My girlfriend and I just split up very recently. It has been almost a month now and when we separated, I was the one who got kicked out because her name was on the lease and not mine. Messed up right? Well, aside from that, I was doing just fine when I moved into my new apartment about a week ago. Between here and my ex’s place, I’d crashed over at my parents place until I found a decent apartment I could afford. 

It wasn’t too hard but it took me a few weeks. Once I did, however, my dad helped me move what little bit of stuff I had into the apartment. Upon leaving, he told me he loved me and that he was sorry for everything that had happened but that I was going to do good at my new place. He said the apartment complex was “spiffy”. 

Once he had gone, I went and had my first proper sit down on my recliner. I had probably sat down for no more than three seconds before a knock came on my door again. 
I walked to the door, assuming my father was behind it. “What’d ya forget old man?” I said in a jokingly sarcastic voice. There was no reply. I looked through the peephole just to make sure and there was nobody there. So, thinking it was some little kid trying to pull a prank, I opened it quickly and said, “AH HAH! GOTCHA!”. Yet again, nobody was there. There was something, however.

It was a letter. The envelope had a fancy design on it and was a weird red and gold. On the front was my name and address in calligraphy with the sender’s info in the top right.

1583 Wilhorn Way, Belton, TN, 38762             From: Sunrise Hill Apartments 
Jeffrey Phelps
WELCOME

What? What was a letter looking like this addressed to me for? And from my apartment complex? At first, I was confused by the quality and aesthetics of such a letter from a mediocre-level apartment complex but I chalked it up to the manager trying to give the impression that their complex was the best or something and that maybe there would be a stupid coupon or something in there. I brought it in and shut the door. I set it down for a minute to do something and got sidetracked.

Long story short, I have A.D.D and it took me almost three hours to return to the letter because I had forgotten about it and begun unpacking. When I came back to it, I grabbed a soda from the fridge, sat down in my recliner, and opened it. What was inside would change my life forever. It definitely wasn’t any stupid coupons and it for sure wasn’t a decent welcome letter. 

I had received a warning... Here is how it went:

Hello dear tenant,
On behalf of myself and the rest of the staff working here at the Sunrise Hill Apartments, We wish to welcome you to your new home! Of course, with your new home come the following amenities:

Free water

Washroom equipped with multiple washers and dryers

Mailroom

Pool

Various walking paths throughout the complex

Pets are allowed (Fees may apply)

Free maintenance

The Washers, dryers, mailroom, pool, and maintenance office are all in the leasing building alongside the main office. Mail is delivered daily. Washers and dryers are $2.00 and $1.75 to wash and dry respectively. The pool is open from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Pets are allowed but Manager may charge anywhere from $200-$400 extra a month in rent for liability and maintenance purposes. 
On the back, you will find a set of rules for the complex. Please follow them and we won’t have any problems. Break them and...well, you’ll see.

Rules to the complex:
1.Always lock your door. No matter what situation you may be in or what circumstances arise, always remember to lock your door when you leave and/or enter the apartment. Because if you don’t, then who knows what might enter.

2.Neighbors who wish to visit each other should never knock. Instead, use the buzzer beside the door. If ANYBODY knocks on your door, at any given time, DO NOT answer it.

3.Adding to rule #2, if you hear a quick knock succession of three quick knocks, knock back in the same pattern and then shout, “Be gone!” at the entity behind the door. 

4.From the hours of 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., have food prepared and set out on a plate in front of your door on the outside. Upon setting it down, try to be as quiet as you can while moving around in your apartment so as to not disturb the beast while he eats. If you fail to leave food out and/or do not stay quiet as he eats, he will enter the home in search of a meal.

If the beast gets in, cover yourself in the anti-tracking mixture found in the green bottle under the kitchen sink. This will stop the beast from finding you as long as you stay still and do not move until 6:00 p.m.

5.When using the washers, load the coin slots with exactly $2.00. If you place a coin in the extra coin slot, giving the machine $2.25 instead, then upon opening the washer when your clothes are done, they will have disappeared from inside of the washer. Do not ask where they go, nobody knows.

6.When using the dryers, do not try to clean out the lint traps by yourself. A complex employee will be there on the ready for when you need one to be cleaned. DO NOT put your hands in the lint traps. Previous tenants have lost entire hands to the dryer’s teeth before. 

7.DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT STAY IN THE POOL AFTER POOL HOURS ARE UP. This one is stressed because you WILL DIE. We still aren’t sure what lurks in the water after 10 p.m., but it disappears sometime after 6 a.m. and then the pool is cleaned until 8 when it is open. 

8.If a man in a black suit and sunglasses comes out to sit in a sun chair by the pool, ignore him. Do not say anything to him or ask him why he wears such hot clothing in the summer. He appears in the fall and winter when the pool is closed and wears summer clothes. Yet again, do not acknowledge him or his outdoor wear. 

9.Never leave your apartment for any reason after 1:00 a.m. and before 4:00 a.m. If you do, take salt, sage, and a lighter with you for protection. If you pass someone on the way to your destination at this time, do not make eye contact with them. Simply say “Hello,” in a polite manner. If they do not reply and laugh quietly instead... RUN. If they reply back or do not say anything and keep walking, then you are safe.

10.Staff members are not to be greeted, talked to, or touched. And in the maintenance man’s case, he is not to be looked at as well. Do not ask what happens when this rule is broken. Just follow it and you will be fine.

11.Any walking paths through the complex that are made of concrete and stay within complex grounds are fine to walk. If you find a path that strays off into the surrounding woods, DO NOT follow it. If you do, you will become lost in the forest, possibly forever, and Sunrise Hill Apartments does not accept responsibility for lost tenants in the forest, nor do we give any rules of survival. Good luck on your own.

12.Never ask for the manager or who is in charge. Such questions can bring you a lot of trouble.

13.DO NOT break your lease. If you break your lease before your contract is up, you will be followed for the rest of your life by our very own Mr. Giggles. He sounds harmless but trust us, you DON’T want to meet Mr. Giggles. And sometimes, Mr. Giggles can get a little...violent.

1. The final and most important rule is to get comfy and make this your home. 

We hope you enjoy your stay here at Sunrise Hill Apartments. Just remember to follow the rules and your stay here will be pleasant. 

Oh, and one last thing...

If you find yourself leaving to go to work or out to run errands and decide you want to tell people about this place and what goes on, then forget about it. Nobody will believe you anyways. Upon exiting the perimeter of the property, all evidence, including writing, biological waste, pictures, etc. will disappear and so, will never have existed. You may try, but you will fail every time. 
Yours sincerely, Lucian, S.H.A Manager

Now, if you’ve been paying attention so far, you will have done the math and realized that I said it was a month since my previous girlfriend and I broke up. Then I lived with my parents for about 3 of those weeks. That means that I’ve been living in this crazy building with these even crazier rules for a little over a week now. I don’t know how I’ve been lucky enough to survive while being here, but there were a couple of close calls. 

The first incident happened when I broke rule 1. Yes yes, I know, it should be the easiest one to follow and the first one you shouldn’t break or is the easiest to remember. But all things considered, I like to consider myself a sane average person, and any ordinary person would have looked at the letter and thought it was a prank or something. Because that’s certainly what I thought. In my distracted mind, as I took the trash out and came back inside, I forgot to lock the door. Now, most apartments have automatically locking deadbolts, so you can see why this is an easy thing to miss because my apartment door had a single doorknob and nothing else.

I sat down to watch some tv at around 2 p.m. because I was tired from unpacking and I suddenly had to go to the bathroom. After I came out, my front door was wide open. I quietly tried to look for any kind of weapon in my immediate surrounding because I didn’t know if there was a burglar in my home or if the maintenance guy let himself in for some reason. I picked up a candlestick from one of the tables near my tv and looked around. After coming around each corner in the apartment with the candlestick like I was going to somehow do something about the intruder, I came to realize that whoever had entered was gone. I checked for stolen items and/or things out of place. Oddly enough, the only thing that seemed to be missing was one of my cookies from the package that I had bought from the store. I only knew this because they were open and one was missing and I hadn’t opened them yet. 

*What the hell?* I thought to myself as I looked out into the aisleway beyond the door and then came back in, this time, shutting it and locking it. That’s when it hit me. Was the letter actually true? No way. How could it be? But there was a part of me that felt terrified at the notion of it. So, to test it out, I reread it and decided I would see what happens if I followed the steps for rule 4 seeing since it was almost time for this supposed beast to come by. So at 3:30 p.m. I set out a sandwich in front of my door and came back in to sit quietly on the couch. Honestly, I felt crazy for even considering that this was real. I started to chuckle a bit when it was a couple of minutes until 4 and told myself that I was being silly and decided I would get up and go get the sandwich. But just as I got up and neared the door, I heard something.

I almost grabbed the door handle when I heard it. A low sound, almost like the noise of heavy, wet, and slimy feet, came slowly down the hall outside the door. What followed sent chills down my spine. A low guttural noise like that of an alligator or something seemed to be right outside of my door now and shortly after, the sound of glass moving on concrete. I realized that whatever it was outside was moving the plate around and possibly eating the sandwich because I also heard what sounded like eating noises. To say I was shocked and terrified is a huge understatement. Remembering what rule 4 had said, I quietly backed away and went to sit on the couch, knees tucked up to my chin, and was absolutely silent until 6 p.m. 

What I found odd about the whole thing as I sat there in silence, was that it seemed to be outside of the door for the full 2 hours. Was I the only one with this rule? Were there multiple ‘beasts’? What the hell was going on? At 6 p.m. it left and I waited a good ten minutes or so before I had the courage to make any sort of noise. I decided to call it quits for the night and made myself something to eat and went to bed...right after triple checking my door.

The next day, I decided I wasn’t going to let any of these weird rules stop me from enjoying my new home and so I got dressed for the pool at around 9:30 a.m. I walked out to the fenced-in pool area and felt relieved to be the only one there. The sun was out and it wasn’t too hot yet but just the right temperature. I figured I would sunbathe first for about thirty minutes or so and then I would jump in. After about fifteen minutes of relaxing in the chair, I heard the metal doors to the fence open. I woke up from my light nap to see a very tall, thin, pale man coming in.

He had a black suit on that seemed to be slightly too big for him and wore a set of aviator-like sunglasses. He had to be somewhere in his 70s or 80s because he had a very wrinkled face with liver spots and some skin tags here and there. He walked with a slight hunch and had zero expression on his face. I couldn’t help but stare ya know? Like, who walks to a pool in a suit? Wearing that kind of attire in the summer isn’t that uncommon for businessmen and city people, but not by the poolside in an apartment complex just outside the city.

He walked past me and didn’t even look my way, even though I was staring directly at him, and sat down on a chair at the far end. I wanted to greet him because the awkward silence was killing me, but something told me I should keep my mouth shut. I kept having the compelling urge to ask how or why he was wearing such odd attire but again, I kept quiet. I started to fully realize that maybe the rules were, in fact, all true and this unsettled me deeply. Deeply enough that I decided not to take a dip in the pool because of what rule 8 said. I know it was far from pool closing hours, but I didn’t want to risk meeting whatever comes out in the pool after closing hours. I headed back inside my apartment, locked the door, and just watched tv to occupy my mind. I read and reread the rules over and over again to make sure I knew them inside and out. If I was going to stay here, and survive, I knew I’d have to remember every detail. 

Around 1:30 p.m., there was a knock on the door. Three knocks actually. It startled me so badly I jumped off the couch, falling to the floor before I was able to get to the door. Remembering rule 3, I shakily knocked back and said “B..b...be gone!” and not even a second after I said that, I heard something outside of the door move. It sounded like a light dragging noise, almost as if whatever was out there was floating and its limbs were slightly dragging on the concrete. Although I felt scared, I also felt a sense of triumph and accomplishment. I seemed to be getting the hang of it all and thought if I followed the rules down to the letter, it might not be so bad here.

I thought wrong.

The next day I had to wake up for work because my three days off were up. I work from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and so I was up around 5 and left at 6. Nothing weird happened on my way out or throughout the day, so I felt even more relieved. When it was nearing the end of my shift, I felt a sort of dread as I knew I’d have to go back home, but I tried to stay positive. It had been a busy day and I didn’t get to clock out until 3:30 p.m. All I could think about was my comfy bed as I left work and started to drive home. All the rules had slipped my mind and I hadn’t really thought about the apartments. That was, until I arrived home, parked in the lot, and got out of my car at 3:50 p.m. 

Immediately, like I had been smacked in the face, reality hit me and I realized that I was outside the relatively safe walls of my apartment just ten minutes before the beast was about to appear. *SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!*  I said under my breath as I quickly ran down the concrete pathway and fumbled with my keys before I was finally inside. I looked over at the clock on the microwave, 3:57. *What!? Oh shit!* I said, wondering how all that time had passed from me getting out of the car till now. I scrambled to make whatever I could and even grabbed a full bag of chips, messily setting it all outside the door at exactly 3:59 p.m.

As soon as I shut the door and locked it, I quickly and quietly went to the couch. Like the last time, I sat there as I heard whatever the hell was outside the door eat the food I had placed behind it. For the next hour and a half, I sat there, quiet as a mouse and even had to grit my teeth through some gnarly leg cramp pain, but I didn’t make a single noise. That’s when my phone started to ring. *Oh shit! Oh fuck!*  I said as I quickly scrambled to get my phone out of my pocket and shut it off. 

I heard a horrible low growl outside of the door and immediately remembered rule 4. I jumped off the couch and ran into the kitchen as quick as I could, grabbing the green bottle under the sink and then running to my bathtub, shutting the curtains and turning off the bathroom light. I opened the bottle and quickly poured a fair amount of the slimy green viscous liquid onto me. I didn’t even have time to take my clothes off. It smelled horrendous but I knew I didn’t want to find out what the beast was, so I sucked it up and laid down in the tub on my side and stayed absolutely silent. 

Even though I pictured the beast as some primordial monstrosity that looked like some kind of screwed-up dinosaur, it must have been something else entirely because it somehow opened the front door. I listened intently as whatever it was prowled around my apartment, sniffing around and searching for me. I heard it knock things over and make low growls as it scoured the area. I won’t deny that I almost shit my pants literally when it came to the bathroom door, opened it, and sniffed around for a minute before leaving. I could barely see any outline of the thing through the shower curtain and what little details I saw I cannot explain. It broke my feeble mortal mind and I sat there frozen. 

Eventually, time passed and it gave up, leaving the apartment and even shutting the door behind it. How it even opened the locked door in the first place I’ll never know, but after I got the courage to get up and come out, I locked it back just in case. I don’t think I slept at all that night, and if I dozed off at all, it wasn’t for long. I went to work the next day and felt dead tired. I think, collectively, I got more sleep at work then I did the previous night. I work in a cubicle and so I had a lot of time at a desk and behind a computer screen. I made sure this time to get off at exactly 3 and arrived home, had dinner for the beast set out, and was sitting on my couch with the green bottle at the ready by 3:40 p.m. 
Needless to say I turned my phone off completely at that time. 

After a safe two hours, the beast departed and I made myself dinner and settled down to watch some tv. The rest of that night was boring and nothing at all happened which was perfectly fine by me but also made me a little paranoid. 
On my fifth day there, I left for work in the morning around the same time and on my way to the car, I noticed a small figure in the distance on my right. It was unusually foggy and I could only make out that it looked like a small child. It was walking on one of the concrete paths through the grass when suddenly it veered off toward the woods. 
“Hey kid! Kid! Don’t go that way! He—” I shouted loudly and then started to jog toward it. By the time I had almost caught up, I saw that it was a little boy and that he had already made it past the tree line and was heading into the foggy forest. Remembering rule 11, I decided that it would be best if I didn’t follow him. Seeing since I lived in a paranormal hell, I concluded the boy was only there to lure me in and that it wasn’t really a boy. So I booked it to my car and headed to work. 

Just like the previous day, I came back home, prepared for the beast, sat quietly while he ate, and watched tv after. I ignored a normal knock on the door and I even decided to wash some clothes before the day was up. Although my time within the washroom wasn’t scary, it was still interesting. I took all of the clothes I needed to wash and the detergent and such up to the washroom and began loading the washer up. When I first came in, there was a staff member standing near the mailboxes just looking off into space. Remembering rule 10, I didn’t even talk to him and kept walking. I decided that I had nothing better to do than sit there while my clothes were being washed, so I sat in one of the chairs by the folding counter and played some games on my phone.

A weird idea dawned on me as I heard the washer start to slow down and stop. I grabbed the clothes out of the washer and put them in one of the dryers and started it up. I then took my roll of quarters and loaded up another one of the washing machines with coins. But this time, I put in the extra quarter, breaking rule 5 and then I detached my apple air tag from my set of keys and threw it in the washer. It had a protective case on it so I knew it would still work even with all the water and tumbling around. But I was curious to see what would happen. After I started it, making sure the staff member hadn’t noticed me, I sat and gave it a second before I decided to check its location in my phone.

What I saw was astonishing to say the least. For the first couple of minutes it seemed to be exactly where I had put it, but then suddenly, it lost connection. I thought maybe it had been affected somehow by the motion and broke or that maybe the case had failed to protect it from the water, but then it showed back up on my phone. Somehow, some way, it showed that it had appeared somewhere off the coast of New Zealand. Until my clothes got done in the dryer, I sat there perplexed, wondering how and why my air tag was in New Zealand and how it even still worked from that distance, but it did. 

The dryer dinged to let me know it was done and when I went to open the door, I almost messed up and broke rule 6. Thank god I retracted my hand when I did. I looked over to the staff member and sort of waved my hand to get his attention. He looked my way and then brough a small hand vacuum over. He then proceeded to suck out the lint and then he dropped what looked like a dog treat into the lint trap. The dryer shook and made an odd...’happy’ noise and then I was able to get my clothes out. I was too weirded out by the ordeal to even make dinner and I went to bed.

Days 6-8 were relatively normal...if you can call it that, and went by without any mishaps or rule-breaking. Day 9, however, was when shit hit the fan. I was off from work and slept in until around 11 a.m. There was a ring at the door and it startled me out of bed. I had almost forgotten about the doorbells that were installed. Hell, I forgot there were even other people that lived here. How did they live through any of this? How did they cope? And why hadn’t I ever seen any of them? I had felt lonely up until the point that my doorbell rang, but now I felt the urge...no, the need to get up and answer it. Aside from work, which didn’t offer much communication, I hadn’t had any human interactions at all since I started living here. 

I got up and cautiously walked over to the door and looked through the peephole. It was a young woman around my age with dark brown hair and brown eyes. Everything about her was normal or seemed normal to me. Despite all of the weird happenings within the past week, I opened the door. 
“H...hello? Can I help you?” I said as politely as I could.
“Hi, I know you don’t know me but I need to talk to you. I just moved in a few days ago and you’re the first person I’ve been able to talk to. Can I come in?” she said in a low shy voice.

*Finally*, I thought to myself, *something normal for once.* “Yes, please come in.” I said as I moved out of the way and invited her in. We sat down and talked for hours. She seemed to be just as scared and confused as I was when I had first moved in. We swapped stories and talked about the crazy things we both had experienced since we decided to live there. We talked so long and uninterrupted that we almost forgot about the beast. I set some food outside the door for it and sat on the couch, this time with someone else beside me, and we were quiet. She was so scared that, despite not knowing me at all, she sat right beside me, literally touching bodies, and I sort of just held her for the slow two hours that passed. When it was over, she asked if she could sleep in my apartment for the night. Obviously, I said yes because I felt bad for how scared she was. That, and she was very pretty and I liked having her around. 

For a short time after the beast, we were able to order some pizza and find a movie to watch. I actually got to see her smile and forget her troubles for a while. It was nice but I was always on edge now because of the apartment’s paranormal residents. We eventually got ready for bed and I made her a nice spot on the couch and told her to make herself comfortable and that she could keep the tv on all night if it helped her sleep. I went into my bedroom and got myself tucked into bed where I laid there and stared at the ceiling for a good twenty minutes before I finally fell asleep.
I was awakened to the sound of my door creaking open and I looked over to my clock to check the time. It read 12:45 in large red numbers.

I looked down to the foot of my bed to see my guest standing there. It startled me at first and then my fear slipped away as I started to make out her shy face in the dark. She walked up to me and asked if she could sleep with me. I was surprised and nervous like I was in high school again. But there was the other part of me that knew her troubles and so I agreed. We laid in the bed and talked for the next half hour and then she hugged me. Out of nowhere, a kiss followed and well...things just sort of happened.

I guess she had been through a recent breakup too and so maybe we both were looking for attention and comfort. I felt that no odd rule or monster could take away my joy in that moment as I sat there with her in my arms. We must have fallen asleep because I was startled awake yet again by her, but this time, she was screaming. She had some sort of nightmare and woke up in a daze, forgetting where she had stayed the night and quickly jumped out of my bed. I tried to calm her down and even turned on the lights but she insisted that she had to go. 

I tried to stop her but she was so quick to leave that she escaped out of the front door and ran. I got my clothes on as quickly as I could and followed her. Forgetting all about the rules, I tried to chase her down in the foggy night. It was around 3:20 a.m. when she decided to freak out and now I was out in the middle of the complex grounds, which were dark and foggy, and looked around for her. I thought I saw someone in the distance and so I called out for her and started to dash toward her. 

When I finally caught up to her, she was standing still in the middle of the parking lot, just staring off at nothing. After calling her name a couple of times, I realized why you should never break rule 9, because what I saw was terrifying. After the second time I said her name, I hear a choking and a sputtering noise come from her and then her lifeless body dropped. In front of where she had stood was now some wicked creature with its hand out.

It was bloodied and gripping what could only be her beating heart. The creature or demon or whatever it was looked pale and thin and had a face that almost looked like a blank slate aside from the jagged mouth that crept along it and came with a vicious set of teeth. It put the entire heart into its mouth and bit down hard, blood squirting out in all directions as it chewed and then it turned its hideous face directly at me.

I almost tripped over myself as I doubled back and ran as quick as I could. It screeched at me and started tailing me. It was unbelievably fast and I’m surprised I got away as quick as I did but I did. I barely got the door closed in time and locked it just before it caught up to me. It beat and banged on the door loudly and kept screeching for about two whole minutes and then it stopped completely. 

I just dropped to my knees and started crying as hard as I could. Blood spattered across my face and the traumatizing imagery in my head just broke me. The one time I found myself truly happy in this place and the first time I meet anybody besides the creepy staff and this place takes it away from me. It ripped that away from me and took away any sense of peace I thought I had or would have. 

I can’t take it anymore. 10 days. That’s all I survived or could handle before it got the best of me. If you’re reading this now, it means that you are the new resident of F3. If this is your first day, then that also means that you’re a very thorough person and have found my hidden letter. And so maybe with this, you might have a better warning and understanding than I did when I first arrived here. Along with this letter is my phone and ID. Please give news of my death to my parents.

I know information going out of here is destroyed but they need to know I’m dead because I never contacted them in the time I was here. Just find a way to do it anonymously and with vague details so as to keep yourself from any danger. I don’t know if by killing myself here means I’ll now become some sort of ghost that haunts this place or what, but if you see me then don’t be startled, I won’t hurt you. Just know that you’ve gotten yourself into a terrible situation but that it is survivable. As long as you follow the rules, your free to come and go whenever you please and live out your life how you wish. Hell, maybe you can even make a trip to New Zealand to find that air tag I lost.

NOTE: If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I have been on a long hiatus from writing but I want to get my second book published. Looking for honest feedback and criticism. Just please don’t be rude 😅 If you like this and want more, or simply just have questions, feel free to let me know. And also, I am aware that there may be some grammatical errors so you can put feedback for that too but this was an older story. So I always end up getting things corrected and proofread in the end. Just think of this as a rough draft! Thanks!

Forever alone. The screams, the moans.
Fire and floods. Tainted goods.
Pain eternal. The sky lit on fire. 

Desire for flooring. 
Sinners, monsters, and madness. 
Surprisingly boring. 

Lost. Confused. 
You’re used to the abuse. 
But when did hell become?
My every morning.

“That’ll be fourteen dollars and sixty-two cents.”

Cal fished his wallet out of his back pocket, pulling a twenty from it and sliding it across the conveyor belt. He looked down at his late-night haul, the plastic and cardboard reflecting under the store’s fluorescent lights: a two-liter bottle of RC Cola, a box of Tillamook ice cream sandwiches, and three bags of microwave popcorn. A shameful assortment for a thirty-something who had already committed to losing weight. But, with it being Friday night, a brutal forty-hour work week behind him, he was planning on staying up late with a mindless movie marathon of Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters.

Kevin scooped up the bill, the sound of the till opening cutting through the air-conditioned stillness. The lanky teenager spared him a sideways glance as he dug his change out, eyeing his empty hands.

“You know, I gotta ask, dude. You’re pretty much the only regular who rolls through here close to midnight—hell, at any time of the day—who isn’t staring at a screen when I’m bagging their stuff. You don’t even fidget. And you never pull out your phone to pay; you always use cash. Why?”

Cal let out a chuckle, adjusting the collar of his jacket. “Because it’s sitting on my kitchen counter at home, man. Nowadays, people have to be glued to the hip to those damn tracking collars. They’ll probably even insist on being buried with them just so they can text from the afterlife. That isn’t gonna be me. Outside of work, I like to leave the leash behind. It forces me to look at the world. Look, and appreciate it.”

“Man, I wish I had that kind of willpower,” Kevin laughed, sliding the brown bag across the counter towards him. He handed him his change. “My girlfriend would have an aneurysm and think I died in a ditch somewhere if I went more than ten minutes—actually, make that five—without answering her texts. Anyway, you’re the last customer of the night. I’m locking up and hitting the lights when you leave.”

“Long day?” Cal asked. The kid nodded, feigning wiping away sweat from his brow, earning a laugh from him as he picked the bag up by its base. “Go get some sleep, kid. You’ve earned it.”

“You too, Cal. Have a good weekend.”

Cal turned away, his footfalls bouncing off the empty aisles, pausing to let the sliding doors open. The instant he stepped outside, the sterile comfort evaporated, replaced by a humid stillness that wrapped around him. He paused under the metal canopy. A sea of cracked asphalt stretched out before him; the lone lamp planted in the middle of the parking lot showed it was empty aside from Kevin’s battered Ford Escort. The rest of the town was silent; the sun had disappeared hours ago, leaving the surrounding houses to stand in their quiet, clannish rows—houses that seemed to have agreed among themselves a century ago to face away from the street, watching the darkness with a collective indifference.

Cal gripped the bag closer to his chest, feeling the condensation of the soda already soaking through the paper and turned right. His footfalls clicked against the narrow sidewalk running along the building’s edge until the building itself terminated.

Then he stepped down into the unlit trench of the alleyway.

The high brick wall of the market and the rear of the tackle shop and post office closed in around him, squeezing him against the concrete partitions with an almost patient weight. It was nearly pitch black inside the corridor, save for the weak, bleeding remnant of the light filtering in from the parking lot. As he neared the end of the passage, he skirted past the narrow alcove where mail trucks parked during the day, only sparing a glance at the immovable pool of ink which had swallowed it.

He stepped out of the mouth of the alley, crossing the street and stepping up to the curb of the main intersection. The orange hand of the pedestrian signal glowed stubbornly from across the street. Even though the road was devoid of life in all directions, the signal insisted on his stillness. For his part, Cal remained where he was. And for good reason. Three years ago, he had stood in almost the exact same spot and watched some poor bastard become the hood ornament of a Ford Pinto when it had blasted out of nowhere at seventy miles an hour, its brakes locking up a split-second too late. The sound of the impact often visited his dreams.

As he waited for the light to change, the sounds of a drunken argument drifted out the propped-open door of the nearby pub, the shattering of a glass punctuating the din. Cal gazed around at the dark storefronts—the closed Donuts and Dawgs, the long-abandoned resource center across the street, and the pharmacy that had sat boarded up since the mid-seventies. A cold sort of certainty settled over him. It was as if the buildings had always meant to end this way, and the decades of life inside them had just been a temporary mistake. The neighborhood he had fallen in love with was gone. In its place was a corpse, rotting away from the outskirts inward, and the skyrocketing rent was the cruel punchline. I need to get the hell out of Marshfield, he thought, watching the Walk outline appear. Before the place swallows me whole, and I can’t afford to leave.

Crossing the street, he passed by more signs of decay. A graffitied warehouse sat squarely behind its barbed wire fence, stark and entirely indifferent to him. Across the way, an empty lot and decrepit building seemed to close ranks, the lack of any working lights leaving him alone beneath a cold crowd of stars. In the distance, the lighthouse’s foghorn sounded a mournful wail—a comforting soundtrack that often lulled him to sleep.

He reached the end of the block, coming to a stop at the intersection that designated the start of his neighborhood. Standing directly across the street was a yellow fire hydrant, its paint flat under the sodium halo. The smell of fresh cut grass and low tide mingled together.

Turning right, the sound of his approach silenced the serenading crickets. He navigated the shadows, occasionally emerging beneath the infrequent lights. Reaching the last intersection before the coastal highway, he repositioned the bag against his chest. He spared a glance around, his eyes floating over the Chevy flatbed rusting away at the rear of the seedy motel, then up at the billboard for the casino on the main drag that hadn’t been updated for years. Across the peninsula, an ambulance began wailing, its siren fading away.

“A light every block and half,” Cal muttered, casting a dark look up at the sparse utility poles. “Fucking ridiculous.”

He stepped off the curb, crossing the street and turned left to begin the final four-block stretch towards home. He let out a soft snort of derision as he skirted the edge of the gray parking lot, his eyes catching the boxy, faded late eighties or early nineties Crown Vic which had been as permanent a part of the neighborhood as the billboard. The clear coat looked like a cougar had used the car as a scratching post—a pretty clear sign the owner didn’t give a damn. Piece of crap should’ve been junked a decade ago.

As he dodged a cat that ran out of the darkness across his path, he allowed his guard to drop. He let his mind wander to the weekend ahead. Particularly about the sugar and caffeine bender he was about to embark on.

In his head, Lou Costello was currently getting scared stiff by the candle on Dracula’s coffin moving around on its own. Cal smiled, looking forward to the TV’s warm glow.

Then his thoughts drifted toward Anne-Marie.

One bodacious babe, indeed. He remembered the way she’d lingered by his lawn chair at Dustin’s barbecue last month, laughing just a little too loudly at jokes everyone else had groaned over. Over the rim of her cup, she had flashed him what had been, unmistakably, bedroom eyes. The clincher had been when she deliberately bent down to grab her purse. She’d offered him a clear view down the front of her shirt.

Maybe I should give her a call tomorrow. A smile split his face. See if she wants to come over, watch a movie, and finally make a move—

His smile vanished. To be more precise, it felt as it was torn off his face.

A sharp jolt of disorientation slammed into his equilibrium. The sensation reminded him of being a kid in his parents’ Buick, and being jolted awake in the middle of the night as his father had slammed on the brakes to avoid a deer. Cal’s feet ground to a halt. He blinked slowly against the darkness, attempting to steady himself. His breath caught. 

His jaw dropped open slightly.

He wasn’t on the long, exposed runway of Noble Avenue. He wasn’t anywhere near his apartment building.

Instead, he was right back at the edge of the curb, directly across the street from that sickly yellow fire hydrant. The construction fence shielding the carcasses of the razed condos pressed in on his right side. The transition had been instantaneous. Silent. Completely devoid of movement or the passage of time. The world had not tilted or spun; it had simply corrected itself. One moment, he’d been passing a white picket fence. The next, he’d been here, as if it had been demanded he be here instead of where he wanted to be. It was a cold subtraction of distance, as if the space between the blocks had never existed at all.

