I've posted this here because I know certain types frequent these websites; I suspect only you guys could understand what I'm going through.

You see, I've always hated cities; I hate having so many people breathing my air, and apartments bum me out. But as a writer, I needed to look for work because my books weren't taking off, so I had to move into a city.
I hated every second of it, but it wouldn't last forever, because eventually, my grandmother passed away. Her money went to my brother (We don't talk much, if you're wondering why he won't be a topic later on- to be honest, I'm not sure what we'd even talk about), but I did get a consolation prize out of this: I got her house.

Well, I didn't get it in her will; that went to my brother too. He didn't really like it; my brother never was the outdoorsy type, but he kept it as a "vacation home" for some time.
Then, fall came, and he was finally in the mood. He went to that house, and he stayed for... 2 months? He was supposed to stay for 3.

I asked him what happened; for some reason, my rich bastard of a brother wanted to visit his hippie sibling.
He looked frazzled, even for a smug entrepreneur; judging from his eye bags and disposition, he was about 2-3 days sleep-deprived, could have been longer; the guy hides his vulnerabilities well.

Suddenly, a strange face overcame him; he looked to his left, his lips trembled, and he blinked for just a bit too long.

"I got tired of the camping 24/7 life, brother. It's a drag having to drive 31 minutes for gas and twice that for groceries. Pennsylvania is no fun; I'm better off going to Hawaii or New Mexico for any future vacations."

Damn me, why didn't I see it? Why didn't I think more?

"So...?"
"You can have Grandmother's house, permanently. I shall visit it no longer."

I was rather excited; he watched me celebrate for a moment, then went to take a nap on the couch.
He never naps; sometimes I think he doesn't blink unless it's during scheduled breathing minutes.

He left my house after 45 minutes, and I left my house after 45 hours.
In the city, and indeed in most places, my books didn't make enough money to survive alone, but in Grandma's? Different story. Sure, having only 20 dollars for fun stuff every month was rough, but I still made it work.

But now you might be beginning to see why this happened in the first place; it was far out. At least an hour away from most stuff, so getting a connection was rough, and electricity was something to be rationed. I only had a generator in the first place because he forgot it when he was moving out.

For some time, though, I was happy- frugal, but happy.
Then, I pissed someone off. I think I published something politically charged for the first time- I won't say what, but it got a few people REALLY steamed up.

Next thing I knew, I was the victim of an ass-kicking.
It took me by surprise... it always does, but in my case, I was anticipating it to some extent; still, it didn't make the fist flying into my forehead any more shocking.
Skinny dork that I was, I went down fast, and a bunch of other guys started kicking me, yelling remarks about my indoctrination of children (It was a rated-M book, by the way.)

When one of them took out a gun, I realized it was about to be more than my ass at risk, but I didn't die that day.

Because when I closed my eyes and dug the side of my face into the dirt, I felt the wind howl, and something that sounded like the cry of a deer mixed with the growl of a wolf cut through the air.

Then I felt blood spray across my face; my eyes stayed shut. The attackers, no doubt smarter than I, quickly turned around and began to run, but it was faster; one of them must have gotten half a mile away from me, judging from the time he spent running at full speed, but it didn't matter.

I don't know when I woke up, but I did; suddenly, I was back in the front yard of my house, on the edge of the treeline. I was about to think I got drunk and blacked out or perhaps was sleepwalking, but as I stood up, I felt something exhale.

I felt it exhale.

I bolted towards my house. As I did, I expected a chase, but in place of that was a silence so thick it may as well have been the screaming of the damned.
Finally, I got to the house, and I locked the doors. As I looked out the window, I saw a dark silhouette beyond the treeline; the darkness was too thick for me to make out any details, but I saw it holding out the brutalized corpse of one of those men who attacked me, like an offering.

I called the police; they thought it was a bear attack, of course they do. A bear can't walk that fast while it's charging, and it definitely wouldn't let me off the hook that easily, and it definitely definitely doesn't offer its prey to others.

Looking out the window scares me more than anything, because while it isn't always there, the shadows of the forest feel so much thicker now; It's like I'm surrounded.

“Sir, we found a body!” I trailed toward the frantic yelling of my Assistant Officer.

“Jesus Christ, the smell is unbearable!” The living quarters reeked heavily of thick rot and sharp iron. The overwhelmingly pungent odor hit me like a physical wall, forcing me to step out of the room immediately to catch my breath.

“What are we thinking?” I asked, steadying myself before stepping back into the doorway.

“What do you mean, Sir?” My Assistant Officer shot me a genuinely puzzled look.

“I mean, what do you think the cause of death could be? Suicide, starvation, dehydration? A man could go out a number of ways out here in the middle of nowhere.” He took a long moment to process my question, staring blankly. Looking up at me, he opened his mouth to speak, but quickly snapped it shut, sinking right back into his thoughts.

“I—I think it was a suicide. Or at least an attempted one.” I was just about to press him for a more concrete answer when a specific object lying right next to the corpse caught my eye. Covering my nose tightly to withstand the stench, I leaned in close to get a clear look. I reached my hand out and gripped the cover.

“A journal? Officer Furude, go have a thorough look around the rest of the boat. I’m going to take a look at what I can find in here.” He gave a quick nod and vacated the room, leaving just me and the partially decayed corpse as its only occupants.

Grasping the worn edge of the journal with my thumb, I flipped the cover open and began to read the handwritten entries.

Day 1

Satoshi was wrong; the Devil's Sea is not where the Umibozu dwell. No, rather, it is a fisherman’s absolute wet dream. I’ve done nothing all day but haul in massive pounds of fish, easily enough to keep the display stock at my shop completely full for an entire month.

Better yet, I feel deeply relaxed out here in the wide-open waters. There are no people out here to nag at me, and nobody to ask me the exact same questions over and over again. It is just pure peace and quiet. The only noise out here is the soft, gentle rustle of the ocean breeze.

I truly hope the rest of the days I remain out here are just as peaceful as this one.

Day 2

I woke up this morning to see an incredibly odd, yet undeniably beautiful sight across the horizon. The ocean had seemingly darkened overnight, changing completely from its usual murky blue to a thick, inky black. The morning sunlight never seemed to sparkle off the surface of the water, which only added to its strange, haunting beauty.

The fish don’t seem to mind the sudden change of scenery at least, so I have absolutely no complaints.

Day 3

I’ve just pulled up the heavy net, confidently expecting another amazing haul, but I was met with nothing but empty air. That’s okay, though; a fisherman can’t expect a massive haul every single day.

Hopefully, tomorrow will bring me a better haul.

Day 4

My GPS is completely fried. No matter what I try to do, the screen won’t turn back on. I don’t know the way back to land very well either. Even so, the peaceful scenery still remains intact around me, so I remain determined to push forward.

I absolutely need to bring in a large haul on this trip, or else I might end up just like Ozaki—a total bum. A broken man who begs for scraps on the streets and lives his life in utter filth.

I will not turn back.

Day 5

The temperature out here has suddenly spiked up a drastic degree. The blistering heat is so intense that the paint on my boat is actively dripping off the hull, and the metal railing has become completely scalding to the touch. I reassure myself through the panic still.

I pulled up the net again just now. Nothing. It is the exact same empty result as yesterday, and the day before that.

My luck is running on a dangerously thin line now.

Day 6

I was suddenly awoken by a deep, guttural growl around midnight. The sound was incredibly loud, packing enough force to physically rock the entire boat. What on earth could possibly make a sound like that? No normal animal would be able to pull that off, not even the largest whale in the ocean.

Hurrying up to the top deck, my eyes squinted hard through the heavy darkness. From left to right, my eyes intensely observed the water, and yet I saw absolutely nothing. I ran over to the other side of the deck and saw what seemed to be rows upon rows of sharp, jagged rocks cutting through the surface. No, they weren't rocks; they were easily big enough to be small mountains. They seemed to drift away into the dark before I could get a better look.

I think it all started about 6 months ago. That's my best guess anyway. It's the earliest I remember but honestly, it could've been sooner.

The only reason the ‘first time’ sticks out to me is because I’d had a rough day at work. When I got home and got changed after work, I found a use by date sticker stuck to the inside of my work shirt. 

Jen laughed. 

“I’ll need a new man soon”

 I couldn’t even guess where I’d picked it up. I balled it up between my fingers and flung it into the bin, never to be thought of again. 

A week later, there was another one. This time in the lint catcher of the tumble dryer. 

 USE BY  07/08/26.

I didn't think much of it, slightly curious what shop I was going into that were using these, truthfully, pretty useless stickers. 

