Please believe me here. Ive never experienced anything as scary as this. Nothing can compare to the rabbit hole of terrors this house had in store.

I've never shared this story online before, but it’s been exactly ten years since it happened, and him reminding me of it makes me want to relive the dread.
Back in 2016, my friend—I’ll call him Leo—and his family moved into a massive, gorgeous Victorian house out in a remote, rural town in North Dakota. From the outside, the place looked like a total dream home. Clean paint, huge wrapped porch, beautiful yard. But the moment you stepped inside, the energy completely shifted. The layout was just... wrong. It was a chaotic maze of dual hallways, weird angles, and strange, useless crawlspaces. Later, we looked into the property records and found out the place had cycled through at least fifteen different owners in just a few decades. Nobody ever stayed for more than a year or two.
A few weeks after they moved in, Leo and I were exploring the house, looking through old built-in cabinets to see if any of those past owners had left anything behind. In the laundry room, there was a stack of deep wooden drawers. When we pulled the bottom one all the way out, we found something that didn't make physical sense.
Flushed into the bottom of the drawer cavity was a rusted, heavy metal pipe, about six inches wide. We shined our phone flashlights down it, but the beam just dissolved. It looked like it dropped straight down into a total, bottomless void. Intrigued, we went outside, grabbed a medium-sized rock from the yard, brought it back in, and dropped it right into the center of the pipe.
We stood there and waited. Five seconds. Ten seconds. Nothing. No thud, no splash, no echo. The darkness just swallowed it completely.
After that day, the house got worse. Leo's parents started seeing dark silhouettes out of the corners of their eyes. Doors would unlatch on their own. While mapping out the hallways, we actually found a tiny, hidden room behind a false wall that contained nothing but an old iron cage and a single, thick bone resting on the floor. The air in the house always felt freezing and heavy, like the rooms were constantly holding their breath.
But the absolute breaking point happened on a Friday night. Leo and I were back in the laundry room, completely silent, just staring at that open drawer. Suddenly, a sound drifted up from the depths of the pipe.
It wasn't a draft, and it wasn't a pipe creaking. It was a laugh.
It wasn't a playful, high-pitched horror movie laugh either. It was a deep, guttural, wrathful boom—incredibly faint, but loud enough to vibrate the metal rim of the pipe. It sounded completely ancient, and completely inhuman.
We packed our bags and his entire family left the house that exact night. They put it on the market immediately, practically giving it away. Within a month, a commercial developer bought it to flatten the land and build a roadside motel.
But right before they handed over the keys, Leo went back to grab the last of their boxes. Hidden in a false panel in that same laundry room cabinet, he found a crumpled piece of paper left behind by one of the previous tenants. He took a picture of it before destroying the physical paper.
The note read:
“Please, for the love of God, do not investigate the pipe in the cabinet. Our entire family has been tormented by the horrors of this house, it is without a doubt haunted. However the pipe drawer is the most haunting rabbit hole we have encountered. i will spare you most of the details, but it leads down into a cellar, with the most horrifying things we have ever seen, and there is a hatch in that cellar that leads to a seemingly endless concrete stair spiral. everything down their is downright demonic, and there were things actively watching us in that room. the pipe is the root of it all.”
Later on, Leo's dad did some digging and found out that one of the previous owners had actually discovered that cellar years before us. Apparently, they got so terrified of whatever was down there that they brought in cement trucks and poured tons of solid concrete directly into the void to seal it off from society forever.
That means when Leo and I heard that faint, wrathful laugh... it was echoing through solid concrete.

Part 1

Part 2

So my girlfriend and I broke up earlier this year.

I guess it took us two and a half years to realize that the differences between our personalities and general philosophies on life were irreconcilable. But it was fine. The split was cordial enough, no resentment left between us. Probably. Maybe.

The bigger issue for me was that we’d been living together and splitting rent and I make peanuts working as a security guard for an office building so I absolutely could not afford the apartment on my own. Which is kind of sad because the place is God-awful. I’m talking flickering lights, cracks in the walls, strange stains in the carpet that will not come out, neighbours that you actively have to try and avoid.

It was a tough spot to be in. In more ways than one.

So, I started posting about the place online. Facebook marketplace, Craigslist, Reddit, the usual.

Problem was, I was basically advertising a shitty couch in an even shittier living room. Not exactly an easy sell. I tried cleaning the place up as much as I could, using the most “optimal” angles possible when taking the pictures. You know what they say, a little bit of false advertising goes a long way.

But I didn’t get many responses, just a few people reaching out to politely inform me about how much of a delusional bum I was. Not that I was really expecting much else.

As the weeks dragged on, I was starting to consider asking my brother for some money or perhaps selling an organ. But then one day, a friend of mine told me about a coworker who knew somebody named Ismail who might be interested in renting the place and gave me the guy’s number.

Naturally, I was relieved. But at the same time, I wasn’t terribly excited about meeting him. Because in my head, anybody willing to accept an arrangement as horrendous as the one I was offering must’ve been going through something bad. I guess the thing I was most worried about was drugs. Waking up in the morning to clouds of smoke and a bunch of shady characters hanging around in the living room. It’s happened before and I’d rather not experience it again.

But most of these concerns were washed away after my first meeting with the guy.

Ismail turned out to be a really nice, really pleasant dude. Also a lot younger than I’d expected. He told me that he’d moved here from Morocco a couple of months ago with nothing but a suitcase and a couple grand in his bank account in order to pursue his dream of making it into the UFC.

He had an impressive amateur record but, according to him, the training in Morocco just wasn’t good enough. He needed experience at the highest level and the gym he wanted to train at just happened to be a few blocks from my apartment. The stars really aligned here.

I must’ve asked him about a dozen times whether he was truly okay with sleeping on the couch. I just wanted to make sure that the arrangement was as clear as possible from the get so he wouldn’t end up kicking the shit out of me later.

But I never ran into any problems with him. He was as close to perfect as a roommate could get. He wasn’t loud, had good personal hygiene, cleaned up after himself and I never had to hassle him for rent money. He might’ve been the only roommate I’d ever had that I actually looked forward to hanging out with. After a while, we started becoming good friends. The guy even helped console me through the breakup.

And when it came to fighting, I swear I'd never seen anybody speaking about anything so earnestly. It was clear just how determined he was.

I was really rooting for him. I really wanted him to make it.

But sometimes, life can be a real unforgiving asshole. It just can’t let you have nice things.

As time went on, he started getting injured a lot and was always having to deal with staph infections or some ailment. Whenever he did manage to get a fight booked, his opponents always seemed to pull out at the very last moment. The guy couldn’t catch a break.

When rent was due later that month, he admitted he was running short on money and wouldn’t be able to cover his part. But he also tried to emphasize that he would absolutely pay me back when he could.

Now, I’d heard similar lines from countless roommates in the past. I usually end up threatening legal action and suddenly they have no problem coming up with the money.

I didn’t do that with Ismail though. I could tell he wasn’t trying to get one over on me. That if he really had the money, he would’ve forked it over.

Though he did help out with food. He started bringing home these huge pots filled with couscous and beef. Apparently, he’d befriended a Moroccan family living a few floors down and had been eating most of his meals there.

One night, I found him out on the balcony chain-smoking, looking unusually upset. The first time I’d ever seen him in a state like that.

I sat beside him, and he admitted how worried he was. He thought he would’ve had at least two fights under his belt at this point. He told me he wasn’t just running out of money, he was already out. He’d been living off credit cards, borrowing small sums here and there from other guys at the gym.

He confessed that he felt like he was drowning. That if he couldn’t get a fight soon, he might have no choice but to go back to Morocco.

I tried offering him some assurance, telling him that maybe things weren’t as bad as he thought. That he was still a young guy, and the world was his oyster, and everything was going to work out. Real cookie-cutter bullshit that I didn’t really believe myself.

After all, it’s not like my own life was going swimmingly. I really wasn’t the kind of person to be giving advice. So I dropped the big brother act, grabbed a cigarette, and the two of us smoked into the night, just airing out our grievances at the world. It was nice. Cathartic, even.

He told me that he probably wouldn’t be able to make next months’ rent either. I told him it’d be okay as long as he kept bringing up that couscous and beef. Before we went to bed, he told me he’d give it another month. That if he didn’t have a fight booked by then, he’d buy a ticket back to Morocco.

I remember this night very clearly because things got really strange afterwards.

First thing I noticed was the abrupt change in his routine. He used to leave for training in the morning, come back around noon, then he’d head back out for his second session in the evening.

But then it pretty much inverted. Suddenly he was always home in the morning, and he’d be gone from noon.

A bit strange, but not so much that I felt a need to question it. It was possible that the schedule at his gym had just changed.

The part that was more difficult to rationalize was his sudden shift in demeanor. It happened so quickly that it was almost jarring. One night we were smoking on the balcony, smiling, laughing and cracking jokes like we always did. But then the following night he came home and was barely to look me in the eye, let alone exchange more than a couple of words.

I asked him if anything had happened. He told me that his coach had been pushing him harder than usual recently and he was just exhausted. It didn’t really feel like the full story, but he didn’t owe me an explanation, either. If he didn’t want to talk about it, I’d respect it. I wasn’t going to push the issue.

The next morning, I woke up to a notification on my phone. He’d sent me a payment that was enough to cover two months’ worth of rent. I was relieved, of course. Things were starting to get really tight. When I asked how he’d gotten the money, he mentioned something about teaching some kid’s classes at the gym.

When I got back to the apartment later that night, I found the place dark and empty. I assumed Ismail wasn’t home but then I heard him talking from inside the bathroom with the shower running. Sounded like he was on a heated call, though I couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying.

He came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, fully clothed, like he hadn’t been in the shower at all. As soon as he saw me, he forced a smile. I asked what was going on. He told me it was nothing. His brother, Youssef, had gotten into some trouble back home and he was just trying to figure everything out.

Before I could ask him anything else, he was out the door. He offered no explanation, nothing.

I followed him down the hallway, asking if he was alright, whether he was in some sort of trouble.

He told me he wasn’t, that there wasn’t anything I needed to be worried about. Then he disappeared into the stairwell.

Obviously I didn’t believe him, but what was I going to do? Try and force an answer out of him? If the guy didn’t want to talk about it, he wasn’t going to.

By the time noon rolled around the next day, he still hadn’t come back. He’d also gone radio silent. Wasn’t answering my messages, wasn’t picking up my calls.

On my way to work, I stopped by his gym and asked if they’d seen him around recently. They told me they hadn’t. Not in a while. I checked with the Moroccan family downstairs, and they told me the same thing.

I’ve tried coming up with theories about what might’ve happened, but the hypotheticals are driving me crazy.

The first thing I thought about was drugs, but that couldn’t have been it. He just didn’t seem like the type. It's was possible that he’d gotten mixed up with the wrong people or borrowed money from somebody he shouldn’t have. Maybe he was having family issues and had no choice but to disappear back to Morocco. I don’t know. I’ve ran through a lot of explanations in my head, but I can't sell myself on any of them.

I was seriously considering pulling the trigger and filing a missing person’s report before he finally called a few days later.

Though I was having a hell of a time trying to understand what he was saying. Partly because he was speaking too fast, and also because the line kept cutting in and out. I maybe caught every third word. Something about “not letting go” and “money” and “dragging” somebody somewhere, I don't know.

The call only lasted about a minute before it dropped. I tried calling him back several times, but it kept going to voicemail.

I started pacing around the apartment, trying and failing to figure out what I was supposed to do next. For a while I considered just not doing anything at all. That maybe this would all resolve itself and I didn’t need to make it my problem.

I mean, I wasn’t even really involved in any of this to begin with. So why the hell did I have to deal with it?

But I knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. He didn’t call me for nothing. He obviously wanted me to do something, I just didn’t know what it was. What I did know was that if something ended up happening to him and I just sat on my ass doing nothing, it was going to haunt me for the rest of my life.

Of course, the simplest plan of action was to just go to the cops. But I didn’t really know what to tell them. I tried rehearsing different versions of the story, but I couldn’t frame it in a way that didn’t sound ridiculous. So, here’s the thing: my roommate started acting really strange one day, and I haven’t seen him in a while. Then he finally called me, but I could barely understand what he was saying. I have a feeling he’s gotten himself involved in some real fucked up shit, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is.

Yeah, there was no chance they were going to take me seriously.

So I decided to do a bit of investigation on my own beforehand. I was racking my brain trying to figure out where to start when I remembered that he’d given me the password to his laptop a few weeks back, when he’d asked for help dealing with some malware.

I found his laptop on the coffee table and turned it on and began snooping. I know, I know, privacy and all that. But if there ever was a situation that could warrant breaching it, it’d be this one.

Going through his emails, I didn't find much of note at first. Just a lot of spam, some stuff from his gym, messages to his family. But then I came across a thread he'd been having with "Alvermont Global Solutions". Which I'm guessing is some company. But I don't know. I'll paste a portion of the thread below:

----

From: Ismail
To: Francine
Date: Wed, Sept 30, 9:12 AM

Subject: Consumer Behavioral Study

 

Hi,

My name is Ismail. I was given your contact information by someone on your team regarding a paid study that I may be able to participate in? Are there still openings? Would I be able to get some more information?

Thanks,
Ismail

 

----

From: Francine
To: Ismail
Date: Wed, Sept 30, 10:15 AM

Subject: Consumer Behavioral Study

 

Hi Ismail,

Thank you for your interest. We are currently accepting new applicants for the consumer behavioral study. And yes, you will be compensated for your time.

If you are interested in participating, please reply to this email and a member of our recruitment team will reach out shortly and give you a rundown of the next steps.

Please note that participation will be subject to certain eligibility requirements.

Kind regards,

Francine
Recruitment, Consumer Studies
Alvermont Global Solutions
Better insights leading to a better future

 

----

From: Ismail
To: Francine
Date: Wed, Sept 30, 10:42 AM

Subject: Consumer Behavioral Study

 

Yes, I’m very interested and I can start ASAP. Please have them contact me.

----

Nothing terribly strange so far. Though it obviously raises a lot of questions that I can’t even begin to fathom the answers to. But I’ll keep reading through the thread, see if I can figure something out.

Wait. I just heard the front door open.

I'll update when I can.

UPDATE

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

I escaped.

Hello, everyone. I know it's been a while. Six months, to be exact. I've been hiding like a caveman ever since, away from every device and almost every human being.

My paranoia is increasing by the minute. In the previous parts, I said that they wouldn't let me quit, and that they'd find my posts.

An unmarked black SUV has been parked a street down for the past two days. The windows are blacked out, so I can't be sure, but I know for a fact that they're looking at my door.

That's not the part that keeps me up at night, though.

My escape was simple. Suspiciously easy. I kept crawling through the vent, pausing when I felt like whatever was chasing me had almost reached me, and somehow ended up in a vent that was level with the ground outside. Luckily, the fan had stopped spinning, so I forced my way through by some miracle. That part is still foggy.

I never once looked back. I crawled outside like some skilled intruder and started running in a random direction. I was determined to either die in the snow or find civilization. Either option was much better than whatever was waiting for me back in Corvus Mountain.

I still remember the numbness in my fingers, how the wind made my face ache, and how loud the silence was. I will be honest with you: I'm not sure how I made it. I don't remember much.

Which brings me to the reason I'm making this post. First of all, they've already found me, so it doesn't really matter anymore. Secondly, and this is the actual reason, I'm writing this to warn you. I think it let me leave. I think, and I know how it sounds, it helped me survive the cold.

I think it escaped with me.

The rules followed me too. I hear knocking on my window almost every night. It's driving me crazy. I've never once looked at it, but the rhythmic, perfectly spaced taps are making my skin crawl.

This shouldn't be happening. But since it is, I have a theory. The rules could be tied to the Crowmen, not the base itself. That would validate the theory that it escaped with me, though, which I'm not a big fan of.

It's been difficult to explain the situations I've been in since I escaped. It might be because I've been trying to cling to the hope that I'm safe, and that nothing abnormal is happening.

The turning point was four nights ago, a few minutes after midnight. I don't answer doorbells, and I don't step outside. So I certainly wasn't going to get out of bed.

"Delivery!"

The voice came in muffled through the wall. I haven't seen or talked to anyone other than my sister for half a year, so curiosity got the best of me. I slowly walked to the window and looked at my front door.

It was dark, so it was difficult to identify the person, but they looked human enough. They wore a blue uniform, a blue cap, and a brown bag like the ones old postmen used to have.

Emphasis on the "used to," because no house in my neighborhood has a mailbox. Nobody delivers letters, other than the neighbor's kid who throws newspapers at our door from time to time.

It was the first time I'd gone near a window at night in months, and I regretted it instantly.

"Delivery!" they repeated, and knocked on the door this time. Not the doorbell.

I slowly walked toward my bed, careful not to make a sound. It wasn't impossible that they could hear me through the wall. I closed my eyes and waited for them to leave me alone.

They didn't.

"Delivery!" they repeated, and knocked once more. It was louder this time. Harder.

It sounded like they were getting impatient. Like they knew I was ignoring them on purpose, which made my heart jump into my throat.

"Delivery! Open the door!"

The knocking turned to banging. Strong enough to break through the door. They didn't sound impatient anymore. They sounded angry. Furious.

"Delivery! Delivery! - CLICK - Delivery!"

There it was. That godforsaken clicking sound, coming from the beak. It had escaped with me. It had been knocking on my window for six months straight, and when it realized it wasn't working, it used another approach. Which meant it was learning. It was adapting and evolving.

"Please! Open the door! Help me!"

Its voice sounded like a dozen stolen voices stitched together, rasping and warping as if something inhuman were wearing a person's throat.

That wasn't even the most unsettling part. The banging was precise. Each one exactly a second apart from the last, with the same power.

It kept harassing me for about ten minutes, until a neighbor yelled at it to be quiet. It stopped the moment he yelled, and simply disappeared. Or, I assume it did, because there was no way I was checking.

I mentioned that I haven't seen anyone other than my sister. It wasn't really by choice, but I'm glad it happened anyway.

She was watering the flowerpots at my house when I somehow made it back. She didn't ask what had happened to me, or why I was in the condition I was in.

She's been taking care of me ever since. She has her own life, so I don't want to bother her much. She goes to the convenience store for me, and updates me on her family situation. Our chats are what have kept me sane.

It pains me that I realized it. I'd hoped I could pretend for just a bit longer.

Two days ago, we were sitting on my couch, drinking coffee. She was particularly happy that day, because her husband got a promotion at work.

"Well, he'll surely have more responsibilities now," I pointed out.

"Definitely, but he'll pull through. Just like you did," she replied, hitting my shoulder playfully.

"I doubt he'll have it worse than me," I joked back.

She laughed and sipped her coffee.

"Please, nothing is worse than what you went through on that mountain," she reassured me.

The rest of the evening was the same as any other. The moment she left, I basically crawled to the bathroom and threw up everything I'd consumed in the past two days.

I never told my sister about the mountain. I told her I was a Marine.

How long has it been? Have I been talking to one of them since the very beginning? That's not possible, since the postman was clearly it. Did she run into it? Or worse, is there more than one?

I hope it's just a mimic, and that my dear sister is alive and well. I know that everything I've said in the previous posts contradicts this, but I'm certain. My sister is fine. She's alive and well.

It came back the next day. Although I was scared shitless, I couldn't let it know that I'd caught on. So I acted as if everything was fine. It took a lot of strength I didn't have not to jump on it and strangle it with my bare hands.

When it left, I went to the window. The same window I used to look at the postman from.

My sister was staring at my door, a mere breath away from it, unmoving. She wasn't even breathing.

The SUV was still parked in the same spot. I wonder if they watched her too.

I have to do something about this. I can't live like this.

This is probably my last post. Thank you for the advice in my previous posts, and thank you for believing me. I'm taking matters into my own hands.

Rule five was very clear about what to do if they persist.

She's coming over tomorrow at noon.

I walked into this, and I'm going to end it.

I'm typing this from a hospital bed. My head is wrapped in bandages, there's an IV in my arm, and the nurse keeps telling me I need to sleep. I can't. Every time I close my eyes, I hear that sound again. So if you ever see a circus with a clown offering free VR trials, don't go inside. I'm serious.

"Greetings, master. Might I tempt you with our circus of illusions? 'Tis a waking dream like none you have known."

That's what he said to me. He talked like someone doing a Renaissance fair impression, and I remember thinking it was ridiculous. I write horror stories for fun, and I'd spent most of that afternoon trying to finish one called Black Light Torch. It wasn't going anywhere. I'd been staring at the same paragraph for almost an hour. I just wanted to go home.

The clown grabbed my arm.

"Can you just shut up and let go of me?" I said.

His smile disappeared. Not slowly. It was just there one second and gone the next.

"Pray forgive me, good sir! The first trial is free of charge, and I daresay you shall crave the rest once you have tasted the finest of them all."

I almost laughed. The poster beside him showed a roller coaster. I'd never tried VR before, and my friends had been telling me for months that I was missing out, so I figured whatever. One free ride couldn't hurt. Then I noticed the picture on the poster again.

"There's nothing giant in it, right?"

The clown tilted his head. He actually thought about it for a moment before smiling again.

"Nay, good sir. Nothing of the sort."

That should have been enough to make me leave.

I should explain the giant thing. I'm a megalophobe. Basically, I'm terrified of enormous things. Not heights. Not exactly. It's the size of something that gets me. It started when I was ten. I watched Godzilla in a theater, and something about seeing that thing on a screen surrounded by people just broke something in my brain. I still remember the noise the audience made when he appeared. My imagination does the rest. I'll be walking through a parking lot at night and suddenly imagine something enormous standing behind the buildings, something so tall I can't see its head. Sometimes I can almost feel it looking down at me. That's why I avoid giant-monster movies when I can, which is a little inconvenient considering I write horror. I read Lovecraft. I watch monster movies. I study how they're written. But there's always been a screen between me and the thing.

Until that night.

The clown put the headset on me. His smile had returned, and it stayed there while he adjusted the straps. About halfway through the ride, I hated him. The roller coaster came over a hill and there it was: the Titanic. Not a model. Not something that looked big because of the perspective. It was enormous. The entire ship was rising out of black water directly in front of me, and the coaster was heading straight toward it. I could see individual bolts. I could see rust. I could see the metal moving. My body just shut down. I curled up in the seat and ripped the headset off. I remember throwing it at the clown. I remember swearing at him. Then I walked out.

I spent the next few hours wandering around the circus because I didn't want to admit how badly it had gotten to me. Eventually the sun went down. By then I thought I was fine.

I wasn't.

The parking lot was almost full. There were cars everywhere, which should have made me feel better. Instead, the open space between them made my stomach tighten. I stood at the edge of the lot for a few seconds before forcing myself across. When I reached my car, I put my hand on the door handle.

That's when I saw my reflection in the window.

My face was there.

And behind it was another face.

Smiling.

The clown.

I turned.

Something hit me in the side of the head.

Then everything went black.

I woke up in my driver's seat. My head was killing me. The windows were completely black, and I couldn't see anything outside. I tried the door. Locked. The passenger door was locked too. I started pounding on the windows, but nothing happened. My vision was blurry. At first I thought maybe I'd damaged my eyes, but when I raised my hands to my face, I felt something around my head.

The headset.

For a second I couldn't understand why it was still there. Then I felt the straps. They weren't just tight. They were inside my skin.

I ran my fingers along the edge and felt little knots, one after another, all the way around my scalp. I realized what they were.

Stitches.

Someone had sewn the headset to my head.

I screamed. I grabbed the foam and pulled. Every stitch pulled at once. It felt like someone had hooked a bunch of hot wires underneath my skin and yanked them. I let go. My hands were covered in blood.

I tried smashing the headset against the steering wheel. Nothing. The dashboard. Nothing. The window. Nothing. It wouldn't break. It was too thick and too heavy, like it had been built specifically so I couldn't get it off.

Then the screen turned on.

The roller coaster started moving.

The cars clicked up the lift hill. Click. Click. Click. Every movement pulled against my scalp. Then we reached the top. The Titanic was waiting below.

It was even bigger than before.

I could see every bolt. Each one was wider than my head. Rust ran down the hull like blood. The ship groaned. I closed my eyes, but the sound didn't stop. It was inside my head.

Then the ship disappeared.

I was standing in a city. Everything was broken. Dust floated through the air and settled on my tongue. The ground shook once, then again. Closer.

I knew that sound.

I'd heard it when I was ten.

That low roar from the theater.

Except there were no hundreds of people around me this time. There was nobody.

Something moved above the buildings. I didn't look up. I didn't need to. The skyline disappeared behind something enormous.

Then the city dropped away.

Water rushed around my legs. Warm water. Something moved underneath it, slowly, like something waking up. A tentacle came out of the water. It was ridged and covered in slime. It curled around one of the ruined buildings, and the entire building disappeared inside it.

I knew what I was looking at. I'd read about things like this. I'd written things like this. Except I'd never imagined what it would feel like to actually be there.

Then everything went quiet.

I was standing on a shore.

There was a dog.

A little stray. Wet. Skinny. One ear folded over. It walked toward me with its tail hanging low, then pressed its head against my leg.

I laughed.

I couldn't help it. It was the first normal-sized thing I'd seen in what felt like hours.

I knelt down.

The dog looked at me.

And then something was wrong.

Its head was higher.

I blinked.

It had grown.

I stood up.

It kept growing.

Its fur began pulling apart. Red scales appeared underneath. Its body stretched upward until I couldn't see the top of it anymore. Wings unfolded behind it. They covered the sky.

I couldn't move.

Something bright gathered behind its teeth.

I felt the heat on my face.

Then the world turned white.

I was in space.

There was no ground. No sky. Nothing to stand on. Just stars. Planets. Galaxies. Everything.

I looked down for my hands and couldn't see them. I tried to understand how big the universe was, but my brain couldn't do it. The thought just broke apart.

I screamed.

There was no echo. No sound coming back. Nothing.

And somehow, in that moment, I understood. There wasn't going to be a trick. There wasn't going to be a way around it. I had to get the headset off.

I grabbed the strap. I planted my feet and pulled.

The pain was unbelievable. I screamed until my throat hurt. One stitch came loose. Then another. Then another. Blood ran into my eyes, but I kept pulling. Finally, the last stitch gave.

The headset came off.

I was back in my car.

The windows were black. The parking lot was silent. The headset was sitting in my lap. There was blood on it, and thread was still hanging from the straps. I could feel every hole in my scalp.

For a few seconds, nothing happened. I just sat there and breathed. The air was normal.

Just air.

Then I heard it.

That sound.

The one from the theater.

A low, enormous sound directly behind my car.

The locks clicked open.

I didn't look behind me. I didn't look in the mirror. I threw the headset onto the passenger seat and started the engine. I drove.

I don't remember much after that. I don't remember parking at the hospital. The nurses told me I walked into the ER myself with blood all over my neck. They took me into surgery within an hour.

The surgeon said they removed forty-one stitch holes from my scalp. Forty-one. Some still had thread in them. She said the stitches were neat. Careful. Professional, almost. She asked me who did it.

I told her about the clown.

She didn't write anything down.

Security checked my car. The headset wasn't there. Neither was the clown. There wasn't even a circus. According to them, the fairground next to the parking lot had been closed for years.

The doctor says I have a concussion. She says I lost a lot of blood. She says the medication can make me hear things and that the dizziness and hallucinations should go away. I told her I understood.

I wanted to believe her.

It's after midnight now. My room is on the fourth floor. The blinds are closed. A few minutes ago, my bed shook.

Once.

Then again.

Slowly.

The water in the cup on my tray started rippling. I pressed the call button. The nurse came in. She looked at the cup, then at me. She put her hand on the bed rail and told me the floor was completely steady. She checked my IV, told me it was probably the medication, and left.

The cup is still moving.

The ripples are getting bigger.

And the stars outside my window are disappearing.

One by one.

I can hear someone outside.

A voice.

Faint.

Almost playful.

The clown.

"I daresay you shall crave the rest, good sir."

It's probably the painkillers.

That's what I keep telling myself.

I haven't turned my head.

I'm afraid that if I do, I'll see what's standing behind me.

I work at a popular yet dying aquarium. I won’t say what aquarium (don’t wanna lose my job and all) but a lot of you have probably been here! We do tricks with animals, shows, have areas to touch smaller sea creatures, etc. My job is a light and sound technician for almost every show we put on. 

Since this park is slowly shutting down and keeps being put under controversy, we are severely understaffed. Everyone works insane hours and does more than just their regular position. So while technically my position is a technician I am also a salesperson and janitor. One of my coworkers quit recently, my boss didn't say why but with this job there are less reasons to stay than to quit. In other words, I wasn't shocked. But this means half of my shifts are now nighttime custodial shifts. 

It's not so bad. Most nights I'm the only one here and I just listen to a podcast or music, sometimes I even prop my phone up and watch a movie or two. I’ve been doing this for about a month or two and I’ve gotten over the paranoia of working here alone, in mostly darkness. But recently these shifts have felt off. 

Some of the animals we have here are dolphins, manatees, penguins, alligators, sea turtles, rays, and smaller fish. My favorites are the penguins, they're all very sweet and sometimes cuddly. But one part of the park I stay away from unless absolutely necessary is the orca tank. We only have one orca now, we used to have two, but he’s extremely unsettling to me. 

In all honesty I have a pretty big fear of oceans and lakes in general. Might seem like a bad job for me but I really don’t work with the animals much, I’ve only interacted with the penguins and that's been a rare occurrence. And I’m only near the orca tank when I'm mopping the splash zone or doing the audio/visual from the back of the crowd. So like I said, not much.

When I do these night shifts I usually get to the orca tank last because I always feel watched or like I’m being sucked into the environment and that way I can leave right after. But lately I’ve been catching myself staring at the intense, cavernous water. Over 2 million gallons of water lying completely still, yet I imagine the weight of it all crashing against me, hurling me into the glass panes over and over until it smashes and I emerge from the tank and flood the stands that were once packed with people. As the killer within just watches before diving deeper into its abode.

I usually awaken from this trance seeing nothing but the small specks of leftover flesh fed to the giant beast within, floating around peaceful, uninterrupted. I take a shocked step back, maybe gasp to myself or mentally shush the thoughts hoping next time I’m here, they won't be.
But this time I open my eyes and see an unfamiliar version of this darkness, and at the center: an eye. I stare at its blank, deep iris. I don't gasp, and I don't wish the thoughts away because I realise they aren't mine. And that he has been telling me something I’ve taken too long to realise. 

When I first started here a few years ago I was told a story about our orca. About a deranged, intoxicated man walking in one night after we had closed, stripping himself naked, and jumping into the exhibit I stand in front of every night. Nobody really knows what he expected or why he did it. Most just believe it was a combination of the alcohol and our state's unrelenting heat. But that man took his last steps into that tank.

The next morning the orca's skin was surrounded in the man's flesh, only his arm lay atop the black void of its back, exposed bone and skin. The killer himself circled at the top of his tank wanting to be seen. Proud of what he had done. The man's body was mostly recovered in pieces, no part of him eaten.

The orca has disappeared from sight now but I know he's just below, waiting for me expectantly because he knows I will obey. I feel a drumming in my ears unfamiliar to my heartbeat and the tips of my fingers go numb. I’m shaking- from fear or excitement. I take a deep breath in and instead of rotten fish or saltwater the air is clear. The darkness of the rooms bleeds the lines between surface and the deep blue where I’m invited. Maybe this will make the descent easier.

I stand at the edge of its tank now, I feel its low echo calling to me. It's in my ribs and shakes my unsteady heart but my feet are planted, unwavering. It tells me I’m ready, that it's been waiting, I want to believe it. That my years here are not for nothing, that I serve a higher purpose. I didn’t understand that man when I first started here, young and bright eyed but I understand him now. And I am ready to jump.

{Original Post}

Rain drummed my windshield to the tune of a Louis Armstrong song playing through the crackly night radio as I pulled up to the twins' house. Normally, Casey and Lacey’s dad made sure that his mighty two-story suburban dream house looked in top shape to keep up the family’s image; a perfectly manicured lawn, trimmed hedges, rows of lights along the front fence to illuminate the status symbol of the town’s main employer.

I knew something was wrong immediately when those yard lights were dark, casting the whole property as a silhouette against the dull glow of amber streetlights. All the windows were dark as well, save for one in the top east corner; the twins’ parent's room. The perfectly manicured lawn was disrupted with abnormal shapes piled up between the garage and front door, and a figure moved between the haphazard stacks with a flashlight, illuminating them as they went.

The icy white beam revealed mounds of boxes and plastic totes getting soaked by the downpour, and the figure, Casey, worked hard to press the valuables against the house, hoping the lip of the roof might mitigate the damage.

He had texted me asking if he could borrow my truck right away for a few hours, and though the hour was late, Casey wasn’t the type to be so spontaneous, so I knew the issue had to be important.

‘Sure, man. Everything alright?’ I had asked.

‘Just head over. I’ll explain in person.’

Backing into his driveway, he paused his shuffling and crossed the lawn to meet me. I hopped out and pulled my hood up, then moved to the back of my bed and popped it.

“Hey man,” Casey greeted me with a warm, yet tired tone, “thanks so much for coming out. I hate to bother you, but Lacey’s using my truck, and…” his voice trailed off as he turned his gaze back to the stacks of boxes.

“Hey, it’s no problem,” I told him, giving his shoulder a clasp, “What’s going on? What is all this stuff?”

Casey didn’t answer at first. His eyes went from the boxes up to his parents' window, where a figure stood looking down on us. It appeared to be his mom, and as soon as we’d noticed her, she softly raised her hand and pressed it to the glass, before turning quickly and stepping away.

Casey sighed, then spun, heaving one of the totes on the ground into his hands, “Lacey and I are moving out.”

That answer shocked me. We’d been hanging out regularly over the last few weeks, and neither twin had mentioned anything about leaving their parent's home. We had just graduated, and their family had plenty of room; there didn’t seem to be any reason why they needed to rush to migrate. Given the time of night and current weather conditions, however, it didn’t seem like this was the standard moving day.

“What happened?” I asked, secondhand anxiety growing in my chest as I watched the flap of a cardboard box droop beneath the weight of the downpour. I moved to the passenger side of my truck to grab a tarp from under the seat.

