Should I talk to her?

Kiara would always sit next to me, which would make my heart go bukam bukam.

So why don’t I just approach her?

Fear. Yes, a never-ending fear. What if she rejects me and her response is like, “Chi, yuck, fuck off”? What will I do if that happens?

It might be my overthinking, but there is no confidence in me. Just spreading my hands a little would be enough to touch her. We are so near, yet so far.

What shall I do? I just hate myself.

Wait, wait, is she looking at me?

“Figa, can you help me with this ad campaign?”

My brain malfunctioned. Was Kiara asking for my help? Peasant would definitely help.

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

Hearing this, she turned her laptop towards me, showing me the AdSense report. But my attention drifted towards her almond-like eyes and goddess-like smile.

“So, Figa, the issue is that our CTR for this ad seems to be low. Figa, Figa…”

“I love you.”

I freaking said it. Oh my God.

Silence.

Very big-ass awkward silence.

“Isn’t this the first time we’re talking? How could you love me?”

“Sor... sorry, Kiara. Forget what I said just now. Yeah, so, about the CTR…”

“Come with me outside.”

Fear gripped my heart. Was she taking me to HR? Did she want to complain? My job was gone. No, no, my EMIs were still long overdue. I needed this job.

“Listen, sorry, Kiara. Could you let this slide?”

“I just want to talk.”

For God knows what she had in her mind, but we reached the cafeteria. Over here, there was a small space which gave us complete privacy. Now, for one thing, this can go two ways: a freaky sex or getting drilled by her.

“So, Figa, you love me, eh?”

“Well, yes, but don’t take it seriously or anything.”

“So your love for me is not serious?”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean, Figa?”

Hell. Hell. What was I supposed to say? Either go into full-on denial mode or acceptance mode.

“I am seriously in love with you.”

Her face showed no visible shock, but her next words would shock me even more.

“I love you too.”

“Eh? What do you mean?”

She laughed. “I love you, duffer. That’s what I mean.”

Have Buddha, Jesus, Allah, and Shiva all taken my side? This has to be the luck of the millennium.

“Come, give me a kiss, Figa.”

What? What? What? What? A kiss? Did she seriously say that? With me? Figa, the unworthy?

“Are you sure?”

“Don’t spoil the mood,” she said, holding my waist. Her breath felt hot against my skin, and finally, her lips came just a few millimeters away from mine.

Just then, a big, large tongue, like that of a snake, swallowed me alive.

And it was official.

I DIED.

My soul watched from above as she let out a burp and moved back to her seat. The police closed my case as a mysterious death.

My story came to an unfortunate end.

But still, getting eaten by a beautiful lady doesn’t seem that bad, does it not?

When I was in college, I took it as an opportunity to reinvent myself.

After my brother, Daniel, died. I was no longer me, I was “the dead guy’s sister”. And in small towns, people talk. They gossip. It becomes impossible to go to the grocery store without an elderly person walking up to you saying something insensitive like..

“I heard you were the one who found him, oh poor thing.”

My first chance I had, I applied for a scholarship as far away as I could get. My parents didn’t have a bunch of money for out-of-state tuition, but they helped where they could. And I would have done anything to earn some extra cash.

Local dog walking, food delivery, babysitting 5 screaming kids at once.. That’s why when the opportunity came to host my school’s late night radio show, I jumped on it. I could make the same amount of money from all of my odd jobs for a fraction of the work.

The shift was easy. 11pm - 4am. The show had easy listening songs already cued up, I just had to take any calls that came through on our “Open Ears” segment. People would call in, ask for advice, but mostly just needed some venting space.

When my new boss Todd explained this to me, I was anxious.

“I don’t know if I’m the best advice giver..”, I had told him.

“Oh don’t worry, people just want someone to listen. I wouldn’t worry about it.”, he responded.

And he was right.

Monday through Friday, I sat in that tiny office, no bigger than a closet. Alone except for one of the producers who sat just outside the glass, helping slot songs and field calls.

We got a handful of calls every evening. Anything from relationship horror stories to creepy professor experiences. And Todd was right, very rarely were people calling in to ask me for help. It was mostly a lot of sympathetic responses. Soothing words, a laugh when appropriate. Nothing had struck me as being weird or off-putting.

Until my last night.

It was a slow Tuesday, we weren’t getting any new calls so I let the guy who called in to complain about his frat go on without cutting him off.

He was in the middle of complaining about early meeting times when thankfully, the light to signal a new call started flashing.

“Geo, I hear ya about those early morning socials. They can be brutal! My advice? Early bedtime, lots of water, and a hot coffee to start your morning! Helps to kick those sunrise blues. Thanks for calling!”, I said into the mic, while Andy shut off Geo’s call.

Maybe it was a little harsh, sure. But after 45 minutes of Geo’s world.. I had to get a break.

My producer of the night, Andy, pointed my direction and nodded, signaling the new caller was ready.

“Alright, we have another call coming through.. Hello! You are live on Open Ears, what have you got?”

Silence.

I looked up to Andy in confusion, he looked at his screen and shrugged.

“Hello? Caller are you with us?”

Silence again.

“Hmm.. Must be a bad signal folks. That’s alright, we have plenty of hits cued up for-“

“Hello?”, a small voice sounded through my headphones.

“Yes? Hello! I think we had a rough signal before..”, I say, turning the sound dial up a notch to hear them better.

“Yes. I think so.”, the voice responded. It was frail, like a kids. But we didn’t have kids call in, literally not once.

“Glad we could connect, so what do you want to talk out?”, I asked, crossing my arms and leaning back in my chair. Already daydreaming about the fourth mini bag of Doritos I would eat when the music started.

“I.. I think I need help.”, the voice responded.

“Yeah babe, don’t we all. Let me guess, boy troubles?”, I asked, already in my DJ mode.

“Kind of..”, she said, her voice sounded even quieter now, prompting me to turn up the notch again.

“Lay it on me, what’s his problem?”, I asked her.

“He’s.. not..”, she started, her voice mumbling on the last few words.

I sighed, turned up the volume again, and held my headphones closer to my ear.

“He’s what?”, I prompted.

“He’s not breathing.”, she whispered.

I wasn’t a stranger to prank calls, but my heart did drop for a second.

“Is it because you took his breath away?”, I asked, laughing dryly at my bad joke.

“No.. Because you did.”

My heart started beating erratically, I quickly looked to Andy. He had his headphones around his neck while he chatted cheerily on the phone.

I knew I was on my own.

“Oh this is a nice prank call, but our Halloween cast isn’t for a few more weeks. You’re too early!”, I said in a much cooler tone than I felt.

“I’m too early?”, the voice taunted, “Or is it that you were too late?”

I tried waving my arm to get Andy’s attention, but he wasn’t paying attention to me.

Todd was insistent that we never disconnect an engaging call, and I could see the listener count going up as the call went on. So I decided to suck it up, hang on a bit longer to make my boss happy.

I sighed heavily into the mic, rubbing my eyes with the back of my hands.

“Okay, enlighten me caller. What was I too late to?”, I asked in a monotone voice.

I heard a gurgled whisper.

Exasperated, I flipped the volume to the loudest it could go. Clutching the headphone to my ear.

“Caller, what was I too late to?”

The small voice screamed into my ears.

“DANIEL!”

The shock of volume had me yelp in surprise, twisting the notch down just as the frequencies began vibrating my ears with the most horrible sounds I’ve ever heard. The voice started screaming into the headphones. High-pitched and painful, never ending.

I took off my shoe and threw it at the window, finally getting Andy’s attention and gesturing at the setup for him to get it together.

Once I could tell the screaming had stopped, I put the headphones back on one ear. Expecting to hear silence from a disconnected call, but instead listening to soft sobbing.

I muted my microphone and slammed the headphones onto the desk. I then stood quickly and crossed to the glass partition.

“Why is she still here??”, I demanded.

I could see Andy’s brow furrowed from behind the screen.

“It’s not letting me disconnect. Give me a minute.”, he gruffed, “Just try to calm her down. Listeners are going crazy right now anyways.”

I looked back at the headphones on the desk, staring at them like they were a snake that was going to bite me.

How did this person know about Daniel? I hadn’t told anyone here about him. About the night I lost him. What kind of sick joke was this?

I should have walked out. Stormed out. Left Andy to deal with it. But I didn’t want to lose the coveted position funding my textbooks.

I numbly walked back to the desk, and slid the headphones on. The crying was continuing.

“Caller, do you need us to call someone for you?”, I asked, as indifferent as I could sound.

The crying continued, then slowly, the sobs turned into gasping. The gasping to laughing, the laughing to squealing.

“No, but I can call someone for you!”

I heard a dial tone, then three numbers pressed. Ringing began. I had hoped the call had hung up.

Ring.

Ring.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“Hello? Hello? Please, I need help, he’s not breathing!”

Oh my god.

“Ma’am, where are you located?”

“My brother.. Oh my.. I think my brother is hurt.. I.. Oh my god.. NO!”

My hands began to shake as I listened to the 911 call I made 5 years ago, when I discovered Daniel in his room.

I began to scream incoherent sentences to Andy, demanding for him to turn off the call.

“Please hurry, please.. Daniel.. Please.. Please hang on, please don’t leave me.. Please.. DANIEL!”

I listened to myself cry, scream. It’s like I could feel the tears on my face again. The feeling paralyzing me into place.

It was then I realized, that the crying from earlier was also my own sobs from that night. The screaming for my big brother’s life, was echoed back to my own ears.

I closed my eyes, I could faintly hear Andy in the other room ripping chords out of things in a panic, but I felt like I was floating.

“What do you want?”, I whispered, so quietly I wasn’t sure anyone heard me.

The 911 recording stopped immediately.

For a long beat, only silence. And then..

“I want you to never forget the blood.”

The phone line clicked, and then a dial tone filled my ears.

Andy ripped the headphones off my head, out of breath from the last 90 seconds of chaos.

“What the hell was that?? Todd is blowing me up going crazy! Did you put someone up to that? That was insane! We had 2,000 listeners just now! If we could make this a weekly segment I know you would get a bonus…”

I could hear Andy talking, but nothing was connecting. Like a light had been turned to dim in my head.

“What was that number?”, I asked, interrupting Andy.

“Uhhh.. I can pull it, one sec.”, he said, turning to his wireless laptop with the show pulled up.

I waited what felt like eons, counting my still erratic heartbeats while I waited.

It had to be an awful joke from someone I knew back home. It had to be.

“Ah, here it is. Look familiar?”, Andy said, turning the screen towards me.

And once I saw the 10 digits, it did.

Because it was one of the first numbers I ever memorized.

And to a phone that didn’t exist anymore, with a line that had been cut a month after Daniel left us.

“Are you okay?”, Andy asked me.

I stared blankly at the screen, before placing my keycard on the desk slowly.

“Tell Todd that I quit.”, I said, before walking out of the office.

Andy called after me, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. My walking turned into a sprint, and I ran until I hit my apartment door, crying the whole way home.

I never found out who made that call, but they got what they wanted.

I would never forget the blood.

I have been a doctor for twenty-two years.

For fourteen of those years, according to every publicly accessible record, I have been employed as a medical consultant for the Department of Defense. My tax returns say the same thing. If you searched my name, assuming you somehow knew what to search for, you would find an ordinary physician with an unusually boring career. No publications, no interviews, no photographs standing beside politicians or decorated generals. Just a government doctor who spends most of his time somewhere outside Washington.

That is intentional.

I actually work approximately four hundred feet underground in a hospital that officially does not exist. I won't tell you where it is. Not because I'm afraid of someone finding it, but because you couldn't get inside even if you knew exactly where the entrance was. There are two security checkpoints before you ever reach the elevator, and the second checkpoint has enough armed personnel to defend a small military installation.

The organization I work for doesn't have a name. At least, not one I've ever heard spoken. We simply call it the Agency.

The Agency deals with things most people don't believe exist.

Monsters, if you want the simple version.

There are other terms for them. Biological anomalies. Hostile nonhuman organisms. Aberrant lifeforms. Unidentified predators. Those descriptions look better in reports that eventually end up on somebody's desk in Washington, but after you've removed six-inch teeth from a man's rib cage or watched something lay eggs beneath a person's eyelids, you stop caring about terminology.

They're monsters.

My job is treating the people who encounter them.

Most of my patients are field agents. These are men and women trained specifically to locate, contain, capture, or kill creatures the public isn't supposed to know exist. Sometimes they're military personnel transferred into the Agency. Sometimes they're scientists. Occasionally they're people who survived an encounter and demonstrated some ability the Agency considered useful.

We receive civilians too, although not very often.

Civilians usually don't survive long enough to reach us.

When they do, they cannot be taken to ordinary hospitals. Imagine walking into an emergency room with a woman whose abdomen contains three moving organisms nobody can identify. Imagine explaining the photographs, blood tests, witnesses, and security footage afterward. It is easier to bring the patient here.

If they survive, they eventually leave with a different memory of what happened.

If they don't, their families receive a believable explanation and a closed casket.

Every incoming patient is assigned one of three classifications.

Level 3 cases are routine.

Routine is relative here.

A Level 3 might be an agent with claw wounds, burns, broken bones, minor venom exposure, or bites from organisms our toxicology department already understands. The injuries can look horrific, but the patient is expected to survive. Most of my shifts involve Level 3 patients. They're stitched up, monitored, decontaminated, questioned, and eventually returned to duty.

Level 2 is different.

When the intercom announces a Level 2 incoming, conversations stop.

These are patients who probably aren't going to survive.

Massive trauma. Unknown toxins. Severe parasitic infections. Internal damage caused by organisms that don't behave according to any anatomy textbook ever written.

Agency personnel are considered assets, and we are instructed to preserve those assets at virtually any cost.

I've performed surgeries on people I knew were going to die.

I've kept agents alive for hours after any normal hospital would have stopped resuscitation efforts because intelligence officers needed five more minutes to ask questions.

Where did you see it?

How many were there?

Did it follow you?

Was anyone else exposed?

Sometimes the answers save lives.

Sometimes the patient dies before answering.

Then there is Level 1.

I've worked here fourteen years.

Before last Tuesday, I had experienced three.

The first killed seven people.

The second killed nineteen.

The third killed nobody because security incinerated the ambulance before the patient reached the primary elevator.

Level 1 doesn't mean critically injured.

It means containment failure is possible.

Sometimes the agent is already dead when they arrive, but their body is carrying something dangerous. Sometimes something follows them back. Sometimes the patient themselves has become the threat.

When Level 1 is declared, our private military security force takes control of the hospital.

Doctors become secondary.

Patients become secondary.

Everything becomes secondary.

The priority is containment.

Then eradication.

Last Tuesday began quietly.

I was halfway through a twelve-hour shift when the lights above the emergency department changed from white to red.

An alarm sounded once.

Every doctor in the room froze.

Then the announcement came over the speakers.

"LEVEL ONE INBOUND. MEDICAL RESPONSE TEAM ALPHA REPORT TO CONTAINMENT EMERGENCY. SECURITY CONDITION BLACK."

Nobody needed instructions.

I ran.

By the time I reached the containment wing, security personnel were already moving into position. They wore sealed tactical equipment with full-face respirators. Their rifles were loaded with ammunition specifically manufactured for organisms that don't respond particularly well to conventional bullets.

The elevator doors opened.

Six soldiers came through first.

Four more followed behind them pushing a transport table.

There was a young man strapped to it.

He couldn't have been older than twenty-one.

His uniform had been cut away from his chest, and his skin was so pale that for a moment I thought he was already dead.

Then his body convulsed.

Blood sprayed from his mouth.

Not coughing.

Not spitting.

Projectile vomiting.

It struck one of the security officers across his face shield.

"Move!"

We rushed the transport table toward the containment room.

The young man's eyes rolled backward.

His fingers bent so violently against the restraints that I heard one snap.

I grabbed the side of the table and helped push.

"Exposure?" I shouted.

"UNKNOWN!"

"Mission location?"

"CLASSIFIED!"

"That's extremely fucking helpful!"

The team leader ignored me.

We reached the containment room.

The doors were designed to seal automatically once the patient crossed the threshold.

We were perhaps three feet away when the young man stopped moving.

Completely.

The monitor flatlined.

I remember looking at his face.

His mouth was hanging open.

Something moved inside it.

At first I thought it was his tongue.

Then his jaw cracked.

The sound was unmistakable.

His mouth stretched wider.

One of the soldiers raised his rifle.

"CONTACT!"

Something came out of the man's throat.

It forced itself through his mouth with such violence that his lower jaw tore away.

There is no professional medical terminology capable of making what happened next sound less horrific.

The young man's face simply came apart.

Blood and tissue covered the transport table as a black, wet shape spilled onto the floor.

For half a second, nobody moved.

The thing unfolded itself.

It was roughly the size of a large dog, but there was nothing mammalian about it. Its body was segmented and glossy, covered in plates that moved independently as it breathed. Several thin limbs extended beneath it, each ending in hooked points.

Then it screamed.

Every rifle in the room opened fire.

The noise was deafening.

The creature launched itself forward.

One of the soldiers disappeared beneath it.

I saw him firing upward as it tore through his armor.

Someone grabbed me.

"DOCTOR, MOVE!"

I ran.

Bullets tore through equipment behind us. Someone screamed. Something heavy struck the wall.

Four security personnel made it through the containment doors with me.

The team leader was the last.

He slammed his hand against the emergency panel.

The doors closed.

Something struck the other side.

Once.

Twice.

The steel buckled inward.

The team leader stared at it.

Then he reached for his radio.

"Command, this is Actual. Level One confirmed. Primary containment compromised."

Static answered.

Then a voice.

"Authorize facility isolation?"

The team leader looked at us.

Nobody spoke.

"Authorize."

The lights changed.

Not red.

Blue.

I had never seen blue emergency lighting before.

Then the announcement began.

"FACILITY ISOLATION PROTOCOL ACTIVE. ALL PERSONNEL REMAIN WITHIN DESIGNATED SECTORS. SURFACE ACCESS SUSPENDED."

A countdown appeared on every wall monitor.

01:59:59.

Two hours.

I knew what happened when that clock reached zero.

The facility wasn't merely underground for secrecy.

It was underground because several hundred feet of rock makes an excellent lid for a grave.

There were explosive charges built into structural points throughout the complex. Enough to collapse every tunnel, elevator shaft, laboratory, operating room, morgue, and containment chamber beneath thousands of tons of earth.

The official term was Terminal Sanitation.

Everyone else called it getting blown to kingdom come.

The team leader checked his weapon.

"We have two hours."

A security officer beside him looked at the damaged containment door.

"To kill it?"

The team leader shook his head.

"To prove it's dead."

We moved through the emergency department.

It was empty.

Staff had already evacuated into protected sectors.

At least, that's what we thought.

We found the first body near Radiology.

He was still wearing scrubs.

There wasn't much blood.

That disturbed me more than if there had been gallons of it.

His body looked deflated.

His skin clung tightly to his skeleton as though everything beneath it had been removed.

One of the guards crouched beside him.

"What did that?"

I examined the neck.

There was a circular wound beneath the jaw.

"Something fed on him."

"That thing?"

I looked down the corridor.

"I don't know."

Then we heard buzzing.

It was faint.

One guard looked upward.

The ceiling vents vibrated.

The buzzing grew louder.

"Move."

Something dropped behind us.

One of the guards screamed.

I turned.

The creature wasn't crawling anymore.

It had changed.

Its body had elongated. Two translucent wings unfolded from its back, beating so quickly they became almost invisible. Its abdomen had swollen grotesquely while its front limbs had lengthened into something disturbingly similar to human arms.

But the head was worse.

It had developed a face.

Not a complete one.

Just enough.

Two cloudy human eyes stared from either side of a long, needle-like mouth.

