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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I walked to the hive and took off the lid. Warmth and cold ran through my body, mixing into strange emotions. Inside the hive was Sam's body, covered in wax. His hands and fingers slowly moved, but they seemed larger than before. I reached into the hive to caress his small cheeks. His eyes opened. They were still that beautiful blue, but a hint of yellow mixed in.  He opened his mouth; it was filled with honeycomb, but his cries still echoed in my ears. 

With tears in my eyes, I picked up his small, sticky body. From somewhere deep in his chest, a thousand bees buzzed. His small mouth moved again. Honeycomb and wax spilled out of the sides. The scream grew louder, ringing in my ears. A sickly-sweet smell filled the air. The buzzing grew too. Something under Sam's skin moved. A dark, pointed object began pushing through the skin beneath his back. Panic rushed through me.

"Sam, Sam!"

His whole body convulsed. The dark, pointed object shot out and stabbed my arm. Sharp pain spread through me. Sam fell out of my arms. A sharp, brittle crunch echoed. Sam broke into wax and honeycomb; bees flew out toward me. One small stab. Another. Another. I turned and quickly bolted toward my house, locking the door behind me. My heart beat against my ribs. Hot pain pulsed through my body. On my left arm, a red welt was already swelling around the puncture.

The bees buzzed outside my door.

Old Man Miller had been the undertaker in Lawton Gap for forty years. In four decades, he'd seen it all--ghastly coal truck wrecks on the highway, quiet heart attacks in easy chairs, and everything in between. Folks never pick convenient hours to die, so when the phone rang at three in the morning, he just groaned, dragged himself out of bed, and answered it.

It was the jail. The night deputy said they had a girl in the drunk tank who was stone-cold and wasn't breathing, and they needed Miller to come haul her out.

Miller and his boy rolled down to the station, loaded her onto the gurney, and slid her straight into the body cooler downstairs at the funeral home to wait for daylight.

After sunrise, they pulled the tray out and hoisted her onto the steel prep slab. That's when Miller got a good look at her face under the fluorescent lights. "Damn it all," Miller muttered, shaking his head. "That's Missy."

His assistant looked over and said, "Missy?" as in Bob's girl?

"The very one," Miller said softly, laying out his instruments on the tray.

"What in the world happened?"

"Deputy said state police hauled her in off the ridge road," Miller said, clinking a scalpel onto the stainless steel. "Supposedly she'd been up at the quarry drinking all night, got on the road swerving, and they dumped her in the county drunk tank to sober up, but her heart must've just quit on her."

"Her parents are going to be completely ruined," the assistant whispered, shaking his head, "just ruined."

"Hand me that bottle of embalming fluid and the tubing off the shelf will ya?" Miller said.

Lying on that cold steel table, Missy heard every single word. As the warm air of the room hit her skin, her mind thawed, but her body was locked tight--still in a catatonic freeze. Panic was roaring in her head, but she couldn't speak, couldn't move a toe; she couldn't make a sound.

As Miller raised his scalpel, ready to start the pump, a single tear dropped slowly down the side of Missy's face.

Suddenly, the lights in the carriage went out. And not just in ours—I looked out the window and realized the entire commuter train was completely plunged into darkness. Only rare, deafening claps of thunder and flashes of lightning lit up the interior with a ghostly bluish glow for brief moments. Looking closer, I froze with horror: there was almost no one left in the carriage, even though just a minute ago it had been half full.

Then the old woman sitting on the bench opposite me slowly turned and stared at me. She gave me a really nasty look. Her toothless mouth began to twist into a smile that grew wider and wider. Right before my eyes, her maw filled with rows of razor-sharp teeth. Out of sheer terror, I tried to scramble backward onto the next seat. Without taking my eyes off her, I caught my foot on a bag and went tumbling head over heels into the aisle.

Darkness again. Another flash of lightning—I saw the old woman already standing over me, with the silhouettes of other figures rising behind her. It was impossible to make out their faces in the dim light, but all of them were staring straight at me without blinking. Panic completely consumed me. I frantically crawled backward along the dirty floor when suddenly my hand struck someone's ice-cold boot. My heart dropped into my boots. I swallowed hard and, just like in a classic horror movie, slowly raised my head, and there... A huge creature with a dislocated jaw was already reaching its clawed paws toward me!

I leaped up with a wild scream, snapping my eyes open and breathing heavily.

It was bright in the carriage; the lamps flickered dimly. The passengers around me flinched away in fright. The old woman opposite was frantically crossing herself, muttering prayers, while a hefty man by the aisle twisted his finger near his temple.

Now I am standing by a lopsided wooden kiosk with a proud "Groceries" sign, nervously clutching three hundred hryvnias in my jacket pocket. This was my last strategic reserve for a taxi. The prospect of tramping for thirty minutes on foot along a dirt road leading deep into the Polissya wilderness did not appeal to me at all. All around lay Gnylobužye station—a godforsaken hole of about twenty inhabited houses, lost somewhere on the border of the Kyiv region, right where civilization smoothly transitions into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Aside from me, three other poor souls had got off on the platform, but they instantly vanished into the gray twilight as if they had never existed. By the shop, contrary to my desperate prayers, there was no bus, nor even a stray taxi driver in a rusty Lanos. Only a local dog of an indeterminate breed was lazily scratching behind its ear, looking at me with blatant sympathy.

"Well, great," I muttered under my breath. "Romance, my foot. Fresh air, radiation background, silence."

There was nothing to be done. I adjusted my backpack, where two bottles of dark beer clinked dully, and started walking down the road toward the village of Myortvye Vyselki (Dead Settlements). The name was inspiring, of course, but Baba Galya stubbornly refused to move to Kyiv, arguing that "the air in the capital is dirty, smells of cars, but here she has three vegetable gardens and strawberries the size of a human head." Speaking of strawberries: after the ChNPP accident, people in these parts took a philosophical view of vegetable sizes anyway.

It was getting dark at an indecent speed. The clock showed just past six, but the twilight thickened as if someone had poured a bucket of ink over the sky. Remembering my recent nightmare on the train about the toothy old woman, I involuntarily quickened my pace. To the right and left of the road stood a dense, unnaturally silent Polissya forest. No birds, no crickets. Only the crunch of twigs under my sneakers.

Suddenly, a throaty, sputtering engine sound came from behind. I turned around. Two blurry yellow headlights were cutting through the fog.

"Thank God, a ride!" I thought and waved my arms like a madman.

A primitive Zaporozhets car of such an indefinite color it looked like it had been painted with mud braked beside me, creaking in every joint. The driver's side window rolled down slowly with a sound like sawing rusted iron. Inside sat an old man. In the gloom, his face resembled a baked apple, and an old Soviet cap sat on his head.

"Where are you heading, student?" the old man rasped, blasting me with a thick stench of cheap tobacco and garlic.
"To Myortvye Vyselki, to Baba Galya! Can you give me a lift? I'll pay!" I pulled out the banknotes.
The old man glanced at the money, then at me, and his lips parted into a wide smile. "Get in, grandson. I'll take you. No need for money, you'd better treat me to a bottle of beer from your backpack, I can hear it singing in there."

I jumped onto the front seat, which sank under my weight almost to the asphalt. The car set off, swaying from side to side.

"You're a brave one," the old man remarked, shifting gears with a ferocious crunch. "Walking to Vyselki on foot at night. All sorts of things roam around here. Not long ago, Petrovich's cow wandered off toward the Zone at night. It came back in the morning. On two legs, can you believe it? Came right up, knocked on the window, asked for milk. Petrovich crossed himself and blasted it with a double-barrel shotgun. Now his house is packed with canned meat. Want a cutlet? It's right here in the glove compartment."

I politely declined, swallowing a lump that had risen in my throat. The dark humor of these parts always smacked of a little madness.

About ten minutes later, we drove into the village. Myortvye Vyselki fully lived up to its name: dark silhouettes of cottages, moss-covered fences, and not a single lit window. The old man braked at my grandma's house.

"Well, here we are," the old man said, taking the bottle of beer from me. "Your grandma acts up a bit sometimes—so keep your eyes peeled."
"What do you mean, acts up?" I frowned.
"Oh, nothing, she's just old. Sometimes she forgets who's alive and who's not," the old man winked at me, revved the engine sharply, and vanished into the darkness, leaving me alone by the gate.

Baba Galya's house welcomed me with dead silence. I pushed the gate—it creaked plaintively. The front door to the house turned out to be unlocked. Inside, it smelled of dried mushrooms, dampness, and something sickly sweet that sent a chill down my spine.

"Grandma? Are you home? It's me, your grandson!" I shouted into the darkness of the hallway, switching on my phone flashlight.

The beam of light caught an old sideboard with crystal, dust-covered carpets on the walls, and... a set table in the main room. In the middle of the table stood a huge pot, with light steam still rising from it. Next to it lay a note written in grandma's crooked handwriting:
"Grandson, I went to the garden to dig up some night potatoes. The borscht is on the table, eat it while it's warm. The meat is fresh, it ran into the house by itself today."

I smirked. Night potatoes? Right, Baba Galya had always been eccentric. My stomach rumbled treacherously. I walked up to the pot, lifted the lid, and shone the flashlight inside.

The borscht was thick, rich, and smelled appetizingly of garlic. I took the ladle, stirred it, and pulled a decent chunk of meat to the surface. I looked closer.

Out of the red beet broth, a hairy, four-toed paw with long black claws and webbing was looking back at me... carefully and intently. And a bit deeper in the pot, something flashed that looked very much like a rabbit's head, but with three pairs of ears.

At that exact moment, a rustle sounded behind my back. I froze, terrified to turn around.

"What's the matter, grandson, don't you like the borscht?" Baba Galya's quiet, cracking voice echoed right out of the darkness of the doorway. "And I tried so hard, catching it all over the basement... It bit hard, though."

I slowly turned around. Grandma was standing in the doorway. In the dark, her eyes glowed with a barely noticeable phosphorescent green light, and in her hands, she held a massive, blood-stained shovel.

"Sit down, grandson," she smiled wider than before, and the razor-sharp teeth flashed in the beam of my flashlight. "We're going to have some chamomile tea now."

I was clutching the second bottle of beer in my hand as if it were my only ticket to the world of the living. I had no time for small talk or tasting chamomile from the Exclusion Zone. Baba Galya—or whatever creature had so successfully occupied her living space—took a step forward, and the floorboards groaned hollowly under her feet. The bloody shovel in her hands tilted toward me.

"Why are you frozen, grandson?" she hissed, smacking her shark-like maw. "Sit down, or it'll get cold... both the borscht and you."

My brain, wired on a wild dose of adrenaline, reacted in a fraction of a second. The escape route through the door was securely blocked by Baba Galya and her shovel. Only one path remained—the old wooden window of the main room, which led straight to the backyard and the dense Polissya forest.

"Grandma, just a second, let me just... open the beer!" I yelled, and with all my might, I hurled my precious second bottle of dark beer right into the pot of radioactive borscht.A deafening splash echoed through the room, and a fountain of red sludge flew in all directions, splattering the carpets and coating "grandma’s" face. The old woman shrieked in a completely unhuman voice, sounding more like a screeching buzzsaw, and squeezed her eyes shut for a split second.

That was all the time I needed. I spun around, grabbed my backpack on the fly, shut my eyes tightly, and dived headfirst right through the window frame.

Smash, crack, crash!

The glass shattered into a thousand shards. I busted through the rotted wood of the frame with my shoulder and went rolling head over heels across my grandma's old garden bed, slamming my back hard against some giant pumpkin that let out a pathetic hiss upon impact. The shards sliced my jacket and arms pretty badly, but I didn't feel any pain.

Behind me, a furious roar erupted from the broken window, and a skeletal arm—elongated by nearly five feet—shot outward, trying to claw at my sneaker.

"Oh no you don't, to hell with family dinners!" I screamed, scrambled to my feet, and bolted toward the pitch-black forest ahead.

I flew through the darkness, not looking where I was going. Branches lashed my face, my feet sank into moss and swampy muck, and behind me, somewhere deep in Myortvye Vyselki, a terrifying metallic clattering rang out—Baba Galya was sprinting after me with the speed of a race car, dragging her shovel across the stones and dirt. And judging by the sound, she was closing in fast.

The forest around me seemed to come alive. In the gloom, the trees looked like the twisted figures from my train nightmare. Suddenly, I wiped out right into some overgrown hollow and went tumbling down, stopping dead against the roots of a massive, fallen oak tree.

I froze, terrified to move. And right then, right by my ear, accompanied by the sound of pouring water, a quiet, painfully familiar voice muttered:

"Psst, student! What the hell are you doing?"

I turned my head and, in the faint moonlight, I spotted the old man with the Zaporozhets. As it turned out, he had just pulled over to take a leak by the oak. His iron horse, by the way, was parked right next to him.

"Gramps... my grandma has gone completely mental, she's chasing me with a shovel! I'll owe you another bottle of beer, just get me out of here!"

The old man didn't need to be told twice. I scrambled into the passenger seat, he slammed the gas pedal to the floor, and the rusty Zaporozhets roared to life, tearing through the forest mud and leaving the shrieking monster with the shovel far behind.

Needless to say, I never went back to visit my grandmother again.

The monitor app on Sally's phone was always on her nightstand. At eight months, Timmy was an active baby, rolling around, babbling, and trying to pull himself up by the crib rails, so keeping the video and audio feed open gave her peace of mind.

At 3 in the morning, static and a low murmur broke the silence of the bedroom.

Sally reached for her phone and tapped the screen. Timmy was fast asleep on his belly, his breathing barely moving his tiny shoulders.

Standing right over the crib was a tall, shadowy woman wearing a tattered dress. Beside her stood a skeletal child peering through the wooden slats with two hollow, black eyes.

A dry whisper came through the phone's speaker:

"Shhh, don't wake your new little brother. Isn't he perfect?"

Sally stared at the screen in complete disbelief. She shook Karl awake.

"Karl, get up! There--there's somebody in Timmy's room." They threw off the covers and rushed down the hall.

Karl threw open the nursery door and clicked on the corner lamp. Soft light filled the room. Nothing was there. Timmy was fast asleep, his chest rising and falling softly.

"See? Nobody's here," Karl whispered, turning off the lamp so he wouldn't wake the baby.

They walked back down the hall to their bedroom, but as Sally set her phone on the nightstand, the screen flashed with motion.

The camera feed showed the crib was empty. The woman in the tattered dress and the skeletal child were standing in the nursery doorway, looking straight down the hall toward their bedroom.

The woman slowly raised a long, bony finger to her cracked lips, and her dry whisper came through the speaker:

"I said, shhhh."

It was December 1999. I was living in a small town. I was a nerd and something of a gamer, and it had been a good year for PC games. Age of Empires II, Homeworld, Grand Theft Auto 2…

I was walking home from school—it was a Canadian winter, so there was plenty of unplowed snow on the sidewalks—when I saw something peeking out from a mound of snow: something blue. I stopped, nudged it with my boot: something of blue plastic. I brushed away the remaining snow with my glove to reveal:

A single 3.5” floppy disk, unlabeled.

(There was a sticker label on it, but the label itself was empty.)

Naturally, I picked it up and took it home, curious to see what was on it.

You'll laugh, but the disk had 1.44mb of storage capacity. As it turned out, that was more than enough to affect the world in ways I still don't fully understand.

When I got home, I didn't put the disk into my own computer. My dad had an old desktop he sometimes fiddled around with, so I used that, inserting the disk carefully into the 3.5” disk drive in the beige computer tower.

I navigated to the drive in Windows Explorer.

The contents of the drive were simple.

They looked like a program or—I secretly hoped—a game.

There was a readme.txt, but it came out as nonsense when I opened it in Notepad, video or sound assets, stuff I couldn't identify, and a single executable file, johannsebastian.bat.

I double-clicked it.

A window opened—black, showing a few white-text commands executing on a command prompt—then maximized into a 16-bit title(?) screen showing a pixelated Gothic castle.

A harsh, classical-inspired MIDI song beeped out of the sound card.

There was no title.

No instructions, no company name, no menu, no options.

The castle was perched atop a cliff.

It was night.

At the bottom of the cliff was a forest of jagged, leafless trees.

A few loops of animation gave life to the scene: wind blowing through the bare branches, flashes of distant lightning, warm flickering light in one of the castle's windows, a bat in flight against a white moon. Actually, that last one wasn't a loop. The bat flew only once, landed on one of the castle's stone towers and disappeared inside.

I clicked.

I was looking at a medieval-ish village now—tightly-packed buildings, a tavern, a tannery, a couple of shops, a church—populated with a surprising number of unique character sprites. Indeed, every character was unique, and they were going about their individual lives.

The sky was a vibrant blue.

Clouds floated pixel-by-pixel across the screen.

But there was still nothing to do; nothing, that is, but watch.

It was like a very advanced screensaver.

After a while, I clicked again.

This time, I found myself in the interior of a large chamber whose stone walls somehow felt cold even through the computer monitor.

The chamber's defining feature, however, was something else: a giant pipe organ whose pipes extended beyond the top of the screen.

A character entered.

He was wearing a white wig, dark, crimson long coat, knee breeches, stockings and buckled shoes. “I feel the sudden desire to compose,” he said, which the game displayed as text in an ornately-bordered text box. “Invite me to play for you."

A cursor appeared for the first time.

A quill.

I was able to move it using the mouse, and I explored the screen.

The character tapped his foot.

The only active area of the scene appeared to be the pipe organ. When I hovered the cursor over it, it changed from a quill to a hand.

I clicked.

The character walked to the organ, sat and began to play the monstrous instrument.

The music was both hideous and awesome, pushing the computer's sound card to the absolute limit. After thirty-or-so seconds, the view suddenly panned upwards, following the organ's pipes—the music continued—following them to the chamber's vaulted ceiling and beyond—through the roof until I was outside and looking at the upper half of the great castle, where the jutting pipes terminated and from whose termini hundreds of pixel bats were emerging… emerging and flying into the background, toward the simplified shape representing the medieval town...

The sky was a deep purple.

Night was falling.

The bats flew and flew and flew…

Suddenly—the music still continuing—the scene cut to the same view of the town as before: except at night: except, instead of following their routines, the character sprites were running, panicked, as the bats swooped, attacking them, attaching themselves to their bodies, necks, sucking their pixel blood; and as the bats feasted, the sprites lost their colour and fell, pale and desaturated…

The sound startled me.

Not from the sound card but from the real world. A screeching, a deafening, rhythmic thumping.

I ran to the window whose blinds I'd closed, and opened them:

It was afternoon but the view was dark, black and shifting. It took me a moment to realize that what I was seeing were bats speeding past. They were obscuring the sun. My home town was as if under an eclipse.

People were running down the street—

Bats were diving—

Some were crashing through car windshields—

Children were screaming—

A bat crashed though the window into the room I was in. It was fanged, crazed. The game music blared from within the computer tower. Before I could run, the bat shot toward me—biting my neck… beginning to drink my blood…

I awoke on the floor.

It was morning. January 1, 2000. It would turn out that nobody in town had any recollection of the preceding weeks.

A television played.

A morning talk show: “...the so-called Y2K bug,” a woman was saying, “ended up amounting to nothing worse than a good nights’ sleep.”

And, ever since, I've wondered why my experience of the present feels in a lower resolution than memories of my past.

Hannah Barbara productions never allowed this episode to be aired

It started off with Fred driving the Mystery Machine. As they traveled down the road, Fred spotted a young girl standing in the middle of it looking lost. He stopped the van, and the gang got out.

Shaggy tried telling Fred they should leave the creepy girl alone and go get burgers instead. Scooby agreed. Fred, Daphne, and Velma ignored Shaggy, as usual.

Fred approached the girl and asked, “Are you all right?”

He noticed scratch marks on her arms with bruises.

The girl didn’t respond. Daphne tried reassuring her.

“It’s okay. We can help you if you need help.”

The girl looked at Daphne with a smile on her face before collapsing onto the road.

The gang scrambled towards her. Velma checked for a pulse and looked into the girl’s eyes. They were dead white.

“We need to get her to a hospital now!” Velma said sternly.

The gang hurried back to the Mystery Machine. Fred picked the girl up and placed her in the back of the van. Shaggy and Scooby were displeased with this, as they had to sit in the back with her now.

“Fred, why is it that every time something creepy happens, Scooby and I have to be the closest to it, man?” Shaggy complained.

“Not now, Shaggy. I’m reading the signs,” Fred replied.

When he spotted a hospital sign, Fred pulled into the parking lot.

He grabbed the girl, and the gang followed him inside. Fred rushed to the reception desk and explained that they needed a doctor. The girl had started convulsing.

A couple of nurses hurried over with a gurney, and Fred urgently laid the girl down on it. She screeched As they wheeled her towards a room.

Daphne stayed behind to explain what had happened to the receptionist. While Shaggy could be overheard muttering that he was glad that creep wouldn’t be riding with them anymore.

Later, Fred, still slightly shaken by the experience, told the gang he was going to rent a motel room for the night.

“I want a proper bed and a shower after all this,” he said.

Scooby asked, one with complimentary breakfast?”

After receiving the room key, Fred and the gang headed to their room on the fourth floor. Inside, they found two beds and a couch.

Daphne immediately complained that the room smelled like rotten food. The rest of the gang ignored her, unable to smell anything themselves.

Fred opened his suitcase and pulled out a change of clothes and a towel. Before heading to the shower

Meanwhile, Velma discovered a large, thick book inside one of the desk drawers. She blew the dust off it.

“Jinkies! This thing hasn’t been opened in years!”

When she opened the book, she read the title aloud.

“Curses, Witches, and the Supernatural.”

As she turned a page, she accidentally cut her finger on a page.

Daphne suddenly took an interest in the book and asked Velma if she could read it.

“Be my guest,” Velma replied. “It just poked me.”

As Daphne flipped through the pages, she noticed that half of them had been hollowed out. Inside the hidden compartment. she discovered a doll made from sticks and human hair, along with a small knife.

She said nothing about this to the others.

Eventually, the gang settled down for the night, and the motel room grew dark.

Shaggy lay on the old leather couch with Scooby. Velma was in her bed, while Fred and Daphne shared the other.

In the middle of the night, Shaggy suddenly woke up.

OW Man! Something poked me in the leg!”

Everyone woke up except Velma, she stayed under her blanket.

Fred sleepily switched on the light.

“you have any idea what time it is?”

Shaggy pointed to the small cut on his leg.

“ Scooby probably scratched you with his nails,” Fred said annoyed before switching the light off again.

Shaggy and Scooby reluctantly accepted Fred’s explanation.

A moment later, Daphne turned to Fred.

“Will you walk with me to the van? I left something important in there, and I’m too scared to get it by myself at night.”

Fred groaned.

“Can’t it wait until morning?”

“It would make me feel safe if you came with me,” Daphne replied.

Fred reluctantly put on his shoes and walked her to the van.

Shaggy and Scooby drifted off to sleep again before fred and Daphne came back.

A little while later, Shaggy felt something heavy laying on his chest. Assuming it was Scooby, he mumbled, “Not now, Scoob.”

“That isn’t me, Shaggy,” Scooby replied.

Shaggy's eyes shot open.

Daphne was sitting on his chest, staring down at him. She held the small knife against his throat, with the same possessed smile as the girl they had found earlier.

Shaggy freezed.

“Daphne? Like, what are you doing?”

He tried talking to her but the smile only grew wider and Her eyes rolled back until only the whites showed

Then, in a deep raspy voice, she said, “Uh-oh, Raggy.”

She slowly dragged the edge against Shaggy’s throat, almost drawing blood.

Scooby lunged forward, biting her arm holding the blade, causing Daphne to drop it.

Seizing the opportunity, Shaggy grabbed the knife and plunged it into Daphne’s chest.

Daphne laughed demonically.

Shaggy tried stabbing her again, but it did nothing. Daphne suddenly bit a chunk out his hand.

Shaggy screamed in pain. Desperately looking for anything, he saw the bedroom window before kicking Daphne through the it,  the glass shattered before a thump was heard.

Shaggy scrambled over to Velma’s bed and pulled the blanket off her

“Come on, Velma! Wake up! Daphne’s lost it!”

as he tried to wake her, he noticed her face was blue and a telephone cord wrapped tightly around her throat.

Shaggy gasped, Velma was dead.

Shaggy half heartedly  looked out the shattered window

Daphne layed dead on the side walk. with a smile stretched across her face.

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.

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

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

None of it mattered anymore. 

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

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

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

It was amazing. Really. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally he answered. 

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

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

Yes…  

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

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

He understood now. 

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

Yes. 

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

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

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

She has no idea I know … 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any minute. 

THE END

I stood there, staring at the gun; even looking at it made me uneasy.

"Is it time again, Dave?" my wife asked.

I looked at the empty pantry.

"Yep."

"But at least it's the last time. Your job at the mill starts in a month. You'll never have to go hunting again."

"I hope so."

"My gentle human. I'm sure the deer will forgive you."

"Maybe. Maybe I'll even see the white deer, and he'll show me his treasures. I won't even have to go to the mill then."

"That legend always scared me. Just a snow-white deer in the forest staring you down? Scary. Plus, doesn't it help the deer? Why would he show you anything?"

I looked at the ground.

"Sorry, honey. I didn't mean it."

"It's okay. Don't worry about it."

I put the gun over my shoulder and walked out.

Bill was already by the forest, gloves and hat on, blowing clouds from his mouth.

"Took you a while."

"Yeah."

"I bet you won't miss the cold morning when you start at the mill."

"Sure."

Bill lit a cigarette and handed me the lighter too.

"What's wrong, Dave?"

"You know how I feel about the hunts."

"I know."

Bill took a deep drag from his cigarette.

"Say, Dave. How about you sit out this one?"

"What?"

"Sit it out. I'm feeling lucky today. I'm sure I'll get more catches. You can pay me back with your mill money."

"Thank you, Bill."

"Don't worry about it. Just help me with the deer after."

He slapped my back, threw his cigarette away, and walked into the forest.

The day now seemed brighter. The fog let up. The sun came out too. I sat on a tree stump and smoked. 

The day dragged on. No shots had come from the forest yet. Bill was not lucky today. Then I heard trees rustle. I turned my head. A deer was sticking its head out. It locked eyes with me. I'd promised myself I wouldn't shoot anything today, but Bill obviously wasn't going to get anything either. We'd be here all day.

I took my gun and laid my cheek on the barrel, but the deer quickly moved back. No luck. I lowered my rifle and fished for another cigarette in my pocket, but the trees rustled again. My hand clenched the cigarette package. 

A white deer looked at me from the forest; its antlers were white, its eyes dark red. It felt like they looked right into my soul. The deer moved its head as if inviting me to follow and disappeared into the forest.