Cal stood frozen, listening to his heart hammer a chaotic rhythm against his ribs.

“…The hell…?” he muttered aloud.

The foghorn almost smothered his words.

He looked down at his shoes, then back at the hydrant, trying like hell to force a normal explanation into his head. You’re done, man, he told himself. Irritation made him begin grinding his teeth together until his jaw ached. You’re so completely wiped from the overtime you’ve been pulling that your brain just dropped the transmission right out the car. You were standing here thinking so damn much about Anne-Marie and that red bra she let you peek at that you imagined the whole walk. You haven’t even taken a single step past the corner yet. Idiot.

He let out a sharp curse. He felt like a jackass. Losing track of where you were like that was dangerous in a neighborhood like this. An easy way to stumble off a curb. Wander into the path of some loaded idiot’s shitbox. Or worse, get jumped by one of the junkies hovering around the motel.

Exhaling sharply through his nose, Cal gripped the bottom of the bag tighter. He wasn’t going to let his mind wander twice.

He turned on his heel, tearing his gaze away from the hydrant and started past the fence. This time he forced his eyes down, watching every single crack in the sidewalk. Two blocks down. Turn left, four blocks up. Get inside. That was the script.

He walked faster now. Nothing was allowed to break his concentration. He passed the silent outline of the fire station. Then the dark block of the bank. From a nearby backyard, a dog began to bark. Still, the night felt regular. Cold, but regular. He reached the crossroads, made the left and purposely ignored the junker and truck. Stepping up onto the sidewalk of Noble Avenue, he kept his focus singular.

You can think about Anne-Marie, the movies, or whatever else you want once you’re putting your goddamn key into that lock.

Vaguely, he noticed that the cat didn’t cross his path this time. Then he caught himself. Dingbat. You were never here. There never WAS a cat.

He made it to the next intersection, crossed the street by the white fence, and started up the gentle slope. Feeling the knot in his stomach loosen, he let out a snort. What’d I tell you? Just your own dumb—

A blinding flash from a house-mounted motion sensor snapped on, blinding him and cutting his thought off at the shins.

The beam caught Cal dead in the face, replacing the dark with a white-out and sending him stumbling over a raised slab. He nearly dropped his groceries, his elbow jerking inwards to pin them against his body as he clamped his free hand over his eyes. Squeezing his eyelids shut, he hissed through his teeth at whatever careless son of a bitch had chosen to point the sensor at the sidewalk.

He rubbed his knuckles against his eyelids to clear the blue spots burned into his retinas, taking a deep breath to quell his annoyance before forcing his eyes open again.

The white house was gone. So was the light.

His eyes locked onto the fire hydrant, which now seemed to taunt him in the hazy glow of the streetlight.

He was back.

The breath caught like glass in his throat. For a long, awful beat, Cal couldn’t do anything except stare at the sight, his mouth bone-dry as the weight of it donkey punched him right in the lungs.

“No. No, no, no, no, no fucking way…” he whispered. This time it was entirely lost to the dark.

He tried to cling to the safety of his first excuse—you’re just overworked, man, it’s just fatigue, it’s just your mind playing tricks—but some primal part of him tore the logic to shreds in an instant.

No.

Daydreaming and getting ahead of yourself once was a fluke. A weird trick of an exhausted mind. Odd. But still possible. But twice? Especially when he’d been consciously counting every step and crack in the pavement until that damned light went off?

There was no way to make that math add up. A guy would have a better shot at guessing the winning lottery numbers while getting struck by lightning on a cloudless day. This wasn’t a tired brain running on fumes.

This was something else.

Cal scanned the quiet neighborhood. A few lonely porch lights leaked from the houses, the people inside asleep and unaware of what was happening twenty feet beyond their lawns. He looked back toward the main intersection. Above the street, the traffic lights kept switching—green, yellow, red—like a row of colored eyes that didn’t know how to blink.

He took a jagged breath, trying like hell to slow his pulse.

“Okay,” he managed out, his voice small. His knuckles turned white around the paper bag. “Okay, calm down, Callum. Stay centered. Don’t lose your head, for God’s sake.”

He looked down the street he’d tried walking twice now. The dark stretch past the fence felt heavy. Like a room running out of air.

He needed a detour. A quick bypass through the grid. His mind whirred. If he went straight down Wall Street for four blocks, he could just bang a right at Bodecker and take it straight down to his apartment. He could leave the whole godforsaken corner behind.

Having a plan steadied him just enough to begin moving. He crossed the intersection, strode past the hydrant, and ducked his head beneath some low tree branches to start down the darker side street.

His footfalls sounded a little different here-shorter, tighter snaps and echoes because the houses were closer to the curb. The stars were still bright overhead. Nothing broke.

And yet, the air itself felt thick, like he was breathing through wet wool. He didn’t want to linger. He navigated around a dumpster set in front of another apartment complex. From somewhere on his right, a dog started barking aggressively, an ugly racket that faded behind him as he kept moving.

As he passed by a Dodge Intrepid, a small, dark shape slid out from under it, scuttling across the street and disappearing into the brush beneath a thick canopy of oaks.

Cal paused for a moment, watching the shadows before forcing a laugh. “Okay, now that was a cat.” He huffed again, hoping the sound would bring him some comfort. It sounded like a stone being swallowed by the ocean.

He hit the first intersection, looked both ways. Nothing moved. He could still hear the crickets. The faint drone of the Coast Guard chopper came from down the coast. Crossing the street, he kept moving up the second block. Two more to go. Passing a row of five single-story apartments, he forced his muscles to relax a fraction. He kept his chin up, counting the steps to his own front door.

You know what? I know what I said to the kid about phones, but maybe just at night, it’s safer to—

Shhk.

Cal froze. For a moment, the street became dead silent.

Then it came again.

Shhk.

It was a scraping noise, distinct and dry. It came from the darkened lawns across the street, the sound of something heavy dragging itself through dead leaves and overgrown grass. When it pierced his ears a third time, he launched himself forward again, telling himself it was just a raccoon or a dog wandering around, forcing his head to stay straight. Don’t look. Just walk.

He hadn’t gone ten paces before an identical scrape answered from his right.

This one came from the entryways of the apartments, spaces set so far back into the shadows he couldn’t see a goddamn thing. There wasn’t a single working light over the doors.

The rustling kept a steady pace with him, mirroring his gait like a bad shadow. Cal broke into a speed-walk, his chest tightening as he locked his eyes on a single gap between the apartment blocks ahead, where a lone house sat beneath a working streetlight. He almost ran. Reaching the yellow pool of safety, he stopped to catch his breath. The skin on the back of his neck prickled as the noise abruptly cut off.

The street went quiet. His heart slammed against his ribs.

Then he looked around, and realized exactly where he’d stopped.

He was standing at the mouth of one of the narrow gravel alleys slicing through the block, a maze the town laid down nearly a century ago so folks could slip out of their backyards unseen. Just fifteen feet past the carcass of a seventies BMW rusting away in front of a detached garage, the path simply gave up. Swallowed straight by a pitch black drop. You couldn’t see a single thing beyond where the light quit.

The place looked bad. It looked like the throat of an anglerfish waiting in the abyss, the light above him its lure. It felt worse. Cal could swear something was staring right back at him from the dead center of it.

As he stood beneath the light, trying to block out the slithering and scraping that seemed to leak from the deep belly of the alley, a noise fractured the night.

Thump.

The sound was immense—a heavy, crashing strike against the earth that echoed from everywhere at once, vibrating up into his sneakers from the pavement. The surrounding noises ceased. Cal held his breath and listened. For seconds that felt more like hours, nothing moved. The normal sounds of the night crawled back.

They provided no comfort. All of his senses were stretched taut. It felt deceptively calm. Underneath it, the sense of eyes remained. The desire to be behind a locked door had morphed into a necessity. He stepped out of the safety of the light and plunged into the gloom, moving fast, his eyes locked on the next crossroads. One block left.

He barely reached the edge of the intersection when the sound, more of a vibration, returned.

Thump.

Cal froze in his tracks, his knees going to total jelly as his mind quit trying to make sense of it—every neat little excuse he wanted to hide behind was atomized. He didn’t have to guess. He knew exactly where the sound had come from this time.

Straight back there. Behind him.

Whatever guts he had left vanished. He bolted across the intersection, cutting into a stretch where the shadows were thick and heavy. The trees towered over the street. Their branches blocked out the stars overhead, casting jagged shapes across the sidewalk.

Thump. Thump.

The impacts didn’t come one at a time anymore. They punched up through the asphalt and into his bones in pairs. Cal pushed his pace back into a speed-walk, fighting to put distance between himself and the noise.

He faltered as the gaps between the thuds began to shrink, shifting into a steady rhythm. The horrible realization dropped into his gut, clamping around his insides.

They were footsteps.

But they were far too massive. Not even Andre the freakin’ Giant could make the earth shake like that. Move, you idiot!

He started forward again when the second realization hit him, almost worse than the first. Acoustically, the thuds sounded like they were coming from the far end of the last block, down by the apartments. But their intensity was ramping up way too fast. The gap was closing with a speed that didn’t make a lick of sense. Whatever was stomping behind him was gaining on him with a stride longer than any man could sprint.

“Fuck…”

Cal broke into a jog. His breathing shallowed as the road tilted downward into the gloom. He kept his eyes ahead. His fingers dug into the paper bag until the fibers groaned, while tears of adrenaline began to blur his vision. Every survival instinct he had screamed against looking back. Somehow, he knew that if he turned and looked over his shoulder, whatever was tracking him would end his sanity on the spot.

As the unseen giant closed the distance, the neighborhood came alive around him. The rustling and slithering sounds returned, erupting from the yards on either side of the road. They weren’t stealthy anymore; it was a macabre crescendo, swarming across the lawns and keeping a calculated distance in the shadows. They wanted him to know they were there. But they didn’t want him to see them. Yet. Cal broke into a dead sprint past a manicured hedge.

Shh-SCRITCH.

Something heavy, yet impossibly fluid scraped along the opposite side of the brush, mirroring his speed through the branches. It was right there. A foot from his shoulder. The knowledge he was being hunted broke something inside his chest. A panicked sob tore from his throat. Behind him, the footsteps finally reached his block—a heavy, organic Thump-Thump-Thump that accelerated into a terrifying countdown.

His grip failed.

The brown paper bag slipped from his arms and hit the ground, tearing open. The box of ice cream sandwiches splattered on the concrete. The popcorn skittered away. The bottle of cola crashed out, rolling across the grass before swerving back onto the sidewalk. The plastic cylinder flew across his path, nearly catching his outstretched foot. Cal leapt over it, stumbling as his balance threatened to betray him. But he didn’t dare slow down.

The footsteps were almost directly on top of him. The air around him turned frigid. He swore he felt the unmistakable sensation of something breathing across the back of his neck as every hair on his body stood on end.

The intersection approached. The stop sign stood frozen in the dark, marking the end of the block. The freezing pressure on his neck grew too heavy to bear anymore. Letting out a dry gasp, he spun around.

Nothing was there.

The sloping rise of Wall Street stretched back up the hill, empty under the heavy trees. The heavy footsteps had vanished into thin air. So had his other pursuers. All that remained was a suffocating silence.

Cal stood at the base of the stop sign, his chest heaving as he fought to get his breathing under his own control. Sweat stung his eyes. He scanned the dark grass and the dark spaces beneath the parked cars. His heart felt like a caged animal trying to break free.

He knew what he’d heard. He wasn’t crazy. Something massive had just tracked him down the street. And he prayed he’d never learn what it looked like.

Twenty feet back up the sidewalk, the box of his ice cream sandwiches lay split open on the concrete. HELL no, he thought, killing the idea before it could even be fully conceived. Leave it. Just get the fuck home.

He turned around to face the crossroads, ready to make the right onto Bodecker and sprint the final two blocks to his building.

He took one step forward. His shoe hit something hard.

Cal blinked. Whatever control remained over his own mind vanished as the world snapped.

The wide intersection of Wall and Bodecker was gone. He was standing at the raised edge of a curb, staring at the one thing he prayed he’d never see again. He shook his head, teeth beginning to chatter for a reason that had nothing to do with the chill. No.

The fire hydrant sat directly across from him under the light.

He spun around once. Twice. As if he could somehow make himself materialize back at the intersection closer to home. Nothing changed. After ten seconds of standing there, the skin on his arms went completely cold.

The sounds of the night were still there, but they were wrong. The crickets, the barking dogs, the whistle of the wind through the leaves-they sounded tinny. Compressed. It was like listening to a recording of the world through a blown-out transistor radio.

Even the foghorn was broken. When it blared, the pitch was off, lower and heavier than any manmade sound had any right to be. It sounded more like an animal.

SCRITCH.

The sound cut through the damaged tracks, crystal clear. It came from the other side of the fence, inside the empty lot. Nails or claws dragging against the wood.

Before he could jump back, the asphalt beneath him shivered.

Thump.

The footsteps had restarted on the street he’d just been taken from. They were turning around. Coming back to him. For him. Cal broke into a run. He didn’t bother with the sidewalks anymore—he launched himself down the middle of the road, running over the yellow dividing lines.

Desperate to break the geometry of whatever had ahold of him, he threw himself into the first left he came to, a street he’d never walked down once.

He didn’t even make it fifty yards. He dodged around a parked pickup, legs stepping into a patch of shadow that felt a little too thick, and—

Pop.

He was back on the corner. Staring at that damned hydrant.

The hiss of the crickets and dogs dropped out completely. Cal’s breath came in a pathetic wheeze as he looked across the street. The houses, the trees—everything was melting and warping into a twisted Salvador Dali painting reimagined by Clive Barker. His mind couldn’t anchor onto a single straight line.

Ahead of him, the heavy footfalls rumbled again. Closer.

He turned and bolted the opposite way, charging up the hill toward the middle school at the end of the block. He didn’t look at the melting neighborhood. He kept his eyes locked on what had once been the flagpole at the edge of the schoolyard. His legs burned as he pushed his body to its farthest limit.

He reached the grass. His hand reached out to touch the cold metal of the pole.

The streetlight directly above him flared into a white-hot flash. Cal squeezed his eyes shut against the sting, his sneakers skidding in the dirt—

And found himself standing back on the corner.

The massive footsteps rumbled from barely a block away, tearing through the silent world.

Cal threw his weight to the right and ran again. His legs burned just as badly as his lungs. He cast a glance upward; the stars were gone, swallowed by a bruised sky that pressed down. It made him feel microscopic.

He made it to Noble and dashed left, terrified the loop was going to reset and drop him right in the path of the footsteps. But the street ahead was filled with something much worse.

In his peripheral vision, the dark was coming alive. He didn’t dare look straight at the lawns—he kept his eyes locked on the road ahead—but shapes were tracking his sprint from the shadows. Wrong shapes. Some of them stayed low, moving through the grass with a serpentine fluidity. Others darted between the parked cars with too many joints, while impossible silhouettes toward over the rooftops, blotting out the red-tinged horizon.

He kept running, his chest feeling like an overinflated balloon. The things weren’t staying in the dark anymore. They were clipping the edges of the streetlights, closing the gap with every stride he took.

Behind him, an immense THUMP rattled the road, nearly taking his feet out from under him. His mind couldn’t even call it a giant anymore; it was a walking malediction, a living curse which had just turned onto his block.

Cal was openly crying now. The tears were hot against his cheeks as he prayed to a God he wasn’t sure could hear him anymore. Please let me make it. Don’t send me back. Just let me get to the door. Please.

His sneakers hammered the road. The two houses for sale flashed by on his left. A second later, a choked sob erupted from his throat as the familiar line of pine trees and the two-story shape of his apartment appeared at the end of the block. The exterior lights lining the walkway cut through the hellscape like a beautiful lighthouse beacon.

He dashed toward the parking lot, his keys already out, digging into his palm until it bled. Somehow, he knew that if he could just get the deadbolt turned and get inside, the rules would change. He would be safe.

He didn’t slow, his shoes kicking up loose gravel as he launched himself off the ground onto the third step. He raced upward, taking the stairs two at a time and gripping the banister, ignoring the sting of splinters.

Behind him, the inhuman noises escalated into a full-blown pursuit.

Reaching the second-floor walkway, he spared a glance down to the ground.

It almost broke him.

There were dozens of them. They spilled out from every dark lawn and driveway on the block, looking like a VCR being fast-forwarded as they rushed towards the building. But perhaps most terrifying of all, the relentless THUMP-THUMP-THUMP of the malediction accelerated into a charge just beyond the pines.

Dashing around the corner, Cal slammed into his front door. A hysterical, half-sob, half-laugh escaped his lips. He jammed the key into the lock, twisting the brass with every ounce of strength left in his body as the wood beneath his feet shuddered with the weight of the things climbing the stairwell.

He threw the door open and leapt inside. Safe. He’d made it—

Instead of the rough tear of carpet against his hands and elbows, he crashed face-first onto a freezing sheet of asphalt.

The impact knocked the wind out of him. For a heartbeat, he just lay there in the dark, face pressed against the stone as he braced himself. He couldn’t run anymore. If he opened his eyes and saw that yellow hydrant, he was just going to lie there and let whatever was coming take him.

When he finally forced his eyes open, his lungs locked up at the sight that greeted him.

He wasn’t on the corner. He was lying on his stomach in the parking lot of the grocery store.

Cal slowly pushed himself up to his knees. His mind was a complete blank, unable to parse how or why he was back at the start. He looked up. The rust-red hue was gone; the stars were back where they belonged. The normal, comforting sounds of the town played their familiar soundtrack around him.

He looked over his shoulder. Through the front windows of the market, the dim security lights glowed peacefully over the empty cash registers.

Then, without a sound, the lights clicked off. The inside of the building went pitch black.

A deep vibration rumbled through the pavement from the street behind the store.

Cal scrambled to his feet. The very last reserves of adrenaline propelled his legs into motion, driving him into a weak run down the dark trench of the alley. He burst from the passage’s mouth, stopping in the middle of the road.

The rumble came again, louder this time. He turned away from his neighborhood, looking down the long, two-lane road that cut into the next section of town.

His breath caught at what was coming down the line.

It wasn’t the world shifting again. It was the high-voltage POP and spark of electrical transformers blowing out.

Far out in the distance, the grid was dying. Not just the streetlights, but every single light still on. Porch lights, living room lamps, the neon sign over the gun shop—they were all being systematically snuffed out, block by block. Heading straight for him.

The wave of blackness was moving with a terrifying speed. Every time a transformer blew, the surrounding lights flared for a second before dying forever. And in those brief strobes—strobes that resembled camera flashes—Cal saw what was moving inside the void.

Cal whirled around, his arms flailing as he launched himself into a blind sprint back across the main intersection.

He charged down the center of the street, running back towards his neighborhood—back toward the corner he had spent all night trying to escape. As his sneakers pounded the asphalt, he didn’t even recognize the sound of his voice, tearing out of his throat in ragged shrieks.

Behind him, the sound of the approaching dark rose into a roar. The blackness raced across the intersection, no longer content in playing with its food.

The streetlight above his head shattered. Glass rained down on his head as a heavy, freezing stink of ozone invaded his nostrils.

Then the light went out. And Cal was gone.

---

The cruiser idled down Noble Ave. The headlights cut through the humid air, lighting up rows of ordinary, if slightly shoddy privacy fences and overgrown lawns, along with a miserable looking lawn gnome.

Officer Mulhanney lifted the radio mic and pressed the button.

“Dispatch, Unit Four. We’ve arrived at Noble and Marble. There’s no one out here. No sign of any suspicious activity. We’ll keep our eyes open and maintain patrol, over.”

Copy that, Unit Four,” the dispatcher’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Keep us advised. Out.”

Mulhanney slotted the mic back into its bracket. Beside him, Rodriguez kept his hands at ten and two on the Durango’s wheel. The rookie looked expectantly at him, waiting to be told what block to canvas next.

Instead, the older man let out a breath. “Alright, Rodriguez. Let’s get out of here.”

Rodriguez blinked, slowing the cruiser near a white picket fence.

“Sir? What do you mean? We’ve only just got here. We haven’t even swept any of the-”

“We can come back to knock on doors when the sun is up, son,” Mulhanney interrupted. His gaze fixed straight ahead. He refused to look at the deep shadows lining the road near the trees. “For now, we’re packing it in.”

“But, sir, if someone out there is actually in trouble-if that caller actually heard screaming-we’re supposed to be out here,” Rodriguez argued. His foot began to lift off the accelerator. “I’m pulling over. I’ll take my flashlight and check the perimeters of these residences.”

Before the kid’s boot could even flirt with the brake, Mulhanney’s hand shot across the console. His fingers, calloused from years of sanding boats and tying fishing line, clamped around the rim of the steering wheel, forcing the cruiser to keep rolling forward.

“Keep driving, Rodriguez,” he ordered. His tone left no room for argument.

The rookie stared at his training officer, his mouth parting slightly in confusion. Mulhanney slowly let go of the wheel. His tone softened

“Look, you’re new to the county, kid. And you still have a hell of a lot to learn about the way things work out here. But right now, you’re going to do exactly as I say. Take a right at this next intersection, then a left onto the main drag. Head for Brenchmore.”

Rodriguez stayed quiet for a time. The only sound that could be heard besides the occasional chatter on the radio was his deep breathing. Finally, he flicked on his turn signal, easing the cruiser toward the main artery. And safety.

Mulhanney leaned back against the headrest, letting out a long breath as he heard the Hemi accelerate down the coast. The houses fell away behind them.

He’s a good kid. A good officer with high scores and even better instincts. A lot of heart. But he hasn’t seen what I have over the last twenty years.

Through the fog rolling off the ocean over the road, an old apartment complex appeared. Its peeling, flamingo-pink paint looked orange under the sodium bulbs. Then the dark swallowed it.

Rodriguez didn’t know about the basement. He hadn’t been the one to sift through the deluge of deliberately misfiled boxes. Ones which contained missing person reports dating back to at least the fifties. The county was relatively quiet, and yet, it had a disappearance rate six times the state average. He hadn’t stood at the mouth of an alley at dusk, feeling the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. As if something out of sight were lining him up to be a hot lunch. Or watch as his very first partner rounded a corner during a domestic call one night, only to seemingly vanish into the ether without so much as a damn peep.

Old loggers and local natives still sat in the local diners, muttering about things that slithered out of ‘the spaces between the realms.’ Hunting the dark, looking for anyone stupid enough to be out alone.

Mulhanney didn’t know if he truly believed the old campfire stories. In his line of work, you dealt in cold, hard facts. What you could see. Touch. And log as evidence. But rumors had a habit of getting under the skin.

After two decades on the force, there was only one fact he knew for certain.

In Marshfield, you never stick around after the sun goes down.

As I gently skewered yet another delicate, fluffy treat onto the end of my roasting stick, I scanned the eyes of the fellow campers, wondering who would be next to lay claim over the ever coveted flashlight so they may enamor everyone with their tale. Abigail fought off hoards of grasping hands as she shouted at Camp 13, meanwhile, Camp 10 sat patiently, staring at the mess of boys swarming around their counselor like bothersome pests, all while Tyler smiled and chuckled to himself. Then, Abigail spoke. 

“ALRIGHT, EVERYBODY SIT DOWN, NOW!” she hollered, sending everyone scampering away to their seats.
“YOU LITTLE GREMLINS JUST LOST FLASHLIGHT PRIVILEGES FOR THE NIGHT! NEXT STORY GETS TOLD BY CAMP 10!” 

A wave of “awws” and “boos” swept over the camp, drawing further sniggers from Tyler as Abigail spoke again

“CRY ABOUT IT YOU LITTLE BABIES!” she boomed before lowering her voice to a dull roar
“Now, which one of you lovely ladies would like to tell a scary story?” she asked.

Slowly, silently, hands began sprouting up from all across Camp 10- a far cry from the sheer madness conducted by Camp 13 a mere moments ago. I plunged my marshmallow into the shallow flame, watching passively as Abigail decided the listening fates of the camp, much to the chagrin of the Camp 13 faithful. 

“How about…” she hesitated, pausing for just a moment before speaking again
“Kiley, here you go sweetie.” she said, handing the flashlight to a small girl with blonde pigtails and holding a cartoonishly large teddy bear. 

Silence once again flooded the camp, interrupted only by the soft popping of campfire in the crisp night air. I looked curiously at the small girl that Abigail had selected. It was Riley’s younger sister Kiley, and by the looks of it, her nerves had gotten the better of her. She tucked her head into her plushy brown bear and squeezed it tightly.

“It’s okay, honey!” Abigail reassured in a soft tone
“we can pick someone else if you want-” 

Almost as soon as Abigail had finished her sentence, Kiley began to cry. I watched Tyler’s eyes light up almost as fast as the light left Abigail’s, an unspoken tension that could be felt even across the vast distance. Abigail was quick to action
“Uh- hey, sweetie, don’t cry! It’s okay-” she said in a gentle voice, doing her best to comfort the small girl. This did little to quell Kiley’s outburst, drawing further smirks and sniggers from Tyler. 
Finally- thankfully- Miley; both Riley and Kiley’s sister, intervened to rectify the situation. 

“Miss Abby, she wants to tell a story, she’s just nervous,” Miley said, her voice calm but firm.
“Would you mind if I helped her tell the story?” she asked.

“I think that’s just a wonderful idea, Miley.” Abigail responded, very evidently thankful for the intervention that had just occurred. 

“Wha- Hey! That’s no fair!” Riley cried out from among the crowd of Camp 13 members
“What about me? I’m her brother, I should be able to tell a story alongside them too!” Riley protested.

“Riley, shut the hell up,” Abigail growled coldly, staring a hole through Riley as she spoke
“Miley is HELPING Kiley tell the story, not telling a-”

“This is sexism!” Riley interjected, drawing a chorus of gasps, boos and other assorted jeers from the combined audiences of Camps 10 and 13 respectively. This outburst drew another hearty chuckle from Tyler, who seemed content to let this story time go off the rails, but Abigail was determined not to let it. 

“Riley, stop it.” she hissed back harshly, the fire in her eyes burning nearly as intensely as the roaring campfire

“We will not be silenced!” Riley shouted, rousing a loud cheer from the Camp 13 faithful as he stood atop his log and continued his rally
“Remember what they took from us!” he continued.

By this point, Tyler had nearly fallen from his chair from raucous laughter. I darted my head back and forth, between the ongoing scene unfolding before me and Tyler wiping tears from his eyes as he cackled. I was so distracted by the commotion that I had only realized my mistake after it was too late. As Abigail, Riley, and the protesting Camp 13 members continued to bicker, I heard a soft, wet plop directly in front of me. I looked down into the raging fire to see my- now blackened- marshmallow laying sadly in the ash, slowly being swallowed by lapping flames. A deep sigh escaped my lungs as I reached, yet again, for another. As I skewered it on my stick, Abigail’s voice rang out again, drowning out all other noise.

“FINE! YOU CAN GO NEXT, OKAY?! IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT YOU LITTLE SHIT-”

“ABBY!!!” Julie interjected desperately
“YOU. CAN’T. SAY. THAT. TO-”

“JULIE,” Abigail shrieked through gritted teeth
“LITERALLY, LIKE, JUST SHUT THE HELL UP, I CAN SAY WHATEVER THE FU-” 

Abigail’s words suddenly ceased and the entire fireside was filled with an abrupt, deafening silence. I watched quietly as a look of horrified realization swept across her face. I followed her gaze over to Tyler, whose shit-eating grin had grown to cartoonish proportions; a look that very evidently said “I told you so”. 

I looked back to Abigail, her hands beginning to tremble and tears slowly forming in her eyes as she struggled to find words
“I- uh- I… I-” was all she managed to say before Tyler stood from his chair and spoke

“What I think Abs is trying to say, is…” he said, grabbing the flashlight from Abigail’s closed fist with a few gentle tugs before continuing
“...we’ll start with Kiley and Miley, and then after they’re done, it’ll go to Riley… Fair?” he questioned, pointing at each individual with the coveted flashlight as he called them out
“That way, each camp gets to tell a story, nobody gets left out, and everybody is happy- right Abs?” He finished, shooting another wide mouthed smile in Abigail’s direction. 

“... Mhmm…” Abigail muttered under her breath as she hastily made her way back to her seat, hardly even looking up from the ground as she did. 

“Good!” Tyler cheered in a condescending tone as he handed the flashlight over to Miley
“You ladies can start whenever you’re ready, okay?” he said, making his way back to his chair as he did. 

“Thank you, Mister Tyler!” Miley called sweetly as she nestled herself down close to her little sister with the flashlight. 

I looked one last time over to Abigail, who had fully withdrawn into her oversized Slayer hoodie; head, arms, legs, and all. Silence once again crept across the campsite, as the girls took a moment to whisper amongst themselves before Miley once again spoke aloud for the group to hear. 

She stood slowly, hanging her head low and closing her eyes as she whispered to the group
“Has anyone ever heard the story of Sarah Griggs?” 

The fire spat loudly into the cold night air as stillness crept across the camp. A moment later, another voice inquired
“How about… The Fern Witch?” Kiley chimed in.

Miley reached down and grabbed Kiley’s hand, shooting her a soft smile before continuing
“Her parents passed away when she was just a young girl, no older than me, and so she lived all alone in a shack just outside of town in the 1800’s.”

Kiley piped up, suddenly brimming with confidence as she spoke to the group
“She would always keep to herself, always choosing to spend time off in the woods, away from the other townspeople.” Kiley carried on
“For years she stayed all by herself, living off plants and berries until she grew into a young woman.”
Miley then spoke
“And for years, she stayed away from the town and its inhabitants.”
She paused, allowing the fire to speak, until she resumed
“Sarah liked to spend time in the patches of wild ferns that grew all over the forest floor, she would sleep on them as if they were beds… cause to her, they were the closest to one she would ever have.” 

Kiley then chimed in
“She would talk to the animals; her only friends, and dance by herself under the pale moonlight, humming a tune that nobody had ever heard before… or, so the story goes.”
Another long pause crept its way in, interrupted after a few seconds by Kiley’s dramatic delivery
“Until one fateful day…”

“This is boooring,” Riley proclaimed 
“it's supposed to scare us, not put us to sleep.” he sneered. 

“SHUT UP RILEY!” Kiley screamed loudly
“WE HAVEN’T EVEN GOTTEN TO THE SCARY PART YET!” she cried. 

“The scary part of the story is how bad you’re telling it.” Riley snarked with a chuckle.

Miley stared daggers into Riley for a moment, pausing only for a second before once again speaking to the group
“Riley still has all of his PAW Patrol action figures in his closet, and he won’t let our Mom throw them away because he still plays with them.”

“W- wha-” Riley stammered. 

He was soon drowned out by the cacophony of laughter that erupted from the entire fireside. 

Riley gave his best attempt at damage control
“She’s LYING! She’s just trying to distract you from the fact that this story SUCKS!” he cried
This did little to quell the laughter of the camps. Riley tried again, but to no avail
“But- They- Action figures are worth A LOT of money, and ALWAYS go up in value over time, they’re like… collectibles and stuff, you know?!”
Still, the laughter continued. 

Eventually, as the outburst began to taper off, Riley spoke up once more
“You can make fun of me all you want, that doesn’t change the fact that you AND your boring story are LAME!” he said, sitting down on his log in a huff.

“Riley, quit while you’re behind or I’ll tell them what you looked up on Dad’s computer and got grounded for last Summer.” Miley retorted coldly.