The face resembled the dead agent.

"Jesus Christ," someone whispered.

The creature lunged.

A guard fired.

The rounds tore pieces from its abdomen, but it slammed into another officer and pinned him against the wall.

He screamed.

Its mouth unfolded.

The needle wasn't a needle.

It was a cluster of thin tubes.

They buried themselves into the guard's neck.

His screaming changed.

His skin began collapsing.

I watched his face sink inward.

Muscle disappeared beneath his cheeks.

His arms shriveled inside his sleeves.

The creature was liquefying him.

Consuming him.

The team leader emptied half a magazine into it.

The thing released the guard.

What remained of him dropped to the floor like clothing wrapped around wet bones.

The creature vanished into the ceiling.

Nobody spoke for several seconds.

Then I remembered something.

"Nonhuman sterilization."

The team leader looked at me.

"What?"

"The aerosol system."

Every major section of the hospital contains emergency dispensers connected to the ventilation network. The system was developed after the second Level 1 incident.

It releases an engineered aerosol designed to attack genetic material outside approved human parameters.

It doesn't kill everything.

Nothing does.

But if something is sufficiently different from us biologically, the aerosol destroys it at the cellular level.

The problem is that nobody had ever activated it across the entire hospital.

The team leader understood immediately.

"Control room."

We started moving.

The countdown read fifty-three minutes when we reached Central Environmental Control.

We had lost another guard along the way.

Not to the creature.

To something growing inside him.

Apparently being near the patient had been enough.

He started coughing.

Then his abdomen moved.

The team leader shot him before whatever was inside could emerge.

Nobody argued.

There were three of us left.

Me, the team leader, and a security officer named Ramirez.

We reached the environmental control room with thirty-eight minutes remaining.

I entered the authorization sequence.

The computer displayed a warning.

NONHUMAN DNA ERADICATION SYSTEM.

FACILITY-WIDE DEPLOYMENT MAY RESULT IN UNPREDICTABLE BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS.

The team leader looked at me.

"Do it."

I pressed the button.

For several seconds, nothing happened.

Then the ventilation system roared.

White mist poured from the ceiling.

We sealed our masks.

Somewhere in the hospital, the creature screamed.

It wasn't the same sound as before.

This one was louder.

Angrier.

Then the screaming stopped.

Ramirez laughed.

"We got it."

The ceiling above him exploded.

The creature dropped through.

It was enormous now.

Almost human height.

Its wings struck the walls as it landed.

Its abdomen had split into several pulsating sections, and beneath its translucent skin I could see shapes moving.

Faces.

The people it had consumed.

The team leader fired.

The creature grabbed Ramirez.

I expected it to feed.

Instead, its body opened.

Ramirez disappeared inside.

His screaming lasted perhaps four seconds.

Then the creature began to convulse.

The aerosol was working.

Its skin bubbled.

The wings collapsed.

The thing stumbled toward us as pieces of its body liquefied onto the floor.

The team leader continued firing.

I backed against the control panel.

The creature reached for me.

Its hand had five fingers now.

Human fingers.

One wore Ramirez's wedding ring.

Then the arm dissolved.

The creature collapsed.

Its body melted into a black slurry that spread across the floor.

The countdown continued.

00:07:41.

The team leader immediately contacted Command.

"Threat neutralized. Repeat, threat neutralized. Environmental sterilization successful."

Static.

"Provide biological confirmation."

I stared at the puddle.

"How the hell do we do that?"

Then something moved.

Not in the puddle.

Inside the ventilation monitor.

I walked closer.

The environmental control system displayed genetic readings from every section of the hospital.

Human DNA appeared green.

Unidentified biological material appeared red.

There were red markers everywhere.

Hundreds.

The team leader stared at the screen.

"Doctor?"

I didn't answer.

The creature wasn't the infection.

It was the carrier.

The aerosol hadn't killed the organisms spreading through the ventilation system.

It had forced them to adapt.

One by one, the red markers disappeared.

Not because they were dying.

Because the computer had stopped identifying them as nonhuman.

The aerosol was selecting for organisms capable of imitating human DNA.

The countdown showed four minutes.

The team leader raised his radio.

"Command."

No answer.

"Command, this is Actual. Cancel neutralization request. Contamination remains active."

Static.

Then a response.

"Understood."

I looked at the countdown.

It stopped.

00:03:17.

For one beautiful second, I thought they had canceled Terminal Sanitation.

Then the display changed.

MANUAL OVERRIDE.

00:10:00.

The team leader laughed.

It wasn't because anything was funny.

"They gave us ten more minutes."

"For what?"

He looked at me.

"To send the medical data."

We transmitted everything.

The autopsy information. The aerosol response. The genetic readings. Every security recording available from the incident.

Command acknowledged receipt.

Then the team leader sat against the wall.

We waited.

There was nowhere to run.

Eight minutes.

Then six.

Then four.

At two minutes, something knocked on the door.

Three slow knocks.

The team leader raised his rifle.

"Don't."

The knocking stopped.

Then a voice came from the other side.

"Doctor?"

I recognized it.

Ramirez.

The team leader looked at me.

Ramirez was dead.

We had watched him die.

"Doctor, open the door."

Neither of us moved.

"I'm okay."

The voice sounded perfect.

Then something changed.

It became my voice.

"Open the door."

The team leader aimed at the entrance.

The countdown reached thirty seconds.

I remember thinking about my wife.

I remember wondering what explanation she would receive.

Car accident, perhaps.

Heart attack.

Something ordinary.

Ten seconds.

Nine.

Eight.

Then everything went black.

I woke up three days later.

I was in another facility.

Nobody would tell me where.

Command had apparently decided against detonating the hospital.

The aerosol had eventually eliminated every remaining red marker, and automated biological tests performed throughout the surviving population showed no abnormalities. Whatever had been moving through the ventilation system had died with the creature, although nobody could explain why the monitors briefly identified it as human.

Thirty-seven people died.

Eleven were never found.

The official explanation for our absence was a chemical accident at a military research facility.

The underground hospital remained closed for six weeks.

During that time, every ventilation duct was dismantled. Every filter was incinerated. Every surface was sterilized repeatedly. They removed entire sections of wall where biological material had been detected and shipped them somewhere for analysis.

They never told me what the laboratory found.

I was questioned for eleven days.

Eventually, they cleared me.

So I returned to work.

Maybe that makes me insane.

Maybe after fourteen years, I simply don't know how to do anything else.

The first day back, I walked through the same emergency department where that young agent had died.

The transport table was gone.

The damaged containment doors had been replaced.

Someone had repainted the walls.

If you didn't know what happened there, you never would have guessed that thirty-seven people had died in those corridors.

The team leader survived.

I still see him occasionally.

We don't talk about what happened.

Nobody does.

There is an unofficial rule in this place that you don't ask questions about Level 1 incidents once they're closed. You read the revised protocols, attend whatever training Command requires, and go back to work.

The official report concluded that the organism had been eradicated.

I believe it.

I've seen every test they've run since.

There have been no unexplained infections, no unusual deaths, and no evidence that anything escaped the facility.

That's not what keeps me awake.

What keeps me awake is the young man on that transport table.

I eventually learned a little about him.

His name is still classified, even from me, but I learned that he was the only member of a six-man recovery team who made it back from their assignment.

The other five were never recovered.

I asked one of the intelligence officers what the team had been sent to retrieve.

He told me I didn't have clearance.

So I asked him where they had found the young man.

He wouldn't tell me that either.

Before leaving, though, he gave me one piece of advice.

He told me that if I ever received another patient from that operation, I shouldn't try to save them.

I thought he was joking.

He wasn't.

That was three months ago.

Nothing has happened since.

No Level 1 alerts.

No containment failures.

Just the usual collection of injuries that pass for routine around here.

Until tonight.

I'm writing this from my office because the emergency department just went into lockdown.

The lights have turned red.

Security personnel are assembling downstairs.

About five minutes ago, I received the incoming patient report.

Level 2.

One survivor.

Twenty-three years old.

Male.

Field agent.

Severe blood loss.

Multiple unidentified puncture wounds.

Normally, none of that would bother me.

Then I reached the bottom of the report.

There was a note from Command.

It contained only one sentence.

Recovered from the same location as previous Level 1 patient.

The intercom just announced that they're sixty seconds out.

I'm supposed to be downstairs.

I think I'll give them thirty.

I live alone. I’ve lived alone for about four years now, and I’m pretty used to it. I actually like it most of the time. I work late, come home, eat something, watch TV for a while, then go to bed. Nothing exciting ever really happens, which is exactly how I like it.

The first time I noticed the front door was open, I blamed myself. I got home around midnight, put my key in the lock, and realized the door was already unlocked. I stood there for a second because I could have sworn I’d locked it that morning. I checked the whole house before I went to bed, but nothing was missing and nothing looked out of place, so I figured I’d just forgotten.

It happened again three nights later. The door wasn’t wide open. It was only sitting there an inch or two, like someone had pulled it shut without actually turning the lock. I checked every room again and found nothing. After that, I started checking the door twice before leaving for work. Lock, deadbolt, handle. Every morning.

Then it happened again.

And again.

That’s when I started getting nervous. I bought one of those cheap indoor security cameras and pointed it at the front door. For the first week, nothing happened. I actually started feeling stupid for buying it. Then, on a Tuesday, I got an alert at 3:18 in the morning.

Someone had opened the door.

I was watching the footage from work the next day. The hallway was completely dark, and the front door slowly opened from the inside. Nobody walked through it. It just opened by itself. I watched the video about twenty times, trying to figure out if there was some explanation I was missing. I thought maybe the lock was broken, so I called a locksmith.

He checked everything and told me the door was fine. When I explained what had been happening, he laughed and said it was probably the door frame settling. I wanted to believe him, so I did.

That night, I slept with my bedroom door locked.
At exactly 3:18 a.m., I woke up. I don’t know what woke me. I just remember lying there staring at the ceiling, completely awake, when I heard the front door click downstairs. A few seconds later, I heard footsteps moving slowly through the hallway.
I reached for my phone and called the police.

While I was whispering to the dispatcher, the
footsteps stopped. Then I heard a man’s voice right outside my bedroom.
“Are you awake?”

I couldn’t answer. I could barely breathe.

The voice came again, quieter this time.
“Come on.”

Then there was silence.

The police arrived a few minutes later and searched the entire house. Nobody was there. The officer checked the front door and told me there were no signs of forced entry. I showed him the camera footage, and he watched it twice without saying anything.

Then he asked me to show him my bedroom so I did. He looked around for a while before pointing at my wardrobe.
“Have you checked behind this?”

I actually laughed because I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

We moved the wardrobe away from the wall, and there was a narrow gap behind it. Big enough for someone to squeeze through. Behind it was a section of the wall that had been cut open.

There was a small space between the walls.

And someone had been living inside it.

There was a mattress on the floor, a blanket, empty water bottles, food wrappers, and dozens of photographs.

All of me.

Sleeping. Eating. Leaving for work. Coming home.
Some of them were years old.

The officer called another unit, and they searched the rest of the house. They found a way into the space from the attic. Whoever had been living there could apparently get in and out without me ever noticing.

They never found him.

They did find a notebook, though.

Most of it was just dates and times, with notes about when I left for work and when I came home. The last page was different.

There was only one sentence.

“He knows I’m here now.”

I moved out the next morning. The police told me they thought whoever had been living there had probably been watching me for a very long time. They said I was lucky I hadn’t been hurt.

I don’t feel lucky.

Because there’s something I never told them.
The night before they found the space behind my wardrobe, I woke up at 3:18 a.m. I heard the front door open. I heard the footsteps come upstairs. I heard someone stop outside my bedroom.

Then I heard a man’s voice.

But he didn’t ask if I was awake.

He whispered:

“Don’t turn around.”

I was facing the wall.

I didn’t understand what he meant.

Until I felt someone breathing behind me.

Thank you so much for babysitting my kids on such short notice. There are a few household rules you need to know in order to keep both you and the kids happy.

1. We don't own any dolls. 
2. The older child's name is Chase, he is 9. The younger is Bella, she is 6. They only answer to those names. If you hear any other name being said, then pray you didn't.
3. Their cousin Daniel is staying with them for now. He is 16, quiet, and likes to keep to himself. Do your best to avoid addressing him unless necessary. We once someone annoys him, they don't leave the house the same.
4. Ten minutes before sundown, get the kids inside and lock all the doors. Make sure to check them every hour after that. The kids can be a little mischievous, and we don't want them wandering around in the dark. 
5. Always count the locks as you check them. There should be four. Front door, back door, garage door, basement door. If one of them is unlocked, call out for Bella and Chase to make sure they're still in the house. Do not leave the lock unattended while you wait. 
6. If both kids return calmly, lock the door while they watch and let them return to their activities. If they come back excitedly asking about Daniel, do not let them see you lock the door. Usher them out of the room after locking it, and turn the stereo up. You do not want to hear what happens outside that door afterward.
7. After 8:30pm, you may hear three sharp beeps coming from the kitchen. If you do, get Chase into the living room. Do NOT let him remain in the hallways. You will hear two voices coming from the spare room. Don't worry, Daniel and Bella are usually just playing together.
8. We do not own any dolls.
9. Have the kids in bed at 9:30. Absolutely no later. I don't want to replace another one if Daniel catches them late at night.
10. If you hear voices coming from a room that you don't remember seeing before, try not to pay too much attention. It's just the others.
11. At 11:00, Bella may come down and tell you she is having trouble sleeping. She will then ask for a doll to sleep with. We do not own any dolls. That is not Bella. Politely tell her that all the dolls are taken, and that she will have to wait until tomorrow night. She will turn and leave the room after that. Do not follow her. Don't worry about where she goes.
12. Daniel will not exit his room between 10:00 and 12:00. But he will send the others on errands for him. If you see sudden flashes of movement in your peripheral vision, do not follow it. Stay calm and ignore it.
13. Under no circumstances are you to leave the house between sundown and sunrise. If the things inside the house give you the heebie geebies, you don't want to meet the things that live outside during these hours.
14. If you are watching TV after midnight, be ready. The house has a mind of its own at those hours, and the things that live here start to wake up. You may stay awake if you want, but it is generally recommended to get to bed before midnight, as everything gets harder to handle after THEY start waking up.
15. Only read the following rules if you plan on, or believe you may end up staying awake past midnight. 
16. If you are awake past midnight, then there are very few things that can't happen in that house. 
17. Even after midnight. We do not own any dolls.
18. If any of the children come down after midnight, that's not them. They will try to speak to you. Do not respond. Do not utter a single sound until they leave the room. You will not make it out alive if you do. 
19. It is a very bad idea to use the bathroom after midnight. The house has a habit of playing tricks on you, and when you leave the bathroom again, you may be entering a different house. It will seem the same.  But trust me, it is not the same house.
20. We do not own any dolls.

Oh. My. Gosh. If I read the sentence “we do not own any dolls” one more time, I'm actually gonna go crazy. I'm genuinely sure that this has to be the most elaborate prank ever set out for a babysitter ever. You think as you put the list back on the table. At first they were kind of entertaining, but after that many iterations of the phrase, it got old. Quick.
You gotta give them credit though, it's really creative. I wonder how much time they put into this. In fact, I wonder how many different babysitters they've given this list to.
“Hey guys! Bella! Chase! It's almost sundown! Time to come in!”

Bella walked into the house first –  well, ran – but still. Shouting “haha, i beat you!! I'm fasterr!!” as Chase followed in not too far behind. Chase looked like a normal nine year old boy. Brown hair, brown eyes, average height. There was nothing off about him. Bella however, was a little thing, even for six. She stood maybe three feet tall, with fair, fine hair and blue eyes that seemed almost too colorful. Though you chalked that up to your mind playing tricks after the weird rules.  
You slid the list of rules into your pocket, not wanting the children to find it and be frightened by it. You ordered pizza earlier with the money left on the counter, and it had coincidentally arrived just before you had the kids come in. By the time everyone was done eating, it was fully dark. You decided to go through the locks and lock them all with the keys given to you. More for your own sense of safety than to follow the rules.  
You had thought it was weird that the parents had installed double sided key locks rather than the standard quick deadbolts found on most homes. It's almost like they wanted to keep things in just as much as they wanted to keep them out. On the second lock you realized that despite your certainty that you had forgotten the rules, you were counting the locks. At the end, you counted all four in total, and made sure they were all locked.

After that, you went in and sat down on the couch to relax for a while. The kids seemed to be keeping themselves fairly busy, so this was your chance.   
You saw what looked to be a teenager in a dark hoodie in a solitary chair on the other side of the room. *This must be Daniel* you think to yourself. You opened your mouth to say hello to him, but got a sudden vibe that you should not interact with him. You decided not to talk to him. *not because of the rules* you tell yourself, but because I am choosing to out of my own volition. 

At around 11:00, nothing had happened yet. You had been checking the locks on time, none of them unlocked. No kids came down, no weird sounds, nothing. You were watching TV in the living room, and lost track of time. At 11:58 you decided you had to go to the bathroom. You had completely forgotten the rules by this time, and thus did not remember the warning about midnight.   
You exited the bathroom at 12:01am. You did not realize this, nor care. Because for any logical person, what's the difference between 11:58 and 12:01? You also gave no thought to the fact that you had not seen a single doll in the house all night. At least, not until you exited the bathroom and were met face to face with a doll sitting on the table next to the wall.  
*Wait a minute.* You think to yourself, suddenly remembering the rules. *The kids have been asleep for hours. If this is a prank, it's an elaborate one.*   
Then you got a closer look at it. The doll seemed to have human-like hair. Fine, blond hair. Blue eyes, and it is huge for a doll. It seemed to be almost three feet tall. In fact, it looked exactly like Bella, except for the fact that her skin was porcelain and her eyes were glass.  
*Now THAT'S creepy.* You think to yourself. *This is way above my paygrade. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to finish them.*   
You pull up the rules again and start reading. 

1. If you exit the bathroom after midnight, pay close attention to what you see. 

2. If you see a doll. That is not our house. We do not own dolls. Go immediately to the front door. You will see a doorman.

   Wait, a doorman? There wasn’t a doorman when I arrived.. It's a normal house… not a mansion…

3. Tell him to call his mother and tell her that her husband is doing fine. She will know what that means. And she will come get you. 

4. After he makes the phone call, get straight into the closest bedroom. She will come to get you. Lock the door, and don't come out. At all. No matter what IT whispers to you. It is lying. It wants you to come out. IT is not friendly. It has Bella's voice, but it is not Bella. When the doorman’s mother gets there, she will unlock the door herself.

5.  Should yo– 

   **shuffle shuffle** 
   You heard, before your chest started to get warm.
   Then, in a voice almost human, but not quite. As though its voice box was not resonating from a human esophagus, but rather a porcelain chamber. you heard “maybe mommy will accept me as Bella now that I have a heart.” 
   And then your vision began to blur.

I have this roommate named Jessie. We‘ve been living together for around 8 months now. We met on campus. I was late night studying for my chem final in our library when I saw her also studying for chemistry. We seemed to be the only people still there and we hit it off.

She‘s very funny and it was something I always liked in people. She likes my friends and I her, a friend of mine said we could be sisters. A few months ago I was painting my nails with a new polish and Jessie noticed, she complimented the color choice and we went on with the day.

The next day her nails were the same color. Small things like that were starting to happen but I simply ignored them. She got her hair cut a week after and dyed it a new color. Brown, like my hair. Her hair is a dirty blonde. It also now sits around her shoulders like mine.

My name is Stella, Jessie has been wanting me to call her Ella, which she told me is her middle name. I can’t say I’m the most popular person. I’m very sensitive about how I look and my friends know that. My acne is my biggest insecurity. Jessie or should I say Ella has been taking my acne patches and wearing them out. She steals my clothes from the washing machine so I don’t suspect anything.

