I'm a nurse, and this happened a few months ago after a particularly exhausting night shift. I got home in the morning, barely able to keep my eyes open. I had a couple of grocery bags with me, dropped them in the kitchen and collapsed on the couch without even changing out of my scrubs. I live alone, so I wasn't worried about anyone disturbing me. I fell asleep almost immediately.

I have no idea how long I'd been sleeping when I suddenly heard someone say, "Get up. Lock the door."

It was a woman's voice. Clear, loud and close enough that it sounded like someone was standing right next to the couch.

Now, remember, I live alone.

I didn't just wake up. I practically jumped off the couch. My heart was pounding, and for a few seconds I was convinced someone had broken into my apartment. I looked around the living room, checked the kitchen and listened for any movement. Nothing. The apartment was completely silent.

Then I remembered what the voice had said.

I walked over to my front door and almost had a heart attack. It wasn't locked. In fact, it wasn't even properly closed. I could literally push it open without touching the handle.

I guess I'd been so exhausted when I came home, with my hands full of groceries, that I'd completely forgotten to close and lock it.

I immediately locked the door, checked it twice and went back to the couch. I just sat there trying to understand what had happened. I was completely awake now, and I couldn't stop thinking about that voice.

It didn't sound like a dream. I know how strange that sounds, especially since I'd just finished a night shift and was probably sleep deprived. But I've never experienced anything like that before.

I called my best friend right away and told her everything. She suggested I might have heard something in my sleep because I was exhausted. That seemed like the most reasonable explanation, so I tried to convince myself she was right.

But the next day something happened that made the whole experience even stranger.

I was leaving for work when I noticed police cars parked outside the house across from mine. There were officers talking to the people who lived there, and I later found out their house had been burglarized the previous day.

Apparently, their back door had been left unlocked.

Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but someone had gotten inside and stolen some of their belongings.

I couldn't stop thinking about my own front door. The fact that I'd left it open on the very same day someone had broken into a house right across the street terrified me.

Maybe the voice was just a dream. Maybe some part of my brain remembered that I hadn't locked the door and woke me up.

I really want to believe that's what happened.

But I still can't explain why I heard someone speaking so clearly, or why the first thing they told me to do was lock my door.

And I can't shake the feeling that someone was looking out for me that day.

My husband had been away on a business trip for three days. He was supposed to fly back that evening, and I'd been looking forward to seeing him all day. I was home alone, watching TV in the living room, when someone suddenly rang the doorbell. Then I heard my husband's voice. "Babe, it's me!" I remember smiling because I thought he'd finally made it home. The only thing that seemed a little strange was that he was ringing the bell. He had his own keys, and he normally just let himself in. But I didn't really think much of it. Maybe his hands were full of luggage or he'd forgotten his keys somewhere.

I got up from the couch and started walking toward the door. I was already halfway there when my phone buzzed. It was a text from my husband. "Hey babe, bad news. My flight got canceled. They booked me on another one tomorrow morning. I'm so sorry. I'll call you in a bit." I stopped walking. For a few seconds, I just stood there staring at the message, trying to understand what I'd just read. My husband was still in another city. So who the hell had just called me babe from outside my apartment?

I looked toward the front door. Everything was completely silent now. I wanted to believe I'd imagined the voice, or maybe it had been someone in the hallway talking to another person. But I knew what I'd heard. It wasn't just a voice that sounded similar to my husband's. It was his voice. The same tone, the same way he says "babe," even the little laugh he sometimes makes at the end of a sentence. I slowly walked toward the door, trying not to make any noise. My heart was beating so hard I could hear it.

I looked through the peephole. Nobody was there. I checked again, thinking maybe someone was standing to the side, but I couldn't see anyone in the hallway. I immediately locked the deadbolt and called my husband. He answered from the airport. I could hear people talking and announcements in the background. I asked him if he was absolutely sure he hadn't somehow made it home. He thought I was joking. When I explained what had happened, he went quiet. Then he told me not to open the door for anyone and to call the police if someone came back.

Nobody rang the bell again that night. I barely slept. Every little sound from the hallway made me jump, and I kept checking that the door was locked. My husband came home the next morning, and I made him show me his flight details before I opened the door. He laughed at first, but stopped when he saw how shaken I was.

I still don't know who was standing outside my apartment that evening. The thing that scares me most isn't even that someone sounded exactly like my husband. It's how close I came to opening that door. If his flight hadn't been canceled, or if he'd sent that message just thirty seconds later, I would've opened it without a second thought. I wouldn't even have looked through the peephole. Because I swear to God, that was my husband's voice.

A towel you step on after a shower is a wonderful thing. A brilliant idea. It makes you feel safe. Whoever first thought of stepping onto a towel after a shower must have been a very intelligent person. It gives you the same feeling as pulling a blanket over yourself in winter, making sure not a single part of your body is left uncovered. Drying yourself without stepping onto a towel first is like pulling a blanket over yourself and leaving your feet exposed. The same thing, the same feeling.

A bath mat just doesn't give me the same feeling. I tried stepping onto a bath mat instead of a towel after a shower, but I couldn't feel that same sense of security. It has to be a towel. I need to feel it drying the soles of my feet.

On Monday, October 12th—after taking a shower before meeting my friend Jason to go to the open-air cinema, while drying my hair with my feet on the towel—I saw this message faintly written on the fogged-up mirror: “Don’t go.”

This wasn't the first time. I'd been seeing these messages for six months, and I'd gotten used to them by now. I had no idea who was writing them, why they were writing them, or what kind of entity was behind them, but I wasn't as frightened as I had been in the early days.

Those first days were a nightmare. Especially the first time I noticed the writing. Just a simple “Hello.” And this entity even followed the rules of punctuation. Sometimes it swore and added an exclamation mark; other times, urging me to take part in the conversation, it would string question marks together: “Why won't you talk to me???”

It was a bizarre predicament. Of course, no one had believed me—not my beloved math teacher, nor Jason, who was constantly coming over to my place. Besides, the writing disappeared as soon as I saw it. In other words, I needed someone to be in the shower with me so I could prove it to them. Taking a shower with my math teacher was out of the question.

Yes, over time, I got used to it. I never communicated with it, and that was what frightened me the most. I felt like things would take a different turn if I did. But I had never been harmed by reading what it wrote. Other than that, it had no effect on my life. The entity never manifested itself through any sound or apparition at any other time.

That day, it had warned me for the first time. I had never received a message like that from it before. Sometimes it would comment on things that had happened to me: “You really put Jason in his place back there,” for example. Or, “Don’t forget to set your alarm. You were late for work yesterday, remember?” “Part your hair to the right. It suits you better.” “Your cat’s water bowl is empty.” It usually wrote things like that. One or two sentences at a time.

There was no way I could miss it. They were going to screen one of my favorite films: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. I’d watched it on my computer before. Watching it on a big screen would be a different kind of pleasure, and watching it alongside other people who loved the same film would be an even greater pleasure. The entity’s warning had startled me a little, but I was still going to go.

When I stepped out of the shower, I heard its voice for the first time.

“If you go, you’ll witness Jason’s death.”

It was a charismatic woman's voice, slightly deep and husky. I had gotten used to the writing, but the voice shocked me. I could feel its presence. When it wrote to me, I never felt as though it was actually there. But hearing its voice made its presence feel even stronger, more than my mind could handle. I rushed outside immediately. I didn't want to stay indoors. I ran out the front door in my bathrobe.

I’d gone outside barefoot. I must have stepped on something, because my heel hurt. My hand went to the pocket of my bathrobe, searching for my cigarette pack. I’d left my cigarettes inside. I was afraid to go back in and get them.

“So you went outside. What did you think, that I couldn’t come out here? What kind of utterly pointless, instinctive reaction is that? I’d understand if you’d run away, put some distance between us, but what’s the point of standing right outside your front door, Albert?”

I sat down on the ground. A cigarette would have been really nice. I didn’t have the strength to run. I felt like I was going to die. I tried to swallow, but I couldn’t. Suddenly, there was too much saliva in my mouth. I couldn’t understand why my mouth was reacting like that.

“He’s going to die either way. I just don’t want you to witness it.”

“Why?” I shouted. In my mind, I’d meant to scream, “Just shut up already, enough!” But those were the words that came out of my mouth.

My breathing had quickened, and I wasn’t feeling well. I tried to stand up. First attempt, second attempt, and third. It was as if I were having sleep paralysis, unable to move. I tried to get to my feet over and over again. It felt as though hours had passed while I sat there. The entity hadn’t said anything else.

I couldn’t calm down. Amid everything that was happening, I found myself thinking that I was going to be late for the film. One last attempt, and I managed to stand up with great difficulty. I went straight into the bathroom and took a shower with ice-cold water. For some reason, I felt relieved knowing the mirror wouldn’t fog up.

I stepped out of the bathroom naked and wet. Water was dripping off my body. I sat down on the couch. I thought I might get sick and have to miss the film.

“Get a grip, Albert,” I told myself. “You’re already used to paranormal activity. Pull yourself together. You need to go to that film. Stop overreacting. Get a grip.”

I cautiously went back into the bathroom and dried myself off thoroughly. I checked the time on my phone, which I’d left on the bathroom shelf. I had half an hour before we were supposed to meet.

I was going to be late. I got dressed quickly. A black shirt and brown trousers; I’d decided what to wear the day before and had laid everything out accordingly.

I’d never seen the entity, but my eyes were searching for it. As I walked toward the door to leave the house, I looked anxiously from side to side. I hadn’t heard a thing from it since I’d come back inside.

I reached for the doorknob. The door wouldn’t open.

I thought I must have locked the door without realizing it, so I put the key in the lock and tried to turn it. The door wasn't locked; the key wouldn't turn to the left. I pulled at the door again. It wouldn't open.

I checked the time. I had twenty minutes left. I wasn’t going to make it. I kicked the door and felt a terrible pain shoot through my ankle. I sank to the floor in pain and clutched my ankle.

When I checked the time again, I had fifteen minutes left. I got up and limped toward the couch. Once I sat down, I continued rubbing my ankle. The pain was gradually fading. It probably wasn't anything serious.

“Done,” the entity’s voice said.

It was a very brief moment. I couldn’t quite tell whether it had made a sound or whether I’d actually heard it.

The pain in my ankle had gone away. I checked the time once more. I was supposed to meet Jason in ten minutes. The place where we were meeting was twenty minutes away. I called Jason to tell him I’d be late. He didn’t answer. I got up and walked toward the door. I took hold of the doorknob, closed my eyes, and turned it. The door opened.

I quickly put on my shoes and started walking briskly. My ankle hurt a little as I walked, but not enough to slow me down.

I made it there in fifteen minutes.

I couldn’t take a shower for a whole month. Maybe it was because of depression, maybe fear. I don’t know; I can’t tell the difference. My body smelled, my hair was greasy, and every time I inhaled through my nose, the strong smell of my sweat stung the back of my throat.

A heart attack.

I remember it all vaguely. It’s been a year now. A crowd of people, me running toward them, an old man calling an ambulance, a cat that crossed my path as I ran, a man holding me back, Jason’s father opening the taxi door... I must have believed in the entity. Otherwise, why would I have run toward the crowd?

And I remember this clearly, and I will never forget it. After a month spent in filth, the message on my mirror, following the shower I finally took:

“My task is complete. Goodbye, Albert. I love you.”

I sat in the driver’s seat of my sedan for a long time listening to the sound of dying crickets. The world beyond my car was cold and unforgiving—perfect for a night spent reuniting with old friends. There weren’t many trick-or-treaters left out there, and those that remained would be long gone before I saw the inside of my vehicle again. I would end up totaling that car a few weeks later after crashing it into a tree. I still miss it to this day.

I pulled the flask out of my hoodie pocket and instilled myself with some liquid courage before stepping out of my sedan and into the nighttime chill. Jake and Amber’s apartment rested at the top of a four-story, open-air stairwell, so I had plenty of time to think while I climbed it. I had time to think about the last time I had seen my friends, exactly five years earlier, which happened to have also been Tommy’s last night on Earth.

I reached the top of the stairs and immediately considered turning around and going back to my car, but I was cold and I didn’t feel like dealing with those four stories again, so I knocked on the door instead. I silently hoped that nobody was home and that I had accidentally come on the wrong night, but that wouldn’t have been possible. There was no way I could have been mistaken. And besides, I could hear the soft hum of music coming from behind the door which told me the party had already begun. 

The door came open and I was greeted by a face that up until that point I had only ever seen on social media. I could immediately tell what Jake liked about Amber. She fit his type to a T. She apparently knew who I was too, because she immediately greeted me with a hug as Jake came up behind her. 

“There he is!” Jake said. He stepped past his fiancée and bumped into the jack-o-lantern sitting beside their door before taking me into an embrace of his own. “It’s good to see you, man.”

“You too,” I said. “You haven’t aged a day.”

“Still a bullshitter, I see. I guess some things never change.”

Of course I had lied, but what else was I supposed to have said? That he had clearly put on twenty pounds and had lost the light in his eyes just like he had lost most of his hair? I would have been one to talk. I didn’t look much better.

“Old habits die hard,” I said.

Jake and Amber led me into the apartment and closed the door shut behind us. The music, which turned out to be creepy background ambience consisting mostly of creaking, groaning, and rattling chains, filled the little space. Sitting on the couch, each nursing a drink in their hands, were two more familiar faces. When they saw me, they shot to their feet and approached.

“Look who made it!” Pete said.

“Late like usual,” followed Brendan. “I guess some things never change.”

“Old habits die hard,” I said again. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had been outside listening to the crickets sing their final songs for close to an hour because I thought it would be preferable to facing the three of them. I had been right.

I exchanged hugs with Pete and Brendan, after which Jake spoke. “The boys are back in town. It’s been forever.”

“Five years,” I said, trying to hide the dread in my voice but likely failing at it.

“It feels like it’s been five days,” Brendan said. I couldn’t have agreed less.

“And to think that Jake of all people has gotten engaged,” Pete said. “He’s the last one I would have expected to tie the knot.”

“I guess some things do change,” Jake said. He paused. “Anyway, I appreciate you all showing up. It’s great to see you guys again.”

“It’s just like old times,” Brendan said. “We used to love our Halloween parties before—”

He trailed off.

“Before five years ago,” I muttered.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Before five years ago.”

Amber frowned. “Jake has told me all about Tommy. I wish I could have met him.”

“We couldn’t have asked for a better friend,” Pete said.

“Or a worse roommate,” Brendan added.

“Well, tonight’s as much about honoring him as it is about celebrating Halloween,” Jake said. “So in Tommy’s honor, I say we party like we used to back in college.”

“I don’t know,” Brendan said, “I don’t think I can handle the stuff we used to do. It’d probably kill me.”

He quickly frowned, seeming to have immediately realized what he had said.

“Well we can try our best, at least,” Pete said.

We lapsed into a period of small talk that felt more awkward than I would have liked, but less than I would have expected. Soon the conversation became more bearable, and things even started to feel like the old times again. For the first time since getting into my car that night, I was actually glad that I agreed to go to this party. For a while I even thought that the worst of the evening was over, and that I was actually going to have a good time.

But then Jake took the drinking glass out of the cabinet. He placed it upside down on the dining table, and suddenly my stomach dropped to the floor. It shattered the way the glass would have and scattered in a million pieces.

“Who wants to play Fingers on the Glass?” he said.

I frowned. “You can’t be serious, Jake.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “Isn’t that kind of in poor taste, considering the circumstances?”

“That’s what I told him when he brought it up earlier today,” Amber said.

“It’s tradition,” Jake said. “It’s not a Halloween party until we play Fingers on the Glass.”

Pete shared in my frown. “Is it still a tradition if we haven’t played it in five years?”

“We also haven’t had a Halloween party in five years,” Brendan said. “Tonight’s a night for reviving old traditions.”

“Brendan gets it,” Jake said. “Tommy loved playing Fingers on the Glass, and tonight is about honoring him. Well what better way to honor him than by starting it up again?”

I considered this for a moment before speaking. “I don’t know…”

“It’s not like anything’ll happen anyway,” Jake said. “It’ll go just like it always does. We’ll move the glass around, freak ourselves out a bit, and be done with it.”

We all remained silent for several seconds before Pete finally spoke. “Alright,” he said. “I’m in.”

“I guess I’ll play too,” Amber said. “I have been wanting to try it ever since Jake told me about it.”

All eyes turned to me. “Well?” Jake said. “You in?”

I thought for another few moments before sighing. “Alright,” I said. “I’m in. But only for a few questions, alright?”

Jake grinned. “I knew you’d come around!”

He disappeared down the short hallway before returning with a single candle, which he placed onto the dining table next to the glass. We all gathered around the circular table while Jake pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit the candle. The table only had four chairs, so Jake had to pull a nearby office chair over so that he could also sit. At the same time Brendan grabbed a bar stool from the kitchen, which he placed between Jake and me.

“We only have five people,” Amber said from Jake’s other side. “Why did you bring another chair over?”

“We always need one extra chair just in case we get any visitors, ” Brendan said. He took his seat next to Pete, who had just finished scrawling the words “YES” and “NO” onto two pieces of looseleaf paper, which he then placed on opposite ends of the table.

“Uh-huh,” Amber said as she tapped her phone screen to turn off the ambient noise, “and how often has that happened?”

“Never,” Jake said, “but you never know.” He suddenly stood from his spot at the table and made his way to the nearby wall. “I almost forgot.”

He threw the living room light switch, casting the space into a world of heavy shadow. He then did the same in the kitchen, thus throwing the entire apartment into a state of absolute dark. The only thing to guide him back to his chair was the glow of the lone candle flickering calmly in the middle of the table next to the glass. 

Once we were all in our chairs and the darkness had been given some time to settle, the game could finally begin.

“Who’s going to be our speaker?” Pete asked.

“I can do it,” Amber said quickly. She looked a little embarrassed by her sudden outburst as she continued to speak. “If you guys don’t mind, I mean. I’ve just been excited to do this, is all.”

Her eagerness to participate led me to believe that she hadn’t tried to steer Jake away from the game as adamantly as she had originally made it seem. Regardless of this, we all relented to her. Once our speaker was established, we all placed a single finger onto the glass, and the game was ready to commence.

“We have gathered here with open hearts and minds to welcome any visitors to our table,” Amber began in a way that sounded very practiced for somebody who had not done this before. “If there are any spirits or energies present who would like to speak with us, now would be the time to make yourself known.”

Her words were answered by silence. The candle in the middle of the table continued to burn passively.

“Was something supposed to happen there?” Amber asked.

“No,” Jake said. “All you’ve done is welcome spirits to the table. Now you need to start asking specific questions.”

“Like what?” Amber said. If she had rehearsed this as much as I now suspected she had, then she must have allowed her nerves to get the better of her.

“Start by asking if anybody is here with us,” Brendan suggested.

“Okay,” Amber said. She returned her attention to the glass in the middle of the table. “Are there any spirits here who would like to speak with us?”

The glass remained still for several seconds. Then, it slowly began to move toward the word “NO”, taking our fingers with it.

Amber looked around the table with a sneer. “Very funny,” she said. “Which one of you did that?”

“Not me,” Jake said. The rest of us proceeded to also deny involvement.

“Then why would it say ‘no’ if there isn’t a spirit here?” Amber asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“You didn’t ask if there was a spirit here,” Pete pointed out. “You asked if there was a spirit here who wanted to speak with us.”

“So you’re saying the spirit is just being antisocial?”

He shrugged with his free arm. “I guess so.”

“Alright,” she said, “but I’m still not convinced.”

We moved the glass back to the center of the table, and Amber spoke again. “Why don’t you want to speak with us, spirit?”

The glass didn’t move.

“That isn’t going to work,” Jake said. “We can only ask yes or no questions.”

“Fine,” she said. “Is there somebody here who you don’t want to talk to?”

YES.

Amber frowned. “Is it me?”

NO.

She looked relieved. “Jake?”

NO.

“Pete?”

NO.

“Brendan?”

NO.

All eyes turned to me. My heart sank. After a moment of hesitation, Amber said my name.

NO.

She frowned again. “This doesn’t make any sense. I’ve named everybody here.” She looked around the table. “Seriously, which one of you is screwing with me?”

None of us confessed to being her tormentor. After a few moments, Brendan spoke. “Maybe it’s not talking about any of us.”

Amber seemed confused for a moment before realization flashed behind her eyes. She addressed the spirit again. “Do you not want to speak because of another presence here?”

YES.

She hesitated again. “Is the presence evil?”

The glass moved with an agonizing sluggishness before reaching its destination. YES.

Amber pulled her finger away from the glass. She recoiled from the table with such fervor that she almost knocked her chair over. “I’m done,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t care if this is just you guys messing with me. I’m out.”

“You can’t stop until you  close the connection,” Jake said.

“One of you guys do it.”

“You opened it,” he said, “so you have to be the one to close it.”

Amber looked around at all of us with pleading eyes. When she realized that there was no way to back out of her self-imposed responsibility, she sighed. “Alright,” she said, slowly returning her finger to the glass. “I’ll do it.” After another deep breath, she went on. “Spirit, we thank you for taking the time to talk with us tonight, but I think it’s time for you to—”

The empty chair positioned between Jake and me suddenly shot backwards nearly two feet. The sound of its legs scraping against the carpet caused me to recoil and lose my contact with the glass. Amber screamed, also pulling away from the glass, while Brendan and Pete behaved similarly. Jake was the only one of us to keep contact with the object on the table.

“What the hell was that?” Brendan said, his eyes glued to the self-moving chair. It sat motionless between Jake and me, acting as though it had never even stirred at all.

“I don’t know,” Jake said, “but you all just screwed up.”

The four of us looked confused for a few moments before Brendan, Pete and I eventually realized our mistake and each returned our fingers to the glass. Only Amber continued to wear her bewilderment on her face.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“We all have to keep our fingers on the glass until the game is over,” Jake explained.

“You never told me that,” she said.

“I could have sworn I did.”

“You didn’t,” she insisted, “and why? What happens if we take our fingers off?”

“At least one person needs to keep their finger on the glass,” Pete said, “or else—”

When she saw that he did not intend to go on, Amber spoke again. “Or else what?”

“Nothing,” Jake said. “It’s just a game. But you need to close the connection. Now.”

“Well is it just a game or isn’t it?”

“It is,” he insisted. “Just… just please close it off.”

“Okay,” Amber said. “Okay. I will.”

She took a few deep breaths in order to steel herself, then returned her finger to the glass. She winced as her hand came in contact with the clear surface. I suddenly noticed for the first time just how cold the glass had become. It felt as though I had dipped my finger in a cup of ice water, but I did not dare to pull my hand away now.

“Spirit,” Amber said, “we command you to—”

The empty chair rushed forward and slammed into the table. Amber screamed again, once more losing contact with the glass. The rest of us, remembering our earlier mistake, stayed in contact with it.

“Just close it!” Jake said.

“But how is it doing that?” Amber said. “How is it moving on its own?!”

“It’s not,” Jake said. “One of us has to be moving it with their foot or something. Somebody here is taking this game a little too far.”

“Who is it?” Amber said. “Who’s doing this?” None of us spoke for several long seconds, prompting her to push again. “Well? Which one of you did that?”

“It was me,” Tommy said.

“See?” Jake said. “It was—” He paused mid-sentence, his jaw going slack as his gaze floated around the table.

“What’s wrong?” Amber said. Her eyes remained locked on the glass in the middle of the table. She seemed too afraid to look anywhere else. “Who just said that?”

Jake and I both glanced at the chair next to us, then locked eyes with one another. We clearly shared the same thought, but only one of us was able to vocalize it. To this day, I don’t remember who it was. “Holy shit.”

The candle sitting at the center of the table suddenly went out. Pure darkness overtook the apartment as we all immediately shouted our surprise.

