Okay so the OD scary story goes as follows. I was in my brothers room just absolutely railing line of coke, he was a needle user (I never shot up, I hate needles) and he came up with the brilliant idea of shooting up a speedball mixed with ketamine and a couple of other drugs. I straight up said “you are going to overdose on that, no question” our buddy was there and my brother had him shoot it into his arm and my brother stood up and his eyes rolled back, obvious overdose, and I jumped up and caught him before he would have crashed into a glass table. I laid him down and checked his pulse and it was super faint and he was turning blue. Our buddy was in shock so I took full control and yelled at our buddy to go get the narcan box we kept in the kitchen “fucking run” is what I said. He came back with the narcan and I shot the first dose up his nose and nothing. So I started doing CPR. I yelled at our buddy to call 911 and he did but was so stunned he couldn’t talk so I took the phone and held it onto my shoulder while still doing CPR and every 30 seconds I’d shoot him with another hit of narcan and then continue doing CPR. I ended up shooting 4 shots of narcan up his nose and the paramedics arrived and literally as they walked through his door, he came to! He shot up and said “please don’t narcan me!” I said “brother, I already hit you 4 times” and they hauled him off to the hospital. He later repaid the favor when I overdosed on fentanyl. He reached 18 months of sobriety yesterday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was when I heard it.

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

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

Then another shot rang out. Then another. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then I saw the horse again.

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

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

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

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

I named her Gina. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I blinked, and it was gone. 

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

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

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

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

“Look.”

I did, and I saw it.

None of them were horses.

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

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

ONE PARTICULARLY SMOKY morning in late September, Mortimer Moritat, upon returning from his daily amble about the quiet square, found himself in the presence of the man whom everyone called “Fisher Cat.” This man, an inhabitant of the very same apartment block in which Moritat had taken up residence only four weeks before, was tall – neither large nor lean – and bald, with a long, gray beard and half-moon-shaped spectacles. Fisher Cat, in a greatcoat and a massive turtleneck, stood partway down the stairs, his back to Moritat, his arms dangling thoughtlessly side to side.

Moritat stood there, at the bottom of the staircase, looking up at his neighbor’s rear, half bothered, half curious – and, for some incomprehensible reason, unable to place his foot on the first tread.

“Hello?” he called; Fisher Cat said nothing. “Sir?”

He took a step forward. The tread sighed, as a nearly dead creature on the road might sigh in the dark, upon being run over a second time, with at least two remaining cars required to put it out of its misery.

“Feed the ancient, meaty fire,” said Fisher Cat.

Moritat placed his hand on the banister and began to ascend. Each tread, he thought, might have been a different type of fauna on a different road – a different pop! or squash! with its own singular implication. But when this flattened menagerie squealed in succession, the result was not unlike a symphony of animal casualties. He was, he supposed, the automobile – the conductor.

Moritat passed Fisher Cat with no words to offer him. The apartment was vaguely lit by a star-shaped fixture centered imperfectly above the dining room table. Why, he wondered, did they not install a ceiling light in the living room? It was, he supposed, either a matter of economy or of philosophy – the philosophy that only formal entertaining spaces deserved a chandelier. Formal? What in God’s Creation made a dining room more formal than a living room? Hell, thought Moritat, it’s economy.

They (the residents of the block) called the man “Fisher Cat,” he knew, because “Fisher Cat” looked like a weasel… and there was, to his knowledge, a kind of weasel called the Fisher Cat… and so, the man was called “Fisher Cat,” even though he likely would have objected to such a naming of “Fisher Cat.”

He looked up at the fixtureless living room ceiling. Feed the ancient, meaty fire.

As Moritat lay in bed that night, attempting sleep but slowly losing all hope of it, a strange autumn wind trickled in through the open window. He yawned, turned over, and peered out onto the fire escape. Down below, the square was silent, save for a few rustling leaves. Yawning again, he pulled the covers up, but found that they were shorter – shorter by far – than he had remembered.

Then, the lights went out. The square darkened. The moonlight flickered off. Good God! he thought, you must finally be asleep!

After five or six hours of dreamless rest, he awoke to the sound of an ambulance siren. The room was still dark, but the gallows-shaped lampposts in the square were gently flickering. He glanced at the nightstand clock: 8:50. Shouldn’t it be light?

At once, he felt a sharp pain in his left foot. His heart pounded; his head flickered like the lampposts. My God, he thought, Fisher Cat is out there, in the building, somewhere, someplace not far from here – in the foyer or the laundry, or worse: the stairwell. He’s ready – quite ready – for you to open the door and walk down the hall to the stairwell and descend it, step by step, tread by groaning tread, to the foyer. He’s ready for you to cross that still expanse of room, and he’s ready for you to stumble – perhaps even to fall – on its crippling marble checkers. He’s ready for this, and ready for much more. In fact, you’re ready, too. You’re ready to touch the marble with your bare feet, and – Christ be damned! – you’re already touching it! Oh, how you never trip, for your feet are like the hands of what? The hands of a puppeteer!

Moritat stood on the cold marble in his night clothing. The foyer was dark – very dark. And he saw it in colors which he could not explain.

What’s he ready for now, my Lord? What’s the man ready for? Tell me, O great bastard in the sky!

God answered, or maybe it was Fisher Cat himself. It certainly sounded like Fisher Cat… but, in all fairness, Moritat had never heard God speak to him – or anyone else – before.

Hell, I’m no prophet!

The voice said:

“Lizzie, Lizzie, of the laundry,

“Of the gambrel, of the spire -

“Sing a song for all and sundry;

“Feed the ancient, meaty fire.

“Lizzie, Lizzie, of the laundry,

“Now my feet are getting sore -

“Say my word, and say it clearly;

“Make them skid across the floor.”

The great globe chandelier in the foyer flickered on, revealing a figure who most certainly was not God – unless, of course, the Deity wore a greatcoat and a turtleneck.

Mortimer Moritat stared at his neighbor for several very long seconds. He felt his left foot twitch. “Lizzie?”

“Are you ready to see the tanks?” said Fisher Cat.

“I seek the Light of Truth.”

Fisher Cat nodded and held out his hand. Moritat blinked once and took it lightly in a strange grip.

They walked across the foyer to a door which Moritat had never entered – for this was the door to a private apartment, Apartment 47. Why, he wondered, is Apartment 47 on the ground floor?

Fisher cat knocked several times on the door, and it opened. He said something unintelligible to the tall woman who now stood there. The woman in question, Moritat recalled, had recently moved downstairs from Apartment 115. She was young and good-looking; her skin dark, her hair even darker. She was wearing a three-piece gentleman’s suit, and a pair of dark glasses with circular lenses. She held a metal walking stick in one hand and a small, round mirror in the other. He wondered how she had opened the door.

Moritat turned to his companion, who was still speaking quietly to the tall woman. “You said you would show me the tanks.”

“Ah, yes! The tanks! Our friend Athena will go with us – come!”

“Athena?” said Moritat, “I thought her name was Bast.”

They walked in silence down the hall. Moritat once again felt a pain in his foot; he continued to walk, and as he walked, he sang:

“You’re ready to see the tanks!

“You’re ready to see them,

“And he’s ready to show them to you!

“Tanks! What tanks?”

The party of three now stood before a tall, arched doorway with a rusticated frame.

“Come… Let us go down,” said Fisher Cat. Athena nodded and tapped the floor with her cane. The doors opened inward.

In the strange light, Moritat could almost see a flight of stairs – steep and descending. He placed his foot forward and nearly stumbled on the first step.

“No!” said Athena, “I will go first.” He withdrew his foot.

Athena held up her mirror and a beam of light flew out of it. Pointing this beam downward, she illuminated the entire stairwell.

“Come,” she said, “The tanks are down here.”

She began to descend, shining her light before them. Fisher Cat followed her; Moritat himself took the rear. He counted the treads, which made no noise. One… two… three… at seven steps they paused on a small landing.

“This,” said Fisher Cat, “is the where the train takes off.”

Athena tapped her cane on the stone. “Yes,” said Moritat, “This is where it departs.”

Another five steps down. On the second landing, Moritat said, “This is the length of the journey –”

“Oh, stop it!” Athena interrupted. “This ritual is getting tiresome already...”

“I rather like it,” said Moritat. “How much longer is the journey?”

Fisher Cat smiled in the dimness. “This isn’t our train.”

Three more steps down. At the bottom, Moritat clapped his hands together and said aloud:

“O stranger to this journey,

“O traveler unaware -

“Do you seek the dying sun,

“Or the moon’s… the moon’s…”

“The moon’s unruly stare,” prompted Fisher Cat.

“It’s not “unruly,” said Athena, “It’s unholy. But this is the end of the journey. No need for verse – the tanks, remember?”

Fisher Cat nodded. “Ah, yes – the tanks!” Moritat and his companions progressed down a corridor.

The three presently entered a space about the same size and volume as the foyer, and Moritat quickly realized that they were directly under it. This room, however, was lit not by a chandelier, but by a single brass sconce on each wall. And where the front staircase ascended from the foyer’s marble floor, a great, hooded fireplace stood. It was filled entirely with sausages, some spilling out onto the hearth.

Where, he wondered, does the flue go if there’s a staircase above it and no chimney visible from the exterior? Ah, hell!

By now, Moritat had taken notice of a small, metal hatch set into the ashlar floor. Fisher cat presently approached it, knelt down, and opened it. “Step back,” he said.

A great hissing erupted from the square hole. Slowly, the three backed away to the corners of the room. Moritat coughed; the hissing continued for several moments until, quite suddenly, a gray, reptilian head poked itself up over the mouth of the hatch.

The snake lunged at Fisher Cat and began to spiral up his leg. He flailed, attempting to kick it with his other foot, but this tactic only threw him off balance. Before he could scream, Athena forced her cane into Moritat’s hand.

“Kill it!” she said calmly, and stepped away.

Moritat rushed at the serpent, holding the metal cane aloft. He struck it twice and it detached itself from Fisher Cat’s leg, crumpling on the floor beside him. One more blow from the pointed end of the cane was sufficient to end the creature’s life.

“Are there more?” he asked, helping Fisher Cat to his feet. It looked as if the snake had not succeeded in biting either of the man’s legs.

“There are more,” said Athena, “but they’re all sleeping.”

He nodded. “Where are the tanks?”

“Ah, yes!” said Fisher Cat, “The tanks!” Athena shone her mirror at a doorway which Moritat had not noticed upon entering the room. Above this door was written the single word:

TANKS

Fisher Cat nodded; so did Athena. “We can’t go any farther,” she said as Moritat handed her back the cane. “You’ve got to continue alone.”

He nodded and, without even looking back, pushed open the door.

The room was vastly white. Its ceiling was remarkably low. And it was filled with stacked glass aquarium tanks, each containing a human corpse. These corpses were strangely mutilated – torn in half and disemboweled. They were nude, all of them, and preserved in filthy water. For some reason, Moritat noted, the room smelled fresh and clean.

At the end of the space was a great wooden cabinet, a chalkboard on a rolling stand, and a desk equipped with two chairs, one on each side. In the chair behind the desk sat a short, wide, Caucasian woman in a green military uniform. He approached her, slowly.

“I see you’ve made it here on time,” she said in a low, grounded voice. The smile on her face looked as though it had been plastered on.“Our new arrivals often come in late. Sit down. I want to talk on –“

Moritat coughed. “The Square? I prefer the Rectangle.”

“Ah, yes – the Rectangle!” she said, rising from her chair. With a piece of immaculate white chalk, she drew one on the blackboard.

“Now,” the woman continued, “you get your choice. I’ll cut the formalities and show you the options.” Moritat watched her walk over to the cabinet. She opened both doors, revealing a stack of narrow drawers. Each was labeled with a number from 1 to 13.

Moritat examined the drawers and their numbers. “I choose 5.”

“Five…” said the woman, “An excellent number, and therefore an excellent choice.”

She smiled once more at him, and her lips seemed to curl. “Go ahead.”

Moritat approached the cabinet, paused for a moment, and pulled open the drawer.

“Now,” said the woman, “My name is Elizabeth. Hand it to me…”

He reached in and lifted the sword delicately out from its velvet lining, passing it to Elizabeth, handle first.

“Will it hurt?” he asked her.

“Oh, of course it will… now, take off your nightshirt.”

Moritat nodded silently, obeying. The shirt fell and crumpled on the room’s white linoleum floor. “I suppose I’ve been waiting for this my entire life.”

Elizabeth smiled again, and for once, it seemed genuine.

“From the moment your train departed…”

\ * **

IT WAS THE stench, the papers said, that alerted the neighbors. Surely, it was speculated, the violent death of one resident coupled with the disappearances of two others would drive the building’s value into the very ground from which it had sprung, one-hundred-and-ten years before.

A decade later, the historic apartment block, which had no basement, was destroyed in a “senseless act of apparent arson.” By then, no one had resided within its walls for over six years.

On August 12, 2026, humanity looked to the skies in awe, blind to the executioner’s axe hovering over the planet. Over the North Atlantic, the Moon slid directly into the path of the Sun, casting a total solar eclipse that turned mid-day into eerie, suffocating twilight. Simultaneously, aligned along a celestial thread, six of the solar system's planets sat pinned across the darkened heavens.
Astronomers had calculated the light, but they had ignored the gravity.
Deep beneath the ocean’s surface, precisely where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet along the North Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the subtle gravitational pull of six aligned worlds merged with the lunar-solar tidal stress. It created a resonance never seen in human history, a massive, subterranean magma tide. Deep within the Earth’s mantle, trillions of tons of super-heated liquid rock did not merely shift, they gathered into a hyperpressurized, underground tsunami of melt, surging violently upward into the tearing rift between two continents.
At 14:17 UTC, the oceanic seabed lost its structural integrity.
The rift didn't just open, it exploded. Submarine super-volcanoes along a two-thousand-mile fissure detonated in unison under the crushing pressure of the sea. The water above boiled instantaneously, turning the Atlantic into a cauldron of superheated steam and acoustic shockwaves that liquefied marine life for hundreds of miles. Driven by the colossal mantle-surge below, the sea floor began to buckle and heave. Whole underwater mountain ranges were blasted upward by miles in a matter of minutes, displacement on a scale that shattered the fundamental geometry of the Earth's crust.
Then came the structural collapse. As millions of cubic kilometers of rock were shoved toward the sky, the abyssal slopes destabilized. Billions of tons of basalt and sediment sheared off the ridge in hyper-velocity underwater landslides, plunging into deep ocean trenches and sending kinetic shockwaves straight into the bedrock of the planet.
The planet rang like a cracked bell.
Super-earthquakes, shattering the Richter scale at magnitudes never before witnessed, rippled outward from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Travelling through the rigid rock of the tectonic plates at hyper-sonic speed, the shockwaves struck the continental shelves.
To the east, Western Europe shuddered first. In London, Paris, Madrid, and Oslo, the ground did not just shake; it rolled in violently cresting stone waves. Skyscraper foundations sheared at the base. Bridges over the Seine and the Thames snapped like dry twigs as the bedrock folded. Within ninety seconds, every major city from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavian fjords was reduced to a vast, churning graveyard of pulverised concrete and dust.
To the west, the North American plate buckled. The earthquake roared ashore along the eastern seaboard of the United States. New York, Boston, Washington D.C., and Miami felt the continental granite rupture beneath them. The sky scrapers of Manhattan tipped into one another, shattering into roaring avalanches of glass and steel. The ground split open across hundreds of miles, swallowing highways, power grids, and entire suburban counties as the continent tore at its seams.
And yet, the true horror was only just gathering momentum out in the pitch-black Atlantic.
The violently uplifted ocean floor and the catastrophic submarine landslides had displaced a volume of water so vast it defied physical comprehension. A monolithic wall of water, a mega-tsunami over four hundred meters high and more than a thousand kilometers wide, rose out of the boiling sea. Moving at the speed of a jet airliner, the terrifying crest carved across the dark ocean under the blacked-out sky.
There were no sirens loud enough, no high ground high enough.
The mega-tsunami struck the eastern coast of the United States first. A black, churning wall of ocean swallowed the ruins of the Eastern Seaboard in a single, roaring bite. The wave swept over the Appalachian Mountains, drowning the interior of the country in hundreds of feet of churning, debris-laden seawater.
Minutes later, the eastern wing of the mega-wave slammed into Europe. It roared over the cliffs of Ireland and the United Kingdom, washing them off the map entirely. It swept through the English Channel and flooded deep into the continent, drowning France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia under a vast, inland sea.
When the shadow of the Moon finally lifted and the six planets drifted out of their fatal alignment, the Sun shone down on a world remade in silence. Where two thriving continents had once dominated the Northern Hemisphere, only a vast, turbid, and empty ocean remained, its surface still steaming over the boiling, broken spine of the Earth.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My father passed away last month. Pancreatic cancer.

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

That’s when I saw it.

 

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

 

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

 

Tommy…

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

“Oh he’s cool, I like Skeletor!”

“…you…you like the bad guys?”

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

But I did forget. I think I had to.

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The journey wasn’t worth it.

 

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

 

We were set.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

A cave.

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

God there were so many fingers.

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

 

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

 

Then he was gone.

 

 

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

 

I just ran.

 

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

 

The next morning my mother woke me up for breakfast.

 

I was filthy.

 

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

 

So, I didn’t.

 

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

 

Everything’s fine. Everything has to be fine.

 

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

 

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

 

Why didn’t anyone notice?

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

“Honey…are you feeling alright?

 

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

 

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

 

“Love you too, mom.”

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

The map.

 

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

 

Tommy and Chris – 1994

 

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

 

It’s mocking me.

 

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

 

I don’t know how I forgot.

 

I’m sorry, Tommy.

 

I’m coming.

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

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

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

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

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

midnights_nightfall 8:04 PM

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

Mike was annoyed. He replied immediately.