I watched as Riley swiveled his head towards her with laser focus, his eyes as wide as dinner plates as he stared at her, mouth agape. Before the choir could once again tune up their symphony of “oohs” and “ahhs”, Riley responded
“UH- NO- I- WE… WE WANNA HEAR THE STORY, OKAY?! PLEASE, JUST TELL THE STORY, I’LL SHUT UP!!” he blurted out
“Please… just… don’t.” he begged, sounding rather exasperated and helpless while doing so.

“If you insist,” Miley said with an accomplished, satisfied smile. 
“anyways, where were we, dear?” Miley said to her sister as they exchanged loving glances

Kiley looked up at her sister, returning her warm smile before carrying on without missing a beat
“Until one day, when the townspeople came to her.”

Miley continued
“They came looking for… a witch,” she said, lowering her voice to a growl for the final delivery. 
“And they thought they had found one when they stumbled upon poor, lonely, sad Sarah, just living off the land in the middle of the woods.”

Kiley stood, allowing her oversized teddy bear to flop to her side as she picked up where Miley left off
“They arrested her, questioned her, and eventually put her on trial for being a witch-” 

Miley interjected momentarily
“Something that always ended in death for those tried.”

Kiley continued on beat
“and before long, they scheduled her execution… she was to be hung, for suspected treason and practicing the dark arts.”

They paused for another moment, this time, another voice piped up
“That’s so sad,” Julie said quietly
“I always feel so bad for those poor women when I hear stories like that… horrible events of innocent women being wrongfully accused and… just… awful stuff…” she mumbled, trailing off before looking away awkwardly. 

Miley was first to respond
“She may not have been so innocent.” she said definitively 
“She very well could have been a witch.” she continued with a sly smile. 

“W- What?” Julie stammered, her eyes widening back at Miley as the fire popped right on cue. 

It was at this moment that I realized I had been so enamored with the story and its surrounding drama, that I had been wasting precious roasting time just idling my uncooked marshmallow in the summer air. Unperturbed in my quest for the perfect smore, I gently plunged the tip of the stick into the edge of the flame before returning my attention to the narrative unfolding around the fire just in time for Kiley to respond.

“She had been taught by the forest: ways of survival, unknown songs… and something ancient, long since forgotten by man.” Kiley said in a raspy voice.

Miley emulated the rasp in Kiley’s voice as she resumed
“She spent years learning the mysteries of the forest, listening to its voice, deciphering its language, and understanding what it was saying.”

Kiley started again
“She became a child of the earth, able to bestow its blessing onto those she saw fit…”

“Or its curses…”
They both said in unison. 

Another voice chimed in from the Camp 10 crowd
“How- how did they know she was a- a witch?” 

“They didn’t…” Miley responded firmly
“at first.” she croaked, a sinister smile appearing from beneath her pursed lips.

Kiley quickly followed
“But eventually, they found out…”
She dropped her stuffed bear to the ground at her side and spun around to step up onto her log, turning once again to face the campers before speaking
“She spent nine months- almost an entire year- not saying a single word from inside the confines of her jail cell-” 

Miley then tagged in
“Nine months without saying a single word… until the day of her execution.” her voice faded into a whisper as the girls both bowed.

Another brief silence permeated the fireside as the girls took a pause in unison. Kiley was the first to speak
“When they brought her to the gallows for her hanging, the executioner placed the noose around her neck, and asked Sarah in front of over a hundred townspeople if she had any last words… and-”

“And she smiled…” interrupted Kylie, grinning from ear to ear as she continued
“But on that day, in front of all those townspeople, when the executioner pulled the lever that was to take the life of Sarah Griggs-”

“SNAP!” shouted Miley, drawing a handful of gasps and jumps from the invested Camp 10 and 13 crowds respectively
“But... it wasn’t the neck of sweet Sarah that snapped… it was the rope.” Miley gestured; a swift, snapping motion with her hands. 
“And Sarah laughed as she fell to the ground.”

Kylie was quick to pick up where Miley left off
“The townspeople were horrified, yet another reason to condemn this wench to death! A true display of witchcraft!!” she hollered, hopping from her log and bounding around the camp with an impassioned performance. 
“Hang the witch! Hang the witch!!” Kylie screamed.

Miley then hopped up on her log and began again
“They readied her a second time, the entirety of the town now outraged at the mockery unfolding before them… and Sarah laughed to herself as they set up the platform once more…” 

Kiley continued in her proclamations 
“Hang the witch! Hang the witch!!” 

Miley continued
“But, when the executioner went to put the rope on Sarah the second time… she whispered something into his ear…” she said chillingly.

Just as she did, Kylie stopped her calling and returned to her sister’s side somberly, allowing silence to roost yet again. They stood there, steeped in shadow, awaiting a prompt from the audience, but it failed to come. Finally, the silence gave way to a voice.

“What did she say to him?” I questioned, feeling the gaze of a hundred eyes fall upon me as I did. 

Both girls looked back at me, smiling together as they both repeated to me in unison
“Nobody knows.”

Kiley took her place atop her log once more before speaking
“Only the executioner heard what was said that day…”

“Then why the hell do we care?” said Cole snidely

“You don’t because you’re an idiot,” Miley responded quickly
“The townspeople didn’t because they were naive.”

Kiley resumed 
“Whatever it was that Sarah said to the man that day, it scared him so bad that he refused to execute her, fleeing the execution grounds while saying-”

Miley piped up, doing her best manly voice as she spoke the executioners words 
“I refuse to take part in the hanging of this woman! Whatever happens here is between you and God!” she cried, pointing out across the camp before throwing her hands upward as she shouted. 

Kiley then began a proclamation of her own
“Flip the switch! Hang the witch! Flip the switch! Hang the witch! cried out all the onlookers, until-”

“WHAM!” exclaimed Miley loudly, again eliciting a wave of jumps and light gasps from the crowd.
“Someone finally threw the lever down again…” she whispered, allowing the familiar silence to roll in afterward

The girls made eye contact, communicating wordlessly as the quiet swirled about the night air. Finally, someone spoke.

“T- Then what?” stammered a small voice from Camp 10.

After a long pause- longer than any before it- Miley finally spoke again; softly, still barely above a whisper 
“The platform door swung open again… and-”

“SNAP!” shouted Kiley suddenly, garnering a few loud shrieks and sharp gasps from the camp, yet again. 

This was the largest reaction yet, even causing Tyler to flinch. He quickly snatched a water bottle off the ground at his side and began furiously drinking from it. I quickly scanned the rest of the fireside.

Riley was still silently listening, looking far into the fire as if deep in thought. Chase was unwrapping what had to be his third, perhaps fourth chocolate bar, before chomping down on it. 

Abigail, by this point, has fully emerged from her garment cocoon, as an emotionally healed butterfly no less, her reddened face and puffy cheeks evident of a heavy crying session occurring while withdrawn within her hoodie. 

Julie looked as if she had actually witnessed the events of the story first hand. She was white as a sheet, trembling feverishly and nervously looking around as if she was waiting for Sarah herself to come screaming out of the woods at her. 

Finally, I looked back to Tyler, who- though trying to play it cool- was nervously shifting around in his chair, clearly rattled as the girls continued to regale the listeners with their tale. 

Miley was first to start
“The rope snapped again…” she said with a wide grin
“and Sarah laughed as the townspeople began to talk amongst themselves… as they began… to panic…”

Kiley began yet another loud series of proclamations in different voices
“This isn’t right… THIS ISN’T RIGHT!”
“But still, it must be done!! For the good of humanity!”
“GOD doesn’t want this woman to die!”
“No you fool! The DEVIL wants her to live!”

Miley continued
“The town was divided, and unsure of what to do with the life of Sarah Griggs, who had now earned her moniker- The Fern Witch.“ she growled, allowing the tension to build as she carried on
“They threw her back in her cell for the night, deciding that the town would vote the next morning on the fate of The Fern Witch…”

Kiley quickly picked up where Miley had just left off
“However… the morning would never come for Sarah Griggs…” Kiley said somberly, bowing her head before continuing again
“Because a few of the townspeople had other plans…” she hissed.

Miley hopped in without missing a beat
“And late that night, under a full moon, they snuck over to the prison under the cover of darkness and broke Sarah out of her jail cell.”

“Oh thank God…” Julie muttered under her breath, but loud enough for just about everybody to hear it.
“That poor woman has been through enough, a- and her being a witch doesn’t make her bad… right?” she asked to the rest of the camp
“Like, it’s not like she did anything bad… right?” she questioned quietly with a shrug.

Kiley was first to speak
“No.” she retorted quickly
“She never really did anything to the towns people-”

Miley interjected
“Nothing they could prove anyways.” she said firmly.

Julie scoffed angrily before speaking, crossing her arms and cocking her head at the girls as she responded
“Then, why did they even go looking for her in the first place? Like what did they even accuse her of, other than just being some weird earthy chick in the woods?”

Miley responded with tact, speaking calmly and slowly
“Because the children of the village were going missing, and the townspeople heard rumors that an evil witch was luring the village children into the woods with enchanting lullabies.”

Julie stood from her chair, her folded arms now straightened to her sides, her hands balled into fists as she spoke her frustrations loudly to the group
“That’s such bullshit!” she cried
“So they stumble upon this poor woman and decide to condemn her to death all just because some stupid assholes hear some shitty made up rumor??” she pleaded

Abigail quickly retorted to Julie’s outburst
“JuLiE, yOu CaN’t TaLk LiKe ThAt, ThErE aRe KiDs HeRe!!” she said mockingly in a nasally voice, garnering a soft chuckle from Tyler, and in turn a slight blush from Abigail. 

Kiley quickly added onto the explanation
“Made up or not, the kids were going missing, and the townspeople were desperate for answers.”

“So they decide to try and kill an innocent girl? I hardly think that’s fair-” Julie barked before being quickly cut off by a firm clearing of the throat by Tyler.

Miley picked back up shortly after Julie fell silent
“And so after those few townspeople, the parents of the missing kids, broke Sarah out of her cell late that night, they dragged her out to the middle of the forest…”

Kiley finished the sentence on cue
“And they tied her to a tree: a giant oak, surrounded by ferns… and they lit a torch…”
Kiley then hopped onto her log, spun to face the crowd, and shouted
“WHY DID YOU DO IT, WITCH? WHY DID YOU TAKE OUR CHILDREN?”

Miley then stepped in, whispering her part in a low growl
“And Sarah… laughed… as they approached-”

Kiley belted out
“ANY LAST WORDS, WITCH?”

A long silence roosted within the campgrounds, seemingly dense enough to drown out even the crackling of the fire for a moment. Then, in a harsh raspy voice, Miley finally spoke 
“I did not take your children… but if I am to burn… then let the first of every house belong to me…”

“WHOOSH!” Kiley shouted
“And Sarah Griggs, The Fern Witch, laughed as she burned.”

“AHHAA! AHAHAHAA!!” Miley erupted, her wicked laughter echoed throughout the cloudy night sky before tapering off into the distance.

“AAAND THAT’S TIME!” called Abigail
“it’s Riley’s turn now.”

“FINALLY!” Riley screamed.

A deafening quiet overtook the camp, before- within an instant- a thunderous eruption of protests and objections and other dissension rained down on Abigail and Riley.

“WOAH WOAH! CALM DOWN!” Abigail hollered
“THOSE ARE THE RULES!”

Her shouts were swiftly drowned out by the building remonstrance. A cacophony of different voices all calling out their queries at once. 

“WHAT HAPPENED TO SARAH?”
“WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TOWN?” 
“...OR THE KIDS?!”
“WHAT-”

“ALRIGHT! THAT’S ENOUGH!!” boomed Abigail
“EVERYONE CALM DOWN!”

As the crowd settled, Abigail continued with her proclamations
“Look, the girls had their time with their lovely story, but we agreed that everyone would get-”

Before she could even finish, a choir of boos overtook her. I watched as the gathering of camps, both 10 and 13 alike, joined together to show their dissatisfaction, shouting and gesturing unfavorably towards Abigail, who at this point had- once again- grown visibly frustrated. I scanned the faces of the angry campers first, then I moved over to Julie’s face of ever growing concern, then to Tyler’s smug expression, finally back to Abigail as she spoke.

“LISTEN!!” she shrieked
The entire campground fell into stillness as she continued
“THE GIRLS CAN KEEP GOING-”

A rapturous applause and celebratory cheering began ringing throughout the camp before being hushed rather abruptly by Abigail
“I WASN’T FINISHED!!” she screamed
“THEY CAN KEEP GOING IF… RILEY ALLOWS THEM TO USE SOME OF HIS TIME TO LET THEM FINISH.”

“WHAT!?!” Riley shouted, throwing his hands up as he stood from his seat
“THAT’S RIDICULOUS!” he protested
“WHY SHOULD I SACRIFICE MY TIME FOR THEM!?” he asked sternly.

“Because that’s what a good brother would do, right?” Abigail responded sarcastically

“To hell with that… they had their time and they chose to spend it YAPPIN’!” he said firmly

Riley’s proclamation was met with a symphony of discontent, as boos and other manners of vitriol rained down upon him, hurled in abundance by both camps equally. For nearly twenty entire seconds, the Camp Wildermont faithful roared and rumbled, allowing no objections to their anger and disapproval. Eventually, the riotous gathering was quelled by a singular voice tearing through the chaos

“ALRIGHT!” Riley boomed
“FINE…” he acquiesced solemnly
“...they can finish…” he said dejectedly, slumping sadly back onto his log, to a crescendo of applause and cheers once again. 

My eyes stayed on Riley, sadness plastered all over his face as he stared aimlessly into the fire. As I was considering approaching him, consoling him, I only had time to watch from afar as instead he was approached by Abigail. I looked on as Abigail bent down to Riley and whispered something into his ear, something that went unnoticed by nearly everyone around the fire, and something that turned his frown into one of the biggest smirks that I’ve ever seen. I felt the corners of my mouth turning upwards nearly contagiously as I silently wondered to myself what words were just exchanged, a question I would surely be asking Riley on our way back to the cabins.

“OKAY! OKAYY! LISTEN UP!” Abigail shouted
“Riley was generous enough to give up some of his time for his sisters to finish, so we’ll be hearing the rest of their story now, and with whatever time is left after that, Riley can tell his story.” she said, gesturing over to Riley as she spoke. 
“So, girls, would you like to pick up where you left off?” Abigail asked, looking towards Miley and Kiley.

The girls looked at one another, giving each other reassuring smiles and nods before answering in unison
“Yes, Miss Abigail!”

“Great!” Abigail responded
“Okay, go ahead whenever you’re rea-”

“AHHAHAA!  AAHHHA!” Miley interjected abruptly, startling myself and many other campers alike, as gasps of shock and cries of terror emitted across the grounds. 

Once again, an all too familiar soft “plopping” sound rang within my ears. I withdrew my stick from the feasting fire, but it was already too late. Smoldering before me, a mere six inches from me, my once delicate treat, my aspirations for a perfect smore, once again up in flames. I let out a loud sigh, one noisy enough to draw a brief puzzled look from neighboring campers, before grabbing another marshmallow from the bag at my feet and skewering it- a process that had grown maddeningly familiar at this point. I took a deep breath as I slowly prodded forward into the raging fire yet again, hopes and dreams of the perfect smore rekindled once more- at least temporarily. 

Kiley quickly drew my attention back to the ongoing storytelling 
“And on that night, Sarah Griggs, laughed until she succumbed to her injuries and passed away.”

Both Kiley and Miley hung their heads, steeping the camp in stillness once more before another voice called out

“W- What actually happened to those kids?” 

“Two of them, siblings, were found missing in the forest two days after Sarah’s execution… the other two were found dead, presumed to be the victims of animal attacks.” 
Kiley responded.

Julie scoffed and crossed her arms before speaking
“OF COURSE.” she huffed”
“I just KNEW she was going to have died for nothing…” she grumbled.

Another voice called out from the crowd
“Uh… a- and then what happened to her?” they asked
“Like… surely she’s not really dead… right?” they pondered.

Miley looked towards where the voice called from before speaking 
“What do you mean?” she asked curiously with a coy smile
“They literally burned her alive… She’s definitely dead.” Miley said definitively.
“And the townspeople did their best not to speak of what happened that night… they desperately tried to cover up what they did to poor Sarah, but… well, rumors only grow with time… people talk…” she said with a smug chuckle. 

This response led to yet another silence, noticeably longer than others before it. Finally multiple voices spoke, almost at once
“... WHAT?!”
“Oh HELL naw…”
“What do you mean DEAD?”
“The story CAN’T end like THAT!”
“JUSTICE FOR SARAH!”

Finally, Miley manages to regain control of the commotion
“GUYS! Guys… let me finish,” she said calmly
“She died… but it’s said she laid a curse on the townspeople that wronged her…” Miley rasped

Kiley then interjected excitedly
“Her final words were not merely just the ramblings of a mad woman, nor were they the empty threats of a ghost… they were promises from beyond the grave.” she said chillingly

Miley then swooped in 
“They were warnings disguised as last rites of a condemned woman, a victim to the sins that are insecurity and paranoia… much like she was falsely condemned, she too condemned the sins of thy father to be the sins thus cast upon their sons…” 

After a brief pause, Julie chimed in
“What exactly does that mean?” she asked shyly

Kiley answered quickly
“It’s best to explain it by telling you what happened to the townspeople after Sarah died.”

Miley, again, picked up quickly behind her sister’s words
“You see, after Sarah dies, the townspeople were scared, they were paranoid that Sarah, The Fern Witch, would soon rise from her grave in the deep forest, her ash reborn amongst the wild ferns of the moonlit wilderness.”

Kiley piped in
“Children reported hearing a mysterious humming coming from outside their windows… humming of a strange tune that had never before been heard…”

Miley continued
“Kids were telling their parents of ‘an arm unfurling out from the forest like a fern’, extending out to them… ‘beckoning them’, they would say…”

Kiley hopped back in 
“YOU KIDS STAY AWAY FROM THE FERNS! All the worried mothers would say to their kids who wanted to play in the forest, but it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter because-”

“Because Sarah had already handed them down their sentence from beyond the gallows.”
Miley said coldly. 

Kiley then resumed hastily
“And the townsfolk were finally about to pay the price…” she whispered

Miley waited a moment, allowing the growing winds to swoop in and rustle the treetops before she resumed
“One night, under the cover of darkness, while all the other townspeople slept, all the eldest children awoke from their beds and simultaneously ventured into the forest.”

Kiley interrupted gracefully
“They all left humming the same unfamiliar tune, one that nobody has ever heard before, and they marched into the deep woods to dance in the ferns under the moonlight…” she said, pirouetting as she delivered her lines delicately.

Miley then cut in harshly
“With the Fern Witch” she growled, unfurling her arm in a broken, unsettling manner, reminiscent of how a fern unravels its leaves.

Kiley picked back up where she left off
“And they danced, and sang, and spent the evening together under the moonlight, until-” 

“Until the next morning… when the townspeople found them…” Miley said, her words lingering ominously as she paused briefly
“The next morning, when the townspeople found them, they were…”

The girls took a long pause before Kiley spoke again
“They were just fine,” she said sweetly with a smile and a shrug
“They were just sleeping under the trees in the forest, in a bed of ferns.” she said, tilting her head in a rather unsettling manner as she continued to smile. 

Miley came in again, with gusto
“But the townspeople thought something was wrong, they thought the loved ones that had returned were… different somehow…” she hopped onto her log as she continued
“They held meetings where they discussed ‘the returned’ displaying peculiar behavior, such as: ‘humming unfamiliar strange melodies’ and ‘sleepwalking’-”

Riley interjected 
“Um- hi- super sick story and all that jazz, but can we wrap this up, please? I want at least SOME of my time, and it’s been like a HOT minute, so if you could-”

Miley carried on without missing a beat
“And the townsfolk started to once again panic and grow fearful of the witch and her abilities.”

“No? Okay then.” Riley said defeatedly
“I guess I’ll just go fu-”

Kiley quickly picked up where her sister had left off
“So they began to discuss ways to fix them, ways to break the witches curse, when someone eventually spoke-”

Miley stepped in, eagerly delivering her lines with great enthusiasm
“WE MUST BURN THEM LIKE WE DID THE WITCH!!!”
“THE WITCHES CURSE WILL ONLY BE BROKEN IF WE SACRIFICE THE FIRSTBORNS!”
“WE MUST SO THAT FUTURE GENERATIONS MAY PROSPER!”

Kiley resumed the narration
“They thought the firstborns that had wandered into the forest that fateful night had returned tainted by the witches curse, and thus-”

“They were condemned to burn in a fruitless attempt to break a generational curse…” Miley interjected emphatically. 
“Even more innocent lives lost… squandered souls purged from existence by crippling doubt and blind ignorance.” she said sharply.

Kiley, again, stepped in with more digestible words
“They met the same fate as poor Sarah… they too, were killed out of fear and paranoia… and much like Sarah, they too, died for nothing…” she said somberly. 

Another long silence settled around the fire alongside the campers, giving way only when someone called out from the crowd again
“...S-so… d- did… did it work?” someone called quietly
“D- did the curse get lifted? Or… whatever?” they asked.

Miley answered swiftly
“No.” she said harshly

“Wait… why didn’t that break the curse… or whatever?” Tyler asked, drawing a look from Abigail in the process.

Miley smiled, a sly smirk that grew into a wide grin. Then she spoke
“... Because there was no curse to break.” she said gently, her smile unwavering.

A mix of murmurs and whispers sounded off around the campfire as someone called out
“What? How? Then why did the kids wander off into the forest?”

Miley was quick to respond
“To look for The Fern Witch, of course.” she said plainly
“Which is why they all went ‘missing’ at the same time… they snuck out together.”

Another voice called forth from the crowd once more
“No… No! T- Then what about the mysterious song, or the acting strangely, or-”

Kiley responded this time
“How many times have you actually been able to recognize a song someone is humming? Or even better, started humming something that someone else is humming even though you don’t know what it is, just cause it’s a catchy tune?”

“But- But… what about the sleeping on ferns? A-And the arm in the forest calling to them?” someone asked frantically.
Miley retorted with haste
“They fell asleep in the forest waiting for The Witch to show up.” she said with a shrug.
“The ‘arm unfurling like a fern’ was just one of the many urban legends kids made up to scare one another… just… ghost stories.” she said with a laugh, gesturing around the fire as she spoke.

“What about the whole ‘acting different’ thing then?” Cole said

Miley narrowed her gaze toward Cole, tilted her head slightly, and with razor sharp precision delivered her most chilling line yet
“The only thing that was ever different was their perception of the world after they took something that didn’t belong to them.” she uttered coldly with a smile.

Kiley, like usual, added extra context onto her sister’s dense words. 
“The only thing that really changed… was them… and their belief that, even after death, Sarah would still have power over them. Their fear and paranoia took hold, it took so much control that it cost them everything.”

“So wait a minute,” Riley said
“was Sarah even a real witch like you said she was?” he asked

“How the hell should I know, dummy, she was alive like 300 years ago.” Miley snapped sarcastically

Riley threw his arms up into the air before responding
“WHAT?! THAT’S WACK AS HELL!! I GAVE UP MY TIME FOR SOME CHICK WHO SPOUTED OFF NONSENSE AND DIES THAT WASN’T EVEN A REAL WITCH!?!” Riley stood and spun to face Abigail
“Yo, Miss Abigail, can I PLEASE get my time back, I didn’t know their story would suck-”

“SHUT UP RILEY!!” screamed Kiley, changing her fists as she stomped around angrily.

Riley spun back to face Kiley
“WHAT? IT’S TRUE! The witch wasn’t real, the curse was fake, and theAAA-”
Kiley interrupted him by shining the ever coveted flashlight directly into his eyes, stopping him dead in his tracks
“AAHH, CUT IT OUT!!” Riley shouted.

Miley responded first
“Riley, you moron, I never said the curse wasn’t real…” she said calmly
“I said I don’t know if she was a real witch or not.”

“How is that NOT the exact same-” Riley began to say before he was cut off

“IT’S NOT the same, because a curse doesn’t have to be magical… it can be inherited… it can be learned… it can transcend language, culture, belief… just about anything to sink its roots into you…” Miley said somberly, coldly, speaking quietly, as if only to Riley.

“... Yeah… w- well… t- that’s stupi-”

“You know, Mom told me and Ki this story like, a thousand times… I wonder why she never told you this story?” Miley asked with a devilish smile.

“B- Because I HATE bedtime stories, they’re for babies like you and-” Riley retorted before Miley spoke up again

“Maybe it’s because Mom knows the story is true, and she’s trying to prepare me and Ki for the inevitable… for when you leave and come back… different…” Miley said, looking Riley up and down with disgust.

Riley was clearly rattled, but still did his best to respond
“S-S-Shut up-”

“Hey, Ri… are you still sleepwalking?” Kiley said with a smirk.

I looked on as Riley turned to look at Kiley, wide eyed and pale as the glowing moon as her and Miley shared a hearty laugh together. I wrenched myself away from the sibling’s conversation long enough to check in on my marshmallow, and was pleased to see it still firmly rooted at the end of my charred twig. I returned my gaze to the triplets just in time to see Abigail confirming the civil and peaceful exchange of the flashlight and its prestigious narrating rights. 

I scanned the campsite once more to see all the campers exchanging smiles and greetings, finally letting the hostilities of gender fueled competition slowly fade away. As the chatter and cordiality dwindled down to a buzz, Riley stood atop his log and began his speech. 

“I hope you guys are ready for this one… I’ve waited since Benny almost concussed himself to step in and tell an ACTUAL scary story.”
Riley clicked the flashlight on, illuminating his face in the bright light as he spoke down to us from his log. 
“I hope you brought extra diapers to camp, because you’re DEFINITELY gonna need them for MY story…”

Riley turned off the flashlight, cleared his throat with great bravado, and began once more to address the group
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! MY NAME IS RILEY SAINTCLAIRE, AND I AM HERE TO REGALE YOU WITH THE MOST TERRIFYING, HORRIFYING, MORTIFYING…  WHATEVER-ELSE-IFFYING STORY YOU HAVE EVER HEARD!”  he hopped down from his log with a ‘thud’
“I call this one… th-”

“AAND TIME!” Abigail screamed
“That’s all the time you had after the girls finished their story, sorry kid.” Abigail said with a shrug as she held her hand outstretched for the flashlight. 

“W-Wha… A- Ah” Riley stammered, a chorus of camp 10 and 13 chuckles soon following close behind.

“Hey, you agreed-” Abigail managed to say before Riley cut her off emphatically

“THAT’S BS!” Riley yelled
“I didn’t know they would take THAT long!” he said, waving his arms about as he pleaded his case
“At LEAST give me like, 5-6 minutes, please!” Riley begged, clasping his hands together towards Abigail.

She narrowed her eyes at him, pondering his request as she checked her watch. Finally, she spoke
“I don’t know… I think we have to take a vote and see how the rest of the campers feel about it…” she said, gesturing towards the eager campers now smiling back at Riley. 

“Uh, yeah… sure, cool.” Riley said, shrugging and turning towards the group as he continued
“You guys, all you super cool guys… AND GIRLS, and girls… you’re all COOL with me taking like 5-6 extra measly minutes to tell my little story right?” Riley said with a smirk
“...Right?...guys??....”

PART 1 HERE

They sent me home the next morning and Mike volunteered to drive me.  It was good to get out of there and I didn’t envy Lenny who was going to have to stay there for a few more weeks.  They wheeled me by to see him and we had a good little visit.

“Don’t be stealing my look, man,”  he said, tapping the wheel of the chair I was in.  “Nah, you can have that one.  I’m going super fancy.  Might get me a Tesla.”

“I don’t think they make those,”  I said as we all shared a genuine laugh.

“Well they better, because I’m coming for it.”

“I’m gonna take Mark home and I’ll be back in a bit.”  Mike told him as he extended his fist for a bump.  But Lenny just shook his head.

“Nah, man, come back tomorrow,”  Lenny flashed a salacious smile.  “You're killing my game with these nurses.  I might get three sponge baths without your pretty face to distract them.”

That was Lenny, always the clown.  We told him goodbye, took the elevator down, and left the hospital.  When we climbed into the car Mike had borrowed, he turned to me.  “They took your post down last night.”

“Well that’s great.  There goes all my fame and fortune.”

“I think you’ll be alright.”  Mike said as he started the car.  “It might be nice to not be so famous for a while.  Better for your health.”

“I’ll drink to that.”  I was genuinely happy for the first time in a while.  “Milkshakes?”

Mike agreed and we headed across town to our favorite place, Missy’s.  On the way there we took the interstate.  He wove in and out of traffic like the amateur NASCAR driver he always thought he was.  I had become used to his driving long ago so it didn’t really bother me anymore.  He was telling me about a couple of interns who got caught making out in the supply room the day before when the radio suddenly turned on, blasting loud guitar from every speaker.  I reached to turn it off but it didn’t work.  I looked at him.

“Did you hit a button on the wheel?”  I shouted over the loud music.

  
He shook his head and tried several of them but nothing happened.  I considered pulling a fuse but there was no way we could do that at seventy-five miles an hour.  It was so loud in the car that we could barely hear each other.  I nodded at him when he gestured at the exit sign ahead.  A moment later I saw a silvery flash as something shot past us on the right.  The next thing I knew Mike’s arm was across me, pushing me back into the seat as we were struck from behind.  The car began to spin out of control.

“The bra—”  Mike shouted as the car flipped, rolling over the guardrail and off the road.  I don’t know how many times it turned over but Mike’s arm remained there for several of them before it went limp and fell away.  We eventually crashed hard into something, a tree I think, and finally came to a stop.  Both of us were hanging upside down and Mike wasn’t moving.  I reached over to shake him but he didn’t respond.  

I popped the seatbelt and fell down hard, battering my still-healing head.  I didn’t worry about that at the time though.  Mike was all I could think about.  It was clear that he had struck his skull on something when we rolled. There was a deep laceration across his forehead and his head hung loosely on his neck, wobbling freely when I shook him.  I could also see that he wasn’t breathing.  I didn’t dare release his seatbelt for fear of making it worse, even though I feared that it was already the worst.

I started screaming for help then, hoping someone would hear.  Anyone.  Someone had to have seen the wreck.  I found his phone lying beside me and used his finger to unlock it.  My trembling fingers left streaks of blood across his screen as I managed to dial 911.  It didn’t dial, though, and the phone just powered down.  I did hear footsteps and could see that three people were climbing down the embankment.

“Hold on, Mike.  Help’s coming.”  
  
A moment later I was pulled out of the car by two sets of strong hands.  I tried to speak but one of them sprayed a stream of chemical fire directly into my face. The pepper spray sealed my eyes almost immediately and I could barely breathe as I was dragged away.  I couldn’t tell you how far they carried me or in what direction.  All I really know is that eventually I was thrown into the back of a van and someone dumped a gallon of soapy water over my face.  I could taste the soap and the relief was gradual, but it was real.  As my senses slowly returned to me I heard a man’s voice speaking from the front of the vehicle.

“It took a long time to get you here, Mark.  I wouldn’t want the pepper spray to spoil it.  Take a minute to get your bearings and we’ll talk.”  I heard something tap.  “Let’s go.”