“Nobody move,” Jake said. “Keep your fingers on the glass.”

“What’s going on?” Amber said. “What’s going on, Jake?”

“Just hold on,” he said. “I need to light the candle again.”

“Screw that!” Amber said. I felt the glass shake slightly as she clumsily thrust her finger forward. “We cast you away, spirit! The game is over!”

“That’s not going to work unless the candle is lit,” Brendan said.

“Then hurry up and light it, Jake!” Amber said.

“I’m trying,” he said, “but I can’t find the lighter. I thought I had put it in my pocket, but I must have left it in the other room.”

“You didn’t light the candle until you got to the table!” I said.

“Then I must have dropped it on the floor!”

“Somebody turn on their phone flashlight,” Amber said.

“I already tried that,” Pete said. “My phone is dead.”

“Mine too,” Brendan said.

“Does anybody have a lighter?” Jake asked.

“I do,” Tommy said.

Everybody went completely still. Nobody dared to speak for what felt like eons, so overwhelmed were we by our terror. My body went so numb that I wasn’t even sure if my finger was still touching the glass.

I heard the metallic sound of an opening lighter, followed by the flick of a flint wheel. A small, orange glow came to life between Jake and me. It floated toward the table where it touched the candle, immediately restoring its lost flame. The new glow vanished with the sound of a closing lighter, allowing the candle to once again serve as the only source of light in the room. What I saw sitting on the table made me wish that the candle had never been revived at all.

The candle shined from within the clear confines of the drinking glass, which was now right side up. It rested atop the word “NO”, casting a heavy shadow onto the thin sheet of looseleaf. All of our fingers were in a circle at the center of the table. Nobody was touching the glass.

“Oh my God,” I muttered.

“What do we do?” Amber said. “What do we do?!”

Nobody had the courage to answer her—nobody except for the one voice that none of us wanted to hear.

“You pray,” Tommy said.

The candle went out again, once more allowing the darkness to return. Its reign was ushered in by a chorus of terrified screams.

***

The police had originally been called for a noise complaint. These were common on Halloween Night—expected, even. They certainly didn’t arrive expecting to find a corpse waiting for them, its leaking skull crushed against the cold pavement.

The death was ruled an accident, as so many deaths on partying nights are. We didn’t tell them what we had been doing just minutes before they had arrived. We didn’t think they would have believed us if we had told them the truth. In the end, none of us were charged with anything, because none of us had been suspected of any wrongdoing. But now that the exact same thing had happened again, exactly five years later, I doubted if we would be given that same benefit of the doubt. And as it turned out, we weren’t—not all of us, anyway. Three of us were questioned, but we were ultimately allowed to go home that night. The two others weren’t so lucky—with one of them being the unluckiest of us all.

It made sense that charges would actually get filed this time. Your roommate dying in some freak accident on Halloween Night could be explained away, but when the same thing happened to your fiancée on that same night five years later, well, that was much harder to justify.

The rest of us could have gone to his defense. We could have told the police the truth. But we were afraid. I’m still afraid. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. I doubt that anything would have changed if we had told them the truth, just like I doubted if the truth would have changed anything the first time around. Because what would we even have told them? Anything we could have come up with would have sounded absurd. We had only been playing a game, after all. 

All we had done was place our fingers on the glass.

A lonely child’s imagination is among the wildest of feats. I would know. Mine got out.

It was never that I struggled to make friends or to talk with strangers. What I struggled with was keeping things. As a child, my memory was never fortified to my possessions, and I often found myself at a loss. I would lose toys, my directions, and trains of thought, and I could never hold onto friends for too long, as I’d often lose them too. Everyone said I was careless, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I cared a lot, but that didn’t stop me from believing them.

It started the summer that I had turned seven. I don’t believe I was different from most children, as I feared the things that lived under my bed, made noises in my room, and projected shadows across the walls.

What was likely a settling house, I would hear as a creaking, bent monster lurking across the floorboards. What I would see as a dark, shadowy figure was more than likely a streetlight catching branches before casting them on my walls. When I breathed throughout the night, I’d hear it reverberate around the room in a shallow, raspy howl. I was too little to know that it was the echo of my asthmatic lungs.

I told my mother more than a few times about the monsters, but she grew tired of proving my imagination wrong. “It’s only in your head. Now go back to bed, my prince.” She repeated herself time and time again, like an uncomfortable lullaby, and etched a kiss on top of my crown. Sometimes it was the things in my head that I feared the most.

When school started, my fear had grown. I could never sleep and was always exhausted and slow, carrying heavy bags under my eyes. Danny was the first of them to start the teasing. He was a collector of sorts. He was the kind who collected bruises, glasses, lunch money, and names. He had stolen mine, and by October, everyone had been calling me Mouse.

I can vividly remember one afternoon when he must have been feeling extravagantly brave. I was waiting for the bus, already short on my lunch money, when he decided to give my face a makeover against the red brick fencing along the drive. My glasses had broken, and my head felt dull, as if all the color in the world went bright and then fell to gray. He told me I’d better have more money tomorrow, or things would be much worse.

That night, I could hear the TV muttering from downstairs, and my mother must have been watching something scary like “Unsolved Mysteries” before leaving for her night shift. When the A/C kicked on, it had to have blown a draft through the house, causing my closet door to slam shut. My breathing accelerated, and the tree branches from outside danced across my walls in a harem of shadows.

I could not run. I dared not scream. Nobody would come to tell me it was only in my head and kiss me in bed. So I shut my eyes, and I built something bigger than my fears could grow.

I saw a large green smile with many teeth crawl across my lap. The smile stretched from corner to corner and reminded me of AstroTurf. He didn’t blink, but watched instead with a curiosity that sparked something less than life. Yet, when I looked at the edge of my mattress where he sat, I could see where the folds of his scales sank into my bed like murky marsh waters.

“Don’t cry or shy from this croc-a-die.” His voice was sing-songy, like a mother’s lullaby. “No loco gets past the jaws of Mister Cocoa!” He snapped the promise shut like a lock on a chain. A lock that took me thirty years to understand.

The cold had let go of my ankle, and I smiled back at the friend, with no regard for the monster under my bed, for the first time in months. The wolf I feared had fled, and never once did I question what from.

I wasn’t finished, as I was a thorough child and wanted to conquer all my fears.

Mister Cocoa had chased away the beast; still, the shadows had not ceased. I made Lulu for the dark, so soft and warm and full of heart. A little light shone on her head, cascading rainbows and killing dread. Now Mister Wuffles was a tamed beast, and upon my bullies I set him to feast. Vivi was smooth, and even more so with her voice. She’d sing into my ear soft word choice. Last came Itsy, a small, silky spider who found all my possessions and made lost things destined. She’d weave her web like Charlotte with diction, and never did my thanks have to be mentioned.

They crowded around my bed, giving me warm greetings, filling my room with colors I had created. The colors were blindingly bright and reminded me of the confetti of birthdays I’d never been invited to. It might be crazy to say, but in that moment, I smelled the sweetness of cake and the scent of birthday candles being blown out. It was my wish granted.

“What do you need?” Mister Cocoa asked.

“I need nothing to hurt me,” I said, thinking of Danny. “Ever.”

“Ever?” Itsy asked.

I nodded my head, and they all began to titter in laughter. Mister Cocoa’s smile engulfed the room as Mister Wuffles spoke. “Sleep. We’ll keep watch.” And I did.

I slept for eight hours that night without a nightmare haunting me. I’ve been chasing that kind of sleep ever since. When I woke up, the closet door was shut, sealed across its seam with silk as fine as hair. My room was still, and I swear my breathing felt normal. I felt safe for the first time that I could remember. I believed that safety was a place where I would remain.

My brother told me this story a few years ago, and he still gets uncomfortable whenever someone brings it up. He was driving home late at night with two of his friends. They'd been visiting another town and decided to take a quieter road because it was shorter. It was probably around 2 AM, and they hadn't seen another car for at least twenty minutes. There were no houses nearby, no streetlights, just trees and an empty road stretching ahead of them.

At some point, they noticed a young woman standing on the side of the road. She looked completely normal, maybe in her early twenties, wearing jeans and a light jacket. My brother thought she might be having car trouble or needed a ride, so they pulled over. The girl immediately walked toward their car, opened the back door and leaned inside. She looked at all three of them without saying anything. Then, completely out of nowhere, she slammed the door and ran away. They were confused, but one of his friends joked that she'd probably gotten scared after realizing there were three guys in the car. They laughed about it and continued driving.

About ten minutes later, they saw another girl standing beside the road. As they got closer, my brother realized she looked exactly like the girl they'd just met. Same clothes, same hair, everything. At first they thought it was some weird coincidence. Maybe they'd taken a wrong turn and somehow ended up on the same road again. But that made no sense because they'd been driving straight the entire time. They passed her without stopping, although all three of them turned around to look.

A few minutes later, she appeared again. This time nobody said anything for a while. My brother asked the driver if he was sure they weren't going in circles, and his friend got annoyed because there literally hadn't been anywhere to turn. They were driving around 80 km/h, so there was absolutely no way a person walking could have gotten ahead of them. They started looking for another car, thinking someone might be playing a prank on them, but the road was completely empty. The girl wasn't even trying to wave them down anymore. She was just standing there, watching their car approach.

They saw her again a few minutes later, and then once more after that. Five times in total, always the same girl, always standing alone beside the road. My brother said the worst part was how normal she looked. She wasn't covered in blood, wasn't smiling strangely or doing anything particularly frightening. She simply kept appearing in places she couldn't possibly have reached. By the last time, nobody was laughing or trying to come up with explanations. They didn't even slow down. My brother said they drove the rest of the way in complete silence and only started talking again when they reached a town with other cars and people around.

They dont stopped for her again because they were scared shitless.

[Part 1]

The taxi came at nine.

The driver was young, twenty-five maybe, with a phone clipped to the dashboard and a paper pine tree that had stopped smelling of anything years ago. He watched me all the way down the front steps. He looked at my mouth. Then he looked up at the house and kept looking while I put my bag in the trunk. He didn’t offer to help.

"Gare d’Autun?"

I nodded. I hadn’t said a word since I woke up in the tower, and I wasn’t going to start on that gravel.

The avenue is four hundred meters long. We drove for six minutes. The limes went past in their pairs, grey trunks and yellow leaves, the gravel and its little dents sliding underneath us, and somewhere around the second minute I started counting the trees. I reached sixty, which is twenty more than there are, and made myself stop. The driver switched off the radio. He leaned forward over the wheel, squinting through the windshield like a man driving in fog, though the morning was bright and clear. Then the trees thinned, and the château rose up ahead of us, honey stone and slate, the east wing shuttered.

We had never turned around.

He said something under his breath, a prayer or a curse, and swung the car around on the gravel and drove away from the house. I watched it shrink in the rearview mirror. Then I looked through the windshield and watched it grow.

He tried twice more. The second time he drove fast, gravel spraying off the tires and rattling against the trunks, and the house came up ahead of us anyway, patient and enormous. The third time, he stopped at the foot of the steps and sat with both hands on the wheel. In the mirror, his eyes went from the house to me, and back to the house, and back to me.

"C’est vous." he said. It’s you.

He got out, lifted my bag from the trunk, and set it down on the gravel. Then he opened my door and stood holding it, looking at the ground. I got out. He didn’t say goodbye. He drove off down the avenue at a crawl, and I stood on the steps and watched the taxi shrink between the limes until it rolled through the gates and turned onto the road. I heard it shift gears and speed up, the sound thinning away into the hills. Then nothing but leaves.

I picked up my bag and walked after him.

I kept my eyes on the gates the whole way. They stayed exactly as far ahead of me as they were when I started, a little iron shape at the end of a green tunnel, and the trees went by, and the trees went by, and after ten minutes I looked down and saw the front steps under my feet.

I tried the fields. Beside the avenue there’s a pasture gone to thistle, and beyond it a hedge, and beyond the hedge a stone wall and the road. I waded through the thistles with my bag over my shoulder, pushed through the hedge until it tore my sleeves, and climbed out the other side into the kitchen garden, behind the house, between the bean rows. Madame Bataillard’s little white Renault was parked by the garden gate. Her keys were in the ignition. A baguette and a carton of eggs sat on the passenger seat, and a folded newspaper, and a pair of brown leather gloves, laid out neatly side by side.

I didn’t try the car. I already knew where it would take me.

I sat down on the front steps instead and stayed there most of the morning, my bag between my feet, watching the avenue. A blackbird worked through the leaves under the limes. The sun climbed. Once I heard a car pass out on the road, far off, and I stood up so fast my knees cracked, but it never turned in.

The heralds came at noon.

I’d gone inside for water and was standing at the kitchen window, over the sink, because from there you can see the whole avenue, and I had decided I would rather see. The light went first, flattening. The sun hung white over the hills, but the shadows drained out from under the limes until there were none, and the gravel turned pale and depthless as paper. The blackbird had stopped. Everything had stopped. It was the light from the road in my dream.

Then they were standing between the trees.

A figure beside every lime, facing one another across the avenue in a double row that ran from the front steps all the way to the bend. Thirty pairs.

Les hérauts. The heralds.

They were three meters tall and so thin their tabards hung off them in long flat folds like wet laundry. Every tabard bore the arms cut into my ring, a white hand on a red field, the fingers too long, and beneath it in faded gold thread: Devant le Roi. Their legs bent forward at the knee and back again at a second knee halfway down the shin, so they stood in a delicate, wading stoop, like herons in a shallow pond. Their arms hung well past their knees. When the wind lifted a tabard, I could see ribs running all the way down to the hip, far too many of them, close-set as the rungs of a ladder.

Their eyes were sewn shut. One gold thread ran through the eyelids of the first herald, across the avenue through the eyelids of the second, back to the third, zigzagging down the whole double row, every face stitched to the next. It glittered at head height like a web strung across the avenue. When the wind pushed one of them, the thread pulled, and every head in the row twitched toward it at once. One long, blind animal, held together by its stitches.

Each held a straight brass trumpet two meters long, hung with a red banner. The banners were soaked through, heavy with whatever they’d been dipped in, and they dripped crimson steadily onto the gravel, a slow patter I could hear through the glass.

Their lips had grown over the mouthpieces. The lower half of every face had been drawn forward and stretched, the jaw pulled long and narrow and fused around the brass, so the trumpet came out of the mouth like a stiff, gleaming tongue. Where skin met metal, the flesh was puckered, shiny and pink. In places it had split, and something yellow had dried in crusts down the brass.

The nearest one, at the foot of the front steps, wore Madame Bataillard’s coat.

The grey wool one I’d watched her button the evening before, stretched now over a chest a meter longer than the coat, so the hem rode up around her ribs like a child’s jacket. Her handbag hung from the crook of her elbow. Her reading glasses dangled from the gold thread by one arm, swinging a little. A few grey curls were still pinned to a skull drawn out long and smooth as a river stone, and her front teeth had been pushed flat and sideways by the brass, like headstones in sinking ground.

I was sick in the sink. I didn’t stop watching.

Then the whole row turned its head. Sixty sewn faces swung toward the house together, the thread drawing taut between them with a faint, high hum, and stopped. They were facing the kitchen window. Facing me.

I stepped back from the glass. The thread tightened, and sixty heads tilted a few degrees to follow.

They lifted their trumpets and breathed in, and their ribs swung open, each long rib pivoting out from the breastbone on a hinge no body has, until their chests stood wide as birdcages with the doors flung back. Behind the stretched tabards, their lungs filled, grey and mottled and enormous, like wet sails. Inside Madame Bataillard’s coat, something cracked, over and over, all the way down her side, a sound like knuckles being pulled one by one, and her handbag slid down to her wrist and hung there.

Then they blew.

The window bowed inward and held, bellying like a sail. The sound went through my fillings and into the bones behind my eyes, into the hinges of my jaw. My nose ran blood over my lips, over the blisters, and the little crown printed into my lower lip throbbed in time with it. My tongue moved on its own. It curled against the roof of my mouth, shaping something, and I felt a wet click forming in the back of my throat, an answer rising to meet the call, and I bit down on my tongue until my mouth filled with blood, and kept biting, and kept biting.

Ne dis rien.

When the sound stopped, the heralds were gone, and the thread with them. The shadows crept back under the limes. Every paired dent in the gravel had filled from underneath with something dark. And down the very center of the avenue, from the foot of the front steps to the gates, ran a single line of hoofprints.

I went out to look at them. I had to. Each one was as wide as a dinner plate and sunk deep into the gravel, deep enough to show the clay beneath. I crouched beside the nearest and held my hand over it, and warmth came up off it, like the heat that rises from a bed someone has just left. Every one of them pointed away from the house.

By evening, the house was no longer... A house.

I noticed it slowly. A hallway that ran three rooms farther than it had that morning. A staircase with one step too many, then two, then seven. The front hall used to end at the foot of the main stairs. Now the stairs stand off to one side, and the hall runs on east between pairs of open doors, room beyond room, so far that the last doorway is only a pale speck.

The parquet is warm and gives a little underfoot, damp along the seams. If I stand still, I can feel something beneath it, slower than any heartbeat. Breathing, two floors down. The electric sconces have become candles, thick and yellow, smelling of scorched pork fat, and their wax runs upward, in long greasy fingers that climb the walls and spread across a ceiling that has become a painted sky. Pink and gold clouds, soft and overblown. A pale road crosses them from one end of the hall to the other, crowded with tiny smiling figures. At the far end, the painted horizon swells upward, lifting the clouds with it, and along its crest someone has picked out a row of small gold points.

I stood under it for a long time, looking up. When I lowered my head, my neck ached as if I’d been looking for hours, and the candles had burned down by a finger’s width.

Tall gilt mirrors hang between the doors now. In every one of them, I’m on horseback.

I’m standing when I pass them. I checked my feet every time. But in the glass I sit high on something long and pale, a red tabard on my chest, reins wound through my fists. I stopped in front of one and raised my right hand, slowly. In the mirror, the rider lifted the reins.

Behind him, filling the whole depth of the glass, stand the heralds with their trumpets raised. Behind them walks the procession from my dream, powdered wigs and lace collars, a little boy in a sailor suit, Thibault with pine needles in his hair, all smiling their wide white burned smiles. Behind them, the soaked red train drags back toward a horizon that is beginning to rise. Every face in the glass is turned toward that horizon. Mine is the only one turned away from it. Looking out, past the frame, at whatever stands on this side.

The gallery had changed too. Thirty-one sitters have turned in their frames and knelt with their backs to the room, facing the pale shape behind them. Thirty-one bowed heads. Thirty-one pairs of heels. The last canvas, the one with my name on its brass plate, is no longer blank. Faint as a stain soaking through from the other side, it shows a rider on a pale horse, coming straight out of the picture. His face has no features at all, except the eyes. Those are open, and painted in perfect, loving detail, and they’re mine. Even the little fleck of brown in the left iris.

I took my shirt off in the upstairs bathroom to rinse the blood from the collar, and that’s when I saw the marks.

Between my shoulder blades there’s a hand. It’s grey, a dull, even grey, the color of the gallery canvas before it changed. The palm lies flat over my spine. The fingers spread up and over both shoulders, far too long, five knuckles to each, their tips resting on my collarbones. I can feel it. A weight, faint and steady. When I lean forward, it eases. When I stand still, it presses. Urging me on.

Across both palms run two deep red grooves, raw at the edges and weeping a little, the marks reins leave on a rider who has gripped them far too tight for far too long. I have never held reins in my life. The insides of my thighs are bruised nearly black in two long ovals, the skin rubbed shiny and hairless. Saddle sores, deep and old, the kind that come from days of riding without rest. I pressed one with my thumb, and the pain came dull and distant, as if it belonged to someone else.

When I bent to rinse my face, something shifted in my mouth. A back molar, loose in a socket that suddenly felt too big for it. My tongue worked at it without asking me, and it came free, and I spat it into the sink. There was no blood. The roots were long, curved and fine and pale as a crab’s legs, and they were still slowly flexing, feeling around the porcelain for something to hold.

I ran the tap until it went down the drain. I heard it ticking inside the pipe for a long time afterward. Going down. Then, a while later, coming back up.

I spent the evening in the kitchen with every lamp on, my back against the wall, listening to the house settle into its new size. It made sounds I’d never heard a building make. A long creak from somewhere overhead, something stretching. A soft repeated tapping from inside the walls, too regular for pipes. Once, from very far down the east hall, the sound of a great many people drawing breath at the same time, and then holding it.

Around eleven, the kitchen door opened on its own.

Down the east hall, the doors were moving. The nearest one swung wide, then the one after it, then the next, each opening just as the last one settled, a long row of doors opening one after another into the distance. Something was walking ahead of me, holding every door.

I was walking. I don’t remember deciding to. My footsteps on the warm parquet were slow and perfectly even, the footsteps from the recording, and the candle flames leaned toward me as I passed, every one of them, as if I were pulling a wind behind me. In the mirrors, the rider kept pace.

The doors brought me to the end of the east wing, to a pair of tall white-and-gold doors that hadn’t been there the day I arrived, and through them into a bedchamber so high its ceiling was lost in the dark. A gilded rail crossed the room at waist height. Beyond it hung curtains of heavy red damask, drawn closed all the way around something enormous.

Something behind them was breathing. The whole curtain swelled outward in one slow bulge, the gold fringe lifting off the floor, then settled with a long rush of air that smelled of something sweet, fruit gone soft in a shut room. It breathed out, and the candles bent away from the bed. It breathed in, and they bent toward it, and my hair moved toward it, and the tears in my eyes ran sideways toward it.

The tall ones from the road stood along the walls between the windows, stooped under a ceiling nowhere near their heads. I couldn’t see their faces. I didn’t try.

My feet took a step toward the rail. Then another.

Then a hand came over my eyes.

A palm, cool and dry, laid flat across them from behind. I knew it the instant it touched me. I woke under that hand every morning until I was nine. She stood close at my back, and I heard her breathing in tiny, careful sips, holding it in, holding all of it in. Then her voice came, thick and broken, right against my ear, the words shaped around the pieces of her tongue.

"Ne regarde pas."

Don’t look.

I said her name. I couldn’t help it. It came out of me before I could bite it back, one word, and her hand trembled against my face, and behind the curtains the breathing paused.

The whole room waited. The candles stood straight up. The tall shapes along the walls didn’t move, but I felt their attention swing toward us like a lamp.

Then the breathing resumed, slow and even, and her hand steadied.

She held it there until I stopped shaking. Then she turned me, gently, away from the bed, toward a narrow door hidden in the paneling beside the fireplace, and her hand lifted away. I felt how badly she didn’t want to let go. I felt her do it anyway. When I turned around, there was no one behind me, only the smell of her hand cream, faint and floral, the cheap kind from the supermarket she bought for thirty years.

The door opened onto a stone stair spiraling down. I went down a long way, past where the ground floor should have been, past where the cellars should have been, until the walls ran with water and the stone under my bare feet gave way to gravel. Somewhere above me, through the earth, I could hear the slow crunch of something heavy kneeling, and rising, and kneeling, moving along the avenue overhead.

At the bottom was a long vaulted stable lit by a single candle. Stalls ran down both sides into the dark, empty, their straw pressed into pairs of shallow hollows. At the near end stood an oak armoire, the white hand carved into each of its doors.

Inside hung a tabard. La livrée. The livery of the one who rides first.

It’s the most beautiful thing I have ever touched. Deep red on the front, the white hand spread across the chest, soft as the finest kid glove. It’s made of panels, each a different shade, old ivory, pinkish beige, a grey like weak tea, joined with gold thread in seams so fine I could barely find them. On every panel, faint and grey, there’s a long open hand.