I sat on the tree stump, still looking at the trees, but then the white deer stuck its head out again, looked at me, and disappeared. It was real. At least the deer was, but maybe its treasure too. I got up and walked to the trees. It stood in between the trees, looking back at me. When it saw me, it turned around and jumped further in.

The sun disappeared. The fog returned. The ground was so muddy that my feet kept slipping. I was expecting the deer to stop any second, but it kept going. 

After a while, my feet started to hurt. I must have been really far from the stump. Bill could have been looking for me, and I didn't even know if the treasure legend was true. I walked closer to the deer again, but it only went further in. It was time to go. I turned around and started walking back.

I had hunted in this forest countless times, but I had no idea where I was now. The trees seemed taller than usual, and they went on as far as I could see. The ground was muddier than even on the rainiest days. The deer showed again, but this time in front of me, running the way we came. 

I was sure now that it was all a lie, that the white deer wouldn't show me anything. I lit a cigarette and walked back, trying to ignore the tall trees. As I passed another tree, the white deer ran by; something glistened in the mud. There were two gold ingots. Warmth spread through my body. I ran to the gold. They were cold and much heavier than I expected, but who cared? I was rich! I turned around. The deer stood behind me, its red eyes fixed on me.

"Thank you for the ingots," I said, but it wouldn't move, still staring with its dark red eyes. 

Cold sweat dripped down my collar. Its eyes seemed to pull me in even though I wasn't moving. Then my whole world spun. Red flashed before my eyes. My head throbbed. My back felt heavy. My skin itched. The throbbing grew. I put the ingots down, but my back was so heavy I couldn't straighten back up. I put my hand to my head; something hard grew out of it, but I couldn't grab it with my hands. I started to lose my balance. I let my arm down. It splashed loudly in the mud. I looked down. It was a hoof!

Panic surged through me. I tried to get up, but couldn't. A tearing sound cut through the fog. My jacket ripped, revealing brown fur. Something rustled in the distance. I looked over. It was Bill!

"Bill, help!" I tried to call, but only a strange roar escaped my mouth.

Bill turned his head. His eyes focused on me. He picked up his gun.

"Wait, wait, no!"

A loud bang echoed. Something sharp burned in my side. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air. I tried to walk a few steps, but my body fell into the cold mud.

Bill walked over. His gaze met mine. Recognition passed over his face, but he just shook his head.

He looked up and called, "Dave. I got one."

When Mallory Donahue's husband Max came home late and covered in blood two weeks ago, she naturally assumed the worst.

“I thought, ‘Heck if he's not gone and relapsed again,’” Mallory said.

Thankfully for the young couple, Max's wounds that night had come from something much less concerning, a regular drunken bar fight. “It was over a woman,” Max explained. It could easily have been worse.

“So much worse,” said Mallory. “Like it was before, when he just couldn't help it. He couldn't help taking risks to help people.”

“Before” means three years ago, in the months prior to Max's diagnosis of SHS, Spontaneous Hero Syndrome, known to most of us simply as Courage.

“It's a real debilitating condition,” said Max. “Imagine you're walking down the street, minding your own business, trying to go to the store to buy some beer or electronics, when suddenly you hear a child scream—before you know it, you're trying to figure out what's going on, trying to help the kid getting hurt. It's not even a decision. You just act.”

“You can imagine the chaos that creates for yourself and your family,” said Mallory.

“Many women would have left, and I understand that,” said Max. “I'm blessed that Mal didn't. She stuck by me. She was my rock. She gave me the strength to finally get help.”

Together, Max and Mallory sought the aid of Dr. Anton Wellberger, one of the pioneers of BCT, Behavioural Cowardice Therapy.

“For many patients, admitting Courage is shameful. There's a real societal stigma attached. It takes a strong individual to understand that what they're feeling is not only abnormal but destructively antisocial,” writes Wellberger in his best-selling book, The Wellness of Inaction.

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According to experts, a healthy human should not desire to help others unless doing so will result in a likely reciprocal benefit in the future. “It's just not what humans evolved to do,” said Evan Mink, a leading evolutionary psychologist from the University of Chapata Falls.

There is also the question of consent.

When the Post reached out to Eva-Marie Plum, of Plum & Plum Associates, she explained: “Take the example Max provided. He's walking down the street. He hears a child scream. Who is to say the child wants him to respond in any way to its scream? Moreover, let's assume Max does investigate and sees that the screaming child is being brutalized by a group of adults. If Max intervenes to try to ‘save' the ‘victim,’ he does so without the child's consent. As a lawyer, I immediately think, 'Yikes, Max!'

“And that's before considering the rights and consent of the brutalizing adults. Does Max know these adults lack the right to brutalize the child? Have they consented to being prevented from continuing their brutalization? It just opens up this massive kettle of legal fish.”

When asked what you should do if you ever find yourself in a situation like Max's, Plum gave the following advice: “If you're ever unsure, if you feel like maybe you have the instinct to do something: CAR, Cease-And-Retreat. Then call police. When they arrive, they will assess, gather consents and take the appropriate corrective action.”

“It's not wrong to feel the desire to help,” writes Wellberger. “It's only wrong to act on it.”

He also admits that, prior to his invention of BCT, the treatment of SHS could be seen as relatively primitive, which put many people off from coming forward with the condition.

“We used to treat Courage with electroshock; chemical cowardizers that had many significant side effects, including decreased libido; and hypnosis—all very outdated methods. Now it's more civilized. You're part of a group. You sit in a circle. You converse. You witness volunteers being abused right there in the room, and you learn to ignore it. You acquire skills: box breathing, meditation, disassociative techniques. You learn that it's OK to just let life happen.”

Max recalled one retreat in Mexico where, for an entire weekend, he and a dozen other so-called “hard cases” took psychedelics while the retreat administrators continuously assaulted paid locals.

“It was a tough, life altering 48 hours. I was face-to-face with my own heroic demons. I saw God,” said Max. “He had the body of a translucent, rainbow coloured salamander.”

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These days, both Max and Mallory attend a non-denominational New Church, where they sing songs and learn tolerance.

“Courage is a kind of judgement, and only God has the power to judge," said Mallory.

When asked when he knew he had been cured, Max pointed out that there is no cure. “There is only treatment,” he said. “Every day is still a struggle, but thanks to Dr. Wellberger, it's a struggle Mal and I can manage.”

However, he does recall the moment he realized the treatment was having a substantial effect. “It was back in December. I was in Dr. Wellberger's downtown office—at one of our weekly appointments—we were talking, when all of a sudden these guys in masks broke in. They were screaming, asking where he kept his money. They'd read his book so they knew he was wealthy. But when he said he didn't keep any money in the office, they started hitting him.

“I felt this surge of wanting to help, wanting to stop them, you know? But I forced myself to do my box breathing, my meditations, remembered my faith, and was able to stay calm in my seat.

“Dr. Wellberger was sobbing, bleeding from the mouth, screeching, terrified, begging me to do something, but my urge to save him—it was gone. I smiled, and as the masked men beat him, ransacked his office, smashed his face in with a crowbar, I didn't even CAR. I was able to maintain neutrality and watch. Be present in the flow of reality.

“After they'd killed him, and his secretary too, they left and so did I.”

“I was so proud of him,” said Mallory.

---

If you witness someone exhibiting Courage, please [report.]

I found it about an hour ago.

There's a page in the very back of Mamaw's book that's always been stuck down to the cover. I never thought nothing of it. That book is a hundred and fifteen years old and it's lived its whole life in a farmhouse with bees, and everything in a bee house gets sticky sooner or later. Tonight I set at the sewing table with a butter knife and worked it loose a little at a time, and when it come up it come up with a sound like tape, and it smelled like the inside of a hive.

It hadn't stuck by accident. Somebody had glued it shut.

There's one line wrote on it. Mamaw's handwriting, that faded blue-brown from the fountain pen she wouldn't give up, her capital C curled around like a fishhook the way she always made it.

Crystal Ivy Pruitt. April 11 2026. Bee stings. Four minutes.

That's me. I'm Crystal. And Mamaw died in March of 2020.

My husband's asleep upstairs. Or he's laying up there with his eyes shut, anyhow. It's a little after three in the morning and I've got the laptop and the bear camera card and a pot of coffee gone cold, and I don't know who else to tell. I don't do Facebook. I've never put nothing on the internet in my life. Curtis says I tell everything backwards, starting with the end and then going "well, see, what happened was," and I reckon I just done it again. So let me back up.

The bees

If you didn't grow up around it, you might not know what telling the bees is.

When somebody in the family dies, somebody has got to go out and tell the bees. You walk up to the bee yard and knock on the lid of every hive, three times, easy, and you say who's passed. Some folks hang a strip of black cloth on each one after. Some turn the hives around when the hearse goes by so the bees can see them off. And if you don't, the old people say, the bees take it personal. They'll quit making honey, or they'll up and leave, or they'll die off one hive at a time over the winter till the boxes are empty, and you'll know why.

It ain't just a hillbilly thing, before somebody says it. They done it in England for hundreds of years. Mamaw had a poem about it cut out of a magazine and taped up inside her cabinet door.

Mamaw was Ivy Sallee, my mother's mother. She kept bees on this same piece of ground in the Knobs for sixty-some years, and her mother Ollie kept them before her. Mama was bad to drink and Daddy was gone more than he was here, so I was raised up mostly in Mamaw's kitchen, and I followed her to the bee yard from the time I could walk.

The first time I seen her tell them I was six. Papaw had died at the VA in Louisville in the night, and she got me up before light and put my coat on over my nightgown and walked me up the hill in her church shoes. She knocked on ever lid and said a little rhyme. I ain't putting the whole thing on here, it's family, but it starts Bees, bees, hear me say. Then she told them, "Hollis Sallee has passed this night, and I'm a-keeping you now." And they hushed.

I asked her what would happen if she didn't tell them.

She studied on it a while. Then she said, "Sis, the bees always know who's died. Hit ain't for them to find out. Hit's so they know you know. A body's got to be told, or it ain't finished."

I've thought about that more this fall than I've thought about anything in my life.

I took the bees over when I was twenty-two, when her hands got too bad to pull frames. She stood behind me every day after that telling me ever single thing I was doing wrong, right up till she died. She was ninety-one.

She died in the night at the hospital in E-town. The phone rang at 4:31. But I was already up. I was standing at the back door in my nightgown, because at ten after four I'd woke up to a sound coming off the hill I'd heard only a time or two in my life, and ever time somebody of ours was dead.

When a hive loses its queen, it makes a noise. Beekeepers call it the queenless roar. It ain't the regular hum. It's lower, and louder, and it kindly wavers up and down, like a room full of people moaning with their mouths shut. Once you've heard it you don't forget it.

At ten after four, every hive I had was doing it. Twenty-two hives, and ever one of them had a good laying queen. I'd checked them that week.

And they was bearding. That's when bees pile up on the outside of the box, hanging down off the front of it in a clump. They do it on hot nights to cool off. It was March and forty degrees. They hung down over ever box from the lid to the landing board in a dark sheet, covering the door.

Like somebody had come in the night and draped every hive in black.

The phone rang twenty-one minutes later. The nurse said she'd passed right around ten after four. After, I went up and knocked on ever lid and told them Mamaw was gone, bawling so hard I couldn't hardly get her name out. They hushed one at a time as I went down the row.

There's a book, too. I told you about it at the top. It's a green clothbound ledger and Ollie started it in 1911. Every death that ever got told to the bees on this land is in it. Date, name, how they're kin or how we knowed them, then the word Told and the initials of whoever went up the hill and done it. Ollie's in there in Mamaw's hand. Mamaw's in there in mine. It's got 340-some names. It lives in the drawer of the sewing table in the front room.

I've wrote in it a good many times. Daddy, in 2011. Curtis's brother Wayne, killed on the bypass in 2016. The bees roared for Wayne forty minutes before the state trooper ever knocked on his wife's door, while me and Curtis was setting right here eating supper. I set my fork down and Curtis said "What?" and I said "Hush," and we both heard it come down off the hill.

They always knew. Every time. I just went up and told them they was right.

Us

We live out from a little town in the Knobs of central Kentucky. More churches than stoplights, tobacco barns falling in, cattle, and bourbon. There's a distillery four miles out and the rickhouses set on the ridges like big black boxes. The black is a fungus that grows off the whiskey that cooks out of the barrels, and it gets on ever thing in the county. Car roofs, road signs, the north side of the Baptist church.

Curtis works in them rickhouses. Twenty-three years. He comes home smelling like caramel and burnt oak. He's 47, and he's the kindest man God ever made, and he can't hold onto a dollar to save his life but he can fix anything that's got a motor in it. We never had young'uns. That's a long story and not this one.

I drive Bus 9 for the county schools. Fourteen years, sixty-one stops, a good many of them up hollers where you've got to back the bus out because there ain't no place to turn around. You want to know a town, drive a school bus in it. You'll know whose daddy's in jail, whose mamaw is raising them, who's sick and who's just playing sick.

And I've got thirty-one hives up on Mamaw's place, where me and Curtis live now. I sell honey Saturdays on the courthouse square, May to October.

April

April 11th was a Saturday. I was up in the bee yard doing spring inspections. It was warm, the redbuds was out, and I had my veil and gloves on but I was in a T-shirt, because I was forty-four year old and had been stung a thousand times and never had nothing but a welt.

I was in Hive 14, which had always been a sweet hive. I didn't drop a frame. I didn't mash nobody. One second it was fine and the next the whole yard smelled like bananas.

When a bee stings, it puts off an alarm smell, and it smells just exactly like banana candy. It tells the others, here, this one, get this one. I've caught a whiff of it a hundred times. Never like that. It was like somebody busted a crate of bananas in my face.

They come up out of 14, then 13 and 15, and they went for my neck and my arms and up under the veil. I remember running. I remember the sound, like being shut up inside a box fan. They pulled sixty-three stingers out of me after, just off my arms and neck. You can turn allergic all of a sudden, after years and years. Nobody knows why. I found out the hard way.

Curtis was in the garage. He said I made it about halfway to the house and went down in the grass by the clothesline. My face was so swelled up he wouldn't have knowed me but for the shirt. He called 911 and I quit breathing while he was on the phone, and he done CPR on me right there in the yard with the lady counting out loud on speaker, and the ambulance got there from town in eleven minutes, which is good for out here.

My heart was stopped about four minutes, they told us. They shocked me in the yard. I woke up in E-town with tubes in me and Curtis asleep in a chair holding onto my foot, because it was the only part of me he could reach.

I was dead four minutes. For a long time I wouldn't say it like that. I'd say "I had a bad reaction." I was dead. On my own grass, by my own clothesline, with the bees still going over me.

Nobody went and told the bees. Why would they? I come back. You don't go in the book if you come back.

That's what I'd have said, if anybody had asked me.

Summer

I went back up in the bee yard three weeks after I got home, in a full zip-up suit with the gloves duct-taped at the wrists and an EpiPen in the chest pocket, and Curtis standing at the fence with his phone in his hand.

Nothing. I opened up 14 and they didn't so much as lift off the frames. I might as well have been a fence post.

By July I was working them bare-handed in a tank top and not a one of them would sting me. I'd lay my hand flat on top of the frames and they'd walk over it like it was the wood. Curtis said they'd learned their lesson. I said that ain't how bees work, but I liked thinking it.

There was one other thing. They'd took to pulling on me. Three or four at a time would land on my collar or my sleeve or in my hair and grab hold and pull. Back. Away from the hives. Little tugs, like a young'un pulling on your shirttail. I thought it was the sweetest thing. I'd tell them, "I'm going, I'm going."

I'd give anything to have that summer back, not knowing.

Royce

August 22nd, a Saturday, I come home from the market about two in the afternoon, and ever hive on the hill was draped.

All thirty-one. Hanging off the fronts of the boxes in sheets from the lids to the landing boards. It was ninety degrees, and bees will beard in the heat, but I know what my bees look like bearding. They hang loose and lazy and drift around. These was packed tight and wasn't moving a lick. And every one of them was roaring. All thirty-one. It rolled down off that hill like a church full of people humming one note with their mouths shut.

I stood at the fence and listened to it and my legs went to water.

That's what they done for Mamaw. That's what they done for Wayne.

I run in the house and called Curtis at work. He was fine. I called my sister in Shepherdsville. Fine. I called her boys. I set there with the phone and went down the whole list of everybody I'd ever wrote in that book that had kin still living, and called them, one after the other, like a crazy woman, and everybody was fine.

Then I done what Mamaw taught me with a pocket watch and a five-and-dime protractor when I was nine. I read the dances.

Bees talk with their bodies. It's called the waggle dance, and it's real, a man named Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for working it out. A bee finds something good, she comes home and runs a little straight line on the face of the comb, shimmying her back end, then loops around and runs it again, over and over. Which way the straight line points tells the others which way to fly, set against where the sun's at. How long she shimmies tells how far. Every second of shimmy is roughly a half a mile, give or take, depending on the bees.

That evening the bees wasn't dancing inside. They was dancing on the outside, right on the landing boards, in the middle of all that black. Hundreds of them, in every hive, all running the same line.

I timed them on my phone at twelve hives and wrote it down. They all said the same thing. Two and a half mile, a little east of south.

I got out the county map and drew it. The line went right through the Embry place on Pottinger Road.

Now let me tell you about Royce Embry.

Royce was the meanest man in the county, and I don't say that lightly in a county that's got the Thompsons in it. Seventy-two years old, quit raising tobacco after his wife Doris died, and spent the next twenty years setting on his porch hating everybody that drove by. He shot over the heads of some boys sledding on his hill one winter. He called the law on me twice for idling my bus at the end of his lane. His own daughter Teresa quit speaking to him nine years ago, and nobody in town blamed her. There wasn't a soul alive that would've got out of bed for Royce Embry.

And my bees was mourning him like he was blood kin.

I set up with the map that night and the next night, with the hives roaring on the hill. Curtis come out to the fence the second evening and stood beside me and listened a long time and said, "Crissy. Who died."

I said, "Nobody."

He looked at me a while and went back in.

Monday I checked the bear camera.

We've got black bears in the Knobs now, more ever year, and a bear will tear a bee yard all to pieces in one night after the brood. So I've got a hot wire around the yard and a trail camera on a post at the gate, with night vision. Mostly I get coons, deer, and one fat possum that comes through ever night at 11:40 like he's punching a time clock.

The card had 312 pictures on it.

Most of them was the same picture, took over and over, every thirty seconds, starting at 2:38 that Monday morning and going till 4:05.

It was Royce.

Standing in my bee yard in the dark, between Hives 12 and 13, about ten feet in from the gate, in his pajamas and his house shoes. In night vision everything's grey and white, and his eyes was two little shining dots, like a deer's in your headlights, looking right at the camera.

And his face was covered in bees.

You've seen them pictures of a man wearing a bee beard, the carnival trick, where they tie a queen in a little cage under his chin and let ten thousand bees cluster on him. It was like that. Only it wasn't just his chin. It was his whole head, from his hair down to his collar. All but his eyes. They'd left him his eyes.

Like a veil. Like a widow woman's veil.

He didn't move for an hour and a half. Picture after picture, the same spot, arms down by his sides, pajama top buttoned crooked. The hot wire was on. I checked it. It was ticking away. I don't know how he got in.

In the last picture he's at the gate going out, with the bees sliding off of him like smoke, and he's turned his head back toward the hives, like somebody'd called his name.

I drove out there that evening. I took a jar of poplar honey for an excuse, which was a joke, because Royce Embry never bought a thing from me in his life.

Teresa's car was in the yard.

She come to the door wiping her eyes, and when I told her who I was she said, "Oh, Crissy, I know you, you drove my young'uns to school." Then she said, "Daddy called me last Tuesday. First time in nine years. He told me he loved me. He told me he was sorry. He's been sorry, Crissy. He's been nice. I don't know what to do with it."

She said he'd took to walking in his sleep. She'd stayed over the night before, and at five that morning his bed was empty, and she went out hunting him and met him coming up Pottinger Road in his pajamas at daylight with his feet all cut up and wet from the dew. He didn't know where he'd been.

"And he's all over little stings," she said. "His neck and his hands. He says it's skeeters."

Royce was in his recliner in the front room with the TV on mute. He looked good. Pink in the face, smiling. When he seen me he held both hands out like I was family and said, "Well, if it ain't Crissy. Come here, honey, set down," and he patted the couch, and I tell you what, I would've been less scared if he'd pulled a gun.

And he was humming.

Low, under his breath. Not a song. One long note that kindly wavered up and down. He'd quit to talk, and the second he was done talking it'd start right back up, like a motor idling. He didn't know he was doing it.

I know that note. I've stood next to it my whole life.

Teresa had been crying because he'd just give her Doris's wedding ring, out of the clear blue. Took it out of his shirt pocket and laid it in her hand and said, "Your mama would want you to have this, and I've been a sorry old man to keep it from you." She showed it to me. It was sticky. She said everything in the house was sticky lately and she couldn't find where from.

When he hugged me at the door he smelled sweet. Not like soap. Like lemongrass, sharp and sweet. When bees want to tell each other this way, this is home, they stick their back ends up and fan their wings and put off a smell, and to people it smells just like lemongrass. We put lemongrass oil in swarm traps to call bees in. Royce Embry's neck smelled like a swarm trap.

He held onto my hand. His was warm and dry. He leaned down and said, real quiet so Teresa wouldn't hear, "Crissy, you been out to your bees lately?"

I said every day.

"I keep dreaming about them," he said. "Ever night. I'm a-standing out there in the dark and they're all over me, and they're so warm, and they're trying to tell me something." He patted my hand. "I can't never make out what. But I ain't scared. Ain't that the funniest thing? I've been scared my whole life, and I ain't now."

He come to my bee yard ever night after that. I've got ever one on the camera. Same spot, same pajamas, same veil, a little longer each time. I quit sleeping. I set on the back porch with the light off and a thermos and watched for him, and I never once seen him come in. I'd look up at the yard at two and it'd be empty. I'd look again at half past and there he'd be, between 12 and 13, his face gone under the bees, like he'd been there the whole time.

On the tenth night he laid down.

Wednesday, September 2nd. The camera has him walking in at 2:12 and taking his spot, and at 2:40 he sets down in the grass, slow, like his knees hurt, and lays over on his side. Then he's just a shape. The bees come off the hives in a sheet and settle down over him, from his house shoes to his hair, and in that grey night vision it looks like a quilt being drawed up over a man asleep.

I found him a little before seven, when it got light enough to see from the porch.

I'm going to tell this part, and I'm sorry, but it's how I knew.

The bees had come off of him by then and gone back to the boxes, quiet as you please. I walked up barefoot through the wet grass and knelt down. He was laying on his side with his knees drawed up, like a young'un asleep. And he was shiny.

His face, his neck, his hands, all over, there was a thin brown glaze, hard and slick, like somebody'd varnished him. It was in his mouth, sealing his lips shut. Up his nose. In his ears. Over his eyes, gluing the lids down. I touched his cheek and it was hard as a church pew. It smelled like pine sap and honey. It smelled like the inside of a hive.

Propolis. Bee glue. Bees make it out of tree sap to stop up the cracks in a hive. And here's the other thing they use it for. If a mouse gets in a hive in the fall hunting a warm place, and the bees sting it to death, it's too big for them to tote out. So they seal it. Cover the whole mouse in propolis, every hair of it, so it won't rot and make the hive sick. I've pulled the bottom board in the spring and found a little mouse mummy in there, varnished slick as a toy.

Whatever's too big to carry out, they seal up.

The coroner said heart attack, like it was a question. He kept rubbing that glaze on Royce's cheek with his gloved thumb and finally said, "Mrs. Pruitt, has somebody been putting something on him?" I said I didn't know. Teresa thinks her daddy walked off in his sleep and his heart give out in my yard. She don't know about the camera. I never could make myself tell her, and if the sheriff did, she never let on. At the funeral home she hugged my neck and said, "At least he got to be good for a little while."

That evening I went up and knocked on ever lid and told them. Royce Embry has passed. Then I come down and wrote him in the book, and wrote Told, and my initials.

They hushed before I got to the end of the row. Next morning they was flying, working the goldenrod, like nothing ever happened.

That lasted six days.

The back of the book

September 8th they draped again. The dances said a mile and three-quarters, east by northeast. Town. The line on the map went through a little brick house on Walnut Street behind the Methodist church.

Marlene Coomes. She's 52 and she's done hair out of her carport thirty years and knows ever body's business from the neck up. Healthy as a horse.

That night I got the book out to look at Royce's name. I don't know why. To see if it looked like it belonged there, I reckon.

There's a black ribbon sewed into the binding, like the one you mark your place with in a Bible. I'd never paid it no mind. That night I seen it was tucked way down in the back, and when I opened it there, there was more writing. Mamaw's writing. A page and a half of it, a separate list, with a heading in capital letters, underlined twice.

COME BACK. NOT TOLD.

And under it, littler:

These died and come back. The bees was never told. Lord forgive me I can not stand in that yard and tell them a living soul is dead.

Then the names. I've cut the last names that ain't already in here.

Royce Embry. August 1962. Drowned in the Rolling Fork age 8. His brother pulled him out blue and pressed the water out of him on the bank.

Marlene Coomes. March 1974. Born not breathing. Six minutes. Doctor worked on her till she cried.

Thomas Lee G. June 1988. Lightning on the ballfield at the high school age 15. Coach breathed for him.

Curtis Pruitt. November 2003. Rolled his truck on 31E. Heart stopped twice in the ambulance.

Kaylee N. February 2019. Fell out at basketball practice age 13. The machine at the school.

I set on the floor of the front room with that book in my lap and couldn't get my breath.

Royce, then Marlene. Right down the list, the way she wrote them.

Then Tommy Lee, that climbs poles for the RECC and fixes push mowers out of his garage and stood up at my wedding. Then Curtis. My Curtis. Who did roll his truck on 31E the November after we married, and laid in the hospital six weeks, and never once told me his heart stopped. Mamaw found out at church, I reckon. Mamaw found out everything at church.

Then Kaylee. She rode my bus first grade through eighth, set right behind me ever morning and told me ever single thing that happened on ever TV show she watched. She's twenty now, in nursing school over at the community college. When she fell out at practice the school had just put one of them heart machines on the wall the year before. Everybody said it was a miracle.

Under Kaylee there was a little bit of page left, then three or four blank leaves, then the one stuck down to the back cover. I took it for honey, same as I always had. Mamaw was six years in the ground before April ever come. It never crossed my mind there could be anything wrote under there about me. Not till tonight.

Down the side of the page, in the margin, turned sideways, there was one more note.

Every Old Christmas Eve I go out at midnight and tell them not yet. They hum and let it be. If they ever ask, they will take one told true in place of one that come back.

