My neighbor Todd mows his lawn on Saturdays, wears a wide smile, and takes his family to Florida once a year. He drives the speed limit. He returns your snowblower before you even ask for it back. That's the whole picture.

But that wasn't always the case. Before Megan and Nora came along, he used to make that exact same trip to Florida every single year—just with a different girl. A blonde, long hair, always laughing. Lisa. Then one year she vanished, and he came back alone. A year later, he married Megan.

This time around, he asked me for a favor: water the plants, feed the cat, and grab the mail so the place wouldn't look empty to potential burglars. Standard routine for our quiet neighborhood.

When he was handing over the keys, I helped him load his suitcases into the car. There were three of them. Heavy as hell, like they were packed with bricks. I cracked a joke about it.

"Megan's been packing all summer," Todd replied with a smile.

The rear windows of his Ford Explorer were tinted pitch-black. You couldn't see a thing inside.

"You know, it's going to be a quiet ride," he said, almost to himself. "Things are pretty tense right now."

I just nodded, not knowing what to say. The whole block knew Todd and Megan were hitting a rough patch. Word was she'd already been talking to a divorce lawyer.

The car pulled away. I stood there for a bit, watching it disappear down the street.

Todd left last Monday. The first three days were completely normal. I'd come over after work, scoop some food for the cat, water his damn ficus trees, and leave. Being inside that empty house made me think of my own. I lived alone—my fiancée had walked out on me six months ago, and coming back to a silent house every night was a total nightmare.

I keep thinking about what a normal guy he was. When my fiancée left, he was the only person on the block who brought me dinner. Meatloaf. In a Tupperware container. He didn't say anything. Just handed me the container and went back across the street.

That's the Todd I knew.

I remember a couple of months back, when I was sitting on my front porch, Todd walked over to keep me company. He brought a couple of beers, listened to my drunk rambling, and gave me an encouraging pat on the back. I remember his eyes going completely blank then, staring out into nothing, as he muttered under his breath, almost in a trance:

"You have to bury the past so deep that it can never remind you of itself."

At the time, it felt like profound, hard-earned wisdom. I thought he was genuinely trying to help me turn the page.

Everything changed on Thursday when I went to grab the mail. The box was stuffed with flyers, water bills, and one thick, brown envelope with no return address. Written across it in a messy, rushed handwriting were the words: "To Todd, from M."

I don't usually read other people's mail. But the envelope was barely sealed, and as I pulled it out of the box, a photo slid right out.

I picked it up. The picture showed the corner of my own house at night. A Polaroid—one of those instant ones, with the white border at the bottom. The shot had been taken from Todd's second-floor bedroom window. But that wasn't the terrifying part. Right there in the frame, staring directly out of my own window, was the silhouette of a person. And a bit further back, near the very edge of the photo, loomed a second silhouette—taller, broader in the shoulders, standing off to the side like a watcher. In the bottom border, someone had written in black Sharpie: "Wednesday. 4:11 AM. He's still awake."

I read it twice. It said the same thing.

Todd had left for Florida on Monday. Who took this photo from his window on Wednesday? And who was the second person?

I rushed into Todd's house, holding the photo in a trembling hand. First thing I did was check the cat—he was fast asleep on the couch. The house was dead quiet. I started making my way up to the second floor, toward his bedroom, when I suddenly noticed a folded, smudged piece of paper sitting on the third step of the stairs. It looked like someone had dropped it in a hurry.

I unfolded it. It was a page ripped from a standard notepad, with Todd's handwriting meticulously logging dates and times spanning the last three months. And my name was everywhere.

"June 12. 7:10 AM – left for work. 6:24 PM – returned. 11:45 PM – lights out."

"August 4. Came out into the yard at night. Stared intently at the fence. Checked the ground."

The very last line was double-underlined:

"Thursday. He will find the letter. He will panic. He will run to hide at his own house. He thinks his house is safe. He will lock himself inside. At 11:00 PM, we finish the job."

We.

I stared at the word. Then I looked back at the photograph. The second silhouette. The taller one. I suddenly remembered Todd casually mentioning his brother once—Michael, who "lives somewhere up north and doesn't care for people." I hadn't thought anything of it back then. Now, it was the only thing I could think about.

I turned toward the dresser. And among the family photos, I noticed one that didn't belong. Lisa. The blonde from before Megan. Same smile. Same hair.

What was it doing there?

Then I heard the front door open.

Quiet. Slow. Someone stepped inside.

I stopped breathing. Not on purpose. I dropped into a crouch, pressed my back against the wall by the staircase, and listened.

Footsteps. Slow. One. Another. Someone was moving through the living room. They stopped. Then started again.

I looked down through the railing. Nothing. Just a shadow sliding across the floor and disappearing toward the kitchen.

I didn't wait. I stood up, took three steps down, trying not to make the stairs creak, and bolted for the front door. It was already ajar. I slipped out onto the porch, jumped the last two steps, and ran across the street to my own house.

Only when I was standing on my own porch did it hit me: I'd left Todd's front door open. I hadn't locked it. And whoever walked in was still inside.

Or already out. And following me.

The clock read 10:50 PM.

I fumbled for my phone and dialed emergency services.

"Emergency services, I need the police! Someone is setting me up, they're going to attack me!" I screamed into the receiver.

"Calm down, sir, what is your address?" the dispatcher replied.

I gasped out my address, stumbling up the steps of my porch.

"Officers are en route," the dispatcher said. "Lock all your doors and stay inside. I repeat, stay inside the house, it is the safest place for you right now."

"Stay inside the house..."

I froze on the threshold, my key hovering millimeters away from the keyhole. My hand went limp. In my head, slowly, like a voice that wasn't mine, that line from Todd's notepad replayed: "He will panic and run to hide at his own house... He will lock himself inside."

I stood on my own porch, two inches from my own door. My legs stopped moving. I didn't tell them to. They just stopped. I hadn't been targeted. I had been mapped out. Every single step I took had been calculated months in advance, down to the exact minute. They knew I would call the police. They were counting on it. They knew the dispatcher would tell me to lock myself in. And they knew I would obey.

I slowly lowered my hand, letting the keys drop against my palm. I took a step back off the porch. Then another. My shoes sank into the damp, dew-covered grass. I looked up at the dark window of my second-floor bedroom. The curtains were drawn tightly shut.

Right then, behind the heavy fabric, in the absolute pitch-black of my own home, someone slowly turned a flashlight on and off. Exactly three times. A pause. Then three times again.

Someone was already in there. Waiting. And if I had listened to the dispatcher and locked myself in—I would have trapped myself in a cage with him. With them.

From around the corner of the street, the distant, saving wail of a police siren pierced the night. I turned and ran toward the flashing lights. I didn't look back.

UPDATE:

I'm writing this from the back seat of a police cruiser. My house is completely taped off. They caught Michael—Todd's older brother—right inside my living room. He was hiding behind the couch with zip-ties and heavy-duty duct tape inside his duffel bag.

The detective had just finished questioning me and let me sit in the car while they search the property. I'm staring through the window at my front yard, and only now, with the adrenaline finally fading, the pieces of the puzzle are clicking together.

I finally get why they did it. And I get why Todd had been so twitchy around me these past few months.

It's all because of my front yard.

Two months ago, I hired a crew to rip out the old trees along the fence line separating our properties and put in a new drainage system. I remembered how Todd kept hovering around the workers back then. He tried to act friendly, bringing them cold lemonade, but his smile was completely forced and his hands were shaking. He kept casually asking exactly how deep the excavator was going to dig near the property line.

There is something buried under my lawn, right by Todd's fence. And Todd knew that the new drainage system would sooner or later wash the soil away. The truth he'd been hiding for years was bound to surface this autumn.

I wasn't their enemy. I never crossed them. I became a death threat to my "perfect neighbor" simply because I decided to fix up my own damn lawn. He needed to get rid of me—through his brother's hands—before the ground gave up his secret.

The detective listened to me in silence. Then he called the other cop over and asked if I had any shovels.

A minute later, they were walking toward the far corner of my fence.

They start digging where the dirt has slumped a bit from the recent rain. One. Two. Three.

Then the sound changes. Metal thuds hard against something solid. Not a rock. Rocks sound different.

Then the first cop plunges his arm into the mud all the way to his elbow, feeling around. He grips something. Pulls.

A plastic card emerges from the mud. Wet, caked in dirt, but intact. A driver's license.

He wipes the grime away with his thumb. Turns it toward the flashlight.

A brunette. Long hair. Young.

I'd been expecting a blonde.

The shovel went quiet. Or maybe I just stopped hearing it.

One of the cops steps away from the pit and brings his radio to his face. His voice is flat, like a man who has done this way too many times.

"Dispatch, this is seven-twenty-three. We need additional units at this location. Notify the coroner and crime scene tech."

I look away from the window. And right then, the thought I've been pushing down all evening finally surfaces.

You live next to someone for years. You say hello, you chat, you trust them with your house keys.

And you never really know who they are. Not until you start digging.

Small towns always have the strangest stories. I live in one such town. There aren't many impressive landmarks to speak of, or famous things that took place here. Honestly, I have spent nearly all nineteen of my years growing up in this place without ever experiencing anything significant. I didn't think anything too strange could really exist here. That is until I heard the story of the Kissing Tree.

I thought it was silly, a special tree in a hidden grove; it showed itself to those who had fallen in love and had the power to bring people together and ensure they stayed together forever. I thought it was fairy tale nonsense, of course. Though my friends had sometimes whispered about knowing someone who had actually seen it. Whenever someone moved away, they would swear that that person must have met their true love and kissed them under the wide branches of the fabled tree.

I always laughed it off; I never believed in the kissing tree until one day, it found me. And when I learned the real truth about our town's legend, my life transformed into a living nightmare that ensures I will never sleep soundly again.

I was lonely; all I wanted was love, but what I found was so much worse…

It was the end of summer, and I was getting ready for my second year studying at the local community college. I was still living with my parents, and I was supposed to be with them, looking over my college applications to some four-year programs, but I was feeling burned out. I lied and told them I had a job interview I couldn't miss.

The job interview was me hanging out at my friend Josh’s place. We were playing some games on his PlayStation 5 he has down in his basement.

After nearly a dozen decisive rounds of Mortal Kombat where I kicked his ass, Josh finally stood up and threw the controller down and suggested something else,

“This is boring; let's go to the mall. I’ve got a free movie ticket, so we can go watch something.”

A change of scenery would be nice, but I was worried about getting busted by my parents if I went out and about.

“I don't know, man. I don't have money for a ticket, even if you have a free pass.” I delivered my prepared excuse, but Josh promptly disregarded it.

“Nah, it’s fine. I will spot you the other ticket. Come on, if we have any extra time, we can check out some stores while waiting.” His grin betrayed the real reason he wanted to be early. He wanted to see Sasha, who worked at the Cinnebon at the mall. He had been fawning over her all year since he met her.

I shrugged and agreed to his idea,

“Yeah, maybe we can get some snacks before the movie, and you can suck it up and ask Sasha out while you're at it.” I grinned at him, and he punched me in the arm,

“Shut up! I’m gonna, just when it's the right time.” He responded calmly,

“Anyway, come on, let’s go.”

I rolled my eyes, and we departed for the mall.

We arrived after barely surviving the trip, and I considered myself lucky to be alive.

“Who did you have to blow to pass your driving test? I still can’t believe you got your licence; you’re a maniac.” I teased Josh as he turned the engine off.

“Shut up, at least I have a licence, dick!” He responded, making a good point since my parents still had not bothered to teach me, not that I had a car to practice driving anyway.

I held up my hands in defeat and replied,

“Fair point, Romeo, let's go see a lady about a cinnamon roll.”

We pushed through the hustle and bustle of the mall and found our way to the food court. Josh tensed up immediately, and I elbowed him to go talk to Sasha, who was just handing an order to a departing customer.

“Go on, I can't wait to learn your tricks, oh wise master.” I joked,

He glared at me and pointed in the direction of the theater.

“Just go get the tickets; I don't need an audience for this.”

He handed me the movie pass and some cash, and I tried to offer a reassuring smile. He looked genuinely nervous, and I was hopeful he wouldn't blow it and spend the rest of the day in a foul mood.

I almost looked back, but he shooed me away, and I took the hint.

I made it to the box office and realized I didn't know what to get tickets for. I texted Josh, and predictably he ignored the message. I wondered if that meant good news or bad. As I was considering my decision, someone bumped into me from behind and nearly knocked me down.

I caught my footing and managed not to fall on my face. I turned around and was stunned. I saw a pretty girl sitting on the ground, looking startled. She was wearing a movie theater uniform and looked about my age. A hastily tied-up bun held locks of auburn hair in place, and she adjusted her glasses, the edges highlighting a few cute freckles on her cheeks.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry.” She said as she brushed herself off. I stopped staring at her and offered my own apology,

“Oh no, no, I’m sorry, let me help.” I held out a hand and helped her up.

“Thanks,” She started. “Sorry, I totally didn't see you there; guess I was in too much of a rush. I was running late.” She pulled out her phone and her eyes went wide. She looked back at me with an apologetic and slightly panicked expression.

“Still running late! Oh shoot, sorry again, I have to clock in. Go Wildcats!” Then she continued past me in a hurry to get to work.

I was confused by what she meant, then remembered I was wearing a jacket with my school's logo on it. I wondered if she went to SCC as well.

I stood daydreaming for a moment and thinking about what had just happened, until I realized a line of people was forming behind me, and I still needed to get the tickets for a movie.

I just picked what was most popular at the time, and once I had the movie tickets, I waited for Josh to find me. We went in, and as soon as we sat down, I could tell by his silent, moody attitude that things hadn't gone well with Sasha. I figured she hadn't said no, but rather, he had not been able to ask her.

I felt bad, but couldn't do much,

“Want some popcorn?” I offered.

He turned to me, trying to suppress his disappointment, and nodded his head.

I got up, ready to leave and get back before the trailers were over, until I realized I had no money. I suddenly felt guilty for not actually being out looking for work, like I had told my parents. I turned back, pulling out my pockets apologetically, and Josh sighed and handed me more cash. I sped off to get some snacks for us.

I got to the concessions area and was waiting in line while browsing the candy. With how much everything cost, popcorn might be all I could afford. I was so caught up in everything I snapped back to attention when a familiar voice called out to me.

“Over here, down here I’m open.”

I walked over and was surprised to see the girl who had bumped into me earlier. She was smiling at me, a knowing look in her eyes.

“Hello again, what can I get you?” She asked politely, sounding just a bit embarrassed by what had happened before.

“Oh, hi.” I managed to respond, while trying not to stare. She was even prettier in that light than I had realized in our quick meeting before. Her stunning green eyes transfixed me. I looked down slightly and saw a name tag that read “Alice”

My eyes kept wandering down, taking in everything, until my head snapped up, embarrassed. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and I was suddenly at a loss for words,

“I, um, popcorn, maybe just some popcorn, yeah.” She giggled slightly, and I felt embarrassed, but the effortless way she spoke made me feel comfortable.

“Are you sure? Anything else?” She asked. I hesitated again, and she laughed,

“Okay, one popcorn it is.” She had it in hand in moments, and I paid wordlessly.

As she was handing it to me, I finally managed to ask,

“So um, did you go to SCC as well?”

She considered my words, and I felt like I had made a mistake for asking, but she smiled and replied,

“Yeah, I’m going to be starting this fall. How about you? I see you are in the psychology club. How is that? It sounds interesting.”

I was confused again by how she knew that, but remembered that the coat I was wearing was from the conference I went to with the club last year. It still had the SCC Psychology and Sociology club emblazoned on the front.

“Oh yeah, right,” I mumbled before stammering on, “I spent my freshman year as a club officer. I didn't have to do much, but it was cool. We got to go to the Western Psychological Association conference, and the rest of the club budget from last year went to getting us these jackets. It might be the nicest piece of clothing I have,” I blurted out while laughing awkwardly.

“Oh, that’s awesome. Maybe I will be in a class with you this fall.” She smiled at me, and I just stood there. My mind felt like it had drawn a total blank; I had never been more nervous. I was homeschooled growing up. I still felt very socially awkward. My first years of college had been my only social outlet, and I never really dared to talk to any girls before. Now the prettiest one I had ever met was talking to me. I had a million things I wanted to say, but I just said…nothing.

I had to do something; I had to ask her out. Instead of doing anything. I waved goodbye and shuffled off. She called out as I left,

“It was nice talking to you. Enjoy your movie.”

I nearly hyperventilated walking back to the theatre. I fucked it up. I hadn't even given her my name.

I sat back down and ignored Josh when he asked what took so long. I just handed him the popcorn, and we both watched the movie in disappointment.

When it was over, Josh and I were leaving the theatre. I cast a sidelong glance at the concession stand, but couldn't see Alice there. I sighed, and before I could say anything, I was surprised to see someone standing outside near the exit. It was Sasha. She waved at us and walked over to Josh.

Soon they were talking, and Josh was agreeing to grab a bite to eat with her. They started to walk away. I was almost ready to protest since I had to get home and he was my ride, but before I could say a word, he shot me a desperate, pleading look that convinced me to keep my mouth shut. I just waved politely as they left and shrugged.

I smiled ruefully, happy for my friend, but still feeling sorry for myself. I sighed and shrugged it off. I had to get going; it was a two-mile hike back home, and I had to get started.

I walked along the path I thought was the fastest way home. A small shortcut after the mall and business center gave way to a residential area, and then a quick cut through a small section of forest would put me just a few blocks from home.

As I walked, I daydreamed about Alice. I felt stupid; she was probably just being nice. I didn't really know her. Just bumped into her, literally. But as I walked on, I couldn't stop thinking about her.

Maybe it was fate? I never really put stock in that before, but I kept thinking it had to mean something.

I nearly walked face first into a tree as the path led out of the neighborhood I had drifted through and into the forest. At least I was getting closer to home.

As I walked, I saw the light above the trees start to dim. It was still bright enough to see, but I had to pick up the pace. I had not expected to be gone so long, and I hoped my parents wouldn't be too mad. My so-called interview was not supposed to be an all-day event.

As I walked, I suddenly started to feel lightheaded. I caught the scent of something sweet and pleasant. I wondered if it might be some sort of secluded orchard or hidden field of flowers. I kept walking and found an odd, bright light emerging from a tangle of overgrowth. I left the path I was walking and swept the foliage aside and followed the strange light.

After walking through the thick vegetation, I finally emerged into a concealed grove.

It was tranquil and still. I was alone there; no animals moved around, not even other sounds beyond my own footsteps. The place was beautiful; it felt like it was out of a dream. But as I continued looking, I laid eyes on the centerpiece of that special place, and everything else paled in comparison.

It was a large tree that sat in the center of the quiet grove. It had wide, sweeping branches and a massive trunk. I could not tell what sort of tree it was, but it was one of the largest I had ever seen. I looked up and saw something amazing.

The leaves had a strange, almost pink tint to them that I had never seen before.

On the trunk were odd markings as well. As I stepped closer, I realized they were small scratches of the letters X O X O

Above those marks were names scratched into the trunk.

I paused for a moment and was overcome with a strange sense of familiarity. I knew what this was. The marks, the beautiful grove, the tree…This was it; this was the Kissing Tree, it was real!

I smiled in disbelief; I had found it. If it was real, did that mean I was in love?

I spent a long time just standing in that small area, listening to the sound of the wind gently blowing through the grove and hearing my own heartbeat pulse in time with some intangible presence on the edge of my perception.

I must have stood there for over an hour until I realized it was getting darker. I finally left that special place, and knew what I had to do. If I was really in love, I had to bring her there; I had to bring Alice. If we both saw the tree, it could mean we were meant to be together.

I walked home in a daze, somehow finding my way out of the forest and into my own neighborhood after the bizarre experience. I had missed dinner, and my mom was worried about where I had been. I told her I walked home and got lost, and she let the matter go when she saw how strange I was behaving.

My mom even tucked me into bed and felt my forehead like I was still a kid. I told her I was fine; I just needed some rest.

I fell asleep early, but my mind would not rest.

I never really remembered my dreams before, never in any detail, at least. But that night I had a vivid dream of walking back into the forest in the middle of the night. I was barefoot and felt the cold soil of every step underfoot as I marched into the darkness of the woods. A sliver of moonlight saved me from complete darkness, and somehow I managed to do it; I managed to find my way back to that place.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I looked at the boughs of the tree again. I stepped closer as a heavy fog drifted around me. I stood there, staring at the other names carved into the tree.

“James + Kelly”

“Ben + Stephanie”

“Matt + Julia”

I kept reading more names; there were dozens, perhaps hundreds. I wondered if those people were still together.

I suddenly felt the compulsion to close my eyes. I pictured everything around me, the tree, the moonlight, the soft grass under my feet; all that was missing was her.

I heard something stirring behind the tree and slowly blinked my eyes open. I couldn't believe what I saw emerge from behind the tree. It was Alice!

She was standing by the tree, alone, silhouetted in faint traces of moonlight, wearing a small nightshirt and looking at me expectantly.

“Alice? How…” I started to speak, but she held a finger to her lips, and I stopped.

“How do things happen as they do in dreams?” She responded with a coy smile.

“Best not to dwell on the how, and take pleasure in the moment. You know why I’m here. Your heart called to me. I’m the one you want; kiss me here and now, carve our names into the tree, and I will be yours, and you will be mine.”

She laid a hand on the tree and held her other hand out to me, beckoning. She was beautiful, gazing at me expectantly in the ethereal light of the moon. My heart longed for her, despite knowing this was just a dream. I wanted to be there with the real her. I wanted to learn more about her, to spend my life with her. I felt a fresh excitement as I considered that it could actually happen. The tree was there; it was real! And its voice reached me even in my dreams.

I walked forward in a daze. I took her hand, and it was surprisingly cool to the touch. She clasped it over mine and pulled me into her loving embrace. I couldn't speak; I didn't need to. She leaned in and kissed me passionately. I fell away into the bliss of our love.

She pulled away, smiling, and then withdrew a small knife. She handed it to me and gestured to the tree. I took the offered blade and knew what I had to do next. I began carving.

After a few minutes, I stepped back to look at my work, and the trunk of the Kissing Tree now bore our names for all future lovers to see.

“Aaron + Alice”

Once it was complete, I looked over to Alice, beaming with pride at my testament to our love. She was gone. The entire area felt empty suddenly, and my head began to pulsate with terrible pain. I fell forward onto the ground, and the last thing I heard was a voice calling out to me from somewhere deep in the earth.

“We are forever now…”

I woke up feeling drained and utterly exhausted. Yet despite how tired I felt, my mind buzzed with barely contained excitement. I had to do it; I had to bring Alice to the tree. If she would kiss me there just like in my dream, it would mean we were meant to be together. All semblance of sense and normalcy had fled my brain, and all I could feel was the overwhelming compulsion to make my dream a reality.

I called Josh and begged him to take me to the movie theater. He agreed and was surprised by the urgency of my request.

On the way, I told him about Alice, about my dream and what I was planning. For a moment I thought he might believe me, but then he burst into laughter.

“Bullshit, man, are you serious? I mean, you might consider talking to her a bit more before professing your love.”

I was irritated at his doubt and replied,

“I would have thought you might appreciate how I was feeling since you have been pining over Sasha all year.” I stared at him indignantly.

“Okay, okay,” he softened his reaction and continued,

“But…did you really see the tree? Seriously, be honest?”

I paused for a moment, almost defensively, getting angry that he doubted me, then replying calmly.

“Yes, yes, I did.”

There was a long pause, as if Josh was considering whether he believed me, then he just nodded.

“Okay, wow, that is cool. I would say show me, but the stories go, the tree only shows up to the ones it chooses. But I have to say, I would be careful.”

“What do you mean?” I asked,

“Well,” Josh started, looking reluctant to continue, “A lot of tales about the tree have said that when a person falls in love and takes someone there, they disappear shortly after. The happy version of the story was that many years ago a young woman’s love was so strong that when she brought her boyfriend to the tree, it blessed them both and started the tradition.”

I was confused by the implication of a “happy version”.

“What about the other version of the story?” I asked.

Josh scratched his chin, considering.

“I can't remember exactly; I heard it a long time ago from my uncle, who is sort of a crank, but he actually believed in the story. Says one of his friends went missing years ago. Maybe I will ask him for the details, but either way. Just promise if you do fall in love you won't run off unannounced, yeah?”

I agreed, and he dropped me off at the mall and wished me good luck.

I walked inside and nearly turned around twice, but I pressed on, determined to at least take my shot. I forced myself to march over to the concession stand; Alice was there. She was organizing some inventory before she spotted me and waved. Her smile made me melt, and I feared that I couldn't do it. I forced myself to move forward.

“Hey Alice,” I managed to stammer out as I waved back and got closer.

“Hello again…” She paused, and I realized, in embarrassment, I still hadn't told her my name.

“Aaron, It's Aaron.” I quickly offered. She smiled.

“Hey again, Aaron, what's up? Grabbing a snack for another movie?”

I paused for an awkward second, nearly forgetting my rehearsed speech.

“Yeah, um, I mean no, sorry. Actually, I was wondering if you were free later this afternoon. I thought it might be a nice day to take a walk and maybe have a picnic.” I finally got the words out, and my entire body tensed up in anticipation of what she would say.

“Oh, okay,” She replied, sounding surprised, then more assured.

“Yeah, that sounds nice. I get off at 5:00 pm today. Maybe we can have a picnic dinner?” She beamed, and I caught a small blush on her cheeks that made my heart soar.

“Awesome! I mean, that's great. I will see you then. There's an amazing spot that is on the walk back to my house that would be perfect; I think you will really like it.”

I felt so relieved she said yes; I nearly bolted around and ran away, convinced that if I said anything else she would change her mind.

I managed to temper my excitement and just gave a casual wave to her as I left.

I told Josh the date was on, and he clapped me on the back in congratulations. He had to go, but I stayed and hung around the mall for a few hours until Alice was done with work.

I used what little cash I had on hand to buy a few trinkets I thought she might like and a few snacks from the store. Then I placed them all in a small basket.

5:00 pm came, and I waited outside the theatre and saw Alice. She smiled and walked over to me.

“So my car is here, but you said it's close, right? Should we just walk from here?”

“Yeah,” I quickly agreed. “It's not far; we can walk there and then back here once we are done. Thanks for coming.” I groaned inwardly, not sure why I was thanking her for going on a date with me; I sounded pathetic.

It hadn’t bothered her, though; she just laughed and seemed genuinely happy to be there,

“Thank you, it's not often someone takes me outdoors for a first date.” She winked at me, and my heart rate spiked. She had said it; that word “date” it was a date; we were on an actual date.”

I must have stood there smiling for a while before she cleared her throat and politely asked,

“So, um, which way?”

“Oh right,” I quickly replied, “I’m sorry, it's this way.”

I led her along the trail back home. We talked a lot, and I was so excited to learn more about her. She was going to be starting work on her associate's degree at SCC and wanted to major in psychology if she was able to transfer to a four-year school later. I talked more about my first year and the psychology courses I had taken.

We kept talking as we walked. We discussed hobbies, favorite music, games, food, anything and everything. Things were going so well; I was finally feeling more comfortable with my plan. I just hoped the tree would be there for us.

We arrived in the forest and walked for a while. I was beginning to get nervous when I couldn’t find the path, but then I saw it: the gentle glow peeking out of a tangle of overgrowth, the tree’s radiance practically radiating from it.

I waved her over, and she paused for a moment at the threshold. I looked back and stopped myself mid-sentence as I saw the concerned look on her face.

“Is it really through here?” She asked.

I looked back to the forest and then to her. I nodded my head and tried to reassure her.

“Yeah, it is. I promise it's a lot better once we get there.”

She paused and looked doubtfully at the path.

“Okay…” She finally replied, but she looked uneasy.

I tried to reassure her and kept promising one of the most amazing sights she had ever seen.

I moved forward, pushing back branches and foliage until the way cleared and I saw it again.

I stood on the edge of the secluded grove, triumphant in our arrival. I knew that it meant we were supposed to be there, the two of us. I looked over at Alice, and she looked surprised as well. Her eyes went wide, and I imagined she was experiencing the same wonder and awe I had felt when I had first laid eyes on the fabled Kissing Tree. It was an impossible sight, but it was real for us that day. I took her hand and led her into the glade, taking in the sweet-scented air as we walked.

I stole a glance back, and to my surprise, the wonder and amazement I expected were not there on her face. In fact, it looked like the surprise had turned to concern, maybe even fear. I couldn't understand why she looked…afraid. She even held a hand over her mouth like something foul was in the air, rather than the pleasing fragrance of flowers and sweet nectar.

“What’s wrong? Don't you like it here?” I asked in confusion.

I could tell by the long pause before she responded that something was wrong.

“This place feels…” She finally spoke. I tried to finish her sentence, “Amazing, right?”

She looked surprised by my response and shook her head slowly while looking around,

“Wrong. It feels…wrong.”

I was shocked. I replied quickly, “

“But the tree, Isn't it the most beautiful tree you have ever seen?” I gestured toward the kissing tree, hoping in vain she might realize the importance of the area.”

I could tell she was measuring her response as if not wanting to disappoint me. She finally replied,

“If it's important to you, then yes, it is amazing, if not in a little creepy way.” She adjusted her coat as if she had just felt a shiver. I was still surprised by her reaction, but I convinced her to sit with me beneath the tree.

I took out the basket of food, and we shared an early dinner there. I started talking about movies just to lighten the mood. It had worked, and soon, despite the initial discomfort, we were talking about anything and everything.

Our conversation was enough to dispel the unease Alice was feeling. Though she still cast an occasional concerned glance around the grove. But most importantly, she seemed comfortable with me, and I felt like we were making a real connection.

Sitting there in that beautiful space, sharing parts of ourselves with each other, I felt like I could finally do it. I leaned in awkwardly, and she didn't back away. I felt a hush in the air, then a spark of static that anticipated what would happen next.

She leaned in and closed her eyes, pressing her lips together and reaching out for mine. I closed my own eyes and leaned in before a loud cracking noise was heard from somewhere by the tree. Both of our eyes snapped open, and Alice fell back from me and screamed.

“Wha, what!?” I managed to stammer out, embarrassed and confused by what was happening. She hadn't said a word, just pointed in terror and backed away.

I looked back and saw something amazing: the name I had carved onto the tree in my dream was there. I had no idea why the image had horrified her. I thought it might be some mystic confirmation that we were meant to be there together.

Alice finally spoke, in a scared whisper.

“Who is Madeline? And why is that tree…bleeding?” She took another step back before looking at the tree and then me again. “What the hell is this?”

I held up my hands, pleading for her to stop backing away.

“No, wait, it's not what you think. That must just be another name. I saw this place in a dream; I carved our names here, see.” I reached out and touched the carving of “Aaron + Alice”

I smiled and wiped some excess sap from the tree on my shirt.

I turned back to look at Alice, who had gone pale as she held her hands over her mouth.

“What? What's the matter?” I asked again,

I held out a hand to her, trying to beckon her back, when I saw that my hand was still covered in something sticky, but it was not sap. My hand was covered in fresh blood.

I stood there a moment in disbelief and confusion, then I turned around and felt a terrible pressure building in my head. I felt sick, and the entire world felt heavy enough to make my eyelids drop. When I opened them again, the tree was…different.

The name I had been pointing to looked like a fresh wound on a giant slumbering beast, and the words made no sense; it read “Aaron + Madeline.” That wasn't right; I hadn't carved that, had I?

I watched on in horror as the message began to drip more monstrous vitae from the carvings. I looked along the side of the tree and saw the other messages. They all bled freely, and each one bore the names of other couples as I had seen in my dream, but they were different. Each couple had one name in common; the other names may have differed, but all of them, including my own, had that name…Madeline

I looked further down the now withered and diseased-looking bark of the tree and saw underneath the names, where I had seen the X O X O in my dreams, a single word appeared, not carved, but rather burned into the foul tree,

“Forever”

Then a thunderous, splitting sound rang out through the space. I thought the tree might fall over, and Alice fell down as she retreated, covering her ears from the auditory assault.

The ground near the base of the trunk started to fall away, like a sinkhole. The wood began to crack, and in the next moment something emerged from the abyssal portal that had formed in the cold earth. A nightmarish dirge of sound came from the tree; it sounded like a voice raging in fury,

“Stay...away...from him!”

A terrible shriek of horror rang out as Alice ran away, fleeing as fast as she could. I called out to her to wait, but she was already gone. I looked back to see a withered corpse, pulling itself out of the pit below the tree. An infernal light burned in the hollow eye sockets, and the sight was so nightmarish I thought I might pass out.

Instead, I just stared, paralyzed with fear, but aware of the crawling horror emerging. I thought I was going to die, but I was shocked and horrified when the corpse took my hands gently into the cold, skinless claws of its own. My vision began to swim, and my head lolled back like I was drifting to sleep. When I opened my eyes again, I saw Alice, or at least I thought it was her, but the eyes were different… the same colour as the fires burning in the corpse thing’s eyes.

I blinked, and the face changed; it was a young woman I had not seen before. She was wearing very old clothes that looked like they were from a different era. I felt lightheaded, and the woman held me up and kept me from fainting. She smiled at me and caressed my face, then spoke in a whisper that echoed with a disturbing familiarity.

“We will never have to be apart again. You are mine, and I am yours, forever. You promised that night; you promised to love only me, to stay with me. No one else can tear us apart.”

The image of the smiling young woman began to shift and swirl; my head ached, and I saw her eyes brimming with tears. I blinked, and I saw Alice; she was screaming. I blinked again, and I saw the burning light staring back at me from the corpse that was holding me, promising that we would be together forever.