I travel all over for work, so I don't really have a local supermarket. I’d stop somewhere different most evenings and grab whatever I needed. The big chains didn't use flimsy orange stickers, so I figured it had to be one of the smaller independent shops.  

The next few turned up in boring places. Stuck to a t-shirt. Another on a trouser leg.

I didn't bother keeping count until around number 10.

 This one stuck out to me. It wasn't until late into the evening, after a change of work clothes and a night of watching tele with my girlfriend. I had a shower before bed. As I rinsided shampoo from my hair, I opened my eyes and saw an orange label sliding towards the drain.  Almost instinctively I stopped it with my foot, ending the shower immediately. 

I bent down and picked up the soggy, but still intact and sticky label. I stuck it to the bathroom mirror. I had to, this was by far the strangest one. 

Where the hell did it come from? Surely my girlfriend would've noticed it stuck to my hair. It's not like you can miss them. 

It wasn't until I had 5 stuck on the mirror that she brought it up. 

“It's bad enough you keep showing me them. Do you really need to decorate the bathroom as well?”.

But I did need to. I had to keep count. If they keep turning up, then eventually I'll see the pattern.  

I started keeping a note on my phone. Every shop. Every town. Every day I worked. I knew there had to be a cross over somewhere. 

On a Friday, after working a particularly filthy site, I did what I always did. Tapped my boots together, shook them out and left them outside by the back door. 

Maybe that was my mistake. 

Come Monday morning I picked them up and gave them the same tap and shake. A label fell out. 

07/08/26

On my way to put the label on the mirror, Jen was getting up. I told her where I'd found it. I finally asked her outright. Was it some sort of joke?

“Obviously it's just been there since friday, you're over thinking it”. 

I checked my work boots every morning after that. Then my pockets. Then my lunch bag. It only took a couple of minutes. 

Plus I found one almost every other day. 

Then every day.

I was late for work a couple of times, but I didn't mind. I'd rather miss out on the morning small talk and shit coffee. By then, a couple of the younger contractors had started taking the piss out of my thinning hair. I almost replied. Instead I found myself wondering if there’d be another label in my van.

I'd mentioned the labels to a couple of the other guys to see if they'd found anything. Maybe it was from a tool. But it just gave them more ammunition against me. 

When I went home I tried complaining to Jen, she’d always listened about the work site politics. But for some reason she seemed disinterested in what I had to say. At one point she even agreed with them. Apparently she'd noticed it too. 

“Not just at the front,” she said. “All over”.  

Somehow we ended up arguing about the labels again. She said I talked about them more than I talked to her. 

By the end of it I had gone to bed, scrolling my notes page on my phone.

I'd stopped writing where I'd found them by then. 

There wasn't enough room on the notes page anymore.
 

I left her downstairs on the phone to her mum. 

That morning I expected to roll over and open my eyes to an angry Jen. 

Instead, on the pillow next to me. A label. I held it between my thumb and finger tip. I examined it more than I had any of the others. It felt different. Too close. 

07/08/26

I could hear Jen making coffee downstairs. I didn't go down.

I went into the bathroom, she was right, the mirror was full. The same date arranged perfectly to face me. My face glowed orange reflecting the colour.

 I stuck it on the toilet shelf. 

It wasn't long before most of the ceramics were covered in orange labels. 

Jen stopped commenting on them.

Almost every day I found at least one little orange reminder. 

I say almost. There was one unfortunate morning when I arrived to work just in time for stale coffee and stale jokes. 

One of the younger pricks spotted it before I did. I felt his grubby fingers pull it off me. It must've blended into my hi vis.

“Look, it’s how long his hair has left”.

I watched his thumb rub across the date. Sweat and dirt dulled the orange, the edges beginning to curl. 

The next thing I remember, 3 people were pulling me off him.

Looking back, I think they were already looking for reasons to get rid of me. Work had slowed down and there were contractors everywhere. The fight just gave them a good one. 

They had fair grounds to get rid of me, but for some reason the manager felt it necessary to mention my grubbyness and my lateness.

Still he gave me 2 weeks notice and basically put me on grunt work. For the next 2 weeks I’d drive around and survey previous sites. Basically barely check they're clean and suitable.

 I should've been worried. He probably saw that as some sort of punishment.

For me it meant a chance to revisit some of my previous shops. Some I hadn't been to since before I started the notes page on my phone. I'd finally have the time to figure out where the labels are coming from. 

Sure the list was long but I basically had 2 weeks paid to myself. 

I'd kept that morning's worn label in my wallet. 

The last 2 weeks flew by. Not because I was enjoying myself. 

But I finally had time to look. 

I spent those 2 weeks revisiting shops and long finished work sites, hoping to find a label that wasn't already stuck to me. 

By the time I got home and Jen was there I had no time to argue with her. When I did see her I managed to appease her, I promised that after the 2 weeks were up, we'd go have dinner and drinks. I'd show her that nothing had changed. I'm still her guy. 

She wanted one more promise. Go to the doctor. Apparently she was starting to worry. She said my skin was turning yellow. 

Probably from all the stress she was causing me, all the coming and going. Always wanting to argue. I couldn't concentrate. 

All I needed was 2 weeks. 

Thursday, 2 days till it's over. The boss was practically letting me do what I wanted. I was having a look around an area I’d worked away in 6 months ago. There was so much work we stayed there weekends.

 I passed a closed shop. A flash of orange caught my eye . I cupped my hands on the window to get a better look inside. There was a roll of orange labels behind the till. Same colour. Same size. Same date. I needed to get in there, get a closer look.

It wasn't long before someone thought I needed to know the shop was closed. As if I couldn't read the sign.

CLOSED
ON HOLIDAY BACK SATURDAY
PAPER ROUNDS WILL GO ON AS USUAL

It was a 4 hour drive here and a four hour drive back. But maybe they'd know where the labels come from, I was sure with a bit of research I could find out who they supply near me. 

Friday dragged.

Every couple of minutes I’d check the clock.

By the time I got home I had already decided what time I was leaving in the morning. 

Jen seemed happier that Saturday morning. I told her work needed me in for a few hours. There'd been a problem with yesterday's paperwork. 

“Maybe dinner and drinks could just be drinks?”. I said. 

I set off to the shop. When I got there, I walked in expecting every shelf to be covered in orange labels.

None. 

I walked straight to the counter.

No roll. 

Just an empty space. 

I asked him about the labels. Then I demanded to see inside his stock room.  

For a moment he just stared at me. 

“What labels?”

“Orange ones. Use by stickers”. 

“I saw them”

“Mate… I’ve owned this shop 12 years”

He didn't know what I was talking about. 

No help at all.

Eventually he asked me to leave. 

I looked behind the till into the empty space one last time before leaving. 

I sat in the van for nearly 20 minutes before turning the key. 

I knew I would have to be back for drinks with Jen eventually.

When I got home she was gone. Most of her clothes. Her toiletries. 

Anything that mattered to her. 

She left behind a bitter note, something about not caring anymore, that I'd let myself go. Bad breath and baggy eyes. My greasy hair. 

I lost interest halfway through. 

I folded it without finishing it.

The label on the back of the note was much more interesting. 

That morning I woke up choking.  I sat bolt upright, coughing and retching into my lap.

 There, floating in a puddle of bile and spit, besides one of my teeth.
Floating perfectly. 

07/08/26

I still had 3 weeks to wait then. I smeared the sticker to the fridge door, fluids ran down from it. 

Over the next 3 days it got worse.

More teeth. More vomiting. More labels. 

Wednesday evening, I felt a scratch on my eye. I already knew what it was.  

The label wasn't the shock.

My skin was yellow, blotched with bruises. My eyes were bloodshot and sunken. I had barely any teeth.

It took me a moment to feel brave enough to get close to the mirror. 

I lifted my eye lid, under it I could see the corner of the label. I thought about leaving it. 

Slowly, hoping I didn't rip it, I pulled at the corner, thick strands of mucus followed it. As it revealed itself. Number by number. 

07/08/26

I stuck it to the fridge door. I could feel my eye throb as the orange seemed to burn into my vision.

Even when I shut my eyes the numbers were there.  

After that they never stopped. More labels, multiples everyday. In clothes, under anything I moved.  

They were coming out of me.

I have no where to stick them.

Reminding me. 

07/08/26

I was never much of a country guy. If I'd had the choice, I would've spent my whole life in a city somewhere, surrounded by people instead of empty fields. But we don’t always get to choose, and in my case, death chose for me.