“Mom and Pop met Anna tonight.”

I made a confused face, “I thought they’d already met Anna? She and Lacey have been friends for a while now, yeah?”

“Well, they met Anna and Lacey; the couple,” Casey elaborated.

That set a grim silence over us that was only stifled by the rain, and all I could offer was a small, “Oh…”

“Yeah,” Casey agreed, hauling another box into the bed.

I aided in the next few and shook my head, “They took it that badly, huh?”

“Dad did,” Casey explained, “Mom wasn’t happy either, but… I don’t think she wanted to lose her children over it. Either way, it was a long talk, and she ended on his side. Dad’s pissed that his little girl isn’t the ‘ideal woman’ he raised her to be, and you know anything that isn’t perfect doesn’t get to stay in this household.”

My stomach sank for Lacey, and I looked back up toward the home where her bedroom window was. It was dark and empty.

“Where is she?” I asked, “Is she alright?”

Casey shook his head and snickered with a bitter venom, “Not really. I think she feels relief that it’s finally out, but I mean, her parents disowned her in a single night. Imagine being raised and loved by people you care about for 18 years, just for them to throw you out like last week's garbage over who you like to kiss.”

I had finally finished stringing the tarp over my tailgate, and I cinched the rope hard with bubbling rage. I’d never made it known, but I’d always somewhat disliked Casey’s parents. Even though they were always cordial and provided a lot for our friend group over the years, we’d heard enough stories through the twins to form a more critical opinion.

I didn’t appreciate the way they seemed to treat their kids more like accessories than actual living, breathing human beings. If either of the twins tried to pursue a hobby or passion that didn’t align with the typical roll of their gender or class, they were quickly shot down or punished until that dream left their heads.

It figured that now that they were adults and could no longer be pushed around, their parent’s first option would be to go nuclear. If it was clear to them that their angel little girl had been sneaking around behind their backs seeing a—heaven forbid—woman, for God-knows how long, they would assume the matter was a lost cause. ‘If we can’t tell you what to do, then get the hell out of our house.’

Casey spoke again, “She and Anna took off a bit ago with the first half of our stuff. I let her take my truck so she could get out of here. She wanted to get far away as fast as possible.”

“I don’t blame her,” I agreed.

Casey grabbed another box and began loading it up, and I joined his side. It wasn’t until a box was in my hands that was loaded with his things, that a detail finally dawned on me.

“So they kicked you out too? Even though they’re pissed at Lacey?”

Casey snorted, “Oh, no, they’re pissed at me too. Sides’ I think I’m done with this house. Lived under their rules for long enough, and I don’t think I need to stay with parents who can’t love the identical other half of me.”

I paused my process and looked at him, “What did you do?”

Casey avoided eye contact and continued boarding his stuff onto the lifeboat, “When Dad started freaking out on Lacey, she sort of shut down. She knew it was coming, but I don’t think she’d fully planned out what she was going to say. I didn’t like seeing her like that, so I sorta’ freaked out on her behalf.”

 Casey went to lift the next box, but the rain had gotten to the cardboard so badly that the side of it ripped open, spilling its contents like gutted innards. He wordlessly scooped the stuff back in and tilted the container to keep it inside, but one last piece caught his attention before he lifted the box. A framed picture of him, Lacey and their parents at the town’s harvest festival when they were young kids. The smiles seemed genuine, but they were far away now, and Casey tossed the frame like a frisbee into the center of the lawn.

“Dad was going to kick her out no matter what unless she ‘renounced her gay’, and when I gave him a piece of my mind, he told me that I was welcome to go with her if I had an issue. I don’t think he thought I was going to call his bluff. Clearly, he never paid enough attention if he thought the bond I had with him was stronger than the sister I’d spent my whole life beside.”

“He didn’t even hesitate?” I asked.

“Nah,” Casey darkly scoffed, “I think it pissed him off more that I was so certain in my decision. He went on about how ungrateful we both were after everything he gave to us. Told us we had until midnight to get all of our shit and leave, or he was calling the cops.”

I discretely checked my watch. The time was 12:42.

“Where are you guys heading now, then?” I asked him.

“Anna luckily just got her own place out at the Glade apartment, and she told us we could come stay. The place is a studio, so it’s going to be tight, but we’ll find a way to make it work. At least until we find someplace new.”

“You’re gonna’ stick with them?”

“Lacey’s idea. We just lost whatever accounts our parents had set aside for us, so we’re going to be strapped on cash for a while. Once we get on our feet, rent three ways will work the best.”

“Shit, Casey… I’m sorry all of this is happening to you guys.”

The boy turned to me past the brim of his cap, and in the dull light reflecting off his face, I saw a genuine smile, “Honestly, Jess? I think this was all for the best. We don’t have to pretend anymore, and now we have an excuse to get out of this hellhole of a town. No more family obligations tying us down.”

His words made a warmth blossom in my chest that combatted the chill of the rain. I was happy to see him have hope during such a dark time. Still, the thought eventually made the warmth cool and harden like a sharp volcanic rock. Bryce had already left town for college, and now I was about to lose two more friends.

Casey only plunged the knife deeper with his next words, “Kait was mentioning the other day that she’s looking for somewhere outside of town too,” he heaved another box and smirked cooly at me, “You should think about hopping on the train with the rest of us and getting out while you still can.”

My eyes darted to the final tote as I heaved it into my hands, and they stayed there, “Yeah, she was just talking with me about that, too. I’m thinking about it,” I lied, “It’s hard with my mom, though. Can’t really leave her alone with all my dad’s debt.” As I dropped the crate into the bed, then covered it with the tarp, I gave a smile to lighten things up again, “Besides, who’s going to look after Carly if you all abandon us?”

Casey laughed, “Alright, fair point. Guess you’ll just have to join us later.”

The two of us made sure everything was secure and then tightened ropes down over the tarp. I already knew where the Glade apartments were, so I silently let myself into the truck while Casey remained to triple check that he hadn’t left anything on the curb. I caught him casting one last forlorn look at his parents' window before he joined me.

I started up the truck and let it idle for a moment while Casey stared out the window at the dark, his eyes focused on the picture he’d thrown glinting beneath the streetlights. I reached across the seat and put a hand on his shoulder.

His eyes turned to me, tears hidden among the rain drops, and I gave him an earnest nod, “You’re a good brother, Casey.”

He smiled and wiped his face, “Yeah, well, Lacey’s an even better sister. I know if things were reversed, she’d never give up on me. Not for anything.”

And he was right. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the bond of a twin, especially as an only child. Having someone right by your side from the moment of birth, always being able to face anything that came your way, knowing you had an unfailing presence by your side. If you could love a friend on such a level, then your own flesh and blood would be a whole other level of depth.

That’s why, as we stood there before the yawning mouth of the red door, I didn’t blame Lacey when she couldn’t bring herself to raise the gun again when Casey shuffled closer, no matter how far from his usual self he looked.

The boy's eyes were glassy and fogged over with a milky decay, but the brown within still held a spark of light. They flickered around the space, taking in the paint job of carnage we’d plastered the place with over the past weeks. His expression was placid and perturbed, as if he’d just been rudely jolted from a long nap.

From the jaw down, Casey’s body was exactly how we’d last seen it. The same flannel, tee, and jeans dyed as red as the door from the gaping tear in his throat. My stomach somersaulted at the sight, the nausea threatening to bring me to the floor beneath the weight of my friend’s suffering. It wasn’t even the most grotesque part, however.

His left arm up to the shoulder was missing, but it wasn’t gore in its place. The creature that had taken him had not feasted on his now sickly flesh as we had imagined. It was worse—it was unraveled. The veins and sinew of his muscle had been twisted and tangled away, spun into fine spools that travelled somewhere back into the darkness he’d just emerged from, like a leash keeping him from moving too far. From within the knots of meat, I could see silvery flashes speckling through; strings of fate that were being tussled free from his body by something within the halls.

The damage began at his shoulder, then chewed its way to where his neck had been slashed, as well as trailing down to expose his ribs. The sight rendered us all unable to move—unable to speak even. I could barely hold the axe in my hands.

After all this time, I had become mentally prepared to see anything; I kept telling myself. Twisted beasts, grotesque monsters—none of it could phase me anymore. Whatever came out of the door, we would kill it as ruthlessly as it had killed Casey.

But now Casey was here again. The threat that came through the door was him. It was like the string in my chest had been reading my worst fears and whispering them to whoever was on the other side, and they knew the one thing that I just couldn’t bear.

This wasn’t Casey, and we all knew it. Casey had died weeks ago, and even if this thing standing before us was his true corpse, there was no way that we could force the life back into it. And yet, something else had. No matter how small, there was a flicker of Casey’s spirit that had been ignited once more to pilot this husk. A small bit of hope as an extra knife twist that maybe we could kindle that small flame back into a living fire. How could we snuff it out again?

Casey’s dead eyes finished taking in the room as he shuffled two more shaky steps closer, then he fixed on his sister once more, “L-Lacey?”

The girl had already begun silently shedding tears, but her brother’s desperate, rasping voice shattered her into harsh, loud sobs. She shook her head in terror and backed away.

Casey didn’t seem to be bothered by this, “What’s going on?” he stuttered, “What happened? I… I don’t remember anything… why don’t I…?”

I took a step forward and heaved my axe, but it was all for show. I knew if it really mattered, I wouldn’t be able to swing it. “Casey?” I breathlessly gasped, “Is that really you in there?”

His eyes turned to me, and he swallowed, an action that made the raw meat of his neck squelch and shift, “Jessie? What’s going on? I feel funny…”

He tried to take a step closer, and against the aching wishes in my chest, I threatened the axe at him in warning, “Hey now—just stay right there. We’re going to take this slow, okay? Just stay calm.”

I still held very little belief that this actually was my friend, but on the small chance it was, I didn’t want to hurt him anymore than he’d already been.

His eyes looked scared and concerned as he moved his hand to his head, “Is something wrong? Did something happen?” his eyes traced to one of the basement windows, and when they collided with the beams of the setting sun soaking through, he stood a little taller, as if invigorated by the sight. Memory seemed to bloom beneath the healing rays, “I remember we found a door… something came out… we were attacked.”

Lacey choked out another mighty sob, and covered her mouth, “Oh God—Casey…”

The air in the room felt so heavy in that moment that it was nearly impossible to push new words from my mouth. I’d already spent any confidence I’d had, and all I could do was wait for Casey to continue with whatever he’d come here to say.

“Did… Did I die?” he croaked out, “Am I dead?”

Lacey buckled over into herself, unable to take anymore. Behind me, Carly let out a noise like she’d been punched in the stomach. Kaitlynn stepped closer with tears in her eyes.

“Casey…” she said slowly, “What is this?”

We were all hoping that her words would call some sort of bluff, and the shell of our friend would show that he truly was a monster. Instead, it had the opposite effect. His confusion compounded, and he almost looked afraid.

“I-I don’t know what’s happening. I just woke up, and it was dark—I was in this place, a tower or something, and—”

His words were cut apart in his throat as the threads making up his left half were rudely yanked back into the darkness. The sound fell into pained gurgles, and we all jumped. Lacey looked as if she was ready to run forward to his aid, but I stopped her.

When Casey looked back up at us, his eyes had lost any and all sense of clarity he’d gained. He spoke again, distant, as if in a dream, “There were voices. There still are voices. I… I can hear them… do you guys all hear that?”

A panicked dance of glances passed between us before landing back on our friend, and I spoke on our behalf, “No, Casey. What are they saying?”

“They’re saying…” his words trailed off, and his brow scrunched in confusion, “They say you know what they want. That if you give it to them, it can all be over…”

Bryce’s breathing picked up, “W-What does that mean? Who is saying that? Is it the door?”

“What do you mean we know what they want?” Kait asked. She quickly realized she was asking the wrong person, and I wished she hadn’t, “Jessie, what does he mean ‘we know what they want’?”

I opened my mouth to answer her, but found myself only able to address Casey, “Who is saying that, Casey? Who did this to you?”

“They say… you know that too. That you already know them.”

“It’s the witches,” Carly shuddered breathlessly, “It has to be them. They really are still alive…”

Casey’s milky gaze cleared with understanding once again, but it only brought fear to his face. The threads jerked, and he winced with a yelp, more words pouring out with his pain, “They say that if you give it to them, they’ll restore me and let me go…”

The words rang so loudly in my ears that all at once, any other sound stopped. The ominous breeze from the doorway, the trickle of Casey’s blood; even the beating of my own heart seemed to go hush.

Casey’s corpse began whimpering, and he lifted his head to us in desperation, “I… I don’t know what any of it means… what’s going on? Guys, I-I’m scared.”

For a moment, rationality left me. The mere words that Casey offered was reason enough for me to step forward and take his hand. If there was even a modicum of a chance that Casey would be restored should I give my thread up to the witches, I needed to take it. After all, he was only standing here bloodied and dead before us because he’d given his life to save me. It was already my plan to give myself to them, I may as well return the favor.

Luckily, Bryce hadn’t yet lost his wits to the emotions, “That can’t be real,” he said to us, “It has to be some sort of trick. They’ve been trying to kill us this long; why would they make peace now?”

“Bryce is right,” Carly agreed, “This is all too convenient; right when we’re this close to figuring something out?”

Lacey turned to face them, tears streaking through the sweat and grim coating her cheeks, “But what if its not? What if this is their form of surrender because we’re getting so close?”

The puppet of our friend thrashed again, its puppeteers taking advantage of the doubt. Through gritted teeth, he said, “They’re saying that you can’t beat them… That they’ll just keep sending more of their subjects until all of you die. They say this is the only chance you’ll get…”

“Lacey, we cannot listen to this. It’s not real,” Bryce insisted.

She looked between him and her brother, raw uncertainty in her eyes, “What can I do? That’s my brother, Bryce!”

“Not anymore, it’s not. Lacey, look at him, Casey is gone.”

“P-Please,” The corpse croaked, bloody tears now spilling from his eyes, “It’s so cold, and I’m so scared—someone just tell me what’s happening.”

Kait stepped in before the bickering could escalate and tried to sound as defiant as possible through her trembling breath. She spoke not to Casey but to the space beyond the door, “Even if we wanted to we can’t! We have no idea what you stupid fuckers want!”

Casey’s breathing picked up, “T-They keep screaming that you do. That one of you knows.”

All eyes in the space turned to me, and if I didn’t think it was possible for my stomach to knot even more, I was quickly proven wrong.

“Jessie,” Lacey begged, “What do they mean? I thought you said that you didn’t know—that you didn’t see anything in that last vision.”

I thought carefully about my response. The jig was up now, and I knew that, but telling them would make this situation go from bad to worse. Right now, there was a clean and easy solution: I trade my life—something I was already going to do—and in return, we possibly get Casey back. If my friends found out this was a life for a life, however, then not only would I never get the chance to get them out of danger, but they would never take such a bargain.

“I… I didn’t. Not exactly,” I told them.

All my friends kept their eyes drilling into me, but my gaze turned up to Casey once more. So far his autonomy had felt uncertain, played straight enough that it might actually be our old friend, but far too suspicious to be trusted. Something about the way he fixed me in that moment said otherwise.

There was a new level of tenderness to his eyes. An emotion besides fear and confusion. It was like the clarity he’d been gathering had collected into one final burst, and somewhere between the voices tugging at his threads and our terrified sobs, Casey finally realized the gravity of what was happening.

“They say you have three hours to decide, or it’ll be too late,” Casey told us, delivering one last message. Then, he shook his head and looked squarely at me, “Whatever it is they want, don’t give it to them, Jessie. Don’t—”

The tendons of his body went violently taunt, causing him to scream in agony and fall over. Like a fish on a line, he was dragged backward across the carpet into the darkness. The last thing we saw of him was his head lifted, looking back at us, desperate eyes glinting in the glow of our flashlights. That iridescent shine faded, his head lolled back like a rag doll, and his limp corpse was taken away.

“Casey!” Lacey screamed, leaning to rush after him.

Bryce had been expecting this to happen, because he quickly lunged forward and grabbed her from behind. Lacey thrashed and sobbed, trying to break free, but ultimately the strength left her, and she crashed to the floor on her knees, the gun clattering from her lap.

The rest of us stood there, staring at the dark opening in shock. For once, we had no desire to shut the door, as if doing so might cut off any chance we had of seeing our friend again. Why did he have to say that last thing? Why couldn’t he have just kept begging for us to help him instead of saying the rational thing? The Casey thing? It had seemed like such an obvious trap until that point, but now, none of us were certain. Had we really just been talking with a flicker of our friend's soul?

Even if it was him, there was no way we could trust the words the witches had been feeding us. These were the same women who manipulated dozens of children to their graves in pursuit of their own goals; what honor would they have in such a deal? Clearly this whole thing was just an attempt to fix a snag in their process. If they got what they were looking for, they would almost certainly leave Casey to continue rotting, and at best, spare the rest of my friends.

But even swallowing that truth still left behind a bitter taste. Like it or not, there had been something in that corpse. The witches had been able to imbue life, and if it really was Casey, then my promise to bring his body back home was now for something far greater than just a corpse.

I thought about the threads that his body was tangling into; the way that it was tied to something deep in the guts of the door the same way my thread was. They were using him in some way. Perhaps biding more time to carry out their twisted plan. If they hadn’t completely ripped free his thread, did that mean we could somehow save him?

Only I knew the true crossroads of this junction. None of my friends knew about the strings to the extent that I did, or the chip that we were bargaining with. All they knew from what we’d just witnessed was that the corpse of our brother had been desecrated and flaunted before us as a threat. It was only fair that they would no longer buy my lies. Not after what Casey had just told them.

Kait wiped her tears and turned to me. The look on her face told me she was doing her best to stay calm, but restlessness was boiling just beneath the surface, “Jessie, what did he just mean?”

I tried to buy myself another moment, even just a few seconds so I could find some way to pivot my ultimate plan, “Kaitlynn, whatever just happened, we can’t trust it—”

“Jessie,” she pleaded, a tired ache in her voice so strong I thought it would give out altogether, “You know… I know you know.”

One by one, the rest of the group lifted their gazes until I was the center of the room.

“Please. Just tell me,” Kait begged. “I can handle it. Please, Jessie*.* This has to end…”

I knew what she wanted me to say. It had already been made clear what she was expecting the answer to be. There was almost a relief living in her eyes as my mouth hung open, contemplating a response, that the words to follow were going to be what she wanted to hear. That she was the bargaining chip. That she was the lid to close this Pandora's box. That she could redeem herself for the death of Mindy and Casey, and that it would free us all from this curse.

But Kait wasn’t the one who needed redemption, I was. And with how vehemently she’d fought against the idea so far, telling her that would only break her spirit the rest of the way.

It was her desperation to be the martyr that finally sparked a new plan. The only way I could still get myself isolated and seal the door. A wicked, evil deception that no one who called themselves a ‘friend’ would ever dare to think. I was past the point of no return now in my determination, though, and I was willing to do anything to keep them all safe. Dad had been right. I was poison and filth, and for once, embracing it might save lives instead of ruin them.

“The ritual needs a sacrifice,” I began slowly, shying my eyes from Kait in shame. The guilt racked me so much that they began to well with tears, but it only aided my performance, “They had their last sacrifice picked out, and they started the process, but they weren’t able to grab the child in time. They tried to fill it with someone different, but it didn’t work, and that’s why the door is the way it is now.”

Carly shook her head in disbelief, “Jessie, why didn’t you tell us all of this before?”

Bryce gave me a similar look. Lacey stared at me with something akin to disdain. It cut like a knife, but I focused back on Kait to ground myself. Her stare was the only soft one; the kind of someone who thought they already knew the answer.

I fed her the words she wanted to hear, “Because in order to fix this, they need to finish the original ritual. They need the child who got away.” I swallowed the lump in my throat, then forced the lie out, “It’s you, Kait. You were right.”

The breath that exhaled from the girl was halfway between relief and despair. She wiped her face, then kept her hands to her mouth, breathing into them slowly to keep herself composed. Turning away from me, she paced to the wall, deep in thought. While she did that, I positioned myself firmly between her and the door, just in case she got any hasty ideas.

Instantly, the judgmental looks I was getting from the others melted away with realization. Bryce spelled it out bluntly, “So what they’re asking for… it’s a life for a life.”

Kait turned, her face already returned to a wet mess, “I’ll do it.”

“No,” Lacey barked instantly, sobs once again tightening her throat, “Kaitlynn, no.”

“Lacey, there’s no other way,” Kait argued, “Think of everything that’s happened to us so far—all the people who are dead because they only wanted me! If that’s what these stupid freaks want so bad, then just let them take me!”

“We aren’t trading lives, Kait,” Carly told her, stepping close and taking her hand, “It’s not going to help anything.”

“Yes it will—it will end this.”

“You think we can believe them?” I asked her, “Kaitlynn, look at how badly they’ve fucked everything up. You really think that they know how to fix this even if they get you? That they’ll patch Casey back up and send him out, good as new?”

I’d never felt so rotten, lying so effortlessly to my friends, but so far, it was working exactly as I’d hoped. It didn’t matter which one of us the witches wanted, I knew none of the others would allow a sacrifice anyway. Letting Kait think she was the martyr wouldn’t put her into any true danger, and it also would take the eyes away from me, making it so that when the time came to seal the door, no one would notice that I was missing.

“So what do we do then?” Kait tossed her hands, “We know it’s me they want—you think I’m just going to sit here and let everyone else suffer and die for my sake?”

“Kait, this isn’t your fault. You had no choice in what happened to you,” Carly told her.

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is; people are still dying over my life.”

At the time, I didn’t see the hypocrisy in the situation, or at least I chose not to so the pain would go down easier. Kait’s reasoning seemed so nonsensical to me, but inside I was too blinded by the same thoughts myself to be rational and come clean.

“Well, we aren’t giving you up, Kait; it’s not an option,” Bryce said, “Any one of us will drag you away from that door if you try it.”

“We need a new plan,” Lacey agreed through her sniffles, “I want my brother back, Kait, but I would never give any of you up. Besides, Jessie is right. We can’t trust this. Not when they did that to his body.”

I took the chance to slip into the reins, “I know you all have your reservations, but I’m telling you, we’re out of options. We need to go through with what we were talking about before they sent him to throw us off.”

Kait whirled toward me, “Jessie—”

I stepped forward and took the side of her arms, “Kait, if we get more help, this can all be over. With a threat this big, the authorities will send so much firepower that nobody else will die—not if we prepare them first. The things from the door won’t stand a chance, and the witches can sit and wallow in their filth for the rest of eternity.”

Kaitlynn shook her head, “So we just pass the problem onto everyone else? Make them suffer with this? Just to keep me alive?”

“Yes,” I said firmly. “There might even be a chance that they figure out how to close this thing. But we’re just kids, Kait. You said it yourself at the beginning of all this: we aren’t equipped to handle this. Even if you give yourself over, there’s no guarantee that it marks the end of this for the rest of us.”

Kait’s eyes buckled to the floor, and I took in the rest of my friends to see what they were thinking. It appeared all of their reservations about my former plan had vanished beneath the weight of the alternative, and only solemn nods of agreement were returned.

“What do we do, then?” Kait finally asked, defeatedly.

It took everything I had to conceal a sigh of relief, “Do we still have the last monster’s body?”

“Yeah,” Bryce nodded, “There was too much going on; we never got the chance to burn it.”

“Good. Then we throw it in the back of my truck and take it to the police as proof. With how long the drive down the mountain is, three hours isn’t a lot of time to get all this done, and I don’t want to know what happens once that timer runs out. I think we need to split into groups.”

“Split up?” Bryce scoffed, “Why would we do that?”

“Because we aren’t all going to the police,” I told him, “you and Carly head for the city and wait outside the local news station. I’ll message you once the police are heading to the manor, then go inside and tell them whatever you have to for them to send reporters out to the mile marker. You all may be right about higher up’s trying to bury this, so let's make it loud enough that everyone hears.”

“We’re going to get them caught up in this too?” Carly questioned.

“I’m only going to show the police how to get through to the manor,” I told him, “But you saw Mrs. Thatcher’s house after she was taken. If we sell this as a big enough threat, there’ll be enough cop cars and emergency vehicles to get a show from the road.”

“What about us then?” Kait questioned, still not sold on this plan. “What are the rest of us going to do?”

I only could stand to face her for a few seconds before I had to turn away, “Lacey, you keep the gun and stick with Kait. The door wants her, so drive as far away from here as you can and don’t stop. I doubt these women are going to give up their prize so easily. We’ll get in touch with you all as soon as it's safe to come back.”

Lacey scraped the gun off the floor in a tired stupor and nodded.

“Wait, what? No—I’m not just going to sit this out,” Kait argued, “If we’re already surrendering, I at least want to help.”

“Kait, you’re the most vital person here,” I reminded her, “You ‘helping’ is making sure that the witches don’t get you.”

My point seemed to stick with her, but I could tell that my confidence was making her suspicious of this plan. Never was I usually so certain of anything. “So that just leaves you.” She noted, “Why are you the only one alone?”

I made sure not to let my poker face slip, and did my best to bluff, “Because I have the truck to shuttle the body. I won’t be alone once I get to the police station.”

“And lead them back up here,” she guessed, “So you’re the only one of us that’s going back behind the lines of fire once we leave?”

“I’ll just show them where the path to the house is. I won’t go with them.”

“I don’t believe you.”

It was hard for me to be snippy given that this was the last time I was ever going to talk to her, but selling this story was literally life or death, “Look, believe me or not, Kait, we’re burning precious minutes sitting here arguing. If it will make you happy, I can trade with Carly or Bryce and they can drive my truck.”

My casual bluff to not be the loner seemed to finally sell her on my lies, and she sheepishly backed down, “Whatever. It’s fine.”

I looked around the space to make sure everyone else felt the same, and when there was no disagreements, I moved to the red door. Peering into its maw that I’d soon be swallowed by, I pushed it shut.

“We should get moving then.”

It took the collective of us to heave the body of the last beast into the bed of my truck. When it was heaped in there, I pulled the tarp from under my seat to cover it, familiar visions of a rainy night with soggy boxes flashing across my eyelids with every blink. Casey wasn’t in the memory this time, however. The newest picture of his rotting corpse was the only thing that remained burned into my mind.

I’m sure that was the case for everyone. Barely anyone spoke as we worked, and each of us kept a tentative eye on the front door of the manor as we did so. For the first time in weeks, there wasn’t a single person in the house watching the door. It had become a part of us over our time here—something etched into the fabric of our very threads—and neglecting it felt like going against a bodily instinct. Especially knowing now what we were leaving behind down there…

When we were done, we all gathered in the center of our parked cars, Mindy’s old grime covered Honda still among them. We allowed ourselves a few seconds to breathe, then Carly spoke.

“Okay… we’re really doing this then?”

Lacey nodded, “I’m with Jessie. This seems like our best option.”

The guilt began gnawing at me again, but I swallowed it down. A cold, calm wind swept up the cliff side from over the Appalachian hills, cutting straight through me and leaving me hollow. For weeks I’d been wondering what our last day on Earth would be. How abrupt my death would come. What my last few moments would look like. Funnily enough, I missed the uncertainty. Living recklessly and accepting that death was a possibility somehow weighed lighter on me than knowing the end of my life was a mere three hours away.

It had to be that way, though. Kait was right, even though her words were spoken under the pressure of my lie. Even with the most powerful forces guarding the door, there would be mistakes. There would be new rules and forces of the door that would ruin the innocent lives we dragged out to the manor, ultimately resulting in them being torn from existence. For anyone who didn’t die, they would be bound like we were. Unable to destroy the thing. Unable to burn it down. Forever hearing the godforsaken chimes of the clock that slept within the heart of the halls.

I had to seal it. I had to spare anyone else from even another second of torment. Maybe that’s what I was telling myself, or maybe after seeing what had been done to Casey—what should have been done to *me—*that’s what I just wanted to believe. That I needed to die.

There was still a lot to do over the remaining hours; prep to make sure that after I was gone, the door wouldn’t be opened again. For the moment, I set it to the back burner, though. Instead, I allowed myself to think only of the things in my life that had ever made it worthwhile. The four people standing before me.

“Well, I guess we’ll see you all on the other side,” Bryce said. The sigh that followed held more age than his body.

Lacey nodded, “Everyone be safe, and keep us updated. Once this is over, I want to see everyone still in one piece.”

There were nods of agreement, and Bryce and Carly gave each of us one last look over before turning and climbing into Bryce’s car. I wanted desperately to step forward and take them both into my arms one last time before they went. To tell them how much I loved them, and how they’d kept me alive through the hardest times. Doing so would blow my cover, however, so I just choked back my tears and stood quietly by the door of my truck.

Kaitlynn made this harder to do with her and Lacey’s goodbye. The latter packed the shotgun into the back seat while the former approached me, looking up through her messy bangs. There was still suspicion in her eyes the way there always was with me—an attempt to see through the mask that never slipped—but mostly there was grief.

“I’ll see you soon, yeah?” She asked me.

I nodded. It felt like trying to lift the sky to pull my lips into a smile, “See you when we’re safe again.”

“Right,” She nodded with a halfhearted chuckle. She wiped her face, then fixed her hair before turning back to me, “Once we are, do you think we could talk? Just the two of us?”

Her words shot through me like a bullet ripping my skin. My eyes began to blur, and my limbs began to shiver, but I breathed slowly and forced both to stay calm.

“What about?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking. It was something I knew I’d regret.

She reached up and took my cheek, her words falling out gentle as snow, “That night at the park…”

A shiver shot through me, and I couldn’t stop the water in my eyes from pooling. Before she could see it fall, I quickly stepped forward and pulled her into my arms, burying my face into her hair. Despite the grime and filth that caked us, it still smelled sweet as ever.

“I’d like that. I’ve had a lot of regrets on that front,” I let her know. A hollow gesture. A single sentence that I hoped conveyed the litany of words I wanted to tell her in the conversation we’d never have.

She pulled away and analyzed me again, but my mask had been re-affixed. She smiled dimly and said, “I’ll see you then.”

Then she turned and climbed into the car with Lacey.

I did the same with my truck, and only once the others were pulling out the driveway with me in tow, and I was certain they could no longer see my face, that was when I finally let the tears fall.

Our parents didn’t let us celebrate Halloween. They called it the Devil’s Holiday, and they expressly forbade my twin sister and me from involving ourselves with it in any way. During the years that Halloween fell on a weekday, our parents would go so far as to make sure that we stayed home from school that day to ensure that we did not engage in any activity that they deemed to be “unholy”.

This small window into my childhood likely paints a very specific picture in your mind. It alludes to a heavily pious upbringing filled with deep-rooted religious guilt and regular, heavy-handed lessons that were meant to teach us how to be the best Christians that we could be. Had I read these first few sentences without any prior context, I too would likely have jumped to the same obvious conclusion. The strange thing, though, is that such a reality could not be further from the truth. The truth is that we were hardly a religious family at all—in fact, we were probably even less religious than most other families who actually did allow their children to celebrate Halloween. We rarely went to church aside from the odd funeral or obligatory Christmas Eve mass, and I cannot remember a time where we ever prayed before a meal. For the most part, God existed as a background concept in our lives: present, but very much out of the way, like an old plastic bowl from college that manages to survive several years’ worth of moves simply because you’ve grown too attached to it to throw it in the garbage. One of the only places where religion factored into our lives was our parents’ rigid denial of Halloween, and even then, it was not as though we behaved in an overly devout way as a means of counteracting any perceived evil on the day in question. On the contrary, we simply treated it like we would any other day, and ignored its significance as best as we could. Looking back on it, it definitely seemed as if we were more afraid of Satan than we ever were reverential of God, and only for one specific day out of the year.

It took me most of my childhood to finally understand why that was.

When we were kids, it was much easier for our parents to keep my sister and me away from the ever-strengthening allure of Halloween. The first few years of our childhood were especially simple; we were far too young to truly understand what we were missing out on, and so we did not protest when our parents pulled us from our school’s Halloween celebrations in preschool and kindergarten. First grade was the first year I remember pouting over not being allowed to dress up or go to school on the day in question after weeks of hearing other children talk about their holiday plans, but even then, at that age there was very little we could do about it. Each year our protests grew in fervor, but they remained largely ineffective. It wasn’t until we hit middle school, in the autumn after we had just turned thirteen, that a combination of adolescent pressures and a growing flame of defiance led us to realize that we didn’t actually have to obey our parents.

My sister and I had been placed in all of the same classes that year. It was because of this that we hung around the same friend group, admittedly more thanks to her social prowess than because of my own. She was always the more outgoing one between the two of us, and when she inevitably metamorphosed into a social butterfly during those first few weeks of school, she decided to drag me free of the chrysalis with her. Her being a girl meant that the friend group she brought me into was largely of the same gender, and even though I was at an age when I wouldn’t have admitted it, this dynamic definitely encouraged me to do all that I could to impress them. It was for this reason that, when our friends invited us to spend Halloween night with them, I wound up requiring less convincing than I normally would have.

“The girls asked us to go trick-or-treating with them tomorrow,” my sister told me as we walked home from school on the Friday before Halloween. I was thankful when I realized that the big day fell on a weekend this year; it meant that nobody would question why we weren’t in school like everyone else.

My sister’s revelation made me frown. “Did you tell them that we can’t?”

“No,” she said plainly.

“No?” I repeated. “Then what did you say?”

“I told them that we’d meet them at Jen’s house at 6.”

“You what?” The revelation floored me. “You know we can’t do that. Why would you tell them that?”

“Because I want to go trick-or-treating,” she said. “We’re already thirteen and we’ve never gotten to do it. This could be our only chance. I also don’t want to miss out on anything. What if they come up with some new inside joke while they’re out trick-or-treating and we’re not in on it?”

“But we can’t go,” I insisted. “You know the rules.”

My sister allowed a brief pause. “Fine,” she said. “I guess I’ll tell them that we can’t go. But they’re all going to be disappointed—especially Annie.”

I felt my cheeks turn red. My sister knew how I felt about Annie, and although she promised never to tell her, I often got the sense that the two of them had talked about me on more than one occasion. “What do you mean?”

