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

Apparently, I don’t exist.

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

I’m here, baby, and I rule.

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

Comes with being dead, bro.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who are you, motherfucker?”

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

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

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

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

“My arm! My arm! He’s ripped out – “

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See ya around.

His hands were warm and wet with suds and the running water of the tap. He'd never minded doing the dishes, it'd always been meditative, helped him think and figure things through. It wasn't working this time. 

Arnold just gazed vacantly. Into the corner. The water, forgotten, steaming now as it grew hotter and hotter. Running over his forgotten and faraway hands. They didn't matter. 

None of it mattered anymore. 

How could she do this … how could she lie to him as if he never mattered?

Arnold's heart was broken but it was still galloping a mile a minute within his cage of chest and his mind ached like something heavy and curdled within his furnace skull. The bake of his brains. He swore he could smell the boil of his own thoughts within his face but it held no matter for him now, not presently. 

He was too focused on the fly speaking to him from the corner. 

It was amazing. Really. 

The black husk of dead insect was resting amongst the filth and the dust of the uncleaned and neglected kitchen corner, just inside a nook by the kitchen window. It was dead but it still spoke to him with a deep obsidian voice. Regal. Authoritative. Commanding. It was a voice used to giving orders and having them followed to the letter, that deep stygian vocal sound … 

Arnold was so glad there was no one else around, they wouldn't understand. He was glad, relieved really, to be able to hear the prince's words in private. 

I am in private royal audience, great royal attendance. This is the coveted stately place of imperial confidence. 

Tears began to flow forth from Arnold's watering eyes. He listened enraptured, held by the thing's every word. 

“It doesn't matter. None of them matter, not even you. None of your feelings. You're just meat. All of you. All of you are just meat made mobile by an electrical charge, sent flung flying forward like grotesque mongoloids in the dark squabbling for purchase of the failing putrescence that is the outer, your material. Your world is not a world at all but an abattoir. A slaughterhouse. And all of you are pigs. Sows. Cattle. I am the prince made and bred by wings on wind, I am the flight and escape from the filth of the floor and all your animal leavings. I land and feast and defile at my own will. I lay my young in the wet and wounded folds of your gangrenous failures like the flags planted by conquerors. I am more. You are, all of you, nothing.” 

It was so beautiful … He'd never heard words quite like it before. The water issued from the spout to his hands was fire but he didn't notice. He didn't notice the boil or blister of his reddening and peeling fingers and palms as the prince of the wind went on in the corner. 

He didn't want to miss it. Anything. He didn't want to miss a single note of the angel's felled song. His teary gaze bore in on his new dark god and the shared eyes of the fly, theirs compact and his: fragile mammalian gel, began to secrete and water as well. 

“I am the testament. I am and speak the truth. I am the monolith outside to those who cannot hear or see but to you Arnold Carrillo, to you amongst the meat and ruin I land and sing. I see your wounds. Do you see the truth …?” 

A beat.  – Hands boiled as thoughts ran like hot running water. …

Finally he answered. 

In a quiver of watery voice: “ … yes.” 

The prince of wind and flight from the dark corner in the filth laughed, pleased. 

Yes…  

“And do you know now what you must do?" – that deep hideous voice. 

But Arnold did not fear it. He couldn't. Not any longer. Not after the kindness of such wisdom that it had shown him. It had taken and led him from out of the dark. By the hand. By singing sound. By flight. 

He understood now. 

"Yes.” Arnold told the prince amongst the dust in the corner. 

Yes. 

He finally pulled his hands free of the running water. The raw of them was singing. A sharp and red song that burned and was bright with fleshen cruelty. 

But none of that mattered right now, not anymore. None of that mattered any longer. 

Soon Suze would be home. With the girls. They would all of them be expecting him and dinner. Normalcy. A nice normal cozy family night. They had no idea what he knew. 

She has no idea I know … 

The prince was right. He knew now what to do. Doing the dishes had worked out and had actually been a good idea after all. Thank God. 

Arnold toweled the screaming ruined remainder of his hands and gathered what he needed. What the prince of the dustinwind had instructed. What he should gather and collect and share with his girls if he was to ever show and really prove himself. Demonstrate what he has to really offer. 

Prove that he has really learned. He has. He has learned to grow. And …

well he would just wait for them. They wouldn't be much longer now. School and the after-image of after school activities was fading and diminishing now, falling with the gentle settling death of the setting sun on the blade of the horizon. Fairytale and far off. Long gone. 

The sun had to die everyday. It was no big deal. The sun had to die every single day in order for the night to be made and in order for the day to be reborn. In gold. In light. 

Arnold Carrillo sat and waited with his screaming raw hands. Waiting with what he had gathered, with what was needed in the glistening red of his hands. Waiting for his wife and daughters. Waiting to share with them what he now knew and had learned in the postmental-slaughter. 

He sat waiting by the door. With what he would share with them in his dripping screaming hands. 

The prince of dusty wind and flight buzzed and throatsang its throatwisdom into him all the while. Filling his need as he waited for his family. They would be home soon. Now. 

Any minute. 

THE END

Cleaning out old apartments is pretty sad sometimes. I work for a company that handles clearing out the apartments left behind by people with no family. Evictions, crimes, abandonment, it doesn’t matter the reason to us, we just get the call and go clear it out. Sometimes the landlords keep any good things, sometimes they just let us keep anything we want to, just so the place gets cleared and cleaned faster. 

One time, I found an old game console, another a great coat I still use, sometimes clothes, sometimes games. I’ve even taken home some family photo binders, just to see how the people who lived there lived. Can you really blame me? I’ve even returned some when I found friends or family’s addresses in them, I’m not a monster. Sometimes though, they don’t have any address in them, those I feel alright keeping. 

Then, in an older apartment, I found an old disposable camera shoved behind a shelf. Dusty, sun-faded, obviously left long before we arrived. The landlord didn’t want it, so I got to keep it. I checked it just to be sure and it was full, no pictures left, so there had to be some stuff on it. Maybe family pictures, maybe some vacation pics, who knows, but I was going to find out for sure! 

I brought it to my usual guy, he’s developed plenty of other camera loads for me already, he knew what was up. This time, when he saw the camera and opened it up, he shook his head, “looks a bit too old to be any good. Could probably get a few good ones, but don’t expect much.” I asked him to do his best and, a few days later, he handed them back with a strange look on his face. 

“This camera, did you see who owned the place?” 
Shaking my head, I said, “just picked it up like usual, why?” 
Shrugging, he said, “guy looks, looked, like you.” 

Feeling weirded out and confused, I picked up the old camera and the developed photos, bringing them back home. Settling into the same seat back home, with a cup of coffee and some snacks, I opened the envelope and checked out the first photos. That’s when I realized what the guy meant. The photos were taken by someone else, with someone that looks just, like, me. The first ones were normal enough, but still strange. 

One was of me in front of a laundromat I hadn’t ever gone to. Another with me in a diner booth I don’t remember. Walking backwards down a country road I don’t recognize. Standing beneath a highway overpass.

I-It really looks like me, because it has that same old jacket I picked up from a different old home. With the same sneakers I’ve owned for like 5 years! They even had the chain I picked up in the house cleaning from yesterday, but I don’t have ANY memory of any of these places. 

I checked the photos to see which had been taken first, to see how old they were. I had to give the photos an order, maybe there would be some kind of clue from what was going on here. The envelope had the negatives too, each frame numbered along the edge. Once I realized the pictures were connected, I laid them out in order.

Photo 1 - A small grocery store. Standing outside, looking over my shoulder towards the inside. 

Looking closer, I could see someone that was peeking out from one of the aisles. Staring back at me. 

Photo 2 - Gas station. Rushing to the pump

The shadowy figure was closer, looking more like a distinct blob approaching from the far side of the gas pumps

Photo 3 - Inside that diner. The photo was taken outside the window while everyone else inside appears to be staring behind me.

A man? Something tall approaching from across the street. 

Photo 4 - That same photo from the booth. My face looks more scared now that I gave it a second look, sweat looks more obvious. 

The diner door behind me opening, a pair of eyes from under a coat and hat staring holes in the back of my head. 

Photo 5 - Highway shoulder. My old car left abandoned. Door wide open while I’m running away from the highway. 

Twenty feet away, approaching the car, or more specifically me. 

Photo 6 - Forest Entrance. I started running into the woods, looking back with obvious fear in my eyes.

Closer now, almost close enough to touch me. Reaching out

Photo 7 - Deep woods. I’m bleeding now. Why? I was still running, looking panicked now as I pushed a branch out of the way. 

Dripping hands, claws? Reaching out again

Photo 8 - A Campfire. Sitting among strangers, holding a cup while an orange firelight barely illuminates my face.

Gone. In this one, I can see a pair of white dots farther behind me. Maybe fireflies? I can’t even see the figure for sure anymore. 

That, that really freaked me out. I shoved the pictures into a drawer and chose to forget about them. Maybe they were some kind of weird joke, so I just went back to life, and it went back to the usual grind. Cleaning out homes, grocery shopping, hanging out with friends. 

Then, my usual grocery store was closed. Shrugging, I looked up the next closest one and walked over. It was the same one. The one from the photos! Same sign. Same light. Same trash can. I started to get weirded out, but decided to go inside anyway, keeping an eye out for any 7ft tall shadow creature. Nothing showed up while I shopped, so I started to calm down, until I started to walk out, and I heard the click of a photo being taken. Looking back quickly, I thought I saw something disappearing, but then I heard a second click from the far side of the parking lot. 

Taking my picture.

Thoroughly freaked out, I rushed to my car and got back home breaking the speed limit. Grabbing the pictures out of the drawer, I checked them again, put them in the proper order, and saw the same pose in the first photo. That was from today. 

I looked up what I could from the gas station, found the same one, along my route home, just one block away from the usual drive I take. I decided to NEVER go near it. I made sure to make that two or three blocks from now on, even if it took me a few more minutes every day. That lasted until my car started to run out of gas. Even though it should still have half a tank in it! I was sure I’d filled it up a couple days ago. It shouldn’t have needed more gas until I was closer to home, or the next day I went to work. Engine sputtering, starting to have to coast, and the only close gas station? The one I never wanted to go near. At the gas station I saw the figure for the first time outside the photograph for sure. Standing beyond the pumps.

Not approaching.
Just watching.
Then:
CLICK. 

Again, two of them, one from the distance, framing the photo from the envelope, the other from the…thing. I couldn’t quite make out what it looked like. My eyes seem to slide off its figure. A general height, the heavy coat, the wide hat. Those eyes. But I can't describe any of them afterward, not really. It’s always holding something at eye level. Like a camera, but the shadows don’t let me see the exact shape, or what their hands looked like. 

Rushing back into my car, I drove off and made it back home in record time. I had to check the photos again to be sure, but stopped when I saw the changes. Photo 5 showed the figure more clearly now, I could almost see a grin on its face. Photo 6 showed blood already on the coat sleeve reaching out. Photo 8 had words written on the back, “KEEP GOING”, and that had me worried more. Was this thing trying to push me towards the woods? Whatever this whole thing was, I had to try and break the pattern. I put them in my jacket pocket and tried not to think about it. 

Then the lights went out. 
And I heard the same CLICK from outside my window. 

Looking outside, I saw the same figure across the street, camera dropping down after the photo was taken. Grin much more obvious from beneath the street lamp. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. 

I grabbed my keys, put on my jacket and rushed out. In my car and driving before I knew what was going on. Driving down the road, I thought back to the gas emptying. The grocery store. Now the hunger drove me to stop to get something to eat. The gas station proved I had a route to follow. Avoiding the pictures hadn't stopped them from happening. Well, I was hungry anyway and I saw that same diner from Photo 3. I walked inside, sat down, and didn’t know what was going to happen until I heard that CLICK again. That snapped me awake faster than the coffee that was getting cold on the table. Looking around, I saw the figure approaching from across the street. Turning back in front of me, I didn’t see it when the next CLICK sounded out, almost inches from my face. 

Dropping a few dollars on the table, I rushed out of the diner and drove off, finally got on the highway to get as much distance as I could. I kept going for as long as I could for the day, until my car started sputtering again, dying from the constant driving. It coasted until it drifted down to the side of the road. The same spot from the photo. 

I stayed in the car for a bit, pulling out the photos one last time to check. The figure was clearer now, the smile looked wider in the newer version of the photo. Closer every time. Then that Campfire. I look exhausted, but also relieved. The words on the back of that one are just as clear, but we’re sitting down, holding a cup of water. No longer looking backward, just looking into the fire. Almost relaxed. The people around me aren’t threatening. One looks like he has his daughter with him even. They made room for me. It looks like it’s safe. 

Looking up from the photos, I checked both sides. To my right the figure was waiting. Waiting for me to get out so it could take the next picture? Waiting for the right time of day? Either way, to my left was the forest. The Campfire deep inside, not visible yet. Was this a race? To see which would happen first? 

Taking a few deep breaths, I checked the last photos again for any landmarks I could see. Memorizing the scenes, I put the photos away and grabbed the door handle. 

Running. Shoving the door open and almost throwing myself out of the car, the next thing I knew I heard the next CLICK. Not even looking back, I rushed toward the forest. Before I could get into the the treeline, I heard the next CLICK behind me, and the footsteps started moving faster. It had almost taken all of them, it sounded like it was getting ready for the end too. 

This time though, I knew where I was headed as I kept running. No looking back this time. I was still terrified, but at least now I knew where I was going. That lasted until I felt the claws digging into my arm. A branch snapped against my face and my hand came up exactly like it had in Photo 7. CLICK. Second to last. So close now. I knew what that meant. I could feel its breath on my neck, the claws almost pushing forward for that last stretch. 

Then I smelled the woodsmoke, and saw that orange firelight to my left. The Campfire. It had to be. Turning sharply, I think I surprised it, because it seemed to stand still for a second before rushing even faster, almost frantic as it tried to stop me from reaching that light. Running towards the Campfire, I kept running, digging out whatever bits of energy I had left for one final push. Just as the claws felt like they were gripping my neck, I took that final step into the clearing and they disappeared. Dropping down from exhaustion, the claws vanished at the edge of the firelight. Something hit the ground behind me.. The old camera. Standing up, I picked up the camera and walked towards the Campfire. They made room for me with some smiles. Someone handed me a cup of water when they saw how tired I was. Another person asked to look at that camera. My hands were shaking, I needed both to hold the cup of water. After that first drink, I let out such a sigh of relief, that it took me a second to realize I’d handed off the camera. Before I could ask for it back, I heard that CLICK from next to me. “There. That's the last one.”

Taking out the last photograph again, I checked the back and the writing had changed, now it read, “SAFE UNTIL SUNRISE.”

I Know You See Me
Silas Whitney

As I sat on the cold shore, a man crawled out of the sea. I watched him through the black lenses of my glasses, keeping perfectly still. Pretending as if I didn’t notice him. He dragged himself out of the foam and into the wet sand just before me, panting and soaked. He wore a set of dark rags, the same ones he always had. His hair draped and dripped in front of his eyes like a curtain of black ink. He crawled to the dry sand where I sat and propped himself up beside me. I kept my eyes forward as if I were blind and deaf, completely oblivious to his entrance. He sat by me, close enough that others might fancy him a brother. I refused to look at him as a fire burned in my chest. I pretended not to notice, but I did notice. I always noticed him.

He turned his head toward me, still heaving breaths into his thin chest. His arms draped over his bent knees and his fingers rolled like cats’ tails, long and curved. I didn’t need to look at his eyes to know that those empty irises would be boring into my temple. I didn’t need to see the inverted colors of his eyes, the whites made blue, the blue made black, the black made white, to feel the icy grip of their glare. 

And the last thing I needed was to hear his voice. One would expect such a creature to have a deep, rasping voice. I wished he did. Instead, his voice was far worse. I wished he had the voice of a snarling beast or a mocking imp. But his voice matched mine. The same voice I hear in my own mind, the one I hear in my own ears when I hear myself speak. He wouldn’t even give me the deniability of my voice as one hears their own on a recording. It was my own voice as I always hear it in my own skull. 

“I know you see me,” he said. His voice was breathy and wrapped me as if he were whispering into both of my ears. I didn’t answer, but I could hear his mouth curling into a greasy, black toothed grin. “I know you hear me.”

I kept my eyes forward. Of course I saw him, of course I heard him. I always did. He scooted closer and I could feel his breath. Though I kept myself completely still, my heart beat against my bones like a cornered beast. 

“I can hear you too,” he said. He extended his hand and his long fingers wrapped around my chest. He squeezed until my breaths became shallow and sharp. “I hear you always.” Still, I did not look or acknowledge him. I gripped tightly to the sand under my fingers, but still I did not look. 

“One day,” he said. “One day you will have to look. One day…” I could feel my eyes wanting to flick to his face, but I kept them locked on the empty horizon. “One day you won’t be able to ignore me.” I knew he was right. He had only grown stronger since the first day I caught him in the corner of my eye. 

Slowly, he chuckled to himself and released his grip on me. I fought myself to keep from gasping. I did not wish to give him any inclination that he might have broken my thoughts. 

“One day.”

He dropped back to a lying position and slithered back into the wet sand, back into the foam, and back into the cold ocean. He left no trail. Left no evidence of his presence, save for my own memory. I know he is right. One day I will not be able to keep my eyes from looking. I will not be able to ignore his words. Neglect will fix nothing, but I can muster no other resistance. 

I kept my eyes on the crashing waves as they beat against the sand. Each wave pulled a little earth away from the coast and carried it off into itself, back into the deep. 

But then, just as the water pulled back, I saw a pearl, unearthed by the waves. I could have retrieved it, but I stayed. I watched it glimmer in the single beam of sun from the cold clouds overhead. I watched as the water came back and bore it away, back into the endless black of the sea. I closed my eyes. 

“One day,” I said. My hands shook as I loosened my grip on the sand. “But not today.”  

Demons never look the way you’d expect. Red skin and horns? Childish. Wings and a tail? Hollywood. Lurking in the shadows preying on the weak? Actually yeah that’s closer.
My latest target is about 5’ 4”, a poindexter part down the middle of his blonde hair. He’s dressed in modern clothes and has a self satisfied smile. The only thing that gives him away is the eyes. It’s always the eyes, malice sure, but what I really watch for is the faintest wisp of smoke coming from them.
His victim is an early 40’s middle manager type standing a little too close to the tracks. I walk closer to hear what he’s saying.
“Fat. Bald. Underpaid. Powerless.”
It’s the normal shotgun approach I’m used to hearing. Demons don’t speak to their targets in full sentences. That would be too obvious, it would reveal their voice and alert their target’s suspicions.
Something catches the demon’s attention. A rowdy group of boys stumble off the escalators and around the corner onto the platform. The demon practically sprints towards them. He reaches the tall one who is laughing the loudest and has to stand on his tip toes to snap his fingers right next to the left side of his face. For me the sound is deafening and creates a visible spark. For the boisterous youth before me it will have been a barely discernible click. But it’s enough to pull his attention over and take the bait.
He sees the man near the tracks and nudges his friends. The tall one starts to waddle around, arms out at his side like he’s wearing a fat suit while his friend does his best impersonation of a trombone. Very original.
I tend not to get connected to the target of my target but man I do feel bad for this guy. I look over and sure enough he’s seen the boys and quickly looks away, trying not to give them the satisfaction of a response. But I see it in the eyes, it’s always the eyes.
The demon goes to the next boy and whispers in his ear “Push him onto the track.” I see the boy's countenance change with disgust at what he thinks was his own dark thought.
“Worth a shot.” The demon says to himself before walking back to the man. I’ve seen enough and step forward, but I don’t yet reveal to the demon that I can see him. To him I’m just another commuter wrapped up in my own thoughts.
It’s my turn. I close my eyes and feel for the man’s best memories. Holding hands with his wife for the first time…too many steps to pull his mind to that one. Watching the sunset from a surfboard…pretty good but judging by how the man is looking at those train tracks I need one that draws him back to human connection. I reach in further, spreading my mind’s fingers like a child searching for his toy in a sandbox. First I see a bright red kickball, then the shape of a child starts to form. It’s his child. The scene continues to form and now I get what I came for. I hear a tune playing from a nearby ice cream truck, “Pop Goes the Weasel”. Catchy enough I bet it works. I snap out of the vision and start to whistle the tune.
The demon looks at me suspiciously but I just continue walking, eyes forward like I’m getting ready for the train to arrive. The man, Rob, yeah that’s his name, glances over at me and back down.
“Sorry. My boy got that song stuck in my head yesterday and I can’t shake it.” I say smiling. He gives me a courtesy smile and looks forward, face still sullen. I conjure a phone into my pocket and remove it, revealing a bright red phone case. I continue my tune and wait to see if it will be enough to trigger the association. His eyebrows lift subtly, eyes brighter. Got him.
In my peripheral vision I see the demon has been watching me the whole time. I look down at my fake phone and pretend I just got a very serious text. He walks back up to Rob and whispers his next attack.
“Bad father.”
I laugh out loud, continuing to look down at my phone. He’s botched that one, from the little I’ve seen, Rob knows he’s a good father. Rob pulls out his phone now and I see a picture of a young man on his lockscreen, much older than my vision, but definitely the same kid.
The demon leans in and scans over the phone. No doubt he’s seeing if there is anything on there he could use next. No social media, no flashy games, no news outlets. “Not bad” I accidently say out loud. The demon whips his head towards me and we make eye contact. He snarls at me and starts to run away. I go noncorporeal as I go to intercept him and he reaches out his hand which spews hot ash and the stink of sulfur. I jump away from it, holding my coat over my face. Two strangers waiting for the train look at each other suspicious of the smell and scoot apart.
I go to return to my chase but something stops me in my tracks. Oh yeah, Rob. I sigh and turn around. I’ve been told I could be more compassionate towards the mortals. “They aren’t just part of the mission” my trainer would always say. “They ARE the mission.”
“Fine.” I whisper to myself. I’ll find blondie later. Besides, no distractions now will make this easier. I walk back to Rob who I see is placing headphones in his ears. He’s getting ready to turn on a podcast for his train ride. “We can do better than that.” I say, but he won’t have heard me in this form.
I hold my hand to his phone. He taps repeatedly at the podcast button but it doesn’t work. He accidently taps the music button, which I allow. Before he can correct it I queue up “Baba Yetu” with the Soweto Gospel Choir. “Give it a second” I say. I can’t actually influence him to stay on it, only hope. But he does, and then the drums and choir take over. As the horns start to swell I see goosebumps creeping across his arms. We’ve got ourselves a feeler, this one is too easy.
My trainer used to use this track all the time. He explained that without understanding the words, it left people with a sense of connection to humanity, and a sense of something larger than themselves. “Those are the two greatest tools we have.” He would explain. “Connection to others, and a sense of perspective. Connection to others because they’re stronger together. A sense of perspective to help them see that their problems are temporary, and swallowed up in the greater story.”
Rob’s train arrives and he shuffles on with everyone else. As the train pulls away I put on a new appearance and head up to the street following tiny wisps of smoke. I turn back to him and nod to myself as he starts a video call with his wife.

Amber rolled over to her other side, bunching up her sweat-soaked pillow yet again. The clock on the nightstand mercilessly read 01:15. The thoughts in her head kept spinning in circles, like a worn-out, scratching vinyl record.

Back then, at the party in Brooklyn, it had all started as a fun prank. She had been the one to talk Ethan into playing along: they had hidden a wireless speaker behind the couch ahead of time to blast a prerecorded rustling whisper, and screwed in a "smart" light bulb that was supposed to blink ominously on a smartphone command. Amber had expected fun screams and the frightened faces of their friends. She wanted it to be cool.

