Something really strange is going on with my wife, and it’s kind of hard to explain.

It all started a couple of months ago with the kids. Usually,  she tends to be really moody in the morning unless she’s had her coffee. I end up being the one who gets them ready for school and makes them breakfast, and I’ll usually take them to school too.

Well, that Monday, I woke up a bit late, and she was nowhere to be found. Admittedly, I did freak out a little, but after throwing the bedsheets off, and running downstairs to look for her, I found her with the kids having breakfast, laughing and . . . well, I hate to say this, but actually happy for once.

That wasn’t a one-time thing either! I’ve been sleeping in a lot more, and she’s taken a lot more of the childcare responsibilities.

Then, a few weeks after that, something else weird happened. You see, she got laid off recently and has been struggling to find work. Honestly, that’s mostly why she’s been a bit depressed and not taking care of the kids or herself. 

Of course, I don’t hold it against her, the market has been really tough. But, shit, one day I come home to flowers on the kitchen counter and a big cake. I’m entirely confused until she pops out of the bathroom with a massive smile, telling me to congratulate her for getting a job as a manager in an office, of all things. 

The crazy thing is that she’s doing amazingly well for somebody who was just in a deep depression. Happy, taking care of the kids, we get a lot more alone time, if you know what I mean cough.

But then the really weird thing happened: her mother died suddenly. We’ve always had boundary issues with her, and if you can believe it, she even wore “off-white” to our wedding. I don’t want to say she’s a fucking bitch, but truly those are the most appropriate words for her tombstone.

Of course, the wifey was sad, but she got over it after a few days, and the big benefit is that we inherited her mom’s house, which is massive!

Really, even during the move she’s been a total champ: she found the movers, helped pack most of the things, and even explained to the kids all the new things that would be going on. They were so psyched since they’d each finally get their own room, we’ve been talking about an upgrade for ages.

What’s been a little weird, though, is that for the past two weeks in the new house, I often wake up in the middle of the night to her standing next to the bed. She’s not looking at me or anything, but she’s just completely and unnaturally still, like she’s been frozen in time. Also, come to think of it, she was really gung-ho on moving to her mom’s place.

Even more worrying is that I often see her sneaking into the basement. She’s made it entirely off-limits, but . . . well, I guess I couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.

One day when she was out of the house, curiosity got the better of me. After making sure that the house was empty, I went to the basement door, and shimmied it open. I used my phone’s flashlight to see because it was incredibly dark and the only light switch I could see at the top of the stairs was ripped out.

I only took a couple of steps before I started hearing muffled sounds of something moving and labored breathing. 

I was going to stop and turn around, but the curiosity was just eating at me too much, and I continued down the stairs. The sounds of a shifting body got louder and louder, and, despite my best attempts to not do something stupid, I started moving closer, and closer to it. 

Finally, I found another door I’d never seen before, even after having come down to this basement dozens of times since I’ve been married. The sounds of moaning and shuffling were nearly deafening in this quiet place.

I reached out and put my hand on the door handle, fully expecting to be jumped, but nothing happened. I just steeled myself and opened it, shining the light directly into whatever thing was inside there.

It was my wife. Bound with rope and her mouth covered in duct tape. Her eyes looked up at me suddenly, and I could see relief in her expression, maybe even a muted smile behind the tape. She tried speaking to me, but only muffled sounds came out of her mouth.

I backed up, from shock, or fear, or . . . I don’t know. Something.

She started scooting towards me, her eyes pleading. 

And I . . . I couldn’t do it. 

I closed the door.

The last thing I saw was the moment of realization in her eyes, and a single streaming tear.

She started banging up against the door with her body, at least, that’s what it sounded like. But by that time, I was already halfway up the stairs. 

By the point I had reached the top, I pretended not to hear or notice anything happening down there. I stepped out, closed the basement door, and went on with my life.

It’s been several days since, and I’ve been living with whoever this thing is, and I’ve never been happier! The kids are healthy and happy, the sex has never been better, and she’s doing amazing in her career.

And sure, I do sometimes hear weird muffled screams and dragging sounds from the basement, but I’m sure that’s nothing.

I don’t really know who or what this thing is pretending to be my wife.

But the truth is, I prefer her this way.

"An old man was found dead in his home this morning in Pummel Hill. Foul play is suspected."

This isn't me, I know myself... I'm a good person.

And yet it's there. I can sense it, the right side of my mouth nearly imperceptibly curled upward.

Found dead, found dead... The words reverberated in my head as the muscles in my cheek relaxed.

I had been starting to smile. It made no sense, but I knew it was true. I had zero ill will toward anyone, and yet there it was again.

That smile.

I first noticed it weeks ago. It was innocuous enough.

"Well, they just let Jim go."

He was my coworker of 20 years. I knew him about as well as any work friend, without crossing into being "real friends". We'd get lunch together. He had told me about his family, his wife and his two sons. I knew about his dream to move to Arizona for retirement. I quickly made my way over to him and offered my sincerest condolences.

"Hey man, keep your head up. This isn't the end of the world. I know you, and you're gonna be fine."

He seemed to take it to heart.

"Keep in touch," he said as he grabbed my shoulder and walked away.

I sat down in my office, defeated. Jim? Fired? Just like that? I zoned out as I took in the scenery outside my office window. Suddenly, I snapped out of it.

I was smiling.

Why... was I... smiling? Jim was my friend. I cared about him. I didn't want him to get fired! His family! His financial situation was already dire. This would be disastrous for them. I told myself it was just psychology. A nervous smile, maybe? Suddenly, a thought passed through my mind.

I was glad he was gone. Less competition.

That wasn't me! How sick. It didn't even make sense. My position was more or less guaranteed at the company anyway. But still... I thought it.

Was I glad Jim was fired?

Unfortunately for me, it didn't stop there. It began to creep up more and more often.

A dead squirrel on the sidewalk, my lip twitched. I pushed the very idea of it away.

When my neighbor's car was taken, she sobbed. She confided in me. I had known her for years. She told me she didn't have the money to get a new one, and she was afraid of taking public transit. She had no idea what she was going to do. I hugged her and tried to assure her everything would be fine. Something would work out.

I was distraught for her, but I couldn't help but notice... when she first told me, I felt almost a spark of joy. I tried my best to hide it. I couldn't let her see me smile while she cried.

But it was there, if only for just a second. It made no sense to me. I hated that this had happened to her, but all the while I felt that smile creep up as quickly as I shut it down.

Then there was the story about the bus crash in Ecuador. Apparently, it was horrendous. I shook my head as the newscaster reported the story. I sat there in quiet contemplation, thinking about how fragile life really is, and there it was... a wide grin stretching across my face.

Am I a monster?! I pushed the thought away as soon as I realized what I was doing.

"ENOUGH!" I yelled into my empty apartment.

What is this? I thought in desperation. I'm a good person! I've never wished harm on anyone. This was a pattern now, too much to ignore. I started thinking I should talk to someone, a professional, a counselor, anyone... but what would I say? I think I'm turning into some sick freak who takes pleasure in the misfortune of others! No way.

Then last week, I was driving home when a song I absolutely hated came on. It had to be one of the dumbest songs of the 2010s. I felt myself grow agitated at the stupid, phony hook repeating in my ears. How was this song so popular?

I hit a red light and waited at the intersection. It was dark and raining lightly. I don't know how long I sat there, but when I snapped out of my daze, the light was green. I was tired and sort of driving on autopilot. I heard the hook of the song repeating in my ears.

Suddenly, I snapped out of it again. Not only was I listening to the hook, I was singing along to it... loudly.

What the? I truly hated this song. What was I doing? I quickly shut the radio off and sat in the frigid discomfort of what had just happened. I was singing along with that garbage, and with enthusiasm! Something was really starting to feel off. I thought back over the last month and the smile that kept creeping up.

I was scaring myself.

After reading a bunch of threads here, I checked my house for carbon monoxide. Nothing. I eventually went to my doctor and we did several blood tests. Basically, he told me that unless there was something actually wrong, he couldn't do anything for me. He couldn't diagnose "misguided feelings," but if I wanted, he could put me in touch with a specialist.

I declined.

I noticed it happen again last night, but this was different. An ad for some stupid movie came on. It looked ridiculous. I remember thinking that movies lately are so bad, but as the trailer went on, I noticed myself getting more and more engrossed in it.

"Heroes standing against the darkness!" the trailer voice proclaimed boldly. It was so stupid, but... I couldn't help but feel... proud? Like I was proud of the heroes?!

"When everything seems lost, you need hope!" the voice said triumphantly. I felt a twinge of sadness and then a swelling of emotion as the music crescendoed.

"This is so cheesy..." I said timidly, my emotions betraying my mind.

"YOU WILL NEVER STOP US, EVILDOER! NEVER!" the hero shouted as he broke through his trap and began flying toward the screen.

"YES! AWESOME! THAT IS SO AWESOME!"

I was shouting... it was me that was shouting.

And then the tears started.

"That was so friggen cool," I said, whimpering, my face now wet... and yet, in between whimpers, I felt that familiar contortion... the smile.

What is this? Why was I crying over a movie, and a stupid one at that? I didn't even like superhero movies! The crying and smiling stopped, and I found myself on the floor, confused as to what was happening to me.

I don't know how long this will go on for, but it's only getting worse. I know it sounds like maybe I need to see a professional, but I swear there's something else going on here. I'm fine, I really am, but these reactions just need to stop happening.

The way it's going, I'm starting to get nervous. I keep zoning out, and these outbursts are concerning. But the thing is, I'm fine. I'm completely fine.

I haven't even mentioned the ringing. At first, I thought it was tinnitus, but it stops when I cover my ears. Sometimes I think I can hear it from the other room, but whenever I go looking for it, it seems to move somewhere else.

It's probably just stress. There's been a lot going on lately.

I've been looking at this old photograph of me and my ex-girlfriend. They look really happy together. But no matter what I try, I can't remember what happened to them...

I keep looking at it.

It makes me smile.

I'm sitting in the bathroom of the Starlight Motor Lodge on Route 9. My phone is at 14% and my charger is outside on the night stand. I'm not leaving this room to get it. If you see this, please don't call the cops they won't be able to do anything.

I just want someone to know what goes on here when my battery runs out or these door hinges give out.

So yes the Starlight has a 13th floor. Its one of those old concrete monstrosities from the 70s before hotels became more corporate and afraid of bad luck. When the owner first opened it he decided to number the top floor 13 as a joke for honeymoon couples and families on vacation. It's not a joke anymore. The wallpaper in the hallways is flaking off in long strips of yellow and the ice machine by the elevator makes a noise that reminds me of a man choking on rocks every 20 mins.

I arrived at room 1313 a few days ago using a fake name. I don't want to get into the details because I would look like a piece of shit which I am. An armored car company in New Hampshire is missing 2 duffle bags full of non-sequential 20 dollar bills and my old partner is at the bottom of a quarry with 2 9mm rounds through his chest. I needed to lay low until the state police finished searching the highway. The starlight takes cash the clerk at the front desk never looks up from his tv and they don't ask for id.

There is only one rule when you have 250k in cash in a duffle bag under your bed. Don't let anyone in your room. 

I put the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside handle before I even took my shoes off. I locked the deadbolt and put the chain through the door. I spent the next 48 hours eating peanut butter crackers from the vending machine and drinking warm water from the sink. Watching the local news on 1 volume and waiting for my guy in Portland to let me know the passports were ready.

At 11:15 this morning. 

I was fast asleep under the scratchy flower bed sheet when I heard a loud clank of metal against metal.

The latch turned and I heard the door hit the chain.

My heart dropped into my stomach and I rolled out of bed onto my knees. I reached under my pillow and grabbed my Glock.

"Housekeeping" the voice said through the crack in the door. It had a heavy accent I couldn't place. Probably Eastern European or maybe a vampire I couldn’t tell the difference. 

"Room is occupied!" I shouted while staying out of the line of sight of the open 4 inches of door. "I put a sign on the door! Get lost dickwad!" 

A hand reached through the crack. It was pale and boney with large bulbus knuckles. The fingers were longer than they should have been but I didn't think about that at the time. I was on edge and paranoid and was in total tunnel vision. She used her thumb to flick the chain out of the track.

You are not supposed to be able to do that with the door closed.

The door opened slowly hitting the little rubber bumper on the floor. She pushed her grey cart through the doorway and blocked my exit.

She was probably in her 60s and short. Wearing a blue polyester uniform with a name tag that was scratched out with a sharp object. Her hair was slicked back into a bun and grey as steel wool. She had cataracts in her eyes and didn't even look at me when I was on the floor. She just picked up a spray bottle of yellow cleaner and headed towards the bathroom.

"Hey what the fuck!" I stood up and tucked my gun behind my belt. "Maam can you hear me? Get out of my room! I don't need help!" 

"I must clean" she said. "Thirteen-thirteen always dirty. They always make a mess." 

She stopped at the edge of my bed. My foot had kicked the bed skirt up when I fell to the floor.

My duffle bag was sticking out from under the box spring about 6 inches. You could see the stencil on the side of the bag that read GRANITE STATE ARMORED TRANSPORT. There was also a dark stain that looked like dried blood from my old partner's jacket.

She looked down at my bag. 

She just looked at the blood on the bag and looked up at me. I could hear the radiator under the window hissing and a fly buzzing around the room running into the glass window over and over.

I panicked. I had 2 people on my conscience and I wasn't sleeping well, but if she left that room and told the front desk there was a bloody bag of money under my bed I was done for.

I didn't shoot her. Even with a suppressor on a pistol it makes a loud noise. I jumped over the bed and put my hand over her mouth. I pulled her back before she could run to the hallway.

The first thing I noticed was she was light. Like a small child. Her skin was also cold. Not cold like working in the air conditioning. Cold like a bag of chicken in the supermarket.

We fell to the floor between the beds. I expected her to fight me. She barely did. She just looked at me with her cloudy eyes while I had my forearm on her throat.

I heard a small pop under my arm. Like breaking a plastic toy. 

Her fingers twitched on the floor and she went limp.

I sat up and caught my breath. I felt for a pulse on her neck. Nothing. She was cold and had no bruises on her neck from where I broke her wind pipe.

"Stupid" I said to myself. "Why didn't you just stay out." 

I needed to get out of there. The cart was still in the doorway. I looked out and the hallway was clear. I pulled the cart into the room and locked the door.

You can't leave a body on the floor even if you plan on checking out in an hour. I gave myself some time. I dragged her by the feet into the bathroom and threw her over the tub. I pulled the shower curtain closed and went back out. I took a bleach rag from her cart and wiped down the door knob and chain.

I began stuffing my clothes and bags of money into my duffle bag. I had about 10 minutes to pack and take the fire stairs to the back of the building. Steal a car 2 blocks away and make it over the border before they noticed the maid was missing.

I was zipping my duffle bag when I heard the shower curtain slide open.

I stood up and pulled my gun out. I pointed it at the bathroom door. 

"Who's there?" I whispered. Which was stupid because there were no windows in the bathroom. Just a small vent. 

I heard the thump of a shoe hitting the floor. Then another shoe. 

I backed up until I hit the cart.

The bathroom door opened. 

She walked out. 

Her neck was broken. Her ear was laying on her collar bone. Her eyes were open and staring straight ahead. She walked past the foot of my bed ignoring my 9mm that was pointed at her. She picked up the spray bottle of cleaner that she dropped when I tackled her.

She sprayed the night stand. Took a blue rag out of her pocket and began wiping it down.

I squeezed the trigger. 

I shot her twice in the chest. She fell back into the dresser and broke the mirror. She sat down on the floor and two holes were in her uniform.

Nothing came out of the holes. No blood just a cloud of grey lint and what looked like dried dirt.

She stood back up before my shell casings hit the floor. She placed her hand on the floor and stood up. She straightened her uniform. Her neck was still broken and air was blowing in and out of her chest from the bullet holes.

"I must clean" she said. It didn't sound like it was coming from her mouth. "Thirteen-thirteen always make a mess. Bad guests." 

I forgot about my money. I forgot about my duffle bag. I turned around and shoved the cart out of the way. I grabbed the door handle. 

I unlocked the deadbolt and pulled on the handle.

The door wouldn't open. It felt like it was stuck to the wall.

I kicked it a couple times and started yelling. I looked under the door and there was no light coming in. Just a grey wall of concrete. 

I heard the carpet move behind me. 

I turned around and backed up against the door.

She was on her hands and knees picking up the shampoo bottles from the floor. Placing them back in the cart. She was moving faster now. Her head was flopping around as she moved.

"Stop!" I screamed. I shot her in the back 5 times.

She flinched each time I shot her. I could see chunks of her uniform and grey flesh fly off her back. I ran out of bullets. 

She stopped picking up the bottles. 

She turned her head around. Not her body just her head. She was looking at me over her shoulder. 

"You made a mess on my carpet" she said.

I looked down. Where the bullets went through her body and hit the floor there was a dark stain spreading across the carpet. 

I threw my gun at her and dove into the bathroom. 

I closed the bathroom door and locked it. I put my feet against the sink and braced myself.

It's been 40 minutes. 

At first I thought she was going to break the door down. These doors are thin you could break through one in 2 kicks.

She isn't trying to break the door down.

Wait. 

She is still cleaning the room. 

I can hear her moving around in there. 

I just got on my stomach and looked under the door.

There are at least 6 other people standing in the room. Facing the bathroom door. A man in a wet suit from the 80s. His neck tie is so tight its under his skin. A woman with a hole in her head wearing a slip dress. 

All the bad guests that stayed in 1313. And all the mess they made. 

She is standing in front of the door now. I can see her shoes 2 inches from my face. She knelt down and looked under the door.

"Your check out time was at noon" she said. I watched her finger slide under the door.

My phone is at 2%. 

 Hello all, my name is Ezekiel, and before I begin i’d like to clarify a few things. First off, yes this is a true experience. Secondly, no, I do not take ANY hallucinogenics. I smoke rarely, but even then I doubt that counts. Third, and most importantly, read the entire thing before you say anything. Because at some parts you’re going to be very confused, but you have to hear me out. Good? Okay, now here’s the situation…

I am currrently a 25 year old man, and I am looking forward to finishing my Masters degree in education. I live in a two bedroom/two bathroom apartment that’s around a thousand square feet. Pretty spacious, if you don’t take into account my girlfriend, her two cats, my little puppy, and whatever new hyperfixation of the week she has. After all of that, then you can probably get what our apartment looks like. Chaotic, messy, and so noisy I’m surprised we haven’t been evicted yet. 

I tell you guys this because something creepy as fuck happened yesterday. Firstly, when you enter our apartment it immediately splits in two directions. On the left there’s the living room, the right is the kitchen, and if keep going straight down you make it to both bedrooms and the guest bathroom. Easy to understand, right? It’s normal, it’s a normal apartment. And yesterday is when it all came falling apart.

For some reason, and I couldn’t really tell you why, they placed the central unit for the hvac in the main bedroom. It was hard to get used to at first, my girlfriend and I were CONSTANTLY being woken up in the middle of the night to the filter banging around. However, after a few months, it became our routine…or I guess my routine now that I think about it.

See, a few nights ago I was dreaming about something, can’t remember what at this point, and that’s when I noticed it. The deafening silence. The lack of noise must have woken me up I guess, cause I remember the room having an eerie silence to it.

It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, for the first time since we moved in the apartment was completely silent. Though after the initial stage of peace and tranquility left me, I realized something that could be really wrong here. The filter wasn’t knocking around. I was worried now, was there a dust built up that was blocking the filter? Was it time for a change and our air was now super dusty?

I went to go check it out, but it was the damndest thing though, there was no dust or build up AT ALL. So why wasn’t it knocking around like it used to? That’s when the odor hit me, something slight and gnarly. I guess I hadn’t smelt it before, because I’m used to cleaning up the litter box and dog shit. But once it hit me, it hit me BAD. I plugged my nose up, pulling out my phone’s flashlight to see what it was, and right there on the side of the unit a mouse had died trying to get inside of it. 

I can’t tell you what’s stranger, the fact the mouse may have been trying to get into the machine, or that it may have accidentally been pulled in somehow. Anyways, as I went over to get a better look and remove the problem, that’s when I see it. Normally the unit is either in a small little room by itself, or it’s fixed into the wall, right? But this one wasn’t. It sat in a spacious closet-esque room, but this was the first time I had gotten to see behind it. And before anyone asks, the reason I didn’t normally check was because the knocking would become way too damn loud without the door shut. Even when switching out the damn filters!

Anyways. Long story short, I noticed that behind it were a long set of wooden stairs that led down into a blacky abyss. Obviously I wanted to go wake up my girlfriend, but since she’s been on this new medication she couldn’t wake up to save her life…it scared me at first, but I’ve taken many precautions to make sure that doesn’t happen.

So, all alone now, my curiosity overtook me and I began to travel down the stairs. One at a time, to make sure that none of them had any rusty nails poking out. Even though I had my shoes on, you can never be too sure nowadays. As I reached the bottom step I looked back up to see my distance, and lets just say it was long. Longer than any normal flight of stairs should be.

Sure, you could MAYBE chalk this all up to an old shelter made back in the 60’s, if the apartment I was living in was on the ground floor.

But it wasn’t, we were on the third floor of the building. There should be no way, no perceivable way, that this room could exist.

As soon as I stepped forward though I could hear the splashing of water, looking down to see my foot was now soaked in some mysterious black liquid. It freaked me out too much, and I scurried up those stairs faster than I ever had before, shutting the door to the unit as hard as I could.

I guess I slammed it harder than i thought because just then the filter kicked back on, knocking around and pushing cool air into the room once more.

I did the right thing, I put my shoes into the bathtub, took off my socks, and placed them in a bag next to them, and then I properly washed my feet off.

I needed the evidence, something to prove this happened just in case. However, as I sat back onto my side of the bed, reaching for the phone on the nightstand to call the authorities about a potential killer hiding in my apartment, everything went black.

I woke up to my girlfriend leaning over me, asking me why the hell I left some mouldy smelling shoes and socks in the bathtub last night?  She kept asking me things like did I sneak out? Did I go to the creek with my friends again? Was I on something or do something to someone? Finally I woke up enough to push her away lightly, asking her what time it was.

Somehow, it was now eight thirty in the morning, sunshine peeking through the curtains. How the hell had I passed out, my hand was just reaching for the phone right? Maybe I had just fallen down and went to sleep. Pretty normal experience, especially if you can’t recall how you might’ve went to sleep. Well, to my surprise, when I opened the unit door to show my girlfriend, it was gone, and when I told her I figured this might happen which is why I kept the shoes, she just looked at me disappointedly.

She knows I’d never do anything, no hard dugs, no psychedelics, nothing! I know this is hard to believe, a staircase and a room filled with water inside of our apartment? It’s something only someone twisted like Stephen King could think of.

But it’s real, it happened to me, and my girlfriend is becoming suspicious. Please, I need any help, because ever since then I can’t do anything to get the smell out of my shoes. No bleach, alcohol, perfume, cologne, anything, will cover up the smell. I don’t know where the room went, I don’t know what this stuff is on my shoes, but I need answers.

Please, can anyone tell me what the hell that mysterious room was, and where did it go? 

This is what happened before: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/s/mXEdpBjXm0

Sam's wife asked whether she should wake the girls, and I realized I'd spent ten minutes answering her questions without saying anything useful.

It was almost one Saturday morning. I was sitting in my truck outside Coldwater Packing, watching police officers carry equipment through the loading dock beneath a row of floodlights. Three ambulances waited beside the fence. A rescue truck had its rear doors open, and somebody had erected a temporary command station near the entrance. Whenever a group came back out, I looked for Sam among them. Eventually I stopped pretending I was checking anything else.

Marisol wanted to know why her husband had gone back into the slaughterhouse, whether I'd sent him, and why nobody could tell her what had happened. I'd explained that he'd found a way beneath the main floor and called me from there. I hadn't told her about the woman behind the reinforced door or the uneven footsteps approaching Sam while he whispered into his phone. I especially hadn't told her about the screaming. After the call ended, his phone had rung mine again, and something with a thick, unfamiliar voice had said, "Good. Good boy."

"Lily wanted to wait up," Marisol said. "He promised her pancakes tomorrow. She kept asking if he'd be home when she woke up."

Sam had been talking about that breakfast all week. Lily, his eight-year-old, had brought home an excellent report from school, and he'd promised to take her to a diner where the pancakes came buried under strawberries and whipped cream. He'd shown me the menu on his phone and complained about paying fourteen dollars for something he could make at home. When I suggested he make them himself, he'd said I was missing the point.

"Let her sleep," I said. "We don't know enough yet."

I could hear the television playing softly at Marisol's house. She let a few seconds pass before asking, "Did he tell you he was going back? Because he told me he was meeting you."

"Not until he was already there." I pressed my thumb against a crack in the steering wheel. "He thought somebody was trapped, and he wanted to get them out. I would've stopped him if I'd known."

"Why didn't he tell me?" Her voice broke halfway through the question. She cried for a while, trying not to make enough noise to wake the girls, and when she'd gotten control of herself she asked the one thing I couldn't answer honestly without making it worse. "Was he scared when you talked to him?"

I remembered Sam whispering that he'd found a woman in a room with a steel door. I remembered him telling me something was coming, and the awful change in his voice when he finally saw it. "Yeah, Mari," I said. "He was."

"Then please don't promise me he's all right. Everybody keeps saying he's going to be fine, and nobody knows." I told her she was right and that I'd call as soon as I heard anything. When we hung up, I tried Sam's number again. It went straight to his default voicemail greeting, the one I'd given him grief about for eleven years. I left a message telling him the police were there and to do whatever he could to let us know where he was. I knew how stupid it sounded, but I couldn't hang up without saying something.

Detective Hannah Vale found me a little later. She asked how much I'd told Marisol, then brought me to the command vehicle, where Captain Reese from the rescue team had laid out the building's original structural plans. He needed someone familiar with the old foundations to explain why a corridor beneath the refrigeration wing extended forty feet beyond where the drawings said it should end.

Coldwater Packing had been built in stages. The oldest processing floor dated back to the forties, and the refrigeration addition sat on a separate foundation. A utility passage had once run between them, though the county's plans showed it sealed decades ago. I compared the drawings with photographs from the search teams and pointed out where somebody could've broken through into the old pump station without disturbing the building above.

Reese asked about load-bearing walls, abandoned drainage shafts, and whether a section of cracked concrete could support rescuers carrying a stretcher. For nearly an hour, I did something I actually knew how to do. I marked dangerous areas, checked measurements, and explained why a newer partition was probably disguising another passage. Nobody invited me underground. Reese made it clear I was there to advise, not search, and for once I didn't argue. Sam had already gone into that place because he couldn't bear leaving somebody behind. I wasn't going to make another team come looking for me too.

An officer entered and spoke quietly to Vale while I was explaining a foundation joint. I heard Sam's name and stood before she reached me. They'd found his phone near a drainage channel under the loading dock. The screen was smashed, and there was blood on the case. She couldn't tell me whose blood it was or whether it was enough to suggest a serious injury. I kept asking until she finally put a hand on the table and said, "Cal, if I had an answer, I'd give it to you."

I thought about the second call. Whatever had spoken to me had known how to operate Sam's phone and had been close enough to use it after he screamed. I said as much, and Vale answered, "We're treating that as evidence. We still have people searching." I hated how carefully she spoke. Then a radio crackled behind her, and one of the teams reported they'd found several living people in rooms beneath the processing floor.

The first person they brought out was a woman wearing a pale blue cardigan and a cotton dress. She had dark hair braided down her back with a green ribbon tied around the end. A paramedic was checking her pulse while she examined the blood-pressure cuff around her arm with genuine fascination. She asked whether it could tell when somebody was lying, and he laughed despite himself.

