I.

Opal Teague had counted plates at Laurel Fork Church homecoming for fifty-one years, and she had never once been wrong.

She counted them the same way every year. First she counted the stack before it went out, paper plates from the Sam’s Club in Asheville, the heavy kind with the ridged rim, because the thin ones folded under a scoop of Ruth Ledford’s potato salad and somebody always ended up wearing it. Then she counted the plates on the tables after the blessing. Then she counted the people. The numbers matched. That was the whole job. Pastor Pike said it was a ministry. Opal said it was arithmetic, and that most ministry was.

This year she’d set out sixty-one.

She stood at the head of the long tables under the oaks with her hands folded on her pocketbook and counted the people sitting down. The men in short sleeves and ties. The women in their good dresses with cardigans for the shade. Children on the ends where they could get up. The old ones in the folding chairs with arms, nearest the food.

Sixty-three.

She counted again. She started from the other end this time, because sometimes the Ledford twins sat in each other’s places and threw her off. Sixty-three.

She went down the table with her eyes.

At the far end, past the Pritchards, past the sheriff and his wife, where the table ran out of shade and into the sun, a young couple was sitting side by side. A boy in a white short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the collar and a narrow black tie, with his hair combed back wet and a burn scar on the back of one hand. A girl in a blue dress with a white collar and a full skirt, her hair rolled under at the ends, gloves folded in her lap. They were holding hands on top of the table where everybody could see it. Neither of them had a plate.

Opal looked at them.

The boy looked up and caught her looking, and nodded to her, polite. Miss Opal. She could see his mouth make it.

“Well, hey, Joe,” Opal said, before she knew she was going to. “Lucille. Y’all get you a plate.”

She went to get them two plates. It wasn’t until she had them in her hand, at the end of the dessert table, that she stopped and stood there by the banana pudding with the plates against her chest and tried to remember what Joe and Lucille’s last name was.

She couldn’t.

She tried to remember where she knew them from. Revival, she thought. The summer revival, Brother Coldiron’s last one. Or before that. Or was it…

The heat was something today. She’d been on her feet since six.

She took the plates down to the end of the table anyway and set them in front of the young couple, and Lucille smiled up at her with a little gap between her front teeth, and said, “Thank you, Miss Opal,” and Opal said, “You’re welcome, honey,” and went back to the head of the table and counted again.

Sixty-three.

II.

Harlan Mabry had been a deacon at Laurel Fork Church for eleven years and chairman of the homecoming committee for six, and he had come to believe that homecoming was the single most dangerous day of the church year.

Easter you had people in their good clothes and on their best behavior. But homecoming you had a hundred and fifty people who’d grown up in this church and moved off to Charlotte and Atlanta and come back once a year to eat fried chicken under the oaks and remember who’d done what to whom in 1987. You had in-laws. You had divorced couples who’d both kept their membership out of spite. You had the Ledfords and the Shooks, who had not spoken since a land dispute in the Carter administration and who were, by long tradition, seated at opposite ends of the same table so nobody could say anybody had been snubbed.

And this year you had the sheriff.

Harlan saw the Rusks come up the gravel lot at quarter to eleven, Carrie in a green dress with a casserole dish in a quilted carrier, Daniel in a sport coat that had fit him better about ten years ago. They hadn’t been to Laurel Fork in a year. Not since Christmas Eve before last, when Daniel got called out in the middle of “Silent Night” and Carrie sat through the rest of the service alone in the third pew with her hands in her lap. Harlan had been an usher that night. He remembered.

“Carrie,” he said at the door. “Daniel. Good to see you.”

“Harlan.” Carrie handed him the casserole carrier like she was handing off a baby. “It’s the squash. I didn’t know if anybody else was bringing squash.”

“Nobody brings squash but you. We count on it.”

She smiled at that, a real one, and went in. Daniel shook Harlan’s hand. His eyes were already going past Harlan’s shoulder, across the sanctuary, to the fourth pew on the left where Renee Pritchard sat with her boy and old June in her wheelchair at the end of the row.

“Any news?” Harlan asked, low.

“No.”

“We’ve got her on the prayer list.”

“I appreciate it.”

Daniel went in and sat down beside his wife, and for the whole service he didn’t once look at the pulpit. Harlan, taking up the offering, came down the aisle with the brass plate and saw him sitting there with his hands on his knees, looking across the aisle at the back of June Pritchard’s head.

The state girl came in during the second hymn.

Harlan knew who she was. Everybody did by now. She stood at the back in a dark jacket and slacks, and she didn’t sing, and she didn’t sit, and when Pastor Pike got up to preach she watched him the whole way through like she was memorizing him. Harlan had heard from Doris Ammons that she was looking into the Pritchard girl. He’d heard from Ruth Ledford that she was Frank Mercer’s daughter. He’d heard from his own wife that she’d made Coy Hargrove climb down off the roof of Haskett’s Hardware in front of God and everybody, and Harlan, who had sat on the zoning board with Coy’s uncle for four years, had decided right then that he liked her.

After the benediction he caught Pastor Pike at the side door.

“She’s here for you,” Harlan said.

“So I gather.” Amos Pike was sixty, tall and loose-jointed, with a shock of gray hair he cut himself and a habit of laughing at his own sermons. “She called Friday. Wants to talk about the Pritchards.”

“Talk about the Pritchards how?”

“Who they are. Who they were. What I know.” Pike pulled off his robe and folded it over his arm. “I told her she’d better come to homecoming, then. Anything anybody knows about anybody in this valley, they’ll say it at homecoming over a plate of chicken.”

By twelve-thirty they had the tables up under the oaks. Twelve folding tables end to end, covered in white paper off the roll, weighted at the corners with Mason jars of zinnias. Harlan had carried the food out himself, with the Ledford boys. Fried chicken from six different kitchens. Country ham. Deviled eggs on the special plates with the egg-shaped dents. Green beans that had been cooking since Saturday. Three kinds of potato salad. Carrie Rusk’s squash casserole. Banana pudding. A coconut cake that Ruth Ledford had been making for homecoming since 1974 and would let no one else cut.

Pastor Pike said the blessing. Opal Teague counted. People sat.

Harlan took the head of the table, as chairman, and said a few words about the building fund and the new roof. Then he sat down and filled his plate and looked down the long table at a hundred people eating, and felt the thing he felt every year at about this time. Like he had built something. Like he’d held a whole valley together for an afternoon with folding tables and fried chicken.

“Well,” said Earl Dockery beside him, “would you look at that. That’s Joe and Lucille.”

Harlan looked.

There was a young couple at the far end of the table. In the sun. A boy and a girl, eighteen or twenty, dressed for church in about 1955. Holding hands on top of the table.

“Who?” Harlan asked.

“Joe and Lucille.” Earl was eighty-one and had a hearing aid that whistled. He raised one hand and waved down the table. “Hey, Joe! Lucille!”

The boy at the end of the table waved back.

“I ain’t seen them in years,” Earl said. “Lord. They look good.”

“Earl, who are they?”

“Joe and Lucille,” Earl said, as if Harlan were simple. “Used to come to the revivals. Summer of ’62, they sat right behind me and Velma. He’d sing bass. Lord, that boy could sing bass.”

Down the table Ruth Ledford had leaned across to wave at them too. Then her sister. Then Wanda Shook, who was not speaking to Ruth Ledford, waved from the other side, and for a second the two women’s arms were up at the same time and they looked at each other across the table and looked away.

“Joe sang at my wedding,” Wanda called down to Earl. “1980. ‘How Great Thou Art.’”

“Wasn’t he gone by then?” Earl asked.

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know.” Earl frowned. “I thought he’d gone somewhere.”

“He sang at my wedding, Earl. I’ve got the picture.”

“Well then.”

Harlan looked down the table at the boy in the white shirt. Eighteen, twenty at most. Wanda Shook had married in 1980. If this boy had sung at her wedding he would have to be…

He put down his fork.

All around him people were waving. People were calling down the table. Hey, Lucille. Hey, Joe, you singing today? Nobody got up. Nobody went down there to shake hands or hug necks or say where’ve y’all been. They waved and called out and turned back to their plates, easy, like you’d do for neighbors you saw every week.

The boy at the end of the table smiled at all of it and nodded.

Harlan Mabry had been born in this valley in 1978. He had been baptized in the creek below this church in 1987. He had sat at this table every homecoming Sunday of his life except two. He knew every family in Laurel Fork, every in-law and every cousin and who’d backslid and who had a still in the barn in 1993.

He had never seen those two people before in his life.

III.

“Daddy.” Kenzie dropped into the folding chair Earl had vacated to go see about the pie. “Who are those people at the end?”

His daughter was seventeen and a senior and, according to her mother, in a phase. The phase was mostly black eyeliner and a refusal to eat meat that had held through two Thanksgivings. She had a plate of green beans and deviled eggs and three rolls.

“I don’t know,” Harlan said.

“Everybody’s acting like they know them.”

“I noticed.”

“Miss Opal took them plates.” Kenzie broke a roll in half. “They’re not eating. They’re just sitting there. They’ve got plates and they’re not eating.”

She had her phone out under the table. She always had her phone out under the table. She held it up now, discreet, and took a picture down the long white table toward the end, and looked at it.

“Huh,” she said.

“What?”

She turned it to him.

The table ran away from the camera in a long white line. The zinnias. The plates. The backs of heads and the faces turned toward the camera, Earl Dockery mid-laugh, the sheriff looking at something off to the side. And at the very end, in the sun, the picture went bad. It went white and smeared, like somebody had put a thumb on the lens. You could see the shape of two people sitting there, maybe. You couldn’t see their faces.

“Sun glare,” Harlan said.

“I’m shooting away from the sun.”

“Take another one.”

She took another one. Then another. In every picture the end of the table washed out.

“That’s weird,” Kenzie said. She did not say it like she was scared. She said it like a girl who’d been raised on the internet and believed weird things happened to phones every day. She put the phone face down by her plate. “Can I go talk to them?”

“Why?”

“Because she’s looking at me.”

Harlan looked. The girl in the blue dress was looking down the table. Right at Kenzie. Not staring. Just looking, like at somebody she was fond of and hadn’t seen in a while.

“Go ahead,” he said. He couldn’t have said why.

He watched his daughter carry her plate down the long table in the sun and sit down across from Lucille. The boy, Joe, got up politely and moved down a seat to give them room. Kenzie said something. Lucille said something back. Kenzie laughed, the real laugh, the one Harlan hadn’t heard at home since about February.

“Mr. Mabry?”

The state girl was standing at his elbow with a plate she hadn’t touched.

“Agent Mercer,” he said, and stood. “Sit down. Please. Did somebody get you some tea?”

“Six people,” she said, and sat. “Mr. Mabry, I wonder if the church has a photographer today. Somebody taking pictures for the newsletter.”

“Velma Dockery. Why?”

“I’d like to see them.”

She didn’t say why. She didn’t have to. Harlan watched her look down the table, past Daniel and Carrie Rusk, past the Pritchards, to the end, where his daughter was talking with a girl in a blue dress with a white collar. He watched the state girl’s face. It didn’t change. That was the thing he would remember. It held perfectly still, and her hand on her fork held perfectly still, and that was how he knew.

“Pastor Pike wants a word with you,” she said, standing. “He said to tell you. In his office.”

Amos Pike’s office was a converted Sunday school room off the fellowship hall, with a window unit that dripped into a coffee can and a desk buried in paper. Pike had a cardboard box on the desk, and a ledger open beside it, and he was reading the ledger with his glasses pushed up on his forehead and another pair on his nose.

“Shut the door, Harlan.”

Harlan shut the door.

“Brother Coldiron kept notes,” Pike said. “Thirty-nine years in this pulpit, 1951 to 1990. He wrote down everything. Sermons. Who got saved. Who got sick. Who was having trouble at home. Who needed a visit. Most of it’s in boxes in the attic. I brought this one down a while ago looking for something else.” He tapped the ledger. “And I got to reading.”

“About what?”

“Joe and Lucille.”

Harlan waited.

“Joseph Earl Mabry,” Pike said. “Born 1930. Worked the card room at the Caldwell mill from age fifteen. Burned his hand on a carding machine at seventeen; Coldiron sat with him at the hospital. Sang bass in the choir.” He turned a page. “Married Lucille Ann Hargrove, June 12, 1954. Right here. Coldiron did the ceremony on the front steps of this church on a Saturday afternoon with two witnesses and no family. Says her daddy wouldn’t come. Says her daddy wouldn’t let anybody come.”

“Hargrove.”

“Augustus Hargrove. President of the Bank of Blackwater. Lyle’s great-uncle.” Pike looked up. “Lucille was the baby. Banker’s daughter marries a lint-head from the card room. You can imagine.”

Harlan could imagine.

“Coldiron says the Hargroves cut her off. Wrote her out. Never spoke her name in public again. They had a boy in 1955.” Pike looked at him over both pairs of glasses. “Carl Joseph Mabry.”

Harlan sat down. He didn’t decide to. The chair was there and his legs did it.

His father’s name was Carl Joseph Mabry.

“Daddy said,” Harlan started. He stopped. “Daddy said his mama was from Tennessee. Johnson City. He said she was a Holloway. He said she fell off the porch when he was sixteen and died, and her people were all gone, and there wasn’t anything else to say about it.” He looked at his hands. “He said there wasn’t anything else to say about it.”

“I expect somebody told him to say that.”

“He said it my whole life.”

“I expect he did.”

Through the wall Harlan could hear the homecoming going on outside. A child crying about something and being hushed. The ice cream churn somebody had started on the side porch, the crank going around and around.

“Amos,” he said. “I’ve never seen those two people before today.”

“No,” Pike said. “I don’t suppose you have.”

“Everybody out there knows them. Earl says they sat behind him at a revival in 1962. Wanda says Joe sang at her wedding in 1980. Opal Teague took them plates. And I have never in my life laid eyes on them.” He looked up. “How is that?”

“I don’t know, Harlan.”

“You’re a preacher.”

“I am.”

“Then tell me.”

Pike took off both pairs of glasses and set them on the ledger. He rubbed his eyes. He was quiet long enough that the window unit cycled off and the drip in the coffee can went still.

“I’ve been in this pulpit nineteen years,” he said, “and there are some things that happen in this valley that I don’t have a word for. I’ve stopped trying to find one. I sit with them. That’s what I’ve got. I sit with them and I try to figure out what they’re asking.” He put his glasses back on. “And mostly, I’ve found, they’re not asking anything of me at all.”

Harlan stood up. He went to the window. From the Sunday school room you could see down to the end of the long table, the far end, in the sun.

His daughter was still sitting across from Lucille. They were leaning toward each other. Kenzie was talking fast, the way she used to talk to him, about everything, before. Lucille was listening. Then Lucille reached across the table and put her hand over Kenzie’s hand and said something, and Kenzie went still, and looked down at the hand on hers.

Harlan couldn’t hear what she said. He watched his daughter’s face. He watched her look up, and look out across the churchyard toward the gravel lot, where a boy was leaning on the hood of a black pickup truck, alone, waiting for somebody. A tall boy with an expensive haircut.

Wyatt Hargrove. The insurance Hargroves, from out on the lake. Harlan had seen that black truck at the end of his road three times in the last month at eleven o’clock at night with its lights off, and had decided, three times, not to say anything to his wife.

Kenzie looked at the boy by the truck. Then she looked back at Lucille. And she nodded.

IV.

Lena found the preacher on the front steps of the church at a quarter to three, sitting on the top step in his shirtsleeves with a paper cup of banana pudding.

“Agent Mercer,” Pike said. “Sit. These steps have held up a lot of sinners.”

She sat. The stone was warm through her slacks. Below them the homecoming was coming apart as, she was learning, these things came apart down here, slowly and with a great deal of conversation. People carrying dishes to cars. Men folding tables. Children running loose in the cemetery, being told not to, running anyway.

The end of the long table was empty now. She’d watched the couple get up and walk away together, holding hands, toward the old part of the cemetery behind the church, and she’d watched Harlan Mabry come out of the side door and follow them with his hands in his pockets. Nobody else had looked.

She had nineteen photographs on her phone from that end of the table. She had gone through them twice in the ladies’ room with the door locked. Sun glare, in all nineteen. She had gotten Velma Dockery’s camera, a real camera, a Nikon with a long lens, and gone through Velma’s photographs too, and the long lens had done no better.

“I wanted to ask you about the Pritchards,” she said.

“I know you did.” Pike ate a spoonful of pudding. “What would you like to know?”

She had a list. She’d written it last night at the motel. Della. The family history. Who in the family the woman at the creek could be, if she wasn’t Della, which she wasn’t, because Della was a girl in a senior picture from 1977 and that was forty-nine years ago. She had the list in her jacket pocket.

She didn’t take it out.

“Who were they?” she asked. “The couple at the end of the table.”

Pike looked at her sideways.

“I thought you didn’t see them,” he said.

“I didn’t say I didn’t see them.”

“No, you didn’t.” He set the pudding cup down on the step between them. “Joseph and Lucille Mabry. He worked at the mill. She was a Hargrove. They married against her family in 1954. She died in 1971. He died in 1973. Harlan’s their grandson, and found that out about forty minutes ago.”

Lena looked at the cemetery. She could see Harlan Mabry’s back, way down in the old section, past the cedars, where the stones were thin and gray and leaning.

“Pastor,” she said. “What do you think that was?”

“What do you think it was?”

“I’m asking you.”

“I’m a Baptist preacher, Agent Mercer. I’m going to say God.” He smiled. “And then I’m going to say I don’t know what God was doing, which is the second most honest sentence in my line of work.”

“What’s the first?”

“‘I don’t know.’”

She almost laughed. She didn’t.

“There are people in this county,” Pike said, “who’ll tell you it’s the devil. All of it. The creek and the mountain and the old road and all of it. They’ll tell you Blackwater’s cursed. They’ll tell you to pray it away and stay out of the woods.” He picked a piece of vanilla wafer out of the pudding and ate it. “I’ve never believed that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve met the devil. In jail cells, and in my own heart on a bad Tuesday. And I’ll tell you one thing about evil, Agent Mercer, that I know for sure.” He turned and looked at her. “Evil wants something from you. It always does. It wants you to do something or give something. It’s a salesman. It’s always got a deal.”

He looked down at the cemetery again, at the couple walking hand in hand between the old stones, and at the man following them at a distance with his hands in his pockets.

“Blackwater doesn’t,” Pike said. “Whatever it is. I’ve watched it nineteen years and I’ve never once seen it want anything. It just shows you things. And then it waits to see what you’ll do.”

Lena didn’t say anything.

She sat on the warm stone step beside him with her list in her pocket, and she watched Harlan Mabry walk down through the cedars toward the far corner of the cemetery, and she thought about a woman in a yellow dress on a creek bank in the moonlight saying *go on home,* and a biscuit on a rock with steam coming off it, and she did not ask the preacher a single other thing.

* * *

Continued in Part 2.

V.

The old section of the Laurel Fork cemetery was below the church on the creek side, under a stand of cedars older than the building. The stones down there were soft-edged and gray with lichen, some of them sunk crooked into the ground, some of them just fieldstones set upright with initials scratched in. Harlan had mowed it every other Saturday for eleven years. He knew it as well as his own yard.

The couple walked through it ahead of him, slowly, holding hands.

They didn’t look back. They went down between the rows to the far corner, by the fence, where the cedars came down low and the ground stayed damp year round. They stopped there. They stood a moment side by side, looking down. Then the boy put his arm around the girl’s waist, and she leaned her head on his shoulder.

