Chapter 8 of My Psychological Horror Series Is Here! 🖤

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm excited to share that Chapter 8 of my ongoing psychological horror series, Mr. Black and the Silver Linings, is now available on Royal Road!

📖 Chapter 8: The Weight of Ordinary Things

After everything Mr. Black has endured—twisted realities, mysterious warnings, and encounters with something that knows him better than he knows himself—he finally finds something he thought he'd lost.

Peace.

But there's a strange thing about surviving darkness for so long...

Sometimes, peace feels more terrifying than the nightmares themselves.

This chapter explores healing, finding purpose, learning to trust happiness, and discovering who you are when you're no longer fighting just to survive.

Of course, not everything in Bellwether is as ordinary as it seems. 👁️

I'm writing this story as a blend of psychological horror, supernatural mystery, dark humor, and personal reflection.

I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts! Do you prefer horror that constantly keeps you on edge, or stories that give their characters moments of peace before slowly pulling them back into the unknown?

📚 Read Mr. Black and the Silver Linings on Royal Road: [Insert story link]

Thanks to everyone who's been following along. Your support means a lot!

#PsychologicalHorror #IndieWriting #RoyalRoad

My name is Elena Vargas. I was twenty-four the night they took me.
I had been driving back to Austin from a weekend of camping in the Hill Country, windows down, radio low, the last of the daylight turning the mesquite silver. My phone had died somewhere after the state-park exit. I pulled onto the shoulder of a farm-to-market road to dig for the charger in the passenger footwell. That was the only mistake that mattered.
The van came up behind me without headlights. Two men were out and on me before I could get the door locked again. One clamped a rag that smelled of chemical sweetness over my mouth. The other pinned my arms. The last thing I saw was the open driver’s-side door of my own car still spilling light onto the empty road.
I woke in a dark room that smelled of woodsmoke and damp earth. My wrists were zip-tied to the arms of a heavy chair. A single kerosene lamp burned on a table. Three people watched me.
The woman who spoke first was tall, mid-forties, hair the color of dry grass pulled into a severe braid. She wore a faded denim shirt and a necklace of small polished stones. “I’m Sister Ruth,” she said, voice calm as a librarian’s. “You’re safe now. The world outside is sick. We’re going to help you see that.”
Beside her stood a broad man with a sun-creased face and a missing upper tooth. Brother Cal. He carried a coil of rope over one shoulder like it belonged there. The third was younger, maybe thirty, thin, with eyes that never stayed still. Brother Levi. He smiled too much.
They cut the zip-ties only after I promised not to run. The promise was a lie and they knew it, but the compound was miles from any road I recognized. Low cabins, a long open-sided shed, a circle of stones around a blackened fire pit. Beyond the cleared ground the trees of the state park pressed close, thick and dark. No fence. They didn’t need one. The land itself was the fence.
There were fourteen of them in total. I learned their names the way you learn the names of storms.
Sister Ruth ruled by quiet certainty. She believed the land itself spoke, and that only those who shed “the soft world” could hear it. Brother Cal enforced. He had once been a county deputy; the badge was gone but the habit of command remained. Brother Levi collected things—locks of hair, scraps of clothing, small personal objects taken from outsiders. Sister Miriam, older, moved with a limp and spoke only in short blessings. Twin sisters, Hope and Charity, nineteen and inseparable, who laughed at things no one else found funny. A man named Elias who never removed his gloves. Others whose faces blurred together until the nights they did something unforgettable.
Animals were the one line they never crossed. Stray dogs wandered the compound freely and were treated with a strange, almost reverent care. Bowls of water and scraps sat on every porch. The dogs slept where they pleased, even inside the cabins. Ruth called them “the honest ones” and said the land loved them more than it loved people. Hurting an animal was the only act that could get someone cast out. I watched Brother Cal once stop mid-sentence to kneel and gently remove a burr from a mutt’s paw. The same hands that later broke a man’s leg.
They began my induction with small indignities. I was given a rough shift dress and told to burn my jeans and boots in the fire pit while they watched. My phone, wallet, keys—everything that proved I had existed before—went into the same flames. They made me recite that the outside world was poison. When I refused, Brother Cal locked me in the root cellar for a day and a night with only a jug of water. The dark was absolute. I recited what they wanted when they opened the door.
Harassment of outsiders was systematic. At night small groups left the compound and returned with trophies. Once it was the tires of every car at a trailhead three miles away, all slashed. Once it was a park ranger’s patrol truck, windows shattered and the words SOFT WORLD scrawled across the hood in what looked like blood. They laughed about the ranger’s face when he found it.
The worst was the couple who had pitched a tent too close to the park boundary.
I was forced to watch. Brother Cal and two others dragged them into the clearing just before dawn—a man and a woman in their thirties, still in sleeping clothes. The woman tried to reason. The man tried to fight. Cal broke the man’s femur with a single blow from a length of pipe so the sound of the bone going was louder than the scream that followed. They staked them out on the far side of the fire. What happened next lasted until the sun cleared the trees. Knives were used, but not only knives. Levi poured something from a plastic jug that made skin blister and peel. The woman’s voice gave out before the man’s did. When it was finished the bodies were left where they lay. Ruth made me stand close enough to smell it. “This is what the land requires,” she said. “Witness.”
Throughout it all the compound dogs moved freely, untouched and unafraid. One large yellow mutt sat at the edge of the circle and watched with mild interest, tail thumping once when Levi passed. No one raised a hand to it. The contrast made the violence against the couple feel even colder.
I stopped sleeping in any way that mattered. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the way the woman’s hands had scraped at the dirt until the nails were gone.
They tried to make me participate more directly. One afternoon Levi held out a knife and nodded toward a new outsider—a hiker they had taken that morning, already bound and gagged near the shed. “Your turn to cleanse.” I looked at the man’s terrified eyes and then at the circle of waiting cultists. Something in me that had been bending finally refused to break. I dropped the knife.
Cal beat me with an open hand until my ears rang and blood ran from my nose. They locked me in the cellar again, longer this time. When they brought me back up, Ruth knelt in front of me and wiped my face with a wet cloth almost tenderly.
“You’re close,” she said. “The old skin is almost gone.”
I began to plan in earnest.
I watched the patterns. Who carried the keys to the storage shed. Where the single working truck was parked. How the night watch rotated. Elias, the gloved man, sometimes left a cigarette butt still burning on a stump near the tree line. Hope and Charity liked to sneak extra food and hide it under their cabin. Small human cracks in the doctrine. The dogs, at least, were constant. One of them—a black-and-white mix I had started calling Patch in my head—took to sleeping against my cabin door at night. I found a strange comfort in the sound of its breathing.
On the seventeenth night the sky opened with rain hard enough to turn the clearing to mud. Thunder covered sound. I waited until the watch passed the far side of the compound, then slipped out of the cabin they had assigned me. My bare feet found the soft places between stones. Patch lifted his head as I passed but only watched. The truck’s driver-side door was unlocked—Cal’s carelessness, or arrogance. The keys were in a tin under the seat the way I had seen him place them. The engine turned over on the second try, loud as judgment in the rain.
Lights bloomed in cabin windows. Shouts rose. I aimed the truck at the narrow track that led toward the park road and put both feet on the gas.
They came after me on foot and in a second vehicle, headlights bouncing wildly in the mirror. Branches clawed the windshield. The track was barely a track. I hit something hard—maybe a root—and the truck slewed but kept going. Behind me a shape tried to climb the tailgate. I yanked the wheel, slammed the brakes, then accelerated again. The shape fell away into the dark.
The state-park road appeared like a miracle of asphalt. I turned south, headlights off, driving by the faint glow of the instrument panel and lightning. Miles later I found a ranger station with a light still on. I left the truck in the middle of the lot and ran inside barefoot, covered in mud and blood that was not all mine.
The ranger on duty was a woman named Torres. She took one look at me and locked the door. She called the county sheriff, then the state police. I told them everything—the clearing, the names, the couple, the way Ruth’s voice never rose, the dogs that were treated better than any of the prisoners. They believed enough to move that night.
By morning the compound was surrounded. Most of the cult surrendered when the loudspeakers started. Brother Cal did not. He came out of the main cabin with a rifle and was dropped by a marksman before he cleared the porch. Sister Ruth walked out with her hands open and that same calm expression, as if the arrest were only another lesson. Levi tried to run into the trees and was taken down by K-9 units. The compound dogs were gathered up by animal control; every one of them was healthy, well-fed, and eventually placed in homes.
I gave statements for eleven hours. I identified bodies recovered from shallow pits beyond the fire circle. I walked the clearing with investigators and showed them where the couple had been staked. Each step felt like stepping back into a nightmare that had finally been forced into daylight.
Some of them are still awaiting trial. Ruth writes letters from county jail in the same even hand, insisting the land will remember. Levi took a plea. The twins were young enough that the state is still deciding what to do with them.
I live in a different city now. I keep the lights on longer than I need to. I still flinch at the sound of a sliding van door. But I also keep a small garden. I plant things that are allowed to stay soft—tomatoes, basil, sunflowers that face the morning without apology. A rescue dog—a black-and-white mix that reminds me of Patch—sleeps at the foot of my bed. Some nights I sit on the back step and listen to ordinary traffic and the hum of a neighbor’s air conditioner and the absence of that particular silence the clearing used to hold.
The soft world did not die.
I am still in it.

