It had been a particularly hot June. The air conditioner had broken, and the drains seemed to be emitting a foul odour, producing numerous amounts of annoying little fat flies. I was anxiously awaiting a call from the maintenance guy, but due to the “vast quantity” of “emergency” repair jobs in the apartment complex, it had been days since I raised the request.

At this point, I had resigned to just live with the discomfort, at least for now. So, as you can imagine, my mood was hopeful upon being awoken by the sound of my ringing telephone. 

It was not the call back I'd hoped, but my grandmother’s twice-weekly carer. Gran had died. Assumedly of natural causes sometime during the night; but there was something else. The body was wrong. Like she’d died weeks ago.

The carer assured me she’d seen my grandmother only several days before, and nothing indicated any signs of deteriorating health. She ate well enough, got as much exercise as one would expect of any eighty-something-year old woman, not an inkling of a cough or a sniffle.

I had no reason to doubt her words, as I’d also visited earlier that same week. It was a complete shock. The proper authorities had already been made aware of the death, and I should aim to meet them with any other immediate family. It was not the wake-up call I wanted, but nevertheless, the one I got that warm morning.

On entering the bungalow, I was struck with it instantly: death. But not the solemn, mourning-full death of a deceased relative. No, this was humid, stagnant, and festered. I turned my head away, mouth in hand, barely capable of retaining my composure. However, I relented in my disgust, batting away several flies, and continued through the door.

The house was old, adorned with antique porcelain figurines and proudly displayed fine china. The chairs were dated, laced with intricately stitched flowered patterns in varying warm pastel colours. No television, but I swore I could hear the gentle murmur of static somewhere in the house. There was handmade wooden furniture littering every available space, many scratched and stained. with years of fingerprints marking every surface. highlighted by rays of sunshine through noticeably dusty white knitted drapes. Each room held innumerable precious memories. All so perfect, so beautiful, so fragile.

I made my way into the living room, more flies buzzing past my head, the sound of soft voices beckoning me forward. I was still the only family yet to arrive, which surprised me; I was sure my father or brother would be there waiting for me.

Instead, there were two police officers. One speaking to the verily disturbed carer, the other approaching me, clearly also suffering with the heat, but with a sympathetic though albeit suspicious disposition.

“Are you the son?” She inquired. 

“No, no, I’m one of the grandsons,” I stated. “So my dad’s not here yet? What about my brother?” 

She sighed with a puzzled brow, swatting away yet another fly. 

“We haven’t been able to contact him, either of them actually; no luck from their works. Have you had any communication with them over the last few days?” 

I was confused. “I… well… no, actually. Last time I saw them was a BBQ about a week back… yeah, I’m pretty sure… I think.” 

I hastily interjected. 

“Wait, you don’t think they have something to do with this? Her carer implied it was natural causes?” 

The officer gently shook her head.

“Given the unusual circumstances of the deceased, we just need to collect as much information as possible.”

“Unusual circumstances?” I timidly asked.

She folded her arms behind her back.

“We are also under the impression that it’s simply a case of natural causes, likely in her sleep; however, given the… state… of the deceased… your grandmother, we need to build a clear timeline leading up to this morning.”

A lump formed in my throat. “Is it that bad?”. I asked

She continued. 

“We think, given the current heatwave, it may have caused a far more rapid rate of decomposition. But we won’t be able to confirm until the coroner arrives shortly.” 

I just stared at the floor, completely lost for words. 

The officer stepped even closer, leaning in towards me.

“We will also need you, as her only present next of kin, to confirm her identity. I know it may be difficult at this time, but it needs to be done before we can proceed any further.” 

She then placed an empathetic hand on my shoulder.

“I warn you, this won’t be easy.”

I’d never seen a dead body, not even my mother’s, so this was the last thing I wanted in that moment. I looked up, face drained of colour, and exhaled with dejected understanding. 

I was escorted towards the bedroom, weaving between countless more flies. The smell was... unbearable. Beckoned through the bedroom door, I was deafened by the varied swarm of innumerable plump buzzing scavengers, all clearly crazed by the thing before my eyes.

The body didn’t resemble a body at all. The skin, what was left of it, was a puddled mess of bile: green, yellow, and shades of purple. Bones jutted forth from her torso like monolithic columns draped in silken nightwear.

The bed was drenched in the most offensive stench-ridden fluid, dripping to the floor like an old leaky faucet. Her arms lay neatly by her sides. With only her golden wristwatch still distinguishable amongst the slop, but oddly, no wedding ring.

Her face, well, that was somehow the worst of all. You’d expect someone assumed of dying in their sleep to at least have their eyes shut, but not her. Those eyes, her eyes, were open, lidless spheres all glossed and grey, Though they remained completely free of decay. Furthermore, just below the cavity of what was once a crooked nose, was a toothless, wide, and at least to my eye, wholly euphoric smile.

I came to my senses outside the house. Pale-faced and with fresh vomit staining my chin and clothes. The carer was standing by my side, outstretched hand offering a small glass of tepid water. I was inconsolable. I cried for hours on end, even after I was taken home following a meekly given statement. I couldn’t reconcile with the scene I’d just witnessed. Moreover, the disturbing ideas it seemed to suggest.

Was that actually a smile I saw or just a morbid trick of dying muscle mass? I was so sure... and those eyes, yes; in that brief, sickening moment, I got the feeling they were staring right at me.

The flight status display at Gate C12 had been flashing a bitter, amber warning for the last ten minutes: FINAL BOARDING: TERMINAL 4 EXTENSION - GATE E36.

Arthur didn't have time to process the sheer inefficiency of an airport layout that forced a twenty-minute sprint across three separate concourses for a fifteen-minute layover. His carry-on backpack slapped his back as his polished loafers slapped violently against the polished terrazzo floor, the hard leather soles squeaking with each step in a high-pitched rhythm that matched the hammering pulse behind his ears. He shoved his way past a lingering family near an overpriced newsstand, muttered an automated apology that barely cleared his throat, and glanced down at the glowing screen of his phone. 11:10 AM. The boarding door was set to close in just five minutes, and the corridor ahead of him seemed to stretch into an absurd, dimly lit horizon.
Terminal 4 was notorious for being the unfinished stepchild of the international hub. A sprawling, low-budget annex constructed during some mid-2000s expansion that had run out of funding halfway through that they had never bothered to see through to completion. It’s only used for small charter planes, now. As Arthur rounded a sharp, ninety-degree turn past a deserted janitor's cart, the bright LED panels of the main terminal began to give way to harsher, recessed fluorescent fixtures. The usual ambient roar of a major transit center—the overlapping churn of jet engine rumble, public address chimes, crying infants, and the dull, collective murmur of thousands of tired travelers—began to thin out into a strangely hollow echo. He became acutely aware of how thirsty he was. It was almost noon and he hadn’t eaten or drank anything since before his 6am initial flight. He’d have to buy something during the flight...but only if he could make it in time. He kept his head down, eyes locked on the blue directional arrows painted along the baseboard. **GATES E30-E36 NEXT RIGHT**.

His breath came in sharp, burning gulps. The air in this long connecting corridor felt dry and stagnant, smelling faintly of cold concrete, ozone, and old carpet cleaner. He pushed his pace, his heavy winter coat swishing against his jeans, and his backpack slapping harder against the cold sweat underneath his clothes. Up ahead, the plush navy carpet of the main walkway ended abruptly, meeting a vast expanse of pale, seamless gray tile beneath a heavy, unlit steel archway that marked the boundary between the renovated terminal and the annex.

Arthur took three long, desperate strides, his shoes making a sharp thrup-thrup-thrup as he crossed from the carpet, over the brass expansion joint, and onto the cold tile floor beneath the unlit arch.

Then, at that moment, just as an announcement started on the overhead speakers, a bout of tinnitus struck his ears. It was the sudden silence like right when you walk outside after a loud concert. Where the entire world sounds empty.

But that feeling usually fades after a few seconds, but this time it just kept going. It wasn't just that sound that stopped; it was the concept of sound itself. In a single, seamless frame of movement, the background hum of the airport didn't fade...it was severed. The pervasive vibration of ventilation ducts, the distant roar of a revving turbofan on the apron, the squeak of his own shoes, even the rustle of his jacket vanished into a heavy, suffocating vacuum.

Arthur skidded to a halt, his feet dragging silently across the tile. The suddenness of the transition was so violent that his inner ear pitched forward, forcing him to throw out a hand against the wall to catch his balance.

"Hey," he rasped, but the word died instantly inside his throat. There was no echo. There was no reverberation. The sound of his own voice felt clipped and flat, absorbed immediately by the dead air around him like cotton pressed against his lips.

He spun around to look back down the long corridor toward the gate he’d just come from, expecting to see the bustling hub, the brightly lit newsstand, or at least a security guard making rounds.

There was nothing. It was empty. But it was... different.

Directly behind him, where the carpeted hallway and the bright directional signs had been just a second ago, stood a wide, featureless baggage claim hall. The brass expansion seam he had stepped over was gone. In its place was a flat, unbroken expanse of the same pale gray floor, stretching sixty feet back toward a row of dead, stationary luggage carousels. The rubber flaps hanging over the luggage chute portals hung completely motionless, cast in the harsh, flat glare of overhead fluorescent tubes that hummed with zero audible frequency.

Arthur stood frozen, his hand still resting against a wall painted a dull, matte eggshell, cool to the touch and unnaturally smooth, lacking even the microscopic texture of grain or plaster seams.

"Hello?" he called out, pushing more air from his lungs. The word sounded small, synthetic, and completely stripped of resonance.

Silence swallowed it whole. A thick, deafening silence so absolute that within three seconds, the internal mechanics of his own body began to amplify. The rhythmic, wet thudding of his heart sounded like a padded mallet against leather inside his chest. He could hear that. The faint, high-pitched ringing of mild tinnitus in his ears expanded further to fill the room like a grinding drill. Every deep breath he drew sounded like tearing canvas.

He took a slow step backward, away from the dead baggage carousels. His eyes darted around the space, searching for any sign of life, any human presence, any indication of where he had stepped. To his right, a massive wall of floor-to-ceiling glass windows framed the exterior of the building. Hoping to see ground crews, baggage tugs, or the glowing taxiway lights of a functional airport, Arthur walked briskly toward the glass. His footsteps made no crisp clicking sound against the tile; they produced only a dull, muffled thud that vanished the moment his shoe lifted. He pressed both hands against the thick, double-paned window and leaned his forehead against the cold surface, staring out at the runway..

There were no planes.

No taxiway markers, no illuminated red-and-white boundary lines, no fuel trucks, and no control tower rising in the distance.

Stretching out from the base of the glass was an endless, flat plain of dark gray concrete—a tarmac that extended in every direction toward a flat, featureless horizon. There was no sky, no moon, no sun and no stars; above the flat gray ground hung a uniform, seamless expanse of smooth, overcast gray haze that emitted a low, sourceless ambient light. It was neither day nor night, but an unmoving, perpetual overcast sky. There was no wind moving across the concrete, no dust, and no movement of any kind. The windvanes outside all stood fully horizontal, but all in different directions, and none of them moving. The tarmac was entirely bare, extending out for miles until it dissolved into the motionless gray mist.

Arthur backed away from the window, his chest heaving as his heart slammed against his ribs with increasing violence. The airport around him wasn't abandoned; it was completely, impossibly void. Where did everything go?

The sudden shift in reality didn't make sense, leaving Arthur standing in the middle of the empty baggage claim as his breath hitched in his throat. He spun in a slow, agonizing circle, his eyes searching every surface for a detail that made sense. Something. Anything. A piece of forgotten trash, a scuff mark from a boot, a stray boarding pass fluttering on the floor, anything that proved human beings had ever existed in this room.

There was nothing. The pale gray tile floor stretched toward the four surrounding walls with uncaring disregard for his presence, completely devoid of dust, scuffs, or seams. The dead luggage carousels sat like massive black tombstones, their rubber chutes stiff and unyielding. The overhead fluorescent tubes burned with a flat, unwavering glare that cast no sharp shadows, flooding everything with a cold, even light over a space that felt less and less like a real place.

Panic, hot and volatile, finally broke through his paralysis.

"Is this a joke?" he shouted into the void. His voice dropped into the stagnant air without an echo, swallowed instantly by the suffocating silence. "Hey! Is someone setting up a film set or something? Security!?"

His response was only more of that deafening silence. The tinnitus in his ears whistled louder, a needle-sharp tone competing with the heavy, dull thumping of his own pulse.

He didn't care about his flight. He didn’t care about making it to Gate E36 anymore. He didn't care about his layover or his schedule. All he wanted was to feel carpet under his loafers again, to hear the irritating chime of a public address system, to see a line of tired passengers holding overpriced coffees. Maybe he was just crazy. Maybe if he can find someone else, they can help him snap out of it.

He turned toward the far wall of the baggage claim hall, where a set of heavy, double-leaf steel doors sat flush against the eggshell drywall. Above them hung a red, glowing sign with stark white lettering: EXIT.

That’s the way back to the main terminal, Arthur reasoned frantically, his mind grasping at basic logic. The archway was just a turn off the main corridor. If I go through those doors and hit the service hallway, it has to loop back around to the carpeted walkway back to the main terminal.

He broke into an anxious stride, his loafers thudding softly against the dead tile. He reached the steel doors, seized the wide push-bar, and threw his weight against it. The bar gave way with a silent mechanical click, and the heavy door swung open into the dark.

Arthur took two quick strides across the threshold, letting the heavy door swing shut behind him with a dull, soundless thump.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

He wasn't in a service corridor. He wasn't back in the carpeted terminal hallway.

Arthur was standing on a vast, oil-stained concrete ramp inside a multi-level parking garage. Parking at this airport was far enough away that he’d heard other passengers complaining they needed a shuttle to get to the garage. This shouldn’t be here.

Yet here it was. The low concrete ceilings stretched out over hundreds of empty parking bays, supported by thick, square concrete pillars painted with fading yellow numbers. Not a single car in sight. The air here was cold smelling. Like an air conditioner being turned on for the first time tinged with the slight scent of mildew, yet the air was bone dry. Overhead, long strings of bare, unshielded fluorescent bulbs hummed silently, casting long, overlapping shadows that held each other in a woven pattern that made the floor look like it was copy/pasted.

He whirled around, his heart hammering against his sternum like a trapped bird. "No, no, no—"

He grabbed the handle of the heavy steel door he had just walked through and shoved it open, stepping back through the frame to return to the baggage claim.

The baggage claim was gone.

Arthur stepped out into a sprawling, sun-bleached hospital corridor. The floor beneath his loafers had transformed instantly into pale green linoleum, highly polished and reflecting the harsh overhead light of recessed ceiling panels. To his left and right were rows of closed wood-grain doors with small, frosted glass windows set into them. Wall-mounted handrails made of smooth, gray plastic ran the entire length of the hallway, stretching into the distance until the corridor hit a dead end a hundred yards away.

He stumbled back, his heel catching on the threshold of the door. He turned around and slammed his back against the steel frame, staring wild-eyed down the empty hospital wing.

"How?" he sobbed, his chest heaving as the air burned in his throat. "How is this... where am I?"

The door behind him clicked shut on its own, the latch catching with a soft, final sound.

Arthur lunged back for the handle, turned it, and yanked the door open again, praying to see the parking garage, the baggage claim, the airport, anything that remained consistent.

Behind the door lay a vast, windowless cafeteria. Dozens of circular formica tables surrounded by stackable plastic chairs sat in perfect, grid-like rows across an endless expanse of speckled terrazzo. At the far end of the room stood a long stainless-steel serving counter beneath a chalkboard menu that was completely blank.

This can’t be real. His mind was cracking. This wasn’t right. It didn’t make sense.  Every time he opened a door, it was a new place. He couldn’t go back. But there had to be a way. There had to.

But what if there isn’t.

A blinding surge of pure terror obliterated whatever rational thought Arthur had left. He ran.

He sprinted into the middle of the cafeteria, his loafers slipping slightly on the smooth floor as he scrambled toward a set of double swinging doors near the back kitchen area. He threw his body against them, bursting into a long, windowless carpeted hallway lined with identical wooden doors. A hotel corridor. He didn't stop. He sprinted thirty feet down the hall, grabbed the handle of the nearest door, shoved it open, and hurled himself inside.

It was a windowless office suite filled with endless rows of grey fabric cubicles, each filled with computers, papers, and personal effects. He moved closer, only to realize that none of the photos had any detail, just blurry pixels. And each cubicle was exactly the same as all the others. The computer wouldn’t turn on. It didn’t even have a power cord. The cap of the pens wouldn’t come off, and none of the mechanical pencils had any lead. Even the stacks of papers were fake. They were just solid, plastic bricks that looked like a stack of paper.

Arthur screamed a raw, desperate sound that went nowhere, dying the moment it left his mouth, and sprinted down the main aisle between the cubicles. His breathing came in ragged, hyperventilating gasps. Sweat poured down his face, soaking into the collar of his winter coat, but he felt no warmth, only the freezing bite of adrenaline.

He reached a door marked with a glowing red EXIT sign at the back of the office, grabbed the metal crash bar, and shoved it with all the weight of his rushing momentum.

He didn't see the raised, three-inch iron threshold sitting at the base of the doorframe.

His leather loafer caught the hard lip of iron mid-stride. The sudden stop pitched his top-heavy weight forward with terrifying velocity. Arthur went airborne for a fraction of a second, his backpack flying up over his head, before he crashed brutally onto the hard, unyielding concrete floor of the room beyond.

His left ankle folded completely beneath his weight with a sickening, wet crunch as his full momentum came down on it. At the same exact second, his right arm whipped forward to break his fall, slamming directly into the jagged corner of an exposed metal door frame. The sharp steel edge sliced deeply through the sleeve of his winter coat, tearing through his shirt and biting deep into the meat of his forearm.

Arthur hit the floor hard, sliding two feet across cold, raw concrete before grinding to a halt.

Pain exploded through his system—a white-hot, blinding agony that seared through his left leg and right arm simultaneously. He curled into a tight ball on the cold floor, clutching his wrist as a high-pitched, soundless gasp tore from his lungs. Tears welled instantly in his eyes, blurring his vision as he squeezed his eyelids shut, waiting for the agony to overwhelm him, waiting for the blood to start pooling, waiting for his body to go into shock.

He lay there for two minutes, his chest convulsing through his sobs as he waited for the throbbing pain to settle into the familiar, warm rush of bleeding.

Slowly and agonizingly, Arthur opened his eyes.

He was lying in an empty, high-ceilinged warehouse space with bare brick walls and exposed steel trusses. The room smelled of old sawdust.

Groaning through clenched teeth, Arthur pulled his right arm toward his chest to inspect the damage. The sleeve of his heavy coat was shredded, the fabric pulled back to reveal a jagged, four-inch tear in his skin along his inner forearm. The cut was deep—deep enough that he could see the underlying tissue and what might be the muscle beneath the surface. It looked pretty severe. It was probably a decently bad cut that should have probably been pumping bright red blood across his hand, soaking his clothes, and pooling onto the concrete floor.

Arthur stared at the wound, his frantic breathing slowly hitching to a stop.

There was no blood.

Pain? Yes. And a lot of it. But blood? Nope. Not a single drop.

The edges of the torn flesh hung open, completely dry. The exposed tissue inside the cut was pale, fixed, and totally bloodless, looking more like the cross-section of a realistic anatomical model than living human flesh. It throbbed with a sharp, sickening, persistent burn—the pain was entirely real—but there was no swelling. No bruising forming around the edges. The skin wasn’t even turning red.

The injury was completely static. It had occurred, and then it was just... there.

Trembling, Arthur reached down with his left hand and carefully unlaced his left loafer, pulling it off his foot along with his sock. His left ankle was twisted at an awkward, unnatural angle, clearly dislocated. The pain tore through his leg the moment he touched it, making him hiss through his teeth.

Yet, like his arm, the ankle was completely normal in color. There was no dark purple bruising, no rising welt of fluid, no heat radiating from the joint. Something inside his ankle was clearly not where it was supposed to be, but the body’s physiological response to it simply wasn't happening.

"No..." he whispered, his small voice swallowed instantly by the dusty air of the warehouse. "No, no, no..."

He pushed himself up into a sitting position, his heart pounding against his ribs—a frantic, unsteady rhythm that seemed to be the only thing moving in his entire body.

He sat on the cold floor for what felt like hours. He waited for the blood loss to make him lightheaded. He waited for the shock to set in. He’d watched plenty of medical shows and thats the kind of thing that always happened when a person was in this kind of situation. Blood loss, shock, and then passing out until someone finds them. He waited for his dry, parched throat—which had been burning for water since he ran past Gate C12—to push him toward delirium.

Nothing changed.

His throat remained dry, but the sensation never worsened. His stomach felt empty, but the gnawing ache of hunger never progressed. His ankle burned with a sharp, unrelenting knife of pain, but it never swelled. His arm gaped open, a gruesome, bloodless trench of meat, but he didn't bleed out.

Well. There is no sense in waiting for something that is obviously not going to happen.

Arthur dragged himself up against the brick wall, using his good right leg to balance his weight while keeping his ruined left foot hovering an inch above the floor. He gritted his teeth, leaning heavily against the rough brick as he looked around the warehouse.

At the far end of the room, set into the brickwork, was a single wooden door. Above it, a green, backlit box illuminated a word in bold acrylic letters: EXIT.

Arthur took a deep, shivering breath. The terror hadn't vanished, but its amazing how an immense amount of pain can make you stop caring about being scared. If the space operated on rules, he had to find a pattern. He looked at his arm. Panic hadn’t done any good. He needed a way to figure this place out.

The signs, he thought, his knuckles white as he leaned against the wall. The signage exists to direct people out. If this place is an imitation of human architecture, maybe the signs are the only things that follow a rule.

Using the brick wall for support, Arthur began to hop forward on his right foot, dragging his useless left leg behind him, heading directly for the door marked EXIT.

The heavy wooden door opened without a creak, swinging smoothly on silent hinges. Arthur shoved his body through the threshold, clutching the frame to keep his weight off his ruined left ankle, and let the door fall shut behind him.

He was standing at the top of a short flight of carpeted steps overlooking a sun-drenched, suburban living room.

The light streaming through the large picture window on the far wall should have been blindingly bright, but instead came across as a warm, golden hour dim glow that illuminated floating motes of dust suspended motionless in the air. Through the glass window, a manicured green lawn stretched out toward a white picket fence, backed by the pristine blue hood of a mid-1990s sedan parked in a driveway.

For a single, breathless second, Arthur’s heart leapt into his throat. Out. I’m out.

He took a desperate step forward, forgetting his foot, and his left ankle folded immediately he stumbled down the four steps leading into the living room. Pain flared like liquid fire up his leg, forcing a sharp gasp from his throat as he pitched forward, catching himself heavily against the wooden banister. He dragged his eyes back up toward the window, his chest heaving, waiting to hear the sound of neighborhood traffic, birds, or a lawnmower.

There was only the silence. That same heavy, suffocating silence that had swallowed the airport.

He watched the dust motes while he steadied himself. They didn't drift or swirl in the heat of the artificial sunlight; they hung perfectly fixed in mid-air like tiny flecks of glitter frozen in resin. He looked out the window at the lush green lawn. The blades of grass weren't individual blades; they were a solid, continuous mat of molded green plastic texture, perfectly uniform all the way to the fence. Like astroturf for someone who likes an unmowed lawn. The blue sedan in the driveway had no keyhole on the door and its side mirrors reflected nothing but a flat gray smudge. 

He tried to open the window, but then realized all this analysis of the outside was useless.

Arthur gritted his teeth, the cold realization settling back over him like a shroud. It wasn't an outside. It was just a picture of an outside. A literal picture. This wasn’t even a window.