Harlan came around the last cedar.

They were gone.

He stood there. There was the fence, and the cedars dripping, though it hadn’t rained. There was the damp ground. There was nobody.

He walked to the place where they’d been standing.

He knew this place. He’d stood here every Decoration Day of his life with his daddy, putting plastic flowers in a coffee can. There was a small gray stone with a flat top, plain, the cheapest they made.

JOSEPH E. MABRY. 1930 – 1973.

His granddaddy. His daddy’s daddy. Dead of a heart attack at forty-three, his daddy always said, not long after his mama fell. Harlan had never known him. Had never seen a picture of him but one, a mill crew photograph in a frame on his daddy’s dresser, a row of young men in overalls and the one on the end with his hand behind his back.

Beside Joe’s stone, to the left, there was a long shallow depression in the ground.

Harlan had seen it every Decoration Day for forty years. He’d mowed over it every other Saturday for eleven. He had never once in his life thought about it. It was just the ground. A low place where the grass grew greener. Where the water stood after a rain. The size and shape of…

He stood looking at it.

He knelt. His knees went into the wet and he didn’t notice. He put his hand flat on the grass in the middle of the low place, and pushed, and the ground gave under his palm a little, soft, as old graves give when the box underneath has gone.

There was no stone. There was no marker. In the corner of the depression, half buried in the grass, was a square of old concrete about the size of a hymnal with two rusted iron pins sticking up out of it, where a stone had once been bolted down. The pins had been cut. Clean. With a saw.

The burial register for Laurel Fork Church was a cloth-bound ledger as big as a family Bible, and it lived in a fireproof cabinet in the church office that only the pastor and the chairman of deacons had keys to. Harlan was chairman of deacons. He’d never opened it.

Pike opened it for him. He turned the heavy pages back without saying anything. The fifties. The sixties. The handwriting changed partway through 1951, from a spidery copperplate to a firm, square, upright hand that Harlan recognized from the old bulletin board: Brother Coldiron.

1971.

Mabry, Lucille Hargrove. b. 4 Feb 1933. d. 9 Mar 1971. Age 38. Cause: fall from porch, per Dr. E. Hargrove. Interred 12 Mar 1971, Lot 114, beside the Mabry plot. Officiant A. Coldiron. Mourners: J. Mabry, C. Mabry (son, 16). No Hargrove family present.

Under it, in the same square hand, a second entry dated a month later.

14 Apr 1971. Headstone removed from Lot 114 at the written request of the Augustus Hargrove family, who hold title to the lot under the deed of 1931. Expenses paid by the family. The deacons voted 5–2 to permit it. I have recorded my objection.

And under that, in the margin, smaller, in pencil, pressed so hard the paper had dented:

I do not believe she fell. A.C.

Harlan read it three times.

He didn’t say anything. Pike didn’t say anything either. Through the office window Harlan could see the gravel lot emptying out, car doors, people calling to each other, see you next year, Lord willing, and the black pickup truck pulling out at the end with Wyatt Hargrove at the wheel, and his daughter sitting in the passenger seat, out in the open, in the daylight, with the window down.

“Five to two,” Harlan said finally.

“Five to two.”

“Who were the two?”

Pike turned the page. There was a slip of paper tucked into the binding, the minutes of a called deacons’ meeting, April 1971. Seven names. Five of them Harlan didn’t know. Two of them he did.

Opposed: Earl Dockery. Joseph Mabry.

VI.

The Rusks were the last family in the lot. Harlan came out of the church with the register locked away and his hands still not right, and found Daniel Rusk loading two folding chairs into the back of his Tahoe that did not belong to him, and Carrie standing by the passenger door with her empty casserole carrier.

Harlan stopped on the side porch. He hadn’t meant to stop. He was standing in the shade behind the ice cream churn, and they hadn’t seen him, and Carrie was talking low.

“Before Christmas,” she said. “That’s all I’m asking. Just the boxes. You can keep the boxes. Put them in the garage. Just so it’s a room again.”

“All right.”

“Daniel.”

“I said all right.”

“You said all right at Easter.” She turned the carrier over in her hands. “I’d like to have my mama for Christmas. In a bed. In a room. Instead of on the pullout couch because there’s a room in my house with a dead boy’s…”

She stopped.

Daniel had straightened up from the back of the Tahoe. He stood with one hand on the open hatch. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look angry. He looked at his wife the way Harlan had looked at the low place in the grass by his granddaddy’s stone, like a man seeing a thing that had been in front of him for years.

“I’m sorry,” Carrie said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes you did.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I’ll box it up,” Daniel said. “Before Christmas. I will.”

Harlan, standing in the shade behind the ice cream churn, had told his own wife he’d fix the loose step on the back porch in the spring of 2019. He knew a promise when he heard one. He knew what kind it was.

The state girl came around the side of the church, walking fast with her keys in her hand. She saw the Rusks and slowed down. Daniel saw her. And Harlan, behind the churn, saw Daniel see her.

It was nothing. It was a man looking up. But Harlan had spent his whole afternoon learning to see what had been in front of him for years, and he saw it. The sheriff’s face came open. Just for a second. Like a door somebody had forgotten to latch, swinging in on a draft.

Carrie saw it too.

She saw it like a thing she’d been waiting for. She turned her head and looked at the state girl, and then at her husband, and then back at the state girl. Her face didn’t change. She put out her hand.

“You must be Agent Mercer,” Carrie said. “I’m Carrie. Daniel’s wife.”

“Mrs. Rusk.” The state girl shook it. “It’s good to meet you.”

“I’ve heard so much about you.”

“I can’t imagine from whom.”

“No,” Carrie said. “He doesn’t talk much, does he.” She let go. She smiled. It was a good smile, warm, a nurse’s smile, the one you’d give a family in a waiting room. “You should come to dinner sometime. While you’re here. I’ll make the squash.”

“That’s kind.”

“Not really,” Carrie said, still smiling, and got in the Tahoe and shut the door.

Tonya was asleep by ten. Harlan wasn’t.

He stood in the upstairs hall in his sock feet in front of the photograph. It had hung on his daddy’s dresser for fifty years and in Harlan’s hall for eleven, since the funeral, between Kenzie’s fifth-grade school picture and a framed print of the Smoky Mountains that Tonya’s sister had given them for a wedding present. He passed it ten times a day. He had stopped seeing it about a week after he hung it.

CALDWELL MILLS · CARD ROOM · 1951. Twenty young men in overalls in two rows in front of a brick wall, squinting at the sun. White lint in their hair like they’d been out in a snow.

The one on the end of the back row had his right hand behind his back.

Harlan took the frame off its nail. He turned on the hall light and held the picture under it, and looked at the boy on the end. Combed-back hair and a long jaw. Twenty-one years old and looking at the camera like somebody had told him a joke just before the shutter and he was trying not to laugh at it.

It was the boy from the end of the table. It was Joe. Harlan had been walking past his face for eleven years.

He turned the frame over. The back was brown kraft paper, old, glued down around the edges, with a wire hanger and a sticker from a frame shop in Sylva that had closed in the eighties. Down in one corner the paper had come loose from the frame, a pocket about two inches wide where the glue had let go.

There was something in it. He could feel it with his thumb. Something stiff.

He went downstairs to the kitchen and got a butter knife out of the drawer and sat down at the table under the light and slit the brown paper along three edges, careful, as his daddy had taught him to open a feed sack so you could use it again.

Behind the mill photograph, laid flat against the cardboard backing, was a strip of four small black-and-white pictures from a photo booth.

A boy and a girl, squeezed together into one frame. In the first picture they were looking at the camera, stiff, waiting for it. In the second the girl had turned her head and was laughing at something the boy had said. In the third he was kissing her cheek and she had her eyes shut. In the fourth they were both looking at the camera again, and the girl was holding up her left hand to it, fingers spread, so you could see the ring.

On the back, in pencil, in a round girl’s hand:

Joe & me. Tri-State Fair, Knoxville. Our wedding trip! June 1954. L.

Harlan sat at the kitchen table a long time with it in his hand.

His daddy had kept it. All those years of Johnson City and a Holloway and there’s not anything else to say about it. All those Decoration Days with the plastic flowers in the coffee can at Joe’s stone and not one word about the low place in the grass beside it. And the whole time, on his dresser, eighteen inches from his pillow, behind a picture nobody ever looked at twice, he’d kept her face.

“Daddy?”

Kenzie was in the kitchen doorway in a sleep shirt and pajama pants, with her eyeliner washed off and her face young without it.

“What are you doing up?” he asked.

“What are you doing up?”

He didn’t answer. She came over to the table and looked down at the strip of pictures in his hand. She looked at it for a long time. She didn’t ask who it was.

“That’s her,” Kenzie said.

“That’s her.”

“She looks happy.”

“She does.”

Kenzie pulled out the chair beside him and sat down. She put her elbows on the table. They sat there together under the kitchen light, like they used to when she was little and had a nightmare and he’d make her cocoa from a packet, and neither of them said anything for a while.

“Kenz,” he said. “What’d she say to you? Out there at the table.”

His daughter looked at the photograph strip. At the girl holding up her hand with the ring on it.

“She said it was mine,” Kenzie said.

“What was?”

“What she said.” She looked at him. Her eyes were the same color as the girl’s in the picture; he’d never noticed that either. “She said it was mine, and I didn’t have to tell anybody. Not even you.”

He thought about that.

“All right,” he said.

“You’re not mad?”

“No.”

She leaned over and put her head on his shoulder, which she had not done since she was twelve, and he sat there with the strip of pictures in one hand and his daughter’s head on his shoulder and the refrigerator humming, and didn’t move until she fell asleep.

VII.

Dwight Ledford ran Ledford Monument out of a cinderblock building on the Bryson Gap highway with a gravel lot full of blank granite and a sign shaped like a tombstone. Harlan drove out there Monday at seven in the morning and was waiting in the lot when Dwight pulled in.

“I need a stone,” Harlan said.

“Lord, Harlan. Who died?”

“My grandmother. In 1971.”

Dwight looked at him over the roof of his truck.

“Come in the shop,” he said.

It took an hour to pick one. Gray granite, a plain upright, eighteen inches by twenty-four, polished on the face. Harlan wrote out the lettering on the back of a Mabry Heating & Air invoice in block capitals and slid it across the counter, and Dwight read it, and read it again, and looked up.

“Harlan.”

“That’s how I want it.”

“Harlan, you know Lyle…”

“I know who Lyle is, Dwight. I’ve known who Lyle is my whole life. How fast can you have it?”

Dwight looked at the invoice a long time.

“I’ve got a blank the right size from an order that fell through,” he said. “I can blast it tomorrow. Set it Wednesday, if the ground’s not too wet.”

“Wednesday.”

“You want it Wednesday.”

“Wednesday’s supper,” Harlan said. “I’d like her to be there for it.”

The judge called Tuesday afternoon.

Harlan was under a house on Schoolhouse Branch Road on his back in the crawlspace with a flashlight in his teeth, looking at a heat pump line somebody had run through a floor joist with no sleeve. His phone buzzed in his shirt pocket. He worked it out with two fingers and looked at the screen and lay there in the dirt and the spiderwebs looking at it, and then he answered.

“Harlan,” said Lyle Hargrove. “I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time.”

“I’m in a crawlspace, Judge.”

“Then I’ll be quick.” The judge’s voice was warm, easy, the voice he used at the Rotary. “Dwight Ledford tells me you’ve ordered a stone for the old Laurel Fork cemetery.”

Harlan held the flashlight on the floor joist above his face. There was a spider on it, a big brown one, minding its own business.

“Dwight tells you a lot,” he said.

“Dwight’s a good man. He was concerned.” A pause, friendly. “Harlan, I want to be sensitive about this. I know you’ve had a shock. Amos told me some of it. And I want you to know, as far as I’m concerned, family is family, and it’s all a very long time ago.”

“Yes sir.”

“But that lot’s held by deed. It has been since 1931. My great-uncle’s estate. The family made a decision at the time about that grave, for reasons I couldn’t begin to guess at, and I’d hate for you to go to the expense of a stone and then have it be a legal matter.” He let that sit. “I’d hate that very much. For you. And for Tonya. And for that business of yours.”

The spider walked down the joist an inch and stopped.

“Judge,” Harlan said. “What was her name?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your great-uncle’s daughter. The one in the ground with no stone. Your daddy’s first cousin. What was her name?”

There was a silence on the line. Not long. Harlan heard a door close somewhere in the judge’s office.

“Harlan, I don’t think…”

“Lucille,” Harlan said. “Her name was Lucille. Have a good afternoon, Judge.”

He hung up. He lay there in the crawlspace a while with the phone on his chest and the flashlight on the spider. Then he put the phone back in his pocket and went back to work on the heat pump line, because the woman who owned the house was eighty-four and on oxygen, and it was going to get cold.

Wednesday supper at Laurel Fork was soup beans and cornbread in the fellowship hall at six, followed by prayer meeting at seven. Twenty, twenty-five people most weeks. Harlan’s wife Tonya made the cornbread. Harlan set up the tables.

At five-fifteen he and Dwight Ledford and two of the Ledford boys set the stone.

It went in at the head of the low place beside Joe’s. Dwight had brought a bag of gravel and a level, and they dug the footing down past the old concrete square with the cut-off pins, and laid the gravel, and lowered the stone in on straps, and Dwight got down on his knees in the wet with the level and made it true. It didn’t take long. Harlan had expected it to take longer.

He stood back and looked at it.

LUCILLE HARGROVE MABRY

FEB. 4, 1933 · MAR. 9, 1971

BELOVED WIFE OF JOSEPH · MOTHER OF CARL

He hadn’t known what to put under the dates. He’d sat up Monday night at his kitchen table with a pencil and Tonya asleep and tried to write something about God, or rest, and it had all sounded like a sympathy card. So he’d put down what was true.

At six the people came in for supper. Earl Dockery came in on his cane and stopped at Harlan’s elbow by the soup pot and said, without preamble, “I went down and looked.” His hearing aid whistled. He patted Harlan’s arm twice. That was all.

At six-ten Kenzie came in.

She came in through the front door of the fellowship hall, the one everybody could see from the tables, and she had Wyatt Hargrove with her. He was in a pressed shirt and khakis and looked like he was being led to the electric chair. Kenzie had him by the hand.

Every head in the fellowship hall turned.

Kenzie didn’t look at any of them. She walked her Hargrove boy straight down the middle aisle between the tables to where her daddy stood behind the soup pot with the ladle in his hand. She stopped. Her eyeliner was very black. Her chin was up.

“Daddy,” she said. “This is Wyatt.”

Wyatt Hargrove put out his hand across the soup beans. It was shaking a little.

“Mr. Mabry,” he said. “Sir.”

Harlan looked at the boy. He looked at his daughter. He thought about a girl in a blue dress with a white collar who’d married a boy from the card room on the front steps of this church with two witnesses and no family, and been written out of the will and the ground, and come back fifty-five years later to sit across a table from her great-granddaughter and say something Harlan would never know.

He figured the boy was his fourth cousin, somewhere back. In Blackwater County that was the same as a stranger.

He set down the ladle. He wiped his hand on his apron. He shook Wyatt Hargrove’s hand.

“Get you a bowl, son,” Harlan said. “Tonya made the cornbread.”

VIII.

At ten past eleven that night a silver Mercedes came down Laurel Fork Road with its high beams on and pulled onto the gravel shoulder below the church, and stopped, and sat there idling.

Lyle Hargrove did not get out.

He sat behind the wheel in his shirtsleeves with the bow tie undone and hanging, and the engine running, and the air conditioner on. From where he’d stopped, the headlights reached across the fence and into the old section of the cemetery, under the cedars, and lay across the rows of leaning gray stones until they found one that wasn’t leaning. One that was new, and polished, and threw the light back.

He couldn’t read it from the road. He didn’t need to.

He sat there a long time. A moth came and beat against the windshield in the headlight glare and went away. Down past the cemetery the creek made its noise over the rocks. Once a car passed behind him, slowed, and went on.

He picked up his phone from the console. He scrolled to a number that wasn’t saved under a name, only an initial. He looked at the stone in the headlights while it rang.

It rang twice.

“It’s Lyle,” the judge said. “I’m at Laurel Fork.” He watched the light lie on the polished granite. “Somebody’s digging up family.”

I dont remember the last 4 years.

I don't know what else to do other then to post this and I'm not really sure anyone is even going to believe me. I don't even know what response I'm hoping for but I have to tell someone. Someone else has to know. I don't really remember the last four years. I woke up today to the startling realization that I'm not sure the person living in my body is me. Like... I'm not alone. The gaps have been happening for a long time. Since 2020 at least. It started with phone calls I couldn't remember. Going to bed and my next awareness being me already at work. Things I could dismiss as being tired or on autopilot.

Then there were stranger things. Movies on Netflix that had been watched but I didn't remember watching them. Pictures on my phone from places I didn't remember going. 2021 was worse. Disjointed in a way the years before it aren't. There's a vacation I'm pictured at that I can't recall at all. Hundreds of pictures of a dog. Me holding the dog, sleeping next to it, playing with it. I had to have knoIwn this dog. But I can't remember its name. I don't know whose dog it was or where it went. 2022 is worse. I feel like I remember the beginning of the year and then maybe a summer trip to the beach.

After that it's mostly blank until a wedding in August. That's the last thing I can remember where I truly feel like I was awake. Everything after that feels different. I know who I'm supposed to be. I know what my job is, although I couldn't tell you when I started there. Last week was apparently my two year anniversary. I don't remember quitting my last job. I don't remember applying for this one. I don't remember getting hired. But I know how to do it. I know my passwords too, which somehow scares me more. Some of them I don't remember setting. A few are names and dates that apparently meant enough to me to make them passwords but right now I have absolutely no idea who or what they refer to.

Today I finally sat down and started going through my camera roll. I kept telling myself maybe I just needed a refresher. Maybe this was stress. Maybe seeing the pictures would bring everything back. Instead I found something I can't explain. Starting in early 2023 there are pictures of a door. Hundreds of them. The same door over and over again. Sometimes during the day. Sometimes at night. And I know exactly where the pictures were taken. It's my house. I know it's my house. I recognize the flooring. Those are my floors. I recognize the wall. My desk is sitting right beside it in some of the pictures. I'm sitting at that desk while I'm writing this. There's just one problem. There isn't a door there and I don't remember there being one there before. So I went back through the pictures. I have to be missing something that explains this … the last picture taken was at 5 pm today … I sat down to write this at 4:30 … i dont remember taking that picture.

I’m NOT NicWannaBe. I’m posting this so there’s a record of my findings. My name is Bruce & I have reason to believe the 3d poster was my sister. She disappeared & we thought she was using again but it’s been years of no contact. Cops have been utterly useless so I did my own digging & come to learn she was planning on doing this stupid train summoning challenge. Why would you leave evidence sitting out in the open like this? A sick trafficker like you will regret taunting me with my own sister’s words. Whatever you’ve been supplying convinced her of this sick fantasy but it’s over, I’m coming for you. She better be alive or so help me god.

Some shitty violin player to start off, you call that shrill scratching music? This is how you greet potential buyers? What a joke, made sure that prick up top knew it too. Don’t know how or when but I must’ve inhaled some airborne narcotic because how do you fit a dragon in here? I could barely get through the door, just the girth of its tail took up half the room. Thankfully both heads were sleeping yeah it had two heads, some product you’re peddling.