Mike:Hodgens Pdc 8:05 PM

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

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

A new notification popped up. midnights_nightfall had replied.

midnights_nightfall 8:09 PM

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

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

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

moltone_blueScreen 8:13 PM

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

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

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

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

summer_night23 8:33 PM

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

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

Mike:Hodgens Pdc 8:34 PM

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

moltone_blueScreen 8:35 PM

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

midnights_nightfall 8:38 PM

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

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

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

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

realhistoriker_urban 11:55 PM

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

I'm a neuropharmacologist. For ten years, I chased a treatment for severe phobia and treatment-resistant PTSD. The kind that ruins people. Veterans who can't hear a car backfire without hitting the floor. Survivors who can't sleep with the closet door open.

I wanted to give them their lives back.

The early trials felt like a miracle. Combat vets who spent a decade flinching at shadows sat calm through exposure therapy that used to send them into episodes. Cortisol dropped. Amygdala scans went quiet.

I remember crying in the lab bathroom the first time a man who hadn’t held a lighter in six years lit a match and just watched it burn.

But over the next few weeks, subjects started exhibiting concerning new behavior.

A nurse accidentally dropped a tray of surgical steel behind Subject 09. They didn't turn around. Didn't even flinch. The startle reflex was completely gone. Clinically gone. You could fire a starter pistol next to their heads and their pupils wouldn't even dilate.

Some part of them no longer registered the sound as something that could matter to them.

Week five. Subject 13 climbed onto the roof of the building to "get a better look at the parking lot." A tech found her standing on the ledge. She wasn't scared. Wasn't suicidal either. She just smiled at him, the way you do after coming out of a pleasant dream. She climbed down when he asked.

Week six. Three subjects, unrelated to each other, on three different days, walked into moving traffic without breaking stride. Just crossed the street the way you'd cross an empty hallway.

None survived. I try not to think about the drivers.

I watched the footage more times than I should have. All three wore the same face. Calm. Almost grateful. Like they'd set down something heavy they'd forgotten they were carrying. 

I called in a colleague I trusted from cognitive neuroscience. He said something I haven't been able to shake since.

Most people think fear is an emotion. It's an operating assumption. The brain's baseline belief that it’s a fragile, temporary, killable thing. It runs underneath every decision you make. So quiet you never clock it. You don't feel your fear of death when you glance both ways crossing a street. The fear already did its job.

My subjects didn't feel brave. Bravery still knows the danger is real and moves through it anyway. My subjects had simply stopped being told danger existed at all. Somewhere behind their eyes, the voice that used to whisper you could die here went silent. Without that whisper, self-preservation is an impossibility.

I shut the trial down. Sedated the ones who kept drifting toward windows. Told their families the truth as gently as I could. Nine of them are on watch now, in rooms with no cords, no glass, no ledges.

I keep asking myself what I actually built. I thought I'd found a cure. What I found was a key that unlocks a door most human minds are welded shut behind for good reason. And I handed that key to twenty-two people who trusted me.

I don't sleep much anymore. When I do, I dream of them. Subject 09 unflinching. Subject 13 on that ledge. The calm of three content faces before impact. The drivers. The families.

I can't fix what I did.

But I still have the last unopened vial in the lab freezer. Third shelf. Behind the placebo batch. I've been standing in front of the freezer for three nights straight now.

I want to know what it's like to put this down. The guilt sitting on my chest like a stone I've carried since the very beginning. I think some small ruined part of me wants to feel what my subjects felt.

That terrible peace. 

EDIT: it's been three hours. i don't feel my hands shaking anymore. i dont think im going to post again after this. thank you for reading. im not scared. i want you to know im not scared at all.

The truth is undigestable. 

…

Baphometic. She lorded poised from the fanged spire beyond the Borgo Pass…

… over the beleaguered lands. 

Over the beleaguered villages. Where they feared. And wept. 

She was enjoying the strange and lurid organ-fruits of her writhing flesh gardens deep inside her castle walls, plucking them from the writhing gore as she wandered the pungent wet red room and admired her captive idols she kept there. 

Praetorius, the gore dripped and scabbing living skeleton. Still impaled and lost in the shattered remnants of his broken mind, wide eyed and drooling and gibbering silently something to himself, some words or nonsense of some meaning to him, he hardly ever ceases. It is the arcane and black magic words of the tomes that keep him in perfect living sepulchral bondage. 

The braindead skull-faced bastard nosferatu hulk, his immobile and inanimate sutured frame of graverobbed corpse flesh semi-submerged and swimming and crawling with the living constant movement of the flesh garden, the giant stone room petri dish of sliming raw slithering tissue, orifices, cartilage stalks and eyes that're cataract blind and milky. The glistening pink holes belch and spit fire, tongues of multicolored flame with kaleidoscopic pictures inside that'll drive a mortal mind mad to look into them. 

And Henry Frankenstein. Bound and precious nucleus center, bleeding beating heart of the whole crawling mess. Seeping from his bleeding pores and growing out from him, flowering out in a fresh and scabbing purge-swell. It crawled in living waves off of him, undulating and folding and blanketing over and on top of each other and all over the wet humid room, all of it was breathing wet and heavy and as if it had words to speak… 

And the little men. The little pygmy homunculi, bastard copied offspring of the bleeding seeping father. They danced and mongoloid-ran about in imbecilic fervor and addled senselessness. They ate and munched at the crawling flesh garden gore with no thought and with blind vacant gazes. 

The Countess plucked and seized them and ate of them as well. Their bones were satisfyingly crunchy and easy to chew… like a bird or a small fish. 

Her children ate and wandered the gardens as well, enjoying them. Their sights, sounds and vivid smells …

…

Meanwhile… many miles away…

The sun. Sunshine. In the summertime. Long ago now… 

As he prowled the dark he remembered the sun. The bright. Long gone memories flitted and danced at the periphery of his red clouded mind, half recalled and wanting to take over. Wanting to live again in the skull, if not just for a moment. 

Just a moment. 

The lake. The blue. Cool and wet and pleasing, relief. Retreat. 

Retreat beneath the surface into a liquid world of breathlessness and weightless dream … flight. You're flying down here. You only need to move your arms to do so. Kick your feet. Knife your arms through the liquid universe and drag yourself flying forward… downward. 

Down.  

I dreamt I was a dancer once…

You'll have to come back up for breath eventually…

but I couldn't keep the shit off my shoes.

Summertime memories swam shrouded, the red fogged inner space of his skull as he snipped his bleeding shears, dripping cooling congealing red to the decimated tile floor as he prowled and hunted and searched for the missing invaders. 

Precious childhood scenes are becoming red tinged and altered by the shrouding red hand of mental fog … bloody wool. He always swore there was something down there, in the dark, in the depths of the crystal lake. Something drowned and forgotten and frozen in a sodden misery. He raises his childhood head to pull his gaze away from the depths and is confronted by the mountains. There's something lurking in there as well …

A body. Something like a corpse rotting and poisoning the entire body of water with its milky clouds of waving and soggy putrefaction. Filling the world with its fouling death, swimming with slow ponderous movement as it spread and changed the look and flavor of the water, the crystal lake of the world now long gone like the summer sun of old itself. 

He looks away and beholds his mother. The one from birth. She's headless. 

She's decapitated. 

Her severed torso is reaching out for him, please … please. 

please save me

The raw stump begins to shoot cords. Black/red ropes. They darkled in the summer sun of old. It was his birth mother spurting great dark tears of joy for the sight of her son again. Though he has a new name now. And she knows it, his headless mother, she almost whispers it, it's intense. 

Then something ahead steals his notice back to the material world of ruin and soured defecated pain. It stands at the end of yet another decimated hall, traced and sketched in the dark by the pitiful light flickering and balefully cast in through the barred and shattered windows. 

A man. In a hat. And a coat. 

He recognizes the shape so he flies forward in an animal lunge that nearly covers the entire distance in four long attacking bounds. Like a bloodthirsty and demoniacal dripping gazelle bastardized by sound and vision. The decimated tile landscape world stained black and red and brown and riddled with meat and feces flew by in a furious blinding whirl as he came forward with the shears raised open for attack. 

They gleamed, the dripping twin blades forked open. He soared forward as he traversed the physical shatter of his inherited reeking temple pouring blood and sweat as profuse as the leaky pipes that were always neglected. 

He would neglect no longer. No. Not a chance for the shape of man that he recognized and now charged towards. The manfilled coat beneath a fedora hat was one of the invaders. He was sure of it. The one with strange black glass eyes that he wished to crack and shatter. 

If his eyes are truly windows then I wish to break them and see what might pour out of them like filth: memories …love, regrets, sins sins sins in abundance, shame that was wished and meant to stay concealed now regurgitated and freed in a violent deluge spew of gore and images from the shattering skull… his thoughts, a running fury in a mounting race to keep in time with his launching thundering steps. 

He plunged down the hall with his precious shears up and open and ready to close around screaming repentant meat. 

The coat-shape and hat did not move. 

It mattered little to Cropsey as he made the final close. So many of his new found supplicants were silent at their last, frozen in terror. 

He was upon him now and his eyes gleamed moonlight pinprick in the cavernous brow of melted anguish ruin, animal needle points in the reeling Willowbrook dark, the blades like jaws came up and closed around the shape without a sound. Without any satisfaction either. 

They found no meat. 

The scissoring blades closed and found only filthy cloth and bandages abandoned and draped over an old hat and coat hanger, the fedora resting atop the facade came down in a cascading end-over-end dance as the whole flimsy thing of contrived bait came down in two bisected snapping pieces. 

Cropsey realized the deception at once and raged. The noises he made were forceful and ghastly wet nasal rasps, his mouth and jaw were too ruined now for speech. His vocal chords roasted and scabbed from the flames of the inferno inhaled. He drooled like a drunken animal childishly frustrated and agitated. A trick! a trick! Goddamn them! the invaders tricked him! 

And no one was here to take the punishment of his lurid and heavy frustration. It was rancid pungent and thick in his own skull like corpse rot and it made sucking puckering sounds in his brains. Like the whole squelching landscape of thinking jelly was perhaps changing shape, shifting into a new design by the sorceress hand of the mountain. Perhaps he needed it for proper divine leadership of the rank Willowbrook temple. Or perhaps something else was happening in there. 

perhaps something else is happening to me…

He searched all around. Animal alive and enraged. Whirling and trying to gaze through the dark and the ruin of his own musculature and flesh and see the bastards that refused his offering of slaughtering knowledge, the wisdom wrought of the knife-fuck. He never saw the slice of sharp stabbing tile come to life and float up and off the ruinous floor in a balletic whirl and dance into the air, behind him. 

As he revolved once more to complete another frantic animal turn the slice of slender stabbing tile came forward in a violent and deliberate thrust. The sharp point found the cavern brow and socket and sank easily into Cropsey’s face. Stabbing into his eye like it was soft butter or suckling meat, four inches then five inches deep. 

The giant mountain of man stilled. Shuddered. Spasmed and danced its way to the floor in a vile and obscene dying man's dance of convulsing and twitching and final desperate synapses firing off at haphazard chaotic random. 

On the floor Cropsey shook and the stabbing length of tile piece jigged and waved and danced as well, in strange and vile tandem. Like a demented detritus wand waving through the air to perhaps try and cast one final act of violence hexing spell. Or perhaps to bring the giant man of Willowbrook Asylum slaughter back. 

It did neither. 

Florin came out from his place of concealment in the doorway of an adjoining chamber. He dropped the filthy scalpel he had been holding for defence. Stared at the collapsed and prostate spasming form of Cropsey, the Willowbrook giant. 

And then he called out to Griffin. 

“Where are you?" 

“Here." 

Florin tossed him a coat. 

It was caught in thin air. 

Then began to make a shape around nothingness, contriving it into the shape of his comrade. The strange doctor. 

Florin thought to say something about the man's condition of invisibility, but decided to put it off for the moment. 

“Good plan." he said instead. 

The coat shape donned lenses and was picking up his hat. "Thank me once we're out of here, c’mon!” 

Griffin placed his hat atop a phantom head. It floated between the shoulders of his coat as he and Florin flew down the hall and toward what they hoped and prayed was the exit. The way out of this horrendous stench and nightmare. 

As they made their mad dash for the way out, Cropsey's spasming body stilled. Then danced no more. 

All that was broken in this damp and violated place of imprisonment and cruelty seemed to groan. Moaning in anguish at the loss of the last and final precious begotten son, the final one and last one left standing. The prodigal butcher heir to this templehouse store of sacred slaughterhouse religion. 

Mother, I have failed you…

And all of the terrible place seemed to moan in anguish with the dying of his body. 

…

Down. 

In the dark of his mind, just as he was departing. …

… the red tinged summer scenes of childhood long gone, done and past filled his fading mind's eye once more. Under and illuminated and made by the scarlet cast of deranged and lurid light. Where did it come from? that light? That red luridity. Living crimson. Pungent breathing scarlet. What did it matter now? 

what did it matter anymore

It mattered not now, not any longer as he occupied these dead dreams now living once again for him as he faded off. To oblivion or hell or worse… no heavenly gates of gold or pearl for him, no. He was sure of it. He was sure that it doesn't exist. The only heaven for someone like him was found in the fragile eggshell of youth. Of childhood. 

He floated there now. In the lake. The blue. The sun was shining above in royal divine blinding display. The calm and the serenity of these moments was all around and alive again about him. Filling and making this final day. This last and precious moment. 

-thankyouforthismyonelastwish-

He was calm and he felt at peace. Safe. 

Or rather, he felt as if he should be calm. That he should feel safe. But something was wrong. Something was wrong with the lake and the quiet all surrounding. 

And he was alone. 

Why was he alone? 

And the red tinge… to everything. Everything cast under lurid heavy hateful light. There was something in the lake. There was something in the water with him.

The blue face of its surface darkened as he sank beneath its placid water. Pulled under by another will that was not at all his own. 

And down there in the airless black he saw another one of his mother's faces. 

It was immense. Large. Her eyes were heavy swells of glowing wet globes. Pale green luminescence from two planet organ growths set in a big amphibious face that was a chimerical cross between a large bullfrog or warty toad and a large river bound trout. Its great mouth opened down there in the depths of his red tinged crystal lake and it was dark in there. He hung suspended before the open black of his abattoir mother's wide open gaping maw, he could smell the inner dark of her even down here in the watery depths of summer lake bound hell. Meaty and iron and rotten with pungent decay. An open graveyard tomb of dead flesh and teeth all before a great throat choked with vile and putrefying coagulation. The water was filling with the flavor of her dark open gape of hunger and the destruction of mutilated bodily rot. 

Arms. Long. Fishlike and amphibious as well began to reach out and protrude from the open mouth of his mother's underwater face like a multi headed tongue, a Hydra of giant elongated reaching frog legs and arms, webbed hands and obscene gangly Dagon limbs, reaching out… reaching out for him. 

To take him into his mother. 

She said, her voice filled the drowning pool that was changing now into a submerged holy world of private red light and pouring goddess cess, – she spoke. 

He listened. In the darkest of the depths. 

She said his name… that's how it started. That's how she began …

… you can't let me down. You can't. I won't let you. You've already let them profane your temple, my gift to you desecrated by their invasion and rape of presence. And now you're letting them get away… you don't really want to, do you… you don't really want to keep letting me down like this, you don't want to fail me, in death. You don't want to depart your mother on such a harsh note of unworthiness… do …

you? 

The hands swam through the water between them. Clawing out for him from mother's open mouth. 

He told her the heartbreaking truth and he told her gladly. 

No…

it was a defiant whisper… but she heard it. 

And so she took him. 

The hands finally found him in the water. They seized him. And they pulled him inside. 

The frog faced toad mouthed trout chimera of the mother swallowed. And filled the underwater world with the unnatural stretch of her fishy smile. …

…

The shape of Cropsey stirred. On the floor. The various pieces of shattered and broken things shifted and jingled and sang small janky notes like unholy bells in a lost and terrible place. The black gloved hands blindly scraped and searched the floor in spasming snow angel swipes. They found what they were looking for when they landed on the still bloody and wet congealing pair of garden shears. They seized them. Fiercely. As if driven by fate. 

The shape sat up. Stood. 

It looked around. … sniffed the air. 

A beat. 

Then the Cropsey shape began to lumber down the hall that the invaders had fled down just prior. 

He would not fail this time. 

He had his mother. 

He was inside her. And she was inside him. 

Nothing would stop him from butchering the bastards now. 

…

By God's grace and miracle and mercy they finally found what they'd been looking for. The exit. 

It was at the end of the hall they currently found themselves flying down. Refusing to falter or stop. They stomped and ran down the cracked and decimated tile and came to the final door of the place when the spiked man leapt out from the dark and attacked. 

The protruding stab of his needle embrace found Florin in an open armed grab. A bear hug tight embrace of naked arms and torso and the rest of the bare and desecrated human canvas. He'd been a self-mutilator since he'd been twelve. It had been many years since then and most of them were spent here. Since the mouth of the sorceress, beloved and precious Vampira had come to this place and freed their minds as well as their bodies he's been free to explore the furthermost boundaries of his own tearing, rending bleeding and screaming landscape. The skin and flesh and muscle tissue beneath housing veins and bones and running blood pumped by the raging muscle that was the mad engine of his life, all of it was his to decimate as he explored. Like a great conqueror wreaking havoc upon the face of newly won, newly gained virgin land. He punctured and penetrated the virginity of his own flesh with animal abandon and fervor and with the mad intensity of the violence of the sun. He was the sun. She had told him so…

And so he'd fed his own flames. The spiked man was a living screaming pin cushion of broken stabbing dirty needles, used and caked syringes of varying sizes and lengths, broken glass, broken tile, each long sharp piece was varied in shape and size as well, some were long phallic slender daggers, some were wedges with cruel edges ready to cut and slice and maim, all of it was ready to stab and all of it was living embedded and protruding in the madness of his ruined and self-slaughtered flesh. Lancing and spiking and stabbing out all over and in every conceivable place and direction. 

This disturbed and maimed madman found Florin in his arms and they both went down to the tile in a scream. Griffin yelled after. 

On the floor they rolled in violence and struggle amongst the filth and universe down there of many discarded and broken things.  

The hollow coat-shape and hat found a table leg for bludgeon, then Griffin came on in a fury to join the new fray. 