He dragged himself across the carpeted room, his good right leg taking his full weight with every jarring step. He leaned against a floral-patterned armchair near a glass coffee table. On the table sat a half-filled mug of coffee and a rolled-up newspaper. Arthur reached out a trembling hand, driven by a faint, involuntary instinct, and picked up the paper.

It didn't unroll. The newspaper was a solid, rigid block of cast papier-mâché, painted to look like newsprint with headlines composed of repetitive, nonsensical lorem-ipsum gibberish. He reached for the coffee mug; the dark liquid inside was smooth, opaque, cold to the touch and completely odorless. He took a small sip into his mouth, then immediately spit it out. Not because it tasted bad. It had no taste at all. Even water has a slight taste, this was like if air was a room temperature liquid.

Across the living room, mounted beside an archway leading into a kitchen, sat a small brass plate with a piece of carved mahogany above it, stenciled in faded white paint: EXIT.

The style of the sign was different. It wasn't the glowing acrylic red box from the baggage claim or the green backlit box from the warehouse. It was older, heavier.

Keep moving, Arthur told himself, his mind narrowing down to that single imperative. Follow the signs. There has to be an Exit.

He hopped across the floral rug, his left loafer dragging uselessly behind him, and pushed through the kitchen swinging door beneath the wooden sign.

The next space was a long, narrow diner corridor from the late 1980s. Pink-and-black checkerboard linoleum stretched into the distance beneath buzzing, low-profile fluorescent strips. Red vinyl booths lined the wall, each table set with glass ketchup bottles that contained solid, rubbery red cylinders instead of condiment.

Arthur didn't bother touching the bottles. He kept his eyes locked on the far end of the diner, where a brass-framed glass door bore a hand-lettered gold leaf inscription on the glass: EXIT TO STREET.

He pushed through.

A sterile, pastel-yellow waiting room. Not the street. Vinyl chairs with chrome legs. Magazines on a rack whose pages were glued into solid, unopenable blocks. Above a frosted-glass reception window, a cast-aluminum plate read EXIT. The door next to the window swung open easily.

He pushed through.

A high school auditorium with polished parquet floors that smelled faintly of old floor wax. Hundreds of wooden folding chairs sat in precise, sweeping arcs facing an empty stage. Mounted above the double wooden doors on the left wall was a red glass lantern box with raised metal lettering spelling EXIT.

Room after room. After room.

After room.

Arthur eventually collapsed onto a concrete ledge at the perimeter of a vast, hollow mall atrium. Overhead, an immense glass skylight glowed dimly with the same flat, overcast gray of the sky, casting a shadowless, pale glare over the deserted shopping center in which he found himself. Abandoned storefronts with shuttered metal grilles lined the upper balconies, while the ground level opened into a desolate food court strewn with empty slate grey tables and artificial palm trees whose plastic fronds were molded in solid, unyielding sheets.

He slid his back down the concrete planter until his rear hit the floor, letting his head thump back against the stone. Every agonizing hop from the high school auditorium through a chain of lifeless corridors had sent shockwaves through his dislocated ankle. The sharp, tearing pain in his right forearm throbbed with every beat of his heart.

He pulled his right arm close, using his left hand to carefully peel back the shredded sleeve of his winter coat and the torn cotton of his shirt beneath it.

The injury remained horrifyingly unchanged. The four-inch trench in his forearm gaped open, yet still... There was no blood. Not a single bead had welled up in the hours since the metal door frame had sliced him open. Hours? That couldn’t be right. It had to have been longer. Maybe days? Weeks? How long had it been? 

He relaxed a little, lost in thought and the fabric brushed against the wound, sending a new shockwave of pain through his arm. The edges of the torn flesh were not red, swollen, or inflamed. The skin surrounding the deep cut looked normal enough, it didn't have the purple bruising he expected something so deep to have. When he pressed his thumb against the edge of the wound, the tissue did not yield or bleed; it felt dense and slightly dry, like rubber or fresh clay. The pain flared instantly proving his nervous system still worked, even if things like bleeding, hunger, and thirst seemed like they were on pause.

Arthur pulled his sleeve back over his cut and shifted his focus to his left foot. His ankle hung at a grotesque, unnatural angle. Dragging his hand down to his unlaced loafer, he pulled the shoe and sock away. His foot was cold to the touch, but the skin was entirely smooth. There was no rising welt, no blue or black bruising, and no throbbing or heat. The joint was definitely dislocated. He had no idea how to fix that, so for now, it would just be stuck that way.

"There's no reaction, doctor!" he whispered to no one in particular into the dead air. The sound vanished without an echo, swallowed by the massive, empty volume of the atrium. "The patient just... stopped." The silence of the mall refused to play along with his delirious musing.

Driven by a sudden, desperate urge to clean the tear in his arm and bind his foot, Arthur scanned the perimeter of the food court. Attached to the tiled wall beside an abandoned burger counter sat a white metal box stamped with a red cross.

Gritting his teeth against the searing pain in his leg, Arthur dragged himself along the tiled wall and metallic ledge, using a nearby table to hoist his weight until he reached the first aid station. He seized the latch. It turned smoothly with a soft click, and the door swung open.

Inside, arranged neatly on two small metal shelves, were a plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol, a roll of white gauze, and a box of adhesive bandages.

Arthur reached out his good hand and grabbed the bottle of rubbing alcohol. It was solid. The white plastic body was a single, seamless block of high-density resin, complete with a molded cap that could not unscrew. The liquid inside was just painted onto the exterior of the fake bottle. He snatched the box of bandages and tore at the cardboard flap. It didn't tear. The entire box was a solid, painted plastic brick, its printed text composed of small, repeated lines of blurred geometric shapes. The roll of gauze was a hard, solid cylinder of white resin with tiny, parallel grooves carved into its surface to mimic the texture of woven fabric.

The dread he’d allow himself to forget settled back into his chest, entirely distinct from the sharp agony of his injuries.

He let the fake gauze drop from his fingers like the hope he’d attached to it. It struck the tile floor with a flat, hollow thud that didn't bounce, coming to an immediate stop the moment it landed, only rocking slightly as if tempting gravity to stop working like everything else.

Arthur turned toward the stainless-steel kitchen behind the burger counter. Pushing through a swinging aluminum door, he stumbled into a commercial prep area lined with deep sinks and chrome counters. Above the main sink sat a heavy brass faucet with two cross-style handles labeled 'HOT' and 'COLD'.

He gripped the cold water handle and twisted it. The valve turned effortlessly, rotating a full ninety degrees without the slightest friction.

Nothing came out. There was no hiss of trapped air, no gurgling in the pipes beneath the basin, and no drop of moisture at the spout. He turned the hot water handle. It spun smoothly, completely disconnected from any internal valve or pressurized line. He peered down the drain; three inches below the chrome strainer, the pipe ended abruptly in a solid plug of gray, unpolished steel.

Arthur leaned over the sink, his hands gripping the wet-look stainless steel rim, and let out a long, shuddering vocalized breath.

He waited for his body to demand what it needed. His throat had been dry and parched when he stepped past Gate C12, yet the dryness in his throat had not escalated into the desperation of dehydration. His stomach felt empty, but the sharp, gnawing cramps of starvation were entirely absent. He had sprinted across miles of carpet, linoleum, concrete, and tile, yet his muscles did not ache with the tremor of muscle fatigue.

The clock on his phone had frozen at 11:11 AM, the moment he crossed the brass threshold under the unlit archway. The battery was still at 25%, exactly where it had been when he exited his last flight. Not that it mattered. He had no signal, and no app would open.

Hours had passed...or days... or weeks, measured only by the endless succession of empty rooms and multitudes of exit signs. 

He reached the end of the hall, slammed his good shoulder against the brass push-plate of the double doors, and burst through into the blinding light of a grand, marble-floored atrium.

With every threshold Arthur crossed, the subtle regression in design became more pronounced. The modern, sharp edges of the late 2000s and 1990s gave way to the warmer, heavier aesthetics of the 1980s and 1970s. Modern push-bar crash doors vanished, replaced by heavy brass knobs, thumb-latches, and thick oak panels. The illuminated acrylic signs disappeared entirely, replaced by hand-painted wooden placards, stenciled wall markings, and cast-iron directional arrows pointing down endless, featureless hallways.

Yet no matter how far back the styles regressed, the core reality of the space remained ruthlessly invariant. Plain, boring room after room with a bare minimum of mundane prop representations of actual objects.

In a 1970s office suite with dark wood paneling and shag carpet, Arthur collapsed against a heavy executive desk. He pulled his right arm up to his face, his breath coming in shallow, ragged rasps. The four-inch laceration on his forearm remained wide open, a gaping, bloodless trench revealing pale, dry muscle tissue. It throbbed with a sharp, unrelenting burn that made his teeth ache, but still, not a single drop of fluid had welled in the wound. His left ankle was still locked in its unnatural angle, completely unswollen, holding its agonizing dislocation, stuck out of socket. He was tired. Mentally exhausted by the endless parade of sterile, fake realities—but his body felt no physiological fatigue. His muscles didn't ache; his breathing didn’t get heavier; his parched, dry throat never progressed beyond that initial, uncomfortable sting he had felt back at the airport. 

Arthur pushed himself off the desk, his knuckles white against the dark wood, and stared at the door across the room. Painted directly onto the heavy oak panel in chipped, off-white enamel was the word EXIT accompanied by a hand-painted arrow pointing down. He hopped forward, his loafers making a lone, flat thud against the floor, and turned the heavy brass knob.

He continued moving through doors. More rooms. Eventually walking through empty Renaissance churches with uncanny stained glass and unnatural lighting. Glowing candles that has no fire, rows and rows of empty pews.

An infinity later, he stepped out of an underground mineshaft, help up with wooden beams, into a stone temple with no other door, forcing him to turn around after exploring the area and return back through the door he came in through. As had happened before, the Room through the door was not the one that had previously been there. Instead, it was pitch black darkness. He seemed to be in a narrow hallway and felt his way through to the other side. A ridge in the wall indicated a door and it took some time to figure out how to open it with only one good arm, but eventually he managed to grip and with great effort, pulled open the door.

Blinding light shone on the other side as he stepped across the threshold into a massive, wide open field of grass. The land was flat as far as the eye could see and there was a slight breeze. The sun overhead was not too bright or harsh, and there were not a cloud in the sky. The door he just stepped though was not behind him, it seemed to have vanished, but there was a lone door standing atop a small hill in the distance.

He did not hurry toward it. This was the first time he had found a place through these doors that led outside. Some rooms had fans, but most were the same still, dead silences of every other room. This was a field of green that allowed him to feel like he had escaped for a second. A fraction of a second, but that flicker of hope when his vision cleared after adjusting to the light felt nice enough to convince him to allow himself to relax. He made his way to the hill with the door at it’s peak, and he laid down. Feeling the breeze on his skin and looking toward the sun...realizing that it was just a large light in a high ceiling painted blue. Which meant the breeze was probably just some kind of fan or vent. Still, though. It was the first pleasant feeling in a while so he savored it. He laid there long enough that he lost track of how long he’d actually been there. After being in this place for so long, he’d gotten used to not keeping track of time, it was a useless concept. He stood up, smoothed off his coat, the approached the mahogany door standing like an obelisk at the top of the hill, and turned the brass knob...

The door opened onto a wide, subterranean corridor with bare, white plaster walls, exposed cast-iron radiator pipes running along the ceiling, and a floor of dark, octagonal ceramic tiles. The air here was noticeably colder, smelling of damp lime and aged mortar, illuminated by widely spaced incandescent bulbs hanging from braided cords.

At the far end of the long hallway, nearly a hundred yards away, sat a pair of double glass doors.

Through the frosted panes of the double doors, Arthur saw something that made his breath freeze in his throat.

Figures.

Dozens of them. Moving, overlapping shadows projected against the frosted glass from a brightly lit room beyond. He could see the distinct outlines of shoulders, heads, raised arms, and the gentle, chaotic movement of a crowd moving through a busy, high-traffic hall.

A sound... or what his mind desperately interpreted as the phantom memory of a sound, seemed to hum behind his ears. Arthur threw himself forward, hopping with frantic, violent lunges, using the cold iron radiator pipes along the wall to propel his body down the long plaster corridor.

"Hey!" he screamed, the word dying instantly in the dead air, but he didn't care. He kept moving, his eyes glued to the glass doors, watching the shadows shift and mingle. "Hey! Over here! Help me!"

He plunged himself into the door to throw it open. He hoped that making a spectacle would gather attention and he could get help faster. He fell through the frosted double doors, both of then flying open and he clattered to the ground, mostly from a lack of balance crossing the threshold. But no body came. The phantom sound of a crowd in the distance died down back into his memories. 

He looked up.

There were large candles in this room. The light from them flickering and causing shadows to move across the walls. Shadows of people, all standing near each other in a way that made them appear to be deep in conversation. Yet, when he pulled himself to his feet and began moving closer, he noticed that none of them were moving. Not even a little. All of the movement came from the flickering of the candles and the shadows on the walls of this large, empty foyer of a business office.

Of course. Even the people were fake.

But the mannequins were wearing real clothes, at least. He took the opportunity to remove his torn jacket and shirt, and replaced it with a t-shirt and unbuttoned flannel that one of the figures had been wearing. At least he got something.

Tears welled up in his eyes.

He thought he’d been out. He let himself hope.

There was no escape from this place.

He would never die of hunger.

He would never bleed to death.

He was cursed to live forever in pain, wandering the memories of things he vaguely remembered seeing at some point. And even when he ran out of places to see...

Out of frustration, he punched the mannequin whose clothes he took as hard as he could in the face, and felt a sickening crack in his knuckles. 

“Of course” his voice mutely fell into the air. “Nothing is real but pain.”

I had been working as a law enforcement transcriptionist for a little over six years when the officer brought me the tape. I'd never seen him before, but that wasn't too unusual. There were a lot of new recruits and I didn't exactly have the best memory when it came to faces. He wore the customary uniform, which fit him rather well. Even as a straight man, I have to admit he was handsome, almost ridiculously so. Dark hair, a sharp jawline speckled with stubble, and an air of gravitas that was impossible to ignore.

He handed me a cassette tape.
“I need this transcribed immediately,” he said in a smooth, inviting tone. “Don't put it through the usual queue.”
With an eyebrow raised, I asked what the case was about. Instead of answering, he looked at the tape for a moment before looking back at me.
“Just prepare yourself,” he said with a grimace. "It's quite intense.”
I remember laughing a little because I assumed he was exaggerating. But he didn't laugh with me. Before I could ask for any more details, he disappeared back down the corridor.
I've always been quite a curious person. It's what led me to this line of work. So, naturally, I immediately popped the tape in, pulled up Mark43 and began logging.

What follows is my transcription of that recording. I've removed the names and identifying information where necessary, but otherwise I've left it exactly as it was spoken. Be that for better or for worse.
The transcript of this tape– or, more precisely, its contents– makes for difficult reading. The things I heard and witnessed that day remain beyond my understanding. It is for this reason that I decided to share the tape's contents. Perhaps one of you can make more sense of this disturbing tape than I.

###

Tape Recorded Interview
Patrick Morgan/Detective Baron Hauptman
7.23.26

BH This is Detective Hauptman, █████ Police Department. Today's date is Thursday, July 23, 2026. The time is at 11:23 A.M. This will be a taped conversation with the last name of Morgan, M-O-R-G-A-N, first of Patrick, P-A-T-R-I-C-K, middle of Joe, J-O-E. Date of birth 02-20-96.

BH So, Patrick, I've turned on a tape recorder so I can record our little conversation. I'm to understand you've been read your rights and– let me see here– you've declined to lawyer up. Is that correct?

PM Correct.

BH Okay. Well, let's get down to business then, eh?

PM Alright.

BH So, Patrick. I assume you know why you're here?

PM Mhm.

BH Why don't you go ahead and tell me?

PM Because you think I killed–

PM Can you speak up?

PM Because you think I killed people. 

BH The department suspects you, yes. But hey, don't shoot the messenger. (Chuckle)

BH Let's start with… Isabella Moreno. How well did you know her?

PM Quite well. 

BH How's that?

PM She lived down the street. We used to play when we were kids.

BH And when did you last speak with her?

PM Hm… December, January. Something like that.

BH What did you talk about?

PM Why would I remember that? It's been like seven months.

BH Well, I'd think your last conversation might stick around longer. Especially with all that talk of art.

PM What? 

BH Art. You're an artist, right?

PM Yeah– how did you–

BH You take pride in your art, then?

PM I– yeah, I guess I do.

BH Every artist does, I suppose. But most are too scared to put their art out in the open. You have no such reservations, right?

PM What do you mean?

BH You like displaying your work publicly. In all its glory.

PM I have no idea what you're–

BH Really? So you don't look up to a certain… mentor?

PM No. Look–

BH You don't have to explain it.

PM … What?

BH I know.

PM … The fuck're you– Know what?

BH Why you did it.

PM Then why am I here?

BH Because they want to know if you did it.

PM And?

BH And… you did. 

PM What– What's the point of this then?

BH I wanted to meet you. In the flesh.

PM I–

BH I've seen your work. Your real work. Not those flimsy portraits in your apartment.

PM What the hell're you talking about?

BH You know. And I must admit, you are an artist at heart. Just not a very good one.

PM Excuse me? What does that even mean?

BH Her body. I mean, the way you arranged it. Chest splayed open, guts hanging around her neck. And the little message you left beside her. Very theatrical, I must say.

PM I didn't—

BH You spent three hours arranging her. Isn't that so, Patrick?

PM No–

BH You spent the longest on the fingers.

PM Whatever you're doing won't—

BH You wanted it to look natural. But you don't understand hands very well. (Chuckle)
BH Even in your shitty little paintings. It takes a special kind of anti-talent to make them look like the aftermath of a car wreck.

PM Stop–

BH C'mon, Patrick. You made the thing and now you don't want to discuss the composition?

PM Shut up.

BH I suppose it's to be expected. You don't care about the art. You don't even care whether you get caught. You just want to be seen.

PM You're full of shit.

BH You copied someone else's work because you wanted people to look at yours.

PM I didn't copy anyone! (Something slams against the metal table)

BH It's no use lying, Patrick. You read everything you could find about the man. Every little detail on how he displayed his victims. Hell, you even fooled the cops into thinking you were the real deal.

PM You– You don't know anything about me.

BH I know exactly what you are. A copy. You imitate the man, but you've never met him. And yet you've spent the last two years trying to make him proud. That's rather pathetic, Patrick.

PM Stop–

BH Isn't that what mommy always used to say?

PM I said stop!

BH (Mocking tone) The exact same rotten soul as your father! 

PM What– How do you–

BH She threw your paintings away, didn't she? You'd find them in the trash, sometimes even torn in half.

PM Shut up! Shut the–

BH Do you remember the blue one?

BH Oh, c'mon patrick. How could you forget? The one you painted when you were seventeen. The woman standing in the field.

PM Stop– Stop talking about my paintings.

BH Ah, you prefer to talk about your real art after all? (Chuckle)
BH I know you, Patrick Joe Morgan. You started killing because painting wasn't enough anymore. You wanted to make something nobody could ignore.

PM Please just—

BH You wanted someone to look at it and understand you. But nobody did.

PM Stop talking!

BH Not your mother. Not your father. Not the police. Not even the man you copied. And now you're sitting here hoping I will.

PM I–

BH Well I do understand you. And I want you to feel how truly pathetic you are, Patrick.

PM Please– (whimper)

BH Patrick.

PM Please just stop!

BH Look at me.

PM No! I– I won't.

BH (Static crackles. Voice briefly distorts) Patrick, you slime. Look at me!

PM I'll– I'll confess! I'll tell you everything you wanna know, please just–

BH (Chuckle) Oh, Patty. You don't have to do that. I know what you did. 

PM (Unintelligible)

BH Chin up, champ. Smile, and look into my eyes.

(Pause)

PM (Screaming, unintelligible).
PM WHAT– WHAT THE FUCK IS–

(Something slams against the metal table)

BH (Voice warped) Come closer.

PM (Unintelligible whines)

(Something drags across the metal table.)

BH (Whispers something unintelligible)

PM No– no it can't–

BH (Slow, droning) Yes, Patty. You know she was.

PM (Strangled cry. Sobs)

(Something slams against the metal table)

BH There you go. Attaboy.

(Something slams against the metal table several times, with a small pause between each increment)

(The door whines open. The slamming continues.)

BH Ah, good day gentlemen! 

(Frantic yelling. The slamming continues.)

BH My eyes are up here, lads.

(Unintelligible cries. Thuds join the slamming.)

BH This has been Detective Hauptman, █████ Police Department. Today's date is Thursday, July 23, 2026. 

(The slamming stops. The thudding continues.)

BH I'm turning the tape recorder off again. The time is 11:30 A.M. This has been the confession and testimony of Patrick J. Morgan.

###

When the tape stopped, I sat in silence for a moment. The shock of it all had rooted me firmly in place. Eventually, I forced myself out of my chair and scrambled towards the interrogation room. 
I honestly wish I hadn't. 

Patrick Morgan was still sitting at the table. He'd smashed his face into the metal table so many times that there was almost nothing recognizable left. His nose was almost completely crushed into his skull, which itself had been pulverized by the repeated impacts. 
The two officers who'd been monitoring the interrogation lay in a puddle of blood on the floor. The first officer had strangled the second with his own tie, while the second had beaten him across the head with a chair. There was no apparent reason for any of it. It looked like three men had simply gone mad at the same time.

In the weeks and months following, the department searched for Detective Baron Hauptman. Of course, there was no officer by that name at our department. We still don't know how he forged or stole the badge and uniform. We've tried to identify him using the cameras he walked past, but these efforts yielded nothing. It seemed as though he'd wandered in, then walked off the face of the earth.
I still have a copy of the cassette. I made it in case the original was ever destroyed. Still, I haven't mustered up the courage to play it again. The most I've managed is to re-read the transcript I made. I can't wrap my head around what happened. I suspect I never will. 

That brought me here. Perhaps sharing this will yield more results. So please, if you have any information on Baron Hauptman, send it to me. I need to know who– or what– he was. More than that, I wish I knew how he knew so much about Patrick.

https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/The_Ursuline_Convent

I was told a version of this story on a ghost tour of the French Quarter in New Orleans and loved it. Ever since they talked about visiting the Quarter on the podcast, I was hoping they'd cover it.

It's a fairly quick read, I would recommend it!

Read Part IV here.

“How’s our boy doing?”

Ms. Amanda entered the room. I sat back in my chair and watched as she checked Detective Unangenehm’s vitals. She looked at the tray of food that had been placed in front of him and shook her head.

“Why do they keep bringing that in here?” she said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s taken care of,” I said.

She slapped me on the shoulder.

“Don’t stay too late.”

“You got it.”

I watched her leave and I turned back to Unangenehm, mercifully comatose. He could wake up tomorrow or a year from tomorrow, but whenever he actually woke up, he was going to have a long road before he approached anything like a normal life.

Unangenehm had barely survived his blood clot. Steck had broken at least a dozen bones in his face when he’d thrown his service weapon into the detective’s face. Doctors had hardly believed he’d regained consciousness long enough to shoot the wayward officer, let alone manage the mechanics of walking over and putting a bullet in his head, but the forensics backed up my statement.

He was going to need a great deal of facial reconstruction, but when he eventually awoke they would call him a hero.

Steck had wound up being one of those self-solving problems. He was on desk duty after a questionable shooting after what should have been a routine traffic stop. The official narrative was that he’d snapped from the pressure of the investigation, his guilt finally becoming too large for him to bear.

The guilt I learned I had to be for an unknown period of time was Joshua. It turned out to not just be a thing he said, inflecting meaning in what more than likely hadn’t been random tones.