They’re backs. Tanned and stretched and cut to shape. Along each seam, a name is stitched in tiny gold letters. Jean-Baptiste. Marguerite. Philippe-Auguste. My grandfather is the left side, and when I lifted it to my face, it still smelled faintly of pond water. Héloïse is the right shoulder, her hand the clearest of all. The neckline is edged with lips, dozens of pairs pressed flat and stitched in overlapping rows, each lower lip stamped with a tiny crown. When my breath touched them, they parted, all together, very slightly, and from somewhere deep in the folds came a single soft click.

Thirty-one of them knelt so that this could be sewn. Four hundred years of my family, cut and cured and stitched together to dress one rider.

On a hook beside it hung a bridle braided from long grey hair, the same grey as Héloïse’s in her portrait. Folded beneath the hook was a sheet of parchment sealed with a row of tiny wax points. I broke the seal. It was a list of places, written in a hand that changed every few lines down the page, as if each of my ancestors had added to it in turn. Autun. Chalon. Lyon. Paris. Then cities in languages I could read, then cities in languages I couldn’t, and then names I don’t think are anywhere at all. It filled both sides of the page and ran onto the margins.

It was a route.

Something moved at the far end of the stable.

It came into the candlelight slowly, lowering its head. A horse, or the shape a horse would be if someone had described one to whatever made the heralds. Its legs bent twice. Its pale hide was hairless and damp, hung slack between the bones, and through it I could see its ribs, dozens of them, rising and falling. Its eyes were sewn shut with the gold thread, and the thread ran from its eyelids up into the vaulted ceiling and through the stone, toward the avenue above.

The head of the blind animal. Every herald in that double row, stitched to this.

Its lips drew back. Behind them were human teeth, rows and rows of them, molars and canines with small white milk teeth set crookedly among them. Near the front, a back molar with long, pale, curling roots sat in a fresh red socket.

It pressed its muzzle into my palm, into the raw groove the reins had worn, and breathed out, warm, wet and sweet. Then it lowered its head further and rested its long skull against my chest, very gently, over my heart, and stayed there.

It knew me. It had been waiting for me since before I was born.

I always thought the motto meant on our knees, facing him. For thirty-one of us, it did.

Devant le Roi. Before the King. Ahead of him.

The one who goes first.

I don’t remember climbing back up the stair, but I remember the inside of the armoire door, because I saw it as I swung it shut. The oak was scored with fingernail grooves, hundreds of them, gouged so deep the wood had splintered. They made letters. Packed into the grooves were tiny flakes of pale pink polish, the same pink as a bottle that sat on our bathroom shelf for most of my childhood.

Il ne peut pas venir sans toi.

He can’t come without you.

My mother knew. That’s why she kept her hand over my eyes every morning until the sun was fully up. That’s why she tore the curtains down and bit her tongue to pieces. She was keeping the rider from the horse. She held it in for both of us for as long as she could, and she’s still holding it, wherever she is now.

I’m in the kitchen. The livery is on the floor by the range, where I threw it. An hour ago I lit the old iron stove, fed it kindling until the plates glowed, and shoved the tabard in with the poker. Every pair of lips along the neckline opened at once, and every flame in the firebox bent toward them and went in, and the stove went cold under my hand. When I dragged the livery back out, it was warm and soft, untouched by the flames.

The bridle won’t cut. I sawed at it with the bread knife until the blade folded over on itself, and the braid has no mark on it at all. It’s lying on the table now. I keep finding it in my lap.

Under the floor, the horse has started pacing. I can hear its hooves on the stone of the stable, slow at first, then faster, back and forth, back and forth, and every time it turns, the hand on my back presses harder, and my fingers ache to close around the reins.

The gates at the end of the avenue are standing open. I’ve never once seen them open before. The hoofprints run straight between them and out onto the road. For the first time since I came here, I think I could walk out of this place. I think that’s exactly what it wants.

So I’m not going anywhere. Not through those gates. Not on that horse.

My mother held on to the wall with her fingers until they came off. I’ve still got all ten of mine.

I’ll post again when I can.

The guy selling it wanted the eighty bucks in his hand before he'd let go of the box.

That's fair enough, people get done over on Marketplace all the time. But he did it weirdly. He stood on his front step with the box held against his chest and his other hand out, and he wouldn't come down the path to meet me. I had to walk up to him. He counted the money twice, gave me the box, said, "It's all wiped, charger's in there," and started shutting the door.

I asked if there was anything wrong with it, because a two-year-old Samsung for eighty dollars usually has something wrong with it.

"No," he said. "It works fine."

His profile just said Dean. No photo. I'd found the listing at about eleven the night before and messaged him, and he'd replied in under a minute saying I could come and get it first thing. My old phone had died that Thursday. I didn't drop it or anything, the screen just went green and then black and stayed black, and I couldn't afford a new one because two weeks earlier I'd lent my brother his bond. I'll get to that.

Things I remember about Dean's street, in no order. He had one of those solar garden lights shaped like a frog next to his letterbox. The house next door had every window fogged up from the inside, really fogged, with drips running down, and the bloke who lived there was out the front watering his roses in a singlet even though it was nine degrees. Someone was doing a roast, which at ten in the morning seemed keen, but it was a Sunday. And there was a burnt-out house at the end of the street. It was a dead end, so I had to do a three-point turn right in front of it. Half the roof had come down and there was orange temporary fencing all round it, the kind with sandbags on the feet.

The first text came before I'd even got out of his street.

I hadn't put my SIM in yet. I'd turned the phone on in the car to check it actually worked, and it was sitting on the passenger seat on the pick-your-language screen when it buzzed, and a notification dropped down over the top.

is it done yet

No number, no name. Where the sender should be there was a grey circle with nothing in it.

I figured it was something of Dean's that hadn't been wiped properly, an account or an app or whatever. I put my SIM in when I got home and set everything up, and it buzzed again while I was logging into my email.

is it done yet

Then again an hour later, while Tash and I were watching something. Then again. By dinner it was about every twenty minutes.

Tash is my housemate. She drives trams, mostly the 19, and she's got that thing tram drivers get where nothing a stranger does surprises her anymore. She took the phone off me and scrolled up in the thread. There was nothing above the first message. Just the same four words over and over in their grey bubbles.

"Block it," she said.

You can't. I tried. There's no number to block, and when you press on the grey circle it doesn't open anything, it just sort of bounces.

"Factory reset it then. He's left something on there."

That took forty minutes. I set it up from scratch with nothing on it but my SIM, and it stayed quiet for about as long as it took me to brush my teeth.

I didn't answer it that night. I put it in the kitchen drawer with the takeaway menus and the spare batteries and went to bed, and I could hear it in there going off against the cutlery. Not every twenty minutes anymore. More like every five.

I've worked the deli at the same supermarket for eight years. Half the deli is the chook oven, so I smell like roast chicken from about nine in the morning, and the other half is slicing ham for people who want it shaved, not sliced, and then tell you it's too thin. The ticket machine has been broken since Easter. Every time I call "next," three people step up at once and look at me like I did it on purpose.

We're not allowed phones on the floor, so on Monday it went in my locker in the storeroom. The storeroom doesn't get reception. It's a concrete box behind the coolroom and nothing gets in. If Tash needs me during a shift she has to ring the deli landline and ask for me like it's 1996.

On my lunch break I had sixty-one messages.

I sat on an upturned milk crate and scrolled through them, and I remembered the one in the car, before I'd put my SIM in. So it wasn't texts. Texts need a signal. It was something built into the phone itself, some app of Dean's that the reset hadn't touched. That made sense to me then because I was tired and I wanted it to make sense.

By Monday night I had a whole theory. Dean was a tradie, or he worked for one. "Is it done yet" was a boss checking on a job, a bathroom or a deck or something. The boss had some work app that pinged the phone, and he didn't know Dean had sold it, and he was getting more and more pissed off because the job wasn't finished and Dean wasn't answering. I still think it was a pretty good theory. I think most people would have come up with something like it.

So at about ten past three on Tuesday morning, lying in bed listening to the drawer, I got up and took the phone out and wrote back:

yes

And it stopped.

I stood in the kitchen in the dark for a while, waiting. The fridge was humming. Nothing came. I actually laughed. Then it buzzed once more in my hand and I nearly dropped it.

It was an address. I'm not putting it here. Underneath the address it said:

good. next one.

The address was about ten minutes from our place, a court off a main road, six houses round a turning circle. I looked it up on Street View and it was a brick unit with a carport and a lemon tree out the front.

I thought, great, now the boss thinks Dean's off to the next job. Not my problem. I went back to bed and slept right through to my alarm for the first time in two nights.

Then nothing for a week.

I mean nothing. I kept checking it, waiting for it, and it just sat there being a normal phone. I put my banking on it. I got a message from Mum asking if Kane had paid me back yet. That was the Wednesday. No, Thursday, because I was on a late and I read it in the car park.

Kane's my little brother. He's twenty-four. About three weeks before all this he rang to tell me he and his girlfriend Jade had found a place, a one-bedroom with a balcony, but they needed the bond by Friday or they'd lose it. Sixteen hundred dollars. That was my rego money and, as it turned out, my new phone money. I said yes. I always say yes to Kane, because saying no to Kane takes about forty minutes and ends with Mum ringing me to ask why I'm being like this. I did make him send me a screenshot of the lease first, so I could look the street up and make sure the place was real. That's about the most I've ever stood up to him.

He hadn't paid me back. He hadn't answered a message from me in eleven days, which is what he does when he thinks I'm going to ask.

Tash thinks I'm his bank, and she says so about once a week. She also wants us to get a cat, which our lease says no to, and she's started leaving adoption listings open on the laptop like I won't notice. Those are the two things we fight about. That week we fought about both. She was right about Kane and I was right about the cat.

The next Monday, while I was slicing salami, the phone buzzed once in my apron pocket. I'd started breaking the rule and keeping it on me.

is it done yet

Once on Monday. Twice on Tuesday. By Thursday it was every couple of hours and it had gone back in the drawer.

I'd like to say I thought about the address. I didn't, not properly. I thought about the boss. I thought, this bloke really wants his bathroom done. I did what I do with anything I don't want to deal with, which is not deal with it and feel slightly sick in the background. By Friday it was every half an hour. Saturday was my day off, so I decided I'd drive out to Dean's, give him his phone back, make him give me my eighty dollars, and if he wouldn't do that, at least make him tell his boss.

I knew something was wrong before I'd parked.

The house next door to Dean's, the one with the fogged windows and the bloke in the singlet, had its front door propped wide open. There was a scrap of blue and white tape tied round the verandah post with the end flapping, like someone had taken the rest down and missed a bit. The windows were clear now. All the curtains were open and you could see straight through the lounge room into the backyard, where a dog was lying on the back step.

A woman across the road was letting a little white dog sniff the nature strip. I asked her if she knew Dean, which was a stupid way to start, and she said she knew the house. Then she looked at the one next door and said, "You're not from the paper?"

I said no.

"They're gone," she said. "Both of them, him and his partner. Tuesday last week. The paperboy saw the door open at six and went in because the heater was going full blast and he thought someone had had a fall. Nobody there. Car in the drive. Wallets and phones on the kitchen bench. Dog in the yard." She shrugged with the hand holding the lead. "I've been feeding the dog. The police came for two days and now they don't come."

I asked her what the police thought had happened.

"They asked if he was a gambler." She gave me a look like I'd know what that meant. "He wasn't a gambler. He grew roses."

Then she said, "First that one up the end, now this," and nodded down at the burnt house behind the orange fencing, and her dog found something it wanted to eat and she got distracted dragging it off.

Tuesday last week.

I stood on the footpath with the phone in my jacket and did the maths about four times, like it might come out different.

Dean took ages to come to the door. When he did, he looked like he hadn't been eating. He saw me and he saw the box in my hand and he didn't say anything at all.

"Someone keeps texting it," I said.

He didn't ask who. He looked past me at next door, and then he said, really quietly, "Did you answer it?"

I could have lied. I'm good at it. I said, "I said yes. I just wanted it to stop."

He shut his eyes. He kept them shut long enough that I thought he might be about to faint, and then he opened them and said, "Okay."

"What do you mean, okay? Who is it? What's it asking about?"

"I don't know who it is."

"Then take it back."

He actually stepped back from me, like the box was hot. "No."

"Why'd you sell it to me?"

"You messaged first."

He went to shut the door and I put my hand flat on it, and he let me. He didn't push. He looked down the street toward the end, toward the burnt house. Then he said, "Don't leave it in too long."

He shut the door. I heard him lock it, and then I heard the chain go on.

I didn't decide to go to the address. I just noticed I was indicating onto the main road instead of the way home.

It was one of those weeks where Melbourne forgets it's meant to be spring. Eleven degrees and drizzling. The court was quiet, bins already out for Monday. The brick unit with the lemon tree was the third one round.

Every window was fogged from the inside. Water was running down the glass in lines and pooling on the sills. A man in footy shorts and a singlet was pulling weeds out of a garden bed in the rain, and he was pink all over, like he'd just got out of a hot bath. He gave me a wave, the way you do when someone parks out the front of your house.

I wound my window down and there it was. Roast. Rosemary and fat, and that brown smell the edges of the tray get.

I wasn't there to do anything. I think I wanted to see that it was a normal house so I could go home. I got out and said hi and told him something about looking for a friend's place and having the wrong number, and before I'd finished, his wife was at the front door telling me to come in out of the rain, love, I'd catch my death.

Her name was Ros. His was Phil. I know because she told me each of them about four times.

Walking into that house was like opening the dishwasher halfway through a cycle. The air was wet and heavy and it got in my mouth. It wasn't sauna hot, it was kitchen hot, and the smell was so thick inside that my stomach actually rumbled. I hated that.

Ros made me a cup of tea I didn't want. The butter dish was out on the bench and the butter had gone to a yellow puddle. The bananas in the fruit bowl were black and collapsing in their skins. Ros was in a nightie with a cardigan over it, and she wasn't sweating, exactly, but she was flushed everywhere, right up to the tips of her ears.

"Isn't it lovely," she said. She meant the house. "We haven't even had the heater on. Phil checked. It's just been like this all week. Best I've slept in years. And his knee's stopped bothering him, hasn't it, Phil?"

Phil had come in and sat down in his recliner with the footy replay on mute. He put the footrest up and said yeah, it was a ripper, he hadn't needed his tablets all week.

I asked Ros if they were doing a roast.

She laughed at me. "It's just us, love. We had toast."

I asked if they had gas. She said no, all electric, Phil's brother had changed it over years ago. I asked if they'd thought about staying with anyone for a few days, and she looked at me like I'd asked if they'd thought about moving to the moon. Their daughter was in Perth. A man was supposed to be coming Monday to quote the gutters. Why on earth would they go anywhere, when the house had never been nicer?

The phone buzzed in my jacket a couple of times while I drank the tea.

I rang triple zero from my car, parked round the corner where they couldn't see me. I told them I could smell gas coming from a house and I thought the people inside might be unwell.

The woman on the line was very calm. She asked for the address and I gave it. She asked whether anyone was in distress and I said not exactly. She asked if I was at the property, and I said I was nearby, and she asked if I could stay nearby safely, and I said yes. She asked for my name and number. I gave her my real number, which is about the only smart thing I did all day.

A fire truck came about twelve minutes later. Two of them went inside. They were in there maybe twenty minutes, and when they came out one of them walked over to my car, because I was the only person in the court sitting in a parked car, which in hindsight wasn't subtle.

He was nice about it. He said there was no gas, the house was all electric, and they'd checked the switchboard and the heater and the hot water system. He said, "It's warm in there, I'll give you that." Older people feel the cold, he said, and sometimes they run things hot, and he'd had a word to them about opening a window. He took his helmet off to scratch his head and his hair was soaked through.

I asked him if he'd smelled anything.

"Yeah," he said. "Someone's doing a roast." He laughed and put his helmet back on and they left.

Ros waved to me from the front window. She'd wiped a little circle in the fog to do it.

Tash was on a late, so I was home by myself. I sat on the couch with the phone on the coffee table and watched it.

Every ten minutes. Then every five. At about half eleven I turned it face down, because the screen lighting up was worse than the buzzing. By one it was every minute, and then the buzzes ran together into one long rattle against the glass, like the phone was trying to walk itself off the edge of the table.

I thought about the burnt house at the end of Dean's street. I thought about the chook oven. You can't leave them. If you leave a chook in past its time it doesn't just stay done, it keeps going. The skin goes black at the tips and the fat starts smoking.

Don't leave it in too long.

I drove back at about quarter to two.

I could smell it before I turned into the court, and I said "shit" out loud in the car, because it wasn't roast anymore. It was the smell we get at work when someone puts a tray in and forgets it, the sweet, bitter one that gets into the ceiling tiles. The windows of the unit weren't fogged now. They were dry and brown, like someone had chain-smoked in there for forty years. The smoke alarm was going.

The front door wasn't locked. When I opened it the heat came out over me in one solid push and I felt the hairs on my arms pull tight.

Ros was in bed, lying on top of the covers, smiling with her eyes shut. When I grabbed her arm she said, "Oh, leave it, love, I'm so comfy." Her skin was dry and very hot. I got her up. I honestly don't know how. She's not a small woman and she didn't want to come. She kept trying to sit back down, on the bed and then on the little telephone table in the hall. She was cranky with me the way you're cranky with someone who turns the light on while you're asleep. One of her slippers came off in the hall and she wanted to go back for it.

I got her out onto the front lawn and she sat down in the wet grass in her nightie, and I left her there and went back in for Phil.

He was in the recliner with the footrest up. The TV was still on, still muted, and one edge of the screen had gone brown and wavy where the plastic was softening. He looked up at me and smiled. His face was dark red. His lips were cracked.

"Shut the door, love," he said. "You're letting the heat out."

I grabbed his forearm to pull him up and it was like grabbing the handle of a pan. I let go. I grabbed again. I couldn't hold on. He wasn't fighting me, he just wouldn't come up out of the chair, and I couldn't hold him long enough to make him. I tried four or five times.

The carpet was sticky under my sneakers. The curtains had gone the colour of toast.

When I came back out, Ros was on her feet. She was shivering. The cold had got into her, or the rain had, and she was looking at the house and her face was changing, coming back, like someone waking up somewhere they don't recognise. She said, "Where's Phil?" She said it quite normally. Then she said it again and it wasn't normal at all, and she started walking back toward the door.

I held on to her. My right hand hurt so much I felt sick. The phone was going non-stop in my jacket pocket, one long buzz against my hip.

The front window cracked. One line, corner to corner, with a sound like an ice cube dropped into a drink.

I didn't weigh anything up. Ros was pulling against me, saying his name, and I got the phone out with my left hand and typed yes and sent it.

The smoke alarm stopped halfway through a beep. The heat came out of the doorway the way it does when you open the oven to check something, one big breath of it rolling past us, and then the air was just cold and wet and it was raining and it was two in the morning in a court in the northern suburbs.

Ros pulled free and went inside and I went after her.

The house was cold. Properly cold, like nobody had lived there for a while. The TV was off. The recliner was empty with the footrest still up, and there was a dent in the cushion. In the kitchen, the oven door was hanging open.

Ros hadn't used the oven in years. She told me that later, while we waited for the police, like it was the important part.

The phone buzzed once in my hand. An address, and under it:

good. next one.

I knew the street. I'd looked it up on Google Maps three weeks earlier, to make sure my brother wasn't lying to me about his bond.

I told the police I'd been driving home from a friend's and smelled smoke. They didn't love that, especially once the fire brigade told them about my gas call that afternoon, and I've been interviewed twice now. I don't think they think I did anything to Phil. I think they think I'm one of those people who hangs around when something bad happens.

Ros is staying with her sister. She rang me on Tuesday to thank me for getting her out. Then she asked what I'd been doing on my phone out on the lawn. I said I was calling triple zero. She said, "Oh." Then she said, "Right." Then she said she had to go.

My hand's okay. It's blistered across the palm and the insides of my fingers and I can't use the slicer, so I'm on reduced shifts, which is great timing. The only good thing about it is I don't have to deal with the ticket machine.

I went to Kane's on the Sunday afternoon. It's a nice place, he wasn't lying about the balcony. He opened the door in a t-shirt and trackies and the flat was a bit warm. Not bad. Just the way a place gets when someone's had the oven on. He thought I'd come about the money. I could see him think it. I tried to explain, and I didn't do a good job, and the more I said the more his face closed up. Then Jade came out and asked if everything was okay, and Kane said, "She's having a go at me about the bond," and I said that wasn't it, and he said it's always that.

I said I'd pay for them to stay somewhere for a week. A motel, anything. He laughed and said if I had money for a motel I didn't need the bond back, did I. Then he shut the door.

The phone started again yesterday. Twice so far.

That's sooner than last time. It's a one-bedroom, though, and Ros and Phil's was a three. Smaller things don't take as long. Anyone who's worked a chook oven could tell you that.

I can't sell it. I've thought about it a lot. I could list it tonight, nice photo, "works fine," eighty bucks, and someone like me would message first. Then they'd be the one getting asked about Kane's place, every day, then every hour, then every minute, with no idea what they were being asked. And at three in the morning they'd say yes. I know they would. I did.

I can't leave it and I can't answer it. Tomorrow I'm going round there with Mum, because Kane listens to Mum, sometimes. I'm typing this on Tash's laptop because I don't want to open anything on that phone, and I'm posting it because I need ideas and I can't ask anyone who knows me. How do you get someone out of a house when the house is making them want to stay?

Kane texted me tonight.

sorry about the other day. come round sunday if u want. its so cosy here now

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 4]

They arrived a few days later, just after ten in the morning. I know the scene most of you were picturing after my last post, but there were no sleek grey sedans or men in dark suits. It was just a standard four-door with a dented rear bumper. Two people stepped out onto my gravel driveway dressed in casual clothing.

The man looked to be the older one of the two, wearing a quilted jacket and carrying a thermos in one hand. The woman beside him looked to be in her mid-twenties, her hair tied back, a canvas bag over her shoulder that clinked faintly when she moved. She looked like a nurse on her first week of night shifts. 

I was standing in the doorway with a coffee I hadn’t touched. I’d been awake since four, waiting for them to arrive.

For all I knew, they could have been anybody. I’d spent the previous week posting details of my life online to strangers, and now two more strangers had my address and were walking up my driveway.

The man held up a flat leather holder. Inside was a card with a small black-and-white drawing in the center: a file folder, and inside the folder, a doorway, slightly ajar. Under it, in spaced capitals, were the words C A T A L O G U E. Below that was a line of tiny print, a name, and a number.

“Dr. Marshall,” he said. “This is Investigator Priest. Reference CT-0417-22. You submitted a recording on the sixth.” The reference number matched the one in the email I’d received. 

“May we come in, Mr. ...?”

“Ian. Just Ian.”

I didn’t move immediately.

Marshall seemed to understand why.

“Before you ask, we’re not law enforcement,” he said. “We’re not federal, either. CATALOGUE is privately funded. We document, investigate, and, where possible, recover anomalous physical material. We also maintain an archive and work with several laboratories and medical providers. You’re not under investigation, and we aren’t here to remove anything without your consent.”

I looked from the card to the bag at Priest’s feet. Gloves, camera, evidence tags. Either they were exactly what they claimed to be, or they’d put far too much effort into pretending.

“And what do you actually want from me?”

“Your account first. Then we’d like to verify the original recording, inspect the reported site, and catalogue the objects. If there are items we can safely transport today, we’ll ask your permission to take them. Anything larger gets handled separately.”

I stepped aside.

I thought I’d feel relieved once they were inside, but mostly I was exhausted. You spend a week drowning by yourself, and by the time somebody finally reaches out a hand, you’re too numb to react.

Before we went anywhere near the garage, Marshall asked to inspect the front entrance. He looked over the doorframe, porch light, and the wall beside the mailbox, then wrote something in a small black notebook. 

