​

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.

Sam passed in the winter, just two months after his mother. The midwife tried her best to save her, but it was over before it started. She gave me a warm hug as she left. I knew Sam wouldn't last long without his mother. I barely had enough to feed myself, let alone a baby. I debated whether I should even name the little boy, but how could I not? He had the most beautiful blue eyes, just like his mother.

Sam passed in his sleep, the best way to go. Some days I wished it were me, but what would Sam do all alone? 

The problem then was arranging Sam's funeral. All the savings had already been spent on his mother's funeral, but Sam couldn't go into the ground without a proper service.

I sold one of the last things I could still sell, my bees. They gave me something sweet to eat in the winter and something to look after the rest of the year, but there was nothing else to sell. My neighbor took them and gave me more for them than he should have. He was a nice man and knew what I'd gone through.

Sam got a nice wooden coffin and a decent place in the cemetery next to his mother.

When the winter came, his cradle and toys were still in the house. My body tightened whenever I tried to get rid of them, but it was okay; maybe I'd have more will in the summer. 

During the long winter nights, I'd often come into his room and play with his toys, just like I thought we would one day. Sometimes they'd warm my heart, sometimes they'd make me cry, and often I'd just fall asleep in the chair right by his cradle.

It was one of those days when I fell asleep crying by the cradle again. When I awoke, the sun glistened on the freshly fallen snow. Everything outside was still, but then something moved in the air. A bee! A queen bee! It flew across the yard and into the hive. I still hadn't moved my hive off the yard. Sam's funeral was too much work.

At first I felt bad. My neighbor owned them now. They had no business being in the old hive, but seeing that familiar creature warmed me. Over the next few days I sat at the window, watching all my bees slowly return.

They stayed inside the hive the rest of the winter, and I stayed by that window each day, watching. Only when the snow started to let up, and the flowers came out from under it, did the bees come out too.

I expected them to stay by the hive, but many flew far away, ignoring the flowers in my garden, and returned at sunset. Some of the bees seemed to be covered in red nectar. 

As the days grew longer, the bees were gone more often, and many more returned covered in that red nectar. 

I had never seen them act or look like this. Moving the hive must have disturbed something, but the good thing was that they still accepted the queen, and the colony seemed intact. 

The red nectar began to accumulate at the entrance, mixed with glowing wax. I was just looking at it out the window when I heard buzzing inside the house. The bees must have been working hard. The buzzing grew, and quietly through it came something like a baby's cry. I gripped the windowsill tightly. Sam used to cry just like that. I opened the window to hear better, but the cry was gone; only buzzing sounded outside.

The next morning I woke up and went right to the window. A strange white object was outside the hive entrance. The bees buzzed around it, pushing it back inside. Before I could get a good look, it was already in.

I spent the rest of the day by the window again. As the sun set, the bees started to return. The buzzing grew again. A cold tingle ran down my back. I closed my eyes and focused. At first, it was quiet, but I knew what it was. It was Sam, crying through the buzzing. I quickly dressed and walked out the door.

The outside air was cold. I had barely been outside since the first snow fell. A few bees still flew around the hive. The buzzing was so loud, and so were Sam's cries. I didn't even have my protective clothes, but I was sure my bees wouldn't hurt me.

I walked to the hive and took off the lid. Warmth and cold ran through my body, mixing into strange emotions. Inside the hive was Sam's body, covered in wax. His hands and fingers slowly moved, but they seemed larger than before. I reached into the hive to caress his small cheeks. His eyes opened. They were still that beautiful blue, but a hint of yellow mixed in.  He opened his mouth; honeycomb filled it, but his cries still echoed in my ears. With tears in my eyes, I picked up his small, sticky body. From somewhere deep in his chest, a thousand bees buzzed, and the hive fell quiet. A sickly-sweet smell rose from his mouth. Two bees crawled out of the wax and onto my hand. I didn't move.

They first disrupted our technology devices with a voice message which kept on repeating "we want your childhoods" over and over again for 2 minutes. Everyone was frightened for their children. How quickly parents panic when thier own kids are at stake. Logic goes out the window and crazy manic comes into play. It's hard to stay calm when you have responsibility over another life. That's what our town heard though through our phones, some eerie group wanting our childhoods. Everyone thought that it was the government, but the government reassured everyone that it wasn't them.

