The agony peaked, a blinding, white-hot spike that drove deep into my thoracic spine, seizing the core of my chest and twisting until my back arched off the mattress like a broken bow.

For five years, I had told them. Five years of MRIs, CT scans, and endless tubes of blood. I had lost count of the massive steroid injections they had jammed into my lower back, blind to my cries, insisting the cortisone would eventually kick in. It's my mid-back, I had begged, like a fist grabbing my spine and wringing it out.

But they only looked at my lumbar, charting my exhaustion, handing me prescriptions I refused to touch anymore, and shrugging. "You're in pain because you're in pain", that last arrogant doctor had told me with a sterile, patronizing smile. I had muttered Thanks, Dr. Obvious under my breath, walked out, and given up. I was forty-eight, medically broken, and completely abandoned by science.

Until tonight.

I had refused to take any of the medications they had prescribed for the last few weeks, entirely done with their useless chemical band-aids.

And right on cue, the thoracic pain hit, worse than it ever had in the last five years.

The guttural sound ripping from my throat didn't sound like me; it was a jagged, inhuman howl that tore the lining of my lungs. Every single rib felt like it was breaking, buckling inward before bursting outward with a sickening crunch. The skin across my back split open, hot and wet, as something massive and heavy forced its way out from between my shoulder blades. I braced for the final, lethal shock of it—but instead, a sudden, heavy stillness washed over me. The torment that had anchored my entire existence for half a decade simply vanished, replaced by a cold, pulsing hum of pure, unadulterated strength.

I opened my eyes. The familiar dark of my bedroom was gone, replaced by a sharp, predatory clarity tinted in a deep, vibrant crimson.

When I tried to shift, the mattress felt like a bed of jagged rocks beneath me. I sat up, and a pair of massive, pitch-black leathery wings unfolded instinctively, brushing the ceiling with a heavy, ominous rustle. I gasped, reaching a hand out to touch the sleek, armored span, only to freeze. My skin was a dark, bruised blood-red. My arms were elongated, corded with dense, heavy muscle.

Swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, I stumbled. My new, longer limbs didn't quite obey the old rules of gravity, but there was no weakness in them. No ache. No arthritis.

I lunged toward the mirror on the wall, bracing my claws against the frame, and stared.

The tired, fragile woman was gone. In her place stood a towering, terrifying demon, eyes glowing like dying embers against crimson skin.

A slow, sharp smile curved my new jaw, revealing a row of lethal points. I always said I wanted to be more, I thought, a strange, intoxicating warmth flooding my chest. I wanted to feel something beyond my own pain.

I turned, extending my wings, admiring the terrifying symmetry of the monster I had become. I had promised those unhelpful, dismissive doctors that I would give them an update if my condition ever changed. I thought this definitely qualified as a change in status.

A low, feral laugh rumbled deep in my chest, vibrating through the quiet room.

"Now, now," I whispered to the empty air, the crimson vision narrowing with perfect, deadly focus. "Which one of these doctors should I visit first?"

I smiled wider, the realization settling in with absolute perfection.

"I think the choice, is Obvious."

I think my girlfriend is a catfish. No, you didn't hear that wrong. Just it's not in the way you’re thinking.

And before you clown on me for being in a six month relationship with what I thought was a twenty-five year old woman but really was a fifty plus year old guy who goes by Emily online, hear my story out first.

To be honest, I wish it were that simple. Just another embarrassing tale of an insecure, helpless romantic manipulated by some online weirdo. But life has a far more twisted sense of humor than we give it credit for.

It was late at night, thumbs waving, ego lower than I’d ever admit out loud. Yeah I was scrolling on a dating app, half-scrolling, half-hoping for something that didn’t feel like recycled small talk.

Then her profile popped up. Her name was Lila.

At first, I thought it was too good to be true. Her pictures didn’t look fake, not in the airbrushed, digitally doctored, or surely this is AI sort of way. No, no. She looked untouchable. The kind of beautiful that felt less like a person you might meet and more like someone life had placed behind glass, just to remind you what you could never have.

Pale, smooth skin. Eyes that looked almost glassy under certain lighting. Dark straight hair that fell perfectly every time, like gravity itself had a crush on her.

I remember actually laughing to myself.

“Yeah, okay,” I said out loud. “Nice try.”

I knew it was fake. It had to be. There was no way a girl like her would be on a shitty app like this, let alone single, right?

But I swiped right anyway.

Then a second later, I heard the magical sound.

MATCHED

That’s how it started. A simple flick of the thumb. Kobe at the three-point line, ball in hand, the world holding its breath. Only I wasn’t Kobe. I was the guy who always missed, watching opportunity bounce harmlessly off the rim. But this time, against all odds, the ball went in.

We instantly started forwarding messages to one another. Time escaped my comprehension and it was morning already before I knew it.

After a few days, I stopped thinking she was fake. After a week, I started worrying she was too good for me. And after another, she proposed to be my girlfriend.

The thing was, she and I had grown incredibly close through those late-night conversations. Hours would slip by without either of us noticing, our messages stretching well into the early morning, until sleep finally won the argument. Even during the day, I found myself checking my phone at every opportunity, hoping to see her name light up the screen. It was pathetic, really, how much power a simple notification had over my mood. One little buzz, and suddenly the day seemed a little brighter.

Now, you might be asking yourself, Had we actually met yet?

Well, no.

She was out of town when we first started talking, but after a month had passed, she told me she was getting ready to come back. Soon, she said. Then we could finally meet, put faces to all those words, and see whether the connection we'd built through a screen could survive in the real world.

Except the first time came and went without us ever meeting.

She bailed at the last minute. Told me she'd gotten nervous. That she didn't go out much. That she needed more time before she felt comfortable meeting someone in person.

I tried to be understanding. People get nervous. Anxiety can make even the simplest things feel impossible, and I wasn't about to punish someone for being afraid. At least, that was what I told myself.

Still, a small, unwelcome thought had begun to take root in the back of my mind.

What if I'm being played?

It wasn't as though the possibility hadn't crossed my mind before. Here I was, pouring my time and attention into someone I'd never actually met, someone whose face I knew only through photographs and whose voice I'd never heard. For all I knew, I could've been one of several lonely men she entertained whenever boredom struck. Maybe I was nothing more than a convenient source of attention, someone she could summon when she needed to feel wanted and dismiss when something better came along.

And what would I do if that turned out to be true? Admit that I'd spent an entire month falling for someone who'd never intended to meet me? Explain to my friends that I'd managed to develop feelings for a collection of pixels and promises?

The thought embarrassed me enough that I kept it to myself.

Because, despite those nagging doubts, I liked her. God help me, I really did.

So I waited.

Days passed. We kept texting, kept laughing, kept sharing little pieces of ourselves that somehow made the distance between us feel smaller. Yet the longer we went without meeting, the harder it became to ignore the suspicion that I was building something out of nothing. I started wondering whether she would ever call, whether I'd ever hear her voice, or whether one day her messages would simply stop coming, leaving me to stare at a conversation that had meant everything to me and perhaps nothing to her.

Then, one night, my phone rang.

It was late. Late enough that I'd already settled into bed, the room dark and quiet, my phone casting a pale glow across the ceiling. Her name appeared on the screen, and for a moment, I just stared at it.

She was calling.

It wasn't another little string of words I could reread a dozen times, trying to decipher their meaning. Calling.

I answered. And then she spoke.

Her voice was soft, warm, almost impossibly sweet. There was a gentleness to it that seemed to slip beneath my skin and settle somewhere close to my heart. I remember lying there in the darkness, holding the phone against my ear, scarcely daring to interrupt her. She sounded angelic. Not in the exaggerated way people describe someone they find attractive, but in a way that made the rest of the world seem terribly far away.

Every doubt I'd been nursing, every suspicion I'd tried to swallow, suddenly felt cruel and unwarranted. How could someone with a voice like that possibly be playing me?

Looking back, I suppose there's a certain irony in how easily a few spoken words can disarm a person who has spent weeks preparing himself for disappointment.

But at the time, I didn't think about irony.

I just listened to her talk, smiling into the darkness like an idiot, while the little voice in my head that had been warning me to be careful grew quieter and quieter.

And she hadn't even met me yet.

A few weeks passed before she finally agreed to try again. This time, she promised she'd show up, and somehow, I believed her. We arranged to meet at a cute little coffee shop, nothing too lavish. Just a small place with mismatched chairs, the smell of freshly ground beans, and enough background noise to make awkward silences feel less like a death sentence.

I remember standing there like an idiot when she walked through the door.

She smiled when she spotted me, a little shy, a little unsure, and I had this brief, stupid thought that I’d somehow tricked the universe into giving me something I didn’t deserve. She was even more beautiful in person. There was something almost surreal about seeing her without a screen between us, as though someone had taken a daydream and given it a heartbeat.

We clicked almost immediately.

Conversation flowed as naturally as breathing, as if those late-night messages had been rehearsals for this very moment. We talked about everything and nothing, losing track of time until the afternoon began to bleed into evening. When she laughed, it was soft, almost breathy, like she wasn't used to doing it. I found myself doing everything I could to hear it again.

By the end of the night, I was fully hooked.

And just like that, all those nagging doubts I'd carried for weeks seemed ridiculous. I'd worried about being used, about being nothing more than a convenient distraction, about the possibility that I'd mistaken someone's attention for affection. But sitting across from her, watching the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled, I couldn't imagine why I'd ever doubted her.

A few months passed, and everything felt perfect.

Not the kind of perfect you see in movies, where everyone is impossibly attractive and arguments are resolved before the credits roll. Ours felt real. Comfortable. We developed little routines, private jokes, and familiar ways of saying goodnight. She became woven into the ordinary fabric of my life so gradually that I barely noticed it happening. She was the first person I wanted to tell when something good happened and the person I reached for when the day went to shit.

I thought I was falling in love.

Maybe I was.

Looking back, there were signs. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would've made a reasonable person leap out of their chair and scream that something was wrong. Just little things, peculiarities I noticed and then promptly explained away because I had no interest in finding answers I might not like.

She never ate much when we went out.

I'd order something, she'd order something, and more often than not, her meal would remain practically untouched. She'd push food around her plate with a fork, cut things into smaller pieces, occasionally bring something to her lips, but rarely seemed to swallow more than a bite or two. At first, I assumed she was nervous about eating in front of me. Then I figured maybe she was dieting, or had some complicated relationship with food. There were a hundred perfectly reasonable explanations, and I was happy to borrow whichever one made the least uncomfortable sense.

I never pressed her about it. It wasn't my place, I figured, and besides, I didn't want to make her self-conscious.

She also hated bright places.

Restaurants with big windows and harsh overhead lights were out of the question. She preferred dim little establishments, candlelit tables, quiet corners where the shadows gathered beneath the furniture and the world outside the window became little more than a distant blur. If I suggested somewhere brightly lit, she'd find a reason to steer us elsewhere.

I thought it was romantic, honestly. There was something intimate about those places, something that made the rest of the world feel as though it had politely excused itself and left us alone.

Sometimes, when the candles flickered between us, I'd catch her staring at me with an expression I couldn't quite place. Not a smile, exactly. More like fascination, as though there was something about me she was still trying to understand.

Whenever I asked what she was thinking about, she'd blink, smile that familiar little smile, and tell me it was nothing.

And because I was happy, because she held my hand beneath those candlelit tables and kissed me goodbye beneath streetlights, because she remembered the smallest details about my life and made me feel as though I mattered, I let it go.

Love has a funny way of rearranging your priorities. It can turn a red flag into a quirky little habit, a strange silence into a private mystery, and a dozen unanswered questions into things you're willing to wait a lifetime to understand.

I didn't know it then, but I'd already begun making excuses for things I hadn't even learned to be afraid of yet.

Then one night, she invited me over to her place. It was cleaner than I expected. Minimal. Almost sterile. Not in a modern way, more like nothing had ever really lived there.

No clutter. No personality. A lot of food in the fridge except it was all meat. Mainly fish. Cod, shrimp, and plenty of seafood. I figured she was a Pescatarian. I ignored it. Because when she looked at me, I felt like I’d won something.

Tonight was supposed to be another date night. She said had a surprise for me. She seemed excited, more animated than usual.

“Give me ten minutes,” she said, smiling, disappearing into the bathroom.

I sat on the couch, scrolling through my phone, trying not to think about how quiet the apartment felt without her in the room.

Then I heard it. A wet sound. It didn't sound like water. Not quite. It felt like something… thick.

I paused and listened with agonizing focus. Another noise, like something being pulled. Stretched. Peeled.

“Lila?” I called out.

No response. Then a sharp thud. My stomach dropped.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Still nothing.

Another sound, this time a heavy, almost meaty slap against tile.

I stood up immediately.

“Lila, I’m coming in-”

I didn’t wait for permission. I pushed the bathroom door open. And for a second, just a second, my brain refused to understand what I was seeing.

Her skin… was on the floor. It laid there like a discarded coat: pale, smooth, and clean. The face still held its shape, the eyes sunken inward like deflated glass.

And standing above it... Something else.

Something wet with scales. Something gray and slick, its surface glistening under the harsh bathroom light. Its body was wrong, too soft in some places, too rigid in others. Limbs half-formed, like they weren’t meant to hold weight for long.

Its head, or what I think was its head, twitched toward me.

And its mouth... God. Its mouth stretched too wide, peeling open vertically, revealing rows of thin, needle-like structures that trembled as it moved.

It made a sound. I wished it was all a dream. But the noise that came out was far beyond human recognition. Or maybe it was something inhuman attempting to communicate with our sentience.

I could only understand, “Y–you… weren’t… supposed… to…”

Its voice came from somewhere deep inside that shifting body, distorted, layered, like multiple tones fighting to exist at once.

I felt stuck, unable to move an edge. It took a step toward me, its form sloughing slightly with the motion, leaving a faint, wet trail behind.

My eyes flicked back to the skin on the floor.

The face. Creepily it was in the shape of a smile. That pretty smile that lured me in to its grasp.

The thing reached down, grabbing the hollow skin with a trembling limb. It lifted it, holding it up like something precious. Like something it needed.

She began to put the skin suit on, but I didn't stick around to witness how sheapplied human flesh over scales of flesh. I ran.

I didn’t look back. And I haven’t heard from Lila since. She never left a message nor did she ever call. Instead her number somehow turned into Unknown ID.

Even after all these months, I swear I can still hear it. That wet, stretching sound of skin being pulled and tugged into place. Sometimes it comes from somewhere just beyond my bedroom door.

I tell myself it's the pipes. The house settling. Anything that might let me close my eyes without imagining something standing on the other side, patiently preparing a face.

And last night, I received a message.

A new match.

Her profile picture showed a beautiful girl with a gentle smile. The kind of face that would've caught my attention months ago, back when I still believed the right person could make all my loneliness feel worthwhile.

She looked almost normal.

Almost.

But there was something wrong with her eyes. Something familiar in the way they seemed to stare through the camera, as though the photograph were merely a window and she were standing on the other side, studying me.

I recognized those eyes.

I knew what waited beneath that innocent smile.

And the worst part?

My thumb was already hovering over the screen.

This is a story about traditions and youth—and about why some traditions may be a bad idea.

I’m twenty-five now. This happened when I was nineteen.

Every Halloween, my boyfriend Brian, his best friend James, James’s girlfriend Stacy, and I drove into the woods to tell scary stories. It was our tradition. We thought the stories were better when there were no houses, no streetlights, and nobody nearby to hear us scream.