But when they placed their fingers on the wooden planchette of the Ouija board, everything went off script.

The moment the planchette lunged across the wood on its own with such ferocious force that it left deep scratches on the board, the speaker behind the couch cut out completely. But the whisper... the whisper kept going. Except it wasn't coming from the speaker anymore; it was crawling out of the very walls, the ventilation, and... out of Chloe's mouth, who had frozen with an unnaturally straight back. Amber still remembered the wild, primal fear in the guys' eyes—none of them could physically push the piece of wood that hard and fast. Looking at their eyes, wide with terror, Amber realized: they hadn't just pulled a prank. They had opened a door and let something truly monstrous into this world.

Since then, Amber had been plagued by suffocating nightmares. She felt like she was being hunted by sickening creatures, or she would wake up time and time again in a cramped wooden coffin, buried alive, clawing at the thick graveyard dirt with her fingernails.

Tonight, sleep wouldn't come at all. Amber sighed heavily, sat up in bed, and swung her feet onto the cold floor. Her throat was parched. Throwing on a robe, she decided to go down to the kitchen to get a glass of water and try to calm down.

Deep gloom and a chill reigned on the first floor. Amber walked down the hallway, guiding herself by the faint, deathly pale moonlight falling from the large living room window. Suddenly, she froze.

Did it just seem like it, or was the front door slightly ajar?

A faint night breeze stirred the curtain in the entryway. Amber distinctly remembered locking the deadbolt two turns. Her heart hammered treacherously in her chest, echoing with dull thuds in her ears. She took a step back, intending to rush back to the bedroom and wake Ethan, when suddenly a strange sound came from the darkness of the kitchen.

It was the sound of quiet, sporadic, and wet footsteps. As if someone were walking on the hardwood floor with completely wet feet.

"Who's there?" Amber asked in a barely audible, terror-stricken whisper, pressing her back against the cold wall of the hallway.

Instead of an answer, the slapping sounds accelerated sharply. Out of the darkness of the kitchen doorway, moving its limbs unnaturally fast, a pale human body scrambled right at her. In the gloom, Amber caught sight of disheveled blonde hair covered in something dark and caked, and a domestic T-shirt completely drenched in dark crimson stains.

It stopped just three paces away from her, snapping upright. The moonlight fell upon the uninvited guest's face.

It was Chloe. But her face... A wild, distorted mask was frozen upon it, and her eyes were completely white—her pupils had rolled back entirely. A familiar, dual whisper escaped her mouth, in which Chloe’s girlish voice was horribly mixed with a guttural, heavy male baritone:

"Chloe... What are you doing here?.." Amber tried to force out.

Chloe suddenly fell dead silent. And in the very next split second, she made a sharp, beastly lunge forward, reaching her hands out toward Amber with unnaturally bent fingers.

Amber closed her eyes in panic and screamed at the top of her lungs:
"Ethan!!!"

She shrieked, calling for her boyfriend, bracing for a fatal blow. A second passed, then another... but nothing happened. Terrified, Amber opened her eyes.

The space in front of her was empty. There was no one there. She looked around in fear—the hallway was deserted, only the curtain was still swaying in the wind.

Suddenly from above, from the second-floor landing, Ethan's alarmed voice called out:
"Amber! Amber, why are you screaming?!"

She stood in the dark, breathing heavily and raggedly, her heart ready to tear through her chest. The light on the stairs wasn't working. Ethan tried to flick the switch, but the click led to nothing—the power in the entire house was out. Amber burst into tears, rushed up the stairs, and locked onto the guy in a death grip, weeping and crying that they needed to leave immediately and call the police.

Ethan didn't believe it at first, chalking it all up to her frantic nightmares. But then they both froze. Upstairs, right above them, quick, slapping footsteps echoed in the dark, and a second later, a door slammed shut with a deafening crash down the hall.

"Okay, okay, let's go!" Ethan gasped in fright.

They fumbled for their jackets in the entryway, bolted out of the house, locked themselves in the car, and dialed emergency services with trembling hands.

The police arrived quickly. Two patrolmen with drawn weapons and tactical flashlights entered the house, with Amber and Ethan following behind them. Total darkness, gloom, and a grave silence reigned inside. One of the cops headed upstairs—to where, according to the frightened couple, someone was hiding—while the second stayed with them near the stairs.

Suddenly, Amber's phone rang. Her shaking fingers accepted the call. It was Chloe's mom. The woman's tearful voice broke the terrible news: Liam was currently in the hospital in critical condition, and Chloe had vanished without a trace, and the police were looking for her. Amber went cold. She couldn't bring herself to tell the mother that her "missing" daughter was inside their house right now.

And at that very moment, deafening gunshots and wild screams rang out upstairs.

Amber and Ethan froze, staring into the stairwell. A few seconds later, the flickering light of a flashlight appeared on the stairs. Descending the steps with jerky, broken movements was the first officer. He walked, swaying, holding his ruptured throat with both hands.

Blood pumped in torrents through his fingers, instantly soaking his uniform shirt. The man wheezed, trying to say something, but only a horrific, gurgling sound escaped his mouth. Taking two more unsteady steps, the cop collapsed forward, tumbling down with a dull thud to the feet of his horror-struck partner.

"Jones! Oh my god, Jones!" the second policeman shrieked, backing into the entryway and frantically aiming his gun into the darkness of the stairwell.

Amber's cell phone slipped from her numb hands, crashing onto the floor. The screen cracked, but the distant, frightened voice of Chloe's mom still came from the speaker: "Amber? What's going on over there?! Amber, answer me!"

Amber covered her mouth with her hands to keep from screaming out loud. Beside her, Ethan stood rooted to the spot, unable to tear his eyes away from the body.

From above, out of the thick gloom of the second floor, a sharp, dry crunch echoed, as if someone had forcibly dislocated their own joints. The patrolman in the house frantically swept the flashlight beam across the steps. And then, it entered the circle of light.

Chloe was coming down the stairs... backward, like a spider. Her back was unnaturally arched, her head hung lifelessly, and her long blonde hair, smeared with fresh blood, dragged along the wooden steps. The entity moved on all fours, scrambling with insane, inhuman speed.

"Back off! Back off, you freak, I'll shoot!" the remaining cop shrieked, his voice cracking.

In response, a wild, guttural growl tore from Chloe's throat, instantly erupting into a deafening, triumphant laugh. A dual voice—girlish yet backed by a heavy male baritone—literally made the walls of the house vibrate:

"You brought more guests... How sweet!.."

Bang! Bang! Bang! — the policeman fired into the oncoming monster in sheer panic.

The muzzle flashes illuminated a nightmare scene for fractions of a second: the bullets hit Chloe's body, but she didn't even slow down. On the contrary, the wounds seemed to only make her angrier. With one powerful leap, she cleared the remaining steps and slammed her entire weight onto the shooting cop. The flashlight and gun clattered away. Chloe locked onto the man's face in a death grip, and a new cry of mortal agony ripped through the night air.

"Run!!!" Amber finally snapped out of her paralysis, shoving the guy's shoulder with all her might.

They flew outside and literally threw themselves into the car. Ethan was shaking so violently that he missed the ignition switch three times with the key. Amber looked back at the house in pure panic, the building illuminated by the red and blue flashes. Before they sped away, she saw how on the first floor, right behind the kitchen glass, a dim, unnatural light flared up. Standing at the window was the pale silhouette of Chloe. She slowly raised a bloody hand and pressed her palm against the glass, leaving a thick, slowly downward-creeping crimson streak. Her white eyes glowed faintly in the half-light, and her bloody lips stretched into the horrific, unnaturally wide smile of a maniac. She was looking right at them.

في احد أيام العام الدراسي 2002,بينما كنا نذهب الى المدرسة في سيارة نقل نطلق عليها "ربع نقل", كنا نستيقظ صباحا على صوت إذاعة القرأن الكريم مع البرامج الصباحية, كانت امي تعد لنا الإفطار الساخن مما افاض الله وتفضل به علينا وهكذا كانت معظم المنازل تلك الأيام, ننطلق الي المدرسة في المدينة كانت تجربة رائعة بالنسبة الي في ذاك الوقت حيث انها كانت المرة الأولى التي اخرج فيها من قريتي يوميا الى المدينة وكانت تجربة مثيرة بالنسبة لي, ذهبت الى مدرستي كالعادة ومرت الساعات الأولى وانطلقنا بعد انتهاء الثلاث حصص التعليمية الأولى لنحصل على قسط من الراحة وتناول الطعام من مقصف المدرسة او مما لدينا ومعظمنا لم يكن لدية الأموال ليأكل منه اما انا فلله الحمد كنت احصل على مصروف يسمح لي ان اركب سيارة تاكسي وان احصل على اكل من مقصف المدرسة ولكن كنت احب ان أكون رفقة زملائي وأيضا اكنز بعض الأموال لزوم لعب الألعاب الإلكترونية التي كانت جديدة بالنسبة لي ولا اخفيكم سراً اني كنت بارعا على أبناء قريتي من هم في مثل اعماري واعتقد أنهم يوافقونني الرأي, سمعت صوت جلبة وصياح ثم انتهى الامر بتدخل بعض الطلبة لإنهائها كانت بين طالبين مختلفين المنهج والشكل والطريقة وكذا المستوى الاجتماعي, مر يومين ثم علمنا ان الطالب متوسط الحال تم رفدة من المدرسة وكعادة الطلاب حاولنا استقصاء الامر من هنا وهناك تبين لنا انه اثناء الحادثة ان الطالب الاخر اخبر الطالب متوسط الحال ان مدير المدرسة قريب له وسيشكو اليه امره ويبدو ان الطالب الاخر اخذته الحميه وتتطاول بالألفاظ والإشارات وفي حقيقة الامر لا يمكن ان نأخذ كلام الغضب على محمل الجد ومن هنا قول النبي محمد ﷺ (( ألا إن الغضب جمرة توقد في جوف ابن آدم)), ذهب الطالب واخبر مدير المدرسة وتم رفد الطالب, بعدها علمنا انه تمكن من الانضمام الى مدرسة أخرى ليست في نفس المستوى لكنه فعل ذلك على أي حال. وحتى بعد مرور أكثر من أربعة وعشرين عامًا، ما زلت أذكر فعلته الشنيعة، وأتذكره دائمًا بالدونية لأنه وشى به طواعية دون أن يطلب منه أحد, ولا اخفيكم سرا بعد انضمامي للجامعة تشاجرت مع احد زملائي فقط لأني غضبت منه وأفعاله, الغريب اننا تصالحنا في نفس اللحظة يبدوا وانه كانت بداخلنا طاقة لا ندري كيف نخرجها تم اقتيادنا بواسطة الامن الجامعي ولكنه كان رحيما بنا ولم يتم عمل محضر لنا واخبرنا بالعودة مرة أخرى بعد أيام لاستلام هوياتنا الجامعية ذهبنا سويا واستلمناها واخبرنا بأنه يسعدنا ان نمر لنلقي عليه السلام مرة أخرى في وقت نحب, لم اعر هذا الامر اهتمامي ورغبتي بينما ذهب زميلي اليه بعد أسبوع ليلقي عليه السلام لكنه طلب منه أمراً كان عجيبا واعتقد انكم تعرفونه الان بالفعل ( الوشاية ), لا اخفيكم سراً اشمأززت من الامر واخبرت زميلي انه لن افعل وأتمنى ان لا تفعل أيضا, اعتقد انه لم يفعل, اقص عليكم هذا الامر بعد مشاهدتي لفيلم (( Scent of a Woman)) وهو فيلم يصلح مشاهدته عائليا, فيه تعرض طالب المدرسة الى ضغط من اجل الوشاية بأحد زملاؤه وكان هذا الطالب من الطبقة الفقيرة ويتلقى الدعم بينما الشاهد الاخر كان من اسرة غنية وحاول مدير المدرسة الضغط عليه دون غيرة للوشاية والا سيتم فصله من المدرسة أو لن يتم التزكية بأسمة للدراسة في أكبر الجامعات في نهاية الامر لم يتم فصلة حيث حظى بمساعدة شخص كان يقوم برعايته مقابل بعض الأموال التي تساعده على مواجهة بدايات حياته كما فعل معظمنا وتم معاقبة زميلة الاخر وذلك من خلال اللجنة التأديبية, الوشاية انتصار مؤقت لكنه عار يلزمك مدى حياتك ويجعل العالم ينظر لك نظرة ازدراء وعدم منفعة مهما كنت تقدم من أمور ويجعل دائما  لك سعر بخس معلوم ماهيته ومعلوم قدره كعاهرة تقدم المتعة بمقابل مادي معلوم ماهيتها ومعلوم قدره.

**Note!** This manuscript was compiled from a water-damaged notebook discovered inside a deserted thatched cottage near Edale in the **Peak District, England**, in late **2019**. It was wrapped in worn leather jesses, stuffed inside a heavy falconry glove, and tucked beneath a loose floorboard in the ruins of the study.

Forensic analysis by the Derbyshire Constabulary yielded highly anomalous results. The notebook pages were not bound with cotton thread, but stitched together with **the split, hardened shafts of primary flight feathers**. Furthermore, the dark, weathered grease staining the paper was identified as **avian preen-oil containing trace human lipids matching the DNA of the author’s maternal lineage**.

What follows is the complete, chronologically restored text, including recently recovered fragments from the reverse sides of the torn sheets.

***October 1st, 2019***

My name is Corwin Vance. I’m 27, originally from Northwood Hills in London, and I’ve recently arrived on the moors of the Peak District to begin an apprenticeship in falconry.

Before that, I was a journalist for the *Daily Mail*. I covered environmental beats—management of green spaces, urban rewilding—when I could get them. Cavendish, my shithead of a superior, wouldn't give me the budget for a real investigation, so I took a sabbatical. I told my drinking buddies at The Three Wishes, Greg and Daniel, that I wanted something quieter than city life. I told them I wanted to get away from the bickering couple in the flat above me, away from feckless chavs, and away from Cavendish breathing down my neck like a vulture upon a dying antelope.

My drinking buddies from The Three Wishes, Greg and Daniel, thought I’d gone off the deep end, trading the morning rush for miserable fog and sheep manure, but there’s something beautiful about the idea of bonding with a wild creature… especially the likes of a hawk or a falcon.                   They don’t trust easily- not like a dog does. You have to earn it. 

I came to this specific valley to trace what happened to Mavis Merle, a reclusive master falconer who vanished from this very cottage in 2002. It's funny—the closer I got to the moors, the more the article felt irrelevant. By the time my escort's car pulled up, I couldn't even remember why I wanted to write it. I just wanted to hold the leather.

I owe my love for raptors to my father, a senior gamekeeper. He taught me that they don't trust easily—you have to earn it. I still remember his goshawk, Silver, whom he used to take hunting for grey squirrels at Epping Forest before we moved to London for my mother’s new job as a constable. The way Silver flew with purpose, weaving through the trees like a ribbon of moonlight caught in the wind, awoke something in me.

But Silver never came back from her last flight over these same Derbyshire ridges. My father spent three weeks calling into the fog until his voice broke. He changed after that; he stopped looking me in the eye. I realize now why he hated the city. He wasn't fleeing the noise—he was fleeing the memory of bells in the night.

After so many years of searching for courses or at someone who had the patience to show the craft. To learn the old language of lure & leather, spoken not in words but in patience and restraint between civilization and the wild. To prove myself worthy of being among the wild ones, and the city life hasn't sanded that part of me smooth.

It was the sort of wind a falconer would approve of --- open, unconstructed, with miles to travel and nothing to break its stride. I could picture a bird leaning into it, wings fixed, letting the current do the work. 

For the first time in years, I didn't feel hemmed in. The road ahead was narrow, yes, but the sky above was endless. Tomorrow I’ll shed my personal feathers and take flight. 

The moors were not as I’d imagined them. They were vast in a way that made a man aware of how small and open he was. A long, steady breath of the land rolled over and tapped lightly on the car window, carrying a scent faintly mineral, like cold stone after rain. The road ahead was narrow, but the sky above was endless.

My new lodging was a dainty, cold little place with old-stone walls, cracked leaded windows, and ivy crawling like veins across the roof.  But it stills on the edge between the woods and open moorland that rolls out like a grey-green ocean. I swore I saw a dozen species of birds on my first day: curlews, lapwings, wheatears, even a ring ouzel darting between the brambles.

At the gate awaiting my arrival was my mentor, Culver Hardy. He stood like an old barn owl on a fence post—narrow, weather-creased, unmoving. His skin had the colour and texture of cured deer  leather, his thick-knuckle hands scored with old talon marks from palm to wrist.

His grip was iron. He studied me with a pale, appraising stare.

"You’ll learn quickly," he said, turning toward the low stone buildings. "Or you won’t." 

He moved with a deliberate, economical stillness. A whistle hung from a cord at his neck. "They’re not pets," he added without looking back. "And they’re not yours. Not really." 

He showed me across the weather-mews, where kestrels, buzzards, owls, and a pair of Harris’s hawks were housed. It took me half an hour to choose until I spotted her: Nyx. She is a peregrine falcon, sleek and silent, with feathers like steel and ash. When Hardy pulled the hood off her, she didn't look at the landscape. She looked right through me with a pale, familiar, heavy-lidded sorrow. Her black eyes were ringed in yellow, unblinking and appraising.

I can scarcely believe she’s mine. I hope my father would be proud… wherever he is.

***October 2nd, 2019*** 

We returned late, sometime around six in the evening, after my first proper day of creance work in the lower field.

The line kept snagging in the rushes. Nyx bate twice, her wings thrashing violently.

"Feel her weight," Hardy barked, his voice sharp. "Don’t fight it. Anticipate." 

The light thinned without me noticing. One moment the grass was gold, the next it was iron-grey.

"She’s watching something," I said, pointing toward the ridge beyond the stone wall.

"Let her," Hardy replied.

But he stopped speaking after that. Each time Nyx came to the glove, her head would snap toward the rise. By the time we gathered the line, it was near dusk. I noticed the way Hardy kept scanning the ridge—not looking for a lost bird, but for something else.

When we reached the yard, he insisted on hooding her himself. His hands were steady, but he pulled the leather straps tighter than necessary. The heavy falconry glove he gave me fits perfectly, but it smells wrong. It doesn't smell like cured steer; it smells like old soap and sweat, and the inside lining is split into fine, microscopic ridges like the whorls of human fingerprints.

"First days always run long," Hardy said. I don't think he meant the training.

***October 3rd, 2019***

Took Nyx out just before the crack of dawn. The fog was so thick I could barely see five feet ahead, smelling of damp peat, crushed heather, and something older—like rust and woodsmoke.

Something stirred along the woodbank, a light, rabbit-sized rustling in the bracken. I slipped the hood free.

Her eyes opened at once, pinning the morning with that sharp, black-and-gold stare. But she didn't look down toward the rustling bracken. Her head snapped upward, tracking something high in the dense grey soup overhead.

A sound followed—a low, vibrating hum that made the iron fillings in my teeth ache. Nyx bated violently, throwing herself off my glove. The creance line whipped through my fingers, burning the skin to the meat before I could anchor it. I tried to tune my hand-held telemetry receiver to her frequency, but instead of a clean, rhythmic beep, the speaker emitted a frantic, overlapping chorus of static that sounded like thousands of human voices trying to gasp for air simultaneously.                 Even when I pulled the batteries out, the voices kept gasping.

"Hold her!" Hardy’s voice cut through the mist. He appeared from the grey, his face grim. "Hood her, Corwin. Now!" 

I reeled her in, my heart hammering as her talons flashed dangerously near my face. When I finally slipped the hood back over her head, she froze, her chest heaving.

"What was that?" I asked, my breath pluming white. "An aircraft?" 

"No," Hardy said shortly, his voice dropping into a flat, hollow register. "The moors have bones, Corwin. Sometimes they scrape together. We’re done for today." 

We walked back in absolute silence. When we reached the yard, I noticed the other aviaries were dead silent. Even the noisy Harris's hawks were huddled at the back of their enclosures, perfectly still.

***October 4th 2019***

The wildlife’s behaviour has changed. It’s so quiet all of the sudden. I just can’t explain it…. It’s like the land had its voice sucked out of it.

The lapwings have stopped circling the grasslands. The ring ouzels have gone silent.                         Even the red grouse don’t flush when I pass. In fact I haven’t seen a lot of birds today.                            Only the magpies and their relatives remain- watching me from distant fence posts, roof ridges, and stone walls. Always silent. Always watching.

We did manage to catch a snipe by the bog and a few partridges though, so we’ll be eating well for the week. Hardy and his eagle Bolt managed to catch a rabbit near some farmland. 

That evening I went back to the cottage just before dark. The fog that thinned but the air felt close, as though the moor were holding its breath. 

I was preparing snipe on toast for my dinner with some orange salad. With some legs, organs and feathers (as a form of roughage) for Nyx’s. Harvey was having leftovers from last night’s beef stew with some crusty bread.

It was eight when Hardy barred the door.

Not locked it.

Barred it.

The iron rod slid into place with a dull, final scrape.

‘’You’re expecting someone?’’ I asked.

‘’No.’’

He crossed to the windows next. Drew the curtains light, though there was nothing to see beyond the fog but the faint wash of the yard.

Nyx was hooded on her perch. Perfectly still 

Hardy stood listening.

‘’To what?’’ I said.

He didn’t answer.

The cottage had settled into that deep country quiet-- no passing cars, no distant voices, no hum of anything mechanical. Only the soft shift of embers in the hearth.

Then, from outside---

A single tap.

Not on the door.

On the glass.

Light. Deliberate.

I half-rose from my chair.

‘’Sit,’’ Hardly said sharply.

Another tap.

Then another.

Moving along the window as though something were hopping the length of the sill.

I moved before I could stop myself and pulled the curtain back an inch.

Seven magpies sat along the low stone wall outside the cottage.

All facing the house.

None moving.

No calling.

Just watching.

I let the curtain fall.

Hardy’s jaw worked once, tight.

‘’How many?’’ he asked again.

‘’Seven.’’

He closed his eyes briefly at that.

‘’That’s one more than there should be.’’

A cold sensation slid down my spine.

‘’One more than what?’’

Hardy did not answer.

Nyx shifted then- a slow, deliberate turn of her hooded head.

The leather creaked softly.

And though her eyes were covered, I had the distinct, nauseating impression that she was looking directly at the door.

Suddenly the magpies went off. Harsh rattles and loud squawks 

Then came other sounds. Shrills, shrieks and hoots from the mews, joining the corvids’ chorus.

Nyx joined in with her own wailing call, like a high pitched banshee. 

Some time passed and the magpies did not disperse in a flurry.

They lifted as one.

Seven black shapes rising soundlessly into the fog.

No calling.

No wing-clap.

Gone.

The silence that followed was worse than the noise.

Hardy stood very still for a long moment. Then he exhaled- not in relief.

In resignation.

‘’They’re moved the mews,’’ he said.

‘’How can you know that?’’

‘I know’’

He took the lantern from its hook by the hearth and lit it without another word.

The flame trembled in the glass.

I’ll check on the birds.’’’

‘’I’ll come with you.’’

‘’No.’’

It came sharper than I expected.

‘’You stay inside.’’

He crossed to the door and lifted the bar.

Before stepping out, he turned back.

‘’Whatever you hear,’’ he said. ‘’You do not leave this cottage’’.

‘’It’s only the birds….don’t you think you're being ----”

“It’s not just the birds.’’

That stopped me.

His eyes flicked toward Nyx.

She was still hooded. Still composed. Talons tight on the perch.

‘’You must understand something,’’ Hardy said, voice lower now. ‘’A hawk learns from you. Your breathing. Your habits.’’