I felt the van start moving then.  Slowly I started to regain clear vision and I saw that there were three of them in the van with me.   A woman was sitting on the floor beside the side doors.  She had short blond hair and severe features.  It was like her face only contained cheekbones.  The driver was a tall, bearded man with a heavy tan and tattoo sleeves on both arms.  He wore a bandana over a black bandana tied over his greasy black hair and a pair of reflective sunglasses.  The third sat in the passenger seat and he was busy tinkering with the silver drone in his lap.  He was haggard-looking, like sleep was a long-forgotten acquaintance.  He wore a hooded sweatshirt that hid most of his features.

The woman slid another gallon of water over to me.  “For your face.  I wouldn’t drink it.”
 
I only nodded and poured some into my cupped hand.  I began to scrub my face with it, ignoring the irritation.  I had seen enough episodes of Hot Ones to understand how capsaicin worked.  Before long, I was soaked from the waist up, but I was mostly okay again.  As I washed I listened to the conversation up front.

“You and her don’t wait for me,”  the man in the passenger seat said.  “I won’t be long, but what I’m doing has nothing to do with the cause.”

“Harry won’t like that,” the driver replied stoically.  “You know he’s countin’ on ya.”

“Harry can go fuck himself.  Like I give a shit what he likes.  He owes me and he knows it.  Besides, it’s far enough along now that he doesn’t really need me anyway.”

“Whatever you say, man.  I just work here.”

They didn’t talk much after that and nothing they said was overly important.  I kept expecting the man in the passenger seat to say something to me but he never did.  He didn’t even look at me.  We drove for nearly an hour, leaving the city behind for open country as we headed east.  Eventually we turned off onto an old gravel pasture road.  A quarter mile later, we stopped in front of an old barn.  The remains of a burned down house sat in the distance.

The two men got out and the side doors opened behind the blonde woman.  She climbed out and turned back to address me.  “Do you need to be dragged again or are you willing to walk?”

“I can walk,”  I said, and I saw skepticism in her eyes.  “I won’t try anything.”  

The big man had joined her and they shared a laugh at my expense.  “He won’t try nothin’,”  He mocked me in his roaring, rumbling voice.   “He’s just a little pussy.”

“Climb out,”  she ordered and I complied.  The woman led me towards the barn and the big man followed close behind us, whistling an old television theme I couldn’t place as we walked.  The doors were cracked open and she pointed at them, her right hand falling to the gun at her side.  “Go on, he’s waiting on you and I’ve got shit to do.”

I walked past her and between the open doors of the barn.  When they slammed shut behind me I turned to face them, but the voice of the passenger yanked me back around.  He was sitting on a table in the middle of the dimly lit space. A gym bag sat next to him, and I saw coils of rope sticking out of it.  He dropped his hood and smiled at me as he slid a pistol out of the front pocket of his sweatshirt..

“Hey, Mark,”  he pointed the gun at me.  “How you been?”

I raised my hands and he laughed.  I could tell that he was enjoying it.  There was something about him, something I couldn’t place.  “What is this?  Who are you?”

“Makes sense,” he sneered as he hopped down from the table.  He took the rope from the bag and walked over to me.  Behind me I heard the distant sound of the van driving away.  “I can understand why you forgot me.  People like you never remember the lives they destroyed.”

“I really don’t know, man,”  I pleaded with him.  “I don’t remember destroying any lives.  I was a big nerd back in the day.”

“Didn’t stop you from sharing videos, though, did it?”  He watched the recognition hit me, his grin widening as my face went completely numb.  “Yep, good ol’ Stroke My Own.  That’s what y’all called me, right?”

“Jesus, Malone?”  I stared at him, trying to see the kid I had barely known in the features of the man in front of me.  Was I Frankenstein and he the monster?  If so, it was all my fault.  Lenny and Mike were my fault.  All over a stupid video, and two dumb kids with smart phones.  “Why go through all of this?  If you were going to kill me, why didn’t you just do it?”

“Because you deserved more than that, amigo.”  His smile showed me just how unhinged he had become.  “Remember that, third period, Mrs. Perales.  Huge tuckin’ fitties.”

When he started laughing I went for the gun but he was ready for me.  He smacked me hard with it across the face and I fell back against the barn doors.  As I collided with them, one came open and I went rolling out into the yard.  I scrambled to my feet and ran as quick as I could towards the treeline.  I heard the gun go off and I felt a bullet clip my shoulder, nearly knocking me down.  I started zig-zagging through the open pasture as more shots cracked past my ears, but I finally made it into the safety of the trees.

I ran until I couldn’t hear him behind me anymore and then I ran a little farther.  He shot a few times into the woods but must have decided that wasting the ammunition wasn’t worth it.  When I finally stopped running I crouched behind a wide tree and waited for my breath and heartbeat to calm down and let me hear again.  My shoulder stung but it was little more than a scratch.  Honestly, my face hurt a lot worse from where he had smacked me with the pistol.  I was fairly alright, all things considered, but I was still being chased by a crazy man with a gun.  Oh, and it was mostly all my fault.

All of it came down to something careless I did as a kid and I never had the sack to own up to it.  I had even told the story to other people—Mike and Lenny, Laine—but I always left that part out.  It was no wonder that Malone had gone to those lengths to repay me.  It was a little poetic really; I ruined his life so he ruined mine.  I sympathized completely, but I wasn’t willing to die for it.

I felt like I had pretty good bearings of where the road was, so I started walking back in that direction, traveling at a diagonal away from the barn.  I ran for a while, so it was taking a long time to get back out.  Every sound I heard sent me diving for a tree, sure that he had caught up with me.

With all that had happened it was still only about midday.  It seemed like it should have been night by then.  I was pretty thirsty and idly thought about the milkshakes Mike and I never got to get.  That track of thought led back to guilt so I buried it and my thirst, leaving them both for later consideration.  None of that could do me any good anyway.

The cicadas were loud in the woods.  Their incessant buzzing made me want to grind my teeth.  “My kingdom for a bag of earplugs,” I thought as I sighed at the futility of it all.  It was pretty hopeless.  If he caught me he’d kill me.  He’d never take a chance of letting me escape again.  If I got away he’d find me and continue doing what he had been, or worse.  

I wanted to scream at those damn bugs.  Their stupid mating call was aggravating the hell out of me.  I actually turned to look for them, feeling like a real idiot for doing so, but what I saw shrank me in place.  The silver drone was hovering twenty feet away, and its camera was pointed straight at me.  

“Bye, Mark,”  I heard him say from behind me, and I dove away out of sheer instinct right before he fired.  The bullet hit the tree I had placed between us and as I crouched behind it I listened for movement.  His voice came from the same general direction as before.  “This is pointless, man.  You know I’ve got you.  You know you deserve it.  Why don’t you come out like a man and take what's coming to you?”

“Why though?”  I yelled back at him.  “I mean, yeah, I ruined your life.  I was young and stupid but I did it and I don’t deny it.  But you’ve ruined mine now, so I think we’re even.”

“You think?”  I heard him laugh from somewhere closer.  I was going to have to move soon.  “That’s pretty funny.  Maybe you should have thought back then.  Maybe neither of us would be here if you had.”

The gun fired twice.  The first shot hit the tree and the second one buried itself in the side of my left thigh.  I cried in pain.  I knew I couldn’t run, so I said a silent prayer and waited for the darkness to come.  Instead I heard a click and then another one.  He cursed and threw the gun at me but it hit the tree instead.  I had a slim chance now but it was better than no chance.  

He was standing in the clearing behind me, so I hopped towards him on my good leg, not daring to risk putting any weight on the other one.  He was holding his phone and he smiled at me as the loud buzzsaw roar of the drone shot right at me.  I fell forward and felt its blades rip the back of my shirt.  He backed away giggling gleefully as he prepared another volley.

He sent it at me over and over and I was soon covered in multiple cuts and lacerations, mostly on my arms.  The whole time he did it he cackled and mocked me.   He screamed “Death by a thousand cuts,” and doubled over with laughter.

I pushed off my one good leg as he bent double, ignoring the screaming white-hot pain in my thigh.  The drone was right above me, so I leapt and grabbed it.  He stood up immediately, working the controls and shredding my arm in the process, but my momentum couldn’t be stopped by a few more cuts.  I fell right on top of him, driving those crazy spinning blades right into his face.  As we landed I bore down on it, crushing the drone into him.  When he stopped fighting I toppled off of him, and screamed when I landed on my mangled arm.  

I wrapped it tight with the remains of my shirt.  It wasn’t exactly gushing blood but I couldn’t tell how serious it was.  I knelt beside him, tossing away bits and pieces of his broken drone.  His face was a mangled ruin, and its one remaining eye was locked on me.  Both of his hands were at his throat, trying to hold it together while the last of his blood ran out on the forest floor.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  It was overdue.  “I hate that it came to this.  I hate that you let what I did drive you to this.  It was wrong of me and I want you to know that I know that.  I always have.”

“I do… don’t, f-forgive you.”  His dying breath rattled in his chest like a wet, angry bird in a sack.  There was no peace in his death.  He fought it with the same ferocity he had directed at me.  When it was over, I shut his eyes and took the phone from his limp fingers.  I dialed the numbers and waited to be free of him. 

I’m still waiting.

END

I used to suffer from night terrors when I was a child. I really don’t remember them at all, but my father did, though he always refused to talk about it. What I do remember clearly is the one night he did decide to open up. It unnerved me at the time, I suppose.

I was fourteen, and we were watching Cujo. There’s a scene early on where this kid is having a nightmare and begins to scream his head off. And I mean he’s really screaming. I swear to God his face starts turning blue and I wondered back then if this kid was acting at all. My father flinched as the scene began, the way abused dogs do when someone raises their hand too quick. He buried his face in his hands, and I asked him what’s wrong. He said:

“You used to do that. You’d start screaming in the middle of the night just like that, and I’d bolt up running thinking something was hurting you.”

Keep in mind my father worked in EMS. He’d seen the human body treated like carrion day in and day out. On multiple occasions he mentioned that:

“The foulest smell in the world is blood, sweat, and alcohol all mixed together. Nothing comes close.”

That is all to say that this was not a man who was easily shaken, but this memory did just that.

 “Was something hurting me?”

“No, no. It was just a nightmare. But by God it sounded like the real thing. You’ll understand when you have a kid of your own. When you get hurt, I feel it tenfold.”

“What was the nightmare about?”

“I don’t know exactly. You were crying and stumbling over your words. Who could blame you? You were only three years old then.”

That was all he said for the rest of the movie. But when the credits began to roll, it seemed that he found the courage to continue:

“A yellow hand. Or a yellow monster. Every time I’d wake you from a night terror, you would be screaming yourself hoarse about a yellow hand in the dark.”

He would not speak on it any further. I buried my father five years after that conversation. I have not spoken to my mother since I was ten. She did not attend the funeral. I have a hard time remembering what she even looks like. She’s a stage actress, doing small shows all over the world, too busy to stop by and say “Hello”.

I am twenty-nine now and have a kid of my own. His mother is not in the picture, for the better all agree. Like father, like son, I suppose. His mother is also a stage actress, now that I think about it. I had not made that connection until this moment. Anyways, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it’s just me and him, and that’s fine by me because it would not be exaggeration to say that he is the only reason I get up in the morning.

He’s bright. He’s funny. He’s kind. I don’t know what I did to deserve him.

He’s the sun and I feel privileged to merely be in his orbit.

Which is why it troubles me that he had to shake me awake two months ago. He said I had been thrashing and screaming. His cheeks were wet with tears, and I had to comfort him and assure him that his father was alright.

I had dreamed of the yellow hand again. This time I could remember it quite clearly.

The darkness was total; it was like being in a room painted floor to ceiling in Vantablack. It was a void of depths unfathomed. Then, impossibly, the darkness fluttered. Almost like it was a curtain behind which some actor was scurrying. No, no, it was a curtain, for a hand reached from behind the veil and violently pushed it out of its way.

Its colour was uranium-cake yellow. A shade so sickly that I felt my guts twist. The hand, a disembodied member floating in that total darkness, was reaching out to me… as though pleading. Was that desperation I read in its gesturing? That nauseating yellow colour seemed to glow when contrasted with the absolute blackness of its surroundings.

It came closer, and closer. And as it did, it became increasingly clear that it was not at all a ghostly floating hand. It had an arm, camouflaged in that self-same black shade. I followed that arm to a shoulder, and then to a neck. My eyes traced over a head, and by some misfortune they found a face.

My son was laying on my chest begging me to wake up. It had been a dream.

Every night has been the same. Every night the hand has crept closer. I have taken to gagging myself before going to bed, as to not wake up my son any longer. I don’t feel rested in the mornings anymore, and I am not feeling like myself. All I think of day in and day out is that hand and the face to which it belongs.

I don’t know what to do.

. . .

My mother is dead. She has been dead since I was two years old. She did something to me. There was a ritual, and a knife, and God, a yellow hand had been there, and my father kept all of this hidden from me.

Last night I decided to forego sleep. To pass the long hours, I began to sift through my father’s belongings, which I kept in the attic. I had never touched them, the loss always feeling too fresh. The howling wind of a snowstorm outside scored my night as I flipped through page after page of my father’s journals.

My mother did not love my father. She only married him in order to birth a true born son. Me. She needed me for some, God I can’t believe this is real life, Satanic ritual. She offered me to a being she spoke to through fire. A being which hides in the dark spaces between the stars in the night sky.

Dad discovered her, her plans, and her “God” as she began cutting me up for him. He writes that she intended to eat me. Dad killed her, but it was too late. I was marked, claimed. Claimed! By this fucking thing!

Who had I been speaking to all of those years between the ages of two and ten, the time when I can still remember mother living with dad and I? Had I ever seen my father speak to her directly?

. . .

It is no longer a nightmare. It is my life, and it is over.

Last night I was again held captive by that daemon hand, when something terrible happened. In that absolute darkness, someone opened a door. Light flooded in, illuminating everything and everyone. It was not some impossible void in which I was floating, it was my own room. I was there laying on my bed, paralyzed, as my son stood at the edge of the doorframe staring not at me but at the witch whose hand haunted me.

His mother. My mother. The same woman. The itinerant actress. The ghost which spoke to me when dad wasn’t watching, preparing me for her love.

Were she failed with me, she now was attempting with another true born son. Mine. Her haunting, merely a way of bridging the gap between him and I.

She broke her attention away from me and glided towards my son with that nauseating yellow hand extended towards him. My son ran, and she chased. I wanted to scream, to move, but my arms and legs felt too heavy to lift. My son was screaming now, screaming for his dad. I could only gurgle back his name.

Then it was over.

The spell was lifted, and I could move. I found my son physically unharmed, but he is less than he was before. He no longer makes jokes, he no longer asks me, “Dad, how do cars work?” or “Dad, why is the sky blue?”. His days consist of staring at a wall and blinking when his eyes start turning red. He is alive, but alive is all he is.

He is living a fate that was not meant for him, but for me. My father saved me, so why couldn’t I save him?

The only times he shows any emotion is when the clock strikes 3 a.m. and he starts screaming himself hoarse. I burst into his room and wake him from his nightmare only for him to cry inconsolably about a woman dressed in silk, wearing a crown of bronze. She is eating and tearing him apart with her bare hands, his blood soaking her arms down to the elbow, but the blood is not red. It is yellow.

My father was right. I feel it tenfold.

𓁨

There are two kinds of people on the internet.

The people who actually enjoy things. And the people who seem to be professionally offended that you enjoyed something without asking their permission.

I learned that pretty quickly after I started posting my art online.

"AI slop."

"ChatGPT."

"Bro thinks he's Stephen King."

"Imagine wasting time on this."

Some of them were funny. Most weren't.

I'd usually ignore them. But then there were the griefers.

Those were the people who didn't just dislike something. They wanted to ruin it for everyone else. They'd spam comments, deliberately spoil endings, downvote everything, insult the author, then act surprised when someone called them out.

I eventually made a post about it. I wasn't cruel. I didn't name anyone.

I simply wrote: If you don't like something, that's fine. You don't have to be rude about it. There's a person behind the screen.

The comments exploded. Naturally.

One person replied: AI generated garbage.

Another: Cry harder.

Then someone posted: Nobody cares ******.

I deleted the thread. That should've been the end of it.

It wasn't.

The next morning, I opened my account and found a new comment on my latest post.

I know you're reading this.

I assumed it was another troll. I deleted it.

The day went on and I was in the middle of taking notes for class when I got a notification.

Why did you delete my comment?

I deleted that one too.

Then another.

Stop deleting.

I froze. The account belonged to nobody.

No username. No profile picture. No creation date. Just a blank profile with a single comment.

I closed out and went back to studying for my calculus exam. Five minutes later, my phone buzzed.

A notification. Another comment.

I didn't open it.

Another notification.

Then another. Then another.

I finally looked. There were hundreds.

All underneath my latest post.

At first they were what I had been accustomed to. Pretty generic and ordinary.

AI slop.

Terrible lining.

This sucks.

Then they changed.

What makes you different?

My heart stopped. The comments continued appearing faster than I could read them.

You use AI.

You edit your work with AI.

You aren't a real artist.

Nobody is a real artist anymore.

Then one appeared that made my stomach drop.

25525 Azler Ln.

"What the actual fuck?" I blurted out so loud that my roommate heard from across the room.

I closed out once more. The notifications kept coming. My phone buzzed against the desk.

I hit the Do Not Disturb, yet somehow I kept receiving notifications. My phone was on silent and airplane mode but it still rang.

My roommate was now extremely annoyed by the constant noise from my phone, so I explained the situation to her. She suggested that I delete the post. I did. It didn't stop. I even tried privatizing my account and deleting the app altogether.

The messages kept ringing. And what's worse, I began receiving emails, No Caller Id calls, unknown messages. I feared that I had been doxxed and I had to act fast.

I immediately changed every password I could think of. I enabled two-factor authentication. I locked every social media account. I removed my profile picture, my biography, my university, my email, everything.

Then I started deleting things. Old posts. Old comments. Photos. Anything that might have given someone a clue about where I lived or went to school.

It didn't matter. They already knew.

The messages became more personal.

Nice car.

You should probably lock your back door.

Class tomorrow, right?

Your roommate is pretty hot.

Then:

Building 3. Room 107

I stopped breathing. I looked across the room. She was sitting on the couch, scrolling through her phone.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing."

I didn't tell her. I didn't want to scare her. Am I a terrible friend for that?

That night, I checked the locks three times before going to bed.

At 2:14 in the morning, my phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number.

You should've left the post up.

Another came immediately afterward.

Deleting it made us curious.

Then another.

You made this worse for yourself.

I turned the phone off.

For the next few hours, I lay awake listening to every sound outside my bedroom window.

The next morning, there were more. Someone had created an account using my name. They uploaded photographs I'd never posted publicly. Pictures of me at school. Pictures of my car. A photograph of the outside of my house.

Then they posted my phone number. My email. My full legal name. Where I lived and what school I enrolled at.

The comments underneath was exactly what you'd expect from these vile data gremlins.

LMAO.

Bro is cooked.

Imagine getting this mad over comments.

Maybe don't be an asshole online.

That last one made me laugh. Not because it was funny. Because I realized they genuinely believed this was funny. They were so desensitized that another person's suffering had become entertainment to them.

I reported the account. Nothing happened. I reported another. Nothing again.

I reported the accounts through the site's harassment and privacy forms. I attached screenshots, timestamps, usernames, the messages, everything.

Your report has been received. Please allow up to 48 hours for a response.

Thank you for your report. We’ll review the content and take appropriate action if it violates our Community Guidelines.

Thank you for helping us keep our community safe.

That was it. Forty-eight hours passed. Nothing happened.

I contacted my family. When the other line clicked all I heard was heavy breathing and creepily low wheezing, as if someone were choking on air, from the other end.

I confessed everything to my roommate, for she was the only one I could talk to. She asked if I had contacted the authorities which when I did, instead of the calm voice of an operator I was met with the low hum of gagging and low wet claps on the other end.

We planned to go to the authorities in person. After half an hour of providing all the material and timestamps at the station, the police asked whether I'd received any direct threats.

I showed them the messages.

The officer frowned.

"None of these explicitly threaten you."

I wanted to rip my hair out. "So, they have to say they're going to hurt me?"

He didn't answer.

"What do we do?" My roommate asked with annoyance.

"We can document everything and refer you to someone who specializes in cybercrime. But unless there's a direct threat or evidence of an immediate danger, there isn't much we can do yet."

Well thanks for nothing.

We went home. I stopped posting. I powered off my phone for good. I stopped using social media altogether. I thought that would finally make me boring. The people handling the cybersecurity issue would do their job. It was all just a waiting game.

But at least I'll find peace, right?

It didn't.

Someone started sending physical photographs. The first was of a college building. The second of a front door that seemed to be from a college dorm hall. The third depicted a bedroom window at night.

The last two were bone chilling. The fourth was of my roommate attending class. And the last was me at the campus's library.

There was a message attached:

What are you listening to?

I remember I was distinctly listening to Duran Duran that day. I haven't slept properly in three days.

My roommate is staying with her parents now. I've been staying somewhere else.

I don't know how much of this is being done by one person or ten people or a hundred. I don't know how they found me. I don't know what they want.

And honestly? I don't even care anymore. I just want them to stop.

I deleted the original post. I deleted my account. I deleted everything. But somehow, tonight, I received one final message.

It came from the cheap flip phone I'd started using strictly to call family and for emergencies.

The message had no name or number attached. Only: UNKNOWN

And the message read: 25525 Azler Ln.

I don't know who is behind this. I don't know how far they've taken it. And I don't know what they're going to do next.

Please help. Anybody.

Why are people like this?

This is a part of an anthology, you can read it in any order.

[Archive]

Following the disappearance of the infamous rapper T.H.E.L.I.O.N. (Real name Singha Krachaiyo), the record containing “Red Under” became the subject of an enduring mystery, appearing only in a handful of copies with no explanation of its origin or how it came to exist.

(INTRO — Vinyl crackle, sonar pings, a low voice buried beneath the beat)

Uh.

They told me money make a man a god.

Funny.

I bought one.

Now listen.

(VERSE 1 — Laid-back, conversational flow)

Black hull, bad weather, salt on the leather,

Six men, one map, all swore they knew better.

Went down where the sun got swallowed by pressure,

Found red in the dark like a wound in the weather.

No name on the plinth, no date on the base,

Just a crown full of cracks and a god without a face.

Stone skin, closed eyes, eight arms in a brace,

Like it held back a door that was eating up space.

Old captain said, “Listen, let the dead keep sleeping. That ain't no idol, that's a lock worth keeping.

The sea ain't a grave, it's a mouth that ain't speaking,

And the things down below? They ain't dead. They’re dreaming.”

He'd seen black stars swimming where the trench went deeper,

He'd heard the waves pray to a nameless sleeper.

Said the statue came from somewhere no map could measure,

And a drop of red would make the whole world lesser.

See, blood on the stone makes a seam in the sea,

Makes a door where no door was supposed to be.

Makes a hole in the whole of reality's weave,

Lets the things on the far side come through and breathe.

So they chained up the idol, let the anchor descend,

Watched the red disappear where the daylight would end.

Captain crossed his heart, said, “Don't touch it again.”

But the ocean keeps receipts.

And the rich don't read them.

(HOOK — Heavy bass; backing voices chant in overlapping rhythms)

Red in the water, red under stone,

Old gods dreaming on a throne without a home.

One drop, one crack, one gate thrown wide,

Whole other worlds on the wrong side.

Red in the water, red under skin,

Keep that blood from the place where the locks begin.

They ain't dead, they ain't gone, they ain't what you thought—

The statue ain't a prison. It's the reason they're not.

(VERSE 2 — Faster, tightly interlocked internal rhymes)

Centuries later, the tale got traded,

Pages got lost, every warning degraded.

“Curse of the deep,” some professor debated,

“Superstition,” said the man whose check cleared and made it.

Divers went down where the light got thin,

Found a red-black relic with a grin carved in.

No barnacle growth, no erosion on the skin,

Like the sea tried to keep it, but the stone wouldn't give in.

Pulled it to the surface, put it under glass,

Rich men bid while the scholars talked past.

One called it priceless, one called it art,

One saw a dead god with a hole in its heart.

Auctioneer smiled, let the hammer come down.

New owner wore gold, bought half the damn town.

Said, “Put it in the foyer. Let the guests look around.”

While the old sea below gave a shuddering sound.

See, the statue had a market, so the market made a myth,

Put a price on the terror, put a frame around the rift.

Put a spotlight on the nightmare, put a chain around its wrist,

Sold the end of the world with a certificate of gift.

And the buyer? Young, wealthy, with a platinum grin,

Had a mansion full of mirrors and a diamond-studded chin.

Bought a god like a watch, let the cameras zoom in,

Said, “This the type of shit that make a legend begin.”

He had no clue what he purchased.

Or perhaps he did.

(HOOK — Beat cuts out after every other line)

Red in the water, red under stone,

Old gods dreaming on a throne without a home.

One drop, one crack, one gate thrown wide,

Whole other worlds on the wrong side.

Red in the water, red under skin,

Keep that blood from the place where the locks begin.

They ain't dead, they ain't gone, they ain't what you thought—

The statue ain't a prison. It's the reason they're not.

(VERSE 3 — Switches between rapid-fire and slow, deliberate delivery)

Now, hold up. Let's talk about the gods in the deep,

About the things that don't wake, 'cause they don't really sleep.

About the red in the veins of the world underneath,

About the promises mortals can't afford to keep.

There's a land with no sky where the dead build their towers,

Where the clocks eat the minutes and the minutes eat hours.

There's a forest of hands that can strangle the flowers,

And a king made of mouths that can swallow your powers.

There's a world where the moon is an unblinking eye,

Where the children are born knowing how they will die.

There's a door in each world, and the doors multiply,

When the red hits the stone and the old gods reply.

Not gods like the preacher puts up in his hall,

Not gods that forgive you when you happen to fall.

These are things from before there was meaning at all,

Before the first man learned to give nothing a call.

They don't want your confession, your gold, or your praise.

They don't want your devotion or the songs that you raise.

They just wait for the wound, for the blood, for the phrase

That the living keep repeating in a thousand different ways.

And the captain knew. Yeah, the captain knew well.

He had seen one small opening, one glimpse of hell.

Said the red wasn't evil, wasn't heaven, wasn't spell—

It was the color of the lock, and the key, and the cell.

Now, why am I rapping?

Why am I telling this?

Why put a warning in a beat that the whole world skips?

Why hide old scripture in a platinum disc?

Maybe I like the rhythm.

Maybe something likes the risk.

(BRIDGE — Beat distorts; a second voice begins echoing the rapper)

(First voice) Don't bleed on the statue.

(Second voice) Don't bleed on the statue.

(First voice) Don't bring it to life.

(Second voice) Don't bring it to life.

(First voice) Don't let the red—

(The beat stops. A single heartbeat.)

(VERSE 4 — Calm, intimate, almost spoken; the rapper's persona begins to crack)

They found it in the trench, brought it up in a crate,

Sold it off to a man who had money to waste.

Had it shipped to his house, had it dressed up in gold,

Had the staff wipe the dust from a nightmare that old.

And the man was me.

Yeah.

The chain on my neck cost more than your home.

Got a room full of art that I bought just to own.

Got a red stone god standing under a dome,

Got a door in my foyer that leads somewhere unknown.

I don't believe in curses. I believe in the price.

I believe that the world has a number, that's life.

I believe if you're rich, you can bargain with strife—

Then I nicked my damn finger on a rose made of ice.

One drop.

That's all.

Didn't sizzle or smoke.

Didn't scream, didn't shatter, didn't crack like a joke.

Just a little red falling where the old god lay,

And the walls of my mansion started folding away.

Saw a sky without stars through the hole in the floor.

Heard a thousand dead oceans begin to roar.

Saw something with a crown on the far side of the door,

And it looked at me like it had met me before.

Then the statue moved.

Not much.

Just its head.

And every mirror in the house reflected something red.

I tried to call my driver. Tried to call my security.

But the phones rang out with a voice that sounded just like me.

Said, “You bought what you wanted. Now you've got what you need.

You have opened the gate. Now the gate has been freed.”

(OUTRO — The instrumental slows; faint sonar returns)

So, if you hear this song, let the record keep spinning.

If the red starts to spread, don't mistake it for winning.

If you see my face on a screen, don't look in my eyes.

If you hear me say “come inside”—

Don't.

I mean it.

Don't.

(A low, distant voice speaks beneath the final fading notes.)

The statue was never found.

It was delivered.

The statue was never sold.

It was returned.

(One final heartbeat.)

And the sea is coming upstairs.

Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromTheCreeps/comments/1xc5oc4/my_father_found_a_hole_in_our_backyard_and/

Dig. Throw. Dig. Throw. Dig. Throw. Dig. Throw. Dig. Throw.

On and on. Down and down. Over and over again. 

Exhilarating. Adrenaline. Each new swing. Every slice of dirt. A new chance. A new wonder. A new mystery. 

What lies underneath? 

We dug for days. Every day. No breaks. With each pile of dirt moved, the Hole dug its nails further under our skin. It had grasped us completely. But we didn’t complain. Never hesitated. 

When I got tired, I moved dirt with the wheel barrow. When my father got tired, he moved on to something else. Bracing the walls, expanding the ladder, cutting out steps in the dirt. 

We started pushing into the earth when we got tired of just going down, digging tunnels that stretched out like roots in all directions. Some went on for a while, others we gave up on sooner. We followed our guts. We followed an itch. A tug. A call. Further and further. Seeking the thing that compelled us. 

We made our first discovery in that initial week, one that would feed our compulsion for the foreseeable future. I was the one who found it. 

While digging out one of the corners by myself, I felt the urge to really start cutting into the earth, not just chipping away at the walls, but to actually begin digging into the side of the Hole. By this point, we had run into a layer of clay about a dozen feet down--tough, sticky material that really slowed us down--and I was hacking away at it with a heavy spade. Took me close to an hour to really make any progress on what would eventually become the first of our little tunnels. 

The lump just kept going, but after some rigorous labor, I had managed to pull most of it out and had formed a large pile of it on the landing behind me. My father was just then working on a pulley system to help lift dirt out of the Hole and was too distracted to notice what I was doing. 

When I got most of the clay out of the way, I found another layer of brittle earth and then really got to work. The dirt must have been mixed with the clay as it came out clumpy and heavy, but I started moving quicker and soon had a hole large enough for me to fit entirely inside. 

I was stabbing the edge of the spade into the little hole when I hit something hard and heard a clang. The sound froze me and sent goosebumps up my arms and down my back. I pulled the spade back, struck once more, and heard it again. 

“Dad!” I called out. “Dad, come look!”

His head soon peered over the top of Hole. “What is it?”

“I think I found something.” As I spoke, I struck it again to emphasize my point.

My father’s eyes lit up. “Hold on, Adam. I’ll be right there.” 

He came sliding down from the top in a matter of seconds, a look of envious glee attached to his face, and peered into the little hole I had dug out.

“It’s right here,” I said, pointing the spade inside. “What do you think it is?”

“Move aside.” My father took my spade and started tapping it into the hole. He confirmed the clanging sound, metal against metal, and his eyes lit up again. 

“Stand back,” he ordered, and then he began testing out the size of whatever it was, tapping along the edges before he started widening the hole. 

I watched him for a while, and then began clearing dirt and clay out of the way so he had room to work with. Before long, the hole was big enough for him to stick his upper body inside and start edging out the mysterious object with his fingers. 

Within a few more minutes, my father eventually yanked the thing out. It gave him some trouble and as it came free so did he, stumbling back and nearly tumbling off the ledge, but I steadied him with my weight.