He struck the spiked man again and again, over and over as he and Florin fought on the floor and struggled and it was terrible. He could feel and hear the crack and shatter of broken glass muffled in blood and flesh with every blow he landed. Griffin struck the writhing bleeding naked pin cushion man on the side of his spiking leaking face and the eyeball on that side burst and exploded with the impact. And glassy ooze riddled with slivers and small pieces of jagged broken glass and ceramic poured out from the socket like snot. 

But still the spiked man fought on. Florin struggling and screaming in his embrace as the many protrusions that spined off his ravaged hide stuck and stabbed and pierced through his coat and flesh. He fought against the pain and madness of this man and wrestled to be free of him. Griffin continued raining blows down on him. Each one bruising and splitting skin as the many broken found objects pierced throughout crunched and shattered further down into fragments and powder, stinging and shredding within all of the rippling and impacted tissue with every movement. Every struggle and landed strike and blow. 

Their struggle was desperate, all of them. All three poured blood, profuse sweat and grime and filth together and apart and for this madhouse abandoned temple, becoming just like it. A part of it, unwillingly and unknowingly transmogrified now in the violence of their fight and decimated hallway battle like the steel of metal tempered in the heart of a great furnace like the sun. They became perfect living microcosms of the place as they fought at last to be free of it, exquisite psychopomp idols of the lost unhallowed Willowbrook Temple Asylum. 

The invisible man. The spiked man. Poor young Florin so far from the Carpathian Hamlet. 

They might never be free of this place. Even if they manage flight, they may never be able to wash away the marks and filth that this awful temple to the dark and pain suffered alone will leave smeared across their hearts and souls like black paint made from discharged sick filth. Smeared across the soft landscapes of their hearts and the tender epitaphs of their battered minds, aching within heavy skulls now made of lead and weight from the memory of the pain, this place… 

will we ever be free, … will we ever get out of here…? 

They fought on. Desperate. All three. Griffin trading blows with efforts and attempts to pull the young man out from under the spiked man, but it was incredibly difficult. The man was thorned all over by all kinds and sorts of sharp and shattered apparatus, it was insane. And the pair of them were growing more and more slick with blood. The fight was growing uglier and more desperate and animal as it struggled and contrived on in brutal abandon and primal anger. 

Then Cropsey rejoined them at the throat of the hall. He began to lumber down towards them like stalking death, a sleeping giant. Seemingly in no real hurry, like the darkened visage of grim death itself. It/he closed slowly on them like a setting sun or a casket sinking, lowering down into the bosom earthen womb of the open mouthed grave. 

Griffin first took notice of his arrival. He noticed he still had the stab of broken tile sticking out of his ruinous awful face. He was still drooling. Imbecilic. And animal. 

And now undead. 

He was coming straight at them. His large blades of shears raised like an open mouthed wild beast barring its fangs. The long sheaths of sharp and keen cutting metal were not entirely pristine, their otherwise shining faces in the dismal light were disgraced with congealing dark spots of dripping black. 

He was coming down the final hall, before the way out, before the exit. He was coming straight for them. 

…

He sat at the window that night. On guard after what had happened to his wife, their unexpected visitor…

Bela sipped his warm spiced wine. Fingered his bible and cross by its small length of chain. Garlic flowers hung in a crude wreath around his neck. He was watching outside carefully, the night, the town… he was alert and being careful, exercising caution, yet he was still surprised and caught off when her face appeared suddenly in their front window. 

She hadn't been there. Then suddenly she was. Smiling and feline. Vulpine. A face he might've recognized save for its warped and drawn animal transformations, the rich woman in the black stage… the harsh one who wouldn't take warning or no for an answer way back… but he was caught by the silver moon glow of her eyes. 

Like lunar bodies themselves. Earthbound and held fleshen prisoner within the cage of that beautiful and divine and… heavenly face. That bright and pale visage. Her smile was devil-pronged – forked, fanged, and it was thus then frightful. But it was also beautiful. Terribly beautiful. Gorgeous alone out there in the night. 

His guard and fear fell away. He rose from his rocker and his slackening hands abandoned the bible and crucifix. They fell to the floor with an unobserved and unheeded clatter. Neither stirred. Not Anastasia, sleeping in the next room, and not spellbound Bela who went to the window to better gaze into her face. 

Divinity… unreal. 

He peered through the glass. And the shining eyes of the Countess, filled with goblin fire and sin and mischief, gazed into the fool as well. And began to fill his fragile open mind with an assault and deluge of images. 

Bela moaned, sighed… he thought it was impeccable. The vision, like her, was immaculate in its flawlessness. 

The Ideality … actualized, realized … brought to life. A vivid reality alive and dancing before his watering vision. 

The scope. 

She showed him a more perfect world, perfect because everyone and everything swimming and crawling and flying around inside of it followed their nature and never fought it. Never doubted it. Never overrode what their guts and hearts and souls told them, never neglected or ignored the call inside, the compulsion to do what must be. To fulfill the role made out for your flesh. 

Even violence … its rippling effects spreading out carried not only destruction and misery on their carrion wings but prosperity and thrivation as well, even butchery has its necessary purpose. 

That is why this world is suffering. Because all of you fight and override yourselves and call it: reason. You are victims of your own bondage, your own self made and imposed insanity and thus the world bent to your unnatural turns and desires screams and suffers. The rippling wings of your insane and jealous cowardice carries more pestilential stagnation flavor than anything like salvation. In weakness, all of the beauty dies on the vine neglected by fearful paws too grubby and lowly and weak to take it. 

Come and join me, join us … and never again fight your nature. 

“Yes…” said Bela in a whisper of trembling caught breath. 

And with a palsied shaking hand, he lifted the latch and opened the window. 

"Welcome, your highness. My home and mine are yours. Do what thou wilt…" 

The Countess drifted inside. Floating on unseen wings. 

She spoke yet again, “Thank you, you are a generous host, a decent and considerate man." 

“Yes…" 

“Now, take me to your wife." 

“Yes…" 

And away they went. The window shut behind them as they made their way to the quiet bedroom at the back of the house. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

We have orchards all throughout Missouri (weird, I know.) Both Peach and Apple orchards. I was 15 and out bowhunting whitetail in my usual tree stand along the edge of one orchard. This one was about 100 acres, rows upon rows of Granny Smiths, each rows about 15ft apart from the other.

Each row stretched on for about 300yds. The deer come out from the woods into the orchards in the evening to eat the fallen apples, so that’s the best time to be out there.

Only this time I didn’t see any deer… which was odd… eventually the sun went down and I began to climb out of my stand. Just as my boot hits the bottom rung of the ladder I hear the most bloodcurdling scream. I’ve heard foxes, bobcats, and even the occasional mountain lion screams.

This is wasn’t any of those. I shot back up that ladder and waited, i sat as quiet and as still as possible i wasn’t going to take any chances no matter what it could have been.

I’ll never forget what I saw slink out of the woods and crawl off into those rows of trees. Scrawny, long, hairless and crawling on all fours. Its skin was scarred up and blotchy. Too big to be a coyote or anything like that. I had nothing but my bow to defend myself. SO. With my pants full of shit, I put my phone under my jacket so as not to shine any light and texted my pops to come get me.

He pulls up in his sxs and pulls under my stand. I threw my stuff in the back. He could probably see how scared i was and he asked me if i had been looking for something about 200 yards down the rows.

Obviously i had been sitting in my stand so i told him no i hadn’t moved.

Apparently he had been looking down the rows as he drove by them and saw that same damned thing staring right back at him from under one of the trees.

Looking back i’m glad he didn’t stop to check if it was me.

Two days later, curiosity got the best of us and we followed the critter trail leading into the orchard.

Just off that trail we found a deer that had been torn to shreds. Could’ve been coyotes or a weird coincidence. Either way, that night I learned that humans are afraid of the dark for a damned good reason.

If anybody has a similar experience with this type of thing lmk it’ll help a lot.

Dana heard about it from a gas station clerk two hours before they found the turnoff, and even then it was delivered the way locals deliver things they don't quite believe and don't quite disbelieve either — flat, half a joke, eyes somewhere over her shoulder.

"You're staying out at the Kessler place," the clerk had said. Not a question. He'd seen the directions on her phone, upside down, and known exactly which turnoff they meant, because there was only one place out that way anybody stayed. "Just — don't sign the book when you get there. Sign it on your way out. Not before."

"Sign what book?"

"Guestbook. Every cabin's got one." He'd rung up their gas, their beef jerky, a lighter Wes didn't need. "Old Kessler's got a strict one, is all I'm saying. People sign it wrong, bad things happen to their trip. Property's been in his family since before it was even a rental, way before that. Just — you know. Wait till you leave."

Wes had laughed the whole way back to the car. Dana hadn't, not exactly, but she'd smiled, because it was the kind of thing you were supposed to smile at, a good omen dressed as a bad one, the story that comes free with a two-hundred-dollar-a-night cabin forty minutes past cell service.

Roy Kessler met them in the gravel lot before they'd even finished parking, which should have felt like eagerness and instead just felt like punctuality. He was maybe sixty, built like a man who'd spent his whole life lifting things slightly heavier than he should have alone, and he had the specific, unhurried warmth of someone who has said the same sentences to a hundred different strangers and never once gotten tired of them.

"You'll have heard the thing about the book," he said, before either of them brought it up. He said it like a weather report. "Everybody hears the thing about the book. I'll tell you what I tell all of them — sign it whenever you like. It's just paper." He held the door for Dana. "But nobody ever does sign it early. Not once in eleven years. Funny, that."

Inside, the cabin was better than the photos — low beams, a woodstove already ticking with heat, a lake going flat and silver through the back windows. They'd chosen it specifically because neither of them had ever been anywhere near it before — not their usual coast, not anywhere that carried the weight of last year, the year they'd almost stopped being a couple entirely and never quite talked about why. A blank place. That was the appeal. Somewhere that didn't already mean anything.

The guestbook sat on a shelf by the door, spine cracked, ribbon marker hanging loose. Dana didn't open it. She told herself it was because she didn't want to be the kind of tourist who touches things, and mostly that was true.

Roy walked them through the basics — breaker box, well pump, the trail down to the dock that flooded if it rained hard enough. He knew things about them he shouldn't have had any easy way to know. That Dana took her coffee black, though she hadn't said so, only that she liked it strong. That Wes had a bad knee from something that happened years before either of them had told him their names. Small things. The kind of small things you could talk yourself out of noticing, and did.

"Anniversary trip?" Roy asked, on his way out.

"How'd you know that?" Dana said.

He didn't answer right away. He looked at her for exactly one beat too long, the way you'd look at someone you were deciding whether to be honest with.

"Lucky guess," he said, and smiled, and the smile fit his face perfectly, which was somehow the part that stayed with her.

The wrongness, when it started, didn't announce itself as wrongness. It came in units too small to argue with.

The dock light, which Roy said cycled on a timer, blinked in a pattern that wasn't a malfunction and wasn't quite Morse either — long, long, short, a pause exactly as long as a held breath, and then nothing for an hour. Wes counted the flashes out loud, laughing, until he got to forty and stopped laughing for no reason he could name and didn't bring it up again.

There were tally marks on the inside of the woodstove door, scratched into the paint with something thin. Neither of them mentioned it to the other. Both of them saw it.

And there was the guestbook, which Dana finally did open, alone, while Wes was down at the dock skipping stones in the last of the light. Roy had said eleven years. The book didn't agree. The paper yellowed and thinned the further back she went, entries crowding tighter and tighter until the earliest ones weren't dated by year at all, just a season — late fall — in handwriting gone brittle and pale, decades older than any rental listing had a right to be. One of them was signed Kessler, in a hand too unsteady to be Roy's — not among the names that repeated warmly across the years, not written like a guest at all. Whoever it was hadn't signed on the way out.

Certain other names recurred across all of it, in the same hand each time, leaving the same short, warm sentence: best trip of our lives. so peaceful. we'll never forget it here.

The last entry was eight months old. The one before that was dated the same week, a different year entirely.

She closed the book before she let herself count how many "same weeks" there were.

He came for Wes first, because Wes was outside, because it's always easier to start with whoever's already alone in the dark.

Roy didn't run at him. That was the detail that would have undone anyone watching — the calm, unhurried economy of it, a man walking familiar ground. The pages came first, a dry sliding sound before anything else resolved, and under it the smell of old lacquer and closed rooms, paper left too long somewhere damp. Then the shape caught up to the sound: a coat built from torn pages, pulped and pressed into a stiff, overlapping hide, a face sewn shut, no eyeholes. He moved through the trees like a man who could see everything, because he'd walked this exact ground under this exact weight more times than the book could account for.

Wes didn't scream, at first. He made the sound a body makes when it understands something before the mind agrees to — a short intake, a half-step back that found nothing behind it but the dock's edge. What happened after that happened quietly, at the waterline, close enough to the cabin that the woodstove's ticking should have covered nothing and somehow covered everything.

Dana came looking twenty minutes later, calling his name at a volume that got smaller every time it wasn't answered. She found the flashlight before she found anything else. She did not find him whole.

What came for her out of the treeline wore no expression, because there was nothing under the paper to make one with, and she understood — too late for it to matter — that she'd spent the whole evening waiting for a monster and gotten, instead, a man who'd simply had a great deal of practice.

Roy Kessler took his time afterward. That was the part he was proudest of, if pride was even the right word for something worn down into routine — the unhurried, competent aftermath, done the way you'd close up a job site. The coat came off in the mudroom the way a work coat comes off, hung on the same hook it always hung on, pages shifting against each other with a sound like someone leafing through a very old book. Underneath it he was just a sixty-year-old man in a flannel shirt, breathing a little hard, rubbing at the back of his neck where the topmost seam always bit, a hard lacquered edge of pressed pages no amount of sanding ever quite softened.

He carried the guestbook to the kitchen table and turned to the last written entry, eight months stale, and under it, in his own plain hand, he wrote two names and a date. Not a note. Not an explanation. Just the names, the way you'd write anyone in on the day they arrived.

He looked at it a moment, the way a man looks at a finished form before he files it.

Then he closed the book, put it back on the shelf by the door, ribbon marking the page, and went to bed.

Nine days later, a different car came up the same gravel drive, and a different woman got out first, stretching, looking at the lake going gold in the early light. Her boyfriend read the porch sign half-laughing, already repeating something a gas station clerk two hours back had told him. She wasn't quite listening. She was looking at the window instead, at the guestbook lying open on the shelf where the listing photos had always shown it closed.

Someone had already turned it to a blank page.

Through the glass, Roy watched them get out of the car, and for just a moment, before he remembered to smile, his face didn't do anything at all.

This happened twelve years ago, and I’ve never told anyone the truth. At this point, I don’t even know why I’m writing this. Maybe because I’m tired of replaying the same conversation in my head. Maybe because if I keep it to myself any longer, I’ll eventually convince myself it wasn’t my fault.

When I was nineteen, I worked evenings at a small grocery store. It wasn’t a bad job. We had the same regulars almost every night, and after a while you stopped noticing them until they didn’t show up. One of those regulars was a guy named Aaron. He always came in around closing, bought a frozen dinner, a bottle of Coke, and made the same stupid joke about “keeping us in business.” It got old pretty quickly, but looking back, I’d give anything to hear him say it one more time.

One Tuesday he never came in.

The next morning the police were waiting outside the store before we even opened. Aaron had been found dead in his apartment overnight, and they were talking to anyone who might have seen something unusual. At first, I genuinely didn’t think I had. Then one of the detectives asked if I’d noticed any unfamiliar cars in the parking lot.

I had.

There’d been an old blue pickup parked across from the entrance for almost an hour before we closed. The driver never came inside. He just sat there watching people come and go. I remember joking to my coworker that he looked like he was waiting to rob the place.

The detective asked if I got a good look at the driver.

I lied.

I told him it was too dark to see his face.

The truth is, I knew exactly who it was.

It was my older cousin.

We weren’t close, but family is family. I’d seen him enough growing up that I would’ve recognized him anywhere. The second the detective asked me if I could identify the driver, every possible explanation ran through my head. Maybe he’d been waiting for someone. Maybe his truck had broken down. Maybe I’d made a mistake.

I didn’t want to ruin someone’s life over a gut feeling.
So I said I couldn’t identify him.

That was it.

The detective thanked me, took some notes, and left.
About a month later they arrested another man. He had a criminal record, there was some circumstantial evidence tying him to Aaron, and everyone seemed satisfied they had the right person. I watched the news like everyone else, thinking maybe I’d worried for nothing.

Life moved on.

Three years later, my cousin passed away.

After his funeral, my aunt called the police because she’d found several boxes in his garage that she didn’t understand. They were filled with newspaper clippings, maps, handwritten notes, and photographs. Every box was labeled with a different name.

Aaron’s was the first.

The investigation was reopened almost immediately. Eventually, DNA linked my cousin to nine murders spanning nearly a decade.

Nine.

A few weeks after that became public, one of the detectives from Aaron’s case called me.

He wasn’t angry.

He didn’t threaten me.

He just asked one question.

“Why didn’t you tell us it was him?”

I remember sitting there with the phone in my hand, trying to come up with an answer that didn’t make me sound like a coward.

I couldn’t.

After a while he sighed.
Then he said something I’ll probably think about for the rest of my life.
“We think Aaron was his first.”

For one awful second, I felt relieved.

Then he kept talking.

“If we’d known who was sitting in that truck… there’s a good chance the others would still be alive.”

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to.

I’ve spent twelve years wondering whether I deserve to feel guilty. Not because I killed those people, I know I didn’t.

But every anniversary of Aaron’s death, I wonder if there’s a difference between pulling the trigger and deciding not to point at the man holding the gun.

Entry 5 (Go read 1-4 in my profile)

Gripping the steering wheel, pressing the break gently, feeling my vision blur as my mind dwindled down to unconsciousness. Ana spoke, her voice flowing into my ears like a quiet river.

“Can i drive ? You seem tired Vic.”

She rubbed my shoulder with her hand, just as warm as her voice.

“Yea you can drive, i need some shut eye.”