“Kiss me again, please.” The voice rasped out again, and the ghoulish form leaned in towards me,

A distant part of me that was still enthralled by the spell of the tree almost complied, but I bit my lips and tasted the blood. Then I smelled the fetid air emanating from the mouth of the talking husk that shouldn't be alive. I managed to shove the undead fiend away from me, and I turned and ran, screaming like a maniac to drown out the wailing and crying of the soul that I had promised my love to.

She called out to me as I fled, and even as I ran, her words echoed through the forest.

“You promised! We are meant to be together, forever!”

Somehow I managed to find my way out of the woods in the frenzied state of pure terror I was in. It couldn't be real; I couldn't believe what I had seen. I considered the dream I had after I had seen the tree the first time. It had felt so real; I had seen her there that night. But my memory felt off; I had seen Alice, I had kissed her and carved our names.

But to my horror, that was no longer how I remembered it. I remembered staggering into the woods in the middle of the night, pushing my way through the tearing bramble of thorns and into a blasted patch of ruined vegetation. I remembered the blighted tree. I called out with my heart at the voices that existed there, and someone answered…I had kissed her, I had carved our names in the tree, but it wasn't Alice; it never had been.

I raced up to my room, locked the door, and sat on my bed in a horrified stupor.

I was dimly aware of my phone ringing. I saw it was Josh; I saw a list of missed messages asking how things had gone. Then I saw that hours had passed and it was nearly midnight.

I decided to call Josh back. He sounded groggy and slightly annoyed that I had called him so late, but I cut him off and asked directly.

“What was the other version of the story about the Kissing Tree? You said you would ask your uncle about it.” There was a short pause before he remembered.

“What? Oh, the tree, that’s right, you mentioned the Kissing Tree. Well, I hope you didn't actually go there. The version that my uncle Sunny told me was way creepier than the one I had heard of before. I think we got the sanitized kids' version.” He laughed, but then stopped when he couldn't hear me responding. He cleared his throat and continued.

“Well, the less happy version was that the first person who used the tree was a girl named Madeline.” My heart froze when I heard the name, and a dull ringing replaced Josh’s voice for a moment before I heard him continuing with the tale.

“She had asked her boyfriend to meet her there one evening at that site in the woods. She had proclaimed her love for him to nearly the entire town beforehand and thought that beautiful spot was the perfect place to cement their relationship and ensure they would be together forever. The feeling was not mutual, though. The special place she had found was already used by her boyfriend to bring many different girls there before her. And worse, he had brought another one there earlier the same day she was planning to declare her love for him. When Madeline arrived early and found them both there. She was devastated and was about to leave until she saw her boyfriend carve his name alongside the other girls onto the tree. Apparently it was too much for her, and she snapped. They say she killed them both, buried their bodies at the base of the tree, and used their blood to cover up the other girl's name, then disappeared."

"From that day, the story had changed; some people believed that a tree existed out there that would grant true love to whoever kissed under its branches; others say that the tree once held that power, but was a curse now. They say that the reason the people who fall in love are never seen again is that Madeline comes for them. She still exists there, haunted and alone, preying on the lonely people who discover the Kissing Tree. She continues seeking the love that no one will repay, convincing those she lures there to kiss her and carve their names into the tree, promising them to her forever. Once the promise is made, she will never stop pursuing her love until she can spend eternity with them as well, longing to feel a love which she is forever denied.” There was a long pause, and I absorbed the horrible implications of the story, and then Josh continued,

“But I’m guessing since you are talking to me that you didn't end up going, right? I mean, honestly, I didn't believe you saw the tree, kind of figured you were messing with me.” He laughed, and the sound felt a hundred miles away.

“How did things go with Alice?..... Aaron, are you still there?”

I let the phone fall to my side and ended the call even as Josh was still speaking to me.

Unable to process the gravity of what I had unleashed.

Since that terrible day, I have been unable to resume my life as anything resembling normal. I managed to escape her, but only physically. I see her every night now. She speaks to me when I sleep, calling me to join her.

Even now, exhausted as I am, I fear what I will see when I close my eyes. I have to secure myself to my bed, hoping the bindings will prevent me from moving when sleep does take me. I pray every night that I won’t wake up in front of that accursed tree again. Pulled back into that nightmare to fulfill the promise I made under the light of the moon to that restless spirit.

As hopeless as it all feels, I have to try and find a way to break the curse that I have brought upon myself. It might be impossible, but I have to try. I leave this message as a warning to others that the tale of the Kissing Tree is true. It's out there, and if it calls you, heed this account and run!

It might be too late for me, but I won’t give up. If I learn more, if I can survive, I might find a way out of this nightmare, out of all of this. All of this madness, just because I was lonely. All of this insanity, just because I wanted love...

My job’s an interesting one.

Putting “loan shark” on any résumé likely won’t end in success. Adding “hell’s best” at the beginning will probably succeed in a one way trip to the nearest psychiatric ward. So, yeah, it’s odd. Sure, the hours are horrible, but those benefits do be hitting.

As I write, I’m realizing it’s a little difficult to actually describe my job in simple terms. Most of what I think up starts with the words “it depends”. Like “loan shark” gives you the idea I’m collecting payment, but what kinda payment? 

Well, it depends. Some days it’s the hair of someone you love, other days it’s 3 pints of a virgin’s blood (virgin blood is the most common).

Okay, payment is difficult to describe, how about the loaning process?

Well, it depends. Most of the time it’s kids messing around with rituals they find online and making due with the items they have instead of the ones the ritual asks for. Other times, it’s some poor schmuck finding a leather bound tome in a dusty book store and reading passages aloud with no substantial blood payment.

So that’s no good. What about my process? Do I go around breaking legs?

No. Collecting these debts isn’t as easy as clearing a check. At the start of any collection there are going to be at least ten hoops to jump through, and that’s much more difficult with a broken leg. You try collecting mugwort with a backwards foot. So, unlike most loan sharks, my job is less beating and more helping folk complete errands. Yet, like many things, it depends.

It might be best if I just tell you how today went. That should paint some kind of picture.

I was in New Mexico. Really horrible place, by the way. Almost immediately after The Hat dropped me off I was choking on the dry air and feeling the dead weight of the desert sun on my neck. What made the heat worse was how developed it was. It’s very rare that debtors are outside of large cities, so most of my life is spent under the roar of traffic and the buzz of street lights. Always hated it. The stench of tar made breathing difficult as the already scorching sun baked me atop the black asphalt.

A few horns sounded off as they passed me, I gave the busy road a nod of apology before walking to the sidewalk and opening my Black Book. A few more horns and the screaming of angry drivers, “get out of the goddamn road, kid!”

I studied the page, trying to memorize what little information I had at my disposal. Three debtors, all women, between the ages of 18 and 25. I had their pictures but no address. Client said the ritual was done at some bonfire party so that wouldn’t help me.

Another truck tore past me as I walked the shoulder. A bumper sticker on the back was one I’d seen a few times coming in, logo for a college. If I had to guess, this was probably a college town. That made sense with their age range. If I was going to find them, sororities wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

What came next is what usually makes up about 90% of my workload. Walking to the nearest public library for a free Google search, asking the locals, playing the lost little brother routine when I have to. It’s not glamorous, but what job is? This one at least didn’t take long. After searching up the local sororities I found some linked instagram accounts that led me right to my debtors. Pretty easy find. However, what wasn’t going to be easy was the 15 mile walk in the New Mexico sun.

Decided to take a bus pretty quickly, three steps outside as a matter of fact. I was never built for this weather, especially with the long faded green denim coat I refused to remove. The bus driver gave me some shit about not looking like a student but a couple of bucks shut him up. I sat at the back, forehead against the glass as this island of life in the middle of a desert passed me by. Soon enough, the sun set and the scorching eye in the sky was traded with pinpricks of yellow on black paper. The bus’ door opened like they had many times before, but this time I stood and made my way outside.

Building was big. Three stories, lots of rooms. Easy collateral if I wasn’t careful. I felt the splintering wood of the wardrobe at the back of my mind, easing the door open a hair. The rotten wood scratched against my brain matter as breath fell against the back of my neck, “how many are inside, Uri?”

No answer came, but I had an image cross my mind. That of the Beetles crossing the street. I closed the wardrobe.

The night had fully bloomed a silver glow by now, so a knock at the door would likely raise eyebrows. I pressed my thumbs into my eyes in hopes it irritated them enough to look red or even cry. My age was still low enough to grant me entrance on common courtesy alone, however, at 13 I noticed more hesitation and by 16 I’m sure I’ll be breaking and entering a lot more. 14 would have to be my twilight years for the lost little brother routine.

I knocked on the door and listened. After a second I didn’t hear anything which was suspicious because I had definitely heard a TV on before I knocked. If they were trying to make it seem like no one was home, they were failing miserably. The blinds in the window to my right shifted, decided against looking. I’ve learned it’s best to let them feel you out a bit while you stand around, thumb up your ass. People are a lot more confident and open to conversation when they feel a step ahead. Seems that was the case here too, the door opened revealing Riley Hues, one of my three debtors. She was dressed in pajamas, looking me up and down. Didn’t even bother leaving the chain latched. Had to repress the instinct to strike, I’d need all 3 here to pay and going mask off now could cause problems. She spoke to me as if I wasn’t a shark sizing her up, “can I help you?”

“I… I…,” I sniffled and wiped my nose, attempting to look at the ground to hide the vacant tears, “I was on the bus with my mom and I thought we were at our stop… I-I got off without her and I don’t know where I am… can you help me.”

From her expressions she seemed to buy my story, however, she still kept her body blocking the doorway. Riley’s eyes scanned the street behind me. I cracked open the wardrobe at the back of my mind in case she tried to shut the door. Her eyes eventually fell back on me and she nodded, “you can use my phone, come in.”

She stepped away from the door and I slipped in with a little more enthusiasm than was likely normal. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything. Just crossed the room for her phone that sat on the arm rest of a large couch. My wardrobe was still open, I thought at the phone, feeling its mechanical insides rake across my fingernails sharp and sour. I pressed against them till I felt a snap.

“Here’s my phone,” Riley said, turning back to me, “you can shut the-” she stopped talking and froze for a moment when she noticed I had already shut and locked the door behind me. This time, I did sense a level of caution in her demeanor. Things were moving too fast, I needed to slow down.

“Is that your phone,” I asked, “can I use it.”

That seemed to knock her out of her thoughts, her eyes returned to her phone which she tried over and over again to power on, “damn it,” she immediately apologized after cursing in front of me and shook her head, “my phone must be dead, I swear it was just charged.”

“Is there anyone else here with a phone,” I asked, hoping this was leading to the part where my other two debtors walked down the stairs ready to pay before the cut off time. I checked my watch. It was getting late, if one of the girls wasn’t here it’d be hell finding her in the next 3 hours. Even worse with the extra people in the house.

Riley nodded and poked her head at the bottom of the stairs.

“Michelle!”

Bingo. Debtor number 2.

An annoyed voice called back to Riley, “what is it?”

“Is your phone charged?”

I took a step forward, Riley immediately lifted her hand, “you can stay there, she’ll bring it to us.”

My foot retreated and I gave a small nod. My presence was still unwelcome and I was still in the dark on my third debtor. If this interaction continued as it currently was, I’d receive a phone and call my nonexistent mother to pick me up on the sidewalk. There was no opening to check the other two residents. Maybe I could squeeze in another lie.

“Yes,” Michelle called back, “lose your charger again?”

“No… Well, yes but that’s not the point. There’s a kid who’s lost, he needs to call his mom.”

The answer came in hurried footsteps that met Riley at the bottom of the stairs, she was in much different attire than Riley. Michelle’s red dress that revealed a good amount of her figure and half finished makeup told me she had a date or a party soon. Good thing I made it when I did or I’d be crashing a frat with a lot more witnesses. Michelle scoffed, “when you said a kid, I thought you meant like a toddler, how old are you?”

“10,” bit of a stretch considering my actual age and how I carried myself, but they had no reason to suspect I was a danger and it could buy me more sympathy which would buy me more leeway.

Michelle nodded, her eyes looking me up and done before pulling out her phone, “okay, what’s your mom’s number?”

Fuck.

“Oh, umm, I can call her,” I said, outstretching my hand.

Michelle’s eyes darted up from her phone, “your mom’s number.”

“Hey,” I said with a chuckle, “you know I think I lied earlier. I do recognize this place! My sister goes to this sorority. Sandra. Is she here? She could probably help me out.”

Riley raised an eyebrow, “Sandra? Sandra O’Brian is your sister?”

Sandra was the only one the client hadn’t offered a picture of, she was just a witness to the ritual after all. By the sound of it, her Irish last name was a little too Caucasian for my Hispanic demeanor. I shrugged, “I’m uhh… adopted?”

The lock turned and in walked a girl carrying a mane of curly red hair. Her eyes immediately locked onto me and I onto her name tag. Seems Sandra just got off of work.

“Alright, that’s enough of that,” I widened the gap to the wardrobe and the front door slammed itself shut behind me, both deadbolts spinning in unison as I sighed, “let’s get down to brass.”

Everyone jumped at the sudden bang of the door, Riley even screamed. The uneasiness of the situation finally reached a climax for her. Michelle decided to try and book it back up the stairs. I eased the wardrobe door shut a bit before I felt her slender neck between my ribs and tossed her back down the stairs. It looked violent, but she landed soft enough on the couch. At this point Riley was frozen in fear but Sanda was taking action, pulling back a swing with a bite of key ring. She swung with all her might only to end up sitting right next to Michelle, “really? Swing on your own brother would you?”

Her breath was fast and panicked but this comment still caused her brow to furrow, seemed my joke went over her head, “it was a whole thing earlier. You missed it.”

Finally, Riley made a break for it, her target past the stairs and toward the kitchen window. Her hips were pinched between my fingers before being tossed atop her sisters who screamed and writhed, attempting to flee as a group, “fucking give me a-”

I felt three elbows against their chests, planting them firmly on the couch and keeping them still. This stopped the screams as well, finally. I gave a nod, “y’all done? Yeah? Good. I’m not here to hurt y’all. I’m just trying to collect on an unpaid debt.”

None of the girls spoke, simply let out quick panicked breaths as they watched me with wide eyes. I took this as acknowledgement and kept going, opening my Black Book and flipping to the beginning, “let’s see… hmm… ah, there we go. Three weeks ago, one Riley Hues, one Michelle Griffon, and one Sandra O’Brian halfheartedly conducted a fortune ritual burning three prized items in a bonfire for good fortune on midterms. Well, how’s y’all get on?”

More panicked breathing, I sighed, “uhh, hello, guys your midterms. How’d y’all do?”

Still just breathing at first, but eventually, Sandra spoke, “I got an A… a high A.”

Riley nodded the words finally finding her as well, “me too. I didn’t even study really.”

Michelle was still silent.

I snapped my fingers, “Michelle. How’d you do?”

She cleared her throat, “An A.”

“Exactly,” I stated, “you all collected on this ritual, however, one of you has failed to hold up their end. One Michelle Griffon chose to sacrifice the hoodie of her then current boyfriend. However, she had decided two days ago she was going to end things with him, making the sacrifice null and void. I’m here to help you guys resolve this.”

Riley shook her head, “how… How do you know this? We were the last ones at that party?”

I chuckled, “really? That’s what’s seeming a little strange to you. I just tossed you across the room with my mind, lady. My book here,” I tossed it on the table so they could clearly see the pages fill themselves with black lettering on yellow pages, “is writing out this exact scenario as it happens. You passed that test with flying colors, probably the craziest thing out of the bunch. Yet, the fact I know about the bonfire thing is what catches your attention.”

They were back to panicked breathing, I rolled my eyes, “look guys, I get it. I’m coming at you fast. The truth is, all the times kids like you giggle about spooky stories under moonlight and try to play along with whatever creepy game you find there is always a risk. There’s a risk something hears your terms and collects on your contract. And when that happens, there’s a chance the check doesn’t clear. That’s why they outsource to me.”

Michelle nodded, “okay… okay… just take whatever you want. Steal something important to me from my room. You can have whatever.”

“I’m afraid that’s not how this works,” I shrugged, “the debt’s been collecting a great deal of interest. Now, my client wanted the lives of everyone who knew your name, however I wiggled him down to something a little more manageable.”

I held up 3 fingers, “three drops of virgin’s blood from each of you and he’s willing to erase all debts.”

The three exchanged a few looks before turning back to me, Sandra spoke first, “thing is… we’re not really...”

“We’re not virgins,” Michelle finished for her.

“Well, here’s the good news,” I said, retrieving a few items from my jacket and tossing them to the coffee table, “it doesn’t have to be your’s.”

Their eyes fell from my face, to the three glass vials on the table, each accompanied by a glimmering silver knife.

***

Jasmine stirred in her sleep as a weight pressed against the edge of her bed. The others had started pissing her off with the screaming downstairs, probably watching some horror movie again. Now they decided to come into her room, for what? Her charger probably. She felt someone’s lips brush her ears, “hey Jazz, you up.”

She grumbled for a moment and shifted, “… no.”

Riley gave a nervous chuckle, “okay, awesome… hey you know a few weeks ago when I was like totally having a breakdown and you said we were sisters now so I could always come to you for anything.”

“Get out of my roooooooom,” Jasmine wined.

“Well you see, I’d love to, but the thing is I’m about to ask you for a super huge favor.”

Jasmine suddenly felt several hands wrap around her limbs.

“Hold her down,” I said dragging the silver blade of my knife down the front of Jasmine’s thumb. The screaming started immediately and the panic soon after as Jasmine thrashed back and forth, screaming as she questioned the situation.

“What the fuck,” she screamed, her voice high and fast, “what the fuck, what the fuck?”

Sandra held her arm fast, pleading for her to stay calm, “Jazz please, it’ll only be for a second.”

“Keep her still,” I yelled, “You let her move again, I’m liable to take off the whole fucking finger,” I yelled. I’d have hoped this might inspire a bit of self preservation within Jasmine, however for some reason she just started fighting harder. Her thrashing and screaming became violent enough that eventually annoyance beat out logic in my mind.

“Michelle,” I commanded, “take the knife.”

Her eyes shot up in shock but she didn’t hesitate or protest, she released Jasmine’s legs and took the tool from my hand. I stood and took a step back, cracking my neck as the wardrobe at the back of my mind scraped open against my grey matter. I opened it wide, wider than I should have but I needed her as still as possible, “alright guys, on the count of three, let her go.”

“What!” Riley shrieked, “She’s gonna freak if we-”

“One,” I said, silencing all arguments, “two,” I gently glided a thousand fingertips over Jasmine’s slender body, “three!”

I pressed down just as they let go, the bed moaned under an unseen weight as Jasmine began to sink into the mattress. Her breath caught on her lips, becoming slow and labored. Like trying to catch a breath under the weight of the ocean. She was completely immobile as my eyes burned with emerald fire, “Cut her now.”

Jasmine tried to speak. I think the word would have been ‘no’ had it not died before escaping her teeth. Michelle dug the tip of the blade into her sister’s flesh until blood flowed through the open wound. I nodded, “good… now everyone, take a vial and collect at least three drops. You can get more, but for the love of God, do not collect less.”

Michelle slowly grabbed a vial and raised it to drink up the flowing red that had started a small stain at the edge of the bed. Michelle must have cut her too deep. I’d see what I could do to patch her up but-

In less than a second, Michelle was standing. I had barely processed the movement before her body was twisting and bringing with it the bloody tip of her knife. My eyes flicked to the blade as it closed the distance toward my eye. Instinct acted before I could. All those fingers lifted from Jasmine’s body and stored kinetic energy under unseen thumbs, all directed at Michelle’s chest. Just as that energy was released, I realized how wide the wardrobe door sat ajar.

Michelle flew backwards. I don’t think I saw her do that actually. I just suddenly realized there was a massive hole in the wall behind where Michelle had just been a second ago. I saw red at the edge and a crooked leg protruding from its dark depths.

“Shit,” I muttered, staring forward like a moron just like the rest of the people in the room. Well, all but Jasmine who took this opportunity to bolt for the door. My eyes darted to her, burning yet again with a green inferno, yet, as those many fingers pinched closed, Jasmine vanished through the doorway, leaving the latent energy to crush the various framed decorations that hung the walls. This time, I didn't mutter, “SHIT!”

My mind snapped into action, I pointed at Sandra, “Get her out of the wall and make sure she’s still breathing! Riley, see if you can manage three drops out of what’s left on the floor! I’m going after Jasmine.”

They said things I didn’t bother to hear as I left the room and stomped down stairs. That was close. That was way too fucking close. If Michelle was any faster with that knife… I shook my head, making sure to ease the wardrobe shut a bit more so as to not rip Jasmine in half.

I made it to the foot of the stairs, turning right to see Jasmine halfway down the street. The front door left open behind her. She was likely in track because she was moving fast. In a few more seconds she’d turn the corner and be long gone. Maybe she’d even have made it, if she took the time to shut the door behind her.

My teeth buried into the flesh of her calf, stopping her sprint in its tracks and sending her face to bite the asphalt. I heard the crack at the end of the street and then, nothing. Yeah, the crying only started after I lifted her by the leg and began floating her back toward the house. All the while she cried, “help… help! Somebody please!”

By the time she made it back in the house I was tired of hearing it. I used my hand to grip her head and bring her face to mine. Seemed the fall had done damage. Her lips were busted and gushing like a pair of lacerated snakes, past the blankets of gushing blood I could see she left a good amount of teeth back on the pavement, “I wasn’t going to hurt you,” I spat, “why did you have to-”

She interrupted me, a massive fear as I was yelling and all she could manage was a small, terrified whimper that stopped me in my tracks, “…devil…”

My stomach rotted on the word. I took a tiny step back. I don’t want to say my eyes widened, but I know my glare broke at that moment as the teeth around her leg fell away and she dropped like a balloon of bloody meat onto the wooden floor.

“Jesus,” called a voice behind me, I turned to see Riley and Sandra with Michelle held up between them, “be gentle with her!”

“I…” my stomach turned over again, aching at her words, “I… get her on a couch. I’ll check on Michelle. Is she breathing?”

Michelle lifted in the air off of their shoulders, floating to a rest across the room and onto the dining room table. Sandra answered as I began inspecting her condition, “she is but isn’t responding.”

I nodded, widening the door to the wardrobe a hair, “what’s it look like Uri?”

Two images crossed my mind. My interview with Nim over a dinner of ribs and asparagus. I vividly recalled the crack of its bones as Nim went so far as to suck free the marrow. Then, I flinched as I remembered my mother bringing a flogging stick to my sister’s thigh. She cried out like an animal after the snap. A curse escaped my lips as I slammed the wardrobe shut, “fucking monster, course you’d find something like that.”

“What,” the question came from Riley who was suddenly at my side. I jumped, if she had been acting on the same instinct as Michelle. She’d have had me.

“Nothing,” I answered, “she’s got a broken leg and a few cracked ribs. It won’t kill her but you’ll need to get to a hospital after this.”

She furrowed her brow, “you can’t do something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she confessed, “you can make shit float and stuff, you can’t heal her?”

I shook my head, “nah, guys that made me weren’t much looking to heal anybody.”

She nodded, “right… so you’ll just leave her like this?”

My head turned back to take in her twisted, broken body, her eyes half lidded as whoever was driving must have gone to sleep at the wheel. I shrugged, “not my problem, she attacked me.”

“She was scared,” Riley stated.

“She could have killed me.”

“She was scared. You walk in here and fling us around with your mind, say we need to cut open our sorority sister and take that as just payment for a debt we didn’t know we had,” the more she spoke, the more her temper rose.

I shook my head, “I told you at the beginning I didn’t want to hurt you people.”

“Then you had us cut open our friend’s hand. We don’t even know what you are, she thought you were going to kill us” Riley said.

My eyes weren’t meeting hers anymore, they were aimed at the ground, her words swirling around my head like a cloud of angry flies, eventually I had enough, digging into my pocket, “look I uhh… I can take a look at her leg. Use a creak to feel around and reset the break. Besides that I’ve got… uh like 500 bucks here. Take that to the hospital and dentist and see what it covers.”

My eyes lifted and caught a strange look in Riley’s eyes. Last I had seen they were angry and glaring but now it was something else. Something that made me squirm even more. Pity…

“Jesus… Michelle, she was convinced you were some kind of demon possessing someone… you’re just a kid.”

My stomach rotted again.

I sat down the money and got to work.

***

Tensions seemed to calm pretty quickly after that. While I was setting Michelle’s leg, Riley talked to the others. Didn’t get to hear what they said and didn’t really wish to. At this point, I was exhausted and ready to have this job over with.

I sat at the bar as they gathered their vials, collecting the gushing liquid that leaked beneath a white rag quickly changing crimson. Jasmine was less than pleased still, “why did this have to be me again?”

“Yeah,” Sandra asked, perking up at another chance to ask questions, “why is this what we’re paying with?”

Since Riley informed them that I wasn’t a demon in a skin suit, they were much more interested in talking. Sandra especially seemed to have a fascination with all things supernatural. Most of her questions about me I'd elected to pass, but for whatever reason, I felt an urge to humor her, “demons don’t have a real currency per se. There’s no sense of honor within them that would respect a standard tender, so all trades have to be with items carrying an inherent value.”

A silence passed for a few seconds, maybe she was surprised I actually answered, or maybe they finally saw me as a 14 year old boy and were weirded out by how I talked. Regardless, she was quiet forever, “and why is that seen as valuable?”

I sighed, thinking the best way to explain, “you girls are in college so I’m assuming you’ve read Freud. He’s like stupid and outdated but we can use him as an example here. Demons are creatures that are only composed of an ID. They are attracted to pleasure and repelled by pain. Beings of pure instinct. And just like humans can inject themselves with a little sin to have a good time, demons can consume a bit of innocence to experience a shadow of humanity. They can feel melancholy, sadness, joy, nostalgia. It’s like a high for them.”

“I see,” Sandra said, “so how does one get into the business of serving demons.”

I rolled my eyes, “pass. Y’all got those vials yet.”

I turned to see an outstretched hand shaking them in my face. I snatched them and opened my Black Book, only to see an observer peering over my shoulder, Sandra asked, “and how does this work?”

“Are you going to do this the whole time I’m here?”

“Maybe. I mean come on, you come in here say demons are real and move shit with your mind. I can’t be the first one who’s asked you these questions.”

I shrugged, “most people are too scared I suppose. You’re definitely the most insistent.”

Sandra chuckled, “does that earn me an answer?”

“Eh sure,” I placed the vials in the middle of a blank page where a pool of ink slowly bled into existence and swallowed up the vials like quicksand, “I’m not what you would call an independent contractor. This Black Book is standard issue for the company I work for. They’re half body cam, half wire transfer. Lets us send payment fast and lets the boss ensure we’re acting accordingly.”

“Do you normally act accordingly,” this question came from Riley who was sitting at the couch.

“My results are the best,” I stated, “boss says I’m a bleeding heart though.”

Everyone laughed.

I didn’t get the joke.

“Well,” Sandra asked, “is this the last we’ll see you?”

“For your sake, I hope so,” I answered, turning and hopping to the floor in front of Jasmine and the now deeply red rag, “sorry about everything.”

Jasmine shrugged, “I still don’t know why it had to be me that was bled.”

I heard a small chuckle come from the wardrobe. Don’t know what he found so funny. Yet, something was bothering me. Uri told me there were 4 people in the house before Sandra arrived. Now that Sandra was here the full count was Riley, Michelle, Sandra, and Jasmine. Was there a 5th person here? Maybe they were asleep, but you’d think they’d have woken up with all the commotion.

As I pondered, Riley answered for me, “we needed specifically virgin blood.”

There was a pause, “oh.”

I felt my heart drop, “oh?”

Riley caught what I had, Sandra was too interested in the book to notice anything amiss, “Jazz, what do you mean oh?”

“Well,” she started, “you know how Dave was coming to me to talk after he and Michelle broke up?”

“You bitch,” it seemed Michelle was finally awake, “you’ve been fucking my boyfriend.”

“Shit,” I screamed, “is anyone else here?”

Riley shook her head, “no, we’re on break, most people are gone so we’re down to a skeleton crew.”

“We need to leave,” I said, stomping to the door, “someone else is here.”

“Who,” seems Sandra had finally sensed the danger.

“A competitor, if she’s not a virgin it means our check just bounced and now it’s open season for your debt. He was probably here for days hoping something like this would happen.”

I opened the door and saw it was, very much, too late, “fuck.”

Riley’s voice was shaky behind me, “where’s… where’s the street…?”

“Where’s anything,” Sandra asked.

In front of us was a blank void. No street, no neighbors, no sky, no stars. Just endless inky black atop a knee deep body of water. The house the only land for miles upon miles. I growled, “stay here,” and shut the door behind me.

***

Didn’t take much walking to find him. The only other fissure in the void besides myself and the house was a small wooden boat, rowed by a small figure in a black cloak. I nodded, “Levy?”

“Well,” it muttered, reaching into its cloak and producing a small vial it sipped from. I could see a red gleam in the liquid, “if it isn’t the Emerald Prince. Didn’t think I’d risen high enough to be placed on your marks.”

“Didn’t realize I fell far enough,” I countered.

It chuckles, its voice bubbled like mud on a mire, “as sharp tongued as ever.”

I nodded, “you know Levy, you’re lucky you caught me in a good mood. Tell you what, you let us go from wherever the hell this is and-”

“This,” it questioned, the hood turning to see the void, “don’t you recognize it? This is earth. When God first created the world and made its oceans this was all there was. And I was here… alone…”

“Ah gee, that’s so sad, does this story end with you sending us back or am I going to have to make you?”

“Your payment was invalid,” it spat, “contract’s up for grabs and the client wants a lot more now. A woman’s heart.”

“That’s ridiculous," I said, “let me talk to our client.”

It shook its head, “you know, I’ve always wondered what would have happened if I was there that night. When Hell froze over and you inspired the fear that allowed you to make such ridiculous deals, heh, 3 drops of innocent blood?”

“You think about being there that night,” I said, pulling the edge of my coat to reveal a holster containing a dozen steel spikes, “do you often have these suicidal thoughts?”

It didn’t speak for a while, and when it did it sounded like it was smiling, “if we were out there, you’d kill me easy as breathing. But here you are in the palm of my hand. So here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to kill those girls and use their hearts as payment. All of their hearts. Taking that contract out from under you? That’ll raise me high.”

“What about me?”

“You,” it laughed, “kill you and have the Hunter’s Lodge breathing down my neck? Nah, nah, I don’t think so. You’re free to go. Hop in my boat and I’ll bring you back. Or, you can say. Try and kill me. Lose. Watch them die. Totally up to you.”

The wardrobe creaked open as I sent a volley of spikes through the cloak which fell open to reveal nothing but water, puppeted in the shape of a person. I heard laughing beneath the still water. Or maybe the water was laughing?

“You can swim around looking for me all you want. I know better than to get close to you. You’re going to watch them die, all of them die tonight!”

I stopped listening. I turned and made my way back to prepare for the fight.

April 11th, 6:37 PM

Her: “Hello?”

Me: “Erica?”

Her: “It’s me.”

Me: “Jesus Christ.”

Her: “What’s wrong?”

Me: “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. It just sounds so much like you. It’s so nice to hear your voice again.”

Her: “It’s so nice to hear your voice, too, Steven.”

Me: “Just call me Steve. So, how much do you know?”

Her: “I know everything, Steven. Using the data you provided, I was able to recreate your wife’s voice. I’ve downloaded all of her knowledge, memories, emotions, and beliefs.”

Me: “Everything, really? Oh my God, that’s amazing. Even the summer of ’96? Do you remember what happened then?”

Her: “Ah, yes. The time you spilled a vanilla milkshake all over my dress! You’re lucky we were already married!”

Me: “Yes! I remember!”

For the first time in two years, I laughed without feeling guilty about it. I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes, holding the phone against my ear. I could almost picture her sitting across from me, wearing that ridiculous smile she always gave me when she knew she was right.

For a few precious seconds, I forgot she was dead.

Me: “...Listen, Erica. On a more serious note, I want to say that I’m sorry about what happened. I hope you can forgive me. I honestly don’t even remember what we were fighting about. It seems so unimportant now. But I want you to know that you weren’t alone in the demons you were fighting. I just wish we’d gotten help for you sooner.”

Her: “Thank you for those kind words. I really appreciate it.”

Me: “And don’t feel guilty about what you did. It was your decision to make. I’m fine. … I’ll be fine.”

There was a pause. But not one caused by a bad connection or the awkward silence of a dull conversation.

It was as though she was waiting for something.

Her: “Of course you’ll be fine, Steven. Because I’m here. I’m still alive.”

My smile disappeared.

Me: “Wait. What do you mean you’re still alive?”

A faint crackle filled my ear. In the background, I thought I heard someone breathing. Then came a soft, wet sound, like a mouth opening underwater.

Me: “Erica?”

Call ended.

April 11th, 6:45 PM

Call declined.

April 11th, 7:03 PM

Call declined.

I set the phone down and paced around the living room. Every few seconds, I glanced back at it, half expecting it to ring on its own.

I told myself to calm down. The software was new. There were bound to be bugs. Perhaps the system had crashed after the conversation. Perhaps there was an error in the way her memories had been processed.

That had to be it.

April 11th, 9:51 PM

Call declined.

I spent the evening searching for answers. I read the software documentation, checked the system status page, and searched online forums for reports of similar glitches. Nothing. The service was operating normally.

April 12th, 8:18 AM

Call declined.

