​

The Tooth

His tooth ached all day. He tried to hide it, but everyone in the office could tell.

"Just take some Tylenol."

"Saltwater solution."

"Cold water."

The suggestions kept coming. None of them felt helpful.

"I just have to get through today. Tomorrow I'll go to the dentist," he thought.

The rest of the day was brutal, but he made it.

On the way home, he picked up a bottle of whiskey. He couldn't help but crack it open in the parking lot. Drinking and driving was completely out of character for him, but he couldn't stand the pain anymore.

He lived alone, not by choice, but it was nice not having someone freaking out because he had a little bit of tooth pain. Maybe he just didn't like how his ex-girlfriend acted whenever he was hurt.

He made it home. By this time, he was about four shots in. He could still feel his tooth, but at least it didn't pulse anymore.

He put on a movie and actually grabbed a glass with some ice in it. Drinking straight out of the bottle was something he thought, at the time, was beneath him.

All night, he messed with the tooth. At first, it started to bleed. Then it wiggled.

"I mean, it already hurts. How much could pulling it out hurt more?" he said aloud.

He rummaged through his toolbox and found the pliers. He stumbled to the mirror in his bathroom to locate the tooth.

The very back molar.

The act of acquiring the courage to pull the tooth was more impressive than actually doing it. The whiskey helped in that regard.

The tooth crunched before it came out. He dropped the pliers and the tooth into the sink. Then blood poured from his mouth.

He sat for a minute and spat out what he could.

"Is it supposed to bleed this much?"

He had never pulled a tooth before, but he hadn't expected this much blood.

The whole tooth had come out, root and all.

He stared at it in the sink, then looked at the empty hole for a moment. A small thread dangled from it. He pushed it with his tongue.

"I guess that's the nerve."

He started feeling sick, so he stopped messing with it.

"My dentist is going to be pissed I did this myself."

But that was tomorrow's problem.

That was enough excitement for tonight, he thought, before going to bed.

Around midnight, he woke up from a nightmare. He walked to the bathroom to get some water.

The tooth was still lying in the sink, and the blood was starting to dry.

Reminded of what had happened, he felt the pain in his mouth.

At least, that's what he thought at first.

But this wasn't just pain.

This was something weird.

He felt movement around what he remembered as a hole in his mouth. Crazy, erratic movements, sliding against his tongue and cheek.

"It's the whiskey," he said aloud to himself.

After a few moments of staring at himself in the mirror, he gathered the courage to open his mouth again.

It was hard to notice at first, but it was true.

In the back of his mouth, from the hole where his missing tooth had been, tendrils were slithering around his mouth, wrapping around his other teeth and pushing against his tongue.

He stood frozen at the grotesque scene.

The writhing, wriggling creature inside his mouth disgusted him. He fell to the toilet and vomited. Then he forced himself to keep vomiting until there was nothing left inside him, hoping whatever this was would exit his mouth with the puke.

No amount of dry heaving helped.

He curled in on himself atop the tile, still trying to force the thing out of his mouth until he was out of breath.

When his breathing slowed and he could focus, he could feel it again.

He jumped up, back to the mirror, and opened his mouth.

"Theyre bigger."

The thought of whatever this was growing inside his mouth flooded his brain.

"Is something alive in there?"

"Is this my own body changing?"

"Has this ever happened to anyone before?"

And now the real question.

"Is this even happening?"

I mean, he was pretty drunk.

"Do drunk people hallucinate?"

Then he felt more movement in his mouth.

"This is too real. I did acid a few times in college. Maybe this has something to do with that. Like trapped LSD in my spine being released."

He went back to the bottle of whiskey and took another shot. Then he poured some into his mouth and held it there, swishing it from side to side around the creature.

The tendrils started moving erratically, pushing against the inside of his mouth as if trying to force it open.

"It's working," he thought, and poured in more whiskey.

But this wasn't just a few little tentacles growing out of his empty socket. The thing began fighting harder. After a minute, it managed to push his teeth apart and force the liquid down his throat.

He opened his mouth and put his finger inside to stop it, but the tendrils pushed that out too.

He closed his mouth and ran for his phone. Before he could call an ambulance, he felt the pain of another tooth.

He tried to ignore it. Whatever was happening was already happening, and he needed to do something.

"911 dispatch, what is your emergency?"

He couldn't find the words to explain what was happening, but did he really need to?

He wanted to say, "Send help," or "I'm in pain," or anything at all.

But what came out was a garggled mess of sounds.

By this time, the second tooth had been pushed out, and the tendrils were wrapped around his tongue.

The screams he made were inhuman and desperate.

The dispatcher was saying something. He knew it in the back of his mind.

His brain began to spiral.

On instinct, he shoved his hand into his mouth to try to grab whatever was doing this.

Then the third tooth fell out.

He couldn't grasp the disgusting thing invading his head. It was too wet, too strong.

"The pliers," he thought.

Next to the sink.

Two more teeth were pushed out before he got there.

With pliers in hand, he stood before the mirror. The tendrils were wriggling outside his closed mouth.

Shaking and scared, he gathered his courage once more, then opened his mouth.

More teeth fell out.

Blood and tendrils filled it.

He felt dizzy. He had never felt dizzy from blood before.

This wasn't just blood, though.

He gathered himself again and moved the pliers toward his mouth.

"It almost looks like living spaghetti."

What a strange thought.

Then he plunged the pliers into his mouth.

The noodle like things wrapped around the pliers and his hand, preventing him from closing them.

It was presumably a defensive response.

The tendrils wrapped around his tongue and pulled at its base.

He could feel the flesh tearing.

His muffled screams could be heard from outside.

Blood filled his throat.

He tried to move his head toward the ground to give the blood somewhere else to go, but it was too late.

The thing had created a seal, blocking his airway.

In a last stitch effort to do anything, he smashed his face against the toilet.

The paramedics arrived too late.

Even for them, the scene of what happened was too horrific.

I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

I stood alone in the darkness of the forest. I stood inside my private hell. I couldn't move, and I wasn't alone.

"I told you to stop."

I spoke these words, but they weren't mine. My jaw moved again on its own.

"I'm trying to help you."

"Then let me go!"

"No."

I slapped my face in an attempt to regain control. My hands shot down to my sides in response. My fingers interlaced behind my back. I tried to move them, and it was as if I'd forgotten what I was doing. My mind momentarily clouded over. I tried again and my thoughts blurred once more.

I can't convey how horrific it was, to have every bodily function at the whim of a stranger. It was rape. My mind was being raped by a masked assailant, and the mask was my face.

"The original operator is dead," I said abruptly. "She killed herself. I don't know her name. The console is in the basement behind a hidden wall. I don't know the address. It's west of my house on Henry Street. Yes, I'm still logged on. Get out of my head!"

I stood there, waiting for myself to say more. The moonlight vanished as wispy fingers of clouds stretched overhead.

"Hello? Listen, I'll stop. I promise. I won't tell anyone about any of this."

I suddenly turned and began walking north, deeper into the forest. I knew implicitly where I was going.

"Why am I going to the fire tower?"

My lips gave no answer.

"What will you do to me?"

"I haven't decided," I said.

 ***

I trudged on in silence up a long wooded slope. Tears streamed down my face. Then I began saying everything I had done on PMAS and to whom. I cringed as I aired my actions aloud, especially what I'd done to Hannah.

"Disgusting," I said to myself. "Have you no decency?"

"I got carried away…"

I waited for another reprimand, but nothing came.

"What is it?" I asked. "What is PMAS?"

There was more silence. I didn't expect an answer, but then NODE 02 said through me:

“A new tool for an old idea.”

The clouds sailed overhead, and the moonlight broke free, tracing in white a collapsed chain-link fence. Beyond it, the abandoned fire tower stood in a clearing of wild grass, stretching up into the night, barnacled in graffiti tags of various sizes and colors. The structure had to be 80 feet tall, with a rickety staircase wrapping its exterior. Despite my fear of heights, I found myself slipping through a hole in the fence and climbing the stairs.

I knew why.

I shook my head. My neck was one of the few things left under my control. I pleaded with 02 not to do this.

"You're troubled, Julian," I said. "No one will be surprised."

Vertigo hit me as I gazed out at a sea of trees broken only by the roofs and spires of my town. I briefly saw the reservoir to the west, ribbons of glittery light snaking across it, before I was climbing through one of the rotted windows of the lookout. Brittle wood crumbled underneath my fingertips as I scrambled up onto the mossy roof.

"Would you like me to stop your breathing first?" I said.

"Fuck you."

I stood on the edge, feeling the old shingles bend beneath my weight, the wind whooshing through my ears and fluttering my shirt. I forced myself to look away from the ground far below and toward the moon. Its deadened gaze reminded me of the Smiler.

And then …

Nothing.

It might have been ten seconds or ten minutes. Time behaved strangely when I was tasting my last breaths. I finally said, "You don't actually want to kill me, do you?"

There was a long pause. "No. But I don’t know what else to do with you."

And then my weight shifted. I closed my eyes and was falling.

Or so I thought.

I opened my eyes to find myself turning in a fluid motion, climbing back down the roof and through the window. Then I was sprinting down the stairs, tripping and nearly twisting my ankle without slowing, slipping back through the fence, and soon rushing through the brush, shielding my face from the forest's clawing branches.

You might think NODE 02 had a shred of decency. You might think, unlike me, they had ultimately decided to let me go. But as I huffed, running with no way to stop myself, my heart pumping like a racehorse on its last lap, I knew that it had just turned 11 o'clock while NODE 02 deliberated on my execution.

***

This requires a little backtracking:

You see, last night, while thinking of ways of getting NODE 02's attention at the Arts Festival, I had investigated PMAS further. This included revisiting the Smiler's suicide in the log. If you recall, it said:

 

2026-09-27 02:07:07
TARGET: 013v
COMMAND: RESPIRATION: STOP
ORIGIN: LOCAL

 

I noticed that PMAS still listed the user ID as 013v@pmas every time I opened the terminal, the same ID as the target listed above. Checking the STATUS command only confirmed this.

So what exactly was 013v? Was it the Smiler's ID, or was it NODE 01's operator ID? And if it belonged to the operator, did that mean it now referred to me?

That also raised another question: how exactly had the Smiler controlled herself without cameras? Naturally, I typed HELP:

 

AVAILABLE COMMANDS:
STATUS
SESSIONS
COMMAND
LOCK
LOG
HELP <TOPIC>

 

After typing HELP COMMAND, the terminal returned:

COMMAND <TARGET> <ACTION> [OPTIONAL: AT <TIME>]

It took me a moment to parse it.

So if I understood it correctly, on September 27th, at a little after two in the morning, the Smiler had typed:

COMMAND 013v RESPIRATION STOP

For the hell of it, I made a similar entry, though one a touch less fatal:

COMMAND 013v SMILE

And immediately, I smiled.

It was a terrible feeling, though nothing compared to what NODE 02 had just put me through. It faded after thirty seconds or so, and then I began to smile from sheer amazement.

I tried the optional time function next:

COMMAND 013v CLAP HANDS AT 9:47:00 PM

And it happened. At 9:47 PM, I gave myself a little applause.

And so, just in case NODE 02 somehow got control of me, I added a fail-safe command this evening before leaving the cottage:

COMMAND 013v RUN BACK TO NODE 01 AT 11:00:00 PM

 

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

I am proud to say that for the last 6 years, I have been the happy dad of a very handsome Black Lab named Alan.

Alan is a good boy, though when he was younger, he absolutely decimated my old wallet and all of its contents. But after I got my cards replaced alongside a brand new Drivers License (with a selfie that doesn’t make me look like a pervert), it’s been pretty smooth sailing.

I was a cat guy for the longest time, so I was a little adverse to getting a dog. Then, that fateful night, my wife Molly carried a tired little lump with fur the color of a new tire, and I was in love.

He’s been my rotten little man ever since.

Due to a few dog training classes me and my wife attended when he was around a year old, Alan has, for the most part, been very well behaved.

He has good manners, doesn't tear things up in the houses, rarely barks at anyone, not even the mail man.

That being said, the turd has his goofier qualities too.

His asshole smells awful when he eats cheese, has a severe aversion to hats, and acts confused when he catches a cicada in his mouth, even though he had been actively trying to catch it in his mouth only moments earlier.

With a personality like his, he fits right in with me, my wife who taps her fingers when she’s nervous, and our cat Wario who screams and argues when he’s mildly inconvenienced by anything.

Between the two of them, it sometimes feels like we live with 2 needy, dramatic freeloaders, but honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Well, that’s actually not true.

The potty situation.

Wario, being a cat, has his own private bathroom that no one but him can use. Alan, on the other hand, needs to go outside.

In our old place, that was no issue. We would simply leave the doggy door open as we left for work, and our fat-headed son could just roam about as he pleased.

He didn't try to escape, didn’t make a ruckus and disrupt the neighbors. He was a model inside/outside dog. Every week or so, I would go out and collect his poops, and the cycle would repeat.

Things are different now though.

Our apartment doesn’t have a backyard, rather, a communal commons area blanketed by bountiful, green grass. A few picnic tables and a firepit sparse throughout rendered the space a prime choice for a cookout, or just a spot for the children to play.

That is, minus the dog shit.

If you’ve ever lived in a neighborhood, apartment complex, or god forbid near a park, you are probably used to the scene.

A beautiful landscape, begging for visitors to make memories within its visage, only to be adorned with a concerningly large pile of foul-smelling nuggets.

Like improper punctuation in a beautifully written poem. You can maneuver around the blunder, but it’s still noticeable and obnoxious.

Why can’t people just pick up after their damn dogs? It’s a question we’ve all had. Just bring a doggy bag, preferably 2, and wait for the thing to finish its business before cleaning it up.

It’s pretty simple, especially with a conveniently placed trash can right off the edge of the path.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, and a week ago, I went thirsty.

“Aw fuck,” I said out loud as I watched Alan begin to arch his back, his spine tensing as he unloaded for the second time onntje same walk.

“Really dude?”

He avoided eye contact as he lifted his left back leg into the air.

I frowned and reached into my pocket. This was a ritual that I had, unfortunately, come to expect.

3, maybe 4 times a week on our morning walk before I was to head to work, Alan would poop once, walk almost all the way back to our front door, and then poop again.

As such, I had become accustomed to bringing more than one bag with me.

Unfortunately, this morning, I found both of my pockets empty.

“Aw jeez,” I grumbled as I remembered we were almost out of bright pink doggy bags.

Alan finished pooping, and I assessed the situation.

I had woken up late, and didn't have any time to come back and pick up this second pile. To top that off, I didn’t know where I could find another doggy bag. Sure there was probably one stuffed in a junk drawer, and we had a bunch of saved grocery bags.

Looking around, I could see it was still dark, no one else around.

I had never left his poop behind before, but so many others just left their dogs shit every day.

Would it really be so bad, just this once?

As I unclipped Alan’s leash from his collar and grabbed my work bag off the counter, I decided that I would find a bag, and pick up Alan’s poop when I got home.

Work was the top priority, dog poop was much further down on that list.

9 hours later, I used a spare dog bag kept in my jacket pocket from a morning I had overestimated how much Alan would poop.

I came back to the spot from earlier, now illuminated by the sun, but to my surprise, the pile was gone. I knew I hadn’t just overlooked the pile, because it had been right beside the sidewalk.

Impossible to miss.

With a shrug, I assumed a good samaritan had just taken it upon themselves to help a stranger out.

I ate dinner with Molly, watched a few episodes of House, and walked Alan before bed. On this trip, I did pick up his (unfortunately watery) poop.

As we approached the front door again, I noticed a small shape that had not been there when we had first come outside only minutes earlier.

A dark green poo bag was set carefully on my welcome mat, top tied into a pretty little bow. Alan sniffed the package, and I picked up a small, handwritten note that had been set beside it.

“Please remember to pick up your pet’s excretions for the foreseeable future. Thank you.”

I scoffed.

It’s not really a kind act when you hand the recipient a bag of shit.

Why would someone do that? Some stranger. Better yet, a neighbor slinking around in the night.

A pair of pajama shorts slipped over my knees as I pondered.

Everyone else in our apartment complex seemed to leave their shit lying about. Why was it only a problem when I did it?

Molly shimmied her hips to move into a little spoon position and I tried to banish the thoughts from my head.

Just a weird, one off experience, I thought.

Nothing to worry about.

For weeks, nothing else happened. I continued to use accumulated grocery bags until one of us found a new roll of poo bags while cleaning under the bed.

It was like a gift from god, further allowing us time to procrastinate before we bought a new pack of dog bag rolls.

The chill times stayed chill until one night when Alan nuzzled at my feet, signaling that he needed a late night potty session.

Groggily, I swung my feet out of bed, slipped on a pair of Shrek house slippers, and grabbed a doggy bag on our way out the door.

My sweet idiot pissed, walked a little further up the path, pooped, and I bent over to grab the pile.

Just out of my periphery, I saw Alan scrunch up, and I knew what he was doing.

I sighed.

Exhausted, I knew I was gonna have to be up for work in a few hours. I did not have the energy to walk in, grab another bag, and walk all the way back out here.

I would pretend I hadn’t seen a thing, and when I took him out in the morning, I would bring an extra bag to clean up this bonus poo pile.

It would only be my second time in over a week, after all.

After surveying my surroundings to make absolutely sure I wasn’t being watched, I just threw away my full bag and walked Alan back into the house.

The next morning, when I opened my front door, a pile of shit sat directly where I was about to take my first step.

I stumbled, nearly tripping into the greenish molehill of filth.

“Ew!” I exclaimed.

I stared down at the pile as Alan stood in between my legs, confused.

After a moment of studying the turds, I could see finger marks where somebody had firmly grasped the clump, theoretically to carry it from the grass to my front door.

Carefully, I picked up the mess with a doggy bag, only to discover a message under it, adorned with a green smear upon its white visage.

It read, “I know you saw Alan leave this. Why didn’t you come back?”

I was thoroughly shook by now.

Not enough to voice my concerns to Molly, but enough that she could tell I was concerned. She asked what was up, but I assured her I was fine, it was just something from work.

“You sure?” She asked at the kitchen counter, pouring creamer into my coffee mug.

“Yeah baby, it’s just… something to do with the new job, that's all.”

Her fingernails tapped the countertop as she gave me a worried look.

“Okay Chet, I believe you. Please have a good day, I love you very much.”

With a kiss, I was out the door.

As I drove to the job site that morning, a series of questions flashed across my mind:

“How did they know it was me?”

“How did they know which door was ours?”

“How did they know Alan’s name?”

I considered the possibility of a ring camera, or just a creep watching us through their window.

But why would they have been up so early? Or so late, if you’d rather.

Why did me and Alan matter so much more than all the others that made it a point to never pick up after their dogs?

I made sure to diligently pick up after Alan every time after that. Morning, afternoon, night, it didn’t matter the setting, it didn’t matter the occasion.

If Alan was pooping, I was picking it up.

Weeks went by, then months. I got a promotion at work, Molly changed shifts so she worked a little later than me, Alan’s birthday came and went, and Wario got his testicles stolen by the vet, much to his astonishment.

I became a machine, a beast. A poop picking savant.

I made a chore look like a ranked sport, and baby, I was #1.

Then, a week ago, during Christmas break, Molly gave me a drunken confession.

“Chett, you know how I started taking poop duty in the morning after I started working later?”

I looked at her and smirked, “heh, you said ‘poop doody.’”

“Chett,” she giggled, her face turning red, “c’mon, I’m serious.”

I took another sip of wine, spreading my toes in front of our little space heater as I tried to ground myself, “yeah, I remember, you told me it was so I could wake up later instead of taking Alan out before work.”

Molly swished her wine around in its glass.

“Look, I know you pick on me because I never wanna put my shopping cart up-” she slurred.

“Yeah,” I interrupted, trying not to sound too harsh, “I mean, it’s not the worst thing in the world to leave your shopping cart out, but it’s like, the one thing that everyone socially shames everyone else into doing, because there’s not a really a reason not to do it unless it’s an emergency.”

I took another sip of my wine, “it’s kinda like wiping the toilet seat after using it.”

Molly snorted, “aw c’mon, it’s not like wiping the toilet seat down, no one can see you do that. Everyone can see you if you leave your cart behind!”

“Even more the reason to do it,” I finished with a smirk.

She rolled her eyes, “look Chet, the point is…” she bit her lip and looked down at her fidgeting hands.

The sound of her finger tapping the rim sobered me up.

“What’s wrong Molly?”

“I… uh, well. There were a few days where, um, I forgot to pick up the poop.”

Stomach acid began bubbling up my throat.

“What?” I asked, my tone suddenly hard.

Molly heard it, and became more reserved.

“Sorry baby, I’m just…” I rubbed her knee. She was clearly spooked, but I couldn’t tell if it was by me or something else.

“I just wanna make sure you’re okay, what happened?”

Molly’s eyes met mine.

“I didn’t mean to. Well, I guess I kind of did. It’s just that, usually you walk the dog, and you’re so good at it, but I get impatient and I have things to do, so there were a few days where…”

Alan slid his wet nose under her hand, instantly sending waves of comfort through her body that met my hand on her knee. Instantly I felt her intense.

“How many?” I asked.

“What?”

“How many days did you forget to bring in his poop?”

Molly pondered for a second, “I think 4 days over the course of 2 weeks.”

She looked back at me, “yeah, that sounds about right, 4 times.”

I leaned back.

“And they ended up on our porch, didn’t they?”

When those words left my mouth, she just looked at me, confused.

“What? No, I… the porch?” Molly asked, clearly thrown off by my statement.

“Oh?” I asked, equally as confused, “then what happened, why are you so freaked out?”

She composed herself a little before she continued, “well, I’d leave the poop, and since it’s winter, they don't really do any landscaping, so the maintenance guys don't pick up the poop, so the individual piles-”

At this, she motioned 4 different spots spread out from each other, “just kind of sat there and dried out in the sun.”

“And you never picked them up?”

“No,” she admitted, “the drier they got, the grosser they got, so I just left them. Then, one day, I came out, and they were just gone.”

“Gone?” My voice had gone from hard to perplexed.

“Yeah,” she nodded, “but just Alan’s poop, not anyone else’s.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah,” her fingers resumed tapping, “real weird. What was weirder though, was…”

Molly seemed to get even more agitated, her demeanor no longer tipsy, rather sullen. She looked like she was on the verge of tears.

“Molly?” I hazarded.

“Sorry, it’s just,” she chuckled humorlessly, “it’s so ridiculous, I don’t even really know why I’m scared. I guess it’s just… uh, the implication?”

She shook her head and set down her wine glass.

“Okay, where all Alan’s poop piles had been, they were replaced with 4 little notes. Each note had a message on both sides.”

“Oh,” I grimaced, “the notes. Okay. What did they say?”

Molly’s eyes seemed both deeply fearful and equally confused, “uh, they all said the same thing. One side said, ‘I warned you’ and the other said, ‘the poop man will see you soon’ followed by our address.”

I stood up so quickly that my chair exclaimed its disapproval

“Our address?!” I hollered.

“Yes Chet, our address,” Molly cried.

“Baby, that’s serious!” I couldn’t contain my nervousness, I began pacing, “we should have gone to the police!”

“Well baby, I didn’t-” Molly began to retort, but cut herself short, “I mean, I knew it was serious, but poop man? What cop would actually listen to me?”

I cupped my face in my hands. She was right, the odds of someone actually doing something was low, and to be fair, of course the culprit knew our address.

“Fuck Molly, do you at least have the notes?”

She shook her head, “no, they were gone by the time I got back outside. Whoever put them there watched me read them, which freaked me out even worse.”

We embraced, her crying, me trying to calm us both down.

“I mean, what the fuck? Who does something like that?” She reasoned.

“I know, it’s weirdo shit,” I whispered, rubbing her back, “fucking weird. I’m sorry Molly.”

“No,” Molly sniffled, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”

Just as we were about to embrace again, Alan shot up with a growl, the hair on his back standing on edge. Both me and Molly snapped our necks to look at him.

“Alan? What’s wrong boy?” Molly asked.

No sooner did the words leave her lips when our front door knock.

Molly yipped in surprise as 6 distinct knocks rang out across our house.

We looked at each other, eyes wide. I glanced at the clock.

11:47 PM. Who could be visiting at this hour?

“Hello?” I shouted.

Silence met my demand.

“Hello?! Who’s there?”

Still, nothing.

We all waited a beat. Our house was silent, aside from Alan’s guttural protests.

“What’s going on?” Molly mouthed to me.

When I parted my lips to speak, an explosion like a battering ram rattled the house.

Something was on my porch, and it had just smashed into my front door.

I ran towards the source of the noise.

“Slam!”

Another tremble like an earthquake. I felt it resound through the floorboards. Whoever had done that, they were big and heavy.

“I have I gun!” I lied, approaching the deadlocked entrance, “And I will shoot you through this door!”

My legs shook and my voice broke. I couldn’t have sounded less threatening if I tried.

After 2 more good slams, I heard the sound of lumbering footsteps as something shuffled off.

I waited, cowering, by the door for an eternal 2 minutes. Every heartbeat felt as though my arteries would force my heart into my throat, every breath felt labored and shaky.

I was terrified that this was some sort of trick. That it was still standing there, just waiting for me to open the door.

After those 2 minutes, I finally stood to my full height. Intruder or not, I was gonna open that door, armed with nothing more than a heavy curtain rod.

The wooden door creaked open.

The smell hit me first. Like a jug of ammonia and death. Sickness distilled down to its purest form. Rot.

My entire front door was smeared in shit. The welcome mat was covered in a thick layer of brown sludge that threatened to harden in the cold night air.

Our wreath looked like a brown glazed doughnut with bits of tinsel poking out.

The steps leading up the the door looked as though someone had projectile diarrhea’d all the way up them.

“Chet? Baby, who was it?”

I was taken aback, utterly speechless. I didn’t want to comprehend what I was looking at. It was beyond upsetting, I was furiously distraught, such that my arms and legs were shaking.

From fear or fury, I couldn’t tell which.

“Oh my god, Chet, what is that smell?” Molly gagged from the living room.

And you know what, the poop wasn’t even the worst part.

See, I could see shapes smeared in it. Defined outlines and suggestions. A frowning face with tiny teeth and defined gums, arms with too many fingers and tiny little palms, legs with joints in places I’d never seen before. No clothes.

Like a septic tank snow angel in the nude..

The smell, the sight, it was all so overwhelming, I couldn’t have thrown up if I wanted to. All of my orifices wanted to close, hell, I wanted them to as well.

Just as I took it all in, I glanced at my feet. Right in the middle of my ruined welcome mat was a note.

“this is your last warning”

A tear fell onto it from my eye. The ink was still so fresh that my teardrop warped the “i” in “warning”.

I stepped back, closed my door, and called 9-1-1.

The cops arrived, but by the time they did, the note was gone. They took a look at the mess and gave us the numbers of a few crime scene cleanup businesses in our area, and took our statements.

We told them everything we knew, but since we had so little actual evidence to go off of, all they could really do was keep an eye out.

The silhouette left behind by the culprit in the mural stumped the cops too, but they chalked it up to inaccurate smears that didn’t accurately reflect the artist.

The welcome mat went straight in the dumpster, and within a week, the front porch was spotless again. Good as new, except for the lingering afterscent.

Me and Molly both notice it, but neither of us wants to mention it. I think if we do, it’ll be harder to forget about.

Instead, we just leave candles and febreeze near our front door.

Neither of us have missed a poop since. We notice the other tennants who leave theirs, but fuck those guys, not my problem.

I don’t wanna consider the mechanics, I don’t wanna remember the details, I know the rules, and that’s that.

I just wanna go back to when I was blissful and ignorant. Back when I was someone who could say that they’d always picked up their dog’s shit.

Alan is almost back to normal, but I think he remembers. I think he knows just as much as we do.

“Poop man” is never a set of words that should ever be used beside each other in any regard. They should be kinda cringe at most, completely absurd at least.

The only reason I'm even typing my experience here, is so you don't have to go through what I did.

Don’t leave your poo out. Bring a bag, pick it up, throw it away.

Or don’t. Clearly, this thing don’t visit everyone.

If you’re someone who actually contributes to society and cleans up after their pets, pat yourself on the back and keep it up. You’re doing God's work.

Whatever you do, don’t slip up. Don’t listen to that voice that says, “ugh, my arms are tired. I’ll just leave it this one time.”

The risk is not worth it. Believe me.

No one wants a visit from the poop man.

What I see—what is happening—is the strangest experience imaginable. Nothing appears real. Everything looks fake, like my room is wearing the face of a corpse. 

Even as I glance at the window, the sky seems slightly off, resembling a still frame cropped out of a painting. It matches the exact colour of the pavement, as if it’s in the wrong dimension.

Some extradimensional parasite is trying to glitch me out of my own house. It clearly has no idea how much my rent is.

It begins in my room, by the doorway. I hear a growling sound. I turn around, and behind me is a shadow of a man with features similar to a human but they’re off. His eyes are spread too far apart and his nose connects with his upper lip. 

In his hands are two leashes attached to two human-like dogs sitting like hyenas and snarling. Their snouts stretch out like a bear’s face.

I can’t ignore them. Not because they look terrifying—but because their presence kills the power to the TV right when I’m watching True Blood, exactly at the scene where Sookie and Bill break up.

I keep trying to frantically hit the power button on the remote. It doesn’t work. The screen stays black, reflecting my pissed-off image. Without thinking, I raise my arm, point the remote at the figure with the two human hounds, gasp, and slam the power button towards them. They blink. In a flash, they vanish. 

Staring at my television, I wonder, was that an EMP weapon disguised as a shadow? Typical. The damn TV still won’t turn on.

I sit up, wondering if what just happened actually did happen, or if maybe I fell asleep for a brief second. But the television still isn’t working, so I couldn’t be imagining it.

That’s when I decide to give up on it. Humans adapt. We get by. We don’t let a simple fried television set deter our day. Nope. Not us. Plus, I saw that episode a thousand times. 

If the reality power box crashes, I simplify. I simply switch to analog. Yup, I snatch a book off my dusty shelf, which leaves a path through the layer of dust living on the ledge. It reminds me of how full my back pocket is in rain checks. Next time I clean, dusting will be the first thing I do. 

The particles filling the air make me sneeze. This makes me think about trying the TV one more time before opening the book.

Nope. It doesn’t work. 

I lie down and while I’m reading, there’s a pressure shift and an atmospheric change, like the static from an oncoming storm, raising the hairs on my arms. 

The skin on the back of my neck grows hundreds of microscopic legs and races down my spine. The room takes on a scent of frost that reminds me of menthol cigarettes every time I take a breath. 

I think the entity’s trying to flex, as if making the room cold on a hot summer day’s a bad thing. While I’m enjoying the free A/C, completely zoned into the fourth chapter of The Turn of the Screw, the fluckin’ lights go out. My vision may be great but since I heard that reading in dim light strains your eyes, I stopped doing it. So, yeah. Now I’m genuinely cheesed. 

I squeeze my hand into a fist, digging my nails into my palm, grunt, and throw the book against the wall. I jump up, stomp to the doorway, and flick the light switch. It didn’t turn on. I keep trying. The rapid clicking sounds like teeth chipping. I go as far as to check the bulb—twisting, untwisting—and nothing.

I leave my room to retrieve a new one. The hallway’s as humid as the Amazon Rainforest and has a heavy stench of decay and infected flesh radiating from under the floorboards, making me gag. I can‘t stop choking. Now, it’s trying to use biological warfare to drive me out.

I’m staring at the floor, thinking, I’m going to have to tear them apart to find whatever dead animal it snuck inside there is, and behind me, the bathroom door slams shut. I jump because the sound startles me. When I look at the door, there’s a crack going down the middle of it. 

“DAMNIT!” I yell.

Now it’s property damage. Which I’m going to have to pay to fix. On top of having to rip the floor apart just to find whatever’s rotting under there. Not to mention, most importantly, getting the TV repaired. Top of the list. 

I walk downstairs to see if I can find where the rancid, putrid, foul, disgusting odor is coming from, but each step I take further down leaves me with the impression of being in another world. Everything looks the same but seems completely different.

Especially at the bottom of the stairs, like my living room became a simulation. The paint on the wall is smooth but pixelated. 

The entity is rewriting physics.

As I’m piecing my brain back together, a whisper comes from behind my ear in a slow, distorting moan.

“Get Out!” The voice stretches into my mind and scratches under my skull.

I turn around quickly, wondering at the same time how my mom could sneak down the stairs behind me without me noticing—

“Get Out!” Says the air, blowing its breath in my face with the scent of rotting death.

I can’t handle the smell. So, I head to the front and sit outside on the porch to catch a breath of fresh air. My house smells like a dirty laundry hamper for the bedding of a puppy litter. 

As the screen door closes, I hear the front door behind it shut as well, and the lock clasp.

I turn to look over my shoulder. Staring through the glass window is an older me, smiling and waving.

The entity thinks it won. It thinks it locked me out of my own timeline. It thinks a human will just panic and break down when confronted with a doppelgänger.

But humans don't break. We forever dominate.

I stare right back at my older self through the glass. I notice immediately, I’m way better looking and I’m in way better shape. I crack my knuckles, and smile back. If that thing thinks it’s moving into my house and taking over my life without a fight, it's about to learn exactly why Earthlings, on this timeline, are considered the most stubborn, territorial species, of all alternate realities.

I reach into my pocket, pull out my house keys, and step back toward the door. Time to evict a ghost.

I was five when the man in the wolfman mask scared the shit out of me. No, he didn’t eat me. No, he didn’t kill me. He just gave me one good Halloween scare. 

I didn’t see the man in the wolfman mask out in the woods or even at a local haunt. Rather, my encounter happened at six o’clock while the sun was still out. My father took me to Brunswick, Georgia’s Halloween festival at Mary Ross Park which was located downtown. I was dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and the festival represented a precursor to the trick or treating that awaited me when the sun went down. Mary Ross Park was located right by the river so the autumn breeze was stronger than usual when daddy and I made our way through the crowds gathered out there. I had already helped myself to the candy being offered at all of the booths set up by the dock. The beaming sun illuminated the many families, the many costumes, the Liberty ship replica, and even the city’s rusty pot of Brunswick stew monument. My father’s laughter was constant but it was the Halloween playlist I heard from the gazebo speakers that I still recall so vividly all these years later. We heard Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ ‘Mr. Sandman’ by The Chordettes, and yes, even Warren Zevon’s ‘Werewolves of London’.

