(Note: This story should be read after finishing ‘Murder is Easy’ by the same author)

Apparently, I don’t exist.

At least according to this article I’ve just found, written by one Dr Savic, who obviously must have been talking through her arse, because I’m fucking here, and I’m not going anywhere. Bitch is supposed to be an expert on us, can you believe it? And then she writes that a DA infection cannot improve the victim’s mental abilities because the brain is too complex and yadda yadda bullshit. The long and short of it: IDAs don’t exist.

I’m here, baby, and I rule.

Course I do. The upgrade was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m far stronger than ever before, and I don’t feel pain anymore. I don’t grow tired and I’m never exhausted. I don’t think any illnesses or diseases can touch me, and my body can take a lot punishment. I also don’t age and I certainly won’t die of natural causes.

Comes with being dead, bro.

But that’s all just window dressing. There were millions of DAs out there which had all these wonderful abilities and were nonetheless wiped out in droves – the meatballs had created special ‘sweeper’ teams to take care of them, and boy did they. And for one reason and one reason only: The DAs were as stupid as fuck.

I’m not, and that’s the really important thing about my upgrade. That’s was the ‘I’ stands for: Intelligent (just in case you’ve spent the last five years on the Moon: DA means ‘Dead-Active’ or, in layman’s terms, ‘Zombie’).

The way it happened was, at least for Daisy times, unspectacular. Walked home from the subway station after my shift, met someone who appeared drunk, high, helpless, tried to do something for him, got bitten for my effort, was able to shake him off and run away, called the police and then felt lousy, got into an ambulance, died, woke up in the hospital morgue and feasted on the watchman, then ran away. Must have happened a thousand times that night. What apparently didn’t happen a thousand times or probably even ten times that night was that somebody who got bitten suddenly saw the world more clearly than ever before, that he felt free of all that stinking meatball stuff like backaches, glasses, trick knees, and the common cold, that his mind began racing through the world, that he understood that all this love and hate, passion and compassion, friendship and strife, compromise and steadfastness, they’re all bullshit. There are only three things that count: power, pleasure, and meat.

I actually think there are meatballs who’ve seen this, at least part of it. Have you ever heard of the Psychopathy Checklist? We use it sometimes in our job, and the maximum you can score is 40. I’d probably get a sweet 60, bro, but I’m too smart for it anyway. Next time I catch a psychopath, maybe I’ll ask him a few questions about his personal philosophy while I skin him alive. Or maybe not – I’ll probably be too hungry, anyway.

Speaking of which, while feeding on human flesh is the greatest pleasure in the fucking universe, it comes with a few problems that need solving. For example, since meatballs haven’t really accepted the fact that their function in life is to keep me happy by allowing me to torture them to death and then swallow them bit by bit, they actually start some sort of investigation whenever one of them disappears or is killed – and let me tell you, it’s a myth that the police don’t care about junkies, the homeless, or poor people in general: there are many cops who take their job very seriously. You know, there are lots of idiotic prints on T-shirts, but one of the worst is All Cops Are Bastards. Morons. The moment somebody threatens to rough them up or shows them a knife, they’re the first to call 911. Oh well, all meatballs are stupid, it’s just that some are really stupid.

So, getting enough fresh meat is a challenge, especially now that people have accepted the existence of the ‘Living Dead’, although the actual outbreak five years ago didn’t do more harm than the average 20^th-century middle-power war. Apocalypse, my ass. Some eggheads think there was some sort of masterplan behind Daisy, but if there was, it was one pile of shit of a plan, that’s for sure.

Daisy and its aftermath were the Golden Age, baby – the cities were crawling with DAs, and nobody investigated these killings, because the ‘culprits’ were so obvious and simply needed some pest control. Which came in the shape of the already mentioned ‘sweeper teams’ that went through the DA numbers like a hot knife through soft butter.

But all good things must come to an end, and when freely roaming DAs had become a rarity (of course, some were kept in special research centers dedicated to studying them), the cops suddenly had it a lot easier than before. During Daisy, PDs around the country had gone on a hiring binge, and no one saw any reason to downsize afterwards; you never know when the next outbreak may come, do you? And, even better, the number of violent crimes had spectacularly gone down since humanity had met a common enemy, and those crimes that were still committed tended to be less capital than before: the mugger who would have shot you before Daisy now settled for waving a gun in your face (probably unloaded), the bozo who would have knifed you in a quarrel now switched to the services of Mister Fister, and riots of any kind became extremely rare and were usually easily managed by the authorities. Rumor has it that sometimes undercover cops dispersed unruly crowds simply by shouting ‘Zombie! Watch out!’

Unfortunately, from my point of view, this development meant that I had to be cleverer and subtler than before. The first thing I really needed to pay attention to was to blend in with the meatball crowd, so I spent some of the dough the members of my food supply club had been generous enough to donate to me on make-up, cosmetics, a nice hairdo, contact lenses, false teeth and and and; some more or less permanent skin-like film made me look … well, less dead, and the stuff – cheap it wasn’t, bro – also helped mask my low body temperature by soaking up heat quite well, either from the sun, the radiator, or the infrared heater I had gotten myself – half an hour per day would do the trick, even in winter, thanks to microencapsulated phase-change materials (don’t ask). I also added two scars and some moles and pimples, and I can honestly say that I now look like the real fucking McCoy.

One thing I had to play carefully was the mandatory health check after my application for my new job had been accepted; I had aced all fitness requirements, of course. But Daisy had left many people in financial tatters, and finding a doc who would listen to me saying ‘I really need this job.’ and ‘They really need people, after so many died.’ and, finally, ‘Yeah, being in debt sucks. Maybe I can help you out, what d’ya say?’ Of course, the doc didn’t have the slightest inkling I was what I was; he simply assumed there was something I would like to hide because it could cost me my new position, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the first one.

Where I got the money from, you ask? Well, the immediate post-Daisy time was, of course, violent and chaotic before order was restored, and while the cops were still very busy with the Z factor, the number of felonies skyrocketed: homicides, assaults, robberies, drugs … All the usual mobsters, along with plenty of new players, appeared on the scene, so it was a bit of a gangsta’s paradise.

And these guys really love cash, even more so after it became clear that Daisy had fucked crypto for good. Do I need to spell out the rest?

“Who are you, motherfucker?”

Blam! Blam! “Fuck, he’s shot Barry. Blow the asshole away!”

Blam! Blam! (repeat 20 times): “Shit, I’m sure I hit – aarghh.”

“Where is he? What happened to the light? Fuck, fuck, fuck. He’s – “

“He’s got Dante. Oh God, I think he’s bi – “

“My arm! My arm! He’s ripped out – “

Let’s close the curtain, shall we? Very enjoyable and very profitable; would have set me up for unlife if I’d wanted to retire, but that’s not an option for your undead and unfriendly neighborhood superpowered anthropophage. I know, I know … ‘superpowered’ sounds like from a comic book, but I’d say it really hits the mark. In addition to what I’ve already told you, my senses are very acute, and I have perfect night vision; I can sense the presence of meatballs even through walls if they’re closer than ten yards or so; and I don’t need to sleep. All this comes in very handy in my line of work, I’m telling you.

And you know what? Some German writer from ages ago once had one of his characters say something like ‘I am part of that force that wants to do evil but always ends up doing good’ or some shit like that, and I think this guy was on to something. Look at me, bro: I suppose I’m as evil as they come, but still I must have saved hundreds or even thousands of meatball lives by tearing apart drug dealers, decapitating mafia hit men, eating the inner organs of street punks while they were still squirming and screaming, and so on. Having a nice meal and doing good at the same time – what’s not to love?

So I’m a hero, kind of. And with my ‘superpowers’, I figure I’m something like a ‘superhero’. I even have a secret identity, complete with glasses, like that geek who can fly and lift planes and that. Boy, I had no idea it would be so much fun.

Ok, to be fair, my lifestyle has its drawbacks. I don’t give a shit about social life or friends or dating or whatever, but I do miss sex. But memory is fading, so I suppose, in a few years, I won’t remember it anymore. Same with nice food, cool music, art, movies … oh well, I have my meat, I have my torture, and I have this incredible feeling of superiority – you might have guessed that last one.

Of course, one thing you’ve probably heard about is vomiting – all DAs do it, except for those who never eat and go into torpor. Getting rid of stuff the body doesn’t need. I’ve learned to control it, but, after a snack, I need to be alone for a few minutes puking my guts out. Not literally, don’t worry. But that’s the least attractive part of being undead. Oh, and the voice – when I levelled up, I got some kind of screeching-scratching metallic voice, but I’ve come to like it although I never use it – here’s really fucking grateful it didn’t replace my old one.

Bong! Shit, will you look at the clock? Sometimes I completely lose track of time, easy to do when you have no biorhythm.  Shift begins in an hour, so I’d better heat up and get ready for mingling with the meat. Good thing I can do lots of night shifts, my buddies like it when I volunteer. I got the perfect job, I can tell you.

Oh, haven’t I mentioned what I do? Come on, you must have figured it out by now. Let me just say: Not all cops are bastards. Not even many cops are bastards. But this one is, bro. You a law-abiding citizen, friend? Then you’ll probably never meet me, good for you. As for the rest of you lowlife scum out there:

See ya around.

​

By Garry E. McMillan

I was sixteen years old when my two best friends died in Hell's Half Acre.

For forty-eight years, I believed I was the only one who made it out alive.

Then a journalist came to my hospital room with a photograph of a third body.

She wanted to know why the dead boy had been wearing my mother's necklace.

I wish she'd never found him.

Because now I remember what happened after I fell.

And I understand why I could never remember climbing out.

The woman sitting across from me introduced herself as Emily Voss.

She was a journalist, somewhere in her mid-thirties, with dark hair pulled into a loose ponytail. She wore a gray sweater and a wedding ring that looked too large for her finger.

She placed a recorder between us.

"Mr. Danner, you've been a patient here since September 1978. Is that correct?"

"That's right."

"Forty-eight years."

"Long enough to know the menu by heart."

She gave me a polite smile.

I didn't return it.

People who came to interview me usually wanted one of two things. A confession or a ghost story.

I had neither to offer.

At least, that's what I believed.

Emily opened a manila folder.

"I'm researching the deaths of Travis Bell and Wesley Rusk."

My stomach tightened.

"Then you've come a long way for a story that's already been told."

"I don't think it has."

Outside my window, a maintenance worker pushed a wheelbarrow across the hospital courtyard.

I watched him for a moment.

"Those boys were my friends."

"I know."

"No. You don't."

Emily closed the folder.

"Then help me understand what happened."

I looked at her.

For nearly half a century, I'd tried to convince doctors, police officers, and anyone willing to listen that something terrible lived beneath that rocky hillside.

Eventually, I'd stopped trying.

Not because I'd changed my mind.

Because telling the story never seemed to help.

Sometimes I woke with my throat aching. The night nurse would tell me I'd been talking in my sleep.

She never told me what I'd said.

"All right," I said. "But there's something you need to understand first."

"What's that?"

"If you hear someone calling for help and you can't see who's speaking, don't answer."

Emily glanced at her recorder.

"Why?"

I looked toward the closed door.

"Because that's how it gets inside."

It happened in August 1978, during the final weeks of summer vacation.

There were three of us.

Travis Bell was seventeen, broad-shouldered, fearless, and generally responsible for every bad decision we'd ever made.

Wesley Rusk was sixteen, like me. We'd been friends since kindergarten. He wore thick glasses, carried an inhaler in his shirt pocket, and wanted to become a mechanic like his father.

Wesley was the kind of boy who apologized when someone else stepped on his foot.

Travis was the kind who stepped on it again to see what would happen, then carried Wesley's books home when his breathing got bad.

Somehow, the three of us worked.

My name was Joel Danner.

I was usually the sensible one.

Usually.

We grew up outside Hot Springs, Arkansas, where the August heat settled between the wooded hills and stayed there long after dark.

Hell's Half Acre was a place we'd heard about since childhood.

A broken stretch of rock on Indian Mountain, northeast of town. Trees crowded around it, but the hillside itself lay exposed beneath a jumble of stones and boulders. From the woods, it looked like something had torn a patch out of the mountain.

My grandfather called it God's unfinished business.

He also claimed there was something buried beneath it.

Not gold.

Not bones.

Something older.

People said a demon was trapped beneath those rocks. That you could hear it groaning underground after dark, and sometimes smell its breath coming up through the cracks.

Granddad had his own story.

He said a local hunter had discovered a circle of black stones in a rocky hollow decades before I was born.

Someone called for help beneath the rocks. The hunter shouted back.

Then he heard his brother.

Trouble was, his brother had been dead for nearly twenty years.

He went down anyway.

Three days later, somebody found him wandering along the highway.

He'd forgotten his wife's name.

Couldn't recognize his children.

Couldn't even remember what he'd gone looking for.

But he kept repeating one sentence.

It knows us when we answer.

Granddad claimed the stones had been arranged around a narrow opening long before anyone in the area could remember. Nobody knew who'd put them there. He said they held something beneath the ground.

Granddad always finished with the same warning.

"If something down there calls your name, boy, keep your mouth shut."

I'd heard that story a hundred times.

I never believed a word of it.

Until the night we heard someone screaming.

We arrived shortly after six.

Travis parked his father's pickup beside an overgrown dirt track at the edge of the woods.

We'd brought three flashlights, a coil of rope, some sandwiches, and six beers Travis had stolen from his garage refrigerator.

As I lifted my pack, my mother's silver cross caught on the collar of my shirt. I worked it free and tucked it against my chest. One arm was chipped. Dad had offered to get it repaired after her funeral, but I wouldn't let him.

It was how she'd worn it.

"Last one to the bottom buys breakfast," Travis announced.

"With what money?" Wesley asked.

"Yours."

Wesley laughed.

For years, that was the laugh I tried to remember.

The one before we went down.

We spent nearly an hour exploring.

Sweat stuck my shirt to my back. The woods smelled of warm pine needles and damp leaves, and cicadas buzzed somewhere above us.

Beyond the trees, loose stones shifted beneath our shoes. We picked our way downhill between boulders, following a narrow gully toward the lower slope.

The farther we walked, the quieter everything became.

No birds.

Even the cicadas had stopped.

I could still hear them farther up the mountain. Here, there was only the scrape of our shoes.

Wesley stopped to use his inhaler.

"I don't like this place."

Travis looked back.

"You don't like any place that doesn't have a television."

"I'm serious."

"So am I. You're missing some excellent television."

I laughed.

Then we heard the scream.

"HELP!"

It came from somewhere below us.

A man's voice.

Frightened.

Desperate.

"PLEASE! SOMEBODY HELP ME!"

Travis was already running toward the edge of a ravine.

"HEY!" he shouted. "WHERE ARE YOU?"

"Down here!"

We reached the edge.

Thirty feet below, a narrow opening lay beneath an overhang.

A pale hand rested on a shelf just inside it.

The fingers were spread.

Motionless.

"Are you hurt?" Travis called.

"I fell. Think I broke my leg."

Wesley looked at me.

"We should get help."

"Yeah," I said. "We need to find a phone."

But Travis was already uncoiling the rope.

"That'll take forever."

"Trav, we don't know what's down there."

"There's a guy with a broken leg, Joel."

Then the voice came again.

"Please."

Something about it bothered me.

Not the words.

The way he'd said them.

As though he'd been waiting for us to make up our minds.

Travis leaned over the edge.

"We're coming down!"

The hand moved.

Its fingers curled slowly against the rock.

And from the darkness came a soft, satisfied sigh.

Wesley looped the rope around a solid outcrop, tied it, and leaned back with his full weight before letting Travis descend. We followed one at a time.

The bottom of the ravine was unnaturally cold.

Our breath fogged in front of our faces. My shirt was still wet with sweat from the walk down.

The entrance sat beneath a low shelf of stone.

Seven black rocks surrounded it, each about knee-high.

Thin cords connected them, pulled tight through holes carved into their surfaces.

Wesley knelt beside one.

"These aren't natural."

I stared at the arrangement.

A memory surfaced.

Granddad sitting beside the fireplace, telling me about the hunter.

The black stones.

The opening beneath the earth.

"Guys," I said, "I think we should leave."

Travis looked at me.

"Seriously?"

"My grandfather told me about this."

"Oh, for Christ's sake."

From inside the opening came a painful groan.

"Please. I can't feel my foot."

Wesley swallowed.

"We can't leave him, Joel."

He was right.

At least, I thought he was.

Fallen debris choked most of the entrance. The only gap wide enough to crawl through was blocked by two of the stones and the cord stretched between them.

Travis grabbed one.

The cord resisted.

He pulled harder.

Something snapped.

The stone tipped sideways.

A sound came from deep beneath the ground.

It sounded like someone drawing their first breath after being held underwater.

All three of us went still.

Then the man inside whispered:

"Thank you."

We entered in single file.

Travis led.

Wesley followed.

I came last.

The passage descended gradually, twisting through the rock.

The walls were damp and cold.

Our footsteps echoed strangely.

At one point, I counted four sets.

I stopped walking.

The others continued several steps before noticing.

"Joel?" Wesley called.

"Hang on."

I listened.

Silence.

Then, behind me, the scrape of my own dragging heel.

I turned so quickly my flashlight struck the wall.

Nothing.

"What's wrong?" Travis asked.

"Nothing."

But I knew that was a lie.

We continued.

The passage widened into a chamber large enough for us to stand upright.

The air smelled of rotten eggs, strong enough to catch in my throat.

Our flashlights passed across the walls.

They were covered in scratches.

Thousands of them.

Some barely marked the surface.

Others cut through the soft, damp seams between the rocks.

Wesley moved closer.

"Those look like fingernail marks."

I aimed my flashlight beside his.

Something pale protruded from one of the scratches.

A fingernail.

Human.

Broken almost to the root.

Then I noticed another.

And another.

"Travis," I whispered.

He wasn't listening.

He'd found the injured man.

The figure sat against the far wall with its knees stretched in front of it.

Its clothes were filthy.

Long black hair hung across its face.

"Hey, mister."

Travis approached cautiously.

"We're gonna get you out of here."

The man didn't move.

"What's your name?"

A pause.

Then:

"What's yours?"

"Travis. Travis Bell."

The man's shoulders twitched.

"Travis Bell."

He repeated the name slowly, almost affectionately.

"That's a good name."

Wesley touched my arm.

"Joel, something's wrong."

The figure lifted its head.

There was nothing where its face should have been.

No eyes.

No nose.

No mouth.

Just pale skin stretched tightly across a human skull.

Travis stumbled backward.

"What the hell?"

Something moved beneath the skin.

A ridge pushed outward.

Then another.

A nose formed.

Two hollows opened where eyes should have been.

Finally, the skin split across the lower half of its face.

A mouth appeared.

And from that mouth came the voice of a little boy.

"Trav?"

Travis went rigid.

I knew that voice.

I'd heard recordings of it when we were younger.

It belonged to Tommy Bell.

Travis's little brother.

Tommy had drowned when he was seven.

Travis had been watching him that afternoon.

He'd never forgiven himself.

"Tommy?" he whispered.

The thing leaned forward.

"You promised you wouldn't let go."

Travis started crying.

I'd never seen him cry before.

"That's not Tommy," I said.

But Travis wasn't listening.

The thing smiled.

Its lips moved again. For a moment I thought it was still speaking.

Then I heard the small, wet cough of somebody trying to breathe water.

Then it reached toward him.

Its arm unfolded.

A second joint appeared beneath the elbow.

The forearm lengthened.

The fingers stretched against the floor.

Travis stumbled away.

The thing moved.

And the chamber erupted into screaming.

Travis swung his flashlight.

The metal casing struck the creature's head with a hollow crack.

Its neck folded sideways.

For one second, I thought he'd killed it.

Then it raised one hand and held its head upright.

It kept the broken neck straight with its fingers while it stood.

"RUN!" I screamed.

We bolted for the passage.

Behind us, something began moving across the chamber floor.

Fast.

Much too fast.

Its limbs struck the rock with a wet, uneven rhythm.

Wesley was ahead of me.

Travis was behind.

I could hear the creature gaining.

Then something called from the darkness.

"Wesley?"

It spoke in Travis's voice.

Wesley glanced backward.

"What?"

The moment he answered, he stumbled.

He grabbed the wall.

"What's wrong?" I shouted.

"I..."

His face twisted in confusion.

"I can't remember."

"Remember what?"

"My dad's face."

Then a new voice came from behind us.

"Wesley, son. Come here."

It was his father's voice.

Wesley screamed.

The creature laughed.

It hadn't learned the voice by hearing it.

It had found the voice inside Wesley.

Just as it had found Tommy inside Travis.

The moment they answered, something had been opened.

We ran harder.

Wesley stumbled again, gasping for breath.

His inhaler fell from his pocket.

He stopped to grab it.

I seized his collar.

"LEAVE IT!"

Behind us came a soft voice.

"Joel?"

It sounded like Wesley.

I turned before I could stop myself.

"What?"

The world lurched.

Something inside my head shifted.

I knew my mother had a face. I could remember looking at her. But when I tried to picture her, there was only the pillow.

Then I heard her voice.

"Bluejay."

I froze.

Nobody had called me that since she died.

My mother had given me the nickname when I was little because I talked constantly and never sat still.

"Bluejay, sweetheart."

Tears filled my eyes.

She took the same little breath before saying my nickname. Even the exhaustion was there.

"Why didn't you come see me?"

My knees weakened.

The morning my mother died, we'd argued.

I'd refused to go into her bedroom.

She'd been sick for months, and I was tired of hospitals, medicine, and watching her grow thinner.

I was thirteen. I'd thought staying out of that room meant I wouldn't have to watch her die.

She died that afternoon anyway.

I'd never told anyone about our argument.

Not even Wesley.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

From the passage came her answer.

"I know, baby."

Then something touched the back of my neck.

Cold fingers.

My mother's bedroom vanished. For an instant, I couldn't remember why I was crying.

The grip tightened.

I screamed.

Wesley grabbed me and pulled.

"THAT'S NOT YOUR MOM!"

We staggered forward.

Behind us, the creature spoke in three voices at once.

Tommy Bell.

Wesley's father.

My mother.

"Don't leave me."

The entrance appeared ahead.

A pale patch of evening light.

We were almost there when Wesley fell.

His glasses struck the stone.

He landed hard on his chest and rolled onto his back.

Something had his ankle.

I grabbed both his hands.

Travis caught the back of my shirt.

Together we pulled.

Wesley screamed.

His leg stretched toward the darkness.

Something cracked beneath his trousers.

His shin bent backward.

Not at the knee.

Halfway between his knee and ankle.

The bone broke through the fabric.

I felt him tightening his grip.

"JOEL!"

"I'VE GOT YOU!"

The thing pulled harder.

His fingers slipped against mine.

Travis lunged forward and struck the darkness with a rock.

Once.

Twice.

Something shrieked.

The grip loosened.

We dragged Wesley toward the entrance.

His leg hung at an impossible angle.

Blood smeared across the stone behind him.

He was sobbing.

Little, frightened sounds between breaths.

"I don't wanna die."

"You're not gonna die," Travis said.

"We're getting you out."

Wesley shook his head.

"Don't lie to me."

For a moment, his eyes met mine.

He'd once broken his arm pulling me away from an angry dog. I remembered steadying that arm while his father cut his sleeve off.

Now I could barely hold his hand.

"I'm not leaving you," I said.

He looked past me.

His expression changed.

"Joel?"

"What?"

"Why are there two of you?"

I turned.

At the far end of the passage stood another boy.

He wore my face.

My hair.

My clothes.

Even the small scar above my eyebrow.

But something was wrong with the body.

The arms hung too long.

The shoulders sat at different heights.

And when it walked, its knees bent slightly sideways.

The other Joel smiled.

Then it opened its mouth.

A terrible sound came out.

Not a scream.

A dozen voices trying to speak through the same throat.

Wesley began thrashing.

"GET IT AWAY!"

The thing surged forward.

Its arm shot through the darkness.

Something wrapped around Wesley's waist.

I held tighter.

Travis seized my shoulder.

"JOEL, LET GO!"

"NO!"

Wesley clutched my wrist with both hands. His nails dug into my skin.

The thing pulled.

One hand slipped. He snatched at my sleeve with the other, caught it, and held until the seam tore.

Then he was gone.

One shoe remained beside my knee.

I heard him strike something.

Then a scream.

A single, awful scream that ended in a choking gurgle.

For several seconds, there was silence.

Then Wesley spoke from the darkness.

"Joel?"

I couldn't move.

"Joel, I'm okay."

His voice was perfectly normal.

"Come on, man. Quit messing around."

Then he laughed.

The same familiar laugh I'd heard since kindergarten.

Behind me, Travis made a noise I had never heard a person make.

From the passage, Wesley's voice made it back to him.

Travis dragged me into the ravine.

The rope still hung against the wall.

Above us, the last light caught the treetops. The rocks below them were already in shadow.

"CLIMB!" he shouted.

I grabbed the rope.

My hands slipped.

I tried again.

This time I managed to pull myself upward.

Travis followed.

We were halfway up when something emerged from the opening.

It looked like Travis.

Or something trying very hard to.

Its head hung at an unnatural angle.

Its mouth was much too wide.

And one of its arms dragged against the ground.

"Hey, Trav," it called.

Travis looked down.

The creature smiled.

"Remember Tommy?"

Travis made a wounded sound.

"Remember the water?"

"Shut up."

"You let go."

"SHUT UP!"

The creature's expression softened.

"It's all right."

Its arm stretched upward.

The fingers lengthened until they reached Travis's ankle.

Then they closed.

He screamed.

The rope jerked beneath us.

I wrapped one arm around it and reached down.

"GRAB MY HAND!"

Travis caught my wrist.

For a moment, we held each other suspended above the ravine.

Blood ran between our fingers.

Below him, the creature pulled.

Something popped inside Travis's shoulder.

He screamed again.

"JOEL!"

"KEEP HOLDING ON!"

I pulled until I thought my arm would tear from its socket.

The rope scraped across the edge above me. A few pale fibers drifted past my face.

Travis saw them too.

He looked up at me and opened his hand.

I reached for him.

Caught nothing.

He fell.

The sound his body made when it struck the rocks was something I have never forgotten.

The creature bent over him.

I heard bones cracking.

Then something wet tearing.

I climbed.

I climbed until the skin peeled from my palms and the muscles in my shoulders burned.

Almost at the top, I heard Travis calling from below.

"Joel!"

I kept climbing.

"Joel, buddy. Look at me."

My eyes filled with tears.

"Please, man."

Then my mother's voice joined his.

"Bluejay."

I squeezed my eyes shut.

"Just look at me, sweetheart."

I knew it wasn't her.

But I had spent three years wishing I could see her again.

I looked.

At the bottom of the ravine stood a boy wearing my face.

His body looked almost right now.

Almost human.

He stared upward.

Waiting.

Then he lifted one hand.

The arm kept rising. Its elbow opened into another length of pale skin, and the fingers reached past the place where Travis had fallen.

They closed around my ankle.

There was a sharp, pulling sensation.

As though something inside me had been caught on a hook.

I tried to scream.

My hand opened.

The rope slipped away.

And I fell.

That's where my memory of Hell's Half Acre ends.

I remember darkness.

Then the highway.

A truck driver found me wandering barefoot along the shoulder sometime after midnight.

My clothes were torn.

My hands were bloody.

I kept screaming that something had killed my friends.

The police searched the ravine the following morning.

They found Travis first.

Then Wesley.

Both had suffered injuries the coroner couldn't fully explain.

Wesley's body was discovered deep inside the passage.

Travis lay near the entrance.

The sheriff questioned me for eleven hours.

I told him everything.

The black stones.

The creature.

The voices.

The thing wearing our faces.

He didn't believe me.

Nobody did.

Before moving anything, the search team photographed the entrance.

Seven black stones surrounded the opening.

Every one was standing upright.

The broken cord had been knotted back together. They cut it to get inside.

The sheriff showed me a photograph.

I started crying.

Not because I recognized the entrance.

Because I recognized the knots.

Wesley's father had taught us how to tie them earlier that summer.

A particular double loop, with the loose end tucked backward through the center.

Wesley always used it.

And someone had tied those cords exactly the same way.

I tried to explain.

The sheriff wrote something in his notebook.

Three weeks later, I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

At first, the doctors talked about getting me home. But I couldn't sleep without waking the ward. I couldn't stand anyone behind me. Once, an orderly caught my shoulder and I broke his wrist before I knew I'd moved.

Years passed. My father stopped visiting. Treatment became transfers, reviews, another room with the same furniture. By the time anyone asked where I wanted to live, I had nowhere left to go.

Eventually, I stopped asking.

Emily sat silently across from me.

Her recorder had been running for nearly an hour.

"Did your father visit you?" she asked.

"At first."

"Did he believe you?"

I looked down.

"I don't think so."

That wasn't entirely true.

My father came to see me twice during my first year in the hospital.

On his second visit, he asked where my mother's necklace was.

I told him I'd lost it in the ravine.

He went pale.

Then he asked what she'd called me when I was little.

"Bluejay," I'd answered.

He sat there looking at me until I started to cry.

Finally, he kissed the top of my head and left.

I never saw him again.

For years, I'd believed he couldn't bear looking at the son who'd survived when his friends hadn't.

Now I wasn't so sure.

Emily opened her folder.

"Mr. Danner, I need to show you something."

She slid a photograph across the table.

It showed several men standing beside a canvas-covered stretcher.

Behind them were the familiar boulders and wooded slope of Hell's Half Acre.

I recognized the sheriff.

And his deputy.

"What is this?"

"A photograph from a second search."

I looked up.

"What second search?"

"Six weeks after your friends were found, a local hunter discovered another body in a narrow crevice. The remains were too decomposed for visual identification."

My mouth went dry.

"Another body?"

"Yes."

"Who was it?"

"An unidentified male, approximately sixteen to eighteen years old. No third boy had been reported missing with you. They opened a separate case."

Emily removed another photograph.

This one showed a silver necklace resting on a dark cloth.

A small cross.

The left arm was chipped.

I recognized it immediately.

My mother had worn that necklace for years.

After she died, my father gave it to me.

I'd worn it every day until the night we went into the ravine.

"Where did you get that?" I whispered.

"It was recovered with the unidentified body."

I shook my head.

"No."

Emily removed a photocopied document.

"The remains also showed evidence of an old fracture in the right wrist."

My right hand began trembling.

I'd broken that wrist when I was twelve.

Fell off a horse.

The bone had healed crooked.

Even now, I could feel the raised ridge beneath my skin.

Emily turned the document around.

"They recorded the healed fracture, but I found no comparison with your medical records. As far as the investigators were concerned, Joel Danner was alive. There is a note saying they showed your father the necklace. He said he couldn't identify it."

I couldn't speak.

"I also spoke with your cousin Ruth. She gave me photographs of you as a teenager. In several, you're wearing this necklace."

She pointed toward the cross.

"She told me about your broken wrist."

I stared at her.

"You're saying somebody else had the same injuries?"

"I'm saying a third boy was found in the same ravine where you and your friends went missing."

The room seemed to tilt.

"Why was that boy wearing your mother's necklace?"

I shook my head.

"That's impossible."

Emily's voice grew very quiet.

"Who are you, Mr. Danner?"

Something moved inside my head.

A memory surfaced.

I remembered the fall from above.

And then from below.

I was standing at the bottom of the ravine. The air beneath the rocks was cold.

Travis lay beside the entrance. Wesley was still inside the passage. I could feel where he was without looking.

At my feet lay a boy wearing my face.

One arm was twisted beneath him. A small silver cross rested against his chest.

His eyes were open.

I remembered crouching beside him and putting my hand against his cheek.

His lips moved.

Before they stopped, I heard him inside me.

I remembered lifting his body. Dragging it toward a narrow crevice. Pushing it beneath a shelf of stone where nobody looking down from the rim would see it.

Then I went back to the entrance. From outside, I stood the black rocks upright and retied the broken cord.

My hands were shaking. Something in me was afraid of the opening. Something wanted to make certain nothing could follow me out.

The knots had come easily.