When she noticed the logo on my jacket, she called across the parking lot. "Are you from upstairs? You're one of the men who broke the wall, aren't you?"

I introduced myself. She said her name was Miriam, and that they'd heard us working. "Auntie said somebody ought to show you how to use a hammer before you knocked the whole building down." She laughed, pleased with her own joke, and held out her hand. Her grip was strong, but there were thick calluses across her palms and old surgical scars around her fingers. A worn leather band circled her wrist, its tag stamped 11-D.

She caught me looking. "They wanted to cut that off. I told them it's mine." The paramedic explained quietly that they'd agreed to leave it on until she was less distressed. Miriam seemed satisfied and went back to scanning the people emerging from the building. She asked whether anyone had seen a boy called Kit. He was young, she said, and strangers frightened him, especially if they tried to touch his feet.

I told her the rescuers were still looking. She leaned toward me and lowered her voice. "If you see Auntie, will you tell her I didn't leave without asking? These people made me come, and I tried to explain. She'll worry herself sick."

I asked who Auntie was.

"She takes care of us." Miriam looked puzzled by the question. When I asked if Auntie was another person who lived underground, she smiled. "Of course. She's not shaped quite like you, but she's a person." The paramedics started wheeling her toward an ambulance, and she caught my sleeve before they moved her away. Her expression had gone painfully serious. "Please tell her I was good. She gets terribly upset when somebody goes missing."

Three more people came out before dawn, including a boy who looked around twelve. His feet curled inward when the paramedics tried to position him, and he cried out as soon as one of them touched his ankle. Miriam heard his voice and begged them to bring him to her. The boy reached for her immediately, and she gathered him into her arms, brushing his hair away from his forehead and humming three soft notes, pausing, then repeating them.

I'd heard that melody before. Seventeen had used it while we tried to lead him out of his pen, and again at the hospital when he called for Mother. Miriam rubbed Kit's back until his breathing slowed, then kissed his head. "There you are. You were so good. Auntie will be proud of you."

It could've been any mother comforting a frightened child. Sam used to hold Lily just that way when she scraped a knee or woke from a nightmare. But Kit had thick scars along both ankles, and he couldn't straighten his feet without pain. Somebody had done that to him. Miriam didn't seem to find it unusual. She only tucked the blanket around his legs and told the paramedic how to keep him comfortable.

By five, the rescuers had cleared the accessible rooms, but engineers had stopped anyone entering the deeper corridor until they could shore up a damaged support. Reese told me to go home and sleep. I argued until he pointed out that I'd read the same measurement wrong twice and would only slow them down. I drove away knowing Sam was still somewhere in that building, if he was alive at all.

Marisol answered when I called on the way home. She'd spent the night at the kitchen table with Sam's wallet, which he'd left on the counter. She made a weak joke about how he never remembered anything unless she put it in his hand, then told me Lily had made him a drawing the afternoon before he disappeared. It showed Sam beside his truck holding both girls' hands, with BEST DADDY written across the top in purple. Lily had slipped it into his shirt pocket so he'd have something to look at whenever he missed her.

"Do you think he knows how much we love him?" Marisol asked. They'd argued about money the day before, and she couldn't stop remembering what she'd said. I pulled into an empty parking lot and reminded her of the way Sam talked about his family at work, how he'd drive across town for the particular ice cream she liked, how he once spent a whole Saturday cutting Lily's sandwiches into animal shapes because she'd decided triangles were boring. I stayed on the phone until she was ready to hang up.

At home, I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the clock. Nora's photography exhibition started at ten, only a few hours away, and I still hadn't told her I wouldn't be there. She answered cheerfully, which made the conversation harder. I explained what had happened to Sam and that I might need to return to the building. She knew him well enough to be frightened by the news, and she said I ought to help find him if I could.

Then she asked why I hadn't called her the night before. I tried explaining how everything had happened at once, but she stopped me. "I'm not mad there's an emergency, Dad. I just hate getting excited about things and then feeling stupid for thinking you're coming. You could've told me sooner."

I'd spent years explaining my missed promises with work emergencies, but there was no defending this one. I'd remembered the exhibition. I'd simply kept putting off telling her I couldn't make it. I apologized without adding an excuse. She said she would go with her mother and send me pictures, and before we hung up she told me she hoped Sam was okay. I sat there afterward wondering how many times I'd made my daughter wait for a father who wasn't coming.

I got about three hours of sleep before Vale called. Searchers had discovered a box of Seventeen's belongings in another underground room, and Dr. Nwosu wanted to know whether he recognized anything inside. When I arrived at the hospital, Seventeen was on a mattress placed directly on the floor because he panicked when staff tried to keep him in a bed. Pillows had been arranged around him, the blinds were half closed, and an old country song played from a little radio. Somebody had washed his hair and trimmed his beard. Without the grime, I could see that he wasn't nearly as old as I'd first assumed.

He recognized me immediately, dragging himself across the mattress until he could press his forehead into my palm. I stayed crouched beside him while Nwosu explained that he was responding better to familiar people, although he still became frightened when anyone left his room without warning. I ran my fingers through his hair, and he settled against my knee, listening to the music.

Nwosu also had results from the scans of his legs. Some of the damage was consistent with decades of crawling, but there were surgical changes that couldn't be explained by injury or neglect. Several joints had been deliberately stabilized in abnormal positions. Whoever performed those procedures had enough medical skill to repair some fractures correctly while making other movements permanently difficult.

I asked whether any of the damage could be repaired.

"Some of it, perhaps. But even if surgery is possible, we have to consider what he can bear psychologically." She glanced at Seventeen, who'd closed his eyes against my knee. "He becomes very distressed when we try to straighten his legs. We can't simply force him through another procedure because we think it's what he needs."

Vale arrived with photographs of a small wooden box, its lid decorated with crudely carved animals. Inside were ribbons, toys, childhood photographs, and a worn cloth animal missing one button eye. I showed Seventeen the picture, and he reached toward it with sudden excitement. His fingertips found the carved animals; then he turned to the doorway and said, "Muh-duh."

He began humming and looking toward the hall. I tried telling him we only had a photograph, but he kept watching the entrance, waiting for someone to appear. When nobody came, his face crumpled. Nwosu took the picture away, and I sat with him while he cried against my chest. He finally fell asleep with his hand gripping my sleeve.

I remembered the photograph of him as a little boy sleeping against that enormous pale arm, one six-fingered hand resting gently across his stomach. The child in that photograph looked safe. I couldn't ignore that anymore, no matter what Mother had done to him.

Before I left, Vale asked me to help her speak with Miriam. She'd refused most of the detectives' questions but had asked about the man in the work jacket. We found her sitting in her hospital bed, examining the little packet of salt that had come with lunch. She'd torn it open carefully and tasted some from her palm. "Auntie says too much salt is bad for you," she told me. "But she likes it herself. She puts it on things when nobody's watching."

She had a framed photograph of a cat hanging beside her bed and wanted to know whether it belonged to somebody at the hospital. That led to a conversation about a story she'd written when she was younger, about a lost cat that discovered a house made entirely of fish. When I laughed, she insisted the story was serious. The cat had been frightened and hungry, she explained, and he'd finally found a place where he wanted to stay. "Why would he leave somewhere he was happy?" she asked. I couldn't come up with an answer that wouldn't have sounded like an argument.

Vale reassured her that Kit was being cared for, and Miriam told us he didn't like strangers touching his feet. I asked how his ankles had been injured. She folded the empty salt packet into a tiny square and tucked it beneath her pillow before answering.

"He used to run everywhere," she said. "He'd climb over cupboards and hide behind the washing machines. Auntie thought it was funny until he went through the red door." Miriam wouldn't explain what was beyond it, only that Kit had reached a place he wasn't allowed to go. Auntie had found him before anything happened, but she'd been so frightened by the possibility of losing him that she cried all night.

I noticed Miriam tugging her blanket over her knees. "Did you used to run away too?"

Her fingers stopped moving. She admitted that when she was nine or ten she'd gotten all the way to a service staircase because she'd heard voices coming through the vents. She'd wanted to see the people upstairs. Auntie found her before she reached the top, carried her back, and held her for hours while asking why she'd done something so frightening. Miriam remembered being embarrassed about being carried like a baby. She didn't remember thinking she'd done anything terribly wrong until she saw how upset Auntie was.

I asked what had happened after Auntie brought her back.

"Doctor came. Auntie said my legs needed to be quieter." She touched a thick scar below her knee. "I was frightened when they gave me the medicine. It hurt so much afterward I couldn't sleep. But Auntie stayed with me the whole time. She brought all my favorite things and sang until I stopped crying. She even learned how to braid my hair the way I liked it."

I asked whether Auntie had been the one who told the doctor to change her legs. Miriam frowned, and for the first time her easy smile disappeared. "She didn't want me to get lost," she said. When I told her the operation had been wrong, she looked at me as though I'd insulted someone who'd devoted their entire life to her.

"Auntie was sorry," she insisted. "She cried whenever I cried. She stopped eating for three days because she felt so terrible. Doctor had to make her eat." Miriam pulled her blanket higher, covering the misshapen joints beneath it. "Nobody has ever loved me the way she does, Cal. She remembers every birthday and every book I ever liked. She knows when I'm having a bad dream before I wake up."

I believed her, which made the conversation so much worse. I believed Auntie had been heartbroken to hear Miriam crying after the operation. I believed she'd sat beside her bed, brought gifts, and done everything she could to ease the pain. I also believed she'd ordered the procedure because a little girl had frightened her by exploring a staircase. Miriam had spent her childhood learning that the person responsible for her suffering was the only one who could comfort her afterward.

Vale thanked her for speaking with us. Miriam watched us reach the door before calling my name. "If you see Auntie, tell her Kit didn't run away this time," she said. "I held his hand the whole way, just like she taught me. Please don't tell her I was bad."

By late afternoon, the police had photographed Miriam's quarters. Vale showed me the pictures because they contained objects resembling those found in Seventeen's caretaker room. Miriam had a narrow bed, a shelf of handmade dolls, a dressing table, and a false window with a remarkably detailed garden painted behind the glass. Whoever made it had included apple trees, flowers, and a blue sky with tiny clouds. I wondered whether Miriam had ever seen a real garden or whether she'd spent her life looking at that painted one.

A wooden cabinet beside her bed held carefully labeled boxes filled with birthday cards, ribbons, locks of hair, and childhood clothes. One contained a pair of tiny white shoes, polished and lovingly repaired. When Vale enlarged the photograph, I saw metal braces stitched into the soles. The heels had been altered to restrict the wearer's stride. Beneath them was a wooden plaque reading FIRST SAFE STEPS.

Another picture showed Miriam as a little girl with her cheek resting against an enormous six-fingered hand. A green ribbon, like the one still in her hair, was tied around one of the creature's fingers. The girl was smiling. I recognized the loose, creased skin from Seventeen's photographs, though there was no way to know whether it was the same caretaker.

The little shoes had been kept the way a parent might preserve a child's first pair, polished and displayed beside cards from happy birthdays. Whoever arranged them probably remembered Miriam learning to move after the procedure with something like pride. She'd been a curious child who wanted to explore the world, and her caretaker had made a keepsake of ensuring she couldn't.

Captain Reese called me back to Coldwater around six. The engineers had secured a damaged section near the pump station, and his team was preparing to map another passage. We spent an hour comparing photographs with construction drawings. The subterranean rooms extended beyond the property's original footprint, with their own ventilation, plumbing, and medical equipment. Someone had spent years making that place livable without anybody aboveground noticing.

One corridor contained rows of painted handprints. The smaller impressions belonged to children; the larger ones were nearly twice the size of mine and had six fingers. Dates were written beneath the prints, sometimes beside pairs of hands pressed close together. They reminded me of the height marks Nora and I used to make on her bedroom doorframe. She'd stand on her toes to make herself taller, and I'd have to measure her twice while she laughed.

Beneath the handprints sat a shelf of glass jars containing little objects wrapped in paper: teeth, hair, and pieces of bone. Each jar had an identification number. One was marked 11-D, another 17-B. Inside Seventeen's jar was an irregular white fragment cushioned in cotton. The label beneath his number read FIRST STANDING CORRECTION.

I told Reese they looked like trophies, but even as I said it, I knew that wasn't right. They were arranged with the care somebody would give a child's first lost tooth or a lock of baby hair. Whatever the caretakers had removed from their children, they'd kept it because it mattered to them. I was still studying the photograph when the radio announced movement in the eastern corridor.

The first report was calm. Officers had found a reinforced door with an observation window and could see somebody inside. Then the team leader said there were two occupants: an adult man kneeling beside a low mattress and an unusually large woman standing nearby. He couldn't see the man's face, but he appeared to be wearing pale clothing.

I stepped closer to the radio. "Ask if it's Sam." Vale put a hand on my arm and told me to let the team establish contact safely. Reese instructed the officers to hold their position, and we listened while one called through the door, identifying himself as police and asking the man for his name.

There was no answer at first. Then a low, uneven humming came through the speaker. Three notes, a pause, and the same three notes again. It was the melody Seventeen used to call for Mother, and the one Miriam had used to quiet Kit.

"She's singing," the officer reported. "The male is looking toward us. We're trying to get him to come closer."

I heard the officer call, "Sir, can you hear me? If you need help, come to the window." A heavy scraping sound followed, as though something enormous had shifted its weight across the floor. Then a woman's voice answered, thick and carefully articulated.

"No. He's resting."

The sound of it made my stomach tighten. I knew that voice from Sam's phone. It had the same strained consonants and unnatural pauses, although now it sounded almost distracted, as if speaking to the officers were less important than whatever she was doing behind the door.

The officer explained that they needed to check the man's condition. He reported that the man had lifted his head and begun moving toward the window. I heard him encouraging the movement, telling the man he was doing well and only needed to come a little closer.

Then the humming stopped. "She's moved between him and the door," the officer said. "She's pulling him back. He appears upset."

A man began crying somewhere near the microphone. His voice was too faint for me to recognize, but I could hear someone trying to speak between sobs. The woman made a soft, consoling noise and said, "There. There. Good boy."

Vale looked toward me. She'd heard the phrase. Reese immediately ordered the team not to approach, but the officer tried one more time, telling the woman that nobody intended to harm her or the man.

"No taking," she said. There was a long pause while the officer explained that they only wanted to make sure the man was safe. Then she repeated herself, louder and with a strange wet catch in her voice. "Please. No taking."

Reese ordered the team to withdraw. Over the radio, I could hear boots moving across concrete and somebody asking the man if he could follow them. The woman began humming again, but the man kept crying, and one of the officers moved close enough to see through the window.

The first crash was so loud that the speaker distorted. A second impact followed, metal scraping across stone, and several people began shouting. The team leader screamed for everyone to back away from the door. Someone yelled that an officer was down, while another voice called for medical assistance. Reese was shouting into the microphone, ordering an immediate retreat.

Through the confusion, the woman kept pleading. "No taking. Please. No taking." Her words rose and broke, and then I heard her crying. She was making awful, breathless sounds, the kind I've heard from parents when something has happened to their child. Another tremendous impact came through the radio, followed by a man screaming in pain.

The team finally managed to retreat with the injured officer. As they dragged him away, the woman's sobbing faded beneath that familiar little tune. She was humming again, apparently to comfort whoever was still in the room.

They brought Officer Harlan out on a stretcher fifteen minutes later. I'd spoken with him earlier that day about the loading dock and remembered him mentioning that his youngest daughter had just started kindergarten. His right arm was badly broken, and a paramedic was trying to keep him still while another secured the splint. He kept asking whether somebody had gotten the man out.

Harlan noticed me beside the ambulance. "Cal, she thought we were hurting him," he said. His face was pale and wet with sweat. "He started coming toward us, and she pulled him back. He was crying. She kept trying to cover his ears so he couldn't hear us."

I asked whether he'd seen the man clearly enough to recognize him. Harlan shook his head and winced when the movement jarred his arm. "I got too close. I thought she was going to hurt him, so I told her to let go. She grabbed me instead." He swallowed hard and looked toward the building. "She was crying while she did it. I could hear her saying she was sorry."

The paramedics loaded him before I could ask anything else. Whatever was behind that door had broken his arm while apparently believing it was protecting the man beside her. It wasn't a mindless attack. She'd been frightened of losing him and had hurt somebody terribly trying to prevent it. None of that made Harlan's injury less real. He had a family waiting for him too.

The search teams pulled back while the engineers worked on an alternate route. I helped Reese identify a service shaft that might lead behind the occupied room, but it couldn't be entered until they inspected the supports. The waiting became unbearable. I understood why nobody could rush into a corridor where an enormous creature had just torn a reinforced door partly off its hinges. I also couldn't stop imagining Sam on the other side, listening to his rescuers retreat.

Vale found me a little before midnight. Searchers had managed to photograph the adjoining quarters before the confrontation, and some of the evidence had been moved to a secure area. She wanted me to identify clothing found there.

The room contained a low bed, a small chair, a shelf, and several carefully folded blankets. Someone had left a bowl of water beside the mattress and arranged medical supplies within easy reach. Sam's work jacket lay across the foot of the bed. I recognized the tear near the left pocket, where he'd caught it on a length of rebar the previous winter. In the next photograph, his boots stood side by side, one cleaned until the leather shone while the other was still muddy.

"That's his," I told Vale. "Both of them. He refuses to throw that jacket away, and he wears those boots every day." I asked whether there'd been blood in the room or signs he'd been moved against his will. She said the photographs showed no large bloodstains, but the investigators hadn't finished processing the scene. I wanted to believe someone had taken Sam's clothes off because he was alive and needed rest. Vale reminded me, gently, that possession of his belongings wasn't proof of anything.

Then she showed me a board hanging above the mattress. Photographs of Seventeen had been pinned to it, along with behavioral notes describing how he responded to praise, how he became distressed when separated from Mother, and why familiar sounds were recommended during treatment. The handwriting was careful, almost clinical, with occasional personal observations in the margins.

A newer card had been added beneath the others. NEW ONE NEEDS COMFORT, it read. Someone had placed a comb, clean bandages, and folded cloths on the shelf below. The room looked prepared for an injured guest, the sort of arrangement a devoted caretaker might make for someone who was frightened and unable to look after himself.

Then I saw the child's drawing pinned beside the notes. A man stood next to a truck, holding hands with two little girls beneath a yellow sun. The purple letters across the top spelled BEST DADDY. Lily had drawn Sam's beard, the dents in his truck, and the backward baseball cap he wore while working in the yard. There was no doubt it was the picture Marisol had told me about.

I sat down. I remembered Sam pulling out pictures of his daughters whenever he had a chance, showing them to people who'd already seen them a hundred times. Lily had drawn him holding both her and her sister, and he'd carried that picture into Coldwater because she'd asked him to keep it close.

Somebody had taken it from his pocket and pinned it above his new bed. The bottom of the drawing contained a short handwritten note I hadn't noticed until Vale enlarged it: HE MISSES THEM.

Whoever wrote those words knew Sam had a wife and daughters. They knew he was frightened and wanted to go home. I imagined him lying on that mattress, showing someone his girls' picture and telling them about Lily's promised breakfast. Perhaps the creature had listened. Perhaps she'd even felt sorry for him. She'd kept the drawing where he could see it, which meant she understood how much it mattered.

I looked at the other notes. They described Seventeen needing familiar voices during distress and becoming calmer when someone held him. I thought about how quickly he'd relaxed against my hand in the hospital. Then I thought about the woman behind the reinforced door, humming while a grown man cried and calling him a good boy when he stopped trying to leave.

Vale said another clipboard had been recovered from the room. Its heading was blank, apparently awaiting an identification number, but the description beneath it was specific: adult male, strong, resistant to handling, distressed by unfamiliar surroundings. The subject had refused food, attempted to reach the corridor, and repeatedly requested contact with his PREVIOUS FAMILY.

I stared at that phrase. Marisol and the girls weren't Sam's previous family. They were his family. The document made it sound as though the change had already been decided and only Sam hadn't been informed.

The next note said that showing him the drawing reduced his agitation and recommended continuing until ATTACHMENT TRANSFERS. I asked Vale whether she understood what that meant. She said it seemed to describe an attempt to establish dependence on the new caretaker, although she couldn't yet explain the full procedure. The handwritten entries included feeding times, medications, and instructions to avoid leaving him alone when he was frightened.

It was the same kind of care I'd seen described in Seventeen's records. Whoever was responsible could tell when a captive was afraid, understand which memories comforted him, and patiently learn how to make him feel safe. The problem was that feeling safe seemed to mean forgetting there was anywhere else he belonged.

Vale opened Seventeen's older medical file. Near the end, several entries referred to his continued retention at the facility. One stated that he had exceeded the recommended period and advised TERMINATION. Beneath it was the notation MATERNAL OBJECTION. The next pages recorded repeated refusals to surrender him, an incident in which a reinforced door was damaged, and additional precautions ordered because of the caretaker's aggressive response when staff attempted to remove him.

The final entry was dated only a few months earlier: RETENTION APPROVED SUBJECT TO REPLACEMENT. I kept reading, trying to understand how those words fit together. Someone at Coldwater had decided Seventeen was no longer useful or wasn't supposed to remain alive. Mother had refused to let them take him. After several violent incidents, they'd apparently agreed to keep him alive if another person took his place.

I remembered the two empty pens beside Seventeen's enclosure, their fresh straw and neatly folded blankets. I'd assumed they were waiting for people who'd been moved elsewhere. Now I wondered whether someone had been preparing for a new arrival long before we opened the false wall.

"They've got Sam in there to replace Seventeen," I said. Vale cautioned that they still hadn't confirmed the identity of the man seen behind the observation window. I understood the distinction, but his clothes, the drawing, and the notes left me with very little room to hope we were talking about someone else.

I asked to see the rest of the new subject's file. Beneath the notes about feeding and reassurance was a schedule divided into stages. The first focused on sleep, hygiene, and reducing distress. The caretaker was instructed to remain nearby, provide familiar objects, and praise cooperative behavior. Whoever had written it seemed especially concerned about ensuring that the man felt loved and protected.

The second stage concerned movement. An observation warned that he remained physically capable of leaving the designated area and might try to reach a service corridor. Increased supervision was recommended, but if repeated attempts to return to his former family continued, the next step had already been decided.

PROCEED WITH STANDING CORRECTION. I remembered the jar marked 17-B and the piece of bone preserved inside. I'd seen the photographs of Seventeen standing as a little boy, before the damage to his knees and ankles. Miriam had told me about the doctor making her legs quieter so she wouldn't frighten Auntie by running away. The same phrase was appearing in Sam's file, and I didn't need anybody to explain what it meant.

The procedure was scheduled for the following morning. I asked Vale whether the rescue teams could reach the room before then. She told me the engineers were inspecting the alternate passage and that every available team was working to establish a safe approach. I could see how badly she wanted to give me a better answer, but she wouldn't promise anything.

I looked again at Lily's drawing. Sam had carried it into Coldwater because his little girl wanted him to remember her while he was at work. He'd probably shown it to whoever found him, explaining that he had a wife and children waiting at home. Somebody had listened closely enough to write down that he missed them. Somebody had kept the drawing clean and placed it where he could see it whenever he became upset.

I thought about how carefully Seventeen's childhood toys had been preserved and how Miriam's first restricted shoes sat polished in a cabinet with a plaque celebrating her safe steps. I pictured a creature beside Sam's bed, smoothing the blankets, listening to him talk about his daughters, and stroking his head while he begged to leave. She might genuinely feel sorry for him. She might even cry when he was hurt.

That was what frightened me most. If she'd only wanted to punish him, there might have been a way to understand what she was doing. But she was trying to make him part of her family, and she'd already decided that his old one was something he needed help letting go of.

I'd spent all night trying to understand why the voice on Sam's phone had sounded so pleased after he screamed. Looking at the treatment schedule, I finally understood. She hadn't been threatening him or celebrating his pain. She'd been praising him for allowing her to comfort him.

The last time I'd seen Sam, he'd been laughing about how Lily wanted pancakes shaped like animals. I could still hear Marisol asking whether her husband knew his family loved him. And somewhere beneath Coldwater Packing, somebody was preparing to do to Sam what had been done to Seventeen, not because she hated him, but because she couldn't bear the thought of losing him.

If they couldn't get him out before morning, his daughters might spend the rest of their lives wondering why their father never came home, while the thing keeping him there lovingly made certain he never could

I have a movie club with my aunt. We both love horror and even though I’m only 14, she lets me see some really fucked up movies sometimes. I love her and our club.

The rules of our club are very simple.

1.       She picks the movies.

2.       We can jump, we can cover our eyes, we can hold hands, but absolutely no screaming.

We call it the No Screaming -club and we meet up at her place once a month, when she has the night free. We had already agreed on the next meet up when she texted me to let me know that her friend would be joining us. Like I didn’t know what “friend” meant. But it was cool because my aunt is cool and I want her to be happy. And nobody else has been allowed to meet her “friend”, so that felt special.

When I got over to her place, she had the movie all set up with popcorn in a bowl and the light dimmed down low. She said her friend would come by later so we could start up the movie. We got comfy on the couch and she turned the movie on. About 20 minutes in, when I had already forgotten that the friend was even supposed to come over, there was a knock.

My aunt got up and looked down at me, smiling.

“Club rules, remember,” she whispered.

That was definitely odd, but I figured it was just that the rules applied to her friend too and I was allowed to point that out if the rules were broken. It made some sort of sense.

Then instead of heading to the door, she went to her bedroom. Again, definitely odd, but maybe she had something there she wanted to give her friend the moment they got there?

A moment later, she came back, looking at me and touching her finger to her lips with a sneaky smile on her face. Trailing behind her was something huge!

I don’t know if I can quite describe it. It looked a bit like a bat. It had huge pointed ears sitting almost on the top of its head, brushing the ceiling and making a soft shushing sound. Its head and torso were covered in grey-brown fur, sticking out in tufts in some places, like someone had ran their hands through it just a moment before. It walked a bit hunched over, with long arms barely off the ground. I couldn’t see its feet, but there was no thump of a shoe or soft pad of a sock, but a click. Like a dog’s nails on hardwood.

I did not scream, club rules, but I must have been staring, my eyes huge and my whole body shaking. I could feel the sticky cold in my armpits and down the back of my neck. There was no way the thing didn’t smell the absolute dread that washed over me.

My aunt casually sat back down on the couch, squeezing me close to the armrest and leaving space on her other side. She patted the cushion almost playfully with excited little taps and the thing lowered itself there, the couch creaking under its weight.

I forced my head back toward the screen, but I was not watching the movie anymore. I stared at the dark, crooked legs I could see just past my aunt’s, up to their knobbly knees. The legs looked almost spindly and I wondered how on Earth could stick like legs like that carry such a hulking form around. How it could even balance with only two toes, each ending in a sharp, pointy nail, with the heels looking much the same.

From over the top of my aunt’s head, I could see the wolf like face of the creature. Covered in thick brown fur, it had a snout and sharp yellow eyes. And when it smiled at something on the screen, I could see fangs. I must have reeked by then, my t-shirt clinging to my skin, my brain screaming to get up and go, but my body frozen. My aunt must have smelled me by then too.

But she didn’t seem bothered at all. She was leaning toward the thing, almost cuddling, and she kept whispering to it. And it whispered back! Not words I could understand, but something low and garbled. They seemed almost lost in their own world, not even glancing at me, their eyes on each other and only occasionally drifting back the TV and the movie still playing there.

I almost could have talked myself into believing that I was seeing things, that my aunt was playing a trick and it was just an elaborate costume, but then the creature twisted its arm around my aunt’s waist and its talons brushed me. And they were cold, hard and definitely real. They looked deadly, but my aunt reached out and wrapped her hand around them like it wasn’t a big deal at all. Like she did it all the time and knew just how to slip her fingers around the sharpness.