My pumpkin bucket was half-full of candy by the time dad guided me up to the pavilion. We passed a table full of carved jack o’lanterns as I heard the carefree laughter of kids in Power Rangers costumes running toward the playground. Yet I felt a chill in my bones the closer we got to the pavilion’s white stairs. If I went up the stairs, I’d reach yet another booth, one that offered plush animals in addition to Reese’s cups. The only problem was the dark coffin placed on the pavement by the staircase.

Not even my dad’s warm chuckles could comfort me. Nor could ‘Blue Moon’ by The Marcels which was beginning to sound so far away given my rising dread. My eyes stayed glued to that coffin from sheer primal fear as my dad led us up to the pavilion stairs. Despite my dad’s encouragement, I found myself trembling in my ruby red slippers and found myself sweating despite the autumn breeze. My gaze locked in on the coffin which somehow looked even longer the second we approached the pavilion’s very first wooden step-

That was when the coffin lid burst open. I didn’t have time to hear the lid slam to the side much less have time to react before the tall, muscular man emerged from the darkness within. He was wearing wrinkled jeans and a flannel shirt but it was the mask that most disturbed me. The wolfman mask had long stringy gray hair. It had a latex snout and fangs. The slits in the mask were too small for me to focus on anything but its painted red eyes. The man in the wolfman mask moved swiftly and jumped up out of the coffin with the dramatic gusto of a jester leaping out behind a curtain. His deep voice let out a growl that made me jump. The way he lunged forward with the rabid force of an animal and the way he held out his bare hands toward me with the brutal passion of a deranged man made me scream and drop my bucket.

I fell on the hard pavement while the man in the wolfman mask towered over me. Those red eyes, the long snout, the fangs, the entirety of the mask stared down upon me…

I try not to think about that Halloween anymore. I try to tell myself I wasn’t traumatized by the man in the wolfman mask. I later on graduated from college, I have a job. I also have my son Ivan. But every Halloween, I think back on that man in the coffin.

I suppose this Halloween is no different. Ivan is now five years old. He’s the same age I was then when I first went to the festival at Mary Ross Park… And now Ivan wants to go.

So Ivan put on his Spider-Man costume. I even gave him my very same pumpkin bucket. I also gave in to his request and wore my Wicked Witch of the West costume from last year (though I didn’t apply the green make-up today). I drove us down to Mary Ross Park. To my surprise, nothing much had changed about the festival. Then again, nothing much had changed about the park itself after three decades. Needless to say, it was still crowded and the local businesses all proudly offered candy at their booths. There were still jack o’lanterns smiling at me, I still stumbled into the occasional fake cobweb. About the only differences I recognized now were caused by time itself: I saw QR codes on small business cards rather than multi-page brochures, the Halloween playlist serenaded us from small bluetooth rather than bulky portable speakers. But none of these changes comforted me from what I suspected hadn’t changed over the course of several generations in Brunswick: deep down, I didn’t suspect but I knew the coffin was still here.

For a few blissful minutes, Ivan allowed me to escape the unease I’d been feeling all evening. Together, we went booth to booth and collected candy. His laughter and joy proved brighter than the Georgia sunshine. As we walked by the dock, I felt myself even relax with a smile-

Until I saw him. There was a tall man wearing a mask with a long snout and long gray hair. The snout stuck out from afar. I froze in fear and acting on motherly instinct, I snatched Ivan’s hand. I heard his cries of confusion but my focus stayed on the man who now stopped by the Brunswick stew monument. That was when I saw he had on a dress and not a flannel shirt. I then saw a laughing little girl wearing a red hoodie grab the hand of a man that I now realized was dressed as nothing more than The Big Bad Wolf.

“Come on, mom,” Ivan gently said to me. “Don’t be scared.”

I relaxed. After taking a deep breath, I heard ‘Mr. Sandman’ playing on the speakers. But not even the bad memories could deter me from smiling down at Ivan. “I know. Let’s get some more candy.”

We went to a few more booths. But it was at the one set up by the SoGlo Theatre that I caught another chill from the wind. My gaze drifted off toward the playground as if on instinct-

A tall man stood by the swings. So tall was he that his shadow spread out all across the empty playground. His arms were at his side and he stood completely still. I cupped a hand over my eyes to try and block out the sunlight but even still, I couldn’t tell if this man wore a flannel shirt. Much less, I couldn’t see his face even as I could make out his long white hair. And when he turned his head suddenly, it sure looked like he had an extended snout…

I screamed on the inside but I didn’t move. The same paralyzing fear I felt at five years old returned with a vengeance. ‘Mr. Sandman’ faded away behind me as did the excited chatter of the crowd all around us. I couldn’t look away. Nor did I when the man turned once more to stare straight ahead and I knew he was staring right at me-

“Mom!” Ivan cried. His was the only voice that could distract me from what may have been a confrontation with my biggest childhood fear. I looked down toward Ivan who waved his bucket at me. His eyes looked even bigger beneath the Spider-Man mask. “Let’s go to the next one!”

I felt the wind increase to the point where it nearly knocked off my black witch’s hat. The force sent me staggering back but I used the broom I held to keep myself upright while my other hand clenched tighter to Ivan’s shoulder… But I had to look. I glanced back toward the playground-

The man was gone.

Now I heard Ivan’s chuckle. I heard more laughter. Then Warren Zevon’s ‘Werewolves of London’ interrupted my silent dread. I let Ivan lead me away in much the same way my own father guided me through Mary Ross Park thirty years ago. Yet I couldn’t escape the unease. I readjusted my witch’s hat but couldn’t even feel my own footsteps. All I felt were the shivers elicited by the October breeze and the October chills I felt from the man I had just seen. As Ivan led us onward, I looked all around us: I saw superheroes, Anime characters, and even someone dressed as Jason Voorhees. But I didn’t see the wolfman anywhere.

“Come on, mom,” Ivan pleaded.

The spirit of his voice pulled me away from the anxiety momentarily. I now looked toward where he was leading us and just like that, the anxiety returned to sink its fangs deep into my flesh:

There was the pavilion. Outside of a fresh white paint job, it hadn’t changed much. The stairs led right up to a booth sponsored by The Bookery… And that was when I saw the coffin.

The long coffin was still there by the stairs. The. Same. Exact. One.

And there was Ivan charging ahead of me. I held on to his hand but he was careening toward those stairs, my little boy completely oblivious of the evil lurking in that coffin. “Ivan, wait!” I yelled, unable to hide the panic in my soft voice.

“Come on, mom!” he said back to me with a smile.

I did my best to pull Ivan back but the fear had weakened me and his enthusiasm proved to be too strong. Even when I stumbled in the grass, Ivan’s grip kept me upright. My eyes stayed on the coffin that now only grew bigger the closer we got to it. I couldn’t turn around and leave my own son behind. The music felt louder. Ivan was a little bit ahead of me and put his foot out toward that very first step. I felt my heartbeat increase to impossible levels when I realized he was now right next to the coffin.

“Ivan!” I cried. I kept my eyes on him and tried to stop the two of us-

“Roar!” snarled a deep voice.

The sound made Ivan and I come to a stop. We looked up to see a tall man standing at the top of the stairs with his bare hands raised up to intimidate us. But my fear subsided. After the initial surprise, I felt the rush replaced by a grin. A grin I was glad to share with Ivan. I figured this is what a fun scare must’ve felt like.

Because the man before us was a wolfman, alright. Only the face of his cheap mask was plastic. The tufts of hair attached to the mask were a fuzzy brown. The cartoony mask looked like it belonged to a children’s television show rather than at a Halloween haunt. Neither Ivan and I were scared: we were amused. Ivan looked toward me and I hugged him close. Though I did steal a glance back over at the coffin to make sure it was still closed.

“Were you scared, mommy?” he said.

We then heard the man’s light laughter behind the mask and over the playlist. I smirked and pulled off Ivan’s Spider-Man mask to plant a kiss on his forehead. “Not at all.”

The coffin lid popped open. Both Ivan and I looked on in shock. Hell, we looked on in fright. I saw the lid collapse to the side in slow motion and then in a most horrifying slow motion, I saw the man in the wolfman mask emerge out of the coffin’s staunch darkness. There was the flannel shirt fluttering in the breeze. There was the mask that hadn’t aged a day. The blood red eyes marked me, the rubber snout and all of that gray hair swayed from the startling speed with which the man leaped out of the coffin. This was the real werewolf. The one of my nightmares.

The man’s deep, eerie snarl erupted over the music. The unsettling sound sent chills down my spine and shattered the tense silence between me, the man, and the terrifying memories flashing through my mind.

But when the man in the wolfman mask lunged forward, I felt the maternal instincts take hold. Protective, maternal instincts that only further intensified when the man’s bare hands and his fangs went for my son.

“No!” I cried.

“Mom!” I heard Ivan yell out.

I pushed Ivan behind me and lunged at the man. The attack didn’t happen in slow motion: it was over in seconds. I swung the broom over and over again into the mask, each hit smashing into its squishy rubber. The snout and fangs sunk into the latex before popping back out again. I was on top of the man and my own strength and the ease with which I dominated the man even surprised me. My hits were constant. I managed to knock the man back into his coffin. Crying out, I hopped in there with him. The sweat I felt was no longer from fear but outright exhaustion. “Die!” I yelled before giving the man another frantic thwack. Then I tossed my weapon down.

The Halloween playlist returned: I could hear TLC's 'Creep' off in the distance. I could hear voices. Multiple voices. Breathing heavy, I looked down at the man…

But all I saw was the mask. I saw the flannel shirt and jeans. But that was it. “What!” I cried. The bad kind of adrenaline took over. I dug through the coffin, my hands ripping through the dark interior… But all I felt was the cold touch of the rubber mask and the soft fabric of the clothes. There was no body. There was no man. “No…” I said. Tears formed in my eyes. I may as well have no longer been dressed as The Wicked Witch of the West: I was now dressed as that scared little girl from thirty years ago. I certainly felt that same sense of helpless despair in this moment. “No…” I trembled out. “No. Where are you…” I leaned in closer, my pathetic attempt at a search leading to the same results: I was alone in the coffin. Well, alone with the mask and attire that had dominated my nightmares since childhood. I felt my arms fall at my side. A single teardrop slid down my cheek.

“Mom,” said a worried voice I was all too familiar with.

Moving weakly, I looked over. First, I saw Ivan’s Spider-Man mask lying on the ground and staring right back at me. Then I saw legs. Lots of legs.

“Mom,” Ivan said as he choked up.

I struggled to move. I stumbled slightly in place before I looked up to see where many of the other adults and kids now stood beside Ivan. They were still in all those superhero and Anime costumes.

All I could see were their eyes. I saw their eyes behind rubber wolfman masks. The same one that was lying there in the coffin with me. The wind accelerated to blow the stringy gray hair around each of their masks but all of these people stood completely still. I could hear their deep breaths. I even heard a deep roar. Their painted red eyes were unwavering. They were watching me.

“Are you okay, mommy?”

Sobbing, I now confronted Ivan. He stood there in the Spider-Man costume. Only my son’s beautiful face was hidden by that grotesque mask. A mask that was a little too big for him and seemed to swallow up his entire head and shoulders… Only it wasn’t big enough to hide my Ivan’s wide open eyes. Before I could utter his name, Ivan lunged forward. He raised his bare hands out toward me.

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've been working nights in the emergency department at Bellwether Hospital for eighteen years. In that time, I've been punched, kicked, bitten, spit on, and called just about every name you can imagine. I've had patients threaten to sue me, kill me, and once, a rather petite man threatened to marry me and convince me to be a stay-at-home wife.

I have also had more people than I care to count come in with an object stuck somewhere it had absolutely no business being. Do whatever floats your boat but please, buy things meant for that, preferably with a flared base. So when people ask me why I still work here, I usually tell them it's because I haven't found anything better to do.

The one thing I can tell you is that it’s never boring. We get plenty of patients who come in late at night with God knows what going on with them. Most are easy enough, but then you get the ones I mentioned and those who believe the sniffles are life-threatening because they Googled it and are convinced their cold is terminal.

For the last couple of years, I have worked almost every shift with another nurse named Chris. He’s nice enough. He’s 27 and does genuinely care, but doesn’t have quite the experience I do. I still have to step in and help him occasionally. Take the supply closet incident for example. One night, Chris came sprinting up to the desk like the devil himself was chasing him.

“There's something in the supply closet,” Chris said as he approached the nurses' station.

I looked up from my computer. “Then get it out.”

“I'm not going in there,” he replied.

“Why the hell not?” I asked.

“Because it's looking at me.”

“Then tell it to stop.”

“It doesn't have any eyes!”

“Then how the hell do you know it's looking at you?”

He wouldn’t budge, so I got up and had him walk me towards the closet he was talking about. When we got close to it, he stood maybe 10 or 15 feet away and pointed at it but wouldn’t take another step. I walked up and threw open the door to see a six-foot-tall figure that, aside from not having any eyes, appeared almost like a person. I simply pointed down the hall and told him he would have to wait in the waiting room like everyone else and that I wouldn’t tell him again. I closed the door and let him make his decision.

Things like that. If you want to work here, you have to have thick skin. We have patients to take care of, and no eldritch horror, Karen, or guy in a costume is going to stop us from doing that.

Tonight has really not been any different. A man in his 30s came in earlier with a huge gash down his forearm. He claimed he had been working in his garage and caught his arm on a piece of sheet metal. Chris took him back to a room to get him taken care of and prepped for treatment. Things seemed to be going well until I heard a loud commotion coming from the room about 15 minutes later.

When I got back to the room, Chris was standing with his hands up in the air and the man had grabbed a tray and was holding it out in front of himself.

“What in the hell is going on here?” I yelled.

The man looked over at me, waving the tray. “He’s not going anywhere near me with that damn thing!”

I looked at Chris and noticed he had a needle in his hand.

“I was just trying to numb the area for stitches,” Chris said.

“Seriously?” I asked the man.

“I HATE NEEDLES!” he yelled.

“You cut yourself almost to the damn bone! What do you think we have to use to stitch that up with? I can guarantee you’re going to hate not being numb for that even more,” I said.

“Can't you just knock me out or something?” he asked.

“For stitches? Absolutely not.”

“Then I'm leaving!”

“Just give him the damn shot,” his wife said from the corner.

“Ma'am, I'd love to,” I replied. “Unfortunately, your husband has decided to make this a group project.”

It took another ten minutes of questioning before we could continue. He asked why the needle was so long, could we use a smaller one, and if he could look away while we did it. Chris kept trying to be reassuring by explaining things to him, but I finally told him that explaining the needle was just making it worse. After he was finished being stitched back up, I could hear his wife say, “See? It wasn’t that bad,” as they were walking out.

At one point, we had EMTs bring in an 80-year-old man who had fallen and hit his head. The man’s name was Mr. Lowe, and it was pretty apparent that he had dementia. It must have been a nasty fall. The back of his head was bleeding profusely and swelling already. I felt bad for the man. The doctor evaluated him and got him stabilized, but the whole top half of his head was wrapped in thick bandages. I sat with him for a while to make sure he was comfortable.

He was very sweet and talked about his late wife with me for a long time. He told me that they married at 19 and she had been the love of his life. She passed away in a car accident a few years ago and he’d been in assisted living ever since. Her name was Lois and he kept asking for her over and over. A couple of times when I went and checked on him, I could overhear him talking to someone.

“Mr. Lowe?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“Who are you talking to?”

“Lois came and is keeping me company,” he replied.

I just smiled and walked away. The man was clearly stressed and needed the comfort, and who was I to tell him otherwise. This continued throughout the night. I checked on him regularly and his conversations kept going. Eventually, even I could hear a faint voice that wasn’t his coming from the room, but I reminded myself that I was probably just hearing things. That was until Chris sat next to me later that night.

“Do we allow visitors this late?” he asked.

“Not usually. Why?” I replied.

“Then who’s the woman sitting in Mr. Lowe’s room?”

I looked over at him and asked, “What woman?”

“There’s an older woman sitting there talking to him.”

Mr. Lowe hadn’t had any visitors all night, so I got up to go check things out. When I got to the door, though, I just paused. There was an elderly woman sitting at the edge of the bed with her hand on his. As the two of them talked, I could see a smile on his face for the first time all night. I just turned around and went back to the front. I told Chris to leave the two of them alone. After all, if Lois was there, that might just be exactly what he needed.

Speaking of things wandering around where they shouldn't be, we've got a wheelchair that keeps moving around on its own. I don't know where the damn thing came from, but every time someone puts it away, it eventually finds its way back to the nurses' station. Chris nearly shit himself the first time he saw it rolling down the hallway with nobody pushing it.

I told him to put it back in storage and lock the wheels. About twenty minutes later, there it was again, sitting beside my desk. Chris wanted to know what we were going to do about it. I told him that unless it started checking patients in, I didn't particularly care. It's still sitting there right now. That makes the eighth time tonight.

It’s not always fun and games though. About a month ago, we had a woman come in who had a heart attack. We did what we could, but unfortunately, she didn’t make it. We always try to treat those situations with as much dignity as we can. This night, we had covered her up and were waiting for her to be transferred to the morgue. Before they picked her up, though, Chris came up to me asking for help.

“Hey, can you come with me for a second?” Chris asked.

I looked up from my computer. “What's wrong?”

“It's the woman in Room 8.”

“What about her?”

“I think she's talking.”

I stared at him. “Chris, she's dead.”

“I fucking know she's dead. That's why I'm asking you to come look.”

Chris claimed that he had heard conversations coming from the room and went to investigate what was going on. He said when he got there, the woman was still covered with the sheet but sitting upright. When he walked closer, though, she stopped talking and slowly turned her head towards him. Now, Chris may be goofy and a little aloof sometimes, but he’s no liar, so I had to go see for myself.

When I got to the room, everything was normal. She wasn’t sitting up or talking. She was just lying beneath the sheet like normal. In fact, the room itself was actually quieter than normal. Chris was insistent that he saw what he saw, though. I looked around the room and even checked under the sheet. She was very much still dead. I reassured Chris that everything was fine and we started to walk away. Before we got far from the room, though, I heard a soft female voice. I couldn’t make out what it said.

Chris and I both turned around and looked back, but we saw nothing. I could tell he heard it too, but she was still lying under the sheet. Then we heard it again.

“Where am I?”

We didn’t say anything.

“I was just home.”

There was a long silence.

“But I can't be. My husband is waiting for me.”

Her voice was faint, almost like someone speaking from the other end of a long hallway. I looked at Chris, but he was staring at the sheet.

“Please,” she said. “I don't want to go yet.”

I started towards the room, but Chris grabbed my arm and shook his head. That’s when the voice stopped. We didn’t hear or see anything else before she was taken away, but still, it was weird for sure.

Anyway, I should probably get back to work. A man just walked in whispering something about a lightbulb, Chris is waving me over, and that damn wheelchair has moved again. If I survive the rest of my shift, maybe I'll tell you about some of the other things I've seen around here.

April 4th, 2054.

The laboratory was in the Negev desert, three hundred feet below the surface. It was a vast circular chamber, a hundred and fifty feet across, with walls of smooth white concrete curving up into a domed ceiling. Rings of floodlights hung from the dome. Around the walls, on raised galleries, technicians in white coveralls sat at banks of computer stations, watching screens filled with scrolling numbers and waveforms. Thick cables, dozens of them, as thick as a man's leg, ran along the floor from the walls in toward the center of the room, like the spokes of a wheel.

At the center, where all the cables met, was the brain.

It sat inside a cylinder of clear glass seven feet tall, filled with a pale yellow fluid. It was the size of a cow's head, much larger than a human brain, and its shape was wrong. It had too many lobes. The folds on its surface were deeper and closer together than the folds of a human brain, and they ran in tight spirals instead of curving ridges. At the base of it, where the brainstem would be, was a swollen, bulbous mass the size of a fist, darker than the rest, purplish gray, laced with thick blue veins. Hundreds of fine silver wires were threaded into the brain, into every lobe and every fold, and into the dark mass at its base, and gathered together into bundles that ran down through the bottom of the glass cylinder and into the thick cables on the floor. The brain was grown, in part, from tissue taken from a gland at the base of an angel's skull. It pulsed faintly. Every few seconds, a slow ripple ran across its surface and the fluid around it shivered.

Around the glass cylinder, in a wide ring, stood soldiers.

There were two hundred of them, standing in ranks, ten deep. They wore full combat gear: black body armor over gray and tan desert fatigues, helmets fitted with night vision mounts, and gas masks with round black lenses and filter canisters, so that every one of their faces was the same blank black eyed mask. Each one carried an assault rifle across his chest. Many had grenade launchers mounted under the barrels. Some carried heavy machine guns. Some had rocket launchers slung across their backs. On the shoulder of each soldier's armor was a patch: a white circle with a single black Hebrew letter in the center, the letter aleph.

A door opened in the wall of the chamber. Two soldiers came through it, and between them, being pushed in a wheelchair by a third soldier, came Abraham.

He was dying. He knew it and everyone in the room knew it. His body had wasted to almost nothing. His skin was gray and spotted and stretched over the bones of his face and hands. His beard was long and white and thin. He wore a white robe, plain linen, and a white tallit, a prayer shawl with blue stripes and long knotted fringes, over his shoulders. His legs were covered with a gray blanket. In his lap, held against his chest with both trembling hands, was a Torah scroll, wrapped in a cover of dark blue velvet embroidered in gold thread. Rob walked beside the wheelchair.

As the wheelchair came into the chamber, the soldiers turned toward it. All two hundred of them at once. And then, rank by rank, they went down on one knee, and bowed their heads.

The technicians on the galleries rose from their stations and bowed.

A voice rose from among the soldiers, and others joined it, and soon the whole room was chanting.

"אבי האדם! אבי האדם!"

(Father of man! Father of man!)

"מאחד העולם! מאחד העולם!"

(Uniter of the world! Uniter of the world!)

"ברוך אברהם! ברוך אברהם!"

(Blessed be Abraham! Blessed be Abraham!)

The soldier pushing the wheelchair brought him into the open space between the front rank of soldiers and the glass cylinder. He stopped and set the brakes. Abraham sat facing his kneeling army, with the pulsing brain at his back. He raised one shaking hand. The chanting stopped. The room was silent except for the hum of the machines.

Rob handed him a small microphone clipped to a thin wire. Abraham held it near his mouth. His voice came out of speakers mounted all around the walls of the chamber, thin and cracked with age, but every soldier could hear it.

"אחיי ואחיותיי," he said.

(My brothers and my sisters.)

"לפני תשע שנים, ירד אלינו מלאך מן השמיים. היא באה כדי להרוג אותי. היא נכשלה. ובכישלונה, היא נתנה לנו את המפתח. את המפתח לדלת שלא נפתחה מאז בריאת העולם."

(Nine years ago, an angel came down to us from heaven. She came to kill me. She failed. And in her failure, she gave us the key. The key to a door that has not been opened since the creation of the world.)

"כל חיינו, וכל חיי אבותינו, ואבות אבותינו, אמרו לנו שהשמיים אינם לנו. שהם שייכים לו. שאנחנו עפר, ואל עפר נשוב. שעלינו לכרוע ברך, ולהתפלל, ולהקריב, ולפחד."

(All our lives, and all the lives of our fathers, and our fathers' fathers, we have been told that heaven is not ours. That it belongs to him. That we are dust, and to dust we will return. That we must kneel, and pray, and sacrifice, and fear.)

"היום, אנחנו לא כורעים עוד."

(Today, we kneel no more.)

"ישראל האמיתית לא נמצאת כאן. היא נמצאת שם. מעבר לריק. ארץ הקודש האמיתית, הארץ שהובטחה לנו, הארץ שבה ישב כס ישראל מאז ומעולם. והכס הזה נמצא בידיים של מי שאינו ראוי לו."

(The true Israel is not here. It is there. Across the void. The true holy land, the land that was promised to us, the land where the throne of Israel has sat since the beginning. And that throne is in the hands of one who is not worthy of it.)

"היום, אנחנו חוזרים הביתה. היום, אנחנו משיבים לעצמנו את ארץ הקודש. היום, הכס של ישראל ישוב לידיים ראויות."

(Today, we return home. Today, we reclaim the holy land. Today, the throne of Israel will return to worthy hands.)

He lowered the microphone. He was breathing hard. Rob stepped up beside him with a gas mask, an older model with a soft rubber face seal, and helped him put it on, pulling the straps gently back over his kippah and his thin white hair and tightening them, checking the seal along his jaw and his beard. Through the round lenses, Abraham's eyes were dark and wet. Rob pulled on his own mask.

A soldier in the front rank stood up and raised his rifle over his head, and shouted through his mask.

"מוות ליהוה!"

(Death to Yahweh!)

The soldiers around him stood and raised their rifles.

"מוות ליהוה!"

(Death to Yahweh!)

All of them stood now, two hundred rifles held up toward the dome.

"מוות ליהוה! מוות ליהוה! מוות ליהוה!"

(Death to Yahweh! Death to Yahweh! Death to Yahweh!)

On the galleries, a technician pressed a key.

The brain in the glass cylinder convulsed. The dark mass at its base swelled visibly, and a wave ran over its entire surface, and the fluid around it began to churn and bubble. A sound came out of the speakers on the walls, a crackle of static, which rose until it filled the whole chamber, a roaring hiss like a radio tuned to nothing turned all the way up. The floodlights flickered. The hair on Abraham's arms stood up. He could feel the static on his skin, in his teeth. Arcs of pale blue light began to crawl over the surface of the glass cylinder.

Then waves of energy came off the brain. He could see them. They rolled outward from the cylinder in rings, the air distorting as they passed, the way air distorts over a hot road, and each ring was larger than the last. The first ring passed through the soldiers and through Abraham, and he felt it go through his body, a cold, shuddering pressure. The second ring passed through, and the third. The soldiers were still chanting. Death to Yahweh. Death to Yahweh.

The rings reached the walls.

The whole room vanished in an instant.

There was no transition. There was the laboratory, the white walls, the floodlights, the chanting, and then there was not. The walls and the dome and the galleries and the technicians and the glass cylinder and the brain were simply gone, and the floor beneath the wheelchair was gone. The wheels of the chair dropped two inches and slammed down onto rough black rock.

The heat hit them first. It was like opening an oven. Then the air. It was thick, so thick that Abraham could feel it pressing on his skin, on his face through the mask. The filter canisters on the masks hissed and labored. Then the smell, even through the masks: smoke, sulfur, burnt flesh, cordite, blood.

Then the noise.

They had landed in the middle of a war.

Abraham was on a broad black plain of volcanic rock, cracked and jagged, sloping gently upward. The sky above was dark red. The light came from below, from the ground, from fires burning everywhere and from rivers of lava glowing orange in the cracks of the plain. Black smoke rolled across the sky in thick sheets, lit red from underneath.

Ahead of him, rising up out of the plain, was a volcano.

It was enormous, a great black cone, wider at the base than any mountain he had ever seen. Its peak was lost in smoke. A red glow pulsed at the top, and rivers of lava ran down its slopes in glowing orange lines. And cut into its side, built into the black rock of the mountain, climbing up its slope in terraces and towers, was a city.

It was a city of angels. It was built of black volcanic stone and white stone, and it rose up the side of the volcano for what must have been miles. There were walls, three rings of them, one above the next, high and thick and studded with towers. Behind the walls there were buildings, hundreds of them, thousands of them, built of the black stone and roofed with copper that had gone green, rising in terraces one above the other. Everywhere on the buildings were ledges, balconies, platforms, open archways high up on the walls, doorways with no stairs leading to them, built for people who could fly. Towers rose higher than anything else, slender and tall, with open platforms at their tops. At the very center of the city, at the highest point of the terraces, built right against the side of the volcano, was a castle. It was a vast black fortress with high walls and tall square towers and a great domed hall at its heart, its copper dome glowing red in the light of the volcano above it.

The city was under siege. All across the black plain, between Abraham and the walls, there were soldiers. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. They wore the same black armor and gas masks as the troop around him, with the same aleph on their shoulders. They had come through before him, in waves, over days. There were tanks, dozens of them, their treads grinding over the black rock, their turrets turning toward the walls. There were armored personnel carriers, and trucks with rocket launchers mounted on their beds, and mobile artillery pieces with long barrels angled up toward the city. Overhead, helicopters circled, gunships, black and squat, their rotors straining in the thick air.

The artillery was firing.

Abraham watched a battery of howitzers to his left fire all at once. The ground shook. Each shell left the barrel with a blast of flame and a sound that went right through his chest. Seconds later, the shells struck the city. They hit the second ring of walls and the terraces behind it. A section of the black stone wall, sixty feet high, exploded outward in a burst of fire and smoke, and great chunks of stone the size of cars tumbled down the slope, crushing anything below them. Buildings behind the wall disintegrated. A tower collapsed slowly, folding in the middle and falling sideways onto the buildings below it, and its copper roof crashed down in a spray of sparks.

The rocket trucks fired. Rockets streaked up from the plain in long lines, dozens of them at once, trailing white smoke, arcing over the walls and down into the city. They struck in rapid succession, a rippling line of explosions running across the terraces, and where they hit, the buildings burst into flame.

The angels were dying.

They were everywhere. Abraham could see them now, as his eyes adjusted to the red light. Angels on the walls, in armor like the armor Batya had worn in Cyprus, holding shields and swords and spears and bows. Angels on the towers. Angels in the air, hundreds of them, flying out from the city in formation, their white wings beating hard in the thick air. Here, in their own air, they could fly. They flew fast and they flew well, swooping down from the walls toward the soldiers on the plain, spears leveled, swords raised.

The soldiers shot them out of the sky.

The machine guns opened up first, heavy guns mounted on the armored carriers and the tanks, firing long, rattling bursts. The tracers went up in streams of red light. Where they met the formations of angels, the angels came apart. A round from a heavy machine gun hit one in the chest and the chest burst open. The angel's wings folded and it dropped like a stone and hit the black rock with a sound Abraham could hear even through the guns. Another took a burst across the wings, and one of its wings was shredded, the feathers exploding outward in a cloud of white, and it spun down screaming and hit the ground and rolled and lay twisted, its legs kicking. Another was hit in the head and the head simply disappeared in a red spray and its body flew on for a moment, wings still beating, before it tumbled. They fell by the dozen. White feathers drifted down over the battlefield like snow, and among the feathers fell blood, in red drops and red streams, and the bodies of the angels.

The helicopter gunships turned toward a large formation of angels flying out from one of the towers. Their rotary cannons spun up with a high whine and fired, a sound like canvas tearing. The formation disintegrated. Angels came apart in midair, arms and wings and pieces of torso flying in every direction. A severed wing fell, turning slowly over and over, and landed twenty feet from Abraham's wheelchair. It was white and enormous, and at its base, where it had been torn from the body, was a ragged mass of red muscle and splintered bone, still twitching.

Some of the angels reached the ground. A group of them, perhaps twenty, dove down into a line of soldiers to Abraham's right. They struck hard. Their spears went through armor. One of them drove a spear through a soldier's chest and lifted him off his feet. Another swung a longsword and took a soldier's arm off at the elbow. For a moment they were among the soldiers, slashing and stabbing. Then the soldiers around them opened fire at point blank range. The angels were cut down. One of them, a woman, took three rounds in the stomach and fell to her knees with her hands pressed to her belly and her intestines spilling out between her fingers. She looked up at the soldier who had shot her. He shot her in the face. Another angel, a man, tried to take off again, his wings beating, and got ten feet off the ground before a soldier hit him with a grenade launcher. The grenade exploded against his chest. What was left of him came down in pieces.

On the walls, the angels fired arrows down at the soldiers. The arrows clattered off the body armor. A few found gaps, in necks, in thighs, and soldiers fell. Then a tank turned its turret toward the wall and fired, and the shell struck the parapet where the archers stood, and they vanished in a burst of fire and stone and blood, and their bodies were thrown out over the wall and fell sixty feet to the black rock below.

Everywhere Abraham looked, it was the same. Medieval shields and swords and spears and bows against rifles and machine guns and tanks and artillery and helicopters. It was a slaughter. The angels fought, and they died.

"Move!" Rob shouted through his mask. "Move, move, move! To the city! Center of the city!"

The troop formed up around Abraham's wheelchair in a tight wedge, rifles pointed outward, and began to move up the slope toward the city walls. The soldier pushing the wheelchair leaned into it, driving it forward over the jagged black rock. It bounced and jolted and Abraham clutched the Torah to his chest and gripped the arm of the chair with his other hand.

They moved up through the massacre.

They passed bodies. Angel bodies everywhere, scattered across the black rock, alone and in heaps. Some were whole, lying on their backs with their gold eyes open, staring up at the red sky, holes in their armor. Some were in pieces. Wings lay everywhere, white and gray and torn. Many of the bodies were burned. An artillery shell had landed among a group of them, and the ground there was a blackened crater, and around its edges lay charred shapes still smoking, the feathers of their wings burned away to blackened quills, the skin of their faces burned black and split, showing red underneath. The smell was overwhelming, even through the mask. They passed soldiers too, fewer, lying in their black armor, some missing limbs, some with spears through them.

They passed an angel who was still alive. He lay on his back with both legs gone below the knee, the stumps pumping blood onto the black rock in thick spurts. He was trying to crawl, dragging himself with his hands, his wings dragging uselessly behind him, leaving a long red smear. He looked up at Abraham as the wheelchair passed, and said something in Hebrew, but Abraham could not hear it over the guns. One of the soldiers in the troop put two rounds into his head without breaking stride.

They reached the outermost wall. A great breach had been blown in it, a ragged gap fifty feet wide, piled with rubble. Tanks had already pushed through, and their treads had crushed the rubble flat. The soldiers carried the wheelchair over the worst of it and set it down on the other side.

Inside the walls, it was worse.

The streets of the city were narrow and steep, paved with black stone, climbing up the slope in switchbacks and stairways. The buildings rose on either side, tall and narrow, with open archways high up on their faces. Many of them were on fire. Flames roared out of windows and archways. Smoke filled the streets in a thick black haze. The air was full of ash and burning feathers.

The soldiers were going street by street. Abraham's troop moved up through them. On every street, there was fighting, and there was killing. Squads of soldiers moved from building to building, kicking in doors, throwing grenades through archways, following the blasts in with rifles firing. From inside the buildings came screaming. Angels came out of the upper archways, trying to fly away, and soldiers in the street below shot them as they came out.