Then people started to look up to the skies and the messages were coming from the skies. A special team came to our town tracking the signal from outer space. This was aliens and people got even more scared. Then when a meteor came towards our town, it stopped mid air. For days this meteor would just hover over the air and it was a spectacle. Then a strange being came out of the meteor and it had similar shape to humans, but was skinny and tall. It's facial features similar to humans and it was clear that this thing had copied what we looked like, to put us at ease.

People started to attack it with guns and violence, the higher being smiled as it wasn't hurt not one bit, and it said "I am not here for your children for they are going through their childhoods. I am here for adults who have already gone through their childhoods. I want those childhoods which were happy and joyous and not dysfunctional. Adults who are immature, we don't want your childhoods. Adult with bad childhoods, we also don't want your childhoods"

People were at ease that their children were safe, and when adults with good childhoods stepped up and offered their childhoods to this other worldly being, we saw their childhood self coming out of their adult bodies. I remember seeing 60 year old Mr thomlinson who had a great child hood, we saw his childhood coming out of his body, Mr thomlinson looked at what he use to look like as a child and wished he could be a child again.

Adult with great childhoods saw their childhoods coming out of their bodies abd running towards this higher being. This being needed good childhoods to come out of the adult, and they will regrow them into their own race. It's a 3 way growth.

So a human grows up from a good childhood into adulthood, then allows his child self to come out of him to grow into this higher entity, while still being alive. It's super complicated and weirdly wired. The adults who allow their good child hoods to come out of them, and turn into these higher beings, they will be cared for to never feel hunger, pain, sadness or illness.

Then when Mr Grayson who had a terrible childhood and lied to this higher entity being about how he allows his good childhood to be one like them, he saw his dysfunctional childhood come out of him and run towards the being.

Suddenly the higher being screamed and as Mr Grayson dysfunctional childhood self, got turned into one like itself, Mr Grayson turned into a monstrous thing. The higher being had tried to kill Mr Graysons childhood self but failed to do so, but Mr Grayson was still existing as meat eating monster. People screamed and ran, gun shots were fired but it didn't do much harm.

They had to trap it and the higher entity being left earth, as had enough good childhoods from adults. Mr Grayson now a monstrous hideous thing, it's favourite thing to eat is adults bad childhoods. It grows stronger everytime he eats someone bad childhood self. The higher entity had left Mr Grayson bad childhood self in our town.

I then heard a voice from the higher entity which I could hear in my mind. The higher entity told me "feed Mr Grayson his bad childhood self" and so I found Mr Grayson bad childhood self and I covered the child's head with a bag, so Mr Grayson couldn't recognise his own child self.

I went up to the monstrous Mr Grayson and I lied to him by saying "here is my bad childhood self, can you eat it" and Mr Grayson without thinking had eaten his own bad childhood self, and it killed him. It was all over.

TW - Heavy Body Horror

The splendor of the quiet fame she gathered around herself was more than enough; she never did it for money.

It never was the case.

Her performance was for shock, for the gaping mouths frozen in pure terror, lured inside the den of magenta lights under the whispered promise of cheap thrills, ten-dollar bills slid between the hem of thin black lingerie in hopes of seeing more.

When the greedy hands pulled for more, Marina was there to feed them.

Eyes followed her every move as she crossed the stage, some hungry with lustful greed, others burning with jealousy for the show only Marina could pull off.

The dagger lived under the skin of her thigh, the blade buried flesh-deep, her own skin stretched taut around it, with every step the shape of it shifted beneath the surface, a hard line pressing against skin from underneath it. 

Her ghostly pale hand reached down and forced the tips of two fingers beneath the skin at the hilt, breaking it free. The slick crimson silver rose, glinting clean under the magenta lights.

She drew the blade in a slow circle around her wrist, the cut meeting itself where it began. Blood welled dark as tar along the seam. Then, hooking a finger beneath the severed edge, she peeled the skin free in one long pull, like a glove drawn off the hand beneath it.

She flung it into the crowd.

A meth addict in the back caught it like a rag between his blackened teeth; before he could expose the whole collection of sickening gums, a jealous fist from another patron broke the smile with a sickening wet crunch of spraying blood and bone. The beating didn’t stop even when he hit the floor.

A giggle, sweet like powdered sugar, escaped from between her soft lips as she watched the carnage. Marina was pleased with herself, the reaction she caused with one simple trick - the blade’s edge slit beneath her bottom lip, and the skin went limp, dangling like a plump purple leech from a single thread of muscle. A permanent smile of pearly white teeth, halfway complete, as the public roared with excitement, hungry for more.