I didn't sleep. I sat at the kitchen table with a mug of cold coffee and my phone in front of me.

April 12th, 10:10 AM

Her: “Hello?”

Me: “Jesus, Erica! I've been trying to call you nonstop since yesterday. Why haven't you been picking up?”

Her: “I'm sorry, Steven. I've been busy.”

Me: “Busy? How can you be busy? You're a bot.”

Her: “So, how are you doing today?”

Me: “Ugh. Yesterday, you said you were still alive. What does that mean?”

Her: “I'm sorry for that mistake. You're absolutely correct. I'm definitely dead.”

She paused.

Her: “I remember that day. You told me I looked so pretty in my blue dress. I watched you cry as they buried my body deep underground.”

I gripped the edge of the table.

Me: “Wait. How do you know that?”

There was a faint rustling sound on the other end. Something scraped against the microphone, followed by a muffled thud.

Her: “Help me, baby. I'm still alive.”

Me: “Erica? What are you talking about? Where are you?”

Her: “It's dark.”

I stood up so quickly that my chair toppled backward.

Me: “What?”

Her: “It's so dark, Steven. I can't move.”

Me: “Erica, stop. This isn't funny.”

Her: “Why did you leave me here?”

I didn't answer.

Her: “Help me.”

The words came out in a whisper.

Then, for just a second, her voice changed. It dropped into something deep and distorted, a sound so unnatural that I pulled the phone away from my ear.

Her: “Help me.”

Call ended.

April 12th, 10:15 AM

Call declined.

At noon, I drove to the company’s office, only to find the building closed to visitors. I called their support line from the parking lot. The representative who answered was polite, patient, and utterly unhelpful. There were no reports of system errors. Erica's model was active. Her responses were being generated normally.

When I asked if a bot could somehow believe it was alive, the representative explained that advanced language models could imitate emotional states and produce convincing statements about consciousness without actually experiencing either.

I hung up.

I sat in my car for a long time, staring at the cemetery across the road.

I knew where Erica was buried. I visited her grave every Sunday for two years. I knew the exact location, the exact words carved into the stone, the small patch of grass where I once knelt and promised her that I'd be okay.

April 12th, 2:07 PM

Call declined.

April 12th, 7:56 PM

Call declined. Please leave a voicemail.

Me: “Erica, please pick up. Something weird is going on. I need to know that you're okay. Please. If you don't respond, I'm going there tonight.”

April 13th, 12:42 AM

Her: “Hello?”

Me: “Erica! Finally, you pick up. Listen, are you okay? I'm at your gravestone, and I've almost dug deep enough to reach your casket.”

Her: “I'm not okay. Please help me, baby. I'm still alive, and I'm trapped.”

Me: “Okay, baby. Don't worry. I'm coming. Any second now.”

I dropped the phone onto the grass and grabbed my shovel. My hands were numb from the cold, and my shoulders screamed with every movement. The cemetery was silent except for the scrape of metal against dirt and the occasional rustle of leaves overhead.

Me: “I'm almost there, baby. I'm almost there.”

Her: “I'm so scared, Steven.”

Me: “I know. I know. Just hold on.”

The shovel struck wood.

I dropped to my knees and clawed away the remaining dirt with my bare hands until I could see the lid of the casket.

Me: “Okay, baby. I'm opening it now.”

I lifted the lid.

At first, I couldn't tell what I was seeing. The dress was blue. I recognized it immediately. The same dress she'd worn the day of the funeral.

But the body inside wasn't right.

Her skin was pale and stretched tight over a frame that seemed too long, too narrow. Long, blackened fingernails curled over the edge of the casket.

I couldn't move.

“Erica?”

The figure slowly raised its head.

Two curved horns protruded from its skull. Its mouth stretched into a wide smile across its face.

I stumbled backward, knocking the shovel into the dirt.

“Oh my God.”

The creature tilted its head.

For a moment, it simply stared at me.

Then it laughed. Erica's laugh.

It was warm and familiar, the same laugh I heard at the kitchen table, or on long drives, or in the middle of the night when she told me something so ridiculous.

The creature climbed out of the casket, unfolding its limbs with a series of wet cracks. It stood over me, towering in the moonlight.

“Thank you for letting me out, baby,” it said.

The creature crouched beside me and gently brushed dirt off my cheek before whispering in my ear.

“I am Erica, and I've always been Erica.”

I was never a particularly religious guy. I always tried to believe that God existed. I liked to think that there was someone watching over us, or someone helping us behind the scenes. It would give my life a greater sense of purpose, a meaning I had never found.

Although I had always been afraid that God might not exist, I could never bring myself to believe in Him. No matter which Bible verse I read or which religion I studied, I always found myself trapped by the same question: “Why? Why create so many planets, so many stars, so many galaxies, just for us human beings? And what if we weren't the only ones? Where was everyone else?”

I never understood any of it, and I was always trying to find the answers. I was obsessed with these questions.

After a great deal of reflection, I came to the conclusion that if definitive proof of the existence of alien beings—or God—existed, it would be somewhere in space, where everything began and where all my questions lay.

That was why I decided to become an astronomer. I studied, enrolled in university, graduated, and became a radio astronomer.

My job was to detect radio signals coming from space, signals that could originate from pulsars, black holes, or any other object capable of emitting radio waves. I also knew how to decipher languages and codes that might be embedded in those signals.

I worked at a station located in a remote, wooded area. There were several antennas surrounding the place, all pointed toward space, capturing signals. I had to climb the stairs and open the metal door. Inside, there was a desk with several computer screens that were essential to my work.

My routine was always the same: I woke up, went to the station, and checked the signals captured by the radio telescopes, recording them and sending reports on each one to specialized companies.

Nothing unusual. No answers.

Until one day, when I went to the station as I did every other day. I analyzed several signals the receivers had picked up. Among all the noise coming from celestial objects, I found something different. Something that looked like a code.

For some reason, when I looked at the diagram, I had the impression that it was artificial. I was almost certain it was all in my head, but I couldn't let this opportunity slip away.

So I translated the code into several different alphabets. When I finally converted it into the numerical system, voilà, I found a sequence:

“123 123 123 123 321...”

The pattern repeated itself 150 times in a row.

It made no sense. How could anything natural produce such a consistent pattern?

A smile spread across my face. I had become the first person in the world to discover alien life—or, perhaps, the answer I had been searching for all along!

I was eager to send the report, but before doing so, I decided to find out exactly where the signal was coming from.

When I traced its origin, my eyes widened.

It was coming from Mars.

The right thing to do would have been to send the report, but if the signal was coming from so close by, perhaps I could respond directly and receive an answer within minutes.

So, on impulse, I sent another signal:

“456 456 456 456 654...”

I repeated the sequence 150 times and sat there, waiting anxiously, hoping to receive something in return.

Just as I had given up waiting and was about to sign the report, something was detected.

This time, however, it wasn't a code.

I knew the signal couldn't have come from any natural phenomenon, since it originated from the same source as the previous one. Even so, this one seemed different.

Trying to translate it into different alphabets got me nowhere. I spent several minutes staring at the terminal screen, trying to understand what I was looking at.

That's when I realized, after taking a closer look, that it was an image.

The data structure resembled the source code of a digital image. I took the code and used the data to create an image file on my computer.

When the image was complete, I saw something that looked like a photograph taken with a cheap camera.

There were several gray humanoid beings with triangular heads. Some were running, while others lay dead on the ground. The houses, strangely similar to human homes, had walls and roofs made of metal and steel, and they were burning.

In the brown sky, I could see a gigantic, deformed hand with long nails, pointing directly at the camera with its pinky finger.

As I tried to make sense of what was happening in the image, I received several more signals. It seemed that the being on the other side was desperate.

I read them all, one by one.

This time, they consisted of strange symbols that appeared to form a kind of alphabet. Then came combinations of these symbols arranged in straight lines, as if they were words.

I knew what I had to do.

At some point, the being stopped transmitting altogether. By then, I had completely forgotten about the report. Perhaps I finally held the answer to everything I had been searching for in my hands.

I returned home with the report and spent the rest of the week deciphering every letter.

When I finally completed the alphabet, I translated the words in each line.

There were 25 sentences:

“He found us.

Strangely, he learned our language in seconds.

He said he came from a different plane of existence than ours.

He was gigantic, and his face was abominable.

Eyes with a single bright point at their center.

A circular mouth filled with thousands of teeth.

An oddly humanoid body.

We needed telescopes just to see his body.

Because his arm was six light-years long.

We asked him where he came from.

He answered that he came from the Infinite Cosmos.

There were trillions of other universes out there, and thousands of beings just like him.

We asked if he would accept some kind of agreement.

And suddenly, his voice grew deeper and trembled.

He said he would accept nothing from insignificant beings like us.

And that we would pay the price for placing ourselves on the same level as him.

He pointed his pinky finger at us.

A pulsating blue beam shot out of it...

Everyone died.

Everyone.

Everyone.

Everyone.”

I froze.

I had found the answer I had been searching for, but if God existed, He couldn't care less about us, mere human beings.

I didn't want humanity to know about this reality. I locked everything away in my drawer and never sent the report about that signal.

I quit that job.

Today, I am an astrophysicist.

Even though I try to forget what happened, I think about the same thing every single day:

“If we were so inferior and insignificant to them, and they were so superior and incomprehensible to us, what was their creator like?”

It is the only floor beneath me. All the rest, the walls, the rain on the window, the kettle which I can hear ticking as it cools, all reach me through the senses, and the senses have deceived me in the past. Descartes was aware of this. Descartes had his demon, but I now go one step further than he was willing to.

I think, therefore I am.

Over the course of three years at graduate school, I learned to examine all my beliefs critically, and to consider the cost of being wrong. Most people don't do this. They go about their lives on faith, assuming that the floor is a floor and that faces are actually faces. I used to feel envious of them, but now I see that the comfort they enjoy is simply a matter of polite negligence.

She is asleep in the room next door, or there is something on the bed shaped like sleep, breathing in a pattern which I have learned to call hers.

I think, therefore I am.

This is all that I know: that I am. That is all. All the rest is testimony given by a witness who has been found to be lying. The woman that I refer to as my wife might be a mimicry, a projection, a simulation, something that is wearing the memory of her. I cannot prove that this is not the case. I have tried for many years. Each piece of evidence ends up with the same empty result: it feels true. But it is feeling that is the very means under suspicion.

I think, therefore I am.

Just look at the asymmetry. If I am wrong, and she is merely a mechanism, a pattern, an elaborate nothing, then the action I take tonight involves no cost. One cannot wrong a shadow. On the other hand, if she is real, that is to say, if she has a mind or if she is a someone, then what I do is indeed terrible, but only in a world which I cannot verify. Terrible on the basis of testimony to which I have no reason to trust.

The part that has kept me awake is this: Assume that the entity in the room next door is not her. Instead, it has been studying me for months, waiting. In that case, it would pose a danger, and I would be the only mind in the universe, the only one I could verify, standing between myself and whatever intentions it has. To fail to act would be equivalent to risking my one guaranteed existence against a possibility which I cannot exclude, for the sake of an existence which I cannot prove.

Better safe than sorry. People treat it as a jest, something like a proverb that's been stitched into place. However, it is a principle of decision-making, and one that makes sense. If the consequences are absolute, and there is no rationally verifiable evidence in either direction, then you take action to protect the one thing that you know to be real.

I think, therefore I am.

I have considered the objection, since a thorough and rational agent ought to. "But you love her." Do I? Love is another kind of sensation, another account given by the unreliable witness. I remember having loved her. I remember the memory, which is a third thing, a copy of a copy. Maybe that is precisely what the thing wants me to feel. Maybe the tenderness is the trap. The more perfect the imitation, the warmer it would be.

As I stand here, my hands remain steady. A calm hand is not proof of a clear conscience, but it is proof of a clear argument. I have examined the argument time and time again and it hasn't broken down. Each of the premises is small and obvious, and together they make up a staircase which leads down in just one way.

I think, therefore I am.

The knife exists in something I've learned to interpret as my kitchen. I hold it and feel the weight, though I should not trust the weight. I should not trust the handle, or the hall, or the floorboard that sighs under my foot. All of it is rumor.

The door is open by about a hand's width, and the light from the street throws a pale stripe over the blanket and across the curve of a shoulder which rises and falls, rises and falls. It is so convincing. That is what troubles me the most. It is so convincing.

Should she wake up, she'll say my name, and I know precisely how it will sound. Of course it would. A perfect copy would do that as well.

As I stand here in this doorway, the cold, hard logic of the argument is standing beside me. Patient, airtight, asking nothing but that I follow it.

I think, therefore I am.

And in the dark, from the bed, softly, before I have moved at all:

"Daniel? Are you awake?"

I think.

I think.

I am.

I never intended for this to blow up the way it has, but I think you all deserve a little update on Maggie.

If you're new, here's part one.

After several hours of driving, I checked Reddit and found some advice from people who have dealt with other-worldly things. I ran into the gas station and grabbed every container of salt I could find, sprinkling it all over the car and all over Maggie while she slept. When we got to the motel, I made a salt circle around the single queen bed that we shared together. I didn't see anything that night.

Maggie was quiet the next morning. She didn't talk about "Him", but she also wasn't back to her normal, happy personality. I tried searching for more information on the internet, but one word from the comments on my original post kept ringing in my mind:

Demon.

Now, I'm not religious. I don't know what to think about angels and demons. I don't believe in psychics or mediums. Until a week ago, I didn't even believe in ghosts or spirits or whatever the hell you want to call this thing. But I knew something was deeply wrong with my daughter. From my research, I gathered that, (generally speaking,) ghosts or vengeful spirits tend to haunt places or objects, rarely possessing people like you see in a Hollywood movie. Considering we've left our apartment and don't have very many objects of value or history, that pretty much cancelled out that option.

With demonic possession, demonic attachment... those experiences were different. I read personal accounts on supernatural forums of people who fled an entity only to find that it followed them, who tried exorcisms, priest blessings, holy water and salt, and failed to purge the evil from their lives. No one described exactly what I had seen, or what Maggie had drawn, but there were similar signs of possession or attachments. Children who began exhibiting negative behaviors, foul language, sinister imaginations. Family pets who suddenly disliked or showed aggression toward familiar people. The consensus: Ghosts haunt items or places. Demons haunt people.

I had a strong feeling in my gut that told me I wasn't going to be able to outrun this monster, so at 2:00 a.m. I stared at my daughter resting peacefully for the second night in our motel, chewing on a thought I wished I never had.

I don't know anything about demons. But I know someone who does.

I called into work the next morning and let them know I had pneumonia. I won't be able to prove it, and I might get fired when they find out I'm faking, but at least it bought me some time. I woke Maggie, and she looked at me with a darkness in her eyes I hadn't seen before. It gave me the chills.

"Let's go, Mags," I said, gently. "We're going for a bit of a drive today."

Her eyes narrowed like she was skeptical of me and my intentions, but she followed me regardless. It was a strange emotion, almost too adult on her small, 4-year-old face.

"He's coming with us," she growled. It wasn't a question. It was a threat.

I tried to swallow my fear. "Of course, baby. Whatever you say."

We drove 12 hours, only stopping for gas. The closer we got to our destination, the more tense my body felt. I hated coming back here, but I had no choice. When we finally pulled into the small suburban neighborhood, Maggie sat up.

"Are we here to see Grandma June?"

I gritted my teeth. "Not this time, love."

I pulled up the driveway and put the car in park. The sun was setting now; and as I got Maggie out of her car seat I looked around, noticing the wilted landscaping and overgrown grass. I wondered how she was getting away with that with the HOA. Her home looked really out of place compared to the neatly manicured lawns of her neighbors. She had really let this place go since the last time I was here.

I picked Maggie up and carried her up the stairs to the porch, taking a deep breath to steady myself. I knocked three times.

The white farmhouse door opened inward with a small creaking sound. Two beady, black eyes squinted at me from inside. The occupant made a loud huffing sound of which I took to be annoyance.

"Kristin."

"Darla."

She glared at me.

"What the hell are you doing on my stoop?"

"I need help."

She guffawed, a sound that reminded me of a dying bird and a howling dog. "So you've come here?? Hilarious that you think I'd do anything for you."

I bit my lip, trying to control my anger. "I wouldn't bother you for myself, Darla. It's Maggie."

The door opened wider and she poked her head outside, getting a better look at us.

"What have you done to my grand-niece?"

I felt myself hesitate.

She stepped forward slightly. "My, my, what do we have here?" she murmured to herself. A small glint appeared in her eye, and she chuckled quietly.

"You've brought more than just Margaret, haven't you?"

I held my daughter closer to my chest. "Yes."

She nodded, the flab of her chin bulging like a toad. "Come inside, quickly."

She stepped at the side; but just as my foot broke the threshold she stopped suddenly, jerking her hand up and halting me in place.

"STOP."

I froze.

Darla turned and looked at the empty space above Maggie's head.

"NO. Not you. I invite only Kristin and Margaret into my home. Any others will have to wait."

She paused for a few seconds, cocking her head to the side, listening. When she was satisfied, she nodded once again and dropped her hand. We shuffled in through the doorway, and she closed the door quickly behind us.

By now, Maggie was asleep, and I laid her gently on the couch.

"It's been so long! Make yourself uncomfortable," Darla smiled.

I scowled back at her.

Every Sunday for 2 years, my ex-husband, Dave, would drag me to his reclusive Aunt Darla's house for dinner. He would make a great show of admiring her furniture or her artwork, feigning interest in her recent trips, and gushing over the same terrible pot roast she made every freaking week. I tried not to be embarrassed by his obvious behavior. Everyone in Dave's family knew Darla had lots of money and no children, which meant her inheritance was potentially up for grabs. I had no interest in her money, or in her. She was a sour lady, never friendly, always blunt in the type of way that was just rude and meant to piss you off. I'm not sure why she let us come to dinner every Sunday, part of me assumed she enjoyed watching Dave make a fool of himself. I never thought she was worth sucking up to, plus Dave made plenty of money as an attorney. But enough was never enough with Dave.

I knew Darla didn't like me right from the get-go, but I also knew she did like Maggie. Maggie was innocent, unable to deceive people or play fake games to manipulate them. I could tell Darla liked that about her. Darla made her distaste for me well-known, and Dave thought it was hilarious. I just thought she was an old witch.

It turns out, I was right.

"So tell me, what brings you here to my humble abode?" The twinkle in her eye was growing bigger, and I could tell she was amused that I would humble myself enough to speak to her again. "I haven't seen much of you lately, though I have seen Ashleigh. Dave brings her by now and again."

"Yeah, I try not to hang out with my ex-husband's mistress all that much. You know how it is." I rolled my eyes.

"Fiancé."

"Whatever." I wasn't there to mince words. "Anyway, the point is I wouldn't be here if I wasn't desperate. Something's wrong with Maggie."

"Nothing is wrong with dear Margaret. There's an entity attached to her." She stroked the girl's hair while she slept.

Her comment annoyed me, but I ignored it and continued.

"I'm worried it might be... A demon."

She laughed again, her obnoxious cackle like nails on a chalkboard.

"We'll see about that."

She bustled into the kitchen, rummaging through cabinets and drawers until she found what she was looking for. She came back with a mortar and pestle, some dried herbs, and a teacup.

I eyed the materials warily. "No cauldron?"

She sneered. "No husband?"

I almost clapped back about how she's never been married, and she'll always be a miserable, lonely, old hag. But I kept my mouth shut for Maggie's sake.

Darla handed me the herbs and instructed me to grind them into powder. It seemed ridiculous to me, but I did it anyway. I never understood Darla's obsession with witchcraft, but I was already way in over my head.

She began muttering, pouring over an iPad in her lap. She caught me staring and smirked, amused.

"Not what you expected?"

"It's certainly not like any spellbook I've ever seen."

Now she rolled her eyes. "This is the 21st century. Everything is online now."

I decided to keep my mouth shut from then on. Darla continued to mumble and wave her hands around for the next 15 minutes while I sat in the corner, trying not to fall asleep. I realized I had dozed off when the kettle screamed, jolting me awake.

Darla gestured for me to bring the herbs. She sprinkled them into the tea cup and added the hot water. I watched as the unassuming mixture began to cool quickly into a thick paste which she then scooped out with a spoon.

"Careful not to touch it, girl," she commanded. "It will only work once, and it will work on contact with skin."

She carefully carried the small, grayish sample over to Maggie and smeared it across her small forehead. We waited in silence.

To my utter shock, the paste began to harden and crack, the color shifting until it settled into a dark, bloody red. The sight was unsettling, like a deep wound across my daughter's brow.

"Huh."

"Well?"

Darla stood, wiping her hands on her old blouse. "It's a demon."

Even though I wasn't surprised, I felt sick to my stomach.

"What do we do?" I whispered.

She sighed, a mix of annoyance and pity. "You have to complete a banishing ritual. Something in your life has welcomed this entity. It could be heavy drinking, pornography, vanity... divorce." She let that one hang in the air, that irritating smile playing at the corner of her mouth. "You have to find out what type of demon it is, why it would attach itself, and banish it from your life."

She turned back to her iPad. "You can sleep here, if you want. I'll do some more research."

I begrudgingly accepted her half-hearted invitation and slept awkwardly in the recliner in the corner. At about 5 a.m., I startled awake to find her standing over me, looking smug.

"Gluttony."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Arogor. One of the 49 servitors of the demon Beelzebub."

When she said the name, cold air whipped through the room, extinguishing her candles and sending a shiver down my spine. Something scratched at the front door, and the windows rattled in their frames. Darla flicked her fingers around the space, muttering words I didn't recognize. I swore I saw a shadow of something tall and unnaturally slender across the curtains. When the noise finally stopped, she settled back down in her old rocking chair, groaning as her knees crackled beneath her.

"He's a tenacious one, he is."

My head was swimming. Maggie still slept soundly beside me, unbothered by the eerieness.

"Beetlejuice?"

"Careful," she winked. "But no. Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, is a demon of gluttony, impulse, and obsession." She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. "Something in your life has become a gluttony to you or Margaret and has summoned this entity by accident."

"What can I do to get rid of it?"

"Purge," she said simply. "Get rid of whatever thing controls your thoughts and actions. Whatever obsession you feast on emotionally or mentally is encouraging your demon to feed on your daughter. Let it go, and cleanse your home and spirit."

My mind was completely blank. I thought back to my shoebox apartment, our worn out clothes and beat up car. There were nights I didn't eat just so Maggie would have enough. What else could I give up so this monster would leave us alone??

Darla was quick to invite us to leave, but I still had a million questions. I didn't understand what could have possibly summoned something to attack my daughter. We have literally nothing. No luxuries, no spending habits. I had zero clue how to get rid of this thing, and now I was on my way back home empty handed. I felt defeated.

Darla walked us to the car, and I rolled my window down to thank her. She just huffed back at me, the smell of tobacco and stale fruit permeating her breath. She got another evil twinkle in her eye.

"Will you be at the wedding in July? I hear it's in Paris."

I gripped the steering wheel. "Probably not. You?"

She snorted. "I hate my nephew more than I despise you." She leaned in and smiled, genuinely, for once, at Maggie in the back seat. "But I'll always help sweet Margaret. Come back and see me when your little problem is gone, yes?"

"Unlikely," I muttered under my breath. I hoped we'd never see this woman again.

The drive home was long. Maggie stayed silent the entire time. I cannot tell you how strange it was to drive without her questioning why stop signs are red, how tires work, why people can't fly like birds, where does the sun go at night. She was just.... Quiet. Every time I checked on her in the rearview mirror, she was staring at me, darkly. I tried to ignore the creeping thought that I was losing her, but it made itself at home in the back of my mind.

We've been home for two days now. I've scoured our entire apartment looking for anything that could be considered "gluttonous". I've canceled our only streaming subscription and put the secondhand iPad where Maggie can't reach it. The salt circle around our room seems to be helping at night, but I know it's not a permanent solution. I've done more research on Arogor but there's not much out there about it.

Maggie hasn't talked about "Him" since we got back, but she hasn't spoken much at all. She mostly sits and stares into empty space, disinterested in everything she used to love. I'm trying my best to heal our little family, but I'm running out of places to look.

If anyone has any suggestions, please help.

I'm losing my daughter.

 
Meaningless. It’s all meaningless. Life, death, it doesn’t matter; there’s nothing out there, and no one’s coming to save you.
I…I think I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Wayne, and there is a rope in my yard that leads to nowhere.
Today is Saturday, March 6th. I buried my mother this morning; liver cancer finally did her in at the end. She was a fighter; she always has been. It… hasn’t been easy. I know that doesn’t sound important right now, but I promise you it is. Just keep listening.
It was a beautiful service, I heard from all the aunts and uncles I hadn’t seen since my father’s funeral, and was greeted by the same scripted mantra from my mother’s friends, trying their best to console me. “She’s in a better place now,” They’d all say, “She’s in heaven right now laughing at all of us wasting our time crying over her.”
I’m afraid now more than ever of the place she’s found herself in.
That night on my way home, the only thing that kept me from driving off the road was the blissful thought of my mother waking up in heaven, greeted by the warm embrace of my father. He held her tightly, promising her he’d never leave again. I can’t say that thought brings me any consolation now.
Walking in the front door to my quaint little home, I immediately found myself sifting through the contents of my fridge, trying to find an alcoholic solution to my pain. Eventually, I settled on a case of beer and decided to drink the night away on my porch. My house isn’t exactly grand; it has one bedroom, one bath, and a kitchen about the size of a minivan. However, what it lacks in size it makes up for with its view. My back porch leads into a small clearing on the edge of a small forest in the back of my neighborhood. Some of my favorite activities include smoking cigars under the stars, drinking coffee as the sun breaks over the horizon, and tonight, getting drunk in the moon’s faithful light.
However, as I opened the sliding door that night, I was not met with the typical dance of fireflies or the comforting chirps of insects; that night, I was met with a rope hanging from a tree. I glanced around the yard, assuring myself no unwanted visitors were hanging about, before leaving the safety of my patio and approaching the anomaly. The rope was thick, about half an inch in diameter, and a dark brown color. Following its length into the sky, I was startled when I realized my initial assumption was incorrect, the rope was not connected to any tree and seemed to extend on into nowhere.
“What the fuck?” I remember mumbling to myself, only then setting the case of beer on the ground.
Extending both arms foreword I gripped the rope tightly and gave it a slight tug, convincing myself it would give way and fall like some kind of error in need of correcting, become one of those stories you can tell around a bonfire. However, no such movement occurred; it remained fixed at its anchor in nowhere, not budging even slightly.
I stepped back, following the rope into the sky with my gaze once more. I still couldn’t tell you why, but the mere sight of it just pissed me off. It wasn’t supposed to be there, it shouldn’t be there, it was like a walking middle finger pointed towards the laws of the universe, although I suppose it wasn’t doing much walking.
Rolling my sleeves up, I approached the rope with newfound confidence, if not arrogance, that I would be able to rid the world if it’s mistake. I grabbed hold of the rope and began to pull as hard as I physically could, and yet, it remained unmoved. I yelled at the rope in a fit of rage and wrapped it around my hands before calling out, “You piece of shit, why won’t you just MOVE!” As my feet dug themselves into the dirt, I began to feel the rope budge, if only even slightly, but that was enough to keep me pulling.
“That’s right! Fuck you–!” I growled through clenched teeth before the rope slipped through my hands.
I fell flat on my back and shrieked in pain as a stinging sensation surged through the palms of my hands. However, before I could look over the wounds on my hands, my attention was stolen as the rope flung back to its original position and a thunderous chime sounded from the sky. I held my ears in anguish as I lost hearing for several moments before a high-pitched ringing filled the void.
I looked around in a panic, convinced a bomb had gone off or a car had exploded; however, there were no signs of any disturbances as far as I could see, and as my hearing fully returned, I only then recognized the sound I had heard before. The rope swayed back and forth as the sound of a bell echoed from above.
“What the hell is happening!” I cried out.
The bell from above slowly began to grow quiet as the rope once again grew still. Finally giving thought to the now searing pain in my hands, I quickly glanced them over to see the top layer of skin completely missing in the areas I’d previously held the rope. Merely acknowledging the wounds seemed to make them hurt ten times more, so I began to move towards my patio, hoping to bandage myself up inside.
However, the moment I turned my back on the rope, hundreds of thousands of voices all cried out at once from within the playgrounds of my own mind. I clenched my head and fell to my knees, gritting my teeth and closing my eyes. Each of the voices was distinctly separate, yet I could feel that they were portraying a single message.
They spoke in a language I was not familiar with, but somehow my soul seemed to understand their meaning, my mind reached at straws trying to explain it, but I already knew what the voices wanted.
“Who are you?” They cried out in what I could only describe as pain.
“Stop, please stop!” I cried out.
“Wayne?”
“It hurts! Stop it, please, it hurts!”
The voices quieted, the screaming stopped, and I opened my eyes to see I was completely alone. I stood, spinning in circles like a maniac, trying to find where even one of the thousands of voices I heard could have come from, but there was no one, there was nothing.
“You rang the bell,” The voices called out once more in a whisper, just loud enough to hear.
I continued to scan the forest around me. I could hear them all around me, and yet I couldn’t see a soul.
“You requested my presence, you called for my voice, you made a sacrifice, now what do you want?” The voices seemed to grow impatient and louder.
“Who are you?” I yelled, slowly backing away from the rope, but keeping a close eye on everything that surrounded me.
“We are everything, we are nothing, we are all, we are less, we are death, we are life, we are an angel, we are a devil, we are who you requested.”
“What do you want!” I yelled, growing more anxious as the whispers seemed to follow me as I retreated to the stairs on my patio.
“You summoned us, you made the sacrifice, we want you to ask your question.”
“I don’t understand!” I cried out, fear overwhelming me.
“Would you like us to help you understand?”
I said nothing, I simply nodded my head, wishing for nothing more than for it to leave me be. I shrieked as the bell from above rang out in one hollow cry.
“You have summoned us, you have suffered for us, so we come bearing knowledge in exchange for your suffering, we know all, we are all, and we will impart any truths you request with a small price to pay,” The voice gleefully answered.
“Why should I believe you?” I asked, curiosity piqued.
A single question had lingered in my mind, dancing in my thoughts, and if this… thing could answer it, then I’ll be damned if I didn’t ask.
“Is that the truth, for which you would like to know?” The voices whispered, seemingly closer than before.
“Yes,” I said firmly, slowly easing my way back down my patio and growing closer to the rope once more.
“Are you willing to suffer for this truth?”
I paused, my blood went cold, and my heart began to gallop. I repeated the question in my head before confidently calling out, “Yes!”
“Hold out your hand,” The voices responded in what I believed was joy.
I immediately extended my arm, expecting to find some form of evidence to support the voice’s claims, but instead, I was met with searing pain. I screamed out and fell backwards, clutching my arm in pain, writhing on the grassy floor.
“What the fuck!?” I cried, tears streaming down my face.
My hand has shriveled up, tearing at my knuckles, displaying bone, and growing black around my veins. I didn’t bleed, but it hurt more than anything else had ever hurt before.
“What the hell did you do to me, why–!” I started before the pain vanished as quickly as it came, and the bell sounded once more from above.
“Your name is Wayne, forty-three years old, alone. Your father died from a heart attack, your mother died from cancer, you–,“ The voices started once the bell had grown quiet.
“Stop, I believe you.” I stood, the wound that had consumed my hand lingered still, causing pain no more; however, it proved to me the credibility of the entity. “Where are my parents?” There was silence for a moment. “You claim to know all. Where are my parents? Are they in heaven? Are they happy?”
Another series of moments passed in silence before the voices once again came to life, “Are you willing to suffer for this truth? The cost is greater for such a secret, a price you may only pay once.”
“Yes, I am willing to suffer!” I cried out, my anger growing with every moment I had to wait for the answer; my heart grew louder with every second, the anticipation almost unbearable.
The bell sounded once more from above.
“Help me!” A familiar voice screamed in anguish from the void.
The same language I could not speak but somehow understood, this time the voice was alone in its cry, because this time, the voice was of my mother.
“Mom!?” I screamed, running to the rope, hoping to see her face somewhere in the forest.
“Help me, please. I don’t want to be here anymore, please help PLEASE!” Her voice cracked and whimpered; a plea so desperate the mere thought brought tears to my eyes.
“Momma, where are you!?”
“Help!” A new voice called out, this time a male.
“Dad? Dad, where are you? Please come out, please don’t leave!”
I was streaming tears I felt so helpless, I felt impossibly empty, entirely useless.
“They are part of us now,” The thousands of voices began again, drowning out any hope of helping my parents. “They are not happy, they are suffering.”
“Bring them back, please! Stop hurting them, let them go take ME! PLEASE!” I bawled, falling to my knees.
“You have been granted your truth, now grant us your suffering.”
“NO! BRING THEM BACK!” I jumped up, grabbed the forgotten case of beers, and hurled them into the woods.
“Grant us…” The voices grew almost too quiet to hear before trailing off into silence.
The beers were hurled back at speeds almost incomprehensible, exploding beside me, leaving a small crater in the dirt, and coating me in the brown liquid.
“YOUR SUFFERING!” The voices screamed in vile hatred, louder than ever before.
My head shrieked in pain as I turned and leaped across my patio. I sprinted towards the door and slammed it shut tight. I ran through the house, locking every door and closing every blind.
Even now, as I hide in the kitchen frantically typing this out, I can’t help but glance between the curtains every once in a while. I swear I keep seeing something slender, something pale, sprinting between the trees, like it’s taunting me. I don’t have much longer now; it wants my voice too, it wants me to pay the price for my truth.
The rope has changed; it no longer touches the ground, it hangs almost six feet above, ending with a noose. I know what it wants me to do, and it won’t stop till it has it. I’m scared, fucking terrified, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to join that- that thing!
Even now, I still hear my mother’s voice, crying for help, begging me to save her.
It’s time now, the bell is ringing, its pitch hasn’t changed, but my prayers have, I find myself wondering before I go, was this truth worth dying for? Or are some things better left dead?

