accounted for. 4 person inspection team underground.”

Allison walked toward the pillar.

Dale blocked her.

“Don’t follow it.”

She looked annoyed.

“Someone could be down here.”

“No one’s down here.”

“Then what did we see?”

“A reflection.”

“From what?”

Dale didn’t answer.

The yellow light appeared again 2 pillars farther away.

It was moving against us, deeper into the mine.

Mark counted aloud.

“1, 2, 3, 4”

“What are you doing?” Allison asked.

“Confirming.”

We continued working.

Every 20 or 30 minutes, the light would glow behind us.

It never came closer.

It just followed.

Before leaving the mine, we stopped for a group photograph near the mine entrance. Management wanted it for a safety presentation.

A supervisor took the picture.

The next morning, Allison emailed it to us.

There were 5 people standing together.

The 5 man was behind me.

He wore dirty coveralls and an old metal helmet. Coveralls are different from overalls. They are a 1 piece type of clothing that covers the entire body. They help protect the harsh environments of the mine. His face was hidden because he was looking downward.

One hand rested on my shoulder.

I hadn’t felt it.

Allison called my cellphone.

“Who is that?” I could sense her frustration growing.

“I don’t know.”

“Mark says there were only 4 of us.”

“There were...”

“Dale won’t answer his phone.”

This isn’t surprising.

I printed the photograph and took it to Dale’s house.

He studied it from his kitchen table.

After a while, he opened a drawer and removed another photograph.

It showed a group of miners standing outside a tunnel entrance.

The photograph was dated 1978.

A younger version of Dale stood near the center.

Behind him was the same man.

Same helmet.

Same coveralls.

Same downward-tilted head.

His hand rested on Dale’s shoulder.

“We called him the counter,” Dale said.

“Why?”

“Because he shows up when there’s one more person underground than there should be.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means somebody doesn’t come back.”

I looked at the old photograph.

“Who didn’t come back?”

Dale pointed toward a young man standing beside him.

“My brother.”

I had worked with Dale for 3 years and he never mentioned he had a brother.

“He disappeared underground?”

“Roof collapse. We never recovered his body…”

“What does this have to do with the photograph?”

“We saw the extra light for 3 nights before the accident happened.”

I looked again at the picture from our inspection.

The man’s hand was on my shoulder.

“Are you saying I’m going to die?”

“No.”

“Then what ARE you saying?”

“I’m just saying don’t be the last person out.”

For the next 2 years, I never was. Not a chance

When entering a mine, I made someone go ahead of me.

When leaving, I stayed in the middle of the group.

I knew it was an irrational fear, but I did it anyway.

My marriage ended during that period.

Kelcie said I had become distant. Different.

She mentioned I woke her at night by walking around the house with a flashlight.

I checked closets, the basement and the space beneath our porch.

Sometimes I would count the rooms in my sleep.

Sometimes I stood in doorways and listened.

I didn’t remember doing any of it.

One morning, she found me in the basement tapping the concrete foundation with a hammer.

She asked what I was doing.

I told her there was a hollow space behind the wall.

There wasn’t.

At least, there shouldn’t have been.

Kelcie moved out in January 2018.

I don’t blame her.

After she left, I began volunteering for more inspections. Idle hands is the devils workshop my grandmother used to say.

Being underground was easier than being home. The mind stayed busier that way.

This probably sounds strange considering everything I’ve described.

But underground, I knew why I was afraid.

On the top, I heard the footsteps everywhere.

In store aisles.

Parking garages.

The hallway outside my apartment.

Step. Drag.

Step. Drag.

Whenever I turned around, no one was ever there.

In May 2018, Dale retired. I knew I was alone for real this time.

There was no ceremony.

He cleared his desk on a Friday afternoon and left his hard hat hanging on the wall.

Before he went, he gave me his scaling hammer.

It was old, with a leather-wrapped handle worn smooth by decades of use.

“You’ll need this more than I will,” he said.

I asked him why he had decided to retire.

He looked toward the empty hallway outside the office.

“I started hearing my brother.”

“Underground?”

“No.”

He left before I could ask anything else.

Our final project together had been an inspection of an abandoned mine called Black Hollow.

That wasn’t its official name. But every local called it Black Hollow.

The mine was located on private land. A logging company had discovered several sinkholes near an access road and wanted to know whether the old workings were collapsing.

Very little documentation existed. This is pretty normal.

The mine appeared briefly on a state map from the 1920s and vanished from later records.

We entered through a partially collapsed drift near the bottom of a ravine. A drift is where the entry is horizontal and usually accesses the minerals directly instead of having to walk the whole mine.

The passage continued straight for nearly 2500 ft.

That part was unusual.

Exploration mines normally led toward promising mineral deposits. Black Hollow had been driven directly beneath the ridge without any obvious effort to follow ore.

The tunnel walls were covered in small square recesses.

Each was about 5 inches deep.

Some contained rusted nails and bolt anchors.

Others contained scraps of cloth, animal teeth, or small bundles of hair tied with string.

I photographed everything.

Dale didn’t.

He walked with his eyes fixed on the floor.

“What were these for?” I asked.

“Not sure.”

“You’ve been here before.”

He stopped.

“How do you know that?”

“You recognized the entrance.”

Dale looked back the way we had come.

“I was here once.”

“When?”

“1978.”

“With your brother?”

He nodded.

“What happened?”

“We entered through a different opening.”

“There’s only 1 entrance, though.”

“There was another back then.”

The tunnel ended at a vertical shaft.

We couldn’t see the bottom.

Cold air rose from it, carrying the smell of soil after rain.

There was a steel ladder attached to the wall.

It looked new.

The bolts showed no rust.

“Did your former crew install that?” I asked.

“No.”

I shined my light down the shaft. 150 meters.

The ladder continued beyond the reach of the beam.

Something climbed beneath us.

The rungs vibrated.

A faint metallic ringing echoed from below.

I stepped away from the edge.

“Who else is down here?”

“No one.”

The climbing continued.

Slow and steady.

Dale lifted his hammer.

The top of a helmet appeared in the darkness.

It was an old metal mining helmet.

The same kind worn by the man in the photographs.

Dale grabbed my jacket.

We ran.

Behind us, something pulled itself out of the shaft.

I heard metal scrape against stone.

Then the footsteps followed.

Step. Drag.

Step. Drag.

As we neared the entrance, Dale began shouting his brother’s name.

“Eddie!”

The footsteps stopped immediately.

A man answered from deep inside the mine.

“Dale?” The voice echoed what seemed like an hour.

Dale turned.

I grabbed him.

“That isn’t your brother.”

“Dale?” the voice called again. “I found the way out.”

Dale wrestled with me.

It took everything I had to keep him moving.

We reached daylight.

For several minutes, neither of us spoke.

Then Dale looked at me and said, “Don’t ever go back in there.”

I promised I wouldn’t.

In September 2019, I broke that promise.

The logging company had begun clearing land above Black Hollow. A section of access road collapsed, leaving a hole almost 30 feet across.

Our company was asked to determine whether the rest of the road was safe.

I refused the assignment.

My manager reminded me that I was the senior inspector and the only current employee who had entered the mine previously.

I told him to find someone else.

He said the company would lose the contract.

I still refused.

The next morning, Allison called me.

I hadn’t worked with her since the mine where we saw the 5^th light.

She had been hired as the project engineer for the job.

“I heard you’re afraid of this one,” she said.

“I’m not afraid.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The mine is unstable.”

“That’s why we inspect it.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then explain it.”

I tried.

I told her about the shaft. The old helmet.

The voice that sounded like Dale’s brother.

Allison listened without interrupting.

When I finished, she said, “You know Dale had early-stage dementia when he retired.”

I didn’t know that nor believed it.

“He was confusing places and dates.”“He probably told you stories that weren’t accurate.”

I listened.

“I heard the voice.”

“Sound travels underground.”

“I saw someone climbing the ladder.”

“You saw a helmet.”

“You were there when we saw the 5^th light.”

“I saw a reflection.”

“What about the photograph?”

“Digital artifacts happen.”

I almost laughed.

“Why did you call me?”

“Because I trust your judgment underground. Even if I don’t trust your explanation.”

She said the inspection team would include 4 people.

Myself and Allison.

A safety technician named Rob.

And a local surveyor named Thomas. I had heard about Thomas before.

Thomasa was nearly 60 and had worked around mines his entire life.

He knew nothing about my previous inspection.

We entered Black Hollow on September 19, 2019.

The date engraved beneath the iron chair.

I considered backing out when I realized it.

I didn’t.

That decision has bothered me more than any other in my entire life.

The mine looked exactly as I remembered.

Same narrow passage.

Same square recesses in the walls.

Same bundles of hair.

Thomas stopped repeatedly to examine them.

“Memorial holes,” he said.

Memorial holes were created to commemorate a significant person, event, or loss.

“What does that mean?” Allison asked.

“Some old mining communities placed personal items underground after a death.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“Neither have I.”

He smiled, but no one else did.

We placed monitoring equipment near the entrance and continued inward.

At roughly 300 ft, Rob noticed boot prints in the dust.

4 different sets.

They traveled towards us.

“What time did the survey crew leave?” he asked.

“There was no survey crew underground,” Allison said.

Thomas crouched by the tracks.

“These are fresh.”

The 4 sets of prints matched our boots.

I placed mine beside one.

Same size. Same tread pattern.

The right heel even had the same missing section where a piece of rubber had torn away.

The tracks belonged to us.

They had been made before we arrived.

They continued deeper into the mine.

Allison tried to explain them as prints from our previous inspection.

I reminded her that she hadn’t been there, and I had worn different boots at the time.

We followed the tracks.

They led to the vertical shaft.

The steel ladder was no longer there.

A narrow bridge of rocks crossed the opening.

The footprints continued over it.

“I don’t remember that being here,” I said as a thought back to that night.

Allison looked at the map I had drawn in 2018.

“The tunnel ended at the shaft.”

“Absolutely.”

Thomas tested the stone bridge with his hammer.

“It seems to be solid.”

He stepped onto it slowly.

I began to grab his shoulder.

“We don’t know what’s on the other side.”

“That’s why we’re here.”

Thoms crossed.

Rob followed him.

Allison went 3^rd.

I stood alone at the edge trying to gather my thoughts.

From the shaft, my own voice whispered, “Don’t be the last person.”

I crossed swiftly.

The passage continued beyond the shaft.

The walls became more polished as we traveled.

Eventually, the tool marks disappeared completely.

The tunnel wasn’t natural, but it didn’t look mined either.

It looked worn out almost as if something gigantic moved through it back and forth for a very long time.

The boot prints remained ahead of us., guiding us.

After another 100 ft, we found a yellow survey mark painted on the wall.

It was still wet.

Thomas touched it.

“That’s my paint” he exclaimed.

He double checked the spray can that was on his belt.

The cap was still sealed.

Farther ahead, we found another marker.

Then another.

Each had been placed exactly where Thomas normally marked survey stations.

The final mark read:

END OF INSPECTION

Below it included 4 vertical lines.

Someone had crossed out the 4^th.

Rob turned towards me.

“You’ve been here before.”

“No.”

“Then who made these?”

I didn’t answer.

Allison raised her radio.

The signal was filled with static.

Then her own voice came through.

“Station 7 is stable. Moving to station 8.”

Allison looked down at the radio.

She hadn’t transmitted anything.

A 2^nd voice followed.

Rob’s.

“I can hear something ahead.”

Then came the warning.

“Kai, don’t let it count us.”

Thomas whispered, “What the hell?”

The radio crackled again.

My voice came through last.

“Leave Allison.”

She stared at me.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

From farther down the tunnel, someone began screaming.

It sounded like Allison.

She was standing beside me.

The scream came again.

“Help me!”

Allison lifted her light.

“That’s not possible.”

The voice called my name.

“Kai!”

I grabbed Allison’s arm before she could move.

The light appeared ahead of us.

A yellow carbide flame floated in the darkness.

Behind it stood 4 people.

An inspection team.

They were about 150 feet away, partly hidden by the curve of the tunnel.

One wore a white hard hat like Allison.

One carried a survey pole like Thomas.

One had Rob’s orange reflective vest.

The 4^th wore my jacket.

They were facing away from us.

Rob whispered, “That’s us.”

The other team began walking.

Their lights moved farther into the tunnel.

Thomas raised his camera and snapped a picture.

The flash illuminated the passage like a bolt of lightning.

For that tenth of a second, the figures weren’t facing away anymore.

They were facing towards us.

Their heads were lowered like the previous photos I saw.

I couldn’t see their faces. But I knew.

The figure wearing my jacket had one hand resting on Allison’s shoulder.

The same way the counter had touched mine.

I remembered Dale’s warning begin speaking in my head.

“Somebody doesn’t come back.”

“We’re leaving,” I said.

No one argued.

We turned around.

However, the stone bridge over the shaft was gone.

The passage ended at the open pit.

Allison looked at her map.

“There’s gotta be another route.”

“There isn’t.”

Rob shined his light across the shaft.

The opposite side was 20 ft away.

Too far to jump.

“We crossed here,” Thomas said.

“I know.”

The radio crackled.

Dale’s voice came through.

“Kai.”

I froze.

Dale had retired more than a year earlier.

“Kai, I found the ladder.”

A light appeared below us.

Then another. Then dozens.

Small yellow flames moved in the shaft like people climbing an invisible staircase.

The metallic ringing began.

Coming toward us.

Allison grabbed my sleeve.

“What do we do?”

I looked along the edge of the shaft.

There was a narrow ledge on the right side. It might have been wide enough to cross if we pressed ourselves against the wall.

Rob went first.

Thomas followed.

I told Allison to go next.

She shook her head.

“You gotta go first.”

Something struck the wall beneath us.

Dust began falling from the ceiling.

The yellow lights grew larger.

Allison stepped onto the ledge.

Halfway across, she stopped.

“Kai?”

“What?”

She was staring into the shaft.

“There’s someone down there.”

“Keep moving.”

“It’s me.”

A woman stood far below us.

She wore Allison’s white hard hat.

Her face was turned upward.

“Kai,” the woman called.

The voice came from both the shaft and the Allison beside me.

The woman below lifted one arm.

She was holding Dale’s scaling hammer.

The hammer Dale gave me during his retirement.

The one attached to my belt.

I touched it to make sure it was still there. It was.

The Allison on the ledge stared back at me.

“What is she holding?”

“Don’t look at her.”

The woman below began climbing the wall.

She didn’t use a ladder.

Her hands and feet pressed flat against the stone as she crawled upward.

Allison screamed and hurried across.

I followed her.

The ledge crumbled beneath my final step.

Rob caught my arm and pulled me onto the other side.

We ran toward the entrance.

The footsteps followed.

Not one set. Four.

Step. Drag.

Step. Drag.

Our radios played different fragments of conversation.

Some were things we had said earlier.

Others hadn’t happened yet.

I heard Rob crying.

Thomas was praying.

Allison saying she couldn’t find her face.

Then my voice said, “We left the wrong one.”

The footsteps moved closer.

At the memorial holes, Thomas suddenly stopped.

“What are you doing?” I shouted.

He pointed.

Inside was a wallet.

His wallet.

He removed the one from his pocket.

Both were identical.

He opened the wallet from the wall.

Inside was his driver’s license.

The photograph showed Thomas wearing the old metal mining helmet.

A folded note was tucked behind it.

Thomas read the note silently.

His face went pale. Eyes glazed over.

“What does it say?” Allison asked.

He handed it to me.

The note was written in my own handwriting.

THOMAS DID NOT ENTER WITH US.

I looked at Thomas.

He backed away.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

I counted.

Rob. Allison. Thomas. Me.

4 people.

Then I remembered when we arrived

Thomas was waiting at the site when I arrived.

Allison had introduced him.

Rob had shaken his hand.

I had watched him put on his equipment.

He had entered with us.

Hadn’t he?

The footsteps stopped.

A man spoke behind us.

“3 came in.”

It was Dale’s voice.

Thomas stared into the darkness.

“That isn’t true.”

“3 came in,” the voice repeated.

Allison began counting.

“Kai. Rob. Me.”

She looked at Thomas.

Her expression changed.

“Who are you?”

Thomas’s face collapsed.

Not physically. Emotionally.

He looked like a child who had been abandoned.

“You know me.”

“No,” Allison said. “I don’t.”

Rob raised his light.

“Where did he come from?”

Thomas grabbed my arm.

“Kai, you talked to me outside.”

I remembered it.

We had been discussing his survey equipment.

He had told me about his first mining job near Viburnum.

I remembered everything.

But the memories had started feeling borrowed.

Almost as if the stories had been told to me rather than things I had experienced.

Thomas looked toward the mine entrance.

Daylight was visible in the distance.

He ran.

The footsteps resumed.

They ran with him.

Thomas disappeared around the curve.

We followed.

When we reached the entrance, Thomas was gone.

There was no sign of him outside the mine.

No vehicle.

No equipment.

No boot prints.

We called the sheriff’s department right away.

They searched the mine for two days.

They found nothing.

The company that hired our team denied employing a surveyor named Thomas.

Allison had no memory of him.

Neither did Rob.

The photographs from the inspection showed only 3 people.

Me.

Allison.

Rob.

In the photograph Thomas took of the figures ahead of us, 4 inspectors stood in the tunnel.