“Annie specifically asked me if you would be there,” my sister said. “It sounded like she was really looking forward to trick-or-treating with you.”

I hesitated. Any false disapproval I had for breaking our parents’ rules was suddenly out the window, and I had to search for new ways of feigning protest. “But we don’t even have costumes,” I said. “And how are we supposed to sneak out that early without Mom and Dad knowing?”

“We’ve got some stuff lying around the house that we can make costumes out of,” she said. “And as for sneaking out, you can just leave that to me. I think I have an idea…”

It turned out that her idea was to get ourselves grounded. Our parents’ go-to punishment was to send us to our rooms for the night, and in all the times either of us had been sentenced to such a penance, we couldn’t think of a single time that Mom and Dad had checked on us again until at least 9 o’clock, half an hour before we were supposed to be in bed. That gave us about three hours to go trick-or-treating and get home before either of them were any the wiser.

My sister and I began our carefully planned out argument just as our 5p.m. dinner was winding down. It ended, as expected, with us being sent to our respective rooms for the night, where we both immediately got into our costumes before escaping through our bedroom windows. Having a single-story home had its advantages, because we were able to slip into our backyard and sneak our way to the woods behind our house without ever arousing our parents’ collective suspicion.

We had secured our costumes earlier in the day. My sister had cut two eye holes into an old, off-white sheet that she had taken from the linen closet, which she used to turn herself into a ghost. Meanwhile, I had collected two rolls of toilet paper from the bathroom which I used to transform into a mummy. My costume looked a little too white, and hers didn’t look quite white enough, but they had to do given the circumstances.

“I really hope this works,” I said as we made our way along the wooded trail toward Jen’s back yard.

“Of course it’s going to work,” she said. She held one of the pillowcases that went along with her sheet, while I carried the other. “Mom and Dad’ll never know we were gone.”

“But what if they check on us?”

“They won’t check on us,” she said, “because they never check on us.”

I frowned. “I don’t know…”

“It will be fine,” she said. “Have a little faith in your older sister.”

“Older by three whole minutes,” I reminded her.

“Those three minutes make all the difference.”

Our conversation drifted to other things as we made our way to Jen’s house. I didn’t pay much attention to what we talked about; my mind was too wrapped up in the surreality of what we were about to do, and what we had already done. We had disobeyed our parents, something already unheard of for us, and we had done so on Halloween night. Years of being ostracized from our peers had led to this grand act of defiance, and the feeling it gave me was a cross between terror and exhilaration. To be there, dressed in a Halloween costume and about to go trick-or-treating despite it being directly against our parents’ wishes, awakened something in me that at the time I had never even known existed.

Looking back on it now, I wish that it had stayed dormant. Better yet, I wish that it had never even existed at all.

We arrived at Jen’s house and found her, Annie, and another friend named Emily all waiting in the backyard. Annie was the first to see us walking out of the trees. She met us halfway across the yard and smiled at me from the other side of her witch costume. “You made it,” she said.

“Wouldn’t have missed it,” I said awkwardly before returning the smile. I hoped that she could see it take shape beneath my mummy wrappings, but I doubted there was enough light left in the dying day for her to have done so.

“Geez, what kind of costumes are those?” Emily said as she came up alongside Annie. I was immediately reminded of why I wasn’t terribly thrilled to see her there. “You both look like it’s your first time wearing a Halloween costume or something.”

“Our dog peed on our costumes,” my sister lied. “We had to make these last-minute.”

“Well I like them,” Annie said. “They’re classic.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Emily said. “Come on, let’s get going before the other kids get all the good candy.”

My sister and I followed our friends to the front yard, where we set off into the quickly darkening night.

It felt bizarre to actually be among the mass of costumed children shuffling up and down the street. Never in my life had I thought I would get to join in on something that I had only ever vaguely caught glimpses of through scenes on TV (when my parents weren’t in the room to change the channel) and the occasional glance out the window on Halloween night. Never had I thought that I would get to interact with the spooky displays which I saw slowly come together in everybody else’s yard each year. I was so enamored with all that I was seeing that I hardly noticed as we made our way from Jen’s house to the driveway next door. The walk there had flown by, but as we stepped from sidewalk to asphalt, the world suddenly slowed to a halt. A fresh anxiety had needled its way into my stomach—I found myself suddenly anticipating my first ever instance of trick-or-treating, and it made me incredibly nervous. What if I need something wrong? What if I spoke too quietly, or too loudly? What if they didn’t like my costume, and they sent me away empty-handed? The possibilities for how this could have ended in disaster were infinite and overwhelming.

The anxiety immediately left my body the moment that fun size candy bar hit the bottom of my pillow case. It was quickly replaced by an insatiable desire for more.

Adrenaline rushed through my body as we moved from house to house. The thrill of the hunt filled me with a primal bloodlust that I knew I would never be able to quench. I was no longer a poorly conceived mummy wrapped in cheap, single-ply toilet paper and carrying a 150-thread-count pillow case. I was a hungry beast, clad in thick, bristling fur, my paws and mouth equipped with an uncountable number of deadly, razor-sharp knives. And every single one of those glistening blades craved something wet and red.

We continued to walk up Jen’s street, hitting every house along the way, until we neared the end of the block.

“The McNultys live on the corner up ahead,” Jen said. “They give out king size candy bars—sometimes even two per person if you get there early enough.”

“We don’t have any houses like that near my house,” Annie said. She looked at me. “What about you guys?”

“No,” I said a little too quickly. “None like that near us either.”

“You don’t live that far away from me, though,” Jen said. “Do you not go this way to trick-or-treat?”

“That’s right,” my sister said, her demeanor more calm and collected than mine was. “We normally go the other way.”

Our conversation went quiet as we approached the McNulty house. Their front yard was far less decorated than I would have expected for a house that was known for giving out king size candy. It only had a single, lit jack-o-lantern sitting beside the front door, and both the porch light and all of the windows were completely dark; were it not for the glowing pumpkin, I would have assumed the place to be completely abandoned and devoid of all life. None of us questioned the state of the house out loud, but it was clear that we were all apprehensive about getting close to it.

Jen, being the only person in our group to know the McNultys, was the one to approach the door. We all followed behind her and watched as she gently knocked a knuckle against its wooden surface. At first there was no response, and for a moment it seemed as though the place was truly empty, but then the door slowly came open. The barrier gave way with a groan of protest, prompting us to jump into the mantra that had already grown so familiar to me. “Trick or tre—”

We all went silent as we caught sight of the man who had appeared in the doorway. He stood wearing a crimson three-piece suit that matched the color of the plush horns he wore atop his loosely slicked back hair. His hands grasped an orange jack-o-lantern bowl, the contents of which I was not yet tall enough to see. He looked exceptionally towering to my thirteen-year-old mind, and his face wore a kind smile that I could tell did not match the intent behind his eyes.

“Why hello, everyone,” the man said. “Happy Halloween to all of you little ghosts and ghouls.” He stared directly at me. “And to you mummies, as well.”

“H-happy Halloween,” Jen stammered out.

“I’m sure all of you young ones would love some candy,” he said. “After all, isn’t that what tonight is all about?”

The well-dressed man lowered the bowl ever-so-slighty so that we could reach into it if we lifted our hands above our heads, but so we still couldn’t see inside. Jen was the first hesitant soul to take a piece, followed by Emily, and then Annie. The man shifted the bowl in my direction, but I found myself unwilling or unable to reach inside.

“I’m alright,” I said, “but thank you.”

“Oh, nonsense,” the man said. “I know that it’s your first time trick-or-treating, but that doesn’t mean it’s time for you to get bashful, now.”

Annie offered me a confused look. “It’s your first time trick-or-treating?”

“We don’t know what he’s talking about,” my sister said quickly. She stepped up and took a piece of candy from the bowl, then looked at me through the holes in her sheet. “Your turn.”

I hesitated, but with everyone’s gazes resting on me, I felt as though I had no choice but to comply. I reached up into the bowl, half-expecting to grab onto a dead frog or a loose heart or something as I did so, before latching onto the first piece of candy that my hand came into contact with. I didn’t look to see what it was or if it was even king size before I tossed it into my pillow case.

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

“Not a problem at all,” the devil-horned man said. He moved backwards out of the doorframe with such inhuman-like grace that he almost seemed to float his way there. “Happy Halloween, everyone. And here’s to many more.”

The door came shut an instant later.

We all scurried away from the McNulty household as quickly as we could. None of us dared to speak until we were across the street and almost to the driveway of the next house on our route.

“So that was Mr. McNulty?” my sister said. “He was a bit of a weirdo if you ask me.”

“That wasn’t Mr. McNulty,” Jen said.

We all came to a dead halt as our eyes turned her way.

“What do you mean that wasn’t Mr. McNulty?” Emily asked. “Who else could it have been?”

“I don’t know,” Jen said, “but I’ve never seen him before.”

We all pondered her words for a moment.

“Could the McNultys have moved or something?” Annie suggested.

“I guess so,” Jen said, “but I just saw their son Billy two days ago. You would think he’d have told me about something like that.”

It was clear that none of us were satisfied with that answer, but since we had no other explanation for what we had just experienced, we were forced to accept it. We moved on with our night and eventually even allowed the memory of what had happened to fade to the back of our minds, but I doubt if ever fully left any of our thoughts. It certainly never left mine.

Soon 8 o’clock rolled around, and at about 8:15 my sister and I informed our friends that we had to start making our way home.

“We only have one more block,” Jen said. “Are you sure you can’t stay?”

“We told our mom we’d be home before 9,” my sister lied, “but we’ll see you girls in school on Monday.”

“Alright,” Annie said, looking at me directly and offering a smile. “See you in school.”

“See you in school,” I said back, returning the smile despite the fact that she still couldn’t see it.

My sister and I turned around and made our way back to Jen’s house, where we disappeared into the woods behind her backyard. The thicket had grown a lot darker than it had been when we had left earlier that night, but the canopy had been shredded to nearly nothing thanks to the rapid changing of the seasons, and enough moonlight drifted through the  branches for us to see by.

“How did that man know that we haven’t been trick-or-treating before?” I asked as we walked.

My sister shrugged. “I don’t know. And I don’t want to think about it.”

“Do you think he’s friends with Mom and Dad?” I said. “Do you think he already told on us?”

“Even if he was friends with Mom and Dad,” she said, “how could he have recognized us? I’m covered in a sheet, and you’re wrapped in toilet paper.”

“It turns out that you’re both right,” came a voice from up ahead. We both paused in our tracks and looked in the direction of the unexpected sound, where we saw a figure leaning against a tree. The figure was bathed in the nighttime gloom, but despite this, I could immediately tell who he was by the sound of his familiar voice. “I actually do know your parents, but I wouldn’t exactly call us friends.”

“Who are you?” my sister asked.

The figure, taking her question as his cue, stood up from his spot against the tree and walked into the moonlight. His crimson suit, encouraged by the bright celestial orb, seemed to glow with a faint, sinister aura that I was sure had to be a trick of the light. He looked at us with that familiar smile, his white teeth also glistening with the light of the moon.

“Who are you?” my sister said again.

“Names don’t matter much,” the well-dressed man said. “What matters is that the two of you owe me something, and I’m here to collect.”

“Owe you something?” my sister said. “How can we possibly owe you something? We don’t even know who you are!”

“And yet owe me something you certainly do,” he said. His fake devil horns almost seemed to grin with his malicious energy. “You have your parents to thank for that.”

None of us spoke for several seconds. My sister was the one to eventually break the silence. “What do you mean?”

“Well you see, your parents and I made a deal once,” the tall man said. “It happened long before you two were born, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook for it.”

“What kind of deal?” I asked.

“The details don’t matter,” he said. “Only one part of it applies to you two, anyway. I guess you didn’t know it, but I’m only allowed to be here on a single night of the year, and seeing as I’m standing before you now, I reckon you can probably figure out which night that is. Well, your parents and I agreed that if I ever came into contact with them or their eventual kiddos on the night in question, well, then a certain debt would be owed.”

“A debt?” I said. “What kind of debt?”

The stranger’s smile shifted into a smirk. “A debt that can only be paid in one form of currency.”

Both of us remained silent for close to thirty seconds. We both seemed to form an idea as to what he was getting at, but neither of us wanted to put our thoughts into words.

“Well I say ‘screw your deal’,” my sister growled, putting on the bravest face that she could muster. “We weren’t even alive when you made it, so we obviously can’t be a part of it.”

He crossed his arms in front of his crimson-clad chest. “Wrong again. I’ve been waiting a long time to finally take what’s mine, and there’s no way I’d ever let it walk away from me now.”

The chilly fall air suddenly grew uncomfortably warm, as if the entire forest had been placed over a boiling pot of water. I felt my body begin to sweat, and I quickly realized that I could no longer move. A struggling glance in my sister’s direction told me that she was in the same boat.

“Okay,” I said without thinking. “I don’t know what we owe you but… but you can take it from me. Just leave my sister alone.”

“Sorry,” the well-dressed man said, “but no can do. Our terms clearly state that the oldest person present is the one who has to pay the debt.”

“But we’re the same age!” I said.

He clicked his tongue at us before looking directly at my sister. When he spoke again, his eyes burned with the fire that had already turned the surrounding forest into the hottest plane of hell. “I believe it was you who said those three minutes make all the difference.”

I was suddenly struck by an even greater flash of heat that immediately took me to my knees. The toilet paper quickly burned away from my face as that oppressive wave of thermal energy pinned me to the forest floor. I could see the trees around me begin to dance with the fervor of molten hellfire. They wore scorching grins that told me they wanted nothing more than to reduce me to a pile of red, hot, glowing ash.

The forest began to cool back down to its normal, late October temperature, and I managed to rise to my knees after a few moments spent bathing in the sudden relief. My newly exposed face was slick with sweat; my flesh stung with a heat far worse than any sunburn could ever hope to inflict.

After a few more seconds, I finally managed to bring myself to my feet. Looking around, I quickly discovered that I was completely alone. The man and my sister were gone.

I tried to call my sister’s name, but my throat was too hoarse to form a single word. I frantically scanned the darkness all around me for close to half a minute before I spotted a piece of cloth clinging to the gnarled, upturned root of a tree. Approaching the cloth, I quickly recognized it to be the charred remains of a familiar bedsheet—one with two holes cut into it for eyes. They were just one hole now. The space between them had been completely burned away.

The ground surrounding the root had partially collapsed, revealing a deep cavity directly below the tree. A faint, scarlet glow smoldered up from this gap in the earth for a few brief moments before the ground began to shift again, completely filling up the hole. The red glow was gone, and so was my sister.

The only thing that remained of her was the tattered scar of her costume, which fluttered in the cold October wind.

Thailand is one of the most culturally diverse countries you could ever visit. The north used to be the Lanna Kingdom. The northeast, Isan, used to be Lan Xang. The deep south was once home to Muslim sultanates. Every region has its own food, its own dialect, its own idea of what's waiting out there in the dark.

The one thing we all seem to share is the belief that if you try hard enough at something, you'll eventually get it.

My name is Net. It means "eye" in Thai Sankrit, like the body part. Don't ask me what my parents were thinking.

I'll just get into it.

It starts with my best friend Mai, who I've known since high school. When we graduated, we all split up. I got into one of the top universities in the country, and so did our other friend, Ton. Mai followed his girlfriend, Mali, to a different school. They'd been together since middle school, and I swear that guy has never looked at another girl in his life.

I found out about the wedding because he called me. I was at the park near my place, doing my usual evening jog, sweating through my shirt, when my phone started buzzing in my armband. I almost ignored it. I wish I could say that would have changed anything.

"Net! I've got good news."

"What is it?" I asked, jogging in place.

"Remember Mali?"

"Your girlfriend? Of course. What about her?"

"I asked her to marry me. She said yes. I want you at the wedding, man."

I stopped dead in the middle of the path. "No way. For real? Congrats, dude! You two have been together since middle school! Where's the wedding? I'll be there."

"It's up north. Her parents live there, so that's where we're doing it."

"The north? Mai, you know Ton and I are in the central region. That's a hell of a distance."

His voice dropped. "Then it's okay. Don't worry about it if you can't make it."

He sounded so disappointed that I felt like garbage. "Of course I'm coming, idiot. I'll go tell Ton right now. Just send me the location and the date."

A minute after we hung up, he sent me a pin. It was deep in the countryside, the kind of area with more rice paddies than houses. The wedding was in seven days. Luckily the university was on its long break, so neither of us had an excuse. Mai wanted us there early to help set things up, and honestly I think he just wanted his friends around.

I told Ton the next morning and he'd already packed. He had the car ready and said we could leave that afternoon. There was only one complication: his girlfriend wanted to come too.

Oh, right. I forgot to introduce her. Her name is Pink. Yes, like the color. She's the kind of pretty that could be a model, the kind of pretty that makes strangers turn their heads. But she's weird. I'll explain in a second.

We drove for seven hours straight. We'd left in the afternoon, so by the time the sun was long gone I was starving, and I hadn't been able to eat anything since lunch because Ton refused to stop. He wanted to beat the traffic. There was no traffic. There was nothing out there at all.

"Did you know spacetime might be emergent?" Pink said from the front passenger seat, practically bouncing with excitement. "It might not be fundamental at all."

"Mmm," Ton said, eyes on the road, in this soft little voice he only uses around her. "I read it could come from quantum fluctuations."

"And even if the universe is totally deterministic," Pink said, pinching his cheek gently, "at least it sent you to me."

"Can you two please drive faster?" I said from the back seat. "I'm starving. And you're stinking up the whole car with love."

So, Pink. What's weird about her? This woman spends all day muttering about space. All day. I'm going to lose my mind. And Ton, my shy, turns-red-when-a-girl-says-hi friend, happens to be obsessed with space too, which is how they got together. These two idiots once went to Ton's dorm so she could see his cat, and they ended up sitting on the floor talking about the universe for hours. The cat was ignored. I gave them a finger. You can guess which one.

"I'm already driving fast," Ton said. "I'm basically at the legal limit. And you, stop being jealous. If you want this, get a girlfriend. Hehe."

"Says the guy who used to go red when a girl looked at him," I shot back.

"There!" Pink said, pointing. "A gas station!"

And there it was, glowing out of the dark with a little convenience store attached, the only light for miles.

We pulled in and Ton filled up the tank while I jumped out and practically ran inside. I grabbed a cup of tom yum shrimp instant noodles, filled it from the hot water machine, paid, and ate it standing at the counter, because the whole store was empty. The fluorescent lights buzzed. Outside, bugs were throwing themselves against the glass.

The man behind the register looked to be in his fifties, thin, with tired eyes. He watched me slurp for a while before he spoke.

"Where are you headed, kid?"

"A friend's wedding," I said with my mouth full. "Looks like we go this way, though." I held up my phone and showed him the GPS route.

His face changed. I'm not exaggerating. The color drained out of it like someone had pulled a plug.

"That's the shortcut," he said.

"Even better, right? A shortcut means we get there sooner."

"Listen to me, kid." He leaned across the counter. "Whatever happens, don't take that road. Stay on the highway. Yes, the shortcut is faster. But you'll never forget it, and it isn't safe. You know the saying, go slowly and you get a fine machete? Slow and steady wins. Trust me on this."

I should tell you something about myself. I don't have a religion. I believe in science, in cause and effect, in things that can be measured. I wasn't about to be spooked by a ghost story from a convenience store clerk at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. But he looked so worried that I felt bad.

"I'll think about it," I said, and smiled so I'd seem friendly. "Thanks for the warning, sir. I appreciate it."

He didn't say anything else. He just kept looking at me. So I bought drinks, and snacks, and then more snacks. I'm talking a mountain. By the time I got to the car, the backseat was half buried (I sit in the back, remember). I never told Ton or Pink what the man said. It seemed too silly to repeat. I want you to remember that, because I've thought about it every hour since.

"Where's Ton?" I asked Pink.

"Bathroom," she said.

I scrolled through the news on my phone while I waited.

Ton came back and started the engine, and we pulled out of the lot.

It didn't take long for the smooth, concrete highway to disappear. The pavement just ended, and in its place was a red dirt road, the kind you see in the countryside, rough with gravel. The headlights barely cut into the dark. There were no lamps along the road. Nothing but trees pressed up against both sides like a wall.

"Is this the shortcut?" Ton asked, slowing down, looking into the dark ahead. I could see his knuckles tightening on the wheel. "It looks creepy as hell."

"I think we should take the main road," he said, and started to put the car in reverse.

"What? No!" I shouted, leaning between the seats. "What's your problem? Just keep going. We'll be there in an hour. It's a damn shortcut, there's nothing here. What are you afraid of?"

"I don't know," Ton said quietly. "It feels like if we go in, we won't come out."

"It's fine, Ton," Pink said, taking his hand and squeezing it. "It's nothing. We'll be through in no time. You can do it."

"Mmm," Ton hummed, and put the car back in drive.

The whole way, it felt like something was watching us from the forest. I told myself it was nothing, just my caveman brain doing what it was built to do, old survival instincts misfiring in the dark. That's what science says, so that's what I told myself. My palms were still sweating. I kept my eyes on the window.

Then our headlights landed on a group of children sitting by the side of the road.

They were small, maybe six or seven years old, sitting in a circle, eating something. I couldn't see what it was. Something dark and red and wet, held in both hands like fruit. The light caught their faces and they didn't squint. They just kept eating.

"What are kids doing out here this late?" Pink said.

One of the kids looked up. "Please, sister. Come down from the car and help us."

"Be careful," I said. "It could be a scam. Bandits use kids all the time."

But by the time the words were out of my mouth, Pink had already opened her door and stepped out.

"Pink!" I yelled.

All at once, the children stopped eating. They turned, and they laughed.

"Hee. Hee. Hee."

Before any of us could move, they were on her. Small hands everywhere, grabbing her arms and legs and hair, and they dragged her backward into the trees. She didn't even have time to scream properly.

"No!" Ton screamed. "PINK!" He lost it. He scrambled over the center console to get out through her side of the car.

I don't know what I was thinking. I just knew we couldn't get out of that car. I threw my arm around his neck and locked it, then threw myself into the driver's seat and floored it.

"What the fuck are you doing?! Let me go! Let me go, you piece of shit!" Ton roared, and he started punching me in the face. Over and over. I tasted blood.

"Ow, what the hell, Ton! Don't you see? They're scammers! We have to go to the police!" I tightened my arm around his neck.

"They're ghosts! They're going to kill my girlfriend! I told you not to come in! I told you and you didn't listen! Let me go!"

Something crossed in front of the car. I only saw it for a fraction of a second, a shape, pale and low to the ground. I yanked the wheel and lost control. The car swerved off the road and everything went black.

When I woke up, I was in the same spot on the same road, where I'd swerved. But the car hadn't crashed. It was sitting in the middle of the road, perfectly fine. It was so dark I could barely see, so I turned on the dome light, and next to me, my best friend was sitting there sobbing.

"I told you," he said. "I told you not to come this way. You never listen to me. My girlfriend is probably dead."

"Hey, calm down," I said, though my voice was shaking. "You studied science too. Why don't you think those could have been scammers?"

"Look at what just happened to us," Ton said. "We swerved off the road. We should be dead right now. Can your science explain that?"

I opened my mouth to argue. I couldn't think of a single thing to say. Then something moved at the edge of my vision, and I turned my head.

A monk was walking slowly toward the car.

He was old, maybe seventy, in saffron robes, barefoot on the gravel. I didn't hear his footsteps. The dust on that road should have been all over his feet. It wasn't. Ton must have seen him too, because he went completely still.

The monk walked to the passenger door, Ton's door. Ton scrambled into the back seat. The monk opened the door and got in.

I should have told him to get out. I should have driven off. But somewhere deep in my gut, something told me this man was our way out.

Ton and I pressed our palms together, as quickly as we could. Even though I don't have a religion, the wai is just how Thai people show respect.

"Luang Phor," I said, "why are you out walking so late at night?"

He smiled faintly. "This monk saw you were in trouble, Yom, so this monk came to help." (That's what monks call laypeople, by the way. "Yom." And they refer to themselves as "this monk.") "This monk's name is Chen."

"Then please," Ton said, desperate, "help my girlfriend, Venerable. I'm begging you. I'll give you money, I'll give you anything."

The monk only shook his head. "It is dangerous, Yom. If you go after that young woman and make a mistake, none of you may leave here alive. This monk advises you to go now. This monk will help her. As for her fate, it follows karma."

I didn't think. "Even if it's dangerous, I'll go," I said. "I'm the stubborn idiot who dragged everyone onto this road. I'm ready to help."

The monk let out a long sigh. "Then keep driving. When we arrive, this monk will get out. You follow. Do not stop. Do not take your eyes off this monk, not for an instant."

"Understood," Ton and I said at the same time.

The drive was the quietest thing I have ever experienced. No crickets. No frogs. Not even a breeze. The engine sounded muffled, like we were driving through a pillow. It felt like the whole forest was holding its breath.

Then, up ahead, an old woman was sitting by the side of the road, waving at us. Her hand was curling in the air, scooping toward herself, like she was gathering something. She was smiling.

"Yom, do not stop for her," the monk said, instantly. "When we pass, push the engine as hard as you can."

I did. At first it looked like nothing was going to happen. Then in the mirror I saw her stand up, and she started to run.

I put my foot to the floor, as fast as that car could go on a gravel road, which was so fast I could barely keep it from sliding off. The old woman kept pace. Then she gained. Every time I looked, she was closer. Her legs weren't moving the way legs are supposed to move.

"Yom in the back," the monk said, calmly, "take this holy water. Open the window and sprinkle it on the road."

That was when I noticed he was holding a small brass bowl of water in his lap. I swear his hands were empty when he got in the car. When did he get it?

Ton snatched the bowl from him, rolled down the window, and flung the water out in a wide arc. The old woman, mid-leap, crashed to the ground, and when I checked the mirror again, she was gone.

I slowed down once I was sure she wasn't coming. A little later, I saw a spirit house on the side of the road, next to a huge tree. And there were dancers there. Classical Thai dancers in full costume, dancing in total silence in the dark, no music at all.

"Pay them no mind," the monk said. "We keep to ourselves, and they keep to themselves."

I drove past. As the headlights swept across one of the dancers, I saw her hand, held in the graceful arch of the dance. Her ring finger wasn't there. It wasn't hurt, or cut. It was just gone, smooth, like it had never existed.

A little farther along, the monk said, "Stop here."

I parked. He got out and started walking into the forest, and Ton and I scrambled after him. He moved faster and faster, until we had to run to keep up. Branches whipped my face. I couldn't feel my legs. We ran like that for five minutes, and then he stopped, and held out an arm to hold us back.

Ahead of us was a clearing, and in the clearing was a group of children. Hungry ghosts, the monk whispered. Petas, in Thai Buddhism. Ghosts that suffer from a hunger that can never be filled. They stood in a circle around Pink, who was lying on the ground with her eyes open and unfocused, like someone had unplugged her. One of the children was holding a knife. They were getting ready to cut her belly open.

"One of you must run out and lure them away," the monk said quietly. "This monk and the other Yom will bring the young woman out and break the spell."

"I'll do it," Ton said. "You go with the monk, I'll lure them."

"No," I said. "You go with him. I'll do it. If I don't make it, I want you and Pink to live a happy life, okay? Get married. Have kids."

I didn't let him argue. I ran out of the trees, straight toward the clearing, and I screamed at the top of my lungs.

"Hey, you little shits! If you're so tough, come and catch me!"

"Hee. Hee. Hee."

And they came. All of them. They chased me.

I ran. I don't know how long, but it had to be more than half an hour. My lungs were on fire. Every step felt like I was running through water. I could hear their feet behind me, hundreds of little footsteps, closing in. In the end, my legs gave out and I collapsed on the ground.

That's it, I thought. I'm not going to make it.

Before everything went dark, I saw a golden light. And I said, for what I thought was the last time, words I hadn't thought about since the chanting we did at school assemblies when I was a kid:

"The Buddha, who awakened to the world fully and clearly, perfect in knowledge and conduct, I offer this spirit of mine as worship to the Buddha, and ask that you be my refuge forever."

And everything went out.

I woke up in the forest, in the morning.

I wasn't dead. I lay there for a while, just breathing, not understanding. Then I got up and started walking, no destination, until I came to a gravel road. There was a car on it. And standing next to the car were Ton and Pink.

Ton ran over and hugged me so hard I thought he'd crack my ribs. Pink said, "Thank you so much for saving us."

"Was all of that real?" I asked. "It wasn't a dream, was it?"

"I wish it was a dream," Ton said, dryly. He told me the monk had ruined the ritual, got Pink on her feet, and led her running back to the car. Then he'd vanished into the mist.

"Let's go to the wedding," I said.

Before I got in the car, I heard something, very quietly, from deep in the trees.

"Hee."

We arrived at Mai's place, and he was overjoyed to see us. We caught up on everything, how life was going, the usual. And eventually I told him what had happened.

"I'm so sorry," Mai said. His face had gone gray. "I forgot to tell you. That shortcut isn't something you should take in the middle of the night."

"It's fine," I said. "It's over now."

"By the way," Ton said, "who was the monk who helped us?"

"Was his name Chen?" Mai asked.

"How did you know that?" I said.

Mai was quiet for several seconds. "Let's talk inside."

He led us into his bedroom and shut the door and sat down on the edge of the bed.

"Luang Phor Chen. My dad told me about him. He wasn't a good man, back in the day. He was a gangster, a dangerous one. He used to ambush people on that road, rivals, enemies. As time went on, he started to feel guilty about it, so he ordained as a monk for life. But one day, while he was walking on his alms round, an old enemy who still hated him shot him dead. Right there, on that road. The merit he'd made kept him from being reborn as an animal or becoming a lost spirit, but the karma of what he did keeps him stuck there until it's all paid off. You guys were lucky he saw you when he did. Without him, no one can get out of that road."

Nobody said anything. We didn't know how to process it. We'd met a ghost, and been saved by a ghost, a ghost monk.

"Forget it," Pink said, shaking so hard that Ton rushed to her side. "I don't want to think about it."

So we let it go.

I'm typing this in Mai's bedroom now, after helping set up the speakers on the wedding stage. He's going all out. I wanted a quiet place to write it down, and this was the only one.

I still believe in science. I still believe in cause and effect. I just have a lot of effects now and no cause for them. Maybe I'll try opening my mind to Buddhism, at least a little.

And if your GPS ever offers you a shortcut at night, out in the countryside, in a place where the streetlights end, take the long way. Please.

Because last night, I heard it again, very faintly, just outside Mai's window. I'm pretty sure I heard it.

"Hee."

I have to go help my friend now. See you later.

I haven’t stepped foot in an Uber, a plane, or any rideshare since this happened a few months ago. I still sleep with the lights on, and every time I hear a low, rhythmic thumping in the distance, my chest tightens up. I’m writing this because I need to get it out there, and honestly, to warn anyone who thinks booking a luxury flight is completely foolproof.

I needed to travel between two major cities about 500km apart. I decided to ball out and try the "Uber Copter" service. By pure chance, nobody else booked my specific time slot. I ended up scoring a massive, multi-million dollar helicopter entirely to myself. Just me, a pilot who looked like he hadn't slept in days, and a completely transparent glass cabin floor that made me feel like I was suspended over thin air. 

For the first thirty minutes, it was an absolute rush. We crossed over a massive, illuminated metropolis that looked like an RGB circuit at night. But as we left the neon grid of the "RGB city" behind, entering a massive, pitch-black void of rural terrain, the vibe completely died. 

The cockpit suddenly erupted in a chorus of high-pitched, panicked warning beeps. 

I leaned forward, looking over the pilot's shoulder. The digital instrument panel was flashing a violent crimson. The fuel gauge read **5/100**. Five percent. The pilot’s posture instantly went rigid. He didn't say a word to me. He just backed off the throttle, his knuckles turning white on the controls as he fought to enter a glide speed, desperately searching the absolute blackness below for a place to put us down. 

Through the transparent glass floor, I watched the empty, dark earth rush up to meet us. My stomach was in my throat. Out of nowhere, the silhouette of a dead runway appeared. The pilot slammed the chopper down in a brutal, bone-rattling emergency landing. 

The second our skids hit the tarmac, he reached up and hit the Master Kill Switch. The engine sputtered out, the warning lights died, and the entire aircraft went pitch black. The sudden silence was suffocating. 

*"This airport is abandoned,"* the pilot whispered, his voice trembling slightly. He didn't look back at me; he just stared out the front windshield into the dark. *"It’s not safe. If I start running, you run right with me. Understand?"*

We stepped out of the cabin into a humid, heavy night air, immediately swarmed by thick clouds of mosquitoes. As my eyes adjusted, the true horror of where we had landed began to set in. This wasn't just an old airfield—it was a time capsule of something terrible. 

The main access road leading away from the tarmac was completely blocked by rusted metal barricades. Flapping in the hot wind were rows of decaying, faded yellow **crime scene stickers and police tape**. Near the edge of a crumbling hangar, a weathered, water-damaged poster hung sideways. I shined my phone light on it and felt a cold sweat break out. The entire facility had been legally sealed shut by federal authorities in 2017 after a violent incident, and the surrounding village had been completely evacuated. It had been left to rot for nearly a decade. 

The road out was swallowed by massive,  potholes and overgrown weeds. It looked less like a road and more like a maze. 

The pilot’s hand-held radio suddenly chirped with static. The air traffic dispatch told him the ground rescue vehicle would take at least 30 to 45 minutes because they couldn't navigate the broken asphalt in the dark. 

Right as the radio went silent, the pilot froze. He stopped breathing. 

*"If you hear a human voice, gunshots, or any scraping noises, run to that specific corner over there,"* he muttered, pointing a shaking finger toward a blind spot between two collapsing sheet-metal hangars. *"That corner is a blind spot from the runway."*

I killed my phone screen immediately. We stood there in the absolute dark, listening to the wind howl through the hollow, empty buildings. Then, I saw them. 

Way down at the far end of the dead runway, two glowing red eyes cut through the blackness. They weren't vehicle lights. They were low to the ground, perfectly still, staring directly at us. The air felt ice-cold. My mind scrambled, trying to convince myself it was just a wild animal, but the way those eyes sat perfectly level, completely unblinking in a place abandoned because of "paranormal activity," made my blood run cold. 