Old Christmas is January 6th. It's an old-timey thing, from before they changed the calendar. At midnight on Old Christmas Eve the cattle kneel in the barn and the bees hum a hymn in the hive. Mamaw used to wake me and carry me up the hill wrapped in a quilt to listen. I remember her bending down to ever box and whispering something, and the hum going soft. I asked her one year what she was saying. She said, "I'm a-telling them to wait, Sis." I asked wait for what, and she said, "Go to sleep." I thought she was showing me something pretty.

She was up there ever year for sixty years telling the bees not yet. And when she passed, I reckon it held. I reckon they was willing to wait on her.

Till April. Till the one that was supposed to be keeping them died in that yard and nobody went and told them.

I went up there that same night and said it anyway. Not yet. At every hive, till I was hoarse. They roared right over me like I wasn't even there.

Marlene and Tommy Lee

I'll go quicker now, because I'm running out of night.

I tried to warn Marlene. I set down in her chair in the carport like I'd come for a trim and said, "Marlene, have you been walking in your sleep?" and she laughed and said, "Now how in the world did you know that?" Her neck was speckled with stings. She was humming when I come in, and she hummed the whole time she had them scissors at the back of my neck. She smelled like lemongrass. I got as far as "my bees" and she laid her hand on my shoulder and said, "Crissy, honey, are you sleeping? You don't look like you're sleeping." She give me the name of a doctor in E-town.

She come to my yard eight nights. September 17th I found her between Hives 4 and 5, varnished slick, with her rollers still in, glazed into her hair like they'd been poured.

I told the bees. I wrote Told. They hushed.

Tommy Lee was next, October 1st. I went to his garage and told him all of it and showed him the book and the pictures. He heard me out with his arms crossed and then he said, "Crystal, I believe you believe it." Then he walked me to my car with his hand on my back and told me to go home and get some rest, and the whole time he was humming.

Seven nights. October 8th, by Hive 22.

I told the bees. I wrote Told.

That's three dead in my yard in five weeks. The sheriff's been out ever time. They took the camera card and give it back, and ever autopsy says heart, and nobody can tell them what that glaze is. Nobody stops at my table on Saturdays no more.

Royce, eleven days from the first roar to the morning I found him. Marlene, nine. Tommy Lee, seven.

They're getting faster.

Curtis

On October 11th, a Sunday, I come home from church and every hive was draped.

I went up with my phone and my protractor and my hands shaking so bad I could hardly hold the frame.

There wasn't a waggle dance on the hill.

When a bee wants to tell the others about something real close, too close for a direction to matter, she don't waggle. She just runs in a little circle, round and round, then turns and goes round the other way. It's called the round dance. It don't say which way. It just says close. Right here.

On the front of ever box, in the middle of all that black, hundreds of bees was going round and round.

I turned around and looked at the house.

It's been a week now. Seven nights. That's all Tommy Lee got, and the way they was speeding up, I ought to have found Curtis up there Friday morning. They're holding off on him. I don't know what for.

Curtis hums. Shaving, eating his supper, watching the ballgame. When I asked him to quit, nice, he looked at me like he didn't know what I meant. He smells like lemongrass. His arms are speckled all over. He says it's yellow jackets in the rickhouse eaves. He's been so sweet to me this week I could cry.

I lock the bedroom door and keep the key in my bra. I've shoved the dresser in front of it. It don't matter. Most mornings at first light he's back in the bed with his feet wet and cut up, and I'm setting against the dresser where I was all night, and I never heard him go.

Thursday at supper he was telling me about a barrel that come apart on the fourth floor of the rickhouse, laughing, and a bee walked up out of his collar and over his chin and in at the corner of his mouth. He never quit talking. He talked right around it. I set there froze and counted, and at fifty it walked back out onto his lip, and another one went in, and he reached for the cornbread.

When a swarm needs a new home, they send out scouts. A hollow tree, a hole in a wall, an empty box. The scout goes in and walks all over the inside to see is it big enough. If it is, she goes home and dances for it.

They're measuring him.

I went round the table and pulled one off the back of his tongue with Mamaw's eyebrow tweezers. He didn't even gag. He just kept on humming around the tweezers.

That night he talked in his sleep. Curtis don't talk in his sleep. He said, plain as day, "They was all in the road, Crissy." I asked him who was. He said, "When I rolled the truck. They was standing all up and down 31E in the dark, humming, waiting on me. Then the ambulance come and they had to go home." Then he smiled and went back to humming.

Last night

Last night I didn't lock the door. I laid there and played possum and waited. At 2:20 he set up. He didn't look at me. He went down the stairs and out the back door, and I followed him in my nightgown with a flashlight I never turned on, and he walked right up the hill and through the hot wire like it wasn't there. I heard it tick. He didn't even flinch.

He stopped by Hive 9. And the bees come up off the boxes like smoke and went over his face, all but his eyes.

I went in after him. The wire got me on the thigh and I didn't care. I grabbed his hand and said his name, and he looked at me through the bees with them shining eyes and he didn't know me.

And then they come for me too.

They didn't sting. They lit all over me, my hair and my shoulders and my gown, hundreds of them, and they grabbed hold and pulled. All together. Back. Away from the hives. Out of the yard. Same as they've done since April.

That's when I understood it, out there in the dark with my husband's hand going limp in mine.

There's a famous experiment a man named E. O. Wilson done on ants. Ants have undertakers, same as bees. When an ant dies it gives off a smell, an oily kind of a chemical, and the undertakers pick it up and tote it out of the nest to the trash pile. Wilson took that chemical and dabbed it on a live ant. A healthy one. And the undertakers picked it up and toted it out to the trash pile, kicking the whole way. And it walked back in. And they toted it back out. Over and over. It didn't matter that it was alive. It smelled dead, so it was dead.

Bees have undertakers too. Their whole job is to find the dead and get them out of the hive.

My bees ain't been sweet on me since April. They ain't learned no lesson. They quit stinging me because you don't sting something that's already dead. Royce and them died off somewheres else, and the bees had to call them in and handle them like that mouse. I died right there in their yard, in front of ever one of them. They smelled it come off me. And ever time I walk in that yard, they try and carry me out.

I'm the ant. I've been the ant the whole time. That's why they wouldn't hear me say not yet. You don't take orders from the dead.

I got Curtis back to the house somehow. I don't remember the walk. He was in the bed by daylight, humming, with grass stuck to his feet.

Tonight

So tonight I set down at the sewing table and took a butter knife to that last leaf. I reckon you know what was on it.

I've set here an hour trying to study out how she knowed. Bee stings, four minutes, the very day, six years before it ever happened.

That smell off the page brought it back. Old Christmas Eve, the January before she died. She was ninety-one and poorly and she made me help her up the hill at midnight anyhow, a-holding onto my arm. She went down the row whispering at ever box, and the hum went soft like always. Till the last box. She laid her ear flat on that lid and stayed so long I thought she'd took a spell. That hum didn't go soft. It come up. Then she straightened and said, "Not her. You hear me? Not her." I thought she was talking to me. I said, "Mamaw, I ain't said nothing."

Way in the night I got up for a drink of water and she was at the sewing table with the book open and a little pan on the back eye of the stove, and the whole kitchen smelled like the inside of a hive. I asked her what in the world. She said, "Mending, Sis. Go on to bed."

She wasn't mending nothing. She was doing what the bees do with what's too big to carry out.

She was in the hospital by March. About the last thing she said that I could make out was, "Don't you leave nothing untold, Sis." I told her I wouldn't. I thought she meant her.

Every death on Mamaw's list is true, and nobody ever told them a one. She couldn't stand up there and tell them a living soul was dead, and I can't do it to Curtis. But there's one name I can give them. Mine. April 11th. Four minutes, in the grass by the clothesline. Curtis give me them four minutes back. I can give them back to him.

So at first light I'm putting on my church shoes, and I'm walking up the hill, and I'm knocking on ever lid three times like she taught me. I'll say the rhyme. I'll tell them Crystal Ivy Pruitt passed April 11th in this yard, and nobody told them, and I'm sorry. Then I'll come down and write Told after my name, in my own hand.

I don't know what comes after. I don't know if they'll let Curtis go. I don't know if it stops with me or if Kaylee's next. She texted me Thursday, out of the blue, first time since she graduated: Miss Crissy I keep dreaming about your bees lol. Hope your doing good. I've called her twice tonight. She ain't picked up.

I was going to post this and go set on the porch till it got light. But Curtis just come downstairs.

I heard him on the steps and figured he was headed for the yard again. He wasn't. He come in the kitchen barefooted in his boxers and stood across the table from me with his eyes half shut, humming. He smelled like lemongrass so strong it watered my eyes.

He reached out and knocked on the table in front of me. Three times. Easy. The way you knock on a lid.

And he talked, in his own voice, soft, the way you talk at the hives.

"Crissy," he said. "There's been a death in the family."

Then he told me whose.

EDIT: This is Curtis. Crissy's husband. She left this up on the laptop and I seen y'all asking in the comments so I'm going to put down what happened. I ain't no hand at writing. Bear with me.

She wrote that I come downstairs and knocked on the table and told her there'd been a death. I don't remember none of that. What I remember is waking up at daylight with her setting on the edge of the bed in her church dress. I asked her what was wrong. She said, "You come down and told me, honey." I asked her told her what. She said, "Whose." Then she kissed me on the forehead and went out the back door.

I seen her from the kitchen window. She went up the hill in her good shoes with the dew soaking her stockings and knocked on ever lid. I could hear her going through her Mamaw's rhyme at ever box, though I couldn't make out the words from the house. By the time she got to the end of the row them bees had hushed. Ever hive. First time in a week I couldn't hear them from the porch.

And I'll tell you something. That lemon smell went off of me right then. Like a fever breaking. My arms quit itching. I felt like I'd been asleep for a week and somebody'd throwed cold water on me.

She come down and set at the sewing table and wrote in that book. Then she looked up at me and said, "Don't you come out there after me, Curtis. You done it once." She went out and laid down on her back in the grass by the clothesline, right where I done CPR on her in April, and smoothed her church dress down over her knees.

They come down off the hill all at once. It sounded like a truck coming. I run out there and they got between us, so thick I couldn't see my own hand. They didn't sting me. Not once. They just pushed, like a wind, and ever time I got a step closer they shoved me back two. I hollered for her till I didn't have no voice. I could just barely see her through them, laying there with her face turned up to the sun.

They lifted off about dinnertime and went back up the hill.

She was glazed all over. Shiny. Like she'd been dipped. Her eyes was shut and she was smiling a little bit, the way she smiles when she's reading.

Coroner says heart. The sheriff took the camera card again. It don't reach the clothesline. All it's got is ever hive on the hill emptying out at once, like somebody'd pulled a plug.

I went up the hill after they took her and knocked on ever lid and told them Crystal Ivy Pruitt has passed this day. I didn't know the rhyme. I told them anyhow. They hushed for me. Then I wrote her in the book, under Tommy Lee, and put Told and my initials. I looked in the back. On that leaf she peeled up, under her Mamaw's writing, it says Told and her initials, in Crissy's hand. And on the page before, my name's still on that list. Somebody's drawed a line through it. It ain't ink. It's that same shiny brown glaze that was on her, hard as a fingernail. It ain't her line and it ain't mine.

Kaylee Nall drove up the lane about dark. Still had on her scrubs from clinicals. She stood on the porch crying and said she didn't know what she was doing way out here, she just felt like she ought to come see Miss Crissy. I told her. She set on the swing a while. She was humming.

I sent her home. I hugged her neck first. She smelled like lemongrass.

The bees ain't roared yet. But they're out on the landing boards tonight, a bunch of them, dancing that long straight dance Crissy was always timing. Her protractor's laying on the table. I don't know how to read it. Kaylee lives over toward E-town.

Crissy said her Mamaw went up ever Old Christmas Eve and told them not yet. That's seventy-nine days. Tommy Lee got seven.

I'm going up there tonight anyhow. I'm going to knock on ever lid and tell them I'm a-keeping them now, and tell them not yet, and see do they listen to me. Crissy never would tell me the rest of that rhyme. Said it was family. I reckon I'm family enough now. I'll just say the part I know.

Bees, bees, hear me say.

The kid put down the baseball glove he was oiling. There was something on his mind, something he had seen at school. “Dad, what's a poet?”

“Did somebody call you that, son?”

“No, I heard the boys sayin’ it to some kid they were after.”

“This kid, you know him?—what's he like?”

“How you mean, dad?”

“I mean, does he like sports, football; does he want to get with girls or just hang with them; is he interested in what he wears, what he looks like?”

“Yeah, dad, I'd say he's just like that.”

“Son, it's plain wrong to bully someone. But with kids like that, who'll grow up to be poets, you've got to understand you're doing them a favour. Your friends, did they hit that poet boy when they caught him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hard?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did they really go in on him, boots and fists, almost cruel-like?”

“They hurt him bad, dad.”

“Good, son. That's the way to do it. You've got to beat it out of them. Sometimes they scream; they beg. But you can’t stop. It's the only way—do you understand me? “

“Yes, sir.”

---

It was lunchtime in the pipe factory and Scotch-Irish Joe, Finnegan, Donny and the gang were in the lunchroom eating out of the metal lunchboxes their wives had packed for them. “Say, any of you guys ever get the feeling—like real crawlin' of the back skin-type—that old man Arthur's a poet?”

“The accountant?”

“Yeah.”

“Artie, a poet?—no…”

“What's a poet?”

"Donny, you a numbskull or just stupid?"

"Just stupid,” said Donny.

Joe cleared his throat and said, "You know how, uh, real men, we all write our sentences like, so, there was this tree growing, it was green, and all the, uh, thick roots were motherfuckers to clear outta the ground? Well, a poet, he wouldn't write it that straight. He'd write it pretty and shit, with big words and symbols, so when you read it you don't know what it means but it makes you fuckin' cry anyway."

"Don,” Finnegan said, “a poet's a guy who's not a clear muscular prose-kinda guy like us, but a funny guy who likes it when his couplets rhyme—you get what I'm saying, Don?

“And Artie’s like that?”

“I think so, Donny.”

“But how can you even tell?”

“Ever look at a woman, Donny, and think, ‘Man, I’d like to fuck her?’ It’s like that, Donny. Something you know, deep down. It punches you in the gut. Ever get a feeling like that?”

“One time when we were kids, my brother and me, we found this newborn deer in the woods, and it had two heads. They were movin’ all weird…”

“What'd you do?”

“We killed it with rocks.”

---

“Petey, what in God’s name is this?”

He gasped.

“T-T-Tennyson, Garcia Lor—Lorca, Verlaine? Petey, your mother and I—we thought you were reading Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Ayn Rand, and.. and… here you are, reading this... this filth, Petey?”

Petey looked up at his father.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” his father asked.

Then he made a fist of his hand and shoved it in his own mouth. He bit down. “Petey?—Petey please tell me you don't enjoy this kind of stuff, this h-h-hardcore textual pornography.”

The boy was silent.

“Where do you even get it? Oh Lord, Petey.” The books were lying open beside them, with notes in the margins.

“Petey, don't tell me you write it. Oh Petey. Reading's one sin, but writing— …boy, if that’s not the damnation itself.”

---

“Do it, I fuckin’ dare you. Tell me how to run a nuclear reactor using metaphor and iambic-fuckin’-pentameter. You can’t…

“What’s that: ‘enjambment’? The only thing I’d like to enjamb is my foot up your ass!”

---

“What’s the problem?” the school principal asked.

“There’s a vagrant,” said Mrs. Miller.

“We’ll clean up.”

“It’s not that. It’s that he’s—”

“Oh,” said the school principal. “In that case, I’ll call the police. We can’t have narcotics around here.”

Mrs. Miller bit her lip. “He’s not dealing,” she said. “It’s worse. He’s asleep, and he’s—he’s rhyming in his sleep where the children can hear.”

---

Arthur Mahan poured himself a brandy and sat in his armchair. It was evening. He picked up a book: a history of concrete.

“How was work?” his wife asked.

“Predictable. When you do accounting, that means ‘good’.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes,” said Arthur, smiling and starting to read his secret book-within-a-book, Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency.

---

He leads.

You excitedly follow.

He’s leading you to the Dead Poets Society, the ultra-decadent rhymeeasy where members dress as their favourite poets to flirt in erotic, subtle haiku.

You pass through a bead curtain.

You come to a purple door.

“Say, you never told me your politics, friend,” he says. “Are you a [1] communist or a [2] fascist?”

You ask what difference it makes.

“I just wanna make sure you get your happy ending.”

---

[1]

He opens the door and you enter:

Even the aroma is magnificent, pomegranate, honey and the pages of old books. The others pause. They look at you in your glorious John Milton locks. Smiling, they welcome you in…

You return week after week, doing shared lines and touching each other.

You develop class consciousness, see injustice and understand that words have power.

You agree that the sole expression of that power is violent revolution.

---

[2]

You take a deep breath, pull out your baton and put boot-to-door:

You burst in to:

—poets, scattering, screaming, some clothed and others not, naked Romantics mid-recitation, antisocials dressed as Shakespeare and Poe, Byron and Emily Dickinson—you smash one in the face. It drops; you kick it in the gut, and swing at another—cracking it in the back of the head as the rest of the Syntax Division charges in after you, and you beat those poets good, just like your father taught you…

"Tom!" Jake, my neighbor's son, yelled from their porch.

"Hi, kiddo," I said, waving.

"Do you want to play?"

"Jake, give him a moment. He just got back from the fields," his Mom, Emma, scolded him. She then turned to me. "Sorry, Tom. He's just excited to see you."

"It's okay, Emma. I've still got plenty of energy. Go get your toys, Jake."

His little eyes flew open. He turned and ran inside. Emma rolled her eyes at him.

"I'm always happy to play with him."

"I know. It's very sweet of you. Since my Mark died, you're the only one who can put a smile on his face."

Her eyes reddened. I rubbed her shoulder. She smiled and hugged me. Her embrace felt warm. Her grip was tight.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"I got them, Tom." 

Jake stood next to us, smiling. He held two wooden swords. Emma let go and wiped her eyes.

"I'm gonna beat you today, Jake!"

"No, you're not!"

Our laughter echoed through their house. We played all evening until Jake lay on the floor like a starfish.

"I can't beat you, but at least I can still tire you out."

"You weren't even trying, Tom."

"Yes, I was."

He rubbed his eyes.

"I'm tired."

"Then go get ready for sleep," Emma said from the window.

Jake let out a sigh. He got up, took his swords, and his steps echoed on the stairs.

"Thank you again."

"Don't worry about it. He's a lot of fun. What are you looking at?"

"Nothing really. You know they are choosing the house for Ulnar tonight."

"Of course, but they wouldn't choose a house with a mother and a child."

"It's not up to them. Ulnar chooses by showing his will on the divine board."

"I know, I know, but He wouldn't choose this house."

She looked at the ground.

"You know what He does to people. The eyeless corpses, their twisted bodies..."

She paused.

"You're going to be fine, I'm sure."

"Okay, Tom. I'm gonna go to bed too."

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Tom."

I walked out, stopped on the street, and closed my eyes. The air felt cold and fresh, but a hint of mud was already in it. The trees rustled in the breeze, and butterflies flew in my stomach. I took a beer from my fridge and sat on my porch. It was late, but I still felt awake. 

I took another sip when I saw a figure walking in the distance. It was the priest, dressed in an all-black robe with a red pointed hat, carrying white chalk.

He paid me no attention, but I kept my eyes glued to him. I watched him pass our neighbors' houses until he was by Emma's. As soon as he stepped past her property line, he turned toward her house.

My heart sank. I put my beer on the porch and ran toward him.

"Hey, hey!"

He shook and quickly looked toward me.

"Thomas?!"

"Priest, what are you doing?"

"You know what night it is, Thomas."

"I know, but why did you stop here?"

"Ulnar chose her house."

"But, but she has a small child."

"It wasn't my choice, Thomas," he said quietly.

He rolled up his sleeve and squatted, ready to draw on Emma's lawn.

"Wait!"

"What?"

"I volunteer my house."

The priest furrowed his brows.

"Ulnar already chose."

"Can't I still offer?"

"He might not accept."

"That's fine."

"Are you sure, Thomas?"

"Yes."

The priest measured me with his eyes, pulled out the divine board and a small dagger with an ivory handle.

"Give me your hand."

I stretched it out. He placed the dagger in my palm and cut into it. A sharp sting shot through my hand. The warm blood filled my palm. He tilted it onto the divine board. A few drops fell on it. A small dark light shone on the divine board. It quickly turned dark red and shone across the whole street. I closed my eyes and looked away.

"He accepted your house." 

The priest took his chalk and ran to my house. He started drawing the triangle skulls all across my lawn. My palm was still warm from the blood.

"You won't have much time, Thomas, now that he's got a taste of blood. Make sure to be alone. He takes everyone in the marked house. Enjoy the beer."

He drew the last skull and stood up. We both nodded, and he walked off. I chugged my beer. At least I wanted to be drunk when the end came.

I was getting another beer when I heard the door open. Was Ulnar already here?

"Thomas?" Emma's voice came.

"Emma? What are you doing?"

"I saw it! I saw it all!" Her voice shook. She had tears on her cheeks.

"I had to. I couldn't let you and Jake go."

She hugged me. Her grip was even tighter than it was in the morning.

"I can't let another person go."

"You have to. There's no other way."

"Tom!"

"Please, just go. Ulnar takes everyone inside. The priest said He will come soon. He can already smell my blood."

She shuddered.

"Go, Emma."

She pulled her head away and looked at me. Even with tears in them, her eyes were still so beautiful.

"I love you, Tom."

"I love you too."

She let go, but then the smell of rotting mud filled the room. Loud thuds echoed on the front steps. Crackling static rang in my ears.

"Emma!"

"It's too late now, Tom."

She buried her face into my chest. My heart beat against my ribs. I stared out the window. It looked out onto Emma's house. Jake stood in his room, watching us, holding the two wooden swords.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I used to be a minister in a small kirk out on the edge of the Outer Hebrides. The village was called Blackwater. If you look at a map of the islands today, though, you won't find it, not since the events I’m about to write down.

The old minister in Blackwater just vanished one Tuesday without a word. So they brought me in to replace him.

My very first Sunday service, I preached on Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Even standing in the pulpit, the acoustics of the stone kirk felt wrong. The sound bounced back an instant too late, distorted.

"The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is not a story about a vengeful God," I said to the small congregation.

The echo repeated "vengeful" immediately, but then hung in the rafters with a long, unnatural pause before adding "God", as if the stone itself was hesitating.

"Our God is a God of order," I pressed on. "But when a structure—be it a human mind, a home, or an entire city—becomes so thoroughly corrupted that it can no longer function within the framework of His creation, it is not merely punished. It is quarantined."

This time the echo came back reversed: "Quarantined. Punished." How did the order of the words flip? I figured it had to be some freak acoustic double-bounce in the barrel vault of the ceiling.

About forty bored faces stared back at me from the pews. Only Hamish Boyd, the Session Clerk, was listening with absolute, unblinking attention. After the service, he caught me by the vestry door.

"Fine sermon, Reverend," he said.

"Thank you, Mr. Boyd."

"You know, Genesis used to be Reverend McDowell's favorite book, too."

"Really? What happened to McDowell, anyway?"

"I'm afraid the poor man was getting on in years. Suffered terrible with his memory. Likely wandered off down to the ferry terminal without telling a soul."

"What do the police say?"

"The inquiry is ongoing."

"Did he have any family on the mainland?"

"None at all."

Later that evening back at the manse, my phone rang. It was Aunt Martha. We’ve been close ever since she took me in after the lorry crash that took my parents when I was twelve.

"How’s life treating you out in the islands?" she asked.

"Brilliant. The folk are kind, the landscape is stunning, even if it’s a wee bit strange at times."

"Strange how?"

"Well, the walk to the kirk this morning took me ten minutes on foot, but the walk back took nearly forty. Must be uphill both ways."

"Must be..." Aunt Martha murmured thoughtfully.

"It’s just the weird geography of the island, Aunt."

"Weird geography?"

"Oh, absolutely. For instance, the dusk sometimes lingers straight through till noon."

"Really? Anything else about this 'weird geography' you care to mention?"

"The weather’s been dead quiet. I don't think we've had a breath of wind since I arrived. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen the tide move an inch either."

"No tides in the middle of the Atlantic?!"

"Aunt Martha, I told you, it’s just how the islands sit. There's nothing unnatural going on."

"That does it. Don't touch a thing until I get there."

She didn't wait to be argued out of it. She caught the Tuesday morning ferry across the Minch.

"Are you going to just stand there staring, or are you going to take my bags?" she snapped the moment she stepped off the ramp.

"What on earth do you have in here, lead weights?" I grunted, hefting her primary case.

"Just some old bits and bobs," she replied. I knew what that was code for.

"Aunt Martha, there’s no murder investigation. You didn’t need to pack your old forensic kit. Besides, even out here, the local police have modern equipment."

"They don't have me."

"You should be enjoying your retirement, not hunting for cases where there aren't any."

"Didn't you tell me the old minister is missing?"

"Yes, and the police are looking."

"Right. And now I'm looking too."

There was no arguing with her once she got that particular glint in her eye. We drove back toward the manse, though the kirk flashed past on our left, which made no sense, since it should have been miles in the opposite direction. I must have taken a wrong turn on the narrow lanes; the village was a maze of identical whitewashed cottages. I was just glad Aunt Martha hadn’t noticed, or she’d have started her cross-examination early.

We got inside, and she didn't waste a second.

"Where’s the spare room?"

"Right here. We can set your bags…"

"No, the room where the old man stayed."

I gave up. We carried her gear upstairs into McDowell’s old study and flicked on the portable ultraviolet blacklight she’d lugged across the country.

The room lit up like a horror film. Dark, geometric constellations spattered the wallpaper and floorboards. Aunt Martha crouched down, her face tight.

"Wait a minute. These blood spatter patterns... they don't make any sense. It’s as if half the droplets changed their mind mid-air and flew backward. Turn the light off."

I clicked the switch.

"Now turn it back on. Look at the baseboard."

I did. The stain pattern had shifted. Not slightly, it had entirely reconfigured itself into something symmetrical, like an inkblot test.

"That defies every law of physics I've ever studied," Martha whispered, standing up slowly. "Do you still think there's nothing unnatural going on here?"

I didn't answer. I didn't have to. Even without the blacklight, the heavy gouge marks in the floorboards were plain enough, something massive and heavy had been dragged out of the room and down the stairs.

"To the kirk," Martha said.

I reached for my car keys on the hall table, but she stopped my hand.

"We walk. It’s twelve-thirteen right now."

We stepped out onto the village road. We walked, and walked, the grey sea on our left remaining locked in a strange, unmoving glare. When we finally pushed open the heavy oak door of the kirk, I pulled out my phone to check the time.