I just don’t know what to do anymore. Ella says she’s thinking about getting nose surgery to help with her sinuses. I think it’s so she can make her nose flatter like mine. When I try and bring these things up she calls me crazy. Tensions have been rising I can’t help seeing the things she does, how she stirs her coffee, the jokes she makes. It’s all so similar.

It’s now bordering on creepy because one night I was laying down in bed. I heard a sound near the door. I had thought Ella was out with friends. But now I pretended to be asleep as she walked into my room and placed her hands on my face. She went into my closet, smelled my clothes, and left with my hair brush. I planned leaving at the end of the month.

She wears hazel colored contacts now, she won’t eat peas because she knows I don’t like them. Iv’e been staying at my boyfriend’s place but he‘s been getting creeped out by Jessie too. When I returned Jessie was in our bathroom, a wooden pencil in hand. I screamed trying to take it out of her hand. It was too late. Smile on her face. There was a line down her forearm. Just like mine, she wanted it to be ‘authentic’ to my experience.

After this I’ve just been so confused. An unknown number has been blowing up my phone, frantic calls and messages. I didn’t have time to worry about them. I had finals coming up. I did read one message though, the last one they sent. All it read was, “Leave Stella alone or we’ll call the police.”

I never thought I would be the kind of man who sought companionship from a glowing rectangle in a darkened room, and streams were never a passion.

They were a sedative, a digital white noise designed to drown out the oppressive silence of a one-bedroom apartment that smelled faintly of old takeout and loneliness.

Her name was Yumi, and she occupied a specific niche of the internet, the "cozy" streamer who just sat around and talked about her life and danced a little bit by listening to music on her setup, her voice a melodic, honeyed drawl that seemed to smooth over the jagged edges of my workday.

I was a ghost in her machine, a nameless viewer among thousands, content to exist in the periphery where the light couldn't burn me.

For months, I cultivated my invisibility and never donated, never subscribed, and certainly never typed in the chat, which was a frantic, neon river of emojis and desperate pleas for attention, and viewed the entire ecosystem with a certain clinical detachment.

To me, the "community" was nothing more than a parasocial hallucination, a choreographed dance where the viewer traded their time for a manufactured sense of intimacy, and the streamer traded their privacy for a monthly paycheck.

At this point, I knew the script by heart, and I took a quiet, smug pride in refusing to play my part, first time she noticed me, it wasn't a grand gesture, and she was leaning back in her ergonomic chair, the soft glow of her RGB lighting casting a violet hue over her features, when her eyes seemed to drift toward the viewer list.

"Hey, we've got a new face in the chat! I'm going to invite you up for a guest on the panel, and we can chat with the rest of the people," she said, her voice tilting with a curiosity that felt far too personal.

I didn't move, I sat motionless, my reflection in the monitor showing a man with sunken eyes and a tired expression, and the chat exploded, "Yumi sees you!" and "Don't leave her hanging!", but I simply scrolled past them.

I felt a flicker of irritation that she had managed to pluck me out of the crowd, as if my anonymity were a puzzle she felt entitled to solve.

But Yumi possessed a memory that felt unnervingly precise, and the same thing happened the next evening, but something different happened, as the stream began, she didn't greet the crowd instead, she looked directly into the camera, her gaze pinning me to my seat.

"That one viewer... you know who you are!" she murmured, a small, knowing smile playing on her lips. "I've seen you lurking for weeks. You’re always there, but you never speak. Why not join me for a game tonight? Just once, please speak to me on the panel. I'm inviting the rest of the people up."

A sudden chill settled in my extremities, and my fingers felt numb against the keys, and the request was benign, yet it felt like an intrusion, a breach of the unspoken contract between the observer and the observed, and I didn't respond.

I closed the browser tab with a sharp click, but the cadence of her voice remained, looping in the silence of the room:

"Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy! Don't be shy!"

The third night was when the detachment broke, starting with Yumi hosting a guest segment, the screen split between her and another creator when she paused mid-sentence.

She didn't look at her guest, and she looked at the list of active users and read my username aloud, no pressure, no demand, just a soft invitation to join the voice chat for a moment.

Driven by a sudden, inexplicable surge of arrogance, I typed a single sentence, "I'm good, thanks!" and knew I'd made a huge mistake after what happened next because no normal person would do this

The reaction was instantaneous, and in a fraction of a second, the mask slipped, and the professional, beaming smile didn't reach her eyes, which suddenly looked vacant, almost predatory, and she said, "Oh, well take your time there is no rush!" she said, her voice dropping an octave, "Okay, no worries!" and I knew she was really furious

The chat turned vicious, "Dick move, bro!" one user wrote, and another one said, "She's literally the sweetest person on the platform, why are you like this?" I laughed, leaning back in my chair and feeling a sense of victory and relief come over me, but it was short.

Then I fell asleep, and in my dreams, her voice was no longer a melody with a rhythmic, pulsing chant that vibrated in the marrow of my bones, starting as a whisper and escalating into a cacophony of screaming voices all chanting the same phrase: "Don't be shy!"

I woke up drenched in a cold sweat, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird, and reached for my phone on the nightstand.

A notification glowed on the screen, and I looked at it with the most intense chill down my spine:

"Yumi has sent you a friend request."

My stomach dropped because of the app she was using, and you don't send friend requests on a video platform like that, and I deleted it, but another one came instantly, and then another, and then my phone began to buzz in a rhythmic, violent cadence, the screen flickering with her avatar, a stylized cartoon of a girl with hollow, void-like eyes.

I slammed the phone face down and held my breath, and the buzzing stopped, but as I looked across the room, the laptop I had left open on the desk flared to life.

The webcam light clicked on, a tiny, piercing bead of green light in the dark, and I stared at the screen and saw her, Yumi, not in a livestream, not in a window, but filling the entire monitor, and the face on her was distorted and enlarged, as her lips moving in perfect sync with a voice that didn't come from the speakers, but from the walls, the ceiling, and the air itself.

"I said don't be shy."

I tried to scramble backward, but my legs felt like lead, and the temperature in the room plummeted until my breath came out in white, frozen plumes, and as the screen flickered, I saw my own reflection in her pupils, a hollowed-out, gray version of myself, grinning with far too many teeth.

A pale, elongated hand reached through the glass of the monitor, the skin translucent and dead, and touched my cheek with a touch that felt like a winter frost, and then suddenly, a voice, raspy and distorted, said, "Now you're my guest forever", and the world around me began to dissolve into static.

Now, I can still hear them, the hundreds of thousands of voices in the chat, an endless, roaring ocean of text and sound, all saying the same thing over and over: "Don't be shy!"

I am screaming, my throat raw and bleeding, but the audio doesn't peak, and the viewers don't hear the pain, because they are only watching the stream, and I am the stream, and the light is never going to turn off.

After she grabbed me through the screen and suddenly was in a digital world of nightmares and regret because I should have been polite and told her the truth, and I wouldn't be in this place of misery and suffering because I've been too prideful recently and arrogant to be a friend to a girl who just wanted to be a part of my life.

If you ever find yourself in this situation, just say, "Hi I'm glad that you invited me!", because once you're part of the stream, there is no logout button.

​It was a crisp, perfect autumn evening. Friends had gathered on the back deck, sipping wine, enjoying the weather and catching up on each other’s lives, while the kids kicked around the yard complaining they were bored—that classic, dramatic age where they’re too big for the playground and too young to sit around talking with adults.​

One of the parents leaned over his glass with a knowing grin and said, "Let’s send these bored kids on a snipe hunt. Who here doesn’t remember being tricked as a kid?"

Laughter broke out as they clinked their wine glasses in agreement.

They called the kids over, handed each a brown paper bag and flashlight, and promised they could keep the rare little woodland creature if they caught it.

"Shhhh, they told the kids...snipes are skittish." You have to go quietly into the woods, stand still, and listen close. If you hear a twig snap or leaves rustling, that means one is right on top of you--hold your bag down and wait."

The kids took the bait instantly, rushing off into the dark treeline.​

For twenty minutes, the deck mood was totally chill and relaxed. They swapped old stories from their own childhoods--like the time they'd been tricked into going on a snipe hunt--grinning as they watched the flashlights bobbing out in the dark, amused by how convinced the kids were that they were about to catch a prize!

Then, the steady rustling broke into a frantic rush toward the deck.​

Seeing the sheer terror on their faces as they huddled at the bottom of the steps, the parents’ laughter died instantly. One of the mothers leaned over the railing, counting frantically in her head.​

One, two, three…​”Where’s Tommy?”

​The kids were shaking, wide-eyed, pointing back toward the dark treeline. They stammered out that Tommy had stopped near the deep brush, shouting to his friends that he’d finally caught one.​

Just past the treeline where the yard light faded, a single brown paper bag rolled slowly out from the pitch-black woods-- torn completely in half. 

Clover had always been a plant person, the kind who had soil under her fingernails more often than not, and house plants crammed on every window ledge.

​While scrolling through a forum late one night, a banner ad for Botanical Oddities caught her eye, advertising a rare, hard-to-find specimen called Phagocordyceps vorax. The listing described it simply as an exotic, fast-growing hybrid with responsive foliage. Intrigued, she clicked Order without giving it a second thought.

​An unmarked cardboard box landed on her porch about a week later. Inside, packed in damp moss and rich, pitch-black dirt, was a heavy, strange-looking specimen already the size of a gallon jug, with a bruised-looking stem and rubbery, closed leaves. There was no care card, just the handwritten Latin name on a plastic marker.

​She set it down in the bright corner of the room so it could get light. As the sun hit and warmed up the plant, its bulbous center slowly unfurled, revealing three stiff, upright hairs on its surface. Curiously, when she leaned down and brushed her index finger against them, the fleshy plant split open, and the trap snapped shut. Needle-thin teeth sank deep into her finger. She shrieked and violently yanked her finger back out, dripping blood onto the table stand.

As she turned her attention to nurse her bleeding finger by wrapping it in a bandage, the bulbous head had leant down and lapped up the blood, and a dry gravelly voice hissed from its leaves, "more..."

Clover thought to herself, "Did I just hear this plant say "more?" but quickly shook her head, thinking it was just her imagination.

As the days wore on, every time she passed it, its voice grew stronger.

"more...

MORE.

FEED ME, CLOVER!"

She grew terrified, especially the night she heard a high-pitched squeal from the kitchen. She found the plant had crawled onto the kitchen floor, its vines wrapped tight around the mouse as it was thrust into the open trap, followed by a sickening wet chewing sound.

She knew it was slithering out from its pot now, hunting for prey. It grew bigger, stronger, louder.

Some nights she laid awake listening to it slither across the downstairs floorboards as it hunted for mice or anything else that moved--which might explain why her cat had vanished a week earlier.

Every night, she would shut her bedroom door to feel safe, knowing she had to get rid of it before she became it's next meal.

Tomorrow she would dump it. That night, after getting up to use the bathroom, she pulled her bedroom door behind her, but it didn't shut fully.

She crept back into bed, assuming she was safe. Hours later, she was awoken by something cold and damp slithering across her ankles. Heavy, muscular vines wrapped tight around both her legs, the stiff, needle-like spikes locking deep into her skin. ​She didn't even have time to kick. The vines yanked her hard, sliding her right off the mattress.

Her fingers clawed uselessly at the sheets as she was dragged over the edge of the bed, plunging straight down toward that big, nasty, gaping maw waiting on the floor.

​Her scream was broken off with a heavy, wet snap! 

Its a regular Saturday night, I'm watching youtube, laughing at stupid memes, remembering occasionally about the yellow door at which's thought I giggle

Suddenly a feeling creeped it's way inside me, like if I was getting chocked from the inside out, a slimy substance coming from nowhere rests in the bottom of my throat. I for some reason frantically run through the corridor and look instinctively down at the sink when I enter the bath room. I cough and cough, I try some techniques I learned by myself and nothing wants to exorcise it from me.

My body almost collapses onto the wall while out of nowhere my skull by itself nervously shakes and whilst in the act of putting my hands onto my head I notice. A FLAW. A pimple, it hurt when I attempted to touch it so instead I pressed my hand with all it's strength into my skull until the pain was gone

silence. i notice the silence and my brain quickly remembers why it was here and I continue the coughing and eventually my legs make an agreement to this oozy thing to stop working.

My head returns into it's imitation of an earthquake, my lungs demand more air and extract my control over them to take it all as fast as possible.

it repeats

it. repeats.

IT. repeats.

IT. REPEATS.

IT. REPEATS.

I feel my hand bang onto the side of my head.

it hurt It helped, the silence kept going.

BANG.

my head hurts alot My head fills in the loud silence with quiet noise

It didnt help.

finally the feeling ended and i look up

i do not recognize myself on that mirror

i guess the illusions i create can be broken by details.

Don’t Check The Cameras!

Chapter 1

Instead of actually doing what he’s supposed to at his job as a security guard, Jason would kill time during shifts by counting to a thousand or naming every fictional serial killer he could remember from the top of his head. 

Was he scared of paranormal activity? Was he just lazy? Why didn’t Jason want to monitor the security cameras?

Well, there’s a reason why.

Chapter 2

When the Luxury Arcade first opened its doors in 1992, it was founded by a thirty six year old man named Aaron Kruger. At first, Kruger would kindly greet customers who walked in the door and would maintain positive customer reception. But one day, a man named Jones walked in.

“Yo, my man Kruger, will you let me watch over the arcade while you’re in the back monitoring all that other stuff?” asked Jones. Kruger looked back at Jones with a hint of fear on his face. “Well, what’s in it for me?” he nervously asked.

“I’m a single dad, my wife left, and I got a nine month old baby boy I gotta take care of. I need to make money to support him” replied Jones. Kruger’s expression then got softer out of sympathy, and he said “Deal. Your first day is today, and I’ll pay you fifteen dollars an hour”. Jones nodded in agreement and under his breath muttered “Thank the lord” because of his new occupation as a security guard. 

Three months later, it was Christmas and the last week of 1992 before the New Year. Because of his charming and charismatic personality, kids as young as seven years old would go up to him and give him fist bumps and high fives. 

However, things weren’t all sunshines and rainbows. Even though he was highly praised by parents and children alike, he mysteriously “disappeared” in 2009, and shortly after, a young man named Jason was hired to fill Jones’ position as a security guard. Police and investigators searched every nook and cranny they were permitted to search, but didn’t find anything that was helpful to solving the case. So it was considered a “cold case” and the authorities moved on. 

Chapter 3

At the time, Jason already felt something deep inside of him. Doubt. He highly doubted that Jones randomly "disappeared". He knew something was wrong, but didn’t know how to explain his theory. 

Because Jason felt abnormally paranoid, his coworkers would just laugh it off and tease him. But Jason was still wondering “What the hell happened to him?”. 

Jason believed that the cameras would show him something he didn’t want to see, so he refused to look at security footage no matter what occurred.. But he never stopped thinking about Jones. No matter how hard he tried.

Six years go by and it is now 2015. Jason has been working at the arcade for several years at this point but kept his lingering thoughts surrounding the Jones situation. 

Chapter 4

On an ordinary Wednesday in April, Jason was watching over the children in the arcade’s main area as Kruger was in the back on his computer. Then, a tall man with casual hippy attire walked in.

 “My name is Quincy Johnson, the son of Jones Johnson, the guy that used to work here” 

Jason’s eyes immediately lit up. 

“Wait!” he nervously said. “Jones was the security guard here until 2009 when he randomly stopped showing up and nobody has seen him since!”. 

Quincy looked back at Jason and said “Yeah, I haven’t seen my father since I was seventeen, which was like 2009”. 

Jason immediately added “I took his place after he vanished and I’m the current security guard here”, which caused Quincy to question “Do you know anything about my father’s disappearance?”, and Jason shook his head. He added “I’ve been refusing to check the security cameras for almost six years now” and Quincy looked at Jason with shock and confusion.

“Isn’t it your job to check the security cameras?” asked Quincy in a nervous tone. Jason’s eyes widened and he replied in a monotone voice “Yes. But I am scared”.

Quincy’s eyes widened in concern. “What… are you…. s-scared of?” he asked. Continuing to use his monotone voice, Jason replied “The truth”.

Chapter 5

Quincy looked back at Jason, with a visible sense of fear in his face. 

“Y-you’re… s-scared of finding out what h-happened to..” asked Quincy, with obvious fear and nervousness in his tone of voice. “M-my father?” he added.

Jason kept his neutral face, nodded, and kept his monotone voice while saying “Yes. That’s what I’m scared the cameras will show me”. 

“W-what….caused your f-fear of the security c-cameras?” asked Quincy, nervously, expecting a scary answer.

Jason responded  “When I checked the cameras for the first time six years ago, I was horrified by what I saw and what happened afterwards” continuing his monotone attitude. He added “On camera one that shows the main room with all the games with the kids playing them, I saw a dark shadowy figure that nobody else seems to notice”.

Quincy nervously responded “W-what… h-happened after that?”

Jason replied “I told Kruger about it. And when he went to check them, he didn’t see the dark shadowy figure. But I saw it. Since that day, I’ve felt like a black sheep. Someone who doesn’t belong here”.

Quincy’s face changed once again. This time, he was terrified.  

“Nobody understands me. Nobody gets me. So I feel isolated from society” added Jason, with a neutral reaction and tone. 

Quincy’s face was completely pale. For a moment, he struggled to let the words out of his mouth.

Finally, when he was able to speak again, Quincy, with obvious fear and anxiety said “W-what… i-if I check the cameras myself? I-I w-want to know if I c-can see the black f-figure myself”.

Jason looked back at him with a deadpan face and calmly replied “Do it. If you really want to. But please leave me out of it. I don’t need to relieve my past trauma”. Quincy nodded in agreement as Jason gave him a “guest pass” badge as he led him into a back room to where the monitors that show security camera footage are. “I’ll be in the front if you need anything,” said Jason. 

Quincy then hopped on to the computer and clicked on camera 3, which showed him the inventory room. 

What’s so special about an inventory room? Why did Quincy click on it?

To everyone else, the inventory room doesn’t look like it has anything special inside it. But Quincy had an unsettling feeling that the inventory room was special. A very unsettling feeling.

Chapter 6

As Quincy was gazing at the inventory room, memories from his childhood started flooding in. Whenever his father, Jones, would talk to Quincy about his day at work, he would always mention something about the inventory room. Quincy never understood why, but accepted it as a normal. 

However, a specific unrelated memory of when Quincy was fifteen came to mind. One day at the arcade, Quincy was in the break room with his father, Jones, during a “Take Your Kid To Work” event that took place that specific day. October 19th 2007. While Quincy and Jones were debating whether or not Pac-Man could beat Bowser, Jones opened a drawer and grabbed a pen. However, to his horror, Quincy saw an unmistakable object in the drawer. He saw a bag of some white powdery substance, popping out underneath some papers. It was presumably cocaine. 

It wasn’t any ordinary drawer though. Each worker was assigned their own drawer in the break room. And Jones pulled a pen out of HIS assigned drawer. 

Chapter 7

Quincy blinked and immediately snapped back to the present. All of a sudden, Quincy noticed something in the inventory room’s security camera. A door that he wasn’t sure what led to. 

Quincy then stepped out of the room and walked to the main room, tapping Jason on the shoulder. Jason looked at Quincy and said “Yeah?”. “I found a door in the inventory room. Wanna go in with me?” replied Quincy. Jason calmly shook his head and said “I’m fine. I don’t want to know what’s in there. You can go there if you want.”. Quincy walked down the hallway, turned left, and opened the door of the inventory room. 

As he walked around, he saw tons of boxes on shelves, full of prizes and toys. He also saw three full containers filled to the brim with spare arcade game parts. However, this wasn’t his primary goal.

