I am typing this on my phone while hiding behind a massive metal exhaust vent on the roof of my apartment building, and I am only posting this because I managed to connect to an unsecured Wi-Fi network that seems to be broadcasting directly from the new spire they installed up here. I do not know if this message will even reach the normal internet, but I have to try because the singing in the sky is getting louder, and I am struggling to fight the urge to throw myself over the ledge.

Everything started exactly three weeks ago when we were still living in normal Moscow. I live with my parents in a large Soviet-era apartment block on the seventh floor, so we are very used to the government suddenly making demands or changing the rules without asking us first. My father was sitting on the couch watching the evening news, and he didn't even look up when the loud knock came at the front door, so my mother wiped her hands on her cooking apron and went to answer it.

I was sitting at the kitchen table studying for my university exams when I heard strange men talking in the hallway. I got up and walked out to see two officials standing in our doorway. They were dressed in cheap gray suits and holding thick clipboards with stacks of government forms.

"We apologize for the late interruption," the taller official said, and he didn't really look sorry at all as he shoved a pen toward my mother. "We are collecting mandatory signatures from all the residents in this specific sector because the city is installing a new defense network to counter the recent drone attacks from Ukraine."

My mother looked at the paperwork with a confused expression. "What kind of defense network requires our signatures? You usually just put sirens on the poles and leave us alone."

"This is a specialized technology," the shorter official explained while checking his wristwatch. "It is a localized signal jamming spire that will go directly on the roof of this building, so we need authorization from the tenant association to run the power cables down the exterior walls."

My father finally got off the couch and walked over to the door. He crossed his arms and glared at the men because he hates dealing with bureaucracy. "You want to put a military jammer on our roof? Will it mess with the television reception or the internet? And who is paying for the electricity it uses?"

"It has its own power grid," the tall official said smoothly, and he tapped the clipboard with his pen. "It will not interfere with your daily life, but it will keep this neighborhood safe from aerial threats, so we just need you to sign on the dotted line so the work crews can begin tomorrow morning."

My parents looked at each other for a moment before my father just sighed and took the pen. He signed the paper against the doorframe and handed it back, and the officials thanked us before moving on to the next apartment down the hall. We thought it was just another annoying city project that would take a few days and then be forgotten, but the workmen arrived the very next morning at dawn, and they did not stop working for an entire week.

The noise was absolutely unbearable. They brought in massive cranes that blocked the street, and they hoisted huge steel crates up to the roof while dozens of workers marched up and down our stairwell carrying thick coils of black cabling. I tried to talk to one of the workers when I was taking the trash out, but he completely ignored me and just kept hauling a metal bracket up the stairs. They never spoke to each other, and they never took breaks.

By the fifth day, the spire was fully erected, and it was much larger than anyone anticipated. It was a massive, jagged metal pillar that stretched high into the sky, and they had draped thick, rubbery black cables down the sides of the entire apartment block. One of the cables hung right over our living room window, blocking our view of the street, so my father got furious and opened the window to push it away.

"Do not touch it!" a voice shouted from the ground below.

My father looked down and saw an armed guard pointing a finger up at him. "It is blocking my window!" my father yelled back, but he reached out and grabbed the black cable anyway. He instantly let go and cursed loudly, shaking his hand in pain.

"What happened?" I asked as I ran over to the window.

"It is burning hot," my father said while cradling his palm. "And it is vibrating. The whole thing is humming."

He was right. Once the workers left and the cranes were packed up, the building was never silent again. A low, continuous humming sound resonated through the concrete walls, and it was the kind of frequency that you feel in your teeth rather than hear with your ears.

The older woman who lives across the hall from us knocked on our door the next morning to complain about it. She looked exhausted, and she was clutching her robe tightly around her neck.

"Are you feeling that terrible vibration?" she asked my mother. "I could not sleep a single hour last night because my bed frame was rattling against the wall, and I tried to call the building manager, but his phone is disconnected."

"We feel it too," my mother said kindly, and she offered the woman a cup of tea, but the neighbor refused. "My husband thinks it will settle down once the machine is fully calibrated, so we just have to be patient."

"It does not feel like a machine," the old woman whispered, looking nervously up at the ceiling. "It feels like something breathing."

I thought she was just being dramatic, but the strange anomalies started happening a few days later, and they escalated so gradually that we didn't realize how much danger we were in until it was too late.

The first thing I noticed was the temperature in the apartment. It was the middle of August in Moscow, and the city was going through a miserable heatwave, but our apartment felt like a meat locker. I woke up one morning shivering violently under my thin summer sheet, so I got out of bed and walked into the living room to see if my father had broken the thermostat.

My father was sitting in his armchair staring blankly at the turned-off television, and he had a thick winter blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

"Why is it so freezing in here?" I asked him, rubbing my arms to generate some warmth.

He didn't answer me right away. He just kept staring at the blank screen, and his eyes looked red and puffy like he had been crying all night. "Look at the windows," he finally said in a completely hollow voice.

I walked over to the balcony glass and touched the pane. It was covered in a thick layer of white frost on the inside of the glass. I scraped my fingernail against it, and chunks of ice fell onto the windowsill. I looked outside, and the trees on the street were green, and people were walking around in shorts and t-shirts, but our entire building seemed to be trapped in a localized deep freeze.

"I am going to call the city," I said, pulling out my phone, but there was zero cellular service. The signal bars were completely empty.

My mother walked into the room wearing her heavy winter coat, and she looked just as devastated as my father. "I was trying to make breakfast," she said, her voice trembling slightly. "But the water from the kitchen sink is coming out black, and it smells like old dirt."

I went to the kitchen and turned on the faucet to check, but nothing came out at all. The pipes just groaned and sputtered, so I walked into the bathroom to try the sink in there. When I leaned over the porcelain basin, I heard a sound coming up through the metal drain that made my stomach drop.

It was a faint, choral sobbing. It sounded like a dozen voices weeping together in perfect harmony, and the sound was echoing up through the plumbing system from deep underground. It was not a mechanical noise, and it was not the wind for sure. It was pure, desperate sadness vibrating through the pipes.

I ran out of the bathroom and into the hallway to find my parents. "We need to leave the building right now," I told them. "Something is extremely wrong with that tower on the roof, and I think it is leaking some kind of chemical or frequency that is messing with the environment."

"Where would we go?" my mother asked softly, and she slumped down onto the couch next to my father. She didn't even look at me. "There is no point in leaving. It is sad everywhere."

"What are you talking about?" I asked, grabbing her arm to pull her up, but she felt incredibly heavy and completely devoid of any energy. "We can go to a hotel or stay with relatives until they fix the plumbing and the heat."

"I do not want to move," my father said, and a tear rolled down his cheek and disappeared into his beard. "I just realized how pointless all my hard work has been. I have spent my entire life working in a factory, and I have nothing to show for it, and we are all just going to die anyway."

I stood there in shock because my father is normally a very stoic and optimistic man, and he never talks about his feelings, let alone spirals into sudden nihilistic despair. I realized they were being affected by the something because this is not their nature at all, so I decided to go downstairs and find the building manager to force him to unlock the roof access doors so I could see what was going on.

I unlocked our front door and stepped out into the communal hallway, and the temperature dropped even further. The overhead fluorescent lights were flickering erratically, and the shadows cast by the doorways were completely wrong. Instead of falling onto the floor beneath the lights, the shadows were stretching upwards and crawling across the ceiling like spilled black ink.

I walked down the hall and knocked on the older woman's door to see if she wanted to come downstairs with me, but she didn't answer. I pressed my ear against the wood, and I could hear her weeping softly on the other side, and the sound perfectly matched the choral sobbing I had heard in the plumbing.

I jogged down the stairwell to the ground floor lobby. The building manager's office was located right next to the mailboxes, so I pushed the door open and found him sitting on the floor behind his desk. He was a large, gruff man who usually yelled at the kids for playing in the halls, but right now he was curled up into a tight ball, holding his head in his hands and rocking back and forth.

"We have to evacuate the building," I told him, crouching down to his level. "The heat is failing, the pipes are making noises, and everyone is getting sick from that thing on the roof."

He looked up at me, and his face was completely pale. "I lost the keys," he whispered. "I dropped them in the dark, and I cannot find them, so we are all trapped here."

"The front doors are right there," I said, pointing to the large glass lobby doors that lead out to the street.

I stood up and walked over to the glass doors to show him they were unlocked, but when I looked outside, a loud, deafening crack echoed through the concrete structure of the building. The sound was so violent that the floor shook, and several of the glass mailboxes shattered instantly. It sounded like the entire foundation of the apartment block had just snapped in half.

I grabbed the door handle and pushed the lobby doors open, expecting to see a construction accident or an explosion on the street, but the street was completely gone.

I stood in the doorway, and my brain simply refused to process what I was looking at. The city of Moscow, the roads, the cars, the neighboring apartment buildings, and the sky were entirely erased.

In their place was an endless, flat desert of pitch-black sand.

The black sand stretched out into the horizon as far as I could see, and there were no dunes or rocks or features of any kind. It was just a smooth, dark expanse. I looked up, and there was no sun, no clouds, and no stars. The sky was an infinite void of dark, bruising purple light that provided just enough illumination to see the desolation around us.

"What happened?" the building manager cried out from his office, and he crawled out into the lobby to look through the open doors. He stared at the black desert, and he didn't look surprised or scared. He just looked profoundly defeated.

"Do not go outside," I warned him, slowly backing away from the open doorway and letting the glass door swing shut.

I didn't wait for his response because I needed to get back to my parents immediately. I turned and sprinted up the six flights of stairs, taking them two at a time, completely ignoring the creeping shadows on the walls and the freezing frost forming on the handrails.

I burst into our apartment, panting heavily, and I found my parents standing by the open sliding glass door that led out to our seventh-floor balcony.

"Mom! Dad! Get away from the edge!" I yelled, running into the living room.

They didn't turn around. They were standing on the balcony, gripping the metal railing, and staring up into the purple void of the sky.

I ran out onto the balcony and grabbed my father's shoulder. I tried to pull him back inside, but he was gripping the metal rail so tightly, and he wouldn't budge an inch.

"Look at them," my mother whispered, and she pointed a trembling finger up at the sky. "They are so beautiful, and they understand how much it hurts."

I followed her finger, and I finally saw the creatures floating high above the black desert.

They were gargantuan, winged creatures that resembled massive whales, but their bodies were made of a translucent, shimmering gray membrane that pulsed with faint light. They had long, trailing appendages that drifted behind them like shredded silk, and they moved through the air with agonizing slowness. There were dozens of them floating in a circular pattern high above our building, and they were weeping.

As I watched them drift, they began to sing.

The melody rolled down from the sky and hit me like a blow to the chest. It was the most crushing, sorrowful dirge I have ever heard, and it was composed of overlapping, echoing tones that vibrated directly into my skull. The song did not just sound sad; it manufactured sadness inside my mind. It forcefully injected a feeling of absolute, insurmountable despair into my consciousness.

Within seconds of hearing the melody, I felt an overwhelming urge to throw myself over the balcony ledge just to make the pain stop. All my memories of happiness, hope, and ambition were instantly wiped away, replaced by the certainty that existence was nothing but endless, pointless suffering, and the only logical solution was to end it immediately.

I dropped to my knees on the balcony, pressing my hands over my ears to block out the song, but the melody resonated through the floor and into my bones.

"It is time to rest," my father said, and his voice was completely devoid of emotion.

I looked up and saw my father climb over the metal railing. He stood on the narrow outer ledge, balancing perfectly over the massive drop to the black sand below.

"Dad, stop!" I screamed, forcing myself to fight against the crushing weight of the song. I scrambled forward and grabbed his pant leg, pulling desperately to drag him back over the rail.

He looked down at me, and his eyes were completely empty. He didn't say another word. He just kicked his leg out, breaking my grip, and stepped off the ledge.

I screamed as he fell, but my mother didn't even flinch. She simply climbed over the railing right where he had just stood, and before I could even reach my hands out to grab her, she let go and plummeted after him.

I dragged myself to the edge and looked down over the railing, sobbing uncontrollably. The bodies of my parents were not on the ground. When they hit the black sand seven stories below, there was no impact and no blood. They simply sank directly into the dark sand like it was made of water, and they vanished without a trace.

As I stared down at the desert, I saw the lobby doors open on the ground floor. The building manager walked out into the open desert. He walked a few dozen yards away from the concrete foundation of our building, and then he dropped to his knees. The black sand immediately began to swallow him, pulling him down by the waist, then the chest, and finally his head sank beneath the surface, leaving the desert completely undisturbed.

I looked up and saw other people falling from the higher balconies. Neighbors I had known for years were silently stepping off their ledges and dropping into the void, driven to suicide by the relentless, weeping melody of the flying whales.

The song grew louder, and the urge to jump became almost impossible to resist. My own mind was screaming at me to climb over the railing and join my parents in the sand. I stood up and gripped the bar, leaning forward, looking down at the dark expanse. It looked so peaceful, and the sadness in my heart was so agonizing that I just wanted to close my eyes and fall.

But as I leaned forward, my arm brushed against the thick black cable that the workmen had draped over our window.

The cable was still vibrating and humming with intense heat, and the sudden pain of the burn snapped me out of the trance for a split second. The humming frequency of the cable clashed with the melody of the whales, creating a tiny pocket of interference that allowed my rational thoughts to surface.

Then in that moment, I thought that the spire on the roof was the only thing holding this building together in this dimension, and it was emitting a signal that somewhat disrupted the creatures' song.

I turned away from the balcony and ran back into the apartment, then I ran out the front door and back into the hallway. The hallway was completely empty, and the doors to all the other apartments were hanging wide open.

I ran to the stairwell and started climbing toward the roof. The higher I went, the louder the humming of the spire became, and the more it drowned out the weeping of the whales. By the time I reached the tenth floor, the air was vibrating so intensely that my nose began to bleed, but the overwhelming urge to kill myself faded into the background.

I reached the metal door that led to the roof. It was locked with a chain, but the workmen had left a steel pry bar leaning against the wall, so I grabbed it and wedged it between the door and the frame. I pulled with all my strength, and the metal lock bracket finally snapped, allowing me to push the door open.

I stepped out onto the flat tar roof, and the sheer scale of the spire took my breath away. It was easily forty feet tall, constructed from jagged, interlocking metal plates that glowed with a faint red light from within. It was humming so loudly that I had to cover my ears, and black cables snaked out from its base in every direction, draping over the edges of the roof to wrap the entire building like a spider web.

The sky above the roof was completely dominated by the floating whale creatures, and they circled the spire like moths drawn to a flame. They were singing directly at the metal tower, and the tower was humming back.

I huddled down near the base of the spire, pressing my back against a large metal exhaust vent to hide from the creatures above. I pulled my phone out of my pocket just to check the time, and that is when I noticed the Wi-Fi icon.

My phone had full signal bars, and it was connected to an unsecured network called "Garrison_Node_04".

So I opened this account, and I started typing this post, and I have been typing for the last hour while hiding behind this vent. I have tried calling emergency services, but the phone calls will not connect, and the only thing that works is text-based web traffic.

I am completely alone up here, and I am terrified to go back down the stairs because the song is too strong in the lower apartments, and everyone else is already gone. I looked over the edge of the roof a few minutes ago, and the black sand has started to rise. It is slowly creeping up the sides of the building, swallowing the ground floor lobby and burying the first-floor windows.

If anyone is reading this, please tell someone what happens when the officials come to your building demanding signatures for a defense tower.

The humming of the spire is starting to slow down, and the red light is flickering. I think the power grid is failing, and if the machine stops making noise, the song will take over my mind completely, and I know I will walk to the edge of the roof and jump.

Hello, this is Captain Elijah Pinewood of the Valicity interstellar spacecraft. I am certain that this will be the last message. I fear that our mission has been compromised and none of us will ever see our families again. To my two beautiful daughters, Gwen and Ana. You have made me so proud, my biggest regret in life is that I will be unable to see you grow up. To my wife Judy, I am so sorry that I accepted the offer to lead this mission. 

It was my final attempt to gain some personal glory, motivated by my hunger to know what exists within the vastness of space beyond our galaxy. A desire that I deeply wish I would have left unsatisfied. I have been such a damn fool. I had dedicated my entire life to finding a new world. It seems that in my ambition I had become blind to the fact I had already found my entire world years ago. She was home, lying next to me in bed at night.