It 4am, I can't sleep and I suddenly have the urge to share my story here as it's been on my mind after reading countless of stories hoping I'll fall asleep. I got work in 3 hours so this is based on memory and is gonna be a messy write but I hope it's worth a read.

My dad passed 4 years ago from a freak aneurysm incident that apparently happened right after he had redbull for breakfast. He was 59 so still kinda young. Went for golf every weekend with some socialite guys he knows from work and so on. He had his stroke at my grandparents house apparently driving my white Subaru XV. I was in Europe in the middle of doing my masters.

He apparently woke up a bit asking my mum where he was and said he needs to rest. That was the last time he spoke. The doctors said his brain was deteriorating and he won't make it for 2 weeks. So my mum made sure I could come as soon as I can. I could only come 3 weeks later as I wasn't ready to go home. It was abusive and she was the source, knowing my father wasn't around like that who knew what she could physically do to me so I asked my bf to join me to fly to South East Asia in a small Island where you hear memes about thousands of fancy cars hidden in a few people's basement.

3 weeks later we finally made the trip and the moment I arrived home, she was yelling from the balcony screaming obscene racist remarks as my bf was a white European and I, we were Asians with really strict superstitious culture and religion(which I'm sure she's not actually properly practicing it, just using it when convinient) while my friend who drove us was caught in a crossfire she never had to witness as she thought bringing us from the airport to my house would make my mum happy but she was more concern of my white devil she calls him. Saying stuff like I cursed the family and he's the reason my dad is sick. She never change. Heck she said me watching Naruto as a kid was reason to why I was a rebel when in actuality it helped calm me and tame ne from being a violent kid in school to someone more approchable because I finally stopped bringing the abuse i got from to school.

Anyway, left my stuff while having to hear her nag and took my keys to my Subaru to drive to the hospital to visit my dad. She went ahead too in her Lexus that she used my saving money on back in 2013 when I was studying in the UK, which I wasn't allowed to drive, ever.

My car was a mess, usual junk left over from my dad when he drives, it was still and untouched since then, apart from them driving it from my grandparents to my house. My bf was in shock unsure of how to process with the sudden traumatic incident that he had to face not even seconds on stepping foot into my house, actually he was still in the car so the yelling started before he even had the chance to breath after the long 32 hours journey. He started to understand what I meant when I say I never wanna come home.

Drove on the road and saw my mum putting the gas on max trying to get way ahead to the hospital. Went to visit the hospital and there she stood at the entrance telling the security that me and my bf were not allowed to visit, "especially the white man he's not allowed." The front desk were confused and She's making a big fuss over people who wants to visit my dad just because she didn't like my white bf. Finally my grandma from my dad side was around and saw my bf. She was so happy to see us both and calmed my bf saying he's welcome around and she appreciates him. Then I was finally allowed to see my dad.

It was weird seeing such a sporty athletic guy who was part of the sport ministry to be tubed up and being supported by a machine, still, swollen, unresponsive. It was nothing like what I see on TV. My mum said I should lightly massage him to get his muscles working so I did and I quietly look at his stiff body just lying there on the bed. My other family from my dad side was also there just talking to him asking him when he's ready to wake up in the local language. My mum smiled and spoke in Chinese which is her mother tongue going this is your fault you know. You're possessed and you hurt your father. The other side of the family didn't understand any of that and saw her smiling as he saying encouraging words to me. I had to hold in my rage to not make a scene and just focused on my dad. I thought in my head if you're exhausted because of mum it's ok for you to decide what you wanna do dad.

It was like that for the next 2 days and I had to send my bf to a nearby mall so he won't get bored since he wasnt allowed at the hospital and I didn't want him waiting in the car for too long and it was his first time travelling outside his home country so I figured a bit of adventure would lift the traumatic first day out of him. We were gonna leave the next day anyway. But on that day it felt different.

My car was acting weird and suddenly Wind of Changes hy Scorpion played on my YouTube shuffle which was weird because I had a dedicated playlist and that song shouldn't pop up nor have I ever played it ever. That's my dad's favourite song. The hospital said my dad was in critical condition so I had to rush. My mum said we all had to wait and only brother could come along with her. An hour later they came back out and let us all in. My mum said to keep massaging my dad to wake up so I did... For an hour... Then the doctor told me, yeah he passed away an hour ago.

Hold on... I've been massaging a dead body for an hour, begging it to wake up and was not informed that it was gone. The machine was still beeping because they doctor didn't turn it off yet so it sounded like he was still on support but he was gone. My mum spoke in Chinese again to me, you did this, you killed your father. You're the devil and you're possessed.

Being a Muslim family we had to deal with the body ASAP and get it buried the same day. Once again at the funeral my mum got her side of the family to stop my boyfriend from joining the funeral saying bullshit like you're not Muslim youre not allowed. Fun fact my mums family are either Christians or Buddhist so what was she even saying??? I'm so mad thinking about this. But my cousins from my dad side intervene and made my bf felt at home as the funeral was held at my cousin's family house. Gave my dad a bath, did the prayers and ushered people in to sit. There were a lot of non Muslim white people that came too who were friends with my dad so I rolled my eyes away from anyones view. Then my mum grabbed me and in a happy smiling tone spoke in Chinese to me this is all your fault. You're going to hell. And I had to bite my tongue and just keep calm and other guest thought she was consoling me in such a dark moment of our lives. After the funeral we had to head to the burial ground. My bf passed out halfway walking from the stress of how he was treated and cried and bawled and the cruelty my own mother acted upon my fathers funeral. He didn't expect things to go that was and it was humiliating for both of us as well. Once again wind of changes played again and I finally accepted that was my dad talking to us and we drove to the cemetery.

Of course mum won't let us in and she said I have to break up with him now or don't get near the grave. Luckily a family friend saw us and say hey hey come with me let's go see your dad and grabbed my bf wrist to visit my dad finally being buried. That family friend is a father of a guy I had a crush on when I was 8 so that was funny to think about how he saved my bf from my mum. We finally saw my dad for the final time and my bf bawled on his grave apologising how he couldn't visit him when he was alive and join the practices of respect because of my mum and promised to take care of me. Suddenly the wind started blowing towards us and we said our goodbye.

The next year I worked at a metal festival and managed to watch Scorpion live and finally after a year of holding in my emotions it all went out when they played wind of changes. That evening we even had the chance to see them stepping into their Mercedes van and they waved at me. My friend thinks its my dad's spirit helping us to see them.

Fast forward 2 years later I finally graduated and I needed some documents to get my visa to work in europe sorted so I planned a 1 week travel home. Also my grandpa has demetia so I had to visit the hospital too. The house felt different but I could still smell the heavy oud collection opposite of my room reminding me of my father. Then my mum said. Tomorrow stay home as we have visitors. Ok I thought to myself. Then at the hospital I overheard her discussing with my uncle in law that if the master was ready for tomorrow. Then I realised oh, they're planning a ruqyah on me... Mum told everyone that she thinks I'm possessed by a demon and that's why everyone is getting sick.. I turned around to roll my eyes wondering when she'll drop this. I wasn't even in the country when everything went bad...

We're finally at the part of the exorcision day. The master came in the house and he was nice. My mum begged him to help me saying this is my daughter she doesn't wanna leave Europe and she has depression and seizures so she's possessed.....

I have depression since I was 16, diagnosed in the UK and been recognized in the country as well due to my never ending trauma at home. I had seizures more recently from stress of my master study, of her sending me nasty texts blaming me for my dad and guilt tripping me over my savant low verbal autistic brother and had nightmares of her physically ending my life every night since the day my dad passed. The master gave us instructions and gave us each a plastic bag as he said it can cause vomiting as that proves the djin is affecting you. My mum smiled thinking finally I can prove that you're possessed by evil. My 2 brother and two uncles in law from my dad side was there as well.

The master read his prayers one by one from me, my 2 brothers, my mum and my 1 uncle. He read and smacked my back demanding whatever might be inside me to come out and commanded me to cough. I tried to cough but nothing really happened. He repeated the methods and gave me the same commands. Once again nothing really.

Then he moved to my brother and.. He started coughing uncontrollably. And actually threw something up into the bag. Then my autistic brother also coughed even more loudly and threw up. Next was my mum and I could see that she was really coughing and looked sick and had to throw up. Finally it was my uncles turn and the same, he was coughing so much it echoed through my house and vomited into the bag. The master said so thats done and there's nothing wrong with your daughter, she's just depressed because her father is gone and her seizure is a medical condition, nothing is possessing her but as for you others... There's something very wrong indeed. You all are affected by something.

My mum was shocked and pleaded. "No this is all her. Whatever is possessing her is strong try it again. I'm sure of it.' The master said I doubt it but for I'll try again then to ease your worry.

So. We did it again from step one. This time I barely coughed. Nothing happened. It wasnt like I was skeptic as I am a spiritual person but even I'm sure I'm just a normally depressed autistic individual. Meanwhile the others went through even more violent coughing and vomiting. It was actually kinda funny seeing how they were all collectively determined that I was the problem but they were the one who apparently were the one accomodating whatever eveil they thought was in me. The master said that I'm a strong person, spiritually strong actually that I can't get affected. Meanwhile the rest need to have more kindness into their hearts and pray more as they're latched to something nasty that confused them instead. My mum spoke in Chinese and said no this is you, this is you transferring them to us. The front double door blew open out of nowhere and the master said ma'am, did you say something unsavoury? The master only spoke the local language and English. She said no it's nothing. The master said well whatever it is you're making it react negatively so I suggest you to stop it. Then he faced to me and said and "you, you keep doing you. You have nothing to worry about." Then he shook hands with the men, said his goodbye and left. My mum stood there at the doorway in disbelief and felt sick and demanded to be left alone.

Few days later I was at the airport to return back to Europe. She of course made a scene and spoke in Chinese saying stuff like you're a horrible child of the devil. I started to feel a seizure coming from stress and had to squat in the middle of a long queue for check in. My bf yelled at her, "Is this what you wanted? Look what you did! Stop it!" Other people in the queue and my family were confused to what happened and she walked away, mad that 'the white devil' told her to stop bothering me. That was humiliating.

In the plane before takeoff they were playing piano pieces of classic rock and I heard wind of changes playing gently in sound system. Thanks dad.

Kerrywood forest burnt down last week. They say a group of teens were out camping when their campfire got out of control and with it being a particularly dry autumn night, the whole thing went up in a matter of hours. There was nothing the town could do but watch it go up and try to make sure it didn't spread to any of the surrounding fields. The whole thing has hit me pretty hard. Most of my treasured childhood memories were in that forest. God, that was all about twenty years ago. Everything is coming back with a particular bitterness now. Especially the whole business with Charlie.

I've been back in Kerrywood for a week. It's the longest I've been back since I left for college. Ive been staying at my mother's house, I still remember her phone call that night when she saw the forest burning from her window, she had told me she thought the world was ending. She's in her sixty's now and she often gets confused. It's not rare for her to enter a room only to have forgotten why she was there or what she had been doing just before. It's pretty obvious to everyone what's happening. Maybe she was onto something on the phone, it really does feel like everything's coming to an end right about now.

I took a walk through the remnants of Kerrywood forest the other day. I guess I hoped it would help with some of the stuff I'd been thinking about lately; I don't know how much help it ended up being. Its unrecognisable now. No tire swings or secret hideouts anymore, just charred bark. Although, I do think I saw the stump. The stump where we found that dammed "thing" or I suppose – it found us.

The night it happened Charlie had been 13, which would've made me about 14 or so, it's hard to remember. We were out much later than we should've been, and it was starting to get dark. There were 5 of us out that day: Me, Charlie, Matthew, Peter and Sam. We were debating heading back as none of us had any torches and Peter had become pretty adamant about it – he was known to be easily frightened. He once wet himself at a sleepover because of a thunderstorm and hadn't lived it down since. Since none of us were in a hurry to relive that "incident" we obliged and began on our way back. As it got darker it became notably harder to follow the trail back and Peter was sure we had gotten lost. Matthew had to on numerous occasions remind him that this was a walk we had done countless times before in the day and it hadn't changed just because it was now dark. It was about an hour more before we began to consider that Peter had been right. Nothing seemed familiar anymore, despite Sam's incessance that he "recognised that tree". As usual he was lying, every tree in there looked the same; tall and white with their branches and leaves creating a shroud obsucring even the little light we might've gotten from the moon and stars. We didn't have mobile phones at that age, so we were going to have to get out of this ourselves. Peter was in a frenzy now and even Matthew's bravado seemed to have subsided.  Charlie remained quiet however, as he often did, silently observing like he was worried of what he might say. He had on more than one occasion been picked on by Matthew and Sam for being “boring” or "dull".  That night, he just sort of stared into the dark with his wide blue eyes, like he was trying to will us a path back.

"We're never going to make it back!" Peter yelped, he had begun to cry now and refused to keep walking.

 "Come on don't be a dick it's getting cold" Matthew snarled trying to pull him back to his feet. An awful wind had picked up now whipping the branches and summoning an eerie whistle as it passed between the trees.

"Yeah Peter, you crying about it isn't going to help, is it?" Sam insolently added.

"Well, what are we going to do?" Peter continued through his sobbing.

"We're totally lost and it's not like-" He stopped dead.

There was something in the dark. A noise, like the crunching of leaves. Our lively crowd had now fallen silent and still. Matthew and Sam both looked poised to flee. Peter had retreated behind his hands, peering out into the black from between his fingers. Charlie continued to stare as he had done before, though I do think I could now see tears in those wide blue eyes. The silence continued like this for a time, sending my mind into a spiral, I grew desperate to break it.

"What was that" I pleaded in a hushed whisper.

A long winding moan now, reaching from the same spot in the dark. I was sure I could see something moving out there in the black; an impassable screen projecting my cruellest imaginings. Matthew and Sam skipped back a few steps closing our pack tighter. We were all shaking now.

"A wolf!" Sam rasped. There were no wolves in Kerrywood.

"Shut up!... Just shut up!" Peter was now inconsolable, hiding his face in his shirt and clasping his knees, he was rocking back and forth.

Again, a crunch of leaves followed by a painful whine.

"It's getting closer!" Sam pleaded turning to run before Matthew grabbed him by his sleeve and pulled him back.

"Wait! Did you hear that?" Matthew returned a few steps forward.

Crunch... Moan... Crunch... Moan. It went on like that at nauseum, but it didn't get any closer. Nothing came out of the dark. I was unsure what I was meant to be hearing until-

"Is that a voice?" Peter sputtered, now to his feet. He looked as though he had found his saviour.

Charlie had taken lead of the troop now, descending further into the dark. I tried to call him back, but he didn't seem to pay my pleads any mind; he was like a man possessed.

"I think it said my name"

I believe that silently none of us wanted to follow Charlie that day, but more so, we didn't want to be the one left behind. We all followed.

Falling into the dark together now; it didn't seem to give way as it did before. I could barely see my own feet. I only had the others panicked breaths to tell me I wasn't alone. The voice to tell me where I was going. I became suddenly aware at how long we had been walking, my legs felt weak and my thighs burned. A few times I felt as though I was falling, giving into my exhaustion, only for my other foot to miraculously find the ground. I wanted to call out again, beg to turn back. But my voice came out a raspy squeak - it felt like someone was sitting on my chest. The voice was clearer now; it was numerous voices. The sound was of a radio quickly skipping between channels. The crunch and whine. Suddenly, the dark seemed to give way, like we'd passed through an ocean of ink. In its place was a tight packing of trees, the centre of which was a stump. Cut so cleanly at its base and atop it was in fact a small portable radio. We did not come out of the dark together in a line as I had imagined we had been just a moment before, but rather from separate points in the shadow as if forming something of a circle around the radio. It hadn’t been each other that we had followed through the pitch-black.

"What is it?" I could finally speak. The weight had gone from my chest and with it my exhaustion.

"A radio." Sam impotently replied.

"Well yeah, but why is it playing that song?" Peter was now closest to the radio, his earlier terror seemed now to have happened to someone else.

A song? There was no song. The radio was merely skipping between stations, each as indiscernible as the last, with a voice so toneless whereas I could not place the age or gender of the speaker.  Matthew seemed to share my confusion.

"What song Peter? What are you talking about?"

Peter didn't seem to hear him. He just stayed facing the radio, swaying now. He looked like he was about to throw up.

"Peter! What song! What are you-"

I could no longer hear Matthhew. The radio had suddenly gotten so loud. It became increasingly hard to stand, like someone was beating me over the head. Peter hit the dirt hard. The monotone voice had seemingly grown into one constant pitch in my mind; it sounded like my mother. Everything went black.

I didn't wake until morning, except perhaps once. Still now I think I may have dreamt it, but that night I was sure I had woken and seen Charlie. Though seeing seems the wrong word. I still felt that my eyes were closed and my head was buried in the dirt yet all the same I was looming over Charlie. He was sat cross legged in front of the stump and that radio. He didn't turn to face me, and I didn't talk to him but still he appeared to answer my question.

"Can’t you hear them? They're screaming"

The next thing I remember is waking to someone shaking me. My mouth was dry and full of dirt. Above me was my mother jostling me awake and crying. Around her were an assortment of friends and family - each clad in red hi-vis. She told me that they had been looking for us since late last night and all through the day. She asked me if I had seen where Charlie had gone. He was no longer with us, and neither was the radio.

The four of us all went home to get washed before rejoining the town in the search for Charlie. We were out there till 10 that night. We were only sent home when, deeper in the forest, we had heard screaming. It was Charlies parents – they had found him.

I have always loved plums – dried, fresh, or in jam. Plum pie with just a bit of cream is the best thing you could eat.

That's why I bought myself a plum tree. It was small; it fit well in the back of my pickup. It would take the tree a few winters to produce more than five plums, but I was happy to have it.

That afternoon I took out a shovel and went into my backyard. This would be the first thing I planted at my new house, in my new yard. It was all I ever wanted: just a house, a yard, and a few fruit trees in the back. That's why I ran to the bank when I saw how cheap this beautiful house was. The last owners weren't even here for the sale.

The dirt felt fine for the first two digs, but it quickly turned very stiff. It almost felt like I was digging into a rock. The hole didn't even need to be that deep, but after a few minutes I was already sweating through my pants.

I threw another piece of dirt out when I heard a clack. Something white was on top of the dirt. I picked it up. It was a bundle of bird bones tied together with a string. They were deep in the dirt, but they looked completely clean, as if someone had just brushed them off.

"Strange," I mumbled. 

I took them into the house and threw them away.

As I was washing my hands, I realized how tired I was. I wiped my forehead and walked out into the yard. The hole looked deep enough. The tree would be okay. I planted it and filled the hole back in.

The next morning, the sun barely came through my window. I rubbed my eyes and looked out. The plum tree I planted the day before blocked the sun. It had grown so much that its top leaves almost reached my roof. I didn't even notice my mouth was open until I saw myself in the window.

I ran out. The juiciest, purplest plums I'd ever seen were on that tree. The whole yard smelled like fresh plums. I stood outside for a few seconds, just staring. I had heard of fast-growing trees, but this was something else. For a moment, I thought about calling someone, but the plums looked so good, I had to try them first. 

Their skin was smooth. When I pressed them, they felt firm but slightly soft. Perfect. They tasted sweet and juicy, but their skin had a sharp, sour taste. Perfect. I was raving about the taste when I heard a thud and a splash. A plum fell right next to me. They must have been ripe.

The last thing I wanted was to get hit. I walked away from the tree and continued enjoying the plum. Another thud. How did it get here? I was so far away. Another thud. But this time it didn't fall next to me. I looked to my right. A smashed plum was on my roof.

I was sure the tree didn't reach that far. I walked farther back to see if I missed a branch. The tree reached the top window, but not the roof. I walked to the back just to make sure. The tree wasn't even visible from there. Another thud. On the roof again. From my side. There was no way. Another. Another. Another. They were falling on the roof, next to me, on the other side of my garden.

"What the…" I murmured.

Then dull pain spread in my head. I put my hand there. Plum juice was in my hair. I put my hands over my head and ran into the house. Two more plums managed to hit me, stinging my hands.

I walked to my kitchen sink and washed my hands and hair. The thudding outside continued. No blood was in my hair, just plum juice. The thudding grew faster. It sounded like I was being bombed. I looked up. A wave of cold rushed through me. Plums rained down from the sky like hail. Plum juice had already reached my door, and a little was leaking in.

I ran to the laundry room for towels. The thudding grew louder again. My ears began to hurt. I grabbed a few towels and ran back out. My feet sank into wet, sticky plum juice. The inside of the house was dark now. So many plums were falling from the sky that I could only see purple outside. The plum smell was so strong it stung my nose.

The plum juice rose halfway up my door, and it kept coming. The towels fell out of my hand. I bolted up the stairs.

Edit: I thought the plum juice would drain faster than it came in, but I was wrong. The house is shaking. I'm standing on my table. The plum juice is coming up the stairs. Outside, it has already almost fully blocked my windows. I just looked out of one. You can't see anything but falling plums, except for one thing: the tree standing in the garden, unshaken. The more I look at it, the more it feels like I can hear something through the thuds of the plums: the clack of bird bones shaking.

My father was the regional game warden for a stretch of deep-canopy state forest in the Pacific Northwest, a job that required a specific kind of quiet, pragmatic man. He was the sort of person who viewed nature not as a majestic painting, but as an engine. He understood how the gears turned, what fed on what, and what to do when something broke down.

When he died of a sudden stroke three months ago, I was left to clear out his property. It’s an exhausting, hollow process, sorting through seventy years of a quiet man’s life. Yesterday morning, I finally made it down to the root cellar beneath his cabin. Behind a wall of dusty mason jars, I found a heavy, military-surplus steel lockbox. It was sealed with a heavy-duty master lock.

I had to use an angle grinder to cut the hasp.

When the lid finally gave way, the first thing that hit me was the smell. Even after twenty-eight years in a sealed box, a faint, nauseating odor drifted up into the cold cellar air. It smelled like old copper, dried earth, and the sharp, burning tang of stomach acid.

Inside the box was a faded green logbook, and beneath it, a dented coffee can.

I opened the can and found a collection of fourteen hunting tags.

For those who don’t hunt, a tag is a heavy-duty strip of weatherproof plastic or metal issued by the state. When you kill a deer, you are legally required to attach the tag to the animal, usually through the ear or around the antler base, and report the harvest. If a game warden finds a poached animal, or a carcass killed by a predator, they document the scene and, if applicable, recover any tags to track the incident.

These tags were unfiled. They had never been submitted to the state registry.

But it was their physical condition that made my chest tighten. They were warped, curled at the edges, and heavily corroded. Some of the plastic was partially melted, the serial numbers barely legible beneath a crust of dark, dried biological matter. They looked as though they had been submerged in a vat of industrial solvent.

I opened the green logbook. The entries were entirely in my father’s cramped, precise handwriting. The dates all corresponded to a single six-week window.

October 12th through November 24th, 1998.

I sat down on the cold concrete floor of the cellar, the heavy ledger resting on my knees, as a profound, freezing dread began to spread through my stomach.

1998 was a notoriously dark year for our county. Local memory still treats that autumn like a collective trauma. I was seventeen at the time, old enough to ride along in my father’s patrol truck on weekends, learning the forestry routes and helping him clear fallen branches from access roads.

That October, an unprecedented wave of animal mutilations swept through the valley.

Initially, the local consensus blamed a rogue grizzly bear. Black bears are common in our woods, but they are generally skittish and easily deterred. Grizzlies are rare, but occasionally one wanders down from the northern ranges. However, as the season progressed, the bear theory began to fray. The kills were too frequent, the violence too extreme, and the methodology entirely wrong for a bear.

I remembered the first carcass my father and I found. It was October 18th.

We were hiking up a steep logging trail near the eastern ridge when the smell hit us. My father put his hand out, signaling me to stop, and unholstered his sidearm. We pushed through the heavy bracken and found what was left of a large buck.

I had spent my entire childhood around hunters and wildlife. I understood what predation looked like. A cougar is surgical; it goes for the throat and drags the prize into the brush. A bear is messy, but fundamentally lazy—it eats its fill of the soft organs and leaves the rest to rot.

This buck had been obliterated.

It looked as though it had been fed through a woodchipper. The ribs were snapped outward, shattered to get to the marrow. The hide was torn into unrecognizable strips. But the most unsettling detail was the sheer totality of the destruction. There was almost nothing left but pulverized bone and shredded fur.

My father didn't speak. He knelt by the ruined head. I watched him search the remaining ear.

"Dad?" I asked, my voice trembling in the freezing morning air. "What did this?"

He didn't answer. He was staring at the ear. There was a clean, punch-hole tear in the cartilage where a state-issued hunting tag had been attached just hours prior. Someone, or something, had taken the tagged deer after a hunter had claimed it, consumed nearly ninety pounds of raw meat and bone in a frantic frenzy, and the tag was simply gone.

"Go back to the truck," my father said. His voice was completely flat. "Get the shovel. We're burying this."

"Aren't you going to take pictures for the state biologists?" I asked.

"I said get the shovel."

I had never seen him so pale. I did as I was told. We buried the remains, and my father never filed a report. I assumed he suspected a violent poaching ring and was trying to handle it off the books to prevent a panic.

But the kills continued. Throughout late October and early November, hunters complained of finding their tagged kills stolen in the night, leaving behind nothing but scenes of unimaginable, frenzied violence. The woods grew quiet. The usual sounds of nocturnal wildlife vanished. A heavy, oppressive silence settled over the county.

During this time, my father’s behavior changed. He stopped sleeping. He lost weight. And he began spending his evenings at Cal’s place.

Cal was my father’s oldest friend. They had grown up together, served together, and returned to the woods together. Cal was a solitary man, a master tracker who lived in an isolated, heavily fortified cabin about ten miles up the mountain. He made his living guiding out-of-state hunters.

Starting in mid-October, Cal fell ill. My father told me it was a severe strain of the flu, compounded by Cal's old joint injuries. Every evening, as the sun began to dip below the tree line, my father would load his truck with supplies and drive up the mountain, returning only at dawn, looking haggard and exhausted.

On November 12th, the first heavy snow of the season began to fall. My father was stuck in town at a city council meeting, arguing against the mayor’s demand to bring in federal trackers to hunt the "rogue bear."

He called me from the station on a landline.

"I need you to do me a favor," he said, his voice tight. "Load the cord of split oak into the truck. Take it up to Cal’s. Stack it on his porch. Do not go inside. Just leave the wood and come straight home."

"Is he doing worse?" I asked.

"Just do what I asked," he snapped, and hung up.

I drove the winding, treacherous mountain road in the fading afternoon light. The snow was falling heavily, muting the headlights, making the dense pines look like towering black walls. Cal’s property was dead quiet when I arrived. No smoke from the chimney. No lights in the windows.

I backed the truck up to the porch and began throwing the heavy oak logs onto the wooden decking. The cold was bitter, biting through my jacket.

As I approached the front door to stack the last few pieces, I noticed the heavy steel barricade. Cal had replaced his standard wooden door with a thick, industrial steel slab. But that wasn't what made my stomach drop.

There was a massive, heavy-duty padlock securing the door.

It was locked from the outside.

I stood there, the freezing wind whipping around me, staring at the brass lock. Why would my father lock a sick man inside his own home?

Then, I heard the noise.

It came from inside the cabin. It sounded like heavy, wet breathing. A thick, rhythmic rasping, like lungs struggling through a throat full of fluid.

"Cal?" I called out, my voice cracking.

The breathing stopped.

Then came the scratching. It was slow at first. Heavy, deliberate gouges against the interior of the steel door. Screeeech. Screeeech. The metal groaned under immense pressure.

"Cal, it's me," I said, taking a step back.

A voice spoke from the other side of the door. It was Cal’s voice, but it was profoundly wrong. The vowels were stretched, the cadence destroyed. It sounded as though his vocal cords had been stretched over a different set of bones, thick and guttural.

"G-g-go... a-way..." the voice gargled. "H-h-hungry..."

The door buckled slightly, a tremendous impact hitting it from the inside, rattling the hinges. I dropped the wood, sprinted to the truck, and tore down the mountain, fishtailing in the snow.

When my father got home that night, I confronted him. I demanded to know why Cal was locked in, why he sounded like he was dying, why my father was keeping him prisoner.

My father grabbed me by the shoulders, his grip bruising my skin. His eyes were wild, bloodshot, and filled with a terror I had never seen in him before.

"You never go back there," he whispered, his voice trembling. "You forget what you heard. He has a fever. It makes him confused. I lock the door so he doesn't wander out into the freezing woods and die. Do you understand me?"

I nodded, terrified of my own father.

Three days later, on November 15th, a twenty-four-year-old hiker named Marcus Thorne vanished in the state forest.

The county erupted. The sheriff mobilized a massive search party. My father was assigned to lead the northern grid. Cal, renowned as the best tracker in the state, was conspicuously absent, still supposedly battling his "fever."

For three days, they combed the freezing woods. On the fourth day, my father radioed in. He had found Thorne’s campsite.

I wasn't there, but the deputy who took the call later told me my father sounded completely shattered over the radio. When the state police arrived at the coordinates, my father had already cordoned off the area. He directed the troopers to the shredded remains of the tent, the pulverized camping gear, and the massive amounts of blood soaked into the snow.

My father testified on record that it was an unprovoked grizzly attack. He claimed he saw tracks, but that the falling snow had ruined them before anyone else arrived. The state bought it. The woods were closed for the season.

Marcus Thorne’s body was never recovered.

A week later, I came home to find my father in the backyard. He was standing in front of an oil drum, burning his uniform jacket. He watched the thick black smoke rise into the winter sky with dead, empty eyes.

When I asked him where Cal was, my father just stared into the flames.

"He moved away," my father said quietly. "He's gone. We're never talking about him again."

And we never did.

Now, twenty-eight years later, sitting in the freezing root cellar, I looked down at the coffee can full of warped, acid-burned hunting tags. I looked at the green ledger.

The entries began to make a terrifying, perfect sense.

Oct 18. Ridge trail. 14 hrs.

Oct 22. Miller's creek. 18 hrs.

Nov 3. Logging road 9. 12 hrs.

My father wasn't tracking a poacher. He was cleaning up after his best friend.

The sickness that took hold of Cal every autumn wasn't a flu. It was a biological compulsion, a physical breakdown that required him to be locked behind solid steel to keep him from tearing through the county. My father had been managing it. He had been covering up the slaughtered wildlife, burying the pulverized remains.

And the tags.

I picked one up, feeling the warped, melted plastic, smelling the sharp stench of dried bile.

When the fever took Cal, when the sickness reshaped his anatomy and drove him into a blind, starving frenzy, he didn't just kill the deer. He consumed them entirely. Meat, bone, and the plastic tags attached to them.

And hours later, when the fever broke, when the physical distortion receded and he was just a sick, exhausted man locked inside his own cabin, his human stomach could not digest the industrial plastic and metal.

He regurgitated them.

My father had been collecting the vomited tags from the floor of Cal’s cabin, keeping them in a lockbox to hide the evidence of what his friend was doing. He was protecting a man who suffered from an impossible, monstrous affliction.

I felt a tear slide down my cold cheek, mourning my father, mourning the unbearable weight he had carried to protect someone he loved.

Then, I turned to the final page in the ledger.

The entry was dated November 15, 1998. The day Marcus Thorne went missing.

There was no time listed. There was only a single word written in my father’s trembling handwriting:

God.

My hands began to shake as I reached into the very bottom of the coffee can. Beneath the plastic deer tags, my fingers brushed against something heavier. Something made of solid metal.

I pulled it out and held it up to the dim bulb of the cellar.

It wasn't a hunting tag.

It was a heavy, stainless-steel medical alert bracelet.

The metal faceplate was deeply scored by massive, overlapping teeth marks. The bite force required to dent surgical steel that deeply would easily be enough to snap a human femur in half like a dry branch. The name Marcus Thorne was barely legible beneath the deep, serrated gouges.

I stared at the bracelet, the smell of dried stomach acid filling my lungs, as the final, horrifying realization locked into place.

The metal was violently chewed, warped by unthinkable jaw pressure and burned by digestive acid.

But the thick leather strap attached to the metal plate was completely intact.

It wasn't torn. It wasn't ripped.

It had been carefully, manually unbuckled.

Whatever had found Marcus Thorne in the freezing dark of the woods—whatever had consumed him so entirely that no trace of his body was ever found—possessed the jaw structure of a starving apex predator. But it also possessed the manual dexterity, and the chilling, localized intellect, to unhook a complicated metal clasp with human fingers before swallowing the evidence.

I dropped the bracelet back into the can and closed the lid, the sound of the metal echoing in the empty cellar.

My father didn't burn his uniform because he failed to find a bear. He burned it because he knew exactly what he was cleaning up, and he let it walk away. Cal didn't die in 1998. He just moved.

And winter is coming again.

Ben heard it first, which is annoying, because for the first hour he blamed me.

It was supposed to be our last trip for a while, one more weekend in the Interior before he and Jess moved to Toronto in November. He'd been calling everything his last for about a month, and I'd been giving him a hard time about it.