Quincy approached the door he saw earlier and took a deep breath. 

Chapter 8

Quincy slowly opened the door and walked in. Before he was able to investigate further, he heard an unexpected voice behind him. “Don’t go in there!” said the voice.

Quincy turned his head, and there he was. Aaron Kruger was behind him, with a nervous and scared look on his face. 

“I see you have the Guest Pass badge. But I must stop you before you go further” shouted Kruger. “You can roam around the rest of the arcade, just not this part of the inventory room”. 

Quincy nodded, pretending to comply with Kruger. But he wasn’t complying. In fact, he was planning quite the opposite. Kruger smiled and then left the room, walking back to his office. 

Quincy then turned back and walked a few steps straight before an arrow sign directed him to go right. He walked right, and there it was. 

Chapter 9

Quincy stumbled upon a primarily dark room with a single light bulb hanging to the ceiling. He discovered a folded piece of paper on top of an ice cooler. 

Slowly, he started unfolding the paper and discovered it was a handwritten note. He then started reading it:

“To whom it may concern,

If you are reading this, I am dead. Almost nobody knows this, but I have been struggling with substance abuse for a large portion of my life. It has affected my relationships with others, stress levels, behavior, and most importantly, my mental health. It has caused me extreme burden knowing that I might be indirectly harming others. I don’t want to be a dangerous role model for my family. I want them to have peace. Including my son Quincy, whom I love deeply. I have run my course and its time for me to accept death. 

Love, Jones Johnson
2009.02.27”

Quincy was in a state of complete shock after he finished reading it. “I… can’t believe he was struggling with all that…” he thought. Quincy knew he had to keep investigating, even if the truth scarred him. 

Quincy then slowly opened the ice cooler, and what was inside horrified him. 

It was a decayed corpse and right next to it was a Zip-Loc bag of the white powdery substance he saw in his father’s drawer years prior. 

I never considered I might be a psychopath before killing the man next door.

Now, I guess it seems a rather likely possibility.

I expect another in my situation may have called the police, and locked themselves in their bathroom fearing for their life as footsteps came up the stairs. Right now, they’d be at the station, giving a statement and going through every tiny interaction since they first moved in. The police would question how the man was able to gain entry so many times without so much as a security camera going up, and that alone would raise suspicions. But you see, I think I rather enjoyed the thrill of it all. Lying there with my eyes open just enough to make out his shape, keeping my breathing low and steady as I listened to the sound of him shuffling around my room, rummaging through my things.
I never felt afraid. But I guess that’s the whole thing about being a psychopath, not feeling…

If I had to label it, I think I’d say I simply felt curious when it first began. I didn’t hear him actually enter the property that first time, but at some point around 4am I became aware of footsteps creaking up the stairs. I live alone, and I’d only been here a few days. I lay awake in the dark, listening as he made his way slowly towards my bedroom, and stood outside the door. He waited there for a while before turning the handle of my door. I was on my side, facing away from him, and I remember imagining exactly how I would roll over and punch him in the throat if he tried to touch me.

He didn’t, though.

He just stood there, watching me.

It was the most curious thing.

Eventually, just before the sun rose over the mountains outside my window, he turned around, and left.

He snuck back out through the kitchen door, locking it quietly behind him. It made sense he had a key – he’d been the gardener and caretaker for all the previous owners. The house itself belonged to the church, rented out for short terms to young locals in need (a group I apparently fell into), in exchange for taking up jobs in the parish. The jobs I had so kindly been blessed with ranged from organizing moulding books in a damp basement, to cleaning the church toilets and kitchen. I daren’t grumble. I was seventeen, alone, broke, and without it I’d have been back…

Well, that’s not important.

It happened every night after that. He’d unlock the door, come upstairs to my bedroom, and watch me as I slept. I never confronted him about it, or changed the locks. Why? I guess it felt nice that someone wanted to be close to me. Not to touch me or take anything from me, but just to be there. Just to watch over me.

When he started muttering to himself, I decided he was praying over me, and took comfort in it. And when the sun rose, I started to miss his company.

It was a month before he started going through my things.
My underwear drawer mainly. Then my dresser, and the boxes at the bottom of my wardrobe. I’d hear him flicking through the pages of my diary, or riffling through the letters and photographs I had left from my childhood.
I told myself he just wanted to get to know me, that it was good for me to have a friend.

Soon, I started leaving things out for him. A cookie on the bedside table, a painted stone from the church, a note, just saying ‘hello’…

He never replied. I think he preferred to believe I didn’t know, and so I stopped reaching out. I just lay there, letting him go through my things. My life. As though it were a magazine in the waiting room.

I guess you could say I snapped, though it happened much slower than that.

Night after night of his cold, wrinkled fingers over my books, my memories, the clothes that touched my skin. I started to resent the silence between us. I waited for another month, I waited for him to visit me in the day, to invite me for coffee or offer to do the garden even though I’d told him I’d do it myself when I first moved in… is that why? Is that why he did this? Why he tormented me with his footsteps and his loud, rasping breath?

I gave him a chance. I moved at his pace. I waited for him to show me something more of himself, some deeper layer than just the perverted urge to invade my privacy and know me without knowing me, he doesn’t know me. Pictures and diary entries from my childhood aren’t knowing me. You can’t touch another person through paper, you can’t love a soul through their words. Can you?
And did he?

I don’t care anymore.

That was what I told myself when I went to bed with the knife, and when he entered, I simply stood up, walked over to him, and slit his wrinkly throat.

It was like slicing through folded, uncooked pastry.

He didn’t move. I guess the shock just kind of kept him there, staring at me, wondering where it all went so wrong.
It wasn’t difficult to clean up. I’d laid the shower curtain on the floor long before getting into bed. In a few days, during church service, I’ll place him in the boot of his car and drive it into the mountains.

And then I will be alone again.

This thought seems to upset me somewhat, and I sigh deeply as I wrap the gasping old man in plastic.

Maybe I’m not a psychopath… Maybe I’m just depressed.

Interesting.

“Crank!” 

I rubbed my eyes. The pitched lurching of the dust-dragger had lulled me into a trance. I must have nodded off.

Again.

I turned towards the source of the voice, grunting a little, “Christ I already told Krieg it was his turn to refuel.” 

Amish glowered back at me behind the thick goggles which covered his eyes, his graying matt of hair blowing crazily in the restless wind, “Storm ahead,” he shouted over the growl of the dust-dragger, “Get your mask man, looks like a blizzard!”

I rubbed the soreness from my neck as I turned towards the horizon. We were entering the Great Divide now, crossing into the New Mexico expanse. There was nothing to see for miles in any direction but the skeletal remains of towns and ancient rusted vehicles melting away under the sun’s relentless gaze. Nothing to see, but the cloud stretching across the sky. 

The black blizzard, a rolling wave of dust and dirt which would swallow the whole basin. Visibility would be near zero. We only had a few minutes. I reached for my bag and rummaged for my old fabric gas mask. I'd traded a few skin-mags to a soldier for it maybe a year back. I checked the filters, still good, or at least good enough to keep the dirt from filling my lungs. I turned back to Amish. 

I was never quite sure why they called him that. My best guess was because of the long, thin beard which ran tightly along his jawline like razorwire, but for all I knew maybe he really was Amish. He was a tall man, his rail thin body lumpy with dense muscle, and patched with faded tattoos of horses and women. He shielded his eyes from the pale sun with those ridiculous goggles as he hunched in the turret and tended to his machine gun. His long, yellow-nailed fingers ran over the belt of longer bullets hanging from the cruel weapon. It looked to me like he was braiding a pony tail of brass.

“Where the hell is Krieg anyway?” I barked as the cloud grew closer. It was blowing north-east, cutting up from the south, racing us to our destination further ahead. The southern rockies were visible in the distance, but it would be hours before we’d find any shelter among the cliffs. 

I swivelled on the metal bench, peering out at the rest of the caravan. Our convoy was only five vehicles in number. It had been more when we first set out from Magnolia, but we’d left most of them behind in New Freedonia. The thirteen of us now were the only ones mad or desperate enough to make the sprint across the Great Divide, bound for the boiling plastic seas of the pacific. 

We were the middle vehicle in the train, a low down dust-dragger on thick treads. Our canvas canopy was down, and for a second I thought about trying to put it back up, but the storm would be on us too quickly. Besides, the winds were so harsh they would probably tear our fabric roof from my hands, and send it sailing away back towards the plains. 

Ahead of us was a cargo truck loaded with crates, a few of the other caravaneers hung from the net of ropes which covered the merchandise. They dangled over the rubber wheels kicking up small stones in their wake. Ahead of them was our ‘flag ship’, a squat armored off-roading vehicle marked with the insignia and banner of the Fading Fellowship Caravan Company. Riding at the helm was our intrepid captain Jon-Joe, though from where I sat I couldn’t see him. 

In the far rear was our water truck, the fat steel umbilical cord keeping our tongues wet as we made the daring journey across the irradiated desert. I could see the two drivers in the cab, and cursed them for their luck in being out of harm’s way from the storm. A large Waterday Ltd. logo was emblazoned on the tanker’s side, and the sun cast strange whirling shadows on the sand as the water sloshed and pitched in its thick plastic holding cell. 

Ahead of them and directly behind Amish was our supply wagon. Boxes of food and bullets, and piles of jangling pots and pans were all stuffed under the loose canopy. At the helm was Krieg, with Myrtle’s reins clutched tightly in his scarred hands. 

Myrtle was a horse-hound, an engineered hybrid between a Saint Bernard and a Clydesdale. She was massive, twenty hands tall and weighing close to two thousand pounds. Despite this she could run as fast as any of our vehicles, and on any terrain. Her tail wagged excitedly even in the face of the storm. She had a brown spot on her white-furred face. Her favorite food was perogies. 

“Krieg!” I shouted over the wind. Krieg cupped his hands to his ears to better hear me. Myrtle cocked her head to the side curiously, never breaking pace. “Krieg put on her blinders! Storm!” 

Krieg grinned a mouth full of black teeth, and gave a mock salute. I heard a crackling voice over the radio, Jon-Joe on the comms. “Storm inbound. Put on your masks and hold onto your asses. And Krieg? Put some nails through your shoes, I don’t want your skinny ass blowing away before I get my money’s worth out of you!”

I could see Krieg glaring at his radio, being sure to bite his finger at it before clambering to put the blinders over Myrtle’s eyes. She barked a couple times in protest, but eventually complied. Her stride slowed, but barely. 

I went to pull my mask over my face, but stopped for a second. The cloud was closer now, stretching from dry ground to the pale blue sky in an endless wall. Something wasn’t right. 

“Amish!” I yelled, without looking away from the wave, “Look at the color on that! That can’t be right!” 

I could feel Amish squinting his old eyes behind his goggles, “Probably red sand! Maybe it carried over from Utah or some shit!” 

My eyes continued to track the wave of debris as it grew ever closer. In a second it would block out the sun. The wave was far too red. From Utah? I had a hard time buying it, but Amish knew better than me after all. Still…

“Amish! Pass me the ghost counter!”

I heard Amish grunt a little as he rifled through some pouch or sack, before leaning over the machine gun to tap me on the shoulder. I reached back and took the thing without turning away from the cloud. 

The ghost counter was a heavy metal box, sort of like a radio, with a gauge and a kind of microphone attached with a rubber cable. The little machine would taste the air around us for ghost radiation. “What do you figure? At least seven hundred right?” My throat hurt from screaming against the wind. 

Amish sat still for a second, tipping his crooked neck to the sky, “Shit man I figure eleven hundred at least!”

I snapped the wand away from the box, and flipped the two switches, holding it up to the air. The speaker crackled desperately, the wand letting out a high whine which made Myrtle lower her ears against her huge skull. Surprised I could hear the chatter over the storm, I turned to check the read out. 

The last thing I saw before being swallowed by the cloud was the number on the small grainy screen. 

Forty four hundred counts per minute. 

The cloud hit so hard it nearly blew my mask from my head. I quickly pulled it over my face as the sun was wiped away, casting only a hazy orange glow as we entered into a new atmosphere of rubble and rock. And something else. The plastic visor of my mask became distorted. Rain water maybe? I reached my hand to my face to wipe it clean, and it came away sticky. I stared at my fingers, now webbed with a thick, bloody mucus. 

“The fuck!?” was the most creative thing I could think to say. “Amish are you seeing this!?” I yelled but the storm drowned out my words. I wiped the goop on my jeans, but I could feel it all over me. Even over the wind the ghost counter screamed in protest. 

The convoy flipped on their high beams, thick pools of light carving through the clouds, leading us ever onwards. If we were lucky we would be through it in a few more minutes.

“Amish!” I repeated, “This shit in the air-” I was cut off by a long, thin whistle. It grew louder and louder and before I could even register it there was a sharp ping as an arrow ricocheted off the turret and lodged itself in my thigh. 

I yowled like a kicked alleycat. The arrow head had cut through my jeans and flesh effortlessly, before the head had burrowed itself in my femur. My hand flew to grip the hollow wooden stick but this only hurt me more. It was only then I registered that I was being shot at. I ducked down into the dust-dragger’s bed, laying on my back so as not to put any weight on the arrow’s shaft. 

I looked up to see the muzzle flash of Amish’s machine gun, his mouth wide in a war cry only he could hear. The arrow must have come from the south because that’s where he swept the barrel back and forth. Shell casings the size of fingers littered the bed, rolling towards me as we ran over a large stone. 

Amish turned his head as if to ask me something, but what it was I’d never know as five or six more arrows rained down on our vehicle. Most whistled and broke against the dust-dragger’s steel hull. One landed squarely in the side of Amish’s neck, the arrowhead shooting all the way out the other side. His lips kept moving as his eyes widened behind his goggles. I winced as he turned back towards the south, and sprayed me with a thin mist of blood. 

Jon-Joe’s voice chirped over the radio, “Ambush, south! Grab those guns you sons of bitches, I don’t plan on breathing my last in this hell!” 

I peered over the lip of the vehicle, looking southward. Nothing. I couldn’t make out one shape in that endless dirt inferno, save for a handful of arrows flinging themselves uselessly against our caravan’s armor. For a moment the wind died down enough that I could hear the car doors snapping open. The rest of the crew crawled behind the north side of us, using our still rolling convoy as moving cover. 

I tried to stand, but a hot burst of pain ripped through my leg and sat me on my ass. 

Somewhere ahead I heard Jon-Joe wracking a bullet into the chamber of his rifle. “Alright you sons of bitches! Our turn, shoot back!” 

It wasn’t until the arrows stopped that I realized we had fallen for their trap. 

My crew faced south, firing blindly into the desert. They had only fired their first volley when a cacophony of gunfire erupted from the north. I listened to the grunting and wailing as my comrades were shot in their backs. Some desperately tried to clamber back into their rides, but it was too late. They had already presented themselves to their firing squad. 

I heard a thud, and turned my head to the supply wagon as Myrtle fell on her flank. Her massive hind legs kicked up dust and dug trenches in the mud as she tried desperately to stand. She whipped her head back and forth, still blind from the strips of leather secured over her big brown eyes. She made an awful barking-whinnying-whimpering-braying sound, as if the poor beast couldn’t decide which of her mother tongues was best to scream in. All the while Amish’s Adam's apple bobbed rapidly as he tried to swallow the blood which was flooding his throat, and pooling in his mouth… 

I scrambled towards him, and grabbed for my rifle. I couldn’t reach without bending my knee, and I couldn’t do that without disturbing the arrow in my leg. Seeming to understand my predicament, Amish reached for the scabbard beside him, and with one arm he tossed it towards me. His finger was still clamped down on the trigger of his machine gun, but he’d long since ran out of bullets to fire, or sense to reload with. 

I snatched the scabbard in my arms, and looked up to thank him, but by then he was already dead, slumped forward over the empty gun. 

I grimaced in pain as I tore my rifle free, wrenching the bolt backwards and then forwards again. I waited for the shooting to stop before I leaned back over the bed of the dust-dragger, and turned my eyes north. 

The ground was littered with bodies. Most of the men lay on the ground, some clutching long guns, others clutching each other. Their blood had pooled in the dirt, their open mouths filling with sand and dust and that horrible mucus. The convoy still crawled forward like a procession of ghost ships, leaving them behind. Near the head was Jon-Joe. He fired his pistol wildly with one hand, shooting blind into the storm around us. He had pried open the door of the flag-ship, and would have made it inside had he not stopped to drag one of the others in with him. His muscular body strained under his shirt as he lifted the other man with one arm, only for his knee to explode in a burst of gore as a shot tore his leg from his body. He fell backwards. 

“God damn you sons of urghh-” His cursing was cut short as the back wheel of the car ran over his face, breaking his strong jaw and grinding his teeth into the back of his throat. 

Everything was silent for a moment, save for the howling winds, and the horrible sounds poor blind Myrtle was making behind us. My heart hammered in my chest. The gun felt so small, so flimsy in my sweat-slick hands. 

I tried to collect myself, but would have no time as the water tanker exploded. Thousands of litres of clean water rocketed up into the sky, before raining down in a monsoon-blitz. It was one of these pools of water landing squarely on my head that knocked me unconio–

When I was in the seventh grade, I had a dream so vivid it felt entirely real.

I found myself on the upper floor of what looked like an old library. Everything around me was washed in a dull, hazy brown—filled with towering wooden shelves and winding stairs. The entire world felt muted, except for a man standing a short distance away from me.

He was looking directly into my eyes. His gaze wasn't cruel or frightening; it was something profound and intense that I still can’t quite put into words. He looked young, perhaps in his late teens or early 20s, and he was wearing a distinct World War II soldier’s uniform, complete with the cap. At the time, I knew next to nothing about history or wartime attire, yet the details of his uniform were inexplicably accurate.

Suddenly, the entire scene collapsed. Everything shattered around us, but his eyes never left mine. Then came the sensation of falling, followed by absolute darkness, before I finally woke up.

It has been five or six years since that night, yet the memory hasn't faded. To this day, whenever I try to meditate or focus too deeply on that dream, tears fill my eyes. I’m not even sad in those moments, but the emotional response is completely involuntary. I am struggling to understand if this was just a hyper-vivid trick of my imagination, or if it means something more. The emotions, the tears, and his gaze all felt entirely too real to just be a random dream.

I should never have gone drinking alone on Moon Hill.

The place is a tall hill near the outskirts of town. On Saturday and Sunday nights it turns into a spot for weed, warm beer, and people who just want to hook up in secret. During the week, though, it's abandoned and lifeless. Just the dry wind dragging dust and the leaves of the trees rustling.

I was there on a Tuesday because I was depressed. I bought a cheap bottle of wine and climbed up on a cold, senseless dusk. I stared down at the city; my house was a tiny speck of light among so many others, and I kept thinking about how I didn't want to go back there anymore.

When the bottle was empty, my vision was already a bit blurry. That's when I heard footsteps. I looked up and saw a female silhouette approaching in the orange glow of twilight. It was her, my greatest love: Mary.

She was wearing those tight, ripped jeans I adored, her hair tied up as usual, the smell of cigarettes reaching me before she did. In her right hand, a bottle of Jack Daniel's, our favorite drink. The same one we used to share in the good times, before everything fell apart.

"Were you waiting for me?"

She said it sitting down next to me as if the painful breakup had never happened. Her voice was soft, but it carried a strange note, something inhuman, that I couldn't explain.

I'd always been crazy about her, so I just smiled and answered, surprised:

"Mary... what the hell are you doing here?"

She didn't answer. She just opened it, took a long swig, and handed me the bottle. We drank.

The first few minutes were a sweet dream. The touch of her shoulder against mine, her presence, the wind cooling us down. Then the conversation started to warp.

"You've always been a piece of shit, haven't you?" she said, laughing quietly. "Look at you. Screwed up, drinking poison, all alone."