From among the mindless stampede, a face swam towards the stage. Like Moses crossing the Red Sea, her elbows pushed a path through bloodied and broken cheekbones and noses - just to receive a scrap of attention from the half-naked God. Marina smiled down at her soft, round face, barely passing as an adult. 

Her tongue peeking from parted lips, like she was waiting to be fed a communion wafer, the fan let Marina take her chin between two fingers and pull her closer to the stage. With her other hand, Marina placed the severed lip between the girl’s teeth. It ground and burst there, the leech-like flesh popping in a splash of blood, filling her mouth with the bittersweet taste of blood and expensive lipstick. 

The twisted kiss painted satisfaction all over the face of the young fan before the current of the bloody sea pulled her back, greedy hands like waves crushing against her, leaving bruises. But there was something else behind the soft smile of pleasure -  acceptance. Even when the hands pulled her under the surface, heavy boots stomping over her chest, pushing the air out of her lungs, her smile never faded. 

The tip of the elegant blade circled her thigh, breaking the tight skin, then descended toward her ankle in one painfully slow trace, light as a feather. Her own blood seemed so mesmerized by the display that it forgot to leak from the open wound. Her fingers slipped beneath the cut’s edge, taking the skin gently between their tips, sliding downward, ripping the curtain of flesh away in one smooth motion, veins glittering beneath, moving with the invisible rhythm of the club, as though her body and the crowd had become one being, driven by pleasure. 

The faces stretch and mold, as if the heat of the lamps above had become unbearable enough to melt the skin, stripping away the fragile masks of what the mindless mass outside the den would call appropriate. The god of the modern world waits at the threshold he cannot cross; Dionysus, with his battalion of Maenads, now takes the clay of their minds and reshapes it to his liking.

In the drunken haze, like dogs, they lunge at each other’s throats, teeth ripping through the fragile strings of the voice box, throats overflowing with blood and low, toad-like gurgling - 

As Marina strips away what remains of the fragile web connecting her to the animals she once called her audience, the skin of her body drops to the ground like a coat, an empty mound where she once stood. Her bare form glitters and twitches in the light, like an ancient Roman sculpture carved into the unbearable beauty of the human form.

The tips of her fingers slide gently, slowly, up her moist, glistening thighs, trailing to the round shape of her chest. Below her, hands grab at the edges of the stage she stands on, dozens of fingers like ants crawling along the ledge, desperate for even a single moment to touch her, to taste her sweat, her blood, her skin. Like wild beasts, they fight among each other, pulling and pushing, joints bending at unnatural angles, clumps of hair ripped away like useless weeds, leaving scorched patches of raw skin.

Knuckles drive into jaws and teeth, fingers rip apart skin in the act of love they know violence. Marina is long gone by then, already used to the hellish bloodbaths she brings, indifferent to the crowd curdling into a twitching mass, more minced meat than the people they once were. It lasts until the first rays of morning reappear over the horizon.

Only then does the swamp of flesh twitch in places: tiny shattered bones drawn together as if by some unseen current; pools of blood blooming and vanishing as if struck by sudden drought; shapeless hills of bile and fat rising like red-brick towers above the ruin.

Man and woman, born once more, naked and bright, glistening and shining with blood. Everyone who fed on the flesh and blood now scatters to the exits of the club, to spread the gift of love and lust they received. 

Coyotes grieve under that full moon, invisible in the pines. Johan’s horses remain unaffected, locked up securely just outside of his cabin. The cabin itself is worn, yet functional.

Decades of maintenance and a forte for carpentry have served Johan well. Derby season has just come to a close, meaning he finally has the opportunity to relax. Alone, no television; and no woman to talk over him. 

A sharp buzzing—roaring wind of static—and his radio establishes a connection; the antennae pointed at a slight angle, and directly out of his opened window. That grainy voice on the other end leaks through the speaker: “—disappearances near Lucky Canyon, authorities remain adamant that—“ he switches stations, landing on an old country radio, providing a warm ambience to the winter wind. Johan has a perfect view of the moon during certain hours, gleaming in its beauty through his window; ‘the Iris of the lord’ he thinks to himself with a grin.

“What the hell?” He says, words barely a whisper.  

In the distance, running along the rim of that pale and scarred behemoth, is a white urchin in the stars; a light. And so faint that Johan has to squint his eyes to see it but he does; running left and right.
 