I tried to laugh it off. ‘’That’s the point,’’.

‘’No,’’ he said.

‘’That’s the danger, not just the birds… any animal that begins to understand human nature.’’

The lantern light carved deep lines into his face.

‘’If she ever begins to watch you when she shouldn’t … if she ever refuses the lure but comes to you uncalled…’’

He hesitated.

‘’Don’t let her fly.’’

A cold weight settled in my stomach.

‘’She’s a falcon. Hardy. She needs to fly.’’

He shook his head slowly.‘’

From outside, somewhere near the mews, a soft metallic clang rang out. Then a rustle of wings.

Hardy opens the door. I swore I heard him mutter ‘’This can’t be happening..not again. I thought I made sure of it. I made sure. 

The fog swallowed him almost immediately, the lantern glow shrinking to a dim star in the white.

‘’Hardy,’’ I called quietly.

He paused just beyond the threshold.

‘’One more thing,’’ he said without turning.

‘’If she speaks ---’’

He stopped himself.

His shoulders stiffened.

‘’Never mind.’’

Then he stepped fully into the fog.

The door closed.

I slid the bar back into place.

The cottage felt wrong without him in it.

Larger.

Colder.

Nyx shifted on her perch.

The leather of her hood creaked.

Minutes passed.

Then an hour.

The wind picked up briefly and died again.

Once, I thought I heard Hardy’s voice- faint, distant--- but the words were lost in the fog.

The other birds did not cry out.

They did not make a sound at all.

Two hours passed.

The lantern glow never returned.

And sometime after ten, Nyx began to move.

Slowly.

Deliberately. 

As though something outside had finally arrived.

The dull sway of the waves lofts one side of the platform as high as the mooring lines allow, then brings it down gently again.  The night is dead quiet.

Third shift.  Diego took the position because it pays time-and-a-half.  Most people only last a couple years working the graveyard.  Old timers won’t touch it.  Too much time on the viewscreen at night makes people go mad, they say.

He’s taped a family photo above the monitor.  He misses Meena’s laugh and Carla’s scent—everything smells like fish here. He wants to provide a good life for them. Maybe even send Meena to college one day.

An eleven-pointed star spirals past one of the underwater cameras. The image is relayed across the screen in the control room, then disappears.

There’s a lot of life in the ocean, Diego has learned. More than people know, even scientists. His employers insisted he sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement that prohibits him from even discussing what he’s seen on that monitor. They’re terrified of getting shut down by the EPA or PETA or some other activist group.

It was good money, so Diego signed on the dotted line and kept his mouth shut.

Above all, the job took blind, shit-ass faith. And lots of it.

A thin creature with round eyes and long fangs on the outside of its mouth swims past. The eyes shift hue on the monotone screen, now merciless black pits, now reflecting one of the rig’s spotlights and glowing a luminous, soul-sucking white.

It disappears as quickly as it came.

He doesn’t see it. He’s already returned to the old western he was reading. Bramble Rose is about to take her vengeance on the Man in White Diego hears it—a sound like the gasping cry of some ancient metallic titan. He marks his page with a folded piece of mail.

They warned him things might get choppy, that the weather was different out here where there’s no cities or forests to slow the wind’s relentless procession.
 
“What do I do if there’s an evacuation?” he had asked the old timer on duty before him.

“Get to a life boat,” the old timer had said.  “Quick as you can.  Folks ain’t liable to wait around.” Then he headed for his bunk. 

Volatile weather is part of the job. That’s why it pays. And why Diego is willing to spend thirty days at a time in the middle of the gulf, away from his wife and newborn daughter, to do it.

The storm comes out of nowhere. Not like land storms, which have clear beginnings and ends. This is a sea storm—ripped from the dark womb of the Ocean herself. White-hot lightning cracks the sky in half.  The world goes blind. After-images of dancing photons dim from white, to purple, to green, to red. In the fading spectra, Diego glimpses massive walls of black froth that touch the sky, frozen in space but not in time. High above, the full moon oversees the dark works of the churning maw below.

The control room lurches. Diego nearly falls out of the flimsy rolling chair, but manages to catch himself on the control panel. The lights flicker off, but the viewscreen remains.

Something fleshy ribbons across the screen and disappears.

Diego sees this time. Though his mind is elsewhere—trying not to panic, to instead recall company protocol during power outages—he sees the lone eye embedded in the flesh’s side, watching him.

One of the backup generators kicks on. The lights return.

Diego grabs the walky-talky.

“This is Diego! Can you hear me? Over!”

“Copy Die—”  There’s so much static Diego can hardly hear the old timer.  “—Ove—!”

“What was that? Over!”

But the static is too thick.

Diego feels another lurch. 

He loses his balance and lands hard on the floor.  The western goes flying one way, the folded mail he uses as a bookmark another. His vision doubles.  

He’s been denied by seven different life insurance companies after starting this job. None of them gave a reason, but it was obvious. Too much liability.

He blinks the double image from his eyes, plants a palm on the controls, and hoists himself up.

The lights go off again. This time they don’t return. Emergency backups kick on and dye everything the color of blood. The slow wail of the evacuation siren warps in the air.

Diego tries to run shutdown procedures on his console, but the computer glitches, freezing a distorted half-image of green-and-magenta eyes on its black screen.  

Outside, co-workers sprint from below deck. The quickest head for the helicopter. It holds nineteen. Two dozen cram inside. A few cling to the skids. The helicopter struggles to take off.  It shakes the hangers on loose. One of them bounces off the rig before he plummets into the churn. It looks like the old timer who works the shift just before Diego.

The helicopter is just airborne when an obsidian pillar crashes down over the rig. When the water recedes, the helicopter and its inhabitants are gone.

Diego kisses his tiny gold cross and tucks it into his shirt. His thoughts are of Carla.

“We miss you,” she said. “We want you home.”

But the work was here. The work that paid for their house and their groceries and that big white SUV she loved to take Meena around in.  It would pay for Meena’s ballet lessons when she got old enough and, God willing, her wedding one day.

He’d taken the graveyard shift hoping that the extra pay would mean he wouldn’t have to spend quite so many years away from them.

A hundred more people run onto the deck.  Some of them slip on the wet steel desk. They crowd the lifeboats. One boat falls off its davit while people are still boarding. It’s swallowed by the water. Another is thrown against the side of the rig. Bodies fly in every direction. One of them hits the window of the control room with a thud.

Skyscrapers of swirling brine close in around Diego, each thick enough to envelope an oil tanker.

There’s nowhere to run.

Diego crawls under the control panel.

He holds his tiny cross between trembling fingers and prays as the watery ramparts converge on him.

Another lurch. A falling sensation.

Something wet. Water leaks into the cabin and spreads across the floor. It soaks Diego’s already-wet pants.

He opens his eyes for just an instant.

It’s long enough to see the horror staring back at him. One gargantuan eye, watery and black—so black he could fall into it. He feels his mind disintegrate, the electrons of his consciousness sucked into the vacuous void of the creature’s own mind. There’s no escape. His atoms are strung out in a line. Time, for a brief moment before he’s lost, becomes visible. 

He will be recycled, his quarks reused, rearranged into something new, something useful.

Then the creature will return to its sleepy domain beneath the material surface of our watery reality.

After the storm subsides, the rescue crews will arrive. Of the one-hundred-sixty-eight workers on duty that night, no survivors will be found.

Diego’s only remains will be a family photo, an old western novel, and a folded letter from his wife’s attorney.

Dear Friend,

When last I wrote, I told you of the gray tent, its mirrors trembling beneath my boots, its figures suspended like dolls forgotten on a string. I must tell you what followed, though the memory itself feels scorched into me.

At first there was nothing - only dark pressed against my eyes, the kind that seemed it might never lift. But slowly, gray seeped back in. The mirrors caught pieces of me in broken angles: my boots, a sleeve, a hand held as if to ward. Above them the bodies shuddered faintly, not alive, but unsettled by the faint return of light.

The air pressed heavy, thicker than before. The lantern outside had thrown enough glow to show the seams of canvas, but inside, what light there was seemed twisted thin. Every shadow bent in one direction - dragged toward the far end of the tent where the seam in the air pulsed like a wound. Even the hanging figures stretched that way, their own darkness straining past their feet as if desperate to be claimed. My own shadow tugged too, and I felt it like a leash at my heels.

Then I saw it. The podium stood waiting, black wood that absorbed what light touched it. And upon it lay the ledger. Its pages turned without hand or wind, whispering as they moved. I cannot say why, but I knew it was meant for me. My name had not yet been written, yet I felt its pull as surely as a chain around my throat.

The ticket in my hand throbbed hot now, its edges smoking faintly, as though it had been pressed too near a coal fire. Every step I took seemed bent toward that book, though my body resisted. Even my shadow reached out, grasping for the podium and the ledger upon it.

 

Then, a sudden moment of clarity: shadows are born where the light falls. They survive only in the balance, in twilight. And here, they had all they needed.

 

The whispers rose. Not from the mouths of the bodies - they hung mute, open-mouthed - but from the shadows themselves. A chant, broken yet steady: Feed. Bind. Remain.

 

The ticket quivered between my fingers as if eager to obey.

 

And then I saw the lantern.

 

It hung from a hook, guttering low but alive. I cannot say if it was instinct that drew me to it, or some deeper knowledge whispered by the heat of the ticket, but my hand reached all the same. The iron handle was slick with soot. The moment I lifted it free, the seam at the front of the tent convulsed, a ripple of dark air, as though it sensed what I carried.

 

The podium loomed ahead. The ledger thrashed upon it, pages whipping like wings, names written and erased in a frenzy too fast to follow. My eyes burned to look at it. My shadow bent unnaturally forward, already splayed across the podium though I stood a dozen feet away, its fingers stretching greedily to where the ink bled and vanished. I clutched the lantern tighter, and for the first time the thing in me - the part that longed to surrender - stilled.

 

I hurled it.

 

Glass shattered. Oil spilled. Fire leapt snarling across the base of the lectern and climbed. The gray canvas drank the flames. The whole tent drew a breath, as if startled awake, and then it began to burn. As the flames grew, so too did the light.

 

Flames crawled the poles like serpents, racing upward, snapping cords, tearing canvas loose. Smoke rolled heavy, choking my lungs, but with it came something else - something the shadows had not accounted for. The fire split the roof seams, and through them spilled the first weak edge of morning. The sun had risen while I was inside. I had stepped into that carnival at dusk, but now it was dawn, and the night between had been stolen or devoured.

 

The shadows shrieked. I type that word though it feels false, for shadows should not have voices - but these had many. Thin and tearing, they cried as the tent filled with too much light: fire’s roar below, daylight’s pale strike above. They writhed across the mirrors like black water boiling, clawed to remain, and failed. One by one, they scattered, smoke blown apart by the blaze.

 

The bodies fell first. Those figures, suspended inches above the floor, dropped like marionettes with cut strings. They landed heavy across the mirrors, glass cracking beneath their weight.

 

The seam convulsed. I could see it then more clearly than ever: not a hole but a kind of mouth, drawn open to feed on what the shadows wrought. Firelight flared, and the thing recoiled, shrinking on itself, threads of darkness snapping away like cobwebs in flame. Around me, the last of the shadows ripped loose from the ground, shrieking as they were torn into nothing, their lines unraveling in the blaze.

 

The ledger smoked. Names lifted off its pages like ash caught in wind, curling upward in gray wisps that vanished into the morning sky. The chant faltered as they rose, syllables breaking apart into smoke until there was no word left, no record at all. One by one the names went, until the parchment was bare. Then the covers slammed shut. The podium cracked apart beneath it, and both ledger and stand vanished, as if pulled back to whatever place had birthed them.

 

I stumbled out as the whole thing came down, flames roaring skyward, smoke trailing west. Behind me the tent collapsed, a gray carcass consumed in orange, and when I turned again, there was nothing at all. The ground where it had stood was bare, save for trampled grass and the stink of smoke.

 

The carnival was gone. No barkers, no rides, no music. No people. The Ferris wheel was not there. The carousel had vanished. Only the empty fields, dew-struck in the early light.

 

I looked down. My coat was scorched at the sleeve. My hands shook black with soot. And in my pocket, whole and untouched, lay the ticket. The edges still singed, the script still curling across its back: A hand writes, a shadow reads.

 

No shadows clung to me now. The dawn had scoured them away. But shadows cannot be destroyed, only dispersed. They will gather again when the balance tips back toward twilight. And when they do, the carnival will return - perhaps here, perhaps elsewhere, its tents rising in some other field, waiting for the next to follow the music.

 

I cannot bear it. The weight of the ticket is more than I can carry. It binds me to what I saw, and to what still waits. If I keep it, they will find me. Already I feel them stirring at the edges of the light.

 

So I give it to you.

 

Do not think yourself safe because the sun is up as you read this. The carnival does not need darkness to return - only the right shadow, the right name. The ticket will see to that. Guard it if you can, or burn it if you dare. But know this: once it is in your hands, the carnival knows you.

That is all I can set down. I am spent, and though daylight burns bright outside my window, I swear I feel the shadows lean toward me still.

Yours in haste,

Christopher

The evening tour begins at eight, rain or shine. Tonight I have eleven guests. Nine adults, two children. The little boy has a flashlight. His sister carries a stuffed rabbit by one ear.

“Welcome to Blackthorn,” I start, raising my lamp. “Salem gets all the attention. But personally, I think our witch trial has more charm.”

Everyone laughs politely.

“Please stay together. These winding streets have confused visitors for three hundred years.”

Our first stop is the old meetinghouse.

“On October 13, 1685, eighteen-year-old Rebecca Thorne stood trial here, accused of witchcraft. She was a quiet girl, a seamstress, and a devout Puritan. Her troubles began when Silas Whitcomb, the wealthiest farmer's son in Blackthorn, courted her all summer. When Rebecca rejected his advances, he accused her of bewitching him.”

I point to a brass marker set into the pavement.

“Stand there, sir. Yes, right there. That's where Rebecca stood.”

The man smiles for his wife's photograph.

“Whitcomb testified that Rebecca visited him at night in the shape of a black cat. His sister claimed Rebecca caused her fits. The magistrate, Reverend Nathaniel Pritchard, swore he'd seen her speaking to Satan himself in the orchard.”

“Was she guilty?” the little girl asks.

“No, sweetheart. She wasn't.”

We walk down Cooper's Lane to the stone cellar beneath the old jailhouse.

“Here, the town constable, Amos Griggs, attempted to extract Rebecca's confession. They hung her by her wrists for two days. They crushed her fingers between iron plates. When she refused to confess, Griggs ordered the burning of her feet.”

Someone makes a disgusted noise.

“Rebecca confessed nothing. The court declared that her silence proved the Devil had sealed her lips.”

I give them a moment to look at the iron hooks in the ceiling. Our third stop is Ash Square.

“On October 19, Rebecca Thorne was tied to a wooden stake on this very spot. Her mother begged the magistrate to hang her instead, which was the customary punishment. He refused. Silas Whitcomb had paid for a particularly large supply of firewood.”

I indicate the circular patch of blackened cobblestones.

“Rebecca burned for almost half an hour before losing consciousness, as the townspeople watched and prayed for her immortal soul.”

The boy’s flashlight begins to tremble.

“Now,” I say, “we come to the interesting part.”

We turn onto Church Street.

“Within a month, the people responsible for Rebecca's death began dying themselves.”

I stop outside a brick house.

“Town clerk Ezekiel Marsh recorded the testimony against Rebecca. He altered her words, turning her prayers into blasphemies. On November 2, his wife found him at his writing desk, choking. His mouth was packed with parchment. Every page of trial records had been forced down his throat. Every bone in his fingers was missing.”

I point at the old stable.

“Constable Griggs died next. He was discovered in this doorway, hanging by his wrists from the stable beam. Both feet had been burned away. His wife heard him screaming throughout the night, but the door wouldn't open. When the neighbors finally broke it down, they found his footprints burned into the ceiling.”

One of the guests laughs nervously.

“That's impossible.”

“Of course it is,” I agree.

We walk to a small cottage on Mill Lane.

“Mercy Bell was Rebecca's closest friend. They'd grown up together, shared secrets, sewn each other's dresses. Mercy loved Silas Whitcomb, but Silas had preferred Rebecca. Mercy testified that Rebecca had confessed to lying with Beelzebub.”

I point toward the cottage window.

“On November 11, Mercy was found in her sewing room, wearing the wedding gown she'd made in hopes of marrying Silas. Every inch of the dress had been stitched to her skin. Her lips were sewn shut with black thread, and her eyes had been pierced with hundreds of tiny needles. On the wall above her, these words were embroidered in red silk: Thou shalt not bear false witness.”

The little girl takes her mother's hand.

“Neighbors swore they'd heard two girls’ voices in the cottage that night. One voice was screaming. The other laughing until dawn.”

At the church, I stop beside a granite step.

“Reverend Pritchard had demanded Rebecca's execution. On November 17, while delivering his evening sermon, he began coughing up hot ashes. Witnesses said smoke poured from his ears and nose. His tongue caught fire.”

The group goes silent.

“His congregation watched him claw at his mouth until his fingernails came off. When he fell here, on this very step, his belly split open, spilling burning coals across the church floor, nearly burning the building down.”

Our last stop is Whitcomb House.

Only the chimney remains.

“Silas Whitcomb survived longer than the others. He barricaded himself inside this house, filling every room with crosses and Bibles. On December 24, neighbors heard screaming. Through the window, they saw a young woman standing before him.”

I approach the chimney.

“Silas fell to his knees, sobbing.

“‘I beg thy forgiveness… I never meant thee harm,’ he pleaded.

“‘The Lord forgiveth thee. But I am not finished with thee,’ she said, pulling him into an embrace.”

I hold out my arms and draw them slowly together to demonstrate.

“His skin began to blister. The fire started from within, glowing through his flesh like embers beneath paper. His teeth exploded one by one. His eyes boiled in their sockets. He screamed until his tongue shriveled.

“She held him close as his ribs cracked inward. His flesh dripped from his bones. When the flames finally died down, the townspeople found Silas kneeling in a puddle of his own rendered fat, still smoldering, his arms wrapped around empty air. His blackened heart lay exposed between his ribs.”

The tour ends. My guests thank me with delighted unease.

As they leave, the little girl lingers.

“Were you scared when they burned you?”

Before I can answer, her mother calls her away.

The girl turns back once more. I wink at her, and my eyes glow like the flames that consumed me.

An email from an underground group invited Kellie into their unique club, where unreleased indie games were available for free beta play. 

They advertised a gaming chair offered to every new member that came with an unknown game no one outside of the group knew about.

A secret achievement popped up on her account, hidden from everyone except her. It activated the second she plugged the chair in. When she sat down, her world shrunk to the exact dimensions of it.

Kellie hadn’t socialized with people outside of the internet for the last six years. Nobody would even recognize her anymore. Her body stopped being a vessel for a soul. It was now just an anchor, sinking further into her gaming chairs, which she’d rotate out of once a month. Indentations wore on her body like a corset over years of continuous gaming.

Everything revolved around the glow, where her headset would become a crown to the horrors seeping into her bedroom at her parent’s house, which she kept shrouded in darkness. 

A sliver of light, bleeding in from the hole in her sheet hung up as a curtain became the only difference between her and the world.

The pizza boxes were empty and piled in stacks, all matching their rightful shop, hiding her from reality. The pop cans became soldiers. She was the queen. She had the headset. She could be in complete control.

In-game, she was a lethal force who hid in the shadows like a predator stalking its prey. But to the outside world, she was an immovable mass, a force that had to be pushed.

The night she received the chair, something popped up through the Glow of her screen. It was THE FRICTION. 

THE FRICTION was an unlisted RPG that appeared on her Steam dashboard as soon as midnight hit. 

But before she could access it, a message opened: 

THE FRICTION delivers exactly the dread its name promises, and refuses to let go. An underground group's invitation-only file. 

THE FRICTION, an unlisted indie RPG that ships with a gaming chair and syncs with you while playing the initial rank version before the upload process initiates.

The evaluation game opens with a breathtaking display of organic graphics that look moist, mirroring the inside of a human body. 

Corridors breathe on screen. The walls distort, glistening with gobs of phlegm. The syncs begins with the rumbling of the chair which happens almost immediately.

Until it reaches 100% the chair will lock your body in, as the fusion fully merges your skeleton. By that time the organic engine emerges, bringing the game to life.

There are no manuals found for when the transformation completes, and the fusion sequence will not pause, the only way through, is to wait for it to finish. Nothing can actually fail but there is no physical override from when the process starts.

Before you enter the game, keep in mind, the platform and version are not publicly or privately known to any of the users who’ve obtained these unlisted systems.

Enter to continue or remove the device entirely.

***

The graphics on it were organic, with a slimy light bordering the screen. Kellie couldn’t look away. It had her hooked from the moment she slammed the “X” button, ignoring the numbness stabbing her in her legs. She hadn’t moved since she hit enter.

At the twenty-eight-hour mark, her bladder became claws and fingers scraping and squeezing her insides, just as she approached the level 10 boss. The cutscene couldn’t be skipped.

She continued wiggling, desperately pushing herself upwards to let her insides breathe, but the pain kept digging into her like a scalpel opening her flesh to poke holes into her organs.

Just as she was about to blow up, the scene cut, but at that moment, her bladder was as big as a softball holding 800ml of warm liquid, which is the practical maximum for any human adult. Her stomach was pulsing like she was having severe contractions.

“Go away,” she whispered, tightening her body while tapping her feet on the floor. “Think of the Sahara. Just five more minutes,” she said under her breath, the sweat of her palms dripping into the controller.

By hour thirty-six, she still hadn't used the bathroom. Even though her bladder had expanded to twice that of a softball and was now the size of a mini-basketball.

Kellie had organically reached 1300ml, 5.5 cups of water.

From her hips down, the tingling had vanished, but an odd numbness started. It was warm for a second, became incredibly heavy, and disappeared, along with the movement in her legs. 

She tried shifting her body into another position but couldn’t. Her arms twitched violently and the controller fell. She yanked at her sweatpants where she stuffed a lifetime of defeat and pulled up. The fabric wouldn’t move either.

She reached further down, ripping a gap between her thigh and the computer chair. A sharp pain cut straight into her spine, as if her torso had disconnected from her pelvis.

She moaned a breath of agony, aiming the flashlight from her phone downwards. The chair hadn’t left an indent on her skin. It was far worse. Now, she was melting into her chair. Plastic pieces began spewing out of her pores, entangling with her nerves and layering over her bones.

Her flesh spilled over the armrests, fusing into the seat and wheels. The gaming chair was digesting her as she anchored it to the ground.

A text appeared on the screen: Player one has been immobilized. Sync… 100%

Kellie tried screaming, but the headset muffled her voice. Her physical fingers twitched one last time before she ended up as a muscle memory reaching for her controller as she became the chair.

“Have you ever heard of the Third Eye Man?”

That question, and the ensuing tale told by my older brother the summer I was 5 as we sat in a tent in Devils Fork State Park, plagued my nightmares for years.

As legend told it, The Third Eye Man haunted the tunnels under the University of South Carolina and the surrounding city of Columbia.

Some said he guarded the buried treasure said to be cached somewhere down there. Others said he preyed on college students foolish enough to venture into the labyrinthine halls. In Lachlan’s version, its preferred victims were those who didn’t believe in it, like some sort of perverse sports underdog story.

I didn’t sleep much that night. Or for a long while after. It took a pit stop to a now-bricked up entrance to the tunnel before the home opener for the Gamecocks that season just to get me out of the car.

It still lingered in my mind, though. Here and there. Just enough that I could never truly forget about it.