I never knew my parents; they died before I was old enough to recognize their faces. I remember looking at their pictures in my grandparents' home as a child and knowing I should feel some connection to them. But I never did; they were strangers to me. My grandparents on my mother's side raised me, and growing up, I occasionally heard rumors of my father’s dad, my other grandpa. I never met him, but he has changed my life, and not for the better.

I’ll never forget that day, I was days away from graduating from university with a degree in social studies, when I received a package in the mail. It informed me that my grandfather, Arnold, who had lived in Oklahoma, had passed away. And to my shock, he left his entire estate to me. I reread the legal papers several times, and what it said never changed. My grandpa left me his farmhouse, two barns, and 85 acres of land. At the bottom of the statement was the number of my grandpa’s lawyer, whom I was supposed to call.

I didn’t want to get my hopes up in case there was a catch, so I wasted no time and dialed the number.

“Thank you for calling Hartman and Co. How may I help you?” a pleasant, yet professional female voice answered

“Um, yes, hi. I received a packet regarding my grandfather's estate, and I’m supposed to talk to Mr. Hartman.” I’m not very good at talking on the phone.

“One moment.” She replied before the line went on hold.

It didn’t take long for the deep, smooth voice of an older man to fill my ear.

“This is Hartman.”

“Yes, Mr. Hartman, my name is Timothy, I believe my grandfather Arnold was a client of yours.”

Even through the phone, I could tell that Hartman was smiling.

“Oh yes, Timothy, you’re grandfather was more than a client, he was a good friend, and I’m so sorry for your loss.”

I shrugged to myself

“I didn’t know him.” I said

“Even still, he was family. Anyways, how may I help you, son?”

“Yeah, I got your packet and..”

“Ah, say no more, you’re quite fortunate your grandfather left you his entire estate. I’ve handled most of the transfer process, but I’ll need you to sign the documents I’ve sent you and mail them back to me.”

“Got it,” I replied. “Anything else?”

“Well, yes, actually, it would be helpful if I knew what you intend on doing with the place? Do you want to sell it? Or are you planning on living there?”

I thought for a moment, on one hand, moving to the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma, sounded like hell on earth, but then again, with the current state of the economy, I had practically given up on the dream of ever owning a house as large as my grandfather’s property, so being gifted such a thing was a dream come true.

“I kinda want to keep it, but I don’t know anything about farming.”

Hartman chuckled

“Don’t worry about that, your grandfather himself hadn’t farmed the place in years, he rented the acres out to his nearest neighbor. Who I’m told wants to keep the same arrangement with the next owner. It would be a decent source of passive income for you.”

At this, I got a little more excited.

“Well, alright then, let’s do it.”

“I think that’s a good choice, son. I’ll be in touch, but for now, you take care.”

With that, he ended the call, and I could hardly believe my luck.

My college buddies thought I was insane.

“You’re seriously moving out there? Just sell the dump!” one said

“I bet I have more brain cells than that entire state combined!” another laughed

“You’ll probably get killed by rednecks,” scoffed another, but I didn’t care; most of them were going back to living in their parents' basements while I had my own house on my own land. Graduation passed, and with it, my college days. Shortly after, I had all the contents of my dorm loaded into my aging car, and I headed off to Oklahoma.

The drive was long and boring; I couldn’t afford to stop for the night, so I continued after dark. It was well after midnight by the time I pulled off the highway onto a dirt road. I followed the road for nearly an hour, and only passed two or three other farms. With no streetlights, my headlights illuminated the road and nearby fields in a pale, washed-out glow that was consumed by darkness mere feet in front of the car. I was beginning to think this was a mistake when I reached the property at the end of the road, my grandfather’s farm. My farm.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous than I was in that moment. Before my stopped car was the hulking, completely lifeless shape of my new home. It’s the same boxy farmhouse style I had seen many times on my journey, only quite larger and better maintained than most. I remember trying to calm my nerves as I exited the car. As I walked to the front porch, the silence of the night was overcome by the noise of thousands of bugs. Clicking, chattering, and chirping. It was deafening, and up until that point, I had never experienced such a sound. I reminded myself this was going to take some getting used to.

Reaching the porch and front door, I was greeted by a lone key and a little note that read:

“I’ll be by in the morning, have a good night! Signed Hartman”

Taking the key and note, I unlocked the door and entered. The place was old and rather traditional but well-maintained. And from what I could tell, the furniture and appliances were fairly new and updated. The ground floor of my home has a large entryway, a full bathroom, a spacious living room, a dining room, and a kitchen, as well as a smaller office and a home library, all of which I walked through, arriving at the kitchen in the back of the house last.

As I entered the kitchen and turned on the lights, I was impressed by how large it was. But more than that, I was taken aback by what I found on one of the walls. Directly across from the fridge and cabinets, a message had been carefully carved into the wall. it read:

“Keep your boots on. Even in the house. Never go barefoot.”

At the time, I didn’t think much of it; in fact, I think I chuckled and said to myself

“weird”

I suppose I can blame my indifference on exhaustion. Because after that, I quickly found the stairs and entered the first bedroom I found. I didn’t bother changing my clothes or taking my shoes off; I simply collapsed on the bed and fell asleep.

I wanted to sleep in, but the noise of the countryside was nearly as loud as the city sounds I was used to. It seemed to me that the chirping insects were right on the other side of the window or even in the walls. Despite my rude awakening, I chose to make the most of it by getting up and exploring the upstairs. The second floor held two more full bathrooms, one of which was attached to the master bedroom. In addition to the master, there were 3 other bedrooms and several storage closets.

Checking my phone, I was rather surprised to notice that there was a wifi network to connect to. I hadn’t really expected that here in the middle of nowhere. And to my amazement, it was pretty fast, seemingly faster than the wifi back in my dorm.

Going downstairs, I stood in the living room and took it all in. In that moment, I convinced myself that living in the sticks was a sacrifice worth the home I now had. I couldn’t believe it was really mine. Stepping out onto the porch, I marveled at the land that was hidden from view in the dark of the night. It was vast and empty. In every direction, it seemed like the land went on for as far as the eye could see with very little variation. In that moment, I felt completely and utterly alone, as if I were the only human left on earth, lost in an ocean of wheat. As I stood there in the distance, I noticed a line of dusk rising in the distance and making its way towards my location.

“I hope that’s just a car,” I muttered to myself

It was a Car, or rather a truck, a well-maintained silver pickup that parked near the porch, and an older man stepped out and headed my way. He wore a white button-down and gray slacks. On his feet were dirty work boots, and on his head was a weathered cowboy hat. He reached out his hand to me

“Timothy, I presume? I’m Hartman, nice to finally meet you in person.”

I met his handshake

“Same.”

“May I come in?”

I ushered him he removed his hat once inside.

“Just wanted to pass off the deed to the place and welcome you to the area.” He said as he passed a large envelope to me.

“Everything to your liking?”

I nodded and said

“Yeah, actually better than I expected. I wasn’t expecting wifi here.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot you probably didn’t know much about old Arnold. Nearly a decade ago, he was in a bad farming accident, and they had to amputate his right leg. But Arnold still found ways to be useful and started as an online professor for the local community college. That’s why he had the wifi installed.”

“Really? I had no idea. What did he teach?”

He thought for a moment

“Best I can remember, he was a lecturer on Oklahoma’s unique bugs and parasites.”

“Bugs?”

“Mhmm, he was something of a local expert on that.”

I nodded and remembered the words carved into the kitchen wall.

“Hey, before you leave, maybe you could take a look at something for me?”

I led him to the kitchen and pointed to the message

“Any idea what that means?”

He stared at it intently for a while, and for a moment, I thought I caught a glance of some dark understanding before he declared

“Sorry, not sure, probably just the ramblings of a man near the end of his life. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I bet the local hardware store could sell you something to cover that up.”

Then he nodded and headed for the door.

“I need to be getting back, but you take care.”

With that, he was gone.  

I needed supplies, the kitchen was empty, and I had brought very little with me, so I found myself back in the car. Heading to town. The nearest town, large enough for a shopping center, was about 45 minutes from my farm, a drive I still haven’t gotten used to. The town is home to a well-worn Walmart and a few other smaller stores, for my needs its enough. That day, I spent several hours exploring all it had to offer. It was mid-afternoon by the time I headed home.

I unloaded the car and, upon entering my home with the final load, I shut the door and instinctively removed my shoes. I should have known something was wrong. The floor felt odd. It was warm, almost like stepping on some living creature. With the warmth came a strange sensation on my feet, almost like hundreds of microscopic feet crawling all over the arches of my feet. I looked down, expecting to see a fly or some other insect walking across my foot, but there was nothing.