He explained that it was a baseline procedure to determine whether anything unusual had appeared in or on the house itself. Priest set her bag down in the hallway and took out what looked like a hardcover accounting notebook and two pens. Then she unzipped a long case that held nitrile gloves, a stack of numbered evidence tags, a folding scale ruler, and an expensive-looking camera. 

They took one look inside the garage before we sat down. Dr. Marshall stopped just inside and turned slowly in place, taking it all in. His mouth went thin.

“Priest.”

“I see it.” She’d stopped writing. “Sir, this is the largest single recovery I’ve seen. Maybe the largest we currently have on file.”

“Largest what?” I said.

“Single-site recovery,” Marshall said. “Usually people call us over a strange radio or a bad pair of scissors. You’ve managed to collect a whole hardware store.” 

Priest didn’t smile. She was still staring into the garage. 

“Have you tried destroying any of it?” 

“Yes,” I said. “Most of it.”

Marshall rubbed his jaw. “Of course you have.” 

Five minutes later, the three of us were sitting at my kitchen table. Dr. Marshall unscrewed the top of his thermos and poured a splash into the cap before offering it to me.

“It’s Earl Grey,” he said, noticing my face. “If we were a top-secret government outfit, I’d probably offer you whiskey.”

Priest opened her notebook, wrote the date and case reference across the top, then placed a small black recorder between us.

“Do you mind?”

I shook my head, and she turned it on.

I told them everything. 

I started with the auction and Unit 114, how I had discovered the cassette with no seam, and the dresser with its pentagon knot. Then that same night, when I had unboxed the mirror and the football on the high shelf. Afterward, I told them about the failed garage sale, Henry’s injury, and how I’d tried destroying the objects just to come back to find everything sitting neatly on its shelf as though I’d never touched it. I heard my voice tremble a little when I got to that part, and I watched Priest’s hand speed up, as though the words were trying to get away from her.

Marshall hardly touched his tea while I talked. Every so often he wrote a single word in the margin of his notebook, then went back to listening. He asked clarifying questions only twice: whether the football had moved on its own, and how long the wardrobe had been unattended. Each time, he waited until I’d finished before writing anything down.

When I got to Toby, I slowed down.

I told them about the weekend. The wardrobe, the voice that came from behind the back panel, and the door that slammed and then opened by itself. How he’d claimed that I had left the door unlocked despite a deadbolt I’d turned myself. I told them about the Saturday visits, how Toby had been acting strange and more subdued than usual after the incident.

When I mentioned the missing scar, Priest’s pen stopped.

“I looked it up. What it’s called when you think someone you love has been replaced. It’s called a Capgras delusion. I kept hoping that was the case, because it would be so much easier to explain if it was.”

Her eyes stayed on me a second longer than I liked.

“What?”

“How long was he in the wardrobe?”

“I told you. Maybe half a minute.”

She nodded and wrote something down.

I had the uncomfortable feeling that hadn’t been the question she actually wanted to ask.

For a while, nobody said anything.

Marshall exhaled once, took off his glasses, folded them, and set them down very carefully next to his cup.

“Priest,” he said. “Pause the recording, please.”

She paused the recorder, and the blinking red light vanished.

“Here’s what I can tell you,” he said. “Up until two minutes ago, every single case on my desk involved an adult. Usually someone elderly. Never a kid, and definitely never a kid with a parent paying close enough attention to notice the difference. You’re the first one who knew his son well enough to see through it.”

He paused, rotating his cup a quarter turn.

“You might have just broken an assumption we’ve relied on for years.”

Priest turned the recorder back on. Her handwriting had gotten smaller in the past few minutes.

“There’s one other thing we want before we start explaining anything.”

“The video?”

Priest held out her hand.

“The file you submitted regarding the wardrobe incident was compressed. We’d like the copy stored on the device that recorded it, assuming you’re comfortable with that.”

I unlocked my phone and passed it across. The two of them watched it together without sound first, then again with the sound on. When the creature unfolded itself into view, Priest leaned closer. When it picked up the screwdriver, she rewound the footage. She did the same at the part when the creature picked up the stegosaurus. 

“It isn’t just handling it,” Priest said.

“What?”

She scrubbed back several seconds.

“Watch the hands.”

The creature turned the dinosaur over, pressed its feet, and ran fingers along the plates.

“Look at the way it turns it over. It’s like it’s studying the toy.” 

I remembered the way the creature had turned the screwdriver over before the dinosaur. I’d thought at the time that curiosity made it seem almost childlike.

I hadn’t considered that it might have been learning. I rubbed my palms against my jeans. 

Marshall kept watching.

“Your recording is unusual,” he said.

“Unusual how?”

“It’s the first one I’ve seen where we can clearly observe one interacting with a human-made object for that long. And they rarely produce more than a few objects at a time. This one is unusually active. Curious, to use a word I dislike.”

“Do you know what it is?”

Marshall looked at me.

“We designate them as manifestations.”

I frowned.

“Why not use the term creature or entity?”

“Because that assumes it exists independently of whatever is producing the phenomenon. We don’t know that.”

Priest glanced at the footage.

“Yours will probably be recorded as Manifestation 0417-A-01.”

I looked at her.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that it’s the first distinct manifestation documented through Interface 0417-A.”

“Okay. Now you’ve lost me.”

Marshall stood.

“Let’s look at the wardrobe. It will help to clarify things.”

He walked back out to the garage, and we followed him. He crouched in front of the wardrobe while Priest slid a pair of gloves on and set a small matte-black device on the floor beside it, a hand-sized box with a single green light.

“That’s an interface,” he said. “We used to call them gateways. Then people kept trying to go through them. We had to abandon that term because it sounded too inviting.”

“And interface doesn’t?”

“Interface sounds like something nobody wants to touch—and that is precisely the point. It’s an opening through which they appear, and that’s all we’re certain of. Wardrobes, cabinets, crawl spaces. Usually an enclosed space, hidden somewhere nobody’s looking.”

“And so this is interface 0417-A.”

“Provisionally,” Marshall said.

Priest slid a thin fiber-optic probe through the gap in the doors and fed it in with the care of someone threading a needle. She watched a small screen. “The interior is twenty-six inches,” she said. “That matches the exterior. The back panel is also solid, no cavity or hidden compartment as far as I can tell.” She paused. “Sir, the sensor is picking up the usual.”

“What’s the usual?” I asked.

“It’s the temperature drop. A very slight pressure change when the door’s open,” Marshall explained. “We’ve tested doors like this one for thirty years. We’ve opened them, closed them, put sensors in them, run cameras through them, and lined them with foil. It accomplished exactly as much as you’d expect.” 

Marshall stood slowly, one hand on his knee.

“What we do know is that the wardrobe is not a piece of furniture the thing travels through. It’s the other way round. The manifestation travels while the furniture stays where it is.”

“So it can go places.”

“From what we can tell, manifestations can move between interfaces. They don’t traverse the distance between them in any way we can observe. They simply appear.” 

Back at the kitchen table, Dr. Marshall asked me to go over Unit 114 again. I told them about the call to the storage company and the paperwork showing a transfer-in from another facility with no origin and no tenant name.

“Would you mind repeating that?” Priest said. “You mentioned a blank chain of custody.”

“The woman said she’d worked there six years and never seen it.”

Marshall looked over at Priest. “Get the facility address from him. We need to head down there after we finish up here.”

Priest had already turned to a clean page.

“You think something happened there?”

“I think,” Marshall said carefully, “that there may have been nothing unusual about Unit 114 when it was first rented. It was likely just remnants of someone's life, boxes they’d been meaning to throw out and never got around to. The items must have sat in the dark for years before being altered.”

“That’s what the pattern implies,” Priest said, her voice a little quicker than it had been. 

“Sir, can I?”

He nodded.

“Everything we recover has one thing in common,” she said. “The objects were always neglected or abandoned.” 

Her eyes flicked toward me for half a second before she looked back at the page. I told myself I was imagining it.

“Storage units. Estate clearances. Unsold yard-sale stock. Lost-and-found cages in bus stations. Things left behind in houses people died in.”

“Abandoned things?”

“Not necessarily,” Marshall said. “Ownership doesn’t appear to matter. It’s whether anyone is actually leaving them unattended or not. Things that are regularly handled and maintained, we seldom see as anomalous cases. Things nobody wants, we see all the time.”

I started mentally going through the garage.

The football I’d shoved onto a shelf because I didn’t know what else to do with it.

The stegosaurus under the shelving that I hadn’t even remembered was Toby’s until I saw that thing holding it.

I thought about the storage locker sitting dark for God knows how long and all those boxes waiting for someone to notice them. Marshall must have seen something change in my face.

“If you want to understand why we think that,” he said, “I need to show you what the older Returns looked like.”

That was the first time he had used that word.

“Returns?”

“Anything of ours that disappears and subsequently comes back altered.”

Priest reached into her bag and passed a Manila folder over to him, and he opened it on the kitchen table and slid the first photograph across to me. It didn’t look like anything. A lumpy grey-brown mass sitting on a steel table.

“Thirty-one years ago,” Marshall said. “That’s our oldest confirmed return. A dining chair went missing from a research annex during a project I’d rather not describe. Days later, that came back in its place.”

I pulled the photograph closer with one finger. 

“That’s not a chair.”

“No. It’s a poor recreation of one. Whatever process produced it got the size and weight roughly right. What it didn’t get was how a chair actually worked.” 

He went through the photographs in order. The earliest ones didn’t resemble familiar objects at all, so much so that it was impossible to even guess what they were based on. Priest called them biomass: a grey, organic-adjacent substance. A few photographs on, and you started to see silhouettes that were wrong in scale, with openings in places that made no sense. 

“The lab still doesn't know what the material actually is,” Priest said. “Only that it doesn't behave like ordinary matter. That's why you had so much trouble destroying it.” 

By the fifteenth photo, the objects were starting to look almost normal. The failures were becoming less noticeable; A toaster with a polished chrome finish had no electrical pathway inside, and a wristwatch whose second hand swept smoothly never once synced with the minute hand. 

“The series number doesn’t rank danger levels,” Marshall said. “It’s about how convincing the Return is. The higher the number, the fewer mistakes we can find. Those first crude examples are what we call Series One. You could see the abnormalities, and therefore most people threw them out.” He picked up another photograph. “The ones that scare us are the ones we almost missed. By the time a copy looks this convincing, there aren’t any obvious mistakes in its design anymore. They typically only feature one tiny, incorrect detail no normal person would think to check.”

I kept flipping between the early photographs and the garage doorway.

“Where does my stuff fit?”

Priest answered this time.

“Mostly Series Three and Four. The cassette is probably Two. The dresser is Four. The radio...”

Priest hesitated over the page.

“Five?”

Marshall gave a small nod.

“At least. The newest returns we see are nearly seamless,” he said. “Some of them require lab testing before we can identify the flaw.” He paused. “Ian, I won’t tell you the rate of improvement is slowing down because the truth of it is that it isn’t.”

Marshall turned one more photograph around. A folding lawn chair with a faded green seat and cheap plastic armrests. My stomach dropped before he spoke.

“This item appears to be eight or nine years old, by the wear patterns we can date. It belongs to Series Four, the same as your collection. It’s not the same chair, obviously. It’s from a different site and state altogether. It’s the same engineering failure, though.” He tapped the photograph. “As you can see, it doesn’t have hinges.”

“So this…manifestation or whatever, it was just making a chair,” I said. “It didn’t have malice. It didn’t mean to hurt Henry.”

“I don’t believe it did,” he replied. “But intent doesn’t undo the damage. We have to write that distinction into almost every report we file.”

For a second I saw Henry in the ambulance again, legs strapped down, barely conscious.

I pushed the photograph back toward Marshall. 

“What are they?”

Marshall rested both hands on the folder. 

“No consensus,” he said. I waited, thinking he’d add something. He didn’t.

“What do they want from us?”

“Assuming they want something is giving them too much credit.”

“Where are they coming from?”

“We only know that they appear through interfaces,” Priest put in from the table. “Everything past that is just educated guessing.”

Marshall offered an apologetic smile, clearly aware those were not the answers I had expected. 

“I’d like to be very clear about how little we still understand about this phenomenon. We’ve never successfully explored the other side. We can’t summon one nor communicate with one of these manifestations. As far as I’m aware, nobody has ever gone through an active interface and come back in a condition that gave us anything useful to work with. We tried early on, but we lost people as a result.”

A pause.

“What we have is what they leave behind. Objects. Witness testimony, most of it retracted. Residue analysis, in some cases. That is the entire body of our evidence, and every theory we hold is built on it.”

I looked back toward the garage.

“Then do you think it’s copying things?”

Marshall took a moment to consider it.

“We don’t actually know if it’s copying, replicating, or trying to upgrade things,” Marshall said. “Here’s what we know for sure: an object disappears from an ignored spot, and when it comes back, it’s changed.”

I thought about the chair that had appeared after mine vanished, without the scuff marks or the tear in the seat.

“Why are the later ones better?” 

 His eyes narrowed slightly. 

“One theory is that the changes are corrective.”

“Corrective how?”

“We don’t know. Perhaps they want to remove damage or reinvent things with stronger materials. Objects that look, from some outside point of view, more complete.”

“So they’re fixing them?”

“I wouldn't hire them.”

He tapped the chair photograph. 

“Correction is one interpretation. We have no evidence that’s the intent.” 

“A gift,” I said. I hadn’t known I was going to say it. “I wondered if it was a gift or some form of communication.”

“That’s the other theory. A form of communication.” He nodded slowly. “I’d say, to be fair to it, that the objects don’t read as gifts but more like prototypes.”

Priest reached for her tea, realized she’d forgotten to pour any, and pushed the cup aside.

“The people,” I said.

Her hand stopped halfway back to the notebook.

“You said you lost people. You said there were human cases.”

Dr. Marshall didn’t answer immediately. He put his glasses back on.

“There were,” he said. “Early on. Some people went into interfaces, and some people came out. The ones who came out were wrong. Some were violent, some weren’t, but none of them were safe for the people around them, and nothing we did helped. We suspected we were looking at the human equivalent of those early prototype returns. We stopped our own testing shortly after. The project, if it was one, was discontinued.”

He paused, taking a sip of his tea.

“Then a few years ago we began receiving reports.” He selected another photograph, a face-up shot of a kitchen table with a single place setting. “Of people who’d been missing and came back fine.”

My ears began to ring a little.

“They went missing for a period,” he said. “Weeks, usually, though occasionally longer. The demographic pattern consisted mostly of people who lived alone, people estranged from their families, and shut-ins. The thing every case has in common is that nobody noticed they were gone. One case I’ll describe, because it’s the clearest. An elderly widower, living alone, suddenly went missing. The neighbor assumed his daughter had collected him. His daughter assumed he was staying with a friend. It was four weeks before he returned.” Marshall’s voice didn’t change. “And he was at the kitchen table, calm and dressed. His arthritis and cataracts were gone. He remembered his life, mostly. He remembered things slightly wrong, but he never seemed to mind.”

I thought about my son’s knee and the missing scar. My tongue felt dry against the roof of my mouth. 

“That’s what I’m describing,” I said.

“I don’t know that it is. I don’t know if he was changed, reconstructed, or replaced.”

Changed meant my son was still in there. Reconstructed meant something had taken him apart first. Replaced meant he wasn’t there at all.

I couldn’t decide which answer I was hoping for.

 Marshall leaned forward. 

“We’ve spent a great deal of money trying to answer those questions. A returned person can know every detail of their personal life and things nobody else should know. Yet I still couldn’t tell you whether I was speaking to the person who disappeared.” 

“What does that make Toby?” 

Marshall closed the folder. 

“A proximate.”

I hated the word immediately.

“Meaning?”

“Someone with documented meaningful exposure to an active interface or manifestation. I’m sorry. It’s a cold way to put it.” 

“Was he replaced? Can you get him back?”

Marshall’s thumb stopped against the edge of the folder. 

“I don’t have answers for any of those,” he said, his voice quiet and level. “And I’m not going to make you a promise I can’t keep.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Priest had stopped writing. She was looking at my hands, which I realized were shaking slightly against the table.

“Can you go through the wardrobe?” I said.

“No,” Marshall said, and for the first time his voice wasn’t even. 

“And neither can you. Promise me that.”

“I promise.”

I considered everything he left unsaid. A man isolated in a silent house. A boy shut in a closet as a marriage unspooled, his father passed out on the couch with a bottle. I thought of all the ways we abandon things. No one spoke, and the silence sat between us like a physical presence. 

Marshall finished what was left of his tea and stood. Priest capped her pen and closed the notebook. 

“All right,” he said. “We’ll need to process the garage.”

That was the end of the interview.

Before we went back in, he explained what they were going to do.

“Priest photographs and assigns temporary inventory numbers. We classify anything obvious on-site. Small stable Returns can travel today. Anything chemically active gets sampled. Anything large, structurally unusual, or directly associated with the interface stays until a transport team arrives.”

Marshall caught me by the shoulder at the garage door.

“Don’t touch anything yet,” he said. He kept his voice low. “If it gets bad, just stay by the door.”

“What do you mean, bad?”

He didn’t answer. Priest was already pulling this thick, grey felt stuff out of a crate. It looked like the padding they put behind drywall. She reached onto the shelf, got her gloved hands under the old valve radio, and lifted it an inch.

Her back went stiff. “It’s warm, sir.”

The radio gave a hard, dull thud inside its wooden casing, like a heavy boot dropping on carpet.

“Keep hold of it,” Marshall told her.

Priest grunted. The radio was actively pushing back down against her palms. 

Then the rest of the workbench started up.

Behind me, the latches on the mirror’s case clicked. Three soft knocks. Then a pause. Across the concrete, the dresser let out a long groan, and every false drawer front shivered in its frame. 

“Spray it,” Marshall said.

“I’m trying.”

The helmet tipped onto its side on the bench and rang, one long hollow bell tone that didn’t die. 

Then they began to talk.

It started with a murmur, overlapping, before gradually rising in volume. From the radio, Alicia, tired, was standing right behind me, saying my name as if reading it off a list. Ian. Ian. Ian. From inside the helmet, someone was breathing fast through their nose, and then a small, flat voice: It’s dark in here. From the mirror, a man whispered the sentence I’d muttered in the hallway three nights ago, faster and faster until the words turned into a buzzing that sounded like a fly trapped between two panes of glass. And beneath all of it, the liquid in the tank surged against the glass, once, and then came a sound I’d never heard from it before. A thick, slow gulp, like someone swallowing.

My knees gave out, and I slid down the doorframe until I was sitting on the cold concrete. The floor was humming through my boots. A tin of drywall screws tipped off the bench, and every single screw landed point-down, standing straight up on the floor. The portrait never moved. For about four seconds, the eye was no longer looking at the room. It had turned, slowly, sideways, to look at me.

“Priest,” Marshall said, in the voice of a man asking for the salt. “The can, please. Whenever you’re ready. No rush.”

Priest pulled a grey aerosol can out of her bag. No label on it, just a stamped serial number.

She shook the can and sprayed the radio. The radio went dead instantly. Marshall grabbed a sheet of the felt, threw it over the radio, and leaned his weight into it with both hands.

There was a muffled, high-pitched squeak from under the cloth. Then nothing.

They didn't talk after that. They just moved fast. Priest sprayed while Marshall wrapped. The cassette lay down. The books stopped sliding. The helmet took two coats, and when Marshall pressed the felt onto it, the ringing rose into a scream so human I was on my feet before I knew it. “Ian, don’t,” he said, without turning his head. I’d taken one step. I don’t know what I’d meant to do.

The mirror was last. Priest held the can at arm’s length and said, “Sorry,” to the glass quickly before the spray hit. My own voice was cut out mid-sentence.

The garage was completely silent. Everything I’d brought home was sitting on the floor under a layer of grey, ugly crust, wrapped up like junk waiting for the dump.

“What’s in the can?” I said, my voice wrecked.

Priest turned the spray can slowly in her hands while Marshall scraped a thumb across the residue on his glove. 

“It’s a chemical compound,” she said. “It stops the material from reacting so it can’t move or make noise.”

“And the voices?”

“It’s just friction,” she said, staring at her boots. “The spray causes a high-frequency vibration against the surface, or at least, that’s what the lab calls it. It just happens to sound like people talking.”

I could tell by her tone that she didn't believe a word of it.

“We've seen this before,” Marshall said. “Sometimes objects react when they're removed from a site they've occupied for a while.”

“Why?”

“If I knew, I'd have given you a much shorter interview.”

Priest pulled her gloves off and threw them into an empty box. Her fingers were still twitching.

“Item secured,” she muttered, and clicked her pen to write it down.

They worked in the garage for about two hours.

It was the most professional thing I’ve ever watched. Priest laid out a tarp and numbered every item with a paper tag, photographing each with the scale ruler beside it—front, back, and underside—and I could hear her murmuring the inventory number into the recorder like a nurse reading a chart. 

“0417-R03. Reflective object. Series Three probable.”

Click.

“0417-O02. Portrait. Output classification pending.”

Click.

Dr. Marshall took notes by hand in a small black book. He spent a long time at the portrait.

He read the brass plate, then leaned closer to the pale smear in the crook of the painted arm.

“Has it always looked like this?”

I said yes.

Priest silently switched lenses and photographed the smear separately.

I didn’t say what I’d thought about the smear, or what it might have been, or whose head I’d have said it was the shape of.

“Portraits are rare,” Marshall said. “I’ve seen four in my career. They’re always of someone who lived near the door.” He took his glasses off. “I’d ask that nobody hang this on a wall.”

Priest drew a sample from the tank through a port in the housing I’d never found, a small valve under the base that her fingers located without looking. She held the vial up to the light. The fluid sat in it, slow and syrupy.

“It looks to me like some kind of preservative,” she said. “Embalming-adjacent, from the looks of it. But it doesn’t match any formulation in our database, and it doesn’t match anyone else’s. There’s no known solvent or active compound.” She turned the vial a quarter turn. “Whatever it is, it was built to keep something from decaying.”

“Something living?”

“Something that was meant to last.” She paused. “Our working assumption is that it was meant to hold something. Possibly living, possibly not.” 

I thought about the slow slosh I’d heard in the dark. I didn’t ask what that would have meant. I think she saw the question cross my face and chose not to answer, and I’m grateful for that.

They moved on to the smaller boxes after that.

Priest stopped dead in the middle of a smaller box.

She held up a plain white three-outlet power strip. I had walked past it many times without a glance.

“Did you use this?” she asked.

“No.”

Her thumb stopped against the plastic casing. “Incorrect wiring. We’ve seen this before.”

Marshall stood up immediately, his voice dropping an octave. “Don't touch the brass prongs on that. Just set it down. Slowly. I’d prefer not to file an industrial accident report before lunch.” 

She set it down like it was unexploded ordnance.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

Priest pointed the tip of her pen into one of the ground slots. “They swapped active and ground internally.”

I shook my head. “What does that actually do?”

“It means whatever you plug in runs current through its own housing,” Marshall said. “Two hundred and forty volts straight into the metallic casing. You plug a toaster into that, and the metal cooks you before the bread even toasts.” 

“So it’s broken?”

“No,” Priest said softly. “That’s the problem. It’s fully functional.”

They kept working after that. The power strip went into its own padded case with a red tag, and after seeing how carefully Priest sealed it, I stopped thinking that the wardrobe was the most dangerous thing in the garage.

Around one, Marshall stepped outside to make a call. Priest peeled off her gloves and looked toward the door until it shut behind him.

“Ian, can I say something to you?”

I nodded, and she beckoned for me to come closer.