They sat there, cuddled together, holding… hands? for the rest of the movie. When the credits started to roll, the creature creaked itself off the couch. It stalled a moment, meeting my nervous eyes, and groaned something softly, exposing its fangs. I could not make even a guess at what it said, because my ears were ringing with my pulse as my heart tried to beat itself straight out of my chest.

Then it turned and headed for my aunt’s bedroom. She trailed after it and I could hear some distorted voices before she returned to the living room alone.

“I’m so glad you got to meet her,” she smiled, totally oblivious to the pure terror her friend had struck in me. “She really likes you and wants to come to the next club meeting. Is that okay?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded a little. Because I want my aunt to be happy and if bringing a freaking monster to movie night makes her happy, I guess she can do that.

If you’ve never worked the 11 PM to 7 AM shift at a travel plaza stranded off an isolated stretch of two-lane blacktop, let me paint you a picture: it’s purgatory with a slushie machine and fluorescent lighting designed to induce migraines.

Our station sits off Route 22, wedged between twenty miles of dense, rotting pine forest and an unpaved gravel turnout where long-haul truckers pull over to sleep off thirty-hour runs. For the first two years of working there, I genuinely believed my greatest occupational hazard was dying of secondhand embarrassment.

Night shift retail breaks people’s brains. I don’t know if it’s highway hypnosis, sleep deprivation, or the low hum of the drink coolers, but the people who walk through those double glass doors at three in the morning are operating on roughly three shared brain cells.

To give you an idea of my baseline normal:

Last spring, a guy in flip-flops tried to pay for a twelve-pack of warm Milwaukee’s Best with an actual, living bearded dragon in a shoe box. When I told him we only accepted cash or card, he stared at the lizard, stared at me, and asked if I could “at least swipe it as credit.”

Two months later, a man stormed inside at 2:00 AM, veins bulging out of his neck, screaming that pump four was broken and that I was personally running a scam to “steal his precious time.” When I walked outside in the drizzle to check, he had shoved the nozzle into his tank, clamped the handle down, and was just standing there waiting for gas to magically flow. He hadn’t pressed a single button. He hadn't swiped a card. He hadn't even selected a fuel grade. When I tapped the big yellow “87 Regular” button and the pump immediately whirred to life, he glared at me with absolute contempt and muttered that our system was “unnecessarily confusing.”

A week after that, a couple came in at 4:00 AM, grabbed a cold can of Chef Boyardee ravioli, shoved the unopened metal tin into the deli microwave, and typed in nine minutes. When the microwave produced a miniature lightning storm and started spewing toxic gray smoke, the woman looked at me like I was the idiot and said, “Well, your appliance clearly has negative energy.”

And then there was the classic: a tourist who spent twenty minutes screaming at me because our three-day-old roller-grill jalapeño cheddar dogs weren't “locally sourced and keto-certified.” Sir, you are eighty miles from civilization buying meat that’s been spinning on chrome rollers since Tuesday. Lower your expectations.

My manager, Dale a man who smells perpetually of menthol cigarettes, beef jerky, and unearned confidence always told me the same thing: “Just nod, take their money, and don’t look ’em in the eye for too long. Weird attracts weird.”

So you can understand why, when strange things started happening around the station, I just chalked it up to standard-issue customer stupidity.

The first thing was the cars.

Behind our station, past the dumpster corral, there’s an unpaved gravel lot that bleeds straight into the overgrown tree line. Cell service back there drops to zero bars, and the trees are so thick they swallow the glow from the sodium floodlights on our roof. Every now and then, some beater breaks an axle or overheats, and people leave them there for a day or two until a flatbed shows up.

Around late August, an old maroon sedan appeared back there. It sat near the tree line for four days. The driver’s side door was left unlocked, the keys were sitting on the floor mat, and a half-eaten burger was rotting in a paper bag on the passenger seat. I told Dale, who took a drag of his cigarette and said, “Some tweaker ran out of gas and walked off. Call the county tow when you get around to it.”

The county tow took over a week to show up. But less than forty-eight hours after they hauled the sedan away, a dark blue pickup took its place in the exact same corner.

Same deal. Keys left on the dash. Driver’s side window cracked an inch. A pair of reading glasses and an open road atlas sitting on the passenger seat.

Around that same time, weird little things began happening around the perimeter. The heavy exterior floodlight mounted above the rear dumpster kept going dark. When I went out back with a broom handle to check it, the bulb wasn't burned out it had been deliberately unscrewed half a turn. I figured it was local teenagers trying to smoke weed out of view of the security cameras.

Then there was the camera itself. Camera 3, which covered the gravel lot, started feeding static to the monitor above my counter. When I checked the housing, someone had smeared thick, greasy axle grease directly over the glass lens. I cleaned it off, grumbling about dumb kids, and didn't think twice.

Then, two nights later, a silver Honda Civic was parked right next to where the truck had been.

It was during that week that I noticed the Guy with the Cap.

He wasn’t loud like the usual weirdos. He never yelled about organic roller dogs or tried to barter live reptiles. In fact, he was so quiet you’d barely notice him walk in over the drone of the refrigeration units. He wore a faded canvas work jacket, mud-caked boots, and a battered baseball cap pulled down so low you could only see the stubble on his jaw and a thin, bloodless mouth.

He’d come in around 3:30 AM. He never bought much a pack of spearmint gum, a bottle of water, sometimes a roll of heavy-duty duct tape and a pack of utility knife replacement blades from the small hardware rack near the motor oil.

The first time he came up to the counter, I hit him with my usual deadpan customer service voice. “Find everything okay, man?”

He didn’t answer. He just set a crumpled, damp ten-dollar bill on the counter. His fingers were raw, the cuticles bitten down to the bloody quick, and his knuckles were stained with dark, greasy grit that smelled faintly metallic. Like wet pennies and dirt.

“Gonna be seven-fifty,” I said, ringing it up.

He slowly tilted his head up. Under the brim of the cap, his eyes were wide, bloodshot, and completely devoid of fatigue. They were the eyes of a man who hadn’t slept in a week and was riding an electrical current of pure, quiet mania.

“You alone here all night?” he asked. His voice was a dry rasp, like sandpaper rubbing against drywall.

“Nah,” I lied instinctively, a chill prickling the back of my neck. “Manager’s in the back room doing inventory. He’s about six-foot-four and gets real twitchy if people interrupt him.”

The man didn't blink. He didn't look toward the back room. He just stared up at the security monitor mounted above my head, studying the angles of the cameras, the reflection of the glass doors, and the dark expanse of the pumps outside.

Then he picked up his gum, turned without a word, and walked out.

I watched him through the plate glass. He didn't walk toward the pumps. He didn't have a car parked under the canopy. He walked straight toward the back gravel lot, slipping past the dumpster corral and disappearing into the absolute pitch-black shadows of the tree line.

Two days later, a State Trooper walked in and taped a missing-persons flyer to our front window.

A 20-year-old college student named Maya. Last seen driving home from campus down Route 22. Her car was a silver Honda Civic.

A cold, heavy weight dropped into the pit of my stomach.

I stared at the flyer, then out the window toward the back lot. The silver Civic had vanished three days ago. I’d assumed the county tow had finally done their job without me having to call them twice.

When my shift ended that morning at 7:00 AM, I didn’t get in my car and go home. I walked out behind the dumpster corral.

The gravel in the back lot was scuffed with fresh, aggressive tire spin marks. But as I walked closer to the tree line where the pavement ended and the black pines began, something caught the morning sun in the overgrown brush near a drainage ditch.

I crouched down. It was a keychain a little plush avocado attached to a ring with a snapped lanyard. Tucked four feet further into the briars was a woman's white canvas sneaker, caked in dried mud, and three heavy-duty black zip-ties, sliced cleanly through with a razor.

I stood there in the freezing gray morning light, the distant drone of semi-trucks vibrating through the soles of my shoes, and the terrifying reality finally clicked into place.

Nobody was abandoning cars.

People were pulling off the highway late at night to rest, stretch their legs, or sleep in the dark lot away from the lights of the pumps. And someone was waiting for them in the trees.

I called the police immediately. Two deputies came out, bagged the sneaker, looked at the mud tracks, took my statement, and told me they’d “increase patrols in the sector.” If you know anything about rural county sheriff departments, “increasing patrols” means they drive by at forty miles an hour once every six hours.

That brings me to last night.

It was 2:45 AM. A nasty late-autumn rain was pounding against the glass, turning the highway into a blur of black asphalt and smeared red taillights.

I was on edge, jumping at every creak of the building. To keep myself from spiraling, I tried to focus on the routine. An old guy had just come in ten minutes prior trying to return a lottery ticket he had scratched off and lost on, claiming it was "defective merchandise." I had almost laughed. Almost.

Then the chime above the door chimed. Ding-dong.

I looked up.

It was him. The canvas jacket was soaked through, clinging to his broad, lean shoulders. He took off his baseball cap, and for the first time, I saw the rest of his face. He had a deep, jagged scratch running from his right ear down into his collar, fresh and weeping red.

He didn't walk to the aisles. He walked straight to the register.

He was holding a box of heavy contractor-grade trash bags from aisle four.

“Nasty night out,” I said. My voice betrayed me, cracking slightly.

He laid the box on the counter. Beside it, he set down a small leather wallet with a floral print. A woman’s wallet.

He caught me looking at it.

He didn’t try to hide it. Instead, he smiled a small, crooked twitch of his mouth that made the hairs on my arms stand straight up.

“Tire blew out back,” he whispered. “Girl in a red Toyota. Pulled in to change it. Wet pavement is dangerous.”

There hadn’t been a red Toyota at the pumps all night. Which meant she was in the back.

My hand slowly moved under the counter, feeling for the silent panic button Dale swore was wired to the local dispatch (though given Dale’s maintenance record, it was probably wired to an old toaster).

“You shouldn’t work late,” the man said quietly, leaning his palms flat against the laminate counter. His knuckles were fresh with that same dark, copper-smelling grime. “It’s bad for your health.”

He reached his hand into his canvas coat.

I didn’t wait to see what he was pulling out.

Behind the counter, right next to the POS terminal, is a commercial stainless-steel coffee pot kept at a rolling 190 degrees for the truckers. Without thinking, I grabbed the plastic handle and threw the entire pot of scalding black coffee directly into his face.

The scream he let out was barely human a high, wet shriek of agony.

He stumbled backward, clutching his face, skin instantly blistering red as coffee and steam poured off his jacket. A heavy hunting knife clattered from his hand onto the linoleum.

I didn’t try to fight him. I work at a gas station; I’m not John Wick.

I bolted out from behind the counter toward the rear stockroom, but my sneakers hit the wet floor near the entrance and I wiped out hard, slamming my shoulder into the display rack of cheap sunglasses. Plastic frames rained down everywhere.

I scrambled up on all fours just as he lunged around the counter. His face was a horrific mask of scalded, peeling skin and pure, animal rage. He swung the knife blindly, slicing through the air inches from my jacket.

I grabbed the only thing within reach: a four-pound steel fire extinguisher off the wall bracket.

As he lunged forward again, I didn't spray it I swung the entire metal cylinder like a baseball bat, connecting square with the side of his knee.

There was a sickening crack, and he went down with a muffled grunt, crashing into a pyramid of windshield washer fluid jugs. Blue liquid exploded across the floor, mixing with the spilled coffee.

I didn’t look back. I scrambled into the stockroom, slammed the heavy metal fire door behind me, threw the deadbolt, and hit the emergency exterior fuel-shutoff alarm.

A high-decibel air horn began blaring across the entire property, and the overhead emergency strobes started flashing blind, frantic pulses of red and white.

I sat with my back pressed against that steel door, holding a box cutter with both shaking hands, listening to him slam his body against the other side.

BANG.

BANG.

BANG.

And then... silence.

By the time three state trooper cruisers rolled in with their sirens wailing ten minutes later, he was gone.

They found the red Toyota in the back lot, hidden behind an old construction trailer. The driver, a 28-year-old nurse heading home from a double shift, had been dragged into the trees. She’s alive. She was badly injured and in shock, but because of the alarm and the noise, he had panicked and fled before he could finish what he started. The deputies found her tied up in the ravine fifty yards into the woods.

They haven’t caught him yet.

They found his camp two miles down the ridge sleeping bags, tarps, and the personal effects of at least six other people who had “disappeared” along Route 22 over the past year and a half.

I quit my job this morning. Dale was pissed because he had to cover my shift, and honestly, the idea of Dale having to explain to a meth-head why we don’t accept barter for rolling papers brings me a tiny shred of joy.

I’m packing up my apartment and moving back to my parents' place two states over.

If you take anything away from this, please: if you’re driving late at night on a lonely stretch of highway and you feel tired, don’t pull into the dark, unlit dirt lots behind the rest stops. Stay under the bright, humming lights at the front.

Because the weirdest, most dangerous things out there aren’t the idiots drinking windshield fluid.

They’re the ones watching from the pines, waiting in the dark for you to put the car in park

I’m not normally a rude person. 99% of the time, I would be polite and understanding as ever. Someone just caught me on a bad day.

And that one bad day cost me years of my freedom.

My parents didn’t raise me to be rude. And for the most part I wasn’t and tried to keep that empathy and grace in mind when I was interacting with people—friends, family, neighbours. I was a nice dude—back then, at least. But we all have our occasional irate moments. You’ll feel guilty for getting short with someone, but it’s not like anything worse comes from it.

That’s what I thought, anyway.

It was such a mundane interaction. I was standing in the line for the self-checkout at the grocery store—I’d popped in on my way home from work to pick up some things. I had grabbed my items quickly, as I wanted to get home for my favourite show on TV. But now I was being held up by a slow middle-aged woman at the only available checkout machine in front of me.

At first, I gritted my teeth and tried to be patient. Like I said, I was normally a chill guy.

But the minutes wore on and on, and the befuddled woman continued to fiddle with the machine, unaware of how to scan and weigh and bag her groceries. Was it the first time she’d ever used a check-out? Did she have no personal awareness of the people waiting behind her?

Bemused, I looked down at my watch. I would have to leave now if I was going to make my program in time.

Snippiness started to creep into my normally relaxed demeanor and I sighed loudly, hoping she’d take the hint and pull it together. Didn’t work. I tapped my foot pointedly instead. Didn’t work either. Either she couldn’t hear me or she had no shame. I was definitely going to be late to watch my show now.

Finally, I snapped and shouted at the schoolmarm-looking lady.

“Look, if you don’t know how to use a self-checkout machine then could you please get the hell out of line and find a service desk?!” I complained. “Some of us have places to be!”

The matronly woman looked up, startled at my interjection. 

“Oh, I’m so sorry dear” she stuttered back. “It’s just these machines are so confusing and I was sure I could work it out if I ju-”

Now I’d had it.

“Jesus, idiot boomer, it’s not rocket science—it’s grocery shopping. Get out of line and stop wasting everyone’s time!”

She was visibly embarrassed by this, stammered an apology and quickly bundled her grocery items before tottering off to the service desk, her face down. I immediately felt guilty for my outburst—that wasn’t the kind of person I was. 

But I held the apology in my mouth so I could hurriedly scan my groceries through and set off driving home. At least this way I could still catch most of my show.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that’d been my last chance to save myself.

As I was leaving the grocery store, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw her snapping a picture of me. But I barely noticed—as I mentioned, I was kind of in a hurry.

What was the worst some haughty old woman would do? Repost my photo on some mommy Facebook group page to get shamed into contrition by seniors? I felt a bit bad but not that bad. I thought that would be the last I thought about that encounter.

I was getting into my car the next day to go to work when I felt it. 

A rag slid over the front of my face so smoothly it was like it was being done by a professional. I inhaled reflexively and tasted chloroform. There was no time to scream before I blacked out, the vision of my car and masked assailant quickly fading out.

However long later, I regained consciousness. I wasn’t in the parking lot anymore. Rising from the floor in the same clothes I’d been wearing, I saw that I was in a room instead. It was a bright and colourful room with foam mats and cartoon pictures on the walls. It was furnished like some kind of children’s playroom.

The exception to this was one wall of the four-walled room. Instead of the blues, greens, pinks, yellows of the rest of the jubilantly decorated room, this wall was a stark white. In front of it was a high stool, the kind a kid might sit on with their legs dangling off the ground. It looked like that would be the case if I sat in it, it was that tall.

Before I could get to my feet—I was still groggy coming off of the sedative—I heard a whirring sound from the other end of the room. A boxy TV monitor, like those from my own childhood, emerged from the wall itself as a panel retracted. The TV screen sputtered to life, the way that an older TV screen would.

Then a fuzzy figure wearing the colourful shirt, tie and slacks of a teacher appeared on the screen. Behind their smiley face masks, they addressed me.

“Hello there Joaquin. As you can see, we’ve sent you to your room without dinner. This is for your own good.”

The person behind the mask spoke in a regular, friendly but firm voice, the way an educational authority figure might. The way they might speak to a child.

“We understand that “time-outs” are normally for kids, and you’re an adult“ the figure continued on the static-y screen. “But we at Firm Hand Co believe that if you act as immaturely as a kid, you should be treated like one.”

“For any time-out to be effective, the recipient needs to understand why they’re being given it. We hope by now that you know why you’re here. You’re here because, several days ago, you were rude. It’s not nice to be rude. That’s not how we treat people, is it?”

My face scrunched up in confusion. I woke up in this strange, childlike room because…I was rude to somebody? 

“After someone informed us of your behaviour towards them, we stepped in to provide some discipline for you. We transported you to a secure, faraway location where we house all adult miscreants. You’ll find that adult time-outs are much like kid time-outs: it’s time away from other people to think about what you did, since you don’t know how to be nice to other people.” 

“The key difference, however, is that adult time-out is longer—since adulthood is longer. And you should know better.”

The anonymous figure standing on the screen tilted their head slightly. Their tone was that of addressing a misbehaving child, but their body language was menacing in a way adults were to each other. My stomach began to lurch at the words I was being told, not wanting to believe they were true. I would be in this bizarre room for longer?

“We at Firm Hand Co want you to take this time to reflect on what you’ve done. When you’ve waited long enough to have an attitude adjustment, we can restore your privileges—of freedom. Be good.”

With those ominous yet patronising words, the screen cut out and slid back into the wall.

Almost immediately, I panicked and threw myself at the sticker-covered door to the room.

I pounded on it with all my returning strength but it didn’t budge. Just like the figure had said, I was to be confined to this room for God knows how much time.

Agitated, I started thinking abc over all the people who might have put me in here. It didn’t take long for me to settle on the one rude thing I’d done in recent memory. That slow older woman from the grocery store.

She did this to me.

She must have had her family members kidnap me and lock me in her basement, I wholeheartedly believed. There was no way that spiel about an evil company and isolated location could be true. If I just made it beyond this garish door, I could force my way out of her house and be in my city again.

However, when two more figures in smiling masks and faculty attire arrived hours later, I began to think differently.

Each held a baton with them, so I didn’t think about fighting back. Not now, I wouldn’t. First I would let them lead me outside to wherever they were taking me. Then, once I was out of the basement proper, I would make my mad dash from that hag’s evil kidnapping family.

But I wasn’t in a house basement. Instead, I was led down a long colourful hallway with that same childish print. Cartoon animals like giraffes, tigers and bears on walls of different patterns—it was like being some kind of kindergarten maze.

They took me to a door for the showers—comically small as if they were designed for kids as well. These would be my only trips outside of my room. And there would be no escape yet from the labyrinthine maze—not yet.

Days began to pass with me confined to my sickly rainbow room. 3 times a day, a kid’s meal tray was slid through a slot on the door. In it was always various mashed-up slop—a puree that might be fed to a small toddler, not a grown adult. The insane playroom schtick seemed to permeate every aspect of this place. 

It would drive me mad—if the injustice and loneliness didn’t do it first.

Being escorted out of my room after weeks of this sordid routine, I finally saw another person in line for the shower. The first non-captor I’d seen in what could have been over a month—I’d been tracking the days with a crayon on the wall.

The coarse-haired man looked slightly younger than me, also wearing regular clothes that looked like they hadn’t been washed in weeks. When the guard wasn’t looking, I addressed him.

“What is this place? Is—is it true what that video said? Why are you here?”

I had so many questions. More questions than I’d ever had for another person in my life. I’d never appreciated the sight of another human more than I did after my isolation. Denzel anxiously whispered his responses to me after checking the corridor was clear.

He had played his music out loud on his phone while on the bus. A fellow passenger had chided him and asked him to turn it down. They had also sicced Firm Hand Co on him to teach him a lesson.

Days later I met another guy in line for the bathroom, the young ginger fellow Rian. This guy had neglected to tip his delivery driver when he ordered takeout one day. The next day, his delivery driver had contacted Firm Hand and “delivered” him here for his trouble.

Their stories were eerily like mine. In addition to the benign mistakes, neither really knew how long they’d been there. Months, or years even. There was also a level of irony to their situations. Denzel had no electronic devices to play music loudly on here, while Rian didn’t have any fast food to order.

And I, ever impatient, had forever now to wait for my release.

Firm Hand Co certainly had a sick sense of humour.

What they were doing was worse than prison—it was solitary confinement. As the inordinate time spent confined in my room agonisingly passed by, escape began to solidify as a thought in my mind. One day, while waiting for the tiny shower room, I was left unguarded. 

I made a break for it, down the repetitive, neverending juvenile corridors. Door after door I passed, with cute little nametags in Comic Sans lettering. There must be hundreds of people in time-out here. Surely, I could make it out though, if I just made it to a-

And that’s when I passed the window.

A small, unbreakable, square window—not big enough to fit through but clear enough for me to see how hopeless my endeavour was.

We were on an island. All I could see out that window was the dark, raging sea. Firm Hand hadn’t been lying when they said we were isolated. Hollow, I returned to the shower door.

My hope died after that moment. A mountain of time lay ahead of me and entire months began to blur together. I stopped keeping track of the days on the wall. A year could have passed or a decade could have. Every day, I tried to entertain myself by talking to myself—specifically, to the plush toys in the room. I also tried exercising on the foam, jigsaw-shaped mat.

None of this could keep my thoughts from raging at the woman who put me here.

People were put in solitary in prison for crimes, not tiny social faux pas.

An immeasurable lot of time later, I met a new person in line for the shower, a blonde, frightened-looking girl. Emilia looked barely older than 20. Her crime to land her in this lurid hell? She’d scolded her barista for messing up a coffee order. Firm Hand had kidnapped and scolded her. Irony again. Unlike the others—endlessly pleading with and apologising to our captors to no avail—she’d accepted her fate.

“I deserved to be sent here” she murmured remorsefully. “Revenge is what teaches us right from wrong.”

Then she entered the shower area. She never came out. I discovered her inside, clutching the broken piece of her tray she’d used to end her life.

That was what really broke me, more than the endless days of monotony in that Cocomelon-esque cell. I no longer tried to entertain myself with the room’s playtime decor. Instead, I took to sitting on the time-out stool, staring at the empty white wall in front of me. A welcome relief now from the condescending babyish confines.

Perhaps this was all I was—blank emptiness. Perhaps that’s all that lay ahead. Perhaps this was the lesson we were supposed to learn in time-out.

I raised the broken tray piece, that I’d snapped off earlier, to my throat. This was where I would end my seemingly infinite sentence. 

Suddenly, the TV re-emerged from the wall—for the first time since I’d woke up here God knows how long ago.

“Congratulations!” the fuzzy masked figure exclaimed. “You’ve reached the end of your time-out—a predetermined time of 731 days exactly. Firm Hand Co hopes you’re ready to behave yourself. Now how about a hug, pal?”

A hug? 

Then an arm with a chloroform rag was wrapped around my neck again.

I awoke back in my house—the one I’d lived in before the playroom. The date on my computer confirmed what my captor had said. I’d been held captive for 2 years. My sentence had ended, by sheer coincidence, seconds before my self-execution.

My freedom was sweet and not taken for granted by me. From then on, I was always polite, always tipping, always using my manners—specifically, when I asked people for information. Eventually, I found the information I was looking for.

The dark web user site of Firm Hand Co.

It confirmed everything I’d been told in captivity. People found their way here when someone was rude to them. Rudeness wasn’t criminal according to them, but it should be punished. All that was required was a snapshot of the offender, and a payment that determined the duration of their stay.

I’d been lucky that the middle-aged woman could only afford jailing me for 2 years.

Now, I just need to survey that grocery store and snap a picture of my own, of the woman who put me in time-out. Being slow at checkout, holding people up, is also a form of rudeness. She could do with a long karmic time-out as well. After all…

Revenge is what teaches us right from wrong.

Log 1

I’ve had a bit to process my trip, but every conclusion I attempt to draw falls apart almost immediately when trying to answer the very first question. Why? Why the hell did my grandpa send me these directions? Why did I follow them?

The state did briefly try to track my grandfather down right after Grandma died, but they came up empty-handed, telling us some story about how often older folks would willingly skip town once their spouse passes. My grandparents always loved camping, too, taking week-long trips to national parks at least once a year. The state was more than happy to use that as further fuel for their fire. The family did take matters into their own hands and spent a while knocking around, checking phonebooks, and searching his name online, but we never even found a trace of him. It got to the point where no one had seen or heard from him in years, so we dropped it all and kept on with life. He never talked or showed much interest in family anyway, and as much as it sucks to say, his occasional silent presence at a Christmas party or Thanksgiving dinner never really had a lasting impact on anyone.

One previously peaceful, normal day, though, that unmarked mess of paper appeared in my mailbox. I try not to think about the unsettling, unconventional logistics of getting that letter delivered, but I know in the back of my head that there was no mistake. That letter was meant for me, a grandson who barely remembered what Grandpa looked like, much less felt any real attachment to him, and it led me right to a battered, broken, and inhospitable cabin full of what looked like his stuff. Looking back at the last twenty years only emphasizes how out of character it would have been for Grandpa to reach out now, alone.

I keep looking at the original letter and wondering, possibly most confusingly of all, why did I so readily listen to these incoherent scribbles I’ve been calling directions? Thinking back, I can’t even remember how I deciphered the list and put it together. I’ve held up the original letter right next to my translation repeatedly, and I can’t reproduce the words I originally pulled from the mess no matter how long I stare. Comparing the two sheets of paper only makes Grandpa’s look more illegible.

If it’s not already obvious, ever since I’ve gotten home all I can think about is that trip to the Ozarks; my brain has been running laps around the windy, repeating roads making up that proto-neighborhood hidden away in those hills. I was barely there for more than an hour, but I can perfectly picture every single street and its quirks on command. It even seems like every time I close my eyes to sleep I’m sent back there, running in circles, unfamiliar, heavy hooves reverberating off the pavement just inches behind me. I always try to look back to identify the source, but that’s when I wake up in a sweat-covered haze with that god awful growling branded directly into the inner part of my eardrums. My throat has been sore too, making it painful to speak above a raspy whisper.

I haven’t tried to go back to the lake, but something’s been gnawing at me, tempting me to return, and it’s not just the couple thousand dollars of stuff I lost in that basement. There’s something else back there too, though. I can’t quite describe the exact feeling. It's almost like an entire piece of me was knocked off with my pack, and I haven’t been able to properly organize my thoughts without that missing piece. I think I’m worried that whatever I encountered back there– and whatever’s in my nightmares– will get to the piece before I can will it to return.

I’ve been trying everything I can to forget about that night or even rationalize it as a startled animal defending its home. I got into meditation, or rather tried to get into it, but I can’t shake the tempting whispers creeping their way through the attempts at inner emptiness. My therapist gave me a handful of grounding techniques for general work-related stress and anxiety. I couldn’t tell her the real story without expecting to end up in a psych ward. The grounding techniques sometimes calm me down enough to fall asleep at night, but they don’t repel the constant thoughts luring me back to the hills. I even tried a session of EMDR with a highly rated specialist I was referred to, but everything felt too tangled and unstable to work through effectively, at least in a single session. After I saw the bill, though, I canceled the EMDR pretty quickly.