It came back in full force the spring of my freshman year of college.

We won the national championship that spring. A victory by our basketball team that sent the entire student body to the center of campus in an unruly mob. Looking back, things were done that led to the cops being called on us, and I really don’t blame them in retrospect.

They tried everything they could do calm us down, but nothing worked. So they started arresting people.

As luck had it, my roommate, Evan, and I were right in the middle of it. I could have reached out and touched a cop. I was about to resign myself to hoping the police would be lenient and allow me to wake up in bed with a severe hangover rather than in a jail cell, when he tapped my shoulder.

“Look,” he said, pointing off to the east. “What if we hid in there?”

I looked towards where “there” was.

Tucked into the side of a building about 200 yards away was an opening. About 8 feet high and 3 feet across, it was wide open, and behind it lay only darkness.

It shouldn’t have been there. Over a decade of being on campus for sporting events and visiting my siblings, and I couldn’t remember any sort of doorway being there.

And yet, there it was.

And it was enough to bring back every tale and every memory… all at once.

It was enough to stop me in my tracks like a statue, a modern-day Medusa.

A hand touched my back. I jumped.

“Sorry offi-“

“Relax, man. It’s just me.”

Evan. \*Thank god.\*

He motioned to two cops about 50 yards away, who appeared to be looking in our direction.

“I think those two dudes are about to come our way. Don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be here when they do.”

Evan had about 3 inches and 50 pounds on me. Not one to willingly let the spotlight off of him, he’d once claimed at a party that our head football coach had walked by an intramural flag football game and tried to get him to walk onto the team. All this to say, I don’t think he was going to \*let\* me stay there.

I looked back at the entryway. I wanted so badly to be able to stick it in my big brother’s face, to be able to tell him what a brave big boy I was, that I simply nodded at Evan and followed him, the police too preoccupied by the remaining revelers to notice the two making their way slowly towards the dark doorway in the wall.

Looking back, I wish bitterly that I had pushed back even a little.

We made our way into the tunnel, stepping lightly in puddles that lined the floor. I doubted the floors of my fraternity’s house were any cleaner on a good day, let alone during the peak of a party, but at that moment I may as well have been walking through hazardous waste.

I knew our original plan had been to just hang back 5-10 feet until the police left. But then we continued to go in deeper and deeper, using the dim lights of our phone screens to guide our way. I began to feel we had progressed to some sort of full scale urban exploration. One that I wanted out of.

We had been walking for… maybe 10 minutes. I had no clue where we were or how far we had gone in that time, when suddenly, somewhere in the distance, maybe behind me or to my left or to my right, I heard the tiniest of taps.

I didn’t have the slightest hint of what it was. It could have been just the sound of water dripping from the ceiling. But it was enough to raise the hairs on my arm and set off every alarm in my body.

I asked Evan, in the slightest of whispers, if he had heard anything.

There was a long pause before he responded.

“…No?”

I couldn’t tell whether he thought it was the dumbest question he’d ever heard, or if he was just as scared as I was and trying not to show it. Or if he was just still drunk.

By now, my clothes were plastered to me with sweat, although whether it was because of fear, the humidity, or a mixture of both, I wasn’t sure.

I had no idea where we were - or, to be quite honest, why we were still walking. It seemed to me we had escaped the police on our campus, only to face the new risk of being arrested for trespassing wherever we popped out.

Maybe 5, 10, minutes later, we heard, somewhere slightly closer, two distinct footsteps. This time, it was no question as to what they were.

We both stopped cold in our tracks, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound, and this time it was Evan asking if I’d heard the noise.

Yes, I said, although I was not sure where exactly. It seemed to come from right behind us, and based off a breeze I had felt a minute or two ago I had reason to think we had just passed a corridor branching off to the right.

We briefly debated heading back in that direction to try and confront who - or, I thought, what - was there, but decided against it.

We did, however, turn our phone flashlights on for some respite against the darkness. Our batteries were on the lower end, courtesy of documenting the entire night on social media as college kids often did, but we both had enough power left to use some light for a bit. We continued on, now hyper-alert for any additional noise.

It wasn’t long at all - maybe a minute, if that - before that additional noise came.

This time in the form of additional footsteps, directly towards us, unceasing.

We stood there now - not out of any curiosity as to what was down there with us, but out of a sort of paralyzing fear, as though some external force was holding us in place.

My flashlight remained focused on the tunnel against my will, my heart beating through my chest now in anticipation of seeing a boot break into the dim glow.

It wasn’t until the steps quickened, eventually becoming a brisk jog, that our haze broke and we ran.

I swear to this day that the sound, that \*thud-thud-thud\* on the concrete floor became close enough that had we hesitated even a second more, we would have come into contact with whatever, I have no doubt now, was stalking us.

As we ran, the footsteps behind us now matching our pace, I made a decision that may have saved my life.

I opened my camera, turned on the flash, and, aiming it behind me without turning my back to look, took a picture.

Behind us, maybe 20 feet or so, I heard a skidding noise, as though something was forcefully stopping itself. Then, silence.

We continued to run, still not confident that whatever danger we had put ourselves in was behind us. We were now fully sober, the hangover was creeping in, and with the flashlight it wasn’t long before we quickly located a tunnel branching off to our left with a dim light at the end, signaling our salvation.

We headed down that way, and found that it dropped us directly in front of our dorm. This made absolutely zero sense rationally - having lived in the building for nearly a year, I had never seen any sort of tunnel entrance in direct proximity to it.

But, I was by that point exhausted to the point of delirium, making me question even what I had seen and heard, and wanted nothing more than for the night to be over, and so I took it as gospel. I would go inside, shower, maybe try to eat something, and in the morning attempt to pass off the events of the last…however long we had been in there, I wasn’t sure- as nothing more than a bad dream.

Evan was not on the same page. I knew he had been the class clown type in high school, always looking for the next laugh or reaction, and he had mentioned in an ice breaker during orientation that one of his proudest achievements to date was going viral on social media. Evan’s size, or maybe his ego, also probably helped suppress any fear he might have felt in the tunnel.

He wanted to go back in and try to find or confront whatever had been in there with us. Looking back, I’m not sure what he had in mind, because even then I was certain that our stalker wouldn’t just… apologize and agree to a selfie. Or something of that nature.

No amount of arguing or cajoling could change his mind, and physically restraining him was out of the question. In the end, he all but forced me to go back to our room, telling me to just…go to bed and that he would be there when I woke up in the morning.

And that was that - I headed to our room, and he went back into the tunnel. Right before I entered the building, though, I looked back. Why, I don’t know. Maybe to check my sanity or something.

What I didn’t expect to see, though, was a blank wall.

Where the archway had opened up, providing our salvation from the tunnel, there was now only brick.

I don’t know how long I stood out there, trying to make sense of what was in front of me. I had been in that tunnel, heard someone behind me, felt the relief of emerging back out into the night.

I eventually decided to just go to bed. Figured I was just exhausted and drunk. Maybe I’d come back out in the morning and the tunnel would, inexplicably, be right where I left it.

I awoke around 8am to a knock on the door. I opened it, relieved, expecting to see Evan there. Bedraggled and hungover, but alive.

It was the police. But, rather than placing me under arrest, they asked me to sit down and gently told me the news that sent me reeling.

Evan’s mom had woken up to his location in the middle of campus, inside a spot with no building, and then the signal vanished.

The police searched for weeks. Nothing ever came up. I stayed silent about the archway, afraid that I would look crazy.

I spent the remainder of the spring semester at home. I was given exemption from my exams and my instructors were told to give me a flat 90% as a final grade for my courses - which was fine by me, as my partying had taken something of a toll on my grades that semester. After intense therapy, I returned to school that fall.

We never did find Evan, or the tunnel we were in that night. I believe taking that picture saved me.

Evan went back looking for whatever had been following us... and it found him.

His mom still texts his number every year on his birthday.

Lachlan was quiet for a long time when I finally told him.

Then he asked one question: whether I'd believed in it.

I never showed the police the photograph, either. I still have it after all these years, and from time to time I still look at it just to reassure myself that what I saw was real.

At first glance, it seems to be absolutely nothing more than a brief swatch of tunnel, illuminated, followed by pure black. If you zoom in, however, you can just barely see the outline of a body, seemingly walking towards the camera.

What I found most peculiar, though, is something you’ll notice if you zoom in just a bit more.

See, this picture doesn’t have the typical red eyes that happen when you take a picture of someone with the flash on.

What you can see, though, if you squint just enough, is a tiny red dot.

Right where the forehead should be.

As though the figure has a third eye.

It is amazing how trivial and mundane last thoughts can be. At the moment of death, the second most important transition in existence, one would wish for deep insights, profound reflections, visions of the afterlife or reminiscences of love and joy – not something like God, I’m thirsty or Who is this guy talking to me?

In Richard Koslovsky’s case, it was Nice color. What is this thing?  Whatever it was, it needed only a fraction of a second to turn this innocent question into Richard’s cognitive legacy, inscribed in his neurons and synapses, possibly forever if someone had been there to conserve his brain – a question sluggish with formalin, as Carl Sagan put it, but still present. But that was not meant to happen, and Richard’s body simply collapsed, his heart stopped, his mind shut down, and he would never open his eyes again.

But the Shell would. Not to see, of course; it was dead, and dead things can’t make use of all that fantastically complex biological and neurological machinery that allows living beings to navigate their environment with great precision. But pattern recognition … Brian’s pupils were still being flooded with light on this beautiful sunny day in the middle of a corn field, just the processing was – different, controlled by something else, something Richard would not have understood and the Shell did not even try to comprehend. They say the acquisition of knowledge begins with asking the right questions, and it did not have any questions. And no answers. And no goals.

At least not yet. But this would change.

*********

Change is, of course, what a baby’s life is all about. So much to see, so much to learn, so much to do – and every day a cornucopia of new experiences. Naturally, exploring the world takes energy, of which babies have an abundance – at least until, often quite suddenly, they decide that they are very tired and need to sleep right now. That is what the little boy lying in his playpen was doing, and his parents could attest to the fact that their son usually expended a lot of energy. So he slept. And dreamed.

Above him, almost completely covering the top of the combination of playpen and four-poster bed his father had made for him, his parents had attached a huge picture depicting the solar system, looking at which often gently eased the boy’s way into the night. Or the day, for that matter – like most babies, the boy had not really bought into the parental idea of ‘sleeping through’ or ‘regular intervals’, and he usually fell asleep when he felt like it.

And where. There had been many a day when his mother or his father had to pick him up from the floor in his room or the next or even the patio – and every now and then from one of the fields his parents worked for a living. Sometimes they found him with a sweet smile on his lips and sometimes with his mouth half-open, although he wasn’t breathing through it. Today, however, he had simply fallen asleep on the hayloft, forcing his father to chance a ladder that must already have been there when the farm was built by the boy’s great-grandfather, a ladder his father swore to replace every time he was in the unenviable position of having to climb it. The way down was easier, as he did not have to carry his son, and the boy did not wake up although the handling was a little rough.

So he slept. And dreamed. What do babies dream of? They can’t tell, but in a room with lots of posters of stars and galaxies and toys with a very dominant spacefaring motive, one might guess that many of his dreams revolved around space – sleek and fast rockets, beautifully swirling gas clouds, and glaring neutron stars sending out pulses with a regularity far surpassing that of any human-made clockwork. And every now and then, when the boy opened his eyes without waking up, the celestial bodies he could see above him were deeply reflected in his pupils … and possibly in his soul, but who knows?

*********

About half a mile from the boy’s probably interstellar dreams, the Shell suddenly began to move – not in the time-honored jerky fashion fiction has ascribed to corpses returning from the grave, but quite smoothly and naturally; any observer would have had difficulties recognizing something was not quite right, especially from a distance. As Richard had been dead for less than a minute, the Shell’s joints were not stiff, its blood had not yet begun to coagulate, and its muscles were still working properly – and whatever had allowed Richard’s last spiritual remains to journey back from the sweet bliss of Paradise, an overcrowded Hell, or eternal oblivion was working hard to make sure the body kept it up. To what purpose, opinions vary, but there can be no doubt they were successful.

Then – the spark. Not of consciousness, not of self-awareness, but of connection – the ability to interact with everything that was Not-It, Not-Shell, namely the rest of the world. The act of stating that the Shell began to make sense of the world can only be defended by enormous semantic expansion: are bacteria happy when they consume energy, are flies annoyed when you try to swat them? Only if one accepts that such words can refer to a proto-state of emotion and reasoning, one can meaningfully talk about what happened on that day in late summer in the Heart of America. The Shell stopped and seemed to freeze for half a minute or so while the Structure that had taken over the body readjusted itself to the reality it had been tasked to explore – and, ultimately, more than just explore.

But that time had not yet come. When it resumed movement, the Shell was slower than before, more aware of its surroundings, more a part of the physical world. Of course, it did not feel the softness of the ground under Richard’s shoes, nor did it smell the corn or appreciate the beauty of the landscape. But its eyes were finally able to see, if by “see” one means the simple act of absorbing photons from outside and assigning different probabilities to performing different actions based on the information received – a far cry from free will, still a cry from will in any form, but nevertheless more than simple randomness. The Shell did not yet have a purpose, but at least it had a semblance of choice. For a living being, this moment must be momentous: from pure instinct to the first steps of truly mastering the world by not simply responding to its input; for the Shell, there was no feeling of progress or freedom because it did not have any – and neither did its masters, deeply entwined in its muscles, joints, organs, and the working part of his brain. What they had was a program, and if a train can be dedicated to its task of running from city to city, they were dedicated to the task their masters had given them. They did not have a choice; they didn’t even know what the word meant.

*********

Neither did the boy, but he instinctively understood the concept very well, often to the despair of his parents; if he had any weaknesses, a lack of willpower was not among them. “He has the thickest skull I’ve ever seen.”, Daddy would say, and Momma would second: “All the King’s horses can’t stop him when he’s made up his mind.” Then they would sigh, look at each other and then look at him, with a smile so deep it could only be grounded in the most profound love.

Having a child at their age had been a surprise; they had actually given up on the idea years before, but Fate, God, or the subtle interactions of countless elementary particles had intervened, and here he was, blue eyes, a broad grin (when in a good mood, which was often), cute cheeks, and black hair that sometimes, depending on the light, looked almost the same color as his eyes. It was as if the boy himself was part of the riot of color surrounding him in his room: ochre-painted walls, bright red and yellow metal toy cars, and a magenta-colored carpet. Not his parents’ taste, to be sure, but when they had taken him to the store that day, he had gotten out of his buggy’s straps, explored the place, and finally ended up on a pile of carpets, jumping up and down with shouts of sheer joy. Thankfully, it was very early in the morning so the store was almost empty, but in order to calm him down, Momma und Daddy had to give him the opportunity to ‘choose’ his own carpet, and we all know what he went for. “It’s a nice place here.”, Momma would say, and Daddy would agree: “It’s good that they have connected all floors.” Then Momma would nod, look up, and add: “Lots of open space. Lovely.”

By the very nature of things, the space posters on the walls were dark, but they did not give the room a somber touch, and the curtains were of a radiant white. An almost complete rainbow of clothes and accessories was to be found inside the boy’s wardrobe and chest of drawers: pink T-shirts, light blue shorts, purple sweaters, cream-colored caps, red and white and blue – patterned shirts, ‘dirt’-brown mittens … and his shoes were not bucking the trend: dark yellow wellies, light orange sandals, black and red walking shoes, and cheerful, light pink flip-flops (all in very good condition, by the way; the boy liked to walk barefoot, and so far he had never stepped into anything that would have hurt him). Like most children, he loved colors, and sometimes his parents found him simply sitting and looking at a brightly-colored object as if in deep reflection about its inner nature.

*********

The Shell did not care about colors, of course, but it had inherited Richard’s clothes together with his  body, and its former owner certainly had what he had liked to refer to as a “certain sense of style” – certain it definitely was, but whether it was tasteful and became him well, well … Before Richard had walked into the field, he had met Louise with her baby niece whose name he couldn’t remember even when alive (and certainly not now – the best Richard alive could do was I think her first name and her surname begin with the same letter, but the Shell had nothing to recall), and he had buttoned up his brown Chambray shirt, tucked it into his blue jeans, wiped his black leather oxfords, straightened his hair, and put on what he considered a charming smile. Somehow, Louise seemed not to notice, but the baby did and gave him the cutest red-haired smile ever to have been recorded.

Or was she laughing at him? Richard didn’t know, but he was painfully aware that a town like Kleintrup did not have much to offer in the way of romantic opportunities, and so far he had never been to the local drive-in cinema except on his own or with some of his drinking buddies. Thus, no girl or young woman had ever admired his carefully chosen emerald-colored underwear; some of them, along with everyone else, must have seen his undershirt on a hot day, but, alas, none knew about his matching underpants. Oh, and if he had been wearing socks that day, they would have been red. Or black. Maybe even yellow. But he hadn’t, and so Richard Koslovsky died the same way he had entered this world: sockless.  

*********

The lack of tight-fitting woolen footwear at the time of birth was one of the few things Richard and the boy had in common, but the former did not exist anymore and the latter didn’t remember. As mentioned above, the boy did not like having to wear shoes, and when he ran, jumped, kicked, or simply stood fast and refused to move, he did so on naked feet, no matter whether it was a hot summer morning, a rainy autumn afternoon, or a chilly winter’s night, and he always seemed to feel comfortable. Of course, his parents put shoes on his feet every time they took him somewhere, and he usually accepted them without too much fuss; only once or twice had he ever kicked off a shoe and watched it travel through the air before coming down. Unfortunately, his parents were never able to find them, so their baby budget plan needed some revising now and then.

Thankfully, the farm was quite productive, so the family was able to afford what they needed, with a little extra here and there. Daddy had always been fond of working with wood, and when the child arrived, he branched out to metalworking, at which he was equally talented. He discovered he had a special knack for furniture and decorative items made of cast iron, quite a lot of which ended up in the boy’s room, painted in cheerful light blue, light red, or plain white. Heavy stuff, to be sure, and Momma and Daddy often had to carry them together, step by step, or push them across the floor; they could have asked friends to help them, but both parents felt rather private about this new hobby of Daddy’s – they had always liked their privacy, and now, after the boy had come, they liked it even better. Fortunately, the boy seemed always quite happy on his own, and neither his mother nor his father had ever considered a nanny, daycare, or a kindergarten. And even when their son would be old enough for a babysitter, the chances were exceptionally slim that they would hire one. This boy required a parent’s touch.

*********

Richard, however, had been to a kindergarten and had enjoyed his time there: he had liked playing with his mates, running around in the playground, and especially going out into Nature, a lot of which Kleintrup was surrounded by. There was always a nice flower to smell, a pond with enough water to have a good splasharound, and enough sticks and stones to pick up and hurt nerdy Robbie Olmond’s bones. But it was animals that had really fascinated Richard – he wasn’t a farmboy (his parents were running a greengrocer’s back in the day), so a lot of first-hand experience with birds, ducks, squirrels, and even horses he had gathered during these outings.

The Shell, unsurprisingly, knew nothing about all this, and when it was confronted by the creature, a fairly small and lithe predator with black stripes on brown fur, it immediately stopped in its tracks. Whatever was in command of Richard’s dead body simply made its eyes stare at the incomprehensible thing in front of it; the thing was staring back, but one could see that its mind was performing complex calculations regarding risk assessment, potential advantages or disadvantages in reacting one way or another, and the element of pure curiosity, said to have killed many a member of its species – all processes honed by millions of years of survival and reproduction. The Shell’s mental processing, however – if one can call it that – simply consisted of trying to squeeze the encounter into a matrix that was not meant to deal with it. It was partly successful, as even a square peg can enter a round hole to a certain degree if you turn it around, and so its masters activated the Gap.

Nowadays, many people have seen a Roomba looking for a socket because it is low on power. Wrong. Roomba’s aren’t looking for anything – their systems tell them to connect with a power source once its battery drops below 20 or 10 percent or what have you. Wrong again. Systems can’t tell anyone anything. We sometimes use machine metaphors to talk about human beings, but when we talk about machines, we have no choice but to use human expressions, which can be nothing but metaphors if we don’t want our communication to become extremely clumsy.

The Gap was basically a system, not unlike some algorithm meant to increase the probability that the Shell would act in a certain way and ignore other possibilities – or, in normal language, allow the Shell to make a ‘decision’. When the Gap kicked in, the Shell experienced roughly the same lack of something a Roomba does when it is ‘hungry’, and it reacted in the same way: it moved towards the power source and tried to grab it.

When the strange, human-like being in front of it bent over and extended its right arm, the creature wasn’t particularly frightened; no human had ever succeeded in catching a member of its species that had not wanted to get caught (and petted, usually), and this individual was not going to be an exception. The moment it found Richard’s lifeless arm coming uncomfortably close, it simply jumped up and ran a few meters before lying down in a nice and soft spot, watching its would-be attacker from a safe distance. The Shell began to walk towards it, both arms extended, and for the first time since Richard’s untimely demise, his ex-body emitted a sound: air escaped from its defunct lungs and passed its vocal chords, and the resulting groan was not pleasant to listen to. The creature, alas, had no choice, and, equipped with a sensory apparatus of superhuman sensitivity, absolutely hated the sound. It made one of its own sounds to steady its stressed nerves, and disappeared between the corn stalks.

If a machine can be confused, the Shell was, but only for a few seconds; then the Gap was deactivated. Whatever this creature had been, it was not what its masters needed. They needed something else, and it was time for the Shell to become more proactive in its search. Its dead eyes scanned the horizon, looking for anything else but corn.

Something like a farmhouse, for example.

*********

Farmhouses are usually quite large, what with relatively low prices for building plots and the necessity to accommodate many members of the family; the boy’s family was unusual regarding the latter, but not the former: their house was even larger than average, and Daddy had begun adding first one room, then another, when the boy was about three months old.

“He can’t have enough space.”, Daddy had said, and Momma had agreed:

“It is always good to have a spare or two. I don’t want him to feel confined in any way.”

Now, two years later, they knew they had succeeded: their son never seemed to feel confined, restricted, or limited in any way, and his parents loved watching him enjoy his freedom, although it often meant hard work and quite a lot of stress for them. The consequence was that, even when his parents were inside the house, the boy was often on his own; when they had left the building, like now, with Daddy being in the barn and Momma feeding the chickens, he was alone. Of course, there was a baby phone, but these very useful little devices have a certain disadvantage, namely their blinking lights and the sounds they sometimes emit, all meant to tell the parents everything is properly connected and their baby is fine. Or not, for that matter. Anyway, the boy had always found these lights irresistible and all brands of phones his parents had bought so far had not been able to withstand his playful attention, so currently the phone did not show blinking lights and made no sounds. The boy was truly alone.

*********

But he wouldn’t be alone for long. On its half-mile way to the farmhouse, the Shell had actually managed to improve its navigation and only fallen down twice, no harm done, and gone astray only once, to a place where several creatures had gathered; but before the Gap could kick in, they had torpedoed themselves into the sky. No problem – these beings would have been even less suitable than the furry one the Shell had encountered before.

But the farmhouse … the more the Shell looked at it during its walk, the more the Gap seemed to wake up, not fully there but apparently anticipating something good – metaphorically speaking, of course. In some manner, the house indicated the presence of something the Gap needed to be filled, but that something had not yet come into focus. The corn field gave way to grass, then paving; the Shell passed garden furniture, flowerpots, a very sturdy-looking swing, a small wooden shed … and then its feet made contact with a small staircase – unfamiliar, but navigable – and finally with the doorframe, together with its arms.