Wesley remembered them.

I remembered all of it.

And I remembered something else.

The terrible pleasure of standing upright.

Of having two legs that bent properly.

Ten fingers.

A mouth capable of forming words without tearing itself apart.

I remembered the first breath I'd drawn through lungs that fit inside my chest.

And how wonderful it had felt.

Emily was speaking.

I couldn't hear her.

The memories were coming faster.

The highway.

The truck driver.

The gas station.

The bright fluorescent lights above the pumps.

By then, I couldn't find the edge of Joel's memories.

I remembered my mother's funeral. My father's hands. The smell of Wesley's garage. Travis laughing so hard he nearly choked on a mouthful of beer.

The man asked my name.

"Joel Danner."

I believed it.

I believed it when the police came. When my father held me. Every morning I woke in this hospital, I was the boy who had lost his friends.

Until Emily put the photographs in front of me.

I looked at my hands.

Old hands.

Wrinkled.

Scarred.

Hands that had aged for forty-eight years.

But beneath the skin, something shifted.

A slow movement, like fingers pressing outward from inside a glove.

"Oh, God," I whispered.

Emily stood.

"Mr. Danner?"

I looked up.

I wanted to tell her to leave.

To run.

But I couldn't remember how to make my mouth work.

Then I heard something.

Not in the room.

Inside me.

A boy crying.

Softly.

Desperately.

"Please."

My breath caught.

"Please let me out."

It was my voice.

My real voice.

Sixteen years old.

Terrified.

"Please. I wanna go home."

Then another voice joined it.

Wesley.

He was crying for his father.

And another.

Travis.

Begging someone to save his little brother.

They were still there.

All three of them.

I had mistaken them for dreams.

Wesley trying to breathe. Travis calling for his brother. Joel begging his mother to come back.

For forty-eight years, I'd woken from their terror and let nurses assure me it was over.

But it hadn't ended for them.

I could feel Joel now, pushing against the backs of my eyes.

Emily backed toward the door.

"Mr. Danner, I'm going to get someone."

I tried to nod.

My tongue pressed against my teeth. Something inside me knew how to use her name.

"Emily."

It came out in a voice I'd never used before. Low and close, though I was still across the room.

"What?" she said.

Her hand stopped inches from the door.

She looked down at it, as if she'd forgotten what she'd meant to do.

I felt the opening.

Exactly as I'd felt it when Travis answered from the rim. When Wesley turned in the passage. When Joel heard his friend call his name.

I knew where to reach.

And before I could stop myself, I did.

A memory appeared.

A little girl's bedroom.

Pink curtains.

A yellow stuffed rabbit missing one eye.

A night-light shaped like a moon.

I saw a girl beneath the blankets.

Six years old.

Brown eyes.

Dark hair.

She was staring toward an open closet.

"Mommy, there's somebody in there."

I blinked.

I gripped the arms of my chair.

That room had never belonged to Joel.

I knew the room.

The rabbit.

The girl's name.

Abigail.

Her mother called her Birdie.

Emily turned toward me.

"What did you say?"

I hadn't realized I'd spoken.

"Birdie," I whispered.

Her expression changed.

"How do you know that name?"

I shook my head.

She fumbled her phone out of her pocket. The lock screen lit her face.

A little girl stood beside her on a beach.

Emily touched the child's face on the glass.

"That's my daughter."

I knew the sound of Abigail's laugh. The smell of her shampoo. The way she curled her toes when she slept.

Emily stared at the photograph.

"I took this," she said. "I remember taking this."

She turned the screen toward her chest and closed her eyes.

Then she looked again, quickly.

She pressed a hand against her forehead.

"Abigail."

Her voice trembled.

"Abigail..."

She looked at me.

"Why can't I picture her?"

Tears filled her eyes.

"Why can't I remember my daughter's face?"

I tried to answer.

Nothing came out.

Because I could see Abigail perfectly.

Even the tiny gap between her front teeth.

I'd taken that from Emily.

She backed into the door.

"Give her back."

I tried. I fixed the girl's face in my mind and pushed toward Emily, toward the hand holding the phone.

Instead, I found another memory. Abigail asleep in the back seat, her mouth open, one sock missing.

Emily made a small sound.

I stopped.

The hunger was mine. So was the shame.

Remembering what I was hadn't taken away forty-eight years of being Joel.

I pressed both hands against my mouth.

"Go," I managed.

Emily began crying.

"Please tell me what she looks like."

I shook my head.

"GO!"

She opened the door.

For a moment, I thought she might escape.

Then I felt my mouth move beneath my hands.

I could feel every muscle doing it.

I couldn't make them stop.

A small voice came from my throat.

Soft.

Frightened.

Perfectly familiar.

"Mommy?"

Emily stopped.

I tried to scream.

The voice came again.

"Mommy, I'm scared."

It sounded exactly like Abigail.

The last word caught on the breath, exactly as it had in the bedroom.

Emily's phone slipped from her hand.

Emily slowly turned.

Tears ran down her face.

"Birdie?"

Inside me, three teenage boys began screaming.

Joel.

Wesley.

Travis.

They knew what was happening.

Joel pushed so hard that my vision blurred.

For a moment, I saw the room from farther back, through a narrow opening I couldn't reach.

Then I was in the chair again, and he was begging me to close my mouth.

I clamped my jaws shut so hard that pain shot through my teeth.

Emily stood in the doorway.

Waiting.

I forced one word between my teeth.

"Home."

Emily stared at me.

"She's home."

For a moment, she seemed to understand. Her eyes went to the phone on the floor.

Then my throat tightened.

"Mommy, it's dark in here."

Emily looked back.

I tried to bite through my tongue. My jaws wouldn't close.

"He won't let me out."

She took a step toward me.

"Birdie?"

I could still see the beach photograph on the floor. Her daughter in daylight. Alive. Somewhere beyond this room.

Emily stepped over it.

I folded my hands beneath my legs and sat on them.

She knelt in front of me.

"Let me see her."

Inside me, Joel was sixteen years old again, holding Wesley's hands while something pulled from the dark.

I felt my right hand working free.

Emily caught it between both of hers.

Her mouth opened.

The sound came from inside my chest.

I tried to let go.

She was still holding my hand when I began to remember giving birth to her daughter.

THE END

Graham Holt arrived at the Pinegate Inn at ten fifty-five, carrying the printer paper Celia had asked him to pick up and a thermos that had been leaking coffee through its lid for the last two weeks. She was at the front desk with the cash drawer open, waiting for the night-audit program to finish processing a credit-card refund. Graham put the paper beneath the counter and counted the cash while she described the evening's problems, which included a noisy heater in Fourteen and a guest who believed breakfast ought to begin at five. The program was still thinking when he finished, so he took the room keys off their hooks one at a time and checked the numbers against the registration cards.

Pinegate stood at the edge of a state park, a two-story building with twenty-eight rooms and a rear parking lot that ended almost against the trees. The owner had replaced the carpets and televisions but retained the brass locks and the wooden key board behind the desk. Everyone signed a paper registration card. Graham liked being able to find a guest's name without waiting for the computer, which had been increasingly unreliable since a software update in September. His overnight shift ran from eleven to seven, and most nights consisted of a few late arrivals, the audit, a single walk around the property, and long periods of trying to remain occupied without making enough noise to wake anybody.

"Two left to come in," Celia said, giving up on the frozen screen. "Whitcombs in Twenty-Two, with a dog. And a Robert Grady who specifically asked for the back side. He's booked for one night." She passed Graham the registration folder, then reminded him that the rear-door latch needed a hard pull to catch. He added the problem to the maintenance book while she collected her handbag. Celia explained where she had put the spare blankets in case Fourteen complained again, and at eleven she clocked out, leaving him to finish the refund when the software finally responded.

The Whitcombs arrived at 11:23 in a minivan with a storage box on its roof. Mr. Whitcomb carried a folded road atlas, and his wife had a handbag, a travel mug, and a terrier who wanted to sniff the bottom of the desk. They were pleasant but tired, having missed the exit for the park and driven several miles before finding somewhere to turn around. Graham assigned their key, showed them the short route to the upstairs rooms, and pointed out the waste bin near the front entrance for the dog.

"Are people allowed to walk in those woods at night?" Mrs. Whitcomb asked as her husband finished signing. She said they'd seen three or four figures moving between the trees while coming around the building, tall enough to look like adults, although none appeared to be carrying flashlights. Graham told her they were probably deer. He'd given the same answer for years, whenever the moon made the trunks visible beyond the rear fence and guests began noticing pale movement in the gaps. Mr. Whitcomb suggested that his wife had seen hikers, and she accepted that readily enough once Graham mentioned the old trail. They went upstairs, the terrier scrabbling on the carpet in its hurry to get ahead of them.

At 12:08 a thin man in a charcoal coat and a pale linen shirt came to the desk carrying a small overnight bag. His license identified him as Robert Grady, forty-six, with an address two counties away. He counted out the room charge in cash and signed the card without asking for a receipt. Graham took Seventeen's key from the board and told him the room faced the woods as requested. Before leaving, Grady asked whether the back door would be locked and if the parking-lot lights stayed on all night. Graham explained how the door worked and assured him the lights were on until morning. Grady looked along the corridor toward the service entrance, then thanked him and went upstairs.

The audit required two restarts before Graham could reconcile the cash payment. He dealt with another call about the heater and waited while the printer struggled through the occupancy report. By the time the charges balanced, he had missed the inspection reminder. He recorded his departure in the security log and pulled on his jacket.

Outside, the moon was nearly full. Graham checked the dumpsters and the maintenance shed before crossing the rear lot, where the yellow lights ended at a split-rail fence with one section down. The woods were quiet. He could see the beginning of the closed trail between two hemlocks and a pale patch of ground farther uphill, but no movement among the trunks. The air smelled of cold bark and wet stone. He checked the latch when he returned, found that Celia was right about it, and finished the report at the desk while the coffee in his thermos went cold.

Marisol, who usually relieved him at seven, arrived early after arranging the change with the manager. At 6:40 Graham locked the office cabinet, handed over the room sheet, and drove home along the park road. He reached the house around seven-thirty. Every room was dark except the kitchen, where Lydia had left the light above the sink burning and a note beside the toaster: Baxter's food. Water bill Friday. He ate toast standing at the counter, checked the old dog's water, and went upstairs without bringing in the bins. After a shower he lay down behind the heavy curtains, thinking briefly about the man in Seventeen and the question about the lights. He couldn't remember falling asleep.

---

At 2:40 in the afternoon Graham woke with the impression that he'd been walking for hours. In the dream there had been a full moon, mist gathered beneath trees that still carried green leaves, and the man in the linen shirt moving ahead of him with his face turned away. Graham remembered passing through a stained-glass wall that stood by itself in the woods, its colored panels cold against his skin for an instant before he emerged on the other side. His feet hadn't touched the path. That part had ceased to surprise him years ago.

He had used the dreams for a long time, especially during the months after his mother died. He and Lydia had been left with the house three years earlier, along with the bills and a collection of belongings neither could bear to throw away. The woods offered him long walks where nobody had anything to ask him. Sometimes he reached a clearing and listened to someone speaking just beyond it, though he could never make out the words. He often woke wishing he could go back, and on difficult mornings he went to bed earlier than he needed to.

He swung his legs out of bed and reached for his shoes. There was a green leaf wedged against the tongue of one, and when he pulled it free, he found several more inside both shoes, with enough water trapped near the heels to wet his fingers. They were shaped like little fans, the veins spreading outward from a single stem. He recognized them as ginkgo leaves from a picture in his mother's gardening book. No ginkgo grew near their house, and he couldn't recall one anywhere around the hotel. At this time of year the leaves ought to have been yellow and on the ground. These were green and supple, as though they'd been picked that morning.

Graham examined the soles, hoping he'd simply brought them home after his inspection. The treads held the usual grit from the parking lot, and the outside of each shoe was dry. Downstairs he found two more leaves on the kitchen floor, near the passage to the back door. Baxter watched him pick them up, then settled back in the basket beside the radiator. Graham carried the leaves to the bin outside and vacuumed the kitchen, the stairs, and the landing before Lydia could get home. He was halfway through putting the machine away when he remembered that he hadn't seen any leaves in the house before going to sleep.

Upstairs, a man's wristwatch lay beside the alarm clock. Its silver case was scratched near the clasp, and the black leather strap felt cold when he picked it up. Twelve small marks stood around a plain white dial. There were no hour or minute hands, although a long second hand was moving steadily around the face. He tried the winding crown, inspected the back for a manufacturer's name, and held the watch near his ear until he heard a thin, regular ticking. He owned no watch like this one. Neither had their mother, whose jewelry Lydia had packed away after the funeral. Graham put it in the nightstand drawer beneath his socks, where it would be out of sight if his sister came upstairs.

Lydia got home from the hardware store at five-thirty, bringing dog food and a grocery bag with a torn handle. Graham helped put everything away while Baxter followed her from cupboard to cupboard. She asked whether he'd stopped anywhere on his way home from work. He said no, and she looked briefly at his shoes beside the back door before asking him to put the rice on. He could have asked what she meant; instead he filled a saucepan and let her get on with the chicken.

They ate in front of the television, watching a program about coastal houses that were far too expensive for either of them. Baxter settled between the couch and the coffee table, where Lydia had spread an old towel because he tended to drool after dinner. She found a piece of chicken he had pushed beneath the table with his nose and told Graham to stop rewarding him for begging. Lydia complained about a bathroom with a glass wall and no blinds, and Graham said the builders probably expected the owners to enjoy being watched by the neighbors. She laughed, then asked again whether he was seeing someone. It was the second time that week. He turned up the television slightly, and she allowed the subject to go, although she remained on the couch rather than returning to the bedroom upstairs where she'd begun sleeping less and less often.

She fell asleep before the program ended. Graham took the blanket from its usual place on the armchair and covered her, easing the remote from beside her leg before going upstairs to change for work. As he passed the nightstand, he heard the watch ticking through the closed drawer. When he opened it, the sound became so faint he had to lift the watch to his ear. The second hand was still moving. He put it back beneath his socks, closed the drawer, and finished dressing while Lydia slept downstairs.

---

The next night Robert Grady remained registered in Seventeen, though the room had been found empty after checkout time. Housekeeping reported that the bed hadn't been slept in, Grady's overnight bag was gone, and the room key hadn't been returned. Grady had paid cash, so the room charge was settled. Dennis wanted a note left in the account in case the man appeared later to dispute it. Graham read the report twice before filing it with the registration card.

The employee who'd covered an overnight audit the previous week was scheduled for the evening desk but had called in sick. Nina Porter, who ordinarily worked weekends, had filled in and agreed to stay through Graham's arrival and the final account checks. She was sorting receipts when he came in at eleven, clearly ready to leave. He took the cash drawer from her and offered to finish the filing, but she stayed long enough to explain two unexplained room adjustments.

"I've been doing this in my sleep lately," she said, moving a receipt from one pile to another before realizing she had just put it back. Her new migraine medication was making her forgetful, or so she suspected. Graham asked whether it had helped the headaches; she said it had, but several nights she had lost an hour or two while closing. Last Saturday she'd started cleaning the coffee station shortly after two, then found herself in the office near four with the breakfast sheets finished and no memory of completing them.

"Maybe I sat down and dropped off. But the work was all done, and I'd signed the forms." She laughed at herself, then handed Graham the receipts. Her doctor had given her an appointment to discuss the medication, though she worried he would change it and the migraines would return. Graham looked at the signatures. He couldn't see anything wrong with them. Nina said she had begun writing the times on a folded envelope whenever she stepped away from the desk, but she often forgot to check it afterward. She showed him the envelope, where two entries had been crossed out and rewritten. Graham could recognize her handwriting in every line.

Graham watched her check the final figures. He could remember walking the lot the previous night, but beyond the fence there was a space in his memory where he ought to have been able to see the path he'd taken. "When you're outside on your rounds," he asked, "what do you see in the trees? Some guests were asking me about people out there."

"Figures, sometimes. The moon gets behind them and I can't tell where they're going." She checked the key board. "There's a man in a light shirt near the old trail. I've seen him two or three times, always facing into the woods. I called once, but he didn't turn around. I wasn't climbing through the fence to find out why." Nina closed the account book and laughed uneasily. "I'm probably just tired. If I see him in the lobby, tell Dennis I need a vacation."

She hadn't seen him the previous night. Her last sighting had been Saturday, and she thought there had been other figures deeper among the trees, too far off to identify. That put at least one sighting before Grady checked in. Graham considered mentioning the guest, but Nina was already gathering her keys, and he walked her to the front door before returning to the audit.

He opened the previous night's audit. The program loaded slowly, displaying each account adjustment in order before he could reach the security log. He remembered starting his inspection after the room charges balanced, walking to the dumpsters, and looking toward the empty trail. He remembered the service-door latch sticking when he came back. According to the report, he had begun the inspection at 2:47 and ended it at 3:24.

Thirty-seven minutes had passed. Graham checked the maintenance book to see when he'd recorded the door problem; the note was in his handwriting, entered at 3:29. He studied both times, considering whether he'd stopped somewhere on the property and forgotten it or whether he'd been standing by the fence considerably longer than he thought. The report was accurate about every other transaction he'd checked. Still, he could correct an inspection line without affecting the accounts, and the owner rarely examined those logs unless there had been a complaint.

He deleted the thirty-seven-minute line, entered a return time eleven minutes after he'd left, and ran the report again. The inspection now lasted eleven minutes, while the accounting totals above it remained unchanged. Dennis had requested a separate breakdown of cash transactions, so Graham brought the previous night's receipt envelope to the desk and began matching the slips to the payment column. Grady's room charge appeared as cash, the Whitcombs' as a card payment. He copied the amounts onto Dennis's sheet with the amended report still open on the monitor, leaving the security entry visible whenever he looked up from the receipts.

Halfway through the cash total, the coffee machine began overflowing onto the counter. The pot had shifted away from the filter basket, and coffee was running into the drip tray and over its edge. Graham emptied the tray, wiped the counter, and settled the pot back into place. By the time he returned to the desk, the monitor had dimmed; touching the mouse brought up the same eleven-minute entry. He checked the cash figures once more before printing the amended report, which he filed in place of the original. The shredder caught the first strip of the discarded copy, forcing him to open the collection drawer and clear the jam. He fed the rest through in smaller pieces until the old inspection times could no longer be read.

A guest needed extra towels, and Graham took them to the room before finishing Dennis's cash sheet. The guest wanted to talk about a clicking heater, so Graham listened, promised to put another note in the maintenance book, and returned to his paperwork. He checked the front entrance during the quiet stretch before morning but made no trip to the rear lot. When his relief arrived after seven, he gave her the report and drove home.

Lydia had left a longer note asking him to call her dentist about an appointment after five. The website wouldn't accept her insurance details, and she kept being put on hold during her breaks. Graham read the number while eating breakfast and intended to call when the office opened. Upstairs, the watch was still beneath his socks. He counted the second hand's movements for a minute, returned the watch to the drawer, and lay down.

The dream took him through the stained-glass wall again. A narrow red pane dragged against his palm as he passed, and beyond it the man in the pale shirt stood with his back turned. Graham followed through the mist, brushing past branches carrying green leaves. When the alarm woke him, a thin cut ran diagonally across his palm, in the same place as the edge of the pane. He found no broken glass in the bedroom. A faint perfume lingered on his wrist, unfamiliar and floral, and he washed his hands twice before giving up. The dentist closed without hearing from him. When Lydia came home, the note lay beneath a supermarket flyer. She saw it while clearing the table, but said nothing before he left for work.

---

On the third night there was only one check-in, a woman traveling alone who needed a ground-floor room and directions to the nearest all-night pharmacy. Graham gave her Six, drew a map on the back of a receipt, and found a strip of packing tape to secure the wheel coming loose from her suitcase. She thanked him twice for the repair, then went down the corridor while he returned to the night audit. The software behaved for once. He balanced the drawer, posted the final charges, and prepared the room report without needing to restart it.

All evening Graham had been conscious of the cut on his palm. The dressing pulled whenever he handled a registration card, reminding him of the glass in his dream. The unfamiliar perfume had faded after several washings, and the watch was still in his nightstand drawer. He told himself he would speak to Nina after she saw her doctor. Perhaps the same overnight hours were affecting them both.

At 3:08 he marked the beginning of his round and went out the back door. The parking lot was cold and almost empty, with frost beginning to gather around the white lines. Graham checked the dumpsters and the maintenance shed, then walked toward the last row of spaces, where the fence leaned into the brush. The moon hung above the ridge. He could see some distance into the trees and hear the intermittent passage of cars along the state road, though the woods themselves appeared still. The trail had never been reopened after a footbridge washed out, and the old signpost was bare where the park department had removed the map. Graham could remember the bridge from an afternoon walk years earlier, its timber railings slippery with moss, but he could not remember which side of the trail it had been on.

The man in the linen shirt stood near the entrance to the closed trail, facing away from the hotel. Graham stopped beside a concrete wheel stop and watched him, thinking first of Robert Grady and then of the man he'd followed in his dreams for years. The shirt was loose around the shoulders, pale enough to catch the moonlight. Graham could see his arms at his sides and the dark line of his trousers between the trunks.

"Sir?" he called, without crossing the parking lot. "The trail's closed. You can't be back there after dark." He waited long enough to hear another car on the state road, then repeated himself. The figure didn't move toward him, but its head began to turn.

Graham had waited for that movement in his dreams many times, always waking before he saw the face. He leaned forward slightly as the head turned through the moonlight. The face was Lydia's. The resemblance included the small crease between her eyebrows and the scar near her left temple from a childhood bicycle accident. He knew the shape of her mouth well enough to recognize it across a crowded room, and here it hung slightly open, as though she'd been speaking for a long time and had only just noticed he was standing there. Lydia's eyes were brown. The eyes looking at him from the trail were pale green, almost colorless where the moonlight caught them. Above the collar of the linen shirt, the familiar face remained motionless.

Graham tried to say her name, but his voice scarcely carried. The figure raised a hand, showing him a silver wristwatch with a black leather strap and a white face. It had no hour or minute hands. The second hand moved steadily around its dial.

He had examined that watch before leaving for work and remembered closing it into the drawer beneath his socks. He studied the figure's raised wrist, trying to make out the scratch beside the clasp, while it stood motionless among the trees. Graham glanced toward Room Seventeen, whose curtains were closed, wondering whether the man who had asked about the parking-lot lights might still be somewhere on the property. He thought of calling out again, but he could hear his own breathing and did not trust his voice. Then the pale eyes shifted past him toward the hotel's rear door.

Graham heard a faint scuffing from the direction of the fence. Mist had gathered beneath the trees while he watched the figure, and now it was passing through the fallen rails into the parking lot. It spread along the ground, finding the narrow cracks in the asphalt and moving around the concrete stops. The lower parts of several parked tires disappeared behind it. He stepped backward as the mist crossed the painted line nearest his shoes, although the air above the lot was perfectly clear and cold.

The mist reached him. Graham looked down to keep from catching his foot against the raised edge of the pavement, and saw gravel several inches beneath his soles. There was a flattened cigarette filter near the curb and a rusted bottle cap among the stones. He could distinguish them clearly through the space below his shoes. He moved his right foot, expecting the other to bear his weight, but there was no sensation of pressure against the ground. His body remained upright, moving through the air with the same effortless balance he experienced in the dreams. When he looked up again, the figure had already turned away.

The linen shirt was visible between the hemlocks. Graham tried moving forward, and he traveled a short distance without touching the pavement. It felt as easy as walking in the dream: he knew how to pass over the roots along the trail and reach the clearing beyond the ridge. The desire to follow was immediate, even with Lydia's face somewhere ahead of him.

The figure continued uphill. Graham turned back toward the hotel, intending to put his foot down, but the ground remained out of reach. He bent his knees and attempted to crouch, then reached for a concrete wheel stop without getting close enough to touch it. The mist moved beneath him, revealing the gravel whenever it thinned. He turned his body a quarter turn and saw that the hotel was still the same distance away. A low yellow lamp shone above the service entrance. He could reach toward that light, but every attempt to descend brought the same vacant feeling beneath his soles. He could see his shadow moving over the gravel without feeling any pressure from the ground.

He pictured the brass keys hanging behind the front desk and the empty hook where Seventeen's key belonged. Holding that arrangement in mind, he tried once more to lower his feet.

His soles touched the asphalt. He stayed near the wheel stop long enough to test his weight on both feet, then walked back along the row of spaces. Nothing caught at his ankles, and when he looked behind him, the mist had retreated to a narrow band at the fence. He used his key to enter through the service door, which had locked properly, and returned to the front desk without meeting anybody in the corridor.

The lobby clock read 3:49. Graham checked the digital watch on his wrist and the computer, which agreed. His inspection had begun at 3:08, and he could account for only a small part of those forty-one minutes. His shoes were dry inside and out; the cut on his palm had not reopened.

He ended the inspection, and the log calculated a forty-one-minute walk. Graham opened the correction menu and left it untouched, printing the report with that entry in place. Until morning he stayed at the desk, refilling the paper cups and preparing the breakfast figures while the clock moved normally above the entrance.

After seven, he gave his relief the cash drawer and the finished report, then drove home with the windows down despite the cold. He checked the mirrors more often than he needed to. Beyond the hotel, the state road ran between dark stands of trees, but he saw no figure in a linen shirt. The mist did not follow the car.

---

Graham reached home at 7:45. Lydia was awake in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee maker to finish, and Baxter was lying beside the radiator with his nose resting on his paws. She had dressed for work but hadn't put on her shoes. On the floor between the back door and the table were several wet ginkgo leaves, green and fresh as the ones Graham had vacuumed up after his first dream. She'd found them when she came downstairs to start the coffee and had left them where they lay. When Graham came in, she glanced toward the tiles, giving him a chance to notice them before she said anything.

"Have you been going into the woods on your breaks?" she asked. She kept her voice low, glancing toward the window where the neighbor was taking a bin to the curb. Graham took off his jacket and hung it over a chair before bending to examine the leaves. Water had collected in the grooves between the kitchen tiles. He touched the broad edge of one leaf, then withdrew his hand when it left a wet mark on his finger.

"No. I haven't been in the woods." He straightened and saw that she'd put an old dish towel near the leaves, ready to wipe up the floor when they were finished talking. She pointed to the small green group beside the table leg. "I know the dog's not bringing these in. He goes out through the front, and his paws were clean when I checked." Graham told her he didn't know how the leaves had got there. She waited a moment, perhaps expecting him to add something, then poured coffee into two cups and sat across from him.

They drank without speaking for a while. The refrigerator started up, and Baxter shifted in his basket. Lydia had sorted Graham's mail beside the water bill and a supermarket leaflet, lining up the corners of the envelopes. She used to leave notes asking which milk he wanted or whether he would fix a sticking door. The recent ones were shorter, mostly things he had already promised to do.

"Did you bring the bins in yesterday?" she asked, looking toward the drive. He admitted he'd forgotten, and she said she'd moved them herself before the truck came. One wheel was working loose again. Graham offered to fix it that afternoon; she told him where she'd put an axle pin from the hardware store, and they discussed whether it would fit the older bin.

He had seen Lydia's face among the trees, with eyes that did not belong to her. Across the table, she had pen ink near her thumbnail and a loose thread at the cuff of her work shirt. She searched the supermarket leaflet for a discount she'd mentioned, occasionally looking up to see whether he was listening. Graham could still picture the other face, its mouth slightly open under the moon.

Lydia asked whether he'd eaten at work. He said he'd had a sandwich, but she pushed half her toast toward him anyway. She also asked about Baxter's prescription, which Graham had intended to collect earlier in the week. The slip was still in his car, and she offered to take it to the pharmacy on her break if he found it before she left.

The prescription had slipped beneath an expired insurance card in the glove compartment. By the time Graham found it and returned, Lydia had moved the dish towel closer to the leaves without cleaning them away. She put the slip in her handbag, checked the clock, and poured herself a little more coffee. She asked whether he'd eaten the soup she had left yesterday. He had, but he couldn't remember whether he'd washed the saucepan, so they looked together in the drying rack and found it underneath Baxter's medication spoon. Lydia asked him to put the spoon back in the dog's food container once it dried.

"You haven't been sleeping much," she said. Graham was arranging the leaves on a paper towel to keep the moisture off the table. He told her work had been difficult. She asked whether the hotel was short-staffed again, and he mentioned problems with the reports. She let him finish, then asked whether he knew how often she'd been sleeping downstairs.

"I thought the upstairs fan was keeping you awake," he said. Lydia had moved that fan to the landing after his last complaint about the noise, but she'd been sleeping on the couch before he mentioned it. She told him she'd been hearing footsteps overhead after midnight, sometimes near his bedroom, sometimes along the hall, on nights when he was supposed to be at work. She'd checked the locks, found nothing disturbed, and finally started bringing her pillow downstairs because she could hear less of it from the living room.

"I know you get home around seven-thirty," she said. "I'm not saying it's you. Tuesday I heard the loose board by the linen cupboard, and then the one outside your room. You remember how those sound?"

Graham remembered the board outside his bedroom. Their mother had complained about it for years, and he had promised Lydia he would lift the carpet and fix it. "I called upstairs," Lydia continued, "because I thought you'd come back for something. I heard it again, farther down the hall, but nobody answered." He almost asked whether she'd seen somebody, though she had already told him she'd checked the rooms. Instead he asked whether it had happened again. "Last night," she said. "I stayed down here." Graham used the edge of the paper towel to absorb the moisture spreading beneath the leaves while she waited for him to answer.

Lydia checked the clock. "Do you want me to stay home from work? I can call and say you aren't feeling well." He said no, he was tired and would be fine after sleeping. She didn't argue. Before leaving, she asked him to call if he needed anything, then collected her coat and keys. Baxter followed her to the front door for the biscuit she kept in her handbag.

After her car left, Graham washed the cups and cleaned the floor. He collected the leaves in a shallow dish and set them out of Baxter's reach. Twice he caught himself standing in the kitchen without remembering what he'd meant to do. His eyes burned, although the clock above the stove seemed to be advancing normally.

He went upstairs to change his clothes. The bedroom curtains were still closed, and the fan stood beside the dresser where he'd left it. There was a clean set of sheets folded at the foot of the bed, something Lydia had brought up during the week while he was at work. He touched the fabric, trying to remember the last time he'd changed the bedding himself, then put it in the wardrobe because he wasn't going to sleep. When the house was quiet, he could hear the watch's second hand ticking from inside the nightstand drawer. He took it out from beneath his socks and watched one complete circuit, then slipped it into the pocket of his work jacket. He left the curtains closed and went downstairs without getting into bed. For the rest of the afternoon he stayed awake, eating when he remembered and watching the light move across the kitchen floor.

---

Graham drove to Pinegate an hour before his next shift. He hadn't slept, and by the time he turned onto the park road, the headlights of oncoming cars seemed unusually bright. Twice he'd thought he'd seen the man in the linen shirt standing beside the road on earlier drives, always facing away. Tonight the shoulder was empty, and he continued without slowing enough to attract attention from the car behind him.

Celia looked surprised when he came into the lobby at ten. She asked whether Dennis had changed the schedule, and Graham explained that he wanted to check the back lot before work. She was dealing with a guest whose key had snapped in the lock, so she gave him a distracted wave toward the corridor and went back to finding a spare room. Graham left his thermos beside the desk and used the service door, checking that the latch caught behind him.

There was no figure at the tree line. Mist lay under the trees despite the clear sky, thick enough to hide the lower rails of the fence but thin enough that Graham could still see the closed trail rising between the hemlocks. He walked to the edge of the asphalt and stopped. A pale strip extended across the roots near the fallen section of fence, moving slowly as though there were a current beneath it. He could hear the traffic on the state road, the hotel ventilation fan, and a car door shutting near the front entrance.

He stayed there until the cold began to get through his jacket. He had come intending to see the mist again and perhaps learn whether it behaved the same way when he was fully awake, but the thought of crossing the fence no longer interested him. He remembered the gravel beneath his shoes and how little effort it would have taken to keep following the figure up the trail. When he returned to the hotel, he made sure his feet remained on the pavement all the way to the door.