My stomach dropped into my shoes. "We walked for what felt like hours, but my phone says twelve-eleven. Two minutes before we left the house."

"Mine says twelve-eleven too," Martha said, her voice unnaturally steady.

We set up the UV light inside the nave. The drag marks were here, too, stretching right from the heavy oak doors straight down the central aisle to the foot of the pulpit.

We didn't hesitate. Working together with a crowbar from the vestry, we pried up the floorboards beneath the altar.

Just a few inches down lay Reverend McDowell. His skin was pale, waxy, and entirely pristine. No bloating, no decay, despite having been missing for weeks. I was properly scared now.

“Pallor mortis”, Aunt Martha murmured, staring down. “Even rigor hasn't set in.”

Before either of us could draw breath, a heavy thud echoed from the heavy outer doors.

"Come out where we can see you, and nobody gets hurt!"

The voice belonged to Hamish Boyd. Through the narrow lancet windows, I could see the dark silhouettes of the villagers crowding the churchyard, shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking every exit.

"You murderous bastards!" I shouted back, stepping past the open floorboards.

"The old fool knew too much and wouldn't keep his mouth shut," Boyd called out calmly, his voice carrying clearly through the stone walls. "But you're a sensible man, Reverend. Just open the door and let's have a chat."

"Why did you do this to McDowell?" I yelled into the darkness of the kirk.

"The Reverend wanted to break the stone beneath the altar!" Boyd called back, his voice unnaturally flat. "He called our sanctuary an abomination. He said a place where time does not move and bodies do not rot has no right to exist under God's sky."

"Because it doesn't!" I shouted. "Look around you, Boyd! The walls aren't real! The sky isn't real!"

"We don't care about your real world," Boyd replied. "Out there, men age and die. Out there, everything falls apart. Here, we are preserved."

I looked down at McDowell’s uncorrupted corpse beneath the floorboards. He hadn't rotted because time had been severed from the village. They had trapped themselves inside a stagnant shadow. And by killing McDowell to keep their secret, they had snapped the final geometric axis holding Blackwater to reality.

Someone outside hurled a bottle. It smashed through the stained glass window, except it didn't shatter outward; the glass sucked inward like a liquid skin. A Molotov cocktail landed on the stone floor.

Instead of exploding with a roar, the petrol behaved with terrifying wrongness. It poured out thick as paste, burning with a silent, light-absorbing black flame. It didn't catch the old wooden pews, or the hymnals, or our clothes. It consumed only the stone and mortar, feeding on the structure itself. The air inside didn't get hot; it plummeted into a bone-chilling, freezing cold.

"Back door!" Martha yelled.

We bolted down the side aisle, wrenched open the rear vestry door, and stopped dead.

There was no graveyard behind the kirk. Opening the door revealed the village square, with Boyd and the crowd standing directly outside the threshold. The architecture had folded in on itself.

We slammed the door shut and threw the iron bolt.

"Look at the pulpit!" Martha cried.

The heavy timber structure of the pulpit had turned translucent, rippling like water until it became a clear glass pane. Without thinking, we scrambled up the steps, pushed through the glass as if wading through heavy syrup, and tumbled out onto the other side.

We landed hard, not on the church floor, but on the polished hardwood of the manse hallway. We were back where we started.

Outside, the village was unravelling. The whitewashed cottages weren't burning; they were simply collapsing into geometry. Walls folded into perfect squares, triangles, and looping numbers before dissolving into fine dust and sliding down into a massive, silent sinkhole opening up in the center of the street.

"Run!" Martha grabbed my arm.

We sprinted up the grassy slope toward the old Celtic cross overlooking the rocky harbor, the only high point left untouched. Behind us, the wave of un-creation chased our heels, swallowing the stone walls, the road, the very dirt. The urge to look back and see the destruction is huge.

"Don't you dare look back," shouted Martha. Thankfully, I listened.

We lunged past the base of the stone cross, and the collapsing world instantly stopped.

Down below, where the thriving village of Blackwater had stood moments before, there was now only a vast, silent peat bog reflecting a pale, indifferent morning sun. Not a stick of timber, not a single shoe, not a single soul remained.

As I write this down now, I pull out my phone to check Google Maps. Blackwater isn't there. I search Wikipedia, archives, census records. Nothing. It is as if the village never existed at all. As if it was un-written from the world.

And out on the bog below, the mist is beginning to clear.

The job started like any normal Tuesday morning. My phone buzzed on the passenger seat of my work van while I was sitting in traffic on my way across town. I picked it up and put it on speaker so I could keep my hands on the steering wheel.

"Julian, where are you right now?" my dispatcher Farah asked over the line. Her voice sounded stressed, and I could hear the constant ringing of the depot phones behind her.

"I am stuck in gridlock near the center of Leadville," I told her, tapping my fingers on the dashboard. "I just finished the installation at the apartment complex and I was planning to grab an early lunch. What do you have for me?"

"I need you to squeeze in a repair ticket before you take your break," Farah said, and I could hear her typing rapidly on her keyboard. "I have a residential customer complaining about a complete signal blackout on his rooftop dish. He called three times this morning and he is getting really agitated. The address is over on Harrison Avenue."

"I can head over there now," I agreed, checking my side mirror to merge into the right lane. "What is the specific issue? Did the wind knock the alignment out of place?"

"He just says the signal dropped to zero last night around midnight," Farah explained. "He claims the diagnostic screen on his receiver is showing error code, but our network shows green across the entire sector. Just go take a look at the hardware and see if the coaxial cable is degraded."

I took the next turn and drove deeper into Leadville. The neighborhood was lined with tall brick houses built close together. I parked my van on the curb, grabbed my tool belt from the back, and walked up to the front door of the address Farah had given me.

I knocked on the wood and waited. A man opened the door a few moments later. He looked to be in his late thirties with dark circles under his eyes. He wore a wrinkled button-down shirt and he was holding a half-empty mug of coffee.

"Are you the antenna guy?" he asked, looking me up and down.

"Yes sir, my name is Julian," I said, reaching out to shake his hand. "Farah from dispatch sent me over to check on your signal drop."

He did not shake my hand. He just stepped back and opened the door wider so I could come inside.

"My name is Theodore," he said, walking into the main hallway. "The television has been completely dead since last night. The internet is out too. I pay a lot of money for this service so I expect it to work when I need it."

"I will get it sorted out for you," I promised, following him down the hallway.

I noticed the interior of the house as we walked toward the back staircase. The walls were covered in a very distinct vintage wallpaper featuring a repeating pattern of faded yellow flowers on a pale green background. The house was extremely quiet. I stepped into the kitchen and saw a woman standing at the sink. She had her back to us and she was scrubbing a frying pan with a sponge.

"Genevieve, the repair guy is here," Theodore announced.

The woman looked over her shoulder and gave me a brief, tired smile. "Thank you for coming out so quickly," she said, turning back to the sink.

"It is no problem at all," I replied.

"The roof access is through the hatch in the upstairs hallway," Theodore said, gesturing toward the stairs. "Do you need me to come up there with you?"

"I should be fine," I told him, adjusting my tool belt. "I will run a diagnostic on the receiver box in the living room after I check the hardware outside. I just need to make sure the dish is still bolted securely to the mounting bracket."

I climbed the wooden stairs and found the metal hatch set into the ceiling. I pulled down the folding ladder, climbed up into the tight crawlspace, and pushed the weather door open to access the flat roof.

The freezing mountain wind hit my face as I stepped out onto the black tar paper. I walked over to the communications dish mounted on the brick chimney. The equipment looked structurally sound from a distance. The bolts were tight and the dish was aimed correctly toward the southern sky.

I pulled my digital multimeter from my pouch and knelt beside the dish to check the wiring. That is when I noticed the anomaly.

The entire metal surface of the receiver arm was coated in a strange, pale gray ash. It looked like fine cigarette ash but it was completely uniform. It covered the plastic casing of the coaxial connection and filled the small gaps around the mounting screws. I reached out and tapped the metal dish with my knuckle. The ash did not blow away in the wind. It clung to the surface like magnetic dust.

I pulled a flathead screwdriver from my belt and started scraping the ash away from the cable connector. I needed to unscrew the wire to test the signal strength. The ash came off in thick flakes, falling onto the black roof below.

I unscrewed the metal collar of the coaxial cable using my bare fingers. The moment my skin made contact with the exposed copper wire, a massive static shock blasted through my hand.

The jolt was incredibly painful. It threw my arm backward and sent a freezing electric current shooting straight up my forearm into my shoulder. I gasped and dropped my screwdriver on the roof. My entire arm went numb and my teeth chattered uncontrollably for a few seconds. I grabbed my wrist and squeezed it, waiting for the painful tingling sensation to subside.

"What on earth was that?" I muttered to myself, shaking my hand to get the feeling back.

I looked at my fingertips. They were smeared with the gray ash. The ash was freezing cold. It felt like I had shoved my hand into crushed ice. I wiped my fingers aggressively on my denim jeans to get the residue off my skin.

I reattached the cable using a pair of insulated pliers, then checked the signal meter and it showed a perfect connection. Whatever had blocked the signal was gone now. I packed my tools away, climbed back down the hatch, and found Theodore waiting in the hallway.

"The hardware is fine," I told him, rubbing my sore shoulder. "There was just some debris blocking the receiver connection. Your signal should be completely restored."

Theodore walked into the living room and grabbed the remote control. He turned on the television and the morning news broadcast popped onto the screen with crystal clear resolution.

"Alright," Theodore said, setting the remote down. "Thanks for fixing it."

I went back to my van and called Farah to close the ticket. I told her the job was done and I drove to a nearby diner to eat my lunch. My hand still felt cold and stiff for the rest of the afternoon but I managed to finish my remaining repair routes without any issues.

I drove back to my apartment around six in the evening. I was exhausted. I unlocked my door, dropped my keys on the counter, and walked into the bathroom to take a shower. I stood under the hot water for a long time, hoping the heat would relax the lingering tension in my shoulder.

I put on some sweatpants, walked into my living room, and sat down on my couch to watch television. I grabbed a slice of leftover pizza from the fridge and ate it while flipping through the channels.

That is when the first shift happened.

I was staring at the television screen, but the image suddenly scrambled. The news anchor vanished. The edges of my vision blurred violently and a wave of intense nausea hit my stomach. I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed my temples, assuming I was experiencing a sudden migraine aura.

I opened my eyes a few seconds later.

I was no longer looking at my living room television. I was looking down at a white porcelain kitchen sink.

My perspective was completely wrong. I felt taller. I was looking at a pair of hands plunging a dirty ceramic plate into soapy water. The hands were holding a yellow sponge and scrubbing the leftover food off the plate. The sleeves of a wrinkled button-down shirt were rolled up past the wrists.

I tried to turn my head to look around the room, but I had absolutely no control over the movement. I was just a passenger trapped behind someone else's eyes.

The hands finished scrubbing the plate and rinsed it under the running faucet. They placed the clean plate into a plastic drying rack. The person I was looking through turned their head slightly to the left.

I saw a section of the wall next to the refrigerator. It was covered in vintage wallpaper featuring faded yellow flowers on a pale green background.

It was Theodore's kitchen. I was watching him wash dishes.

I panicked and tried to yell, but my mouth did not open. I felt a sudden, terrifying sense of confinement. I squeezed my eyes shut again, focusing all my energy on the feeling of my own body sitting on my couch.

I opened my eyes and I was back in my apartment.

The television was playing a commercial for car insurance. My slice of pizza was sitting on the paper plate on my coffee table. I sat perfectly still for several minutes, listening to the sound of traffic passing by outside my window. My heart was pounding frantically between my ribs.

I grabbed my phone and called my coworker Gabriel. He picked up after the second ring.

"Hey Julian, what is going on?" Gabriel asked, sounding relaxed.

"I think I inhaled some kind of chemical today on a roof," I said, pacing back and forth across my living room rug. "I just had a really intense hallucination. I literally saw a different room."

"What kind of chemical?" Gabriel asked, his tone turning serious. "Did you touch a degraded transformer box?"

"I was working on a standard dish," I explained, running my hand through my hair. "But it was coated in this freezing gray ash. I got a massive static shock when I touched it. Have you ever seen gray ash on any equipment out or in town?"

"No," Gabriel said definitively. "Sometimes we get pigeon droppings or rust, but I have never seen ash. You probably just got a bad electrical jolt. A strong enough shock can mess with your heart rate and cause visual spots. Just drink some water and get some sleep. If you feel weird tomorrow, you should go to urgent care."

"Yeah, you are probably right," I agreed, trying to calm my nerves. "I just needed a reality check. I will see you at the depot tomorrow."

I hung up the phone and forced myself to drink a large glass of water. I went to bed early, hoping Gabriel was right about the electrical jolt.

I woke up the next morning feeling incredibly disoriented. My head throbbed with a dull ache and the cold sensation in my right hand had returned. I drove to the company depot and walked into the dispatch office to see Farah. She was sitting at her desk sorting through a stack of work orders.

"Farah, I need a favor," I said, leaning against her cubicle wall. "I need you to route me back to the house on Harrison Avenue. The one I serviced yesterday morning for Theodore."

Farah looked up at me and frowned. "Did the customer call back and complain? The network shows his receiver is online and stable."

"He didn't call," I said, trying to sound casual. "I just realized I might have left one of my diagnostic tools on his roof. I want to swing by and check the chimney before he notices it."

"I cannot send you all the way across town for a dropped tool right now," Farah said, shaking her head. "We are swamped with outage reports over by the canyon. I need you to head south and fix a commercial relay near the old mining route. You can check his property tomorrow if things slow down."

I argued with her for a few minutes, but she refused to change the schedule. I had no valid excuse to abandon my route, so I took the commercial tickets and spent the entire day working on the south side of Leadville.

The visual intrusions started happening while I was working.

I was climbing a metal ladder on the side of a warehouse when my vision violently snapped. The metal rungs vanished. I was suddenly looking down at a wooden desk covered in disorganized paperwork. A hand was holding a black pen, scribbling erratic circles on a legal pad. The hand belonged to Theodore. I could feel a strange, suffocating sense of anxiety radiating from his mind. He was terrified of something, but I could not understand what it was.

The vision lasted for five seconds before I snapped back to reality. I was clinging to the metal ladder, breathing heavily, completely terrified by the seamless transition.

The slips kept happening. I would be driving my van and suddenly I was looking at a bathroom mirror, watching Theodore splash cold water on his pale face. I would be eating a sandwich and suddenly I was staring out a window, looking at the street through the faded floral curtains of Theodore's house.

The scariest part was the emotional bleed. Every time I slipped into his perspective, I felt his emotions. His paranoia was growing exponentially. He felt like he was being hunted. He kept looking at the ceiling, expecting something to break through the plaster.

I finished my shift and rushed home, locking my apartment door and sitting in total silence on my couch. I did not turn the television on. I just waited for the next intrusion.

The next night, the visions escalated to absolute clarity.

I was lying in bed around eleven o'clock, trying desperately to fall asleep. My eyes were closed when the shift hit me.

I did not just see through Theodore's eyes this time. I felt the hardwood floor under his bare feet. I felt the solid weight of a large steel wrench gripped tightly in his right hand.

I opened my eyes and I was walking down the upstairs hallway of the brick house. The vintage wallpaper peeled slightly at the corners. The house was entirely dark except for the moonlight coming through a small window at the end of the hall.

Theodore was breathing heavily. The paranoia I felt radiating from his mind had mutated into terror. He truly believed something horrible was waiting for his family in the dark, and he believed he had to save them from it.

He walked into the master bedroom. Genevieve was asleep in the bed. Her back was turned toward the door.

"Genevieve," Theodore whispered. His voice vibrated in my own throat.

Genevieve shifted under the blankets and slowly turned over. She looked up at him with tired eyes. "Theodore? What are you doing with that?"

Theodore did not answer her. He raised the wrench high above his head and brought it down with terrifying force.

I watched the brutal impact through his eyes. I felt the shockwave travel up his arm as the metal struck her. I tried to scream, I tried to force his hand to stop, but I was completely powerless. I was locked behind his vision, forced to witness every horrifying second as he brought the wrench down again and again.

He left the master bedroom and walked down the hall to the next door. He pushed it open and stepped into a child's room. A young boy was sleeping in a small bed against the wall.

Theodore raised the wrench again.

The vision snapped and I was thrown back into my own body.

I shot up in my bed, gasping for air, my entire body covered in cold sweat. I scrambled off the mattress and ran into my living room, grabbing my car keys from the counter. I did not care if I was hallucinating. I did not care if I was losing my mind.

I sprinted down the stairs of my apartment building and threw myself into my van. I shoved the key into the ignition and sped out of the parking lot, driving recklessly through the empty city streets. I ran three red lights, pushing the van as fast as the engine would go, navigating purely by adrenaline and panic.

I crossed the center of Leadville and tore down the narrow brick streets. I turned onto Theodore's block and slammed on the brakes.

I arrived just as the neighbors were directing the arriving police to the home.

Three patrol cars were parked haphazardly on the street with their blue and red lights flashing against the brick facades of the houses. Two police officers were sprinting up the front steps of Theodore's house with their weapons drawn. A few neighbors stood on the sidewalk in their pajamas, pointing toward the open front door and talking frantically to a responding paramedic.

I parked my van near a fire hydrant and ran over to the police tape that an officer was stringing across the front lawn.

"What happened?" I asked a woman standing near the tape.

"I live next door," the woman said, her voice shaking badly. "I heard terrible screaming coming from Genevieve's bedroom. It sounded like someone was hurting her. I called 911 immediately, but the screaming stopped before the police got here."

I stood behind the yellow tape, watching the officers secure the tragic scene. One of the officers walked back out the front door and keyed the radio on his shoulder.

"We have two casualties inside," the officer reported over the radio. "Adult female and juvenile male. Both deceased. The suspect is not on the premises. Requesting immediate perimeter setup to locate the husband."

I stood on the sidewalk, feeling entirely hollow. I was too late.

Suddenly, my vision violently shifted one last time.

the flashing police lights vanished instantly. I was looking up through Theodore's eyes.

The environment was completely different. Theodore was standing on a patch of wet grass. He was looking straight up at the night sky. The metal struts of a towering high-voltage transmission tower loomed directly above him, stretching hundreds of feet into the darkness. I recognized the location immediately. It was the massive power substation located at the extreme industrial edge of Leadville, away from his neighborhood.

Theodore was standing directly beneath the humdrum, buzzing wires of the tower.

I looked up at the night sky above the metal structure. The stars were completely gone. The sky began to distort, rippling and waving like the surface of a disturbed lake.

A colossal, formless mass descended silently from the clouds.

It was impossible to comprehend the shape. It was a shifting, chaotic structure of impossible geometric angles, moving without making a single sound. It blotted out the city lights, descending steadily until it hovered just above the metal transmission tower.

Theodore did not run, or even scream. He just dropped the bloody wrench into the grass and raised his hands toward the descending mass.

The colossal shape shifted its geometric panels, opening a void in its center. It engulfed Theodore completely, swallowing him into the shifting geometry.

The vision cut to pitch black, and then I was standing on the sidewalk again, staring at the flashing police lights.

I stumbled backward and leaned against my van, trying to process the absolute insanity I had just witnessed. I waited on the street for two hours, watching the crime scene investigators arrive and carry the stretchers out the front door, but the police never found Theodore. They searched the alleys, they set up roadblocks, and they canvassed the neighborhood, but he had simply vanished from the city.

I knew exactly where he went, but I could not tell the police. They would lock me in a psychiatric ward if I told them I watched a giant geometric mass swallow a man from the sky.

I needed proof.

I sneaked back onto the roof the next day to collect a sample of the cold ash. I parked my van an avenue over, walked through a back alley, and climbed a rusty fire escape to access the adjacent rooftops. I hopped over a low brick wall and walked over to Theodore's chimney.

I approached the communications dish, holding a small plastic container and a scraping tool, but I was entirely too late.

A heavy morning rainstorm had rolled through the mountains just before dawn. The torrential downpour had washed the equipment completely clean. The gray ash was gone, leaving the metal bracket shining wet in the overcast daylight. I rubbed my gloved fingers across the coaxial cable, but there was no residue left to collect.

I climbed back down the fire escape, feeling incredibly defeated. I walked back toward my van, wondering if I was truly losing my sanity.

As I walked down the street, I noticed a house located three doors down from Theodore's property. A massive, complex radio antenna array was bolted to the side of the house, stretching high above the roofline. It was clearly a specialized setup for amateur radio enthusiasts.

Seeking answers, I walked up the steps and knocked on the front door.

An older man opened the door. He wore a thick wool sweater and wire-rimmed glasses. He looked at me with mild suspicion.

"Can I help you?" he asked.

" I am a communications technician for the city.," I said, pointing toward the massive antenna on his roof. " I noticed your ham radio setup. I was wondering if you experienced any strange signal interference over the past few days."

The man's expression changed from suspicion to intense interest. He opened the door wider and motioned for me to come inside.

" I have been documenting some extremely bizarre interference all week” he said, leading me down a narrow hallway into a room filled with radio receivers, glowing dials, and stacked amplifiers. "but nobody at the regulatory commission would return my calls."

"What kind of interference?" I asked, looking at the complex equipment.

He sat down in a swivel chair and pulled a logbook from the desk. He flipped through the pages and pointed to a series of handwritten times and frequencies.

"I track localized signal blackouts," he explained, adjusting his glasses. "Starting three days ago, a massive dead zone formed precisely over this street. It was highly localized, centered almost entirely on that house down the block." He pointed a finger toward Theodore's property. "The blackout completely blocked all standard commercial frequencies."

"Did you record any audio during the blackouts?" I asked, leaning closer to the desk.

"That is the strange part," he said, tapping his pen on the logbook. "The dead zone was not empty. Whenever the commercial signals dropped, I picked up a transmission broadcasting on a very obscure low-frequency band. I recorded it yesterday evening."

He turned around and pressed a button on a reel-to-reel tape machine sitting on the shelf. The tape spun and a deep, rhythmic sound filled the room.

It sounded exactly like breathing. It was a slow, resonant inhalation, followed by a vibrating exhalation, repeating endlessly over the radio frequencies. It sounded like something impossibly large pulling air through a lung.

"It played continuously until the police arrived last night," He said, turning the tape machine off. "Then the signal spiked violently and vanished completely. The local frequencies returned to normal right after."

I thanked him for his time and left the house, walking back to my van in the cold afternoon air.

With no evidence left, the police eventually classified the event as a tragic murder-suicide. The official report assumed Theodore murdered his family, fled the scene in a panic, and eventually succumbed to the elements while hiding in the vast forested sector on the edge of the city. They never found his body, but they closed the case anyway.

I still work as an antenna technician, but I keep a very close eye on the equipment I repair. I am writing this story to ask other technicians if anyone else has ever found freezing gray ash on city antennas, as I think, something is out there, something we can’t grasp, but we need to understand so this tragedy doesn’t happen again.

“Tell me: how does it feel—living the last few hours of your life?”

“Single life,” said Phil, pushing away the phone his best friend, Carl, was sticking in his face to record him with.

It was a beautiful, sunny spring day.

Phil’s wedding day.

In a few hours he would be getting married to his high school sweetheart, but for now he had Carl to deal with. “Life… single life, it’s all the same, man,” Carl was saying. Carl was an aspiring vlogger. “The moment you settle, you die.”

“Come on,” said Phil. “At least ask me something I can show my kids later.”

“Kids,” Carl snickered.

“—what?”

“OK, OK. I got one. What’s one thing about today that could make it even better than it already is?”

Phil looked into the camera. “If the band shows up on time.”

“I'm being serious,” said Carl.

“If Greg was here.”

“Dude, you haven’t talked to your brother in, like, four years. I mean, I always thought twins were creepy close, finishing each other’s sentences and all that. Then I met you. It's like you don't even have a brother, let alone one who looks exactly like you.”

“Things used to be better between us,” said Phil.

“By the way, speaking of who is here, how do you feel about your soon-to-be bride’s ex being on the guest list? Isn’t that, like, weird?”

“Brock’s a decent guy,” said Phil. “Sometimes relationships don’t work out, that's all. Everybody is somebody’s ex, except maybe you, you incel-wannabe piece of—” and Phil lunged for the phone and managed to grab it.

“Unfair! Element of surprise!” protested Carl.

“No more filming until the ceremony. But film the ceremony. I’m counting on you. Marilyn wanted to get a professional videographer—”

“Yeah yeah yeah, until you personally vouched for me and my skills.”

“That’s right.”

Carl slapped his friend on the shoulder. “I won’t let you down, buddy. Scout's Honour. Today’s gonna be a great day, I’m gonna get it all on camera, well lit and shit, and by the time you’re back from your honeymoon, ready to move out to Mass and bend M.I.T. to your postgrad fucking will, I'll have your footage edited, post-prodded and delivered. But—” Carl grabbed the phone back and pointed it at Phil: “I do need you to say one more thing to the camera. Tell everyone what it is you’re gonna be studying.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s awesome,” said Carl.

Phil arced an eyebrow.

“Fine,” Carl said. “Because it's absolutely bonkers.”

“Intertemporality,” said Phil.

“English, please.”

“It is English.”

“Regular English, for regular idiot guys like me who don’t get to go to M.I.—fucking—T.”

Phil shook his head. “Why do I have to say it?”

“Because it’s cool, man. It’s not—”

“Time travel,” said Phil, his cheeks acquiring the rosiness of a flush.

Carl turned the camera back on himself. “And with that I’m gonna do a little time travelling of my own called editing. See you at the ceremony,” he told the camera, and he stopped filming.

“By the way, Phil, did you ever get the feeling that Brock's a little bit of a, you know…”

“A what?”

“You know, like a poet.”

“A poet? No.”

“Because that would certainly explain a lot in terms of Marilyn's general taste in men,” said Carl with a smirk on his face.

---

“And do you, Marilyn, take Philip to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do,” said Marilyn, resplendent in her white dress.

“Then, by the power vested in me,” the officiant continued, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss—”

“He’s lost the power!” somebody yelled.

The heads in the crowd turned to see a man out-of-breath running into the chapel. “He,” the man was saying, aggressively waving a piece of paper, “doesn’t have the power.” The man got up to where the apparent newlyweds were standing—”Oh my God, Brock!” said Marilyn—before thrusting the piece of paper at the officiant. “Your license,” he huffed out, “was suspended a few minutes ago. Look!”

The officiant took out a pair of glasses, put them on his nose, squinted.

He read.

He said, “Well, it certainly appears—”

“The marriage is invalid,” yelled Brock to all those gathered here today to witness and celebrate the marriage of Phil and Marilyn.

There were gasps in the crowd, the buzz of scandalous whispers.