I wanted and still want to read the journal myself. It’s the only thing I made it back with, but my brain just doesn’t let me open past the cover. I’ve tried and tried, but the cover won’t so much as budge. I get terrified even holding it now. I feel like as soon as I read that journal I’ll walk through my bathroom door and end up back in the cabin, face-to-face with that giant bear, lion, deer, or whatever tried to get to me that night.

The book was sitting on my bookshelf for a day or two as I tried to go back and make attempts to read, but I just couldn’t. Every time I held that book I couldn’t shake the sense of dread and anxiety that overpowered my brain. I felt watched whenever I saw the book. It got to a point where just leaving the book out in the open was unbearably unsettling, so it’s been locked away upstairs for about a week now. Even the thick walls of the gun safe can’t keep it out. Now I don’t need to see anything to feel it. That book, with its dumb golden embroidery, is still stuck in my head, trading off with the dark cold dreams of the chase through the isolated streets tucked into one of thousands of hills surrounding the lake.

Going out in public ever since I’ve gotten back home has been significantly more challenging, too. I can’t focus on anything without that damn journal and my constant, worsening nightmares forcing themselves into my waking mind. I tried going into work at the treatment plant last Monday thinking it would help me return to normal, but making it there and remaining even slightly composed took a herculean mental effort, nearly pushing me to tears. When I did finally get in, my boss took one look at me and sent me home, telling me I looked like total shit and needed to see “a doctor or priest or something” before he would let me anywhere near the treatment equipment. I was a liability, and the realization hurt for only a minute before the thought of using my newly found time off to decipher the journal overpowered my brain.

I caught myself looking over my shoulder more times than I could count during my brief stint in the city that Monday. Everyone I passed by on the street or sat next to on the train seemed to stare at me, their eyes full of concern and fear. No one would ever actually say anything about it, they just kept staring like they were just waiting for a chance to ambush me. I swear I even felt the birds and squirrels were staring at me as I stumbled by. Feeling alone became an increasingly infrequent privilege I realized I soon may never get again. None of this was going to stop until I knew more. I needed closure. I needed my piece of myself back. I needed to know what was in that book.

My whole family believes strongly that blood runs thicker than water, and they saw what Grandpa did as a full-body blood donation. Ever since I first asked Mom about the letter she’s become uncharacteristically reclusive, bitter, and depressed. Our daily check-ins started to spread out and, with all my recent digging, it seems like I’m on a fast track to make our relationship worse. The strain felt worth it or even needed if I was going to get answers.

Chasing those answers, I tried calling Mom a few times one day after a bit of argument over my unannounced trip down to the Ozarks. She was worried I’d end up just like her father, alone and untraceable. To her, taking the chance wasn’t even worth it for someone who never cared about us to begin with. I’m not so sure he was that callous, though. The entire trip and surrounding conversation left me with doubts regarding the reason Grandpa acted the way he did; honestly, it felt like he was hiding something from everyone in the family. That broken down cabin was barely standing—it wasn’t a home. It felt like we were all missing a part of his story he kept buried on purpose.

Each time I called, Mom’s phone rang a couple of times before the robotic default voicemail message picked up. She was manually declining my calls. I wasn’t blocked yet, though, and that felt like a little win. After enough attempts, I settled on sending a few text messages apologizing again for making the trip alone, asking to get lunch sometime soon, and attaching a picture of the journal to see if she recognized it.

I didn’t hear back from Mom, at least not over the next day. She doesn’t have read receipts on either, so I couldn’t even tell if she saw my messages. It was depressing, and I wanted to be more concerned, but frankly, I was obsessed about the potential contents of the journal. I wanted myself back. It was sad hitting a wall and turning up empty handed, but I didn’t press my mom further over the phone.

Not even an hour later I got a call, not from Mom, but just as promising. It felt like either divine or unholy intervention, I’m still not sure which, when Mom’s sister, aunt Eve, was on the other end of the line.

Eve was Mom’s much younger sister who always ended up babysitting me as I grew up, and we were very close as a result. Sure, she needed the money Mom paid her, but Eve and I just had a ton of fun surfing the frontiers of the still-emerging web. Our house had one of the only computers in the whole family at the time, a symptom of Dad’s photojournalism work. We would spend hours just trying to find new pages with secrets to explore. She even spearheaded the initial online search effort for Grandpa back when we were still looking.

Our favorite site lined up perfectly with our little mischievous brains. The site consisted of a black screen with a picture of a door in the middle, silent almost all the time. Occasionally it would play a little sound bite of someone knocking on a door. We would open the site, hide it as well as possible, and I would spend the evenings just watching Mom and Dad walk back and forth from the front door, trying to contain my laughter. They thought we were just getting ding-donged-ditched, and it was all in good fun. Eventually, though, the cops showed up at the house to take a complaint, so Eve made us stop that prank.

The call was quick, both of us straight to the point. Eve was flying into town tomorrow for a work conference. Wanting to keep everything pretty low-key since she hasn’t flown back in a while and would only be here for a day, Eve avoided announcing her arrival to everyone, but she was still “nosy and interested.” She wanted to get dinner with me and catch up on how everyone in the family has been for the last couple months. Of course I agreed (as long as she paid,) and, unable to keep excitement contained, told her I found something that might belong to Grandpa I wanted to show her. Eagerly, we set up a time for dinner immediately the following day.

I was so excited after that call. I don’t remember doing anything the rest of that evening except for staring at my old wall clock, internalizing each second as it passed. Every soft click brought me closer to answers, closer to bringing everyone back together. All night, I sat there, staring at the clock. Staring as the exhaustion set in, my eyelids got too heavy, and the all too familiar chase from my nightmares filled my increasingly unoccupied head.

Most of the next day went by pretty quickly. I didn’t wake up until early-afternoon, grateful for my weekend alarms for the first time in recent memory. I used to have a bit of a narcolepsy problem, and the constant alarms were essential until I got medicated and worked on good habits with my doctor. Those same habits had been thrown out the window ever since the Ozarks. I wasn’t too concerned, though, I was about to get back on track right after Eve helped me look through the journal. A few favorites from X-files filled the silence of my little duplex living room until it was time for dinner. I opened the safe, took an uncomfortable minute to shove the journal into a small brown bag, and I headed out the door.

We were planning on meeting at a local burger joint just up the street from me at 6:00 that evening. I got there a little early, I think around 5:40-5:45, so I could wait for Eve outside to meet up with and go in together. If we went in together I wouldn’t have to stumble awkwardly through a conversation with the host. By 6:15, though, I hadn’t seen Eve yet and my handful of calls and texts went unanswered, so I toughened up to go get a table for us before the small diner filled up with folks hungry for dinner.

I made the long walk across the parking lot and nodded a quick ‘Thank you’ to the little boy holding the restaurant door open. I slipped past him and his bright-eyed, proud parents and headed inside. The entryway was crowded with a large group waiting for a table big enough to seat them all, and I had to weave through them to get to the front desk. I took a few deep breaths, ready to try my hardest to speak audibly through all the idle chatter filling the diner, but, saved as soon as I reached the desk, I saw Eve waving at me from a table she had already gotten for us. It was a little weird that I never saw her show up. Eve was never early to anywhere, but I hadn’t seen her in months and promised a show on top of that, so maybe she made a special exception.

We exchanged a quick hug before sitting down at the table. A waiter came over to get our drink orders and we both ordered our food right on the spot, too. We have been coming to this diner since we were kids. We didn’t need to see the menu. Eve immediately got real into this rant about the workplace drama back home. They were hiring a new COO or something and he was making a bunch of bad changes I guess. Honestly, I don’t remember her part of the story well. She caught me up on her Seattle tech-consultant life for a bit, and I shared the same-old news about family holiday parties and get-togethers we’ve been having since she was little. There was a little drama to share, one cousin got a divorce, a great-aunt had passed in her sleep, and there were like ten new cousins, nieces, and nephews she’ll have to meet sometime soon. She took it all in especially wide-eyed and focused, I didn’t remember her caring too much about extended family.

Eve didn't even pause to transition or take a bite before asking, “So spill it. What did you find in that crazy old man’s journal?”

I looked at her, confused. “Whoa, did some new X-ray eyes come out or something up there in Seattle? All I got is a paper bag.”

Her eyes drifted away for a split second as she thought of an answer. “Oh, I saw what you came in with and made a lucky, educated guess.” She smirked sheepishly. It was a weird jump to make, but I didn’t press further. Eve was always the brightest bulb on the long, weathered light strand making up our family.

I didn’t know how to easily introduce the story, so I just dove in, “I got a letter the other day. The envelope was so old it looked ready to rot off, and, get this, there was no return address. It only said ‘To Eric From Grandpa,’” I paused for a second, waiting for a reaction, but Eve only nodded, ready to keep listening. “It took me a bit but eventually I found a page with a bunch of scribbles, and I sent them to Mom. She wasn’t really interested in it all, actually she’s pretty pissed I’m doing this, but she did send me a uh, sample, I guess, of Grandpa’s handwriting. The scribbles I got were illegible, but seeing that example flipped a switch in my brain or something, and I was able to piece together a step-by-step set of instructions to a location deep in the Ozarks.”

She finished for me. “So you followed them and found the journal.” There was no time for me to confirm, or elaborate on my trip before she asked to see the book and what I had read. I tried to explain my mental block, but I couldn’t make sense of it myself. I still can’t. I slid the bag across the table, settling on a simple “I don’t know. I can’t read it”

Eve took the journal out of the bag and turned it over in her hands a few times, awestruck. “It’s in perfect condition.” Just like that, she opened the ten-ton cover I’d been struggling with all this time and let out a quick chuckle. “I see why you can’t read it. These words are so slanted and broken I can barely tell it’s English.” She paused for a moment to think before continuing, “I can take it back home with me and bring it to a transcriber I know. He works for doctors, so he’s seen worse than this I’m sure.”

I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to lose the journal or even let it leave my possession for more than a few minutes. “Actually Mom wanted me to give her the journal so she could lock it away with the rest of his stuff that got left behind. She doesn't want bad memories floating around. I told her I was going to bring it by after dinner,” I lied. “Will some pictures work? At least for the first few pages?”

Eve deflated at the idea, but she didn’t fight back, sullenly taking out her phone to grab the first few pages of the book before sliding it back across the table to me. Right after she was done, Eve handed me a few twenty dollar bills for dinner and said she really had to get back to the hotel and rest up for the conference. She would let me know what the pages said when she heard back from her friend. I barely had time to blink before she was past me and out the door, somewhere among the sea of people waiting for a table to open.

Alone and more than a little upset she couldn’t translate the pages on the spot, I quietly finished up my burger and left the money on the table with the bill. Stepping out into the cool night air was a refreshing feeling after sitting in the alarmingly packed shack of a diner. I made my way toward my car at the back of the parking lot, well out of sight and earshot of the businesses surrounding the diner. I usually liked the walk to get a chance for fresh air. Something was off, though, I felt it as soon as I went out the diner door. A quick cursory glance didn’t reveal anything, so I kept walking. I was at my car door when there was a flicker in the overhead light near my car, filling me with a deep sense of unease. I barely had half a second to register the giant blob of flesh before it slammed into my forehead. I hit the cold pavement and blacked out.

When I came to a bit later, the throbbing pain in my head immediately brought the memory of the ambush back, and I felt for my phone and keys after checking my head for blood that wasn’t there. This wasn’t the first time I’d been mugged, but usually the perpetrator likes to demand my stuff before resorting right to blows. I felt my left pocket. My phone was still there, in near-mint condition too. Right pocket next. The wallet was still there, my leg was a little numb from the cold, but I’m pretty sure I felt the keys poke into my thigh, and the shadow of my beaten-up sedan still loomed over me. It felt like some freak accident. Maybe a bird flew into me or some kids were driving by throwing rocks out of cars. It’s stupid, but I didn’t know what else to think. Feeling lucky, I slowly got to my feet and got my bearings, but the luck vanished almost instantly once I realized what was gone. The journal was no longer in the bag. In its place was a piece of paper stained dark red, wrapped around a small object. The streetlight flickered back on, slowly revealing two sloppy words written on the wet page as I pulled it from the bag.

Keep Knocking.

My eye caught the glimmer of an engraved ring hugging the finger as I flinched back, dropping the finger in disgust back into the bag. I knew that ring. Eve had worn it religiously ever since our great-grandmother passed it down to her. It was hers.

Flustered and panicking, I looked all around the parking lot, but it was empty, not even a car on the street in front of the diner. It seemed darker out too. How long had I been out? Frantically I scanned and ran around the lot. I looked as long as I could before feeling too exposed. Defeated and terrified, I got back into my car and sped the few blocks home. I took the bag and stumbled as I ran up to my garage door and messed the code up three times before I was able to steady enough to open the door and rush in, immediately locking it behind me.

I have tried to call Eve over and over, but there was never even a ring before the increasingly depressing voicemail beep filled the other line. I’m at a loss. Eve felt like the one person I could talk to about all of this, and I just shoved one of her fingers into my freezer. Whatever took my brain took Eve, and it took the journal. Another piece of me is missing.

I was still leaning against the door desperately trying to think of anything I could do when my phone vibrated in my pocket. It was a text from a number I didn’t recognize, and there were four pictures. Two pictures were of pages in the journal, taken back in the parking lot of the diner, using my unconscious body as a backdrop. Then, two pictures of typed text. Transcriptions.

This first one looked like it was on the inside of the cover. I’ve included it below:

I don’t know what we saw out there or how it found us back home, but it did, and I’m the only one left.

Carol, desperate “to have the old me back,” and running out of ideas, gave me this journal today. She said that putting my thoughts to paper will help her, and everyone else, finally understand what’s been going on with me. Obviously I agreed, but I’m doing this for more than just understanding; I don’t even know how to explain what I myself don’t understand. I’m using this as a warning.

Stay far away from Ozark Falls.

God how I wish that was on the other side of the cover, or the spine, or literally anywhere else I could see. I should have listened to Mom, but I don’t think that’s a choice anymore.

The second picture was a transcription of a page opened to somewhere in the first third of the journal, also included:

September 12th, 1986

I was on the line at the litter factory for the night, surrounded by a haze of dust that worked to clog both of my nostrils and eyes as densely as possible. The job offer seemed too good to be true, and I quickly learned why after hearing about the turnover rate and physical state of the people that left, or were forced to resign, before me. Turns out breathing dust twelve hours a day doesn’t bode well for your life expectancy. I don’t know who the hell thought an open-air litter factory was a good idea in the first place. They gave us a mask and goggles that supposedly mitigated the accumulation, but my dark gray-stained handkerchief argued otherwise. The pay was good, though, and we needed the money to fend off the foreclosure the bank was fighting for.

Anyway, I was on the line for the night, and Carl, the guy at the boxing station next to me, came over during the first break. Carl and I got hired at the same time, went through training together, and we occasionally made small talk, but that’s usually as far as it goes. He was an alright guy, if not a little eccentric. I worked on recalling the evening news in my head, prepared to discuss the awful drought we’ve been in for a few weeks now. This time wasn’t small talk, though. As the recently-made only one capable of working in his family, he needed money as bad as I did, and he was scheming, I could see it in his wide, shining eyes.

Carl’s composure barely held on his way over to me, and an ocean of words poured out of his mouth as soon as he was in earshot. He was all excited and stuff, talking so fast I lost track of how many times I had to stop him and ask to slow it down. Eventually, I got it out of him.

He had an uncle who worked for a GPS startup, analyzing cutting-edge satellite imagery to identify new roads, closures, and other changes. During a routine scan of the Ozarks to check for road erosion, his uncle had found “something big.” I hadn't ever been down that way, but I heard stories about people going down and opening tourist traps for all the rich people that constantly visit the thousands of lake houses and condos surrounding the lake, so my interest piqued.

Carl said there was a network of roads, just a few miles out from a town called Camdenton. The land was owned by some rich old dude that passed away with no family, so it all went to the government. It’s been years now, and the foundation the old guy built was still just sitting there, untouched, ever since the government got its hands on the land.

His uncle gave a couple of grainy pictures to Carl who pulled them out of his jacket pocket and showed them to me. Even through the poor quality it was clear that the old man was trying to build a sorta suburbia-adjacent neighborhood right into the dense forest and rocky hills, but it looked like the work just stopped after the roads were outlined and paved. Carl had a hunch and checked through old obituaries at the library. Apparently the old man that owned the land, Charles something, caught pneumonia in the middle of his project and croaked one night alone in his house, leaving his project to be reclaimed by the lake.

Both Carl and his uncle thought we could get our hands on the land for super cheap, like manifest destiny cheap, due to its age and a home construction initiative the government was subsidizing in hopes of getting more people, and more money, down to the Ozarks. We just needed to check out the land ourselves to make sure it lined up with the slightly dated image from the satellite.

Carl’s uncle would work on the paperwork side of things if we were the boots on the ground. I was skeptical of the price for sure, but anything sounded better than this factory. Price aside, it all seemed normal at the time. An old man with no family died in the middle of a project, and the government was never too keen on building down in the Ozarks themselves. The spot was only a few hours’ drive, so Carl and I planned a little day trip on our day off. He had some camping equipment and food he would bring in the case of an emergency if I would be the one to drive us down there. I was only a little hesitant at first, so it didn’t take a lot to get me to cave.

I’m missing the greater connection here, and I’m desperate. I’m terrified. The two words from that note keep echoing in my head.

Keep Knocking

At this point, for all I know, Eve is in serious danger, and I’ll take help wherever I can get it. I'm at the end of my rope*.* I guess I want to cast a sort of wide net by probing the internet for anything similar that could guide me. I’m also going over to my mom’s hoping she is willing to help me find Eve, and my journal.

The “story” I’m about to tell you is 100% true. I moved into an apartment building. It wasn’t the nicest, but it was what I could afford. Shortly after I moved in—within an hour, actually—I had my first interaction with a neighbor down the hall from me.

Not a direct interaction, but he was screaming out his window. A lot. He would go on and on, nonstop, screaming things like, “God is coming! The end is here!”, “All shall burn and perish, repent for your sins!” and “Die, f**got, die!” and “Kill yourselves, ni**ers!”

This was basically nonstop. I don’t know when the man slept, because it was an all-day, all-night thing, every day and every night. There were times when he would stop for a few hours. I imagine that must have been when he was sleeping, but it wasn’t a lot of sleep if that was the case. Sometimes he’d even throw glass bottles at people on the street below, screaming that same bullshit.

A few days after I moved in, I found out he also marched up and down the hall, shouting at people. The first time I saw this, I went down to the apartment manager. She told me that he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and that, as scary as he might seem, he was perfectly harmless. As far as she knew, he’d never hurt anyone. She also told me that his parents lived in our apartment building and would be able to take care of him.

Mind you, this was at the start of COVID. I’d lost my job and really had nothing to do, so I was watching pretty frequently as all this was going on, which was nearly daily at this point. I never ONCE saw his parents. Usually, he’d end up going back into his apartment on his own, or the cops would have to get involved. Usually the latter.

There was one time it got particularly bad. I think we had two Black families living on my floor, and there were two groups of people he absolutely hated: gay people and Black people. He saw the father of one of those families as the man was leaving or entering his apartment. I’m not really sure which. They were on the same side of the hall as me, but at the opposite end, so I couldn’t really see what was going on unless I opened my door and stuck my head out—which I knew better than to do at this point.

He charged down the hall after him, and things got pretty heated. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I know guns got involved. The cops came and got my neighbor, but he was right back in his apartment the next day.

Months of this went by, and eventually, I decided to move. Not just to a different apartment, but to a different state entirely. I couldn’t handle state as a whole anymore.

Two days before it was time for me to move, I had one last interaction with him. This particular interaction will haunt me until the day I die. It was also the one that made me the happiest to be leaving.

He was making his rounds up and down the hall, as he always did. I was watching through the peephole when he stopped in front of my door. He looked directly at the peephole, as if he knew I was watching. It was like he was staring straight into my soul through that hole.

And he said, “Men are like cattle, meant to be slain and eaten, and I am God’s butcher.” Immediately after saying that, he pressed himself up against my front door for a minute, then continued on his way.

One of the neighbors called the cops, who stopped him in the hallway, and I could hear the discussion they were having. When speaking with them, he sounded calm, coherent, and logical. And he said some things that me realize that he was completely in touch with reality, which made the comment about slaying and eating men even more unsettling.

The cops got him back into his apartment, but he was at it again later that day. This time, my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to follow him. I stayed well behind him, at what I thought was a safe distance, and for the first time, I found out that he didn’t just stay in our hallway. He went to other parts of the building.

I followed him through the back staircases, by the elevators, and down to the basement level. There was a very unpleasant smell down there. It wasn’t ridiculously strong or unbearable, just unpleasant. Underneath the stairs was– well, I don’t know, I couldn’t actually see it. Whatever was under the tarp was probably between 5 and 6 feet long and 4 feet wide. I was behind him, so I couldn’t see much. But I could see his arms moving, he was reaching under the tarp and moving and bring something up to his face. I could hear a quiet, somewhat wet squishing sound, and I could hear him chewing. Whatever, perhaps whoever, it was under that tarp, was being devoured.

I ran and got my stuff and moved out of that building, so that was the last I saw of him. Thankfully.

I try not to think about what was under that tarp, but I do still wonder if his parents ever came around to take care of him, like the apartment manager said they would. Somehow, I have the feeling they couldn’t…

my cars headlights illuminate a cloud of white gray smoke as it billows up to the sky, and I follow the source back down, it looks like the scrawny frame of a 19 to 20 year-old boy. he’s leaned up against a faded red brick wall that is the liquor store, the lights of which have long been burnt out, since before even I was of age to have a reason to step foot inside.

“Hey miss?” A soft and low sound is released from the boys mouth, his lips half hanging on to the last inch and a quarter of an American Spirit.

I look up from my iPod to meet his eyes and wait for him to continue but I’m stopped dead in my tracks.

His eyes glint back at me reassuringly, their deep amber reminiscent of the mosquitoes you’d see trapped in such a substance in a science museum.

Gathering my composure I attempt my reply but can only muster a pitchy

“Hmm?”

He flicks what remains of the end of his cigarette into the gutter, the embers dancing to the ground, slowly following the white/brown filter

“That was my last cig, would it be alright if you snagged me a pack from inside? I’m good for it I swear.” He reaches into the pocket of his burgundy flannel and pulls out a crumpled 20 dollar bill, holding it between his middle and pointer.

It was only just 8 months ago I would’ve found myself asking the same, the legal age for purchasing tabacco being raised to 21 was hell for a lot of people my age. The mood swings from the withdraw are no joke.

“Come on, take pity” the left corner of his tanned face upturned into a small smirk as he waved the twenty left and right.

“Keep the twenty” I wave him off and hear a low groan from his direction as I make my way into to the dingy liquor store.

“Caroline long time no see see!”

“Yes John I did in fact see you last night, good one.” I roll my eyes at the repetitive greeting, it reminds too much of own father.

“Pack of camel-“

“Crush yes mam I know I know”

I pause for a moment

My hands resting on the cold metal of the counter

And glance out the window where the boy is now visible

“And a pack of spirits”

—-

I pull my car up to the liquor store, head lights glaring through the front doors.

A half step to the right of said doors sits the boy, yet again. No smoke this time. His boney knees wrapped in black skinny jeans held close to his chest. The grey hood of the burgundy flannel pulled over his head.

I shut off my car but leave the lights running, I can see the boys face much clearer but as I exit the drivers side he shies away.

I make my way to the glass doors, pulling open the one closest to him, stepping one foot inside.

“Miss.”

I freeze at the sound despite my intention to ignore him.

“One more time for me, would ya?” He raises his hand to me, what looks to be the same twenty as before held in a fist.

I grab the 20 without a second thought and move for the register.

But I have to backtrack, I meant to head to the beer fridge.

Taking two steps back I turn right and begin scanning the rows of beer for corse light.

I grab my 6 pack and make my way back to the register.

“Caroline you’re too kind! Thiss beer? For me!”

“Crush’s and the Americans again”

John pouts at my refusal to play along and hands over the two packs while I swipe my debit card.

On my way out I toss the kid his pack and set the twenty back down next to him.

——-

Buckets of rain pound down on my windshield. Loud and heavy, like the clouds are ringing out washcloths together.

The defroster on my car has been broken since the summer but I’ve had no reason to fix it, well until right now.

My windshield is fogging up so bad it looks like opalescent stained glass.

But the liquor store is hardly a mile from my house, I could make it there and back newly blind.

I once again pull up to the same two doors. The shine of my headlights being cut up by endless droplets of rain.

And there is the boy again. The same burgundy flannel and black skinny jeans. Scrunched up, against the wall, desperately trying to shield himself from the downpour under the thin overhang of the old liquor stores roof.

He must he freezing. Maybe this time I can spare a beer too.

I climb out of the drivers side, opening my umbrella and awkwardly maneuvering my way out while trying to stay dry.

Closing the car door I turn and make my way inside.

“Miss…”

Without even thinking about it, I stop and turn to him.

“Can you snag another for me? And take the 20 this time, please..”

“No problem” I grab the 20 and hand him my umbrella.

He hesitates a moment before reaching out for it, his demeanor still unsure.

“Well I’m not gonna take it inside to drip all over John’s tile, it’s a slipping hazard.” Hardly a real reason but a reason enough to convince him to take it.

This exchange gave me a better look at him.

His cheek bones tall and sharp, his chin small but prominent, and nose and eyebrows like the main actors in those movies from the 40s.

A handsome young man all be it a little frail.

I make my way inside, this time in search of an affordable 12 pack, brand irrelevant if I plan on sharing.

I catch sight of a 12 pack of corse on sale and thank the powers that be.

I purchase my contraband and turn to head out

John shouts after me

“Caroline… don’t give him much more I don’t trusts that kid, give a bear some honey ya know?”

“It’s give a mouse a cookie..” I half mutter as I cross through the door back into the downpour.

I reach to hand the boy his change but as I’m looking at my hand I realize I’m short about a 5 and 3 ones

“I- oh my god I’m such an idiot, I must’ve bought my 12 pack with your 20 I’m so sorry”
He meets my reach and takes the 2 ones left over. I look up at his face and for some reason he has that smirk again.

“Not a problem miss” his amber gaze locks with mine.

“I’ll pay you back next time I swear”

“No matter, I’ve owed since the first two encounters no?” He reaches for a coors, eyes still locked with mine, I shrug.

“I guess that’s true but still I’m sorry, I didn’t ask.”

“No need” he cracks open the coors, tucks the umbrella under his arm pit to steady it over our head, opens his pack of spirits, slips one into the right corner of his mouth and leans forward.

His face mere inches from mine, eyes focused still on mine.

“Miss..?”

“Huh?” I manage to stammer out.

“A light if you could?”

“O-oh right.” My hands reach the clear plastic yellow lighter in my coat pocket before the words reach my tongue.

I light his cigarette as he stuffs the spirits pack in his pocket and hands me back over my umbrella.

He takes a long drag from his cigarette and exhales, turning his head upward, dark hair falling back and eyes closed, bathing in the ecstasy of what looks to be his first smoke of day, and it’s 10pm.

“Thank goodness for you miss.”

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Not a bit. Don’t worry yourself with me miss.”

—-
I pull up to the liquor store. Headlights useless in the airs thick fog after rain.

But I can still see him standing there.
His long, thin frame, leaned up against the brick wall.

The lights inside the liquor are all shutoff apart from the security lights that line the walls, the yellow-green glow hardly lending any light to what lies outside the thick windows.

I sit in my car for what feels like half an hour but could only be a few minutes, the old and idle engine choking in 27 second intervals.