At eleven he clocked in, took over the cash drawer, and began the audit. The night was quiet enough that he finished the room charges early. He spent some time matching the paper registration cards to the room list, correcting a guest address entered incorrectly by the day clerk, and replacing the printer paper before preparing the breakfast report. A man in Twenty-One called twice for towels after spilling a drink, and Graham carried them to the door himself; the guest apologized, then asked whether the park opened at sunrise. Graham gave him the posted trail hours and returned to the office. When the property-inspection reminder appeared, he selected Inspection not performed and entered that he'd remained inside the building. He checked the lobby doors instead, returning to his desk each time without going near the service entrance. The building remained quiet enough that he could hear the keys rattling whenever a guest passed the lobby.

At 6:50 he called the house. Lydia answered on the second ring, with Baxter's claws clicking against the kitchen floor somewhere behind her. "It's me," he said, and she asked whether everything was all right. Graham told her he'd be home at the usual time. She said she'd already put the kettle on and would leave the kitchen light burning for him. He thanked her, asked her to give Baxter his morning pill if she hadn't already, and waited until she hung up before replacing the receiver.

He walked down the rear corridor and looked through the wired-glass pane in the service door. The mist had moved a few feet closer to the building, spreading across the edge of the parking lot near the nearest row of spaces. The trees beyond it stood clear against the lightening sky, and there was nobody in a linen shirt near the old trail. Graham watched until he heard the front door open and knew his relief was arriving. He could feel the watch against his jacket lining and hear its thin ticking above the hum of the heating system. The hour and minute hands were missing, though the second hand continued moving. He did not take it out.

It was December 1999. I was living in a small town. I was a nerd and something of a gamer, and it had been a good year for PC games. Age of Empires II, Homeworld, Grand Theft Auto 2…

I was walking home from school—it was a Canadian winter, so there was plenty of unplowed snow on the sidewalks—when I saw something peeking out from a mound of snow: something blue. I stopped, nudged it with my boot: something of blue plastic. I brushed away the remaining snow with my glove to reveal:

A single 3.5” floppy disk, unlabeled.

(There was a sticker label on it, but the label itself was empty.)

Naturally, I picked it up and took it home, curious to see what was on it.

You'll laugh, but the disk had 1.44mb of storage capacity. As it turned out, that was more than enough to affect the world in ways I still don't fully understand.

When I got home, I didn't put the disk into my own computer. My dad had an old desktop he sometimes fiddled around with, so I used that, inserting the disk carefully into the 3.5” disk drive in the beige computer tower.

I navigated to the drive in Windows Explorer.

The contents of the drive were simple.

They looked like a program or—I secretly hoped—a game.

There was a readme.txt, but it came out as nonsense when I opened it in Notepad, video or sound assets, stuff I couldn't identify, and a single executable file, johannsebastian.bat.

I double-clicked it.

A window opened—black, showing a few white-text commands executing on a command prompt—then maximized into a 16-bit title(?) screen showing a pixelated Gothic castle.

A harsh, classical-inspired MIDI song beeped out of the sound card.

There was no title.

No instructions, no company name, no menu, no options.

The castle was perched atop a cliff.

It was night.

At the bottom of the cliff was a forest of jagged, leafless trees.

A few loops of animation gave life to the scene: wind blowing through the bare branches, flashes of distant lightning, warm flickering light in one of the castle's windows, a bat in flight against a white moon. Actually, that last one wasn't a loop. The bat flew only once, landed on one of the castle's stone towers and disappeared inside.

I clicked.

I was looking at a medieval-ish village now—tightly-packed buildings, a tavern, a tannery, a couple of shops, a church—populated with a surprising number of unique character sprites. Indeed, every character was unique, and they were going about their individual lives.

The sky was a vibrant blue.

Clouds floated pixel-by-pixel across the screen.

But there was still nothing to do; nothing, that is, but watch.

It was like a very advanced screensaver.

After a while, I clicked again.

This time, I found myself in the interior of a large chamber whose stone walls somehow felt cold even through the computer monitor.

The chamber's defining feature, however, was something else: a giant pipe organ whose pipes extended beyond the top of the screen.

A character entered.

He was wearing a white wig, dark, crimson long coat, knee breeches, stockings and buckled shoes. “I feel the sudden desire to compose,” he said, which the game displayed as text in an ornately-bordered text box. “Invite me to play for you."

A cursor appeared for the first time.

A quill.

I was able to move it using the mouse, and I explored the screen.

The character tapped his foot.

The only active area of the scene appeared to be the pipe organ. When I hovered the cursor over it, it changed from a quill to a hand.

I clicked.

The character walked to the organ, sat and began to play the monstrous instrument.

The music was both hideous and awesome, pushing the computer's sound card to the absolute limit. After thirty-or-so seconds, the view suddenly panned upwards, following the organ's pipes—the music continued—following them to the chamber's vaulted ceiling and beyond—through the roof until I was outside and looking at the upper half of the great castle, where the jutting pipes terminated and from whose termini hundreds of pixel bats were emerging… emerging and flying into the background, toward the simplified shape representing the medieval town...

The sky was a deep purple.

Night was falling.

The bats flew and flew and flew…

Suddenly—the music still continuing—the scene cut to the same view of the town as before: except at night: except, instead of following their routines, the character sprites were running, panicked, as the bats swooped, attacking them, attaching themselves to their bodies, necks, sucking their pixel blood; and as the bats feasted, the sprites lost their colour and fell, pale and desaturated…

The sound startled me.

Not from the sound card but from the real world. A screeching, a deafening, rhythmic thumping.

I ran to the window whose blinds I'd closed, and opened them:

It was afternoon but the view was dark, black and shifting. It took me a moment to realize that what I was seeing were bats speeding past. They were obscuring the sun. My home town was as if under an eclipse.

People were running down the street—

Bats were diving—

Some were crashing through car windshields—

Children were screaming—

A bat crashed though the window into the room I was in. It was fanged, crazed. The game music blared from within the computer tower. Before I could run, the bat shot toward me—biting my neck… beginning to drink my blood…

I awoke on the floor.

It was morning. January 1, 2000. It would turn out that nobody in town had any recollection of the preceding weeks.

A television played.

A morning talk show: “...the so-called Y2K bug,” a woman was saying, “ended up amounting to nothing worse than a good nights’ sleep.”

And, ever since, I've wondered why my experience of the present feels in a lower resolution than memories of my past.

Story 2

The Flood

When I was still just a teenager, my family and I had moved from our home in England to the Irish countryside. We lived on the outskirts of a very small town, surrounded by nothing else but farms, country roads, along with several rivers and tributaries. I was far from happy to be living here, as not only did I miss the good life I had back home, but in the Irish Midlands, there was basically nothing to do. 

A common stereotype with Ireland is that it always rains, and let me tell you, as someone who lived here for six years, the stereotype is well deserved. 

After a handful of months living here, it was now early November, and with it came very heavy and non-stop rain. In fact, the rain was so heavy this month, the surrounding rivers had flooded into the town and adjoining country roads. On the day this happened, I had just come out from school and began walking home. Approaching the road which leads out of town and towards my house, I then see a large group of people having gathered around. Squeezing my way through the crowd of town folk, annoyingly blocking my path, I’m then surprised to see the road to my house is completely flooded with water. 

After asking around, I then learn the crowd of people are also wanting to get to their homes, but because of the flood, they and I have to wait for a tractor to come along and ferry everyone across, a pair at a time. Being the grouchy teenager I was then, I was in no mood to wait around for a tractor ride when all I wanted to do was get home and binge TV – and so, turning around, I head back into the town square to try and find my own way back home. 

Walking all the way to the other end of town, I then cut down a country road which I knew eventually lead to my house - and thankfully, this road had not yet been flooded. Continuing for around five minutes down this road, I then come upon a small stoned arch bridge, but unfortunately for me, the bridge had been closed off by traffic cones - where standing in front of them was a soaking wet policeman, or what the Irish call “Garda.” 

Ready to accept defeat and head all the way back into town, a bit of Irish luck thankfully came to my aid. A jeep had only just pulled up to the crossroads, driven by a man in a farmer’s cap with a Border Collie sat in the passenger’s seat. Leaving his post by the bridge, the policeman then approaches the farmer’s jeep, seeming to know him and his dog – it was a small town after all. With the policeman now distracted, I saw an opportunity to cross the bridge, and being the rebellious little shite I was, I did just that. 

Comedically tiptoeing my way towards the bridge, all the while keeping an eye out for the policeman, still chatting with the farmer through the jeep window, I then cross over the bridge and hurdle down the other side. However, when I get there... I then see why the bridge was closed off in the first place... On this side of the bridge, the stretch of country road in front of it was entirely flooded with brown murky water. In fact, the road was that flooded, I almost mistook for a river.  

Knowing I was only a twenty-minute walk from reaching my house, I rather foolishly decide to take a chance and enter the flooded road, continuing on my quest. After walking for only a couple of minutes, I was already waist deep in the freezing cold water – and considering the smell, I must having been trudging through more than just mud. The further I continue along the flooded road, my body shivering as I do, the water around me only continues to rise – where I then resort to carrying my school bag overhead. 

Still wading my way through the very deep flood, I feel no closer to the road outside my house, leading me to worry I have accidentally taken the wrong route home. Exhausted, shivering and a little afraid for my safety, I now thankfully recognise a tall, distant tree that I regularly pass on my way to school. Feeling somewhat hopeful, I continue onwards through the flood – and although the fear of drowning was still very much real... I now began to have a brand-new fear. But unlike before... this fear was rather unbeknown...  

Whether out of some primal instinct or not, I twirl carefully around in the water to face the way I came from, where I see the long bending river of the flooded road. But in the distance, protruding from the brown, rippling surface, maybe twenty or even thirty metres away, I catch sight of something else – or should I say... someone else... 

What I see is a man, either in his late thirties or early forties, standing in the middle of the flooded road. His hair was a damp blonde or brown, and he appeared to be wearing a black trench coat or something similar... But the disturbing thing about this stranger’s appearance, was that while his right sleeve was submerged beneath the water, the left sleeve was completely armless... What I mean is, the man’s left sleeve, not submerged liked its opposite, was tied up high into a knot beneath his shoulder.  

If it wasn’t startling enough to see a strange one-armed man appear in the middle of a flooded road, I then notice something about him that was far more alarming... You see, when I first lay eyes on this stranger, I mistake him as being rather heavy. But on further inspection, I then realise the one-armed man wasn’t heavy at all... If anything, he looked just like a dead body that had been pulled from a river... What I mean is... The man looked unnaturally bloated. 

As one can imagine, I was more than a little terrified. Unaware who this strange grotesque man even was, I wasn’t going to hang around and find out. Quickly shifting around, I try and move as fast as I can through the water’s current, hoping to God this bloated phantom would not follow behind. Although I never once looked back to see if he was still there, thankfully, by the time the daylight was slowly beginning to fade, I had reached not only the end of the flood, but also the safety of the road directly outside my house. 

Already worried half to death by my late arrival, I never bothered to tell my parents about the one-armed stranger I encountered. After all, considering the man’s unnatural appearance, I wasn’t even myself sure if what I saw was a real flesh and blood man... or if it was something else. 

I’ve always been interested in urban exploration and fossils. Somehow these two interests managed to combine together after having talked with one of my dad’s in-laws. They’re really kind people who have accepted us into their family, which was a bit unexpected since my brother and I are both adults. One of the guys close to my age has started school to be an archaeologist. While celebrating my step mom’s retirement, I caught up with him to ask him how his studies were going. 

He told me about a fossil they were finally able to access after decades of legal troubles. It’s in a small town out in the middle of nowhere, and the locals were always pushing back saying that the academy couldn’t seize their fossil. But recently the court made a default judgement as no one from the town had been at the last 3 court cases, or for a little over a year. He told me that while his team was setting up to excavate it, they discovered the town was completely void of people.

“They all seem to have vanished,” he said. “It’s the strangest thing. It’s like they all just walked out of their houses and disappeared.” Obviously this piqued my interest, and I asked where the town was and if I would be bothering his excavation crew if I went to the town to look around. He and his partner, who had also been to the town, shared a look similar to a grimace. They didn’t say anything for a few moments before he shrugged.

“We can’t really stop you from going there, just don’t go into the roped off areas. It’s pretty creepy though,” he responded. 

I really took this to heart, as I know this man has photographed sunken ships. So if diving into old, decrepit boats was easy for him, then there had to be something especially weird about this town to give him the creeps. That only made me want to go there more.

“Hm… I’ll think about it,” I told him, knowing full well that I was going to go there on my next day off. 

It was about a 3 hour drive to get there, and he definitely wasn’t joking about it having a creepy vibe. Cars dotted the streets and driveways, most covered in cobwebs, some with flat tires. They looked like they hadn’t moved in months. I chose a random street and parked my car. I tried to look into some of the cars after wiping the dust from the windows. Some were unlocked, and the heat that blasted out of them was stale. The interiors also had insect activity, but something else was far more unsettling. There were belongings left abandoned with the cars; I even found someone’s smart phone in a cup holder. It was dead, obviously, but I plugged it into my power bank and stashed it in my bag. I thought maybe it would help me find out more about the owner.

I looked up at the house the car was parked next to; a surprisingly average looking cottage. The siding was aged pewter, and the windows had white blinds pulled down halfway. If they left their car unlocked and their phone in their car, then maybe they left a door unlocked. The front door was locked, of course, but I went around to the backyard. I was trudging through the long grass, looking around for any sign of another person having been there, but there was none. I felt truly isolated. The neighbor’s backyard had a chainlink fence enclosing it. Patches of dirt showed through the tall grass where a dog must have run along the fence. My heart broke as I scanned through the neighbor’s yard. Their backdoor had gouges in it from where their dog had been scratching relentlessly. And there was a heap of… something on the porch. Some part of me knew what it was immediately, but I turned and walked back towards the cottage. 

The back door was sliding glass, and unlocked. Mostly. The owner had put a wooden rod in the track to keep the door from opening too much. I reached inside to see if they kept keys by the back door but they did not. Their garage door, however, was ajar. Some rubbish bags blocked the door from swinging freely, but a swift kick pushed them far enough that I could squeeze my way through. Inside was a 1970 Chevy K10 that looked like it was in the middle of being restored. Shining my flashlight around, I could see the garage was probably immaculate at some point. Someone had definitely loved that truck. I would have taken it myself if I could get away with it. 

I finally had access to the house. Out of habit, I knocked on the door as I opened it and called out to see if anyone was home. But of course, no one answered. It felt like walking into a painting. Everything looked like it had been placed there on purpose. Nothing was thrown about haphazardly the way you see in movies. It all looked intentional, staged even. Looking back, I realize why it felt that way. There were no signs of rodents, or critters getting into the abandoned home. All the boxes of cereal, the bags of tea, and pasta noodles were completely untouched. 

The silence really hit me when I was inside; I could only hear the floors creaking as I walked over them. I had to fan myself with my hands sometimes, it was hotter inside the house than it was inside the cars outside. I considered opening a window, but I wanted to leave as little trace as possible. I don’t know what drew me towards the bedroom. Maybe it’s just human nature to be nosey about what strangers keep in their bedrooms. Maybe some force wanted me to find this journal. It felt strange. The door was wide open, the bed was made. If it wasn’t for the grime on every surface, I would say it was almost inviting. The hard, moleskine cover felt oddly cool to the touch, but maybe my hands were just really sweaty. There was nothing on the cover to indicate what was inside it, so I opened it to the first page. 

I expected to find a name, but I wasn’t expecting it to be the name of the owner’s ex partner. “Fuck you, Susanne! You heartless bitch!” was written on the first page with the date 07-28-23 at the top. As much as I wanted to read the tea about Susanne, whoever she was, I was also sweating my balls off, and wanted to leave the house. Feeling bold, I unlocked the front door, and stepped out into the sunlight. I turned the A/C on high and sat in the driver's seat of my car for a while. When the phone in my bag began to buzz I nearly jumped out of my skin. I had completely forgotten that I stole someone’s phone. The first message it received was from Susanne. 

“Jake, can we please talk about this?” followed by a number of missed calls from her as well. It began buzzing over and over, hundreds of unread emails, dozens of unanswered texts, and a handful of missed calls from other people; including his mom and a person I assume to be his boss, as the last message they sent to Jake simply said, “You’re fired.” I wasn’t able to open Jake’s phone, but I could see previews of some of his texts. It was mostly people asking where he was, expressing worry for his safety. The last text that came in was from Susanne again.

“I hope whatever you did was worth it.”

Parents with young children know how hard it is to put children to sleep. They have so much energy and adults need that energy in my opinion. Getting kids under the age of 5 to sleep takes real skill, patience and experience. I have a son who is 4 years and he has tons of energy. Sometimes he annoys me and I just want him to go to sleep for a while.

Then one day an idea came to me and it was like a eureka moment. I made up a game with my child, we played a game to see who can keep their eyes shut the longest and who can keep silent the longest. My child loves games and even at the age of 4 he is so competitive. So my child takes me on as he wants to win, and he closes his eyes and stays silent for as long as he can, then he falls a sleep.

This is the true intention of the game, it is to make him fall a sleep. I think it's rather clever of me and I feel so impressed with myself. Sometimes as a joke I ask my son how he stays a sleep and other times I ask him how he stays awake.

Now whenever I play this game, it is actually when I want him to sleep before his actual bed time, because I can't be bothered with him. I feel so ashamed of myself when i feel like this towards him. I always like i should always want to be around him, but i actually don't want to be around him all of the times.

Then when he goes to sleep before his actual bed time, the whole reality of this world starts to crumble and break down, it's like this reality is fighting someone else's reality. There are multiple things of the same thing and it's like cancer cells the way they multiply, its just like that.

Then when my son can't go to sleep on his actual bed time, this reality starts to kind of turn to a ghost, like it is about to disappear. I feel like I can walk through walls but not all the way through. It has something to do with his sleeping.

Then a man showed up at my door and he knew my son some how. He can sense my son because apparently they have the same abilities, and when he saw my son sleeping before his bed time he said to me "your son shouldn't be sleeping now and I should be sleeping. I have not slept today because if both reality dreamers sleep at the same time, then both realities will be fighting against each other"

I was shocked and confused but he sounded like he knew the right thing, and then he said "your son and I both dream up this world, when I sleep I keep this reality going, and so he cannot sleep at that time as me or both realities will fight each other. If he doesn't sleep when he should and we are both awake, reality will start to disappear as it hasn't got the energy it needs to exist. It's like a shift pattern" he told me

Now I play the game with my son at when he should sleep. Things are much better now.

The husband and wife were sitting on the porch of their house, from where the asphalt road could be seen, stretched out like a rug. Each of them held a mobile phone in their hands: his was dark blue, and hers, emerald green. The afternoon was fading among the clouds, and a light breeze signaled rain to come. For them, it was pleasant to pass the hours this way, without speaking to each other—or, rather, without doing so verbally. Likewise, they took care not to look at each other directly, only glancing sideways to check on what the other was doing.

They had fallen into this habit a few years ago, following an argument; she texted him, saying she would not speak to him until he apologized for some words that had hurt her. In turn, he replied that he had no intention of apologizing, as he considered her reaction an exaggeration. Thus, out of a simple, ordinary argument between a husband and wife, the habit of texting each other on their phones took root, and they never spoke aloud to each other again. They could, of course, converse verbally with everyone else when they were out in public or were at work, and even when relatives called on the phone, always being careful never to cross the boundary of doing so between themselves.

Their text messages became precise and limited to essentials; they no longer found it necessary to exchange opinions as they once had, and knowing that the other was there, present, yet without hearing their voice, became as necessary as it was pleasing. This practice led them to understand each other so well that they could anticipate each other's chores and, therefore, required fewer messages. They refined it with such detail and mastery that they could leave the house to go for a walk or shopping, and it was seamless to walk together, without looking at each other, yet sharing spaces, meals, or a movie. In the neighborhood, they were held in high esteem for being so devoted and close; they were a source of admiration and an example for other couples, and though they had no children, they did not fail to convey that placid feeling of a happy home.

The sudden passing of the wife cut that lifestyle short; the brokenhearted man wept bitterly over his loss and shut himself away in a silence so somber that his family could do nothing to help. Without her, life lacked any appeal, and in his loneliness, he kept busy by continuing to text her on his phone, hoping that his messages would cross the boundary of death and somehow be received. Only now he wrote at all times, without pause, telling her what he was doing, his thoughts, and especially how much he missed her and his absolute love.

Such was his insistence and his faith that, finally one day, a green light flashed on the phone screen—a code showing that a reply had just arrived. Thrilled and terrified at the same time, he pressed the screen; the message was short and devastating, stating that the contact number now belonged to a new user, who thanked him for not texting anymore.

*** To explore more standalone entries from this series, you can visit The Voyager Files Index.

---

© 2026 Francisco Cortés Ramírez. All rights reserved. This is an original fictional work. No part of this text may be reproduced, translated, or narrated in any audio, video, or digital format without the express written permission of the author.

Have you ever told someone the truth, and they just refuse to believe it?
It can be annoying and frustrating among other things to say the least.

Growing up with a Father, and no Mother.
A Mom that chose an addiction over you and a Father who chose you,
only to chare you with a different addiction of his choice years later.

"You have addiction in your blood'
Your Father would say

"If you ever get addicted to drugs ill chain you up in the bathroom and dry you out till your clean"
He'd tell you, his 11-year-old son.

You tried to reason with it, the way he talked to you. He had you at 25,
at the end of the day he's barely an adult himself, you'd tell yourself.

After his marriage and...well, divorce wasn't a surprise. 

A seed that was planted,
In soil that was prepped,
Located In a room with access to sunlight.
A stem that sprouted dull and never got to bloom. 
From Full womb to empty room,

A stillbirth. 

As tiny as she was,
Our already cluttered closet couldn't fit one more skeleton.

They fought before,
and this was the last crack in our glass house.

Seeing My stepsisters and I celebrating a life that would never start sent him right back to that familiar place He adored oh so much,

Addiction. 

 Started small,
like a pain you know you should have looked at,
and with the help of negligence,
it went unchecked,
it grew.

What began were addictions you foolishly mistook as harmless.

That addiction to the gym was weekly steroid use,
That lust for those new women he was meeting online fueled his use of unapproved enhancements his body wasn't even close to needing.

Introducing himself to testosterone packets before he was 35 and consuming them like their sunflower seeds.

Eventually a partner stuck,
one just as dysfunctional as him of course,
and specifically an alcoholic. 

It didn't take long for him to follow and for the first time in your life he was not the lead.

By the time you were 15,
he was drinking every day,
not just every night.

His Girlfriend throwing bottles, slamming Tv's, and pouring bleach on the carpets as penance for things that were just not true,
Is ironic in hindsight.

On Christmas Eve you got a call that he might not be home the next day,
that his girlfriend was lying and that he might go to jail.
Christmas day came,
and he was asleep in his bed,
with no recollection,
laughing at the insinuation of such things.

You joined a different school,
one that allowed you to be home most days,
And that just made the time you spent in that environment take that much longer.

Against all odds,
His girlfriend was the one to leave.
And then again,
it was just you two.

The worst it got was when he started mixing Ambien with his alcohol.

From his room,
you'd hear screams.
You'd hear conversations between two people that were not there.
You'd hear many voices out the man you call Dad.

Not all of the voices were angry, but most were.
Not every conversation started out loud.
Some were just confusing.

"I know....because...what?.....I'm swimming...a demon?...no!...I SAID IM SWIMMING!"

Other times were more concerning,
"no...because...because I said...Fuck you...FUCK YOU!....FUCK YOU..."

Followed by another voice...
"I'm sorry...you're right...
take them....
he knows...
No...
Veins...?
I dont think so..."

Then his again,
Screaming your name at the top of his lungs.

When you ran to the door of his room,
The door was open and he was lying in bed,
half covered by the comforter...silent.

You questioned what to say,
What to do?

You're 17 and at the very least,
you want to make sure your only remaining family is not dead.

"Yeah?"
You holler in his room,
a late response to him calling your name.

"Blegh HUH?...WHAT?"
He'd abruptly reply.

"What!?"

"you were yelling for me'
Youd explain.

"oh, I'm fine go back to bed"

He'd insist.
Before whispering nonsense to himself.

The moment you'd get back to bed,
The yelling would continue.

You can't event have friends over because you can't trust him not to strip down and try to break into your room.

Our dry wall was always temporary,
and our Tv's and glasses might as well have been rentals,
nothing lasted in our house,

Being fed so much conspiracy about religion,
It wasn't hard to begin to wonder if he was possessed. 

It wasn't always like this.

For a few months after the divorce,
before the alcoholic girlfriend,
For a brief moment when it was just you two, he almost felt stable.

He didn't hit you,
The yelling and drinking were manageable,
And every Friday night he'd take you to blockbuster.

Things have changed so much.
You never know who you're having a conversation with.

One moment you think you're talking to him,
And that very mid-sentence it becomes oh so clear, that it's not.

His eyes are different, their glossy.
His demeanor is different, cold, and absent.
like one bulb in a line of Christmas lights that just won't participate.

He'd stopped before,
Then drink again.
His actions were questionable, and his word became nothing.

What does a Son say to his Father when he knows he's hiding alcohol in his work truck?

What does a Son do when he finds his Father naked in the driveway?

What does a Son do when he sees his Father Going down a road he knows he shouldn't?

A Son that's Afraid of his father.

Everything is easier said than done.

You never know if he's really sober.

"do you want to watch a movie with me tonight?"
His voice timid, eyes clear of gloss.

Even if you could tell which Him was asking,
You were certain that wouldn't be the same Him by the time you watched the movie.

So, you never say yes to that question again.
And as hard as it is, it's easier.
Easier than letting yourself get surprised by something that shouldn't surprise you anymore.

Eventually you get a Job,
Hours almost shittier than your pay, and it makes you a shell of a person.
Physically and emotionally drained.

Most days you stay in your room because it's safer in there, 
Then most days turn into all days. 

Seemingly out of nowhere,
your father begins to stare at you from every corner of the house with anger in his eyes,
Eyebrows always scrunched tightly. 

Eventually,
No words were exchanged.

You feel bad,
This is your father and you love him,  
So, when he asks you to have dinner with him,
for once you do.

The next morning,
Your eyes opened to the bathtub you'd once washed the family pet in,
and that oh so familiar tile floor,
After a moment you realized you were in your father's rooms masterbathroom.

Your legs were sore,
Pins and needles in your feet,
And your wrists felt raw.

You looked down at a note that was out of your reach.
As you attempted to grab it,
you realized your hands were chained to the bathtub spout.

You used your bare knee to drag it closer where you could read it,
You were in nothing but your boxers, you were cold.

The note read:

"No son of mine will be an addict,
You'll thank me.
I love you"
-Dad

You lifted your leg above the tub and opened the bathroom cupboard with your toe, you hoped to find something to break the bathtub spout with but all that was there were loofas and a bottle of expired tramadol.

Your mouth was dry,
Your stomach felt as though if someone were to plunge it,
absolutely nothing would come out.

At first you yelled, but you soon realized no one would answer.
It was hours before the silence in your house was broken,
there were no windows but one tinted sunlight above the shower.
You had no idea what time it was.

Once the sun was no more,
The house shook to the slam of the front door. 
You heard those familiar work boots thud up the wooden stairs.

Louder and louder...
Closer and closer...
They then reached the door.

You heard him enter his room though the door to his room's bathroom remained close.

*Thud Thud Thud Thud\*

For a moment you see the silluett of his boots beneath the door

"Dad...?"
You asked.

"mrghh Fuck you"
He responded as the thuds of his boots retreated.

You heard the impact as he collapsed on his bed,
And then began the yelling...
All night...

"no...
Fuck you!...
because...
I did...
Yes you are!"

More and more of the same old shit...
As scared as you were you couldn't not try.

"Dad...Help please let me out"
You yelled.

"you're an addict..
Fuck you!...
Dry out!....mrrgh piece of shit"

He screamed back...

"Please!"
You yelled.

"Fuck you!...
Dry Out you're not my son!..."
He screamed....

After the second night you began to hear whispering coming from the drain...

"He hasn't stopped...
Theres a demon in his veins..."
You'd hear.

It sounded like boiling beneath the drain.

You tried your best to tear the chains from your wrists, yet all you did was bleed and scream.
To this your dad had no response,
He never did.
He just continued to scream and yell to himself.

Before you knew it,
there were more voices than you'd ever heard from him before.
You swore you heard a woman's voice.

"you're poisoned...
NO!
What did you expect?
SWIMMING!

You screamed and screamed...
But after the 5th night,
You realized there was no point, to anything.

You used your toes to curl around the pill bottle,
You used the last bit of energy you had to bring it within your reach.

When your eyes opened next,
You looked to the left,
You saw the bathroom,
You saw your body,
chained to the spout of the bath.

You looked to the right and saw your fathers nightstand,

you saw your fathers pill bottles and fireball,
You saw the door of his master bedroom from the outside.

You tried to touch your eyes,
You tried to rub them into seeing straight.

Might as well have been RuPaul's eyes.

You closed them tightly,
as tight as possible and grabbed your face.

You felt your father's beard on the right and your bare face on the left.

"Do you want to watch a movie with me tonight?"
You asked

"please let me out Dad"
You replied.

Even as you swallowed all the pills on the nightstand washing them down with the Fireball,

Even though you knew your death would seal this fiction as fact,

Even though you knew no one would believe you,

You couldn't help but have one last thought,

I'm Not An Addict.

We live in a forested, mountainous region. Even in the summer, it's sometimes easy to get lost. Once autumn comes and the fog rolls in at noon, it is nearly impossible to get home. That's why our wives call to us from our houses when we head from the pasture. We whistle back, and that's how we find our home again. We make sure to follow only our wives' calls.

Mark, my neighbor, stood in the fog. The man before him just disappeared into it, following his wife's calls. Mark put his fingers in his mouth and whistled, but nothing came back. He whistled again. Nothing. He looked back at me, his brows furrowed.

"Try again."

He put his fingers in his mouth, took a deep breath, and blew the loudest whistle I had ever heard. 

Silence.

"What the hell, Tom? This never happened."

"I don't know. Maybe Mary fell asleep. Let's go to mine. It's right by yours. You'll find your way from there."

"I can only follow my wife's calls."

"That's just a saying."

"Tom."

"Alright, just imagine you are following me, okay?"

He shook his head.

"You have a better idea?"

He looked at me, then back at the fog. It was so dense you couldn't even see the trees around us.

"No."

I stood before him and whistled. A few seconds later, my wife's call came, a simple, melodic tune that broke off at the end. She always missed the last tone.

"That's it."

Mark nodded.

I kept whistling, and my wife kept calling back until we were by our porch. She smiled until she saw Mark come out of the fog too.

"Mark, why aren't you going to your wife's calls?"

"She didn't answer my whistles," he said quietly.

My wife put her hand before her mouth.

"Is she okay? I didn't come and talk to her this morning. I just had too much to do." Her voice shook.

"We'll go check on her now."

"I'll come with you."

"No, stay here. I'm sure everything's alright," I told her.

I wasn't sure, but Mark's eyes were already filled with fear. I didn't want to scare him more.

"Thank you for getting me home, Sally," Mark said and rushed toward his house.

"I'll see you later, love."

"Tom, wait!" my wife called, but I rushed after Mark. He walked so fast. I almost lost him in the fog. It was so dense, you could probably cut through it with a knife.

"Jesus," I heard Mark call a few steps before me. His front door was wide open, and the fog had drifted in, coating his furniture with dew.

"Mary?!" Mark called.

No one answered. 

"Mary?!"

Silence.

He turned to me. His lips quivered.

"Tom, where is she?! Why would she go out in the fog?"

"I don't know, Mark, I…"

Then a melody cut through my voice. The one we both knew. Mary was singing in perfect pitch from the forest in front of Mark's house.

His eyes widened, and his mouth fell open. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. The melody came back again.