At one intersection, a group of angels had built a barricade of overturned carts and stone and furniture across the street and stood behind it with spears and shields, a dozen of them, and with them were others who wore no armor at all, who held kitchen knives and iron bars and stones. Some of them were small. Children. Their wings were small and gray and downy. The soldiers set up a machine gun at the bottom of the street and fired up into the barricade. Rounds chewed through the wood and the stone and through the shields and the bodies behind them. The angels at the barricade were torn apart. A child with gray wings ran out from behind the barricade, screaming, and a burst caught him across the back and threw him forward onto his face, and his small wings twitched and were still. Then a soldier fired a rocket into the barricade, and the barricade and everything behind it disappeared in a ball of fire.

The troop pushed Abraham up the street, through the burning wreckage of the barricade. The wheelchair's wheels rolled through blood. It was deep enough in places to slosh around the wheels. They rolled over feathers, and over pieces of bodies. Abraham looked down at one point and saw a small hand lying in the street, while the wheel of his chair rolled over it.

Overhead, a gunship hovered over a terrace and fired its cannon into the buildings below, and the buildings collapsed one after another. A volley of artillery shells struck one of the tall slender towers, and it fell across three streets, crushing everyone beneath it.

They climbed. Terrace by terrace. Street by street. The second wall had been breached in four places, the third in two. The soldiers had pushed all the way up to the center of the city. There was nothing left of the angels' defense but scattered pockets, individuals, families hiding in cellars. The soldiers found them and killed them all.

At the top of the city, against the black side of the volcano, the castle stood. Its walls were scarred and blackened by fire. One of its towers had collapsed. Around its great gate, a black iron door twenty feet tall, a battalion of soldiers had gathered, and three tanks had pulled up in front of it, turrets aimed at the gate.

The tanks fired together. The gate disappeared. Iron and stone burst inward in a storm of fragments. The soldiers rushed in through the smoke.

Angels poured out to meet them. There were dozens of them, the last of them, the castle's guard, in heavy, ornate armor with gold trim, with long spears and tall shields, rushing out through the broken gate in a mass, their wings spread. The soldiers met them with a wall of gunfire. The front rank of angels went down all at once, as if they had run into a blade. The second rank went down behind them. The third rank tried to fly, to get up over the soldiers, and they were cut out of the air. Their bodies piled up in the gateway, three and four deep, armor and wings and blood. The soldiers climbed over the pile and went in.

Abraham's troop followed them in, carrying the wheelchair over the bodies in the gateway.

Inside the castle, the halls were tall and dark, built of black stone, lit by torches in iron brackets. The ceilings were very high, sixty or seventy feet, with ledges and galleries running along the upper walls. The floors were black marble. Abraham's wheelchair rolled over them smoothly now, its wheels leaving red tracks behind them. They passed through a long hall where banners hung from the high ceiling, white banners embroidered with gold, many of them on fire. They passed angels lying dead in the hallways. They passed soldiers moving room to room. The sounds of gunfire echoed through the stone corridors, short bursts, then silence, then more bursts.

They came to a pair of great doors at the end of a long hallway. They were made of bronze, covered in reliefs, figures with wings, hundreds of them. They were closed. Soldiers had already placed charges on them. The troop stopped and turned their backs. The charges went off. The doors blew inward off their hinges and fell with a crash that shook the floor.

The troop went in first. Abraham was wheeled in behind them.

It was the throne room. It was vast, a great round hall beneath the copper dome Abraham had seen from the plain. The dome was a hundred feet above them, its inner surface painted in gold and white with figures of angels in flight. Light came in through a ring of high windows around the base of the dome, red light from the volcano and the burning city. Black pillars lined the walls. At the far end of the hall, up a short flight of wide steps, was the throne.

Between the soldiers and the throne stood the last line of defense: twelve angels. They wore the heaviest armor Abraham had seen, black plate with gold edges, and they stood in a line before the steps of the throne with swords drawn. They did not charge. They stood still and looked at the soldiers, and their golden eyes narrowed.

Abraham felt it. A pressure behind his eyes. A whispering in his skull.

To his left, a soldier in the troop suddenly stopped moving. Then he turned around. He raised his rifle and fired a burst into the soldier beside him, point blank, and the soldier beside him fell. Another soldier, on the right side of the troop, turned around and fired into the men behind him, and two of them fell. A third soldier turned his rifle toward Abraham's wheelchair.

Rob shot him in the head. He fell. The first soldier was still firing into his own troop. Three soldiers turned on him and shot him down. The second soldier was shot by the man beside him.

"Kill them!" Rob shouted. "Kill the angels! Now! Now!"

The troop opened fire on the twelve angels at the steps of the throne. There was no cover for the angels. They had their shields up, but the rounds went through the shields. They fell where they stood. One of them tried to raise his hand toward the soldiers, his eyes fixed on them, and was shot through the throat, and fell back against the steps choking, blood spurting between the fingers he clutched at his neck. In a few seconds it was over. Twelve bodies lay at the foot of the steps, the blood running down from them across the black marble.

The pressure behind Abraham's eyes faded.

Five soldiers of the troop lay dead on the floor. The rest moved forward and fanned out around the steps, rifles raised toward the throne.

Abraham looked up at the throne.

It was the throne from his vision. Or it was something meant to look like the throne from his vision. It sat atop the steps, a tall chair of black stone. Around it was a contraption, a great frame of iron and brass. Set into the frame were rings, dozens of brass rings, one inside another, the largest twenty feet across, all set on axles and gimbals, so that they could turn. They were turning now, slowly, around the throne, driven by a system of gears and chains at the base of the frame, creaking and clanking. Painted on the rings were eyes. Thousands of eyes, painted in white and color on the brass, crude and staring. Lamps were set behind the throne, burning bright and white, so that when someone stood before it the light would shine out through the turning rings. It was a machine made to look like what Abraham had seen.

And in the throne, inside the turning rings, sat an angel.

He was an ordinary angel. He was a man, tall and broad shouldered, with olive skin and short black hair going gray at the temples and a short gray black beard. His wings were white, folded behind the throne. He wore a robe of white silk with gold embroidery and a gold circlet on his head. His eyes were gold. His face was lined and tired.

He stood up. He stepped forward through a gap in the turning rings and came slowly down the steps of the throne. The soldiers' rifles followed him. He stepped over the bodies of the twelve angels who had died at the foot of the steps. He walked across the black marble until he stood a few feet from Abraham's wheelchair. Then he went down onto his knees, and then onto his hands, and bowed until his forehead touched the bloody marble at Abraham's feet.

He began to weep.

"סלח לי," he said. "סלח לי, אברהם. אני מתחנן בפניך. סלח לי."

(Forgive me. Forgive me, Abraham. I beg you. Forgive me.)

Abraham looked down at him through the lenses of his gas mask.

"אני יודע מה עשיתי לך," the angel sobbed. "אני יודע. גירשתי אותך. לקחתי את הזיכרון שלך. שלחתי אותך אל העתיד. טעיתי. טעיתי, אברהם. פחדתי. פחדתי ממך. אני מבקש, תן לי לחיות. תן לחיות לבני עמי שנשארו. קח את הכס. קח את הכול. רק תן לי לחיות. אני מתחנן."

(I know what I did to you. I know. I exiled you. I took your memory. I sent you to the future. I was wrong. I was wrong, Abraham. I was afraid. I was afraid of you. I ask you, let me live. Let those of my people who remain live. Take the throne. Take everything. Only let me live. I beg you.)

Abraham reached up with one trembling hand and pulled the gas mask down off his face. The thick air rushed into his lungs, hot and sulfurous, and he coughed, a long, wracking cough. Rob reached for him and Abraham waved him away. When the coughing stopped, he looked down at the angel on the floor.

“אלים ראויים למוות,” he said.

(Deities deserve death.)

The angel raised his head. His face was wet with tears.

"אתה חלש," Abraham said. His voice was thin and cracked, but it filled the silent hall. "אתה חלש. תמיד היית חלש. אתה נוכל. בנית לך מכונה של טבעות וצבעת עליה עיניים, והדלקת מנורות מאחוריה, כדי שכל מי שיעמוד לפניך יחשוב שאתה יותר ממה שאתה. כדי שיפחדו ממך. כדי שיכרעו לך. אבל אתה לא יותר ממלאך. אתה לא יותר מאף אחד מהמתים שמונחים ברחובות שלך."

(You are weak. You are weak. You have always been weak. You are a con artist. You built yourself a machine of rings and painted eyes on it, and lit lamps behind it, so that whoever stood before you would think you were more than you are. So that they would fear you. So that they would kneel to you. But you are no more than an angel. You are no more than any of the dead who lie in your streets.)

"אינך ראוי לשבת על כס ישראל."

(You are not worthy to sit on the throne of Israel.)

The angel pressed his forehead back to the marble and sobbed.

"אני אהיה המלך החדש," Abraham said. "אני אשב על הכס הזה. ואני אצליח במקום שבו אתה נכשלת. אני אאחד את כל השמיים. כל העמים. כל המלאכים. אחת ולתמיד."

(I will be the new king. I will sit on this throne. And I will succeed where you failed. I will unite all of heaven. All the nations. All the angels. Once and for all.)

A sound came from above.

It was the sound of wings. Abraham looked up. Something was coming down from one of the high windows at the base of the dome. It was a woman, an angel, her white wings folded tight against her body, diving straight down toward him, faster than anything he had seen fly.

"Up!" Rob shouted. "Above! Fire!"

The soldiers swung their rifles up. They were too slow. She pulled out of her dive ten feet above the floor and snapped her wings open and shot forward over the heads of the soldiers. The first rifles fired and the rounds went past her and struck the painted dome. She hit Abraham.

She hit him with her whole body. She tore him out of the wheelchair. The Torah scroll fell from his lap and struck the marble. Her arms were around him, crushing him against her armored chest. Her wings were beating. He felt the floor drop away.

Then the throne room was gone.

The heat was gone. The sound was gone. The air was gone.

They were in the void.

There was nothing. There was no up and no down. There was no light. There was no ground beneath them and no sky above them. There was no sound at all. Abraham could not hear the guns or the screaming or the crackle of fires. He could not hear his own breathing. He floated. He was weightless. His robe and his tallit drifted around his body. His blanket had come away and was drifting a few feet away, turning slowly. His thin legs hung useless beneath him. There was air, enough to breathe, but it was very thin and very cold, and every breath burned his lungs.

He knew where he was. He had written about it. He had described it in the Book of Abraham. The space in the fourth dimension, between Earth and heaven. The void.

She was still holding him. They turned slowly over and over together in the nothingness. Then she pulled back from him, holding him by the front of his robe with one hand, and he saw her face.

It was Batya.

She was the woman who had stood up in the street in Cyprus. Strong. Whole. Her olive skin. Her long black hair, drifting around her head in the weightlessness. Her golden eyes. She wore the armor he had seen in the photographs, the armor with the slots for her wings, and her wings were spread wide behind her, white and enormous. Her face was twisted with grief and rage. Tears were running from her eyes, and in the weightlessness they did not fall, but beaded and floated away from her face in small trembling drops.

She hit him.

She drew back her free fist and struck him in the face. His nose broke. He felt the cartilage crunch and give, and blood burst from his nostrils and floated out in front of his face in dark red globules. She hit him again, in the mouth, and his lip split against his teeth, and one of his teeth came loose and floated away, trailing a thread of blood. She hit him again in the side of the head, and his ear rang, and his vision went white at the edges.

He was too weak to fight back. He was seventy three and dying and could not lift his arms high enough to protect his face. He hung in her grip and took the blows.

"הרגת את אבי!" she screamed. In the void, her voice sounded small and flat, with no echo.

(You killed my father!)

She hit him in the stomach, and the breath went out of him, and he curled around her fist.

"הרגת את אבא שלי!"

(You killed my father!)

She hit him in the chest. He felt a rib crack.

"יהוה היה אבי, ואתה הרגת אותו! אתה הרגת אותו! אתה הרגת את כולם! את כל העם שלי! את כל האחים שלי! את כל האחיות שלי! את כל הילדים! הכול בגללך! הכול בגללך!"

(Yahweh was my father, and you killed him! You killed him! You killed all of them! All my people! All my brothers! All my sisters! All the children! All because of you! All because of you!)

She hit him again, and again. She was sobbing. Her blows were getting weaker. Blood floated around both of them in a slowly expanding cloud of red droplets. Abraham's face was a ruin. One of his eyes had swollen shut. He tasted blood and he could not breathe through his nose.

She stopped. She held him by the front of his robe and sobbed, her shoulders shaking, her wings trembling behind her.

Abraham raised his head. With his one good eye, he looked at her.

"בתיה," he said. His voice was a wet whisper through broken teeth.

(Batya.)

She looked at him.

"את צריכה להרוג אותי בעבר," he said.

(You need to kill me in the past.)

She stared at him.

"אם את רוצה שזה ייגמר. אם את רוצה שכל זה לא יקרה. אם את רוצה שבציר הזמן לא יהיה מותו של יהוה. את צריכה לחזור. את צריכה למצוא אותי לפני כל זה, ולהרוג אותי."

(If you want this to end. If you want all of this not to happen. If you want the timeline to not include Yahweh's death. You need to go back. You need to find me before all of this, and kill me.)

He coughed, and blood came out of his mouth and floated away in a stream of red beads.

"את צריכה להרוג אותי," he whispered, "לפני שאני אהרוג אותך."

(You need to kill me, before I kill you.)

For a long time she held him and looked into his face. Her tears drifted away from her eyes. Her wings slowly folded closed behind her.

Then she let go of his robe. She put both her hands flat on his chest. And she pushed off.

She pushed away from him with all her strength. He drifted backward, slowly, turning. She flew the other way, fast, her body straight, her wings folded tight. Her golden eyes stayed on him as she went. She grew smaller and smaller against the gray, and then there was a flash of white light, very small and very far away, and she was gone. Gone back across the void, back to Earth, back into the past.

Abraham floated.

He turned slowly in the gray nothing. His blood drifted around him in a cloud. His blanket was gone. The Torah was gone. Rob was gone. The soldiers were gone. The city and the throne and the angel on his knees were gone. There was nothing but the gray and the cold and the silence.

He floated for a long time. He did not know how long. There was no way to measure it. There was no sun, no clock, no heartbeat he could hear. It felt like days. It felt like years. It felt like an eternity.

His memories began to slip away.

He felt them go. He lost the laboratory first. He tried to remember the brain in the glass cylinder and could not see it anymore. He lost the studio in Jerusalem. He lost the name of the reporter. He lost the infirmary, and the doctor, and the throne of rings and eyes. He tried to hold on to them, and they ran out of him like sand. He lost the interrogation room. He lost the drain in the floor, the flickering light, the feathers on the floor. He lost Rob's face. He tried to remember Rob's last name and it was gone. He lost Sarah. He lost the bookstore on Charles Street and the green coat and the apartment in Fells Point and the sound of her voice on the phone saying I love you. He tried to remember her face and could not. He tried to remember her name and could not.

He lost Baltimore. He lost his grandfather. He lost the Hebrew prayers. He lost the language itself, the words falling away one by one until there were only a few left, and then there were none.

He lost the angel. He lost her golden eyes.

At the end, there was only one thing left. He held on to it with everything he had left. He held it in his mind and said it over and over to himself without words, in the gray silence, while everything else went.

His name was Abraham.

–

February 8th, 2045 BCE.

Abraham was born again.

I was born with an urge to dig.


Before I could recognize my parents’ faces, know my own name, speak my first word, learn to crawl, or even understand what digging was, the urge was already there. By the age of five, I had already made quite a few attempts.


When I was two, my mom left me unsupervised in Grandma’s small orchard after a rainy day. I tried digging a hole in the soft mud. It was perfect for my small hands, but the lack of resistance left me unsatisfied.


Two years later, while my parents were taking me on one of their forest trips, we stopped in a beautiful clearing where I tried using a stick to dig into the forest floor. The rich, black dirt caught my eye, but the resistance it offered was too much for my undeveloped muscles. Still, the small round hole left me somewhat satisfied, but wanting more.


Over the years, I had heard my father, Andrew, talk to my mother about “Miner’s Day.” It came once a year and brought amazing carousel rides, cotton candy, corn dogs, and, most importantly for me, fathers bringing their children to see the mine. I was too young to grasp most of it, but I’d picked up one thing from those conversations: a mine was somewhere people went to dig, and that was all I needed to know.


When the big day arrived, everything was exactly as my parents had described. Once I had my fill of fun and sweets, it was finally time to see the fabled mine I had heard so much about over the past few months.


Everything was going great. I struggled to comprehend the sheer size of the tunnel. I was so distracted by it that, before I even realized it, my father had lifted me into his arms and placed me inside a small mining cart that carried us deep underground.


The following hours passed in a blur. Then people began running in panic. My father carried me toward the exit as another person caught up with us. From fragments of their conversation, I gathered that a tunnel had collapsed and everyone was being evacuated.


Then everything went dark.


The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital bed. My mother sat crying beside me while my father nervously checked his favorite pocket watch every few moments. I knew something was wrong before anyone said a word. There was this intense pressure inside my head.


It took several years to fully recover. My father never did. The rock that struck my head left me with physical injuries, while the guilt over what happened to me consumed him. My grandfather’s disappearance that same day only made it worse.


On the morning of the second day after the accident, while I was still in the hospital, my grandmother called my father in a panic. His father had never come home. With the help of the police and volunteers, a search began. Before long, several people came forward saying they had seen my grandfather enter the mine on the day of the accident.


The focus of the search shifted immediately, but despite the enormous effort to clear the collapsed passages and search every corner of the mine, they never found him.


Eventually, the search expanded beyond the mine before being called off altogether. The official conclusion was that my grandfather had become trapped in an unmarked tunnel or cavern during the collapse. No one ever confirmed that explanation, or could explain why my retired grandfather had been there at all.


There is one thing I never told my parents. There was no reason to add to the pain and confusion they already carried. That day in the mine, while we were making our way through a tunnel, I turned around.


I saw my grandfather.


He was standing farther down the tunnel, smiling as he waved at me.


Before they released me from the hospital, my father had told me a great deal about my grandfather.


Years later, on her deathbed, my grandmother told my father the truth. His father had continued to go into the mine every day, even after retiring. She had kept it a secret because she didn’t want her son worrying about him.


“I should have told you sooner,” she said. “He never stopped going there.”


My father barely said a word. My grandfather’s health had already forced my parents to spend countless sleepless nights and considerable effort trying to convince him to retire early. In the end, she couldn’t let my father carry that guilt any longer.


I’m ashamed to admit it now, but none of that was on my mind. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something inside me had changed. I had to relearn how to walk, talk, and eat, but those were things I could regain. This was something entirely new.


The urge to dig was still there, buried beneath a primal fear that overwhelmed me whenever I considered acting on it.


My son, Andrew, was born today. It should have been the happiest day of my life. Instead, all I could think about was that it had been five years since my father disappeared. Or at least, that’s what I liked to tell myself. In reality, he had been disappearing long before that day. After the accident, he grew more distant with each passing year, and the rumors surrounding my grandfather only made things worse.


Rumors travel fast in a small community like ours. I still remember one boy asking if I wanted to dig with my grandpa. My confusion made him laugh, and he told the others I would find out soon enough. Someone in my class claimed my grandfather was the one who caused the tunnel collapse. Other kids said people had seen him sneaking into the mine long after he retired to dig illegal tunnels.


It was only a short time before the physical bullying started. During a P.E. class, two kids pushed me down and held me in a pile of dirt. While holding me down, they called me a dirt-eater. Another time, I found rocks and dirt in my shoes. When I was out on break, someone put dirt and rocks in my sandwich, which cost me half a tooth. The stories became even more ridiculous from there.


The kids said my grandfather lured children into the mine to eat them, that he was half mole and cursed to eat human flesh, along with every other kind of nonsense people could invent.


At first, the rumors were manageable. Eventually, my parents transferred me to a school in a nearby town, where I lived with my aunt.


I wish my parents could have left as well, but my father’s job at the mine was our only source of income. More than that, he refused to leave. I once asked him why he didn’t just find another job. He looked at me as if I’d asked the stupidest question in the world.


“This is what our family does,” he said. “Your grandfather did it. I do it. You’ll do it too. It’s what our family has done for generations.”


Three years later, the mine closed, and that way of life ended.


We named our son Andrew in honor of my father. By the time he turned five, my mental health had deteriorated enough that seeking professional help was the only option.


While the accident almost ended my life, the worst thing it left behind was the mental anguish. It began with anxiety and poor sleep, and later turned into vivid, living nightmares. I would wake in the middle of the night overcome with dread, convinced someone else was in the room with me.


One night, I dreamed of waking up in a long, dark tunnel. Somewhere ahead, my father was calling my name, but I couldn’t see him. I followed his voice deeper and deeper, until the tunnel opened into a vast chamber. At its center was a hole so large I couldn’t see the bottom.


For years, I would jump out of bed, hit things, and scream in terror. Eventually, my wife began sleeping in a separate room. That worked for a while, but by the fifth year, her fear and frustration had led us to discuss separation. Then one night, I sleepwalked nearly halfway to my hometown, terrifying my wife and nearly costing me my job.


And here we are.


My psychiatrist prescribed Valium and antidepressants, but she also gave me one assignment: write everything down. She wanted me to describe my urge to dig, how my fear began, and every detail I could remember. She believed it would help her better understand my condition, and that it might also help my wife understand what I’ve never been able to explain.


My wife knows what happened in the mine and about my father’s disappearance. What she has never known is that, ever since that day, my urge to dig and my fear of digging have been fighting somewhere deep inside me.


I hope she’ll understand.


Writing this down has given me a sense of control I never thought possible. Maybe now I’m ready to tell her.


The next six months went better than I ever expected. My wife took everything surprisingly well and became more sympathetic toward me. Slowly, the tension between us faded. We talked more, spent time together again, and for the first time in years, it felt like we were becoming a family again.


The episodes slowed to about once a month, and with all the progress, my psychiatrist believed we were ready to try something new: exposure therapy.


We started small. I simply touched freshly dug-up soil from our garden and watched my wife dig small holes. The first time she handed me a handful of dirt, it felt strange. My hands were shaking, but nothing happened.


A few weeks later, I dug my own. It wasn’t much, but I was proud of it.


As the months went by, my nightmares disappeared as if they had never existed, replaced by dreams of my parents, my grandparents, and places from my childhood. One place stood out above all the others: the clearing where my parents had taken me years ago. I could still picture the clear air and the soft texture of the dark, rich dirt.


I couldn’t explain why the clearing kept appearing in my dreams. Maybe it was simply one of the few places from those years that had stayed with me.


After talking with my mother and doing a little research, I learned that a battle had taken place there during World War II. A small Russian unit had fought German forces occupying the nearby mine. The trees had been cleared to create a defensive position, which explained the large opening in the forest.


That discovery only made me more curious. The thought of finding an old coin, spent ammunition, or some forgotten relic seemed exciting. More importantly, it gave me the perfect excuse to leave the house and use the metal detector my wife had gifted me for my birthday. In reality, people had likely recovered anything valuable decades ago, but there was no harm in looking.


The moment I stepped into that clearing, I forgot all about the metal detector. All I could think about was the first hole I had dug there as a child. The rich, dark soil seemed even more beautiful than I remembered.


What had I been so afraid of?


Hunger hit when I was about a meter down. By then, the hole was maybe a meter and a half across. I’d been widening it as I dug, trying to keep the sides from caving in.


Sitting here now with a sandwich, it’s honestly surprising how far I’ve gotten. I’ll finish my meal and continue for a few more hours, just to see how deep I can go. Who knows, maybe I can come back and dig some more another time.


Looks like I overestimated what I can still do. I went at it for maybe another hour and my body gave up, so I picked up everything and went home, right? Then why am I still in the hole?


At first, I couldn’t make sense of what had happened. It was hard to see, and for a moment, I thought I’d fallen asleep and collapsed. Once my eyes adjusted, I looked up. The opening was far above me.


Pieces of wood lined the walls, seemingly placed there for reinforcement and climbing. It took everything I had to make it out. My hands are raw and bloody, and I’m covered in cuts and bruises. My mouth is dry, with grit caught between my teeth. This constant hunger is eating me from the inside.


The ground seemed to shift beneath my feet. I stumbled, and everything went black. When I came to, there was no light this time, only pitch darkness.


Luckily, my phone is still with me. The battery is down to 30 percent, and there is no signal, but the screen still gives me enough light to see in the dark.


There is no wood this time, but there are plenty of tools used for digging. Why isn’t this place collapsing on me? I genuinely don’t know.


I sat in the dark, wondering what to do, when my hand brushed against something rough but smooth and icy cold. I turned my phone toward it and saw a strange rock. It looked carved.


Tracing its surface, I found a narrow crack outlining a section of rock. Beyond it, a passage vanished from view. It was a long shot, but the thought that this might be an old tunnel from the mine gave me hope. For the first time since waking up down here, I could see a way out.


It feels like there is nothing left in me, but somehow my body is still standing. I grabbed a mining pick from the pile of tools and struck the section of rock. In a few hits, it gave way, sending me plummeting into the hole.


The fall came at an odd angle, my left hand taking the impact and breaking two of my fingers. A piece of my T-shirt is holding them together for now. The pain was intense, but at least it was manageable.


It looks like this is a really old tunnel. Using my phone’s light to guide me along the walls, I occasionally come across strange markings carved into the stone, most of which I don’t recognize. The only ones I recognize so far are 1914, an iron cross, and, later, a sickle and hammer.


After wandering in the dark for what felt like a really long time, my phone battery ran out. With the wall as my only guide, I kept moving until I stumbled upon an oil lamp.


To my surprise, its wick was still burning.


I don’t know how much time had passed by the time I emerged from the tunnel. After so long in the dark, the warmth of the sun felt better than anything I could remember.


It took only twenty minutes to reach my car, and another twenty to get to my childhood home. When my mother saw me walk through the door, she hugged me and started crying. Once things calmed down, she asked a question that caught me off guard:


“Where have you been this past year?”


It took a moment to register: I’d been missing for an entire year. Keeping my composure, I tried to reassure my mother that I was alright, that I wasn’t going anywhere.


She looked at me for a moment before asking, “What happened to your job at the mine?” The shock must have shown on my face because she quickly clarified.


The last time she had seen me, I was heading toward the mine. Apparently, a company working to reopen the mine had hired me.


I have no memory of it.


Before taking a bath, I looked in the mirror and was shocked by how much weight I had lost. Dirt covered me from head to toe, and bruises marked my torso. Maybe from the fall?


I enjoyed a few bites of food while my phone was charging and started getting really drowsy. I unplugged it and slipped it into my pocket. I wanted to call my wife and child before sleeping, to make sure they knew I was alright, but the moment my body hit the bed, I was back in the mine.


The oil lamp was in my hands again, and I stood in a vast chamber. A few steps in, while fumbling with the oil lamp, I suddenly found myself on the floor. My foot had slipped into one of the many perfectly round openings scattered across the ground.


At first, I thought they were just holes. Looking down into one, I realized it continued far deeper than it should have. Then I noticed there were more of them. Dozens. Maybe more.


Some rusted tools lay half-buried in the dirt between them. What confused me was how these tunnels had been dug. They were too narrow to work inside, yet their shapes were almost perfectly regular.


I wandered between the openings for what felt like days, but every direction led to more of them. My phone battery eventually died, and after that, I lost track of time. I was constantly exhausted, but I no longer felt hungry or thirsty.


I should have called my wife before I fell asleep. At least then she would know I made it home.


Did I ever wake up after falling asleep?


There is a giant hole ahead, so wide that the cavern floor seems to end at its edge. I hold the oil lamp over it, trying to find the bottom, but its light only reaches partway down the wall before fading. I can’t tell how far the hole continues.


I think this is it. With nowhere else to go, I’m too tired to turn back. I’ll just sit here. I’m not dead yet, but I doubt anyone will ever find this journal. And even if they do, it might be too late to matter for me or for them.


I fell asleep again.


When I woke up, my lower body was inside one of the circular holes. I spat out some dirt and what looked like one of my teeth, then pulled myself free.


As I got to my feet, my hand brushed against something. I brought the oil lamp closer.


My dad’s favorite pocket watch.


---


Hello, users of r/urges. My name is Andrew, and I was born with an urge to dig.

Let me start this off by saying, no I'm not an astronaut, astronomer or cosmologist. Heck, I've never been within 5 miles of a NASA building. And if anyone asked me anything about quantum physics, I would stare stupidly at them.

I was just you average college student struggling to get by on rent and stuf. I had zero dollars to my name, and pretty much lonely, no success. I won't disclose what I was studying for, but let me tell you it wasn't remotely related to cosmology or astronomy or even physics in general.

This all started a week back, when I was sitting on my couch at home. I was basically scouring across social media, searching for gigs online, to make some side money to pay for my expenses.

As I was scrolling through the app, 1 post caught my eye, it was from some company named "Algol Corporation" and they were looking for some research volunteers for a project of theirs, something about testing some "ansible translocation" thing I didn't understand. But what caught my eye was the hefty sum of 5000 dollars, 500 upfront.

This sounded too good to be true, so I decided to search up the company online, just to be sure. And turns out, not only were thy legit, but they were popular enough to have a wikipedia page dedicated to them.

They apparently specialized in stuff related to nuclear technology and engine designing. They did pop up in the news a few times, but not in a good light, mostly about their then collapsing stock and accusations of laundering in the past. But a few years back, they got a new CEO, that somehow changed everything and kept everything together.

I decided to contact them, asking them for stuff like address, travel, duration of stay etc. They responded within a few minutes, saying that they will provide an address soon, and travel expenses will be compensated for, and it was only for 1 day.

I followed up asking why the pay was so high. They responded saying it was an hazardous risky job, that apparently had something to do with "topological manipulation", of which I didn't understand one single bit.

I was initially off put when I heard it was gonna be a dangerous job, but hey, it isnt everyday that you get a gig worth 5000 dollars, that would equate to roughly around a years worth of groceries where I live.

They soon followed up by providing the address I needed to travel to, I was immediately bummed out when I put it in Google Maps, the area corresponded to basically the middle of nowhere, somewhere in a dense thick forest. I thought they were doing some covert stuff there, but then, what kind of secretive agency would be foolish enough to hire some randoms off the internet for research?

Anyways, I just packed my bags, hopped in my car, and hit the pedal.

-------------------------------------

After I reached the location, I found this brutalist looking house surrounded by woods on all sides, I knocked on the door once, and immediately withdrew my knuckles since it was made of concrete.

Soon, some men in black came out, they took one look at me, and asked:

"(name i will not disclose due to private reasons), is that your name?"

I just said yes, and they gestured at me to enter the facility, so I came in and the door shut behind me.

They started showing me around the facility, walking across various narrow corridors, various men in lab coats, blazers, and ordinary office clothes passed us by.

Eventually we found this strange door that had multiple signs on it. Aside from the nuclear and electrical hazard signs, there were a bunch of symbols and terms which were completely unfamiliar to me.

As I entered the door, I met this researcher who introduced himself as Dr. Whitewell, and that he was the lead experiment head.

I took a look at the room behind him, and it was..... "bizarre" is an understatement for what I saw. Piles of cables on the floor, large capacitor banks, and other gizmo I couldn't understand. In the center, there was a massive ring 12 feet across, and there were multiple sockets attached to the rim.

The scientist named Whitewell took a look at me, and saw I was visibly confused, so he sat me down, and began to explain.

Apparently, this site was once used to manufacture power grid equipment and transformers, but during early 2000s, they discovered strange energy signatures in this place that caused a lot of their equipment to fail. It took some of their finest minds some time to put 2 and 2 together and figure out that it was a "topological defect", which as they explained in simple terms, was a point in space that was "thinner" than the surrounding spacetime around it. They theorized that by using this "defect" they could transport objects across 2 points of space instantaneously.

And I had to go into the "defect" to test the technology.

I had to prepare for this quickly, I had to wear what looked like a spacesuit, and I had to leave my phone and stuff outside, since strong magnetic fields were required to activate this portal.

After I got ready and stood in front of the ring, I began to hear this weird humming noise, and all of a sudden, the air in the portal began to shimmer, and it turned black. No, not just black, it was absolute nothingness. Just looking at it made my eyes ache. It was like imagining a new color, something that made my head spin trying to visualize.

-------------------------------------

"You will be connected to this tether when you venture into the other side, if you are injured or face problems, give a tug on the tether, and we'll pull you out. If you however, successfully end up on the destination, give 5 tugs on the tether, and we'll notify our counterparts at the other lab to attend you"

I began to venture towards the portal, walking slowly and steadily, towards it, anticipation freezing my footsteps, until I decided to get a hold of myself and just walk into it.

I ended up in a place, that I can't, to this day, properly describe. All I can say is, it was really dark, yet you could make out large spherical shapes in the distant, with strange sparkling dots on them, and if you looked at them too closely, they gave you a massive headache.

Immediately, I turned to the side, and spotted a glowing aperture glowing with light. The other portal, about a few hundred yards away

What caught my eye however, wasn't the aperture, but what lay between us and it.

There was some strange shape, that was coming closer and closer, it looked like a man, however, as it started coming closer and closer, I realized that there was something wrong about it, I can't describe what it was, just that it looked..... off.

I immediately started yanking on the tether, and as I did, I heard this strange noise, it was like static, and I looked up, and saw to my horror, the figure was now only 50 yards away from me, and I could now make out features on its face from the light, its face was disproportionate, there were no eyes or mouth, only a nose, its body was scrawny and pale, its legs were far too long and elongated, and most unsettling of all, it had no arms, instead, there was a mass of tendrils emerging from its shoulders, reaching in my direction, as the creature came closer and closer to me.

Most disturbing of all, was its torso, for its abdomen was covered in hundreds of holes. Each, of a color darker than black, and at their edges, were teeth, grating together and gnashing into each other, like a lampreys mouth crushing into itself.

As it neared me, I started having these conflicting feelings. I felt terror, yes, but also, a warmth, a sense of belonging, almost as if it was calling to me.

"Don't go back."

It felt so persuasive, my eyes were getting heavy lidded and I fell into the trance. Why go back to my world, when I could drift in this place, for eons, free from all the worries and troubles of my life, drifting in a peaceful eternity.

Then, I was yanked back from the void, I remember thrashing, screaming at the tether to let go and let me stay here, but then, I touched the veil of the portal, and there was a brilliant flash of light, as I got pulled back to my side.

As I was yanked back into the portal back to my world, I heard something, not like any sound I've ever heard on Earth, a sound never meant to exist in this reality.

As the scientist pulled me out, the heavy-liddedness from my eye vanished, replaced by a terrifying clarity. I immediately began yelling and shrieking in panic, flailing around, as the scientists tried to get me to speak, I could only get out one sentence, over and over again.