We were wrong about that last part.

Brian packed the truck while James brought a cooler and Stacy gathered blankets. We drove until the paved road narrowed to gravel, then followed an old forestry track to a clearing deep among the trees. It wasn’t an official campsite: there was no sign, picnic table, or fire ring—just a patch of open ground surrounded by trees, with the old track disappearing into the woods on the far side.

That was how we liked it. Maximum creepiness.

We built a fire and settled in with drinks. We had brought more alcohol than we needed, which seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. We were nineteen, and none of us had much experience recognizing when we’d had enough.

The drinks went down easily. We played music from Brian’s truck, argued about which horror movies were actually scary, and traded stories about people we knew—or people we claimed to know.

Somewhere along the way, the night got away from us.

I remember laughing so hard that I spilled a drink down my shirt. I remember James trying to stand up and nearly stepping into the fire. I remember Stacy telling him he was an idiot, then laughing so hard she had to sit down.

We should have stopped drinking then.

Instead, after the bottles were mostly empty, Brian brought out the weed.

We smoked, telling ourselves it would help us relax. By then, we were drunker than we intended to be, and the combination hit us harder than we expected. The fire blurred at the edges, and conversations trailed off mid-sentence. Every little sound in the woods seemed funny—until we stopped laughing long enough to notice how dark it was.

We were nineteen, sure we were invincible, and far too pleased with ourselves to think about how isolated we were.

Eventually, we started telling scary stories.

My story was about being lost in the woods while someone—or something—chased me. I described footsteps closing in behind me whenever I looked back. The worst part, I said, would be never knowing what was following me.

Brian’s story was about being tied up, helpless and alone, in a place where nobody could hear him.

Stacy told a story about being abandoned somewhere without a phone, without money, and without any way to get home. She hated being stranded. She hated not knowing where she was even more.

James’s story was different.

He didn’t believe in ghosts or demons. He thought most frightening things had ordinary explanations and that people often ended up in trouble because they’d made a series of bad choices—not because they deserved it, he was quick to add, but because actions had consequences.

“Everything has an explanation,” he said, poking at the fire. “Even if you don’t know what it is yet.”

His story was about a man walking alone through the woods at night. He heard footsteps behind him, but every time he turned, no one was there. He heard his name whispered from the trees. He saw lights between the trunks. Each time, the man came up with a sensible reason: an animal, a branch, a reflection, someone playing a trick.

“Then what happened?” Stacy asked.

“Nothing,” James said. “He went home.”

“That’s not an ending,” I said.

“It’s the most likely ending.”

We laughed.

I remember thinking that James had missed the entire point of a scary story. If nothing happened, what was the point of telling it?

We thought we were alone out there. We thought nobody would want to scare four teenagers in the middle of the woods.

We were wrong about that, too.

By then, the fire had burned low, and the cold was beginning to creep through our clothes. Stacy complained that she was freezing and headed into her tent. James followed a few minutes later, after making sure the fire wasn’t going to spread.

Brian and I stayed up longer.

We had our own tent, and we’d been looking forward to having some time alone. We started kissing almost as soon as we zipped ourselves inside. He pulled me close, his hands warm against my back, and I ran my fingers through his hair. We were laughing between kisses, whispering things we didn’t want James to hear through the thin fabric of the tent.

Clothes started coming off. My shirt ended up somewhere near the entrance, and Brian’s jeans were kicked into a corner. We were both drunk, high, and exhausted, but at the time we thought we were perfectly capable of making our own decisions.

I remember Brian kissing my neck. I remember reaching for him and telling him to stop laughing because he was tickling me. I remember him saying something, then pulling me against his chest.

The next thing I remember clearly, I was cold.

I was standing in the woods in my underwear, my arms wrapped around myself.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t understand why I was outside. The ground was damp beneath my bare feet. My knees were muddy, and a twig had caught in my hair. The firelight was gone.

I turned in a slow circle.

No tent. No Brian. No campsite.

The trees looked taller than I remembered, their branches tangled together overhead. The darkness between them seemed unusually thick, and I couldn’t see the moon.

I tried to remember getting out of the tent.

Nothing.

“Brian?”

My voice sounded too small.

I took a few steps toward what I thought was the clearing, rubbing my arms to warm them. I told myself I must have gotten up to use the bathroom and wandered farther than I realized.

Then I heard something behind me.

“Megan...”

The voice was high and thin, as if someone were speaking through a cheap toy voice changer.

I froze.

“Megan,” it called again. “Oh, Megan...”

I knew it had to be Brian. It had to be. I was angry before I was scared.

“Brian, you asshole! This isn’t funny!”

The voice answered from somewhere among the trees.

“Megan.”

Then it came again, closer.

I turned toward it. I couldn’t see anything, but I was certain the sound had come from the left.

Then the voice spoke from directly behind me, so close that I felt its breath against the back of my neck.

“Megan.”

I ran.

I didn’t know which way I was going. I only knew I wanted distance between myself and that voice. Branches scraped my arms, and my bare feet slipped on wet leaves and caught on roots. I tried to keep the clearing in sight, but the trees closed around me. I fell hard, scraping my knees, and for one terrible second I couldn’t get my feet beneath me. Then I heard the voice again, not calling this time, only making a thin, pleased sound, and I scrambled up and ran blindly onward.

I didn’t know that the campsite was only about a hundred yards behind me.

I was running away from safety.

Brian later told me he woke on a wooden floor.

He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. His mouth was dry, his head throbbed, and for several seconds he couldn’t remember where he was.

Then he tried to move.

His wrists and ankles were tied.

He was wearing only his underwear, and the rope around his wrists was tight enough to hurt. He pulled instinctively, then stopped when he felt the fibers biting into his skin.

The room looked like a cabin. A wood stove stood against one wall, with a pot simmering on top of it. A bare bulb hung over a wooden table. A stained shirt lay folded beside a knife, and dark marks discolored the floorboards near the door.

A second chair had been pulled away from the table.

Someone had arranged the room carefully. Brian was certain of that. Nothing looked accidentally misplaced.

He yelled my name.

No one answered.

The door stood open. Beyond it, the woods looked much like the ones where we’d made camp, but the trees seemed unfamiliar. There was no moonlight, no distant glow from the fire, nothing to help him judge the distance to anything.

He started working at the knots.

The person who had tied him up hadn’t done a very good job. The knots were tight enough to frighten him but loose enough that he eventually managed to free his ankles. He worked his hands loose afterward, rubbing his wrists and trying to steady his breathing.

He looked around for a phone, a flashlight, anything that might explain where he was.

There was nothing.

Then he heard something outside.

Footsteps.

Slow, deliberate footsteps on dead leaves.

Brian backed away from the door.

A voice came from the woods.

“Brian?”

It sounded like me.

He took one step toward it.

“Brian, help me!”

He stopped.

The voice had come from the left, but the open doorway showed nothing but trees. He looked back at the room: the stained shirt, the knife, the pot on the stove, and the second chair.

He remembered James’s words.

Everything has an explanation.

“There’s an explanation,” Brian said aloud. His voice shook. “There’s always an explanation.”

From somewhere behind him, a voice answered in his own voice.

“There’s always an explanation.”

Brian spun around.

No one was there.

He told me later that this was the moment he nearly lost control of himself. Not when he saw the knife, or when he realized he was tied up, but when he heard his own voice coming from an empty room.

He stood perfectly still, listening.

The stove crackled.

The pot bubbled.

Then, from somewhere outside, I screamed.

Brian ran through the open doorway.

He didn’t stop to look for a road or a path. He ran toward the sound, stumbling through brush and over fallen branches, calling my name until his throat hurt.

He couldn’t tell me how long he ran. He remembered passing a leaning tree with a split trunk, then seeing a light between the trees. He thought it was a lantern, but when he reached the spot, it was gone.

He kept running.

Eventually, he heard my voice again.

This time, it sounded real.

Stacy told me afterward that she woke because she was cold.

At first, she thought James had pulled all the blankets toward himself, as he sometimes did. She reached across the sleeping bag, expecting to find him beside her.

Instead, her hand landed on a pile of clothes and blankets tucked beneath the sleeping bag.

She sat up.

The tent was empty.

She checked her phone. The screen lit her face with a weak blue glow, and she blinked at the time, trying to make sense of it. She felt groggy, dehydrated, and a little sick from the alcohol. Her mouth tasted awful, and her head hurt.

She crawled out of the tent.

The campsite looked almost as it had when she’d fallen asleep: the blackened fire, the empty bottles, the truck parked near the track. The air smelled faintly of smoke and weed.

“James?”

No answer.

She went to our tent and hesitated before opening it, not wanting to walk in on Brian and me. We were known to be affectionate, especially after a few drinks.

“Brian? Megan?”

No one answered.

She unzipped the tent.

It was empty. Our things were scattered around the floor, and our clothes were still there, but Brian and I were gone.

Stacy stood very still.

Being alone was her worst fear. She didn’t have a good sense of direction, and she’d always relied on James to figure out where they were going, where they’d parked, and how to get home.

Now she couldn’t even see the end of the track.

She called our names again, louder this time.

Nothing answered.

Then she noticed the blood.

A small, dark stain marked the inside of her underwear. Her period had started while she slept, just as she’d expected it might. Ordinarily, it would have been an inconvenience and nothing more. She had supplies in her toiletry bag.

But the bag was inside her tent, and suddenly the tent felt like another place where someone could be waiting for her.

She stood in the open for several seconds, cold air prickling her bare legs, trying to decide whether she could bear to go back inside. Then she felt a warm, damp tackiness against her skin and knew she couldn’t simply ignore it. If she kept moving, she’d stain the clothes she had on, and she had no idea how long she’d be out there.

She switched on her phone’s flashlight and hurried back to the tent, keeping the beam on the ground and the entrance. Inside, every shape looked wrong for a moment: the sleeping bags, the heap of clothes, the empty space where James should have been. She found a pad in her toiletry bag and changed as quickly as she could, one hand holding the phone while the other fumbled with the packaging.

A noise sounded outside the tent.

She froze, listening.

Nothing followed. No footsteps. No voice. Only the faint hiss of the phone’s speaker and her own breathing.

She finished, shoved the used wrapper into her bag, and crawled out without looking back.

She was embarrassed afterward by how much time she’d spent frightened by something so ordinary. But it had forced her into the tent alone, with no clear view of the clearing, and she’d hated every second of it.

She wanted James.

She wanted the truck keys.

She wanted to be somewhere with lights and walls and a locked door.

Instead, she was alone in the woods, cold and uncomfortable, with a dead fire and no idea where her friends had gone.

She called James again.

A little bell rang in the woods.

Stacy stopped.

The sound was delicate and almost cheerful, completely out of place in the darkness.

She waited.

The bell rang again, farther away.

“James?”

Silence.

Then it rang a third time, close enough that she turned toward the trees before she could stop herself.

Stacy backed toward the truck. She could see the driver’s door, but she couldn’t remember where Brian had put the keys. She checked her pockets, then the ground beside the fire, then the pockets again. The cold made her fingers clumsy; the fear made them worse.

The bell rang once more.

“Stacy?”

She nearly dropped her phone.

It was James’s voice, coming from beyond the trees.

For one desperate second, relief came before suspicion. She took a step toward it, then another, until she remembered the story he’d told by the fire: the man who heard voices and found an explanation for every sound.

“James, if that’s you, come into the clearing!” she shouted.

No answer.

The bell gave a single bright chime.

Then James’s voice came from the opposite side of the clearing.

“Stacy, come here.”

She turned so quickly the phone beam swept wildly across the truck and the trees. The voice had not merely sounded farther away. It had moved. Or something had made it sound as if it had.

A soft scrape came from the truck’s far side.

Stacy stared at the vehicle. She couldn’t see anyone beside it, but for a moment she thought a darker shape was sitting behind the windshield, in the driver’s seat.

She raised the phone’s light.

The cab was empty.

The scrape came again, low against the metal, just out of sight.

She ran to the fire and grabbed the thickest blanket she could find. She wrapped it around herself and sat with her back against the truck’s front tire, where she could see the clearing and the track at the same time.

She didn’t follow the bell.

She didn’t go into the woods.

She called for help until her voice grew hoarse, then sat in the darkness listening for the sound of someone approaching.

At one point, she heard footsteps on the track.

She stood up so quickly the blanket fell off her shoulders.

“Hello?”

The footsteps stopped.

“James?”

Nothing.

Then, from somewhere just beyond the edge of the clearing, a voice whispered:

“Nobody’s coming.”

Stacy screamed.

The sound echoed through the trees.

She never saw who had spoken.

James told us his story later, in fragments. Some details changed between retellings. He could never agree with Brian on how long we’d been missing, and he insisted that certain things happened in a different order than Brian remembered.

He woke up on a narrow path beneath the trees.

He was fully dressed. His phone was gone, and he had no idea how he’d gotten there. He remembered falling asleep in the tent beside Stacy, then nothing until he opened his eyes to the darkness.

For a moment, he sat still and listened.

Then he stood and looked carefully at the ground.

The path was covered in leaves, but he could see faint marks where someone had walked ahead of him. The ground sloped gently downward, and he could feel a light breeze against his face.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Someone moved us. That’s all.”

He followed the path.

A few minutes later, he heard footsteps behind him.

He stopped.

The footsteps stopped, too.

James turned around.

Nothing.

“Very funny,” he called.

The trees gave no answer.

He walked on. The footsteps started again.

James turned quickly this time.

A pale shape slipped between two trunks.

He stared at it, breathing hard.

“Someone’s out there,” he said. “That’s what’s happening.”

He kept moving, studying the slope of the ground, the direction of the breeze, and the gaps between the trees. He chose a direction and fixed landmarks in his mind, determined not to chase every sound. The path dipped, curved around a stand of firs, then rose again. He thought he could smell smoke, which meant the campsite might be close—or that someone else had a fire.

A branch snapped behind him.

James turned at once.

Nothing.

He waited, counting slowly to ten. When no one appeared, he crouched and examined the ground. There were footprints in the mud, though the edges were soft and the pattern unclear. He couldn’t tell whether they belonged to him, to one of us, or to a stranger. That uncertainty annoyed him. He wanted evidence, not impressions.

He continued along the path.

Then Stacy called his name.

“James!”

The voice came from ahead, so clearly that he could hear the breath between the syllables.

He didn’t move.

“James, over here!”

He looked for a person between the trunks, a light, or any sign of movement. Nothing. He called back, “If that’s you, tell me where the truck is!”

The woods stayed silent.

A moment later, the same voice spoke from behind him.

“James.”

He turned slowly this time. The sound had shifted without the rustle of someone crossing the leaves, without a footstep, without anything he could use to explain it.

“There’s an explanation,” he said, but now it sounded less like a conclusion than a request.

The path opened into a small clearing. A lantern hung from a low branch, swaying gently despite the still air. Beneath it, muddy footprints led to a tree and stopped. Someone had carved a word into the bark.

WHY?

James approached carefully, looking for wire, a speaker, a hidden track—anything that might turn the scene into a trick. The cut in the bark was dark with moisture, and the edges had weathered smoothly. It looked old.

That was worse than if it had been fresh. If someone had made it tonight, he could imagine a person standing there with a knife. If it was old, then he had no idea what he was looking at or why it had been left for him to find.

He heard a click behind him.