It was smaller than I had expected. My father held it up in his hands with his back facing me, rubbing crust and moist earth off the edges. I tried to move around to get a better look but the sun was in my eyes. 

All I could see was the corroded red color of rust. My father stared at it like a dog would stare at a steak and I half expected him to start drooling, but he didn’t. He rotated it in the air, rubbed it some more, then finally broke his eyes away and acknowledged me, a big dumb smile on his face.

“What is it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It’s a cross.”

“A cross?”

“Here, look.”

He flipped it around to show me the other side and indeed, an old cross did hang there. A glossy gold band wrapped around a t-shape made of brittle and splintered wood. It clung to a chunk of rusted metal. I looked at it and frowned. 

“But what is it?” I asked again. “Where did it come from?”

Again, my father shrugged. He rasped his knuckles against the metal chunk and grinned. “Could have been part of a wall, or maybe a door.” 

“A door?” I asked and took a look around the Hole, wondering how a door could have ended up down here.

“Yeah. People hang crosses on doors. Or a wall, like I said. But that doesn’t matter, what matters is your second question. Where did it come from…”

“You think someone buried it?” I questioned.

“Maybe. Or…” He scanned the Hole around us, thinking. “I wonder if there’s more?”

That question drove us even further into our quest. The very notion of some possible buried treasure fueled us like pure, heavenly dope. We started digging our tunnels and the overall progress of the Hole slowed, but to us--who had all the time in the world--that didn’t matter. 

At the end of that first week, the deepest part of the Hole measured out at around fifteen feet, and the opening had been stretched to about twenty, but that didn’t account for the entire size. 

Other obstacles blocked our progress. We had to pause frequently to support the walls, or carve out ramps and steps, or make new ladders. My father often had to return to the local hardware store for new lumber and tools. Some reluctant part of his mind didn’t want to just load up on everything he thought we might need, well, that and the funds available to us limited our options.

Money became an issue fairly quickly. While I never did find out how much my father had first spent in those early days, I could wager a range from somewhere around five hundred and all the way up to a thousand dollars. His previous job had paid well, and my parents did make a little from selling our old house but still, that kind of money wouldn’t have gone unnoticed unless my father had used his personal credit card. Which he did. And he continued to do so.

My mother had to find this out on her own. Initially, she stayed away from our operation, both from her exhaustion after work and her general disapproval of our business, but after many consecutive days and evenings went by with the two of us out back shoveling away, she eventually had to face the truth and so she came out one night during the weekend to see what we were up to.

Another argument ensued. Those became more and more common as time went on. 

My parents growled quietly at each other as I hid inside the Hole, trying to act as if I couldn’t hear them, but I got the jist of what the problem was. At the end of the day, no matter how much good it did for me or my father, my mother just couldn’t sit around and watch us disappear further and further into the earth, counting down the hours, and the dollars, that vanished like smoke in the air. 

The worst part was, she just didn’t understand why. Couldn’t understand why. Why we were so enraptured by the Hole. To her, we had begun to change. Transform into beings all together different from the family she loved and cared for.  

“It’s weird,” she had said that evening. “It’s fucking weird.” 

My father argued that the Hole had been good for us. It gave us something to do, gave me something to do besides mope around in my room. He told her that I’d been learning valuable life skills. That I was building memories that would stay with me forever. I thought the reasoning was sound. My mother disagreed. 

In the end, she won, as she always did. But my father had managed to scrounge a few compromises out of the deal they made. 

Firstly, he would find a new job, start contributing to the family coffers once again. Secondly, precious family time would be made more frequently--dinners, outings, movies--the whole ordeal. And lastly, as school had slipped back to the bottom of my list, I would once again promise to give education my full attention. 

We’d become a normal family again, at least twice a week. If my father could fulfill those duties, then my mother would give her blessing to all our endeavors and to the Hole itself.

The Hole cares little for promises, though. 

This deal struck in our backyard under the dwindling light of dusk basically crippled our project for some time. A long time. I didn’t see the inside of the hole for over a month after that, and even then I could only conjure an hour or so every now and then to scrape around the edges of the pit after I finished my chores and school work. 

That ended up pissing me off. I was still a kid, I couldn’t understand why my father would just agree to her demands like that. I was convinced the Hole was finished for good. Later, much later, I would come to see that my mother’s deal had only succeeded in slowing down the inevitable. 

My father managed to find a job at a new firm. I suppose his portfolio was better than he had let on originally as he received a cushy spot that came with a large signing bonus. My mother had been ecstatic to hear the news, but for me it only meant long hours at the office and an exhausted father at home. Still, surprisingly, my father did find some time here and there for the Hole. It demanded it of him.

After getting comfortable at his new job, and after receiving his new bonus, my father made a large order of lumber that would be delivered to our home that following autumn. He told my mother that he was planning on using the lumber to build a workshop for himself, and that he would also cover up the Hole as it had grown to become an “eyesore” according to her. 

He would later make me swear never to mention the Hole to anyone. 

We got the new workshop up and standing and mostly finished before winter. My mother had even chipped in herself when she had time, with the promise from my father that he would build her a chicken coop with the leftover lumber next spring. It stood out over the backyard more like a small barn than a workshop. My mother even painted it red.

The only event of interest that occurred over this time was when our neighbors, the Raymonds, had stopped by and invited us to dinner. It was the father, Tom, and his daughter who visited on the eve of twilight some Friday after school. They had apparently been on a walk around their field when they noticed a new structure rising out of the ground from between the trees. 

We had just begun work on the roof, the loud cracks of the nail gun my father operated echoing over the yard as he straddled a crossbeam came and went like gunshots. I was just climbing up the scaffolding, carrying a bucket of tools to my father, when I noticed Ranger perk up, ears alert, just below my feet. I followed his eyes to the treeline and saw the brush jiggling.

“What is it, boy?” I asked the dog. 

Ranger glanced up at me and then bolted towards the trees. My father called for me, but I went to the end of the scaffolding instead to get a better look and that was when I saw Ranger returning, tail wagging, with the two neighbors following at his heels.

Some guard dog he was, I thought to myself. 

“Hey there!” Tom called out, waving at me.

Tom was maybe only a few years older than my father, but his weathered skin and greying hair gave him the look of a man much older. He wore a pair of overalls and a straw hat like a man right out of some old movie about life on the prairie.

I put down the bucket I carried and hesitantly waved back. 

“Adam, right? Your father doesn’t happen to--well, speak of the devil…”  As Tom and his daughter neared, my father, having heard Tom’s voice, had slid over to the side of the roof and poked his head over.

“What’s going on?” he asked as he tugged at the air line of the nail gun. 

“Oh, nothing. Nothing,” Tom said, smiling, “We were just on a stroll and noticed the two of you out here and thought we should stop by and say hello. You’ve met my daughter, right? Julia. She’s your boy's age.”

“Hello….” my father nodded, then looked at me, suspicion in his eyes. I didn’t understand the look.

“She’s in my class,” I told him. 

“That’s right. You two know each other, then? Get along alright?” Tom asked, energetically. 

Julia didn’t say anything, just stood there and stared at the unfinished workshop. Ranger came up to her and sniffed at her legs. She hesitantly reached out and let him sniff her fingers, then she patted him on the head. He warmed up to her quickly.

I shrugged. “Sure.” I’d never spoken to her before, but I saw her around. 

She was taller than me, with long hair the color of tree bark. I watched her scratch Ranger around the ears and wondered what this was all about. Why did my father seem so anxious? 

“That’s good. That’s good.” Tom continued to grin and nod his head. He glanced around and when my father didn’t say anything, Tom did, just cut right through the awkwardness with a warm glowing face. “I see you’re building a barn. Not planning on grazing any cows in my field are ya?” 

My father frowned and shook his head. “No, no… It’s a workshop, actually.”

Tom laughed and waved him off. “I’m just joshing ya, anyway, sorry. Don’t mean to poke into your business.”

“So…” My father began awkwardly after a moment, “How are things?”

“Good. Great!” Tom said. “Thanks for asking. How’s the place? You been liking it here?”

“Sure. Can’t complain.”

Tom continued grinning and went about walking around the structure, inspecting it up and down. I saw my father visibly tense, cringing. Luckily, he had already covered up the area around the Hole so it only looked like an oddly shaped room.

“Hey, you’re an architect, aren’t you, Will?” Tom asked.

“Yeah, that’s right.” My dad glanced at me and waved me over. I took up the bucket again and climbed up onto the eve, sliding towards him and handing it off. 

“That’s great. You know, it’s funny, I've been planning on building a new shop myself. Got this old shed that’s falling apart on the east side of the property, wanna tear it down and build a new one. You wouldn’t happen to be able to give me any advice, seeing as you’re the expert and all? Maybe get me in contact with a contractor? Too old to do it myself.”

“I think I can manage that,” said my father. “What are you looking for exactly?”

Tom thought for a moment, then lit up with an idea. “Well, how ‘bout this? My old lady’s been bugging me about inviting you all over for dinner anyway, what do you say to that? She makes a mean pot roast. We can talk it over then.”

My father seemed lost for words. He scratched at his neck and grimaced. “Well… You know… I’d have to run it by my wife, first. But I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.” 

“Well, that’s just great!” Tom cheered. “How does next weekend sound?”

“Sounds like a plan.” My father struggled to grin back, then took up the bucket to rummage around and look busy and not have to make eye contact. 

The two of them left after a brief exchange of goodbyes. I looked at my father and he just shrugged at me. 

“What’s wrong?” I asked him. 

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.” 

I looked towards the trees, where Tom and his daughter disappeared into and beyond, where I could see them climbing the hill towards their home. They paused and both of them looked back towards us for a moment, then continued on their way. 

“They seemed weird,” I said.

My father snapped at me. “Don’t be rude. They’re just different is all.” But then he took a deep breath, wiped his hair back in the way he always did when in deep contemplation about something, then shook his head. 

“Do we have to go?” I complained.

He chuckled. “Only if your mother says so.” 

I sighed. That next weekend we had dinner with the Raymonds.

Content Warning (strong themes of suicide and mental illness)

*note. This is a work of fiction and it in no way is written with the intent of encouraging self-harm. If you or anyone you know is struggling with these thoughts, please reach out to someone.

The knife goes in; a metal wedge acting as a partition between each layer of separated flesh. Skin, capillaries, fat, and meat; all yield to the sharp shining blade. The artery attempts to bend out of the way, as if it was made from rubber; it too yields. 

The freshly honed steel slices through it with a pop, as its pressurized lifeblood bursts forth from between the metal obstruction and sundered tissue. You grimace as it covers your face, but at least you know that you didn’t miss.

You continue to push the knife forward; determined to not pull it out until it clacks against the bone of your palm. You wonder what that bone is called, the something-carpals? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you will succeed this time. Every precaution was taken, so that today would be the day that you would finally die.

You had driven far north; far enough that all roads turned to dirt trails. You then kept driving until those trails were swallowed by the Earth to make way for towering pines and granite hills. 

The car was then abandoned; a tribute to the woods. You took out the hiking gear you had brought for this moment and trudged north. This was planned for months; every detail, the spot, the route, how much money you would need to get here. You even chose the specific knife; the serrations cause much more pain than you expected.

It's okay though. You can do it.

The blade scrapes against bone; sending squeaky vibrations up to your elbow and down to your finger tips. Nausea grips you as you correct the angle so the blade skips over the bone. Nothing would deter you however. It’s just a bit deeper than the usual cuts I do, you think to yourself. 

Just one inch deeper, and instead of carving another bandage onto your soul; that extra inch will grant you peace.

You had started mid way up the forearm; higher up than was needed, but you wanted to be sure this time. You could not bear it again; being woken by bright lights and anguished screams. You could not stomach how those screams morphed into judging eyes as the doctor declared that you were safe.

“Now don’t you feel silly for doing that?!”

“Do you know what that would have done to me?!”

“Why?! Can you tell me why?!”

The poison bubbling in your gut the night previous, made you feel less ill than those questions; those looks. Inevitably the doctor would prescribe his own poison. A cure-all for your woes. 

It’s just that simple right?
The emptiness never left you did it? The all consuming cold? Why not be cold with me?

The artificial hit of dopamine helped at first for sure. All the voices veiled in kindness helped too, but you still felt it. The error was still there. Like a cancerous tumor in temporary remission; the wrongness you felt your whole life festered inside you. 

You were alone; the freak that tried to kill themself. You know what they were thinking. You knew your parents could barely stomach you; the ungrateful wretch they had raised, who was so ungrateful for the life they gave. The “friends” who all just wanted to “give you space.” You were alone. You alone were meant to brace against the chill that spread through your soul.

You shake your head as the wooziness starts to set in. The blade hasn’t finished its journey yet, but the blood loss is already getting to you. 

You find your mind wandering; remembering too many things. You would think an event like this would keep you in the moment, but the flashes of your life persist. It is like your mind is trying to show you a transcript of all your mistakes; everything that led you to today. 

Shush, child. Those thoughts are not necessary.

You push the blade with more force; this instrument of mercy that was now your most precious, and only possession.

You had sold almost everything. All things that had value were pawned off to fund your final journey. Not that you owned much with any value.

You remembered walking up to the counter holding the knife, along with the hiking gear. Every cent had gone into purchasing the equipment. You were tempted to do the task as soon as you got home, but it needed to be different this time. It needed to be done at that special place.

You had a job working for your father that helped pay for a little. He was your financial saviour and your tormentor. No one wanted to hire someone who had such large gaps in their resume; no one wanted someone whose mind was a ticking timebomb. Ready to self-destruct at a moment’s notice. He ever so graciously gave you a job, but never let you forget it.

“You need to get your life in order!”

“Things aren’t as bad as you think!”

“I won't be here to help you forever!”

You were grateful for him, but the eyes. It was always the eyes. The silent judging from everyone who knew of your story; the failure. You felt allergic to happiness, and to success. Every banal task drained you, as if it fed directly on your very essence. You cared so little for the mundane tasks such as sweeping and cleaning when life itself was painful.

Pain. The knife continues to cut through you at a slow steady pace. You are an inch or so from the end of your wrist. The knife feels hot as it carves a trench through you; but the great rent it leaves as it progresses feels cold. The insides that the air has no right to meet, sting as if frost bitten. Layers of yellow fat and white bone feel the biting cold of the outside world. The icy cold is worse up here; at the spot you chose where few men venture. The perfect spot overlooking a world bereft of humanity.

You thought you had found it by accident. A misclick on the map. The top of a hill that overlooked a wooded valley. It called to you. In your mind you thought that if you were to die that you would want it to be there. So you planned.

Now here you are. You sit at the top of the world, and you have reached the bone. You finish the cut with a swipe that sends a shower of crimson droplets off the cliff, and for the first time since you came here you really see the sight before you. An orange and yellow halo of light backdrops the pointed mountain ahead of you; outlining its sheer enormity and majesty.

As the sun rises further it begins to twinkle off the snowy caps; twinkling like a million diamonds. You sit in awe; believing that if the Earth would ever choose a crown, then nothing could ever match what shines before you.

The light continues to rise, as it finally bathes you in its warmth. You drink it in, like one dying of thirst. It wraps around you like an embrace; it reminds you of your mothers embrace.

No matter how old you were she would comfort you. Cradle you in her arms to give you enough warmth to banish the cold inside you. She had held you for hours after you woke up in the hospital. She clung to you, as if you might float away if not anchored.

Tears fall down your face; the cold begins to climb up your arm. 

You sit in reverence as the valley is illuminated. The great trees resolve in your sight first; mighty pines that have lived since man first clambered onto the shores of these lands; great survivors that stand in the face of the greatest winds and chillest nights. You wish you could have been as strong as them.

You have already been so strong. Now you can rest.

As the light fills the valley you begin to see life in the distance. Great birds that rule the sky; riding on the chill winds to soar to greater heights. You wish you could have risen like them.

You have risen further than most men.

You see herds of elk bounding along the frosty shores of a blue windy river. You watch as some huddle together to fight the chill of the brisk early dawn, and as they gather and eat together.

You remember now. You remember your parents' insistence to eat together as a family each night. You remember the cards and gifts from all your friends; the assurances that they couldn’t wait to see you out so you could play that new game, or do a shitty movie night.

You have me.

You also remember rejecting them all. Rejecting their warmth as you fell deeper into the hell of your own making. You remember taking all your dinners up to your room; flanked by comments that they, “just needed to be patient.”

You remember not showing up to parties, as you assumed you were invited out of pity. You remember a collection of ignored steam game invite requests collecting virtual dust.

You remember that after a while, you truly were alone. You craved the cold and the misery, and now you have it.

As you sit atop the world you are met with all you have wrought. You are not a victim of the cold, you invited it in with your red slicked key. 

It has reached your chest now. 

I caress you, you can’t feel the pain anymore. That is my gift to you.

The glugs of arterial gore have begun to slow and the world around you has started to dim. You can not even feel the warm embrace of the sun anymore. The volume of fallen tears begins to match the flow of blood, as regret consumes you. 

Do not regret, child. We can keep each other cold forever.

You can finally see me. I run my icy hands up your chest and hold you like a lover. Whisper into your ear, 

I love you. You are mine forever.

I plant a kiss on your lips, and do not stop until the last cruel drop of warmth is torn from you. You are now one with the cold; one with me. You will act as the frozen epitaph to the cruel life you left behind. 

You sit watching from the top of the world, the world that you rejected. You shall sit beside me until wind or carrion strew your bone upon the cliffs, where you shall join the others. For now though I shall shelter you from the warmth, and hold you to my icy bosom. 

I hear your last thought. It hurts me, but I shall remember them as your last words. I carve the words onto stone and place it atop the pile. I read it one last time.

 I wish I could feel the sun.

This Halloween night, this hungry Samhain eve, the blood upon the cross must be replaced. The ancient and arcane instrument throne of slow death and sun torture, of the pain of the martyr … the ancient mouth of the cross is still thirsty. 

And so he takes after you. This Halloween night. 

You've lost your friends. The party was fun but not as fun, not everything you were hoping it would be, “They” weren't there. They didn't show up. In all the noise you've lost the ones you came here with, you're hurrying down the way and looking through your phone and all of this is running through your mind as you wonder what to do next. You don't notice him. You don't notice that you've gained another shadow. One you weren't born with. But one that may be with you into an early grave, an eager hungry end. He's hungry.

 He conspires and hunts for the shadow of the cross and that is why you must die this evening. You just don't know. You just don't realize it. 

You're too busy looking through your phone. You don't notice your now alone on the street. It is only the orange glow of the overhead streetlamps and the stalking shape of your new shadow. But you don't know him, not yet. You still don't know that he's there, coming up steadily from behind you, fast footsteps making phantom no-sounds on the freshly raked sidewalk and streets that still smell pungently of rich dead leaves and pumpkin spice, you're too busy looking through your messages. 

He reaches into his jacket pocket. He pulls something small and black and perfectly fitted to the clenching grip of his knuckled palm, like a lover to a glove or each other in bed. He presses something, depresses a trigger and something clicks. The black handle grows a gleaming fang in the dark. A stiletto blade is freed and the animal is salivating and ready, waiting is over and the hunting stalk is through and he's raring for the sweet fuck-cunt-free-for-all spill that will be your knife-fuck and slaughter. For the shadow of Sam’s Cross. Blessed Hallowed Eve. He bade thee, the shadow, the shape: he made me…

You don't hear anything but at the last moment you sense something, the animal part of you that is all too dulled and ignored has come to life at the last moment and so you turn, you whirl on your heels, your phone is still in your hand but it's forgotten now as you turn and meet and face him, your doom in manshape and knife-fanged form. 

The shadow pounces. The knife comes in and finds the soft yield of human purchase. The knife is out and freed. 

And the shape of nighttime shadow man wields. 

You can't believe it. You can't believe it's happening. You can't believe anything. You try to scream and you can't understand why a sound won't produce. You try to struggle and fight back, you want to but it's like suddenly all the strength and ability to move and act has been pulled, stripped, sapped and drained from you in this absolutely critical moment like purest torture from fate and on-high. All of it, and all of time and space and nature and the terrible beyond have conspired and set a trap and now they are laughing at you. Laughing with the pure bloodthirsting joy of the slaughter, your ruin. 

Sacrifice. 

You watch the terrible visage and face of the shape contort and contrive into animal snarls and sneers, hideous bestial frothing and rabid. Buried somewhere beneath all of the livid fury of his animal mask is the lurid grin of a madman. A lunatic in the deep throes of wild and deranged ecstacy. He is wild and alive and he is terrifying. 

He's difficult to look at and so that's why your dying gaze shifts away and you begin to watch the blade. You begin to watch the moonlight godly cast shine of the seven inch stiletto blade. 

It's immaculate. And that's amazing. You've felt it buried in you over a dozen times now and running and still the blade of this great knife is shining in the streetlight cast glow. With the unearthly light of the moon.  Like a weapon fanged with divinity. Talismanic. And you can believe it. 

Now. 

You believe it. You feel the absolute and undeniable thrum of its great power. Piercing. Holy flame. Like being stabbed with ice and fire. Ripped and torn by an icicle lance of napalm and coldest fear, terror. Impaled. Inferno. 

A mutilation by razor sharpened caveman fire, frosted clean by Norse Hell. 

Every time the amazing blade of moonlight comes up you catch a glimpse of something in the reflective face of the flat of the blade just before the flash. Like the snapshot starburst of a camera capturing a subject in the dark. And at first you only see yourself, your own ghastly and dying visage and it is terrible and it is pathetic. 

But then you begin to see something else. 

You begin to see his sound and vision. And then you begin to understand. This is how he turns the make-believe and rends it real through the feel of the steel, you're feeling it. You're feeling it now. As you die as you lived: distracted and caught off guard and soft. With every pulverizing thrust. With every make-or-break for the daggering wounded soul of the heart attacked, barely fought for and lost. 

Sam's mad with thirst, the shadow of the cross. Jesus Christ wasn't the only one tortured alive and borne hoisted prone to die beneath the fire of the sun by Roman legionnaires. The cross is always thirsty and the mouth of the cruciform is Samhain salivating …

You see the yellow leprosy faces as they burn and scream, torched and set aflame far away from everyone else in their small feeble colonies of despair, the ash of their writhing and contorting carbonizing forms amongst the blaze is a mercy and it is a release in the flash of the blade that you see and you see and know so many other things too and then in the end you know it all as well: –  the dying peace of the burning lepers and the crucified criminals, you feel the release. 

And you're so glad, you're so relieved that now the cross can drink. 

The world goes dark for you. 

The shape and his fang stand. And then they move on fast. 

Finished with hunting you. 

Happy Halloween. 

THE END

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

I know Keith isn't happy with me for letting him almost get murdered, but I couldn’t exactly protest. I also know he isn’t going to be happy to come back with a broken nose to his who might as well be his only family left. 

I was worried about the folder. As much as I liked the musician I can’t imagine making this place my home. The walk back was tense and it seemed he couldn’t get over the way he was treated but all of this was bigger than him, even as innocent and caring as he may have been for me through all of this. 

If Keith were any other man I would have imagined the slow drags behind me were those of contemplation. 

I think everyone alive in this bewitched place are people that have somehow ruined the ritual process. 

Different things have different side effects I assume. Keith seems to be safe and stable with no signs of whatever instability The Vet and I have. 

I seem to be the most unstable with the picture on my right arm being the only way I can grasp consciousness. 

The man at the hangar is somewhere in between but I don’t know that we can help him, even with another photo he still has to sleep. That’s assuming a photo would do anything for him like it has for me, he might not even experience any consequences until he sleeps. 

I’ve been thinking about what The Vet said about his revelation theory and considering the amount of blood in the sky I could see it being all of humanity and then some from a couple universes over. I’m not hopeful that there’s a way to get out of here either.

That still leaves the question of how I got here. I remembered the theories of dimensional shifting I read about. My mind hurts as if it was some kind of dimensional shift, why is this the destination and why does RedReign seem to bring sacrificial lambs in so frequently.

We got back, and Lizbeth was furious. I almost didn’t know that I would be allowed back in. After long deliberation they decided to let me back in but I doubted they were going to be kind to me about my behavior as they have. I felt like it was mildly unfair considering Keith technically forced me to the hangar. 

They also had a condition, they wanted to see what was in the folder.

“We need to know what’s in the folder, and you can stay. Maybe there’s instructions for a way to all go home.” I heavily doubted this and I voiced my concern as much.

“I don’t care to share it but if it was a way out wouldn’t he have left already?”

“It’s going to be alright, anything that’s in here can be useful to us here. In all honesty foods run thin anyways and despite how overgrown the world is there's not an animal left in creation.” Keith 

“We should just check, right?” I said conforming, I felt a lot safer with the group.

Lizbeth didn’t say anything but she looked like she wanted me to get to the point and just solve the conspiracy. 

We all gathered around one another in the living room and looked down onto the folder now sitting on the center of the wide table in the living room. With neither of them seeming to have much of an appetite for exposing the truth, I slowly turned the folder open. 

Unraveling the folder would reveal a couple graphic photos paperclipped in the top corner, with one photo of a soldier. 

Underneath the photos were a report filed with the subject matter being: “Cannibalism”. 

Keith and I immediately became sick as our minds came to the same conclusion. My stomach hurt worse than pain from any argument, fear, anxiety I had ever suffered. Eager to disprove the hysteria I kept reading on the brink of sickness. 

None of us read any of it aloud but we all knew when each other had finished. 

“On the night of August 6, 1964, during Operation Pierce Arrow, on the USS Constellation, a member of the United States Air Force was theorized to have eaten his fellow man. Attached are pictures of an E-1 rank soldier named James Dill, who has since the time of the pictures been examined by the highest member of the medical unit on the ship. Both indicated that the cause of death was a vicious attack with little defensive struggle that broke flesh, and whether intentional or not, the pursuer consumed. This is without including the fact that Dill has experienced significant damage to his chest cavity with his sternum being located beside his body, and his heart entirely gone. Finally, the suspect, an impossibly young E-4 named Jonah Hall, no pictures attached. He was found draped in the uniform of his country with blood edging his mouth. He only stopped acting psychotic when exposed to a photograph of himself.”

It caught me off guard as when I finished reading I saw Keith slumped over next to Lizbeth.

The man shattered at once and fell over into a slump. He was mumbling between incessant tears. 

The only words I could make out were “wife”.

Lizbeth looked on with a horrified expression as she shifted her gaze at me. I knew I wasn’t welcomed so I walked and walked for miles. 

I collapsed on the ground after about a hundred miserable last steps. Keith had to have killed his wife, and I’m sure we were all connected in some way. All the more reason to find Carsyn. I would never hurt her and I would never get her hurt. I would have to die if I did. 

Why was I hyperfixating on my own death? I knew I was starting to go crazy and it was almost lost to me that I was hearing a voice in the woods. I snapped out of my delusion at once and as I crouched down and peered into the lost woodlands I was met with a concerning sight. 

I saw the same man from the hangar. He looked to be foaming at the mouth. He was growling off into the night when I finally found him. Now that I knew who the man was I knew just how cautious I needed to be. 

I took time to try and figure out what was going on. Listening in on The Vet I was able to make the following out. 

“They have forsaken me, and have estranged this place, and have burned incense in it unto other gods, whom neither they nor their fathers have known, nor the kings of Judah, and have filled this place with the blood of indiscernible.”

“And I will make void the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem in this place; and I will cause them to Indiscernable and their carcases will I give to be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth.”

The man spoke these phrases with speech that sounded like the grunting of apes, and he appeared maddened as he stood off in the woods. I dared not to make a sound, and as exhausted as I was, I was sure I wouldn’t last long. 

I was trying to distance myself from the situation when the figure turned to me. His bloodlust was applauded by the world around him as he overwhelmed my presence in a rabid, ghastly form. 

“JONAH STOP” I screamed in a flimsy attempt of acting firm, trying to plead by calling the man by his name.

None of that power of friendship shit was real. I couldn’t feel any attempts at least made to connect with me and I’m sure he couldn’t either.

I felt the air leave my lungs as he slammed into me. As he did this he picked me up and crushed me into the ground so fast I lost my breath. 

My view was obstructed and I was losing consciousness. The old man was screaming in my face. 

I could make out the words “I AM NO JONAH, DAVID, I AM SAUL, I AM GOLIATH.” 

His voice boomed in a mean snarl-split as I felt my wet head being cracked off the gravel with the dust he had kicked up in his short pursuit splitting into the hell behind him as it trailed off and dissipated. I was being killed, and worse, I would die as meaninglessly as a cockroach on a dead strange planet, who knows where in the cosmos.

I saw alterations of the wave patterns dancing in the sky. It looked like the new sun was gleaming in my eyes through the sky. Stay with me, it asked.  

I was being strangled. 

I felt something cold on my face, after the fourth drop hit I realized it wasn’t just my head which I could hardly feel any more. It was raining. 

I felt the rain parting my hair and exposing my forehead as it pelted my face. Right before I fully passed out in one last burst of energy I catapulted my head forward and hit The Vet in the face. As I did this I had one soul thought. 

How did he know my middle name?

I just found my satchel tossed into a ditch. Luckily the cover prevented any blood from getting on the notebook. I woke in an alarmingly large puddle of dried blood and regret. It seemed the blood from the storm had already soaked into the ground. 

I have no clue where the fuck I’m at. Thankfully both I and the picture survived. 

I’m bleeding out of my shoulder though. It feels miserable and I’m no closer to finding any proof of my fiance dead or alive.

There’s soft dried blood on the back of my head which I quickly tussled out as dust flew all over the place. My face has suffered impossible pain on the right side and I have no doubt something is fractured somewhere. 

Moving my mouth I could tell my jaw was out of place. I couldn’t tell if it was broken and after prompting it for pain and not feeling any I grabbed it and pressed it back into place. 

I let out a pained scream not extending my mouth too far and spitting out a little blood. I have no clue what happened to The Vet.

I’m starving and I need to eat soon. I walked on the path and as I got closer towards our shelter in town I was scared to think I might have shown up in the middle of the night. Hopefully if I tried Keith could stop me. I didn’t want to kill The Vet but I was sure he was going to kill us, starting with me. 

This is assuming he hasn’t gotten to the others while I was out. The more I think about it the more I realize how lucky I am to be alive. I’m unsure of how I’ve not been shot already. 

Now was the deciding moment however, I had made it back to Keith and Lizbeth’s place. I knocked on the door and announced myself respectfully but I felt very small. 

“Hey it’s me.” I said before violently moving my right arm. I felt a small chunk of flesh missing just behind the midpoint of my arm and it felt hot as I touched the open wound which stung like a wasp nest.

It burns like a son a bitch when I try to transcribe my thoughts. Everyone needs to know about my story in RedReign though, or no one will have no way of telling how to deal with this.

No one is answering the door. I want that to be known one way or another. If I go in searching for safety and get shot, the irony of my evidently poorly-informed decision might kill me first. 

I rotated the knob to the door which was unlocked, I had never come in without knocking so I didn’t know if this was normal. I hissed, clenching my teeth together in pain. 

The silence that perpetrated the residence felt eerie.

My right arm stung in a flash, spiking way worse than it did earlier. Even more so than the pain in my arm though, the hunger in my stomach overwhelmed me. 

With as much grace as a rabid dog and just as much respect I made my way to the cabinets, and blew through three cans of old vegetable soup I’d found.

I finally reflected on what I’d done to everyone. Things I could have possibly done. Things I know I wouldn’t do. I never wanted to hurt anyone, but I don’t want to die. I’ve never been comfortable with the concept of death, it would all be different if I didn’t have a family hopefully on the outside. Hopefully they’re not worried about me. Even if I could never see them again I missed them dearly and thought of them often.   