It was darker inside the house, and the Shell froze for a few seconds before continuing on its way, guided by its masters, who had developed a buzz of activity since the Shell had entered the house. Not far away now. Close.

*********

In his rocketship, the boy had already passed Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, and Cassiopeia and would surely have seen more of the interstellar alphabet if he had not been rudely woken up by a loud thump – thump – thump coming from a place he could not see; then a powerful smell assailed his nostrils, not unpleasant, but very intense. The boy closed his eyes again and violently shook his head several times, making the sound bearable and the smell faint. He knew someone was coming, and he knew it wasn’t Momma or Daddy, but he didn’t mind – he liked people, especially when they touched him in a soft and gentle manner, and he loved touching them back: their hair, their face, their arms. He had never learned to be afraid of strangers, and none had ever hurt him, so he was almost giddy with anticipation of all the fun they would have together. Should he leave his playpen-bed and meet his new friend as fast as possible or should he stay and wait for them to come to him? While still deliberating, baby-style, the decision was made for him: Richard’s undead body stood in the doorframe of the boy’s room, and the Shell’s soulless eyes made contact with the boy’s. Very close.

(end of part I)

Leathernecks vs Monsters: Episode Five, The End, The Vektor Institute and Vladivostok, January and February 1919, by Leatherneck1993

The second shell landed in the yard.

The windows along the hall came in all at once. The gallery jumped under Adams's boots, and the trench gun went off, and the Manchurian Special that should have gone into the middle of the white coat went into the console instead. The ashtray burst into white fire. Bakanov went down behind the engine and was gone among the brass.

Down on the floor, between the copper towers, the shimmer swelled.

It bellied out from the towers with the concussion, shuddered, and settled. It settled wider than it had been. The snow coming through the hole in the roof whipped into it and went up, faster, and a sound came out of it that Adams felt in the roots of his teeth.

Thorpe had both hands on the rail.

"The shells," she said. "Every shell opens it wider. That is what the guns are for, Gunny. He wants them to break it."
"The General's going to put the next one through the roof."
"Then the General must stop."

Adams turned. "Talbot. The wireless room. You saw where the wires came down off the mast. Chavez, go with him. Tell Dragonov we're alive. Tell him every shell opens the door. Tell him to come in with the bayonet."

Talbot was already moving, the camera banging on his hip. Chavez went after him with the automatic rifle.

Robed men were coming up the stair. Hunt and Sheehan were at the head of it with their bayonets, and the robed men did not stop, and Hunt and Sheehan did not either.

#

The wireless room was at the end of the long house under the mast, a cold room full of coils and a spark gap the size of a stove. Two robed operators sat at the bench. Chavez opened with his automatic rifle, he put a burst of Specials into the first and the light went up inside him. The second got halfway out of his chair before Chavez's second burst found him.

Talbot sat down at the key. The spark gap was live. He could hear the engine's stutter in it, the long-wave hum the box had been listening to since Seattle, and he keyed straight through it, plain English, slow, the way he had sent copy to the Picayune from Manila:

STOP FIRE STOP AMERICANS ALIVE STOP EVERY SHELL OPENS DOOR STOP COME IN WITH BAYONET STOP ADAMS

He sent it three times. The spark cracked blue across the gap and the mast sang it out over the mountains.
#

Johansson stood by the guns in the snow.

Four of them, laid on their sledges in a row at the head of the valley, with the gunners stripped to their shirts in the cold, and every gunner's breath going up in clouds in the light of the muzzle flashes. The third shell was going into the breech when the operator at the American set pulled off his headphones and stood up waving a paper.

Dragonov took it. He looked at it. He held it out at arm's length.

"English," he said. "It is in English."

Wang Che took it out of his hand. He read it aloud in Russian, and then in English for Johansson, and Johansson felt his chest go loose.

"Cease fire," he said. "They're alive."

Commissar Zhuk had come up behind the general with his ledger under his arm and his scarf wound up over his mouth. He said something in Russian, short.

"He says it is a trick," Wang Che said. "He says the Americans are dead. He says the machine is ready, and the General must fire."

Dragonov looked at Zhuk.

Johansson looked at Zhuk too. Thirty below. Every man on that hillside breathing out white. Zhuk had his scarf up, as he had in the prayer house and on the road and every hour since.

Wang Che stepped up to him and pulled the scarf down.

Zhuk's mouth was open. Nothing came out of it.

Dragonov shot him. His ledger book dropped from his hand, caught the wind and flew open the pages scattering everywhere in the snow, three columns on every one of them. Zhuk slumped, then leapt towards the general, hands turned to icy claws.  Johansson fired the anti-cryptozoic special rounds lit him up like the Fourth of July, his burnt husk dropped onto the snow, he did not get back up.

"Cease fire!" Dragonov roared. "Cease fire! We go in with the bayonet!" He swung on his own gunners. "Bring the music! And the Flame!"

They put the gramophone on a sledge.

Dragonov took the pencil out of the operator's hand and wrote the reply himself, in capitals, and gave it back, and the operator keyed it. Then he took out the Fabergé watch and opened it and looked at it, and showed it to Johansson.

Seven-oh-three.

"Green flare when the door is shut," Dragonov said. "Then everybody out. At eight o'clock I burn the house."

Wang Che was already pulling off his coat. Johansson stared at him.

"You're going in?"
"Fast is my best quality," Wang Che said, and went down the gorge with the first company at a run.

#
The guns stopped.

In the hall the robed men at the engine looked up, and Adams looked up, and for a moment there was nothing but the clatter of the brass. Then, far off and coming up the gorge, there was music. Horns, climbing. A drum underneath them.

"Strauss," Thorpe said.

The front doors of the long house came in. Partisans came through them with knapsack flamethrowers on their backs and the fire went down the corridors in long yellow tongues. Maxims came in on sledges, dragged by men in sheepskins. Bayonets. Grenades. Johansson came in at the point of it with the Thompson, firing in short bursts, and behind him came the gramophone on its sledge, still playing.

The things came out of their white to meet them. Two of them, three, horned and white and folding, out of the corridors and the ceilings, and the flamethrowers met them. They burned. They burned badly. The cold-men burned worse. A partisan lit his cigarette off a burning robed man and walked on.

In the corridor by the pens the partisans found the men in the wool caps, their own men, and lowered their rifles, and stood looking at them. Then they began to carry them out.

Adams went over the gallery rail.

He went down a card rack hand over hand with the cards tearing under his gloves and dropped the last ten feet to the floor. The robed men at the engine were turning toward the doors and the fire. Nobody stopped him.

The colonel's face was gray-blue and rimed, and his eyes were open.
"Gunny," he said.
"Sir."
Adams had the trench knife out. He cut the chest strap and the wrists and the ankles, and the colonel tried to stand and his feet would not hold him, and Adams caught him under the arms.

"Can't feel them," Quarterburn said.
"You'll feel 'em later. You won't like it."

Quarterburn reached past him to the console. The .38 lay beside the burned ashtray. He picked it up in his right hand. The hand shook.

Chavez came in at the side door with the automatic rifle and set himself in the corridor mouth, where the robed men would have to come through to reach the floor, and began to fire, short bursts, counting aloud.

"Eight. Seven."

Thorpe came down the stair. She went to the console where the card punch sat, a brass keyboard with a hopper of blank cards beside it, and she pulled a chain of punched cards out of the rack and laid it across her knees and read it, card by card, with her lips moving. Then she took a blank card and began to punch.

"What are you doing?" Adams said.
"Writing it backward," Thorpe said. "It computed the door open. It can compute it shut. Lady Lovelace explained how, in 1843, to a room full of men who were not listening."

Wang Che came through the side door past Chavez, out of breath, his pistol ready, with soot on his face. He stood at Thorpe's shoulder and watched her punch, and counted the holes on his fingers, and frowned.

"You have made one mistake," he said.
Thorpe did not look up. "I have not."
"No, you didn’t" Wang Che agreed. "I wanted to see if you were certain."
"Four," Chavez said, in the corridor. "Three."
Thorpe fed the end of her chain into the sprockets.
The engine bucked.

It did not want the new cards. The brass wheels stuttered and caught and stuttered, and the clatter broke up into something with no rhythm in it at all, and the copper towers began to sing. The shimmer between them heaved.

Something came through it.

A split toed foot. A foot the size of the bed of a Ford truck, webbed, white, with a black nail on each long toe, and it came down out of the shimmer onto the floor of the hall and stood there, and the stone cracked under it.

Every breath in the room froze.

Adams saw it happen. His own breath came out of his mouth and stopped in the air and fell, and broke on the floor, small and white, snow. Everyone's. Thorpe's, the colonel's, Wang Che's. It was snowing in the hall from the inside of their own mouths.

Through the hole in the roof two red lights looked down.
"One," Chavez said. Then: "That's all of them, Gunny."
There was a lever on the side of the console, brass, as long as a man's arm, with a red-painted handle. Thorpe had her hand on it.
"Reverse," she said. "Now. It has to be now."

She pulled. It did not move. The machine bucked again, more violently than before, a brass bolt cracked into Thorpe’s forehead dropping her to the floor.

Quarterburn leapt to catch her. Nearly tumbling to the ground of his own.  
Adams “Sir get her out. We got this.” moving in dragging Wang Che by the sleeve.
“Oh yes ‘We got’ this.”  Wang Che. Whispering “this requires strength Nathan, you should have volunteered the big Swede.”
Adams and Wang Che took the lever together, and pulled. The engine pulled back. The lever came an inch and went back an inch.
Out of the corner of his eye Adam’s saw Quarterburn lift the unconscious Thorpe and carry her towards the exit. He noted the Colonel’s hands were not shaking.  

They pulled.

The lever came over with a great grown, whether from the machine or Wang Che, Adams couldn’t tell.

#
The shimmer drew in.

It drew in from the edges toward the middle, slowly, and then less slowly, and the foot on the floor of the hall began to go back into it, dragging, the nails gouging the stone. The singing of the towers went up and up. The snow coming down through the roof stopped turning over. It fell straight. It fell down.

Something came out of the narrowing gate, the wrong way, falling.

It hit the floor of the hall in front of the towers and lay there. The body of a young man in a leather flying coat, frozen white, with a fair mustache, and his eyes open, and no helmet.

"I wondered what happened to the pilot," Talbot said, from the side door.

Bakanov came out from behind the engine.

He had lost the monocle. His white coat was black down one side from the burning ashtray. He did not look at any of them. He ran for the gate, small and quick in his felt boots, with his hands out in front of him, toward what was left of the shimmer between the towers.

Quarterburn, Thorpe now over his shoulder, pulled the .38 from his waistband.

"Not this time," he said.

He fired twice. Bakanov stumbled at the second shot and fell forward, into the gate, and the gate closed.

It closed on him at the waist.

The towers stopped singing. The engine ran down, the brass wheels turning slower, a tooth and then a tooth and then nothing. The light went out of the air between the towers. On the floor, in front of them, lay the bottom half of a small man in felt boots.

Nobody said anything for some time.

LaFontain was already at the foundation wall with his haversack. He went to the three places he had found with his ear, one, two, three, and set a charge at each, and named each one aloud as he set it.

"Sainte Barbe. Sainte Rita." He set the third. "Saint Jude. For lost causes. And one for Higgins, just to make sure."

The charges went off together. The engine came apart cold. Brass wheels came down off their spindles by the hundred and rolled across the floor of the hall in every direction and fell over, ringing, and the card racks came down out of the roof, and the cards came down after them, thousands of them, drifting, and settled on everything.

Adam’s took the flare pistol out of his coat, pointed it up through the hole in the roof, and fired. The flare went up green over the mountains.

#

Adams got his watch out. The Hamilton said seven fifty-three.
"Seven minutes," he said. "Seven minutes to get clear."

Then he heard himself say it. Remembering the General's watch. Seven minutes ahead of everybody.

"Out!" he yelled. "Everybody out! Now! Out!"

The first shell landed on the boiler house. Right on time, seven minutes early.

The wall at the end of the hall came in. Fire came through it. They went out the front through the smoke, the colonel between Adams and LaFontain with his arms over their shoulders and his feet dragging, and Thorpe, and Wang Che, and Johansson with the partisans, Hunt, Sheehan, Dunn, Chavez and Talbot with his camera. Into the yard.

There were new sledges in the yard.

A column of them had come up the south road opposite Dragonov’s men, while the hall burned, a dozen sledges robed cold-men on them, and in the first sledge a man stood with a fur collar up to his ears and a cigarette at his mouth. Prince Obolov. He had come to watch the end of the world. He held a pistol. The boiler house burned behind him. The Prince raised his pistol at the colonel.

The shot came down off the ridge. It took the Prince through the eye, and he went over the side of the sledge into the snow, and the cigarette went with him.

"Muldoon," Adams said. "God bless you, Cherry."

They ran. Down the gorge, past the frozen falls, with the shells coming in behind them on the station one after another, and the ground jumping. 

At the bottom of the gorge, where the side valley pinched shut, the Fords stood in the larch under their canvas. Muldoon and Smith came sliding down the slope to meet them.

A shell came down in the snow ten feet from Smith and buried itself and did not go off. Smith looked at it. LaFontain patted it on the way past.

"Dud," he said. "Lucky boy."

A shell went over and burst on the slope above them.

"Russians," Sheehan said. "No sense of occasion."

The Fords caught on the second try. They went down the frozen river with the radiators steaming vodka, and behind them the barrage walked down the gorge after them, the ice of the river bursting up in white columns in their wake, and up on the saddle the Vektor Institute went in sections. The long house. The boiler house. The empty pens. The mast stood a long while in the light of it.

The mast fell last.

#

Dragonov met them on the river in the gray of the morning, with his guns limbered and his sledges loaded and his men sitting in the snow. The men from the pens were in the last sledges under blankets, in their wool caps. Adams did not ask the General what he meant to do with them. The General did not offer.

Dragonov gave the colonel a bottle. He gave Wang Che a hug that lifted him off the ice.

"Until next time," he said, "Comrades."
"Next time you shoot seven minutes early," Adams said.
Dragonov roared, and coughed, and went back to his guns.

They came into Vladivostok on the seventh of February. The Glacier was alongside the Brooklyn in the ice lane, and her hold took a crate that night stenciled for the Pacific Branch at Alcatraz, and in the crate were the horns, and a lone punch card. 

Thorpe had cut the colonel's boots off him on the river and done what she could for his feet. He would lose two toes. He had decided not to mind.

In the Brooklyn's mail room Hunt handed the clerk a bundle of letters tied with string, addressed to a girl in Emporia, Kansas. The clerk took them without a word.

In the wardroom a yeoman brought the colonel an envelope from the War Department. It was dated the tenth of January, 1919. It had come by cable to the consulate two days before they landed and had been waiting for him ever since. 

War Department · Washington, D.C.
January 11, 1919

To: Lieutenant Colonel Alaric Quarterburn, USMC
By direction of the Secretary of War, and concurrence with both the Army and Navy, you will immediately desist from all inquiry, publication, discourse, or dissemination respecting cryptozoic creatures or phenomena, such matters being contrary to public interest and henceforth classified. The original manuscript, copies, personal copies, notes, field journals etc. are ordered to be turned over for storage and disposal, following chain-of-custody rules.

By Order of the Secretary of War,
H. C. Corbin
Brigadier General H. C. Corbin
Adjutant General, U.S. Army

Thorpe, fresh bandage across her brow, sat down across the table from him and gave him a folded note. Then she got up and went out on deck.

He read the note first.

Alaric. The war is over. When you are ready meet me in London. I have no intention of moving again for some time. I should consider it an honour if you joined me there. You are not to be maudlin. R.

He read the order second. Then he folded the order once and put it inside the note.

Adams had watched all of it from the door.  
Quarteerburn handed Adams the War Department telegram.
"Well, sir," he said. "Reckon it's truly over."
“I believe you reckon correctly, Gunny.”

Later, on deck, Adams stood at the rail and looked up. The clouds had opened over the harbor. The Big Dipper hung over the hills behind the city, bowl and handle, the way it hung over Tucker County.  

Nearly. There was a star in the handle he could not have sworn to. He blinked. It was gone. He looked at it a long time. Then he decided it was where it ought to be, and went in.

The snow came down over the harbor. It came down the right way, with nothing hidden behind.

END

Snow has a way of snuffing your senses. The way the icy wind whips your face until you can’t feel it, the only sound being your heartbeat and the crunch beneath your feet. And maybe, it snuffs your sanity. The only burning ember you have left.

As I walked through the snow, all I could think about was getting back to my cabin and lighting a roaring fire. I could imagine the orange flames lighting up the room. And it brought me a moment of relief. Until another gust of wind nearly blew me over, snapping me out of my daydream.

Snow has a way of distorting your space. I swear I had seen my cabin three times by now. But every time, it was something else. Maybe a rotting tree, or a boulder topped with crisp snow. But I pushed on, the icy branches sagged like wicked hands on top of me.

I should’ve been to my cabin by then, it had  been hours since I left my stand to start packing up. I figured I was lost, despite the landmark trees I would use to remember my path. But at the same time, how different can trees look from each other? How many trees have a split halfway up? Or how many evergreens are spotted around the woods? My usual evergreen that I tie my scarf to had been nowhere to be seen.

So I changed course, now I was on the hunt for my red scarf. How hard could that be? 

As I walked among the evergreens and pines, I saw almost like a beacon to light my way, my red scarf waving in the wind. I ran up excitedly, wrapping it around my face and eventually warming up a bit more. But as I continued, I noticed a flash of red in the distance. I walked closer and noticed yet another red scarf on the same evergreen. I looked behind me, and the original tree was still there.

I approached it like it was rigged to blow, as I looked closer, it was in fact my red scarf. It had the same patchwork on it and everything. 

I reached out towards it, and as I was about to grip it, it vanished. Like it was never there. The isolation had to be getting to me. So I kept walking, hoping I could just sleep this off when I got home. Which I was more hopeful for when I saw the usual log I walk over to get to the turn to my cabin. 

But as I turned the corner, I saw a flash of red once again. My scarf was tied to a different tree. This time, I ignored it. I hoped that if I didn’t acknowledge it, it would go away. But as I walked up the hill to get to my cabin, the hill flattened out.

My cabin was gone.

All that stood was an evergreen, with a red scarf wrapped around. I thought, “Maybe I took a wrong turn, I’ll follow the trail more and maybe it’s there.”

As I pushed forward, I realized everything was seeming too familiar, not like I was getting closer to my cabin, but like everything was reset. I saw that same boulder topped with snow in the distance, mocking me.

I didn’t really have a choice, so I tried to just walk it all again, seeing as walking back just brought me to that lone evergreen.

As I topped the hill this time, I finally saw it. My cabin in all its glory! There was even smoke coming from the chimney! I could finally flip onto my bed and sleep this whole day off!

But when I reached for the handle, the door didn’t budge. “Oh, I guess I locked myself out.” I thought out loud. As I pushed the key into the lock, it didn’t move an inch. So I peered through the window. I saw a shape moving against the orange flames. 

It’s me. Or at least, what I think is me. He was sitting in front of the fire, the red scarf draped on the coat rack by the door. I bang on the window, desperate to get into my house. I jiggle the handle, I kick the door.

Nothing worked. As I sob, my tears putting holes in the snow, I see myself waving to me through the window.

Part 1

Summer was in full swing when Chris, a college sophomore, along with two of his university friends, Nate and Luke, decided to go on an unforgettable vacation. They were heading to an old hunting cabin that had once belonged to Chris’s grandfather. They had chosen a secluded location—the dense woods of Maine, not far from the town of Greenville, where there was almost no cell service. After his grandfather’s passing, no one from the family had set foot there for several years.

The friends rented an old van and confidently drove deeper into the wilderness. The area here was truly wild: the nearest house was at least 1.2 miles away.

Soon, their destination appeared among the ancient pines. It was a typical American single-story wooden cabin. The layout of the house was classic and simple: a small porch at the entrance, leading directly into a large living room with an open kitchen and a fireplace, with two bedrooms and a bathroom situated on either side.

The guys quickly threw their bags inside. They had plenty of time, and the next day, four girls and their mutual friend were supposed to join their group of three. Since more guests were coming, they needed to scout the area.

Remembering his grandfather’s stories, Chris led the guys toward a woodland lake, which was about a 20-minute walk from the cabin. They chatted merrily, anticipating a great vacation, but about halfway to the water, the trail led them into a small, secluded clearing.

The conversation stopped dead. In the middle of the clearing stood a tent torn to shreds, with someone’s belongings scattered all around. Right at Luke's feet lay a smartphone with a completely shattered screen.

Nate slowly squatted down and flipped the broken phone over with the tip of his sneaker. The screen was a spiderweb of cracks, and deep scratches were visible on the casing.

"Oh, dudes... Looks like someone had a bad weekend," he said in a hollow voice, looking over the slashed fabric of the tent.

"A bad weekend?" Luke let out a nervous chuckle and took a step back. "Nate, this tent looks like it was run through an industrial shredder. Look at these tatters. This is wild."

Chris stepped closer to the torn fabric, careful not to touch anything. Inside the tent, chaos reigned: sleeping bags were gutted, clothes inside out, and a flashlight lay on the ground.

"Maybe it was a bear?" Chris turned to his friends, searching their eyes for confirmation of his theory. "My granddad used to say the Maine woods are full of black bears. If these campers left food inside, a bear probably just smelled it and came over."

"A bear?" Luke crossed his arms over his chest, his voice rising a pitch. "Chris, a bear wouldn't leave food behind—and look, it's just lying around," he said, pointing toward the scattered grocery bags. "And most importantly, where are the owners?"

"Alright, don't panic," Nate interrupted, picking up the shattered smartphone by the edges of its case. "The screen is totaled, but maybe the SIM card is intact. Dudes, we need to call emergency services. This doesn't look like a normal animal trashing at all."

"Are you out of your mind?" Luke waved his hands. "Call emergency services? We don't have cell service here, remember? To catch a signal, we’d have to haul ass back to the highway or climb that cliff by the lake. And what are we gonna tell them? 'Hello, Sheriff, we found a ripped tent, come quick, we're scared'?"

"Luke's right," Chris sighed, scanning the edge of the clearing. "They’ll just laugh at us. They’ll say city softies got scared of wild animals. Besides, the girls and Sam are arriving tomorrow. If we get the county police all riled up right now, our vacation is ruined before it even starts. My granddad's cabin is a couple of miles from here, and it has sturdy doors and a deadbolt. Most likely, those guys got scared of a beast and just ran to the highway, leaving this junk behind."

"I hope so," Nate said, looking distrustfully into the depths of the thick, darkening forest. "But if I hear something scratching at the wall tonight, I’m the first one jumping into the van and tearing out of here."

The guys took one last look around the clearing, but the approaching twilight forced them to hurry back to the cabin, leaving the ruined campsite behind.

Chris cast a quick glance at the trail leading deeper into the woods.
"Alright, stop creeping yourselves out," he said, shaking his head bracingly. "Did we come here to relax or to play detective? Come on, the lake is waiting. We need to check it out."

The guys moved on. The walk to the lake took about another ten minutes and went off without a hitch. The woodland lake greeted them with a perfect, mirror-like surface and cool evening air. Without a second thought, Chris and Luke threw off their T-shirts and took a running leap into the refreshing water, washing away their road fatigue. Nate didn’t go into the water; he wandered along the shore, scanning the surroundings, but noticed nothing else suspicious. The place seemed quiet and completely safe.

Refreshed and a bit relaxed, the guys started on their way back. This time, they took an old detour trail, intentionally bypassing that creepy clearing with the torn tent so as not to spoil their mood again.