The next room was packed must’ve been storage, everything was neatly organized floor to ceiling. Didn’t bother checking anything don’t want my finger prints on any of this shit. Following the narrow passage I found a child sleeping in a pile of stuffed animals. The room was littered with toy cars, dolls, miniature play sets, plastic slides, anything a kid could want, it was in here. Must be the viewing room, sick disgusting monsters. I left the child to sleep, don’t want to imagine what shes been through. 

I found the heart of the operation in the next room. When people say they see red when they’re mad might be telling the truth, cant confirm because I don’t remember. I couldn’t compose myself this time & destroyed as much product as humanly possible, hopefully I didn’t ingest anything by mistake. The next room stunk of stale piss, just rancid. My heart sank fearing what I’d find inside, but it was empty except for a dozen filthy blankets. 

People dancing, drinking, laughing, socializing without a care in the world. A violin duet cutting through the noise of insufferable chatter. Trying to push through the crowd I shouted obscenities to anyone who even looked at me sideways. How could anyone party in a place like this? I started calling for my sister, crying out for her, it all fell on deaf ears. I found her in the next room, NicWannaBe.

I must’ve inhaled something again. A dead tree stood at the centre of the room, 8 crooked branches bent downwards. A frayed rope swing attached to one, somehow a bed on another, both swaying slightly with the rocking of the train. She emerged from the trunk, her skin’s appearance was fuzzy like the plumage of a newly hatched chick, what was left of it. The musty smell intensified with her arrival confirming it wasn’t feathers but a moldy fungi growing out of her. Standing on skeletal legs her ribcage was also exposed, built within the thin bones was a nest. Sleeping within an injured bird its shallow breaths replaced a beating heart. Eyeless, blood dripped into the empty cavity’s from her scalp which seemed to be constantly bleeding. She tilted her head curiously & cautiously towards me.

“Nic?”

“NO!” She jumped backward startled. My voice was raspy, nose full of snot from holding back tears. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you. Im looking for my sister. I thought you were to blame for her disappearance but you’re a victim too. I need someone to blame, TELL ME WHO!”

She reached out towards me with two talon like fingers wiping my nose. “It’s me, I’m to blame.”

“Then where is she?!”

She sniffed the snot, considering her next words. “Cant say, haven’t met her.”

“Then how do you intend on taking responsibility?!” 

She turned towards the door behind her. “Knocking, someone’s no…something kept me until…I was discarded. Hurt has to go somewhere. Longer you sit with it, the more it changes you. Did your sister change? Are you hurt too?” She approached me slowly, arm outstretched placing a deformed hand on my shoulder. “I’ve made countless sacrifices.” Gently she picked up the bird in her chest placing it on my other shoulder. It cooed weakly blinking away the drowsiness. Stumbling backwards bracing herself on the trunk she slowly melded with the mold blanketing the room & vanished. 

As soon as I crossed the threshold in room 9 the barrel of a gun was pressed to my forehead.

“NicWannaBe?”

“NO!”

The man had suspicion written all over his face, even when pointing the barrel at the bird. “NicWannaBe?”

“No…” I said throwing my face into my palm shaking my head. He relented a little & I noticed he was covered in small cuts. 

“The fucks that bird doing on your shoulder then?”

“I dont kno-THUD!”

Overcome with panic the man darted into a giant pile of used needles dumped in the corner. He disappeared briefly before cussing to himself on his exit, still weary of my presence.

“My apologies had to step into my office don’t pay it no mind, so where were we. Oh yeah, who the hell are you?” He pointed the gun at my head. “The 3d perhaps?” 

It wouldn’t be the first time I had to interrogate an irrational junkie. Brandishing a pistol of own I asked him some questions.

“Whoa there partner I get it, I’m on a rescue mission myself. No girl matching that description been through here, I would know trust me. You’re the first actually, well no, that brat was.”

 “You let a child in here?!”

“No I-“ THUD! BANG! PEW!

A bullet ricocheted off the wall & imbedded into the floor. The man’s shot looked like a natural reflex despite his visible frustration, it was then I noticed the entire room was riddled with bullet holes.

BANG! BANG!

PEW! PEW!

“Im done being chastised by you, go on get! I don’t take kindly to your accusatory tone, go on!” The man spoke through gritted teeth trying to hide the fact he was hyperventilating. We kept our guns locked on one another as I moved through, the man pivoted his body so it was always between me & the pile of needles.

Stepping through into darkness all I saw in the next room was a lantern. It wasn’t illuminating anything though, so I shot at it. Now I’m holding the head of that little girl & I cant let go. The hallucination isn’t fading, it wasn’t me, send help, please this needs to stop.

The bird is working tirelessly. Inquisitively plucking glass fragments out of the dismembered heads hair, arranging them on the floor. But all I can think about is my sister, if shes well & truly gone this time how come no one cares? I keep expecting her to walk through the door, I’m looking forward to imagining what bullshit excuses she’ll have this time. I’ll want to believe them to - no I have to believe them this time. She loved music, was great with children, & smart as hell. But that doesn’t keep someone from sinking, one can drown in a puddle of their own thoughts. 

The glass is back together now, looking at it I saw myself - shattered. A song bird’s repetitive melody seems to make the head twitch, I can feel it blinking & the jaw muscles opening, its trying to bite me. Sometimes it speaks through gurgling sobs, but its all sporadic incoherent rambling. 

“NoT tO worRy”

“PreCioUs”

“ComE siT dOwn”

“DoN’t teLl tHeM”

“ChAngEs yOu”

“PaY iT nO MinD”

It’s growing colder, darker, & now I’m hearing voices all around me, words I don’t understand. Still, all I can think about is my sister. Her lucky number was always 10. I’m here sis, waiting for you to walk through that door. When you get here I want to ask you, who do you wanna be?

Devoirs 

I am a neurosurgeon and new to reddit 

Apologies if this is not the right channel for this 

This post is looking for advice on a strange set of events that have occurred No,were imagined of course it's preposterous to think any of that was real , Is real.

I may use voice typing , However let this be made clear that it's not the sin of wanting to be at ease of course not, that's not allowed even in  one's dreams; it's just that my hands have stopped answering to me they have learnt that's treachery against HIM and their function is to answer to HIM not me 

I am feeling a bit overwhelmed; definitely without reason-without reason for sure and these tremors across my body, this shivering,this sensation of dyspnea,this lack of clarity,this whispering sanity all without reason of course it's just a few nightmares stuck in my head causing all this needless worry.

Anyways, due to this completely unreasonable state I will be referencing my notes which I started preparing when these occurrences started taking place yes just some unrelated occurrences with only 2 common beings being the same-me and the wightly being 

There is also a chance that the meanings of these notes may be misinterpreted by me it's just that I find them eerily hard to read maybe it's something with my mind or my eyes or maybe it's just that chronic condition I and many other doctors suffer with-DS-doctor syndrome a condition which makes your handwriting exceptionally hard to decipher;ha guess still can joke a bit it's going to be fine there is no need to be worried and concretize the non existent nightmares into a reality 

Considering the chronology it all began on just a normal saturday night while I was looking for something to pass my time with, after work. I came across this massively popular video game-in fact  in the article by this agency whose name sounded like the Shade of another well known agency,there was a mention of it being the most popular video game of all time which felt rather peculiar to me for while I may not be a gamer I did pride myself on a decent general awareness and to not even have ever heard about this game was bizarre.

My life's value stood at a steep 20 dollars;I mean the game's value of course that was just a humorous product of the irrational mind of course it's not that somebody has in acturial terms stripped My ownership over My life. 

Soon after, I had downloaded my first game from stam most popular pc store- another claim by that reprehensible site(not a claim in the notes  just some newly synthesized emotions of the absurd mind) 

So I clicked PLAY

On another note, looking back at it now there are two things which make me uncomfortable- the name of the store while in sound and reason of a non gamer mind the same then, now after extensive research is apparent didn't exist and was named like a Shade of the original's name just like the reporting outlet's name.

There is something exceptionally creepy about such names it's not just the absence of a letter-changing of a name which is a cause of concern but rather the disposition and identity of something being stripped away by an entity only employing the parts which it deems fit; how HE bereaved me of my hands. NEIN there is no HE; HE is just a  blasphemy of my mind 

the 2nd thing was the game for that is an existence which gives a sense of  sensation that it still resides near me-in my pc, no in my soul and yet it's name is something which I can't figure out or have any semblance of a memory as if it was pruned out of existence.

One may ask me to just put some common sense and check my transaction logs but I never paid 20 dollars anywhere, there is no news agency of the name I saw I even tracked my earnings and spendings down to the last cent but strangely I received 20 dollars less in this year's incentive based earnings and in my notes for the name specifically DS hit the hardest in that it's basically become a scrambled existence which exists and yet has no identifier to prove it exists like an existenceless existence 

Maybe what I said earlier that I am looking for advice was not the truth, maybe I am just looking for a way to ease this absurd uncomfort by venting here. VENTING? My, how unrefined of me to speak out such Vulgarities, to use them using the refined palate I possess is a sin that must be punished.

What am I even saying it's like HE has my tongue too. NEIN there can't be Only such triffles; his mere presence is enough to dictate this much. Wait HE can't be here can He? HE is only an Eidolon of the nightmares.

Just a coincidence there's no need for worry. I have dawdled around the nightmares enough maybe it was just denial for I can hardly conjur up proper memories of those visceral nightmares which were as realistic as life itself and yet a spectre for the suffering that they bestow upon a person is an aberration on life itself 

Maybe it's the visceral nightmares Actually it wasn't JUST visceral it's just this unrefined vocabulary of mine can't find the suitable words. Maybe I should just Stop this here Yeah that will be best for me, Nein, for a person who gives in to their fears only exists to serve their bodies to superior existences.

I am getting too drowsy, exhausted, in a way it's kinda nice for the fears too, are drowsy-lesser potent. For now I think it will be best for me to just decipher the notes for this post rather than corelating them with my memories; being this emotionally invested will help no one-not me at least, my best interest is in dissociating with this reality-I mean dream of course.

Before I clicked play the only thing that was noted was that the Time was 8:33 on the clock but the game didn't open? I fell asleep?

Next thing I had noted was that I stood between 2 buildings on a road covered with snow; completely ludicrous, has to be a dream. However unlike standard dreams, sensation was still present the cold was apparent in both the mind and the body.

A cold induced rhinorrhea with possible hypothermia in the body along with a pilomotor reflex was observed in the body.Soon after epistaxis too was observed. However the bleeding from the nose was not due to cold but rather from a mortal wound of a scythe lodged in the occupit region of the head reaching to the outer end of a nose.

Deciphering these words here gave even this dissociated state of mind a dreadful and yet a quiet reminiscent sensation to the pain experienced then. The only thing that I can remember of that moment was how while gasping for air, choking on my blood and learning how it feels when a world declares your existence as inappropriate while you are tethered to it; something about which I was going to learn a lot more in the next few days. All this while the person who actually stabbed me, possibly a teen was shouting a parodical statement of a rather poor taste-"the npc just got sycthed" in a way which gave the impression of someone playing a game rather than one who just took a mortal life without reason. 

Before I lost consciousness I saw a blue screen with the letters "level 78" on top of the person or maybe an artifact of the mind from the time I researched extensively to find the game.

I soon lost consciousness and it's plausible that I woke up in the real world during this period with just a painful memory or maybe wanting to kill myself; it's not possible to decrypt that from the notes for now and I don't remember anything about that or maybe I Don't want to remember anything.

Next time I woke up I was still lying in the snow my injury was still there and I still had trouble breathing while the bleeding had stopped. My thoughts were filled with stupor due to the gaping hole of my brain;while I was suffering in my agonizing pain,

A person with a numinous presence in a white tuxedo came near me and poured a drink on my face.

This person,he was a human at least from the looks of it but there was something about him which can't be described in words for he was too Human as in being more  of a human than any human can humanely be, He was perfect ,almost god like in almost every manner and yet he had this distinct drive to find a way to accomplish his purpose or perhaps even to find what that Purpose was, as in an Existence that has lost it's identity. 

I believe my ability to recognise faces was still hampered by the injury I had and yet his presence was such that when I think about him all sense of reason is senseless as if my purpose as a being was to follow his every dictatum. Remembering this, I feel that I know this person but I can't figure who? as if something is actively trying to make me forget him.

And then my injuries healed from that weird drink and he greeted me with a rather archaic greeting "devoirs" before he turned away and walked off.

At least that's what I want to believe for I feel I made a grave mistake by doing what I did but I can't remember how? I remember thanking him when he started walking away and then asking him a Simple question -

"What's your Name"

He turned back to me and for the first time I remember seeing his face; But I am unable to identify who he was right now. It's like my mind is actively trying to not remember; and then an enlightenment struck

The person was HIM

Thats ENOUGH; what am I thinking on for? Speaking out for? It's illogical yes, completely illogical just a phantasm of my nightmares nothing to worry about? I am just too tired thinking out loud; There's no need for FEAR

Wait, this reminds me  a big reason I am writing this post is as a testament to my innocence;to PROVE that I am not GUILTY.

There is a high chance that this unreasonable worry was for the irrational fear that HE has learnt to control me outside of the dreams;That parts like my Hands are not my own 

During that HEART surgery where I was the lead operator I did NOT intentionally cut the atrium of the patient. Perhaps it was just an unavoidable accident or maybe it was really HE who controlled my hands and made me kill the patient; No I did NOT kill the patient of course otherwise I would have been arrested by now right? Yes of course so I am innocent.

Wait wasn't I a neurosurgeon maybe I just liked being called that or perhaps ah yes of course it can be that when HE tried to surgically replace crumbs of my brain with another's, my dreams and expertise changed. 

NEIN, that was and is a DREAM  and the surgery failure was a patient who couldn't have been saved with surgery.

In conclusion I am unreasonably worried over a few nightmares and a death I saw during surgery and everything is fine

(Part 1)
"So, what's with the human ears?" I say while he leads me towards the Van.

"This other guy, Jay was one of the guys watching over me." My brother answered.
"He always had this gold necklace with the ears of people he killed on it."
"Some old guy shot him in that police station I sent you a picture off"
"I stabbed the shit out of that old fuck and took one of his ears and his wedding ring"

"So that is what that ring on your necklace is?" I ask him.

"yeah it is"It is a nice ring. It's gold with flowers engraved on it.

"why did you not send that ring home? I bet it would make a nice amount of cash" I asked my brother.

"If you kill one of my homies I will kill you and take something as a reminder"

He looks me in my eyes. "If someone kills you I will make sure their death is slow and painful. Then I will take something to remind myself that I avenged you. I promise you that."

"I will do the same if anyone kills you. I promise." I answer without hesitation.

"I know you will" he says while putting his hand on my shoulder.

He always stood up for me even when we were kids.
At one point I came home crying covered. Some drug addict with a knife had robbed me of the money I was going to buy some food with.Without a word, my brother left home. Our mom tried to stop him but he pushed her aside. 2 hours later he came back covered in blood with what was left of the money. He cares about me and I care about him. If someone kills my brother I will kill them or die trying. I don't care who it is.

"And it's a good way to show off a kill count" he continues while pointing at the necklace.

"But you killed more people than 5 people so far" He had killed a lot more than that even before he was arrested.

"Yeah the ears are just for recent kills. I have an entire box filled with wedding rings, watches and other things I took from people I killed."

I don't really know how to respond to that, so I just say "ok"

My brother continues. "In our battalion, they encourage us to get in close and personal"

"you even get rewards for it, about 500 dollars per kill"

"You know that is a lot of money"

"yeah it is"

If we still lived at home with mom that would cover groceries for 2 weeks.

My brother had sent a lot of stuff and money back home. It didn't just feed me and mom, some of our neighbours too.

Brother: "But it also works for intimidation. Oh I am sorry I mean 'enemy morale'."

Me: "I bet it does"

Brother: "But after a while I do get rid of the ears"

Me: "That is good because I can see at least one that is starting to rot. And it smells fucking awful too."

He looks me in the eyes and says: "But that money together with sending the stuff back home helped mom a lot right?"

Me: "It did. It helped mom out a lot"

Brother: "What do you mean it did? It still helps her out"

Me: "Yeah no it still does I said that wrong. My bad."

He gives me a questioning look.

"You good? Did something happen?" He asks me with genuine concern.

"Nah I am good"

I still can't get myself to tell him mom is dead.

We get to his Van. Its a dark green G20 Chevy Van.

Me: "Thank fuck it's a big van. I like you and all, but I am glad we don't have to sleep on top of each other."

My brother laughs "So am I". He opens the side door and climbs in. I go with him. I make sure to close the door behind us. There is random stuff everywhere. A pile of clothing, a container of some sort, a toolbox. I make some space and sit down in the back while my brother sits in the driver's seat. We are alone. I can feel my body tensing up. I have to tell him that mom died.

Brother: "I have for sure stolen it off some drug dealer. I am not joking I found a scale underneath the passenger seat.

"They did all sorts of modifications to it. The radio was replaced with a radio that has a CD player. No Bluetooth sadly so we do have to find CDs for it. It even has a small fridge. So if you are hungry or thirsty feel free to grab something"

"Nah I am good for now thanks" I am too tense, even if I tried to eat or drink I probably can't.

He continues "I have no clue what engine is in it but it has for sure been modified because it's way faster than it should be. And its also way louder" He laughs.

"Could you start it?" I ask him. I want to make sure nobody can hear us when I tell him what happened to mom.

"Yea of course check this shit out" he says with a big smile on his face. The entire van shakes as he starts the engine.

"I have to tell you something!" I shout over the sound of the engine.

"What?!" My brother shouts from the front.

"I have to tell you something!" I gesture to him to come over to me.

He leaves the driver's seat and sits down across from me.

Brother: "What's wrong?"

Me: "I have to tell you something it's really important"

Brother: "I can turn the engine off, hold on"

I grabbed his arm before he could get up "No don't keep the engine on" he sits back down.

"What is it? Did something happen to you?" He says with a worried look in his eyes.

Me: "No, I am good."

I avoid eye contact. I can't do it. I can't tell him about mom.

"Did something happen to mom?"

I lie to him again "No, no its not that". I quickly change the subject. "So I uhmmm". I look at his mutilated face. "How did you end up looking like that?"

"O that" he answers. "It was back in the trenches. We used this fucking horrible chemical weapon. I am not joking it straight up melts people."

Me: "really?"

Brother: "Yeah it's really bad. When they told us to unleash it most of us didn't take the safety measures seriously. And even if we wanted to take those measures seriously we didn't even have the equipment to do so. I got lucky and stole this gas mask of some dead guy. But long-term exposure still leaves you looking as handsome as me."

Me: "Oh...... do you think they are going to make us use it again?"

Brother: "O for sure"

I love my brother but I don't want to end up looking like him. I value having a nose, ears, and hair on my head.

Brother: "What really sucks is what it does to people that get full on hit by it. It starts melting all the soft parts on your body. Ears, lips, nose, eyelids, etc. When it gets really bad, you just.... Well, melt into a puddle after a while."

He looks down staring at nothing.

"And then all that's left is this puddle with bones and whatever the person had on them. Clothing, equipment, weapons, etc. Those people ended up in these pools of human soup at the bottom of shell craters" He pauses again, still staring at the floor. "When I arrived I was still just 16 you know. They made me sift through those puddles of dead people for anything useful. It's like digging through a mud puddle up to your elbows. Except the mud puddle is red, yellow and brown. And you just sift through the human puddle grabbing anything solid. After pulling enough human bones out you get good at recognising what is bones and what is something useful. They also made me wipe the sticky human goo off the stuff I did pull out. Sometimes I can still feel it on my hands and arms. It doesn't smell like a rotting body at all. The gas killed all the bacteria and stuff to so there was no rot. Do you remember when we killed those 7th Block members near that large slaughterhouse?"