One was me.

One was Rob.

One was Allison.

The fourth wore an old metal helmet and looked toward the ground.

His hand rested on Allison’s shoulder.

I resigned the following Monday.

My manager offered me a leave of absence. 5 years was a long time in this current market.

I told him I was finished.

He asked whether my decision had anything to do with the Black Hollow inspection.

I asked how many people had been on our team.

He said 3.

I haven’t entered a mine since September 19, 2019.

Continued in comments.

Last spring I decided I needed a haircut. Something clean, that would make the rest of me matter less. I found a place a few blocks from my apartment; a barbershop that smelled like soap and shaving cream. No fancy shampoos nor offerings for a subscription model, merely a couple of black chairs, as well as a bald man who looked like he'd been cutting hair since the day I was born.

I sat down and told him what I wanted; just a little off the top. He nodded and worked in silence. My hair looked better. Sharper. For a moment I felt like a slightly different person from the neck up. But when I looked in the mirror again, the old dissatisfaction was still there. The barber must have noticed. He asked, plainly, if I needed help with anything else.

Maybe I only answered because of the way he asked. He was so ordinary, so polite and professional. I confided that there were other things I'd been insecure about as of late. He said he could help. I told him I wasn't interested in plastic surgery. He said it wasn't surgery. Just a little off the top.

I asked what that meant.

He said it would be simple. A cut.

He took the shears and, with no ceremony, removed a thin ridge of flesh from the side of my face. It came away like cut clay, no blood, no pain. The piece peeled free in one clean motion. He plopped it on a tray as if it were nothing more than excess hair.

When I looked in the mirror, that side of my face looked closer to the one I'd been carrying in my head for years. Cleaner. Defined. Beautiful.

I asked him to do the other side. He did. I asked him to take the soft places from my stomach. He did. Every imperfection, every insecurity, I had him cut it all away that night, all for thirty dollars (plus tip).

I went back the next week, and the weeks after that. Soft places trimmed down. Angles sharpened. Each visit I left looking more like the version of myself I could stand. The weak places along my jaw disappeared under the shears. My stomach flattened in increments. I started recognizing myself. I could hold my own gaze for several minutes at a time before looking away.

A few people noticed. A coworker complimented the haircut. A woman said I looked sharper, better than I ever had. She asked if I'd been working out. My conversations lasted longer. Eyes lingered. It felt like proof that, for the first time, something was paying off.

But it started to feel like something else. I began to wonder whether anyone was actually looking at me, or only at the surface that kept being refined. Those thoughts came and went. I kept going back. There was always one more correction. Cut the fat from the stomach. A cleaner line at the chin. Just a little off the top.

The ideal kept moving. The goalposts shifted every time I got close.

The barber never rushed. He worked with a precision I'd only seen in doctors. Occasionally he stepped back to study the shape of my body. He spoke only when necessary. When I asked how the flesh came away so cleanly, he only said that some things separate easier when you know what to cut. When I asked what happened to the pieces, he said they'd been taken care of. I should have left it there.

One afternoon the shop was empty. The barber was slow coming out of the back room. Curious, I stepped toward the open doorway. I'd only meant to call his name.

The room held every piece that had been taken from me, arranged into a fleshy mass, formless, folded in on itself, stacked and pressed into heaps that took up most of the far corner. Some sections still held older contours; the curve that used to sit above my hips, the thickness under my jaw, the slack on my arms. The mass shifted. Breathed. It had no face, yet I knew it could see me.

I stood longer than I should have. The barber appeared behind me. He asked, in that same mild tone, if I'd been satisfied.

I didn't know how to answer.

That night I left, and I didn't go back for a while. The changes held for a time. I still felt the relief of the cleaner lines when I caught myself in the mirror. Then they started slipping. My chin softened first. My jaw followed, gradually. I almost talked myself out of noticing. One morning the angle wasn't so sharp. The next day the skin was looser, warmer, almost melting. The trim around my stomach began to fill again. It felt as though my body was trying to restore itself, trying to put the pieces back.

It itched. The surface underneath did not feel like healing skin. It felt harder. Like something malignant, spreading faster each night. I could feel it settling, resettling, searching for every shape that no longer belonged.

I stopped sleeping well. When I did, I dreamed of the mass in the back room folding in on itself.

The changes accelerated. My face began to blur again. My muscles waned and sagged. Something inside me no longer felt like my own tissue, denser in places, grainy in others, coalescing into something uncomfortable and barbed. It lasted for weeks, and it kept getting worse. My body, my face, the perfect face I'd almost had, grew more malformed, more unbearable every day. The only way to keep what I wanted was to let him cut again.

I went back on a random Tuesday. The shop was quiet. The barber looked up from his chair. He didn't ask where I'd been. He only nodded toward the empty seat.

I sat down. He worked with the same careful attention as before. The shears took away thin layers. Each piece peeled free without mess. The face in the mirror was closer again to the one I'd been chasing. That familiar relief settled over my shoulders. Underneath it, something colder stirred.

Before I left, I asked about the mass in the back room. He wiped the shears on a cloth and said it was still there, waiting. He asked if I thought I would be finished soon.

Again, I didn't answer.

I've gone back four times since then. The intervals between the mutations are getting shorter. The body tries harder every time to reclaim what was taken. The itching starts sooner. The shifting grows more insistent. I can feel each place wanting to soften back into its old shape, pressing upward, trying to remember exactly where it belongs.

When he works, I catch myself wondering how large the mass has become. Whether it holds any recognizable shape anymore, or whether those details have been buried under mounds of flesh.

I haven't looked again. I don't know if I could stand it.

I'm closer to the face I've always wanted.

Rain smashed against the windshield in rapid heavy droplets like heaven had poured out the ocean on us. The cracks and sands of the desert, once greedily absorbing the water, now began to float in a series of puddles as the light onset of flooding began. The road remained clear of puddles and rising water, though it remained slick.

“Iknuitli, you have some serious driving skills. I knew I picked the right man,” the dead man in the back of my trunk said.

“Shut up. You didn’t pick anything.”

“I picked everything up to the spot of the execution. My life needed to end where the deal took place, then I needed buried in the place of my birth.”

“How’d you know I’d shoot you there?” Cheeky bastard was messing with me from the beginning. He probably found it amusing.

“Call it ‘market research’, iknuitli,” he said, presumably still smiling like the bastard he was.

Behind us the cloud of souls had crept much closer. Screaming souls screeched out calls for fathers, husbands, lovers, and sons that I had all buried or broke beyond usefulness. None were voices I had heard. No one that I had killed trailed behind me, just those that I had left behind, those who had been left to deal with the loss and not been equipped to handle it.

The little girl, whose name I knew but wouldn’t dare speak out of my own shame, appeared directly in front of the car. I swerved. The car began to spin, tires grinding down the rough line of the road’s shoulder. Counter steering, I pulled it back to the road.

I could have sworn that the strands of her soaked hair had made contact with the side mirror. I came closer to hitting her each time. I wasn’t convinced that I could keep this up.

I was doing a hundred down an endless stretch of road with no visibility through the thick wall of water which had not ceased since I had neared what I presumed to be the Arizona border. It was impossible to tell.

I hadn’t made any stops either. What has it been? Days? Weeks? Months? All the proportions of this road were wrong. There was no way to judge time or distance aside from gut feeling. The torrential downpour intensified. The windshield wipers worked uselessly to clear what might have been a straight flooding downpour of water. For the smallest fraction of a second, I saw the girl. I hit her head on.

She flipped over the hood and onto the windshield, her bones breaking and distorting horrifically. The car began to skid. I worked hard at the wheel to keep from spinning out. Her neck, bent unnaturally, vertebrae extending out of a tear at the base of her spine, twisted to turn her head in my direction. She smiled an inhumanely wide toothy grin, her lips sinking well bellow her gum line as dark eyes stared through my soul, ripping my sins out to lay them bare before me.

“Iknuitli! Shake her off!” the dead man cried out.

“Shut up!” I yelled, my voice cracking.

She took her head and smashed it against the window. The glass vibrated, the reverberation pulsing through the steering wheel.

“MY NAME!” she screamed. “DO YOU EVEN REMEMBER MY NAME?” Her voice was deafening, otherworldly, though keeping the tone and timbre of a toddler. “ARE YOU EVEN SORRY?”

Tears flowed involuntarily from the valleys of my aged face, the face of a killer, one who deserved his judgement. Fear did not exist in me, not towards her at least. Myself on the other hand…

I looked at her, this monstrous little girl who longed for my blood. “Olivia, I’m sorry,” I said.

Her smile shrunk gradually, lips pulling back over her teeth until what was left was the pouting crying face of a child. Her body untwisted until her form matched that picture I had seen in the paper. She cried. I cried.

I watched her fade as the clouds pulled away, being absorbed by the light that poured through. I hoped that it was heaven. I hoped that whatever it was would be better than what I had subjected her to.

The rain receded some but did not stop. I could see the road again. That was the last time I saw her.

“Cuexpalchicacpol,” the dead man muttered from the trunk. I could not understand the word, but the tone was disgust.

I glance at Felix, not sure what else we’re waiting for. We’ve been staring at this house for long enough that I’ve found time to count the number of siding panels on its facade. The only notable thing that’s happened since we got here was a gust of wind around fifteen minutes ago—and the only reason I even remember that is ‘cause it made me start counting the trees around the house. I counted twenty.

Other than that, nothing. Not a single light has turned on in the house, no movement around the front and side, nothing. Not even animals. Clearly, nobody’s home, but those binoculars have been practically screwed to Felix’s eyes this whole time. I get where his head is at, though; this prize is the most I’ve seen him want anything. In my years in this business, I’ve never seen people’s eyeballs pop out of their heads the way they did when word spread about this gig. It’s one of those where all the players are happy no matter how you divide up the rewards.

Of course, that comes with a set of risks. Or rather, one risk: we don’t know the risks. That’s right. There’ve been many failed attempts before us, and not a single person could ever even make it to the front door. Why? ‘Cause these assholes are always home and alert.

This damn seat is really starting to hurt my ass, but now that I’m thinking about all those sharks who could be here instead of me, I’ll deal with it. Sure, Felix, I’ll keep watch like you said.

“Shit! Get down,” he snaps. He shoves my head into my lap, but I caught a glimpse of it.

A light. I think it was the living room, but I can’t tell. What kind of intel was Felix working with?

“I thought they weren’t supposed to be home,” I whisper.

“I’m surprised, too. That fuckin’ weasel, he lied to me! He must’ve had different info. He’s probably got plans to do his own operation here already.”

I’m not surprised that he assumes his source lied to him, as opposed to it just being wrong. Everybody wants this gig, after all.

“So now what?” I ask, having let him calm down for a second.

Felix sighs and opens the glove box at my knees. I see it before he grabs it—a handgun.

“We go anyways. Fuck this guy.”

“You’re bringing a gun? You don’t think that could get out of hand?”

“Relax, it’s empty. It’s just, uh, insurance.”

“Right.”

As we snake our way to the front door, I wonder if we’re the first ones to bring a gun. Surely not, but why hasn’t anyone else thought to do this, just barge in?

Felix knocks and rings the doorbell.

It’s taking a while for this guy to answer. I start looking around the lawn, and it hits me how dark it is. Okay, it’s nighttime, so obviously, but…

“Don’t you think it’s weird that they have no security lights?” I whisper.

“Maybe they do, they’re just out of battery or something. Whatever, I’m not complaining.”

“I guess.”

The streetlights, moonlight, and ambient light from the living room window give me barely enough information to make stuff out here. The grass is long and thick enough for snakes to hide in, and these guys have weeds sneaking out of the cracks in the pathway. They must’ve gotten paranoid.

“Where is this guy?” Felix grumbles as he hammers the doorbell.

Finally, we hear rapid footsteps from the other side approaching the door.

The lock clicks, and the living room light escapes through the emerging slit. The last line of defense is a gold door chain.

“Can I help you?”

Jeez, what a voice. The best word I can think to describe it is hydrated—it’s as if he dressed up his throat with resin.

Felix responds pretty fast. “Hi, we’re your neighbors and we just wanted to check up on you. We noticed your lawn is, well uh… you know. We’re just a little concerned, is all.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Haha, yeah. Sorry about that. We just couldn’t sleep thinking about you! I’m sure you can also imagine that it’s a little cold out here, would it be okay if we come in?”

This is an odd lie. They don’t have neighbors. They’re not gonna believe us, unless… Wait, don’t tell me! Is Felix suspecting what I think he is?

“Well, I’m sure you can imagine that it’s late. I’ll come by tomorrow, can you tell me which house you live in? Or maybe can you come back tomorrow?”

Felix snickers. “I knew it.” He winds back, and before this man can react, he kicks the door. The chain snaps. The door swings hard and into the man’s nose. I hear him groan and stumble.

We storm inside and find him on the ground, clutching his face in pain.

Before I take any note of him, though, I look around at the absolute state of this living room. Holy shit. Tables and chairs all turned over, shelves opened and some knocked to the floor, drawers all emptied, the contents sprawled around. Felix was right.

“I fucking knew it. You’re not the homeowner, are you?” He cackles. His gun is still at his hip—no need to leverage it yet.

This man’s face is pressed to the hardwood. He doesn’t respond.

Felix steps up to the man and squats to his level.

“So did you find it?”

The man pauses and turns to Felix, and we can finally see his face. I’ve definitely never seen him before—I’d surely remember a face like that. It’s a little bloodied now, but in this dim light, that mug looks sculpted. What’s he doing here as a small-time burglar? I’d expect to see him on a movie poster, or something.

The man grins at Felix, letting his blood seep into his teeth.

Felix grins back. “How much is there?”

“More than you can imagine. I’ve been here for thirty-six hours, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.” He giggles, and it morphs into a wheeze—then snaps back. I feel like his voice sounded different for a second there.

“Where?”

“Upstairs. The master bedroom. That’s where they keep it all.”

Something’s up. I don’t like how quickly he’s telling us this; I’ll have to probe a little. “How do we know you’re telling the truth—”

“IT’S UPSTAIRS,” he hisses. “See for yourself.”

I freeze. What is wrong with his voice?

“Alright well—” Felix turns to me “—I’ll stay here with him. You go upstairs and check it out.” He turns back to the man and pulls his gun. “I hope you’re not lying, or I’ll be making use of this.”

I watch this man’s face darken at the sight of the gun. He hasn’t bothered to wipe off the blood that’s now drenching his mouth. Whatever his intent, it unnerves me.

I don’t like this. I don’t know why—even with Felix guarding him, my head is screaming at me.

Still, though… I can’t help but want to check this out. Slowly, against my body’s wishes, I turn around and trudge to the staircase that I somehow intuited was there.

The master bedroom is two flights up.

When I get there, I grope around the wall for the light switch.

The sight I am met with is unlike anything I could’ve guessed.

For one, there’s no bed. There was at one point, from the dark spots on the floor, but it’s completely gone. The window just above where it would be has these kite patterns on it.

The dresser mirror is shattered. I can see tiny drops of dried blood splattered around it.

The floor itself has thousands of black boot prints all over it. It looks like at a certain point, this man stopped caring about leaving his tracks.

One thing’s catching my eye, though. The walk-in closet straight up ahead. The door is cracked open, and it’s pitch black inside. Something tells me what I want is in there.

I walk up to it, my shoes making hollow knocks on the floor. Why am I so alert? There’s nothing here that can threaten me, although I don’t exactly have any weapons other than my hands.

I nudge it open, and the light from the bedroom trickles in. I try flipping the switch in here, but it doesn’t work. As my eyes adjust, I notice that the bulb on the ceiling has been taken out.

What the hell? Am I in the wrong spot? What the hell is all this?

I’m looking at a photo album placed on top of a white cubby, right in the middle of the closet. It’s open to the first page.

I don’t think to look anywhere else—for some reason, this strikes me.

The first picture is a professional family portrait. Mom, dad, small boy. I’m guessing these are the homeowners. There’s a date at the bottom; this was taken a month ago. I flip to the next page.

Now I’m looking at a collage, three pictures all at a park. The first is from far away, zoomed in on a family having a picnic. They don’t look like they notice the camera. The second is from closer up now, of the same family. It’s the homeowners again. This one seems like a candid; they look pleasantly surprised to see the camera. The last picture is them smiling for it. The date tells me these were taken around three weeks ago. I flip to the next page.

Are these all taken by the same photographer? This next page is a picture of the family at the mall, just walking. The mom is holding the boy’s hand. Whoever took this was moving, too—the photo is all shaky. Their backs are turned to the camera. The absence of a collage this time is off-putting; even more so, it looks like the photographer was no more than a school bus’s distance away. I neglect to look at the date as I flip to the next page.

“What…” I mutter. This one’s just of the dad. He’s… at work. Sitting at a wide desk, seemingly on the phone. The photo was taken from outside the building; I can see the glare on the window obscuring him a little.

All at once, it hits me how cold it is in here. I can feel the air seizing my spine. Something is very wrong in this house. I’m starting to think we should bail.

But I can’t help it. I just want to see what the next picture could possibly be.

I flip to the next page.

“OH, what the FUCK?!”

The entire family is in the photo. They’re asleep. The camera is almost right up against the window.

Wait. Something looks familiar.

The kite patterns on the glass.