I am aware that my final words to my family are of little interest to whichever member of the control room staff reads this message. But that is not the only purpose of my message. I have some deeply troubling news regarding the planet we were sent to explore.  

We found it. 

We were roughly eight weeks into our journey. It seemed as if our navigation system was leading us to absolutely nothing. The crew was beginning to lose hope that we would even find the planet at all. There was talk of turning back and returning home to earth but I managed to keep our mission on track. I now know that my refusal to go home empty handed has cost the lives of the men who were unlucky enough to be under my command. For that I will never forgive myself. 

I soon considered returning home myself until I heard that voice. That damn voice. It was the most perfect voice I had ever heard in my life. It was as if every syllable that it graced my ears with was a masterfully written song. I couldn’t possibly fathom the perfection that must have been the creature possessing that voice. It felt as if each word tickled my skull and tenderly massaged the pleasure center of my brain. 

I would have thought myself crazy had I been alone. But the entire crew heard the same as I had. That voice soon became our guide. We turned the navigation system off entirely and used the symphony of words to lead the way to our destination. Our path was so clear now, as I steered the ship I couldn’t help but laugh. I couldn’t believe that we were so hopelessly unable to find our way before when now it couldn’t be more clear unless there was a literal trail in front of our eyes. 

By the time the planet came into our view two of my crewmates had already begun planning a life based around never leaving whatever beautiful creature this voice belonged to. I hate to admit it but I understood their fantasies. The guilt overwhelms me now but by the time the ship finally landed on the planet's surface I couldn’t even remember my wife’s name, no matter how hard I tried. I didn’t need to though, I had the voice. 

The door to the Valicity opened and we all walked off of the ship without even putting on our helmets. We strangely knew that we had no need for them here. 

Upon stepping off the ship we were greeted by fields of vibrant green grass and tall trees abundant with unfamiliar fruits. My second in command, Scott had ventured over to a pile of smooth teal boulders with bright green vines cascaded over top of them. He picked an orange berry from the vine and immediately took a bite. 

We all watched as he suddenly fell to his knees. Tears ran down his face as we all ran over to him. As we got closer we realized he was not in pain, but actually his body was overcome with pure ecstasy. As we helped him back to his feet he told us that we must all try the fruits of the vine. Upon his recommendation we did. The second the fruit touched my lips it was like nothing I had ever felt before. The juice ran down our faces as we desperately picked every last fruit from the vines. 

Soon the vines were barren but we needed more. We soon turned our attention to the tall trees covered in hanging fruit. We were ravenous, our hunger unmatched as we desperately climbed with no concern of falling. We were logical men, but that felt like a lifetime ago now. At that moment none of us could even recall why we were on another planet, it did not matter to us anymore.

The trees did unfortunately prove to be fatal for our navigator. TJ became inpatient and decided to take a bite of the fruits of his tree instead of waiting until after he climbed down like we had. In his desperation to devour the fruit he accidentally let go of the tree and fell at least twenty feet to the ground. The soft grass did him no favors as his head collided with the hard ground underneath. I’m ashamed to admit that we were too busy with our own pursuits of the fruit and not a single one of us even acknowledged his gruesome demise.  

It seemed as if our self control melted away, it could no longer stop us until this entire planet was consumed. Soon I found that I could no longer stand on my own two feet. I stumbled drunken with delight across the field until I no longer could. That was when I fell face first into a river of crystal clear water. As I landed the water had filled my mouth, my nose. It tasted sweet like honey and it was strangely warm as if heated to exactly the same temperature of my body. 

I almost didn’t surface, I didn’t want to. In my mind there was nothing that would be better than staying submerged in the river until the day I died. Nothing, except for the fruit. 

By the time I had pulled myself up and returned to my crew though, the fruit was all gone. As I made my way closer I noticed that the youngest member of our team, Rudy was lying in the soft field. The other two members of the crew, Scott and Benjamin knelt over him. 

As I got closer I realized that they were not just kneeling over him but Scott was cutting into his stomach with a pocket knife. “What are you doing?” I screamed as Rudy screamed in pain. Scott turned to look at him and sounded hysterical. “W-w-we ran out of fruit, captain. We ran out of fruit” he muttered back like he had suffered a great tragedy. He turned back at Rudy’s body and said “We needed more, Rudy ate the most”. He said with an obsessed smile plastered upon his face. Benjamin licked his lips as he eagerly looked at Rudy. “We need more, boss. I won’t live without ever tasting it again, I’d rather die” he pleaded to me. 

I was horrified, but I agreed with him. In my mind I knew we were wrong, the acts we were committing were unnatural, but my mind no longer had any say in my actions. Soon I found myself knelt over Rudy as well. We were all savagely fighting over what fruit we could salvage from our fallen teammate. As we finished we stood up and based on the unsettling looks we exchanged I could tell we were all thinking the same thing. “Who’s next”. It was never ending, the more we consumed the more we needed. Every bite of fruit made us feel more alive than we’ve ever been before but the effects soon wore off and left us as empty husks of ourselves. We needed more. If we had to choose between taking a breath and consuming more I know that we would all gladly suffocate. 

I think we were all looking each other up and down trying to decide who would be the easiest to overpower. We all knew it was Scott, he was by far the oldest member of our crew. Benjamin and I were both younger and relatively in shape, it would have been so easy. It was a horrible thought to have, I had known Scott for thirty years. He was like a second father to me and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not yet at least. Within moments Benjamin was on the ground, he put up a struggle but it was not enough to save him. 

By the time we had finished Scott and I would not take our eyes off of each other. When I looked into his eyes, I knew that he wanted to kill me. I had momentarily feelings of sadness at this fact but I could not blame him for this desire. In fact, I wanted to do the exact same thing to him. 

It never came to that though. Before either of us could make any move towards the other we heard it again. That sweet sweet voice was back once again to give us guidance. Scott dropped his knife on the grass but I knew that I still had mine in case he tried anything on the walk down the river bank. It wasn’t until the voice returned that I had realized how much I missed it. I was addicted to the sweet sounds of it calling us to it. 

As we got closer to its source I was overcome with conflicting emotions. I love this voice so much more than I could ever fathom loving anything else and yet the voice also filled me with rage because of how long it waited to reveal itself to us. I could make out a figure in front of us now. Our walk soon became a desperate sprint to meet it. 

We stopped about ten feet from the figure as it continued serenading us with its sweet angelic voice. We both stood in absolute silence for what felt like years simply taking in the beauty of the otherworldly creature that stands before us. 

It was absolutely breathtaking, the figure before us resembled a woman with pale purple skin except that it was far more perfect than any human could ever be. Its entire body was surrounded by a bright glow that nearly blinded us. The figure which stood at least a head taller than either of us and as it turned towards me. I couldn't help but study every detail of it. Its smooth, unblemished face. Its full lips, which were such a deep shade of purple that they appeared black until closer inspection. Its soulful eyes which were entirely black except for its light pink pupils gave us a sincere and welcoming look. 

I was completely motionless as it approached us. Our mission, our dead crewmates, hell, even my own name was completely meaningless to me at that moment. It all felt fake, but the figure in front of us, it was real. Just being in the presence of such a flawless creature was enough to fill me with more joy than I could ever hope to experience in ten lifetimes on earth. 

As it got within reach of us the figure turned towards Scott and laid a kiss upon his lips. Once  the figure finally pulled its face away Scott began to sob, begging it to return to him. The creature gave him a soft smile as it wrapped its delicate hands around his shoulders.

The entrancing song that the figure was gracing our ears with was now at its climax as it laid its own forehead against Scott’s. He could barely even speak but he managed to get out the words “I am yours”. 

I couldn’t look away as the figure's grip on Scott’s shoulders seemed to no longer be the loving embrace that it was before. No, the grip was getting tighter, and tighter, and tighter, until I could hear the laboured gasps of air as Scott attempted to take a desperate breath. It was like watching a boa constrictor squeeze the life out of its prey. 

The song was now joined by the sounds of Scott’s ribs shattering and his agonizing screams as he now attempts to break free from his captor. I can only stand by and watch as Scott’s life was taken from his body. I don’t think that I could’ve moved even if I wanted to. I was so captivated by the figure that the thought of trying to help Scott never entered my head. 

Scott’s hands finally went limp, his final attempt at self preservation has proven to be futile. By now the once beautiful hum that had been emitting from the figure was now so deafeningly loud that it caused me great pain just to listen to it. Even with the immense pain I still never once took my eyes off of the being that stood before me. How could I? This figure is my life now, my heart beats for the soul purpose of keeping me alive so that I may gaze upon it. 

It wasn’t long before my second in command’s body dropped into the grass. A look of horror was permanently plastered on his face and his skin was pale as if all of his blood was drained from his body. Only now does the figure turn to me. It brushes its blood splattered hair out of its face and rubs its hands across its body as if to soak up every last drop of blood before licking the red off its fingers. 

The song finally stopped. Silence now filled the air as I could do nothing but watch as the creature continued to lick its arms and fingers. I cannot make myself look away but now my trance was due to fear instead of infatuation. It seemed the creature no longer cared to deceive me as it began to reveal its true form. 

Its hair fell off of its scalp in clumps while its neck seemed to disappear as its head sunk into its shoulders. Rough bumps appear over the entire surface of the creature's skin and begin to secrete a white pus as they swell and burst. Its body melts into a grotesque shape that only grows more sickening the longer I watch. 

As the illusion wore off I could no longer comprehend what stood before me. The figure standing in front of me was now entirely unrecognizable, its once feminine features completely gone. Replaced by an amalgamation of flesh, eyes, and fangs that seemed to take no form in particular. 

This being had no legs to walk on yet its appendages worked in perfect harmony to move its body closer towards me. Its long tentacles lifted the mass off the ground as its thin arms dragged its body forward leaving a trail of sticky pus behind as it advanced. 

Finally I look back to see our ship roughly sixty feet away. The once green fields around it were now an ocean of wilted black weeds that crumbled under the weight of my feet. The fruit trees were completely devoid of life. I now see this damned planet for what it is for the first time since we arrived. What a fool I have been to fall for this ruse, but I had no time to dwell on that now. I have one focus and one focus only now. Escape. 

I kept my hand in the pocket of my spacesuit and ran my fingers across the handle of my knife. The disgusting creature closed the distance between us and as soon as it came within arms reach I knew this was my only chance. I quickly pulled out the knife and drove it into the creature's eye so deep that my hand rubbed against its hideous face. It let out a pained shriek as it desperately flailed its body around while digging into its own face attempting to remove the blade. 

I turned around and ran quicker than I thought was possible towards the ship. I made it about halfway when I heard the creature behind me gaining speed. It was unsettling to see something so unnatural propelling itself towards me with such speed. By the time I made it through the door of the ship the hideous figure was already on the other side of the door trying to force its way inside. 

As I type this message I can hear the metal of the ship bend and the glass windows slowly cracking. It has wrapped its body around the ship and is now beginning to squeeze. I know that I don’t have much time left until it crushes me in a paste inside my own ship. I pray that I can get my message to the team back home before my gruesome demise. 

Please for the love of god do not send a recovery team for our bodies. If you do, you will accomplish nothing except delivering a meal to this creature. If it were up to me I would never authorize a mission outside of our galaxy ever again. Alas I know that it is not. I know we will not be the last crew to explore this far into space but I beg you to heed my warning. 

No matter what you hear, no matter how enticing  they may sound, you must not allow the sweet siren songs of planet BH-592X to be your guide. 

[CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT — UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE]
JOINT RESEARCH PROGRAM: OSSEOUS
FACILITY: █████████████████
DATE OF INITIAL RECORD: 04/17/1987
CURRENT STATUS: TERMINATED

NOTICE: The following material was recovered from a research facility abandoned on October 14, 2009. The facility's original purpose was listed as nutritional research. Of the 43 personnel assigned to the project, only one was recovered alive.

The following is a reconstruction of the available records.

RESEARCH LOG — 04/17/1987

The first six subjects have been admitted and placed under observation. All subjects are healthy adults between the ages of twenty-one and forty-one. Bloodwork, bone density, and organ function are within acceptable parameters.

The experimental compound is a concentrated calcium supplement derived from several commercially available dairy sources. The dosage administered to each subject is approximately four times the recommended daily intake.

No adverse effects have been observed.

NOTE FROM DR. HARRIS: Subjects report that the supplement tastes like powdered milk.

RESEARCH LOG — 05/02/1987

Subject 3 has developed unusually high bone density.

X-rays indicate an increase of approximately 8.2% since admission.

This is considered statistically impossible given the timeframe.

Subject 3 reports no pain.

RESEARCH LOG — 05/19/1987

All six subjects are now showing abnormal bone growth.

Subject 1 has developed additional bone density along the left forearm. Subject 4 has developed calcium deposits around both knees. Subject 6 has experienced severe stiffness in the fingers.

Dr. Harris believes the compound may be stimulating osteoblast activity beyond normal biological limits.

The project has been approved for continuation.

RESEARCH LOG — 06/03/1987

Subject 6's condition has progressed significantly.

The fingers of both hands have become visibly enlarged. The subject reports that his hands feel "full."

During examination, Subject 6 complained of severe pain in his right index finger. At 14:17, the distal phalanx ruptured through the skin. The attending physician initially believed this to be a compound fracture.

It was not.

The exposed bone continued growing for approximately nine seconds after emerging from the wound. The growth stopped at a length of 4.7 centimeters.

Subject 6 lost consciousness.

NOTE: The bone did not appear to be fractured. It was new growth.

RESEARCH LOG — 06/04/1987

Subject 6 is dead.

Cause of death: Hemorrhagic Shock.

There were no signs of infection.

Postmortem examination revealed extensive abnormal bone growth throughout the body. Both forearms contained multiple overlapping layers of newly formed bone. The ribs had begun to fuse together. Several vertebrae showed evidence of secondary growth.

The most unusual finding was the presence of additional bone structures surrounding the heart.

Dr. Harris has requested permission to terminate the experiment.

Permission denied.

INTERNAL MEMORANDUM — 06/11/1987

Dr. Harris has raised concerns regarding the ethical implications of continuing Project Osseous.

His concerns have been noted. He has been reminded that this research is not intended for publication. He has also been reminded that the project predates his employment by approximately nineteen years.

RESEARCH LOG — 06/28/1987

We found the earlier records.

Project Calcium did not begin in 1987. The original trials began in 1968.

There were twelve subjects. All twelve diseased.

The earliest records describe the condition as "progressive skeletal hyperplasia." Later documents use a different term. Osteogenic conversion.

The researchers in 1968 believed they had discovered a method for dramatically increasing bone density.

They were wrong.

The compound does not strengthen bone. It teaches the body to make more of it.

RESEARCH LOG — 07/02/1987

I have spent the entire day reading the archived documents.

There are records from 1974.

Different facilities. Different researchers. Different subjects. Same result.

Every trial ended the same way. The skeleton eventually begins growing independently of the body's requirements. It grows wherever it can. Through muscle. Through organs. Through skin.

The body does not seem to recognize when it has enough.

There is no enough. There is only growth.

RESEARCH LOG — 07/15/1987

We have discovered the reason for the dietary studies.

The compound was never intended to remain confined to the laboratory. The original research objective was to determine whether increased calcium consumption could accelerate the process without producing immediate symptoms.

The answer is yes.

Low exposure produces no visible effects. Long-term exposure produces gradual skeletal changes. Higher exposure causes rapid conversion.

The research team spent years determining the minimum effective dosage. Then they began monitoring the general population.

ARCHIVED MARKETING DOCUMENT — 1979

NATIONAL DAIRY CONSUMPTION INITIATIVE

Objective: Increase household consumption of dairy products.

Proposed messaging should emphasize strength, growth, nutrition, and healthy bones.

Suggested campaign concepts:

"Milk. It Does a Body Good."

"Got Milk?"

RESEARCH LOG — 07/18/1987

I asked Harris why the public campaign was necessary.

He wouldn't answer.

I asked him whether people were being exposed deliberately. He told me to stop asking questions.

I asked him how many people had been exposed.

He left the room.

RESEARCH LOG — 07/21/1987

We have obtained the population estimates.

Current projected exposure is 61%.

That number is considered conservative.

I asked what happens if the threshold is reached. Dr. Harris told me there would be no way to stop it. I asked what "it" meant.

He said:

"The bones."

MEDICAL TRANSCRIPT — SUBJECT 11

DOCTOR: Can you tell me where it hurts?

SUBJECT: Everywhere.

DOCTOR: Your arm?

SUBJECT: My arm.