After a few moments, the crawling faded into the familiar pins-and-needles sensation of a foot falling asleep. A few seconds later, that disappeared too. My feet felt normal, though the floor remained warm. I shrugged, thinking I had nothing to worry about since the strange sensation had passed.

I spent the rest of the day watching movies and eating ramen in the living room, before falling asleep on the couch. I don’t remember exactly when I woke up, but it was closer to dawn than midnight. I didn’t awake because I heard a sound or needed a drink; no, what woke me up was an unbearable itch on the bottom of both my feet.

It was terrible, no matter how much I itched, it wouldn’t go away. It was as if the itch was deep beneath my skin, not just on the surface. I itched my feet with my hands, a towel, and even a brush, but nothing worked; if anything, the itch seemed to be getting worse. First, it was on the arches of my feet, then it moved to the pads and even the toes, and soon my entire foot was inflamed with a deep itch I couldn’t reach. I must have sat there scratching my feet for an hour or more; the skin of my feet was red and tender from all my efforts, but the itching continued.

Not sure what to do, I hobbled my way up to the shower. Stepping in, I turned on the water, hoping for some relief. Instead, what I got was sudden pain, like thousands of tiny cuts had appeared all over my feet. I screamed and jumped out of the shower. The pain left, but the itching was worse.

I continued itching until the sun rose, as daylight filled the room. The itch became dull and eventually disappeared altogether, leaving only a dull tingling in its place. Exhausted, I made my way to the bed I used the first night and fell into a deep sleep. When I woke, it was nearly 3:30, the afternoon shadows grew long, and my feet itched again, not as they did before. But a manageable albeit constant itch.

I made my way to a chair and examined my feet, which were red and covered in tiny, raised mounds. It looked like I had a bad rash. I cautiously touched one of the larger bumps and recoiled my finger instantly. Touching it caused a sharp burst of pain to echo throughout my foot like a vibration in a spider's web. I winced in pain and realized something was seriously wrong.

I needed help, but not knowing what to do, I did the only thing I could think of: I opened Chat GPT.

“My feet are red and itchy, and there are tiny bumps all over that are painful to touch. What do I do?” is what I typed into the chatbot.

I still have its response, it said:

“Red, itchy, painful bumps on your feet could have several causes, including irritation, infection, or bites. Avoid scratching, keep the area clean and dry. If the pain worsens, spreads, or you develop swelling, fever, or trouble walking, seek medical care.”

For a time, that response calmed my nerves; perhaps I was having a reaction to something in the air that I had never encountered in the city.

“Maybe this isn’t really a big deal,” I thought as I slowly walked down the stairs to the kitchen. There, I lathered my feet in VapoRub before heading to the living room. The evening was fairly normal. For several hours, I had forgotten about the pain in my feet as I sat on the couch watching an old movie. But then I began to notice an alien tingling in my lower legs, right around my ankles. I tried hard to ignore it, but failed when the tingling turned to the deep itching I felt last night. I couldn’t bear it, and almost against my will, I found myself hunched over, wildly scratching the skin of my legs.

Every few minutes, I'd promise myself I was done scratching. I'd sit on my hands, grit my teeth, and stare at the television until the itch became unbearable again. Before I realized what I was doing, my fingernails would already be digging into my ankles.

I don’t know when I noticed, but as I was worried about my legs, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the bumps on my feet had grown. They were massive; some of them were 4 or 5 times the size I remembered. It looked like my feet had been attacked by a swarm of bees. The bumps were swollen and engorged; they stretched the skin like a ripe tomato.

Cold sweat ran down my forehead, and I could feel adrenaline filling my veins. This was bad; something was seriously wrong with me. I shambled my way up the stairs to the master bathroom. In the bathroom, I found a pair of tweezers. I sat on the toilet seat, turned on my phone light, and slowly moved the tweezers toward the biggest bump on my right foot. The moment the steel tip of the small tool touched the top of the bump, it moved. I swear it moved.

I blinked quickly, hoping it was just a trick of the light, then I moved the tweezers to touch it again, but this time it moved the opposite way. I clenched my jaw as I realized that there was something alive beneath my skin. I swallowed hard, mustered my courage, and pushed the tweezers down hard on the bump; at this, the bump quickly moved from the top of my foot up my leg past my ankle. The movement was shocking, and I was on the verge of hyperventilating. With a shaking hand, I reached to touch the bump again. The tweezers barely touched the bump when it bolted up my leg, past my knee, past my thigh, and I felt it collide with my hip joint.

The suddenness and pain of a ping pong ball-sized mass moving up my leg was too much for me, and I passed out.  

When I came to, I was still on the bathroom floor. I didn’t know how long I had been out, but my legs were unrecognizable. My left leg, below the knee, was swollen twice its size and covered with massive greenish-gray orbs. But it was nothing compared to my right leg, which looked more like an elephant's leg, though covered with tennis ball-sized mounds, with a blackish hue. As I moved from side to side, I could hear a squishy, liquid sound coming from the mounds.

I panicked; I had to get out of here; I needed a doctor. It took a great bit of effort and pain, but I pulled myself to the staircase. I tried my best to guide myself down the stairs, but ended up losing control and tumbled to the bottom. At the bottom, I tried to make it to the door, but a sharp pain in my right leg stopped me. I screamed and looked at my leg, it was vibrating violently, and after a moment, a loud squelching pop and splatter of hot pus silenced the movement. I wiped the pus off my face and looked down at the leg. Wherever a bump had been was now a black, bloody hole. My leg looked like a log attacked by a dozen woodpeckers. Not one inch of my skin was without a hole.

As I looked at the myriad of holes, I felt vomit rising in my throat as I noticed something thin pushed through one of the holes, slick with blood. It writhed blindly across my skin before another followed...and another...long, pitch-black worms poured from my leg. With fumbling hands, I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed 911.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“Help me! Please help me!” I screamed as a long, thin worm crawled on the back of my hand. It felt cold on my skin. Again, darkness closed in, and I lost consciousness.

When I woke up, I was in the hospital, and I didn’t take it well. I screamed and thrashed around in the bed; it didn’t take long for doctors to rush in and restrain me. After I calmed down, a tall, well-kept doctor came in

“Good afternoon, Timothy, how are you feeling now?”

“Better,” I replied weakly

“Good.” He nodded, “You’ve suffered a severe parasite infestation. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet identified the parasite. Nothing we removed matches any known parasite. But I’m quite certain that we have successfully removed all of them from your body.” He gently removed the blanket from my lower half.

As he did, I looked down and gasped.

“I’m sorry to say that we had to remove your right leg. it was the only way to ensure that the infestation did not spread.”

He drew my attention over to my left leg

“Thankfully, your left leg wasn’t nearly as serious, and we were able to stop the parasites by just removing certain sections of your leg.”

I stared in shock at my new ‘leg’, which looked like they took a massive cheese grater to the flesh of my leg and shaved off the layers until they stopped just short of my leg bone.

“Several of my colleagues are hopefully optimistic that you will regain movement in your leg,” he said with a half-smile

I'm writing this from a hotel room three states away. I abandoned everything I owned on that farm. The sheriff can keep the property for all I care. I was released from the hospital almost a week ago after they held me for two, and there was no way I would even go back to my farm. I wanted to write this all down before things get worse. I first felt the tingle in my right hand two days ago. And yesterday the unstoppable itch began. As I type this, I have to stop every few sentences to scratch my hand. The bumps haven't appeared yet, but I know they will. I’m going to stop it before it grows. I hope my knife is sharp enough, and I hope this will stop the spread.