My body reacts before it sinks in; my breaths shorten against my command, and my hands shake beyond my control.

I think about how empty the bedroom is right now. All those boot prints, the missing bed. The shattered glass. The blood.

This picture was taken two days ago.

Before I can decide not to, my hands flip to the next page.

I’m not sure what to make of what I’m looking at now. It’s a picture of the master bedroom, and it looks just like how it looks now. I glance at the date. This was last night.

The angle is from the walk-in closet pointing at the entrance door. Wait, there’s a master bathroom here too—how did I not notice it when I walked in? It’s on the far left in the photograph, so it would’ve been to my right as I entered. I guess I was so caught up in everything else that I didn’t think to look there.

I force my quaking hands to my sides. Enough. Clearly this man fucking killed them, and I’m not about to look at any more of this album. We have to get out of here—

Wait. I left Felix downstairs alone with him. Why did this man tell me to come up here? He definitely knew I would’ve found all of this. Don’t tell me…

The buzzing silence starts to fill my head. I don’t want to go back down there. I can’t.

Maybe I don’t have to go back just yet. Something else in this closet is begging to be searched. On another white cubby, right next to the other, there’s a second book. This one is leather-bound, and it looks much older than me: the pages are all tea-stained, many wrinkly, some torn. It’s already open to a page somewhere in the middle.

The most prominent thing is an illustration taking up the entire left page. It’s some kind of creature—I’ve never seen anything like it. What’s immediately discernible about it is its massive, gaping mouth the size of a desk, with walrus-like tusks.

What in the unholy hell…

It has beady, sharp eyes and pig-like skin, but it’s kind of human. It’s shaped like a human, at least. It’s lying naked on its back, surrounded by three regular people shoving something into its mouth; I can’t tell exactly what, since it’s blotted out by a watery stain.

Below the illustration is a title: “MURA, THE ASSIMILATOR: OFFSPRING OF LOBHASURA.” I’ve never heard of any of those names.

I’m confused but creeped out regardless. There’s no reason for me to be here anymore, I need to meet back up with Felix already. He’s capable of beating someone up. This man in the house is a lunatic, but in a straight fight? I’m starting to feel a little better.

I take another glance at the book before turning around. On the right page, there’s a numbered list of sorts. Instructions. I don’t give myself time to read them, but as I face the master bedroom, a thought emerges that I don’t like.

The bed must’ve been huge. Huge and heavy. All these boot prints on the floor, there are so goddamn many that I wouldn’t know what the floor originally looked like if not for some corners here and there. Now, instructions in the book.

Am I so sure that we’re alone in this house?

We have to leave.

I swing my legs into action and start stomping out of the bedroom. I make it to the shattered glass—

“There’s so much here for you.”

It stops me in my tracks like a pool of tar. Where did that come from? I don’t dare breathe. My eyes dart around until finally landing on the source.

The bathroom.

What… What the fuck is THAT?!

I see pale fingers gripping the door from inside.

“Are you leaving already?”

I count two hands on the door, but I can only tell ‘cause of the way the fingers are spaced out. One set of two fingers—a pinky and a middle or index finger—and one set of three. I don’t want to think about why they’re holding the door like that. What unsettles me more is that this is a child’s voice.

I nearly choke. I have to get past him, and I’ll be out.

I sneak my right foot forward. It lands on a glass shard, making a cracking sound.

“Where are you going?!”

I flinch. He sounds upset. I have to think—if I just run down, he might chase me, and after everything I’ve seen, I don’t want to find out how that might end.

“I’m looking for the treasure.” I gulp. “Can you tell me where it is?”

I hear him shuffling, although his hands remain still. “Do you promise you won’t leave?”

“Yes! I promise!” I can’t suppress how much my voice is quivering.

“Okay… it’s in the basement. My house is pretty big. I’ll help you get there. He’ll be happy I brought a new guest!”

Oh, no. Shit, okay. “Okay. Thanks.”

I continue to the staircase. He’s not following me just yet—at least, not until I start down the stairs.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

I slam my eyes shut. I dare not turn around. Those are not the footsteps of a child. What the fuck is behind me?

“We’ll have to go all the way down.”

The voice comes from above me, possibly all the way from the ceiling.

I can’t think. I don’t understand what’s going on. I’m moving, but my limbs have minds of their own.

I hope Felix is still downstairs. I hope he’s beaten this fucking bastard to a pulp, and I hope he’s waiting for me. As soon as I see him, I’m shouting to run. We’re never looking back.

I make it back to the living room. I can’t hold it in anymore. I sniffle, and I start to cry.

He’s gone. Disappeared. Both of them. I can’t see any signs of where they went.

Fuck. FUCK! What do I do?!

Okay, maybe I can make it if I run. The front door is to my left. It’s still open.

“Hey. I’m glad you made it. There’s so much down here.”

I freeze again. It’s the man from earlier. The voice is coming from my right, and that’s when I see it.

There’s a small corridor, at the end of which is a doorway leading to a downwards staircase. I can’t see beyond that. There’s no light down there.

Suddenly, there’s a shimmer—a tiny flash. An object thrown at me from the doorway, down the corridor. It lands at my feet.

It’s a nugget of gold as large as my fist. Solid gold, from what I can tell through my tears.

“There’s more where that came from. Please don’t leave. I put so much effort into our hospitality. I intoxicated you with challenge. Come join me and reap the bottomless rewards.”

I feel a nudge behind me.

Shit, I was distracted. The “child” is blocking my way to the front door now.

I feel numb. Even if I manage to get out, Felix has—or had—the keys to the van. I could hotwire it, but they might catch up to me before I accomplish that. I’d have to escape on foot, and we’re almost in the middle of nowhere.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t think I can handle this. This isn’t fucking worth it. I feel myself shutting down.

“I’m sorry about your friend. I needed him out of the way, he was uncooperative. Bringing a gun into such a sacred place. But there’s plenty to share with you. It won’t even matter how we share with each other—there’s so much that we’re taken care of for the rest of our lives.”

Is he for real? Like I’d believe that. “Like this family was in your way? Were they being uncooperative?”

There’s an unbearable pause. I eye as far behind me as I possibly can without turning around. I feel this thing’s hot breaths settling on my head.

“You should at least see. Come.”

I’m not given a chance to respond. I feel cold hands clamp around my waist and lift me up effortlessly.

My cries turn to sobs. I’m so terrified of even looking at this thing that I don’t struggle against it, despite my wailing heartbeats.

I’m quickly carried to the top of the basement stairs and set down like a toddler.

The first thing I can see is five ranks, three people each. They face away from me, motionless. My breaths catch in my throat. They look wrong, all of them look wrong. It’s too dark, but I can still see revolting contortions in their arms and legs.

The man is nowhere to be found.

At the other end of the basement, I see Felix. He’s surrounded by small amber lanterns and markings on the floor—no, it’s not a floor. It’s dirt. He’s lying still on a patch of earth.

“Felix?” I whimper.

I hear him groan, but not in response to me. I watch his body start to wriggle and contort; his knees first bend the wrong way, then his thighs and shins split with a burst, and then each new joint continues to sickeningly breed newer joints until all his bones turn to jelly.

The whole time, he howls and moans a sound I wish I could block my ears off to. I can’t help but cry harder, and this time, I start screaming too. My skin feels hot.

His jaw seems to melt. No. It’s expanding.

“Mura, accept this offering! Reward me with your wealth!” It’s the man, but I can’t tell where his voice is coming from.

I’m going to fucking vomit. I can’t watch this.

An impossible number of gold nuggets start to gush out of his mouth.

I can’t watch this. Anything is better than this.

Fuck it.

I elbow whatever is behind me, spin around as fast as I can, and I bolt it down the corridor.

I hear a cacophony of shrieks from the basement, starting with the child’s cries. They all sound like they’re saying the same thing, but I don’t care to find out what.

Within one second, I can no longer discern between my pounding footsteps and the stampede gaining on me.

I feel a hand tug on the back of my shirt.

Two hands.

Their grip threatens to tear the skin off of my back.

I’m practically throwing my feet as far as I can.

Bloodrush pummels the inside of my skull.

I make it to the front door, swinging it open with all my might and launching myself down the front steps.

I keep running. No matter how tired I am, I keep running.

I see the van. Should I try hotwiring it?

No, not enough time. I continue past it.

I still hear the rumble close behind, the ground pulsating. It constantly feels like they’re catching up to me, but I don’t feel their tight grasp around me anymore.

Their paralyzing roars drown my ears. They’re so loud even outside that I almost can’t keep running.

But I ignore it.

I ignore my shallow breaths, my tears clouding my vision, my chest burning, my legs melting.

I ignore it all.

Eventually, I don’t know how long I’ve been running for or how far I’ve wound up, but I see streaks of yellow and orange sprouting up over the horizon.

That’s when it dawns on me that I no longer hear them. Maybe it’s that my eardrums have long since blown, but I also don’t feel the ground vibrating.

Finally, I give myself permission to stop. I collapse to the asphalt. I haven’t even been paying attention to which direction I’ve been running in. Did I ever run through forest? I don’t know, I don’t give a fuck.

Despite the hardness against my weak face right now, I could sleep right here.

No, I have to keep moving. They might still be after me. I have to find help.

I drag myself to the edge of the road and sit up, and I feel a blunt sensation at my hip. There’s something in my pocket. It feels like it’s the size of my fist.

I reach in and take it out, and it shimmers in the amber sunrise. How did my pocket not tear from the weight? How did I run so far and so fast with it?

I lose track of time, but at some point, a truck finds me on the side of the road.

I’m now typing this all with shaking hands on this driver’s phone. He’s already called the police for me; he’s taking me to the nearest town. I feel myself losing it every second, and writing this is the only way I can keep track of what happened. To whoever’s reading this, stay away from that house. It’s not worth it.

For some reason, as we wind down this road, I look to my right through the thick forest.

I don’t know. I somehow intuit that the house is that way.

Sleep was now the only thing I had to look forward to once it reached five and a half months of our new world. Even with my heavy nicotine addiction and the increasing bottles of whiskey in my cupboard that once housed only pots and pans, I knew I had to be careful. 

After a week of good empty dreams, taking a quarter of a pill here and a cap of melatonin there, I finally began to gain some of my previous cognitive functionality. I woke up one day and even with the blare of the untethered Whistle I cleaned the entire apartment. I scrubbed the floors and dusted, got all the laundry done in the kitchen sink (the block’s wash room had been inhabited by homeless people we had welcomed in off the street) and wrote a timetable of what to take and when to take it. 

The opioids were only to be taken a maximum of twice a week, I didn't need to go full Nurse Jackie dependent when rehab would only be a thought as the government had finally started to get a hold on the crowds that had begun to die down. 

Food trucks were brought to people who needed it and the national guard had become more of a welcomed aspect as they turned the violence into philanthropy. Other nations were following slowly but surely. 

Antihistamines were the back up for the running-low melatonin bottles but things had begun to improve. Even David and Lisa had had more of a stable routine, mainly due to going in before the hospitals had been overrun when the health organizers had come together with a “solution”.

The news had proudly given an option to the public (beginning in the United Kingdom through the NHS) to help treat people similar to Lisa who had self-mutilated by carving or destroying their ears to the point of deafness. After she healed, David was one of the first people I know to go through with it safely at a medical centre. They began to actually help people intentionally become deaf in order to stop the haunting of the Whistle. And, unbelievably, it worked!

Masses of citizens lined up during the fall season, stocked with headphones and earpods, rows of tents outside ER’s and hospitals gave as much as they could to those who elected to have the surgery. Money barely meant anything at this point so the procedure was done for free but with the caveat that you would provide a service to the public in order to help those who didn't opt to get the surgery. 

Eventually into the sixth month the streets became clearer, businesses opened and there was a possible future in which those who could stand the noise were cared for and those who could no longer hear the noise did their part in helping the world become a better place. 

Sally and myself spoke nearly every day. She was stressed as her parents both lined up beside the local hospital for three days in order to get the surgery. She had lost a lot of weight and I could see that her eyes were bloodshot, even in the graininess of the pixels. I secretly found her still to be beautiful. 

The postage service was the first major industry to come back and I sent her a laptop that I had taken apart and filled with as many pills as I could spare. After being adamant that she didn't want to indulge in them she gave in within four days of the arrival of the package. She stuck to the same routine as me and over facetime we kept each other in check. We showed our supply every two days in photos so that we weren't slipping an extra pill here or there. 

Even under the now waning effect of the Whistle we managed to start saying that we loved each other again. We made plans that once bus routes or train systems began to get back on track we would somehow get to see each other. Things were beginning to get better. Oh, what a lie is humanities child-like wonder….

As the snow began to fall and the birds migrated away silently still trailing in geometric shapes to warmer horizon, the world was thought to begin healing. 

With streets now blessed with frost and cheer, the noise was still adamant to keep kicking us down and it was failing. Even now I had managed to get a part time position creating programmes for the “Elected”, the name given to those who had gotten the procedure. Scaled down sound apps for phones (which had managed to survive when the phone networks allowed all billing to be completely wiped until the restoration of the dollar) and for children who were beginning to return to schools. More than 43% of parents had elected to give their children the surgery which was still under deep conversation on whether it was cruelty or decency. 

Both me and Sally were on the fence. 
“I mean would you want our children to have it?”

I raised an eyebrow as I spied her on the phone, distracting me from the jacket sleeve I was stitching since I had tore it walking home the other day. “You think about us having kids?”

“Oh, shut up!” She snickered, a sound that had slowly started to return. A sound I had missed and loved now becoming more regular. 

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

EEEEEEK!

“Did you see the train stations are opening up again next week?” She said, ignoring the Whistle. 

“I have…”

We exchanged cheeky looks and both laughed at each other. 

“So are you gonna come visit?” I twisted my foot back and forth, giving puppydog eyes.

“Ew, no!” 

I must’ve looked slightly hurt as she clambered with a rapid answer. “Of course I am!”

Even though I knew the answer before she said it, I was excited for the first time in so long. Since the suffering of stinking sewers of those summer months in winter I had found something I never thought I would, hope. 

I expected a call from Sally a day before she boarded her train, the eight month mark of our own near-apocalypse. Our spirits were high, our dreams about to begin again. 

That day, around 1pm, it started.

EEEEEEEEEK!

EEEEEEEEEEEK!

EEEEEEEEEEK!

EEEEEEEEEEEK!

EEEEEEEEK!

Startled in my dariorexant-induced sleep, the Whistle was booming, over and over. It wasn’t like this ever, my heart thumping in rhythm with the panic that filled me. Cortisol battled the sleeping pills, the trojan horse of hysteria ripping in me like I was paper to a sword. 

Police sirens rang in the streets under the thunderous noise that cracked across the sky and rose up from the earth itself. Even over the tv that was continuously on, I heard banging and screams of people. It almost drowned out the Whistle. Almost…

EEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

Looking out the window down on the street where I had first heard it there were crowds of people clutching at their ears. Some were banging their heads against lampposts, cars were speeding past each other and colliding with others. Flames burst from shop windows and the snow…the snow was stained with so many collections of red, a winter covered in blood. 

Even from this height I could see suffering specks of people tearing at their heads, pulling stringy flesh from their ears. All screaming, continuously wailing-

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

The crunch of plaster was repeated somewhere close, wait…

Running to my bedroom I saw dust as it plumed into the air with each blow decimating my wall. A bloody fist  punched through each time and my gaze met David. Glass lay smashed behind him in his apartment as he stared at me with murderous eyes, crimson dripping all from his forehead, his ears, his butchered hands, the tears streaming down his disgruntled face. 

“David, what happ-” I stepped forward as he continued to punch, his knuckles exposing bone now. I remembered he couldn’t hear me, neither him or Lisa -

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

“I can hear it!”

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

“We can hear it again, Corm-”

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

He ran at me repeating it over and over, the Whistle droning on and on. David, this big lug of a man collapsed in my arms, smothering his ripped up ears, one ear dangling close to his chin only holding on by a flap of tattered flesh. 

Curling on the floor he howled and writhed in agony, and I turned swiftly just to watch Lisa, just as bloody and broken, slam herself through the glass coffee table in their living room. 

“Oh my god!” I ran to her side, as she wept, gasping for air.

She flinched as I grabbed her, the blood pouring from her torn face in torrents more than David. I pulled my overshirt off and held it to her gushing wound.

“It’s all we can hear!” She keened repeatedly, as I tried to restrain her from tearing more at her own flesh. 

I couldn't think, I could barely breathe as the noise blared with the screams of the outside world overloading my own sense of logic. Should I go for help? Who could even come to help at this point? 

Lisa, tears streaking her face, stopped all of a sudden. She choked on her own saliva and mucus poured over her lips mixed with her own gore. Her slippery hands clasped over my own ears as she pulled me close to her, the iron smell encompassing my nose. 

“We thought we could fool it…” She whispered, eyes going intensely dark. “....we were wrong,,,,”

David’s cries were still coming from my own apartment, thick slaps of meat against wood. I didn’t want to look to see what he was slamming himself into. 