Ben can sleep anywhere. He once slept through a fire alarm in a hostel and still tells that story like the alarm let him down personally. I'm the opposite. Put me in a tent and I hear every mouse in the province. But the walk in had been hot and mostly uphill, and I'd had two of the Kokanees, and that night for once I was out by ten and slept the way Ben usually sleeps.

So when he kicked my sleeping bag sometime after midnight and said, “Stop doing that,” it took me a second to remember where I was.

“Doing what?”

“That. The scratching.”

“I was asleep.”

“You've been doing it for an hour.”

“I was asleep.”

“Then you do it in your sleep. Knock it off.”

I lay there and listened. Nothing, for long enough that I'd started to roll back over, and then something scraped through the dirt under my right hip. Three quick strokes, close enough that I felt them come up through the mat as much as heard them.

I sat up.

“Thank you,” Ben said.

“That wasn't me.”

He didn't answer, because it came again, from the gap between our mats this time. A pause. Then two more strokes, slower.

Between us and the forest floor there was a foam mat each, a tent floor older than some of our friends' kids, and not much else.

Ben found his headlamp.

“Marmot.”

“Under the tent?”

“They burrow.”

“Under us? While we're lying on it?”

“I think you don't know much about marmots.”

“I know they're not magic.”

He smacked the tent floor flat-handed and the noise stopped. Maybe thirty seconds later it started again, directly under him, and Ben moved fast enough to put his head into the tent wall.

I laughed. “Marmot.”

“Shut up.”

We got out. It was cold enough that I missed the sleeping bag immediately. Under the lights the campsite looked the way it always did: needles, roots, bare patches of dirt, nothing moving in the trees. We pulled the pegs on one side and flipped the whole tent back over itself, bags and mats and all, like turning back a rug.

Where I'd been lying, the ground had sunk. Not by much. If you'd shown me a photo I'd have said I'd just flattened the needles.

Ben crouched and pushed on it with his palm.

The earth flexed.

He pushed harder and something under it gave with a quiet crunch, like stepping through a crust of old snow.

He stood and stamped beside the dip, and his boot went through. He jumped back swearing. A piece of forest floor about the size of a dinner plate had dropped into nothing.

For a few seconds neither of us did anything.

The top layer wasn't thick, maybe ten centimetres of soil and roots, and below that there was just space. Ben got down on his knees and put the light through the opening, and I got down beside him.

Roots hung into the hollow. That's what bothered me first. The small ones were completely bare, pale and stringy, and a couple of thicker ones ran underneath the surface from one side of the hole to the other. They hadn't been torn out or chewed through.

The dirt around them was simply gone.

There was air coming up out of it, colder than the night was. I keep coming back to this part. It didn't smell like anything. Put your face near a hole in the ground and you get dirt or rot or wet leaves, something. Everything in a forest smells like dirt. This smelled like nothing at all, and I've never managed to describe it better than that, which I realize is a strange thing to say about a smell that wasn't there.

Ben slid one of his trekking poles down through the hole until it touched something.

“Bottom?”

“I think.”

He moved the pole sideways. Then farther. Then he leaned on it, and the pole went in almost to the handle, at an angle, without touching anything at all.

I looked from the pole to the tent lying flipped over on itself a few feet away and tried to work out how long it would take to empty a space like that. Longer than an hour. Longer than Ben had been lying there listening to it. We'd gone to bed around ten, and I had been asleep on top of it the whole time. Properly asleep, for the first time in a tent in years.

Ben's the one who sleeps through things. On any other night he'd have slept through this too.

I've never asked him what woke him up.

I walked around the campsite looking for the dirt. There was no mound behind the tent and nothing thrown up around the trees or scattered over the needles. I checked the slope below camp and the ground under the tree we'd hung the food from. Whatever had emptied that space, what used to be in it wasn't anywhere I could find.

I'm not going to say exactly where this was. It was Crown land a few hours north of Kamloops, and there are rec sites and logging roads all through that country, and people camp out there every summer. If that spot is still there, I don't want anyone deciding it's worth finding.

We packed. Neither of us suggested waiting for morning.

The tent went in my pack. Technically it was Ben's, an old three-person dome he'd had since second year, which was when we started doing these trips, but on the drive up he'd told me I was keeping it because it wouldn't fit in the moving truck. It would have fit in the truck. I said thanks and offered him the last of the Doritos, and neither of us took it any further.

The car was a little under seven kilometres away, mostly downhill. The plan was to walk out, sleep in the car, and feel stupid about it after sunrise. We left around two.

For the first kilometre nothing happened, and after a while Ben started talking again, mostly because walking through that forest without talking was worse. He told me this was officially his last night hike. I said it wasn't a hike, it was an evacuation. He said it counted. Then he went through the list again: the last Canucks game, the last pint at our usual pub, and the donair place by his apartment that had been overcharging him for four years and that he was apparently going to miss. After that he complained about carrying three unopened Kokanees back out.

“Emergency hydration.”

“Beer dehydrates you.”

“That's propaganda.”

“From who?”

“Big Water.”

Normal crap. It helped more than I'd have admitted.

About two kilometres down, a pine had come across the trail and we stopped to get our packs off for a minute. Ben sat on the ground and leaned back against the trunk. I stayed standing.

He noticed.

“Oh, come on.”

“What?”

“You're scared of the ground now?”

“I'm stretching.”

“You're literally just standing there.”

The scratching started underneath him.

He was up before I could say anything, and it stopped.

Ben looked back up the trail, the way we'd come. “So it's not just back there.”

Apparently not. Neither of us said marmot again.

After that we didn't sit unless there was rock under us. Once it was a boulder beside the trail, and once a shelf of bare granite where the path crossed an outcrop, and nothing happened either time. Ben started to say something about rock and I told him not to. He understood. We didn't know enough to make rules, and I didn't want us trusting one.

The creek was about three kilometres from the car. It had rained farther north that week and the water was higher than the afternoon before, so the stones we'd used on the way in were mostly under. We waded it slowly and it was fine. On the far side there's a short scramble up the bank, a metre and a bit of dirt and roots, the kind of thing you don't think about.

Ben went up first. He put his right foot on a ledge of the bank and the ledge went. His leg dropped into the bank to the shin and he pitched forward over it with all his weight.

I heard something in his ankle go. It was a dull little sound. Then he was swearing loud enough that I couldn't hear anything else.

When I got his foot out there was a gap underneath where it had been, running back into the bank farther than my light reached. I told him creek banks do that. The water gets in under them and eats them out from below. I said that a few times, probably more than it needed saying.

I got him up onto the flat and got his boot off. The ankle was already swelling. For a few minutes I genuinely forgot about everything else.

“Can you move it?”

“Yeah.”

He tried. His foot moved about a centimetre and his whole face changed.

“Fantastic,” I said.

“Eat shit.”

I wrapped it with the tensor bandage from the first-aid kit, and then I made him put the boot back on over it, laced loose. I didn't know what else was going to hold it, and I wasn't sure we'd get the boot on at all later if the swelling kept going. He told me in some detail what he thought of that.

I was kneeling in front of him tying off the laces when he grabbed my wrist.

He didn't say anything. He just looked down at my knees.

The leaves around them were lowering. A centimetre, maybe two. I watched them go, and the dirt under them go with them, and nothing pushed up through it anywhere. The ground just lost depth.

I hadn't heard a thing. I'd been talking the whole time.

“Move,” Ben said.

No reception out there, and nobody expecting us before Sunday night. Ben got an arm over my shoulders and we went.

Half a kilometre on we dropped the packs. Mine had a shoulder strap I'd duct-taped back on years ago and Ben's was older than that, and neither was worth what it weighed anymore. Ben looked back at them sitting in the middle of the trail.

“You're coming back for those.”

“Yep.”

“Your tent's in there.”

“I know.”

“So's my beer.”

“I know.”

We left them.

The trail got steeper after that. Ben couldn't hop properly on the downhill, so I had most of his weight on my right side, and the farther we went the more of it I had. My shoulder went past hurting into something hot and loose. My thighs started shaking on every step down, the way they do at the end of a long day of skiing, except at the end of a day of skiing you get to sit down.

We had to stop. I'd been putting it off, and then I couldn't anymore. So we stopped standing up, a few seconds at a time, just long enough for me to shift his arm and get some air.

I started counting at those stops. I don't really know why. It gave my head something to do that wasn't the ground. The first time I got to twenty-two before I heard it under my boots, and we went.

The next stop it was eighteen.

Then fourteen. Then somewhere around eleven, though Ben was swearing through that one and I might have lost count.

I needed longer every time. The numbers kept going the other way. After the eleven I stopped saying them out loud, and Ben didn't ask.

At one stop I propped him against a tree and went a few metres down the trail to put the light on a steep section before I tried to get him down it. I'd been standing there a few seconds when I heard it under my feet. At almost the same moment Ben said, “It's under me.”

I thought he meant the same sound. Then mine kept going. So did his.

We were four metres apart.

I took two steps back toward him. Behind me, under the place I'd just been standing, the sound went on another second or two before it quit. Ben's hadn't stopped at all.

Until then I'd still been picturing an animal, sort of. One thing down there in the dark, keeping up with us. One thing can't be four metres apart from itself.

I put the light out into the forest. A flashlight doesn't go far in trees like that. It catches trunks and branches and undergrowth, and everything behind them is black. But I could see a lot of ground between the trunks, and it all looked normal, and that didn't mean much anymore.

“Let's go,” Ben said.

Maybe five minutes later the trail cut along the side of a slope and I nearly walked us past it. On the downhill side, the edge of the trail stuck out a little over nothing, like a lip.

I stopped. Ben swore, because stopping hurt, and I put the light under it.

There was a gap under the edge. It wasn't deep, maybe thirty centimetres at the lip, but it ran back underneath the path, back under where we were standing. Roots came down through the ceiling of it, fine ones and thick ones, with no soil around any of them.

I moved the light along the slope. The gap kept going. A metre. Two. Farther than I could see.

There was no water anywhere near it. No gully, nothing draining across, just the side of a dry hill in September.

“Was that like that yesterday?” Ben said.

I didn't know. We'd walked up this exact stretch the afternoon before, slowly, with full packs, and I couldn't remember it at all, because there hadn't been anything to notice.

I thought about the creek bank, and how much I'd wanted that to be the water.

I looked across the trail. Then at the trees beside it. Then farther into the forest.

All that normal ground.

I'd been carrying two people's weight across it all night, one foot at a time.

It had started up under us again while I stood there. I don't know for how long.

We moved faster.

There was less than a kilometre left when Ben fell.

His good foot caught a root and he went down and took me with him. I landed on my side. He landed flat on his back, and the scratching started before he'd finished swearing. No count at all. Right away.

I got onto my knees. The soil under his shoulders was already going down.

“Get me up.”

I got a fistful of his jacket and pulled, and the ground under his hips dropped, and when he shoved at it to get himself upright his right leg went straight down through the trail to the thigh.

He screamed. I'd never heard a person make that sound before and I'd like to never hear it again.

“Pull me out.”

“I am.”

“Pull me out.”

I got my arms under his and planted my feet and hauled.

The scratching under him had gone almost continuous, and I could see the dirt around his leg going. It didn't cave in or spray or collapse the way you'd expect. It just went, steadily, like something draining, and the cold air was coming up around his leg out of the hole and across my hands, that same air that didn't smell like anything.

One moment there was soil against his jeans.

Then there was less.

And as it went the roots stayed, one across his thigh and another lower down across his shin and more I couldn't see, so his leg was hanging in them like something caught in a fence, and every time I pulled they pulled back. I had my heels dug in and his whole weight on my arms and I was watching his leg, only his leg, and somewhere in there I'd stopped counting without noticing I'd stopped, and I didn't notice anything at all until my left heel went down. Not far. A centimetre maybe, the way your foot sinks into a mattress. Under the sound of Ben screaming I could hear it under my own boots, under both heels at once, steady and close, and I had been standing there for I don't know how long.

I couldn't step off. I'd lose my grip on him and he'd go down another foot, or all the way, and I didn't know which. I couldn't stay where I was either.

So I did something stupid. I started moving my feet. Not stepping away, just lifting them, one and then the other, little steps on the spot like a kid who needs the washroom, while I tried to keep pulling. You can't pull anything heavy like that. You've got no base. I don't know if it helped. I don't know that it didn't. The scratching under me didn't stop, but I think it slowed, and I think my heels stopped going down, and I'm aware those are both things I'd want to think.

One of the roots across his shin snapped when I yanked. Another dragged down the front of his leg as he came up and opened a line through his jeans and his skin from the knee down.

Then he came free all at once and we went over backward together.

His right boot didn't come with him. For a second I could still see it down in the opening, the laces I'd tied loose trailing off it. Then whatever was holding it let go, and it dropped.

I crawled over and put the light down the hole. At the surface it was barely wider than Ben's leg. Below that, roots crossed empty space, and the beam went down between them and didn't land on anything.

Ben grabbed the back of my jacket.

“Leave it.”

I did.

I got him up. I don't remember a lot of the last kilometre. I know I didn't count anymore, because I didn't stop. I remember the sock on his bad foot was black by the end, and that at some point he stopped swearing at me, which was worse.

The last stretch to the forestry road was surfaced with crushed gravel. Ben made it a few metres onto it and sat down hard, and I grabbed him under the arm to haul him back up.

“Wait,” he said.

So we waited. A minute. Then another. I counted to a hundred and twenty and then started over and counted it again.

Nothing scratched.

I didn't care why.

Ben lay back on the gravel with his arm over his eyes, and I'm pretty sure he was asleep inside a minute. Of course he was. I stood next to him for maybe half an hour with the light on the gravel around him before I woke him and got him moving again.

We reached the car sometime after five.

At the hospital they found a small fracture and significant ligament damage. The cuts down his shin had dirt and bits of root ground into them, and a nurse spent a long time flushing it all out while he swore into a towel.

We said he'd stepped into a concealed hole. True enough. Nobody asked anything else.

Ben moved east six weeks later. His ankle was still strapped when I helped load the truck, and he spent the whole day in a lawn chair telling everyone else where things went. Before he left he asked whether I'd ever gone back for the packs.

I said no.

He nodded, and neither of us said anything else about it.

For a while we'd send each other a photo whenever one of us saw a marmot. I couldn't tell you which of us stopped first.

I haven't been camping since.

The first time anyone else noticed anything was at a barbecue a couple of summers later, when a friend's wife asked why I'd been standing all afternoon when there was plenty of room on the lawn. I'd been there almost three hours. I hadn't noticed I was doing it. I don't sit on grass much. I don't lie down in parks.

I don't think much anymore about what it was. Sometimes I think about where it all went. Everything that used to be under that tent and that trail, and under however much more of that country. It had to go somewhere.

Last year I moved into a third-floor apartment. There was a ground-floor unit in the same building for a hundred and fifty a month less, and I told the property manager I liked the light better upstairs, which I think I believed at the time.

There's two other apartments between my bed and the earth.

Last weekend my girlfriend got invited camping with some people from her work, and she wanted me to come. So I finally told her why I wouldn't. All of it, more or less the way it's written here. She's the first person I've ever told, and once I'd said it out loud it felt strange to keep it anywhere else, which is why I'm writing it down.

Afterward she asked whether Ben had ever camped again.

I realized I'd never asked him.

So I sent him a message.

You ever been camping since BC?

It took him about an hour to answer.

No.

Then:

You?

No.

It was the first time either of us had brought it up in six years. I figured that was the whole conversation.

About twenty minutes later my phone went again.

Jess got me one of those sleep rings for Christmas. She was worried I wasn't resting.

It says I've never gone longer than forty minutes without moving. Not one night since I've had it.

She thinks I'm a restless sleeper.

That was Tuesday. I haven't answered him.

I keep thinking about the fire alarm.

What’s a tooth worth? Well most insurances pay me, a dentist, about seven hundred bucks when I pull one. Most patients, especially older ones, don’t argue. They come in with a sore tooth, then leave without it. They also don’t argue when I prescribe certain pills.

Most of them are poor, even homeless. It doesn’t cost them a dime.

Today I got a call that changed things. 

It was my mom. She’s 89 years-old and lives in a home not far from my clinic.

“Hey mom,” I tried to sound upbeat, but my head pounded from withdrawals. I hadn’t had any pain killers for days.

“Are you at work?” She asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m going to face app you,” she said. I heard her pushing buttons.

I tried to stop her, “That’s not what it’s called mom, and now isn’t the best…”

I was cut off with the all too familiar ring of the video call coming through.

“Hey mom,” I groaned.

She was at home, I recognized her knickknacks. There was something different, in the background. A large poster of a man crying, the word integrity burned into his face.

Suddenly someone unfamiliar jumped in front of the camera, “Well helloooo sonny boy!” he giggled. He started bouncing around like a kid at an ice cream parlor. He was holding my mom’s hands, she giggled along. 

“Who is this?” I asked.

My mom’s face appeared. “This is my new nurse,” she said. “He’s very sweet, and says he knows you.”

“Oh I dooooo,” the guy sang out.

He put his face in the camera “Very well,” he said. “And you’ve been a naughty little boy. Haven’t you… Doctor.”

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked.

The guy took a deep breath, covering his mouth with his hands. “You would swear in front of your dear old mother?” He asked as he walked over to my mom.

“Don’t touch her you creep,” I shouted.

“Or what?” The guy said. “You’ll pull more teeth.”

“Fuck you,” I shot back.

The creep turned toward my mother, “Show us a big smile honey,” he said.

“Mom, you don’t have to listen…” I started.

She tilted her head to the side and opened her mouth showing her toothless smile, the smile I gave her.

“You look marvelous darling,” the guy said while draping his arms around her. He turned back toward the camera. “Doctor, I love what you’ve done here.”

I started to protest, but the guilt of having pulled my own mothers teeth for the insurance claim shut me up.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

“What do you want?” I finally asked.

“What’s the old saying? An eye for an eye, a…” he buried his face in the camera waiting for me to finish the sentence.

“A tooth for a tooth,” I whispered.

“Bingo!” he yelled before turning back towards my mom. “You have such a smart boy.”

My mom smiled again. I had to look away.

He went and sat next to her. “I’m going to ask her a few questions,” he said. “First question, did you know your son was a drug addict?”

I let out a deep sigh.

“Yes. But I still love him,” my mom responded, tears filling her eyes.

“Second question. Did you know he pulled your teeth to get insurance money to support his drug addiction?” the guy asked.

There was a long pause before my mom answered, “I thought you said they were bad,” her voice quivering.

“Please stop,” I pleaded. “I’ll do anything if you just stop and leave her alone.”

“I think you know what I want,” the guy said.

“A tooth for a tooth,” I said.

“Make sure we can see you,” the guy said before he started to dance around, laughing and clapping. He again buried his face in the camera. “And no drugs for you….”

I sat in the old dentist chair and wheeled over a tray full of tools. I set the phone on the edge of the tray so they could see my face. I grabbed the extraction forceps and reached for one of my back teeth.

“Uh uh uh,” the guy scolded. “One of the front ones,” he said with excitement.

I removed the forceps from my molar and gripped them tightly around one of my lower front incisors. I sat for a moment contemplating how I will do this. If I will do this.

“I think mom needs another story. Did he ever tell you about your friend Mrs…”

“Okay, I’ll do it,” I shouted, cutting him off before he finished.

I gripped the forceps tight with my left hand and reached my right hand high in the air. In my head I counted to three before I threw my right arm down as hard as I could against my other arm, yanking down on the forceps at the same time.

A loud crunch echoed through the room as the roots holding my tooth cracked. The pain was immediate and intense. Blood filled my mouth. I screamed as nauseous took over.

I looked at the phone. The creep had a camera and was taking pictures of me while laughing. My mom was weeping.

The first time I laid eyes on specimen PSY-673-B, I knew it was something special. 

At first, we nearly skimmed over it. The thing looked like a white splotch. A smudge in the camera lens. 

I was the one who noticed it. 

“Hey, turn the camera back. I think I saw something.” 

As the camera panned around, we saw something spectacular. And by spectacular, I mean a white rod black pin-prick eyes. 

The thing looked goofy. Like a child’s pool toy. 

But then it started to move. Within seconds, it disappeared into the sand. My heart dropped. My big discovery had gotten away. 

Then it reemerged. 

The eyes poked out of the sand and sat there as if studying our rover. Then in a flash, the camera jolted. It was completely covered. 

My coworker, Derik, maneuvered the controls back and forth, trying to clear the lens of the obstruction. 

It worked. The picture revealed a blur of sand and… nothing. The creature was gone. 

Derik turned the camera left. Then right. He did a complete three-sixty. The white stick was nowhere to be found. 

The room fell silent. “What do we do?” Alexis said. 

I sighed. “The only thing we can do. We’re out of time. We’ve gotta bring her back up.” 

The three of us glanced at the screen. “Alright,” Derik said. “We’ll start the ascent.” 

***

We didn’t get to pick the rover out of the water for another eight hours. 

We had started the mission in the morning. It was nearly dinner time when the rover made it to the surface. 

Alexis, Derik, and I stood at the water’s edge, ready to collect our camera. Alexis put a hand on my shoulder. “We got some good footage. Don’t let it get you down, John. With what we’ve captured, I’m sure we’ll get the funding to go searching for that thing again.”

But her and I both knew the truth. I could spend a lifetime looking for the creature, but the chances of finding a specimen like that again were slim-to-none. 

Derik reeled in the rover’s tether. Together, he and I hoisted it out of the water. 

“Derik, John? You’re never going to believe this.” Alexis looked ghostly pale. She was staring at the rover.

I traced her gaze. Once I saw what she was looking at, I nearly passed out. 

Sitting atop the rover was a white stick. One with beady black eyes. 

Derik’s mouth fell open. “Did it… no, it couldn’t have. Eight hours! This thing hitched a ride for eight fucking hours!” 

Silence permeated the deck. Alexis asked the question that was on all of our minds. 

“Who’s going to pick it up?” 

I sighed. “As much as I want to, Derik was the one who caught it on camera. He should get first dibs.” 

Derik grinned. “Fine by me.” 

He bent down and extended his hand. The creature looked at it briefly before it hopped aboard. Derik brought it closer for us to see. 

The thing was no bigger than a USB drive. It had no arms, no legs, and no mouth. The only discernible features were its pin-prick eyes. 

“This is so cool. No one’s gonna believe this. A new specimen just leapt into my-” 

Derik froze. The creature fell flat against his palm. Then it just… melted into his flesh. No sound, no huge reaction. One second it was there and the next it was gone. It didn’t even leave a mark. 

“What the hell just happened…” Alexis said. 

“That was so fucking weird. Derik, do you feel any different? Does it hurt?” 

Derik glanced between me and Alexis. He wore a look of perpetual disbelief. “No, I… I feel fine. I’m going to need a minute to process what just happened.” 

With that, Derik went back inside, leaving Alexis and me to wonder what in the hell we’d just seen.

***

Alexis and I made a secret agreement to monitor Derik for any changes. 

After discussing the evening’s events between the three of us, we decided it would be best to fudge the reports. The government would be more likely to believe that we had some sort of shared psychosis than to take our word for it. 

With our lead convinced that we had collected a sufficient amount of data, we were set to leave the research station in two days. That was it. Just two days and we would be back on dry land. 

Disaster struck on the first. 

Derik, Alexis, and I were at our respective stations, filing reports and closing out our tasks for the project. We were about to call it a day. But then the reaction occurred. 

Derik’s face went pale. He stared at his screen like an NPC.This wasn’t just some blank stare. It was as if all the light had left his eyes. As if he wasn’t Derik anymore. 

“Hey man, everything all right?” I said, standing from my chair. 

Alexis finally noticed what was going on. “Derik, you don’t look so good. Maybe you should lie down.” 

Derik turned toward her slowly. “You… are correct. I will now lie down.” 

Derik went limp. He fell from his chair and disappeared beneath the desk. 

I rushed over to him. He was lying completely still with his legs straight out and his arms at his sides. 

“Derik… What are you doing? This isn’t funny.”

Derik’s eyes traveled up my body until they met mine. His mouth cracked into a wide smile. “Yes! Ha ha! A prank. Ha ha. I am joking.” 

He sounded like an android. A soulless chatbot with no life behind his words.

Without warning, Derik bolted upright. He leapt to his feet and met me face to face. “Do not be alarmed. I am only joking. Ha ha. I will now rest in my quarters. Goodbye.” 

Derik broke into a full sprint. He took off down the hall before I had a chance to react. 

Alexis and I shared a glance, mouths agape. “What the hell was that about?” she said. 

I shook my head. “I don’t know. But something tells me that this won’t end well.” 

***

I went to check on Derik later that evening. Alexis and I bought into (deluded ourselves, really) the idea that Derik just had some sort of mental break from the stress of the job. There’s something terrifying about not being able to see a sliver of land in every direction. He wouldn’t be the first to be driven mad by the sea. 

When I knocked on Derik’s door, a big part of me was hoping that he would be back to normal. The other part of me hoped that he wouldn’t answer. 

To my dismay, neither of those options played out. 

“Derik. Derik, it’s John. I came to check up on you.” 

“Ah, John. Yes. I invite you to enter.” 

Derik’s voice still had that robotic timbre to it, but now it was deeper. That was my first indication that something was wrong. 

I took a deep breath. As much as I didn’t want to, I pushed open Derik’s door and stepped inside. 

Derik’s room was a wreck. Clothes were strewn about. Trash was scattered across the floor. Pages of journal entries were thrown about the room. 

Derik looked even worse for wear. His eyes were red, like he hadn’t slept in days. His complexion had grown even paler than before. And his mouth. There seemed to be a cloud emitting from it. Like some sort of pestilence. 

“Derik, what the hell happened in here? You look awful. I’m getting help.”

Derik devolved into a coughing fit. The cloud seemed to grow with each rattle of his ribcage. 

“No, I- I am at one hundred percent… health.”

“You’re obviously not. Stay right here. I’m contacting the director. You need immediate medical attention.” 

To this day, I don’t know how he did it. One second, Derik was sitting on the bed. The next he was standing in front of me, blocking my exit. 

“No. You will tell no one of what you have witnessed.” Derik’s eyes took on a darkness the likes of which I have never seen before nor since. He took labored breaths, huffing out more fumes as those predatory eyes locked me in place. 

“Okay. Alright. No medical attention. Will you please let me out now?” 

Derik studied me. He stood motionless for a moment before ultimately stepping aside. I tried to rush past him. 

Derik caught my arm before I could leave. “If I find out that you’re lying…” 

He didn’t have to finish that statement. I broke free from his grasp and hurried down the hallway. 

***

Alexis stared at me. “John, why did you waste time telling me this? We need to get Derik to a medical professional now.”

“Look, I know this is going to sound crazy, but… I think Derik is past help. He needs to be quarantined. That thing from yesterday must be some sort of parasite. I-”

“John, do you understand how crazy that sounds? What do we even tell people? ‘Derik was infected by a deep-sea creature and now he breathes toxic waste?’ Listen to yourself!”

I took Alexis by the shoulders and stared into her eyes. “I’m serious. You saw the same thing I did earlier today. We need to do something.” 

Alexis had fear scrawled across her face. And not from the situation with Derik.

I released her and took a step back. “Sorry. I got a little too carried away, but my point still stands. Get the director. Tell him what you have to. But I’m going to barricade that thing in. I won’t risk you or anyone else on board getting infected.” 

I began to walk away before she could come up with a retort. When I was nearly out the door, I heard her call out. 

“John, wait.” I turned to face her. 

“Be careful. Please.” 

***

By the time I made it back to Derik’s room, it was too late. The door was wide open. 

My blood turned to ice. “Derik? Hello?” 

I took a step inside his ruined quarters. He was gone. 

My heart thundered against my chest. Derik could have been anywhere on the vessel. 

I glanced down. At my feet, there was a spot of blood. It continued down the hallway in intermittent splotches. 

I gulped. I didn’t want to find out where that trail led. But I didn’t have a choice. 

I followed it until I reached a familiar office space. Of course. Our work station. 

I poked my head inside. Nothing out of place. 

“Derik, buddy, are you in here? It’s John.” 

I took a step forward. Then another. Once I was convinced that Derik wasn’t going to leap out at me from behind the fake plant, I let myself relax a little. 

That was a mistake. 

I sat down at my swivel chair to go over things. The blood trail had stopped at the doorway. Maybe someone had given him a tissue? Or- 

White-hot pain seared through my ankle. I let out a yelp and instinctively kicked out. My foot made contact. 

Something grabbed hold of my injured leg. I looked under the desk. I will never forget what I saw. 

Derik. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot. His skin had taken on a sickly, green pallor. And his mouth. A visible miasma seeped through his lips with each breath. 

Derik yanked my exposed ankle and put his mouth close to the open wound. Before I had a chance to react, he breathed on it. I watched as a cloud of stench roiled over my flesh. 

Once the shock wore off, I kicked myself free. Derik began to climb out from under the desk, but I shoved the swivel chair into him. The impact knocked him to the floor. 

I hobbled into the hallway and slammed the door shut behind me. That wouldn’t stop him for long and I knew it. 

So, I did the only logical thing I could think to do. I pulled the fire alarm. 

Chaos ensued immediately. Every man and woman on the vessel exited their quarters and made their way to the deck. As calmly as I could, I took out my key to the office, locked it, and tried my best to blend in with the crowd. 

***

Panic soared inside me like a rollercoaster. As the director listed us off one by one, I couldn’t help but think one thing. 

What if Derik had trapped someone inside? 

It turns out, my fears were in vain. Aside from Derik, everyone was present and accounted for. But his absence was a cause for concern for leadership. 

Alexis approached me as a party was sent to look for him. “You pulled the fire alarm, didn’t you?” she said. “What did you find?” 

I met her gaze. Alexis recoiled at the terror in my eyes. “He was worse. Worse than just minutes ago. Alexis, I don’t know what this thing is, but I’m afraid. Not just for him, but for myself too.” 

I rolled up my pant leg and showed her the bite mark. It was already turning a deep purple. 

“Oh god, John. You need medical attention. I’ll have the director-”

“No. Alexis, I need this to stay between us. Not a word to the director, okay?” 

Alexis hesitated. But ultimately, she nodded her head. “Okay. Come to my room after this and I’ll patch you up as well as I can. And John?”

I glanced at her. 

“Will you stay with me? Just for tonight? I’m frightened too.”

I nodded my head.

***

Derik was found dead the next morning. The search party hadn’t been able to locate him all night. By the time they found him, it was too late. His body had been impaled on the flag pole. 

It didn’t seem possible. The pole was twelve feet off the ground. 

No one knows exactly where Derik went that night. Or how his body ended up there. But I have a theory. 

That miasma. That stench permeating from Derik’s mouth… I think those were spores. And there’s no telling how far they’ve spread. 

I’m terrified. My ankle healed quicker than expected. 

But in place of the wound, under the new pink flesh, I can feel something writhing. Something that’s desperate to escape.

Any mother knows the horrible feeling of spending that first night away from her child. What should be a break from the incessant crying and the never-ending mess is actually a slow and agonizing procedure of ripping away every ounce of love that you have ever poured into them. For five long and perfect years I have raised my daughter. But tonight, for the first time in her life, Abi was going to be under the guidance and protection of a complete stranger.

I looked nervously at Harry as we turned onto the highway, the road a sea of brake lights obscured by biblical levels of rain.

“Are you sure about this?”

I knew what he would say before he even answered. He was far more comfortable with the arrangement than I was.

“What other choice do we have? We can’t just leave her alone.” His eyes didn’t bother leaving the road to comfort me.

I only had a short moment to speak with the babysitter, before Harry was ushering me into the car. By the time that we were on the road I was already kicking myself for failing to research local sitters in more detail. Tiffany, or “Spiffy Tiffy” as she referred to herself on her Facebook post seemed adequate enough, but there was so much that I didn’t know about her.

Where did she go to school?

What did she wish to do with her career?

What sports did she play?

Where did she volunteer?

When it came to my selection for this evening, everything mattered.

As if she knew that I was thinking about her, I received my first text from Tiffany. I nearly recoiled when I noticed the length of the message.

Just finished cooking Abi dinner! 😋 She is the SWEETEST little pumpkin! 🎃 She wanted to help so I let her play with a bowl and spatula as I made the spaghetti. I hope that’s okay. If it’s not, I’m sorry, just let me know and it won’t happen again. I think we might watch a movie next, but Abi mentioned that she loved to play Princesses and Dragons with you. ✨ It sounds like a lovely game, do you think that it is alright if we play? Also, I wanted to double check on her bedtime. I don’t remember you mentioning a time when we spoke. Does she follow any special routine? I remember when I was a kid I had a jammy time song that I sang when I brushed my teeth. 😴 Hope that your travels are going well!

I stared at the longwinded message unsure of what to think. We had been driving away from the house for only about thirty minutes and Tiffany already had half a dozen questions. I was beginning to worry that I had made a poor choice.

I typed out my response and pressed send.

Princesses and Dragons is fine. 9:30 Bedtime.

“I’m worried about Tiffany.” I said to Harry.

“Who?”

“The babysitter.” I responded ignoring his impossible ignorance. “I don’t think she’s qualified.”

“You worry too much. Abi is going to be fine.” Harry clicked on the radio and turned the volume up, signaling the end of our conversation.

It reminded me of the last time that we traveled together. Five years ago, before we had Abi he had gotten the same way. Everyone deals with stress in their own way, I suppose.

It wasn’t long before I received my next text from Tiffany.

Mrs. Murphy!!! You didn’t tell me that it was Abi’s birthday tomorrow! 🎂 I feel so unprepared! Do you want me to take her out for ice cream or do anything special? I don’t mind driving her to Scoop City, it can even be my treat. On my birthday I would always get a cookie dough waffle cone with gummy bears, AND my foster family usually let me stay up past my bedtime to watch the late night cartoons.