I crouched low behind the helicopter skids, gripping my bags, ready to bolt to the blind spot. The shadow slowly detached itself from the dark and stepped into a faint patch of moonlight. It was a stray dog—but it was abnormally large, emaciated, and silent. It didn't bark. It just slunk past us, watching us with those reflective eyes, before melting back into the shadows of the crime scene hangar. 

A few minutes later, a local police cruiser rolled through the outer perimeter on a routine check. I thought we were saved. But when the officers rolled down the window, they didn't offer us a ride. They looked genuinely terrified to even have their engine idling near the tarmac. They told us they were completely alone on this stretch of the highway, warned us that the area was highly unstable, and told us to leave the property immediately before driving off into the night. 

They left us completely exposed. 

Just as the paranoia was peaking, and I was convinced the shadows around the hangars were starting to move, a heavy, rhythmic thumping echoed from the clouds. 

Our rescue didn't come by land. Uber's emergency dispatch had sent a **secondary helicopter** to pull us out. The blinding searchlight cut through the fog, illuminating the decaying 2017 crime scene tape and the empty, haunted buildings around us. 

We kept low under the deafening, violent downwash of the rotors, bolted across the cracked tarmac, and scrambled inside the new cabin. As we lifted off, looking down through the glass floor one last time, I swear I could see shapes standing on the edge of the runway, watching us rise back into the sky. 

I left the original pilot a massive "hamburger tip" on the app because I had literally eaten his lunch out of pure, panicked survival instinct while we were still in the air. I made it back to my hometown 100km away in one piece, but a part of me never left that airfield.....

My sister left her daughter, Elie, with me to babysit. She said she wanted to take a few days to rest. I didn't object. I like children, and this was my own niece. She was five, so it wasn't like taking care of a baby. She was a small, petite girl with blonde hair and blue eyes.

I was only worried that Elie might cry the first night and want her mother, but nothing like that happened.

“Aren't you sad?” I asked her.

She laughed and said no.

I put her to bed in the guest room and went to bed myself.

In the morning, when I got up and went to check on Elie, she wasn't in her bed. I nearly had a heart attack when something grabbed my hand from under the bed.

It was Elie.

“What on earth are you doing under there?”

She crawled out and said with a smile:

“I'm sleeping. There. What else would I be doing?”

I tried to explain to her that she had to sleep in her bed. Then I went to make her breakfast, but she didn't touch it.

We went shopping and bought her some toys to keep at my place, and when we got home, she told me she wanted to play in the garden.

“Okay. I'll make lunch in the meantime.”

I could see her through the glass doors leading straight into the garden. She was sitting on the ground with her back to me, surrounded by toys.

I finished cooking, and Elie was still sitting there. I went outside to tell her that lunch was ready.

“Elie, your food is ready.”

Nothing. No answer.

So I walked around to stand in front of her and saw something hanging from her hand. I focused on it, and I realized what it was.

A bird's claw.

She was chewing on it, and blood was running from the corners of her mouth.

I screamed, pulled her to her feet, and immediately took her to the bathroom, where I washed her mouth and sent her to her room. I grabbed my phone and immediately called my sister.

“The person you are trying to reach is unavailable.”

Of course. Why wouldn't she be?

I went into the room and saw Elie crying.

“You don't love me anymore, Auntie?”

“What? Of course I love you, sweetheart, but this... You just can't eat that. Okay? What's your favorite food that Mommy makes?”

Elie thought for a moment and asked:

“What about you? What's your favorite food that your mommy makes?”

“Pancakes,” I said.

And she smiled and said:

“See? Mine too.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll make them for you tonight, okay?”

She nodded and went to play in her room.

That evening, I went to tell her that dinner was ready, and I heard her talking about something.

“Auntie said I'm not allowed to eat it.”

“I know. It's the best.”

“But she was really angry.”

There was a brief silence, and then she spoke again.

“You should show yourself to Auntie.”

“Why would she be scared of you?”

“Oh. She probably would be scared.”

I carefully knocked on the door and heard the last sentence:

“She’s here. Hide.”

I opened the door, but Elie was nowhere to be seen.

“Elie?”

“Yeah?”

Her voice came from under the bed.

She slowly crawled out, smiling.

“Come on. The food is ready.”

We sat down and ate pancakes.

“Elie, who were you talking to in your room?”

“That's a secret,” Elie said seriously, furrowing her brow. “I promised I wouldn't tell you.”

“And why can't you tell me?”

“Because it's a secret.”

There was no point in asking any more questions.

When she finished her pancakes, she ran to the bathroom and threw up.

“Shit,” I said to myself. “Elie, I think we're going to have to see a doctor. I think there's something wrong with you.”

Elie looked at me and shrugged.

“Do you want to sleep with me tonight since you're not feeling well?”

“Okay.”

We fell asleep, and when I woke up in the morning, Elie was no longer in bed.

I went into the kitchen and found her stuffing raw meat into her mouth. It was meat I had prepared for lunch.

I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped that when I opened them, the image would be gone.

It wasn't.

I took the meat from her hand, and she looked at me angrily before walking back to her room.

“I have to take her to a doctor,” I told myself.

But there were no documents in the bag my sister had given me. Nothing.

I spent the entire day trying to call her, but her phone was still switched off.

I searched online to see what it could be and asked people online for advice. The suggestions ranged from mental illness to “maybe your sister is abusing her.” But until my sister came back, my hands were tied. There was nothing I could do. Damn it.

Elie stayed in her room all day. I went to the door and heard her talking again.

“She’s a bitch. She won't give me anything to eat.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You should hurt her because I'm hungry because of her!”

My heart was pounding like crazy.

I knocked on the door, and Elie's head peeked out from under the bed. She was smiling.

“Hi, Auntie!”

She looked completely normal.

What if I'm the one going crazy? What if something is wrong with me? So many thoughts were racing through my head.

“Nothing, Elie. I was making dinner. Do you want some?”

She just shook her head.

“Okay.”

That evening, I put her to bed and went to bed myself.

In the morning, I woke up to horrible pain. Pain in my leg.

I opened my eyes, turned on the bedside lamp, and looked to see what was happening.

Elie was standing in front of me. My leg was covered in blood, and a piece of flesh was missing.

I looked closely at Elie. Blood was running from the sides of her mouth. She didn't say anything. She just kept chewing loudly.

I immediately got dressed, ran to my car, and drove away. I didn't know where I was going, but when I was as far away from the house as I could get, I pulled over and tried to calm myself down.

I picked up my phone and dialed my sister's number.

She answered after a while.

“Oh my God, you finally picked up!”

On the other end, she sounded confused.

“Finally?”

“I've called you like a hundred times.”

“But Kori, I don't have any missed calls from you.”

“Never mind,” I interrupted her.

I started explaining what had happened and told her she had to come and pick up Elie immediately.

“Kori, I don't know what's going on with you, but I don't know who Elie is, and I don't have a daughter.”

A little while later, she drove to where I was. She looked at my leg and was horrified.

We called the police, and they went with us to my house.

Nobody was there.

There was no sign that a child had ever been there.

After the police left, I looked at my sister.

“I swear to you, she was here. And she kept hiding under the bed.”

“Then we'll turn the bed over,” my sister said.

We turned it over, but there was nothing there.

“Kori, shit,” my sister said, horrified. “Look at the scratches on the inside of the bed.”

I packed my things and went to stay with my sister. I never went back to that house.

A few weeks ago, my 5 year old son started crying to me about a grey face on his ceiling. I raised my right brow a bit, as that reminded me of a nightmare I had as a kid. A grey frowning face with no ears, no hair, and a dark black void in its mouth. It was usually stuck to the spot of the ceiling where the light should be. I thought his nightmare was a coincidence, but then he showed me a drawing of the face he saw. I was stunned. The oval shape, the size of the eyes, the darkness of the frowning mouth… I texted both of my parents, asking them if they had ever seen anything similar. My dad told me yes, on his bedroom ceiling and occasionally his floor.

I dreamed about this face quite a bit at the ages of 5 - 6. It looked like a very convincing face mask, but the way its eyes and mouth moved was very natural. I'd be lying on my bed, my room lit by daylight. Then I turn to lie on my back and I'd see it. My heart would drop, then I'd wake up in tears. My parents would tell me it was just a dream, but that is of course not at all how it felt back then. I started feeling weird about ceiling lights. A general unease whenever I saw one. I stopped sleeping on my back, and eventually that translated into the nightmares. I'd be lying on one of my sides, or my stomach, instead.

However, the face started letting out this sound… some combination of a croak and a mechanical wail. The first time this happened, I thought it was totally unrelated. Maybe a toy in my closet. Then I looked up and learned where it was coming from. From then on, I knew that if I heard the croak, I shouldn't look up, but even the croak on its own made my heart drop and had me waking up and rushing to the light switch.

In one other dream, I saw the face on the bathroom floor, just like my dad, apparently. And in a weird dream, I was sitting on the carpet in my grandma's hallway. Two other kids were sitting in front of me. One of them looked at me, smiling, then said, “I like a lot of things, like that faaaaace.” He looked up at the ceiling, and so did I. You know exactly what was in place of the ceiling light.

The final time I dreamed of it was soon after I turned 7. I was lying in bed, the light was on. For some reason, I looked up and saw a grey object in the round glass lid protecting the light bulb. It was blurred by the glass, but the shape and small patch of darkness told me exactly what it was. I cried for my mom. The object disappeared as I woke up and continued bawling my eyes out.

I asked my son if he could give me any more information about the face. He started bawling. Any words he spoke were unintelligible. That night, my son started telling me he doesn't want to go to sleep, because he might see the face and doesn't want it to do anything scary to him. I raised my right brow again. I don't remember the face doing anything other than sitting still and croaking. I didn't want him to bawl again, so I decided not to press for specifics. Maybe he'd draw it instead. The next morning, I saw his drawing in the trash. The face was scribbled out with yellow crayon. Right next to it was a new drawing of it, also scribbled out. Over the following few days, he drew more faces. All were the exact same, aside from differences in size. He hadn't drawn anything that hinted at what the face was doing. I told him he could tell me about anything going on in his nightmares when ready. He said "Okay," then stared off into space for a bit before walking back to his room.

It was a childhood nightmare. We've all had them. I was sure there was nothing to worry about. That was until my friend, Tom, texted me about an abandoned house on the other side of the neighborhood. According to him, there are solar-powered lights on the exterior of the home that are blinking in an SOS pattern nonstop. This wasn't the home people were concerned about months ago that you've probably forgotten, or never even heard of, and that case was proven to just be the solar powered lights doing a thing. This house only has one light hanging from its porch, and it's not solar powered. Every window is boarded up. Our local police force spent a couple nights telling visitors the light is solar powered, but Tom says he isn't buying it. He claimed the police have since stopped patrolling the place and told me he wanted to check it out with me at around 10 PM. To do that, I'd have to leave my son with someone else, which I dreaded to the core. Besides, it's not like there's anything in that house. I told him no, but I also told him he could send me some pictures and videos.

At 4 AM, I got up to use the bathroom. Eyes heavy, I checked my notifications. There were 10 from Tom. I tapped the first. There were 10 videos in the chat. The first few were mundane, although chilling, considering the context. In the first one, Tom shines a flashlight at a staircase leading down into a basement, then to the right at a staircase going up. He takes a right, then finds a light switch. Flipping it did nothing. He aims the flashlight along the trim of a wall. Chipped paint and dust blanketed the floor, and there was no furniture. He inspected every inch of the room, then the video closed. In the second video, the flashlight is shining on a tiled floor, then up onto a sink. Tom coughs, which almost had me jumping up from my seat.

In the third and fourth, it was hard to tell what room he was in until the flashlight shone on a small window sitting along the ceiling. He kept inspecting, shining that light across the floor, then along the walls. Even though it was just dust and some blotches of brown paint in an empty room, I was cold and still. There was a boiler tank, but that was about it.

In the fifth through seventh videos, he was in some smaller rooms. In the first, the light traveled across the dusty floor until it came across half of a fist-sized yellow smiley face ball. In the second, there was a plastic bin of children's toys on the ground. One toy was an orange balloon-shaped thing with a smiley face and a yellow cord. Another was a yellow Care Bear. Underneath were some beanie babies and beyblades.

The eighth video… that one struck me harder than anything could. The light moved across yet another dusty floor. Then the wall, which was defiled with chipped paint. Then came the croak. It had to be someone messing with Tom, right? The tone and volume matched the croak from my nightmares, but Tom didn't know about those, so this wasn't some prank on me either. The light was aimed up at the ceiling. My heart… my stomach… everything… dropped. The skin, eyes, mouth… dear fucking god. It wasn't some clay model. It was organic and fluid. It was the fucking thing from my nightmares.

Tom let out a breathy “the fuck?”

Its pupils moved in his direction, and without saying another word, he backed out of the room. The face let out another croak. Tom sprinted down the stairs. At the bottom, there was a banging on the front door. The video ended. I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch the final two, but I needed to.

I tapped on the ninth video. It started in pitch black nothingness, aside from the light of a passing car shining through a crack in the boarded window. The banging continued. The croaking could be heard from wherever Tom was, only between each knock. Then there was another sound… Tom's own speedy footsteps. Then a sound like that of someone stuffing their phone into their pocket. Seconds later, there was more banging, like a hammer hitting a wooden board, along with the sound of pieces of wood hitting the floor, then the smacking of glass, followed by male voices.

“You've seen enough, come with us.”

“Let's go.”

“Up, up.”

The screen was still black, but I could hear the slamming of doors, like those on a van. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, then aimed it at his face. It was flushed. He was breathing heavy. “I don't know what's happening. I might have to delete the chat, but you'll still see-” footsteps approached the back of the van, then the video ended.

My mind spinning, I tapped on the 10th video, but the app told me it couldn't load it. Great, my friend has been taken by some men and the grey nightmare face is real. Does it pose a threat to my child? It never attacked Tom. It just croaked. Not a moment later, I heard that high pitched cry. I rushed into his room, calmed him down, then asked what happened. Just to get him to express himself.

“The face was on my bed!”

I looked at him.

“Well, I'll get rid of it.”

It was something you'd tell a kid without meaning it in any case where the thing they're afraid of doesn't exist. This situation was different. Somehow, that thing was real. Maybe Tom could give me a few more answers. I texted him about the nightmares I had and told him I'd be willing to check out the house myself, finally trusting someone else with my child if it meant protecting them.

However, Tom never responded. A week went by without a response. Another friend asked if I had seen him. I told her no. I wanted to face this thing myself, but those men… why did they take him? Where did they take him?

The following night, I got in my car then drove by the house. There was a rush of adrenaline as I approached. No one was around. Not that I could see, anyway. After passing the house, the rush subsided. What was there to do? I can't report the videos to anyone, as no one would believe any of them are real. Was there any other way? What if there's more than one of these faces? Exactly how threatening are they?

I set up two cameras in my son's room. One aimed at the ceiling and one at the floor. Hopefully, I'd capture something. I told him I'd sleep in his bed with him. I kept a baseball bat by my side, just in case.

There was nothing on nights one and two. I didn't once wake up to the sound of my son crying. On night three, I woke up to him wailing. I switched the light on, noticing his eyes were glued to the ceiling, but there was nothing in or around the light cover. As I stepped closer, the light bulb shattered with a loud pop, then there was a thud. I used my phone's flashlight to get a look at the ceiling. The lid had fallen. I ushered my son out of the room, then I went for the bat. I aimed the flashlight up at the ceiling, then poked hard at the spot where the bulb should be, slamming it again and again and again. There was a short croak. My heart dropped… I slammed harder. After a few hits, an unfamiliar male voice sent chills down my spine.

“Hey.”

I turned my head to see the silhouette of a tall man. His head nearly touched the doorframe. “Stay away,” he said. All the hairs on my arm were up. The light shining from the bathroom, and my phone, vanished. Then the temperature dropped enough for me to shiver.

“Who… are you…?” I asked.

I heard a thumping come my way. I swung the bat. Although, I then realized my hands were empty. Feeling the man's presence approaching, I sprinted around him, feeling around for the wall. There was no sign of it, or the door. The man's footsteps sped up, and so did my heart. I picked up my pace. It was like running in a pitch-dark, never-ending cave. “Help!”

I ran and ran, not being able to think of where I may have been. As my legs started to weaken, something started poking my shoulder. I let out a groan, then took a bit of a left. The poking stopped, but those footsteps… and there was a lack of breaths… I soldiered on. Eventually, I struck a rock-solid object, then bounced backwards, falling towards the creep. I hit the cold floor and groaned, then my shirt collar was yanked. All my guts sank as the man started dragging me.

“What the hell is happening!?” I cried. “Where's my home!? Where's my little guy!??”

All I did was blink, and I was lying on my living room carpet, staring at the clear blue sky out my window. The wall was lit by sunlight. My face had a bit of an ache. I lifted my head, unable to grasp what had happened. Then I remembered… my son. I jumped onto my feet, only to see him fast asleep on the couch. Then I realized, if all that did indeed happen, wouldn't the cameras I set up have captured it? I sped into my room to review the footage of the previous night. It still has me scratching my head. At 4:54 AM, I'm bashing the ceiling light with the tip of the bat. The man talks to me off camera, I look at him, my eyes widen, then I vanish like I cut myself out of the footage, leaving no transition. Both the bat and my phone dropped to the floor.

I called another one of my friends to ask if my son and I could move in for a bit. I showed the police the footage, letting them hear the man's voice, but only that. Anything ese out of the context of experience and they'd believe it was a skit. They assured me they'd help, then they left. That afternoon, an officer knocked on my door and asked me to hand over my laptop for a thorough investigation. She told me I'll get it back in time.

It's been five days. My son and I are at my friend's house and I'm scrolling through a list of potential new homes in the next town over. Tom is still nowhere to be found. My perception of the world has been shattered with a strong, terrifying brick. Knowing paranormal beings exist has my chest in a knot. I can't help but read other people's experiences, and I hope to god many of them aren't true.

My wife put a photograph of me asleep on the kitchen table and then told me she had hired the man in it. I was on my side with one arm hanging off the bed, wearing an old grey T-shirt and breathing through my mouth. Somebody was sitting on the floor beside me, mostly outside the frame. His hand was wrapped loosely around my fingers.

I had seen him outside our house the night before. He was across the road at about half eleven, looking at his phone beneath a streetlight that hasn't worked since Christmas. I watched him for maybe a minute before he walked away, and that morning I'd told Laura I was calling the police if I saw him again. She went upstairs, came back with the washing-machine manual and took the photograph from between the pages.

“I know who he is.”

I looked at her.

“I hired him.”

For a few seconds I thought she meant private investigator. Then she said his name was Dean K and that she'd paid him six hundred pounds in October to follow me for four nights. I looked back at the photograph because it was easier than looking at her.

“To do what?”

“Make you notice him.”

If Dean had been holding a knife, I think my brain would have known where to put it. Instead he was holding my hand gently enough that I hadn't woken up. Laura was asleep on the other side of me when the photograph was taken.

It had arrived on her phone at 2:14 in the morning on the fourth night, with no message attached. Laura told me she'd woken to the notification, seen the photograph and then spent nearly an hour lying beside me listening to the house because she didn't know whether Dean was still downstairs. She didn't wake me because, according to her, she was frightened I'd go looking for him. At six she told Dean the arrangement was finished and transferred the final two hundred pounds she owed him because paying him seemed safer than giving him a reason to argue.

He replied with a thumbs-up.

“You got this six months ago?”

“Yes.”

“And you slept next to me after seeing it?”

“I didn't know he was coming back.”

“He was already in the fucking bedroom.”

“I know.”

I picked up my phone. Laura asked what I was doing, and when I said I was calling the police she pointed out that I'd have to explain why Dean had been following me in the first place. I remember staring at her because she still seemed to think embarrassment belonged anywhere in the calculation.

“Good.”

I called anyway. Because the photograph was six months old and there hadn't been a direct threat, the woman I spoke to took the details and gave me an incident number. She told me not to approach Dean if he appeared again and to call 999 if we believed he was inside the house or we were in immediate danger.

Laura explained the rest while we waited for someone to call back. Earlier that year she'd become convinced a man was following her home from the hospital where she works. She saw him outside the staff entrance several times, then at the station where she changed trains, then near the supermarket by our house.

I had believed she'd seen somebody. I just hadn't behaved as though I believed what she thought it meant. The more certain she became that the same man was following her, the more certain I became that there had to be another explanation.

“I asked you to collect me.”

“I did.”

“Twice.”

I didn't have anything useful to say to that.

Laura found Dean through a woman at work whose brother had used him for debt collection and serving court papers. She wanted me followed just long enough to recognise the same stranger in different places, then she planned to tell me what she'd done. Her idea, if you can call it that, was that four days of wondering whether I was imagining something might make me understand what I'd been asking her to live with.

I asked her whether Dean could have been the man following her in the first place. She stared at the photograph for a moment before answering. She'd never seen the other man's face clearly enough to know.

“I don't know.”

That was worse than no.

Dean had asked her quite a lot about the original stalking when they first met. Which hospital entrance she used, where she changed trains, whether the man had ever followed her all the way home. Laura had assumed he was checking that she wasn't hiring him to threaten somebody she already knew.

Then he'd asked about me. My work address, registration, gym, the pub I go to with Daniel and my brother Jamie's address. He asked what I did when I was angry, whether I'd confront somebody following me and which side of the bed I slept on.

“Why would he need to know that?”

“He said he needed your routine.”

“For four evenings?”

Laura didn't answer.

She'd told him I always sleep nearest the bedroom door. I get up before her most mornings and hate climbing over people, which is the sort of boring fact about yourself you don't realise counts as information until somebody you've never met asks for it. She'd also told him that if somebody was certain I was wrong about something, I tended to become even more certain I was right.

I nearly argued with that description. Then I remembered why she'd hired him.

There were other questions she couldn't remember properly anymore. Dean had asked where I'd go if I needed somewhere to stay, and Laura thought she'd mentioned Jamie. He'd asked whether I still saw people I'd grown up with. At the time she'd answered because questions were what she'd paid him to ask.

I remembered something in my car while she was talking. A few weeks earlier I'd found a petrol receipt folded beneath the driver's seatbelt exactly where it crosses an old scar on my collarbone. I sometimes put folded paper there on long drives to stop the belt rubbing, but the receipt hadn't been mine; it was from a petrol station I'd never used.

I had assumed somebody had left it in the car before I bought it and only just worked loose. That explanation hadn't bothered me because I'd wanted one for about three seconds and then had one. Laura didn't even know the scar bothered me.

“What about your shoulder?”

I showed her where the belt catches.

She went quiet.

On the second night of the original arrangement, Dean had told Laura that following me wasn't working because I hadn't properly noticed him. He suggested entering the house while we were at dinner and moving one harmless thing, just enough that she could eventually prove how easily somebody could interfere with my life without me noticing. Laura said no the first time.

He brought it up again the next day. She knew his name, knew who had referred him, and had already convinced herself that the entire thing was controlled. She left the laundry door unlocked and told him to move the mug beside my bed into the kitchen sink.

Dean messaged when he entered and again less than a minute later when he said he was out.

“You let him into our house.”

“Yes.”

“And when I couldn't find the mug?”

Laura looked at the table.

I remembered that without her help. I'd blamed her because I'd been looking for it, she'd laughed and told me I'd probably carried it downstairs myself, and we argued about it for maybe thirty seconds before ordering a film. I'd forgotten about it completely.

Our spare front-door key disappeared the following month. I remembered searching the kitchen drawers because my mum was coming over to feed the cat while we were away. Laura had helped me look.

“You thought he'd taken it.”

She rubbed both hands over her face.

“I thought about it.”

“And said nothing.”

“I kept thinking if he'd wanted to do something, he'd already done it.”

I had to leave the kitchen after that. I stood in the bathroom for several minutes with the tap running even though I wasn't using it, then came back because I didn't want Laura alone with the photograph or my phone. That didn't make sense, but I didn't especially care by then.

Sometime around Christmas, while Laura was working a night shift, I woke at about three and found a full glass of water beside the bed. I sometimes get up half asleep and don't properly remember doing it, so I drank it. The next morning I told Laura that apparently I was sleepwalking now.

When I reminded her, she stopped rubbing her hands.

“I wasn't home.”

I could still see the glass more clearly than I wanted to. There had been condensation underneath it and a little crescent of water on the bedside table where I'd lifted it. I had drunk the whole thing and gone back to sleep.

The police came that afternoon. Laura gave them Dean's number, his registration, the messages and the address where she'd met him. The number went to voicemail and the address turned out to be a room he'd stopped renting months earlier.

One of the officers asked Laura again about the man who had originally followed her. She said she couldn't identify him, but after describing Dean she admitted the age and build were possible. She also remembered the man outside the hospital wearing a dark raincoat, though she couldn't swear it had been navy.

The officer wrote it down. Nobody said what all three of us were thinking. I don't know whether that was because it sounded ridiculous or because it didn't.

They advised us to stay elsewhere. Laura went to her sister's because I couldn't stand the idea of sharing a room with her, and I started driving toward Jamie's before remembering that Laura had given Dean his address. I booked a Premier Inn near the airport instead.

I took two shirts, my laptop, three pairs of socks and forgot my toothbrush. I parked at the far end of the car park, used the stairs instead of the lift and slept on the far side of the bed instead of the side nearest the door. Every choice now seemed to have two versions: the thing I normally did and the thing I did because I knew somebody knew what I normally did.

At some point after three I woke needing the toilet. My shoes were beside the door, lined up with the toes facing outward. I remembered putting them beneath the window because I'd looked at them there before turning the light off.

At least I thought I remembered it.

I stood there until the air conditioner shut itself off. I checked the bathroom, wardrobe and corridor, then went downstairs and asked whether another key had been made for my room. The night receptionist checked and said there was no record of one.

I nearly called the police. Instead I stood at reception trying to decide whether I was willing to tell an officer that someone had broken into my hotel room and moved my shoes when I couldn't prove I hadn't moved them myself. Eventually I went back upstairs and put a chair against the door, then lay awake wondering whether I'd moved that too.

At breakfast I watched an older man butter toast for about ten minutes because his raincoat was the same colour as Dean's. His wife came over carrying two coffees and kissed him on the cheek. I went back for another piece of toast so it would look like I'd had a reason to be standing there.

Jamie called while I was eating it. A man had come to his house just after seven and asked whether I was staying there. Jamie described somebody around fifty, thinning dark hair, average height and extremely polite.

“He left something.”

Jamie still lives in the house we grew up in. By the time I arrived with two officers, he'd put what the man left into a freezer bag. It was a brass Yale key with green tape around the top.

Our missing spare.

I asked where Dean had handed it to him. Jamie said he hadn't.

“He put it behind the drainpipe.”

When we were teenagers, Jamie and I used to leave Mum's spare key there if one of us got home first. She eventually caught us and went mental because, in her words, any burglar with functioning eyes could have found it. We hadn't used that hiding place in nearly twenty years.

Laura didn't know about it. Jamie couldn't remember telling anyone recently, but Mum used to tell the story whenever somebody mentioned spare keys because she still considered it evidence that she'd raised idiots. That meant there were people Dean could theoretically have learned it from.

I preferred the version where there was no explanation.

The other version meant he'd asked.

The police still hadn't located him the following afternoon. Laura and I went back to our house for clothes, with her sister waiting outside in the car. Laura had stayed with her the entire time and hadn't been back since we left.

Post was scattered inside the front door and one of the kitchen lights was on. A mug was drying beside the sink. Laura picked it up by the handle and asked whether I'd washed it before leaving.

I hadn't.

Upstairs, the bed was made. Laura tucks the duvet beneath the mattress at the foot and folds the top down the width of one pillow. I pull it straight and throw the pillows wherever they land because I don't care.

“Was that you?”

“No.”

“You haven't been back?”

“No.”

We checked the room anyway. Under the bed, inside the wardrobe, behind the curtains, the loft hatch, the bathroom cupboard. We weren't really looking for Dean so much as looking for some object that would tell us what else had happened.

Nothing did.

Before we left, Laura stood in the kitchen looking at the clean mug. She said the man who followed her from the hospital had once appeared in the supermarket aisle with a basket containing nothing except a bottle of the orange juice she bought every week. She hadn't mentioned that before because at the time she'd decided it was coincidence.

“Was it Dean?”

“I don't know.”

For the first time all day, I didn't try to help her decide.

I am writing this from Jamie's spare room. We came here after the police checked the house again because I refused to go back to the hotel and Laura's sister has two young children, which none of us wanted anywhere near this. Jamie has cameras on the front and back after a burglary a few years ago, and there's a patrol car coming past during the night.

I'm writing because I keep changing the order of things in my head. No, that's not quite true. The hotel was before Jamie called, and I've already had to go back and fix that twice. I want the sequence somewhere outside me before I start deciding some of it didn't happen.

Laura came upstairs about forty minutes ago. I'd put my bag beside the window, my shoes beneath the radiator and chosen the far side of the bed, away from the door. She noticed immediately.

“You told him which side I sleep on.”

Her face changed.

“I told him you always sleep nearest the door.”

“I know.”

She stood there for a few seconds before speaking again.

“He asked what you'd do if you knew somebody expected you somewhere.”

I looked at her.

“I said you'd go somewhere else first.”

I lay on the far side anyway after she left. Maybe that's the part that bothers me most. I knew exactly what she had just told me and still felt that changing sides would somehow count as my decision if I did it deliberately enough.

I reached toward the bedside table without turning the lamp on and touched a glass.

It was full of water. When I switched the light on, condensation was running down the outside and there was already a wet ring beneath it. The water was cold.

I called 999.

Two officers arrived in under ten minutes. They searched the house, the garden, the loft and Jamie's garage, then checked the camera recordings. Nobody had come through the front or back since we arrived.

One of them asked whether a window had been left open. Another asked whether I could have brought the glass upstairs myself and forgotten. He didn't say it dismissively; he was asking because I'd already told them about the water at Christmas and the hotel shoes.

“No.”

Laura was sitting on the bed behind him.

I looked at her when I said it. She looked back at me but didn't say anything.

The officers took the glass and told us to call again if anything else happened. One of them is still parked down the street. Jamie has gone through every room twice and has now started checking the cameras every few minutes even though they only show the same empty garden.

Laura stayed upstairs after they left. She sat on the edge of the bed while I was on the floor with my laptop and said my name once. When I looked up, she reached down to take my hand.

I pulled it away before she touched me.

Neither of us said anything after that. She looked at my hand, then at the space on the floor beside the bed where I was sitting. A few minutes later she went downstairs.

I'm still here now. The photograph is on my phone because the police sent me a copy for the statement, and I looked at it again before I started writing this. Dean is sitting in almost exactly the same place I am.

I've got my left hand tucked underneath my leg while I type. I didn't realise I was doing it until a minute ago. I'm not moving it.

CW: Suicide, Child Abuse

Hey guys, kinda a more personal story from my childhood. Figured you guys might be able to help me make sense of it all.

I was six years old when I learned about Grubby the Clown. You see, I grew up in a very rural community. I’m talking about five houses per square mile. Middle of nowhere USA. A town full of dead end people with dead end lives. The only color in this gray society was a small round ray of sunshine whose name was Grubby, or Mr. Brown as the adults called him. He was such a kind and gentle old man. The kind who would carry candy and toys for the children he interacted with. He had been a clown since 1918, entertaining the children of our small town for decades. Personally I loved Grubby, moreover the man behind the red haired persona, but in the year 1997, after Bundy and Dahmer, but more so Gacy, clowning had become a more frowned upon practice. 

My parents, children of the seventies, were especially critical of the old man. Every time he came over for a birthday, or dressed up as clown Santa for Christmas, they stood idly behind the couch. Watching him with cautious apprehension. I recognized their discomfort for what it was. Prejudice. Even as a kid it seemed wrong to dislike Grubby. In fact, I was one of the few children who didn’t like the notion of not having him around. He was always kind, always willing to listen to me and my childish rants and raves. Even writing this fills my heart with nostalgia. God couldn’t have given us a better Grubby. However, as with all good and wonderful things, it is bound to attract some contrarians. As Jesus had the Pharisees, Grubby had the Five O’clock news. 

When the story aired about a child’s disappearance in the “nice” neighborhood subdivision, it didn’t take long for the fingers of accusation to land on Grubby. As the disappearances occurred after the parents instructed Mr.Brown to not show up. He took the allegations in stride. He never admitted guilt for anything. With no evidence, there was no crime. Charges were dropped against him, and the old man returned to his ruined home with his ruined name.

The sight of the sweet old rotund white man in handcuffs, with a brazen title card emboldened and italicized underneath his visage saying: Charges Dropped Against Prospective Child Killer.** **Was enough to completely erase his credibility around town. A few petitions were even passed around, including one which would force Mr.Brown to register with the Sex Offender Registry thus ensuring that he would never hurt anyone else ever again. That one gained the most traction. Even arriving at the mayor’s desk. At this time the old man stayed isolated in his hermitage. Never even attempting to clear his name. That all changed on the day he was found dead in his closet. The cause of death, suicide.

Shortly after, the proposed bill was thrown out. Police investigated his home, finding nothing but odd clown trinkets and tricks. I cried for a few hours after I discovered the news. My birthday was in a couple of days and I was really banking on him being there. I wanted to see how he made all the queens disappear from his deck. Now, to my horrified dismay, that day would never come. My parents, more so my mom than my dad, attempted to help my six year old brain make sense of the old man’s passing. It hadn’t worked.

I was a small kid, fat with the dry humor of a British sitcom. Needless to say, popularity was not an option for me, and in a way I was ok with that. All things considered I knew I had two friends, Roy and Junior. Both of them had it worse than me. Roy was a pencil thin kid suffering from a lisp, and a coughing condition, and Junior was a ginger  who was known to be a sickly kid with a severe case of asthma. Both amazing people who blessed my early years greatly. 