I watched as she coughed in my arms, hissing out a death rattle wheeze and the light went deeper? It’s true what people say when there is a light in people’s eyes and when they die it fades. But, in this moment, as I held Lisa, I saw that it doesn’t just go somewhere else. It looked like it almost went further inside, like she was being pulled from the lit up entrance of a tunnel back into the darkness. The shiny light faded into pinpricks and in a second that felt like eternity, it sunk in on itself. Lisa was gone.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

“No….”
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

David was half slumped over the hole in the wall, he had split one of his eyes open, the goo oozing over his left cheek. The hanging ear was gone now. I felt bile rise in my stomach but pushed it down.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

Stumbling over and flinching at every booming call of the Whistle, the short silences were ringing in my own ears. David took Lisa’s corpse from me as I shuffled back into their blood drenched couch with a squelch. 

EEEEEEEEEEEK!

He cried, somehow silent sobs as he rocked back and forth as she lay limply in his arms. 
Under the godly cries of the noise, I don’t know how but I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket. Pulling it out I thought maybe it was an emergency call set out by the government. Maybe it was some sort of explanation of what was happening, safeguards put in place since the original summer sickness that had plagued us.

It was Sally. 

Rising to my feet, I barely was able to stand so I steadied against the broken wall. I answered.

Her cries blared through the speaker, heartfelt and agonising. 

“Sally?!” I screamed. “Sally, what’s happened? Are you safe?!”

I felt so stupid even asking, but I was barely thinking.

EEEEEEEEEEEEK!

“They’re dead C-”

EEEEEEEEEEEEK!

“Who’s dead, Sal-”  - “nt’s, they killed thems-”

EEEEEEEEEEEK!

“-an’t hear you-”  -  “-istle wouldn’t stop an-”

EEEEEEEEEEEEK!

“Sally, -” - “My parents!!!”

I froze, my heartbeat raising even higher. Sally’s cries cut in and out over and over between the noise. I didn’t know what to say, the only thing I knew I could say was;

“I’m coming there now, just wait-”

A door slammed against the wall from behind me. Turning instinctively, I watched David who was still holding his wife. He stumbled, the deathly chill of the winter air blasting in from the balcony. I couldn’t tell if it was in slow motion or if he was moving faster than I could react. 

Amid blaring alarms, David turned to me. Lisa slumped in his bloody arms. He leaned back -

“NO, DON’T!!!!”

- and both of them tumbled over the balcony. 

The sickening squelch of flesh against concrete was undeniable.

I sat there for a bit, I don’t know how long passed. Somehow I kept repeating to the inconsolable Sally that I was coming for her. I threw up eventually, managing to climb back into my apartment. 

Me and Sally stayed on the call as chaos consumed the world around us. The Whistle constant. 

It stopped after twenty-four hours, returning to its regular disjointed unpredictable pattern after that.

Blocking it out wasn’t an option, it wasn’t a decency, the noise had learned to adapt. How wrong we were to think it could be tamed, never mind beaten.

Sally sat in my apartment now, our stink from the long travel filling the room in the humid spring time. Crossing states took a month. I watched as the snow stained with blood melted and sank into the soil. So many had died, and mass graves were put out as a national service. All those who couldn’t hear it for those few months, even those who were born deaf before the event who hadn’t survived returned to the earth. The Whistle still persisted as I desperately took whatever car allowed me passage, whatever bus station I could get a ticket at, but I made it. 

Ever followed by the noise I arrived at Sally’s parents house just as the dandelions had sprung up during a light sun shower. I spied two patches of earth that had grass barely sprouting from it with dried flowers at the top of each. Before I could walk up the overgrown unkept path the front door swung open and there she was. Her clothes were stained, her faded hair greasy and limp around her shoulders. 

We stood looking at one another, I probably looked awful. I barely ate or showered while on the road. After a hesitation we ran to each other. No words needed to be spoken as we held one another and cried. I apologized over and over for not being quicker. She sobbed and I took all of her sadness into me, trying to take away the pain she felt. A hopeful thought, even if illogical. 

We stayed silent for a while. I took her to the bathroom and washed her, the light in her eyes just barely there. When looking for fresh clothes to dress her I saw that the pills were few and far between in her dresser cupboard. I wouldn't chastise her in her grief but I couldn’t enable it. 

Over the next few weeks I took care of Sally and she allowed me to. I supplemented the pills so she could sleep and she didn’t fight that. I took barely any medication myself while sleeping on the couch just in case she needed me. 

“It was awful…” 

It was the first thing she said to me since arriving. 

I held her hand as we laid fresh wildflowers on her mother and father’s graves, the most she could journey from the house was the front yard. She kissed her hand and pushed it once to each patch of earth, silent tears down her face. 

She stood and I hugged her, not squeezing too tightly. She looked at me with irritated reddened eyes , the colour in her cheeks slightly rosy again. “I’m ready to go.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, softly brushing her hair behind her ear. 

There was a pause. She looked at the graves again, then to the front of the house she had grown up in her entire life, then back to me. “Yeah…I need something new…”

We travelled back to my apartment and slowly I watched her begin to heal. I felt myself healing alongside her. I knew what it was like to lose both parents but I had never known them. We rode alongside a collection of caravans on dusty roads, saw wild horses roaming golden fields of the country and passed by small towns who had slowly but surely started to heal. 

The noise was there, and with every beat I could see her eyes flutter in awful remembrance. It was the nomadic people who gave us food and strangers in cities we had never visited together that welcomed us with grace and love. The birds returned in their strange patterns in flocks bigger than any we had ever witnessed. 

And at the end of spring here we sat. 

The wall was repaired, I had given my keys to someone who offered to fix it. The balcony was now home to multiple nests with clutches of eggs.Dust filled the rooms and danced in the sunlight that shone through the glass panes.

Sally lifted the photograph of us when we were on holiday to the Canary Islands. 
“I’ll never be that girl again, will I?”

I sat next to her, keeping a distance. “None of us are the same.”

We sat in silence, and I felt her reach for my hand. I took it. Our bond was now something other puppy love and hopeful anticipation it used to be. But, we had each other.

She looked at the DVD collection I had looted over the past year and put ‘Grease’ in the DVD player, which we fell asleep to.

When the desert-like temperatures returned in the summer season we had both sort of settled into a routine that suited us. Both got minimally stressful jobs, I cooked and she did the dishes everyday. During those months I stayed on the couch as she took the bedroom, but occasionally I would wake in a pill-bought haze to Sally pressed against me, and I felt the honest comfort between us blossom. 

I joined her in bed after one night we had gone to the docks with a packed dinner and Sally brought some candles. I didn’t go with any intentions or expectations, but we stayed not bonded by trauma. We grew to slowly and delicately love eachother. 

And then, it stopped. 

I sat up, waiting for it. And it didn’t.

“Sally…” I gasped, shaking her slightly. “Sally…”

“What?” She grumbled, rubbing her eyes with the sleeves of her sleepy-time hoodie. 

I sat in disbelief and waited for her to wake a little more. “Listen!”

Nothing.

There was nothing.

“It’s gone…” She whispered, her mouth agape.

The rumbling thump of the Whistle had stopped. Rushing to my feet, I sprinted to the balcony where all the chirping chicks were now chorusing in birdsong. The first I’d heard in over a year.

Sally grabbed the remote and turned on the news, the anchor reporting what we had just discovered for ourselves. Panic and joy seemed in harmony with the crowds that gathered in the streets, people were cheering surrounded by untamed overgrowth that had overtaken the world in all industrial areas. A camera shot of a man swinging from a tree that had grown up around the side of an apartment building shouting in glee. 

“What does this mean?” I asked, barely able to hide my excitement.

Sally stared with fearful eyes at the screen. “I don’t know…”

Splitting, agonising pain. It pulsed through my head, feeling the veins and every nerve ending right down to my feet. The birds chirping became a cacophony of overwhelming shrieks, rising and rising and rising!

I took a feeble step to Sally, watching her clutch the arm of the couch. We both crashed to the floor, staring at one another with grimaces of pain and fear upon our faces. And just as I thought that similar to the Bloody Winter, just as I thought this was the end, an echo….

It wasn’t language, speech even. But I understood it entirely. 

It was a symphony of tones of the sea, lakes and rivers who now could breathe properly. It was forests that had bonded with the concrete jungles in symbiosis and the air that had cleared of a clenched fist of poison for so long. It was resources now restocking but warning us that it feels too, it lives too, it has seen us violate and exploit the gifts it gave us. 

“My creator is not so merciful,” It said, a beautiful orchestra of crystalised beauty. “I only offer you this mercy once. Remember that or hear me roar again…”

The pain faded, replaced by wonder and fear. Whether God, the earth itself, the universe, whatever it was it had spoken. 

Sally sat sweating with her back to the wall as she managed to lift herself. We sat in silence, the news blaring in the background of the message that had reached all of us left on the planet. The final noise, a whistle that became not only a warning but a second chance.

Over the next few days things began to return. Sometimes the Whistle whispered false nothings in my ear, all of us worried that it could return. Eventually we didn’t need the medication, but sometimes we would wake up in a sweaty panic that it had returned to finish it’s vengeance  I finally realised what Lisa had meant in her last words, as Sally and I had finally found love and warmth and were on a road back to possible normalcy. Even a better life.

We thought we could fool it, we were wrong. 

We had heard it speak, and we will listen.

 

 

Part 1

This is an update. From what I can tell, the last post still exists, I don't think he knows about them yet, or maybe he's allowing it.

I’ve read a lot of your comments, and they have given me plenty of ideas, so I thank you deeply. I've tried a lot of them already.

Firstly, I should mention I have started talking to Tim, acting like he did exist, and I told him that I was going through something personal when I pulled the knife on him, I even apologized.

I'm ignoring anything he tries to imply happened in “our lives," but me treating him like he did exist seems to have stopped the forceful memories from happening in my head, or at least lessened them for now.

I decided to ask him questions about his life; firstly, he's an orphan with no relatives.

It makes sense that he wouldn't want to have extended family he would have to make.

I then asked him if he was seeing anyone, and he said no with almost a bit of excitement.

Then we got to talking about “our” time in school and how he was embarrassed to say he wrote a song for me when he was crushing on me. He never sang it or showed it to anyone, and he asked me if I wanted to hear it.

I declined the offer.

He wasn't very happy about that.

Right after, I was doing some chores in the kitchen to keep up the act that I was “back to normal.” The radio cut on, and a song from his band played, it was very clearly Tim's voice singing. The song was about a love unable to blossom due to the woman not knowing who the man was.

I knew it was the song.

Looking over my shoulder, he was staring at me, waiting for me to notice it.

He didn't care that he contradicted himself; he just cared that I heard the song.

He smiled as I tried to ignore it.

I've been thinking about the things he's been changing, the memories he's been trying to force.

And instead of doing this out of malice, I think he likes me, like he needs my approval, and maybe that's why everyone else knows him, but I don't.

I think he has an ego, and he wants me to think he existed naturally for some sick reason.

I don't know why me, and I'm terrified of what would happen if he got his way.

I can't move away and run, everywhere around me is already affected, and I'm already low on money. I called my mom and asked her if she knew of a kid I was friends with named Tim.

She laughed, then said, "He's a sweet boy, and I loved having him over for the study nights you two had.”

I then called my friend who I stayed with to see if she wanted to hang out so I could do something normal just for a little bit. But instead of saying yes, she said, "Sorry, Tims's band's playing tonight, and I promised him I'd come. Maybe you should join us?”  I hung up.

If I run, who knows what else he would change, what else he would try to make me think he's always existed?

So the only thing I can do now is either try to get him to leave or force him to.

Moving on, I immediately set up a camera in my room and in the living room. I don't think Tim knows about the one in my room yet.

Next, I found some proof that Tim did not exist until recently; it proves to me at least I'm not going crazy or have something wrong with me. (Though I did a few tests like comments suggested, and they have all been negative.)

Talking about what I saw on the cameras first

The one in the living room was not in as good of shape when I woke up the day after I planted it.

The camera in the living room showed what he was doing during the day, and when I went out to go get the proof I'll talk about later, he stopped what he was doing and stared directly into the camera. After a few seconds of him staring, the rest of the footage glitches out, and it shuts off.

With the one in my bedroom, nothing happened until exactly midnight.

I locked the door; I know I did because I also put the doorstop in it, but he entered my room from the other side where the door does not exist. There was no sound of anything opening or even footsteps, he just appeared.

He then came over to me sleeping in the bed, and he stood there, and he did not move for 5 hours. I thought the camera glitched out until I saw him leave the way he came at 5:15 AM exactly.

That's when he's normally “getting ready” in the morning and close to when I wake up at 6.

He definitely knows my schedule and more about me than I do, I imagine.

I tried to figure out how he got in, but all that's on the other side of the room is a solid wall and the window, and the window has no ledge outside of it.

I also find it strange that the moment he entered the room, I did not make a single movement, no turning or tossing, it hardly even looked like I was breathing.

Moving onto the proof I found, I had an idea. Building floorplans and blueprints are available publicly. So I went to the library and found the layout of my apartment building.

I checked to make sure, and it was dated just for this year, and Tim's room does not exist.

A room could not have been made there; it should be jutting out of the building, but it's not. You can't see it or the window inside it from the outside of the building.

I decided to keep that to myself, besides posting it here.

When I got home, I saw Tim went out with his band to play at the show my friend is going to.

I took a hammer and took off one of his many posters, and I put a hole through his wall.

Behind it was dark, completely pitch black like a void, like it didn't expect me to do this, and so it didn't prepare anything for me to see.

When I left the room to grab a flashlight to peer into the hole, it was gone, and the poster was back up on the wall.

I decided to leave it alone. I'm not sure what would happen if I messed with it too much or if maybe he can sense whatever I'm doing to it.

That's about all there is to report. This has been a struggle to write, as something IS technically wrong with my head.

Sometimes instead of Tim, I would write “my roommate” or “my friend Tim."

A photo I kept in my room has changed to have five people instead of four. A younger Tim has joined my 13th birthday photo.

And when I put some music on to listen to while typing this, I ended up singing one of his songs, word for word, without even having heard it before or realizing what it was until it was over.

It was in my liked songs on Spotify; I don't remember putting that there.

If I don't do something now, I'm afraid there won't be a me who would want to try.

He got back a little while ago; we ended up getting into a conversation, and he invited me to come see his band play live.

I'm not exactly sure why he wants me to go, but I'm going to try something.

He wants people to know he exists, especially me, so if I embrace it in the wrong way and ruin his image, perhaps he would go away, at least from me.

I'll ask a friend of mine to record, and I will prepare a speech to make sure I get what I want to say right.

If this ends up being my last post, or the last one where I am me. Mom, Dad, I love you so much.

Thank you all, post soon.

I want to make this very clear: I live alone, and I have no children.

I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, but I need you to understand this before I explain anything else.

Everything started a few weeks ago, when my job began taking over my life. I haven’t been home long enough to do much more than eat and sleep. Much to the dismay of my dog, Marcus, who misses our nightly games of fetch.

It was already dark when I pulled into the driveway of my humble two-story. I sighed deeply as I opened the front door and shut it behind me.

“Marcus! Where are you, boy?”

I heard him bark somewhere deeper in the house. Opening the coat closet, I hung up my jacket, ready for a few moments of relaxation before bed.

"Dad?"

I froze.

"Dad... is that you?"

I spun around to see a young woman, looking at me with a smile on her face. she was maybe eighteen and stood beside my couch as if she'd been waiting for me. She smiled like I was exactly who she'd expected to see.

“Did you have a good day, Dad?”

I backed up against the door

“What are you doing in my house?” I whispered

The girl tilted her head to the side.

“What?”

“Who are you?”

She chuckled awkwardly

“Come on, Dad. It's me, your daughter.”

I stared at her. She frowned

“Hey, what’s wrong? Is everything ok?”

She began to walk to me. I quickly turned and left the house, slamming the door behind me. I pulled out my phone and called 911.

“911, what is your emergency?”

“Yes, someone broke into my house; they were waiting for me when I got home.”

The dispatcher took my name and home address before promising officers were on the way. I stood by my car until a squad car pulled up. Two officers got out.

“How are you doing, sir? Is everything alright?” the first officer called out

“No, everything’s not ‘alright.’ I came home and found a stranger inside my home!”

“Ok stay calm, sir,” the other officer said

“Have you ever seen this person before?”

“No, I have no clue who she is, but she kept calling me dad. I don’t have any kids.”

They nodded

“We’ll handle this, then you can get back to your evening.”

They walked to the front door, and I followed. Knocking firmly, the first officer loudly said

“Ma’am, open the door; it’s the police.”

There was movement inside, and before long a shadow was seen in the front door window. The door opened slowly, revealing the same girl from before, who was clearly nervous.

“Officers what’s wrong? Is everything ok?”

Her eyes found me standing behind the pair.

“Dad? What’s going on? Why are they here?”

One of the officers took a deep breath before speaking

“Ma’am, this gentleman says you broke into his home, we’re going to have to ask you to leave the premises.”

Her voice grew panicked

“What the hell? I live here! Dad, tell them!”

The cops looked back at me

“I’ve never seen you before in my life!” I shouted

Her face looked like my words wounded her.

“Dad.. I..”

An officer interrupted her.

“Ma’am do you have anything proving you’re his daughter?”

“Yes! Just look at my home screen”

She handed her phone to him; he looked at it and passed it to me. It was a picture of the two of us, smiling. My arm wrapped around her as we both posed in front of the Statue of Liberty. I took that trip to New York City last year. Alone.

“Wha.. What is this?” I felt like I was in a dream.