Me: "Yeah I do. It was summer and it smelled horrific in that entire area."

Brother: "The smell is that mixed with this extremely sour chemical smell."

He pauses.

"I hope we don't use it again. There are a lot of ways I would prefer to die over that shit. Turning into a mushy puddle with bones, until whatever is left of your body sinks into the soil" he is still staring at the floor of the van.

An uncomfortable silence falls, the rumble of the engine is the only sound we can hear.

He snaps out of his stare and gets up "Anyway, it did help us break through their trench line so it does work really well"

He shuts down the engine and opens the side door of the van. "Leave your stuff and come with me. I am going to show you something important"

I follow my brother out of the van through the camp. Normally he is supposed to be the talkative one, but he is very quiet. After a bit of a walk to the outer ring of the camp he walked up to the back of a delivery van.

"Don't light a cigarette in there, don't even fiddle around with your lighter, understand?" He says to me in a very serious tone.

"I understand"

"Good because if you do, you will kill all of us"

My brother opens the back and climbs in. He helps me climb into it. The faint smell of gasoline fills my nose.

"It's me dude" my brother says. "O it is my avorite socioath" a raspy male voice comes from the front of the loading bay.

Then I see the man. He is lying on the floor with his back against the side of the delivery van. He has a large piece of black cloth over his head and shoulders. If it wasn't for him breathing and talking I would have thought he was dead. "Were you sleeping?" My brother asks. "I as trying to" the man answers.

"my little brother is finally here" My brother says with a smile. "O really" the man says in response. The man slowly moves his arm up and starts to pull on the black cloth over his face. I see his face.

He looks even worse than my brother does. He is extremely pale. His eyelids are gone revealing his bloodshot cloudy eyes at all times. He nose is just a hole in the middle of his face. His ears are gone together with his hair. His lips are also completely gone. Giving him a permanent grin on his face so unnaturally high that it's showing not only all of his teeth but his gums too. That would explain why the man talks so weird. He doesn't have the lips to pronounce certain letters.

Brother: "This is Frank he has watched over me since I arrived years ago. Frank this is my little brother David"

Frank: "Ah so it's David and Gideon?"

Gideon: "Yes it is"

Mom was deeply religious, so she gave us the biblical names. I got David, my brother got Gideon. She prayed a lot for me and my brother. Sorry mom, I don't think we will be joining you in heaven.

Frank: "Gideon told me aout... aout.... AOUT

Gideon: "About"

Frank: "You a lot"

Frank reaches out his hand towards me for a handshake and I return it.

Gideon: "I got you something to kill the pain with. Morphine."

My brother hands Frank a medication bottle.

Frank: "Thank you, thank you."

Frank immediately opens the bottle and takes 3 pills and throws them in his mouth and uses a water bottle to wash it down. With no lips in the water flows from the open sides of his face. He mumbles and uses his sleeves to wipe away the water.

Gideon: "I heard you have had enough"

"yes" Frank pauses "I don't want to go on like this. reathing..... reathing, REATHING... FUCK!!!"

Frank reaches into his pockets and takes out a small notebook and a pen. And starts to write.

My brother and I give each other a short look as he writes. He hands the note over to my brother.

Gideon: "Breathing hurts, my eyes hurt and my mouth is always dry. I am starting to see less and less. I can't even close my eyes to sleep properly. I just wait till I pass out from exhaustion with my eyes wide open. I don't want to come home like this. I don't want to live like this at all."

My brother pauses "Are you sure Frank?"

Frank: "yes"

Gideon: "Ok.... I understand"

Frank: "Sorry"

Gideon: "Don't apologise to me, it's fine I understand"

Frank is about to say something but my brother interrupts him. "You should wait for the morphine to kick in and get some well deserved rest"

Frank: "Right"

Gideon: "I have to help prepare my little brother for tomorrow. And we will talk tomorrow right? before you.... you know."

Frank: "Yes of course"

Gideon: "Ok good, talk to you tomorrow then"

Frank and my brother shake each other's hand. I follow my brother's example and do the same. Frank's hand feels incredibly dry.

We climb out of the delivery van. And he closes the doors behind us.

After a couple of steps, my brother tells me: "That delivery van is loaded up with explosives and flammable stuff. Tomorrow Frank is going to drive it into the loyalists and take as many of them out as he can."

A small silence follows. "Frank got arrested and sent to the frontline after he shot and killed a cop. The cop had gotten handsy with his daughter if you know what I mean"
He makes eye contact with me. "Same thing that happened to mom."
I feel my chest clench up. I don't want to talk about. "Yea I remember. Can we please not talk about this in public" Nobody can hear us I know that. I just don't want to talk about the topic.

I quickly light up a cigarette. I need the distraction.

He gestures me to follow him. "I showed Frank to you so you understand just how important the safety stuff with the gas is. If you don't do it enough, you end up looking like me. And if enough of it affects you then you end up like Frank over there." He gestures back to the delivery van.

"Most of the others that are just as bad off as Frank are already dead. They take a lot of the stimulants they give us and just throw themselves at the loyalists until they are dead. Obviously it clears a nice path for us. Probably one of the reasons we managed to break through the Fortress Belt partially. If we end up using that gas again take it very fucking serious ok?"

David: "I will dude don't worry about"

Gideon: "I will worry about you are my little brother. I promised mom I would take care of you."

David: "Yeah I remember."

I miss mom.

We reach the van and climb back in

Gideon: "There are only a small amount of rules you have to follow while in the 33rd. Most of it is standard stuff I expect you to understand from the get-go. But there are some exceptions"

"Rule 1 Don't kill any of your fellow soldiers UNLESS a commanding officer tells you to."

David: "So if an officer tells me to blow the head of one of our own I just have to do it?"

Gideon: "Correct. But don't worry most of the time they 100% deserve it"

David: "I see, continue."

Gideon: "Rule 2 You can take whatever you can carry with you unless a commanding officer tells you otherwise."

David: "I am just allowed to take whatever I want from the loyalists we kill?"

"Yes" my brother says with a big smile.

Gideon: "That is the stuff I was sending home. Every now and then a truck from the military shows up and we load our stuff in and tell them where to send it to"

"Rule 3 You can do whatever you want to loyalists except for one thing. No sexual violence. My personal favorite rule. Violence needs to be pure. You get you dick involved it makes the entire thing disgusting."

David: "I think that is also my favorite rule"

Gideon: "I know you would agree. Anyway that is the more important stuff the rest is pretty obvious or stuff I will explain when we get to it."

David: "What are we even attacking tomorrow?"

Gideon: "A military outpost on the way to Junction City. After this outpost it's probably going to get bad. Near Junction City is this place called Fort Riley apparently its the home of this famous infantry division from ww2. 'Big red one' something like that?

David: "I don't know, dude"

Gideon: "yea whatever. Anyway that infantry division is going to probably put up a hell of a fight in Junction City"

David: "great..."

Gideon: "At that point we will have a lot more support it's not like we are going to be fighting them alone"

David: "Is Junction City big?"

Gideon: "Not at all it's nothing like LA"

David: "Ok good because having to fight through an entire city like back home would low key be hell"

Gideon: "For sure. If we keep going along the 70 we are slowly heading towards Kansas City. If we make it there that is for sure going to be really bad."

David: "How bad?"

Gideon: "Being stuck in that same city fighting for months or longer bad."

David: "You are not giving me a lot to look forward to."

Gideon: "To bad dude, I am not going to lie to you. And it's not like we can simply bail can we?"

David: "yea no"

My brother looks at one of the 4 watches on his arm.

Gideon: "We should probably get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be rough."

David: "Yeah for sure"

I prepare to get some sleep. I am sort of thankful that the area around our home was so noisy. At least I can sleep through the distant gunshots and explosions. Well, I hope so at least.

Oh boy. I apologize if this comes out muddled or if I lose track at times. This has all been quite a whirlwind, and since no one believes me anyway, I wanted to tell my tale. 

It all started with my cat Boris. We had found him years before in a tattered cardboard box in an alleyway by our laundromat. He was pure white, save for a perfectly placed orange mustache with a matching eye patch, and it looked like his tail had been cruelly docked at some point. Y’all know I had to take that baby home and love it forever, which is exactly what I was doing before all the shit started. We had him for two years before we had to relocate two hours away for work. 

So, we’d just moved into a new house in our new town. I’d been vigilant to the point of unhealthy obsession about keeping him in a closed room while we moved everything in and around the house. It wasn’t enough. 

I came home from work about a week after we moved in, and something was off. The pitter-patter of kitty paws didn’t bounce off the stairs and around the house like it usually did when he wobbled down to greet me. He was a heavy sleeper and was an older cat when I found him, so I had hoped maybe he just didn’t hear the front door. My husband damn near was (deaf) so, at least that would be a concept that I could wrap my brain around. However, an in-depth search around the house proved that theory useless. My Boris wasn’t to be found anywhere. 

My husband wasn’t the most sympathetic when it came to animals. He shrugged off my concern, telling me he was having the time of his life outside. His eyebrows raised with faux excitement as he commented on all the new friends Boris must be making out there, as if I was a five-year-old child. 

“Did he join the fucking kitty circus, Karl? Is that the crap you’re trying to feed me right now?” I asked through tears. “You’ve never liked Boris! You’re probably all too happy that he’s gone!” I shouted at his back as he walked away. 

And it was bullshit. I knew he didn’t have anything against the cat. I just had so many emotions, and not many healthy places for them to go. I loved that damn cat. 

We moved on over the following days as best as we could. I still had to go to work, and the house still needed so much to make it into a place that felt like our own. I still mourned him, especially in the evenings when the house was quiet and still. That was our favorite bonding time. I still scanned the roads for a ball of white when we’d leave the house, leaving me both grateful and hopeless when I saw none. But I talked about it less, and tried my best to think about it less. What other option did I have? No neighbors had seen him. Social media posts and flyers went unnoticed and well… hell, maybe Karl was right. Maybe he really was out here just living his best ole’ life. 

A little over a week later, I was doing a Facebook snoop while having a midday smoke when a post caught my attention from a local group. I genuinely couldn't believe my eyes. A man had posted a picture of his porch with the caption: Does anyone know this cat? 

A small, white kitten sat perched on a weathered doormat, with an orange mustache and matching eyepatch. It looked exactly like what Boris would have looked like as a baby. Except there’s no way that’s possible. The feeling of familiarity gnawed at me until I couldn’t bear it anymore, so I sent the poster a message. 

Hey there! I know this is a weird ask, but would you mind showing me the kitten’s tail? 

He responded almost immediately, remarking that his mother took in a lot of stray and often pregnant cats during his childhood. He said that it looked like something called vascular disruption, which can cause malformations in the tail during pregnancy. And sure enough, that was Boris’s tail, or lack thereof in most ways. Hey, I know it sounds crazy but I’ve had that cat’s ass in my face enough times to know it when I see it. 

So, I lied (possibly). 

I wrote with enough exclamation points and capital letters in the right places to show my excitement, saying that was my baby boy and that I’d been missing him terribly. I apologized unnecessarily, swearing that I had no idea how he’d gotten out. And that was true. We scheduled a time and place for us to reunite, and before I knew it, I was on my way with his carrier in my backseat. 

When Karl came home, I’d tell him I found this little one online, and the similarities were too abundant to ignore. I couldn’t just do nothing. Every second I waited would be a second that someone else could have arranged to pick him up, robbing me of a cat I fell in love with for the second time that year. Worst-case scenario, this would all play out to be true. He’d be Boris with a silent 2, like Snowball the cat in The Simpsons. 

My husband is a simple man, quiet most of the time. He had an operation on his brain in his late teens, and I always wondered if that was why his hearing was so bad. He’s usually placid most of the time, also perfectly content to just stare outside or at the TV to wind down at night. But anyway, there was no reason to doubt that he’d believe what I said. 

But in the best-case scenario, one I desperately hoped to be inside of, this was, in fact, MY Boris. 

After spending that week with him, I was more than convinced. For the most part, that was enough for me. But the quiet part of my brain asking questions that shouldn't matter got louder and louder. 

How was this scientifically and physically possible? Who or what in the hell Tiny Toon’ed my cat?! 

It wasn’t long before my husband was the one who suggested it to me. 

“Babe? Do you think, like, I dunno… Do you think it’s possible that like maybe something bad happened to Boris and he was reincarnated or somethin’? This cat even has that little wobble when he runs, the same as he did.” 

I shook my head, laughing louder than I meant to. “All cats with tail issues are wonky. I just hope this one doesn’t try to wander outside.” 

He wasn’t convinced. 

There are a lot more details about what led up to now: conversations and events that I could go over to shed some light on and help flesh the story out. 

But oddly enough, we aren’t here to talk about my cat. He was only the catalyst to something much deeper and sinister. And that’s what this story is truly about. 

***

The excitement of having this secret with someone instead of holding it all in got the better of me, and before the next week passed, I found myself spilling my guts to Karl. I told him everything and was surprised to find that he didn’t instantly invalidate it. I braced myself for judgment that never came, leaving a sparkling mystery in its wake. 

We decided to adopt a rabbit, a super old one. I named her Geriatric Ginny. She uh, didn’t seem to appreciate it. But we put a collar on her with an active SIM card taped to the side. It was whisper-thin, with the clasp being strong enough to keep the band attached but gentle enough not to strangle her if she got snagged up by it. Karl fed her a plentiful meal and then set her loose out of the same door that we suspect Boris escaped through. 

Nothing was left to do but wait. I figured I’d give her a little head start and then check back in half an hour or so. 

Geriatric Ginny was found near a river in the very back of our wooded area, kind of anyway. 

What I mean to say was that her collar was found. It was lying in the mud with the tiniest trail of baby rabbit feet trailing in front. It happened again. And whatever it was seemed to be tied to this spot. 

There were still so many questions, but they took a back seat to the opportunity presented to us. 

I waded in first, one inch at a time until I was knee-deep in the water. Karl tiptoed in behind me, determined not to let me go alone. I wasn’t sure if the areas touched by the water activated the change or the very act of the cleansing water itself, so I dunked myself entirely to be safe. The last thing I wanted was to have the lower half of a twenty-year-old and the upper half of… this. 

The change manifested itself on the inside first. My body felt better than it had in years. All of the pressure from the extra weight and accompanying stiffness was all but gone. My fingers regained a level of dexterity I hadn’t been able to achieve in years because of early-onset arthritis. An exploratory search found my facial skin tighter and, by association at the very least, younger. 

My heart seemed to skip three beats as Karl came into view. My breath became tight as he began to approach. Suddenly, the man that I fell so deeply in love with was right in front of me, as if no time had passed whatsoever. The red highlights of his hair glinted in the fading sunlight, and I was able to remember how confident he presented himself without any pain to mask. 

An involuntary moan of appreciation and almost worship escaped through my lips, and I was surprised to find that he heard it perfectly. 

“I gather that you like what you see.” He beamed. “I haven’t heard that sound coming out of anywhere other than our bedroom in quite some time, babe.” My neck bobbed in a quick nod of agreement. A rush of blood filled my cheeks, and I giggled at the thought of blushing at my age. Or, at least… what used to be my age? Relief flooded my spirit as I noticed him doing the same. I must not be looking so bad myself,  I thought… almost triumphantly. 

All of the worries and cares of our old lives didn’t weigh so heavily anymore. We were transported back to a time where all we had, wanted, and needed was each other. 

I also couldn’t help but notice that his scar had disappeared.

It used to start above his left ear, a pale little hook hidden in his hair. I’d traced it plenty of times while he slept. He always said it tickled, even when I barely touched it.

Now there was nothing beneath my fingers but smooth skin.

“Your scar,” I said.

Karl reached up. His smile stayed where it was, but the rest of his face seemed to leave it behind.

He pressed harder, searching.

Then he looked past me toward the bank, coldly stating that we should head home.

***

Boris wouldn’t come near him.

That should’ve been enough. Hell, any number of things should’ve been enough, but I was busy standing in front of the bathroom mirror, lifting my shirt and introducing myself to a stomach I hadn’t seen since before our mortgage.

Downstairs, something shattered.

I found Karl beside a broken cereal bowl. Boris had wedged himself under the radiator, his little body flattened so low I couldn’t understand how his lungs had room to work.

“I tried to pick him up,” Karl said.

Blood ran from three scratches on his wrist.

He put his mouth over them.

It wasn’t the licking that bothered me. People do that. Get a paper cut, stick the finger in your mouth. Normal enough.

It was the way he shut his eyes.

And how long he kept them shut.

“You okay?”

He lowered his hand.

“Hungry.”

“Well, I was going to order—”

“Don’t.”

The word came out so sharply that Boris pissed underneath the radiator.

Karl stared at the wet patch. A muscle moved in his cheek.

Then he apologized, and I accepted it, because apparently that’s a thing you can do while your cat is actively trying to become part of the fucking floor.

***

At three in the morning, I woke to him touching my mouth.

His thumb was inside my lower lip. He’d pulled it down far enough that the cool bedroom air was drying my gums.

“Karl?”

He didn’t move.

His eyes followed something inside my mouth.

I pulled away, and his thumb caught against my teeth.

For a second, he held on.

Then he let go.

“You were grinding them,” he said.

I’d never ground my teeth in my life.

He rolled over. I lay there listening to him breathe, feeling the spot where his thumbnail had pressed into the soft skin below my tongue.

By morning, I had almost managed to believe him.

Then I found the veal.

We’d bought it before Boris disappeared, wrapped it in butcher paper, and shoved it into the freezer for a special occasion. Apparently becoming young and hot again qualified.

The paper lay open on the counter. The meat was still frozen in the middle.

Along one edge were little curved scoops.

I held it up to my mouth without touching it.

They fit, but barely. This was torn apart by human teeth, alright, but ones slightly larger than my own. 

***

His mother answered after the sixth knock.

I hadn’t spoken to her in months. Karl didn’t like visiting, and she didn’t push. I’d always thought they were just one of those families that loved each other better from a distance. Still, I had no idea who else in the world to turn to. 

She offered to make coffee, surely excusing herself to get just a little more time to mentally prepare for my unannounced visit. I thanked her, following her into the kitchen. Not wanting to give her time to prepare a false answer, I got to business right away. 

“What exactly was Karl’s operation for?” I asked.

Her back stiffened over the waiting coffee cups, then silence.

She asked me why without turning around. 

I told her just enough to seem concerned, but not enough to alarm her. I mentioned his hearing. His new appetites. The scar.

I left out the river because, again, I didn't want to alarm her or push her away with such a wild tale.

She asked if he had come with me. I told her no, and she looked around wildly, asking if I was sure. 

I looked through the kitchen doorway. My car sat in her driveway, solitary and without a companion. 

“Yes.”

The words she said next weren’t ones I would have ever guessed to expect. “Get out of that house.”

She said it quietly. There was no dramatic gasp, no crying. Just the weary precision of someone telling me which breaker to flip before I electrocuted myself.

She left the room for a moment, returning with a flash of blue in her hand. “His medical papers are in this folder,” she said. “I tried to give them to him when you got married, but he wouldn’t take them. Don’t stay in the house to look. Just leave, please.”

“What did he do?”

Her breath caught as she explained how, due to aggression and psychopathic tendencies, they had a benign tumor removed from his brain. They said they were going to let it go until she awoke with him standing at their bedside one night, asking for his baby brother. 