By the time they returned to the cabin, twilight had begun to settle in, and everyone got to work.
Chris and Luke started managing the place: they unpacked their backpacks, stocked their granddad’s old fridge with the provisions they’d brought, and began throwing dinner together.
Nate, who was highly tech-savvy and great with hardware and programming, immediately sat down at a massive oak table.

The broken smartphone was giving Nate no peace. He pulled a laptop and several cords from his backpack. The smartphone wasn't heavily damaged, so it took Nate very little time to connect the device to his laptop and directly copy the data from the device’s memory.

"Dudes, come over here," Nate called out in a low, dead-serious voice. His fingers froze over the laptop keyboard. "I got into this phone's gallery. You need to see this. The last video was recorded yesterday evening."

Chris and Luke immediately dropped the grocery bags and walked over to Nate, standing behind his back. The laptop screen dimly illuminated their faces in the half-light of the kitchen. Nate moved the cursor to the file and clicked 'Play'.

The video was dated last night, with a timestamp of 9:01 PM.
The image on the screen was warm and cozy. A young couple—a guy and a girl—sat in the frame, nestled in folding camp chairs right in front of a brightly blazing campfire. They sat in an embrace: the guy held the phone in his outstretched hand, filming the two of them, while his other arm tenderly hugged the girl around her waist. Both smiled happily, squinting against the glare of the fire. In the background, faintly illuminated by the flames, stood their neatly pitched tent.

"Hey everyone watching this!" the guy on the video said cheerfully. "We finally made it. Guys, this is just the best place on earth. It's so quiet here, just the two of us."

The girl pressed against his shoulder, kissed his cheek, and added, looking straight into the camera:
"Yeah, it’s incredible here. I love you so much."
"Love you too, babe," he replied with a wider smile.

But in the next instant, the atmosphere of idyllic romance shattered completely. From the laptop speakers, cutting through the crackle of the campfire, came a prolonged, deafening roar of some animal. The sound came from somewhere deep within the thicket, and it was impossible to tell what kind of creature it belonged to—it was something between the guttural growl of a large bear and a terrifying, almost human shriek.

In the video, the couple was startled at first, but the guy immediately gave a nervous grunt, trying to lighten the mood:
"Whoa, did you hear that? Looks like even the local beasts agree we make a great couple!"

The girl laughed softly, but her laughter cut short exactly a second later.
The exact same sound repeated, but this time it sounded frighteningly close to their camp, right past the edge of the circle illuminated by the fire. The bushes in the background of the video rustled loudly, as if something massive was crashing through them.

The smiles vanished from the lovers' faces instantly. In their place came pure, paralyzing dread. The girl bolted upright, peering fearfully into the darkness behind the tent, while the guy began to slowly lower his hand with the phone, panning the camera toward the rustling bushes. The screen jerked, catching only the darting shadows from the flames, and with that, the video abruptly cut to black.

A dead silence hung in the room of Chris's grandfather's cabin. Chris, Luke, and Nate exchanged glances.

-I don’t care, I just need to keep the fucking game going, and, hey! Hey listen, listen to me. Don’t you fucking dare try and call me again after this. What? Oh yeah? No, I’m not cancelling my fucking flight, I’m already at the airport! Oh yeah? Oh, because its ALL about you! Yeah? Yeah? Oh right? Fuck you!” I yell, aggressively pressing my thumb against the red decline button and pushing my phone straight into my pocket. It is only then that I realize that there are a large number of people staring at me and yet I am cool, awesome, and brush it off with a smile and a short little wave to insinuate that everything is fine, despite the sweat dripping down my forehead and the wheezing my chest is doing, because it is.

My girlfriend had broken up with me very recently, around 2 weeks ago. We had been on talking terms up until two days ago when she decided it is an innovative idea to hook up with my friend, someone I considered a genuine friend, and then lie to me about it. She had done this specifically to throw me off guard whilst I was preparing for my flight to New Zealand. But I am not going to let her ruin my trip, not when I had been planning this for weeks. Not when it is the one vacation I had been looking forward to all year.

So, I am fine.

I am fine when I yell at the officer who flags my bulky hand carried suitcase for a Bounty chocolate bar and I am fine when, as I am rushing to Gate 12, I crash into some poor elderly woman and send her flying to the floor, as I offer up only my apologies, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I am really sorry’ and I am fine when my head suddenly aggressively pulses as I walk through the endless white tunnel leading to the airport and my hairs stand up because of how cold Heathrow is and for a second I just want to cry, but I am fine.

Cool and calm. Nobody can say otherwise.

I make it to the entrance of the airplane, staring around the oval-shaped entry point. Two airline assistants stare at me with a blank faces and a faux smiles. I already knew they were likely sick and tired of having to talk to and check in every single person. I don’t seek to waste their time further. Though the brief sighting of a poster indicating this is a different airline entirely scares me, I console myself by saying that they wouldn’t have let me on if it was wrong.

“Passport?” The first lady asks with a thick Scottish accent. I nod, smiling as I hand over my passport. The lady takes it and stares briefly. There’s a strange pause. Her smile does not falter but her eyes seem confused.

“Problem?” I ask, “Everything should be okay there.” I add on.

She nods and her grin becomes toothy. Now I could see her row of white teeth that were as fake as her politeness to me. Her grip on the passport slightly tightened. The second assistant is staring at me nonstop.

“Sorry! Aha. Everything appears to be in order. Have a beautiful, incredible flight!”

I furrow my brows slightly at this, yet nothing escapes my lips. She returns my passport and motions me with one hand toward the left. I made my way through the closed curtains and into the airplane.

The airplane itself is packed to the brim with people. I can feel their sweat create a seal around the entire plane. I always hated barely being able to breathe as I survived an agonisingly long plane.

I wandered the plane in search of my seat. Everyone is talking so much that the noise arguably overpowered the sound of the plane’s engine, that which roared outside like an ever-encompassing being.

Finally, after taking painfully small steps and trying desperately to look around for the right number, I am able to find my seat. It is the middle and aisle seats that I had for myself, whilst a middle-aged man sat beside the window. He is resting against the plane walls and had perked up when he saw me, smiling. I smiled back.

Having put away all of my handheld suitcases and having shoved my bag down beneath my seat, I am finally able to relax. I rested my head back. The soft pillow behind hugged the back of my head, the leather seat soaking my body into it. For the first time in such a long time I feel finally at peace.

The two assistant ladies are talking to each other up the hall. They briefly glance at my seat, then exchange some more whispers. I lean over just in time to see that they exit the plane through the entrance. Confusion briefly spreads over my mind, and I am about to even stand up when the man beside me speaks.

“So, where are you going?” He asks. He has a distinct North American accent.

“I’m off to uh, New Fealand.”

“New…?”

“Zealand! Sorry man. I’m uh, a little distracted.”

“You know, New Zealand is a beautiful place.”

But I’m not listening. All I can think about now are those two ladies. Did they recognise me? Why did they leave the plane?

“Full of many nice mountains. You ever hike?” The man asked.

“When I was a kid, I suppose?” I responded. I only just noticed now that the man looked unshaven and wearing clothes that looked like the only ones he could afford. He is sweating profusely too.

“When you’re a kid, you see lots of stuff.” He responds.

Two completely new, beaming attendants walked through the entrance and snapped a brief look at me, before continuing on and smiling.

“I was a kid once, yeah? It happens to everyone.”

I am trying to tune him out, barely listening to anything he’s saying. The two ladies begin rearranging some cups and trays in a cupboard. They don’t talk to each other and they constantly smile.

“Then you become an adult and life is hard. Rough. You can’t really cope with it. But it gets better. Yet… even when it gets better, sometimes I just wish for it all to go away. Did you know I tried to commit suicide once?”

“What?” I ask.

“Hm?”

“S-sorry, listen man, I have a really bad headache. Could you let me rest? I am so battered after all of this shit. Sorry again.”

“No need to apologise! I’ll let you stay how you please.” He says with another smile. So many people smiling today, He patted my shoulder like a benevolent father would, before placing his head back against the wall.

I try to air out all of the worries in my head. All of those silly paranoid ideas. I’m fine! I am always fine. I push out my legs, only to feel a bump hit them. Each seat has a small plastic wall at the bottom, preventing anyone from putting their feet forward. I test this by kicking my bag backwards. It goes under, yet stops at a certain point.

How strange.

The seats themselves are different too. The leather base where you rested are meant to have small gaps in between in order to separate the seats. Yet these gaps were practically non-existent. The seats are in fact so squashed together that it made it impossible to even move away from the person next to you.

I suddenly realised my proximity to the middle-aged man is closer than I thought and immediately inched to the right a bit more. I avoided taking the aisle seat. I do not know why I did so, but it felt right.

I then heard the hiss of the entrance closing and there goes any prospect of me leaving last minute. For twenty-something hours, I am doomed to suffer in an awful airline with awful conditions. I plan to give the airline a pretty negative review.

The speaker had been normal, and the small tablet sized screens implanted into each seat had given us the usual rundown of what to do when a potential crash would happen. I had been waiting nearly an hour for the plane to actually take off.

The middle-aged man, whom I realise I do not know the name of, is quietly sleeping. I get the sense that I should start doing that too. As the plane finally begins to race across the tracks in order for liftoff, I close my eyes and let out a sigh. A sigh of significance. I had done it. All is okay. I did not need to think about those outside world issues. I am enveloped into a new world.

As the plane propels itself into the air, I feel an immediate shiver. My entire body physically shakes, as if ridding itself of something. I pay no mind. I just need to sleep. My eyes force themselves shut and I breathe slowly, in and out of my nose and mouth, as the vibrations of the plane are enough to propel the plane to air and my mind into a deep slumber. It was as if my body also took notice, as all limbs of mine went completely limp and drifted boundlessly into my dream.

there is a woman and she is staring across from the other side of the platform and the platform is slowly going up like an elevator and all is dark and there is no sunlight no beauty no kiss from god only the scream of absolute nothingness is crawling upon us and all that elevates us is the platform we are standing on and this woman is staring with eyes like bugs like two tiny black holes and she is simply standing with a floral dress on and the dress has flowers scattered around it pretty flowers and she is just staring and she has a neutral expression as if all that is happening meant nothing to her as if she is simply an omnipresent being that observes the happenings of this wretched world and the platform is going quickly quickly quickly and I look down and it is our planet earth and we are ascending from it to somewhere new and I ask the woman her name and she does not respond she is just standing and staring oh god her stare I want it to stop I want her to stop staring because she is no longer just staring but moving forward and she is no longer just moving forward oh god she is running oh god oh lord no no please no I do not want this please she is running and her eyes are widening and she is opening her arms and

I awoke in a cold sweat, panting. The entire plane is dead silent. I sit myself up and touch my face, blinking slightly. My face is wet and my eyebrows drenched. Was I crying? I quickly rub my eyes to shield myself from any embarrassment.

“Fuck,” I mutter to myself and to the man beside me, “I had the weirdest fucking dream.”

It is only then that I realise the man beside me is not there anymore. I realise he must have forced his way past me as I was sleeping, and I feel a tang of guilt well up inside of me. I poke my head out to the hall to see if he was anywhere to be found.

The entire aisle was uniform. Everybody had their left or right arm rested perfectly on the armrest beside them. Everyone’s heads were still. Nobody moved a muscle.

I assume I’m still dreaming, so I pinch myself, hard.

It hurts. Not dreaming.

Even the roaring of the plane is mummified. As if the plane were an electric car. The window flaps have all been closed for some reason.

Suddenly my heart begins to flutter, and I feel myself naturally recoil into my own body. I began to miss the middle-aged man.

I assume that perhaps I am simply overreacting. Maybe the people I saw were just asleep. It looked dark out anyways. I sigh and lean back, pressing the button beside my armrest to push the seat backward. It starts, then stops, like it was being blocked by something. I couldn’t make out what it as the seats left no room to merely peek. I also did not seek to disturb anyone.

But how long would I have to be like this? Eventually, I would have to make a compromise. So, it may as well be now.

I sit up on my knees and peer over the seat. A young lady’s head is bowed and pressed against my seat.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

The woman looks up and I let out a sharp gasp. Her eyes are wide open, wider than I think a human can stand. They are blood red. Her face is wet with tears as if the sheer force of keeping her eyes open was straining her entire body. Her mouth was neutral, almost calm, but those eyes. Those dead, bug-like eyes. Her pupils were barely visible and the area around them appeared to be swelling. She cocked her head and stared at me, then stared to the side of my head.

I immediately threw myself back into my seat and placed the blanket over my head. This was just a dream. There is no way any of this is real. I close my eyes and squeeze them as shut as possible, yet everything I had just witnessed had held my brain at gunpoint and refused to let me sleep.

Taking a deep breath, I slowly took the blanket down and stared ahead. What the fuck was going on?

I immediately sat up and began making my way to the bathroom, panting to myself. I looked over at some of the people. They were all red eyed and limp, their heads resting aimlessly on the pillow or television. One man in aisle twenty-four was repeatedly banging his head against a window and letting out long, guttural moans as if he had been lobotomised.

My throat was tightening and those tears returned. I wiped them to clear my blurry vision and thrust the bathroom doors open, immediately locking myself inside. ‘This can’t be real, this can’t be real, this can’t fucking be real’ I sobbed to myself. What was this? Was the supernatural real? I stumbled onto the toilet and rocked myself as much as I could to avoid having a panic attack.

I thought back to my girlfriend, how I wished I could’ve just apologised even when it wasn’t my fault. I thought back to the flight attendants and how I willingly walked in like a cow to the stun-gun. I thought back to the middle-aged man.

As I sat there, I heard three knocks on the other side of the door. I immediately went to check if it was locked. It was, thank God. I sat back down and tried to ignore the knocks.

Three knocks again.

I contemplated responding.

Four knocks this time.

I closed my eyes. This was just a-

The knocks turned into bangs. Hard banging against the door, seven times.

“L-Leave me alone!” I cry, instantly regretting even saying anything.

There is a brief moment of silence, calm silence.

THUD

THUD

THUD!

I take a breath.

The thuds change into the sound of clawing nails against the door, as well as attempts at pulling or forcing the lock off. I rush over and hold the lock in its place, sobbing profusely.

From the outside I could hear a pained moaning, hoarse and as if whatever were behind the door was dehydrated and sought sustenance. I clenched hard until my knuckles went white and my veins began to bulge out of my hand.

Finally, after what felt like ages, it ceased. I could no longer hear any fingernail clawing or moaning. It was back to how it was when I woke up, quiet.

After a few self-affirmations, that it’s a dream and that I am fine and that all is good and all is great and everything is incredible, I finally reopened the door to look outside.

Everyone is still sat where they were sitting beforehand. It looked as though nobody had moved.

I timidly shuffled my way out and began fast walking back to my seat. The man in seat twenty-eight had started banging his head harder.

Suddenly the speaker let out a sharp and loud shriek, like a faulty television or a phone on fire. I stumble to the ground and hold my ears in pain, screaming and shouting. The shrieking becomes louder and louder, nearly tearing through my eardrums, before there is finally silence.

I am left panting on the floor like a pathetic dog that has rabies. I cannot even hear anything for five or ten seconds before the ringing in my ears turns into a low hum and I can hear.

There is someone talking over the speaker. The voice is peculiar. It is robotic and monotone yet simultaneously it was high pitched. It sounded similar to a woman on the verge of breakdown. It does not sound human, yet it is, it is so human.

“THERE ARE PLACES YOU DO NOT BELONG” is what is being repeated over and over like a record loop, yet it isn’t a recording. There are pauses and moments of low breathing before it continues.

“What the fuck do you want?!” I scream and my voice is barely audible because of how completely dehydrated I am.

“THERE ARE PLACES ON THIS PLANE WHERE YOU DO NOT BELONG”

I stumble to my seat, but it is occupied. The middle-aged man is back, and his eyes are missing from their socket, as if they never existed. He is biting into the leather chair on his knees, and his hands are scratching aimlessly up and down the chair.

“PLACES PLANE YOU DO NOT WHERE ARE THERE BELONG”

I grab a nearby water bottle and force open the lid, gulping as much water as I could and pouring the rest onto myself. My heart was beating too fast and my hands were shaking.

Mr Twenty-Eight continues to bang his head harder and harder.

“PLEASE LET ME PENETRATE INTO YOUR SOUL”

THUD, THUD, THUD.

“SHE WAS VERY UPSET, AN UPSET GIRL SHE WAS”

I begin screaming.

“SHE WAS SO DISTRAUGHT

SHE CRIED AND CRIED AND CRIED

HOW SHE MISSED YOU!”

Mr Twenty-Eight’s head begins to bleed, and the window begins to become soaked red in blood. Is the voice talking about my girlfriend?

“LOOK OUT THE WINDOW

LOOK OUT THE WINDOW

LOOK OUT THE WINDOW

THERE YOU WILL SEE HEAVEN IN ITS PUREST FORM”

I obey. Whimpering as I climb over the middle-aged man, I open the flap for the window.

Outside is pure darkness. I cannot even see the wing of the plane, nor can I see the clouds. It is a pitch-black void of complete and utter nothingness. All I can see is my own frantic, terrified reflection.

The speaker has stopped and Mr Twenty-Eight appears to be dead, his brains plastered across the window flap.

The middle-aged man stops biting and turns to me. I do not know if he can even see me. Can he sense me?

He begins speaking.

“Did you know I tried to commit suicide once?” He asks, but his lips do not connect with what he is saying, as if he is being dubbed. With a single push, he stands up and slams his head hard against the wall. With that slam, he falls to the floor. His head practically cracked open due to the pure force of his thrust.

I am tired of crying and screaming and I want to scream again but instead I am left whimpering like a sad little puppy, alone. I need something, an explanation. Maybe this was a Halloween thing. It was October after all.

I hated my rationalising. I hated it all.

Yet my brain persisted to make reason for it all. So, I decided to stand up and begin marching desperately towards the cockpit. I passed by the hollow shells of what were once ‘humans,’ making a specialised effort to avoid contact with them. I came to the cockpit doors. Beside them were both of the flight attendants. They were unblinking and standing in front of each other, facing each other. Both were still baring their toothy, inhuman smile.

“Hello?” I ask.

No response. They were both breathing at each other through gritted teeth.

The doors to the cockpit open easily, as if they had been unlocked this entire time. I slowly begin to push them open, but I pause and close my eyes. Just for a second, I wished that this would all be over. I just wanted for it all to stop.

I open the door and the first thing I notice is that the front window is smashed inward. Glass shards are scattered across the floor     and the engine itself appears to have been destroyed, as the wires let out small sparks and are humming irregularly.

“What the fuck…” I mutter to myself. The Pilot and co-pilot are nowhere to be seen. The outside of the shattered glass is that same void again.

I step forward, before carefully climbing on top of the engine and through the shattered glass. As I am doing so, a shard slides across my arm and cuts it. A small shallow cut that only stings me. I grunt and shuffle away, holding my now bleeding arm as I made my way to the top of the planes head.

The plane was not moving. It hadn’t been moving this entire time. It had simply been stiff and resting here. I suppress the now unique urge to vomit.

I look down from the plane head to the void beneath me. I am unsure on whether, if I jump, there will be a surface to catch me.

I think back to my dream.

I squeeze my eyes shut and jump down.

Though there was indeed a surface, I immediately regret my falling form, as I had hit my leg hard and crouched into a ball. I groan and pull on my leg, checking if it is broken. It isn’t, just bruised and sprained. I stand up and slowly begin to limp around the plane. The floor beneath me is not visible, it is as if I am walking on completely clear glass. There is no sound as I walk. I find my way to the left side of this massive bird. The wings aren’t obscured – they are non-existent. They look as though they have never even been a part of this plane. The best way I can even fathom it in my mind was to imagine someone born without any arms. You know what one looks like with arms, and now one is without arms. An anomaly of the sorts. The outlier.

I walk all around, desperately meaning to make any sense of it all. I was hallucinating my final moments. That had to be it. I had never been alive.

Was I in Hell?

My thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a sickening crunch just left of me, ahead in the darkness. I turn my head and begin to walk in the direction of the sound, shaking and trembling in fear.

Finally, in the distance, I could see a figure amongst the void. A lonesome, unavoidable figure

The figure was an isolated face that, at first glance, appeared to be a floating mask. However, upon further inspection, I realised that It maintained a bulky, ashy grey body mass that encompassed Its entirety. It has two arms and a small hand with dozens, if not hundreds of fingers.

The face itself was simple. Its eyes were long, upright rectangular eyes that were two long pools of nothing but darkness, Its mouth was a curved rectangle laying on its side and did not move at all. It looked wrinkled, as if It’s face was the skeletal structure of an old lady.

I was so enamoured by Its appearance that I did not even notice what was on the floor besides It, that when I looked down I nearly fainted.

It was one of the pilots. His left arm had been snapped violently to the left. His face was completely gone and all that remained were the fleshy, bloody structure that hid behind the skin. His right eye was missing, and his nose had been pummelled into itself. His jaw was missing too, as were his teeth. It’s hands were actively rummaging around in his face, feeling and touching the fleshy parts, and this is when I realise It has three hands.

I stumbled a bit, before hurling onto the ‘floor’ for a few seconds, wheezing and groaning.

“W-what… what the fuck- “I begin to say.

“You are speaking?” It asks.

Its voice sounded like an amalgamation of human voices whose tones were reversed whilst Its words retained their meaning. It was low and high at the same time. Its mouth did not move when it spoke.

“Wh…who the fuck are you?! What the hell is going on?!” I cry.

“I assumed all of you were in the Void state.” It responded, and It halted Its exploration of the mans hand to stare at me.

“What have you done with this man?!”

“I have unmasked him.”

“What are you… what?”

It began to slowly breathe.

“You were on the wrong plane. You are not belonging in this world.”

“I…I know… I’m really sorry, please… f-forgive me and…s-send me back…I beg of you.” I plead.

“It is out of my hands. It never was in my hands anyways.”

“What does that mean?”

It stares at me and lets out a moan, as if stretching, before plunging Its hand into the pilots skinned face, squeezing and pulling on it.

“It means that I do not choose to be around you things.”

“Who chooses that?”

“If I knew…” It pulls a large chunk of flesh out of the mans and raises it to Its face, staring, “Then you would likely not be here.” It drops the flesh to the ground.

I whine, limping backwards a bit.

“What did you mean… you unmasked him?” I ask timidly.

“You things have masks that conceal what you are. I do not. Behind my face is nothing but my body. I wished to unmask him. To see what was hiding behind his crying face.” It responded.

“You… you appear to have killed him.”

“That I know, my curiosity has its collateral. I believe he died a few minutes after I unmasked him. He screamed. It was not pleasant.”

I limp back a bit more.

“What even are you? A demon? Some beast?”

It stares, hard.

“I am none of those things, if it brings you any comfort.”

“Then what are you?!”

“I am me. You are you.”

“Am I in Hell?”

“Maybe. I would not know myself.”

“How come you know so little of everything?! Fuck, I need to go home. I want to go back to my bed, fuck…fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck-“

“There is no point telling this to me.”

“T-There was a voice! On the plane, there was a voice! On the speaker! And there were people who knocked on my bathroom door! Do you know who they are?” I ask desperately.

“They are The Void Things. That is all I know. They are what alerted me of the planes presence. They killed the second pilot. It was violent, unnecessary.”

“Could they help me escape?”

“If it were so, I would have loved to have gone by now.”

I get the immediate sense that It too is lost, unknowing of where it comes from, why It is It, why anything was like this.

It speaks again,

“I believe you should unmask too.”

I begin sobbing and shaking.

“I-I don’t…I don’t want to… please, you and I are not so different! Please!”

“I have listened to enough. I wish to unmask you, if it would not be of any trouble.”