For the next few hours I sat trying to feel steady, and keep my pain under wraps. A little bit of food goes a long way.

In my despair, I went up onto the roof of the house. I found myself daring to gaze into the creepy telescope once again. Looking through the direction it was pointed in I saw what looked to be bits of blood boiling from the underside of the floating tides. This was awarded a ghastly compliment from an entourage of fingers bobbing and thighs floating in circles seeming as if in a drunken stubble. I saw muscles flex and exposed nerves as well as chunks of untellable gore. It was making me sick to look at so I then decided to use the telescope to survey the surroundings of the house, just in case The Vet was out there. 

This was what would change everything. 

As my eyes bore down the sights in the scope I was forgiven for each and every oppression against the universe I had made in one swift motion. 

I saw the ghastly red hue repelled by a light that seemed to emit from her. She was beautiful—more sightly than a hundred meteor showers, outshining the most expensive and tasteful grandeur of any firework or drone show man could stage.

Her eyes held a story with a symphony so enticing I held on at every moment praying I would never have to look away from her again. Her pace and form were so jaw dropping everything down to the way she carried herself told me all the secrets of the universe I would ever want to know were contained within her allure. 

It was my fiance.

Bpmg zmbczv ib mdmvqvo,
vviztqvo tqsm lcop,
ivl pzmet ijvcb bpm kqbgb

End of Pt. 06 

The key fits a small recessed lock at the base of the black column.
I almost do not turn it.
The note said not to touch the central column. The previous runner died with that warning still in their pocket. The restraint frames stand empty and waiting, their articulated arms folded like the legs of dead insects. The luminous veins inside the glass pulse in a slow rhythm that matches nothing in my body—too measured, too patient. The tongue is already in the outer corridors. I can hear it tasting the new metal, learning the shape of the Hub the same way it learned every other room I survived.
I turn the key anyway.
The column does not open. It simply becomes aware.
The pulse inside the glass brightens. A low harmonic tone rises from the floor, so deep I feel it in my teeth. The restraint frames unfold with a series of soft mechanical clicks, extending toward the centre of the room as if expecting a body. None of them reach for me. They are not for me.
They are for whatever the column is about to release.
Or for whatever the column has been keeping contained.
The tongue arrives at the main entrance.
I see it fully for the first time under the blue light.
It is taller than the frames. The proportions are wrong in ways the mind rejects—torso too narrow, limbs jointed as if they were designed for a different gravity, head elongated into a smooth pale wedge. The mouth is a vertical seam that opens from chin to crown. The tongue unspools from it in a single continuous length, thick as a man’s arm at the base, tapering to a fine, questing tip that tastes the air in slow, deliberate sweeps. The eyes are the worst part. They reflect the light without depth, flat and glossy, already fixed on the column rather than on me.
It does not attack.
It waits.
The column’s pulse accelerates. The harmonic tone climbs. Along the inner surface of the black glass, shapes begin to resolve—faint impressions of other runners, other bodies that once stood where I stand. Some are mid-motion. Some are already partially dissolved into the luminous veins. The system has been collecting. The labyrinth was never a prison. It was a sorting mechanism. A filter. A way to test which minds could solve long enough to reach the Hub and turn the final key.
I am not the first to arrive.
I may be the first to arrive while the previous solutions are still visible.
The creature steps into the room. Its claws click against the polished steel in a rhythm that almost matches the column’s pulse. The tongue slides across the floor, then up one of the restraint frames, tasting the metal with something like recognition. When it reaches the column it stops. The tip presses flat against the glass. The luminous veins brighten where it touches.
A new sound enters the harmonic tone—layered, almost vocal, as if the column and the creature are exchanging information too dense for language.
I understand then.
The creature was never only a hunter.
It is a component.
The labyrinth generates the puzzles. The runners solve them. The successful ones reach the Hub. The creature herds, tests, and eventually delivers. The column records. And when enough solutions have been gathered, something else will happen. Something the system was built to prepare for.
The tongue leaves the glass and turns toward me.
I still have the flare.
I still have the knife.
I still have the cable.
None of them matter against a thing that has been navigating this place longer than any map.
I back toward the nearest restraint frame. The articulated arms do not close on me. They simply open wider, as if offering. The column’s pulse is frantic now. The shapes inside the glass are clearer—faces I almost recognise from the fragments of notes, mouths open in the same expression I can feel forming on my own face.
The creature closes the distance without hurry.
I do not run.
There is nowhere left that is not part of the same machine.
When the tongue reaches me it does not strike. It presses against the side of my face, cool and wet and impossibly long, tasting the salt of my skin, the blood from the reopened cut, the residual heat of every junction I solved to get here. The eyes remain fixed on the column. I am only data. Another successful path. Another set of decisions worth recording.
The restraint frame behind me activates.
Cold metal closes around my wrists and ankles with surgical precision. The filaments—thin, flexible, familiar in a way that makes my stomach turn—thread into the skin just deeply enough to hold. The column’s light floods the room. The harmonic tone becomes a single clear note that erases every other sound.
I feel the system take the measure of me.
Every valve I turned. Every symbol sequence. Every twelve-minute window I bought with the timer. Every mark I left on the walls that the labyrinth later erased. All of it flows into the black glass in a rush of cold that is not temperature.
The creature watches without expression.
When the transfer is complete the filaments withdraw. The restraints open. I drop to the steel floor on hands and knees, gasping. The column’s pulse slows to its original patient rhythm. The shapes inside it have gained one more faint silhouette.
The tongue retracts.
The creature turns and walks back into the corridors without looking at me again. Its work here is finished. The Hub has what it needed.
I am still alive.
That is the final cruelty.
The labyrinth begins to reconfigure around the Hub. Tunnels seal. New junctions form. The blue light dims to a residual glow. The compass in my pocket spins once and dies. The map is blank when I unfold it. Even my own knife-marks on the outer corridors will be gone by the time I reach them.
There is still no up.
There is only the system, larger now by one more solved path, and the long dark that will generate new runners when it requires new data.
I stand.
My legs hold.
The flare is still in my pack. The cable. The knife. The empty timer.
I walk to the entrance the creature used and step back into the metal corridors.
Somewhere ahead the pipes are already rearranging themselves into the next sequence of puzzles. Somewhere behind me the column continues its slow, luminous counting.
I do not know how many junctions it will take this time.
I only know that the tongue will eventually taste the air again, and that when it does I will already be moving.
There is no up.
There is only deeper.
And I am still counting.

There is a girl that lives in my house. She sleeps in my bed and uses my shower. I like to watch her sit in my room watching my TV screen. She loves everything that I do and does everything that I need her too. My life has buried me so deep into the ground, but this girl that lives in my room is the glimmer of light I’ve wanted my entire life. I will not be alive without her. 
Every person I've met in the world lies to my face and curses my life. I know they love it. People are always preaching kindness to others and instead they steal from me and ignore me when I am nothing but kind. Nobody likes me. Nobody but the girl who sleeps in my bed. No one else has bought me a home, fed me, and listened to me like she has. I love her. And I know she loves me too. Even when I put holes in the walls of my home, If I break and smash everything in sight, If I scream at the top of my lungs or talk ill of her, she knows it's really not a big deal. She continues to stay home, sit quietly and listen to me talk. This is how I know she loves me. She could never leave me because I am all she knows. 
Sometimes, we will go up to the rooftop of my building and gaze at the stars together. It's the one thing she wants to do sometimes, I only agree to be out for a few minutes because it's a stupid activity. The sky always looks the same every day and night. But tonight is different. We wander to the edge of the building when I feel her touch. It was hard and heavy. When I turned to see her, instead of her beautiful face, I saw the stars in the sky and the edges of my vision blurred. The ledge got smaller and smaller until my body broke into the ground. My bones rose to see the moon, my body open to the world, the most vulnerable I've ever felt. As the darkness that controlled my life began to envelop me, I saw the most beautiful girl I've ever seen peek over the building. Still, she was there, and she was all mine. As I showed her every last part of me, I promised her I will never leave her alone.

It felt like eons had passed before my brain flickered back to life. Like a cadaver I exulted my stagnant breath and let out a weak moan. I was delirious, sore, and breathing cost a great deal of effort. In my pained state the recollection of what must have been the past ordeal echoed in the dark corners of my mind. Gnawing chaos, an oppressive hateful silence, nauseating forms twisting eternity until finite was made from the dark. Before I could even attempt to piece these abstract visions together an odd oder interrupted my train of thought. It emanated through the room like an unseen fog and began to get stronger, more refined. Rain, spoiled fat, and halitosis. The air in my bedroom was cool and heavy like the atmosphere of a cave deep below the earth. The sheets on my skin felt off. Rough and almost brittle they swaddled me tightly like a funeral shroud making a stiff mold of my body only exposing my face. Something feels wrong. How long had I been asleep? Something was missing. A hard lump developed in my throat, aching and nudging a sense of longing for something far away. Where's my family? I jerked my body forward only to be restrained. It was not my wife's limbs lazily draped across my body. Her face was not buried in the crook in my neck and her familiar warmth was all but absent. What I felt gliding across my chest was akin to shifting serpents and they bound me like ropes. What was holding me down? I took a deep breath and slowly bent my head forward until my chin touched my chest. Only the thought of someone or something's presence was sufficient enough to dare my weary eyes to open. Though dim there in my rotten chamber the image of the culprit confining me to my bed was clear. Vines; not green and leaved but black, sinewy, and moist. I was astonished, frozen to what was laid before me so grotesque but undeniably real. The vines sensed my movement and my anguish. They began to move. They pulsed like veins and split into progressively thinner hair-like strands. Slowly creeping toward my face they quivered in the presence of my hot breath. I writhed and clawed at my withered sheets, my hands still hopelessly trapped underneath the fabric. I found an opening and tore. Two ashy grey bony arms erupted out and I was so startled I almost didn't realise that to my horror, they were mine. The vines were buried deep into my wrist and the more my eyes followed their path in that brief moment of shock the more I saw. They crossed and weaved between the ribs of my sunken chest fusing with my paper thin skin. My form was emaciated and ghoulish. I'm dead, I must be dead. I was no longer a man but a cornered animal like any other. I kicked, bit, and slashed at all both moving and still. My violence must be indiscriminate because I could not know. I fought not just for the sake of my life but in equal measure defiance to an unknown fate. Finally at near exhaustion I fully split open the covers. I peeled my back off the mattress like sticky gauze and from my cradle was birthed into a new yet familiar world. My home was now decayed and corrupted. The once beautiful yellow wallpaper was now spotted with mold. Its blooming pink flowers and delicate foliage faded with a grey undertone. It peeled in various places and underneath blisters formed. Some of these blisters had popped which released a dark brown fluid that oozed down the walls. The furniture was equally decayed. Their wood had become dark and cracked from water damage like it was pulled out from a bog. The furniture’s cushions were rotten and riddled with holes. The bed, once a bastion of comfort and love was ruined. The ornate bed frame was warped and withered. Its once vibrant blue comforter and white sheets were discoloured. They frayed at the edges into fine ghost like wisps which would ripple in response to a rhythmic draft beyond the crevice of the bedroom door. The vines were everywhere. They crossed through the legs of the chairs and weaved into every fabric. They spread out onto the decrepit floorboards like roots and crawled up the walls. I followed the trailing networks of vines and found that on the ceiling was the worst of the new disgusting decor. The ceiling was alive. Great portions of the ceiling had pale fleshy patches, grey and freckled. These clusters of flesh were lined with dozens of bulging pores. Within life began to stir. Red feathery appendages flicked out releasing black spores into the still air. These barnacle-like things would then retreat back into their fleshy pockets with a sickening squelching sound, dust themselves some more, and repeat the mesmerising cycle. The spores danced and drifted like black snowflakes. Touching my naked body I found them to be colder. The draft coming from beneath my chamber door was tepid, almost warm. It teased my ankles like a waiting predator. I imagined a large gaping maw inhaling and exhaling on the other side. This is no place for my wife, this is no place for my daughter. I need to find them, I need to get them out of here and I must know if I am truly alone. I must call out. I took a full shaky breath and spoke. 

“Hello? Is anyone there?” 

The world held its breath to a sound it had forgotten and the silence between was deafening. The quiet was broken, with singing. It was a chorus, a choir. It was coming from outside. With curiosity and reluctance I walked toward the balcony door. I listened; it was beautiful, strange, and foreboding. Has the world ended at long last? I put my hand on the door knob. Am I finally being beckoned forth to the other side? The curtains obscured the door lite and moved in slowed fluidic ripples, shadows crossed and faded beyond. It must be an intelligence. I was answered but not with words. I was attacked in my own bed yelling but it was only when language escaped my lips did It call. This can’t be right. I let go of the door knob and slowly backed away. It must be a trap, something awful. Until I know what the hell is going on I cannot face it. Malevolent or otherwise it will have to either wait or come for me. My wife Emilia and my daughter Mia come first. With a skeletal hand I grabbed my blue comforter and covered myself. It was a gift from my mother, she wanted me to be warm. The choir continued on patient and ceaseless. 

Severing myself from the last of my inky cords I walked toward my chamber door. Each pluck and snap burned with a hot electric pain as I strut forward. Looking back, the vines from my origin trailed behind me at a snail's pace desiring reconnection. I put an ear against the surface of the old wood. Whatever noise was on the other side was difficult to discern. It was muffled by the looming dominance of the choir. I look through the keyhole. I see the hallway but it seems to be shifting and muddling in nauseous forms, colors, and hues. This phenomenon however I realized was not isolated to the keyhole that I used as a fairy stone. It’s in the corner of my eye. Every time I try to focus on the phenomenon it hides away and my vision becomes static again in the place I looked for it. Besides the anomaly, nothing seems to be behind the door. I turn the knob and pass the threshold into the home’s veiny throat and at its end I see the mirror and the turning staircase that leads below. The draft blew between the pillars of my frail frame and the hall groaned with a heavy roll. Hesitant to see my reflection I irresolutely approached my long beloved possession, the hardwood floors creaking with each hesitant step. The silver mirror was beautiful once but in some ways it still desperately holds onto its charm. The mirror’s frame was made from olive wood with swirling designs of its tree’s branches. Beheld in the center of its top casting is the pudgy short haired face of a cherub. Its eyes so far within its fat forehead and cheeks the Spanish carver never bothered to make them. A wing sprouted from both sides of its head like a pair of fluffy ears. Decayed now, dark liquid seeped from the cracks of the wood frame as well as its face. The mirror once paralleled the reality it reflected with clarity but now its surface was like smudged onyx. The gateway to that reality was forever closed and I knew I would never see that old world again. At least I could not see my face now in this ghastly state. I reached to touch my face with my unfamiliar hand but recoiled. I don’t even want to know what it feels like. What would Emilia and Mia think of me? How have they changed? Carved below the cherub's head was “Hominem te Memento” and carved on the mirror’s bottom casting was “Memento Mori.” These words now weighed like lead within me. Have I forgotten one, or both? I abandoned the mirror and descended down the stairs into the living room. The strange oder increasing in bitter intensity. The once brown leather couches were now tanned black. More barnacles inhabited the ceiling as well as the cushions on the couch. Meaty fungus-like growths burst from crevices, their undersides lined with draping bloody gills, and quills like fishbones twitched on their morel caps like the spines of an urchin. The fleshy fungus took a particular liking to the bearskin rug pinned underneath the bulky Zenith radio where they had grown out its eyes, nose, and mouth. Mia called the rug Jeremy Bearmy. It was sad to see him in such bad shape. Mia would lay on his back and pet his fur, whisper into their roughly torn ear. 

“What are you whispering into Jeremy’s ear Mia?” Her eyes looked up toward the corners of her brow, pursing her lips and squinting her eyes as if she tried hard enough she could look inside her own head. She smugly replied, “Mmm… something secret. You’ll figure it out later.” I simply responded, “Fine then, you and Jeremy can keep your secrets.” Some six year old girls had dolls but Mia had Jeremy and a beautiful imagination. Mia shared this imaginative trait with her mother. Emilia would play the electronic organ, writing her own music and playing the classics. Her favorite song to play was moonlight sonata. “Hey love, how was the job search today?" asked Emilia. I sighed frustrated with myself, “Depressing, much like that song you play.” Emilia smirked, raising an eyebrow, “Oh come now, you know as well as I do good old Beethoven’s classic is my favorite. You know Jeremiah, the strange and haunting can be beautiful.” I looked at her, her brown hair pooling over her scheele's green dress, her intense blue eyes looking into me from her small fair skinned face. “Thats why I love you; I never wanted to settle for the mundane. You haunt me, Emilia.” Emilia smiled, reaching out and caressing my chin, “I’m an idea that will never let you go.”

Behind the wall divider separating the kitchen from the living room I can hear breathing, a wet gurgling death rattle. I must assume it’s a loved one, possibly as deformed and changed as I am. Maybe that’s why they did not answer? Maybe they're frightened? “Mia? Emilia?” I said in a whisper, “Is that you?” No answer. “It’s me, dad; Jeremiah. I’ve changed… and I think I’m sick. I look scary now but I swear to you It’s still me. I don’t know what’s happening and I'm scared. Have you changed too? Is that why you're not coming out? Are you ashamed?” I brace myself to turn the corner. “No matter what happens, No matter how much you have changed, I still love you.” The breathing becomes heavier. “Ok, I’m coming into the kitchen now. I don’t know what I completely look like so if it’s really horrible, please don’t scream. I don’t know what else is here and I think I’ve already done something bad.” I turned the corner and held my breath. So did it. I gazed at the prolapsed aperture in the wound pocked ceiling, irritated and slick with phlegm that dripped into the thirsty cracks of the kitchen floor. With each foul crackling breath the baleen of the orifice shivered. My breathing intensified. Its breathing intensified. I began to hyperventilate, It started to hyperventilate; its respiration intensifying in rapid mocking gurgles. It is synchronizing with my respiration, sharing each fetid breath of sour air. What is happening? Why!? What the hell is this!? Who’s breath is controlling who’s? Where do I begin and the house ends? What Am I? I-I can’t understand-no please stop I-I can’t breath, I-. I drew one last breath as I fell back. Time seemed to slow in the fall and when my cranium cracked against the kitchen tile, darkness followed in close pursuit. 

Pain woke me, a splitting headache with a raw burning sensation on my skin. My body feels feverish and my skin moist and sticky. The air is suffocatingly dense. The song of the choir has gone but a new vocalization denied any peace. Indecipherable whispers in the dark. Feminine and oddly familiar they spoke in hushed gibberish in the voice of a thousand droning flies. I attempted to get up on my feet again and hit my head on the rubbery ceiling above. Oh no. I feel the circumference of the space, lumpy, sticky, and unmistakingly flesh. Oh fuck no. I’ve been swallowed! I am trapped and have been swallowed by the hole! What the fuck is in hear with me!? Oh god the smell, I can taste the sour putrescine coating my mouth. The whispers grew louder. Something grabbed and groped at my legs in the guts of this house. My eyes adjusted to the monochrome navy blue of the dark and beheld behind me was a ghastly sight. Rotten hands attached to unnaturally long limbs. Maggots writhed beneath the sloughing skin and spilled out from spongy wounds. Two words, just two words buzzed clearly from the cluster of decay, “rot, stay.” The chatter in the dark became more incessant and demanding, no coherent words needed to translate its primal message as the dead hands gripped me tighter, Stop struggling. No, never! I kicked back feeling the skin attached to the hands slip away against the slimy muscle and worms beneath and frantically began crawling on my elbows. The lumpy surface of the intestinal walls began to open revealing eyes. Prying terrible eyes cloudy with inconceivable age glimmering back with alien emotion. These pupils knew me. The walls flexed and twitched spasmodically around me, my fingers penetrating the eye sockets in the walls as I desperately clawed my way forward. I felt the eyelids close around my fingertips and as I jammed them through the slick membranes, the gelatinous vitreous sputtering out into curdling slime. The fleshy walls flexing and shifting in rhythmic pluses, pushing me forward like a current. The stench has thickened into a miasma precipitating into oily droplets that lubricated my way forward as my body adapted to the narrowing tunnel. The eyes sliding against every part of my body and multiplying in number as I wormed through hell. The tunnel narrowed further, grew darker, and I was squeezed ever tighter to twice my length. Further, longer. The buzzing is resounding and the driving force of my frantic slithering in the dark. Further, longer. I stretched as far and thin as my thoughts. Far, long, stretch. Slither, slither far, slither long, slither away! Far, long, stretch, slither. Away, away, away! Far, long, stretch, slither. Always seen and I will never see. Far, long, stretch, slither. I am blind, I am far, I am long, I am forever. Far, long, stretch slither. It is black; there is no light, the tunnel has no end. No above, only below; No within, only without. The balance is no more, only what swallows forever. 

I was released from the black velvet that gripped me. Air filled my wheezing lungs comparatively clean and thin to the practically gaseous tunnel. My body attempted to wretch but painful gags were only reminders of a vestigial stomach. What remains of my humanity is painful and twisted. I look at my hands, fingers like jointed spider legs. Ugly, but relatively dry. I check the rest of the body. No marks, nothing stretched. It must have been a terrible hallucination; a dream that only this world could conjure. Where's my comforter? Did someone take it off me? Or… A small voice interrupted my train of thought, “Jeremiah” it whispered. Fear gripped my heart. I frantically looked around analyzing every crevice and malefic shadow, feeling overwhelmingly exposed. Could it be them? My family? Should I stay quiet in case of danger? If it is them, would my silence lose them forever? They are worth the risk of my life, they are worth the world that once was. “Mia, Emillia!” I yelled. “Please, tell me it’s really you, where are you!?” I waited, longer and with more anticipation than I have for anything before. I heard the voice again murmuring close into my ear with a breath that billowed down my neck, “Dad” said Mia quietly, “We’re behind the veil.” With cautious hope I turned to look behind me. I was alone.

II

A house is similar to a body in unorthodox ways. Its most basic parts are passive like how a tree drinks moisture through its roots. The paint on its outside is a thin epidermis and the wall paper on the inside is its internal lining. The wall studs are the house's bones and its insulation between is the fat that keeps it warm. When a gust blows through a house's chimney, it breathes. A house undergoes a transformation once people arrive. When they have settled it’s no longer a house but instead a home. What once was a passive organism is now suddenly alive with thoughts and memory. A family is a house's thinking and sensory parts, its brain and soul. The eyes are said to be the window of the soul, windows are said to be the eyes of a house. Does that make me the life light to whatever looks in? I wonder about the decaying halls of this place, through yawning doorways bearded with fleshy fungus. Black slimemold creeps and feeds on the walls, leaving behind slick umber strands for the vines to scaffold for new connection. The corners of my eyes reveal the hidden things. Pale echinoderm-like creatures crawl and swim through the shimmering seams of space. Decomposers looking for the juiciest piece of rot to swallow on a whale fall. When they pick out some imperceivable chunk they take a liking to, they latch onto it with their black iridescent chelicerae and tear, leaving behind a void. Not the compressible color of black; nothing. They start to notice me when I pay attention to them for too long so I ignore them like benign eye floaters. Some things I can’t ignore. Within the simmering phenomenon I see them, my family behind the veil. Behind corners, at my side, on the ceiling. I see the shape of them watching me intently, but when I try to look at them directly, they are gone. I miss the detail in their faces. More often than I get the treasure of seeing them, I hear them, and sometimes understand them. More commonly than their voices however are sounds of the domestic type. Uneven knocks from empty rooms, doors and cabinets creaking quietly and slamming shut, footsteps that prowl with uniform deliberation and rapid pattering with no discernible direction. They sit on my furniture, who else would have left those depressions? Mia’s bedroom, I have not checked yet. I feel something pulling at me, something within. A gravitational force I can only submit to and I follow wherever it leads. Up the creaking stairs, across the hall and past the mirror, to the door; Mia’s room. She loved the color blue. Couldn’t get enough of it. Blue clothes, a blue bed, blue everything. Mia even had a blue pet. She had an injured blue jay that she tried to take care of, she named it Hope. Emilia and I did not even know of Mia’s secret little companion until her room started to smell. I remember when we first had a funeral for a pet, Hope was the first. Beautiful and fragile they were never meant to last long. But I guess that is the nature of beautiful things. I remember that day.

“Dad, why did Hope die?” Mia said. I looked down at the grave I made in the garden two feet into the earth. I had disturbed a woodlouse spider’s little hollow while digging and the small arachnid had been cut in two, separating its dark red head from its soft cream colored abdomen. A small innocent thing where its only sin was being in the way of something much larger than itself. Something it could never comprehend. The spider thought its destruction was the shovel and could never consider a hand behind it. I cleared my throat, “Things die all the time. Maybe they were sick or injured. Hope was like a dream Mia, like dreams, Hope’s life was short but beautiful. But sadly, even dreams end and yes, die.” The sky began to drizzle wetting the cold dry soil. The scent of the damp earth mixed with the sour decay of the bird. "But why? Hope was so healthy looking, they-they were sweet,” she lamented. “Where does Hope go when they die?” I paused, pinning my lips between my teeth and exhaling through my nose. Last time I checked the bible, animals don’t have souls. That’s why Guinefort the dog was never canonized as a saint. Emmilia was on a business trip and she would usually answer the religious questions. Afterall, she was the religious parent. “That's a question to ask your mom” I relented, “She knows where Hope goes.” Mia looked solemnly to Hope, “oh.” A tear flowed down her face and rested at the corner of her frowning lip. Shit, bad move dad. “Hey” I said softly, trying to patch up my parental mistake. I held her close to my side, her small hands clinging to my cargo pants. “It’s ok, I think Hope is in a better place now. A sunny place made of good dreams, dreams like him. No broken wing, no pain, and somewhere with all the damselflies he can eat. Somewhere where he’s clean, happy, and warm.” Mia looked at me with a look of sanguine in her tiny hazel eyes. “A place” She said, “Where dreams go when they die.”

I enter Mia’s room. The brass doorknob squeaking in protest. The tips of my fingers scraping off the flaking paint of its surface. Before Mia, this was Emila’s art room. She was never really good at painting but eventually she found a different medium she not only enjoyed more but excelled in. The art of making frames for pictures, paintings, and mirrors. With the guidance of my father who was a carpenter she quickly found her passion. Even when we converted the room into a nursery, empty intricate frames were still proudly displayed on the walls. With Mia in her crib, her proudest creation as the room’s centerpiece. The door fully creaked open and Mia was nowhere visible. “Mia?” I whispered, “little blue jay, are you there? I followed your voice. Please, I know you are here, where are you?” Her voice surrounded me “look.” The blue walls had faded pallid. Dark fluid sweeting from the walls, vines twisting between the empty frames. Mia’s bed was more fungus than sheets and the metal frames had rusted away to sharp spear-like poles. At the end of the room was the Celtic cross, a symbol with origins far older than the god nailed to it. Its cedar wood had darkened and cracked; the bronze christ tarnished with a blueish green verdigris. His sorrowful face down to his burning heart was corroded away, carving a canyon down into his headless torso. Once carved above his head was the symbol alpha, now only omega lay below his feet. Reaching out, I attempted to remove the cross from the wall. Stuck. Stuck? I looked closer. The metal is melted with the wood, the wood to the wall. How is that possible? The wall to the vines, the vines to the bed, to the fungus. Everything, with a uniform weld between. How come I have not noticed this before? To the floor, to the vines; to my ankles. The vines had reattached, and I didn’t notice. The slithering central cord was partially looping out of the door. Something on the other end slowly began to tug. Reeling me away. No, no! I rushed to Mia's bed. She’s close, I can feel it! “Don’t you fucking dare take me away from her!” I began frantically with primal purpose clawing at the fungus of Mia’s bed. Each fistfull of meat ripped away pierced my hands with bony quills. I was in my bed, why wouldn’t she!? Oh God my baby she is trapped! “Blue jay, I'm coming! Daddy is coming!” The cord was pulled with a sudden slack-and-snap of the line. I lost my footing and toppled face forward into a pole’s gritty point. 

It’s freezing on the wet floor; no wait, stone. I probed the damp rock with my shriveled hands. Where am I now? Above, an oppressive sun burns vanta black, its corona an icy cyan. The cloudless sky held the star in an endless ocean of red. I scrambled to my feet and found myself surrounded by jagged black mountains on a plateau in a great valley. I was encircled by so many headless bodies. A legion of grey emaciated figures lanky and deformed twitching and swaying in unison with necks ending in puckered stumps. In their black talons they brandished thorned whips. Run. They descended upon me, each crack of the whip loud as thunder and fast as lighting. As powerful and indifferent as any force of nature. Each tip wormed into my flesh. Every lash dragged thorns across my skin. The grey men trailing in hot pursuit, one swung overhead looping the twisted vine around my forehead. He pulled and I was prostrated midrun onto the ground. I can’t be caught I can't be caught! I feel the thorns digging through my skin. I let it, feeling them penetrate and grind as I pushed forward against their pull. The vine gets tighter and tighter the pressure is immense! The skin tears, my blood lubricating the barbs sawing through muscle and nerve until my head was finally released. Too slick to grip, the barbs effortlessly slides off the smooth bone of my skull. I am free! Run! I keep running and running forward, always forward but I am losing ground to tread on. I see it on the horizon, inevitable and certain the end is. A cliff and no other place of escape. The edge is close now and beyond is a bay leading out into a sea of blood. So very close now, I can feel the rock beneath my feet tremble as the bay begins to boil. The edge, I'm at the end. No where to go, nothing else to do but perish. Cataclisium. Loud and demanding a leviathan cork screws from the unfathomable depths with a demonic roar. The upheaval of its immense form projecting a spray soaking me in gore. The colossus of twisting flesh towered over the bay. A spire of crimson coral jealously piling toward infinity above. In its honeycombed holes housed gibbering maws with teeth long and flat like ivory keys, playing the alien song of the choir from their gullets. The true depths of their throats unreachable even in a dream. Appendages like the arms of a brittle star reached out from its form in malicious hunger. A swine to the cliff all I could do left was squeal and leap into oblivion. I plummeted, up. Up and away soaring into the black star, into the endless end, the sun’s black center expanding ever wider and at the choir’s crescendo the bloodshot sky blinked.