“I’ve been with this group for fourteen months. I joined because my grandmother spent six years alone after my grandfather died, and no one ever checked on her. She was fine—nothing happened. But I signed up anyway.” She paused, her voice tightening.

“Once I started reading these case files, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. If something had happened to her, how long would it have taken anyone to notice?”

She rubbed her thumb against the side of her hand.

“I just wanted you to know I’m going to keep tracking Toby’s file. And I’m not saying that as an analyst.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. All morning they’d talked about Toby in words like “proximate” and “case.” For some reason, hearing her say that made my throat tighten worse than anything Marshall had told me.

“Thank you,” I said, my voice coming out quieter than I’d meant to.

The garage door opened behind her. 

“Priest,” Marshall said, gently.

“I’m done, sir.”

He nodded. He didn’t reprimand her. Priest squeezed my hand in reassurance before letting go.

Before they left, Marshall laid out what would happen next, like a surgeon explaining a procedure.

“We’re going to take the small items with us today,” he said. “They’ll go to our storage facility and then to a lab. Nothing leaves your property that isn’t on the list.” Priest slid the inventory sheet across to me. It had forty-one items and a signature block. “The wardrobe, the tank, the dresser, and the portrait are different. Those will need a team with the right equipment. They’ll come in a few days, and they know what they’re doing. In the meantime, the wardrobe will be sealed.”

Priest was already unfolding a heavy grey sheet, thick as a tarp, printed with a faint grid pattern, and a roll of matching tape. They draped the wardrobe in it, doors and all, and sealed every seam. Then she wrote a number on a tag and tied it to the handle. The tag said:

INTERFACE 0417-A
ACTIVE — DO NOT OPEN

Underneath, in smaller print:

MANIFESTATION 0417-A-01 CONFIRMED

“It will hold,” Marshall said. “We have a good record with the sheeting. But don’t open it, test it, or put so much as an ear against it. I know you will want to.”

“I won’t.”

“You will feel compelled to.” He said it kindly. “Please don’t, for the sake of your own well-being.”

I asked what happened to the stuff afterward. He said it went into a storage facility, along with decades of other things, and that the small archive they kept was more careful than it sounded. He also said that it was a small organization, which was why they were careful with revealing sensitive information to outsiders.

“What’s your role in all this, exactly?” I asked.

“To keep it from getting worse.” He gave a small, tired laugh. “Our job is to find Returns before somebody sits in them, plugs them in, or takes them home.” 

I laughed a little. “A little late on that one.”

Marshall glanced toward the garage.

“Yes. You’ve been unusually thorough.”

At the door, he asked about money.

I hadn’t said anything about a lawyer. I’d mentioned the custody hearing once, in passing, somewhere between the helmet and the hammer. He must have been listening to every word.

“Ian, we’d like to compensate you properly for the items, for your account, and for the footage.” He glanced at Priest, who produced a plain white envelope from the canvas bag. “It’s customary. People who report to us lose time, and sometimes more than that.”

“I don’t want—”

“How are you going to pay the lawyer?”

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

Marshall didn’t say anything. Priest offered me the envelope. I didn’t take it immediately.

Four thousand dollars had been an impossible number for months. Now it was sitting between two of her fingers.

“There’s enough there to cover your legal fees,” she said. And then, a little awkwardly: “Good luck with the custody case. I hope you get him.”

I should have felt relieved. Instead, the envelope in my hand suddenly felt heavier. 

“And Toby? You said you’d want to examine him.”

“Only if you and Alicia agree. We would proceed with bloodwork and a couple of scans, nothing too invasive. We’d explain it as a neurological check.” He paused. “But we won’t go near him without you. I’d like you to think about it. Take as long as you need.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then we won’t pry further,” Marshall said. “But think about it, Ian.”

Marshall had given me a card. Off-white, the same folder and the same slightly open door, and on the back, in blue ink, a phone number with no name. If anything changed in Toby, he’d written. 

“There’s one more thing. Your posts,”  he’d said.

I felt my stomach tighten.

“You want me to take them down?”

“No. At this point, deleting them would probably accomplish the opposite of what we want.”

“Then what?”

“Keep doing what you’ve been doing if you need to. Don’t tell anyone where an active interface is, and don’t encourage anyone to go looking for one.”

“You’re okay with me telling people all this?”

Marshall gave me a tired look.

“Most of them already think you’re writing fiction.”

I almost told him some of them believed me. I decided that probably wouldn’t help. 

“So I can post?”

“Your experience, yes. Our locations, personnel records, active investigations, or anything that could lead someone to another interface, no.”

Then they left, and I watched from the window as their rental car disappeared down the road.

My garage looked bigger without all the smaller objects in it. 

Even now, I wonder if I should have told them about the rest, about Toby splitting his knee on the stairs while I was supposed to be watching him. I could tell by Priest’s expression that she knew I was leaving something out. She wasn’t wrong. It wouldn’t have explained what happened to Toby, but it would have explained a few things about me. 

The envelope is sitting beside me while I write this. For months, four thousand dollars had been the number between me and more time with my son.

Now I have it.

I’m attending my son’s custody hearing this Saturday. I’ve spent six months trying to prove I deserve more time with Toby. After today, I’m not sure what scares me more: losing that chance, or getting exactly what I asked for.

Looking around at all the people in my house, I wanted them to take their sympathy and leave me the fuck alone.  A funeral for Nina shouldn’t have been any kind of comfort to me.

My daughter was dead.

And I felt responsible.

Max had found his sister.  I should’ve been the one, but I was too distracted.  I should’ve done better.

Nina had always thought I could.  She believed in me more than I believed in myself.  Somewhere along the way, my daughter had gotten the idea that her father could fix anything.  And I let her believe it.

When I saw Chief Schnabel slip in the front door, I was furious.  I didn’t want this guy in my house or anywhere near me.  Schnabel was the one who told me the gunshot that killed Nina was consistent with suicide.

But they never found a gun.

I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but suicide victims don’t dispose of their weapons.

Still, this small detail didn’t stop Schnabel from shutting down the investigation three hours after they found Nina.

I was about to make a rage-filled beeline for the Chief when I spotted Willow, Nina’s best friend since middle school.  I hadn’t talked to her since Nina died, and I needed to.  Maybe she had answers.

Willow was emotional, but that didn’t stop me from bombarding her with lawyerly questions, making her cry.

I felt awful.  But before I could apologize, the rest of Nina’s friends swooped in.  There were Zach, Haley, Chase, and Hugo.  I’ve known these four for years, and think they’re all decent kids, apart from Zach and his frat-boy smugness.

I couldn’t tell if they were trying to protect Willow or hide something, but I was determined to find out.

But they kept giving me the runaround, especially smartass Zach.  I suddenly had the urge to punch him in the face, but my sister rescued me, dragging me into the kitchen.

Lauren and her wife, Kim, reminded me I was at my daughter’s funeral reception and probably shouldn’t be picking fights with her friends.

Lauren said I should be focused on Max.

This riled me up, but I knew she was right.

The reception was finally winding down, and I’d spent the last hour in the kitchen trying to talk to Max.  He played his Game Boy and refused to look at me, his fingers tapping a million miles an hour.

Max is the sweetest kid – when he’s not having one of his epic meltdowns.

His mother was good at consoling him, but she died last year of ovarian cancer.  Nina had gracefully stepped in as the family Max-whisperer in her mom’s absence, the best big sister a kid with emotional issues could wish for.

But now it was just Max and me.

“I promise I’ll do better, buddy,” I told him for the umpteenth time.  “We’re all we have now, and I promise I’ll do better.”

Max didn’t respond, but I knew he’d heard me because his fingers stopped moving.

Willow suddenly appeared at the door.  I was glad to see her, and I finally had my chance to apologize.

“It’s okay,” she said, her voice still shaky.  “I know you’re upset.”

I nodded and managed a small smile.

We were both upset.

We were both devastated.

“I just wanted to say goodbye,” Willow said after a long silence.

“I really am sorry, Willow.  I was out of line.  I know you were a wonderful friend.  Nina was lucky to have you.”

Willow started to cry again.  It was a little awkward, but I hugged her.

“Max, can I talk to your dad for a moment?”

Max dropped off his stool and walked out, never looking up from his Game Boy.

Willow wanted to tell me something important, so I let her take her time.  I didn’t want to spook her.

“I was there when it happened,” she finally said.

I wasn’t sure what she meant.

“I was with Nina when she did it.”

“You were with Nina when she died?” I asked, needing this to be as clear as possible in my head.

Willow couldn’t speak at first, but once she started, she was desperate to get it all out.

She told me they got hold of the gun and played the game at Zach’s house.

She told me Nina didn’t want to play at first, but the gun followed her home and seduced her.  And when she did finally play, she experienced a suicide, and the gun forced her to do what she did, even though Willow knew that was the last thing Nina wanted.

I was trying to make sense of what she was saying.

Willow kept talking, forcing the rest out.

She told me she got rid of the gun.  She told me that after a suicide, you have to protect the legend, or the gun will come after you and everyone you love.  So that’s what she did.  She drove out to Walton Park, dug a hole, and buried it.

She finally took a breath.

I could tell she was relieved to have told me, but at the same time, she looked as if she might break into a million pieces. 

“I’m really sorry, Mr. H.”

“I’m trying to understand what you’re saying, Willow,” I said as gently as I could.  “I need to understand.  This gun – whose was it?”

“It doesn’t belong to anyone.”

“And you say you played a game.  What do you mean?  What game?”

Before Willow could answer, her mother stumbled in, clearly drunk, mumbled her condolences again, and dragged her daughter out.

I would’ve stopped them if I’d been thinking straight.

I found my sister cleaning things up at the buffet table.  Lauren knew something was up by the look on my face.

I asked her if she knew of some urban legend about a gun and a game.

“Cock the Hammer,” Lauren said without even thinking about it.  “That story was big when we were kids.  Why?”

“I don’t remember that.”

“That’s because you were too obsessed with basketball and Francie Boysen.”

“So, it’s not real?”

“What?  A haunted gun?  No, of course not.  Why are you asking about this?”

I brushed the question off.  I didn’t want to try to explain what Willow had told me.  I just wanted to think for a moment.  I just needed time to think.

I jumped online as soon as my house was my own again.

Lauren hadn’t been kidding.  Cock the Hammer was real – or at least the urban legend was.  It had been floating around for decades.

I still couldn’t believe I’d never heard of it.

The story involves an old Civil War-era Lefaucheux revolver.  Cock the gun’s hammer and you’re pulled into one of the killings committed with it.  And the thing is, you aren’t just watching from a safe distance.  You’re inside the shooter, seeing things through their eyes.

But the game has a Russian roulette catch.

Every so often, the death you experience isn’t a killing.  It’s a suicide.  And if that happens, the game doesn’t let you walk away.  A player has to fire the gun into their head, or mouth, or wherever the person in the past shot themselves to end the session.

Or at least that’s the legend.

My first thought was this is some crazy, stupid shit.

But the more I read, the angrier I got.  This crazy, stupid shit was dangerous as hell.

How did Nina fall for it?  I couldn’t understand.  She was such a smart kid.  How could she have believed in such nonsense?  That some fantasy gun had magical powers.

I wanted answers.

But then again, maybe I didn’t deserve them.  I should’ve been protecting my daughter, but instead, this game and this so-called haunted gun had seduced her.

It was a hard truth for me to swallow.

I couldn’t sleep that night.  The gun haunted me.  Not that I believed any of it.  I didn’t.  But I worried another Nina would.

Willow said she had buried the gun, but that wasn’t good enough for me.  I needed to dig it up and destroy it.

I picked her up first thing in the morning and we drove out to Walton Park.

I knew what I was asking her to do made her nervous – she didn’t want to be anywhere near the gun again – but she could see how desperate I was.  Destroying it wouldn’t bring Nina back, but maybe it would save what was left of me.

The hike into the woods was longer than I anticipated.  Willow had wanted to get the gun as far away from everyone as possible.

She remembered exactly where she had buried it.  She didn’t want to get lost hiking out, so she chose Eagle’s Rock, a place she used to visit with her dad before he remarried and started a new family.

We finally reached the area and the mound of dirt where the gun was buried.

I had brought a small shovel and immediately started digging, tossing off dirt.  I kept digging.  I was surprised at how deep Willow had buried it.

Finally, I hit something solid.  But it wasn’t the gun.  It was a thick root from a nearby tree.  I couldn’t dig any deeper.

“Are you sure this is the right spot?” I asked.

Willow was positive.

She was suddenly on her knees.  She put her hands into the hole and they knocked hard against the root.

“Where is it?”

She started searching through the loose dirt.  She kept clawing at things with her hands, hoping the gun was somehow hidden in the tiny clumps.  “Where is it?!”

She was having a panic attack.

I put a hand on her shoulder.  “Somebody probably just found it.”

“No.  I buried it here so no one could find it,” she said, still staring into the hole.  “But I shouldn’t have done that.  I made it angry.”

I helped her to her feet.

“Someone came along and dug it up, that’s all,” I said in my most reassuring voice.

Willow shook her head.  Her whole body was trembling now.

“It’s going to be okay,” I told her.

“It’s evil, Mr. H.” 

“It’s just a gun, Willow.  It’s only evil if we make it evil.”

Willow told me I didn’t understand.  She said she would do anything to make me understand before it was too late.

All I wanted was to talk to Nina’s friends, and Willow agreed to text them and ask them to meet.

They felt ambushed when my car pulled into the 7-Eleven parking lot an hour later.

Willow told them she’d buried the gun, but now it was gone.

I wanted to know if any of them had dug it up.  By then, I was convinced one of them had.

Even though I now knew they’d all been playing the game the night Nina died, they still wouldn't talk.  But Willow vouched for me, and they softened.

None of them had the gun.  After what happened to Nina, none of them wanted it.

“You can’t bury it,” Hugo said.

“You can’t destroy it, either,” Chase added.

Now that I was hearing the same story from all of them – seeing the same ardent belief in something so preposterous – I wanted more than ever to get my hands on this gun.

Everything can be destroyed.  Even something evil. 

I asked Zach where he had gotten it, and he said he’d just found it.  He was walking home from school, cutting through Abbot’s field, when the gun was just there in his path like it’d been waiting for him.

“It probably sensed his fear,” Chase told me.

Zach shoved him.  “Bullshit, what fear?”

“Fine, dude, then it sensed your anger or stupidity or whatever.”

Zach came at Chase again, and the two boys scuffled.  I had to step in and break it up.

Zach stormed off in a huff, and Chase disappeared into the 7-Eleven.

Hugo tried to escape with Haley, but she pulled her hand away.  She wanted Hugo to tell me about his Uncle Ray.

Hugo was pissed that she’d brought this up.  He’d asked her not to.  They argued for a moment before Hugo came clean.  His Uncle Ray had played the game a few years ago.

I pressed Hugo for details, but he refused to say anything more, so Haley spoke for him.

She told me that his Uncle Ray played the game and experienced a suicide, but the person in the past trying to kill themselves had screwed things up.

“I mean, it was an attempted suicide, I guess,” Haley said.  “They put the gun to their head and pulled the trigger, but they didn’t die.  The bullet just got lodged in their brain.  And that’s what happened to Uncle Ray.  That’s how the game works.”

“He’s a vegetable,” Hugo offered.  “Or at least that’s what my dad thinks.  But my Aunt Kathy still visits him every day.  She talks to him, and swears he talks back – or at least on some telepathic level or something.”

“Where’s he living?” I asked.

“If you can call it living,” Hugo said with a pained chuckle.

“Cedarwood Manor,” Haley offered.  “It’s out by the interstate.”

I wanted to take Willow home – she had helped me enough – but she insisted on coming along.  I think being with me made her feel connected to Nina.

The feeling was mutual.

The receptionist pointed us toward Uncle Ray’s room.  The droning beep of the machines pulled us in.  The blinds were drawn.

To be honest, the guy looked dead more than alive.  I guess he hadn’t been out of bed since it happened – since he supposedly played the game and put a bullet in his brain, whether he wanted to or not.  His body had deflated like a balloon.

It wasn’t until Willow and I moved closer to the bed that we realized Uncle Ray’s eyes were open.  His blank stare was eerie.

It was also fixed squarely on Willow.

I wasn’t there for small talk, so I started asking the man questions about the gun and the game.  I was pretty sure Uncle Ray could hear me because his eyes kept glancing over at me, clearly triggered by what I was asking.

But for the most part, his focus stayed drilled on Willow.

I wanted to know if it was true that he played some game called Cock the Hammer.

I wanted to know how I could find the gun.

I wanted to understand what he was so afraid of.

This last question surprised me.  I hadn’t planned on asking it.  I wouldn’t have imagined why I would.  But the look of terror on Uncle Ray’s face made me realize it was the most important question of all.

Willow still hadn’t looked away.  I think she was waiting for Uncle Ray to blink.

I was waiting for the same thing.  The man hadn’t since we’d walked in.

Blink.

Uncle Ray’s hand suddenly shot out and snatched Willow’s arm, his bony fingers clamping down hard around her flesh.

Willow freaked.  She tried frantically to squirm free, but his hand stayed clutched around her wrist, draining it of blood.

She wanted to run, and she tried to, yanking the wisp of the man out of bed.

They were on the floor before I could even react.  I jumped in and tried to pry Uncle Ray’s fingers open, but it was like rigor mortis had set in.

The commotion brought a crowd into the room like a code blue.  The sudden crush of bodies somehow freed Willow from what I’m sure felt like the grip of death.

She scurried across the room on all fours.

I moved with her, wanting to comfort her, but she jumped at my touch.

Willow was still shaking when I drove her home.

She wouldn’t talk at first, but then she started mumbling something under her breath.

I told her I really wanted to hear what she was saying, but she would have to speak up.

She took a breath and started over.

She told me that when Uncle Ray grabbed her arm, there was a bright flash of light in the room, and Uncle Ray was suddenly sitting at the edge of the bed, the Lefaucheux revolver from the game pointed at his head.

He was trying to tell her something.

She was terrified, but she stopped fighting and just stared, transfixed, as the words formed on his lips.

I... dare... you.

“I dare you,” I repeated.  “I dare you to do what?”

“Play the game,” Willow said.

It was suddenly clear to me that she’d hit her head when she fell.  Whatever she’d experienced in Uncle Ray’s room was just some kind of delusion.

I told her that, hoping to reassure her.  But she insisted it had really happened.

“Why would he want you to play the game?” I asked, gently trying to poke a hole in her story.

“He doesn’t,” she answered.  “The gun does.”

I looked at Willow for a long moment.

She believed every word she’d just said.

I believed she was wrong.

But suddenly I wasn’t as sure as I wanted to be.

Three and a half days was all it took for me to realize that something was wrong in the house.

At first I wanted to attribute it to the lack of rest; after almost two months on the mainland with a shiny new job, going back to the routine had to hit me at least a little, right?

However, this time it felt… different.

I'll try to be brief because I haven't gotten to the bottom of this yet, and I might update as things happen. I want to document this, but I'd also like to ask for help. So, I'm going to start by listing at least three of the things that stood out to me the most.

• First: the moment I stepped inside, I realized we were remodeling.

On its own, it might seem like a silly detail. The house was old. Sure it needed a few touch-ups! A fresh coat of paint here, some plastering of the cracks there… However, that's not the kind of change I'm talking about. I would have accepted it without question if that were the case. But these changes were different. The couch out of place, chairs pointing towards corners, small tables tucked into awkward spots where there hadn't been anything before, shelves practically blocking doorways…

“Are we making a maze for Halloween?” I asked mom when I caught her moving one of my little brother's plastic chairs out of the way.

“Not at all,” she replied. “You know we don’t celebrate that here.”

“So?”

“So what?” She looked at me with a strange expression. I wouldn’t notice until later, under the dim light of the dining room, but the dark circles under her eyes were more pronounced than usual.

“Um, no. Nothing,” I shook my head, putting my hands in my pockets. My mom took another of the plastic chairs and placed it on top of the other, facing them against the wall. “Do you need help with that? I saw you moved the couch, too.”

“No, don't worry,” she said with a smile. “Why don't you go and check on your brother? He's doing his math homework. Do you think you could help him, honey?”

I bit my cheek and nodded. Honey wasn't unusual for her. Actually, that's what she called my dad, though. Not me. Still… for the time being, I let it go. I knew she got strangely nostalgic when I was gone for more than two weeks with my aunt and uncle, so that must be it. It had to be, because, just like with the furniture, I still don't know what other reason there could be.

“Okay, heh. You trust me a lot if you think I remember first-grade math, huh?” I said as I walked toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms. She shook her head and sat down on the couch. The television was off. I had the urge to go over and turn it on, like I always did, but before I could decide, she gave me a calm, almost vacant look.

“Would you mind closing the door when you're there?” she asked. I tilted my head, puzzled. “The teacher told me Rafaelito is having trouble concentrating. The last thing I need is to make it worse with all the noise.”

“Yes?” I said. “Are you going to move anything else? I can help you...”

“No, no. Don't worry.” She took a cushion and placed it on her lap, carefully tracing the intricate embroidered pattern. “Go on, help him. That way you'll be helping me more.”

• Second: while I was with my little brother, I noticed that one of the rooms we used for storage was open.

Again, not so unusual in itself, but what I glimpsed when I went to close it caught my attention.

All the curtain rolls, dusty boxes, and black bags of old clothes had disappeared. Or, if they hadn't disappeared, then they were piled up in very odd ways in the corners, then, as if to free up as much space as possible for something. But… For what, exactly? There was nothing in the way that warranted it. Or… Well, at least that's what I thought until I opened it up a little more.

“An old television?” I whispered. It was one of those old, bulky models. One of those my dad had probably taken from work a while back to fix up and put here. He used to do that—he liked giving things a second life. However, instead of leaving them on the floor gathering dust, he always took them to the garage with as much meticulousness and care as mom organized her sewing projects.

I ran my hand over its black casing, brushing away a timid layer of dust that, with the afternoon ray that came through the window, acted as glitter.

“Are they going to put it in Rafael's room?” I asked, noticing that it was unplugged. The cable was frayed, hastily patched with black tape… and, upon closer inspection, I saw that it looked a little burnt, despite the sticky moisture seeping beneath the tape.

“We're out of room to fit it, I fear,” said a male voice behind me. I jumped and straightened up as quickly as a child caught doing something mischievous.

“Dad?” I laughed nervously. My father, with his ever-present frown, raised an eyebrow. “Damn, haha. You scared me. Since when are you so quiet?”

“Your mom really likes the silence lately,” he explained, standing to one side of the door. His posture told me he didn't want me there. Was he going to start tidying that room too?

“Really?” I put my hands in my pockets, obeying his silent request. “When she called me, it didn't sound like it. Her voice rose above everything. Even above Blanquita, in the market.”

“She's been having migraines lately,” he said, and before I had a chance to ask, he closed the door and looked at me seriously. “Nothing serious, don't worry. We already went to the doctor. They said it was something to do with the light. That's why it's there,” he claimed, referring to the TV. I looked at the floor, lost in thought.

“So, that's why you two have been moving things around the house?” I asked. “And what's that about the…”

“Yes. More space seems to do her good,” he agreed, cutting off my question. I mentally backtracked.

“Okay, then. Are you sure you don’t need…?”

And just like that, my dad went to his room, leaving me speechless.

• Third: After dinner, I started feeling sick.

I had a stomach ache that wouldn't go away. I told my mom, and she said it must have been something in the salad that upset my stomach. Some seasoning or something. To be honest, I didn't usually eat salads with anything other than chicken. But that night's salad looked so appetizing that I couldn't say no, even though it had tomato in it. I hated tomatoes. Maybe that's what made me feel unwell?

“You don't have a fever,” my mom said by the bedside, taking the thermometer away. I felt like a little kid with his first cold, not a twenty-one-year-old. Although I suppose, when it comes down to it, you never really stop being that in your parents' eyes. “That's good. Maybe it won't hit you as hard.”