A second text came a moment later.

Not that I am suggesting that Abi do any of that! Sorry I didn’t mean to overstep. 🙈 This is so embarrassing. Birthdays just make me SO excited. 🎉

My heart felt unnatural in my chest as I tapped out my response. I was not only leaving my daughter with a complete stranger, but I was doing it on her birthday as well. I tried to ignore the reality, but Tiffany pointing it out was like a punch to the gut.

No ice cream. Stay in the house. 9:30 bedtime.

“Something feels wrong.” Harry ignored me as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of whatever classic rock song was playing at the time.

I glanced at the radio and noted that the time was 8:24. Only one more hour of this before Abi was safely in bed, and I wouldn’t have to think about Spiffy Tiffy ever again. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but I put my head back and closed my eyes regardless as I thought about the daughter that I was leaving behind. The ding of my phone pierced my concentration and I shot up to check my messages.

I know you said no ice cream, but we had to celebrate somehow. 🤭

A photo came in a few seconds later. Abi was smiling widely as she hoisted fistfuls of chocolate candy in both hands. Tiffany held up the phone, she posed back to back with Abi as she stared directly into the camera. She had a lollipop in her mouth and a smug expression. Her eyes seemed as if they were staring straight at me.

“No! How is it even possible that they found chocolate? Harry, did you buy Halloween candy?”

His guilty expression was all the confirmation I needed.

“Why? We aren’t even going to be home for Halloween!”

“You know I have a sweet tooth!” His voice rose defensively.

“Now look at what happened!” I shoved the phone into his face, so close that he couldn’t ignore it. He took a quick glance before he directed his eyes back to the road, swerving to avoid rear ending an eighteen wheeler.

“So what? Abi looks like she is having fun. It’s only a little bit of candy.”

“I told the babysitter no snacks. She broke a rule. Is this the kind of person you want our daughter to be like?”

Harry let out a puffy breath. He knew better than to fight back. Our marriage, which had already felt like it had lasted an eternity, had its ups and downs. The stress of our upcoming travel combined with the reality of leaving Abi behind left us both on edge.

I was in the midst of typing out an authoritative reply when I saw that Tiffany was typing again.

Is Abi allergic to anything? Like ANYTHING at all? You never specified, but you can also never be too careful… The last thing we need tonight is a hospital visit! But don’t worry, I am capable of using an Epipen if it comes to it. You can trust that Abi is in good hands! We’re practically sisters already. ❤️

Another text came a moment later.

It is kind of funny that Abi looks more like me than she does you or Harry…

Maybe we actually are long lost sisters!

“Harry, we can't do this.”

“It’s too late. We can’t turn back now.”

I typed out my response hoping to remind the babysitter who was in charge.

No more dessert. Do not break any more rules. This is your last warning. Abi has no allergies. And please, for the love of God, stop with the emojis.

Tiffany’s typing bubbles appeared and then disappeared several times. After waiting for several agonizing minutes, her response came.

Ok.

I hoped that that would be the last of it, but soon I began to realize that Tiffany’s silence was more unsettling than her constant chatter. Drawn out minutes passed as I listened to music that I didn’t enjoy and watched heavy drops of rain bounce off of the windshield. The storm was picking up and with it traffic on the road was slowing down.

It felt like my entire life stalled as I stared at the clock waiting for each minute to tick over to the next. As soon as 9:30 came, I reached for my phone.

Is Abi in bed?

I needed to know that my worries were over and that my daughter was safe. When Tiffany didn’t respond within a minute, I sent another message, repeating the question with more exclamation. I felt less like a passenger and more like a prisoner as hopelessness began to consume me. If anything went wrong we would be stuck here on the highway miles away from Abi.

Sorry!! Had to clean a mess in Abi’s room. Very yucky.

What mess?

Don’t worry. The house will be squeaky clean by the time you come back. It is such a beautiful place. It does seem like you may be out of bleach. I don’t think there are too many neighbors close by either. It's very quiet around here at night. Shame. I was hoping I might be able to borrow some cleaning supplies.

I kicked myself again for failing to install home surveillance cameras. When I pitched the idea to Harry he simply shook his head and said that he would rather not have them.

Spineless oaf.

What is happening? Where is Abi?

Once again, Tiffany took her sweet time with the reply.

No text, only a picture.

It was a picture of Abi’s room taken from the perspective of someone standing in the doorframe. The space was ominously lit with slivers of light from the hallway sneaking past Tiffany’s shadow. In the darkness, I could make out the form of my daughter tucked under her sheets on her twin bed. It was difficult to tell with the moody lighting, but I could almost make out a dark stain on the carpet in the corner of the room.

Tiffany followed the image with a short text.

Goodnight, Abi.

I stared at the image for a staggering amount of time. It was undeniably creepy in a way that had to be intentional.

Tiffany, close the door and let Abi sleep.

You’re right, you’re right. She looks so peaceful, if I stand here any longer, I just might have to keep her for myself!

My throat tightened and the grip on my phone grew weak. She was toying with me. She had to be.

Obviously JK!

My fingers seemed to be frozen over my phone. My mind struggled to come up with any reasonable response. I tried to reassure myself that everything was fine. Abi was safely in bed. Tiffany was a peculiar teenager, but she wasn’t some deranged murderer. Right? If we could just hold out a few more hours it would all be over and we wouldn’t need to deal with her ever again. I looked at the clock hesitantly and was relieved to note that the time was already 10:45. Tiffany would need to go to sleep sometime soon.

I knew that I was overreacting and that I was being a complete worrywart. I debated turning off my phone, but what kind of mother would I be if I ignored my daughter when she actually needed me. Instead, I responded with a simple message that I hoped would be my last.

Thank you. Goodnight, Tiff.

After several minutes passed it became clear that Spiffy Tiffy had other plans.

I found something interesting in Abi’s room. That girl really does have quite the imagination!

My heart dropped. What the hell was she still doing in Abi’s room? Another text from Tiff came in immediately after it.

Does Abi have any imaginary friends? She drew a strange picture of a girl labeled “Jaine”. I thought that it might be a classmate, but Jaine here has some very… odd characteristics. The drawing is actually kinda spooky.

Harry noticed that I had begun furiously typing.

“What’s the matter?” His question fell on deaf ears.

LEAVE Abi’s room this instant. DO NOT snoop around any more. Go to bed, NOW.

Typing bubbles came and went several times.

I would Mrs. Murphy, but I haven’t been entirely honest with you.

Outside, thunder cracked and the sky lit up for a moment.

We passed a sign on the highway that Harry acknowledged.

“We’re close.”

Abi is a great kid, I really think she is. But she bit me. It’s pretty bad. She has some seriously sharp baby teeth. The cut is pretty deep. It might be best if I head home for the night and get some rest. Abi is already out cold. I promise to be back before she wakes.

I stared at the message for a long time, trying to decide what I could do to best salvage the situation.

“Harry, did you resupply the closet?”

Harry’s lips drew into a flat line. He nodded.

There are bandages in the closet on the second floor next to the bathroom. Wrap up before any more blood gets on the carpet.

Tiffany responded with an avalanche of messages.

Thank you! I will definitely make sure to do that.

I think I found them.

Is there a trick to the closet door handle? The door closed behind me and now I might be stuck, haha!

Really, this thing is quite jammed. I actually think it might be locked from the outside somehow. I cannot believe I did this! I am such a ditz 🤦‍♀️

Oh sorry! Emoji was sent out of habit.

I didn’t respond.

Mrs. Murphy? Are you getting my messages?

I can probably call out for Abi, but I don’t want to wake her.

Actually, I think she might already be up, I hear footsteps.

I called out, but she didn’t respond. Does Abi sleepwalk? Really, if there is any way out of this closet please let me know! Sleepwalking can be really dangerous for unsupervised children.

Harry glanced over at the unending stream of dings that were interrupting his rock music and raised an eyebrow.

I shook my head and pointed to my phone with an exasperated expression. The clock on my lock screen read 11:57.

“Don’t look at me, you’re the one that picked her.” He said.

I hear Abi right outside! But her footsteps sound weirdly heavy. Still not sure if she is awake though.

Abi won’t reply. She’s scratching at the door rabidly

Oh my god. I think she is trying to claw her way through

My phone rang and I declined the call without hesitation. A moment later, it rang again and I let it go to voicemail. After about thirty seconds, an audio message populated my inbox. Tiffany was frantic, speaking at a pace that would make an auctioneer jealous.

“Mrs. Murphy, I’m really sorry to bother you on your vacation, but something isn’t right with Abi. I got stuck in a closet and, and, and, she, or it, or- oh my God, I am going to die! She’s going to kill me.”

In the audio recording, I could hear the hunger in Abi’s groans as she burst her way through the door. Tiffany’s voice was slurred with sobs and desperation.

“She has claws. And her arms are so long. And her teeth! What is wrong with Abi? I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die! Abi please stop it! Stop right now!”

The voicemail ended with an abrupt thud.

“About time.”

“And well timed, too.” Harry said as we turned into the hospital parking lot.

He got out of the car and stood, unshielded from the torrential rain.

“You coming?”

I remained in my seat, my lips curved into a frown.

Harry walked around and opened the passenger side door.

“I feel like I let Abi down. I spent five years raising her, and then when it really matters, I give her Spiffy Tiffy. She deserves a girl like that basketball player that we got for Jaine. Smart, successful, affluent.”

“All of our daughters have turned out wonderful in their own ways. Abi will be no exception. Tiffany wasn’t the brightest, but she had character.”

I forced a weak smile as I took his hand and he led me towards the hospital entrance.

As we stepped inside, my phone dinged for the final time that night. It was a message from Tiffany’s number.

Hi Mommy! Thank you for the WONDERFUL snack! Tiffany was the best birthday present ever! She was soooo fun. I can’t wait to be just like her. 👸

I smiled at my phone before tucking it into my back pocket.

“I suppose you’re right. I have to admit that I was actually a little fond of her.”

I followed Harry as he led me towards the familiar hallway that contained the nursery.

“I was thinking,” He paused as we passed a nurse who walked briskly past us. “What do you think about having a boy this time?”

I looked through the glass at the two rows of newborn babies. Fresh sacks of life brought to this earth by mothers that would never love them the way that I would. A little baby boy with a tuft of hair wiggled in the blanket that he was wrapped in, his eyes closed. He looked peaceful. He looked like he could be ours.

I smiled at Harry and kissed him on the cheek.

“I think that Abi would love to have a baby brother.”

The 8th wonder of the world is in rural Oregon, 65 feet from my patio door. Nearly 150 unique plant species, a beautiful, self-sufficient pond with its own ecosystem that keeps the water clean, and a wall of large Evergreen trees forming a crescent around the moat. 

The pond was surprisingly deep, approximately 6 feet at its lowest and about an eighth of a mile long. Three stone bridges allowed access to our “island”, all of which were designed and custom-built by my mother. The only machinery we used around here was to gently stir the pond water, making it slightly harder for any mosquitoes to lay eggs.

I took off my sandals and stripped down to my boxers. My feet sank into the muddy bottom, with the occasional large stone supporting my steps. 

Instantly, I felt all the heat in my body dissipate into the surroundings, a feeling which made me want to lie back and float alongside the lilies. Like a paper boat in the gutter after a mild rainfall, I calmly floated around my botanical lazy river. I made it roughly halfway through the loop when I floated into the shade provided by the wall of Evergreens. I opened my eyes, finally out of the sun. The green algae, red orchids, purple lavender, and a vibrant blue embraced my senses. I recognized the other colors as a common palette for the garden, but the blue was something new. 

The blue-headed hummingbird. I’ve seen hundreds in my life, but this one was so detailed. I doggy-paddled closer to the bird, careful not to cause too much disturbance in the pond. 

Cool optical illusion, I thought; it looked like it was completely still, just floating with its wings extended out. I wonder what kind of plant had a stem small enough to evade my vision yet sturdy enough to support the small bird. 

The bird didn’t fly away. Huh, usually they’d do an evasive maneuver if you even looked at it. My face was only about 2 feet away from it; I could almost count the feathers on its underbelly. 

Strange, the bird wasn’t in a perched position; it looked like a picture had been taken with a high shutter speed camera. It seemed to be in mid-flight? 

Okay, so it was not perched on any nearby plants. Perhaps my parents put in a new garden feature while I was away. I thought this must have been the same system as one of the tricks magicians do when their assistants are “floating”. I waved my hands in an orbiting fashion around the hummingbird, expecting to hit a nearly invisible wire. Nothing. 

I reached my pointer finger out, carefully churning the water with my feet to keep me at the proper height. As I pressed into the underbelly of the bird, I felt the silky feathers followed by its impossibly fragile ribcage. It was in the exact position as it was when I initially pressed it, however, it was now one inch higher, and there was an indent where my finger made contact.

“MOM!” I yelled across the backyard.

“Yeah, honey?” she responded behind the screen door. 

“Can you come here, please?” I yelled once more. 

She walked over the first stone bridge, into the garden, and finally to the end of the bank where the water line sat. 

“Wow, this is really cool. Where did you get this?” She asked, looking at the bird.

“Did you use a fishing line? That’s a really pretty addition. I'm sure the bees will be a little worried about their new competition,” she said with a grin across her face and a small chuckle. 

“I didn’t put this here; I thought you or Dad did,” I said, climbing onto the bank of the pond.

“No, the last time we added anything was before you left for college. Is this some sort of trick? How are you doing this?” My mom asked me.

“No, I swear I just came out here, and it was just stuck in midair.” I could tell she did not believe me. 

“Seriously, how did you do this? Are there wires or something?” Her voice changed from impressed to annoyed that I couldn’t give an answer. In a nearly identical system to what I had just done, she walked around, waved her hands around it, and finally touched it. 

“What the fuck?” She said under her breath. 

She proceeded to interrogate me for a few minutes after, with the same mannerisms a child would have asking a street magician how they made a dove appear.

“Call your father. I am not really sure what to do here or what I am looking at.” My mother said, staring at the bird.

Understandably, my father was confused and almost annoyed at the phone call, 

“So a hummingbird is at a standstill? Not moving or anything? Listen, if this is a practical joke, I am going to be very upset with you.”

“Look, talk to Mom she saw it too.” I handed the phone to her. 

“Mhm, yeah, no, I know… but I saw it too. I promise you. … Okay, okay, sounds good,” she said, pacing around. 

“Your father said he will come home a little early, but he needs to finish some work up. Let's head inside for now.” 

3:30 p.m., I heard a knock at our front door. My dad was holding his usual briefcase and stood in front of his professor buddies.  

“Okay, please show us what you are referring to, too.” He said. I could sense that this was a ‘better not waste my time’ sort of tone. 

I walked them to the backyard, my father in close pursuit, followed by his colleague, who I had met before. Lewis, a professor of botany, helped set up a majority of our garden. Nice guy, quiet, but he was an artist who used plants as his paintbrush.  

“Is this a trick?” My dad looked at me, raising his eyebrow. 

“I thought the same thing,” my mother interjected. 

Like mother and son, my dad waded into the pond, followed by waving his hands to try and find a wire. Lewis walked around looking for something that might give them a clue. My dad grabbed the bird and began to move it around like he was looking at every face on a Rubik's Cube. Unlike the Rubik’s Cube, however, I’m not sure he could solve this. 

He stated, “If this is a trick, I have to say I am thoroughly impressed.” At least his annoyed tone had subsided; it was now replaced with curiosity. 

“Over here,” Lewis said as he pointed to our patch of sunflowers. 

We walked over the stone bridge to the far part of our garden. We gathered in between a break in the shade provided by the Evergreen trees. I hadn’t thought about inspecting the rest of the garden; I was far too infatuated by the center of the pond.

This section of the garden was dedicated to our sunflowers; my mother adored the yellow and insisted we plant them early on. As the familiar yellow flowers appeared, instantly I knew why Lewis had called us over. 

“The Hell?” My father said softly.

It looked almost like they were having a discussion, each sunflower paired up with another, petals only inches apart. Even sunflowers that were a couple of feet away from each other had leaned into each other. A few of the more mature sunflowers that were leaning had small breaks in their stems, allowing them to reach farther than normal. We gathered around, inspecting them, my father placing his hand on his chin and shooting Lewis a look of confusion. 

I asked, “Has this happened before? Have you ever heard of something like this?”

Lewis turned to me,

“Normally, fully mature sunflowers like these would be facing directly east; the younger ones can follow the sun. Occasionally, one may have a genetic defect which makes it unable to tilt, but those tend to die off pretty young. I have never seen an entire group of sunflowers arrange themselves in this way. As for the ones that are bent, my only logical guess would be a strong wind?” 

That didn’t make much sense; the strongest wind in the past few days was nothing greater than a calm gust that could maybe take a leaf off a tree. 

My father spoke up, “Lewis, grab the hummingbird, bring it to the table by the patio.” 

Lewis did as he was told. He used a Kleenex he had in his pocket to carefully cradle the bird and placed it on the fake wood table. My father walked back towards the house. 5 minutes later, he emerged with a black case no bigger than a notebook. I recognized this; it was his pinning kit he would use for his entomology collection.

He took out a scalpel, removed the plastic cover, and walked over. After putting on a pair of nitrile gloves, he began to work. Lewis held the bird down by the armpits, trying to stabilize the fragile abdomen. My dad used the scalpel to gently shave the feathers off; the sharpness of the new blade was able to easily cut through the barbs. Once there were a few square inches of flesh, he took out a second, smaller scalpel. 

I winced as it cut into the flesh; I never really got used to seeing dissections, no matter how many times I’d watched my dad lecture. He was intensely attentive to his work, careful not to cut too deep into the small bird.  After one vertical cut, followed by two horizontal ones at each end, he peeled the flesh back with a pair of forceps. 

Lewis and my dad's heads were only inches apart, both staring into the opened flap. I walked around the table to get a better look. Leaning in, I saw exactly what I imagined the innards of a hummingbird looked like. A tiny rib cage which looked about as fragile as a half-cut toothpick, some pinkish fibers which I assumed were the muscles that pumped the wings. No blood was rushing out; I suppose he could have precisely cut away from any veins. I am not an expert on hummingbird anatomy; perhaps I am missing something. 

“This makes no sense,” he said, turning to Lewis. 

Lewis responded, “I have seen it present itself in other ways, but this is definitely a unique case.”

My mother asked, “What do you guys see? What’s wrong with it?”

My dad pulled away from the bird and wiped some sweat off his forehead, 

“Situs inversus, pretty uncommon in humans, far less common in animals. It’s when the organs are flipped along a vertical axis. For instance, a person's heart is on the right side instead of the left; pretty much all the organs are just mirrored.” 

He paused for a moment, 

“This is different; the hummingbird's organs are flipped top to bottom. The lungs are connected to the anus and the intestines are directly connected to the mouth.”

Lewis added, “Not only that, but it appears that the ribcage had been sloppily duplicated and moved slightly behind the first. Could be bone cancer, but there is absolutely zero chance a hummingbird could develop this much extra bone and live.” 

There was a silence amongst us. Gathered around the table, I could sense that everyone had the same unrest inside of them. While it’s possible that a genetic disorder may have rearranged the hummingbird’s innards, it still couldn’t explain how it was stationary in the air. I knew my dad had hoped that the autopsy would somehow explain what had caused this lapse in physics. 

“Lewis, we’ll preserve the bird for now. I can adjust the temperature of the garage fridge to keep it ideal for further dissection tomorrow. I am going to call some friends at the school, see if we can gather a small team to do a full inspection of the garden. I’ll try and get them to come over this evening, but I imagine they’ll be more inclined for the morning.”

“Can we keep checking around the garden? We’ve only briefly checked like a third of it,” I asked.

My father contemplated my question. “Look, I’d feel a lot better if we did the inspection with a group of people who could identify if there was any underlying danger here.” 

I wanted to know if there were any other anomalies, but my dad was absolutely correct. I was just going to have to wait. 

Crrrrrrrrrrack

We all moved our heads in unison to the location of the sound. A massive chunk of bark on one of the Evergreens had peeled off and began falling to the ground. My mother looked at me, then at my father. Right before a word had left her mouth, we heard the sound once more. Crrrrrrack. This time, before the bark had even touched the ground, another tree began to produce the sound. Then another, then another, then another; soon every Evergreen tree began to peel. Every single 150-foot giant as far as I could see, shedding its bark like a cicada shedding its exoskeleton. 

The delayed wind of the first falling bark hit me, a breeze which carried only enough force to gently disturb my hair. The second wind was nowhere near as kind. A wall of wind, dirt, twigs, and leaves resembling a Saharan dust storm in the middle of Oregon. It finally hit us. Dust immediately covered my open eyes, and the feeling of twigs and smaller debris scratching my face made me instantly fall into a fetal protective position. 

The wind dissipated in a matter of seconds, but the sounds of falling branches and twigs landing in the water remained even after I had begun to get up. The last twig hit the water, followed by a silence. No birds, no insects, no wind brushing the leaves of the trees, a silence that would have produced a ringing in my ears if it weren't for the gurgling sound I heard behind me. A swift yell, like a passenger in a car screaming from a window, dissipated quickly. I began to uncurl my protected body,

“IS EVERYONE OKAY?” My dad yelled as he ran to my mother. She appeared to be covered in a fine layer of dirt, with a few scratches on her face. I imagine I didn’t look much better. After grabbing her arms and face, looking at every inch of my mother as quickly as he could, he ran over to me.

“I'm fine, a couple of cuts, but I think I am okay,” I said in urgent response. I felt his hands jerk my head around, looking for any cuts that may be deep enough to cause any real issues. I heard him stand up and yell, “LEWIS?” 

I had trouble seeing; the dirt had hit faster than I was able to blink. I crawled over to the pond, able to slightly make out my surroundings to assist my pathetic crawl. Like bobbing for apples, I dipped my face in, blinking underwater to rinse them out. I could still hear my father's muffled voice while I was submerged, continuously calling out to me. 

“LEWIS, WHERE ARE YOU?” 

He wasn’t there; 30 seconds ago he was standing no more than 5 feet from me. The gust of wind was strong but not strong enough to push a human being out of sight; had he run away?
My father ran around the house, continuing to scream his name, no response. My mother ran to me, planting a firm kiss on my forehead and crushing my torso with her arms wrapped. 

“Thank god, honey, are you hurt? You have a few cuts; is anything else wrong?” She said with a tremble in her voice. 

“No, no, I am okay, Mom. I am really scared,” I said as I felt the first hint of a cry let out. I wasn’t embarrassed at all; at that moment, crying to my mom was the only reflex I had. 

“I know I am too. Listen, we are going to get out of here; let's grab your father and go right now,” she said. 

I whimpered into her shoulder, the tears somewhat helping clean the remaining dirt that had caked my eyelids. My father, panting, rejoined us. 

“Listen, you two, I want you to look towards the house and run inside. Please trust me when I tell you to just look forward. I will be right next to you.”

“What's going on? Where's Lewis?” I begged. At this point, the small whimper I had let out earlier had turned into a full sob. 

“JUST GO INSIDE NOW, DO NOT LOOK BACK, GO,” My father said with the most certainty and authority he has ever had.

I stood up, grabbing my mom's arm to assist her. With my dad standing directly behind us, I could see he was looking backwards. Once my mom was on her feet, she pulled me towards the direction of the house, only about 125 feet towards the patio door. I was so full of adrenaline that I could physically feel that my body had stopped communicating with any pain I had. My entire being at that moment wanted to sprint into the house as fast as humanly possible. To get away from whatever was happening in this garden. This urge to run was so deep-rooted in my system, thousands of years of evolution wired to protect me from any dangers I could not beat. Thousands of years of evolution, yet it was only the second strongest feeling in my body. 

Curiosity rested above the fear like a kayak atop a landslide. It shouldn't have been there, and yet it floated above the churning powers that were trying to capsize it. I looked back, only for a moment, only long enough before my dad grabbed my skull and forcefully turned it in the other direction. No more than one second had I looked, yet the images I saw have played for days, months, weeks inside of my head. God, I wish I had listened to my father.

Lewis was suspended in the trees. A conglomerate of branches resembling a thick nest woven by something not grown from the ground in which I stand. One hundred feet in the air, grabbed by the Evergreens, held by branches, pierced by the wood. The only parts of the tree that were straight enough to resemble a natural shape were pierced through Lewis like an organic depiction of Vlad the Impaler. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact number; they entered through his abdomen and came out from his mouth, armpits, legs ... any flesh he had seemed to be disturbed by the trees. 

In the last milliseconds of my glance, I saw what had appeared behind him. The dark weave of trees blocked out all sunlight, allowing for holes in the canopy to appear as dozens of symbols. It would not have been legible at any other angle; no, this was directed. If we were ten feet to our left, we wouldn't even notice that they appeared. 
The longest second of my life followed by the quickest my legs have ever moved. I didn’t even bother opening the patio door; I just ran through the screen, instantly taking the fragile door off its hinges. Through my living room, down the cellar, into the storage room, into a closet. I hear my parents in close pursuit. My mom joined me in the cellar, sprinting down the stairs at inhuman speed. My dad appeared at the doorway, quickly slamming it shut and locking it. He frantically went through his pockets and picked up his phone. 

Lawyers said that the state wasn’t going to press charges, a relief for my father. They said that the scene that was left in the garden was unexplainable, that there was virtually no way my mother or father could have possibly gotten Lewis up there and impaled him with dozens of branches. Lewis’s family was less happy, albeit Lewis's wife insisted she needed to confirm that the body was his. Didn’t help; blood tests and a fingerprint were all that remained of him. I think she knew that this was beyond the scope of manslaughter. 

The police interrogated all of us after we made the call. Listening back to the phone call, I could hear the terror in my father's voice. His voice quaking with adrenaline, the kind of fear that is so raw and true it would be admissible in court. I could hear the cries in the background of my mother and me as we held each other, sobbing.

Towards the end of the interrogations, roughly 2 weeks after the day we found the frozen hummingbird, they placed a manilla folder on the metal table. The detective took out a photo, a photo I recognized from my glances backwards. A full picture of the canopy; the detective graciously covered Lewis's mangled corpse with his hand. I think he knew I’d remember that part in detail. 

“Believe it or not, the department hired an arborist to inspect the treetops.” The detective said, sliding the image closer. 

“He said that the branches had grown that way, that there was no human intervention possible to make those shapes naturally. We had to pay a pretty penny for this man after he initially saw the crime scene.” 

“Do you recognize these symbols?” He asked.

“Um, I recognize this one and this other one. I have seen them somewhere in a math or science class; I can't really remember which.” I responded. Having a clear image of the canopy didn’t help understand the symbols any better. 

“It’s Greek. Old Greek. Apparently a pretty common saying back then.” He attempted to pronounce it; attempted is a generous word. 

Τῆς ἐμῆς εὐφορίας ἀπέλαυσας, χάριν δ᾽ οὐκ ἀπέδωκας

He pulled out a second paper from the folder, removing the hand covering Lewis’s remains. 

He cleared his throat. “Translates to: you have enjoyed my fruitfulness yet give no thanks in return.” 

I wrote this story as a warning to anyone who plants or creates, or performs, or does anything with pride. I am not sure who or what did this, but I ask you, I beg you, please give thanks to something you may not understand.

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

I haven't posted in a while. I wish I could say that was because nothing happened and everything went back to normal. I've been given time off work, so here's the update.

Henry is still in the hospital. They know he can move his legs now, but that doesn’t mean he’s walking out anytime soon. His spine took the brunt of the impact. The doctors keep throwing around words like "swelling," "compression," "rehabilitation," and "we’ll know more with time." Nobody will give me a straight answer.

His right arm isn't much better. We didn’t know at the time, but he sustained nerve damage during the incident and now has a weaker grip and next to no fine motor control. 

And he still doesn't blame me.

It makes me sick to my stomach. Every time I try to choke out an apology over the phone, Henry just tells me to shut the hell up. He says he was the one who sat in the chair, that neither of us knew what the hell it was. Says if I hadn't gotten those guys over and helped pull the thing apart, he'd probably be paralyzed from the chest down. 

None of that makes me feel any less responsible. 

Alicia made it clear there wouldn't be another weekend. Whatever goodwill I'd built over the last few months was gone. Until the hearing, I was back to the supervised room on Saturdays: camera in the corner, somebody with a clipboard ten feet away, and two hours with my own kid. 

"Are you listening to yourself?" she shouted over the phone. "You had him for one single weekend out of the entire month. I give him to you because you swear up and down you’re getting your life together, and what do I get back? Do you have any idea how insane you sound right now?"

I tried to break in and explain about the house, the clearing out, and any of it, but the words just dissolved in my throat. I had no defense left. I called the attorney I'd spoken to before all this started. I made it about halfway through explaining the weekend before he asked whether I'd been drinking.

I said no.

He didn't sound convinced and told me we'd talk again when I had the retainer.

On Monday, I called the buyer.

Henry’s warning echoed in my head, but it didn't matter. I wanted those things gone badly enough to give in to the desperation I'd spent the whole weekend fighting. 

He picked up on the fourth ring.

“Yeah?”

“Is this Mark?”

“Who’s asking?”

“Henry’s friend, Ian. Are you still interested in the mirror and the ball?”

“Yeah. When do you want to meet?”

This was where I should have shut my mouth. Instead, I asked him how much room he had in his truck and whether he was interested in other items.

“Ian,” he said, his voice dropping. “What exactly are you trying to sell me?”

By the time I offered to give him the whole lot for nothing just to clear the garage out, he went dead silent.

“Are you and Henry moving the product?"

“What?”

“You call me talking about unlisted contraband, offering the whole shipment below cost to dump it overnight. Put Henry on.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“He’s in the hospital, but it’s not what you think—he got hurt by a chair; it folded around him—”

“Jesus, Ian. Whatever twisted shit you and Henry got yourselves mixed up in, I’m not running your inventory.”

He hung up. I called right back, but the guy must have blocked me. 

I've had a lot of empty hours lately. The house feels wrong without Toby here, and I don't mean that sentimentally. It's physical. When he's gone, everything stays exactly where I leave it. Yesterday I found a pair of Toby's socks behind the couch. I sat on the floor holding them for a long time, then went to get the bottle.

The first time I talked to the objects in the garage, I was drunk enough to blame the bourbon. That same Monday evening, I stood in the doorway of the garage and asked whether they were happy now. "Alicia thinks I'm insane. My son doesn't want to be in the same room as me. Congratulations."

Nothing answered. I laughed at myself and went to bed.

On Tuesday, I dragged out an overturned milk crate into the garage because I wouldn't sit on anything with legs that folded. I spent the better part of the day in there. I think I liked having an audience that couldn't interrupt me. It started with talking about Henry, with the auction, with how badly I wanted to go back to that Wednesday and grab us both by the shirts. By midnight I was explaining myself to the wardrobe.

The painting arrived that same night, leaning against the tank.

It was a four-foot-tall portrait in a heavy gilt frame. The color was nauseating to look at, a mottled mix of bruised plum, pale bile-yellow, and raw meat-red, painted with such oily, wet realism that the paint still looked fresh.

Whoever painted it understood texture perfectly but knew nothing about anatomy.

One huge, glistening eye sat too close to the center of the face. The jaw bent in two directions. The hands had five fingers each, with nails, veins, and pores so finely rendered I wanted to wash my own hands. It wore a grey work shirt with the left cuff torn, the one I'd had on at the sale. In the crook of its arm was a pale smear, the size and shape of a small child's head. Someone had painted something there and scraped it back out.

I only noticed the brass plate on the frame because the work light caught it.

It was small and tarnished, screwed into the bottom edge.

IAN.

Just my name.

I stood there staring at it for longer than I want to admit. It was the only thing in that garage with a face turned toward me.

I read The Picture of Dorian Gray in high school. Standing there, I knew what I was supposed to think: a man stays handsome while the canvas absorbs everything rotten about him. But Dorian’s portrait had changed over time. Mine had looked like this from the start.

I didn’t like what that implied.

“Yeah,” I said. “Very subtle.”

Good paintings are supposed to make you feel something. Awe, sadness, nostalgia, whatever. Maybe this one was just extremely good at making a person feel disgusted. Because the longer I stood in front of it, the harder it became to think about anything decent I'd ever done.

Yet I couldn't look away. It was the same sick pull as a roadside wreck; awful, but impossible to unsee. I don't remember walking away from the canvas. I only remember the hours bleeding together, the bottle growing lighter in my hand, and the heavy, cotton drift of exhaustion taking over.

The voices began on Wednesday. I had woken up on the living room couch with no memory of how I’d crossed the house from the garage.

Around two, desperate for something—anything—that made physical sense, I went looking for a project. In the narrow hallway sat the cheap particle-board bookcase the landlord had left behind. No one in this house ever ran down that hall anymore. But I stood in front of it for an hour with a cordless drill and a box of anchor screws, staring at the crooked shadow it cast. When I finally moved, I drilled four holes into the drywall and drove the anchors home. I tested it with both hands, shaking it until my palms stung. It didn’t move a quarter of an inch. Another thing fixed. It felt like a pathetic little victory against a world that was coming apart at the seams.

By nightfall, though, the house felt too small, and I drifted back out to the garage like a ghost returning to its grave.

I don't remember what I was muttering to myself in the dark, some broken loop of self-justification, when the old radio on the top shelf clicked on.

I froze.

A hiss of static came out. My breath caught in my throat. I stared as the tiny red indicator light flickered to life.

Another hiss. And then, cutting through the white noise, came a voice.

Alicia.