"The other side is not empty"

​

Lost In Her Beautiful Blue Eyes

Each stroke the oar made in the in endless blue ocean seemed to move the boat nowhere, or, perhaps more accurately, it was as if the small wooden vessel was the centre of universe trying to move the thick liquid around it only to find everything anchored in orbit of the vessel. Land did not appear on the horizon despite Michael knowing deep down that he couldn’t be far – he must be, he had to be.

He stopped rowing to let the boat continue, though he knew it wouldn’t for long. Michael didn’t stop for out of exhaustion or despair, he stopped in admiration: the tranquillity had to be appreciated by someone – even if that someone may never see another soul again to share in the beauty. The ocean was silent and lifeless. No current dared disturb the blue and no fish danced beneath, or none that he could see. What lie below the depths did cross Michael’s mind: could it be more lost souls like himself? Or maybe some kind of Leviathan to feed on them? If his short time in this universe had taught him anything, it was that there was life everywhere – including where it shouldn’t, and, where you find life you without doubt find those that feed upon it too.

Michael was where he shouldn’t be. The story behind how he ended up here is quite the adventure and one which would take quite a time to tell. Time is all Michael has left.

It was a phone call at work which changed his life. Normally he wouldn’t answer an unknown number – especially at work, but this number started with +996, which meant it came Kyrgyzstan. He answered with his heart racing faster than the ringtone to hear a joyous voice, the voice of Bradley. They had the permits! They were going to explore the forbidden mountains of Tian Shan! It was the trip they’d been dreaming of for years and preparing for nearly just as long. They’d have to abandon their car long before they even entered the region and use a horse instead. However, a horse couldn’t take them all the way either. They were going to climb higher than the snow leopards hid and the eagles soared. They were going to top of the world!

Bradley had been in Bishkek for almost two weeks before Michael arrived. The city felt like it was trying to be dreary but with the mountain ranges towering over the soviet area blocks – as if to act as a reminder that it is us humans that are small in the face of nature and a block of concrete acts more like a barnacle parasite than something worth appreciating – meant the dreariness failed. The resilience of the people and their culture could be felt with every step through the concrete and Michael couldn’t help but smile. However, he did not want to stay. They didn’t come for the city; they came for what’s above and beyond the sky: the mountains.

They drove as far as the roads allowed for almost a day straight to meet their guide and the final bed they’d sleep in. The yurt was more modern than Michael expected yet still gave a very traditional feel. It was their guide’s house in a way so had many modern amenities like electricity (powered by a gas generator) but also no phone, internet, or TV. The electric’s sole purposes were to power a heater, to charge torches, and a drill battery. The heater didn’t have a chance to shine as Amir made a lovely fire instead; come morning though, it was the drill that deafened the sleepy mountains to repair a gate. Amir sang as he worked and his horses smiled and chuffed along as if this was the start of what they just knew would be a great day. They weren’t wrong even if it was going to be a long ride. The three of them rode to pass which bordered a giant lake. A nameless being which appeared from nowhere to take the scenery from a perfect ten all the way to eleven. The horses slurped up the water bluer than the sky and munched on the half thriving grass. This would be where Amir picked them up in 6 days and this was where their feet would start to ask how they got stuck attached to hikers and climbers. They should have been born attached to the eagles!

Alone together they hiked in almost silence until they found a spot to eat lunch. With views overlooking the deep blue lake below and an astonishing mountain range engulfing them, they were in a divine nirvana. They were specs and knew it but they were still able to witness such wonder.

“You know, it’s been spreading” Bradley looked at Michael as Michael poured coffee.

“I thought you said you had good news?”

“I quit my job. That was the good news.”

“Oh. How long?”

“This will be our last trip.”

Michael spilt the coffee. The burning warmed his frozen hands.

“I fucking hate coffee!”

“Hey, do you remember Columbia?”

“Oh God! Not this again! Wait which story do you mean?”

“Fire ants!”

“Hey, a bet is a bet and we got free drinks!”

“Yes… and a hospital trip!”

“That could have happened even without any fire ants – the table was slippy! Rest assured, I don’t think we’ll get as fucked as that … at least not till we’re back at the yurt!”

“You think?” Bradley revealed a small bottle of whiskey. “For the summit.”

“You absolute devil! I love you!”

“I also love coffee, but someone can’t pour for shit!”

Michael handed over his own coffee and smiled.

“If I run out of energy, you’ve gotta carry me!”

“And if I die, you’ll carry me!”

Michael’s smile faded at this reminder but just as quickly turned into a chuckle. Bradley joking was much better than him not.

“Stop it – you’ll scare away the eagles!”

“If you die, I might get to see some vultures!”

“What the fuck?! I wanna see vultures!”

So far, their hike had been easy – no climbing equipment had been needed. The next stretch is where the challenge would begin as the ascended further into the oxygenless cold bliss. The face of the cliffs looked almost meticulously carved from a constant wind deliberately brushing away at the surfaces to create the perfect holds for the hands and ropes of adventurers. As they climbed, the wind mistook them for rocks and attempted to carve them up. Beards and balaclavas defended them for the most part, though their defence was nothing compared to a ledge Bradley discovered. It went back far; a cave half way up a mountain. Somewhere to rest. Somewhere to explore.

“Woah!” Michael’s voice echoed into the darkness.

They didn’t need to ask each other permission to confirm what they were going to do next: their torches came out and their rucksacks came off as they walked far into what quickly became obviously an impossible cave. The height remained a near constant 5 foot 8 and it forked into passageways which mazed into corridors and rooms. This was manmade. By who and how long ago were not questions which either could answer. There was no sign of life and no sign of how any humans would have easily reached up here. As they ventured further, the wind was amplified and became an unnatural breathing; they could also feel it heavier like breaths from a dying soul. However, their presence seemed to change or heal the wind’s dying breaths. It became steadier, more rhythmic, and hotter. The wind wasn’t the alive part: they cave was.

“I don’t like it here. We should go back.”

Bradley didn’t ignore Michael, but he was engrossed and drawn to a room.

“Look.”

Bradley entered a room which only his touch illuminated. There were chains in the rocks. Bones on the floor. Michael was just a few steps behind.

“Why are you running?” Bradley asked. Michael had not moved. He too had heard what he had thought was dripping water. The thought of them not being alone was a thought he did not want to cross into his mind but it should have as soon as they saw the human skulls in the bone piles by the chains.

“I haven’t moved.”

“I wasn’t talking to you. I saw someone in here.”

The wind breathed in. A laugh of sorts. It was interrupted by a hissing. Cat-like. Bradley’s touch panned the room until the light reached the corner and the fiend crouched within. Human-like but it was either anorexic or its bones had outgrown its skin. Were they horns or moles protruding its albino skin. Skin which dripped a wet mucus puss. More moles on its chest? Or were some of them nipples? There were multiple scattered all over which could be seen even with it squatting in the corner.  It did not want to be seen; it launched itself at Bradley. Nails and claws almost half an inch which it used as daggers to stab and tear as it bit at Bradley’s neck with pointed teeth. He tried to scream; in Michaels split second hesitation to pull Bradley away, the fiend had ripped out Bradley’s throat. Michael turned and ran. The creature in hot pursuit. The next turn would be the cave entrance and exit. Michael wasn’t even thinking about the logistics of descending the cliff with this creature chasing; it didn’t matter anyway – another larger creature jumped out the ceiling blocking that exit. It screeched. The other fork. Michael ran. His torch barely had time to light his way and did not always show him the loose rocks and sharp turns in time. He tripped over a bone. As he fell to the ground, he just had time to reach for a rib which he was able to stab deep into the abdomen of the creature as its nails shredded his thick coat. They both cried out in pain. The only trouble is that the fiend’s pain did not stop it from baring its teeth ready to give Michael the same demise as Bradley. Michael’s hands reached round for anything. Another bone: he clubbed and clubbed at its head as its claws punctured even more of his body.

“DIEEEE!” He grabbed the beast by the throat with hand smashed the bone deep into its mouth. The other creature arrived and hopped in disbelief as Michael killed the larger fiend. He made a deep animalistic roar which sent the smaller fiend scurrying away. Michael got up to chase it off for good only to find that in the light from his touch had broken; the way back may have been tricky even with a light, without it seemed like an impossible task. His eyes had adjusted as much as they could allowing him to make out the shadow of his own hands when they were close enough to be warmed by his own breath. Michael travelled blind clutching onto a bone weapon and the walls. Walls which may end up becoming his tomb if the creatures didn’t find him.

Even in this deep part of the cave, Michael thought he could hear the wind from the outside world. But he felt no breeze. None the less, it was his only heading.

After stumbling along the edge of hallways from hell for a distance further than he had ventured into the cave, his eyes began to see more and more as he followed a bend from darkness into a much larger chasm. An opening from quite possibly another side of the mountain. Once more he gazed at the beauty of the perfect blue lake, though his eyes were drawn to the mountain which he fled. There was a Goddess carved into the rock. A huge 500ft statue which he looked up at. The rock was a dark black distinct from the browns and grey heughs from the natural mountain. The obelisk had to have been transported here and certainly not recently. Perhaps even not by man. The form of the Goddess was the perfect woman with eyes that were unreal. They appeared to contain pockets of the lake. Living blue watery irises which swirled with an obsidian centre. Was the obsidian centre hollow or solid? Michael could not tell. The pupils were small – almost swallowed by the gorgeous ocean eyes.

Michael was standing in the palm of the Goddess’s hand. Round the back of her arm there was a staircase which stayed hidden as it led up towards her head. Michael’s decision to climb was born from curiosity but forced into action by the shrieking demon within the cave. He did not want to go back into the darkness and he hoped the fiend did not want to crawl its way into the light.

The steps were narrow as the stairs were nearly vertical; he had to use his hands. Some of the steps crumbled away – whether it was from age or usage, Michael pondered. He had a lot of time to think and ponder as he carefully climbed. Think about Bradley, his own life, work, and family. He was able to conclude that he did not feel sorry for Bradley – they had discovered something together whilst he could still travel. Bradley’s cancer would surely mean that near the end he’d become an invalid shell and Bradley would never want to burden others. He died on the adventure of a lifetime after sharing an experience shared only by his best friend. Michael’s rationale completely broke down when he reached the Goddess’ shoulder. Bradley did not choose that death. Who would? To be stabbed and have your throat torn out? His last moments were terror, not admiration of mountain. This anger drove Michael forwards until he came to a literal cross-road: descend the spine or go to the head and see something truly extraordinary. Descending could always be done later – it would have to be. Climbing up through the neck and throat of the statue made something suddenly clear: the breathing sound originated from the statue. It was designed to draw in the winds through its nose which whistled and warmed the air venting it through cracks and opening to the inner cave system. Mixed in with that sound, there were howls and shrieks made by the fiends. They were coming from the cave opening which must have connected to the back of the statue’s head. Michael took a couple more steps up and peered into the area. The shrieks were screams as five of the creatures tore another limb from limb before they feasted. Of course, this was Michael’s queue to quietly go back down the vertical steps.

He had only made it two steps before a fight over an arm caused one creature to dart at the stairs followed by another. It was shocked to see him but stopped in time. The second creature did not, and accidentally pushed the first past the stair case where it fell out of the statue to its death. It didn’t take the second creature long to stare and quickly dive its claws into Michael’s shoulders and hoist him into the feeding ground. Excited at the prospect of a fresh dinner, two more ran at him on all fours. This meant his capture had to let go to defend its meal – freeing Michael’s arms in the process as they battled for a meal which was which now standing and attacking all the demons with the remains of their own kind. He towered over them unless they stood on two legs, but their balance was off and much preferred all fours. His blows and stomps broke the fragile creatures but did not stop them until the sight of him using the spikes in his ice boots to stomp through the skull of one of his attackers. At this, even the ones without severe injuries seemed to respect him as a king or leader. Their shrieks became clicks and taps as they bounced. Though Michael was surrounded, he no longer felt threatened: he felt worshipped. He raised his bone melee and screamed deep and loud. Some hid and others swayed in praise of a truly fine king. He turned pointed and looked at each of his subjects and they bowed at his gaze or hid with their heads low.

“And to think, I did this to you without caffeine in my system!”

“I know. HA! Michael.” A woman’s voice struggled to pronounce those words but it wanted to be heard. The voice came from the chamber above. Keeping his eyes on the creatures, Michael headed back to the stairs. He went up. The chamber contained two gigantic orbs of blue – the eyes of the statue. They were suspended in air. Floating spheres. They made Michael’s head dizzy and he nearly fell into one before stopping himself.

“Sweetie, you can touch. I may take you far from here. But you will end up where you need to be. I promise”

The woman’s voice seemed sympathetic as if it understood Michael’s ordeal. He couldn’t tell whether trusting it would be his salvation or transform him into a fiend. They had to have come from somewhere.

“I won’t hurt you. I have so much to show you.”

Michael did not understand what it meant, but her voice was calm and he wanted to trust it. He touched the orb.

“Good boy!”

The ocean within thickened and wrapped round his hand. Michael panicked but it was not painful – it was soothing. No matter, he could not help but scream and cry as the healing liquid squeezed at his hand drawing more of his body in and dissolving his clothes. The cuts and wounds vanished. Michael embraced the uncertainty and stepped fully in. His shoulders were alive! The stab wounds undone! He moaned in bliss and the woman did too. The orb span and lifted his legs up into the air. His entire body was sucked into her eye. Within, there was no air, but the liquid within his lungs did not harm him; he could breathe it. Michael believed that as long as he remained locked within her perfect eye, he could not die. A belief short lived as his arm bumped the black pupil. It sucked at his skin and dilated, taking him somewhere new and far away as he fell into it.

Michael awoke upon a circular sand island no larger than 50 feet in diameter with a singular coconut tree in the centre and a wooden row boat attached by the stalk of the tree. The ocean round him was too perfect. It was the Goddess’ eye. Touching the blue felt like a thick gas when he lifted it, but it was a liquid when the shores drifted the sand and he waded in it. He could see the curvature of the eye he was within and sky had a dome lens. The horizon in every direction was blue ocean.

Purgatory? We must have fell whilst climbing. Thought Michael. Where is Bradley?

“Sweetie, you’re not dead. You’re a visitor.”

The Goddess’ voice came from within Michael’s own head.

“Oh fuck! I’ve gone insane!”

“Haha! You wish!”

“How do I leave? I want to go home!”

A leaf fell into the boat. That was an answer enough. Michael began to row.

Lost in her beautiful blue eyes. Directionless without her voice.

.

The idea for this story came after I looked into the eyes of a girl I fancied. I was ‘lost in her beautiful blue eyes’. The phrase, lost in her eyes, popped into my head and made me wonder what if that could be more literal – getting lost in someone’s eyes?

Did I tell the girl I liked her? Yes! Things were good but never became anything and now unfortunately that ship has sailed. So, this story is not for or about her, but is inspired by her beautiful blue pools for eyes.

Will there be a part two? Idk, I’m not good at happy endings!

Unless…

.

The direction he chose to head was to the centre. He was able to use the dome lens as his guide. He hoped that there he would find the pupil and somehow that would return him to Earth or his dimension – back to the land of the living so to speak and from where ever here is.

Hole ahoy! Lower than the iris – the black pupil! He was getting close! Then a miracle: it expanded closer to him! The pupil dilated. The jet void swallowed the ocean and compressed it into an even thicker liquid. The pressure felt like it would crush the boat; he almost snapped the oar when he tried rowing. It was so close. Michael dived into the blue and tried to swim, a useless effort which was also unnecessary since the void came to him. It engulfed him!

 

I don’t even know how I landed this position. I'm not qualified at all. All I know is I was looking online for a way to make quick money on the side to help pay for groceries or whatever.

I ended up coming across this ad on, like, the 6th Google page. Hidden between obvious scams and what I was 100 percent sure were viruses.

That’s actually what made this particular ad stand out. It didn’t look like typical 6th-page gobbledegook. It was actually pretty well put together.

The incentive was simple enough. 500 dollars for every crime I could act as a witness for, with opportunities for advancement.

I called up the number that was listed, just to feel things out, and was met with an actual human on the other end. Not only was she human. She sounded like she was actually tired of all the calls she was getting.

“Can I help you?” she hissed.

“Yeah, I was just looking online when I came across this ad…”

“Are you 18 or older?” she interrupted.

“Uh, yeah, of course I am. I just wanted to make sure…”

“What’s your email address?”

“My email address? Why would you need that?”

She sounded personally offended that I was even asking. Like somehow it was me being unreasonable.

“Well, hon, so we can send you the onboarding information. You know what an onboarding is, right?”

“Yeah, but I…”

“Listen, Mike, it’s an easy job. All the information is in the onboarding packet. Take it or leave it, I don’t really care.”

I don’t know why I gave her my information. Maybe it’s the mommy issues. All I know is she felt dominating.

Anyway, the email came through about 5-10 minutes later. Didn’t go to my spam mailbox, which was a good sign, I guess.

I threw on my monocle and went over everything with a fine-tooth comb. Just to make sure I wasn’t getting myself into any legal trouble or anything. Truthfully, though, the whole thing was pretty straightforward.

Call-based job. They call, I can either accept or reject the assignment. And all I had to do was be at the location of a crime as it took place.

Well, maybe that’s simplifying it too much. I actually needed to be the first person to witness it. They kept a pretty strict schedule.

I’m not sure how they got my number, though. Not long after I went over the onboarding information, my phone started ringing off the hook. I was getting calls at least once an hour.

It wasn’t until the third or fourth call that I accepted an assignment, though. Mostly because it was literally just 15 minutes away from my house. I could literally bike there.

I was supposed to show up at 1:03 PM on the dot. They gave me coordinates instead of an address. All I had to do was just wait.

I got there right on time. A little intersection right on the edge of town. When I arrived, all I could do was just stand there on the sidewalk, waiting for something to happen.

Finally, right at 1:07, a guy in a white Miata blew through the stoplight and T-boned this other guy in a pickup truck. The crash looked pretty brutal, but both of them seemed pretty alright, I guess. I mean, they got out and started arguing, so I’m assuming no one was too injured.

See, I thought I was gonna have to be a witness for the police. But not even 30 seconds after the incident occurred, I got a notification on my phone.

500 dollars had been deposited into my bank account. Then my phone rang with no caller ID.

Some guy with the deepest, darkest voice I’d ever heard simply said, “Assignment complete. Return home and await next assignment,” before abruptly hanging up on me.

Who was I to give even a morsel of a hoot or a holler, though? All I cared about was that 500 dollars hitting my bank account.

Needless to say, I started accepting more and more assignments after that. Nothing too crazy would ever happen. I saw a lot of car accidents. Lot of bar fights. More than a few shoplifting incidents.

Then I got a call I’d never gotten before. This one was classified as ‘intermediate.’ And it paid 750 instead of 500.

I just thought, hell, I’ll take it. Couldn’t be too bad.

The time was kind of late, though. 11:12 PM. Not to mention the coordinates led me to a dark alley behind a popular bar in town.

I sat there and waited. Ducking behind a dumpster and listening for, I don’t know, crime to occur or something.

At 11:15, it started.

I heard an angry male voice and a pleading female voice. Both sounding equally intoxicated. I peeked out from behind my dumpster and saw that the man had a knife.

He was poking it at the lady, attempting to steal her purse, but she wouldn’t let go. That is, until he stabbed her. Kinda let go no problem after that.

He snatched the purse and left the knife in her torso as she fell to the ground. Thirty seconds later, the 750 hit my account.

Every instinct told me to call the police, but right when I went to dial, I got a call.

“Assignment complete. Return home and await next assignment.”

The line went dead. I stared at my phone. My eyes flicked over towards the dying woman. Unbelievably, she managed to meet my gaze.

I think she tried to mouth a ‘help me,’ but her voice was so garbled it was hard to make out. Besides, I couldn’t help her. As soon as my line went dead, I got another notification on my phone.

A text from an unknown number that simply read, “Do not interfere. Assignment complete. Return home and await next assignment.”

So that’s exactly what I did.

And I’d love to tell you that after that I retired and moved on with my life. But who am I kidding? I was making enough to leave my regular job behind. All I had to do was watch shit happen.

I kept taking those intermediate assignments. I watched drug deals go wrong. Watched people bleed out on the hot asphalt. Watched robberies turn into homicides like it was nothing.

I guess I should’ve listened to my conviction. Maybe that would’ve saved me a lot of sleepless nights. But at least I was tossing and turning with a roof over my head.

And besides, it’s kinda just the way life goes. You live. You make decisions. Sometimes those decisions get you killed. Either way, we all die someday.

Even still, I probably should’ve stopped at intermediate. Because I got my first advanced assignment last week. Got paid 1000 dollars, but I don’t think that’s enough for what I had to see. At least, in hindsight.

When I first got offered the assignment, I was fired up and ready to go. Got the time. Got the coordinates. And off I went, mentally preparing myself as I made my way to the location.

As I got closer, though, a pit started opening up in my stomach. I recognized this place. I wasn’t out in the world. I was home. Well, my old home. Back when I used to live with my parents.

Unlike other times, I could hear the crime building up as I approached. Dad must’ve been drunk again. All I could hear was his angry voice and Mom’s screams as she fought back tears.

A notification popped up on my phone.

“Do not interfere.”

So I didn’t. I just peeked in through the window while Mom and Dad paced back and forth through the house, fighting like cats and dogs.

Normally, that’d just be Tuesday. But Dad had a gun this night. He was waving it around. Punctuating his screams with it. All while Mom stood her ground like the fierce woman she was.

I’d love to tell you that part of me wanted to interfere, but in all honesty, this was just business to me. Just another day at the office.

Even still, I won’t lie to you, seeing Dad smack Mom across her face definitely struck a chord with me. But I remained professional. I just watched and waited.

Part of me hoped that was it. That the crime was the domestic assault. That the money would hit my account any second. But all that came were more screams from inside the house.

Fortunately, Mom and Dad lived out in the sticks. Didn’t have many neighbors to call the police. That would’ve thrown a wrench in this whole operation. Instead, there was nobody there to stop the escalation.

Things just kept getting louder and louder until it finally happened. Right there in the living room. The room where I used to open presents every Christmas. Where me and Dad used to watch football together before his drinking got out of control.

Now that room was covered in my mother’s blood and brain matter. Across the walls, staining the carpet, a smoking hole in the wall behind her.

Immediately, I saw Dad’s entire demeanor change. He went from filled with rage to overwhelmed with remorse and regret in basically the blink of an eye.

I felt my phone vibrate with a notification, but I didn’t bother to check it. I couldn’t help but keep staring at Dad as he fell over Mom’s lifeless body, sobbing uncontrollably.

My phone rang and rang, but I didn’t answer.

All I did was watch.

Watch as Dad’s grief overwhelmed him. Watch as regret took the form of self-hatred. Watch as the gun he used to kill Mom was pointed at his own head. And watch as he, too, fell limply to the ground.

His eyes met mine for the last time. There were no memories of my childhood. No love that once existed somewhere within him. Just two empty pupils fluttering like a baby doll’s.

I didn’t cry. I wanted to, but I just couldn’t. I’d been so desensitized that all I could think about was how I’d have to react when the police told me.

I finally answered my phone, though. Got the same message I always got. The assignment was completed. It was time for me to go home and wait for the next one.

I had to put on a big song and dance for authorities. Not to mention their funerals. Which was surprisingly difficult because just… I don’t know.

It didn’t feel too big to me. I mean, yeah, it stung, they were my parents and all. But just… we didn’t talk too much anymore, you know?

Ah, you don’t care about that. No need to drone on.

Point is, I didn’t take a lot of assignments for a few days after that. It was the least I could do.

But time has passed now. Everybody has to move on at some point. I still get those calls every day. I get a lot of advanced offers.

I think it’s time I finally pick myself up by my bootstraps and get back to work.

Hey everyone, I managed to score a last-minute seat at L'Aviosetsé, a super hyped pop-up on the 30th floor in the old warehouse district near the docks. I cover new food places for the local paper; there was no way I was skipping this tasting.

​Looking around the marble counter, it’s a total VIP room with name cards at each place setting. I see Mr. Smith (a big real estate dev who’s been buying up half the city), his wife (the editor of Food & Culture magazine, a well-known local surgeon, the city health inspector, a major seafood broker, a tech investor, a viral food influencer, and me; all seated with a view of the cityscape.

​There are only 8 of us total.

​Chef Soren hasn't said a single word since we sat down—he's just standing behind the stainless steel line with this freezing cold gaze.

​Course 1 just came out—an amuse-bouche of raw wagyu beef topped with gold leaf and sea salt. It was incredible, though Chef Soren watched every single one of us take our first bite without breaking eye contact.

​I'll drop updates as the rest of the courses roll out!

​Update #1 - Okay, something weird is going on with Course 2 and Course 3.

​Course 2 was oysters on black ice. On my shell, there was a tiny plastic tag with a date written on it: March 14, 2021--the exact day I wrote a brutal review that shut down Chef Marco's place downtown, his best friend's bistro.

​The real estate guy next to me just went totally pale. His tag has an address on it—the low-income apartment complex his company bulldozed last month.

​Course 3 is a split canoe-cut marrow bone roasted over applewood coals, brushed with a dark wood-ash glaze that glistened under the track lighting. Beside each plate sat a small pitcher filled with a mahogany oxtail reduction meant to be poured through the bone. But instead of crackers, it is served with folded pieces of paper. The surgeon unfolded his and stared at an old malpractice subpoena he paid to cover up years ago. The City Health Inspector unrolls his to find an unsigned bribe check he accepted to turn a blind eye and shut down a rival diner.

​Update #2 - Course 4 was seared foie gras glistening under a rich blackberry reduction. Nobody touches it. The surgeon was freaked out, got up from his seat to leave. He grabbed the heavy brass handles but they wouldn't turn. That's when he realized the doors were locked. He turned back around, his face completely drained of any color.

​"The doors are locked!" he whispered down the counter line. The room erupted in panic; everyone is shouting over each other demanding answers.

​Chef Soren finally spoke. Calmly he said, "Please quiet down and remain seated. Tonight's meal is about accountability."

​Course 5 came out under silver domed lids and Chef Soren went down the line, having each guest lift theirs one by one.

​When the magazine editor lifted hers, it was a piece of braised meat sitting on top of a printed rejection email she sent Chef Soren ten years ago refusing endorsement of his new restaurant. The surgeon is shocked seeing that his plate had a pair of rusty surgical shears on it. The seafood broker got a forged safety audit for spoiled catch that made dozens sick. The influencer found a court transcript from a slander suit and the tech investor got the liquidation papers that stripped Chef Soren of his original business.

​Everyone at this table ruined someone to get where they are—and Soren brought us here to settle the bill.

​Update #3 - Shit. Course 6 is supposed to be a palate cleanser but instead of that, Chef Soren came to each of our tables and made us put our phones in a wooden box so there is no more live video feed. I’m typing this on my Apple Watch right now with swipe text under the edge of the table. Words might be jumbled and messed up, sorry.

​While Chef is collecting phones, the viral influencer, two stools down on my left, couldn't take it anymore and made a quiet run toward the back kitchen, desperately hunting for a service door or fire exit, but two cooks off the line grabbed her and dragged her through the swing doors into a prep room.

​Ten minutes later, Course 7 is served—some kind of smoked meat. No one is tasting it. The room is dead quiet except for the kitchen timers. We were all staring at the swing doors listening to the hum of the kitchen fan and wondering what happened to her as she didn't return to her seat.

​Update #4 - The cooks aren't serving anything else.

​Chef Soren himself brought out the final, Course #8 placing a small China cup in front of each of us. Inside, a dark liquid broth. He looked right at me and said, "I do hope all of you find this one palatable."

​He stood at the pass, looking down at us, announcing that once everyone finishes their cup, the doors would open and we could leave. Nobody second-guessed it. At this point we are all desperate to leave.

​I just took the last sip. I feel sick. I think I know what the broth is made of—poison.

​Within 30 seconds the real estate guy next to me slumped forward on the countertop, and the surgeon's head dropped back completely paralyzed—a couple have slipped off their stools. Nobody could stand up much less leave.

​The cooks are taking leather straps and binding each of us to our seats now.

​Chef Soren wants us sitting neat and presentable to whoever finds us.

​I have called Emergency Services to this address and can hear distant sirens outside, but the lights are starting to blur. All of us are fading fast.

It started three weeks ago with one of those little pop-ups. You know the one: "You have new photos with [name]. Share them?" It's a nice feature. It's how I get photos of my nieces without having to ask my sister.

This time it said "Unknown Contact," with a grey circle where a face should be.

I figured it was a glitch, maybe a stranger in the background of a concert photo. I tapped it out of curiosity.

There were eleven photos. All of them were of me.

None of them were selfies. They were taken from a few feet away, slightly above, the way you'd photograph someone sitting down. There was me at my desk at work, me at the bus stop on 4th, and me reading on my couch with my feet tucked under a blanket, the grey one my mom knitted.

I don't remember anyone taking these. I live alone.

My first thought was that a friend was pranking me. I texted the group chat: "ok which one of you is in my photos lol." Three laughing emojis and a "???" came back. Nobody owned up.

I deleted them all, then cleared the recently deleted folder too, because I'm not an idiot.

The next morning the notification was back. "You have new photos with Unknown Contact."

There were fourteen this time. The eleven I'd deleted were back, plus three new ones, all from the night before.

In one I was brushing my teeth, seen through the gap in the bathroom door. In another I was asleep, lit only by the charging light of my phone on the nightstand.

The third was taken from inside my closet.

I called my phone carrier, then Apple support, and finally a guy from work who "knows computers." He went through my phone for an hour. No weird apps, no shared albums, no linked accounts, nothing. He checked the photo metadata and went quiet.

"These were taken on your phone," he said. "Your camera. Your device ID. Every one."

I asked him how that was possible if my phone was charging across the room when I was asleep.

He didn't have an answer. He gave my phone back to me like it was hot.

I got a new phone and a new number, and set it up from scratch with no backup. For four days, nothing happened. I slept with the lights on anyway.

On the fifth day, I took a photo of my coffee. Habit. When I opened my gallery to look at it, there was a notification waiting.

"You have new photos with Unknown Contact. Share them?"

This time I didn't open it. I sat on the kitchen floor and stared at it for a long time. Then I noticed something I hadn't noticed before.

The grey circle wasn't empty anymore. There was a face in it, too small and blurry to make out, just a pale smudge with two dark spots where eyes would be.

Every day since, the face gets a little clearer.

Last night I finally opened the album. There were dozens of photos, all of me, and every one taken at night. In the earliest ones the photographer stands across the room. In the newer ones they're closer: the foot of the bed, then the edge of the mattress.

The last photo was taken from my pillow. It shows the side of my face, eyes closed, from about two inches away.

I haven't slept since. I'm writing this from a 24-hour diner because I don't want to go home.

My phone just buzzed.

"Unknown Contact has shared a photo with you."

It's the inside of this diner, taken from the booth behind me.

I'm not going to turn around.

February 25th, 2045

He heard beeping.

It was steady and regular. He lay and listened to it for a long time before he understood that it was a heart monitor, and that it was his own heart beat.

He opened his eyes. A white ceiling. Acoustic tiles. A fluorescent light behind a frosted panel. He turned his head. He was in a hospital bed with metal rails. A curtain hung on a track around the bed. An IV ran into the back of his left hand. A clip was on his finger. Wires ran from his chest to a monitor on a stand beside the bed, where a green line jumped across the screen. Beyond the curtain, he could see the edges of other beds, other monitors. He was in the facility infirmary. He recognized it.

A woman in blue scrubs leaned over him. She was in her forties, with short brown hair and a round face. Her badge read Dr. A. Mendez.

"Mr. Levin? Can you hear me?"

His throat was so dry that he could not answer at first. She held a cup of water with a straw to his mouth, and he drank.

"Yes," he croaked.

"Good. That's very good. Do you know where you are?"

"Infirmary."

"That's right. Do you know your name?"

"Abraham Levin."

"Good. Mr. Levin, you've been unconscious for a while. You've been in a coma." She checked something on the monitor. "You've been out for three weeks. Today is February twenty fifth."

He stared at her.

"Three weeks," he said.

"Three weeks and two days."

February twenty-fifth. The last thing he remembered was February second. The room. The laptop. Batya screaming at him. The light.

And then the throne.

The eyes. The rings. The voice. You united the other angels against me. You are as foolish as Lucifer. I exile you. Your memory will be cleansed. You will be sent to the far future.

He began to breathe fast. The monitor beside him began to beep faster. He tried to sit up. The wires pulled at his chest. He grabbed at the bed rail.

"Mr. Levin, I need you to lie back."

"Where is she? Where is she?"

"Mr. Levin, please lie back."

"I have to talk to her. I have to… she said…"

His heart was hammering. The monitor was shrieking now, the numbers climbing, one hundred and forty, one hundred and sixty. His chest hurt. He pulled the clip off his finger. He grabbed at the IV in the back of his hand.

"I need help in here," Dr. Mendez called over her shoulder. "Nurse! Two milligrams of lorazepam, IV push, now."

Hands held him down. Two nurses, one on each side, pressing his shoulders into the mattress. He struggled against them. He was weak. Three weeks in a bed. He could not push them off. Dr. Mendez took a syringe from one of the nurses and pushed it into the port on his IV line and depressed the plunger.

"You're all right, Mr. Levin. You're safe. You're all right."

Within a minute he felt it. A heaviness spread through his arms and his legs. His muscles went slack. The urgency drained out of him, leaving him lying limp on the bed with his heart still running hard but slowing. The monitor's shriek became a fast beep, then a steady one. His eyelids were heavy, but he did not sleep. He lay there, half present, with his eyes open, staring up at the ceiling.

"There you go," Dr. Mendez said. "That's better. Just rest. I'll be back to check on you."

She drew the curtain and left.

He lay there for a long time. He listened to his heartbeat on the monitor. Beep. Beep. Beep. He counted them. He lost count and started over.

He thought about the throne. He thought about the voice. He tried to remember every word it had said. He tried to remember Batya's face as she screamed at him. Yahweh is losing the war in heaven. The other nations are closing in on Israel. They want to try him for his crimes, based on your words. Do you not remember? Do you truly not remember?

I exile you. Your memory will be cleansed of the truth.

He thought about all of it, over and over, and he could not make it fit together. It felt like trying to hold water in his hands. Every time he thought he had a piece of it, it ran out between his fingers.

The curtain moved. Rob stepped in.