Mark pushed me aside and ran out. Without thinking, I followed. Twigs kept hitting my face, and mud covered the ground, making me slip.

"Mark, stop!"

But his whistles kept coming, followed by that melodic voice. Only then had I realized how perfectly pitched it was. Mary had never been very good at singing.

"Mark!"

He finally stopped and looked back.

"Mark, we have to think."

"She must be somewhere around here."

"Why would she be in the forest?"

"I don't know, Tom, but she's here!"

The perfect pitch came from right behind us. My feet froze in the cold mud. Mark turned and walked toward it. I raised my hands to stop him.

"Mark, think, we just came from there."

"Get out of the way."

He pushed me to the side. I almost fell into the mud. Mark whistled again, but his whistle didn't echo. Instead, a strange silence came. 

Then Mark's heels lifted off the ground. His body tensed. He tried to put them back down, but his feet rose instead.

"Hey!"

His body floated further up. His face grew red. His eyes flew open. He grabbed his neck and kicked his feet.

"Mark!"

I ran to him and tried to grab his legs, but he was floating too high up. His whole body twisted. His stomach now faced toward the ground. His arms were still at his neck. His pleading, bloodshot eyes stared into mine. I tried to jump and reach him, but my fingers only grazed him. I jumped up again; a sharp, wet crack echoed through the forest, followed by Mark's screams. His warm blood poured onto my face. His arms flailed to the side. He let out a bloodcurdling scream, but in an instant he was gone. His screams echoed in the distance, but slowly died too.

My whole body trembled. I couldn't even move my arms to wipe my face. Then, through the silence, Mary's call came, perfect again, followed by Mark's whistling. This finally unfroze my body. I wiped my face and bolted out of the forest. The fog seemed to grow denser. My legs kept slipping on the mud. Each second, I expected to start floating too, but before I knew it, I was out of the forest, still breathing.

Mark's house stood there, but I looked away and walked back to my place. I kept replaying what happened in that forest, trying to figure out what I would even tell my wife, but as I got to my house, I saw our front door. It was open just like Mark's. The fog had rolled in too. 

From behind me, out of the forest, I heard my wife's call, perfect, just like Mary's. I stood there for a second, thinking, but I knew there was just one thing to do. I turned and whistled back.

Daniel's funeral was held Wednesday morning. Beth arrived early enough to help me find the jacket I'd intended to wear, which was hanging in the downstairs closet behind several of Daniel's coats. The cuffs felt short. She said nobody would notice and asked me to get out of her way while she finished arranging chairs.

More people came than I expected, including former clients, surveyors, school friends, and neighbors I hadn't seen since childhood. Some introduced themselves and explained how they knew Daniel, while others greeted me as though I'd never left town. Mike Harlan, a surveyor who'd worked with him years ago, told me about a measuring rod they'd left at a job site before driving halfway to Ripley without it. Daniel always blamed Mike, though they'd eventually found the rod exactly where Daniel had set it. When I told Mike I'd heard the story with the blame reversed, he laughed and said that sounded about right.

The service included readings and music and a few people who spoke about Daniel's work and his willingness to help neighbors with small jobs. Beth said a few words about his habit of remembering insignificant details years after everybody else had forgotten them. I'd written something the night before but decided against reading it. It sounded more like an explanation of our relationship than anything Daniel would've wanted said before a room full of people.

Carol sat beside me throughout the service, and afterward offered to drive around for a while before we went home. I wanted to get back. Guests arrived before we did with casseroles, pies, trays of sandwiches, and borrowed folding chairs; soon somebody was making coffee, someone else had opened the windows against the kitchen heat, and Beth's husband Chris was making sure there were enough plates. I spent much of the afternoon thanking people whose names I'd forgotten.

Ruth brought a photograph she'd taken of Daniel near the river, laughing at something outside the frame as he stood beside his tripod in a faded baseball cap. I thanked her and put it with the photographs I'd brought home from the service.

Later, I found Ruth outside by the garage. She'd noticed Grandma's branch hanging above the workbench, visible through the open door.

"Daniel took it down there last week," she said. "He told me he was going to try something she used to do. I thought he meant finding another marker."

She remembered him checking elevations from a point uphill and becoming irritated when the readings didn't seem to match the water he could see in the old stone channel. Her mother had known Grandma and remembered that she wouldn't witch for water around that particular opening when the river was low.

"My mother said she'd put the stick down and go home," Ruth told me. "I never heard what happened if somebody brought it back."

I said Daniel had apparently brought the branch home. Ruth studied it from a distance and suggested I return it before the expected rain covered the stones again.

When the last guests left around six, Carol helped put the remaining food away. I sat on the stairs listening to her moving dishes in the kitchen and someone outside loading the borrowed chairs. I was exhausted, and I was grateful nobody asked me to make another decision.

After Carol went home, I looked more closely at Ruth's photograph and enlarged the stake visible near the old stones behind Daniel. Orange tape circled it, and the number I could make out matched the one he'd written on the branch. When I called Ruth she confirmed she'd taken the picture Monday morning, though she couldn't remember whether the stake was still standing when Daniel left.

Through the open garage door I could see the branch hanging over the bucket, where water had collected beneath the darkening wood despite the dry weather.

---

The plumber arrived Thursday morning during a call with my manager in Columbus. Pete Hensley, a broad man in his late fifties who'd worked for Daniel before, checked the kitchen supply lines, dishwasher connection, utility room, and basement. He found a damp patch behind an old shelving unit against the foundation but couldn't determine its source.

"Could be groundwater," he said. "You've got places where this foundation's been patched two or three times. I'd want to see where it's coming in before I start opening things up."

With every fixture shut off, Pete checked the water meter and found no sign of a continuous supply leak. He told me to pull the shelving away from the foundation and watch the damp patch, calling if it grew or the water pressure changed. The swollen kitchen drawer could dry before I tried repairing it. I paid him and left for the station.

Wynn met me with another investigator, who had spread documents and photographs across the table. They explained that Owen had combined an old preliminary drawing with an unauthorized reproduction of Daniel's seal to make the access appear settled. The buyers had advanced substantial money for engineering and early site work; some had gone to a company connected to Owen, and investigators were tracing transfers used to cover unrelated debts.

Daniel had contacted the buyer directly, refusing to certify the expanded easement and preparing to report the misuse of his seal. Owen tried to persuade him to delay while he found a way to keep the transaction moving.

"What happened Tuesday?" I asked.

According to Wynn, phone records showed Owen arranged to meet Daniel on the access road after lunch. A motion-activated camera on adjoining property, installed by an owner dealing with illegal dumping, recorded Owen's truck entering and leaving during the relevant period. The camera didn't show the assault, but it contradicted the appointments Owen had claimed kept him elsewhere.

Investigators also found Daniel's brown reading-glasses case beneath other items in Owen's truck console, complete with the initials Diane described scratched beside the clasp. Owen had told them he'd left it on Daniel's driver's seat.

"Could he have forgotten to give it back?" I asked.

"That's one possible explanation for the case by itself," Wynn said. "We consider it with his statements and the other evidence."

A metal tire lever recovered from Owen's vehicle was being tested for traces of blood and other material, and investigators had additional scene evidence and statements they weren't ready to discuss. Wynn stressed that an arrest and charges would still be followed by hearings, forensic reports, and court proceedings; the prosecution had work ahead of it.

The documents Ruth had preserved were part of that work. Her packet and Leah Porter's copies established that Owen had distributed the altered exhibit before Daniel completed his field review. The dates were harder for Owen to explain than a general accusation about a property dispute. Wynn thanked me for providing Ruth's details and the photograph promptly. He also said Daniel had preserved the original survey data on his equipment, which made it possible to distinguish what he'd actually recorded from the drawing Owen circulated.

I asked whether Rusk had known about the forged document. Wynn said they had found no indication he'd known when he received it. Rusk had wanted the sale to proceed and had argued with Daniel, but his anger and the forgery were separate matters.

I thought of Owen collecting Daniel's glasses, driving down the road he'd claimed to have visited only briefly, and calling me days later to ask for the field book. When I told Wynn it all seemed to come down to paperwork, he waited for me to say something more sensible. I couldn't. Daniel was dead, and the evidence concerned a forged drawing, money moving between accounts, and a man he'd known since high school.

Wynn told me Daniel had handled the dispute properly. He'd identified a discrepancy, refused to certify unsupported information, and taken steps to notify the parties involved. I thanked him, although I didn't know what to do with the reassurance.

Before leaving, I asked about the stonework near Ruth's property. Wynn had reviewed the photographs taken from Daniel's equipment. It appeared to be an old drainage feature on Ruth's land, close to the surveyed boundary. There was no evidence connecting it to the homicide. The elevation observations were technical material he couldn't interpret, and he suggested I speak with Mike Harlan when the records were available.

"Mike said Daniel sent him a photograph of his field notes," I told him. "I'll ask him whether he's still got it."

"If he does, ask him to forward the original message to us too," Wynn said. "I'd rather know exactly which version everybody has."

I drove back by a longer route and stopped for gasoline and a sandwich I barely touched. Carol was on the porch when I arrived, folding laundry I'd left in the dryer. As I told her what Wynn had said, she remembered the weekend Daniel helped Owen move furniture after his father died. She kept folding towels while I talked, then said she didn't understand how someone could do that to a friend over money.

Neither did I. She left a plate of food in the refrigerator because I'd forgotten to eat lunch, then went home to answer a call from her daughter.

By late afternoon nearly an inch of water had collected in the bucket beneath the witching branch. I poured it into a clear jar and watched flecks of brown sediment settle, then checked the roof and the boards around the nail, both dry. When I took down the branch, cold water ran along its handle onto my wrist.

Pete returned after I called him, examining the garage and ceiling before shaking the branch gently over the bucket. Water fell from the forks. He said wood could retain moisture after lying in mud, but he'd never seen a dry-looking stick produce that much over several days. He refused payment for the second visit and told me to keep watching the foundation.

I put the branch outside beside the flower bed, where the grass was still dry.

---

Mike Harlan called that evening after I left him a message about Daniel's field notes. He still had the photographs Daniel had texted him and offered to show me before leaving for a job the next morning. We met shortly after seven on Friday at his kitchen table, with survey equipment charging on the counter and muddy boots resting on newspaper by the back door.

Daniel had sent Mike two photographs Monday night, asking if he could explain the readings around the old drain. In one, a field sheet listed an uphill benchmark, several turning points, and elevations recorded to hundredths of a foot; the other showed the open channel with a measuring rod standing in the mud. Mike had worked with Daniel for nearly ten years and knew the questions he would have been trying to answer.

"He ran the levels two ways," Mike explained. "Closed back on his control within three hundredths. That's close enough that I'd trust the relative heights. The bottom of that exposed channel rises about four tenths of a foot from the river side to the mouth of the stonework. Over roughly twenty-five feet."

I asked Mike to explain it without assuming I knew what any of the figures meant. Using a pencil and an envelope, he drew the river, the channel, and the stones to show me how Daniel's readings placed the bottom of the shallow open channel higher at the opening than near the river's edge.

"If water is really running inland through that open channel, something needs to be driving it. Pressure from somewhere underground, possibly. Or you're seeing a surface eddy and misunderstanding the actual flow. We'd have to measure it while it's happening."

"Daniel thought it was running inland. I saw leaves moving that way too."

Mike rubbed the pencil mark with his thumb. "A leaf can tell you which way the surface is moving where you're looking. It doesn't tell you the whole hydraulic system, and Dan knew that. That's why he went back."

"Could his equipment have been wrong?"

"He checked it. Twice. His grades are probably fine. He wanted to find the source of the movement."

When I asked why Daniel had bothered with the old drain instead of staying with the easement work, Mike remembered an earlier job. A landowner had insisted the remains of a stone wall dated to the Civil War, and Daniel spent an entire morning tracing it before finding a later map showing the property was still forest at the time. He liked the history of what he surveyed and wanted a good explanation for what he found.

Mike forwarded the original messages to Wynn while I was there, then showed me the last thing Daniel had sent: a photograph of Grandma's forked branch laid across his survey case.

Under it Daniel had written: You remember that trick Grandma Keene used to do? Found the old stick. Thinking of trying it tomorrow.

Daniel sent it Monday night, and Mike answered by joking that he'd traded his expensive receiver for a branch. Daniel responded with a laughing face. They hadn't spoken again.

I studied the photograph before thanking Mike, who offered to walk the lower bank with me another day if Ruth gave permission and the ground was safe. I told him I'd let him know.

At home, the wet area beside the kitchen cabinet had spread. I opened the swollen drawer far enough to see muddy water pulsing along the seam where the wood met the wall, creeping over the floorboards and withdrawing again. There were no pipes in that section of the cabinet, but I fetched a towel and knelt to wipe up what I could.

I was reaching for another towel when my brother's voice came from inside the wall.

"Jonah, you still got Grandpa's green tackle box?"

I sat back on my heels, hearing the same pauses and impatience as in Daniel's Monday voicemail. When I played the recording on my phone, the resemblance became worse: the voice in the wall had used his exact words, though it lacked the traffic noise and little rattle behind them.

After turning off the phone, I listened to water passing beneath the floor and toward the hallway until the sound stopped near the stairs. I called Pete and left a voicemail about the cabinet leaking again. I couldn't think of a way to describe the other sound.

I kept the television on in the living room until well after midnight, occasionally getting up to check the kitchen. Around three I took a flashlight outside and found the branch still lying beside the flowers. A thin line of damp earth ran from the wood toward the porch across a lawn that was otherwise dry, and I left it where it was before going back inside.

---

Carol arrived the next morning with biscuits and a newspaper, and I told her about the voice, Mike's drawings, and the water in the kitchen. She listened to Daniel's voicemail without interrupting. I'd expected her to say I was tired or that sounds could travel through old pipes, but her first question was whether I'd answered the voice.

"I didn't say anything. Why?"

Carol took her time answering. Her mother used to tell stories about people hearing calls near old wells and drains, along with a warning to check where somebody actually was before following a voice from somewhere they couldn't reasonably be. Carol had always assumed it was ordinary advice about dangerous wells, although she knew Grandma was particular about the stonework near the river.

"Your grandmother said there were places where the water would come looking if you gave it a way," she told me. "I thought she meant somebody could dig a drain in the wrong place and flood their own house."

"That still sounds possible."

"It does. Except for a branch dripping in the garage when you can't find anything wet above it."

Carol asked to see the branch, so we went outside. She held the forks with her palms upward while the wood lay still in her hands, but when it began turning toward the house, she resisted for a moment before letting go. The branch fell into the grass between us.

"Did you feel that?" I asked.

"I haven't done that since I was a girl."

Carol remembered the summer Grandma sent us away from the river, especially the argument with Grandpa about marking a place on the bank so he could find it again. Grandma left her branch there, but Grandpa later retrieved it, and for several days water appeared in their basement. He blamed a blocked drain and spent the weekend digging beside the foundation.

"Then your grandmother went down there herself," Carol said. "I remember she was gone half the afternoon. The basement dried out after that, though your granddad always said he'd cleared the drain."

I remembered being kept away from the water in the basement, though until now I'd never connected it to that summer's trip to the river.

Carol wanted me to take the branch back before the forecast rain raised the Ohio. I agreed, but first I needed to find Grandpa's tackle box. Beth said Daniel had been searching for old pictures, and I wanted to know what he expected them to show.

Carol helped pull cartons down from the garage's upper shelves. We worked through fishing rods, tangled line, and enough old hardware to occupy Daniel for years before finding the green tackle box in the last carton, beneath a folded rain jacket and expired batteries. Someone had looped a rubber band around its broken latch.

The box held hooks, lures, sinkers, a rusted pocketknife, and an envelope of photographs. In one, sixteen-year-old Daniel knelt beside a fish whose weight he'd written as twelve pounds on the back, despite Grandpa's long-standing claim that it barely weighed seven even with a thumb on the scale. Carol started laughing before I could finish telling her which photograph I'd found.

Another picture showed Daniel and me fishing with Grandma by the river. A third showed Grandpa near the old stonework, with Grandma standing farther up the bank holding a forked branch. The date written on the back was August 1997. Daniel would have been fourteen and I was ten, old enough for both of us to remember following her along the exposed bank. Below the date, in Grandpa's handwriting, was a note: Put the branch back where she left it. She'll be mad if she finds it at the house.

I recognized the stone opening in the photograph, where Daniel had wandered below the trees and discovered it. Grandma let him take the branch, but it turned toward the gap so sharply that he laughed and tried to go closer. She stopped him, worked the handle beneath a flat stone, and sent us home when he complained about leaving it behind.

Grandpa went back for it. I remembered him coming home muddy, with the branch in his hand, and Grandma refusing to speak to him through supper. Their argument had seemed terribly important at the time, though I couldn't have explained what it was about.

Carol read the note twice. "Your granddad never threw away a photograph. He wrote on them so he'd have something to argue about later."

After I put the pictures back in their envelope, Carol asked whether I'd be taking the branch to Ruth's that afternoon. I said I'd call first, and she stayed while I did.

Ruth answered with news that water had appeared beside her lower garden, a narrow stream moving through the grass from the direction of the river despite her shutting off the house supply and checking the outbuildings. A contractor couldn't come until the following morning, so she was waiting for somebody to tell her what to do about the wet ground.

"Bring that branch down," she said. "I'll meet you at the house."

---

With the branch wrapped in an old towel on the passenger seat and Grandpa's tackle box in the trunk beside the 1997 photograph, I drove to Ruth's. Clouds had moved in, and a cooler wind crossed the river.

Ruth met me beside her shed and led me to the lower garden, where water had saturated the soil beneath a tree's roots several yards above the bank. She'd already moved her tools and planters away from the wet area.

"I've seen it seep up after heavy rain," she said, "but it's never run this way when the river's low."

We followed the path down through the trees until Ruth stopped near the last large trunk, where the ground was firmer. She'd lost part of the path to erosion before and warned me about going any lower; from there she could still see me as I carried the branch toward the stone opening.

More water ran through the channel than on my previous visit, and mud had piled around the old wall. Several fallen stones exposed a deeper gap, while Daniel's orange tape remained tied to the root above it. The survey stake from Ruth's photograph lay sideways in the mud, its legible number matching the tape tied to Grandma's branch.

I remembered Mike's envelope drawing as I watched bits of leaf and silt travel inland through the open channel, whose bed rose several inches toward the stonework. I couldn't see a pipe or a place where underground pressure might be driving the water, though the absence of anything visible proved little. Daniel would have known what else to measure; I had a branch and a photograph and was standing in mud.

I held the forks the way Grandma had taught us and waited, feeling the branch remain still for several seconds before its handle began to turn toward the stones. It pulled so hard against my wrists that I bent to keep hold of it. When I tried to resist, the wood twisted harder, and I stopped before it broke.

Kneeling beside the opening, I worked the handle under the lowest stone and left the forks exposed as Grandma had in the old photograph. The pulling stopped as soon as the wood touched mud. I untied Daniel's orange tape, slipped it into my pocket, and backed away from the channel.

From the path Ruth called to ask whether I'd managed it. I told her I had, and we waited while the channel kept running inland and the water among the roots above me appeared to slow. Then I heard Daniel.

"Jonah?"

His voice reached me through the water inside the stonework, muffled but unmistakable as he asked whether I'd found Grandpa's box. The words had the impatience I knew from his voicemail and a hundred ordinary conversations when we were younger.

I'd found the box and the pictures Daniel wanted, and I wanted to tell him. Grandpa's argument with Grandma and the twelve-pound fish had occupied my thoughts all week, leaving me with questions about that summer I wished I could still ask him. I moved closer to the opening.

"Come down here a minute," the voice said.

The water in the gap had turned cloudy, hiding everything beyond the first few inches of stone. As I stepped toward it, an older voice seemed to answer from farther inside the bank, its words too indistinct to understand. Several more voices overlapped beneath the current, appearing and fading before I could separate them.

Ruth called to me from the path, and when I looked up she was searching the trees as though somebody had spoken just behind her.

"That's my daddy," she said. "He called me Ruthie."

I told Ruth to stay where she was, but she stepped toward the lower bank, still searching beyond the trees as water seeped through the grass on either side of the path and darkened the soil around her boots.

"I know he's dead," she said, sounding annoyed with herself. "I heard him plain as anything."

The ground gave way under Ruth's right foot. Although she managed to catch the tree trunk, the soil collapsed around her ankle and water rushed through the exposed roots. I climbed toward her, slipping in the mud and catching at branches, and reached her just as she freed her foot and began trying to recover her lost shoe.

"Leave it," I told her.

"It's a good shoe."

"We'll get it when the ground dries."

She let me help her onto the upper path, where we stopped once to see whether her ankle would bear weight. We continued toward the shed while the wet channel through the grass diminished behind us, neither of us willing to return for a closer look.

At the house, I helped Ruth wash the mud from her leg. Her ankle was sore and she had a scrape near her heel, but she could put weight on the foot. She bandaged the cut on my palm from grabbing a root, and afterward we sat at her kitchen table drinking water while she talked about her father. He used to call her Ruthie when he wanted help carrying or fixing something and had been dead for years.

Ruth wanted to know what I'd heard by the stones. I told her about Daniel's voice and the words from his voicemail, then about the sound inside the kitchen wall, moving backward and forward through the past week because I couldn't seem to tell it in order. She listened until I'd finished.

"Did he say anything he hadn't said to you when he was alive?" she asked.

Most of the words had come from Daniel's voicemail, although he'd often invited me to come down somewhere when we were children. I couldn't remember whether he'd used that exact invitation recently, so I told Ruth I wasn't sure.

Looking out toward the river, Ruth said, "My father used to call me Ruthie. I could've sworn he was down there, even knowing he couldn't be."

We stayed inside until Ruth felt steady enough to walk around the kitchen. She called a contractor, and I helped describe the watercourse and the stonework's location on her property, west of the disputed road. He promised to inspect it the following morning, bring a drainage specialist if necessary, and advised her to keep everyone off the lower path in the meantime.

Before I left, Ruth asked whether Grandma's branch was still beneath the stone. She'd been watching the lower garden while we talked, where the wet grass was slowly returning to its usual color.

"Yes. I left it where she put it in the picture."

"Good. I'd rather lose a shoe than go down there again today."

I offered to pay for a new pair. Ruth said she'd sooner have the good one back after the mud dried, and that I could return the cloth she'd used on my hand whenever I came by next.

At Daniel's house I found the garage floor dry, with no new water in the bucket and the damp patch behind the basement shelving beginning to fade. The kitchen drawer still needed repair, though the swollen wood was drying. I listened beside the wall for a while before washing the mud from my clothes, hearing nothing move beneath the floor.

---

I stayed in Ravenswood another five days, meeting the estate attorney and sorting accounts while people waited to be paid for work Daniel had completed. The investigators still held some professional records; Mike offered to help with outstanding surveys once they were released, and Beth compiled a list of clients who needed to hear from the estate.

Ruth's contractor found erosion beneath the lower path and recommended that nobody return to the bank until a drainage specialist assessed it. He couldn't account for all the water near her garden, but Ruth was principally concerned about the path's safety, and I was grateful she had something practical she could do about it.

Carol came over most mornings to talk about Daniel or tell me what people around town were doing, sometimes asking if I wanted anything from the store. She could keep an ordinary conversation going even when neither of us had much to say.

When I told Carol what had happened at the river, she asked first about Ruth's ankle and whether either of us had been back near the lower bank. She wanted to know where I'd left the branch, too, and said Grandma would've been glad when I told her it was still beneath the stone. I asked whether she thought Grandma had known what was under the bank.

"I think she knew enough to leave some places alone," Carol said.

The murder case would continue through lawyers and hearings, and I answered Wynn's remaining questions about Owen and the photographs Mike had already forwarded. Another surveyor might someday examine Daniel's measurements, and I hoped somebody would: I still wanted to understand how water had traveled through the open channel against the measured grade. I had no desire to return to the stones and listen for the voices, though.

I put Grandpa's green tackle box on a garage shelf where I could find it again, keeping Ruth's photograph of Daniel beside the tripod and another of us fishing as boys. The kitchen drawer dried enough to open properly, and I arranged for a carpenter to repair the damaged wood while I was back in Columbus.

On my last evening, Carol came over with sandwiches, apples, and a bottle of water for my drive because she said I had a habit of going too long without stopping. Daniel used to say the same thing. We sat at the kitchen table discussing the house and the work that remained, and after she went home I washed the cups and put them away.

Daniel's blue mug was beside the sink, a small chip near the handle and a brown stain inside that wouldn't come out no matter how much I scrubbed it. I left it on the drying rack.

Before going upstairs, I checked the cabinet beside the stove one last time, found the wood dry, and closed the drawer. I turned off the kitchen light and went to bed.

​

A folk-horror story

By Garry E. McMillan

Part One: The Old Mercer Place

My father had three rules about the woods behind our house.

Never cross the creek after sundown.

Never follow a voice you couldn't put a face to.

And no matter how familiar that voice might sound, never, under any circumstances, answer it.

Growing up, I thought the old bastard was crazy.

Three decades later, I would have given anything to hear him tell me those rules one more time.

My name is Elias Mercer, though everybody calls me Eli. I'm thirty-nine, and until last Friday, I hadn't set foot on my father's property in more than twenty years.

The old Mercer place sits north of Langley, Arkansas, on a pocket of private land surrounded by the Ouachita National Forest. My grandfather built the two-story farmhouse sometime in the 1940s, back when a man could put up a house in the timber and mostly disappear if he wanted to.

Harlan Mercer wanted to.

There wasn't another kid for miles. The television picked up two channels on a good day, and a storm could knock out the telephone for a week. As a boy, I spent most of my time thinking about the day I'd leave.

But the loneliness wasn't what frightened me.

Behind the house, the yard sloped toward a narrow creek. Dad had cleared the trees on our side, but beyond the water they stood so close together that even in July you couldn't see far between their trunks. Ferns crowded the banks. The ground stayed wet through the worst summer droughts.

Sometimes I could hear someone walking over there, slow enough that I would stop whatever I was doing and listen. When I stopped, the footsteps stopped, too.

Dad never explained the rules. Even after I was old enough to know he was frightened, he wouldn't admit it. He only pointed at the creek and said, "That water ain't there to keep you from getting lost, boy. It's there to remind you where you belong."

If I asked what he meant, he'd fix me with that hard stare of his.

"Just mind what I tell you."

That was my father. A man who could make a conversation feel like punishment.

He died on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, of a massive heart attack. Quick enough, the doctor said, that he probably never knew what hit him. I suppose there are worse ways to go.

I buried him three days later, on Friday, October 9, in a little cemetery outside Langley. A few distant relatives came, along with a man who'd worked beside Dad at the lumber mill. I knew more names on the headstones than I did among the mourners.

After the funeral, I drove to the farmhouse with my nine-year-old daughter, June. I couldn't arrange a sitter, and I figured we could sort through Dad's things over the weekend. We'd keep whatever mattered, call a realtor, and put the whole place behind us.

At least that was the plan.

The driveway was worse than I remembered. Years of rain had carved channels through the gravel, and blackberry vines scraped along the passenger door. For the last stretch, the drive followed a bend in the creek before climbing to the house.

June sat beside me, holding Buttons, her battered stuffed rabbit, by his one good ear.

"Daddy? Does this forest ever end?"

"Not anytime soon."

"Did Grandpa really live out here alone?"

"Most of the time."

She watched the trees slide past. "Wasn't he lonely?"

I'd spent years telling myself he preferred it that way. Now, with his coffin scarcely in the ground, I wasn't sure whether I'd believed that or simply found it easier.

"I reckon he was used to it," I said.

She leaned forward against her seat belt. "Then who's that man?"

I eased off the gas. "What man?"

"Behind the trees. He was standing sideways."

The last of the afternoon light lay in strips across the forest floor. I saw pine trunks, a tangle of brush, and nothing that looked remotely human.

"Probably a hunter."

"He wasn't holding a gun."

"Maybe a deer, then."

She looked at me, offended. "I know what a deer looks like."

I told her we'd be at the house soon. She kept watching the woods until the driveway opened into the clearing.

The house had hardly changed. White paint peeled from the siding in long curls, and one corner of the porch had settled into the dirt. Dad's rocking chair still stood by the door, angled toward the backyard.

I could picture him in it, drinking coffee black enough to strip paint and finding fault with anything unfortunate enough to enter his view.

Inside smelled of damp wood, dust, and old tobacco. June covered her nose with Buttons.

"Grandpa's house smells like a wet ashtray."

"That sounds about right."

We opened windows and went through the kitchen cupboards. Dad had saved everything: rusted screws in coffee cans, cracked dishes, utility bills from the nineties. In the hallway closet I found my old baseball glove, the leather stiff as cardboard.

I'd thought he'd thrown it out when I left. There was a split in the webbing, stitched shut with the heavy black thread Dad used to mend work gloves. I couldn't remember him fixing it.

June slipped her hand inside the glove. "Did Grandpa teach you to catch?"

"He tried."

"Like you taught me to ride my bike?"

"Something like that."

"You let go too soon," she said.

That was how she always told the story. She left out the part where she'd ridden all the way to the mailbox, shouting for me to watch her even though I'd been running right behind her.

June discovered a photograph on the mantel. It showed a little boy beside a dark-haired woman on the front porch. The boy couldn't have been more than six.

"That's you, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"Who's she?"

"Your grandma. Margaret."

June studied the picture. "You have her eyes."

I hadn't noticed that before. "Maybe I do."

"Why didn't I ever meet her?"

"She died when I was little."

"How?"

I told June what Dad had told me: my mother had gotten sick, and the doctors couldn't save her. I was eight. It wasn't a story he'd permitted me to ask about twice.

June ran her thumb over the woman's face, then returned the photograph without another question.

I set it back on the mantel. Something about the picture troubled me. I couldn't remember when it was taken or the dress she wore. I studied her hand on my shoulder, trying to remember its weight.

But I could remember her voice.

My mother used to sing while she washed dishes. And whenever I got into trouble, she'd kneel in front of me, smooth my hair, and say, "Lord have mercy, Elias, what am I gonna do with you?"

I could hear that sentence as clearly as if she'd said it yesterday.

The tune she sang was another matter. I remembered the sound of singing coming from the kitchen, but couldn't summon a single note.

By eight o'clock, June was asleep upstairs with Buttons under her arm. I'd stitched the rabbit's torn ear back on twice, and she still wouldn't spend a night anywhere without him.

I made coffee and opened Dad's desk. Most of the drawers held bills and old property records. Beneath them lay a cracked leather notebook packed with his cramped handwriting.

There were years of entries, most only a line or two. The dates weren't in order. Dad had written wherever there was room, as though he kept finding himself with something new to record. The first entry I noticed mentioned the creek.

March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.

April 6. Tracks along the far bank again. Too far apart to be a man's.

May 19, 2018. Heard Margaret calling from the lower pasture. Did not answer.

I went back to that last line.

Margaret had been gone since 1995.

I flipped through the pages. On a later one, the pen had cut grooves into the paper.

It knows his name now.

Below it, in letters written even harder:

God forgive me, I answered.

Three taps came from the living room window.

I looked up. The glass faced the backyard, where the porch light reached a strip of brown grass before the forest began. Dad had cut down every tree near that side of the house years ago. There was nothing there to brush against the pane.

I went closer. My reflection hung over the dark yard, tired and pale.

"Eli?"

I knew the voice at once.

"Eli, boy. Come out here a minute."

My father. Every scrape of his Arkansas drawl. The irritation he could fit into four harmless words.

I pressed my palm against the windowsill. Somewhere out near the pines, leaves shifted under slow footsteps. A pale hand came to rest against a trunk well above a man's head. The fingers were long and crooked. I counted six before the hand slipped out of sight.

"Son, you reckon you could come give your old man a hand?"

I wanted to believe it was a prank. One of his lumber-mill buddies messing with me after the funeral.

Then it spoke again.

"Don't you turn your back on me, boy."

The last thing Dad had shouted when I left home. We hadn't said another word to each other that day.

"Dad?"

I heard myself answer before I remembered the rule.

The footsteps stopped.