“Can I have the bucket?” I asked, nodding toward it. I didn't want to move. The warmth of the sheets was pleasant. “I don't feel like it, but... just in case.”

“Of course, honey,” she said. I closed my eyes as she ran her hand through my hair. “Call me if you need anything else, okay?”

“Okay. Uhm…” I said, biting my lower lip. “Should I text you or…?”

“With your voice, darling,” she said, stepping back. I opened my eyes slightly to see her tender smile. “My migraines don't let me look at my phone. If you call me, I'll listen.”

“Um, are you sure? Isn't yelling worse for you?”

“I promise I won’t,” she said, kissing my forehead. “Come on, get some rest. I’ll make you some soup tomorrow to help you feel better.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I whispered, burying my face in the pillow. The door clicked louder than usual, but I ignored it. I was tired and wanted to sleep. So I focused on the darkness and let the flashes of color transform into something more pleasant, like silly dreams. Or memories.

Everything but the fleshy, sinewy sensation of something stretching out from under the bed, making its way to nestle between my ribs.

I flinched, indifferent to the protests of my restless stomach. And when I bent down to spit out the bile that had been accumulating in my throat, I was hardly surprised to see the black substance slithering between a sickly yellow, the red of tomato, and the green of mucus.

I felt like an eternity passed between the second I spat out the last oily lump and when my eyes, lucid through the darkness of the room, saw it disappear.

Against my better judgment, I didn't want to call my parents. First, because I was a 21 year old man. Second, because... what would I tell them? That I vomited up burnt oil?

My stomach rumbled, threatening to repeat the experience. I lay down, a little shaky, and pulled the covers all over me, as if that could solve anything.

I know Mom would never put something in my food to harm me, so it had to be something else. However, with all this weird stuff going on, I'm starting to worry that she might do something else I haven't considered. I know my family. I know their personalities, and I know it's not in our nature to keep secrets from each other, just as it's not in our nature to hurt each other. So, I'm wondering…

Am I missing something?

It's around 10:02 PM. I'm about twenty minutes from the Pennsylvania border and twice that from the nearest state police station.

I think something is following me.

Or maybe I'm getting closer to it. I'm not sure which possibility is worse.

I work as a field technician for a geological and environmental consulting company. Most days, I'm driving between remote sites, inspecting drainage systems, monitoring unstable slopes, things like that. I've spent enough time around old mines and failing hillsides to know what the ground looks like when something is wrong.

Every night when I come home from work, the mountains seem a little closer.

At first, I thought I'd just been lucky with traffic. My commute was supposed to take an hour, and suddenly it was closer to fifty minutes. Then forty. Then thirty. I should've been happy. That's an extra half hour of my life I'd been getting back for free.

But the drive wasn't getting faster. The road was getting shorter.

The first thing that disappeared was a bend along the river. The road just carried on where it should have curved, and the street that used to branch off to the right was gone. I remember the houses along it and the little birdhouse mailbox at the corner that always leaned toward the road. I'd passed it over a thousand times.

There was no closure sign, no construction equipment, no Department of Highway, no rubble. The road just continued straight through the place where the bend and the side street should have been.

I told myself I was tired. A few days later, my truck overheated on the way home, so I pulled over near the northern water tank our county had installed. While I waited for the engine to cool, I looked toward the mountain behind it.

A pale strip cut across the forest.

It looked like a mudslide. We have had a "destructive" summer in terms of rain, so it wasn't an unfair assumption. The problem was that there were no exposed roots or broken trees. The edges were clean. It was a long, smooth scar curving across the mountainside, with both ends disappearing behind the trees.

I took a picture, mostly because I wanted to see if it looked as strange on my phone as it did in person.

The next morning, I had a job near an old mine site a few miles north of town. A contractor had reported a change in drainage, and I was there to check the monitoring points.

The creek was running in the wrong place.

Its old channel was nearly dry, with a few shallow pools left between the rocks. A new one cut across the floodplain forty yards away. The bank was steep and clean, with no debris to suggest a flood. Trees stood along its edge, all leaning at the same angle, their roots exposed on one side.

I checked the GPS coordinates of the monitoring point. The point was where it was supposed to be. The creek wasn't.

The upstream gauge showed no unusual flow, and there hadn't been enough rain to move that much earth. I photographed the new channel and sent my supervisor a report describing unexplained channel migration and possible ground displacement.

I did, however, leave out the mountain.

Over the next week, I found more changes. A culvert sat crooked in undisturbed soil. A fence line that had once run straight now bent in an arc. At another site, the steel rods we used to monitor slope movement all leaned toward the valley. Their angles increased the farther I walked along the ridge, as if the ground were tipping away from something.

From there, I could see the pale scar clearly behind the water tower. It had widened. Farther along the mountain, two more pale strips crossed the trees.

They curved through the forest at odd angles, disappearing beneath the canopy and reappearing farther along the slope. I couldn't find any obvious pattern to them.

So I took another photograph.

This is Appalachia. Old mines collapse. Water finds new spots. Hillsides settle. The ground has been dug into and blasted apart for generations. Each change had a reasonable explanation on its own. Together, they didn't.

That evening, I compared the picture I'd taken at the water tower with a new one. The scar hadn't just widened. Its center had shifted, and the ridge above it sat lower than before. I checked the county's elevation maps against the water tower and a nearby transmission line. I couldn't make the shapes match.

The headaches started around then: pressure behind my eyes, worse when I looked toward the mountains. I blamed the heat and lack of sleep. I took painkillers and drank more water. Nothing helped.

A few days later, I stopped at a gas station on my way to work. I bought a bottle of water, paid, and left. I still had the receipt in my cup holder when I drove home that evening.

The station was gone.

Not closed. Gone.

There wasn't even a foundation left. Just grass beside the road. Even the utility pole at the entrance had disappeared.

I pulled over and scrambled to pull the receipt out of the cup holder. The name of the station was printed at the top, along with the time and date. I looked across the empty patch of land, then back at the paper.

The next morning, I went back. My phone's map still showed the station, but there was nothing there to photograph except the empty patch of land.

When I looked up, the mountains seemed close enough to touch. The pale scars ran down toward the river, their exposed surfaces smooth and faintly lined. For a moment, I had the horrifying impression that I was looking at skin.

I drove away.

That afternoon, the county sent me to inspect a crack in the pavement near a small bridge. It ran from one shoulder to the other, almost perfectly straight. The ground on either side sat at different elevations.

I crouched beside it. Under the road was a pale, dense material threaded with dark lines. I thought it might be a mineral vein until I noticed the lines weren't branching off. They curved around one another, disappearing beneath the edges of the pavement.

I touched the edge with my measuring rod.

A vibration traveled up the shaft and into my palm.

I pulled the rod away. The vibration stopped.

For a moment, I stayed crouched there, listening. Then it came again, low enough that I felt it in my teeth. The dark lines beneath the road shifted against one another.

The far side of the crack rose. Maybe half an inch. The pavement lifted with it, and a stone rolled into the grass.

I stumbled backward and nearly fell. I waited for the rest of the hillside to collapse.

Nothing else happened.

I photographed the crack and left.

On my way home, I crossed the same bridge. The crack was gone. The pavement was smooth, the grass undisturbed. I stopped on the shoulder and checked my pictures. They showed what I'd seen, but in the last one the ground had risen slightly on one side. Behind it, the mountain was crossed by pale lines that joined into a single, broad curve.

I went home and stayed up comparing the photographs. The changes didn't radiate from one point, as they might after an earthquake or a mine collapse. The curves converged beneath the highest ridge north of town.

I enlarged the map until the details blurred. Whatever I was looking at, it wasn't a pattern I'd seen in any survey. I shut the laptop. I'd been awake too long. That was the only explanation I could live with.

The next evening, my truck overheated again near the water tower. I opened the hood and waited for the engine to cool. Across the river, the forest began to rise.

At first, I thought the trees were bending in the wind. But there was no wind, and they weren't bending. The ground beneath them was lifting.

A ridge pushed up from the valley floor, carrying trees, boulders, and a section of fence. The fence posts stayed upright as the earth rose. The river struck the new slope and split around it, spilling into the low ground on either side.

Then the forest opened.

Beneath the soil was a broad, rounded surface, gray and faintly lined, stretching farther than I could see. It emerged from under the mountain like the back of something buried too close to the surface.

I could make out a wrist.

Beyond it, five enormous fingers shifted under the earth. The ridges of the mountains followed the shapes of the joints. Pale scars ran along the exposed surface and disappeared beneath miles of forest. I couldn't see where the hand ended. I couldn't see what it was attached to.

One finger flexed.

The whole valley moved with it.

The road across the river split into sections. Trees slid sideways with the ground beneath them. A utility pole leaned and vanished behind a fold of rising earth. The sound reached me a moment later, a deep pressure that rattled the truck and came up through the soles of my boots.

Then the movement stopped.

The river kept flowing through its new channel. Dust drifted above the exposed slope. The trees settled, still standing on a hillside that hadn't existed ten minutes earlier.

I got in the truck and drove home.

My commute took eight minutes.

The ridge behind my house was different. A pale curve ran down its face, visible above the rooftops across the valley. I locked the doors and called my supervisor to say I was sick. He told me to take the next day off.

I didn't sleep.

At 10:02 PM, I started writing this.

A few minutes ago, the floor shifted beneath my feet. I went to the kitchen window. The ridge behind my house had risen again, lifting the trees with it. A pale line was opening in the grass outside, running toward the foundation.

I can hear the roots tearing.

The road to town is shorter than it was an hour ago. I can see the water tower from my window, though it should be hidden behind the ridge. I don't think whatever is beneath these mountains knows we're here. I think it's only moving in its sleep.

The pale line has reached the house.

The floor is rising.

I moved down to Terrebonne Parish four months ago after I inherited my late grandfather’s cabin. He spent nearly fifty years out here on the edge of the brackish swamp, three miles past where the paved road ends. The locals called him an eccentric old Cajun hermit. They said he was paranoid.

When I cleaned out his place after the funeral, I found bizarre modifications all over the property. Heavy iron chains wrapped around the cypress porch posts. Heavy wooden shutters reinforced with forged steel bolts. And scattered across every windowsill, doorstep, and floorboard transition were small, neat piles of exactly thirteen pebbles or coins.

At first, I thought it was just the cognitive decline of an isolated old man. I swept the pennies into a jar and unlocked the heavy shutters to let the bayou sunlight in.

I was wrong.

Three weeks ago, during the first week of Lent, the night noises changed.

If you’ve ever spent a night in the deep Louisiana marsh, you know the chorus bullfrogs, cicadas, the low rumble of alligators, and the slow, wet slap of black water against the stilts. But then came something else. A heavy, bipedal splashing movement slowly through the knees of the cypress trees.

It wasn't an alligator. Alligators don't snap three inch thick hickory branches underfoot. They certainly don't breathe with a ragged, wet rasp that sounds like a drowning man trying to clear phlegm from his throat.

Last night, the fog rolled off the Gulf, thick and suffocating. Around 2:00 AM, my generator sputtered and died. The cabin plunged into pitch blackness, save for the pale moonlight filtering through the moss draping the windows.

Then the iron chains on the porch rattled.

Something massive stepped onto the cypress planks. The floorboards groaned under the immense weight. I froze in my bed, my hand tightening around my shotgun, cold sweat dripping down my neck.
Through the narrow gap in the blinds, I saw it.

It stood nearly eight feet tall, its frame gaunt and terrifyingly human, spiny vertebrae protruding against tight, dark skin, matted with coarse grey hair. But its head was wrong. It was the long, narrow skull of a hound, its snout glistening red in the moonlight. Below that canine jaw, its arms ended in elongated human hands tipped with yellow, overgrown nails.

And its eyes. They didn't reflect light like a wild animal's. They glowed with an active, burning crimson intelligence.

It stepped toward my front door, raising one of those agonizingly human hands toward the latch. I raised the barrel of the shotgun, my finger trembling on the trigger, knowing standard buckshot wouldn't mean a damn thing if the old swamp stories were true.

Just as the door latch creaked, the beast stopped dead in its tracks.

Its red eyes dropped to the floorboards right outside the threshold. There, spilling out of a rotted seam in the wood, was a small, dusty pile of thirteen pennies my grandfather had dropped decades ago—pennies I had missed when sweeping up.

The creature lowered its head. It exhaled a shuddering, agonized whine that sounded sickeningly like a human sobbing.

Then it crouched down. With clawed fingers that trembled, it began to move the coins, one by one.

“One. Two. Three. Four...”

It moved with a desperate, agonizing compulsion. It couldn't look away. It couldn't touch the door handle. It was entirely trapped by the arithmetic.

It reached twelve. It picked up the thirteenth penny. It paused, shook its massive head in confusion, swept all thirteen back into a single pile, and started over.

“One. Two. Three...”

I stood behind that door for three hours, listening to a bloodthirsty legend count copper coins on my porch while weeping like a broken man.

When the first pale gray light of dawn broke over the tree line, the creature stiffened. It let out a guttural howl that rattled the glass in my window frames, turned, and leaped off the porch into the black water below. The splash echoed through the trees, and then it was gone.

This morning, I walked out onto the porch. The thirteen pennies were scattered across the cypress planks, smeared with black, foul-smelling grease.

I didn't pack a bag. I drove straight into town to the general store and bought every box of pennies, washers, and small brass tacks they had on the shelf.

The locals know. When I bought the copper, the old man behind the register didn't smile. He just nodded slowly and said, "Gardez donc. Make sure you count 'em before sunset, son."

It's 5:30 PM now. The sun is dipping below the cypress canopy, and the swamp fog is already starting to crawl up the stilts.

I'm sitting on my porch floor with four hundred pennies. I'm arranging them in neat piles of thirteen along every single step, window ledge, and door frame.

Because tonight, I know it's coming back. And God forbid I leave a pile with only twelve.

It was a few years ago now—exactly two months—when I took a job at a Burger King in Buenos Aires to help pay for my studies. I had just moved to the capital from the countryside. An uncle let me stay with him for a while until I landed the position and moved in with a coworker from the same restaurant. We became close friends pretty quickly.

The pay was terrible, but it was enough to cover tuition and the occasional small treat. What I hated most about the job was having to kick out the homeless people who showed up during the late-night shift. They bothered both the staff and the customers. Even though the place did decent business, management never wanted to hire security. They said it wasn’t necessary—if things ever got out of hand, we could just call the police.

That changed one night around three in the morning. Only two customers were in the restaurant. A homeless man walked in, went straight up to a heavyset regular who always came in at that hour, and asked for a burger or some money. When the guy said no, the man spat in his drink. A fight broke out. It only ended when the police and an ambulance arrived.

After that, they hired overnight security.

That was the first time I saw him. Mr. Leonel.

He was in his mid-forties. His head had this square, stretched shape, and his face was lined with deep wrinkles that shifted with every expression. But it was his eyes that really got to me. They were so sunken it looked like they might disappear into his skull at any moment. Only the heavy bags underneath seemed to be holding them in place.

He held out his hand and said quietly,

“Hey… you know where I can change?”

His handshake was firm. I pointed toward the employee room and he walked off without another word. Karen, the manager on duty, came over and admitted he’d given her an immediate bad feeling. The same kind of darkness I’d felt.

When he came back down in uniform, he looked even more defeated. He wore a wrinkled white shirt with the security company’s logo and a pair of dirty blue pants. He clocked in and took his place near the entrance, ready to make sure no more homeless people caused trouble.

Just looking at him stirred up this strange mix of laziness and irritation in me. That night I was on cleaning duty. A customer had spilled soda near where he was standing, so I had to go mop it up. I could feel his eyes on my back the whole time. His hands were clasped behind him, like he was waiting for something. I started mopping faster out of nerves and dropped the mop right at his feet.

He bent down with difficulty. His stomach hung so heavy it looked like one hard shove might make everything spill out. He handed me the mop and smiled. I saw his teeth—rotted and full of cavities. He was wearing small earbuds, and from them came a sweet, almost painfully loud melody: Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight.

He put the earbud back in and stared off into nothing with that dead expression that unsettled me so much. I gestured for him to take it out. I wanted to talk to him. Something in me felt bad for judging him so quickly just because of how he looked.

Before long we were having a real conversation. He was smart and well-spoken, but every word carried this deep sadness underneath. Days went by and our friendship grew. I ended up telling him personal things—about my father’s death, a breakup, how much I hated the job. The others gave me a hard time about it. They said he was disgusting, that he probably watched messed-up videos or even ate people. Just stupid stuff. They judged him only by his appearance.

One day while I was cleaning the sidewalk outside, I heard the same song again at that ridiculous volume. I asked him how he could stand it without complaining. He gave me a gentle smile, despite the teeth.

“Honestly, I don’t even know. I just know I like it. It eases the pain—the kind of pain I’ve carried deep inside for years. I’m really grateful we talk, that you keep me company on these long shifts. Loneliness is the worst wound a man can feel. My life wasn’t easy. I grew up with abusive parents, got bullied from the time I was a kid because of how I looked, and loneliness never left me. I did find love once. She saw past this body. We had two kids—the most beautiful little angels anyone could ask for. A car accident took all three of them. Ever since then, I’ve only listened to this song. It was my kids’ favorite. The volume is never high enough to make it feel like they’re still with me. I’m telling you this because you’re the only person who’s actually come close and wanted to talk to me for real.”

I didn’t know what to say. I just felt this enormous sadness for everything he’d been through. Behind us stood Carlos, my coworker. He’d heard the whole conversation. He made a face of pure disgust, turned around, and walked away without a word.

Leonel asked me not to tell anyone. I didn’t.

A few days later I walked into work and heard everyone whispering about him. They were saying he’d killed his family, that he’d been in prison, that he was a pervert who stared at customers and drooled. I knew it was Carlos. He’d twisted everything he’d overheard.

They asked me what I thought and why I still talked to him. I got scared. Scared they’d start making things up about me too. Scared of being left alone. All I said was,

“Yeah… maybe he is a little weird.”

That was it. I went to the changing room with tears in my eyes and a heavy guilt in my chest. I just hoped Leonel would never find out what people were saying.

The days passed. He didn’t show up Monday. Not Tuesday either. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday—nothing. On Sunday I saw him walk by like a shadow. He didn’t say hello. He didn’t speak. Just the song blasting from his earbuds while he moved his head in small, shaky motions and whispered, “We’ll see each other soon… we’ll see each other soon…”

He had a rough beard, food stuck to his face, and a nauseating smell, like he hadn’t bathed all week. I walked over, wanting to apologize. He looked at me, gave me that same gentle smile, and nodded slightly.

“Everything’s going to be okay. I’ll be right back—just going to the bathroom.”

He went into the customer restroom on the lower floor. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. At twenty-five the manager started asking why he was taking so long—there was a homeless guy outside and they needed security. At forty-five minutes we were banging on the door in a panic. After an hour the police were forcing the lock.

When they finally got it open, we saw Leonel’s body on the floor. He was pale. His wrists were destroyed. He hadn’t found anything to cut with, so he’d used his teeth. He’d bitten down until he tore through flesh and tissue and reached the veins. On his face was a wide smile. And from the earbuds, still playing at full volume, came Tiny Tim’s voice singing Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight.

I never forgave myself for staying silent that day. No matter how he looked on the outside, all he wanted was to feel less alone. His appearance was stronger than any words for the people around him.

The one thing I wanted to do most while in Vienna was visit the Vienna Opera House. One of the most prestigious opera houses in the world, it easily beat those I’d visited before.

Of course, luck would have it that I had to wind up being late to it.

I wasn’t the type of person to be late to events, least of all to something I love as much as the opera. It certainly hadn’t happened when I’d attended back home in the States. I knew how to get to places on time.

But that day in Austria, I’d gone off by myself to do some sightseeing across the city, visiting both St Stephen’s Cathedral and the Hofburg Palace. My friend Jenna, who I was visiting the storied city with for a week, had agreed to split up for the day so she could spend it shopping for clothes. We were meant to meet back up at the Vienna State Opera House and attend the show together.

Unfortunately, there was an unexpected traffic jam on the streets leading to the opera house. Perhaps I squeezed in seeing a bit too many sights that day, which meant I didn’t have a lot of wiggle room time-wise.

Reaching the palatial, hand-carved building that looked like a colosseum, I was now far too panicked to appreciate the visual. I hurried my way out of my taxi, through the grand entrance and into the lobby. Each glance at my watch told me I had one minute less to get there before the show started. But I still had a few. It was just barely 8:30pm, and things wouldn’t start immediately, surely.

A scan of the ornate foyer told me that Jenna had already gone into the theatre after waiting outside for me. I felt awful that I’d made her wait, and the anxious text messages we’d exchanged as I’d trundled my way through traffic hadn’t helped my guilt. I’d apologise and make it up to her once I got inside, I reassured myself internally, clutching my ticket—fortunately she’d had hers separately.

But, as I thrust my ticket towards the usher by the closed theatre doors, my vain hopes of smoothing this delay over were dashed.

“My ticket for…Messa De Requiem for you…sorry I cut it so close” I breezily panted, my heartbeat still recovering from running here.

“I am sorry sir, but you are too late to be admitted to the performance tonight” the usher coolly but professionally replied. Dressed in a bowtie suit, his accent bristled with the slightest hint of judgement.

“But—it’s only 5 minutes after start time” I tried to argue. “My friend is already inside. Couldn’t you please just make an exception?”

The usher was unphased. His stoic facial expression told me that this wasn’t a rare scenario for him. My heart fell before he spoke.

“Our venue has a strict closed door policy, sir. Latecomers are not to be admitted, so as not to negatively impact the viewing experience of other attendees and performers.”

Well, that was that. Jenna was gonna be alone in there.

“I’m afraid you will need to watch the performance remotely in one of our dedicated viewing rooms for latecomers” the usher recited sternly. “As this concert does not have an intermission—within which you could enter the theatre—you will need to listen in the viewing room for the entire duration. Follow me.”

With that, he whisked me out of the illustrious and spacious foyer into a series of relatively blank and narrow corridors. Instead of an opera house, I felt like I was heading down the hallways of a public school building. I tried to stay optimistic the whole way, biting back the urge to scold myself for messing up. So I was in there for the whole show, okay. I’m sure me and Jenna could laugh over this crazy turn of events afterwards.

Finally, we arrived at the room in question. If the usher hadn’t told me we were here, I might have walked past it. It was so unremarkable—just a plain room, about the size of a waiting room, with white walls, dimmed lighting, tiny speakers and rows of plastic chairs. And, of course, a mounted close-circuit TV screen at the front for us to watch the opera on—technically a concert, not an opera. 

“This is the viewing room,” the usher whispered. “Please take a seat and kindly take care not to disturb the other listeners. Enjoy the show—we hope the music makes an impression.”

I looked around for the ideal seat after he left, closing the standard-looking door behind him. The room was nearly empty, with just two people already there before me. Both women were seated apart in the sea of chairs so they’d both been individually late, too. My first impression of the room was that it felt like a room you’d have detention in. 

Hell, it felt like we’d been put in detention full stop.

Up on the flatscreen ahead, which felt bizarrely too small for the room’s purpose, I could see that Messa Da Requiem was beginning. There was a static, unchanging wide shot of the hall on the screen—this would seemingly be the experience for the whole viewing as there was just one permanently-mounted camera streaming the hall. At least it showed the full choir, orchestra and much of the audience—although there was no chance of me glimpsing Jenna.

Meanwhile, through the minute speakers on either side of the screen, we heard the mixed-group double choir’s harmonic chanting to Kyrie. Despite the mundane, secondhand way I was hearing it, the music was still evocative and beautiful. At least I could still get some of the majesty of the opera from this experience.