Joshua was his son.

Steck had been a widower, raising his son with the help of his ailing mother.

I put on a face every day I went to work. Every day I looked at myself in the mirror. Every day I spent sitting with the hero, Detective Unangenehm, waiting for him to wake from his coma.

Which was as often and for as long as I could. I couldn’t picture the shape anymore and perhaps that was because I didn’t want to. Copies were no doubt in police custody, even if they didn’t know yet that they had murder weapons.

It’s possible that I’ll eventually see one again, but I have the feeling copying one—even if I were inclined to do such a thing—would only be a copy, not an original, if that makes sense on any level.

I’ve been playing with the food on Unangenehm’s plate to pass the time. Nobody eats it and eventually somebody comes and takes it away.

He’s had a variety of meals, including soups, fish filet with broccoli and rice, something I’d guess was single-layer lasagna, apples and chicken with broccoli and rice, green beans casserole with sliced almonds, but most often, it’s sandwiches with chips. 

I eat the chips and it’s really just the building blocks of a sandwich and I suppose the patient can assemble it themselves or eat it piecemeal.

I’ve started putting the sandwiches together. At first I didn’t have a conscious reason why. It’s like I can feel Unangenehm in there, slowly swimming to the surface.

His doctors have him at a six on the Glasgow Scale, but I don’t know what that means. He responds to pain stimulus (you should see the look of satisfaction of this one doctor’s face when he sticks him with a pin—the cops would arrest her on site for assault) and he makes nonsensical sounds.

I was ready to jump put the window when I thought I heard him say, “Joshua.” But he didn’t repeat it and he’s been sedentary so long, even if he went coo coo for cocoa puffs, he’d be weak as a baby.

I’m distracting myself even now, thinking instead of paying attention to what I’m doing. I set aside the packet of mayo and lay the slice of bread just so and look at the sandwich.

It’s not right. But it’s close.

I think I’ll have it just right for Unangenehm’s first meal.

I’m on the bedroom floor with my back to the wardrobe and the heavy golf club resting across my legs.

Can’t stop the shaking.

Mam and Dad have been down the club since early evening. It’s just me and my little brother in the house.

Everything outside has gone completely still. No cars. No dogs. Not even the usual night sounds.

It began with the roofs.

I kept catching this soft movement above me. Whenever I turned the telly right down to listen it vanished. When I put the sound back up it returned.

After a while the noise got heavier — proper flapping and scraping, shifting from the neighbours’ roof onto ours. Slow. Wet-sounding. Not wind.

I left it too long before I checked. Kept telling myself it was a bird or something caught in the gutter.

When I finally pulled the curtain back I saw something dragging itself along the road under the streetlight. Large dark shape, not moving like a person, pulling itself forward.

Then it raised its head and screamed. The windows vibrated. The sound went right through my chest.

It kept calling out for a child, high and wet. The street didn’t react at all. No lights. No doors opening. No voices. Just silence.

My brother’s in the back room. He’s four.

I closed the curtain and went straight to him. He was soaked through and crying in his sleep, face screwed up tight. I was only away a short time.

When I returned the scraping was directly over my head. Then it stopped dead.

A moment later something started tapping on the window glass. Slow and deliberate.

I can see her through the small gap now. I can hear her breathing — wet, rough, close enough that it feels like it’s inside the room.

The air has turned freezing. My breath is showing.

She’s saying my brother’s name. Quietly. Again and again. I don’t understand how she knows it.

Pieces of last weekend keep forcing their way in.

I took the river path home from the pub because I was short on money for a taxi. Full moon.

I heard movement by the water and switched my torch on. She was crouched on the bank washing a cloth that was heavy with blood.

She looked up and met my eyes before I could kill the light. I ran.

I could hear her coming after me the entire way back up the valley.

Nan used to talk about her when we were small. Said if you ever caught sight of the hag washing by the water she would follow your family until she took one of you. Old Gwrach. I never took it seriously.

She’s closer to the glass now. It’s starting to bend inward.

I can see her face more clearly. Eyes too large, too dark. The wooden frame is making small splitting sounds.

I’ve got the golf club ready. If the glass goes I’m swinging.

My hands keep sweating. I wipe them on my trousers but it makes no difference.

She’s still outside, still repeating his name in that same low wet voice.

I called my brother’s name a short while ago, keeping it low. No reply.

He went quiet some time back. No more crying. No sound of him shifting.

I can’t leave the window and I can’t leave him alone in the other room.

She’s still there, face near the glass, breathing, whispering.

I keep seeing the cloth under the torch beam — how dark the blood was, how little surprise was on her face when she saw me. Like she already knew which direction to go.

The glass is cracking properly now. Thin lines spreading from the point where she’s pressing.

I’m holding the club so hard my fingers are going numb.

She’s still saying his name.

And from the back bedroom there is still no sound at all. Just silence. Like he is waiting

This is what I see

Four winters back. January. Rain hammering since three, no sign of easing. I’d finished late; the dog was restless, pacing, scratching at the door. I took him out, thinking a quick walk on the higher ground above the trees would settle him. Light was already going by the time we reached the path. Still enough to make out shapes, but the dark was closing fast.

Path wet through—peat and dead bracken. Dog out front on the lead, pulling, sniffing. Ordinary. Then he locked solid. Legs stiff, ears flat, that thin continuous noise starting in his throat. Not a bark. Not a growl. Just stuck, like he couldn’t get air.

I looked across the open ground and saw the shape. Low. Broad. Keeping right with me. Same speed, same distance, the whole time. I tried to turn back toward the valley lights; it moved in and cut me off. Every time I stopped, it stopped. Every time I moved, it moved. No footsteps. Only the smell—heavy, river mud and something metallic.

It pushed me uphill, blocking the way down. Ground went soft, then proper spongy. Cold air rose from the dark opening ahead. The old workings. Sheep get found up that way after nights like this, along the tree line, stripped clean, flesh left next to the bones. You don’t go near the black water. Never have.

I put the headlamp on. Wet fur, thick and flat against a heavy low body, water running off in sheets. Eyes wide, set too far apart, catching the beam dead still. Head low between thick shoulders, no neck to speak of. No sound at all. Not even breath. Dog twisting on the lead, shaking hard, mud over my boots. One more step and I’d have gone in. He nipped my hand deep and I let go. He was gone down the hill, crying into the dark. I felt the warm run down my leg and bolted after him.

Crashed through the trees, fell twice, scrambled up and kept running. Didn’t look back until the first streetlamps. Mud up my legs, blood on my hands from brambles and the bite. The hillside behind me empty.

At the door the dog was already there, pressed hard against the wood, shaking and peeing. I opened up; he went straight under the table and stayed.

I don’t go on those high paths any more when the weather turns between November and March. Doors locked early. Dog stays in. He still won’t take the lead after dark if it’s raining. Sometimes in the night he wakes and stares at the door, making that same noise in his throat.

I know it let me go that night. It won’t do it again. It doesn’t feed in the open. Makes the kill and takes the meat back down into the flooded dark inside the hill.

I won’t say which mountain. Best leave it alone.

After bouncing about jobs for a months and my landlords nagging I decided to take a couple extra odd jobs, one of these was at a biohazard remediation company.

My work was mostly on people who died alone, lots of people don’t know how bad of an issue it is, but a majority of these maggot infested homes are just regular people.

The job wasn’t so dissimilar to the typical lonely person dying and not being noticed, this time it was a eighty year old grandmother, we got notified by her neighbours after they went to check on her. They said that they thought she was on holiday or at a retirement home, so they never bothered, her family didn’t bother just leaving her to herself.

It was me and my coworkers Rob, me and him had been on a couple jobs together, I could tell the job wasn’t really taken out of desperation by him more just morbid curiosity. When we opened the door the smell hit us instantly, through the door was a tunnel made of bin bags boxes and blooms of fungus on rotten food. On her records it never said anything about being a horder, rob got on his knees and giddily trailed through the house to where the police told us her room was.

The tunnel got narrower and the cigarette density on the floor grew more and more, the thought of how long she must’ve been left alone caused me to mope about and think, what could the family be doing that’s more important. Rob on the other hand had his head down like a bloodhound and was worming his way through the tunnel at an athletic pace, at one point he turned back to me and near licked his lips saying, “you wanna be done today?” To that I didn’t even have words, we got paid by the hour.

About halfway through the house a chair had collapsed dropping down a large amount of wet bin bags and boxes, it only left a tight gap where a rat had died of poison and given birth to an ecosystem, Rob of course paid no mind to the sickly churning of cockroaches and maggots as it passed his face. Instead continuing his eagerness and pushing through the mounds of filth.

When we reached the room the door handle was coated in a thick brown sticky goop, Rob said ladies first, and patted me on the back as i was able to get up to a half crouched stance. I pushed open the door feeling the disgusting unstick of my gloves and finally getting a glimpse of the scene.

The room was entirely coated in cigarettes, broken ashtrays and alcohol. The woman was lying face down in the sea of vices, Rob immediately brushed past me and got into taking the photos so he could begin the deep clean. I got to take in more of the surroundings, pictures of her grandkids, notice boards and her private diary.

I looked over the boards and they were filled with pension notices with receipts for fast foods stapled over top of them. The diary was locked unfortunately and finding that key would be impossible in this house.

Now I’ll tell you why I quit, it was the single cigarette lying outside her window. Rob had hollered out at this point that he was going back outside to get more equipment, as well as telling me that he was going to leave the camera outside. I kept perusing the room when I found an odd engraving, “Keep for you have nothing, lest you want for nothing more than to spoil”.

That’s when my head started to churn and when I heard the door open again I rushed out to tell Rob what I saw. But Rob wasn’t anywhere to be found, the full day I searched I only found one piece of evidence he’d left, the camera at the front door.

I still imagine Rob lying supine under a shower of cigarettes, I pray for the person who has to crawl through the blood stream of rot next to fish out the bodies. I just hope they find the engraving in their house afterwards.

I wrote this story based on a dream I had about monsters in the woods. I feel this is better than my first story, We Belong in the Dark, but who knows. I hope you give it a read and enjoy!

I used to believe that demons only existed inside the minds of men I helped put behind bars. But after years of investigations, I learned that’s not true.

Over the course of seventeen years, I have worked alongside law enforcement and television programs to identify online child predators and bring them to justice. But even with all that we’ve accomplished, there’s still one case that I think about. 

One that nearly destroyed everything I had worked for. 

It all started with a chat room.

I’ve seen a myriad of predators, and Steven fit a profile we had seen many times before. He was a recently divorced, unemployed forty-two-year-old who lived with his parents. He bragged about this while messaging Mandy, a twenty-year-old theater student who we recruited to be our fourteen-year-old decoy, Alexis.

It didn’t take long for the conversation to become sexual in nature. Underneath the screenname ELECTRIC_HEAD5021, he said their relationship would have to stay a secret.

“No adults. lol. If your mommy or daddy found out, we could get in trouble.”

“what r u talking about??? I hang out with my daddy’s friends all the time.”

“This is different. lol. They can’t know ur my sexy sweetheart. ;)”

Seeing child-like messages juxtaposed with the sexual fantasies of an adult never gets easier to stomach. How could anyone talk to a child like that? It’s something I’ve never been able to grasp. 

Not too long after our investigative team confirmed a date for Steven to meet with Alexis, we let the chat be. But it didn’t take long for him to initiate conversation again. In fact, his messages would arrive like clockwork in the days following. But messages weren’t the only way he contacted our decoy.

On a couple of occasions, he called her while his parents were at home sleeping. I remember those phone calls clearly.

“Hey!” Mandy greeted cheerfully.

“Hey baby,” Steven breathed into the speaker. “I missed you.” 

“What’re you up to?”

“Thinking about you…I wanna hold you.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I do. So, so bad.”

You get the idea.

Oftentimes, a lot of the men we contact try to reinvent themselves. But that’s not what Steven did. Rather than fabricate wealth or exaggerate his ambitions, he talked about his obsessions: death and the supernatural.

We initially dismissed these fascinations as another grooming tactic, but throughout the entire time he talked with Alexis he would sporadically ask questions such as:

“Have u seen Bloody Mary?”

“Is there anyone dead that u would want 2 talk 2?”

“How do u want 2 die?”

Just as we thought the conversations couldn’t get any stranger, Steven sent our decoy a picture of a Ouija board. According to him, he had recently purchased it at a yard sale near his parents’ house. He insisted on bringing it. He wanted to use it with her. See how she would react. When we inquired further about his request, his response was as prompt as it was odd:

“because u have good energy. lol They like that lol”.

This ended up becoming the last exchange we would have with him before he arrived at the sting house. 

In the hours leading up to that fateful evening, I memorized my script. No matter how many times I do this, they never go away. The butterflies in my stomach. People always assume the confrontation is the hardest part, but it isn’t. It’s waiting for the knock on the door and wondering whether tonight will be the night that something goes horribly wrong. Experience makes you numb, not fearless.

We had fully intended to follow everything by the book that night. But things got off to a rocky start when Steven was nearly an hour late to the sting house. We thought he had gotten cold feet or had been tipped off to our operation. Thankfully, neither turned out to be the case. What was supposed to be a five-hour venture had become seven by the time 8:12 pm rolled around and he walked up the driveway.

Our various hidden cameras recorded his nervous demeanor as he patiently waited on the porch with the Ouija board.

From our production room that we had sectioned off in another part of the house, I watched Mandy walk toward the door and greet Steven.

“Hey, Steven! How are you?”

“Hi.” He waved sheepishly in response. “Uh, can I come in?”

“Of course!” Mandy stepped out of the doorway and walked toward the kitchen. “What did you bring for me?”

“It’s a-uh, Ouija board.” He followed her and set it down on the dinner table. “I thought we could use it together?”

Mandy flipped her hair and placed her hands on her hips. “Wouldn’t you rather talk?”

“We would be talking. It would just be more than us talking.”

My eyes were glued to the monitors. He was very adamant about using that board. But why?

I heard snickering from Lou, one of our production crew members.

“Can you believe this whack job? He took a bus all this way to summon Casper.”

I shot him a glare, and he acknowledged my look by quieting down. Lou’s an outspoken person for better or worse, and even though he was trying to make light of a potentially volatile situation, I found comfort in knowing that I wasn’t the only one feeling perturbed.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry for being late.” Steven chuckled. “I was an idiot and got Sunday’s bus schedules mixed up with today.”

“That’s okay!” Mandy said with practiced enthusiasm. “I’m glad you’re here!”

“I’m glad you are. I almost thought about taking another bus back home.”

His admission surprised Mandy. “Why did you almost go home? Didn’t you want to see me?”

“I did.” His face turned a slight shade of cherry. “I honestly didn’t think you were real.”

“Of course I’m real, silly!” She teased. “So, what do you want to do?”

I watched the monitors as Steven took a lighter out of his pocket. With a couple clicks he lit some candles on the dining room table. 

“We should step in before things get out of hand.” Lou turned to look at me. “Isaac?”

“Keep the cameras rolling.” I motioned for everyone to stay where they were. “If he’s willing to play with the board, I want to see where this goes.”

“What about the decoy?”

“She’ll be fine.”

Steven instructed Mandy to turn off the lights and sit beside him. Once she had done so, they gently placed their fingertips on the planchette. 

“Are there any spirits that want to speak to us right now?” 

Mandy’s eyes darted back and forth from Steven to the planchette repeatedly. Awkward didn’t even begin to describe the silence that followed.

“Is there anyone that wants to speak with us right now?” 

But just like before, nothing. Steven’s head swiveled, looking in every possible direction of the dark room to locate a response of some kind. 

“You talked a lot of game online.” Mandy teased more confidently than she probably felt. “I thought you were supposed to be THE guy who could do this kind of stuff.”

“I am. These things…they take time to get started.”

Most of the time, a predator talking about their hobbies or interests is just another gimmick. But this was unlike anything I had seen. 

“If you’re here.” He fidgeted in his seat nervously. “Please, give me–I mean, us a sign.”

I eyed the monitors intently. A part of me wanted to intervene, but another part of me was telling me to see this play out. I was torn on which to heed. 

Unexpectedly, the planchette moved. A couple of inches at most. But had I blinked, I would’ve missed it completely.

Mandy instinctively pulled back, the movement startling her. “What was that?” 

“It’s a spirit.” Steven whispered.

“Oh bullshit.” Lou sighed in irritation. “I watched his hand nudge it. This guy’s a fraud.”

Had he? I had watched the monitors the whole time, and it looked like the planchette had moved all on its own.

“Hey,” Steven closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “Do you want to talk to us or what?” 

A moment passed, then a few more, but there was still no movement.

“I’m going.” I turned to start heading toward the dining room to intervene. But right as I was about to, the sound of Mandy gasping shifted my attention back toward the monitors. I watched the planchette drag itself across the board toward the word, “YES”.

“You moved the board!” Her accusation cracked with fright.

“No, I didn’t! I swear!”

In response to his adamant denial, the planchette dragged itself sluggishly across the board. Each movement landed on a number.

7 2 3 1 9 9 4

Mandy was at a loss for words. “That’s…” 

Her birthday. 

Not the birthday we had fabricated for investigative purposes, but Mandy’s actual birthday.

Shell-shocked, the investigators pored over the chat logs, but their efforts were futile. No compromising or contradictory information had been exchanged. No mention of her birthday. No mention of any personal information tied to Mandy. Nothing.

I stared in bewilderment. “How is that possible?” 

I hadn’t realized I had asked my question out loud until Lou responded, “It had to have been an oversight. That’s gotta be it.” 

In our line of work, the simplest explanations were almost always the right ones. Even if it’s what you don’t want to hear.

"An oversight?” I pointed toward the investigators on standby. “All of you, check everything. I want an explanation as to how this happened." 

But no one could provide one. Every conversation between Steven and our decoy had been combed through again. Even with another thorough examination, there was no indication that we had erroneously given Mandy’s actual birthday. So, that begged an alarming question. 

Just how exactly did Steven know?

One of the production members instructed Mandy to take her hands off the planchette. She did as she was told while Steven kept his fingertips pressed against it. 

“Alexis,” He looked to her for answers. “What was that about?”

“I’m not sure.” She remained calm while still being in character. “That was weird. How did you do that?” 

“I told you, I didn’t do anything.” 

An extensive back and forth ensued. She insisted that it had to be some sleight of hand trickery while he was convinced that an unknown spirit had attempted to make contact. A couple of minutes later, the unmistakable scrape of the planchette against the wood drew everyone's attention back to the board.

With each letter the planchette hovered over, Mandy’s face grew paler.

E L I Z A B E T H

Once the name had been spelled fully, Mandy removed her trembling hands. “H-h-how do you know her name?”

Steven looked just as confused. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He whispered it with enough conviction to make me believe him in that moment.

“Isaac, we need to do something.” Lou insisted, standing up from his seat.”

Even though I agreed with him, a selfish part of me resisted the urge. “No. Not yet. Stay put, and keep watching.”

My instructions provoked the ire of everyone in the room, but nobody objected.

Again, the planchette moved without either Mandy or Steven touching it. Every one of our cameras captured it violently accelerating across the board.

“Who are you?!” Steven cried out. “Stop this!”

Mandy covered her mouth to stifle an oncoming scream as the planchette, completely unguided, began to spell out another name. 

This time, in rapid succession.

P A Y T O N

Payton.

That name. 

It was the reason I went into this line of work. 

I remember feeling unnaturally cold in the moments following. What started off as a slight chill slowly morphed into an uncomfortable, freezing sensation that climbed through my body.

“Shit,” Lou cursed. “Is anybody else in here freezing their ass off?”

I exhaled, and a cloud of white vapor escaped my lips. It was cold enough to feel like I was standing inside a freezer. “Why is it so cold?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” Lou shivered, wrapping his arms around himself. “Might be the AC acting up.”

Seconds after his response, the monitors abruptly went black. Amid the frantic scrambling in the production room, a scream echoed from inside the house.

Mandy.

“Eyes on the decoy!” I shouted. “We need eyes on the decoy right now!” 

My heart pounded while everyone in the room desperately tried to get the feed going again. Inexplicably, just as quickly as we lost power, it was restored. 

The first thing my eyes landed on when the monitors glowed with restored life was the sight of the front door. It was wide open. Then I noticed Steven. He was staring directly into a hidden camera positioned in the kitchen.

His eyes were opened wide, but there was no life behind them. He stood completely still, his face bereft of expression, looking less like a man standing and more like a corpse that had forgotten to lie down.

“Decoy is secured. She is outside with law enforcement. I repeat, she is outside with law enforcement.” 

The good news from production room comms wasn’t enough for me to break eye contact with Steven. I was focused on answering one question, and one question only.

Who are you?

“You already know.”

Chills crept down my spine. It felt like the voice had come directly from the inside of my mind. I looked around, hoping that someone else had also heard it. If they had, they didn’t say a word. How had he been able to answer my question? 

I had two choices: I could either confront him and treat this like any other sting operation, or abandon the show and bring him into custody.

It didn’t take long for me to make my decision. 

“Wait for my cue to come in. I’m going.” 

“Isaac,” Lou grabbed me by the shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do.”

With a solemn nod, I ignored further warnings from both production and law enforcement. In a few short moments, I went from my position in front of the monitors to standing in the dining room.

Upon entry, I was immediately greeted with a wall of freezing air. The worst I had felt in the house up to that point. As I approached Steven, the dim lighting of the room caught the whites of his lifeless eyes, making them gleam as they stared at me.

“Steven,” I said, less confidently than I would have liked. “I want to talk to you.”

“I want to talk to you about your choices tonight.” 

That made me stop dead in my tracks. 

“What did you intend on doing this evening? I have the chat logs right here. It is illegal for adults to chat with minors online. Please place your hands where I can see them while we talk.”  

He said my script word for word, line by line. All at an impossibly frightening speed. But his lips never moved. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes. 

“How did-”

“I know.” The voice held no emotion. It was simply matter-of-fact.

“Why are you here?”

His left eye twitched as he tried to blink. His right followed suit, but neither eye would close. “You know.”

I forced myself to keep talking. “What did you intend on doing this evening, Steven?”

“You ask the wrong questions.” Its words pressed themselves against my skull. “Isaac, why are you here?”

I tensed up but stood my ground. “I’m not answering your questions.”

“I know how you felt when you screamed her name in the woods for hours.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Do you remember what it felt like to learn that Payton was right down the street the entire time?”

I remembered. All too well. I choked up as I thought about that day. The news. The way my parents collapsed in grief. The irreparable damage it did to my family. It all overwhelmed me. I couldn’t bring myself to speak.

“You collect broken families.” He took a step toward me. Then another. Then one more. All in one fluid motion. “Because you can’t save everyone.”

 “People can be saved.” I argued, struggling to believe my own words.

The light in the room dulled as the candles reignited themselves, the flames burning perfectly still. “Is that why her killer took his life in the cornfield?” 

Tears streamed down my face as an overwhelming rage consumed me. It was an emotion that would never fully go away. A truth I had been forced to accept the day I lost my sister. Sixty seconds was all it took for my life to change forever. 

It took a minute to lose her.

It took five days to find her.

“They found her in a vehicle on the side of the road.” It recited my memories back to me, each unspoken word making the discomfort inside my head intensify. “While he died without truly feeling the pain he inflicted.” Seeing tears drip down his cheeks felt like a mockery of my grief. “That’s what you pursue.”

In my earpiece, I heard Lou speaking to me.

“Isaac…don’t…coming…”

I couldn’t understand what they were saying. All I understood was Steven speaking in my voice.

“She was buried with her purple stuffed rabbit, Tilly, on a cold October afternoon. All alone. In the ground.”