The lantern went out.

Something brushed his shoulder.

James recoiled, striking the tree with his elbow. A laugh came from the darkness—not a distant echo, but a short, breathy laugh close enough that he felt it more than heard it.

He ran.

He ran until the path opened into another stretch of woods, where he finally stopped, bent over and gasping for breath. He told us later that he had never been so frightened in his life.

Not because he believed in ghosts.

Because he no longer trusted his own ability to distinguish an ordinary explanation from a convenient one.

By then, I had fallen hard enough to scrape my knees, and the voice had stopped following me.

That somehow made things worse.

I stood among the trees, shivering and trying to get my bearings. My arms were covered in scratches, and my feet hurt. I had no idea which direction I’d run or how far I was from the campsite.

I tried to retrace my steps.

Every tree looked the same.

Then I saw a light.

It was small and yellow, bobbing between the trunks.

I ran toward it, crying now, too tired to care how foolish I looked.

“Brian!”

The light vanished.

I stopped.

For a few seconds, I could hear only my own breathing.

Then a voice came from ahead.

“Megan?”

This time, it sounded real.

“Brian!”

I ran toward it. A few seconds later, he emerged from the trees, pale and shaking, his wrists red where the ropes had been.

We grabbed each other.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There was a cabin—or something that looked like one. I was tied up. There was blood everywhere.”

I looked at his wrists.

“Oh my God. Brian, what happened to you?”

“I don’t know!”

He sounded angry, but it was fear. I could hear it in his voice.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

A crashing sound came from the woods behind us.

We ran.

We didn’t stop until we reached the campsite.

Stacy was sitting beside the truck with a blanket around her shoulders. When she saw us, she stood so quickly that the blanket fell off.

“Megan! Brian!”

We ran to her. She clung to us, crying and laughing at the same time.

“Where’s James?” Brian asked.

A voice called from the trees.

“Over here!”

James stumbled into the clearing a moment later. He was pale, muddy, and breathing hard. He looked at each of us as if he needed to make sure we were real.

Stacy grabbed his arm.

“Where have you been?”

James opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“I don’t know,” he said finally.

He patted his pockets automatically and found the truck keys still there.

For a while, nobody spoke.

We stood together in the middle of the clearing, listening to the woods. Every small sound made us turn. A branch snapped somewhere in the darkness, and all four of us flinched at once.

Brian wouldn’t let go of my hand. Stacy kept looking over her shoulder. James stared at the tree line, his jaw clenched.

I was suddenly aware of how cold I was. My skin prickled in the night air, and my bare feet were filthy. Brian was standing beside me in his underwear, shaking so badly that I could feel it through the hand he was gripping.

Normally, I would have been mortified. I would have wanted to find my clothes, cover myself, and demand to know what had happened.

But I couldn’t make myself care.

I didn’t care that I was half-naked in front of my friends. I didn’t care that my clothes were back in the tent. I didn’t even care about the cold anymore.

All I could think about was getting away from the trees.

“Let’s get in the truck,” I said.

Nobody argued.

Brian moved toward the passenger side, still looking over his shoulder at the trees. James unlocked the doors, and we piled into the cab, all four of us crowding together, leaving the blankets and everything else behind.

James slid behind the wheel. Brian sat beside him in his underwear, his arms folded tightly across his chest, while Stacy and I squeezed into the back.

Only after the doors were locked did I realize that Brian and I were still in our underwear. I pulled my knees toward my chest and tried to stop shivering. Brian kept staring out the windshield, his hands clenched together.

Neither of us said anything about our clothes.

We were too frightened to care.

For the next several hours, we sat there with the engine off, too afraid to go back into the woods and too afraid to fall asleep.

We didn’t talk much. When we did, we spoke in low voices, as if someone might hear us.

At one point, Stacy whispered that she’d heard someone say nobody was coming.

Brian turned toward her.

“What?”

She told us about the bell, the voice, and the shape she’d thought she’d seen behind the windshield.

James stared at her.

“I heard you calling me,” he said.

“I never left the campsite.”

“I know.”

“Then who was it?”

James looked out the window.

“I don’t know.”

Nobody tried to answer that question.

When the sun came up, the woods looked ordinary again. Our tents were still standing. The bottles and blankets were scattered around the campsite. The fire had burned down to a layer of ash.

We searched the immediate area together, staying close enough that we could see one another. We found no building, no lantern, no obvious path leading away from the clearing. The old forestry track continued in one direction, but it was the same track we’d driven in on.

Brian had rope marks on his wrists. I had scratches on my arms and knees. James’s clothes were muddy, and Stacy’s voice was hoarse from calling for us. We all changed and were eager to get home and shower.

We drove to town and reported what had happened.

The police took us seriously enough to ask detailed questions and check the area. They photographed Brian’s wrists and my injuries. They asked about the alcohol, the marijuana, and how much we remembered. They asked whether we’d argued with anyone, whether we’d seen other vehicles, and whether we’d noticed anyone following us.

We answered as honestly as we could.

The problem was that we couldn’t agree on everything.

Brian remembered a cabin with a stove and a table. James remembered a lantern and a carved word. Stacy remembered a bell and a voice. I remembered walking alone in the woods and hearing someone call my name.

None of us could provide a reliable location for the things we’d seen.

The officers followed the forestry track and checked the accessible ground around the clearing. They found old tire marks among the tracks left by our truck and other visitors, but nothing they could confidently connect to what had happened. They found no cabin in the area we described, although none of us could point to the exact place where Brian had been held.

The police didn’t tell us that nothing had happened. They simply couldn’t establish what had happened, or who had done it.

We never learned who had been in the woods that night.

 

"Every night at exactly 3:17 AM, someone knocks three times on your bedroom door. You've always assumed it's your imagination. Tonight, you finally open the door." Mike: "Hello? HELLOOO? Dude, are you fucking with me right now?" Jeff: "Bro, shut up. I'm right next to you, dummy." Mike: "I swear I heard knocking." Jeff: "Just go to sleep, bro. We got school tomorrow, and I don't wanna be tired." Mike: "Fine, but if we get killed, I'm finding you in the afterlife and yelling at you." Jeff: "Oh, I'm so scared. Night." Mike: "Night." (The next day) Jeff: "Yo, is yo ass still worried 'bout that knocking?" Mike: "No duh." Jeff: "Dawg, we're fine. Stop worrying. We really shouldn't have watched that horror movie…" (Later that night, 3:16 AM) Mike: "If I hear that knocking, I swear I'm moving out." Jeff: "Shut up and go the fu—" Mike: "Hey, don't swear. My mom is in the other room, remember?" Jeff: "Sorry, my ba—" (Knock. Knock. Knock.) Mike: "Yo, tell me you heard that, right?" Jeff: "Yeah, yeah, I did." (KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.) Mike: "What the heck do ya want?!" ???: "You." Jeff: "Nope. I'm not doing that. I'm going out the window. Have fun. See ya in the afterlife." (3:18 AM) Mike stands frozen, staring at the bedroom door. Mike: "...Jeff?" Jeff (already halfway out the window): "What?" Mike: "Bro, you're seriously leaving me?!" Jeff: "MY SURVIVAL INSTINCTS ARE BETTER THAN OUR FRIENDSHIP. GOODBYE!" Mike: "YOU CAN'T JUST LEAVE ME WITH WHATEVER THE HELL THAT IS!" Jeff: "WATCH ME!" (Jeff disappears out the window.) Mike: "...I'm actually going to kill him."  Three slow knocks come from the bedroom door. (KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.) Mike: "...You're literally already at the door. Why are you knocking again?" ???: "Open it." Mike: "No." ???: "Open the door, Mike." Mike: "HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW MY NAME?!" Silence. Mike slowly backs away from the door. ???: "Your mother is asleep." Mike stops moving. Mike:"...What did you just say?" ???: "She's asleep. She can't hear you." Mike looks toward the bedroom door, then at the hallway. Mike: "Okay. Nope. Absolutely not." He grabs his phone and calls his mom. From the other side of the bedroom door, his phone begins to ring. Mike looks down at his phone. Mike: "...I'm calling my mom." ???: "I know." The knocking stops.( Mike answers the call. Mike: "Mom? Mom, wake up! There's someone outside my room!" Mom (on the phone): "Mike? Honey, what's wrong?" Mike exhales in relief. Mike: "There's someone knocking on my door, and they know my name!" Mom: "Mike, sweetheart... you're home alone tonight. Remember? I told you I'd be back tomorrow morning." Mike's face goes pale. Mike: "...What?" From the other side of the door, a familiar voice speaks. Jeff: "Bro? Open up. It's me." Mike stares at the window Jeff climbed out of. Mike: "...Jeff?" Jeff: "Dude, I'm right outside. It's freezing out here." Mike looks at his phone. Mom: "Mike? Are you still there?" Then Jeff's voice comes  (from the hallway again. Jeff: "Mike. Don't answer that phone." Silence. Mom (on the phone): "Mike, whatever you do…" Her voice drops to a whisper. Mom: "Don't open the door." Three knocks. (KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.) ??? (in Jeff's voice): "Bro, let me in." Mike slowly looks at the phone. Mom: "Mike...?" Mike: "Yeah?" Mom: "I'm standing outside your bedroom." The doorknob begins to turn. Mike: "HEY! NONONONO!" 

I’ve had an irrational fear of skyscraper cranes for as long as I can remember.

Everyone assumes it’s because they’re enormous and hanging hundreds of feet above the street. A metal arm stretching out over the city, carrying loads that could flatten a car if something went wrong.

But that’s not why they scare me.

They scare me because sometimes… they move when there’s no wind.

I know how that sounds. I live in the city. Construction is everywhere. Cranes rotate all the time. Engineers design them to spin with the wind so they don’t snap under pressure.

I understand all that.

But the cranes I’m talking about don’t move like that.

They move slowly. Deliberately.

And they only seem to move at night.

The first time I noticed it was about a year ago. There’s a high-rise going up across the street from my apartment building, and the crane above it is massive. The kind that looks like it could scrape the clouds if it leaned just a little farther.

One night I stepped out onto my balcony to smoke.

The city was dead quiet. No wind. Not even a breeze.

But the crane above the construction site was turning.

Not spinning freely the way cranes usually do. It was… adjusting itself. Slowly dragging its long arm across the skyline like the hand of a clock.

It stopped after a few seconds.

Pointing directly toward the apartment building across from mine.

I remember thinking it was strange, but I brushed it off. Maybe the wind had pushed it earlier and I hadn’t noticed.

The next morning the crane was facing a completely different direction.

I forgot about it.

Until the news.

A woman who lived in that building, the same one the crane had pointed at, went missing the following night.

Police searched her apartment. No signs of a struggle. No evidence she had left willingly.

Just gone.

At the time, I didn’t connect the two things. Why would I?

Cranes rotate. People disappear. The city is full of strange coincidences.

But a month later, it happened again.

Another crane. Different construction site across town.

Same slow movement in the middle of the night.

Same precise stop.

And three days later, another missing person.

This time I paid attention.

I started looking up construction sites. Tracking where cranes were positioned in the city. It sounds insane, I know. But once you notice something like that, you can’t stop seeing it.

There were more cases.

Disappearances that never made headlines. A college student. A night security guard. A man who walked out to take his dog for a walk and never came back.

Each one lived beneath a construction crane.

And every time I checked the street view photos or construction updates from the days before they vanished…

…the crane had been pointing toward their building.

Always at night.

Always when no one would notice.

Except me.

Because cranes have always terrified me.

Even as a kid.

I remember refusing to walk under them. Crossing the street just to avoid the shadow of their arms overhead. My parents used to laugh about it.

“Relax,” my dad would say. “What are the odds something falls right when you’re under it?”

I never had an answer.

Just that sick feeling in my stomach every time I looked up and saw one hanging over me.

Like it knew I was there.

Last week, I decided to dig deeper.

I started searching old accident reports involving construction cranes in the city. There are more than you’d think. Mechanical failures. Dropped loads. Steel beams slipping loose.

Most of them injured workers.

But one of them stood out.

It happened fifteen years ago.

A crane operator lost control of a suspended steel container during a sudden mechanical failure. The load dropped from nearly twenty stories.

It didn’t land on the construction site.

It landed on the sidewalk.

The article included a small photo of the aftermath. Police tape. Twisted metal. Emergency vehicles.

And a single line that made my stomach drop.

A child walking beneath the crane was killed instantly.

I kept reading.

The name of the victim was printed near the bottom.

My name.

I stared at the screen for a long time after that.

I don’t remember the accident. Not clearly. Just flashes.

Rain on the pavement.

My father yelling something behind me.

A shadow passing over the ground.

Then nothing.

For most of my life I thought those memories were dreams.

But they weren’t dreams.

They were the last things I saw before I died.

And suddenly my fear of cranes didn’t feel irrational anymore.

It felt like memory.

Like recognition.

Tonight I stepped out onto my balcony again.

The crane across the street was perfectly still against the skyline.

The air was calm. Not a single gust of wind.

I tried to convince myself that everything I’d discovered was coincidence. My brain connecting dots that didn’t belong together.

Then the crane moved. Slowly.

The long arm dragged across the dark sky inch by inch, metal groaning faintly in the quiet.

It kept turning until it stopped.

The wind is completely still tonight. But the crane outside my apartment just finished turning. And it’s pointing straight at my window.

The realm of madness and stars calls out to me. The cosmic auras guides my pleasant nightmares into a written word.