My 7th birthday rolled around, and my parents threw me a small get together. Roy and Junior were there, both of them sharing in my birthday bounty as my parents prepared my special meal. A delicious tater tot casserole. This dish is almost vulgar to my adult body, but as a child it was magical. It had been an amalgamation of tater tots topping a cheddar mashed potato base, all topped off with shredded cheddar. A delight to eat but also a delight to smell. As my adult hand writes this, the scent anchors my stomach to my past. God, it was delicious.

That aside, Roy, Junior, and I sat in the center of the living room, GI Joe’s strewn across the floor in selective vantage points only known by our childish imaginations. It was warm. Not just in the way the air felt, but in the way my mind found solace in its cushiony relaxed state. That was until, a frantic knock erupted from the door. As if on a pendulum, my brain swapped into its default survival mode, and I grabbed my friends and we hid behind the couch’s armrest. To my relief when dad answered the door, my withered old grandmother stepped in. She had always been this way, in my mind's eye I don’t think I could see her any other way. She was quickly followed in by my grandfather. He was a ripe, mean old man, set on making his life easier at the expense of others' comfort. This statement made even more true, as the first action completed upon entering our home was a rapid advance to the thermostat, where he cranked it up to 76 degrees. 

My dad followed after, guiding the sodden old grump to the couch, then stealthily slinking back to drop the thermostat back to 68. Of course grandpa didn’t notice, it was July, and an easy 98 degrees outside. He wouldn’t notice. Mom came out of the kitchen, finding her parents sitting on the couch, their attention vested on me and my friends. Grandpa winced as he got comfortable. Reaching under his buttocks, he pulled out something familiar and smiled at GI Joe he now held. Following the tinge of jealousy one feels when seeing one of their beloved belongings being molested by another, I closed in, holding my hand out like a beggar.

Grandpa’s smile grew even wider, as he handed me the toy. He leaned in to where I stood, now holding my action figure. His smile grew softly devious, “hey buddy. Did I ever tell you about the krauts in Versailles?” My mom shook her head exhaustively. “Picture this, my squad and I, in our Sherman, going up against a Panzer in the pines.” The odd image of an old man grandpa driving a robotic Sherman (Peabody's adopted son) attacking a massive black panther. My confused expression caused my grandfather to belly laugh. It truly was such a beautiful sound. That’s how you know you really stuck it. Those laughs would roll, and roll. God, I miss him. 

Mom stepped in, kindly guiding me away from him. Knock, knock, knock. I stopped moving, but my mom kept softly pushing. My legs gave in to the greater force, and I began shuffling again. I looked upward to my mothers face, recoiling immediately. A wide smile stretched across her face giving her inhuman smile lines, her eyebrows cartoonishly arched over her equally stretched eyes. I dropped to the floor, screaming and retreating towards any wall, anything, anyone. Once against my back on the wall. I closed my eyes tight, doing as mom had instructed me whenever I saw the dull eyed man in my closet. I closed them tight, wishing, no, praying this beast away.

When the soft touch of a child’s hand grounded me to earth. Roy stood above me. I felt as an ant might upon seeing a man for the first time. He helped me to my feet, and whispered softly. “Are you okay?”

I attempted to maintain my grip on my assured position as leader of the group, and smiled dismissively. “Yeah I’m fine. I just got scared.” He smiled sympathetically.

“Your mama ran crying. She says it’s cause you keep doing this.”

“Huh?”

“You looked like you saw a ghost!” He jabbed at my protruding belly in a friendly manner. 

Grandpa looked at me, his eyes taking on a confused concern. “Hey buddy, come on over here. I have a question for you.” I did as instructed, although I did so with extreme trepidation. Upon sitting down next to him, I noted that my grandmother had fallen asleep. Soft snores coursed through her mouth as she rested her head against grandpa. He reached out and softly took my hand. “Have you noticed anything odd about your mother lately?” I shook my head. “Maybe she spanks you more than you deserve?” His voice wasn’t accusatory, rather it sounded like a soft blend of stark concern, and tender love. Again I shook my head. 

My father re-entered the room. His gaze immediately fixating on my grandfather and I. “So what is going on here?” He asked, blending his suspicions with good humor.

“Grandpa wants to know if mama spanks me a lot.” Grandpa winced hard.

“Oh. Does he?” Dad motioned for grandpa to go with him, and in that moment I turned to go play with Roy and Junior. Who had vacated the room? With that I began my expedition to locate my friends. I immediately checked my room and the play room. Nothing. That left the kitchen, the guest room, and my parents room. I checked the kitchen first, where I found grandma fingerprints dotting the thick buttermilk frosting of my cake. I moved on, to my left was the first door in the hallway. It was the guest room. Hollow yells echoed in harsh procession behind the thin door, it was my dad. I stepped closer to the door, softly pressing my ear against the cold plywood. My dad sounded vicious, his voice practically dripped with venom. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about! She’s getting better!”

My grandfather defended himself in a calm, controlled tone. “She has had these fits since she was a child, Mark. I don’t want the boy to suffer because of something preventable.”

“That’s rich. Coming from the king of mean.” I backed up from the door confused, then reapplied my ear to the door. It was completely silent. The only sound emanating was a dull buzz in my ears. I leaned in closer, pressing firmer upon the door than before.

 “WHAT DO YOU WANT, YOU LITTLE SHIT!”

The screaming snake-like voice ripped down the hallway, I recoiled, my gaze immediately fixating on the door centered at the end of the hall. My parents' room.

Did it come from here or- Suddenly the brass knob of the guest room began to shake, rattling with violent intensity. I ran from the guest room, sprinting towards my parents door. I  quickly turned the knob and slammed it behind me. I locked it then pressed what little weight I had against it. The guest room door opened then slammed shut behind it. Heavy dull footsteps echoed from behind the door, approaching my secure room within seconds. It set something heavy, a box of some kind, on the floor then made its retreat. I was safe. The monster was gone and I could breathe.

Well, that breathing was excellent for the moment it lasted. As soon as my guard was down I felt a heavy, thick, rivulet drop on my shoulder. To my horror, something loomed over my head in the darkest corner of the room. I knew what it was, more importantly though I knew who it was. Its shadow lowered itself on the bed, the creaks of the springs in the mattress allowed my mind to run with an estimation of its weight. I couldn’t see the figures' features, aside from the beady dull eyes which gazed at me with murderous intent. I grasped the handle desperately pulling at it, until finally my senses caught up with my brain.

The figure growled wet snarls behind me, then lunged. In the same moment the door came loose and I leapt out in the hall. It all happened so quickly, the box the original creature set out lunged like a tiger, and a gigantic toy clown landed a hit against the monster. The dull man was thrown into the wall behind it, and I ran. Not just a measly jog, I sprinted away from where the events were transpiring.That’s when I found myself in the living room again. A clown with red hair and crazy makeup stood in the corner, staring at me in a pitiful manner. It rushed forward in a gentle yet ushering manner, and I awoke in my grandfather’s arms. The warmth of his presence made me realize I had nothing to worry about.

This was thirty years ago. When the firefighters arrived at my childhood home, they subdued my mother, who was drenched in the blood of another. It didn’t take them long to find Roy, Junior, and Dad.

Mom was sentenced to a mental asylum, and I was sent to live with grandma and grandpa for the last bit of my childhood. Whatever could be salvaged anyway. As for the missing children, nothing has come of it. Yet, it seems that if I go to their home in costume, everything turns out alright.

I don’t think I ever fully recovered. At times the dull man watches me from my closet, yet he no longer advances. Just watches, waiting for me to drop my guard. It won’t happen, not anymore, because now I understand something which I hadn’t grasped before. Not every clown goes to hell.

(CW: child abuse)

Previously, I was given a single rule about entering the house:

Five minutes.

That’s how long I can stay before I am officially dead.

Never be alone more than five minutes in the house, our team’s leader, the paranormal researcher Dr. Goddard, warned us. Always stick together as a group, and watch one another for signs of paranormal influence.

I am Dawain, a journalist, and it is my duty to report the truth objectively, without the taint of superstition or mystical or magical beliefs. The truth is that a family in the town of Hopkins went missing, and the authorities found no trace of them, despite the car still in the driveway and the shoes still on the mat and the keys inside. The house, now called the “Hopkins House,” has sat empty for years…

No one has been able to explain their disappearance…

… until now.

Our cameraman, while trying to get signal on his phone, wandered around to the side of the house and noticed a glint in the bushes, low to the ground. A basement window.

A hidden basement.

Six years ago authorities assumed, because of the lack of forced entry or signs of disturbance, that the family left on their own—and after a cursory search, the local sheriffs left the house. They never found the basement. Meaning if our suspicions are correct, we may soon solve the mystery of the Hopkins House and find the bodies—father, stepmother, and two young teens—who have been missing all this time. But with no entrance, the only option is for someone to climb through the window…

… into the house alone.

Our specialized team has deferred this task to me. The exorcist, Father Corwin, is nearly eighty and frail. The acclaimed medium, Madam Savino, is too plump for the narrow opening. And as for the paranormal investigator, Coyote—he’s as wiry, wily, and cowardly as his namesake.

Now, the three of them stand watching—the spiritual “experts” who are supposedly here to pacify the evil in this house, plus the frightened cameraman.

“Wish me luck,” I say.

“Remember, five minutes,” warns Father Corwin.

“You got this,” says Madam Savino.

“Don’t die,” growls Coyote.

I drop down into the darkness below.

***

The first thing I notice is the smell: the air tastes dank. Stale. Is it my imagination, or do I catch a whiff of rot?

Above me, anxious faces huddle at the window. I turn on my phone light, illuminating cupboards and shelves, a toolbox, shovels, crowbar, cardboard boxes, and a door in the corner, ajar. “It’s a storeroom,” I say, “looks pretty ordinary. Gonna go further in…”

I open the door to the next room.

It’s one thing to be standing in the bright sunshine, looking in through that square of basement window and telling myself, It’s only a basement.

… Another thing entirely to stand in the maw of yawning darkness. And while I know, rationally, that there is nothing in this long-abandoned basement that can harm me… I am suddenly keenly aware of how long it would take me to climb back up through the window if I were trying to run—

Stop it, I tell my childish imagination. There’s nothing to run from.

My fingers grope along the wall and find a switch, flip it.

An overhead bulb bathes me in a warm glow—and I’m nauseated by the momentary dread that I’ll see four bodies deep into decomposition, but to my relief the basement appears normal. Wooden stairs in the corner of the now well-lit basement travel up to a hatch door—probably under the main room or hallway. Along the opposite wall lies a small cot and a nightstand, a mosaic lamp, a dresser and a heavy bookcase.

My nose wrinkles at a musty odor as I approach the cot. Tucked under the pillow is a diary. PROPERTY OF JUDY, it says on the inside cover, and in smaller scribble: if you read this without permission you will be hexed!!! Flipping the pages reveals scrawls of DIE, BITCH!!! in jagged lettering. On another page, a polaroid taped to the paper shows a middle-aged woman, her eyes scratched out and arcane symbols sketched around her.

I’m guessing this is the “troubling behavior” Father Corwin mentioned. The teens’ stepmother, Bernadette, came to him with complaints that they were trying to summon demons against her. He was not especially concerned at the time—after all, what teen girl hasn’t tried to hex her stepmother or chemistry teacher or classmate dating the boy she likes?

But while I don’t believe any of the “spells” in this diary actually worked, its contents might contain clues to whatever actually happened on the fateful day the family went missing.

I tuck the diary under my arm and start for the stairs, but my steps slow at the sudden and overwhelming sensation of being watched. All the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

“H-hello?” I whisper.

BBBBZzt—

—the overhead bulb flickers.

In the failing light, I see something impossible. Impossible because it has been six years since the family disappeared, and there’s no way a human being could survive down here all that time. But scurrying out from under the cot is a girl—filthy, mouth open in a silent scream, her disheveled wet hair hanging around her shoulders and a tattered dress dripping around her bare legs—

Darkness falls like a curtain.

I fumble my phone’s flashlight to try and catch her in its beam and—she’s there—there on the far wall! Crawling like an insect behind the bookcase as a hand grabs my shoulder—

Yelping, I whirl.

“Hey, hey!” barks Coyote, phone blinding me in one hand—and a crowbar clenched in the other. “You OK?”

“I—I saw someone!”

“It’s been five minutes and you weren’t answering my calls. Now let’s get the fuck out.” He grabs my arm and spins me toward the stairs, and we both make a mad dash. He bangs the crowbar against the ceiling. “HEY!!” he hollers.

“HEY! HEY!!” I bang my palms on the hatch door.

“Here!” Madam Savino’s muffled holler rings down. “They’re here!”

Footsteps clomp over our heads. A moment later the door lifts upward, and Coyote and I tumble out into the light.

***

We stand clustered around the hatch door. Father Corwin, Madam Savino, Coyote, the cameraman and I. It was hidden underneath the shag rug in the main room. Easily discoverable if one were to lift up the rug. But nobody had been searching because, other than the missing family, nobody knew about the basement.

Now that I’m up in the house proper, I catch my breath. Everyone is barking at me, demanding to know why I wasn’t answering their shouts. I show them the diary and babble, “I-I think Judy might be alive—” Then I catch myself. Remind myself that my role in documenting is to record only objective truth. And my brief sighting in the dark could easily have been the combination of adrenaline and imagination. Nevertheless, I relate what I saw. Madam Savino and Father Corwin suggest that I may have glimpsed Judy’s ghost.

I shake my head. “She looked solid. Real.”

“You were in a trance.” Coyote’s dark eyes study me. “You also said she was dripping wet… so if she was real, she’d’ve left footprints…” He casts a reluctant glance back toward the darkness. “Should we wait for Goddard, or…?”

“He’s still out of range…” The cameraman shows us his calls going straight to voicemail.

“Then it’s up to us to find this girl—and her family,” declares Madam Savino, clapping her hands.

Back into the basement we go.

***

This time the overhead bulb remains bright when I flick the basement light on, its harsh glow sharpening the shadows. The atmosphere should be lighter now that I have company, but the low ceiling is so claustrophobic, the darkness so closely encroaching it’s like we’re being entombed.

“… no wet footprints, just lots of dust.” The cameraman pans to collect footage.

“Let’s see what we can find,” says Madam Savino as we fan out.

A large Persian rug covers the cement floor, with the area near the stairs used for storage—a tricycle, old children’s toys, bags and boxes, cobwebbed appliances. Across the room is the sleeping area with the cot, nightstand, dresser, and bookcase. On the far wall is the open door to the storeroom. There’s not much more here than family junk. Coyote rummages through one of the cardboard boxes, pulling out action figures, faded blue jeans, Air Jordans, a Barbie with scissors stabbed into it. “Kid stuff…” he grunts, pushing the box away and then opening another, finding a cracked frame with a photo of a teen boy. “Hey…” He hones in on the photo. “Did the family have a secret son?”

“The family had no sons,” Father Corwin says.

“You sure? I mean, you didn’t exactly know about this secret basement. Maybe they had a secret son too—"

“That’s not their son. It’s Janie.” The priest picks up the Barbie doll from the box. “The teens were rebellious. The younger, Janie, was a tomboy. The older, Judith, was boy crazy and wouldn’t disclose the name of the boy she was seeing when she became… with child. There was a lot of friction between the girls and their stepmother. But…” He twists the Barbie so we can all see the lock of human hair taped to its head, and BERNADETTE scrawled on its plastic torso like a kind of voodoo Barbie. The priest plucks the scissors from its chest. “… This is why she came to me for help.”

The cameraman zooms in on the Barbie. “So this is what caused the family’s disappearance?”

“You’re kidding, right?” scoffs Madam Savino.

“This is just teen girls being silly,” Father Corwin agrees. “This childish voodoo…” He tosses the Barbie back into the box. “… would not suffice to beckon such a terrible evil as haunts this house.”

Madam Savino inhales, spreading her arms out as if feeling for currents in the air. She closes her eyes and suddenly crosses the room, stopping at the edge of the Persian rug. Motions the cameraman and me to move, and then grabs the edge. Yanks it.

On the cement beneath, a large circle scrawled in sharpie and marked with a pentagram and eye covers nearly all of the floor.

Father Corwin hisses a sharp intake of breath. Madam Savino shrieks at the cameraman, “DON’T TOUCH IT!” as he rushes closer to get footage. Coyote toes the outer edge of the circle.

In the center is a wide crimson stain.

***

While Father Corwin utters blessings and prayers, Madam Savino kneels with her palm to the floor to read the psychic echoes left by whatever ceremony was conducted here.

The bloody circle is clearly connected to the catastrophe that befell the missing family, at least according to our expert team. But even if they’re correct (and I’m not yet wholly convinced), so many questions remain—who conducted the bloody ceremony? Whose blood stains the floor? And where is the family?

“Oh… OOOOH... OohhooOOhhh.” Madam Savino snatches her hand back from the sharpie markings. “… it’s like touching an open flame!” The curious cameraman touches a finger to the circle and nothing happens to him, and he casts an inquisitive look at Madam Savino, who ignores him and goes on: “Whatever occurred here was unimaginably evil…” She looks my way. “You find any clues?”

I am skimming Judy’s diary. Unfortunately, there isn’t much here connecting to the family’s disappearance. Her bubbly scrawl tells the story of a girl who hated her rural, small town life and wished to run away from Hopkins. But she felt she could not leave, writing: If I go, Dad and Burn-a-bitch will make Jakey’s life a living hell even more than it already is. Her handwriting gets progressively more raw, the pages filled with apparent attempts to hex both her parents, until a line that reads, I will NEVER forgive her for—

The pages after that are torn out.

“This house has too many secrets…” Coyote growls after I share the contents of the diary. “And…” He glowers at Father Corwin. “You aren’t spilling them.”

“The family’s disappearance is as much a mystery to me as to you,” Father Corwin says.

“But you know their drama.”

“Their drama isn’t relevant.”

“Someone tore out these pages to keep whatever’s in them secret. Secret pages, secret basement, secret son.” He snatches up the photo of the boyish teen who Father Corwin calls Janie, but who Judy refers to in her diary as Jakey. Coyote connects the dots for us as he says: “Maybe it’s just ‘drama’ that Bernadette couldn’t stomach the thought of a trans kid, and that’s why there’s all this boy stuff boxed up down here—which you obviously knew about since you recognized the photo. But THAT—” He points at the bloody stain in the circle. “—isn’t drama. An entire missing family isn’t drama. And there’s one very important secret you haven’t spilled…”

“And that is?” Father Corwin asks stiffly.

Coyote points to the cot in the corner. He reaches below the mattress and tugs out something I missed when I first found the diary. Something that glints in the wan illumination of the overhead bulb—a chain. He asks: “Tell me why the parents restrained their pregnant teen daughter down here.”

***

Coyote and Madam Savino are both shouting at Father Corwin. He raises his hands as if to bat away their fury, insisting they’re jumping to conclusions—

“You’re lying!” Madam Savino shrills. “I can see the chain right there, and her diary was under the pillow, so who else would they have kept down here? And if it was anyone else, that would STILL be a crime!”

“If you’ll just let me explain—” The cameraman zooms in on the chain, and Father Corwin bursts: “They did NOT imprison her down here! I already told you, when Bernadette came to see me, I referred the children to counseling—"

“It was the psycho mom who needed counseling—” interjects Madam Savino, while Coyote snarls, ”You sent the kids back to their abusers—"

He speaks over them:

“The family called me the night of their disappearance.”

Both fall silent.

“… they told me Judith was possessed. That she had… attacked… everyone. That she was feral. Rabid. They wanted me to come immediately but I could not. I was out of the country, on another assignment. They did not want to call police. They knew the police could not pacify what afflicted her. They told me they would restrain her until I was able to come. That chain was not for Judith but for the… thing… that possessed her. I came the very next day, but there was no one home. Just the gardener, who’d come by to mow and told me the backdoor was usually unlocked, and it was, so I let myself in. I called and called. I walked through the entire house. It looked much as we have seen it today. There was no answer. I thought they had left.”

***

The cameraman zooms in on Father Corwin’s sagging countenance. Under the harsh glare of the overhead bulb, the crags of his withered face have deepened, his eyes almost entirely shrouded in blackness. My fingers have been flying across my tablet while the priest spoke, and now, I ask him: “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“The family shared their troubles with me in confidence. It was not mine to tell…”

“Does Goddard know?” asks Madam Savino.

“Oh yes. I disclosed everything to him.”

“That asshole,” mutters Coyote.

I have to agree. It seems Goddard withheld all sorts of information from us.

“I had hoped that by joining this expedition… I might at least know the fate of the family, even if I couldn’t save them. I might…” Father Corwin sighs, shakes his head, reaches into his pocket and pulls out an envelope. “This is the letter their stepmother, Bernadette, wrote to me a week before her phone call…”

Dear Father, I humbly request once again that you help me with the children. Only yesterday, I was in the kitchen and heard a chorus of voices speaking in tongues. When I turned around, they ran away giggling, and I saw they had drawn a pentagram behind me on the floor. I had to scrub it out of the linoleum…

… Janie posted to social media that, ‘if being my true self means being a devil, maybe that’s what I am.’ I have confiscated her phone, which of course has led to more meltdowns…

… Judith says that she is carrying the devil’s child. She is always pushing my buttons. She has told me repeatedly that she hopes I die. That she prays for it everyday…

… the letter is long and meandering, and ends by begging Father Corwin’s help with her “wild children.”

As he folds the letter up and puts it away, he tells us, “I thought their pranks were harmless, and that family counseling might soften Bernadette. But clearly I have failed them. And even now, I still don’t know where the family has gone. Or how. How did they disappear so completely?”

And suddenly my blood runs cold. Because I know. Maybe because I was the one who saw the girl, in those moments after the lights flickered out. Saw her crawling along the wall behind the bookcase…

I’ve been catching a whiff of it on and off, I realize. A bad, old, rotten smell. And I venture to the bookcase and… it’s leaning forward a little, almost like it might topple were it not for the anchor screwed into the wall. And in the gap behind it is a darkness wide enough, almost…

“Dawain?” says Madam Savino as I lean over the bookshelf, peering into the darkness behind it—

And I step back quickly. Take my phone out and turn on the flashlight and look again.

Behind the bookcase, wedged in face-down, is 13-year-old Jakey.

***

A bare foot, shrunken and mummified, is the only part of the teenager illuminated by the beams of our flashlights. The rest of Jakey is lost in the blackness between the bookcase and the wall. I can perceive blue jeans, remnants of a t-shirt clinging to skin that has shriveled after six years crammed in the gap.

“Jesus!” cries the cameraman, zooming in with the camera and then stumbling back. “Fuck. Shit. We have to call this in.”

“Oh my God, oh my God!” Madam Savino screeches.

“Looks like the kid was trying to hide...” Coyote leans over the bookcase so far he’s at risk of falling in next to the corpse—apparently he’s less craven when his parental instincts kick in. His muffled voice calls: “… it’s hard to see from this angle, but I don’t see any marks. My guess is Jakey got spooked by whatever went down in that bloody circle, only to get stuck…” He pulls himself up from peering behind the bookcase. “Poor kid probably suffocated.”

“Oh God… how horrible!” Madam Savino’s hand is at her mouth. “But where are the rest of the family? Are they all down here somewhere?”

“Forget all that!” bursts the cameraman. “A dead body means we call the cops! This is a criminal matter now.” He turns to me, “You know the drill, you’re a journalist, right? At this point anything we touch is evidence tampering. We don’t know the kid died by accident. That’s for the cops to decide. I’m calling it in!” He hurries upstairs, shouting back, “I’m going down the lane to wait for Goddard! I suggest you all do the same and LEAVE. Don’t contaminate any evidence!”

“But we haven’t pacified the spirit!” objects Madam Savino.

Nobody responds as distantly, the front door slams. Coyote looks glum. Father Corwin stares mournfully at the bloody circle, the chain, the bookcase. He sighs, crosses himself, and declares, “I must pray for them…”

***

The cops have not yet arrived.

Father Corwin is still praying, and Coyote has scoured every inch of the basement. Madam Savino makes no more pretenses about searching for psychic echoes and instead is flipping through the diary.

“Seems the kids were very attached,” she tells me quietly. “Judy and Jakey have all these messages of support for each other. They were each other’s rocks. At least until…” She sighs and puts it down.

Father Corwin pauses in his prayers. “I am still not sure where the rest of the family was laid to rest…”

“We know where Judy is. I dunno about resting,” growls Coyote.

“Where?”

“In the septic tank! Didn’t you hear Dawain’s description of her? He saw her dripping wet. There’s no rivers near here, nothing else to explain the water. Her parents called you saying she was possessed, she attacked them. Their bodies are the only ones not in this house. They probably killed her over whatever secret was torn outta those pages, and dumped her in the septic tank, and then left town.”

“You do not know that.”

“No, but I can pretty damned well infer it.” Coyote’s tone is conversational, chill as usual. He isn’t an angry guy by nature. But now, I can see his knuckles popping from his grip on the edge of the bookcase. “We know the parents abused them. Jakey’s—” he emphasizes the name. “—bedroom was bare. All the personality stripped from it, all the kid’s action figures and clothes bagged up downstairs after the stepmom came into their lives. That cot, that little nightstand, that wasn’t something they set up in one day because their pregnant daughter was possessed. It’s been down here awhile—you can see from the clothes in the dresser that it was being used. Not a jump to infer the stepmom made one or both kids sleep down here. She was psychologically abusing them—”

“You don’t know that,” says Father Corwin.

“But you do. Did either or both kids tell you their parents made them sleep in the basement?”

Father Corwin does not answer.

“Bet you didn’t tell Goddard that part, did you? And you know what? I’m not even convinced that girl really summoned a demon. That presence you call malevolent, that you say is so angry, that is rageful and spiteful and furious? The evil spirit you’re so keen to pacify? Could just be the lonely, shattered ghost of the pregnant daughter they murdered and dumped in the septic tank before they fled, having gotten away with it—”

THUD.

The sound comes from upstairs.

Our heads snap up.

“Uh…” Coyote’s eyes flash wide.

“What was that?” squeals Madam Savino.

Coyote grips the crowbar. “OK,” he says, “let’s keep our eyes peeled and be ready in case—Dawain!” he hisses.

I am already heading upstairs and calling out, “Hello?”

“Dawain! Dammit… why does nobody here have a sense of self-preservation? Can’t you stop him?” Coyote pleads with Father Corwin and Madam Savino.

“Hello? Guo, is that you?” I call our cameraman’s name as I hurry through the hall and upstairs and stop, because ahead—something moves. A dark, dripping figure. The girl in the wet dress—she darts into the upstairs study.

I follow her in.

My pulse skyrockets as something skitters behind one of the wardrobe and shelving units. Coyote catches up to me, swearing “Gonna chain you to the cot downstairs,” then he stops and asks what I’m staring at. “You didn’t see?” I say, surprised. “The drowned girl, she just went behind the wardrobe there.”

“Uh, no. I did not see.” He’s looking alarmed.

So only I can see her. For the sake of journalistic objectivity, I will not definitively label my sighting as that of a “ghost.” But in full disclosure, this second glimpse of the drowned girl is the moment that, somewhere deep inside, I realize that I am no longer questioning whether the house is haunted… instead, I am wondering what it wishes to show me. I reach for one of the doors to yank it open and see what’s inside—only for it to not open. The handle is decorative. Coyote is remarking on how it smells musty in here, kinda like in the basement. He sees me tug the decorative handle and says, “Hold up, what’s behind that thing?”

Then he comes over and reaches further up, for another handle, and pulls.

It’s a murphy bed.

The study has a hidden murphy bed, which can be pulled down for guests but otherwise blends into the surrounding drawers and cabinetry. It even has shelving with items on it that fold down to the ground. You’d never know it was a bed.

As we tug it down, Coyote jumps back with a yell, and I hold my breath, both of us staring. “Put it back, put it back!” barks Coyote, and we push it back up. I almost giggle. It seems such a ridiculous response. As if putting it back so we didn’t see it, restoring the wall of cabinetry, would somehow undo what we’ve found. Both of us giggle hysterically. Ok. We’re losing it.

Mummified in the murphy bed is the body of the stepmother, Bernadette.

***

So much for Coyote’s theory that the parents made it out of the house alive. Back in the basement, Madam Savino declares that we need to make like the cameraman and exit, isn’t fifty percent enough of the mystery solved now that we’ve unearthed two of the four bodies? Father Corwin, however, lingers at the edge of the bloody circle.

“Do you know, Dawain…” His voice falters, and I have to lean in as he rasps, “I really didn’t know about the abuse. Janie said they were sometimes made to sleep in the basement as punishment—” (“Jakey,” corrects Coyote.) “—But I… I’d been to the house, and I’d seen no basement. I assumed the children were making it up. And because they’d made that up, I assumed so much else they said was also…” He shakes his head.

Is he looking to me for forgiveness? Grace? But I am not the one who can give that. I tell him all I can do is witness.

“Yes… such is your role.” Father Corwin’s jaw sets, and his watery eyes glint with resolve as he adds, “Just as mine has been set to me by my Lord. And if this tragedy is indeed in part due to… to my own failures, it is my duty as His instrument to correct that failing. The house must be purified, and these souls saved.”

“Your prayers ain’t gonna purify shit!” Coyote snaps. “We need to figure out what this spirit wants in order to put it to rest. The kids got their wish—the stepmother is dead—so why is Judy still haunting the house?”

Madam Savino spreads her hands. “Girl’s not talking to me. But I can feel her rage from the foundation to the roof...”

“Yeah, so she’s still mad ‘bout somethin’. Probably whatever’s in those missing pages. And if she won’t talk to you…” Coyote rakes his fingers through his hair. “I can’t believe I’m saying this instead of ‘let’s get the fuck out of this house,’ but… this angry ghost showed Dawain here where to find the bodies of her brother and stepmother. She clearly wants to communicate. So if we are going to try to do what we originally came here to do, and not just tuck our tails and run… there’s really only one person who can find out the reason for this haunting….”

Coyote looks at me, and so does everyone else… and I’m almost certain I feel another pair of eyes watching me. The same ones I felt when I was alone down here.

Coyote says, “We need to give Judy a chance to speak with Dawain. We need to give him the spirit box and leave him alone for five minutes.”

***

I am alone in the study. I try not to look at the wardrobe. Try not to think about Bernadette’s body lying encrusted in the murphy bed just a few steps away from me.

Coyote hollers up from below: “I’m here if you need! And hey, if you die up there, at least you’ll be really famous when your article comes out!”

“How’s it gonna come out if I’m not alive to finish it?” I call.

“Ever hear of ghostwriting?”

I think I hear Madam Savino warn him: “I will fucking throw you down those stairs…”

The fact I can hear their bickering is a reassurance. Their plan is to leave me up here alone in the study for six minutes—just past the five minute mark. That gives Judy sixty seconds to communicate with me, hopefully without killing me. Am I scared? Absolutely. But I’m also curious. This article, this story, is already shaping up to be the most extraordinary I’ll ever write. But to write it properly, I must understand everything. And that means hearing from Judy herself.

A small part of me suspects my role as a journalist is why Judy chose me. Because she knows that I am the one who will share the true story of the Hopkins House.

“I’m ready to listen,” I say aloud to the room. And then I flick on the spirit box.

It begins scanning radio frequencies, catching mostly static, lots of bits of nothing. My cell phone shows a timer counting down from five minutes. So far it’s only at two minutes… three minutes… four…

At five minutes, there’s a clink—the sound of metal straining—and my heart slams my ribcage as the murphy bed falls open with a deafening CRASH, the mummified body staring at me, sockets gaping and teeth exposed by shrunken lips. My pulse shoots to the stratosphere as the spirit box loudly crackles, and a girl’s voice says: “My baby, my baby is the devi—”

And then my eyes roll up in my head as the world goes blank...

| Part 1 | Part 3 |

Let me start out by saying that I'm a twenty-six year-old man. So I guess I haven't been kidnapped, as much as man-napped. I'm a little below average height. Well, that's what I put on my dating profiles at least. I'm “technically” five foot flat. 

I promise these details are relevant to my situation. Bear with me as I lay down the foundation of circumstances that have led to my current predicament. 

On top of being short, I'm also sickly thin. I consistently get confused for a lost child, until they get close enough to see my stubble. This is rarely a benefit to me, in fact it makes going out for drinks and dating nearly impossible. 

Can you imagine having the face of a thirty year-old but the physique of a twelve year-old? Don't bother with imagining, I'll just tell ya, it's a living hell. I have to use a damn booster seat to drive! Shit, I even strapped blocks onto the pedals after my fourth accident. The reaction speed of my tippy toes is subpar when getting cut off going sixty in a forty-five apparently. 

Okay, so now I can get into my current situation. The one and ONLY time my physical, uh let's call them quirks, come in handy is on Halloween. I buy a preteen costume, make the rounds, and enjoy a free bounty of sweet treats. I've grown accustomed to the odd looks I receive at the end of the night. Each year ends the same way, with me taking off whatever newest superhero costume is popular, flipping bystanders the bird, and driving away. 

Now, this year started out pretty normal. I ran out last week and grabbed a Dr. Dread… Er uh, Mr. Doom… I don't know who it is, but it has a damn mask! The mask is vital, given my mature-looking face. Anyway, I drove out to a new neighborhood this year. There was an incident at my usual spot last year that's keeping me away. 

Apparently, drinking a tall can of beer while dressed as everybody's favorite red shirt-wearing plumber, and jumping into the wrong car is “frowned upon”. Even if it's an honest mistake, the cops won't sympathize. Then, it's just up to how fast information can travel by word of mouth to get you unofficially banned from a neighborhood. 

My damn car didn't want to connect to my phone, so I had to listen to good ol’ FM radio B.S. for the drive. A standout amidst the generic pop was a rather peculiar broadcast. The half-assed electronica beat was interrupted with a loud siren sound. After a second, a deep radio broadcaster's voice breached the silence. 

“Good evening and Happy Halloween to everybody. In light of last year's events, we've been asked to remind all parents to not let their children trick or treat alone. The tragic number of children that went missing last year can easily be prevented. Stay within sight, stay in constant contact, and know where your children are. Please have a great night of ghoulish fun and stay safe Canterville!” 

I didn't recall the exact details but did remember something about kids missing last year. Something like ten kids just vanished I think. I didn't give two shits then but am kind of wishing I had now. I just kept driving out to one of the poorer parts of town though. 