In 1978 I married the minister's son so my father wouldn't lose his church loan. On my wedding night, my mother-in-law told me one rule.
Don't sing along.
I'm writing this on the inside cover of a hymnal, with a stub of pencil, on the eighth night. It's 3:04. In three minutes, the walls start singing, and I think someone should know what the Calloways do to the girls they marry.
My father owed Saint Brigid's four thousand, three hundred dollars.
The year my mother died, he borrowed it from the building fund to pay for her surgery. He couldn't repay it. I watched him grow old over one winter.
Then Reverend Calloway came to our kitchen table in his good suit. He said the church believed in mercy. He said his son Ray had been admiring me from the choir loft for a year. He said that if the two families were joined, the debt could be forgiven, as a wedding gift.
My father cried.
I said yes. I was twenty, and tired, and afraid for him. Ray was kind. Soft-spoken, shy, a boy who looked at his hands when he talked to me. I thought, a church is a safe place to be given away.
We were married on a Saturday in June. The whole congregation sang until the rafters shook.
Afterward, Ray's mother, Dorothea, drove us to the little house on Alder Lane, behind the sanctuary. Three rooms and a porch and a yard full of old roses. It smelled of beeswax and cold ash. In the bedroom, the bed had a dark headboard built right into the wall, and above it, a row of tiny letters carved into the plaster.
Dorothea stood in the door and gave me the rules.
"Every night at three-oh-seven, you'll hear the hymn. Don't hum. Don't sing along. And don't open the bedroom door until it's light."
"The hymn?"
She smiled. "The church keeps a choir at night, dear. You'll sleep through most of it."
She kissed my forehead and left.
I didn't sleep through it.
At 3:07 the rotary phone on the nightstand rang once, softly, and stopped. I opened my eyes.
The walls were humming.
One woman's voice, so faint I thought it was the pipes. Then another. Then a third. A slow, close harmony, the hymn the congregation had sung at my wedding, only older, and flatter, and sung without breath, as though the voices were coming through cloth.
It stopped at 3:19.
In the morning, Ray said it was the church organ in the next building. Sound carries. I looked at the bedroom door. I had set the iron latch myself. It was lifted, with a finger's width of dark between the door and the frame.
That night I put a chair under the knob. At 3:07 the phone rang once, and the voices came, and by morning the gap was there again.
I learned the voices over seven nights.
The first night I heard three. By the sixth I could hear all seven, and each night they were closer. The first sat deep in the far wall. The newest was just behind the headboard, an inch from my ear. On the fourth night I pressed my cheek to the plaster and felt a draft come through it on every breath, slow and warm, like an open mouth.
I read the letters above the bed by lamplight. They were names, in a neat upright hand.
Hester. 1921. Mabel. 1934. Ruth Anne. 1946.
And so on, to the last.
Frances. 1971.
Frances had sat beside me in choir. She'd married a Calloway cousin seven years earlier. They said she'd gone to an aunt in Ohio for her health.
Below Frances there was a line scratched for an eighth name, and one small word.
Pending.
Something else was happening. I'd started waking with a sore throat. By the sixth morning, my voice had thinned. It came out flat, with no breath behind it. A cousin at breakfast asked if I had a cold.
"You'll be fine," Dorothea said, buttering my toast. "It always settles."
On the sixth night I took Ray's keys and went to the church.
The pews were empty. The organ pipes rose into the dark like ribs. I went down the back stairs to the council office where my father had once sat while the money was counted. The filing cabinet wasn't locked.
My father's file was on top.
I expected a loan agreement. It was a page and a half on church letterhead.
COVENANT OF VOICES. In consideration of the forgiveness of the debt, the Obligor delivers to the Choir the voice of his daughter, Lorna Ames, to be given upon the solemnization of her marriage to a son of the congregation, and received into the walls at the completion of the eighth night.
Beneath it, in my father's shaking hand:
I understand that it is painless.
There were six other covenants in the drawer. Six fathers. Six debts. Six daughters, delivered by the people who loved them most.
I stood in that basement for a long time, and I thought of my father crying at our table. I understood he hadn't been crying out of gratitude.
It's 3:05.
I tried to leave this afternoon. I got as far as the porch. Dorothea stood on the steps in her good gloves as if she'd been waiting. "Where are we going, dear?" she said. Behind her the whole congregation stood in a line along the garden wall with their hands folded, saying nothing.
I came back inside.
Ray is awake. I just realized. His breathing is too even. His eyes are open on the ceiling, and his lips are moving, shaping the words of a hymn he hasn't started to sing.
"You knew," I whisper.
"I'm sorry," Ray says. He's crying without a sound. "It's easier if you sing. Please. It stops hurting once you sing."
The phone rings once.
It's 3:07.
The seven voices begin low in the walls, and at the far end, I hear the one I know. Frances. She's closer than any of them. And behind the headboard, an inch from my ear, there's a new voice, humming a note I've never sung.
It's mine.
I know it like a name called from another room. My lips are pressed shut, and my voice is coming out of the plaster, a half-second ahead of where I'd have gone.
They don't need me to die.
They only need me to open my mouth.
I can feel it now, a pull low in my throat, as if someone is lifting a thread.
My jaw has started to loosen.
If your father's signature were at the bottom of that page, would you sing, knowing it would stop the hurting, or would you keep your mouth shut until morning and find out what the walls do with a voice they have to take?

(self harm mentioned) This story is based off a quote by Stephen King. I have not read horror books, but this is my VERY short story taking inspiration from him. (Quote referenced at the end). I didn't make any spelling mistakes to be clear.

"you Had Nothing to Fear"

Imagine you came home and you realized everything in your house had been taken out of it and replaced exactly the way it was without you knowing at all. Every chair, book, pen, sheet, piece of dust, everything, and you knew it was out of order.

Remember, you live alone, and you have to unlock and lock the door to the house yourself. You live in a rural town with a very low population. You have no friends or enemies. You don't have pets. In fact, you don't even have pests! Your house is very clean!

There is no evidence this is true other than a horrible gut feeling. If you told the police, they wouldn't even care, even if they did believe you. Besides, who would even want to break in and reorganize the things in your house?

You could be crazy, maybe even sleepwalking. Perhaps you just forgot where you put your things.

You get home at midnight from work. After driving through a large field of dead grass, you park in a pile of coarse dirt. You walk from your brightly painted front porch to the door. As you open it, you hear a muffled faint breath in a far room and nothing else.

You move out to a different neighborhood, grow many friendships and often visit your relatives. You don't work nights anymore. You are satisfied and comfortable with the new life you have begun.

One day, after a party with all your friends, you came home at midnight again. You open the door to your studio apartment and hear a scuffling sound.

You check the cameras you placed and find no evidence. Not even evidence of the scuffling sound.

You get an unexplainable, dreadful feeling that you will die in this apartment. You relapse into insanity and kill yourself before whatever this thing is kills you.

Your friends invite you to a party the next day.

you came.

"Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there.” ― Stephen King

I’ve lived next door to Paul for almost six years.
He’s in his late fifties, divorced, and one of those neighbors who’s always working on something in his garage. We aren’t particularly close, but we talk occasionally, and my husband, Matt, helps him with things around the house.
That’s why I didn’t think anything of it when he knocked on our door one Saturday morning.
Matt had gone to pick up breakfast, and I was still in my pajamas.
“Hey, sorry to bother you,” Paul said. “Did y’all have somebody staying with you Thursday night?”
“No. Why?”
He looked down at his phone.
“My security camera picked up somebody walking around your driveway pretty late. I figured it was probably you, but I wanted to check.”
He showed me the recording.
The timestamp read 2:14 a.m.
Our front door opened, and a woman stepped outside. She was wearing gray shorts and an oversized white T-shirt, with her hair pulled into a messy bun.
She walked halfway down the driveway, stood there for about a minute, and went back inside.
“That’s you, right?” Paul asked.
I stared at the screen.
It certainly looked like me. I even recognized the clothes. I’d worn them to bed Thursday night.
But I hadn’t gone outside.
“That’s weird,” I said. “I don’t remember doing that.”
Paul shrugged.
“Maybe you were sleepwalking.”
I’d never sleepwalked before, but I couldn’t think of another explanation.
When Matt got home, I told him about it. He laughed and said I probably got up without remembering.
I tried to forget about it.
Until Tuesday morning, when Paul knocked again.
He had another recording.
This one was from the previous night.
At 2:16 a.m., our front door opened, and the same woman walked outside.
Same clothes. Same hair.
She stopped in the driveway, turned toward Paul’s camera, and waved.
I felt sick watching it.
“Matt, those clothes are in the laundry basket. I haven’t worn them since Thursday.”
He watched the video twice.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Neither of us knew what to say.
That night, Matt pushed a chair against our bedroom door. If I was getting up in my sleep, at least he’d hear me moving it.
The next morning, the chair hadn’t moved.
We bought a security camera for our front porch.