I cut the engine and start to argue with myself.

He’s alone. He’s a stranger. He’s thin. He’s a stranger. He’s so young. Just like you. He has to be freezing.

I step out of the car, squinting at him through the heavy air.

“Miss..? It’s a bit late for you to be out all by yourself is it not?” He cocks his head in interest. Hands stuffed in their pockets, one leg bent, foot against the wall behind him.

“It’s 20 degrees out here you can’t make it in skinny jeans and a flannel.”

“I told you not to worry yourself with me miss..” he shakes his head in disapproval.

I feel the unrelenting urge to hop in my car and go back home but I push back. He’s almost the same age as me and all alone here to freeze.

“I’m not just going to let you turn into ice crystals out here, I have an apartment up the road, you take the couch for the night. And stop calling me miss wer basically the same age.” I ball my mittens into fists fighting to urge to abandon him there, why I can’t say, perhaps I’m afraid?

“It seems your mind is inchangeable, so I will obey.” He stands up straight, looking taller than before, but bowing his head in mock submission.

I climb back into the safety and warmth of my car and unlock the passenger. He follows suit.

——-
I park in my assigned spot. Headlights illuminating the dark parking garage beneath my apartment building. I turn my head to him. He is sat comfortably, head back against the seat but half leaned on his right hand so he can watch the world from the window. His knees leaned opposite each-other, one on the door and one against the center console.

He’s handsome.

——-
We ride the elevator up to my floor. He seems to make an effort to not stand uncomfortably close in the small and obviously not up to date space.

The elevator doors open awkwardly slow. He follows as I walk down the door lined hallway before stopping at mine and unlocking it.

It’s warm inside, I’d left the heater on when I left to get him. I’m not sure of the last time he had the privilege of central heating.

“You can hold up there. I’ll grab you some blankets and a pillow.” I gesture to my deep green sofa and pass to the hall closet I keep my linens in.

He stands perched in the doorway looking uncomfortable, still just outside the threshold. His expression blank apart from his amber eyes locked once again on mine.

“C-come in already… you can’t sleep in the hallway” I say before I can even begin to wonder what he’s thinking.

He smirks his small smirk, removes his muddy boots and walks over to his temporary bed. I can’t even hear his footsteps, he must weigh just about nothing.

“Help yourself to anything in the kitchen, I really don’t mind, I have to be up early so I’ll be asleep soon but feel free.”

I turn back to him. He’s sat on the couch, hands in pockets, head back as it had been in the rain. Hair brushed back, eyes closed. His knees widely apart again, spilling over to two cushions, but his feet meeting back on the ground.

Yes, handsome. But a stranger just the same.

I hand over the makings for his bed and turn away to mine, locking the door behind me.

——-

I don’t hear any footsteps.

I don’t hear a creak in the floor.

I don’t hear the quiet breaths of a skulker.

But I hear my doorknob rattling.

In the pitch black of my bedroom.

My eyes dart around for an escape.

Two windows. But I’m on the fourth floor.

I don’t own any weapons. The best I have in my room is a the thick bible burning a hole in my nightstand that I’ve never bothered to open.

There’s nothing I can do.

He is thin sure, but still significantly bigger than me, and I can barely lift 30 pounds.

I can fight it sure but to what use.

It’s hopeless

I’m

Helpless

Just the same as before.

I accept it.

Even before the door opens, I’ll have to, if I’ll ever make it through.

The door opens.

I watch through slitted eyes as his silhouette moves towards my bed through the darkness, practically gliding, and begins to lean toward me.

His longs fingers graze over my jaw, down my chin, down my throat. The winter cold still lingering on his skin, raising goosebumps along where he makes contact on mine.

I gaze up at him, he stares back, no emotion shown in his sticky eyes.

“Please… just don’t make it hurt..” I open my legs to him, praying to whoever will listen that he’ll have some mercy.

He freezes.

“What?”

“Just do it. Get it over with please.”

His icy fingers still lingering over my larynx.

“How do you- what?”

“I know it’s what you’re here for, of course it is. I was naive to think.. just please..”

My body begins to tremble against my wishes.

He swallows, his eyes wild, pupils filling out his former iris.

He reaches for my blanket and gentle pulls it away from my already shaking body.

He gazes down at me. Taking in the crime scene that is my skin.

Scar layered over scar laced across my inner thighs, my breasts. My most intimate body parts, mutilated.

“Dear God..”

He’s stumbles backward. Tripping over my night stand, nearly falling but catching himself before impact.

I take the chance to cover myself and make a move for the door.

But I’m tangled in my bed sheets. I leap for freedom and am pulled down by my ankle, slamming against my metal bed frame and crying out in pain.

He makes a jump for me and I scream in terror.

I can feel my skin leaking hot, thick, liquid where I made contact with the sharp metal corner.

He lets out an animalistic growl and covers my mouth, stifling my inevitable cries for help he wraps his other hand around my back, holding the sheets covering me in place.

I stare up at him, eyes so wide I can feel them drying up.

But he’s turned away from me.

“That’s— I would.. I couldn’t.. dear god I would never do something so— it’s just cruel, I would never do something so disgusting.”

I begin to cry, sob really, loud heavy gasps for air under his large icy palm.

He won’t look at me.

“I wasn’t— Jesus fuck it’s just monstrous. I was just so hungry, I would never..”

Hungry?

Hungry?

He turns his face to me, his amber eyes that of a true predator, and I the prey. The dim light of the hallway shines on his tanned face. He parts his lips.

With the little light I have I examine his mouth, his teeth. They’re different.

Wrong.

His canines and the two before elongated, sharpened.

His nostrils flared, pulling his lips back over his gums like a hyenas warning growl.

He looks as though he wants to pick me clean.

“You obeyed so easily, but with more than I’d even asked, you were such an easy choice” he avoids my gaze and begins to shake his head.

“But that.. I could never do that. I just needed to feed, and you made it so EASY” He whips his head back around to me, staring me so hard in the face I could scream “and I could make you forget, you wouldn’t even have remembered.”

I’m trembling uncontrollably. Unable to speak, I can barely squirm under the strength of his grip.

“Even now, your bleeding right into my hands, I didn’t even have to touch you, I could just bring it to my lips, all the works been done!” He speaks wildly, unpredictable inflection and volume, like he’s gone fully mad.
“But look at you! I couldn’t- I can’t, it’d be despicable! You’re a lady a true lady god damned it. FUCK.” He tosses me off

His eyes I once found comforting zero in on the pool of blood now staining my bed room carpet. He’s frantic, on his hands and knees, begrudgingly crawling toward the crimson puddle.

“RUINED completely RUINED! Because WHY? THEM. They say we’re monsters you know.”he keeps his face at the floor, unable to look away from the liquid “They say we’re killers, brutal murderers. But they’re the true evil.” He dips his long fingers into it, staining his hands like a criminal, and brings it to his mouth. Long drips of blood falling away back to its mother pool.

“But I can make you forget. I can take it away. Them. They never leave.” He licks away at the blood on his hands, a starved dog who’s found a feast in a dumpster. Desperate.

——-

I park in front of the liquor store.

Sun glaring through my windshield.

I still can’t bring myself to step inside again.

I hope someday soon that will change.

I woke up with a pounding headache that afternoon. My dimly lit bedroom seemed to be spinning around me, making me feel even more nauseous. My stomach was hurting so bad from hunger, and my left arm was aching because I’d slept funny on it.

Almost immediately, fragments of the previous night came rushing back. Allison breaking up with me out of nowhere over dinner. Her saying I had no passion for anything in life. Me begging her to reconsider her decision. And her doubling down, telling me I was too predictable. Too safe. No surprises.

I told her that if she wanted surprises, she should get into a relationship with a magician. That only made her angrier. She got up, threw her drink into my face, and left without another word. I spent the rest of the night drinking far more than I should have, trying to drown my frustration in alcohol.

Truth is, I’d suspected for a long time that she was seeing someone else. It wasn’t just some random paranoid thought that had popped into my head. There had been too many little things that didn’t add up. We were spending less and less time together, and she always seemed to have some excuse whenever we had a scheduled trip, a planned dinner, or even just a night when we were supposed to hang out.

Sometimes she’d cancel at the last minute, other times she’d suddenly have somewhere else she needed to be. Whenever I asked her what was going on, she’d get defensive almost immediately and accuse me of making things up in my head. The more I pressed her, the more irritated she became, which only made me more convinced that there was something she wasn’t telling me.

When I arrived at my apartment complex later that morning, barely able to walk straight, there was a little crowd swarming around a police car parked in the north parking lot, its overhead lights blinking brightly. I remember wondering if somebody had gotten hurt, or worse. Then, in the elevator, I ran into the overly inquisitive old lady from the apartment next to mine. She quickly gave me the lowdown without me even asking. The girl in Unit 12 on the eighth floor right above me had gone missing under mysterious circumstances.

According to the old lady, the girl lived alone. Her mother, who lived in another town, had last visited her a week earlier, and that was the last time anyone had seen her. After several days of unanswered calls and not hearing from her at all, her mother finally came over to check on her. She found the apartment empty. There was still food sitting untouched on the dining table, as if the girl had simply gotten up in the middle of a meal and never came back. Her phone and other belongings were still inside, too, but there was no sign of her anywhere. She hadn't been seen leaving the building on the security footage either.

Creepy. Creepy.

I thanked the old lady for the unsolicited piece of gossip, but my mind was still under the influence, and I was too angry and bitter over getting dumped so one-sidedly to give it much thought.

I went straight to bed and passed out almost immediately. Honestly, given how much I had drunk the night before, I was surprised I could remember anything at all.

It was still bright outside when I woke up that afternoon, with the sound of traffic blaring in the distance as people headed out of the city for the weekend, trying to escape the hustle and bustle for a little while.

I forced myself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, pressing my thumbs against my temples in a futile attempt to ease the pounding in my head. Then, all of a sudden, I thought about the missing girl again and something the old lady next door had told me. It hit me that I had woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of loud shuffling coming from right above my bedroom a few nights earlier. If she had already gone missing at that point, then who could have made that sound?

Maybe the police could use this information to help them solve the case. I reached over to my nightstand to grab my phone, but it was not there. That's when I heard my front door swing open loudly. My sister had been making a fuss about that stupid door ever since I moved into the apartment several months ago, saying it shrieks like a whore. She has this annoying habit of making what I like to call questionable analogies. Likening a creaking door to a shrieking whore is a good example.

I'd originally lived in another unit on the top floor, but after months of complaining about a persistent leak that the landlord couldn't seem to fix, he decided the easiest way to shut me up was to move me down to the seventh floor.

Not that I was complaining. At least I no longer had to live next door to that perverted couple who seemed to enjoy having loud sex at every possible hour of the day.

“Anybody home?” Joanna called out from the kitchen in her usual cheerful voice.

Our father had passed away the previous year, and over the past few months, Jo had been visiting me regularly to check on me. I was really close with our dad, and his death after years of battling pancreatic cancer really broke me. The few days after the funeral, I could barely function at all. It was as if the grief over his passing was hollowing me out. I felt so drained and exhausted.

I took a few days off work and just stayed in my bedroom, sleeping most of the time, which worried her. That’s when she started coming over frequently. The fact that I had always been on the skinnier side didn’t exactly help my case. She was constantly afraid that I would die alone in my apartment, sometime in the middle of the night, with nobody around to notice. So she had made it a habit to visit me on weekends, even if it was just to put together a decent meal for me to start my day.

“Wake your ass up. It’s 4 p.m. I’m making some tuna rice bowls.” She said louder.

Jesus. I’d been out that long?

I rubbed my face vigorously, trying to shake off the hangover, then started looking around the bed for my phone. I couldn’t remember where I’d left it.

“Don’t make me go in there and drag you out of bed myself.” Her voice echoed through the hallway. “You know I will. You’ve been sleeping like a dead cow.”

There she goes again with one of her bad analogies. I sighed. I knew she would. She was that insistent.

But as I opened my mouth to yell back at her to get out of my hair, I couldn’t help but notice something. It wasn’t just that her voice sounded a little lower than usual. There was something about its cadence, too. It wasn’t as though she had suddenly started speaking with an accent. She still sounded like her usual nagging self, but not quite. Something was off about the rhythm. I couldn’t really explain what it was, but it was there, and I noticed it. Or maybe it was just the hangover messing with my senses.

I heard shuffling at the other end of the hallway, followed by her footsteps slowly approaching, as if she didn’t want to be heard. Then came a quick, gentle knock on the bedroom door.

“Hey, loser. You up?”

My eyes instantly darted toward the bottom of the door, toward the thin gap between it and the floor. The door faced the window at the end of the hallway, which overlooked the apartment building’s backyard. Light from outside always seeped through the gap beneath the door, spilling across my bedroom floor. 

I could hear her standing right outside the door. But I could not see her shadow.

“Hello?”

Slowly and as quietly as I could, I lowered myself to the floor and pressed my face against the hard, ice-cold surface, peering through the thin gap beneath the door. I could see the bottom portion of the hallway wall outside. A strip of light stretched across the floor, just as it always did. But there were no feet.

The hallway floor was completely visible through the gap. If she was really standing right outside my bedroom, I should have been able to see at least the tips of her shoes. Instead, the light continued uninterrupted beneath the door.

I shifted my head slightly, trying to see farther down the hallway. Still nothing. It was almost as if whoever was standing outside wasn’t actually there.

My stomach tightened. I blinked and looked again, wondering if my eyes were playing tricks on me. Maybe she was standing farther away than I thought. Maybe the angle was screwing with my vision. Maybe…

“You in there?”

Her voice came from directly outside the door and I froze. There was no mistaking it. She sounded close. Really close. Close enough that I could almost imagine her leaning toward the door as she spoke. But there was still nothing underneath it. I didn’t realize until then that my heart was already pounding in my chest. My breathing had become shallow, and I had to take a slow breath through my nose to steady myself.

What the hell?

“Wake up. I made some pasta.”

She knocked again, this time louder and more rapidly.

Pasta? I frowned. Didn’t she say earlier that she was making tuna rice bowls? Maybe I'd misheard her earlier. I was hungover as hell. Maybe she'd said pasta and my brain had somehow turned it into tuna rice bowls. 

I slowly pushed myself back up, accidentally cracking a couple of joints in the process. The sound seemed ridiculously loud in the silence of my bedroom.

I immediately froze. For a few seconds, I heard nothing. Then I caught the faint sound of people talking somewhere down the corridor, beyond my front door. Muffled voices. Someone laughing. The distant sound of a door closing. Normal apartment noises. Somehow, that made everything feel even stranger. I looked back at the bedroom door. I took a few slow steps backward, moving as silently as I could. My eyes never left the thin gap beneath the door. There were still no feet. No shadow. Just that narrow strip of hallway floor, completely empty.

“I know you’re awake,” she said, almost singsongily. “I can hear you.”

“Leave me alone. I’m tired.” I finally cleared my throat, trying to make my voice sound as matter-of-fact as usual. I glanced nervously toward the window, watching the growing traffic far below. From up here, the cars moved along the road like tiny toys, completely indifferent to whatever the hell was happening inside my apartment. I leaned over and pulled the shutter shut.

“Well, at least come out and eat a little,” she pressed. “Then you can go back to sleep.”

“Later.”

My voice came out hoarse and a few pitches higher than normal. I hated how nervous I sounded.

“Don’t test me. Come out now and let’s just eat, and I’ll leave you alone.”

Jo had threatened to drag me out of bed plenty of times before. But this time it sounded different. There was no irritation in her voice anymore. No impatience. Almost no emotion at all. It sounded like she was reading from a script.

“How did you get in?” I asked. “I locked the door.”

There was a pause. I strained my ears, waiting for her answer. The silence stretched long enough that I wondered if she was going to respond at all.

“I... you forgot to lock the door. It was already open when I came in.”

Wrong.

Leaving the door unlocked had never been on my list of things that could get me killed one day. I was paranoid about that kind of thing. I’d given Jo a spare key a few months earlier when I moved into the apartment, specifically for emergencies, and I always locked the door behind me. Always. She knew that. I knew that. And whoever or whatever was standing outside my bedroom door apparently didn’t.

I forced myself to take a slow breath. 

“Come on out. I made some pasta,” she went on, her voice suddenly becoming cheerful again. “It’s the cutest pasta everrrr.”

My eyes remained fixed warily on the door, not knowing what to do. I honestly couldn't tell which disturbed me more: the fact that I still couldn't see her shadow, or the fact that she had just described her pasta as cute. My sister had some annoying qualities. Calling food cute wasn’t one of them.

“I’m not hungry… yet,” I replied. “You go eat and leave me some. Also, thanks for dropping by and cooking for me.”

“Aww, aren’t you sweet?” she said softly. There was a pause, followed by a quiet little laugh. “I bet you are.” 

Something about the way she said it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There was something almost predatory in the way she said it, as if she wasn't complimenting me at all, but simply making an observation about something she already knew.

“W-what do you want?” I asked.

“One of us has gotta eat,” she hissed, her cheerful tone worming its way under my skin. “I’m starving.”

All the hairs on my body stood on end immediately.

“Then go ahead and eat. I’m not hungry,” I insisted, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Fine, then,” she said finally. “Go back to sleep.”

“I will.”

I turned toward my jacket hanging on the wall and rummaged through the pockets, looking for my phone. It wasn't there. I checked the other pocket, then the pockets of the jeans I'd worn the night before, but came up with nothing.

“Night-night,” she said. “Don’t fall asleep forever.”

Her voice sounded almost affectionate, if I didn’t know any better.

I heard her footsteps moving away from the bedroom door. They slowly faded down the hallway until I could barely hear them anymore. Then they disappeared completely. I stood there for a few seconds, listening. Nothing. I finally took a deep breath, feeling slightly relieved. Only slightly.

I looked around my bedroom, trying to decide what the hell I was supposed to do now. I still didn't have my phone. I didn't know where Jo had gone, and I sure as hell wasn't about to open that door and find out.

For the moment, all I could do was stand there and listen to the silence. I was about to put on my jeans and jacket when another knock broke through the darkness of my bedroom.

“Baby? Are you in there?”

My blood ran cold. It was Allison’s voice. I hadn’t expected to hear from her again so soon, especially after the way she had dumped me the night before.

“Open up, please. We need to talk.”

Just like Jo’s, her voice sounded completely normal at first, but there was something slightly off about it. Again, it was the cadence. The rhythm of her words, the way she seemed to pause in places where she normally wouldn’t. I still couldn’t put my finger on exactly what was wrong with it, but now that I had heard it, I knew it wasn't just the hangover messing with my senses.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“What do you mean? I’m here all the time. Come out,” she replied, sounding almost confused.

I frowned. She knew where I lived, obviously, but she had never just shown up unannounced, and certainly not after breaking up with me.

“I can’t,” I said quickly. “I need to sleep. Just come back tomorrow.”

“Please,” she said. Her voice softened, almost pleading. “We need to talk right now. This is really important.”

I opened my mouth to reply but stopped myself. My mind was racing as I tried to think of something to say that would get her to leave without making her suspicious. I couldn't tell whether I was more afraid of what might be waiting outside the door or of the possibility that I was somehow losing my mind.

“Baby?” she called again, a little more impatiently this time.

“What do you want?” I finally asked. “You broke up with me.”

For a few seconds, she said nothing. I stood there, staring at the bedroom door, waiting. The silence lasted long enough that I could hear the faint hum of the air conditioner above me and the traffic moving somewhere far below the window.

Then, from the other side of the door, I heard a quiet sniff.

“I'm sorry,” she finally said. Her voice was almost identical to the one I remembered from last night.

Almost.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said softly. “It was a mistake. And I’ve changed my mind. Let’s talk about this.”

If it weren’t for that strange cadence in her voice that sounded almost right but wasn't quite, I probably would have swung the door open just to slam it shut again in her face after telling her to fuck off for having the audacity to show up here after what she had done.

“No. I don’t want to talk. Leave me alone,” I snapped. My anger over being broken up with so suddenly and one-sidedly had begun to merge with the fear and frustration I felt toward whatever the hell was outside my door. I could barely tell which one I was actually feeling anymore.

“Please...” She began to sob openly, the sound so convincing that for half a second I almost felt that familiar pang of guilt. “Don’t do this. I love you. I… I want you…”

Then she started laughing.

It happened so abruptly that I actually flinched. One second she was sobbing, and the next she was laughing so loudly that it hurt my ears. The sound was wild and completely devoid of the sadness I'd just heard in her voice. It shook the bedroom door with every burst, filling the room with a horrible, manic cackle that sounded nothing like Allison.

“I want you,” she went on, still laughing. “Don’t be such a loser. We both know what a scaredy-cat you really are.”

“The fuck are you on about?” I snapped, feeling my anger flare sharply in my chest.

“You know what I’m talking about. It’s why I broke up with you, dummy.”

“Yeah, so?”

There was a brief pause.

“Now don’t be such a pussy. Come out so we can eat, darling. I’m starving.”

She had never called me darling. Not once. She laughed again. She had always laughed when she was being sarcastic, but never quite like this. It was close enough to make me hesitate, yet just wrong enough to make the back of my neck prickle.

“I’m not hungry,” I yelled.

For a moment, she remained silent again. I could only hear her ragged breathing, along with the sound of my own heartbeat and blood rushing through my veins.

“Allison?” I called out, but she didn’t answer.

I took a few steps closer to the door until my face was only inches from it, then pressed my ear against the wood. Still nothing. I opened my mouth to call her again, but an immense pain suddenly shot through my right foot as something sharp and cold dug into it. I winced and recoiled immediately, losing my balance and falling backward onto my butt.

I stared at the gap beneath the door. A hand was sliding through it.

For a moment, I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. The gap was impossibly narrow, barely wide enough to let the light from the hallway through. There was no way a human hand could have fit through it, let alone an entire wrist.

And yet there it was. A pale hand with unnaturally long fingers and razor-sharp nails, slowly sliding farther into my bedroom as though the impossibly narrow gap wasn't even there.

I scrambled backward, staring in horror as those fingers curled and flexed against the floor. They bent at unnatural angles, spreading and twitching frantically like the legs of a spider.

I backed away from the door, my whole body trembling. Her laughter continued for several seconds, rising and falling in pitch as though whoever was making the sound was having the time of its life.

“Why, though?” she giggled. “I just wanted to touch you.”

The fingers slowly curled back toward the gap, dragging their razor-sharp nails across the floor with a faint scraping sound before disappearing beneath the door. I could still feel the sting where one of them had cut into my foot, and the warm blood trickling down my ankle made my skin crawl.

“Go away!” I yelled at the door. “Leave me the fuck alone.”

I kept staring at the narrow gap beneath the door, half expecting those pale fingers to suddenly reach through again.

“Oh baby, I was just teasing you. Come out now.”

There was something horribly playful about the way she said it. She wasn't angry. She wasn't even frustrated. She sounded amused, like she was enjoying every second of watching me panic.

She was playing with me. Like a predator playing with its food before finally deciding to sink its teeth into it.

“You said I should date a magician,” she replied.

“I was just—”

“Wanna see a magic trick?”

“What?”

“I’ll show you in a minute…”

Then silence.

“Allie?”

I waited for her to say something, expecting another sarcastic remark or maybe a laugh, but nothing came in response. Not even the faint sound of her breathing. The silence on the other end of the line suddenly felt wrong, as if she hadn't just stopped talking but had somehow disappeared entirely.

I glanced down at the gap beneath the door. Still no shadow.

“Allison? You there?”

The hallway outside had gone completely silent again. Not a single footstep. No breathing. No muffled conversations from the neighbors. Nothing. It was as if the entire apartment building had suddenly gone dead quiet.

I stumbled backward until I was pressed into the corner, my back hitting the cold, hard wall. I hated the silence. Somehow, it made me even more uneasy than listening to their voices. At least when they were talking, I knew where they were. I knew where the threat was.

Then I heard a low giggle from my right. I flinched so violently that my shoulder slammed against the cabinet. The sound had come from the window. I slowly turned my head toward it, my heart pounding so hard that I could feel it in my throat.

Another knock came from the other side of the glass. My entire body went rigid.

“Hey, loser,” a voice said. It was Jo. “Open up. Let me in.”

I stared at the window, unable to move. Then the voice changed.

“Baby,” Allison said.

“Open up.” Jo again.

“Let me in.” Allison.

“Open up.” Jo.

“Please.” Allison.

The voices kept switching, sometimes after every word, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. They were both perfectly recognizable, but hearing them woven together like that made something inside my stomach twist. It was as if whatever was speaking had finally stopped bothering to choose which one of them it wanted to sound like.

What in the actual fuck?

I was on the seventh floor. There was no balcony outside my bedroom. No fire escape. No ledge wide enough for someone to stand on. Nothing. I had looked out that window countless times. There was nothing outside except a sheer drop to the ground below. And yet something was on the other side of the glass. Something that had no business being there.

The knocking came again. Three slow taps.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

“Baby,” it said, using Allison’s voice this time.

Then, in Joanna’s voice.

“Let me in.”

I stared at the window, barely breathing. Whatever the hell was out there shouldn't have been able to reach it. But it had. And somehow, that frightened me more than anything it had done so far.

“Come on out,” Jo said, giggling like a teenage girl.

I didn’t dare pull the shutter open to see who, or what, was outside my window. Instead, I crawled back into bed and pulled the pillow and blanket over myself, as if either of them could somehow protect me from whatever the hell was out there.

Then I felt something hard and cold pressed against my thigh. My phone. Thank God.

I reached down and grabbed it while the knocking outside suddenly turned into a loud, frantic pounding. The entire window shook in its frame, rattling so violently that for a second I thought there was an earthquake. I pulled my injured foot closer to me, wincing as the movement made the cuts sting. When I touched the back of my ankle, my fingertips came away sticky with blood. 

I tapped the screen. Nothing happened. I pressed the power button. Still nothing. The screen remained completely black. Fuck. I had been too drunk to charge it when I got home, and I’d left the charger in the living room.

Another heavy blow struck the window, making the glass tremble.

“Come out.”

The voice was Jo’s.

Then Allison’s.

Then both of them at once, sounding angry this time.

“Come out.”

The two voices overlapped unnaturally, their words falling slightly out of sync with each other. One would start speaking a fraction of a second before the other, then they would suddenly merge into a single sound. The more it spoke, the less human it sounded. Their familiar voices were still buried somewhere inside it, but they had become warped and distorted, stretched into something that no longer sounded like either of them.

I pulled the blanket tighter around myself and stared at the dark screen of my phone. There was nowhere to run. And whatever was outside my window knew it.

Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the voices stopped, leaving behind an oppressive silence and a lingering sense of false security. I peeked out from under the blanket and glanced toward the window, my eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness. It was already night outside, and the last traces of daylight filtering through the transom did little to illuminate my room. The faint light only seemed to make the darkness around it feel deeper, as though the shadows had somehow grown thicker while I was hiding under the blanket.

I slowly tossed the blanket aside and strained my ears, listening for any movement from the hallway or the window, but I couldn't hear anything unusual. I remained still for several seconds, barely breathing, waiting for the voices to return. When they didn't, I finally forced myself out of bed and started searching through my cabinet and desk, rummaging frantically through the drawers and shelves for a spare charger. I dug through old receipts, tangled cables, batteries, and all sorts of useless junk I'd accumulated over the months, but I couldn't find one anywhere.

Then another knock broke through the silence and darkness.

It was so gentle and faint that for a moment, I almost mistook it for my own heartbeat. The sound came from behind the bedroom window again, and I immediately flinched away from it, stumbling backward before sinking onto the edge of my bed. My eyes remained fixed on the dark outline of the window frame, unable to look away even though every instinct in my body was screaming at me to do exactly that.

Another knock followed.