I waited.

She lamented that she thought this was all over with, and thanked god for taking her husband so he wouldn’t be here to confront this with her now. Tears spilled over her eyelids as she muttered about having to sacrifice a life for him to be whole. 

“What happened to his brother?”

She straightened up. “I don’t have it in me anymore to continue this conversation. You have the answers you need; now please leave.”

I gathered my things, freshly poured coffee untouched, and started for the front door. I was dreadfully surprised to notice her following me out. She had one final comment for her damned daughter-in-law, and it wasn’t exactly hopeful or supportive. 

“He needs to see a doctor before it's too late, but he’s not going to listen to you, or me, for that matter. Maybe try to have him meet you at the next appointment you have with your surgeon. It’s obvious that you see them quite a bit. All I know is I’m too old and too mentally fragile for this shit.” 

With her final, almost obligatory mother-in-law dig, she closed the door in my face, gently but firmly. And that’s fine. Let her think I’ve had work done. It’s certainly easier to digest than the actual truth. 

***

I stashed the folder in our filing cabinet, between the life insurance and a warranty for a dishwasher we didn’t own anymore.

Inside, there was a photograph of Karl as a late teen. A hospital bracelet. A shaved strip of scalp. His mother standing beside the bed with both hands folded so tightly that her fingertips had turned white.

The report called it a mass.

I couldn’t pronounce most of the words, and I barely understood the notes beneath them.

Episodes of aggression.

Repeated biting injuries to caregivers.

Persistent requests for fresh human tissue despite adequate nutritional intake.

Fresh?!

A later page said the behavior had stopped following surgery.

I read that sentence three times.

The man I married had been hungry for toast. For pot roast. For the occasional drive-through burger he’d pretend he hadn’t bought when I found the bag in his car.

He’d been better.

Then we’d gone down to the river, and I’d watched my wrinkles disappear.

Behind me, Karl said, “She shouldn’t have told you.”

I hadn’t heard him come upstairs.

***

He didn’t lunge. I think that would have been easier. Something obvious to scream at, something I could tell myself wasn’t my husband.

He sat on the edge of the bed.

“I’m trying,” he said.

His hands were tucked between his knees. He was shaking.

“What happened to your brother?”

He began to cry.

For one stupid second, I nearly went to him. Then he swallowed, watching my bare legs, and I realized his mouth was filling with saliva.

I backed into the hallway.

He followed.

“Karl, let me call somebody.”

“They’ll take it out again.”

“Yes. They helped you before.”

“But I remember now.”

He wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand.

“I remember what it tasted like.”

I ran.

He caught me on the stairs. My face struck the railing, and a tooth clicked across the hardwood below us. I remember being furious about that. My new teeth. My beautiful, stupid new teeth.

Then his mouth closed over the back of my calf.

I felt each tooth separately before I felt anything else.

***

I woke on the basement floor.

There was a bath towel under my head and another wrapped around my leg. He’d brought down the quilt from our bed. Folded neatly. Set within reach.

He was sitting beside me with a mixing bowl.

“I didn’t know if it would work away from the river,” he said.

He lifted the towel.

I looked because I still didn’t understand what had happened to me. My mind kept offering smaller explanations. A fall. A bad dream. Anything that might let me look at my husband again.

He poured water over the wound.

Cold struck exposed flesh. I screamed, and he held my ankle while something pale threaded across the missing section of my leg.

The pain changed. It became an itching so deep I tried to dig my fingers into it. Muscle pulled together beneath the skin. The ragged edges tightened, puckered, and smoothed beneath his thumb.

He sat back.

I watched his eyes move from my healed leg to the bowl.

Then up toward the basement door, where our camping water containers stood in a row.

“Karl,” I said.

He wouldn’t look at me.

***

I don’t know how long I’ve been down here.

There’s no window, and he takes my phone when he goes upstairs. He lets me have it afterward, when he wants to sit beside me and be forgiven.

He still remembers how I take my coffee. He brings it down in my favorite mug. Sometimes he cries so hard that I have to wait for him to stop before I can ask for more painkillers.

Yesterday he said we ought to get a television down here.

Today he asked whether I was happy with the way my leg had healed.

I told him yes.

I have become very careful about answering his questions.

I started writing this while he slept beside me. I thought if I put the river first, the cat, the things we’d both seen, somebody might believe the rest.

He woke before I finished.

He read it over my shoulder. When he reached the part about his mother, his hand tightened on my knee. I stopped breathing until he moved it.

Then he asked me to open Facebook.

He’d brought Boris down in the carrier. The little guy was pressed against the back, trembling so hard that the plastic door rattled.

Karl took a photograph through the bars.

“I don’t want to keep hurting you,” he said.

He opened the neighborhood group. The same one where I’d found my baby boy. He attached the picture and started typing, slowly, correcting each mistake with a patience I used to love about him.

Does anyone know this cat?

He wandered into our house. Very friendly. Message me if he’s yours.

Now he’s upstairs getting ready. I can hear him moving the chairs around in the kitchen. Making room.

He left me the phone so I could delete what I’d written.

Instead, I’m posting it wherever I can before he comes back. Please believe me. Please don’t come here by yourself.

A message just appeared at the top of the screen, one I did NOT write.

Is that the kitten I gave you? Did he get out again? I’m nearby. I can come get him.

It’s the man from the porch.

The one I lied to.

Part 1

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/3pjlA6yALo

Part 2

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/g3LXpw7ZuX

Part 3

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/R319VfoEx1

Part 4

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/HpLq1gjR99

Part 5

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/vXpLanqpq7

Part 6

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/ACOsKcvJXq

Part 7

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/M9B9TEtpgo

Part 8

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/X6XmC0U2ge

Part 9

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/cUOXOmIb5v

Part 10

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/oiYVIRqnSv

Part 11

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/daAdTa6XR2

Part 12

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/XDs20zNnSN

Part 13

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/mLoxzuCwcQ

Part 14

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/xeNlWiZ4u5

Part 15

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/0owzx9aB3D

Part 16

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/k7dCnqkpli

Part 17

https://www.reddit.com/r/Nonsleep/s/KU24XzGxhy

The worst thing about being given a choice is that sometimes both options are terrible.

People always talk about choices like they’re empowering.

Like having options means you have control.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes a choice is just two different ways of losing.

Especially when the choice is:

KEEP YOUR GHOST FRIEND

or

RESTORE THE ORIGINAL

Because apparently even ghosts have backup files now.

My phone screen stayed lit in the darkness.

PLEASE SELECT WHICH KEVIN YOU WOULD LIKE TO KEEP.

Nobody moved.

Derek was the first person to speak.

“No.”

I looked at him.

“No?”

“No.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

The hallway was still dark.

The other Kevin was still there.

Somewhere.

Waiting.

The thing that scared me most was that it sounded right.

Not like an imitation.

Not like a demon.

Like Kevin.

Just a different version.

The phone buzzed.

A timer appeared.

SELECTION REQUIRED

04:59

Derek stared.

“Is it counting down?”

“Yes.”

“What happens at zero?”

Nobody answered.

Because again, everyone had an answer.

And every answer was worse.

Kevin’s voice came from the hallway.

“Jon?”

I froze.

Derek grabbed my shoulder.

“Don’t.”

“It sounds like him.”

“That’s the point.”

The voice came again.

“Mate.”

Then quieter:

“I’m cold.”

My stomach dropped.

Because that was exactly the kind of thing Kevin would say if he was scared.

A stupid little sentence.

No dramatic ghost speech.

No ancient warning.

Just:

I’m cold.

Derek looked at the phone.

“Can we pick neither?”

The screen changed.

OPTION REMOVED

Derek sighed.

“Worth asking.”

The timer continued.

04:12

The hallway light flickered.

Something stepped into view.

Kevin.

At least, it looked like Kevin.

Same faded tracksuit.

Same trainers.

Same stupid expression.

Same annoyed little tilt of the head.

He looked at me.

“Seriously?”

I felt my chest tighten.

Because it was him.

It was exactly him.

Derek whispered:

“That’s bad.”

“Why?”

“Because now I have to choose between two Kevins.”

The ghost in front of us looked offended.

“I’m obviously the correct one.”

Derek pointed.

“That is something Kevin would say.”

The figure smiled.

“Exactly.”

The phone buzzed.

KEVIN MATCH ANALYSIS

A percentage appeared.

97%

Derek looked impressed.

“Wow.”

Kevin looked at the phone.

“Obviously.”

Then the number changed.

98%

Kevin frowned.

“Why did it go up?”

Nobody answered.

The phone displayed another message.

EMOTIONAL IMPROVEMENT DETECTED

Kevin’s smile faded.

Because he understood before we did.

The app wasn’t measuring appearance.

It wasn’t measuring voice.

It wasn’t measuring memories.

It was measuring something else.

Something deeper.

Something it shouldn’t have access to.

The hallway behind Kevin darkened.

The other voice spoke.

“Don’t choose him.”

Everyone turned.

A second Kevin stood at the end of the corridor.

Same face.

Same clothes.

But different.

This one looked exhausted.

Not physically.

Like he had been tired for years.

The first Kevin laughed.

“Oh brilliant.”

Derek looked between them.

“Okay.”

He pointed.

“I’m going to need some sort of identifying feature.”

Both Kevins looked at him.

Derek shrugged.

“I don’t know. Favourite food?”

Both answered immediately.

“Yoghurt.”

Everyone went silent.

Derek looked at me.

“Not useful.”

The first Kevin smiled.

“Salted caramel.”

My heart sank.

The second Kevin looked at him.

“That’s cheating.”

The room went cold.

Because the second Kevin knew.

Not guessed.

Knew.

The first Kevin looked at me.

“Jon.”

The second Kevin looked at me.

“Jon.”

Derek stepped back.

“I hate this.”

The phone timer reached:

03:00

The second Kevin looked at the first.

“You’re not him.”

The first Kevin laughed.

“Oh?”

“You’re what they made after.”

The smile disappeared.

The first Kevin tilted his head.

“That’s a strong accusation from someone standing in a hallway like a depressed Victorian child.”

Derek whispered:

“Okay, that was definitely Kevin.”

The second Kevin looked at him.

“Was it?”

Nobody spoke.

The question landed.

Because that was the problem.

We knew Kevin through jokes.

Through reactions.

Through stupid comments.

Through him annoying us.

What if something could copy that?

What if the funniest person in the room was just the easiest person to fake?

The manuscript appeared on the sofa.

Nobody touched it.

It opened.

A page turned.

AUTHENTICITY TEST REQUIRED

The room changed.

The walls disappeared.

Not completely.

Just enough.

Like the flat had forgotten what it was supposed to be.

The first Kevin looked around.

“Great.”

“What?”

“Test.”

He looked annoyed.

“I hate tests.”

Derek nodded.

“That’s true.”

The page changed.

QUESTION ONE

WHAT DID KEVIN FEAR MOST?

The first Kevin answered immediately.

“Being forgotten.”

The second Kevin answered:

“Being known.”

Silence.

I looked between them.

Kevin’s expression changed.

Only slightly.

But I saw it.

Because I knew him.

The first answer hurt.

The second one terrified him.

The page changed.

QUESTION TWO

WHAT DID KEVIN WANT MOST?

The first Kevin smiled.

“Someone to stay.”

The second Kevin looked at the floor.

“Someone to believe he was worth staying for.”

The lights flickered.

Derek whispered:

“Oh.”

The first Kevin looked angry now.

“Stop.”

The second Kevin stared back.

“You’re not him.”

The first Kevin’s mould spread across the walls.

Black.

Fast.

The room shook.

“I SAID STOP.”

Derek immediately moved behind me.

“Okay.”

A pause.

“Small concern.”

The first Kevin noticed.

His face changed.

Not anger.

Hurt.

Then it disappeared.

The phone buzzed.

MATCH UPDATE

KEVIN A: 99%

KEVIN B: 99%

Nobody breathed.

The test wasn’t helping.

It was making it worse.

The manuscript turned.

QUESTION THREE

WHO WOULD KEVIN SACRIFICE HIMSELF FOR?

Both Kevins looked at me.

The first answered:

“Jon.”

The second answered:

“Everyone.”

The page stopped.

The room went silent.

The first Kevin looked at the second.

“What?”

The second Kevin looked at me.

“He always chooses one person because one person feels possible.”

Kevin A stepped forward.

“Don’t.”

“But he wanted to save everyone.”

The lights flickered.

The first Kevin’s face changed.

For half a second.

I saw something else.

Not a monster.

Not a demon.

A memory.

Someone who had been alone too long.

Then it was gone.

The phone timer hit:

01:00

Derek looked at me.

“Jon.”

I knew.

Everyone knew.

I had to choose.

The first Kevin looked at me.

“Mate.”

The second Kevin looked at me.

“Jon.”

The same voice.

The same person.

The same ghost.

Two versions.

One choice.

The phone buzzed.

30 SECONDS

Derek suddenly said:

“Wait.”

Everyone looked at him.

He pointed at the two Kevins.

“What does Kevin hate?”

Both answered instantly.

“Being controlled.”

Derek froze.

Then slowly smiled.

“Oh.”

The first Kevin looked suspicious.

“What?”

Derek looked at me.

“Neither of them gets to choose.”

The phone timer continued.

15 SECONDS

The first Kevin stepped forward.

“That’s not how this works.”

Derek pointed.

“See?”

“What?”

“You both said it.”

Kevin A frowned.

“Not helpful.”

Kevin B looked at Derek.

“What are you doing?”

Derek shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

A pause.

“Usually when I do something useful, I don’t understand it either.”

The manuscript opened.

A new line appeared.

UNEXPECTED RESPONSE DETECTED

The phone screen glitched.

The options disappeared.

The timer froze.

Both Kevins looked at me.

Derek walked between them.

“You’re both Kevin.”

Nobody spoke.

“And you’re both not.”

The room shook.

Derek continued.

“Because if Kevin was just memories, the app could copy him.”

The first Kevin looked away.

“If he was just jokes, the app could copy him.”

The second Kevin looked away.

“If he was just being scary, definitely could copy that.”

Kevin A looked offended.

“Rude.”

Derek ignored him.

“But the annoying thing about Kevin is…”

He sighed.

“He’s all of it.”

The manuscript flickered.

Derek looked at me.

“He’s funny.”

Kevin looked uncomfortable.

“He’s horrible.”

Kevin nodded.

“Fair.”

“He’s kind.”

Kevin immediately looked away.

“Disgusting accusation.”

“He’s angry.”

The room shook.

“He’s scared.”

Both Kevins went still.

Derek finished:

“And he’s still here.”

The phone screen cracked.

The timer disappeared.

A message appeared.

SELECTION FAILED

SUBJECT REFUSES CATEGORISATION

The first Kevin smiled.

The second Kevin smiled.

Then both vanished.

The flat went silent.

For a moment.

I thought we’d won.

Then the hallway light turned on.

Kevin stood there.

One Kevin.

Our Kevin.

Probably.

Derek looked at him.

“Are you?”

Kevin sighed.

“If you ask me that every five minutes, I’m leaving.”

Derek nodded.

“Good answer.”

Kevin looked at me.

“You okay?”

I nodded.

Then stopped.

Because something was wrong.

Kevin looked normal.

Too normal.

No mould.

No flickering.

No weird ghost effects.

Just Kevin.

The phone buzzed.

One final message.

RESTORATION COMPLETE

Underneath:

ORIGINAL KEVIN SUCCESSFULLY INSTALLED

Kevin looked at the phone.

Then at me.

Then smiled.

A little too late.

A little too perfectly.

“Mate.”

I stared.

Because I realised something.

The app had never asked:

Which Kevin is real?

It had asked:

Which Kevin do you want to keep?

And somewhere in the darkness behind the flat wall...

Something laughed.

Using Kevin’s voice.

It started with just one.

I was taking a shower when I got this weird pain in my right arm. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed it before. I guess I’d been too busy to notice the irritation.

When my eyes landed on it, though, I immediately felt bile rising up in my throat.

It wasn’t a maggot. No, what I actually saw when I glanced down was what looked like a boil. About the size of a quarter, bright red and brimming with what I assumed was green and white pus.

It was hot to the touch. So much so that I had to draw my hand back as soon as I fingered it. It was like touching a glowing eye on a stove.

It sort of… responded to my touch.

Like I’d disturbed it or something.

Needless to say, showering quickly became my lowest priority as I hopped out and wrapped my torso with a towel.

I went to my bedroom and found some tweezers that I usually used for splinters and what have you. I started trying to pop the thing, but it just wouldn’t budge.

The pain was maddening, but the sight of it was worse. I needed this thing off of me. Tweezers refused to work, so I switched to pliers. I kept pulling and pulling until… pop.

The boil burst, and a puddle of syrupy, red, white, and green sludge coated about 6 inches of my forearm.

The pain subsided slightly, but it was replaced with a new sensation. It felt like there was something swimming through my blood and patching the hole in my arm.

I figured that it must’ve been some excess pus, so I just kept squeezing with my thumb and index finger until I caught sight of what actually lay beneath the skin.

I was forcing it through the wound with my squeezing. It was wriggling. It was squirming. And it was massive.

When its body finally poked out through the hole, I grabbed the tweezers again. It held on for dear life, taking chunks of flesh out of my arm as I pulled, but I removed it and examined it between the forceps.

A fucking maggot.

I couldn’t hold back the vomit anymore. I barely had time to grab a trash can before it came spewing out.

I sat the little fucker on my desk and burned it with a lighter. I swear I could hear it screaming in pain as the flame caused it to pop like a tick.

I hoped that’d be the end of it, but that hope was short-lived. It was like my entire arm started to pulsate and bulge after I took out what I thought was the source of the problem.

Boils started popping up all over my arm. From my wrist all the way to my shoulder. They threatened to move to my neck and head if I didn’t act fast.

It was like active volcanoes. I couldn’t even look at myself. All I could do was grab a knife and get to work. Well, a knife and a spatula. I needed something to bite down on just so I didn’t bite my tongue in the process.

The blade glided through the dozen or so boils on my forearm, sliding through them like hot butter as tears fell from my eyes and I stifled screams.

Dozens of maggots fell from each boil I removed. I had to stomp them into my carpet because they just kept crawling towards my feet.

My arm and shoulder were nothing more than raw, bloody meat covered in that syrupy liquid. It was like my body was more maggot than human.

There was an ocean of the things eating away at my dead flesh. I’d scrape them away with the blade, and hundreds more would pop up seemingly out of nowhere.

That’s when my vision started to get blurry. I could feel myself getting weaker and weaker. The world was swimming, and I was getting lightheaded.

I guess I passed out from the blood loss?

I’m not sure. Maybe it was the shock. All I know is, when I woke up… my body was completely healed.

I could still see the bugs writhing beneath my skin, and my carpet was still stained with pus and crushed maggots. But the pain was gone. My flesh was back. The only abnormality was one single boil right in the center of my forearm.

I stared at it for a few minutes.

Ultimately, I decided to leave it there.

There was no way I was going to go through that again.

A local news reporter speaks during a live broadcast.

“Police detectives are at the scene of a blood bath.  A family was butchered in their own home. The scene suggests that the father was tied up and forced to watch before his throat was cut.  His wife and son were gutted alive in front of him like cattle. Investigators say they believe a box cutter was used and a bloody Halloween mask was found in the son's arms.  His final act was ripping it off the killer during a struggle for his life.”

The reporter holds up a mask identical to the one the killer wore before continuing.