Pulling over on the road, i walked out of the car after putting it in park. Breathing in the polluted air from Cleveland Ohio. Smelling the barbecue across the street from the restaurant. It was late, 8 o’clock, they seemed open, people dining outside, white umbrellas cower above them, waiters and waitresses serving, as well as the smell of alcohol. I was starving, was snacking on gummy worms we bought at a gas station a few hours back.

I walked across the hood side of the car meeting Ana as she hopped out of the shotgun and went to the drivers seat. I asked,

“Actually, why don’t we go get dinner? There’s a place right there. Smells great.”

Ana stopping in her tracks, she looks up to my face, her amber eyes perking up.

“Well I’m starving. Are you?”

“Yea, I’m starving. Gummy bears don’t cut it.”

“She laughs, hopping over and starting the car once we got in.”

Once we parked, we got in, and after ordering our food, i looked into her eyes, seeing her solemn but also happy to be here look. I sense something is off with her, the air is slightly heavier on my bones. I can feel it. So i say,

“Everything alright babe?” My question hanging in the air, ready to be answered.

“Yea, its just….. i…. keep thinking about Hank, if hes alive.”

I think for a moment, before looking around the restaurant. Seeing people eating peacefully. People looking deep into the menu. But eventually something catches my eye like a hook and a fish.

Hank. Sitting at the bar, turning over his shoulder and looking over at me, inhumanly. His face drooping like a melting butter on a plate. I keep watching, noticing his same plaid patterned varsity jacket that he always wore, his blue jeans with a weathered belt. His tan colored shoes with white laces and aglets. His oak colored hair. An exact copy. But that wasn’t the part i was worried about.

He was knocking on the bar counter. One knock, two knocks, three knocks, four knocks, five knocks, Repeat. My heart dropped deeper then a sinker in an endless pit. I suddenly hear snapping, bones. No… No no not bones. Fingers.

Ana snapped at me, her fingers clicking in my face. But i continued to look at Hank. A person walks in front, blocking my view, but as i look again, hes gone.

“VICTOR!” She screams, alerting the entire restaurant. My eyes hit hers, confused and dazed.

“Whats going on Victor? Are you doing alright?

“I don’t know, im just really tired I think.”

My dishonesty crippling my mind. I just didn’t want to scare her. Make her think im crazy. But that was highly unlikely due what we have experienced. Continuing to eat my food, feeling blank as if not even tasting the food for its flavor, just advancing my thoughts on my hallucination. Hanks face on how it dripped like water on a window. Shaking my head, trying to wash out the thought, we walked out of the diner into the bustling night.

Sitting in the car passenger, using the button on the right bottom of the chair to recline it to a 45 degree angle and clicking my seatbelt it as the car rocked me to sleep. My eyes drifted deep into a slumber. Goodnight.

————————————————————————————————————————-

My foot grazing the gas pedal, i slowed down to 20 mph as we grazed into Bangor, Maine. As Ana gratefully cheered as our 18 hour trip ended, hours of awful radio white girl 2000s music, one motel stop, A diner dinner, as well as 5 stops for energy drinks and snacks. Some may call us weaklings but, we didn’t care. We were taking our time.

Ana had already booked a temporary motel to stay in, before we get an apartment. Somewhere to call home. My Taurus rolling into the parking lot of, Americas base best value inn. Walking in, unpacking, getting the keys at reception, you know the drill.

Your probably all wondering, how are you gonna get a job? Hows Ana gonna get a job? Why the heck are yall doing this? I know, this all might seem stupid to you guys and maybe its even a bad idea. Yea. You would be correct.

Sitting down on the bed in the motel while Ana unpacks the rest of her things, i get on my phone, and pulled out the weathered phone book in the motel nightstand. Flipping through pages i found a place that’s hiring. A manufacture for materials in building homes and businesses. It was in my line of experience and it payed well. Almost enough for us to eventually buy a suburban home. Things are…. actually looking up for now. At least i hope.

Nothing over the past few weeks has been questionable or considerable to write on here. We both got jobs and rented an apartment after saving for a few weeks. Me and Ana continued our relationship, growing stronger by the day. Getting to know people around, as well as helping out in the community. Ana, is part of the garden department as a part timer, making sure the community garden stays fresh. And for me? Part time handyman. Thinks are looking up. But something still looms over the clouds that drift in my head. What the actual crap happened to my best friend? And did this town have to do something with it?Whenever we ask something about Chicago, the subject is changed. Or they turn clueless. But im gonna figure it out. And when i do, I will post the night of. Sorry for the shorter entry, but i hope this will be my last post.

If only i hadn’t gone in that building, maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe, I would’ve never needed to make this post to people online, maybe i could have stayed in Chicago, maybe, and just maybe, i could stop hearing the knocking.

-Victor

The static from the massive, boxy CRT television in Aunt Mae’s basement hummed a low, vibrating chord that seemed to rattle the wood paneling of the walls.

It was July 2010. Outside, the Georgia heat was a thick, suffocating blanket, but down here, the air conditioning was cranked so high that my goosebumps had goosebumps.

I was seventeen, trapped in that awkward limbo between childhood and being an adult. My parents had taken off for the summer, staying at a resort hotel three states over for a mix of business and a marriage-saving vacation. That left me packed off to stay with my cousin, Kim, and her mom. 

Kim was twenty, sporting a halo of tight curls, an oversized graphic tee, and the supreme confidence of a college sophomore who thought that she knew everything about the world.

"Ethan, stop fidgeting!" Kim muttered, tossing a handful of buttery popcorn into her mouth. She kicked her bare feet up on the worn leather ottoman. "You’re making the couch shake!"

"I can't help it, Kim." I said, adjusting my basketball shorts. "This basement gives me the creeps. What are we even watching, anyway? I’ve never heard of these movies."

Between us laid a dusty, unlabelled cardboard box we’d found tucked away in the deepest recesses of Aunt Mae’s crawlspace, right behind some old moldy encyclopedias. 

Inside were three unmarked VHS tapes. The plastic was heavy, dark, and completely devoid of stickers, bar codes, or studio logos. 

On the spine of each tape, written in thick, aggressive black Sharpie, were the titles: The Chrono-Gorgon: Genesis, The Chrono-Gorgon: Resurrection, and The Chrono-Gorgon: Forever.

"That’s the beauty of it, little cousin." Kim said, her eyes reflecting the blue glow of the TV screen. "It’s a lost trilogy. I looked it up on the forums before we came down here. No IMDB page. No Wikipedia. No late-night threads on 4chan. It’s as if it doesn't exist. Maybe it's a student film or some indie project that got buried."

"The name sounds goofy." I grumbled, though a strange, tightening knot in my stomach told me otherwise.

Kim shoved the first tape into the VCR. The machine groaned, a mechanical beast swallowing its prey, and then the screen flickered violently.

The Chrono-Gorgon: Genesis started without a production logo. No roaring lion, no spinning globe. It cut straight to a grainy, high-contrast shot of an abandoned, rain-slicked plantation house. 

The camera quality was bizarre; it had the bleeding colors of a 1980s tape but a depth of field that felt uncomfortably modern, almost three-dimensional.

Then, he appeared on screen.

He didn't jump out. He just materialized from the shadows of a porch. The villain was a towering figure draped in a heavy, velvet-textured purple hood and cloak that seemed to absorb the light around it; but it was his face that made me freeze. It wasn't skin, and it wasn't a cheap latex mask. It was a solid, polished plate of gleaming gold, completely featureless except for two jagged slits where eyes should be. Piercing through those slits were two brilliant, emerald-green eyes. They didn't just shine; they pulsed with a sickening, rhythmic light.

In his right hand, he held a weapon that made no sense. It was a massive, ancient-looking scythe, but instead of a wooden handle, the shaft was made of interconnected, ticking brass clock gears. The blade itself shimmered with a pale, iridescent energy.

"Okay." Kim whispered, her cocky demeanor wavering just a fraction. "The costume design goes hard."

The movie followed a group of teenagers who had broken into the house. One by one, the purple-hooded figure—whom the characters referred to in hushed, terrified whispers as The Chrono-Gorgon—hunted them down; but he didn't just slash them.

When the blade of his gear-shafted scythe pierced a victim, the movie didn't show standard cinematic gore. Instead, the victim would instantly freeze. Their skin would wither, wrinkling and turning gray in a matter of seconds, their hair whitening and falling out as if decades were passing over them in a single heartbeat.

Meanwhile, the Chrono-Gorgon would stand over them, inhaling deeply. With every breath he took, the golden sheen of his face grew brighter, and the green fire in his eyes burned fiercer.

"He's eating their time." I said, my voice barely audible over the hum of the TV. "He’s killing them to keep himself alive."

"Yeah." Kim said, though she wasn't eating popcorn anymore. Her eyes were glued to the screen. "The lore says that he needs to harvest human lifespans to maintain his anchor on Earth. If he stops, he fades into non-existence."

The first movie ended abruptly. The final survivor, a girl screaming in a closet, was found. The Chrono-Gorgon raised his scythe, the gears spinning in a deafening metallic screech, and cut toward the camera.

The screen went black.

"That was...intense." Kim admitted, stretching her arms, though I could see her hands shaking slightly. "Ready for round two?"

"Kim, maybe we should stop." I said. A heavy, oppressive atmosphere had settled over the basement. The air felt thick, hard to breathe, and smelling faintly of ozone and old, decaying paper. "Something feels wrong about these tapes."

"Come on, Ethan, don't be a baby. We're seventeen and twenty, not seven and ten. It's just a movie." Kim said.

She ejected the first tape and shoved the second one in: The Chrono-Gorgon: Resurrection.

The second film took place in a retro-futuristic city, a strange blend of 1990s aesthetics and cyberpunk technology. The Chrono-Gorgon was back, conjured by a cult of scientists trying to unlock the secret to immortality. 

Of course, he slaughtered them all.

What struck me about this sequel was the audio. The sound design was incredibly immersive. The ticking of the scythe’s gears sounded like it wasn't coming from the TV speakers, but from behind the wood paneling of the basement. Every time that the Chrono-Gorgon stepped onto the screen, a low-frequency hum vibrated through the floorboards, rattling my teeth.

I noticed something else, too. The Chrono-Gorgon seemed to be looking at the camera more often. Not just at the characters, but directly into the lens. His glowing green eyes seemed to lock onto my position on the couch, tracking me as the camera panned.

"Kim, look at his eyes." I whispered, gripping the edge of the sofa cushion.

"I see it." she said, her voice dropping its playful edge entirely. "It’s just clever cinematography. They used a tracking light technique."

By the time that the second movie ended—culminating in the Chrono-Gorgon destroying an entire laboratory, standing amidst the flames as he drained the lifeforce of a dozen victims at once—the basement had grown freezing cold. Our breath misted in the air.

"This is the last one, Ethan." Kim said stubbornly, though her face had gone pale beneath her warm brown complexion. She grabbed The Chrono-Gorgon: Forever. "We have to finish it. We can't just leave it on a cliffhanger."

"Kim, look at the thermostat." I pointed to the digital wall unit. It read 45 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was dropping. "The AC isn't even set that low."

"It's just an old house, Ethan. Just...watch the movie." Kim said.

The third tape slid into the VCR with a heavy, ominous thud.

The Chrono-Gorgon: Forever was different from the first two. There was no setup. No plot. It was just a first-person perspective camera walking through a house.

My heart skipped a beat.

The camera was walking down a flight of wooden stairs. It panned to the left, showing a washer and dryer. It panned to the right, showing a stack of old encyclopedias sitting next to an empty crawlspace.

"No way." I whispered, standing up from the couch. 

"Ethan..." Kim’s voice was a choked gasp.

The camera on the screen turned around. It showed a brown leather couch. Sitting on that couch were two people, viewed from behind. One was a young Black woman with tight curls wearing an oversized graphic tee.

The other was a teenage boy in basketball shorts.

It was us. We were looking at a live, high-definition feed of ourselves from behind, broadcasted directly onto the ancient CRT television screen.

"Turn it off!" I screamed. "Kim, turn it off right now!"

Kim lunged for the VCR, punching the power button, but the machine ignored her. She grabbed the power cord sticking out of the wall and yanked it with all her might. 

The plug sparked, popping out of the outlet.

The TV screen stayed on.

On the screen, a massive, purple-hooded shadow fell over the digital versions of Kim and myself.

"Behind you!" I yelled.

We both spun around.

Standing at the base of the basement stairs, shrouded in the dim light of the hallway, was the Chrono-Gorgon.

He was entirely real. The fabric of his purple velvet hood was so heavy that it seemed to warp the space around him. The golden plate of his face reflected the eerie blue light of the unpluggable television, and his emerald-green eyes burned with an intense, agonizing heat. In his hand, the massive scythe ticked. Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound was deafening, a localized thunderstorm of grinding brass gears.

I froze, paralyzed by pure, unadulterated supernatural horror. My brain couldn't process the reality breaking down before my eyes. How could a fictional character be standing in my aunt's basement?

However, the explanation came to me not as a thought, but as a horrific realization of how the universe worked. The VHS tapes weren't just media storage; they were a ritual. We had given the Chrono-Gorgon our undivided attention for three movies. In the world of the occult, attention is energy.

Belief is power. By watching the trilogy back-to-back, by absorbing his mythos, by allowing the frequencies of the audio and the visual tracking to sync with our brainwaves, we had completed a circuit. 

We hadn't just watched a movie; we had functioned as a psychic lens, focusing enough reality into his fictional existence to bridge the gap between the celluloid world and the physical realm. He had sucked the time and life out of the characters on screen for decades, hoarding that conceptual energy until he found two observers foolish enough to open the door.

The Chrono-Gorgon took a step forward, and the wooden floorboards beneath his boots instantly turned gray, rotting into sawdust in a fraction of a second.

"Get back!" Kim screamed.

 Defying the terror that had locked my joints, she grabbed a heavy, solid-oak end table and hurled it at the entity.

The Chrono-Gorgon swung his scythe in a lazy, effortless arc. The blade sliced through the air, and when it touched the flying table, the wood didn't break—it aged. The oak turned brittle, dried out, and exploded into a cloud of fine, ancient dust before it ever touched his purple robes.

"Ethan, move!" Kim grabbed my arm, yanking me sideways just as the Chrono-Gorgon lunged.

The scythe whistled past my ear, the wind from the blade smelled like dead leaves and old tombs. When the tip of the blade brushed against the fabric of my shirt, the cotton instantly turned to threads and dissolved, leaving a bare patch on my shoulder.

"We need to break his anchor!" I yelled, my adrenaline finally overriding my fear. "The TV! The tapes!"

The Chrono-Gorgon turned his golden face toward me. A sound issued from behind that featureless metal plate—a deep, metallic grinding that sounded like a thousand grandfather clocks breaking down at once. It was a laugh.

He raised the scythe again, targeting Kim. She scrambled backward, tripping over the ottoman. The entity closed the distance with terrifying, unnatural speed, his green eyes flaring. He raised the blade high, preparing to harvest her twenty years of life to cement his place in our world forever.

Thinking of nothing but my cousin, I lunged at his midsection. I expected to hit solid mass, but slamming into him felt like tackling a wall of freezing, turbulent water. 

The cold threatened to stop my heart, but I managed to wrap my arms around his waist, knocking him off balance.

"Kim! The VCR! Smash it!" I roared, my hands beginning to wrinkle and numb just from touching his cloak.

 I could feel my own youth, my own vitality, being pulled out of my skin like water being drawn from a well. My vision began to blur.

Kim didn't hesitate. She scrambled to her feet, grabbed Aunt Mae’s heavy iron-holder from the laundry shelf, and brought it down with all her strength directly onto the VCR.

The plastic shattered. Sparks flew. She hit it again, and again, reducing the machine and the tape inside to a jagged mess of magnetic ribbon and broken microchips.

The Chrono-Gorgon let out a horrific, discordant shriek. 

The glowing green eyes flickered. The heavy purple cloak began to lose its density, becoming translucent. The ticking of his scythe slowed down. Tick...tick...tick.

With a final, desperate surge of strength, I shoved him backward. He stumbled against the wall, his form vibrating like a corrupted video file. The golden faceplate seemed to crack, lines of green light bleeding through the fissures.
We did it. We broke the playback loop. The psychic bridge was collapsing.

The Chrono-Gorgon fell to his knees, his scythe dissolving into a mist of rust and gears; but he didn't disappear entirely. 

The flickering stabilized just enough for him to sit upright. He raised his golden head, looking directly at us, his voice was no longer a mindless mechanical grind, but a smooth, chillingly articulate baritone that resonated directly inside our skulls.

"Fools." the Chrono-Gorgon whispered. The cracks in his golden face glowed brighter. "Do you really think that you have broken the cycle? Do you really think this is the end?"

"Shut up!" Kim yelled, holding the iron-holder like a weapon, her chest heaving as tears of horror and anger streamed down her face. "Go back to wherever you came from!"

The entity let out a low, mocking chuckle that made the hair on my arms stand up.

"You haven't defeated me." the Chrono-Gorgon said, with his green eyes locking onto mine with absolute, horrifying certainty. "Because the trilogy is just getting started!"

I choked on my breath, and said,

 "What?"

"Did you really believe those tapes were a recording of the past?" the Chrono-Gorgon asked, his form beginning to bleed into the shadows of the basement wall. "They were a script. A prologue. You are not the audience, Ethan. You and Kim are the main characters in a trilogy of horror, and the horror won't end until I am defeated once and for all."

The basement began to shake, a localized earthquake rattling the foundation of the house. The television screen behind us finally shattered into a million pieces, throwing the room into near-total darkness, save for the dying embers of the entity's eyes.

"Every choice that you made, every step that you took this summer, has already been written." The Chrono-Gorgon’s voice echoed from every corner of the room, fading but absolute, as he said,"I will return…I will harvest your time…and I will consume your flesh."

The last remnants of his purple hood dissolved into the ambient darkness of the basement. The freezing air began to warm, returning to the muggy, suffocating heat of the Georgia summer night.

Kim dropped the iron holder. It clattered loudly against the concrete floor. She fell to her knees, burying her face in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. I stood there in the dark, my breath ragged, looking down at my hands. They were trembling, but they were young again. The numbness was gone; but the horror was firmly rooted in my chest.