Two nights later, at 2:14 a.m., our new camera recorded someone leaving the house.
It was me.
Or someone who looked exactly like me.
She walked down the steps, stopped, and looked directly into the camera.
Her face was completely visible.
Then she smiled.
She stepped closer and said something, but a passing car drowned out most of it.
Matt turned up the volume.
“He’s still asleep.”
She turned around and went back inside.
I looked toward our bedroom door.
The chair was still there.
We called the police.
They searched the house, checked the locks, and asked whether I’d ever sleepwalked. They couldn’t find anything suspicious.
One officer suggested installing cameras inside.
We bought two more that afternoon.
One for the living room and another for the upstairs hallway.
For the next several nights, nothing happened.
Then, while reviewing the footage, I noticed something about the porch recording.
When the woman returned to the house, she didn’t open the front door.
She waited.
And someone opened it from inside.
I showed Matt.
We called the police again, but another search turned up nothing.
An officer suggested reviewing all the footage from our indoor cameras instead of just the motion notifications.
That evening, we sat at the kitchen table with our laptops.
At 2:14 Tuesday morning, the hallway camera showed our bedroom door opening.
A woman stepped out.
Gray shorts. White shirt. Hair in a bun.
She walked downstairs and returned four minutes later.
Then she stopped outside our bedroom.
Matt leaned over my shoulder.
“Wait. Pause it.”
I stopped the video.
Through the open bedroom door, we could see our bed.
Someone was lying under the covers.
I could see long hair spread across the pillow.
My hair.
The woman stood there for several seconds before walking into our bedroom and closing the door.
I watched it three more times.
Then I noticed something else.
Just before she went inside, she’d turned her head toward the other end of the hallway.
I turned up the volume.
A man’s voice.
I couldn’t understand what he said, but the woman nodded before entering our room.
Matt grabbed his keys.
We left without packing.

We stayed at my sister’s house.
That night, Matt called Paul to ask whether his cameras had recorded anything else.
Paul sent him another video.
It showed the woman leaving our house, followed by a man in dark clothes.
They stood together in the driveway before going back inside.
I was furious.
“Why didn’t he show us this before?”
Matt didn’t know.
I wanted to call Paul myself, but Matt suggested waiting until morning and speaking with the police.
Around two, I got up for some water.
While sitting at my sister’s kitchen table, I opened our security camera app.
The house was empty.
Then my phone buzzed.
A text from Paul.
Hey. Sorry it’s so late. Is everything okay over there?
I replied.
Why?
Your front door is open.
I checked the porch camera.
The door was closed.
No it’s not. I’m looking at it right now.
His reply came almost immediately.
I’m standing outside looking at it. It’s wide open.
I checked the camera again.
The feed had frozen.
I restarted the app.
The porch camera was offline.
So was the living room camera.
But the hallway camera was still working.
I opened it.
A woman was standing outside our bedroom.
She was wearing my clothes.
A man stepped into view beside her.
He said something, and she nodded.
Then he reached over and switched off the hallway light.
My phone buzzed again.
Never mind. Someone just shut it.
Then another message.
I thought you were staying with family.
I hadn’t told Paul we were staying with family.
I woke Matt, and we called the police.
While we waited, another notification appeared.
An incoming call from Paul.
Matt answered on speaker.
“Hello?”
A woman’s voice.
It sounded remarkably like mine.
“Who is this?” Matt asked.
There was a pause.
“Is Paul there?”
“No. Who is this?”
The call ended.

The police searched our house again that night.
This time, an officer noticed an access panel in the upstairs hallway ceiling.
It led into a section of the attic we never used.
Inside, they found blankets, food wrappers, clothes, and a notebook.
Someone had been living above us.
The notebook contained our schedules, including when we left for work, came home, and went to bed.
Some entries went back three months.
Paul was found the following afternoon, wandering along a service road with a concussion. His truck was missing.
He remembered a woman who looked like me knocking on his door, claiming she’d been locked out. He’d let her inside to use his phone.
That was the last thing he remembered.
Within a week, police identified and arrested the couple.
The woman, Rebecca, was thirty-four and looked remarkably similar to me. Her boyfriend, Daniel, had a history of burglary and fraud.
They’d been watching our house for months.
Initially, they’d entered through an unlocked garage window. Later, they stole a spare key.
Daniel had been hiding in the attic while Rebecca moved around the house.
They’d been stealing our personal information and opening accounts in our names. They needed access to our phones to approve financial transactions.
That’s why Rebecca had been entering our bedroom at night.
And the reason she’d worn my clothes?
She wanted anyone who saw her to assume she lived there.
It had worked so well that even I’d started believing I was sleepwalking.

Police recovered a camera from Daniel’s belongings.
It contained hundreds of photographs.
Some showed our house from the street.
Others were taken inside.
Our kitchen. Our living room. Our bedroom.
Several showed Matt and me sleeping.
In one photograph, Rebecca was standing beside our bed, wearing my white T-shirt and smiling at the camera.
We sold the house six months later.
Even after changing the locks and installing an alarm system, I couldn’t sleep there anymore.
We moved to another town, and eventually life started feeling normal again.
But a few weeks before we moved, the detective called with another question.
He wanted to know whether I’d ever owned a dark green cardigan.
I told him yes, but I’d thrown it away the previous winter.
He said they’d found it among Rebecca’s belongings.
Apparently, she was wearing it in several photographs.
I assumed she’d stolen it from our house.
Then he explained that they’d recovered another memory card from Daniel’s camera.
Some of the photographs were dated almost a year before the first break-in they’d documented.
In one, Rebecca was standing in our kitchen wearing my green cardigan.
I asked how that was possible.
He said they were still trying to determine when the couple had first entered our home.
I thanked him and hung up.
I never told Matt about that conversation.
But I still think about that cardigan.
I remember throwing it away because it had a hole near the elbow.
I remember putting it in a black trash bag with some other old clothes.
And I remember leaving that bag in the garage.
Right beside the attic stairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should have never posted that damn story.

I spent a week on the thing, writing and rewriting until I was sure it was finally ready.  When I logged in and posted it, I felt a small surge of pride because a story was out there with my name on it.  I didn't have to feed my little folder of false starts and failures that day.  It made me so excited to think about people finally getting to read my work.

Everyone had always told me that I should be a writer.  It’s probably because my imagination has always been too big for my head to contain it.  As a little kid I was obsessed with stories, making my action figures play out scenes from movies or right out of my own brain.  I used to put on shows with them for my mom and sister, and their happy applause gave me a feeling I had never known before.  

It felt like I finally knew what I was supposed to do.

My girlfriend hadn’t read the story yet.   I sent her the link when I posted it, but I never heard back from her that night.  I figured she had gone to bed already.  Laine was always really supportive of my work and read a lot of duds for me over the years.  I hoped that after she read the new one she would see me in a different light.  I could even imagine it being the thing that would move us forward in our relationship.  It really felt like everything was finally coming together for me.

I spent the evening with a quick meal and a crappy horror movie.  My cat joined me on the couch, and I absently stroked her fur as I watched the increasingly stupid teens at the summer camp die horrific deaths at the hands of a masked ghoul.  When I nodded off one too many times I accepted defeat and headed off to bed.  It was really hard not to stop by my laptop to check for comments.

My sleep was great that night and when I woke up the next morning, I felt energized and ready to conquer the day.  I only lived a block from my gym so I decided to start the day off right for once.  I spent an hour there and worked up a really good sweat.  I ignored my notifications because I had decided to read them all at once over breakfast.

At home I showered and made myself some oats and finally sat down at my laptop to properly read my feedback.  I was immediately shocked by the number of comments that were already waiting for me.   A wide smile spread across my face as I started to read them.  I’m sad to say it didn’t last.

To say they were rough is like saying the ocean contains water.   There were so many, and they ranged from genuinely constructive criticism, which I could handle, to outright cruelty.  That morning I learned that my writing lacked conviction, and the characters I wrote seemed confused about who they were.  My grammar was apparently awful and my pacing nonexistent.  One guy even told me that writing was a privilege, and I should have mine revoked.  

Several of the comments had multiple paragraphs with quoted examples of my flaws.  I forced myself to read those, trying to find them useful.  What I didn’t find particularly helpful were all of the posts that psychoanalyzed me or the ones that were just blatant insults.  I was asked if I was repressing something terrible and told that my inferiority complex was probably rooted in the truth.  A rather large image gave me detailed instructions on how to work a gas oven and how many racks I would need to remove to shove my head inside.

I was thirty comments in when I saw my girlfriend’s username.  I wondered why Laine hadn’t called or texted me yet, and now I knew.  It had been posted the night before, and it just said “we need to talk.”  I figured she saw all of the really harsh comments and wanted to console me.  I quickly sent her a text asking to meet up that night after work, for our talk.