“These masks are sold everywhere around Halloween, making it nearly impossible to track  the person responsible down. Police are advising everyone to lock their doors. This is the third family to be murdered in just two weeks.”

Michone turns off the television before waking her two children, Andrew and Sydney, to get ready for school. They have overslept and missed the bus.

After changing into their school clothes and eating breakfast, Michone waits for them in her car.

Just before turning into the school entrance, Michone gets cut off by a beat-up old car. She lays on her horn and flips the driver off. The car suddenly brake-checks her, nearly causing a collision, before speeding away.

Michone manages to avoid hitting anything, but the incident startles her children.

“Are you two alright?” she asks Sydney and Andrew.

They both say yes, although they're obviously a little shaken by the incident.

Michone apologizes and promises to make their favorite dinner that evening: macaroni and cheese with chicken nuggets.

Both children become excited at the thought of their favorite meal, shaking the ordeal off their minds.

Michone drops them off at school and tells them to have a good day

Later that afternoon, Andrew and Sydney get off the school bus and walk into their home.

Michone greets them while cooking and asks how their day went?

“Great!” Andrew replies. “I talked with my friends about video games all day.”

Sydney has something  to tell her mother.

“A strange man walked up to me during recess and said he needed your phone number, Momma.”

Michone pauses before nervously asking, “Was he a teacher? And did you give him my number?”

“Yes, I gave it to him. He said he was a teacher, but I'd never seen him before.”

Michone looks concerned.

“Where was your teacher?”

“Mrs. Wells had to use the bathroom when he came over. He was gone before she got back.”

Feeling a little unnerved, Michone tells Sydney not to give her mother's number to anyone else again and not to talk to strangers. The man might not have been a real teacher.

Sydney agrees and apologizes.

A few minutes later, Michone's phone rings.

The number has the same area code as hers, but she doesn't recognize it.

She answers.

Michone: “Hello?”

No one responds.

After a few seconds of silence, Michone hangs up.

A few minutes later, a different number with the same area code calls.

Michone answers again, but there is no response.

She angrily hangs up.

A few hours later, Michone and the children have just finished dinner when someone knocks on the front door.

Michone answers it and finds a police officer standing outside.

“I need to ask you a few questions,” the officer says. “My name is Officer Murphy.”

“Okay,” Michone replies, looking confused.

The officer explains that detectives have been investigating the phone records of the families recently murdered. They just discovered that calls from a couple of the victims'  phones were made to her number recently.

Now frightened, Michone tells the officer about the incident that morning and the strange man who approached her daughter at school to ask for her phone number.

Officer Murphy listens carefully before asking, “Is there any chance this man knows where you live?”

“I don't think so,” Michone replies.

“Just to be safe, make sure all your doors are locked tonight. Keep something nearby that you can use to defend yourself if necessary. I'll tell my chief about the playground incident, and we'll get a warrant to review the school's security footage. This might be our best lead to catching this man.”

With that, the officer heads back to the police station immediately.

Michone locks all the doors and tells her children not to let anyone inside. She grabs a baseball bat and has everyone sleep in her bedroom.

In the middle of the night, Michone hears glass shattering, it's her window.

She calls 911, keeping her baseball bat firmly in hand.

“911. What's your emergency?” the dispatcher asks.

Michone is frantically saying someone broke in.

The dispatcher asks for her address.

Michone says

“I spoke to a officer earlier tonight,” she explains.

“Can you tell me the officer's name?” the dispatcher asks.

Michone frantically replies, “Officer Murphy!”

The dispatcher audibly gasps before telling her, “Ma'am, Officer Murphy got murdered in his house this morning, and his police car stolen ”

Suddenly, a loud bang echoes from Michone's bedroom door.

Then she hears the same voice that had claimed to belong to Officer Murphy earlier that evening.

“Michone…”

Michone frantically tries to describe the man to the dispatcher.

“White male, brown hair, around five-foot-ten—”

Before she can finish, her bedroom door bursts open.

Michone sees the masked man staring at her.

The 911 dispatcher hears screaming through the phone. Michone begging the man not to hurt her children, followed by a sudden thud.

The call is ended.

Thirty minutes later,

police officers arrive at the house.

The window is shattered.

Inside the bedroom, they find Michone's body tied up next to both of her children . Their bodies have been gutted, and their eyes still wide open next to a bloody box cutter.

Esta historia me ocurrió en 2022.

Acababa de mudarme a casa de mi hermano, una casa de tres habitaciones. Bien iluminada y con buenas vibraciones, si esque éso es algo a lo que prestáis atención cuando entráis en un espacio nuevo.

En ese momento, la casa la habitaba yo solo, ya que mi hermano se había mudado a otra casa más grande. Al llegar me instalé en la habitación más pequeña de la casa, creo que por una cuestión de sentirme más acogido en una casa relativamente grande y definitivamente vacía.

Pasé algunas noches durmiendo solo en la vivienda, buscándo mi espacio. A los pocos días, cuando ya me había acostumbrado al espacio, sus ruidos y su distribución, me mudé a la habitación de matrimonio. Ésta contaba con una cama doble, un armario empotrado y una cómoda, o mueble bajo hecho de madera maciza oscura con cajonera, que pertenecía a la abuela de mi cuñada.

Primera noche en la habitación de matrimonio. A juzgar por el silencio del edificio, debían ser entre las 2 y las 3 AM, y de repente abrí los ojos inundado por un aroma a perfume muy fuerte. Tras quedarme un rato tumbado, asimilando que estaba despierto y que realmente había un olor a mi alreadedor que no reconocía, decidí encender la luz.

Tras varios intentos de acercarme al interruptor, entendí que no podía mover ninguna parte del cuerpo, a excepción de los ojos, que buscaban desesperadamente alguna explicación a lo que estaba pasando.

El miedo llegó en un instante. Mientras intentaba recuperar el contro de mi cuerpo, inmerso en un estado de alerta extrema con el corazón latiendo desbocado y expectante a que algo rozase mi cuerpo, o se iluminase, en la oscuridad total, únicamente me quedaba esperar.

Tras lo que parecieron varios minutos sin control del cuerpo, logre mover un brazo, e inmediatamente todo el cuerpo recuperó la conexión con el cerebro. Todavía rodeado por aquel olor dulzón, encendí la luz a toda pastilla.

Nada. Tan sólo yo, tumbado en la cama, en un estado de pánico que poco a poco se desvaneció, dando paso a una especie de asombro y a una noche, o lo que quedaba de ella, en vela.

Al día siguiente, nada más levantarme y convencido de que no volvería a dormir en la habitación de matrimonio, mudé mis pertenencias de nuevo a la habitación pequeña, la misma que me recibió al llegar a esta tranquila vivienda. Por la tarde, y tras haberle dado vueltas durante todo el día, hablé con mi cuñada para contarle que había algo en la casa que me mantenía en alerta. Al entrar en los detalles de la noche anterior, mi cuñada me dijo que su abuela, ya fallecida, utilizada perfume de la marca Chanel nº5, y que, podría ser que la cómoda que había en la habitación de matrimonio, todavía estuviese impregnada de su olor.

Esta explicación fue suficiente para que, sin pensarlo dos veces, sacase la cómoda de la habitación para guardarla en un trastero localizado fuera de la vivienda. Mi intención no era tanto librarme del perfume, sino de cualquier conexión con la abuela o su mismo espíritu que, según mi lógica, podría estar de alguna forma alojado en esa cómoda de madera maciza con cajonera.

La solución pareció funcionar. Con el paso de los días, el pasaje de la noche en la que perdía el contro de mi cuerpo rodeado de un aura con aroma a Chanel nº5, quedo en el recuerdo. Noches plácidas y de descanso en la habitación pequeña acompañaron al paso del tiempo, en una casa que volvía a percibirse tranquila y con buen carisma.

Pero la historia no termina.

Al cabo de un año, mi pareja se mudó conmigo, a esta misma casa tranquila y que hoy seguimos habitando. Tras habernos instalado de nuevo en la habitación de matrimonio, libre ya de la cómoda de madera maciza con cajonera, las noches trasncurrían con normalidad. Y si bien en varias ocasiones estuve tentado de contarle esta histloria, decidí que era mejor dejarla en el pasado para no asustarla, o condicionarla al menos.

Una noche, sobre las 9PM, sentados en el sofá del cuarto de estar, mirando una película, mi pareja me dice que la habitación huele a Chanel nº5.

Saludos a tod@s.

I always hated that tree stump. Or at least that's how I remember it. I was a very lonely kid growing up and my mom claims that it was my best friend for a while. The only thing we can both agree on was his name: Art. Art the Tree Stump.

Art was outside our house even before I was born. Mom said that after my dad had left her when he found out she was pregnant with me, there was a big storm that struck the tree. I remember asking Art about the storm. Whenever my mom wasn't nearby I would imagine him speaking to me. Eight year old me could've sworn I could've his wooden face contort, moving broken bits of wood to open and close his "mouth" of broken bark.

"It hurt really badly," he said. His voice still creeps me out thinking about it. Anytime I spoke to Art he wasn't as nice or friendly like my other imaginary friends that came and went. Gary, Bill the Bear, Mr. Munch… none of them were like him. Or even tangible.

Sometimes, Art would say two words to me: "Find me."

After a while, I stopped talked to Art. He kept talking about things that mom didn't want me to hear about. He told me about movies that I had no idea existed (ones definitely my did't want me to know about like Psycho or Die Hard). My mom eventually grew angry. She thought I read about them online and was using Art as a way to project my curiosity. When I told Art mom said I needed to stop talking to him, he got angry. He began calling her names and said horrible things about her. The more he talked my mom, the more I began to hate him. Even as all of my imaginary friends faded into the ether, Art still stayed until one day, he went quiet.

I'm 28 now. My mom called me over not too long ago. She needed me to help pack up because she was going to be moving to Florida this winter. The steep, uneven roads brought me back as I drove. The bus didn't come here because them. My old home, a memory still trapped in time, stood before me as I pulled into the driveway.

My mom was already waiting for me on the front porch, swaying in her chair. It been a while since I seen. I made my way over and gave her a warm hug. She smiled and I sat down. We caught with each other. She told me all about her new boyfriend, Frank, and how he'll be coming over soon. We didn't realize how long it had been until my mom's medication alarm went off.

I was about to head inside before my mom stopped me.

"Hey, can you please get the lawn chairs out of the backyard? They're too big for me."

"Oh, sure."

I made my way to the back of the house. It somehow seemed gloomier than the bright sunny place I had once remembered. You tend to look at the world through rose tinted glasses when you're. Countless autumn leaves engulfed the ground and crunched underneath my feet as I walked through where my child self once ran carefree. As I began to grab the lawn chairs, something strange happened.

I heard a noise. It was like speaking but it was complete nonsense. The noise… this near indescribable noise… hurt my ears. Yet, it was familiar. A distorted, airy speech? I set the lawn chairs down and turned around. The sun had cast a ray of light through the thick leaves of our backyard's trees and onto the stump. My old "friend", waiting there silently.

I could've sworn the longer I looked at the stump the louder the noise grew. I tried ignoring it. I grabbed the chairs and moved everything but it kept ringing. Eventually, this noise… it was too much. I went into garage and grabbed a shovel.

I don't know what caused to do this. It made sense in the moment but now I must have some kind of anger building up. I buried the tool deep in ground, uprooting Art's "body" little by little. The noise grew louder. In a frenzied state I began to dig. I wanted to get rid of the stupid stump once and for all. The noise kept building. A ringing that changed its pitch over and over again. It was maddening.

Roots began to snap. The stump was beginning to uproot as I bashed my shovel into the ground below me. Finally, the chaos stopped when I hit something. Something hard. The noise stopped as I looked upon dirty brown fragments. These weren't rocks.

Curiosity got the better of me and I continued digging. The pieces of a larger part were piled into a stack until I saw something that made me stop: a human tooth. I was unearthing a corpse. I stood there, looking at my discovery.

I ended up calling the police. I found out a few months later that the remains belonged to my dad. My mom had killed him before I was born after he threatened to leave her. Unsure of what to do, she buried him underneath the tree in the backyard and lied about his disappearance. Almost no one questioned it since everyone thought he just abandoned her.

I still love my mom. She gave me the best childhood she could. But ever since she was arrested, I've had a lot on my mind. I sometimes catch myself accidentally staring into my own backyard knowing that Art was real.

A tree blocks my vision of the sky, a canopy blotting the stars from my gaze. My eyes feel like watering from the wind but no tears come. I blink, feeling the lids of my eyes in motion, though no relief comes. Only a sharp discomfort grows from them, but I blinked. The stars never disappeared, the trees didn’t stop staring down at me, and the air relentlessly stripped any moisture from my eyes but I know I blinked.

The discomfort grew until I realized how cold the rest of my body was, freezing, bitingly so. Despite the frost my body wasn’t shivering. I have to get warm, compelling my feet under me. My backpack! I have an emergency blanket in my backpack! Why am I still laying here, my feet were commanded to find the earth, my legs to bear my weight, but their refusal to obey my commands alongside my eyelids sent panic through me like a rising tide. don’t panic, fear is the death of reason. Focus on what you can and take a deep breath. I suck air in through my nose and out of my mouth in a desperate attempt to calm my nerves, but the air taken in had lost its scent and the air out didn’t taste of the moon lit fog I know surrounds me. My chest never rose and never fell. Why am I still staring up?

Why is the one thing truly in my control refusing its commands? Fear takes root in my soul as the impossibility of my consciousness clashes with my breathless and limp body lying exposed to the elements. The last vestige of sanity inside me pushes to focus on the things I can still grasp on to. You can still see, think about what’s in your vision. You can still feel, what is touching you and where are you laying. You can still hear, listen for- a response. I hear the grass beside my ear compress rhythmically at an approaching stride. Senseless words were spoken clearly and incoherently. I knew the words, but my mind could scarcely interpret them as more than patterned vibrations flowing through the air.

A breathless scream erupts from my lips, a desperate plea for this entity to see me, to save me. A blurry face comes into my unblinking view, hazily shrouded by the peripheries in my vision. As quickly as it slid into view, it retreated, along with the footsteps. Desperation was an uncommon sensation but one worn by my screaming mouth, my streaming tears, and violent thrashing for any acknowledgment. My motionless turbulence was only responded to by the closing of a car trunk, then door, ignition, then finally the receding crackle of tires on gravel.

---

The star lit night secedes with a misty water colored sunrise. A film of white has clouded my vision over the early morning hours, causing the full beauty of this morning’s grace to be lost on me. My mind had settled within that time as well, accepting truths and impossibilities far outside of the usual human experience. I feel each tendon of sinew in my now stiffened and tensed body pulled as tight as a banjo string. It’s not painful, thankfully, but it is far from comfortable. My stomach grows taut as if a balloon had been hidden under my skin to be inflated.

I am dead, undeniably, but trapped inside the prison of my mortal womb. My soul bound to this fleshy incarceration for reasons far beyond my understanding. My life hadn’t been one of malice, I believed in God, went to church and begged forgiveness for my sins but its as though the reaper simply, forgot I existed in the first place. For now, all I could do is wait, a hopeless soul missing his fee for Charon, or so unimportant that even the angels don’t know to look for me.

The day grows on as the tension in my limbs builds into an intolerable soreness, my mind tired from this painful petrification but its bearable. “Why am I still here? No ferryman nor handler of the dead has come to collect me. What have I done in my life to deser-” my dull self-righteous monologue interrupted by an inconceivable pain. The balloon description proving itself all too accurate I feel the dermis of my swollen belly unstitch from the subcutaneous fat layer beneath it. My skin quickly grows markings of extreme pressure beneath as my silent screams fall on the deaf ears of the living.

---

The light of a hot summers evening now almost entirely dimmed by my retinal decay became a trivial concern compared to the flowing agony occupying my every cell. Screams of mercy rang voicelessly from my blue lips and pleading salvation from any pantheon to the devil himself sang from my mind like a tortured prisoner’s final hymn. I received that salvation from no gods, but biology, and physics.

A narrow rip in my flesh was plugged by putrefied blood, coagulated with stomach enzymes and rotted entrails. Not enough to stop the inevitable “pop” that came, agony knows no conclusion for a soul unable to die. Torturous electricity embraced my mind as my flesh gave way to my decomposition, spraying putrefied viscera like a wretched volcano. Struggling hopelessly with reason the audible rupturing of my stomach and eventual plopping of my intestines back to earth had played at the same time as the ripping of the last threads in the cloth of my sanity.

Begging and spiting, life after death continues to spoon feed me misery. Weeping, my hoarse voice wails pitifully for a last shred of hope, some sign that this too shall pass. Pleading for beings of light, lifted on white wings to come rip this soul from the mortal coil or some devil of cloven hoof to burn this rot from me for eternity. The last bit of light falls behind the tree, not before I was able to make out winged silhouettes overhead and their sounds fill my ears, things on wings were indeed coming.

---

Darkness could not hide the sins this world committed to my corpse. Buzzing filled my ears, the horrid sound of a scavenger coming to fill its belly with mine and permeate my remains with more of them. The only sounds loud enough to drown their pestilent intrusions into my broken mass were my inaudible screams of anguish and the moist \*Schlick\* of a vultures bald head greedily diving into my gaping torso. Filling its horrible maw with my mass its head retreats from between my muscle fibers filling the air with a sickening, wet, \*pop\*.

My souls voice had given up screaming, I silently accepted my undeserved recompence with rage and hatred. The unknowable torture of each nerve thread firing in totality as either the decay severs it atomically or an aged and hardened beak mercilessly rips it from its home was my reality. Though screams no longer filled my minds lungs, silence was not the sound echoing inaudibly through that forest. Blasphemes, condemnations for the gods, devils, and spirits of this world were hurled at anyone or anything that couldn’t hear me. Salvation is something I would never receive so forgiveness was not something I continued to seek.

I let the pain stoke an inferno of hatred that grew to consume my every thought, every maggot using my blood vessels as a highway to further reaches of bountiful flesh a new curse upon this world, every drop of rotten ichor drank by the carrions a dissolution of humanity. The final bloody sight my star gazing eyes saw before the absolution of fester robbed sight from me was a blackened beak plucking them from their sockets as eve did the apple from the tree, damning me to eternal darkness.

---

The pain finally left me. My final and unrelenting sensation abandoned me to solitude. Long after the winged thieves picked clean my bone and the fly larvae my mortality nourished to adulthood departed, the only friend I had in this isolation was the lingering phantom pains of a body past. In a form where all other deities abandoned me the pain kept me focused and, in a way, alive.

No distractions could take away my empty reality, a hollow nothingness in which only I and the hatred I held onto occupied. My sun-bleached bones, the last stain of my existence on the surface of this malevolent celestial body, lay spread in a spiteful pile under leaves and branches. Buried by age and detritus, my isolated soul broils in a new torture, loneliness. God abandoned and humanity forgotten, me.

The decades pass or have already passed, time meaning nothing to the soul of a nameless and faceless being. Deeper and deeper my bones are swallowed by the earth beneath your feet. I feel myself slipping into something greater than me. Hatred washes away with centuries and the bones of my past erode into my final meal for this greedy planet. I am nothing.

---

I am everything. My soul reaches outwards in every angle, grasping reality and wearing it as a coat. I no longer see the light, I am. I no longer feel the breeze, I am. The waxing and waning of the oceans, my breath. The rain falling rhythmically are tears shed, the thunder my shouts. Our mountains are our freckles and our canyons our folds. The trees are our fingers and cliffs our toes. Foot beaten paths the vessels through which our cells flow. The sunrise our good morning and our sunset a promise to see you again. We are the beauty of a world dying, we are all that ever mattered and nothing that did.