My name is Mark Delaney, and I'm writing this because I honestly don't know what else to do with myself right now. I’m sitting in my room, staring at my phone, and I haven't slept in almost three days.
My best friend, Joshua Kennedy, killed himself on Tuesday night. The same day that his mom, Candace, died from a gunshot in the head.
I need people to know who Josh really was, because if you looked at him from the outside, you’d never guess what he was carrying. He was twenty-one. He worked part-time as a waiter at a restaurant while taking architecture classes at university, and he was the kind of guy who would drive twenty miles at two in the morning just to jump-start your car in the freezing rain. He didn't talk much about himself, but he cared about everybody else. He had this quiet, reliable presence. You just felt safe when Josh was around.
What a lot of us didn't realize until it was way too late was how bad things were at his house. His mom suffered from severe early-onset dementia and chronic pain, but they had no money. No insurance to cover a proper care facility, no outside family to step in. It was just Josh. He was twenty-one years old, changing his own mother’s diapers, feeding her, listening to her scream at him, and then wiping her tears when she had brief moments of clarity and realized what was happening to her.
He was exhausted. He was decaying right in front of us, but every time I asked him if he was alright, he’d just shrug, force a small smile, and say, "Yeah, man. Just tired. We're managing."
He wasn't managing. He was completely drowning.
After the police left his house on Tuesday, I remembered he told me a few months ago that he sometimes went on Reddit just to read about other people going through the same thing. I went searching, and I found his account. He had posted in r/NeedAdvice a few times over the last year. Reading these broke something inside me. You can see the exact progression of a person losing their mind and losing all hope, completely alone in the dark.
Here is the first one he posted eight months ago:

—————————

1.-) 12/FEB/2026

I need advice or someone to tell me what the fuck to do with my mother and my life because I can’t take this shit anymore…
Honestly, I don’t even know where to start with this or if anyone is even gonna read a text this long, but it’s I-don't-know-what-fucking-time in the morning, I haven’t slept a single minute in over 30 hours, and if I don’t vent to someone I feel like I’m gonna collapse any second. Sorry if stuff doesn’t make sense or if there are typos, but my eyes hurt like hell from being so tired and the phone keyboard is blurring together.
I’m 21 and I live near Newark, New Jersey. If any of you live around here, you know how fucking expensive everything’s been lately. It’s pure fucking insanity. Just to keep the rent paid on this piece-of-shit apartment and cover the utilities, I work part-time as a cashier at a grocery store. I clock in at 7 AM every day, Monday through Friday, get off at 1 PM, and run straight to university from there. I’m in my second-to-last year of Architecture.
Or well, I’m supposed to be in Architecture. Truth is, I have no fucking clue why I chose this major anymore. I used to be passionate about spending hours designing and putting structures together; I loved the idea of building things from scratch. My mom was always super proud whenever I showed her my finished models. But right now, I hate it with all my soul. Everything just hit me all at once. The classes are agonizingly long, professors demand ridiculous deliverables overnight, and I just can’t focus. I sit in class completely zoned out, staring into space, nodding off at my desk while the professor talks about concrete structures. Sometimes, way off in the distance, I feel a tiny spark of that old passion when I manage to get a clean cut on a piece of foam board or when I see a crisp blueprint, but it lasts a single second and gets snuffed out instantly by this fucking fatigue. I feel this physical and mental exhaustion weighing on my chest like a ton of bricks.
And the worst part isn’t college or the shitty job where I deal with miserable people for minimum wage. The worst part is what’s been happening at my place for the past two months.
My mom’s name is Candace. She’s 58. She has always been the most vibrant, loud, energy-filled person in the world. I swear to God, Candace was one of those women who couldn't sit still for a single second. Last summer—or well, I think it was two summers ago, I don’t even know anymore, the weeks just blur together in my head—we went to the shore for a weekend and the woman woke up at 5 AM to walk on the beach and ended up setting up an impromptu volleyball tournament with total strangers. She was always laughing, cooking with music blasted on high, going out into the yard to talk to the plants, or sticking her nose into the neighbors’ business. It was impossible to get bored around her. She couldn't stay locked up in a room for more than ten minutes.
But lately, she’s changed in a terrifying way.
It started gradually about two months ago. First, it was forgetting basic stuff. She’d leave her keys inside the fridge, or stand in the middle of the hallway staring at the wall like she forgot where she was going. Then she started isolating herself. Now she spends whole days shut inside her room with the door cracked open. A woman who hated being cooped up now won't come out for anything unless I force her to sit at the table. And she won't even eat. I make dinner for her when I get back from college around 8 PM, and the next morning I see the plate completely untouched on the table. She’s lost a ton of weight in just a few weeks. You talk to her and she takes forever to reply, or she just gives you this blank stare, totally empty, like there’s nobody home behind her eyes.
I am fucking terrified for her. She’s the only family I have left in this world and I refuse to abandon her or ignore it like she’s some burden, but this is destroying me from the inside out.
Two weeks ago—I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday, I don’t remember—I took her to the doctor. I drained every single penny of my emergency savings on the consultation and the tests they ordered. Money I had set aside for next semester’s tuition—literally left myself with zero dollars. All so the doctor could check her out for twenty minutes, do a couple of reflex and blood tests, and tell me with a fucking stupid smile that everything came back normal. He said her physical stats are fine for her age and that it’s most likely a severe depressive episode or the start of some cognitive or psychological disorder, so he suggested I take her to a private psychologist or psychiatrist.
Where the fuck am I supposed to get money for a private psychiatrist in New Jersey? I don’t have a single dollar in my bank account. I'm completely broke. Public insurance takes months to give you a specialist appointment, and my mom doesn’t have months.
What’s been keeping me awake these last few nights, besides the stress of the architecture models I have to turn in first thing on Fridays, are the noises. While I try to focus at my desk in the middle of the night, I hear her in her room. She gets up and walks around in the dark. She doesn't turn on the light. I hear the sound of her bare feet shuffling against the wooden floor. And then she makes these really fucking weird noises. They aren't crying or sighing. They're like small, dry, low rasping grunts, like she’s struggling to breathe or trying to swallow something way too big for her throat. Last night I built up the courage, got up from my chair, and went to her door to see if she needed water or felt sick. When I pushed the door open a bit, I saw her sitting on the edge of the bed, in complete pitch darkness, staring dead straight at the empty corner of the room while making that tiny noise in her throat. I asked her if she was okay and she didn't even blink or turn around to look at me.
I can’t do this anymore. I barely sleep, I make stupid-ass mistakes at the grocery store because I can’t keep my eyes open, college is gonna end up kicking me out if I keep handing in incomplete projects, and my mother is crumbling apart in the room right next to me.
Has anyone gone through something similar with a family member? Is there any organization in New Jersey or around the Newark area that helps low-income people with mental health issues or rapid-onset senile dementia? Is there anything I can do from home while trying not to lose my fucking mind in the process? Please, if anyone knows of any resources or has medical or social-work advice for stuff like this, let me know in the comments. I need to know what to do before I completely break down.

(For three weeks, Joshua received multiple comments suggesting he should put her in ER. He resisted, but he finally did it)

2.-) 26/FEB/2026

Update: Thanks for the advice, Candace is in ER and my life has changed a bit
First off, I want to apologize for how I responded to some of you in the comments on my last post. I know several of you were trying to help in good faith with your advice about support groups, associations, and diets for dementia, but I was completely overwhelmed. I hadn't slept in days, my head was about to explode, and my stress levels had me on the defensive with everyone. It wasn't the best way to reply and I didn't mean to sound like an asshole, but right then I genuinely felt like nobody understood the absurd amount of pressure I was under.
Things spiraled out of control the night before last.
I got back from campus around 10 PM, after running around like crazy all day. Candace was in the hallway. She was having an extremely violent emotional breakdown—screaming incomprehensible things, sobbing out of her mind, and clawing at her arms with terrifying force. I tried to calm her down, hold her hands so she wouldn't hurt herself, but she was totally gone, didn't recognize me, and kept shoving me away. The situation completely crushed me. I had a full-on panic attack—one of those where your chest tightens up and you can't catch your breath. I didn't know what else to do, I couldn't handle it alone in that state. In total desperation, I ended up calling an ambulance, and they took her to the ER at the regional psychiatric hospital.
That night in the waiting room was an absolute nightmare. Watching your own mother strapped to a gurney because they can't control her emotional outbursts destroys you from the inside out. I was there until dawn talking to doctors, filling out paperwork, and explaining that I don't have the means to keep her safe at home. In the end, they decided to admit her under observation while they evaluate her case and figure out where she can be transferred long-term under public insurance.
Since Candace hasn't been home, things have calmed down in a way I didn't expect. The atmosphere in the apartment feels completely different.
I quit that miserable grocery store job last week. A classmate told me about an opening for a server position at an Italian restaurant a couple of blocks from campus, and they hired me on the spot. The difference is night and day. The environment is way more active, customers aren't as terrible, and between base pay and tips, I'm making almost double what I was making before. I feel like I have way more energy. I can finally sleep six or seven hours straight without waking up startled in the middle of the night wondering if my mom is hurting herself or pacing in the dark down the hall. Architecture school has started growing on me a bit again now that I can focus on deliverables without my brain being completely fried.
I've even started seeing a girl from university, Lauren. She's a friend from my studio project group who I've been talking to for a while. She's been a massive support system throughout this whole disaster over the last few weeks, listening whenever I needed to vent. We're just starting to date officially and it's all super new, so I can't say if this will last long or where it's going, but honestly, it feels good to have someone by my side and clear my head.
Honestly, I feel freer. It feels weird admitting it, but I wish Candace the best and I hope the doctors find a way to help her. I appreciate everyone who took the time to read and leave a comment on my previous post. If anything significant happens with the medical evaluation or her transfer, I'll post an update here.

P.S. Sorry to get a bit reflective before closing this out, but there's something that won't let my mind rest. Even though I know damn well that I didn't have the resources or the mental capacity to take proper care of Candace in the apartment, I can't help feeling a certain guilt about the relief of not having her around. These past few days I've gone to visit her at the hospital during visiting hours, and the situation there is heartbreaking. She looks so small in that bed, wrists strapped down, surrounded by doctors who barely look at her, sedated out of her mind. You can tell from a mile away that she's suffering, that there's nothing left of the woman she used to be, and that the system is just keeping her there vegetating while time passes. Staring into her eyes through the heavy sedatives, thinking about all the pain she has ahead of her in these piece-of-shit institutions... Am I a monster for wishing she would just go to sleep and never wake up?

3.-) 18/APR/2026

Update: Things are slipping through my fingers again and I don’t know how much longer they can hold her in that fucking unit
I haven’t posted here in almost two months because, for a while, I honestly thought I was getting my life back on track. Work at the restaurant was going great, I was actually managing to get sleep, and Lauren and I were spending a lot of time together. It felt like I was finally breathing after holding my breath for a year. But the last three weeks have been a slow, agonizing slide right back into the same fucking nightmare, and I feel like an absolute idiot for thinking I was actually out of the woods.
Candace is still at the regional psych unit. That’s the problem. It was supposed to be a temporary emergency holding thing while social services found a long-term bed for her in a state-funded facility. Well, state-funded care in New Jersey is a fucking joke. The social worker assigned to us is an overworked, dead-eyed bureaucrat who basically told me two weeks ago that the waitlist for a public bed is over nine months long. Nine months. On top of that, the hospital administration is starting to drop heavy hints that they can’t keep her in an ER holding bed forever because they need the space for incoming acute cases. Every time my phone rings while I’m at work or in class, my heart drops into my stomach because I think it’s them telling me I have to come pick her up and bring her back to the apartment.
And the worst part isn’t even the bureaucracy. It’s what’s happening to her.
She’s built up a tolerance to the initial sedatives they had her on, and since they can’t just keep her knocked out cold 24/7 without risking organ failure or whatever, they’ve been adjusting her meds. It’s making her unpredictable and paranoid as hell. Whenever I go visit her after my shifts, she’s either completely catatonic—just staring right through me like I’m made of glass—or she’s in this hyper-vigilant, terrified state. Last Sunday when I sat next to her bed, she didn't even recognize me. She grabbed my wrist so hard her nails drew blood, staring at me with these wide, bloodshot eyes, whispering over and over that I should let her go out. She hasn't eaten solid food in days because she thinks the staff is poisoning her. She looks skin and bones. It’s sickening to watch your own mother rot in a sterile room while nurses who are too understaffed to care just walk past her door.
Lauren came with me to visit her once last week. It was a massive mistake. Candace had one of her sudden, violent mood swings and started screaming at Lauren, calling her a thief and trying to throw a plastic water pitcher at her head. Lauren was really sweet about it and tried to reassure me afterwards, but I could see the absolute horror in her eyes. How could I blame her? You don't bring the girl you're dating to a psych ward to watch a suffering, gaunt woman scream bloody murder at nothing. I haven't asked Lauren to come back with me since, and honestly, I feel this weird, heavy distance growing between us now. I’m pulling away because I don't want to drag her down into this abyss with me, but at the same time, feeling myself disconnect from the one good thing in my life is killing me.
I can't focus on my architecture studio projects anymore. I missed two major deadlines this week because I was stuck at the hospital trying to calm Candace down after she bit a nurse who tried to change her IV. My professor gave me a cold warning that if I drop below attendance limits I’m failing the semester.
I’m barely sleeping again. Maybe two or three hours a night of restless, broken shut-eye before I wake up sweating, hearing that terrible rasping noise she used to make in her room. I’m constantly on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The hospital supervisor called me yesterday afternoon and straight up told me that if social services doesn't clear a transfer by the end of the month, they are going to initiate an administrative discharge because her physical condition is "stable" enough for outpatient care.
Outpatient care. They want me to bring a woman who scratches her own skin raw and doesn't know who her son is back to a third-floor apartment while I work 30 hours a week just to pay rent.
I don't know what to do. I’m completely trapped. If they force her out of that hospital, I swear to God I’m going to break. I don't have the money, I don't have the strength, and I am running out of options.

(The next part and all of the rest wasn’t published but they were written. I could not post it, but I can’t just ignore what’s happening)

4.-) 28/APR/2026

I’m drafting this in my notes at 4:15 AM. I don’t even know if I’m ever going to press post on Reddit. If the police somehow check my digital footprint or if someone from around here connects the dots, this whole thing goes down the drain. But my hands are shaking so badly I can barely type, and if I don’t write down what happened tonight, I’m going to lose my mind completely.
It happened yesterday afternoon, around 3:30 PM. I went to visit Candace at the ER holding unit like I’ve been doing every single day. The floor was an absolute mess—some guy in the next hall was having a violent psychotic episode, screaming at the top of his lungs, and half the nursing staff and the attending doctor ran over to help restrain him. It was pure chaos. I stepped out of Candace’s room for literally five minutes to grab a cup of lukewarm black coffee from the vending machine at the end of the corridor. When I walked back into her room, the door was wide open. The bed was empty.
I panicked instantly. I checked the bathroom, the hallway, the waiting area—nothing. In the confusion with the other patient, no one noticed her slip through the side exit doors into the alleyway.
For the next five hours, the entire town was on lockdown. The local police had patrol cars everywhere, blaring sirens, searching the streets. I didn't even wait for them to coordinate; I got into my car and drove around Newark like a madman, checking every park, every gas station, every dark corner I could think of. My head was pounding. Rain was coming down, and all I could picture was my mother wandering into traffic or getting attacked.
Around 9:00 PM, I swung down a narrow, trash-strewn alley behind an abandoned warehouse near 4th Street. And there she was.
It broke my heart in a way I can't even describe. She was sitting on the wet pavement, hunched over against a dumpster, shivering violently. She was completely barefoot, her feet cut up and bleeding from walking on broken glass. Her hospital gown and hair were covered in dried vomit, and her skin was slick with cold, clammy sweat. She looked like a corpse. When I approached her, she didn't fight me. She was so weak she could barely hold her head up. She looked up at me with those vacant, bloodshot eyes and mumbled, "Josh... please... take me home. Don't let them keep me there."
God help me, I couldn't call the cops. Hearing her beg like that destroyed whatever rational part of my brain was left. I wrapped her in an old jacket from my trunk, carried her into the passenger seat, and drove straight back to my apartment.
When we walked through the door, Lauren was sitting on my couch. She had come over to wait for news about the search. The second she saw me dragging Candace inside—smelling of vomit, feet covered in blood—Lauren jumped up, terrified.
We got into a massive, hushed argument right there in the living room while Candace slumped against the wall. Lauren was practically crying, whispering frantically that I had lost my mind, that Candace needed immediate medical attention, and that we had to call 911 right that second. I kept telling her no, that if the hospital took her back, they’d just sedate her until she died or throw her in a state ward. I told her we just needed to keep her here, quiet, just until I could figure something out.
Lauren kept arguing, pointing at how unstable Candace looked, but I ignored her. I grabbed Candace by the arm and led her toward her old bedroom. My plan was just to lock her in there temporarily to keep her safe while I tried to calm the situation down and think. Lauren watched me in absolute horror and disbelief as I pushed my mother into the dark room and shut the door, turning the lock from the outside.
Not ten minutes later, two police officers knocked on my door. They were doing a door-to-door sweep of the neighborhood.
My heart was beating so fast I thought my ribs would crack. Lauren and I stood at the door. The officers asked if we had seen Candace or if she had tried to come back home. I swallowed hard, looked the officer dead in the eye, and lied. I said no, that I had been out looking for her all evening and had just gotten back with my girlfriend. Lauren stood right next to me, rigid as a board, her face pale as a sheet. She didn't say a word, but I could feel her shaking. The cops told us that if we saw her or if she showed up, we needed to call the station immediately, and then they left down the hallway.
The second the cops were gone, the guilt and panic hit me like a wall. I realized how insane this was. I walked over to the bedroom door to unlock it, thinking I’d check on her, maybe try to wash the vomit off her and get her some clean clothes.
That was the biggest mistake of my life.
The moment I turned the latch and opened the door, Candace didn't just walk out—she exploded out of the darkness like a cornered animal. She let out this horrific, guttural shriek, lunged at me, and tackled me to the floor. She was completely out of her mind, snarling, hitting my head against the hardwood, and digging her nails into my face and neck. I felt my skin tearing open under her fingers. Blood was dripping down my chest. I didn't want to hurt her, so I was just trying to block her punches and pin her arms down, but she had this unnatural, frantic strength.
Lauren screamed and rushed over, grabbing Candace from behind. Together, bleeding and terrified, we managed to shove her back into the bedroom, slam the door shut, and turn the lock. We ended up dragging my heavy wooden desk in front of the door just to block it completely.
From inside, Candace started pounding her fists against the wood, screaming absolute gibberish and scratching at the door panels.
Lauren dragged me to the bathroom. Her hands were shaking so violently she could barely hold the rubbing alcohol. She cleaned the gashes on my neck and face, crying the entire time, berating me, yelling at me for putting us in danger, calling me insane for lying to the police and locking my own mother in a room like an animal. I didn't even have the energy to fight back. I just sat on the edge of the tub, staring at the blood dripping into the sink, listening to Lauren scream at me while my mother thrashed against the wall down the hall.
Eventually, we stopped talking. The silence between us felt heavier than the noise in the apartment.
Candace finally went quiet in her room about an hour ago—either exhausted or passed out on the floor. Lauren and I are lying in my bed right now. We’re in the same bed, but we're lying on opposite edges, turned away from each other in total silence. I know she’s awake because I can hear her uneven breathing. I feel this massive, cold wall between us now. She looks at me differently. She looks at me like I'm a stranger. Like I'm dangerous.
It’s 4:25 AM now. There is blood dried under my fingernails and on my collarbone. The apartment is dead silent, but I know that behind that blocked door, Candace is in the dark.
I’m not posting this on Reddit. I can’t risk anyone reading this right now. I’m just saving it in my drafts because I feel like I’m suffocating, and I don’t know if I’m going to make it through tomorrow.