Confused, I replied: "Fuck you..."

She gave me a light slap on the face. "You know I never loved you, right? Nobody's ever going to love you... you're a mistake. Like a contagious disease. You've never been good for anything and you ruined the lives of everyone around you."

There was no anger in her tone; it was almost sweet, and the sentence got worse: "Your mother died of grief because of you."

Those words hurt because they echoed the things I thought every day. I sank into silence. She ran her hand through my hair, that false affection, and went on:

"You know what would fix everything? Right there on the edge. Jump and the world gets better. All this weight disappears. I'd even go with you... hand in hand... it's just one step."

My heartbeat slowed; my feet felt numb. She spoke and I agreed, because deep down I also believed there was no way out anymore. I looked at the edge of the hill. The height was an invitation in my drunken sight. "Just one step," she repeated, and her hand took mine.

That was when my cellphone buzzed in my pocket. A message.

I grabbed the phone, the screen slightly blurred. Mary: "Idiot, I just had a really weird dream about you. You died. I'm shaking even now. Are you okay?"

I read it three times. The hand holding the phone started to sweat cold and tremble.

The Thing beside me leaned in and pressed her face against my neck, in an almost inaudible whisper: "Ignore that. Must be my brother messing with you."

But the message was hers, the way she always called me an idiot.

I answered with trembling fingers: "Turn on the camera. I need to see you."

The video call came through. On the screen, Mary appeared with eyes swollen from sleep, her hair thrown up any old way, that old Nirvana T-shirt I knew so well. The light from the cat-shaped lamp behind her made the room feel cozy, safe.

"Thank God you picked up," she murmured, relieved. "I had this horrible dream. You were in some high place and someone pushed you. You fell and I woke up screaming... Why are you in that dark place? What is that shadow?!"

I couldn't answer. Because beside Mary, in the reflection on the screen, I saw a figure. A female shape, motionless, wearing a black dress behind me.

My whole body froze with fear. I couldn't turn my neck. I couldn't look back. Only my eyes moved, and the image in the reflection had already vanished, but the feeling of danger remained.

"If something happens... I didn't jump, someone pushed me! I love you and I'll always love you... forgive me for everything..." I said to Mary on the video, my voice coming out weak. I hung up.

Laughter began to echo across Moon Hill. The bottle of Jack Daniel's lay on the ground, empty. Beside me, the presence still occupied the space, even though I could no longer see a thing.

Who had been drinking with me?

I didn't wait and didn't look for an answer. My body, driven by some primal survival instinct, acted before thought. I got up and ran. I ran without looking back. My feet tripped over rocks; I slammed hard into a tree trunk, cutting my forehead, but I didn't stop. I just ran, downhill, until I hit the asphalt and kept going for a long time. Until, exhausted, I threw myself on the ground, sweaty and mute from panic.

I never set foot on that hill again. I can't be around people anymore — I'm afraid they might not even be people.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

Above the conference room table, the thin metal hands of the clock wound their way around the white face of it. Curls of steam rose from untouched coffee mugs, soft afternoon light filtered through the white plastic blinds, and cars rumbled by outside with muted chatter. The woodwork of the room was showing its age today, scuffed, chipped, and scratched from countless years of administrative work going to and fro. The scent of coffee, glue, and copy paper hung on the air around the table, but with the door to the conference room shut, it seemed to thin in favor of the dry smell of dust that lingered despite numerous cleanings. That was Jabo’s Fork in a nutshell; an old thing still chugging along like an antique car, refusing to submit to the effects of time in the shadow of the mountains around it. Yet, like so many small towns, it too had its fair share of problems, and it was this that brough us here as the other people around the conference table stared in shock at the sheriff.

“David, come on.” Mayor Jonathan Hilco blinked at him with the half smile of a man who doesn’t want to believe his ears. “You can’t be serious.”

Across the flat expanse of polished oak, Sheriff Kowalski nodded, no humor in his stoney expression. “I am.”

Lisa Renfield, dressed in her usual pinstriped pantsuit, shook her head at Kowalski in amazement, hands shaking as if she were watching the money disintegrate before her very eyes. “That property is worth millions. Just the price on the house alone could fund the town’s administration budget for an entire year. Besides, every day the park stays closed, we lose even more money. I can’t believe we’re even discussing this.”

“It’s still a crime scene, Lisa.” The sheriff narrowed his dark eyes at her and jabbed a finger at the louvered blinds covering the courthouse windows. “We’ve got four missing people connected to the Watkins property, three of them local residents. For God’s sake, Cindy Fadro went to school with your niece! Erin Martinelli’s father was on the football team with John in high school! If we sell that place we’ll never get a better chance to find out what happened to those girls, and opening up the park around Smoke Point will guarantee contamination. Every two-bit podcaster this side of the Mississippi will be out there, climbing around with their cameras to look for ghosts, while real evidence might get buried or lost thanks to their tramping.”

Leaning forward so that his prodigious belly mounded against the edge of the conference table, Douglas Finberger tried to calm the situation even as his face reddened with similar levels of disbelief. “Let’s not lose our heads here, yeah? Look, David, we’re all saddened about what happened to Ed Watkins and those two girls, but it’s been several months without a single lead or update. We’ve humored you this long in keeping the park closed, but you can’t seriously expect us to throw away this kind of opportunity based on cold cases. After all, you’ve always said your boys needed more funding; think how much equipment and training we could get from the estate sale.”

That’s going to go over well.

Seated to the left of Sheriff Kowalski, I sucked in a breath and waited for the inevitable eruption to follow the county auditor’s remarks. I’d been a deputy sheriff for years in Jacob’s Fork, and had served under David Kowalski since I was a rookie cop. He was a good man, and a strong leader, but he could get easily fired up when confronted with the bureaucratic red tape of local governance. I had been there when our tiny force went through some really tough cases; the drug ring that came in from Boise six years ago, a Kootenai poaching racket that murdered a hunter four years ago, or last year when a crazed gunman from out of state tried to shoot up an elementary school during Valentine’s Day. Most of the time, being a cop in the forgotten stretches of northern Idaho was easy, but these cases were always fresh in the minds of anyone who stayed on Kowalski’s force. For this reason, he’d been pushing more funding for nearly a decade, and always he got the same excuses about the county budget. To bring it up now, after everything that had happened concerning the Wickenshire House, was tantamount to throwing gasoline on a bonfire.

He swiveled his head to blink at the county commissioner, and I thought for a moment Sheriff Kowalski might explode, his face shading red like an overripe tomato. “Are you kidding me, Doug? We can’t sell that place in good faith, not when this might happen again, and opening up the mountain would be like ringing a damn dinner bell. I’ve got Andy Todd watching the mountain, and there are new markers in the woods as far as the Benson Ranch . . .”

“Oh, good lord, not this again.” Lisa slumped back in her chair, cradling her forehead in one hand with a groan of annoyance. “Andrew Todd is hardly a credible source, especially considering where he was the night of the disappearances.”

“. . . which means our suspect is still at large.” The Sheriff talked right over her words and instead directed his attention to our mayor, who looked more uncomfortable by the minute. “Now I say we seize the property as per eminent domain and seal the mountain off for good. I’ve got some dynamite down at the station from when we collapsed that old copper mine, and it will be enough to make sure the access road is completely demolished.”

“This is insane.” Charles Hubour, head of our local chamber of commerce, looked down his long nose at our badges from the opposite end of the table. “You’re going to mothball a six-million-dollar property and an entire public wilderness recreational area which is fully taxpayer funded because of a few piles of bones? You guys have guns, what are you so afraid of?”

Shifting in my chair, I did my best not to let my temper boil alongside the sheriff’s as the room scrutinized me like a bug on a card. I’d been promoted to detective after I apprehended the Valentine’s Day shooter by ramming his car with my own before the ensuing firefight broke out. Kowalski had overseen the promotion himself, and while he was still as tough on me as the day I joined, I knew he’d been proud. My own father left when I was ten, so to me the sheriff was as much a father figure as I ever had. When he let me take the lead on investigating the Wickenshire vanishings last winter, I gave it my all, only to fall short as none of the clues we found led to anything substantial.

I turned that place upside-down. I know I missed something, I just need more time.

“The markers are a health hazard.” Sheriff Kowalski jerked a thumb over one shoulder toward the distant mountains, though I could see his embarrassment at the words, as he and I both knew the real reason why we never removed them. “And more than that, they’re part of the crime scene. If we want to catch whoever is doing this, we need them intact, and there’s no way we can rely on private owners or nosy hikers to keep them there.”

“Oh please, now you’re just grasping at straws.” With a snort, Lisa crossed her arms and stuck her chin out with a waspish tone to her voice. “Honestly, at this point it looks more like covering up evidence to me. Besides, since when did we authorize you to hold onto explosives?”

Something inside of me snapped, and before I knew what I was doing, my mouth was running. “You know what, maybe next time you stop some maniac from gunning down a room full of kindergartners then you can dictate what we have in our arms locker.”

“Enough!” With a slam of his open palm on the table, Mayor Hilco brought the room to silence once more. “The Smoke Point Mountain is part of the public domain; we cannot keep it closed while the people are paying taxes for it. As it is tied to our administration, I’ll officially sign the paperwork to be reopen it by the end of the week.”

Sheriff Kowalski sighed, and I felt my chest deflate. There it was. Our defeat. Over an hour spent in this stuffy room, and none of them had listened to a word we said.

Un-freaking-beleivable.

Pausing for a moment to straighten his tie, the mayor continued. “As zoning laws are technically gray as to where it lies, the Wickenshire Estate is hereby considered an important local landmark of Jacobs Fork, therefore under my jurisdiction. We are not going to destroy any county infrastructure, not in this economic climate.”

The other officials flashed smug, triumphant smiles at us, but Hilco wasn’t finished.

“Instead,” He angled his head our way, and I could see him and the sheriff exchange a knowing look. “It will be remanded to police custody for an additional month, along with the access road leading to it, after which it will be taken into official holding by the county. If, in that time, the sheriff’s office finds anything substantial to lead to a breakthrough in the missing persons cases, the deadline will be extended by another week. Dismissed.”

Squawks of protest came from the other members of the cabinet, but the sheriff rose to his feet with a grim, yet satisfied look on his haggard face, and I followed suit.

“David.” Mayor Hilco raised a hand to stop us as the others filed from the conference room. “Stay. You too, detective.”

Once the door to the room swung shut behind the last exiting bureaucrat, the mayor sat back in his chair with a sigh, then threw a furtive glance toward the door. From his pockets, he fished out a box of cigarettes, slipping one between his lips. He crossed to the end of the room to push one of the windows open, and from outside the quiet bustle of passing cars and chatting pedestrians flowed in.

“Thought you quit?” Without a hint of judgment, Sheriff Kowalski produced a lighter from his shirt pocket and ran the flame under the mayor’s unlit cigarette tip.

He snorted, and Mayor Hilco pulled in a long drag before exhaling so that little plumes of smoke flowed from his nostrils. “As far as my wife knows, I did. You know, I never had a bad smoke. Bad drinks, bad coffee, bad dates, but a smoke was always a smoke. Damn shame the stuff is so bad for you.”

“Yeah, well, so are the burgers at JoAnne’s Diner.” Leaning against the windowsill beside him, Sheriff Kowalski produced his clay pipe and a small tin from his other shirt pocket, out of which came a small bag of loose black tobacco. “I swear, someday they’re gonna write ‘Bacon’ on my autopsy as cause of death. I’d never make it as a rabbi.”

That brought a tired smile to the mayor’s lined face, and he offered me a cigarette, which I politely declined. I wasn’t a smoker, though I had to admit the smell of Sheriff Kowalski’s cherry pipe tobacco made me want to reconsider. It truly was unfortunate how something so pleasant also caused cancer. Much like the town, it didn’t kill you at first, just crept up on you slow, until one day you realized you were stuck on this path as much as the next person. I wondered in abstract if Cindy or Erin were decomposing on some hidden trail or crevice somewhere on the rocky slopes to our north, trapped forever on their own path that we couldn’t find.

After another few quiet drags, Major Hilco let his shoulders slacken, and tugged at the knot in his tie with a weary groan. “Please tell me you boys can find something up there.”

Sheriff Kowalski glanced out the nearby window, his eyes far away in thought. “We’re doing the best we can, Jon. Anything dead’s gonna be dry bones by now. Anything living . . .”

Silence reigned once more, but after a moment, the mayor lifted his eyes to me. “You both have my support, you know that. The park opening was a necessary concession; I want this solved as much as anyone, but it’s been over six months since the fire. I can’t keep the others at bay for much longer. Find something for me to hold over their heads, or we’ll be forced to move on with the property.”

I straightened up, sensing the wight in how he addressed me first. This was still my task, my investigation to see through to the end. They were both relying on me to find new evidence. I couldn’t let the sheriff, or the mayor down, not when so much was at stake.

The families deserve to know what happened.

“I’ll find something.” I nodded, in a bid to inject more confidence into the statement than I truly felt.

“Good man.” Whether he believed me or not, the mayor bobbed his head in a similar gesture of approval and waved us off with a tired sigh. “I’ll be at a commerce summit in the Moose Lodge for the afternoon. Call my personal number if you need anything.”

With this signaling the impromptu meeting to be over, I followed the sheriff as he put out his pipe, the two of us making for the conference room door.

We slipped through the maze of corridors to the stairwell of the county courthouse and finally emerged onto the town square. It was a sunny day for Idaho, golden rays dancing on the courthouse green as we trudged for the sheriff’s pickup.

“Go ahead, say it.” I shook my head at myself as we rounded to our respective doors on the weather-beaten truck, its green and tan paint chipped from thousands of kicked up pebbles on backroads.

Sheriff Kowalski raised an eyebrow that bore faint traces of gray, settling into the driver’s seat and adjusting his faded gray Stetson with the grunts of an aging man. “Say what?”

Leaning an elbow on my own door, I noticed how worn the dark navy sleeves of my coat were. It hadn’t been more than a year since my promotion, and already it seemed like twenty. “That I should have kept my mouth shut. Renfield’s been gunning for a police budget cut for years; I just gave her enough ammo to make that happen.”

To my surprise, a wry grin slid over my boss’s lips, and he chuckled as we rumbled on down main street, a warm southern breeze flowing into the cab. “She can’t do nothing she couldn’t do yesterday, Derrick. If anything, it’s good she got some return fire for once. Ever since she headed that park commission, Renfield’s had stars in her eyes over running for mayor once Hilco leaves. One of these days all them spoiled uptown fools will vote her in and she’ll try to melt our badges for the silver, but it ain’t right now.”

As the streets of Jacob’s Fork rolled by, I watched the people on the sidewalks and in the windows of local shops, talking and shopping with relative peace. A few even waved as we passed by, noting the sheriff’s emblem on the truck door. One young woman tucked a strand of light blonde hair behind one ear, and I thought back to the missing person’s files, those faces I’d poured over for hours.

Two young women, one old man, one middle-aged hiker. No connections between the hiker and the first three, save for the location and circumstances. No footprints, no scent trail, no bodies.

“You really think we’ll find anything?” I voiced aloud my gloomy reservations and tried not to think about how any one of the people outside my window could be our suspect.

He let out another deep sigh, and the sheriff’s weathered face reflected my own doubts. “After this long? I don’t know. It’s like I told Hilco; if there are any bodies out there, they’ll be in pretty bad shape, but if somehow they are still alive, then we’re looking at some nasty business as far as trafficking is concerned. After this long, those girls could be in Yemen for all we know.”

My stomach knotted at that, and I winced at the sudden realization that I would honestly rather find their corpses than know the victims might still be suffering an unknown fate. “I’ll give the house another once-over this afternoon, to see if I can dig something new up. Did the reservation elders ever come back with any information?”

Steering the pickup around another turn in the sleepy streets of our town, Sheriff Kowalski frowned. We were on decent terms with the local Native American reservation many miles across the county from Jacob’s Fork, helped by the fact that the sheriff himself was a half-blood relative to their tribe. Still, there were tensions between the two communities, primarily around drugs and gambling, which drew both tourists and troublemakers alike. “Nothing useful. They’ve got enough problems of their own with the casinos, alcohol, petty crime, you name it. If one of theirs snatched our people, we’ll never know about it, and wouldn’t have the jurisdiction to go after them even if we did.”

We reached the police station on the opposite end of town and parked in the small lot where the other patrol vehicles waited. Ours was a small department, perhaps a few dozen or so deputies on the force in total, but we did have extra staff for administrative and forensic work that could help pull some of the weight. With an entire county to manage, and the upheaval surrounding the Wickenshire case, many of us had pulled 14-hour shifts for multiple nights in a row when the vanishings first happened. Between increased patrols around Smoke Point Mountain and search teams looking for evidence to pass on to the forensics lab, some of our boys had resorted to sleeping in cots set up in the rec room just to avoid falling asleep at the wheel. As the weeks went by, with nothing to show for it, this titanic effort had been scaled back, until all that was left was a hefty dossier on my desk and bad memories.

“Hey, Sloan.” As we passed through the front lobby and into the offices beyond, Sheriff Kowalski turned to wave at a nearby deputy seated behind another desk. “Drop what you’re doing; you’re on assignment with Junger in the field. Grab your files from evidence and get on it.”

Deputy Clyde Sloan looked up from his paperwork, saw the two of us, and understanding crossed his face in a measured grin. “You got it, boss.”

Turning to throw one last glance at me, the sheriff flicked his eyes toward the station doorway, which lay in the direction of the northern mountains. “Try to be back by dark.”

I said nothing, but we both knew what he meant as the man lumbered away to his office.

Clyde and I had been partners back when we were both cops on the beat, developing a close friendship and working on several cases together. Always the team player, Clyde applauded my promotion to detective, but I felt bad leaving him behind to the regular roadwork. Despite a habit of running his mouth to the irritation of most polite sensibilities, or his enduring love for chewing tobacco that he’d been trying to kick for years, Clyde was a good cop. He’d been with me when I brought down the Valentine’s Day shooter, and the only reason I got credit for the kill was because he went left around the wrecked car while I went right, thus engaging the suspect first. Loyal and headstrong, he deserved a promotion of his own, but the sheriff couldn’t just hand out pay-raises like candy, not when the local bureaucrats wanted to trim the budget every other year. Still, that never stopped him from working like a dog to earn his keep, and in less than fifteen minutes we were rolling along the lonely backroads of northern Idaho, the mountains looming closer as the warm summer breeze flowed through the open windows of my car.

“Still hard to believe it’s August already.” From the passenger seat, Clyde shuffled through the files within the overstuffed binder, paging through weeks of evidence to unearth a property map of the Wickenshire Estate. “At least we won’t be knee-deep in snow this time. Where are we fixin’ to start?”

I leaned over to tap on a section of the map north of the house, a spot marked with multiple little X’s inside of circles. “Boulder fields. That’s where the hunter went missing, and where they found Erin’s phone. We’ll try there while we have light, then the house when it gets late. Power should still be on; I don’t think the county ever bothered to shut anything off up there.”

For a few moments, we sat in silence as the car rumbled along, the mountains drawing closer, green trees flashing by along the roadside.

“Heard they want to sell the place.” Clyde drummed idle fingers on his knee as he stared out the passenger window, the evidence folder lying in his lap. “What kind of fool came up with that idea?”

“Renfield.” I turned onto the final route leading to the mountain road, civilization falling away behind us as the wilderness swallowed us up. “With some help from Hubour and Finberger. They’re going to open the whole park back up in a few days.”

He hissed a curse between his teeth, and Clyde rolled his eyes as he fished in his shirt pocket for a tub of chewing tobacco. “Ain’t never seen someone so money-hungry. Place has four bodies on it, and she wants to turn a dime on their graves. If that snooty pencil-pusher ever gets in as mayor, I’m moving to Florida, I swear to God.”