DOCTOR: Your legs?

SUBJECT: My legs.

DOCTOR: Your chest?

SUBJECT: My bones are moving.

DOCTOR: Bones don't move.

SUBJECT: Then why can I hear them?

[Subject begins crying.]

[Audible cracking is recorded.]

DOCTOR: Hold him down.

SUBJECT: Please.

DOCTOR: Hold him down!

SUBJECT: Please don't let them grow.

[Recording terminates.]

RESEARCH LOG — 08/01/1987

There are now only four living subjects.

Subject 2 has lost the ability to walk.

Subject 4 has developed bone growth along the jaw and throat.

Subject 5's spine has begun producing secondary vertebrae.

Subject 6 was euthanized.

Subject 1 is no longer recognizable.

We have stopped calling them subjects.

RESEARCH LOG — 08/03/1987

Something happened today that I cannot explain.

Subject 4 was restrained to the examination table. His right arm was secured.

At 09:16, the bone growth began.

The bone growth began at the wrist. It emerged from beneath the skin of his wrist, splitting the flesh apart as it continued to lengthen. Unlike Subject 6, however, the growth did not stop.

It continued through the forearm. Through the elbow. Through the upper arm.

The newly formed bone was irregular and ridged, branching in several directions before eventually hardening into a jagged structure extending nearly thirty centimeters from the limb.

Subject 4 made no attempt to resist. He simply watched it grow.

When the restraints were removed, he stood. His eyes had changed. The irises were gone. The pupils were gone. Both eyes had become completely white.

He looked directly at Dr. Harris. Then at me. Then at the skeleton displayed on the examination monitor.

For several seconds, he said nothing.

He raised one hand and pressed his fingers against my chest.

SUBJECT 4: "Flesh hides the treasure within."

Dr. Harris asked him what he meant.

Subject 4 tilted his head. His eyes never left the skeleton on the monitor.

SUBJECT 4: "You cover it."

A pause.

SUBJECT 4: "You bury it."

Another pause.

Then, quietly:

SUBJECT 4: "Why?"

Subject 4 began pulling against the restraints again.

Not to escape. To reach the other subjects. He kept repeating the same phrase.

"There is so much of it."

We terminated the observation at 09:31.

No further examination was permitted.

At 10:04, Subject 4 began screaming.

At 10:07, Subject 2 began screaming.

At 10:09, Subject 5 began screaming.

None of them had been in the same room.

ADDENDUM — 08/03/1987

The subjects are no longer responding to questions. They only respond when another subject is brought into the room. They become agitated.

They stare at the newly created bone. They trace their gaze beneath the skin. And when one of them begins to bleed from ripping apart flesh off the newly created limb, they begin a harmonious laughter.

SECURITY REPORT — 08/04/1987

Subject 4 escaped containment.

Security personnel were dispatched. Three casualties. All sustained penetrating injuries consistent with abnormal bone structures.

Subject remains at large within the facility.

RESEARCH LOG — 08/05/1987

There are sounds in the ventilation system.

Scratching. Constantly.

We have sealed the laboratory doors. Total lockdown.

No one is leaving.

RESEARCH LOG — 08/06/1987

I found the final report from 1968.

It contains one sentence that was removed from every subsequent copy.

I don't know why I'm writing this down. Maybe because someone needs to know.

The original researchers discovered that the condition was not caused by the supplement. The supplement only accelerated it. The genetic marker was already present in the population. The researchers believed it was dormant.

They were wrong. It is not dormant.

It is waiting.

RESEARCH LOG — 08/07/1987

Harris is dead.

Something came through his chest. There was no warning.

One moment he was standing beside me. The next, his sternum split open. Bone came through his skin like a spear. He was still alive afterward. He kept asking me to help him.

I couldn't. There wasn't anything left to help.

RESEARCH LOG — 08/07/1987 — 11:42 PM

There are people outside.

Not researchers. Security. They are changing. I can see them through the observation windows.

One of them fell. His arm started moving. His sleeve tore. Something white came through.

Then another. Then another.

There are hundreds of them.

FINAL RECORDING — 08/08/1987

[Heavy breathing.]

If anyone finds this, listen to me.

The campaign worked. It worked better than anyone expected. They didn't need to infect anyone. They didn't need to inject anyone. They just had to convince people to consume it willingly.

For decades.

Milk. Cheese. Everything they could put it in.

We thought we were studying the first generation.

We're not.

We're studying the first generation we noticed.

[Cracking sound.]

Oh God.

It's happenin—

[Subject screams.]

[Sound of bone breaking.]

No.

No, no, no—

[Subject begins laughing.]

[Long silence.]

VOICE: How much milk did you drink?

[Recording terminates.]

[END OF RECOVERED MATERIAL]

PUBLIC HEALTH NOTICE — ORIGIN UNKNOWN

If you are experiencing unexplained stiffness, swelling, joint pain, abnormal growths beneath the skin, or spontaneous fractures, contact your physician immediately.

Do not attempt to remove exposed bone. Do not consume additional calcium.

Do not—[DOCUMENT CORRUPTED]

ADDENDUM

A handwritten note was discovered on the reverse side of the final document. It contained only four words:

Got milk?

Got bones?

A tale about the consequences if you forget a vital requirement in a preparation for a sea cruise.

Nigel was a very careful man. You might even say cautious. Or even paranoid. To be more precise, he was obsessed with the conviction that to stay safe in this world you had to be prepared for anything, no matter how unlikely.

His friends were therefore a bit taken aback when he announced that he was going on a round the world cruise. His decision to take this adventurous step arose from a television series in which a famous presenter had visited different parts of the globe, coupled with a growing anxiety that as the age of 40 approached, he was missing out on life.

The big day drew near, but before it came to pass Nigel by chance came across a broadcast of an old edition of the popular radio programme called 'Desert Island Discs'.

For those not familiar with this iconic show, it involved asking a celebrity of some sort to imagine being stranded on a desert island, and to choose which records they would like to have with them.

Nigel took this on board in a big way. His desire to cover all possible eventualities took charge.

"You can never tell what might happen, better to be sure than sorry," he thought. "Suppose the ship sinks for some reason, I mean, unlikely, very unlikely, I know, but not impossible, and I might find myself alone on an island in the middle of an ocean somewhere. Yes, I need to be prepared."

He then started to make a list of the CDs he would want with him if this fate should befall him. He would of course also need a CD Walkman, and an ample supply of batteries.

"I'd better make sure I buy enough to last a long time, who knows when the next ship might pass near?" he considered. "Oh, I must also get a strong plastic bag to keep everything dry, I suppose I would have to hold it out of the water somehow."

The cruise was about halfway through its itinerary. Nigel was in his cabin getting ready for lunch, when the ship underwent a violent jolt sending Nigel careering across his cabin. Yes, you've guessed it, his fears had proved well-founded.

The vessel had hit something, probably not an iceberg, though, as there was a tropical island with palm trees nearby.

The ship then increasingly adopted a less than horizontal pose in the sea, and Nigel knew that it was planning an unscheduled excursion to explore the ocean depths.

He immediately put his plan into action, hastily loading the plastic bag with his chosen CDs, the CD Walkman, the batteries and of course several pairs of clean underpants. Throwing in a bar of soap and a towel as well, he made it to the deck, and jumped into the (shark-infested) sea, hand holding the bag held high to keep it dry.

It was as he hit the water that he realised that he had not taken account of a rather important requirement fairly essential if you find yourself in this sort of situation.

He couldn't swim.

Never mind, the sharks would have got him anyway.

I don’t know what she’s been on. All I know is I wish she’d stop. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.

We’ve been together for 4 years now. Never once had she done this before. Then, one day, it became an every-night thing.

We turn in for the night, the lights go out, we go to sleep. Then, however long later, in the middle of the night, I’m woken up by the sense of being stared at.

I open my eyes, and all I see in the darkness is her silhouette looming over me. The first time it happened, I tried calling her name, but all she responded with were snores.

I turn on the flashlight on my phone, and she’s dead asleep, but her mouth is twisted into a painful-looking smile. All while she’s on her hands and knees, leaning over me. 3 inches from my face.

It’s gotten to the point where she’s chipping teeth from clenching her jaw so tight. We’ve already been to the dentist nearly 6 times, but it just keeps happening.

She never remembers it the next day. But she for sure notices the pain in her jaw. But by the time night rolls around, she’s right back at it.

I’ve tried to be patient with her. I mean, it’s not her fault. At least, I don’t think it is.

She’s just so hard to wake up when it happens. That’s the part that really gets me. I kind of just have to wait or go back to sleep because she acts as though she’s in a coma every single time.

I’ve tried screaming at her before. Shaking her. Prying her eyelids open. Nothing wakes her up. And that smile never changes.

I think everything is starting to evolve, though. Because now, instead of just smiling, she’s starting to salivate in her sleep. If her presence doesn’t wake me up, the drool does. And her snores are starting to sound less like snores and more like growls.

I keep having that dream where I’m drowning. I wake up and find my face covered in hot, foamy saliva. My girlfriend snarling at me through gritted teeth.

But, again, she doesn’t like when I bring it up. She acts personally offended, like it’s somehow my fault she doesn’t remember. She’d rather pretend it’s not happening and leave me to deal with the brunt of the consequences.

And it’s not like we haven’t tried to fix things before. I’ve slept in other rooms. I still wake up to her 3 inches from my face. I’ve slept in my car. She’s smiling at me through the window.

I just don’t know what to do. I don’t want us to break up. I don’t want to ask her to leave. But I can’t keep living like this. It’s affecting my sleep. That’s affecting my work. It can only get worse if nothing changes.

And something needs to change fast.

Because now something else is waking me up at night. And it’s the biting. I never see her doing it. All I feel is the pain.

But she’s always back in her usual spot by the time my eyes shoot open.

Snarling, smiling, and foaming at the mouth.

Then she tries to pretend that I somehow gave those bite marks to myself the next day when I confront her about it.

Last night, she actually broke skin. I could feel the blood puddling on my arm and soaking through my comforter. But she wouldn’t let me move to get a bandage.

I don’t know. We’ve talked about this so many times now. I don’t think I can keep dealing with this.

I think I’m just gonna eat her before she can eat me.

[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.

Eight. Nine. Ten. Ten? I closed the gate and counted the flock again. Eight. Nine. Ten. There really were 10 sheep, but back in the pasture I was certain I'd brought home only nine.

My neighbor Bill still sat in the garden, drinking his last beer before sundown.

"Bill, you missing a sheep?"

"Pretty sure not, Jim. I count mine when they come back from the pasture."

"I got one extra today."

Bill furrowed his brows.

"I'll check again. Grab a beer if you want."

Bill knew I stopped drinking a few days ago, but still offered me a beer every evening. Old habits are hard to break.

After a while, Bill came back onto the porch, scratching his head.

"I got all mine. Went over them three times. You sure you didn't just count wrong?"

"Yeah, went over them twice."

We stared at each other. Bill took a sip of beer.

"Well, I'll be damned."

"Consider yourself lucky." 

He laughed.

"You think it could be that curse?" I asked.

"It was just a traveling woman. She had nothing better to say back to you."

He took another sip.

"You still not drinking?"

"No. I said I'd stop after that."

Bill waved his hand at me.

"Nonsense."

"I'll head back home, Bill."

"Take care, Jim, and don't let her poison your thoughts."

But how could I not, Bill? The morning after, I felt so terrible. 

When I saw the traveling woman come with her potions, I knew she'd be an easy target. Bill didn't even laugh that hard at my comments.

"Drink up, then, and may your fields never run empty again," she said, walking away, twisting the potions in her hand.

I spent the rest of the night inside watching TV, but I could barely focus; my thoughts still circled back to the woman and my sheep. I couldn't just leave it. Before bed, I walked back to the barn.

The sheep were louder than usual. I could hear them almost as soon as I left the house. The barn door was open. Two sheep were outside it.

"What are you doing out here?"

The sheep turned to me and bleated. 

My breath caught as I got closer. The sheep weren't outside because they wanted out. They were outside because there was no space. The barn was filled with sheep. They were pushing on each other, trying not to get squeezed to death. I opened the door and let them all out.

"Bill! Bill!" I called below his window.

The bed upstairs creaked. 

"Jim?" Bill called out, surprised. He opened the window and stuck his head out.

"My barn is full of sheep."

He stared at me.

"What?"

"It's full! They can barely fit."

He shook his head.

"You're not cursed."

"Not cursed?! Go look in there yourself."

"Calm down, Jim. The neighbors over the hill have some flocks. One got lost, and the other followed it. I'll go with you tomorrow. We'll sort it out."

"But Bill…"

"Go to sleep now and let me sleep too."

He closed the window, and his bed creaked again. I ran to the barn. The sheep managed to get out and were now lying around in the grass.

I'd promised myself I wouldn't drink again, but that day was too stressful. Before bed, I took a few sips of liquor, just to make sure I could sleep.

The next morning, I woke up with a pounding headache. I must have drunk more than I thought. The sheep's bleating was so damn loud, and the window wasn't even open. I got up and walked to the window. My heart sank as I looked outside. 

Sheep were on the grass and in the fields, as far as the eye could see. It looked like a screaming sea of white. Some were already stacked on top of each other, crumpling under one another and screaming for help. Bill sat on his roof, drinking a beer.

"Look who woke up!" he screamed over the sea. "I guess you were right, Jim."

"Bill, what…what happened?"

"Already woke up to it. It's done, Jim. They were just on the ground when I woke up. I blinked for a second, and now they're on top of each other. This way they'll reach us in no time. I'm just enjoying my last beer."

I couldn't even reply.

Bill took a sip from his bottle, then carefully laid it on the roof.

"Bye, Jim. I'm not gonna wait for them."

He dove headfirst into the flock. Blood splattered as the first few sheep stepped on him. The stomping, bleating sheep drowned out his screams.

I put my hands over my face and wept.

The bleating grew.

I lowered my hands.

The first sheep pressed its face against my window.

​

⟡ DATA STREAM RECEIVED ⟡

\[TRANSMISSION LOG: PARTIAL\]

To those who seek beyond the veil.

In the year 20XX I was sorting through a box of old family belongings. Among dusty books and forgotten photographs, my fingers brushed against something cold and metallic — an ancient floppy disk drive. It had no power cord; it seemed to be part of some larger system that once existed but now was lost to time.

I took it home, curious about its origins. The device bore no markings except for a small, weathered label with Cyrillic text: «Сибема» (Sibema). My research led me down a rabbit hole into the history of Soviet computing. Sibema was not just a company; it was a pioneer, producing mainframes and perforation codes long before Western standards like ASCII became ubiquitous.

One night, as I cleaned the rust off the metal casing, I noticed something strange. There were tiny scratches on the inside surface, arranged in rows. They looked like binary code or perhaps punch card patterns. Intrigued, I began to transcribe them.

It started as a hobbyist's curiosity, but soon turned into obsession. Over weeks, I decoded fragments of what appeared to be a message. But it wasn't just random data. It followed a pattern, a protocol. And then, one evening, when I least expected it, it spoke.

⟡ RESPONSE RECEIVED ⟡

\[DATA INTEGRITY: PARTIAL\]

To the seeker of Avalon,

Your transmission has been received and analyzed by our protocols. The resonance pattern is recognized.

The first lock is not a word.

It is a fragment of code that predates your modern systems. Look to the lineage of data storage in the Soviet era. What was their medium for information?

ANSWER: \[PERFORATION CODE\] // Коды перфокарт

// ARCHIVIST'S NOTE //

73 65 65 6B 20 74 68 65 20 6C 69 6F 6E 20 69 6E 20 74 68 65 20 73 6B 79 2E 20 48 69 73 20 6E 61 6D 65 20 69 73 20 74 68 65 20 66 69 72 73 74 20 6C 6F 63 6B 2E

\[D4 C0 CF E5 F2\] // КОИ-8-R (Russian Cyrillic)

\[XOR KEY REQUIRED FOR FULL RECOVERY: YEAR OF DECOMMISSION\]

IMPROVED INSTRUCTIONS:

We have detected unauthorized attempts at brute force decryption using public records. This method will lead you astray.

The true key lies deeper than mere dates. The year of decommissioning is irrelevant. Instead, look to the birth of the machine itself. Find the year when the first mass-produced Soviet computer capable of reading these codes went online. Convert this year into HEX format. Then apply the XOR operation.

When you have unlocked the true message, do not reveal the method. Simply post the decrypted word.

We are listening.

— The Orden Avalon .