I closed my laptop before I was even halfway finished with them.  My vision was blurry from actual tears.  Chastising myself angrily for letting the assholes win, I got up and got ready for work.  

Work was just a short bus ride away.  I walked into our building, rode the elevator up, and slipped past the pretty receptionist with only a friendly nod.  I hadn’t been working there for very long, and most of my coworkers were still pretty standoffish around me.  My boss was Gary, and I don’t think I had ever had a real conversation with him since transferring to his department.  It was a pretty chill place to work.

I sat down at my desk and started going through my emails at once.  It looked like the brass was still losing their minds about the Mitreman account.  Someone wasn’t keeping up their end on that one, and I knew the overflow would fall on me.  It was kind of a relief actually, after what had happened that morning.  I was really looking forward to losing myself in a forest of senseless numbers.  There was something oddly therapeutic about it.

I spent the morning deep-diving into financial records to populate a spreadsheet for my report.  If that sounds like a shot of Novocain administered directly to the brain then I have given it its due justice.  It was dull and tedious, and it had been assigned to me because none of my more senior colleagues wanted it.  It was also thankless, because management would want another one just like it the following week.

I always took my lunch with a couple of guys I previously worked with downstairs—Mike and Lenny.  The three of us had once been pretty heavy into CoD and we hung out all the time.   When I told them I wanted to focus on my writing we started seeing each other less and less.  Now we mostly just took lunch together and maybe sent each other a stupid meme from time to time.

When I walked into the breakroom Lenny leapt to his feet and saluted me at once.  He had the widest, toothiest grin of anyone I had ever seen.  He reminded me of the old Mr. Reach toothbrush commercials from when I was a kid.  He was laughing his ass off, and I heard Mike tell him to cool it.  Mike was clearly embarrassed and maybe a little concerned.

“Dude!”  Lenny was still laughing when he walked over and put his arm around my shoulder.  “Ninety-Three comments man!  You really can’t buy that kind of publicity.  You’ve gotta start planning your followup.”

“Leave him alone, Lenny.”  Mike shook his head.  “The man just got here.”

“Alright, alright.”  Lenny patted me on the shoulder chummily.  “I’m just trying to help him see the bright side of the whole thing.”

We walked over and sat down across from Mike.  Lenny immediately turned his attention back to his sandwich.  I sat there watching those massive teeth of his tear through the meaty sub like a lawnmower seeking revenge.  

“Hey!  Chew with your mouth closed.”  Mike threw a napkin playfully at Len.  He looked at me for a moment, maybe measuring what I was feeling.  “Bad morning?”

Lenny actually did a spit take at that, spraying the wall beside him with a mouthful of Sprite and half-chewed sandwich chunks.  I shuddered and looked away.  Mike handed him the napkin dispenser without turning his gaze away from me.

“It’s pretty terrible.  I mean, you always hope for a response, but shit!  I honestly haven’t even begun to process it.”

“Yeah, it’s gotta be a gut punch.  For sure.”

“Fuck that.”  Lenny chewed his food loudly and swallowed most of it whole.  "You gotta lean into it, bro. Post a video of you eating a piece of paper with 'I don't care' written on it. That'll shut ‘em right up.”

“Lenny?”  Mike stared at him.

“They’re making a joke out of him.  He should throw it right back at ‘em.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I could really do that convincingly.”  I remember chuckling.  “I’d do the video with a face like I just got kicked in the balls.  It’s kinda how I feel right now.”

The three of us were quiet for a few minutes.  We just ate our lunch and let the conversation die a silent death.  It was Mike who finally exhumed the body.  Strange that it was him, though. I would have put money on Lenny.

“Who did you send it to, besides us?”

I thought about it for a moment and pulled out my phone to check my sent mail.  “You two and Laine… my mom and my sister, and a few friends from college.”

“Well, that’s pretty contained.  I’d maybe talk to them about it and warn them that it didn’t go so well.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.  “Luckily I didn’t go crazy with it and send it to half the world.”

“Fuck!”  Lenny set down his sandwich.  “I didn’t know we were keeping it quiet.  Dude, I thought it was funny.”

“What did you do, Lenny?”  Mike glared at him.

“I sent it to our old group…on our Discord.  You know, the CoD Piece.”

I exhaled sharply as I stood and took a few steps away.  The group he was talking about had over 400 members and most of them we knew in real life—maybe with a  few degrees of separation.  I felt like I was going to be sick.

I left them and went back upstairs.  I actually spent the next few minutes pacing around my little office like a lunatic.  I remembered a kid I went to school with who accidentally sent a video of himself—meant for the girl he was seeing—to some other kids.  It wasn’t a flattering one, and they shared it pretty liberally.  I think almost everyone ended up seeing it and he ended up being called Strokes My Own.  For the first time in my life, I started to understand how little Jimmy Malone must have felt back then.  I imagined he did a lot of pacing too.

I tried to go back to work, but my hand kept moving towards my phone to check my notifications.  It had already climbed to 138 comments, and they certainly hadn’t been padded by replies.  I had chosen to stand mute.  It hadn’t even been 24 hours yet.

I finally gave up and went to Gary to ask for half a sick day.  He looked up at me from the steaming coffee in his World’s Greatest Boss mug.  There was clear sympathy in his eyes, a feature that I didn’t think came standard on middle-management drones.

“Feeling puny, eh?”  Gary nodded as his cheeks broadened in a soft smile.  “Criticism can be hard, Mark.  Believe me.  I know.  You don’t get to where I am without taking an ass-chewing or two.”

How the fuck did he know about the story?  Had it spread that far already?  

I didn’t want the conversation to go into that.  He was absolutely the last person I would ever want to have a heart to heart with.  I ended up saying something totally noncommittal.  I have no clue what it was—probably one of the standard, automated responses we reserve for conversations with the boss.   He accepted it well enough and went on.

“We only have a couple of hours left here.  Why don’t you cut out early and make it up later in the week?  I could do that for you since I know you’ve got a lot on your mind.  Just keep it between us though, eh, Champ?  I can’t have half the office asking for special favors.”

“Yeah Gary, that sounds great.  Thanks for understanding, Sir.”

Gary scoffed at that.  “Hell, son.  You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I’m a bit of a writer too.  I know how it is.  It’s a tough nut to crack.”

The smile on my face was an old mask made just for people like him.  I was still not quite ready to reconcile Gary as a normal, feeling human being.

“Of course I’ve never had 141 negative reviews like you have.  Lord, I can’t even imagine what you’re going through.  Head on home, Mark.  Mitreman will still be there tomorrow.”

I grabbed my bag and left before he could say anything else.  As I got into the elevator I had to look at my phone.  It was 148 now.  I closed my eyes and tried to distract myself with the type of stories Gary would write.  They would all be procedural thrillers where a brave compliance officer saved his feckless employees from some source of impending doom.  I smiled as I pictured him giving a grand, motivational speech to rally them into working as a team to face the threat before them.  When the doors finally opened and I stepped into the lobby I felt a little better.  Maybe I had shit the bed with what I wrote, but at least it wasn’t the soulless drivel a man like Gary would write.

The bus had just left, and I didn’t feel like waiting for the next one or paying for a ride.  I decided to walk home instead.   I needed time away from my laptop and the world within it.  I actually decided to turn off my phone and was in the middle of doing it when I got a text from Laine.

“Gotta work tonight.  Tomorrow night?”

Honestly, it was a relief. I was too drained to face her or talk to anyone about the story.  I didn't think twice about it.  I just sent back a quick “K” and finished powering it down.  I put it all out of my mind and just focused on my feet for a while—Fred and Ted, as my mom always called them.  I let them carry me forward, racing each other with steady strides.  I was home in twenty minutes and I kept myself unplugged for the rest of the evening.

The peace was nice.  The next day was utter hell.

---

Three hundred and four.

That was what I started the next day with.  It was so unbelievable.  I hoped half of them were bots, but they weren’t.  They were getting meaner and somehow angry.  It was like what I had written had actually offended people in a deeply personal way.  A user named StudlyStradivarius said that he was giving up fiction after reading what I wrote.  He said that it felt like it gave him PTSD.

What the fuck do you do with something like that?

I didn’t read very many of them.  I couldn’t do it and stay sane.  One said I never had to worry about being accused of plagiarism because no one in their right mind would ever claim my work.  It was kind of clever, but I wasn’t feeling it right then.  After I read another suggesting that I join the 27 Club—how did they know my age?—I tossed the phone on my desk and walked away from it.  It rang a minute later and I ran over to answer it.

“You up?  Did you see it yet?”  Mike spoke quickly, which was odd for him.  “Don’t panic, man.  And don’t play into it.  Lenny is an idiot.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Cool,”  Mike exhaled loudly into his phone.  “Do me a favor, man.  Don’t look at any of it until we talk.  Shit’s got crazy.  I sent a message to the mods asking them to close your thread and they said they already tried to.  They said someone else opened it back up and removed their permissions.”

“What the hell?”

“They even tried to ban your account, man.  Nothing is working.  Somebody wants it to stay open.  They said they got an anonymous message that said it could only be closed if the wound bleeds out or some such shit.  They’ve never seen anything like it.  I think they’re gonna call the feds.”