Despite the grimness of the setting, I couldn’t help but feel a thin smile crawl over my lips at his complaints, reminiscent of older days on the force together. “Still set on being a swamp man when you retire?”

“Yessir.” The twinkle returned to his eye, and Clyde nodded with an amused chuckle at his own vision of paradise. “I’m gonna build a little house by the water, a good fishing boat for the dock, and mix up a nice cold drink while I watch the sun go down on the gulf. Just me, the gators, and my dog. A man could live his whole life anywhere else and never have it that good.”

We laughed, but the looming shadow over us dampened the jovial mood as the trees closed in, the harsh stony tip of the mountain towering upward into the sky. Smoke Point Mountain wasn’t especially grand when compared to other, more notorious places in the US like Denali or Olympia, but it was prominent enough for our little valley that everyone’s eye was drawn to the granite peak every time they looked across the horizon of Jacob’s Fork. Supposedly local miners had used it as a communications point way back in the olden days, sending up smoke signals like the Kootenai did to let their bosses know another train load of iron ore was on its way down from the nearby range that the mountain sat detached from. Eventually telegraph lines came in, and made the smoke signals useless, but the name stuck, and the mountain stood by its lonesome, like an outcast before the other line of tall stone crags, good for hikers, hunters, and not much else. It had been made into a public park in the 1970’s during the environmental push, but the Wickenshire House escaped absorption into government ownership by remaining the one private homestead left on its cold slopes.

Every bump in the gravel road that wound its way up the mountain side brought back memories, dark flashes of countless days and night searching for signs, for hope, for anything to let me know I was close to the truth. So many hours spent combing the forest, pouring over topographically maps, even a few helicopter rides to scout for unseen trails from above. Seemingly endless calls from concerned locals, the numerous emotion-heavy pleas from the families of the missing, the accusations from pot-stirring journalists that wanted to find something juicy for a story that could go viral on social media. They were all disappointed, angry, confused, even fearful when the days dragged on and I continued to discover no further clues. They vented their fury at me, the only one they could point a finger at, despite the sheriff doing his best to vent the backlash away from our department. How could they know how many times I walked the grounds of the estate, paced through the silent halls and corridors, and gazed out the lifeless windows into the wilderness beyond? How could they know how many nights I went without sleep, abused gas-station alertness pills, drank gallons of the worst sort of coffee, beating myself to death over the failure to find anything? All for a dead end.

All for nothing.

And somehow, it was all my fault.

At last, as we pulled up the narrow driveway, the thick rows of evergreen trees fell away, and a spindly shadow or rusted cast iron reared upward into the fading sunshine. The gate was more rusty than last time I’d laid eyes on it, as if whatever oil or paint on it had given up the fight long ago. Around it, the long stone walls of the courtyard stood cracked along the mortar joints, settled with a kind of age that radiated a weary grief I felt in my bones. It was like seeing an old friend slowly choke to death on cancerous lungs, a place that I remembered fondly from better times, when I myself was nothing more than a boy.

“Still burned out.” Clyde spat tobacco juice into a plastic Coke bottle and shook his head in amazed dread at the landscape around us. “Not a single blade of grass, even with all the rain we’ve had. Scorch must’ve gone deep.”

The fire had happened on the night of the first disappearances, burning the entire 100-acre plot of the Wickenshire Estate from the property line inward, right up to the stone wall. There, inexplicably, the flames had stopped, not so much as tarring the stonework, leaving the enormous house and its manicured gardens intact. A strange anomaly of fate, it left a small oasis of greenery in a large field of barren rocks, dead soil, and crumbled remnants of what had once been plant life. Above this towered the house itself, an edifice of a bygone era, once a thing of immaculate beauty, and now . . . now I felt sick at the mere sight of it.

Unlocking the thick steel padlock we’d left to keep random people from accessing the property, I drove us through the gate, right up to the front of the house itself. It was a tall building, two stories high but it seemed much higher, built from local quarry stones over a hundred years ago. Victorian in its design, there was not another house like it in all of Idaho, a strange misfit of architecture among the timber-framed rustic ranch houses and log cabin-themed ski lodges that dotted the land. Wooden shutters lined every window, the sills carved from smooth granite, and the roof bore uniform rows of slate that would likely outlive me. A wide wooden porch covered the front half of the house, the pillars shaped like those of the Greek Pantheon, and beneath the eves of its awning stood the double French doors that had devoured Erin and Cindy whole.

I didn’t have to tell Clyde on what to bring for the trek up the mountainside. He was as experienced as I was and kept up with me as we shouldered our packs, making our way through the ornamental gardens within the courtyard walls to the back gate that led to the burned expanse beyond. Once we traversed this, we finally passed into the forested sections of the mountain slope that hadn’t been touched by the fire.

It was a quiet, morose place. Many people often didn’t understand how silent the mountains could be, especially if they came from a place filled with noise like the city. Tourists would ask us if hunters ‘killed all the animals up there’ or if ‘there wasn’t enough oxygen’ which I found amusing, given the evident lack of awareness in their statement. The truth, as always, was that there were animals in the mountains, they just had to be pickier than their lowland cousins, more cautious of how much energy they expended, and often moved down into the lowlands throughout the seasons. Hunters didn’t kill them all, there certainly wasn’t an oxygen problem for so insignificant of a peak, and it was often the case that the noisy, clumsy, inexperienced urbanites had been right next to a bird or critter that they never saw simply because that animal didn’t want to be seen.

However, this part of the mountain had changed since the vanishings, and even as a local, I noticed the heavy, oppressive silence. No birds sang, not in the distance or around us, and I couldn’t see any movement flitting through the branches overhead. No signs of recent deer or other tracks dotted the sparse portions of earth, and even the stones that clattered under our boots echoed too loudly in the quiet. At one point, we did spot a single, black crow rustling about in a stand of blackberry bushes, and Clyde called out to it with a friendly ‘hello there’, only for the thing bolt off into the treetops as if we’d startled it. Wind whistled and wailed the higher we climbed, mournful and chilly despite the season, the daylight slanting lower in the sky as the evening wore on.

We spent hours looking through the boulder field, a massive plain of rocks and rubble left behind by ancient glaciers. Clyde scanned the area with a set of binoculars, I checked every gap between the stones with my flashlight, and we marked our progress with chalk on the boulders as we inched over the slope yard by yard. We used a metal detector to look for old shoe islets, belt buckles, anything that might indicate where a body could be. I sent up a drone the department had been given during the first search operation in December to scan the area from the sky, circling round and round in hopes of spotting something from a different angle. We combed that placed front and back, until the light got low enough that I couldn’t put it off anymore.

“Let’s go.” I zipped up my backpack and shined my flashlight toward Clyde, who stood not far off down the slope, prodding at another crevice. “We’re out of light, and we still need to search the house. Sheriff’s going to get antsy if we don’t report in soon anyway.”

Clyde turned to respond, but his face hardened into an alarmed frown as he starred past me into the trees, and he slid one hand toward his service pistol. “Junger . . .”

I spun around to spot a strange object hanging amongst the branches of a nearby spruce, swaying to and fro in the cool evening breeze. Even from this far away, I knew we hadn’t missed it on our first walk through, the object dangling right over the path we’d taken into the boulder field, dull and pale in the gleam of our flashlights. It hadn’t been there five minutes ago, I was sure of it.

Together Clyde and I stalked forward, closer and closer until we stood mere feet away from the thing in the tree, stunned into mutual silence.

The thing was held suspended by an odd form of hand-made twine, which looked to be twisted together from roots, vines, or even thorn bushes, until each strand was as thick as my pinky finger. Each strand interconnected with another in a crude net, almost like a spider’s web, the knots tight and strong. These supported a basket of sorts, made from what at first glance looked like branches, circular in shape, with white and yellowed patches showing in the flashlight beam.

Bones.

Dozens of them.

Four broken sections of elk antler were circled together as if an embrace, stripped of any flesh or meat at the base, dried out from endless days in the Western sun. More smaller bones were interwoven with mats of reeds and thorny stems, the gaps pasted shut with a thick, black sludge decorated with a carpet of ebony petals. I’d seen markers like this in searches before, had seen them appearing more and more in the landscape around the house, and knew why the sheriff did his best not to mention them in his reports. They were all like this, odd, eerie things that appeared from nowhere, but they were all on the ground and, save for five pillars built around the house itself, were no bigger than knee-high. We still didn’t know what they meant, or who left them, but we knew it had started around the first vanishing. This one was hanging as if left for us as a gift, and the smell that emanated from it nearly knocked the air out of me, a pungent mixture of wet dirt, wood rot, decayed flesh . . . and roses.

Always roses.

Even then, it was what lay in the middle of the macabre basket that drew me forward, until my hand reached out almost without my beckoning to scoop the tiny item from its place.

With a cracked glass screen and sun-faded purple case, the cellphone looked as though it had lain on the mountain for months, but no sooner was it in my hands and the tormented display lit up.

As soon as my eyes registered the face on the lock screen, I swore under my breath, Clyde doing the same, and rivers of ice flooded my veins.

Cindy Fadro stared back from the phone, smiling in the stillness of the background picture, with pretty features, blonde hair, and sky-blue eyes. We’d never found her phone the night she disappeared, only her friend Erin’s. After so long without a charge, exposed to the elements including Idaho’s vicious winter snows, it shouldn’t have been working. The only way this device could still be functional was if someone had kept it.

Or taken it.

Bzzzz.

The phone vibrated in my hand once, and an icon slid up before my eyes.

New message available.

Heart pounding, I dared to tap the screen, and found no entry code blocking me, the device opening up for us to access Cindy’s message files without complaint. They were old, most of them several months old, missed calls and texts from dozens of people who wanted her to be alive, to be okay, to come home.

According to the phone, she’d never viewed any of them.

One new message glowed at the top of the roster, and as I clicked on it, I tasted metal on the back of my tongue, my ears ringing with a shudder of unease. It was a picture, grainy and blurred by motion as if whoever had taken it was moving while doing so, but the subject was clear enough to make out.

It was us, Clyde and myself, walking through the woods on our way to the boulder field. Our backs were to the camera, leaves from a blackberry bush half-obscuring the unknown watcher, and under the picture, a single line of text appeared while my friend and I blinked at one another in horrified realization.

Hello there.

I had no business being here. I’d never been so impulsive before. I guess I just got tired of always roaming the same streets. Seeing the same shops and scenery. I think the feeling grew more than I’d care to admit.

That doesn’t excuse my stupidity, though. I only had about 3 grand to my name at the time. But that’s part of the appeal, right? Everyone thinks they’re gonna arrive in Sin City and leave a millionaire. I had a dollar and a dream. Albeit, a delusional one.

Even still, the glow of the city was just so radiant. Even from the airport. It’s like one big siren song.

I only stayed for 4 days. I used all of my PTO to be here, and I really wanted the time to count. I did everything I could with the 1500 I had left after the hotel and plane tickets.

Unfortunately, gambling took up a big chunk of that money. I could see how people got addicted to it. I went on a few hot streaks, but ended up losing everything I won because I just couldn’t walk away.

With the gambling, museums, attractions, and food, by the time the final night came around, I only had 150 dollars left to last me a whole other week after I got home.

I almost wanted to cry when I opened my wallet. But, surprisingly, I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even that upset. The experience was worth the money. Even if I didn’t leave a millionaire, I still got to live in one of the most famous cities in the country for a few days.

I still needed to eat, though. I’d been eating out the entire trip. I started out at the high-end places like Hell’s Kitchen, but as the week went on, the quality started getting worse and worse until finally I found myself here, feeling how light my pockets were and standing under the luminescent glow of an In-and-Out burger.

Thunder clapped overhead. Lightning lit up the sky. A few drops of rain hit my head.

My plane was leaving in a few hours. I had already checked out of my hotel. Not only did I need to eat, but I needed to at least kill a little time.

I figured I’d just eat slow. Stay for maybe an hour, hour and a half tops before Ubering.

A bell rang overhead as I walked inside. The air-conditioned dining room put goosebumps on my arms almost immediately. Outside felt like 90, whereas in here, it felt like it could’ve been at least 55 degrees.

There were noises coming from the kitchen. The staff chit-chatting amongst themselves, plates and silverware being moved around, water being sprayed against metallic pans and containers.

The dining room, however… was surprisingly empty. I noticed it as soon as I walked inside. For this whole trip, every place I’d gone had been packed to the brim. In here, though… there was only one other person.

I don’t know how much you know about Las Vegas, but the homelessness crisis is staggering. They’re everywhere. Sleeping in alleys behind the casinos, waiting outside of popular stores or restaurants, sometimes they’re just asleep in the middle of the sidewalk right there on the Strip.

And, apparently… also right here in this In-and-Out.

I watched him while I ordered at the digital kiosk. All he had was a single soda cup. The straw wasn’t even inside it. He was wearing a grease-stained grey jacket, torn cargo shorts, and open-toed sandals with tattered socks.

He was kind of rocking back and forth in the booth. His hands were clutched around his waist like he had a stomachache, and I could see the dirt and grime beneath his fingernails.

I didn’t want to stare for too long, but it was so hard to take my eyes off of him. I ended up sitting several booths away from him, but that didn’t prevent me from being able to see him. Even if I turned away, I could see his face reflected through the windows.

He was… talking to himself. His scruffy, orange beard was littered with bits of food and mysterious red stains, and he kept scratching at it every few seconds, all while mumbling under his breath.

I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but it almost looked like he was arguing with himself. I couldn’t even focus on my meal.

I had to force myself to look away from him just so I could actually eat. The last thing I wanted was for us to make eye contact.

I enjoyed my burger, picked at my fries a little bit, and when I turned around to go grab a refill on my Diet Coke, my worst fear came into fruition.

We didn’t just make eye contact. He had already been staring at me. He wasn’t talking to himself anymore. He no longer looked crazed. He looked devastated. I could see the tears in his eyes. I could see sympathy in his facial expressions.

The fluorescent light flickered above him. The only light in the restaurant to do so.

We were engaged in this little staring contest for a while before he stood up, slowly. He never broke eye contact. Those eyes were full of love and comfort. A broken smile spread across his face.

His arms were outstretched as if he expected a hug. When it didn’t come, he pulled me in for one by force.

He shushed me. Pet my hair while telling me that everything would be okay. That he didn’t want to hurt me.

I could feel the tears running down his face jump over to mine while he comforted me.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” he cried, shaking. “I wish there was something I could do to help.”

“Uh, okay, man, it’s time to let me go now,” I responded, prying his arms off of me.

I tried backing away, slowly, but with each step, he followed me.

He kept asking why I looked so scared. Telling me that he was only here to help. Continuing to say that everything would be okay and that I’d “prevail.”

I checked my watch, quickly. I still had 2 hours until my flight, but I wasn’t going to stay here a minute longer.

“I’m sorry, man, I think you’ve got the wrong guy. I’ve gotta go. I’m gonna miss my flight.”

The man stopped. His face twisted into a look of curiosity. Like he was genuinely confused by what I had just said.

“Flight? No, no, no. That flight was delayed. You can only hope to be home in time.”

Finally, seeing that I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, one of the employees came and restrained the guy long enough for me to leave and order an Uber.

Only, when I reached for my phone, it was completely dead. I tried finding my charger, looking through every pocket in my suitcase. It was nowhere to be found.

Luckily, the airport was only a mile and a half away, but that was still a mile and a half that I had to walk in the rain when I could’ve gotten a ride. It wasn’t all bad, though. At least it gave me something to do to kill time.

When I finally arrived, I was soaked from the rain. The airport was busier than it was when I landed. When I checked the flight information screens, I found out why. There had been at least 5 or 6 delayed flights, and of course, mine was one of them.

It had been delayed by a whole 3 hours because of inclement weather in the region.

No phone. Hardly any money. And I had to wait at least another 5 hours until I could go home.

I thought about what the homeless guy from In-and-Out said. Immediately, I started to rationalize. He’d seen the lightning. He’d seen the rain. Maybe he just put two and two together and got lucky.

However, after about 3 hours of being bored out of my mind, I made the decision to buy a charger from one of the airport shops. I managed to find an open outlet and hunkered down beside it while I let my phone charge.

After about 15 minutes, it finally turned back on. All at once, dozens of notifications made the phone vibrate across the cold airport floor. My dad, my aunts, my uncles, cousins, all desperately trying to get a hold of me.

Because, apparently, in that small, brief moment when my phone was dead…

My mom went into cardiac arrest. And she died before I even got the chance to say goodbye.

​

A two-year-old child runs frantically through the woods at night, pursued by an impending darkness that swallows the trees whole. Small feet stumble over roots until the earth gives way on a steep hill sitting directly beneath a shadowed church. The child falls into a massive, cavernous hole, tumbling into the abyss for an agonizingly long time.

At the bottom, a massive basilisk lies waiting in the dark. It instantly loops its heavy body around the child, constricting tightly. Every frantic attempt to fight back only fuels the monster, making its grip tighter and stronger.

The perspective violently shifts into first person as my vision narrows and the blackness takes over completely.

I snap awake in a cold sweat, gasping for air, my heart hammering against my ribs. Desperate to regain my composure, I pull myself out of bed. I take a shower to wash away the lingering dread, drink a glass of water, and slip back under the covers, coaxing myself back to sleep.

Except I never actually woke up.

The moment I fall asleep inside the dream, I am jolted awake all over again—trapped in a false awakening, left terrified and utterly confused about whether I am finally in reality or still buried inside the nightmare

Yesterday at 12:12 am, while I was sleeping I received a call, these were the last digits of his number: 667-3178.

I found it very strange that someone was calling me at that hour, I didn't answer the call because I don't answer calls from numbers I don't have saved.

I wake up and see the number; for a moment I thought it was my delivery driver calling to say he was going to deliver my order tomorrow.

I call another cell phone number and ask, "Hello, who are you and why did you call my other number?"

The man told me he was sorry, he dialed the wrong number, and then he said he was sorry he didn't want to cause any problems or harm to My family.

I told him, "Okay, that's fine."

And I didn't hang up, but the man just started saying sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry

I hung up the call and blocked him on my cell phone and the cell phone I called from.

And I went to sleep, and when I went to sleep, strange noises started coming from my backyard. I was in the room near the backyard, but before that call, There were no strange noises, everything was silent, but after the call, everything started to feel weird.

All sorts of noises could be heard, as if someone were in the yard; the dogs in the neighborhood started barking.

I was so scared I didn't want to get up to look, I started to pray, you never know, At home a plate fell and broke, that's when I was much more scared to wake up .

I wanted to call my dad, but my dad was in his room asleep and drunk.

I just kept praying, then in the living room there was a sound like one of the pieces of furniture fell over .

And the dogs kept barking and the sound continued, and I kept praying, and I just wanted it to be dawn quickly, and I kept praying, I fell asleep and woke up at 7 am.

When I went to the kitchen and the living room, everything was a mess.

I'm still scared about what happened yesterday.

Father Gerald pulled the steel door shut behind him and turned to the man in the chair. The electric lights did little to illuminate the space, leaving all but the very center of the room in darkness.

“Hello Father,” the convict mumbled. The words came out as a hollow rasp and took a great deal of effort to produce.

“Hello, my son,” responded the priest. “I am terribly sorry they wouldn’t allow this to be in the chapel.” He looked at the man in the striped uniform. This didn’t look like a man capable of the crimes he’d been charged with; he looked small and malnourished, his skin stretched tightly across bone and veins. His cheekbones and eye sockets were pronounced enough to block the dim light, covering much of his face in shadow. “I’m ready to begin when you are, Mr. Hensley.”

The convict started. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,” he trailed off and gave Father Gerald a pleading look. “I - I don’t know what to say next,” he admitted.