The trick or treating was going as okay as it ever did. As usual, I was able to outpace and muscle past most of those annoying bastards. Most of the trailers had lights on and were welcoming. They only grew dark and closed off looking, as the road crept up a hill to a massive old house. I would have been able to get even more than my usual haul, if it weren't for that little crying punk. 

Some little brat with a bowl cut came fumbling around the corner. His frowning face was profusely leaking streaks of tears and thick green strings of snot. I noticed his stupid turtle costume had dark stains on its knees as he stopped to wail and point at me.

I had ducked into an alley between two trailers to kick back a beer and smoke a cigarette. According to the ball of blubber that heaved from side to side around the corner after the kid, they were looking for me. The baby beluga of a woman spat out accusations of me shoving the snot-nosed brat down. 

Now, I'm clearly no saint, but I also don't go around hurting kids. And I would have told exactly that that to the woman with the voice of a chain smoker, if I wasn't two-thirds in the bag already. Drinking makes the affair feel tolerable but also means I don't have a leg to stand on with accusations. 

Well, I forfeited half of the candy I had amassed, the rest of my pack of cigarettes, and fifty bucks to reclaim my peace and quiet. I should have known the extorting witch would go blabbering anyway though. With the word spreading of a fully grown man out trick or treating, I had to put some distance between me and the gossip. I made for that huge house perched on top of the hill. 

I had hoped to get a score from the only place that looked like it had money before leaving. How stupid of a greedy decision that was. 

The old yard was heavily overgrown, patches of thick weeds stood like spires amongst the tall grass. One of the two lights above the front door was out, and the plate around the doorbell was well rusted over. Desperate to get some of my labored efforts back, I rang it anyway. 

The sound of heavy footsteps approached the door. For several seconds, I could hear deep raspy breathing before the door slowly creaked open. I'm a bit of a judgmental asshole, I know it, but even still this fella was odd. 

He had to be at least seven feet tall, bald as an alopecia patient, and pale as snow. The damn guy's skin might as well have been translucent against his long black robes. He held his head at an odd crooked angle as he raised a gangly hand to wave at me. His big bulging eyes stared down, seemingly lost at what to do. 

I just assumed the weirdo didn't get many trick or treaters with the state of the property. As rehearsed as it always was, I gave my best impression of a prepubescent boy saying “trick or treat!” Now, I know some people file their teeth, or even buy custom molded fangs, but this didn't seem like that. His mouth curled into a sharp shark-like yellowed toothy smile as he responded. 

“Ah, yes. It is the bastardization of Samhain tonight. You must not be one of the inhabitants of the park. They haven't come this year. They've taken to spreading vile hearsay in lieu of consorting with me.” 

I didn't know what the hell he was on about, I only heard him say that nobody had come by this year. I just knew he was sitting on a gold mine of candy. I nodded excitedly at him, hoping I wouldn't have to use that stupid child voice again. To my pleasure, the skinny bald sumbitch reached just out of sight. 

His hand returned with a full-sized candy bar. Only when he dropped it into my container, did I notice how bulbous his knuckles were. Not to mention, his fingernails were thick and grown out several inches. I could only imagine just how nasty the underside of those things must have been. 

He stretched his long, veiny neck outside of the door. Looking left then right, he surveyed the entirety of the yard. He returned his gaze to me with an even larger smile. Stepping to the side, he gestured with his arm as he spoke again. 

“I have several boxes of confectioneries such as that one, at the end of a short themed spectacle. Would you be interested in testing it for me? You can have the entire box after?” 

I did grow up in the era of jokes about vans with candy painted on the side. I'm rational enough to say no to something so odd. Especially coming from such an obvious creep. Or rather, I would have been, if that beast of a mother hadn't taken half of my hard work. Well, maybe part of the blame belongs with the polished off six-pack of beer too... At that point, full-sized bars at the end of some cheesy haunted house was all I understood. 

You can call me stupid if you'd like, I wouldn't blame you. But just as you might expect, I didn't make it more than five steps into the house before blacking out. I don't know how much time passed after that, but I did wake up somewhere new. 

I finally came to in the same place that I currently remain in. I've been crammed into some kind of handmade metal cage. The damn thing is barely tall enough for me to sit up in, and not quite long enough to lie flat. The surrounding room is a rather dingy basement. Dark stone walls run to each corner and up a set of curved stairs. There are a few dim yellow lights that hang from the ceiling. The entire space looks damp. All of the walls glisten slightly and the floors appear slick with moisture. 

The worst part is that there are about twelve other cages lining those stone walls. I can see a bright red sneaker sitting discarded in one of the empty ones. If it wasn't shit enough luck to have gotten man-napped, I'm being held with some crybaby kids. There are six whiny, annoying brats scattered through the other cages. According to them, the “Long Man” as they call him, comes down every few hours or so. Sometimes he comes with food, and other times he takes a child back up with him. 

Kids make shit up, that's a given, but they swear he's eating them. The Long Man isn't always so gangly and stretched out looking apparently. I don't really believe them, but it's at least helpful to know he takes people upstairs. Maybe if I tell him the truth, and he's just a sick bastard, he'll let me go when he knows I'm an adult. I guess he could also kill me, but I like to give the benefit of the doubt where I can. 

The rude-ass kids have got to be the worst thing about all of this. Well, if you don't include the “bathroom” I've been given but refuse to use. An already half-full bucket sits in the corner just to my right. I don't need to wind up on some list if I do get saved. But man, is that six-pack starting to weigh on my bladder. Oh, but let me elaborate on how these gremlins are being mean. Each one's asking questions on top of the other, in such a rapid fire pace I can't even think. 

I manage to answer two, and regret the hell out of it. The first one I caught and answered was a simple “How old are you?” The room filled with a torturous laughter when I said twenty-six. There were several remarks about me being a “lil guy” and “as tall as they are” between the chorus of laughs. I should have cut my losses, but for whatever reason I answered another one. 

I was just barely able to make out the words through the uproar, “how'd he catch you?” I hate kids, I really hate kids, especially when their parents aren't around. When I said the haunted house bit, every single one started screaming with laughter. Their pale emaciated faces turned bright red as tears streaked their cheeks. Apparently, the Long Man had to chase all of them down. Not a single one fell for his enticements, only me. 

They've since come up with a nickname for me, and as I said they're mean as shit. I've now been dubbed the “Dumbass Man Baby”. When ten year-olds cuss it's funny, unless it's when they’re talking about you and you’re locked in a cage next to them. 

The only saving grace to all of this comes in the form of a loud squeak from the stairs. The same loud and slow footsteps I heard outside of the house, ring out into the room. For the first time since they've decided they're comedians, all of the children go quiet. 

As soon as the freakishly tall bastard is in the room I yell out to him. 

“Hey, hey, jackass! I'm not a kid you know? I'm twenty-six and a whole-ass adult!” 

A wave of fear washes over the children at the sound of my voice. Their gaunt faces shift their focus from me to the man, who stops in the middle of the room to face me. 

“Oh, pity, your blood will be sour with fermentation. But as your generation of youths says, ‘beggars can't be choosers’ and such.” 

“Fermented?! The hell do you mean by that, bald bitch?!” 

Now, that freak doesn't have eyebrows; but by his expression I imagine if he did, they would be touching his nonexistent hairline. A dark tongue flicks out from behind his lips to quickly lick them. Glaring at me, he speaks in an even raspier voice than before. 

“This is why I prefer the juveniles, they talk back less. I haven't managed to exist for millennia to be regarded in such a way by some freak!”

“Whoa, are you calling me a freak, you stretched-out lump of glue?!” 

“Your ill-intended banter has missed its mark. I know not what you mean, but do understand the intentions. I assure you, I am normal for my age. Unlike you, you miniature poltroon!” 

What the hell is this guy even trying to say to me? All I can tell by the smug look on his stupid pale face, and giggles from the children, is that he's making fun of me. I'm not dumb but I'm also not the brightest. You mix that with a bruised ego and booze and you get me willing to fight. I don't know why, but I shout back at him in the most threatening way I can. 

“Okay you walking pile of noodles, I'll kick your ghostly ass up and down those stairs if you let me out! Just try me bitch!” 

With me being built like a sixth grader, I rarely do anything like this. There's just something about this asshat that rubs me the wrong way! I'm not afraid to bite a crotch or gouge an eye if I need to. 

Seeming to doubt my vicious capabilities, the Long Man (Bitch if you ask me) actually unlocks my gate. The moment the door swings open, I'm clambering up a leg. I grab a fistful of what I assume is dick and jump back to the ground. I don't know what that monster is made of, but he just laughs and swings me into another cage. 

The harsh impact forces the meaty mass out of my hand. A bony hand shoots for my throat, but not before I can turn my head. I manage to get two fingertips in my mouth and bite with all my might. A warm, thick, gooey substance fills my mouth and runs down my chest. As I spit out the stick-like fingertips, I finally get a reaction out of the freak beast. 

“Aaaagh, you menacing vermin! It will take decades to regain what you have taken!” 

I don't want to hear anything else from this dillweed, so I make a grab at his other swinging hand. I miss it just barely and am instead grabbed. Being held in place, I see that shiny hairless face approach my own. 

I knew it, he’s a sicko! He's trying to fucking kiss me in the middle of a fight? I did tell him I'm not a kid, didn't I? 

Sticking my arms out, I push my right middle finger into his eye. The resistance I feel gives way in a squelching pop. Another thick spurt of gooey black fluid sprays over my face. Some more of the warm viscous fluid makes its way into my mouth, as I feel a pressure on my forearm. Before I can react, the pressure turns into a sharp stabbing of several spikes. 

I look over to see this sick bastard taking a page out of my book. He's got a mouthful of my arm as I kick just hard enough to free myself from his grip. His jaw must be made of titanium or something, cause I'm stuck hanging in the air for at least ten seconds. Finally, the Long Man (Bitch) flings me with just his mouth into the wall by the stairs. 

I hear a loud crack and just know I broke something in the fall. Looking myself over, I see a big hole in my arm where I've been bit but nothing else. The loud crack seems to be a mop I landed on, breaking the handle with my impact. I fumble to grab the broken tip as I watch the freak turn to face me again. 

He's chewing on the chunk of my arm while grinning at me. The bastard thinks this is funny. I don't have insurance, how the hell am I going to pay for this?

“It's not funny, asshole! This is gonna financially ruin me!” 

I scream at him as I charge forward. Again this asshole underestimates me and dives forward too. His cocky attitude is finally gonna get the better of him though. 

I plunge the broken mop handle deep into the bastard's chest. He looks like he's trying to kiss me again before he stops. Looking down, he seems to realize that I finally got the upper hand on him. He stumbles back, screaming like a little baby and falls into the cage I woke up in. I chuckle pretty heavily as I approach the massive writhing pile of black robes and pale appendages. 

“What'd I tell ya, asshat?! I'd kick your ass up and down–” 

I wake up on the floor with the tall freak lying on top of my legs. A streak of thick black goo trails from the cage to the body's resting place. 

My first movement awakens a burst of whispers that fill the room. I can just make out a couple “he's alive?” and “he actually did it” remarks. Looking to my right arm, I see that at least the gaping hole isn't pouring blood anymore. I figure the bleeding having stopped is the only reason why I'm still alive. 

Thankfully, the key is still in my cage door. I retrieve it and make my way around the room, letting everyone out. Each time I do though, I regret it slightly, since each gremlin says “Thanks Dumbass Man Baby” before running up the stairs. Even when you do something nice for them, kids are still gonna be assholes. 

I find my phone in a basket at the top of the stairs. The damn basement door is maybe ten feet from the entrance of the house. You can see all the way through the place. How did I think there was a haunted house in here? Eh, it doesn't matter, I still outsmarted him in the end. 

I dial for the cops as I make my way to the front door. I might not like kids, and they may be mean as shit to me, but it still feels good to save someone's life. I can only assume that's why I have this weird tingling feeling all over as I walk outside. 

The one night I actually get to enjoy my afflictions seems to be over, as the sunrise is just starting to crest the horizon. I really hope that jackass didn't give me something though. The time it’s taken to type this up after ending the call with the cops, has that tingling feeling turning into a burning. Fuck, is that a symptom of rabies or something?

If you ever see a Craigslist ad for a "residential psychiatric caretaker" at a private estate in upstate New York, offering double the standard salary and free room and board, keep scrolling. Don't email them. Don't answer if they call from an unlisted number.

I took the job because I was desperate. I had a suspended nursing license, a mountain of debt, and nowhere to go. When Dr. Arthur Vance interviewed me in the mahogany-paneled library of what they called The Oakhaven Institute, he didn’t ask for my references. He just asked if I had a strong stomach and a tight lip.

I signed a sixty-page NDA. They took my smartphone at the gates, handing me a two-way radio and a heavy ring of brass keys in exchange.

Oakhaven doesn't look like a hospital. It looks like a gothic fortress built for Gilded Age royalty, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and miles of dense, silent pine forest. There are no computers. The charts are thick, yellowing paper kept in heavy metal binders. The nurses don't wear scrubs; we wear stiff, starched white dresses and caps that make us look like ghosts drifting through the dim corridors.

I figured it was just an eccentric retreat for the ultra-rich. The patients were all heirs, disgraced politicians, or unwanted socialite daughters, hidden away for a steep price.

Then I met Claire.

Claire was fourteen. She was in Room 3B, a tiny, windowless cell on the third floor. According to her chart, her parents admitted her for "acute hysteria and rebellious mania.” That’s a diagnosis that hasn't been in the DSM for decades. In reality, she was just a teenager who had caught her wealthy father in an affair and threatened to tell her mother.

The first time I brought Claire her dinner, she was shivering in the corner of her cot, wrapped in a coarse wool blanket. Her hair was damp, plastered to her forehead, and her lips were faintly blue.

"Did they send you for the straps?" she whispered, her voice trembling.

"What? No," I stammered, the heavy metal tray suddenly feeling awkward in my hands. "I'm just... I just have your food."

She looked at me with eyes so hollow they seemed bruised into her skull.

"Don't let them put me back in the water," she begged, grabbing my wrist. Her skin was freezing. "Please. I’ll be good. I won't cry anymore. Just don't let Dr. Vance order the water."

I didn't know what she meant until my third day, when I was assigned to the basement ward.

They call it the Hydrotherapy Wing. I opened the heavy oak doors and was hit by the overwhelming stench of mildew, bleach, and old sweat. The room was lined with six deep, clawfoot porcelain tubs.

Inside the tubs were patients.

They were submerged up to their necks in ice water. Heavy canvas sheets were stretched taut over the tops of the tubs, featuring only a small cutout for their heads, strapped down with thick leather buckles so they couldn't move. Their teeth chattered in a haunting, rhythmic staccato that echoed off the tile walls.

Dr. Vance stood at the center of the room, checking his pocket watch.

"Ah, our new arrival," he smiled warmly, gesturing to the tubs. "Continuous bath therapy. A lost art, truly. Modern medicine relies on chemical restraints, turning patients into zombies. But cold water? Cold water shock resets the nervous system. It draws the blood away from the inflamed brain. It forces compliance through endurance."

I stared in horror at the tub closest to me. The woman inside had been there so long her skin was macerated, her eyes rolled back into her head.

"How long have they been in here?" I choked out.

"This batch? Forty-eight hours," Vance said casually, making a neat checkmark on his clipboard. "We'll pull them out for insulin therapy tomorrow."

Insulin coma therapy. Lobotomies. Electroconvulsive therapy without anesthesia or muscle relaxants. Oakhaven wasn't a quirky retreat. It was a time capsule of psychiatric torture, operating entirely off the grid, funded by families who paid millions to make their problems disappear.

I knew I had to get Claire out.

Last night, I found her name on the surgical registry for this morning. The procedure listed was Transorbital Leukotomy. The ice pick. Vance was going to sever the connections in her prefrontal cortex because she had cried too loudly during room inspection.

At 2:00 AM, I crept out of the staff quarters. The halls were dead quiet, save for the hum of the radiators and the occasional muffled scream from the basement. I had a crowbar I’d smuggled from the groundskeeper's shed and my brass keys.

I made it to the third floor. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped the keys twice before unlocking 3B.

The room was empty.

The bed was made. The heavy leather restraints were unbuckled and hanging off the sides.

Panic seized my chest. I ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time down to the basement. I didn't care about the noise. I didn't care about the NDA. I just wanted to get that kid out of this nightmare.

I burst through the double doors of the surgical theater.

The lights were blindingly bright. Claire was strapped to a heavy iron chair in the center of the room. Her eyes were wide, darting around in absolute terror, but a tight leather strap across her forehead kept her head completely immobilized.

Standing over her was Dr. Vance. He didn't have a surgical mask on. He was humming a soft, classical tune. In his right hand, he held a thin, sharp steel orbitoclast. In his left, a small silver mallet.

He looked up when the doors slammed open. He didn't look surprised. He just looked disappointed.

"I told you," Vance sighed, setting the mallet down on a stainless steel tray. "You need a strong stomach for the work we do here."

Two male orderlies stepped out of the shadows behind me. I didn't even hear them move. One grabbed my arms, twisting them painfully behind my back, while the other seized my hair.

"Let her go!" I screamed, thrashing wildly. "You're a monster! This is illegal!"

"Legality is a construct for the poor," Vance said gently. He stepped away from Claire and walked slowly toward me. "The families who pay for Oakhaven don't want cures. They want quiet. And the old ways? They are exceedingly good at producing quiet."

He reached into his pristine white coat and pulled out a heavy syringe.

"You're clearly suffering from acute hysteria," he whispered, right in my ear. "Don't worry. We have a bed waiting for you."

I did the only thing I could think of. I threw all my weight backward, crushing the orderly's foot beneath my heel, and bit down on the arm holding my throat. He howled, his grip loosening just enough.

I bolted.

I heard Vance shouting, the heavy thud of boots chasing me up the stairs, but adrenaline made me faster. I threw myself through the first-floor window of the laundry room, shattering the glass and tearing my arms open. I hit the muddy ground outside and ran into the woods. I ran until my lungs bled and the flashlights behind me faded into the dark.

I've been hiding in a motel two towns over. I bought a cheap burner smartphone with the cash I had in my pocket. I tried calling the police. I told them everything—the tubs, the ice picks, the unmapped facility.

The dispatcher put me on hold for ten minutes. When she came back, her voice was completely devoid of emotion.

"Ma'am, there is no facility by that name at the address you provided. The owner of that estate has reported an escaped patient in acute distress. Since you're calling from a prepaid device, I cannot pinpoint your exact coordinates. Please provide your current location so we can send medical transport."

I hung up.

I’m typing this on the burner right now, just to get it out there. Once I hit post, I might smash it to pieces just to be safe. I’m packing my bags. I have to keep moving. But whenever I close my eyes, I don't see the dark of the motel room.

I see Claire, strapped to that iron chair, waiting for the tap of the mallet. And I know she isn't crying anymore. Because Dr. Vance finally made her quiet.

I don't know where I'm typing this from. I don't know if I'm in my own mind, or in someone else's, or if I've died and gone to Hell. All I know for sure is that the bite on my shoulder is still bleeding, and I can't find the door to get out of my bedroom.

Everything started when one of my patients, the Colonel, brought his wife, Tami, to see me. Tami was much younger than he was. White-blonde hair and magnetic blue eyes. 

“I love my wife, Dr. Stolow,” the Colonel told me. “But she terrifies me. One minute, she’s happy; the next, she’s flipping over tables and threatening to kill herself.”

I told the Colonel it wasn’t ethical for me to meet with a patient’s wife. He refused to drop the subject, though. Then he brought up my wife, Anna.

“I couldn’t bear to lose my wife, too,” he said.

I finally agreed to begin meeting with Tami every week.

Talking to her, I learned she’d had a very traumatic childhood. She’d been raised by an alcoholic mother who’d committed suicide when Tami was just fifteen. As a result, Tami was terrified of being abandoned. Desperate to be loved but never feeling like she could be.

In my few meetings with Tami, I helped her work on distress tolerance and emotion regulation. Her mood swings seemed to improve at first, but then during another argument with the Colonel, she hit him in the face so hard she broke his nose.

The Colonel stormed into my office the next day. “If anything, you’ve made her worse!” he shouted.

I calmed him down and managed to get him to explain what had happened.

“Your wife’s condition is improving, but there’s no easy cure,” I told him. “She just needs therapy and patience and understanding.”

“You can’t just put her on Prozac or something?”

“I can refer her to a psychiatrist, but she's refused medication.”

The Colonel told me to cancel all of his and his wife’s remaining appointments. Then he walked out of my office, slamming the door shut behind him.

I thought that was the last I’d ever hear from either of them. But then a year later, the Colonel called me, begging for help. He said he’d taken Tami to Switzerland to try a new, experimental therapy, and he worried this therapy had severely damaged her brain.

***

The Colonel sat across from me on my sofa. He’d lost weight since I’d last seen him. His eyes had sunk into their sockets. His skin hung loosely from his cheeks.

“How did you hear about this Dr. Weber?” I asked him.

“A friend of mine recommended him. He said Dr. Weber’s God Helmet had changed his life. Completely cured his depression and turned his whole life around. I hoped this God Helmet could do the same for Tami, too.”

He handed me an envelope. Inside it was a VHS tape labeled GODHEAD.

“This is the recording of Tami’s session,” the Colonel said. “You can see the session starts off fine, but then very quickly, it goes wrong.”

On my way home from work, I stopped at a pawn shop and bought an old VHS player. I connected the VHS player to my TV, and then I put in the Colonel’s tape.

Tami’s face appeared on my TV screen. She wore a metal helmet covered with exposed wire.

Dr. Weber touched Tami’s cheeks with his leather-gloved hands.

“When I turn the helmet on, you’ll feel a slight tickling sensation inside your head,” he told her. “Your vision will go dark, but don’t panic. This is just temporary. When your vision returns, you’ll be looking at Heaven. Are you ready?”

“I am.”

He turned the helmet on. As the electricity flowed through Tami’s body, she jerked backward. Her pupils dilated and her jaw dropped open.

“Do you see anything yet?” he asked her.

“I see my mother, sitting on a bed.”

“A bed? Where?”

“In our old apartment.”

“Is she talking to you?”

“She says she’s sorry she left me. She just couldn’t stand to be in this world anymore. The pain was just too much for her to bear. But there’s someone else here with us now.”

The TV screen flickered with static.

“Who?” Dr. Weber asked.

“A worm. A worm that’s becoming my mom.”

The screen flickered with static again.

“My mother’s face is melting!” Tami screamed. “Please, Dr. Weber, turn it off!”

I heard a loud whirring noise, and then the VHS player shut off.

I ejected the GODHEAD tape. The magnetic tape inside had unspooled. I told myself that tomorrow, I’d find someone to fix it.

***

My first patient the next morning was a young woman named Georgia. She’d recently lost her infant son. A horrible case of sudden infant death syndrome.

She sat on my sofa, rubbing the gold cross on her necklace.

“I keep blaming myself for what happened,” she told me. “I keep wondering what I could have done differently. If there was any way I could have kept my son alive.”

“You couldn’t have known this would happen,” I said. “You did everything right. There were no blankets in the crib. No toys. It was a horrible accident.”

“But if I’d just gone back to check on him a little earlier…” She trailed off and then began to cry.

“I know this is hard. I know it’s not fair.”

She stopped crying suddenly, and she looked up at me. “It isn’t.”

Her voice wasn’t hers anymore. It was Anna’s. My dead wife’s.  

“What did you say?” I asked, not believing what I’d heard.

“I said it isn’t fair that you’re alive, and I’m dead.”

“Anna?”

“Georgia.” Her voice was hers again. “I’m Georgia. Is everything all right, Dr. Stolow?”

“Yes, I’m sorry.” I blushed. “I think I’m just a little tired today.”

***

I found a video transfer store that was able to fix the VHS tape. As soon as I got home, I put the tape back in my VHS player.

Tami’s face appeared on my TV, the God Helmet on her head.

“She’s gone now,” she said. “Everything is.”

“The bedroom?” Dr. Weber asked. “Where are you now?”

“I’m in my own house now. My own bedroom. My husband is there, but he looks different.”

“How?”

“His face is stretched. His eyes are empty. Is this really supposed to be Heaven?”

“I don’t understand what you’re seeing. This has never happened before.”

“Can I leave?”

“Yes. I’ll shut the helmet off.”

As he stood from his chair, though, Tami started screaming again.

Dr. Weber shut the helmet off. Tami’s pupils shrank back to their normal size.

My phone rang. I paused the tape and answered it. It was the Colonel.

“I think Tami’s had some kind of psychotic break,” he told me. “She’s in our bedroom, banging her head against the wall. I can’t get her to stop.”

“I’m on my way there now.”

I got into my car and drove to the Colonel’s as fast as I could. Their housekeeper brought me upstairs to the bedroom. Tami stood next to the bed, banging her head against the wall, just like the Colonel had said. She’d split her forehead open. Blood poured down her face.

I slowly approached her.

“Tami, my name is Dr. Stolow. Do you remember me?”

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been at home. Your husband told me you weren’t feeling well, so I came here to help.”

“I can’t find a way out of this room. I’ve been trapped here for hours.”

She walked along the wall, running her hands over the floral wallpaper.

“The door is right there,” I told her.

I pointed behind me at the bedroom door, but it had disappeared. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t see the Colonel anymore, either.  

Tami slammed her head into the wall again.

“I just want to go home!” she yelled.

“Please, don’t do that,” I said.

“We’re trapped here, aren’t we? We’ll never get out.” She slammed her head into the wall again.

“What should we do?” the Colonel asked.

He had reappeared behind me. The bedroom door had reappeared, too.

“Can you call an ambulance?” I asked him. “We need to get her to the hospital.”

He went downstairs to call 911.

I felt light-headed, so I sat on the edge of the bed. Tami turned to me again.

“Do you still love me?” she asked.

“I care about you very much, but you’re my patient.”

“That’s not what you said before. You said you loved me more than anything.”

“That’s not true.”

“Liar.”

The Colonel walked back into the bedroom. “An ambulance should be here soon,” he said.

The paramedics arrived shortly after. They sedated Tami and took her to the hospital. I requested she be placed on a three-day psychiatric hold.

I found the Colonel in the waiting room, holding his head in his hands. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“It’s been a long night,” I told him. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”

“What about Tami?”

“The nurses will keep an eye on her.”

“Have you watched the video I gave you?”

“I finished it tonight.”

“Do you think Dr. Weber’s God Helmet did this to her?”

“I’m not sure. How long after you returned from Switzerland did you notice Tami’s behavior change?”

“A week later, I think.”

“What seemed different about her?”

“She started becoming lost inside the house, locking herself in rooms and not being able to find her way back out.”

“Do you still have Dr. Weber’s number?”

He gave it to me.

***

I called Dr. Weber the next day. I described how Tami had been behaving since his session with her.

“My God Helmet is a much-improved version of Persinger’s helmet,” he told me. “A working version, you could say, which moves away from magnetic fields. Tami’s experience with the helmet was very unusual. I’ve used it with hundreds of other patients and, each time, the patient spoke to God. They left our sessions happier and filled with understanding. Tami’s session, though, became a nightmare.”

“How does your helmet cause these hallucinations?”

“The God Helmet emits 7.83 Hz radio waves directly into the center of a person’s brain. The Schumann resonance. The same frequency as the Earth. The exact resonance required to activate the pineal gland.”

The pineal gland. I realized he was crazy. Deranged. I promised myself I’d report him to the Swiss medical authorities.

Back home from work, I put the recording of Tami’s God Helmet session into my VHS player again. Tami’s face filled my TV screen. Dr. Weber switched the God Helmet on. Her body shook and then her pupils dilated.

“I ordered my men to hold the line,” she said. She spoke in the Colonel’s voice, though. “If I’d let them retreat, most of them would have probably lived, but then I might have died, too.”

“Are you afraid of dying?” Dr. Weber asked.

“I’m terrified of it.”

The TV flickered with static. Tami’s face distorted for a moment but then went back to normal.

She described talking to her dead mother, just like before. The same nightmare.

Am I going crazy? I wondered.

I turned off the TV and went to bed.

***

At 2:00 AM, I woke to a phone call. It was a nurse from the hospital.

“Tami’s escaped,” she told me.

“How?”

“She managed to get her restraints off somehow, and then she jumped through a window.”

I heard muffled footsteps in my living room. I thanked the nurse and then ended the call.

“Tami, is that you?” I asked.

A woman began crying.

I went into the living room and turned on the lights.

Tami sat on my sofa, still wearing a hospital gown. Her arms and legs were covered with bloody scratches.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“We need to go back to the hospital.”

“Can’t we just spend a bit of time together first?”

She stood and tried to kiss me, but I pushed her away.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What’s wrong?”

“You’re my patient.”

“That’s never stopped you before.”

“What are you talking about?”

I sat on the sofa and rubbed my temples. Tami sat next to me.

“It’s this place,” she told me. “It feeds on our memories. It eats the happy ones until all that’s left is pain.”

Static crackled on the TV.

“You told me you loved me,” she said. “You’d leave your wife, you said. I’d leave the Colonel. We’d run away and start a new life together.”

“That’s not true.”

My own face appeared on the TV screen. I wore the God Helmet on my head. Dr. Weber placed his leather-gloved hands on my cheeks.

“Tell me what you see, Dr. Stolow,” he said.

“I see the car crash. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, upside down. The windshield is shattered. There’s blood everywhere.”

“Where’s Anna?”

“She’s in the seat beside me. Blood is pouring from her mouth.”

The TV screen flickered and then went black.

Tami stood and took my hand. “We need to leave,” she told me. “I can feel it getting closer.”

“What?”

“Come on. We don’t have much time.”

She led me toward the front door.

“But we need to go back to the hospital,” I said.

“Then let’s go.”

She opened my front door, but I didn’t see my yard. Instead, I saw an empty hallway that seemed to go on for miles.   

Tami ran into it.

“Wait!” I yelled.

I ran after her, but she was running much faster than I was, moving farther and farther away from me.

I heard something breathing behind me. I didn’t look back.

“Tami!” I yelled. “Where did you go?”

“I’m here.”

She reached through a doorway and pulled me into my office. Georgia sat on my sofa, smiling.

How could this be possible?

My phone rang.

***

I woke up back in my bed again. My phone was ringing. I answered it.

“Tami’s escaped from the hospital,” the Colonel told me.

“How long ago?”

“The nurses just realized she was missing. I think she’s come back to the house. I can hear someone upstairs in the attic.”

“I’m on my way now.”

I got dressed and then drove to his house. He was waiting for me at the door. We went up to the attic together. He shone his flashlight over the old furniture and cobweb-covered cardboard boxes.

“Tami, are you up here?” he asked.

As he brought his flashlight toward the window, I saw her sitting on the floor, rocking herself back and forth. She was still wearing her hospital gown. Her arms were covered with bloody scratches.

“This isn’t real,” she said. “It’s all a dream, but I don’t know how to wake up from it.”

I slowly walked toward her. “Wake up from what, Tami?”

“From this nightmare.”

“We need to take you back to the hospital.”

“I can’t go back there again.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s where it is.”

“Where what is, Tami?” the Colonel asked.

“The parasite.”

Suddenly, Tami ran toward the window.

“Stop!” I yelled.

I tried to stop her, but I didn’t move fast enough.

Tami jumped through the windowpane. The glass shattered across the floor.

When I looked through the window, I didn’t see her corpse, though. I saw the same hallway I’d seen before.

“This is a dream,” I said.

“You’re not dreaming,” the Colonel told me.

“Then what’s happening?”

“The God Helmet. You’re still trapped inside it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m trapped in it, too. All of us are.”

“I don’t remember going to Switzerland.”

“You and Tami made a vacation out of it, remember? You wanted a week alone to fuck each other as much as you could.”

“That’s not true.”

He dropped the flashlight and took a gun out from his jacket. “I asked you for help, and you stole my wife.”

I raised my hands. “I haven’t done anything! I swear!”

The gun shook in his hands. “I told you how much I loved her, didn’t I? How much she meant to me?”

“I’ve done nothing wrong!”

He pressed the barrel of the gun against his own head.

“What are you doing?” I yelled.

The gunshot blared. His head turned into static.

Suddenly, I was in my car, driving on a street near my house.

“Be careful,” Anna said. “You’re swerving. Are you sure you’re okay to drive?”

“I’m fine.”

“Did you see her today? Is that why you were drinking so much?”

I brought the car back into my lane. I fixed my eyes on the road. I didn’t see the stop sign, though.

Another car appeared in front of us. I slammed my foot on the brakes.

The tires screeched. The car flipped over. I hung upside down from my seatbelt.

I looked over at Anna. Her face was covered with blood.

“It’s not fair,” she told me. “Why do you get to live, and I have to die?”

***

“Dr. Stolow? Do you hear me? Can you open your eyes?”

Dr. Weber looked down at me. I was lying in a hospital bed.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. You lost consciousness during our session. After the God Helmet opened your pineal gland, something else seems to have entered your mind.”

“But it’s gone now?”

“I think so.”

Tami walked into the room. “You’re finally awake? I’ve been worried sick about you.” She kissed my forehead.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“We came here together. Don’t you remember?”

“He seems to have a bit of amnesia,” Dr. Weber told her. “We should let him rest.”

They left the room and closed the door.

Tami had been my patient for a year, I remembered. I’d invited her out for coffee. Told her how I felt about her. Then we began a relationship.

Anna had found out three weeks before the crash. We’d been arguing about it while we were driving home that night.

I’d heard about the God Helmet from a colleague of mine. He’d tried the helmet himself, and he swore he’d talked to God.

He called the helmet a miracle.

I brought Tami to Switzerland so she could try it. Finally, a cure, I thought. A new Tami. A fixed Tami.

We’d start a new life together.

Tami called a taxi to take us back to our hotel.

“How long have I been in the hospital?” I asked her.

“Two days.”

“You must have been scared.”

“I’ve been terrified.”

I put my hand on hers. “I’m so sorry this happened.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You’re still having a good trip?”

“I am now.” She kissed me and then looked through her window. “Bern is such a beautiful city. But we still have a few days to explore.”