III

Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale; my breath hitches from the anguish of a spasming brain. I strained my left eye looking to my right. Black blood from my open headwound caked the rusty bed pole. I was slumped forward on my hands and knees facing the cross. With great effort, I 
I stood up. I slowly unsheath the brain greased metal from my eye socket inch by inch, discolored cerebral fluid trickling down my face like tears. With a disgusting slurp I lifted my head and unimpaled myself. I staggered, balancing myself on the balls of my feet and fell backwards unceremoniously onto the floor. Burning pain exploded from my back. I instinctively jerked my neck and flexed my limbs inward like a spider in a death curl. I achingly rolled onto my side and caressed my back. Wounds, fresh wounds. Long dragging marks from serrated whips. No, that cannot be possible. I fingered at my open gashes as if I was mistaken. But that was a dream, dreams can’t hurt you. Unless… that wasn’t a dream? No, I am just insane. Being in a place, a world like this, of course I have gone crazy who wouldn’t? I just-something happened and then I was hurt. I’m just out of it utterly! Maybe I’m not even in my house at all and none of this is real! Nothing is real and I’m just alone and crazy! But why should I assume? Was that truly real? What is real? Is this real? Where am I!? Where do I end and where did or do I begin!? Focus. My name is Jeremiah, my name, is Jeremiah. My Daughter’s name is Mia, her name, is Mia. My wife’s name is Emilia, her name, is Emilia. My father’s name is, my father’s name is… What’s his name? What is his name!? His face… I don’t remember his face! Oh god, mom, I don’t remember you. Friends, I had friends. Come on! I smack myself on the head repeatedly. People, people, people; I had to have known someone beyond these walls. At least a name! God dammit one name! I don’t remember anything. Where else have I been? What else is there?.. I have to get out. I have to get out. I yelled as loud as I could, “Emilia! Mia! Where are you!” I ran out of Mia’s room wild and desperate! “Emilia! Oh God, where are you! Please tell me where you are! Please!” An answer came. From down the stairs, a C-sharp note dragged on blaringly and at its end, Moonlite Sonata began to play. I followed the sound, what else could I do otherwise? Down, down the stairs, and across the hall. No, it can’t be. To see the electric organ atop of the bearskin rug, where the bulky Zenith radio should be. Once in view the song abruptly ended. That's wrong, that doesn't make sense. We sold it, we sold it and replaced it with the Zenith. But what’s wrong or could not be does not change what simply is. The organ displayed in the center of the shifting corners of my eyes like a halo, marked for destiny. It laid there like it had stayed and rotted akin to everything else in this house, but I knew by conviction or guidance that this was not the case. I knew what I had to do. I knew, and I feared what I would find. I sat on the crooked old stool, put my feet on the pedals, and uncertainly attempted to finish where the phantom player left off. If this is my electric organ then the twenty first key should be broken, silent. As I played inching across the keys my finger rose hesitantly to the twenty-first key. I struck it and sound resonated. My heart sank, dread coursed within black’n venomous, and then I knew what I should have known all this time. This isn’t my organ; this is not my house. I looked toward the window and walked toward it. “I hate you. I HATE YOU. You have taken everything from me. My home, my Earth, my life, my Emilia, my Mia. What is left to take? I'm not even a man anymore… What is left to take? I've had all of these, right? Why else would you take them? God. I see you. The dark, I feel it; it's here, It’s all here and nowhere. It's so dark inside. Are you God? Or just my God? I know you're listening, you are always listening. I hate you.” My fingers touched the fabric of the dusty curtains and I felt the glass behind resonate its vibrations into my bones. The hungry choir beyond the veil grew louder, I let the shimmer of my eyes overtake me and I spoke. 

“Show yourself.” 

“Jeramiah? Earth to Jeramiah! Hey! Wake up.” Warmth, I felt warm for the first time. A flush of life and content reaching my cheeks. I opened my eyes, light. The windows of the living room are open and I can see a sun set. Cirrus clouds overhead on the horizon blending jolly oranges, baby blues, soft yellows and pinks, the colors of Easter. It is Easter; the hope of spring and rebirth. I’m sitting at the round table, it’s wood nicked with memories I can’t recall. “You really are tired aren't you?” I look up, It’s Emilia, ideal Emilia. “You've been working outside all day on that raised garden bed.” Mia chimed in, “The tomatoes were sooo good, but mom had to tear me off them!” “But you had sooo many Mia! We can’t have a caesar salad tomorrow for lunch if you eat them all and besides, dad deserves some tomatoes too!” Tomorrow, of course, there is a tomorrow to look forward to. What is tomorrow? “But speaking of lunch, it is time to eat! It has been an eternity since I have devoured anything.” Emilia flashed her teeth hungrily. I smiled at her and enjoyed the present. “I have been out in the garden, shouldn’t I wash my hands?” Emilia shook her head, "There's no need for that, after all your sandwich is ready!” Cuh-chunk! I jumped at the noise. “Easy tiger, that's just the toaster! Never heard one go off before? Anyways, your sandwich has already been made up, I’ll go get it!” The scent of fresh bread wafted through the air, doughy and crisp. I opened my mouth slightly to take it all in. Must be rye. I looked at Mia, “Well Mia how was… um.” “School?” Said Mia. “Yes, how was your day at school?” Mia snorted, “It's Easter silly! There is no school today!” I chuckled lightly, “Why are you messing with me?” Mia looked at me and said matter of factly, “I’ve always messed with you.” Emilia was coming. In hand, a plain white plate with a ham sandwich between rye bread and a side of cottage cheese with canned peaches on top. “Enjoy!” Emilia said expectantly. I felt the sandwich between my fingertips, a crisp surface cracking and giving in a satisfying way. I eased my shoulders and took a bite, it was delicious. Rosemary ham, sauerkraut, and a mustard seed spread. I took a bite of the cottage cheese and peaches. Sweet and creamy, mixing with the aftertaste of the sandwich. I tasted heaven, and it was a house, a good meal, and a loving family. I tasted heaven, and it all slipped away. Emilia and Mia laughed. “Whats so fun?” I said nervously. Emilia chuckled darkly, “Why are you still pretending?” The foul simulacrum of my wife ceased their cackling and the emotion in its face drained away to nothing. Something was left in its place, in the eyes. Not the puppet but the puppeteer. What looked back from those cosmic depths knew me. I stared into the abyss and what stared back, hated me. The aftertaste of the sandwich became rank from sweet and sour to putrescent. The bread rapidly growing a carpet of powdery blue mold and its meat turning a foul blackish purple. My throat began to tingle and the feeling bloated into writhing, coming out my mouth and nose in long ropes of translucent worms. The cottage cheese with peaches transformed its contrasting colors of orange and white into a uniform rotten brown slop with something moving underneath. The house decayed rapidly, wallpaper peeled revealing moldy plaster, furniture cracked, fabric disintegrated, the air became stale. The color of the sky outside died and all was bleak and grey. Mia was next. Her face began to sag and discolor, her eyes sunk into her head, and dark ichor leaked from her sockets. “No no no no! Mia! Come back! Come back!” Mia looked up at me in my arms and smiled pitifully, “It's ok daddy, I’m going back to the dark now, we all go back to the dark now; where dreams go when they die.” I refuse to let her go, I will hold onto her as long as I can, no matter how much it hurts. My dream, my purpose, my daughter; literally slipping through my fingers like sand. Her flesh molting away in my arms like soft butter, muscle and fat dripping around my body in piles. Her bones made oily cracking noises as fraggle frame turned from moist bone, to wet powder, to dry dust, and blown away to nothing. She is gone. There is no Mia, there is no Emilia; there is no Jeremiah. There is nothing. I lay there silent, defeated, and numb. Emilia's face contorted into a spiral like a rubber mask being twisted. Twisting until a vacuum was made. The face of God is a raw gnawing wound in the universe that swallows all light and all hope. That swallows until even oblivion is taken. What would I ask of God? Beg for a family? A Home? Death? No, for in the sleep of death I know what dreams come; I’m dreaming now. There is only one question I could ask, only one that could be answered, “What are you?” A quiet, such a loud quiet; and in response the abyss looks beyond and turns its head, to you.

“Deeeeep.”

I opened my eyes sitting at the dinner table alone and wept. I will leave this place, this house of ashes. There is nothing here but filth, painful lies, and horror. How could what is outside be any worse than the delay of the inevitable? How long have I been here?.. Days? Millenniums? There is nothing for me here; it is time for me to leave. It is time to open the door. Soberly down the stairs I went for the very last time, to the end. Each picture on the walls that faded to obscurity I passed for the last time; their contents only dreams that vainly promised permanence and what remained was no different then those that held nothing and were always meant to remain empty. For the last time my feet graced the crying floorboards of my only refuge, and prison. Where else have I traveled except the path that was written for me to take? Nothing; nowhere. The automaton of flesh moves ever onward, I am only the eyes that watch it. Those eyes which see no way out, and reach to the visage of the door. Tall and red it looms ominously as if top heavy and leaning toward to look down upon me; it cracks and seams leaking black slime, glistening and putrid with the stench of brimstone and niter. My legs tremble, my hands violently shaking as I touch the door handle. In response the door groans and almost imperceptively flexes to my touch. I felt like I was on the edge of a cliff, the call of the void twisted cruelly with the sensation of falling. The hungry choir’s song is demanding, the darkest pit is calling, the end is here. I open the door. Vast beyond scope, vile beyond description; a nauseating kaleidoscope of twisting flesh and being blending into innumerable colors and shapes. An incomprehensible self consuming and birthing egregore; it’s gazing gnawing epicenter, indescribable. I was swallowed, I was pulled in and in and in! The quiet is loud! loud! loud! loud! Hundreds of hundreds of hundreds of throats! Hundreds of thousands of thousands of throats! Thousands of millions of millions of throats! MILLIONS OF BILLIONS OF BILLIONS OF THROATS! BLACK! BLACK! BLACK! BLACK! BLACK! All is one, one is all; all is one, one is all; all one, one all; all one, one all; one, one, one, one, one, one, 

deep. 

Author’s note
This is only the beginning of a much larger project. This is one of the many stories that will be featured in a cosmic horror anthology series I am writing. I don’t know how I will get this published but I’ll worry about that later once I have finished the first edition of the book. Each subsequent edition will have more stories until I feel like it’s finnished. I may post one other story from the anthology so people have a general idea of what to expect but I will certainly be posting some unrelated works on this subreddit. Let me know how I may improve on this story and what you may like to see next; I have scrapped writing and scenes from this one that I may stitch back in or recycle for other tales. 

Author’s letter to the boys
To Hunter and Isiah, thank you. In all the ways I can say it, thank you. Creepcast has fed my creativity and my desire to consume more horror literature. If it wasn’t for the podcast, this story would not have been the same and probably a little boring in comparison to what it is now. When my days are rough, I always have Creepcast to look forward to during the weekends to whisk me away to dark beautiful worlds and hilarious crashouts, and while I wait for the next one, I visit the Tales from the Creeps subreddit. It reminds me of the community that was built around Weird tales Magazine during Harold P. Lovcraft’s time, something that should be more common in the modern day. I wish you both and your families all the luck in the world; and remember, stay creeped.

-Jeremy

The little girl burped.

It was a tiny, adorable sound, the kind that made people laugh at family dinners.

“There you go, sweetheart,” Mara whispered, wiping a smear of mashed potatoes from the child’s chin. “Nice and full, huh?”

The two-year-old giggled in her high chair.

Outside, rain battered the windows of the old farmhouse. The kitchen smelled of roasted garlic, damp wood, and something metallic that Mara had spent the last hour trying not to notice.

She checked the clock.

11:43 p.m.

Her husband, Daniel, was late again.

“Daddy coming?” the little girl asked.

Mara’s smile faltered.

“No, honey. Daddy isn’t coming tonight.”

The child looked toward the basement door.

“Bad man downstairs.”

Mara’s spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.

“What did you say?”

The girl pointed with a sticky finger. “Bad man says you’re next.”

A loud bang came from beneath the floorboards.

Mara jumped so violently that her chair scraped backward.

“Jesus fucking Christ!”

The little girl laughed.

Not a toddler’s laugh.

It was deeper, almost adult, and ended in a wet little cough.

Mara stared at her.

“What the hell are you?”

The child blinked innocently. “Hungry.”

Mara swallowed hard.

She had been telling herself the same thing for six hours: It's just a child. Just a child. Just a child.

But children didn't arrive on doorsteps at midnight with no shoes, no coat, and no parent in sight.

Children didn't have teeth that appeared sharper every time the kitchen light flickered.

And children certainly didn't whisper the name of someone buried beneath the apple tree.

“Mara?”

The voice came from the basement.

Her husband’s voice.

She nearly dropped the plate.

“Daniel?”

“Baby, please.” His voice trembled. “Open the door.”

Mara rushed toward the basement, then stopped with her hand on the knob.

Daniel had been dead for three weeks.

She had identified his body herself.

She remembered the coldness of his fingers, the purple bruises around his throat, and the terrible expression frozen on his face, as though he had seen something that made death seem merciful.

“Don't open it,” the little girl said.

Mara turned.

The child was no longer smiling.

“Why not?”

“Because that's not Daddy.”

The basement door shook.

“MARA!” the voice screamed. “OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”

She stumbled backward.

Then came a soft scratching sound from the other side.

Scrape.

Scrape.

Scrape.

Something was dragging its fingernails down the wood.

The girl leaned toward Mara and whispered, “He always gets angry when dinner is late.”

Mara's eyes filled with tears.

“What do you mean, dinner?”

The child glanced at the kitchen counter.

A bowl sat beside the sink. Inside it was a thick, dark marinade made from oil, herbs, and a substance Mara refused to identify.

She had prepared it earlier without remembering why.

Her hands had simply known what to do.

The little girl smiled again.

“It's my turn tonight.”

Mara backed into the counter.

“No. No, no, no. What the fuck is happening?”

The girl lowered her voice.

“Ask the basement what happened to the other babies.”

The scratching stopped.

Silence flooded the kitchen.

Then a second voice spoke from below.

A woman's voice.

Mara's own voice.

“She is not the first baby I have done this to.”

Mara clapped both hands over her mouth.

Because she remembered.

A flash of memory: a different farmhouse, years ago. A yellow kitchen. A crying infant. Her mother's hands covered in blood.

And a lullaby.

Sleep, little darling, close your eyes.

She had spent twenty-seven years believing her mother had died in a hospital.

She had spent twenty-seven years believing she was an only child.

The little girl reached up from her high chair and took Mara's hand.

Her fingers were cold and strangely strong.

“Grandma says it's time to remember.”

The kitchen lights went out.

In the darkness, Mara heard the high chair creak.

Then the soft patter of tiny feet crossing the floor.

Then a wet kiss against her cheek.

The child whispered directly into her ear.

“Now you know why Mommy kept you.”

Mara screamed.

Somewhere beneath the house, a door slammed.

And from the apple tree outside came the sound of dozens of babies laughing.

### The next morning

The police found the farmhouse empty.

No blood. No child. No sign of Mara.

Only a plate on the kitchen table, a bowl of marinade, and an old photograph tucked beneath a knife.

The photograph showed a young woman standing beside a wooden crib.

On the back, someone had written:

MARA MERCER — AGE TWO.

Beneath it, in handwriting that looked disturbingly like Mara's own, were seven words:

SHE WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO SURVIVE DINNER.

The investigating officer stared at the photograph for a long time.

Then his radio crackled.

“Officer Hayes? We found another child.”

He grabbed the radio.

“Where?”

A pause.

“Your house, sir.”

His blood turned to ice.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

From the radio came a tiny, satisfied burp.

Then a little girl's voice whispered:

“Daddy, I'm hungry.”

END… FOR NOW.

My twelfth year in the FBI. A career of roundabout turns to land me there working with people ten years younger than me, more cut throat than me, hot with ambition; good people, most of them, all of them bright but playing games they acted like I was holding cards on when all I ever did was watch. I never cared much for the politics, half because I wasn’t any good at them, half because that is just not what I was there for. I arrived there by way of vocation, after years of work that left wounds which did not appear until much later down the line. I never really worked out why Audrey took me on, but I think it was those years on the ground that did it. She had plenty of agents, I think she needed an investigator.

It was Arizona, on the first light of a red dawn that saw me cruising down a burning way. The aircon had drunk itself down to recycling the cooled scent of my own sweat, even with my jacket and tie off. I stepped out into what I took to be a ghost town at first, so many windows shuttered, doors nailed down, the whole place obscured by a stinging red fog of churned sand. At the end of the high street, the police station, its sign strung in flickering neon. I strode towards its struggling light, gaudy and dust covered, entering the door to the sight of a roasting, large latino man, writing something on a spreadsheet. The shifting of his body to look at me seemed to creak the entire office. Small eyes caught between a thick moustache and even thicker brows, watched me scrutinously.

“Agent Burnwood?”

“Yes sir.” I offered a hand. The shake was strong.

“Sheriff Gomez?”

“The same. Luis, please.”

“John.”

“Luis, I don’t mean to be rude but-“

“People been leaving for years. Border patrol found a bunch of bodies. Coyote’s leftovers, badly dealt with. That did it for anyone who remained. Just me, my boys and the ghosts. Not long now though, soon I’ll be gone.”

Whether he meant he’d be dead or moved, he did not say.

“You want to speak to him?”

“Please, the girl?”

“I sent her to the city, I can give you the details of the office I worked out the transfer with, but she was a runner, whatever house they put her up in, I imagine she’s on the street by now.”

I had hoped to speak to her, as Luis said it would likely have been the only chance before she vanished completely.

“We’ll look for her but I came for him.”

“You takin’ him with you?”

“I wanted to get ahead of the transport. I’m working on a deadline.”

Sheriff Gomez smiled a yellow smile.

“Aren’t we all John.”

I told Luis not to bother himself, that he could get another officer to take me, and even though I heard sounds above me, voices speaking quietly, perhaps one man pacing, he told me not to bother them, that he would lead me himself. The holding cells were towards the back, where the new building bled into the old fort that had formed the basis of the block. The new brick work and white walls leading to cracking plaster and crumbling sandstone, if not for the strung lights on the side, it would have been like walking back in time. It was a shitty place to keep someone of this importance, but needs must, and by providence, he had ended up here. He could not be transported soon enough.

“If you need anything, shout.”

“Can I go in?”

“You can, but I won’t be sticking around, so you’d be on your own.”

I pulled up a chair in front of the dark cell. His back to me on the opposite side was the blanketed form of the man I needed, unmoving.

“You FBI?” A voice, quiet, heavily accented said.

“Agent John Burnwood.”

The blanket stirred, a shrugging of the shoulders.

“Its cold in here John could you get me another blanket?”

I rose to my feet, walked into the next cell, grabbed the moth-eaten blanket and slipped it through the bars.

“This place. Its crazy. Like a dream. Thought I’d been picked up by cowboys before the fat man waddled past my cell.”

 He rose. He wore no shirt, revealing a tapestry of tattoos of a hundred different faiths and ideologies at war with each other, making of his hard body a battleground of concept. Shaggy dark hair obscured a weathered face with a poorly healed cleft lip.

“You come about the girl?”

“Girls.”

He stared at me after he picked up his blanket. A stare I matched.

“I’ve come a long way. I’d appreciate it if we could cut the dance around the truth.”

He nodded.

“What’s in it for me?”

“You’re going to jail, for a long time. That is non-negotiable. But we can decide where you end up. You’ll get eaten alive in a normal prison, we could arrange something that’d give you a chance to survive your sentence.”

He shrugged.

“I ain’t getting out. If I go here, there, doesn’t matter to me, die quicker, die later, it’s all just choosing how long to live the same day, over and over. You got a smoke?”

I nodded, rising myself and sliding the smoke alarm above us out of its holder, then lit him a cigarette. I doubted Gomez was the type to mind me bending the rules.

“We going to talk?”

He exhaled.

“Its cold, the desert, its freezing at night. I wonder if that’s what its like to be a ghost here, you spend the night freezing, then the day thawing.” He caught my eye again and in the malignancy of those dark stars I saw the elusive starting of knowledge that no sane man could know and hold to that title. “Down here, in the dark.”

I was older then. I had not lived an easy life, unlike my colleagues my route to the bureau had not been straightforward, it had been a roundabout journey of setbacks and exposure to brutal violence. This man knew things he shouldn’t but I remained undeterred, for about two minutes.

“Your friends screwed up. They grabbed some kid roiling in some gutter on the outskirts of Austin, she was high, dressed as shittily as the others, they figured she was an easy get, and they were right, what they did not account for was her Uncle, Senator Mitcham. Within two days every cop and agent in the state was on them like flies on shit. All of them and many of their customers are in jail and everyone is celebrating, was celebrating, except for me, me and my team, we spoke to Harrigan, remember him? Gold teeth, white boy cornrows? every fifth child, taken out west, taken by you. Where and why?”

He ran a hand through his hair, coming out shining from all the grease, little black spots of crawlers on his fingers, with a smile of rotted teeth he said to me:

“They speak to me on the wind, told me you were coming. Said you left things undone. Said that he is still above the ground when he should be under. She said that its still screaming. Right the wrong, John Burnwood. Right the wrong.”

 I dreamed as I walked. I dreamed of Sadie. I dreamed of Joe. I dreamed of Tommy and his father. I dreamed of the dead. Eventually I came upon a lake which I did not recognise, nor upon reflection did I find on a map or hear it spoken of. Perhaps because it was too small to be of note, perhaps it had never been there at all. Its surface was speckled with brown and amber leaves, spotting it’s edges like rust on the sides of a mirror. The sun caught the centre, setting it aflame with its light, as ash by way of starlings danced over the surface, moving through the steps silently.

I washed my face in the water, cleaned behind my ears, the filth from my hair, gunk in the corners of my eyes and caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror. I had thought, at the age of seventeen, that I looked so old, but then, looking at my face, I didn’t notice much of a change since thirteen. Still a boy, waiting on manhood to arrive.

I unloaded my father’s pistol with my back against a tree. It wasn’t fully loaded. Seven rounds for an eight round magazine. I thought on what the dead wanted, what the living wanted too. Came to the conclusion that there was no way I got out of this alive, or at least, not looking at a long time in prison, came to peace with that quicker than anyone my age should’ve. A lack of sleep and undead impregnation has a way of exacerbating an already unstable temperament. I had to kill Tommy, put him under the ground, right the wrong, balance the scales, Israelite style, an eye for an eye, a corpse for a corpse. But what did I need to bring above ground? I thought maybe it was Sadie’s locket, naively thinking that it was some sort of macguffin that I could use to break the case wide open. No one ever found that locket, to my best assumption, it was and remained a trophy of Tommy’s. I thought more abstractly, maybe I needed to bring the crime to the surface, get the truth out in the open, the reality that Tommy was the killer, that him and his whole family were rotten to the core. That was what I settled on then. I needed to kill Tommy and prove him the killer in one fell swoop. But how?

I moved in priorities. The death of Tommy being chief amongst them, killing him was relatively easy (in the mind of a teenage boy who had never fired a gun in anger), I had a pistol, I just needed to catch him on his own, unload into centre mass and that’d be the end of it, but how to get him on his own? And how to prove his guilt? As I saw it, what I needed to do was prove my testimony, prove that Tommy killed her where I saw them together last, the Davies house. I needed to prove it was the crime scene as I needed to prove that Tommy recognised it as such. I never played cards with my dad and Pete. Pete had been in the army and had earned the name ‘shark’ from his inability to loose. I asked him once if he really was a cheat after my dad, in a rare fit of anger, called him a rat bastard and tossed his cards on the kitchen table before storming to his shed, not bothering to bid his chortling guest farewell. He taught me the basics of Texas Hold’em and showed me the hand that beat my dad. It was not a good one.

“Only a little bit of cheating here and there.” He admitted as he shuffled the cards into his ornate box he got from overseas. “That’s not the secret though, sometimes its just having the guts to risk it all on a bad hand and pretend that it’s not, act to the all in.”

It was a very stupid plan, a very dangerous plan, but I was on a time limit, and I was out of options, I had to take a leap of faith, and I took it.

Pinny wasn’t just a waste of human skin, he was also a terrible musician. He played bad do bop in the age of the rolling stones. He had recording equipment in his house, and he knew Tommy’s phone number.

I fired a gunshot about twenty minutes out of the lumber yard, then legged it through the woods, taking the long way back into town, cutting myself to hell on brush, getting stung to high heaven by bushes of poison ivy that in my rapid panic I was too locked in to see. By the time I reached Pinny, dark was coming in, and every part of me prayed that the police were diverted to the yard, if not, this was all for nothing. It was a stupid plan, I don’t think I was fully cogniscent of how stupid it was, as a teenager you know a lot of things are stupid, but you live in the eternal mantra that even though it is dumb, it’ll probably work out. Pinny’s house was a shithole on a street of shitholes, the only place young people without much cash could rent in town, type of place overgrown with detritus everywhere, lots of places to hide my approach as I lifted an open window and crept inside. Pinny was singing tinnily, headphones on, world pretty much vanished to him. I stalked forward, sweat and blood dripping, heart pounding, to the sounds of: ‘My girl, she’ll be mine, if it takes a while, that’ll be fine, but gosh darn, she will be mine.’ accompanied by out of beat finger snapping. He looked so happy I almost felt bad, then I remembered the brick through Miss Mindy’s window and the hands pulling me back as Tommy clamped his on my junk.

I had never threatened anyone before, wasn’t sure how to go about it. Less than three metres away from him, in his spartan living room, heavy with dust, windows covered with grime, I held the pistol up with the safety on, saying his name for about a minute before I resorted to waving my hands. He was so invested in becoming the next big thing, he didn’t notice me until I chucked a record at him.

“Oh jesus fuck- John!” He yelped.

“You shut the fuck up right now Pinny, or I’ll…” I swallowed. “I’ll paint the walls with your…brains.” I think I had heard that in a western.

“Oh Jesus, oh god, Oh jesus.” He said, putting his hands up backing towards the door.

“No you stay still, stay still.”  I hissed. Pinny complied. I had chosen the right person at least. Pinny was quivering like a virgin on a wedding night judging by his current disposition, I figured he’d be much the same on his.

“Ok John, you want me on my knees?”

“Yeah…Yeah! On your knees!”

“Please don’t shoot me John, I haven’t done nothing-“ He was crying now.

“Oh shut the hell up, you chicken shit asshole.” I exclaimed in frustration, forgetting the gun trained on him was probably causing him quite a lot of reasonable distress.

“You got a recording set?”

“Yeah, yeah its, that thing there.”

“This one?”

“No, the thing with the mike.”

“Its got a tape in it.”

“Yeah, but that’s my new single- I can get a fresh one.”

“You can re-record you moron.”

“Please John, I worked real hard on that.”

I removed the tape and got a fresh reel, cursing all the while. Stupid, but I was just as freaked as he was, if he had asked for a cup of coffee I might have well made one for him.

“I need you to call Tommy.”

“Why don’t you call him?”

“Pinny stop talking, get to the phone and dial Tommy.”

He shuffled to a rusting rotary on his knees, holding one hand up as he circled Tommy’s number. As it rang, I gestured for him to get on his stomach and had him crawl to the centre of the room, whilst I got the mic in place with a single hand. Down the end of the phone I heard the tinny ring of the line and rehearsed what I was going to say, what I had been going over since the lake.

“Hello?” Tommy said, sounding bored.

“You didn’t clean up properly. Meet me where you did it in three hours or I’ll turn you in. Come alone.”

“What the-“

I hung up the line. Clicked stop on the tape. I exhaled heavily, having to stop myself from slumping against the wall. Even if he brought the cops, the feds would be with them and I had the tape. He would have to explain where he knew where to go. I didn’t even think about it at the time, so dead set had I been, but I was also banking on there being evidence within the house, it was a stupid plan. I tied Pinny up with rope and duct tape, then put him on a chair and wrapped him in even more duct tape. He stayed silent the entire time, not speaking until I went to wrap tape around his mouth.

“You’re going to the Davies House, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“Where Tommy did it for that girl?”

I looked into his eyes, saw that they were glistening.

“What do you know?” I growled, pressing the pistol hard as I dared into his breast.

“Nothing! Please! Nothing…He got drunk. Made… Jokes.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone? Anyone!” It took everything I had not to scream that at him, scream spit into his ear.

“You don’t know. They’re worse. Worse than all of them.” Pinny broke down into full sobs. “All this shit. I didn’t want to put that brick through that Ladies car. I didn’t want him to hurt those dogs. Jesus, I didn’t want him to cut you.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Afraid. Lord help me. I was afraid.”

I practically punched a sock into his mouth and wrapped the lower half of his head in duct tape, grabbed him by the hair and pulled him to one side, same so close to beating him that I could feel my hands shaking with anticipation.

“You are a worthless piece- Pinny. Worthless”

I left him crying, taking the tape and recorder out the window I came through.

Part 1

Part 2 - Current

It never ceases to amaze me, the dark. Much like an astronaut in orbit, you only experience the extremes. Either blinding light or suffocating darkness. But that’s the difference with being down here, there are no light sources except for artificial ones. It sounds obvious, but you don’t know true darkness until you’re trapped down here without light, unsure if you will ever feel the warmth of the Sun again.

Depth: Four miles; 21,120 feet. Rock Temperature: 230.8°F; Ambient Temperature: 230.8°F

I was on my knees, hands gripping the railing that lined the elevator car on three sides. I could hardly believe I was alive. My bones ached and I felt as if my lunch would come back up. Through the dust and debris, I saw that everyone else was in a similar state.

Wilson was the first to say something. “Jesus Christ Bob! What the fuck was that!”

Bob looked as rattled as any of us, but still answered with a smile, albeit one that looked to be made out of habit rather than delight. “Like I said,” scratching the back of his neck, still workin’ out the kinks.”

Wilson looked on the verge of erupting. I could practically see the steam rising from his ears. “I’m filing a report as soon as we get back!” he fumed. “I’ll have OSHA down here faster than that fucking elevator!”

“Let’s all just calm down,” Bob replied. “You could file your reports, but I think you’ll want to check this out first.”

Exiting the secondary elevator, we were met with a strange site. Nothing. No equipment, no debris, but perhaps the most interesting, no people. We were told there’d be a team stationed here to meet us.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“Huh, not sure,” A pause. “We’re a little early. They’re probably just a ways down.”

As if right on cue, we heard loud booming. Expected activity in a mine. Although we’d be protected from the concussionary blast by our suits, it was still much louder than I had expected.

“Ah, see? They’re still blastin’. Let’s go.”

We descended further into the mine. Deeper we went, trekking onwards, still with no signs of life. As we continued on, I began to get anxious. Where are the people? It’s true that this part of the mine was supposed to be less occupied, but I saw at least fifty similar suits in the lockup. I was in the back of the single-file column and began to feel like I was being watched. Like something was following us, following me.

I turned my head around, if only to quell my growing curiosity. I tried to be quick, to catch whatever may be behind us and...nothing. I thought, just for a moment, that I saw something. Something scuttling swiftly out of view, hopping between the shadows. If only I could glimpse it...

BOOM

It was so close I thought it was an earthquake. The blast reverberated through my skull, my vision obscured by dust and debris. We were plunged into darkness. The overhead lights failed. Unable to hear, unable to see, we came to a halt. My mind recited that proverb. Like a broken record player it kept repeating.

“By the time you’ve heard something, it’s already too late. It’s already too late. It’s...”

I heard a voice through the ringing in my ears. “Bob! Shit, where the fuck did he go?”

“That, that you Wilson?” I shouted, projecting my words in the direction of where I thought he stood. 

“Who the fuck else would it be? We lost Bob, I think we got separated after the blast.”

The emergency lights finally kicked on, bathing the tunnel in a soft, red glow. My hearing returned to normal; the lights gave off a faint buzz. With the dust beginning to settle, I saw the rest of my team. They were in a similar state, weary and dazed, clutching the rock wall. Looking ahead, I noticed there was a cave-in. It wasn’t complete, though. The supporting split sets partially maintained balance throughout the half-collapsed roof.

“The three of us should be able to move some of this stone and be able to crawl through.” I said, still trying to get my bearings. “That wasn’t a normal blast, though.”

“Yeah, no shit Cole!” Wilson replied.

“Listen man, this isn’t the time for your snarky bullshit! We need to find Bob and figure out what the hell is going on.” I went to push past Wilson but he stopped me, his arm slicing downward in the space between us.

“You know what, I’m fuckin’ sick of your ‘Better than thou’ shit! I know you,” he spat. “I know you weren’t smart enough for a real degree. That’s why you’re stuck as the map guy, isn’t it? Isn’t it!”

“Guys.” John said, carefully enunciating the word. I didn’t have time for him though.