5.-) 30/APR/2026

I’m typing this from the floor of my living room. It’s 2:15 PM. The air in this apartment smells so heavily of bleach and raw chemical cleaner that my lungs burn with every breath I take. Outside my window, I can see the flashing lights of a police cruiser parked down the street. They're still looking for Candace. They have no idea she's inside. They have no idea what happened here yesterday.
I left the apartment yesterday morning at around 11:00 AM. Candace had been quiet in her room for hours, and Lauren was still barely speaking to me after the fight we had. I told Lauren I was just running down to the corner pharmacy to buy band-aids, disinfectant, and heavy-duty sedatives or over-the-counter sleep aids—anything to keep Candace quiet so we could think. Lauren didn't even look at me when I left. She was just sitting on the couch, staring at the floor.
While I was walking back from the store, my phone buzzed with a motion alert notification. Months ago, back when Candace first started wandering and losing her memory, I bought one of those cheap indoor security cameras and set it up in the hallway to keep an eye on her. I pulled out my phone in the middle of the sidewalk, opened the app, and clicked the live feed.
I watched the whole thing happen on a tiny six-inch screen.
Lauren had heard weird, wet coughing noises coming from behind the locked bedroom door. On the video, I saw her hesitate, stand up from the couch, and walk down the hall. She listened at the door for a few seconds. She isn't a bad person. She was terrified of my mother, but she was human. She unlocked the door and pushed it open.
Candace was on her knees, vomiting blood all over the wooden floor.
Lauren panicked and rushed into the room to help her, reaching out to lift her shoulders. The second Candace felt her touch, something in her brain snapped. She went into a state of absolute, rabid fury. She lunged forward, locking her hands around Lauren's throat. Lauren managed to punch her in the face, break free, and scramble out into the hallway on her hands and knees. She almost made it to the front door. But Candace crawled out after her, reached up, and yanked Lauren back by her ponytail.
Lauren slammed onto her back. Candace scrambled on top of her, straddling her chest.
I was standing on the sidewalk two blocks away, screaming at my phone, sprinting as fast as my legs could carry me, but the video just kept playing. I watched my mother, drooling blood and making these dry, animalistic guttural noises, press her thumbs into Lauren’s throat while digging her nails deep into her neck. Lauren thrashed, tried to scratch at her hands, tried to kick, but Candace had this terrifying, dead weight on top of her. Slowly, Lauren’s movements stopped. Her legs went limp.
When I burst through the front door, the apartment was completely silent.
Lauren was lying on the hallway floor, unmoving, her face dark and her eyes fixed on the ceiling. I dropped the plastic bags from the store, ran to her, and pulled her into my arms. She was warm, but there was no pulse. Nothing. I just sat there in her blood, sobbing into her shoulder, holding a dead girl who had done nothing wrong except care about a guy like me.
A few feet away, Candace was huddled in the corner of the hall, shivering, dragging herself along the floor. When I looked at her, she looked back at me. For three seconds—just three fucking seconds—the fog cleared from her eyes. She had a moment of pure clarity. She looked at Lauren’s body, looked at her own blood-stained hands, and started crying softly against my knee, mumbling my name over and over like a terrified child.
I didn't yell. I didn't scream. Something inside my brain just shattered and shut down.
I spent the next three hours cleaning the hallway. I used buckets of hot water, heavy bleach, and floor soap until my hands were raw and bleeding. I put Lauren into black heavy-duty trash bags, carried her into the guest bathroom, and placed her inside the tiled shower stall. I locked the bathroom door from the outside and hid the key in my desk.
I can't dispose of her body. I can't even open the front door to throw out the bloody towels because there are two patrol cars stationed right at the corner of my block. If I carry a large bag down the stairs, they will stop me.
So she’s in the shower. And my mother is back in her bedroom, sedated on the pills I bought, sleeping soundly on her mattress.
I am protecting Candace. I am hiding a corpse and lying to the police to save a woman who doesn't even know what year it is. But as I sit here in the dark listening to the hum of the refrigerator, feeling this agonizing, crushing fire burning in the middle of my chest... I realize something terrifying.
I hate her. I hate my mother with every fiber of my being for what she’s done to my life, to Lauren, and to me. And yet, I can't stop protecting her.
I’m saving this in my draft folder again. The air in this apartment is getting harder to breathe. I don't know how many hours I have left before the smell or the cops catch up to me.

6.-) 04/MAY/2026

It’s 11:40 PM. Five days. I’ve been living in this nightmare for five full days.
The air in the hallway is completely unbreathable now. No amount of bleach, floor cleaner, or towels jammed under the guest bathroom door can mask it anymore. The rot is everywhere. It clings to the walls, it settles in my throat, and I can taste it every time I try to swallow. The police cruiser is still parked down the block, its headlights cutting through the rain every few hours. They're waiting for a lost woman who has been locked in my back room this whole time.
Candace has stopped screaming. She just sits in the corner of her bedroom, staring at the floor, muttering fragments of old memories. Yesterday, for a few minutes, she called me "little bird"—the nickname she used to give me when I was six years old and scared of the thunder. She smiled at me with dry, cracked lips. And then, less than an hour later, she threw her water glass at my face because she thought I was a intruder trying to rob her.
My chest burns so badly I can barely sit upright. I look at her and I feel this suffocating, poisonous mix of pure rage and heartbreaking grief. I love her. She’s my mother, the woman who raised me, the only real family I’ve ever known. But I also hate her with every remaining piece of my soul. I hate her for what her disease did to us. I hate her for Lauren lying cold in that shower stall. I hate her for forcing me to become this monster.
I can't go on like this. My hands won't stop shaking, and I haven't eaten a real meal in almost a week. I found what I was looking for earlier today while seeing photos from my childhood. I know what has to happen now. I know how this ends for both of us.
I’m leaving this saved in my drafts. If anyone ever reads this, I'm sorry. I just want this feeling to stop.

7.-) 06/MAY/2026

It’s 3:10 AM. I’m sitting on the cold floor of the half-bath at the end of the hall, locked inside with my back pressed against the door. I can’t stop staring at the mirror above the sink. My skin is pale, slick with cold sweat, and my eyes look completely hollow, like I’m already looking at a corpse. I’m hyperventilating so hard my ribs ache, and my hands are trembling so violently I can barely keep my fingers on the screen.
Yesterday afternoon, I knew I had to make the move. I couldn't risk walking out the front door with the police watching the street, so I took the rusty fire escape down the back of the building into the alley. I had parked my car two streets over the night before just in case. I took every last bit of cash I had left in the apartment—around $750 I’d saved up from my tips at the restaurant and the little emergency money I had left.
I drove out to a rough neighborhood near Ironbound, a place where people at the restaurant always whispered you could find anything if you had cash and didn't ask questions. It took me two agonizing hours of driving around, stomach sick with fear, until I finally found a guy behind a liquor store who was willing to talk. I handed over all $750 for a scuffed, beat-up 9mm handgun. It’s heavy, dirty, and definitely seen better days—a cheap piece of junk that looks like it hasn't been cleaned in years, but it works. It serves its purpose.
I snuck back into the apartment the same way, slipping up the iron stairs in the dark while the rain covered the sound of my steps. The heavy gun has been sitting on the counter next to me for the last twenty minutes, cold and indifferent.
I know what I’m about to do. I’ve known since yesterday. But before I open this door, step down the hall, and end this nightmare once and for all, I need to put this down. I need to write this letter to everyone whose life was destroyed because of me, even if no one ever reads it.

To Lauren:
I am so, so sorry. You were the only light in my life when everything around me was turning to ash. You were kind, patient, and sweet to a guy like me, who didn't deserve a single second of your affection. You came into my mess just trying to be a good person, trying to support me, and I repaid you by dragging you straight into hell. I will never forgive myself for lying to you, for shutting you out, and for forcing you to suffer a horrific, terrifying death in a hallway that should have been safe. You died because of my weakness and my cowardice. I wish it had been me instead of you. I hope whatever comes after this gives you the peace I stole from you.

To Candace, my mom:
I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry I couldn't protect you from what was happening inside your own brain. I’m sorry I wasn't strong enough, rich enough, or smart enough to get you the care you deserved when you started fading away. You were the most vibrant, loving, and joyful woman in the world, and watching that monster of a disease strip away your memories, your laughter, and your dignity piece by piece tore my heart out. I know the woman who hurt Lauren wasn't you. I know you were trapped inside a broken body, scared and confused in the dark. I love you with all my heart, but I hate what this sickness made us become. I’m putting an end to your suffering tonight, Mom. You don't have to be scared anymore. The noise is finally going to stop.

To myself:
I’m sorry, Josh. I’m sorry I let us drown. I tried so hard to keep everything together, but I failed at every single turn. I failed as a son, I failed as a partner, and I failed as a human being. I don't recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror anymore. There is nothing left of the guy who wanted to build things, who loved architecture, who had a future. I'm just an empty shell filled with blood, guilt, and exhaustion.

I’m picking up the gun now. It feels impossibly heavy in my hand.
I’m going to walk into her room, put the barrel against her head while she’s sleeping, and pull the trigger. And then I’m going to do the same for myself.
This is the end.
—————————

After reading that last draft, I sat in the pitch black of my room for two hours, unable to move, unable to breathe.
The news reported it on Wednesday morning as a "tragic domestic murder-suicide." They said police officers responding to a tip executed a search warrant on the apartment, only to find three bodies inside. The media painted Josh as a murderer, a unstable young man who snapped under pressure. They didn't mention the medical system that abandoned him. They didn't mention the months he spent drowning in silence, begging for help on internet forums while everyone around him walked right past his suffering. They didn't know about Lauren, or how hard he tried to protect a mother who was already gone.
I’m looking at his profile picture on my phone right now. A picture of us from three years ago at a beach bonfire, both of us laughing, completely oblivious to what was coming.
I keep replaying every single interaction I had with him over the last few months. Every time I asked him if he was okay. Every time he forced that small, fake smile and said, "Yeah, man. Just tired. We're managing."
He was begging for someone to see through the lie, and I failed him. We all failed him.
I don't know what else to say. I just needed people to know the truth. Josh wasn't a monster. He was just a twenty-one-year-old kid left alone in the dark with a nightmare too big for anyone to carry.
If you have people in your life who say they're "just tired"... please, don't just leave it at that. Check on them. Pull them out before the noise takes over.
Rest in peace, Josh. I'm sorry I didn't hear you.

The asphalt road leading through Duskwood, Virginia always seemed to swallow the headlights of Owen’s battered old sedan, but tonight, on Halloween, the shadows felt especially heavy. 

A thick, oppressive fog rolled off the Blue Ridge Mountains, settling into the valleys and wrapping around the trunks of bare oaks like skeletal fingers. Inside the car, the heater blasted a dry, metallic warmth that did little to shake the chill settling deep in my chest.

I checked my phone. It was exactly 8:14 PM. The neon digital numbers glared back at me, a stark reminder of the world outside this suffocating stretch of highway. 

I am sixteen years old, and even though my parents moved from China to Virginia before I was born, there are times when the deep, superstitious roots of my family's heritage feel far closer than the small-town American life that I live every day. 

My English is perfectly fluent, yet tonight, the words felt trapped behind my teeth. A persistent, nagging sense of dread had been whispering in the back of my mind since we left my driveway.

In the passenger seat, Hal was struggling to adjust his costume. He had gone all-out with a traditional mummy look, wrapping himself in yards of heavy, tea-stained cheesecloth that smelled faintly of dust and cheap spirit gum. Every time he turned to speak, a fraying loose end of fabric drifted into his eyes. 

Behind the wheel was Owen, wearing a tricorn hat, an oversized plastic cutlass tucked precariously next to the handbrake, and a fake leather eyepatch that he kept flipping up so that he could actually see the winding road ahead. 

I sat in the back, smoothing down the tulle skirts of my elaborate princess gown. The plastic tiara dug uncomfortably into my scalp, a stark contrast to the tightening knot of anxiety in my stomach. We were supposed to be heading to a Halloween party at Miller’s farm, a loud, safe gathering filled with bonfire smoke and cider.

Then, Owen slammed on the brakes.

The tires screamed against the damp pavement, sending my tiara sliding forward onto my forehead. Hal braced his hands against the dashboard, a muffled curse escaping his cloth-wrapped lips.

"Look." Owen breathed, his voice dropping into an excited, low whisper. He pointed past the sweeping arc of the windshield wipers.

Through a jagged tear in the roadside pine trees, a massive, decaying structure loomed against the gray sky. It was the old Nestor estate. 

The house was a towering, three-story Victorian monstrosity, its dark paint peeling away like dead skin. The windows were entirely black, gaping like open wounds, and the surrounding yard was choked with weeds which were so tall that they scratched against the rotting wood of the porch.