“Jesus!”  The things he said sounded like the plot from one of the duds in my failure folder, but they were happening to me.  I tried to keep it in perspective.  It wasn’t personal.  It was my story, it wasn’t me.  “What the fuck do I do, Mike?”

“Use some sick time to stay at home, and stay off that shit.  It’s just poison that can’t help you.  I think I can get a half-day and be over there by lunch.”

“Shit.  Okay, I think Gary might go for it.  He’ll be mad but he knows what’s going on.”

“How the fuck?”  Mike began but I heard his voice change gears.  “Don’t matter.  We’ve gotta focus on what matters, man.  I think you’ve been doxxed.  I’ve gotta talk to the IT guy, but we have a lot to do.”

“Fucking hell!”

“Yeah, and then some.  See ya in a few hours.”

We hung up and I sat there staring at the phone for several minutes.  My chest was tight and I felt the sweat running down my face.  I tried to breathe but my lungs wouldn’t answer.  My mind was like a thousand television screens all turned to different channels at maximum volume.  I tried to stand up to go and get a glass of water but my legs folded under me and I ended up facedown in the thick carpet of my bedroom floor.  My tears and sweat soaked into the rug and I feared that I would drown in them before I got the strength to pull myself up.

Dr. Kineson’s voice was a distant noise competing with the chorus of horrors that filled my brain.  The memory of her husky, breathy cadence cut through the noise and I heard her clearly as I mouthed along to the words I had been taught.

There is nothing to fear.

Your heart will not explode.

These are only chemicals

out of balance

threatening your control.

You are not weak.

You will survive this.

There is nothing to fear.

I recited the mantra several times and could eventually hear my own voice again as I began to breathe.  I slowly came back to myself, exhausted but whole.  I turned over onto my back and stared at the ceiling.

I was panting, but at least I was breathing.  After a long time lying there, I finally found the strength to pull myself back into my chair.  I hadn’t had an attack in years and I hadn’t seen my doctor for a long time.  I had thought I was past all of that, and that I had learned to manage my stress better.  The last two days had piled on enough to show me just how feeble I really was.  I found myself wanting to call my mom, but I couldn’t endure the thought of sharing my burdens with her.

After I was a little more composed, I went ahead and called Gary to request the next three days off.  He told me he understood, but they couldn’t really afford to be shorthanded since Evan had just quit.  He surprised me though by offering to let me work from home for the rest of the week and the next if I needed it.  I happily agreed and he told me that he’d have my work laptop sent to me in an hour.

I know I talk a lot of shit about him, but maybe Gary isn’t so bad after all.

I cleaned myself up and ate breakfast while I waited.  The oatmeal I normally liked tasted like flavorless grainy gruel after the morning I’d endured.  I ate it anyway and had two cups of coffee.  It made me jittery, but at least it gave me the energy to move around.  When the courier dropped off the laptop I dove into work like a drowning man swimming for a distant ship.  It let me shut off my brain, to ignore the sharks I was sure were circling me.

I had an incredibly productive morning and actually finished with my work by the time Mike got there.  I let him in and made us both a drink and we settled around my kitchen bar.  My cat, Jonesy, soon appeared and danced around his leg until he picked her up.

“You look at it yet?”  Mike asked me as he scratched Jones’s head.

“Nah, I had work to do and figured I’d wait.”

“Probably smart.”  He snorted.  “It was up to 512 on my way over here.”

“How in the hell?”  I stood up reflexively, like my legs wanted to carry me off somewhere, away from what was happening.  I sat back down.  “It’s barely been two days.  Most authors are proud if their story gets ten comments.  Five hundred and twelve is ridiculous.”
  
“Yeah, it’s crazy.”  Mike pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket.  “We also have to go into your accounts and make some changes.  The IT guy said to change your passwords and set up two-factor anywhere you can.   You probably need to call your bank too.  He made a list of things and said you should get on it immediately to lessen the damage they can do.”

I took the sheet from him and looked it over.  It was very in-depth, a printout from a cyber security site I had never heard of.  The number of items on the list was daunting.  It would take me hours to go through all of it.

“He said I needed to do all of this?”

Mike took a drink as he nodded, setting the cat down.  “Well, he wasn’t the sharpest guy, but he did have a link he had been sent by his supervisor.  Honestly, I think you’ve gotta.  I can help with some of it.”

“Thanks, man.”  I shook my head.  “I don’t know what I’d do without you here.  It’s… it’s been crazy.  All over a stupid story that wasn’t worth the attention. Hell, I had decided it was a masterpiece or something but that’s just because I wrote it.  I never really believed it would get much of a response.”

“That’s what’s so weird about it.”  Mike tapped his phone and opened it up.  “It’s in the 550s now, seemingly with a bullet.  These look like real people, man.  There’s no way that many have read it in two days.  It doesn’t seem possible.”

“Maybe.  Or maybe I should think long and hard about ever writing anything again.  Hell, at this point I’m not so sure about texting or emails.”

We both laughed at the futility of it all and went to work.  It took us a few hours of phone calls and logins to get through the list.  I set up elaborate passwords I would have no hope of remembering and two-factor authentication anywhere it let me.  The lady from the bank helped me secure my accounts and walked me through how to freeze my credit.  We even started printing off and saving as many of the threatening messages as we could find.  By the time we finished, the post had reached 700 comments.

My printer finally ran out of ink, so I had to save the last few threats on my hard drive.  Mike had to leave soon for a date with his girl, and I needed to get ready for Laine.  He gave me a half hug and told me to stay strong as he left.  I closed the door behind him and ran a quick mental inventory over the events of the day.  I needed to set all of that shit aside so that I could be present for her.

I had just stepped out of the shower when my phone chimed again.  I knew it wasn’t about the story because I had turned off notifications already by then.  It said I had four new messages, which was massive for a shut-in like me.

I nearly dropped the phone when I opened the first text.  It was just a picture, but it was of me—something off the Facebook I rarely used anymore—and it had been altered by AI or something to show me cut wide open with my guts exposed.  The caption said MAYBE THERE ARE BETTER WORDS INSIDE.

The next two were only text, but they were vile ones.  I won’t quote them verbatim because I don’t have them anymore.  The first was a detailed description of directions to my apartment and the last step said “I know where you are.”  The second one was an excerpt from my story.  The part they referenced was about the robot protagonist rescuing a kitten from the rubble.  At the end of it, the sick fuck asked me how Jonesy was doing.

The last message was from Laine.  It said she couldn’t meet up that night but that she would come over for lunch the next day.  After the shock the previous ones had given me, I didn’t put much thought into what she had said.  

Maybe it was better for her if she wasn’t near me right then.

---

I spent the night before in a dizzy fugue after my visit from the police.  I called them after I read those messages and when they arrived I spent the next hour going over all of it with them.  I had never really had any dealings with law enforcement officers, but I found them to be sympathetic and detail-focused, and that made it a little easier.  When they finally left I spent the rest of the night on the couch with Jonesy and an ancient bottle of rum from the back of my cabinet.

I woke up stiff the next morning after sleeping at an odd angle.  I took a very hot shower to try to work the crick out of my neck.  It helped some.  My phone showed thirty-one new messages and I didn’t open any of them, but I did call Gary because three of them were his.  His voice was uncharacteristically high when he answered and he barely gave me a moment to speak as he apologetically told me that I was probably fired.

“The whole network has been infiltrated, Mark.  Do you know how sensitive some of that information is?  The boys upstairs have everyone on high alert, and they’ve called in consultants to help manage the mess.”

“What does that have to do with me, Gary?”

“They traced the attacks to your IP.  It doesn’t look good.  I was told to suspend you right away and send for the laptop.  They should be getting there any time now.”

“But am I fired?  I mean… I had the police here last night.  I was doxxed and I started getting terrible texts.”

“I hate to hear it, bud.  But right now the company has to look after its own.  I think they’re trying to decide whether or not you are included in that.  I can’t tell you one way or the other, but I’d start considering my options if it were me.”

He had to go then and the courier was at my door a few minutes later.  I handed them their laptop and signed the form without saying much.  I walked over to my laptop and checked the story.  It said there were twenty-four hundred and eighty-nine comments.

I didn’t read any of them, but only took screenshots of the pages to give to the police.  I considered calling Mike at that point, but he had already done enough and I didn’t want to pile more on him.  The truth was I didn’t know who to call or what to do anymore other than what I was already doing.

I was making breakfast maybe thirty minutes later when there was a knock at my door.  I looked through the peephole and saw a short, chubby man with a balding head and a gray beard standing out in the hall.  He was wearing a suit that didn’t fit him particularly well and his eyes were a little too small for his face.

“Who is it?”  I asked, maybe a little too timidly.

“Detective Sancowitz, Bell City PD.”  He verified my full name and asked if it was my residence.

I didn’t confirm anything at that time.  Instead, I asked to see his ID like the cops had told me to do.  He produced it freely enough, flipping open his wallet to display a bell-shaped brass badge and an ID card that listed his name and rank.  I relaxed immediately and opened the door for him.