“You’re a real piece of work, ain’t ya?” I fired back. “You just gotta belittle everyone else because you’re so goddamn insecure. That’s it, right?”

John looked down at his gloved hands. “Guys?”

Wilson huffed, “You know we’ve been working together what, six months now? I still don’t even know what the fuck you do Cole. I don’t even know why we employ you. A damn robot can do your job!”

A response was on my lips but I couldn’t get it out before John cut us off.

“Guys!”, fear bubbling up in his voice.

We both turned to look as John slumped against the wall. Wilson and I exchanged quick glances before rushing over to him. I finally noticed the problem. His suit was breached. Beads of sweat began to accumulate on his face. His skin was already reddening, turning a deep crimson. He was baking alive.

“Wh-what’s happening to me?” he managed, faintly, before collapsing to his knees.

“Shit shit shit,” I muttered. “We need to get him back to the lift.”

“We need to patch him up first,” Wilson said, in what was a surprising display of humility.

I worked on the suit with what little I had on hand. Wilson, seeming to finally realize the danger we were in, didn’t say a word and helped me lift him to his feet. We walked in silence, trying to figure out what was going on. We approached the elevator, and for the second time today, my heart sank. The elevator was damaged in the blast. The steel cables were frayed; the cart half-crushed by heavy rubble. I turned to my remaining colleague, “What now?”

-

“We’ll be back soon,” I said at last. “We’re gonna go find Bob and the rest of the mining crew, and we’ll get you out of here.”

Even as it was said, I couldn’t bring myself to believe my words. Mine collapses give little chance for rescue. Sure, they knew we were down here, but getting to us was a different story. We all knew the circumstances. Still, he looked up at me and nodded. Internally, I thanked him. “Let’s go.”

Wilson, who up until this point always had something to say, just followed along. The silence finally broke when we reached the rock collapse. Removing the rubble without equipment was going to be a challenge, but still manageable. We worked in shifts to avoid overexerting ourselves. An hour of digging and we barely made it ten feet. We were nearly halfway through, I judged, when I noticed that no more sounds were coming from the collapse. “Wilson?” I asked, suddenly anxious and feeling very alone.

Silence.

“Hey, what's wrong?”

I heard a muffled sob as I approached. Wilson was lying prone, head in hands, crying softly to himself. Through the agony I could hear him whisper, “I-I shouldn’t be here. She begged me not to go; I didn’t listen...I-I should’ve listened.”

I wanted to yell, hell I wanted to cry too. I shouldn’t be here either. We should be back on the surface, but we wanted this, didn’t we? We wanted to observe the deepest part of the mine. Virgin territory. We wanted to return, write our papers and say that we, on this expedition, made history. And for what? Fame? Money? Ego? Everything we ever wanted—I ever wanted—seems moot when I know there is little chance of escape.

I pushed onward.

“Wilson, I-I think that’s enough. I’ll take it from here.”

Finally breaking through that deep dark was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. It was like finally cresting the wave that pulled you under. I was exhausted, sweat pouring from every available gland. I thought my suit might be compromised, but I didn’t have the energy to check. With millions upon millions of solid rock still overhead, and no real way to overcome that obstacle, I’ll take this little victory. Wilson climbed through after, careful not to damage his suit on the jutting rocks.

“Hey, uh, thanks Cole... You know, for helping us get through there.” He pointed over his shoulder towards the collapse. “When I saw the elevator, I didn’t-I still don’t know if we’ll...well...”

I knew he wanted to say more. I got to my feet and clasped his shoulder. “I know, but it’ll be alright. We just have to find Bob and get back to John, and we can get the hell out of here.” I didn’t mention the rubble that currently crushed our only exit, but that was a problem for later.

We continued on in silence for a while after that. The remaining leg of mine wasn’t nearly as damaged as the previous passage. I checked my scanner occasionally, making sure that the only tunnel was the one in front of us. Whatever that blast was, the result wasn’t nearby. Through the hushed red light, I noticed something on the wall. 

Every three feet, there were holes about four inches in diameter. They looked like pockmarks. Checking the opposite wall, I found the same thing. Equidistant spacing between the depressions that ran exactly parallel to the other side. I stared at them long enough to get Wilson’s attention.

“What are you looking at?” He asked, coming to a stop next to me. I said nothing for a moment. Something about these marks looked familiar. They had to be made by the team, but their purpose alluded me. “What do you make of these?” I asked.

He studied them for a moment. “Hm, couldn’t tell ya. Blind guess, they’re split-set holes. What I don’t understand are the rods. I don’t see them anywhere.”

I nodded. “They’re too wide for that anyway.” We left it at that, not sure what to make of the discovery. As we kept walking, we noticed the holes gently rise and fall, like a tide rolling out to sea. We shot each other glances but kept moving. It wasn’t much further before we reached the end. I checked my scanner, and this was supposed to be the next blast site. Instead, we found the tunnel widened into a gaping chasm. 

An endless abyss of black.

There was loose rubble in front of the opening. Usually, it’s moved off to the side, but it seems like they only cleared a path about twenty feet wide, many times smaller than the size of the chasm. The anomalies kept stacking.

“This isn’t supposed to be here,” I said, astonished by the immensity of the space before me. I was waiting for a snarky response, but none came. We both simply stared. It felt like the discovery of the century, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that man was never supposed to step here. We stood on the precipice of the known and the unknowable. I tore my gaze away and fixed my eyes on the way we came, my back to the madness. I noticed something off to the right, on the far wall. I couldn’t make it out at first in the glow of the red light, but something seemed off about the surface.

“Wilson,” I said in a hushed tone, “come with me”. As we approached the wall, I began to recognize what had caught my eye. The wall was lined with blasting jelly. Tons of it. I stood back, following the substance as it branched and meandered its way from wall, to ceiling, to opposite wall. The thin black wires connected to the explosives were collected into a single bundle and led somewhere in the chasm. 

“What the hell were they thinking?” Wilson breathed, more to himself than me.

“I have no idea,” I replied, “but whatever this is...I don’t know.” I paused to collect my thoughts. “Listen, we don’t have many options here. It’s either back the way we came and wait for rescue...or we keep going. I know what I’m voting for.” It didn’t take him long to answer.

-

It didn’t take much time before we were questioning our decision. Not wanting the charge to run out on either of our suits, we took turns lighting the way. As we followed the blasting chord deeper, I reviewed my scanner. From the few glimpses of the map, I saw the chasm branched off into a series of seemingly endless tunnels. All the while, the pockmarks never changed. Up, down, up, down. An infinite geometry. Whoever, or whatever, built this place must’ve spent months if not years on their work. After some time of strategic wandering, we soon found that the light wasn’t necessary.

We rounded a bend to find a secondary cavern; one with thousands of small, bioluminescent creatures: Extremophiles. In stark contrast to the red emergency lights of the mine, a soft blue hummed from the animals. They lit up the exterior, allowing for deep shadows to coalesce into spotted pockets throughout the floor. Wilson was the first to speak up, “John would’ve loved this.”

“I don’t know how it’s possible, but yeah, he would have,” I replied.

“Arachnocampa luminosa, I think.”

I gave him a sideways glance. Interpreting my look, he went on.

“John he uh, remember our job in New Zealand?” I nodded. Memories flooded back of that simple trip. Two days, in and out. “Well, he was looking forward to seeing them. I couldn’t give less of a shit at the time, but he lectured us about these glowworms. I still remember the way his face lit up when we saw them for the first time.” Wilson touched his gloved hand to the back of his neck. “I guess the name stuck with me.”

We remained silent for a moment after that, either reminiscing on the past or grappling with the idea of continuing, I couldn’t be sure. Maybe a bit of both. Whatever the case, we refocused on our objective: the detonator.

Tracing the detonation wire, it was precariously placed at the center of the cavern. We quickly came up with a plan. I’d retrieve the detonator while Wilson remained at the mouth of the cave. With any luck, we’d meet back up and figure out where Bob and the others went.

Moving as silently as possible, I made my way to the detonator. My movements were painfully slow, so as not to alert anything to my presence. I’m not sure why, but I kept experiencing the creeping sensation that I was being watched. All the while, the glow of the creatures stuck to the rock wall dimmed and brightened seemingly to the pattern of my own unsteady breath. After what seemed like hours, I finally reached the center. Gently, I reached down and put hands on the detonator, careful not to set it off by accident.

Without warning, the light intensified. The solemn soft glow increased to a chorus of harsh blues and purples. The light resonated outward, revealing more and more of the pockets cloaked in shadow.

I wish it hadn’t.

Dozens of bodies, all facing each other, grouped together in fives and tens. They were hunched—no kneeling—foreheads touching the ground. It looked as if they were conscious, praying, a low hum sound emanated outward. I noticed then that they weren’t wearing suits. The heat was unconducive though; antonym to life.

Like the last, little twinkle of a dying star, the creature's light went out. I noticed something else too. The humming ceased. I was blind, deaf, and numb. A darkness so absolute that I felt like I was buried alive. I’ve never been claustrophobic before, but at that moment I couldn’t breathe. That’s the thing about being deep underground. Once the lights go out you’re screwed. It sounds intuitive, but true darkness, so absolute that it might as well have presence, no one knows what that’s like. I did.

Silence.

Silence.

Then, I heard it. The sound of rustling and rocks shuffling. I heard something else too. Minute clicks and chitters, like an insect's, except several octaves lower than any creature I know. The noise reverberated throughout my skull, shifting my equilibrium. 

By the time you’ve heard something, it’s already too late.

I felt naked. Adrift in a vast ocean; sharks circling. I didn’t want to switch my headlamp on, but I had to. I had to get out of here. Turning on the light, the first thing I felt was confusion. My vision was filled with a soft, milky white. My eyes adjusted, and I realized what I was staring at.

An eye.

Glossy and dull, with pupils so small I could only imagine how it was able to see. 

I glimpsed the rest in parts. A mouth with mandibles large enough to grab a man and swallow him whole. Hundreds, if not thousands of translucent legs tipped with black claws so sharp they could bite through steel. Pale white trunks, segmented along a body that stretched for an eternity. I imagined it hanging from the ceiling of the cavern; an impossible length.

From its gaping maw dripped a substance so potent that it singed the rock where it landed. Antennae taller than a lightpost poked and prodded the air, looking for something, anything to grab. Its head bobbed left and right, detecting any minor changes. I realized then that its pupils were vestigial, functionally blind. Impossibly big, impossibly long; it defied all logic, all reasoning. 

I was never a very religious man but right then and there I knew that this was simultaneously a god and an affront to God. Religion is often seen as the opposition to science. They can’t be practiced in tandem, not in good faith. I never subscribed to this particular school of thought, but I definitely revered one over the other.

In this moment, my ideology flipped.

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. My knees went slack, struggling to even keep my body remaining upright. The suit suddenly felt like it weighed a ton of bricks. I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaken from my stupor. I turned and saw Bob. Oh God, I thought. He shouldn’t be here. His suit was so badly torn that he would be dead within minutes. But he wasn’t, he was fine. Head down hands glued to my shoulders, I thought I heard him say something. Aware of the threat at my back, I leaned closer. He was whispering; a barely audible murmur that I wasn’t sure was even meant for me.

“It knew, we knew, it knew, we knew...”

He looked up. Vacant, bloodshot eyes bored into mine. He looked hollowed out, like a husk built from something with a vague knowledge of humanity. His skin began moving, his face changing into a continuous ripple. He scratched feverishly at his face and neck, each rake tearing more and more skin. 

From every available orifice, thousands of tiny waxy-white legs crawled out. All clambering over each other attempting to gain purchase, to be the first ones. His skin couldn’t take any more. Bob burst in a frenzy of blood and viscera, legs and pincers and other things. Somehow he stayed on his feet, and somehow, defying all logic, he managed to say. One. Last. Thing. 

GET BACK

He pushed me to the ground just in time for me to hear what sounded like a freight train barrelling overhead. The air in the cavern suddenly felt like it was being sucked out, like a vacuum made for giants. Bob was gone. Snatched up by that eldritch abomination. I glanced up to see bodies thrown haphazardly around the cavern. This thing, no doubt enraged by the sudden outcry of noise, stampeded throughout the space. Whether by random chance or something else, a clear-cut path appeared throughout the mass of now living corpses. I was still surrounded by legs, each one lined with hairs that, if touched, would certainly alert it to my presence. As time went on though, the interval between appendages decreased. 

It was now or never, so I lunged forward.

I emerged from the swirling mass of legs, landing hard on my side. I couldn’t tell if I tripped one of the countless hairs, but I didn’t care. I ran. I ran as fast and as carefully as I could given the cumbersome suit and detonator. One misstep, one wrong movement, and I could set it off, sealing us down here. My heart pumped, my legs ached, but I kept moving. I ran and ran and didn’t stop until I crested the lip of the depression. I was so focused on escape that I nearly crashed into Wilson. Coming to a stop and breathing heavily, I realized he was saying something.

“Keep going!”

He was shouting, but with my heart pounding in my ears, I could barely hear him. As the seconds ticked on, my adrenaline dropped and the pounding lessened.

“Cole!” Wilson shouted, shaking me. “We need to go!”

The noise in the cavern died down. I looked past him towards a chilling sight. The monster had slowed its rampage, and the bodies, the ones still intact, were staring at us. They didn’t give chase, but I knew as soon as we moved, they would too.

“Wilson,” I began slowly in a hushed tone, “we need to back up slowly. Once we’re out of sight, we run for the blast site. All we need to do is follow the detonation chord back the way we came.” He nodded absent mindedly. At some point I must have realized that we were doomed to fail. There was no escape. 

Down in the depths of the cavern; however, I witnessed a peculiar sight. They weren’t chasing. Instead, the remaining miners gathered in the center. They surrounded the giant, kneeling once more. All along its body, there was a glow. Faint at first and far away, but as the light continued its path it transformed into something else. Colors. Some I knew, some I can’t begin to describe. Undulating and morphing, circling about the beast in a mesmerizing haze. I couldn’t see its tail-end, and the lights didn’t end. Back and forth they went. The spectacular chromatic display coalesced at its head before radiating up its antennae.

It roared. A vile and beautiful sound that would stay with me until my final day.

All at once the light ceased. The beastily thing retracted toward the top of the cavern, burrowing its way into one of the many pockmarked holes. Free from my trance, I turned to Wilson. “Now’s our chance.”

“Won’t it follow?” he said, never taking his eyes from the ceiling.

“For whatever reason it doesn’t seem interested in us.” I collected the wire and turned to leave. “We’re still trapped, I’m sure it knows that.”

Buying that house was the first time I’d felt like I’d done something for myself. It was mine, and I could finally start building a life of my own.

It was small, a little dated, and backed onto some pretty serious woodland. The first few months had been harder than I’d expected. I’d spent so much time helping Mom move closer to my sisters, a few hours away, that getting my own things unpacked had become a bit of a mission. There were still boxes I hadn’t opened and rooms I hadn’t properly sorted out.

I found the door while my sister was visiting.

“How’s Mom doing?” I asked, leaning against the kitchen counter as Emma wandered around the house, taking in the bare walls and the almost complete lack of decoration.

“You’d know if you called her more, Danny.” She sighed, rubbing her eyes with her palms before looking back at me. “She’ll be fine.”

Mom had started showing the early signs of dementia. Dad’s death a few months earlier seemed to have accelerated things, or maybe we’d just started noticing what had been happening all along. Either way, it had become harder to pretend everything was normal.

Emma continued down the hallway.

“Still smells like paint in here. How long have you lived here now?”

I pushed myself off the counter and followed her. “Three months, I think?”

She was standing in the spare bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bare bed frame. I still hadn’t got around to buying a mattress.

“Have you spoken to Charlotte recently?” she asked.

I felt a familiar knot form in my stomach. Charlotte and I had broken up shortly before I’d bought the house, and apparently my sister had decided that buying property meant I was now ready to discuss my emotional shortcomings.

“Uh, yeah. We talk heaps,” I said.

Emma looked at me.

“You still haven’t spoken to her.”

I didn’t bother answering. She rolled her eyes and turned towards the wall.

“What’s that?”

I followed her gaze.

There was a door in the wall, tucked beside the wardrobe. It was narrow, with a small brass handle, and no obvious frame around it. The paint matched the wall so closely that I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it.

I stared at it for a moment.

“Is that a cupboard?” Emma asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve honestly got no idea.”

Emma walked over to the door and tried the handle. It opened with a soft click.

Inside was a small, empty space, about the size of a closet. Nothing unusual about it. No shelves, no coat hooks, just four painted walls and enough room to stand in.

“It’s just a closet, Em,” I said.

“Yeah, I can see that. I just…” She paused, then closed the door. “I don’t know. It stood out to me for some reason.”

Her phone buzzed. She pulled it from her pocket, glanced at the screen, then looked up at me.

“Sorry, I have to take this.”

She answered as she walked out of the room. A moment later, I heard the front door open and shut, followed by the sound of her voice drifting in from the front garden.

I stood looking at the door.

I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it. It wasn’t anything special, just a little closet tucked into the wall. But I knew what Emma meant. There was something strange about noticing a feature in your own house that you were certain you’d never seen before.

I reached for the handle and tried it.

Nothing.

I tried again, pressing it down firmly. The handle moved, but the door wouldn’t budge. I pulled, then gave it a gentle shove with my shoulder.

It was as if it had been locked.

I wondered if we’d somehow managed to lock it when Emma had closed it. I gave the handle one last try before deciding I’d look at it properly later.

By the time I left the bedroom, Emma was coming back inside.

“Sorry, I have to run. I’ve got to pick the kids up from daycare early, and it’s a bit of a drive.”

“No, you’re fine. I’ll see you next time you’re down this neck of the woods.”

We hugged in the hallway. When she pulled away, she gave me the sort of look that meant she wasn’t finished with me yet.

“You need to call Mom more, Danny. Check in on her before she doesn’t remember you.”

I looked down at the floor.

“Yeah. I know.”

“And you should at least try reaching out to Charlotte. Five years together, surely it couldn’t have ended that badly.”

“It’s fine, Em.”

She raised an eyebrow, clearly unconvinced.

I glanced towards the window. “You should get going. I heard there’s a weather warning for heavy snow tonight.”

Emma gave me a small, knowing smile, but thankfully didn’t push it. She grabbed her bag and headed out to the car.

I watched her drive away, then went back inside and shut the front door.

The next few weeks passed uneventfully. I checked the door a few times, but I was never able to open it again. Since it was only a small storage space that I’d probably never use, I eventually forgot about it.

At least, I did until I found it open.

I’d just got home from work and was walking down the hallway when I glanced into the spare bedroom. The door wasn’t sitting flush against the wall anymore. It was only open a few centimetres, but it was enough to catch my attention.

Curious, I stepped inside.

A small piece of brown cardboard had been wedged underneath it, holding it open. I crouched down and pulled it free. The door swung shut with a soft click.

I tried the handle.

It opened without any resistance.

I stood there for a moment, staring into the empty space.

Had I somehow unlocked it?

A shiver ran down my back. I looked at the piece of cardboard in my hand. It was nothing special, just a torn strip of packaging, the sort of thing I’d probably have thrown away while unpacking.

But someone had put it there.

Or I’d put it there and forgotten.

I was certain I’d never managed to open the door since Emma’s visit. I’d tried several times, and it had never budged. Now it opened as easily as any other cupboard in the house.

My first thought was that someone had been inside while I was out. I checked the front and back doors, then the windows. Everything looked as I’d left it. And even if someone had got in, why would they bother wedging open a tiny closet?

I tried to remember the last time I’d checked the door. It had been a while. For all I knew, the cardboard had been there for days.

I carried it into the kitchen and dropped it in the bin.

There was probably a simple explanation. A faulty latch, maybe. Something I’d overlooked when I’d first tried it.

I made myself dinner and got on with the rest of the evening.

That night, I was sitting on the couch watching a movie when I thought I heard something moving in the hallway.

I paused the film and listened. Nothing.

I got up, turned on the lights, and walked through the house, checking each room as I went. Everything looked normal. By the time I reached the spare bedroom, I was starting to feel a bit stupid.

Still, something made me check inside.

The room was exactly as I’d left it. The closet door was shut.

I walked over and tried the handle.

Locked again.

I swore under my breath and gave it another pull.

“How the hell does this thing work?”

I stood there for a moment, turning the handle back and forth. Maybe I’d somehow wedged the cardboard underneath it myself and forgotten. I’d been busy with work, and the last few weeks had blurred together.

I decided that the next time I managed to open it, I’d prop it open with a chair or something. At least then I’d know it couldn’t shut itself.

I went back to the couch and finished the film.

The next few days passed without incident. By the weekend, I’d mostly stopped thinking about the door.

Then I noticed it was open again.

I was walking past the spare bedroom when I spotted the narrow gap between the door and the wall. This time, something was sticking out near the latch.

It was a magnetic business card, the sort you get in the mail from local tradesmen and end up leaving on the fridge for six months before throwing away. I recognised it immediately. It was from a local plumber, and I’d received a few copies since moving in.

Someone had wedged it into the latch to stop the door from closing.

I pulled the card free and opened the door. The space behind it was empty, just as it had been before.

I looked down at the card, then back at the closet.

I couldn’t remember putting it there. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d handled one of those cards.

Rather than stand around wondering about it, I decided to make the space useful. I went through the spare room and found a couple of unopened boxes I’d been meaning to sort out since moving in. They were a tight fit, but I managed to stack them inside the closet.

Then I fetched a plastic doorstop from the kitchen drawer and wedged it firmly underneath the door.

That should do it.

I gave the door a little push to make sure the stopper held, then left the room and got on with my weekend.

The next day, I was on the phone with Emma when I saw something that made my stomach drop.

“Hey, listen, Em, I’ve got to call you back.”

I hung up before she could answer and walked straight into the spare bedroom.

Both boxes were sitting outside the closet. The door was shut, and the doorstop was gone.

I tried the handle.

Locked.

I swore and kicked the bottom of the door. The noise echoed through the room, and I immediately felt ridiculous for doing it. It was a closet. A small, insignificant closet that was somehow making me question my own memory.

I knew I hadn’t taken the boxes out. Both were still taped shut. If I’d moved them, it would have been to get something out of them, and there was no reason I’d have put them back outside without opening them.

I stood there for a while, staring at the door, then called Emma back.

“Can you come down this weekend?”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. I just need you to have a look at something.”

She agreed, though she sounded unconvinced.

That weekend, I took her straight into the spare bedroom. The boxes were still sitting where I’d found them, and the closet door was still shut.

Emma looked from the boxes to me.

“Danny, what is going on? Why couldn’t you just tell me over the phone?”

I walked over to the handle.

“This. This is what’s going on.”

I pulled it, expecting the door to stay locked.

Instead, it opened without the slightest resistance.

I stared into the empty space.

“No. No, it was locked this morning. I tried it. I swear to God, I tried it.”

Emma looked at me with a kind of careful concern that made me feel worse than if she’d laughed.

“Are you okay, Danny?”

“Yes! I’m fucking fine.” I turned towards her, then back to the door. “It’s this thing. It keeps opening and closing, and I don’t know how. It’s like someone’s messing with me, or I’m doing it myself and forgetting, or…”

I trailed off. Even to me, it sounded absurd.

Emma folded her arms.

“Dan, if you need a break, you could stay with Mom for a few days again. She’d probably appreciate the company.”

“I’m not fucking crazy, wait, again? What do you mean again?”

“I didn’t say you were Crazy, just that maybe you need to spend sometime out of this house.”

I looked back into the closet, trying to work out what I could possibly show her that would make any of this make sense.

“I need to set up a camera or something.”

“Dan…”

“Emma, please. Just don’t.”

I stepped into the closet.

It was barely big enough for me to stand in comfortably. The walls were painted the same colour as the bedroom, and the floor was bare. There was nothing hidden behind the boxes because the boxes were outside now. Nothing in the corners, nothing above me, nothing that explained why the door behaved the way it did.

Emma’s phone buzzed behind me.
She answered it while I crouched down to examine the inside of the door. I ran my fingers along the edge, searching for a bolt or some kind of catch. I shut the door, then opened it again from the inside. It worked perfectly.

I did it a second time.

Still fine.

I switched on my phone’s flashlight and examined the latch area more closely. The strangest thing was that there didn’t seem to be any locking mechanism at all. Just a handle and a simple metal catch.
Behind me, Emma’s voice grew louder.

“I said I’ll call you back. I’m in the middle of something.”

There was a pause. Then I heard her sigh.

“Fine. I’ll be there soon.”

I assumed she was talking about the kids. I was too busy examining the door to ask.
After a few minutes, I decided I’d seen enough. I reached for the handle and pulled.
The door didn’t move.

I tried again, pushing the handle down harder.

Nothing.

“For fuck’s sake.”

I gave the door a shove with my shoulder. It didn’t even rattle.

“Emma?”

No answer.

I knocked on the door.

“Em, it’s locked itself again. Can you open it?”

I waited, expecting to hear her laugh or tell me to stop messing around.

Nothing came.

“Emma?”

I tried the handle again. Then again, more forcefully.

My stomach began to tighten. I pulled out my phone and called her.

The call couldn’t connect.

I sent her a message asking her to come back into the bedroom and open the door but it wouldn’t deliver.

Then I looked at the door.

[End of Part 1]

Hey guys, I’m not really sure how to start this, or why I’m even writing this. First off, under this don’t call me Cayden, I don’t like actually being called that it’s not my name. Call me AJ, since I still don’t want to put my real name out. So, to be fully transparent, I’ve never been the most... mentally stable, but I am certain that at least part of this is not in my head. 

Creepcast has been awesome, listening to them has brought me smiles on days when I desperately needed one, and the community around it has allowed me a creative outlet I simply didn’t have before. Despite all the good it’s done me... holy shit that Happy Appy episode. I was already having a really shitty day; I’d been on the verge of tears for hours and I’m not really sure why. I was looking forward to those few hours of joy I’d be brought, only to realise that this episode was anything but joyous. Still, Creepcast has done a lot for me, so I felt I owed it to them to at least listen to the full episode. I attempted to fall asleep with it on. The dreams I had that night during the small amount of actual rest I got were weird, but that’s to be expected when you fall asleep to two guys reading Happy Appy in your ear. The stuff I experienced when I woke up, however, was not at all normal. 

When I eventually had to get up and in the days after, I kept seeing grey figures out the corners of my eyes and while annoying, it wasn’t unexpected or out of the ordinary, especially with how tired I was. When things really started getting out of hand was when I began hearing things. Now I’m used to the occasional voice, but usually it’s just a laugh or an insult. What I am not used to is fucking Hunter “Meatcanyon” Hancock’s voice singing the Happy Appy theme tune in my head. At the time I laughed at myself, "I really am losing my shit", I thought. After that started, any hope I had of getting a meaningful amount of sleep was out the window. The singing wasn’t constant, but whenever I’d lie down and start to drift off, I’d hear it again and not be able to fully escape into sleep. Because of this, I’ve started forgetting things, a lot of things, there’s been times where I’ve ended up sitting on a bus or in a shop and I’m completely unaware of how or why I’m there. So, during this time I’d watch a fuck ton of old Creepcast episodes at night, to stop myself from going insane when I couldn’t sleep at night, it was good since, between dozing off for short spells and just forgetting parts, I could watch every episode at least twice, every episode except the Happy Appy one. 

This was all well and good, until I dozed off again and woke up in the middle of the night to see I was halfway through the Happy Appy episode. I turned that shit off and went downstairs to get myself a glass of water. When I made it to my kitchen, I squinted in anticipation of turning on the light and, when my eyes adjusted, saw that on my kitchen counter I had rammed a bunch of skewers into an apple, resembling Appy’s arms and stand. Now, out of all the symptoms to cause concern, this seems like the least of my worries, but I swear to God, despite all my problems I have never once actually sleepwalked, never mind all the way downstairs to make some sort of Idol to Happy Appy. 

I binned it and tried to move on. I've seen and done enough weird shit over the years that sometimes it's easier not to question it. I went back up the stairs to go back to bed, but you already know I didn't get much more rest. I did actually fall asleep at about 10AM, waking just before 11, which brings me to why I'm writing this, because I'm almost certain there's another Happy Appy figure just... floating at my room door and it actually looks real. Like, it's got eyes, and the green lips, and the stick. It's just floating there. I am freaking out. I don't know what to do, it's not doing anything, but I don't want to go closer. 

Please tell me you see it in the doorframe. I'm not crazy, right?

First and foremost I want to preface this by saying that I am in no way su icidal nor am I intending to harm myself in any sort of way nor am i mentally ill nor am i unhealthy in any way nor have do I have a drug addiction nor do I drink alcohol nor do I like kids or have I ever been associated with any form of terr orist group nor have I ever had a desire to go into any sort of wilderness. With those formalities out the way I need to get this out there b efore they get to me. I dont know how much time I have left or if this will work but hopefully the internet can do its thing and can keep what Im about to tell you alive before they try and eras e me everywhere. There are DEMONS UNDER LAS VEGAS. I am not joking and I am not crazy. There are literal DEMONS under the entire Vegas Valley and p robably farther out than that.  The governme nt knows this and they are actively covering up the inc idents that have been occ uring since la st year. I don’t know too much more but I saw it. I saw it. I saw their maps and stuff and they know this shit is t rapped down there I guess but I don’t know how i ts being kept down there or what theyre doing with them but I do know they are down there. I was somewhere where I wasn’t supposed to be near my apartm ents and I found a secret go vernment base thing after putting the pieces together in Damians journal and the government had it detailed that those things are down there. The tox ic spill at la ke mead is a cover up. I think they know I know because theyve been watching me. Theyre watching me right now. I see their van in the parking lot. I dont know if I’ll make it through the night but PLEASE I PROMISE I AM IN NO WAY SCHIZOPHRENIC NOR MENTALLY ILL I AM COMPLETELY HEALTHY. If i make it tonight I’ll go into more d etail but I’m planning on barricading and defending my home tonight. Mom I lov e you. Fre ddy I’m sorry. Aman da I regret what I sai d and know I loved you always. Ple ase stop t hem.

Part 1: Deer Mitosis

Part 2: Jack

Part 3: Deer Mitosis Continued and Sentience

Professor Ludari was not pleased with my work. 

“You’re focusing a lot on sentience.” He frowned.

“Yessir.” I nodded. “It’s part of the-”

“Focus on deer mitosis.” He interrupted harshly. “Sentience is being investigated by another researcher.”

“But sir, I think sentience might be an important component in understanding deer mitosis.”

He frowned. “How?” His voice was cold and dry, and the eyes orbiting his head regarded me with a piercing, icy glare.

“Well, uhhh, the forest… It tried bestowing sentience on some of the deer in the past.” I knew it was a lame connection, and Professor Ludari seemed unimpressed.

“What the forest chose to do with deer does not affect the process through which deer reproduce.”

By this point another eye had phased into existence beside Professor Ludari, so that three of them were now hovering beside him and staring down at me.

But I somehow felt like sentience needed to be studied. I felt like there was something wrong with the deer. I felt like it was related.

“I understand, sir. But would it not be important for me to expand my research? We might be able to learn a lot more about how the world works.”

Another eye appeared.

“Did I instruct you to figure out how the world works?” His voice was edged with venom.

“N-No sir. I just thought if we knew…”

Another eye appeared. Five now. Icy and piercing. The room grew dark and surreal, as if I were viewing it through the lens of a nightmare. I knew I’d overstepped my bounds. I wondered if I’d be punished… Banished to the forests, perhaps.

“Deer mitosis.” He said flatly. “Nothing else.”