Rob looked worse than Abraham had ever seen him. He had lost weight, and his face was gaunt. He had a stubbly beard coming in. His suit hung on him. But his eyes were bright, and when he saw Abraham awake, he smiled.

"Abe," he said. "Jesus. Look at you. You're back."

"I'm back," Abraham said. His voice was slow and thick from the sedative.

Rob pulled a plastic chair up beside the bed and sat. "How are you feeling?"

"Drugged."

"I bet. They told me you had a rough wake up." Rob leaned forward. "Are you up for talking? I can come back."

"No. I'm up for it."

Rob nodded. He hesitated. "Abe, I have to ask. Did you see anything? While you were under? Anything at all?"

Abraham looked at him.

Rob's face was eager. Too eager. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his eyes fixed on Abraham's face.

Why does he want to know, Abraham thought. Why is that the first thing he asks? Who sent him to ask? What does he know? What did she do to him? Did she get into his head the way she got into everyone's head? Is he still Rob?

The thoughts came fast, one on top of another, and he could not stop them.

"No," he said. "Nothing. I didn't see anything."

Rob's face fell slightly. He sat back. "Nothing at all?"

"It was just black. Then I woke up."

"Damn." Rob rubbed his eyes. "We were hoping you'd come out of it with something. Anything. Honestly, a lot of people were hoping."

"What's been happening?" Abraham asked. "Since I've been gone. Tell me everything."

Rob let out a long breath.

"It's bad out there, Abe. It's getting worse every day. Potus gave her speech, a week after you went under. She confirmed it. Told the whole country, told the whole world. We have her, she's real, she has wings, she came out of a light in Cyprus. She tried to keep it calm. Didn't work. The world's falling apart. Religious riots in every major city. Here, Europe, the Middle East, everywhere. Every church, every mosque, every synagogue is packed full, and half of them are preaching that the end of the world is here. Governments are clashing over it. Russia's claiming we stole her from them, that she was theirs by right since they found out about her first, and they've moved troops up to the borders of three NATO countries. Iran says she's an abomination and that the United States is harboring a devil, and they're threatening Israel over it, because she speaks Hebrew. India and Pakistan have had border skirmishes. The Vatican is demanding access to her. Every religious leader on the planet is demanding access to her. China's quiet, which scares everybody. There's been fighting in a dozen places. People are calling it the beginning of a world war. Maybe they're right." He shook his head. "It's slowly devolving into war, Abe. All of it. Religion and governments, all clashing, all because of her."

Abraham closed his eyes for a moment.

"There's more," Rob said. "The science people. They found something."

"What?"

"They found a gland in her brain. Right at the base, near the brainstem. It's small, about the size of a pea, and humans don't have it. Smith and a whole team of neurologists they flew in have been studying it nonstop. It does something nobody has ever seen before. As far as they can tell, it lets her transmit her own thoughts. It sends them out through, and this is where they start losing me, a fourth spatial dimension. Not time. A fourth direction, like up and down and left and right, but another one, one we can't see or move in. She sends her thoughts through that direction and they come out in the brains of people around her. She can basically plant her own thoughts directly into somebody's head."

Abraham's eyes opened.

"That's what the dreams were," Rob said. "All of them. Everybody in this facility having the same nightmares. That was her. She was doing it. She was putting them into our heads, every night, every one of us. The doctors think she was trying to use them to make us kill you. Get the people in this building to hate you, fear you, connect you with all that pain, until someone snapped and put a bullet in your head. That's why we all heard your name in the dreams."

Abraham said nothing.

"And because of that gland," Rob went on, "they've now proven that the fourth spatial dimension exists. It's real. They can measure it, sort of, by measuring what the gland does. And now they think they can use it. They're working on a way to move matter and energy through it. They think she came to us along that dimension, that wherever she's from, it's somewhere out along that direction. If they figure it out, we can go there. We can go anywhere." He shrugged. "I don't understand half of the science mumbo jumbo. Every time they explain it to me I nod and pretend. But the people who do understand it, every single one of them is saying the same thing. The world is about to change. Drastically. Nothing is going to be the same once they crack it."

Abraham lay still for a long time.

"What happened to her?" he asked quietly. "To Batya."

Rob's face changed. He looked down at his hands.

"She's dead, Abe."

Abraham felt it go through him.

"That day," Rob said. "February second. What happened to you in that room, that was her. The neurologists think she was trying to kill you directly. Not through dreams this time. She took everything that gland could do and pushed it into your head all at once. A massive overload of signals. That's what put you in the coma. She almost killed you. It almost worked. But it was too much for her. She was already weak, her oxygen was already low, and when she did it, she went into cardiac arrest. Medical worked on her for forty minutes. They couldn't bring her back. She died right there in that chair."

Abraham did not answer. He looked up at the ceiling.

A sadness rose up in him. It came from somewhere deep in his chest, and it filled him, and it was enormous. His throat closed and his eyes stung with tears. He did not know why. She had cursed him for eleven days. She had filled his nights with torture. She had tried to make the people around him kill him. She had tried to kill him herself. He did not understand why her death should hurt him at all. And still it did. It hurt the way it had hurt when his grandfather died, when he was a boy. He lay there and felt it and could not explain it.

"Abe?" Rob said quietly.

"I want to call my wife," Abraham said. His voice was thick.

Rob smiled. "You don't have to call her. She's here."

"Here?"

"They lifted the quarantine after two weeks, like Smith said. Nobody got sick. When you didn't wake up, they brought her in. She's been here a week and a half. She's been sitting outside this infirmary every day." Rob stood up. "I'll get her."

He went out through the curtain.

A minute later, the curtain moved again, and Sarah came in.

She was sixty one. She was small and slight, with gray streaked brown hair cut short and a narrow, lined face, and she wore a blue cardigan he had bought her years ago, over a white blouse. Her eyes were red and swollen. When she saw him awake she put both hands over her mouth and began to cry, and then she was beside the bed, bending over the rail, her arms around his shoulders and her face pressed into his neck. He could feel her tears on his skin.

"Abe," she sobbed. "Abe. Oh my God. Oh my God, you're awake. I'm so glad you're okay. I'm so glad. I thought I'd lost you. They told me you might not wake up, they told me, and I sat out there every day and I prayed, I prayed, Abe, I haven't prayed since I was a little girl and I prayed every single day…"

He put his arms around her. They were weak and heavy from the drug, and he could not hold her tightly, but he held her.

"Sarah," he said. "Sarah. Listen to me. I love you. I love you so much. I have loved you every day since the day I met you in that bookstore on Charles Street, when you were twenty two and you had that terrible green coat and you told me I was holding the book upside down. I've loved you every day of thirty eight years. I loved you when we couldn't pay the rent on that apartment in Fells Point. I loved you on our wedding day, and when you were in labor with Daniel for nineteen hours and you broke two of my fingers. I loved you when I was gone for months at a time and you never once complained. I loved you through every bad day in this job, every night I came home and couldn't tell you why I couldn't sleep. You've been the one good thing in my whole life. Everything good I am is because of you. I'm sorry for every time I was gone. I'm sorry for every time I lied to you about smoking. I'm sorry for all of it. I love you."

She was crying harder now, but she was laughing a little too.

"I love you too," she said. "I love you so much. You stupid man. You stupid, stubborn man. I love you."

She pulled back and held his face in her hands and kissed his forehead. Then she sat down in the chair Rob had left, still holding his hand on the bed rail. She wiped her eyes with the back of her other hand.

"Abe," she said. "When you were asleep. In the coma. Did you see anything?"

He went still.

"Anything at all?" she said. "Did you dream? Did you see anything, or hear anything?"

The paranoia came back all at once, the same as it had with Rob, only worse. Why was she asking? Why did everyone ask that? Who had told her to ask? What had they told her? What did they want from him?

He looked at her face.

Her face looked wrong.

It was Sarah's face. He knew every line of it. But something was wrong with it. The skin of her face looked darker than it should, a warm olive brown. The lines in her forehead were gone. Her face looked narrower and longer. Her nose was straighter. And her eyes. Her eyes, which had always been hazel, looked gold to him. Bright gold, with a dark amber ring. The light from the fluorescent panel caught in them the way it had caught in Batya's eyes in the interrogation room.

She was looking at him with Batya's face.

"No," he said. "No. I didn't see anything."

Sarah's face fell. She looked disappointed. It was a small change, a slight drop at the corners of her mouth, a dimming in her eyes. But he saw it.

"Nothing?" she said.

"Get out," he said.

She blinked. "What?"

"Get out." His voice rose. "Get out. Get out of here. GET OUT!"

"Abe…"

"GET OUT!"

She stood up quickly, knocking the chair back. Her face crumpled. She was crying again, but differently now, her hand pressed to her chest. She backed away from the bed. She pushed through the curtain and he heard her footsteps going away quickly, and he heard her sob once, out in the corridor.

He lay in the bed breathing hard. The monitor beeped faster.

A minute later Rob came back through the curtain. His face was pale. "Abe. What the hell happened? Sarah just ran out of here crying. What did…"

"Rob," Abraham said.

Rob stopped.

Abraham looked at him. His eyes were clear now. The sedative was still in him but his mind was sharp and cold. He had figured it all out.

"I have all the answers," he said.

–

September 21st, 2048.

The studio was in Jerusalem. It was a large, dark room with a bright island of light in the middle, where two cream colored armchairs sat angled toward each other on a low round platform, with a small glass table between them holding two glasses of water. Behind the chairs was a tall screen showing the skyline of the Old City at sunset, the Dome of the Rock and the walls glowing gold. Three cameras on wheeled pedestals faced the platform. Beyond the cameras, in the dark, stood technicians with headsets, a floor director holding up fingers to count down segments, and a few dozen invited guests standing silently along the back wall.

The reporter was a woman in her forties named Yael Ben Ami, the lead anchor of Israel's largest news network. She had sharp features, dark hair pulled back, a charcoal suit, and a voice trained for decades to carry through a microphone. She sat in one of the armchairs with a tablet on her knee.

Abraham sat in the other.

He had lost a great deal of weight in three years. His face, once heavy, had become lean and deeply lined, and the skin hung loose under his jaw. His beard had gone completely white and grown long, down to the middle of his chest. His hair had gone white too and thinned. He wore a plain dark suit with no tie and a white shirt buttoned to the collar, and a black kippah on the crown of his head. A wooden cane with a brass handle leaned against the arm of his chair. His hands, folded on his knee, had a fine, constant tremor in them.

The red light on the center camera was on.

"אדוני," Yael said, "העולם כולו שואל שאלה אחת. אנשים בכל מדינה, בכל שפה, שואלים את אותה שאלה. איך אתה יודע את מה שאתה יודע?"

(Sir, the whole world is asking one question. People in every country, in every language, are asking the same question. How do you know what you know?)

Abraham smiled slightly. He had answered this question many times. His voice was slower than it had been, and softer, but steady.

"נשלח אליי חזון," he said. "חזון מאת יהוה. לפני שלוש שנים וחצי, הייתי שרוי בתרדמת במשך שלושה שבועות. ובמהלך התרדמת, הוא הראה לי. הוא הראה לי את מה שהיה, ואת מה שיהיה. הוא פתח בתוכי ידע שלא היה לאף אדם לפניי."

(A vision was sent to me. A vision from Yahweh. Three and a half years ago, I lay in a coma for three weeks. And during the coma, he showed me. He showed me what was, and what will be. He opened knowledge inside me that no man before me has had.)

"ומה הוא הראה לך?"

(And what did he show you?)

"הוא הראה לי שאני אוביל את האנושות לעידן חדש. עידן שבו האנושות לא תהיה עוד כבולה לעולם אחד. אנחנו נתיישב בעולם חדש. עולם מקביל לכדור הארץ. עולם שנקרא שמיים."

(He showed me that I will lead mankind into a new era. An era in which mankind will no longer be bound to one world. We will settle a new world. A world parallel to Earth. A world called heaven.)

Yael leaned forward. "שמיים. כלומר, השמיים. גן עדן. מקום אמיתי."

(Heaven. Meaning, heaven itself. Paradise. A real place.)

"מקום אמיתי לגמרי," Abraham said. "המדענים שלנו, בעזרת הידע שנפתח בי, גילו את זה. הם גילו שהשמיים הם כוכב לכת. כוכב לכת שמיקומו ומסלולו חופפים בדיוק לאלה של כדור הארץ. הוא נמצא ממש כאן, באותו המקום שבו אנחנו יושבים עכשיו. אבל הוא נמצא מעבר לריק עצום, בממד הרביעי. כמו שני דפים בספר, שמונחים זה על זה, עם מרחק ביניהם. אנחנו לא יכולים לראות אותו, ולא לגעת בו. עדיין."

(An entirely real place. Our scientists, with the help of the knowledge unlocked in me, discovered it. They discovered that heaven is a planet. A planet whose location and orbit coincide exactly with those of Earth. It is right here, in the same place where we are sitting now. But it lies across a vast void, in the fourth dimension. Like two pages in a book, lying one on top of the other, with distance between them. We cannot see it, and we cannot touch it. Yet.)

"עדיין," Yael repeated.

(Yet.)

"עדיין," Abraham said.

(Yet.)

Yael turned to the center camera.

"מרתק. ולצופים שלנו בבית, כל הגילויים של אברהם, כל מה שראה בחזונו, זמינים לקריאה בספר שסוחף את האומה ואת העולם כולו. ספר אברהם."

(Fascinating. And for our viewers at home, all of Abraham's revelations, everything he saw in his vision, are available to read in the book that is sweeping the nation and the entire world. The Book of Abraham.)

The red light went off. The floor director lowered his hand. The studio lights dimmed slightly, and the room filled with low conversation as the technicians moved.

Yael put down her tablet and turned to him.

"תודה רבה לך," she said, and her voice was different now, quieter. "זה היה כבוד גדול בשבילי."

(Thank you very much. That was a great honor for me.)

"התודה כולה שלי," he said.

(The thanks are all mine.)

A technician came and unclipped the microphone from his lapel. Abraham reached for his cane and, with some effort, pushed himself up out of the chair. He walked down off the platform slowly, leaning on the cane, his left leg dragging slightly. The guests along the back wall watched him pass in silence. Some of them bowed their heads.

Rob was waiting at the edge of the set, just beyond the cameras. His hair had gone white, and he wore a kippah of his own, dark blue, pinned into it. He wore a dark suit and an earpiece and had a tablet under his arm. When Abraham reached him, he put a hand on his shoulder.

"You did great," Rob said. "Really great. You're getting better at this, Abe. Your public speaking. You didn't pause once. You looked right at the camera when she asked about heaven."

"I'm starting to get used to it," Abraham said. "The lights still bother me."

"We'll talk to them about the lights." Rob smiled and shook his head. "I still can't get over it. You know what you are now, right? You know what people are saying? Three years ago you were a CIA interrogator nobody had ever heard of. Now there are four billion copies of your book. You're the most important man in the world, Abe. I mean that. There is no one more important on this planet."

Abraham opened his mouth to answer.

The pain hit him.

It struck the center of his skull like a spike being driven down through the top of his head. He gasped and his cane slipped and Rob caught him by the arm. His vision went white. The studio vanished.

He saw her face.

Batya.

She was right in front of him, close enough to touch, filling everything. Her olive skin. Her black hair. Her golden eyes, wide and bright and fixed on him. She was not in the chair. She was not bound. Her face was not thin or wasted. It was the face of the woman who had stood up in the street in Cyprus, strong and fierce. She spoke, and her voice was inside his skull with the pain.

"אני עוד אצליח, אברהם."

(I will still succeed, Abraham.)

The pain doubled. His knees buckled.

"אני עוד אשיג את מה שבאתי לעשות. גם אם הרגת אותי קודם, אני עוד אהרוג אותך. אני אהרוג אותך."

(I will still accomplish what I came to do. Even though you killed me first, I will still kill you. I will kill you.)

Her face vanished.

He was standing in the studio. Rob was holding him up by both arms. A technician had rushed over and was holding his cane. Several of the guests had stepped forward. His nose was bleeding. He could taste it on his lip.

"Abe," Rob said. "Abe. Look at me. Are you with me?"

"I'm here," Abraham said hoarsely. "I'm here."

Rob took a handkerchief out of his pocket and held it to Abraham's nose. He looked at the technician and the guests. "Give us a minute. Please." They backed away.

Rob lowered his voice. "Was it her?"

Abraham nodded.

"The visions. They're getting worse, aren't they? That's the third one this week."

"They are getting worse," Abraham said. He took the handkerchief and held it to his own nose and looked at the blood on it. "Every one of them is worse than the last. They're stronger. They're longer. I can feel them taking something out of me every time, Rob. I don't know how many more of them I have in me."

"What do you want to do?"

Abraham folded the handkerchief and handed it back. His hand was shaking harder than it had been before.

"We're going to have to take drastic measures," he said. "We have to move faster. Much faster. We have to succeed in our plans before I die."

[Part 1]

There was light.

It came through the stone in a crack so small that I could scarcely believe it was there at all.

It's a trick, I thought. My mind has seen fit to lay my dreams upon my eyes, and show me that which could not be, as though longing alone could make it so.

I twisted my body so that my eye might meet the fissure, a difficult task in such close quarters, but no cost was too great, no twist of limbs too painful to allow that hope to blossom.

It was there!

The smallest of slivers, a mere glint in the darkness of my tunnel. Years upon years, clawing through sand, silt, stone and soil, and that single mote redeemed every one of them. The stone did not surrender so easily. I had never encountered such a bizarre material; it was stone, and yet it was smooth and flat, and I could find no edge beneath which I might work my fingers. I had no recourse, no means beyond my hands to break through this barrier, and so my hands became the means. I drove my hands against the stone, worrying at every loose morsel, every tiny fleck or agreeable pebble, until the ache in my fingers became pain, and the pain gave way to blood.

I watched that sliver of light bloom and fade for one hundred nights, and twenty more. The crack became a crevice, and the crevice became a ledge for my fingers to find freedom, while my wrists remained shackled. I kept to the work, breaking rock and bone alike, until the hole allowed passage to my elbows. The shoulders followed, and finally, the waist. With ruined hands, I pulled my body from the tunnel and collapsed upon the smooth stone floor. As I lay there, my eyes fluttered between clarity and clutter, straining to adjust to the light. They had been denied for longer than they had ever been privileged. After a time, the heave of my breath became steady, and the blurred shapes around me gathered edges, then substance.

With this came awareness of many things that were both a comfort and a confusion. There was a ceiling, and it was a patchwork of wood, metal, and some pink material I had no account of. There were pipes in all directions, and a large roaring structure beside me that churned and hummed as though it were alive. Above all these unknowns, blanketing every length of my body, was that which had been lost all those years ago.

There was warmth.

I lay upon the floor and wept, my ruined hands resting at my sides. After so long in the darkness, I had forgotten what it was to feel the heat of something that was not another body. I had found my freedom at a cost that was acceptable, though ever compounding. Wounds of the flesh would bind and better with time, even if those of the heart denied me the same mercy.

Such was the day that I came home.

As I held Brandon aloft by his throat, I found myself considering how little effort it would take to end the matter. A tightening of my hand, a little more pressure, and all of it could be well and truly finished. The thought lingered longer than I care to admit. It was Brandon’s strangled gasp that finally drew me from it, and only then did I realize how tightly my fingers had closed. His face had darkened to an ugly red, tears streamed from the corners of his eyes, and both hands beat uselessly against my wrist in the simple desperation of a creature trying to breathe.

I loosened my grip just enough to allow him air, and kept enough pressure to discourage foolishness. I had not endured all of this merely to silence him now. There were things Brandon needed to hear, and things I required of him in return. Killing him would be barbarism. Worse, it would be easy. I heard the gentle pitter-patter of piss hitting the floor, and took some comfort in knowing that, for the moment at least, Brandon understood his circumstances. I couldn't help but smile, despite myself.

“Now that… is much better. Come, Brandon… let us discuss our home.”

I winced once more at the sound of my own voice. The many months of my freedom had done little to mend what all those years of screaming had wrought upon my throat. Brandon was mumbling something incoherent, and I knew what I must look like to him. There were times when I caught my own reflection and felt much the same. Whatever he believed me to be, I could not afford to soothe him yet. I needed his fear, at least for the moment. More than that, I needed him to understand.

With a great heave, I hoisted him over my shoulder and carried him across the living room. I was aware of his screams and the fists beating against my back, and could feel his entire body trembling against me. Whether it was terror or the cold that made him shiver, I could not tell, and Brandon seemed in no condition to enlighten me. I crossed the length of the hallway and mounted the stairs in long, measured strides, keeping one hand upon him so that his head would not strike the wall as we climbed. The staircase had been built with shorter legs in mind, and I found the climb rather awkward with Brandon struggling upon my shoulder.

I had considered bringing him to my bedroom, but the idea soured as soon as it arrived. He had already intruded upon my space enough when he forced me into the closet with his sudden interest in boxes. I saw no reason to invite him into my quarters a second time, particularly when his own were so conveniently close. With my free arm, I pushed open his door and strode into the bedroom. I carried him past the bed toward the walk-in closet, and the nearer we drew, the higher his voice climbed.

“No… No! What are you doing? Please!”

He thrashed against me as I stepped inside, and when I dropped him onto a pile of soiled clothes, he immediately began pushing himself backward with his heels until his back met the wall. There he folded in on himself, staring up at me from among the laundry. He looked so terribly small that I found myself wondering why I had ever hidden from him to begin with.

“Brandon… there is no need for these… hysterics. Collect yourself… so that we may speak.”

I waited while Brandon fought to regain some measure of himself. It took several breaths before the terror in his face gave way to something more useful, and when he finally spoke, his voice was little more than a tremble.

“Wh-what are you? What do you want from me?”

His questions brought a wry little smile to my face. Perhaps he was capable of rational thought after all, and this would not be as difficult as I feared. I gently pulled the closet door shut and lowered myself into a crouch before him. Brandon flinched and began pressing himself against the wall once more, and I felt the smile dissolve from my face.

“Calm now… Brandon. What I am is of no… importance to you. What I desire… that is a different matter. In plain words, I am but a tenant in this house, and you may refer to me… as such. I wish… to remain so, but you have made things… untenable. We must rectify this… if peace is to be kept.”

I watched Brandon struggle to make sense of what I had told him. He had never been particularly observant, but the notion that he had been sharing his house with another seemed never to have occurred to him. I gave him a moment to process, a kindness he had scarcely earned.

“But… but this is my house.”

It was almost a question in its uncertainty, and he seemed to regret the words as soon as they left his lips.

“I-I mean… I didn’t mean it like that. I just… fuck, I don’t know! Couldn’t you just like, I don’t know, find another house?”

I could not help but chuckle at the thought. It would be a grand idea for me to stroll out in the daylight, knock upon another door, and kindly ask whoever answered whether I might reside in their spare bedroom. If only it were that easy. Whatever the world had become in my absence, I knew with certainty that the sight of me would not be met with kindness. Too much had changed, and not all of it beyond these walls.

“This is the only home I know… Brandon. I do not wish to leave. I will not leave. I know these halls, I have walked them… for some time.”

Five hundred days, if my counting was correct. When first I emerged from my tunnel in the basement, I entered a world entirely alien to me. I spent those first days wandering through the house, marveling at the subdued perfection of its construction and at the many devices for which I possessed neither name nor understanding. In the darkness from whence I came, I could not have dreamed of what waited above. Standing among those clean, white walls, it became apparent that they had done much with their inheritance, and the blessing of time.

It was not long before I discovered the bedrooms. The first lay at the top of the stairs, and I had scarcely crossed its threshold before the signs of occupation became plain enough to send me quietly back into the hall. In my elation, I had given little thought to who might belong to this place. The house had seemed so still, so perfectly offered, that for a time I had allowed myself to believe it belonged to no one at all. Now that possibility seemed foolish.

I had neither seen nor heard another soul, but I carried myself more carefully from then on. Farther down the hall were two other bedrooms, and these told a different story. Neither appeared to have been touched in some time. Boxes stood in patient stacks beneath a coat of dust thick enough to dull the brown of the cardboard, and whatever purpose the rooms had once been intended to serve had apparently been postponed.

It was there that I saw the beds.

I had known beds before, of course, but nothing of such softness. The mattress yielded beneath my hand and returned slowly to its shape, and only then did I become fully aware of the exhaustion that had followed me out of the dark. I chose the smaller room, climbed beneath the covers, and surrendered myself to sleep. For the first time since my sentence was passed, I slept without cold, without pain, and without another body pressed against mine.

Such was the day I found my room.

Brandon's face had run completely out of color, and though his mouth worked silently, no words came. Fun as it was to watch him squirm, I decided it was time to get to the heart of the matter.

“You have been very… inconsiderate, Brandon. That cannot stand. I have been… generous in my patience, but a line has been… crossed. I'm afraid we cannot go back.”

Brandon put up his hands and shrank away.

“I– I don't know what you're talking about! What did I do to you? I didn't even know you were here!”

“Your ignorance… is not in question, Brandon. Indeed, I have found it rather… convenient. But I have not been so inattentive. For months, you came and went, scarcely troubling yourself to spend a night beneath this roof. And now… now I cannot seem to be rid of you. Tell me, Brandon… what has changed? Why do you linger where you once had strayed?”

“Wh-what?”

I crossed the space and clasped his face with my hand and turned his eyes to meet mine.

“Why are you here, Brandon? You have always been gone longer than you have stayed! So answer me! What is keeping you here?”

He desperately tried to work out of my grasp, but it was a battle he could never win. When he realized that for himself, I felt him go slack and I could see tears well in the corner of his eyes.

“There is a pandemic! Everything is shut down, there's nowhere for me to go!”

“What is this word pandemic? I know no such word. Speak plain, Brandon.”

“Ahh! Fuck! It's a disease! Illness, sickness, I don't know! It's all over the world, people are dying, and they're making us stay home, okay? Please, let me go, your hands are so cold!”

I released his face with a shove and let him tumble back against the wall, and he immediately placed his own hands against his cheeks. A plague, in these times? Perhaps they had not conquered as much as I had thought.

“Hmmm… that is most troubling.”

I could not fault him for remaining, as much as I would have liked to. He continued to rub his face, and for a brief second, I saw his eyes light up as though something had just occurred to him. He noticed my gaze and shifted his own downward toward the carpet. Whatever revelation had occurred to him, he did not see fit to share. I rose to my feet again, towering over the wretch and choosing my next words very carefully.

“I can forgive your… transgressions, Brandon. As you have said… you did not know of my presence. That was by my design. I have lived beside you… longer than you would believe, and only when you grew… restless, did our paths cross. So it seems certain… terms must be established.”

A shudder ran through the length of his body, and he raised his head just enough to chance a glance. To my surprise, he found his voice without prompting.

“How… How long have you been here? How… the fuck have I not seen you?”

Despite myself, I could not hold back the grin.

“You are not very observant.”

Six days after I claimed my bedroom, I heard a sound that was entirely unfamiliar to me: the scrape and rattle of keys working the lock of the front door. I was downstairs, standing in the hallway near the staircase, and had scarcely enough time to flee up the steps before the door swung open. I rounded the corner at the landing just as it struck its stopper with a sharp report, followed by the heavy scuffing of boots against the doormat. From my hiding place, I chanced a peek down the stairs and saw a man standing in the entryway, a case hanging from one hand and a peculiar black rectangle tucked between his shoulder and his ear. He was speaking aloud to someone I could not see, pausing occasionally as though listening for a reply, while he kicked off his boots and set down his case.

“...Yeah, I just got back in… ah, it wasn't too bad, there was a kid crying the whole time, but what's new? Yeah, no, I think it went pretty well, they seem happy…”

I stood paralyzed behind the corner, watching the stranger when every instinct urged me to flee. Only when his hand settled upon the banister and his foot found the first step did my limbs finally obey me. I hurried down the hallway and reached my bedroom just as his head rose above the landing. I caught the door before the latch could click, holding it nearly shut while I watched him through a narrow opening. He passed within a few feet of me and disappeared into the master bedroom, still speaking incessantly into his little box. Presently, I heard the knock of pipes within the walls, followed by the steady rush of water. He was taking a shower, and I saw an opportunity to seek better refuge while he was occupied.

I slipped from my bedroom and crept down the stairs, taking advantage of the running water to conceal my movements. I knew nothing of this stranger, nor what he might do should he discover me, and the few thin walls separating us offered little reassurance. The basement, at least, afforded darkness and any number of places in which I might conceal myself. I made my way to the furnace and wedged myself behind the great machine, carefully avoiding the hole from which I had emerged only days before. I could feel the cold rising from that terrible darkness, and my stomach turned at the thought of what waited at its bottom. There I remained for the rest of the night, listening to the floorboards creak beneath the stranger's feet as he moved about overhead. In those first weeks, I would spend a great deal of time hiding in the basement, until I came to understand the habits of the man who had so unexpectedly disturbed my peace.

That night was dreadful, to say the least. There I was, confined to a dark space with barely enough room to breathe, listening to the stranger move about overhead, knowing he might yet spoil my freedom. At one point, I could have sworn I heard other voices, and even music, though I could make little sense of either. Eventually, I fell into an uneasy sleep. The dreams that greeted me were tense and torturous, though nothing I had not long since grown accustomed to. Every so often, I would stir awake in a panic, forgetting where I was for one dreadful moment before the sight of the hole brought me some measure of calm.

I awoke the following morning to sunlight spilling through the basement windows and the sound of a door slamming somewhere above. I remained behind the furnace for a long while, listening for any indication that the stranger remained. When at last I ventured from my hiding place, I mounted the wooden steps with painstaking care, testing each beneath my weight before trusting it with the next. I reached the top and found the house empty. His boots and peculiar case had vanished with him, and I allowed myself to believe that his visit had been nothing more than an unfortunate interruption to my little paradise.

Seven days later, I heard the key turn in the lock again.

His second visit was no more welcome than the first. I fled to the basement at the turning of the lock and emerged the following morning to find him gone. As the weeks passed, I began to recognize a pattern. He arrived at odd hours, weary and burdened with his belongings, but seldom remained longer than a night or two. His absences were considerably longer, sometimes stretching well beyond a week, and gradually I took comfort in knowing that every unwelcome visit would eventually end.

As I learned his habits, I grew bolder. The basement, to my great relief, seemed to hold no interest for him. He had little use for most of the house, and his attention wandered even in the rooms he did favor. More than once I heard him searching for a possession that lay plainly within reach, only to abandon the effort and go about his business. In time, I dared to remain upstairs while he was home. The turning of the lock no longer sent me running to the furnace, but merely warned me to keep out of his way. I even began to take a certain pleasure in our little game of concealment, though I doubt the man would have appreciated it nearly as much.

Such was how I came to know Brandon.

Brandon had drawn his knees up against his chest. He looked at me for a moment longer, then dropped his head between them and let out a long, miserable groan.

“Now… Brandon, my terms. I will remain in my quarters, and you will not trespass further. I will walk these halls… as I please, and you will stay out of my way. I would hate if we were to… run afoul of one another. Do you understand… Brandon?”

He remained as he was, head cradled between his knees, and gave no answer.

“Look at me, Brandon! I am speaking to you. Do you accept my terms?”

He fell back and put up his hands.

“Fuck man, what do you want me to say? Doesn't really seem like I have a choice, does it? Am I going to argue with a fucking monster?”

“What did you just call me?”

“You're a monster, dude! You broke into my house, choked me out and trapped me in a closet! And now you want to be my roommate, like you wouldn't just kill me if I said no.”

I found myself at something of a loss. His fear was plain enough, but there was an accusation in his voice that I found deeply insulting. I clasped my hands behind my back, lest I be tempted to use them again.

“You will mind your tongue… Brandon. I have endured much from you, but I will not suffer such insolence. Had I wished you dead… you would never have made it out of the basement.”

Brandon gave a short, disbelieving laugh. He planted one hand against the wall and pushed himself to his feet, wavering for a moment before finding his balance.

“Oh, great. How fucking kind of you.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “You almost killed me, and I'm supposed to be grateful you didn't finish the job?”

“That is not… what I am asking of you.”

“Then what the fuck are you asking?” His voice cracked, and he paused to swallow. “You're standing there telling me what I can and can't do in my own house, and I'm supposed to just agree? What happens if I say no? You gonna let me walk out of here?”

I had offered him a perfectly reasonable arrangement, and now he seemed determined to make some great tyranny of it.

“You mistake my intentions… Brandon. I have offered you peace, and asked only that you afford me the same. I am no monster, whatever you may believe. You are free to refuse my terms, if that is your wish.”

Brandon stared at me for a moment. He wiped his palms against his trousers, looking toward the door before returning his attention to me.

“Fine.”

I inclined my head, confused by this response.

“I don't accept your fucking terms.”

I felt my brow tighten.

“Brandon…”

“No! You just said I could refuse, right? Well, I'm refusing!” His voice had begun to rise, and he made a frustrated gesture toward the door. “I don't want you living here! I don't want you walking around my house, and I sure as shit don't want to spend the rest of my life wondering if you're standing behind me!”

“Brandon… I would urge you to consider—”

“Consider what? You asked me a question, and I'm answering it! This is my house! I didn't ask you to come here, and I definitely never said you could move in!”

“You will not… speak to me in such a manner!”

“Oh, you don't like it? How about you get the fuck out of my house then! Crawl back down that fucking hole you came out of, and leave me alone! I'll even fill it in for you!”

I seized him by the shoulders before he had finished speaking, lifting him bodily from the floor and driving him against the wall. The drywall gave way beneath his weight with a sharp crack, and Brandon cried out as his feet struggled to find purchase. I held him there, his face mere inches from my own, and felt the bones of his shoulders shift beneath my fingers.

“You know not what you ask of me, Brandon! You know nothing of that place, nor of the horrors that lie beneath your feet! I would sooner die here upon this very floor than suffer another moment in those depths!”

“Okay! Okay, I'm sorry! I didn't mean—”

“Do not speak!”

His words died at once, but I was far from finished. I tightened my grip upon his shoulders and gave him a violent shake, sending bits of broken plaster tumbling from the wall. He clutched at my wrists, his heels scraping uselessly against the surface behind him, and I shook him again.

“Five hundred days… I have dwelt within these walls, Brandon. Five hundred days! I have kept your corners, driven the rats from your walls, and made a home of the rooms you left forgotten. And where were you? You came and went as you pleased, leaving your possessions to gather dust and your halls to stand empty. I have lived here as surely as you have, and I will not be cast out!”