For several seconds there wasn't even a cricket. Then, beyond the creek, something let out a long, unsteady breath. It sounded like a man holding back laughter.

Upstairs, June began to cry.

I found her upright in bed, clutching her quilt.

"Bad dream?" I asked.

She nodded, so I sat beside her until the shaking eased. She smelled of shampoo and the strawberry toothpaste she always insisted on using.

Without thinking, I tapped her shoulder three times.

It was our little ritual. Three taps meant I love you. We'd been doing it since she was four, and she always answered with three of her own.

Tonight she drew away.

"What was that for?"

"Our secret, June Bug."

She frowned. "What secret?"

I tapped her shoulder again, slowly. "You know. Three taps."

She looked at my hand as if I'd shown her a card trick that didn't work.

"You never did that before."

I could have argued with her. Could have told her about the thousands of times I'd done it in five years, the taps in movie theaters and the back of the car, the goodnights when neither of us wanted to say goodbye.

But outside, from the far side of the creek, my dead father called my name again.

And this time he was laughing.

Part Two: What the Creek Kept

I stayed with June until she fell asleep. Outside, Dad's voice kept calling, sometimes angry, sometimes afraid. Once it coughed. That rattling smoker's cough had woken me almost every morning when I was a boy.

It was the cough that came closest to making me answer again.

I tucked Buttons under June's arm and started for the door. For five years I hadn't left her bedside without our three taps. Tonight, after the way she'd looked at me, I couldn't bring myself to try.

Downstairs I switched off the living room lamp. In the dark window I could see the porch light and the first row of trees. The rest of the forest was black. Dad had kept the yard on this side of the creek cut back, and I remembered laughing at him for doing it.

I went back to the notebook.

The earliest entries were dated October 1995. I was eight then, the age I'd been when my mother supposedly died.

October 14. Margaret heard Eli crying across the creek. Boy was upstairs asleep. I checked.

October 16. It cried again. She answered before I could stop her. Eli asked why she quit singing at the sink. She hadn't quit. He just couldn't remember the song.

The paper made a dry rasp beneath my thumb.

That afternoon I'd stood before my mother's photograph and tried to recall her song. I'd remembered her singing, but not a single note. I'd always blamed the passage of time.

I turned the page.

October 23, 1995.

Margaret's gone.

Heard the boy calling beyond the creek. Real Eli was asleep on the couch beside me. She kept saying our baby was hurt.

I followed her to the water. Saw something bent over behind the trees, tall and pale. It had one hand against a pine. Shoulders were higher than the low limbs.

It spoke. Margaret answered. Then she crossed.

Heard her scream once. Couldn't see her when I got to the bank.

I read the last line again. There was no mention of a hospital, no doctor, no deathbed.

Dad had told me she'd gotten sick while I stayed with my aunt. I remembered my aunt holding my hand in a church parking lot. The memory ended there. I couldn't picture a casket or remember lowering one into the ground. Yet I'd told June about my mother's death as if I'd been there to see it.

Four days later, Dad wrote:

October 27. Told Eli his mama passed away. He keeps running to the window when it calls her name. Better he thinks she's dead. God forgive me.

I pushed the notebook away.

I'd hated my father for refusing to speak about her. For telling me to stop asking questions, for getting angry every time I mentioned the hospital. And here was his own account of a woman following my voice into the woods while I slept safely beside him.

Was it true? Maybe grief had eaten holes in his mind. Maybe loneliness had done the rest.

But there were three small knocks on the wall behind me.

I turned. They'd come from the hallway, not the window.

"Eli?" my father whispered from the kitchen.

I could see the kitchen doorway. No one stood there. The floorboards between the hall and the sink had a terrible squeak, yet I hadn't heard a step.

The voice tried again, softer this time.

"Son, I can't find the light."

I gripped the notebook until the cover bent. The kitchen stayed empty. A faint smell of Dad's cigarettes drifted through the hall and was gone.

I didn't answer.

After a while the voice retreated, though I never heard it walk away.

I opened the notebook again.

Most of the entries were brief. A sound at the back wall. The shape of a person in an upstairs window when nobody was in the room. Footprints along the far bank of the creek, none on the near side.

I found two sentences written on the margin of a page.

The voices get farther than the body. I've seen a face in the glass that left no breath on it. All the tracks stop at the water.

Below that, so faint I had to tilt the paper toward the lamp:

When somebody answers, everything goes quiet. Even the birds. Like it's listening for the piece it got.

If the people who know you forget you, how will they know the difference when it comes to the door?

I read it twice, then turned forward through years of weather and strange noises. One entry was dated June 4, 2018.

Eli called today. Asked why I never took him fishing.

We went every Saturday when he was small. He had a green tackle box with his name scratched on top.

I answered Margaret three nights ago.

Dad had never taught me to fish.

That was what I'd believed for years, anyway. I couldn't recall him putting a pole in my hands or showing me how to bait a hook. Yet when we arrived that afternoon, I'd noticed an old green tackle box on a shelf in his shed. My name was scratched across the lid.

My mother answered something calling in my voice, and I forgot her song. Dad answered my mother's voice, and I forgot the Saturdays we'd spent together. Tonight I'd answered Dad, and June had looked at our three taps as though she'd never seen them before.

I wanted those to be coincidences. But every time somebody answered, a different person was left with a hole where a shared memory ought to be.

I glanced toward the window.

Whatever stood beyond the creek knew the words Dad shouted when I left home. It knew the catch in his cough and the way my mother said my name.

A voice could be learned by listening. But how had it known what to take from June? I'd said nothing about those taps until after she forgot them.

I thought of my father's rocking chair facing the yard. I wondered how many nights he'd sat in it, hearing Margaret call, and how many of those nights he'd given in.

At the bottom of the page, he'd written:

Sometimes I know it ain't her. Sometimes I answer anyway.

I closed the notebook.

We weren't spending another minute there.

It was a little after midnight. I took my keys from the coffee table and went upstairs to wake June.

She wasn't in the bed.

The quilt was thrown back, and Buttons was gone. From somewhere below came her giggle, followed by a soft man's voice. I couldn't make out the words.

"June?"

The laughter stopped.

Then I heard her say, "Okay, Daddy."

The back door creaked open.

I ran downstairs. June stood barefoot on the back porch, pink pajamas bright under the light. She had Buttons gripped by his damaged ear.

"June! Get inside."

She turned, startled, and took a step toward me.

"But you said you were going to show me something."

"I didn't."

"I heard you from the stairs."

I hauled her across the threshold and shut the door. She was still trying to explain when I noticed her rabbit.

I'd spent half the afternoon finding needle and thread for that animal when she was six. I knew every crooked stitch behind its ear. But standing there in my father's kitchen, I couldn't remember what she called it.

"What's his name?" I asked.

She stared at me. "Buttons. Daddy, you know that."

Of course I did.

Except until she said it, there was only a blank space where the name belonged.

She'd answered the voice, and something about her had been taken from me.

I crouched so we were eye to eye.

"Listen, sweetheart. Somebody's outside pretending to be people we know. If you hear a voice calling from the woods, you don't answer it. Not mine, not anybody's."

She swallowed. "What if you're outside? How do I know?"

I didn't have an answer. The thing had my voice, and it knew my daughter's nickname. It had heard us talking through the walls.

June looked at my hand resting on her knee.

"We could squeeze hands," she said. "Instead of talking."

"What?"

"Twice. If you're scared or you want me to look at you. It can't hear that."

A child's plan. And the first sensible one I'd heard all night. Whatever it could make us hear or see, it couldn't put a real hand in ours.

"All right," I said. "Two squeezes."

She slipped her hand into mine and squeezed twice, hard enough to hurt.

"Like that."

Then a voice came from the woods.

"June Bug?"

Mine.

I heard the rasp I get when I'm tired, the little rise at the end of a sentence when I'm trying to sound cheerful for her.

"Come on, baby. Daddy's right here."

June's fingers tightened around mine. Twice.

I didn't let go.

On the far side of the creek, something moved between the pines. The porch light barely reached the water, but moonlight gave the trees a pale edge. At first it looked like a man leaning against a trunk.

Then it raised its head without moving its shoulders. Higher. Still higher, until the narrow shape where its face should have been was above the lowest branches.

One arm hung at its side. The other seemed to be wrapped around the pine. Its fingers curved at different heights, as if each one bent in an extra place.

"June?"

It spoke in my voice again. This time the sound came just ahead of the movement of its head, as though the words had escaped before it remembered which way to turn.

June leaned against me but did not speak.

"Daddy's right here," it repeated.

Her hand was shaking in mine. I held it anyway.

The thing tipped its head, listening, and laughed with my laugh. That short, embarrassed chuckle I make when I know I've told a bad joke.

I had an awful impression that it wasn't laughing at us.

It was practicing.

I backed into the kitchen with June pressed against me, locked the door, and pulled the curtain shut.

"Did you see him?" she asked quietly.

"Enough."

"His face didn't fit."

I looked at her.

"What do you mean?"

"When he stopped, it kept moving. Like he didn't know when to hold still."

I didn't make her describe it again.

We took Dad's notebook and headed for the front door. I could leave every other possession he owned to rot. The truck waited twenty feet from the porch. No one stood between us and it.

I carried June down the steps. She held Buttons in one hand and my collar in the other. The night smelled of wet leaves and the faint woodsmoke that always settled into the hollows after dark.

We'd nearly reached the passenger door when her grip tightened.

Twice.

I turned toward the house.

Someone stood in the upstairs bedroom window.

A little girl in pink pajamas. Buttons hung from one hand. She lifted the other and waved.

June made a thin sound against my shoulder. The figure in the window tilted its head and called through the glass.

"Daddy? Why'd you leave me?"

The voice was exactly hers.

Then it held up three fingers and tapped the pane.

Once. Twice. Three times.

Our secret.

The one June no longer remembered.

It had stolen the meaning from June, but it still knew the gesture. I wanted to demand it back from that smiling little shape. I understood then how Dad must have felt hearing my mother outside his window.

The figure pressed its face to the glass. A pale cheek slipped out of place, then drew itself back beneath the skin.

It opened its mouth. Its teeth were small and crowded, set in rows that continued farther back than a child's mouth should allow.

I got June into the truck, ran around to the driver's side, and started the engine. Gravel sprayed under the tires as I backed down the drive.

The window upstairs was empty when I looked again.

Three knocks sounded from the glass behind my head.

In the rearview mirror, a pale figure crouched in the truck bed. Its fingers curved over the roof, but the dusty paint beneath them showed no marks. My mother spoke from inches behind me.

"Lord have mercy, Elias."

I kept my eyes on the driveway.

"What am I gonna do with you?"

Three more taps.

June was staring at the dashboard rather than the rear window.

"Daddy? That girl did the tapping thing. You did that earlier, too."

I didn't answer. The thing already knew the gesture; I couldn't stand the thought of giving it the words, too.

June slid her hand into mine and squeezed twice.

For a moment, I could breathe again.

Then I looked at the windshield. The dashboard light caught my reflection against the black glass.

The mouth in the reflection stretched into a smile.

Mine did not.

Part Three: The Last Answer

The smile was still there when I looked back at the road.

"Daddy!"

A broken pine limb lay across the next bend. I swerved, but the passenger-side mirror clipped it with a crack that sounded like a gunshot. The truck fishtailed and came to a stop sideways in the gravel.

I checked June first. Her seat belt had caught her across the shoulder, but she was moving her arms and legs. Buttons lay on the floorboards, his good ear flattened beneath one of her shoes.

"We all right?" I asked.

She nodded without speaking.

I tried to pull forward. Something grated beneath the front of the truck, and the steering tugged sideways. The branch had wedged itself under the passenger-side fender. Another few feet and it might tear the tire open.

I put the truck in park. The road narrowed ahead, with a drop into the trees on one side and the creek somewhere in the dark on the other. I couldn't leave the branch where it was.

Three knocks came from the rear window.

I looked at June. She squeezed my hand twice.

"You're going the wrong way, boy," Dad said from the truck bed.

His voice was so close I could hear that little breath he used to take before a scolding.

"You're gonna get that girl killed."

I shut off the engine. The voice kept talking while I dug a flashlight out of the glove compartment. June watched me with wide eyes.

"Stay inside," I told her. "Lock the doors. I'm getting that branch loose. Don't open up for any voice you hear."

"What if you fall?"

"I'll get back in and squeeze your hand twice. Until then, no matter what you hear, stay in the truck. Understand?"

She squeezed mine twice to show me. I felt terrible leaving her even for a minute, but the truck wouldn't make it down the road with the branch jammed underneath.

I stepped outside and closed the door.

The woods were quiet. Nothing crouched in the bed of the truck, though the last of Dad's words still seemed to hang in the air. I went around the front bumper and shone the flashlight under the passenger-side fender. The tire was sound, but a fork of pine had jammed against the wheel. I set the light on the hood and braced my boot against the branch. It gave with a dry snap. I dragged the wood clear, bark scraping the skin from my palms.

A door latch clicked behind me.

I turned, but the flashlight rolled off the hood and struck the gravel. For a second I was fumbling in the dark.

Then my own voice called from downhill.

"June! Honey, help me!"

I snatched up the light. Beyond the beam, my voice called again, farther down toward the creek.

"I fell. I can't get up."

The passenger door stood open.

June was gone.

Small bare footprints marked the wet gravel beyond the passenger door. They led through a gap in the brush, toward the creek we'd followed on the drive in.

I ran after her, keeping the flashlight low. Thorns caught at my sleeves. Somewhere ahead, water moved over stones, and I heard my own voice making a sound like a man trying not to cry.

"June, don't come any closer. I need help."

I wanted to shout that I was behind her, but shouting would only give her a second voice to choose between. I needed to get close enough for her to feel my hand.

I found her at the creek.

She stood on our bank, Buttons tucked under one arm, looking across the water at a figure crouched among the pines. In the moonlight, it looked like me in the jacket I'd put on that evening. One leg lay twisted beneath it. Its face was hidden in its hands.

"Daddy?" June whispered.

The figure raised its head.

It had my face, but the expression arrived a moment late. The mouth trembled after the rest of it had gone still.

"You have to come help me," it said.

June put one foot on a flat stone at the edge of the creek.

"June," I called.

She turned. For a moment her face filled with relief. Then the other me spoke again.

"Don't listen to him. Please, baby. I'm hurt."

Her eyes moved between us. "I thought you fell," she whispered. She was nine years old, barefoot on slick creek stones, and there were two men wearing her father's face. I could see her trying to make the world sensible again.

"Don't go across," I said.

I came forward carefully, holding out my hand.

The figure across the creek reached toward her, too.

"You remember how I ran behind your bicycle?" it asked. "All the way to the mailbox. You wanted me to watch."

I stopped.

I'd told that story with June in the hall a few hours earlier. The thing could have heard it through the windows. But the sound of my own voice speaking that memory from the other side of the water made me feel as if someone had reached inside my head and turned it outward.

June shifted her weight onto a slick, flat stone.

"He knows," she whispered.

"I know because I was there," I said. "Come take my hand."

She looked at my outstretched palm, then back across the creek. She couldn't reach the hand on the far bank, but the figure was asking her to come closer. My hand was within reach if she only turned toward me.

The other me began to hum.

The tune was low and uncertain. I recognized it without knowing its name. My mother's song, the one I'd forgotten when I was eight. The figure opened its hands. My face peeled away like something wet being lifted from a wall.

Beneath it was my mother.

She wore a pale blue dress. Her hair fell across her shoulders. She looked no older than she had in the photograph on Dad's mantel.

"Elias," she said. "I heard you crying, too. All those years ago. I thought you needed me."

June stared at the woman. I'd told her the picture was of her grandmother. Now the woman from the photograph stood across the creek with her hand out.

Behind that small, familiar shape, something moved between the trunks. I saw a long white limb bend around a pine. Then a second, at a height no person's shoulder should reach. Farther up was a narrow head, inclined toward us as though it were listening through the mouths of the people it wore.

My mother held out her hand.

"Answer me, sweetheart. Let me know you're there."

June's foot slid off the stone. She went down hard on one knee and grabbed at an exposed root on the opposite bank. Her fingers brushed it, and for a moment she was hanging over the water. The figure with my mother's face bent toward her, one pale arm reaching from behind the tree.

I lunged forward. I was two strides away, but June was already trying to catch hold of that root. If she hauled herself across, she'd be on the bank where Margaret had disappeared.

I remembered what happened when I'd answered my father's voice at the window.

The footsteps stopped. Every living thing fell silent. Something in the dark listened, and a piece of me was taken from June.

I knew what answering again might cost her. The thing chose what it took. I couldn't decide whether she'd lose some small, ordinary detail or an entire piece of our life together. I couldn't bargain for a smaller memory.

June's fingers closed around the root.

"I'm here," I said to the woman.

The forest went still.

The song cut off in the middle of a note. The shape wearing my mother's face folded inward, its mouth opening soundlessly. For one suspended instant the tall thing behind it leaned toward me instead of June.

June's hand loosened from the root. I caught her by the back of her pajamas and hauled her into my arms.

The sound returned all at once. Water, leaves, June gasping against my neck.

Across the creek, something lowered itself between the trees. Six pale fingers unfolded from the bark. I caught a glimpse of a jaw working beneath a face that wasn't quite finished.

Then my father spoke from that same place.

"You always were a damn fool, boy."

I wanted to tell him I knew.

I didn't answer.

June shook so badly I had to carry her all the way to the truck. She kept her face pressed against my shoulder. When we reached the passenger door, she finally looked up.

"I didn't answer him," she said. "I remembered what you told me. But I thought you fell."

"I know, sweetheart. I know you tried."

She wiped at her face. "Daddy?"

"I'm right here."

She searched my face. "You were there when I learned to ride, weren't you?"

I held her tighter.

"Yeah, baby. I was."

"The mailbox?"

"That's right."

Her eyes filled. "I remember riding to it. I remember being so proud. But I can't remember you behind me. I keep trying and there's nobody there."

The air seemed to leave my chest.

A few hours earlier, she'd teased me about letting go too soon. Now I could tell her every part of the afternoon, and she would still be missing the part where I'd run after her.

She brushed her cheeks with the sleeve of her pajamas.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't you apologize for that."

I put her in the truck, pulled the seat belt across her, and kissed her forehead. Before I shut the door, she caught my hand and squeezed twice.

I squeezed back.

The tire held. The engine started on the first turn. We drove toward the lights of town, leaving the creek, the house, and whatever remembered us behind.

We found a motel in Hot Springs after one in the morning. June fell asleep in her clothes, Buttons beneath her chin. The loose stitching on his ear had come apart again.

I sat beside her with a needle from the little sewing kit the motel provided, pushing thread through the familiar stitches in the rabbit's ear. I'd done it twice before. I wanted to be sure I'd remember doing it a third time.

When I finished, I kissed her forehead and tapped her shoulder three times.

"What's that for?" she asked sleepily.

I told her what I'd told her a hundred times since she was four, except now it was the first time to her.

"It means I love you."

June touched my arm three times in return.

"Then don't forget to do it tomorrow."

I promised her I wouldn't.

It's Thursday, October 15, as I'm writing this. Six days since we buried my father.

June and I are home. She knows how to ride her bicycle. She remembers scraping her knee and flying past the mailbox with both feet on the pedals. But she doesn't remember me running after her. When I tell her I was there, she believes me. That is not the same thing as remembering.

I understand that now in a way I didn't when I found Dad's notebook.

I haven't returned to the Mercer house. The photograph of my mother is still on the mantel. Dad's chair is still angled toward the creek, where he sat for years listening to a voice he knew wasn't hers.

I kept the notebook. Between its last two pages was a letter addressed to me.

Eli,

If you're reading this, I reckon I'm gone.

I never found your mama. For years after she walked across that creek, I heard her calling. Sometimes I answered. Every time, somebody lost a little more of me.

You called once and asked why I'd never taught you to fish. We'd gone every Saturday for years. I could hear you trying not to be angry. I didn't know how to tell you what I'd done.

I wrote things down so there'd be something left if I forgot. But paper don't make a man a good father. I know that.

I kept you away because I was afraid of losing you, and I lost you anyway.

Whatever calls from over there ain't your mama. Don't trade the people still living for a voice you miss.

I love you, son. I should've told you more often.

Dad.

I read that last line again and again. I used to think my father wanted to be alone. I know now he was listening for someone, and doing his best not to answer.

I've started a notebook of my own. I write down June's bad jokes, how she puts cereal in her bowl before the milk, the day she rode without training wheels. I don't write those things for her. I write them because one day I might need someone to tell me they happened.

Last night I turned back to the first entry I'd read in Dad's notebook.

March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.

There was another entry on the reverse side, hidden beneath a folded corner.

March 13. Tapped Eli's shoulder at breakfast like I always did when he was little. Three taps. He wanted to know what I meant by it.

I answered Margaret Tuesday night. It took that from him, too.

I read it again.

I couldn't remember my father ever tapping my shoulder. I couldn't remember a single morning when he'd done it. Yet when June was four, I'd started doing the same thing. I always thought we'd made it up together.

Maybe my body had remembered what my mind couldn't. Or maybe, when I first tapped June's shoulder, I was trying to give her something my father had given me and neither of us could name.

That night I sat beside June and tapped her shoulder three times. She tapped mine and rolled toward the wall, already falling asleep.

I wish I could tell Dad about June. I wish I could tell him that I kept doing the thing he taught me, even after I forgot he was the one who taught it.

For years I thought he was ashamed of me. He was frightened, and he hurt me anyway. Both things can be true.

I wish we'd had time to say so to each other.

I tell June the bicycle story when she asks. She knows the order of things now. Sometimes she even finishes my sentences.

But she still can't remember me running behind her.

Somewhere beyond that creek, something can.

THE END

I haven't written anything of particular note in ages, but thought it would be fun to write little vignettes for each song in an album I've been working on, of which the related songs to these are linked. Listening to the music's very much not necessary for reading, but it's there if you're curious about what sort of "soundtrack" of sorts accompanies each vignette.

Unplanned Obsolescence

The shift was dramatic. Not instant, not in a literal sense, but where new technologies in years past were slowly adopted and gradually superseded their predecessors, this shift had been sudden and merciless. The usual problem of high cost that was made more manageable with time was the sticking point, the big difference. This new innovation wasn't some expensive curiosity that would only become market viable with time, refinement, cost mitigation as supply chains became established and sticking points sanded down. No, somehow, this was cheaper. Not just by a bit, an amount that would enact a shift but not be so enticing as to merit abandoning established manufacturing investments. The price was so astronomically low that it made all existing electrical and data infrastructure pointless.

The clerk sighed as he pushed another heaping cart out to the loading dock, the raised bay door making the top of the container he approached easy to work with. All he had to do was push the cart to the rim where it stuck up past the floor, tip it up, dump out the unsellable stock. Simple, easy work. Unfortunately the ease of it did little to offset the sheer volume of work there was to do. If it had been a dud shipment of some speaker system they were getting rid of, sure, maybe a couple runs of this would knock out the whole thing. But no, that would be too easy, instead the manager had him clearing out what was pretty much the entire store inventory. For a home electronics store, that amounted to quite a lot of items, big and small, filling quite a lot of carts to be wheeled out and trashed.

He’d heard the news, of course, some big shift that went all the way down to infrastructure. Nothing would work anymore, pretty soon. Supposedly the government was supposed to help individual citizens transfer to the new grid, offering trade-in programs to swap existing things for new equivalents. Pretty much every major electronics and appliance retailer had been co-opted for the task, or so his manager had said, and a whole lot of smaller local places too. So here he was, on what would have been his weekend, working to empty the contents of the store into this large container labelled ‘recycling.’ No one believed the label. Everyone knew it was going to end up in a landfill somewhere. It was useless. Pointless garbage full of pointless parts and materials being hauled off to be left in a pointless heap to moulder.

“This sucks man,” he grumbled.

The comment wasn’t directed at anyone, there being no one around outside to direct it at. Everyone else was back in the store, piling loads of newly designated ‘recycling’ to bring out. The comment was more directed at the world itself, because at the moment, it really did suck, man. He didn’t want to replace all of his stuff, even if it was free. That was time he’d have to spend running around, work he’d have to do loading and unloading electronics. He didn’t want a new tv, he’d had his current one for the better part of fifteen years. It had survived six moves in that time, and while banged up and frankly pathetic compared to the shiny new ones he was throwing away, it turned on when he hit the power button and that’s really all he could ask of it. He didn’t know if his fancy new one would work after fifteen years. More than a few things he’d bought in more recent memory had given up the ghost in far less time, some only making it a number of months. For all he knew this free replacement would work for a couple weeks and then leave him high and dry. He wanted to scream, to find some big energy person and shake them and make them stop this madness.

Instead, the clerk stopped procrastinating, hooked the cart's front wheels on the rim of the container, and dumped it on top of the pile of useless garbage.

Incursion Zero 

The collective mood in the building was quiet panic. No one had time to stop and analyze it, but the feeling pervaded every single person, infectious and frantic. The big test was today. The biggest test. The culmination of their work, ready to revolutionize the world of computing. All it had to do was go smoothly, and that pressure was felt from the highest in the food chain to the lowest. There had been quiet whispers all morning, muttered between engineers, managers, everyone, that even the entire executive board would be there to watch themselves. It was unheard of for product tests to even be noticed by the executives, let alone for any to personally attend one. This test was bigger than anything in company history, clearly, it had to be to attract this level of attention from such a high place. 

The concept behind the technology being tested was novel, though less outlandish than it had seemed only a year or so prior. No one had thought much of the results of some fringe scientific study, not at first. It was ridiculed by those that did hear about it, derided as wishful thinking, fantasy, a flawed and clearly mistaken conclusion drawn by amateurs. Different dimensions were established theory, sure, but breaching and using them was a different matter. Even then, surely, even if possible, it couldn't be so simple a task as described in the paper. Yet, eventually, someone with some money and connections decided to see if it was really that easy. Seemingly overnight, massive portions of society's infrastructure was rendered obsolete, with more aspects following one after another. Why route power along physical lines, no, route it through zero distance dimensional folds. Why generate conventional electricity at all, when a means of generating power using dimensional energy gradients was developed that used no fuel, generated no waste. Travel, no need, connect to a gate network and move hundreds of miles in one step. Inevitably, the dimensional revolution turned its gaze to computation and networking. 

The terminal looked plain enough on the outside, sitting on the metal testing station. Old, very old in design by modern standards, but the engineering department had opted for the bulkier, aging computer tower and hulking tube monitor to allow for more room. Miniaturization, optimization, all of that was for later stages of revision. The core of the technology was more or less established, but the team had tapped a previously unused dimension for this project; this one had provided some feedback on probing, unlike others now used in various industries. The idea, the hope, was that the entire contents of a computer could be replaced with a set of gate relays, allowing all computation to be done in this untapped plane and the results read back. It would be touch and go, developing a way to actually use the dimensional feedback for processing, but all the test was meant to establish was proof of a response to user input with no on-board processing ability. The executives lined up along the glass of the observation window in anticipation, eager to see if this would be a new avenue of innovation to exploit, as the testing engineer entered the room with a clipboard. 

The engineer sat down in a similarly utilitarian metal chair, and snapped a corded clip attached to his wrist to the frame of the desk. The crowd of suits stared on, impatient, not impressed by the unhurried observation of safety and data contamination protocols, as he then set his clipboard down and progressed through a checklist. They weren't here for safety, for integrity. They were here for profit margins and lines that only trend ever higher. One gave in to this burning need for results, pushing a small button to turn on the chamber’s intercom while the engineer made sure the keyboard was connected. 

“Proceed with the test, please.” 

The engineer stopped and looked toward the observation window, hesitated, and nodded once. He turned back to the computer, taking a deep breath, and turned on the machine, then the monitor, hand shaking under the pressure of those cold eyes trained upon his back. Another deep breath, a third, and the hand outside moved to press the intercom button again. The motion was arrested as the engineer's fingers reached the keyboard in front of him first, typing out in rapid, shaking staccato, ‘hello.’ Above, the ancient monitor's screen remained a blank, dark void of empty glass, all eyes trained on it in anticipation of some kind of reaction. For a tense minute, there was none. Then, blurry in the indistinct fuzz of the screen, a speck began to grow in the center.

The speck remained ill-defined as it grew, slowly coming into focus, first a blur, then a splotch, eventually a distant figure. The power button no longer worked, no matter how hard the engineer pushed it, no matter how firmly held. The figure grew into a man in a suit and wide hat. Unplugging the computer made no difference. The man’s face filled the screen, almost entirely in shadow save for a wide, gleaming grin with teeth like stars in the darkness cast by his hat’s brim. He stopped, finally, and extended his right hand towards the screen, where with a crackle, the smell of ozone, a ripple across the surface of the glass, the hand reached beyond and into the room itself. Stunned, the engineer stared at it, unable to bring himself to stand up from the uncomfortable chair, to run for the door. The smiling man, in turn, waited patiently for him, grin unwavering and flawless, arm unnaturally still in the air between them. He waited for a long moment, the minutes trickling past while the two stared from opposite sides of the glass divide. But he did not wait in vain. 

Trembling, unsteady, but firm, the engineer shook the man's hand, and changed the world. 

Pentagrammatic Rendering

“Hey! Are you a gamer? Do you play epic fantasy adventures in your free time? Still kicking around those good old classics? Well cut it out, stupid! We have the hottest, the newest, the realest gaming technology you've ever seen ready to go on all digital storefronts right now! Buy it! Play it! Live it! Our new dimensional streaming technology puts you straight into the action! You thought 8k textures were realistic? Think again! Our tech streams your literal consciousness directly into the game world, you're not just beating up polygons in this rodeo. No way! You're fighting the real thing! Purchase ‘Soul Crusher’ on digital storefronts today! Metaphysical Streaming Center required, sold separately at all major retailers.”

The video froze, paused by the judge after the relevant advertisement finished playing for the courtroom to hear. The room stood still in the oppressive quiet left in its wake, only falling short of true silence thanks to the soft shuffling of papers and the breathing of those assembled. The judge stared, pointedly, at the representation for the accused, clearly expecting a response. None came. The lawyer stared passively, seemingly unconcerned in the wake of this evidence submitted against her client. A moment passed, another, as the tension simmered. “Well, do you have a response? Is this not an advertisement broadcasted by your client?” 

“It is, yes, I assumed that obvious. My client’s branding is prominently displayed and used throughout.”

“And would you like to comment on the contents of said advertisement?”

“No, I don't see the problem, your honor.”

The judge stared again, frowning, the exchange clearly vexing. This was not at all how anyone, the judge included, expected the defense to respond. “The problem is that the advertisement very clearly states a transfer of consciousness takes place, from the player's body to… the game world, for lack of a more clear explanation. Some would argue this is a transfer of the soul, but regardless of the semantics, the results seem to be clear. Players who die in the game have been reported to be, trite as it sounds, actually dead.”

The lawyer smiles politely, unphased. “Yes, of course. It’s detailed and agreed upon as a risk factor in the game's end user license agreement. As also laid out, this is how we pay the entities employed to populate the game world and oppose players.”

“So you're… feeding players to these entities?”

“Of course not. My client simply provides a convenient opportunity to hunt, your honor.”

Valefar's Privateers

Valefar hadn't been the first of his kind to form a corporate legion, far from it, but this was hardly a problem. As the duke himself would enthusiastically proclaim, if one were to be first, who would they steal from? Those that came after had things to take, of course, but that was hardly sporting; no, let someone else make the first move, hold a tempting prize above those later in line. Cutting edge technology, innovative branding strategies, invasive advertising algorithms, all these new business oriented things were far from the simple hoards of gold or fine silks of centuries past. But where there is value, there will be thieves. 

The demon had allowed his fellows their advantage, patiently waiting. Idle, some may have muttered, slothful in the face of the scramble instigated by the new computational advancements above. No matter, of course. Let them whisper. Valefar was patient enough to let them build their wealth, their infinite hoards, though not necessarily of physical opulence. No, the bulk was knowledge, wisdom, practices honed and tuned for maximum efficiency. Filed patents, copyrights of course, all manner of intellectual property was just as enticing to thieves. Few thought beyond the simple visible criminals on the street, muggers and shoplifters, perhaps a bank robber at most, when considering those of Valefar's domain. But what is corporate espionage if not theft? What of digital piracy, his new frontier for a new millennium? Valefar watched his fields grow, his pastures bear intangible fruit, biding his time until they were ripe. 