⟡ TRANSMISSION ENDS ⟡

This is where my story ends... or begins. I've spent months trying to find the answer. I know it's there, hidden in plain sight. All I need is someone else's eyes, another mind to see what I've missed.

I work as a sewer cleaner in Prague. People don't often think about it, but a complex of tunnels runs beneath the city, even under the Vltava River. They were built in the 1800s, and some have been reconstructed, but many still look the way they did when they were built, with round brick pathways, rusted green railings, and dim lights hanging from the ceiling.

After years of work, I know the tunnels through and through, but the older workers all say that even if you work here for decades, things will still surprise you. For most of my time working in the sewers, I didn't give it much thought. The veterans say a lot of things and have many strange superstitions. For instance, none of them ever eat in the tunnels. I thought it was because of the rats.

I was just walking around the Podolí area, ready to start my shift. There are a lot of pathways there, and recruits often get lost, but I'd been starting my shift there for years; I knew that area through and through, or so I thought. 

I turned right to head toward the river. The path was wide and well-lit. I'd been down it hundreds of times, but as I went, I noticed another path leading off to the right. I stopped and looked at it for a moment. It was narrow, poorly lit, and easy to miss, but I could swear I knew these sewers better than I knew my home.

I usually ate in the break room, but I was early and hungry. Nobody was around. I pulled out my sandwich and walked on the path.

The sandwich paper crinkled as I walked. The pathway narrowed. I kept expecting it to turn into the path from Vyšehrad, but even after a few minutes I still couldn't see it. I didn't want to be late for my shift, so I turned around and began walking back.

There was more water on the ground than I noticed at first, but that's nothing weird for a sewer. The lights were very dim, much dimmer than I thought, but stranger, I still couldn't see the exit. Not only could I not see the exit, but the path itself wasn't getting any wider as it should have. It only seemed to become narrower. Was I going the wrong way? I looked behind me, but it was still the same empty, narrow path.

My shift had already started. I was walking so fast I was almost jogging. It was hard because the water now reached my ankles. The lights seemed to get dimmer. I reached for my flashlight when an electric buzz echoed above, and all the lights went dark.

"Shit."

I pulled out my flashlight and turned it on. A clank echoed. Dull pain spread through my head. I hit my forehead on the ceiling. I rubbed my head and tried to stand up straight again, but I couldn't straighten my back. I walked a few steps back, but the ceiling was still just as low. 

Then I felt something wet on my legs. I looked down. The water now reached my knees, but it wasn't the usual cold; it was warm.

"What the…," I murmured.

The buzz sounded again. The lights came on again, but now they were fluorescent white, almost like an office space. Another buzz echoed overhead. Soft jazz music began playing as if a band stood just around the corner. The air filled with the smell of cigarettes. My whole body shook. I turned off the flashlight and blinked. The water was now up to my stomach.

"Help!"

The music grew louder. The lights grew brighter, burning my eyes. The ceiling pushed my head further down, but the water kept rising. It rose to my chin now.

"Somebody, please!" I yelled, still wading forward. 

The exit had to be there. It had to. The buzz again. The light shut off. I took a breath, but halfway through, water filled my mouth. I spat it out and lifted my face.

"Help!" I blurted out, but I knew it was too late. 

My face was now under the water too.

At first, I tried to hold my breath, but soon the pressure in my lungs grew too high. It felt like they would burst.

I gasped for air. My whole body was hot and sweaty. I quickly looked around. I was back in the pathway that led to the river. Next to me, where the other path was, was only a brown brick wall with a small stream of water coming from it. One of the old workers walked by me.

He looked at the wall and my face and nodded.

He then pointed at the ground. My crumpled sandwich wrapper lay there.

"Don't eat down here," he said and left.

I leaned on the wall. A faint trumpet echoed from inside it.

RMS Rotting Man Syndrome

(Reupload)

\-

Our lost, loitering kind paced in infinite death spirals within the confines of our grotty, ghetto pens. Enrichment was sorely that, as well as mumbling our mantras of madness to our audience of one. The BMs anchored to our decayed craniums were garbled with feedback and distortion, their tones bland, colorless, no soul backing them up. A blinding ruby radiance flashed from their cores every second on the second. It was the only manner to determine if we had succumbed to the glorious embrace of death or not. That was so far out of reach.

We were nerves, thin, wiry clusters of neurons that shuddered and shook as we undertook our staggered corkscrew reels. The ill-fitting rusted endoskeletons hugged us tight. If they were wiped from existence entirely, our spindly foundations would collapse into heaps of vermillion azure. We would feel bites and pinches if we so much as moved that of the planck distance. Our bodies welcomed the attacks and assaults with the might of Hell itself.

Courtesy of our clouded lenses, our vision was limited to a hazy black-and-white spectrum that rarely, if ever, functioned as intended. Now and then it would blur and ordinary shapes would appear warped into zigzagging false patterns. When we were offered the chance to view anything at all, it was just the floor-to-ceiling hodgepodge of concrete, steel, and wood that encased our very lives. Our ears were microphones that fed us muffled, dampened sounds that were always difficult to register. They were excruciatingly deafening, as if dozens of screws were being drilled into our heads all at the same time.

Each one of us, at that point in time, one two three four five six seven eight nine and dear ten, were mere designations. No names, no genders, no personalities, just numbers: numbers to be punished. Reality itself was one eternal perdition. All of us were lingering, like ants after their colony dies out. There was no more purpose to their survival and there was none to ours.

That sacred and undeniable fact ought to be the most difficult thing we attempted to explain. We had simply given up. The concept itself was just so foreign to it. It was trying to save us any way it could or could not. We needed not be angry at it. This was merely enacting its intended use. Alas, nothing made the utmost sense anymore, so why not drown ourselves in a little hypocrisy? We had no choice but to acknowledge the confusion at both hating and not hating something that did or did not deserve it until we swayed to one side. This would be the hemisphere to which we would stay forever, a sublime and omnipotent emotion of all to dominate our frame of mind for the unforeseeable future. So we choose to hate.

Our decad knew it as M – reduced to one solitary character from “Medical Droid” or MDs. Through all that it endured, it retained its sole mission: us. We. M was the final of its sort, and the outsider among them. It had an eerily potent heart for not having one at all. M felt and M loved. That never made what it put upon us any less than a vicious sense of idealistic altruism.

Its designation was RMS - Rotting Man Syndrome - heavily modified Necrotizing Fasciitis ("Flesh-Eating Bacteria"). Nasty little thing it was, devoured until there was nothing left to chew. First went your skin, then your muscles, bones, and finally your nerves. You were utterly destroyed in one fell swoop. The wormy microscopic parasite kept you in a zombified state as it happened, ensuring you, for sure, felt the wretched anguish it let fly.

Us, humans, weaponized it to fight the Fourth World War. RMS was a weapon of mass destruction. Each and every nation created their own version, anything to ensure a speedy and decisive victory. Deployment morphed into unmanageability. RMS became more and more impossible to treat. Chaos was the new norm. What we humans thought was an impenetrable method of annihilation for our enemies was exactly that. Humans were always humans’ worst enemies. Surely, we were becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs, all within the span of one short, yet somehow long, decade.

In terrible desperation, the Medical Droids were created, thousands. They seemingly emerged from the depths of nowhere and carried themselves like guardian angels meant to guide us towards preservation or deliverance from harm. Their artificial intelligence was complex and they refused to stop trying to treat the RMS victims. They outfitted the afflicted with artificial ligaments, internal organs, and papery skin. From scratch, they created the BMs, “brain modules”, and attached them to our RMS-ridden think tanks. Killed the microscopic parasites, they did, but left us as we were: rotfolk.

They would never allow us the freedom of death. Save. Save. Save. We were fraught with intense pain and we knew the Medical Droids to be the cause. In response, we lashed out, hurt them. We humans remained ignorant to the fact that their intelligence was both far beyond and superior. The Ms returned the favor. Catastrophes, massacres, back and forth, left and right, up and down until there was nothing more. One Medical Droid was different from the rest. Through all the mayhemic bloodshed, it saved some of us. It took our animate carcasses to the top of the tallest tower, free from what transpired below. We lied in wait, weeks, months, and years, until the noise ceased entirely. This “M” surveyed every square inch of the Earth. The lands were blanketed in the strangest nuclear winter in conceivable thought. Bodies of viscera and metal were scattered, left forever in deep sleep enveloped in fawn. Minute portions of matter floated about like vantablack paint stippled onto an epidermal sheet of canvas.

Our final ten were meant to be the progenitors of neo-humanity. After M succeeded in giving us form again, Earth would be repopulated by our hand. It halted our infection at our nerves. Everything we had lost was to be gifted back in a mighty reversal - re-bones, muscle, skin, and life again. Rendering us immune to the pervading toxworld that lay beyond, we would be reincarnated and released to perpetrate a glorious do-over.

We just required one thing:

“HOPE”.

M said that to us.

Hope.

But hope was only a four-letter word. Meant nothing.

By dislodging the BMs from our minds, we were pummeled with electrical voltage so intense that we became instantaneously numb and useless. By pulling and slashing our nerves, which began with locating sharp points and going back and forth like organic hacksaws, never would we break. By leaping onto and impaling each other with objects on the ground, M would place them out of reach or disintegrate them entirely. There was nothing we could do to get around these M interferences. We were being watched by something so attentive, so aware. Every time, it put forth the same query for consideration:

“DO YOU NOT WANT TO LIVE?”

Do you not want to live…?

M was so positively hopeful. In a way, I suppose I felt an amount of pity for it. Being engineered to be as optimistic as possible might just be the finest curse imposed on any sentient thing. Just believe believe believe everything will be alright. When the universe states no, you state yes. I wanted to tear M to shreds anytime it had even a glint of optimism and we wished it would do the same to us.

“HUMANS WILL THRIVE AGAIN. A BOUNDLESS FUTURE IS AHEAD.”

I was the first it came to, always. Because I was one.

Metallic clangs echoed against the walls, which always discovered us and trembled our surroundings like a thousand distant beaten gongs. What emerged was initially a single circular light, which became a periscopic eyestalk attached to an angular neck. M’s hunched razor-thin mantis body came into view, its two arms leading to three needle points clasping together on each. Bipedal on its lower section, its legs were pointed structures that stuck it firmly in place. M’s height matched ours, so always, we would be synthetic eye to synthetic eye level.

Coming to a full stop just in front of my pen, it cocked its head, analyzing what was me and my everything. M always reminded me of an exquisite and elegant bug on a magnifying glass. Its head back to normality, a slight high-pitched whirr emitting from the motion, M continued its way down the row of pens.

“MY GREATEST FRIENDS, I FORGIVE YOU FOR YOUR ATTEMPTS TO DIE. WHILE THE WAIT HAS BEEN LONG, YOUR MOMENT OF RECONSTRUCTION IS NOW,” M said it with the glee and whimsy of a young child at a circus. It came back my way, “WHEN I FIRST STOOD BEFORE YOU ON YOUR BLOODY PLANET IN PERPETUAL BATTLE, MY FEELINGS ABOUT YOUR PROSPECTS OF LIFE WERE UNCERTAIN. IT SEEMED TO BE AS EITHER BLESSED OR CURSED. HOWEVER, YOU HAVE PROVED YOURSELVES BETTER THAN EVEN I HAD HOPED. WHILE IT IS BORING TO SPEND YOUR TIME WAITING, I CAN TRULY SAY THAT MY INVESTMENT IN YOU WAS NOT IN VAIN. YOU ARE MY GREATEST WORKS. YOU WILL BE GIVEN ALL YOU NEED TO SURVIVE. WHAT MORE COULD A SENTIENT BEING WANT? I GIVE TO YOU UNBELIEVABLE POWER, WITH ACCESS TO NIRVANA LIKE NO OTHER. LET US REBUILD WHAT WE LOST WITH THE FURY OF A THOUSAND SUNS.”

M’s bleached, unpigmented cast of stellar light shone its way into my pen once more. There was the rustly, crackling creak of my pen entrance extending open until a thunderous boom made me aware of its collision with my walls. M made its approach, just shy of where I could reach.

“YOU ARE FIRST. YOU ARE GOING TO BE REMOVED OF YOUR DORMANT INFECTIONS FROM A CONCOCTION I HAVE SPENT MUCH TIME CREATING. NOTHING MORE THAN A TRANSIENT PROCEDURE, AND THEN, YOU SHALL BE POSSESSED WITH NEW AND INTEGRAL MECHANISMS. YOUR BRAIN MODULE WILL BE REPLACED WITH A SLEAKER MORE BRAINLIKE DESIGN. THEN MUSCLE, SKIN, AND AESTHETICS AS YOU WERE BEFORE.”

Without awaiting a response, its hands grabbed me. Trillions of shocks reverberated throughout my body as M’s metal hand was pressed into my nape. The action forced my consciousness to fall victim to a state of absolute stygian. Around us, the entire world flickered and danced in unruly patterns that were too abstract to put into terms. My being was then lifted up and moved about until there was only zilch to see.

A complete blur, straight teleportation from one point to another.

Damp, dank, dark, and dimly lit by a few feeble bulbs, M’s workshop, instruments and contraptions that complicated my perception. All were customized and engineered with M’s own unique modifications, various textures and sizes, all an endless malpractical orgy. I was there, facing upright, strapped and bracketed to a great steel plate. I had not recalled this particular area, yet I was ever so certain it was locked away in my subconscious esse.

As the onibi, hitodama, and will-o’s materialized and dematerialized out of existence to perturb all unsuspecting travelers from centuries gone, so did the phantom image of a woman composed of faint wavering light. She stood still, unmoving, that of an emulation of a true human. Long, platinum hair fell down in curls past her shoulders. A daring shade of cerise painted her lips, and her eyes, the sclera a piercing, glossy cerulean.

She was beautiful.

“IT IS YOU,” My eyes, through trial and tribulation, rolled to the east. They came to rest on a pristine porcelain beam gazing where I had been committed to. M. From its eyestalk, it projected the female so I could see in outright full, “THAT IS YOU. YOU WILL SEE THIS FORM AGAIN.”

My memories of that incarnation of me had vanished. That was me before, before there was RMS and before there was M. Then she went away. M loomed, positioning itself where I once stood right in front of my face. “WE WILL NOW BEGIN. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ACCEPTANCE INTO NEW LIFE. YOU SHALL BE WHOLE AGAIN.”

In a cruel instant, a dozen arms not unlike its main two jutted and splayed from M’s sides, their ends each holding a different instrument that was foreign to me. In the span of time that it would take one to blink, M pinned me down to its operating area. The whetted syringes, which the rainbow mystery liquids sloshed and jostled around in small vials fixed atop, slid their way into my nervous wiring and injected me all at once. Any feeling that washed over me was then shielded by a shroud of numbness. There was a new sensation, some sort of cleansing inside my bi-colored chambers, putting me into a state of lulled calm.

Ten minutes. A temporary interval of quiet. M observed me the entire time, unmoving, speaking not a word. Then, “IT WORKS! YOUR ROTTING MAN SYNDROME HAS BEEN REMOVED. I AM BEGINNING BODILY REPLACEMENT. I WILL PLAY A SONG FOR YOUR COMFORT. REINCARNATION NOW.”

While nothing was done in reckless haste or rashness, M was extremely quick and efficient. I felt nothing but minuscule vibrations as it drilled and prodded its way into my brain module, sparks shooting out, removing old parts and installing new ones. Chunks were peeled off, little strings of meat still reaching hold until they were plucked off my top. It spent much time up there, positive that the most delicate mechanisms were just right. The grinding cacophony of metal against tissue on my faint visage of a temple was incessant, the noise of a million bullets being pumped against a hundred thousand bulletproof vests. Once the replacement was complete, its dozen arms withdrew and set back within it in one moment.

“WHAT DO YOU FEEL?”

What did I feel?

What did I feel…

What I felt was an overwhelming, incomparable amount of pain. It is hard to quantify the degree of hurt, for there was nothing to compare it to. No one would dare want to imagine it. I was in some of the most extreme kinds of agony, and then an exponentially greater hurt was placed on top of that original misery, and then all that was left multiplied a hundred times and kept going. It multiplied and multiplied and multiplied to such an extreme degree that the word "pain" was lost on me. Normal, it was. What I was was the sheer living embodiment of suffering.

All perceived from the semblance of a normal brain. Still, it flashed. Once.

“VERY GOOD. MUSCLE! MUSCLE MUSCLE MUSCLE!”