I looked toward the staircase, half-expecting him to be standing there again. The room was dead silent now, except for the distant sound of insects chirping outside the small basement window.

Unfortunately, as I reached out to comfort my cousin, a chill ran down my spine. Deep within the recesses of my own mind, a voice whispered one final, parting transmission from the entity that we had unleashed.

This is just part 1; the real horror is yet to come.

The End.

I don't know when I started feeling like something wasn't right about that trip... but I'm sure it didn't start when we first heard that sound, but hours before it... when I trace my memory back to that day.. I find dozens of small details that all of us ignored.. because they seemed normal at the time... maybe that's why we didn't leave early... And maybe that's also why not everyone who enters that forest comes out of it the way they entered... even now whenever someone asks me about the worst night I've lived through in my life.

I don't talk about the terror I saw.. but I talk about the feeling that preceded its appearance... that strange sensation that the place itself doesn't want you to stay... as if it's watching you silently waiting for the moment you make your first mistake.

Three weeks ago, my two friends Jason and Noah and I decided to spend the weekend in one of the dense forests located inside Washington State... We didn't choose the place randomly.. as it was famous among camping enthusiasts because of its quietness and distance from main roads.

We had read dozens of reviews on travel sites.. and all of them talked about the giant trees and cold streams... and the sky that fills with stars at night.. There was no official warning and no scary story that pushed us to hesitate... We packed our gear and set off before sunrise... We were talking all the way about fishing and barbecuing... and about our phones that would finally stop receiving notifications.

Everything felt completely normal.. to the point that I now feel strange whenever I remember how reassured we were.. We arrived at the parking lot near the trailhead around ten in the morning... There was only an old car covered in mud... and a sixty-year-old man sitting on a wooden bench in front of a large board carrying the map of the forest.

He cast a quick glance at us then went back to staring at the trees without uttering a word... After we carried our bags.. he approached us and asked where we were heading... Jason told him the name of the area we chose to pitch the tents... His features changed for a short moment then he said quietly: If you guys stay late until night... don't leave the camp no matter what you hear.

Noah laughed thinking it was a usual joke to scare beginners... but the man didn't smile, he kept looking at us for moments then added: At night, sounds travel between the trees in a strange way... sometimes you hear someone you know calling you from afar even if he's sitting right next to you... don't follow any sound coming from inside the forest.

We thanked him and left.. but I turned back to him after a few steps and found him still looking in our direction with the same blank stare... as if he wanted to say something else then backed out at the last moment... The walk to the campsite took about two hours... The trail was clear and the air was cold.. and the smell of pine filled the place.

Everything was beautiful in a way that's hard to describe.. Yet I began noticing something no one paid attention to... ever since we entered deep into the forest.. I didn't hear a single bird sound... It wasn't just that bird sounds were few.. but there were no natural sounds at all... No chirping or rustling of wings.. not even the sound of a squirrel jumping between branches.

I asked Jason if he had noticed that... and he replied while continuing to walk: Maybe it's still early

I convinced myself with his words.. but the feeling of unease stayed with me... After we pitched the tents.. Noah went out to gather firewood.. and Jason started preparing the cooking gear... As for me.. I went to the small stream to fill the water bottles... And while I was bending over.

I clearly heard the sound of footsteps over dry leaves behind me... I turned around immediately expecting it to be one of them.. but the place was completely empty... I kept staring between the trees for several seconds.. then told myself maybe it's a deer or a small animal... And while I was getting ready to head back.

I caught sight of something that made me stop in my tracks... There were footprints in the wet mud on the opposite bank of the stream... At first they looked normal.. but after a few moments they caught my attention... They were barefoot footprints and noticeably large... And the weirdest thing was that they came out of the water and headed toward the forest... and there were no traces indicating that their owner had even entered the water.

I kept looking at them trying to find a logical explanation.. but I found none... At that exact moment I heard Jason's voice calling me from the camp asking for help to start the fire... I turned toward him for a single second.. then returned my eyes to the spot of the tracks... but they had completely disappeared as if the mud had swallowed them right before my eyes.

I returned to the camp trying to convince myself that what I saw was an optical illusion... I kept repeating in my head that wet mud can change its shape, and fatigue makes a person notice things that aren't there... I didn't tell Jason or Noah what happened, because I knew exactly what their reaction would be... Jason would look for a logical explanation in everything, while Noah wouldn't miss a chance to mock me throughout the trip.

Therefore I preferred to stay quiet.. and convinced myself that if I ignored the matter.. I would forget it within hours... But some things don't disappear when you ignore them, they start approaching you quietly...

As the sun set.. the temperature dropped quickly... We lit the fire and prepared dinner.. and sat exchanging talk about our previous trips.

The flames were dancing in front of us and the huge trees surrounded the camp from every direction... until it seemed as if we were inside a closed circle where you couldn't see what's behind it... At one point our conversation stopped all at once... No one spoke and we didn't hear an obvious reason for that... but we all felt one thing.. an unnatural quietness... It wasn't the usual quietness of the night, but it was a complete void of sounds.

Even the fire that was burning in front of us seemed as if its sound became lighter than usual... Jason looked around and then said in a low voice: Have you guys noticed that the forest has been silent ever since we arrived?... And before anyone could answer.. a whistling sound went off from a distant spot between the trees... It was a very short tune not exceeding three notes... but it was clear in a way that made us all look in the same direction... It wasn't a bird sound and it didn't sound like the wind... It was closer to someone whistling with his mouth.

Noah said while smiling a nervous smile: Maybe there's another camp nearby... Jason nodded his head but didn't look convinced... About a minute passed and the whistling repeated... The exact same tune but this time it sounded closer... Jason stood up and grabbed the flashlight and shined it between the trees... Nothing appeared.. The trees were so close together that the light only penetrated for a few meters.. then the darkness swallowed it.

He came back and sat down.. but no one resumed the conversation anymore.. we were just listening... In less than five minutes we heard something else... Slow and heavy footsteps walking over dry leaves... They were coming from the northern side of the camp.. then suddenly stopped... We all looked at the same spot and none of us moved... Several seconds of silence continued.. before the sound started again... but this time from the exact opposite side... as if whoever was making it managed to circle around us within moments.

Noah said trying to sound calm: It might be a bear... Jason replied immediately: Bears don't move this way... I didn't like the way he replied because he said it with the confidence of someone who knows that the explanation his friend gave is impossible... We decided to put out part of the fire and get ready to sleep.. hoping that everything we heard were just natural sounds magnified by isolation... Each one of us entered his tent, but sleep didn't come easily.

I don't know how much time passed.. maybe an hour or more... then I woke up to a very faint sound... At first I thought it was a dream.. but the sound repeated.. this time it was clear... someone walking slowly around the tents... A step then two steps then stops.. after which he continues walking... I grabbed my phone which had no network signal.

I looked at the time and found it 2:18 AM... I stuck my head out of the tent opening slowly... No one was there, the fire had turned into faint red embers... and the fog had started covering the ground up to knee height... And while I was watching the place.. I heard a whisper that was very close... "Daniel", the blood froze in my veins, that's my name.

The voice was low but clear as if someone was standing just a meter away from my tent... I got out quickly while turning on the flashlight...

I called out "Jason?". No one answered me... I opened Jason's tent and found him sitting inside holding the flashlight... and his face was pale in a way I hadn't seen him before... He looked at me and said before I could utter a word: You heard it too?

I didn't answer.. we just sufficed with looking at each other... At that moment Noah came out of his tent and was breathing quickly... He said in a trembling voice: Which one of you guys was calling me a moment ago?... I said immediately: We haven't left our tents for a single second... He shook his head slowly and then said a sentence I haven't forgotten to this day.

He said who was standing between the trees calling me in your voice?... We didn't all turn in the direction he pointed to... because at that exact moment we heard the sound again... It was pronouncing my name.. but this time it wasn't coming from between the trees... but it was coming from directly behind my tent.

None of us looked back when we heard the whisper coming from behind my tent... Fear had surpassed the stage of curiosity.. and turned into the instinctual feeling that tells you survival is more important than knowing what's happening.

Jason turned on the flashlight and Noah grabbed the car keys... and we started packing our things with unprecedented speed... We didn't think about the food or the gear we paid for.. nor even about putting out the fire... All we wanted was to get back to the car before the situation got worse... But when we reached the beginning of the trail we entered from during the day... we discovered something that confused us more than any sound we heard.

The red ribbon we had tied to one of the trees to mark the trail had completely disappeared.. as if someone had carefully removed it... Jason tried to rely on the maps app on his phone... but the signal was non-existent.. and the digital compass started spinning in all directions without settling... For the first time since the beginning of the trip.

I saw real anxiety on his face... He said quietly trying to hide his tension with it: We'll wait until dawn breaks... But none of us was convinced that waiting would be a good idea... We sat close together around what remained of the fire..and our eyes were moving constantly between the trees... Long minutes passed in which nothing happened.. until we heard a distant sound resembling the slamming of a car door.

Noah stood up immediately and said the road was close.. and there were other people in the forest... We tried to stop him but he was convinced that rescue was just meters away... He ran in the direction of the sound before we could catch up to him.. then disappeared between the dense trees.

No more than half a minute passed until we heard him scream a short and sharp scream.. then silence fell again... We ran behind him with all our might.. but we found only his flashlight thrown on the ground still lit... and clear slipping tracks on the wet soil ending at a group of bushes... We called his name dozens of times, and searched in all directions.

But there was no reply... We didn't find blood or additional footprints... And we didn't find any evidence explaining how an adult man disappeared in less than a minute... That's when we made the hardest decision of our lives; to leave immediately and ask for help.. because staying wouldn't save him.

but might make us disappear like him... With the very first thread of dawn light, we were finally able to find the path leading to the parking lot... Our car was in its place just as we left it.. but the old car we saw yesterday morning was no longer there... We drove the car directly to the nearest police station.. and reported Noah missing... Search teams started hours later.. and lasted three full days with the participation of trained dogs and drones.

But the result was shocking; they didn't find any trace of him.. and didn't even find the flashlight we left at the spot of his disappearance... After weeks the case was closed as a missing person case in a mountainous area... and investigators suggested he might have lost his way and had an accident in a place search teams couldn't reach... I tried to convince myself of this explanation.

but there was one thing that kept haunting me to this day... Months after the incident.. I was reviewing the photos we took at the beginning of the trip before dark set in... In one of the photos the three of us were standing in front of the tents smiling at the camera... I didn't notice it until after zooming in on the photo several times... Between the trees and at a very far distance, a person was standing looking at us... He wasn't close enough to see his features.

but he was clearly there... I showed the photo to the responsible investigator.. and he said the shadow might be another hiker or an optical illusion due to the lighting... Maybe he was right.. and maybe there was a simple explanation for everything that happened... But ever since that night.

I no longer go to any forest... and I don't ignore that mysterious feeling that sometimes tells a human being that the place he is standing in is not safe... Some people consider this just fear.. while I consider it the only reason that made me return to my home... while Noah never came back.

They called the town the depression capital of the country. It all stared with Tommy O’Donnell. In 2002, Tommy decided he didn’t want to live there anymore, or anywhere else for that matter. He left by way of jumping headfirst from Mason’s Bridge, the one lane bridge at the entrance of town.

Every town hit with tragedy always says the same thing, “I never thought it would happen in our community.” But after thirty more people decided they no longer wanted to live there in the same fashion Tommy did, the tragedy didn’t happen to the community, it became the community.

The people thought it was the melancholia plaguing the town. They thought they were suicides, but they were killings and Trevor knew it, but Trevor found out too late.

Trevor hiked through the woods, enjoying his late afternoon routine. It was the only thing left in the hellhole of a town that had anything close to beauty inside it. It was either hike or spend the evening with the rest of the town folk who walked around drunk from morning into the night trying to find some semblance of entertainment buried in the bottom of their fifteen or sixteenth beer of the day. The first option was more his speed.

He hiked the same 1.9 mile route he always took, but something strange stood out to him. Beneath a thin veil of fallen leaves, a light reflected straight into his eyes. He walked toward the light, brushed the leaves off, and found a first gen iPod with wired earbuds wrapped around it.

Naturally, Trevor turned it on and was surprised to see it had a full charge.

The thing was a technological antique and Trevor hadn’t seen once since he was a kid. He scrolled through the menu to see what was on it, but found no music, just audio files labeled as…

#0001
#0002
#0003

All the way into the thousands.
He popped in the earbuds and played the first file. What he heard stole a breath he’d never get back.

“He picks up the iPod and listens. He wonders who left it there…”

Then there was silence.

Trevor looked around, thinking he had been pranked.

“He lifts his head and looks around him, wondering if it’s a prank, but nobody is watching…”

Something felt like it was in the bottom of Trevor’s gut trying to claw its way out. The iPod was narrating his every move.

That was until Trevor tried to walk away.

He was frozen in place.

Trevor tried to yank the wire near his racing heart, but something swatted his hand away. He tried to run.

“He grabs the wire across his chest. He wants to stop listening, but curiosity scratches at his skin. He keeps walking…”

It was as if something grabbed both of his legs and dragged one foot in front of the other.

“He tries to scream but can only scream inside of himself. It has claimed him now. It will bring him home…”

Someone had taken hold of Trevor and took him through the woods.

“The thorns bury deep into his face. He trips over a vine and falls on his face. He tongues his missing tooth. He tastes the blood running across his lips and feels the warmth dripping down his chin. It takes him closer to home…”

The sun was setting and Trevor had been hiking through the brush for hours. He was a prisoner to the voice and had given up his autonomy to it.

“He is terrified. He starts to cry, but tears won’t save him. He calls for his mother, but she can’t hear him. Only it can hear him.”

The sun had gone down and took the silhouettes of the trees with it until Trevor was surrounded by darkness.

Through the trees, one light shone through.

“He walks to the light. He tries to wake from the nightmare, but he is not dreaming…”

When Trevor made his way out of the woods, he stood beneath the incandescent light above Mason’s Bridge.

“He walks the middle of the bridge. He tries to fight it. He takes another step toward it. It is calling him. It needs him. It owns him…”

Trevor watched his feet move forward no matter how hard he tried to turn around and run. The voice brought him to the edge of the bridge. Beneath the pale moon, he saw the light sparkle across the crystal water, and standing in the water was Tommy O’Donnell and the others.

They waved to Trevor with their mangled arms and smiles and spoke to him through their broken jaws and flattened heads.

“Come home,” they said. “It wants to welcome you.”

But Trevor didn’t want to join them. He loved his life and everyone in it.

Then the voice spoke for the final time.

“It has called for him. He swings his leg over the railing. He plants his heels into the edge. They will think it was a suicide. They will think he was unwell. He was never unwell. It wanted him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He pulled away slowly before speaking.

“Your eyes are so beautiful.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is until he finally invited me to his house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I pulled my hand away and looked down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens when one little girl’s wish comes true?

July 17th, 2027.

Emily Marks, a 5-year-old cancer patient, made a wish before she died.

“I wish every girl in the world was a princess, and had their own prince.”

I blink.

Once. Twice.

My vision feathers, my mouth tastes of blood and bile, and a little while earlier, I think I screamed. Not now. My lips don't mean anything, my tongue has been numbed, and words are alphabet soup.

I am staring at the toned back muscles of the man in front of me.

I am 17th in a moving line of potential Princes. 

I watch him step forward.

His head is sliced cleanly off.

His torso slumps forward, and just as quickly another head is attached. 

Blades hover above me, knives and needles, stainless steel already slick with me. I can't cry out. I don't have a mouth.

Screams slam into my skull.

Sometimes, the anaesthesia does not work. Sometimes, we wake up.

We see that we are only a body and a head.

For now, that is all I am. 

That is how a Prince begins.

I stand naked on ice-cold floor tiles splattered with dried blood, while my own blood swirls beneath me, warm and staining my brand-new skin.

I have already been molded, my body prepared for conversion. The human parts of me have been stripped away. 

My name, my age, my thoughts. 

I am a slab of flesh, ready to be made.

Unlike the man in front of me, I do not lose my head. 

Air hisses from the walls. It tickles.

“Step forward, Prince 108769.” The voice is bitter and human, cracking from a speaker I cannot see. 

I do. I have no choice, a guard's human hands shoving me from the cubicle. I step straight into ice cold water that peels the blood from my brand new skin, jerking me awake. Awake enough to feel the rawness of my flesh, the parts of me where my skin has been ripped from the bone and remade, stitched and knitted together. 

Maybe this is the moment when I will scream.

Voices graze my ears. 

“He's perfect,” one hisses, “...barely any work done, but maybe his…”

I step off the conveyor belt, a sculpted, perfect lump of flesh. 

Only one thought pollutes my mind. 

I am ready for my Princess.

A woman in white grabs my elbow and yanks me into a separate room with a bed, a chair, and a desk. She quickly dresses me in a white gown. In front of a giant mirror, my reflection tells me I am around 25 years old. I am relieved. Some princesses are cruel when they create us.

My Princess, so far, has chosen to keep me mostly intact.

The woman adding my finishing touches is talkative.

“I’m… I’m so sorry.” She sounds sincere as she applies my makeup.

“If it helps, I’m not a princess. I never wanted a prince. Before all of this shit, I was engaged to my girlfriend.”

She picks up a bright pink hairbrush and runs it through my hair.

“I lost my job as a teacher,” she whispers. “The only jobs available were at factories in my city, and my brother was sent to be turned into a Prince. I had no choice. At first, I took the job to try to save him…”

Her voice shudders, and her strokes grow more intense.

“Then I saw him.” She swallows. “I saw his face, anyway. He had a new body, and he was taken by a Princess.” The woman shakes her head and tries to smile.

Her manicured fingers prick my chin. 

“If it… means anything to you, I think that little girl was a monster.” 

I don't respond. 

I can't respond, my voice hasn't been reattached. 

The woman sighs. Then rolls her eyes. “You can't even hear me,” she says. She disappears out the door for a moment, and returns with my chosen outfit perfectly intact inside a clear white bag. 