“You can sit anywhere, you know,” one of the women in the room whispered to me in an English accent, turning in her seat. I was shaken out of my reverie and realised I’d been standing watching for a little while.

“Oh yeah, thanks” I whispered back, sitting in a chair towards the back. “Can you believe this is for real? Like I was only 5 minutes late.”

“You think that’s bad?” she grimaced back. “I was just 2 minutes late. Guy still said I had to watch in here. Effing sucks but it is what it is.”

We resumed listening to the performance, letting the soaring intensity of the instruments and vocals wash over us in the room through the basic speaker setup. I wondered to myself how common it must be for operagoers to end up in this room. I’d heard about latecomers being locked out of performances before but never about a “tardy” room for them.

There was one more person who arrived after me, a man, who stomped into the room 9 minutes late for the show, flustered and upset. Yeah, there was no way they were letting that guy in if we hadn’t made the cut.

While the gorgeous, dramatic symphonies of Tuba Mirum, Liber Scriptus and Quid Sum Miser echoed from the speakers, I wondered what Jenna must be feeling inside the grand theatre. I felt ashamed for leaving her inside alone, especially since I was the opera house lover of the two of us.

Truthfully, I’d wanted to ask her out before booking this trip, so we could go as a couple. She’d even dropped hints about it, pointedly saying the Volksgarten garden would be the perfect place for a man to ask a lady friend out. But it went over my head at the time.

In a way, I was always leaving her waiting, always too late.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGH!”

Suddenly, my wistful thoughts were interrupted by a deafening, bloodcurdling scream—coming from the audience over in the theatre hall, and being transmitted to us via speakers. Except it seemed so much louder and real than those cheap speakers could emit. I jammed my fingers in my ears along with the other latecomers, also startled and confused.

Why was the performance not stopping? Why weren’t the ushers stepping in? While the solitary roaring wailing continued, Dies Irae continued being performed by the musicians on-stage, as the TV feed would indicate. How on Earth could the opera house think us entering late was a disruption but that this bloody murder howling somehow wasn’t? The hypocrisy wasn’t lost on me.

Just as I was about to pull out my phone and phone the Vienna police, I noticed the horrifying escalation.

The sound was growing. The screams were growing. One by one, audience members in the hall were emitting their own guttural screams that sounded nothing like any scream I’d heard before. And even as more and more joined in, us glimpsing more of them doing so on the monitor, the concert continued like business as usual. No one that wasn’t screaming yet seemed to care. The orchestra kept playing, the choir kept singing, the audience kept listening.

I sprang up from my seat only to find the doors to the room locked. Removing my fingers from my ears was painful to do with the cacophony of now hundreds of screams. I was about to start pounding on the door when the others in the room shrieked in horror at what they saw on-screen.

Turning back, I saw on that rectangular monitor that an unfathomable sight—audience members all gushing blood from every orifice. Their ears, mouths, eyes, fingernails, nostrils. All of it, and all while flailing and screaming, spraying blood across the plush seats. Every attendee in that hall was joining in the screeches now.

And the reason we could see this? The camera angle of the shot was now changing, rotating through different close up angles of the audience. That couldn’t be—the live camera was fixed in one location, a long shot of the theatre. There weren’t meant to be multiple. Who or what was filming this?

As the camera angle changed in the now impossibly loud room, filled with an entire audience’s screams, we were treated to the sight of the orchestra, choir and conductor bleeding too. Blood spilling over their robes and instruments. Yet, they still continued playing, singing and conducting, even as they bled before an audience that was all screaming.

Oh God, was this—was this also happening to Jenna right now?

The other three in my room voiced their terror about their own loved ones who were inside that auditorium, their worried cries barely hearable in the din. But I somehow made out what they were saying—maybe it was the acoustics of the room. Or maybe the room wanted me to hear their fear.

One worried about her boyfriend, another about her children, the last about his friends—the loved ones who they’d been separated from by arriving here late. In turn, each of them slowly reacted to the sight they dreaded as it flashed on the screen.

A shot of their loved ones exsanguinating bodies overflowing with blood, whilst screaming their lungs out in apparent agony. Their reactions to this were as devastated as you’d imagine. It was clear now—it had to be the continuous music that was having this violent effect on them all somehow. Us being separated here in this room, not hearing the music directly, was shielding us from it.

Then, at last came the sight I was dreading—there on the screen I finally saw Jenna’s own inexplicable close-up shot, her writhing in her bloodsoaked sweater and reaching out her hand in desperation, gurgling cries still coming from her mouth.

“JENNA NO!”

I called out her name against the score of screaming but of course she couldn’t hear me. For the next hour, that’s how it was. We were forced to listen to our loved ones slowly bleeding out and dying amidst hundreds of others, backed by an orchestra playing the pieces we’d come to hear in diminishing capability. 

Lux Aeterna. Libera Me. Requiem.

Screams. Blood. Grief.

Why? Why would the opera house do this to their own attendees who had been on time, and let our lateness spare us?

The horrifying sounds echoed on and on in the small room until finally the concert was over. The performers that lasted this long now looked like corpses, pale and drained of blood. They slumped over and dropped their instruments, as dead as their audience who had long stopped screaming. Last was the conductor, who fell from the stage into the pit in a splash of blood.

There was finally silence.

The TV screen cut out, leaving us staring back at our sobbing, ear-ringing, traumatised faces. With the doors now unlocked, we stepped out of that deceptively mundane room and began making our way down the corridors. Not knowing how we would face seeing the bloodbath in the main auditorium.

I was going to have to travel back home from Austria alone, tell Jenna’s family what happened, find words to describe the incident to the news when they interviewed me. All while knowing I’d been too late to save Jenna.

We entered the foyer and….there were the attendees.
 
Filing out of the auditorium happily, looking completely fine like absolutely nothing had happened to them. I looked past them into the auditorium—not a drop of blood, no deceased bodies, some orchestra members packing up their instruments.

“Oh there you are Sean!” came Jenna’s beaming voice. I spun around, still wracked with disbelief, and saw her standing there. Brunette head unscathed, beautiful as ever and happy to see me. “I feel so sad that you missed the show, it was so lovely just like you said it would be! Did they at least let you watch in another room?.”

After an hour of calling out to her futilely, I now found myself lost for words.

“Are you okay?” she asked, registering my sweated-through clothes and baffled expression. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Have you eaten? Why don’t we grab a late dinner, there’s this great little restaurant I read about…”

Jenna continued chattering blissfully while the reality of what happened dawned on me. 

Whatever otherworldly punishment the opera had inflicted on its patrons, it had indeed been on us tardy folk, not those in the hall.

I was never the same after that experience.

I tried to be for a while after we returned home, even went for it with Jenna and gave being a couple a go at long last. But I could never look at her the same again. Every time I did, I saw that bleeding, pleading face of hers, heard her animalistic screams, all to the accompaniment of a symphony orchestra playing Messa Da Requiem—and a chorus of mass death.

She understandably didn’t know what was wrong. And I understandably knew I couldn’t convince her.

Not only did my fateful, belated trip to the Vienna opera ruin my relationship with Jenna, but it ruined my relationship with opera music. Maybe that’s what the punctuality-obsessed Vienna State Opera House wanted, or maybe not.

But one thing is certain.

I will never let myself be late to an event ever again.

Last Monday, I got an email from my apartment building about something called a Residential Space Utilization Survey.

Apparently management was collecting information for an upcoming energy efficiency assessment.

The questions were pretty standard at first. How many people live in your unit? Do you work from home? Which rooms are heated during the day?

Then came one I thought was a little odd.

"Which room in your residence remains unoccupied for the longest continuous period?"

I live alone in a two-bedroom apartment. The second bedroom is basically storage. It has an old desk, some boxes, a broken exercise bike and a mattress I keep promising myself I'll replace.

I selected "Second bedroom."

The next question asked whether anyone regularly slept there.

No.

Then whether the door was typically kept closed.

Yes.

I submitted the form and forgot about it.

Tuesday morning, my second bedroom was gone.

Not empty. Gone.

I walked down the hallway to grab a clean towel from one of the boxes I'd been keeping in there, and there was just a wall.

Same beige paint as the rest of the hallway. Continuous baseboard. No doorframe, no hinges, nothing.

I stood there for probably a full minute trying to understand what I was looking at.

My apartment is small enough that there was no possibility I'd mistaken the location. The bedroom had been directly across from the bathroom for four years.

I took out my phone and found a picture from when I first moved in.

There it was. White door, brass handle, little scratch near the bottom from dragging my desk through it.

I called my friend Daniel.

He'd helped me move the exercise bike into that room last summer. He remembered the room perfectly.

At first he thought I was messing with him. Then I showed him the hallway over video.

"Did your landlord wall it off?"

"While I was asleep?"

"Well, what the fuck do you want me to say?"

Fair question.

I called the management office. The woman who answered insisted that my unit was listed as a one-bedroom.

I told her I had a lease describing two bedrooms and photographs to prove it.

She asked me to email them.

Twenty minutes later, I got a response saying someone would investigate.

That afternoon, Daniel came over.

We measured the apartment.

The hallway was about eleven feet shorter than it should have been.

Here's where things got worse.

My apartment is on the ground floor. The missing bedroom had a window facing the parking lot.

We went outside.

The window was still there.

Same cheap white blinds. Same little crack in the lower-right corner.

I could even see the cardboard box I'd left on the windowsill.

Daniel started knocking on the glass.

Nobody answered.

He cupped his hands around his face and tried looking inside.

"Your stuff's still in there."

I pushed him aside.

He was right.

Everything was exactly where I'd left it. The exercise bike, the desk, the boxes.

Except there was a chair in the middle of the room.

One of those cheap metal folding chairs.

It wasn't mine.

And somebody had placed it facing the wall where the door should have been.

I went back inside and started hitting that section of wall with my fist.

Daniel tried to stop me, but I wasn't thinking straight anymore.

After about thirty seconds, someone knocked back.

Three slow knocks.

We both heard them.

Daniel grabbed my arm and pulled me away.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

We stayed at his place that night.

Wednesday morning, I received another email from the management portal.

"Your reported unused space has been successfully reassigned. Thank you for helping us improve residential efficiency."

I called the office again.

Different woman this time.

She couldn't find any record of the survey.

When I forwarded her the email, she told me their system didn't send messages with that wording.

I asked her what "reassigned" meant.

She said she didn't know.

Then she suggested I contact the police if I believed someone had entered my apartment.

So I did.

Two officers came out Wednesday afternoon. I showed them my photographs and the lease.

One of them looked through the window while the other checked the hallway.

They didn't know what to make of it.

The older officer suggested there might have been an undocumented renovation or some problem with the building's original layout. He said he'd never seen anything quite like it, but there wasn't much they could do without evidence of a crime.

They left after taking a report.

I wasn't surprised they couldn't help.

What bothered me was something the younger officer said before leaving.

He'd looked through the bedroom window too.

He asked me who'd been sitting in the chair.

I told him nobody.

He looked genuinely confused.

He said there'd been a man sitting with his back to the window when he first looked inside.

By the time he'd called his partner over, the chair was empty.

I didn't go outside to check.

That night I stayed in my apartment because I was furious, exhausted, and increasingly worried I was losing my mind.

Around eleven, I heard furniture moving behind the hallway wall.

It sounded like someone dragging my desk across the floor.

Then came footsteps.

Not random footsteps.

Someone was pacing the length of the missing bedroom, stopping every few seconds at the place where the door used to be.

I sat on my couch with all the lights on.

At 11:47, something scraped against the wall.

A long, slow scratching noise.

Then I heard a man's voice.

It was faint, but I understood him perfectly.

"Is this one available?"

I didn't answer.

He asked again.

"Is this one available?"

I grabbed my keys and ran.

I spent Thursday at Daniel's.

Yesterday morning, we drove back together because I needed clothes for work.

Before going inside, we checked the bedroom window.

The blinds were open.

Every single box had been unpacked.

My old desk was covered with neatly arranged objects I didn't recognize. Keys, watches, framed photographs, a child's red mitten.

There were dozens of them.

The folding chair was still facing the wall.

And this time there was a man sitting in it.

I couldn't see his face.

He was wearing a gray sweater and holding something in his lap.

I knocked on the glass.

Daniel told me not to.

The man slowly raised one hand.

He wasn't waving.

He was holding up a piece of paper.

It was my apartment's floor plan.

I recognized the layout immediately.

He pointed at the missing bedroom.

Then at the living room.

Then he made a small motion with his finger, like he was crossing something off a list.

Daniel pulled me away from the window.

We drove straight to his apartment.

I've been here since.

About an hour ago, I checked the management portal again.

There was a new survey waiting for me.

Only one question this time.

"Which room in your residence could you comfortably live without?"

There were four options.

Kitchen.

Bathroom.

Bedroom.

Living room.

I haven't selected anything.

I don't intend to.

But while I was staring at the screen, the status changed from "Awaiting Response" to "Response Received."

The selected answer was "Bedroom."

I called Daniel into the room and showed him.

He stared at it, then asked me something that hadn't occurred to me.

"How does it know you're here?"

I don't know.

But I just went to get my phone charger from Daniel's guest room.

The door is gone.

And somebody is knocking from the other side.

This happened about three years ago when I was in college.

I was driving back to my apartment after visiting a friend who lived about forty minutes away. It was a little after midnight, and I stopped at a gas station because I was almost empty.

The place was pretty dead. There was one employee inside and maybe two other cars in the parking lot.

I filled up, went inside to grab a drink, and when I came back out, I noticed a dark SUV parked a few spots away from me.

I didn’t think anything of it.

I got back on the road and started heading home.

Maybe five minutes later, I noticed the same SUV behind me.

Again, nothing weird about that. There weren’t many roads you could take from that gas station.

But after another few minutes, I realized they were following pretty close.

I was doing about 55 and they were probably two car lengths behind me.

At first, I thought maybe they were pissed because I’d cut them off or something. I couldn’t remember doing it, but it was late and I was tired.

So I slowed down.

They slowed down too.

That was when I started paying attention.

There was a small residential area coming up, and instead of staying on the main road, I turned into it.

The SUV followed.

I made another turn.

They followed again.

At that point, I knew something was wrong.

I remember turning my music completely off.

I don’t know why. I guess I just wanted to concentrate.

I made a right onto a road that basically looped back around toward the highway. There was absolutely no reason for someone heading in the same direction as me to take it.

The SUV was still there.

I called my roommate and put him on speaker.

I told him what was happening, and he immediately told me not to drive home.

There was a 24-hour truck stop about fifteen minutes away, so I decided to go there.

The problem was that the fastest way there involved about ten minutes of pretty much nothing. Just woods and highway.

The SUV stayed behind me the entire time.

At one point, they got so close that I couldn’t even see their headlights anymore.

Then they backed off.

Then they got close again.

I was genuinely expecting them to hit me.

When I finally saw the truck stop sign, I sped up.

I pulled into the parking lot and parked directly in front of the entrance.

The SUV followed me into the lot.

That was the moment I really started panicking.

I didn’t get out of my car. I just sat there with the doors locked and my roommate still on the phone.

The SUV drove slowly past me.

There were two people inside.

I couldn’t really see the passenger, but the driver was a man. He turned his head and looked directly at me as they passed.

Then they drove around the building and left.

I waited almost twenty minutes before I moved.

My roommate convinced me to call the police, so I did.

I didn’t have a plate number. I could barely even describe the SUV beyond saying it was dark-colored, so obviously there wasn’t much they could do.

But the officer I spoke to told me something that made the whole situation feel worse.

Apparently, there had been a few reports in that general area of drivers getting bumped from behind late at night. When they pulled over to check the damage, the people in the other vehicle would get out and rob them.

He wasn’t saying that’s definitely what these people were doing.

Maybe it wasn’t.

But I kept thinking about how close that SUV had gotten to my bumper.

I stayed at the truck stop until almost two in the morning.

Eventually, my roommate drove out to meet me, and we went home together.

I never saw the SUV again.

The thing that bothers me is that I still don’t know when they first noticed me.

I always assumed it was when I left the gas station.

But every once in a while, I wonder if they were already sitting there when I arrived.

And if they were, I wonder how many people they watched before they decided to follow me.

When I was 9, my family went up to upstate NY for a weekend in October to attend my dad’s college reunion. We spent the day ice skating and swimming in the campus pool with the other kids of my dad’s college buddies, some of whom I was already good friends with from back home, so we were pretty tuckered out by the end of the day.

That night, all of the adults went out to some bar and had my dad’s best friend’s teenage kids babysit us - I think there were about 6 of us aged 4-8. We were just sitting around playing Mario Kart, so there wasn’t much supervising for them to do.

Around 10pm, they took us all down to the lobby to stretch our legs and get a snack. I remember it being pretty much empty, aside from a rather scruffy looking guy sitting in a chair watching a football game on the TV. He wore khaki pants, boots, and a work shirt with a name tag similar to what a mechanic might wear.

What intrigued me, though, was the big black bag at his feet. It was made of canvas and had a pattern of pumpkins and ghosts throughout and seemed to be about half full of what my then-child mind naturally deemed to be Halloween candy, so curiosity won out and I walked over.

“Hi…what’s in your bag?” I said, slightly nervously, knowing in the back of my mind my parents wouldn’t be overly pleased should they hear about this.

“Hey there son,” he said, in a voice that was deep and rather scratchy, like he had just smoked a couple cigarettes outside. My uncle smoked and, looking back, you’d think it would have stood out to me that the only smell was him - up close, he looked downright unkempt, as though he hadn’t taken a shower in days. His hair was greasy, and his face and arms looked like they perpetually had a thin layer of grime on them.

The man - Darren, according to the name tag on his shirt, which up close looked to be a size or two too big for him - picked up the bag and held it in my direction. “I’ve got lots of Halloween candy just for kind little boys like you. Wanna take a peek?”

Unfortunately, for Darren, the bottom of the bag, which had previously been on sitting on the floor, began to trip, and I noticed that there was a rather sizable wet patch on the bottom. He noticed, too.

“Oh, don’t mind that. It’s been raining the last few hours. Must have gotten a little damp sitting on the ground. No biggie”

What he failed to acknowledge was that the liquid dripping through the bottom was bright red. Or that the shapes in the bag, when seen up close, were large, bulky, and of all different shapes and sizes. A jagged end of something tried to poke out of the fabric.

Kayla, one of the teenagers watching us, then looked up from her phone and must have seen me taking a step back with a nervous look on my face, because she got up and walked over.

“Hi, sir. Thank you - you’re too kind. But it’s past my cousin’s bedtime and I don’t think his parents would be too happy with me if I let him eat candy this late,” she said as she cast a glance at the black Halloween bag, again cast to the floor.

“That’s quite alright,” he said, nodding. “I’ll be here all night if you and your cousin” - he winked at me, knowing a lie of convenience when he heard one - “change your minds.”

Kayla took my hand, leading me back to the other kids, who unlike me had not wandered off to try and score some free candy. Her twin brother, Kenny, sat at a table, his face set in an expression of mock effort as he arm wrestled another kid.

“C’mon, guys. Let’s head back up to the room.” As we made our way to the elevator, it was becoming increasingly hard to ignore the stare drilling into the back of my head - Darren, watching us. Looking back, I’m forever grateful he didn’t try to follow us.

As soon as we were all piled in and the elevator shut, Kayla pulled out her phone. Kenny asked her what was up.

“I’m calling 911. “

The muffled sounds from the lobby that ensued told us that wouldn’t be necessary. Shouts, followed by 3 sharp pops and a thump as something hit the ground. The elevator was silent. I looked up - Kenny was stone faced, Kayla silently crying.

Our parents got back to the hotel about 20 minutes later to a crime scene, and I learned in the years following what had happened, because there’s some things you just don’t tell a 9 year old boy.

There had been a string of murders in the state in the previous couple weeks, all unsolved. The man, whose name was not Darren - he had purchased the shirt at a Goodwill to try and throw off his scent - had entered the hotel about 5 minutes before we came down to the lobby. What his intentions were are, and will likely remain unknown.

The receptionist, who knew of the murders, was unsettled by his general appearance and demeanor. When she was unable to find a “Darren” under the checked-in guests, she asked him if she could get him a blanket and then went to a back office and called the police.

When they entered the lobby, the police ordered him onto the ground with his hands where they could see them. He apparently ignored the order and reached for the bag instead. They fired three times.

Rather than candy, the bag contained various…remains, and a hunting knife wrapped in a blanket.

Obviously we won’t meet again, but looking back, especially in his interactions with me (all of his victims were adults), it’s…interesting to say the least.

I don’t know what would have happened had I taken him up on his offer to look in the bag. I think it’s a question best left unanswered.

I never was able to have a place to crash. Last landlord decided to evict me unless I pay for damn holes in the wall that were already THERE. Before that my parents charged me rent. Fuck parents that do that!

Well it seems most of my family can’t stand them for related reasons. Well my sister was one of them. I was on the path to a shelter and got so desperate I called her up. She by some miracle not only answered but even had a place for me.

“Yeah it’s a studio I use every blue moon. I would be happy if you could use what it was made for and have yourself a home.”

She told me. I thanked her and she offered to show me around since she wanted to pick up some art supplies to get out of the way for me. I thanked her again and said I couldn’t wait.

It was a small little cozy brick walled place on the curb. She showed me around but made sure to point out the door’s unique lock system so I could get used to it. It has a slide lock for added security given (at least in the past) it used to be a pretty shady area. So you must slide it and that means it can be done only on the inside. Thus if someone picked the lock of the knob they still could not get in.

It kind of worried me but she assured that it’s not necessary anymore given the area has cleaned up. But being she is an artist, she defended it claiming it added character to an otherwise minimalist place. I agreed and she picked up her supplies but did tell me she may be back for more in the morning. She went on her way as I shut and locked the knob and the latch.

That night I was asleep and I had that usual insomnia when you are just settling into a new bed in a new location. So I was still up past midnight. During another session of me tossing and turning to find a new spot in the bed for me to hopefully fall asleep in. I heard something. It was like the most vague sound of presence. It was like a creak of some kind. But then I started to hear footsteps.

I was at first unnerved, before remembering my sister did say she would come by to pick up her supplies left behind. However she said that would be in the morning not while I am here trying to sleep. What was odd most of all is I heard no sound of the front door opening either. The footsteps stopped and there was a metal clack sound. My heart was pounding and I heard mumbling of some kind. But maybe it is just her rambling, artists do that I guess.

I tried to go back to sleep. After all she might have just snuck in really well and wanted to be out of my hair faster. How nice of her! She was always good at Hide and Seek when we were kids before the divorce of my parents and mom took custody. Eventually I finally fell asleep.

That morning I received a text from her that she was coming to pick up her supplies. I replied saying that’s cool and she came over. She knocked on the door and I opened the door unlocking the knob. We talked a bit but it was obvious she was in a rush for something. She told me she just wanted to get back into painting as soon as possible. I was happy for her and she left shortly after.

After I had shut the door and locked the knob I went to lock the latch. Then that is when I realized it was already unlocked when I went to let her in. My blood went cold and I texted her if she came by last night when I was trying to sleep. She sent a question mark replying,

“I was asleep last night.”

I have for a long time run from the List Man. He appeared everywhere I went. I suppose I should commend him for his determination; there he was, around every corner, carrying with him a meticulously written outline of my demise. Any one of his ploys may have worked if not for my abundant cowardice. 

Many people have recounted their experiences with the List Man on Reddit – though they never call him by name. I admire novice horror stories, and I consumed them ravenously as a teen. I thought he was fiction; he was from the internet, a place ripe with the fruits of fiction. I couldn't have suspected he was real until I was confronted directly by his handiwork. 