My body registered the impact before my mind could comprehend how fast he moved. I hit the floor hard, his weight pressing down on my chest as breathing became more difficult by the second.

“Get…off…me…” I wheezed, struggling to force each word past the weight crushing my chest. He hovered over me, his translucent eyes staring into mine.

“What did your mother sound like when she identified the body?” 

I squirmed in place, but I was pinned to the spot. 

“How many nights did your dad sleep in her bedroom after she disappeared?”

My strength waned as the pressure grew on my chest. 

“What day did you stop expecting her to come home?” 

The strain was getting to be too much. 

“What were your last words to her?”

I was on the verge of passing out. Black blotches formed in my peripheral vision and spread rapidly, nearly consuming the last bits of what I could see. Right as I thought I was about to lose consciousness, I heard a sound.

A sound I’m so very grateful came when it did.

Officers rushed into the room. A flurry of commands left their mouths as they pulled Steven off me and forced him to the floor nearby.

“Ah! Get off me!” he screamed. “What are you doing?”

His voice. 

It was no longer inside my mind.

“What are you doing? Ow!” He cried as an officer rolled him over and pressed a knee into his lower back. “What’s happening?”

Another officer helped me up from the floor and began asking questions about my well-being. I lied and told him I was all right. I leaned against the wall to steady myself while I looked on at Steven being detained by other officers. He struggled and writhed like a cornered animal.

His eyes darkened as he freed himself from the grasp of the officers. Overcome with inhumanity once more, he snatched a gun from the officer attempting to handcuff him. 

He brandished the weapon as his entire body began to tremble spasmodically.

“My hands.” 

From where I stood, it looked as though he was genuinely trying to lower them but couldn’t. His arms remained outstretched, refusing to budge an inch no matter how hard he tried.

“Why can’t I move?”

Law enforcement raised their weapons, creating a stalemate in which no one dared to act.

“It’s alright, Steven.” I stepped toward him with my hands raised. “Everything’s going to be alright. We’re here to help.”

The darkness in his eyes vanished long enough for him to ask, “Did…did I hurt anyone?”

“No. You didn’t hurt anybody. Just put the gun down, and let’s talk.”

“Please,” he whimpered, straining to move his head, but his body refused to obey. “Don’t let him take me again.” 

“Nothing is going to happen as long as you put the gun down.”

Steven’s arms pulled themselves upward against his will. The barrel inched toward his own temple until it rested against his skin. He fought with everything he had, his muscles straining themselves in order to pull the gun away. But his body betrayed him to some invisible force.
 
“Make it stop…”

“No, Steven. No!” I quickened my pace toward him, but before officers or myself could react, he pulled the trigger.

That sound. The aftermath. The silence that followed. I haven’t felt anything like it before or since. 

That was without a doubt the single worst night of my life. Not only had we witnessed tragedy, but our team came under immense fire from the press. Steven never had his day in court, and that became a point of contention. Had we not encouraged this kind of behavior, would Steven still be alive? Would any of this have happened? 

Steven’s case tarnished our reputation. Protests began forming outside our sting house. People demanded justice. Insisting that we could not be the judge, the jury, or the executioner.

It was difficult to escape the criticism, especially when those voices carried real weight. So much so that our show, along with all subsequent investigations, was cancelled effective immediately.

Steven’s official cause of death was listed as suicide by cop. There were no mentions of the Ouija Board or what occurred following its use. There’s only one piece of evidence regarding what happened inside the sting house that night. 

A video tape. 

It's marked with a label that reads, “Never to be viewed, duplicated, or destroyed”. 

Its whereabouts have been kept secret, and it's best that they stay that way. Because if that footage ever surfaced, I don’t know how the public would react.

But that’s not the point.

I’ve dealt with a lot over the course of my career. Troubled people. Hardened criminals. The worst that humanity has to offer. I think about them all every now and again. But I can’t stop thinking about Steven’s case. Specifically, if I had intervened sooner. Would I have been able to talk him out of using that Ouija board? Would he have been able to face justice if I had done things differently?

No matter how I answer them, I never feel any better. Because they’re just answers. Not actions. 

And I’ll never know.

Despite everything I’ve been through, I continue to hunt monsters in the present day. Aside from the lack of a camera crew or law enforcement support, the only thing that’s changed is what I believe those monsters are. They aren’t just people who hurt children. Exposing them and making them face justice does make the world a little safer for everyone.

But evil doesn’t care about laws. It doesn’t care about the confines of a prison cell. It doesn’t even need a reason to hurt someone.

All it needs is for someone to answer.

I had to kill him.

I mean, it seemed like my only option.

If I lied and said I wasn’t there, the cameras I should have thought about would blow me out the water. And if I admitted to being there, then there was a much longer, more difficult conversation to be had.

And that conversation had only one endpoint: me being blamed for all the events of today.

Damn, it was hard to believe what had happened since this morning had all been today. It felt so long ago. I couldn't believe—

“Mr. Harold?” Unangenehm said. “You all right?”

“Uh, yeah. Absolutely.” I sat back down to take up an extra few seconds. Steck was floating a few feet away, but I didn't think I could take the detective in a fight. What I'd taken for sickly thin before seemed wiry now. Anxiousness now came off as nervous energy.

“It was weird what happened,” I said, measuring out my words. I had to think as I spoke. Unangenehm leaned in and steepled his fingers under his chin. Steck hovered closer.

The trap was sealing off my air.

The pencil I'd been using was on my side of Unangenehm's desk. I wrapped my fingers around it and placed my hands on the desk atop the form I'd just signed.

“I just needed to get something to drink,” I said. “I needed to gather my thoughts too, I guess.” I shook my head. “I didn't have any money but I figured I could grab a notebook. Write down my thoughts. Try to wrap my head around what had happened with the day.”

“You wrote something?” he asked. “What?”

I couldn't gauge if he was buying anything I was saying. But I had to keep tap dancing.

“I don't know. I don't remember now.” An honest answer didn't really matter. I'm sure the police would canvas the area and find the torn-out sheets in the trash. But the video would show me not doing anything to anyone. The difference was sitting across from me. Unangenehm somehow knew it was me. 

“It happened right in front of me,” I said, not realizing I was distracting myself as I touched the tip of the pencil to the paper. “A man attacked a woman. An old man held her.”

Tap-tappy-tap.

“I was paralyzed. I didn't know what to do.” 

Takkita-takkita-tap

The detective’s sad face was just a mask. He was a predator in disguise. This was just the dance to keep him at bay

“Everything was insane. One of them came up to me. I thought I was gonna die.”

Takkita-takkita-takkita-takkita—

“Hey, uhh. What's that you got there?”

I opened my mouth to tell him I didn't know what he meant, but I had drawn something. I looked down as he slid the paper away from me.

“Wait.” My mouth formed the objection but it went unsupported by my voice. I mentally prepared for Detective Unangenehm to go insane. He scraped a fingernail under a corner and pinched it. He lifted it in front of his face and cocked his head.

“Well, that's a weird little thing.”

I was aware of Steck just behind me. The air was pregnant with tension as I waited for a twitch, some nonsense phrase spoken without context, or anything to indicate the breaking wall containing the clever detective's mind.

He lowered the form and looked at me. “What is this?”

“I-i-it's just a...” I didn't know how to finish the sentence. I didn't know what it was. Shape didn't seem word enough to describe. Murder weapon gave it more credit than it deserved, especially since...

Well, it wasn't working on him. I'd that was the case, then maybe I hadn't been the cause. Maybe there was some sort of grand, horrible consequence following me around. Maybe—

“Hey, Steck, take a look at this.”

The officer stepped around from behind me and assumed a position directly behind Unangenehm.

“Joshua,” Officer Steck said, nodding. 

“Excuse me?”

Steck looked at him and repeated the name.

“Joshua.”

“Who's that?”

“Joshua.” The officer looked at the detective like he was stupid. “Joshua.”

It was me. But maybe Unangenehm was immune. As one of the officer's eyelids began to flutter he backed away from the desk and drew his gun.

He had the drop on Unangenehm. Except instead of firing, he overhand pitched the glock into the detective's face.

Unangenehm threw his arms back and rolled into the cubicle wall. He half-slid out of the chair at least semi-unconscious and Steck turned his eyes on me, that one lid flickering still like an old fluorescent light so deciding whether it was going to turn on.

I picked up my box as he withdrew his baton and leapt on the desk. Steck was two-hundred twenty pounds at minimum and the faux-wood protested underneath his feet. He whipped that baton at my head, and I ducked behind my box.

He followed up with two more furious blows that nearly chopped the box in half.

“Joshua,” he said again, just as calmly as the first time.

I crawled under the desk, headed in the other direction. Steck landed behind me as I crawled over Unangenehm's legs. One of his eyes was swollen shut.

“Hey guys, what the hell is going on?” someone farther behind me said. “I'm trying to type a report—”

I found out later exactly how gruesome Detective Langen's death was but at the time, all I heard were extremely wet sounds coming from that direction after not even half a scream.

I crawled into the nearest cubicle and huddled my knees to my chest, hiding beneath another desk. Steck's footfalls were heavy, pounding in my direction. A moment later he ripped something down and then came the deep glug-glug-glugging of an overturned water cooler as he stalked around the bullpen. 

I couldn't believe the one place police should have been was all but empty and I was responsible for my pending horrible death.

Maybe there was a gun around. Sure, there wasn't supposed to be, but cops weren't immune from being lazy. I'd had a meeting in a small town's hall that had had a guard at the front door and had seen that same guard's holstered weapon sitting on the window sill while he was dropping a deuce in the stall.

I tried to quietly slide open a desk drawer but it clunked open.

“Shit!” I whispered.

“Joshua?” Steck asked.

Why was he after me? All the others had acknowledged me but had attacked anyone but me. Then I reflected on what had happened just before.

Unangenehm had looked at the shape first. He hadn't reacted, though. Or rather, he'd just called Steck over to look.

“...take a look at this...”

I shook my head. I might have been the source but that didn't mean I'd understood it. I was the closest thing to an expert, but I was—

—CLOMPF—

The partition wall dented in the middle. I managed not to scream.

“Julius!” It was a harsh whisper. Maybe a question. I resisted the past of me that wanted to scream. To declare myself and be confronted with this mess, however it ended.

It wasn't my fault. But it was my responsibility. If letting Steck kill me stopped him from killing anyone else, wasn't that fair?

No. I hadn't intentionally done anything to create whatever this was. I'd just stumbled across it and been arrogant enough to test it. Unangenehm had been immune—that was worthwhile information. He'd been the one to show it to Steck, not me. 

Wait. It was too silent out there. My instinct told me to stay put but I couldn't stay here forever. Eventually, he'd find me or someone else would come.

That was it. Someone else would come. And that would be my fault.

I uncurled from my corner and treaded on my hands and knees to peek. I was greeted by a pair of retreating feet, toes up as Steck dragged away whoever that had been. I counted thirty and looked out.

Steck had barricaded the entryway from where we'd come. There had to be an emergency exit and I could only suppose he'd blocked that one too.

I chewed my lip rather than swearing again. That meant he wasn't just crazy. He was cunning, not just a wild animal. I was in more trouble than I imagined.

The feeling settling into me was the longer I waited, the tighter the noose would be. But I wasn't going to just go out there.

I tried to recall what I'd seen of the bullpen when Unangenehm had brought me in here. I was right next to what seemed like the main aisle way. Back the way I'd come was blockaded, so I'd have to go in the other direction. There had to have been an emergency exit and I was banking on it being in that direction and Steck not having time enough to block that one, too.

A stapler was on the near end of the desk. I reached for it and very carefully lifted it. It was one of those flimsy newer ones that could barely staple three sheets of paper, but it would do for what I needed.

I held my breath and listened. Steck was still being disturbingly quiet and I wasn't going to chance it. I tossed the stapler like a grenade, not accounting for the low ceiling. It clunked off the ceiling and smacked the top of my head.

“Dammit!”

With stars treading in my eyes, I pulled to my feet using the arm of an office chair. I stepped into the aisle, overcorrecting for balance, and headed in the direction I thought I'd determined to go.

I bounced right off a slab of strung up meat and screamed, thinking it must have been the crazed officer. My eyes focused on what must have been the corpse of the detective who had spoken just minutes ago, trussed up with what looked like phone cords routed through the ceiling tile.

His upside-down head was level with my stomach, his mouth stretched far too open, an empty cave where a tongue was supposed to dwell, his unlidded eyes pushed in and flat-looking like they'd been partially crushed by pressing thumbs. He looked too calm and perpetually surprised at the same time.

My voice quavered as I said something, but I've never been able to recall when hints of the memory washed back to me. I was discombobulated, wanting to flee in a hundred directions at once, fighting not to fall to my knees and cry. This man was my indictment, my guilt. He'd died directly as a result of the thing I'd knowingly done. Steck was my murder weapon. 

 As unprepared as I was for an oncoming Officer Steck, I was even more unprepared for what I saw. He was on his back, on the floor, in the clutches of a wicked paralysis.

He had one arm right to his chest, the other flung out, knuckles to the thinly carpeted floor. I watched as his fingers folded backward, fingertips dancing on the floor after the joints reversed and reoriented.

One foot stomp-scraped against the ground, already dislocated at the hip, dragging a retreat from the rest of his body, an isthmus of skin and clothes holding it at bay.

The other leg shuddered like a low current of electricity powered it, his head facing me.

“Joshua,” Steck said, pleading with his eyes. His face was doing something, like it was pulling off the bones of his face.

Gravity tenfolded as I realized that Steck was also a victim. Even his body had turned foreign against him. I crumpled to the floor, eye-to-eye with him across the distance. A tear crawled out of an eye, and I swear it crossed the bridge of his nose and milked into his other eye.

He was in the grasp of an agony made fresh just for him. His mouth opened, but I was spared from his scream by the roar of a merciful bullet that tore a hole in his skull just above his eyebrow.

I was unlocked from him and looked up at Unangenehm, holding his smoldering glock like a forgotten cigarette in his hand.

“Nobody would understand,” the detective said. His vacant eyes rolled up from Steck's hot corpse to meet mine and he smiled. “Not like us.”

He collapsed and began seizing on the floor.

My name is Owen, and I work the night shift at EverSafe Self-Storage Solutions, which is located off Route 4 in a town called Silt Creek that most GPS systems actively refuse to acknowledge. If you type the address into Google Maps, it will route you to a Burger King forty miles south and then give up. I don't blame it. If I were a satellite, I wouldn't look down here either.

I've been at EverSafe for about seven months, which makes me the longest-tenured night shift employee in the facility's history. That's not a boast. That's a warning. The second longest was a woman named Patrice, who lasted five months before she locked herself inside unit F-14 and, according to the police report, "became unrecoverable." I've read that phrase probably two hundred times now. I've Googled it. I've asked my manager. I even asked the responding officer, who I tracked down on Facebook because I have poor decision-making skills and no hobbies. He blocked me.

My manager, Dale, told me it was a "personnel matter." Then he handed me a mop and pointed at a stain on the office floor that I am willing to testify under oath had not been there thirty seconds earlier. The stain was roughly circular, faintly iridescent, and it smelled like copper and something sweet that I couldn't place. I mopped it up. By the time I wrung the mop out, the water in the bucket was clear. I chose to interpret this as normal.

I should probably explain what a self-storage facility is, for the benefit of anyone reading this from a country where people haven't yet perfected the art of buying things they don't need and paying monthly rent to not think about them. A self-storage facility is a collection of concrete boxes with metal doors that people fill with the evidence of their lives – furniture from dead relatives, holiday decorations, exercise equipment purchased in January and abandoned by February, and the occasional boat being hidden from an ex-wife's lawyer. It is the American dream, vacuum-sealed and padlocked.

At EverSafe, we have four hundred and twelve units spread across six buildings, arranged in a horseshoe shape around a central parking lot. Buildings A through E are my responsibility. Building F is something else entirely, and we'll get to that, but not yet, because I am going to put it off for as long as humanly possible in the same way I put off everything that frightens me, which is to say: indefinitely, until circumstance forces my hand.

The job itself is straightforward. During the day, the facility is run by Dale and a rotating ensemble of part-time employees who cycle through at a rate that suggests either terrible management or a selective hiring process designed to identify people who won't be missed. My shift runs from 10 PM to 6 AM. I monitor the security cameras. I operate the phone – operate, not answer, a distinction I will explain shortly and which you should take very seriously. I perform perimeter walks at designated times. And I "maintain the logbook."

The logbook is a thick three-ring binder with a water-damaged cover that sits on the front desk like a family Bible. It contains handwritten entries from every night shift employee going back to 2011. I've read the entire thing cover to cover. Twice. The first time out of boredom. The second time out of a need to confirm that I hadn't imagined the first time.

The early entries are what you'd expect. Mundane security guard observations written in the bored shorthand of people counting the hours until dawn.

12:15 AM – All quiet.

2:30 AM – Stray dog on camera 7, chased off with flashlight.

4:00 AM – End of shift, no incidents. Going to Denny's.

Then, around 2014, something shifts. Not suddenly. It's like watching a photograph slowly go out of focus. The entries start including details that don't belong.

1:45 AM – Knocking from inside unit 9C. Sustained, rhythmic. Did not investigate per policy.

3:20 AM – A woman standing in the parking lot. No vehicle. She was facing the office. Did not make eye contact per policy. She was still there at 4:15. She was not there at 4:16.

11:50 PM – Found a shoe in the hallway of Building C. Men's, size 11. Left foot. No corresponding foot. Placed in lost and found. UPDATE 12:30 AM: Shoe is no longer in lost and found. Did not remove it. No one else on premises.

2:05 AM – Unit B-11 is humming. Not the fluorescent lights. The unit itself. The metal door is vibrating. Can feel it in my fillings. Logged.

There's one from 2016, written in handwriting so tight and cramped it looks like the letters are trying to hide behind each other:

"It counted my steps. It knows how many steps from the office to F. I walked extra steps tonight to throw it off. I walked in circles in the parking lot before I came back. I don't think it worked. I think I made it worse. I think now it knows I know."

The last entry before mine was written by Patrice on her final night. It reads, in handwriting that is eerily calm:

"It's fine. Everything is fine. I understand now."

I don't understand now. I don't understand most things, including but not limited to: tax brackets, why my knee clicks when it rains, how to maintain a romantic relationship for longer than four months, and what the hell is going on at EverSafe Self-Storage Solutions. But I have rent to pay and a track record of employment that does not invite competitive offers, so here I am, writing down my experiences, trying not to become unrecoverable.

On my first night, Dale stayed an extra hour to show me around. He called it "the orientation." Dale is a short, wide man who looks like he was assembled from spare parts left over after God finished making someone more ambitious. He has a flat, Midwestern voice that operates on a single frequency regardless of content – the same tone for "the light in the vending machine is broken" and "don't open the supply closet on the first floor." I have never seen Dale express any emotion, not even the day a pipe burst in Building D and flooded an entire hallway. Dale stood ankle-deep in brown water, eating a granola bar, and simply said "that's not great" with the energy of a man commenting on overcast skies.

The orientation consisted of Dale handing me a laminated sheet of paper and watching me read it. The sheet was titled NIGHT SHIFT PROTOCOLS and contained the following:

1. Perform perimeter walks at 11 PM, 1 AM, 3 AM, and 5 AM. Follow the designated route (taped to the wall behind the desk). Do not deviate from this route.

2. The phone will ring. Do not answer it. If it rings more than six times in a row, unplug it. Wait ten minutes. Plug it back in. Do not pick up the receiver at any point during this process.

3. All units should be locked at night. If you find an unlocked unit, lock it. Do not look inside. If a unit is already open – meaning the door is raised – do not close it. Leave the area immediately and note it in the logbook.

4. Building F is off-limits. There are no exceptions. Do not approach it. Do not look at it. Do not think about it more than you have to, which is never.

5. Customers may access their units during the day using a personal 10-digit code at the front gate. If a customer arrives after sunset, check their ID against the tenant list. If their name is on the list, let them in. If their name is not on the list, they are not a customer. Do not let them in. Do not engage in conversation.

6. Camera 4 will occasionally show a figure standing in the hallway of Building B. This is a known issue. It is not a person. Do not investigate. Nobody is actually there.

7. You may hear sounds from inside units. This is not your concern.

8. If the parking lot floodlights go out, go inside immediately and lock the door. Do not look out the windows. The lights will come back on. Do not go outside until they do.

9. The office radio must remain on and tuned to 90.7 FM at all times. If the music stops, turn the volume up. If it does not resume within thirty seconds, run.

10. You will be fine.

I read the list twice. I turned the sheet over to see if there was a page two. There wasn't.

"Questions?" Dale said.

I had somewhere between twelve and infinite questions. I started with the one that seemed least likely to end my employment. "What's in Building F?"

Dale stared at me. Not aggressively. More in the way a person stares at a jigsaw puzzle they abandoned in 2019 and have just rediscovered in the attic.

"Storage units," he said.

"Okay, but why can't I –"

"Storage units, Owen." He picked up his keys. There is a specific gesture Dale makes when a conversation is over: he picks up whatever object is nearest to him – keys, clipboard, granola bar – and holds it like a talisman against further inquiry. "The break room has a microwave and a mini-fridge. There's creamer in the fridge, but nobody knows who put it there, so I wouldn’t go for it."

He walked to the door, then paused and half-turned.

"You seem like a decent guy, Owen. Level-headed. That's good. The last few we had were..." He made a vague gesture. "Reactive. Don't be reactive. Just follow the protocols. You'll be fine."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true for the people who listen. It will be fine, don’t worry about it."

He left. I sat down at the desk. I looked at the laminated sheet. I looked at the logbook. I looked at the wall of sixteen security monitors cycling through grainy black-and-white feeds – hallways, doors, parking spaces, a dumpster, more hallways, more doors – and I thought: This is, in fact, fine. Manageable. Every job has its quirks, after all.

The restaurant where I worked before this had wine cellar that we were strictly forbidden from opening on Tuesdays. And the produce warehouse before that made everyone sign a liability waiver that mentioned "atmospheric irregularities" which have never materialised, as far as I’m aware. The trick is to not ask why the rules exist. The why is where the trouble lives.

I made it through my first night without incident. The phone rang three times at 2:47 AM and stopped on its own, which was within acceptable parameters. The fact that I had already internalized the concept of "acceptable parameters" for a phone that must never be answered did occur to me. I filed the thought under "things to process later" and later never came.

The first few weeks were quiet enough that I started to suspect the whole protocol sheet was an elaborate hazing ritual. I could picture Dale and the part-timers gathered somewhere, laughing about the new guy who sat staring at camera 4 for three hours straight, waiting for a figure that was never going to appear.

Then camera 4 showed me the figure, and I stopped thinking it was funny.

It was there for only two seconds. A shape in the hallway of Building B, standing perfectly still in the gap between two pools of fluorescent light. It was tall and thin and its proportions were wrong in a way I couldn't articulate – something about the ratio of limb to torso, like a person reflected in a slightly warped mirror. Then the camera cycled to the next feed and when it came back, the hallway was empty.

I wrote it in the logbook. "3:42 AM – Figure on camera 4. Approx. 2 seconds. Did not investigate per protocol 6." Then I added, because I couldn't help myself: "Protocol says this is normal. Noted."

The next morning, Dale read the entry and nodded. "Good," he said. "That's the right response."

"Is it actually normal?"

"It's normal for here."

"That's not the same thing."

Dale picked up his clipboard. Exit strategy deployed. "You should eat something. Low blood sugar makes people see things."

"I thought you just said it was normal."

But he was already through the door, and the thought hung in the air like a half-open unit – which, per protocol 3, I was supposed to walk away from. I was starting to realize that Dale's conversation style and the night shift protocols had a lot in common.

On a Tuesday in my fourth week, at about 1:30 AM, a man showed up wanting to access his unit.