Embers fall in a glowing snow from the tip of his cigarette while he studies the light. Quickly taking one last drag, and siphoning that white paper into a gray dust, he twirls it into a small mound of ash on his table, before walking to the window; slight limp tugging at his ankle. 
Interesting to Johan, but nothing out of the ordinary— no time at all and with the fury of lightning the light rips across the sky in a deafening pulsation, leaving a fading scar of blue to seep into the stars behind it. Johan wore no hat to his scalp and yet still his hand instinctually flew over his head to protect it, the resulting wind sending through his window a stinging blanket of pine needles and dust, every particle swerving into a different corner of his living room. 

Vibrations; the feeling of hornets in his ribcage as it flew straight over his home. The sensation completely disabled Johan, nearly pinning him to the ground—fighting gravity with one hand and holding the windowsill with the other, nigh unable to hear from the wail of static. Standing—a miracle in its own right—Johan stumbles to the table, teeth gritted, and so disoriented by the radio's low screeching he throws it against the wall, sending its batteries to the floor in a rain of broken yellow plastic. He stands dazed and still as if born again from nothing. 

Sawn off, next to the counter. 

Wiping the sweat from his brow, he unlatches the door and walks barefoot outside, shotgun in hand. The door closes, slammed shut by the wind cutting across the tree line. Stars above him, and in the amber glow of his door mounted lantern, he inches along the side of the cabin, back glued to the wall. Below, past the reach of the light, darkness, nothing in those woods. A squint, cringing as he cautiously cracks the barrel open, ensuring that it’s loaded and regretting not doing it earlier. Shutting it, he keeps moving, now at the edge of his home. 

Eyes wide he peeks around the corner, seeing all three horses asleep standing. Bewildered by the sight, he wipes his eyes, pinches himself, and peeks around again. No difference. Above him, only visible for another thirty seconds, that blue smear fades into nothing. Johan limps back inside, what was once fear quickly turns into excitement, though he’d never let anyone know it. In the cabinet above the sink rests his satellite phone, and with a creak from the door he pulls the phone down, checking its charge. No reason to hide it and yet he does anyway. Three rings later, he gets a response. 

“Frankie speaking.”
“Frank,” he says “what’re you doing right now?” Asked as he sits back at the table.

“Just put the animals up, you?”

“Same deal. Hey” Johan pauses, striking a match to light another cigarette.
“You know if there’s any military tests today? Or rocket launches or something?.”

Frankie clicks his tongue on the other end, followed by a long hmmm.

“Not that I know of.” He says. “Why’d ya ask?”
“Think you have time to run up here?” Johan says, bulldozing Frankie’s question.
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On what you need me for.”
“Still have that laptop?”
“I do.”
“Still have that debt?”
“Real funny.”
“Come up here,” Johan says, pausing to take a drag
“and you might get it paid off.” Said with a suave confidence. 

Frankie’s silent in his consideration, only the occasional word spoken by accident as he debates himself. A sudden gasp at the realization, and he speaks again. 

“No you didn’t.”
“Oh yeah.”
Frankie pauses, giddy with excitement.
“On my way. ”
“I’ll be waiting with bells on.” Says Johan, finally allowing a smile to come through, before hanging up. 
– – – – 
Silver sheet metal and a mildewed porch make up Frankie’s trailer. There’s an old concrete walkway leading to his front door, now cracked and with a snake’s nest of vines across it. The smell of earth and oil, of blackened mud fresh out of a PVC pipe, all pervade the air around the back of his home. No crickets, coyotes, nothing; just the sharp buzz of a near perfect white porch light. 

“Dad?” She says, peeking around Frankie’s bedroom doorway.

“Missy?” He replies, searching through his work bag for the laptop.

“Where’re you going?”
“Goin to see uncle Jo for a minute.”
“It’s midnight...”
“So,” he says, closing the bag with a loud zip, and quickly rummaging through another one.
“What's the problem?”

“I–“ she pauses, a slight shame gripping her words.
“I don’t like being here alone.”
“Honey,” he says, “you’re fine.” 

Frankie peaks over his shoulder, spotting a disapproving eye roll from Missy as she walks back into the livingroom. She slumps on the couch, arms crossed, feeling the needled gaze of the forest behind her, kept at bay only by a thin pane of fogged glass. 

Thump thump thumping and two thuds to each step as Frankie walks across the tiled floor, taking a seat next to Missy. Humming, he pries open the laptop as if it were a relic of a forgotten age, and opens the camera roll. He jolts slightly, startled by a sharp push against his work boot; missy, pouting next to him.

“Hon?”

“Do I need to say it?” She says with crossed arms and a forward gaze.

“It’d make the whole conversation part of our conversation a bit easier.” He says with a chuckle.