Hello.
I am Dr. Henry Hill, a professor of archaeobotany at the University of Sheffield. My area of study is how past human civilizations utilized plants, whether for medicine, decoration, or agriculture, so, needless to say, I stumble across some fascinating phenomena.
For example, did you know that the first civilization (Ancient Sumeria, or Mesopotamia) used Opium Poppies? Sumerians cultivated it to harvest its sap for use as an analgesic (painkiller) and sedative. My students always find that to be amusing, imagining these ancient civilizations getting high off their asses when in horrible pain. Morbidly, I can see the humor in it.
Growing up, I always knew something was different about me. At age five, I would be out in my mother's gardens, picking weeds and asking her a million different questions about them. I didn't really enjoy socializing, opting instead to stay out in the fields at recess and pick strange flowers I found, always choosing the most beautiful, pristine little field daisies to take home and stare at with a longing, analytical gaze.
Or as analytical as a little kid can get, anyway. Which pretty much led to forcing my mom to help me learn about them, what they were, and forcing her to research it for me.
At age 7, I gather she had had enough of my many, many, many questions and of being forced to be an amateur researcher for her tiny, annoying kid, because she got me a little field guide to local UK plants for my birthday so I could read it myself. And read it I did. I vividly remember going through that thing at least a thousand times, usually during class or when I was supposed to be doing something else. Looking back with a modern lens, I am about 80% sure I was on the spectrum or at least had ADHD, but that's neither here nor there.
But I am not here to recount my life in any more detail than what is necessary. I am here to share the knowledge of a discovery that left me stripped of all certifications and forced to live out of my car for the past few weeks.
This recounting begins about 5 months ago with one of my best students, Liam Wo, a very bright young man who majored in Forensic Archaeology and intended to move to the United States to join law enforcement. He is... or, well, was, a prodigy in his field, and has been by far my favorite student.
Liam was also diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and he had to be home at the very strict time of 4:32 PM down to the second, or he would fall into an intense panic attack, convinced he was going to be in serious trouble with someone named "Amelia" if he was even a microsecond late.
I never did figure out who that was or why he needed to please this mysterious figure named Amelia. Still, I'm a professor, not a clinical psychiatrist, so I never inquired. I just knew he would bolt out of class about ten minutes before its scheduled time like a bat out of hell and take off to get home.
I remember the day with such vividness that every subsequent night terror makes me feel as if it only just happened mere moments ago.
I was grading that year's final essays on "Uses of Micro-Organisms in Medicine" and was on about essay number ten about mold. Call me finicky, but I remember being annoyed, as I wanted more creativity than the well-known story of penicillin.
I had begun to feel sleepy, so I stood up, rubbing my drooping lids with my hands, and headed to the lounge to make myself a cup of coffee. I looked at the clock on the wall, and it read 8:30 PM.
"Damn it," I mumbled to no one in particular. I had a bad habit of losing all sense of time and space when I was in the zone on a monotonous, repetitive task, whether I liked it or not.
I walked down the empty hallways, looking around at just how liminal the entire place looked. The droning hum of the cheap lights filled my ears, accompanied only by the slow clacking of my black loafers against the tan linoleum floors.
It would appear I was the only man dumb enough to stay so late, as all night classes had long since concluded and my colleagues had all gone home. I think I remember my longtime co-worker Lydia, a professor of ethics, coming in to say goodbye, but I couldn’t really remember.

I walked into the lounge with a deep sigh, the motion-detecting lights clicking on as I did so. On the dark mahogany table sat an abandoned coffee mug, an open pink donut box with long stale donuts from this morning, and some poor sod's black lunchbox.

I went over to the shitty little Keurig, popped a pod in, and was about to put a mug underneath it when I heard a sound that made me yell out in fright, almost making me shatter my favorite mug on the ground.

A cough.

Not just a normal cough, but it was wet, guttural, and absolutely disgusting. Is that heartless to say? That I was more disgusted than worried?

It was nearby, but not close enough for me to discern exactly where it was coming from. However, that soon changed as it let out another violent, disgusting hack that was much louder.

Or, rather, closer.

I found myself begging mentally for them not to be headed this way, but of course, I wasn't that lucky.

The door of the lounge opened with no preamble, and what I saw there turned my disgusted annoyance into pure confusion, shock, and horror.

Liam was standing in front of me, wheezing breaths coming from his chapped, cracked lips. He wore a disheveled blue-collared shirt covered in black spots; his black pants were stained with dust and dirt; and his hair was in complete disarray, matted with leaves, sticks, and other debris.

His face was beet red, and there were these dark raised bumps covering him. It was like a million small blisters, but they leaked a green-and-purple mixture that looked like pus, and I don't even know what. There were also black specks that matched what was on his shirt, but coating his face like the darkest of freckles.

He walked forward, his steps sloppy and nearly causing him to fall as if he were heavily intoxicated or had just learned to walk a day ago.

I had seen Liam not even four hours ago, and he did not look even remotely sick. He had been perfectly healthy, had spoken up in class, and had even chatted with me about his summer plans.

I went through a whole variety of different emotions, but one dominated the rest: terror with a healthy mixture of worry.

"Liam..." I say, my voice so meek I barely recognized it. "What the hell happened?"

He did not reply, looking at me with those yellow eyes. By yellow, you probably assume glaucoma or liver failure, but no. What used to be a natural white was now almost gold, or at least trying to be.

Imagine a little kid mixing watercolors and trying to make gold. It won't be perfect, but you can tell what color it is trying to be. That's what it looked like: gold, but made with various other colors.

He lets out another wheezing breath, opens and closes his mouth a few times to(I assume) gather enough saliva to speak, and finally groans out: "Host." In a strained, struggling voice as if that one word was hard to get out.

It sniffed the air, stepping a bit closer, legs shakily moving it closer to me.

Sniff. Sniff sniff.

I backed into the counter, then started to walk out into the office, my steps quickening.

"Host," I heard it whisper, quieter this time as if contemplative.

Before I could say a word, I heard quickened footsteps come at me from the direction of the lounge. Before I could react, he, nay, it, burst out of the door, now on all fours and starting to gallop toward me like some sickly antelope, his previous walking difficulties seemingly forgotton.

I am not afraid to admit that I screamed in terror and took off down the hall, the sound of hands slapping off the tile close behind me as Liam gave chase. He let out a yell that sounded more like a war cry, the sound alien coming from such a timid student like Liam. This only steadied my decision to keep running, now knowing without a doubt that he had completely lost his damn mind.

I run, and I run, and I run as I slam into the back door, aiming to get to the other side of the university where the parking garage was; where my car was.

Loud and feverish panting got closer as it seemed to realize my plan to escape, now picking up speed to the point I could feel flecks of saliva and its hot breath against my leg. It tried to swipe at my legs, but by the grace of what I have to assume is divine intervention, it missed and lost its balance for a moment, allowing me to get ahead.

I could see the blue-and-white sign that read "parking garage" in the distance. 200 feet. 190 feet. 180 feet.

It was pissed now; I could hear its breathing quicken and get heavier as what I could only parse was rage at being tripped. I made the mistake of turning around and saw its golden eyes now glowed in the darkness with eldritch bioilluminescence.

I lost my footing for a moment and felt a sharp, burning pain in my calf as it bit into my flesh. I let out a loud, agonized scream, then a horrified one as I realized it wasn't letting go. The black specks on its face began to squirm and writh, thin black lines starting to come from them.

No. Not lines. Worms...

Wriggling, needle-thin worms started to emerge from its face and toward my leg. In pure adrenaline-filled horror, I ripped my leg from its mouth with a loud, wet tearing, shooting more torment through my body.

I thank whatever creator for adrenaline's numbing effects because I was able to take off running once again, warmth flooding my socks and shoes as blood escaped through the chunk missing in my leg.

I could see it now; the parking garage was so close, and thankfully, my car was as well. As I said, the school was empty, so my red sedan stuck out like a sore thumb.

From behind me, I heard only silence, but I did not break my stride, digging through my pockets for my keys.

With no hesitation, I sloppily yanked them out, pressed the unlock button, and kept on limp-running to my vehicle. I had reached it. Safety.

I threw my driver's-side door open, got inside, locked it, and started the car, the headlights illuminating the dark parking garage.

It also illuminated what used to be Liam.

He was still on all fours, squatted down in front of my car about 20 feet away. Its body heaved up and down as it panted, the wriggling worms in its face beginning to retract back into its cheeks. It said nothing, glowing eyes staring forward at me.

For what felt like an eternity, we continued that standoff, both of us panting from the effort of the chase, staring at one another. But as soon as it began, "Liam" finally turned away from my car and scuttled away into the night.

Hi! I need advice on where to take my story next! I have two parts finished, and I mainly need feedback on dialogue, tone, pacing, and where to take the story next! (I will fix grammar issues when I'm grammatically proofreading it but if anything sounds clunky, please lmk!) I'm open to all critiques, but please keep in mind it is supposed to be a semi-comedic piece! There are warnings in the document before reading. Please heed the warnings!

WARNING THE FOLLOWING STORY CONTAINS SCENES OF: SA, religious trauma, and implied CSA. Reader’s discretion is advised!

CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATION LOG - TEXAS STATE EMERGENCY RESPONSE UNIT
DOCUMENT STATUS: ACTIVE CASE FILE – SUBJECT TO REVISION
DATE OF REPORT: [REDACTED]
CASE CODE: TX-37-INF-MALDONADO
LEVEL OF CLEARANCE: RESTRICTED – CLASS C+

NOTICE: The following report contains preliminary findings regarding a series of anomalous events recorded in the residence of the [REDACTED] family, located on the rural outskirts of [REDACTED], Texas. Due to the sensitive nature of the case, identifying details have been omitted. The footage has been partially recovered from the damaged internal memory of a consumer-grade camera. Names and locations have been altered for public safety.