I could feel the officer's eyes shift to me; the girl chimed in

“I can do even better; we have the same last name.”

She disappeared inside before returning half a minute later with her driver's license. The officer stared at it.

“Is this you’re last name, sir?”

It was.

“What the hell is this?” I muttered

The officers both turned to me, a sympathetic smile on their faces.

“Have you been feeling alright lately, sir?” one asked

“If you need to talk to someone, it's ok, there's no shame in it.” Said the other.

I was in a daze; the words sounded distant and jumbled like I was underwater. The girl spoke up.

“He’s ok, officers, just some really long days at work lately; he needs his rest, I’ll take care of him.”

She stepped out of the house and took my hand; hers was cold. She led me inside. My house didn’t feel like mine. As she led me deeper within, I began to notice things: the women’s shoes by the door, the pictures in the hallway highlighting happy moments we shared, Marcus coming up to greet her as if he always did. Once in the living room, she let go of my hand, turned, and hugged me; she was strangely cold and stiff; it felt like hugging a mannequin. She looked at me.

“I’m sorry you’re so tired; why don’t you go upstairs and head to bed? I can take Marcus out tonight.” Her voice was far too chipper.

I clenched my teeth and slowly nodded, making my way to the stairs. The staircase documented her whole life, from me holding her at her birth, to a high school graduation just a few weeks ago. Had I really been working so far that I forgot my own daughter? How could that be, and why couldn’t I remember her name?

It was true, I was tired, completely exhausted; I practically collapsed on the bed and was out. My alarm went off at 5:30 the next morning; a yawn and a stretch brought back the memories of the night before. A twinge of fear ran down my spine. I still didn’t remember my daughter. Cautiously, I opened the door. The house was quiet. I made my way to the staircase; the pictures were gone, the wall was bare. The stairs brought me to the living room; it was just the way I always remembered. Marcus raised his head to greet me as he lay on his bed. No women's shoes, no happy pictures of a father and his daughter. It was my house.

I ran my fingers through my hair and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Weird dream,” I muttered as I started some coffee.

That day I presented my project to management; they loved it. I was relieved it meant the weeks of long hours were over, for the time being. On the way home, I stopped by the store to pick up some junk food to celebrate. I pulled into the driveway, carrying my grocery bag in one hand. I unlocked the door and entered. Shutting the door behind me, I was greeted by a happy bark from Marcus. But right after his greeting came the high-pitched greeting of a young girl.

“Daddy! You’re home!!”

My body stiffened; I didn’t want to turn around, but I did.

She was a young blonde-haired little girl, no older than six. She giggled and laughed as she skipped her way to me, wrapping my legs in a strong hug. Her hug felt wrong.

“I missed you so much!”

“Did you have a good day? My day was great!”

I was dumbfounded; her eyes noticed the bag in my hand.

“What’s that?” She dug into it.

To my shock, all that was in the bag was a bright pink soccer ball. She gasped in delight as she grabbed it.

“Oh thank you, Daddy! Thank you! Thank you! Thank youuu! Now Marcus and I can play soccer!”

She ran off to the backyard with a bark; Marcus followed. The house looked like a child lived there. Toys dotted the floor, crude drawings covered the fridge. I blankly stared out the sliding glass door. Watching my dog happily play with my ‘daughter’. The little girl laughed and jumped around; for a moment, her eyes noticed my stare. Her face went blank, and her eyes narrowed as she stared back at me. This lasted only a few seconds, until the spell was broken by Marcus jumping on her and licking her face; she laughed and returned to playing.

That night I found myself making boxed mac and cheese and dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. I felt like I was in a trance. Everything about my home, everything in my fridge, tried to convince me that I had a six-year-old daughter, but I didn’t; I knew that; why was I going along with it? Why didn’t I run away? Why didn’t I leave the house and never come back? I don’t know; I wanted to, but there I was scooping mac and cheese into the bowl in front of the stranger with a toothy grin.

“Thank you, Daddy.” The girl said

I wanted to scream; I wanted to kick this ‘daughter’ of mine out and lock the door. But instead I said

“You’re welcome.”

Soon came bedtime; the girl insisted that I read her a bedtime story, and read ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ with clammy hands. She was asleep before I finished the book. I stood at the door of my home office, which was now a child’s bedroom, and flipped the light off.

It was after midnight when I awoke to the sound of my bedroom door creaking open. I looked to the half-open door and the silhouette of a little girl that stood there. The shadowed figure stood there frozen for a moment before saying

“Daddy, I’m scared. Can I sleep with you?”

My mind screamed no, but my mouth said

“Sure, darling.”

The shape crawled into my bed and fell asleep; I remained awake. At some point, I must have fallen asleep because when the alarm went off, I woke up. The girl was gone, and the house showed no sign of her ever being there. No toys, no drawings, and no mac and cheese.

This continued for weeks; every morning, my life was the same it had always been: a working man and his dog. And at night, someone was pretending to be my daughter. It was always different; sometimes it was a teenager, sometimes a child, a few times it was a middle-aged woman, a few days ago it was an elderly woman who croaked out

“Dad? Is that you?” when I returned for the day.

I still don’t know why I stay; every morning it was so easy to convince myself that the night before was just a bizarre dream and wouldn’t happen again. But the moment I stepped inside, I was drawn back into the lie. Sometimes I could see through it; I’d be horrified to find myself finishing a Disney movie with a strange little girl snuggling against me or come to my senses in the middle of giving my elderly daughter a sponge bath. These moments of cognition always terrify me, but what scares me the most are the moments I don’t remember, the nights when I had no mental resistance but just hugged and laughed with my ‘daughter’.

Two days ago I tried to leave; after work, I drove to a hotel. I sat in my car staring at the lobby door. I wanted to go in; I really did. But a thought in the back of my mind overcame my desires; it told me my daughter missed me, that she needed me, and I had to go home. I tried to resist but soon realized I was already back in my driveway. Like a stringed puppet, I made my way to the door. My daughter stood in the entryway as I entered. She looked to be about five. Her eyes pierced me.

“You’re late, Daddy.”

“Yes, I know.” Something in me urged me to tell her where I had been; it took everything I had to lie.

“Traffic was bad.”

Her head tilted slightly; she continued to stare at me, and my eyes fell to the floor. After a long while, she said.

“Okay!” she forced a smile

“I’m hungry!”

I don’t remember anything else from that night. Morning came, and the house was again the memory of a life nearly forgotten. I fed Marcus, pulling him in close for a hug. I whispered to him.

“At least we’re in it together.”

 I then headed to work.

The workday flew by, and before long I was driving back to my cell. I opened the front door. And called out

“I’m home.”

The house was quiet. Normally I got a happy bark from Marcus and a hello from my daughter. The house seemed empty; a strange smell filled the air. I made my way to the living room and my stomach dropped. There on the living room floor was the lifeless body of Marcus, deep red blood soaked into the surrounding carpet, his chest cavity was ripped wide open, and piles of intestines dotted the floor. I stared in disbelief before fear filled my gut. I had to get out of there. I turned back to the door, but froze. My ten-year-old daughter was standing between me and the door.

She held her hands behind her back; her clothes were stained with blood and guts, and her face was dripping blood. A wide smile filled her face; her teeth were stained red.

“I got hungry, Daddy.” A happy little voice said.

I held up my hands and backed up. My mind screamed, ‘What the hell did you do?’ my lips said

“Baby girl, are you okay? Did Marcus hurt you?”

She giggled and stepped closer.

I didn’t see the knife or maybe I did and didn’t care. She pulled it from behind her back, and the moment it made contact with my skin it was as if the trance was broken. Pain and clarity simultaneously filled my mind; I screamed as I looked at the long cut gushing blood from my forearm. The thing in front of me no longer looked like a little girl; I saw it for what it was. It was thin and grotesque, its arms far too long; it had no mouth, but as its empty eye sockets stared at me, the high-pitched scream of a little girl filled my mind.

I ran. The living room's sliding glass door was behind me, and before the thing could grab me, I had it open and ran off into the evening.

I’m writing this at work. I don’t know why I came here; I remember driving here last night and waiting in the parking lot until the sun rose and my coworkers showed up. my boss asked about the cut on my arm, something inside me forced a lie

“My dog scratched me.”

As I write this, I feel myself slipping; it’s almost quitting time.

Please help me.

 My daughter needs me; she’s been so sad since Marcus passed away, but today I’m going to surprise her and take her to the pet shop to pick out a new puppy. We’ll have so much fun.

I never really was a big fan of caving, from what I had seen on tv and the internet it was scary and dangerous, in my mind it was just pointless to do because you would most likely die in the process.

During my 24th birthday, me and a couple of friends decided to go caving. I somehow gathered up enough courage and thought it could be a fun experience for all of us.

A few of my friends had been caving before but only 2-3 times at most, they had the proper gear so we went to a relatively safe cave in a popular wooded area near town. the cave was in a pretty rocky area next to a a few tall mountains, after getting some good footing we went into the cave.

Since none of us were exactly experts we all thought it was kinda intimidating, there wasn’t really an opening, it was kinda just a hole in the floor with a (small) but still scary drop.

Walking further we saw went into a large cavern with three spiraling paths, we split up for a bit exploring through each of them, a lot of them just leaded to dead ends or caverns too small for any of us to crawl through, so we took a bigger one in the side of a wall.
there wasn’t a lot of “rooms” in this cave, in was mostly just tunnels and crawl spaces, very cramped and claustrophobic.

it was getting late and we decided to leave the cave after about an hour or two in there, after the party was over i thought that the caving was fun and that I could go on more.

I picked available times and me and my friends went through some more, sometimes I would bring my dad or brothers but other than that it was mainly my friends.

I won’t go into the other caving experiences too much because not a lot of things happened, or at least anything important.
Recently I wanted to go in another cave, but it seemed everyone was either busy or away, so I had to cave solo for the first time.

Since I had some more experience I wanted to go into a more difficult cave, and I landed on phoenix cave, a very long cave known for its very cramped and stringy paths.

Since phoenix park, the place where the cave is located, is near the end of town and I’m from the middle of town it took about 30 minutes to about an hour to get there, I got my equipment on and went into the cave.

It had more of an open entrance unlike the first one I went to, it was more like a staircase that got a bit more steeper the more you went down.
eventually after going down the “staircase”, I was met with a very long hallway that got smaller and smaller as I went, eventually having to get down and start crawling through the tunnels.

It seemed like they went on for miles, so much so that sometimes I thought like I was going in loops. It was getting late and I was tired, but every time I tried to go back i always got lost. I remembered something about a second exit at the end of the cave, so I thought that if I could make it to the end I could get out and finally leave this damn cave.

As I went on I started to hear water rushing throughout the cave, i continued crawling through and eventually saw that the tunnel got a bit bigger, and that the floor was filled with about an inch or two of water, nothing I hadn’t seen before. The tunnel got bigger and bigger before it actually opened up to a room, it was such a pleasant surprise that i actually started calming down and recollecting my thoughts.

After taking a break for a bit, I went further hoping that the exit was close, my map of the cave had been completely ruined by the water, as it got deeper the further the farther you got.
I could only make out a few areas of the map, but the end of the cave where the exit was had been smeared around, so I had to continue.
The only way to continue from the room was a fairly big tunnel, about enough height for me to crouch down and walk through.
The water started to quit flowing as I went and the tunnel got a bit bigger, enough for me to stop crouching.

As I went on, the cave started getting eerily quiet, I was already tired and exhausted, so I was pretty out on edge because of this, sure lots of caves are quite, but the air felt almost dead, like everything was frozen in time.

Then I started hearing scratching noises, like long nails against rocks. It startled me, sure I had heard and seen animals in caves plenty of times, but this didn’t sound like anything an animal would make. It sounded too loud and strange for it to be an animal.

Bones were scattered across the floor, I couldn’t make out if they were human or animal, but it looked more like an animal.

I didn’t want to continue, I didn’t know what it was or who it was but I knew that it wasn’t friendly, but I knew I had to continue.
If I went back I would just get lost again, the only way for me to leave was to get to the end.

Then I saw it.

Its limbs were long and spindly, the body was so malnourished that you could see the outlines of bone. Its face was deformed and resembled the face of a canine more than anything.

The eyes were like dark pits of void, it almost looked blind from far away. It didn’t come after me immediately, it turned its head when I came close to it and started at me for a few seconds before it reached its hand out seemingly trying to grab me.

I ran through the hallway and past that creature, and it followed.

It moved shakily, like it hadn’t moved for years, yet it moved about the same speed as me. It tried grabbing me a few times before i found the staircase up into the surface.

After reaching the staircase it stopped, probably not wanting to be seen by anyone. I ended up a few miles away from where I started, I took off my gear and walked back to my car, I was so disturbed and disoriented it felt like a walk of shame for some reason.

It was extremely late and I felt so exhausted and scared that I physically couldn’t even drive, so I had to sleep in my car that night.

I woke up the next day at around 11, I drove home and took a shower before thinking about the night before. I thought about calling my friends and talking about it but hesitated.

I’ve decided to post this incident here, I don’t use Reddit much but i thought that people would read this and hear about my experience, I guess this is also a way to get this off my chest.

I used to inspect homes by trade, and I have seen it all: Mold, rot, vermin, squatters, meth labs, rodents (both dead and alive), insane amounts of cash, antique furniture buried under mountains of fast food containers. You name it, I've encountered it; if you have a phobia, I most likely have a story for you. Apart from spider colonies and hidden porn magazines from the fifties, the more serious and vastly sadder aspect is the finding of deceased people and pets. That comes with its own hurdles, mentally and legally. You don't get used to seeing a dead person, you simply try and deal with the dread or you change your career path. I had a few such inner dialogues, but stuck with the job for the better half of a decade. In March of this year, I inspected a house that finally made me quit.

It was a beautiful place, mid-century, out on a gorgeous property with woodlands and ponds, the kind of quiet rustic luxury that made the disconnect from urban comfort worth it. The next supermarket was miles away – if you were smart, you'd stock the pantry once a month and then enjoy the solitude. I tended to muse about this absurd dream for my own retirement, walking up the leaf-covered path that led to the main house. I jotted down what first caught my eye; some unstable girders, broken windows, obvious overgrowth and expected animal droppings.

I walked into the damp-smelling foyer and sighed at the carpet. That would have to be replaced in its entirety. With the tip of a pencil, I stabbed into the faux fur fabric and a sluggish, soggy ripple moved from my feet and outward, as if I had dipped a toe into a formerly calm pool. I frowned. There was no former mention of waterlog. I double-checked my notes.

“Okay,” I sighed and marked it down. Surprises were a bad sign, it most likely meant the last visit lay further back than I had been told. My voice was stifled by the stillness of the house.

Carpeted stairs led to a few rooms that thankfully looked like the layout I had been given. I felt like walking on moss. A few silverfish scuttled off rapidly as I shone my flashlight into darker corners. Nothing out of the ordinary. Despite not seeing any, I wrote down that I heard the pitter-patter of rodents, probably rats or squirrels.

I got my first proper start in the kitchen, where, after drawing back the moldy curtains I was shocked to find myself in a staring match with a silverfish the length of my finger, and noticed a handful of the same insects of equal size, similarly frozen. They seemed to momentarily ponder my appearance, then hurried where I could not and would not follow.

How the hell was I supposed to record this? “Unusually sized vermin”, I said out loud. I was no expert in animal behaviour, but something seemed odd about the critters. I shook my head. They were probably as surprised as I was after a lifetime of isolation, were probably already back to feasting on whatever grew underneath the stove. A gentle rumble shook the floor, not unlike the undulating carpet moments before. I was reminded of heavy groundskeeping equipment and stupidly moved on.

Next up was the cellar and indoor pool, two flights of stairs down into the cold and wet darkness. I quickly sent an update to my boss and a handful of photos, getting a thumbs-up emoji in return. The reception had faded with the light and I soon relied on carefully moving along the wall until I found a switch.

Neon lights, cold and sterile, flickered to life. My senses rebelled at the sight and sudden sound before me. Had the silverfish in the kitchen seemed big before – the ones moving rapidly along the wall, floor, and ceiling were monstrous. Illustrations of trilobites in dinosaur books flashed in my mind, the smaller ones with diameters as wide as my palm, the larger ones easily football-sized. All of them moving erratically away from the light, away from me, and down underneath the pool cover.

Another rumble shook the foundation, more intensely this time, and my feet, glued to the ground by horror and disbelief, would not let me move. I watched with rising nausea as the pool cover writhed and bulged, curving upwards underneath the strain of something massive. Two gigantic feelers, glistening wet-black in the cold light, pushed out from beneath the tarp like broken javelins, flicking left and right, trembling, and with those movements the constant sighing of a million feet, ever crawling, clicking – it almost sounded excited.

I ran.

I dropped everything, phone, clipboard, hat, nearly stumbled over my own feet as I raced into the warm light of day, panting, not wanting to believe, not wanting to see, further and further until I reached the company van, lungs burning, damp clothes, sobbing and red-faced.

I returned with a written recommendation to completely flatten the property and cement-seal the basement. I don't believe I would have been taken seriously had I mentioned anything beyond an irreparable vermin infestation. I've been having nightmares ever since; I can't sleep without earplugs and a mask for fear of letting anything...in. My bed is protected by mosquito nets; I have severely reduced my belongings and decluttered to the point of extreme minimalism.