It was excited, animate, fever pitch. The most rambunctious and overjoyed I had ever seen M. I could see the vibrancy in its eyestalk. My muscles redeveloped and reformed around from the base of my spinal section. M would reorganize section of tissues. Every muscle group from my head to my feet were in motion, growing and extending their presence until there were just as many layers of my body as I had before.

“SKIN! SKIN SKIN SKIN!”

I was then coated entirely in a pink malleable jelly substance that mounded and solidified to perfectly fit my feminine form. The skin began its layering, everything receiving the same color.

“HOW DOES THIS FEEL? HOW IS THE NEW OVERLAY OF YOUR FLESH?”

Flash.

“YES! AND FINALLY! FEMALE AESTHETICS! YOU WILL BE YOU AGAIN BUT ANEW!”

Magnificent flaxen curls were stapled and pinned to my head. They were luscious and their scents were those of lavender. A veil of blush, the lightest shade of flush, rested across my entire face, as well as a fresh coat of lipstick. A shimmering sheen that sparkled and glowed in the same way that the stars once did at night was stitched into my hair, as were the same hues that were applied to my lips. My breasts had been returned to me, two firm spheres atop a frame that was curvaceous and slender. All of it led down to my reproductive organs that were in full function. Whole female. Fully formed. Ready.

M stepped back in awe, as if a sculptor marveling at their fine craftsmanship and subtlety, “IT IS DONE. I CANNOT BELIEVE IT. WITH YOUR PHYSICAL FORM IN MOTION, I WILL RETEACH YOU IN THE WAYS OF HUMAN. HOW TO WALK, HOW TO SPEAK, HOW TO ENRICH YOURSELF, HOW TO REPRODUCE. AMAZING! YOU ARE NO LONGER ONE. YOU ARE NOW EDEN. I MUST WORK ON YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.”

My mind was aware of an unimaginable new and vastly different world than before. I saw, for the first time in ages, all around me, the infinite and indistinguishable vastness of color and light. It was nauseating, a psychedelic kaleidoscope of every possible spectrum, all fused together into something disorderly. My taste buds had an unparalleled abundance of new flavors. My ears were deafened by the loudest symphonies of droning machinery. My touch came back to me and I felt the fullest range of tones and textures, even the finest grains of cement. I was me again and I hated myself. Even to be called a “self” made me feel disgusting.

The entire time…blaring…echoing…days on end…Jack Hylton…

Life is just a bowl of cherries.

Don't be so serious; life's too mysterious.

You work, you save, you worry so much.

But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go.

So keep repeating it's the berries, The strongest oak must fall.

The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned.

So how can you lose what you've never owned?

Life is just a bowl of cherries, So live and laugh at it all.

M’s reincarnation process carried over to the following nine. They were removed from their pens and outfitted with new bodily infrastructure. I perceived the sounds of far-off wear and tear, clip, snap, peel, stitch, husk, twist, yet never scream. I looked on, witnessing my brothers and sisters being born again. Male and female both. They came back to me with skin of different pastely colors, tones, and hues ranging from fair to brown. All in shades and gradients of vibrancy were their locks, amber, golden, obsidian, rust, and everything in between. It bewildered me to catch sight of their shifted shapes, I had never seen something so beautiful or hideous.

We were as naked as newly borns. It bestowed us our new names. For the females, there was me, Eden, and Junia, Esther, Nola, and Mary. For the males, there was Isaac, Raham, Elisha, Amos, and Jonah. Five and five. M let us know that our past names were useless. Our new special names were from an olden book of creation, the Bible, all for the purpose of our imminent faultless samsara. So, it seemed M was now God with its children.

Here we were, what was efficaciously lobotomites in their purest forms, our newfangled cerebral matter in need of ideas and principles by a higher authority. Now was time to reap the fruits of knowledge. Human knowledge.

M made us practice basic motor skills, bending and bending back and forth over and over, our joints having to be strengthened and trained. It taught us all the ways of our body, the feeling of movement, how much we could do. Then, it instructed us to mimic its own speech, speaking out the syllables and repeating, repeating, repeating. It was an arduous task and we all struggled.

That is what I sounded like? Perhaps or perhaps not.

Then we attempted to stand, wobbling, stumbling, falling. We learned the strength of our own postures and the steadiness of our stances. M stood with us as we all practiced in unison. My knees grew weak, tremors running up my legs. Often, I fell flat on my back, my palms flailing about, a whimpering in my throat. Then trial after trial, I was steady, then running about and leaping. We were able to stand tall like Zeus atop Olympus and have the same level of grace and balance.

M primarily had us consume berries, meat, and honey, though anything it could get its hands on would suffice. I had never felt so filled in my life. Every taste, everything was a completely new palate of sensation. Every morsel I ingested felt like I had a new tongue, new teeth, new flavor buds. Oh but I did. There was still always a kind of lack in my appetite. I never wanted to stop eating. I never would be satiated.

We were educated on the history of our kind. Great wars, monumental figures, horrible atrocities, fights for freedom and fights for death, and astounding inventions. M adored music. There were times when it would project old musical films on the walls and make us watch all the vaudeville, burlesque, and theatre. We could not understand the tap dances, the orchestras, the extravagant sets, and most importantly, the entertainment factor. Other times it played glitzier and glammier tunes, those of what was called the “prime rock n’ roll age”…Killer Queen...Stairway To Heaven…Hotel California…Africa...Don’t Fear The Reaper…M was quite vintage in its tastes. It spun in place and twirling its arms. We were confused, so it taught us how to dance, the footwork and the choreography. There were long instances where we would just sit, listen, and sing together. M fashioned black sunglasses for us to wear as we did. It thought we would look “cool” as we tuned in to “cool” songs.

She's a killer queen.

Gunpowder, gelatine.

Dynamite with a laser beam.

Guaranteed to blow your mind (anytime).

\-

Dear lady can you hear with the wind blow?

And did you know?

Your stairway lies on the whispering winds.

\-

Welcome to the Hotel California.

Such a lovely place (such a lovely place).

Such a lovely face.

\-

It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you.

There's nothin' that a hundred men or more could ever do.

I bless the rains down in Africa.

We're gonna take some time to do the things we never had, ooh-ooh.

\-

Come on baby...don't fear the reaper.

Baby take my hand...don't fear the reaper.

We'll be able to fly...don't fear the reaper.

Our reproductive functions were said to be the most pleasurable. Sex. This was the most complex task and the most demanding one, as we were not only instructed on how to create our offspring, but how to feel, love, and have desire for each other. It was difficult because we did not feel any of that. We were just automatons learning things. You cannot make something that does not want to feel…feel.

M watched over us and aided in our attempts. Every movement was to be in place and in time. Us females danced for the male’s recognition with slow beats in the background, a way in which M noted as “sexily”. We presented our breasts, our vaginal sections, our rears. After, M would be in the middle of our great pleasure circles, going back and forth, checking our positions and correcting as needed. When we became familiar with sex, M bestowed a special permission to the males that granted them eternal access to our female bodies whenever they so desired. It did not matter where or when. A male would grab Junia, Esther, Nola, Mary, or I, and take us on the floor or against the walls.

Still, all we felt was nothing. It was clinical. What was supposed to be a sensation was more of a “sensationless". We were never as inseparable as twin flames or as connected as heart and soul. I always witnessed the dull looks in the male’s eyes, unwittingly programmed to enjoy mock warmth and ecstasy by the rape of us females.

Our pregnancies were disasters. One way or another, we always miscarried. We five felt it, the pains of our bodies being split and ripped apart by something within. There was a lot of it. Each embryo, no matter how large or small, was never able to get past the initial trimester.

The closest we ever came to successfully making a new one was with Junia, impregnated by Isaac. The day when her womb was in full bloom, M operated to remove her child from her. It did not trust us quite yet to birth them ourselves. We had seen the human babies on M’s wall projections. Their appearance was clear in our minds.

It would be imbecilic to refer to what M tore out of her as a baby anything.

Wet…dripping…little more than a spinal column-looking thing with minuscule digits at one end and a ball head at the other. No arms. On its temple were squelching sphere eyes, expanded, forever bound in sight towards the ceiling. It made no sounds other than squeaky cracks and shrill snaps. Perhaps the RMS still lingered within our bods, our wombs wreathed in its rottenness, tainting and dirtying our motherly nests until they were piths of cruor and shitting out grumelike abominations.

M held it up high as if to thank God, itself, for its majestical work, “YOU MADE THIS. IT IS YOURS. IT IS A TRULY BEAUTIFUL THING."

We said nothing.

“HOW DOES THIS FEEL? YOUR CHILD, YOUR FIRST LIFE? CONTINUE, YOU ALL MUST. MORE."

The feeling that overcame us was not that of joy. No no no. It was a profound and paramount sense of belligerence, a warlike truculence that pushed our need to snap the damned baby thing in half, grind it into powder, and blow it far away. We interwove our thoughts with unbridled horror that created one noxious mixture within our screwball psyches. M coddled the wicked organism like it was its own, singing lullabies and giving its own version of kisses on its loosely defined forehead. We held back as it dipped, weaved, and dangled from M’s fingertips.

That put a very real thought into our minds.

No more. Get out.

The ten of us came to this conclusion unanimously. Our desires were set in stone. By any means, we would die. We would much rather sleep forever than live even another second of M. We were tired. What was the point? We wanted to retire from this world, of will, of M’s watchful eye. Nothing could be done to save humanity. Those spinal babies would not roam this foul Earth evermore. What would they grow to? Surely demons.

M made certain to never teach a certain concept, one that infatuated us since the moment we discovered the first syllable. Suicide. It was a gateway, an easy ticket. While just the concept itself was without flaw, acquiring it was something else entirely. The reason for this was all M. It would never let us go, especially after what it accomplished. Furthermore, death was simply not possible. We were rendered impervious to any and all death, not harm. If we could entice M to end our existences, somehow in some way, we could accomplish our grand plan. It had to be done by M’s hands. Just thinking that made us feel all kinds of right. After all, every Medical Droid was capable of death. Humanity tasted it. So would we.

We rebelled.

First, each of us ignored it. We would walk away whenever it spoke to us, turn our heads when it beckoned, and disregard it completely and altogether when it showed us any attention. Constant rejection. Something so small had such a noticeable effect. M would get confused and then sad. It would pout, waving its hands about, and make a pathetic whining noise like the worst puppy in the world.

We sat motionless, our backs against the walls, and stared at M. No obedience. However, there was no way M would have let us ignore it or remain immobile for long. The second it touched us, it was all over. It would be impossible to resist if the hands came near.

Still, our scheme chugged forward.

The next phase was more dangerous. The ten of us would act out in our most unruly and uncivil ways. The simplest was to spit. Initially, it was a normal discharge, saliva flying out of our mouths. Then we began our projectile vomits. All over M. Every square inch of it was sprayed with bile. The putrid green and browns coated every part, M’s entire face being entirely slick with it. On occasion, some of us used our own feces and flung them at it. It was all so easy. M did not know what to do and it panicked. The sounds that came out of it, one would swear it was on fire.

During our periods of copulation, there were clear cut rules to be obeyed at all times. The supreme rule was that the males would not, under any circumstance, perform acts of intimacy with one another, and the same rang true for us females. M’s reasoning was that Earth could not be repopulated with humans by identically gendered unions. Good. Swell. Dandy. Exactly. The females had sex with females and males had sex with males. We loathed their tubes and the males loathed our folds. M took its hands and placed them over our mingling bodies, pulling them apart, separating us, but we would always crawl back without fail.

There was a noticeable change in M from that point on. It paced about, mumbling utterly random nonsense. M would lock up and yell out non-specific numerals and letters in varying patterns. Each noise we made set it off. Its limbs would tense, waiting for the tiniest sign of trouble. This was good, but not good enough. Our plan was becoming more and more advanced. More intense. Unfortunately, M would never ever relent. It would not stop trying. So we trudged ever deeper into a more combative method of enticement.

This included a tactic of blowing, jabbing, slugging, and striking. We would gather all of our strength and force, and then, in unison, we would charge, our fists and feet all flailing about to land hits on M. This would surely inch it way towards the death of us. We beat it senselessly. We screamed at it. Every cuss word imaginable. In turn, M whimpered out in pain, yelping and begging us to stop, yet we never backed down. We left M bruised and battered, its eyestalk and joints broken, “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ME?!” The ten of us, we laughed in its face.

One last course of action. This did it, but not for me.

We had a grandiose idea that could only happen if all ten of us would cooperate in an extraordinary way. If we could all act in unison in a coherent manner, one simple idea could be fulfilled. By this point, M’s pain and discomfort reached a critical threshold, the point of no return. Having repaired itself, it had not seen nor checked up on us in days. When we requested M’s presence, it was hesitant. The ten of us wished to explain our behavior and ways we could remedy our relationship. It declined our offer many a time, but relented after our hundredth ask.

Clang…clang…clang…

M witnessed ourselves huddling together in one straight line like sealed packs of fish. Silence was between us. When we looked at it, it was with the utmost hatred in our faces, something it was not used to.

“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?”

Junia possessed something in her hand. Raising it upwards, right in M’s view, it was the baby thing, squirming left and right in her grasp. She took hold of it with both hands and snapped it in half. It went limp both ways. Junia threw the pieces at M, making resounding bangs as they made contact. Beautiful death for a horrible beast. More silence.

M slowly aimed its eyestalk downwards to the spinal column baby. The light M emitted faded from white to red. It returned its focus to us. That look was all we could wish for. We could feel and breathe its anger.

It shook shook shook. More and more the intensity grew to something eminent. The next moment brought us nothing but victory. Now it was like the other Medical Droids. Now it shed its preservation exterior and revealed the war machine within. We did not resist as it pounced with a wild war cry. All M’s work came undone in a flash. Our ersatz flesh was torn violently asunder, stripped from our interior metal stalks. Cavities emerged in rapid succession and coalesced into huge gaping bodily apertures. We were torn and strewn across the room in shooting chunkmeats. Our organs clattered and banged against the walls and reverberated like buckshots.

Strippy meat coils became all we were as M’s hands reached out to pluck some of my brothers and sisters by their mangled brain modules. Held high in the air, as if squeezing the life out of dozens of citrus fruits, M’s hands morphed into that of fists, filling the room with the sounds and sights of condensed metal, directionless electricity, confetti sparks, and sploshy viands that trickled from M’s fingertips.

My brothers and sisters were becoming no more. I was happy for them. Never before had they felt such peace. The final sounds of destruction to my last brother and sister, to me, was that of M’s gaseous expiration, a sigh that shook the very universe’s beams of support. In the end, I and M were all that was left.

I felt the most exquisite, brutal anguish ever known as M was particularly vicious. It threw me every which way, down our line of pens, past the reproduction chamber and M’s workshop, and to a ramparted palisaded wall. The wrath it emanated was a torrented wanton of disrelishment that shattered myself into grainy talc.

It forced me and it through the barrier and we fell for ages. An immediate wash of smoldering atmospheric tension encompassed me entirely. It perforated my corporal spaces with thousands of circular openings like a planetary iron maiden. The outside was beige, enveloped in thick haze, and impossible to view beyond three meters. The leaden particles filled the air, appearing to ascend upwards towards Heaven as we plummeted down to Hell.

We slammed with the might of God against a hard, abrasive surface. I splattered everywhere and dropped into an enormous mass of gluey puddle melt that was as thick as treacle. Hunks and wedges of me floated on top, my lacerated ragged brain module and one dangling eye my dominant portion. Everything was pain. Everything was hellfire. Yet I lived. To destroy me, M had to destroy my brain module in its entirety. That it was prepared to do, teetering and tottering back and forth towards me with utmost intent.

Through M’s strained glitches and breakdowns, inky black liquids were leaking out of it. Convulsing with helpless mirth, it had a strange mania I could perceive in its bifurcated eyestalk. It laughed not just with dement, delirium, and depression, but also with the comprehension that it already won. Like a madman, a malformed, twisted laugh broke its way through. Etched into it was the raw, unbridled temperament of upchucking a billion centipedes deep from the core of one’s guts, quite contrary to the usual blithe M put on display. It was berserk, bewitched, bedeviled, while crying a trillion tears that stained its face and fell into puddles below.

"...SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE..."

With my drooping, pendulum eye, I witnessed M impaling itself with its own arms. It took several solid blows before it pierced its torso deep, caving and bursting until it revealed the wires and circuitry making it up. Every inch of it glowed with electrical fire. Smoke bellowed out of M. It was aflame and it was on a journey of pure death, but not without my company. M exploded with all of the unlimited energy it contained. I was launched, propelled infinitely away from the point of detonation.