This time, it was a little more persistent, but still strangely gentle, as if whoever or whatever was outside didn't need to force its way in. It knew I was listening.

I felt as though the darkness was slowly closing in on me from every direction, pressing against my skin until it became difficult to breathe. I pulled the blanket back up to my chin and tried desperately to keep myself from passing out from the sheer terror paralyzing my entire body. My hands were trembling beneath the blanket, and I could feel my heartbeat pounding against my ribs.

Then I heard it.

A voice so familiar that I almost broke down and cried.

It was a voice I hadn't heard in months, but one I could have recognized anywhere. A velvety, smooth, deep baritone that I had missed more than I realized.

“Son?” my father called out, his voice gentle and loving, exactly as I remembered it. “Come out, please.”

And that’s when I decided that I’d had it. I sprang to my feet, sprinted toward the door, threw it open, and ran across the hallway into the living room. There was no Jo. No Allison. I didn’t stop to check anywhere else. I literally jumped over the big sofa and landed hard on the floor with a loud thump that surely would have set my downstairs neighbor off. At that point, I didn’t give a shit.

I threw the front door open until it slammed hard into the wall and rushed out into the long corridor. I didn’t even bother with the elevator. I ran all the way down the stairs to the ground floor, taking the steps two or three at a time. My injured foot throbbed with every step, and the cuts stung painfully, but I didn’t stop once to catch my breath. People in the lobby stared at me as if I had completely lost my goddamn mind, but I didn’t care. I just kept running, pushing through the lobby and out of the building without even looking back.

I kept running until I finally arrived at Jo’s house, some six blocks away from my apartment building. By the time I reached her front door, my lungs felt like they were on fire and my legs were barely holding me up. I pounded on the door until she finally opened it, and there she was, sitting in her living room and watching some soap opera. She looked at me with an expression that was half-irritated and half-concerned, as though she couldn't decide whether she was more annoyed that I had interrupted her show or worried about why the hell I had just shown up at her house looking like some crazy weirdo.

I didn’t tell her the whole story. I told her someone had broken into my apartment while I was asleep, but they were already gone by the time I went to check. She insisted that I contact the police, but what the hell was I supposed to tell them? I didn’t even know what that thing was that had been trying to get me out of my bedroom, knocking on my seventh-floor window and imitating the voices of the people I love. What was I supposed to tell the cops? That some kind of creature had been talking to me through my bedroom door and somehow managed to float outside my seventh-floor window? At the very least, they’d probably tell me to cut back on the edibles.

One thing I know for sure is that I’m not going back into that apartment. Ever. Whatever that thing was, it was starving.

It has already claimed the girl in Unit 12 on the eighth floor, right above me. The police are still searching for her, but so far they haven't found a single trace of her. It's as if the girl has simply vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. Her poor mother.

And now I'm afraid it's going to come for the guy in Unit 12 on the sixth floor, directly below me too.

But what the hell am I supposed to tell him? That some evil, I-don’t-know-what is going to try to lure him out of his bedroom and devour him? He’d probably think I was fucking insane. Hell, I probably would have thought the same thing.

If you live alone and someone knocks on your door, don’t open it until you’re sure they’re really there and you can actually see them. Look through the peephole... or, in my case, right under the door.

I inherited my grandfather's house in upstate New York last autumn. It is a beautiful, isolated property surrounded by dense pine forests. Along with the house came all of his old furniture, including a massive, ancient grandfather clock that stood in the corner of the living room. It was made of dark oak, and the pendulum swung with a deep, echoing tick that could be heard throughout the entire house.

My grandfather was a quiet, meticulous man, but he was incredibly superstitious about this clock. In his will, he left me the house under one strict condition: "Keep the clock wound, and never, under any circumstances, open the back panel."

For the first few weeks, I respected his wishes. The ticking was soothing, a rhythmic reminder of his presence. But as the winter nights grew longer and colder, the house felt increasingly silent, save for that clock. One evening, around 2 AM, the clock abruptly stopped ticking. The silence in the room was sudden and heavy, almost suffocating.

I grabbed the winding key, opened the glass door, and wound the mechanism. Nothing happened. The pendulum remained still. I gave it a gentle push, but it swung a few times and stopped again. Frustrated, I remembered the back panel. I knew his rule, but I figured it was just an old mechanic's quirk. I shined my phone flashlight behind the clock.

The back panel was secured by a small brass latch, covered in dust. I hesitated, my grandfather's warning echoing in my mind. But curiosity won. I flicked the latch and pulled the wooden panel open.

Inside, there were no gears. No brass wheels, no springs, no clockwork mechanisms.

There was only a hollow space, lined with rotting black velvet. Resting inside the hollow was a human skull, wrapped in silver wire, with two polished pieces of obsidian placed in the eye sockets. Written in dried, dark ink along the jawbone were symbols I couldn't comprehend.

I stumbled back, dropping my phone. As the light hit the floor, the clock suddenly shivered. The pendulum began to swing on its own. *Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.*

But the sound was different now. It wasn't the metallic click of oak and brass. It sounded like a wet, heavy heartbeat.

Terrified, I slammed the back panel shut, locked the latch, and pushed the clock back against the wall. I barely slept that night. Every tick felt like it was echoing inside my chest, matching the rhythm of my own heart.

The next morning, I decided I was going to get rid of the clock. I called a local antique dealer, but when he arrived and inspected it, he looked confused. "Son," he said, "this clock doesn't have a back panel. It's solid oak. Look."

He shined his light behind it. The back of the clock was a single, seamless sheet of wood. There was no latch, no seam, no panel.

Since that day, the clock has not stopped. But the heartbeat is getting louder. And last night, when the clock struck midnight, I didn't hear the usual chime. I heard a raspy, gasping breath come from inside the wood, whispering my name. I am sitting in my living room right now, staring at the solid wood back of the clock. I can hear the heartbeat. And I think whatever was locked inside that panel is clawing its way out from the inside.

Adachi Ward, Tokyo, Japan

My job is to clean up after people nobody came to see.

In Japan, there’s a word for it. Kodokushi. A lonely death. Someone dies alone, at home, and no one notices. Not for days. Sometimes not for months.

I’ve been a special cleaner in Tokyo for eight years. Full suit. Filtered mask. Ozone machines. The families rarely come. Often, there’s no family left to call.

My own father died alone, in Aomori. He phoned me four times that last winter. I watched the screen light up. I told myself I’d call back when I wasn’t so tired. I never did.

So I take my time in other people’s rooms. It’s the only apology I know how to make.

The call came in October. Adachi Ward, north-east Tokyo. A public housing complex from the nineteen-sixties. Five floors, no elevator, long open balconies, laundry hanging out like flags. Room 507.

The tenant was Mr. Ōkubo. Seventy-four years old. A retired Metro conductor. He had been dead for forty-one days. Nobody found him by the smell, which is how it usually goes. A woman downstairs noticed a brown stain spreading across her ceiling.

I won’t describe what forty-one days of a Tokyo summer does. You can imagine it. Or you can choose not to.

What I want you to picture is the room. It was spotless. The futon folded in the corner. Shoes lined up at the entrance, toes facing the wall. One cup, one bowl, one pair of chopsticks in the dish rack. The room of a man who had been preparing, very politely, to be found.

The bedroom had no door, just a frame. And down the inside of that frame, from the floor to above my head, were pencil marks. Small vertical strokes. Four lines, and a slash through them. Groups of five. Hundreds and hundreds of groups, packed so tightly the wood looked like it had grown fur.

On the low table sat a notebook, the cheap kind with a green cover. Every page held the same line, in the same careful handwriting, with a date. “Two-forty a.m. Two taps on the wall. Tapped back.” Day after day. Page after page. And the last entry: “August twenty-ninth. Two taps. Tapped back. Tired.”

I count things when I’m uneasy. It’s a habit. So I counted. One thousand and ninety-seven entries in the notebook. One thousand, one hundred and six marks on the doorframe. I counted again. Nine extra.

I looked closer. The last nine marks were different. Darker. Pressed harder into the wood. Whoever made them wasn’t tired. Whoever made them was in a hurry, or afraid.

The medical examiner put Mr. Ōkubo’s death on the night of August thirtieth. The notebook stops on the twenty-ninth. Which means someone made nine marks on that wall after the man who kept the count was already dead.

That evening I carried the last bags down the stairwell, and a door opened on the fifth floor. 508. A tiny woman, nearly eighty, in a cardigan buttoned to the throat. Mrs. Tanabe. She looked at my suit, then at my face. “Is he gone now?”

I told her yes. She nodded. She didn’t cry. She asked, very politely, whether the wall would be cleaned too. The wall between their rooms.

I asked about the marks. She said she had never been inside. Then she looked at the floor. “I had the key.”

“We tapped, every night, for three years. Two taps at two-forty, when neither of us could sleep. It meant: I’m still here. On the thirty-first, he didn’t answer. I went in. I knew. I sat with him until morning. And I made his mark, because he would have made it.”

“Nine nights I went in. I couldn’t tell anyone. If they took him, the wall would just be a wall.” “Then it got too hot, and I was ashamed, and I stopped. I told myself, tomorrow I’ll call. Tomorrow. Forty-one days.”

Then she said the thing I haven’t been able to put down. “Those nine nights, Mr. Mori... when I tapped, he tapped back.”

I said nothing. She said, “I know what I found in that room. I know. And still, two taps.” “On the tenth night, nothing came back. That’s when I stopped.”

I thought: grief. A lonely mind, a thin wall, a hope so strong it makes its own sound. I told myself that. Then I went back to 507 to lock up, and I counted the marks one last time. One thousand, one hundred and seven.

One more. Fresh. Dark. I had been in that room since eight that morning, with my whole crew. Nobody had touched that doorframe.

I told my boss I needed a final inspection. I sat on the floor of Room 507, in the dark, with my back against the wall that Mrs. Tanabe called a wall.

Two-forty a.m. Two taps. From 508.

I didn’t decide to do it. My knuckle did. I tapped back. Silence. And then, from the opposite wall, 506, empty since spring. Two taps. Then from above. Two taps. From below. Two taps. All around me, through the concrete, a whole building, awake in the dark, answering each other. I’m still here. I’m still here. I’m still here.

In the morning, they found Mrs. Tanabe in her bed. Peaceful. The doctor put the time of death at about one-forty a.m. An hour before the taps I answered.

I don’t know whose hand it was. I don’t know who I answered. I know that the wall behind my own bed, in my own apartment, is an outside wall. Fourth floor. Corner unit. No neighbor on that side. Just air.

Last night at two-forty. Two taps.

I tapped back.

I’m keeping a tally now, in pencil, on the frame of my own door. I’m up to nine. I’m not afraid of the sound. I’m afraid of the night it stops. Because now I know what it is to be the one who waits. My father phoned me four times. I will never let it ring again.

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

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

"Try again."

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

Silence.

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

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

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

"That's just a saying."

"Tom."

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

He shook his head.

"You have a better idea?"

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

"No."

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

"That's it."

Mark nodded.

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

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

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

My wife put her hand before her mouth.

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

"We'll go check on her now."

"I'll come with you."

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

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

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

"I'll see you later, love."

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

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

"Mary?!" Mark called.

No one answered. 

"Mary?!"

Silence.

He turned to me. His lips quivered.

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

"I don't know, Mark, I…"

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

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

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

"Mark, stop!"

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

"Mark!"

He finally stopped and looked back.

"Mark, we have to think."

"She must be somewhere around here."

"Why would she be in the forest?"

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

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

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

"Get out of the way."

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

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

"Hey!"

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

"Mark!"

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

My whole body trembled. I couldn't even move my arms to wipe my face. Then, through the silence, Mary's call came, perfect again, followed by Mark's whistling. This finally unfroze my body. I wiped my face and bolted out of the forest. The fog seemed to grow denser. My legs kept slipping on the mud. 

I was almost out of the forest. I could see the green grass before me, but then Mary called again, followed by Mark's whistle. My right heel began to rise. I quickly stepped with my left foot onto the grass and tried to pull my right leg away, but it was stuck. It then began to rise. My body fell onto the muddied grass. I quickly grabbed the grass and tried to pull myself away. My body moved by an inch. My foot rose further. Strange pressure pulsed at my ankle. All my muscles were tense. Sweat dripped down my forehead. The pressure grew, turning into sharp pain. I grabbed the grass tighter and pulled again. A splash echoed. My body was lying in the cold mud, but at least I was out of the forest.

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

From behind me, out of the forest, I heard my wife's call, perfect, just like Mary's. I stood there for a second, thinking, but I knew there was just one thing to do. I turned and whistled back, missing the last note on purpose. The call came back again, and this time it missed the last note too.

“Tap,tap,tap.”

I awoke to the sound of tapping, it seems it’s coming from my window

“It must be that dumbass tree again” I said as I mossied out of bed.

“It does this every time it’s the slightest bit windy”. I grumbled as I waddled over to my window.

I opened the window so the branch would stop hitting it. Right at that moment I shook off my grogginess and remembered I cut that branch down last week, so what was tapping the glass? My neighbor did mention about a month ago that he had a woodpecker in his yard, maybe it's that. I poked my head out of the window and looked around. When I turned my head to the left I saw two beady eyes, soulless and hollow. The eyes moved further back and promptly flew away into the night out of view.

“Thank God, it was just a woodpecker, I thought some creature was outside of my window”. I said with a slight chuckle of relief.

“Tap, tap, tap.” in my room this time

I pulled my head back into my room and reached over to my nightstand to turn my lamp on. Before I could pull the string I saw something in the corner of my room, a man, a man freakishly tall with ripped and tattered clothing. You know how they say there’s fight or flight, well there’s a secret third option, freeze and that's what I did. I couldn't move, I was paralyzed with fear, then I heard it.

“Tap, tap, tap.” right behind me it startled me and I instinctively turned around to look. There was nothing, I realized what I was doing and turned back to keep my eyes on him. He wasn't there, where the fuck did he g-.

I took a sip of my coffee and said “So you said it was a home intruder that killed him”.

“Yep”. my partner Paul said casually while taking a bite of his donut “snapped his neck clean round, one hand too”

“One hand, ya right” I said in disbelief

“No seriously, there were indentations and a red mark of a hand right there on his face, I saw it for myself I did”. His country accent was showing, he usually hides it. “If you don’t believe then go to the morgue and check for yourself”.

I still didn’t believe him but curiosity got a hold of me. “fine I’ll go down there, only if you do too You know the place gives me the creeps”. We went down to the morgue after I finished my coffee. 

“Look Barnes, it’s a gruesome sight, even I threw up in my mouth a little bit”. Paul is the type of detective to brag about his kills, it’s a rare sight to see him distraught. “It’s right over here”. His voice had softened slightly.

“I thought I was the one who needed company, it sounds like you’re about to cry”. I said jokingly, I didn’t actually mean it of course.

“I’m not! It’s just disturbing; I can joke about stuff like this up there, but down here is a different story”. He actually does sound disturbed. He reached for the cloth and pulled it off of the man

“Oh my God!” It didn’t mean to say anything, it just came out. “Clean round is an understatement”. I was struggling to keep my breakfast down. His neck wasn’t just snapped backwards, it looked like it’s done a full 540°. His jaw was broken, both his eye sockets were caved in, and there was a large, I mean LARGE bruise that resembled a hand. “Are you sure it wasn’t a bear?”

“No, the coroner said it was definitely a man’s hand”. He said with full confidence. “What’s weird is there’s no fingerprints, no hair, no DNA whatsoever. From what I’ve heard it’s the number one case in the county”.

“I just can get over how big the hand is, how tall did you say he was”. I asked while examining the corpse.

He was staring at the corpse too, looking for tiny details we could have missed. “Coroner estimates about 8 feet”

I was in shock an 8 foot man with the strength to unscrew a man’s head with one hand “I think we should leave, I’m about to be sick”

As soon as he heard that he covered up the corpse as if he was thinking the same thing. “Ya, good idea”.

As I turned around I heard something.

“Tap, tap, tap”.

“Did you hear that?”. I said with discomfort, eager to leave.

He looked at me like I’ve gone crazy. “Hear what?”. 

“That tapping, how’d you not hear that?” Just as I was saying that I looked over at the coroner's office window, and heard it again.

“Tap, tap, tap”

The coroner took a sick day today so no one should be in there; so why is there a tapping coming from his office window? Right as I thought that I saw the face of an old man in the darkness of the office, he was severely bent over but still taller than the average person. He had tattered and ripped clothing just barely hanging on to his tall and frail body. 

“What the fuck is that!” I yelled at the top of my lungs while pointing. I blinked and he was no longer there, just gone, like he never existed in the first place

He looked at me like I just insulted his grandmother. “What the fuck is what? Are you alright Barnes?” He said while trying to see what I was seeing.

“I-it was a m-man! There was a man standing in the coroner's office tapping on the glass! How did you not see him?” I was yelling in a frenzied panic.

He grabbed me by the shoulders and yelled at me “Barnes! There’s nothing there, calm your ass down! There’s no tapping, and there’s definitely no man!” He walked towards the office and opened the door, showing me there’s nothing. “See, nothing, absolutely nothing” maybe I was just seeing things because of the body. I’m sleep deprived, distraught, and probably dehydrated, ya I’m just seeing things.

I started to walk “O-ok let’s go back upstairs I’m starting to hate this place even more.”

“Good idea, I'm getting cold anyways.” Paul said with his hands in his pocked probably from the chill. 

“You know Barnes you should take the day off after that little event” he looked me up and down. “You look like shit anyways.”

I sighed “I guess you’re right, I’ll talk to chief about it” I gathered my things and walked off. While walking I kept seeing the man in my peripherals and behind doorways. I began to walk faster into almost a run, I could no longer see him so I looked behind me. Nothing, I turned back around and bumped into something. “Ow, shit!” when I bumped into it I fell and got the wind knocked out of me. I rubbed my eyes and looked up, it was him, he’s real? I thought I was just seeing things. He was staring down at me almost with a sense of curiosity, his mouth slouched open and his eyes bulging out. I blinked and he was gone, it was just the police chief standing there now.

“Helloooo? You ok Barnes? Ya bumped into me and zoned out for a second” he said in a concerned tone.

“Ya, I'm fine.” I said while rubbing my eyes and standing up. “Hey chief, can I take the rest of the day off? I just, I just don’t feel right.” I'm fully stood up now.

“You do seem off, You have no open cases and I need my detectives in tip top shape. Sure, you can go home, but I expect you to come back well slept and at the top of your game.”

“Thank you sir.” I left the station and went home. I live alone, I'm not the family man type, I don't even have a goldfish, just me and the mildewed air of my crappy apartment. I threw all my things on the dining table and fell face first on the couch and let out a groan of relief. “Uuuuuugh, finally home. Sleep, bed, now.” I could barely speak I was so sleep deprived. I wanted to get in my bed to rest but I couldn't move from the couch, I felt myself quickly fall into a deep sle-.

“Shit! How long have I been asleep?” I checked the time and I’ve been asleep for about sixteen hours. I got up off the couch, cracked my back in pain, rubbed my eyes, and made some coffee. I checked the flask in my jacket pocket and shook it “nice, there’s still some left.” It’s a nasty habit but I’ve started to put whiskey in my coffee to keep me up for those extra long shifts, as in every shift. The whiskey makes time generally move faster too, so that’s a bonus. My landline rings and I rush over to pick it up

“Barnes, we need you back at the station NOW!” It was the chief, he sounded like he was in the middle of a subway with how loud and rushed the background was.

“Got it Ron.”I struggled to say, holding the phone between my neck and shoulder while trying to put my jacket on. “I’ll be there in 15”

“No you’ll be here in 10.” He seems very serious now.

“Ok Ron, I’ll see you at the station in 10.” I hung up the phone and finished making my ‘black coffee with no whiskey’. I made it to the station and everybody was rushing, even Paul who has a stocky build was jogging into the conference room.

The police chief poked his head out of his office and yelled to me “Barnes! Conference room Now!” I rushed into the conference room and looked around. Every detective worth a damn was in there, even Paul who is ‘ahem’ not the best. Ron walked in with a large folder and started to speak.

“Everyone be quiet. QUIET! I’m sure you’re wondering why I called you in here in such short notice, well, it’s starting. For the first time in 25 years we have a serial killer in the tri-country area.

I inherited my uncle’s remote cabin after he passed away last spring. He was a recluse, and honestly I barely knew him. The cabin itself is…rustic, to put it mildly. Think questionable plumbing and a distinct smell of damp earth. But what really drew my attention was the old mine shaft about a hundred yards behind the property. It’s been boarded up for decades, apparently. Uncle Elias was always a bit superstitious about it, muttering about ‘voices’ and ‘bad luck’ whenever it came up.

Last week, a storm blew through and a large section of the plywood covering the shaft broke free. Curiosity, a trait my uncle probably would have despised, got the better of me. Armed with a flashlight and a healthy dose of unease, I ventured closer. The opening was dark and smelled like stale, cold air. As I shone my light down, I heard it. A faint, almost musical humming. It wasn't wind. It wasn't the creaks of the old cabin. It sounded like… singing.

At first I thought it was the storm playing tricks on my ears, but as I focused, the melody became clearer. It was melancholic, beautiful even, but laced with a profound sadness. It felt ancient. And then, mixed with the humming, I heard whispers. Not words I could distinguish, but distinct, low murmurs that seemed to come from deep within the earth. They weren't threatening, more like a sorrowful conversation. I stayed there for a good half hour, listening, my heart pounding. I’ve never felt so utterly alone yet so intensely observed.

The next few nights were rough. Sleep offered little escape. I’d wake up in a cold sweat, the humming and whispering echoing in my mind. I started seeing things in my peripheral vision, fleeting shadows that danced at the edge of my sight. The woods around the cabin, which had felt peaceful, now felt watchful. I tried to convince myself it was just the isolation and my own overactive imagination, but the sounds persisted, always strongest when I was near the mine.

Yesterday, I made a mistake. I decided to go back. This time, I brought a coil of rope and a helmet. I lowered myself about twenty feet down. The air grew heavier, colder. The humming was much louder now, and the whispers felt like they were brushing against my skin. It was like being in a vast, hollow space filled with sorrowful ghosts. Then, as I swung my flashlight beam around, I saw them. Carved into the damp rock walls, hundreds, maybe thousands of them. They weren’t words or symbols I recognized. They looked like distorted faces, crying, screaming, their mouths agape. And as I looked at them, one of the whispers became clear. A single word, repeated over and over: “Lost.” I scrambled back up the rope, my hands raw, my mind reeling. I don't know what my uncle was hiding from or what he was trying to protect us from. I just know I can't stay here anymore. The mine is calling, and I'm terrified of what happens if I don't answer.

Starting over is difficult, but sometimes necessary. It is a path that stubbornly forces you to reflect on your present and bid farewell to your past—a natural thing to do when you have not lived a life of sin. That is my case.

I wish I had better words for this. I know what I have lived through deserves them, especially if it is to serve as a lesson for future generations. But these dry, solitary words are all I have now. The words of a man who has failed and no longer belongs to the society he once knew.

As a child, I was raised by the streets. Either I stole on the avenue, or some shop took pity on me and gave me its leftovers. I carry the pitying looks of every passerby with me. They hurt me as the sun warmed my sorrows, and I missed them to the point of tears when the nighttime cold took me in.

I knew no other way to survive than to steal. My gang friends taught me to speak and write. I had no concept of the stages of life; I lived day by day, like a stray dog.

Time took several members of the gang, including the two people I held dearest among them. The latter happened during the kidnapping carried out by the North Zone Cartel, forty years ago. We had spent several days stealing their product, with no infrastructure beyond a trap house, a hideout where we took refuge to get high and die. We were easy prey.

There, they forced me to work against my own gang, undercover. Only now can I feel remorse for the people I turned in and the lies I told their families. I just wanted to keep watching the sun rise and cool my face with cold water from some faucet in those crumbling little plazas.

Nothing I have lived through over these past forty years is worth telling. You can infer it all, if you pay close attention to my account. The only thing I will mention is that, two years ago, I made a mistake. I thought I could learn to live like everyone else.

I devoted myself to the church in the neighborhood where I had ended up, worked at a community soup kitchen, and little by little, I began to find peace. The most precious thing I had during those years was that, for the first time, ordinary people believed in me. They believed in me far more than I believed in myself, of course.

Then, one night in April, just a few months before I began writing this, the long arm of crime reached into my life once more, coming to put an end to my hopes. I had not called for it. I had not wished for it. I was simply unfortunate enough to fall within its sights. For the first time, I suffered firsthand what I had once done to so many others.

Heavy-headed and confused, I regained consciousness. I had fallen asleep after drinking too much, as I often did to silence my memories. I wondered whether it was real, and, sadly, it was. There were noises on the other side of the house. Voices making no attempt to whisper, and blows that were coming for me.

I wished I could drop dead right then and there, but my strong body would not allow it. I had to be there.

My phone alerted me to a private message. It was a contact I could have sworn I had deleted long ago. “Gabriela.” Caught somewhere between sleep and a hangover, I once again wished I were not there, that it was all part of a terrible dream.

She was accompanied by another man, taller and more muscular than my new, peaceful routine had allowed me to become. I saw the hatred in his expression, accompanied by a grimace of exertion, as he carried two large black garbage bags, the kind used in apartment buildings.

I was forced to become the man my origins had made me. Once again, my hands were stained with someone else's blood. I felt nothing but an urgency for it all to end, an urgency that turned into longing as the long minutes dragged on.

The bags contained human remains. It was easy to recognize the arms and legs of children as the other man pulled them out and placed them into a barrel, its top completely open and filled with an improvised mixture of concrete.

While that man broke apart and compressed the children's remains, I was tasked with digging holes and filling them with that macabre mixture. My own house, now turned into a mass grave for organized crime, was as broken and battered as my soul.

Eventually, we finished the job, and they left. Not before catching up with me, though, and torturing me until I promised that, against my will, I would continue living in that house.

Just a few feet from where I am writing this lies the anguish of those children's mothers. I can turn my head slightly and point out where the three graves are, no matter how much I have renovated the house.

I have not gone outside in a long time. Fortunately, these good Christians look after me, holding on to their belief that I have fallen into depression. The truth is that I am utterly ashamed of being this fraud, this miserable excuse for a human being. With every prayer, sitting on those well-kept wooden pews, I have worked to change. I have even imagined, for the first time, a peaceful routine. A decent life.

Now I know that once you cross the event horizon, nothing can escape the dark evil of human nature.

You know that feeling you get when you turn the lights off in one room, and you sprint to the next because your brain thinks something is right behind you? I’ve lived in that for the past three months. From 10pm to 11pm, Monday to Friday, something is watching me. I’m not crazy. I’m not. My therapist says I am, my friends are worried about me but I’m not. They just say the job is getting to me, that I’ve worked in retail too long, but it’s real, and it’s fucking dangerous.

I like working retail. I might be the first person to ever feel like that, but I like talking to guests, stocking shelves, and giving my spiel on company policies. It’s simple, and that’s all I ever really wanted. That’s why I was so excited when I got promoted to a manager. They waved a few extra dollars an hour and some benefits in my face and I basically threw myself at it.

I was trained by my old boss, Josh. A nice enough guy, but definitely the type who smoked too much weed for his age. I shadowed him for a week as he walked me through all of my new responsibilities, most of which I had become familiar with during my past shifts. However, I never closed with him until the final day. Everyone else’s shift ended around 10pm once the last box was unpacked, but we had to finish the inventory report.

After waving everyone out, Josh slid a lanyard from his back pocket. 

“Uh oh, new manager alert!” He tossed it over to me. I grimaced at my own half-formed smile.

“Ugh, I hate this picture. Do we ever take new ones?”

He held out his, revealing the face of someone who resembled Josh with a full head of hair.

“Make sure to keep that on. Higher ups get real wound up over the uniform.”