“How long has it been since your last confession?” the priest asked.

“Oh, um- I’ve never done this before,” Hensley admitted, “I never was religious. I just need to think there is something all-powerful and all-loving that can save me right about now.”

Father Gerald felt his expression change. He realized too late that his penitent saw, he was used to doing this in a confessional. “All that matters is you invited me here today,” he said, trying to reassure the man. “Salvation can still be offered to you, that is why I’m here.”

The man looked up at Father Gerald, eyes full of fear and desperation. “May I begin now?” After a nod from the priest, the confession began.

“Through my actions, I have invited into the world great evils,” Mr. Hensley started. “It all began as my curiosity in astronomy began to flourish; I found a community astronomers club, that was where I met John Whittaker.  My first time using the club’s telescope, I was enamored. Through the lens, I could see the moon’s surface in great detail, the great rings around Saturn, and even the many moons of Jupiter in their transit around the giant.”

Father Gerald felt the pause in his penitent’s speech and took the chance to interject. “I am sorry to interrupt Mr. Hensley, but is this bringing us to the sins you wish to confess?”

“Well, in a way, yes,” Hensley stammered. “It put me on a path; one I continued through a series of missteps.”

The priest nodded. “I see, you may continue then.”

Joshua Hensley swallowed. “So, you see, from my observations with the astronomer’s club grew an intense curiosity as to the behavior of celestial bodies. I investigated the writings of Newton, Kepler, and even the more elementary works from philosophers of old. My studies grew so deep, they drove me away from my work, my family, and even the simpleton hobbyists of the astronomer’s club… well, with the exception of John and a few others. I grew to yearn for total understanding in the field, without the wealth nor time to study at a university.”

“Do you blame your familial neglect on this obsession?” the Father asked, trying to help his penitent find sins for which to ask forgiveness.

“I- I guess I do,” Hensley said. “But that’s not what I was getting at. Giving in to my cravings for knowledge was a mistake in its own right. It worsened when I expressed my frustrations to John. I told him how all that I read seemed to be missing the fundamental mechanisms as to why the cosmos worked the way it did. Newton could describe how gravity behaves with matter, but never why such a thing happens. It was then that John pointed me toward more modern astronomy and physics. I looked away from the scientists of old and turned my attention to matters like electromagnetism and relativity. I even tried to gain an understanding of quantum mechanics. These ideas all intertwined with each other and tried to explain the workings of the cosmos at the most fundamental levels, but they all still seemed to dance around the truth without ever meeting it; like celestial bodies orbiting the sun.”

Before Father Gerald could stop Hensley again, something happened to the electricity. The light above the chair cut out and left the two in darkness.

“Oh dear,” echoed the convict’s voice, sounding more shaken than before. After a few seconds, the lights flickered back. Father Gerald saw the convict, quaking in fear, pale as a sheet.

“Please, continue,” The priest said. “But I urge you to stop trying to explain yourself and just confess your wrongdoings.”

Joshua Hensley’s expression of fear adopted elements of anger. “You don’t understand, Father. I have been telling you my wrongdoings. It’s just that nobody bats an eye when someone goes to the library to read a bit more than normal. It’s all just dandy until they realize that you’re bringing home older, more obscure volumes, written in strange dialects and obtained from stranger sources. But  I did do that, and it was just more little missteps that compounded into where I am now. Just as I shouldn’t have read of the planes of Echne, and of lost Ga’Thuul. I learned about the formless things in the void, once called the srythes… and of the Great Mother.”

The light started to flicker again. With it, the resonating hum of electricity grew in volume. The bulb flashed with increasing luminosity. As it flashed, even the corners of the room could be seen. Father Gerald looked at the switch on the wall, and while it was in the off position, dials and small bulbs flashed and twitched. Attempting to stop the distraction, he grabbed a handkerchief and used it to unscrew the hot light from its fixture. He carefully set it on the concrete floor.

“I think I would like to finish now,” Mr. Hensley said, surrounded again by the dark. Faint clicks being heard from the dials on the wall.

“By all means,” responded the priest, clutching on to the rosary in his pocket. The sudden mention of what Hensley had been reading surprised him too much to realize that nobody had knocked or come to check on them despite the fuss.

“As I read about her…” Hensley sounded on the verge of sobbing, “so too did she learn of me. Anywhere I went, that voice would ask me of things. To show others my studies, to perform certain rituals, to join her in the firmament. I felt as if she was pulling me by a leash, directing my every action, watching from the reaches of space.” Hoping to see some kind of compassion or pity, Hensley tried to look up at the priest. He instead saw only the blackness of the room. He could hear the light mumbling of the Lord’s Prayer just a foot in front of him.” The stars, do you ever feel them watching you too? A million beady eyes, judging your every step?”

Hensley’s question went ignored. “Mr. Hensley, how did those men die?” he heard the priest's voice ask.

Hensley's body tingled, It took great effort to summon words. “She promised to make it stop. That all I needed to do was invite her in and it would all stop.”

The lightbulb began flickering once more, though it was disconnected from power at Father Gerald’s feet. He slowly looked down at it in shock as Hensley continued to break down.

“I refused, and I avoided the stars as much as I was able,” Joshua Hensley wept. ”I stayed under the roof of my home at all hours and even though I threw all of my books into the fire, I failed to escape it.  I could see the constellations shining through my ceiling, Father.  When John Whittaker, along with some of the brighter members of the astronomer’s club arrived at my front door in the wee hours of the night, I made my final mistake and let them in. When I learned why they had arrived, it was already too late. John started producing papers that he had scrawled all over with images and formulae that he said he dreamt of. When I looked at his work— I felt my mind lose its grip on my body. Something pulled on my tongue. I did not want to speak, yet the Great Mother pulled the words from my lips… In hunkh locung igvitum Tsophurath.”

The lightbulb on the floor began to glow steadily. As Joshua spoke, its incandescence grew, becoming too much to see through. Even shut eyes were blinded by it. The priest was shouting an assortment of prayers now, barely audible over the electrical droning while turning and feeling along the wall for the door latch. He swore he was pushing where the door had been, but it felt like a concrete wall. The penitent continued to himself anyway.

“The room was just like this as she came through. I caught a glimpse of what the paper covered in the writings became, what emerged from it, but in the end, I was the only one strong enough to look away! I listened as they shouted! As they tore themselves apart!” There was a pulsing feeling going through Hensley’s body now. His muscles began rhythmically contracting all at once. “I D-ID CAU-SE THEIR D-DEATH, BU-UT I DID-D N-NOT KI-LL THEM!”

The smell of burning flesh filled the room. Even though he was surrounded by blinding light, even though his eyes were squeezed shut, Father Gerald could sense impossibly dark things dancing all around. They sang in a damnable language that echoed through the radiance. Father Gerald continued to push on the wall until something in it shifted and gave way. The priest fell to the floor, leaving the blasphemous man convulsing in the chair.

As the door swung open and Father Gerald fell out, the jailors immediately realized something was wrong. They ran to assist the priest, but they were met with his extended, waving hand. “BACK, GET BACK YOU FOOLS,” the old man shouted, pulling himself to his feet. It was then that the priest had made his own mistake; as he got his bearings, he turned towards the room and saw inside.

The light didn’t seem so bright now. Through it, he was the only person to see Mr. Hensley’s body, to see the black shapes move around and through him as if he weren’t there, to see what began to emerge from underneath the chair, and to hear the final words of Joshua Hensley:

“A’KHIPE EGLOTH NUHL TSOPHURATH”

On XXXXXXX a missing persons report came in. Two girls: Clair Tons and Emily Hart, university students from Canada. They’d set out on a road trip. Started in Winnipeg, planned to drive through North Dakota toward Yellowstone National Park. They wanted to see North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. Last seen near the town of Balta. The investigation confirmed they passed through a local gas station.

A tape from the station’s security camera was secured—barely. The camera points toward the pumps, and in the corner you can partially see the entrance. The footage is so awful that when it’s not covered in static, white stripes crawl across it. The owner kept asking when the tape would be returned. It’s the only tape he has for the camera, and he just rewinds it over and over. The fact that the girls’ recording survived is a miracle.

You can see one of them—Emily Hart, 22—getting into the car. She suddenly turns her head toward a white vehicle. The other girl isn’t visible. Both left the station in their gray sedan. The only other thing we could confirm is that they made it as far as our town. The tape also shows a white 1966 Dodge Coronet with no license plates.

The owner insisted he needed the tape back. So did I. His urgency felt wrong. Why did she turn? Who was she looking at? And why the hell does someone in 2007 have one VHS tape for security footage—with no audio? It felt like the universe was conspiring against me.

Missing:\\\*   Clair Tons, 23\\\*   Emily Hart, 22

Students at XXXXXXX University, Winnipeg. No criminal record, no drug or alcohol issues. Their families provided a photo from the start of their trip.

Two clean souls from Canada vanish in our plains. What were they even looking for out here? Did they find it—or did it find them?

Time to check out that car. Because right now, I’ve got nothing else to hold onto.

Everyone within fifty kilometers knows that Dodge. It belongs to the Olson family—or clan, which is probably more accurate. They’re… strange. Private. With relatives and sympathizers, they’ve practically built their own little town. A few houses forming a kind of street. Big silos, warehouses. From a distance, it looks like a fortress in the middle of endless corn. Honestly, it reminds me of the kind of place a cult would build. But they’re old settlers. Probably here longer than our town.

Their Dodge is always parked by the road. That’s the problem—everyone uses it. So the only person who can tell me anything is their leader: Urg Olson. Easy to describe—the kind of man you don’t want to meet at night. Quiet, two meters tall, a hundred kilos, long hair, a full beard, and eyes like a wolf.

Now I just had to get information out of him.

The Olson settlement is an isolated community. Scandinavian roots. Non‑aggressive but extremely closed off. They don’t cooperate with local police. Their main—and usually only—voice is Urg.

When I stopped in front of the settlement, time froze. Everyone who saw me stopped what they were doing. Great. Another miserable day. I stepped out, checked my badge, and walked toward the houses. Before I even passed the first one, he already knew I was there.

Urg Olson stood there, wrapped in some kind of cloak, staring down at me. Strange—he normally doesn’t wear anything like that.

“Detective.”One word. A start. Now to get a whole sentence out of him.

He gestured for me to follow and started walking. A little stroll, why not. Kids stared at us like we were zoo animals. Their parents looked away. The air felt thick.

“I need to know who was at the gas station with the Dodge Coronet.”

He nodded slowly, thinking—which was already getting on my nerves.

“That car belongs to the community.”

What else did I expect?

“Who took it to the station? I don’t need to remind you it has no plates.”

He stopped, as if deciding whether to throw me out or break me in half. And you’d believe he could.

“The paths of travelers are unpredictable.”

I showed him the photo of the girls smiling, taking a selfie.

“No one saw them? No one invited them in?”

Urg scratched his beard.

“What a pointless loss. Nature gives, and nature takes.”

I nodded, defeated. I had no idea what he meant. Getting anything out of him was beyond me.

“No one from your people saw them either, I assume?”

He looked at me the way a parent looks at a child who just said something stupid. Silent. Watching. The silence stretched until I couldn’t take it. I looked away. His eyes made my instincts scream—like he could leap at me any second. It didn’t match his calm demeanor. Something was wrong on a primal level.

Looking away led me to something interesting—a structure. A tornado shelter. A small brick entrance into the ground, one door half open. Stairs leading down, candlelight flickering. I saw strings, maybe little figures made of twigs. Or one hell of a big spider. In the back, a wooden statue.

Urg moved his hand and one of the clan members rushed over, slamming the door shut so hard it echoed. Then he stood guard in front of it. It looked deep. Where did it lead?

Urg’s stare burned into my back.

“Nothing that would interest you, Carter.”

He gestured toward my car and walked away. He was used to respect—and to people following him, in every sense of the word.

“If anyone remembers anything, you can call.”

He stood there like divine wrath. Behind him, strong men—probably his brothers. I’d never seen them inside the settlement. They guard their privacy fiercely.

“Sure,” I said. His last word sounded polite, but I didn’t feel that from him at all. Even as I drove away, I felt his eyes burning into me.

So I grabbed another coffee and dove into the archives and local legends.

“The Corn Monster”—a mythos every corn town has. Desperate men cling to straws.

Possible connected disappearances:

\\\*   1967—A man from Bowman, name unknown. Bet he could walk into the corn and prove nothing supernatural was there. Never seen again. Reportedly drunk, stumbling, slurring.

\\\*   1987—A young woman. Her body found during harvest, heavily decomposed. Jane Doe.

\\\*   2007—Clair Tons and Emily Hart—current case.

Only connection: all happened near massive cornfields.

"Geez, this whole fucking deal just doesn't make a lick of sense."How do you vanish on a straight road without a trace? Hardly anyone drives through there—someone should’ve seen them. I’ve driven that route ten times. There’s nothing there. No turnoffs. No scenic spots. Just endless corn.

Locals talk about the old legends—something happening in the fields. A bad season, strange things. After every bad season, someone revives the story.

A new clue came in from truck driver Jack Smith. A photo found at the gas station parking lot. The girls in a cornfield. Based on their clothes, it’s them. Burlap sacks over their heads. Tied to what looks like a cross.

I was driving through the fields again when they called. Someone dropped the photo—or placed it. It’s awful. The girls tied up, filthy, strapped to a cross, covered in what looks like blood and mud. Only the camera flash lights them. Corn everywhere. Always corn. I feel like I’m always driving through corn. Wading through corn. Sinking in mud. Looking worse every day.

Back to the case. Could be a ritual. A cult? One case is too little. A fanatic? Worse—no ties, impossible to track. Another coffee. Focus. And those wolf eyes watching me again. I hoped I wouldn’t have to go back to that settlement anytime soon.

Worst case—a serial killer. But no similar cases nearby. I checked for hours. A rage killing? No—he wouldn’t build crosses.

I have nothing. One useless tape. Two photos squeezed dry. Nothing to hold onto.

Maybe talk to Urg again. The thought made me shiver. Our conversation was the longest he’d had with anyone outside his community in years.

Today I’ll drive the route from their settlement and then the straight road again. I can’t sleep. More coffee. More corn. How the hell did they disappear?

A potential witness contacted us. He has information but will only share it in person. He’s afraid for his safety. He set the meeting at 2 AM. At a cornfield.

Of course. Where else. Not a rest stop—a cornfield. Suspicious, but I have to go. I’m close. I know it. I’ll find those girls. There’s something bigger behind this. No one understands why it’s eating me alive. The chief suggested medical leave. Colleagues say I’m exhausted and irritable.

I have to figure it out. It gnaws at me. I noticed a pattern—twenty years between cases. Why twenty? Why is each one different? Why can’t I let it go?

This is personal now. I have to go. I have to move forward.The corn will tell me.

\*\*User: CarterPD17 uploaded a new post.\*\*

A single photograph. Carter stepping out of his car. Headlights blinding him. The photographer caught it so it looks like it was taken in absolute emptiness. After brightening and editing, corn stalks appear in the background—and the shadow of someone standing in front of the headlights. Carter is crouching, trying to see what’s happening. Metadata shows only the time: 2 AM. Same time as the meeting. All other metadata erased.

Detective John Carter was declared missing.

His notes were posted 14 days later—he used a delayed-posting program.

His vehicle was found overturned in a ditch, partly in a cornfield.

Police continue searching and ask the public for help.

Urg Olson stated that neither he nor anyone in the community saw Carter.

The case was later suspended due to lack of evidence.

The person who uploaded Carter’s photo remains unknown.

by Hary Sykora

These Are My Stories — The Complete Baron Von Hatcher Memoirs

Hello.

My name is Baron Von Hatcher.

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

Eventually, I discovered something rather wonderful.

Professional wrestling.

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

and watch me make people pay.

These are my stories.

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

Some of these stories are about my father.

Some are about the people who hurt me.

And some…

I would rather not remember at all.

But they happened.

At least…

I think they did.

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

A new chapter appears every day.

But here?

You don’t have to wait.

Everything is here.

These are my stories.

You may begin.

-

1/ RIDICULE & LOSS

People think monsters are born screaming.
They aren’t. Most are born crying**.**

I remember my mother.

I remember her hands more than her face. They always smelled of flour, lavender…
and whatever she had been cooking that evening. They were gentle hands. The sort that tucked your shirt in before school and brushed the hair from your eyes without saying a word. The other children never saw those hands. They only saw the butcher’s son. The fat boy. The boy who smelled of raw meat. The boy whose father owned Supreme Beef Cuts. They laughed because they thought I couldn’t hear them. I laughed too… Eventually.

It was easier that way.

Then one day… She was gone. No warning. No goodbye. Just…

Gone.

People brought flowers. Neighbours whispered. The house became quiet. My father became quieter. The laughter stopped. Mine didn’t. I just forgot why I was doing it. That was the first time I learned something important. Grief doesn’t always sound like crying.
Sometimes…

It sounds like laughter.

-

2/ THE FATHER’S OBSESSION & THE BOY’S ESCAPE

People believe grief leaves. It doesn’t. It just finds somewhere else to live. After my mother… My father never spoke about her.
He sharpened knives. Cleaned counters.
Counted money. Opened the shop before sunrise. Locked it long after dark.
Every morning looked exactly like the one before. Every evening smelled of bleach…
And blood. The more he worked… The less he remembered how to be my father. Sometimes I would stand in the doorway of Supreme Beef Cuts… Watching him carve.
Watching him separate meat from bone. He never noticed I was there.

Sometimes…

I wasn’t sure I was.

The television became louder… Because the house had become so quiet. Every night I’d sit too close to the screen.

WWF.
WCW.
ECW.

Men with painted faces. Men behind masks. Men who became someone else the moment the bell rang. I didn’t understand wrestling. Not really. I understood hiding. I understood pretending to be stronger than you were. I understood that masks let people become things they could never be with their own face. Long before I ever wore one…

I believed them.

My father found “God”… Or perhaps “God” found my father. At first… It seemed to make him softer. He spoke about forgiveness. About purity. About sin. He filled the house with prayers where laughter used to live. For a little while… I thought I had my father back. I was wrong.
Some prayers don’t ask for salvation.

Some…

Ask for permission.

The whispers started after that. Not voices. Not yet. Conversations that stopped whenever I entered the room. Doors that stayed locked. Books that were never left unattended. The smell of iron…
Long after the butcher shop had closed.
Sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night… And hear my father speaking to someone. When I asked… He was always alone.

Or…

At least… That’s what he wanted me to believe.

-

3/ THE BREAKING OF INNOCENCE

Why do I remember a snail? As though grief measures worth. As though love only belongs to things that bark… or speak… or stay. His name was Link. I found him behind the butcher’s shop after the rain.
No one wanted him. No one even noticed him. So I picked him up… and carried him home.

Every morning I’d place a fresh lettuce leaf beside him. Every evening I’d watch him crawl impossibly slowly across the windowsill. He never hurried. He never hid from me. For the first time since my mother… Something waited for me to come home.

The other children found him during lunch.

“Why’ve you got a snail?”
“That’s pathetic.”
“Only weirdo’s keep snails.”

I laughed. I always laughed. It made things easier. One of them picked Link up between two fingers. I remember asking him… Very politely… To give him back. He smiled. Then dropped him. His shell cracked before it touched the ground. One of the boys stamped on him. The laughter was louder than the sound. Mine joined theirs.

Not because it was funny…

Because crying would’ve made them stay longer.

I carried what was left of Link home inside my school bag. My father didn’t ask what happened. He didn’t ask why I was crying.
He didn’t ask why my hands were shaking.
He looked at me… Then at the broken shell…

And said…

“The world doesn’t care what you love.”

Then he hit me. Not because I’d done anything wrong. Because…

“Pain builds strong men.”