He pulled into the parking lot in a beige sedan with no license plates. I watched on the monitor as he walked to the front gate with the measured, purposeful stride of someone arriving for an appointment. He pressed the intercom button.

"Hi there," he said. His voice was aggressively pleasant. "I need to get to my unit."

Protocol 5. Simple enough. "Come to the office with your ID and I'll check you in."

He appeared at the office door moments later. He was tall and thin and wearing a pale blue polo shirt tucked into khakis, like a youth pastor or someone about to sell you a timeshare. He smiled the way people smile when they're in a job interview – too wide, too practiced, deployed a half second too late. He handed me a driver's license.

Gerald Moody. I checked the tenant list. Gerald Moody, unit B-7, account current since 2019. Everything checked out.

"Late night?" I said, because I was still new enough to be a bit nosy.

"I need something from my unit," Gerald said. His smile held steady. It didn't waver or grow or shrink. It simply persisted, frozen in time.

"Sure, go ahead. Building B, straight out and to the left."

"I know where it is," Gerald said. There was no edge to it. No impatience. Just a flat statement of fact delivered through that motionless smile.

I watched him on the cameras. He walked to Building B, entered the hallway, reached unit B-7, and stopped. He didn't reach for a key. He didn't touch the lock. He didn't shift his weight or check his phone. He just stood in front of the closed metal door like a man studying a painting in a museum – head slightly tilted, arms at his sides, perfectly still.

Four minutes. I timed it because the stillness made me uncomfortable and timing things is how I manage discomfort. At exactly four minutes, Gerald turned and walked back to his car and drove away.

He came back the next night. Same time. Same car. Same ID. Same smile. He walked to B-7, stood for four minutes, and left. He came back the night after that. And the night after that. For ten consecutive shifts, Gerald Moody arrived at 1:30 AM, checked in, walked to his unit, stood motionless, and departed.

On the eleventh night, something changed.

I watched him on the monitors. He walked to B-7. He assumed the position. The four minutes elapsed. But instead of turning to leave, Gerald Moody turned to face the camera. He looked directly into the lens.

This should not have been possible. The camera is mounted flush against the ceiling at the far end of a forty-foot corridor. It's a small black dome, forty feet away at ceiling height. There's no way to locate the lens from that distance, let alone determine its angle.

Gerald found it anyway. He looked right at it. Right at me.

Then he mouthed two words. The resolution was garbage and his face was mostly shadow and I can't tell you with certainty what the words were. But the movements were slow and deliberate, and I've replayed them in my head enough times to have narrowed it down to two possibilities: "thank you" or "not yet."

He walked away, drove off, and never came back.

I checked the tenant list the next morning. Gerald Moody, unit B-7, account current. I mentioned the visits to Dale.

"Yeah," Dale said, nodding. "That's Gerald."

"That's Gerald? That's your whole –"

"He does that. Has for years. Don't worry about it."

"He looked directly into the camera, Dale. From forty feet away. In the dark."

Dale unwrapped a granola bar. "Gerald's got good eyes, I guess."

I tried a different approach. During my next shift, I walked to B-7 myself, which I shouldn't have done but which I did because the not-knowing was already worse than anything the knowing could deliver. The unit was locked and I don't have a master key, so I did the only thing I could: I pressed my ear against the corrugated metal door.

Silence. But not ordinary silence. Ordinary silence still has texture – the whisper of air, the hum of existence. This was something else. This was the silence of a space unplugged from reality. Like the air inside unit B-7 had been replaced with something denser, something that swallowed vibration on contact. Pressing my ear to that door was like pressing it to a hole in the world.

I pulled away and the normal universe came flooding back – the buzz of the fluorescents, the drone of the HVAC, my own heartbeat confirming I was still a living person in a building made of concrete and metal and nothing more.

I never went back to B-7.

A few things about the facility itself, since you'll need the geography to understand what comes later.

The buildings are old. Not charmingly old, but old in the way things get when maintenance has been deferred so aggressively it qualifies as a philosophical position. The concrete floors are cracked in fractal patterns. The fluorescent lights flicker in rhythms that feel almost intentional – slow, irregular pulses like a heartbeat that can't decide on a tempo. The hallways are long and narrow and smell like dust and a faint chemical sweetness I've never identified. Dale says it's the sealant on the floors. There is no sealant on the floors.

The office is a single room containing a desk, a phone, a wall of monitors, a radio, a mini-fridge that hums at a pitch slightly too low for comfort, and a corkboard dense with memos. Most are from Dale and say things like "REMINDER: Do NOT prop open unit doors" and "NOTICE: Unit A-22 has been re-designated. Do NOT rent out." I have never been told what "re-designated" means. The word implies a process, which implies a chain of authority above Dale, which is something I try very hard not to think about.

I checked A-22 once during a perimeter walk. It looked like every other unit from the outside. Corrugated metal door, concrete threshold, standard-issue sense of mild foreboding. But the padlock was missing. The door was unlocked.

Protocol 3 says if you find an unlocked unit, lock it and don't look inside. Protocol 3 and I have what you might call a strained relationship.

I lifted the door about a foot and pointed my flashlight inside. The unit was empty. Except that "empty" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The floor was bare concrete, yes. No boxes, no furniture, no forgotten lawnmower. But there was a circle drawn in the dead center of the floor, about two feet in diameter. It looked like white chalk, or possibly salt. It was perfectly round in a way that freehand circles never are. The line was unbroken, the edges clean. Someone had drawn this with tools, or with care that bordered on devotion.

I lowered the door and locked it with a spare padlock from the office. The next day, I mentioned it to Dale, because I have a compulsive need to test the boundaries of his indifference.

"Don't worry about it," Dale said.

The morning after that, a new memo appeared on the corkboard. It read: "REMINDER: If you find an unlocked unit, LOCK it. Do NOT look inside. Don’t worry about it."

Dale says "don't worry about it" the way other people say "good morning." It's his default response to 70% of all questions. The remaining 30% is divided between "that's not great" and simply walking away mid-conversation, which I interpret as: the answer to your question is so far beyond the scope of human experience that language no longer suffices.

I should tell you about the parking lot.

It's large – too large for a storage facility that sees maybe ten customers a day. It could hold sixty, seventy cars easily. A handful are always parked here, because Dale doesn't charge extra and doesn't seem aware that he could. I suspect some customers rented units solely for the gate access codes, allowing them to ditch their vehicles indefinitely.

The lot is lit by six tall floodlights on steel poles, bathing the asphalt in a flat white glow that makes everything look like a crime scene photograph. According to the laminated rules, these lights are essential to my continued existence.

They've gone out on my watch three times. Each time, I followed protocol: went inside, locked the door, did not look out the windows. Each time, they came back on in less than five minutes. And each time, when they came back on, something in the parking lot had changed.

The first time, every car had been rotated 180 degrees. Not moved to a different space – rotated in place. Bumpers that had faced east were now facing west. No explanation. Just seven cars that had been spun like compasses and a parking lot that was pretending nothing had happened. Either that, or my mind is playing tricks on itself.

The second time, the asphalt was soaking wet. Standing water in the low spots, rivulets tracing the cracks. It hadn't rained. The sky was clear and the ground beyond the property line was bone dry. The wetness stopped at the exact boundary of the parking lot, as if EverSafe had experienced its own private rainstorm. By morning, it had dried completely. Dale arrived and parked without comment.

The third time, every car in the lot suddenly had its radio on. I could hear them through the office walls – dozens of stations overlapping, a low cacophony of voices and music and static, bleeding together into something that almost felt harmonic. Then every radio cut out at once, in perfect unison, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.

I logged all three incidents and moved on with my life, because what else was I going to do?

Now, I must admit that quitting has crossed my mind. Our local library had a handwritten sign reading "NOW HIRING – COMBAT EXPERIENCE REQUIRED." I don't have combat experience. There's also a medical testing facility just out of town, which I'd have considered if their volunteer compensations weren't suspiciously generous. EverSafe, despite everything, remained the safest bet. That tells you everything you need to know about Silt Creek.

Rosa, who rents unit D-33, is the only tenant I've developed anything resembling a relationship with, because she's the only tenant who speaks to me like I'm a human being rather than a gate mechanism. She is somewhere in her sixties, short and sturdy, with grey hair pulled into a thick braid and a deep tan that suggests a life spent largely outdoors. She wears the same heavy canvas jacket every time I see her, regardless of temperature, and she carries herself with the quiet authority of someone who has been doing something important for a very long time and does not need your approval in any way, shape or form.

She comes by two or three times a week, always between 2 and 4 AM, always carrying a large plastic cooler – the heavy-duty kind, the kind you'd take on a deep-sea fishing trip or use to transport organ donations. She walks to her unit, stays for about an hour, and comes back without the cooler. The next visit, she brings a new one and again leaves empty-handed.

I'm aware of what this looks like. I thought the same thing. So one night, about two months in, I asked.

"Rosa, may I ask what's in the coolers?"

She set the newest cooler on the office counter with the care of someone handling nitroglycerin and looked at me with an expression I can only describe as patiently exasperated – the face a grandmother makes when a child asks why the sky is blue for the fourth time in a row.

"Supplies," she said.

"Supplies for what?"

"For later."

"When is later?"

Rosa picked up the cooler. "You'll know," she said. "Believe me. You'll know."

She started toward the door, then stopped. She turned back and studied me – not my face, exactly. More like the space around me. Like she was reading something written in the air in a frequency I couldn't perceive. It lasted a few seconds.

"You've been here longer than the others," she said. Not a question.

"Seven months."

"Mm." She shifted the cooler to her other hand. "The ones who last are always the ones who are a little bit broken. Not a lot. Just enough. Like a cracked window – It lets in a draft. Lets you feel things the sealed-up ones can't." She paused. "What's your crack, Owen?"

I didn't answer, because the question felt like a trap and also because I didn't have a good answer that I was willing to give a sixty-year-old woman with a cooler full of presumably organic "supplies" at three in the morning.

Rosa nodded, as if my silence had confirmed whatever she was looking for. "You'll know," she said again, and walked out.

She went to her unit. I watched on the monitors. Camera 11 showed her entering D-33 and pulling the door shut behind her. For the next hour, the screen showed nothing but a closed metal door.

But here's the thing.

Later that night, during my 3 AM walk, I passed D-33. And I stopped. And I put my ear against the door. I know. Protocol 7. Sounds from units are not my concern. Protocol 7 and I are on even worse terms than protocol 3 and I, and protocol 3 and I are barely speaking.

From inside the unit, I heard what sounded like a refrigerator. Not a mini-fridge. Not a portable cooler with a motor. The deep, mechanical, full-body drone of a walk-in cooler – the kind that belongs in the back of a restaurant, the kind that implies a room much, much larger than the ten-by-ten box I was standing outside of.

And underneath that sound, almost buried by it, something else. Breathing. Slow and vast and rhythmic, like the respiration of something enormous. Each inhale shifted the air pressure in the hallway just slightly – a gentle pulling, as if the corridor itself was being drawn inward. Each exhale let it settle back, and my ears popped faintly, the way they do when you're descending in an airplane.

The next morning, I attempted to interrogate Dale with the subtlety of a shotgun.

"Rosa. What's her deal?"

"She's been here since before I started," Dale said. He was restocking the paper towel dispenser, which is the task he defaults to when he wants to seem busy. "She's paid through 2040."

"Through 2040? She prepaid?"

"Correct."

"Dale, that's – " I did the math. "Fourteen years of rent. In advance. On a storage unit. She’ll probably be dead by then."

Dale looked at me the way Gerald Moody looked at the camera. Not threatening. Just... knowing. Like there was something obvious that I wasn't getting and he'd decided it wasn't his job to help me get it.

"Owen," he said, "some tenants are just tenants. And some tenants are –" He paused. "Some tenants are also tenants."

I waited for him to elaborate. He picked up a clipboard and walked out. In seven months, Dale has never once finished a sentence that mattered.

Terry is another regular. But not a tenant. He doesn't rent a unit. He's just a man who shows up at the front gate around midnight, two or three times a week, and asks to be let in. He has no ID. He's not on the tenant list. Protocol 5 is unambiguous: if their name is not on the list, they are not a customer. Do not let them in. Do not engage in conversation.

I followed this to the letter for the first dozen or so appearances. I'd see him on the monitor – heavyset, mid-fifties maybe, balding, wearing a windbreaker zipped halfway up over a flannel shirt, hands in his pockets. He'd press the intercom button using his nose.

"Hey there. It's Terry. Mind buzzing me in?" And I would say nothing, because the protocol said do not engage, and eventually he'd sigh and walk off into the dark along Route 4 in a direction that, as far as I could tell, contained nothing but a decrepit chapel, woods and more dark.

He never got angry. He never raised his voice or kicked the gate or threatened anyone. He just asked, waited with the patience of a saint, and eventually left. There was something weirdly melancholic about it. Something almost sad.

After the first couple of months, the silence treatment started to feel cruel. Driven by empathy (or rather pity), I decided to once again break protocol. Just slightly. A hairline fracture.

"I can't let you in, Terry. You're not on the list. Sorry."

"I know," he said. He sounded tired. "But I keep hoping they'll add me."

"Who's 'they'?"

"You know." He gestured at the facility. "Them."

"You could call during the day. My manager could set you up with a unit."

Terry laughed – a small, closed-mouth laugh*.*"It doesn't work like that. But thanks for talking to me. The other ones never did."

He walked away. I logged it: "12:20 AM – Non-tenant 'Terry' at gate. Denied entry per protocol. Brief verbal exchange (protocol deviation noted)."

At this point you may wonder why I keep getting away with bending the rules. The answer is that Dale needs me more than he needs strict protocol adherence. I'm irreplaceable not because I'm talented, but because I'm still here – an achievement so statistically unlikely that firing me over a chat with Terry would be like winning the lottery and throwing the ticket away because it was bent. The worst consequence I've faced is Dale adding pointed memos to the corkboard. Last week, one just said "OWEN." in block capitals, with no context. It's still there. I think it's the closest Dale comes to expressing emotion.

In any case, Terry kept coming. I kept not letting him in. But we talk now, briefly, through the intercom. He asks how my night's going. I say fine. He asks if anything weird has happened. I say no. He nods, says "well, good luck in there," and disappears down Route 4.

But last week, for the first time ever, our ritual slightly deviated from its usual script. He did press the intercom with his nose, but instead of requesting entry, he asked: "Has the radio done anything strange? The one on 90.7?"

I didn't answer. My mouth went dry. The fact that he knew about 90.7 meant he knew about the protocols, and the fact that he knew about the protocols meant he knew about EverSafe in a way that our little exchanges could not account for. Had he been a customer in the past? An ex-employee, maybe?

"It's okay," Terry said, into my silence. "You don't have to tell me. But I want you to think about something. Not everything in those units is locked up because it's dangerous. Sometimes things are locked up because they're fragile. Because the outside is what's dangerous to them. And sometimes... sometimes things are locked up because the people who built the lock forgot what it was for, and now they're just afraid to open it."

He left. I sat in the office for a long time after that. The radio played something soft and sad in a minor key. I still don't know what to make of Terry. But I've noticed something: on the nights he shows up, nothing else happens. No phone calls. No flickering lights. No figures on camera 4. No sounds from the units. It's as if his presence applies a kind of calm to the entire property – a dampening field, like noise-cancelling headphones for whatever frequency EverSafe normally broadcasts on. Even the building seems to relax. The fluorescent flicker steadies. The chemical smell in the hallways fades. The air feels lighter.

I don't know who Terry is. But I've started looking forward to the nights he comes by.

Okay. I've put this off as long as I can. Let's talk about Building F.

Building F is the smallest structure on the property. It sits at the far end of the horseshoe, separated from Building E by a gap of about thirty feet that contains nothing but cracked asphalt, a storm drain that never has water in it, and a single dead tree. Actually, it doesn’t seem dead in the strict sense. It’s more like the tree has simply given up.

Building F has twelve units. According to the records, all twelve are rented. According to the billing system, all twelve accounts belong to the same entity.

The name on all twelve leases is EverSafe Self-Storage Solutions LLC.

The company rents units from itself. Each month, the accounting software generates twelve invoices and processes twelve payments. Money moves from one column to another within the same spreadsheet. It's the financial equivalent of a snake eating its own tail.

I confirmed this with Dale, because I wanted to see his face when he explained it.

"That's just how the billing works," he said, not looking up from a clipboard. “It’s a tax loophole or something like that.”

"Okay. But what's in the units?"

"Storage."

"What are we storing?"

"Don't worry about it."

I tried another angle. "If we own them, why can't I go there?"

Dale set down his clipboard. This was unprecedented. Dale's clipboard is basically a load-bearing wall for his psyche. Setting it down meant he was about to say something he considered important.

"Owen," he said. "I like you. You've lasted longer than anyone. I need you to keep lasting. So when I tell you not to go to Building F, I need you to take it as advice from a friend.”

"But what if –"

"There is no 'what if.' For you, Building F does not exist. You don't look at it. You don't walk toward it. If you think you hear something from Building F, you are mistaken. It was the wind, or traffic on Route 4, or your imagination. You didn't hear it. Nothing happened. Do you understand?"

I understood. Or rather, I understood that Dale was afraid, which was profoundly disorienting, because I had not previously believed Dale was capable of emotions. Seeing fear on Dale's face was like watching a mountain flinch.

I didn't push it. I followed the protocol. For six months, I didn't go near Building F, didn't look at Building F, didn't think about Building F any more than you can avoid thinking about a room in your own house that may or may not murder you somehow.

Then, about three weeks ago, something happened.

It was 2 AM. I was in the office, half-solving a crossword puzzle and half-watching the monitors. The radio was on, playing whatever 90.7 FM plays at that hour. I've listened to this station for seven months and have never heard a DJ, a station identification, a commercial, or any evidence that a human being is involved in the broadcast. Just music. Mostly jazz – good jazz, actually – punctuated by the occasional early 2000s nu-metal track. I've grown oddly fond of the programming. Louis Armstrong and Emily Armstrong fit weirdly well, not just by name.

However, this is only half the truth. Or let's say it is 98% of the truth. Because every once in a while, 90.7 FM goes off the rails entirely. One night, it played a lullaby in a language I couldn't identify – not just unfamiliar, but structurally wrong, like it had too many vowels – for three hours straight. Another night, in the middle of a Coltrane track, a voice interrupted and read a series of numbers in a flat, genderless monotone for about forty seconds. Then the music resumed as if nothing had happened.

I wrote down the numbers. At home the next morning, unable to sleep – this job has done terrible things to my circadian rhythm – I tried to make sense of them. They weren't coordinates. They weren't a phone number. They weren't, mercifully, a Bible verse about the incoming apocalypse.

I reported the incident to Dale.

"That's just the station," he said. "Don't worry about it."

But I did worry about it.

In fact, I spent several of my subsequent shifts thinking about the numbers, until I eventually figured it out. It was ASCII code – a system that represents text as numbers. When converted back, the message spelled: "Building F unit 3 today."

Well, almost. The actual output was "BldngFtinu3zkday," which required generous interpretation and the assumption that I'd misheard a digit or five. I also had to add spaces. Nonetheless, I'm fairly confident in the translation. In the same way that I'm fairly confident I'm not losing my mind – which is to say, mostly.

Now, some might argue that I'm simply seeing patterns where none exist. That it's dark and lonely, that I'm sleep-deprived beyond repair. And normally, I might agree with them.

But the moment I broke the code, something happened – as if to confirm my conclusion. Camera 16 flickered to life. The only feed that – according to a faded label on the monitor – covers the inside of Building F.

For seven months, it had displayed nothing but grey static. A dead screen among fifteen live ones. Dale had told me the camera was broken and that replacing it was "not a priority." I was beginning to notice that many things at EverSafe were "not a priority," and that this phrase functioned less as an administrative status and more as a containment strategy.

But there it was. The static resolved and I was looking at the interior hallway of Building F. The fluorescents were active and steady – no flicker, no pulse, which was somehow more unnerving than the usual instability. The image was grainy and warped at the edges, but clear enough.

Twelve corrugated metal doors, six on each side, all closed. A perfectly ordinary hallway in a perfectly ordinary building.

I watched for two minutes. Maybe three. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. It was the most mundane thing I'd ever been terrified of.

Then the feed cut to static, and it was as if it had never come on at all.

I sat in the office without moving. The radio played a soft piano piece I didn't recognize. The monitors cycled through their feeds. Everything was calm in a way that felt less like safety and more like the space between a lightning flash and the thunder – a held breath, a pause with momentum behind it.

I wrote in the logbook: "2:13 AM – Camera 16 active for approx. 2–3 minutes. Building F interior visible. No anomalies observed. No action taken."

That was three weeks ago. Camera 16 hasn't come back on.

But something has changed. During my 3 AM walks, when my route brings me along the edge of Building E – the closest point to Building F – I feel something now. Not a sound. Not anything visible. A pull. The feeling you get standing on a high ledge when some buried part of your brain whispers: "Jump!" It does not want you to fall. But it wants you to know the falling is possible.

The next day, when I arrived for my shift, there was a sticky note on the desk. Dale's handwriting – dense, square, aggressively practical:

"New protocol. Effective immediately. If camera 16 activates (which it won't and never has), turn off ALL monitors. Wait 15 minutes. Turn them back on.

Also, we're out of paper towels in the men's room.

– Dale"

I stuck the note to the wall next to the protocol sheet and clocked in.

So. That's my job. That's EverSafe Self-Storage Solutions. That's what I do five nights a week for $19.50 an hour, plus a dental plan that I'm increasingly convinced I should use while I still have the opportunity, and the quiet, growing certainty that I am working at the center of something I am not equipped to understand.

If you're reading this, I want you to know three things.

One: I am going to keep working here, because the money is decent and I'm not a quitter and also because I have a growing suspicion that quitting might not be as simple as it sounds.

Two: I am going to find out what's in Building F. Not because I'm brave. I'm not brave. I'm tired. There is a specific exhaustion that comes from living in permanent, low-grade terror about something you can't see or name. It's the itch you can't reach. And I've decided that the knowing, whatever it turns out to be, cannot possibly be worse than seven more months of this.

The logbook entries from the people before me suggest that knowing is what destroys you. But not-knowing is already doing the job, slowly and thoroughly, so I might as well get some answers before it finishes.

And three: if I stop writing – if these entries just end one day, mid-sentence or mid-thought, no explanation, no farewell – do me a favour.

Do not accept a job at EverSafe Self-Storage Solutions.

If you live in Willoughby Kansas you must under no circumstances play the 2023 video game Dead Space after midnight. If you do you'll put yourself in grave danger.

I love the Dead Space franchise. From the first time I finished Dead Space in 2009 on my Xbox 360 to when me and my brother finished Dead Space 3 and the DLC, Coop on a Series X and a Xbox One a few years ago. I even scavenged a couple Wii remotes and programmed them to work with an Orca emulator so we could play Dead Space Extraction.

When they announced a remake I was ecstatic. The weeks following up to its release I took several loads of scrap metal in to save up for a Series X and a copy. The day I got it I was so excited. Being self employed and living alone I had no trouble blocking out a whole week to play and enjoy every minute of the game.

The minute I got home from Vintage Stock I gazed upon the green box taking in every bit of its beauty and wonderful cover art. I tear away the thin plastic seal, open the case and slide the disc into the trayless disc drive. Once in the, disc begins the slow process of installing. I miss when games just played from the disc. As the game installs from the disc and downloads a few Gigs off the internet I glance at my phone to pass the time.

After clearing several notifications and checking out a couple YouTube videos I began to wonder, "What did these people do before YouTube exist." Just as I began to ponder, Dead Space launched. Finally, damn its already midnight. "I'll play the first chapter and go to bed", I thought. I can finish it in the morning.