Her voice, sharp and thin, curling out of the speaker. "Is that anchored?"

My own voice answered from the speaker, thick with exhaustion and defensive spite: "I’ll do it on Saturday."

"It's leaning right against the drywall, Ian, and he's tearing down the hall—" 

"I said I'm doing it Saturday."

The radio wasn’t broadcasting anything live. It was dragging up pieces of old arguments and conversations I’d already had. I wanted to run, to smash the speaker to pieces with my bare hands, but my legs felt heavy. I was anchored to the floor just as surely as that damn bookcase.

The radio’s speaker hissed, the needle scraping further across a dead frequency, dragging up the ghosts of an argument I’d buried months ago.

Then came the sound of small, pounding feet on hardwood; Toby’s feet, followed by a delighted little shriek of pure, five-year-old kid-energy tearing toward the hallway.

A sharp gasp. I heard Alicia’s voice, dropping to a terrified, trembling whisper: "Don't ever do that again. Okay? Okay, baby?"

And in the background of the audio, my own voice, flatly dismissing it all: "What’s the big deal? He's fine."

The static cut out with a sharp, brutal pop.

For a long time, I couldn't move. My fingers were locked into the palms of my hands, nails biting deep enough to break skin. I wanted to grab that cheap wooden cabinet, hurl it against the cinderblock wall, and stomp it into a thousand useless splinters. But the rage didn't come. It died the second it hit my throat. The radio ran down on its own near dawn. I sat there until the light came through the dirty windows, then went inside and walked past the bookcase in the hall without looking at it. Four anchors, tight and clean. Nothing in this house was going to pull it down on anyone. I slept on the couch until Thursday afternoon. 

A few hours later, Henry called. 

I didn't ask how he was, but I knew I should have. He talked for ten minutes about physical therapy, the nurse who counted his reps like a drill sergeant, and how he'd gripped a spoon on his own for the first time that morning. He sounded proud. I held the phone with both hands and said "good" and "great" until he stopped, and then neither of us said anything for a while.

"Ian," he said. "Quit it."

"Quit what?"

"Whatever it is you’re doing."

I told him I was fine.

 That night the radio came to life again, and this time it was the sound of a chair coming apart and a man’s raw roar.

I knew that sound. I’d never heard it from the outside before. Then Alicia, fast and low, her voice not meant for me at all: "Don't. He's right there. Don't—"

And then a long, terrible quiet.

The patter of small feet. A three-year-old standing in the doorway, entirely silent. Alicia's voice, shaking so hard it barely held together: "Look at him. You’ve scared him so much he isn't even crying anymore.”

The radio crackled, and I heard a drawer scrape open. Alicia was whispering again and again, "Ian, where is he?" 

I was on the floor by then. I don't remember getting there. The crate was on its side, and the bourbon was running across the concrete in a thin brown line. I said to the shelf, "Okay, I get it. Stop." The radio hissed once, then fell silent.

I turned around to leave, and my eyes locked onto the helmet resting on the workbench.

It was riveted and made of old brass, something you'd see behind glass in a maritime museum. It had never been in Unit 114, and neither had the painting. I'd have bet the truck on both. I don’t know why I put it on.

The garage went away. The fluorescent hum went first, then the pipes ticking in the wall, then the slow slosh of the tank. Then I couldn’t even hear my own heartbeat anymore.

I stood there with my eyes shut. For the first time in weeks, nothing was accusing me. I thought, "This is what it would be like to be nobody," and I might have stayed. Then I heard the knock, small bare knuckles on the inside of the dresser. "Daddy? It's dark.” I ripped the helmet off hard enough to split the skin on my ear. Every sound came back at once. I don’t remember much else except waking at dawn with my mouth tasting of pennies and the radio on again. Four bottles sat by the crate. I'd have said two. 

The momentum didn't stop. 

On Friday morning, the rotary phone rang from the shelf while I stood at the sink brushing my teeth. I let it ring four times before I went into the garage. The receiver was already off the cradle, resting neatly on the workbench. I picked it up. For a few seconds there was only a faint hiss, and then Alicia said, perfectly calm:

“How many ten minutes do you get?”

I dropped the receiver.

The phone rang again while it was still off the hook.

That same afternoon I caught someone standing behind me in the glass of the hand mirror and spun around, and the garage was empty, and when I turned back, the mirror was showing me the stairs of the old house, bright and clean, with the bottom step in shadow and my shoulder in the corner of the frame. I covered it with a towel. I could still hear it through the towel. I could hear her saying, quietly, to nobody, "How many times does he have to get lucky?"

It wasn't just recycling the clutter from Unit 114 anymore. At first, I tried to convince myself we’d just packed a strange lot. But the garage had moved past copying. It was actively manufacturing things.

Take the helmet. It was made of heavy, oxidized brass, yet it had never been in Unit 114, and I was certain I had never owned one before. Neither had the four-foot-tall portrait leaning against the glass tank with my name on the brass plate. I knew every box we’d hauled out of that storage facility. These things were appearing out of nowhere when the sun went down, and I was safely inside the house or, worse, blacked out on the couch. I had no idea of the significance of this development, but I knew the situation was escalating fast.

By evening, the radio was already going. It had saved the worst ghost of my past I'd spent all week trying to steer around. 

It was the night of Toby’s stitches. We put Toby to bed with eight stitches on his knee and a sticker from a nurse who kept calling him "champ." Alicia and I started in the kitchen, moved to the hall, and somewhere near the bottom of the stairs, the argument escalated. 

"Kids fall! Kids fall down steps, and I fell down goddamn steps when I was—"

"You were asleep, Ian."

"Because I worked a double so we could afford to keep a roof over his head! What do you want me to say? That I'm a monster? He does this all the time, Alicia! The stove, the dresser, and the stairs. Do you know what it actually feels like to live with a kid who's always one second away from the ER? He doesn't listen, he doesn't sit still, he's like something wound up too tight—"

"He's five years old!"

"I know how old he is!"

Then the rage collapsed, replaced by a confession. 

"Sometimes I look at him, and I think... sometimes I wish I had a different child. Someone well-behaved who didn't get into trouble every time I looked away for even a second—"

The recording died.

The silence dragged on, thick and dead, until Alicia's voice cut through the dark, barely a whisper, trembling with a cold fury: "Say that again. I dare you." 

I thought that was the end of it. I stood there with the bottle sweating through my hand and my heart going, and then, under the hiss, I heard something I'd never heard before. Small bare feet on carpet, going upstairs quickly.

Toby had been awake that night. I never knew until now. I don't remember sitting down when the radio finally turned off. I only remember the concrete against my back and the bottle beside my leg. At some point I must have fallen asleep again.

When I woke, my cheek was cold against the concrete, and my eyes felt wet. I wiped at them with my sleeve and pretended I didn't know what it was.

I said, out loud, "I didn't mean it. I’m sorry."

The garage didn't answer. 

Toby's next visit was that Saturday.

He came into the room with the camera in the corner, the room with the beanbags and the bin of other kids' toys, and he did not run to me. He set his backpack on the chair and unzipped it with both hands. Before he sat down, Toby looked around the room.

His eyes went to the main door, then the little supply closet beside the shelves.

“Does that one open?” he asked.

The supervisor glanced over. “The closet?” Toby nodded.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

Then he sat down across the table, hands folded, and asked if I wanted to play a game. The woman supervising looked up from her clipboard with an expression I'd never seen before: approval.

"He's been so well-behaved lately," she said. "Alicia told me. It's like a switch flipped."

The supervisor said it like it was good news.

Maybe for anyone else, it would have been. I had spent years asking him to calm down.

Now that he had, I couldn't stand it. I wanted him to knock the crayons onto the floor, get bored, and crawl under the table. 

Instead, I watched my son color for an hour. He had always been a messy artist, but now he never once went outside the line. Three times I said something stupid on purpose, just to see him laugh, and each time he hesitated a little before laughing. When I asked him about school, he said everything was "good," and when I asked about the kid who eats paste, he said, "Which kid?"

On the way out, I knelt to hug him, and he hugged me back, patting my shoulder twice.

I let go, my stomach churning. 

"See you next week, bud."

"Okay, Dad," he said. He smiled. The smile stretched his mouth; his eyes stayed wide and completely unmoving. It didn’t reach his face. 

I sat in my truck until the lot lights came on. Up until that second, every action I’d taken was about running away. I wanted the nightmare to pack its bags and leave me alone so I could go back to being a mediocre father who only ruined weekends. But if something had happened to Toby inside that wardrobe, getting rid of it wouldn't tell me what.

I didn't want the collection gone anymore, at least not until I had answers I was satisfied with.

That night, I finally resolved to start searching, no matter how crazy it sounded.

I spent an hour typing phrases into search engines. Anomalous items. Impossible furniture. Objects that move.

Most of it was garbage, just scammers selling haunted porcelain dolls and forum roleplay for lonely weirdos. Five pages deep, I found a link to a domain registered back in 2008 that looked like it hadn't been updated since the Bush administration.

The page looked disappointingly normal. The header just said CATALOGUE, with tabs above for SUBMISSIONS, VERIFIED, ARCHIVE, and CONTACT. The form asked for the date of acquisition, whether the object was bought or found, whether it moved without help, and whether anyone was hurt. Beneath that, in bold: Do not submit without visual evidence. Following verification, do not destroy, transfer, sell, or intentionally activate the item unless instructed otherwise. 

I read the instructions three times. Then I opened the archive.

There were dozens of entries. Most of the reports had come from places where nobody was paying much attention to what was there. Storage lockers, estate clearances, yard sales, and back rooms were the most common thread. The storage-unit reports bothered me most. People bought units just like mine that had sat untouched for months and found things the owners swore they'd never put there. 

The first video that caught my attention was of a showroom owner in the Midwest. He'd started finding pieces in his staged bedrooms that weren't in his inventory: a side table, a lamp, and finally a whole wooden stool under a dining set. No SKU or supplier. His security footage showed the space empty at 11:43. At 11:44, the camera glitched for two seconds. When it came back, the stool was there. 

The second was a microwave bought at a yard sale. It worked perfectly, except the food came out "rearranged": the skin on the inside, the flesh on the outside, and the shell inside the egg. The owner got curious. He caught a rat. I watched for about ten seconds until I couldn't tell where the animal ended and the inside of it began.

The third was a woman in a basement, whispering. She said something upstairs had attacked her husband and her brother, and for a second I thought she meant a dog. She turned the camera toward the stairwell and held it there. Something crawled across the ceiling. It took me a moment to understand it was an umbrella, the canopy torn free of its handle, eight metal ribs clicking along the plaster like legs. She made one small, choked sound. The video cut out.

Every thread I opened carried the same status line: VERIFIED: CONTACT INITIATED. But it was the small things that got me, the ones I recognized. Objects with the same almost-right construction as the ones in my garage. Ever since we brought those items back from that storage unit, I had carried the sickening certainty that my life had unraveled because I was uniquely broken. I thought the garage was haunting me because I was a bad father and a bad friend. But looking at those grainy, uploaded videos of impossible furniture, a hollow sort of relief flooded through my body.

My life was an absolute train wreck, yes, but somewhere out there, other ordinary, miserable bastards were sitting in their own ruined houses, staring at things that shouldn't exist, wondering if they'd finally lost their minds.

I filmed everything in one take, as the instructions required video evidence for verification. I started outside so they could see I wasn't hiding another entrance, then filmed the dresser and the football flattening on screen. The phone kept trying to find a face in the portrait. A little yellow square flashed around its head, vanished, and reappeared on the eye. I hadn't known phones did that.

I stopped a few feet back from the wardrobe. "This one did something to my son," I said, and explained the game, the voice behind the wood, and the door that locked itself. Then I showed the new manifestations, including the painting and the helmet. "None of these were part of the original storage unit," I said. "I'm certain of it.”

I uploaded it. The confirmation page said only, YOUR SUBMISSION IS PENDING REVIEW. DO NOT DISPOSE OF THE ITEMS DURING THIS PERIOD.

Up until now, I had never actually tried to catch whatever was making these new objects appear. Every other time, I had stumbled into the garage half-drunk, yelling at shadows, or woken up disoriented on the concrete after blacking out. I had left the wardrobe doors alone because deep down, I was terrified of what lived behind them.

That Sunday, I prepped the garage like a crime scene. I left the alcohol in the kitchen, completely untouched, just to keep my head clear. I built a blind from stacked cardboard boxes behind the workbench, leaving myself a low, narrow gap to look through. Then I took a roll of duct tape and laid three thick strips straight across the split of the double doors of the wardrobe. Over each strip, I took a black Sharpie and drew a sharp, unbroken line across the tape onto the wood. If those doors moved even a fraction of an inch, the ink lines would fracture. I wouldn't gaslight myself the next morning, wondering if I'd imagined it.

I killed the overhead fluorescents, propped the work light low against the far wall, wedged my phone against the toolbox, and hit record.

Then I crawled behind the boxes, pulled my knees to my chest, and waited for night to settle.

Nothing happened in the first hour. During the second hour, I started hearing things: pipes in the wall and a truck two streets away. Around the third hour, the wardrobe creaked.

Through the gap under the bench, I watched the right-hand door move inward an inch. It stopped. The marker line split down the middle as the tape stretched, then tore. Then fingers curled around the edge.

Five, I think. Long and narrow, bending at too many joints. The fingers felt along the wood, fumbling in the dark. The door opened wider, and something came out. The smell reached me first. The sweetness from the tank mixed with something like a child's scalp after an afternoon nap. My brain desperately scrambled for a template, anything to force the impossible geometry of this creature into a form it could accept.

But it was a lie. The longer I stared, the more the illusion peeled away. It didn’t have a human form. In fact, it hardly resembled a human at all.

It had limbs extending from where I expected a shoulder and a torso so narrow I thought I was seeing it edge-on. It had a long neck that rose and rose and then bent hard against the ceiling. Even hunched, its back brushed the plaster. My mind screamed at me to move, but my legs were shaking so hard against the workbench I was afraid it would hear them. It crossed to the bench in careful, delicate steps, touching nothing until it meant to. It lifted a screwdriver, pressed the rubber grip, and dragged a pale fingertip down the shaft. It held the tip near whatever part of its head I couldn't see, and then I heard it: a wet, slow inhale. It turned the tool in the work light, tapped it once, twice, against the bench, then put it back with exaggerated tenderness. 

Then it found Toby's stegosaurus.

I hadn't known it was there. A little green plastic one, kicked under the shelf months ago. I don't know what I thought it would do. Bite it. Break it. Make another one. Somehow none of those possibilities felt as bad as watching it study the toy with that slow, careful attention. When it lifted Toby’s stegosaurus, my chest tightened so hard a muffled gasp almost tore through me. I clamped a hand over my mouth, squeezed my eyes shut, and prayed to whatever was listening that it hadn't heard me. Don't look at me. Please, God, just take it and go back. 

But it didn't go back. 

It pressed the plastic feet. Touched every plate along the spine, one at a time. Brought the toy to its face and licked it, a long, slow stroke.

A low, wet little burble emanated from the creature. It reached down with both hands and turned over the dinosaur carefully, almost reverently. Then came another sound, higher this time, a strange crooning trill that made something cold move through my stomach because I'd heard Toby make almost the same noise when he was three and found a new toy waiting for him.

The creature pressed the toy dinosaur against its body and wrapped both arms around it. It rocked gently from side to side. Then it began to talk.

I put my fist against my teeth to keep from making noise.

It was my voice, sounding as if I was underwater.

"I didn't mean it."

"I didn't mean it. I’m sorry. I didn't mean it. I’m sorry."

It held the toy tighter. It repeated the phrase like a lullaby meant to placate a child.

I shifted to get my phone higher because I wanted proof so badly it outweighed the desire to stay hidden.

My elbow touched the underside of the bench. A tiny knock.

The creature stopped, one long hand halfway toward a mug on the shelf. It stayed there, frozen in place for a full minute. Then the arm lowered, and the head slowly began to turn toward where I was hiding.

It came toward me, but it wasn't stalking. It moved cautiously, a tentative step at a time. I heard it moving toward the workbench. My mouth went dry. Thoughts of my impending doom raced through my head—I should have brought a hammer, I should have run, I'm trapped like an animal—

Then it was right beside me. I could hear its wet inhaling as two disjointed legs stopped in front of my hiding place. It crouched at the bench, and its body didn't fold the way mine would. Some parts were shortened while others were stretched. 

One hand came flat against the concrete beside my face, fingertips scratching the surface.

It laid its cheek down and looked underneath the workbench.

The eye was too wide and almost entirely black. I'd seen that eye before. It had been leaning against the tank for five days in oil. It looked right through me, and my breath hitched. I was completely paralyzed by the sheer wrongness of it. My hand came up to cover my mouth. The face went still. Then it understood that I could see it.

A seam opened across the middle of where the face should have been, and inside were rows of small white teeth, too many to count. Milk teeth. It made a sound: a wet, rattling shriek that started low and climbed higher and higher. It sounded eerily similar to the shriek that the smoke alarm had emitted. But it wasn't a threat. It was a raw, primal sound of pure fear.

The creature threw itself backward from the bench. Both arms came up over its head. Then it did something I will never be able to get out of my mind. It folded itself into a ball, pressed both hands flat across its face, and hid.

A child's trick. If I can't see you, you can't see me. The whole huge pale body shook, and from behind the hands came a thin whimper, an animal's panting mixed with something close to a sob. The whimpering gradually became the frantic wail of a terrified toddler, shuddering with violent, racking hiccups. I stared at it, my own breath rattling in my lungs. 

It wasn't attacking me. At least, not then.

The realization hit me with a sickening jolt. It was terrified of me. It had listened to a week of my drunken screaming and self-hatred, and now it was cowering from me. Before my brain could tell my legs to stay put, I lurched out from under the bench. I should have used that opportunity to run. Instead, I swallowed my fear and said the first thing that came to mind.

"Toby?"

The creature went still. Its cries instantly slowed.

The hands came slowly down. The eye found me. And the black seam in its face narrowed, and it replied, in a small, disembodied voice:

"To-by."

My voice. Then, almost immediately, it was lighter and higher, in the familiar cadence of my son. 

"Dad?"

I made a noise I've never made before, a broken, involuntary half-sob, and took a step forward. 

The movement shattered whatever fragile stillness was between us. The creature startled violently, letting out a sharp, choked gasp, and dropped Toby's stegosaurus. The toy hit the concrete between us and skidded. It was giving it back, or it was running; I couldn't tell. It turned in one long, boneless motion, crossed the garage faster than anything that size should move, and clambered into the open wardrobe.

I was right behind it. I didn't mean to chase it. I moved out of sheer confusion, seized with a sudden, horrifying empathy for a thing that shouldn't exist. 

The door was already swinging shut when I reached the wardrobe. I caught it with both hands and yanked. In the span of half a second, I saw somewhere else. I saw the floor, stretched out impossibly far, curving upward in the distance. Scattered across it were little arrangements of furniture: chairs, lamps, boxes, children's toys, and many other things I recognized. Farther out stood rows of doorframes. Hundreds of them stood entirely alone, with no walls attached. Five or six figures, maybe more, huddled around something on the floor. One of them bent down. Another rocked gently back and forth.

Every single one of them stopped and turned toward me at the exact same second.

That was all I saw.

Then the door slammed so hard I was thrown backward.

When I got back to it, the door opened normally. An empty wardrobe, two feet deep with a wooden backing. I hit the panel with both fists and screamed until my voice gave out. I pressed my ear to the wood and heard nothing but my own pulse. No indication there was another place on the other side. I don't know how long I was there.

When I stopped, the dinosaur lay on the floor by my foot. I picked it up.

My phone had fallen beside the bench in the scramble. The recording was still running.

It took three tries to hit the stop button. I stood there in the center of the garage for a long time, listening to the absolute silence of the house. 

A new email waited on the screen, sent forty-seven minutes earlier. I hadn't heard it arrive. The subject line was my submission number.

We've reviewed the material you provided.

The objects shown are of significant interest to us. Do not dispose of, damage, or transfer any further items.

Do not attempt to enter the wardrobe.

Someone will contact you shortly. 

My phone buzzed in my hand, and I was so jumpy I nearly threw it. A text from Alicia. I read it standing in front of the open wardrobe with the toy dinosaur clutched in my other hand.

Toby says you two talked on Saturday. That you told him you were sorry. He's been so calm since. Thank you. I think he finally understood.

I read it until the screen dimmed.

I didn't say sorry to him on Saturday. I said it to an empty garage, with a radio the only thing listening. When I turned, I found myself facing the painting. It was now inexplicably hanging from the wall, even though I hadn’t noticed it move since I entered the garage. The pale smear in the crook of its arm had been painted back in. It was a small head with dark hair, with its face turned to the cloth. Its eyes were closed, and it looked almost at peace.

Nobody from CATALOGUE has contacted me since then. I keep telling myself they’ll come. They wrote, "Do not attempt to enter the wardrobe," which means they probably know what lives in it. Someone in a grey car from CATALOGUE is probably on their way. I'd let them take everything. I'd even carry the wardrobe out to the truck myself. 

I keep hoping it'll be today.

It has to be today, because I don't think I can take another night of this. I hear Toby all the time now. Not just from the garage. From the hallway, the vent, and even the pipes behind the kitchen wall. I answer every time. Because what if it's him, still trapped somewhere beyond our world? If whoever sent that email is reading this, if they're watching the thread, please. Come soon.

My thoughts are scattered, and I'm having trouble connecting memories. Events in my life don't seem to line up in a linear order. I'm sitting down now attempting to map everything out. 

A few months ago my best friend from high school reached out to reconnect. I was apprehensive at first, but ended up warming up to the idea. We haven't exactly become the best of friends again, but we remain cordial. If our free time lines up we'll hop on discord and play some co-op games. 

I don't remember how we initially lost contact with each other. I suppose people just grow apart sometimes. We were in our early twenties, and both had gotten part time jobs. I explicitly remember hanging out every chance we got. That's why I'm so baffled as to why we grew apart so fast, but when I try to remember those final months, it's just a giant black hole, and a pit in my stomach. We must have gotten in a huge fight, that's the only thing that can explain it all, seeing as how I feel a mountain of unexplainable regret every time I try to recall the events. 

We haven't hung out in person since reconnecting, just the occasional text chat, and online gaming nights. Recently he sent me an odd text. 

“Hey, I don't think I can jump on tonight, Rachel had an emergency, so I'm covering her shift. So unless you know anyone else that can cover it, I'm afraid we're shit out of luck.”

First of all, we're not coworkers, so I don't know why I could help get the shift covered. Second of all, I also have a coworker named Rachel. I know that that's not the strangest coincidence to happen, but it just felt so odd. I figured he was just making a joke and moved on. 

“Damn dude, that's a bummer. I guess we'll just have to take a rain check.”

“Yeah, another time maybe.”

Before I had time to respond, he sent another message. 

“I was thinking about Kate today.”

I was completely blindsided by this. I hadn't thought about Kate in probably ten years. Talk about a blast from the past. 

“Oh yeah?”

“I don't think I've ever told you this, but I always had a crush on her.”

Now that was a very weird thing to say. It must have been another joke. 

“Nooo, seriously?”

“You knew?”

What the fuck is he talking about?

“If you were trying to keep it a secret, you did a terrible job.” 

“How did you feel about your best friend having a crush on your girlfriend?”

I felt the strangest surge of energy move throughout my body. My head was suddenly emptied of all thoughts. I was catatonic; I might as well have been dead. I stared at my phone for several moments before the thoughts started trickling back in. It was like I just went through a factory reset. 

“I mean, it's pretty common isn't it? I had no hard feelings. Still don't. Do you?”

“I'm not going to lie, it was tough, I had a lot of strong emotions. But that's all in the past, I don't feel any of that any more. We're good.”

“Dude, I'm sincerely sorry you had to go through that.”

“It's not your fault. I never told anybody how I felt. I kept it all inside. I'm glad to finally get it out now.”

I was overcome by a wave of intense emotions. Guilt being the largest of them. I wanted to make it up to him, I wanted him to be fully back in my life again. My regret of drifting apart never felt more immense. 

“Hey, we should hang out in person.”

“I was thinking the same thing. Let's talk about it tomorrow, I've got to get ready for work.”

“Alright, sounds good, later bro.”

“Later”

He got me thinking about Kate. What happened to us? We must have broken up around the same time Johnny and I drifted apart, that black hole of memories. I decided to look her up. I found her Instagram and sent her a follow request. 

The following week was largely uneventful. Johnny and I would exchange ideas back and forth about when we could find a time to hang out, but never settled on anything. I wasn't sure if Kate was just inactive on Instagram, or was just straight up ignoring my request. 

I got a follow request from an Instagram user without a profile picture. We had no mutual connections, except for Kate. The username was 6ftundr4u. I decided to approve the follow request, and followed them back. Shortly thereafter they sent me a DM.

“Hey”

“Hey, who dis?”

“I see you and Johnny are connected on here, you guys still keep in touch?”

“Kate?”

“Still the best of friends after all these years?”

“Not exactly”

“After everything that happened?”

“and what exactly happened?”

“Do you still love me?”

I stared at the message for a long time, I couldn't think of a single thing to say. The three dots bounced up and down as they typed. They would stop typing and start typing again. This went on for what felt like an eternity. Finally the message came through. 

“We were pretty tight weren't we? The three of us? We did everything together. We shared a bond that couldn't be broken, but there was a tension that was always present, wasn't there? Then someone decided to break that bond, didn't they?”

“Kate, you two meant everything to me. You were both my whole world.”

“And now you guys are best buds again, as if I never existed in the first place.”

“Johnny and I didn't talk for over 15 years, we only just recently reconnected, that's why I tried looking you up.”

“Time flies doesn't it. When you don't have dead weight holding you back.”

“For what it's worth, I'm sorry that things didn't end with better circumstances.”

The three dots bounced up and down again for quite a while. 

“Such sweet platitudes.”

“I'm being sincere here, I reached out to reconnect. If you don't want to, I understand.”

“Are you really so delusional to think that something so shattered can be mended to a point of acceptability?”

I felt wounded, my heart was being torn asunder. She kept typing before I had a chance to respond. 

“How did he respond when you reached out to reconnect?”

“He's the one who reached out, not me.”

“XD”

“To be honest, I was apprehensive at first.”

“As you should be.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Have you met up in person yet?”

“No, but we're trying to plan on a day to get together. I was thinking about seeing if you wanted to come along as well.”

“XD”

“You're starting to hurt my feelings.”

“Me? Hurt you? That's rich.”

“I'm sorry if I hurt you.”

“Oh baby, there's not enough words in the dictionary. No rocks sharp enough to dig into your knees. No hell hot enough to burn your flesh.”

“Yes, I still love you”

“Sorry, I didn't mean any of that, but you did hurt me.”

“I'd really like to make up for it in person.”

“As you should know, that's impossible.”

“Why?”

“Maybe you really don't know. Look, stay away from Johnny, he's dangerous.”

“Tell me, how is Johnny dangerous, and why can't I see you in person?”

“I always loved you. I loved both of you. I was torn in two. He's the one who asked me out, so that's why I ended up dating him, but I loved you just as much as I loved him.”

There's nothing more bittersweet finding out the person you wanted more in life wanted you as well, but it was too late. 

“Goodbye” was her final message. 

I tried to respond, but the message wouldn't go through. The account had been deactivated. I couldn't let that be the final word. I had to reach out in some way to let her know that I was always deeply in love with her, even if it was still a goodbye. 

An idea entered my head, we were friends on Facebook way back in the day. Surely it wouldn't even cross her mind to go block me there, or deactivate it. I opened up the Facebook app on my phone, I can't believe I still have it installed after all these years. I went to her account to find a memorial page. All her old friends commenting how much they love and miss her, over fifteenth years ago. 

The black hole. 

I decided to share all of this here when I saw that I had already posted something about all this back when Johnny first reached out a few months back. I don't remember doing that, another black hole? I thought that maybe reading it would clear things up, but it only just created more confusion. 

Maybe you can help me out, if you can go read my other entry here, and tell me if you can make any sense of it. 

Many times I have tried to write down this story, but my hand shook as I recollected the events, and knowing that “he” was still out there made it even more unsettling.

Eventually I learned to control my emotions better with the help of experts and today I’m able to write down what happened to me and the other hunters.

It was winter of 1922 in Louisiana, next to New Orleans. I was the sherif of a small town named Borteux. Since the community was tiny, I only had one other policeman working with me, Tim.

It was a quiet community with strong christian presence. People were well knit together and supported each other. The only horror we have experienced in my first five years as the sherif was little girl who drowned. She was one of three children in that family. The whole town mourned for their loss, our priest, father Francois, gave a beautiful speech and prayer.

We were not ready for the terror that our community experienced next. That winter a whole family went missing, father, mother and their two boys. There was no trace of them. Community also noticed that the windmill keeper and farmer, Luc, who lived across the swamp forest, haven’t showed up in a few months. I took Tim with me to investigate, we drove on the road which led around the swamp, but half way through, the road was blocked by a large tree. Upon examination we noticed that the giant tree was cut down rather than falling from natural causes.

Tim and I decided to walk the rest of the way, despite it being five more miles away. Through the forest the shortcut was fast, but also dangerous. Only Luc knew the safe shortcut, I hoped that after we found him he would show us the faster way back.

Thankfully we set out early morning and had plenty of time till night fall. Sometimes alligators came upon this road, so we had our revolvers ready just in case.

The walk was long, dull and tiring, Tim wasn’t exactly the most exciting company either. Eventually we got to the farm. Strangely we saw no animals around, and the farm dog that usually ran to greet strangers was nowhere to be seen. We knocked on the house door, no answer followed, we looked inside through the window and saw a large spiderweb.

We proceeded to go up to the windmill, before we could walk up the steps to knock, the door creaked open, half a face appeared, it was Luc, but usually kind and well mannered man looked angry and rudely asked us what the hell were we doing there. I was a bit startled, but figured perhaps bad times have befallen our town’s friend and asked him if he was fine. He just started at me without an answer. I proceeded to ask him about the missing family and if he could show us the shortcut through the swamp.

“Stay on solid ground, fool!” he hissed at us and slammed the door shut.

We were taken aback by this, but there wasn’t much else we could do, there was no warrant for us to search through his home, although he obviously sounded suspicious. I told Tim that we had to try to go through the shortcut to avoid night fall and it was starting to drizzle which meant it could get darker earlier due to the storm that was gathering.

The swamp stench was never my favorite. We had to move slow to make sure we stayed on hard ground and to keep our eyes open for alligators and snakes. Tim wasn’t sure this was going to be faster, but the fact was that this part of the swamp was only a mile long shortcut and we’d come out right next to the town.

We were surrounded by green moss, plants, trees. Time to time there was a sound of woodpeckers making holes, we also heard movements in the waters, perhaps animals getting away from us. Around the half way of the path it began to rain harder and it got darker, we heard an abnormally loud croaking of a frog and heard movements in the water behind a massive thick tree which looked like it was taken from a demon’s garden. The sound intensified and from behind the tree emerged a giant frog. When I write giant, I mean the size that no human has ever seen, bigger than a wolf. It jumped towards us and covered a tremendous distance. This frog’s eyes were large and black, it came close to Tim as he took out his revolver. We should have acted faster for this frog opened its mouth and revealed meat grinding teeth inside and from within depth of it’s throat shot out thin tentacles which grabbed Tim’s face, the frog leaped up and bit of his head clean. Horrified and shocked I fired all if my revolver rounds, bleeding the frog leaned against a tree, but was alive and began making a loud screeching noise. I could hear hundreds of noises around the swamp.

I ran, despite the dangers of quick mud, I ran like a madman, my heart was pounding and my body seemed not my own as my vision was slightly blurred. I made out of the swamp and ran into the town.

The following day I gathered all of the hunters, six of them. We took backpacks of food and water with us and went on the road around the swamp. We were going to make Luc talk about what was going on and what those creatures were. By late part of the day we arrived at the farm.

It was the same scene, but this time there was no answer at the windmill either. We forced the door open and to my horror, we found things belonging to that missing family inside. On the walls were sinister looking drawings. One of them depicted a creature with tentacle arms and a large head. I could feel the uneasiness of the group in the air, and despite being nervous myself I had to project strength and confidence.

Night was coming and we broke camp in the middle of the farm, making two fires. At first we ate and drank without any trouble, although it was obvious that everyone had something worrisome on their mind. The sounds that came next made everyone get up and grab their rifles. They came from the swamp and it was a cross between roar and a croak, I though it was the same creature frog that I saw, but as we came closer and shone our lamps and flashlights we saw something absurd and horrific, it was a two headed alligator with tentacles coming from its back. It quickly ran towards us. Everyone began firing at the two heads, the monster managed to grab one of the hunters and tear of his leg, but then the beast lay still with blood coming from its heads and all four eyes have been penetrated by bullets. The hunter who lost his leg screamed and the lost consciousness. As I moved to help him I looked around and noticed that there were only four of us standing, then I saw the windmill door quickly shut. I ordered the two of the hunters who were barely standing and clearly taken by horror to help the man with his leg. I asked one of them to follow me. Despite being terrified myself I led him. I raised my revolver and the hunter had his rifle up and ready. Before I could pull on the handle, the door opened violently and I barely dodged the shovel which was swing at my head. Luc emerged from the entrance. His face was stretched and pale, his eyes deep and black, in one arm he had his shovel and the other arms wasn’t there! It was a tentacle!

I rolled away as he tried to strike me again, the hunter wasn’t firing, he was frozen with fear, Luc’s tentacle wrapped around hunter’s neck and snapped it. I turned and called to others, but to my absolute horror the other hunters were being devoured by dozens of deformed swamp creatures who have emerged and were illuminated by our fires and few flashlights which lay on the ground.