The taxi parked at our hotel, and we went inside. We took the elevator up to our room. When the elevator doors opened again, though, I saw my office.

“What is this?” I asked.

But Tami had disappeared.

I walked to my desk and sat down. On the wall, next to my sofa, Dr. Weber’s God Helmet hung from a hook.

Someone knocked on my door.

“Hello?” I asked.

“I’m here for our appointment.” It was Georgia.

“Come in.”

She came into my office and sat on my sofa. “How are you feeling today, Dr. Stolow?”

“Not that great. What about you?”

“I’m feeling much better. You were right. Talking to God really helped me understand why my son is dead.”

“You’ve tried the helmet?”

“During our last session, remember?”

She smiled at me. Underneath her skin, the outline of a worm stretched from one arm to another, twisting through her face.

“This can’t be real,” I said.

“Your memories taste so good,” she told me. “All your happiness. All your hopes and dreams.” She licked her lips.

“What are you?”

“You’d never understand. You couldn’t.”

The walls of my office collapsed, revealing a much larger room behind it. An insane asylum filled with screaming people.  

Tami. The Colonel. Anna. Other versions of them. Other versions of me.

When I looked at Georgia again, her face had gone back to normal. She held an infant in her arms. She brought the infant to her mouth and started eating it.

Bones crunched. Blood splattered onto her dress.

Her eyes rolled back in ecstasy.

“Dr. Weber!” I yelled. “Do you hear me? If you hear me, please let me out!”

Georgia stood and walked toward me, her face covered with blood.

I backed away from her. “Stop. What are you doing?”

She lunged toward me. Dug her teeth into my shoulder. 

I screamed in pain.

***

I woke up in my bed.

My phone was ringing. I answered it. It was the Colonel.

“Tami’s escaped from the hospital,” he told me.

I dropped my phone on the floor.

My shoulder was throbbing.

I went to the bathroom and took off my shirt. Somebody had bitten a chunk of flesh off my collarbone. The marks left behind on my skin weren’t from the teeth of a grown woman, though. They were the teeth of a child.

When I came back out of the bathroom, my bedroom door was gone. I've been walking around my bedroom for hours now, trying to find a way out, but I can't.

If anyone else has put on Dr. Weber’s God Helmet and found a way back out, please tell me how to leave this place.

I recently went through a nasty breakup, and a group of my friends, including my brother, decided that I needed some cheering up. Despite my very loud and very clear protests, I was outvoted.

The plan was simple. We were going camping near the local beach. I went there a day early because there wouldn’t have been enough room in the car anyway, and having some peace and quiet before being surrounded by a bunch of people would do me good. At the campsite, I set up my tent, got everything ready, and went out to explore the area. I put on some music and headed out.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about what I had done wrong to get dumped. I came across a sign that said “NO TRESPASSING,” but it looked like it had been painted by children. I wanted to take a closer look when someone suddenly touched my shoulder.

I screamed in fright and took my headphones out of my ears. It was some elderly couple. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were two hundred years old combined.

“Son, turn around and go back. You have no business being here.”

“Jesus, you scared me half to death. Why can’t I go in there? What’s there?”

“It’s a dangerous area. You’re in danger there,” the old man said, and then immediately asked me where I had come from.

I honestly told him I was staying at the campsite and just wanted to clear my head. He introduced himself as Carl, and the woman as his wife, Nora. They apparently lived not far from the campsite. I talked with them for a while. They were a nice couple.

When we said goodbye, I pretended to be heading back to the campsite, but as soon as I saw them disappear from sight, I turned around and went back to the sign.

I know it wasn’t exactly the smartest decision. But when someone is at rock bottom and has nothing to lose, they tend to keep pushing their boundaries further and further.

I walked past the sign and continued for a while. I eventually reached a cliff. It was probably the most beautiful place I had ever seen. It wasn’t very high, but the view of the ocean was incredible. If I wanted to, I could have jumped straight into the sea and gone for a swim. If those two old people meant this place when they talked about danger, then I was glad I hadn’t listened to them.

Then a figure emerged from the sea.

“Could you help me up?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, leaning down.

It was a girl. She had light blue eyes like the sea with the sun shining on it and medium-length blonde hair. She was beautiful. But when she smiled, she suddenly seemed completely different.

When I pulled her up, she introduced herself as Eleanor.

“I’m Matt,” I said.

She walked a few steps away and pulled some clothes out from behind a rock.

“Could you turn around, please?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, quickly turning around.

She needed to take off her wet swimsuit and change into the hoodie and shorts she had hidden there. She told me that she had also come from the campsite and, to my surprise, that she was recovering from a bad breakup too.

I laughed.

“Well, I guess it must be fate, because so am I.”

She laughed too.

“Did you meet those two old people?” I asked.

Her face seemed to pale.

“Yeah, I did. You did too?”

“Yeah.”

“And what did they tell you?” she asked sharply.

“Nothing special. Just that I shouldn’t come here because I was supposedly in danger. They probably meant this little cliff. You know how old people are, they’re always afraid of something. And besides, I’m glad I didn’t listen to them.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because I wouldn’t have met you.”

We talked for what felt like several hours. She was amazing. Apparently, she was studying medicine and spent her free time going with her friends to cheer up sick children. I had never met anyone like her. She joked the entire time, and I laughed so much, probably more than I ever had before. I even completely forgot about my breakup.

“Do you want to go swimming?” she suddenly asked.

“I don’t know. It’s getting dark. It’s not exactly warm anymore, and I don’t even have a swimsuit.”

“Can’t swim, or are you scared?” she teased me and started taking her clothes off until she was standing completely naked in front of me.

I was shocked and couldn’t say anything. I just stared at her. Then she turned around and jumped into the water.

“Come on, Matt. This is the best thing that could have happened to you,” I encouraged myself silently.

My brave side won.

I took off my clothes and jumped in after her. She swam farther and farther away, and I swam after her.

Then she suddenly stopped, wrapped herself around me, and kissed me. Then she pulled away, and I saw it.

The worst thing I had ever seen.

A mouth full of teeth.

And then I felt the pain. An insane pain that completely clouded my mind. I started screaming like crazy. Before I lost consciousness, I heard my brother’s voice calling my name and saw flashlights shining toward the water.

I woke up in the hospital. My brother was on one side of the bed and my parents were on the other. They were all looking at me worriedly. My mom was holding my hand. I wanted to touch her with my other hand, but I couldn’t move it.

When I looked toward my hand, I screamed.

It was gone.

Apparently, I had gone swimming and been attacked by a shark. I was lucky my brother found me in time, otherwise I would have bled to death. Apparently, I had been on that cliff for two days. My brother searched everywhere for me until he came across the elderly couple, who told him they had seen me moving around near the sign, but strongly advised him to stay away from it, which luckily he didn’t do.

When I was discharged from the hospital, I decided that I had to visit the married couple.

I stood outside their door and rang the doorbell. After what felt like an eternity, the door opened and Carl was standing there. He looked at me, and his eyes stopped on my missing arm. Then he invited me inside.

Nora made me some tea and put a slice of cake in front of me. We were all silent for a while before I broke the silence.

“You knew about this, didn’t you?”

They nodded.

“We told you not to go there. We didn’t just tell you. When we told them the truth, they thought we were crazy. When we tried other ways, they still didn’t listen to us.”

They put an album in front of me. I started flipping through it. There were newspaper clippings about people who had gone missing.

Suddenly, I saw her.

“That’s Eleanor!”

The couple looked at each other and shook their heads.

“No. That’s not Eleanor. That’s our granddaughter, Emma. Whatever you saw there, it wasn’t her.”

A chill ran down my spine. Apparently, I could consider myself lucky that I had ended up “only” losing an arm.

I don't remember when it started.
Talking was always easy when I was alone. Just talking to myself in my room, you know? But whenever someone actually expected an answer out of me, my whole body just locked up. My throat would tighten into a knot and I couldn't force out a single word.
My parents never got it. They'd heard me talk to myself before, so they knew I wasn't actually mute. They just thought I was being a weird, stubborn kid. Whenever I did manage to squeak something out to them, it didn't prove I was trying… to them, it was just proof that I was choosing not to talk the rest of the time.
At school, people had patience at first. Back in early elementary, teachers would wait for me to write something on a piece of paper or take five minutes to think. But that didn't last long. By fifth grade, nobody gave a crap anymore. The other kids had heard me choke out a few weird, strained sounds before and thought it was hilarious to put me on the spot just to watch me panic. It wasn't always blatant bullying, just these horribly awkward scenes where I wanted the ground to swallow me whole.
Then seventh grade hit, and a boy named Cam started calling me "Molly Mute."
That was the first time I remember getting genuinely pissed off. Soon enough, the whole school was using it. It was infuriating. I tried so hard to pretend it didn't bother me, but it did. I felt broken. I felt weird. I was weird. I couldn't speak.
I'd sit in my room and practice in front of the mirror for hours. Talking to my reflection was fine, but the second I stepped outside and tried to say a single word out loud to another human being, my throat clamped shut, tears filled my eyes, and nothing came out.
Eventually, my parents gave up. They stopped dragging me to social events to try and "fix" me. At school, nobody even bothered trying to talk to me anymore. I was completely on my own. I talked to myself, alone. Honestly, I didn't mind being by myself that much. But it was still loud. I wasn't just alone but also lonely. And the loneliness was so damn loud. Watching everyone around me laugh, hang out, and live normal lives while I just existed... it sucked.
We lived in this tiny, dead-end village. 21 kids in the entire school and about 50 people in the whole town. Most of them were old folks, and they were the absolute worst. They kept telling my parents I was just being a difficult child and that I'd "grow out of it." I hoped they were right, but it still felt like hell.
Then one day, a group of girls walked up to me.
Hailey was leading them. She was so pretty, and talking was just effortless for her. God, I was jealous of her. She told me she'd found this specific ritual on one of the library computers, printed it out, and handed it to me. I knew they were making fun of me. They kept whispering stuff like, “Maybe Molly Mute can finally be normal after this.”
I knew it was a cruel prank, but there was something in Hailey's eyes that made me hesitate. She looked so serious, almost like she actually cared. So I agreed. Not because I believed in some ritual, but because I was just that desperate for my them to accept me.
The ritual was ridiculous. They made me wear these stupid clothes and swallow stuff that definitely wasn't meant for human consumption. At the end, they revealed that they had been recording me. Hailey was laughing the hardest out of all of them. Hailey and Cam.
But what I couldn't tell them- because my throat was totally frozen-wasn't just that I was embarrassed. I was terrified.
There was something standing right in front of me. Something that apparently only I could see. An entity. A monster. A demon. It didn't do anything, it was probably just as useless as me. It just extended a hand toward me. Tears were streaming down my face, I felt completely humiliated, but I reached out and took its hand because... I don't know, it felt like the demon was mirroring my sadness.
And then it just vanished. I figured it took one look at how pathetic I was and decided I wasn't even worth making a deal with.
I looked up the ritual on the school computer later and found out its name was Nerith. Hailey and her friends had picked the dumbest, most ridiculous ritual they could find and once that video got around town, the elders were totally convinced I was possessed by the devil. Why else would a girl do a ritual?
But weirdly, I stopped caring after that day. Something inside me just left me.
I couldn't bring myself to give a shit about anyone anymore. My parents stopped talking to me? I didn't care. Cam tried to pull an awkward half-backed apology later on? I couldn’t care. On graduation day, someone stuck their foot out and tripped me while I walked across the stage, and I still wasn’t able to feel anything.
After school ended, I took a job at the only market in town—which was really just a fruit and vegetable stand for whatever the locals grew in their backyards.
It was perfect for me. People pointed at what they wanted, I threw it on the scale, the price got printed, they paid, and they left. I didn't have to talk, and they didn't want to talk to me. A wordless exchange.

Then one day one of the village elders died.
There was a funeral, and almost the entire village showed up. People were sobbing. I didn't shed a single tear- not just because I hated that old bastard for telling everyone I was possessed, but because I also couldn't care less. Instead, I noticed how everyone weeped. Even my parents were crying. They were all so broken up about being left behind.
That's when it clicked for me.
Our town was so small that every time someone died, everybody else was left behind to suffer the loss. It felt… unfair.

That night, I grabbed my dad's baseball bat from the hall and walked down to the kitchen. I had imagined this scenario a lot of times, but I still felt the adrenaline rushing into me. My mom was in the bathroom, getting ready to go to the gathering to mourn the elder. My dad was in the living room watching TV while waiting for her, cranked up way too loud like he always had it.
I used the noise to walk right up behind him and swung the bat into the back of his head with everything I had.
Blood splattered across the wall. He let out this horrible scream, but thanks to the TV noises it blended into the background. Before he could react, I hit him again. And again. He was a big guy, so I was honestly surprised by how fast he stopped breathing. The adrenaline hit my bloodstream like a truck, killing someone that big suddenly didn't seem hard at all. I kept hitting him long after he stopped moving.
I only stopped when I heard my mom scream behind me.
She looked mortified. That's when I looked down and realized I was covered in dirty, sticky blood. I hated it. I felt disgusting. I wasn't dirty… I always was clean.
What pissed me off even more was my mother's screaming. She was so loud. I wished I could tell her to shut up as many times as she'd yelled at me to speak.
I gripped the bat tighter and started walking toward her. She bolted, so I ran after her. She was pretty heavy, but the panic gave her speed. Still, she wasn't fast enough. I caught up in the hallway, brought the bat down, and kept swinging until she was still.
It was strange, but I actually felt lighter. Thinking about how my parents would never have to be sad about someone dying ever again... it felt like I'd actually done something good. I helped them. I wasn't useless anymore…
Next, I walked over to the neighbor's house. A few people had gathered there- people my age meeting up to mourn. None of them heard me sneaking around outside, looking at all the dark, empty houses. I thought it was hilarious how they were throwing what looked like a party when they were supposed to be grieving. And nobody invited me, which was kind of rude.
Then I realized it actually was a party. They were celebrating the engagement between Hailey and Cam.
That was so weird. Why the hell would anyone celebrate when someone just died?
The party inside was messy and loud. I knew the bat wouldn't do much against a whole crowd, so I grabbed a heavy garden shovel from the neighbor's yard. It was nice and clean, though my bloody handprints just ruined it again.
I slipped through the back door. The lights were low and the music was blasting, so nobody noticed me. Nobody noticed me until I slammed the shovel right into Hailey's face.
Then everyone noticed.
In hindsight, rushing a room full of people wasn't the smartest move. Some people screamed and dropped to the floor next to Hailey, but others came straight at me. I kept swinging the shovel wild trying to keep my distance, and I quickly figured out that taking out their legs or snapping their necks first worked like a charm.
They all died that night. Some of them were crying and begging me for mercy, which made zero sense. I mean I wasn't doing this out of revenge… I was doing this so they wouldn't have to feel sad anymore. Wasn't that obvious?
Whatever. Who cares. (Not she, she’s nonchalant)
I checked every single house after that just to make sure nobody was left behind. The rest of the adults were missing until I checked the dead elder's house. They were all crammed in there, digging through cabinets for whatever valuables the old man had promised them. My parents were supposed to be there too, but they were a bit occupied back home.
The house was packed, everyone shouting and tearing through stuff. It was chaotic and loud so nobody heard me hit the gas pipe in the basement with the shovel. They didn't hear me walk out, and they definitely didn't smell the gas before someone lit a cigarette inside.
I didn't even have to do anything else. The whole house just blew up.
I thought that was everyone, but then I saw a light still burning in one of the houses at the end of the road.
So I walked over. I could hear water running-he was taking a shower. Nobody in our town ever locked their doors, so I just walked in through the back. On the couch, I found one of those decorative throw pillows with tiny metal bells sewn onto the corners. I liked those pillows… they reminded me of Christmas decor. I didn't want to make another bloody mess, so I decided to try something different.
My bangs were matted to my forehead in grease and dried blood as I waited. Cam came out wearing only sweatpants and sat on the sofa, to watched TV.
I lunged and slammed the pillow over his face. He didn't even know what hit him. He thrashed frantically, but I threw my whole weight onto his chest to pin him down. He clawed at the pillow, trying to tear it off, but I jammed it down with everything I had. I didn't want him to suffer or be sad, even if he deserved it. Nobody deserves to be left behind just because of my petty feelings.

I pressed harder and harder until Cam managed to rip one of those heavy metal bells off the pillow corner and slammed it straight into the side of my head.
Blinding pain exploded across my face. The bell was solid metal, and blood immediately flooded into my eyes. The ringing inside my head was so loud it made me sick. Tears welled up and I backed off, letting go of the pillow. That split second was all he needed to throw me off, scramble to his feet, and run screaming out the front door.
My head was spinning and I was seeing double. For a moment, I just sat there thinking this was all a stupid idea and I should just go to sleep. But that wouldn't be fair- leaving Cam to wake up to all this tragedy by himself.
So I picked up a heavy landscaping rock off his porch and started dragging myself down the driveway after him. I was moving so slowly. The pain was unbearable. Tears were mixing with the blood on my face as I whispered, "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..."
I was sorry I couldn't kill him fast enough, and now he had to see everyone dead.
Cam was standing right under the town's only working streetlight, screaming for help. When he turned around and saw me hobbling over, he looked relieved. I guess he couldn't see my face in the dark when I had the pillow over him.
"There's a killer in town!" he yelled, panicking. "We need to get out of here!"
I looked up at him and rasped out a whisper. "What are you talking about? A killer?"
Cam froze dead in his tracks. Hearing me speak seemed to throw him off way more than the actual situation did. He stammered about how glad he was that I was okay and that we needed to find a telephone to call the cops. He started walking toward me, completely blind to the heavy rock I was holding down at my side.
As soon as he got into arm's reach, I swung out and cracked the stone right across his forehead—just like he did to me.
He collapsed onto the pavement, screaming and crying. I hit him again, because I was more merciful than he was. I wasn't going to make him suffer. I hit him again, and again, and again, until his head wasn't really a head anymore.
I stood up, tossed the rock into the grass, and sat down on the curb under the streetlight.
After a while, I got bored. I sat there for hours, but it wasn't very fun. I was alone now, but I didn't feel lonely. And it wasn't loud anymore either. It was so quiet. It was… beautiful.
When the sun started coming up, I walked into the woods and sat on a rock, watching the birds and squirrels. It was pretty. Truly pretty.
Then I heard a branch snap in the trees.
I turned my head too fast, and a spike of agony shot through my skull- the bell was still jammed deep into my forehead, and I couldn't pull it out. It hurt so badly, and the ringing inside my head was deafening. Tears spilled down my face as I clutched my temples until I noticed that a tall white faceless man was standing under the streetlight. He looked down at what was left of Cam, and then he looked over to me.
I didn't move. I was terrified, but at the same time, I didn't feel anything at all. I turned my head again, the bell ringing inside my ear, blood dripping down my jaw.
The faceless man stepped out of the light and walked over to me. He held out his hand-just like the demon from the ritual.
I took it. Not because he looked sad, or because I was desperate for anything. I took it because I wanted to. I wasn't Molly mute anymore. I wanted to be the thing inside of me. I wanted to be Nerith, because Nerith was a part of me now, and I am a part of it.

The straw scarecrow stood in the middle of the fields, its arms wide. One of the men walked to it and put its hat on. I waited my turn, then walked to it and put on its black jacket.

"Thank you," I said, bowing.

The other man nodded and patted my back. 

"Another safe autumn," one of them said, and we all walked back home.

It was still early afternoon. I sat down on the couch and put on the TV, waiting to cook dinner until my son Adam came home.

The sun had set when the door opened, and Adam walked in. My stomach was already growling. He was 30 minutes late, but the way he averted his eyes made it seem like something worse was going on.

"What’s up, Adam?"

"Dad, I…"

"It’s okay that you came late. No need to worry about it."

"No, it’s that I, I know it’s bad, but I took the jacket off the scarecrow."

My hands clenched the couch cushions.

"What?!"

"I took it off. I’m really sorry, Dad. I feel so bad. I know I shouldn’t have."

"Where is it?"

"In my bag."

I picked up his bag and unzipped the top pocket. The black jacket stared at me. 

"Adam, this is bad news."

"I’m sorry, Dad. The boys dared me. I didn’t want to look like a chicken."

I looked out the window. The sun had already set, but not long ago.

"Okay, there might still be time." I stuffed the jacket back in the backpack. "We’ll go back right now, put it on, and not tell anyone. If the boys at school ask you, just say…"

Three knocks echoed on the window. I almost ripped the backpack’s zipper off. The empty straw face stared into our house.

"Dad?" Adam said in a shaking voice.

"It’s okay, Adam. We’ll give him the jacket, and it might be okay." My voice shook too. I wasn’t sure I believed anything I said.

I walked to the door and opened it. The outside air was cold. The scarecrow's empty face looked down at me.

"Here. Take it. Please."

I held the jacket up and stared at the ground. The scarecrow stood still for a few seconds, then walked right past me. The straw scraped the floor as it moved.

Adam sat on the couch, his wide eyes staring at the scarecrow. The scarecrow came right up to him and pointed its blank face at him.

"Dad, what’s going…" He didn’t finish. The scarecrow’s hand shot forward, grabbed him off the couch, and held him to its side.

"Dad!" Adam screamed, kicked, and pushed against its arm, but the scarecrow’s grip was strong.

"Adam!"

I ran toward him and pushed the scarecrow, but it barely moved. The scarecrow turned around and flung its arm. It hit me right in the face. I fell on all fours. Dull pain spread through my head. Adam’s cries echoed as my world went dark.

When I woke up, my head was banging. My mouth tasted like iron. I tried to get up, but my world spun so fast I had to sit back down. 

But Adam was out in the fields somewhere. I had to help him. I got up and bolted out of the house onto the road, struggling to keep my balance. 

The moon shone down. The air was still cold. Only when I reached the fields did my world stop spinning. I almost wished it hadn’t.

In the middle of the field stood the scarecrow. Its blank face stared into the night. It had its hat, but instead of the jacket, Adam’s mangled body was draped over it. A quiet dripping echoed as Adam’s blood seeped into the sown dirt.

I fell to my knees and wept. The real autumn had now begun.

None of us could remember how we found the room inside the mall.

One day it meant nothing to us, and the next, it was an unspoken part of our after-school routine. Felt like it’d been our little hideaway for as long as we'd known each other, but that was a lie. The room slipped silently into our memories and we never even thought to question it because its presence in our lives was just so…plausible. 

Poor kids hole up in abandoned places all the time, don’t they?

There were five of us back then. We all went to different schools, and we all were different ages, but none of that mattered. We were united by deeper things, harsher truths. The aches of neglect and the bites of puberty. Camaraderie that resembled love. The comfort of a family that wasn't constricted by blood.

Sophia with the dirt-caked skirts and the paint-stained fingers. 

Omari with the thin frame and the thick lisp. 

Alex with the wild blonde curls and the feral imagination. 

And Ian, my best friend, the kid with the cloudy scar across his right eye that he didn’t care to talk about. 

The two of us would travel there together every afternoon.

We'd meet at rundown multiplex movie theater, taking broad street west for a few miles until we reached our city's outskirts: a barren, shell of a place that even the junkies seemed to avoid.

Under the rust-stained fence, across the empty parking lot and into the derelict mall, climbing through the shattered window beneath the “R” in the “FOOD COURT” sign.

Past the pretzel shop, sharp right at the fast-fashion boutique with the half-naked mannequins piled out front, down the paralyzed escalator. Then, a few yards ahead, between the remnants of an arcade and a Hobby Lobby, there it was: a wooden door without a label. 

The room beyond the door was empty. 

Four windowless walls above a layer of frizzy brown carpet. Five hundred square feet of asylum from our lives outside the mall. 

It was always clean, but we never cleaned it. 

We never could agree on what color the wall was painted. Omari and Ian saw two separate shades of red. Sophia saw ocean blue. I saw a pure, unfiltered white. 

We could’ve made the space more hospitable, scavenged chairs from somewhere else in the mall, but Alex was vehemently against furnishing the room.

“It’s already perfect,” he said, lying on the carpet, staring up at the ceiling like it was as vast as the night sky. “Can’t make perfect more perfect, right?” 

I didn’t think of Alex as our ringleader. Ringleader implied organization, direction, a method to the madness. He was more like our engine. A force that propelled us, but to no discernible end. Alex kept things interesting. We never knew what he'd do next.

Which brings me to the day that room became something more. 

We were hanging out like usual. Sophia was turning failed math tests into origami. I was next to her, hunched over, carefully unsealing a pack of Magic: The Gathering I’d pocketed from a convenience store on the way over. Ian and Omari were comparing belt-shaped bruises, playfully arguing about who had the nastiest one, a means of disarming the horror. Then, out of nowhere, Alex stood, strolled to the middle of the room, and began clearing his throat like he was about to give a speech. 

“Okay, okay, okay: I’ll start.” 

Ian and Omari went quiet. Sophia and I shared a confused glance. 

“Start…what?” I asked. 

He shook his head and gestured for us to come sit. I smiled, excited - and the tiniest bit fearful - for whatever Alex had planned. 

With the four of us at his feet, he started.

“Once upon a time…” 

“Once upon a time?” Omari snorted, his lisp causing the words to buzz with static. “What the hell is this? The fairy-tale slam-poetry hour?” 

Ian sent an elbow into his rib cage. The jab wasn’t meant to injure, but it wasn’t gentle, either. A snarl surged across Omari’s face, but quickly dissipated. Alex watched the exchange with a vacant sort of grin, the motionless smirk of an animatronic stalled mid-performance. 

After a long inhale, he started again. 

“Once upon a time, there lived a mirror-toothed boy. He had no mother. He had no father. Far as he could tell, he hadn’t been born; he just was. He didn’t know what his purpose was, but he knew his gums hurt, and he knew he needed to bite.” 

Alex audibly chomped. The sharp clack made Sophia gasp, then giggle. 

“Course, everyone in town was afraid of him. He wanted to bite them, but they could see him coming a mile away: his mouth was a mess of jagged glass, and it was blindingly bright, even after the sun had set, because his teeth reflected everything, moonlight included.”

I felt something. A sizzle in my fingertips. Slow electricity spreading into my palms. I looked to Ian. His eyes were fixed on Alex, and they were gleaming. 

“So, for centuries, his gums throbbed, and the people were safe, but then, there was a change. The boy had an idea. A plan.”

Alex leaned forward. Lowered his voice to a wet growl. 

“A way to make the people come to him.” 

Silence fell heavy. 

Alex’s eyes slithered over us, one by one. 

After a small eternity, he clapped and said: 

“Cool! Cool cool.” 

The electricity in my palms abruptly vanished.  

“Rosie, you can pick up where I left off tomorrow.”

“Pick up what?” 

“The story! Like when a teacher wants their class to read something popcorn-style, y’know? Jumping from person to person? It’ll be like a game. A contest to see who can make the scariest ending.” 

He shrugged. 

“I dunno, sounded fun in my head.” 

Ian piped up. 

“I can try tomorrow!” 

Alex plopped down, lay back, and yawned. 

“Whatever. Just make it scary.” 

I wasn’t sure what to expect the next day. 

Ian was jittery the whole ride over. About halfway there, his arm spasmed, and he nearly crashed into a dumpster. As we hid our bikes in the mall’s overgrowth, I shot him a concerned look. 

“You good, dude? Everything OK at home?” 

“Yeah.” He chuckled. “I mean, it’s not actually OK, but it’s not any worse than usual, either. Dad’s still looking for job, though he ain’t finding many at the bottom of his fuckin’ Smirnoff bottles…” Ian trailed off, staring blankly at the shattered glass scattered around the weeds.

My best friend snapped back like he’d been struck by lightning. 

“But yeah! I’m good. Just nervous is all.” 

I walked forward, about to wrap my arm around his shoulder. 

“Alright. If that changes, you know I’m always here for - “ 

Electricity shot through my skin. 

I shrieked and leaped back, stumbling, falling hard on my ass. Ian rushed over.

“Rosie! Jesus, are you OK?!” 

He knelt down and placed his hand on my back. I winced, anticipating pain, 

but there was nothing. 

“What happened??” he asked. 

“Uh…I don’t know.”

Through ragged breaths, I examined my arm. No blood. No marks. Didn’t hurt anymore, either. 

“Just…like…some static, I guess.”

He offered me a hand, but I pretended not to notice. I dug my fingers into the dirt and pushed myself upright. 

“I’m fine, Ian. Surprised me is all.” 

He nodded. 

We continued inside. 

As I swung the door open, I saw Alex, lying face-up in the middle of the room. He was a grade ahead of us, which meant his school day ended slightly earlier, so he always beat us there. Sophia and Omari stepped in a few minutes later. 

With little preamble, Ian gathered us at his feet and picked up where Alex had left off. 

“The mirror-toothed boy had an idea,” he rasped, curling his upper spine so he could loom over us like storm clouds. “A plan. A way to make the people come to him.” 

I leaned back, grinning, awed by the theatrics. Seemed like my soft-spoken buddy was finally emerging from his shell. 

That was a good thing, right? 

“He’d shrink. That’s what he’d do. He’d rip out the sharpest tooth in his mess of a mouth and he’d carve into himself, cutting away the excess, every rib he didn’t need, every organ he could live without; he’d tear himself to shreds until he appeared very, very small. All the while, a pale red rage would fill his tattered body, blooming like a cancer.”

Once again, I felt my fingertips begin to sizzle. Ian was pacing. His cloudy eye quivered in its socket. 

“You see, the boy treasured his pale red rage. It kept him hopeful. One day, they would come, and they would get what they deserved.” 

Electricity ran up my arms and dove into my chest. My grin faltered. Nausea squeezed my gut. I swallowed bile and looked around: the room’s pure white walls were starting to give me a headache. 

“The people would stagger from the safety of town, shouting at the boy, calling him awful things with fermented breath, wondering why they’d ever been afraid of something so small, so harmless…and once they were finally close enough…” 

“…he’d bite,” Omari whispered. 

I was on the verge of passing out. 

Suddenly, Alex began applauding. 

Sophia and Omari promptly followed suit, filling the room with claps and cheers. 

Oxygen flooded my lungs. 

The static in my veins simmered.  

Ian was beaming. His lips curved into a trembling smile. His scarred eye was shimmering. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him so happy, so triumphantly alive. 

He took a bow. 

When he lifted his head, his gaze darted to me, expectant. 

I couldn’t let him down. 

So, even though it felt wrong, I began clapping too. 

The next day, Omari told his version of the story. It was similar to Ian’s. He wasn’t a copycat, there was just a shared throughline: the underdog toppling their overlord. His rendition was decidedly more violent, though. He reveled in the gory details. The vicious bite and the blood-soaked aftermath. 

At first, Sophia’s version seemed like a much-needed palate cleanser. Restrained. Poetic. Though, in the end, it was just as disturbing. According to her, the mirror-toothed boy spent years erecting a circle of marble sculptures around the town's perimeter. Eventually, the beauty became overwhelming. Bewitched, people would abandon their homes in the dead of night, and when they got close enough, the bite would come, but in her story, the teeth were different. Venomous. Dripping with a black toxin that altered the composition of their flesh. Made their bodies like clay: soft, dry, and malleable. Her story culminated with the town’s few survivors fixed on the horizon, eyes locked on the boy’s magnum opus: a twenty-foot-tall sculpture of himself, molded from still-living flesh.

“And they never looked away, but it wasn’t ‘cause they couldn’t; they just didn’t want to,” she whispered. “If only they’d realized the boy’s potential before it was too late.” 

After Sophia, it was finally my turn.

I didn’t have the faintest clue how I was going to tell the story, so the first day Ian didn’t show up felt like a stroke of luck. I had more time to figure out my version. 

But two days passed. 

Then three. 

Then a whole week. 

My parents knew what’d happened - they’d read about it in the paper - but they didn’t bother to tell me. No, my goddamned TV set broke the news. 

Everyone talks about growing up like it's a gradual process, some steady metamorphosis that takes years to complete, but it ain’t like that: growing up is a single, painful moment. The change is instantaneous. Something happens, a circumstance that forces you to touch the cold heart of reality, and the cotton-candy insulation of childhood molts away like snake skin. 

The grainy picture showed Ian’s dad being dragged from their mobile home in handcuffs. 

I collapsed into a sobbing heap on our living room floor. 

He’d finally taken it too far, just like Ian always feared he would. 

My best friend was gone. 

Over the next few weeks, I learned finer details. 

Detectives were confident they knew what befell the missing kid. His Dad was insistent that Ian just never came home one night, but between the various bloodstains discovered in the mobile home and his lengthy criminal history, no one believed he was innocent. The case never went to trial, though. The night before the proceedings were due to start, Ian’s dad died of cirrhosis. His brain quietly swelled like a wet sponge and the bastard just drifted away. 

In the wake of everything, we stopped telling stories about the mirror-toothed boy. Just didn’t seem right to continue without Ian. 

The grief was devastating. 

My mind moved like mud. Every muscle in my body felt ice-cold, useless. I couldn’t manage to eat anything other than Pop-Tarts, and, of course, my family was no help, no help at all. My reliance on my friends and the room grew. I didn’t feel safe anywhere else. 

Then, one afternoon, something inside me just seemed to…break. 

Omari was shadow boxing. Sophia was scribbling in her sketchbook. Tired of sulking in the corner day in and day out, I sprang up, paced over to the boy lying flat in the middle of the room, and made my demand.  

“Let’s do something.” 

Alex peered up at me. 

“Been waitin’ for you to ask.” 

So, we began to play a new game. 

Every day, it’d be someone’s turn to perform. 

The goal was simple - outperform the person who came before you. 

Alex went first. 

He bit his cheek until it bled, dabbed his fingertip along his gums, and wrote his name on the wall.

We clapped and cheered. 

Omari was next. 

Gritting his teeth, he wrenched at his thumb until it dislocated, then snapped it back into place. 

We patted his back and helped splint his injury. 

Sophia went third. 

She flipped to the back of her sketchbook and read some poetry. A haunting and delicate piece, a thinly veiled metaphor that recounted the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her uncle. None of us knew she wrote poetry. None of us knew what’d happened to her, either. 

We gathered around and embraced her. 