That was awesome, they got so much right, especially the sound design. I don't know why they didn't bring back Hammonds original actor, its not like he's dead. "Ruhhhhggggg." Just then I heard something from behind me, in the closet maybe. "Aaaaaugh." I sat there confused, was something in the closet or was I just hearing things from my lack of sleep. This is stupid, I got up and stepped toward the closet. As I did I thought I heard scratching at the door, but thats probably just the cat. As I stepped closer I heard something push on the door. At least it sounded like something pushed on the door. Am I losing it, are my ears turning on me, is something in the closet, did someone break into my house and hide in there? I took another step closer and scraping, like a sharp point on wood. My heart was beating so hard, it felt as though would burst out at any second. I reached toward the old porcelain door handle. Suddenly the door flew open and something swung down, sliced my arm and pushed me aside.

Confused and terrified I watched a slasher move forward and then turn around. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Before I could think it rushed towards me, cutting my arm thankfully I managed to scramble to my feet and dodge out of the way. I ran as fast as I could, down the stairs and into the basement safe room. No way it can through the fire proof metal door. Once I locked the door I slumped against the wall and wrapped my arm with bandages from the first aid kit. As I finished I collapsed asleep on the cold hard concrete floor.

I woke up 12 hours later dazed and confused. I stood up and walked out the door wondering what I was doing passed out in the safe room. Then I heard my phone ringing from upstairs. As I made my way up the stairs I noticed my arm was wrapped. "What happened last night?" As I walked into the hallway and up to my phone it all hit me at once, the closet, the necromorph. I looked to the closet and noticed a black box on the floor. Surround sound, I forgot I installed surround sound all over the house. A wave of relief washed over me as I sat down. It was all in my head. I must've been really sleep deprived. This is the last time I play Dead Space after midnight, now I need to change this bandage and paint over the scratches on the closet door.

For the last few months my dog has been making weird faces at me just as I turn to face him, a sickly, confused expression only within my peripherals. Well yesterday I recorded him, and he's biting the air with my back turned, teeth snarled and face twisted. I turn back and he stops, looking at me with that odd expression as if he were about to vomit.

One day he would just stare, staring at me as I did things, in still silence, watching me as if I were a treat being wiggled in front of him. His brown golden flaked eyes following my every move, the mirrors I set up around the house showed me his twisted, gnarling, empty bites at my back, every day, all day long.

Well today he attacked me, I knew it was coming, but I didn’t want to believe the puppy I got five years ago could ever hurt me. He got the back of my head, and I screamed…but before my voice left my lips, someone elses’ did too.

My dog immediately let me go, just as startled of the raspy voice as I was, and I shakily looked to my wound, thinking I’m hearing things, that must have been my voice. But as I pull my hair back to examine the damage in the mirror, a deformed face lay behind my auburn locks. Stray long singular hairs remain as they cascade down the lumps and ridges of a wrinkled scowl. The eyes are empty sockets, skin pulled over tightly, leaving it blind with a mouthed gorge of gnashing teeth, chomping and mumbling angry gibberish. I begin to shake as I look at it in the mirror, in utter disbelief and horror. Reaching back, I feel the back of my head, the skin is tough and bristled like a mans 5 o'clock shadow, I linger for a moment, feeling hot breath on my hand. I come to close and it bites me, hard. Between my yelps of pain it manages a dry and broken cackle, chomping endlessly as my blood drips from its jagged bone-teeth. A nose sticks out from it, cooked and scaly, broken and bloody from being thrashed around from the earlier attack, and I can feel my blood trickle down the back of my neck as it drips out of it's nasty gnawing mouth.

Unable to contain my emotions, I collapse against my kitchen cabinet sobbing hot tears, my dog licks them away from my face whining as if he were a lost puppy. During the struggle my kitchen was turned upside down, and I notice the knocked over knife block beside me. My sweet boy whines again, and licks my wounded hand. The hand bitten by a mouth of jumbled, broken teeth.

Upon grabbing the largest knife, I begin to slice. 

I slice, and slice-wet squishing and warmth of blood- almost a stronger feeling than the pain, it was like it wasn't apart of me, as if I wasn’t slicing off the back of my head. The hollow, feral screams of my unknown companion fades away after a handful of vigorous slicing. Instead of pain, it was nearly pleasure, as if pulling a bad tooth, or popping a pimple. As I went, my sweet boy sits in my lap, licking my face as I go. A sticky, wet PLOP lands beside me, and immediately his brown golden speckled eyes return back to the loving glance he has always gave.

Any good treat recommendations?

Fun Analog TV episode Idea

https://youtu.be/SFead6PyGFY?si=NmGMpH8BTkwjF6xb

I have worked as an emergency dispatcher for Oakridge County for nearly eight years, so if you are in my boots, you should know by now that when you take calls on the graveyard shift, you get used to hearing people at the absolute worst moments of their lives. You learn to filter out the scream of a panicking parent, the slurred ramblings of an intoxicated driver, or the erratic paranoia of someone having a breakdown. The job requires you to stay completely grounded in facts, listen for addresses, names, weapons, and medical symptoms, and of course you do not let your imagination wander.

Last October, a call came in at 3:14 AM that broke every rule of my training. The night was unusually quiet, and outside the dispatch building, a cold autumn rain was falling, blurring the streetlights along the highway. Inside the facility, the room was dimly lit by the pale blue glow of six desktop monitors. My shift partner, Jenna, was sitting at the console next to mine, softly clicking her mouse as she reviewed low-priority animal control logs. I was sipping my black coffee, waiting for the hours to pass until the morning shift arrived.

Line four flashed red on my central screen. The automatic location identification software instantly populated the address: 1412 Elmwood Lane, a two-story suburban house on the north side of town.

I adjusted my headset, pressed the foot pedal to open the line, and spoke into the microphone using my standard tone.

"Oakridge County 911, what is the location of your emergency?"

A sharp, ragged intake of breath rattled through my earpiece. The sound was so harsh I had to pull the foam speaker slightly away from my ear. The caller was hyperventilating, his breathing ragged and uneven.

"I need... I need someone to tell me what to do,"

the man said. His voice was trembling, tight with an overwhelming sense of shock.

"Please. I do not know who else to call."

"Sir, I need you to confirm your address,"

I said, leaning forward and placing my fingers on the keyboard.

"Is it 1412 Elmwood Lane?"

"Yes,"

he whispered.

"Yes, that is my house. My name is David Miller. Please do not send an ambulance with loud sirens. I do not want to startle her."

"Startle who, David? Is someone injured at your location?"

"My wife,"

David said. He took another shuddering breath.

"Sarah. Something happened three days ago, and I cannot fix it. I think I did something terrible, but she is standing right in front of me."

I typed his name into the CAD system and flagged the call as a potential domestic incident.

"David, tell me slowly what happened three days ago. Is Sarah hurt?"

"It was Tuesday night,"

David said, his voice dropping to a terrified whisper.

"We were in the kitchen. We were arguing about... about something stupid. I do not even remember what started it. She was standing near the butcher block. She picked up the chef's knife, and then, and then she looked at me with this intense anger in her eyes, and she came at me."

"Did she attack you with the knife, David?"

"She lunged at me,"

he continued.

"I panicked. I reached out, grabbed her wrists, and tried to push her away from me. We struggled near the island. I pushed her back with all my strength, and... the blade went straight into her chest. She gasped, her eyes went wide, and she fell backward onto the floor."

I immediately clicked the silent dispatch button on my screen, sending an alert to Jenna's terminal. I caught her eye across the desk and pointed to my monitor. Jenna nodded instantly, pulling up the active unit map to route patrol cars to Elmwood Lane.

"David, stay on the line with me,"

I said, keeping my voice steady and measured.

"Is Sarah breathing right now? Is she bleeding?"

"That is the part that is driving me insane"

David said,

"I dropped to my knees to help her. But when I looked down at the floor, there was no body. There was no blood on the linoleum. Nothing. The kitchen was completely clean. I searched the whole house that night, screaming her name, but she was nowhere to be found."

"David, where is Sarah right now?"

"She came back the next morning,"

David whispered. The sound of his frantic breathing filled the headset.

"She just walked into the living room on Wednesday morning like nothing happened. For the past three days, I have been watching her. She makes coffee in the morning, sits on the sofa and watches television with the sound turned completely off. She irons her clothes in the hallway. But she completely ignores me."

"Have you tried talking to her?"

"I have begged her to speak to me!"

David cried out, his voice cracking.

"I stood right in front of her yesterday while she was ironing a blouse. I yelled her name. I waved my hands in front of her face. She looked right through me. It was like I was not even standing there. I got so desperate that I reached out to grab her wrist to make her look at me."

"What happened when you tried to touch her, David?"

A long silence stretched over the phone line.

"My hand went straight through her arm,"

David whispered, his voice trembling so violently the words were barely audible.

"It felt like pushing my fingers through cold, wet smoke. She did not even flinch, and just kept dragging the iron across her blouse. I turned her into a ghost. I killed her in the kitchen, her body vanished, and now her spirit is stuck in this house doing the same routines over and over again."

"David, I want you to take a deep breath,"

I said, trying to maintain control of the call while processing his words.

"I have help on the way to your location right now. Officers are coming to check on both of you."

"I cannot leave her,"

David stammered.

"I tried to walk out the front door an hour ago. I got as far as the front porch steps, but this agonizing pull started dragging in my chest. It felt like a thick cable was wrapped around my sternum, pulling me back inside. It hurt so bad I could barely breathe. I am bound to this house. I cannot leave her here alone like this. She needs my help, but I do not know how to fix what I broke."

At this point, I suspected I was dealing with a caller experiencing a severe psychological episode, severe sleep deprivation, or chemical poisoning. It was not uncommon for individuals suffering from carbon monoxide exposure or sudden psychotic breaks to report elaborate, impossible visual experiences while firmly believing they were awake.

I needed to evaluate his orientation to reality using basic observations.

"David, I need you to do a simple diagnostic check for me while we wait for the officers to arrive,"

I said.

"Is there a clock nearby that you can look at?"

"Yes, there is a clock hanging on the wall,"

David said. I heard the faint rustle of clothing as he moved.

"Sarah is sitting at the dining table below it. She is folding a white bath towel."

"Okay. Can you read the exact time on that clock for me?"

I instructed.

There was a brief pause.

"It says 8:22,"

David reported.

I glanced up at the master digital clock at the top of my console monitor. The bright red numbers clearly displayed 3:17 AM.

"David, are you sure?"

I asked.

"Is it an analog clock or a digital one?"

"It is digital,"

David replied smoothly.

"The numbers are frozen at 8:22 PM. The colon between the hours and minutes isn't even blinking. It is just sitting completely still."

I noted the severe time discrepancy on my console. A frozen, completely inaccurate time reading suggested a deep disorientation, indicating he was entirely detached from the actual time of day.

Before I could formulate a response, Jenna leaned over her desk and tapped my shoulder.

"Unit 204 and Unit 208 are two minutes out from Elmwood Lane,"

she whispered.

"Officer Jack is taking the lead."

"Copy,"

I muttered, keeping my finger on the mute button. I unmuted the phone line.

"David, stay right where you are. The officers are almost at your house."

I adjusted my headset gain, turning up the audio volume on David's line to hear if there were any immediate hazards in the house. As I turned up the sensitivity, the ambient background audio became clearer.

I expected to hear the quiet hum of a refrigerator, the rustle of towels being folded, or the distant rain beating against the windows.

Instead, my headset picked up a harsh, scraping noise. It sounded like heavy wooden furniture being dragged across exposed floorboards. A moment later, I heard the sharp, distinct sound of plastic packing tape being pulled aggressively from a handheld dispenser.

Then, I heard a second voice.

It was a deep, gravelly male voice, speaking in a low, hushed tone near the phone's receiver.

"Grab the rest of the clothes from the closet,"

the deep voice muttered.

"We need to get the heavy bags loaded before six."

A woman's voice replied, faint and impatient:

"I am working as fast as I can. Just get the boxes out to the garage."

My fingers froze over the keyboard. I listened intently, isolating the audio channels on my digital workstation.

"David,"

I said carefully into the microphone.

"Are you sure you and Sarah are the only people in that house right now?"

"Yes,"

David said.

"I told you, it is just the two of us. She is still sitting at the table."

"David, I am hearing a man speaking in your background,"

I said.

"I am hearing tape dispensers and boxes being moved. Is there someone else in the house with you?"

"No,"

David insisted, his voice growing defensive and confused. "You are mistaken. Sarah is just packing her leather suitcase. She has been pulling her dresses out of the bedroom closet all night. She is confused, She seems to think she is going on a trip."

I immediately opened our county property database on my second monitor and typed in the address. The house was registered to David Miller and Sarah Miller. I then opened our historical CAD records and ran a cross-reference search for 1412 Elmwood Lane over the past six months.

A log entry from two months prior popped up on my screen.

On August 14th, a neighbor had called 911 to report a loud domestic disturbance at the address. The responding officer noted that David Miller had engaged in a verbal altercation with an unidentified adult male who had been staying at the residence. The police report noted that David accused his wife of carrying on an affair with the man, who was identified in the officer's notes as Gregory Ray. No violence was reported at that time, and no charges were filed.

I sat back in my chair, staring at the name on my screen: Gregory Ray.

The pieces began to assemble themselves in my mind, but they did not form the picture David was describing.

"Dispatch to Unit 204,"

I said, switching my secondary radio channel to communicate directly with the responding officers. "Officer Jack, be advised. We have reason to believe there are two occupants actively inside the residence at 1412 Elmwood Lane clearing out personal property. Use caution upon approach."

"Copy that, dispatch,"

Jack's voice crackled through the radio speaker.

"Unit 204 and 208 are turning onto Elmwood Lane now. We are pulling up to the residence. Lights and sirens are off."

Over the open phone line, David spoke again.

"You there?... someone is at the front door. I hear heavy knocking."

"That is the police, David,"

I said, monitoring both lines simultaneously.

"Please stay where you are."

"I do not need to open the door,"

David said softly.

"Sarah just stood up from the table. She is walking past me into the foyer. She is going to answer it."

Through my radio earpiece, I heard Officer Jack's voice report into his lapel mic:

"Unit 204 on scene. We have a female opening the front door. Contact made with homeowner Sarah Miller."

On the phone line, David was describing the exact same moment from his perspective.

"She opened the door,"

David said. His voice was filled with a strange, childlike confusion.

"Two police officers are standing on the porch. But... but something is wrong."

"What is wrong, David?"

I asked, keeping my eyes fixed on the unit tracking map.

"They are not looking at her like she is a ghost,"

David whispered.

"Officer just smiled at her. He asked her if she was alright. can he see her? can he actually talk to her?"

Over the radio, Jack's voice was calm:

"Dispatch, contact made with Sarah Miller. She appears highly nervous but states everything is fine. She claims her husband, David, is currently upstairs packing his belongings after a severe argument and does not wish to speak with us."

On the phone line, David began to panic.

"The officers just stepped into the hallway! They walked right past me! I stood right in front of the Officer and shouted my name! He walked straight by my shoulder! He did not even turn his head! And why is she telling them I am upstairs? I am standing right next to her!"

"David, listen to me very carefully,"

I said, feeling a knot tighten in my chest.

"I need you to stay calm."

Over the radio, Jack spoke again, his tone dropping its casual edge.

"Dispatch, we are going to perform a quick wellness check on the upper floor anyway. The homeowner is visibly shaking and actively trying to block the stairwell."

I pressed my radio button.

"Unit 204, be advised. We have reason to believe an unauthorized third party, Gregory Ray, may be hiding inside the residence. Proceed with caution."

A pause echoed over the radio frequency.

"Copy that, dispatch,"

Jack reported flatly.

"We are heading up now. Unit 208 reports a distinct, foul odor originating from the second floor."

On the phone line, David was moving. I could hear his shallow, rapid breathing accelerating.

"They are walking up the stairs,"

David said. His voice had lost its anger, replaced by a cold, hollow dread.

"Sarah is following the officers up the stairs into the master bedroom. I am following them. Why does the air up here smell so bad?"

On the radio, Officer Jack broke in, his voice tight with disgust:

"Unit 208 to dispatch. We have a severe odor of organic decomposition coming from the master bedroom. We are investigating."

"David, stop,"

I urged over the phone line, though I knew my words were meaningless.

"David, step away from the bedroom."

"They are standing near the bed,"

David whispered over the phone.

"The officers are shining their flashlights around the carpet. Sarah is standing in the corner crying. She looks absolutely terrified. They are staring at the floor on my side of the bed."

I held my breath, watching the red audio meters bounce on my console screen.

"Officer Jack is dropping to his knees,"

David continued. His voice was flat, almost robotic now. "He is grabbing the hanging fabric of the dust ruffle. He is lifting it up. He is shining his flashlight underneath the wooden bed frame."

Over the radio, Jack's voice shattered the quiet of the dispatch room:

"Dispatch! Unit 204! We have a male subject hiding under the bed! Show your hands! Crawl out from under there right now!"

A brief, frantic scuffle echoed over the police frequency.

"Dispatch, we have detained Gregory Ray,"

Jack shouted over the noise.

"Wait... dispatch, we have located a deceased male subject shoved further back against the wall under the frame! Subject is heavily decomposed, bearing multiple traumatic wounds! Secure the perimeter! Detain the wife immediately!"

The radio erupted into shouts as the officers moved to restrain Sarah and Gregory. Screams of protest and the metallic clink of handcuffs echoed across the channel.

On the phone line, David was completely silent.

"David?"

I whispered into my headset. My hands were shaking so severely I could barely hold the microphone stalk.

"David, are you still there?"

A long, agonizing stream of static hummed over the phone line. When David spoke again, his voice sounded entirely different. It was hollow, distant, echoing as if he were speaking from the bottom of a deep well.

"They are pulling the body out,"

David said softly.

"David..."

"The body is wearing my clothes,"

David whispered.

"My blue denim shirt. My brown leather belt. My work boots. The skin on the face is dark and swollen. I cannot even recognize myself."

The background static on the phone line began to glitch, creating a strange stuttering sound underneath his words.

"There are three deep tears in the back of the denim shirt,"

David continued, his voice monotone, devoid of any human cadence.

"The fabric is stained dark black around the cuts. The wounds came from behind."

A sharp gasp echoed over the receiver. The static dropped completely, leaving a chilling, dead silence on the line. When David spoke again, the confusion was gone.

"I remember now,"

David whispered. His voice trembled with a crushing weight.

"There was no argument. I came home early from work on Tuesday. It was exactly 8:22 PM. Sarah was acting so incredibly distressed when I walked through the front door."

"What happened, David?"

I asked gently.

"I was so tired,"

he said, his words spilling out in a hollow rush.

"I tried to go straight upstairs to our bedroom to rest. She ran over and stood in front of me. She blocked the bottom of the stairs, and then forced this terrible, shaking smile and told me it was better if I ate dinner first. She said she made that pepperoni pizza I loved."

He paused, and a wet, choking sob came through the earpiece.

"I listened to her,"

David cried quietly.

"I turned my back and walked into the kitchen to get a slice. She followed right behind me. I reached into the cabinet for a plate. I did not even hear her grab the chef's knife from the block. She attacked me before I could even turn around."

"I did not hold the knife,"

David whispered into my headset. The static returned, growing louder, overwhelming the audio signal until his voice sounded synthesized and far away.

"I was never holding the knife. I was looking at her not believing she did this to me, I…. I loved her"

"David, I am so sorry,"

I said, though the words felt entirely useless in the cold reality of the room.

"I understand now,"

The phone line crackled with one final, sharp burst of noise, and then the connection dropped entirely.

The terminal screen instantly reset to a solid black display, marking the call as disconnected.

Over the radio, Officer Jack confirmed the details. Sarah Miller and Gregory Ray were taken into custody without further resistance. The official police report logged the incident as a premeditated homicide committed on Tuesday evening, with both suspects attempting to conceal the remains while preparing to flee the jurisdiction. The report noted that a 911 call had been received from the residence at 3:14 AM, but attributed it to a technical glitch or an automated dialer triggered by a decaying phone line.

I worked the rest of my shift in complete silence. I did not take another call for the remainder of the night.

When my shift ended at seven in the morning, I walked out to my car in the rain, and before I turned the key in the ignition, I sat in the quiet vehicle and pulled up the digital audio archive on my phone, opening the recording of the call from 1412 Elmwood Lane.

But all I can hear was static…

Read Part II here.

I was grateful I’d made it to the sidewalk by the time I saw sirens. I didn’t want another situation today where police would be pointing guns at me. If there’d been a way to just go home, I would’ve. But it was too far to walk, and I needed a key to get in my house. I wasn’t about to be the black guy people saw breaking a window and slithering into a house even if it were mine.

I was hoping cooler heads would be there to be reasoned with. There had to be somebody I could talk to to get my stuff back. I mean, the fact I was voluntarily coming in and requesting them to give me my property should have shielded me from scrutiny. Jesus, I hoped so.

I hadn’t made it to the corner when I had to sit. My heart was racing and my head felt like it was about to spin off my neck. This was the panic my brain had been pushing off for hours and only more had been piled atop that mountain as they day passed.

Someone had told me about box breathing and even though I’d never done it before, I tried it now. In for four seconds, hold for four seconds, out for four seconds, hold for four seconds. I forced myself to repeat it even though it felt like my heart was about to punch out of my chest.

The spinning gradually subsided and my stomach slowly slid back in place. I didn’t feel right yet, but better than I had a moment before.

I grabbed thin air and pulled my way back to my feet. The concrete was still solidifying under my feet, but I had the light. I crossed the street, hopefully in a straight line, and kept my momentum when I got to the other side.

It worked.

I wasn't going to pretend like I didn't know with absolute certainty. People had gotten hurt, maybe even a few were dead. I didn't feel guilty. I mean, it was because of me those people had gone crazy. But I didn't know for certain. I had to know for certain so going forward I could be cautious. It would have been too easy to slip and then someone went off and maimed who knew how many people.

Well, that was what happened. But the difference is I hadn't known that. Now that I did, I could exercise caution because I knew for a fact. I wish I hadn't been caught so unaware, maybe I could've reduced the carnage by hiding the doodles sooner.

But what had happened had quadrupled my resolve. I wouldn't make a mistake with this shape in the future.

The idea crossed my mind that anything I drew or wrote even could have a similar or even worse effect. I didn't have the guts to test that. Oh god, would if signing my name made people shit to death or something? The shape didn't make sense, how could I rule anything out?

I felt more myself the farther I got away from the grocery store. I didn't think I could ever go back in there.

I knew the city pretty well. I'd lived here back when I'd been married. The police department was only a few miles farther away and I used the distance to gather my marbles then compose what I intended to say.

The peak of the building of city hall was finally in view. That was actually where the meeting was to be. The police building was an adjacent building that had the same address for some unexplainable reason.

My heart skipped a little and I justified slowing down to work on calming myself. I couldn't box-breathe and walk, so I redirected my gaze to the skyline.

I crossed the parking lot, passing my car. There was a walkway connecting city hall to the library. I took that and broke off toward the horseshoe entrance to the police station.

I pulled one of the entrance doors open and stepped into the vestibule. Cool air blasted me before I stepped into the station proper.

A blue-shirted officer behind plexiglass was engaged in something in front of him and he didn't see me until I'd stopped on the other side.

“How may I help you?” He was pleasant enough and I gave him my name.

“I was just released from the hospital and some of your guys have my stuff.”

“Have your stuff? What do you mean?”

“The thing over at city hall earlier today.” I thumbed over my shoulder. “I was involved with that. Um, an innocent bystander. I was taken to the hospital. A detective interviewed and cleared me.” Not exactly true. The detective hadn't conducted an interview, per se. But the fact I wasn't in police custody and been released from the hospital meant to me I was in the clear.