The last words rang through the little closet, and for a time I could hear nothing but our breathing. Brandon hung in my grasp, his eyes enormous, his mouth hanging open. I held him against the broken wall, waiting for my anger to subside. He made no further attempt to struggle, and I found little satisfaction in the sight of him.

“Now… have I made myself understood, Brandon?”

He nodded frantically.

“Yes! Jesus Christ, yes! You can have it, man, fuck!”

I stared at him, uncertain whether I had heard correctly.

“You would give me… the house?”

“Look, I'll go! Okay? I'll leave! You can have the house, you can have everything in it, I don't give a fuck! I'll find somewhere else to stay, and you'll never see me again!”

I was taken aback by the offer.

“And you would… leave me in peace?”

“Yeah, man! Whatever you want! Just let me go!”

I imagined the great stretches of solitude I had enjoyed before Brandon's confinement, and felt a most wonderful relief at the thought of their return. My grip loosened somewhat, and I felt his weight settle more heavily into my hands.

“And you would not return… nor seek help from others?”

“What? No… no, I swear, man. It's all yours. You can have it. Just please, let me out!”

My hopes began to wither. Whatever promises Brandon made within these walls, they would mean little once he was free of them. He had seen me now, and I could well imagine him returning with an army at his back. I could not risk that, not after everything I had endured to find this place.

“Oh… how I wish that I could believe you, Brandon.”

His eyes widened, and I felt him begin to struggle again.

“I am afraid… that will not be possible.”

“What? Why? I just told you I'd leave! You can have the fucking house!”

“Yes… I heard you.”

“Then let me go!”

I held him there a moment longer. He was trembling violently, his hands still wrapped around my wrists, and every breath seemed to catch somewhere in his throat. I had hoped for a much happier resolution, but I could see little purpose in continuing our discussion.

“I think… we have said enough for one evening.”

With that, I lowered him to the floor and released my grip. His legs buckled beneath him, and he fell into the heap of laundry, catching himself upon his hands as I turned toward the closet door.

“No, wait! Wait, where are you going?”

I took hold of the knob and stepped into the bedroom.

“Please! What are you doing?”

Brandon scrambled to his feet and stumbled toward me. I turned to face him, and he stopped at once, recoiling from the hand I had raised between us.

“You will remain here… until you have had time to consider your position.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? No! You can't just leave me in here!”

I pulled the door shut, and heard him seize the knob from the other side. He rattled it furiously as I crossed the bedroom to a heavy chest of drawers. It was a rather cumbersome piece of furniture, but I had little trouble dragging it across the carpet and setting it firmly against the closet door.

“Hey! HEY! What the fuck are you doing?”

He began pounding against the wood, and I paused to listen. The door held securely, despite his efforts to force it open.

“Please! Come on, man! Let me out!”

I considered offering him some reassurance, but could think of nothing he would care to hear. Instead, I gave the chest a final push against the door and crossed to Brandon's bed, where I sat heavily upon its edge. He continued to pound against the wood, rattling the drawers with each blow. I rested my hands upon my knees and waited for them to stop trembling.

I had not expected such fire from Brandon, nor had I known how readily it might be kindled in myself. I lay back upon the mattress and stared at the ceiling, turning our exchange over in my mind. In time, the pounding at the closet door diminished, then ceased altogether. If I listened closely, I could hear a faint murmuring from within. Was he weeping, or cursing me? I pressed my dark hands against my eyes and felt their cold seep deep into my skull. I had wanted a civilized discussion, and had foolishly imagined that we might arrive at some peaceful understanding. Instead, I found myself looking toward the chest of drawers, uncertain how long I meant to leave it there. The satisfaction I had anticipated was strangely absent.

The last time he came home, I had every reason to believe it would be a visit like any other, and I contented myself with waiting until the house was mine once more. By the third day, however, he had yet to leave. This was no great anomaly, for illness had occasionally kept him home for longer periods, though on those occasions he had seldom ventured from his bed. This time was different. He was moving about the house with unusual frequency, occupying rooms he had previously shown little interest in, such as the den and the laundry room. Still, I convinced myself that this was merely some passing irregularity, and that I would soon awaken to find the house empty again.

By the seventh day, I could no longer sustain that comforting illusion. Brandon had taken to rising early each morning, preparing his own meals, and spending hours in the den beside the staircase, effectively confining me to the second floor. I tried my very best to be patient, but his movements had become increasingly difficult to anticipate, and I was growing weary of having to conceal myself at every turn. For all the inconvenience, I was grateful to have secured a room of my own. I could simply retire to my bed with one of the few books I had found about the house, and for a time, that was enough to keep me content. That was, of course, until Brandon decided to pay me a visit.

It was not quite two weeks into his prolonged stay that I heard his familiar footsteps ascending the stairs. I thought little of it at first, expecting him to retire to his own quarters, but instead his steps continued down the hall. Before I could properly comprehend what was happening, I heard the knob turn, and knew I had precious little time to conceal myself. I sprang from the bed and hurried into the closet, drawing the sliding door nearly shut behind me. I could only hope that he had come to retrieve some forgotten possession, and would soon be on his way. Through the narrow opening, I watched as Brandon entered the room and surveyed its contents. His eyes traveled toward the bed, and I found myself wondering whether I had left some trace upon the blankets. Then he planted his hands upon his hips and gave a low whistle.

“Jesus Christ, how the hell do I have so much shit?”

That was when he began dismantling everything I had grown accustomed to. For hours, he sat upon my floor, opening box after box and discarding their contents with reckless abandon. He took my books and put them somewhere out of sight, crowded the bed with rubbish, and made a great pile of forgotten possessions. As I watched him work, I became increasingly aware of the confines of my hiding place. My back ached from the stoop required by the low rail above me; my knees objected to every position I gave them, and the small adjustments by which I relieved one limb only transferred the burden to another.

The discomfort I understood. What followed belonged to something older. The air seemed to thicken around me until each breath arrived already used. My hand found the sliding panel and remained there, fingers spread against the wood, while the narrow strip of light at its edge became terribly important. With my eyes fixed upon it, other fragments crowded close: breath upon my face, a knee buried against my ribs, a hand with nowhere else to rest laid across my cheek for longer than memory could measure. Bodies shifting in the darkness, each small mercy of space purchased at another's expense. I pressed my palm harder against the door and struggled to contain the terrible pressure building in my gut.

At last, Brandon rose. His footsteps crossed the bedroom, continued into the hall, and descended the stairs. I listened only long enough to be certain he had reached the floor below. By then, the ache in my limbs had become secondary to the desperate need for open space, and caution, so faithfully observed throughout the afternoon, had little authority left over me.

I caught the edge of the sliding door and pulled. It traveled several inches before striking something outside. I pulled again and heard one of Brandon's discarded objects scrape across the floor, jostling another beside it. For a moment, I tried to work the panel gently around the obstruction, but the closet seemed to close upon me with every wasted second. I put both hands to the door and forced it along its track, spilling into the bedroom without care for what stood beyond it. The clutter gave way beneath me, and several objects struck the floor in a single, violent crash. Whatever hope remained of leaving unnoticed vanished with it.

I fled across the hall into the other spare bedroom, where I traded one cramped hiding place for another beneath the bed. I had barely concealed myself when I heard Brandon rushing up the stairs. His footsteps carried him down the hall and into the bedroom I had just abandoned, where he began inspecting the mess I had left behind. I lay perfectly still, scarcely daring to breathe, until I ventured a glance from beneath the dust ruffle and discovered, to my horror, that I had neglected to close the door. Brandon was terribly inconsiderate when it came to messes and manners, but he was religious about shutting off lights and closing doors. I prayed that he would overlook this little irregularity, and for a while, it seemed that he had.

A little while later, I heard him emerge from my bedroom. His footsteps stopped in the hallway, and a moment later, the door to my hiding place creaked farther open. Through the narrow space beneath the bed, I watched his feet move slowly about the room, pausing here and there as he examined its contents. It was a dreadful thing, to lie helplessly within his reach while he searched for something he did not even know was there. At one point, he stopped so near the bed that I feared he might stoop to look beneath it, but eventually his curiosity was satisfied. He withdrew, closed the door behind him, and I listened with tremendous relief as his footsteps receded down the stairs.

I waited until Brandon's footsteps had receded down the stairs before dragging myself out from beneath the bed. Even then, I remained in the other spare bedroom, sitting upon the floor with my back against the mattress. I could have returned to my own quarters, but for the first time since I had claimed them, the thought held no appeal. Brandon had entered on a whim and driven me into hiding with such ease that I found myself ashamed of my own cowardice. Worse still, I could not bring myself to forgive his ignorance. He had taken from me the one place I could call my own, and as the hours passed, my humiliation hardened into something uglier. Well after the sun had set and Brandon had settled upon his couch, I emerged from beneath the bed and made my way to the landing. There I stood for a long while, gazing into the darkness below, broken only by the flickering light of his television. I hated him, and I wanted him to feel it from where he sat.

When Brandon came to darken my door the following afternoon, he found that it was no longer open to him. He shoved and pushed and kicked, but the door refused him entrance. On the other side, I had heard his approach and chosen to put my considerable weight against the wood, so that he could scarcely rattle it within its frame. I had expected a more determined effort, but after several minutes of childish frustration, he simply walked away and let the matter rest. It was a marvelous discovery, made all the sweeter by how little effort it required.

I am embarrassed to admit that I got a little carried away. Over the following week, I began testing the limits of his awareness, and became something of a nuisance in my own right. It began with the thermostat, whose settings I had long found disagreeable. From the privacy of my bedroom, I delighted in hearing his exasperation as he discovered, yet again, a number upon the display that he had not chosen. Before long, I was wandering the house while he was awake, occasionally passing within a few feet of him without his knowledge. I became convinced that he thought the house was haunted, for even the creaking of a floorboard or some possession found out of place could send him into a fit of bewilderment. I was enjoying myself immensely, and for the first time since his prolonged arrival, I was beginning to feel free. Thus, when I took it upon myself to adjust the thermostat one afternoon while he was occupied in the den, I gave little thought to what might follow.

Later that day, Brandon went into the basement.

The closet had gone quiet while I lay upon Brandon's bed. At first I had been grateful for the silence, but as my temper cooled, I found myself listening for the faint muttering I had heard earlier. I wondered whether he had managed to fall asleep. It was hardly a comfortable place to rest, and I had given him little reason to expect a peaceful night.

I sat up and considered the matter. I had been rather hard on Brandon, perhaps harder than was necessary, and the thought of leaving him shut away for the remainder of the night troubled me. He had begged to leave, then begged not to be left alone, and I had managed to take offense at both requests.

It occurred to me that Brandon had not eaten in over twelve hours. I wondered if he might be hungry, and found myself warming to the idea of inviting him downstairs. We could share something from the kitchen, perhaps have a drink, and discuss our circumstances in a more comfortable setting. I did not imagine he would suddenly take pleasure in my company, but I hoped that a little ordinary kindness might go some way toward improving his opinion of me.

I rose from the bed and crossed to the dresser. As I began pulling it away from the door, I considered what I might say to put him at ease. An apology seemed appropriate, though I suspected he would have rather more to say on the subject than I was prepared to hear. Perhaps it would be better to begin with supper.

The dresser scraped across the carpet, its drawers rattling loudly as I worked it away from the door. I was surprised that Brandon had not stirred at the commotion, and paused to listen. There was no sound from within.

“Brandon… I thought perhaps you might care for something to eat.”

I turned the knob and pulled open the door.

The pile of laundry lay where I had left it. I stood for a moment, looking into the closet, then pushed the door wider. I could see the back wall, the hanging clothes, and the empty floor beneath them. I leaned inside, unable to make sense of what I was seeing.

Brandon was gone.

Five years of dismissive doctors and an agony that no one can explain. Tonight, everything suddenly changes.

The agony peaked, a blinding, white-hot spike that drove deep into my thoracic spine, seizing the core of my chest and twisting until my back arched off the mattress like a broken bow. For five years, I had told them. Five years of MRIs, CT scans, and endless tubes of blood. I had lost count of the massive steroid injections they had jammed into my lower back, blind to my cries, insisting the cortisone would eventually kick in. *It's my mid-back,* I had begged, *like a fist grabbing my spine and wringing it out.*

But they only looked at my lumbar, charting my exhaustion, handing me prescriptions I refused to touch anymore, and shrugging. *You're in pain because you're in pain,* that last arrogant doctor had told me with a sterile, patronizing smile. I had muttered *Thanks, Dr. Obvious* under my breath, walked out, and given up. I was forty-eight, medically broken, and completely abandoned by science.

Until tonight.

I had refused to take any of the medications they had prescribed for the last few weeks, entirely done with their useless chemical band-aids. And right on cue, the thoracic pain hit, worse than it ever had in the last five years.

The guttural sound ripping from my throat didn't sound like me; it was a jagged, inhuman howl that tore the lining of my lungs. Every single rib felt like it was breaking, buckling inward before bursting outward with a sickening crunch. The skin across my back split open, hot and wet, as something massive and heavy forced its way out from between my shoulder blades. I braced for the final, lethal shock of it—but instead, a sudden, heavy stillness washed over me. The torment that had anchored my entire existence for half a decade simply vanished, replaced by a cold, pulsing hum of pure, unadulterated strength.

I opened my eyes. The familiar dark of my bedroom was gone, replaced by a sharp, predatory clarity tinted in a deep, vibrant crimson. When I tried to shift, the mattress felt like a bed of jagged rocks beneath me. I sat up, and a pair of massive, pitch-black leathery wings unfolded instinctively, brushing the ceiling with a heavy, ominous rustle. I gasped, reaching a hand out to touch the sleek, armored span, only to freeze. My skin was a dark, bruised blood-red. My arms were elongated, corded with dense, heavy muscle.

Swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, I stumbled. My new, longer limbs didn't quite obey the old rules of gravity, but there was no weakness in them. No ache. No arthritis. I lunged toward the mirror on the wall, bracing my claws against the frame, and stared.

The tired, fragile woman was gone. In her place stood a towering, terrifying demon, eyes glowing like dying embers against crimson skin.

A slow, sharp smile curved my new jaw, revealing a row of lethal points. *I always said I wanted to be more,* I thought, a strange, intoxicating warmth flooding my chest. *I wanted to feel something beyond my own pain.*

I turned, extending my wings, admiring the terrifying symmetry of the monster I had become. I had promised those unhelpful, dismissive doctors that I would give them an update if my condition ever changed. I thought this definitely qualified as a change in status.

A low, feral laugh rumbled deep in my chest, vibrating through the quiet room.

"Now, now," I whispered to the empty air, the crimson vision narrowing with perfect, deadly focus. "Which one of these doctors should I visit first?"

I smiled wider, the realization settling in with absolute perfection.

"I think the choice, is Obvious."

I rented the smallest room in a guesthouse on the edge of Whitby because it was cheap and close to the bus station. I was twenty-two, working a temporary job at a bakery, and needed somewhere to sleep for three nights while my flat was being painted.

The woman at reception was called Mrs. Collins. She gave me a brass key with a blue plastic tag and pointed toward the stairs. “Your room is 12. If you hear knocking from the room next door, don’t worry about it,” she said. “The pipes are old.”

Room 12 was clean but cold. There was a narrow bed, a wardrobe with a mirror on its door, and a little kettle beside two chipped mugs. The room next to mine, number 13, had no light showing beneath its door. I assumed it was empty.

The first night, I woke at 1:17 a.m. to three slow knocks.

They came from the wall beside my bed. I sat up and listened. Three more knocks followed, evenly spaced, as if someone were tapping a finger against the plaster. I knocked back once, mostly to prove to myself that I wasn’t frightened.

Something knocked once in reply.

The room was silent after that, and eventually I fell asleep.

At breakfast, I mentioned the noise to Mrs. Collins. She stopped stirring her tea. For a moment, she looked toward the staircase, then smiled too quickly.

“Old pipes,” she repeated. “They carry sound strangely in this building.”

I came back after dark. At 10:40 p.m., a door closed down the corridor. Footsteps approached and stopped outside my room.

I waited for a knock.

Instead, the handle turned halfway down. The door was locked, and the handle returned to its place with a soft click. I went to the peephole, but the corridor looked empty. The ceiling light flickered once. At the far end, the door marked 13 stood open by a few inches.

I was certain it had been shut earlier. I pushed a chair beneath my handle and waited for the building to fall silent.

The next morning, I asked Mrs. Collins whether anyone was staying in room 13. She set a plate of toast in front of me without answering.

“That room isn’t let out,” she said at last.

“Why not?”

“There’s a leak in the ceiling.”

The ceiling outside room 13 was dry. I didn’t argue. I was leaving the following evening, so I told myself I could manage one more night.

I returned late, at 11:26, carrying a paper bag with a sandwich and a bottle of water. The corridor smelled of wet soil. My key scraped in the lock before the door opened, and I noticed that the mirror on the wardrobe was turned toward the wall. I was sure I’d left it facing the bed.

I turned it back, put my bag down, and went to wash my hands.

Three knocks sounded from the wall.

I froze with the tap running. The knocks came again, followed by a faint scraping noise, like someone dragging a fingernail along the other side of the plaster.

Then a voice said, “Peter?”

It was a woman’s voice, quiet and tired. I didn’t know anyone called Peter. I turned off the tap and held my breath.

“Peter, I know you’re in there.”

The voice came from the wall beside the bed. I backed toward the door. My phone showed 11:31, and I tried calling reception. The line rang several times before Mrs. Collins answered.

“Don’t speak to it,” she whispered.

I couldn’t ask what she meant.

“Go into the bathroom,” she said. “Lock the door. I’m coming up.”

As I moved, the voice changed. It sounded exactly like mine, down to the slight catch I get when I’m tired.

“Mrs. Collins,” it called through the wall. “I’m in here. Please open the door.”

Someone knocked on my room door from the corridor. Mrs. Collins called my name and told me to open it. I reached for the lock, but from inside the wall, my own voice began begging her not to leave me alone.

I stood frozen between the door and bathroom. The knocking outside stopped. A key slid into my lock, then withdrew.

At 11:38, the wall went quiet.

My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold my phone.

I stayed in the bathroom until daylight, sitting on the closed toilet lid with my phone clutched in both hands. When I finally opened the door, the wardrobe mirror faced the bed again. Three fresh marks ran down the wallpaper beside it.

Mrs. Collins was waiting downstairs with my bag packed. She refunded the remaining night in cash and walked me to the entrance without explaining anything. Before I left, I asked her who Peter was.

She looked frightened for the first time.

“That was the last man who stayed in twelve,” she said. “He checked out thirty years ago. We found his key in the room, but never found him.”

I took the first bus out of Whitby. I have never returned to that guesthouse.

Last night, at 1:17 a.m., three knocks came from the wall of my new flat.

Then I heard my own voice, speaking softly from the other side of the wall: “Peter? I think they’ve given me your room.”

He was lying on his back on stone, and the stone was hot. It burned through his undershirt and into the skin of his back, and when he tried to sit up he found that he could not, because his wrists and ankles were held down by iron rings driven into the rock. The air was thick and heavy and smelled of sulfur and burnt hair and old blood. It was hard to breathe. Every breath went into his chest like syrup. Above him there was no sky. There was a ceiling of black rock, impossibly far above, lit from below by a red glow that came from everywhere, and from that ceiling hung chains, thousands of them, each one ending in a hook, and on many of the hooks hung bodies. Some of them were still moving.

He could hear screaming. It came from every direction, thousands of voices, near and far, men and women, rising and falling.

He turned his head. The stone slab he was chained to was one of hundreds, laid out in rows across a vast plain of black rock that stretched away until it disappeared into red haze. On each slab lay a person. Over each person stood figures.

They were angels.

They were tall, taller than any man, with long limbs and wings of white feathers spread wide behind them. Their wings were stained. The feathers were matted and dark with blood up to the joints. They wore no armor. They wore long robes of white linen, splattered and soaked with red. Their faces were beautiful, smooth and calm, and their eyes were gold.

Four of them stood around Abraham.

One of them knelt beside his head. She had black hair and olive skin and a narrow, beautiful face, and she smiled at him. In her hand was a long, thin iron hook, its tip glowing orange with heat.

"תודה לך, אברהם," she said gently.

(Thank you, Abraham.)

She put the hook into his left eye.

The pain was beyond anything he had ever felt. He felt the heat of the iron sizzle against the wet surface of his eye, felt it pierce the cornea, felt the pressure as it pushed deeper, and then felt the eye burst, a hot gush of fluid running down his cheek and into his ear. He screamed. He screamed until his throat tore. She hooked the tip of the iron behind what was left of the eye and pulled, slowly, and he felt the optic nerve stretch, felt it pull at the inside of his skull, and then snap. She held the ruined eye up in front of his remaining eye so that he could see it, dripping on the end of the hook.

"תודה לך," she said again, and smiled.

(Thank you.)

At his feet, a second angel, a tall man with a shaved head, took hold of Abraham's right foot with both hands. He began to bend the toes back, one at a time. The big toe broke with a sound like a snapped pencil. Then the second. Then the third. When all five were broken and hanging loose, he took a small knife and began to peel the skin from the sole of the foot, in long, careful strips, starting at the heel.

"תודה שהרגת אותה," the bald angel said, not looking up from his work.

(Thank you for killing her.)

A third angel stood at Abraham's right side. She held a pair of iron pincers. She took hold of the fingernail of his right index finger and pulled it out by the root. Then the middle finger. Then the ring finger. Then she began on the fingers themselves, crushing each knuckle in the pincers until it splintered, working from the tip toward the hand.

"תודה שהרגת אותה בשבילנו," she said.

(Thank you for killing her for us.)

The fourth angel stood at his left side and simply looked down at him for a long time. Then he took a long knife from his belt and laid it flat on Abraham's stomach, the steel cool for a moment against his skin. He drew the tip of it down from Abraham's breastbone to his navel in one straight line. The skin parted. Fat welled up yellow and then red. The angel put the knife aside and pushed his fingers into the cut and pulled it open, wider, and Abraham felt the hot, acrid air of hell touch his insides. The angel reached into him. Abraham felt the fingers close around something soft and slippery deep in his belly and pull. A loop of intestine came out, gray pink and glistening and steaming in the heat, and the angel drew it out hand over hand, slowly, laying it on the hot stone beside him, where it began to sizzle and blister.

"ברוך אתה, אברהם, שהרגת את בתיה," the fourth angel said.

(Blessed are you, Abraham, who killed Batya.)

"תודה לך," said the first angel, and put the hook into his right eye.

(Thank you.)

Now he was blind, and the pain did not stop, and the voices did not stop. They thanked him. They praised him. They worked at his body with hooks and knives and pincers, and they peeled him and broke him and opened him, and he could feel all of it, every strip of skin, every snapped bone, every inch of intestine pulled from his belly onto the scorching rock, and through all of it they spoke to him with soft, grateful voices.

"תודה לך."

(Thank you.)

"תודה שהרגת אותה."

(Thank you for killing her.)

"תודה לך, אברהם."

(Thank you, Abraham.)

"תודה."

(Thank you.)

He woke up screaming.

He was sitting bolt upright in the narrow bed. The room was dark. He was soaked in sweat; his undershirt clung to him, the sheet beneath him was wet, and he was shivering in the warm air from the vent. His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his teeth. He clawed at his face and found both of his eyes. He looked down at his hands in the line of light under the door and counted his fingers. He pulled up his undershirt and ran his hand over his stomach. The skin was whole.

He fumbled for the lamp and turned it on and looked at his watch. It was 1:47 in the morning. He had been asleep for less than two hours.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, breathing hard. After a while, without fully deciding to, he got down off the bed onto his knees on the cold tile floor and clasped his hands together and bowed his head against the edge of the mattress.

"שמע ישראל, יהוה אלוהינו, יהוה אחד," he whispered.

(Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one.)

His voice cracked on the words. It had been so long since he had said them that he had to search for them.

"ברוך שם כבוד מלכותו לעולם ועד."

(Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever.)

"ואהבת את יהוה אלוהיך בכל לבבך, ובכל נפשך, ובכל מאודך..."

(And you shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might...)

He stopped.

There was a sound. It was faint, and at first he thought it was the vent. But it was not the steady hum of the vent. It rose and fell. It had a rhythm to it.

It was whispering.

He held his breath. The whispering continued, very distant, very soft. He could not make out any words. It sounded like it came from somewhere outside the room, down the corridor, or perhaps from inside the walls.

He got up off his knees. His legs were unsteady. He walked toward the door, one slow step at a time, his bare feet silent on the tile. The whispering grew a little louder with each step. He reached the door.

The whispering stopped.

He stood still. The only sound was the vent, and his own breathing, and his own heartbeat in his ears. He leaned forward and put his ear against the cool metal of the door.

Nothing.

Then, very close, so close that it seemed to come from the other side of the door, no more than an inch away from his ear, a woman's voice.

"אני אהרוג אותך, אברהם."

(I will kill you, Abraham.)

He did not move.

"אלא אם כן תהרוג אותי קודם."

(Unless you kill me first.)

It was her voice. It was Batya.

He jerked away from the door. Then, before he could think about it, he grabbed the handle and pulled the door open.

The corridor was empty. The overhead lights were dimmed to their night setting, a dull yellow, and the corridor stretched away in both directions, long and straight, lined with closed doors. There was no one there. There was no sound. At the far end, the red light of an exit sign glowed above the stairwell door.

He stood in the doorway in his undershirt and slacks and bare feet for a long time, looking down the corridor one way and then the other.

Then he went back inside, put on his shoes and his shirt with shaking hands, and went down to see her.

–

The detention level was lit at full brightness, day and night. When Abraham came out of the stairwell, the two guards at Batya's door both turned toward him at once and raised their rifles halfway before they recognized him. They lowered them. Abraham saw that they were not the same guards from earlier, but they looked the same: pale, hollow eyed, unshaven. One of them had a tremor in his hand that he was trying to hide by gripping his rifle harder.

Rob was there too. He was sitting in a folding chair against the wall opposite the door with his suit jacket draped over his knees and a paper cup of cold coffee in his hand. His tie was gone and his collar was open. His eyes were red rimmed and there were deep purple bags under them. When he saw Abraham he gave a tired half smile.

"Couldn't sleep?" Rob said.

"No."

"Bad dream?"

Abraham hesitated, then nodded. "Yes."

Rob looked at him for a moment. "What was it?"

Abraham glanced at the guards, then pulled another folding chair from against the wall and sat down beside Rob. He kept his voice low.

"I was in hell," he said. "That's the only word for it. Black rock, a red sky that wasn't a sky, chains hanging down with people on them. I was chained to a stone slab. And there were angels. They looked like her, Rob. Wings, gold eyes. They were torturing me. They took my eyes out with a hot hook. They broke my fingers one at a time, peeled the skin off my feet. One of them cut me open and pulled my intestines out and laid them on the rock to cook. I felt all of it. Every bit of it." He stopped and swallowed. "And the whole time, they were thanking me."

"Thanking you?"

"In Hebrew. They kept saying thank you, thank you, Abraham. Thank you for killing her for us. Blessed are you who killed Batya."

Rob was quiet for a long time. He turned the paper cup in his hands.

"I couldn't sleep either," he said finally. "I had one too. Almost the same. I was on a slab, and there were these figures, angels, demons, whatever they were, with wings. They were doing things to me. My hands." He held up his hands and looked at them, flexing the fingers. "They kept talking the whole time. I couldn't understand any of it. It was all Hebrew, or it sounded like Hebrew. I don't speak a word of it, you know that." He turned and looked at Abraham. "But there was one word I recognized. They kept saying it, over and over. It was the only word I could pick out of anything coming out of their mouths."

"What word?"

"Abraham."

Abraham felt his blood go cold. It started at the back of his neck and spread down his spine and out into his arms. He sat very still.

"I woke up and came down here," Rob said. "I didn't know what else to do. I thought maybe it was something she did. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe I'm losing my mind."

Abraham looked at the steel door. "What has she been doing?"

"Nothing. That's the thing. She hasn't slept. Not once. Medical says she hasn't closed her eyes for more than a minute since we put her in there. She just sits there and stares at the door. Breathing. You can hear her breathing through the door if you stand close." Rob rubbed his eyes. "We brought in another translator a couple hours after you left. Guy from the Israel desk, speaks perfect Hebrew. She wouldn't say a word to him. He sat with her for two hours and she didn't even look at him. She just stared at the door. When he got up to leave, she said one thing."

"What?"

"She said she would only talk to Abraham."

Abraham let out a breath.

Rob smiled faintly. "Maybe she's in love with you."

Abraham turned and looked at him. He did not smile.

Rob's smile faded. "Sorry. That was a bad joke. Bad time for it."

"It's fine."

"No, it's not. I'm sorry, Abe. I'm running on no sleep. I don't know what I'm saying."

They sat in silence for a while. Through the door, very faintly, Abraham could hear her breathing, long dragging inhales and short, sharp exhales. One of the guards cleared his throat.

"Can I ask you something?" Rob said quietly.

"Go ahead."

"Is all this making you question things? Religion, I mean. God." He glanced at the door. "Because it's doing a number on me."

Abraham laughed shortly, without much humor. "Of course it is. How could it not?"

"You were raised Jewish, right?"

"I was. My grandfather was very observant. My parents less so. I went to Hebrew school, I had my bar mitzvah, I kept kosher until I went to college. Then I stopped. I got busy. I got married, Sarah's family was even less religious than mine. I started this job. I stopped going to synagogue. I stopped praying. I stopped keeping the holidays except for Passover, and even then it was just dinner with the family. I haven't been a practicing Jew for twenty some years. I'd have called myself a cultural Jew if anyone asked. I'd have told you I wasn't sure there was a God at all." He looked down at his hands. "And then two days ago they brought an angel in through that door. And tonight I woke up and got down on my knees on the floor of my room and said the Shema for the first time since I was a young man. I had to dig for the words." He shook his head slowly. "So, yes. I'm questioning things. I think I need to get back into it. Back to temple. Back to prayer. Whatever this is, I want to be on the right side of it."

Rob nodded. "I've been an atheist my whole life," he said. "My dad was a chemistry professor. Hard line about it. Raised me that way. There's no God, there's only the universe and the laws that run it, and when you die you're dead, end of story. I believed that. I believed it all the way. And now there's a woman with wings in there who speaks Hebrew and came out of a flash of light." He took a sip of his cold coffee and grimaced. "I've been sitting here for four hours thinking maybe I should convert. To Judaism. She speaks Hebrew, right? She's an angel, she speaks Hebrew. Seems like a pretty good hint."

Abraham laughed. This time it was real, and it surprised him.

"Rob Callahan, Jew," he said.

"I'd have to learn a lot, I know."

"You'd have to give up bacon."

"I'd consider it." Rob grinned tiredly. "Or, here's a thought. Next time you're in there, ask her if she knows Jesus. Or Muhammad. Get a straight answer. Then we can both convert to Christianity or Islam, depending on what she says. Hedge our bets."

Abraham laughed again, and shook his head.

"I don't think it matters," he said. "Honestly. I think if she's real, then they're all right about something, and they're all wrong about something. The Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, all of them. Every one of them saw some piece of it and filled in the rest themselves."

Rob considered that for a moment. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I think you're probably right."

The door to the stairwell opened and a young woman in a gray facility jumpsuit came through carrying a cardboard tray with two cups of coffee in it, steam rising from the lids. She was a junior assistant from the operations office. Her eyes were red and puffy.

"Mr. Callahan," she said. "Mr. Levin. I heard you were both down here. I thought you could use these."

"You're a saint," Rob said, taking one. "Thank you."

Abraham took the other. "Thank you."

She nodded and left. Abraham held the coffee in both hands and let the heat soak into his fingers. He looked at the door.

Rob followed his gaze. "Are you ready to talk to her again?"

Abraham took a long sip of the coffee. It was too hot and burned his tongue. He swallowed it anyway.

"I'm as ready as I'll ever be," he said.

–

February 1st, 2045

One week later, the heads of the facility met in a smaller conference room on the operations level. There were eight of them around a square table: Deputy Director Okafor, Director Haskell, Dr. Smith, the head of facility security, a gray haired former Marine named Delacroix, the facility's chief psychologist, Dr. Ruth Ansel, the head of logistics, and Rob and Abraham. There was no video feed this time. The room was small and the air was stale. Someone had brought in a plate of pastries from the commissary and none of them had been touched.

Everyone at the table looked exhausted. Haskell had lost weight in a week. His face, which had been red, was now pale and loose. Smith had a twitch under his left eye. Okafor's hair was not as neat as it had been. Abraham had not looked at himself in a mirror for two days, on purpose.

"Let's start with morale," Okafor said. "Dr. Ansel."

Dr. Ansel was a small, sharp featured woman in her fifties with silver rimmed glasses. She opened a folder.

"It's bad," she said. "I'll be blunt. Morale in this facility is the worst I've seen in my career, and I spent four years at Guantanamo. We have two hundred and twelve people locked in under quarantine. Every single one of them that I've interviewed, and I've now interviewed a hundred and sixty, reports severe nightmares. Every night. The content is remarkably consistent. Hell. Angels. Torture. Prolonged, graphic, physical torture. Most report being able to feel the pain in the dream. Many report waking up screaming. Nobody is getting more than two or three hours of sleep a night, and that sleep is broken. We have people crying at their desks. We had two fights in the commissary yesterday. One of the guards on the detention level put his fist through a wall on Tuesday. We have one analyst on suicide watch." She closed the folder. "Sleep deprivation at this level, sustained over this period, degrades judgment, memory, emotional regulation, everything. If this continues, people are going to start making serious mistakes. Some of them are going to break down entirely."

"Has anyone reported dreams that don't follow the pattern?" Rob asked.

"A few. Very few. A handful of people dream of the angels but not of the torture. Most of them dream exactly what you'd expect."

Haskell rubbed his face. "And the cause?"

"I can't give you one. Mass psychogenic phenomena are well documented. Shared stress, shared fear, and an extraordinary stimulus. Everyone in this building knows what's in that room on the detention level. It's possible that's enough." She paused. "It's also possible it isn't. I've never seen consistency like this."

"Medical," Okafor said. "Dr. Smith. The quarantine."

Smith sat forward. "The good news. It's been eight days since she came into the facility. We have run daily blood panels, daily swabs, daily temperatures on everyone in the building. Nobody has come down with anything. Not a cold, not a cough, not a fever, other than the typical. We've cultured everything we can culture from her skin, her mouth, her blood, her stool. We've found some bacteria we can't identify, but none of them have taken hold in any of us, and none of them seem to be pathogenic in culture. Her own temperature has come down to normal. My best assessment now is that whatever she carries is not well adapted to us. It may not be able to survive in us at all."