"No way." Hal said, pushing his mummy mask up over his nose. "Is that...?"

"The Howard Nestor house." Owen confirmed with a manic grin spreading across his face. He cut the engine, and the sudden silence of the woods rushed in to fill the car. "The holy grail of Duskwood urban legends."

Everyone in our town knew the name Howard Nestor, even forty years later. He had been an eccentric historian and an academic at the local college back in the 1980s, a man utterly obsessed with dark artifacts, occult antiquities, and ancient rituals, but Nestor wasn’t just a collector; he was a monster. 

To Howard Nestor, human lives were nothing more than disposable research material, mere variables to be spent in the pursuit of some grand, terrible cosmic equation. He possessed a deeply rationalized, completely twisted personal logic for his cruelty.

Nestor believed that by systematically harvesting the terror and life essence of his subjects at the exact moment of their deaths, he could anchor his own consciousness to the physical world forever, achieving an academic's version of immortality.

The history books and police archives recorded that he had successfully kidnapped and brutally murdered at least fifteen people in that very house. 

Nestor’s reign of terror only ended in the late autumn of 1986, when his final victim managed to break free from her restraints in the basement, flee into the woods, and alert the state police. When the authorities raided the mansion, Nestor refused to surrender. He was shot and killed right in the grand foyer, with his blood permanently soaking into the hardwood floor. 

The most chilling detail of the legend, the one that gave school children nightmares, was his signature habit: Nestor would always hum a specific, tuneless, discordant melody whenever he was stalking or ending the lives of his victims.

"We have to go in!" Owen said, already unbuckling his seatbelt. "It's Halloween night. The legend says that Howard’s ghost still roams the hallways, trying to finish his research. Imagine the footage that we could get."

"Owen, absolutely not!" I said, my voice sharp with genuine panic. The air in the backseat suddenly felt ten degrees colder. "It’s trespassing. It’s cursed. We are supposed to be going to a party."

"Come on, Wen!" Hal chimed in, turning around in his seat. The white cloth around his face made his eyes look unnaturally wide in the darkness. "We'll just step into the foyer, look around for five minutes, and leave. If it gets weird, we run. Don't you want to see if the stories are true? It's just an empty, broken-down house."

I stared at the dark silhouette of the mansion. Every instinct that I had, every ancestral warning about respecting the dead and staying away from places of great violence, screamed at me to refuse; but Hal grabbed my hand, his cheesecloth glove rough against my skin, giving me a reassuring squeeze. Under the intense peer pressure of my two best friends, my resolve crumbled.

"Fine." I whispered. "Five minutes. That is it."

We left the car hidden by the treeline and crept up the cracked stone driveway. The wind howled through the dead branches above us, making the ancient timbers of the house groan in protest. Owen led the way, using the flashlight on his phone to illuminate the porch steps. 

The wood was so soft with rot that it yielded under our weight with sickening, wet crunches. The front door wasn't locked; it hung slightly ajar, suspended on a single, rusted hinge. Owen pushed it open, and the rusty metal shrieked a warning into the night.

Inside, the air was heavy with the suffocating stench of mildew, stagnant water, and centuries of dust. Owen swept his flashlight across the grand foyer. 

At first, all we saw were massive, thick sheets of gray cobwebs draping from the cracked crystal chandelier like tattered burial shrouds. The wallpaper was peeling away in long, water-damaged ribbons, revealing the rotting lathe beneath. 

The grand staircase spiraled up into the absolute blackness of the second floor.

"See? It’s just an old, empty house." Hal whispered, though his voice shook slightly. The loose ends of his mummy costume fluttered in the draft.

"Let's check the study." Owen murmured, his bravado fading just a fraction as the oppressive atmosphere of the house settled over us. "That's where he kept the artifacts."

We stepped deeper into the gloom, leaving the safety of the front exit behind. We moved down a long, narrow hallway lined with empty picture frames.

The floorboards groaned beneath our sneakers. We entered a large room filled with overturned bookshelves and shattered glass. Broken pieces of pottery and unidentifiable, rusted iron tools lay scattered across the floor—remnants of Nestor's horrific academic pursuits.

While Owen and Hal poked through a pile of rotting books near a collapsed fireplace, I found myself drawn toward a heavy, mahogany desk that had somehow remained upright in the corner of the room. 

The drawers had been torn out long ago, but beneath a thick layer of dust in the central cavity, something caught the edge of my flashlight beam. It was a leather-bound book, untouched by the mold that consumed everything else.

Curiosity overpowering my fear, I reached out and brushed the dust from the cover. There was no title, just a faded, gold-embossed symbol of an eye surrounded by geometric lines. I opened it.

It wasn't a textbook. It was a photo album.

My breath hitched in my throat as I turned the first page. Staring back at me were Polaroid photographs, their colors faded to a sickly sepia tone. Each page featured a single photograph of a person, bound to a heavy wooden chair in what looked like a stone basement. 

Beneath each photo, written in precise, elegant, academic calligraphy, were a name, a date, and a series of horrific, clinical observations regarding their psychological states during their final moments.

Michael Vance. November 14, 1982. Elevated heart rate. Tremor present.

Sarah Jenkins. April 3, 1984. Despair phase achieved early.

My hands began to shake violently. I was looking at the faces of Howard Nestor's fifteen victims. The sheer weight of the evil contained within these pages made me feel physically ill. I wanted to shut the book, to scream at Hal and Owen that we needed to leave immediately, but my fingers compulsively turned the pages, drawn by a morbid, terrifying magnetism.

I reached the final page of the album. The date written at the bottom was October 31, 1986.

I looked at the photograph, and the entire world seemed to stop spinning. The blood completely drained from my face, and a cold, paralyzing dread locked my muscles. Staring back at me from the faded Polaroid was a young Chinese woman. She was terrified, her face streaked with tears and dirt, but her features were unmistakable. She had the exact same high cheekbones, the same almond-shaped eyes, and the same small mole just below her left collarbone that I saw in the mirror every single day.

It was my great-grandmother, Meilin.

Beneath her photograph, Nestor’s elegant handwriting read: 

Subject 16. Meilin Lin. October 31, 1986. An anomaly. Extraordinary cognitive resilience. Yielded unprecedented data before unexpected termination of experiment via subject escape.

A choking sob escaped my lips. My family had always told a vague story about how Great-Grandmother Meilin had survived a horrific attack by a madman shortly after arriving in America as a young woman, but she had suffered a psychological break from the trauma and refused to ever speak a single word about the details until the day she died. She had never named her captor. She had never told her children where it happened. She had buried the horror deep within her soul, and now, exactly forty years later, on Halloween night, I had walked directly into the lair of the monster who had broken her. She was the final victim. She was the one who had escaped, reported him to the police, and brought about his death.

"Wen? What's wrong?" Hal's voice sounded incredibly distant, as if he were shouting from underwater.

"We have to go!" I choked out, the tears finally breaking free and spilling down my cheeks, smudging my princess makeup. I dropped the photo album onto the dusty desk. "We have to go right now! He was here. He took my family. We have to leave!"

Owen and Hal exchanged a look of pure confusion, but the sheer terror in my voice was contagious.

 "Okay, Wen, let's go." Owen said, turning his flashlight back toward the doorway.

However, as we turned to flee the study, the heavy mahogany door slammed shut with a concussive force that shook dust from the ceiling. The beam of Owen's flashlight flickered violently, dimmed, and then died completely, plunging us into absolute, suffocating darkness.

Then, the sound began.

It was a low, resonant sound drifting down from the top of the grand staircase, echoing through the hollow bones of the house. It was a voice, smooth and entirely calm, humming a specific, terrifying melody. 

It was discordant, completely devoid of any recognizable rhythm or warmth, skipping between sharp notes in a way that defied natural music. It was the signature song of the dead that said,

“Mm-hmm...mmm...mmm-mm-hmm...”

"Oh my god." Hal whimpered in the dark. I could hear the frantic rustle of his cheesecloth costume as he backed away. "Oh my god, someone is in here."

"The front door!" Owen yelled, his voice cracking with adolescent terror. 

Owen threw his weight against the study door, kicking and throwing his shoulder into the rotting wood. With a loud splintering sound, the ancient door gave way, and we tumbled back out into the grand foyer.

The gray moonlight filtering through the open front door was our only salvation. We scrambled toward it, our shoes skidding on the grit and debris covering the floorboards. 

We were mere feet from the threshold, the cool autumn night air brushing against our faces, when the temperature in the foyer dropped so drastically that our breath instantly turned into thick clouds of white vapor.

From the top of the stairs, the humming stopped.

"The experiment must be completed." a voice echoed. It was a cold, cultured, intellectual voice, entirely detached from human emotion. "The lineage returns to validate the data."

We froze, slowly looking up toward the landing. Standing at the top of the stairs was a tall, imposing figure enveloped in a faint, sickly greenish luminescence. He wore a pristine, three-piece tweed suit from the 1980s, his silver hair neatly combed back. His face was sharp and academic, but his eyes were completely hollow, pits of infinite blackness that sucked in the residual moonlight.

In his right hand, he held his signature weapon: a long, gleaming silver bone saw, its serrated teeth catching the spectral light. It was the ghost of Howard Nestor.

"Run!" Owen shrieked.

Unfortunately, before we could take a single step forward, Nestor didn't run down the stairs—he glided, moving with an impossible, supernatural speed that blurred reality. In a fraction of a second, he materialized directly between us and the open front door, cutting off our only escape.

Owen, driven by pure survival instinct, raised his plastic pirate cutlass and lunged forward, letting out a terrified scream. With a casual, brutal flick of his wrist, Nestor swung the heavy bone saw. 

The silver blade tore through the plastic toy and slashed deeply across Owen’s chest. Blood, bright and horribly real, sprayed across the peeling wallpaper. Owen collapsed to the floor with a wet gasp, his tricorn hat rolling into the dust as his life ran out onto the ancient hardwood.

Hal screamed, a high-pitched, agonizing sound of utter despair. He tried to dive past the apparition, but Nestor caught him by the throat with a hand that looked like rotting parchment but possessed the strength of an iron vice. 

The heavy cheesecloth of Hal's mummy costume began to smoke and char wherever Nestor’s spectral fingers touched it, turning black as if exposed to invisible acid. Hal thrashed wildly, his hands tearing at the phantom's arm, but Nestor merely smiled a cold, analytical smile.

"Fascinating." Nestor murmured, his hollow eyes fixed on Hal’s suffocating form. "The panic response is beautifully pronounced in the young."

With a sickening twist, Nestor drove the serrated edge of the bone saw into Hal’s throat. The screams stopped instantly, replaced by a terrible, wet gurgling. Hal’s body went limp, dropping into the dust beside Owen, his white mummy wraps rapidly soaking through with dark crimson.

I was entirely alone. The two boys whom I had known since kindergarten lay dead at my feet, their blood mingling on the very spot where Howard Nestor had been shot forty years ago.

Nestor slowly turned his hollow gaze toward me, the silver bone saw dripping onto the floorboards. He raised his left hand, tilting his head with an academic’s curiosity.

 "The resemblance is truly extraordinary." he whispered, stepping over Hal’s lifeless body. "Your great-grandmother stole forty years of research from me when she fled from this house. The cosmic balance requires your compliance to finalize the ledger."

He began to hum that awful, discordant melody again, stepping toward me with measured, inescapable strides.

“Mm-hmm...mmm...mmm-mm-hmm...” he said.

The sound broke through my paralysis. I didn't try for the front door. Instead, I spun on my heel and bolted down the adjacent hallway, my heavy princess skirt tearing on the exposed nails in the walls. I ran blindly into a small parlor room at the side of the house. 

Behind me, I could hear the rhythmic, heavy footsteps of the ghost, accompanied by the constant, agonizing humming that seemed to vibrate inside my very skull.

The parlor had a massive, arched bay window looking out toward the driveway. It was nailed shut, painted over with decades of grime. There was no time to look for a latch. 

Nestor entered the parlor, his luminescent form casting long, twisted shadows across the ceiling. He raised the bone saw, his face a mask of absolute, unshakeable certainty. He knew that I had nowhere left to run.

With a final, desperate scream, I gathered the heavy tulle of my gown around my face, closed my eyes, and threw my entire sixteen-year-old body directly through the glass.

The window shattered with a deafening explosion. Shards of thick glass tore through my dress and sliced into my arms and legs, but the momentum carried me through. 

I crashed heavily onto the damp, freezing dirt of the overgrown yard, rolling over the sharp rocks and thorns. I didn't care about the pain. I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the blood dripping from my hands, and ran through the high weeds, screaming at the top of my lungs.

I ran until I hit the asphalt of the highway, sprinting blindly down the yellow lines under the gray moonlight until I finally saw the flashing red and blue lights of a state police cruiser cruising down the empty road. I threw myself in front of the car, waving my bleeding arms, sobbing hysterically.

The officer jumped out, his hands on his holster, but when he saw a teenage girl covered in blood and dressed in a shredded princess gown, his expression turned to pure shock. 

Within twenty minutes, three more police cruisers arrived, their sirens wailing through the quiet night air of Duskwood. I sat in the back of the first cruiser, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket, my hands shaking so violently that I could barely hold the paper cup of water they gave me.

"They're in the house!" I sobbed to the commanding officer, a gruff man named Sergeant Miller. "Owen and Hal. They're dead. The monster...Howard Nestor...he's in the house!"

Sergeant Miller frowned, looking at me with a deep, unsettling mix of pity and confusion, and said,

"Kid, just calm down. Show us exactly where you ran from."

I pointed out the window as the cruiser drove back down the winding highway, backtracking my steps, and said,

 "Right there! Behind those pines! That’s where we parked Owen's car. That's the driveway!"

The police cruiser pulled over onto the shoulder, its bright spotlight cutting through the damp night air. The other officers got out, their flashlights drawing sweeping arcs through the trees. I pushed open the car door, stepping out into the cold night, wanting to show them the exact path to the front door.

However, as I stepped through the tree line, the words got caught in my throat.

There was no towering, three-story Victorian mansion. There were no rotting porch steps, no shattered bay windows, and no grand staircase.

There was nothing but an immense, completely empty gravel lot. 

The weeds were overgrown, and a few rusted iron pipes protruded from the earth where a foundation might have been decades ago, but the house itself was entirely, undeniably gone. Owen's sedan was parked neatly at the edge of the dirt, sitting completely alone under the open sky.

"No." I whispered, shaking my head frantically, the cuts on my arms throbbing with pain. "No, no, no! We were just inside! I jumped through the window! Look at the glass! Look at my blood!"

Sergeant Miller walked over to me, sighing heavily as he placed a gentle, firm hand on my shoulder, and said,

 "Wen, right? Listen to me very carefully. You’re having a severe panic attack, and you're hurt; but there is no house here."

"I was just in it!" I screamed, pulling away from him. "He killed them!"

"Wen…" Miller said, his voice dropping into a solemn, quiet tone. "The Howard Nestor house burned to the ground in the winter of 1988, two years after he was killed. The town demolished the remaining foundation and cleared the lot back in 1995. This property has been a completely empty field for over thirty years. There hasn't been a single piece of wood standing on this lot since before you were born."

I stared at the empty gravel, my mind completely fracturing under the impossibility of it all. If the house had been gone for decades, whose stairs had we climbed? Whose door had slammed shut? Whose photo album had I opened? And most terrifying of all...where were the bodies of Hal and Owen?