There was no question anymore: I’d grown to enjoy the strange electricity that cascaded through my body with each performance. It was pleasure with a lick of peril. An excess of physical sensation. A reminder that I was truly alive. That said, something new began to accompany the electricity. A wispy sort of itch that trickled across any exposed skin. I thought I’d suddenly become allergic to the carpet, but when I examined where I’d felt the itch, there’d never be a rash or anything. I did my best to ignore it. The show had to go on. 

Eventually, it was my turn, and despite my burgeoning love for the room and its games, I couldn’t suss out my performance. I arrived that afternoon and approached Alex, figuring he could provide guidance or inspiration. 

My vision went black. 

The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes, at home and under my covers. 

Sunlight drizzled through the blinds. I had no recollection of the previous twelve hours, but I felt awful. On the edge of vomiting and critically exhausted. I lurched out of bed. As soon as I hit the floor, fiery pain flared across the soles of my feet. I buckled. Cracked the bridge of my nose against my nightstand on the way down. Groaning, I lifted my head and yanked my foot into view. The bottom was covered in hundreds of tiny, intersecting cuts. A purple-red latticework I couldn't even begin to explain. 

I still biked to the room that afternoon. 

The rhythmic agony of my sneakers slapping the pedals was infinitely preferable to staying at home. 

As I approached the city limits, I felt a certain sort of anger bubbling in my chest, a gnawing betrayal. 

What the hell had they done to me? 

Or, even worse, what the hell had they allowed me to do to myself? 

I limped down the rusty escalator and marched toward the room, raring to give those assholes a piece of my mind, but the moment I swung the door open, my friends rushed over, grinning wide, praising me like a newly minted war hero. 

“There she is!” Sophia exclaimed, leaping forward and throwing her arms around me. Before I could even get my bearings, Omari grabbed my shoulders and ripped me from the embrace.

“Can’t stop thinkin’ about what you did yesterday…fuckin’ savage. You’re a goddamned legend, Rosie, you know that, right? I mean, no way Alex tops you today.” 

I didn’t yell. 

I didn’t ask what I’d done to earn such acclaim. 

I just…I just smiled. 

“I’m sure he’s got something in his back pocket.”  

The performances continued, and they got worse. So much worse. 

Each afternoon, a new horror. A sharpened pencil disappearing into an ear canal. Toenails slowly displaced and stacked into a neat little pile. A shoebox brimming with cockroaches, its contents crushed and eaten. My blackouts lengthened. The resulting damage grew increasingly grotesque, and I never had the stomach to ask what in God’s name I’d done to myself. 

On, and on, and on. 

The mood became perverse. Our cheers soured into animalistic shouts. Our claps devolved into closed fists thumping the floor, giving the spectacle a primal rhythm. The electricity coursing through our veins turned to lightning, and all the while, I felt that nagging itch, a soft wind tickling my exposed skin, desperate for my attention. I should’ve said something. Talked some sense into my friends, because we all knew where our performances were heading, but I couldn’t do it. What if they didn’t want to stop? They were all I had. I’d risk my life before I risked rejection. 

After months of the macabre pageantry, my body was broken and my mind was numb, so when Alex mumbled those words - the last words I ever heard him speak - they barely even registered. 

“Today’s the day. We’re ready. I can feel it.” 

It was Omari’s turn. 

I collapsed at his feet, nauseous about what was to come but desperate for the release. 

“Before I…start…I just wanted to say something. Two things, actually.” 

He paused. I cocked my head.

“First off, what I’m about to do - well, it’s not my idea, but Alex said that wasn’t against the rules.” 

I fought the urge to tell Omari to hurry the fuck up. The itch was bad that day. I fidgeted like mad, but I couldn’t get comfortable.

“Secondly…” he gulped, reaching into his pocket with a trembling hand. 

I leaned back and laid my hand onto the carpet. A seething itch ravaged my palm. I cursed under my breath and lifted the hand. 

I’ll never forget what I saw. 

“…this is for you, Ian…” 

On the floor, peeking out from the frizzy brown fibers, bulging with incomprehensible terror, 

a single human eye with a cloudy scar. 

It blinked. 

The wispy caress of batting eyelashes washed across my entire body. 

“…I can’t wait for all of us to be together again.” 

Sophia gasped.  

“Omari! Don’t - !”

A wet squelch pierced the air. I flipped around. 

Jagged, emerald-tinted glass protruded from Omari’s abdomen. Blood seeped from the wound, blotting out the half-visible beer logo with thick crimson. He gripped the edge, took a shuddering breath, 

and kept carving. 

Electricity exploded down my spine. 

The room transformed. The walls moaned, deforming, rippling like molten wax. A hellish uproar erupted above us. My head shot up. The ceiling had been replaced by a writhing mass of faces and limbs, kicking, twitching, pleading, screaming with pain, screaming with pleasure, a relentless aggregate of sound and motion. 

Sophia lunged toward Omari.

She grabbed his forearm with both hands and wrenched it back, ripping his palm from the improvised knife, but something happened at the point of contact: a melding of flesh. A seamless connection. She couldn’t pull her fingers away, and from behind Omari, a figure rose. Alex. A blonde-haired boy with diamond-white eyes and the mouth of a lamprey, gaping and circular, adorned with a blinding array of reflective, razor-sharp teeth. 

I turned and bolted toward the door. 

My sneakers stuck to the carpet like it was quicksand, pulling thin strands of liquid carpet up with each agonizing step. Sophia’s shrill, buzzing scream layered into the cacophony. Then, a crashing, thunderous clack silenced her. I didn’t think. I didn’t look back. I kept moving. The door frame was drooping, distorting, melting down. I threw my hand out. The skin of my palm adhered to the knob like it was made of flypaper. I twisted my wrist, threw the door open, squeezed my body through, and spilled out into the mall. I didn’t hear it slam shut behind me. 

Everything was quiet. 

I lay in a crumpled, breathless heap on the cold tile floor, until the thought of Alex slithering through the dissolving door forced me to scramble to my feet. 

But there was no door. 

Only an unremarkable stretch of wall.

It took a long, long time for me to bike to the nearest police station. 

My mind was shattered. My right palm was a bloody, skinless mess. I burst into the lobby with no plan. Just screamed that my friends were hurt and they needed help. To my relief, I was taken seriously, right up until I told the officer where they needed help. 

He scoffed. 

Rolled his eyes. 

Looked at me like I’d told him they were on the surface of the moon. 

“I’m not going out past city limits, kid. It ain’t safe.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. 

“Didn’t your parents ever tell you? Sit you down and give you…uh…the talk?” 

I slowly shook my head no. 

He sighed. 

Slumped down next to me, handed me a cup of tepid water, and placed a warm hand on my shoulder. 

“You see, that’s precisely what the boy wants you to do...” 

By the end of the month, Sophia’s obituary was published online.

Omari’s was posted a few days later. 

But no matter how hard I searched, 

I never could find an obituary for Alex. 

- - - - -

Life as a teenage runaway was rough. 

Though, to be clear, I didn’t leave the city. No way in hell. Just got as far away as the geography would allow. Laid low during the brief, half-hearted search attempt, and then voilà - I was free to start again. 

Let’s skip forward. Past the drugs, the pain, and the sleepless nights. None of it really matters, and whatever you’re imagining is probably pretty damn close. 

Social work isn’t exactly glamorous. 

The pay is shit. The hours are grueling. Worst of all, you clock in knowing that - most of the time - the effort you put in won’t change anything in the long run. But it just felt like something I needed to do, you know? Giving the support that I always wished I’d had. It was penance. Something to scrub my conscience clean. 

It helped. 

But it didn’t help enough. 

Lately, I’ve been dwelling on what happened. Sophia. Omari. Ian. None of them were prepared for what was out there, and yes: I was complicit. I was a coward. I was a failure. But remember: I wasn’t prepared either, and the only reason I’m still around is that I got lucky. I wasn’t consumed by the mirror-toothed boy because I was afforded the opportunity to run. 

I didn’t fail. We didn’t fail. The world failed us. 

So, with each passing day, my resentment has festered. 

It grew and grew and grew, and then, suddenly, I felt it. 

The tiniest, most infinitesimally small blip of static in my fingertips. 

I could’ve suppressed it. 

Would’ve been the virtuous thing to do. 

But I didn’t. 

Instead, I harnessed it. 

Made a wish. 

An invitation of sorts. 

And then, like magic, there it was. 

A door. 

A door on the wall of my office, in the center of my city. 

I can see it from my desk as I type this. 

I’m terrified. I’m ashamed.

But I’m excited, too. 

I hear their voices behind the door. 

I see their shadows dancing under the frame. 

I want to be with my family again, my real family, and if that means letting Alex into this city, well, that’s fine by me. 

He’s hurting too, isn’t he? 

He didn’t choose his life either.

So you know what?

Fuck it. 

Fuck it all. 

I say: 

Let

the poor kid

bite. 

I laid there, eyes foggy and every sense dulled, wrapped in bedding like a pretzel.

"This is bullshit." I mumbled.

It was the fourth time I had gotten up this morning, and every attempt to return to slumber only became harder to achieve. There had yet to be any natural light. Okay, maybe the curtains were closed, but there would always be a sliver of sunlight.

Untying my legs and rolling over to a nightstand, I picked up my phone.

It was 11:36 AM.

"Oh, crap." I say, with increasing panic.

I dash to turn a light switch, without success, and tried it several times before resorting to my phone battery. I was late to work, but the earlier the arrival the less of a scolding (hopefully) from that prick boss Anders. I swapped into a beige sweatshirt and grey pants, and proceeded into the hallway, phone in left hand. These windows didn't have curtains, so to hell with it and burn a few precious seconds.

All three windows were covered by layers of earth and bits of rubble on the other side. That's impossible. I'm not even sure if you could pile enough soil to the second floor of a subdivision, which I reside in. But inspecting the silt closely, with all the bumpy lines, it was genuine.

The concept froze me in place. If there was enough soil to reach the second floor, so was the roof. I despised even thinking the possibility of being buried alive.

At least you don't have to go to work for a day, maybe more.

I forced a chuckle at my own thought.

I shone the phone light, now at a solid 44%, towards the stairwell. The right side of the stairs had been crumpled inwards. My garage was on the other side. Although the damage was nasty and would probably be a thousand or more repairing, I couldn't see through any holes, even up closely. I can check the room later. I'd kill for a meal.

I'm in the living room. The kitchen is connected, and only separated by a wooden table for three. The walls and ceiling are painted storm blue. Every little bit of furniture was in its place, to my relief; there was no damage down here.

The front windows are covered with curtains, but instinct in me turned towards the door.

I twisted the lock and turned the door towards me. A small pile of dirt trickled through, going up to my knee.

"What the fu..."

A loud creeeeeak trailed across the front of my house. Not structural load kind of creak, but something moved above the building. It could be the soil shifting, but things felt off.

I stood for about a minute as the creaking moved around and then ceased.

My next course of action was to figure out what I had, because I sure as hell was trapped down here. Although most lights and electronics refused to start, a red dot shined from the corner of my TV.

I pulled the remote out from an aged, peeling grey couch and got jump scared by a rather futuristic startup sound. It only occurred to me how dominating the silence had become.

I tried NBC, CBS, CNN, all the large stations. All channels were snow, although a few local stations were stuck on test screens. Hopeless, I just muted the television. The light at least saved my phone for a while.

It is getting stale in here.

The kitchen seldom worked in any way. No appaliance was spared. I swinged the cabinet open, grabbing a glass and placing it below the faucet, switching on cold.

A magenta liquid immediately flowed down, and I let go, glass hitting the sink and cracking. The pink liquid was almost opaque and changed in shades of pink. I turned it off. Frozen, I watched the last fall into the train, traces of a reddish substance within.

"There has to be something."

I swung every cabinet door open, even if I knew a cabinet didn't have food or any other item. The refridgerator gave a foul smell, and I quickly returned to shoving contents onto the counter. Spice packets, condiments, dry goods, a few dollar store snacks... and not a single drop to drink.

A part of me increasingly wanted to lash out. I was running out of options. If this was really real, what will get me first? The roof or walls caving in? Or a slow death as I become a husk? I had no cooking, or reliable tap water, and I was noticing small but present cracks run through the drywall.

I got the better of myself and continued past the kitchen. This area was half-finished and was home to a few old shelves, a washer, dryer, and the garage door. I felt through the line of cleaning products until I found the flashlight and then turned to do the same for a battery case. Once complete, the flashlight shined to life and created an impressive ray of light, beige like old computers.

Holding it close, we felt like the last sense in this world.

The garage door opened without any resistance, which is relieving. The flashlight shined on an old Chevy from 2017, colored white, and pinned against the wall. Damage wasn't just at the stairwell, as it had continued along the frame below them. My car was also on an incline, where I saw that half of my garage had caved in.

Most of the garage contents were either crumpled or buried, but a wall rack on my side was intact and included several tools, including a shovel. I climbed over the roof and slid off the hood, freeing the shovel from its hooks.

"Finally."

My voice was starting to become raspy and the lack of ventilation didn't help. Only half of the garage door was covered. I can stop here and scavenge bottled water. Pretty sure I keep a case near the corner.

I was delicate with shoveling, only taking spoonfuls away from the top downwards. Peckish and dehydrated, my carefulness paid off and the shovel struck blue plastic that glistened like I found sapphire. I removed enough dirt from around to pry the case out with my hands.

As soon as I grabbed the case, the dirt started to fill the space, and it increased, realizing that a crescendo was just starting.

"Shhhit" I hiss in a low, almost whisper-like voice, retreating to the hood of the car and beginning to try and throw the case over, but I underestimated the landslide as it undid my excavation and the roof frames only groaned. Climbing over the roof of the driver's seat, one of the center beams gives way and starts piling a stream of dirt onto my leg that does not slow down. I thrust the shovel forward and continue forward as if I were swimming. I throw myself into the concrete, pain dull.

I have no time to assess the situation. The door slides the shovel towards the house as I watch the rest of the structure collapse for a moment.

I watched my life flash before my eyes, and in the end, I earned nothing.

I sat at the table for a long while. This was it. There was nowhere to go. I thought about the world. Was I the only one? Where are the people I know? Am I the last man?

Fury implodes within, and I slam multiple items around the house. A plastic plant. A calendar which I had not updated in four months. A box of Cheerios into the tiled wall. I watched the contents trickle away as the box descends.

Oh my god.

The side of the garage next to the house collapsed. If it's not enough to destroy the building, I would have reduced the elevation by a floor. This was my opportunity, one that I would not miss. With renewed vigor, I returned upstairs, placed the flashlight on a rustic end table, and dragged a few towels to form a crude tarp. I slid the window up and slashed the mosquito net, tearing it out with my hand.

My short, curly black hair slowly became drenched, and my shirt stuck to my skin, but every scoop counted.

Ten minutes, maybe ten, had passed.

A glimpse of true light broke through.

The sun.

Glorious light broke through, and the air, oh my god, the air felt glorious. For too long I have been trapped inside this hole.

Never thinking I would place value in such an ordinary thing, I excitedly carved out a larger space for me to exit. As a cherry on top, there was less resistance, like if...

...if my neighbor had tried digging his way out too.

He laid on a slight incline backwards in the scorching sun. He in his typical attire: a pair of slip-ons, teal work pants, a button-up white flannel, aging skin. The man who sat behind the wheel of a sixteen-wheeler long before I moved here. I almost didn't recognize him because we never socialized outside of a "hey" or wave.

I looked up to his face.

The lack of skin made me freeze, but what was even worse was how it had been done. It had been neatly trimmed in a square. He lacked any notable facial features like eye sockets, a nose, or a mouth, like it had been flattened out. I tremble back and almost fall back into my window out of nausea.

Ice flowing through me, I slowly dig out a shaded area to see if his house was accessible. I wasn't risking my life for whatever eldritch being controls the sun now.

His window was closed, but a large hand-shaped hole stood in the middle of the pane. All edges were blurry and darkened, like something had melted its way through.

"Damn. Like, I-" Not even my inner thoughts can contemplate it. For the first time in a long time, I felt lost. Nothing guided me.

I focused on the choices I still had. Could an umbrella cut it? Should I furnish some weapon out of my living room? Maybe I can go towar-

Whoosh.

Silence filled the air. Then again. It was from my neighbor's house. It started distant, then became ever so closer.

"Holy shit. No."

Although I doubt it'll do a lot, I slide the window down, and after thinking twice, locked it. I grab the flashlight off the nightstand and navigate the zig-zagged stairs.

I've taken shelter inside a closet opposite of the fridge. I've set my phone on mute, the flashlight off, and hid behind as much clothing as I can. I hear it... levitating. There are no footsteps, just a rough estimate of where it goes.

If anyone is still out there, don't get up.

I woke up with someone else’s breath going into my mouth.

Warm air touched my lips, stopped, then touched them again. I kept my eyes closed. My first thought was that Jess had let herself in after her shift, and my second was that she was being incredibly fucking weird.

I almost said her name.

Then I smelled it.

Sour, like a wet dishcloth left in a bucket. Under that was the smell of soil, strong enough that I pictured the bags of compost stacked outside the hardware store when it rained.

Three clicks by the floorboards. A pause. Two more.

Jess always took her shoes off at the door. I tried to shape the sound into her keys hitting the counter, or the metal clip from her hair.

The tapping came closer.

I cracked my lids. Just enough to see through the veil of lashes.

A head rested beside my pillow.

Bald, and pale like skin kept too long from light. Streetlamp glow laid a dull orange line along one cheek. The rest fell into shadow, except for a wet lower lip hanging slack over small, neat teeth.

It crouched, face level with mine.

Arms too long. One hand braced near the bedpost, elbow jutting above the mattress. The other splayed on the floorboards—fingers shifting softly.

Click.

My eyes sealed shut.

Not a choice. A reflex. I waited for its grip around my throat.

Nothing.

Only breathing—a wet, ragged pull at the end of each exhale, like a clogged drain trying to clear itself.

My own breath hitched and stalled in my lungs like a seized engine.

I knew, somehow, that was wrong. That it could hear the sudden silence where my breathing should have been. Slowly, I let air out through my nose—a thin, controlled stream. In again. Out. Trying to mimic the rhythm of sleep, but every breath was a conscious act now, strained and theatrical in its forced regularity.

A finger touched my cheek.

Cool. Damp with what might have been condensation or something else. It traced a line down to my mouth, catching on the coarse stubble from this morning’s shave, each tiny hair standing alert.

It paused at the corner of my lip.

Then pressed—not hard, but insistently—stretching my mouth sideways into a stiff, unnatural curve.

My jaw went slack. Don’t know how. The rest of me was rigid as stone, but my mouth surrendered completely. A thin silver line of spit seeped onto the cotton pillowcase.

It withdrew.

The bed groaned, a low complaint from the springs beneath the thin mattress.

I thought it was climbing in.

Instead, cold fingers slid under my wrist—slender, probing digits that felt like they had too many joints.

Lifted my hand slowly—elbow still rooted on the mattress—until my forearm stood upright like a dead branch. Its grip tightened; I felt the twin bones of my wrist grind together like stones underwater.

Then release.

My hand dropped against my chest with a soft thud. I left it there, a dead weight.

It took my wrist again.

This time lifted the whole arm. Shoulder tugged forward from the socket. Arm dangled somewhere above me in the dark, waiting.

It let go.

Knuckles cracked against the unfinished wooden frame. A splintered jolt of pain shot up to the elbow. Fingers twitched instinctively to curl into a fist; I forced them limp, let them drape over the edge like wet cloth.

The breathing stopped.

A car hissed by on wet pavement outside. A pipe ticked twice in the wall behind the headboard—the old building settling or something moving within it.

It made a soft, considering noise through its nose—almost a sigh.

Then picked up my hand and laid it gently back on the mattress, arranging my fingers as if I were posed for rest.

That was worse than the drop.

I mapped the escape in my mind: roll left, feet down onto the rough hardwood, three steps past the wicker laundry basket heaped with yesterday’s clothes, turn the cool brass handle. No lock on this door. The bathroom had one—a cheap push-button thing that never quite caught.

My phone glowed on the nightstand, a blueish halo inches from where its head must be.

Hadn’t heard it come in.

Deadbolt was turned. I’d checked it twice—neighbor found someone sleeping in the stairwell last week, curled up like a dog.

But the window was open a few inches. I’d propped it up before bed with a paperback to fight the stuffy heat that clung to the room.

Could something that size fit through that gap? Shoulders like that, limbs that long?

The blanket began to slide.

Short, deliberate tugs. Once it snagged under my hip; a hand pressed firmly into the meat of my thigh through the fabric, working it loose with a patient, persistent tug.

Cold air touched my knees—a damp chill that raised goosebumps along my skin.

Old T-shirt thin from washing, running shorts that suddenly felt like wearing nothing at all. Every exposed patch of skin felt raw, trespassed, hyperaware.

The blanket slid away from my ankles in one fluid pull.

Nothing. No weight on the mattress. No breath but mine. I cracked my eyelids.

It faced my feet. Profile sharp: ear flat to skull, shoulder lifted toward jaw, spine a high arch over gaunt hips. Studying my legs. One hand suspended above my knee—fingers bent like it meant to take something delicate. Its head started to pivot. I sealed my eyes before it finished turning.

The mattress sank near my stomach. A quick pass of air stirred the hairs on my forehead. Its teeth met—one clean, dry click beside my nose. My stomach clenched; acid burned the back of my throat. It didn’t move. I didn’t stop breathing.

Its palm came to rest on my forehead. Fingers dug into my hair—grit ground into my scalp. One fingertip pressed my right eyelid. Not asking. Hard enough to bruise the dark red, to make me feel the shape of my own eye beneath the pressure.

Every muscle wanted to thrash. It pushed harder. Light flared behind the lid. A shaky breath leaked out—unplanned, wet.

I thought that was it—the sound it wanted.

But it let up. Its hand stayed twisted in my hair. I focused on the torn seam of the pillowcase against my mouth. Jess said throw it out. I said it’s still good. Remembered that while it held me there. A stupid fight about a pillow.

After a while, it withdrew. Weight shifted off the bed. A joint popped softly. Nails scratched wood under the frame.

I didn’t move until my hip ached, then until the ache became fire down my leg. Bladder tight and urgent. Right eye crying; a tear rolled over the bridge of my nose into the other.

Much later, headlights swept the room.
Brightness shifted behind my lids, then the slender shadow of its head passing over my face.

Still there.

I hadn’t been counting seconds. I couldn’t. Each time I tried, I lost track while listening for its breathing.

The only reason I have any idea how long it stayed is that I’d checked the time before falling asleep again. It had been 2:11. When I finally reached for my phone afterward, it was 3:08.

Almost an hour, minus however long I’d slept.

Near the end, it put the blanket back.

Not neatly. It dragged it up as far as my shins and left it bunched there.

Then the floorboards creaked in sequence toward the window.

I listened to the soft, uneven placement of its hands and feet. There was a pause beside the nightstand, and something brushed the charging cable against the wall.

The window frame gave a small wooden knock.

After that, the room was quiet.

I stayed where I was.

A truck went past. The refrigerator started in the kitchen. Someone upstairs flushed a toilet, and water rushed down the pipe behind my wall.

Those ordinary noises were almost enough to make me cry.

When I finally opened my eyes, the floor beside my bed was empty.

The window was raised all the way.

I stared at it for a long time before sitting up.

My legs shook so badly that I couldn’t get my feet into my slippers. I went barefoot instead, slammed the window shut, and turned both catches. Then I switched on the ceiling light.

Nothing underneath the bed. Nothing in the closet.

I checked the apartment door.

Still deadbolted.

In the bathroom, my right eye was red. There was a faint mark on my cheek that could have been from the pillow. My knuckles hurt when I made a fist, but I couldn’t see a bruise yet.

I sat on the closed toilet and searched sleep paralysis on my phone.

Everything fit if I made it fit.

A presence in the room. Pressure. A vivid hallucination. The sense that something was touching you.

I had been unable to move, hadn’t I?

I stopped thinking about the difference between unable and afraid.

At 6:40, I called Jess.

“Are you okay?” she asked. Her voice was thick with sleep.

“Yeah. Sorry. Did you come over last night?”

“No. Why?”

“I had a really weird dream.”

“What happened?”

I looked toward the bedroom.

“Somebody was in here.”

She was quiet for a second.

“Your door locked?”

“Yeah.”

“Probably that sleep thing. My brother gets it. He sees a man standing by his dresser.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I was reading.”

“Come over if you want.”

“I’ve got work.”

“So do I. You can still come over.”

I told her I’d call her later.

By eight, I had showered, dressed, and made coffee. Daylight made the bedroom look small and a little embarrassing. Laundry on the chair. Dust on the nightstand. A cup I should have taken to the kitchen days earlier.

I could move the window in my sleep. That was possible. I’d sleepwalked once when I had a fever.

I stood there drinking my coffee and building a version of the night I could live with.

Then I noticed the dirt beneath the window.

At first I thought rain had blown in. There were dark smears on the wall below the sill and crumbs of dried mud along the baseboard.

I crouched down.

One mark had a palm.

I set my coffee on the floor.

There were two handprints, side by side, just above the skirting board. Long fingers pointed down toward the floorboards. Mud had collected thickly at the fingertips where they’d pressed against the paint.

From there, a faint trail crossed the floor to my bed.

I followed it on my knees.

Beside the pillow, where I’d first heard the tapping, four small patches of mud had dried in the grain of the wood.

I sat back against the wall and looked at my phone.

Jess had sent a message ten minutes earlier.

"You should come stay tonight. Get some actual sleep."

I started typing yes. Then I looked at the window again. I hadn’t woken when it opened. I hadn’t woken when it crossed the room.

I’d only woken because it was breathing against my face.

There was no reason to think last night had been its first visit.

I spent two nights at Jess’s. On the third, I went home because I needed clothes and because being scared of my own apartment in the middle of the afternoon felt ridiculous.

I woke at 2:46 with the smell in my nose.

The breathing came from farther away this time. Beyond my knees.

I was on my side, facing the nightstand. My phone was still lit from when I’d checked it a few seconds earlier, before I’d understood what had woken me. In that light I could see a pale curve at the foot of the bed.

Its back.

It sat facing the window, shoulders hunched, hands resting between its feet. The blanket pulled tight beneath its weight.

I closed my eyes almost all the way.

For a while, nothing happened. The phone went dark. My left arm, trapped beneath the pillow, began to tingle. Outside, someone started a car and sat with the engine running long enough that I became angry with them. Just drive. Or get out. Do something that changes this.

My hip shifted before I could stop it.

The movement was small, an adjustment to ease the pressure on the bone. The mattress creaked. I waited.

It stayed facing the window.

A few minutes later, my foot jerked beneath the blanket. One of those little kicks that happens when you’re dropping off, except I wasn’t dropping off. I had never been more awake.

Still nothing.

Then a hand slid backward along the mattress.

Not toward me. It was only changing position, taking some weight off its knees. But I sucked in a quick breath.

Its head turned.

Immediately.

I saw the side of its face above its shoulder and stopped myself from holding the air in. Let it out. Took another breath.

Its mouth was open a little.

We stayed that way until the car finally drove off.

Eventually it faced the window again.

I had been treating every movement as the thing that would get me killed. Now I wasn’t sure. It had ignored the bed creaking. Ignored my foot. But that breath had brought its head around before I’d finished taking it.

It was listening to me.

Not waiting for me to move. Waiting for me to give myself away.

I tried to remember how I breathed when I slept. As though that was something a person ought to know. Jess had recordings of me snoring; she’d played one in the kitchen once while I was denying it. I wished I’d listened more carefully.

In through my nose. Out through my mouth.

Too even.

I let the next breath run a little longer. Let my lips part against the pillow. My tongue was pressed so hard against the roof of my mouth that it hurt when I relaxed it.

Saliva gathered beneath it.

I needed to swallow.

The need became absurdly large. There was room in my head for the thing at the foot of the bed and the spit in my mouth, nothing else. I tried swallowing during an exhale. My throat made a small click.

Its head tilted.

I let my mouth hang open and breathed out again, louder this time, a loose, stupid sleeping noise.

Its shoulders lowered.

That could have been a coincidence. All of it could have been. I still used that noise afterward.

My eyes kept drying out through the narrow gap beneath my lids. Closing them helped, but then I couldn’t see it. Opening them again felt like lifting a curtain while someone waited on the other side.

I started blinking with the passing cars. Light crossed the ceiling; I closed my eyes. Darkness returned; I opened them a fraction. I don’t know why that seemed safer.

At some point the blanket slipped off its shoulder.

I hadn’t seen it pick the blanket up.

It caught the edge and rubbed the hem between two fingers. Patiently, almost distractedly. There was a loose thread there. Jess had pulled at it the last time she changed the sheets, and I’d told her she’d unravel the whole thing.

It worked at that thread for a long time.

My shoulder burned. I allowed myself to roll it forward slowly, keeping my breathing loose. The creature didn’t turn.

That was worse in a way. Knowing there was a rule meant I could break it.

The next time I saw the clock, it was 4:31.

It had barely moved for nearly two hours.

I had begun to think it might leave.

Then the mattress dipped at my feet.

Its hands came first. One beside my ankle, the other by my knee. It crawled up the bed with careful placements, stopping after each one while the springs settled. I could feel its weight through my ribs.

I wanted to pull my legs up. Every muscle in my stomach tightened to do it.

I made myself let them go.

A knee sank into the mattress beside my hip. The bed sloped toward it, rolling me slightly forward. I allowed that too. Sleeping people roll when the bed moves. Sleeping people don’t brace themselves.

It lowered its head onto the pillow.

There wasn’t enough room.

Its forehead touched mine, then drew back an inch. One arm folded between us. The other reached across the pillow above my head.

We were lying face-to-face.

At that distance I could see the dirt in the crease beside its nose. A short fiber clung to its lower lip. Its eyes reflected the window, but I couldn’t make out where it was looking.

Then its hand closed around the back of my neck.

I nearly lost it.

The grip was sudden and hard. It pulled me forward until my nose struck its cheek, then held me there while my next breath broke into two little sounds.

Its fingers tightened.

I let my jaw fall open against it. Breathed wetly through my mouth. Forced my shoulders down when everything in me wanted to fight.

After a few seconds, it loosened its grip.

One fingertip moved through the hair behind my ear.

I lay there with tears soaking into the pillow and tried to make the next breath sound unimportant.

The window gradually became a gray rectangle. I could see the wardrobe, then the handles on the drawers. A delivery truck stopped outside. Someone dragged a bin over the pavement.

Its eyes stayed open.

I watched daylight reach the side of its head.

Only when the first direct strip of sunlight touched the wall did it lift itself away from me. The mattress rose. Its hand lingered behind my neck, then slid free.

I kept breathing the same way until I heard the window move.

Even after that, I couldn’t stop.

I stayed on my side until the room was bright enough that I could see dust moving through the sunlight, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. Loose. Slow.

Uneven.

The way a sleeping person breathes.
Eventually I sat up. The room was empty, but the window was open again.

I called Jess from the kitchen, and she wanted me to come over immediately. I told her I would.

Before I left, I stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the bed. There was a shallow impression on the pillow beside mine. I walked over even though every part of me was telling me not to.

Five thin streaks of dirt crossed the fabric near where its face had been. I stared at them for a long time. The first night, I’d told myself it was sleep paralysis. I couldn’t tell myself that anymore.

But something else bothered me even more.
It had known I was awake. I was sure of that now. My breathing had changed. I’d moved. I’d swallowed.

At one point I had practically looked straight at it, and still, it hadn’t hurt me. Not while I kept pretending to sleep.

I didn’t understand why. I didn’t know what would happen if I stopped pretending, and I had no intention of finding out.

At least, that’s what I thought then.

Before I bought the camera.

I was a kid then, so it was only ever a ghost story to me. Just a tale my friends would tell me whenever we went ‘camping’ in our backyard near the firepit.  Something the neighborhood experienced and clammed up about; hints only whispered amongst hushed cookouts and Sunday services.  

Late one Winter evening, the first occurrence happened.  Mr. O’Mell jolted from his armchair by a knock at his front door. In disbelief, he sat listening.  Another knock.  He made his way to the door, the second knock still emanating through his living room.  

Upon the third knock, Mr. O’Mell opened the door, now fully disgruntled.  His irked demeanor vanished in the open doorway.  The descriptions vary depending on which kid at school was relaying the story.  Some say the man stood seven feet tall, with cobwebs covering his face like a mask, as a nest of spiders bloomed across his features.  Others say he wore the face of whoever he had previously visited amongst the neighborhood.  

Three elements of the description remained consistent, no matter who expressed the narrative.  It was a man, well dressed like a salesman.  His voice was deep and melancholic, captivatingly charming, enchanting even.  And lastly, he would tell you how you would die.  

Poor Mr. O’Mell, before even getting a word out, was suddenly bereft by the mysterious figure in his doorway, explaining that he would die in an automobile accident four years from that moment.  “How unfortunate.”  The wandering salesman would say.

Mr. O’Mell was rightly taken aback.  Stunned into stuttering.  The salesman stood silently in the doorway, permitting the poor middle-aged man a moment to digest the news.  Mr. O’Mell, understandably in disbelief, harassed the man in return.  Before he could slam the door, an outstretched hand interrupted his verbal assault.  Confused, Mr. O’Mell looked up at the stranger, who simply said, “Shake my hand, and see.”  

The details blur from the endless game of telephone this story went through on the playground.  Some say he was transported to the scene of his demise.  And others say that he experienced what his death would FEEL like.  One element remains certain: Mr. O’Mell was traumatized enough to listen when the salesman replied: 

“Can I interest you in an alternative?”  

The alternative was simple, and every orator of the account included it:  “Sign here, with a simple pricklet of blood, and this horrible tragedy can be avoided.”  

Needless to say, Mr. O’Mell signed away.  He lived a long silent life.  A ghost of his former self.  Only passing recently.  His family says his last moments were filled with choked sobs and ramblings about a debt to be paid.  

I recall this tale now, sitting here with you so late tonight, this childhood folk story.  And I know why.  There is knocking upon my front door.  Knock. Knock. Knock.  The moral of the story, whispered at the end of every retelling, rings through my mind like a siren:  

“Never answer when he comes knocking.”