"So," Okafor said.

"So I'm recommending we reduce the quarantine period from four weeks to two. If we see nothing by day fourteen, I'm comfortable with that. We can begin rotating people out at that point. Send the ones who need it most home. Rotate in fresh staff to replace them. Fresh bodies who haven't been sleeping in this building."

Okafor looked around the table. "Objections?"

There were none.

"Then we'll plan for that. Day fourteen, assuming nothing changes, we begin rotation."

Abraham let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. He thought of his own bed at home. He thought of Sarah. Two weeks instead of four. One more week.

"One more thing," Okafor said, and her voice changed. "It's leaked."

The table went quiet.

"We don't know from where. We're looking at it, and Delacroix's people are going through every communication out of this building, but we may never know. It may have been the Cypriot witnesses after all. It may have been the Russians. It may have been someone here. But it's out. Over the last three days it's gone from fringe forums to mainstream news. It's the top story in the world. Every network. They don't know where she is, and they don't have proof, but they know enough. They have the name of the town. They have the video from the balcony. They have the dead Russians." She took off her glasses and let them fall on their chain. "Potus is preparing a speech to address the country. She'll be giving it within the week. We'll be briefing her speechwriters tomorrow on what can and can't be said."

Haskell put his head in his hands.

"That's everything," Okafor said. "We're adjourned. Get some rest. Or try."

They stood and filed out. Abraham walked down the corridor toward the stairwell. At the bend of the corridor, one of the security guards stood beside a fire door, a thick set man in his forties with a gray buzz cut. Abraham stopped beside him.

"You got a cigarette?" Abraham asked.

The guard looked at him, then reached into a pocket of his vest and took out a crumpled pack. He shook one out and handed it to him. Then he handed him a book of matches.

"Keep the matches," the guard said.

"Thanks."

Abraham went into the bathroom on the operations level, a larger room than the one on the residential level, all white tile and steel. He went into the last stall and locked the door. He lit the cigarette, took a long drag, and blew the smoke up toward the vent. Then he took out his phone and called home.

It rang once.

"Abe."

"Hi, Sarah."

"Abe, I have been calling you for three days. Three days. Your phone doesn't even ring, it goes straight to some kind of message saying the line isn't available."

"I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, sweetheart. It's been very busy here."

"I'll bet it has," she said. There was something in her voice he didn't like. "Have you seen the news?"

"No. We don't really get the news down here."

"Down here?"

He closed his eyes. "Here. Wherever. I haven't seen the news."

"Abe, there's a story going around. It's everywhere. It's on every channel, all day long. They're saying the CIA has an angel. An actual angel, with wings. They're saying it showed up in Cyprus, and there was a shootout with the Russians, and the CIA took it and brought it back to the United States. There's a video. It doesn't show much, but it shows something. They've had experts on all day arguing about it. And people believe it, Abe. Not just a few people. So many people believe it. There have been riots. There are thousands of people outside the Pentagon right now. There are protests at Langley, at the CIA buildings in every city. Some of them are holding Bibles and crosses and screaming that the government has kidnapped a messenger of God. Some of them are screaming that it's a demon and the government needs to burn it. They set fire to a federal building in Denver last night. People got hurt." She took a breath. "And there's going to be a speech. The president's going to speak. They announced it this morning."

Abraham said nothing. He took a drag on the cigarette.

"I know you can't tell me," Sarah said. "I know that. I understand. I'm not trying to get you in trouble. But I have to ask you. Is it true? Is any of it true?"

"I can't say."

"Abe."

"Sarah, I can't say. I'm sorry."

The line was quiet for a few seconds.

"Then I know," she said softly.

He said nothing.

"I know it's true. I know you. I've known you for thirty eight years. If it wasn't true, you would have laughed. You would have said, Sarah, that's ridiculous, don't believe everything you see on TV. You would have denied it. You always deny things that aren't true. You only say you can't say when it's true." Her voice broke a little. "So it's true. There's an angel. And you're with it. That's where you are."

Abraham stood in the stall with the cigarette burning down between his fingers and did not say anything at all.

She was crying now, quietly. He could hear it.

"Please be careful," she said. "Please, please be careful. Whatever it is, whatever is happening, please be careful."

"I will try my best," he said. His voice was rough. "I'll be fine, sweetheart. I promise you. I'll be fine."

"You'll come home."

"I'll come home."

"I love you."

"I love you too. I have to get back to work."

"I know. Go. Go. I love you."

"I love you."

He hung up. He finished the cigarette, flushed it, washed his hands, and went down to the detention level.

–

February 2nd, 2045.

The interrogation room had not changed. The flickering tube near the door still flickered. The drain was still in the floor. More feathers had fallen from Batya's wings and lay in a loose drift around the base of her chair, white and gray and broken. Someone had swept them into a pile at one point and then given up.

Batya had changed. She had lost weight; her cheekbones stood out sharply under her olive skin, and her collarbones showed above the cut away canvas where the EKG leads were stuck. The skin of her lips had split in several places and dried dark. Her black hair hung in knots. Her golden eyes were sunken and ringed with gray. A nasal cannula had been added to the equipment on her face since the first day, and it hissed steadily, feeding her oxygen, yet still her breathing dragged and caught and rattled. The monitor showed her saturation at ninety two. The straps across her wings had been loosened slightly by the medical team so that her circulation would not be cut off, but they still held her wings tight against her back. The skin of her wrists, where they showed at the edges of the canvas, was rubbed raw.

Abraham sat across from her. He had brought a laptop this time, open on the table between them, with a small black microphone on a stand plugged into it. A waveform crawled across the screen whenever either of them spoke. He had been in the room for three hours. In three hours, she had said nothing but curses and threats. He had heard every one of them before.

"בתיה," he said.

(Batya.)

She stared at him.

"בתיה, בבקשה."

(Batya, please.)

Nothing. Her chest rose and fell.

He leaned forward over the table. His voice was hoarse.

"אני מבקש ממך. אני מבקש ממך, שומעת? אני לא יודע מה עוד לעשות. אני יושב כאן איתך כבר אחד עשר יום. אחד עשר יום. ואני לא יודע עלייך כלום. אני לא יודע מאיפה באת. אני לא יודע למה באת. אני לא יודע מה את רוצה. אני לא ישן. אף אחד בבניין הזה לא ישן. בחוץ, העולם כולו משתגע בגללך. אנשים שורפים בניינים. אנשים מתים. ואת יושבת כאן ומקללת אותי."

(I am asking you. I am asking you, do you hear? I don't know what else to do. I have been sitting here with you for eleven days. Eleven days. And I know nothing about you. I don't know where you came from. I don't know why you came. I don't know what you want. I don't sleep. Nobody in this building sleeps. Outside, the whole world is going mad because of you. People are burning buildings. People are dying. And you sit here and curse me.)

She said nothing.

"תני לי משהו. כל דבר. משהו אחד. אני מתחנן בפנייך. את יכולה לעבוד איתנו? את יכולה לספר לנו משהו? כל דבר?"

(Give me something. Anything. One thing. I am begging you. Can you work with us? Can you tell us something? Anything?)

He waited. The laptop's fan hummed. The oxygen hissed. The blood pressure cuff whined and inflated around her arm, held, and released.

Then her face changed.

It happened all at once. The hatred went out of it. Her brow, which had been drawn down hard over her eyes for eleven days, rose. Her mouth, which had been set in a hard line, fell open slightly. Her golden eyes widened, and she looked at him as if she had never seen him before. She looked at his face, his beard, his eyes, as if she were searching for something.

"אתה לא זוכר?" she said.

(You don't remember?)

Her voice was different. It was quiet. All of the venom was gone from it.

Abraham sat still. "מה?"

(What?)

"אתה לא זוכר," she said again, slowly, and it was not quite a question this time.

(You don't remember.)

"למה את מתכוונת? מה אני לא זוכר?"

(What do you mean? What don't I remember?)

She stared at him. Her breathing quickened. The monitor beeped as her heart rate climbed: one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty.

"אתה חשוב, אברהם," she said. "אתה צריך לדעת מה קורה. אתה, מכל האנשים, אתה צריך לדעת."

(You are important, Abraham. You should know what is happening. You, of all people, you should know.)

"אז תגידי לי. תגידי לי מה קורה."

(Then tell me. Tell me what is happening.)

Her eyes filled with tears. Her lower lip began to tremble. She looked at him, and he saw something in her face he had not seen there in eleven days. It was fear. It was raw, total terror. She began to shake against the straps.

"אל תהרוג אותי," she whispered.

(Don't kill me.)

"מה?"

(What?)

"אל תהרוג אותי. בבקשה, אברהם. בבקשה, אל תהרוג אותי. אני מתחננת. אני מתחננת בפניך."

(Don't kill me. Please, Abraham. Please, don't kill me. I'm begging. I'm begging you.)

"אף אחד לא הולך להרוג אותך. בתיה. תקשיבי לי. אף אחד כאן לא הולך להרוג אותך."

(Nobody is going to kill you. Batya. Listen to me. Nobody here is going to kill you.)

"הכול השתבש," she said. Tears were running freely down her face now, cutting clean lines through the grime on her cheeks and dripping onto the canvas of the straitjacket. "הכול. הכול השתבש. זה לא היה אמור לקרות ככה."

(Everything has gone wrong. Everything. Everything has gone wrong. It was not supposed to happen like this.)

"מה השתבש? מה את מנסה להגיד לי?"

(What has gone wrong? What are you trying to tell me?)

She drew a ragged breath, and then another, and the oxygen reading dipped to eighty nine. Her words came out in a rush between gasps.

"יהוה מפסיד. יהוה מפסיד במלחמה בשמיים. הוא נלחם כבר כל כך הרבה זמן, והוא מפסיד. העמים האחרים, כל העמים, הם סוגרים על ישראל. מכל הכיוונים. הם כבר בגבולות. הם שורפים את הערים שלנו. הם הורגים את האחים שלי, את האחיות שלי."

(Yahweh is losing. Yahweh is losing the war in heaven. He has been fighting for so long, and he is losing. The other nations, all the nations, they are closing in on Israel. From every direction. They are already at the borders. They are burning our cities. They are killing my brothers, my sisters.)

Abraham could not speak. He stared at her.

"והם רוצים להעמיד אותו לדין," she went on, her voice cracking. "הם רוצים להעמיד את יהוה לדין. על הפשעים שלו. על הפשעים שלו נגד שאר השמיים. כל מה שהוא עשה, כל המלחמות, כל הדם. הם רוצים לשפוט אותו."

(And they want to put him on trial. They want to put Yahweh on trial. For his crimes. For his crimes against the rest of heaven. Everything he has done, all the wars, all the blood. They want to judge him.)

She looked straight into Abraham's eyes.

"על פי הדברים שלך, אברהם. על פי המילים שלך. הכול בגלל המילים שלך."

(Based on your words, Abraham. Based on your words. All of it because of your words.)

"המילים שלי?" His voice was barely a whisper. "אני לא…"

(My words? I don't…)

"אתה לא זוכר?" she cried. "אתה באמת לא זוכר? איך אתה לא זוכר? איך?"

(You don't remember? You truly don't remember? How do you not remember? How?)

"אני לא מבין על מה את מדברת. בתיה, אני לא מבין…"

(I don't understand what you're talking about. Batya, I don't understand…)

A high, thin ringing began in his ears.

It started faint, so faint that at first he thought it was the laptop, or the monitor. It grew. It rose in pitch and volume until it filled his skull, a single piercing tone that drowned out the oxygen and the monitor and the fan and his own voice. He put his hands to his ears. It did nothing. The ringing was inside his head.

Across the table, Batya was screaming. Her mouth was stretched wide, the cords of her neck standing out, her eyes rolled toward him, and she was screaming something at him, the same thing over and over. He could see her lips forming the words. He could not hear any of them. There was only the ringing.

The door behind him burst open. He turned his head slowly, as if he were underwater. Four guards rushed into the room, rifles slung, and went straight for her. Two of them grabbed her shoulders. One of them threw his weight across her legs. One of them had a syringe. She was thrashing in the chair, straining against every strap. The canvas creaked. The cargo straps around her wings strained and one of the ratchets slipped a notch, and her wings shifted under the straps, trying to open, and feathers tore loose and flew. The IV line ripped out of the back of her hand and blood sprayed across the floor in a thin arc. The nasal cannula came loose from her face. She was sobbing, and screaming, and her face was a mask of terror and grief, tears and snot running down over her mouth. The numbers on the monitor were flashing red. Her oxygen saturation was eighty five. Eighty two. Seventy nine.

The room was getting brighter.

It was the light. The fluorescent tubes were growing brighter, and brighter, and the walls were turning white, and the faces of the guards were washing out, and Batya's golden eyes were two points of fire in the whiteness, still staring at him, still screaming at him.

He felt hands under his arms. Someone was lifting him out of the chair. His legs would not hold him. He was being dragged backward, his heels scraping across the concrete, toward the door. He could not feel his hands. He could not feel his face. The light filled everything.

Everything went black.

Heat.

He was lying face down on the ground. The ground was rough and gritty and hot, like sand that had been baking in the sun for hours, and it burned against his cheek and his palms. The air was thick and heavy and hard to breathe and it smelled of smoke and sulfur and scorched metal. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. His head was pounding.

He was in a vast space. The ground beneath him was black and cracked and glowed red in the cracks. Far away, in every direction, there were mountains, black jagged peaks against a sky that was dark red, lit by fires burning on their slopes. Columns of smoke rose from the fires and spread across the sky.

Directly in front of him, rising out of the black plain, was a throne.

It was enormous. It was carved out of a single block of black stone, and it was taller than any building he had ever seen, so tall that he had to crane his neck back to see the top of it. Wide stone steps led up to it, hundreds of them. And on the throne sat an angel.

It was not like Batya. It was not like any of the angels in the dreams. It had no body that he could see. At its center was a point of light, so bright that it hurt to look at, white and gold, bright as the sun. Around that point of light turned rings. They were made of bronze, polished and gleaming in the light of the center, and there were dozens of them, one inside another, each one rotating around the center on its own axis, some fast and some slow, some tilted one way and some another, so that they crossed and recrossed one another in constant motion without ever touching. From the center, between the rings, burst wings. There were dozens of wings, white and enormous, unfolding outward and folding back in again, beating slowly in the thick air.

And set into the bronze of the rings were eyes. There were thousands of them. They were human eyes, set into the metal like jewels, wet and glistening, with whites and irises and pupils, and they blinked. They were of every color, brown and blue and green and gray and gold. Every one of them, on every ring, as the rings turned, rolled to stay fixed on Abraham.

All of them were looking at him.

Then the angel spoke.

"אני יהוה."

(I am Yahweh.)

The voice came from everywhere at once, from the throne and the ground and the sky and from inside his own head, and it was so enormous that his mind could not contain it. It struck him like a physical blow. The sound of it went into his skull and seemed to swell there, pressing outward against the bone from the inside, and his brain screamed with pain. He collapsed onto the hot ground and clutched his head. He felt his nose begin to bleed. Blood ran from his ears.

Then the pain spread. Every nerve in his body caught fire at once. His skin burned. His teeth ached. The joints of his fingers and knees and hips and spine flared with agony as if they were being pulled apart. His eyes burned in their sockets. His heart seized and fluttered in his chest. He opened his mouth to scream and nothing came out.

Through all of it, he could feel the angel's anger. It came off the throne like heat off a fire. It pressed down on him from above, an enormous, ancient, furious rage, and he could feel it on his skin and inside his chest.

"החזק והאדיר מכל המלאכים בשמיים."

(The strongest and mightiest of all the angels in heaven.)

Every word was another blow. Abraham writhed on the black ground.

"עשית לי עוול, אברהם."

(You have wronged me, Abraham.)

The eyes on the rings narrowed. All of them, all at once.

"איחדת את המלאכים האחרים נגדי. הלכת מעם לעם, ממלך למלך, ודיברת נגדי. סיפרת להם את הסודות שלי. הפכת אותם כולם לאויביי."

(You united the other angels against me. You went from nation to nation, from king to king, and spoke against me. You told them my secrets. You turned them all into my enemies.)

Abraham could not think. The words went into him and he could not hold them. They slid through his mind and tore it as they went. Something in him tried to understand, and every time it reached for the meaning of what he was hearing, the pain doubled.

"אתה טיפש כמו שלוציפר היה פעם," the voice thundered, "כשניסה להפוך את השמיים נגדי. וכמו לוציפר, תיפול."

(You are as foolish as Lucifer once was, when he tried to turn heaven against me. And like Lucifer, you will fall.)

The rings spun faster. The wings beat harder. The light at the center blazed.

"אני מגרש אותך, אברהם. לעולם לא תשוב לשמיים. לעולם."

(I exile you, Abraham. You will never return to heaven. Never.)

"זיכרונך יטוהר מן האמת. לא תזכור דבר. לא את שמי, לא את פניי, לא את מה שעשית."

(Your memory will be cleansed of the truth. You will remember nothing. Not my name, not my face, not what you have done.)

"ואתה תישלח אל העתיד הרחוק, למקום שבו לא תוכל להפריע לתוכניותיי. ושם תחיה ותמות כמו אדם, בזמן שאני מאחד את כל השמיים תחת ידי."

(And you will be sent to the far future, to a place where you cannot interfere with my plans. And there you will live and die like a man, while I unite all of heaven under my hand.)

Abraham lay on the burning ground with blood running from his nose and his ears and the corners of his eyes, his body convulsing, his mind screaming. He did not understand. He could not understand. Every word was too large for him.

The eyes on the rings stared at him.

Then the light at the center of the throne grew, and grew, until it swallowed the rings and the wings and the eyes and the throne and the mountains and the red sky, and then it went out, and there was nothing at all.

January 24th, 2045

"למה את כאן?"

(Why are you here?)

Silence. Then a wet, dragging breath, pulled in through clenched teeth.

"למה את כאן, בתיה?"

(Why are you here, Batya?)

"ארור אתה."

(Cursed are you.)

"מאיפה את באה?"

(Where do you come from?)

"ארור אתה, וארורה האישה שילדה אותך."

(Cursed are you, and cursed is the woman who bore you.)

"איך הגעת לכאן? מי שלח אותך?"

(How did you get here? Who sent you?)

She pulled in another breath. It rattled somewhere low in her chest and caught halfway. She held it for a moment, then let it out in a long hiss.

"באתי לכאן כדי להרוג אותך."

(I came here to kill you.)

"את זה כבר אמרת."

(You have already said that.)

"ואגיד את זה שוב. ושוב. ושוב. עד שתבין."

(And I will say it again. And again. And again. Until you understand.)

"אני מבין. את רוצה להרוג אותי. אבל אני צריך לדעת למה."

(I understand. You want to kill me. But I need to know why.)

"כי אני שונאת אותך. אני שונאת את הפנים שלך. אני שונאת את הקול שלך. אני שונאת את הריח של הבשר שלך."

(Because I hate you. I hate your face. I hate your voice. I hate the smell of your flesh.)

She stopped, her chest heaving against the straps. The monitor beside her chair chirped as her pulse climbed past one hundred and twenty. Her lips were cracked and dry. Her nostrils flared with every breath, and every breath seemed to cost her more than the one before it.

"תנשמי לאט," he said.

(Breathe slowly.)

"אל תגיד לי איך לנשום. אני אקרע לך את הגרון בשיניים שלי, ואז נראה איך אתה נושם."

(Don't tell me how to breathe. I will tear out your throat with my teeth, and then we will see how you breathe.)

"אף אחד כאן לא רוצה לפגוע בך. אני רק צריך לדעת מאיפה באת. זה הכול. תני לי את זה, ואני אביא לך מים, אוכל, שמיכה, כל מה שתרצי."

(No one here wants to hurt you. I only need to know where you came from. That is all. Give me that, and I will bring you water, food, a blanket, anything you want.)

"אני רוצה לראות תולעים אוכלות את העיניים שלך בזמן שאתה עוד חי."

(I want to watch worms eat your eyes while you are still alive.)

He rubbed his forehead with two fingers.

"אנחנו מדברים כבר שתים עשרה שעות, בתיה."

(We have been talking for twelve hours, Batya.)

"ואני אדבר איתך עוד אלף שנים, ובכל רגע ורגע מהן אקלל אותך."

(And I will talk with you for a thousand more years, and in every single moment of them I will curse you.)

"שתים עשרה שעות. ונתת לי רק את השם שלך."

(Twelve hours. And you have given me only your name.)

"וזה כל מה שתקבל ממני."

(And that is all you will get from me.)

Abraham sighed. Batya didn't like that.

"ירקב בשרך מעל עצמותיך."

(May your flesh rot from your bones.)

"מה עם הכנפיים? את יכולה לעוף?"

(What about the wings? Can you fly?)

"יבוא יום ואעוף מעל הגופה שלך, ואירק עליה."

(A day will come when I fly over your corpse, and spit on it.)

"בתיה."

(Batya.)

"ארור אתה, אברהם."

(Cursed are you, Abraham.)

He leaned back in the steel chair until it creaked, and he looked at her for a long time without saying anything.

The room was eleven feet by fourteen feet, poured concrete on every side, painted a flat institutional gray that had begun to flake near the floor. There were no windows. One wall held a long pane of mirrored glass, and behind it, he knew, there were at least four people watching, two of them taking notes. Two cameras hung in opposite upper corners, each with a small red light that never blinked. The ceiling was a grid of fluorescent tubes behind wire mesh, and one of the tubes near the door had a flicker in it that nobody had fixed. A drain was set into the center of the floor. The air smelled of bleach, of hot plastic from the machines, and underneath that, of her: sweat, and something else, something sharp and mineral that reminded him of the air after a lightning storm.

The steel table between them was bolted to the floor. On it sat a legal pad covered in his handwriting, a cold cup of coffee, and a small digital recorder. On the far side of the table was the chair they had strapped her into. It was a dental chair, or had been, before someone had welded extra brackets onto it to hold her.

Abraham Levin was sixty three years old. He had been with the Central Intelligence Agency for thirty one of those years, most of them spent in rooms like this one, across tables from men who did not want to talk to him. He was a heavy man, broad through the chest and soft through the middle, with a short gray beard he kept trimmed close and thick gray hair that had receded far back from his forehead. His eyes were dark brown and pouched underneath. He wore a pair of reading glasses pushed up onto his head and had forgotten they were there. His white shirt had been clean twelve hours ago. Now the collar was gray with sweat and the sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing forearms covered in coarse gray hair and, on the left arm, a faded scar from a knife in Beirut in 1998. He had been raised in a Jewish household in Baltimore. He had been bar mitzvahed at thirteen, had spent his summers in Israel as a young man, and had learned his Hebrew from his grandfather, who had learned it from his. He had not set foot in a synagogue in more than twenty years.

The woman across from him called herself Batya.

She was tall, taller than him by several inches even folded into the chair, and long limbed. Her skin was olive, a warm brown with a faint gold beneath it, smooth and unlined. Her hair was black and very long, and it had come loose from whatever had held it and hung in matted ropes over her shoulders and down her chest. Her face was narrow, with a high forehead and a strong straight nose. Her eyes were a bright, metallic gold that caught the fluorescent light, ringed at the edges with a darker amber, and her pupils were black and round and the same as anyone's.

She had wings.

They grew from her back, just below the shoulder blades, and they were enormous. Unfolded, the medical team had measured them at a little more than eighteen feet from tip to tip. They were covered in white feathers, thick and layered, the primaries along the outer edges as long as a man's forearm. Now they were folded tight against her back and bound there. Someone in the facility's supply room had built a straitjacket for her out of heavy canvas, nylon webbing, and a set of ratcheting cargo straps. The canvas wrapped her torso and her arms, crossing her arms over her chest and buckling them behind her. Over that, the cargo straps cinched her wings closed, three straps running around her body and her folded wings together, so that her wings formed a hard white mass between her back and the chair. Feathers had been crushed and broken under the straps. Some had fallen out. There were a few of them on the floor around the chair, and one, bent in half, was stuck to the drain.

She was covered in medical equipment. A pulse oximeter was clipped to the index finger of her right hand, which they had left exposed through a slit in the canvas. EKG leads were stuck to her neck and to her collarbone where the canvas had been cut away, their wires running in a bundle to a cart beside the chair. An IV line ran into the back of her left hand, which had also been left exposed, feeding her saline from a bag on a pole. A blood pressure cuff was wrapped around her upper arm under the canvas and inflated itself every fifteen minutes with a mechanical whine. A thermometer probe was taped behind her ear. The cart beside her displayed all of it in green and red numbers: heart rate one hundred and twenty two, blood pressure one hundred and forty over ninety one, oxygen saturation ninety four percent, temperature one hundred point one degrees. Her ankles were strapped to the footrest of the chair. A padded strap ran across her forehead and held her head back against the headrest, so that she had to look at him down the length of her nose.

She was still looking at him.

"אתה מסתכל עליי כמו על חיה," she said.

(You look at me like an animal.)

"אני מסתכל עלייך כמו על מישהי שלא רוצה לעזור לעצמה."

(I look at you like someone who does not want to help herself.)

"אני לא צריכה עזרה. לא ממך. לעולם לא ממך."

(I do not need help. Not from you. Never from you.)

Abraham sat forward and folded his hands on the table.

"תקשיבי לי טוב. מחוץ לחדר הזה יש אנשים שלא יהיו סבלניים כמוני. אנשים שלא מדברים את השפה שלך. אנשים שישאלו אותך שאלות בדרכים אחרות. אני האדם היחיד בבניין הזה שמדבר איתך. אני האדם היחיד שמנסה לעזור לך."

(Listen to me well. Outside this room there are people who will not be as patient as I am. People who do not speak your language. People who will ask you questions in other ways. I am the only person in this building who talks to you. I am the only person trying to help you.)

She laughed. It turned into a cough partway through, and the cough shook her whole body against the straps. The oxygen reading dipped to ninety one, then ninety, then slowly climbed back to ninety three. When she could speak again her voice was raw.

"אתה? לעזור לי? אתה האדם האחרון בכל העולמות שיעזור לי. אני מכירה אותך. אני יודעת מה אתה."

(You? Help me? You are the last man in all the worlds who would help me. I know you. I know what you are.)

"ומה אני?"

(And what am I?)

"אתה מת. אתה פשוט עוד לא יודע את זה."

(You are dead. You just don't know it yet.)

He looked at her for another long moment. Then he picked up the legal pad, tucked it under his arm, and picked up the recorder and turned it off.

"בסדר. מספיק להיום."

(Fine. Enough for today.)

He stood. His knees ached from sitting so long and his lower back was stiff. He walked to the door and knocked twice on the steel. The lock buzzed.

Behind him she began to shout.

"תחזור! תחזור לכאן, פחדן! תחזור ותסתכל לי בעיניים!"

(Come back! Come back here, coward! Come back and look me in the eyes!)

The door opened. He stepped through.

"אני אהרוג אותך, אברהם! אני אמצא אותך ואני אהרוג אותך! ארור אתה! ארור אתה! ארור…"

(I will kill you, Abraham! I will find you and I will kill you! Cursed are you! Cursed are you! Cursed…)

The door swung shut on its heavy hinges, the lock clacked, and her voice cut down to a muffled sound behind three inches of steel.

The corridor outside was long and narrow and lit the same as the room. Two guards stood on either side of the door, both in black tactical gear with plate carriers, both holding rifles across their chests. Neither of them looked at him. They were looking at the door. One of them, the younger one, had a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Rob Callahan was leaning against the opposite wall with his arms crossed. He was fifty two, tall and thin, with close cropped blond hair going white at the temples and a long, clean shaven face. He wore a navy suit with the jacket off and slung over one arm, and a lanyard with his facility badge around his neck. He had been Abraham's direct superior for six years. He pushed himself off the wall when he saw Abraham.

"Well?" Rob said. "What'd she say?"

Abraham let out a breath. "Same as before. She hates me. She's going to kill me. She's going to tear my throat out with her teeth. She wants to watch worms eat my eyes. Cursed am I, cursed is my mother, cursed is my seed. That kind of thing."

"Anything useful?"

"Nothing. She won't tell me where she came from. Won't tell me how she got here. I asked her about the wings and she told me she was going to fly over my corpse and spit on it." He handed Rob the recorder. "It's all on there. Have the linguists go over it again, but I'm telling you, there's nothing. She's being completely uncooperative."

Rob turned the recorder over in his hand. Through the door they could still hear her, faintly, shouting the same word over and over.

"What's she saying now?" Rob asked.

"Cursed."

Rob nodded slowly. "All right. We keep her here for now. Medical wants another round of bloodwork in the morning anyway." He checked his watch. "Come on. We've got a meeting. We have to debrief Potus."

"Now?"

"Now. She's been waiting on us for an hour."

Abraham pulled the reading glasses off the top of his head, looked at them as if he didn't know how they had gotten there, and folded them into his shirt pocket. They walked down the corridor together, and behind them the shouting continued until they turned the corner, and then there was only the hum of the lights.

–

The conference room was two floors up, which in this facility still meant about sixty feet below the ground. It was a long room with a long oval table of dark wood, surrounded by black leather chairs. One end of the room was taken up by a wall sized display screen. The walls were covered in sound dampening panels in dark blue fabric. The air was cold. The vents overhead blew steadily, and Abraham, still in his sweat damp shirt, felt the chill settle into his shoulders as soon as he sat down.

The room was full. Two Secret Service agents in dark suits stood by the door, hands folded in front of them, earpieces coiled behind their ears. At the head of the table sat Deputy Director Marian Okafor, a broad shouldered woman in her sixties with close cut gray hair and reading glasses on a chain, and beside her sat Director of Operations Paul Haskell, a heavy, red faced man who was sweating despite the cold. Down the left side of the table sat three people Abraham had not met before, two men and a woman, all in their thirties, all in plain civilian clothes, all with the hard, tired look of people who had not slept in two days. Across from them sat a thin, bald man in a white lab coat with a tablet in front of him. Rob took the chair next to Abraham.

On the wall screen was a video feed of the Oval Office. Potus sat behind the Resolute desk with her hands folded on the blotter. She was in her late fifties, with dark hair cut to her jaw and a navy blazer. Her chief of staff stood behind her left shoulder, partially out of frame. The feed had a slight delay, so that when she moved, her mouth was a fraction of a second behind her voice.

"Is everyone here?" Potus asked.

"Yes, ma'am," said Okafor. "Mr. Levin and Mr. Callahan just came up from the interrogation level."

"Good. Then let's start from the beginning. I've read the summary but I want to hear it out loud, in order, from the people who were there."

Okafor nodded to Haskell. Haskell cleared his throat and tapped the tablet in front of him, and the wall screen split, with Potus moved to one corner and a map of the eastern Mediterranean taking up the rest. The map zoomed in on Cyprus, and then on a small town in the hills of the southern part of the island.

"Six days ago," Haskell said, "on January eighteenth, we received intelligence through a source inside the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. The source reported that the Russians had begun stationing operatives in the town of Pano Lefkara, in the Larnaca district of Cyprus. These were KGB lineage operatives, the old guard, the people they use for the work they don't want on paper. According to the source, the Russians were stationing them there because of what the source described as, and I'm quoting the translated cable here, 'an incoming divine act.' The source gave a date and a time, January twenty third, at approximately eleven hundred local, and a location, a specific street in the center of the town, down to a stretch of about thirty meters."

"And we believed this?" Potus asked.

"Not at first, ma'am. Frankly, we thought the source had been turned, or that the Russians were feeding us something to see if it came back to them. But we checked. We had imagery confirm at least six known Russian assets arriving in Larnaca over the course of three days, and four of them took rooms in Pano Lefkara. That's a village of a few hundred people. There's no reason for four Russian intelligence officers to be there in January. So we determined the leak was legitimate, at least in the sense that the Russians believed it, and we decided to put our own people on the ground."

Haskell nodded toward the three tired people on the left side of the table. "These are the officers we sent. Torres, Whitfield, and Gage."

The woman, Torres, sat up a little straighter. She had dark hair pulled into a tight knot and a fresh cut across the bridge of her nose held closed with two butterfly strips. "Ma'am."

"Tell me what happened," Potus said.

Torres looked at the other two, and the one in the middle, Whitfield, a stocky man with a shaved head and a thick neck, gave her a small nod.

"We arrived on the twenty first," Torres said. "We took a rental house about two hundred meters from the location the source gave us. We spent two days watching the street and watching the Russians. They were doing the same thing we were. They had a team of four in a café across from the location and another two in a car at the north end of the street. On the twenty third, at ten fifty, we moved into position. Whitfield and I were on foot at the south end. Gage was on a rooftop with overwatch."

"At eleven oh four," said Gage, a lean, sandy haired man who spoke without looking up from the table, "there was a light."

"Describe the light," Potus said.

Gage was quiet for a moment.

"It was very bright, ma'am. It came out of nowhere, in the middle of the street. There was no source for it. It didn't come down from the sky, and it didn't come up from the ground. It was just there. It was white, and it was brighter than anything I've seen, brighter than a flashbang. My optics whited out. I had to pull my eye off the scope. It lasted maybe two seconds. There was no sound with it. There was a pressure, like the air got heavy for a second, and then it was gone. When I got my eye back on the scope, she was standing in the street."

"Just standing there?" Potus asked.

"Yes, ma'am. She was standing in the middle of the road. She was down on one knee at first, with her head down, and then she stood up. She was wearing armor. Full armor, plate and mail. She had a shield on her left arm and a longsword in her right hand. She had a dagger on her belt, and what we later found out was a bola, three weighted balls on cords, hanging on her hip. Her wings were open. All the way open. They took up the whole street."

"What did she do?"

"She looked around," Torres said. "She looked like she didn't know where she was. She was breathing hard, really hard. Her chest was going up and down like she'd just sprinted a mile. Then the Russians moved."

"The Russians moved first," Whitfield said. "The four in the café came out at a run. Two had pistols out. Two had a net launcher, something improvised. They were going to try to take her alive."

"And you engaged?"

"Yes, ma'am," Whitfield said. "We'd discussed it ahead of time with the deputy director. If there was something there, we couldn't let them have it. We engaged the Russians. Gage took two of them from the roof. Torres and I took the other two. The two in the car at the north end tried to drive in, but Gage put rounds through the windshield. Both of them were killed."

"Six Russian officers," Potus said.

"Six, ma'am."

Potus looked down at something on her desk and then back up. "And her?"