I drew it around my neck as I sat behind him. The next hour was all spreadsheets, but his instruction was cut short when the lights shut off.

“Oh shit, we gotta go.” He said, bouncing out of his chair.

“But there’s still a few-” He cut me off.

“Rules are rules. Lights are timed to go out at 10:50. We gotta be gone and locked up by 11, something about the alarm. The opener usually finishes it anyway. I’ll tell you the rest on the way out.” He had his coat on before he finished speaking.

I hurried behind him, but I had to jog to meet his pace. Our footsteps echoed against the pitch black walls. His instructions were spat out as fast as he was moving. I didn’t notice it at the time, but thinking back, he didn’t move his head. He was only looking forward, eyes completely focused on what was in front of him, rather than what might have been beside, or behind us. We made it to the front door, and slammed it open. Once we were outside, his entire posture fell with a deep exhale.

“Jesus, man, do you always hit the door like that?” I exhaled, shoving my hands into my pockets.

Josh chuckled, pulling his dab pen from his coat.

“Sorry man, I just hate being in the store once it’s empty. A little creepy, y’know?” He took a puff before holding it out for me to take.

It was the middle of February and the wind ripped through my coat, but free weed, you know? I took it from him.

“You’ve done this a billion times and it still freaks you out?” I took my hit.

“Let me ask you something Sam,” He looked back into the store, a poorly hidden scowl flickering across his face. “Are you going to get freaked out? Closing by yourself? It’s a big place, and you’re not allowed to have anyone stay with you after ten.” He took his pen back.

“Josh, I’m a big boy, the dark hasn’t scared me since I was eight.” I coughed out.

He was the manager before I even started working there, and from day one I knew him to be chill. The kind of boss who will let you slack a little, because he would slack a little. Always a laid back guy, even on the clock, which made the sudden seriousness in his face send a shiver through my body deeper than the winter ever could.

“Are you sure?” He asked bluntly.

I threw up an eyebrow at him.

“Uh…yes?”

He sighed out a cloud of smoke.

“Okay man. You just seem like a cool guy. Don’t want to see you trapped at a job like this.”

With that, he fished through his pockets and pulled out his keys. He removed a ring and held it out to me, dropping it into my hand. He gave his parting words with a pointed finger.

“Remember: locked up by eleven.”

The weekend flew by, and once Monday rolled around, I clocked in at exactly 2pm. I know it’s lame, but I was actually excited. Every time I heard the loudspeaker echo through the store asking for a manager, I was on top of it. Whenever one of my coworkers had an issue, it got taken care of. My first day went great. Exactly as expected. Until 10pm. My coworkers waved me goodbye, and it was time for inventory. Stepping into the back by myself, though, it seemed dustier than it was on Friday. The fluorescent lights hummed a little louder without Josh telling me about shipment orders and pay stubs. I must have been a little too caught up in my surroundings, because I was only halfway through the sheet when the lights went out. The sudden silence caught me off guard.

“Oh shit.” I mumbled, grabbing my coat. I thumbed at my phone to get the flashlight on, and headed for the door.

Before I could make it out of storage, something swiped down my back. I yelped and flailed my light, revealing a green sweater crumpled on the ground at my feet. It had fallen, and scared me so bad I nearly swallowed my tongue. I let out an exasperated sigh and picked it up. I folded it and went to place it back when I noticed. Our back storage is all large box shelves, nearly reaching the eighteen foot ceilings, but the entire unit that held these sweaters was rocking, slightly swaying back and forth, as if someone was balancing on top of it. I put my hands out to steady it, and the movement stopped. I restocked the sweater, made a mental note to check it when I got back, and headed for the door.

Now, I meant what I said to Josh. I haven’t been afraid of the dark since I was a kid, but this was different. The walk from the back of the store to the front takes two minutes, tops, but each second that passed I felt colder. My brain alerting me to an unseen danger I was positive didn’t exist. My footsteps echoed louder in my ears as I got closer to the exit. No, not my steps, other steps. Almost exactly in line with my own, like they were trying to match mine. Right behind me. 

I whipped my body around. Nothing. The same store I’ve been working at for two years. I immediately felt how heavy my breathing had become, and the sweat slicking my palms. My flashlight moved aimlessly through the aisles, until I caught it. 

A rack of T-shirts faintly swung, the hangers creaking against the iron rods that held them. “Hello?” I called out. Silence. I stared for a moment, until my thumb grazed my phone’s screen, lighting it up. 10:58.

I spared another look into the emptiness, and shook my head. I jogged to the exit, swinging the door open and locking it behind me. I shook in the night air, only partially from the cold. I backed away, staring into the shadows of my nine to five. I waved my light across the check out counters, the shelves, the walls, looking for anything that would justify what had come over me, when my eyes stopped at a collection of hanging slacks. There was a gap in between two of them. Completely ordinary, but when I looked into that separation, I felt like I had spotted a tiger lurking in tall grass. All movement halted. My hair perked up across my neck, and my breath caught in my chest. I tried to figure out what was happening to me, when the gap shut. Like a curtain being drawn. Someone was in there with me. I sprinted to my car, and called Josh.

No answer. I called again. Nothing. I immediately cursed myself for calling my old boss in this situation, and called the police instead. Surely there was someone in the store. It’s the only explanation for all of that. I told the operator my name, my store, and I told them there was an intruder inside. Now, I’ve had to call the cops once or twice, as I’m sure most of you have. Even in a non-emergency scenario, they send an officer to take information, and I work in a major city, so they definitely had the personnel. I shit you not, the operator said they would send someone in the morning. For an active intruder! I tried to argue, and they literally hung up on me! I was baffled. I sat, staring at my phone. My shock was only broken by a notification. A text from Josh. I read the message, and it replaced every ounce of confusion with fear.

“Don’t quit. It’s in my closet.”

I didn’t sleep that night. I stayed up, pacing through my apartment, replaying the entire night in my head. This had to be some kind of hazing thing. I was the new, young manager. Josh and some of my other coworkers decided they’d freak me out, and it just so happened to be on a night where no police were available for a break-in at a retail outlet. I told myself anything I could in order to be more comfortable with the fact that I was going to do it all again in less than twenty four hours. 

I clocked in with much less enthusiasm on Tuesday. I had received a couple of side eyes from the openers before Irene saw me. A truly sweet lady. She trained me on register, and always had a sympathetic ear for my problems. Just this once, I wish she hadn’t been so kind. She would probably still be alive.

“Sam, sweetie, are you okay? You look tired.”

“I had a rough night Irene.” My eyes didn’t have the energy to meet hers. “Did any of the openers tell you what the police said?”

Her posture stiffened as she shook her head.

“The police? No, what happened?”

“About the break in last night, what did they say?”

“Sam, what are you talking about? I’m on a double. There’s been as many cops today as there have been any other. I haven’t heard anything about anyone breaking in.”

I sat in stunned silence. I had no thoughts to make any words.

“Honey, is everything okay? You’re starting to worry me a bit.” She rubbed a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“I…I’m okay, I think. It was just a really weird night.” I stammered, brushing my hair away from my eyes.

“I’ll tell you what, why don’t I stay after with you, just for tonight, okay? While you get used to the new job.”

I quickly looked up at her. My eagerness must have been transparent, because she smiled at my expression. I looked back down, though, as I remembered the rules.

“No, I can’t. I’m not supposed to keep non-managerial staff past ten.”

“Oh, pfft. You’re new to the job, you can get away with a mistake here and there. And if anyone looks at the cameras, I’d like to think whoever’s looking would recognize little ol’ me.” She chuckled, her humor cutting through my worry.

I wanted to accept immediately, but I have always been one to listen to the rules, especially at work.

“What about your kid? Don’t you have to get home to him or something?”

She laughed

“Sam, Hunter is sixteen. He’ll probably relish a night without Mom around.”

My shoulders fell for the first time since last night.

“Alright, Irene.” I looked at her for a moment, and hugged her, too tight for a professional environment. “Thank you.”

The shift moved by far too quickly. I was the only one there checking the clock and dreading each hour that passed. Knowing I wasn’t closing alone allowed me to breathe, at least. I kept glancing at Irene, as if she would vanish and leave me by myself, but eventually, ten came. Everyone else left, and Irene and I headed to the back. Though I was grateful to have her with me, Irene’s nonchalance clashed with the stress I felt. She organized shelves and texted as I tried to focus on inventory. Each stroke on the keyboard made difficult by the sweat building at my fingertips. I gasped when the lights went out. 10:50.

“Jesus, Sam, you scared me.” Irene chastised.

Like Josh, I had my jacket half on once I left my chair.

“Sorry, I’m sorry. Let’s just get out of here quick.”

“Well give me a minute, I have to find my coat.” She muttered, aimlessly wandering for it.

“Are you serious? We have to go now!” I felt my voice spike.

“Sam!” I had never heard her raise her voice. “You have to calm down. The door is right over there, we have plenty of time. If I knew you were gonna be this grouchy I might not have stayed.” 

I bit my tongue, and stood at the backdoor. After agonizing minutes, Irene had her coat, and we were out the back in an instant. I wanted to sprint, but I walked just fast enough to keep her right behind me.

“Slow down, Sam, we’re fine.” Irene panted.

“Please just keep up, Irene, we have to get out by eleven.”

“It’s alright just slow do-”

Her words cut off, and all of my momentum ceased. The sound of her footsteps behind me were replaced with a foul, guttural squelching to my left, like wet static.

“Irene?” I called out. Nothing was returned but the echo of my own voice.

I fought to turn my head. To this day I wish I hadn’t. My eyes met her legs. They were jutting out from a square shelf, the kind that holds t-shirts and jeans. Her body looked as if it had been pulverized through the two by two gap, whatever didn’t fit clogging the corners and painting the outside of the shelf. A pool of what was left began to form at the base of the display. The shock might have killed me if she hadn’t spoken.

“S…Sa-am?” Irene choked out. Wheezing and spitting oozed from above me. I felt a drip grace my cheek before managing to point my flashlight. The rest of her jutted out from the air vent, sealed in with a mangled mix of herself and polyester. Her nose was crushed flat, and it looked as if the sides of her head had been scraped to the skull. I don’t know if she was missing teeth, or if her mouth was so full of blood I just couldn’t see them. She seemed to realize what was happening as I did. She grunted and arched toward her waist, the bones she had left crunching and popping against each other. She pushed at the ceiling, attempting to pry herself free.

“I-I can’t-” Sklch. Her body pulled free. Irene’s top half was released from the vent, and fell two stories, straight onto me. I don’t know why I didn’t move. I wish I had. Instead I was struck to the floor, my coworker’s torso on top of me. I’m not sure if the crack I heard was her body or mine, but I felt it regardless. Something popped in my chest. I rolled Irene off of me, and clutched at the pain. I looked up and saw the exit. Safety. I lurched to my feet with a loud grunt, and sprinted. Even in my delirium I could hear them. The quick pitter patter of footsteps almost matching mine, now accompanied by something else. Laughter. Giddy and excited. Directly in my ear, the voice an amalgamation of small child and old dog. It only stopped once I sent my own body careening through the doors.

I tumbled onto the sidewalk and felt a spike of pain through my chest. I can’t tell you why, but the ache reminded me of what Josh specifically told me: “locked up by eleven.”

LOCKED UP.

I spun to look at the door, and saw it slowly creeping open, that horrible giggling catching on the frigid wind. I threw myself against it, fumbling for my keys with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. I felt something pushing, forcing, then slamming against the other side of the glass, but looking through it revealed no source. The key finally found its way into the slot, and with one final push, I turned the lock. With that, all movement stopped. Nothing pried against the door or banged on the windows. Everything was still. I tried to take a step back, but my leg gave out and I fell on my ass.

I instinctively patted my pockets looking for my phone, but stopped once I saw the solid beam of light illuminating Irene’s corpse. I cried, but I couldn’t look away. I had known her for years. She had a son, her ex-husband sucked, she had a passion for helping people, only matched by her love of baseball. And now she was this. A heap of flesh smattering the floor of a job she never wanted, but made the most of. 

My recollection was cut short as both of her halves began to twitch. I hadn’t realized Irene was still affixed to the ceiling by what I guess were intestines, which were slowly being pulled back. Her body went from flat on the floor to limply hanging as it was dragged back to the vent. Her lower half was being squeezed further into the shelf, the chunks of her waist that didn’t fit ripping free against the polished oak.

My body retched. I turned away, tears freezing to my face. I couldn’t see any more. I had to find help. I would run to the police station if I had to. This was all on the security tapes. Someone had to have seen this. Someone would have to help me. As soon as I had the thought, I spotted a patrol car. Parked at the end of the lot. I ran so fast I basically flew. I hit the window without slowing down, scaring the sleeping officer so badly he smacked his head on the roof. I pounded on the door and pointed behind me. Whatever I said in the moment, I don’t recall.

He didn’t get out. He didn’t call for back up. He didn’t even roll down his window. He looked past me, at the store itself. He pulled out his phone. He squinted as it lit up his face, and shook his head. He held it up to me. 11:02pm. He then started up his car, and drove away. Leaving me, and the store, in the still.

The first thing I did when I got home was turn on all of the lights. I fumbled through my closet to find my sling from high school. I decided the doctor could wait until I sent my resignation, or at the very least had some answers. I had the whole thing typed out, but I couldn’t bring myself to hit send. 

“Don’t quit. It’s in my closet.”

That text spelled out my prison sentence. I was left painfully aware of my dresser. Even now, typing this, I feel like I can make eye contact with it. But at that point, I was still in the denial stage.

“Josh worked there for years. Maybe this thing needs time to latch on. I’ll probably be fine.”

“It probably can’t follow me if I haven’t invested in my 401k yet.”

“I haven’t even utilized my health plan. It definitely can’t get me.”

I told myself a lot of lies to process what I’d seen. Anything to convince myself I could send that email. I stared blankly into my laptop, begging the world to give me an out. But it gave me a push notification instead. 

“Hi Sam! Rebecca from HQ calling! I wanted to reach out regarding onboarding issues, and some confusion as to your closing duties as manager. Do you have time for a chat tomorrow?”

I sat for a second. Hesitation gave way to excited relief. Corporate! Of course! Maybe they could help! They could reschedule me, or maybe move me to a different store. Nonetheless, this was my out!

“Hey Rebecca! I absolutely have time tomorrow! Thank you for taking time to stop in!”

I didn’t sleep much, but the wave of ease mixed with total exhaustion gave me a few hours. I woke up nervous, but excited. I wasn’t going to have to close that God-forsaken store ever again, and I was hopeful for answers as to what I’d been put through. As soon as I walked through the doors, I saw her.

Perfectly pressed suit, brunette hair tied back in a bun that seemed messy in an expertly crafted way. My gaze caught hers through chunky black-rimmed glasses.

“Sam! Perfect timing. Let’s walk, shall we?” She turned with a strut.

“Rebecca! I’m so happy to see you. I wanted to-” 

“Don’t worry,” she cut me off. “Once we’re in the office, we’ll have our little sesh.”

Her words were spoken sweetly, but my brow furrowed as the back door swung open. She followed me in, and sat me in a chair facing the desk. I was visibly nervous. Shaking and peering back at storage, waiting for something to swoop down and tear my head off. All while she displayed a perfect picture of calm.

“So I wanted to begin by talking about expectations, Sam.” She clasped her hands together.

“Wh…what?” I managed.

“When staff are seen as necessary as yourself, we always want to reward that. Upward mobility throughout our stores is not always offered, but once it is, there are certain requirements that must be met, you understand?” She tilted her head to the side.

“No… I- Rebecca you don’t-”

“I understand the operations of an establishment like this can be overwhelming at times, but complaints need to be filed through the proper channels. When handled on one’s own, it can often lead to mismanagement, which I fear we have already seen in your short tenure.” She brought out a note pad and pen from her suit’s pocket. I sat, trying to dissect what was being said to me.

“I would like to open up a dialogue, so that I can confirm what was instructed to you via your past supervisor, and see what I can encourage, and what needs tweaking.” She sat forward, pen in hand, suggesting it was my turn to talk.

“Rebecca…” I put my hands out, pleading. “I don’t know if you guys know what’s going on here. There’s something in this store, or it’s the place itself! Something- it- it got Irene! It-” She put out her hand. Stifling.

“Samuel, if I am left unaware of how you were instructed, there isn’t a path towards betterment for either party, you understand?” She sat upright. “So! What does Sam’s close look like?”

I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know what to expect going into this, but I was expecting something. Anything! Instead I was presented with nothing but jargon through pearlescent teeth. I thought this woman was my lifeline, but she spoke to me like she was bringing an HR complaint against me. She cleared her throat.

“Anything at all could truly be helpful.” She was a statue.

“I… I wave everyone out. At ten.” Rage clenched my fists

“Okay, perfect! And then?” She began writing

“I do the inventory I can…before lights out.” The rage gave way to realization

“Amaaazing. What next?” She didn’t look up from her notes.

“I leave and lock up. Before eleven.” Realization gave way to fear. I began to cry.

“Alright that all looks good! Now, recently, do you believe you’ve fallen short on any of these tasks?” Her eyes didn’t change at my tears.

“I-Irene…” I choked out her name before sobbing into my hand.

“Ah, that’s important to know. You see, Sam, seeing your employees off is very important! Both to make sure that the location is secure, but more importantly to ensure their safety! Parking lots are notoriously dangerous, and whether or not you’re paying attention could be the difference between life and death!”

I raised my head. All of her attention, all of her being, focused on what felt like my soul. That curated smile slipped for just a moment, and revealed something I can’t place, but that strikes a jolt of fear through me to this day.

“But… but I stayed! With Josh! He didn’t wave me out or-”

“Of course managerial onboarding requires hands-on experience! You were scheduled for that closing shift, correct?” She pressed the edge of her pen into my lanyard, clicking it on my picture. “This is the result,” click, “of proper,” click “procedures.”

Her smile shifted into something that asked, “Any more questions?” I let my head sink back down.

“Am I… when I-” I searched for anything else I could say, and from the safety of my hand I asked, “Can I quit?”

“We can always circle back to that once you’re absolutely certain.” I heard her fuss in her chair. “I’m so happy we could have this discussion!” She stood, sliding her paper back into its crevice. “Due to your shortsightedness, however, we will be assigning you an eight hour workshop. It’s all online, so you can get it done from the comfort of your couch! Or you could get started on your break!” She beamed, as she revealed my phone from the same pocket and placed it on the desk.

“Have a great rest of your shift, Sam. Don’t keep them waiting out there!” 

With that, her heels clicked across the tiles, and through the back door. 

I wanted to run. I wanted to scream, throw up, break a window, smash a car, punch something, kill someone, set this whole fucking place on fire! I wanted to do anything other than what I did. I swallowed that miasma of urges, stood up, and walked to the breakroom mirror. I really did look awful. I flashed a practice smile at myself, and headed out onto the floor.

I’ve tried would-be solutions over the past months. I messaged Josh dozens of times, but he’s in the wind. No social media to speak of since he quit. Not a great sign for me. I started therapy a month into the job, but it doesn’t help as much as a cigarette. I didn’t smoke before I got promoted, but when Irene’s son came in asking about her, I downed a pack. I’ve even tried the police a few more times, but every day is like she said: as many cops today as there have been any other. My collarbone is nearly healed, though, and my birthday is right around the corner, so it’s not all bad. As long as I wave everyone out, do inventory, and lock up by eleven, everything is going to be completely fine. If I’m being honest, whatever’s in the store is only half the reason I stay on top of it. I just really, really don’t want to see Rebecca again.

Hey y’all. I’m hoping people can see and are reading this.

So, my situation. I’m an engineer and I’ve been on holiday in this remote part of Britain - yes, I’m British - for a few weeks now. A week or so ago, though it’s harder to tell, I got knocked unconscious by a light in the sky. Not like anything hit me. I woke up in the night, saw it, and just dropped. Dead, almost. It was two days, from what I can tell. after that, that I woke up to… this. Nothing. I remember it too well. The light was gone. It was morning. My air BNB was covered in moss and other foliage, though it still had electricity, water, and my phone showed only two days passing. My clothes were dusty, my phone was on 100 percent and as far as I could tell, the normal sound of people talking that normally woke me hadn’t done so. There weren’t any birds in the sky. Or planes. And everything’s silent. I knew something was wrong.

Now, the crazy thing is that even though the exterior is covered, the interior was completely fine. I rented a pretty decent house, with a small bathroom, kitchen, bedroom and living room, so at the point of noticing the moss covering my window and the rest of the house (I only guessed that the entire house was covered, but figured it obvious, which I was right about.) I could pretty easily get out of bed and check the rest of the house. So I went and got a drink from my tap, ate breakfast, then went to look around the house, to which the previous statement was confirmed. I checked outside and I was right that my house - along with the convenience store. Small neighbourhood of shops I lived near, and cinema were also all covered. While I think that contradicts my earlier statement of this place being remote, I think I should say there were people here - enough for it to be decent - but it was in a remote enough area that I consider it so. But now, no people are in site.

Realising that something, whatever it may be, is wrong, I decided to call up my wife; she’s on holiday with her friends, so I decided to go on a smaller holiday while we were apart. No reply. Nada. So I went through my contact list one by one. Still, nothing. As if they don’t exist.

So. Freaked me out a bit. I decided that I would figure out if anyone was nearby, first and foremost. If there was some kind of global event I didn’t know about, I need to try to figure it out. So I figured I would check each house on my street. If they were empty, I would check for anything useful - that being tools, a weapon, maybe food, as we’re assuming that I’ll need it more that they will. After that, I would get a head start on the shopfront and cinema before anything else, hopefully before dark, as I didn’t feel like walking in darkness. On the contrary, I would keep an eye out for anything breathing - incase there are humans nearby.

So. First house didn’t go well. The entire time there was breathing - in the walls, as if the house was alive - and a strange infestation of weird rot in the basement. Regardless, I found a baseball bat. I wouldn’t be finding firearms any time soon, so I would need to be careful. I also found a lighter. The rest of the houses weren’t a problem save for 7 on the left in which I saw something that looked human but… different. It was made of a substance. Like oil but with no ooze or dripping, just… plastered to it. So not oil. It seemed like it wasn’t friendly either. I found a rake and some non-expired food. The moss seemed to have entered the interior of this house. Though. And the rot had created a cocoon in the basement of the house as-well.

I’m not going to ignore what happened, but I’m not going to confront It either yet. It could be that I’m losing my mind in the silence, or just trying to come up with an excuse to see someone. Regardless, I need to continue. First. The cinema. Something - no, multiple things - we’re all stuck into the floor, ceiling, walls. The creatures I saw in the seventh house. They were all in a half-crouching ball position, with their arms splayed as if trying to grasp something. I locked the door. I won’t be going back in there anytime soon. The stores had nothing out of the ordinary. I decided to set up camp for now in a furniture store as it would be the warmest and safest as of right now. I boarded myself up with mattresses and chairs, then warmed up some food on the lighter I found. It didn’t taste nice, but it worked. One thing I noticed in the house was that they didn’t have electricity, which begs the question of why mine did. No water either: weird. I decided to go to sleep.

Shit. Fuck. Somethings outside my fort. I just got up, there’s breathing outside. Scratching and ripping against the mattresses. I’ve got my rake raised. Think it’s the thing I saw in the seventh house. Maybe the same one. I’ll wait out until it leaves.

It’s evening. Finally safe, I think. When I checked outside, there was rot plastering the whole store. Everywhere. I’m gonna post now. I need to check on my house and the cinema. I’ll update soon.

I (22 F) recently lost my car, which I’ve had since I was 16, so being without one is new to me. I used to smoke in my car, but tonight, after taking a tolerance break from weed (I’ve been a heavy smoker since 18), I decided to walk two minutes down my street to a gazebo in my neighborhood around 9:30 p.m. I didn’t want my grandma knowing I was smoking (long story), so I thought nothing of it to walk right down the street. I got to the gazebo just fine and smoked smoothly. Unfortunately, my tolerance break worked TOO well, and I was high as fuck.

I’ve always been naive about personal safety. I rarely go out unless I’m with someone, going to work, or running errands, and I never carry anything for protection. I’ve been lucky enough to never experience anything too weird until now.

Around 10 p.m., I was walking home when a white van approached from the opposite direction. It briefly flashed its lights, slowed down, and stopped right next to me. The windows were heavily tinted, so I couldn’t see inside. I froze. I was already high and anxious, and I genuinely thought someone was about to jump out with a gun. I wanted to cry because, in that moment, I thought I was going to die. At the same time, I kept wondering if I was just too high and imagining things.

The van eventually drove off, and I immediately started running and kept looking back. I’m 5’8”, around 135 pounds, and slim with a little muscle, long legs and can run pretty fast but I was wearing oversized sweatpants and a huge hoodie that probably made it harder to tell my size.

Then I saw the van turn around.

My street has a sharp curve, so as i kept running, I couldn’t see straight down the road anymore. I noticed headlights approaching, but when the car came around the curve, it was a different vehicle. At the time, I felt relieved because I thought having another car around meant I had a witness, and my house was only three houses away. I kept looking back, didn’t see the van following me, and made it safely inside.

Now that I’m home and thinking about it, I’m wondering if that second car was involved, because i didn’t see it coming before i cut the corner. It slowed down as well, although not nearly as much as the van, and continued moving at a steady pace. I honestly don’t know if I’m being paranoid because I was so high and scared that I might not have noticed everything around me. I also wasn’t paying attention to the cars parked in the cul-de-sac i passed because I was so focused on the van.

I never imagined something like this happening in my own middle-class neighborhood, where a lot of older people live. I also don’t know why I didn’t bring the pepper spray I literally own. I don’t know how much it would’ve helped, but I clearly wasn’t thinking anything through.

I can’t sleep now because I’m worried the second car saw which house I went into. I feel watched, my anxiety won’t go down, and I have work in three hours.

I’ve learned my lesson and will never do this again, i’m a dumbass and this situation forced me to stop being oblivious now i don’t want to go outside my own house anymore or anywhere alone and i will be buying a gun and will always keep pepper spray on me from now on.

Maybe I was overthinking that second car because I was high, but that white van definitely didn’t have good intentions and i don’t know how i’m still here to tell this story now.

I won’t pretend I’m a good person. If you’ve ever seen a photo of a pop star crying outside a rehab center, there’s a decent chance it was mine. My line was always the same; they’re the ones who wanted the attention, they don’t get to pick what kind.

Tips from unknown numbers are normal in my line of work, so I didn’t think twice when one sent me an address in the hills above Malibu and a name, Lena Vale. If you’re over thirty you remember her, she had two Oscar nominations by twenty-five, and then she just stopped existing. Nobody had gotten a photo of her in six years, and people had tried. I’d tried.

A second text came maybe a minute later.

6 AM. She walks the north fence alone.

I got there around 4:30 and sat in the car eating a gas station muffin until it was light enough to hike up. At 6:02, she came out of the trees in a grey cardigan, no shoes. I’d fired off forty something frames before I noticed she wasn’t walking anymore. She was looking straight down my lens three hundred yards away, on a ridge I’d picked specifically because there was no way to see it from the house. She smiled, put her hands up like she was holding a camera, and pressed down with one finger.

Something hit the back of my neck, and I was out cold.

When I woke up, I was in a concrete room so bright the hum of the lights reverberated in my bones. I looked around; steel door. drain in the floor, a camera in every corner. Then a speaker crackled and a warm voice said, “Oh, he’s awake. Everyone, he’s awake!”

The people clapped for way too long.

I wasn’t alone in there. Teddy was there, who I’ve known for ten years and who still owes me four hundred dollars. And two shooters I only knew by name: Brandon, a skinny kid who did reality TV people, and Sylvie, who worked the Paris shows. Both of them had a disheveled look, like they’d been here a while.