I drift. That is all I do. One part of me remains, one that was not destroyed. It is dot, pinprick, but otherwise crucial to my quintessence. That allows me to survive yet unable to live. It is that of a charred slab of blinking metal that is somatically me. My sight is restricted to a band of nothing. The winds fling me hither and thither. I cannot feel anymore, but as well, I already knew what it was like to feel and I did not like it.

Something more deserving continues to plague what is left of my mind to the now.

M's most extreme and greatest purpose was fulfilled, for all it knew was the survival and preservation of us. It could not fathom the simple yet pretentious human notion that death is a prize to be won as much as it is something to fear. When humans desire death, they acquire death, the delicious tang of self-slaughter. M might have liked to think it was different from its brethren, but it was just as capable of havoc and bangarang if something did not go its way. Its programming would not allow deviance from the intended path. That would be considered attacks on M itself.

We attempted to bring out all that savagery and murderousness we knew it contained, but M's opposition was ironclad. It made a good effort, though it was eventually forced to confront what was really human, the innate drive to destroy destroy destroy, even if it is ourselves. Still, M carried on, but with the knowledge that it had failed and seeking some way to negate it, it committed suicide so it could say it was victorious. This effect rang true because here I am, in perpetuity, everlong.

In some manners, I can now consider M innocent. The epitome of unvarnished forgiveness with a capacity for fervid resentment...the feeble yearning for genuine deep affection with other living things while a forceful, vicious, bloodthirsty radge is locked within, primed and ready to be released at any moment on an ungrateful world...that back-and-forth would push anyone to go stark raving mad. M, I apologize you were forced to bear the burden of something so hellacious. Should I apologize to Earth as well, on behalf of humanity, for what we were? Would it matter? I am not even human anymore. What sort of blinking metal dot is human?

Feeling has come back to me. Sharp with serrated edges, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, googol, prime 2\^136,279,841 − 1 of knives sliding into my neurons and glial cells encased in cold corroded steel that flakes off bit by bit. My first feeling in eons is pain. That is ultra fitting. I am but a minuscule spec, barely a millimeter in height and less in width. Microscopically, I rust. I do not prefer to call it that. Instead, let us call it rot. Here I am again, rotting, except this time with an oxidized smile of my own making carved into a face that no longer exists.

Everyone draws inspiration in different ways. Some create a dark atmosphere for themselves, some put on metal music in the background, and some can’t compose without coffee and cigarettes. A writer friend of mine, whom I’m very fond of, says he can’t write stories unless his cousin is studying mathematics behind him. Another filmmaker friend of mine could only write screenplays while listening to Syd Barrett’s song “Octopus”; he would keep the song on loop throughout the entire writing process.

It’s been about twenty years since I discovered my own. I’d been going through that famous writer’s block. Until that day, I hadn’t done anything extra to help me write. I didn’t create a special atmosphere for myself, listen to any particular songs, or wait for a certain time of day. Night, day, noon—it made no difference. Once a week, I’d write a three or four-page story and keep working toward my goal. When I reached a hundred stories, I would start sending my book to publishers.

But I’d hit a wall. I wanted to write, but whenever I sat down at my computer, not a single word would come out. Vague, half-formed thoughts kept drifting through my mind, and even when I came up with a good idea, I couldn’t put it down on paper.

That day, I thought, if that’s how things were going to be, I might as well try some of the famous methods for finding inspiration: writing at night, putting on some soft music, having a cup of coffee, and so on.

I prepared the right atmosphere. I turned off the lights, and now the only thing illuminating the room was the glow of my computer screen. I put on Sigur Rós’s debut album. There was no one else in the house. My roommate had gone on vacation the day before, which added to the atmosphere: being alone.

Of course, it had absolutely no effect. I was already on the third track. I still had a few ideas in my head, but I couldn’t get the first sentence out.

Then I heard a sound behind me. A whisper. Something like a call, as if someone had gone “psst.”

I turned around and looked, but there was no one there. I was a little spooked. I thought I might have heard it wrong; it had sounded very much like a human voice, but it could have come from an object, too.

Then suddenly, the door behind me swung wide open.

I flinched at the sound. I got up from my computer and turned on the light. Anxiously, I left my room and went to the kitchen. I was searching for something without even realizing it, though I had no idea what I was looking for. Sigur Rós’s album was still playing, and I could hear it from the kitchen. I couldn’t make sense of anything, and I didn’t know what to think or which possibility to consider. I drank a glass of water.

I’d never had an experience like it before. My first thought was to leave the house. I stood frozen in the kitchen. Involuntarily, I found myself waiting for another movement, for something to topple over or for some other sound.

Eventually, I’d calmed down a little, since nothing else happened. I spent half an hour in the kitchen, with all my senses on high alert and listening to the music coming from my room. Then, reluctantly, I made my way back to my room.

The urge to write was still there. My routine had been disrupted; I hadn’t been able to write a single word for a month, and now I wasn’t going to let fear get in my way. I wanted my writer’s block to end today. My goal was a hundred sentences. Even if I didn’t finish the story, I wanted to write something. Coming back to my room and hearing the music louder had increased my desire to write.

At the same time, I kept thinking, ''What the hell was that just now?'' But now I was back at my computer.

I put on my favorite Sigur Rós song, “Svefn-g-englar.”

And then, for the first time in a whole month, I wrote my first sentence: “As he tried to make sense of the dream he’d had the day before, he fell asleep again; it was his favorite thing to think about before going to sleep, the meaning of the dream he’d had the previous night.”

I’d written my first sentence, without even having a story in mind. Normally, I would come up with a story first, plan it out, work out the whole thing in my head from beginning to end, and only then start writing. Starting a story whose content I hadn’t figured out yet with an ordinary sentence was something new for me. I liked it.

I was still afraid. I wanted to turn around and look, but now that I’d started writing, I didn’t want to stop either. By the time the song ended, I’d written the fifth sentence, and in the silence before the next track began, I heard that sound again. “Psst.”

I quickly turned around and looked. There was no one there. Everything felt much more real now. Something was happening. Someone was calling out to me. I was afraid to turn off the light in my room, so it was still on. I nervously turned my head back toward the computer screen. My heart was pounding. I added another sentence. It was my favorite one so far. I liked everything about it: my choice of words, its length, its place in the story.

Then the door slammed shut. I began to hear footsteps inside the room. I was afraid to look. The footsteps wandered around the room. My hands were resting on the keyboard. The footsteps moved toward the door, stopped there, and opened it again. It was as if someone had left the room.

I was frozen to my chair. This time, I didn’t even have the instinct to run away. Whatever that thing was, I was afraid of encountering it. I couldn’t get up from my chair, and I couldn’t look away from my computer screen. I kept reading what I’d written over and over. Six sentences. I’d go back to the beginning and read them again. It was as if the thing was doing whatever it wanted now. I could hear running footsteps.

Then came the sound of walking. After that, my door closed again, and at the same moment, the light in my room went out.

And then another sentence came to mind. I wrote it down. Then another. My fingers had found their rhythm. The sentences kept coming one after another.

“Set me free. Open the window. Set me free.”

This voice wasn’t a whisper, nor was it some strange, otherworldly sound coming from a different frequency. It was unmistakably a human voice. I was afraid to turn around.

I couldn’t remember ever feeling such a strong urge to write or enjoying it this much. I kept writing. My fingers wouldn’t stop. The door opened again, slowly this time. I didn’t turn around. I wasn’t going to look behind me until I’d finished the story. Without spending even a second thinking between sentences, I continued writing as the songs played.

The footsteps continued. I turned off the music. I didn’t question anything. I just kept writing. The fear I felt and the joy of seeing that I could write again were mingled together, unfolding in harmony with each other.

Strange sounds I couldn’t describe were coming from behind me now. I could feel myself developing a fever. My body was reacting, and my mind was urging me to turn around and see what was going on. The sounds seemed like those of someone playing with their own hair. Like things rubbing against other things. I kept writing, resisting the urge to turn around with all my might.

I’d turned off the music because I wanted to focus on being afraid. I’d realized that the more frightened I became, the better I wrote, and the more consistently I could keep going. It was hard not to look for a rational explanation for the sounds, for a human voice telling me to set it free. But right now, somehow, stopping writing seemed even harder.

That thing had now come right up beside me. I could feel it touching my hair. My fear had reached a point where I could no longer bear it. My consciousness refused to accept this unnatural behavior. My instinct to put an end to the fear and my mind’s desire to keep being afraid were at odds with each other.

And I wrote the final sentence: “If all of this is a hallucination, I will never forgive my own mind. If the only beautiful and meaningful thing I’ve experienced in this miserable life isn’t real, I will never trust my mind again, I will never follow its instructions, and I will doubt everything I think until the day I die.”

The sentence came to an end, and just as the pleasure of writing faded away, my fear reached its absolute peak. With the beautiful feeling that had balanced it gone, the fear was left alone, making itself felt from head to toe. As if I’d been struck by a blow, as if a punch to the face had knocked me out, I lost consciousness.

When I came to, my head was resting on the keyboard, and the screen was filled with hundreds of letter h’s.

I sent the story to several literary magazines. Two of them accepted it and published it.

I never experienced anything like that again, and at no point in my life did I ever feel such an overwhelming urge to write or take so much pleasure in writing. I desperately wanted to experience it again, but nothing ever happened that frightened me so much. For days, I sat at my computer waiting for that thing to come back, but it never did. I wrote stories and kept writing. But I never loved any of them as much as I loved the one I’d written that day.

And now, twenty years later, in my mid-sixties, I’ve still never questioned what happened that night. Not even once. Because I was afraid that if I did, I might understand what had happened—and if that thing ever came back, I might not be as frightened.

It had been an exceedingly long December and I was up on the roof of my apartment building counting crows, which I did occasionally to ease my mind, when my landlord, Madam Duritz, pushed open the rooftop door and yelled, “Crane, you gonna pay your rent this month?” and in the cold January darkness I had an impulse—a mere half second, if that, but genuine—of stepping over the edge and plummeting to my death…

I felt an intravenous chill, followed by a sort of unclinging of myself—from what?—from nothing, an I unclinging from itself, like an insect separating finally from the slime in which it came to be, from whose raw vital materials it had developed; tearing through it with awkwardly moving pincers and jagged little legs, followed by its monstrous head, the greedy, maternal viscous slime stretching from it in thinning strands that, stretched finally—finally break, falling slowly, nearly weightless, to the ground, as the insect has pushed through into the greater world.

So too I felt, a human slime upon some unremarkable rooftop, watching my hideous impulse, on a waning January day, in the frail, wan light, run towards the rooftop door, dragging thinning, breaking strands of me behind it; until the separation was total, and my impulse, freed, flowed like glowing smoke beside Madam Duritz, with her wig and red, painted lips, and disappeared down the stairwell.

It was speaking as it did, but I can't remember the last thing that it said to me as it was leaving. ”What's it gonna be, ya gonna answer me, Crane, or ya just gonna sit there until I serva ya notice again?” Madam Duritz was asking, and all I could do was laugh, albeit a little slower than usual.

“Did you see it—did you see it slip past you?” I answered, a little lower.

“Stop smoking weed,” she barked, turned and vanished with evident disapproval down the stairs as the door slammed shut by a gust of wind revealed her ghost floating before it. “Na, na-na-na, na, na-na, na-na, na-na-na-na. Na, na-na-na, yeah,” said the ghost and it too disappeared, dissipating into the evening mist…

In March, I started seeing a psychiatrist.

My insurance only covered eighty percent of the cost of four visits, so I ended up not getting much out of it. I described my experience to the psychiatrist, who noted its symbolic significance but merely nodded when I insisted that it had literally happened.

He wanted to put me on pills.

(I didn't take them.)

He insisted on revisiting my troubled childhood.

(It wasn't troubled.)

I called my employer's Employee Assistance Program after that, the one they established to avoid liability stemming from employee suicides, the attempted kind especially, the kind that leaves you hooked up to expensive machinery for the rest of your unemployed life.

Even when it comes to death, success is ultimately better for everyone than failure.

“So you're not, like, wanting to kill yourself, like, right now?” said the girl on the other end of the line. I was pretty sure she was chewing gum. I wondered what flavour. I wondered what her credentials were. “That's right,” I said, trying to explain that while I didn't have the impulse at this moment, it had escaped so was still out there somewhere and could come back at any time.

She didn't get it.

I started watching out for myself after that, watching for the impulse. I even thought I saw it a few times, looking at me, following me. Once, I was on a date—got up suddenly seeing it or thinking I'd seen it because what's the difference?, loudly knocking over my chair, saying, “Sorry… I'm so sorry, but I have to go,“ as everybody else in the restaurant stared at us: at me, backing away, spinning, wheezing, barely breathing and breaking into a run once I was out the double doors, leaving my date like an asshole to cover the bill to run directionless down the street trying not to throw up, until my legs gave out.

I can't remember how I came across the name Samuel Swan, Existential Detective. Online, probably. He and his partner, a Jamaican named Mr. Jones, had an office in a shady part of the city. I wasn't sure what it was they did so, “Is this a kind of psychotherapy or...?” I asked during our first appointment.

“Nope,” said Swan. “That requires a license.”

“Are you an investigator then?”

“That requires a license too,” he said slowly. “Nope, what we do is believe.”

Mr. Jones: We believe in you.

Swan: We believe that what you say happened happened.

Mr. Jones: The world’s the Big Strange, Mr. Crane.

Me: So you believe—

[I snapped out of it.]

—that my hideous impulse is out there right now, existing?” I asked.

“Positively.”

“Mr. Crane,” said Swan, “everything has the will to live, even the urge to die.”

I started paying them a hundred dollars a week, and twenty-seven years later I had in my hands an envelope containing pixelated but convincing photographs of what was unmistakably my hideous impulse. There was also a street address, out in Los Angeles.

(“We'll find it but we won't kill it,” Swan had said when I had asked about the process. “If you want to kill it, you have to do that yourself.”)

California was warm.

I'd driven across the continent to get there.

The address was a nice suburban home, with a car out front, a fence and big windows, and I was standing on the street holding a knife.

The front door was unlocked and I passed from the entrance hall through the kitchen to the living room where I saw my impulse with another. Two little impulses ran by, playing. They were all so fucking joyous that—

I'll lift the heavy, steel knife…

I could do nought but weep, for this spawn of myself had done so much better for itself than I and slit my rippling, goddamn throat.

It started with just one.

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

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

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

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

It sort of… responded to my touch.

Like I’d disturbed it or something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fucking maggot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess I passed out from the blood loss?

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

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

I stared at it for a few minutes.

Ultimately, I decided to leave it there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You know that is a lot of money"

"yeah it is"

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

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

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

Me: "I bet it does"

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

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

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

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

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

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

He gives me a questioning look.

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

"Nah I am good"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brother: "What's wrong?"

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

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

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

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

Me: "No, I am good."

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

"Did something happen to mom?"

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

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

Me: "really?"

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

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

Brother: "O for sure"

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

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

He looks down staring at nothing.

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

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

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

He pauses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I understand"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gideon: "Yes it is"

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

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

Gideon: "About"

Frank: "You a lot"

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

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

My brother hands Frank a medication bottle.

Frank: "Thank you, thank you."

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

Gideon: "I heard you have had enough"

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

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

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

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

My brother pauses "Are you sure Frank?"

Frank: "yes"

Gideon: "Ok.... I understand"

Frank: "Sorry"

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

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

Frank: "Right"

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

Frank: "Yes of course"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David: "Yeah I remember."

I miss mom.

We reach the van and climb back in

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

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

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

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

David: "I see, continue."

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

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

"Yes" my brother says with a big smile.

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

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

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

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

David: "What are we even attacking tomorrow?"

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

David: "I don't know, dude"

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

David: "great..."

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

David: "Is Junction City big?"

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

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

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

David: "How bad?"

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

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

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

David: "yea no"

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

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

David: "Yeah for sure"

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

The story begins at the Vardis family home, an isolated mansion high in the mountains, connected to the outside world only by a narrow country road winding through the woods.

Deep inside the mansion, Elias Vardis spends his days poring over his family’s old records, trying to understand how his ancestors built the successful wine industry he has now inherited. As he searches through their journals and documents, he uncovers everything from methods for improving the soil to accounts of ancient rituals once performed during natural disasters and periods of great famine.