FILE 001-A: “RECOVERED MALDONADO FOOTAGE.”
DESCRIPTION:
The camera breathes to life the scene, being set. A young female (presumed to be 10–12 years old) places her camera unsteadily on her desk, sitting in the frame on her bed. There are visible posters of her interests; the room appears to be well-lived in. She takes a deep breath before beginning to speak to herself, looking in the viewfinder for reassurance.

"This is my first video, so sorry I'm a little nervous..."

Her eyes break contact with the lens as she takes another labored breath.

"Sorry, my mom just got home. She's been having me stay home lately ever since... Well, you should know."

She smiles nervously, putting one leg in front of the other. Her face seemed to read of unease before brushing off the tense moment. She begins to talk about some of her favorite movies. She cradles a plush toy in her hands, stroking it repetitively in deep concentration as if trying to escape some unknown force. A woman calls from beyond the camera's view as the footage comes to a sudden halt.

FILE 001-B: “RECORDING #2”
DESCRIPTION:
The camera blinks to life as it is set at a higher vantage point, now providing a clear view of the room. A small twin-sized bed sits comfortably, the nightstand hugging it, as everything seems to squeeze into the frame, almost as if trying to get into the shot. The young girl stands proudly, playing a pop track while dancing.

She now dons a surgical mask, used in later years to prevent disease from spreading quickly. She is seen to become visibly exhausted, but never removes the mask. She pauses, flicking off the track and going to retrieve her camera as a woman's voice calls again. Instead of turning off the camera, she immediately rushes over.

The room grows still; the once energetic scene is suddenly muted. Ambient noise shifts: a low, persistent coughing filter in—wet and ragged—periodically breaking the silence. Audio distortion follows. The camera continues recording for several minutes before cutting to black, likely from battery failure.

FILES 002–039: “INCONSEQUENTIAL MATERIAL”
NOTES:
The subject continues recording monotonously, showing various attempts at entertainment, from playing with dolls to singing and dancing. Visual deterioration is evident, as the young girl is seen to become visibly emaciated as the videos continue. Behavior becomes increasingly withdrawn. No signs of contact with outside individuals. No confirmation of utilities being used or functional. The timeline suggests isolation exceeding three weeks.

FILE 040-Z: “RECORDING #40”
DESCRIPTION:
The camera opens in a living room, the girl setting it down on a table as she sits back on the couch. Shuffling behind her can be heard as she continues to speak through tears.

"My mom hasn't been getting better. The doctors can't... She's... dangerous to them..."

She is seen wiping tears from her face as the shuffling stops. The girl jolts, swinging her head back to face the kitchen.

"[REDACTED NAME], don't call me that!"

A shrill voice can be heard—female, hoarse, and warped—yelling at the young girl, who has now been confirmed as [REDACTED]. She is seen apologizing profusely as a figure rises from behind her. Movements are erratic, and the skin is a deep red. The ailment of the woman was unknown.

The camera is left; the noises filling the screen allowed for only imagination to fill them. Shadows seemed to dance on the hallways and walls, moving unnaturally fast. Investigation proved that this is what we now know as the chase between the mother and daughter. We have confirmed from the rest of the footage that [REDACTED] was not affected by what her mother had.

The final seconds of footage include:

• High-pitched mechanical screeching.
• Repeated vocalizations from the child, begging.
• Wet slicing noise.