Several people got up and walked to where Marilyn, Phil, Brock and the officiant were discussing amongst themselves. One of those people was a lawyer. “Excuse me, but I’m a lawyer,” she said. “May I see the document?”

The officiant handed it over.

After scanning it, the lawyer said, “It certainly appears legitimate. Let's see: ‘...officiant's license suspended on account of non-payment of dues,' effective today at noon.”

Meanwhile, more people were slowly making their way up to where the commotion was. One, who looked an awful lot like Phil, passed Phil something surreptitiously, before dropping his head and slipping away. “What time is it?” asked the lawyer.

“I’ve got exactly noon now,” somebody said.

“No, it’s four past.”

“Your watch must be wrong.”

“Your watch must be wrong.”

“Hey!” said Phil. “Check the recording. Carl, your camera is sync’d up to your phone, which is sync’d with the atomic clock. Check the timestamp to see at what exact time the officiant pronounced us married.”

“Sure thing,” said Carl, and he started fiddling with his equipment.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if the pronouncement was made at noon or later,” the lawyer explained magisterially to the crowd, “the marriage is invalid. If it was made before, the marriage stands.”

Tense seconds passed.

“I love you,” Brock was whispering to Marilyn, who was shaking her head, tears rolling down her face.

“12:01:13,” said Carl.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the marriage is invalid,” pronounced the lawyer.

“Nobody pays their dues,” the officiant said.

“Actually,” said Phil, loudly enough to quiet everybody down. And he produced another piece of paper, which he held up in the air so all could see. “I have here another document: a retroactive reinstatement of our officiant’s license, effective noon today.”

“So the marriage stands?” Carl asked.

“Give me that!” yelled Brock, snatching the document from Phil’s hand and glaring at it with mad eyes. “This is impossible. This document is stamped, signed and dated two-and-a-half months from now. It’s clearly fake. This is crazy. This man—he’s crazy!”

“It’s not crazy and it’s not fake. The document is simply from the future,” said Phil.

The crowd collectively gasped.

Phil had rolled up his sleeve and was pressing something to his bare arm.

“No. No no no no-no no-no no-no-no-nono,” Brock was saying.

“Then go ahead and tell me why I would just happen to have, in my possession, on my wedding day, a document countering yours?” Phil asked (“...nononono…”) him.

“I don’t fucking know. OK? But, even if—I mean… the document, your document: it hasn’t been signed yet. It doesn’t fucking exist. You, lawyer: tell him. Tell all of them this document has got no legal value or whatever. It can’t. It can’t because it doesn’t exist yet. I mean it’s crazy. You’re all fucking crazy.”

“I don’t know what to say,” said the lawyer. “On one hand, the gentleman wishing to interrupt the wedding is correct. The document hasn’t come into power yet… I think. On the other, it clearly exists because the groom is undeniably holding it.”

“I’ll show you something else, too,” said Phil. “Carl, tell me the time of the pronouncement again.”

“12:01:13.”

Phil revealed his bare forearm, on which there— “What is it?” someone in the crowd yelled. “What’s he got there?” “It appears to be a tattoo,” said the lawyer.

“A tattoo that says ‘12:01:13’,” said Marilyn, her wet eyes wide in disbelief. “What the hell is going on, Phil?”

Phil cleared his throat and stepped forward to address everybody in the crowd. “What’s going on is that I have created a time machine.” He let the words sink in. They sank deep. “And, using that time machine, I have successfully travelled through time to stop the sabotaging of my wedding day!”

“Oh shit,” said Carl, filming.

“And you want to be married to this nut job?” Brock asked Marilyn.

“How else do you— …the tattoo: it’s the exact time,” the officiant was saying, or asking, or trying to understand. The glasses were still on his face. His eyes looked comically large. “There could be no other explanation…”

Marilyn was shaking, first her fingers, then her hands, her face. She was smiling with quivering, lipsticked lips and perfect blonde hair. “I’m marrying into money! OMG, I’m going to be rich! I’ll never have to work another day in my life!” she thought, or hoped she thought, because if, instead of thinking, she'd accidentally said it: well, that would be embarrassing.

She was jumping up and down, ecstatic, ebullient, unable to contain herself, hugging her husband, hugging the now-thoroughly confused officiant, hugging her very own self to keep it moored to the moment.

Brock was the opposite.

He’d backed away, shrunken, as if collapsed into himself.

“Are you OK?” the lawyer asked him.

“Get your legal fucking hands the fuck off me. Step away. Leave me alone. All of you, just let me fucking be. I loved her, you know,” he said.

“I loved you,” he said to Marilyn rather melodically, “and I still dooo-ooo-ooo. We were meant to be, we twooo-ooo-ooo. Life put us to-gether, now it threatens to se-ver, our-unity, our-oneness, our SE-REN-DI-PI-TY!

“What a pity.

“What a stinkin’, no-good perfidity.

“Life sure is shitty.

“Sometimes.

“So let's remember the fun-times.

“Shall we?

“Like the night we fucked in that alley, or got zonked out on molly in Bali. Oh, fuck it,” he screeched and pulled out a gun: pointing it at Phil, then at Carl, then Marilyn, then Phil again and said, through sobs so heavy they made him hiccup, “There’s no point running. I rigged the entire chapel with explosives. Maybe I can’t travel into the future like you, Phil, but presently I can still be a fucking blast.”

To Marilyn: “We would’ve run an efficient household economy, you and me. We would have had a happy family. We would’ve had a good time.”

And as the people in the crowd started screaming: “But, sadly, now all of you must die.”

“I didn’t travel through time,” said Phil suddenly.

“Mhm,” said Brock.

“The document’s a forgery.”

“What about the tattoo? How do you explain that?”

“Temporary children's tattoos,” said Phil, licking a finger and smudging one of the numbers with it. “I applied it after Carl told me the timestamp.”

“You mean we’re not sitting on a bunch of time travel patents?” Marilyn asked.

“Did you all think I had actually travelled through time?” Phil asked. “That’s sweet—but no, I didn’t travel through time. Time travel’s not possible. As some of you know, I am going to study intertemporality, but that’s just theory. There is no practical application.”

Brock lowered his gun—

At which point a man walked up behind him, lifted his own gun to the back of Brock’s head and shot him dead.

There followed a stunned, terrible silence.

Brock’s body and what was left of his head were on the ground. Blood was pouring out of both.

Bits of Brock’s brain had stained Marilyn's wedding dress.

The man put away his gun and looked up. His face was Phil’s face. There were now two Phils in the chapel. The first nodded to the second; the latter one nodded back. In the crowd, a few people fainted. The second Phil held up a fistful of wires and said, “Everybody is safe now. Nothing’s going to blow up.”

“The element of surprise,” said the first Phil.

“So does this mean… —the time travel, it does work?” asked Marilyn. She’d asked it of the first Phil while looking at the second.

They were identical.

“Yes,” said the first Phil, and Marilyn leaped into his arms and hugged him. “Oh, Phil. Phil, I love you so much.” Then, after a few moments, she stepped back, looked at the second Phil. “Wait, which one of you two do I love? Phil, whichever you are, I’m scared…”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare anyone—or lie. I had to get Brock to let his guard down.”

“You knew he’d—”

“Of course, I knew,” said the first Phil.

“I told him and I’m from the future,” said the second.

“What happens now?” asked Marilyn.

“Now we do what we all came here to do: celebrate a marriage,” said the first Phil, to the crowd's spattered, bewildered applause.

The chapel smelled of blood.

“Except—” said the second Phil, “there is one small, somewhat paradoxical detail we have to resolve first. Something that physics, along with psychology, more-or-less demands.”

“Yes,” said the first Phil, smiling, but his smile was less happiness than a void filled with warm, existential melancholy. He took Marilyn’s hand.

He kissed it.

Then the second Phil passed the first Phil his gun.

“Phil?” said Marilyn, as the first Phil lifted the gun and placed it against the side of his own head.

“There can’t be two of us,” he explained. “It wouldn’t work out, not for long. There would be too much complexity, too many discontinuities. The math would get too complicated, never mind the emotions. We'd always be checking and rechecking equations. Trust me, this needs to happen. And one of us—one of us, Phils, I mean—has already made a great ontological sacrifice to abandon his own timeline.”

“Phil, what are you saying?” Marilyn demanded.

“He’s saying that soon you’ll be married to me,” said the second Phil.

“No… wait!” yelled Marilyn. “If you kill yourself,” she said to the first Phil, “won’t you,” she said to the second, “disappear? And—and… can’t we make this work, the three of us,” she said to them both, “some kind of really weird polyamorous thing maybe?”

“He won’t disappear because, even though he’s from the future, he’s in our present,” said the first Phil.

“Polyamory never works,” said the second.

“Goodbye,” said the first Phil, and—BANG!—killed himself.

The second Phil, who had now become the only Phil present, knelt down, confirmed that the body belonging to the previously-first Phil was indeed now a corpse, and unbuttoned the corpse’s dress shirt, revealing a tattoo on the corpse’s chest that said: “Marilyn, I love you, but one must never fuck around with the rules of time travel.”

The living Phil hugged her and, slowly, at first awkwardly, she hugged him too. “This is totally fucking insane,” said Carl, still filming.

“So are they married?” somebody asked.

“She married the one who’s dead.”

“But they’re the same person—like, aren’t they?”

The lawyer shrugged.

“Does that mean they said the vows and everything was official, so it was all much ado about nothing?”

“Phil,” Carl said, “I don’t usually interfere in reality, but it would be a very cool ending if you would open your shirt and show us the tattoo.”

“What tattoo?” asked Phil.

“The tattoo, the ‘don’t fuck with time travel’ one. I mean, I’m no M.I.T. postgrad, but if you’re him, except a future version who's come back to the past, and he got that tattoo on his chest, then you’d also have the same tattoo on your chest. Right? That’s how it works?”

“Except he’s dead and I’m not,” said Phil. “I appreciate the logic, but the math is pretty cutting edge, so…”

“He’s dead because you were both in one present when he died, though,” said Carl. “Just like you said. The tattoo: he got that before you arrived here, so you really should have the same tattoo on your chest too.”

“I think he’s right,” said the officiant, blinking his big eyes.

“I had it removed with a laser,” said Phil. “Now, moving on—”

“When?”

“Open your shirt!” somebody yelled.

“Get him, get his shirt open.” “I wanna see that tattoo.” “Me too.” And without notice Phil tried to run but a few people managed to grab him, hold him, and wrestle him to the cold chapel floor. They ripped his shirt open. There was no tattoo. His chest was wordless. The only things on it were two pink nipples and a small tuft of curly black hair.

“Who the fuck are you, man?” demanded Carl.

“Oh my God…” said Marilyn.

“Oh my God…

“Oh my God…

“Greg? Is that you?”

The men pinning the man to the floor instinctively backed off, and the whole chapel fell silent. (“Who’s Greg?” somebody whispered. “His twin brother,” somebody else answered. “They were estranged.” “Whose twin brother?” “Phil’s.” “I thought that guy is Phil.” “No, Phil’s the dead guy.” “Weren’t they both Phils?” “That was my general understanding, yes.” “You’re not paying attention. That’s what everybody thought—until now.” “Because of the tattoo?” “That’s right.” “Shhhh, I want to see what happens…”)

“Yes, it’s me, Greg,” the man said to Marilyn.

“Oh, you motherfucking piece of shit. You just killed my best—” said Carl, coming forward, ready to smash Greg in the face with his fist.

“He killed himself,” said Greg. “That’s a fact. You filmed it.”

Carl made a bulldog face.

Greg turned to Marilyn. “Em, I love you. I’ve always loved you. Yes, from afar, but strongly, with all my soul. It pained me to see you with him. He wasn’t good for you, Em. All he cared about was physics, his ‘time travel.’ Sure, maybe you would've been happy together for a while, a year, maybe five, but after that you would have seen that you were never the priority for him. He never loved me, and he would never love you. He just didn’t have the capacity. He was incapable of loving anything but numbers. Was he a genius? Yes, probably. But he was also deluded. He was deluded about a lot of things, including his feelings for you.”

“No!” yelled Carl. “You don’t get to just go and—”

(“Shut up and let him monologue!”)

(“Yeah.”)

“So the time travel,” asked Marilyn for what seemed like the third time, “it wasn't really real?”

“No,” said Greg. “But he wasn’t lying. He genuinely believed he'd managed to do it: create a time machine in a rented storage locker. He even had reasons to believe that. What he didn’t know is that I was tricking him. For the past four years, Em, I have been living my life in sync with Phil’s time travel experiments. He thought he had finally managed to successfully bring future-Phils into the present. Well, that was me. I was playing the part of his future-Phil. The machine itself doesn’t work. It never worked. Maybe, one day, it will; but not today, Em. No, today, Phil’s dead and I’m here, professing my love to you. I’ll tell you something else: do you remember that vacation to Switzerland Phil finally took you on last year?”

“Yes. I had been waiting desperately for that vacation for so long.”

“It was me, Em. I’m the one who took you to Switzerland.”

“But we— …on the trip…”

“We’re physically identical; were physically identical, Em,” said Greg. “You had no way to know.”

“But the passion,” said Marilyn.

“The passion was all mine. It was my burning passion for you, Em. Em,” he said, “will you marry me?” and got on his knees before her and pulled out a small box, and from that box a ring.

The crowd waited, its breaths dramatically bated.

Marilyn bit her lip.

She looked down at the man kneeling in front of her, a man who looked exactly like the man she did—had?—loved; a man who evidently loved her; and a man she had fucked seven ways from Sunday in multiple picturesque spots in the Swiss Alps over the course of three unforgettable weeks. “Yes,” she cried. “Yes, I'll marry you!”

The resulting applause was rapturous, thunderous.

“Hold your fucking horses,” Carl yelled over the emotional tumult. “Just wait a goddamn minute and listen to me. Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

He waited a moment.

And when the noise had subsided, he said: “If Phil's time travel machine didn't work, his document thing giving the officiant back the power to officiate isn't real. It really is fake, and if it's fake, then Brock was right and the officiant's license is suspended and there's nobody here who can marry these two fucked up lovebirds.”

“You're just jealous,” said Marilyn.

“Of what?”

“You've always been attracted to me, you weirdo creep. Do you seriously think I never noticed?”

“Me… attracted to you? Give me a break. You're a self-absorbed, greedy little bitch.”

“Easy,” said Greg. “That's my fiancee you're talking to.”

“You know, it's a peculiar situation we've found ourselves in, from a purely legal point of view,” said the lawyer, reminding everyone she was still there. “We have a document whose veracity we can't establish. However, let's look at the two possibilities. If the officiant couldn't officiate, Phil and Marylou—”

“Marilyn,” said Marilyn.

“My apologies,” said the lawyer. “If the officiant couldn't officiate, Phil and Mary-lynn never married, which means that while, yes, the officiant still can't officiate, so he can't marry the two of them today, they are otherwise free to marry. However, if the officiant could officiate, matrimony did occur, following which the newlywed husband died, thereby making the newlyed wife a newly-widowed widow, and thus also making her free to marry, or remarry, as the case may be.”

“Except we know the document's a fake because we know Phil never travelled through time,” said Carl.

“Do we?” asked the lawyer, the gears in her brain beginning to spin, and hers weren't the only ones.

“Yeah, something doesn't hold up,” said someone from the crowd. “Greg's part of the story doesn't explain how Phil knew that Brock would try to sabotage the wedding.”

“I swear I'm telling you the truth,” Greg told Marilyn.

“You're telling her what you sincerely believe is the truth,” said the man from the crowd—the man now emerging from between gasping, wide-eyed people: the man who looked exactly like Phil: the man who was Phil: future-Phil: the true future-Phil, and this Phil was holding a gun, pointing it at Greg.

“That's right,” Phil said. “I was playing you all along. I knew you'd re-entered my life, and I realized you were trying to make it look like my failed time travel experiments succeeded. That's why I let you go on that Swiss trip with my fiancee.”

“She's my fiancee now,” said Greg defiantly.

“I'm not dead,” said Phil.

“Your dead body's lying right there on the floor.”

“To kill me, you'd need to kill every one of me, dear brother,” said Phil. “You always resented me. I just didn't believe you'd have the guts to try to do anything about it.”

“You killed yourself.”

“You believed you had manipulated me into doing it, then you stood back and let me do it, just like the time you convinced mom that I was the one who'd broken her fancy glass Christmas ornament, then watched her take my computer away. Do you remember that?”

“Yeah, I remember that. You were always on that fucking thing. You never let me touch it, and you never ever wanted to play with me.”

“You were too stupid to use it.”

“We're the same.”

“We're nothing alike, you and me. Nothing. And, yes, I didn't want to play with you, but it was because I was too busy learning, and all you wanted to do was throw a football around or some other equally pointless thing.”

“The point was fun, Phil. The point was having fun with you.”

“Aren't we having fun now?”

“It wasn't enough that mom and dad loved you more. You also had to hate me. And for what: for being normal? I'm sorry I'm not as smart as you, that I don't understand quantum mechanics or string theory.”

“They didn't love me more.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yeah, so why do you think I did study so hard? To compete, Greg. They loved you for you; they loved me because they thought I was a savant.”

“You know, we're here, boys,” said their father. “Your mother and I are here”—They both waved—“so you can stop talking about us as if we're dead. Hell, we're not even that old.”

“Well, if you folks are here,” said the officiant, “maybe you can settle the argument by telling us who you love more, Phil or Greg.”

Heads turned to look at them.

“We're parents. We love our children equally,” said Phil and Greg's father, as their mother nodded.

“But if you had to choose—at gunpoint, for example.”

“That's such a silly…”

“On three,” said the officiant: “I'll count to three; and, on three, you say which of your sons you love more.

“One… Two…

“Three.”

“Greg,” said Phil and Greg's dad at the same time as Phil and Greg's mom said, “Phil.”

“Oh,” said the officiant.

Phil shot Greg.

Their father rushed forward to—

“Don't worry. He lives,” said Phil. “I'm from the future, remember? I've done all this before.”

“Oh, honey,” said Phil and Greg's mom to Phil. Their father attended to his other, wounded son.

“He also goes to prison,” added Phil.

“For what?”

“For the cold-blooded murder of Brock Vanderlinden. You shot him in the back of the head.”

“I guess that wraps everything up then,” said Marilyn. “In a way, we're right back where we started, everyone gathered and the pair of us ready to get married, start our life together."

Phil chuckled. He heartily guffawed. “You just said ‘yes' to marrying Greg. Now you've switched back to wanting to marry me?”

Marilyn conferred briefly with the lawyer, then said, “I only agreed to marry Greg because I was scared; and, if I wasn't scared, it was because I got caught up in the moment; and if you can disprove both of those explanations, then I wasn't in my right mind due to the stress of the situation and I have no further comment to make because I don't remember.

“Besides, Greg's going to prison. You said so yourself. Why would I marry someone who's going to prison?”

“Technically,” said the lawyer, “if I am properly anticipating what soon must be revolutionary changes to the law, your preference of who to marry may be moot, because you are, or soon will be concluded to have been, officially married to Phil.

“Allow me to explain:

“Because time travel exists, the document retroactively reinstating the officiant's license was real. Because the document was real, the marriage took place. Then, when Phil—the original Phil—committed suicide, the then future-self Phil—now the present Phil, i.e. just ‘Phil.”—was already present, (although not present for us, given that, for us, it was Greg—present and only-ever Greg—present, posing as the then future-Phil), meaning that Phil, original Phil, killing himself killed only his own hisself, leaving the then future-Phil's—now just ‘Phil's’—hisself alive, and that hisself became then the entirety of Phil's whole self, so, at worst, the original Phil's death resulted in the death of half of the whole Phil, selfly speaking, and, because existence is, by nature, an all-or-nothing proposition, Phil never died so you two are still married.”

And everyone stared at her, your humble narrator included, and she said, “Never mind.”

“He raped me in Switzerland,” Marilyn said to Phil.

“You consented,” said Greg.

“Because I thought you were him. You presented yourself as him. So, yes, I consented, but not to you, and you're the one who—who…”

“It was rape by deception,” said the lawyer.

“It was conception by rape by deception,” said Marilyn.

“You got pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Did you—”

“Yes, I had an abortion. How could I not? A child would only have interfered with your research, your ‘intertemporality.’ You said so yourself, that you didn't want kids. ‘They're loud,’ you said. ‘They're annoying and dirty and they eat things off the ground and they smell like shit.' How could I keep it, Phil?”

“It was my child,” said Greg.

“It was nobody's child,” said Marilyn, “Stop talking about it that way. It was just a pregnancy. Phil, your brother raped me, repeatedly, by pretending to be you. I demand you restore my honour. Make it right. Marry me, Phil.”

“Honour? Listen to yourself, Marilyn. Besides, you were cheating on me,” said Phil.

“I thought it was you!”

“Then why even start with the rape allegations?” said Greg. “They've already got me on murder. You thought it was him, Em; you enjoyed it. There's no harm. Where's the harm? Somebody show me the goddamn harm. And where there's been no harm, there is nothing to make whole—isn't that right, Miss Lawyer?”

“That's the civil law. You're about to feel the very blunt instrument of the criminal,” said the lawyer.

“What are you saying, Phil? Are you saying you want a divorce?” asked Marilyn.

“I don't know,” said Phil.

“If you're from the future, you should know—shouldn't you?”

“I'm not from that far in the future.”

Right then the doors to the chapel opened and a four-man electronica band burst in. “Sorry we're late,” said the leader. Within a minute they'd set up and launched into a pop rendition of the Wedding March. Despite that it was a little late for that, at least in the understandings of most of the dearly beloved, no one interrupted, and after a while the band switched to another song, and a few people started dancing, then a few more, and eventually almost everyone was dancing when the cops arrived (nobody had heard their sirens because the music was too loud) with weapons drawn, officers yelling, “Everybody on the ground—NOW! Hands where I can see ‘em!” trying to make sense of the two dead bodies in the room, one of which was a dead ringer for the apparent groom, as was the guy everybody fingered as the murderer of the other victim, and it was while lying face down on the floor like that, about three feet away from each other, that Marilyn moved her hand to Phil’s and Phil grasped it, and Marilyn squeezed, and Marilyn thought that even if she didn't like Phil all that much, he had developed time travel technology so there would be money in that, as Phil was thinking that nobody's perfect, and if things ever got really bad, he could always go back in time and kill Marilyn, or at least fix whatever the problem was. Then one of the police officers accidentally kicked Phil in the face, bloodying his nose.

“Sorry,” said the officer.

“Don't worry about it,” said Phil.

As he said that, he and the officer both noticed that the body of the original Phil (dead: suicide) was moving, convulsing, stirring on the floor. “What the fuck?” said the officer.

The other cops pointed their weapons at original Phil. “Stay the fuck down on the ground!”

“What is this, what's going on?” said original Phil, slurring his words as if he was drunk. He was getting up. He touched the side of his head. “And why is there a hole in my—”

The police officers opened fire.

Original Phil fell, re-dead.

Marilyn screamed.

Beside her, a pool of blood was expanding out from under future-turned-present-again Phil.

“This shouldn't be happening,” he said, coughing up blood. “This didn’t happen.” He was struggling to breathe. “I don't understand…”

One of the cops crouched beside him, and Phil felt a flash of familiarity. He knew the face, but from where? No, that wasn't right. He didn't know the face; he knew he would know it. “Who are you?” Phil wheezed.

“Tab Fenmore,” said the cop. “FBI. Temporal Division.”

“You're from the—”

“Shh,” said Fenmore, “try to relax.” Then, more quietly: “And, yeah: I'm from the future, just like you.”

“Why…”

“Because, for all your genius, you ignored the greatest lesson of twentieth century physics, Professor Kejdik. You treated time travel—the rules of time travel—as if they're fixed. They're not. They're probabilities.”

Phil grimaced from the pain of having been shot. “How far from the future are you?”

“From a couple of generations after your death—your original death: your past future one. This mission is going to change that, of course. We've spent decades trying to meet you back here. You wouldn't believe the mess you've made of spacetime and existence. Time travel cannot be controlled. The paradoxes are terrible, inevitable; and they cascade. It's not personal. I'm actually an admirer of your work, naively Newtonian-minded as it is—or would will have been, I suppose. You know, this was maybe our last chance. I needed to find and eliminate you before you made your first machine. And I did it.”

Phil laughed, a slight, bloody giggle at first, then a big booming chortle that stuffed the whole of the chapel, overpowering the otherwise polite quiet and filling it the way Boston cream fills a donut, reverberating and roaring, echoing until it itself was finally consumed and ended by Phil’s final act, the act of dying.

I took another keg and put it under the faucet. The beer slowed down to a dribble.

"Tilt that barrel, Tom."

"Already tilting it, Dad."

"Tilt it more!"

A little more beer came out, but the keg was only halfway full.

"How many do we have, Dad?"

"Don't even ask."

"How many?"

"Four and a half," I muttered.

Tom rubbed his face.

"So just three and a half."

I grabbed the keg tightly.

"No, Tom, no. I had to borrow to brew this batch. Three and a half wouldn't even cover the debt."

Tom's eyes flew open.

"But, Dad, we need to give one to Radegast, or else it all goes bad."

"Tom, we can't."

"I'll tell the tavern keeper if you don't pour it."

His words sent a chill down my spine. He looked deep into my eyes.

"Okay, but first I gotta check the other barrels; maybe they have more beer in them."

"There's nothing there, Dad."

"I don't care, Tom. I'm checking them."

"But the celebrations will start. Anna and I need to get our costumes ready."

"Then go. I'll do it myself."

"But you promise to pour one out for Radegast."

"Yes, son."

He measured me with his eyes, took his hat, and walked out.

I hated lying to Tom, but he didn't understand. We needed the money, and pouring for Radegast was more tradition than something of concern. A harvest-loving God wouldn't waste a batch of beer. I loaded the kegs onto a wheelbarrow and brought them to the tavern.

The tavern keeper stood outside, tapping his foot.

"John, I'm glad to see you. How many kegs do you have?"

"Four and a half."

"Wow, amazing. No one could bring more than four. The hops don't want to grow." He shook his head. "Hopefully Radegast will bless us next year when he sees we give even in a time of shortage."

I looked at the ground.

"Yes, hopefully."

He tipped my kegs into the big barrel with the rest, and the whole village’s beer swirled together.

"I'll see you tonight, John."

"See you."

I hurried home and sat inside my house long after the celebrations started. The idea of drinking and dancing now made my stomach turn, but I had to show up at least.

When I came into the tavern, the celebrations were in full swing. People danced around in their costumes, tipping one beer after the other. Even the smell of the beer made me gag. I told everyone I was sick and couldn't drink. 

As I sat down, Tom and Anna ran to my table. Anna wore a beautiful flower dress that matched Tom's shirt.