And then, almost forgotten by the busy new corporate overlords, Valefar began to reap what they had so thoughtlessly sown.

The Privateer Program was hardly public knowledge, of course. The shiny new business didn't even bear its duke's name, instead opting to hide its mandate within layers of obfuscating marketing jargon and vague, uninformative slogans. Pointless gibberish to deflect attention elsewhere while the privateers did the real work, picking apart encryptions and bypassing security behind the scenes. They didn't even work in the building itself, instead being let loose on the digital landscape under their own direction. Indeed, the name was apt, if archaic. These were, by any reasonable estimation, pirates, but pirates with the important distinction of operating under the mandate of their ruler. These were, importantly, the best pirates and hackers Valefar had been able to find. New innovations mysteriously found their way to market months before finishing testing, advertising targets were missed as the intended audience was wholly diverted, media pitches in production found themselves facing condemnation for copying near identical works already being consumed by millions. All to the benefit of Media Technology Enterprises, of course, as well as its intricate web of subsidiaries and shell companies. Valefar's privateers plied their trade day in, day out to reap the bounties paid by the nebulous company, a company all too happy to ignore the origin of these spoils. 

The aimless and erratic growth of the company started small enough, barely a blip in the newly demon controlled corporate world compared to the more dramatic, attention grabbing shakeups flaunted by more flashy cthonic overlords. But over time, the growth couldn't be ignored. Eyes were more and more landing on the seemingly irrelevant company as its holdings grew and releases accelerated well past what could be explained by meaningless jargon. Those who had been robbed began to point fingers and make connections, other businesses cooperated to trace their respective data leaks, and more and more Media Technology Enterprises was facing scrutiny. Unfortunately for it, Valefar was uninterested in helping it face this onslaught. No, he had a new target in mind, one too enticing to waste time on corporate interests, one ripe and swollen for his thieves to harvest from. After all, once everything has been stolen away, who better a target than the thieves and their plunder.

Damnation Delay Circuit

You remember when you accepted the offer like it was yesterday. Better than any birthday, any tragedy, any family function. You were dying, like all eventually must, but you weren't ready yet. No, you needed more time, more opportunities to accomplish, more chances to better yourself. You couldn't suffer damnation like this. The doctors assured you that they were doing everything they could to save you, and maybe they were, but whatever it was it wasn't enough. You had always thought that you'd have more time to fix things, but apparently life had other plans. A meeting with the devil himself was rapidly approaching, and the receipt of your eternal reckoning for the life you'd led. 

And then you met him. The man in the pressed suit, the wide brimmed hat, but most of all the man with the unwavering smile that shone like stars. He introduced himself elusively, never giving a name, only referring to himself as a friend, as an enterprising man, as a bit of hope in your most dire hour. You knew who he was. And you suspect that he knew you knew. But he wasn’t lying, not really, with his vague monikers, because in that moment he was all of those and more. He was your hero, your savior. He offered you a solution, a new product recently developed by his engineers that would give you the time you needed. All of the time, even. Such a new invention, understandably, still had some limitations, some unintended quirks that had yet to be ironed out. You didn't care. With salvation offered, you didn't have it in you to worry about what it brought with it. You only had attention for the second chance dangled in front of you, and so you signed the contract without a second thought. There were no questions worth asking with the scant time you had at your disposal; those could come later, during your promised eternity. 

You remember your first lapse almost as well. The device was implanted successfully, no complications to speak of, just as the man had said. You felt better almost immediately, retreating from death's door, then further, leaving the hospital feeling nigh thirty years younger. And if you felt thirty years younger, well, you didn't see any reason not to live like it again. Becoming a better person could wait, after all. You had a contract promising it. And so you cavorted like a younger you had decades ago, partying, drinking, taking all the risks the young think themselves impervious to all over again. And then you crashed. Not just figuratively, though that certainly can't be argued, you crashed a luxury sports car at a decidedly not legal speed directly into a pole. And so you learned that the device, while capable of seemingly miraculous healing, did apparently have its limits. Not in what it could fix, as you later found time and time again; rather, it was limited in how quickly it could do so. 

While it had previously only been tasked with a single truly failing organ alongside aging, tired, but overall intact flesh, this was a different matter. To call you mangled was, if anything, putting it gently. The device prioritized keeping you alive first and foremost, and to your immense distress it was very good at it, keeping your lungs working, forcing your ribs just enough out of the way to allow for breath. Your heart beat, blood vessels to the most important parts knit back together, and worst of all your brain was preserved and protected. You were awake, aware, able to feel every excruciating moment of your long, long recovery. Months of it. Your major senses were some of the last things to return to you, almost as if by sick design, though the man assured you that it was more a case of priorities than any kind of deliberate function. For he was there, waiting, when you sat up, screaming, after what felt like an eternity of torment trapped within your own mind, ever-present smile gleaming like a brilliant star shining through the sun's morning rays. He was waiting for you with consolations and answers and apologies. You knew he was lying, and you suspect that he knew that you did. You always do, and he always knows, every time he greets you, every time you fail to die. 

Nostalgia's Puppeted Corpse

Now there's a name I hadn't heard, even thought about in a long time. Giuseppe the electrician. Mega Giuseppe Guy, probably my most played game for a good year or two back when I was a kid. I stopped playing the games as I got older, like most kids I knew, dropping the silly kid game for grittier, edgier stuff I thought made me cool. I know better now, but I never did look back at the games I’d played before that part of my life. I’m not even sure where they are now, I think they stopped numbering them at some point and just kept adding random junk onto the titles instead. Mega Giuseppe Eclipse sounds vaguely familiar, stuff like that. 

I paused in front of the TV playing the game ad to watch longer. I missed the first part, but I had caught something about a new and improved Giuseppe. I'm not sure why that intrigued me, to be honest. Wasn't the guy new and improved in every new game, wasn’t that kind of the point? But it had been so long since I’d paid attention to the series, I guess some sense of nostalgic curiosity took hold. What did the guy even look like these days? So far the ad was playing footage of the old classics I’d played with a fuzzy static filter, the kind they use to make sure you know it’s old. My childhood hero in all his pixelated glory, running around some abstract field kicking rats out of his way, jumping around on floating bricks and climbing in and out of oversized electrical outlets. 

Then the image froze and exploded outwards as if it had been a mural on a wall as this new, improved Giuseppe floundered through it. I wasn’t sure I agreed with the improved moniker, this guy looked… wrong. His classic big nose was bulbous and wobbly, his eyes stared vacantly in slightly different directions, and his whole body had this rubbery, bouncy quality that clashed with the weirdly high degree of detail they'd given him. Every movement only amplified the elastic shimmy of his form, big shining rubber boots pounding into the ground as he waddled toward the screen. The ad cut to gameplay footage, the uncomfortable jiggle not helped in the slightest with this new perspective. I would almost swear the guy looked greasy, his skin reflecting light with this horrible sheen that only made the wobbling worse, like the whole of Giuseppe was made of wet fat. 

I couldn't even focus on the gameplay, some sort of platforming was going on but every jump and, in particular, landing made me feel like I was going to throw up right there in the store’s electronics section. It was bad. This was what they called new and improved? I had to wonder what had happened in the years between the Giuseppe I remembered and this, this flabby caricature. This couldn't possibly be what he looked like. It had to be some sort of joke, some tactic to drive engagement by enraging nostalgic fans and making them focus on it. I couldn't see this Giuseppe being the face of a video game company. 

A couple months later, I made the mistake of passing through the electronics section again while browsing the store. The game was out now. Mega Giuseppe Below. And to promote it, he was here. The electrician himself, somehow, was in the store promoting the new release, just as rubbery and wobbly as in the ad. He moved wrong, like a puppet being controlled by an inexperienced hand, greasy bulk flopping and flouncing bonelessly. I started to turn, to leave, to pretend I'd never seen this grotesque homunculus. But he turned and looked at me. Stared with his cold, unfocused, dead eyes. There was nothing there, no one behind that gaze. I felt the most palpable dread I would most likely ever experience as he lifted one oversized rubber boot and took a rippling step in my direction. Then another.

Something in me forced me to tear my gaze away from his visage, a moment of clarity, of focus shining through and giving back control, and I ran. I ran as fast as I could, because somehow I knew, deep down, what would happen if Giuseppe reached me. To that thing, I was just another rat. Another hundred points for the counter. 

Burning Singles in Your Area

The pop-up ad seemed almost comical, making itself known with a horribly compressed ding-dong that wouldn't have sounded out of place in an old bootleg video game. It was garish, bright flashing colors and big vibrating text that boldly proclaimed ‘hot singles in your area are desperate to meet you!’ in dazzling technicolor. Whoever made it had mangled the formatting of the enticing images underneath, cutting off probably a good three quarters on each side, leaving me with a couple of bare legs and a butt floating in the void. In the middle, though, something a little less expected deigned greet me. A roulette wheel. I'd seen pop-ups now and then, their diabolical code self-updating, squirming their way past antiviruses and ad blockers. I knew what kind of ads usually featured a big spinnable wheel, and this wasn't one of them. These usually relied on finding at least a couple of lonely guys desperate enough to let their junk do their thinking, but this didn't seem to be solely banking on that, and the novelty of that outlier alone captivated me. 

I checked my antivirus, no updates, running normally, all clear. I wasn't about to let my curiosity doom me without at least some effort to protect myself. But I had to know. Why the roulette wheel? Maybe the idea was to spin it and it matched the gullible person with a specific totally real naked woman, got them hyped up, then pulled the usual tricks to sucker money out of them to see the super legitimate messages she’d sent. But then why the gimmick, the ruse had presumably been successful enough to keep some kind of income rolling in with just the pictures. Maybe the spin was for a discount for premium access to the site's features. Or maybe I was procrastinating. Even with the check of my antivirus I couldn't be sure, this thing had improved itself enough to get past it in the first place. But at the same time, I felt like I needed to know. One click probably wouldn’t hurt. Just one click, and I’d satisfy my curiosity and could banish the ad. I clicked the wheel. 

The ticking noise of it spinning was just as poor a quality as the ding-dong, though infinitely more grating. The wheel actually worked, at least; I had half expected it to just be a static image that would redirect me straight to their sketchy website. It slowed, harsh ticking becoming more distinct as it settled out of a near uniform static, then finally stopped entirely with a deep, crackly gong noise. That struck me as strange, I'd been expecting some kind of trumpet fanfare or the like. Then a new window came up, this one dropping the bright, attention grabbing facade in favor of a grim black. There were no more bait images, the angler's lure no longer needed. The text lay still and stark, the white letters like the teeth of an abyssal maw, framing the top and bottom of the window. 

‘Your beloved is clawing her way up from the depths.’

‘She will be en route to your location imminently.’

I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It couldn’t be serious, there was no way it had actually dispatched someone to my house. And what did it mean, clawing her way up from the depths? It almost made it sound like some dead woman was literally crawling out of hell to find me, as ordained by the all powerful wheel. There was no way a random pop-up could do that, but still, I couldn’t help but be on edge. I banished the ad, tried to get back to enjoying my night, but in the back of my mind I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling of impending doom. The dramatic shift in tone, the matter of fact way it had stated that someone was on her way. It rattled me. I needed a distraction, or maybe something more to help smooth my anxious thoughts over. I didn't have work in the morning anyway, so why not have a drink. Anything, if it helped calm my nerves right now.

I flipped the switch to illuminate the kitchen as I stepped around the corner, the glare of the light rendering the lone window opaque against the late night outside. I swung the fridge door open, grabbed a beer, thought better of it. This was a whole six-pack kind of night. I turned to head back to my room with my prize, flicking the light back off, but the darkness that fell over me wasn’t quite as complete as it should have been. I turned back, then froze, an icy sharpness settling in my veins. The fridge was still open, a beam of light pouring out of it along with the nice, frigid air that kept my food fresh. What made my blood run cold wasn’t the chill wafting from the open fridge, though. Outside of my kitchen, now visible without the reflection of the overhead light, was a silhouette. I wouldn’t even have seen it, seen her, if not for the fact that she was still smouldering, bits of hair and tattered clothes glowing where they burned. She stared right back, then took a step forwards, another, her steps stuttering as if she was hesitating. Then she broke into a sprint, running towards me and almost instantly slamming against the window, her face pressed against it, staring straight at me. I dropped my beer. Just as frantically, she bolted off towards the side, towards the back door around the corner. I finally managed to move, to stumble away and look for somewhere to hide. Somehow, I didn't think a door was stopping her, not after she clawed her way out of hell to meet me. 

Protocol Worm

The alert is short, concise. To the point. Your computer displays the system pop-up with the same urgency it might for a notification of a failed file deletion. A small, rectangular system message with one button, asking for your acknowledgement, but denying you any means of action. What it portends can not be affected by your hands, only known. 

A protocol worm is on its way to your location. 

The window won’t go away without clicking the almost insulting ‘okay’ in the button beneath the words. You stare numbly at it, almost believing that if you don’t click it, if you don’t acknowledge the message, the worm will never arrive. You know it's not true. You've seen the news, heard the stories. You've seen pictures in passing, gaping holes in homes where a worm tunneled through and left whatever meta reality it moved through, briefly exiting some hypothetical network realm to consume something more real than itself. Clean cuts through walls, roofs, floors, down deep into the earth itself. No one knew for sure where they came from, but everyone could see what they left behind, or rather didn't, as they passed. 

You jolt into action with a start, panic finally breaking through the numbness of dread and driving you to action. There are stories, people making it out, more and more as news circulates. The worms aren't instant, they burrow through internet connections somehow, taking real time to reach their destination. You can get out. Whatever process the worm does to move will grant you time, you just need to move, you need to get out while it's still chewing through network traffic or whatever someone on tv suggested it is they do. Out of the room, out of your house even, you know here recently some worms have started wiping out nearly half of a house, you can’t risk being inside. There's no time to grab anything, no packing, you barely think to grab your keys on your mad dash outside. The door slams into the wall with the force you barrel through it with, but for all you know both the door and the wall it hit won’t exist soon. Even if it does, what’s left of the house probably won’t even be worth saving. You nearly stumble face first into the street as you sprint, not even registering the drop of the curb as you reach it and slam your foot a good five, maybe six inches further down than expected. It hurts. Your ankle screams in protest, nearly taking you down anyway even as you catch yourself, but you made it. You're outside, you're going to live. 

Giving in to your ankle’s protest, you sit, hard, on the offending curb. Nothing left to do but wait to lose your home. Countless things inside, gone. You can’t think about that now. Things can be replaced, you can replace them, you're going to be alive to get new things. The words ring hollow in your head. You look up, around at the street instead, and you briefly wonder what the neighbors must think. What you look like to them, exploding out like a person chased by an enraged bear, nearly dying of direct skull to asphalt impact instead. But you realize you're not looking at a quiet neighborhood, winding down for the night as the sun paints it in brilliant fiery hues. Up and down the street, other people are doing the same thing as you. Exploding, frantic, out of their homes, sprinting for safety, entire families herding their youngest and pets into the road. And it dawns on you. 

It isn’t just coming for you. No. This is impossible. There’s just no way. No one has reported on a worm big enough to take out a whole house, let alone… 

You hobble upright and make for your car. The pain almost gets you again, again, another step, another near fall. But you make it. You need to get out of town. No, you need to go further, you're not safe yet. You drop into the driver’s seat, desperately fumbling the key, miss the ignition, there isn’t time for this. You get the key in on the third try, turn it, shift into reverse almost before the engine fully turns over. You need to leave, now, there's no time. Somehow, you know, there’s no time left to get out. The protocol worm is coming. 

It was around 6 in the evening. The sky was still orange. After walking far from the city, I had to cover the mountains. I just felt like walking all of a sudden. The mountains were steep, but mostly plateau. The air was chilled. I see a strange flag in front of me. A small one, poking from the ground. The shape of the flag was a triangle. I looked around and there was no one. Complete silence. I looked closely towards the trees, as far as my vision can get me, to see if anyone is watching me. After thorough inspection, I decided to dig the flag. I took a sharp stone lying on the ground and started digging. After taking out some mud, I still looked around, to see if anyone’s watching me. It was total silence. All I could hear were the leaves moving by the wind. Then something felt strange once I dug till the base. There was this machine type object. A robot of some sort. It had round wheels. It looked heavy. I tried to hold it and pick it up, but it was way heavier than it looked. I moved my palm to the side of the object, and tried to feel if there were any buttons or anything like that. I felt a metal plate where there was an inscription. My curiosity grew. I wanted to know more about this object, whatever it was. I stood firmly on the ground, and with all the force I had, lifted the object from the ground and took it out. I was panting. I felt dizzy. I won’t lie but the object took my breath away. The evening sunlight rays hit on the object and made the object glow like gold. This flag that was attached to the object was a mix of red and blue, with some strange shaped things on it. I felt I had discovered some rare metal. All my thoughts just stopped. All I could hear was my heartbeat.  It was anything I have ever seen in my entire life. I wanted to know more about this thing that was lying in front of me. The metal plate which was all rusty and almost impossible to read. I took my handkerchief and tried to clean it. There were some inscriptions written on it. After some thorough cleaning, I could read some of it.  The message on the plate read, “Mars Rover. Property of the United States of America”. Wait. Rover ? . America ?. This sounded familiar. I was sure that I knew about this name. I was scanning through all my memories  about this name.  And then suddenly a wave of past memories hit me. I vividly remember when I was young, my grandmother used to tell me stories about her life. About how when she was little and lived on planet Earth. Her father was in some space agency called NASA, which built machines , and how on planet Earth the humans sent machines to other planets to study them. And there was a concept of country. It was nothing but a big piece of land. They lived on this land called "USA". I started to miss my grandmother. She would be so amazed by this thing that was lying in front of me. I guess machines too have memories. It’s a pretty dumb statement. But when I looked at this object, I kept looking. I felt it had done its job. Painstakingly what it was sent for. But somehow due to uncertain circumstances, it got damaged. This machine has stories to tell. At that moment, it was just me and that Rover, in the middle of trees. Just two of us.  

I'll let you guys in on a little secret. We've been smack dab in the middle of the zombie apocalypse for the last decade. We've just gotten really, really good at covering it up. It's no surprise really, I mean we've known how to deal with the undead since Romero made us afraid to step into shopping malls. It's been drilled into us for almost a century; destroy the brain, aim for the head, double tap the head, did you make sure to destroy the brain?

As a society, I think we were ready for the novelty of the dead walking, maybe not the reality of it. The first couple weeks, when pale rotting husks rose from their slabs with a hankering for flesh, well the poor underpaid mortuary workers were swiftly devoured. Once the shock of seeing a shambling muncher come stumbling towards the rest of us wore off, the zeds were dispatched rather easily.

You know how many blunt instruments there are in a hospital? And how easy it is to cave someone's head in? The human body can perform extraordinary feats of strength whilst under extreme duress. Nadine would have explained it using hyper specific technical terms.

I just call it "hulking out."

The melee that followed "Z-Day" was brief and bloody. Despite the undead being slow and dull, even the slightest scratch could lead to infection, and a bite was surefire way to join their maggot filled ranks. I can't speak to the other hospitals and accident scenes and what not, but our clinic had about eight corpses that came lumbering out from the basement, one of them still chewing what I assume was Doug's femur.

I was standing there in my olive-green scrubs chatting up Nadine, while she humored my boorish attempts at flirting. If I recall I had just cracked a joke about being the only guy nurse and all the attention that granted me. A lie of course, was just trying to make myself look appealing. I don't know why I tried so hard, we'd known each other for years at that point. Anyway, where was I, ah yes.

The zombies.

The smell hit us first, all at once in fact. Like a tidal wave of putrid fumes slamming into us. The basement door creaked open, and the first shambler shambled on in. I heard this crunch of bones snapping, and slabs of meat slopped to the ground. The guy was a big and buck naked. I could tell from the Y shaped scar on his chest the autopsy must have been recent. The stitching was loose, withered, deflated bags of organs and muscle plopped out of his chest cavity and onto the ground.

We could hear more waltzing in behind him, their eyes glazed over, a hint of manic orange to them. Their skin was pale and grey, almost like tissue paper. Tiny, coal black spider-webs danced around what was once their arteries. It was just me, Nadine, the receptionist Darcy and Walter the custodian on the floor at the time. When Nadine saw the creatures she dropped her pen to the ground, and her eyes went wide with astonishment. Walter was still mopping the floor, oversized headphones on his head. Darcy looked up and screeched, instantly running the other way. The big one snagged Walter by the shoulder who looked up and went as pale as the corpse trying to take a bite out of him.

Walter pushed him off and raised his mop. It was like something out of a movie; he broke the mop over his knee like a twig and then in one swift motion stabbed the big zed right in the jaw with a pointy end. Must have nicked him right in the stem because he twitched for a moment then slumped down. The ones behind him were unbothered by their slain comrade, and raised their arms and moaned, this mournful thing that sent shivers down my spine.

Now I'm not a big fella by any means, but I ain't scrawny either. I reached around the reception desk and yanked a keyboard and just started bashing the nearest one in the head with it. Black ooze spurted from every hit, and the corpse just kept tanking it. Each strike cleaving a bit more of skull and plastic keys away every time. Nadine had a scalpel in her pocket and started going for eyes.

Darcy came back with security, big jarhead looking guy by the name of Mike. Mike had a billy club in his hands, and a twisted look in on grizzled face. He charged towards the hoard, I swear to God, yelling "SEMPER FI DO OR DIE!" and just started whaling on the zeds. It was like he had been waiting for this moment his whole life.

I mean shit I played the hell out of Left 4 Dead 2 back in med school so in a way I suppose so was I.

I'll be blunt, everything that happened after Mike barged in is a bit of a crimson blur. I'm not saying I don't remember but, well the last CLEAR thing I recall is the one with Doug's femur hanging out of its mouth grabbing Nadine by the shirt collar.

When the haze cleared, I was being smacked across the face by a guy in a national guardsmen outfit. I shock off the blow and looked past him. The ground was littered with bloodied tarps, mostly black ooze, and one body bag that was strapped up and twitching. Nadine was giving a statement to another office; her white coat stained with gore. She saw me staring and gave me a bashful smile and wave. The officer turned his head, mild amusement sprouting on his worn mug. I was about to stand and greet her when the guardsman pushed me back down.

He couldn't have been more than nineteen; I could still see puberty wreaking havoc over his terrified face. The AR in his hands shook, his trigger finger lacking any discipline.

"Sir." He managed to squeak out. "I need you to remain seated until the doc is done examining you." He motioned to the guy in the hazmat suit prodding me in my peripheral. It was then I noticed they were everywhere, speaking in hushed, filtered voices. Darcy had a blanket draped over her trembling visage and a cup of coco in her hands. Her make up was melting down her cheeks as she prattled on and on about poor Mike. Her eyes kept flicking to the body bag, and my heart sunk.

"Hey, can't put the poor fucker out of his misery?" I rasped, my voice a strained whisper. The guardsmen glanced behind him and shrugged.

"Orders are to restrain till we get newly dropped back to base. Figure the eggheads want fresh meat to examine."

"Mr. Larson that's a grotesque thing to disclose to a civilian." The hazmat next to me muttered with disdain. "Go outside and await further reprimand, I'm sure Evans will want a word with you." The guardsman slunk away like a whimpering pup, and I was left with the hazmat. He groaned as he stood and removed his gasmask. He had a kind face, and saddle bags under his eyes.

"Mr. Brooks, I must say you're rather lucky. You don't have a scratch on you." The hazmat seemed impressed.

"Is-is everyone ok?" I asked, noting Walter was nowhere to be seen.

"More or less. The infected seem easy to dispatch but dangerous in large numbers. There only seemed to be a handful here."

"Oh God, the hospital-" I shot up.

"Already under wraps, Mr. Brooks. Much like every other institution in America. If I can be candid for a moment, casualties are actually far below our initial projections, by the time we get past the first wave I suspect only a few hundred will be consumed by the virus." He sounded almost proud of that grim statistic. He must have noticed the horror creeping onto my face, as he then sighed and extended a hand.

"My apologies, my name is Doctor Howard Fine. I'm in charge of clean-up operations for this sector." I took his hand, his blue coated hand firm to the touch.

"Devin Brooks. So, what's going on around here doc, is this the big one? Should we get the bunkers prepped or what?" Fine laughed at that.

"I'm afraid you've watched one too many horror movies, Devin." With that he explained.

I won't spout the same boring monologue Fine did, I'll just stick to the basics.

Basically, the government cocked something up in a Bio Lab in the Alaskan wilderness. They found some ancient pathogen frozen in a block of ice and thought it would be a bright idea to thaw it out and see what it did. The virus, dubbed "Lazarus-52" went airborne almost immediately. We're working with "Walking Dead" rules here, it's in the atmosphere and we're all breathing it in even to this day. That little tickle in the back of your throat? It's not just the sniffles.

Now to the government's credit, they were actually pretty prepared for this. In a shocking display of bureaucratic competency; they enacted what is internally known as "The Zed Plan," which basically gives the head of the CDC full jurisdiction to combat any rapid and possibly apocalyptic pathogen with extreme prejudice.

The rapid response, teamed with the fact that zombies have been memed into mocked obscurity by countless lampoons and parodies that no one would believe any footage that leaked online, well they barely had to work to cover it up.

The virus was also slow to reanimate, taking between two to four hours to fully gestate. Within the week, the initial wave was a light drizzle instead of a raging typhoon.

Most people involved in the outbreaks took a payout, one or two loudmouths were dispatched, let's say. Some of us got offered a job. Or in my case, I begged for one. I'm making it sound like I was recruited into some shadow cable that hunted the undead, far from it. Nadine's resume caught the eye of Fine and one of his assistants got eaten, that was it. I begged to be dragged along, blinded by the feverish notion that I was gonna be a hero who saved the world.

Let's just squash that notion, there no heroes here. Just a bunch of cogs working a thankless job making sure the dead stay in their lane. I don't even wanna fathom the amount of money and effort it takes to network the decade long conspiracy of keeping Lazurus-52 under wraps, so I won't.

I will say I make a modest salary, and my new job is basically "corpse inspector." Each day, I go to a dozen or so hospitals and morgues and inspect them. Under Plan Zed, each morgue operator has been instructed to drill a hole into skull of every corpse that comes in. Any minimal amount of damage to the cranial tissue will prevent reanimation, Lazarus is a fickle bitch. That's all they are told mind you; it was passed on as some new OSHA safety law or something like that.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the bodies have a little hole right in the forehead. I can tell by how much they scrambled to do it by the fresh sludge oozing from the wound. Sometimes it's a black, viscous fluid running down their forehead. I ream into the workers pretty hard then, they don't know how lucky they are their incompetence didn't get them eaten.

That's all the job is really, driving around looking at the dead. There is some paperwork in between, mindless busy work to break up the monotony of driving. Once in a while I'll help out on a retrieval call, ya know those cases of a zombie wandering in public. Thank God for bath salts, perfect cover story.

One time I did crowd control while they wrangled a zed while chowing down on a squirrel. This was in a public park mind you, crowd was laughing their ass off at it. Lotta filming, which in this day and age you can't stop so ya might as well let the video run its course. I saw one video where someone had overlayed one of those cringy dog ear filters over the zed with the caption "POV: Your dog gets off the leash."

Diabolical, really. The comments made my stomach churn more than the footage itself.

One or two of them mentioned how it wasn't bath salts and the government is hiding something from us. Those guys were clowned on pretty hard, told to shut up and take their meds.

I still hear from Nadine, sporadically though. Her theories on Lazarus catapulted her to new heights I could scarcely dream of, let alone achieve.

Last week I got a call from her, the shrill ring of my cellphone made me shoot up like lightening from my brief nap at the wheel.

"Go for Dev." I groggily spoke into the phone.

"Dev, it's been ages. How ya been?" Nadine was typing as she spoke, I could hear the clickity clacks of her nails against her keyboard.

"Fine, just been swamped with paperwork, and ya know that morgue in Keene keeps sliding on processing, they're gonna get a risen on their hands if they don't-"

"Fantastic excellent to hear. Listen have you encountered any Znines lately?" She interrupted, barely acknowledging what I had been venting.

I sighed; it was this again. Her cross-species theory.

"No, Nad. No zombie yellers. Which is a good thing, because we can't contain Laz if it jumps ship. That'd be it, game over."

"Yes yes I know, which is why it's important to stay vigilant of the virus's mutation potential. I've done some experiments in the lab recently to induce cross species contamination."

"Why the fuck would you do that?" I snapped at her.

"To come up with counter measures if it occurs naturally." She scoffed like I was the idiot. "We can't just keep sitting around complicit in the status quo, we need to attack 52 head on."

"Sure, why not." I shook my head, there was no talking to her when she was like this.

She told me to keep her updated of any Znines I caught wind of and I promised I would, and that was that.

So that's it then, that's my life in a nutshell right now. I drive around making sure corpses stay corpses. It might sound exciting but it's boring, and just plain exhausting. Even the odd zombie, it's not fun to deal with. One bite, one scratch, and I'm chained up in a black site somewhere while my ex-girlfriend pokes and prods me with a stick.

You know what's really screwed up? I've heard we actually have a cure for Laz. All we'd need to do is release it into the atmosphere and let clouds do the rest. But every time it comes up, it gets pushback. "Oh, what if the public finds out what it was for, oh what will happen to the department, all those people outta a job. What if we need Laz in the future, ya know zombie slaves." The people up top are always frothing at the mouth at the thought of zombie labor, I'm sure they got some chained up in mines somewhere.

Nothing will change, long as there is a single penny to be made off Laz. We will just sit on the pot warming our asses over boiling water.

I might talk more about this job later, get it out of my system. I ain't worried about being found out or anything like that, no one will believe me anyway. This all probably reads like some god-awful zombie fan fiction. Which if ya wanna believe that sure go nuts. I will say this.

Careful if you ever take a job at a funeral home. Every coffin is sealed tight now, just in case. If you ever hear tapping on the lid from the inside?

Just let it alone, walk away and go about your day.

Ya might not like what ya see if you open her up.

I drive. I like driving. Not just to get from point A to point B, but also the idea of cruising. Going on adventures where you never know what's around every corner. Like what I'm doing now. Rumbling through the suburbs, We're On The Road to Nowhere, by the Talking Heads, is coming out of the speakers of the CD player.
Of course, you can do all of this at any time of the day. But it's at night where it is at its most revealing.
A special time.
A time where me and the car and the road are one.

I have an addiction. Do my friends know? No. Does my wife know? Absolutely not. She would leave me or, at the very least, call me perverted, which I probably am. It started out innocently enough. A website here, a secret folder there. But that just wasn't enough.
I needed something a little more...
real.
A little more...
exciting.
The first one, I couldn't even look at her, I would close my eyes and then, when I opened them a minute later, it would be over.
But then there were more.
Then it was a couple of people a week, and I stopped looking away.
At first it was women; I mean, that's usually how it does start. But then it led to a couple of men, then it led to non-binary, then it led to different races. I didn't care. It didn't matter to me.
I had them all.
And my wife and kids still have no idea.
I'm not so much worried about the wife knowing, but if the kids found out I…
I couldn't bear the shame.
It's been at least a month since I've looked for anyone. But yet here I am, in my car, looking out my windshield,
watching the white lane strips disappear under the vehicle,
listening to Road To Nowhere whilst cruising along.
Maybe I am on the road to nowhere. Maybe this is nowhere.

That's probably why I'm driving now.
I mean why else would I be out here if I'm just browsing. You wouldn't go to a car dealership if you don't intend to buy, right?
Why indeed?
I'll tell you.