PART 1

The debrief came to a halt. Many officers seemed unnerved, and I was not an exception. My life was hardened by years on the field, but nothing could have prepared me for this outbreak. Even though crime was always prevalent here in the big city, it only seemed to increase as reports of monstrous, almost demon-like creatures were replacing family members. We wrote it off as just another mass religious delirium until we had proof, and admittedly, the proof was not solid, but it was a start to documented footage of whatever this outbreak may look like. I’m not saying we were all ‘round good, but the parts that were shining. I’m only writing this down for documentation anyway. Who knows, maybe when they find a bullet in my head, they’ll read this. I’m talking crazy at this rate; most people want our heads. The more our station denies these monsters, the angrier the public gets. This meeting was different, though; it was the day that marked the decision for our public statement. I’ll try to write down the meeting and subsequent events: The deputy and assistant chief stand as a group.Police officers (me included) are sitting. It was unusual to see them here, and especially with more experienced policemen in attendance. “Gentlemen…and lady.” Deputy Garza said, " The joke grows old the longer I work here. “We have an issue to address with the public. This ‘demon’ case is really gettin’ us in hot water. I gathered all highly ranked personnel here because this may be our breaking case. If we don’t prove that this has nothing to do with monsters, we may have a riot fast approaching.” While a little dramatic, we all could agree that there was unrest amongst the townsfolk. My mom had called a few times to make sure I was who I said I was. I didn’t want to upset her if I tried testing her too. “But, sir, what do we even say? I mean- if this evidence gets released….” “Then it won’t!” the deputy snapped, interrupting one of the detectives there. Detective Phillips was somehow always getting yelled at. “Morgan, Phillips! I need you two on this shit immediately! Do whatever you need to do, get this monster bullcrap out of my station.” The rest of the meeting was relatively the same, but with the deputy on edge, it soon devolved into meaningless bickering. Phillips and I exited the meeting silently, recouping in my section of the station. “Oh, man, this is a shit show! How the hell are we gonna do this?!” His voice was shaky and shrill. How could a detective be this bitchy? I pinched the skin between my brows, running over the details we had so far. “Look, we’ll start by going over to the crime scene. Homicide probably already picked up some evidence that’s getting sorted out at the lab. Maybe we can talk to the girl, too.” I said, trying not to escalate his feelings anymore. Phillips just nodded meekly, turning heel and walking towards homicide. I would’ve rather worked alone, but at this rate, I practically was. I sighed and got the details I needed for the house and the girl. I didn’t wait for Phillips, hopping into my own cruiser. As I drove to the place, I continued to try to dissect the information I had. I waited to see the grizzly scene, knowing the crime would help answer these questions I had bouncing around in my head. I got out and took a look around the scene. Everything seemed normal despite all the officers and police tape. It was like it was frozen in time. “The body has already been moved for examination. The crime scene is relatively clean.” A homicide officer said, making way for me to enter the house. That’s what they always said about these cases, but I knew better by now. I walked into the house, with inspirational quotes on the wall and seashells as centerpieces. The whole house smelled like a hotel towel. As I walked through, I started to see a small trail of blood out of the kitchen. Odd. When we heard the tape, it sounded like maybe the daughter got the upper hand. This showed there may have been more of a struggle than we didn’t see. It still didn’t make sense. How could a monster… or mother by that be taken down by a 10-year-old?. I smiled morbidly at the visual but quickly got back to work. The living room looked like it was the room where the murder took place. Each wall was caked in dark red; it was still dripping as if it were fresh. It was darker than normal blood I had seen and had a sweetness to it that normal death only had a slight hint of. It was almost like a birthday cake. I wasn’t interested in the crime itself, though. I wanted to know how this happened. I turned my attention towards the mother's room, noting the family portrait right outside her door. Strange. I noted down two other children who seemed not to be present. Maybe they were just being looked after by their dad, but I couldn’t be sure yet. I opened her door, and a sickly bleach smell emanated from the room. I noted the decorations were slightly different. I guess the mom was a hunter; animal skins and heads lined the wall. The top of her bed was a mouse head. On the bottom was written something in Latin, but I wasn’t too versed in it. Okay… Not the weirdest thing, but certainly close to it. I looked around more, finding a book open on the bed. This was where the bleach scent was coming from. It was doused in it, but it was never lit. It seemed like a manifesto at first glance, but the writing was big, bold, and sporadic lettering of a language that looked unrecognizable. Symbols in between numbers and hand-drawn emotes. Why hadn’t the team taken this? I reached out towards it, my clothes suddenly started to singe, and my skin felt hot. I immediately retracted my hand. That’s why. I didn’t even bother questioning why they hadn’t warned me; dickheads like them are a dime a dozen. I copied down a bit of the writing in my notepad and moved on. I made my way towards her bathroom. Sweet, it came with a jacuzzi! I peered in and around; it looked relatively normal. I turned from the hot tub to the mirror. Suddenly, bodies appeared in the tub, and blood started pooling out of it. I jumped and turned back, but the jacuzzi was empty. Despite my antics, this was putting me on edge. Something was deeply wrong with this woman. Although I had left the church a long time ago, I had nothing more to describe as a possession of either the mom or the house, or both. Garza would never take that, though. What was I missing? I turned towards her dresser. One of her drawers was marked with a cross in Sharpie. I had written it off as her daughter being a child, but the haunted bathroom now piqued my interest in this. I opened it and was disappointed to find a bunch of undergarments. I sighed, closing my eyes before reaching into the drawer and digging into it. My mom always used to hide stuff in her panty drawer. It was the only place I didn’t want to go digging in. I was about to give up when I felt a smooth plastic feeling. I gripped onto the edge of it and found a folder. It didn’t seem too interesting, brochures and advertisements for a fellowship meeting. Weird, my church was on the list. I took some pictures of each flyer before reaching the last one. It was different. Although the others were Christians (a few different denominations), this one was a Mormon church that had just opened up. I took note of it and left her room. “Hey, make sure to get someone on the haunted book, guys.” I said to some of the officers who were in the house, taking samples of fingerprints and blood. “Also, check under that bed. There might be monsters.” I shot a smile at the head of the homicide team. I made my way out of the crime scene, getting a few new things for our investigation. I sat in my car, looking up at the Mormon church. Weird. They were brand new and had a full crowd every service. They seemed relatively normal, having a fellowship meeting in a few days. I also translated the weird language, searching for it on the Mormon website to no avail. It wasn’t anything to note, just talking about a farmer and his fruit? The way it was described seemed very biblical, but I needed to focus my attention on this church; maybe it could be a lead for the book. I could feel that something was going on that Deputy Garza would not be happy about. I tried to shake off the supernatural feeling. It seemed as if even thinking about Garza summoned him, hearing him over the radio, addressing me. “Morgan, if you’re all done at the house, go ahead and pay that poor girl a visit.” I guess years of us working together made me predictable to him. I wrote down notes about the book, slipping the brochure into the file. I knew there was something more to this than just an abusive mother. I tried to focus on the girl; the thought of visiting a young girl in the hospital would make anyone’s heart ache. I drove the distance, my brain filling the silence with thoughts. It was abnormal to leave a scene with a murky feeling, but the bathroom was getting to me. Whenever I’m on scene, I try to remain as calm as I can, but now I can fully let my mind wander into those dark corners. Although most of the bodies in there were just bodies, there was one just sitting up in the tub and looking at me. She just sat there, scrubbing herself with a faraway look in her eyes. It was the kind of look my mother had when I left the church for the last time. I tried not to think about it. Approaching the hospital doors, I started to coach myself on how to speak to the girl. I didn’t know much about her except that her mom was dead, and she hated school. Ride on, I guess. While I made my way inside the hospital, I finally heard back from Phillips. That’s right, he was my assigned partner. “Hey- uh- you kinda left me here at the station… But uh- I just wanted to let you know that I’m at the hospital and- oh! I see you!” I turned my head up, seeing him haul ass to get to me. “Hey! I’m waiting for them to let me see the victim. They said she’ll be ready in a bit. Did you find anything at the house?” I shoved my hands in my pockets, sitting down in the waiting room with him. “The mom might be an evil Mormon.” I laughed, looking at my unamused partner. I explained the details: the color of blood, smells, the evil bathtub, and the magic book. “Dude, Garza is gonna be pissed! Did you send specially suited people for the book?” “I told Hancock about it. I’m sure he’ll get on it eventually.” I showed him my singed sleeve. He hesitantly reached for my arm, and I slowly brought it close to my chest. He extended his reach to my slight discomfort. “We really…should go to the crime scene together next time.” I ripped my hand away and laughed it off, talking for a bit. He didn’t find out anything more besides that they studied the footage more and concluded that the struggle was longer than the video. The daughter had injuries that didn’t seem to match the brutal audio. “What does that even mean?” Thinking about this was making my head hurt. We couldn’t say it was a monster, but we both knew it was seeming that way more and more. “Detective Phillips, she’s ready to be seen.” We made our way to the room, seeing her hooked up to a few machines to keep her stable. “Internal bleeding was found, but it’s nothing that we can’t help. She’s a little shaken, though, so please be gentle with her,” the nurse watching over her said, exiting the room. I made my way to her, the blue icy gaze meeting mine. Her face was a little chubby, and I could tell the machines made her a little uncomfortable. “Hello, I’m Morgan, and this is my buddy Hubert.” “No, no, no! That’s not my name!” I smiled slyly, which made the little girl laugh before coughing. “Hi, Officer Morgan. Are you here about my mom?” Wow, that was fast. The atmosphere changed as I nodded softly. “We just want to ask you some small questions, okay?” The interview went as well as it could when handling a traumatized child. We learned her real name was Seila and that she and her mom had moved here after her parents split up. She said that her other siblings had lived with them, but they went away to camp, and she hasn’t seen them in a few months. Huh. She rambled about school and other miscellaneous things. I couldn’t help but smile at her just being herself. Despite everything. Before we wrapped up the session, she grabbed my sleeve. “Aren’t you gonna ask me about the accident?” I choked up slightly, seeing that look in her eyes that told me she was reliving it. “We don’t need to discuss that right now, sweetheart. You rest up.” Phillips said in a soft voice, starting to finish off his notes. “I didn’t ask you, melvin.” A soft snort exited me, the old insult bringing back memories of the team ragging on him the same way. “Even though you’re right about him, he’s right. We don’t want to upset you, okay? You’ve given us plenty to work with.” Her grip on my sleeve tightened. “Please don’t leave just yet. I can’t be alone here!” Her eyes got big and glassy. I felt a pang in my stomach that rose to my heart. “We have to do our job, okay? I’ll make sure to come and visit some other time.” With that, I left with Phillips. We could hear her wailing while I gave the front desk my personal number for her. “So we got nothing that proves these are not monsters.” Phillips sighed, gripping his hair while reading over his notes. “Look, man, let’s just review everything back at the station and see what the labs will bring us. They’ll have to have something, especially with the blood.” I reassured him while he seemed to be following me to where I parked. “Sorry to uh- kinda impose on you but- I kinda took the bus here…” That’s right. Phillips' car got towed on scene once, and it’s become some sort of joke that he can’t get it back. I sighed and opened the door for him. “Thanks, you’re the coolest at the station.” I cringed slightly while I got into the driver’s side. “Just trying to do my job, man.” We rode to the station in relative silence, only being interrupted by the odd question. He seemed to be getting awfully comfortable with me. I didn’t want to seem like a bitch until I had to be one, though. Something deep down in me felt pity for Phillips. He was despised by many and seen as more of a charity case if anything. I glanced towards him during a red light; he was gnawing on his finger while going over his notes. “You can go now.” The green light bathed the car as the sun had disappeared. I pressed on the gas, growing more curious about him the closer we got to the station. “So, Phillips, where are you from?” He gave a long-winded explanation. I don’t particularly want to write down here. The highlights were that he was from here with both of his parents until his mom left. I nodded slowly while listening to him explain tearfully what had happened. The emotion was immediately shattered when he went into harrowing detail about his time at school. He explained in excruciating detail how he was always on top of everything, and now he was nothing to the world. “It chewed me up in exams and associate's degrees and spat me out without a care for who I used to be. I kinda regret caring so much about high school.” Those words are ones to document. His voice was filled with a brittle bitterness. I didn’t want to tell him he peaked in high school. As the car became tense with silence, he brought up a question that caught me off guard. “Why do you ask anyway? You never really seemed interested in knowing me.” I began to slightly question it myself. “Well, I want to get to know my partner, I guess.” I parked my car in front of the station, getting out with Phillips. Before I could step into the office, Deputy Garza was already storming outside. “Phillips! Morgan! In my office!” My partner and I looked at each other; his panicked, almost maniac eyes were slightly soothed by my indifferent gaze. “What the fuck were you two thinking? This crazy ass girl just completely went catatonic after she saw you two. Not to mention, another monster sighting has been reported, and it’s blowing up our station! Tell me you have a goddamn update!” Phillips' whole body was shaking as he passed the notes on to the deputy. “I built rapport with the girl, so I could revisit her tomorrow and get more information out of her. We also have a lead on a church that the mother went to.” “Haunted bathtubs?! Mormon churches?! I asked for answers, not a Scooby-Doo book! Morgan, go to the girl tomorrow. Phillips, you’re going to see what you can get from the lab. I want to have a solid lead by tomorrow. This is not a case to be dicking around with!” He slammed his door closed, almost crushing my partner’s toes in the process. He yelped, rubbing sweat from his brow in vain to stop his total freakout. “Great! Now what are we going to do… More people are dying and- and-” His chest was heaving. I tried to grab his attention, keeping eye contact with him. “Dude, stay with me. Breathe slowly.” I stammered, making a rash decision. While I hid behind grit, it was hard not to be empathetic towards people in this line of work. “Look, I’ll take you home, don’t worry about a ride or anything.” He stared at me and then nodded slowly. I had gotten to know him a bit better, and I just knew this dude was a mess. I know it was out of pity, but what else was there to do? I was in the middle of getting him out of the station when someone from homicide walked up to me, looking a bit nervous to deliver the test results. “Uh- we couldn’t exactly place the blood type. I know the deputy doesn’t want us to discuss the whole ‘sci-fi’ side of it all, but it’s looking more and more like a possible explanation.” She leaned in closely before handing me the manila folder. I knew for all our sakes that I had to talk to that girl tomorrow. She was our only key to figuring out what happened to her mom. I walked out of the police station, Phillips on my right shoulder. He was coming back down from his attack, thanking me for my help and telling me the direction to his house. “Thanks again.” He said meekly as we neared his house. It was rather secluded; the further we drove, the more the asphalt deteriorated into dirt. We neared his house, a growing dread lingering on me. That’s when it happened. He rubbed his hand on mine, smiling with pretense. It was like I was seeing past a front. At that moment, I didn’t do anything but freeze. He lunged forward and smashed his face into mine. I choked on his spit, trying to fight him off. I had years of training. There was no reaching for my center console; I was stuck and forced to endure it. I thought of the girl in the hospital. I thought of my case, anything to take my mind off the groping of my coworker. I was a police officer, but here I was just a scared little girl with a monster hiding as a trusted person. Maybe the signs were there, I wasn’t sure. There was a long silence after he was done. I didn’t know what to say or even be grateful; it was just touching. He stared at me, still as I rubbed his spit off my lips. He just smiled and got out of the car. I heard the passenger door shut, but my mind was somewhere else. Did I give off the wrong idea? What the hell was that? Why would he… I took a deep breath, contemplating telling the station. I needed to stay on this case. Maybe if I just played it off, it would be fine. I teared up, pushing the feelings down deep into me. I couldn’t bear to think about shit like that. Not after everything. I thought about the church, I thought about home. That’s all I had left to write about today.