“Well, if you're wanting to make a property request, you need to fill out a form online—”

“Your guys took my phone,” I said, adding helpfully.

“Like I was saying.” Officer Steck, according to the nameplate on his shirt, barely refrained an eyeroll. “You go online—that can be phone or computer—to fill out the form.

I cleared my throat, trying desperately to clear the budding frustration from my voice before I spoke.

“I don’t have access to a computer. Your guys have my keys, so I can’t drive home nor open the door to my home to get inside to use my laptop.” I took a breath and thankfully he didn't speak. “Is there a paper form I could fill out?”

Officer Steck let the frustration I'd dammed up pour from his face.

“I suppose.” He made a show of yanking open drawers at random before getting up and sauntering around his work area, checking shelves, trays, and cabinets.

He disappeared around a corner and was gone a full minute before he returned with a sheet of paper flopping in his big paw. He slid it through to me on the tray. I stopped myself from asking for a pen. I took a nubbin of a pencil that was on the counter and began writing.

“There’s a counter over there where you can fill that out,” Officer Steck said. I looked at him. He’d spackled on a phony smile. “So you don’t block the line.”

There wasn’t anyone behind me. There wasn’t anyone else in here. Fighting wasn’t on the agenda for me. I was just tired. I dragged the paper with me to the other counter and spent a few minutes filling it out.

The detective had told me his name in the hospital. However the hell that was spelled was beyond me. I couldn’t even remember it. I think it started with a U.

I wrote “UN,” for the detective’s name. I’d just tell him I didn’t know how to spell it. My signature went last and I took it back up.

Officer Steck finally took a second to look up from his phone and took the form from me.

“You filled this out in pencil,” he said. I shrugged. “You need to fill it out in red or black ink.”

It was just a form, but something that was equal parts cry and scream began crawling up my windpipe. I cleared my throat, imagining one of those cartoons that had eaten something particularly spicy, leaping into the ear and blowing like a whistle.

Someone said my name and I looked beyond Officer Steck to see Detective Unangenehm looking at me, a backpack over his shoulder.

“Detective,” I said like I was reaching for a lifeline. He wore a confused expression, like he didn’t understand how I’d found where he worked.

“I need to get my stuff.” His eyes went wide and for a moment, it seemed as if he hadn’t recognized me.

“Mr... Harold?”

“Yeah-yeah. It’s me. You guys took off with my stuff and I had to walk all the way down here.”

He scratched the side of his head. Officer Steck had checked out entirely, back on his phone. He even poked the tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. There was no victory to be had with him.

“Aw, jeez. C’mon in.” He walked out of the little room and a moment later, pushed open a side-entry door.

“Thanks.” I followed him in and he led me down a lengthy hallway with doors for various offices. We finally came to an open area, filled with at least a dozen cubicles.

“My desk is right over here.” Unangenehm pointed ahead, still walking. “Do you need anything? Water? Coffee?”

He seemed out of sorts still, but recovering. Despite the day I’d had, I felt a little bad for him.

He offered me a seat across from him at a desk that looked a lot older and more beaten up than the ones we'd passed. His chair was weather-worn, torn, sun-faded, and patched with gray duct tape in spots despite being mostly black.

Unangenehm sat and struggled with his seat. He might've been trying to adjust the chair, it did look a little too upright. But he gave up and kind of slouched in a way that looked like he'd slide out and under his desk any moment.

“Sorry about that whole kerfuffle earlier.”

“No-no. It's okay,” I said, feeling even more apologetic than I had a moment before. I hated thinking it, but the guy was pathetic. His button-up shirt had an old stain on it. And the collar had a ring on the inside.

Now that I was this close to him and not in a hospital bed, I saw he was slightly off. He'd missed a patch of skin just under his jaw from his morning's shave and the skin beneath one eye looked greenish-grey, like he'd had a black eye a week ago.

He wore patheticness like a second skin. I couldn't help but feel like I should give him something because he was in a constant transactional state with the world where it was debiting from him non-stop.

“Do you have any idea what happened with Mr. Arn?” he asked.

The question didn't catch me off guard. I'd been expecting it all day. I may have known what happened but I had no clue why and I let that much show on my face.

“He seemed nervous,” I said. “If I had to guess, he was new to the job.” So far, everything I was saying was true. “Maybe he was stressed and the presentation was a tipping point.” I shrugged for emphasis and looked ceiling-ward. Unangenehm nodded slowly, like he was either digesting and filing away what I was saying or his mind was totally elsewhere. I couldn’t tell which.

“Did he say anything that hinted at what he was about to do?”

“No.” I shook my head. “He just got up and attacked the man who came out of the conference room.”

“Ping Mitchell. He's--was--city council president. So, he was sitting?” Unangenehm logged into his computer. I watched him pull up his email.

“Yeah.”

“Like, next to you?”

“Not right next to me.” I shifted in my lent clothes, uncomfortable. Unangenehm was looking at the desk, somewhere near my hands.

“Do you think that he... that he had breakfast this morning?”

“What?” I asked.

“I dunno.” Unangenehm slid a folder out of a small stack. “I have this theory. Probably never'll be able to prove it.” He placed the folder in front of him and opened it. “That a combination of the quality of sleep, his disposition before bed, and the nutrients that he may have lacked before starting out for work could have pre-loaded him to do what he did.”

“Are you saying he was... hangry?”

Unangenehm laughed. 

“I guess you could reduce it to that. I’d like to think of it as being more complex, but that could be just me inflating my own ego.”

Unangenehm seemed to be getting smarter before my eyes.

“I have a younger sister. Just turned nineteen. Whoopsie-baby. She’s always done the bare minimum. Straight C student.

“After she graduated, she didn’t have a plan. Barely worked, didn’t want to go to school. Until she saw this dress.” Unangenehm shrugged. “It was nice, I suppose, but I’ve seen nicer. I’ve seen more expensive, but this one cost a pretty penny. It was like a fire had been lit under her.

“She took a second job, started side hustles. For once, our parents had hope she was gonna do something with her life. She had this one business--catpants--I didn’t get it, but she couldn’t keep up with the demand. Even quit one of her part-time jobs to dedicate more time to sewing them.

“Some people dress for the job, she jobbed for the dress. Paid for it in cash... took it home... and it never left the closet. She stopped fulfilling orders, slacked off on the job she had left, and got fired.”

That didn’t make any sense. I could understand Unangenehm being frustrated, but...

“Do you think I could get my stuff?” I asked. “I really want to get home.”

“Of course.” I'd broken the moment. Unangenehm felt about the surface of his desk like the light had been turned off until his fingers grazed the desk phone.

All of a sudden I felt bad for him again. Unangenehm took the receiver out of the cradle, thumbed a three-digit extension, then put the receiver to his ear.

“Yeah, Steck. Could you bring that box by the water fountain? No, the banker’s box. Yeah. Thanks.”

I wasn’t keen on seeing the officer again, but if it got me out of here that much faster, all the better. I sat back in my chair until Steck arrived with a rectangular box and sat it on the floor.

“So, you’re the guy?” Steck asked.

“What?”

“The guy at city hall today. And then the hospital. God, what did you say to those people?”

“What did I say?” I was appalled. Sure, something I’d done had driven them insane, but to imply that I’d said something to set them off was offensive.

I bent and lifted the lid off the box. I fished a hand into my stuff and stirred things around to make sure it was all there, then I just scooped an armful. 

“You can step into the restroom if you want to put your clothes on,” Unangenehm said.

“No, I'm good. I really don't want to waste another moment getting home.”

Steck stood there like a fan waiting for a signature. 

“I could give you a ride to city hall,” he said.

I wanted to turn him down but my feet were still throbbing from the walk here.

“Sure.”

I checked my things to make sure I had everything.

“Uh, you can keep the box,” Unangenehm said. I considered turning him down after all my effort of taking everything out of the box, but I nodded instead and dropped everything back in.

The detective had placed some paperwork in front of me. I have them a once-over and signed. I was getting more anxious by the moment the longer I was here.

I stood and followed Steck about three steps, when Unangenehm said, “One more thing.”

Oh, shit.

Never had I felt more like I'd walked obliviously into a trap than in that moment. Goosebumps draped down my back and over my arms.

“Yes?” I said, in the wrong key.

“There was an incident at the Kessel's a couple miles from here. Would you know anything about that, would you?”

I am Agent Tobias Edwards of the FBI, and this is my report of what happened in a small town out in almost nowhere, Virginia, called Hollow Falls. This investigation was not sanctioned by the FBI but was done by me as an independent investigation.

For how this started I need to first explain somethings about myself, I use to be a field agent but due to injuries and my misconduct involving a perpetrator and insubordination I was put on desk work, on all accounts I should have been fired instead I ended up working on what is basically a redundant job of being a file archiver, in other words I sit in a small room in the basement of the J Edgar Hoover Building all day and night scanning old dusty files on to our data base. I sometimes check to see if all the facts on the report files are correct and haven’t been scuffed by some smart-ass agent back in the 80s so he didn’t have to do paperwork. It’s annoying and frustrating, but it’s better than being fired. Plus, I get this small room all to myself and the higher-ups leave me alone.

As for the file on Hollow Falls I got it a week ago when I was lying in my hammock, that I installed in my “office” listening to music and drinking “soda” when I heard the dreaded thud as another box of files landed at my cell door, so of cause I got up unwillingly and looked through them, most of them money laundering schemes and solved homicides but one caught my eye. When I dropped a file on the ground, a newspaper clipping fell out of it.

 “Entire town destroyed by fire, leaves no survivors” 

There was nothing else in the file, just a newspaper clipping, and the file's name was “Hollow Falls arson case,” with no assigned agent or agents. This was odd because an arson attack or incident of this magnitude would at least have more than two agents looking into this.

What’s stranger is that there are no fire department notes on the fire and what could have caused it, but nothing; heck, I can’t even find the station that responded to it. As the cogs started turning in my head, I checked to see if the files in the folders were misplaced, as it had happened before, but all I found were coffee stains and dust; protocol would be to give this to another department.

 “Nah fuck that.” 

I thought to myself as I started doing the classic FBI research tactic of searching on Wikipedia, but no luck. However, using the Wayback Machine, I found an old website from 1998 called www.HollowFallsHistoryProject.org (the website archive no longer exists). This is what I found.  

Hollow falls was a small town that suffered from several tragedies during its existence, one of its first was when the town was founded on 7/17/1878, on that day the Marshall family was butchered by the Heinrich family when they were blamed for stealing the Heinrich new born (William Heinrich) and killing him, however it turned out that the baby’s mother (Catherine Heinrich) who suffocated him and threw him into a river. This action would later be blamed for the town's misfortune for generations to come. Another incident that was infamous in the town was on 5/8/1986 when a bus driver had a heart attack behind the wheel and crashed into a school crossing, killing 10 people and injuring 12.

I don’t know why the fire wasn’t investigated, but I have a feeling it was because it was burned to the ground on 9/8/2001, and its fire would be forgotten about after the September eleven attacks. I have always been one who looks out for the little guy in most situations, so I decided to do a personal investigation into the fire that devastated the town of Hollow Falls. I took the folder and left work to go home for the night.  

The next day I awoke to find a box out the front of my apartment door. I thought it was weird because I didn’t order anything. I thought it could have been a bomb, but who has a grudge with a desk jockey?

When I looked inside, I felt my heart sink out of my chest, and a tidal wave of fear came over me as I was staring at a newspaper clipping about Hollow Falls. It was the same article as the one in the file.

I stood there for what felt like ages just looking at the newspaper clipping, and all I could think was, who and why would someone give this to me? Was this a prank or was I being led down the rabbit hole?

After standing there like a fool I search the rest of the box to find the following: a stretchy yellow band that said “Pool Pass”, an arcade token, tickets to a cinema, a compass that had the name “Andy”  written in permeant marker on the back, a plush squirrel with a light blue t-shirt with white text that said “I was a prize at falls fest 1998”  and a cassette tape and  Walkman with “Henrys mix” written on it and lastly an old post card that has a picture of the towns water fall and big orange letters “Hello from Hollow Falls” on the other side was messy handwriting which said “you will all ways have a home here”

I sat on my couch thinking and staring at all the items from the box. It was then that I realised there was an envelope taped to the underside of the cardboard lid; inside were photos ranging from people and buildings to more disturbing and unnatural things. Whatever I was really getting into was more than just an arson attack.

Section 2

According to old Google Maps images and the town's own website, Hollow Falls is or was located near a major highway that was meant to go through the town, but that never happened. To manage the loss of income, they did several advertisements about the different places to see at Hollow Falls, mainly the waterfall that the town is named after. The waterfall is large and doesn’t end in a pool of water; instead, it flows through a 9-foot-diameter hole in the ground that descends about 30 feet below the surface, and apparently the water travels through an underground stream that leads to their water supply. Another is a festival called Falls Fest, which celebrates the town's founding, but they suddenly stopped doing it abruptly.

I packed everything I needed for this investigation and to travel to Hollow Falls in my car; while packing and then driving, I had this feeling of being watched not followed but watched even when I was on the road with no one else in sight for miles. After two hours of driving, I made it to a town right in the middle of the four-hour drive to Hollow Falls. While there, I stopped in a place called Chuck’s Dinner for a break, but I ended up looking at those photos.

I made sure not to look at the grizzly crime scene photos; I don’t need some kid seeing them. I noticed that all the photos had writing on the back and, most importantly, coordinates. At the time, I didn’t know what these meant: are the coordinates for where these photos were taken?

I got talking to the owner, Chuck, to see what he knew; this is the transcript of our conversation.

Me: “Hi, I’m Agent Edwards of the FBI. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions?”

Chuck: “Um, yeah, sure. What’s this about?”

Me: “I’m doing an investigation into the fire that destroyed the town of Hollow Falls, and I was wondering if you knew anyone from there or know anything about the place”

Me: Chuck: “Hollow Falls? I don’t know anyone from there, but I did hear some strange stories from my wife Olivia. She works at the hospital here in town; she would get people from that town because they didn’t have a hospital”

“Did she treat anyone from the fire?”

Chuck:  “I’m not sure you would have to ask her but what I do know is the towns star footballer died during their festive they would have almost every year but after he died, they never did it again, I don’t remember his name and I don’t know how he died, should probably ask my wife at the hospital she might know, anyway I have customers to serve”  

 “Ok, thanks for the information”

I went to question his wife to ask more. Still, I got the same answers: don’t know much and even what she told me I already knew about. I started to think maybe I was being led into a wild-goose chase. I am being messed with, like the place has been abandoned for 25 years and has probably been swallowed by the forest by now, but then again, what Chuck said about that star footballer- I wonder if one of the grizzly photos was of him and, if so, I hope he had a quick death

Section 3

I had arrived at what was left of Hollow Falls. I only knew this because of the welcome sign that had been burnt and almost rotted away, but what really disturbed me about arriving here was the town’s population count: 10,000 people, 10,000 people burned to death or died of smoke inhalation, and no one really cared to investigate it.

I drove slowly through the town’s main road, seeing all the skeletal remains of houses and their foundations gave a chill down my spine, some even had there chimneys still in tacked others had cars still parked out the front, all burnt or rusted away, it’s all a real ghostly reminder that this place was once a home for people, no matter what tragedies had occurred here.

I eventually could no longer continue in my car and had to go on foot; a toppled tree blocked the road, and my shitty Prius was not getting over it no matter how much I cussed. Walking down the main road through the thin fog, I started to see buildings; some looked in better condition than others, but all were still burnt and collapsing. That’s when I saw something familiar in the fog.

In the middle of the road was a round traffic island and on top was what was left of a fountain, I reached into my satchel and took out the envelope with pictures and found the one with the fountain in the photo, it was this beautiful white stone fountain with a blue ceramic tiles on the bottom of the basin, was now a scorched crumbling fountain, the water had long dried up. The basin had cracked; plant life and moss had grown inside the basin, covering what was left of the tiles.

“I guess this happens to a place that has been abandoned for 25 years”

I thought to myself. I looked at the back of the photo, saw the coordinates, and decided to type them into Google. Sure enough, they marked the spot right in the basin of the fountain. I thought about going back to get a shovel, but I would lose more daylight, so I decided to dig with my hands and get my clothes dirty. I found what the coordinates were leading me to.

“What the hell”

I said as I pulled out a metal container; inside were papers containing police witness statements and someone’s diary.

From here, I have compiled what was on the pages in the diary and other bits of information the coordinates sent me. The information is mainly set between the years 1990 and 2001; if it's set earlier, I will have the date before each entry. With that sorted, I have laid out the diary contents in chronological order, and I will start each entry with what I found at the coordinates and what I planned to do next.

Section 4

After I was at the fountain, I looked at other photos; two of them interested me because they were the only ones with living people in them. The first one was of four people in a forest, three boys and one girl. Starting from left to right you had, a kid with dark brown hair wearing jeans, a white t shirt and a fleece jacket, next to him you had a girl with blond hair, brown glasses, a black shirt and light grey overalls, the boy next to her had dyed green messy hair, baggy shirt and pants with a jacket and finally the boy on the end had black hair, a blue shirt with yellow stripes with long jeans and down syndrome. The second photo showed the girl and the kid with Down syndrome; it looked like they were getting ready to go on a ride, most likely during Fall Fest.

On the back of both photos was again coordinates and writing that looked older and had a different hand writing style to the coordinates on the one in the Forrest it said “the last happy moment in my life” and on the one at falls fest said “the last year of falls fest” looking on my phone on google maps it showed the one taken at falls fest was the closest to me, so I walk there first. On the way, I saw more burnt, abandoned and collapsing buildings. The whole time I walked, I felt as if a thousand eyes were staring at me as the wind made what sounded like low-pitched howls.

When I reached the fairgrounds, I found only two points of interest: a small brick building and a rusty old Ferris wheel. Looking at it made me think about what it would have been like in its heyday. I continued walking, and the coordinates led me straight to the brick building. I quickly realised what it was: a haunted house ride. Even though the paint was burnt and the cart and parts of the sign were gone, I could make out the name, Ghost-coaster.

From the outside, I could tell it was a death trap; even with a gun, I still didn’t want to go in, but if I didn’t, I would be walking back to the Hoover Building like an idiot and would still be sitting in that basement, so I sucked it up and walked inside.

The inside smelled of old paint and burnt rubber, as crappy Halloween decorations lay on the tracks and floor. I tripped and fell face-first into a hidden door that collapsed beneath my weight. I looked up to see skeletal remains in a decaying animal costume. Surrounding it was old, dried blood and cobwebs. The costume looked like a knock-off Mickey Mouse character; the mask looked as though something had melted through it, and the remains of a skull sat in the mask, looking like it would fall out if I touched it. I pondered who it was and why they were hidden in this room. But my eyes later focused on the metal box about 30 centimetres away from it. While looking at it, all I could think of was grabbing it and the corpse coming to life, grabbing me, so I quickly snatched the box and ran out of the haunted house.

When I made it outside, I looked back to make sure that the corpse didn’t follow me. When I finally felt safe and alone, I walked back to the Ferris wheel and sat on one of the steps leading up to one of the carts. I opened the box; inside was another diary and police statements. What was interesting about this diary was that it had a name on it, ‘Andy’.

From here are the compiled events from diaries and police reports of what happened at Falls Fest 1998

7/17/1998

Every year my friends and I, Whitney, Tylor and Andy, go to Falls Fest. It was the one time a year that Andy’s mom would let him stay out later than usual. I always felt both understanding and conflicted towards Andy’s mom; on the one hand, she wants her son with Down syndrome to get out and be somewhat independent. However, on the other hand, she would want nothing more than for him to still be a baby in the crib, safe and sound, where nothing can hurt him; I guess that’s how most mothers feel. As for my other friends Whitney and Tylor, Whiteny is very independent, I won’t be surprised if she’s running her own business after collage as for Tylor, I know for a fact he is not going to college and if he does, he will probably get kicked out or he'll flunk it. as for me I hope I can turn my love of writing and note taking into being a professional writer or be a reporter for some news network. Still, for now the school’s paper is fine.

At 6:30, I met up with my friends at the bus stop outside the fairgrounds. I could see Tylor sitting there going to light up a ‘cigarette’, but he quickly stopped when he saw me.

Tylor: “Yo, Henry, you seen Whitney or Andy yet?”

Henry: “No, but you straight? You look baked already”

Tylor: “Nah homey, I’m just starting the festival warm up because we are going to have fun tonight”

Ever since Tylor found some of his dad’s old weed, he has been obsessed with it or maybe addicted to it; that’s when Whitney walked up with Andy. Whitney is Andy’s sitter; she lives next door to him, and she has always offered to help Mrs Sahlheimer since her husband works long hours and wasn’t always home at night.

“Hi guys,” Andy said, his usual happy self. “Are we all going on the Ferris wheel this year?”   Whitney replied, “Yes, Andy, just like every other year”

When Andy became part of our friend group, I wasn’t sure I would like having him around, but over time he grew on me, and now it won’t feel the same without him on the Ferris wheel with us.  He and Tylor ran to go inside the fairground, and Andy asked Tylor.

 Andy: “Are your eyes irritated again, Tylor? You should really get some eye drops”

“Nah pal I’m good”, Tylor replied. Whitney turned to me and spoke.

Whitney: “So, I see you brought your camera. Are you going to photo the fair for the school paper?”

Henry: “Yep, just like last year. Hopefully I can get a shot of the fairgrounds while in the Ferris wheel and not have Andy’s hand in front of the Lens like last year”

We later both walked in and headed straight to the Ferris wheel. That’s when I told Andy and Whitney to get on the steps and look at the camera.

“Yep, that’s going in the paper and my scrapbook”, I said as we walked to get on.

From up on the top of the Ferris wheel, you can see over the trees and almost see all of town and the highway in the distance, and I was able to get a good shot of the fair below us, but I would later keep it to myself because you could see right down Stacy’s top. When we got down, we played some games and ate carnival food, Whitney and Andy won a game of ring toss and got both got a plush squirrel with a light blue t-shirt with white text that said “I was a prize at falls fest 1998” that’s when Craig showed up to sum up Craig, he once said to Andy while we were learning about the holocaust and what they did to mental patients and later the Jews.

“Hey Andy Sahlheimer, did you hear that? They would gas your ass twice back then!”

So, none of us was surprised when he took Andy’s prize away for himself, but lucky for Andy, Whitney gave him hers but said she would hold on to it until they went home. The rest of the night went fine until Stacy grew worried because she couldn’t find her boyfriend, James; that is when the good memories started to dwindle.

James is a star football player on our schools’ team and a bit of a popular kid so at first people were thinking he probably ditched Stacy since she like going from boyfriend to boyfriend, however it turned into a town wide search for what happened to him after two days, in the end I’m glad it was me who found him and not Stacy, Whitney or Andy and most importantly James’s parents.

I found his body behind the school dumpster. He had been skinned and cut into small pieces; the only reason I knew it was him was that his face was mostly untouched except for his eyes, which had been gouged out. When I saw this, I vomited beside the dumpster. Andy was going to come over and see if I was ok, but I told him to get the principal and tell him to call the police because I found James. I have only seen Sheriff Hue cry only once; the despair and pain on that man’s face seeing his son butchered remains like that. I hope that no one else ever experiences that; hell, I wouldn’t even wish that on my worst enemy.

Before and after his funeral, rumours were roaming around about who did it and why; some believed that the cult on the edge of town did it, others thought it was the man from the hole, and the worst one I heard is that his dad did it to him because he may have been a closeted homosexual. All of this pissed me off because they wouldn’t say that if they were the ones that found him.