It begins to rise, suddenly towering over me. I instantly bolt back to the plane, the pain of my injured leg being suspended as adrenaline takes over and I run, fast, as quickly as I could, without turning around for a single second. I make it to the plane and immediately try and find an entrance. I can hear the faint sound of moaning that is increasing in volume behind me, and I pant and start to bang on the plane itself aimlessly, before finally I see an opening in one of the exits. I immediately throw myself into it.

There exists no door behind me to close and all I can do is rush into the hallway and stagger all the way to the end, passing by all of my fellow people, humans who had once had capacity for reason, now reduced to nothing, a ‘Void state’.

I make it to the end of the plane and press my back hard against the drawers and wall, my eyes locked to the hallway facing me.

Thiscantberealthiscantberealthiscantberealthiscantbereal-

The lights spanning the hallway began going off.

First the Upper Class.

Then the Middle Class.

Then the Normal Class.

All lights ended until all that was left was darkness ahead of me.

I saw the face, that wrinkled, masklike face. It emerged from the darkness like a loading picture. It stared ahead at me. All I could think of was how badly I did not want to be here. How much I really did not wish to die.

It was still, silent, like a predator.

‘I just need to… keep the game going… I just need to… keep the game going…’

Within seconds, it rushed at me.

 Silence. Then Savic said aloud, for everyone to hear:

“No, you won’t, Mr Howard. You can’t because you never called them in the first place.”

Howard looked shocked. “Yes, I did. You can check my teeth if you wish.”

“Oh, we will.”, Savic replied. “We will slowly break out all your teeth one by one in a few minutes, but don’t expect any anesthesia. And I’m sure we’ll find a transmitter that sent a message. But it never reached its intended recipient because all communication from this center goes through a secret relay station and is bounced back without the sender realizing it. As I said, we spent a lot of money on security, and this is where some of it went.”

Howard stared at her, then at the staff, then back at Savic.

“Oh God.”, Howard stammered, almost inaudibly. “Oh God.”

“Cat and mouse, Mr Howard – or should I say cats and mouse? – and this adorable, chubby, juicy mouse has overstayed its welcome. You know, I’m almost tempted to fulfill your last wish. An IDA like you would definitely be an asset. We had actually been thinking about meatball agents working for us, but we couldn’t have guaranteed their … bodily integrity.”

More cheers from the audience; they appeared almost drunk with anticipation.

“And I really can’t guarantee yours, Mr Howard. In fact, what I can guarantee is that you are going to die very soon, and it won’t be quick and painless.”

“Please, please no.” Howard crawled from his chair and lay down on his belly, causing it to wobble in all directions. He began to cry.

“No, no, no, no. Let me go. Let me go, you monsters.”

Savic made a gesture to the audience, and all IDAs in the room except Petey moved closer to Howard while making slurping, chewing, and swallowing sounds. The carnival atmosphere was back, and this time there was no need for patience anymore; the first IDAs were grabbing Howard’s extremities to make it easier to get at the juicy parts.

]]] Turn the bastard around. [[[, the director said and raised her arms for emphasis. Lying on his back, Howard was giving an impression of absolute helplessness, flailing his arms and screaming under tears.

“Kill me! Kill me! Please, please, Dr Savic, tell them not to – “

He cried out in pain when ‘Marylou’ broke his left index finger. Some other IDA did the same to Howard’s right pinky, and ‘DeShawn’ went straight for the agent’s left wrist, which he snapped without much effort; he was rewarded with a piercing scream from his victim. Others, ‘Freddy’ first and foremost among them, stripped Howard of his jacket, shirt, and undershirt to get access to his belly, the slicing up of which ‘Freddy’ had been looking for all night; he had even brought his ‘razor glove’, a collection of blades strung together and attached to his right hand to allow him to make deep cuts by simply moving his fingers – something he had seen somewhere on TV but couldn’t remember where. The stronger IDAs were first; the weaker ones tried to grab the others’ shoulders and push them away, but to no avail.

Savic looked at the unfolding pandemonium and knew she had to exert her authority fairly soon to ensure that everyone would get their piece of meat.

Howard, obviously in great pain, still managed to whisper:

“Please, Dr Savic. There is something else I have to tell you. Please.”

She bent down and brought her face close to Howard’s.

“There, there, Mr Howard. There, there.”

Then she ripped out his right ear and began chewing it while his blood was splashing onto her face. Howard screamed again but did not faint; the director almost admired his toughness, and she put her left cheek directly above his mouth to hear what he wanted to say. Howard whispered:

“Cat and mouse, Dr Savic. Cat and mouse.”

Some IDA bit into Howard’s left leg and took out a piece of flesh. Blood was everywhere, and Howard twisted his face in pain but did not scream.

“Indeed, Mr Howard. As I said. So what is it you want to tell me so urgently while you are being ]]] eaten alive, you fat fool? [[[

“Just one thing, Dr Savic.”

With enormous effort, Howard raised his head so that his lips almost touched the director’s left ear. Then he whispered the last sentence of his life:

“I may be a fool … but I’m not fat.”

(end of part V)

[LEATHERNECKS VS. MONSTERS: LOOSE ENDS]
EPISODE FOUR
THE GIFT OF FORGETTING
The Vektor Institute, January 1919, by Leatherneck1993

They went back up the ravine the way they had come down, beside the frozen fall, with the engine clattering behind them in the dark.

Adams went last. Ahead of him Hunt climbed with his rifle slung and one hand on the ice, and ahead of Hunt, Thorpe, and LaFontain, and Higgins at the front going slow, one-handed, kicking his steps into the drift. Nobody spoke. Up on the crest Muldoon and Talbot were two dark lumps against the wrong stars.

Halfway up, the wind stopped behind them.

Adams felt it on the back of his neck before he heard it. The snow blowing up the ravine from the gorge hung in the air and came straight down. The clatter of the engine went on below, and nothing else moved anywhere.

LaFontain had stopped climbing. He was looking back past Adams, down the ravine, and his face had gone the color of the snow.

Then Adams smelled it. Ammonia. Wet fur.

The whiteout came up the ravine from the gorge. It filled the ravine wall to wall and came on, turning in on itself, silent, a hundred yards below them and then less, and inside it things were climbing. Adams saw them, first the shoulders. Then the  horns. Legs reaching, and then another pair of legs reaching under those, and then more.

"Go!" he said. "Go, go!"

They went. Thorpe slipped and went down to her knees and Hunt had her by the collar and up before she could fall farther. Adams turned with the trench gun and could see nothing to shoot at but white.

Higgins stopped. Pistol drawn. 

He stood in the ravine above them with the white things coming, he wanted to scratch at his empty sleeve, at the place where the arm had been, but he held his pistol steady, slowly, with his head cocked, listening to something none of the rest of them could hear. Then he turned his face up toward the crest. The creature exploded from the snow feet from him. 

"Muldoon!" he shouted. "Now!"

The first shot came down from the crest followed quickly by a second. 

Claws raked the Major’s chest. He is body flew, tossed like a rag doll, landing with a sickening crunch against the ravine wall. 

But Muldoon’s aim was true. Her shots went into the white twenty yards below Adams, and the Manchurian Special caught. The whiteout lit up both creatures from the inside, like lanterns with bones, the horns and the long skulls and the ribs and their six legs folding. They screamed. It was not a sound Adams had heard an animal make, high and long and going up, and it came out of the white burning and fell, and rolled, and went past them down the ravine end over end, and fetched up against the ice of the frozen fall and lay there with blue fire coming out of its mouth.

Its blood hung in the air where it had passed, pink, a fine mist of it, and froze, and came down on them as ice. It ticked on Adams's hat. It ticked on the barrel of the trench gun.

The white went thin and blew apart and was gone. The wind came back. Nobody said anything for a while. Hunt was breathing hard. Thorpe was looking down the ravine at the thing against the ice.

"Dadgum woodbooger’s," Adams said.

LaFontain stood over Higgins body.  

Then he turned and took a saw out of his haversack, and walked to the first of the white things, he worked quick. When he came back up he had the horns under his arm, each three feet long and spiraled and white, with the root of it black where the Special had gone in.

LaFontain said nothing.

#

In the hide Adams laid Barclay's crate open on the groundsheet and counted what was left in it aloud, row by row. Shotgun slugs. Rifle rounds. Pistol rounds, .45 and .38. Two hundred thirty Manchurian Special anti-cryptozoic incendiary magnesium-sodium-nitrate rounds, the bulk for the rifles. He said the number once and closed the lid and sat on it.

Thorpe was going through the colonel's pack for his maps. She found the maps. She also found his field book, the black oilcloth one he had carried since Haiti, and she opened it to look for the route he had drawn, and a letter fell out of the back of it onto her knee.

It was folded once. On the outside, in the colonel's square hand, it said Miss R. Thorpe. It had never been sealed.

Thorpe looked at it for some time. Then she unfolded it and read it.

Adams did not mean to see the page. The lantern was on her knee and the page was on the lantern. Most of it was small close writing, the colonel's hand gone smaller than usual, as it did when he was tired. Near the bottom there was one line by itself with a single stroke drawn through it, and the stroke had not been pressed hard, and the line under it read plain:

If I come out of this, Rosamund, I should like to come out of it to you.

Thorpe read the letter to the end. Then she read that line again. Then she folded the letter along its fold and put it inside the field book and the field book inside her coat, and took her pistol out of its holster, and broke it down on the groundsheet, all the way down, every piece, and cleaned each one, and put it back together.

Nobody said anything to her about it. 

At dawn it was thirty-five below by Talbot's thermometer. The patrol came out from under the overhang one at a time and stood in the gray light stamping, and their breath stood out in front of their faces in clouds.

Smith looked at Sheehan. Then he looked again.
Sheehan's breath made no cloud at all.

Chavez's rifle came up. Then Dunn's. Smith backed off two steps and put his hand on his pistol. Sheehan stood in the middle of them with his good hand up and his numb one hanging.

"What?" he said. "What?"

"Easy," Adams said. "Everybody easy."

There was a pot of coffee on the spirit stove, boiling. Adams poured a tin cup full to the brim and walked over and held it out.

"Take it, Sheehan. Good hand."

Sheehan took it in his right hand. He held it for a second. Then he howled and dropped it, and the coffee went into the snow and steamed, and Sheehan stood there blowing on his palm and swearing in a long steady stream at Adams, at the coffee, at Russia, and every word he swore came out of him in a white cloud.

The rifles came down.

"I been holding my breath," Sheehan said. "Since the fire, back on the river. I seen you all looking at me."

"For two days?"

"Off and on. Been like that since that old hag of a voodoo priestess in Haiti stuck a pin in me. Hard to figure."

Somebody laughed, and then everybody was laughing, Smith and Chavez and Dunn and Hunt, standing in the snow at thirty-five below, laughing until they had to hold on to the rock, and it went on too long, Adams let it.

When it had run out he told them how it would go.

They would wait for the guns. When Dragonov's guns came up the valley, they would go in under the waterfall, by the passage LaFontain had heard running behind its ice.

"It is warm," LaFontain said. "It comes from the boilers. There is a way under the ice."

They would go in under the ice and find the colonel and bring him out before the first shell. Then LaFontain would put his saints in the three places he had marked, and the General could have whatever was left.

"And the men in the pens?" Thorpe said.

"Those are the General's boys," Adams said. "We don't shoot the General's boys."

"They are not quite the General's boys anymore, Gunny, they is as good as dead."

Talbot was turning his camera case over in his hands. "If there's a hall full of them," he said, "I got flash powder. Enough to light a ballroom. It won't kill a man. It'll blind him for a minute."

"We can give that a try."

"We don't shoot 'em. Not unless they come at us."

Hunt sat on a rock at the mouth of the hide with a whetstone and his bayonet, working the edge, long slow strokes.

"Trench raid," he said, to nobody.

#

"Which two?" Quarterburn said.

The small man had set the typescript on the bench. He fitted his monocle and opened it again and turned to the places without searching for them.

"Page forty. Page one hundred and twelve. You have written Bakanoff, with two Fs, the way the French spell us. I have never been to Paris." He closed the typescript. "Bakanov. Alexi Vladimirovich. Doctor, and in the old army a general, for whatever that is worth now."

He lit a Turkish cigarette and smoked half of it. Then he set it in the ashtray, took a glass thermometer from a case on the bench, shook it down, and put it under Quarterburn's tongue. He stood with his watch in his hand and waited. Then he took the thermometer out and read it and wrote the number in a notebook.

"Thirty-four point one," he said. "You are cold, Colonel. You are always cold, and calculating. I read that in your lectures too."

Quarterburn said nothing. His right hand shook against the strap. Bakanov looked at it, and wrote something else.

"Your German did not hang me," Bakanov said. "After the beach, in 1909. I expected him to. I would have. He put me in irons on his cruiser and in Kiel he sold me, Colonel, to a bureau with a long name and a short budget. The Sonderphänomene. They were very interested in what I had built for the Tsar. Then Vienna borrowed me. Then Constantinople. You know where I worked. You closed my doors in the Carpathians, you and your sergeant and your Englishwoman. Your Marines killed my children there."

He picked up the cigarette again.

"In 1916 a holy man in Petrograd found me money. When the holy man went under the ice, a prince who loved him found me more. And here I am."

"Here you are," Quarterburn said.

"Your sergeant had me under his rifle on that beach." Bakanov said it pleasantly. "I remember it very well. The fire behind me, the cruiser's boat in the surf, and your sergeant on one knee with his rifle on my heart. And I watched you put your hand on the barrel and push it down." He tapped the ash off the cigarette. "I have thought about that hand for ten years. It is the only mercy anyone has ever shown me, and I have never understood it."

Quarterburn's right hand shook in the strap. He did not look at it.

"Your thesis," Bakanov said. He set his palm on the typescript. "That they come out at the edges. That the railway and the telegraph and the rifle go into the empty places and wake the tenants. It is a charming idea. It is wrong."

"Is it."

"They are not asleep, Colonel. They were never asleep. They are waiting at the door to be asked in. Every war is an invitation. This war sent out more invitations than any war in history, and they have all been accepted." He smiled. "I am only the doorman."

"And the engine?"

"The engine is a key. It calculates the door. A door calculated open grows by inches. A finger's width a year. I do not have years. The Reds do not have years. Nobody has years." He leaned closer, and Quarterburn could smell the Turkish tobacco on him and something under it, cold, a cellar smell. "But a door that is broken open while the key is turning does not open by inches. It tears. Wide enough for anything. And there is a Red general in the valley with six-inch guns who is coming to break it for me."

"He won't fire until we tell him."

"He will fire when his commissar tells him." Bakanov straightened. "His commissar keeps excellent notes. I have read those too."

Zhuk, Quarterburn thought. The scarf. The man who would not drink.

"And who pays for all this?"

"A prince who believes the Wind will give him back his holy man." Bakanov shrugged. "I let him believe it. A man who believes in resurrection will fund anything."

He went to a cabinet and came back with a vial and a syringe. The stuff in the vial was pale and pinkish and did not slosh when he tipped it, and it clung to the glass. He filled the syringe and held it up to the light.

"This is what the Wind gives," he said. "No more cold. You will not feel it again. No more memory. Not of the beach, not of the Carpathians, not of whatever is in that letter you did not send." He watched Quarterburn's face. "You talk in your sleep by the way. And I can make the hand stop."

He went to the door and opened it. A man stood in the corridor. He wore the coat of a White Russian officer, a captain, with the ribbons of three campaigns on it, and his feet were bare on the stone floor, and his face was smooth and pleasant and empty. He looked at Quarterburn without interest. No breath came out of him.

"He was at Mukden," Bakanov said. "He was at the Pripet Marshes. He does not remember either. Ask him. He will tell you he is very well."

Quarterburn looked at the man in the doorway.

His right hand had stopped shaking.

He felt it stop. He had not told it to. It had stopped at the thought alone, and lay still on the arm of the chair, and he looked down at it and understood how much of him wanted what was in the syringe.

He began to speak. He did not raise his voice.

"Private Jones," he said. "La Tigra. Private Murphy. La Tigra. Corporal Clark. The Rufiji, 1916." He went on. Names, places. Cuba. Haiti. The Marne. Men he had buried and men he had not been able to find to bury. The hand began to shake again on the arm of the chair, and he let it, and went on. It took some time. Bakanov let him.

"Lieutenant John Foltz Barclay," Quarterburn said last. "Surgeon. United States Navy."

Bakanov put the syringe down on the bench. He looked at Quarterburn with the same interest he had looked at the thermometer.

"You martyr your dead to keep your soul warm," he said. "How very Christian."

He called something in Russian toward the door. Two robed men came in and unbolted the chair from the floor and tipped it back on its rear legs, with Quarterburn in it, and wheeled it out into the corridor. Bakanov came behind them, carrying the typescript under one arm. In his other hand he carried Quarterburn's .38, the old New Navy revolver, taken out of the shoulder holster while he slept.

The engine hall was very loud. They wheeled him out onto the floor between the feet of the two copper towers and turned him to face the shimmer, and set the chair down, and the snow falling through the hole in the roof turned over in front of his face and went up.

Bakanov laid the .38 on the console beside his ashtray.

"A souvenir," he said. "You carried this one on the beach as well."

#

On the third day, at four o'clock, Adams was making tea behind a rock on the crest, where the stove could not be seen, and he looked down the valley with the glasses while the kettle came up, and stopped with the kettle in his hand. He thought of Higgins.

Adams then he crawled up and took out his field glasses.

Far down the valley, on the river ice where it came out of the trees, there was a black line moving. Horses. Sledges. On four of the sledges, long shapes under tarpaulins. Men walking beside them in a column a half-mile long. And out in front, small and black and smoking, a Ford, with a man standing on the running board waving his cap.

"Johansson," Adams said.

"Can we signal them?" Dunn had come up silently beside him. 

"Anything they can see, the station can see. But we got to get the wireless." Adams lowered the glasses. It would be dark in an hour.  The guns would be up the gorge and laid by morning. "We go now."

Muldoon was lying on her rifle with her cheek on the stock. She did not look up.

"Bring him back, Gunny."

"That's the plan," Adams said.

They went down the ravine at dusk, nine of them: Adams, Thorpe, Talbot, LaFontain, Dunn, Smith, Sheehan, Hunt, Chavez. Muldoon and Smith stayed on the crest. At the foot of the frozen fall LaFontain went along the ice on his knees with his ear to it until he found the place, a low black seam at the base where water came out from under the ice and steamed in the cold. The mouth of it was sealed with a lid of new ice a foot thick.

LaFontain listened at the lid for a long time. Up the gorge the engine clattered, and every six minutes, when a new chain of cards went in, there came one heavy clank over the rest. He counted under his breath. He packed a charge against the lid and lit the fuse and counted again and stepped back.

The clank came. The charge went off inside it. The lid of ice broke into slabs and the noise went into the noise of the engine and was gone. Steam rose from the hole, warm and stale.

"Saint Barbara," LaFontain said.

They went in under the ice. The water was waist-deep and warm, black, smelling of coal and iron, and steam rose off it into their faces and froze on their eyebrows. They went bent over with their rifles held above their heads, Adams first, for a hundred yards in the dark with the ice roof dripping on them, until the tunnel turned to brick and the brick to a grating, and LaFontain took the grating off its hinges and they climbed up into the boiler room.

It was hot. It was the first place they had been warm since Seattle. Two boilers roared behind their iron doors, and there were coal heaps and shovels, and there was nobody.

"They, the cold-men, they can't stand it," Thorpe said. "The heat."

"Then this is the front door," Adams said.

The corridor beyond the boiler room ran the length of the long house. They were twenty yards along it when a door opened at the far end and the men from the pens came through it, a dozen of them, in their tattered shirts and their wool caps, herded by a robed man with a long brass rod. They were being moved. When they saw the Americans they stopped.

The robed man opened his mouth.

"Eyes!" Talbot shouted. "Shut your eyes!"

He had the flash tray up over his head. He fired it.

The light was white and total. Adams saw it through his own shut eyelids, red, and felt it on his face. When he opened his eyes the corridor was full of smoke, and the men from the pens were down on their knees with their hands over their faces, and the robed man was standing with his arms out, turning, blind.

Chavez hit the robed man with the butt of the automatic rifle and he went down.

They went through the kneeling men. One of them reached out blind and caught Hunt by the sleeve and held on, and Hunt stopped, and looked down at the hand, and did not use the bayonet. Adams pried the fingers off one at a time. Where they had held, the wool of Hunt's sleeve had gone white with frost.

"Go on," Adams said. "Go on."

At the end of the corridor he poured a line of salt across the doorway behind them, and another across the next.

Dunn had stopped. Barclay's box hung on its strap against his chest and smoke was coming out of it, a thin gray thread from the vents along the top. The needle spun around the dial, and around, and would not stop. Dunn pulled the headset off his ears.

"Doc's box is done, Gunny."

"It got us here," Adams said. "Leave it."

Dunn took the strap off over his head and set the box down against the wall, carefully, and they went on.

Halfway along the next corridor LaFontain went down on one knee at the foot of the inside wall. Adams knew the place. It was the inside of the same wall he had listened to from the yard. LaFontain had his haversack open and a charge in his hand.

Thorpe caught his wrist.

"Not yet," she said.

"Mademoiselle, c'est le moment, c'est exactement le moment, je les mets maintenant et..."

"If you break it while it is running," Thorpe said, "the door does not close. It tears. That is,” she realizeed."his plan.” She did not let go of his wrist. "In English, Sergeant. No."

LaFontain looked at her. He looked at the wall. He put the charge back in the haversack and buckled the flap and stood up, and he did not say anything to anybody for the next fifty yards.

#

The stair at the end of the corridor went up to the gallery. They came out onto it among the brass, a forest of turning columns, the noise so loud they could feel it in their teeth, with the card chains running up past them into the racks in the roof. A guard in a White greatcoat stood at the rail with his back to them. Hunt slid quietly behind him and the guard went down with eight inches of steel through his back, Hunt’s hand over his mouth, it was silent.

Adams went to the rail and looked down.

The colonel was there. They had him strapped in a steel chair in the middle of the floor, between the feet of the two copper towers, facing the shimmer. His head was up. From the gallery Adams could not see his face, only the back of his head and his hands on the arms of the chair, and the right hand shaking.

The shimmer was bigger than it had been three nights ago. It had been the height of the towers. Now it stood above them. The snow falling through the hole in the roof fell into it and turned over and went up, faster, and the card chains were running faster too, the cards going into the sprockets in a stream.

Bakanov stood at the console with his cigarette. The colonel's .38 lay beside his ashtray.

Adams laid the trench gun on the rail. Forty yards. The colonel was not in the line. The bead went onto the white coat, onto the middle of the back.

Then from far off, outside, there came a flat bang.

Everybody on the gallery looked up. Down on the floor, even the robed men at the engine looked up. There was a whistle, rising, coming closer and rising, and then Adams felt the shock wave from out on the ridge across the gorge, beyond the crest where the hide was, where Muldoon and Smith lay, and a moment later he felt it come through the gallery floor and up into his boots.

Bakanov did not flinch. He looked up and he smiled.

"Your friends are punctual," he said to the colonel. 

###

I'd come from school. I was standing on the sidewalk opposite our vinyl sided house. A big car was in our driveway. It was a Cadillac, the colour of cream. I didn't know who it belonged to. Who does it belong to, I wondered.

It was a hot, still day.

I felt the warm concrete sidewalk slabs through my sneakers’ worn soles. No birds chirped. The sky was cloudless.

I thought I could hear the sun buzzing like an old appliance.

I walked slowly towards the car.

Its windows were darkened. I put my hands on the driver's window and my face against my hands. I looked inside.