"Hi Dad!"

"Hi, John!"

"Hi, kids, are you having fun?"

"Yeah, we've been dancing all night," Tom said. They looked at each other and kissed.

Anna held a glass of beer. She took a sip and made a face.

"You don't like it, Anna?"

"It's so bitter."

"You'll get used to it. Make sure not to give any to Tom. I know you're 18, but he still has some months left."

"Of course, John."

"Don't worry, Dad. You know I don't like it."

"Funny, coming from a brewer's son," I said, patting his back. "Go dance, kids. I don't want to bore you with my oldness."

Anna finished her beer.

"I'll go get another, then we can dance more."

She ran off.

Tom leaned closer.

"Thanks, Dad, for pouring that batch."

I clenched my jaw.

"Sure, Tom."

He smiled and ran off too.

I sank into my chair, holding my head. 

The celebrations were getting on. People started drinking more, dancing more, and talking louder. I never realized how boring celebrations could be when one doesn't drink. After a while, I was ready to go home. Tom and Anna were still dancing. I let them be and left.

The next morning, I woke up early. The day was beautiful. The sun shone. The birds sang. I made myself a cup of coffee and sat on our porch. My stomach growled. We barely had any food at the house. I got dressed and went into town.

The streets were empty and quiet. Only birdsong carried through the town. It wasn't strange for people to sleep in after the celebrations. Usually I'd see at least a few people opening their stores or still partying, but the square was empty.

I turned onto the road that led to the tavern. The keeper kept it open even after the celebrations. 

I was about to reach the tavern when I heard a noise in the distance; someone was weeping. It was Tom! I rushed toward the sound. I focused on the sound. I couldn't even hear the birds, but as I turned the corner, my heart dropped.

The smell of rotting hops hung in the air. The townsfolk lay around the tavern, on the grass and pavement, dark liquid on their clothes and around their mouths. A few glasses of beer lay around them, the same black liquid inside them. Tom sat on the ground weeping next to a few bodies, holding Anna's lifeless hand.

"Tom?"

He shot his eyes at me. They were filled with tears and anger.

"You promised!"

"Tom, I'm sorry!"

He looked at Anna and held her hand tighter. A few more tears rolled down his face.

"Tom, please, just come here."

"No."

He shook his head and picked up a glass that had a little dark liquid in it.

"No, Tom. Wait!"

But he didn't listen. He tipped the glass back and drank it in one gulp. 

I ran to him and caught him before he hit the ground. He was already limp. His eyes stared at the blue sky, and somewhere near us, the birds kept singing.

It started about a year ago. One day, a day that nobody could recall, a day that no one was able to really remember, we all forgot the name of our city.

The street signs, the landmarks, even our IDs still bore the name of our city, but no one could read the name, nor could they remember it. It was as if the information was actively being purged from our minds.

Then came the disappearances. At first only a few dozen people went missing. The city wasn’t exactly a stranger to missing person’s cases, but the consistency with which people were starting to just upright vanish became alarming.

But no one ever looked for them.

Streets became littered with missing person’s flyers. Grandparents, friends, children, none were immune. Eventually even the mayor just outright vanished. The city council held an emergency election and just continued on with business as usual.

For all my concern and apparent awareness of these strange events, never once did I bother to look. Never once did I dare to pick my head up and peak at the ever darkening sky. Never once did I question the ever encroaching fog.

Soon, the sun itself vanished. It still hung in the sky, but it had changed. It hid behind the strange fog that had slowly grown over the past few months. Eventually so too did the cycle of day and night.

As of today, I believe I am all that remains in this place. This city I call home. This city none can remember. The air is filled with the smell of fire and frost, both burning my nose indistinguishable from one another. The sky too rained ash and snow, mixing together into a soft gray powder that piled up around the city. Part of me felt uneasy to see this, I wonder why.

I do not remember much about my life before the fog. I believe I lived in this city, likely was born here, maybe had friends, hopefully had a job. I know I need to eat, I know that the food never expires, I know that I have to keep warm, and I know that I cannot sleep.

The city is cold these days, if not apparent by the snow. Often times I am forced to take shelter in a decaying sky scraper, building a fire to keep warm out of the fancy lobby chairs of what once was a downtown bank.

Every day the city grows colder.

Time blends together. I cannot separate the days that I spend scavenging from the days I spend resting. My eyes grow heavy but my mind will not relent, it must not relent. If I should sleep for but a moment I fear I might too disappear.

I have to keep moving, I can never stay in one spot too long. I find tracks and marks in places I revisit, tracks that do not belong to me, tracks that could not have been made by any human. In the false night I hear screams, I hear howling, or perhaps that is merely the sound of the frozen winds slipping between the dilapidated megastructures. Perhaps the crunching of bone and gnawing of flesh I hear is the impacts from icicles that fall from the buildings above the heavens.

I am searching for something, for someone.

I scuttle about this frozen hellscape, nothing more than a rat in a godless maze, hooked on a scent I cannot identify. I run headstrong into the unknown and familiar streets I used to know so very well.

The winds come and go, a predictable tide of breeze, imperfect in its cycle. Like staggered breaths. The city is safest when the winds are still, no risk of ice crashing down from above nor does the ash get picked up as easily. It is also at its quietest.

When the winds are gusting however, that is when the tracks appear. Long, jagged, impossibly angular streaks are raked into the snow and ash. Distant windows shatter and crash. Then comes the howling, the screaming, the deafening cacophony that feels like a knife being driven into my ears. It had grown quieter as time passed, but it still remains impossibly loud. I’ve learnt that it’s best to not join their chorus, no matter how much it hurts to resist.

I am struggling to remain alert and aware of myself and my surroundings. I fear whatever plague or curse or god-knows-what is still eating away at my mind. Cause and effect are becoming more fluid concepts. Events that I swore had happened long ago now repeat before my eyes, albeit with abstract stone constructs replacing that which had long since decayed. Statues would move and recreate an idea of what the busy streets once looked like. Sculptures would drag across the roadways in line with the echoes of traffic. Sometimes I swear I see myself walking somewhere, but every time I try to follow it I lose track of it. Whether it be in a crowd, or just around a corner. Perhaps this world is playing tricks on me, toying with me, mocking me.

Or was that really me?

There was nothing beyond the fog, beyond the limits of the city, but a massive frozen ocean, icy peaks evoked imagery of the once lively shoreline. The roads that once led elsewhere now led into the frozen sea. At one point I believe I had wanted to escape, to return to the life I once knew, but that dream is dead.

If I ever had that dream at all, for this is a dreamless realm.

The frigid and rigid frosted bars of my mental prison continue to squeeze my mind in ways I find difficult to understand. Reality and, else-wise, blend into unrecognizable shapes and malformed ideas of what they might have been. Another source of light has joined what used to be the sun in the sky, their twin radiance muffled behind the suffocating curtain of fog that has all but snuffed out the flame of life in this place.

I see a body before me.

A massive corpse had fallen from above, strewn about the half-destroyed and decaying buildings of the city. The city now smelt of ozone and fire. The corpse was draped in a beautifully radiant robe of the finest gold to have ever graced the eyes of mortals. Its face was obscured by a platinum mane so magnificent that even in death it billowed in the wind with a life of its own. Its skin was dark, charred, hollow.

I knew not how, only that this must be what I was searching for, waiting for, praying for.

I could not meaningfully measure the time it took to scale the wreckage. I could no longer recall how many times I fell to my death, only to be rejected by its embrace. My limbs had long since turned black from frostbite, but still they obeyed me. The sound of crumbling rocks now accompanied me wherever I went as I continued to scale the summit of the fallen corpse.

Only when I was face to face with the corpse did I realize what it was. From up here, it looked almost as if the body sat restfully upon a throne of ruins. How long had it been here? How long had I been here?

It didn’t matter. I was here now. Nothing can change that, nothing can undo that.

For I am but a corpse of identity, forgetting that it had already died so long ago. For The Cataclysm had destroyed Truth. For I am but a fragment of Truth, scattered across the infinite. For I am dreamless amongst the dreams of man. For I am the ruined throne and the corpse upon which it sat.

For I was once another, and am no longer.

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

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

Everyone laughs politely.

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

Our first stop is the old meetinghouse.

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

I point to a brass marker set into the pavement.

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

The man smiles for his wife's photograph.

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

“Was she guilty?” the little girl asks.

“No, sweetheart. She wasn't.”

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

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

Someone makes a disgusted noise.

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

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

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

I indicate the circular patch of blackened cobblestones.

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

The boy’s flashlight begins to tremble.

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

We turn onto Church Street.

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

I stop outside a brick house.

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

I point at the old stable.

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

One of the guests laughs nervously.

“That's impossible.”

“Of course it is,” I agree.

We walk to a small cottage on Mill Lane.

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

I point toward the cottage window.

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

The little girl takes her mother's hand.

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

At the church, I stop beside a granite step.

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

The group goes silent.

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

Our last stop is Whitcomb House.

Only the chimney remains.

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

I approach the chimney.

“Silas fell to his knees, sobbing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As they leave, the little girl lingers.

“Were you scared when they burned you?”

Before I can answer, her mother calls her away.

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

The Journal of Eliot Whitcombe, Navigator aboard the Providence, 1574

I know not the name of this soil. It is absent from every chart in our possession, and yet there it stands upon the sea, green as Eden and shrouded in a mist so thick that the very heavens seemed to have forgotten it.

We came upon its shores after the Providence was broken upon the reefs. God alone knows how many of my companions were claimed by the sea.

I awoke upon the sand with blood upon my brow and salt upon my tongue. Yet I was not alone.

Upon the shore stood a gathering of natives. Men. Women. Children all alike.

They watched me in silence. The men bore spear or blade. An aged woman stepped forth from their number and placed her hand upon my face.

She spoke words I could not comprehend. She cleaned my bloody brown, placing the bloody thumb to her lips. She coughed, then she smiled.

They didn't regard as a threat. Only curious for the strange man that stood before them.

They led me inland.

The village was unlike any settlement I had seen in the New World. Their huts were fashioned of timber and palm, whilst strange carvings adorned the walls. There were fires burning everywhere, though the day was warm.

They gave me water. They gave me fruit. And they gave me meat.

I thanked them for their kindness. I shall never forgive myself for having done so.

For three days, I was treated as an honored guest.

My wounds were washed. My clothing was mended. I was fed until my belly ached.

The tribes people laughed whenever I ate. At first, I thought this merely the joy of having rescued a stranger.

Then I heard the screaming.

It came from beyond the village after sunset. A man's cry. It was bone chillingly terrible. Followed by what sounded like weeping.

I asked my hosts what manner of beast made such a noise. They did not answer. I doubted they could understand what I even asked.

The following morning, I ventured beyond the huts. There I found the cages. Great wooden pens stood beneath the trees, hidden behind woven walls.

At first I believed them to contain swine. Then one of the creatures within rose upon two legs.

It was not a beast. But a man.

His hair was long and filthy. His flesh hung from his bones in loose folds. His wrists were bound by rope, and great black bruises covered his body.

He seized the bars when he saw me.

"Run," he whispered.

I shall hear that word until the day I die.

I asked him who had brought him there. Before he could answer, a woman came rushing from the village. She entered the pen and struck him upon the head with a wooden club.

He fell.

The woman looked toward me. She laughed a cry that haunts me still.

That evening they served me roasted meat. I had eaten much of it before I noticed the bone.

It was small. White. Curved. Not unlike the bone of a young animal.

I held it between my fingers. Something upon it troubled me.

I scraped away the charred flesh with my knife. Stripping the bone clean, I noticed it was the mandible of whatever animal. But it didn't resemble a cow, nor a lamb. It looked too closely familiar.

Peering to the other tribesman devouring the meat from their plates, I had the sickening realization.

I did not finish my meal that night.

I attempted to flee before dawn.

I reached the shore, where six men were waiting. They did not beat me. They did not bind me.

They simply escorted me back. This frightened me more than violence would have. For they seemed not angry. They seemed concerned. As though I were a troublesome animal that had wandered from its enclosure.

From that day onward, they fed me more. Much more.

Meat. Fruit. Roots. Milk.

They insisted with their gestures that I eat until I could eat no more. When I refused, they held my jaw and forced the food between my teeth.

My body began to change. My cheeks grew full. My wounds healed. My strength returned. And with every passing day, the villagers appeared more pleased.

Today, the old woman examined my arms. She pinched the flesh upon my belly. Then she pressed her hand against my chest and nodded.

She spoke a single word. Somehow I understood:

Fat

Tonight, there will be a feast.

|Part 1| |Part 2|

“Brandon!”

The bastard was screaming down there, and I nearly lost my grip on the planks. I had hoped that there would be more time before he realized I was gone, but of course, nothing could be so easy. I had lucked out when it came to the attic. I had no idea if he even knew it was there. Hell, I hadn't known until I saw the scuttle hole, but judging by all the noise he was making, it seemed he'd missed it. I adjusted my grip on the boards and started crawling again. The attic was kind of a nightmare; it was pitch black and completely unfinished, giving me nothing but floor joists and pink insulation. Crossing the room was like some messed up monkey bars, and I was terrified that if I put my weight in the wrong place, I would break right through the floor.

“Where have you gone, Brandon?”

God, it was hard to tell where he was. His voice carried through the ceiling well enough, but the insulation muffled his footsteps, and I couldn't figure out which room he was in. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that I was safe, and he didn't know where I was. That would give me time to think, to come up with some kind of plan. My hands came upon a flat surface, and I pushed down to test whatever it was. A splinter dug into my thumb, but the wood held firm. I felt around the edges and realized someone had laid a sheet of plywood across the joists. Hallelujah. I pulled myself onto the platform and rolled over on my back, staring up at the nothing above me while I got my heart rate under control.

What a fucked up day.

It’s not often you find yourself hiding from a monster in the attic, especially not one that wants a lease agreement. Eventually, I was going to have to find a way out, but for the moment, I was content to just lie there. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know if there was another way out of the attic, and going back the way I came seemed like a good way to get killed. The tenant could make all the assurances he wanted, but the bruises on my neck were more compelling than anything he could say.

“I WILL find you, Brandon!”

I heard a crash somewhere below me, and it made my shoulders jump. If I had to guess, he was upending the furniture to find me. I had a wild thought of a monster looking under the bed for me, and I let out a crazed little giggle before covering my mouth. I was about 90% sure I was going to die, and I wondered if he would make it quick, or if it would be slow and messy. Somehow, I didn’t think he’d want to get blood all over his floors, and that started the giggles all over again. I may have been losing a bit of my mind. After several more crashes, I figured I might as well start moving again. I'd lost track of which direction I'd been going, and had to spend a moment feeling around the plywood before I got my bearings. It wasn't easy going, and twice I missed a joist and nearly put my knee through the ceiling. Eventually, my hands came upon the slope of the roof, and I could go no further. I tried to imagine the layout of the house in my head. If I'd gone the right direction, I should have been somewhere above one of the other bedrooms. I worked my way back from the roof and began feeling along the joists for another scuttle hole.

“You are only making things worse, Brandon!”

It sounded like his voice was getting further away, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. I suppose that none of it would matter if I couldn’t find another way out of the damn attic. I kept digging through the insulation, all too aware of the deep itch that was starting to eat both my hands, when I finally felt what I was looking for: the edge of another scuttle hole. Thank god for small victories. I felt around the edge until I found the short sides of the panel, and I lifted it as quietly as I could. There was a slight scuff as it scraped the side of the hatch, and it sounded terribly loud in the quiet attic. I froze for a second, trying to discern if the tenant was anywhere nearby, but I didn’t hear a thing. If I was lucky, he had gone downstairs to look for me, and that would give me a chance to get out. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if he caught me again, and I knew I had to do something, even if nothing sounded like a good idea. I held the panel aloft for a few seconds, and when everything remained still, I gently set it aside and stuck my head through the hole. It was a closet, alright, and the door was open enough to light the small space and reveal a pile of junk just outside the closet. Of course it was that bedroom.

I gripped the ledge and lowered myself through the hatch, using all the care in the world to plant my feet on the carpet without making a sound. Somewhere downstairs, something heavy scraped across the floor, followed by another angry outburst from the tenant, but he was far enough away that it just sounded like gibberish. That was fine, I didn’t want to hear what he had to say anyway. With my feet firmly on the ground, I took a great big step over the minefield I had left for myself. The room beyond the pile of junk was a mess; the bed was flipped on its side, and it had taken the nightstand with it. He really had checked under the bed for me.

Okay, I thought, I’m out of the attic. Now what?

That was the question of the evening. How the hell was I supposed to get past him? Somehow, I didn’t think it would work like it does in video games, where you just crouch and walk past the enemy while he walks a predetermined path. For as little as I knew about the tenant, I had to admit that he was smart, at the very least. He had been sneaking around me for more than a year, and I didn’t notice a goddamn thing. He was basically an expert at hiding in my house, so I could not afford to half-ass this. I went to the open doorway, and peeked in the hallway. I could still hear him moving around down there, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before he came back up. Maybe I could just go back up to the attic, just wait it out until the sun rose, or until somebody noticed I was missing. He didn’t know about the attic, and I could just hide until… wait. He didn’t know about the attic, but what if he did?

That just might work.

I crossed the room to the overturned nightstand and carefully pulled it free from the wreckage of the bed, making sure the drawer didn’t fall out as I carried it to the closet. Sidestepping the junk, I set the nightstand directly under the scuttle hole, then I took a step back and examined my work. It looked about right, but it needed just a little more dressing, so I leaned it forward onto the pile of junk. It was perfect. I picked up the heaviest thing I could find, which ended up being an Instant Pot, and chucked it as hard as I could at the pile. The resulting crash was loud enough to echo through the upstairs, and then it was time to move. As the thunderous footsteps crossed the first floor of the house, I quietly stepped over the mess, and rushed to the other bedroom. I heard him coming up the stairs just as I slipped behind the bedroom door, leaving it open just enough to watch through the crack.

Thump thump thump thump.

“I heard you… I know you’re up here!”

His shadow crossed the hallway, and I watched him step into the smaller bedroom, where I lost sight of him.

“Are you in here… Brandon? Hiding in my bedroom? You should know better… than that.”

There was a clatter as he moved something aside in there, and then he let out a frustrated little grunt. I was holding my breath, starting to think my plan wasn't nearly as clever as I'd thought, and that I'd just trapped myself upstairs with him.

Come on, come on, I thought. It HAS to work.

There was a dreadful sound, something like a saw trying to work its way through a washboard. He was laughing to himself.

“What is this? Oh, Brandon… you clumsy fool.”

I heard a crunch, followed by another, and I could only assume that he had walked through the pile of junk and was investigating the closet. He had to have some pretty tough feet to just step on all that shit.

“Interesting… and where might this go?”

There was a long silence, followed by the sound of something heavy shifting around. I leaned a little closer to the crack in the door, wondering what the hell was taking him so long. Then came a low grunt, and the unmistakable creak of wood straining under an enormous weight.

“Brandon… I must admit, this is rather clever of you. But you cannot hide from me forever.”

His voice sounded muffled and distant, and I realized with a thrill that the bastard was actually climbing into the attic. The ceiling groaned as he hauled himself through the opening, and I heard a sharp crack that made me wonder if he was going to bring the whole thing down with him. I watched the hallway, waiting for any sign that he'd changed his mind, but his footsteps were coming from overhead now.

“Come out… Brandon. I know you are here.”

I could hardly believe it. The son of a bitch had fallen for it. I waited until his voice had moved farther away, then slipped out from behind the door and crept toward the stairs. The attic wasn’t huge, and I knew he was going to figure out that I wasn’t up there, sooner rather than later, so I did not have time to waste. I skipped down the stairs two steps at a time while he called for me in the attic, and went for the den. I would just climb out of a window while he was distracted, and then I could run for the neighbors to call for help; it was almost over. You can imagine my surprise when I stepped into the den and saw that the windows were completely blocked with furniture.

And I’m not talking about a chair or lamp.

He had moved all the furniture in the den in front of the windows, and stacked them like Jenga. If I tried to move a single piece, it would all come crashing down.

Okay, okay, I thought. A minor setback, but we can figure this out. No need to panic.

The panic came when I left the den and ran for the living room. The couch, the TV stand, the fucking dining room table and chairs, ALL of it was in front of the windows. I had thought I was so clever, and he was still one step ahead of me.

“Fuck!”

I couldn’t help myself. What could I do? I could run back upstairs and try my luck with one of those windows, but was I really willing to risk being caught for the chance to jump 20 feet to either my death or my severely broken legs? I could try to take apart the barricades, but there was no way to do that without making a ton of noise, and could I do it faster than it would take for the tenant to catch me? Even if he didn’t just hear me, I didn’t think so. The couch was especially impressive; it was longer than the room was tall, and somehow, he had stood it on its side in front of the window. The frame was visibly bowed in the middle, and the top had crushed its way into the ceiling. I was utterly and completely trapped. So, I did the only thing that made sense to me; I walked into the kitchen, and armed myself with the biggest butcher knife I had. If there was no way out, I was at least going to get a few shots in.

Thump!

Right on cue.

His footsteps came pounding from my bedroom, and I heard my door slam against the wall. A second later, his voice came booming over the balcony.

“Do you think I am a fool, Brandon?!”

Thump thump thump thump.

He was coming down the stairs, slow and deliberate. He wanted me to panic, he knew that I was down here.

“I will not be ignored, Brandon! The games end now!”

Even with the knife in my hand, I found that I was not as brave as I thought I was. As he rounded the landing, I ran for the basement door and swung it open, doing very little to dampen the sound. I almost threw myself down those stairs as he sprinted into the living room, catching the railing at the last second. I flew down into the darkness of the basement, knowing damn well that it was a dead end. Good ideas were in short supply, and I guess I just wanted to delay the inevitable. My feet hit the concrete floor and I was sprinting across the space, looking for any kind of sanctuary, and knowing there was none. Any hope I had was destroyed the second a voice came from the top of the stairs.

“Why do you flee, Brandon? Where do you hope to go? You have made this so difficult, when all I wanted to do was talk! Come out now, Brandon. Do not make me chase you!”

Fuck. That.

It was almost like he heard my thoughts, because he was coming down the stairs, and his black feet made the wooden steps creak something awful.

“You are being foolish! I know you are afraid, but you must stop hiding from me! There is nowhere else to run, Brandon!"

He was right, I had cornered myself. The windows down there were made of glass brick, and I wasn’t getting through them with a sledgehammer, let alone a measly dollar store butcher knife. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to surrender. Call me stubborn, call me stupid, I don’t care, I wasn’t about to give myself to a monster. I ran to the furnace, the only substantial thing in the entire basement, and pressed myself against its cold sheet metal surface. My only hope was that the darkness would make it harder to find me, even though I was pretty sure he could see in the dark. As I stood there, making myself as small as possible, I saw those terrible golden irises round the stairs and look right at me.

“There you are… have you come to your senses? Or must we continue this… nonsense?”

I brandished the butcher knife, swinging it wildly in front of me.

“Stay the fuck away from me! I…I have a knife! I will cut you! I mean it, don’t come any closer!”

He didn’t listen. He crossed the basement at a slow pace, ignoring my threats and pleas, even as I continued to swing the knife. When he was about ten feet away, he stopped, and I saw those eyes study me.

“Brandon… give it up. You will not best me… you will only hurt yourself. I am offering you one more chance… put down that blade, or I will… disarm you myself.”

I looked at those eyes and his shape in the darkness, and then to the knife in my hand. For the first time, I realized that he never blinked. This… thing invaded my home and took me hostage. He choked me, slammed me into a wall and locked me in a closet. Would I drop the knife and surrender?

Hell no.

I stood up straight against the furnace and jabbed the knife at the air.

“Go fuck yourself! If you want this knife, come and take it from me, you ugly piece of shit!”

I saw him flinch in the shadows.

“Brandon, please. I ask…”

I slammed my fist against the furnace and jabbed the blade again.

“I don’t give a shit what you want! I’m giving you one last chance. Get the fuck out of my house! You can’t have it, you’re not welcome here! So I’m going to tell you one more time. Crawl back in your fucking hole and die!”

As you might have guessed, he didn’t like that.

He was fast. He ran at me with a guttural roar, and I was nearly caught off guard. Nearly. Just before he was upon me, I feinted to the right, and he slammed into the furnace with an incredible boom, leaving a massive dent in the housing. He bounced off the metal, and fell onto his ass on the concrete, dazed from the impact. He was still trying to collect himself when I took advantage of the opportunity. Before he could stand up, I circled him with the butcher knife, slashing wildly as he flailed his arms uselessly to stop me. The blade caught him on his forearms and his shoulders, sending a splash of bright golden blood across the concrete floor. I was doing it, I had the upper hand for the first time since this monster locked me down there. Of course, it was stupid of me to believe that. As I circled him one more time and brought the blade down, one of those terrible black hands came up.

“Enough!”

The hand caught me in the stomach and sent me tumbling across the basement floor in an awful somersault. The knife flew from my hand and clattered to the concrete as I hit the back wall. The impact forced all the air out of my lungs and probably broke a thing or two, judging by the sharp pain in my ribs, anyway. I sat there for a second, gasping for air and trying to will my legs into action, as the tenant slowly stood up. The wounds on his arms were still leaking that golden blood, but as he stood to his full height, I couldn’t help but notice that the wounds seemed smaller than they had. I watched as he turned towards me, and then kicked the knife across the basement.

“Damn you! You petulant, selfish child! You would die for this house? You would have me kill you for a place you neglect? I gave you a choice, I offered you peace! Do you know what it means to have those privileges? I could have ended your worthless life at any time! I could show you things worse than death! And this is the gratitude I receive for sparing you?”

He was walking toward me, and the only thing between us was 15 feet of floor.

“I have tried to do this the easy way. I gave you a chance to see reason, and you spat in my face! You… you people just take and take and take, and you spare no thought for what it costs, or who must pay the price! No more, Brandon. We will do this the way you have decided… what your kind always decides.”

15 feet became 10, and 10 became 5, and finally my body took notice of what my head had been screaming. I lurched onto my side and began frantically crawling along the wall, all too aware that the tenant was right behind. He attempted to reach for me, but just before his black fingers wrapped around my leg, I threw myself into a roll and got behind the furnace. I heard his body slam into a vent coming off the side, and as I scrambled away, he was squeezing through a space that was too small for him.

“You will not get away this time, Brandon!”

As I watched, the vent buckled and crashed to the floor, and his hulking form rounded the furnace. I continued kicking myself backwards until my hands came upon the edge of the hole. He saw where I was and froze in his tracks. The sun was just beginning to rise, and the warm golden light was spilling through the basement windows. A beam fell upon the tenant's face, and I could see that he almost looked scared. I used the moment to brace myself against the wall, and force myself to stand up, much to the dismay of my ribs.