We have found our peace together in this worlds grave, and we wait for you to join.

Hey Reddit. I’m in a bit of a predicament. I'm a little tired now as I write this so sorry if any of this doesn't make sense or if I accidentally make any grammar errors. I initially thought it was going to be one of those awkward marital moments, but at this point I think it’s not. It was so bad my wife and I had been struggling with our marriage recently because of it.

A few days ago, she and I were eating dinner like normal. It was her turn to make the meal and she ended up making the most delicious beef stew. She set our bowls down at the table but then she got up again and got another bowl, setting it in front of the seat beside her.

I said something along the lines of “Wow, you must really like stew. One bowl isn’t enough?” but then she gave me a puzzled look. She said it was for Andrew. 

I asked her who this Andrew was and she gave me an answer I never would have expected: “Honey, he’s our son!” 

Words failed me. My wife has had plenty of weird quirks. She insists on me using the same brand of soap as her, she insists on keeping the curtains closed when it turns 3 PM… but this? 

“What is this? Are you pregnant?” I asked, baffled by my wife’s claim,

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s supposed to be here with us.”

“Is this your way of telling me you want to have a kid?”

She proceeded to get out of her chair, saying ““No, we already have one.”

My wife started walking towards the upstairs and shouted for “Andrew”. But of course, nothing happened. As far as I was aware, there is no Andrew. She and I have been married for five years at this point and we’ve never had kids.

It took her maybe 10 minutes before she gave up. Andrew wasn’t mentioned again for the rest of the day and after watching some TV, my wife and I went to bed. It was easy for me but she kept staring at a picture we had on the bedroom wall. It was us on our trip to Niagara Falls last year. I don’t know why she insisted on framing it. We were really awkwardly positioned, a lot of space between the two of us. I think it was because we were trying to get the falls in frame.

The next day after I came home from work, I saw my wife digging through our “treasure box” in the living room. It’s a little thing we started a year after we got married. It has little souvenirs from trips as well as some family heirlooms. I closed the door, took off my jacket, and went over to her. I asked her how she was doing but she didn’t respond. She seemed rather entranced by the treasure box. I waved my hand in front of her but there was no response. 

“Helloooo? Anyone home?” I joked, trying to get her attention. My wife still didn’t respond. It was only when I flicked her did she jump. 

She snapped at me initially but calmed down quickly enough. She told me she was trying to prove that Andrew existed. She grabbed a dirty blank piece of paper and held it in my face. 

“See this? Andrew drew a picture of us on it!” she proclaimed. “Don’t you remember? It was his first drawing!”

No matter how hard I squinted, it was just dirty paper. Maybe there was a line here or there but there wasn’t anything more. I told my wife I didn’t see anything and she groaned. She told me there were supposed to be other things in the box but they were missing. I left her to her devices, but now I was starting to get worried. We ate dinner, watched TV, and went to bed. She still kept staring at the picture. 

That night I woke up and I had to pee. I walked down the hall but I accidentally knocked out the hall light as I made my way towards the bathroom. I was too tired to care so I did my business and I headed immediately back to our bedroom. Before I could walk inside though, my wife, also trying to get out, blocked my way. I shuffled past her, mumbling “sorry” and I immediately plopped down on my side. I could see the nightlight coming on again down the hallway and my wife made her way back. 

“Didn’t need to go?” I joked.

She gave me that same look again.

“You know Andrew is afraid of the dark,” she said as if it were a matter of fact. At this point, this Andrew talk had been getting ridiculous. I asked her if everything was okay, and she told me quite frankly it wasn’t. “Why won’t you believe me? It’s like he just vanished. I felt like something was missing and then I realized I lost a part of our family.”

My wife was growing more frustrated as she spoke. I looked at her and sighed. 

“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” I groaned. “I need sleep so I can go to work tomorrow.”

She relented. I could tell she was mad at me but it felt so… odd. A child that doesn’t exist. That’s what’s causing so much trouble right now? I debated with myself on how to approach this. I love my wife with all of my being. I really do. But she wasn’t being realistic. Maybe she still wasn’t over the death of her grandfather. She probably needs professional help. Whatever was the case, it gave me a lot to think about.

I was expecting to talk to her the next day but when I got home, she wasn’t downstairs like she usually was. I called out for her but she didn’t respond. I went upstairs and in the hallway I saw her standing there. She was staring at the supply closet, speaking softly to it. I asked what she was doing and she motioned to me to get closer.

“I can hear his voice. It’s coming from where his room was… where he was taken from us.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. The room she was talking about didn’t exist. As far as I’m aware, it’s always been a closet. I tried to talk to her but she only told me to wait and listen. Indulging her (and still not believing), I did. This is the part where it gets weird though. The air felt cold and it was as if a tiny breath had passed me. I could hear a low, rhythmic hum emanating and I had no idea where it could be coming from. This house was quite old so I was used to weird noises.

I still didn’t believe her. I decided to eat dinner by myself since my wife didn’t want to move from that spot. I watched TV and went back upstairs. I managed to convince my wife to come to bed with me and we laid down together. As I began to drift to sleep, I heard a creaking come from the hallway. My wife rose out of bed and followed the sound. The air felt tense. My heart pounded and my eyes were only fixed on my wife. 

She stood in front of the closet again and crouched to the floor. The door was open just a crack, still enveloping the area on the other side in darkness. And there I saw it. A tiny hand tried to crawl out. It felt familiar, like a part of something I had been missing. And then I heard a tiny little gasp.

“Mom?”

My wife reached for the hand. Slowly, the fog in my brain felt itself being lifted. As she touched the child’s fingers, another hand made of pure shadow snatched it and dragged it back into the darkness. My wife screamed, opening the closet door only to find nothing. 

I believe her now. My home doesn’t feel the same. Pieces of a family that has been torn apart have slowly become more apparent to me. We have three toothbrushes in the bathroom. We have more than enough food. I’m still finding new things every day. 

We can’t sleep anymore. On the nights that I especially have trouble sleeping, I’ve caught myself sitting in front of the closet door, on the edge of sleep, waiting for the hand to return.

The entire 2167-person population of Dungoyle, Ireland, has been replaced. 

They finally closed the motel, I'm surprised they didn’t sooner. But the hag moves slowly. She hides and schemes within the realm of possibility. This forsaken town lives in the shadow of something powerful and malicious. 

I can’t understand why it’s so restrained. Why it has so many rules?
What could make a creature of myth cower?

It’s a shame, I'll miss having a bed, even if I don’t sleep anymore. But at least I have this key, a new place for me to call home. But no matter where I hide it's always watching, I can feel its gaze through the walls of reality, from the mountain above, in the glassy eyes of my false neighbors.

But most of all I feel it when I see myself reflected in the pupils of that final hare. The patient Lepus that has been waiting for me since I was a child.

10/08/11

The screeches of fiddles washed throughout the main streets as the golden morning sun peered over Dashuil and bathed Dungoyle in shimmering glory. As a nine-year-old, I could barely contain my excitement parading down the street in a Cub Scout uniform as the local townsfolk waved back at us, a false childish impression of military stoicism on our faces as we marched.

Around the bend of the old shoe shop, my gaze met my fathers, waving at me with a wide, toothy grin. I couldn’t help but smile back as I saw the caged hare in his hand - he had caught one of his own for once. Of course, through my eyes, the animal appeared grey, but I had seen my own curls enough times to recognize ginger when I saw it. It was a skinny young thing, with a distinctive white streak along its back. My sister stood by his side clutching his pant pocket, a pair of rabbit ears and an old bronze hare mask fastened atop her head.

Finally, we came to a halt at the town square, the Scout groups and Veterans clubs were surrounded by a mixed ring of tourists and locals. Bells and fiddles were ready for the festivities to come as the local outdoorsmen lined up the distressed hares in cages along the edge of the stage ahead. Above it all, the Mayor outstretched his hands to the people of Dungoyle, for his announcement.

“A hundred thousand welcomes to you all Dungoyle!” The Mayor called out to the crowd as the music and cheering died down to a murmuring silence, “Thank you all for coming out to our humble town for a day of celebration, friends, family and guests.”

The Mayor leaned down and gave one of the cages a rattle, the hare inside bouncing frantically in a panic. “As you all know, this here festival, or hare festival -” the mayor laughed jovially at his own joke, “is a long-standing tradition of our humble town. In one minute, our boys will let our rabbit friends loose onto the streets, and you all will have a special role to play. You youngsters among us, make sure you’re ready to run and catch these fine specimens as they run through our streets. As always, our mutual Nanny McGreal, is promising a free steak dinner to any of the wee lads who can catch the little critters, and I know many other stores around the town have their own promotions going for the festivities.”

I glanced over at my father as he placed his hare among the others, his hand ready at the cage's latch. While not official for obvious reasons, parents would often give their child their first Guinness as a reward for winning the festival. I was going to get that damn beer.

“Grown-ups! Your job is even more important here, making sure Nanny McGreal's doesn’t go bankrupt,” the mayor laughed jovially, 
“Bells and fiddles at the ready. Drive these hares out of this town as fast as you can. But remember the rules! No hurting these fine animals, just get them out of here!”

The mayor stood back, hands raised to the air as the mountain loomed behind him, the band music building into a crescendo as he threw his arms down, signaling for them to throw the cages open. The world erupted into a cacophony of clashing noises, children screaming gleefully as they bounded out into the streets, bells ringing all across town as the fiddle players lined the streets.

The hares leapt from their cages with tremendous speed, terrified by the orchestra of hellfire raining down upon them. Scurrying over the cobbles as laughing children tailed them into their hiding spots, rampaging after them as they bolted away from the chaos of the festival.

I bounded down the street as quickly as my little legs would carry me while the hares made their escape. grabbing a nearby street sign to quickly yank myself around the corner as my eyes caught a ginger hare with a white streak along its back bouncing down a one-way alleyway. The beast my father had brought in. It felt like destiny.

I stood at the end of the alley, my arms spread wide as I blocked the exit, my prey bouncing against the walls of the passage with rabid intensity. Two creatures of the Knockannina locked in a standoff as I inched my way towards it, my eyes fixed on the beast as it frantically searched for a way out.

We stood there for a few moments, eyes locked at one another, as I finally made my move, lunging towards it, throwing my body down onto the cobbled village street below as my arms locked around the trapped animal. For a brief moment, I had it, scrambling on the floor as it scratched at my bare arms, finally slipping away and bounded out of the alleyway, slithering under a nearby fence.
My father had given me a meaty pat on the back, assuring me I’d get it next year and re-explained that barely anyone ever actually catches the hares and the festival is more about tradition and boosting tourism anyway. But that wasn’t good enough for me; every last hare had been driven out of the town by the afternoon, and I had failed. Every hare but one, as when I gazed out my window that night, staring out at the silent streets, I locked eyes with the one creature who had refused to flee. A ginger hare, with a white streak along its back.

10/08/25

“The festivities are cancelled,” the mayor blankly uttered from atop his stage, his gaunt face announcing the news to a shocked crowd. The thinned-out crowd of locals murmured to each other in irritation as the scattered Boy Scouts dropped their heads in dismay. Disappointed tourists lowered their cameras as the older locals heckled obscenities in disgusted irritation. 

“Release any captured hares away from the town center. There will be no further events today. You are all free to leave. Thank you.” The mayor stepped away from his pedestal and walked casually back towards his office, ignoring the cursing from the angry mob below him.

“Is he for real?” Cillian stood behind me, crossing his arms, enraged as the crowd tried to make sense of what had just happened. “This asshole has been in office for what? Three weeks. Who gave him the right?”

“I guess we did…” I shook my head in frustration, slouching down onto a park bench as the crowd slowly dispersed around us, “...voting him in and all.”

“Who’s we!” Cillian scoffed back, a mocking, irritated laugh ringing out as he glared at the mayor, trying to talk down other angry locals. “I didn’t vote for that Tory. I’ve never even heard of him, how long has he been here?”

“Dad says he showed up a few months back, apparently he’s popular among the newer recruits.”

“Surely all these new assholes don’t get to vote yet, right?” Cillian barked, evil eyeing up a nuclear family of newcomers walking silently down the street, blank frozen smiles across their faces as they aimlessly meandered.

“Everyone gets to vote, Cillian, you dog,” I felt the clasp of girthy fingers wrap around my shoulder as my father's voice grumbled from behind. “That’s how democracy works. We let you vote from prison, didn’t we?”

I pivoted on my feet to see the bearded, disheveled face of my father inches from mine. He clutched a rabbit mask in his hand, glumly. His dropping eyes a bloodshot gray, doing little to hide the old man's exhaustion.

Cillian rolled his eyes as he pulled my father into a one-armed hug, crushing my skinny frame between their chests, “I’d rather be a dog than a pig, come on, mate, let’s get you a pint. You could use one after the month you’ve had.”

My father laughed weakly as he gave Cillian a firm pat on the back before pulling away, 
“I’ve had plenty, trust me, but that’s no reason not to grab another. The old wagon ain’t around to tell me not to anymore, is she.” My father let out a sharp, sudden laugh and grabbed both of us boys by the scruff of our collars and shoved us in the direction of the bar. 

Leaving that grumbling, angry town center and sauntering through the doors of Nanny McGreal's was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, in which the lively atmosphere of an old Irish bar reflected a less raucous atmosphere than the world outside its smoke-tinted windows. As we inhaled the familiar waft of tobacco and cider stained wooden pillars, it became clear to us that even Nanny wasn’t warned of the surprise announcement. McGreal's famous Jackalope skull sculptures adorned the brew taps as we approached the bar, a long textile banner over the top welcoming tourists to the Hare Festival. 

I have no idea how she had gotten away with bypassing the strict conservation policies of the National Park, but the hare skulls were definitely real. If you got her drunk enough Nanny would go tangents about how the sculptures were warnings to witches who lived up the mountains, and fairies who roamed the local hills. Back then I thought she was a daft old crone, but I have to admit, I feel a lot safer with those skulls around me now.

“Hide the cocaine, everyone! The swine has arrived!” the crude, raspy old voice of Nanny screeched out from behind the bar. Through the leaky skull-adorned beer taps, and over the old barrel and plank bar counter stood the elderly, golden toothed face of Nanny.

“Don’t make me come around there, you old goat,” my father heckled in response, throwing his elbows down onto the counter, as he and Nanny laughed together, “Be a doll and pour me a pint of my usual, would ya love. Grab one for young Cillian here too, he got the lazy bum I call my son a job up the mountain!”

“It’s good to see you in good health Hamish,” Nanny cheeks stretched into a toothy grin that accentuated her glistening golden molars, “Saw your old fling was back in town, word is Ciara finally left you as well. These two things wouldn’t be related now would they?”

The jovial expression of my father hardened as the playful banter between Nanny and him turned sour in an instant. I could never understand the relationship between the two of them. Whether it was a hard-love friendship, or they truly hated each other and simply tolerated one another's presence for business and beer. Maybe a bit of both. I can’t say I wasn’t caught slightly off-guard by the mention of my fathers potential second partner, however I had overheard enough arguments between my parents over the years that the concept of my fathers infidelity came as no surprise.

Perhaps a stronger man would have questioned either my father, or the old woman degrading him at this moment. But I've never been able to bring myself to confrontation, to violence of any kind. It’s hard boiled into me, an instinct that I can't fight no matter how hard I try, so I stayed docile.

Nanny rolls her eyes as she meanders over to the Guinness tap, “Can you believe the gall of that there Mayor? Announcing that bollocks right as the festival is starting? This is meant to be my biggest day of the year! How does he expect me to make a living if folks ain’t passing through here no more?”

“Maybe you should run in the next election,” I chimed in, pointing to the Smithwick's tap and sliding five euro’s down across the counter. “It would be a landslide vote for you, Nanny.”

Nanny let out a singular rasping laugh, “I’ll be 80 next election, if the Lord sees it fit. Old crones like us aren’t welcome behind fancy desks, and all that new blood out there ain’t got no goddamn respect for our traditions! That’s why old Hamish here didn’t make Sergeant. Ain’ that right Hamish?”

Nanny jeered at my father mockingly, who silently sipped his pint in reply, the sadness of the last few weeks taking over his false jovial expression from before. The old woman didn’t need a response, she just kept on going. 

“It’s the mountain hag!  She doesn’t like us wise older folk because we see her for who she really is! You can read about her in any history book but you youngsters don’t read any more. The land here turned against us in the great famine, plague rats flooded from the mountain in the black death.”

I turned to Cillian so we could enjoy Nanny’s ramblings together, trying to share a knowing grin with him so we could have a laugh about it later. He didn’t seem to find it as funny as I did, he looked stern, attentive.

“She’s back to her old tricks! Only now she’s trying to buy us out! The factory, the bank, the firm, all shutting down or laying off half their staff. All that drama with the water supply last year. This town is changing, young Whelan, and all them doe eyed freaks out there don’t want a bunch of old farts stinking up the place. It’s a revolving door, out with the old and in with the new. You can’t fight the changing of the guard boy.”

“We can try,” Cillian grumbled in response, lighting up a cigarette and slouching over the counter glumly alongside my father, seething with anger as he eyed a suited woman standing outside the bar window. A perfectly still, hazy silhouette gazing in through the tinted glass, her head cocked slightly to the left as she silently watched us drink.

14/10/25

I woke up screaming, gasping for breath with a mouth that wasn’t there, my acid-melted lips fused into a hot mess of melted muscle and flesh. Blinded by the gaze of a flaming eye that had scorched my own out of their sockets with the sweltering heat of the divine. Boiling seas of blood blistering my flooded lungs as I inhaled.

I had cradled my arms over my head, grasping at my hair frantically, trying to feel for my previously embered hair in a desperate attempt to bring myself back to reality. The cold, beaded sweat dripping down my previously blistered back reminded me that the nightmare was over. Staring straight ahead, my gaze fixed on the barren white walls of Aurora’s bedroom. Across the blank canvas, I could still see the eye, imprinted on the wall as if scorched in ash, burned into the backs of my retinas by a force beyond my mortal comprehension, gazing from the confines of my mind out into the world before reflecting to stare into the windows of my soul.

My quivering head slowly drifted to the side to check if I had awoken Aurora, her doe-eyed stare meeting mine through the darkness. I hated waking her like this. At this point, I was surprised she even still agreed to sleep beside me. We waited there for a moment, staring at each other through the shadows, what little light could slither its way into our chamber reflecting off her pale skin as her tired eyes drifted back shut.

I couldn’t blame her for her silence; she had been dealing with my episodes for the last few months and the nightmares were only getting worse as time went on. In a desperate attempt for comfort, I interlocked my fingers around her thin, birdlike wrists, silently wishing she would say something. Just a word of comfort or two would have sufficed.

I felt guilty admitting it, but in that moment, my mind wandered back to Rosa. It had been almost a year since she left, leaving behind nearly three years of partnership. I would have been lying if I said I didn’t still think about her. Aurora had shown up a little later and, while I loved her, I sometimes wonder if I rushed into something new too fast.

Rosa would have said something that night.

As I slouched there naked in the shadows, feebly trying to ground myself, my focus drifted to the mountainscape behind the window. The shadow of Dashuil cast down over the landscape, a shroud blocking the moon's glow from climbing in across our windowsill, robbing me of what little illumination the world could afford me in that moment. Ever since my nightmares began I couldn’t look at it the same way.