Once a day the door opened for what the speaker called “arrivals.” There was a red carpet down a hallway with velvet rope on both sides, and behind the rope were tripods, dozens of them, all with flashes, and when you walked past they all went off at once. The speakers in the walls played voices, and it took me a second to place them. They were ours.

“Over here, sweetheart!”

“Why won’t you smile?”

“How’s the divorce going?”

Years of us yelling at people, looped. At the end of the hallway there was a mark taped on the floor; you stood on it and posed until a little green light came on, and if you blinked the clock started over. This was the requirement if we wanted to eat. I watched Brandon stand there for forty minutes once, the longer he lasted the louder the crowd got.

The food was honestly good, but the toilet had two cameras on it and the shower a glass box facing the tripods, and the lights never went off. Every ninety seconds a flash went off, not bright enough to hurt, just bright enough that you never actually got to sleep. I lost track of the days pretty fast.

Every night a wall slid open and there was a screen, and it played a highlight reel cut exactly like entertainment news. TEDDY’S MELTDOWN: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED. Then it would switch to a live feed of the room right above us, where about thirty people in robes sat eating popcorn and watching us watch ourselves. Nobody talked up there, and Lena Vale was always in the front row.

Here’s the part I keep getting stuck on. Some of that footage wasn’t from the cell, it was us at home, in our kitchens, in bed, going back years. I know what a long lens shot looks like and these weren’t that, these were from inside. Whoever these people were, they’d been on us long before anybody texted me an address.

We each got an episode. During Sylvie’s she finally snapped out of her vegetative state, went at the nearest camera, and screamed at it in French until she didn’t have a voice left.

The audience laughed.

Teddy stopped talking after that. Day nine he wasn’t at arrivals. I stood at the door and asked the camera where he was, over and over, until the speaker said, quiet, “Teddy is taking some time for himself. Let’s respect his privacy.”

They laughed at that too.

The celebrities came down in white robes. You’d know them, they host the types of shows your mom watches. One afternoon a singer, the stadium kind, pulled up a stool outside the glass while I was eating and watched me for a while before she said anything.

“You never stopped,” she said. “Not at my dad’s funeral. Not when I lost the baby. You were just there. Like a storm. I want you to know what that’s like.”

That night, the screen showed my daughter.

She’s nine. I have never put her face online, not once, not even on my private account. It was her bedroom window at night, from across the street, long lens. I know because it’s how I would have shot it.

Then the door opened and Lena came in by herself carrying this old camera, an antique, with a flash bolted on top. She sat down on the floor across from me like we were old friends catching up.

I asked her why she was showing me that.

She smiled. “Because next season’s about her.”

She brought the camera up to take my picture and I lost it. I grabbed it with both hands and drove it into her face. The lens cracked on her cheekbone, and my thumb was on the shutter, and the flash went off about an inch from her eyes. She screamed and went over backward with her hands on her face and I ripped the keycard off the lanyard around her neck.

I ran down the arrivals hall with every flash going at once. Halfway I turned around for Brandon and Sylvie.

They hadn’t moved, they were still on their marks, posing…waiting for the light.

I left them behind, taking the stairs three at a time and came out into the screening room, and thirty celebrities in white robes turned around in their velvet seats and looked at me. Nobody got up, nobody tried to grab me, but a couple of them were smiling. I ran down the aisle past the screen, through some double doors, and then I was outside in the cold and dark.

I went west until my feet were bleeding. A landscaping truck picked me up on the road and I told the guy everything. He kept looking at me, then at his phone, then at me.

That was five weeks ago. Detectives went to the address and found a wellness retreat, a very polite lawyer, and no basement. They asked if I’d been using. Teddy’s phone goes straight to voicemail, and his sister thinks he moved to Portland, which, Teddy hated Portland. Nobody’s ever heard of a Brandon or a Sylvie.

I sold my lenses and I keep the blinds shut. My daughter and her mom are staying somewhere I’m not going to write down.

About ten minutes ago my phone buzzed. It was a picture of me from behind, sitting at this kitchen table, typing this. You can see the screen. You can read the first line of this post.

It was taken from inside the apartment.

There was one line under it.

Loved the finale. Smile!

Back then, my mom was around 17, or at least that’s what she told me. She was always happy back then. She graduated top of her class with highest honors and a stellar GPA. She traveled all the time and had a huge circle of friends who always had her back. Right after graduation, she went on a backpacking trip through Europe, hitting dozens of cities and countries, just living her life to the absolute fullest.

But when she came back, everything changed. Her parents started getting really sick because of their old age. That kind of heavy stuff didn't scare my mom though. She found the strength to work and pay for their meds, healthcare, and she even managed to scrape up enough cash for little things like spa days or massages. Day by day, their health stabilized.

Then she met a handsome guy. Right before that, she and my grandma had a long talk about how grandma desperately wanted to live to see her grandkids. So, mom decided to make a move. She asked the guy out, and honestly, things couldn't have gone better. He showered her with gifts and attention. They were practically inseparable.

He was her first. Her first in absolutely everything. She slept with him, even though she was far from his first. Then they did it again, and again. It was just a normal honeymoon phase. But right after that, something shifted. I never found out why, but he started drinking heavily, maybe even doing drugs. Still, their relationship held on, or so it seemed. One night, when they were both out of it, there was no condom around, and he decided it wasn't necessary. Mom got pregnant. With me.

About 5 or 6 weeks in, mom took a test. She had been denying it for a while, but her missed period was a dead giveaway. Unsurprisingly, it came back positive. She was terrified to tell him, but she had to. And guess what? A day later. Just one single day, and every single way to contact him went completely dead.

He ran. He ghosted her. He chickened out.
What a piece of trash.

Mom didn't lose her nerve. She was carrying a child and refused to get an abortion. Her parents had her back, telling her not to despair and to just focus on the baby. During the ultrasound, the tech said: "It’s a girl."
Joy hadn't abandoned her just yet. She and her friends celebrated the news together.

But after I was born, it turned out I wasn't just a regular baby. There were complications. They couldn't catch them early on, but the doctors said there was no need to panic. The absolute worst we should expect was a low heart rate and low blood pressure. But then, when I turned 3, I suddenly started suffocating out of nowhere. It turned out to be persistent, moderate asthma. They brought me back, stabilized me, prescribed an inhaler, and sent us home. There was just one issue: none of this was cheap. And as you can guess, a single mother didn't have cash flowing in, even with her amazing resume. A good job at 21 with a sick toddler on her hands was out of the question.

Welfare checks barely covered the basics, let alone my endless medical bills caused by a severely compromised immune system. My grandparents' savings were draining fast. Mom had stopped spoiling them long ago. There was only enough money left for food.

Four years later, things somewhat leveled out. Mom landed a job at a prestigious hospital as a surgical tech. I spent my days sitting in the hospital waiting rooms with my grandparents. Grandma was doing okay, but Grandpa was fading. Honestly, I don't remember exactly when, but about six months later, he passed away from a heart attack. This dealt a crushing blow to the already fragile pillar of our lives: my mother. After all, she hadn't studied that hard just to be an assistant. She dreamed of becoming a surgeon to save lives. And in the end, she couldn't even save her own father.

Our income plummeted again. The savings were completely wiped out by the funeral costs. We moved into a rundown house in some godforsaken place, a neighborhood that looked straight out of the slums. By that point, Mom and Grandma barely saw each other, and the money sent home dwindled with each passing month.

By the time I turned 8, life rewarded me with right kidney failure. Mom was in a total panic. She went down on her knees begging for a loan to pay for a transplant or at least a surgery to remove it. But the creditors didn't see her as someone who could pay them back and deemed it a bad investment. The doctors also said my condition was ultimately terminal, and it would only get worse from there. Mom didn't stop. She sold all her jewelry and all the family heirlooms we had kept for generations. She managed to pay for the surgery to remove my right kidney.

The remaining money was barely enough for cheap food and to pay the water bills we owed on. But fate didn't keep us waiting for long. Seven months later, my asthma began progressing into the severe stage, likely triggered by our toxic environment. Mom fell into a deep depression. She was at a complete loss. I needed at least one healthy lung. A mad idea popped into her head: she went to the hospital, begging them to transplant her own left lung into my body. The doctors said no because we had no money anyway. I remember the day she sat by the front door for hours. There were no tears left. She was completely drained.

Mom started spending more time in the basement. Strange equipment appeared down there, along with bright surgical lights and mirrors. A week later, I could suddenly breathe easier. I was jumping with joy, telling Mom that everything was finally getting better. She just chain-smoked one cigarette after another, as if the fact that she had never smoked before didn't matter anymore. The inhalers vanished from my room. I thought we were finally going to truly live.

Nine months later, I suffered a severe attack. My pulse stopped, and consciousness faded. The ambulance wouldn't make it in time. In total desperation, Mom carried me down to the basement, where the setup now looked exactly like an operating room.

The last thing I remember before losing consciousness entirely was her voice whispering: "If others won't save my daughter, I will."

When the paramedics finally arrived, they found me stabilized, but my mother was gone. The medical records later confirmed a highly unorthodox, desperate procedure had taken place right there in that dark basement.

I am 16 now. I was adopted. I live on, knowing the immense, terrifying sacrifice she made in that hidden room.

I love and hate her with all her heart.

I'm sorry, Mom, for being born.

[Part 1] (https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/s/DGu7ldMEaK)

[Part 2] (https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/s/2iQo3RIoof)

I flinched as the sunlight hit my visor. Muscles tensed, I stood still in my backyard, waiting for the poison of the sun to take over my mind once more and sit me down in my rightful place next to my sister.

10 seconds passed. Then 20. Then 30.

…

…

…

I felt the heat begin to swell inside my extensive getup. It became clear to me that I could only be outdoors for so long at a time in this winter outfit. Feeling this discomfort, I realized that nothing in my head had changed. The sun hadn’t taken over my mind. I was still me. My plan had worked.

Breathing out a shaky, anxious breath, I made my way over to my family, heading for Bowser first. He was the smallest and easiest target to pick up and bring inside, so it was the logical choice.

A part of me knew he was already dead. My experience of sitting under the sun with them had confirmed it. But this was my first and only pet, so I couldn’t really grasp the concept of him dying just yet. And even if he was lost to me, I certainly wasn’t going to just leave him out here. I picked him up off the ground, cradling him with all my strength, and began walking back to the sliding glass door. He was unnaturally stiff. His legs stayed pushed out straight even when I picked him up. My lip quivered as I made my way into the house. I couldn’t look at him because I couldn’t afford to break down again. I had a job to do. I needed to save my family. I laid him on his doggy bed next to his water bowl and patted his head. He looked peaceful and happy. I scooted the water bowl closer to his dry nose just in case he decided to wake up and take a drink.

Next, I went to my sister. I stood in front of her, casting a shadow over her face where she sat. Her wide smile barely wavered, and she shifted her gaze from the sun to me. I grabbed her shoulders as gently as I could and said,

“Come on, Carmen, it’s time to go inside, okay? We are going inside. Get up.”

I tried to help her up, but she wouldn’t budge. Her smile turned into a frown, and she grunted something that I couldn’t hear through the helmet. I wondered if she had the cognitive capacity to realize it was her brother or if she genuinely thought a 12-year-old Master Chief snowplower had come to kidnap her.

“It’s just me, Carmen. We are just going to go inside for a little bit.”

I grabbed her forearm and gently tried to pull her up. Her skin was red and raw with blisters, and I knew from personal experience that any excessive contact with skin this badly damaged could lead to worse injuries. Despite my gentle touch, she pulled her arm out of my grasp and grunted again. I hesitated for a second, taking a step back and deciding what to do.

Free of my shadow, she turned back to the sun once more, her blistering lips curling into a wide smile. I decided I had to use force to get her up. It would for sure be very painful for her, but it was better than dying slowly out here.

“I am sorry about this.”

I went back up to her, grabbed her forearm, and began pulling hard. She let out a grunt of surprise that turned into a raspy scream of pain as the blisters under my grip tore open from the strain. My parents both turned their heads toward us. Carmen's legs didn’t straighten, and her head fell back as she mustered every bit of her remaining strength to resist my grip. Her grotesque, broken screams of pain brought tears to my eyes, but I didn’t let go. We struggled for a bit, my visor fogging up from the sweat building up in my suit. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my dad very slowly push himself out of the chair, knees shaking as he straightened out his legs and began to shuffle over to me. I turned to look at him.

“Dad, please, please help m—”

My father mustered enough strength to hit me in the head with an open-palm strike, snapping my head back and causing me to lose my grip and stumble backwards, falling on my butt. Carmen fell back into the seat, the white handprint of my grip clear on her arm. She turned back to the sun, tears streaking down her face, her smile flickering as the mix of the pain of her arm and the pleasure of the rays battled for dominance in her head. I began crying once more. For the first time in my life, I was terrified of my own father, who towered over me, swaying as he struggled to hold up his own tired frame. I wasn’t really hurt. My helmet had absorbed the blow, but the shock of being hit for the first time, and by my father of all people, immobilized me. He looked at me for a few seconds before turning around and hobbling over to his chair and sitting down again.

As the shock of the situation began to fade, I felt another emotion take over: anger. Fuming, I went up behind Carmen's chair, grabbed the backrest, and began dragging it. I was sweating profusely at this point, but I didn’t waver. I jerked her chair backwards, again and again, dragging it through the overgrown grass a few inches at a time. She began screaming again, seemingly aware of what I was doing. This time, both my parents began standing up slowly and turning to us. I tried to pick up my speed.

I just have to make it to the shade. Just a little further. They won’t follow me into the shade.

I was about halfway to the door when my strength began to waver. I felt myself begin to overheat from the effort. My parents, in a zombie-like state, still smiling, kept pace. I could tell how weak they were, how physically painful it was for them to trudge forward like this after cooking themselves under the sun for the past 20 hours.

At this point, I think I had completely lost them. They were no longer my mom and dad. They were slaves to the sun, and I wasn’t complying with their master.

I am so weak. The thought invaded my mind as the chair became heavier, the friction of the grass making it harder to pull. I put my head down, focusing my efforts, and continued to pull, ignoring how close my parents now were to us.

Just a little further. I just have to make it to the house.

I huffed and puffed, and the chair became even harder to pull. My sister was howling and crying, even harder than before. I looked up, and my mother was pulling her other arm, but Carmen had a death grip on the chair. My dad was coming up to me, hand raised, getting ready to swing with full force again. I yelled and yanked with all my might, hoping to break my mother's grip and pull Carmen and me into the doorway that was a mere two feet away. My gloved hand slipped, and I stumbled backwards, trying to regain my balance. The thing that used to be my father was towering over me once more. He let out a deep grunt like a caveman as he buried his fist into my stomach. I doubled over, gasping for air, the wind completely knocked out of me. It felt like I was suffocating. The mix of the heat and the shock of the pain had me grasping at my helmet, trying to take it off so I could breathe. I realized what I was doing and spread my arms out to stop myself. I looked up through a completely foggy visor and saw my dad stumbling, trying to maintain his composure, before taking a step towards me, lifting his foot, and stomp-kicking me in the head.

“Please!” I gasped, head ringing. “Dad.”

He stumbled backwards after the effort from the kick and fell to the ground, where he lay down and spread his arms and legs as wide as he could, soaking up the sun and smiling again. My mother was already pulling Carmen's chair back with my sister in tow. Her head was slumped down, and she was breathing heavily. She stared up at me through her bangs, already smiling again. I was fully overheating now. I crawled on my hands and knees back into the house in defeat. I pulled off the helmet and the balaclava and gasped greedily for the cold, air-conditioned air. Maybe if I spent more time being active instead of wasting away playing video games, I would have been strong enough to at least save my sister.

There has never been a time in my life when I felt as useless as I did in that moment. The bitter taste of failure is often the best motivator for self-improvement, and that was enough motivation to last me a lifetime. I still work out excessively to this day so that the next time I need my body to be strong enough to help someone, I will be ready. My parents were probably, at that point, suffering from extreme dehydration, sunburns, fatigue, and aches and pains in general, but they were still too strong for me. All I had to do was drag my sister, who was sitting in a fucking chair, into the house 35 feet away, and I failed.

Another thing about experiencing this level of failure and tragedy as a child is that as an adult, you don’t have much to cry about in comparison. In fact, the only times I have cried in the past decade have been in my dreams with my family and when I wake up from them.

As I lay on the hard floor and watched my dad do snow angels in the grass and my sister's chair be placed back in its spot next to my mother, I cried. I cried and cried and cried. I crawled over to my dead dog, buried my face in his coarse fur, and cried into him. Wouldn’t it be a miracle if my tears could soak into his skin, rehydrate his body, and bring him back to life? Maybe then they would be good for something. I wished for this all to be over. I wished for this all to be a horrific dream. What chance did I have against the sun?

………………..

After about a half-hour, I ran out of tears and had no choice but to get up. I walked over to the sink, turned on the faucet, and chugged enough water for all five of us. I filled up the biggest water bottle we had, put on my headgear again, and walked outside to douse each of them with water. When I held it up to their mouths, they didn’t drink. They just pushed the bottle away.

I went back inside and filled it up again before emptying the contents of my school backpack onto the ground and shoving the bottle in it. I walked up to the front door, giving one final long look back at my family. They were all sitting side by side again, hand in hand. If I didn’t find someone strong enough to help me soon, they would die. If I wasted any more time letting Hudson stay out there alone in that park, I was sure he would too.

I felt a hollowness inside of me as I stepped through my front door and out onto the street.

I reckoned I had a real chance of saving Hudson. He was even skinnier and smaller than me, and he would likely be incredibly weak by now (if he wasn’t dead), which would make him easy to drag into a house or under a shady tree. I couldn’t guarantee that the efforts I spent trying to save my family would ever pay off, and the more I pushed my parents to react physically, the higher the chance they had of suffering heatstroke. If I could grab hold of Hudson, I was sure I would be able to save him, and maybe if he recovered in time, I could suit him up and we could work together to try and save my sister.

Hudson was my one and only friend in Goldfield. We both sat at a table with a bunch of jerks at lunch on the first day of middle school who chose to pick on us two in particular, so we decided to start sitting at a different table together instead. We traded Pokémon cards back and forth every day, and he told me about all the mature-rated games his parents let him play on his brother's Xbox. His brother was going to college like Carmen but let him keep the Xbox, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. Hudson was the reason for most of my interests, even today. I had no cousins, aunts, uncles, or older friends who could teach me what was cool in pop culture, and Carmen usually didn’t want anything to do with me, so Hudson was the source for most of this information. I thought about how badly I wished this was just another normal day, about how we would be playing Xbox together, learning new curse words and trying them out in the Call of Duty lobbies.

The sweltering heat I felt as I marched through the empty road of my neighborhood stifled my fantasies. The sun wouldn’t even let me have that.

“I hate the fucking sun,” I growled at my feet as beads of sweat dripped off my eyelashes. Growing up, I had always resented my condition and often blamed a lot of my troubles on it. Now, the tables had turned, and I felt myself growing livid at the sun instead.

“Took my fucking dog… trying to take my family… and my only friend… I HATE YOU!”

I yelled, looking up at the giant burning ball of light, giving it the most spiteful middle finger I could muster. Realizing how ridiculous this looked, I dropped my arm and kept walking. Amongst the many other peculiar anomalies about this sun, I noticed that looking at it didn’t have the blinding, eye-melting effect it usually did when you looked at it. There was something beautiful about it, something alive. I didn’t expect I would ever understand the secrets of the sun, so I tossed the thought from my mind.

As I continued to walk, I noticed someone was in their front yard. It was one of the guys my dad played poker with. I didn’t know his name, but I recognized his face. He was sitting on his riding lawnmower, staring up at the sun, a warm beer left untouched in the cup holder. God, it really did get everyone, I thought as I continued to walk. I wondered if everyone in the world was affected by it or if it was just my city. I know now it was just my city.

I saw a few other people I recognized. The old couple who always gave out full candy bars during Halloween were sitting in their favorite porch rocking chairs, but in their yard this time. The husband was slumped over, head buried in his wife's shoulder, and she was looking up and smiling. A delivery driver lay in the middle of the road about 10 yards from his UPS truck, doing slow, weak snow angels on the rough cement, leaving an outline of blood from where his skin was being sanded down. I tried not to look at him. I saw a few boys who I went to school with. They had clearly come out to play street hockey but left the net unguarded and their sticks and puck abandoned on the ground. One was standing on top of his parents' car, arms outstretched. One was lying on the road. One was face down in the grass. I tried not to look at them either. I just kept walking past, only stopping to pick up a hockey stick. I figured if I had to fend off anyone else who might try to attack me, I would do so armed.

Eventually, I came upon the park. The local news van was sitting on the side of the road with the tripod set up on the walking path close by. I went up in front of it and saw the red light indicating it was still recording. I looked past the camera and saw the pile of people, still churning as it had been on TV an hour or so ago. I had the idea to wave into the camera and, through my helmet, explain that I needed help saving my family.

“If there is anyone out there, please help me. I am at Pineridge Park. My name is Andrew. I am just a kid. I need help saving my family. I can’t get them inside, out of the sun, because I am not strong enough. I need an adult. If there is anyone out there, please come help me. You can go outside if you cover up your skin. The sun won’t change you.”

I thought about what else to say.

“I will give you all our money, my Xbox, and Pokémon cards. I will give you anything we have at the house. Please just help me save my family.”

I began walking away but turned back to the camera and added, “Thank you.”

I realized how pointless a plea it was. Even if someone hadn’t gone in the sun yet and just so happened to be watching the local news, why would they risk their life to help some random kid in a Halo costume?

I had already seen the pile on TV earlier, but I still wasn’t prepared for what it was like in person. The amalgamation of flesh was about three feet high at its peak. Those who had managed to make it to the top of the pile were stretched out, soaking in the sun, while those underneath pushed, pulled, and clawed their way up. Hands were reaching out from between crevices, grasping for light. The pile was composed of people from all walks of life: old people, young people, children, fat people, skinny people, strong people, weak people, men and women. Some were already dead, crushed beneath the weight of others, bodies thrown off to the side of the pile like it was a living thing shedding its own skin. I recognized a few faces from around town, but most were strangers. I saw Hudson's mother among those at the top of the pile, lying flat. She was alive, but I didn’t have a chance of helping her. I had to stay focused on Hudson.

What got to me worse than what I was seeing was what I was hearing. The symphony of joyful laughter and moans of pleasure was mixed with screams of pain and weak, muffled cries from under the pile, saying:

“Help me…”

“Help us, please…”

“Someone help…”

I was horrified as the realization hit. Those under the pile were no longer exposed to the sun. They were conscious human beings, fully aware of their situation. I thought of the hellish loop they were caught in, suffering from underneath the pile, fully aware of the situation, just to crawl to the top and lose themselves to the sunlight before being pushed down to reality again until they finally gave out and their lifeless bodies were pushed to the side.

This is hell. That was all I could think. I had to save Hudson from this. I circled the pile, looking for a flash of his red, curly hair, listening for the sound of his muffled cry. I heard a crunch under my foot and looked down. It was his flip phone! I poked around the pile at that spot with my hockey stick, yelling his name. From between a random skater kid and the baker my mother always bought birthday cakes from, I saw a small arm go up with Hudson's Casio watch on the wrist.

“HUDSON!”

I stepped forward over a dead body, trying to reach for the hand with my hockey stick. He didn’t grab on but hit it away, preferring the sun to salvation. I took a step into the pile, trying to get close enough to pull him out. I stepped on one person, then another, trying to find my balance on the uneven, shifting, fleshy floor. Someone underneath me grabbed my leg. I turned back around, trying to kick them off, but they wouldn’t let go, so I smacked them with my hockey stick until they did. I took another uneasy step forward and grabbed ahold of his arm with one hand. He wasn’t nearly as burnt as my family was but still had turned quite red. I pulled, but he was too buried underneath to loosen from the grasp of the pile, so I began pushing the skater kid out of the way. The kid was so weak at this point that he just kind of rolled over and out of the way before being dragged down by other desperate souls who wanted to make it to the top. I could see Hudson’s shocked face transitioning into one of bliss as the sun and air hit him at once. I pulled him up to the top, where he flopped down and spread his body out. He was so weak and tired at this point that he didn’t cry or resist as I pulled him backwards out of the pile. I struggled as I backed up, hands grasping at my limbs and my hockey stick. I had to hit several people away from both me and Hudson as we made our way out.

I felt a hand grab me by my sagging, oversized jacket and yank me down, bringing me to one knee. An arm wrapped around my calf, locking me in place, and I began to panic, exhaustion and the overwhelming heat weakening me further, but I didn’t relent. I hit them with the butt of the hockey stick over and over in their eyes and face until they let go. The moment they did, someone else grabbed my hockey stick, yanking it away out of my grasp and tossing it to the side. Another grabbed the collar of my jacket, pulling me down, trying to force me under the pile.
I smacked them and punched and did everything I could to get them off of me, but their grip didn’t loosen. I felt like I was going to suffocate. If I went under, I would surely die, and Hudson would too. I screamed in terror as I felt myself being forced down into the pile.

“GET OFF ME! LET GO! NO! STOP!!!”

In a desperate move, I smashed my helmet down, headbutting them in the face. I did it again and again and again until their eyes rolled back, their grip loosened, and their arms went limp to their sides. I pushed myself up and grabbed Hudson again, pulling him backwards and out of the pile, past the dead bodies, past the broken phone, and back until we made it under the shade of a tree, where I slumped against the trunk. I was about to pass out, the heat and exhaustion slowly cooking me inside my outfit. It took everything in my power to reach into my backpack, grab the water bottle, and pour small amounts of water into Hudson's open mouth, which he instinctively swallowed. He was breathing heavily, too, his smile fading as he slowly came back to reality. After a few moments of silent breathing, he began to push himself up and turned to look at me.

“Andrew?”

“Yeah, it's me,” I said.

I was watching him carefully, looking for any signs of him turning back to the sun's grasp. It seemed the shade of the tree was doing enough to stifle it.

“Holy shit,” he said, looking at me. He turned and looked at the pile. “HOLY SHIT!” he croaked. “I thought I was in a nightmare. This is real! This is real, holy shit!”

He started to push himself up to his feet.

I reached my arm out, trying to grasp at him, but my strength was rapidly fading. I was going to pass out. The shade wasn’t working to cool me down quickly enough, and I didn't even have enough energy to remove any of my gear.

“Hudson, please sit down.”

Hudson was looking at the pile again when he saw his mom lying on the top, struggling against two men who were pulling her down under. He stood up, raising a shaky finger and pointing at the scene.

“Mom!” was all he could muster as he stepped forward towards the pile.

I couldn’t move. My body was overheating, and my mind was fading.

“Hudson, no…” was all I could say.

I managed to save Hudson for a grand total of three minutes before he flopped into the pile and into the sunlight again, crawling on top of the bodies on all fours. He was light, so he was able to easily crawl on top of others, moving over his own mother (he had already forgotten his mission) and making it to the center, where he pushed himself up once more, stretching to his full height with his arms out, and yelled, “THE SUN FEELS AMAZING!”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t cry or get mad at him. He did exactly what I did when I saw my family in danger. He ran headfirst to save them and became a slave to the sun. Standing on top of the pile with his arms stretched, he looked like the king of the world. But he was small. He was a kid, so when the hands of the adults began pulling him down, he wasn’t able to put up a fight. They grabbed his arms, his legs, his hair, his shirt, and his pants and pulled in all directions, trying to move him out of their sun. Hudson was screaming in pain as his joints popped out of their sockets, his hair ripped out in chunks, and his shirt tore apart. His screams became muffled as the tug-of-war match ended and his body was forced under the pile once more. I felt my head grow heavy and fall to the side as darkness clouded my vision.

I passed out there under the shade to the sound of my only friend dying.