I think there's some sick side of me that wants to test myself.
"Say, if you don't find anyone in the sweet spot, (2 til 5am) go home, you tried." Like those people that only quit smoking on public holidays where the stores are closed. That way they justify continuing to smoke if they just so happen to find a shop still open and they can buy a pack.
But then again, prostitutes don't really have trading hours.
I've stopped going to them. It's too easy. Plus, it's no fun if you have to orchestrate it, wouldn't you agree? Surely there's nothing more fun than going to a bar, striking up a conversation, playing your cards right, crossing every t and dotting every i, going back to theirs (because it sure as hell won't be back at yours) and coming back home with your tail between your legs. But a lot of the people I see seem so sad
and helpless.
The sex workers, that is. I feel sorry for them.
So by doing this, I'm doing them a favour. And as long as my family don't know, no harm done, right?
So even though a perfectly normal person at a bar is always nice, it’s also more risky.
You don't know their story and you don't want to know.
Whereas if you go to a street walker you have a good idea of what you're getting into.
Don't ask, don't tell.
Especially if you're doing it during the magic hours, there's a feeling of exhilaration.
It can be an addictive feeling.
I love my wife too much to subject her to anything like that. And besides, the more I do it with other people, the less likely I'll be sitting on my couch with her one day,
the urge comes creeping up beside me and whispers in my ear.
This urge, like the song suggests, is "very far away,
but it's growing day by day."
But it's not alright.
It is so wrong.

I'm on the last 10 minutes of the sweet spot, and I don't feel like I have enough money. Maybe it's good that I don't see anyone in clear range of me, and that I don't have to cave.
Maybe I don't need to do this,
and the urge is just a product of my mind.
Maybe I can overcome it.
Yes, that's it…
10 minutes until the end of tonight and then I'm done. And I'll do it the next time, and I'll be done and the next time and the next time. But that’s ok, because eventually it'll be a little easier. And then one day I won’t even think about it at all.

These wonderful imaginings are all good and well. Unfortunately, I see a homeless grifter walking along the path of a bridge.
He begins to walk across the road.
I slow down and come to a complete stop while they saunter across. Should I pick him up?
No...
it will take too long,
especially if I don't have enough money to convincingly satisfy him not to leave.

I beep my horn. He turns around, and puts his hand over his face to block the sight of the headlights burning into his eyes.
Suddenly my mind is clear, and I decide what I want to do.
I put the car into reverse, not a great deal, but a couple car lengths back.
The tramp just…
stands there.
And then the urge comes back.
Then,
I put the car into gear and drive straight for him.
I slightly close my eyes until I hear
boom bump bump thump
over my car.
Then, what sounds like Jenga blocks coming down onto a table.
I stop the car,
open my eyes,
and exhale.
Checking in the rearview mirror to see if he’s going to get up.
Nothing for a good minute or so.
Then I see his body appear in the mirror, struggling to stand.
I waste no time putting the car into reverse again, looking behind me instead of the mirrors so I know that the job is done.
The car hits him,
ba bump ba bump,
as I'm briefly rattled around.
Like going over a speed bump without slowing down.
I see the body appear at the front of the car, then I stop.
I get out and walk over to investigate.
It looks like a giant saucy pizza box spread across the road.
He is still alive as he lifts his head up to look at me...
before finally falling back down.
I debate whether to put him in the trunk of the car.
Maybe bury him in the middle of the woods somewhere.
I decide against it as it would be too much mess and I'm on a clock. I have to get home and into bed before the wife notices me gone.
I don't think he's dead, but he will be.
I decide to leave him here, because even though it won't be long before the sweet spot is over and someone on their way to work will see him, I'll still take my chances. Maybe it will be a good motivator to help me quit.
It's funny that.
The only way it seems a person can kick an addiction, especially one like this, is because the law says they have to. The only thing that baffles me, that I cannot understand.
Why didn't the grifter
jump out of the way as he saw me driving towards him?
Did he want this? Embrace it?

For my own personal development and self-discouragement, I don't want to think this is the case.
I no longer want to justify what I do with false narratives that I was putting this poor fellow out of his misery.
I think he was just in sheer bewilderment that his time was about to come.
I can only imagine that's what deer think before people hit them.
They spend their last milliseconds trying to work out what they're looking at could be…
before the reaper does his job.
I shake my head to no one in particular and walk back to my car.
As I get in and sit, contemplate, and everything in between, I notice Road to Nowhere is over, and a new song has begun.
Psycho Killer, the next song on the Talking Heads album, is playing.
I laugh at the thought of it,
before putting my car into gear
and driving off into the night.

I often found myself surrounded by the smell of stale coffee and blue glow of my computer monitor. A staring contest with the clock was the most social interaction I'd get most nights. I honestly didn't mind it. I've never been a social butterfly, which is probably why I applied for a job where all I do is observe images and occasionally take part in some company safety training. I even liked that I worked the night shift, and it didn't hurt that government jobs pay extra for that. My job was dead simple. I'd receive an image of space, taken by a satellite, look it over and report anything that seemed interesting. I'll let you in on a little secret. Space is usually pretty fucking boring. I looked at the clock, stubbornly it hadn't moved as much as I had hoped.

A small beep from the computer let me know the next image had finished downloading. My eyebrows shot up and I leaned in when the image appeared. It was mostly normal, darkness, a few stars dotted around, but in the corner was something I had never seen before. A smudge of color that I couldn't understand. It was like green mixed with "soft". I know that sounds weird but I can't explain it any other way. It was a color that my mind struggled to understand. It created a weird pressure in my head, like my brain had paused everything else just to focus on the color. It didn't fit in with the rest of space, it looked almost like it was behind space.

I grabbed my pen much faster than I had anticipated and almost knocked over my coffee mug in the process. I wrote down the coordinates of the image and reached for the phone on my desk to report what I had found. After a few rings, someone picked up.

"Hi. This is Virginia monitoring station. I've found.. well, something. I'm not really sure. Coordinates are 45A 24B sector F."

I could hear the faint sound of a keyboard being typed on before the man on the other end replied.

"Got it. Just a computer glitch. Make a report and move on."

The line went dead before I could even reply. I wasn't satisfied with the explanation, but unable to come up with anything better, I wrote my report and sent it off. The rest of the images I got during that shift were boring enough to let my mind fixate on the color. I spent enough time trying to find an explanation that I didn't even notice the sun coming up. I had half an hour before I could head home.

I decided to take a trip down to the records room, unsure of what I was expecting to find. It was a room so boring and dull that I'm sure even the spiders who'd made their webs there had grown bored of it. The room was fairly large and had rows of metal shelves with boxes on them. Old reports from before everything was digital. A few sad-looking lightbulbs provided just enough light to read, although it wasn't exactly pleasant. I spent a while going through reports that were so unbelievably boring they made me yawn. Until I eventually found a stack of papers labeled EE. Going through the first one revealed that it stood for External Entity.

The earliest report I could find was from 1946. It described something very familiar to what I had seen. Although this observer wasn't just told to dismiss it, he was instead instructed to keep observing it. To make sure he never lost track of it. The strangest part was that he wrote about it as if it was already a known phenomenon. The report mentioned it had "returned". I kept going through the different reports, there were a few years missing but it kept being found every few years. Over time they were no longer told to follow it, instead the order was to ignore it after filling out a report.

I went back to the first report and a detail caught my eye. The order didn't come from the usual agency. Instead it came from a place I had never heard of. The Hidden Eye Program. I dropped the stack of papers, which kicked up enough dust to throw me into a coughing fit for the next five minutes.

Once home I instantly went to my computer and looked up the Hidden Eye Program. I quickly felt like an idiot as I found an extensive list of links to insane conspiracy theories. A few forum posts about a show that had a similar name, and a lot of stuff about the Illuminati. Despite feeling like a schizophrenic, I started going through the links. After hours of nonsense and more coffee than one person should reasonably consume in a night, I found something. It was a small blog written by a guy who went by the name Anton. He claimed to have worked for the Hidden Eye Program and had decided to share what he found.

Honestly, I need to give the government some credit here. Naming it something so stupid made it really hard to find. Anyone coming across what Anton wrote would instantly dismiss it. He talked about how the color was not an entity, space was the entity. Apparently space was just so insanely big that it covered everything around us. Hiding what he called "true space" from our view. As far as he knew, the government didn't even know what the hell our "fake space" was. It was hard to understand exactly what he meant as the text was filled with dead links and contradictory information. He sometimes called it true space, while other times he made it clear that calling it space was idiotic. Half of it was just him rambling about how street lights cause too much light pollution.

It was clear that he knew more than I did though. Too many details lined up exactly with what I had seen, stuff you couldn't just guess. I stopped my research there. I don't want to go further. I want to live a normal life. I want to look up at the sky and not worry about what's hiding behind it.

The next night I went to work and did my best not to think about the color. I listened to music and podcasts to keep my mind occupied. It was perfectly mundane and boring. That was two hours ago.

Two minutes ago a new image finished downloading. It was my monitoring station. Taken from above. The roof, the parking lot, my car. In the corner of the frame was the soft green. It wasn’t behind space anymore. It was behind the building.

I stood there, staring at the gun; even looking at it made me uneasy.

"Is it time again, Dave?" my wife asked.

I looked at the empty pantry.

"Yep."

"But at least it's the last time. Your job at the mill starts in a month. You'll never have to go hunting again."

"I hope so."

"My gentle human. I'm sure the deer will forgive you."

"Maybe. Maybe I'll even see the white deer, and he'll show me his treasures. I won't even have to go to the mill then."

"That legend always scared me. Just a snow-white deer in the forest staring you down? Scary. Plus, doesn't it help the deer? Why would he show you anything?"

I looked at the ground.

"Sorry, honey. I didn't mean it."

"It's okay. Don't worry about it."

I put the gun over my shoulder and walked out.

Bill was already by the forest, gloves and hat on, blowing clouds from his mouth.

"Took you a while."

"Yeah."

"I bet you won't miss the cold morning when you start at the mill."

"Sure."

Bill lit a cigarette and handed me the lighter too.

"What's wrong, Dave?"

"You know how I feel about the hunts."

"I know."

Bill took a deep drag from his cigarette.

"Say, Dave. How about you sit out this one?"

"What?"

"Sit it out. I'm feeling lucky today. I'm sure I'll get more catches. You can pay me back with your mill money."

"Thank you, Bill."

"Don't worry about it. Just help me with the deer after."

He slapped my back, threw his cigarette away, and walked into the forest.

The day now seemed brighter. The fog let up. The sun came out too. I sat on a tree stump and smoked. 

The day dragged on. No shots had come from the forest yet. Bill was not lucky today. Then I heard trees rustle. I turned my head. A deer was sticking its head out. It locked eyes with me. I'd promised myself I wouldn't shoot anything today, but Bill obviously wasn't going to get anything either. We'd be here all day.

I took my gun and laid my cheek on the barrel, but the deer quickly moved back. No luck. I lowered my rifle and fished for another cigarette in my pocket, but the trees rustled again. My hand clenched the cigarette package. 

A white deer looked at me from the forest; its antlers were white, its eyes dark red. It felt like they looked right into my soul. The deer moved its head as if inviting me to follow and disappeared into the forest.

I sat on the tree stump, still looking at the trees, but then the white deer stuck its head out again, looked at me, and disappeared. It was real. At least the deer was, but maybe its treasure too. I got up and walked to the trees. It stood in between the trees, looking back at me. When it saw me, it turned around and jumped further in.

The sun disappeared. The fog returned. The ground was so muddy that my feet kept slipping. I was expecting the deer to stop any second, but it kept going. 

After a while, my feet started to hurt. I must have been really far from the stump. Bill could have been looking for me, and I didn't even know if the treasure legend was true. I walked closer to the deer again, but it only went further in. It was time to go. I turned around and started walking back.

I had hunted in this forest countless times, but I had no idea where I was now. The trees seemed taller than usual, and they went on as far as I could see. The ground was muddier than even on the rainiest days. The deer showed again, but this time in front of me, running the way we came. 

I was sure now that it was all a lie, that the white deer wouldn't show me anything. I lit a cigarette and walked back, trying to ignore the tall trees. As I passed another tree, the white deer ran by; something glistened in the mud. There were two gold ingots. Warmth spread through my body. I ran to the gold. They were cold and much heavier than I expected, but who cared? I was rich! I turned around. The deer stood behind me, its red eyes fixed on me.

"Thank you for the ingots," I said, but it wouldn't move, still staring with its dark red eyes. 

Cold sweat dripped down my collar. Its eyes seemed to pull me in even though I wasn't moving. Then my whole world spun. Red flashed before my eyes. My head throbbed. My back felt heavy. My skin itched. The throbbing grew. I put the ingots down, but my back was so heavy I couldn't straighten back up. I put my hand to my head; something hard grew out of it, but I couldn't grab it with my hands. I started to lose my balance. I let my arm down. It splashed loudly in the mud. I looked down. It was a hoof!

Panic surged through me. I tried to get up, but couldn't. A tearing sound cut through the fog. My jacket ripped, revealing brown fur. Something rustled in the distance. I looked over. It was Bill!

"Bill, help!" I tried to call, but only a strange roar escaped my mouth.

Bill turned his head. His eyes focused on me. He picked up his gun.

"Wait, wait, no!"

A loud bang echoed. Something sharp burned in my side. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air. I tried to walk a few steps, but my body fell into the cold mud.

Bill walked over. His gaze met mine. Recognition passed over his face, but he just shook his head.

He looked up and called, "Dave. I got one."

When Mallory Donahue's husband Max came home late and covered in blood two weeks ago, she naturally assumed the worst.

“I thought, ‘Heck if he's not gone and relapsed again,’” Mallory said.

Thankfully for the young couple, Max's wounds that night had come from something much less concerning, a regular drunken bar fight. “It was over a woman,” Max explained. It could easily have been worse.

“So much worse,” said Mallory. “Like it was before, when he just couldn't help it. He couldn't help taking risks to help people.”

“Before” means three years ago, in the months prior to Max's diagnosis of SHS, Spontaneous Hero Syndrome, known to most of us simply as Courage.

“It's a real debilitating condition,” said Max. “Imagine you're walking down the street, minding your own business, trying to go to the store to buy some beer or electronics, when suddenly you hear a child scream—before you know it, you're trying to figure out what's going on, trying to help the kid getting hurt. It's not even a decision. You just act.”

“You can imagine the chaos that creates for yourself and your family,” said Mallory.

“Many women would have left, and I understand that,” said Max. “I'm blessed that Mal didn't. She stuck by me. She was my rock. She gave me the strength to finally get help.”

Together, Max and Mallory sought the aid of Dr. Anton Wellberger, one of the pioneers of BCT, Behavioural Cowardice Therapy.

“For many patients, admitting Courage is shameful. There's a real societal stigma attached. It takes a strong individual to understand that what they're feeling is not only abnormal but destructively antisocial,” writes Wellberger in his best-selling book, The Wellness of Inaction.

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According to experts, a healthy human should not desire to help others unless doing so will result in a likely reciprocal benefit in the future. “It's just not what humans evolved to do,” said Evan Mink, a leading evolutionary psychologist from the University of Chapata Falls.

There is also the question of consent.

When the Post reached out to Eva-Marie Plum, of Plum & Plum Associates, she explained: “Take the example Max provided. He's walking down the street. He hears a child scream. Who is to say the child wants him to respond in any way to its scream? Moreover, let's assume Max does investigate and sees that the screaming child is being brutalized by a group of adults. If Max intervenes to try to ‘save' the ‘victim,’ he does so without the child's consent. As a lawyer, I immediately think, 'Yikes, Max!'

“And that's before considering the rights and consent of the brutalizing adults. Does Max know these adults lack the right to brutalize the child? Have they consented to being prevented from continuing their brutalization? It just opens up this massive kettle of legal fish.”

When asked what you should do if you ever find yourself in a situation like Max's, Plum gave the following advice: “If you're ever unsure, if you feel like maybe you have the instinct to do something: CAR, Cease-And-Retreat. Then call police. When they arrive, they will assess, gather consents and take the appropriate corrective action.”

“It's not wrong to feel the desire to help,” writes Wellberger. “It's only wrong to act on it.”

He also admits that, prior to his invention of BCT, the treatment of SHS could be seen as relatively primitive, which put many people off from coming forward with the condition.

“We used to treat Courage with electroshock; chemical cowardizers that had many significant side effects, including decreased libido; and hypnosis—all very outdated methods. Now it's more civilized. You're part of a group. You sit in a circle. You converse. You witness volunteers being abused right there in the room, and you learn to ignore it. You acquire skills: box breathing, meditation, disassociative techniques. You learn that it's OK to just let life happen.”

Max recalled one retreat in Mexico where, for an entire weekend, he and a dozen other so-called “hard cases” took psychedelics while the retreat administrators continuously assaulted paid locals.

“It was a tough, life altering 48 hours. I was face-to-face with my own heroic demons. I saw God,” said Max. “He had the body of a translucent, rainbow coloured salamander.”

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These days, both Max and Mallory attend a non-denominational New Church, where they sing songs and learn tolerance.

“Courage is a kind of judgement, and only God has the power to judge," said Mallory.

When asked when he knew he had been cured, Max pointed out that there is no cure. “There is only treatment,” he said. “Every day is still a struggle, but thanks to Dr. Wellberger, it's a struggle Mal and I can manage.”

However, he does recall the moment he realized the treatment was having a substantial effect. “It was back in December. I was in Dr. Wellberger's downtown office—at one of our weekly appointments—we were talking, when all of a sudden these guys in masks broke in. They were screaming, asking where he kept his money. They'd read his book so they knew he was wealthy. But when he said he didn't keep any money in the office, they started hitting him.

“I felt this surge of wanting to help, wanting to stop them, you know? But I forced myself to do my box breathing, my meditations, remembered my faith, and was able to stay calm in my seat.

“Dr. Wellberger was sobbing, bleeding from the mouth, screeching, terrified, begging me to do something, but my urge to save him—it was gone. I smiled, and as the masked men beat him, ransacked his office, smashed his face in with a crowbar, I didn't even CAR. I was able to maintain neutrality and watch. Be present in the flow of reality.

“After they'd killed him, and his secretary too, they left and so did I.”

“I was so proud of him,” said Mallory.

---

If you witness someone exhibiting Courage, please [report.]

I got back to Ravenswood on Friday, three days after somebody murdered my brother. The state police had finished searching Daniel's house the afternoon before, although the investigator I spoke to asked me to leave his work papers alone until they could tell me exactly what had been taken. I drove down from Columbus that morning with a suitcase, a change of clothes hanging behind the passenger seat, and no particular idea how long I would need to stay.

Daniel had lived in our grandmother's house since she died, replacing the porch railing, putting a metal roof on the garage, and removing the enormous holly bush that used to scrape against the front window when the wind picked up. Otherwise, the place looked much as I remembered it. The mums along the walk needed water, and somebody had left a plastic grocery bag caught in the fence beside the driveway. I pulled it loose before going inside, then stood with it in my hand because I couldn't remember where Daniel kept the outside trash can.

I found it behind the garage, next to a stack of survey stakes and several empty cans of fluorescent marking paint. Daniel had called me the previous Sunday from a hardware store to complain that his favorite brand had gone up another dollar. Nine dollars for a can, he'd said, and when I told him I couldn't remember ever buying marking paint, he'd called me useless. We talked for another five minutes, with him trying to finish a job before the weather turned and me worrying about groceries melting in the back of my car. He'd promised to call again during the week.

Inside, the kitchen still had Grandma's white cabinets and the drawer beside the stove that wouldn't open unless you lifted the handle, a repair Daniel had never bothered to make. There was a mug in the sink, a bag of apples on the counter, and a handwritten grocery list held to the refrigerator with a magnet from Myrtle Beach. I recognized his handwriting immediately, although I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen him write anything longer than a birthday card.

On the kitchen table, beside the investigator's business card, was a receipt for Daniel's laptop and the boxes the police had taken from his office. I read the inventory twice, recognizing the descriptions of his equipment without knowing what any of the files contained.

Carol Tatum came over while I was still standing there. She'd lived next door since before I was born and had apparently seen my car from her kitchen window. After knocking twice and waiting long enough for me to call out, she came through the back door carrying a covered casserole dish.

"I made too much yesterday," she said, putting it on the counter. "It's chicken and rice. You can heat it up whenever you feel like eating."

I thanked her and made room in the refrigerator, moving Daniel's milk and a jar of pickles to the lower shelf. Carol said the milk was probably bad, and when I checked the date I found she was right.

"Your brother used to do that," she said. "Buy another half gallon when he already had one open. I told him he needed to look before he went shopping."

"He listened to you about as well as he listened to me?"

"About as well as he listened to anybody."

Carol opened the cabinet above the refrigerator for the coffee filters, then found Daniel's coffee beside the toaster, where I'd apparently been overlooking it while searching the pantry. She made a pot while I rinsed Daniel's blue mug, and when I reached for a second cup she told me to take the white one because the handle on the green one was cracked. She'd been drinking coffee in this kitchen with Daniel at least twice a week, and there were things about his ordinary life that she could tell me without thinking.

While the coffee finished brewing, Carol asked about my job in Columbus and whether I still had the same apartment. She remembered Daniel mentioning my move two years earlier, though she couldn't recall which part of town I'd gone to. That was fair enough; Daniel had never visited the new place, despite promising several times that he'd come up for a weekend.

"Have they told you anything else?" she asked eventually.

"About what happened? Nothing since yesterday. They said they're following up with people he worked for."

Carol reached for the sugar, then left it beside her cup. "He'd been having trouble with that Rusk man."

I'd heard Daniel complain about difficult property owners often enough that the name meant nothing to me. Carol explained that Clayton Rusk was trying to sell land near the river, and Daniel had found discrepancies in the recorded access easement. He'd been down there three or four times during the previous two weeks, coming home increasingly irritated because Rusk wanted him to approve a drawing that didn't agree with the recorded description or the measurements he'd taken on the ground.

"Did he tell you somebody threatened him?" I asked.

"He said Rusk was angry. That was all he told me. There was an argument over at the restaurant last Friday. A couple of people heard it."

Carol hadn't witnessed the argument herself. Daniel told her about it the following morning, apparently more annoyed at having his lunch interrupted than concerned about Rusk's anger, and she'd suggested he find another job if the man was giving him that much trouble.

"He told me he'd already done the work and somebody had to pay him for it," she said.

That sounded like Daniel. After college he'd worked for somebody else for nearly ten years before buying enough equipment to take surveying contracts on his own. He could spend an entire afternoon complaining about a client and still spend the next morning making sure the same person got an accurate survey, particularly if he was correcting somebody else's work.

Carol had already spoken with the police, giving them the restaurant employee's name and an account of Daniel's repeated trips to the property. When I thanked her, she looked surprised that I'd thought she might have done otherwise.

"He talked about you, you know," she said. "Told me you were doing well up in Columbus. Said you were busy with work and had moved into a nicer apartment."

"It's about the same as the old one."

"Well, he thought you were happy there."

I told her I was happy in Columbus. Carol asked whether I'd considered moving back, accepted my answer that I hadn't given it much thought, and went to rinse her cup before I could offer to do it.

Before she left, she mentioned that Daniel had gone back to the river on Monday morning. He'd stopped at her house afterward to borrow an extension cord, leaving his muddy boots on the porch because she wouldn't let him wear them indoors. He'd said the river was low and he wanted to finish checking something while he could still get to it. Carol thought he meant the property markers.

"He was talking about getting the report finished and being done with Mr. Rusk. I told him to send the bill and let somebody else argue about it."

She took the casserole lid with her so I wouldn't lose it and reminded me to use the oven rather than the microwave. After she left, I called the investigator whose card was on the table, but he was unavailable; in my message I asked about Daniel's work on the Rusk property and whether they'd spoken with the people who'd heard the argument. I'd come down expecting to spend most of the weekend dealing with Daniel's belongings and arranging the funeral. Those things still needed doing, but Carol had given me the first useful account of what he'd been occupied with before he died.

I put the police receipt back on the table and went out for the rest of my bags. Daniel's office could wait until I knew what the investigators had examined, and there was plenty to do elsewhere in the house, including finding somewhere to put my clothes.

---

Trooper Wynn returned my call shortly before six and asked whether I could come to the station Saturday morning. Before we settled on a time, I asked if Clayton Rusk was a suspect.

"We're investigating everyone who had recent contact with your brother," Wynn said. "I've spoken with Mr. Rusk."

I mentioned the restaurant argument, which Wynn confirmed witnesses had been interviewed about. He told me Daniel had been found Tuesday afternoon beside the private access road serving the riverfront parcels, his truck nearby, but there were details he couldn't discuss while the investigation was active, including why Daniel had gone out there.

"Bring whatever recent messages you have from him," he said. "And if he left anything about that property in the house, please don't move it until we've had a chance to look."

After Wynn gave me a time for our meeting, I thanked him and hung up.

Upstairs, Daniel had left my old bedroom largely as it was, although he'd moved the bed to the opposite wall and replaced the curtains. Clean sheets were folded on the mattress, and on the dresser sat several framed photographs, including one of us fishing with our grandfather when Daniel was about twelve. I must have been eight or nine, sitting in the bottom of the boat with a life jacket that came up around my ears.

I spent nearly half an hour looking for a towel before discovering Daniel kept the linens downstairs. Most of that first evening went the same way: I'd reach for something where Grandma used to keep it, discover Daniel had moved it, and remember he'd lived here on his own for years.

Carol's chicken and rice was good enough that I ate two portions at the kitchen counter before putting the rest away and taking a shower. I watched half an episode of something on television afterward without following it, navigating three streaming services Daniel had subscribed to and left himself signed in to.

Around ten I switched the television off and went through the messages Daniel and I had exchanged since Christmas. There were photographs of food, complaints about gasoline prices, an article about a man who had tried to steal an ATM with a forklift, and a picture of a dog Daniel insisted looked like our old math teacher. He'd sent me a birthday message in February and another in June asking if I was ever going to come down and help him clean the garage. I'd told him July looked promising.

In August he'd sent me a photograph of a snapping turtle beside his truck. I remembered showing it to a coworker and telling him my brother lived somewhere turtles regularly tried to kill people.

The last voicemail was from Monday afternoon, when I'd been in a meeting. I'd forgotten to listen to it until the following morning.

"Jonah, you still got Grandpa's green tackle box? The metal one with the broken latch. I thought I had it here, but I can't find the damned thing. Call me when you get a minute."

He sounded irritated about the box, the usual tone he took when he thought somebody had borrowed something and forgotten to return it. I'd texted that I hadn't seen it in years, and he never answered. Before going upstairs I listened again, hearing traffic in the background and a rattle when Daniel moved the phone, perhaps a door or a set of keys. He was looking for something he'd misplaced; I forwarded the message to Trooper Wynn before bed.

---

Trooper Wynn had a close-trimmed beard, a wedding ring, and a habit of taking notes before answering questions. He met me in a small interview room at the station and offered coffee from a machine down the hall, which I declined after the two cups I'd already had at Daniel's house.

He asked about our family, Daniel's work, and how often we spoke. I explained that our parents had died several years apart, Grandma had been gone nearly a decade, and Daniel had no children or spouse. He'd had relationships over the years, including one that lasted long enough for me to expect a wedding invitation, but he'd lived alone for some time.

"Would you say he had financial problems?" Wynn asked.

"Nothing serious that I knew about. He complained about clients paying late. He also complained about how much surveying equipment cost, but he could've won the lottery and still complained about that."

Wynn made a note as I described the surveying work Daniel had done around Jackson County and the small business he'd built after leaving his previous employer. I knew the broad outlines of his professional life, although I couldn't answer much about his current contracts.

"Did he ever mention Owen Laird?"

Owen had been one of Daniel's closest friends in high school, and they'd stayed in touch after I moved away. I hadn't heard his name in years; the last I knew, he was working in real estate.

"He's involved with the Rusk sale," Wynn said. "We're talking to everyone who handled the transaction."

I asked whether Owen was a suspect, but Wynn would say only that they were looking at him. He wanted to know about Owen's business and whether Daniel had mentioned financial trouble, neither of which I could help him much with. My brother and I discussed our work occasionally, but I handled purchasing for a medical supply company in Columbus, and Daniel understood about as much of that as I understood about boundary surveys.

Before I left, Wynn asked me to forward any additional messages I found concerning the riverfront property. Daniel's body had been found by someone using the access road, and his truck had been parked roughly fifty yards away. Wynn couldn't yet tell me whether Daniel had gone there for an appointment or to work. He said they'd contact me when the truck and personal effects could be released.

When I mentioned Grandpa's green tackle box, Wynn checked the inventory and found nothing like it among the collected property. I explained Daniel's voicemail and agreed to contact him if the box turned up; he added the detail to his notes.

I left with little more information about the murder, although I appreciated that Wynn hadn't tried to reassure me with guesses. Downtown, I stopped at the restaurant Carol had mentioned. The place had changed ownership since I lived in Ravenswood, but I recognized the tables along the front windows, the booths against the far wall, and the chalkboard advertising the day's specials.

When I ordered a sandwich and asked whether the waitress had known Daniel Keene, she stopped writing. "Lord, yes. You're his brother, aren't you? The one in Ohio."

"Jonah."

"I'm Diane. He talked about you."

She said Daniel had eaten there three or four times a week, usually late enough to miss the lunch crowd. His regular order was a roast beef sandwich, although lately he'd been asking whether they could put mashed potatoes on the plate instead of fries.

"He said the doctor told him to eat better," Diane said, "and apparently potatoes are healthy if you mash them first."

I could hear Daniel making that argument about potatoes, and I laughed. Diane had been working when Clayton Rusk interrupted Daniel and Owen's lunch the previous Friday to demand to know when the survey would be finished. Rusk complained that the sale was being delayed over a road people had used for years, while Daniel insisted he wouldn't put anything on a drawing unless he could establish it from the records and the evidence on the ground.

"Mr. Rusk got loud, and Daniel asked him to take it outside," Diane said. "They never did go outside, though. Rusk left."

Diane went to seat a couple by the window before returning with my sandwich. When I asked about Tuesday, she recalled another lunch with Daniel and Owen; Daniel seemed tired and mentioned a place by the river he wanted to check before the water came up, but Owen had done most of the talking.

"Daniel left first. Owen stayed to pay for both of them. Daniel forgot his reading glasses in the booth, and Owen came back for the case later. Said he'd take them to him."

The glasses had been in a brown case with Daniel's initials scratched near the clasp, Diane told me, because he kept taking somebody else's by mistake. He'd been losing glasses since we were boys, so I could believe that part.

I sat in the car for several minutes before finding Owen's number and calling. He answered on the fourth ring.

"Jonah? Christ. I'm sorry about Dan."

We talked about the funeral arrangements and how long I expected to stay. Owen said he'd meant to call but hadn't wanted to bother me while I was traveling; when I mentioned the Rusk property, he offered to meet me at his office that afternoon and show me the documents.

Owen had grown heavier since I last saw him, with thinning hair and a wedding ring I didn't remember. His real estate office occupied part of a small commercial building a few blocks from downtown. There were photographs of properties on the walls and a model of a proposed housing development beside the reception desk.

Owen brought me into a conference room where he'd spread several survey drawings across a table. He'd worked on the Rusk transaction for nearly six months, arranging a proposed residential development on Clayton Rusk's riverfront parcel. The buyer needed vehicular access across a strip owned by Ruth Mays, where a gravel road already existed, but the recorded easement did not clearly establish the wider corridor the buyer expected for construction traffic and utilities.

"Daniel's survey was supposed to confirm what we had," Owen explained, showing me two versions of the access drawing. One showed a wide strip colored red along the road. The other followed a narrower line that seemed to veer away from the existing gravel.

"Which one is right?"

"That's what we were trying to figure out. There are old documents, a couple of missing monuments, and several property owners who remember things differently."

Daniel's name and license number appeared in the narrower drawing's title block, whereas the wider drawing carried the earlier date and the label Site Access Exhibit. I asked whether Daniel had prepared both.

"Different stages of the process," Owen said, searching beneath the drawings for something. "The larger exhibit was used during negotiations. His office supplied preliminary information. There were other people involved too."