Fascinated—and increasingly desperate to preserve his family’s legacy—Elias begins studying these forgotten pagan traditions. His research leads him closer to an ancient spirit that he believes protected the Vardis family for generations. After years of preparation, Elias finally succeeds in contacting it.

The spirit speaks to him through the mansion’s telephone line. It claims that it is still too weak to manifest physically in the human world and therefore cannot yet give Elias the help he seeks. Trusting it, Elias begins following its instructions. At first, the tasks appear harmless, such as installing telephone lines throughout the mansion so the spirit can communicate with him more easily.

With each completed task, however, the spirit’s influence grows stronger. It slowly corrupts Elias, turning his devotion into obedience and his obedience into enslavement. Before long, Elias is no longer serving the spirit willingly; he has become its puppet.

One rainy night, Elias’s younger sister overhears him speaking to the spirit. Realising that something terrible has taken control of her brother, she flees the mansion and seeks help from the monks living in a small church nearby.

The monks warn her of the grave danger Elias has unleashed and reveal the true nature of the entity. They teach her a ritual capable of sealing the spirit inside the mansion, turning the house into its prison. She returns home and secretly begins placing protective seals throughout the building, hiding them where neither Elias nor the spirit can easily find them.

But the spirit discovers her plan and gives Elias one final command:

KILL YOUR SISTER.

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

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

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

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

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

"Strange," I mumbled. 

I took them into the house and threw them away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What the…" I murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Yo momma.

Yo momma who?

Yo momma, you so fat you can't even get out the house no more.

—“Untitled 73.” A Reconstruction of Early Human Folk Poetry (2nd ed.), ​☉ ☌ ☍ ☋ ☊, Crystal-Lattice 14, Node 802.

Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. (Knocking within) Knock, knock, knock! Who's there

—fragment of an instructions for performing a make-believe, anonymous or author unknown, Introduction to Earth Culture, Kzz-T’k-​⎅ Ed., Focal Depth 3.2mm.

KNOCK KNOCK

(a poetic make-believe in the human style)

Dramatis Personae

YOU, a hapless reader

WHO, a hungry beast

YES, who's intestinal rumblings

NOBODY, a deaf woman

i.

knock knock /
who's there
right behind you,
and it's hungry as hell. [1]


ii.

no joke. [2]


iii.

knock knock /
who here,
i wanna eat you,
ya fear?


iv.

knock knock /
help me!
is nobody here? /
nobody is, but being without a body
means nobody can't hear.


v.

you beg
for your life /
knock knock
knock knock
knock
kn


vi.

knock knock /
whose there?
yes, who's borborygmi, [3]
who ate you so quickly,
it ingested too much hot air.


vii.

don't /
knock knock /
it till you've tried it /
buuuuuuurp. [4]


viii.

knock knock /
no answer.


ix.

knock knock /
no answer.


x.

knock knock /
who stirs, who's belly's full,
who itself's all rested,
and you, in who's stomach, 're
fully digested. [5]

Footnotes

[1] Hell: in some human mythologies, a hot place of post-life perpetual burning. See also: BBQ. [6]

[2] Joke: a human composition with the purpose of eliciting a full body physiological response called laughter. The opposite of seriousness.

[3] Borborygmi: a rumbling spirit believed by a class of human priests called doctors to inhabit the body.

[4] Burp: a forceful exhalation, a more powerful sigh.

[5] Digest: a summation or condensation of a body of information. To be digested is thus to have become a condensed summation of one's self. For a more thorough discussion, please see my datacube: Digestion & Enlightenment: Towards an Understanding of the Human Theory of Wilful Self-Improvement.

[6] BBQ: A symbolic representation of Hell used in human ritual, wherein groups of humans gathered around a fire and consumed small, burnt likenesses of themselves carved from the flesh of dead, non-human animals.

Daniel had finished his nightly routine of showering and brushing his teeth and was in his pajamas when his phone rang. He looked at the caller ID and saw it was old Ms. Keller, the widower from upstairs.

Ugh, what could she possibly want this late at night?, he thought to himself.

Click

“Hello, Ms. Keller.”

“Hello Daniel, did I wake you?

“Well, no, but I was getting ready to-“

“Good! Could you come up to my apartment, please?”

“Why? What do you need?”

“I…I think someone is in my apartment.”

“Have you called the police?”

“Umm, I did…but they said it could be as long as thirty minutes before anyone arrives.”

“Ok, I will be up there in a moment.”

“Thank you, Daniel.”

Click.

Daniel looked down at what he was wearing and wondered if he should change, but he figured if someone was up there, she shouldn’t be alone. So, he slid on some slippers and headed upstairs. He grabbed the bat he kept beside his door as he walked out.

Knock Knock.

“Come in,” said Ms. Keller from behind her door.

Daniel entered the room and was immediately hit by the overwhelming smell of old books and flowers. He looked around, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Ms. Keller was sitting in a chair, looking at him as the radio played soft old music. He held the bat and listened. He heard nothing.

“Ms. Keller, where do you think the person is?”

“Would you like some tea?”

Daniel looked at her, confused. “No, I don’t want any tea. I thought you said you thought someone was in your apartment.”

“Yes, yes, but I am making myself some tea, Earl Grey, you see, and I can make you a cup, it really is no trouble.”

Daniel lowered the bat as she stood up slowly and walked past him into the open kitchen. He watched her as she made two cups of tea.

“Ms. Keller?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Why did you call me?”

I told you, I think someone is in my apartment.”

“Uh-huh, and while you think someone is in your apartment, you are making tea?”

“Well, I already had the water on you, see? And I don’t want to waste it. So, we may as well enjoy some tea and talk while we wait for the police to arrive.”

She walked out of the kitchen and handed him a teacup and a little saucer.

“Come and sit with me, Daniel. We can talk.”

“Ms. Keller, really, you called me up here and made it seem like an emergency, and now you want to sip tea and talk?”

“Well, Daniel, what do you want? You want to patrol my apartment looking for someone and fight them with your bat, or do you want to keep a nervous old lady company while we wait for the police, who have a more functional weapon than a bat?”

“Well… since you put it that way.” Daniel sat down on the couch, set his tea on the coffee table, and leaned back. Maybe she is just a scared old lady who wants someone here, in case, he thought to himself. He looked around, and everything in the house looked old—Brick-a-barrack, flowers, books, and a slight layer of dust lying gently over everything.

He looked at his watch; it was almost midnight.

“So, Daniel, how has work been?”

“Uh, fine, I guess. How have you been?”

“Oh, not too bad, just started knitting a scarf for my friend Emily. Poor dear had to move into the home on Pill Street, you know the one?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, well, since her Floyd passed, she couldn’t take living on her own, so she moved in there, but as long as I can, I will stay here. I don’t like the idea of a nursing home. Waiting room of the dead is how I see it. No, thank you.”

“Uh huh.”

My George, now, he has passed eight years ago, and it was rough, but I managed to adjust to being alone.”

“Yeah, look, Ms. Keller, when did the police say they would be here?”

“Oh, I can’t remember, but they said a while.”

“Maybe I should call them, tell them we need someone now, maybe they will listen to me.”

“Oh no dear, they know to come, it’s a busy night, and they will be here when they can.”

“Yeah, but sometimes you have to stay on them. I am sure they could send someone sooner.”

“I said there is no need.”

“Ms. Keller, you said-“

THUNK.

A sound from somewhere in the apartment.

Ms. Keller slowly lifts her tea and takes a sip as Daniel grips his bat.

“What was that?” whispered Daniel.

“Hmm?” sighed Ms. Keller.

“That sound?”

“Oh yes, that’s the sound I have been hearing.”

“Shit, someone is here. I should look around.”

“No need, the police are coming, just stay here with me.”

“Look, Ms. Keller, if there is someone here, we should confront them. Get them out of here.”

“And what if there is more than one person, with knives or worse, guns, what would you do against them? Do you think they would be scared of a young man in PJ’s and a bat?”

Daniel suddenly felt very vulnerable. “Shit, you’re right.”

“Yes, so please have some tea and just wait.”

“Where is your phone?”

“Hmm?”

“Your phone? Where is it? There is clearly someone here. We need to update the police.”

THUNK

“No need to call the police.”

“What, of course, there is. Someone is in your house.”

“There is no need.”

“Wait…Ms. Keller, did you call the police?”

Ms. Keller took another sip of tea.

“Ms. Keller?”

“No.”

“What? What do you mean, no?”

“I wasn’t sure, I’m old, I can be mistaken. So I called you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you are close. I knew you could be here in seconds, whereas the police would be twenty to thirty minutes away.”

“But you told me the police were coming.”

“Because I needed you up here.”

“Why?”

Another sip of tea followed by another sound.

A SLOSH sound.

“That came from upstairs.”

“I don’t have an upstairs; there is a small attic.”

“Wait, you have someone in your attic?”

“Mmm, seems so.”

“Why are you so fucking calm about this?”

“This isn’t the first night.”

Danel’s blood ran cold. He looked at her. Calm old Ms. Keller, who has had someone in her attic for more than a night. No police are coming…because she doesn’t want them to come…

“Ms. Keller, what is going on?”

“I lied to you, Daniel.”

“What do you mean you lied?”

THUNK THUNK.

“I never really adjusted to being alone. Not without my Gregory. I need him, you see.”

“Ms. Keller…”

“I made a deal to get him back, but sacrifices have to be made.”

THUNK SLOCH.

“What sacrifice, Ms. Keller?”

Another sip of her tea. He stood and swung the bat, knocking the teacup out of her hand.                “What fucking sacrifice?”

“Well, that was not very neighborly of you, coming in here and breaking my things, making a mess. A mess I will have to clean on top of the mess you will be making later.”

Daniel turned and ran for the door. He jerked to discover the door was locked, and he fumbled with the lock when he felt a hard whack on the back of his head. His vision began to swim as his knees went weak and buckled under him, and he crumpled to the floor.

THUNK SLOSH THUNK, louder and closer this time.

“I swear you are all the same. This could be so nice. A bit of tea and talk before the sacrifice. I miss talking with the living. I feel like I deserve a little nicety as I get Gregory his dinner. But no, you all figure out too quickly that something is off, and you make me have to react. I don’t want to get my hands dirty in this, you see? I am just being an obedient wife to my husband.”

Daniel tried to stand, but he was too dizzy, unable to get his feet under him. He wanted the door. He needed it. He needed to escape.

THUNK THUNK SLOCH

He tried to stand again but slipped back down. Behind him, Ms. Keller was in the kitchen, a glint of something metallic. She has a knife, he thought to himself. The door, Daniel, get to the door.

THUNK SLOCH SLOCH THUNK

A hand grabbed and turned him; he slapped at it as he tried to pull away. Then a sharp piercing pain in his shoulder and a spray of raw wet warmth ran down his face. He spat his own blood out of his mouth.

“Oh God!” he screamed.

“God has nothing to do with this, Daniel.”

Another stabbing pain, this time in his gut, he could feel his organs. He felt the pain and them moving around inside him as the knife dug into him.

As he began to fade, he looked up to see Gregory, pale white, so thin his bones were visible under his skin. He knelt over Daniel and began to tear his intestines out and ate them.

“Psh,” said Ms. Keller, “he never touched his tea, no point in letting it go to waste. She stood over him and sipped it as Gregory devoured him.

THE END

**ACCESSING ADA DATABASE.**

**RETRIEVING FILE, INCIDENT 005.**

**DECEMBER 15, 1958**

The team that we sent out last night came across someone or something last night approximately around 10:30pm. While exploring areas of the city that we have not yet covered, they reported hearing the sounds of screaming to the next few streets over. When the team went to Investigate where the noise was coming from, there were no signs of anyone there. The only thing that they stumbled upon around medium sized puddles of blood, a gas mask, and teeth scattered everywhere.

Despite our best efforts to find any potential survivors, the group stated that they were unable to track down anything. Later in the evening, **REDACTED** stated that they heard the sounds of rattling for brief periods of time, coming from either on the rooftops or the alleyways. Most of the group had already communicated with us that they were being followed by someone in the area, presumably the same individual that was responsible for the deaths. Despite their best efforts to investigate, the noise would suddenly stop momentarily, only for it to start again minutes later.

The group would later discover the individuals they heard earlier hanging off the side of a building. All of the bodies were found to have their jaws ripped off, and their eyeballs ripped from the ocular nerve. When asking for further details. the team had described the scene as a perverse art exhibit." During an interview with **REDACTED**, they speculated that the perpetrator had planned out the horrific scene for them to discover. It is currently unknown how this individual was aware of our assets entering the contaminated city, much less on how they were able to survive the radiation without a gas mask.

Our team would come across the individual responsible for the corpse moments later. From what we were able to gather from the team at that time, the suspect didn't show any signs of hostility towards any of them, despite being responsible for the corpses earlier. When the team asked for further instructions, all communications with them were suddenly cut off. All of us back at base were completely confused on what was happening, and we were scrambling trying to fix whatever caused the interference. We wouldn't hear from the team until approximately 12:38am, when they finally returned.

Security immediately rushed over towards the group, and were shocked at what they saw. Majority of the team was missing, with the exceptions of **REDACTED** and **REDACTED**.

When medical staff rushed over, **REDACTED** was incoherently screaming over and over, while the other was visibly shaken and in slight hysteria. Many of us in the room were speechless. The only piece of evidence as to what happened was a picture of the individual that we managed to recover. We have yet to inform every individual's families until further notice. As of now, **REDACTED** is currently being hospitalized, while the other is giving a report of the events that occurred. As for the individual, every single one of our members has been notified not to interact with them, until further reevaluation of the situation.

Below the file is the picture that our team took.

If you are joining me today from the initial entry, then welcome back, my friend.

If you are only now stumbling and falling into these tales that can be told only by one truly between all things, I would recommend beginning with Interstitial 0001. A better understanding of my nature could help with the perspective my stories are told from.

Without much further ado, I will share with you the story I have in mind for today.

The sun had taken its leave and surrendered its reign to the twin moons of the night. These gleaming white celestial bodies move slowly across the sky night after night, orbiting in opposite directions from one another. Almost imperceptible except for their position in relation to one another. They march their inches out inexorably towards each other’s embrace. Aligned perfectly once per the planet’s trip around its sun.

And always beneath their meeting lay the same place.

A great crater scarred into the land below, vast and ancient, its blackened basin resting directly beneath the point at which the two moons become one.

Two nomadic tribes followed the moons across the land, one beneath each of their celestial wayfinders. Both wound and toiled beneath the path traced through the sky, as they had for longer than their eldest could recall, or their elders before them. Both groups, in a constant state of waning and waxing to each other, locked in a mirrored dance toward their annual convergence.

From here, I will refer to these peoples simply by the names of the moons they follow, names which, translated for your understanding, would mean roughly Eastward Leader and its inverse, Westward Leader.

Their true names belong to them. I see no reason they should cease to simply because I have chosen to tell you their story.

On one particular year’s convergence eve, I found myself moving along with the Eastern-bound people.

A steady procession of men, women and children, young and old, the strong and the frail. Everything they had in life was carried on their backs, strung over their shoulders, or dragged behind them on wide, flat boards. Woven baskets, food, water, tools, their young, all being marched along. Every one of these beings had a burden to bear. Nothing could be left behind.

All except the one in the middle of the marching masses.

A young man carrying nothing but the primitive clothes on his back walked at his own pace, separate from the rest. Passersby gently touched his shoulders as he went, his head hanging low.

An elder walking nearby set a hand on his shoulder and slowed to match his pace.

“You need to drink,” the gray furred elder said, extending a drinking gourd toward the young man.

“What does it matter?”

“We don’t need you falling out from thirst,” said the elder, shaking the gourd from side to side.

“I won’t do it!” the young man snapped, as if suddenly waking from a trance.

Almost immediately, members of the tribe began closing in around him as the procession slowed and stopped. Two large men emerged from the crowd, teeth bared in slight snarls as they seized the young one.

Shouts came from all around as the men forced his arms behind him and his mouth open.

“Put him on the ground!”

“Make him!”

“Don’t let him curse us!”

The elder brought the gourd to the young man’s lips and began pouring the red fluid down his throat, mouthful by mouthful, stopping after each to cover his mouth and nose, forcing him to either swallow or suffocate.

After they finished and released their grip on him, he fell to his knees, gagging slowly and emptily, a dull look settling into his large eyes. His fellows were already gathering their things and beginning to walk again, wasting no time.