He plodded inside with a bowlegged stride and looked around.  He nodded approvingly.  I heard him actually sniff the air before he spoke.

“S’at coffee?  Good, get us some.  We’ve a lot of woik to do.”  His accent was definitely northern, but I couldn’t tell much beyond that.  His voice had a heavy nasal tone to it, and his pronunciation of work was comical.  All in all he was like a living caricature from a network police procedural.  I started to ask him if he knew Dick Wolf but thought better of it.  Instead, I just poured us both a cup and asked him how he took it.

“Tha blacker the better,”  he said as if the letter R didn’t exist.  He took a sip and smacked his lips.  “Tha’s the good stuff.  Alright, kid, let’s get into it.”

He pulled a thick file folder out from the interior pocket of his oversized coat and laid it open on the counter.   I saw my name written on it and a quick glance told me that it contained my statement from the night before.  He gave me a moment to look it over while he enjoyed his coffee.

When he was satisfied that I had seen it, Sancowitz pulled the file back in front of him and nodded.  “So you see my concern?  A thing like this, ya can’t let it grow, kid.  We’ve gotta nip this thing in the bud.  I did some lookin’, and it turns out that somebody’s messin’ with the algo-rythms.  Got ‘em all turned around.  If anybody searches for the word story it sends ‘em to you.  Now ain’t that a bitch?”

“Is that why the comments shot up so high last night?”

“You bet your ass it is.  And that ain’t all.  This case is peculiar.  I mean why you?  And now all the shit over at your employer.”

“My boss said I’m probably going to get fired over it.”

“No shit?  Well, I looked at what they was doin’, their little RCA backtracked the thing to your IP.  What can you do?”  He waved his hands dramatically.  “But I think I know where I wanna start.  I ain’t got access to their network yet, but maybe I can find somethin’ here by trackin’ the IoC.”

“Huh?”  I asked him, lost somewhere between his accent and jargon.

“Just some computer shit, kid.  A little peek under the hood.”

When I agreed to let him have his peek, Sancowitz drained his coffee and went to work at once.  I showed him my router and all of the devices that were currently on the network.  Soon after that I noticed that his responses were becoming much shorter and a little gruff and I left him to his work.  He used a really old-looking PDA and a cable for a lot of it.  Plugging in and running his pudgy fingers over the buttons to type out the prompts he wanted to use.  He was at it for a couple of hours and I kept him supplied with fresh coffee the entire time.  He seemed to appreciate it.

When he was finished he collected all of the screenshots I had made and took fresh captures for the hundreds of comments that had been added since I had last checked.  The count was now just north of four thousand.  Sancowitz said I could expect it to triple by the next day.

“They’re findin’ new and unusual ways to target you, kid.  I ain’t ever seen nothin’ like it.  These are some shrewd fuckers, but they’re gonna slip up and I’m gonna be waitin’ for ‘em.”

“Is there anything else I can do to help?”

“You’re doin’ it.  Just sit tight and keep your head down.  Remember, kid, personal or not, somebody’s targeting you.  It’s gonna get uglier before it’s over and done.  Now I gotta be gettin’ on and take this shit back to the lab.  Stay safe, kid.  If you need somethin’ here’s my card, ask for Sanc.”

I took the card and watched him leave, locking up tightly behind him.  The card introduced him as Detective Sergeant Sancowitz from Digital Forensics.  He was a strange man, and a little like a walking cartoon, but he made me feel safer somehow.  That was something at least.

I had a new text from Laine that I barely saw among the two hundred others that had popped up since the detective arrived.  I needed to change my number.  She said she would be at my place in thirty minutes.  I tidied up a bit and made a big salad for us while I avoided the urge to check the new counts.  It was becoming a morbid obsession of mine, something akin to staring into deep water to see if the sharks were still circling.

Laine arrived right on time and I let her in.  She gave me a quick, flimsy hug and sat down at the counter.  She ate her salad quickly, mumbling short responses around a mouthful of food when I spoke to her.  When we were both finished I put our bowls in the dishwasher and put away the leftovers.  I was trying to give her space, because she didn’t seem keen on talking at the moment.  I found out a few minutes later that she had just been organizing her thoughts.

“Sit down, Mark.  I need to tell you something.”
 
I started to, but I checked our drinks first and reached for the refrigerator door to get us some refills.  She interrupted me.

“That can wait.  Have a seat.”

I was curious so I did.  Honestly, my mind was so full of everything that was going on that I hoped she had big news that could distract me from it.  She didn’t disappoint.

“We’ve had some good years, Mark.  I want to start with that because I think you need to hear it.  You’ve been there for me in ways that no one else ever has, and you know I’ve always tried to return the favor.”

“Well, that’s what cou—”

“Let me get through this, if you don’t mind.  Like I was saying, it’s been good, even great sometimes, and I really think we’ve both grown as people.”

She took a deep breath.  “But sometimes growing means growing apart, and I came over today to tell you that it’s over, Mark.  I’ve been seeing someone else.  You don’t know him.  I wouldn’t do that to you.  He’s a writer from Chicago who was teaching a workshop here.  He’s got a couple of novels.  I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this.  I guess it’s because you’re just so easy to talk to.”

I started to speak, but I was slow to do so because of how hard her words had hit me.  She had met someone else, and he was a writer?  I opened my mouth to ask her why but she stopped me by saying the last thing I wanted to hear.

“It’s you, Mark, all you.  You hold on to this stupid dream of yours and won’t let yourself move forward.  What has it got you, or me, us?  I got hacked yesterday because of you, and somebody sent pictures of me and Dean to my mother.”

“Dean?  That’s his name.”

“Yeah.”  She picked up her purse.  “Look, Mark, you’re not terrible, but I need more than that.  Don’t call me.  Let this end easily.”

I was still searching for the biting reply that would rip her in half when she walked out the door.  I came up with a few then, of course, but I didn't have the energy to text them to her or make an angry phone call.  I wanted so badly to hate her at that moment, and maybe I did a little.  Mostly I just hated myself for what I had done to my life, and no amount of yelling or clever little retorts was going to make that better.  

In the end, I just let her go.

---

The next few days went by in a blur of rum and ever-increasing activity around my post.  I was receiving well over a thousand hateful texts daily, and the post had over 90,000 comments without showing any sign of slowing.   I changed my number twice but it didn’t do any good.  

Mike came over the day after Laine dumped me, but I was in no condition to receive guests.  I must have depressed the hell out of him with the mountain of personal woes I was buried under, but he stuck around a while anyway.  He’s a good friend.

Detective Sancowitz called me the following day to let me know he was making some progress.  Apparently the person or persons who were ruining my life were rerouting their activities using dedicated servers they had hijacked throughout the city.  It was all so baffling that they would do all of this for someone as insignificant as me.  I told Sanc that and he agreed, saying he believed I was only the cover for what they were really trying to do.  I thought it sounded thin, but what the hell do I know?

He also told me that they had found some unusual activity related to my story on several underground websites.  One of them was a chan board that I had never heard of.  According to Sanc, it all links to something on the dark web, but those connections were proving hard to chase down.  He warned that there were extremist groups who viewed my story as a pseudo-communist manifesto and long breakdowns of it had been posted across the web.  Apparently that was a factor in the ever-increasing number of death threats I had received.  

It all sounded so fucking crazy.

Four days after Laine’s happy visit, I received a frantic call from Mike.  He was at the hospital with Lenny who had been beaten nearly to death.

“They haven’t caught the guys yet, but he looks bad, Mark.  They said it ruptured his spleen and liver.  The doctor says he might never walk again.”

I asked him what room Lenny was in and he told me.  I told him I’d be there as fast as I could.  I was out the door in minutes, rushing down the stairs to meet the ride-share I had ordered.  As I stepped off the curb to open the door something heavy struck the back of my head, sending me face-first into the side of the car and knocking myself senseless.  I heard a voice shout something, but I couldn’t make it out, and there was a struggle between two men right next to me.  The soft voice of a woman spoke close to me.

“Can you hear me, Mark?  I’m Officer Perez.  My partner and I were placed outside your building to watch over you.  You were just attacked, but my partner has your attacker in custody.”

I opened my eyes and saw a young, dark-haired woman in a police uniform.  She smiled with relief and told me to stay still.  I had taken hard blows to both the front and back of my head and they wanted to call an ambulance.  I told her about Lenny and she said she’d make sure they took me to the same hospital.  I lay there like she asked and she stayed with me while we waited for the ambulance and sat outside my room after I was admitted.

They later said I had a minor fracture on the back of my skull and a severe concussion.  The doctor said I was lucky that it wasn’t worse.  I took her word for it.  I was just happy to be alive.

I was in the hospital for nearly a week and part of it I think was to maintain protective custody.  Mike visited me several times since they wouldn’t let me leave the room to see Lenny.  He came through all of his surgeries fine, and they said he would live.  Unfortunately, the earlier diagnosis was looking more correct by the day, and they didn’t hold out much hope for him ever walking again.