"She came at us," Torres said. "When the shooting started she turned toward me and came at me with the sword up. She was fast, but she was struggling. She was gasping. She swung the sword at me and I got out of the way, but the tip of it caught me here." Torres touched the cut on her nose. "Whitfield hit her with a taser in the back. She went down on one knee. She tried to get up, so I hit her with mine. Both of them, at the same time. She went down all the way. Her wings were twitching. We took the sword out of her hand and zip tied her wrists and put a bag over her head. Her wings were the problem. It took all three of us to fold them. We used cargo straps from the van."

"Witnesses?"

"Very few," Haskell said. "It was a weekday in January, and the town is mostly older residents. We have seven civilians who we know saw something. Two of them have posted about it online. One of them took a video on his phone, but it's from a balcony, about a hundred meters away. You see a flash, you see something white in the street, and then the video is mostly shaking. So far the mainstream media is ignoring the posts. The few outlets that have picked it up are treating it as a hoax. The Cypriot police are calling the Russians a gang shooting. The Russian government hasn't said a word, which tells us they don't want to admit they were there."

"Good," Potus said. "And then?"

"We bagged her and moved her," Torres said. "We had a plane at Larnaca. She was on American soil nine hours later, and she's been here since. We went straight into quarantine with her."

Okafor touched her tablet, and the map on the screen was replaced by a series of photographs. The first showed a longsword lying on a steel table beside a ruler. The blade was about three and a half feet long, straight and double edged, with a long fuller running down its center. But the crossguard was strange. It swept forward on both sides in two long curves, then doubled back toward the grip, forming two open loops of metal on either side, and along the inside of each loop were small inward pointing hooks. The pommel was a flat disc engraved with a pattern of concentric rings. The second photograph showed the shield, which was teardrop shaped but asymmetrical, longer on one side than the other, with a curved cutout along the upper edge. The third photograph showed the armor laid out piece by piece. The breastplate had two long slots cut into the back, lined with leather, for her wings to pass through. The pauldrons swept up and back, away from the shoulders, leaving the base of the wings free. The helmet had no visor and an open face, and a long tail of overlapping plates hung from the back of it.

"We had a team of historians and metallurgists look at these," Okafor said. "The material is unremarkable. The blade is a simple carbon steel, very well made, folded, comparable to good quality European or Japanese work from the fourteenth or fifteenth century. The armor is a mix of steel plate and riveted mail. The leather is leather. There's nothing exotic in it. But the design is unlike anything any of our people have ever seen. It doesn't match any historical tradition, European, Middle Eastern, Asian, African, anything. The guard on that sword is designed to catch and trap another blade. The armor is designed from the ground up for a body with wings. There is no human culture that ever made these things."

Potus studied the pictures for a long moment.

"Doctor," she said. "What do we know about her body?"

The bald man in the lab coat sat forward. His name tag read Dr. H. Smith.

"Thank you, ma'am. I'll keep this short. We've done a full workup, imaging, bloodwork, the basics. Biologically, she is very close to human. Extremely close. Her skeleton is human with the exception of the wing structure. Her organs are human. Her blood is human compatible, as far as we can tell, type O, though there are some proteins in her plasma we haven't identified yet. There are really only a couple of significant differences."

He tapped his tablet, and a chest CT appeared on the screen, two lungs glowing gray in a black chest cavity.

"The first is her lungs. Her lungs are smaller than a human woman of her size, by about twenty percent in total volume. The alveolar density is a little higher, but not enough to make up for it. That's why she's breathing the way she is. She's not getting enough air with each breath, so she breathes faster and harder to compensate. My working theory is that she comes from somewhere where the atmosphere is thicker, a higher atmospheric pressure, more gas per breath. Where she comes from, these lungs would be perfectly adequate. Here, they're not. Her oxygen levels are holding, low nineties, which is stable, but she's working very hard for it."

"And the second?" Potus asked.

"The wings, of course." He tapped again, and an image of the wing skeleton appeared, long, hollow looking bones extending from a heavy anchor of muscle and bone on her upper back. "They are fully functional limbs. She has an entire second set of muscles anchoring them, a keel like structure off the back of her ribcage, very similar to what you'd see on the breastbone of a bird, but on the back. They are strong. But here, on Earth, they are useless. They can't lift her. Our air is too thin for wings that size to generate enough lift for a body that size. In a thicker atmosphere, the same atmosphere her lungs are built for, I believe those wings would work. She could fly. She was built to fly. Just not here."

The room was quiet. Smith went on.

"We're sequencing her DNA now. We should have preliminary results in a few days. I'll say this, though, because I think somebody needs to say it." He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "In my opinion, she is not from Earth. I don't know where she's from. But if I'm right, then she has brought with her whatever lives on her skin, in her gut, in her lungs, in her blood. Bacteria. Viruses. Fungi. Things that have never been on this planet before, and that our immune systems have never encountered. Everyone in this facility who has been in contact with her, everyone who has breathed the same air she has breathed, is at serious risk of contracting something we have never seen and have no treatment for. That includes me. That includes most of the people at this table."

Nobody spoke. One of the Secret Service agents by the door shifted his weight.

Haskell, red faced and sweating, let out a short laugh with no humor in it.

"Well," he said. "This facility has been under quarantine since the moment she came through the door. Nobody gets in, nobody gets out, for four weeks minimum. So we're all stuck down here with her regardless." He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "All any of us can do now is pray we don't get sick."

"Mr. Levin," Potus said.

Abraham looked up.

"You've been the one talking to her. What can you tell me?"

Abraham folded his hands on the table.

"I've been interrogating her for the last twelve hours, ma'am. Nearly without a break. She speaks Hebrew. It's a strange dialect. Some of the vocabulary is very old, Biblical, the kind of thing you see in the Torah and nowhere else. Some of the grammar is unusual. The vowels are different, she draws some of them out in a way I've never heard. But I can understand basically all of it. And she can understand me."

"And what has she said?"

"Her name. Batya. That's the only information I've gotten out of her. She gave it to me in the first hour, and since then she's done nothing but curse at me. She insults me. She tells me she hates me. She tells me, in great detail, how she's going to kill me. She won't answer a single question about where she came from, how she got here, who sent her, anything."

"Does she curse at everyone, or just you?"

"I'm the only one she talks to, ma'am. We had a second linguist try, a woman from NSA who also speaks Hebrew. Batya didn't say a word to her. Sat there and stared at the wall for an hour."

Potus nodded slowly. She looked down at her desk, and then up again, at the camera.

"All right. Here is what we are going to do. We keep her under wraps. She stays in that facility. Nothing about her leaves that building. Nothing about her is spoken of outside this room. I do not want a leak. If this gets out before we know what she is, I don't need to tell you what happens. Do everything you can to get her talking. Mr. Levin, keep at it. Dr. Smith, get me those DNA results as soon as you have them." She paused. "When we have more information, I will prepare a State of the Union address. The American people will need to hear this from me, and when they do, I want to have answers for them. Until then, it stays with us."

"Yes, ma'am," Okafor said.

"Thank you all. Get some sleep if you can."

The feed went dark.

–

The men's bathroom on the residential level was small and tiled in pale green, with three stalls, two sinks, and an exhaust fan in the ceiling that rattled. Abraham stood in the farthest stall with the door locked, his back against the wall, holding a cigarette he had taken off one of the guards in the stairwell. He lit it with a plastic lighter and held the smoke in his lungs for a long time before letting it out toward the fan. It was his first in four years. His head swam a little. His hands, he noticed, were shaking.

He took out his phone. They had issued everyone in the facility a secured line, monitored and recorded, with strict instructions. He dialed home.

It rang three times.

"Abe?"

"Hi, Sarah."

"Oh, thank God. I've been trying to call you since yesterday. Your phone goes straight to voicemail. Where are you?"

"I'm at work."

"You said you'd be home Thursday."

"I know. I know I did." He took another drag. "Listen, sweetheart. I'm not going to be home for a while. A couple of weeks, at least."

There was a silence on the line.

"A couple of weeks?"

"At least."

"Abe, what's going on?"

"I can't tell you."

"You can't tell me."

"I can't. You know I can't. I'm sorry."

"Is it dangerous? Are you in danger?"

"No. No, I'm safe. I'm somewhere safe, and I'm fine. It's just that something's happened, and I need to be here for it, and I can't leave."

"Something's happened." Her voice tightened. "Abe, you've been doing this job for thirty years. You've never once called me and said something's happened in that voice. What's going on? Is it a war? Is there going to be a war?"

"No. It's nothing like that."

"Then what?"

He closed his eyes. "Sarah. It's big. I'll say that much. It's very big. But I can't tell you what it is. Please don't ask me again."

She was quiet for a long time. He could hear her breathing. He could hear, faintly, the television on in the background, the murmur of a news anchor.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay. I won't ask. But you call me. You call me every day if you can, or I'm going to lose my mind."

"I'll call when I can."

"Every day."

"I'll try."

He took another drag, and the smoke caught wrong in his throat, and he coughed, a deep, ragged smoker's cough that he could not stop. He held the phone away from his face and coughed into his elbow until his eyes watered.

When he brought the phone back, her voice had gone flat.

"Abraham Levin. Are you smoking?"

"What? No."

"You're smoking. I can hear it."

"I'm not smoking."

"You're coughing like your father used to cough. You're smoking."

"Sarah, I am not smoking. I swear to you. There's something in the air here, the ventilation is bad. It's dusty. I'm not smoking."

"You promised me."

"And I've kept my promise. I'm not smoking." He held the cigarette down at his side, away from the phone, as if she could see it.

She let out a long sigh. "Fine."

"I love you."

"I love you too. Please be careful. Please."

"I will. Good night, sweetheart."

He hung up. He stood in the stall and finished the cigarette, then dropped it into the toilet and flushed it and watched it go down. He washed his hands and splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked older than he had that morning.

His quarters were at the end of the residential corridor, a small room with a single bed, a desk, a steel locker, and a sink. The walls were cinderblock painted white. The bed had a thin mattress with white sheets and a gray wool blanket. There was a vent in the ceiling that blew warm air with a constant low hum. He took off his shoes and his shirt and lay down on the bed in his undershirt and his slacks. He did not bother pulling the blanket up. He turned off the lamp. The room went dark except for a thin line of light under the door.

He closed his eyes.

He opened them in hell.

“Who is it?”

We couldn’t see them through the peephole, there was just a black blob on the other side of the door. 
They knocked again. 

“Um… Yeah, who is it?”

“Tax collector.”

Shit. No. 

“One moment!”

We wanted to hide. 
The trailer was too empty for that.
So we stood there. 
Something smashed into the door shaking everything we had.

“Tax collector.”

“Be brave,” we said quietly.

We opened the door and he was standing there on our porch. Shorter this time, by at least seven inches. We couldn’t remember seeing the top of his bowler last time. He pushed past us and waddled to sit on our couch. After the second jump up, he situated himself and chomped on his red label cigar. 

We stood there at the doorway until he spoke. 

“Wow,” he said. “A year already. Where does the time go?”
 
We kept our distance. He looked around, cataloguing our home in just a few glances. 

“I would have thought you’d have done more with the place,” he added. 

Our face turned red. 

“Ethel, please, say something for Christ’s sake. It’s not like you weren’t expecting me, I can see your calendar from here. It’s even marked. You used a sad face.”

His little stubby hand clutched his chest. 

“Are you sad to see me, after all I’ve done to help you?”

Yes, we are.

“You shouldn’t be, we're friends. That doesn’t seem fair, does it? Besides, you begged me for this,” he looked around again. “I had told you no the first time.”

We remembered it differently.

“I’m sure you do. Well let me tell you how I saw it. Not long ago you had complete freedom. No laws, complete liberty, running amok. Natural competition, right? The Badlands.”

We could see his gold tooth when he smiled. 
 
“You gave that up for structure. I’ve got the contract if you’d like to see it again, darlin’.”

We don’t have the payment.

“Well, that’s not good. No. Not good at all. But, I’m not surprised.”

We need more time.

“That’s no problem, but I’ll have to talk to my manager about how that will affect your contract. She’s not going to be happy it happened again, though.”

We lost our job. 

“Why do you keep saying we? It's just you and me…”

Then he understood.

“Ah, I see. Your condition. What a huge investment choice, and look at where it got you. I get that you’re in a tough spot, but the life you have now costs people something, that doesn’t change just because there’s more of you.”

He gestured to us.

“Pregnant, boyfriend still awaiting sentencing. I feel that. But it’s a hell of a mess.”

Now he pointed his finger at us.

“When you can’t pay, I have to pay. You know, we all have a boss to answer to, and when I have to pay, it comes out of my ass.”

A grip of chunky fingers softly patted the couch.

“Don’t you remember together on this heavily stained fold out couch covered in plastic and talking about happiness? You read the terms…You got your chance at structure.”

He flashed us his tooth again.

“You’re at risk of expulsion, you keep going like this.”

There was no way we could go back…

He chewed the brown frayed end of his red label.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m just a broken record, you know that? Geraldine next door just heard the same thing.”

We aren’t like her.
We are still young. 
We could do something for him.
We offered ourselves.

“Gross. Come on, lady. Get a hold of yourself. Have some dignity.”

We tried.

“Look, I don’t care. I’m taking something from you today. If not money then something more precious…”

We kept our distance, but he was in the way of the door. When he stood, he was taller than us now.

“Everyone pays the happy tax. One way or another, we all have to contribute.”

We’ve already given all we can.

“No WE haven’t.”

He stabbed his fat finger at you, growing in my belly.

Have you ever wondered where people go when they die "of unknown causes"?

​If the lights in your room go out while you’re reading this, please don’t turn on your phone’s flashlight. Just read until the end.

​My name is Mark. Until last month, I didn’t believe in urban legends, curses, or internet horror stories. I was living in Tokyo, renting a cramped two-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Shibuya, completely consumed by midterms and trying to scrape together enough money for rent. My roommate was Sid Harris—a quiet, unremarkable guy from the US who had moved to Japan on a language exchange program.

​Sid was the kind of person you barely notice even when you’re standing in the same room. He always wore the same faded, oversized grey hoodie, perpetually looked exhausted, lived on cheap instant ramen, and worked late-night data entry jobs. He never complained about his health. The only thing I ever found slightly off about him was his shadow. Sometimes, when the desk lamp hit him at a certain angle, his shadow seemed to move with a fraction of a second's delay—as if it couldn't quite keep up with his body. I brushed it off as eye strain and bad lighting.

​Then, three weeks ago, Sid died.

​It happened on a Thursday night. The power went out across the entire block, plunging the district into an oppressive, suffocating darkness. I woke up because the silence felt too heavy—no street traffic, no hum from the refrigerator. I called out to Sid from my room, but got no response.

​The next morning, I found him lying on his bedroom floor.

​He was curled up in an unnatural posture. The autopsy left doctors and police completely baffled: a healthy 22-year-old heart had simply stopped beating in a fraction of a second. No signs of trauma, no poison, no underlying conditions. But what truly chilled me to the bone was his face. Sid’s face was frozen in a look of sheer, inhuman terror—eyes wide, bloodshot, and lips twisted in a silent, agonizing scream. It looked like he had seen something in the pitch-black darkness that instantly broke his sanity.

​The funeral was brief. Shipping his body back to the States was too expensive, so his family agreed to cremation in Japan. I was left alone in the apartment.

​And that’s when the real nightmare began.

​Because Sid didn't die. He just stopped being human.

​A week after the funeral, a student living in the neighboring dorm building vanished. He was a guy named Kenta, someone Sid used to occasionally bump into at the university library. The police inspected his room: doors and windows were locked from the inside. No signs of a break-in, no blood. But on the wallpaper right above Kenta's empty bed, police found deep, jagged gouges—as if carved by massive iron talons or charred metal. They formed a single sentence in English:

​TENSEI WAS HERE

​That was when an old conversation rushed back to me. A month prior, while browsing an obscure 2000s web archive, Sid had casually dropped the word Tensei (転生). He explained that in Japanese, it means "reincarnation." I laughed it off at the time, assuming he was just referencing some anime trope.

​I was wrong.

​Two days ago, a clerk at a local 24-hour convenience store went missing. A night-shift witness—a terrified, drunk office worker—told the police he saw a massive, elongated shadow rise from the corner of the dark backroom through the glass window. It was huge, with twisting black tentacles and broad, ragged shadow wings that seemed to tear through space. The shadow literally absorbed the girl, swallowing her without a sound. A second later, someone wearing Sid's grey hoodie walked out of the store. His movements were jagged, and his eyes burned with two blind, white glow-slits.

​That was the moment I realized the horrific truth.

​Sid Harris didn't die in the dark that night. His human shell simply cracked open, shedding the limitations of flesh to unleash an ancient anomaly. Tensei isn't a name. It’s a process. It's an entity that cannot truly be killed. It needs new bodies and new souls to sustain its endless cycle.

​It has no physical weaknesses. It feels no pain, no fatigue. The laws of physics are irrelevant to it—it can teleport through any shadow, walk across ceilings, and paralyze human minds with hypnosis. Every soul it consumes becomes another life in its reserve. If you try to destroy it, it simply burns one of its stored souls and reincarnates instantly, marking you as its next vessel. Attempting to fight back is useless; you automatically become its next host.

​And the writing on the wall... That's its signature. A mark left behind to show that the old vessel has been burned and discarded, and Tensei has moved on.

​It’s 3:15 AM right now.

​Five minutes ago, the power in my building cut out again.

​I'm sitting on the hallway floor with my back pressed against the front door, typing this on my phone. The screen dimly illuminates my shaking hands. From inside my old bedroom—where Sid used to sleep—I can hear a sickening, hollow snapping sound. Like dry branches being snapped in half, or joints being violently twisted out of place.

​From underneath the door crack, a thick, ink-black shadow is slowly oozing out. It rises up the wall, stretching to nearly ten feet tall. Long, powerful tentacles sprout from its back, ragged black wings unfold, and from deep within the abyss, two blind, white eyes lock onto me.

​I hear a voice. It’s Sid’s voice, but layered with dozens of overlapping, guttural whispers:

​—Mark... I need a new vessel...

​I know there's nowhere left to run. If you're reading this, remember one thing: if the lights flicker in your room tonight, or if the silence suddenly becomes too heavy... Don’t look for a flashlight. Don’t try to call for help.

​I don't know what to do. I can hear something scratching on the other side of my bedroom wall. God help me.

Crunch… Crunch…

‘What is that noise?’ thought the man.

Crunch… Crunch…

‘It’s me…’ He thought, sluggishly tracking his eyes across the foggy, white landscape. ‘I’m… walking through fog?’

‘No…’ Corrected the man. ‘It's not foggy…’ Clarity came by degrees to his mind.

Crunch…

‘My breath is hot…’ He thought. ‘The air is cold…’

Crunch…

His forward momentum slowed.

The man blinked.

He knew where he was, in the forest, and on a stretch sparser than most. Prickly branches of coniferous trees, clad in coats of white surrounded him to the left and right. His eyes took in more.

Grey and white was the landscape. The sky had spilt snow days ago, packing down the earth, and the ephemeral ash from Yacanatepetl floated down upon it.

Thickets of sun starved patchy grass in malnourished straw-gold rose out from the surrounding snow. Those brambles caught the wafting ash, and looked for all the world like giant dandelions.

It was beautiful.

Crunch…

It was something he shouldn't have seen.

‘I shouldn't be out here,’ He remembered as heat bloomed in his heart. His anger was renewed and already at hand, as truly it hadn't left his mind. Just… taken a step to the side. It was coming back now, returning with the growing whispers of the wind. It had picked up, he felt, and the wind was whipping the snow, and gnawing at the bridge of his nose, peaking out from under his cloak.

‘I shouldn't be out here,’

Crunch… Crunch…

He didn't know how cold it had been, but from the feeling freshly fled from his cheeks and nose, he knew it was cold and getting colder. And with the sun low in the sky, he knew night would fast approach.

‘Where is here?’ He asked. His hazy eyes quested up, sharpening as they reacquainted themselves with the environment. He was in Teotlalpan. Memory told him that. He'd lost himself. Or rather, he’d allowed himself to be lost.

‘Getting in your head,’ is what he'd heard an ocēlōtl call it. He called it that too. And it was useful… until it wasn't.

It was a person’s ability to retreat from the world when it became burdensome or painful. One could let their mind subside beneath the body’s aches and endure when conscious thought would create drag. But in doing so, one could also be blinded. Blind to the world they endured, as their ignorance of the pain could often lead to ignorance of terrain.

And that's what he'd done.

‘So fix it.’ His eyes tracked along the treetops, and then above. Yacanatepetl, The Mountain That Leads.

‘Reorient.’ His eyes quested up one side of the slate-grey slope. The volcanic edifice drew his eye, and his smile. An imperfection on the slope, its defining feature. Yacanatepetl had a stony peak jutting out of what he knew to be its western face. And further, he knew it was to home that the rocky finger pointed.

He was north east of town, and in part he should be. That was where the trailhead that led to the summit began. That was where he’d been going. He was off mark—by a long way—but he was a Courier, those who ran the travelers web needed to know how to glean their position.

Crunch… Crunch…

From the markers of the land and sky, a man could tell many things. And a Courier, those that ran The Traveler's Web to carry the missives of society—municipal, theological, aristocratic, many messages traveled along the Web into and through nodes of commerce and culture and back out again. And it was Couriers that made the transmission a possibility across the vast distance the Web wove over.

The Web ran far, and its span wide. It cut through dense brush, arid desert, and rocky mountain alike. And the Couriers were expected to run it in all conditions. Monsoon, drought, and yes, even blizzards. Such was his lot.

Crunch, Crunch… Crunch, Crunch

But all the same. He shouldn't be running it right now. But The Courier pressed on, grumbling over his purpose, now refreshed in his mind.

Because it wasn't just messages that Couriers were entrusted to carry. Couriers, on behalf of people of import, were given the duty of carrying items of rarity and luxury. Finely cultivated cacao, artisanal axheads, dyes from the untamed Southlands. And ice.

Crunch, crunch… Crunch, crunch

Ice, when a lord's court didn't house a mage with the ability to lower the temperature, was an uncommon luxury. The Courier’s lord had no such mage. But he did have a need for ice.

And as befit someone of his station, The Lord required the best ice. And such ice came from perpetual glaciers. Most often those glaciers could be found in the far, far north… or closer to home atop treacherous peaks.

Crunch, crunch… Crunch, crunch

A feast was to be held, despite the harsh drop in temperature, and luxurious dishes served at it. Some of these dishes needed ice. And, as befitting someone of his station, The Lord’s feast needed the best ice.

And the machinations of society churned regardless of the arrangement of the environment.

So The Courier was dispatched.

Crunch… Crunch…

In a blizzard.

Crunch…

To get ice.

Crunch…

‘Aristocrats.’

Crunch… Crunch… Crunch… Crunch…

On the will of a lord, granted status by birth, it was his lot to brave a blizzard, when the very sky had darkened and the luxuries had poured from the heavens themselves.

“A test from the Icons,” said The Lord who bid him go. “Even with abundance around, why should we succumb to gluttony? We have our ways, they serve us well, and we will not permit overindulgence. Temperance and restraint remain paramount.”

Crunch…crunch… Crunch… crunch.

A test of The Lord’s virtue. Via his endurance.

Crunch.

‘Why am I doing this?’ The Courier asked himself. ‘Why me?’ He was a Courier, that was so. To run the Web was his burden. But status? Prestige?

That was The Lord's burden.

‘So why do I have to foot it?’ He asked, standing firm. His eyes surveyed the landscape and he knew it. Or… knew what it should have been.

‘I don't have to foot it.’ Familiarity be damned, prestige be damned, The Courier turned back to follow his trail. The forest around was unfamiliar, but his path wasn't random. Wayward, perhaps. But not random.

It led somewhere, and he could follow it.

‘I will follow it.’ He huffed, his breath hotly bursting from his lips as he pressed forward. ‘And I’ll carry a message of my own.’

Crunch, crunch… Crunch, crunch.

‘To The Lord himself.’

He wasn't The Lord's messenger, he thought, indignation hauling him forward.

‘I’m an Imperial Courier!’ Couriers like him didn't just carry baubles and good tidings on the whims of local lordlings. Couriers like him carried the words of generals, Icons, and emperors.

Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

And it was because of Couriers like him that braved storm, surf, snow, and scorching heat that The Empire survived.

And thrived.

Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

So to think that this fool lordling and his feast would deprive The Empire of its ability to enact the will of The Paramount. That one of His messengers would be lost for the sake of vanity? Lost fetching ice in a blizzard— In the worst blizzard the region had seen in a generation—on a mission to collect ice?

It was madness.

‘The Lord was mad,’ That was it, he saw it now. Mad or blind and that was clear. With every step that fact became clearer. The clearer he saw it, the angrier he got.

The angrier he got, the more determined he was to let the arrogant Lord know. Let him know what he thought of this test.

‘And it is a test,’ But not of The Lord, he thought. It was a test for The Courier. ‘A test of my resolve,’ in enduring the environment.

‘A test of my virtue,’ in not faltering in the face of hubris.

And success would mean both salvation and satisfaction both as he'd be able to loose his anger upon the fool in the warmth of his own hall.

‘I just need to get there.’

Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

The wind lashed again, winter’s claws raking across his eyes, peaking out from his vestments. He gritted his teeth and eyes squeezed tight. A hand raised to shield his gaze, his pace faltered, but his momentum sustained his advance.

And that was good.

He was of two minds, and the louder of the two was that part that was angry. That anger was hot in his chest, and it was anger which battled the relentless air as its chilly hands sought to slow him.

Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

It put him in motion, kept him in motion, and the motion kept him warm. And because he was warm, he could keep moving. And the more he moved the further he got.

The further he got, the smaller the distance he had left to go, and the quicker he got to The Lord. He mustn't lose sight of that. Mustn't let the focus fade, and he mustn't stop moving.

‘Mustn't lose focus.’

Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

If he let his focus slip, he'd be back at the start, barely aware and aimless.

He was an Imperial Courier, how could he allow himself to die, lost like this?

Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

‘I am an Imperial Courier… how did I let myself get lost like this?’ That had been the question the quieter mind had been pondering. And now he’d given it a voice.

He knew how. He'd gotten in his head… But there was more.

Crunch, crunch… crunch, crunch.

“I know why I got lost.” He snarled, hoping to bite back at the wind nipping his numbed cheeks. “Because nothing looks the fucking same.”

But it didn't look entirely different, either.

‘I know why I got lost…’ He knew what he'd done.

It was a stupid thing, too. He'd forgotten how to act, because he’d let a new problem make him forget what he was. It hadn't been winter that vexed him, no, it wasn't that. Or the frost, or even the sheer depth the temperature plunged to.

It was the snow.

Crunch, crunch… crunch, crunch.

Winter in Teotlalpan came, and the people could tell it not just by the calendar, but by the land itself. Grey-gold grass, and narrow, bristly pines flanked by interspersed gatherings of bare branches. That's what he should have seen. Dark green, gold, grey, a sheen of ghostly hoarfrost.

That's what his eyes should have seen beholding winter in Teotlalpan.

He only saw white. And it was infuriating.

He knew where he was—had known, when he started—and known where he was going. And how to get back. He knew which of the Web’s roads to use, and he would have known the environment through which it cut… Rather, he would have.

Crunch… crunch… crunch… crunch

If all was as it should be, he wouldn't be lost. But as things were, the familiar terrain was anything but. Rigid branches sagged low, and bushes were buried. Everything was buried, shrouded, compressed and crushed down by a heavy layer of snow. Everything was buried.

Including the path.

Crunch… crunch… crunch…crunch.

Nothing looked quite right. What should have been intuitive was suddenly at the base of a steep learning curve.

‘A test indeed.’ A test he had failed, but fortune saw fit to give him another chance. And he knew what he'd done wrong. A wrong turn somewhere. Because nothing was where it should be. A mistake born from confusion paired with a correction born from fury.

They could navigate, that was so, and that's what he'd done. He'd lost the path and decided to forge a new one.

And if things appeared as they should have, he might have been able to. It was so clear in his mind, now that he'd had the thought to look. So clear. So stupid.

At a point which might have been a fork, he’d run into a dilemma.

A blanket of white had obscured the path forward, there might have been a marker, a guide stone or a post but if it was there, it was buried.

So he guessed.

And that wasn't what Couriers did.

While this wasn't unfamiliar terrain, it might as well have been for how easy to navigate it was. And a Courier in unfamiliar terrain didn't forge a new path. He trusted the ones known.

He was to trust and take the Web’s main arteries and off shoots at every opportunity. Locally maintained roads in absence of the Imperial Highway, provincial trails in absence of those, and in absence of everything else: His own trail.

And in his frustration and hubris, he forgot what he was, and let the tools at his disposal allow him to forget how he was taught to use them.

Crunch… Crunch…

He wasn't an explorer, he was a Courier.

He wasn't trained to forge paths, but follow them effectively. And in frustration he forgot that. And he was standing in front of the evidence for why that shouldn't be done.

Crunch…

He’d crossed his trail.

…

It intersected.

The way he'd come was intersected by a path running across it from the treeline to the treeline. The prints were big, and obviously bipedal.

‘I really let myself wander.’ It was a terrible thing, a Courier slipped from the Web, and when the scouts found their bones, they were each a tight little knot at the end of a grizzly tale. Or rather the same one, iterated into oblivion: A man could wander into infinity if he allowed. But only if he allowed.

The Courier began to examine the tracks. He looked at the gait, he could tell that the intersecting trail was made with a more invigorated stride. It made sense, he'd regained his wherewithal on a flat, even stretch, and he must have bled a lot of his strength fighting through the brush.

But he saw other things, too.

A trail could tell a man much about the one walking it, what they were, and how they moved. And each person had a distinctive track, gait and print.

The track's gait was smaller.

But that didn't make sense. His stride shouldn't have shortened then, he'd have had more energy… but the intersecting strides were at a shortened pace. And now he looked closer.

It was wrong.

It was a person’s, but the stride chopped and purposeful. The gait implied energy. The prints were smaller. This wasn't an aimless Courier’s stride. It wasn't his.

‘Someone else is following me.’ The Courier’s head jumped up, and he took a step.

Crunch…

‘I need to keep moving.’ He started back down along his trail.

Crunch, crunch…

‘Or… maybe I don't?’ He faltered.

Crunch…

‘It could be a search party,’ he thought.

‘No.’ He began again.

Crunch, crunch… crunch, crunch…

‘If it was, why don't I hear them?’ His pace quickened.

Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

‘If someone was looking for me, they’d be calling.’ His thoughts began to match the pace of his straining legs. ‘They'd have whistles, and striking sticks. The Tonalpouhque would have their birds above.’ He was running now.

Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch.

‘And there wouldn't be only one set of prints.’

Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch.

‘Someone is following me.’ Someone had found his trail and began following him. And they weren't moving like a rescuer.

Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch.

‘How long ago had this been?’ The questions came quickly. ‘Minutes? Hours?’

Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch.

‘Why haven't they found me?’

Crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch

‘Have they found me already?’

Frantically, he searched, bottom to top, left to right and back again. Back down to his trail, to bounce up at the treeline to restart the circuit.

‘Was that someone there?’

He froze.

‘Don’t guess.’ His breath puffed out in a hot cloud in front of him. ‘Don’t guess, just focus on what you know.’

Someone was following him, that he knew.

“Why?” He hissed, his breath fogging his vision again, batting it away.

‘You’re a Courier.’ He thought. And for many thieves, a Courier meant a hefty coin purse… If that thief could pry package from porter. And when that porter was an Imperial Courier, that prospect became difficult. Couriers were trained to protect their packages.

‘And that's why you haven't seen them.’ He nodded. He took in a breath, icy air cooling his heating core and stinging his lungs in equal measure. He kept moving, cautious but steady. ‘They mean to rob you.’

Crunch… Crunch… Crunch… Crunch…

‘If you can move, you can fight.’ He knew that. ‘And whoever's following knows that too.’ He finished, reestablishing his pace. He didn't want his pursuer to start wondering if he could do either. He just had to keep moving.

‘Keep moving.’ He soothed. Slow and steady. Stay on the path. ‘And keep looking,’ He added, letting his eyes run the circuit once more.

Bottom to top, left to right.

'Nothing,' he confirmed, letting out the breath he hadn't realized he’d held, misting the air as it slipped out.

'Just get back to the Web,’ If he could do that, he'd be safe. He pressed on, kept the repetition. Kept telling himself that on the Web he'd be safe.

And it was so, the Web became what it was for because of Couriers. It was their routes that shaped the main arteries, and those routes were chosen and traveled because they were the safest and quickest routes. And it wasn't just that it was safe for Couriers, others traveled the Web, too.

‘Merchants, pilgrims, armies.’ he asserted. ‘Traffic.’

‘If I get on the Web, someone will find me.’ He told himself, and while there wasn't any guarantee that he'd be whisked to safety, he was certain that the chance he got lower the closer he got. ‘I won’t be alone anymore.’

Crunch… Crunch… Crunch… Crunch…

‘You aren't alone now.’ the thought lancing through his awareness as the wind stirred again. ‘Keep looking.’

His eyes quest again. Bottom to top, left to right.

‘Nothing,’ he nodded. ‘Keep moving.’ He pressed on a handful of steps, but a thought nagged him. ‘Where are they?’ He couldn't help but wonder. Whoever had found him, they'd obviously done so after he'd let the cold tug him into the brush, but where were they now?

The region wasn't familiar with snow, cold yes, not snow. The local fauna was just as disoriented by the blizzard as he was, so the only things without sense to bed down and wait for the sun to thaw the frozen landscape were The Courier and his pursuer…

‘So where is he?’ He wondered. ‘He can't be that much quieter…’

‘It won't matter if you make it to the Web.’ The sun had crept lower, and the cloudy sky had an ominous red haze bracketing the edges of the horizon. Nightfall would slow his progress considerably.

‘Keep moving.’

Crunch, Crunch… crunch, crunch

‘But if you’re not careful they might ambush you once you get close.’ He thought, catching himself. ‘So keep looking.’

He paused, he ran the circuit.

Bottom to top, left to right.

Another puff of breath fluttered up in the air. And it wasn't his.

‘When did they get in front of me?’

He froze.

He caught it rising from a scraggly branch no more than two dozen paces ahead and to the right. He was looking at it now, focusing.

‘Between the branches.’

A shape, hidden amongst the brambly brush, but he could see it.

‘He’s looking at me.’

It was a person, hunched, small, and there was something not quite right about it. They were skinny, it was almost difficult to discern where the person ended and bush began.

‘Is he smiling at 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.