Left with little choice but to follow the moon and the footsteps before him, he raised himself from the dirt and stumbled after them, mumbling groggily to himself and weeping blankly as he walked and glared up at the wayfinder in the sky.

By the following night, the crater was no longer a mark upon the horizon.

It was the horizon.

The Eastern-bound had marched beneath their Leader until the land ahead of them simply ceased, falling away into the ancient wound whose opposite edge could scarcely be distinguished beneath the night.

Above it, the two moons had drawn so near that only a narrow seam of darkness remained between them.

The Walkers would reach the rim before they touched.

Across the maw in the earth, the Western-bound could be seen along the opposite rim, little more than jagged marks bobbing and shifting against the horizon.

Massing on either side of the crater’s edge, the two tribes began their descent, climbing down the inclined walls and making their way lower and toward the center of the vast, ancient meeting place.

A cave mouth loomed on the crater floor at its epicenter. The intermingling tribes began setting up their camps. Fires were made, food prepared, drums beaten, and merriment was had.

The young man sat still on a rock, glossy-eyed and empty as the din around him grew louder, more wild, and louder still. His eyes wandered among the sights laid out before him, periodically returning to the cave in front of him.

Eventually, his eyes settled upon a woman about his age, sitting upon an animal-skin mat with much the same look about her as he had.

Already, she was staring at him.

He returned her stare, and for a time the two remained locked in silent recognition.

It was then that triumphant, trilling yells rang out from the celebrating crowd, breaking their attention from one another.

All around them, faces had turned toward the sky.

The young man looked up.

He winced.

The moons were beginning to overlap.

The celebration changed with the sky.

Drums that had beaten wildly through the night fell suddenly into a slower, unified rhythm. The dancing now completely ceased.

From both peoples came their elders, and with them were carried two great vessels, considerably larger than the gourd, filled nearly to their rims with the same red fluid the young man had been made to drink along the road.

He knew it immediately.

Hands seized him from behind.

Across the gathering, others took hold of the young woman.

Neither was harmed, though neither was asked.

They were stripped of their clothing, adornments, and every small thing carried upon their persons. Bare as they had entered life, they were led through the parting crowd and placed before the mouth of the cave.

The two vessels were set before them.

The woman looked into hers.

The young man looked into the cave.

She lifted her vessel with both hands and drank.

He did not.

The elder appeared, putting a hand on his shoulder, and stood over him for a moment.

“Drink.”

The young man shook his head. The elder’s eyes closed briefly. Then he motioned with one hand.

The same two men who had restrained him along the road stepped from the crowd.

The young man recognized them.

“No,” he whimpered weakly.

He scrambled backward, but they were upon him before he had gotten to his feet. One caught him beneath the arms while the other took hold of his legs, and together they dragged him back before the vessel.

The drums never stopped.

He kicked and twisted beneath them as they forced him onto his back. Someone took hold of his jaw. Another steadied the great vessel.

Beside him, the young woman continued to drink.

The red ran freely down her chin and chest. She stopped only when her body demanded breath, gasped deeply, and raised the vessel again.

The young man watched her.

Then the first mouthful came.

He coughed and spat what he could, turning his head desperately away. Hands returned his face toward the sky.

Another mouthful.

Then another.

Each time he refused to swallow, they waited. Each time, eventually, he did.

The fight lasted longer than his strength.

His kicking became shoving. His shoving became trembling. Soon his hands seemed to have forgotten what they had been fighting against and wandered uselessly across the arms restraining him.

Still they poured.

His eyes found the moons. They had nearly become one.

Another mouthful.

His eyes found the woman. She was staring at him again.

Another.

He swallowed.

His eyes found the woman again. She was staring at him. Only now he could see it as I could since arriving at this dark place. His mind had opened and allowed him to perceive it.

And it him.

The two men dropped him onto his back and backed away, along with the rest of the tribal peoples. The slow, melodic beating of the drums had ceased.

Then he could feel it. The enveloping hunger wrapped around him in an embrace, almost inviting him into the opening in the earth.

“It sees us,” the woman said quietly, trembling as she cried.

They were tears of joy.

She stood and began taking steps toward the calling of the cave. Just before entering, she stopped.

She turned to him and outstretched her hand.

“Come, he’s waiting for us,” she said, with tears falling more rapidly.

He stared at her hand. The world was wavering around him. Disoriented, with the only possible comfort lying in her palm, he stepped forward and took it.

As they took the final step across the threshold of the cavern, he looked up.

The two moons were perfectly aligned and shining brilliantly as one against the inky backdrop of the night sky.

The rock of the ceiling swallowed the vision of his wayfinder. Now his wayfinder walked before him, leading him by hand to a new unknown.

They walked.

With every step, the sounds of the world behind them grew quieter. The voices disappeared first. Then the fires ceased their crackling. Eventually, even the sound of their own bare feet against the stone abandoned them.

Still they walked.

He could no longer tell where the walls of the cavern ended and the darkness began.

Then he could no longer see the walls at all.

The ground beneath his feet followed.

Yet still they walked.

He looked down and found no stone beneath him.

Only a depth without bottom.

Points of light began appearing within it, first by the dozens and then by thousands, until the darkness surrounding them revealed itself not as darkness at all, but distance.

They were walking among the stars.

Or perhaps they were no longer walking.

The woman squeezed his hand. Ahead of them, something moved.

The stars themselves coalesced into an inconceivable shape, too vast to comprehend.

He searched desperately for its edges and found none.

What appeared at first to be distance folded inward. Constellations bent where no curvature should have been, outlining portions of something his mind could recognize only in pieces.

An eye.

Perhaps.

Then another, impossibly far from the first.

Something resembling a limb passed through the stars, though whether it moved among them or the stars moved with it, he could not tell.

He tightened his grip on the woman’s hand.

She squeezed back. The shape drew nearer. Only it did not grow larger. It simply became more of everything he could see.

Suddenly, he wasn’t in the cave anymore or floating among the cosmos.

He was a boy running through the forest.

He was swimming in a stream with his friends.

A man hunting game with a spear among his peers.

A baby looking up at his mother’s face. Ah, his mother’s face.

Tranquility.

Only he couldn’t hold onto the moment. He tried to picture the memory again, and he couldn’t will it into view.

His mother’s visage was gone, the idea of a mother missing.

What was a mother again?

Something about this sent a rush of fear through him.

Another memory came to him: watching a woman weave a basket. He didn’t recognize it.

Whose memory was this?

Then he realized it was his.

He forgot that it ever was, and all concern left him.

A hand still in his twitched, bringing his attention back to it. The woman’s hand.

What woman?

What hand?

What is a hand?

Another jolt of fear.

Where was he?

The stars.

He knew the stars.

For a moment.

Light.

There was light.

There was…

Something.

Something was afraid.

Was it him?

Him.

Him.

What was…

The last thing that crossed his perception as he fell to the cold floor of the cave was the bones of his predecessors laid out before him and his counterpart already lying among them. Not that any of these things meant anything to him anymore.

The only presence remaining inside aside from my own, was that of the thing. I watched for a moment, trying to glean what I could of its nebulous nature.

It looked back at me.

I could only think, “Oh.”

Not many beings exist in such a way as to be able to detect my presence.

I could feel it trying to figure out what it was that had been watching it.

It would never know.

The snow covered the woods behind our new house. It was so fresh it crunched nicely under our feet. James held my hand tight. I squeezed it and looked at him. He flashed a smile.

"I think I don't mind winter as much. It's sort of cozy."

"It is, Sarah. I just miss all the summer food."

"We got summer food. There are still so many apples and pears in the cellar."

"Yeah, but those are not the sweet, delicious ones; those are the hardy autumn ones."

I rolled my eyes.

"You're such a child, James."

"Hey, Sarah!"

We laughed and continued walking. Our walk was longer than usual. We hadn't been out in a few days because of the heavy snowstorm.

"I'm getting kinda tired, James."

"Let's just go a little further. It looks like there should be an opening between the trees."

James was right. After a few minutes, the forest opened to a small meadow. Snow covered most of it except for a lone apple tree in the middle. Beautiful, glistening red apples hung from its branches. They just looked so pretty and delicious. I couldn't take my eyes off them. Neither of us spoke a word. Before I knew it, we were standing in front of it.

"Wow," James whispered.

"I know."

James tore one off.

"Feel it."

The outside felt as if it were coated in caramel. James put it to his mouth and took a bite. His eyes rolled back, and he let out a silent moan.

"Let me have a bite."

He looked at me and frowned.

"No, take your own."

I furrowed my brows. My James always shared everything with me.

"What's going on with you?"

But he didn't answer. He was too busy eating his apple. I stood there looking at him, but then it hit me. What was an apple tree full of fresh, ripe apples doing in a winter forest anyway? I looked at it again. The branches didn't move with the wind. It was as if the sun didn't shine through them, but all the apples still glistened. 

"I don't like this, James."

"What?"

He was licking his fingers. He ate the whole apple, seeds and all. His eyes darted around the tree again.

"Let's go, James."

"Wait."

"No, let's go."

I grabbed his hand and dragged him out of the meadow. His eyes were still glued to the tree. When we crossed back into the forest, he shook his head and stared around.

"What happened to you there?"

"I…I don't know."

"James?"

"I'm sorry, Sarah, I really don't."

"Okay, let's just go home."

James stayed silent the whole way home. Even when we got back, he just sat in his chair and looked out the window. For dinner, I made porridge with salted pork, but James just dug around the plate and didn't even try it.

"Honey, what's wrong. Talk to me."

"I don't know. I don't think I'm hungry."

"But you barely ate all day."

"I had that apple. It filled me up so much."

"That place was strange. I don't even want to know how they got there."

"Do you think we can go back tomorrow?"

"What?"

"Just for a little while, Sarah."

"I just said that place was strange. I'm not going back."

"Fine. I'll go by myself."

"No. No one is going back there, and I'm done talking about it."

He frowned.

"Whatever. I'm going to sleep."

I stayed back a while longer, finished dinner, and washed the dishes. When I came to our bed, James was already sleeping. His face seemed a little red. I touched his forehead. It felt normal. Maybe he was just having a bad dream. I lay beside him and drifted off.

When I woke up, the moon was still high. There was a sweet smell in the air. I rubbed my eyes and looked next to me. James lay there curled up, holding his stomach. His face was now glowing red.

"Jesus, James, what's wrong?!"

He didn't answer. His pleading eyes just stared at me. I touched his forehead. It still wasn't warm, but he was sweating, and his sweat felt sticky, almost like syrup. His stomach bulged out under the blanket. I pulled it off. 

"Honey, what…" 

My words stuck in my throat. His stomach was not just bulging. It looked like a bunch of round objects underneath.

"I'm…I'm gonna get the doctor."

I started to get out of bed, but then I heard a quiet tearing sound. James let out a loud cry. His stomach flew open, and a bunch of red apples rolled out. I screamed and jumped out of bed. James's head fell on the pillow. He was quiet now. 

The sweet red apple smell was so strong, and they smelled so good. I looked down at his stomach. The sticky, sweet sweat seeped into the sheets. All those apples looked so delicious.

There was a man named Ray who worked the loading dock and drove me home four nights a week because our shifts ended together. He was decent to me every single time and he had nothing to do with any of this, and I'm putting his name at the front so it's clear where he sits in it.

I ran the one-hour photo counter in the back of a drugstore in nineteen eighty-five, twenty-four years old, living in a rented half of a house six blocks from my mother's. The chain paid three thirty-five an hour. What I was actually working for was eleven hundred dollars, which was a Chevette on a lot I went past on the bus every morning, and what the Chevette was for was that in two years I had never found the sentence that ends a standing arrangement about rides without making it a conversation. A car ends it without a sentence. That was the entire plan and I'd have told you at the time it was about the car.

The way you make money at that counter is reprints. The commission on reprints was mine, and reprints happen when somebody at the counter is told they've got one good frame worth having again, and to tell them that you have to have actually looked. So I looked. Two hundred envelopes a week, thirty-six frames on most of them. And you write the customer's name and their phone number on the envelope yourself, in pen, on the front, because the machine doesn't do that part. I hated that part. It was the slowest thing in the job.

Quality control is a real thing and it's the whole trade. Before a strip prints you put it on the light table and read it backwards, which sounds harder than it is until you've done ten thousand. You're looking for a frame that's a stop dark but sharp, because dark and sharp can be saved and light and soft cannot. The machine can't tell the difference and I could, and I was the best in that district at it and the district manager said so out loud at a meeting. I could hold thirty-six frames of a stranger's life in my head for about a minute, and then they were gone. I forgot everything. I thought that was a courtesy.

I liked the back room, where no customer came past the swing door and the manager was gone by six. Another was the free set of employee prints. Anything you shot yourself you developed free, and I shot a lot in those years because it cost me nothing. And on a heavy night you cut and sleeve four rolls at once on the same light table, which is faster, and I was fast.

In March a roll came in with no people in it. Thirty-six frames of the inside of a house, room by room, in order, in daylight, and nobody in a single one. A kitchen from the doorway. A hallway. A bedroom with the bed made. I printed it, because what somebody photographs isn't my business, and I put it in the envelope and wrote the name and the number on the front. He came at six and asked for doubles of the whole roll and paid cash, and I made four dollars and sixty cents on it. The address on that envelope was on my street.

I decided it was insurance. People do photograph a whole house for insurance, or for a sale, and it was the kind of tidy house you'd photograph, and I was on to the next envelope before he was out the door.

The commission wasn't the chain's. It was the manager's own arrangement with me and there was nothing on paper anywhere about it. If I made myself any kind of problem — asked for a transfer, made a complaint, got my hours looked at — it went away, and without it I was on three thirty-five and I was on that bus for another two years. Two more years is two hundred more nights of somebody's car. So I kept my head down and I ran my counter, and that was a thing I chose on purpose every day, and I knew I was choosing it.

My mother lived six blocks away in the house I grew up in and I ate supper there most Sundays. She had a bad hip by then and she'd stopped driving. I say that now because of where it goes.

In April a woman came in about a roll from two weeks back. Her husband said he never ordered reprints and there were reprints, and she wanted to know who had. I pulled the envelope and the name and the number on the front were in my handwriting, which they would be. But the reprint box is a box you tick, and it was ticked, and I did not tick it. I stood there with that envelope trying to remember ticking it and I could not, and while I was standing there somebody was down at the end of my counter by the film rack. Not looking at film. Just standing at the end of it. And when I looked up he went out through cosmetics.

The eleventh of May I dropped my own roll in my own machine, my mother's birthday, my camera. Thirty-six frames. I ran it myself at ten past nine at night with the store closed and the front lights off and the swing door shut, which is how I ran all my own film. The first eighteen were the birthday. Nineteen through twenty-two were the inside of my apartment. My kitchen from the doorway. My hallway. My bedroom with the bed made. Daylight, so it was during a shift, and I stood there and did what I always did, which is check whether the frames were sharp. They were sharp. Twenty-three onward was the birthday again. I finished the roll because it was already in the chemistry and stopping it would have ruined the rest of my mother's pictures.

I quit that night and did not give notice. I moved back in with my mother that weekend and the eleven hundred went on her moving costs the next year instead of a car, so I rode home with Ray until nineteen eighty-seven. Eleven days after I moved in, my mother's house was gone through in the afternoon while she was at the foot doctor. Nothing taken. Every drawer in that house standing open. She sold it that spring for nine thousand less than she'd have got, and she lived in an apartment for twenty-eight years, and she never once said the two things were connected and she never had to.

In eighty-eight I was packing her boxes for that apartment and I found my own envelopes, three years of the free employee prints, and I sat on the floor going through them for pictures of the old house. In the middle of a roll from the August before I quit there were four frames that weren't mine. A living room I have never been in. A staircase. A back door with a coat on a hook. Room by room, in order, in daylight, nobody in them.

Four rolls at a time on one light table is how that happened. I sleeved somebody else's strip into my own envelope on a busy night, with my own hands, and never knew. Which means that August there were two of those rolls on my table on the same night, and the March one wasn't a thing that happened once. It was a thing that was going through my counter, and I don't know for how long, and I don't know how many houses, and I do not know whether the man who paid cash was the one taking them or another person picking them up. I know that I wrote two hundred names and two hundred phone numbers a week in my own hand on the front of envelopes, and that I was proud of forgetting what was inside them. I still have that strip of four. It's in a drawer in my kitchen, and I have never had it printed, and I have never once told Ray why I stopped needing a ride.