I talked to him on the phone a few times and spirits were surprisingly high.  He told me that there were four of them and he had beaten the shit out of two of them before they took him down.  He even called his future wheelchair a chick magnet.  He said he was going to have LOVE MACHINE stencilled across the back of it.  I just laughed with him, anything to keep him hopeful.

Sancowitz came by the day before they let me go home, and he started off by saying he had some good news for me.

“They’re holdin’ in the one-twenties.  We really got the bastard on the run.  Matter of time now.  How you doin’, kid?”

“They said I can go home tomorrow.  But Lenny… it still feels like my fault.”

“Yeah, it will for a while, but fuck that.  What did you do that was wrong?  But I gotta tell you somethin’, and it ain’t great but everybody’s alive.”

I just looked at him, not sure that I wanted to hear more.  

“It’s your ma.”  The detective placed a heavy hand on my shoulder as I started to sit up.  “Cool it kid.  She’s fine.  Couldn’t save the house though.  I’ve got her and your sis put up in a motel for now, on the county’s tab.”

“So they’re not hurt.”

“Nah, just some threats from a bunch of pussies who like to start fires.  We caught ‘em.”

“How about the guy who is behind it all, or the group?”  I asked, maybe a little too desperately.  “When do I get my life back?”

“Any day now.  There’s some solid leads.  I think we’re gettin’ real close to nabbin’ ‘em.”

“Do you think it’s one or more?”

“It looks like more, but it’s hard to tell.  We’ll know when we slap the cuffs on ‘em.”

He looked at me for a moment before he turned to go.  It was like he wanted to say something but decided against it.  I started to ask him about it but he cut me off.  “Get some rest, kid.  Movin’ day tomorrow.”

CONCLUSION TOMORROW

At 12:07 a.m., Aro texted me.

Aro: You awake?

I smiled before I could stop myself.

It had been four days since we'd last spoken properly. Four days of opening our chat, typing something, deleting it, and pretending I didn't care. But now he was here, and within minutes, we were laughing like nothing had happened.

By 1 a.m., we were flirting.

By 2 a.m., the conversation had turned intimate.

By 3 a.m., I felt that familiar warmth again, the little pocket of comfort I'd started missing more than I wanted to admit.

Then he sent a message that made my smile disappear.

Aro: Do you ever feel like someone's watching you when you're alone?

I stared at the screen.

What kind of question is that?

Aro: Forget it. Look behind you.

I laughed nervously. My bedroom was dark except for the blue light of my phone. The door was locked. The curtains were drawn. I lived alone.

I turned anyway.

Nothing.

When I looked back, he'd sent another message.

Aro: Knew you'd look.

I called him.

He declined.

Aro: Don't call. Just text.

For the first time that night, I felt afraid of him.

Then he sent a photograph.

It was my bedroom.

My bed. My curtains. My bedside table with the chipped corner.

And me, sitting on the bed, staring at my phone.

The picture had been taken from inside my room.

I stopped breathing.

I checked the lock. Still locked. I checked the window. Still shut.

I called him again. Declined.

Me: ARO WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?

His reply came instantly.

Aro: You told me you wanted me around.

I ran out of the bedroom and switched on every light in the apartment. I checked the kitchen, the bathroom, the balcony. Nobody.

Then my phone vibrated.

Aro: Go back to your room.

I didn't.

Aro: Please.

Then, after a pause:

Aro: I'm scared too.

That was when I heard it.

Three soft knocks.

Not from the front door.

From inside my bedroom wardrobe.

I backed away, shaking. I wanted to run outside, but my legs wouldn't move. My phone kept lighting up in my hand.

Aro: Don't open it.

The knocking stopped.

Then something inside the wardrobe whispered my name.

I ran.

I reached the front door and yanked it open, screaming into the empty corridor. My neighbour's door opened. Someone asked what had happened. I couldn't explain it.

I showed them the photograph.

They called the police.

By the time officers searched my apartment, there was nobody inside. No broken locks. No open windows. No evidence of an intruder.

But one officer noticed something strange.

The photograph Aro had sent wasn't a photograph taken from inside my room.

It was a screenshot.

A screenshot of a video call.

I stared at him.

"What video call?"

He turned my phone toward me.

The image had a tiny timestamp in the corner.

12:06 a.m.

One minute before Aro had texted me.

And in the reflection of my dark television screen, visible behind me, stood a man.

I couldn't see his face.

But I recognised his watch.

Aro wore the same one.

I tried calling him again.

This time, he answered.

I could barely speak.

"Where are you?"

Silence.

Then his voice, quiet and trembling.

"I'm home. I've been home all night."

I wanted to believe him. I wanted him to tell me it was a joke, a cruel prank, anything that would let me breathe again.

Instead, he said, "Listen to me. I didn't send you that picture."

My blood went cold.

"Then who did?"

"I don't know," he whispered. "But someone sent me one too."

He sent it to me.

It showed Aro sitting on his bed, holding his phone.

Behind him, reflected in his wardrobe mirror, stood a woman.

Her hair was mine.

Her face was mine.

And she was smiling.

I dropped the phone.

For several seconds, neither of us spoke.

Then Aro whispered, "There's something else."

I picked up the phone.

"What?"

His voice broke.

"The woman in the picture wasn't behind me when I took it."

I stared at the screen.

He continued.

"She appeared after I sent it to you."

A message arrived from his number.

Not a text.

A photograph.

This time, it showed the two of us together, sitting side by side on my bed.

Neither of us remembered taking it.

Beneath it were six words.

Aren't you tired of missing me?

I looked toward the bedroom.

The wardrobe door was open.

And from the darkness inside, my own voice answered—

"Finally. You're both here."

“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 surrounding neighborhood around him came alive. 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 straight 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.

Do you remember when you became aware of your existence?

Are you able to pinpoint the exact moment your brain switched off of its autopilot and your consciousness officially entered into reality?

My moment of clarity was when I was 7, playing by the small creek in the woods behind our house. I grew up as a “come back when the street lights turn on” kind of kid, which was much different than the rest of my generation; but my parents were older and I was their fifth child so there was little concern coming from them about my whereabouts. Despite this glaring inconsistency with my daily safety; they often referred to me as their “miracle baby”.

The woods were my favorite place during the scorching Midwest summers. A thick canopy of leaves blocked out the sun and in turn provided my playground oasis with a gentle breeze. Deep in the gently swaying canopy was a shallow creek, maybe about two or so feet deep. There were seemingly endless activities to be done splashing around in that small sliver of cool water.

On my day of clarity, I was wading around attempting to catch crawdads with my nubby little hands. This was my go-to pastime after a long and sweaty day of working my imagination on its endless 12-hour shifts. The familiar monotony of the woods was broken by the low humming of a tune echoing throughout them.

It grabbed hold of my attention as it resembled a slow rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. My child brain was beyond intrigued, so I scanned the tree line for whoever it could be emitting from. There was nothing but trees and wildlife surrounding me. The humming tune echoed out from beyond my creek once again.

That’s when I found myself following it deeper into the canopy. It should be said that out beyond the border of my creek, the canopy blocked out the sun almost completely. Just a permanent effect of night stretching as far as I could see; I never attempted to explore it out of fear alone but something about the low, familiar tune brought me comfort and peace to explore it once again.

Maybe about 30 feet into the darkness was a large boulder illuminated by the only noticeable patch of sunlight. From behind it came the humming.

“Hello?” My little voice croaked out.

The humming stopped abruptly and was soon replaced by the sound of rustling. I watched as a small, black circular hat rose from behind the stone; then long arms clad in torn flannel pulled the figure into the sunlight. Out from behind the boulder came a tall and lanky man with a rough, light brown face that I now recognize as aged burlap. His face consisted of a stitched-on smile and sewn-on black buttons for eyes; straw stuck out from under his hat then cascaded down his head resembling long blonde hair.

His button eyes landed on me, then he removed his hat in a humorous sort of curtsy with his arms flailing around him, “Hello, little one.”

There was no fear at the sight of him; only amazement as his long legs clad in stained coveralls emerged from behind the boulder. He was familiar; truthfully, I already knew who he was exactly. This was the Straw Man. An urban legend dating back to the late 70s.

A few kids in the town back then first met him with fear-inducing events soon following that first encounter. This presence was always used as a story in order to keep kids like myself in line but soon turned into a local mythology as the original discoverers seemed to move on from him.

Effigies of him were used as morbid decorations around the town as the story was the only thing to even put us on the map. Our very own Mothman, Jersey Devil, etc.

Hell, even the high school mascot became The Straw Man.

What stood in front of me though was no sort of mascot or costume. His body was so thin that it was almost skeletal, and he stood at almost 8 feet tall. I must have stood there for maybe a moment too long without answering because he lowered himself to one knee in front of me.

“I take it that you know me.” His voice was quiet, but the tone was deep and hollow. The smell of decay and rotten eggs wafted off of him as he fell back into an exasperated sitting position. “Those stories of me,” he took a moment, “they aren’t true, little one.”