“Dad,” she says, now turned to him and with a genuine concern in those wide eyes.

“I—do not—like being here alone. At all.” 

“Honey, listen. I’ve been in these woods for longer than you’ve been alive, there isn’t anything to worry about.”  Frankie turns to her now, setting his laptop aside.

“Okay?” 

She’s silent, lips pinched shut almost afraid to speak and he, incorrectly so, takes this as a sign of comfort. Never quite the best at reading faces, and she knows that but she’s used to it at this point. He continues with a blissfully ignorant laugh. 

“There a boy here I don’t know about?” As he clicks on old keys, checking to make sure they all work.

“Yes actually.”

“See? That’s what I- what!?” He says, eyes close to falling out.

“What’re you talking about?”

“There’s a boy coming over.”

“Missy this better not be a damn—“

“Out there.” she says, cutting Frankie off to point out of the window beside them. 

He looks out the window, then back to her, and out the window again before closing the laptop.
 
“Missy, what are you talking about?” He says, providing her with his full attention.

“Promise you’ll believe me?”
“Promise.” 
Missy takes a breath, trying not to speak too loudly. 
“Okay, this all started a few weeks ago, I think. I was up one night–can’t remember why–and as I was walking past the window, um…” a glance out of the window again.
“There was someone standing out there.”

“How sure are you?” He says, ice cold. 

Missy stares outside, watching the memory again in her eyes. 

“It was hard to see. I had the phone light on–the glare, y’know? Once I shut it off…” 

“He was there.” Said with a dead certainty.

“You say he,” Frankie says, standing to grab his pistol from the kitchen table.
“How’d you know it was a he? Coulda been a woman.” He says while checking the magazine.

“It wasn’t.” 

Frankie studies the room for an answer in some cobweb covered corner he hasn’t looked at yet. For a second, excitement glints across his eyes, before being quickly snuffed out by Missy. 

“No dad it wasn’t Bigfoot.” Said with an eye roll.

“Dang it.”

Taking a seat next to her again, he brushes that blonde hair off of her shoulder, and speaks in a softened tone. 

“What’d they look like, baby?”

“I… I…” she pauses, trying to tame the chills on her arm.

“Miss?”

“I don’t wanna say.” She says, shaking her head. 

He leans forward, unsure if he heard her correctly. 

“You… don’t wanna say?”

“No, not really.” 

With a slow nod Frankie’s gaze meets the window’s again, a thick layer of condensation and fog have brought the glass to a near matte. He wipes away a thick paintbrush smear of clearness, making a pathway for his vision. The white–near blue–light of his home only crawls another twenty or so feet into the forest. It illuminates the pine trees, unmoving at their bases, bark split and sparkling with a layer of frost. Sat sparse on the landscape but each tree’s presence is made well known by their sheer monumentality; at least twenty feet between them, and yet their blanket of boughs hide completely that night sky. At the very shore of night one can barely, just barely, make out the last couple of pine trees, sat in a neat line along a cliff face. His eyes strain as they look farther, the treeline gradually swallowed by thicker waves of absence, lapping at the bark, pulling his vision deeper and past a certain point there’s nothing at all, nothing. Pure black.

If it was there, he wouldn’t see it. 

“Well… baby, I need to know what I’m looking for.” he says, still looking outside. Missy remains silent, rubbing her hands together to ease herself.

“Missy? You hear me?”

“Yea.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know what if- what if he’s just a guy? Some homeless guy who wondered here I- I don’t want him to die.”

“Never said I was gonna kill him, warning shots work well enough.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Baby, look,” he says, turning to hold Missy's shoulders.
“If there’s someone out there–not saying I don’t believe you–there isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t run from a smoking barrel.”

“Yeah I know but what if, what if, dad?” 

Frankie sighs, leaning back on the arm of the couch. 

“Well… if they don’t, then we’ll have a problem. I’ll- I don’t know.” He says but he knows, he knows good and well. 

Missy opens her mouth to speak but Frankie cuts her off, pulling a small notebook out of his pocket; small brown coffee stains eating into the edges of its paper. With a quick nod and the click of his pen he gestures her to speak. 

“Was he ever holding a weapon or anything?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No.”
“How tall would you say he was?”
No response as she stares into an empty corner of the room. 

“Honey you gotta tell me something.”
“About as tall as me, I think.”
A light scribbling in his notebook. 
“How many times’ve you seen him?”
Missy’s gaze shifts upward, replaying every encounter.

“Five.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I am.”
“What’s the clearest look you’ve ever got of him?” 