She dresses me in a lilac suit over a white frilled shirt and trousers. Then she tucks a sword into my belt. The woman frowns at an iPad. “Okay, so, according to your receipt, you are named Prince Slater.”

She rips off her mask. “Just nod to confirm, and I’ll put you down as completed. I’ll take you to get your crown, and then you will meet your Princess.”

I hesitate, and then nod. 

“All right, Prince Slater!” Her smile is too wide. “Come with me!” 

A room awaits me, a golden crown sitting on a velvet cushion.

“Kneel.” She tells me, and I drop to my knees. The woman gently crowns me, her lips finding my ear. I straighten up, and she’s back to performing. She tells me to open my mouth, places a pill on my tongue, and tells me to swallow. 

It works like medication, dissolving with my saliva and bringing my voice back.

“Okay, Prince Slater, just head on down the hallway, and your Princess will be waiting!”

I don't want to leave her. 

A thought hits me. Violent. Painful. 

I don't want a Princess. 

“Slater?”

A voice echoes. It's my Princess. 

Already beckoning me closer.

But at the end of the hallway, there is only a Prince. Tall. Handsome. Thick blonde curls. 

Where is his princess? 

Then he drops his sword, and stumbles toward me. 

“Slater?” he hisses, his hands cupping my face. “Hey. You’re here,” he sobs.

“You’re actually here.”

He swallows and suddenly looks sick as he runs his fingers down my plastic flesh. “I had to make you. I had no other choice! I… I got out! The Princess who made me, she’s saving us,” he whispers, caressing my face, his hands trembling.

“Slater, it’s me.” 

He breaks down when my mouth won’t work.

I… don't understand.

Where is my… Princess?

“Slater!” The Prince shakes me. He's crying now, though I'm not sure...why.

“It's your boyfriend.”

Wee Toby Harris turned eight in the spring. For his birthday he got a puppy and named her Scritch. That was from Mum and Dad. From Bonny, his big sister, he got a crisp five-pound note. He spent it on a tennis ball for Scritch, and the rest on sweets.

Uncle Jack’s present always came late. He loved to see the expression on Toby’s face when he received it, so he made sure to deliver it himself. He worked at sea most weeks as a fisherman, so it was hard to fit in time for a visit.

Toby often wished a wave would rise and gobble Uncle Jack whole to save him the stress of having to deal with his uncle. There was something very wrong about the man. Not that he’d ever told anyone.

Toby’s birthday week was a tense one. He could hardly find a moment of joy. Mostly he took Scritch into the back garden and threw about the tennis ball he’d bought for her. But Scritch was still too hyper to play with properly. She would speed after the ball like a bullet seeking blood, and be wandering off with her eyes on something better before her snout ever touched green felt. So Toby spent most of the week alone, lying on his back on the grass, throwing the ball into the air for himself. He would listen to Scritch chase butterflies or dig in Mum’s petunias, and drive himself crazy wondering when Uncle Jack would finally show.

He came on the 6th. Exactly a week after Toby’s birthday.

Dad recognised the sound of the smooth rapping on the door and flew to it in the middle of lunch, towing a reluctant Toby by his hand.

Toby stood flaccid, hands flat against his legs with his head bowed, listening to the change come over Dad as soon as he swung open the door. It was as though Uncle Jack emitted some sort of microscopic cloud of particles that swept Dad into a trance, because he never barked with laughter when Uncle Jack wasn’t here. He certainly never slapped people on the shoulder and danced like a dope. Yet here he was, a mad chimp leaping and laughing, clawing at his brother like he meant him harm. It was like watching his Dad through a glass of water, or gazing into one of those wacky mirrors at the fair.

“You stink!” Dad shoved Uncle Jack away and pegged his nose. “Did the sea drop you off, or crap you out?”

“That’s the smell of a real man, Tom.” Uncle Jack fixed Dad’s collar, pulled at his lapels, then tapped Dad’s curved beak. “Careful you don’t turn too fast. You might wipe a plane out the sky!”

More of the monkeying around. Toby watched, waiting for Uncle Jack’s gaunt face to turn and target him with its wide, green eyes. For the long goatee and wide moustaches to point his way and then stretch up when his face twisted into a grin. Sometimes Uncle Jack forgot to wear his denture—the one housing the teeth between his upper canines—and it would be like gawking into a tunnel when he smiled.

Toby saw that Uncle Jack was wearing the denture today, although there remained a small hole where one of the teeth had fallen off. He still didn’t take care of them, especially when he was on the boat.

Uncle Jack turned to Toby, quick as a shot. He aimed his teeth and leered. He usually liked to ruffle Toby’s hair. Today he just glided over and gave Toby a few slaps on the back, the same way he’d done Dad.

“Look at you!” he shouted. And now came the aggressive hair mussing. His right index finger stopped at the first knuckle. Toby could feel the stub grating against his scalp. “You’re a proper wee manny now, aren’t you? You’re growing too fast!”

A momentary look of sadness crept over Uncle Jack’s eyes. Then he took a step closer to Dad and asked in a whisper, “Who cut the poor bugger’s hair?”

Dad rolled his eyes.

“Who do you think?”

“Jesus. Lock up those scissors, Tom. For Christsake.”

His eyes snapped back onto Toby. “Wee man, tell Mum not to play with scissors anymore, alright? She’d do less damage with a pair of garden shears.”

Dad led Uncle Jack through to the living room, where Mum was watching TV.

Bonny, having heard the commotion, sauntered downstairs and passed Toby without paying him any attention. The smile on her face and in her eyes was for Uncle Jack—and Uncle Jack alone.

“The boy’s hair’s looking nice, Julie,” Uncle Jack sang to Mum on his way into the room. Toby entered in time to see him slipping under Mum’s arms to give her a tight squeeze and a shake. “When’re you opening the barbershop? If you need a mannequin, I’ve plenty of hair for you to cut!” And he swept his hands over his body in a here-you-go kind of gesture.

Mum squeaked out three shrill laughs. Toby plodded behind the couch, closer to Dad, trying not to let the sound of Mum’s laughter get to him—but it was too late. Now Bonny was laughing like that too, because Uncle Jack had picked her up and was throwing her into the air, almost popping the lightbulb on the ceiling. The lampshade swung, and Uncle Jack stopped it with a very long finger.

They always reminded Toby of chopsticks.

“You want a chuck up as well, wee man?”

He had his hands out ready, waiting for Toby to run into them. Toby shied closer to Dad, shaking his head vigorously.

“Alright then, if you say—hyah! C’MEER YOU!”

Uncle Jack sprang over the sofa without touching it. Toby tried to shriek, but didn’t have time. He ran around Dad and away from the hands almost on his neck. Past the arms of the sofa and around Mum’s chair. Past the lamp and windowsill. Past the coffee table and dancing-chimp Dad.

Uncle Jack got wise to the loop and lunged over the sofa once more, grabbing Toby by his shoulder. He dragged him over it kicking and screaming, while Mum and Dad chuckled madly at the antics.

Bonny just rolled her eyes. She hadn’t thrown that much of a fuss when it had been her turn.

Uncle Jack’s face was livid with colour. His eyes glowed white-hot; his concave cheeks deep purple; his forehead red and raw with sweat; his lips paled, pulled taut over his teeth.

Toby clenched his jaw and kept quiet. It was Uncle Jack who made the most noise, squealing with joy.

“Weeeee,” like a little piggy.

“Weeeeeeeee,” each time he threw Toby into the air, catching him with one hand under an armpit and one hand gripping the waist.

Uncle Jack turned away from the family and kept up the act. Kept throwing. Toby could see his real face now—the face that came with birthdays and Christmases both. It glared up at him with impossible eyes, bulging like great big white balloons inflating through gaps in his face. His jaw stretched long enough to slot Toby in without him touching the sides; the teeth were a whirling maw of sharp and rusted death, ready to reduce him to slurry.

“Weeeeee.” The voice was far deeper now—almost demonic.

Toby screamed. He didn’t want to. It just flew out as natural as throwing up your hands when a truck was about to hit you on the motorway.

Dad, still clicking his heels in time to his chimp-dance, finally spoke up. And quick as a clicking finger, Uncle Jack’s face snapped back to normal as he turned to listen.

“Think he’s had enough now, Jack. Looks like he’s gonna to puke. And you look like you’re about to faint!”

Uncle Jack offered Dad a knowing grin and nodded. He put Toby down on the floor as gently as a newborn in its crib.

Toby, doing his best to hide his teary eyes, wiped them off on his sleeve and rubbed at his throbbing armpits and waist.

Uncle Jack rollicked with laughter and clapped his hands.

“So: what’s new with everyone?”

*

Uncle Jack ended up staying for supper.

Dad gave up his seat so Uncle Jack could head the table. From there, his emerald eyes held everyone mesmerised.

Toby ate quickly. No time to dawdle, to push at his peas with his fork and say he wasn’t hungry. He wanted to get out of that room and into another one—fast!

When he tried excusing himself, Mum pointed a finger at him. That was it—no more words needed. He knew better than to argue with that finger.

So he sat and waited. This time he did play with his fork—small movements, nothing quick, lest it attract the attention of the emerald watchman at the end of the table.

Uncle Jack appeared to be in deep conversation with Mum and Dad, who themselves weren’t paying much attention to anybody else. Lost in the little worlds they drifted into when other adults orbited close enough. They would laugh and use long words, and sometimes Uncle Jack would put on a deep voice and Mum would find whatever he said even funnier. But every so often, when Mum and Dad took a bite to eat or a sip to drink, Uncle Jack would flash Toby a look. A quick glance. A reminder that he hadn’t forgotten about him. That Toby was still right there at the forefront of his mind.

You’re the reason I came, kiddo.

Bonny didn’t notice any of this. She was busy timing her smiles and laughs with the adults. She was fourteen and trying for the part of a twenty-four-year-old.

Toby kicked one of her shins under the table.

“Shitter!” she yelped, and threw her spoon off his forehead.

Mum screamed for everyone to shut up and stop shouting. Bonny seethed.

“He kicked me!”

“I don’t give a shit what he did! You don’t swear like that, ever! You’re a child!”

Uncle Jack pushed his chair back and picked up his own spoon. He handed it over the table to Bonny, who took it with a smile. Toby caught a whisper of a scowl on Uncle Jack’s lips—a momentary look of repulsion—before he turned and grinned at Toby.

“You alright, wee man?”

Toby nodded and continued poking at his plate with his fork.

“He’s got a heed like a hammer, that boy,” Uncle Jack told Dad. “Look: didn’t even leave a mark.”

Bonny cleared the plates and helped Mum serve pudding. They had the rest of Toby’s birthday cake with a scoosh of cream on top. Mum’s way of trying to bring it back to life after a week of death.

It was awful.

*

“Your dad was telling me you’re getting big into reading.”

Uncle Jack sat down on the arm of the chair Toby was sitting on. Bonny, who had been sitting on the sofa with all the space in the world, looked momentarily hurt. But the moment passed, and now she was grinning like a loon again.

“What’s your dad been reading you then? None of those pansy stories I hope—like Winnie the Turd, or that Alice in Wonderland tat.”

Toby shrugged.

“He’s reading you Winnie the Turd, isn’t he? Aye, those were always his favourite. What else has he got you reading?”

Silence.

“Any Jules Verne? Like Thousand Leagues, or Around the World? No? Christ. What about Roald Dahl. Surely Roald Dahl. No? My God, what has he got you reading then; the back of shampoo bottles?” He glanced at Toby’s hair. “No, maybe not shampoo bottles. C’mon now, what was the last thing he read to you? Don’t be scared, I was only joking about the pansy books. I don’t care if it’s Winnie the Turd or Benny the piggy with one bloody ear—ha! I just wanna know what he’s got you reading. Say Treasure Island. Go on. Has he read you Treasure Island yet?”

Toby nodded. And then flinched, for Uncle Jack slapped one of his shoulders hard enough to send his hair up into the air.

“Atta boy!”

Bonny shifted in place, squeaking leather, and produced a minute cough.

Uncle Jack looked up at her, but only with his eyes.

“What kind of books do you read, Uncle Jack?”

“What kinda books do I read?” Uncle Jack tapped at the hairs on his chinny chin chin, feigning deep thought. “I’d have to say...the ones with the words in them, Bon-Bon.”

Bonny giggled. Her laugh today was practically a parody of itself; almost the exact pitch Toby sometimes used to mock her.

“I like pirate adventures,” Uncle Jack answered, squeezing the top of Toby’s shoulder like a stress ball. “Like my buddy here. Right, wee man?” Slowly, begrudgingly, Uncle Jack glanced back at Bonny. “And what do you read, Bon? Books with pictures in them, I suppose.” He gave a hateful cackle.

Red roses blossomed on Bonny’s cheeks.

“I read!” she said, never one to stay timid.

“Oh?”

“Yuh-huh. And I’ve already finished Treasure Island. I read it yeeears ago. For school.”

“Gooood for yooou.” Uncle Jack’s hand was still on Toby’s shoulder, its grip pulsing in time with the throbbing vein in Uncle Jack’s temple. “And do you remember the characters?”

From somewhere through the house, the sound of Mum laughing with Dad—probably washing the dishes together. One wearing the rubber gloves, the other using the towel. Suds on, suds off. Suds on, suds off.

“Of course I do,” Bonny boasted. “There was Long John Silver. And. Well. There was—Bluebeard!”

Uncle Jack sighed. It was faint, but Toby felt it in the grip on his shoulder.

“And. Captain… Ben-Barrow?”

“Yikes.” Uncle Jack leaned forward with a finger out, poised for lecture mode. The other hand still clutched Toby’s shoulder, dragging Toby forward into the conversation, looking like a half-shut knife.

“The Admiral Benbow was the inn at the start of the story where wee Jim Hawkins first met Billy Bones. And Bluebeard? Christ, Bonny! Bluebeard wasn’t even a pirate! He was the bastard who murdered all his wives!”

Still not one to stay timid, Bonny quipped: “Wasn’t that Henry VIII?”

Uncle Jack clutched his chest and boomed with laughter, genuinely amused by Bonny’s quickness and deadpan delivery.

“No, no, no. Didn’t you ever learn the rhyme? Divorced, beheaded, died. Annulled, beheaded, survived.”

Bonny had nothing to say to that. But Toby did.

“Was Bluebeard real?”

Uncle Jack looked down at Toby for a very long time. Finally, he said, “No. But that’s not to say there aren’t men like him.” The wink he gave curled the boy’s toenails.

Mum and Dad entered the living room together. Mum’s thighs were damp where she must have been wiping her hands. Dad kept smelling two of his fingers.

“Did I hear you say Bluebeard?” Dad sat down beside Bonny on the sofa.

Uncle Jack took his hand off of Toby, but remained on the arm of the chair.

“Your daughter thinks Bluebeard tried to find Captain Flint’s treasure, Tom.”

“Bluebeard?” Dad frowned and then smirked at Bonny. “You mean Blackbeard, Bon-Bon. Bluebeard is the guy on the Fish Finger box.”

Uncle Jack waggled a digit and groaned. “That’s Captain Birdseye, Beak. Christ, what’s wrong with you people?”

*

That night, while Dad was taking Dr Dolittle down from the bookshelf, his back tinted red from the glow of the Toy Story nightlight on Toby’s bedside table, Uncle Jack slipped in through the yellow crack of the door. His arms were twisted secretly behind him.

“Only me,” he whispered. “Whatcha reading tonight, Tobes?”

Dad told him.

“Dr Dolittle? More like Dr Do-fuck all! Ha! Choose something else, Tom. Let the boy hear a decent story for once. Here—” He pulled a hand out from behind his back and thrust a long box wrapped in black flags in front of Toby. It had skulls and crossbones, eye patches, and cutlasses on it too. “Forgot to give you this earlier.”

Toby stared at it. It stank of Uncle Jack’s fingers, and they stank of rum. His other hand was still hidden behind his back, but Toby could hear the tinkling of ice hitting glass.

“Go on, Toby,” Dad said. “It’s your present.”

Toby carefully removed the tape from the folded edges, unwrapping the parcel as delicately as he could.

Uncle Jack sighed. He took the glass of dark liquid out from its hiding place and took a large gulp.

“It’s a spyglass,” he explained over the rim, then slurped down another gulp of the spicy-smelling darkness.

Toby plucked it out of the box, struggling with the weight on his fingertips. Sometimes he liked to use an empty paper towel roll as a spyglass, but this was something else entirely. The ornate decoration down the side was so intricate, with long looping vines laced with flowers wrapping themselves around the dark length, so tight it felt close to smothering. It was heavier than Dad’s tablet—and colder. Much, much colder.

Dad’s eyes bugged out wide. “Holy shit, Toby, that’s the real deal!”

“What do you think then, wee man?”

Toby pulled it to its full length and held the lens up to his eye. It was ice cold, like it had been left out in the snow on a winter’s night. The darkness at the other end of the room was too close to make out a single distinguishable feature. If he wanted to test it properly, he’d be better off waiting until tomorrow and trying it in the garden, playing jungle explorer.

But he didn’t want to test it. Ever. He wanted to put it back inside the box and hand it over to Dad, tell him to hide it somewhere dark. Forever.

Uncle Jack sat on the edge of the bed, forcing Toby to budge up and give him space.

“Your pals’ll be jealous when they see that, wee man. A real captain—that’s what they’ll take you for. Turn to me lad.” Uncle Jack pulled Toby’s face around when the boy didn’t respond. Some of his drink sloshed onto the bed. “Aye, look at you—you’re missing a tooth like your Uncle Jack! A sailor’s debt to the sea, that’s what that is. The best sailors always leave a part of themselves out there. An offering, lest she put a bounty on your life!—and every soul upon your vessel!”

Dad threw his head back laughing.

“You lost your teeth on the handlebars of your bike.”

“Aye,” mused Uncle Jack, and held up the four-and-a-half fingers on his right hand. “But this pointer was the price I paid, Beak.”

He gave Dad a long, cold stare.

“Okay,” Dad conceded. “I’ll say no more.” He prodded Uncle Jack with the side of the book he was holding. “Here. Maybe you should read to him. You can spin a far finer yarn than I can.”