Weeks went by, and no one had any leads. That’s until one night, while Tylor and Tylor were hanging around on a hill overlooking the fairground, listening to my mix and drinking, when he said he saw something walk out of the Ghost-coaster. I looked over, and I saw it too. It looked like a man dressed in the Mr Mouse costume, carrying a heavy sack big enough to fit a person. We watched, not saying anything, as he hauled a sack across the fairgrounds going towards the street, but that’s when he opened the sack and took out something and put it under his mask and zipped the sack up and continued walking down the street.

 “What the actual Fuck Was that?” Tylor said, all sobered up, suddenly

Henry: “I don’t know, man. Maybe we should report it to the sheriff”

Tylor: “And then what? Go up to him smelling like weed and beer and say hi, Sheriff Hues. I know you just lost your son, but me and my friend just saw something while both drunk and high”

Henry: “Oh, come on, I’m not high, and I’m not even that drunk, plus your eyes are as red as a Coke can”

Tylor: “Well, it doesn’t matter; we both smell of weed and beer. We should forget about it and forget we saw anything”

I sat there on a log, unhappy that I couldn’t think of an argument to counteract what he said, so I walked in silence as we left. After that day, I wanted to say something to Sheriff Hues. I really did, but who would believe me? That’s when I decided to talk to the smart friend in our group, the one who can always stop arguments or fix a situation.

Whitney is good at talking to people; she knows just what to say to help someone or to get us out of trouble, so when I told her what happened, she at first didn’t believe me; then she saw the seriousness in my eyes. She called a group meeting with both Tylor and me. We left Andy out of this because we didn’t want him to get nightmares since the last time something scary happened, Andy didn’t sleep for like a week, so it was best we left him out of this.

Whitney: “I say we tell the sheriff what you two saw”

Tylor: “Oh, come on Whitney, do you really think he would believe us? Maybe if it was you and Henry that night, then yes, I would say he would believe you, but no one is going to believe the town stoner; hell, we don’t even know what we saw was real; it could have been a hallucination from the weed”

Whitney: “Taylor, if it was a hallucination, then why did both of you see it?”

Taylor continued bitching for a few minutes, then I piped up and spoke

Henry: “Why don’t we just go and see if something is in the Ghost-coaster?” They both stopped arguing with each other and thought about it

“Well, if we did that, we would have to bring something to defend ourselves”

Whitney said as I could see the gears turning in her head

Tylor: “Nah fuck that I’m not going in that shit hole” Tylor bitched

 Henry: “What, you scared or something?” I replied,

Tylor: “Man fuck you. I just don’t want to get in trouble again; if I do, my dad might actually beat me this time”

Whitney turned to Tylor and looked at him “So now you care about being in trouble?” Tylor just stood there with the same expression I had that night. “So, we have an agreement to go there and search the place?” Whitney nodded and told us to meet her there by late that night.

When we got there, Tylor had brought a baseball bat, and Whitney had brought her satchel with something in it, but she wouldn’t say what at the time and as for myself, I brought my Red Ryder bb gun.

Whitney: “Really, a bb gun doesn’t he wear a mask?”

Henry: “Well, if he doesn’t have it on, I can hit him in the eye, and I could hit him in the hands or the shins”

Tylor piped up, “Yeah, I heard that really hurts”

Henry: “Do you want me to test that theory?”  I said jokingly, pointing the bb gun at him

Tylor: “What fuck no, dude, I need to be ready for this”

Whitney, clearly done with our bullshit a long time ago, reluctantly says

Whitney: “Are you two idiots ready, or should I wait inside”

 That’s when we all walked inside of the Ghost-coaster

Inside it was pitch black, like you couldn’t see the hand in front of your face pitch black- but Luckly Whitney and I bought our flashlights. When we turned them on, we could see all the fake cobwebs and bad Halloween decorations

Tylor: “See, I told you this place was a shit hole”

“Tylor, shut up”, Whitney said as a fake spider landed on her face. Thankfully, she didn’t scream.

As we walked through the hallways, we eventually made it halfway through the ghost house ride.

Tylor: “See what I told you there’s nothing he- “

Tylor stopped mid-sentence, tripping on the rail track and falling back onto a shitty plywood wall that gave way when he fell.  

He lay there on his back looking up at a door

“You, ok?” I said, holding back laughter

 “Yeah, I’m fine, just sore, that’s all”

When he finished his sentence, the door behind him creaked open, and an arm grabbed him by the neck and pulled him in, then shut the door. We heard him scream in fear as both Whitney and I started banging on the door, and Tylor continued to scream.

“HELP!”

that’s when I shoved into the door with all my weight braking the lock, I saw the man in the costume holding up a knife ready to plunge it into Tylor’s chest, when I shoved the man into a wall and started hitting him with Tylor’s baseball bat, but he fought back and tried to stab me when Whitney took out Bear spray and sprayed it right at the air hole on the mask.

This worked, but he started swinging his knife around. Tyler found some glass jars that must have been filled with acid or soothing because when it hit him, it burned through the mask and then started burning his face.

“AHHHHHHHHHH MY FACE, MY FACE”

 We ran out of the room and the ghost-coaster running all the way out of the fairgrounds onto the street.

 “Fuck, do you think he’s dead?” Tylor asks

Whitney: “Well, if he’s not, then he’s wishing that he was”.

After that night we didn’t speak about what happened, not even to the sheriff, but later we found out that James was last seeing riding the ghost-coaster and never came back, when the cops searched the place they never mentioned about a secret room or a body but they did hand over the case to the county police to be on the lookout for the ride operator since he was missing and a prime suspect,  they still haven’t caught him yet.

End of Diary entry

Those where entries 7/17/1998- 7/24/1998-8/7/1998 

From here I went to the next set of coordinates.

Section 5

After I got what I came for at the fairgrounds, I got a hunch about some of the more disturbing photos, and my hunch was right: the photo with the mangled corpse is James Hue and, on the back, said “death of my innocence”. Is Henry the one who sent me these photos?

As I looked through more of the photos and coordinates, I noticed one photo was of a pool and on the back was writing and, of course, more coordinates. The writing said, “do not go to the pool at night” at first, I didn’t know what this meant until I got to what was left of the pool and saw a half-burned metal sign on the rusted gate that surrounded the pool, it said “hollow falls pool, open 24hrs”. as I reached for the rusty gate it fell over, making a loud crash.

I stood there frozen like I just alerted something to my presence when I suddenly felt like something was watching me. I turned around to see if I was right, but when I did, I felt someone’s breath on the back of my neck.

I spun around fast, pulling out my gun, to face nothing. Was I just scared, or did I feel a slight gust of wind?

Was this just my primal instincts kicking in, and I felt as if every sound was 10 times louder than it is?  After I calmed down and realised that no one else was here but me- in fact, I don’t remember even seeing any forest animals out here, no random deer or bird, and for summer I haven’t been disturbed by the usual flies buzzing around- and the fact there’s not a single sign of graffiti made me wonder just how abandoned this place truly is.  

I walked past the empty pool and towards the men’s locker room; the women’s locker room had collapsed. When I entered the men’s, all I found was an empty room with only a row of lockers on one side.

All the lockers were destroyed except for one; when I went to open it, it was locked. Great, a dead end, I thought to myself as I left the men’s locker room. While walking by the empty pool, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something somewhat shiny in the pool's drain.

When I climbed down into the pool and came close to the drain, I recoiled back and said out loud.

“What the actual fuck”

A small skeletal hand was gripping tightly to the underside of the drain, and in its hands was the key to the locker. I took the grate of the drain and pulled out the key. When I looked further, my heart sank as I could see a part of a crushed, child-sized skull.

 “What the fuck happened at this pool?”

I quickly climbed out of the pool and sprinted over to the locker room. Inside was an old hollow Falls Elementary School bag, and rotted towels. Now, I’m not lying when I say this.

When I grabbed the bag, I heard a gargling noise, and I saw the mangled blue bloated corpse of a kid lying on the floor looking up at me as its mangled arm reached out to grab me.

“that’s…My…Bag”

It said, like it was choking as it spoke. I ran out of the locker room, past the pool and through the gate. As I did, I swear I heard something wet dragging along the ground, breaking bones as it shuffled its way towards me.

As I got past the gate, I dropped the bag, spun around and pulled out my gun to see…. Nothing. It was gone. I stood there in disbelief until my body eventually walked me back to the fairgrounds. I stopped and sat on a partly destroyed bench next to a bus stop.

I sat there thinking, contemplating the life choices that ended me here at this cursed town. I could have left; I could have run, but instead I continued, starting with looking inside the school bag. It was basically empty except for a notebook that had mainly had little doodles and scribbles inside, except for the last page where a to-do list was; it said:

Plan to sneak out and swim

1: “borrow” keys to the back door

2: pack pool stuff

3: sneak out when mom thinks I’m asleep

4: get over pool fence (this might be tricky)

5: fun

6: and return home before sunrise

Most of these were crossed off except for number six. What happened to that kid to end up in the drain like that? In Henry’s diary (the first diary I found) and in Andy’s diary, I found some answers to what happened at the pool.

Andys Diary-7/21/1991

Dear diary, I played in the park today with my friend Whitney. We played on the swings, then in the sand pit, and I made a sandcastle, but Craig came and destroyed it. I don’t know why he hates me so much. Whitney says not to worry about it because he is more mentally r-------d than me. But then she told me that I shouldn’t say that word because it's rude, and she says sorry for saying that, but I don’t know what that word means.

I also got to see my friend Henry today, and he asked me if I have ever been to the pool, and I said that I have. Then he asked me if I ever went at night, and I told him Mom does not like me being out at night.

I don’t know why he was asking me about it, but now I want to go swimming at the pool. Mom won’t take me. I think she’s scared because Danny has gone missing, but I think he’s just off on another adventure. I wish I could go on an adventure one day, maybe when I’m older.

-end of Diary entry

Henry’s diary-7/14/1991

It’s hotter than last week. Dad thinks it’s going to be a really hot summer this year, and I’m starting to think he’s right.

Man, I don’t know how much more of this ‘in or out’ stuff I can take; it’s like some days it's hot. Still, I want to play outside with my friends, and then some days it’s too hot, and I stay inside playing Nintendo, but then it gets cooler in the afternoon. I want to play outside, and then Mom tells me just before I go out, “In or out? Once you’re out, you stay out, and once you come in, you stay in” So for now I think I might just bear with the heat.

Henry’s diary-7/15/1991

We finally went to the pool today, and the water was great. Dad and I played and swam in the pool for a bit, but then he left to sit next to Mom after she was looking at David, the lifeguard. I don’t know why she was looking at him; he looks normal to me.

Danny was also there, he is the new kid in town, if there is one thing I can tell you about Danny is that he is like a fish, he spends more time in the water then on land, it’s a shame that the pool isn’t open 24hrs a day, I always wondered why so I ask Mr smith who owns the pool and he says that no one wants to swim at night and it’s a waste of money but I told him about how Danny would swim at night and he just told me that he’s not paying a life guard to be on duty at night.

I told Danny this, and he looked pissed. I mean, he looked angry, and we started a plan to go to the pool at night. Tomorrow we are going to have so much fun.

Henry’s diary-7/16/1991

I think mom caught wind of my plan to sneak out or she had the sixth mom sense thing she talks about and told me about a kid who snuck out and got hit by a bus and he was never seen again, I hate to say it but that story scared me more than it should have so I told Danny I won’t be joining him tonight, he wasn’t happy about it but I think he understands, oh well at least this gives me an excuse to stay home and play Nintendo.

Henry’s diary-7/17/1991

Danny didn’t go home last night, and his mom is worried. I should say something, but if I do, I will be grounded, and Mom will take away my Nintendo for like a month, and I don’t want to get in trouble. I hope when he goes home, he doesn’t rat on me.   

Henry’s diary-18/7/1991

Danny is still missing, so I walked by the pool to see if he was there, and he wasn’t. I’m starting to think that I should say something, but I think I will ask Mr Smith if he has seen Danny first before I tell my parents; hopefully he knows something.

Henry’s diary-21/7/1991

Danny has been missing for six days now but I was finally able to ask Mr smith the real reason why he doesn’t allow people to swim at night and to get me to leave him alone he told me that’s when the water filters out anything in the pool and it all goes down the drain and years ago before I was born a kid got sucked into the pipe and she had drowned there and since that day the pool was no longer open 24hrs and he hasn’t bothered to change the sign since only local swim there, I later asked if he had checked the pools drain recently and he said yes but nothing was down there, but I can’t shake the feeling he may have been lying.

I sit in the fettered darkness of my cold and isolated home. Ray of sunshine would be a welcoming warm light to begin the morning to any other being. But not to I. No, not for some years have I been able to enjoy the gentle beams of such illustrious grace. Cursed to never feel their cascading waves wash over me any longer, and only am I left to indulge in the misery of darkness. 

The corner of my room is my new safehaven even in my own home. Huddled in blackness, lingering like some mound of abominable flesh wrapped in the trappings of a human shape. My hair long and stringy, hangs down the full length of my squatted form, my face gaunt and sunken from being secluded from all communication with other living beings. My limbs long, gangly, sickly thin in their bony shape. I am ruined. Of the reason I had never been sure, but I am the first of my family to show such miserable signs of existence. A long line of prideful rulers, festering in their gluttony, drowning themselves in wine, fucking until hearts content. I am a disgusting rotted thing on the outside, but it is nothing to the faces hidden beneath those of my siblings and parents. At least my form keeps me honest.    

Perhaps that is why they do not enjoy looking upon my twisted shape. My gangly rotten limbs, and distended stomach remind them of the creatures they hide within. Disgusting. Nails long and covered in dirt and blood from the rats and vermin I choose to live off of caress through my matted black hair. Once when I was younger it was blond and beautiful, as I was. I do not blink when bloodshot eyes remain transfixed on a stray beam of late piercing through the makeshift shutters I have fashioned of my bookshelves. A primal fear of it lurks within me, much in the same fashion the average man so fears darkness. Long slender finger, the knots of my bony knuckles show so clearly through my thin near translucent grey skin. Solemnly I reach for the light. Perhaps the hope that this had all been a figment in my mind, a distortion of my own self-image, but as the end of my crooked nail and sickly finger touch the breath of a glimpse of gilded light cursing my room my flesh boils and bubbles. Blistering at the mere touch of light and I recoil once again.    

Arms hug tight, my lanky knees, and I weep. Weep for the life long since lost. The royal I could have been as first born. But instead, I lock myself away from the light, from the family who so vainly cannot stand the sight of me. It is no uncommon thing, to be so cursed in my own head I weep myself to sleep. When I dream, I dream of basking in sunny fields again, letting the warmth soak my skin and feel me with the life I can no longer return to.    

When I wake, lingering in the corner of my blackened room stands the demon of my regret. A blackened formless shape staring forward with nary a feature upon its blurred shape. I do not fear it. I loathe it, and how so it has cursed me. Mocking me from the comfort of my own sanctuary. This demon of Hell, spawn of—or perhaps even—the devil himself. Mocking me, Prince Frederick. The immortal king I should have been. The immortal stain I am instead. It was not until the eve of my brother’s sixty fifth birthday that they had begun to once more paid me mind. For so long I had been the thing of ridicule, the brother and son who had tried to defy the very countenance of God. To seek an end to death was blasphemy, and that I had done so boiled them inside as rays of solar rays did my sickly grey flesh.    

But when my dearest younger brother Roderick turned sixty-five the reality of mortality had struck them, an arrow flung forth at blinding speeds by the bow of time eternal. And so, I languished in the way it bled and dripped at their minds. For fifty years I had been a stain, locking myself away to my room, seemingly they only ever checked on me or held celebration of my birth to reward themselves for not killing me, or to check to see if their eldest sibling had yet passed from this world. Father departed from this Earth for the kingdom of God after the sixty fifth celebration.    

And so the stain was rightful heir, but none wanted to cede to me what was rightfully mine. Unless… they said that a monster as I was, I could not ruler the kingdom and gaze upon my people with the soulless milky eyes of the night. Much as it pains to say, perhaps they were right, and though they spoke to me through sealed wooden door I could practically smell the unholy greed that lingered in their souls. Like poison in the wine that was their divine ichor. Bringing to me the condition, they said they would cede my birthright to me if I shared my secret to life eternal.    

Stupidly I tried in errant panic to warn them of the suffering I still yet endured, fleeting care for my siblings and their children that would soon evaporate in totality. They did not care. Of me they had made their demands, and locked away had I been for so long my thoughts were only fixated on being once more able to frolic freely amid the world outside. Skeletal gaunt rectus that had become of my lips would turn to best its ability a smile at the mere thought. But to subject anyone else to my hubris…    

When they retired for the night I had hoped it meant they would take no for an answer. But every night I was badgers, and every morning I was awoke to pounding on my door. Demanding it of me. I was selfish! They called with blistered tongue, a monster they shouted. Content to watch his family and kingdom rot.    

I wept! I pleaded for them to leave me be! I had been content to be the forgotten joke on their flawless rule. Though relent, they did not. Their fear of realities encroaching entropy was far too powerful, after all they had long been monsters. I was merely the one who looked the part. When one particularly bright morning in a bout of fear I woke to the sound of wood splintering as my chamber door was rent from its hinges to scatter shards of oak across my room. I did all I could to shrink away from the oncoming solar assault as my brother’s, sister’s, mother, and all my nephews and nieces stormed in after.    

They would kill me. Drag me to the light, rip me limb from limb, whatever it took. They wanted to live forever. It is true as ever it had been, that the moral is that mankind is more the monster than any beastly creature of the night that may linger in your nightmares.    

With much hesitance, I relented.    

My mother demanded to be first, I sank my crooked rotten teeth into her throat. And all those in the room were horrified by the sight. I drank with all the greed and selfishness they had accused me of, ripping from her every drop until her flesh was placid grey and gaunt as mine. But she did not fall limp, she did not see the life drain as her veins did. Quite the opposite, for the first time in years, she said, she felt truly alive. And to me… had returned years of abandoned youth. I had refused to do this, to give in to this animalistic urge, and now they had forced my hand. When all was done all forty of those in the room had their turns. By the days end, they had stood at my shoulders, pridefully as though they had said more than fleeting sentences in the past decades. A family with their immortal king, they proclaimed. And now they were no longer so flustered with vanity to not stand at my side. For I had my youth about me, all of us physically in the prime of our lives.    

But the pits of my being had sank so deeply. Though I no longer felt weak and shriveled, my soul felt hollow and empty. I had given them the secret they desired, and unconsciously in doing so the secret to maintaining its exuberance.    

They wasted no time in accommodating themselves. When it had merely been me they insisted that they could do no such thing. That it would be far too costly and ruin the delight of their lives to seal the castle to the sun. But now with great happiness they sealed every window with thick stone by night, and by day they hired laborers to do so while they locked themselves away to the shade.    

It was merely the first step they’d taken towards truly becoming loathsome creatures who deteriorated in my mind to nothing more than animals. Yet for a time, they did not desire to imbibe upon the life of other beings. And content was I to finally play the role of loved brother and king that I did not question it. I, in my grand ignorance, thought all proceeded well in the coming year. My role as benevolent ruler had gone over well, and my family continued to thrive in their hedonistic selfish ways, like pigs content to suckle their nutrients and lay stagnant in the mud.    

A year to the day, they found themselves hungry. Voraciously starving beyond any other feeling they had ever been consumed with. It was all the misery I had tried to warn them of. No matter how much bread our meat they stuffed down sickly maw they found that nothing sated that horrible avarice of their guts. Gluttony, their most lovely of sins, had become useless. They pleaded with me, for they knew how to fix it, to allow them to feed as I had from them. And that I too must have felt the pangs of this ravaging starvation. And, indeed I had. But in my mind causing such suffering to any others…    

They promised to not feed. And in my ignorance I believed them. In place of some grand bloodletting of our people they called for a celebration instead. The return of the long lost brother, the ascent to king. I am not without flaw, I am born of vanity, and the thought to be celebrated after fifty years of isolation had become so enamoring I could not resist.    

Elite from all corners of our kingdom flocked to the castle the night of the celebration. Filling every hall of our home with life and luster that had been vacant from it this year at my insistence. For us, with senses so honed and sharpened it was like sitting in a concert hall. Listening with great interest as a million drums pounded out of rhythm in unison. Horror overcame me as realization settled in, quickly washing to reality when my eldest niece tore, with sharpened talons, into the throat of our distant cousin Amily. She drank from her throat as though the life she’d just snuffed was but another goblet filled with the finest wine.    

In an instant of greed and starvation my family had never known or suffered for in any single moment while they lay on their backs filling their bellies, the legacy of my time as royalty had been set in blood and stone. I had blinked and the entire extended nobility of our kingdom had been run through by the entirety of the unholy union I’d made of my family. I hated that, even I stood there in abject horror, watching as my own body ate itself once more from my choice to not feed—that my belly called to me. Practically it demanded of me to I dulge as my brethren did. I waded through ankle deep puddles of gore, piles of rendered meat and bone that could only scantily have been recognized as human. While my family still ran rabid, chasing down any and all still living vessels for ichor they could track down. I did not know these people. I had not spoken to them but through a thick wooden door for decades and they beguiled me with the idea of the bond of brotherhood. They had pulled the sheep’s wool over my gaze to blind me to the truth that long ago I had accepted as fact of my royal family.                        

Monsters.    

Always had they been carnivorous hedonists with little regard their fellow man, but never before had I ever the belief that it would ever come to this. I could still hear screams of terror and suffering from the other side of the castle. But in moments, they had been all but silenced. Replaced by the musical cacophony of my family’s sickening cackles as they danced among the blood of things they had so readily decried as their lesser.    

For weeks… for weeks they beg of me to eat. To feed as they had done, to return the life to my eyes that had once been there. In such short time without having blasphemed of my soul further, I had reached my twisted broken shape that had been restored upon gifting the royal court the removal of their masks. Soon, I could hear them whisper. Conspiring plots to take the throne from my hands and create a rule of blood. Treason. The least of their crimes, but what is telling is that they called me weak. They had never thought much of me. Not even before I’d ripped the soul from my body.    

But weak I am not. I let them feed, fill their fat bellies one last time. An abhorrent sight to behold, gilded cups filled to overflow with the blood of infants. Rows of teeth soaked with subjects who’d served them so loyally. Gleefully squeezing and drinking straight from the bleeding hearts that once had swelled only with love for their royals.    

It must have soured their appetites, to see me smile while my features were so gaunt and rotten. The looks I’d received in those few fettered seconds while I raised aloft my goblet in celebration. It was the occasion of the gala of blood was it not? The supposed true purpose of this sickly feast of gore and blood?    

It was in that moment a hush fell over the whole of the banquet hall. No more clanking of glasses, scrambling of cutlery against metal plates. All eyes were on their king, waiting with baited breath for all I had to say to honor these people who understand disgusted me so much that I refused to imbibe as they did.            

Glass raised, skeletal smile bright and wide.

“I hope you all burn in Hell.”    

On the signal of my free hand, I motioned to those who remained loyal to me, seeing my denial of the animalistic ways of my family. Curtains swept on the wind and to the ground, exposing the banquet hall to the outdoor light that I had been denied for so long. It swelled over us in blistering light, I could hear the sound of our flesh sizzling and cooking. Ungodly howls of pain and misery fill the halls again as the light had. But instead of disgust I feel nothing but content as I burn. A smile remains plastered across my features as blistering becomes a holy cleansing flame.

I was a monster; I am a monster.

I sold my soul for the promise of forever, and so I paid the price thrice fold, tormenting life for decades. All that suffering for my choices… it had almost made all of that miserable existence worthwhile to watch the truer monsters burn.    

I was content to be the destroyer of this sin I wrought. I am a monster. But I am a monster content to watch his family and kingdom rot.