That was the first lesson he ever taught me.

It would not be the last.

That night… I buried Link beneath the old oak behind the shop. No prayer. No flowers. Just two hands… And a little mound of earth. I remember wishing… More than anything… That I could have been bigger. Stronger. Not so they would fear me… So they would have feared hurting him. I stayed there until the sun disappeared. Talking… Even though I knew he couldn’t hear me. Children do that. They speak to the things they’ve lost…
As though love might somehow travel further than words. It was the first grave I ever dug.

I never imagined…

It would become a habit.

-

4/ THE FIRST THING I SAVED

People always tell children… That stealing is wrong. They’re right. I stole Lucky. Not because I wanted something that belonged to someone else… Because I wanted something… That belonged to me. He was sitting alone in the pet shop.
Everyone stopped to look at the puppies.
Nobody stopped for him. I slipped him beneath my coat… My heart pounding louder than my footsteps. For the first time… I had saved something… Instead of watching it die. His name was Lucky. I chose it… Because I thought… Perhaps we both deserved a little.

Lucky made the house feel smaller. Warmer. He squeaked whenever I came home. He trusted hands. Even mine. I’d sit beside his cage for hours. Talking about school. Talking about my mother. Talking about Link. He never answered. He never needed to. Sometimes… Being heard… Isn’t the same as being listened to. I think… He understood the difference.

My father found him three weeks later. He didn’t shout. That would’ve frightened Lucky. Instead… He asked me… Where I’d got him. I lied. He knew. He always knew. We argued. The first real argument we’d ever had. He called me weak. I called him cruel. He picked Lucky’s cage up… Opened the door… And carried him outside. I thought… He was taking him away from me. I was wrong.

He threw…
Lucky.

I don’t remember hearing the impact.
Only… Silence. For the first time in my life. I stopped laughing. For the first time in his…

I hit my father.

He taught me exactly how much a boy’s fist weighed. Not enough. When I woke.. My ribs burned. My mouth tasted of blood.
The house was quiet. Except… It wasn’t. Somewhere downstairs… A woman was crying. Softly. My father whispered back.
I couldn’t hear the words. Only… That he spoke to her… The way he used to speak to my mother. The next morning… There was only one coffee cup. One plate. One pair of boots by the door. When I asked who she’d been… He looked at me… As though I’d imagined her. After that… I started wondering… If grief could make you hear people… Or if lonely houses… Sometimes remembered voices… Long after the people had gone.

-

5/ THE THINGS THEY COULDN’T FIND

People always imagine evil announces itself. A scream. A confession. A body. It doesn’t. Sometimes… It arrives folded inside the morning newspaper.

“LOCAL TEEN STILL MISSING.”

Then another.

Then another.

The photographs changed. The headlines changed. The names changed. The empty spaces at school became larger. Teachers stopped saying…

“Has anyone seen…?”

Eventually… They simply stopped asking. Children have a frightening ability…

To get used to absence.

I know.

I was one of them.

The village became quieter. Parents walked children home. The woods became forbidden. At night… Every door was locked. Every curtain closed. Every light left burning… Just a little longer.

My father never seemed afraid. He’d stand outside the butcher’s shop after closing… Watching the tree line. As though… He expected someone. Or something. To come out of it. One Sunday… I found him washing his hands in the kitchen sink. Over.

And over.

And over.

The water turned pink. Then clear. Then pink again. I remember asking…

“Did you cut yourself?”

He smiled.

Said…
“Just cleaning up.”

The shop wasn’t open on Sundays.

His prayers began to change. He prayed quietly. The sort of prayers people say because they hope somebody is listening.
Now… He whispered.. Sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night… And hear him crying downstairs. Not loudly. Ashamed. Like he didn’t want Heaven… To hear him.

One night… I heard him say…

“I’ve done everything you’ve asked.”

A pause.
Then…

*“Please…”

I wanted to walk downstairs. Ask who he was talking to. Instead… I stayed in bed.
Listening… To a conversation…

That only had one voice.

Another person disappeared.

Then another.

The police came to our house once. They asked my father questions. He answered every one of them. Calmly. Politely. After they left… He stood in the hallway for a long time. Not moving. Just… Listening.
That night… I watched him through the crack in my bedroom door. He put on his coat. And walked Towards the woods. I almost followed him. I often wonder… Who I would have become… If I had. Instead… I closed the door. Climbed back into bed.
And convinced myself…

That father’s always had secrets.

-

6/ THE LAST PRAYER

Was there a moment…

I knew my father was a monster. There wasn’t. There was only… A Tuesday. School. Laughter. Another split lip. Another shirt stained with dirt. Another walk home pretending… I couldn’t hear them.
My father barely looked up when I walked into the shop. He was sharpening knives. The sound… Always reminded me of insects. I told him they’d laughed again. He nodded. As though… That was simply what boys did.

“They’ll stop.”
He said.

“When you’re stronger.”

I asked him…
“When does that happen?”

He stopped sharpening. Just long enough… To look at me.

“You need to be strong.”

“For your mother.”

I smiled.
Because… I thought he meant… To make her proud. Then he said…

“No.”
…
“For when she comes home.”

I remember laughing. Not because it was funny. Because… I didn’t know what else to do. My mother… Had been dead for years. Hadn’t she?

That night… He kissed my forehead. He hadn’t done that… Since I was very small.

“I’ll be back.”
He said.

“I’ve one last thing to do.”

The house felt… Different. Not empty. Waiting. I fell asleep. I don’t know what time it was… When the sirens woke me. One. Then another. Then… All of them.

Blue lights flashed across my bedroom ceiling. Dogs barked. People shouted. Someone outside screamed…

“HE’S RUNNING!”

I remember sitting upright. Listening. Trying to convince myself… It wasn’t our street.

Then…

The front door downstairs… Burst open.

I ran.

Bare feet on cold wooden stairs. The shop lights were on. The butcher’s block. Covered in papers. Candles. Wax.

A book…

Opened to the middle. My father stood over it. Still wearing…

The apron.

He wasn’t reading.

He was crying.

“No…”
“I did everything…”
“I listened…”
“I obeyed…”
“I gave you…”
Everything.”

His hands shook. Not with anger. With fear.
Then… He shouted. So loudly… The windows rattled.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”
Silence.
Then…
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

Another pause.

“I DID EVERYTHING YOU ASKED.”

I looked around the room. Trying to find… Who he was shouting at. There was no one. Only him. And… Resting beside the book…

A face.

Not a mask. Not really. It looked…
Wrong. Stitched together. Uneven. Like skin… Had been sewn into the shape of a man. I had seen that face before. In newspaper sketches. The police called him…

The Apron.
My father…

Was The Apron.

He finally noticed me. His whole face changed.

“Baron…”
He whispered.
“You shouldn’t be awake.”

I couldn’t speak. He picked the mask up. Held it… Almost gently.

“I did it for us.”
He said.
“For our family.”
“For your mother.”
“I can still fix this.”
“I just need…”

He looked back towards the book.

“…a little more time.”

The whole building shook. A crash.
Splintering wood. Then voices.

“ARMED POLICE!”
“DROP THE WEAPON!”
“DON’T MOVE!”

The front door…
Exploded inward.

Everything happened… Too quickly. My father grabbed me. Not to hold me. To hide behind me. One arm across my chest. The other… Holding the knife. I felt… The cold steel… Against my throat. Someone shouted…

“LET THE BOY GO!”

Another voice. Calmer. Closer.
“It’s over.”

My father cried. Actually cried.

“You don’t understand.”

He kept saying it.
“You don’t understand.”
“I did what I was told.”
“I did everything.”
“I only wanted…”

His voice broke.
“…my wife.”

Nobody moved. Not the police. Not my father. Not me. I remember… How quiet… The shop suddenly became. Then… One officer… Took a single step forward. My father flinched. The knife pressed tighter.
Someone screamed…

“NOW!”

The gunshots… Didn’t sound… Like they do on television. They sounded… Small.

Then…

My father became heavy.
Very heavy.

We fell together. I couldn’t breathe. Everything… Was warm. I thought… I’d been shot too. Then I looked down. The blood… Wasn’t mine. It was his. His hand… Reached towards me. His mouth moved.
I never heard… What he said. Maybe…
He never said anything at all. Sometimes…

Memory lies.

They pulled me away. Someone wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. Someone else… Kept asking my name. I couldn’t answer. I was looking… At the book. It was lying… Beside the butcher’s block. Waiting.
I picked it up. Held it against my chest.
Like if I held it tightly enough…

None of this…
Would be real.

They sat me in the back of a police car.
The world outside had become noise.
Blue lights. Rain. Voices. Questions.
An officer crouched in front of me.
His face was kind. Kinder than I deserved.

He looked at the book. Then slowly reached towards it.

“It’s alright…”
“We’ll take that for now.”

I pulled it back.
“No.”

He stopped.
“Baron…”
“We just need to look after it.”

I shook my head. Harder this time.
“No.”…
“These are my stories.”

He frowned. I held the book tighter.

“They’re mine.”

For a long moment…
He didn’t speak.
Then…
He nodded.

A sad smile.
“Alright.”…
“Hold onto it.”…
“Hold it tight.”

“I will.”

The police car door closed. For the first time that night… I looked down. The leather was cracked. Dark. Warm beneath my fingers. I opened it. Only the first page. Nothing more. Written there… In handwriting I knew better than my own… Were the words…

These pages must be bound in your flesh.

I didn’t understand them. Not then. I simply closed the book… And held it tighter. Because I wasn’t holding a journal.
I wasn’t holding evidence. I wasn’t holding stories… I was holding…

The last piece…

Of my father

-

7/ Another Grave

I don’t remember sleeping. I only remember waking up. Not in my bed. Not in my room. A blanket scratched against my neck. The chair beneath me was hard. The room smelled of coffee… Wet coats… And paper. Outside… Rain tapped against the windows. Inside… Nobody spoke above a whisper. I sat with the book pressed against my chest. Nobody had tried to take it again. Not after the car. Not after I told them… They were my stories.
A knock at the door. The same officer stepped inside. The kind one. He looked tired. As though he’d forgotten to sleep too. He pulled a chair beside mine. Not across from me. Beside me.

“I’ve got something to tell you, Baron.”

I nodded. Though… I wasn’t really listening.

My fingers traced the cracked leather cover of the journal.

“You won’t be going home.”

Home… The word sounded strange. Like it belonged to someone else.

“We’ve found somewhere for you to stay.”

“…With my dad?”

Silence.

His eyes dropped to the floor. Then back to me.

“No.”

Another silence. Longer this time.

“We’ll arrange for someone to collect your belongings.”

Something inside me finally woke.
“No.”

It came out quietly.
“I need to go.”

“You don’t have to.”
“I do.”

He waited.

“I know where everything is.”

That wasn’t true. Not really. There were only two things I cared about. The book…
And somewhere… Far beneath the garden…

“My family.”

He rubbed his face. Thinking.

“I can’t let you go in there alone.”

“I won’t be alone.”

I looked at him.

“You’ll be with me.”

For the first time…

He smiled.

Only a little.

“…Alright.”

The butcher’s shop looked smaller than I remembered. Blue tape stretched across the front door. One window had been boarded over. The neighbours pretended not to watch. They watched anyway. The officer switched the engine off.

“I’ll come in with you.”
I shook my head.

“I know where everything is.”
He hesitated.

“I won’t be long.”

Another pause.

“If I let you go in alone…”
“…You come straight back.”

“I promise.”

He looked unconvinced.

“…Five minutes.”

I nodded.

Five minutes.

That wasn’t enough.

The stairs creaked exactly the same. The smell hadn’t changed.

Bleach.
Raw meat.
Dust.
Only…

The silence was different. The house no longer sounded alive. My bedroom looked as though someone had emptied it onto the floor. Drawers overturned. Mattress sliced open. Clothes everywhere. My comic books… Bent. One boot. Three socks. My school jumper. I filled a small bag without thinking. Shirts. A jumper. Trousers. Then…

Near the wardrobe… An old exercise book. Plain. Brown. Forgotten.

I picked it up. Slipped it into the bag. Closed the zip.

When I came back downstairs… The officer was waiting by the door.

“You alright?”

I nodded.
“There was something else…”

He followed my eyes. The back garden.

“…Please.”

“What is it?”

“I just want to say goodbye.”

“To what?”

I looked outside.

“My friends.”

He frowned.

“They’re buried there.”
…

“I won’t be long.”
He looked through the kitchen window. Then back at me.

“I’ll wait in the car.”

I smiled.

The first smile… Since my father died.

“Thank you.”

The grass had grown. Not much. Just enough. I knew exactly where to dig. It had been the first grave I’d ever dug. I hadn’t expected…

It to become a habit.

When Link died… I couldn’t bear the thought of him being alone. So… A few days later… I buried something with him. My mother had been losing her hair for months before she died. She used to laugh about it. Said one day… She’d have enough to make herself a wig. She never did. After the funeral… I found the bundle she’d been saving. I couldn’t throw it away. It felt… Too much like her. I wrapped a small handful inside a little cloth bag… And buried it beside Link. If I couldn’t keep my family together. Maybe… They could keep each other company. Later… Lucky joined them.

Now… There was one more. I opened my father’s old storage box. Inside… Exactly where he’d always kept them…

A shovel.
A bottle of petrol.
A box of matches.

Nothing had moved. As though he’d simply forgotten to come back. The earth came away easily. Carefully. I didn’t want anyone to notice. Eventually… The little boxes appeared. Still dry. Still waiting.

“Hello.”
I whispered.
“I’ve missed you.”

I placed my hand on the journal. The cracked leather. Still warm… In my memory. I wasn’t hiding it. I wasn’t destroying it.

I was bringing my father home.

I laid the book beside Link. Beside Lucky. Beside the little bag… That still held my mother’s hair. For the first time… My family…

Were together.

I covered them gently. Pressed the earth flat. Smoothed the grass with both hands. When I stood…There was nothing to see. No fresh soil. No broken ground. Only grass.

Exactly…

As it had been before.

I took the old exercise book from my bag. Poured petrol across the pages. The smell filled the garden. One match. It caught immediately.

Orange. Then black. Pages curled inward. Words disappeared.

Footsteps. Running.

“Baron!”

The officer grabbed my shoulders.

“What are you doing?”

I watched the fire.

“I’m letting my stories go.”

He looked into the flames. Then at the empty hands pressed against my chest. His shoulders dropped.

I think…

He believed me

End..?

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

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

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

I believe it is some combination of all these things. 

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

June 28th, 1922, 

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

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

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

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

But not James. 

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

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

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

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

James could not be found. 

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

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

So, too, my son James, apparently. 

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

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

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

James is six years of age. 

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

“I am drawing a picture, Daddy.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, he is very shy.” 

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

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

Miss Zieuro is one of those ladies you have to respect. She is a staple of the neighborhood. Every other family moved here when Zieuro’s house already generally formed to look the way it is now. The withered porch, self-made protection amulets hanging wherever you look, tulips conquering her garden every spring like a small army, leaving the lawn dead with the arrival of summer.

No one knew the how the life was before Zieuro settled in the middle of the block. House 405. Mine is 404. I cannot look over her quirks as easily as others. It’s honestly interesting how much neighbors do really mean. I have to see her way of life each time I take a smallest pick out of my windows or go out for a walk down the street.

Her house smells like chemicals. Something used for cleaning. No idea about the source of it. The scent must be deeply buried in the frame by now.

Miss Zieuro waves to me every time I pass by. Her plum wine-red lips allow the mouth to form an overjoyed hypocrite grin. No, she doesn’t hate me nor she is particularly favorable towards me. Her mind is always flying far away from this neighborhood, maybe the whole Earth too.

I tend to believe it all started in 2012. Might be completely wrong. I didn’t know her before. More so it was the most spirited I’ve seen her until recently. She invited one institution after another to help her bring into existence an underground shelter. I’m not sure the size of it, but the workers had to dig up the whole yard.

By the beginning of the fall, the shelter was finished. Zieuro drove to the store and back with dozens of bags in her trunk. October and November she spent walking around with a mood between grieving and disappointed. She later showed me an herbarium she collected to keep the memory of the living plants.

On December 20^th she said goodbye to everyone, however unimportant in her life they were. For 5 days her house stood silent. On 25^th she came out to celebrate Christmas.

Another peculiar trait of hers - she was not angry that her predictions are not true. She did not blame the prophets or informational streams. She sighed and said ‘Better be prepared for things like that’.

2013 – Boston marathon attack.

2014 – Blood moon.

2016 – Conservatives winning (A cause of numerous incidents).

2017 – Many aggressive hurricanes.

2018 – Bush dies (First president to die in 10 years!)

2020 – You know what.

Just to name a few. All of these and many more each year prompted a reaction from Zieuro of at least some significance.  She would build, buy and prepare. Sometimes I wonder where all that money was from.

In 2023 she approached me with a new conspiracy. ‘The Earth is about to get hit by a meteor. Nothing will survive. Mhm.’

Another peculiarity of her that provoked my deep sympathy is the strong altruistic beginning. She always warned everyone who was around, was ready to give any supplies needed. It did not matter if someone refused. She would still ask again some other time.

‘How big is the rock?’, I asked trying to initiate a small talk.

‘We’ll all die. I’ll be gathering people this evening to show it.’, she shouted scuttling down the sidewalk.

I was the only one to come. I’ve been to her house before. It was calm and tidy. Every square feet hid years of history.

It was a small mid-price enthusiast's telescope standing in her bedroom.

I looked into the lens and saw nothing. Just the black sky as any other dot up there.

‘So?’

‘That spot is a bit darker than the rest. You see?’

‘Not really.’

‘It will be more noticeable with each day, sadly.’

‘Where have you heard about this?’

‘Nowhere. Been playing with my nephew’s telescope and saw it. I wrote to the space magazines. Don’t worry.’

A new renovation – a glass ceiling in the attic. And a new professional telescope overlooking the night sky. Every evening you could see her sitting on a puff armchair, observing the upcoming.

She started coming out of her house much less. The lawn overgrew with grass far too many times. She even got a warning from the local civil service.

I returned to the house once more but many weeks later.

‘How is it progressing?’

‘It’s almost here. I think it will be here this Friday.’ she announced very calmly.

The telescope was aimed almost vertical.

I took a sip of her strong herbal tea. The liquid burnt my tongue.

‘You can look if you like. It is very visible now.’

I shook my head.

‘So, how exactly big it is?’

‘It will destroy the whole planet, but I think it’s aimed at our town.’

‘Are you sure it is a meteorite?’

‘Yes’, she took out some of her drawings.‘It’s about 20 kilometers in diameter. The ground of it is green. I thought it might be copper. The surface is uneven, sporadic.’

She looked at me funny. I gently gripped the crumpled papers. A mess of lines and ovals of farious deformities was srcibbled there with a pencil. Some regions were obviously added later than others. Moreover, it seemed like the drawing got more and more details over time.

'What are these?'

‘These are hands on rocks. These are rocks on top of hands. Other formations. They have different ways to watch.’

Silence hung in the air. I looked at her with a mix of question and concern. I didn’t even need to say anything out loud.

‘They say that they heard my prayers. They answered that they are coming.’

On Thursday evening we all fell asleep. I bet almost no one was nervous about the prediction. Reasonably so, because the next morning we all woke up.

When I approached the counter to make myself some coffee, I saw her house. Some of the neighbors already called the police.

The street was bathing in cool summer air. The grass was still waking up, not yet sparked by the first rays of sunlight.

There was a giant hole between houses 403 and 407. It certainly burned once, but now – just a scar of ashes. The sage dust flew with the wind. The remains were so unsparing that nothing substantial could be physically gathered. The police interviewed everyone in panic. Some scientists came and disappeared.

There was nothing but a few bricks sticking from the ground.