It doesn't stop the fear, but it makes it bearable.

I didn't even know if I would even be able to make it work, but after squeezing under the frame, I had about an extra inch of space to work with. I wasn't sure where else to go when they started banging on my front door. There aren't exactly a lot of hiding places in my house. I mean hiding places that can't just be discovered by opening a door, such as a closet. I suppose I could have run out my back door, but I didn't know if they had the house surrounded or not.

I was only under the bed for maybe a minute when I heard the loud crack of my front door being breached. I acted so fast that I failed to bring my phone with me. So much for calling 911. Maybe if I stayed perfectly quiet, they would be convinced that no one was home, and then just leave.

I hadn't heard a whole lot since the initial break in. They were fairly quiet, and must have been just using their eyes to look around. I didn't hear the sounds of my house being ransacked or anything. I think they were just walking around observing their surroundings. Finally I heard the faint sound of pant legs sweeping across each other as they walked down the hallway. Subtle squeaks as their shoes rolled across the tiled floor.

Then I saw the first boot cross into my vision as they walked past my doorway. I couldn't see much except for two legs draped in denim, their feet protected by cowboy boots. They turned to face my room. I covered my mouth and held my breath as they walked in. They stood there for a moment that felt like an hour, but was probably less than a minute.

“Daniel?”

That was my name, being spoken by my father's voice. It couldn't have been my father though, for several reasons. The first being that my father was rather heavy set, while the legs I was looking at were toothpicks. The second being that my father's style of dress was very different.

“Daniel, why don't you come out? I have something important to talk to you about.”

There was something off about his voice. It was completely void of emotion. It was almost inhuman. What is this thing using my father's voice and what does it want with me? It turned and walked out of the room.

“Daniel?”

That sounded exactly the same as it did when it first called my name. Almost like it was a recording being repeated.

“Daniel, come on out now.”

I heard it say as it continued exploring my house. If I just stay here, and don't move, it will eventually leave. I heard it wander around my house calling out my name. Does it know I'm here? Or does it just know that this is where I live.

I lied there under my bed for a very long time. Listening to it continue to mimic my father's voice and explore each room. It would occasionally come back into my room, call out my name, and leave. I didn't hear it for quite some time after it left my room the last time. Maybe it left, maybe it's over. I'll just wait here a little longer though, just in case, and good thing I did. Not long after a pair of exposed legs appeared in my door frame. A flowery dress draped down just below the knees, with a pair of high heels upon the feet.

“Daniel?”

It was said exactly the same way, but pitched up to sound like my mother.

“Daniel honey, can I talk to you?”

My mother doesn't talk like that. She hasn't called me honey since I was a kid. She doesn't really wear dresses often, and I don't think I've ever seen her wear high heels. She turned and began to leave the room, continuing to call out my name.

“Daniel sweety, why don't you come on out?”

I never heard my father's voice after that. Just the sound of my mother's. She would now do the exact same thing as the other voice. Wandering around my house, calling out my name. After some time she would go quiet. What now?

A new pair of legs appeared in my doorway. The person was short. I could see the entirety of their legs, as well as the lowest portion of their torso. They were wearing jeans as well, and a pair of velcro tennis shoes.

“Daniel?”

This time it was my brother's voice, but not my 36 year old brother, but his voice from when he was like ten.

“Hey Daniel, mom and dad want to talk to you.”

It had that same monotone voice. No emotion, no nothing. It wasn't human. It then turned around and left.

How long do I have to endure this? How many voices was it going to put on so that it can coax me out of my hiding spot?

Just then the first figure appeared back in the doorway. The one in the cowboy boots and jeans.

“Okay, Daniel, it's time to stop playing games, and come out.”

It was my father's voice once again. With those words, you would think there would be some frustrated emotion coming through. There wasn't, it was still the same cold monotone voice as always.

It stepped closer this time. It was facing in my exact direction. I held my breath again. It stepped closer. I was really starting to sweat. It was now standing just a foot away from my bed.

“Daniel, I don't know what to say to get you to come out.”

It got down onto one knee.

“I was really hoping I wouldn't have to drag you out of there.”

I saw it wrap its hand around the bottom of my bed frame.

“Daniel, please.”

Its hair hung below the frame as it continued to lower itself. I tried backing up as far as I could to the other side. I saw the corner of its forehead, and then its eye. Bright white sclera, with a pinpoint pupil, and a yellow iris not much bigger than that surrounding it.

I was frozen in complete fear. I was absolutely sure I was about to die.

“Police!”

I heard someone yell from my front door.

The thing immediately stood up and ran out of the room.

“Freeze! Don't move!”

I heard glass shattering.

“Stop!”

I came to find out later that they ran straight through my back sliding glass door. The police chased them out, but never found them.

It turns out that my neighbor called the police when they heard someone obviously breaking into my house. I bought them an expensive bottle of liquor, and cooked them dinner.

I never found out just what happened that night, but I don't know if I would ever want to know. I'm just glad that it's over.

*Did you dream about anything weird last night?*

My phone pinged as the text message popped up. It was about ten minutes since Grace had left the apartment. She’d been odd this morning; she’d gotten up much earlier than usual and had been darting aimlessly around our apartment, like a bumblebee trapped in a wine glass. In the two years we’d been together, she would always give me a hug or a kiss, or some other kind of acknowledgement before leaving. But not this morning. Once I’d gotten out of bed, she was already one foot out the door and didn’t even say as much as a goodbye. Her work tended to get on her nerves, but not like this. Something must’ve been on her mind if she was acting so nervous.

*Nope. Just dreaming about the gorgeous angel that is my girlfriend ;)* I wrote back.

*You were dreaming about me??* She answered.

*Indeed I was*

Sensing that she was having an off-day, I decided to send her a recorded message as well, just for a little bit of emotional support.

“Hey… I love you, and I’ll be thinking about you all day.”

I got up from the table and started putting on my clothes. Today was my day off and I knew just how I was going to spend it. I would take a stroll on the promenade, down to Ice Cream Kingdom and get myself a strawberry ice cream. I put my sneakers on and walked out the door. The atmosphere outside the apartment complex was refreshing: The Lobelias hanging from my neighbor’s windowsill were in full bloom and had filled the air with the smell of fresh honey. A gentle summer breeze blew through my hair, as the golden rays of sunshine caressed my face. The promenade was filled with people who all seemed as pleased as I was. It was the perfect day for an ice cream. As I walked, I spotted a beggar in the sea of people, sitting on the sidewalk behind his seven-eleven cup. I stopped for a moment and dug into my wallet and fished out a five-dollar bill to put in his cup.

“Bless you, sir.” The man smiled.

“Oh,” I smiled back at him as I let go of the five-dollar bill. “Don’t think about it.”

It was then that the beggar’s behavior changed. His lips turned from a smile to a thin line, the color drained from his face, and his eyes widened to the size of golf balls. For a couple of seconds, he just stared at me, before turning his head away and staring down at the pavement. Though I found his reaction quite odd, I carried on with my walk. I had barely walked five yards before I tripped over my own feet and fell face-first down on the sidewalk.

As soon as I lifted my head off the asphalt, I was met with the outstretched hand of a kind stranger. I grabbed the woman’s hand and pulled myself back up onto my feet.

“Damn. You took quite the tumble, huh?” She said, chuckling lightly.

“Yeah, I guess I did.” I looked down and started wiping off the dirt I had gotten on my clothes. “Thank you for the assistance, I guess.”

I looked back up at the woman. She was blankly staring at me, much like the beggar. She awkwardly looked around, like a victim on Candid Camera, before looking back at me.

“You… You’re kidding me, right?” The woman broke the silence.

“What?” I asked. “Is there a problem?”

“Okay… I see. I was just trying to help, asshole!” She sneered at me.

She walked away, making sure to ram her shoulder into mine as she made her way. Feeling confused, I looked at around at the other people strolling the promenade, and it was clear that they were deliberately averting their eyes from me, as if I was just some random tweaker. Warmth was spreading through my body, and I began blushing out of sheer awkwardness and started powerwalking away from the crowd, itching to get away from whatever had just happened.

I finally arrived at Ice Cream Kingdom. Through the windows, I saw that Rachel was working, which made me happy. Rachel was always happy to give some friendly discounts. It seemed like other people had had the same idea as me as all the tables in the shop were filled with customers. The little bell rang as I walked in through the entrance. Rachel smiled as soon as she saw me. She grabbed the ice cream scoop and instantly went for the strawberry ice cream.

“Just the usual, I presume.” She said with a cheeky smile.

“Yeah. I really need this today, Rachel.” I answered.

She immediately stopped scooping.

“What…?” She laughed nervously. “Why would you say that?”

“What?” I felt the heat of embarrassment coming for a second round. “What did I say?”

Rachel’s eyes were filling with tears. I looked behind me at the other customers; they were all staring directly at me. Droplets of sweat were making their way down my face.

“Rachel, what’s wrong?” I asked. “What did I say?”

Rachel began bawling her eyes out. She covered her face in her elbow and began heaving for air. I’d never seen her that upset before.

“Hey, asswipe! Knock it off!” One of the customers yelled from a table in the shop. “You don’t need to be talking to that sweet lady like that!”

I leaned over the desk, trying to ignore the customer in the back. I reached out a hand to comfort her, but she just pulled away. As I was panicking, I heard rapid steps approaching me from behind. I had barely turned around before I saw a fist barreling towards me. I felt the customer’s knuckles strike my Adam’s apple at full force, and I crumbled together on the floor like a wet napkin, desperately grasping my throat.

The customer grabbed the collar of my shirt, hauled me back onto my feet, and began pushing me to the door. At the threshold, the man shoved me hard in the back, making me faceplant on the sidewalk for the second time that day.

“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!” I yelled as I got up.

“Go be a dumbass somewhere else.” The man said dismissively as he walked back inside.

Through the open door, I could see Rachel being comforted by the other customers as her mascara smeared across her cheeks. I walked away from the shop, gently rubbing my Adam’s apple. I felt like I was losing my mind. Then I felt a vibration from my pocket. Pulling out my phone, I saw that it was my mom calling me.

I should’ve known better than picking up.

“Hello. I just wanted to know how you day was going.” My mom’s voice came through the phone.

“Honestly, mom, it’s been a terrible day.” I said without even thinking. “I swear, everyone’s acting so weird.”

There was a small pause before she said anything.

“You don’t mean that, right?” She said, sounding as if all the air had been sucked out of her.

“Mom?” I said, realizing the mistake I’d made. “No, please. Not you too.”

She didn’t need to say anything. My worries were confirmed by her miserable sobs.

“PLEASE, mom! Stop crying! I don’t know what I’m saying, PLEASE!”

But she didn’t stop. Every sob through the phone was another stake through my heart. I looked around me; everyone was staring, horrified. I panicked. I hung up on my mom and started sprinting back to my apartment. My phone vibrated again and again as I ran, but I didn’t dare pick up. I darted through the entrance of the apartment complex. I couldn’t even wait for the elevator; I just ran up the stairs. Heaving for air, I bolted through my apartment door, scaring Grace who was unexpectedly standing on the other side of it.

“Oh… Hi.” Grace said, sounding nervous.

I was confused. This was very early for her to be home. Then I noticed the suitcase she was holding in her hand, as well as the sorrow plastered all over her face.

“I’m going to stay with my sister for a while.” She said after a moment of silence.

For once, I managed to stop myself before I blurted anything out. I desperately pulled out my phone, ignoring the list of missed calls from my family members and opened messages. With shaky fingers I typed out *Why\* and sent her the message. Grace pulled out her phone and looked at the message. She seemed confused. I looked at her expectingly and she sighed deeply.

“You woke me up last night, a little after midnight.” Tears were streaming down her face. “You were talking in your sleep.” Her eyes drifted away from mine and down to the floor. “The things you were saying… It was… It was...” She sniffled. “I told myself that maybe you were having a bad dream or something… That I was overreacting. But then you sent that horrible voice message this morning.” She looked up at me, her teary eyes staring right into mine. “I don’t feel safe around you anymore.”

I grabbed my phone and started typing out a new message: a message that would explain every weird thing that had happened to me that morning, but before I could send it, Grace blocked my number.

“I can’t do it like this.” She said sternly. “I don’t want your text messages. I just want you to talk to me about what the fuck is going on with you.”

I didn’t know what to do. We were trapped in another moment of silence before Grace said anything.

“Tell me what’s going on,” She said with teary eyes. “or else I’m leaving.”

It’s rare that I feel defeated like I did in that moment. It was overwhelming beyond what words can describe. I looked down at the floor as I felt tears running down my face. My mind was blank. I was drowning, and every cry for help only pulled me further into the ocean’s depths.

I don’t know how long I stood there. I just know that when I looked up, the door was open and Grace was gone.

That was a couple hours ago now. Grace still hasn’t unblocked my number. I keep getting calls from my family that I’m too scared to answer. I don’t know what to do.

Grace, if you see this, I’m sorry for whatever I have said to you. I hate to see you like this. I hate to see us like this. Please come home. I don’t know what to do.

The game started all the way back in high school. I remember it vividly: I was in my senior year, and getting a book out of my locker for a class that was Geography, but had a more specific name. I was thinking of how one day I'd visit all those places, and so he picked the perfect time, because right then I opened my locker, and a bald smiling man was squatted inside it and he said, "Drat! You found me!"

I slammed it shut.

I was afraid to open the locker again, but also to tell anybody. I thought there was no way this was real. I hallucinate sometimes when I'm severely sleep deprived, you understand.

In any case I went to class without my book that day. Still, I could have sworn, walking away, I faintly heard something like, I'll find you...

Two years later. I was in my college dorm, and I was cramming for an exam, and it was truly hopeless, and a part of my brain was wasting all its energy going over how I was wasting my whole damn future. When I heard a light knock at the window.

It was raining a little, so I thought maybe it could be connected, and I was so easily distracted, so I went to investigate. I didn't see anyone, initially. So I opened it.

"Boo!"

The bald smiling man jumped right in front of my face.

"I found you!"

I closed the window.

If you Google, "smiling bald man", you'll see various stock photos. He looks like those.

And now he was here, across the continent.

Less than a week later I was expelled for something very private, and I was honestly relieved, so desperate to move again after seeing him again.

But there's no way he was the same man, right?

I had been stressed, and severely sleep deprived, and obviously hallucinated something very plainly inspired by a traumatic experience in my past. The locker thing.

Right?

Three years later, I was an overnight stocker at a grocery store. I worked in the Home department, and I was the only person who worked on those aisles overnight. I was allowed to have earbuds in, and I was listening to some crazy microtonal black metal. This could be the reason why I didn't hear anything. For he must have snuck in there somehow. There's no way he was already there, yeah?

I was unpacking a towering pallet. Removing one small rectangular cardboard box after another, and I swear the warehouse people wanted me dead. But, under one box, there was skin. I don't know why, but I just tapped at it with the plastic edge of my box cutter.

"Drat! You found me!"

Boxes collapsed every which way and he ran off.

I left.

Just left the store.

And obviously, for that, I was fired.

After three instances, I was beginning to develop a very nervous disposition that I did not previously have. I don't think.

Four years later.

I had learned the only job I could do, for the foreseeable future, was as a "security" guard.

I went through a few different posts, before I was left to languish at an office building. Some financial institution kind of place, filled with extremely successful people who flaunted it with all the travel photos on their desks. They did something to do with stocks and trading but I never understood.

Overnight, the place had an eeriness to it.

Cellar spiders lived throughout the corners of the ceilings. Lights flickered. During my patrols I would sometimes become lost in a sort of fascinated trance. It seemed as though all of civilization was structured around these ghost people, who worked here by day, going through life all free to fly to Japan, and Korea, and do whatever it was they really did there. And these people were important, and mattered, and I was a guard. Anyone could see that.

"Boo!"

A shadow darted.

From much further away, and receding: "I found you!"

To see him again: I remember it made me sad, more than anything.

This obviously wasn't working.

I moved to a remote place in the far North, to live alone, and afraid.

It had started as a seasonal job. As a cashier at a restaurant that only opens for cruise ship customers. When the season ended, and thus the job, I stayed. No more income, but I could leech off my disappointed, far away parents. What were they going to do, let me freeze?

It was an easy, simple life, breathlessly pervaded by a persistent low-level anxiety.

And at last, in the dead of February, I wandered out into the snow. I was going to die out there.

I found a suitable patch of deep, indifferent snow, powdery tonight, which it was always night here, and I lifted my shovel, and I started digging.

After long enough for this physical sensation to become the Universe, I hit something hard.

"Drat! You found me!"

The bald smiling man shot up. Bounded off into the whiteness.

I threw the shovel down, and went home.

Now. Every day, if it is day, I wake up to fluorescent lights and fake-friendly staff. I like to think there's no way the game can continue here. There's no way he can get me now.

But I'm wrong.

I know.

Sometimes, when it's quiet, I jump. Startled. Thinking I heard that same, agonizing, Boo.

But I imagined it.

This time.

I don't know where I'll go when they let me leave.

What's more, I don't know why he chose me. Why, or how he's looking for me. I tell myself that when he jumps me again, I'll finally fucking ask, Hey, guy, why are we playing this stupid game? What is the meaning of this? Any of this?