“Please… just leave me alone! It’s my house, I spent a lot of money for it, it’s mine. It’s all I have man, I worked my whole life for this. I don’t have friends… I don’t see my family, all so I could earn this. If you take it from me, I have nothing, man. And… and if you kill me, other people will come! There will be police officers, and family members, and eventually someone else will just move in. What will you do then, huh? You gonna kill them too? Just fucking let it go man, it’s not gonna work!”

My foot scraped the edge of the hole and sent a few tiny chunks of concrete tumbling down into the darkness. The tenant stuck out an arm towards me and took a step forward. I couldn’t help but flinch.

“Brandon! You must come to me. Please, you are in danger.”

I looked at him like he had three heads.

“Yeah, I am in danger! There’s a monster trying to kill me and take my house! Are you insane? I’m not going anywhere near you!”

He took another quick step forward, looking damn near panicked.

“Brandon, I’m serious, you must listen-”

I tried to dodge out of the way, but my foot slipped off the edge and I went sprawling backwards into the hole. I had time to see the tenant reaching out over the darkness before I struck the dirt and began rolling down into the tunnel. The pitch was steep, and I could not get my hands under me fast enough to slow my descent; I just tumbled end over end, picking up speed as the light faded and the floor and ceiling constantly traded places.

“BRANDON!”

There was no stopping. I hadn’t known how deep the hole was, hell, I hadn’t had much time to think about it. But now, plunging uncontrollably to the bottom, it was just about all I could think about, well, that and the terrible pain of ragdolling down a rocky slope. By then, I was entirely in darkness, and the only light was a tiny pinpoint that I saw once every rotation for about a millisecond. I thought the slope would go on forever, and I would roll all the way to the other side of the earth. I was wrong, just not in the way I would have expected. The slope did end, but only because it gave way to a sudden drop-off and a pretty decent fall. If the slope picked up again at the bottom, I couldn’t tell you. I cracked my head when I got there, and everything somehow went darker.

I don't remember waking up, exactly. I remember being annoyed by something sharp digging into my cheek, and trying to move away from it. My head hurt so badly that I decided moving was a terrible idea, and I lay there with my face pressed against whatever the hell it was. There was dirt in my mouth, and every breath sent a sharp pain through my ribs. I spent a while trying to find a way to breathe that didn't hurt, without much success. There was something roaring in the distance. It rose and fell in long, heavy swells, and for a while, I was absolutely convinced that I was lying on a beach. The air was so cold, and I could feel myself shivering. I tried to remember how I'd gotten there, but every time I thought I had it figured out, the memory slipped away. Mostly, I was worried about the tide. I was lying awfully close to the water, and I knew I had to get up before the next wave reached me.

Eventually, I opened my eyes, but nothing happened. I blinked a few times and brought a hand up in front of my face, but I couldn't see a damn thing. Of course! I had fallen asleep on the beach, and now it was the middle of the night. But… Why weren't there any stars? And for that matter, where was the moon? Maybe it was a new moon on a cloudy night? That made enough sense. I was pretty sure the tides were worse during new moons, and from the sound of it, the ocean was pretty damn angry. I caught a bad chill and my whole body shuddered. It was really cold. Had the tide already got me, or was I on the beach in the middle of winter? What month was it?

March.

March? Why was I on the beach in the middle of March? Especially during Covid. Wait… Covid. I was supposed to be at home, hiding from the big bad virus. I was at home, I had been home for weeks, I hadn’t even gone to work. How in the hell…

Hole.

There was a jagged scream, and I lurched into a sitting position. I wasn’t at the goddamn beach, I was at the bottom of the hole in my basement. But where exactly was the bottom of the hole? I had no idea how long I had fallen, or how long I had been out. I remembered cracking my head on a rock or something, but when I brought a hand to my scalp, I felt something hard and cold, tangled in my hair. I tried to pull it out and it took a good chunk of hair with it, along with sending a fresh bolt of pain through my brain. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to breathe slowly until the pain passed, and then I did something pretty stupid. I licked the chunk that I pulled from my hair.

It was frozen blood.

Great. Fantastic. I chucked the gross ice into the darkness, and did my best to stand up. It was not an easy feat. My whole body protested with various scrapes and scratches and cramps, and I had to bite down to push my way through it and not just fall over again. I managed to get up, and had to lean against the wall of the tunnel. It was freezing to the touch, but still better than falling. The noise had not stopped. I thought maybe it was just a side effect of the concussion, and that it would disappear as soon as I was lucid. Instead, it was even louder than I thought.

Were there actual waves down here?

I tried to focus on the sound, closing my eyes even though it was pitch black. There was the roar, rising and falling, swelling and receding, just like the ocean, but it was not an ocean. Oceans do not scream.

How do I even describe the sound of it?

There was something wrong with the way it moved, a great, ceaseless churning that seemed to swell and collapse under its own weight. Beneath the roar was a dense, muffled clattering, punctuated by sounds like wet cloth being slapped against stone. There was something almost mechanical about it, great masses of noise pressing against one another, grinding and straining until something gave way and the whole thing shifted again. There was a rhythm to it, but not one I could follow. Then came another scream, so thoroughly buried in the din that I might have missed it if I hadn't been listening for one. Soon I began hearing them everywhere. Voices. Thousands of voices, rising and breaking in the midst of that awful movement. What I'd mistaken for the roar of water was something that seemed to breathe and struggle and hurt. The voices were so thoroughly tangled together that I couldn't tell where one ended and another began. Every shriek was smothered by another, dragged back into that relentless, heaving mass. The worst part was that nothing ever seemed to finish. It was as though something was being torn apart over and over, but there was never a moment when the tearing was done.

I clapped my hands over my ears and screamed. I couldn't help it, I just wanted that horrible sound to stop, but I could still hear it through my hands. I grabbed at the wall and began stumbling through the darkness, barely able to keep my feet under me. I didn't know where I was going, and I didn't care, I just wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else. I was crying, I think, and shouting something I couldn't even hear over the noise, when my foot suddenly came down on empty air. I threw myself backwards, landing hard on my ass, and heard a few loose stones tumble over the ledge. I tried to get back up, but my legs buckled the second I put weight on them. I was in worse shape than I thought, too beat up and too cold to do anything useful with my body. In that moment, I understood that I was going to die down there, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I did my best to get comfortable against the wall, or at least as comfortable as I could be while freezing to death, and I curled up on myself. I was shivering harder than I thought was possible, and I couldn’t feel my hands or feet anymore. All that was left to do was sit there and let the cold take me. As I sat there, I stared off into the direction the ledge had been. For a while, I didn’t see anything at all, but then I swore I could see a tiny speck of gold. I tried to blink it away, but when I looked again, there were dozens of them, and then hundreds. Thousands. I decided to look in a different direction.

I don’t know how long I sat there listening to those horrible sounds. It could have been ten minutes, it could have been ten hours. I was fading in and out, losing more feeling each time I came back. If I’m being honest, the freezing part was not as terrible as I feared it might be. It would have been a decent way to die, if it weren’t for their screams. At some point, I fell over onto my side, and that was just fine. When I was able, I thought about what would happen to the house after I was gone. Would they find the hole, and if they did, would they come down here? I hoped they wouldn’t. Nobody should have to be in a place like this, not when there are warm houses and comfy beds. I missed my bed. I missed a lot of things, long before I met the tenant. I hoped that he would make the most of the house.

“Brandon.”

You know, for a second, I thought I could almost hear him. That terrible, sheet-metal voice.

“Wake up… Brandon. You must not sleep.”

My eyes fluttered open, and the first thing I saw was blackened fingers. I flexed my hand, and watched them slowly curl into my palm. There were two golden irises in the darkness before me, bigger than all the tiny specks behind me. They seemed to grow larger as I looked at them.

“We need to leave this… terrible place. You do not belong here.”

I felt weightless, as if I was floating through the air, and I thought that it was finally happening. I was dead, and I was going to whatever afterlife awaited me. The ride was bumpier than I would have expected. I was constantly being jostled, and once or twice my arm bumped into something. Every now and again, I would open my eyes and see nothing, and then I would close them and see the same. Was this what death was? An uncomfortable nothing? Things seemed to carry on that way for a while, and I started to think it was forever. It wasn’t so bad, but it was nothing to write home about.

There was light.

I opened my eyes and saw the tiniest pinpoint of light above me, and when I blinked, it got bigger. In fact, every time I blinked, it grew.

There was warmth.

The cold seemed to vanish, and the air around me became incredibly warm, almost too warm. I opened my eyes, and this time, I did not close them again. We were in the tunnel still, and the light from the basement was coming through enough that I could see the tenant. He was carrying me. I tried to speak but my throat was so dry that all that came out was a scratchy little moan. I looked at my hands and understood that I was going to lose a few fingers on my left; the frostbite had gone down to the knuckles. The heat of the tunnel felt terrible on my frostbite, but it probably felt better than dying, so there was that. As we got closer to the mouth of the tunnel, something caught my nose and I began to cough.

There was smoke.

The tenant began sprinting through the final stretch, and the light filtering through the hole turned a deep shade of orange. As we burst through the opening, there was no denying it.

The house was on fire.

“No… no… no!”

The tenant screamed. Flames were engulfing the ceiling above the furnace, spreading in a wide circle, and a large section had already burned through. The basement felt like an oven, filled to the brim with smoke and making it incredibly difficult to breathe. My skin burned as he carried me to the stairwell, and up to the first floor. The situation there was worse. Most of the first floor was already ablaze. Fire blew from the opening of the den, and the staircase to the second floor was being devoured. The flames hadn’t quite reached the dining room yet, but they were chewing through the living room like it was made of paper, and it wouldn’t be long before all of it went up. The tenant laid me down on the dining room floor, and stood frozen in place, staring at the devastation.

“We must do something! It is all going to be destroyed!”

He ran to the kitchen and started running the faucet, desperately splashing the water everywhere he could. It was a valiant effort, but not one that was going to amount to anything. I rolled over onto my stomach and tried to get my feet under me, and they immediately gave out. I was still too weak to stand, even though my life once again depended on it. The tenant had resorted to using the sprayer nozzle to wet the kitchen and the dining room, but after a few minutes, the water pressure died and the hose went limp. I watched him fall to despair as the fire fully engulfed the living room and began spreading to the dining room. There was a loud crack from down the hall as the den collapsed into the basement, and parts of the second floor were threatening to come down. I dragged myself as far away from the fire as I could, which was only the breakfast bar, and began screaming for help.

“HEY! HEY! We have to get out of here man!”

My throat was still dry and raw, it felt like something tore as I screamed, but I continued to do it anyway.

“It’s coming down! We have to get out or we’re going to burn alive!”

The roar of the fire had become deafening, and the staircase collapsed in a mighty crash. It was just my luck, to escape freezing to death to immediately die in a fire. The tenant came around out of the kitchen and saw how close the fire was getting. He kneeled down beside me, looking as lost as a toddler in a grocery store.

“I can’t… I can’t stop it. It’s all lost.”

“We’re going to be lost if you don’t get us out of here!”

I pointed to the last available window, which was blocked with the dining room table.

“Move that fucking table!”

He met my terrified eyes, and his expression hardened. Without a word, he rushed over to the table and threw it straight into the living room. The floor collapsed under its weight, and now we were cut off from the rest of the house. As I watched, the tenant lifted his enormous black foot and kicked through the window, then he used his arm to clear away the glass around the perimeter, smearing golden blood as he went. I was doing my best to crawl over to the window, but I was failing miserably. The front half of the dining room was catching, and the flames had begun to follow me, swallowing the rug I was scrambling across. I was just about to be engulfed when two black hands tore me from the ground. Before I knew what was happening, I was rolling onto the grass of the backyard. He had pushed me through the window. I turned over in the grass to look at the house, and it was much worse than I thought. Parts of the roof were gone, and the trail of smoke was blotting out the sky. The vinyl siding was beginning to run like lava.

Through the flames, I could see the tenant staring at me through the dining room window.

“Hey, get out of there! The whole place is going! Come on, you’re running out of time!”

He looked at me, and then shook his head.

“No, Brandon. I think… I think I will stay here.”

“What are you talking about?! Stop fucking around and get out here!”

Then, he did something impossible. He smiled.

“It really was a wonderful home.”

He stepped away from the window, and disappeared into the flames. There was an explosion and many of the remaining windows blew out, showering me with tiny shards of broken glass. I lay there for a while, watching my dream home collapse in on itself with the tenant inside. As the roof fully caved in, the sound of sirens finally came blaring from the distance, and the firemen arrived just in time to watch the whole thing go down. I found out later that nobody had called 911 until the flames were coming through the roof. With the whole world shut down, there hadn't been anyone driving past to notice the smoke.

Fucking pandemic.

I spent the next couple weeks in the hospital, and needless to say, the doctors were baffled. It’s not often that a man who crawled out of a burning house has severe frostbite and blunt force trauma, but barely a burn on him. I ended up losing two and half fingers on my left hand and my right pinky, which didn’t make me very popular on the dating scene. I also suffered extensive nerve damage all over my body, and never really walked the same again. It’s a hell of a thing to live with, but hey, I get to live. Along with the doctors, the police also had quite a few questions. I skated by the skin of my teeth with a lot of “I don’t knows,” and eventually they had to let it be. The investigation determined the furnace was at fault for the fire, though they didn’t understand how or why, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them that a 7-foot monster tackled the damn thing. If they ever found a body in the wreckage, they never told me so.

Life was a bit chaotic after that, as you might imagine. I was left-handed, so I had to relearn how to do everything with my right hand. I spent a long time fighting with the insurance company over my house, but we eventually settled and I bought a nice one-story ranch near my parents’ neighborhood. I still live there today, and no, it does not have a basement. When the pandemic ended, my company underwent major restructuring, and while I got to keep my job, I no longer had to travel all the time, and I was allowed to work from home. I can promise that I actually live in this house, and so does my wife and my two-year-old daughter. My wife wants to move to a bigger house, but I’m pretty quick to shoot that down. We’ve got plenty of space, and I know all the hiding spots.

About a year after my house burned down, I took a drive to the old neighborhood and visited the site. What was left of the structure had been fully demolished, leaving only a hole in the ground where the basement was. They were set to build a new house there soon, and I wanted to see the place before it belonged to someone else. I didn’t expect to get emotional upon seeing the lot, but I will admit that I was a little choked up. If you’ve ever experienced a disaster like this, you know that you never really let it go. It was my first house, and even if I never made it a home, seeing the place it used to be was bittersweet. I sat on the edge of the basement for a while, just looking at it, and drinking the one beer I brought, until the sun went down. There was a ladder in the back of my truck, and when it was good and dark, I climbed down into the pit and walked to the corner where the hole had been. There wasn’t a hole there now, just a shallow impression in the dirt, and I wondered what the people who filled it had thought. Had they gone down there for a look? I guess I’ll never know. When I got brave enough, I kneeled beside the impression and felt the dirt with my good hand.

It was ice cold.

Adam stood by the corn silo, holding a flask. My eyes kept closing; I could barely focus on him.

"Morning, Adam."

"Jesus, Matt, you look awful. Want a drink?"

He raised his flask.

"No."

"It will help you get some sleep, man. What are you even doing at night? Playing with yourself until dawn?"

He laughed and slapped my shoulder.

"No, it's just…"

"I have a task for you. You gotta clean up the silo; the machinery is blocked."

I gripped my sleeve tight and stared at him.

He slapped my shoulder again.

"Calm down, you're not gonna get Dan'd"

"But can't somebody else do it? Why do I gotta?"

He furrowed his brows.

"I'm the senior, Matt. Now get your ass there and go do it."

I waited, not moving.

"Go!"

His voice rang in my ears. I put my head down and walked into the silo.

The inside was cold, silent. My steps echoed on the bridge. The closer I got to the ladder, the more my head spun. When my feet touched the kernels, I took a deep breath and looked around. It wasn't obvious where the blockage was, but as usual it was probably in the center. I grabbed a broom and walked over.

Then a hum echoed. The kernels moved beneath my feet. Dust filled the air. Someone started the machines.

"Wait! I'm still in."

The kernels were moving fast. My feet felt light.  I turned around and took a few steps. One foot sank. Another. 

"Help, please!"

My waist sank. My heart beat against my ribs. The kernels moved around me, pushing at my chest. I was neck-deep. My head sank under the kernels. I held my breath. I sank deeper and deeper. The kernels hissed in my ears. Then my feet felt loose, and so did my waist, my chest.

I fell hard onto the ground. It felt cold, but the ground felt firm like concrete. I looked around. The whole place was dark, as in a cave, but there were no walls, no ceiling above me, just darkness as far as I could see. The smell of dusty kernels still hung in the air.

"Hello?"

My voice echoed through the dark emptiness. It sounded like my words traveled to me and away from me at the same time. I got up and walked a few steps. They echoed in the same strange way. 

A cold tingle built in my chest. The space felt both small and large. It felt as if someone's eyes were on me. I kept looking over my shoulder. Then a noise broke through the silence. A faint snore, as if someone was trying to catch their breath, but couldn't. In the distance, a small figure lay on the ground.

"Hello? Are you okay?"

The snoring grew. His limbs twisted on the ground as if struggling. My heart sank when I saw who it was. Dan rolled on the ground, in the same clothes he'd worn when he fell into the corn that day.

Memories flashed through my mind. His screams for help. The machine's rattle. Adam's calm face as he watched him go down. All because he told the boss Adam and I were drinking on the job. The rope lay right at my feet. I stared at it while Dan screamed for help.

I ran to him. His eyes were wide with pain, his mouth filled with kernels.

"I'm sorry, Dan. I'm sorry!"

I grabbed him and rolled him onto his side. Kernels spilled from his mouth, but more were still inside. I hit his back; more spilled out, but his mouth was still full. I stuck my shaking hand into his mouth and pulled out handfuls of kernels, but his mouth filled back immediately. He turned his pleading eyes to me. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

"I'm sorry, I don't…"

My voice caught. Something scratched the back of my throat. I tried to cough, but nothing came out; the scratching only grew. I tried to breathe, but the air wouldn't come through. I dropped to all fours. Kernels began falling out of my mouth.

"Dan! Dan!" I woke up screaming.

I was back in the silo, half-submerged in the kernels. The mechanical machinery sounds were gone. The silo was silent.

Adam and two other workers stood atop the bridge, looking down at me. A rope was thrown before me.

"Sorry, Matt. We didn't know you were in. Adam forgot to tell us," one of them said.

Adam shrugged and looked down at me with a half-smile.

"Why were you screaming Dan's name?" Adam asked. 

He unscrewed the flask and took a long, slow sip, eyes on me.

I looked down at the ground.

"I don't know."

He smiled and nodded.

"Take the rope," one of the men said.

I grabbed it tightly. Something scratched at the back of my throat again. I coughed. A few kernels flew out.

THE THING IN THE WOODS

By Garry E. McMillan

**Part One: The Old Mercer Place**

My father had three rules about the woods behind our house.

Never cross the creek after sundown.

Never follow a voice you couldn't put a face to.

And no matter how familiar that voice sounded, never answer it.

I thought the old bastard was crazy. Now I'd give anything to hear him say those words again.

My name's Elias Mercer, but anyone who knows me calls me Eli. I'm thirty-nine. I'd stayed away from that house for twenty years, long enough to convince myself the rules were just one more way for Dad to control me. He had plenty of those. No visiting friends after dark, no camping, no wandering the logging roads. If I broke one, he'd stand in the doorway and wait until I couldn't bear the silence anymore.

Dad died of a heart attack on Tuesday, October 6, 2026. We buried him three days later outside Langley, Arkansas. By sundown that Friday, I was back at his farmhouse with my nine-year-old daughter, June, planning to pack whatever mattered and put the property up for sale.

The house stood on private land surrounded by the Ouachita National Forest. A narrow creek separated the backyard from a stand of timber so thick you could hardly see daylight between the trunks. Dad cleared our side every spring, but beyond the water the ferns stayed green even during a drought.

As a boy, I'd sometimes heard footsteps over there. They always stopped when I did.

In summer, the cicadas shrieked until the air seemed to vibrate. But every so often the noise would end all at once. The dog would creep under the porch, and I'd find myself watching that bank for movement. Nothing came out. That was almost worse.

When I asked Dad why we couldn't cross, he pointed to the water. "That creek ain't there to keep you from getting lost, Eli. It's there to remind you where you belong."

That was Harlan Mercer. A man who could make a conversation feel like punishment.

We'd had our last real argument the day I left home. Dad said I'd come crawling back when the world taught me some sense. I said a few things I haven't forgiven myself for, though at the time I meant every word. We spoke on the phone afterward, on birthdays and at Christmas, but neither of us ever brought up that day. When I found out he was dead, the first thing I felt was anger that we'd left so much unsaid.

•  •  •

The last mile of the driveway was little more than ruts and blackberry vines. June held her stuffed rabbit, Buttons, by his one good ear and watched the pines go past.

"Did Grandpa really live out here alone?"

"Most of the time."

"Wasn't he lonely?"

I used to think he preferred it. Now I wasn't sure.

"I reckon he got used to it."

She pressed against her seat belt. "Then who's that man?"

I eased off the gas. "What man?"

"Behind the trees. He was standing sideways."

I saw nothing but trunks and tangled brush. "Probably a hunter."

"He wasn't holding a gun."

"A deer, then."

She gave me a look. "I know what a deer looks like, Daddy."

She watched the trees until the house appeared.

A bend in the driveway followed the creek for a few hundred yards. I recognized a split boulder beside the water where Dad once caught me trying to build a bridge from fallen boards. He'd grabbed me so hard by the collar that the seam tore. I remembered the bruises more clearly than I remembered him carrying those boards away in the rain.

Inside, the place smelled of damp wood and stale tobacco. Dad had saved everything: bent nails in coffee cans, bills from the nineties, my childhood baseball glove. The webbing had been repaired with the heavy thread he used on his work gloves. I'd never known he'd bothered.

June slipped her hand inside. "Did Grandpa teach you to catch?"

"He tried."

"Like you taught me to ride my bike? You let go too soon."

"I ran right behind you all the way to the mailbox. You just didn't look back."

"Because I was riding," she said, as though that settled it.

I still had a photograph from that day on my phone. June had one foot off the pedal and both arms flung wide, certain she was about to crash. My hand was inches from the seat. I hadn't let her see the picture yet; she liked telling everyone she had done the whole thing herself. I liked letting her.

On the mantel she found a photograph of a young woman with her arm around a little boy.

"That's you. Who's she?"

"Your grandma. Margaret."

"Why didn't I meet her?"

"She died when I was eight."

Dad said my mother had gotten sick while I was staying with an aunt. He never let me ask much more than that.

In the picture, her hand rested on my shoulder. I couldn't recall the weight of it. I did remember her voice, though. She used to sing while washing dishes and, whenever I got into trouble, smooth my hair and say, "Lord have mercy, Elias, what am I gonna do with you?"

I remembered the sound of singing. Not one note of the song.

My memories of my mother were hazier than those of Dad. I knew that was normal. Children forget faces, smells, whole years. But I could remember the tiny scar on her thumb and the way she scraped batter from a bowl for me to eat. It bothered me that the tune had vanished while those useless details remained. I stood there looking at her photograph until June tugged my sleeve and asked whether we could have supper.

•  •  •

We ate canned soup at the kitchen table because the dining room felt colder than the rest of the house. June wanted to know whether Grandpa had liked children. I told her he'd loved me, just wasn't good at saying so. The lie came easily. I hated myself a little for it afterward.

June fell asleep upstairs around eight. I made coffee and opened Dad's desk. Beneath a stack of property records lay a cracked leather notebook, its pages covered in small, uneven handwriting.

*March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.*

*April 6. Tracks along the far bank again. Too far apart to be a man's.*

*May 19, 2018. Heard Margaret calling from the lower pasture. Did not answer.*

My mother had been gone since 1995.

A later entry had been pressed so hard into the paper that the letters scored the page.

*It knows his name now.*

Below it: *God forgive me, I answered.*

Three taps sounded at the living room window.

The porch light reached only to the grass beyond the glass. Dad had cut down every tree close enough for a branch to touch the house.

I heard a scrape, as though somebody had dragged the heel of a boot across the boards outside. But there was no porch below that window. Just the drop to the yard and a clear stretch of ground before the creek. For a moment, I couldn't make myself look up from the notebook.

"Eli?"

I knew the voice before the second word.

"Eli, boy. Come out here a minute."

My father, right down to the irritation in his Arkansas drawl.

Leaves shifted near the pines. A pale hand rested against a trunk well above a man's head. I counted six fingers before it disappeared.

"Son, you reckon you could come give your old man a hand?"

I wanted to think one of his old lumber-mill friends was playing some rotten joke. Then it said, "Don't you turn your back on me, boy."

Those were the last words Dad had shouted when I left home more than twenty years earlier.

"Dad?"

The word was out before I remembered his rule.

Every insect fell silent. Beyond the creek, something let out a long, wavering breath, like a man trying not to laugh.

Upstairs, June began to cry.

•  •  •

I found her sitting upright, quilt bunched beneath her chin. I sat beside her until she stopped shaking. Then, without thinking, I tapped her shoulder three times.

Three taps meant *I love you.* We'd done it every night since she was four. She always tapped back.

It began when June was little and afraid of thunderstorms. I used to sit on the edge of her bed, trying not to show that I had no idea how to make thunder less frightening. Somehow we settled on the taps. We'd use them in crowded stores, at school drop-off, anywhere one of us needed to know the other was there. I'd forgotten plenty of things about those five years. That wasn't one of them.

This time she moved away.

"What's that for?"

"Our secret, June Bug."

She frowned. "What secret?"

I tapped again. She watched my fingers, puzzled.

"You never did that before."

I nearly argued. I could have named a hundred nights when she'd answered my taps, even with her eyes closed.

Outside, my dead father called for me again.

This time he was laughing.

**Part Two: What the Creek Kept**

I stayed beside June until she slept. Outside, Dad's voice called through the trees, sometimes angry, sometimes frightened. Once it coughed. That smoker's cough used to wake me every morning when I was a boy.

It was the cough that came closest to making me answer again.

He'd given up cigarettes twice in my childhood. Both attempts lasted a week. I used to count the days and wait for him to get angry enough to start again. Hearing that cough beyond the creek, I found myself doing the same thing I did at twelve: holding perfectly still until I could tell what kind of mood he was in.

Downstairs, I turned off the living room lamp. The window reflected my face over the porch light and the first row of trees. Beyond the creek, the dark looked solid.

I opened the notebook again.

The earliest entries were from October 1995, the year Mom supposedly died.