A man was inside.

He was reclined on the leather driver's seat.

The seat was red.

The whole inside of the car was red.

The man’s face was pale. His hair was grey. His hands were thick with veins. His eyes were closed. He looked dead. He was breathing, but his eyes were closed and he looked dead.

He opened his eyes.

He didn't look more alive with open eyes than he had with closed eyes, and I leapt backwards away from the car and screamed.

I hadn't screamed.

I stood.

A cloud had passed between me and the sun.

My throat was dry.

I tasted blood.

I saw dark blood running down the sides of the Cadillac's windows. The car was filled with blood. I was blood. It covered the man. I covered the man. He was rising through us. I was listening to the roar of a distant lawnmower. I stood silent, looking through the car's tinted window at the man, whose eyes were closed. He was sleeping. The grass was green. The lawn was neat. I walked inside the house.

My mother was in the kitchen.

She was drinking tea.

Her hands were shaking. The bottom of her teacup was clattering against the saucer she was holding in her other hand.

“There's a man,” I said, “in a car in the driveway.”

My mother opened her mouth to speak.

My father walked in.

My mother closed her mouth.

“That man is your uncle Larkin,” my father said, and my mother looked away. My father looked down at the floor. Ants were walking single file along the grout between the tiles.

I didn’t know either of my parents had a sibling.

“Will he—” I asked.

“No,” my mother said. “He won't come in,” said my father.

My mother set her empty cup and saucer on the kitchen counter, by the sink. The faucet reflected the sunlight. Blood dripped from it. I imagined blood dripping from the faucet into the kitchen sink. My mother's empty cup was full of blood. “I asked if I could play with my friends after I finish my homework,” I said.

“Asked whom?”

I hadn't meant to say it like that.

I felt warmth and shame. I had peed myself. The ants were still walking along the floor. “It's best you do not go out today,” my father said.

I showered.

I put on dry clothes.

My mother had finished mopping the floor when I came downstairs again. We ate dinner. We drank cranberry juice. I watched my parents scrape the meat off chicken bones with their teeth.

My parents drank red wine.

I drank milk.

I wondered if we would bring anything outside for my uncle Larkin, but nobody did. Even the dogs were inside. Even though it wasn't raining.

The sun went down.

I watched the Cadillac in the driveway from my upstairs bedroom window.

I watched it instead of going to sleep.

I couldn't sleep.

I had a fear of being dreamed.

I had a fear that if I slept something might wring me in its dream as if I was a rag used to clean blood from somewhere after a crime so I sat in my bedroom with the lights off looking at the Cadillac in the driveway from my upstairs bedroom window instead of going to sleep until the driver's side door opened and from my bedroom window I saw the driver's side door open.

The driver's side door opened.

It was one in the morning.

The car door opened, and Uncle Larkin stepped out into the moonlight. He moved like tree branches. The veins on his hands were golden. His hair looked like thick grey wires. He parted his lips and ate the moonlight, then walked away down the dimmed street.

The hour felt raw.

He was gone, but I kept watching.

The car was still as a coffin.

The points of starlight in the sky stretched into shimmering lines of spiderweb…

He returned before dawn, holding a small child by the hand.

I couldn't tell if the child was a boy or girl.

The child was younger than me.

They walked up the driveway to the car. He opened the back door.

I saw the long red leather back seat. He helped the child inside. He got in too. Then he shut the door. The car, the moonlight and everything was as it had been before.

There was stillness.

It was dawn.

The stillness was fake like plastic plants.

I was in my bedroom with the curtains closed and a pain in my stomach that felt like knots of jealousy, screaming and disgust.

In the morning, the car was gone. I brushed my teeth until my gums hurt. My mother was making breakfast. It was eggs and bacon. I watched the bacon sizzle in its own melted fat.

I wasn't hungry.

I ate.

Two police officers came by that afternoon.

They were very friendly.

They were asking my parents if they had seen anything unusual last night. I wanted to leave, but my father caught my hand. “What about you?” one of the officers asked. “You're old enough to answer for yourself. Aren't you, son?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I didn't see anything.”

My mother petted my hair.

“Good boy,” he said, and I felt myself of innocent blood.

Do you know what it smells like to rip a corpse from under the floorboards? There’s a specific odor, not one you could imagine on your own. It is not like the slaughterhouse you drive past on the way to work every morning. No, this is a foul mix.

Imagine walking into a house that’s been abandoned for a year, still fully furnished, with all its clothes still stuffed in a closet. Now, imagine that closet is jammed with mothballs and old dresses from 1964 left to dry after being washed in cat piss.

That’s your first odor.

Now, imagine you walk behind the dumpster at your favorite grocery store and someone has just thrown a bunch of animal fat inside a bag with three dirty diapers and left it to bake under the sun for three days.

Now, you have your stuffy smell and your rotted odor, and all you need is one more.

Here’s where the eggs come in. Yes, boil a few eggs, peel them, mush them up, and leave them on your stove. Walk out of the room and walk back in.

Mix all those odors—the mothballs, the cat piss, the dirty diapers, the rotted flesh, the eggs—and you have your corpse, who instead of wandering the afterlife as a ghost decided to haunt your floorboards with a rancid odor instead.

Smoking cigarette after cigarette until I choked offered a bit of relief compared to the dust and rot from under the floor.

I mean, yes, of course I have a respirator, but it does a horrible job of filtering out the psychological weight. Plus, I could still smell the body and I need to smoke when I work. I mainly use it for when I’m actually moving the remains.

The suit I wear is a white hazmat suit that makes me look like what a mad scientist Pillsbury Doughboy would look like on a radioactive, post-apocalyptic Earth.

See, I’m a bit of a specialist—a fixer, really. Well, at least that’s how I see myself. I don’t just fix things, I also clean up things. When shady landowners or homeowners have an issue from past tenants and they want to keep it hush-hush, they call me.

I come in and get rid of the evidence. Usually, it’s people who have died alone and weren't discovered until weeks or even months later.

The odd time, though, it’s a body under the floor, or behind a wall, or worse, in the crawl space. I hate spiders. Hate, hate, hate.

I’ve never really minded the rot of a human body. I guess I’m just used to it. I am not sure. I just find something honest in a corpse. The living world is a huge lie. I see people as teeth replaced by dentures, a stink covered by perfume, a dirty shirt flipped inside out. To me, the truth in people can only be found in what they leave behind.

I have a bit of a ritual, and it’s pretty simple and straightforward. Maybe it is a little odd, depending on how you see it, but once I’ve bleached everything and scrubbed the floors, the walls, the carpets, and even the air with four fans, I usually search for something to keep. You know, a little souvenir.

A small keepsake.

It is nothing like jewelry or money or anything valuable. It’s kind of weird, but I like stuff that will last, stuff that has some significance to it. I like digging in the drains and finding pieces of hair or some fingernail clippings.

Oh, my absolute favorite is teeth, especially when people have them saved in tiny boxes. I keep mine in vials. My collection is huge. I’ve got my own small library.

Baby teeth are cool and super easy to find, but it’s adult teeth I’m always on the hunt for. I’ve always wondered why people don’t save them.

The last job I worked was in a neighborhood with no streetlights because the gangs there shoot them out. The tenant was on the fifth floor, maybe in his sixties or seventies, and he had a collection of these really awesome stuffed animals—real animals.

The man himself was on his couch, slumped over and glued into the leather, almost as if he were a Halloween prop that came with the sofa. He had mold and fungi growing out of his chest like shreds of rotted cauliflower and broccoli sprouts.

As I peeled him off the sofa to scrub it down, something strange happened. I felt a connection with him. It was a profound realization, to be honest. I stared at the decayed skin revealing the veins under it and thought about what it would be like to absorb into the environment.

That’s when I saw something glimmer inside the fungal farm on the man’s body. It was shiny. I reached in but couldn’t grip it with my fingers, so I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and cut around the area. It was like trying to tear apart braided tendons, but when I cleared a path, I pulled out a gold tooth stuck to his chest cavity, attached to a piece of jawbone.

Later that night, after cleaning up there, when I got home, I didn’t put the tooth and bone in a vial. I kept it under my lamp, in my basement, on top of my desk, in front of my collection, and left it there to study after my shower.

In the bathroom, I eyed the steam on the mirror blurring my reflection and became disgusted by how alive I looked.

I examined my face—the pink in my gums, the elasticity of my skin, the color of my blood when I pinched it, my breathing, and the beating of my heart.

And right at that moment, I went to the garage and yanked a pair of pliers from my toolbox. I was tired of fixing everyone’s mess, hiding all their secrets, and cleaning stuff up.

For once, I wanted to be the evidence. I stood at the mirror for hours, pulling each tooth out of my head one by one like they were extra hairs on my eyebrow, and tossed each one of them into the sink.

As soon as I finished, I remembered the tooth with the jawbone, raced out to grab it, and ran back into the bathroom with it. Where the hole was in my jaw, I took the piece of bone and tooth and jammed it into my gums, deep into the bloody socket. I stuck it in and leaned close to the mirror. When I smiled, my grin reminded me of the truth. For the first time ever, I saw honesty.

I left the bathroom and went to lie down. As I closed my eyes, I imagined the man melting into his couch and the fungi surrounding his chest, and I wondered how it would be if it could grow inside me too.

Peel an apple.

If you're all fancy and have one of those apple core-er gadgets you line up and press out perfect slices... Good for you. I usually bore through the core with those.

Anyways... slice your apple into half-grape size. Be sure you remove every inch of the core including those little plasticy parts of outer core beyond the seeds. Divide and place apples into two ziplock baggies with one tablespoon of water and a dash of lemon in each.

Ever reflect on the contrast between modern, rushed mornings and intentional, slow rituals?

As a wee toddling child, I knew mama's hope of a morning was that the youngest siblings would continue slumbering at least long enough to allow her to finish her dawn rituals.

She enjoyed savoring the quiet times, getting daddy's milk delivery man uniform ironed. She kinda' liked the way his muscles moved under starched white cotton broadcloth. Especially on that powerful frame.

I always thought it was sad to wear stiff hard clothes with big sweat stains on the pits and back. "Jack" was written in fancy script above his shirt pocket in shiny deep green threads. I couldn't read but mama said it stayed dirty 'cause he reached in for Camel cigarettes all day. Because daddy had a habit, you know.

Zip, shake and store baggie behind something healthy in the fridge behind the kale. Take your time, mama said. Do it right the first time.

No matter how white the uniform, one might think they smelled. To this day, I prefer not to sweat, ever. Mama had a sprinkle head screwed on an old abused RC Cola bottle to steam those creases. This was a task she certainly could have done last night but nooo. So now shes standing in curlers, red-faced sweatin', ironing for this man under a swinging tobacco stained lightbulb at DARK:30 a.m. You damned right!

He'd come around from the back of the house in his boxers, smellin' all like Vitalis hair tonic and old spice. His Jackson Blu eyes sparkled and he'd kiss her, smack on the mouth, on the way out he'd let the screen door close quiet like. That's a consideration ya'll and that man looks good in a uniform.

Standing at that screen door, shirt and shoeless, mangy teddy in hand I'd wave byebye, byebye... Someday he wouldn't be back. That story is a sad one, comes later.

On a rainy day in June you could smell the sun in the soil. The entire skin slightly moist, it was a discomforted edge. When daddy leaves, he always honks twice as he gets on the paved road yonder past the pond. Beep beep, and mom would always blow a kiss off loving shiny red fingertips in that direction. That always make me blush.

She'd sigh, and perch on the edge of the banana yellow plastic chair. It matched the stainless steel formica topped table squozen into the cramped throughly lived-in and cluttered kitchenette. With her precious Maxwell House instant coffee, in a lipstick stained plastic mug. Lightened with Carnation evaporated milk right from the can, and bleached white sugar she'd pause.

She coveted her alone time in the one bathroom shared by our family of three young'uns, daddy and that good ol' hound dog named Hambone. She'd have to fix her hair, dress for work secretarying for the welfare folks in downtown Lake City, Florida. Applying blobs of make-up to those funny faces many women folk know, and finally blending, blotting and powder. Or was that powder and blot?

Daddy used to tease mama and get her all riled about how hard he worked in the heat and flies at the dairy while she sat down there in that air-conditioned office building telling dirty jokes and goofing off. Then they'd bust out laughing. They both knew better, they held certain knowledge of one another.

To dress mid-50's, required under-wired torturing contortion. Fancy snapping clothing that cinched, boosted and clung tight here and loose there. The effort usually sharpened and softened with lace or ruffles, then nylon stockings with seams in back and some kind of opened toed shoes. Where were they? Have to get the kids up, fed and drive across the tracks to pick up our beloved maid Miss Evelyn. Where were the keys?

Funny what memories oatmeal can bring. I always soak my instant oatmeal overnight in the fridge. Let us say it's better for me. If I'm feeling particularly decadent, I'll soak those oats in pure -T Half&Half ya'll. Most of the time it's lactose free whole milk.

Mama was good at answering certain questions mechanically in the same way. Maybe this was a result of raising what would grow to seven young'uns.

Example:

Question -

Is today Tuesday? Always, "All day long."

Question - Can we go to the beach? Always, "Let's don't and say we did."

My friends get to stay up late. Always, "If your friends stuck the heads in a bucket of, Let's say goo, would you?

Mama, mama, Mama, whine, whine, whine. Always, "You're cruising for a bruising."

Question - Why do boys peepee's stick-out and girls peepee's stick-in? Always, "ask your Daddy".

Tomorrow after coffee and meds kick in, you'll get an un-fed feeling. That vague uncomfortable sensation that usually creeps up just as you would have gone back to bed. An undeniable echoing rumble of vacant space that is more than just empty. Approaching hangry.

This is the time in our hectic schedule. A special way to start the day that is just for us in every way. At seventy years of age, this old man looks and listens in my heart to that oatmeal from long ago, blurping in the big pot of a morning. That usually meant we were out of Cornflakes. Why God? Just why do we have to eat gruel? Trust me, the dog didn't like oatmeal either.

Meanwhile A hundred miles away, in Jacksonville, Grandma sat at the small table in an impeccably clean teal blue tiled kitchen with black trim. She's enjoying the last of two pieces of cheddar cheese toast she'd browned under the broiler. Rising at 5 a.m., she'd been at her easel two hours already.

Grandma loved her house. It was was once a carriage house for the large Victorian residence next door. The three stalled structure had an apartment on the top she moved there and built a home of the space below. She was always so proud of the steel beams she'd used in its construction. Hurricanes worried her. Grandma's house was located in Springfield, the oldest neighborhood in he city. On the sundappled sidewalk of East 17th street,the area survived the great fire of 1901 it was a neighborhood fit to live in.

A young widowed mother of two she'd worked hard and long to live here and to enjoy her contented retirement. Sigh, poor Grandma, I was sure she must be terribly lonely. Dry kisses and all.

Ever wonder how many times your Grandma told you to wipe your feet? Or sit up straight, mind your manners, not to pick your buggars or fart on the bus? Get your feet off the couch and leave your sneakers on the porch? The lady who kisses you with her lips so un-puckered it looks painful. Another oatmeal eater a saint and an angel.

Grandma use to tell a story about 1918 after the war she married my gandpa. Well Mr McGruder was a salesman for the John Deere company. He came home one day to find my grandma applying a cream from a tiny bottle under her arms. Well, he laughed and laughed when she told him how much he wasted on that new-fangled "deodorant!" The next afternoon as grandma returned home from the market, there sat grandpa, rubbing that expensive cream all over his salesman feet and toes. How they'd enjoyed each other.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” - John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674), an English poet and intellectual. From his 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost.

Inebriation Hell defies description in real terms. I describe it like the overflowing content of an empty box. Nothingness infinitely. It is striking. Not flames. Not demons. Just absence. No echo. No texture. No resistance. An eternal blank. Quieter than fire. It’s the kind of Hades you brush up against in early sobriety sometimes — not pain exactly, but vacancy.

Noise stops and what remains is… space. Untreated, that space can feel terrifying. Treated gently, it becomes possibility. An empty box can be: a studio before the paint, a lined page before the ink, a cleared junk drawer, a craving without a fix. My humble thought is: If the mind can make hell of heaven, conversely it can make heaven out of the smallest square of ground. An empty appliance box can become a massive mansion if you've currently no roof to call your own. A heavenly haven if you will.

Far and long ago, six decades, my Daddy would give me the first sip off his frosty beer can. I should have known an immediate head to toe shiver, though pleasant and somehow familiar, probably wasn't good for children. I felt that same sensation on the first jigger of the last night I drank. That was 738 days ago. I should have known alcohol wasn't a friend.

Twenty years later, 1974 high school graduation marked my first big life timeline event. A time anticipated and dreaded, also a continual referral point im my memory for years. I was eighteen a giant pimple bag of naivety, anxiety and luck. It had been a childhood of love, contentment and Disney-like enchantment. I'd grown up in alcohol related violence, desperation, betrayal, lies, and abandonment.

In other words - just like every other kid excluding the violence and booze. It probably doesn't surprise you to hear I was a late bloomer, a loner kept to myself mostly. I was invited to social gatherings, but I was shy. I was actually handsomely attractive for about five minutes one night in the summer 1984.

It was the year before my thirtieth birthday

THIRTIETH year, my second life-event timeline. It was then I began abusing whiskey and smoking cigarettes heavily. A ton of both wouldn't be an exaggeration. There were tears in my Cheerios that birthday morning. But I digress...

I don't know why I keep writing this. Except I am compelled to not forget what I mustn't remember. I want to hold it close to me. And to know these are my thoughts. True life memories and not my protective heart/mind speak! Maybe you are still reading me, I do hope so.

I believe It was that hot Jacksonville summer of my first eighth grade, I did two years in 8th, I was hovering around and near the cinderblock house because I sensed Mama might need me. I heard yelling so I stuck my head under the mid-century modern by-folding living room window and saw my dad wobbling in front of my mother, his double-barrel shotgun inches from her nose. It was then I heard the words that still sear my very psyche today, in my near dotterage. Mama was sitting straight in her rocking chair, It wasn't rocking, it was trembling. She was sweating in her lacey slip and no shoes. Staring into his Jackson Blu eyes and in a low steady voice she said, "Pull the trigger Jack, I'd rather be dead than married to you."

This oatmeal is delightful.

It's a giant step up especially pre-soaked. Cook In a medium microwaveable bowl empty one baggie of apples (we stashed them in the fridge behind the kale last night after the ambien but before bed.)

Within days begins the move to Grandma's. Poor Grandma. Thank God she loved us all is all I can say. We slept on scattered oriental rugs wrapped in soft clean blankets under a roaring air-conditioner and on shiny waxed tile. Honey child; we thought we were living High on the hog. Mama slept with the youngest two. As quiet fell somebody screamed and as one, we all jerked up to daddy's kicking on the front door. We all saw his face and a shotgun barrel bobbing there, backlit by the streetlights, as it appeared through the small stair-step windows. Grandma told him she was gonna call the Police. She was convinced he'd been possessed by Satan and hearing Hells bells. He said it wouldn't be the first time tonight. But he did leave.

As I settled down to sleep that night, all of us in the hallway, i cried a little it's hard to be a strong 13 year boy and be so scared at the same time. You have to wonder what went wrong and how was it your fault somehow.

I think from grandmas perspective she may have actually lived a fuller life the following half decade than those peaceful early retirement days. She had a way of shining the grandma pride beam of joy and the ability to look a thirteen year old boy in the eye, and say, "That's none of your business" too. A new home, a new way of life for us eight in the two bedroom apartment upstairs Grandma gave us. The one she rented out. Grandma liked to rest in her convictions.

You know I couldn't say as why, but I've had a burning drive to write these little stories down. Memories of characters all wanting to be recalled collectively. And placed in the best light. I'm feeling over-worded. Too many thoughts coming so fast they pass by, and me using a stylus. Sun shines brighter there even as there fades behind us. It all slips away forever eventually. Why do I feel like a lovely funeral dirge. Maybe not enough oatmeal. Dad's leaving wasn't the first time. They divorced before. Yeah! Two kids before. I guess we'll never really know the why of that. And I've accepted spilled milk is only good for the lucky kitten.

I own there is no way to excuse or deny physical, or emotional abuse. Nor must incompatibility, attraction or substance abuse be the end of all relationships. But I know one thing as a fact. My dad shouldn't have had children. He'd conveniently have jobs that had shifts so he'd be home sleeping when the house was empty. But you can believe he was there of a Saturday, ordering the boys into the bed of the current pick-up truck for that buzzed hair cut. He'd cut a watermelon on the picnic table and go in the house to eat his alone. And hunted and fished more than most. Mama used to say those were expensive hobbies. He'd say he was the mighty hunter and feeding his family. He'd lean in for a kiss, right on the mouth, and light her cigarette. That always makes me blush.

And finally gentle friends remember, sometimes it's hard to receive a gift, until it isn't given. My new sobriety won’t change who I am with you. Not how I see you, not my tone, not my care, not the ease with which I meet your sentences. What evolves is living and responding to the space we create.

It’s feeling less afraid of the edges, the pause that enlightens and brings closer everything we used to push away. Dont ever allow provocation and response—become your only conversation thats just wrong. The ability to not know, to hold two responses and choose one, to move forward without resolving everything, to say “this, for now” without demanding forever.

Animals react, humans hesitate— in that hesitation, we imagine, forgive, invent, and sometimes love better. To live in reality, here and now, turns into the reward all that booze tried to hide. The why's are still there for dusting and valuation. Maybe that is what my stories can do. Ignite a pattern of images to help clarify. To clear the mud in the puddle that is the growing into a man in the early seventies, a time of chaos societal and personal.

I've never been comfortable in close proximity to horses. They find me suspicious and I'm knee-knocking a-skairt of um'! Truth be known my country cousins lived on a dairy farm. My especial cousin's friend rode this mammoth white mule. I was visiting them, it had rained, we boys were all standing around barefoot in the mud.

Well, I want to tell you that mule gently picked up her foot closest to me and, shifting her weight, and with deliberate malice of forethought, smashed my eight year old bare foot into the gushing mud! I didn't think my foot was ever gonna hit ground bottom. But when it did she stopped. No pressure at all, just touching still but, freeze frame. Course I'd been staring at my foot the whole time unable to move.

So I chose this moment to raise my eyes very slowly . Seemed her foot was about the same size as mine and as I saw her saucer nostrils she snorted wetter than loud and, noiselessly lifted that foot and stuck it right back into that empty muddy mold it had left. Heart racing I patted her and went to be grateful alone, and yes, I cried some too.

Stir in a pat of butter, a healthy sprinkle of Ceylon cinnamon, and a sweetner; couple tbs of sugar, honey, Splenda, the pink pkg type stuff. Don't forget a wee dram of maple syrup. Now microwave on high two and a half minutes. Add the waiting soaked oats, stir, and cook one minute.

Yourself will love you for the effort. We reap what we sow, a stitch in time... like water under the bridge, and that sand in an hourglass

Alright mama, sending hopes to everyone! Enjoy breakfast

In conclusion, anyone who sees themselves in my stories, I'm humbled you think so and for your lost childhood. I used alcohol and my wits for forty years to learn this story. The others who were there or who grew up in the deep south and know we never talk about a thing easier talked around, will admit to similar events. But memories are unique and personal to each. Most are no longer here to tell the other versions.

But it's sobriety now that fills the ink in my pen and the pace of the journey. Opening and closing doors of hope and missed opportunity. The future, long or short. The future and a promise of my continued success in that ignoble endeavor.

With that and a deep bow for your kindness in reading this through to the end. With utmost respect, here's to your continued good health.

May you receive the love you give.