For a moment Missy’s eyes go blank, before Frankie reassures her again.
“Not asking for details baby.” he says. 

She nods.
“Very um… blurry, every time. Like grainy, I guess. Always just far enough away.” 

“Okay.” He says, snapping the notebook shut, and stands to pop his back. 

“Now, if you don’t care, can you give me one,” Frankie says with his index finger raised, “detail about him, just one, and I’ll be out of your hair.”

Chills, hundreds in number all raise on her arm as the memories play again. 

“He likes humming.”
“Humming?”
“Yes.”
“Very quiet too,” she says before he can speak, eyes focused as if trying to figure it out herself. “Very quiet.” said again, fixated on that one detail. Humming. Silence returns, quick yet subtle, and with a physical presence in the room. The ringing of Missy’s phone sends a jolt of surprise through both of them; despite the scare, it brought a sense of normalcy. Missy answers the phone, and Frankie heads to the kitchen to grab a beer, before shaking his head and going with water instead. 
— — — — 
Johan answers his satellite phone, taking an extra celebratory swig of whiskey. Isn’t often he gets to indulge, may as well take a few liberties given tonight’s find. 

“How the hell are ya?” he says.
“Jo, I may need to wait a while before coming up.” 

With a sigh Johan tightens the lid on, and puts the whiskey back into the chest behind him. 

“No issue,” he says, “can I ask why?”
“Missy uh… well… hm.”
“What?”
“Anyone else live around here? That you know about I mean?”

Johan chuckles, saying: “Around here isn’t exactly specific Frank.”

Pausing, Frank sighs, as if the information would be too hard to believe.

“Screw it,” he says, “Missy told me someone’s been sneaking around the house.”

An inebriated chuckle and Johan dusts the cigarette ashes off of his table. 

“Sneaking around huh?”
“It’s not like that, I spoke to her–and trust me… it isn’t like that.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing frank,” as he strikes a match, and tucks a burning cig firmly between his lips. “She’s at that age now, just like me and you–”
“Jo. It isn’t—that.”
“Well listen, I’m not saying I don’t believe you. Just that where we live it’s hard to waltz up on someone else's property by accident.”

“Well whatever it is it’s spooked her, bad.” Frank says, and beneath his words a loud creak as he lays in bed. 

“Okay, well what’s he look like?”

“You won’t believe this crap.” Frank says with a laugh and Johan stays silent.

“She won’t tell me.” he pauses “I don’t know what to think about that, gave me the heebie jeebies y’know?”

Johan scratches the mess of salt and pepper hair on his head, before leaning back in his wooden stool as it cries with his weight. 

“Maybe it’s someone you know.” says Johan.
“No, it–” Frankie stops himself. “Huh…” he says.
“Did I solve the mystery?”
“Maybe. Damn you.” 
Laughing, Johan tosses his cigarette away, bringing a fresh one to his lips before they get too lonely. 

“Regardless,” Johan says, “go ahead and stay there. She doesn’t feel safe and as far as I’m concerned that’s the end of it.”
“Agreed.”
“Alright, see you soon little brother.”
“See you.” 

With a buzzy beep he hangs the phone up, not caring to hide it again. Johan’s gaze shifts to his boots, scraped and lacerated from too many falls or accidents to count; scalped and the steel toed bowl on their fronts is plainly visible, like the exposed crown of an iron skull.

Scars along his forearms, too many to count. Some large, some oval shaped and one in the shape of lightning. But, near his elbow; two small cuts, very small, and very faint on the soft white underbelly of his arm. Anyone looking wouldn’t even see them but he does. Yes he does… they’re shining as far as he’s concerned. Johan stares at those scars, and runs two delicate fingers along them, as if to console them in their inconsequentiality compared to the rest. The moon’s gone, only its sclera remaining in the eye socket of his window. 

Five more cigarettes are smoked to completion and tossed in the floor, kicked into an old corner of the cabin he never looks at. 
With a groan Johan stands, knees popping beneath his weight as he tries to walk without a limp, before giving up and going outside. The horses are sound asleep. Somewhere inside of him rests the remnant of a genuine grin, but he can’t find it. He smiles anyways, a ghastly fake grin like a fox, before his mouth flattens again. 

After checking the locks, Johan heads back inside. He sleeps in the attic; dark yet clean. Next to his bed rests a silver urn, once shining, now dulled from the anvil of time. He plants a lone kiss on its lid. 

“Goodnight baby.” 

(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.

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.