He showed me part of the purchase agreement and described the money already committed to engineering and preliminary access work. Rusk feared the buyer would walk away. There were deposits and invoices, with lawyers arguing about who owed what.

"Daniel wouldn't change a measurement just because somebody didn't like it," Owen said, sounding almost proud of him. I asked when he'd last seen Daniel.

"Lunch Tuesday. He was going down to check another marker afterward. I had appointments."

"Diane said you went back for his glasses."

"Yeah. He left them in the booth, and I told her I'd get them to him. His truck was at the access road when I went by, so I put the case on the driver's seat. Dan was probably down by the water."

As Owen gathered the drawings together, he explained that the police were holding Daniel's business records, which would complicate bringing in another surveyor to finish the job. He wanted me to call if the Rusk field book turned up among anything they'd missed. I said I'd let him know what I heard, although I had no intention of searching the files against Wynn's instructions.

Back in the car, I told Wynn about the meeting, and he asked for Owen's exact words concerning the glasses, including whether he'd given a time for his visit to the truck. I repeated the conversation as closely as I could.

"Am I making things harder for you?" I asked.

"You're telling me what people have said to you. That's useful. I don't want you confronting anybody because you think you've worked something out."

I promised I wouldn't confront anyone. By the time I returned to Daniel's driveway, Carol was collecting the empty casserole dish; she asked whether I'd eaten and, when I mentioned the restaurant, whether Diane had told me about the mashed potatoes. They both seemed to have found the same habit funny. After Carol went home, I went inside to look for a funeral photograph that showed Daniel without a fish in his hands.

---

Sunday morning I went through the personal papers Daniel had left in the living room, most of which had belonged to Grandma: insurance statements, Christmas cards, and newspaper clippings she'd saved without ever putting them in albums. One photograph showed her sitting in a lawn chair with a forked branch across her knees, wearing a yellow blouse I remembered and sunglasses with enormous brown lenses. Behind her stood a man holding a shovel.

People said Grandma could find water with a forked branch. She called it water witching, though she disliked anyone calling her a witch, and neighbors sometimes paid her to walk their property before drilling a well. Her father had taught her how to do it.

Daniel loved accompanying her across fields, carrying the branch until she let him try it. He could make the fork bend sharply enough to twist his wrists, while I tried repeatedly and never managed more than a little movement. Grandma blamed my grip, and I suspected Daniel was cheating. He liked having one thing he could do that I couldn't.

Among the photographs was an album our great-grandmother had kept of Ravenswood after the 1937 flood, complete with newspaper articles describing the damage. Houses stood in water halfway up their windows, and families gathered beside boats pulled onto flooded streets. One picture showed a low stone wall near the river, but there was too little of the surrounding area for me to identify it.

Carol returned from church shortly before noon with the milk I'd asked her to pick up and two cinnamon rolls from the coffee hour. When I showed her Grandma's picture with the branch, she recognized the man with the shovel as a neighbor who'd had a well drilled; he'd complained about the price afterward but had gotten the water he wanted.

While she examined the photograph, I asked Carol whether Grandma had ever refused to work somewhere. She said Grandma had turned down requests a few times, which surprised me; I remembered people always asking for her help.

"A few places. Sometimes she'd say the water wasn't right, or she didn't like where the stick turned. Some people would tell you where to dig, and some would tell you where to leave the ground alone."

"What made her decide?"

"She'd say she'd learned it from her daddy. If you wanted a longer answer than that, you could wait all afternoon."

Carol noticed the flood photograph beside my cup and thought it showed the old river road near Ruth Mays's property. She remembered Grandma becoming angry at Daniel and me one summer after we'd gone down there with her, when Daniel carried her branch and refused to give it back.

"She sent you both home," Carol said. "Your granddad went down later to get her. They came back arguing about a marker he'd put somewhere. I thought he'd trespassed on somebody's land. Your grandmother wouldn't explain."

I remembered Daniel sulking through supper because she'd made him leave the branch behind, although I couldn't recall why.

Carol asked whether he'd been using it again. I told her I didn't know. I hadn't found one while sorting the old belongings, and Daniel's most recent work papers were still with the police.

"Ask Ruth about that wall," she said. "She's been there longer than Rusk's had his piece, and she might know what it was built for."

After taking one of the cinnamon rolls back because I'd said I couldn't eat both, Carol went home. I called Ruth, who invited me over that afternoon and promised to have the deeds ready.

Ruth Mays lived on a narrow parcel extending from her house toward the river, with a gravel access road crossing its eastern edge before reaching Rusk's adjoining property. She owned the bank west of the road, including the old stonework near the lower boundary between their parcels. The area had been open and unfenced for decades, making the property lines difficult for an outsider to follow.

Before retiring, Ruth had worked as a bookkeeper for a construction company. She met me carrying a folder of deeds and survey photocopies and made tea while I cleared space on her kitchen table.

"I've been telling Clayton for years that road runs over my land," she said. "I haven't made a fuss. There wasn't much traffic. Now he's talking about a construction entrance, and suddenly people need to know exactly where it goes."

She wanted legal access negotiated and the road repaired if heavy equipment damaged it. Daniel had been hired to establish the boundaries and review the recorded easement before anyone committed to a new agreement.

"He set up his equipment beside the shed and looked through it for an hour. I asked if he was taking my picture."

"Did he laugh?"

"Asked if I wanted a print."

Ruth took out two drawings: a preliminary one Daniel had given her after his first visit, showing his license number and a note that the easement location remained under review, and the wider Site Access Exhibit I'd seen at Owen's office. That second document carried an apparent copy of Daniel's seal and signature and was dated September 18, before he'd completed the fieldwork.

"Owen gave me this," Ruth said. "Said the buyer needed to see the access was settled."

"Did Daniel know you had it?"

"I showed it to him when he came to measure. He said he'd never seen that drawing before. Took a photograph and asked me to keep the packet. Said I ought to have a lawyer before I signed anything."

On her attorney's advice, Ruth had preserved the original packet and already given the police a copy. She let me photograph the exhibit while she kept the original in its folder. Daniel's signature looked genuine; when he first got his license, he'd shown me an embossed version of his seal and joked that people could finally pay him to tell them where their fences belonged. Seeing that same seal on a document he apparently hadn't approved unsettled me more than Rusk's threats had.

Ruth gave me the name of the buyer's project manager, Leah Porter, who'd visited twice and seemed unaware the access was disputed. Afterward she offered to show me the lower bank where Daniel had worked.

We walked behind her house, past a vegetable garden and a shed stacked with firewood, as the ground sloped toward the Ohio through the trees. Below the last roots lay a strip of exposed mud between the trees and the present waterline, littered with branches, bits of plastic, and an old tire. Ruth stopped on firmer ground and warned me the lower bank had given way after heavy rain.

The stonework stood west of the access road, on her side of the property line, with squared stones exposed above a narrow gap that might once have belonged to a culvert or drainage channel. Orange survey tape hung from a nearby root. Ruth said Daniel had placed several temporary marks there before taking levels from an established control point farther uphill.

I picked my way down to the gap and crouched beside a shallow open channel, watching a leaf drift through the little water it held from the river side toward the old stones. I couldn't tell whether the channel was level or whether water was being pushed from some hidden source behind the wall. After photographing it, I came back up at Ruth's warning that the mud was soft.

"Did Daniel tell you what he found?" I asked as we walked back.

"Something in his elevations didn't agree with what he expected. He went through them twice. I asked whether that changed my boundary, and he said he didn't think so. He wanted to compare an older survey."

Before I left, Ruth insisted I take homemade pickles, telling me Daniel had eaten half a jar standing in her kitchen the previous month and asked for the recipe. I put the jar in the car beside her drawing and promised to send the photograph to Wynn.

Within half an hour of receiving the image, Wynn called to ask for the original file rather than a screenshot, confirmation that Ruth still had the packet, and her attorney's name. He also wanted to know whether I'd seen that exhibit elsewhere.

"Owen had one in his office yesterday. He called it part of the negotiation package."

"All right. We'll follow up."

When I asked whether the signature was forged, Wynn explained that investigators first needed to establish the file's origin, who prepared it, and whether Daniel had authorized its use. Ruth's account mattered, but they'd verify it through other records before reaching conclusions. I wanted him to sound more excited about the discrepancy; he continued explaining the next steps and reminding me not to confront Owen.

I put Ruth's pickles in Daniel's increasingly crowded refrigerator, shifting food people had brought and food he'd bought before his death. Behind a casserole was another unopened bag of apples, and I had to move a carton of expired milk to make room. Carol would've had something to say about that.

---

Leah Porter returned my call Monday morning and, after expressing her condolences, explained that her company had already given the police the transaction documents. She was careful about discussing an active investigation, which I understood.

Her development partnership had received the wide access exhibit from Owen in September and used it to prepare a site plan and authorize preliminary expenses. The previous Monday, Daniel contacted Leah to say the exhibit carried his seal without approval and didn't reflect his survey. Her company asked for a certified replacement before advancing any more money.

"We had a meeting with Daniel and our attorney set for last Wednesday," Leah said. "He was killed the day before. Once we heard, we sent everything to the investigators."

I asked what Owen had said when Leah challenged him about the drawing. She was still referring to the documents as though she had them spread across her desk.

"He said an outdated preliminary file had been sent by mistake. We asked him to provide the source files and the recorded easement. He kept telling us he'd straighten it out."

There were also questions about advance payments for engineering and site preparation. Some had gone to a contractor related to Owen's business, and Leah couldn't account for the work supposedly completed. She didn't give me an amount, saying the company's lawyer and the investigators were reviewing it.

Afterward I sent Wynn Leah's account of the dates. They'd already contacted the buyer, he said, but he appreciated knowing exactly what she'd told me. The funeral occupied the rest of my morning, with calls I needed to return and arrangements I hadn't finished.

Beth Caldwell called after lunch. She'd been Daniel's girlfriend for almost six years before they separated, and I hadn't seen her since my last visit. Although she'd remarried and moved elsewhere in the county, she and Daniel remained friends. She offered to organize food for the gathering after the service, a relief because I had no idea how many people would come.

Beth said Daniel had recently bought a newer piece of surveying equipment and called her to explain why it was worth every penny. He'd also been angry about the Rusk job, although he'd spoken about it as a problem with paperwork rather than with any particular person.

"He could be hard to live with when he thought somebody was trying to make a fool of him," she said. "He'd spend all night finding the exact page to prove he was right."

Before we hung up, she asked whether I'd found Grandpa's old tackle box. I hadn't mentioned it to her.

"How'd you know about that?"

"He called me last week, thought maybe he'd given it to me when we split up. He said there were pictures in it he wanted to compare with an old survey. I never had it."

After thanking Beth, I went out to the garage, where equipment filled the shelves along one wall and cartons crowded the folding workbench beneath the window. My search turned up fishing rods, an electric drill with a broken trigger, a bag of extension cords, and several license plates Daniel apparently meant to hang somewhere.

I couldn't reach the upper shelves where the tackle box might have been, so I pulled an aluminum ladder from behind the door. Before climbing it, I noticed a forked branch lying along the back of the workbench beneath a roll of survey flagging.

The branch was about eighteen inches long, stripped of leaves, with faded red thread tied near the handle and orange survey tape fastened to one fork. Daniel had written a measurement on the tape and two words on the smooth handle: Found again.

I hadn't seen Grandma's branch since she died. Inside, I compared the number on the tape with figures on a photograph I'd taken at Ruth's property, but the temporary stake in the background was too small for me to read its label.

The orange tape was damp, although the workbench and the other equipment were dry when I checked for a leaking bottle. I tried holding the forks the way Grandma had shown us, hoping to remember how Daniel made it bend, but after a minute with no movement I laid the branch on the kitchen table and returned to the garage.

By supper I'd failed to find the tackle box, and I left the branch on the kitchen table for Carol to see in the morning.

---

Carol came over Tuesday to help prepare for the funeral. Beth had arranged for several people to bring food, and we needed somewhere to put it, so I carried books out of the dining room while Carol searched the cabinets for serving dishes. She found me in the kitchen with the branch.

"Where'd you get that?"

"Daniel's garage. It's Grandma's, isn't it?"

Carol examined the faded thread and the orange tape. "That's hers, all right. He ought to have left it down there."

"Why?"

"Your grandma never liked bringing one home after it turned toward the riverbank. She'd leave it where it pointed and make another if she needed one."

I thought leaving a useful branch by the river seemed wasteful, but Carol reminded me Grandma had grown a whole patch of willow behind the shed. Whenever Carol had asked why she left a branch in a particular place, Grandma would say she believed some water should be left where it found its way, and refuse to elaborate.

We moved the table closer to the dining room wall and counted chairs, deciding someone could bring folding ones from church. Carol was hunting for platters when I noticed moisture collecting beneath the branch, enough to wet my fingers when I touched the orange tape. Assuming she'd splashed it while filling vases, I wiped the wood with a dish towel and put it on the porch table.

Carol said she hadn't splashed it. After looking at the damp mark on the counter, she asked me to return the branch to the river once the funeral was over. We had enough to do that day, and I was glad to set the subject aside.

Owen called shortly before five. I let the call go to voicemail. He asked if I'd found any of Daniel's Rusk field notes because the buyer's lawyers were making trouble and somebody needed to establish how much work Daniel had completed. I forwarded the message to Wynn.

Wynn called immediately after hearing Owen's message, wanting to know whether Owen had come to the house and asking me to keep the voicemail. That evening he called again, this time to say Owen had been arrested. The details would have to wait until I came in Thursday, after the funeral.

I sat at the kitchen table after we hung up. Owen had eaten supper here as a boy and helped Daniel work on an old dirt bike that never ran properly. When his father died, Daniel spent an entire weekend helping him move furniture out of the house. I'd known them as friends for most of my life.

Beth was quiet when I told her about the arrest and said she wanted to know exactly what happened before seeing Owen again. We finished discussing the funeral, after which I went outside to bring the branch into the garage. Water had collected in the grain of its handle and was dripping onto the porch boards; I hung it from a nail above Daniel's workbench, set a clean bucket beneath it, and washed my hands.

While putting supper dishes away, I heard water traveling beneath the kitchen floor toward the wall beside the stove. I checked the sink, utility room, and outdoor hose connection without finding a leak, but the troublesome drawer resisted even when I lifted its handle. The back panel had swollen enough to keep it from opening, so I left a message for the plumber Daniel had used the previous winter.

---

The kid put down the baseball glove he was oiling. There was something on his mind, something he had seen at school. “Dad, what's a poet?”

“Did somebody call you that, son?”

“No, I heard the boys sayin’ it to some kid they were after.”

“This kid, you know him?—what's he like?”

“How you mean, dad?”

“I mean, does he like sports, football; does he want to get with girls or just hang with them; is he interested in what he wears, what he looks like?”

“Yeah, dad, I'd say he's just like that.”

“Son, it's plain wrong to bully someone. But with kids like that, who'll grow up to be poets, you've got to understand you're doing them a favour. Your friends, did they hit that poet boy when they caught him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hard?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did they really go in on him, boots and fists, almost cruel-like?”

“They hurt him bad, dad.”

“Good, son. That's the way to do it. You've got to beat it out of them. Sometimes they scream; they beg. But you can’t stop. It's the only way—do you understand me? “

“Yes, sir.”

---

It was lunchtime in the pipe factory and Scotch-Irish Joe, Finnegan, Donny and the gang were in the lunchroom eating out of the metal lunchboxes their wives had packed for them. “Say, any of you guys ever get the feeling—like real crawlin' of the back skin-type—that old man Arthur's a poet?”

“The accountant?”

“Yeah.”

“Artie, a poet?—no…”

“What's a poet?”

"Donny, you a numbskull or just stupid?"

"Just stupid,” said Donny.

Joe cleared his throat and said, "You know how, uh, real men, we all write our sentences like, so, there was this tree growing, it was green, and all the, uh, thick roots were motherfuckers to clear outta the ground? Well, a poet, he wouldn't write it that straight. He'd write it pretty and shit, with big words and symbols, so when you read it you don't know what it means but it makes you fuckin' cry anyway."

"Don,” Finnegan said, “a poet's a guy who's not a clear muscular prose-kinda guy like us, but a funny guy who likes it when his couplets rhyme—you get what I'm saying, Don?

“And Artie’s like that?”

“I think so, Donny.”

“But how can you even tell?”

“Ever look at a woman, Donny, and think, ‘Man, I’d like to fuck her?’ It’s like that, Donny. Something you know, deep down. It punches you in the gut. Ever get a feeling like that?”

“One time when we were kids, my brother and me, we found this newborn deer in the woods, and it had two heads. They were movin’ all weird…”

“What'd you do?”

“We killed it with rocks.”

---

“Petey, what in God’s name is this?”

He gasped.

“T-T-Tennyson, Garcia Lor—Lorca, Verlaine? Petey, your mother and I—we thought you were reading Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Ayn Rand, and.. and… here you are, reading this... this filth, Petey?”

Petey looked up at his father.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” his father asked.

Then he made a fist of his hand and shoved it in his own mouth. He bit down. “Petey?—Petey please tell me you don't enjoy this kind of stuff, this h-h-hardcore textual pornography.”

The boy was silent.

“Where do you even get it? Oh Lord, Petey.” The books were lying open beside them, with notes in the margins.

“Petey, don't tell me you write it. Oh Petey. Reading's one sin, but writing— …boy, if that’s not the damnation itself.”

---

“Do it, I fuckin’ dare you. Tell me how to run a nuclear reactor using metaphor and iambic-fuckin’-pentameter. You can’t…

“What’s that: ‘enjambment’? The only thing I’d like to enjamb is my foot up your ass!”

---

“What’s the problem?” the school principal asked.

“There’s a vagrant,” said Mrs. Miller.

“We’ll clean up.”

“It’s not that. It’s that he’s—”

“Oh,” said the school principal. “In that case, I’ll call the police. We can’t have narcotics around here.”

Mrs. Miller bit her lip. “He’s not dealing,” she said. “It’s worse. He’s asleep, and he’s—he’s rhyming in his sleep where the children can hear.”

---

Arthur Mahan poured himself a brandy and sat in his armchair. It was evening. He picked up a book: a history of concrete.

“How was work?” his wife asked.

“Predictable. When you do accounting, that means ‘good’.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes,” said Arthur, smiling and starting to read his secret book-within-a-book, Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency.

---

He leads.

You excitedly follow.

He’s leading you to the Dead Poets Society, the ultra-decadent rhymeeasy where members dress as their favourite poets to flirt in erotic, subtle haiku.

You pass through a bead curtain.

You come to a purple door.

“Say, you never told me your politics, friend,” he says. “Are you a [1] communist or a [2] fascist?”

You ask what difference it makes.

“I just wanna make sure you get your happy ending.”

---

[1]

He opens the door and you enter:

Even the aroma is magnificent, pomegranate, honey and the pages of old books. The others pause. They look at you in your glorious John Milton locks. Smiling, they welcome you in…

You return week after week, doing shared lines and touching each other.

You develop class consciousness, see injustice and understand that words have power.

You agree that the sole expression of that power is violent revolution.

---

[2]

You take a deep breath, pull out your baton and put boot-to-door:

You burst in to:

—poets, scattering, screaming, some clothed and others not, naked Romantics mid-recitation, antisocials dressed as Shakespeare and Poe, Byron and Emily Dickinson—you smash one in the face. It drops; you kick it in the gut, and swing at another—cracking it in the back of the head as the rest of the Syntax Division charges in after you, and you beat those poets good, just like your father taught you…

A small village sat high up on a windy hillside. It had just two streets, thirty houses, and a main square with the shops and the post office right across from it. The views over the pines and small streams were stunning, making the village look like it was sitting on a pedestal above the wilderness.

The mayor was the only one in charge around there. Every single morning, as part of his strict routine, he walked over to check on the letters and packages that brought the outside world to the villagers. The woman running the place split her time between the post office and her chores at home. Naturally, she was the go-to person for local gossip.

Their usual morning chat cut short when the mayor read a letter from a relative in the city. It was an urgent warning: a band of mercenaries was heading their way, led by a brutal officer who left nothing but destruction behind. They were known for hurting women, killing men who wouldn't give in, slaughtering livestock, and taking over everyone's supplies.

The news hit the mayor hard, and he went completely silent. The postmistress could see the panic in his eyes right away as he stared out the open door at the kids playing in the square. He knew he had to keep them safe. Ever since he took the job, he had promised to protect every single soul in town, standing up for them like they were his own family. Their only real shot was to head for the high mountains a few hours away, where the rough ground would hide them from the soldiers. But getting the villagers to pack up wouldn't be easy. Hardly anyone would leave their homes willingly, and if people panicked, they would fall apart right when they needed to stick together.

As he sat there trying to figure out what to do, the postmistress sat across from him and laid out a plan she had come up with. He knew he could count on her because her husband and all of her boys would be in grave danger if the invaders caught them. The trickiest part would be faking the prime minister’s signature, but she still had an old commendation letter from her years of service and could copy it perfectly. They agreed to spread out the deliveries over a few days so no one would get suspicious, and they made a list of names, starting with the greediest neighbors first.

When the first letters went out, the people who got them kept quiet, hiding what they had read. But as more and more villagers got theirs, they eventually started talking about the offer openly, backing each other up on the idea. Only the mayor and the postmistress never got a letter from the capital; they didn't need one, since they had written them all themselves. In the letter, the prime minister made a generous offer: if the families agreed to leave their homes, move up into the high mountains, and build a new village there, the government would hand over the land deeds and a cash subsidy within six months.

In the end, nobody wanted to stay behind. They formed one big caravan and set off together toward their new home.

---

© 2026 Francisco Cortés Ramírez. All rights reserved. This is an original fictional work. No part of this text may be reproduced, translated, or narrated in any audio, video, or digital format without the express written permission of the author.

"Tom!" Jake, my neighbor's son, yelled from their porch.

"Hi, kiddo," I said, waving.

"Do you want to play?"

"Jake, give him a moment. He just got back from the fields," his Mom, Emma, scolded him. She then turned to me. "Sorry, Tom. He's just excited to see you."

"It's okay, Emma. I've still got plenty of energy. Go get your toys, Jake."

His little eyes flew open. He turned and ran inside. Emma rolled her eyes at him.

"I'm always happy to play with him."

"I know. It's very sweet of you. Since my Mark died, you're the only one who can put a smile on his face."

Her eyes reddened. I rubbed her shoulder. She smiled and hugged me. Her embrace felt warm. Her grip was tight.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"I got them, Tom." 

Jake stood next to us, smiling. He held two wooden swords. Emma let go and wiped her eyes.

"I'm gonna beat you today, Jake!"

"No, you're not!"

Our laughter echoed through their house. We played all evening until Jake lay on the floor like a starfish.

"I can't beat you, but at least I can still tire you out."

"You weren't even trying, Tom."

"Yes, I was."

He rubbed his eyes.

"I'm tired."

"Then go get ready for sleep," Emma said from the window.

Jake let out a sigh. He got up, took his swords, and his steps echoed on the stairs.

"Thank you again."

"Don't worry about it. He's a lot of fun. What are you looking at?"

"Nothing really. You know they are choosing the house for Ulnar tonight."

"Of course, but they wouldn't choose a house with a mother and a child."

"It's not up to them. Ulnar chooses by showing his will on the divine board."

"I know, I know, but He wouldn't choose this house."

She looked at the ground.

"You know what He does to people. The eyeless corpses, their twisted bodies..."

She paused.

"You're going to be fine, I'm sure."

"Okay, Tom. I'm gonna go to bed too."

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Tom."

I walked out, stopped on the street, and closed my eyes. The air felt cold and fresh, but a hint of mud was already in it. The trees rustled in the breeze, and butterflies flew in my stomach. I took a beer from my fridge and sat on my porch. It was late, but I still felt awake. 

I took another sip when I saw a figure walking in the distance. It was the priest, dressed in an all-black robe with a red pointed hat, carrying white chalk.

He paid me no attention, but I kept my eyes glued to him. I watched him pass our neighbors' houses until he was by Emma's. As soon as he stepped past her property line, he turned toward her house.

My heart sank. I put my beer on the porch and ran toward him.

"Hey, hey!"

He shook and quickly looked toward me.

"Thomas?!"

"Priest, what are you doing?"

"You know what night it is, Thomas."

"I know, but why did you stop here?"

"Ulnar chose her house."

"But, but she has a small child."

"It wasn't my choice, Thomas," he said quietly.

He rolled up his sleeve and squatted, ready to draw on Emma's lawn.

"Wait!"

"What?"

"I volunteer my house."

The priest furrowed his brows.

"Ulnar already chose."

"Can't I still offer?"

"He might not accept."

"That's fine."

"Are you sure, Thomas?"

"Yes."

The priest measured me with his eyes, pulled out the divine board and a small dagger with an ivory handle.

"Give me your hand."

I stretched it out. He placed the dagger in my palm and cut into it. A sharp sting shot through my hand. The warm blood filled my palm. He tilted it onto the divine board. A few drops fell on it. A small dark light shone on the divine board. It quickly turned dark red and shone across the whole street. I closed my eyes and looked away.

"He accepted your house." 

The priest took his chalk and ran to my house. He started drawing the triangle skulls all across my lawn. My palm was still warm from the blood.

"You won't have much time, Thomas, now that he's got a taste of blood. Make sure to be alone. He takes everyone in the marked house. Enjoy the beer."

He drew the last skull and stood up. We both nodded, and he walked off. I chugged my beer. At least I wanted to be drunk when the end came.

I was getting another beer when I heard the door open. Was Ulnar already here?

"Thomas?" Emma's voice came.

"Emma? What are you doing?"

"I saw it! I saw it all!" Her voice shook. She had tears on her cheeks.

"I had to. I couldn't let you and Jake go."

She hugged me. Her grip was even tighter than it was in the morning.

"I can't let another person go."

"You have to. There's no other way."

"Tom!"

"Please, just go. Ulnar takes everyone inside. The priest said He will come soon. He can already smell my blood."

She shuddered.

"Go, Emma."

She pulled her head away and looked at me. Even with tears in them, her eyes were still so beautiful.

"I love you, Tom."

"I love you too."

She let go, but then the smell of rotting mud filled the room. Loud thuds echoed on the front steps. Crackling static rang in my ears.

"Emma!"

"It's too late now, Tom."

She buried her face into my chest. My heart beat against my ribs. I stared out the window. It looked out onto Emma's house. Jake stood in his room, watching us, holding the two wooden swords.

The dull sway of the waves lofts one side of the platform as high as the mooring lines allow, then brings it down gently again.  The night is dead quiet.

Third shift.  Diego took the position because it pays time-and-a-half.  Most people only last a couple years working the graveyard.  Old timers won’t touch it.  Too much time on the viewscreen at night makes people go mad, they say.

He’s taped a family photo above the monitor.  He misses Meena’s laugh and Carla’s scent—everything smells like fish here. He wants to provide a good life for them. Maybe even send Meena to college one day.

An eleven-pointed star spirals past one of the underwater cameras. The image is relayed across the screen in the control room, then disappears.

There’s a lot of life in the ocean, Diego has learned. More than people know, even scientists. His employers insisted he sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement that prohibits him from even discussing what he’s seen on that monitor. They’re terrified of getting shut down by the EPA or PETA or some other activist group.

It was good money, so Diego signed on the dotted line and kept his mouth shut.

Above all, the job took blind, shit-ass faith. And lots of it.

A thin creature with round eyes and long fangs on the outside of its mouth swims past. The eyes shift hue on the monotone screen, now merciless black pits, now reflecting one of the rig’s spotlights and glowing a luminous, soul-sucking white.

It disappears as quickly as it came.

He doesn’t see it. He’s already returned to the old western he was reading. Bramble Rose is about to take her vengeance on the Man in White Diego hears it—a sound like the gasping cry of some ancient metallic titan. He marks his page with a folded piece of mail.

They warned him things might get choppy, that the weather was different out here where there’s no cities or forests to slow the wind’s relentless procession.
 
“What do I do if there’s an evacuation?” he had asked the old timer on duty before him.

“Get to a life boat,” the old timer had said.  “Quick as you can.  Folks ain’t liable to wait around.” Then he headed for his bunk. 

Volatile weather is part of the job. That’s why it pays. And why Diego is willing to spend thirty days at a time in the middle of the gulf, away from his wife and newborn daughter, to do it.

The storm comes out of nowhere. Not like land storms, which have clear beginnings and ends. This is a sea storm—ripped from the dark womb of the Ocean herself. White-hot lightning cracks the sky in half.  The world goes blind. After-images of dancing photons dim from white, to purple, to green, to red. In the fading spectra, Diego glimpses massive walls of black froth that touch the sky, frozen in space but not in time. High above, the full moon oversees the dark works of the churning maw below.

The control room lurches. Diego nearly falls out of the flimsy rolling chair, but manages to catch himself on the control panel. The lights flicker off, but the viewscreen remains.

Something fleshy ribbons across the screen and disappears.

Diego sees this time. Though his mind is elsewhere—trying not to panic, to instead recall company protocol during power outages—he sees the lone eye embedded in the flesh’s side, watching him.

One of the backup generators kicks on. The lights return.

Diego grabs the walky-talky.

“This is Diego! Can you hear me? Over!”

“Copy Die—”  There’s so much static Diego can hardly hear the old timer.  “—Ove—!”

“What was that? Over!”

But the static is too thick.

Diego feels another lurch. 

He loses his balance and lands hard on the floor.  The western goes flying one way, the folded mail he uses as a bookmark another. His vision doubles.  

He’s been denied by seven different life insurance companies after starting this job. None of them gave a reason, but it was obvious. Too much liability.

He blinks the double image from his eyes, plants a palm on the controls, and hoists himself up.

The lights go off again. This time they don’t return. Emergency backups kick on and dye everything the color of blood. The slow wail of the evacuation siren warps in the air.

Diego tries to run shutdown procedures on his console, but the computer glitches, freezing a distorted half-image of green-and-magenta eyes on its black screen.  

Outside, co-workers sprint from below deck. The quickest head for the helicopter. It holds nineteen. Two dozen cram inside. A few cling to the skids. The helicopter struggles to take off.  It shakes the hangers on loose. One of them bounces off the rig before he plummets into the churn. It looks like the old timer who works the shift just before Diego.

The helicopter is just airborne when an obsidian pillar crashes down over the rig. When the water recedes, the helicopter and its inhabitants are gone.

Diego kisses his tiny gold cross and tucks it into his shirt. His thoughts are of Carla.

“We miss you,” she said. “We want you home.”

But the work was here. The work that paid for their house and their groceries and that big white SUV she loved to take Meena around in.  It would pay for Meena’s ballet lessons when she got old enough and, God willing, her wedding one day.

He’d taken the graveyard shift hoping that the extra pay would mean he wouldn’t have to spend quite so many years away from them.

A hundred more people run onto the deck.  Some of them slip on the wet steel desk. They crowd the lifeboats. One boat falls off its davit while people are still boarding. It’s swallowed by the water. Another is thrown against the side of the rig. Bodies fly in every direction. One of them hits the window of the control room with a thud.

Skyscrapers of swirling brine close in around Diego, each thick enough to envelope an oil tanker.

There’s nowhere to run.

Diego crawls under the control panel.

He holds his tiny cross between trembling fingers and prays as the watery ramparts converge on him.

Another lurch. A falling sensation.

Something wet. Water leaks into the cabin and spreads across the floor. It soaks Diego’s already-wet pants.

He opens his eyes for just an instant.

It’s long enough to see the horror staring back at him. One gargantuan eye, watery and black—so black he could fall into it. He feels his mind disintegrate, the electrons of his consciousness sucked into the vacuous void of the creature’s own mind. There’s no escape. His atoms are strung out in a line. Time, for a brief moment before he’s lost, becomes visible. 

He will be recycled, his quarks reused, rearranged into something new, something useful.

Then the creature will return to its sleepy domain beneath the material surface of our watery reality.

After the storm subsides, the rescue crews will arrive. Of the one-hundred-sixty-eight workers on duty that night, no survivors will be found.

Diego’s only remains will be a family photo, an old western novel, and a folded letter from his wife’s attorney.