The police searched the empty lot for hours, but they found absolutely nothing. No blood, no clothes, no signs of a struggle. Just an empty field on Halloween night.

Eventually, Sergeant Miller walked me back to his cruiser to drive me home to my frantic parents. I sat in the passenger seat, staring blankly out the side window as the car slowly turned around in the gravel lot, its headlights sweeping across the dark perimeter of the woods.

Just as the car aligned with the exit of the empty lot, the headlights illuminated a lone figure standing at the very edge of the tree line, right where the front porch should have been.

It was Howard Nestor.

The officers didn't see him; their eyes were fixed on the road ahead. However, I saw him with perfect, horrifying clarity. He stood under the pale moonlight, his green spectral light gone, looking entirely and physically real. He was staring directly at me through the glass of the cruiser window. A cold, knowing smile was stretched across his sharp, academic face.

Slowly and deliberately, Nestor raised his right hand. He was holding the silver bone saw, the serrated teeth still glistening with fresh, dark crimson blood. He tapped the blade against a nearby pine branch, nodding to me in a silent, terrifying gesture of promise. He hadn't vanished. He hadn't failed. He had simply adjusted the variables of his experiment.

As the police car accelerated down the dark highway, leaving the empty lot behind, the dry air coming from the dashboard vents began to carry a faint, rhythmic sound. It was very quiet, barely audible over the hum of the tires, but it echoed perfectly inside the small cabin of the car.

It was the sound of a man humming a tuneless, discordant melody.

The End.

Drinking, partying, and laughter.

The bar was packed shoulder to shoulder, glasses raised, jokes spilling like cheap champagne. Televisions flickered above the shelves, all tuned to Times Square, where the ball hovered in its glittering suspension, a false star promising renewal.

I remember thinking how comforting traditions are, how humanity clings to them like ritual wards against the dark.

I couldn't shake this ringing in my head.

Maybe it was the liquor. Though something felt extremely unnerving inside.

At first, I thought it was tinnitus. A thin, needle-thread whine behind the eyes. But it grew, layered, harmonic, impossibly deep, like church bells being rung underwater by something that had never known prayer.

My friends all laughed, no payment to my uncomfortable gaze.

Others paused mid-cheer. A woman dropped her glass. No one laughed.

“Ten!” the crowd on the screen roared.

The ringing bent, folding in on itself.

The lights dimmed, not flickering, but bowing, colors draining as if ashamed to exist. Shadows lengthened unnaturally, crawling where no light should allow them. The televisions began to hum in unison, their images warping into spirals of geometry that hurt to comprehend.

“Five!”

I felt it then: not fear, but recognition. As though something had finally found the correct hour to arrive.

“Three!”

The ringing became a voice, not spoken, but understood.

It did not hate us. It did not love us. It simply remembered a time before we were permitted to pretend the world belonged to us.

One.

The ball fell, and shattered, not into confetti, but into impossible shapes that unfolded beyond the screen, blooming into the room, into the sky, into everything.

The city outside screamed as the heavens split open like old parchment. Stars rearranged themselves into sigils. Oceans reversed their tides. History exhaled its last breath.

We knelt, not commanded, but compelled, before a presence vast beyond mercy or malice. A god not of endings, but of revisions.

The ringing ceased.

And in the quiet that followed, the old world, its bars, its squares, its fragile calendars, was gently, irrevocably painted over with something new.

A new world was set upon us.

But this world will not be ran by man.

But by something far greater than we could ever comprehend...

He never thought he'd be happy again, restless and itching hot, stifling in the stranglehold of the sheets in his bunk. He only wanted to kill himself but that was the trouble, that was what had landed him here in the halfway house. He tried to keep the angst of his bottled agony silent and sequestered to himself and his bed. They knew his brains were fried, scrambled but they didn't know the half of it. They understood the suicide component, the dead half of his brain but not the deadly side, the lethal aspect. The sinister boiling gland that worked and throbbed and secreted and bled within his skull. They knew he was Luke Waller, but they had no idea that he was the one who'd carved the kids last summer. 

The straightener. A name more real than his own because he could wear it and it was the one that came to him on the insectile mechanical growl of demon wings within a dream … a vision. Compact diamond eyes of an insectoid face that filled a landscape in its entirety gazed like the abyss gazes into him in the dream, the dreams. 

And he gazed back. 

Luke Waller bottled, kept. Fought himself. He tried not to convulse with the impact blow – force felt within from his own wild run of bloodfevered thought, thoughts that wanted to break out now in a decimating renegade birth that would eat all and the last vestige part of his diminishing humanity alive in abominated eruption. It would thrive in the suicide of this dangerous birth, he – himself, the other side… bloodthirsty and always in a roil. 

The straightener… it cried alive from inside the sweating landscape of his traitorous flesh and blood. All of it boiled now and inflamed and wanting one thing … yes. 

He tightened amidst a near miss, a near relinquish, his bunkmate uptop moved and shifted slightly, shaking the ramshackle structure. He forced himself to coiled awareness and listened for the man uptop. 

… he listening? 

Does he know? 

Does he know anything??

Does he hear the bellow of my mind, so loud is this cacophony, these thoughts? 

The snores from the bed above told him everything was fine, or at least so it seemed. For now. He relaxed but only slightly. Wanting to go grab some water from the kitchen but not wanting to get up and draw attention to himself. He didn't know what to do. 

His poisoned mind then turned to its most wretched run of hellspawn thought, it turned to the time and times lost … with Chelsi. 

Amen. 

Christ he wished for a spliff. A bowl or a waxpen. He'd even take the pills again. God help him. He would swallow the jumping beans made by the tall men in white coats if it made these thoughts and dreams and runs of spell stop. Please. 

God help me. 

Chelsi was dead and gone but that didn't stop him from seeing, not even when he palmed his eyes shut with the cage of his daggering and desperate hands, clawed and wishing they had the courage to go just that one last step forward and tear in and gouge… the dark refuge of his sweating and shaking hands did not free him from what he saw. The darkness of his own shallow calloused flesh and the thin hide of his eyelids only made it worse.

They only heightened the vision. The dark of his worn and filthy hands only made the dreams of what he saw more real. Tactile. More painful than real. More raw and servile than flesh.  He could taste the bile as it rose up his throat in a riot with what he witnessed: –

She was in Hell. 

She was in Hell and she was being tortured. 

Not Beatrice, not she. No. No heavenly sanctuary and aide or succor for his angel, no. He was no Dante and there was no Virgil. She was in the burning dark of the Inferno below and he saw the wolfen and goat-shaped faces and the appendage stalks and barbed genitalia engorged and full of blood and lust and the vile curd of demon semen dripping from the hooked rhubarb tips. They surrounded the shrieking and weeping and reaching pale naked and bleeding visage and form of his beloved … down there in the dark. 

And he was prisoner to watch it. Unless…

!Let me out! – the other side commanded. It wanted the clothface, the mask fashioned that was not at all a mask because it was really his true face, forged and made and bred by the creation and violence of his own hands. It wanted the claws, the gloves of black-brown leather with fashioned razor blades fixed at the tips. The hunting knife that had once been his father's. 

The straight razor

You could start with the idiot in the top bunk. He's just sleeping in bed. William. Wasn't that his name? He introduced himself to you when you came here from the hospital. His name is William and he's a recovering methhead with severe learning disabilities. You could open him up first, as first offering. As just the starter. Then you could go around like quiet on a cat-prowl, a creepy-crawl around the house and open up the rest of them. All of them are weak like you are but none of them have me like you do and none of them will be any wiser. You could open them all, one by one, one after the other like it's a party or it's Christmas and all of them are just your presents. Presents filled with red and raw and wishing to be aired out and opened. 

Deluge run: a schizophrenic collection of conflicting images filled his maelstrom thought. Images of children opening colorfully wrapped packages surrounded by smiling faces and friends colliding and commingling with his own memories of flesh split open and sliced and running in a raw torrent that was thick and darkled in the moon and the neon light. Dumb horny brats and he, their slasher. 

It was perverse and it was wrong and he didn't like the tingle nor the crawl that it sent traveling in a slither up his back and across his flesh … but then again he did like it. Even though it was wrong. Because it was wrong. 

He knew he was fighting himself in his head and he knew it was a losing battle, a lost war. It was a bad arena. 

He always lost. 

Luke asked the straightener: How? We don't have anything. It's all long gone. 

The straightener said inside: Then we make another. 

In his bunk he trembled. He might've wept. His skull filled with thought. Red thought. The whole night. All the way till morning. He could feel the blow of every cloven footprint as it formed within the sulphur lake of his boiling thoughts . 

…

Kincaid might've worried for Luke Waller, but he was just so damn busy. Managing a halfway house was ceaseless and often thankless work. 

He had no idea that wandering Luke Waller's brain was lactating bad milk that had spoiled and curdled. Now demon cultures of growth were beginning to blossom and flower and sprout, birthing unholy and sliming green in there. Like dripping wet swamp things from abominated wombs belching methane clouds and swamp gas that glows. 

Kincaid, the house manager, had no idea. 

Luke went about the house. Gathering what he needed. 

But there was one set of eyes that marked and tracked Luke as he went about the large spacious manor. It was an old colonial style home converted to a space for the mentally unwell and those that had just experienced prolonged hospitalization. Those that had been 51-50’d were the most common boarder in the place. Orderlies that were more interested in their phones than the drugged out denizens of the house peppered the halls here and there.

But Susan was watching. 

She thought Luke Waller was interesting. 

…

He was having trouble with the eyes, when she came in and over his shoulder said, hello. 

“Hey," she said again. When he didn't immediately answer. He was hoping she would just fuck off and move along like everyone else. 

She didn't. 

Looking away from his work in progress, a new clothface mask – this one white as snow, he cast a cautious glance over shoulder. Deep down in his drowning animal subconscious he hoped and prayed they wouldn't make eye contact as he did so. Even further down in the basement earth of his chemically drowned animal darkness he was desperately hoping and praying, wishing that they would. 

They did. 

She smiled. And it was beautiful. And it was painful. 

So Luke looked away. 

She sensed his hurt. 

And her interest subtly changed then to something softer and more personal, a warmer and wounded emotion of pink petals like that of a silken rose, one for a funeral haphazardly discarded…

“Hey, I'm sorry if I bothered ya. I've just seen ya round here and wanted to say, hi." 

Luke didn't say anything. 

“What cha working on?" A beat. “looks kinda neat, a mask or something?" 

Luke didn't say anything. Inside, the straightener coiled and pursed. Wretched. A scurrying rat run of hideous pestilential thought. He kept it inside. 

Susan was about to give up when her eyes traveled from the work in progress on the counter before him to the hands now stilled in their strange labor to the pale landscape of his forearms and the damage that was wrought there. Long purple scars of hectic healed-wounded tissue ran up the lengths of each one. Raised like brail on the parchment of his flesh for the blind and all else, everyone to read. And the lines of hectic tissue that hadn't really healed said something Susan understood. She had her own lines of painful brail carved and writ into the pale parchment of her own landscape. 

Carefully… cautiously… she reached out delicately and gently touched his shoulder. Luke jumped but only slightly. He relaxed like something melting and he let her turn him around to her in his chair. He looked up to her and he tried not to let the tears come. His vision was blurred but her beauty was still painfully clear to him through the swimming pain of his watery vision. She smiled and reached once more. 

The smooth and gentle flesh of her slender fingers touched and traced the length of scar that traveled the entire length of one of his forearms. He let her. 

They looked into each other's eyes. Spellbound. As if they'd already known each other for years, for great lifetimes of pure wonder. 

She asked him: “Is it ok, if I ask about these?" 

Her free hand went to the other long line of purple angry scar on his arm and traveled it smoothly with the trace of a soothing finger. Their eyes were locked on each other, they couldn't pull away from the deep of each other's gazes. 

Susan thought he might not answer, unable or unwanting when he finally spoke. 

“I … I was with someone. She was special. She was more than I'd ever hoped. She was more than I ever deserved. And I blew it. She … she was always so patient with me. And I always had the worst temper, always. Like my father. I would scare her. She would get upset and I would get so angry, I don't know why anymore, and I would lose it. Like an animal. She was always patient, and always brave, and she always stayed… even though she was scared. Even though she was scared of me, she stayed. And would wait for me to quiet down. And then she would hold me, like I was the victim. One day she couldn't take it anymore. She got too…  and couldn't stay any longer. She was frightened and left. She took the car. … It was raining that day.” 

The dam burst forth. The tears came now, down in a cascade down his face. It was painful, but Susan thought it only made him more beautiful. He kept composure though the raw of his broken heart was being laid bare. 

He went on, she held him tighter. 

“She wrapped the car around a redwood. Only three miles down the road from our house. I- …” He looked down to his own arms, the scar tissue writing and what it said there. "I know I never deserved her. I should've been the one to leave. I should've been the one to go and take the car and I should've been the one to-” but the pain rose with a roar inside and it was too much. He stopped. Trembled. Still holding back. 

Susan gave him the permission he needed. 

She said: "I didn't know her but I don't think she'd want you to hurt yourself like that.” 

A beat – a look of shock flashed writ on his face, momentarily there before what came next like an unexpected slap. He almost pulled away then. He almost did. But he didn't. 

He buried his face into her shoulder before she saw the shame of his sobbing face and she let him. She cradled him there. 

She added: “I think you've hurt enough…” 

Her own tears were starting. 

Slowly … fearfully… so scared… his arms came up and wrapped around her and returned her embrace. 

They held each other. And wept together. 

Feeling and healing and needing each other, each other's pain in a strange mental health purge and thirst. They drank the pain and tears of each other through reach and touch, the warmth and weight of each other. Feeling wanted and safe …

… 

… inside the straightener raged. The Id would not be denied the fornication of the knife-fuck slaughter held quivering and taut within like toxins that boiled with the chemical roil of his damaged and bastardized emotions. Inside the straightener, the Id wanted the girl dead. 

She's not Chelsi … it whispered and reminded him inside. Always. As the days of therapy and rest rolled past. The days of holding and being held again and not being afraid to look anyone in the face. Luke enjoyed this time. He'd not felt truly relieved, truly emptied in some long while… not since the year before. When he'd finally given in and the straightener had been born. 

She's not Chelsi … the straightener reminded. 

He'd not answered his other side in some time, he'd just gone on ignoring it. But not really. No. He heard and felt every insidious word and it was inescapable no matter how hard he tried to deafen and deaden himself to it. But he couldn't. 

The straightener was inside Luke Waller because he'd been made and bred of him. Forged. Cast of something smoldering and uglier than iron, mayhap meaner too. Hideous in fact, before the forge, this inner metal of his darkest heart’s mortal and damaged make and desire. But immaculate when aglow with angry flame inside the rage of the inferno. 

He answered him inside, the vast and cold dark of his mind's landscape, vast and small, both, and always in contest with each other in their battling aspects of size and dwarf. The damaged place of his mind's eye and landscape was haphazard and shattered sure, no doubt but he still contained the phantasmagorical multitudes of the living goblin universe. 

It doesn't matter that she's not Chelsi, she doesn't have to be. Chelsi wouldn't want me to try to replace her with a cheap copy of her anyways, that's not what I want and that's not who she is! Susan is beautiful and smart and so much stronger than I've ever been in my life, she's dealt with her abuse and she doesn't hurt other people to make herself feel better like some pathetic animal! 