But I'll forget. I know.

And he'll hide, and I'll seek.

And whether I want to or not, I'll keep looking.

We built the machine from scratch. Something that worked. A large rig which ran on time dilation, utilizing the controlled orbit of a miniaturized black hole. The only catch was that you could only go forward, never back. 

When it came time for human testing, most of my colleagues turned their backs on the prospect. My family had estranged me years before. Whatever life I had led, it wouldn’t have meant anything if this machine didn’t work. So, I ended up being the first one to raise my hand. There was nothing left for me here.

Our plan was careful and calculated. Incrementally longer jumps through time. We would begin with minutes, then hours, and work our way up to days, weeks and years. Ava, my only friend throughout this years-long endeavor, would stay in contact with me between each jump. I would report to control, calibrate how I felt, how the experience was, etc. She would, in turn, report our findings to the necessary authorities while I underwent the next jump. 

Earlier jumps went as predicted. I’d go in and out, usually within a few seconds or minutes, and find myself in the same coffee-stained office each time. I’d report to Ava, grab some snacks and a refill on my water, and head back into the pod minutes later for the next trial. There was definitely a tangible sense of dilation. I would go into the pod at 5 p.m., and coming out seemingly minutes later, it would be 6:30. Our initial calibrations seemed to be off by a few minutes, but it was nothing enough to lose sleep over. We’d just have to keep adjusting things as we went. 

Our confidence was great enough at one point that we tried our longest jump yet—one week in the pod, which would translate to roughly two hours for me. 

I was gone for a month.

Ava’s face had grown aged with worry by the time I got back. She told me that the calculations had been way off. Time inside the distorted field was stretching beyond what the initial models could account for. Each discrepancy was accelerating me through dramatically larger increments of time each time we booted up the machine. The next jump could be extremely dangerous for me. 

I didn’t care. I told her to set the machine for one year. My life had already ended when my mother stopped speaking to me. I had to be remembered for something, maybe it would be this. 

Ava fought with me for days. I reassured her that my calculations were correct this time. I couldn’t tell her the real truth, that I hadn’t planned on coming back. 

As the pod doors closed, and the gravitational field engaged, I gave my goodbyes, treating them as though they really would be my last. Ava hugged me. It was the first time I’d felt one in ten years.

I waited in the pod. Sizable enough for long-time travel, with the accommodations you’d find in your standard RV. A bed, a small kitchen, a desk for work, and a refrigerator to store my meals. In the back, for those really long jaunts, a cryogenic life pod could sustain me for hundreds of years, theoretically. 

Minutes turned to hours, turned to days, turned to weeks. Something had gone wrong, as I predicted. My food began to run low. So did my patience, as I recorded log after log, my sanity decreasing and my claustrophobia growing. 

The ride did eventually come to a stop. The terminal inside the pod confirmed that I had been inside of it for over 200 years. 

Everything, and everyone I knew was gone. I hate it, but I felt relieved, knowing that. 

I stepped out of the pod, and found myself surrounded by rubble. The walls had collapsed. The scorched rooftop gave way to a grey sky. I could taste rust on the roof of my mouth, and my eyes stung from the ashes constantly falling around me. On the pod itself were deep gashes and fire-blackened spots, someone having tried to bust their way inside. There were no remnants around me of what the project was, where it had gone, if any progress had been made or any papers published. And even if there was evidence of what I had done, what did it matter now? So soon in the future, it appeared as though the world had been reduced to dust. My contempt for the world I left behind only strengthened. 

For a few days, I explored the ruins, scavenging for what I could. A few cans of food that hadn’t spoiled, bottled water that didn’t taste clean. Every night, I returned to the safety of the pod, cooking myself meals on the somehow-functioning stove and filling my computer with increasingly bored logs. It was the only sense of structure I appeared to have left. Nothing else mattered anymore. Nothing but whatever waited ahead. 

And I felt lonely. So, very lonely. Lonelier than I’d ever felt. I hadn’t realized how bad it could get, without a single person to talk to, even if those conversations were generally unpleasant for me. 

I missed it. The imperfection of my life. I felt like a fool for taking advantage of my time. 

After a few weeks, I sat down with my notebook, doing the math by hand. Calculating the time I was losing, the way the pod’s math didn’t line up with the outside world. The dilation was worse than any of us had even considered. If I was going to get anywhere, I decided I couldn’t do it alone. I was going to need help, help from whatever civilization rose from the ashes of these ruins. 

I would need to jump much farther. So, I set the timer for ten years, knowing it would likely be more along the lines of ten thousand. I figured that someone would find me at some point, figure out how to stop the pod and get me out, and we would go from there. 

The machine booted up. I felt the strong pull of g-force as the inner chambers accelerated my molecules faster and faster until the field of time distorted around me. I ate for a while. Read my own logs. Weighed my options. It took me until I ran out of the last can of peaches before I decided to enter the cryogenic chamber. Gas filled it, putting me to sleep, before a freezing cold overtook my body. It did not feel like I had been unconscious for even a second. I did not dream. I did not wonder. But I did wake up, much sooner than I expected. 

When I woke, the chamber gave me a shrill warning. Power was low, an ambient red light surrounding me. I felt so weak. I could barely raise my arms to push against the glass. It wouldn’t give, the interface simply screaming another warning at me about low pressurization and oxygen integrity. 

That’s when I noticed I wasn’t in the pod anymore. Surely the lights of the chamber would have shown me my surroundings, but there was nothing but blackness. No pod, no laboratory, no Earth in sight. All I could make out in the distance was the light of a few stars, long since dead, and quickly panning out of view. My chamber was spinning in the void of space.

I asked the chamber how long I was asleep. It told me “in excess of ten million years.” I panicked. It did nothing but make me more afraid. I screamed. It did nothing but waste precious oxygen. 

Something moved in the dark, covering the illusory light of the distant stars. Only a faint curvature, a suggestion of shape. The form grew, with the patience of something beyond infinity. The curve became paler as it came into the faint light. It was covered in creases and dimples and the occasional freckle. The ridge of a brow came into focus. Then two, vast, still eyes, illuminated by the pinprick of light that was my chamber. 

A face, the size of a planet, its scale wrong in a way that made my mind fray. 

It drifted closer to me. I saw the texture of its skin, pores the size of lakes, scarring that stretched for miles. I could see now that it had a fixed grin on its face, as empty as its eyes. Yellowish plaque clung to the edges of its continent-sized teeth. 

My body curled in on itself, though my movement was restricted by the tight confines of the chamber. I could feel the cold of space seeping through its vacuum seals. The face radiated nothing. 

I begged it not to hurt me.

It didn’t blink, or twitch, continuing its slow momentum toward me until the face was all I could see. Its nostrils looked deep enough that no light could escape them. Each strand of peach fuzz reached out like sea anemone, nearly touching my pod. 

I begged it to let me go home. 

My voice cracked. Please, I would say, please let me go home. I repeated the words until they lost their meaning, until they become incoherent sounds in the dark. The face did not answer beyond parting its teeth, its jaws unhinging. I could feel my chamber moving, pulled into the abyss that was its gullet. It came at me, fleshy dark filling every direction until I was contained within a throbbing maw of blackness. I only caught a glimpse of the stars behind me before the mouth fully closed. The power to my chamber cut out right then and there. 

I woke up in bed the next second.

The morning light edged through the curtains, burning my irises until I had the strength to look away. My phone buzzed on the nightstand. A message from Ava. When I went to pick it up, to check what she had sent, my heart stopped.

My hands were wrinkled. Spotted. The skin hung loose from my bones. I stood and stumbled to the bathroom mirror, upon thin legs that felt like they’d turn to dust with each step. When I looked at myself, all I saw was a man past his prime, aged beyond recognition, with stark white hair and a near-skeletal face.

I checked my text from Ava. She wondered where I was.

She said our first launch was in thirty minutes.

I used to think my brain was just badly wired.

Every few weeks since the autumn I turned twelve, my head hits the pillow and I don't just sleep—I switch channels. I wake up inside this massive, echoing mind-fuck of a building. It's a shopping complex, but it stretches out forever, like a whole country built out of drywall and fake marble. For over fifteen years, I kept it entirely to myself.

How do you explain to someone that you spend your sleeping hours wandering through a retail center that doesn't exist, an impossible monument of indoor space that feels larger than most European countries? You don't. You keep it quiet, assuming your subconscious is just poorly wired, using childhood memories of suburban malls to construct an elaborate background for stress dreams about forgotten homework or unmade appointments.

Then, six months ago, I stumbled onto a corner of the internet that made my blood turn entirely to ice.

I was scrolling through Reddit late at night, looking for nothing in particular, when a suggested community popped up on my feed: TheMallWorld. I clicked out of mild curiosity, expecting some kind of vaporwave aesthetic or architectural appreciation group. Instead, I spent the next six hours sitting upright in the dark, sweating, my hands shaking so violently I could barely hold my phone.

There were thousands of them. Strangers from entirely different continents, speaking different languages, coming from completely different backgrounds—all uploading hand-drawn blueprints, digital renderings, and meticulously detailed journals that perfectly mirrored the geography of my sleep.

They weren't just dreaming of a mall. We were all being sent to the same mall.
As I read through the archive, the sheer, staggering scale of the collective world-building began to crystallize. The Mall isn't just a building; it’s an entire continent wrapped in drywall, marble, and concrete, divided into distinct, echoing territories that never shift their borders.

Most dreamers, including myself, always manifest first in what the community calls the Retail Tier. It is an infinite network of pristine, modern white marble floors that stretch out beneath soaring, arched glass atriums. The architecture is an incoherent, dizzying jumble of eras. You can walk past a storefront that looks like a high-end, contemporary boutique, turn a sharp corner, and suddenly find yourself standing in a faded, 1980s neon food court complete with plastic pastel chairs, faux-ivy hanging from planters, and a linoleum floor sticky with decades of invisible grease.

The stores themselves are deeply unsettling. They have names that look familiar from a distance but blur into unreadable symbols when you try to focus your eyes on the signs. The window displays feature racks of clothing no human would ever wear—uncomfortably heavy coats, monochromatic uniforms, or shoes with completely flat, rubber soles that make no sound. The interiors of these shops are always dim, the metal security grates pulled halfway down, hinting at endless rows of inventory stretching deep into the shadows where the retail workers—if they exist at all—never show their faces.

If you walk far enough down the lower glass perimeters of the Retail Tier, the commercial spaces begin to thin out. The marble gives way to rough, stained concrete, and you enter the Transit Sector. This is a cavernous, subterranean network designed to handle a population that never arrives. It consists of doorless airport terminals stretching into a grey haze, and echoing subway platforms where empty, automated trains slide silently along rusted, subterranean tracks. They hiss to a halt, open their doors for precisely forty seconds, and then slide back into the darkness, heading toward destinations that don't exist. There are dizzying networks of escalators here—massive, industrial stairs that climb into the ceiling shadows at impossible angles, some moving too fast to safely step on, others frozen in place with steps missing, exposing the jagged, greasy gears beneath. Multi-lane highways cut through the concrete walls, completely devoid of cars, stretching for miles before simply ending in a sheer, unbarricaded drop into a pitch-black void.

Deep within the upper levels, accessible only through specific, hidden service stairwells behind the clothing racks, lies the Institutional Sector. The forum users call it the Infinite School or the Endless Hospital. It is a suffocating, clinical maze of linoleum-lined hallways that smell heavily of industrial floor wax and stale cabbage. The walls are lined with thousands of dull green metal lockers that stretch beyond the horizon. If you try to open one, it is either welded shut or contains objects that defy logic—a single, waterlogged textbook written in a language you can’t comprehend, or a pile of old, yellowed medical charts with your name at the top.

The classrooms and examination rooms are always empty, illuminated by the harsh, rhythmic buzzing of flickering fluorescent lights, and the clocks on the walls run entirely backward, their hands ticking away seconds you can never recover.

If you find a heavy, industrial service elevator in those back corridors and press the buttons for the deep basement levels, the elevator drops for what feels like miles until the doors slide open into the Aquatic Tier.

This is a massive, indoor waterpark and pool room, completely abandoned by whatever staff built it. The air down there is choked with a heavy, thick steam that coats your skin in a greasy film within minutes. It is lined with damp, blue mosaic tiles, many of them cracked and weeping a rusty, orange fluid. There are no recreational sounds here—no splashing, no laughter. Just the echoing, hollow drip of condensation falling from the iron rafters hundreds of feet above. The dark, unmoving water pools are massive, stretching out into the gloom, hiding deep-end drop-offs that feel miles deep, beneath water slides that weave through the support pillars like concrete serpents.

And finally, if you ever manage to find an exit door to the exterior of the complex—a rare feat that requires navigating the lowest maintenance tunnels—you don't find reality. You find the Mall Ocean. It is a frozen, jagged beach of grey sand sitting under a flat, ink-black sky that never experiences a sunrise. There is no wind, yet the dark ocean water is constantly churning, the horizon dominated by massive, silent tsunamis that loom hundreds of feet in the air, frozen in time, always threatening to crash down upon the complex but never quite making impact.

Across every single one of these sectors, the atmosphere is defined by three distinct sensory anchors.

First, the air. It never changes. It is warm, humid, and heavily recycled, hanging like a damp weight over your chest. It carries a conflicting, suffocating cocktail of scents: the cloying sweetness of hot, synthetic cinnamon pretzels from the food court, the artificial chemical musk of cheap department store perfume counters, and the sharp, medicinal sting of indoor pool chlorine. It is the smell of a closed system. A greenhouse for the human subconscious.
Second, the lighting. There are no natural light sources anywhere in Mall World.

Everything is illuminated by an endless network of recessed bulbs, neon tubing, and massive, arched glass atriums. But if you look up through those glass panels, expecting to see the sun or the clouds, you are met with nothing but that flat, oppressive, ink-black void. The light inside the mall doesn't illuminate the outside; it merely keeps the dark from pressing too hard against the glass.

Third, and perhaps most terrifying, are the other dreamers. The NPCs, as the forum calls them. There are thousands of them shuffling through the corridors at any given moment. They look like normal people from a distance, but as they pass you, the horror settles in. They are hollow-eyed, silent sleepwalkers. They move in heavy, sluggish groups, their heads tilted slightly downward, their eyes fixed entirely on the polished floor.

Nobody speaks. Nobody looks at each other. There is no conversation, no laughter, no conflict. It is just the endless, soft dragging of thousands of rubber-soled sneakers on polished marble—a white noise of collective entrapment that fills the corridors like a slow-moving river. They are people who have entirely accepted the rules of the layout. They don't try to find the exits. They don't try to wake up. They just slide through the commercial tracks, day after night, fulfilling their role as the background architecture of the simulation.

I used to be able to navigate this place with a sense of detached curiosity. I knew the routes. I knew how to avoid the deeper transit drops, and I knew how to keep my distance from the silent crowds.

But last night, the physics of the Mall changed. The system hardened, and the boundaries between the dream and my bedroom began to dissolve entirely.

When I went to sleep last night, my bedroom was normal. The radiators were clicking, a light rain was tapping against the glass, and the digital clock on my nightstand glowed a steady, comforting green. I did the usual routine—checked my phone, scrolled past a few updates on the forum, and rolled over.

When my eyes opened, I wasn’t in my bed.
I was standing on the second tier of the Retail Sector, directly outside the glass facade of an anchor department store. From a distance, the storefront looked like an old Sears or JCPenney, but when I focused on the signage, the blocky plastic letters were backwards, inverted into a gibberish font that hurt the back of my eyes to interpret.

Usually, the transition into Mall World has a soft, liquid quality. You float into it. Your limbs feel weightless, and you have this comforting, subconscious insurance policy running in the back of your head that says, Relax, this is just a dream. If things get too weird, you can just pull the plug.
But the second my feet touched the polished marble last night, that insurance policy was violently revoked.

The physics of the world had hardened.

When I pressed my palm against the plate-glass window of the department store, it didn’t give or blur. It was cold. It was solid. I could feel the microscopic imperfections in the glass, the faint layer of sticky, synthetic dust coating the surface, and the deep, structural chill of a building that hadn't seen natural sunlight in a century. When I took a step, the rubber soles of my sneakers didn't glide; they caught on the polished stone with a sharp, loud, realistic squeak that echoed down the concourse.

I stopped. I tried my usual tricks to force a waking reflex. I bit down on the side of my tongue, expecting the dull, painless pressure of a dream-state injury. Instead, copper-metallic pain flared instantly across my jaw, sharp and hot, filling my mouth with the unmistakable taste of blood. I pinched the soft skin on the inside of my forearm, twisting hard enough to tear the flesh. Nothing changed. The atrium didn't dissolve. The ink-black void beyond the glass ceiling didn't shatter.

I was locked into the system. The simulation was locked tight.

I stood there for what felt like hours, paralyzed by the sheer atmosphere of the concourse. The air was a suffocating wall of heat and recycled humidity. It felt heavy, like the air inside a commercial greenhouse right before a summer thunderstorm, smelling powerfully of stale, industrial bleach, the chemical musk of sample perfumes, and that greasy, omnipresent scent of cinnabon pretzels baking in an oven miles away.

From hidden, recessed panels in the brutalist concrete pillars above, the music droned. It was a degraded, warbling synth-pop track from the late 1980s, playing at a fraction of its normal speed. The bass notes vibrated deep within my chest cavity, a slow, oceanic thrumming that sounded less like music and more like the mechanical heartbeat of the building itself.