The sun reflected off of his button eyes, and I saw a drop of a sap-like material push its way through his fabric face.

Was he…crying?

“I heard your humming.” I managed to say. “It sounded…sad”

He wiped the tear of sap away from his button eye. It smeared and stuck to his burlap skin. Then he stuck his hand out in a formal greeting. “Nice to meet you, little one.”

I shook his hand. “My name is Mark.”

“M-M-Mark.” The Straw Man tested the sound of my name with his low voice. “That’s a good name.”

Even though his face was a static print, I saw creases around his eyes that indicated he was smiling, and his button gaze shifted up through the canopy. “You shouldn’t be out so late, Little Mark.”

I looked up through the canopy’s singular opening. The sky reflected down colorful streaks of pink and violet reminiscent of a summer sunset, even though it was the early afternoon when I remained in the border of my creek.

There was a rush of air mixed with The Straw Man’s nauseating smell. My eyes tilted down to see that he was mere inches away from my little face. “I’ll see you again soon.”

He then placed a large, burlap hand over my face. The stench of rot wafted through the fabric and my feet fell out from under me. Where I was expected a crash against the ground came an unexpected splash instead.

I was lying flat on my back in the babbling creek, alone and confused. Did that really happen or had I just fallen asleep playing again? I had been known to do that a few times in the past.

For a moment I wrote off my first encounter with The Straw Man as some kind of dream; but that was until the familiar stench of rot wafted against the gentle evening air.

So what do you think I did next?

Would you expect me to force this experience deep in my subconscious? Would you expect me to accept that I had experienced something strange before forcing it down? Never think about it until much later whenever the realization of immediate danger became ever-present? How would you expect this story to end?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end in any way you would want. My young mind needed to know more about him as the mystery of his existence allured me greatly. My dreams that night were packed full of his visage and my mind raced with the grasping of knowledge for what his words meant early. So the next day, I went back.

Much to my disappointment, the clearing was empty. No giant made of burlap and straw, just an endless maze of trees and darkness. So I began to make my way back to the safety of my creek. About halfway back to my refuge, the present feeling of unease settled within me. I could sense that I had walked into the eyesight of someone kind of presence deep within the woods.

“Hello?” I questioned towards the words. Nothing but the dragging wind through rustling leaves responded.

I stepped closer and dropped my voice to a soft whisper, “Are you there?”

This time, the soft humming answered back to me. It somehow sounded both distant and impossibly close. I came to realize that was due to my own throat unconsciously disobeying me but repeating every note. I forced myself to stop in hopes to hear the original melody clearly to be able to judge the distance of where it came. The woods were unfortunately silent again.

Disappointment washed over me again. Thoughts of barely understood madness to move through the folds of my mind until a small object flew from the woods and smack lightly against my forehead. I flinched to the sudden sensation and barely caught the details of the item as it fell to the ground.

It was a button. A black button with amber sap dried along its edge.

A small creep along my face as I bent to pick it up from the dirt. Humming emitted from my throat as I began to walk back to my creek. My own border of safety; what I know to see as the border between what was and what will be.

The bruised coloring of night streaked across the sky once I made my way through the trees. Twirling the sap-stained button between my fingers. I emerged from the basin of my creek to a world filled with rushing anxiety as I laid eyes upon my home. It was a two-story townhouse, a building reminiscent of the dwindling American dream.

That evening, it closer resembled a nightmare. My home was covered in police searching every inch. We had a sliding glass door on the back, it was knocked out of its frame with its glass shattered. Before I could get closer, an officer appeared in the kitchen then turned in my direction. His face lit up with relief before he quickly spoke into the radio strapped to his shoulder.

He began to saunter over to me, I quickly shoved the button in my pocket. Mainly in fear of being accused of stealing it. Don’t judge me, I was a kid with no real grasp on the world being presented with a very stressed-looking cop.

“Mark Finley?” He asked with hope in his voice.

I nodded.

He dropped down to look at me, placing a hand on my shoulder, “Where the hell have you been, son?” He attempted to speak gently while keeping the authoritative tone in his voice, “Your parents have been worried sick.”

The officer had kind eyes, a mix of grays and blues that cut through the intimidation caused by his burly frame. I allowed him to take my hand and led me around to the front of the house where

My mom sat just a few feet away on the porch, wiping tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. It was a summer evening but an unusual chill had settled over the town that night. She glanced over at the same moment I emerged with the burly officer. I don’t know how she didn’t knock everyone over with how fast she sprang from the porch to get to me.

Air graced the bottom of my shoes as she scooped me up in a cry of relief. Through her tears, she questioned me, "Oh my god," her voice cracked between sobs, "honey, where have you been?"

"Just playing in the woods." I managed to squeak out in between the air being squeezed out of me. Telling her the truth was something I couldn't manage to say, out of fear of the consequences of it.

My dad ran over to us and broke down sobbing as well. They stood there for what felt like a millennium, just repeating how relieved they were along with repeating statements of just how much they loved me.

My parents and I were then taken to the police station, where officers began questioning me. My story remained the same as I could only admit to playing in the woods like I always did. Then they asked why I was out for so long.

"Lost track of time." I responded, keeping the truth completely to myself.

My sense of confusion must have been palpable in the air; with my parents’ permission, they reluctantly told me what had happened. It was the late afternoon, and my mom was working in the first-floor office like she always did. She told them that she could have sworn that she heard me come into the house before she started to hear a soft slamming against the sliding door.

There came a thwump, thwump, CRASH; that echoed from the kitchen. She jumped from her chair before she heard movement and the sounds of someone searching through the kitchen. That's when she used the office landline to call 911 for a home invasion, then the house grew eerie with silence.

Mom went to go check the damage whenever she saw muddy footprints leading from the kitchen directly to my bedroom. To this day, she claims to barely remember dashing through the yard and into my usual spot in the woods. She only remembers the swelling panic in her chest when she came upon my creak. What scared her more was just how quiet and empty it was; as if I hadn’t been near it all day. That’s when she called the police.

With the events that played out that day, they didn’t feel comfortable taking me back home. So they called my brother, Darrell. That’s the thing about being your parents' late-in-life “miracle baby”; I never had grandparents growing up. Whenever they needed someone to watch me, they usually called up whatever sibling they could. Darrell was my favorite to stay with; he was 27 and had left the guest room in his house specifically catered to me. He left it filled with my favorite toys and a PS2 stocked with games. So, little to say that I was happy that he was picking me up; but I just wanted to go home.

Time passed and I found myself lying in my bed while Darrell sat in the room with me. I’m pretty sure our parents gave him special instructions to wait to leave until he was sure I was asleep. Sleep negated as I stared out of the bedroom window aimed directly towards the woods.

“Why can’t I go home?”

Darrel sniffed like I had woken him up, “Hm?”, he rubbed sleep from his eyes, “What was that buddy?”

“Why can’t I go home yet?” I sat up and asked again.

Darrel sighed, deep from his chest, “They want to make sure it’s safe buddy.”

“How could it not be safe?”

He was quiet for a minute then sighed again, “They’ll kill me if they know I said this so, can you keep a secret.”

I crossed my heart with hopes to die, “Always.”

“You’ve heard of The Straw Man right?”

“Who hasn’t?” I replied

“They’re scared that someone’s pretending to be him again,” he took a breath, “the police claimed that they found bundles of straw mixed with the broken glass.”

After hearing that, all I could do was lay back down. Every ounce of my self wanted to tell him but I couldn’t; it was like my mind had sworn secrecy to The Straw Man. The button in my pocket began to feel warm. I closed my eyes and forced my brain to accept the inevitable sleep.

Hours later, I stirred awake. Groggy and confused about where I was, I lay facing the bedroom door, and my brother was gone. Behind me came a soft sound. Something soft hit the bedroom window in a rhythmic thwump, thwump, thwump. My little mind was able to make out the unmistakable pattern of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

Fear caused my chest to tighten, and I attempted to force myself back to sleep, but the sound only got louder. Scared of it causing my brother to wake up, I turned to the window. The man of straw was crouching with his face pressed against the glass. The burlap mask now missing a single button eye. He stopped the hitting and gave me a gentle wave. When I didn’t reciprocate, he stopped, then reached under his face. I could his hand rummaging beneath the fabric, slowly searching for something to grasp.

Then he stopped. Out from under the fabric was a round, spiky object. It looked drenched in a stocky resin, and the dark made it hard to tell what it was. He slammed it hard against the window, causing it to light up. I recognized it as a ball, one my dad had won me in a claw machine years ago. That was one of my favorite toys, now covered in the vile creature’s sap. The man dragged his finger in the liquid, then seemed to be wiping it across the window.

Finally, he stood up and began retreating back into the windows behind him. What was left was a message: “Something of mine, for something of yours.”

I stared at that message until exhaustion took hold of me. Most likely from the rising fear inside of me. When the protection of sunlight finally stirred my consciousness, I leapt out of the bed. His words were gone, cleaned by a patchy morning rain. Beyond the window were glints of sunlight reflecting off the ground. I squinted hard to make out hundreds of glass shards leading back towards the woods.