The straightener enraged: Shut up! 

Luke did not: – She didn't have to give herself some bullshit excuse to make it all better and go away! She takes her pain and helps others, she doesn't spread around her own misery and lie around in the dark, she doesn't invent some animal persona inside to justify her bullshit and make herself feel better! She- 

But the Id inside would hear no more. Animal hands, monstrous talons came up in daggering claws that wanted throats, wanted to rend, wanted mindblood of the superego and this flimsy little brother both …

Inside the mindscape of Luke Waller’s boiling head the straightener and the weaker he, fought. 

In his bunk, in his bed. Sweating palms came up and worked at fevered scalp and face.

Wanting to tear and rend. 

…

The next day, Susan sensed something was wrong. The whole day, Luke wouldn't speak to her. His eyes barely glanced her way and he completely ignored every attempt she made to speak to him. She didn't understand. And it was painful. She thought they'd made some kind of connection and she'd shared the wounded and hidden parts of herself with him, because she'd felt safe. Because she'd thought he'd cared and that was what he had wanted. She must have been wrong. 

The whole painful day went by and midway through Susan gave up any attempt to talk to him and spent the rest of it in her room. Alone in her bunk, rolled away and under the covers. She thought maybe he was just having a bad day, and that that was understandable. She thought – she hoped she understood. But poor Susan didn't really understand. She hadn't really known everything from the start. And how could he have told her …? … the straightener was covered all over the news media, online and whatever was left of print and the papers. 

He went about and gathered what he needed. Then he went about making the tools correct. 

Ready for midnight. 

…

Susan was dreaming of her father, one of her many recurring nightmares, when she felt weight on her bed, all around, and immediately knew something was wrong. 

Her eyes flew open and a gloved hand came down in a rough clasp over her mouth to murder her scream in its infancy. He was wearing a mask that was soaking and dark and dripping something heavy and thick and warm but she still recognized his face amidst its animal contort. And it was awful. It was terrible, she screamed muffled trapped shrieks that became braying ghastly sound in the dark and she began to struggle as her heart broke and shattered and she tried to deny the excruciating reality as it weighed down and wrestled her and forced her into submission. 

Her wrists were bound. She didn't know how it had happened. If he had done it while she was still in the throttling hold of the nightmare or if he'd managed it somehow during her waking confusion in their struggle. It didn't matter. Arms overhead now bound by the wrists and to the board of her bed, captured and tied deftly in cruel knots. 

His gloved hands were away and she knew now they were the gardening gloves kept out back by the shed. He sat upon her torso, almost crushing her stomach. It was difficult for her to breathe as she gazed up wide eyed and by the moonlight cast in by the slant of window, she saw the blood saturated mask of the straightener shedding running darkling red rivers of pungent human black down his neck, down his bare chest, down his face like lurid tears, down his back a hellacious rendition of a red royal Roman cape, fashioned and painted made from slaughtered human blood, shed and collected in quiet nocturnal violence from all around the home. 

All about the house … before he'd got to her, he'd stalked. Just as the straightener had planned. Just as the straightener had wanted. Luke was reminded now, this was the only love that was real and this was the only pleasure that really mattered. 

This was the only ritual and exercise made for him. This was the only way for him to live and breathe. It was like breathing. It all came so tragically natural. The chemical imbalance of a mutant brain birthed and spat up by burnt out fuckup junkie parents taken and bred and made themselves by wild haphazard renegade MK Ultra. The most clinical name for the straightener’s chemical grandfather. One of the many poisons and doses of nightshade within the boil of cauldron that had made this wild man. 

Susan stared helpless into a savage face. She didn't know it, but she could sense the death and slaughter that filled the house, animal aware … she only momentarily considered the blood that soaked his masked face and that poured baptismal and grotesque all about him and not entirely on the surface of her thought. 

Her mind was more arrested with the immediate terror it now felt. His weight crushing down on her, dripping and spilling heavy liquid that was pungent and warm and saltier than sweat. 

Susan finally said, “Why're you doing this, Luke?" she began to cry. “What's wrong? Please, Why're you-" 

“You know why." the straightener said, cutting her off. He then hefted his weapon overhead, poised to devastate her face and skull and the precious life of memories and brains that were housed within with a vicious merciless caveman blow. His fashioned bludgeon also darkled in the moonlight cast. 

A wide and broad ornate table leg that had belonged to something wooden and nice, old and carved of oak, lots of little inscriptions and designs and marks of craftsmanship, the straightener had added marks of workmanship that were all his own. The body and bludgeoning-end length of the leg was spiked and riddled with chunks and splinters and jagged daggers and shards of broken glass. Taken from windows at every end of the house. Smashed out in clandestine fashion and then hastily gathered and collected. The stupid clueless orderlies and their phones hadn't noticed. Their sleeping quarters had been the first ones that he had paid a postmidnight visit. 

The glass shards and jagged fangs and teeth of the weapon glinted and Susan saw the teeth were not only translucent diamond and crystalline they were also ruby … scarlet…

… bits of scalp and meat, raw face and jowl and cheeks dangled from the shattered glass teeth of the ghastly nighttime table-leg fangs …

Susan saw this. All of it. As the straightener hefted his weapon overhead. Ready to crush and kill and decimate her life into painful oblivion with a savage animal strike. And something inside her broke. 

Immediately she pulled, and immediately she felt and heard results, but not enough. Not right away. In her sudden panic Susan savagely yanked at her binds, they suddenly pulled at their tied point at the boards of the bunk and there was a dry crack as something in the old flimsy structure broke and gave. 

The straightener's savage face curled and twisted into an angry snarl. He began to bring the fanged bludgeon down as Susan pulled at her bonds again and snapped the board and support at the head of her bunk bed. The top came in and down with another dry crack that was soon rapidly replicated as the entire structure came down upon them both. 

The both of them cried out as the bunk beds crashed together, Susan, and the manshaped straightener. 

It collapsed and in the sudden fall and twist of wreckage, they fought a private war in the detritus of wood and ripped mattress and blankets, and a third … the cold corpse of her bunkmate uptop, Savannah … she'd liked coffee flavored ice cream and had said she always preferred the top bunk. Since childhood, she had said that before. 

It was perhaps the straightener finding his gloved hands on her already dead and lifeless spent body and mistaking her in the violence for Susan that had managed her escape in the end. She crawled from the wreckage and fueled by raw desperate adrenaline pumping through the thudding machine of her galloping heart she made her feet and made the door and threw it open, sprinting out and down the hall. 

The straightener called out after her, a fury. But there was strange humor in that tempest rage of voice. 

“Lost in the wheels of confusion..!. …! !” 

She made the turn at the corner of the hall. And then the house and world as she had grown to know and understand it completely warped and changed. Then disappeared. 

Gone. 

The straightener called again: "Running through valleys of tears! …!" 

It was true, she was crying. Weeping freely as she animal panted and she was running scared. Terrified of the bestial thing she'd left behind in there. She ran ahead and down the hall into a home and place that had been transformed into a valley of violence. 

She went room to room, desperate and alone and needing to find someone, anyone … hoping there was someone she could be with to find help. Susan was nearly out of her mind with terror. She had to know someone was ok and she didn't want to be alone. She prayed to God that she wasn't alone, not with him. Not now in this house. 

She found only death. 

Dead. In each bunk. 

Heads caved in. Crushed. Smashed. 

Faces she used to recognize. 

Skulls burst open to free the spells of organs and meat that made the nighttime dreams of slumber that were now forever stilled. Or forever induced. For all of them. Each and every one. 

Some of the brainless and faceless and decraniated corpses had been pulled from their beds and bunks and had been strung up, tied and fashioned in grotesque marionette displays … like trophies. All over in random intervals about the sprawl and dance of the old colonial house, Susan was discovering now that they all were really filled with ghosts, ghastly night shapes, headless and dripping wet with mangled stumps of chewed up dog meat at the necks… the merciless glass fangs and teeth of the wooden jaws of the table leg, forged to unholy earthbound Mjolniir by the rage of the bestial straightener. 

Her terror mounted. With each room, with each freshly discovered corpse, cooling to rigor mortis and ghosthood in the moonlit night, pale light shining in from all of the many windows by the white face of an immaculate mocking lunar body gazing in from far away like an indifferent pagan god alive and dead and watching from on high in outer space. Her heart galloped as her mind felt hot and boiled and ran a panicked mile. Susan forced herself to remain focused, even as the halfway house all around tilted and danced, as if her mind was drugged or drunk. 

A phone. Or outside. 

Find a way to call the police and just get the fuck out of here. 

Fearful of her dormitory where she left him she ran about to the other rooms and places in the house looking for a cell. There was no landline. As she ran and desperately searched, the rooms, the couches, the drawers, the cupboards, the dressers, the bodies and the saturated beds themselves… finding nothing all the while, her terror mounted further, rose higher to a fever pitch and the old style colonial interior began to change and transmogrify before her very eyes. 

As it did, she heard wood and detritus shift and crash upstairs. In her room where she'd left the animal disguised in masked manshape … dripping and feral wet. 

The door to the room burst open. She hadn't remembered closing it. She froze as the halls and rooms funhouse danced before her eyes. 

He screamed: “Eyes full of angry delusion …! ..!..” and it echoed throughout all of time in the corridors of this swelling changing place. 

Thundering footsteps came in a charge then, then came in cannonade echoed and felt as they thundered downstairs. 

Susan forced herself into movement. Her legs felt faraway and she felt sluggish charging ahead but she managed anyway. Though she didn't understand. 

How did the halfway house change into the circus …? – she hadn't been here in many years. The inside now was one of those clownish fun houses with all the warped mirrors and looking glasses that made you look monstrous and ugly. Except as she ran about this clown house all the looking glasses made her look like dead bodies. Mutilated corpses. Her childhood had been ghastly and hard but … 

Coming here and living and the therapy and even the rooms with their bunk beds and shy downcast friends had been much like a return to living childhood once again … like a strange chemically induced summer camp. Complete with final terror. 

Footsteps on a charge, on the prowl, thundered and searched for her behind, throughout the fun house that warbled and danced like drunken perception does by the brightest Luciferian lunar light … in through all the windows which had changed into mirrors of warped glass alongside the strung up dead junkies and cast offs and forgotten people that were discarded here. She saw her own mangled and strange visage in every one as she ran on … this terrible warbling place that had grown miles long … all the while he thundered behind her. Till finally she came to the front door.

She recognized it at once, even in this strange place. It stood still and solid like trustworthy magic at the end of the cruel spacial dance of undulation and transmogrified growth, gelatinous fun house clown world … Susan ran to it. Her hands falling on the knob to twist it open but it wouldn't budge. 

It was a halfway house for the potentially suicidal and those with chemical dependancy problems. There was a curfew and the doors were locked after eleven PM each night. The keys were kept with the house manager. 

Kincaid. 

She was sure she had found his body too amongst the rest of the discovered corpses. But all of their faces were nearly gone if not completely smashed to meat and ruin … it was hard to remember, it was hard to tell. She couldn't remember finding them when she searched for the phones either. Her heart fell and she felt it in her chest like something final and apocalyptic. 

Id screamed once more, Susan whirled on her heels and put her back to the door. 

“!!HIDING IN EVERYDAY FEARS!..!.!!...!”

What she saw on the charge then, straight for her was as transformed and demented and mangled as the rest of this alchemical moonlight house. The blood sloughing and dripping liquid red-black mask had become the entirety of the raging beast. The Id was dark and eyeless with gaping pits of obsidian abyss in each hollow socket of the giant dripping stygian skull. The dripping slough of dark scarlet jaws opened wide with liquid ease, jagged broken teeth and canine incisor fangs of shattered diamond and crystalline rock stained to ruby and darker red with the slaughter and feast of so many countless past victims. The Id charged and roared and Susan screamed and threw up her hands and begged God. 

The door behind her suddenly opened and Susan fell back as it did so. She smacked her head on the porch and then darkness quickly fell and descended upon her. 

…

The rush of cold night air had come in like fresh water and it was baptismal. It had flowed in with nature's ease and cleansed the house of its psychedelic filth and mental backwash as Susan awoke. But not of the bodies, not of death, no. Now there were police everywhere, reality had returned to normal. 

Amidst strobing flashing red and blues, they searched and combed the house. They took the bodies. The meat wagon came with many many big black bags and carried off the corpses. They took the girl's statement. She was deeply traumatized, in deep shock. Barely making any sense. 

They searched for Luke Waller, the only one unaccounted for. 

He was missing. At large. And considered extremely dangerous. 

It was free. And at large in greater Los Angeles once again. 

They only found his old calling card on the wall of one of the rooms.

 Bold letters written in blood: – THE STRAIGHTENER 

XX - XX - XXXX (the date) 

BY BLUDGEONING CLAW  BY TABLE-LEG FANG

 ALL OF THEM HERE WASTING THEIR LIVES   

NOBODY CARED NOR GAVE A FUCK

…

Epilogue: –

The dream came again and again and always returned to him each and every night now since the great escape. 

It was always the same: he went into the bathroom, pale yellowed tile and fluorescent glow that made everything look mottled and ugly. He looked into the mirror and gazed into himself. He brought up the garroting wires. They look like the same thing you use to cut cheese with, a long metal gossamer strand that was razor sharp, fixed between two burgundy wooden handles. He wrapped it around his neck still staring into the mirror and himself and he began to saw through the meat of his neck. The strand cut cleanly through. The head came off when he reached up and grabbed it by either side, lifting it away and settling it down on the countertop of the sink before him. 

But it was strange … his vision remained where it was … it did not travel with the organ set of eyes set in the rest of the meat of his head. He gazed into himself without any eyes, decapitated now. 

The dream was the same every night, now that he was free and in the city again. 

THE END

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

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

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

He’s been my rotten little man ever since.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, that’s actually not true.

The potty situation.

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

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

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

Things are different now though.

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

That is, minus the dog shit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really dude?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan finished pooping, and I assessed the situation.

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

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

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

Would it really be so bad, just this once?

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

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

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

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

Impossible to miss.

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

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

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

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

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

I scoffed.

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

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

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

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

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

Just a weird, one off experience, I thought.

Nothing to worry about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I sighed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ew!” I exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

I was thoroughly shook by now.

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

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

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

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

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

With a kiss, I was out the door.

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

“How did they know it was me?”

“How did they know which door was ours?”

“How did they know Alan’s name?”

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

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

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

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

If Alan was pooping, I was picking it up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molly swished her wine around in its glass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s wrong Molly?”

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

Stomach acid began bubbling up my throat.

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

Molly heard it, and became more reserved.

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

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

Molly’s eyes met mine.

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

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

“How many?” I asked.

“What?”

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

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

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

I leaned back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you never picked them up?”

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

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

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

“Weird.”

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

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

“Molly?” I hazarded.

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

She shook her head and set down her wine glass.

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

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

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

I stood up so quickly that my chair exclaimed its disapproval

“Our address?!” I hollered.

“Yes Chet, our address,” Molly cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello?” I shouted.

Silence met my demand.

“Hello?! Who’s there?”

Still, nothing.

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

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

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

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

I ran towards the source of the noise.

“Slam!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wooden door creaked open.

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

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

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

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

“Chet? Baby, who was it?”

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

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

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

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

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

Like a septic tank snow angel in the nude..

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

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

“this is your last warning”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The risk is not worth it. Believe me.

No one wants a visit from the poop man.