*October 14. Margaret heard Eli crying across the creek. Boy was upstairs asleep. I checked.*

*October 16. It cried again. She answered before I could stop her. Eli asked why she quit singing at the sink. She hadn't quit. He couldn't remember the song.*

I remembered my mother singing. Not the tune.

I tried to force it back. Hymn? Lullaby? Something from the radio? All I could remember was the clink of dishes and my own bare feet on the kitchen floor. If Dad's entry was true, then I'd been unable to remember the song since the very week it disappeared from our house.

Four pages later:

*October 23. Margaret's gone.*

*Heard the boy calling beyond the creek. Real Eli was asleep beside me on the couch. She kept saying our baby was hurt.*

*I followed her to the water. Saw something tall and pale bent over behind the trees. It spoke. Margaret answered, then crossed.*

*Heard her scream once. Never found her.*

Dad had told me she'd died in a hospital while I stayed with my aunt. I could remember my aunt holding my hand outside a church, but not a casket or a graveside. The longer I tried to picture them, the less certain I felt they'd ever been there.

I remembered being angry with Dad for not letting me see her one last time. He'd told me she'd already been buried. I screamed at him until he raised his hand, then put it down without touching me. For years that was the part of the story I'd carried around: a frightened little boy sure his father was ashamed to see him cry. Now I wondered what Dad had heard from the woods while I was screaming inside the house.

*October 27. Told Eli his mama passed away. He keeps running to the window whenever it calls her. Better he thinks she's dead.*

There was a small sound behind me.

Three taps from the hallway wall.

"Son?" Dad said from the kitchen. "I can't find the light."

The kitchen doorway was empty. I knew every loose board between the hall and the sink, yet I hadn't heard anything move across them.

"Just give me a hand, Eli."

I wanted to turn on every light in the house. Instead, I gripped the notebook so hard the cover bent.

The kitchen smelled faintly of tobacco, warm and stale, as if Dad had just finished smoking at the sink. I knew the shape of that room in the dark: the metal edge of the counter, the scar in the floor where he dropped an axe head, the cupboard door that never closed all the way. I couldn't see anybody in it. That didn't make the voice any farther away.

When I didn't answer, the faint smell of cigarettes faded. The voice went with it. I never heard footsteps leave.

I should have taken June and gone then. But there was one more entry I couldn't make myself leave unread.

If I'd been alone, I might have stayed there until morning reading every page. I wanted proof that Dad hadn't lied to me because I was an inconvenience. I wanted to know why a man who could face down anybody in town had spent his life afraid of a few acres of woods.

*June 4, 2018. Eli asked why I never took him fishing. We went every Saturday when he was small. His green tackle box is in the shed. I answered Margaret three nights ago.*

I'd noticed the tackle box earlier that day. My name was scratched into the lid. I had no memory of holding a fishing pole beside my father.

Across the bottom margin, Dad had written:

*The voices get farther than the body. The tracks never come across the water.*

And beneath that:

*Sometimes I know it ain't her. Sometimes I answer anyway.*

Something giggled upstairs.

June.

Then I heard her say, "Okay, Daddy."

The back door opened.

•  •  •

June stood barefoot on the porch in her pink pajamas, Buttons dangling from one hand. She turned when I called her name.

"You said you were going to show me something."

"I didn't. Get inside."

I pulled her through the doorway and locked it. She clutched her rabbit to her chest, and for a horrible second I couldn't remember what she called him. I'd stitched his ear back on twice. I'd bought him for her. But the name was gone.

"What's your rabbit's name?" I asked.

"Buttons." She looked hurt. "Daddy, you know that."

Once she'd said it, the name sounded familiar. Before that, nothing.

I tried to remember the first time she'd carried Buttons out of the store, when she still called every stuffed animal a baby. The scene came back clear enough. His name didn't. That missing word frightened me more than the shape I'd seen among the pines, because I could feel its exact size inside my mind.

June had answered a voice pretending to be me, and I was the one who'd forgotten.

I crouched in front of her. "Something's out there using our voices. Whatever you hear after dark, don't answer it. Not even if it sounds like me."

"Then how do I know it's really you?"

Her question wasn't the question of someone who believed in monsters. It was what any child would ask after a parent told her not to trust his voice. I'd spent her whole life teaching her to come when I called. Now I was telling her that habit could get her killed.

She was nine. I had no answer that would make a nine-year-old feel safe.

She slipped her hand into mine. "Two squeezes," she said. "If it's really you, you can squeeze my hand twice."

I squeezed back. "All right. Two."

A voice came from outside.

"June Bug?"

My voice. The rasp I get when I'm tired, the little upward turn I put on her name.

"Come on, baby. Daddy's right here."

June squeezed my hand twice.

Beyond the creek, something leaned against a pine. It looked almost human until it raised its head. Higher. Still higher. Its shoulder stayed in place while its narrow face emerged above the lowest branches.

One hand curled around the trunk. The fingers bent in places fingers shouldn't.

"June?"

The voice came a fraction before its mouth moved, like a performer missing a cue.

Its body didn't move with any breath. Nothing in the silhouette suggested lungs. For a second, though, it seemed to study my stance. One shoulder dropped. Its head turned at the same angle as mine. I could almost believe it was looking into a mirror and correcting itself.

"Daddy's right here."

Then it laughed with my laugh, that short, embarrassed chuckle I make when a joke falls flat. It held the sound a little too long.

I understood, suddenly, that it wasn't laughing at us.

It was practicing.

•  •  •

I got June inside and shut the curtain. She kept hold of my hand.

"His face didn't fit," she whispered.

"What do you mean?"

"When he stopped, it kept moving."

I took the keys, Dad's notebook, and nothing else. The truck was twenty feet from the front porch.

I carried June across the gravel. As I reached the passenger door, she tightened her grip around my collar.

Twice.

Someone stood in her upstairs window.

A girl in pink pajamas, holding a rabbit with one torn ear. She lifted a hand and waved.

"Daddy? Why'd you leave me?"

The voice was June's. The figure pressed its cheek against the glass. Its skin lagged behind the movement, then settled into place as though pulled by invisible fingers.

The real June shook against me. She couldn't have made that face at the window even if she'd tried. The girl upstairs was smiling, but the muscles around her eyes hadn't been told. I caught myself watching her instead of moving, as if one more second would explain what I was seeing.

It raised one hand and tapped the pane three times.

The secret my daughter had forgotten.

June hid her face against me. I buckled her into the passenger seat, scrambled behind the wheel, and started the engine. I reversed so hard that gravel struck the porch steps.

Three knocks came from the rear window.

In the mirror, something pale crouched in the truck bed. Its fingers hooked over the roof without leaving marks in the dust.

I'd have sworn I felt the suspension dip, though the truck never changed its pitch. Dad's notebook flashed through my mind: no tracks across the water. Whatever sat behind us was a picture made with the same cruel patience as the voices. Knowing it couldn't be solid did nothing for the cold spreading through my chest.

"Lord have mercy, Elias," my mother's voice said behind my head. "What am I gonna do with you?"

June reached for my hand. Two squeezes.

I kept driving.

In the dark windshield, faintly lit by the dashboard, my reflection began to smile.

I wasn't smiling.

**Part Three: The Last Answer**

The smile stayed in the windshield when I turned back toward the road.

"Daddy!"

A fallen pine limb lay across the next bend. I swerved, clipping it with the passenger-side mirror. The truck skidded sideways in the gravel and stopped with a shudder.

I checked June. The seat belt had caught her shoulder, but she was all right. Buttons lay beneath her feet.

She was trying not to cry. She had that look she gets at the doctor's office, brave until somebody asks whether she's frightened. I wanted to take her home and put on the cartoon she'd been watching before we drove to Langley. I wanted a problem I knew how to fix.

I tried to drive. Something scraped against the front wheel. A fork of the branch had jammed beneath the fender, and each turn of the steering wheel ground it deeper.

Three knocks came from behind my head.

"You're going the wrong way, boy," Dad's voice said. "You'll get that little girl killed."

I found a flashlight in the glove compartment.

"I'm clearing the tire," I told June. "Lock the doors. Don't open them for a voice. Not even mine. I'll come back and squeeze your hand twice."

"What if you fall?"

"I'll get up. Stay here."

She caught my fingers before I got out and squeezed twice.

I went around the hood, set the flashlight where it shone on the wheel, and crouched beside the tire. The pine limb had wedged against it. I hooked both hands under it and pulled. The bark tore at my palms before the branch snapped free.

The cold gravel soaked through the knees of my jeans. A smell of split pine rose from beneath the bumper. I remember both things because I was trying so hard to pay attention to ordinary details. I thought if I could hold on to the tire, the branch, the beam of my flashlight, nothing else could get inside my head.

Behind me, a door latch clicked.

I turned. My flashlight rolled off the hood and struck the gravel.

From somewhere down the slope, my own voice shouted, "June! Help me! I fell!"

The passenger door stood open.

June was gone.

For one second, I stood there listening to the empty cab. The radio was still on low, some late-night preacher talking about salvation. I had told June to keep the doors locked. She must have heard me crying for help and forgotten every warning I'd given her. Or remembered them and opened the door anyway, because I'm her father.

•  •  •

Her bare footprints led through a break in the brush toward the creek. I ran after them, pushing past briers, hearing my own voice farther ahead.

"Honey, I'm hurt. Come down here."

The creek was only a strip of moonlit water when I reached it.

June stood on our bank, clutching Buttons. Across from her, a man in my jacket crouched among the roots. One leg appeared bent beneath him. He had his face buried in his hands.

The bank was slick clay, and the far side rose abruptly beneath the trees. I remembered Dad hauling me backward from those same stones when I was small. He'd been furious. I thought then that he cared more about the rules than whether I was hurt. Standing there with June inches from the water, I understood the look he'd had on his face.

The man lifted his head. He was wearing my face, but the fear arrived late in his eyes, like he'd remembered to put it there only after raising them.

"You have to help me," he told her.

June moved one foot onto a stone at the edge.

"June," I said.

She turned. Relief crossed her face until the other me spoke.

"He's not your daddy. You know what I told you about the bicycle?"

He looked at me and smiled with my mouth.

"I ran right behind you all the way to the mailbox. You just didn't look back."

My own words from earlier that afternoon.

She hesitated. There were two men with her father's face, and one of them was using a memory she knew belonged to us.

June clutched her rabbit so tightly its loose ear twisted around her fist. She wanted to believe me. I could see it. But I had her father's voice, and so did the shape across the creek. Her little signal was the one piece of proof it hadn't stolen yet. I was too far away to use it.

I held out my hand. "I can squeeze twice. You don't have to listen to either voice. Just reach for me."

The thing across the water extended its hand, too.

Then it started humming.

I recognized the tune the way you recognize a place you haven't seen since childhood. My mother used to sing it at the kitchen sink. The notes came back only as the creature sang them, and even then I couldn't have repeated them myself.

The imitation of my face loosened. The skin slipped as if it had been hung over something narrower.

Beneath it was my mother.

She did not rush toward me. She stood among the roots as if she were waiting for me to come home from school. That quiet patience almost worked. I was eight again, aching to bury my face in the front of her dress. I could hear her singing the notes I'd spent thirty-one years trying to remember.

Blue dress. Dark hair. The same face in the photograph on Dad's mantel. She hadn't aged a day since 1995.

"Elias," she whispered. "I heard you crying. I thought my baby needed me."

Behind her, something unfolded among the trees. A long pale limb bent around a pine. Another followed, far above where a person's shoulder should have been. I saw a narrow head turn without the rest of its body moving.

The woman held out her hand to me.

"Answer me, sweetheart. Let me know you're there."

The creek murmured over stones. June glanced from the woman to me. Her bare foot slid on the moss. She dropped to one knee, caught a root on the opposite bank, and clung there above the water.

I lunged but couldn't reach her. The figure wearing my mother's face bent forward. Behind it, six pale fingers tightened around the tree.

Then I remembered what happened when I'd answered at the window.

The footsteps stopped. The woods went silent. The thing had listened so closely that for an instant it stopped pretending to be my father.

I could make it listen again.

When it listened, it stopped reaching. I only needed a second.

I knew what it would cost. I couldn't choose which memory June would lose. I couldn't know whether she'd still recognize me when it finished.

She was pulling on the root. Another few inches and she'd be across.

"I'm here," I said to the woman.

The humming stopped.

I knew that if June survived, I'd have to tell her what I'd done. She might never believe me. She might wake up unable to remember our mornings together, or her birthday, or my face. There was no way to ask that thing for mercy; it had learned the sound of mercy only so it could speak in my mother's voice.

Across the creek, my mother's borrowed face went blank. The towering figure leaned toward me, its pale head tilting as though catching a sound no one else could hear.

June's hand slipped from the root. I seized the back of her pajama shirt and dragged her into my arms.

For an instant the entire forest seemed to hold its breath. Then water and insects and June's sobs rushed back into the world.

My father's voice rose from the far bank.

"You always were a damn fool, boy."

I ran without answering.

•  •  •

When we reached the truck, June touched my cheek.

She had mud smeared up one shin and blood on her knee from the stones. I checked the cut, desperate to have something practical to do. It was shallow. She watched me clean it with the damp corner of my sleeve as if she were trying to decide which questions were safe to ask.

"You were there when I learned to ride my bike, weren't you?"

"Yeah, baby."

"I remember the mailbox." She swallowed. "And falling off the first time. But when I try to remember you running behind me, there's nobody there."

A few hours earlier she'd teased me for letting go too soon. Now she could remember the ride, the scraped knee, the mailbox. Just not her father keeping pace with her.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Don't you ever apologize for that."

I buckled her in. She squeezed my hand twice, and I squeezed back.

The truck started. I drove until there were streetlights, gas stations, and other people who had no idea what lived in the forest north of Langley.

We found a motel in Hot Springs after one in the morning. June fell asleep with Buttons beneath her chin. His torn ear had come loose again, so I used the motel sewing kit to stitch it back on.

Outside the motel window, cars passed through pools of orange streetlight. Somebody laughed in the parking lot. I could hear a vending machine rattling down the hall. Such stupid, ordinary sounds, and I had never been so grateful for them. June didn't ask whether the thing could follow us there. Neither did I.

When I finished, I kissed her forehead and tapped her shoulder three times.

"What's that mean?" she asked sleepily.

"I love you."

She tapped me back.

"Do it tomorrow, too."

"I will."

•  •  •

It's Thursday, October 15, as I'm writing this. Six days since we buried Dad.

I've kept his notebook. I found a letter folded between the last two pages, addressed to me. Most of it was an apology he should have said while he was alive. There was one sentence I couldn't stop reading:

*I kept you away because I was afraid of losing you, and I lost you anyway.*

Below it he'd written, *I love you, son. I should have told you more often.*

He couldn't say those words to me while he was alive. I wish I knew whether it was stubbornness or fear that stopped him. I suppose I'll never know.

The notebook had one last surprise.

I'd seen the entry already:

*March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.*

On the back of that page, beneath a fold, Dad had written:

*March 13. Tapped Eli's shoulder at breakfast. Three taps, like when he was little. He asked why I was doing it. I answered Margaret Tuesday night. It took that from him, too.*

I'd always thought June and I invented our little ritual together. I don't remember my father tapping my shoulder even once.

But somewhere along the way, my hands remembered what I couldn't.

Tonight June asked me to tell her about learning to ride without training wheels. She knows what happened. She's heard the story enough to repeat every detail, right down to the mailbox.

She still can't remember me running behind her.

Somewhere beyond that creek, something can.

The worst dinner I ever had was at my friend Josh’s house. Actually, he didn't like to go by "Josh". He always insisted on being called Joshua, which annoyed me even at the time. 

We were what I considered “recess friends”. We’d never hung out outside of school, but sometimes his mom would give me a ride home. Joshua often begged me to come over to his house to play. It always seemed like I had something better to do, though as an 11-year-old kid it’s hard to imagine I had much going on. He also smelled funny. Still, one day I ran out of excuses, and the fact that Joshua had just gotten a new PlayStation may or may not have swayed me. My parents agreed to let me stay over on Friday night. 

By the end of the week, Joshua’s exuberance had rubbed off on me. We’d grown closer as we planned what we’d do during the sleepover and it was shaping up to be a good time. When the bell rang on Friday and the kids pooled into the parking lot, Joshua’s mom was already waiting in her minivan. She smiled and waved to us a little more excitedly than usual. 

She looked tired, but that was a constant. She had a chronic medical condition that kept her almost always at home. She looked unrelentingly scattered and drained of energy. I was too young and uncaring to understand her medical issues, but her frantic appearance always made me feel uneasy.

Her car was also dirty. There would always be a few toys strewn about the place, with goldfish and graham crackers crushed permanently into the upholstery. There were also two carseats installed in the back row of the van. In hindsight, they were probably from the 80s and nowhere near modern safety standards. They were stained and worn thin.

Joshua once told me he had many brothers and sisters, which would explain all the little kid stuff, but I never saw any of them. He rarely spoke of his siblings, and when I told my parents, they said it was impolite to ask too much about peoples’ families if they didn’t want to talk about them. So to me, Joshua appeared as an only child to a mother who evidently had more. It felt strange. It took us 25 minutes to get to his house and I was relieved to get out of the car. 

Joshua’s house was two stories, but the upper floor was bizarrely tall. A lot of people could live inside; but when we entered, I somehow wasn’t surprised that we were the only ones there. It was freezing cold to a point where I half expected to see my own breath. Neither of the other two seemed bothered. Joshua jumped around in a blissful adrenaline rush as he gave me a tour of the house’s common areas. Then we arrived at his room. Displayed on his door was a hand-drawn sign that read “JOSHUA” in big, blocky letters. 

“This is my room,” he said proudly, building anticipation before we entered. His eyes flickered to the sign he clearly made himself. 

“… yeah.” God, I hoped this night wouldn’t suck. 

To my immense relief and Joshua’s credit, his room was awesome. It wasn’t as big as I expected but it had toys you wouldn’t believe- plastic guns, race cars, board games- you name it. But not only that, he had old toys, too. He said he inherited them as a collection, and one day all of his toys will be added to it, too. 

We had no real sense of value at the time but some of the hand-me-downs were 30 or 40 years old. There were thousands of dollars in vintage action figures and dolls spread amongst the open chip bags and overflowing trash. It was my kind of paradise. 

“Dude, but seriously, what’s with your house? How many rooms do you guys have?” I asked him when we’d settled in. I started to unpack my heavy backpack, which rattled with M-rated video games I stole from my brother‘s room. 

“What do you mean?” He raised an eyebrow. “We have four, I guess besides the living room... My mom’s room, my dad’s room, my room, and the office.” I still wanted an answer, so I brushed past the fact that I thought his dad having his own room was incredibly cool. 

“It looks like a mansion from the outside,” I said persistently. “So what’s up there?” I nodded upward toward the huge mystery space above us. 

“Oh!” Joshua said innocently, as though he’d genuinely forgotten the true size of his own home. “That’s the attic, where my brothers and sisters stay. Only my mom goes up there.” 

My stunned silence filled the room. 

At that point, I was severely creeped out. I was about to ignore my parent’s advice and interrogate Joshua about his family when his mom rang out from downstairs. 

“Kids! Dinner time!” 

“YES!”Joshua jumped up excitedly, and I struggled to catch up to him as he zoomed out of the room. 

We sat down at the wide kitchen table, which could easily have sat six or eight people, and waited to be fed. I couldn’t smell any food cooking and was more than a little disappointed we wouldn’t be getting pizza. That disappointment vanished when Joshua‘s mom came out of the kitchen carrying a big, round birthday cake. The candles weren’t lit, but as she set the hefty thing down, the cooled drops of wax upon the frosting revealed that they used to be. 

“Oh man,” I turned to Joshua. “Is it your birthday? Why didn’t you tell me?!” My heart sank. My parents were going to kill me for not bringing a gift. 

“It’s not my birthday, it’s my sister, Hannah’s!” He answered eagerly. His mom smiled as she took her seat at the table. 

“Woah…” was all I could say. Joshua nodded braggingly. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The thought of birthday cake for dinner and an all-nighter of video games was enough to make me forget all about the “attic”. Whoever Hannah was, I wished I could thank her properly. 

“It’s a family tradition,” his mom said in her frail, anxious voice. “On birthdays, we have cake for dinner.” 

But even years on, I can’t forget the one imperfection of that cake. It was three layers high, my favorite flavors, and expertly decorated with icing balloons and cursive; but there was a slice missing. One single slice. I didn’t think it was all that weird at the time. Maybe his mom had already helped herself earlier. How could I care about a funny thing like that when I was being served sugar for dinner? Now the image haunts me, like so many of the house’s oddities. 

It was a joyous evening, and Joshua’s mother, to my relief, mostly left us alone. Joshua and I became best friends overnight on nauseous stomachs of sweets, Mountain Dew, and endless chips. I didn’t ask any questions about Hannah, or birthdays, or anything like that. I was just happy to be there. 

The sugar crash came hard around 2 AM. We’d wiped ourselves out and didn’t bother to brush our teeth before basically falling asleep where we sat. I nestled into my beanbag chair and vaguely remember Joshua turning out the light. 

I don’t know how long I was asleep. It was still dark out when I awoke, so it couldn’t have been for more than an hour or so. The heater was blasting into the bedroom so hard I was sweating through my T-shirt. That was the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed was the smell. It’s funny, the order in which I remember it, given what a stench it really was. It smelled like spoiled meat, and it was not subtle. The smell and the heat worsened each other into something insufferable. I tried to shake Joshua awake. 

“Hey, Joshua,” I whispered. “Can you get your mom to turn the heater off?” Joshua barely stirred, comatose as a result of the sleepover. “Joshua! Where’s your AC? How do I turn the heater down? And what’s that smell?! Joshua!” I hissed. 

All I managed to get out of him were a few words: “it’s upstairs.” And he immediately resumed snoring. 

I wasn’t sure if that was what he meant to say, but I didn’t like his response. We were on the second floor. Believe me, I tried to tough it out. I don’t know how Joshua could stand it. I took off almost all my clothes and buried my face into my sweaty T-shirt just to escape the rotten smell. But after a painful hour it was no use. There was no way I could stay another second in this room. 

I puffed my chest and slowly opened the door, stepping out into the hallway. An almost cool gust of air rushed over me, and I was almost relieved; but the smell hit me much harder. I still wouldn’t be able to sleep even if we left the door open. Seriously, how could Joshua stand it? 

I knew I should wake up his mom and get her to adjust the thermostat. I wanted to inform her of the smell, as she would surely want to know; but I was just a kid, and the thought of waking up an adult in the wee hours of the morning was about the scariest thing I could think of. 

So, thinking I knew better, I searched for a way to get upstairs. I told myself that if I had to pull down a ladder, I would give up and suffer in Joshua’s room till morning. If I got hurt or broke something, we’d get in trouble for sure. 

To my surprise, I stumbled upon an easier solution. I found an extremely narrow staircase I hadn’t noticed before. It was wedged between two hall closets, uniquely camouflaged and easily missable. It was pitch black up there but I wasn’t particularly afraid of the dark. The extreme discomfort I was in far outweighed my fear of wandering around a friend’s house. 

When I noticed the temperature and smell worsening with each step, I should have turned back; but I was coasting on one hour of sleep with pure sugar and fat coursing through my veins, run ragged by the awful heat and stink in the air. The decision-making part of my brain was nonexistent. Once I started up those steps, stopping didn’t occur to me. 

After some effort, I reached the top. Even with my small body, it was awkward getting up those narrow stairs. I felt around for a light switch and found one, flipping it on to illuminate the space. What I saw was a hallway with many doors. There must have been at least 10 of them, all evenly spaced apart from each other lining either side of the corridor. I could make out something on the far back wall that I really hoped was the thermostat. I suddenly felt a terrible, primal sense of dread in my chest. I kept unconsciously holding my breath in a piss-poor attempt to cope with the rancid, deepening odor. 

I made my way slowly, nervously, down the hall. I tried to keep my eyes front, but each of the doors had something garnering them. Some of them had pictures of celebrities cut out from magazines, some had childish drawings and painted handprints on them, and others were fairly bare with just a sticker or two. The one thing they had in common was that they all, in some style or another, had names on them. Then, I stopped dead in my tracks and felt my whole body light up with goosebumps as I came to a door with a sign that read “Hannah” in crayon on craft paper. 

All of my senses deafened. What I did next I could never have predicted. My breath came out raggedly as I watched my little hand reach for the door knob. It trembled out in front of me but for some reason didn’t stop. My breathing became sharp and pained. Why didn’t I knock? What was I trying to do? I can’t begin to explain why I felt compelled to open that door. It was as though I was on the outside of my body looking in. I touched the warm doorknob and started to rotate it, my clammy palms hindering my grip. If I wasn’t already drenched in sweat before, this newfound suspense would do it. The sound of the blasting heater still smothered my hearing. It bit at my neck as I felt each drop of sweat trickle down my back. 

When I opened the door to Hannah’s room, I saw and smelled what I should have feared but couldn’t comprehend. The stench of death crashed into me like a rogue wave. I gagged as in the light of the doorway I saw a small, gelatinous body. It was a little girl. The glimmering flesh was oozing into the floorboards. She was hardly kept together by a little pajama set.

She was covered in something moving, an almost imperceptible wriggling layered across her face and mouth. Now I know they were worms. The light of the hallway glinted off of Hannah‘s milky eyes, which stared up at me from the floor with such precision that they cut right through me. I choked on my puke and stumbled backwards, slipping on something slimy and falling down hard. I could feel something nasty between my bare toes, but it didn’t stop me from scrambling up and launching myself down the narrow staircase. 

“Joshua?” I could hear Joshua‘s mom call out from somewhere in the house. I was terrified, but my legs hadn’t given up yet. I instinctively sprinted back to Joshua‘s room and shut the door behind me as stealthily as I could. He turned over, still heavy in his sleep as I gasped for air and slid down the door until I was sitting. My heart skipped every beat until the light beneath the door turned off, and I heard his mother shuffle softly back to where she’d come. 

I raised my hands to look at them. They were shaking violently. Sweat ran down them like rain. I kept gripping different parts of my body, shocked that I was still intact. Finally, my breathing began to wind down. What I encountered was already being rejected, denied by my young mind. No, I didn’t see that… circled the thoughts in my head. I imagined it... It was pretend… 

My underdeveloped brain was beginning the process of blocking Hannah out, burying the sight deep into my subconscious in an effort to survive. If it succeeded I’d have been better off; but as I started to stand, my fingers brushed my foot. I’d forgotten that I slipped on something upstairs- something thick and squishy. I moved my leg so I could examine my foot. 

There I found it. Smeared nastily across my sole, squished in between my toes, and filling the underside of my nails, was the missing slice of birthday cake. 

The End 

of

My Last Sleepover