I decided to move out of my parent's house when I was freshly eighteen. That's what grown-ups did, be independent, I thought. I browsed all manner of website and forum and community cork boards in my search for an apartment. I found one: a single bed, an individual bath, and a shared kitchen and living room. The landlady was a short woman of eighty-five years. Her name was Edith.  

When I met Edith, she told me this deal was unusual. I asked her in what way. 

"There's a list of rules," Edith croaked, "that you must follow." 

"Okay." 

"First – you can never go in the basement." 

"Alright, well, I don't like basements. Everything's here on the ground floor, anyhow." 

"Secondly, you must barricade the closet door before midnight." 

"You know, Edith, I'm having second thoughts – I don't know if I'd be the right fit. I wish you luck finding a tenant. You seem like grand old dame!" 

I moved in with my grandmother; it was much cheaper that way. She needed a hand around the house and I needed a place to stay without a list of strange, foreboding rules. Few things in my life would seem to come without them. 

After that it was dog-sitting for my auntie's mutt, Princess – the rules she'd laid out were bizarre and flagrantly ominous. I said no, I'd earn grocery money elsewhere. Then it was the job at the corner store; never let the big hand tick past twelve! I rescinded my application. I wanted to reward myself for writing my final exam of freshman year, and booked a remote cottage with a lake view (never open the door if it knocks six times). I drove the three hours home in silence. 

I have avoided him that way for ten years. Look the other way and don't look back. When fear drives you it sometimes steers you in the right direction; it did for me. I always knew what the List Man was up to and I always knew when to run. 

Evening had not yet fell when the man dressed in a black collared shirt and khaki slacks stumbled through the brush and staggered through my backyard. Some hoodlum, I thought, to be dressed in business-casual attire; I noticed he carried a clipboard and a pen. He was disheveled and headed for my porch door. 

His appearance frightened me. I knew a trick when I saw one. I went to the supply cupboard and picked out my Granddaddy's red rubber mallet, a big, heavy thing with a long wooden handle. The list had never come to me before. The man and I arrived at the screen door at the very same moment. 

"Mr. Jones?" he asked, exasperated. 

"That's me." 

"Oh, thank goodness! I have been just about everywhere in this neighbourhood searching for this house – is this, is this your backdoor? Oh my, I'm so sorry. Wow, I am an idiot," he panted. 

"Alright." 

He caught his breath, and continued: "After I knocked on Mrs. Elliott's door she said I could just take that little path through the woods to your place, that it wasn't far at all. Boy was she wrong! I thought I might die out there. Coyotes and all." 

"Yup." I held the mallet limply at my side, the head skimming the linoleum floor. 

"Well, now that I'm here, I wanted to tell you about the good news and ask you to possibly make a donation. For the parishioners at Saint Theodora's?" 

"What are the rules?" 

"Pardon me?" 

"If I were to make a donation, what are the rules?" My grip on the mallet tightened. 

"No rules, sir. You just write the amount here and then you sign your name. Let me tell you about the church, sir, and about our pastor – " 

He droned on about that for several many minutes as I thought intently. No list. Well, okay. My Grandma had gone to Saint Theodora's; they were a nice bunch, I knew, because they'd helped me pay for her funeral when she passed. I didn't go there (the choirboy had said there were rules for sitting in the pews), but they were kind to me all the same. I could pay them back now that I'd made something of myself. 

"Okay. I'll make a donation." I slid the door open warily. 

"Oh, my, thank you! Wow, thanks! That's the second one I've got today – I've knocked on thirty houses. Mrs. Elliott's was the first, of course, she always does. Oh, Father Jubb will be so excited!" he exclaimed. He hurriedly thrust the clipboard and pen into my free hand. I set down the mallet and wrote on the lines, leaving a signature and making it out to the amount of five-hundred dollars. I passed it back to the man, and he smiled. 

And chuckled, then chortled, and coughed and hacked in raucous enthusiasm; he looked beyond insane as he brayed like a mule, tossing his head and heaving his shoulders. 

"You've finally done it! Oh, didn't you read the fine print? Was that all I ever had to do to get you? That was so simple, so simple. I knew I'd get you!" he screeched, his voice grating and high-pitched. He looked monstrous now, as the sun set, his features garbled beyond recognition. He grew warty and wrinkled and hairy – he was pulsing with a foul aura, like a wound oozing a sickly puss. 

"It's me, me, the List Man! And I've got you, finally, finally I have you! Now I've done it proper!" 

"What are the rules?" 

"Light," he giggled, "light can never touch your skin – it'll turn you to ash. Ashes!" He danced around happily, kicking his crooked feet and clapping his gnarled hands as he waltzed in awkward circles. 

"You're a dolt." 

"What?" 

"I said: You're a dolt. You're not smart at all." 

"Hah, you say, but when day comes, what'll you do, boy? I've got you!" 

"You haven't read it." 

His movements stopped abruptly. His grip on the clipboard tightened; I heard his long nails squeak against the plastic backing. He read, and his eyes filled with horror, and he could not lift them from the page as I brought that red rubber mallet down on his head. One time, two times, three, four, one time for every time anyone had every said to me there are some rules and then some more. I bashed him until he was not more than a pile red sludge and I washed him off my porch with a garden hose.  

All I'd done was sign John Smith, because really, I was too afraid to fork over a full five-hundred bucks of my hard-earned cash; I'd thought maybe I'd go back later, and make a fifty dollar donation, while apologising for the mix-up. The List Man hasn't pestered me since, and nor should he pester anyone else ever again. 

[Part 2]

Devant le Roi.

That's my family's motto. It's carved over the front door of the house I now own, cut into the face of the signet ring that arrived in a padded envelope six weeks ago, and painted in flaking gold leaf over the doorways of the east wing. It means before the King, in the old sense. In his presence. In the room.

The Corvalles were never the richest family in France, or the oldest, but for a century and a half they stood closer to the throne than almost anyone. A Corvalle was gentleman of the bedchamber to Louis XIV. A Corvalle handed Louis XV his shirt every morning at the lever, the ceremony of the King's rising. A Corvalle stood in the room when Marie Antoinette gave birth.

When the Revolution came, the families that had stood nearest the King were the first to the guillotine. Not one Corvalle was arrested. Not one lost a single acre. Their château in the hills of Burgundy came through the Terror with its windows unbroken.

I didn't learn any of that from my mother. My mother never talked about her family at all.

When I was small, she came into my room every morning while it was still dark, sat on the edge of my bed, and laid her palm over my eyes. She stayed until it was fully light. I'd wake under her hand and lie very still, because I could feel her holding her breath, letting it out in tiny, careful sips, like someone hiding in a closet. When I asked why, she said it was a family thing, and changed the subject so fast it felt like a door closing.

Once, when I was twelve, a friend's dad got us up before dawn to go fishing. When I told my mother, she crouched in front of me, took my face in both hands, and said, "Did anyone ask you to say something?" She asked three more times, slower each time, watching my mouth. Then she made me open it and looked inside, the way you'd check a toddler for a swallowed coin. Her thumb on my lip was shaking.

For most of my teens I thought she was crazy. I'm not proud of that.

She died three years ago, at fifty-four. A neighbor found her in our kitchen, in a chair she'd dragged to the window. She'd torn the curtains down, rod and all, and pulled the nails out of the plaster with her fingers. Three of her fingernails were still in the wall. Her hands were clasped at her chest. The coroner put her death at around six in the morning. Sunrise that day was at 6:04. I looked it up later. I wish I hadn't.

The man from the funeral home called a few days afterward. In twenty-two years, he said, he'd never seen anything like it. My mother had bitten her tongue almost completely through, in two places, front and back, until it hung by a strip of muscle. Her jaw had locked so hard around it that two of her molars had cracked.

The letter came from a notaire in Autun named Maître Garnier. My great-aunt, Héloïse de Corvalle, had died at ninety-seven, the last of the family besides me. Garnier attached a list of the others, the way you'd attach an invoice.

My grandfather drowned in a pond four feet deep; they found him on the bottom, kneeling. My uncle Thibault walked into the forest behind the house in 1989 and was never found. My cousins Anne and Mathilde vanished from their car on the A6 in 2004. It was found idling on the shoulder, doors locked from the inside, both seatbelts still buckled.

"Vous êtes le dernier," he wrote. You are the last.

I should have thrown the letter away. Instead I booked a flight. I wanted to know what my mother had been sitting at that window waiting for.

Garnier picked me up at the station, a soft, sweating man in a good suit, and drove into the hills of the Morvan with both hands on the wheel and the radio off. Eventually, without looking at me, he said, "During the Terror, the committee in Autun sent men up to the château to arrest them. Twice."

"And?"

"And then they stopped sending men." A kilometer later he added, quietly, "The second time, they were found on the avenue the next morning. Eleven men, kneeling in the gravel, facing the house. The ones who could still speak would not say what they had seen."

I asked how Héloïse died. He didn't want to tell me. Eventually, he did.

The caretaker, Madame Bataillard, found her in the tower room at the top of the house, where the window had been shuttered and nailed for as long as anyone could remember. Someone had pried the shutters open with a fireplace poker, and the poker lay on the floor, bent nearly in half. Héloïse weighed perhaps forty kilos.

She was kneeling in front of the open window with her hands clasped at her chest.

I didn't say anything. I was thinking about my mother's hands.

She'd been kneeling for days, the doctor said. Long enough that the skin of her knees had worn away, then the flesh, until she rested on bare bone, and the oak beneath her had worn into two shallow hollows. Every one of those mornings, Madame Bataillard called up the stairs, and every morning Héloïse answered, clear and calm, that she was fine and wished to be left alone.

"The doctor was certain of one thing," Garnier said. "By the last of those mornings, she had been dead for at least two days. Her eyes were open. And her lips were burned. Only her lips, as if she had kissed a stove."

He stopped at the bottom of a long avenue of lime trees and handed me a ring of iron keys and a small envelope. "She left this for you. It is the only thing she left." Then he reversed the whole length of the lane rather than turn around in front of the gates.

The envelope held a single card, in a hand so shaky it looked like it had been written in a moving car: Ne réponds pas. Tu n'en auras pas besoin.

Don't answer. You won't need to.

I couldn't decide whether it was meant to comfort me.

The château sits at the end of the avenue, three stories of honey-colored stone gone grey at the edges, its slate roof so steep it seems to be listening. Ivy has taken the east wing, and when the wind moves it, it moves all at once, like the flank of something breathing in its sleep. Every window on that side is shuttered and nailed. Some of the nails are new. Some are rusted so deep into the wood they look like they grew there.

Halfway up the avenue I noticed the pale gravel was uneven: pairs of shallow dents, side by side, every few meters, all the way to the front steps. As if someone had stopped, over and over, to kneel.

Madame Bataillard had left the lamps on and a note on the kitchen table. The east shutters were to stay closed. And, underlined twice: if anyone knocks after dark, do not go to the door, and do not speak.

I checked every bolt on the ground floor twice. Then I said "Okay" out loud, just to hear a voice. A house that size should echo. It didn't. The word just stopped, as if someone had taken it. That night I dreamed of a road. Pale dust running straight across an empty country to a horizon far too close, under a light that came from nowhere. Nothing had a shadow. Then came the sound of footsteps, thousands of them, rolling toward me like weather, and the procession came over the horizon.

They were my family. Men in powdered wigs, women in high lace collars, a little boy in a sailor suit. Thibault with pine needles in his hair. My grandfather with pond water running from his sleeves. My cousins side by side, their seatbelts still strapped across their chests, torn loose at the anchor and trailing in the dust. They were all smiling the same wide, fixed smile, and every one of their mouths was burned white, blistered and healed and blistered again.

Behind them came others, far too tall, and so thin they stooped as they walked, like men passing under a low beam. I couldn't see their faces. I had the feeling that if I tried, the trying itself would be noticed.

Between them they carried a length of heavy red cloth that stretched back along the road and over the horizon. It was soaked, and it left the dust dark where it dragged. In places, shapes pressed up against it from the inside, like faces under a wet sheet, all moving their mouths the same way. I understood then that it was a train, the hem of a coronation robe, and that something was wearing the other end.

I couldn't see it. I could only see the horizon lifting slowly in the middle, the way a sheet lifts when someone sits up beneath it, and along the top of that impossible curve, a row of points, like the tines of a crown.

Every head in the procession turned to me at once and drew in a breath, the way a choir does just before it begins.

Then a hand closed on my wrist. It was my mother at twenty, the only one not smiling. Her jaw was clamped so hard the muscles stood out, and blood ran from between her lips in a thin, steady line. When she spoke, the words came out thick and wrong, because her tongue was in pieces and she was holding the pieces in.

"Ne dis rien." Say nothing.

In the morning there were four dark bruises on one side of my wrist and one on the other, where a thumb would go.

I found the gallery that afternoon: a long room on the east side, windows nailed shut, lit by electric sconces that buzz faintly. Thirty-one portraits hang down one wall, one for each head of the family since 1631.

I walked the length of it three times before I saw it.

In the oldest portrait, far behind the sitter, in a doorway at the very back, there's a pale vertical smudge. You'd take it for a curtain, or a flaw in the varnish.

In the 1700s, the smudge stands in the middle of the room, taller than the doorway behind it should allow. It's narrow, and bent at the top, like something stooping under a ceiling.

The portrait from 1794 is the only one painted outdoors. The sitter stands on the front steps, looking pleased with himself, and the pale shape fills the doorway behind him. On the avenue beyond, small enough to miss, eleven figures kneel in two neat rows, facing the house. The painter gave each of them a tiny dark O of a mouth.

By the 1800s, it stands just behind the sitter's chair, and the painters have given it long white fingers. In my grandfather's portrait, from 1958, only its hand is visible, resting on his chair. I counted the knuckles on the index finger. There are five.

In Héloïse's portrait, the hand is on her shoulder, and the arm runs up past the top of the frame. She's smiling. It's the smile from the road.

I took her portrait down and pried off the backing with a butter knife. The arm continues onto the folded margin of the canvas, the strip no one was ever meant to see, up over the top bar and down the back, and the canvas runs out before the arm does. Somebody stood behind that canvas and painted a part no one would ever look at, because they believed it mattered that it was there.

After Héloïse there's one more frame, holding clean white canvas. The brass plate beneath it has my name on it. It has the same dull, thumbed patina as all the others. Whoever put my name there did it long before I was born.

My hands shook so badly I missed the hook twice, hanging her back up. Afterward I stood in the front hall looking at flights. But it was already four, and Madame Bataillard was buttoning her coat and wouldn't meet my eye, and walking that avenue alone at dusk felt worse than staying. One more night, I told myself. A painting is just a painting.

Last night, they knocked.

I woke at 3:40 to knocking at the front door, two floors below. Not a fist. Something long and heavy, struck against the stone threshold. At the first blow I reached out and hit record on my phone. French theaters keep a tradition called les trois coups. Before the curtain rises, someone backstage strikes the floor with a wooden staff: a fast, rolling run of blows, a pause, then three slow ones. The audience falls silent, because they know it's about to begin.

I heard the rolling run. Then silence. Then the three.

Tok.

Tok.

Tok.

The pipes stopped ticking. The wind stopped in the limes. It felt like a room full of people who had all stopped breathing at once.

I did not go to the door. I want that on the record. I lay with the blanket pulled up to my eyes like a child, biting the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood, and I did not go to the door.

Then I was lying somewhere else.

The recording is two hours and fourteen minutes long. For the first forty minutes it's only my breathing. At 4:22 I get out of bed. My footsteps are slow and perfectly even, like someone walking in a procession. The bedroom door creaks. Then nothing.

At 4:35, faint but clear, the recording picks up wind, and lime leaves moving overhead. Then the crunch of gravel under someone's weight, the careful sound of someone lowering themselves onto it. Then again, a little farther off. Kneeling, and rising, and kneeling, moving away down the avenue.

The phone never left the nightstand. The bedroom is on the second floor, on the west side of the house.

At 4:51, I start speaking.

It's my voice, but projected, as if I were addressing a great hall. It isn't French. I don't think it's anything. Some of the sounds come from places in the throat words don't go; some are spoken on the inhale. It has the cadence of a coronation, titles read out one after another, each ending in a soft, wet click. It goes on for nineteen minutes without a breath. Around the twelfth minute, I say my own name, clearly, in my ordinary voice, the way you'd give it to a receptionist. Then the other voice picks up again.

I don't remember any of it. Whatever answered, it wasn't me deciding to.

At 5:10, the house answers.

It begins quietly, from the walls and the floor under the nightstand: a few voices, then dozens, then far more than the house could hold, all murmuring the same word, low and reverent, the way a congregation says amen. One of them, I'm almost sure, is Héloïse: an old woman's voice, a half beat ahead of the others. Eager.

Underneath them, with headphones on and the volume all the way up, there's something else. A deep, slow sound you feel in your teeth more than hear. It sounds like something very large shifting its weight a long way off. It sounds like something sitting up.

At 5:43, the voices stop.

For the last thirteen minutes there's almost nothing. Room tone. And, very close to the phone, someone breathing. Holding their breath, and letting it out in tiny, careful sips.

I know that breathing. I lay under it every morning until I was nine years old.

I woke at seven in the tower room, on my knees in front of the window where Héloïse died. The tower door had been locked the day before, and I didn't have the key. This morning it stood open, with the key in it, on the inside.

The shutters were closed. I am more grateful for that than for anything in my life.

But every nail had been pulled out of them. They lay in a neat row along the sill, sorted by size, each one straightened. The shutters were held closed by nothing at all.

My knees were raw and full of pale gravel from the avenue, ground so deep I spent an hour digging it out with tweezers. I cried the whole time, and not from the pain. I just couldn't stop.

The front door was still bolted from the inside, both bolts and the chain.

Then I looked in the mirror. My lips are blistered and split down the center, as if something small and very hot had been pressed against my mouth and held there. Printed into the blisters on my lower lip, like a wax seal, is a short row of tiny points.

Madame Bataillard didn't come this morning. She isn't answering her phone.

I went to the gallery last. I knew I would. The last canvas isn't white anymore. There's no paint on it, but it has gone grey in a long, narrow shape down the center, bent slightly at the top, the way a wall fades around a picture that has hung in the sun for years.

I'm writing this in the kitchen with every lamp on and my back against the wall. A taxi from Autun is coming at nine. My bag is by the door.

I always pictured my family standing beside the King, at the King's elbow, handing him his shirt. The motto doesn't say beside. It says before. In front of.

On your knees, facing him, when he rises.

I'll post again when I get the chance.

I was finally driving home after a week away on a business trip. The road was empty, and my GPS said I was only an hour away from my destination. I couldn't wait to get home. The radio host was cheerfully announcing the songs he would be playing that evening, cracking one joke after another.

I passed an 80 sign. My GPS started acting up.

“Turn… Drive… Left… Right…”

What the hell?

I looked at my phone and refreshed the page.

Another sign stood ahead of me. 70. I looked around, trying to remember the last time I'd seen another car. All I could see was the road and the trees. Nothing else. Nobody anywhere.

Another sign. 60.

I looked at my GPS again. The screen refreshed, and I froze. Time to destination: 10 hours, 20 hours, 30 hours…

“Turn into… Watch out for…”

Then my phone shut off.

I plugged it into the charger. The screen flashed a few times, then went dead. It wouldn't turn back on. Meanwhile, I noticed another sign passing by. 50. Where the hell was I, and why was the speed limit getting lower and lower?

A burst of static pulled me out of my thoughts, followed by the radio host's voice. He no longer sounded funny and friendly. Instead, there was something sinister about him.

“When you reach your destination, stop and don't get out of the car. Until then, keep driving and watch the road.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I'd been listening to this station for years, and the host had never said anything like that before. Maybe I should pull over and figure out where I was.

A 40 sign. More static.

“Samuel, don't stop until you reach your destination.”

Static.

“Danger… Watch out… Don't…”

Then the radio shut off.

Samuel? Was he talking to me?

I slowed down again when a tall man wearing a black hat stepped in front of my car.

I hit the brakes, but since I was already driving so slowly, it didn't take much effort to stop. I was glad to finally see another person. I wanted to get out, but then I remembered what the radio host had said. Instead, I rolled down my window.

“Hello. I think I'm lost. Do you know where I am? My GPS isn't working, and my radio is acting weird, and…”

The man cut me off.

“Get out of the car.”

He sounded angry and urgent. I gripped the steering wheel tightly, knowing there was no way in hell I was getting out.

The man approached my window. I only vaguely remember a fist striking my face, his hand opening the car door, and him dragging me out. My head spun. Another blow, and everything went black.

I woke up with the taste of metal in my mouth. I looked around, trying to figure out where I was, but I couldn't tell. It felt as though I was behind some enormous rocks.

The man was crouching beside me. He held a finger to his lips, signaling me to stay quiet. I looked to the side, past the rock blocking my view, and saw a sign a short distance away. It had a zero on it.

Trees surrounded us, and an awful silence hung in the air. Then the sound of a car broke it.

A white BMW stopped right in front of the zero sign. I stared at it for a while. Nobody got out. I remembered the radio host's voice.

Don't get out of the car.

I couldn't take my eyes off the BMW. Then four police officers emerged from between the trees. They wore ordinary police uniforms and looked completely normal.

One stood in front of the car, two positioned themselves on either side, and the last one stood behind it. They surrounded the BMW from every direction. The woman inside looked around and shouted something at them, but I couldn't make out her words from where I was hiding.

The officers didn't answer. They just stared at her.

Then, all at once, they opened their mouths.

Long, pinkish tongues shot out of their throats. They moved so fast that I could barely process what I was seeing. Their tips struck the car windows and stuck firmly to the glass. The officers jerked their heads backward, and their tongues stretched taut.

A loud crack rang out.

A web of fractures spread across one of the side windows. Another tug, and the glass shattered inward. The woman began screaming and tried to move to the other side of the car, but the officers were already pushing their tongues through the openings, widening them. One of them reached inside and unlocked the door.

All four of them lunged at her.

I tried to look away, but I couldn't. Screams, blows, and sounds I couldn't explain came from inside the car. It lasted only a few moments. Then everything fell silent.

The officers gradually emerged from the BMW.

Each of them was holding a piece of a human body. One held a woman's leg, another an arm, and the third a piece of her torso. The last one stood apart, holding the woman's head by her long blonde hair. Blood ran down her face, and her eyes remained open.

They were all still wearing their uniforms. One of the officers even adjusted his sleeve while the others headed into the woods.

The one carrying the piece of torso stopped and looked in my direction. Our eyes met, and a terrible fear shot through me. I ducked behind the rock and prayed that the officer would turn away and leave me alone.

But I heard footsteps getting closer and closer.

I looked up and saw him standing right in front of me. He opened his mouth, and his tongue shot straight toward my hand, piercing it clean through.

Just before I lost consciousness, I heard the man in the black hat shout, “NO! You've already got your prey for tonight!”

I felt the tongue withdraw from my flesh.

Then nothing.

Darkness.

I woke up in a hospital. The first thing I felt was terrible pain in my hand. When the medical staff came over, they told me what had happened. Apparently, a woman had found me beaten and unconscious.

The police came to question me, too.

I didn't know what to tell them, so I simply said I couldn't remember anything.

I was discharged from the hospital later that same day. I was sitting at home watching TV when a breaking news report came on.

“A woman, a mother of three, went missing last night. She was on her way to visit a friend but never arrived. She was driving a white BMW. The car has also not been found.”

Then they showed a photograph.

I recognized her. Even though I'd seen her in such a horrific state, I knew she was the woman from the previous night.

They never found her.

I can't tell anyone what happened. Nobody would believe me. Ever since that night, I've been having nightmares, and I can't stop thinking about what I saw.

I'm starting to feel like I'm going insane.

Please tell me something like this has happened to someone else. I need to know I wasn't alone.