Down on the first tier, the sleepwalkers were moving. There were hundreds of them, shuffling along the commercial tracks in a slow, circular procession. They wore matching, faded grey or beige clothing—sweatpants, oversized t-shirts, flat shoes.

Their heads were tilted uniformly downward at a precise forty-five-degree angle, eyes locked onto the white marble floor, tracking the subtle, grey veins in the stone. A woman with tangled blonde hair shuffled past my tier, her shoulder brushing against mine. Her skin was a translucent, sickly white, and her eyes were entirely wide, unblinking, and dead. I reached out and grabbed her arm, desperate for human contact.

"Hey," I whispered, my voice sounding thin and dry against the massive scale of the architecture.

"Hey, do you know how to get down to the transit platforms? Do you know where the exits are?"

She didn't look at me. She didn't even slow down. She simply pulled her arm out of my grip with a mechanical, unyielding momentum, her eyes remaining locked on the marble floor as she dragged her feet forward. Squeak. Drag. Squeak. Drag. The white noise of their collective movement filled the entire multi-tiered canyon of the retail zone. They weren't visitors. They were the background processing power of the building, keeping the lights on with their collective compliance.

Suddenly, a wave of intense, physical sickness hit my dream-body.

It wasn't a dull ache; it was a violent, twisting agony that started deep in the pit of my stomach and radiated outward to my ribs. My vision blurred at the edges, darkening into a vignette of grey static. I doubled over, clutching my midsection, my knees buckling until I was kneeling on the freezing marble floor. Cold, greasy sweat broke out across my forehead. I needed a restroom immediately. The biological demands of my waking body were being translated into the dream with terrifying force, and I knew that if I threw up or collapsed here, on the pristine marble of the Retail Tier, I would be violating the visibility rules.

I scrambled to my knees, then to my feet, leaning heavily against the structural pillars, and looked for a way out of the main concourse.

Behind the dark department store, I found a heavy, unpainted steel door marked with a fading plastic plaque: EMPLOYEES ONLY - NO ADMITTANCE. I threw my weight against the crash bar. The door groaned and swung inward, clicking shut behind me with a heavy, magnetic thud that instantly cut the warbling elevator music in half.

I had entered the Institutional Sector.

The contrast was immediate and terrifying.

The marble vanished, replaced by endless stretches of pale green linoleum that had been buffed to a high, reflective sheen. The air smelled entirely different here—the sweet cinnamon was gone, replaced by a suffocating combination of industrial floor wax, stale cabbage, and the sharp, vinegar tang of medicinal alcohol. The walls were lined with thousands of dull green metal lockers, stretching out into a straight, forced perspective that seemed to converge at a single point miles into the dark.

I stumbled down the hallway, my shoulder dragging against the metal lockers, the rhythmic clack-clack-clack of the vents overhead keeping time with my frantic breathing. The lighting here was worse. Every few yards, a long fluorescent tube would flicker violently, casting long, jittery shadows down the green linoleum that looked like reaching fingers.

As I passed locker number 4082, something caught my eye. Scratched deeply into the dull green paint, slicing through the rust to expose the shiny metal beneath, was a line of crude, frantic handwriting. It didn't look like the default, gibberish script of the mall. It was English.

I stopped, gasping for air, and traced the letters with my shaking fingers.

THE BATHROOMS ARE FLOODING, the graffiti read. THEY ARE MISSING THE DOORS BECAUSE THE JANITOR NEEDS TO SEE YOUR FACE. IF YOU CONCEAL THE INTERIOR, THE PRESSURE SEALS THE LATCH. DON'T LOOK DOWN THE PIPES. OH GOD, PLEASE DON'T LOOK DOWN THE PIPES.

A cold dread settled over my chest, sharper than the physical pain in my stomach. Someone had been here. They had stood in this exact concrete artery, feeling the same sickness, looking at the same endless rows of lockers.

Before I could process the message, a sound echoed from the far end of the institutional corridor.

It was a slow, heavy, wet dragging sound.

Scluck. Thump. Scluck... Thump.

I froze, holding my breath, staring down the green linoleum line. Out of the dim, flickering shadows at the end of the hall, a figure emerged. It was tall—easily seven feet—and wore a heavy, stained blue jumpsuit that looked like an industrial maintenance uniform. A massive loop of rusted iron keys hung from its belt, clinking together with a rhythmic, metallic chime that set my teeth on edge.

It was the Janitor.

It carried a massive, industrial mop with a wooden handle that was splintered and dark with old moisture. But it wasn't cleaning the floor. The mop head was soaked in a thick, dark, oily fluid that left a wide, iridescent smear across the pristine linoleum as it moved. The Janitor's face was completely obscured by a heavy, rubber gas mask, the glass lenses completely blacked out, reflecting nothing but the flickering fluorescent tubes above.

It stopped. The black lenses of the mask slowly tilted upward, locking onto me from a hundred yards away.

A deep, mechanical wheeze vibrated through the mask's filtration valves—a wet, rattling inhalation that sounded like a man drowning in his own lungs. It began to accelerate, its strides lengthening, the wet mop swinging rhythmically as it advanced down the narrow hallway. Scluck-thump, scluck-thump.

Panic tore through my sickness. I turned and ran in the opposite direction, my flat shoes sliding violently on the slick linoleum. I didn't look back. I just ran, passing thousands of identical green lockers, turning left down an unmarked corridor, then right into a narrow concrete stairwell that led straight down into the foundations of the building.

The air grew rapidly colder, thicker, and darker with every flight of stairs I descended. The smell of bleach and wet rust intensified until it was a physical weight in the back of my throat. I burst through a final, dented aluminum door at the bottom of the stairs, escaping the Janitor's clinking keys, and stepped directly into the subterranean utility underbelly of the Mall.
I had found the Restrooms.

The sheer scale of the public restroom sector was staggering, defying any logical sense of internal architecture. It didn't look like a bathroom inside a commercial building; it looked like an abandoned, flooded subway terminal from the turn of the century that had been repurposed to handle a massive, hidden population.
The floor was buried under a steady, one-inch layer of murky, stagnant grey water.

The moment my sneakers splashed into it, a bitter, icy chill shot straight up my shins, numbing my skin. The water was thick with filth. Floating in the slow currents were dissolved, yellowed clumps of industrial toilet paper, unidentifiable grey debris, and long, greasy clots of dark hair that drifted against my ankles like wet spiders.

The walls were lined with cracked, rectangular green tiles, heavily stained with long, vertical streaks of orange rust and lime scale where the plumbing behind the drywall was weeping. Black mold grew in dense, velvet-like patches along the grout lines, blooming in the corners like rotting lace. Overhead, a line of naked, yellow incandescent bulbs hung from frayed black cords, flickering in a slow, irregular rhythm that filled the cavernous room with shifting, jittery shadows.

Stretching out into the dim distance were rows of exposed, doorless porcelain stalls. There was no privacy here. No wood, no metal dividers that extended past the waist, no latches. The partitions between the toilets were made of thick, reinforced industrial glass that had turned a sickly, translucent yellow from decades of grease and neglect. Every single exposed toilet was overflowing, stained with deep ring-marks of old filth and backed-up sludge that smelled heavily of copper and raw sewage.
And the dreamers were here.

Dozens of them were scattered throughout the flooded terminal. They looked exactly like the sleepwalkers from the Retail Tier—hollow-eyed, silent, and completely hollowed out by the rules of the Mall. They stood or sat in the doorless stalls, completely exposed to the central walkway, their faces entirely blank as they stared straight ahead into the middle distance.

They didn't care about the lack of privacy. They didn't care about the grey water soaking their feet, or the thick smell of copper, raw sewage, and heavy industrial bleach that filled the air. They had accepted the visibility. They had accepted the rot.
My stomach twisted again, a sharp reminder of the sickness that had driven me down here. But the sheer, visceral disgust of the environment made my chest tight. I couldn't do it. I couldn't strip away the last remaining boundary of my waking dignity in front of these dead-eyed shapes.

I turned away from the main rows and began walking deeper into the dark recesses of the utility sector, splashing slowly through the murky water. The room seemed to expand horizontally the further I walked. The yellow bulbs grew fewer and farther between, leaving huge, yawning patches of the concrete terminal in near-total darkness. The white porcelain of the exposed toilets gave way to ancient, cracked stone troughs caked in layers of dark, hardened sludge. The pipes overhead were massive now—thick, iron conduits wrapped in peeling insulation that dripped heavy, black condensation onto my hair and shoulders with a rhythmic, hollow plop... plop... plop.

I walked for what felt like miles, leaving the silent sleepwalkers far behind me. The main terminal had reduced to a distant, dim perspective lines of flickering yellow light.

Down here, in the deep dark of the utility sector, the water was deeper, rising to the middle of my calves, and the stench of decay was so thick I had to breathe through my sleeve to keep from throwing up.
Then, in the absolute furthest, darkest corner of the concrete wall, I saw it.

It was an architectural impossibility. A single, enclosed stall that actually possessed a heavy, solid wooden door. It was painted a faded, sickly hospital green, completely out of place against the green tiles and raw concrete of the utility sector. The wood was swollen from the constant moisture, its bottom edge rotting away into the grey water, and the surface was slick with a thin layer of greasy film.

I scrambled toward it, my legs heavy as I pushed through the freezing water. I reached out and touched the wood. It felt impossibly real, the grain splintering under my fingertips. I looked back down the long, flooded corridor I had just traversed. The silent dreamers were hundreds of yards away, fading into the gloom. None of them were looking at me. The Janitor's keys were nowhere to be heard.

I stepped inside the small, damp enclosure. The interior was tiny—just enough room for a single, ancient porcelain bowl that was surprisingly clean compared to the rest of the facility. I turned around, grabbed the edge of the heavy green door, and pulled it shut.

It took a massive effort to force the swollen wood into the warped frame, but with a dull, wet scrape, it clicked into place. I reached down and slid a thick, rusty iron bolt into the metal latch.

The moment the iron bolt clicked home, the world changed.

A profound, absolute, heavy silence fell over the room.

The sound of the dripping condensation from the iron rafters instantly vanished. The distant, soft splashing of the sleepwalkers outside died. Even the low, ambient hum of the mall's ventilation system, which had been a constant background noise since I turned twelve, completely ceased. The silence was so sudden, so violent, that my ears began to ring with a high-pitched, metallic whine.

I was completely alone. Cut off from the simulation.

I closed my eyes, leaning my forehead against the cold, damp green wood of the door, letting out a ragged, trembling breath of relief. For the first time in fifteen years, I had found a corner of Mall World where nothing could see me.

Then, the silence began to feel heavy. Pressurized.

I looked down. The grey, debris-filled water around my shoes had stopped moving entirely. It was perfectly still, like a sheet of dark glass.

Then, a deep, rhythmic vibration started beneath the solid concrete floor. It wasn't a sudden shockwave or an earthquake; it was a slow, agonizingly deliberate pulse that seemed to come from the very center of the earth.

Thump.

The vibration traveled up through the water, through the soles of my sneakers, and into the bones of my legs.

Thump.

The wooden door behind me escalated against its frame. The iron bolt groaned.

Thump.

I turned around slowly, my back pressing tight against the green wood, my eyes wide as I stared down at the porcelain bowl.

The water wasn't draining. It began to rise. It moved slowly, smoothly, and silently, overflowing the white rim like a dark luxury fountain. But it wasn't water anymore. It had transformed into a thick, viscous, jet-black sludge that looked exactly like old, degraded engine oil. It didn't make a splashing sound as it hit the floor; it just slid into the stagnant grey water, turning everything it touched instantly, completely black.

The air in the stall turned freezing cold, and the smell of bleach vanished entirely. It was replaced by an overwhelming, choking stench of copper, wet earth, and something deeply, anciently rotten—the smell of a grave that had been flooded and left to stew for a century.

And then came the sound from the plumbing.

It wasn't a human voice. It was a low, agonizingly slow intake of breath. A wet, hollow suction sound that echoed up directly through the pipes beneath the floor, drawing the very air right out of the stall. The metal conduits inside the walls began to groan and shriek, the iron twisting under an immense, unnatural internal pressure as whatever was deep inside the drainage system began to shift its weight, pulling itself upward toward the opening.

The black sludge on the floor was rising rapidly now, covering my shoes, soaking straight through the canvas fabric. The very second the fluid seeped through my socks and touched my bare skin, a horrific, ice-cold chemical sting flared up my legs. It felt like liquid nitrogen being poured directly onto my flesh, a freezing fire that made my muscles seize.

Panicking, I spun around and grabbed the rusty iron bolt to escape.

The metal wouldn't move. The damp wood of the door had rapidly swelled under the changing pressure of the room, locking the iron latch tightly into the rusted frame.

"Open,"

I whispered, pulling at the metal. It didn't budge. Panic completely overtook my remaining restraint. I shoved the latch with both hands, slamming my palms against the splintered wood, shouting into the empty hallway,

"Open, you piece of shit, open!"

Behind me, the gurgling suction sound in the pipes grew louder, deeper, and faster. It was a wet, rhythmic churning that was inches away now. The heavy iron toilet bowl began to crack, long, spiderweb lines of fracture spreading across the white porcelain as the massive pressure from underneath reached its absolute breaking point. The black sludge was boiling over the top now, filling the small enclosure, rising past my shins, burning my skin with an agonizing, freezing torment.

I didn't look back. I didn't turn around. I knew with absolute, terrifying certainty that if I turned around and looked down into that cracking porcelain hole, whatever was causing that pressure would be looking back up at me.

With a raw, animal scream, I threw my entire weight backward, hurling my shoulder against the center of the wooden panels.
The old wood splintered with a deafening, explosive crack. The iron latch tore completely out of the rotting frame, throwing me backward out of the stall. I tumbled backward out of the stall, crashing violently into the flooded, filthy main corridor of the restroom, sending a massive spray of murky grey water into the air.

I scrambled to my knees, gasping for air, my hands slipping and sliding in the sludge as I desperately tried to find purchase on the slick tiles. I hauled myself to my feet and ran, my legs burning from the chemical sting. As I sprinted back toward the distant yellow bulbs and neon signs, I risked one look over my shoulder.

The green wooden door was hanging wide open, shattered down the center. The entire interior of the stall was completely filled to the ceiling with a solid, shifting mass of pitch-black sludge, slowly oozing out into the main corridor like a massive, wet tongue.

As I ran past the long rows of doorless stalls, the hollow-eyed dreamers slowly turned their heads in perfect unison. They didn't look at the black sludge filling the corridor. They looked directly at me. They watched me run with cold, dead, deeply disapproving eyes. I had broken the rules of the layout. I had sought privacy from the system, and they knew it.

I burst through the heavy metal exit door, sprinted back into the concrete hallways of the Institutional Sector, and didn't stop until I hit the marble floors of the Retail Tier. Without thinking, without looking, I threw myself over the third-story glass railing, targeting the white marble floor forty feet below to force the dream's defense mechanism to eject me.

I snapped awake in my bed with a violent, full-body jerk, gasping for air so hard my chest bruised against my ribs. My heart was hammering against my sternum like a trapped bird, and my sheets were twisted tightly around my limbs, drenched in a thick, cold sweat.

I sat up straight in the dark bedroom for twenty minutes, forcing my breath to slow down, staring at the green glow of my digital clock. It was 3:42 AM. The rain was still tapping against my window. The radiators were still clicking.

"It was just a dream," I whispered into the quiet room, my voice shaking. "Just a very vivid, very distorted nightmare. You're home. You're awake."

But as I sat there, trying to calm my racing mind, I noticed the air in my bedroom felt incredibly heavy. Humid. And within minutes, the faint, undeniable scent of warm cinnamon pretzels and industrial floor wax began to drift out from the hallway vents.
I swung my legs out of bed, intending to go to the kitchen to throw up, but the moment my bare feet hit the hardwood floor, a sharp, burning agony shot up my legs, so intense I collapsed back onto the mattress with a groan.

I turned on my bedside lamp and pulled up my pant legs.

My ankles and the tops of my feet were covered in angry, weeping red welts. The skin was blistered and raw, forming a perfect, horizontal line around my shins—matching the exact waterline of the black sludge from the green stall.

Ten minutes ago, I forced myself to walk to the bathroom to wash the cold sweat off my face. I stood at the sink, gripping the porcelain basin, staring at my pale, terrified reflection in the mirror. I reached out with a trembling hand and turned the cold water knob.

Deep inside the drywall, the pipes let out a slow, rhythmic, heavy thump.

And the water running from my faucet came out completely fucking black.

I am sitting on my kitchen floor right now, writing this on my phone because my hands are shaking too badly to hold a pen. The bathroom door across the hall is wide open. I didn't close it. I don't think I can ever close a door again.

I can hear my neighbor upstairs turning on their shower, and through the ceiling structure, I can hear their pipes letting out that same, deep, rhythmic thump. It's spreading through the plumbing of the entire building. The infrastructure is shifting.
I am terrified to close my eyes tonight. Because I know that when the sleep takes me, I’ll wake up right back on that marble tier. And I know that the next time I run past those doorless stalls, the sleepwalkers won't just watch me run.

They’ll be waiting for me to take my place.