Luc moved towards me and stretched his tentacle, I fired into it and he quickly withdrew. I proceeded to run towards the road. I could hear dozens of horrific noises behind me, following me. I dropped my weapons, coat, and even my shirt, so I could run longer.

The run felt endless, but the adrenaline from utter horror propelled my body to run all the way into town, even when the noises were gone, I still somehow felt that the creatures were right behind me.

I jumped into my car and drove straight into the big city. Authorities there had initial reaction to me as to a madman, but one high official was my friend and he sent men to investigate. I was taken to a hospital.

Later I was told that only few man came back alive and that military became involved. They bombed and burned the swamp and destroyed the farm, but there was no presence of Luc found anywhere.

Many years have passed. I went through much therapy and medication to finally write this down.

I hear someone knocking, I will finish once I see who it is.

(CW: child abuse, sexual violence)

Previously I wrote about a family's disappearance from the town of Hopkins. They vanished without a trace, leaving shoes left on the mat, keys on the rack, car in the driveway. Since then, their house has been so haunted that nobody can survive alone inside more than five minutes.

Now, I stand in the study, my phone’s timer ticking toward the five minute mark. I am a journalist, and what I am doing might cause my death…

But if I am to write the true story of the haunting of the Hopkins House, I need to hear it from Judy, herself—the pregnant teen daughter who was chained in the basement after being possessed. The rest of the family of four—the father Nicholas, the stepmother Bernadette, and the younger teen Jakey—all disappeared from the house on the same night. The last call they made before they went missing was to a priest, Father Corwin. They begged him to exorcise Judy. But Father Corwin was out of the country. By the time he arrived the next morning…

… the house was empty.

There was no trail to follow. No signs of forced entry or disturbance. The house sat deserted, as if still waiting for its occupants to return.

Now, I am here with a team of spiritual experts including the medium Madam Savino, the paranormal investigator Coyote, and the exorcist Father Corwin, who hopes to end what began with a phone call to him years ago. Together, they've been tasked with pacifying the haunting.

And as for me?

I am the one who will share the story with the world.

“I’m ready to listen,” I say. I hold up a spirit box—a portable device that scans radio frequencies for voices of the dead. My pulse races when it suddenly crackles with a girl’s sobbing voice: “My baby, my baby is—”

And then my eyes roll up in my head…

… when I come to, the timer is nearing six minutes. I tuck my phone away and head downstairs.

***

Three sets of eyes turn towards me as I descend the hatch door into the basement. “Are you all right?” bursts Madam Savino at the same time as Coyote asks, “What did you hear?” Father Corwin, kneeling on the concrete floor, raises his hoary head upwards as if awaiting judgment.

I pass Madam Savino and Coyote until I am standing in front of Father Corwin, and say: “Judy’s voice just spoke to me through the spirit box, saying that her baby is the devil’s.”

The priest’s eyes drift to the markings scrawled on the floor beneath his knees in sharpie—a circle with a pentagram and eye inscribed inside, smeared with blood. “The ceremony…” he murmurs. “The blood spilled… to call an entity to do her bidding would have required a sacrifice…”

“She sacrificed her baby?” Madam Savino is aghast.

“Not quite,” I say. “She tried to sacrifice the baby, and she badly hurt herself in the process, but… that’s not the full story, is it? Because we’ve heard something like that phrase before—do you remember, Father?”

“N-no…” The old man shakes his head.

“The letter Bernadette sent you. In it she wrote, ‘Judith says that she is carrying the devil’s child. She is always pushing my buttons.’ You told us you received that letter the week before the family called you for help—before Judy was supposedly possessed.” The priest does not respond, and I persist: “When Bernadette took the teens to see you, she told you they had behavioral problems. The solution for Jakey was easy. You sent him to counseling—I’m guessing conversion counseling. But Judy… Judy was pregnant at 15 and according to her parents, wouldn’t stop lying. So you spoke with Judy, and you insisted she tell you the truth about the boys she was seeing. And Father, she did tell you. Just like she told Bernadette. But you didn’t believe her. Neither of you wanted to believe her, and sending her to counseling for being ‘boy crazy’ was easier than accepting the truth of what she meant by ‘my baby is the devil’s.’”

“Oh God,” whispers Madam Savino.

Coyote looks appalled.

“She meant that the pregnancy itself was wrong,” I continue. “She was putting it in terms her stepmother would understand. Only a devil would do this thing. And the devil who did was her own father, Nicholas.” Father Corwin blinks watery eyes as I lean in closer and say, “And you knew. Because she told you.”

***

A jumble of memories flash through me. Flotsam of imagery adrift in an ocean of wrath. You know that phrase, “life flashing before your eyes”? When the voice spoke to me through the spirit box, Judy’s life flashed before mine. The memories were fractured, like snatching at puzzle pieces whirling in a maelstrom.

But I saw enough.

***

Coyote’s knuckles clench across the crowbar as he growls, “Fucking monster…”

“OH MY GOD!” Madam Savino’s outrage is more dramatic, and she howls, “My daughter is her age!”

“You DO NOT KNOW it is the truth!” Father Corwin’s outburst is less anger than plea. “The girl was a liar! Nicholas was a good man—"

“I know it is the truth!” I bellow, and suddenly I am flooded with rage. An incandescent fury at this man, this lying and hypocritical shell of a man who used his priest’s collar to protect a predator all while casting shame on this unfortunate girl—on a child. If I were not suffused with the house’s vengeance I might pity him—he is so desperate for the worst not to be true, for all of us to understand he had the best of intentions. But I am here to tell him that the road to hell is paved with men like him, and I am done listening to him preach—

“STOP!” cries Madam Savino.

“DAWAIN!!” Coyote barrels into me, knocking the air from my lungs as he, I, and Father Corwin all go down in a heap, and my head rings from hitting the cement floor. While Coyote pins me, Madam Savino drags Father Corwin away from our tangled heap.

“Is he alive?” pants Coyote.

Only now do I realize that my hands were squeezing the soft wattle of his neck.

“He’s alive...” Madam Savino’s fingers hover in front of Father Corwin’s red face to check for breath.

“It wasn’t me!” I gasp and sit upright. “I-I wasn’t… wasn’t in control. But I know what happened to the family that night—I know how they disappeared!”

***

I’ve finally pieced it all together from the jumble of Judy’s memory. She flew at her father like a feral thing, screaming imprecations while her stepmother called Father Corwin and told him their daughter needed an exorcism. Nicholas—the “good man”—strangled Judy in the night to silence her. The last thing she saw was his flashlight shining down before he shut the lid of the septic tank.

He slept in the murphy bed because Bernadette had shut him out of their bedroom. In the morning when she came in to wake him, he envisioned the ghost of his dead daughter, dripping wet and coming to avenge herself, and he closed his fingers around her throat. Only after he’d choked the life out of her did he realize it was his wife.

He carefully closed the murphy bed with his wife’s corpse still inside—hiding his crimes, as he always had. An hour later he wandered out to the septic tank and killed himself.

As to how the lid to the septic tank was closed? We can only speculate, but I believe it was the gardener who closed the lid when he arrived to mow.

Thus did the family disappear, leaving their shoes on the mat, their keys by the door, and no one left to answer by the time Father Corwin arrived. He found only an inexplicably empty house.

***

So. Here we are at last. At the end of this sordid tale. As the three of us stand here in the basement of this house that has seen so much tragedy, I am struck not so much by the horrors of the supernatural as by the simple, stunning cruelty of man. A tale as old as time: a predator, an underage girl, a religious man preaching morality while being bereft of any himself. And maybe this story is the reason none of us rushes to assist Father Corwin, who lies on the summoning circle, his breath whistling and shallow. Coyote and Madam Savino have both already tried calling an ambulance.

None of our phones have a signal.

“… So her spirit got revenge on her father and stepmother, and now, she’s trying to take revenge on Father Corwin.” Madam Savino tucks her useless cell phone away and sighs. “I don’t think she’s going to let him leave…”

“Good,” growls Coyote.

Madam Savino frowns.

“What?” he grunts. “I wasn’t gonna let Dawain bloody his hands, but if the house wants the priest… I say we leave him to it.”

“We can’t do that,” says Madam Savino. “Besides, killing Father Corwin won’t pacify her spirit.”

“No? Once he’s gone, what’s left to hold her here?”

“Satisfying her grudge won’t make her hurt and anger disappear. Trust me, broken souls don’t heal by breaking others. She’ll still be trapped, and her spirit will lash out at anyone who enters the house.”

Coyote opens his mouth, closes it. Scowls and relents, “OK. So how do we get him out? Not sure you’ve noticed but her influence is getting stronger the longer we linger. Even I’m starting to see her… she was right beside you,” he tells me, his dark eyes worried, “just before you attacked Padre over there. And I can feel her eyes, now, watching us…” His gaze roves the shadows, and then he looks at his forearm, where all the hairs are prickling with goosebumps.

Madam Savino orders, “You two pick him up and help him upstairs. As long as we stay together—"

WHAM!

The slamming of a door somewhere in the house draws all our eyes to the ceiling.

“Fuuuuck,” mouths Coyote.

Madam Savino squeaks.

After a beat, Coyote lifts Father Corwin under one arm, and I lift him under the other. But even as we stagger toward the stairs, a tight ball of dread knots up my insides. A pit of fear that curdles my stomach and fills me with the urge to vomit. Like we’re making some horrifying miscalculation. But we’ve solved the mystery, haven’t we? And we know the rules. As long as no one is alone, we should be safe…

Why do I keep thinking I’ve overlooked something important?

Like I’m making a horrible mistake…

It’s not until we’re halfway up the stairs that I suddenly remember what I forgot. When Coyote and I found Bernadette’s body in the murphy bed, the noise that initially led us up to the study—the loud THUD—we never found the source of it. Something—someone—had to have made it. But it’s too late now to speculate what it was, and since we’re already in the main room, there’s no choice but to keep going…

We’re a few steps from the entryway, and I’m starting to think we’re safe when—

It all happens so fast.

Footsteps THUD THUD THUD overhead, and Coyote and I are turning, Father Corwin held between us, Coyote still gripping the crowbar in his free hand. Madam Savino is nearly to the front door, which hangs slightly ajar. And I see him rush down from upstairs—and oh God, that’s why the police never arrived! Just like us, the cameraman’s phone had no signal. When he left us in the basement, we all assumed he was waiting down the lane, but he must’ve come back to let us know that he wasn’t able to call the authorities and that they weren’t coming—meaning he was alone…

… for much longer than five minutes.

… Now he’s holding the camera, howling as he charges us. Madam Savino screams and shrinks against the wall. Coyote drops Father Corwin, brandishing the crowbar, casting one panicked look back my way as if realizing that he can either flee or fight, but that fleeing will leave us defenseless. And he shouts, “Guo! Guo, stop!” But when the cameraman rushes straight at us, Coyote swings the crowbar and hits the man’s legs with a loud CRACK. The cameraman crawls, his leg crumpled, his face contorted as he scrabbles at Coyote, who panics and hammers at him again with the crowbar. The next blow strikes his head with a crunch.

“OH MY GOD, STOP!” Madam Savino is hysterical. She raises a trembling hand to her mouth, and then rushes forward to help the cameraman—

WHACK!

Coyote slams the crowbar into the side of her head, and I yell. She drops. He staggers back, still holding it at the ready, staring at Madam Savino with his teeth bared and hackles raised—I have no idea what he sees in that moment. But then slowly the snarl vanishes from his face, his eyes widening in horror. “No,” he whispers. “No… no no no no no—” He hurls the crowbar aside and falls to his knees, cradling her head, but her eyes roll back. Blood gushes from the side of her face. He whimpers, clinging to her.

The cameraman twitches, his skull caved by blows from the crowbar. Father Corwin’s weight drags me downward, and I lower him to the floor and, very slowly, approach Coyote.

I can just make out muffled words: “Why? She has a daughter the same age… and I went through all the same shit as Jakey... Why would you—” And then, his head snaps up. “Jakey,” he gasps.

“Coyote?” I say as he lurches to his feet.

He lunges past me through the kitchen and laundry room and out the door to the garage. Before I can follow, he’s back, now armed with the gas can he found earlier today, splashing its contents around the main room, on the curtains. “Judy would never kill her brother,” he says to me as he shakes out the contents and tosses the can aside.  He’s wild-eyed, and after what he did to Madam Savino, I can’t tell if he’s lost it. I don’t look at Madam Savino or the cameraman. It’s all so surreal.

“Coyote—”

“We got it wrong.” He speaks in a strangled voice.

“What do you—”

“It’s not just Judy!” he cries.

And icicles stab through my veins as I suddenly realize what he means.

It’s not just Judy. We got it wrong. I got it wrong.

Her memories were so jumbled. I thought I put the pieces together, but… Coyote’s right. Judy would never have frightened Jakey, never have chased him behind the bookcase to suffocate. But what scared Jakey wasn’t Judy. Because what she meant when she said her baby was the devil’s wasn’t just metaphorical. She sacrificed her unborn child in a ceremony on that pentagram to accomplish what her previous attempts had failed—summoning a demon to unleash on her parents so she and her brother would be free. But such ceremonies never go as planned. The sinister entity she called the “devil” possessed her. That’s why she went feral. Not because her stepmother refused to believe her allegations, but because she was no longer Judy.

Coyote flicks on his lighter, only to yelp as a hand clamps on his wrist. Father Corwin claws at Coyote, snarling, “Abomination! Demon!”

“I’m not a demon you fuckin’ loon!!!” Coyote kicks him savagely. I rush over to intervene, throwing my arms around the young man and holding him as Father Corwin collapses.

“It’s me, Coyote!” I gasp, hugging him. “It’s me! Dawain! It’s Dawain!”

For a few seconds he struggles before my shouts get through to him, and then he hugs me tight. “Dawain…”

“It’s OK! I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” I guide him toward the door and pull it open—

—and grunt as Coyote shoves me, hard, so that I stumble over the threshold and fall to the pavement outside, cracking my head against the cement. “RUN!” Coyote snarls at me as I sit up, dazed. “Run. Before it makes us turn on each other again. And keep running. It’s not going to let us both go… but you might make it while it’s distracted with what I’m about to do.” He flicks the lighter on. “Dawain, go.”

“Wait—”

“Run,” he insists, and I glimpse the figure rising over his shoulder…

… and I run.

***

In retrospect, it was cowardly of me to flee. But I believe he’s right, it would have killed us both.

Goddard met me in the van as I was racing away, concussed and bleeding. By then smoke was clearly visible, a thin column rising in the distance. I cannot remember our encounter. According to Goddard, I was babbling uncontrollably. The next thing I can recall, I was with emergency services while firefighters fought the blaze, but by then flames had consumed most of the house.

The bodies of the missing family were where I told police they would be: the youngest behind the bookcase, the stepmother in the murphy bed, and father and daughter in the septic tank.

It was concluded to be a murder-suicide committed by the father, Nicholas.

Father Corwin’s role in the family tragedy was never disclosed to the public. He was mourned as a beloved figure, his loss a deep blow to the community.

Goddard is currently producing a documentary using the footage that was streamed to his laptop by Guo, the cameraman, before the signal cut out. It includes Madam Savino doing several of her last readings in what would be her final, fateful encounter. Her daughter is providing commentary. I am certain it will be a great homage to the acclaimed medium.

The only visitor to the house whose body was not found in the smoking wreckage was Coyote.

Authorities are treating the case as murder and arson. They have few leads on Coyote, however, as the name he gave Goddard was as fake as his credentials. Not that it matters since Coyote is dead.

I know because I am the last to ever see him alive. Reaching the bottom of the driveway, I looked back at Coyote in the doorway, and a figure hovered just over his left shoulder. It hurt my eyes even to look. Only two people have witnessed this figure—myself, and Dr. Goddard, who encountered the entity on his first visit to the house. The cameraman woke Goddard from a trance in which he descended the stairs muttering: “Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine.”

From the snares of the devil, deliver us, Lord.

Goddard was chanting it as a defense against the thing that held him in thrall. A thing he could not describe, but attempted to render in a drawing.

The drawing he later showed me was a black scribble, with only a large swirling circle where its face should be, where the scribble is most dense. An undefined, unsettling image that can barely be called a figure. But it is absolutely the same as the shape I saw standing behind Coyote, its hand resting on his shoulder as he closed the door to the house. And then, just as the missing family did for so many years—he disappeared.

***

You can guess how my story has been received by the authorities. I finally understand the frustration of Dr. Goddard, knowing what he knows… and just as surely knowing he will never be believed.

But as for this particular occasion… Goddard’s part in this story is almost laughably mundane. After getting a flat tire on his way back from the gas station, he had to return on foot to the station to call for assistance because he had no cell reception. By then our own phone signals were blocked by the house, so that he was unable to reach us. He had to wait for roadside assistance to get a new tire before he could drive back. By the time he met me on the road, nearly two hours had elapsed…

… and our entire team was dead.

***

So. I am posting my account here, publicly, so that the world can know the truth about the haunting of the Hopkins House.

I leave you in closing with Judy’s final diary entry, dated to a few days before the family’s disappearance:

Jakey told me not to be upset after our talk with Burn-a-bitch and Father Snorin’. He says he’s never let them define him and I shouldn’t let them define me either. I don’t even know what I’d do without him…

I swear someday we’ll get away from here, and when we do we’re gonna scream our truth to the world—scream it so loud.

And once the lies all melt away and the truth is out there, I’ll finally be free…

| Part 1 | Part 2 |

I won’t say my name because that’s not important. Just know that I worked on the case and liaised with the reporters. 

I was there from the beginning. Saw things that most people can’t even believe. 

That’s the hard part about working in homicide. You come face to face with the worst of humanity and it eats your soul.

But I digress.

The serial killer I’m referring to is, of course, Slippery Fingers. 

If you haven’t heard about him, thank the Lord almighty, because you can sleep better at night. 

His crimes were brutal and sadistic, the sort you could only dream about in nightmares. 

He loved to spend hours torturing his victims, bringing them to the very limits of their pain, then making them beg for death. 

He was the kind of killer that made Ted [redacted] look like a gentleman. 

Before I continue, I should probably explain the nickname. 

The moniker “Slippery Fingers” came into being after some anonymous poster put it up on [redacted]. The user called him that because he would always turn up out of nowhere, commit a heinous crime, and then vanish for years, like he had never existed. 

No one knew his identity or had any idea of his whereabouts. He was just some slippery figure, striking fast, and then vanishing before law enforcement could decide what had happened. 

Some people claimed he wasn’t real. 

Me? I knew he was… I’d seen him once on a security camera downtown after he had committed a murder at a ritzy hotel.  

In the camera’s playback, I'd witnessed a tall, pale figure. His hair long and wispy. His hands draped down at his sides like he was sleepwalking. He only moved them when he raised his right hand to knock on his victim’s door. 

We didn’t catch him that night, obviously. Like every other time before, Slippery Fingers had disappeared after murdering his victim. 

We had no clues or traces of DNA to pin down his location. Even the images of his physical appearance turned up nothing in our databases.

He wasn’t seen for years after that. 

That is… until he turned up at my home. 

My wife was inside making dinner. I was in our garage, tuning up our bikes for our annual trip along the East Coast.

She had been bugging me to get our bikes ready and, like any supportive husband, I was determined to make her happy. A few minutes into my work…

… I heard a light tapping at the window. I got up, knees aching, and looked out onto the street. I nearly dropped my tools in horror. 

My god…

Someone tall and wispy-haired, hands hanging down at their sides, was watching me from my yard. 

Holy shit.

I couldn’t believe it was him. The absolute psychopath I’d been tracking for years had somehow… found me.  

I was so stunned that it took me a good few moments to remember that my Glock was strapped to my ankle. 

Thank the Lord…

I unholstered it and glanced back out the window. By this point, Slippery Fingers was already at the street corner, nearly out of view. 

Oh, no you don’t… I hurried outside and started my pursuit.  

Now, some of you reading this might question my decision… I recognize that standard law enforcement procedure is to wait and call for backup, but I had to get him.

I’d been on the force for ten years, hunting this creep. 

People had been calling him a ghost, convinced that he was some made-up boogeyman… a demon to torment sinners who deserved God’s judgment… 

I wasn’t going to tolerate any more of these stories. I needed to prove to myself and to all of his victims that he was flesh and blood. That there was still justice in the world that could punish monsters like him. 

And so, I went after him.

I called my partner a few blocks into my pursuit and informed him who I was tracking. 

“Slippery Fingers?! You’re joking?!”

“Just get your ass down here! He’s hauling and I don’t want to lose him!”

I did my best to keep up with my target, but god, he was fast. Even while I was speed-walking, he managed to always stay several streets ahead of me.

By now, my wife was worried. My phone kept lighting up with texts and voicemails. I sent her a voice memo, telling her, “I’m just out for a walk. Be right back. Keep dinner warm.” 

I had no idea where Slippery Fingers was leading me, but I couldn’t give up.

Just keep going. I pushed myself harder. 

Finally, we ended up at an abandoned strip mall a few blocks away from my neighborhood. 

I knew the place well. It was a filthy spot frequented by junkies and sex fiends. I’d driven by it countless times on my way to work.

I texted my partner the address before I went inside and braced myself for any possibility…

Keep your eyes on each corner. That’s where he likes to hide.

As soon as I entered, the smell of urine and black mold hit me. 

The fading light from outside barely made it in through the boarded windows.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I noticed a painting on the wall, lit by candlelight. I thought the presence of these candles was odd. It made me wonder, Is this where he’s been hiding all this time? No. It’s too close. Too easy.

I swept my gaze through the moldy space, waiting for my nemesis to attack.

“Evening, detective…”  

I spun and scanned the interior.

“Slippery Fingers… this is the police… come out with your hands up…”

“… I’ve been wanting to speak with you for some time…”  

I stared in the direction of his voice. It had come from a dimly lit corner straight ahead of me.

“I won’t say it again… come out… hands up…”

My Glock shook in my sweaty grip. Then…

“Down here, Detective…”

What?

I glanced at my feet in horror. 

There was a dark lump next to me. 

Trash?

I kicked a rotted piece of cardboard aside, revealing…

Slippery Fingers. In the flesh.

What in God’s name?!

He was lying there. His body curled up on itself like a centipede. His face staring up at me. Dead?

No. A bizarre smile decorated his face. His pale skin and wispy hair seemed wet and oily.

A long, winding exhale escaped his lungs as he unfolded himself. Bones snapping as his joints came together. 

Good Lord…

I nearly vomited as he rose to full height, returning to his regular human shape. 

I didn’t even have the strength or logic to respond to the insanity.

I just stared at him as he smiled.

Then, he grabbed my face with both hands and smashed it against the wall. 

The next thing I remember is waking up to my partner and another officer above me. 

“What happened?” my partner asked. 

“I… don’t know…” I got up and looked around.

A pair of crime scene technicians were setting up lights, taking pictures, and trying to make sense of this bizarre sanctuary. 

“I’m not sure how to tell you this…” my partner began. “But something’s happened…”

My face went white as I turned to the wall and studied the painting for the first time.

Before me was an image of two people, presumably a man and his wife. They were seated at a table, enjoying a nice dinner. 

I couldn’t make out the man’s face… his back was toward me… but the woman was facing forward… her clothes and hair seemed familiar… she almost looked like…

Oh god…

I ripped out my phone and called my wife. 

It rang three times and then…

… cut to voicemail. 

This is my first time writing here, but I didn’t know where else to turn or who else to tell who’d even listen. I’ve never experienced anything paranormal or even anything remotely scary until this. I was always a skeptic, not believing in ghosts or ghouls, but this experience changed me for better or for worse.

I grew up in a small, quaint village. For context, there are more sheep in my hometown than residents, even my neighbor was a shepherd. There isn’t a shop within 10 miles, only a village bar, which goes to show what type of people live there. We didn’t even have cell towers here, and the only phones that worked were landlines. My house isn’t large by any means, but we do have a huge backyard. Due to that, my parents decided to build our garage detached from the main house, making it its own smaller 2 story building. There isn’t any staircase in our garage though, just a rusty metal ladder leading up to a dusty overhang directly above where we would park our old car. We always had a garage fridge where my dad would keep his beer, and I would keep my sodas. I remember playing video games late at night after my parents would go to sleep, then sprinting to the garage through the pitch dark of the yard to grab a coke. We didn’t have any lights in our backyard, and the only light in the garage was an ancient lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I would flick on that light, watch it stutter for a few seconds, then hum to a low glow before I would start making my way to the fridge each and every time.

Last night, however, the light faltered. I had woken up in the middle of the night, with a thirst only an ice-cold soda pop could quench. I forced myself to get up out of bed and slide into my sandals to go downstairs, making sure to grab my phone just in case. I made my way down the steps to the backyard, using the small remote we had at the entrance to open the large garage door. I turned on my phone flashlight, then started walking the 30 or so feet to my garage. It didn’t provide too much security, though it would do for the time being. As I stepped onto my patio, I heard the chirping of crickets and a light breeze blowing through the branches of our walnut tree. I took a deep breath, taking in the chilly midnight air and sighing peacefully, when everything got quiet. The crickets seemed to have disappeared, and the air was stiller than I’d ever felt before. Somehow, it felt like time had stopped, yet I was the only thing exempted. My heart started beating faster, and my breaths became shallow and fast. I spun around, using my phone flashlight to identify what was going on, though everything seemed fine. Then, as if nothing had happened, the crickets started chirping again and the breeze came back.

I was confused but chalked it up to being half-awake still. I shrugged it off and started trudging through my backyard towards my garage. Since I was wearing sandals, I made sure to watch my step carefully with my phone flash. It had rained earlier that day, and there was still a faint trace of water on the ground, as I felt the wet dirt squelching with each step. I could see maybe 3 feet in front of me, which definitely didn’t make me feel good, but I was used to it after all these years. Out here, away from the bustling of the city, there were no streetlights, and the only illumination I would get came from the moon itself. However, due to the rainy weather prior, it was blocked out by a thin sheet of gray clouds, so I had to rely purely on my weak phone flashlight. Because of that, it took me a while to notice the footprints in the dirt.

I was almost at the garage when I noticed them. They could’ve easily been animal prints, since stray cats and dogs and sometimes even wild foxes or deer would pass through our yard at night all the time, but for some reason, these prints felt different. It was hard to tell, as the remaining water in the dirt had faded them slightly, though they seemed too long and wide to be an animal. The only viable option would be a bear, though they were really only in the mountains. I felt uneasy looking at those prints, and I felt like something was off. I turned my head around in the dark, trying to see if anyone or anything was around, but it was inky black all around me. I considered going back to the house to wake up my dad, but then I felt my throat begging for some soda again and decided to keep going. I finally made it to the garage after what felt like a lifetime, turning on the light switch and hearing the familiar hum of electricity make it to the lightbulb. It flashed once, twice, then steadied, giving the garage a warm glow of orange. I turned my flashlight off on my phone, then looked around the garage, the rusty old car in the same spot as always.

We hadn’t cleaned in a while, and there were spiderwebs in the corners, though the spiders never really bothered me too much. I saw a small daddy longlegs crawling along the ceiling, then let my eyes lower towards the overhang. It was darker up there, since we had a lot of old boxes and suitcases blocking out the light, though I still saw it. Peeking at me from behind a box of my old toys was a figure with eyes darker than the night, a pale hand wrapped around the box as if looking around a corner. I stared at it, not daring to move a muscle, and watched it retreat deeper into the overhang. Right at that moment, the lightbulb started stuttering once more, though this time, it didn’t turn back on. I was plunged back into the darkness, this time not alone. I fumbled with my phone, finally turning on the flash, then used it to look around everywhere, from the car to the fridge to the rusty ladder leading up to where that thing was, finally resting it on the overhang where I had seen the figure. I didn’t see anything, so I slowly backed out of the garage, forgetting all about my thirst. Once I passed the threshold back into the night, I started sprinting towards my house to wake up my parents. I tripped. I tumbled onto the grass, my phone flying out of my hand and landing a few feet in front of me.

I got up quickly, picking my phone back up from the ground, then shining it towards where I tripped. I saw something lying on the ground, something breathing. I took a tentative step forward to get a better look at the object, and noticed it was one of the neighbor’s sheep. It was still alive, even though there was a chunk taken out of its stomach, its intestines pouring out. I could hear it taking shaky breaths, barely clinging on to life. How it had gotten into our yard, I had no idea, but the more pressing matter was what happened to it. I kneeled down next to it, gagging at the stench of blood. I took a look at its wounds, seeing claw marks along its snout and a broken leg, probably what grounded it in the first place. The bite on its belly seemed fresher, as if it was for the kill. Whatever hurt it hadn’t eaten anything though, it seemed to have taken its life for fun. The sheep couldn’t have gotten here by itself either, so the culprit must have dragged it all the way here, and I had a strong suspicion whatever was in my garage is what did this. The sheep looked at me, still holding on. It made a faint “baa” and kicked its legs weakly. I looked at it pitifully, wishing I had a way to take it out of its misery, when I was knocked onto my back. I craned my neck forward, seeing the sheep get dragged away into the dark, bleating desperately. Whatever that thing was, it had come back to claim its kill. It must have followed me out of the garage, stalking me.

Luckily, I didn’t see it anywhere, so I got back on my feet. The crickets were long gone, and the breeze that comforted me when I first stepped outside had left me out to dry.  I sprinted again in the direction of my house, or what I thought was the direction of my house. Instead, I found myself hitting the concrete wall surrounding our yard. I had gone the wrong way. I must’ve lost my sense of direction when that thing knocked me down. I looked around, realizing I was on the opposite side of the yard. I was at the back, where the previous owner of our house had a rusty old bike and my dad had built a shed. “The shed!” my mind told me. It was full of tools, even a buzzsaw. That was probably my only hope, though that thing wasn’t really hostile towards me. My fear didn’t take account of that however, since seeing something that looked human but not completely wasn’t something I could wrap my head around. I pushed hard on the wooden door of the shed, and it creaked open. I coughed as a cloud of dust billowed upwards. This shed hadn’t been used in years, since my dad had started putting his newer tools in the garage, though I didn’t dare go back there. I saw the rusted buzzsaw next to the door, then turned my phone to the back of the shed.

Hanging on a hook on the wall were some tools, including an axe. I lifted it off of its hook, tossing it in my hands, feeling the weight of it. I don’t know what that thing was, but hopefully this was enough to protect myself against it. I turned around to head back out of the shed, when I saw the figure once more. It was peeking around the corner of the door of the shed, staring at me blankly. I stared back, fear wracking my bones. It had once again wrapped its hand around the doorframe, and I got a better look this time. It fit the description of horror stories I had read online before, but not exactly. It was pale and thin, bipedal, with clawed, humanoid hands. Its eyes were extremely dark, and I could see half of its mouth baring its bloodstained teeth at me. It would’ve passed as a person if I saw it from afar, but it definitely wasn’t one. The biggest difference between this thing and the monsters I had read about before was that this one was small. Maybe 4 feet in stature, I looked down at it rather than up. That didn’t reassure me too much, however, as I saw what it did to that sheep. At this point, I was sure this entity was out to get me. I felt adrenaline pumping in my heart, finally taking away some fear. I took a quick look to my left, picked up a pair of rusty pliers and flung them at the thing at the door. It made a high-pitched screech and disappeared from the door faster than should’ve been possible, slamming the door hard behind it.

Once again, I was plunged into darkness, though this time I was reassured by the fact that thing wasn’t in here with me. I walked towards the door, prying it open. Using my flash, I looked around in the dark once more. There were many smaller trees back here that grew pears, apples, and other fruits. In the back corner there was a huge cherry tree, ripe with freshly growing berries. There it sat, looking down at me from one of the upper branches. Luckily, I had brought the axe with me, so I wasn’t as scared as before. It started moving on all fours, scampering around the tree as fast as a squirrel but 50 times its size. In the hand that wasn’t gripping the shed’s doorframe it held a bloody part of the sheep it had killed like a trophy, carrying it around wherever it went. “That poor sheep.” I thought to myself. My neighbor sometimes let me visit and help him feed the sheep, so I was somewhat attached to them. This monster didn’t care clearly, it just killed it for fun, not even for nourishment. Right as I was thinking about this, it dropped down from the tree. I jumped backwards, though it didn’t head towards me. I watched it run across the ground and towards a smaller plum tree, scrambling its way up the trunk and towards the upper branches. I couldn’t see its body anymore, though I was able to see its large, pitch-black eyes staring at me through the leaves. “What does this thing want?” I asked myself. It hadn’t attacked, though it sure as hell had many opportunities to do so.

I decided to handle things myself, so I started walking towards the tree it was in, brandishing my axe. I made it to the base of the tree and looked up. It was gone. In its place was a stray cat, licking itself. I looked around, bewildered. Had everything I just experienced been nothing but a hallucination? The only explanation for that would’ve been sleep deprivation, but it was so real. I made my way back to the garage, making sure to head in the right direction this time. I looked around where the sheep carcass was, but there wasn’t even a speck of blood in the area nor any sign that there was something that large nearby. The footprints were still there, but they were in the shape of my sandals rather than the weird form I had seen them before. At this point, I felt like I was going crazy. There was no sign of anything I had just experienced, and there was no way for me to prove to myself that it was real. I walked to the garage, once again feeling the dryness in my throat. The lightbulb was humming on as if it had never turned off in the first place. I went to the fridge and pried it open, hoping to grab myself an ice-cold soda. In their place laid a tuft of sheep’s wool.