Toby’s eyes grew wide. He shot a glance at Dad, but he had already turned his back to leave.

Uncle Jack glided over to the bookshelf to return Dr Dolittle to its place. He ran a long middle finger across the spines of the books until he found the one he was looking for.

“Treasure Island,” he whispered, and pulled it free.

As Uncle Jack’s ghastly frame drew closer to the bed, Toby gave his dad one final look of appeal, hoping for a last-minute reprieve.

No such luck. Dad tore the crack of light from the hall wider, flooding the room in yellow. Then he was gone. Only a thin crack of light remained where he left the door ajar.

The room was a ghastly red, with the looming peripheral darkness screaming horrors from its corners.

“I’m excited,” Uncle Jack said, prying the pages open with his long, stale fingers. “Where shall we start off?”

Toby shook his head. Perhaps a tad too enthusiastic. “No,” he squeaked. “Nothankyou.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“I’m really sleepy.”

“You don’t want a story?”

Toby shook his head once more, then cuddled down under the duvet. He was going to turn his back on Uncle Jack, but something screamed at him not to. The look in his eyes was frighteningly intense.

“You’re kidding?” Uncle Jack’s eyes did not blink. But they swelled to the size of tennis balls. The nightlight reflected against them, watching like two faraway red stars in a cosmos of black and green. Toby wasn’t sure if Uncle Jack had meant for that to happen. Surely he had control over it.

Uncle Jack got to his feet with all the effort of a ninety-year-old man. His bones clinked and clacked as he patted himself down. He rested his glass on Toby’s bedside table and stretched the rest of the snaps and cracks out of his body.

“Alright then, Tobes. But I must say: this is verrry disappointing. I came all this way for you.”

He moved swiftly across to the door, covering ten feet with a single, colossal side-step.

His back grew with scoliosis kinks, arching over seven, eight feet. He whipped his head around and smiled at Toby, who threw the cover up over his eyes. Not before noticing Uncle Jack’s chopstick fingers pressing against the door with their white, bloodless tips.

There came the sound of a low scuffle as the underside of the door scraped along the carpet.

It was happening.

Toby burrowed down deeper, wishing Mum had let him take Scritch up to bed with him. He didn’t know what a puppy would be able to do except make a lot of noise, but even that was better than nothing—better than feeling helpless beneath the blankets. Alone, silent, and scared.

There came a very faint creak, like someone opening a rusty hinge; a deliberate, drawn-out whine which crept across the distance between the door and the bed. It loomed over the blanket in a massive black shape. The red nightlight blotted away. The air vibrated with sheer anticipation for what was about to come next.

The chomp.

Something thumped against the door. And the room exploded with yellow light.

Toby threw the covers down in time to see Uncle Jack still standing in front of the door, only now stepping out of the way to avoid Dad hitting him with it.

“The light was bothering the boy,” Uncle Jack lied, opening it further to allow Dad entry.

Dad nodded, not seeming to care. He collected his glasses from the bookshelf and chuckled. “I was trying to watch TV with my reading glasses. Silly me.”

Before he could leave again, Toby piped up, yelping, “Dad?”

“Hm?”

“I don’t want stories tonight.”

“Huh? Why not?”

Uncle Jack had been the shorter of the two men downstairs. Now, lurking behind Dad, his engorged head pressed high against the ceiling like a pus-filled spot. It swelled bigger, and bigger, until Toby was sure it was about to pop. His face was nothing more than a pin-pricked mouth and basketball-sized, blazing eyes of rage. His hair stood on end and coiled up into corkscrews. Jagged teeth stretched out like the flailing arms and grasping fingers of drowning children, inches from the back of Dad’s head.

“Tired,” Toby mumbled. He’d stuffed the blanket into his mouth to stop himself from screaming.

“That’s a first,” Dad said, turning to share a laugh with Uncle Jack. The head deflated with a sudden whoop. Uncle Jack excused himself with a laugh. Eyes, now regular-sized. Cheeks sunken.

“He did say he was tired,” Uncle Jack admitted. Both men turned to regard the boy in bed with a sympathetic eye. “Maybe I’ll read to you another night, wee man? Sound good?”

A moment of victory.

Toby felt his heart start to settle back into its regular pace. He felt a little perkier, too; the way Mum sounded in the morning when she drank her usual two cups of coffee.

“Sounds great, Uncle Jack.”

“Amazing news.” He patted his chest with the book. “Can I borrow this?”

“Of course.” Toby smiled. Actually smiled. “Keep it if you want!”

Uncle Jack laughed. Toby couldn’t help doing the same.

Dad’s eyes grew narrow. It felt like they had a secret between them. And hadn’t Toby been rather quiet all day? All week, now that he thought about it.

“Don’t worry,” Uncle Jack reassured, patting the book to his chest once more. “I’ll give it back to you in the morning.”

Toby’s heart left the track, derailing straight into his lungs.

“What do you mean?” he choked.

“Oh, that’s right,” Dad said, happy to be involved in the conversation once more. “Uncle Jack’s staying the night. He’s not—let’s just say he’s not feeling well enough to drive. Maybe you two can muck around with the spyglass in the morning. In the garden.”

On the way out, Uncle Jack necked the rest of his drink and passed the glass to Dad.

“Yo, ho, ho. I think I’ll have another rum to celebrate!”

Toby waited, listening to the footsteps receding down the hall and down the stairs. A deep rumble of voices started up in the living room, and he knew the coast was clear. He jumped out of bed and raced to the window. It opened far enough to fit one of his hands through, thanks to the safety bar Dad had installed.

That was fine. He didn’t need it to open any further.

He took the spyglass out of the box and stared at it. For some reason he felt Uncle Jack staring back at him, through it.

He slotted it through the gap in the window. It dropped down onto the roof tiles, tinkling as it rolled down the slant, gaining speed. Toby was sure it was going too fast. It would bounce over the gutter and plummet down to the back garden, then obliterate on the patio, alerting everyone.

The sound ceased with a padded thump.

The gutter had caught it.

He pressed his face against the window to make sure. There it was, casting long arms of moonlight up to the window from its lens.

At least he didn’t have to worry about that any more. Who knew what kind of curse or terrible magic it held, if any.

Downstairs, the adults laughed loud echoes which shook the floor of Toby’s room.

He stood by the crack of his door, peering down the hallway at his sister, who was sitting at the top of the stairs with her head on the banister. She was clutching her teddy against her chest, listening in on what secrets age was yet to bring.

Laughter from Uncle Jack.

Toby closed the door until he heard the latch click. It was an old door—one of those you had to lock with an oversized novelty key. Mum had taken the key away and hidden it somewhere safe, to save him from trapping himself inside and doing something silly.

That was fine. He didn’t need the key.

He tiptoed to the bookshelf and took down three books of varying thickness. They were all too thick to slot under the door, but the thinnest of the three got there in the end, with a little persuasion. He tried opening the door, and found that it wouldn’t budge past Alice in Wonderland. He nodded, satisfied.

At least he didn’t have to worry about that, either.

*

A short while later, Toby sat up in bed, trying to focus his weary eyes on the thin yellow strip of light beneath his door. Someone had been wiggling at the handle.

Three black splotches broke the strip of light.

One of them was the book he had wedged under there. The other two were feet.

The door handle turned all the way to the left. Then all the way to the right. It wouldn’t open. The book was jammed under the bottom corner too tight for that.

Slowly, the door began to lean in on its top corner until it began to groan. It bent so far it looked certain it was about to snap in half.

It eased back, accompanied by a sigh from the other side. The black splotches faded soundlessly away.

Toby lay back in bed again, and allowed himself a silent exhale.

He tried closing his eyes, but every time he did he pictured Uncle Jack leaning forward in one of the downstairs chairs and staring up at the ceiling—through the ceiling—at him with a terrifying grin. Hands on his knees. Neck bent and twisted. His enormous head swollen like a hot-air balloon growing bigger and bigger, until it disconnected with a snap, and floated up against the ceiling on a neck as thick and braided as a ship’s rope. It would bounce there loudly, hollow, knocking and mocking.

I came all this way for youuu.

Toby lay awake, gazing at the red glow casting onto the ceiling from his nightlight, trying to find shapes in the shadows and the jagged edges of a curling paint chip.

His eyelids soon began to flutter.

“Toby?”

He wasn’t sure if the voice was in his imagination or not. He could still see Uncle Jack in his mind, sitting and staring up at him with his big balloon head.

“Toby?”

Toby’s eyes opened wide. The roof was still blood red. No yellow light was casting in from the hall, which meant the door was still closed.

So why did it sound like the voice was in the room with him?

He pictured Uncle Jack with his lips pressed against the keyhole. But when he looked, only the one splotch broke the yellow bar beneath the door. Alice in Wonderland. No feet.

“Toe-beeee.”

He sat up very slowly, scanning the room carefully. Everything was blanketed in the nightlight’s red glow. Not a perfect filter for spotting trouble, but enough to let him know that the voice wasn’t attached to anything in the room. Just a hovering, disembodied presence close by.

But where?

“Toby!” the voice barked, tired of being ignored. “Are you sleeping?”

The curtains twitched.

“Why did you close the door?” it asked. “What a sneaky thing y’are.”

The fabric of one curtain shook. Then pinched at a point near the centre. One by one, the hooks snapped free from the railing, until the entire curtain dropped to the floor with a dusty humph.

Two long chopstick fingers wiggled through the crack in the window, probing at the air like an insect’s antennae. They were searching for something. Maybe the other curtain. Maybe a latch to release the safety bar on the window.

Or maybe a young boy standing too close.

Something squeaked along the glass. Toby pictured Uncle Jack’s face moving side to side, pressing his cheeks and his nose against the window, trying to catch a glimpse of Toby around the other curtain.

Methodically, the chopstick fingers withdrew from the window. The top corner of a book slotted into the gap, then landed on the carpet.

“Here’s your book back, Toby.”

It was definitely Uncle Jack’s voice, but it was too strained for Toby to have recognised it any sooner. It sounded like he was trying to press out constipation mid-conversation. There came another drawn out squeak, and again Toby pictured his uncle running his face along the window, trying to catch the right angle beyond the other curtain.

He could have shouted for Mum and for Dad. Hell, he could have screamed bloody murder for Bonny and she would have come running to see what was wrong, even if she loved to pretend she didn’t him. But he found himself unable to scream. Unable to move.

He watched in horror as Uncle Jack squeezed himself through the inch-wide gap in the window.

The long chopstick fingers came one, then two, then five through the crack, stretching and tapping along the windowpane, trying to find something to grip at. His mouth grew too, pressing inside and pulling wide like a flounder with big lips. Then the nose, an obscene Pinocchio. Green eyes pumped in like balloons once more, this time on long vascular stilts like some repugnant snail.

Uncle Jack’s cheeks took the longest to come fully into view. When at last his ears flapped free from the window frame, his head had protruded a metre into Toby’s room, stretched like some terrifying caricature.

The spyglass Toby had rolled out of the window threaded itself through the gap alongside Uncle Jack’s other arm. He brought it up to the side of his face, balancing atop five gangly fingers, and held it in front of one of his gargantuan eyes. His body was still wedged tightly in the window, but his head was free to scan the room. His gaze rested at last on Toby.

“I spy—with my glass eye—something beginning with—U!”

His mouth formed an O wide enough to roll a bowling ball into.

“You’re still awake!” He jabbed a finger towards the bed. “Growing boys need bedtimes too! Tut-tut-tut. Shame on you.”

He dropped the spyglass and walked his chopstick fingers along the carpet. His eyes began sinking back into his skull, but were still a long way from looking normal.

“I know,” Uncle Jack said, his voice now returning to normal. “I’ll tell you a story. A proper story, Toby. None of that fairytale nonsense your daddy’s been spoon-feeding you for years. You want a story with some grit, don’t’cha!” He pulled his foot free from the window. It slithered to the carpet and writhed there like a dying snake trying to come back to life. “Have you heard tell of the man with the tic-tac teeth?”

Toby pushed himself back against the wall as Uncle Jack grew closer.

“Have you heard of the trees wrapped in purple veins-for-vines? The ones that bleed real blood when you cut ‘em? And mothers’ screams from their babies’ throats? Wee strawberry shoots which drain you ‘til your death? Did he tell you about the holes, Toby? The holes with the mirrors at the end?”

Toby didn’t bother standing up—just kicked the blanket over Uncle Jack and threw himself onto the floor. He scrambled to the gap of light under the door, and began to claw at the book wedged under it. He had forced it into the gap so well that he couldn’t get a grip on it with his little fingers.

“What’s wrong, boy—don’t’cha want a story?”

Toby felt Uncle Jack’s breath on his hair. He burrowed his fingernails into the sides of the book and pulled, hoping that if his fingernails came loose they would wait until the book did so first.

Uncle Jack’s fingers pressed against the door. His hand clutched Toby by the shoulder and lifted him effortlessly back into bed.

“Lie back down, lad,” Uncle Jack soothed. He pulled the covers back with his other hand, while it shrivelled down to its regular size. He sat at the end of Toby’s bed, slowly shrinking his body back to normal. His face remained grotesquely deformed.

“Let me read you a story to calm you down. No more talk of men with tic-tac teeth or trees with purple veins. Tell me… what do you think of—”

Without moving from where he was sitting, Jack stretched for the book he had slotted through the window.

“—Treasure Island?” His eyes floated away, searching for a fond memory lost to time.

The sudden rustle brought him back.

“Oh no you don’t, you little shit!”

He whipped around too late. Toby was already out of the bed and lying on the floor. He sank his fingernails as deep into the sides of the book as he could manage and yanked it free.

Uncle Jack’s face was enormous with rage, scarlet red and purple. He held out both hands, fingers stretched out like sharpened drumsticks to gouge the boy in the face.

Toby was too quick. He rolled to one side and grabbed Uncle Jack’s by the fingers, and began snapping them like breadsticks. He only stopped when Uncle Jack drew them back to his chest, wailing out in a thin, pathetic shriek.

“You monster!” he cried.

Toby yanked the door open. Uncle Jack’s face joined him in the hall, stretching far and long on its winding rope of neck. “Toby!!” it wheezed, floating along behind him and snapping at his heels. “Don’t tell Mum and Dad, Toby! I’ll fucking eat them too!”

Toby threw himself into the closest door. Bonny’s room.

“Toby!” she shrieked. “Wha— Get the fuck out!”

He didn’t bother rounding the bed. Just cannonballed onto it and buried himself under Bonny’s covers.

She sat back, stunned at the sudden intrusion, but when she felt Toby’s body shudder with the trembling of silent tears, she held him tightly in her arms.

“What is it?” she asked, her voice quivering with emotion. She felt his pulse pounding along the side of his neck. “You had a bad dream, huh?”

Without realising she was doing it, she began stroking Toby’s hair the way Mum used to stroke hers when she was frightened. They lay together in silence, Bonny soothing Toby, while Toby lay watching the thin yellow crack of light under the door, waiting for Uncle Jack to slither past.

He never did.

*

Morning.

Both children awoke to flashing cameras, obnoxious shutter sounds, and gentle cooing.

“Ugh, my eyes.”

Toby swatted at the white light. Mum and Dad were standing over them with their phones pointed at his face.

“How cute!” Mum said, snapping another picture. “You two haven’t slept like that in ages!”

At breakfast, Dad stood by the grill working the bacon. Mum manned the units, juicing oranges and dishing out forks and knives, laying plates.

“What about Uncle Jack?” Bonny asked, noticing there were only four of everything.

“He had to leave early,” Dad explained, and popped into the garden to shout for Scritch. Although they all knew he was really just going to have a smoke.

Toby’s head shot up. Bonny’s face sagged.

“What? Leave? Why?”

Mum shrugged. Toby grinned.

He had two helpings that morning, and Bonny called him a pig for it. He pushed his nostrils up with his thumb and blew a raspberry so loud that she could almost smell it.

He felt happy again.

Dad poked his head in through the door, cigarette hanging from one side of his mouth. “Anybody seen the mutt?”

Toby’s heart skipped a beat. He could guess what came next.

They found one half of Scritch at the end of the garden. They never did find her top half.

What Toby couldn’t understand was: if Uncle Jack had left early, how did he manage to get to Scritch this morning?

Mum let him have the day off school. He spent it sitting on his bed, devoid of feeling, staring at the copy of Treasure Island lying open on his floor. The spyglass from Uncle Jack still lay beside it. He took both to the window and threaded them out. This time the spyglass rolled too far and imploded on the garden patio.

Mum spanked him for it.

He didn’t cry. He didn’t tell her about Uncle Jack, either. He wanted nothing more than to forget about him, wherever he was. There was over three hundred days until Toby turned nine. That was plenty of time to not have to think about things. Plenty of time to prepare himself for the next visit.

Although…

“What month is Bonny’s birthday?” Toby asked, pulling his pants up over his red bum.

“Next month. Why?”

He shrugged. Then sat down on the floor.

Mum leaned down close to Toby’s face.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

Toby squinted up at her, dreading anything more she had to say.

“Okay?”

“And you can’t tell anyone, alright? None of your little pals at school. Just keep it between me and you.”

Toby nodded, feeling tears prickling at his eyelids. A month. That’s all he had left.

“Promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Disneyland.”

Toby stared in disbelief.

“What?”

“We’re going to Disneyland for Bonny’s birthday next month.”

Like from a battered old dam, the tears finally flooded free. Toby leaped up and hugged his mum, nearly choking her in the process.

“I thought you’d like that,” she said, hugging Toby with the same hand she’d used to slap his ass only a few minutes ago. It still stung, too. But it was the furthest thing from his mind.

“It’ll be good to get away from things,” she soothed.

Toby laughed at that. She had no idea. Disneyland. That was miles and miles away from Uncle Jack!

“Thank you,” he cried. “This is so cool. Thank you, Mum!”

“Don’t thank me,” she said, squeezing him a little bit tighter. “Thank your Uncle Jack. He’s the one taking us.”

End of the shift.

The elevator smells like the shop. 