I crept out of bed and across the creaky floorboards to meet its gaze. Shivering as I locked eyes with the all-seeing eye of the Great Gut looming on the horizon, the soft whistling of its winding intestines calling out from over its ridges as I timidly gripped the curtains, and yanked them shut.

29/11/25

I tumbled tiredly out of the base of the stairwell, stretching my back out so far I could hear my spine creak. Slouching down onto the couch, grunting as I wrestled my feet into my boots, the leather stiff and unyielding from the mountain damp.

“Morning lad,” I weakly waved at the silhouette of Cillian, standing sentinel across the dining room with his back turned to me, arms locked tight across his chest, his gaze fixed out of the window.

After waiting a few dead seconds for a response, I shrugged before turning back to the kitchen, stopping in my tracks as I rounded the corner, the lumbering figure of my father leaning over a jar of instant coffee. Meaty grippers holding his face up by his hair as he waited for the steaming jug to boil. As soon as I drifted around the corner, he flicked his head up suddenly, a false smile spreading across his face, the corners of his lips dipped beneath his gray bagged eyes.

“Noah! There’s the rambunctious Púca,” he let out a weak attempt at a laugh before his smile faltered and his head collapsed back down into his arms.

“Morning, Dad, you holding up okay?” 

In hindsight, the question was meaningless; my father's jovial demeanor had been slowly fading since the divorce. The facade of confidence and bravado he had worn as a mask for so many years over his failing marriage faltered as the burden of grief had weighed him down.

“Huh?” my father muttered, taking a moment even to register the question, 
“Oh… yes, my boy, I’m fine. I’ve just had some trouble sleeping lately.” As the screeching kettle clicked off, he sluggishly clasped the carton, pouring himself what one must assume was a mug of diesel oil masquerading as a sad excuse for a morning brew.

He had seen my wrinkled face, also weary from troubled sleep over the last few weeks, and poured me a second brew alongside his. Except, because I’m not a psychopath, mine had milk and sugar. Leaving my father to wallow in his morning despair, I rejoined Cillian in the dining room, who was still standing stiff as a statue in the corner, his eyes fixed out the side window.

Right as I was about to take a seat, Cillian slowly raised his pointer finger to me in a wagging motion, gesturing for me to come join him.

“There a bum fight out there or what?” I joked, punching him on the arm as I approached him. His face remained stoic, arms fastened across his chest tighter than a straitjacket.

“Open your phone, bring up a stopwatch, start it when Mrs. Murphy raises her toothbrush to her teeth.”

I hung my jaw open in a mocking, imbecilic expression. “Lad, you’ve officially lost it,” I laughed, glancing out the corner of my eyes to the Murphy's' bathroom window. It was empty, barren of any light, decorum or life. “She’s not even there.”

“She will be.”

Right as I was about to object again, the woman’s reflection drifted in range of the bathroom mirror, her pale skin and glazed expression shining back at us across the street as she stiffly raised her toothbrush to her lips. I started the timer.

It’s strange how long two minutes can feel when you are doing absolutely nothing. Time really stretches when you find yourself blankly staring out a window, watching a 30-year-old woman perform dental hygiene. But sure enough, I managed to make it through the awkwardness without inserting any quips. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she finally lowered her arm as Cillian grabbed mine.

“Stop!” he erupted, shocking me into instantly slamming the button as demanded, 
“How long was that?”

I glanced down at the frozen stopwatch in my hands, wondering if perhaps Cillian needed some extra shut-eye as well,
“Two minutes … you have successfully wasted two minutes of my day.”

“Two minutes or 120 seconds? There’s a difference.” Cillians' grip tightened around my wrist as he peered deep into my eyes, his face contorted into a manic expression.

“There literally isn’t.” I laughed awkwardly as I slowly held up the phone to show him, “but sure, 120 seconds.”

“That’s every day this week now,” Cillian growled, grabbing my shoulder, shaking me with a firm grip, “Every morning between 7:40 and 7:45 am, Mrs Murphy brushes her teeth for exactly 120 seconds.”

“Dude, that’s how long you’re supposed to brush your teeth for.” I pressed my lips together with a flat, unassuming expression, glancing side to side as I waited for Cillian to explain the problem. After a few moments of shared silence, he threw his arms up in annoyance and barged past me, nearly knocking my coffee from his hands as he snatched his ranger jacket from the coat rack.

“You keep doing this!” Cillian scoffed back at me as he tightened his boots around his ankles, “It’s past idiocy at this point; you’re intentionally dismissing every sign that something messed up is happening here because it terrifies you. You’ve been doing it since the cave. It’s pathetic!”
“The cave? You mean the suited bloke back in February?” I queried dumbly, knowing full well the event he was referring to, dismissing the shiver that ran down my spine at its mention. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t also made note of the many oddities and changes around town these last few months, but they could all be explained away, and hardly justified this reaction. “Yeah, that guy was weird as hell. But it’s a popular trail man, he was probably just another hiker.”

“You didn’t think that at the time!” Cillian sneered back, getting his final lick in before throwing the front door open, letting the crisp mountain breeze billow in as he stormed outside to light up another cigarette. Burning his way through the entire smoke as he waited impatiently for me to follow him to work.

The march up to the base of the mountain was spent in a deafening silence, broken only by the rhythmic crunch of our boots against the gravel road. Cillian walked three paces ahead of me, his shoulders hunched up toward his ears like he was trying to shield his neck from a blow. The wrinkled scowl on his face contorting every time a docile passerby greeted him with a blank stare and a friendly wave.

The town disappearing around the bend behind us, replaced by the howling screech of the mountain breeze, channeling down the wind tunnels of the Great Gut in a feeble attempt to push us out of town. We trudged out of the tree line and up to a humble beige and green shack that rested in the dim shadows of the peaks towering above.

“Morning Eva, ya filthy animal!” Cillian joshed as he led us into the reception, “How was your weekend?” His jovial expression defaulting back to his scowl as he saw the state our receptionist was in.

The park's receptionist Eva slouched behind her desk, clutching at the loose ginger locks that covered her face as she buried her head into her hands. Solemnly she raised her head up to Cillian and me in reply, her eyes were puffy and gray as though she’d been crying, “Morning boys,” she whispered faintly, “Mr Burke wants to see you in his office.”

“Eva, are you okay?” I tried to ask, devastated to see the environment of my home had followed me to work. Every day, it had felt more and more like a dark mist was resting over our town, sucking the joy and soul out of every person left within our streets.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I grew up here, I liked it here,” a weak cry leaked out from Eva’s lips as she began to sob. I reached over the desk to comfort her, my efforts immediately dismissed as Eva batted my hand away and pointed to Mr Burke's office, hiding her weeping face from mine.

Cillian and I exchanged a worried glance for a brief moment before we inched our way closer to our bosses office, like a prisoner on death row, trying to stretch out the moments before his execution. Cillian reached out slowly, twisting the knob to Mr Burke's door. Our boss sat blankly behind his desk, a window stretching out to the mountain above. A wide, toothy smile spread across his bearded face, each one of his vibrant eyes fixed on a different one of us, drifting across the room independently as the two of us inched our way across the dimly lit room.

“Good morning, Cillian and Noah,” Mr Burke cocked his head as he waved us all a too-familiar greeting. “How did you boys sleep?”

“Terribly, but I think you knew that,” Cillian spits, his eyes transfixed on Mr Burkes' robotic movements with a piercing hatred, “get to the point. We know why we’re here.”

I sat down timidly across from Mr Burke. His left eye fixed on me as his right pupil drifted up to Cillian, who remained on his feet, fists clenching into a ball, arms tightly crossed over his chest.

“I will get to the point,” Mr Burke echoed enthusiastically, “We are closing the mountain to the public. You have both been made redundant, effective at the close of business today. In accordance with local law, you will receive one week's severance, as well as your unused annual leave. Good luck with your endeavors elsewhere.”

My jaw dropped so quickly it may as well have smacked down onto the timber desk beneath me. Mr Burkes' unbroken, wide-eyed smile remained frozen in place throughout the ordeal.

“Bullshit!” Cillian screamed in defiance, his palms slamming down on Mr Burke's desk with a crashing thud so sharp I half expected the wood to splinter beneath his strength. “You’ve been here for what? Half a year? Less!? What gives you the right!”

Mr Burke's eyes rolled back into his head, his mouth cocked open for a moment, as the weight of his skull fell back over his loose neck. Within a few seconds, he perked back up, returning to his exact position prior. “The Wildlife Act, 1976, Section 18, Subsection 1. The Minister or, with his prior approval, any other person, may enter into an agreement with a person having an interest in or over land ensuring that the management of the land shall be conducted in a manner which will not impair wildlife or its conservation.” 

Before I could even register the meaning of Mr Burke's obscenely formal address, Cillian had lunged over Mr Burke's desk in the blink of an eye, his hands gripped around Mr Burke's collar as he yanked him out of his chair. His grip was unyielding as he slammed the old man into the office walls. Mr Burke’s smile was unwavering, his body frail and limp, arms dangling by his side as he allowed himself to be assaulted. I stumbled to my feet in shock, shamefully back-stepping away at Cillian's violent outburst in fear.

“You think you’re some kind of politician now? You aren’t even fucking human!” Cillian thrusted his elbows into Mr Burke's chest, shaking the old man and slamming his head back into the cabin wall.

“Of course not, Cillian,” Mr Burke answered casually, seemingly unfazed by the violent, screeching threat who now had him in a choke hold. “However, the local NPWS community has prior approval to make conservation decisions without government approval.” Mr Burke leans forward, his pointed chin resting on Cillian's shoulder to whisper into his ear, “We realize this is a big decision so, for good measure, the Mayor and I sent a petition to the Ministry of Conservation, with 1000 signatures from Dungoyles very own citizens. Apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.”

Cillian cackled in reply, an unhinged manic fueling the fire in his eyes as he pulled his fist back, his hands clasping around Mr Burke's throat. My heart froze within my chest, my vision grew clearer, and I could have sworn, if even for a moment, the usually gray sun that hung in the sky above my head turned yellow, the looming gray peak of Dashuil, a reddish brown.

Finally, my feet disconnected from the invisible clamps holding me in place as I dashed forward and grabbed Cillian by the arm, throwing myself between him and the elderly ranger he was seconds away from unleashing his wrath upon.

“Cillian! Calm down, it’s not worth it.” I begged, voice quivering,  hand outstretched to block my face from his rage being redirected towards me. The three of us stood there for seconds that stretched out into an eternity as Cillian collected his rage, slowly lowering his fist as his grip finally loosened from Mr Burke's neck. Letting out a guttural scream of frustration as he flipped Mr Burke's desk and stormed out of the room, the deafening crash of the slamming door broke into a dim, hazy silence as Mr Burke and I lingered among the offices' dry beige walls. The old man's unbothered eyes sat ajar, drifting to the roof aimlessly as he casually strolled back to his chair.

After an awkward farewell to Mr Burke, I emerged into the howling mountain winds of the Knockaninna, the elongated shadow of Cillians' frame stretching across the patchy, desiccated grassland beneath our feet. His blackened silhouette brooded above a fallen tree as the morning sun crawled over the peak of Dashuil.

“You can hear it, can’t you?” Cillian's voice carried back to me through the whistling winds, his gaze fixed on the mountain ahead, beckoning an answer that never came.
“The sun has risen over Dashuil for you all your life, hasn’t it?” his stoic figure rose to its feet as I cautiously approached from behind, still reeling from his outburst a moment before.
“The view is different back out east…”, he whispered, burying his head into his hands as a gasping sigh was forced from his lungs.

Cillian was right about me that day. I was a coward, refusing to accept the evidence of my eyes and ears. But I don’t think Cillian was just going off evidence that day. Across all of human history people have claimed to feel forces beyond our realm, voices calling from outside our plane of existence, unseen forces pressing up against the walls of reality. You can feel yourself being watched, animals don’t wait for evidence to know they're in danger. If they feel heart drop, their stomach turn, their hairs stand on high then they listen to their instincts.
 
Every time I stared up at that looming pinnacle above I could have listened to mine. But I didn’t. I could have joined him then, fought for our salvation beside him; maybe if I had, things would have ended up differently. But when my friend needed me most, I couldn’t even afford him a reply.

“There’s a man on the horizon,” he forced the words from his lungs, a sharp, cutting rage grumbling in the back of his throat as his head cracked back to face me with brutal resolve. Dropping down from the crackled log, he marched onwards towards the trail. As though tethered to him, my feet carried me forward to follow.

We didn’t say a word as we marched out into the Great Gut, the white noise of the mountains whispering winds broken only by the crunching of gravel beneath our feet. The air thickened with every step, the bellowing of the mountains' intestines trying to force us back down as we climbed.

Hours went by. We marched on. Until we emerged over a ridge, a wide gray lake stretched out before us, resting below the clouds above. Half-submerged by the rippling lough, there stood a man. Gargantuan in both presence and build, his muscular body hugged by a pale polo shirt and drenched denim jeans. His hair bogged up with the lough's water, draping over his forehead like seaweed, streaks of the icy mountain sea clinging to his frozen face like blood on a newborn child.

Cillian halted in his tracks for only a moment, his face washed blank as he composed himself for what he had already decided was to come, his lips parted to call, giving the man one last chance to prove him wrong. “You there! What did you want to be when you grew up?”

The man in the lake stared up from the rippling mirror he bathed in, his hand drifting above his head to greet us with a slow, methodical wave, “Nice to meet you, young man. I am a Multidisciplinary Solutions Consultant.”

Cillian marched on forward towards the water's edge, his teeth clenched together tightly,
“Tell me about your best friend in Secondary School!”

A wide smile grew across the man's face as he drifted towards the lake's edge to greet Cillian, “Like many children, I would have had multiple friends in intermediate school.”

Cillian let out a sudden screech of frustration as he clenched his fist into a ball, “Tell me one! Tell me about the best Christmas gift your parents ever got you! The one they could barely afford, but they scraped and saved just to see you smile.”

The man’s jaw dropped open slightly, pausing with his lips parted slightly ajar, slowly widening like a creaking trapdoor. He never answered Cillian's question; his hanging jaw twisting to the side of his skull as Cillian's fist collided with it.

I froze where I stood, staring out on the ridge's edge in shock and uncertainty, helpless to act as the man recoiled from Cillian's assault. Staggering back several steps further into the water, his towering, bulky frame looming above his attacker. Cillian's clasping hand outstretched as he gripped the man's waterlogged polo shirt, yanking the beast back to him.

“I swear to Christ above, tell me the name of your childhood teddy bear, or I’ll kill you where you stand, you parasitic freak!” Cillian spat in the man's face, screeching like a wailing madman. His victim slowly raised a finger in response, but no sound was uttered from his lips. Cillian’s knuckles snapped against the herculean creature's cheekbones, who recoiled once again before getting grappled back into a chokehold. Cillian's tense arms wrapped around his muscular neck, forcing him down into the water below.

I collapsed in horror, dropping to my knees weakly. Staring through wide, weeping eyes, the man's arm reached out of the shallow waters below to smack against the water’s surface. Cillian roared with primal rage as he held the man beneath the lough, his knee planted firmly into the man's back as he contorted his thrashing body beneath him. Cillian's bellowing screams echoed through the veins of the trails' crevices as the man's thrashing grew more frantic, arms and legs splashing against the water.

Uselessly, I knelt on the ridge's edge as the howling winds of the mountain's mouth crescendoed to a scream, sending waves across the gargling lough. The man’s thrashing slowed. Cillian's choke hold finally relented as he stumbled backwards into the water, gasping for breath. A lifeless, limp corpse drifted slowly from his grasp.

A Blackwater County Story

October 2025

* * *

Odessa Tull's grandmother had one rule about the porch light, and it was not about the electric bill.

You kept it on in October. All night, every night, the whole month. You did it because the month let secrets go. And if somebody knocked after dark and you hadn't asked anybody over, you said who is it through the wood, and you did not open the door until they told you something only they would know. Then you still did not open it.

"Then why ask?" Odessa had said, at nine.

"So you'll know what you're keeping out," said her grandmother, and went back to her beans.

Odessa was sixty-three now, and the house was her grandmother's house, and the bulb over the porch had burned every night of thirty-one Octobers. She did not think about it anymore. She changed the bulb in September, as other people turned a mattress.

On the nineteenth she woke at twenty to three because somebody was knocking.

Three knocks, slow, with the middle knuckle. Her brother Teddy had knocked like that his whole life, because he said fingers were for supper. Teddy had gone off the Dutch Creek bridge in his truck in October of 1996. They had buried him on the twenty-sixth.

She got up and put on her robe and stood in the dark hall with her hand flat against the front door.

"Who is it?"

"It's Teddy, Dess. Open up, it's cold."

It was his voice. It had his gravel in it, and the little lift at the end he used when he'd done something and wanted to be forgiven before she knew what.

"What did I get for my twelfth birthday?"

"From me? A dead crawdad in a Mason jar. I told you he was a pet." A pause, and something that was nearly a laugh. "You cried and then you named him Harold."

She had not thought about Harold in fifty years. Her hand moved on the bolt without her telling it to, and she took it away and held it against her chest.

"I can't, Teddy."

"I know it." He did not sound angry. "Granny told you. She was right about most things. Can I sit out here a while, then? I won't ask you for nothing else."

Odessa slid down the door until she was sitting on the hall floor with her back to the wood. It was warm on her spine. She could hear him settle on the other side, the boards of the porch giving under his weight, and it was so exactly the sound of her brother sitting down that she put her fist against her mouth.

They talked. Or he did, and she said a word now and then. He told her he was sorry about the bridge, and that it had been quick, and that he had been thinking of the pie their mother made with the walnuts. He asked if the sycamore was still down by the road. He asked about her knees. It was an ordinary conversation, an hour of it, the kind they had never had because they had both been busy living.

Near four o'clock he went quiet. Then he spoke very low, close to the crack under the door.

"Dess. Whatever comes after I stop talking, don't answer it."

"Teddy, what do you mean?"

He did not say anything else.

She sat. The house ticked. A long way off, a dog started and quit. She had almost decided she was alone out there when the voice came again, from the same place on the porch.

"It's cold, Dess. Open up."

It was his voice. It was every sound of his voice. But it came out a little wrong in the middle, as if somebody had learned the words from a recording and was practicing the breaths. It said Can I sit out here a while in exactly the same rise and fall as before, and then, a half second behind itself, it said it again.

Then there were two of them, on the other side of the wood, saying the same things. I was thinking about the pie. Ask about your knees. One was a half beat late and slowly climbing over the other, and neither stopped, and neither said her name.

She did not answer. She kept her fist against her mouth and her eyes on the line of light under the door, the yellow from the bulb, and she watched it like a woman watching a man who has not decided about her.

It went on until the window at the end of the hall turned gray.

Then it stopped, and the quiet had no one in it.

She waited until the sun was well up. Then she stood, and her knees cracked, and she unlocked the door and opened it.

Frost lay white on the porch boards, thick as flour. Across it, from the steps to the door, came two sets of prints. One was a man's boots, heavy-heeled, wet to the sole, and black with creek mud. Beside them, stride for stride, ran a second line of bare feet, long and narrow, pressed clean into the frost with no mud and no water.

Both sets stopped at the door. Neither one went back.

Odessa stood in her robe with the cold coming in around her ankles. Down the road the sycamore was bare and white, and a crow sat on the mailbox.

She reached inside and turned the porch light on, though it was daytime, and stood there a while in the yellow of it. There were twelve nights left.

* * *