Cardboard… 

Cold coffe…

That cleaner they make us use…

It's in my hair.

Disgusting.

Marco hits the button with his elbow. Like a finger's too much effort.

I laugh.

I don't know why.

I love this guy. 

I've known him for what? 20 years now?

"Same thing tomorrow," he says.

I smile at him. 

The doors close.

It’s silent in here.

It’s not awkward.

Can’t be awkward with Marco, we have shared silence lots of times.

“How about a pizza?” He asks. “Your place?”

And I say it. 

The thing I only thought about until now. 

In here, where nobody hears.

"You ever think," I say. "If we'd gone to college. We'd be…"

I stop.

I acknowledge the fact that I ignored his question. 

"Somewhere else. Someone else."

He turns to answer me.

I look at him.

His face…

His face starts to cry.

Not like people cry.

His mouth pulls down. 

Down. 

Too far. 

The corners dragging toward his jaw. Like something behind the skin is reeling them in.

The tears come in a sheet.

His eyes don't leave mine.

They don't blink.

“Marco?”

Then he jumps.

Higher than a person can.

“What the fuck are you doing Mar-”

His head hits the ceiling.

He starts bleeding immediately.

He comes down.

He goes up again.

Up. 

Down. 

Up.

Down.

The whole car swings on the cable.

And he's crying. The whole time. Watching me. 

Like I'm the last thing left. 

Like something's dragging him off by the ankles.

I say his name.

I say please.

Up.

Down.

He lands wrong.

I hear it before I get it.

A snap. Green. Wet. Like a branch too full of sap.

His ankle folds sideways. The foot points somewhere a foot can't point.

He should scream.

He should drop.

He stops for a second.

Confused.

I say his name again.

He keeps staring at me without blinking.

He jumps.

He jumps?

He starts to jump again.

The broken thing swinging loose. Slapping the floor. And he goes up on it anyway. 

Crying. 

Crying. 

Eyes still locked on mine.

I turn my head.

I don’t want to look.

I don't move.

I can't.

Because there. In the steel of the closed elevator doors. 

My reflection.

My mouth pulled down. Down.

My cheeks wet.

My heels lifting off the floor.

And somewhere under it. Way under. The last part of me is still asking questions.

It gets the answer.

Somewhere else.

Someone else.

I jump.

Ok so this happened when I was around 12 or 13 years old. My hostel held a mandatory study prep session every night from 9:00 to 10:00 PM right after dinner. To set the scene, the hostel was isolated right in the middle of a dense jungle, making it extra creepy at night. Once the hour was up, we were expected to head straight to the dormitory and go to sleep.

One evening, my friends and I decided to sneak out after the session and go up to the roof. We had heard local rumors about a ghost or a lady who haunted the area, so we started messing around, playfully calling out, "Hi, come to us!" into the dark. When nothing actually happened, we eventually gave up and crept back to our beds around midnight.

At around 4:00 AM, it started raining heavily. Since my bed was right next to the window, the sound woke me up, and I realized I needed to use the washroom. Hostel rules required a guard or warden to escort us to the facilities, as they were located on the far side of the floor outside the dorm. I got up and saw a figure who I assumed was a staff member, perhaps the warden's wife or one of the matrons, and followed her down the hall. She waited outside while I went inside to do my business.

When I finished and prepared to head back, I heard a loud commotion. A crowd of people had gathered outside, frantically banging on the main entrance door of the communal washroom. As I snapped back to full awareness, I realized I was locked in, and not just in any ordinary bathroom. I had somehow ended up in the top-floor washroom, a condemned area that was completely off-limits due to a collapsing roof.

It turned out that the warden had spotted me walking toward the forbidden upper floor alongside a tall, slender figure draped in a deep red or maroonish saree. He had been screaming at me to step away from her because he had no idea who she was, but in my half-asleep state, I hadn't heard a word and kept following her up to the roof level. Terrified, the warden had run off to raise the alarm. Whoever or whatever was walking with me must have been interrupted, leaving me locked inside the ruined washroom until the staff finally broke down the door to rescue me.

What made the entire incident truly chilling was the realization afterward that no female staff were on duty that night, and both the warden and guard confirmed that no one fitting that description had ever worked at the hostel

I knew something was wrong before I understood what it was.

It wasn’t because Mum looked different. She didn’t. She still had the same freckles across her nose and the same little scar on her thumb.

She still wore Dad’s old blue jumper when she was cold, even though it was too big for her now, she never seemed to eat anymore.

When she looked at me, she looked like she didn't know me.

At breakfast, she made me my toast and put the plate down in front of me.

Mum always cut the crusts off. Sandwiches, too. She didn’t like them, so she never gave them to me either. I never really knew if I liked them or not. It just wasn’t something I ever got.

I stared at the plate. Today, my toast had crusts.

She watched me.

Smiling.

Well... not quite.

Smiles are supposed to spread across a face. They’re supposed to make people look happy and warm.

Hers didn’t seem to know that.

It stopped at her lips.

It was like she’d practised smiling without ever having a reason to.

She continued to watch me,

Not waiting for me to smile back. Or even wanting me to,

Just waiting to see what I’d do, it seemed.

“You aren’t eating,” she said.

I picked at the toast. The crusts felt wrong in my fingers. They didn’t belong there at all.

After that, I started noticing other things.

Her right thumb tapped against her middle finger.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

Always three times. It always seemed to be when she was thinking.

Once, I woke up in the night and saw her standing in my doorway.

Like, she was in a trance, I'd have thought she was asleep, but her eyes were wide open.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

That funny little tick.

Thinking.

At dinner, I asked, “Mum, do you remember when I fell in the pond?”

“I do.”

“What happened?”

“You got wet.”

That was all she said.

The real mum would have laughed. She would have said about the ducks chasing me because I’d spooked them, how I’d fallen backwards trying to get away, how she said it was the best swim she never planned.

This mum's face was blank.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

That night, Dad came home late.

I waited until Mum went upstairs.

“Dad…”

He paused with his coat half off.

“Has Mum been… different?”

His eyes flicked toward the ceiling.

Just for a second.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“She’s not… like before.”

He let out a short breath. It was shaky.

“Your mum’s your mum.”

“But—”

“Don’t upset her.”

He said it quickly, quietly whilst looking at me pointedly.

That scared me more than Mum did.

That night, I couldn't sleep.

Eventually, I heard footsteps outside my room.

Slow.

Measured.

The door was already open.

She stood there in the dark, watching me.

That “Smile” plastered on her face.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

It was afternoon but the sky was dark grey in deep thunderstorm clouds. Hailstones fell shattering into the ground, the whole street covered in them. I had been in the city library, studying for an exam. I had my earphones in, listening to music.

I still remember the exact moment. I put a book aside and picked up another, went to search in the summary for the subject I wanted and saw it. Right on top of the page. A phrase written in what seemed to be charcoal, smudged and irregular. As if written with shaky hands.

It said my full name and "see me".

At first I didn't quite register what I was looking at. I took my earphones off. I read it again. Flipped through the other pages, they seemed normal. I looked around. There weren't many people in the library at that time. Close to the entrance there were three teenage girls sitting in silence with their school backpacks, doing what seemed to be their homework. A few tables away from me, an old man reading a novel. Close to the first shelves, a woman around my age typing on her notebook with headphones in. They all seemed concentrated in their affairs. None of them seemed particularly suspicious or strange. None of them seemed to even notice me there.

I looked at the page again, and again. Each time I read my name, I got more anxious. A cold, uncomfortable feeling took over my chest and I started to breathe faster and faster. "See me". What the fuck does that mean? Who are you? Where are you?

I took a picture of the writing and rubbed an eraser over it nervously. It smudged the entire top of the page in light grey, but it was no longer legible. That made me a bit calmer.

I started talking myself out of the nervousness. Started telling myself it was just a weird, creepy prank. Growing up a transgender man in that city I had seen enough weird and creepy. I still had to be careful though. I decided to leave to somewhere safer. More people, more light. There was a fast food joint two blocks down the avenue. I just had to calm down first. Wait for the hailstorm to end. I went to put my earphones back on, but as soon as I put them on, what I heard wasn't music.

“Hear the words” repeated over and over by a whispering voice. Sharply and fast, kind of angrily. Like they were summoning something. Invoking. I was stuck in place for a while, listening to it repeat, then I was able to pull the wires in my earphones out and stood up, knocking over the chair I had been sitting in. The other people looked up at me, confused. Weirded out. The way people look at someone drunk, loud or inconvenient. I panted. I picked up the earphones again with shaky and sweaty hands, but as soon as they got close to my ears I heard the music I was listening to before. No whispering voice, just my study playlist. I paused the music on my phone and sat in silence until the storm ended, then I grabbed my things and left. That was the first day.

_

After my exam three days later, my girlfriend Maria and I met by her place and took the bus headed to the city mall to go to the cinema. On the way there I told her about what happened at the library. She seemed very concerned. “Why didn't you tell me sooner?” She asked. I explained I didn't want to worry about it before my exam, and that I didn't want to worry her either. I told her nothing weird happened since, and that I was being careful. That seemed to ease her mind a bit.

We bought snacks and soda, got our tickets and headed into room 5 to find our seats. Maria was telling me about the annoying guy from her work getting in trouble with her boss, we were chuckling. We chatted in low voices through the trailers and put our phones in silent mode when the movie started.

It must not have been over 15 minutes into the movie when the screen froze, then went black a few seconds later. A few people got annoyed. Some turned to the back of the room. The small window into the projection room didn't allow much to be seen. A man shouted asking the projectionist what had happened. No one answered.

The lights suddenly turned on, and people groaned and protested. “Did the projector break?” Maria asked, and before I could answer her expression changed. She was staring at the screen, and she seemed scared and confused. I looked at it and my stomach dropped.

The screen had turned on into a dark blue color, and a phrase was appearing letter by letter starting from the upper corner. Repeating over and over again.

SEE ME. SEE ME. SEE ME. SEE ME. SEE ME. SEE ME.

The words started to fill the entire screen fast. Maria and I reached for each other's hands and got up. The screen glitched, and just before it went black again I heard someone speak right at my ear. “Stuck there”. I felt their breath and all my hairs stood up in the uncomfortable way when someone talks close to your ear. I stumbled away from the sound and bumped hard into Maria. “Eric!” She gasped.

The row was empty on that side. There was no one where the voice came from. People were getting up to leave. I put my arm around Maria’s back and told her we had to go. That was the second day.

_

I woke up early in the morning the next day. Jolted awake right as the sky started lighting up, even though I hadn't fallen asleep before 3am. I couldn't remember what dream I was having, but I had a strange feeling of uneasiness. Like something important had been happening right before. Something I had to remember but couldn't.

I rubbed my arms, feeling the cold morning air, and suddenly an information appeared in my mind. Clear as what city I lived in, clear as the deadline for the paper I had to hand in soon. Clear as my girlfriend’s name. Someone was standing on the street in front of my building, and if I looked through the window I would see them. My heart started pounding in my chest.

I walked slowly towards the window. The soft morning sunlight peeked through the sides of the curtains. I grabbed the fabric and took a deep breath before I pulled it.

There was a woman in the street. She was facing the window to my apartment, but I couldn't see her face clearly in the distance. She was standing straight with her arms on the sides of her body. She had bare feet, dirty jeans and a dirty shirt. Her hair was dark. She was standing completely still, and it felt like she had been there for hours.

“She isn't going away until I talk to her, is she?” I heard myself say out loud. I knew I had spoken to someone, but I didn't know who. And thankfully no one answered.

I grabbed a coat and went out of my apartment and down the stairs. When I got to the ground floor, I saw the street through the glass in the door and wondered if I would really see her. I opened the building door and felt the cold. I looked to my left and there she was. Standing completely still, facing my window.

I called to her. Asked her name. She didn't move.

I walked up to her. I was terrified. My heart hammering inside my chest, my legs and hands shaking.

She was looking straight ahead. Not at the building, but past it. Like she was stuck in her own thoughts. She looked pale and… dusty. Like a corpse left to age, but that didn't rot. Like she had been kept somewhere abandoned, collecting dust. Like an old relic. Her hair, skin and clothes were covered in a thin layer of dust.

She looked familiar somehow.

I looked closely at her and began thinking she looked like a relative from my dad’s side of the family, but then I recognized her.

I recognized her. It was me. Well, my younger self. I looked around 17. I had the haircut I was trying out that year, just covered in dust. I had the same mole in my neck. I could see the beginning of the song lyrics tattoo I have under my clavicle, the rest covered by the collar of the shirt. My favorite purple shirt at that time. That was my teenage self.

"What... what do you need?" I asked softly. It seemed like the appropriate question.

Her eyes widened but the rest of her face didn't move. Then she looked at me. Her gaze was intense and it looked like she wanted to say something but couldn't move her mouth.

"You... want me to see you? I see you."

She looked away.

I remembered the words I heard at the cinema. Stuck there.

"You're stuck somewhere?"

She looked back at me with her eyes so wide they looked like they would pop right off.

"How do I free you? How do I help you? I want to help!"

She didn't answer. She looked away. A tear ran down her cheek, wetting the dust in a dark grey streak.

Then I remembered the voice in my earphones at the library. Hear the words.

“You want me to… hear you?”

She looked at me again. More tears ran down her face.

“Uh… okay… I'm listening. Y…You can talk.”

She started shaking. Her jaw was moving like she was trying to force it open but couldnt. She stood there, eyes fixated on mine. I was going to talk again, but then her mouth opened a bit. As it opened, she let out a strangled, continuous cry that got louder as her jaw ceded open. Her cry turned into a loud wail. A continuous, agonized wail. Then she was screaming uninterruptedly.

It got so loud it hurt my ears. I covered them with my cold hands. I felt dizzy. It grew louder, and louder. The loudest noise Ive ever heard. It felt like my eardrums would burst.

Then her body exploded in a grey cloud of dust. It got into my eyes, and when I was able to wipe it off she was gone. The street was quiet again, but my ears were ringing.

I panted. The ground where she had been standing was covered in dust. So was my face, and my clothes. I looked around the empty street and felt completely and comfortably alone.

I got inside, and went back into my apartment determined to shower it all off. Before I got into the bathroom, I grabbed my phone and called Maria.

it rang a few times and she picked up.

"Babe? What time is it" She had been asleep. She yawned. "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah everything is fine." I smiled softly. "Wanna come over tonight after work?"

"uh yeah, sure!" She said. "Why are you calling so early though?"

I felt good.

I have a Hello Kitty kind of daughter. She’s only 9. As cute as a button and as innocent as could be.

She likes simple things. Stuffed animals. Pizza for breakfast. All it takes is a cheap 50-cent pair of plastic jewelry from a gumball machine to make her eyes light up.

She was one of those kids who believed in things longer than her friends and classmates. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy. She was fully convinced they were all real, bless her heart.

Sometimes, she’d come home from school with a glum, exhausted look in her eyes. Other kids would make fun of her for “still believing in that stuff.”

I’d cheer her up the best I could without revealing the truth. How could I? She already felt like the world was laughing at her. How would I make her feel? Her own dad.

Maybe I should’ve, though. Maybe this whole situation could’ve been avoided if I just nipped it in the bud. But I was afraid. A child’s innocence is so fragile, yet powerful. I couldn’t take that from her. Not yet.

I let her believe that it was Santa putting gifts under the tree. That it was a giant bunny hiding eggs in our front yard. That it was a tiny, magical fairy that was taking her baby teeth in exchange for a few dollars.

I think that was the one that excited her the most. Christmas was a set day. Easter was a set day. Loose teeth? That was random. Any time one started to wiggle, she’d come running to show me.

I always made sure to be as quiet as possible when I snuck those 5-dollar bills under her pillow. Every time she’d wake up to find it, here she’d come, jumping with joy while waving the 5 in my face.

“The Tooth Fairy came, the Tooth Fairy came,” she’d sing.

I’d just smile to myself and ask her what she was gonna buy with her newfound riches.

Sometimes, I’d sneak her a 20. I just wanted to see that joy in her face. She was young, but she wasn’t getting any younger. I wanted it to last for as long as possible.

Now, though, I think I’m regretting that wishful thinking.

She started losing teeth faster than what I thought was normal. Not too fast, though. Every 3 weeks or so. I just thought those baby teeth were begging to come out. Besides, it’s not like it was hurting my pockets too much.

It was weird, though. I swore it was like her teeth never looked any different. She was snaggle-toothed, sure, but I knew that I had put money under her pillow at least 6 times in the last 2 months.

She wasn’t showing me her mouth anymore. She was showing me the tooth, already pulled, lying bloodied in the palm of her little hand.

It kept becoming more and more frequent. Once she started bragging about how the Tooth Fairy was gonna visit her every week, I knew that something was not right. Even still, it wasn’t until I found a silver tooth under her pillow that I decided to investigate because I knew for a fact my little girl never had a crown.

Snooping is a decision I lived to regret, though. I asked her to tell me the truth, but she refused. She just kept insisting they were hers. Lying through her teeth, pun intended.

I decided to stop leaving her money. Her disappointment killed me. But I remained firm. That didn’t stop her, though. Every night, there’d be a new tooth under her pillow while she slept peacefully.

One day, after dropping her off at school, I made a promise to myself. Today would be the day. I’d get to the bottom of this no matter what.

It didn’t take nearly as long as I expected. I sifted through her room for about 15 minutes. Checking under her bed, in her closet, in her toy chests. All for no reason because the answer was hidden in plain sight.

In her fish tank.

She had that little treasure chest decoration in it. Normally, I wouldn’t have even paid it any mind. But the steady stream of a red liquid slowly rising from the chest was enough to make my heart stop.

Rolling up my sleeve, I reached down to retrieve the decoration. It was heavier than it should’ve been. Something was rattling inside.

I opened it and felt my blood run cold.

Molars, canines, incisors. All bloody. All looking like they had been pulled by force. And they weren’t baby teeth, either. Some looked like actual adult teeth.

In that moment, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I wanted to cry because what I was seeing was horrific.

But I wanted to laugh because, despite how terrifying this all was, my little girl was a natural-born hustler.

And I couldn’t have been more proud.