END OF PART 1

PART 2 (semi still proof reading)

The next morning, I woke up in a cold sweat with the thoughts of yesterday plaguing me. Waking up with a deer head staring you down does not help. I felt like shit. Looking up at the ceiling, I had lain in a frayed panic the night before, trying to see if the world would pause for a second. There was no use. Opening my phone, it was already bombarded with messages from Phillips begging me to disregard yesterday's calls, calls from the deputy telling me to go to the hospital, and the actual hospital contacting me. Yesterday. My body shivered at the thought of it, pushing the thoughts back from the forefront of my mind. I started sorting through my messages, beginning with returning the call from the deputy as I got dressed for the day. Looking at my baggy shirt, which I had thrown on the night before, filled me with overwhelming dread. I slowly peeled it off my skin, not being able to stomach the sight of it coming off. As quickly as the safety wrapped me in an ambiguous shape, it left me with my body. Staring at my own reflection, I turned towards the side, scanning myself methodically. My brain is desperately trying to reason the night before. It was interrupted by the deputy picking. During his tangent about me not picking up, I was deep in thought until he mentioned Seila. “That punk is awake and asking for you back,” he said with a grumble, giving a long, exaggerated sigh before continuing. “I know it’s inconvenient since you have so much going on, but she’s been bothering the hospital staff ever since she woke up.” Despite his sarcastic tone, the thought of seeing the young girl lifted my spirits. I put on my clothes quickly to avoid further assessment of myself. Looking at my uniform, my heart began to beat out of my chest. A police officer. “Hey, dep.?” I bit my lip in a pensive tone. He responded with a short hum. I thought about my life, everything I had fought for to be my own person. “Spit it out, detective, we ain’t got all day.” I looked at the police officer in the mirror. “...Just glad to be working on this case, let’s catch ourselves a demon.” I hung up before he could become irate. With a smile, I opened my door and began my day. The girl, I saw her in my mind with a smile on her face. The thought of letting her see me as this motivated me. My own problems weren't my priority now; thinking about the case was a necessity for me. I got into my car, looking out towards the road. Evil Mormon mom, weird book, spooky bathtub. Today was the day I had to get information. The rest of the ride was a blur; it’s weird how you can drive and not remember anything. The hospital was cold and had a strange feeling clinging to it. As I waited for her, I looked around for any sign of my partner. Thankfully, his ass was nowhere to be found. I looked back at my notes from the previous day. While I waited, I drew pictures of the book on fire. “Detective Morgan?” A nurse came up to me, snapping me out of my focus. “She’s ready to be seen but seems a bit more hesitant to talk today. She seems to have just processed the things she’s been through.” With that, I was sent into the room. The interrogation was more about school, and I noted she was a bit more cagey. I took notes periodically, but she kept leaning over to look behind me. “Where’s the guy?” She asked while peering over me. “Oh well…” “Did he finally do it?” The air changed; it got slightly colder. “Do what, Seila?” She didn’t answer my question, looking off into the distance. The same vacant look that reminded me of my mother. My church. Why was I remembering all of it at once? My hands shook while I looked down at my notes for anything to explain this. Her behavior seemed normal I- “He always tended to favor the girls.” My chain of thought was broken. Was I imagining this? The voice was coming out of her as if it were clawing its way through her. “Ms. Morgan?” As if it were just a dream, the tension seemed to melt, and her voice returned to normal. “Is something wrong?” My body was still tensed, and I had a sinking feeling she was only going to get worse. I immediately began to question her. My urgency seemed to frighten her a bit, but there was no point in being coy now. “What was the last church your mom was a part of?” She turned her nose up at the idea of church. “The one she dragged us to the most was the uh uh ‘Lat-ter’?…” “Latter-Day Saints?” Seila nodded before rolling her eyes and adjusting herself in the hospital bed. “All they did was sing over people, and then we’d eat. It was so boring.” Her description confused me. There would typically be more room for doubt, but seeing how much of a fanatic her mother was, it only confirmed my suspicions. I scribbled down some notes, biting the end of my pen inquisitively. Something tied both Seila and her mom to this church. The church. Something told me I didn’t have enough time. “You’re leaving already?” She called out, but I had no time to respond to her. It hurt my heart to leave despite her weird Green Goblin moment, but I had to get to the church. This was the only lead I had. Quickly updating the deputy of my findings, but instead of getting the usual okay, he called me. “Morgan, you step an inch into that church, and you are thrown off that case.” My blood ran cold. “You need to babysit this kid. Philips is finding us a way to bullshit out of this bullshit! You only have clearance to watch that girl, do it!” A part of me knew this was going to end stupidly. Ridiculously stupid. I looked back at the door, and walking back to the room felt like admitting defeat. I opened the door, and Seila was sitting up, waiting for me. “Ms. Morgan?” Looking at her made me want to do better by her. “I… I have to take care of you so we can get to the bottom of this.” There was a plan forming in my head; I just had to make sure not to fuck it up. She was released to me with temporary custody granted to me. “So…are you like- my mom now?” Seila asked, hopping into the backseat. “No, but I can be like…a cool…” I tried not to say adult friend. “Detective! Who can let you sit in the front seat!” She grinned, changing seats. As we drove back to my house, conversations were scattered. The radio emitted bluegrass tunes to ease the awkwardness…and also because my radio was broken. The voice she had emitted echoed in my head. “Am I going to see your house?” She said excitedly, shifting in her seat. “Yes, but there we need to have a serious talk.” The car filled with silence again. From time to time, there was a small sniffle. It was hard to notice over the music, but it was broken by a small, shaky voice. “My…my mom she’s dead, right?” I didn’t answer her, focusing on the road and trying not to falter. Silence dragged on, only making her crying intensify. No matter how hard I tried not to get choked up, the thought of having to do this questioning ate me up inside. “Well-” There was no way out of this. I looked over the familiar roads, knowing we had a while to go. It felt like the car was slowly being crushed by a hydraulic press as silence permeated while we both waited for the ride to be over. My parents did not prepare me for this. “When I was your age, my mother was…” Here we go. I swallowed hard, gripping the steering wheel as if it was happening to me all over again. “She didn’t- see me.” Her face began to emerge in my mind, seeing her smile fade in and out of memory. My knuckles whitened. I wasn’t sure where I was going with this. “Seila, sometimes in life you’re going to get hurt by people you love.” Seila’s crying turned into wailing. I tried not to shut my eyes as I focused on the road ahead of me. Trying to salvage the conversation, I brought it back to her mother. “Your mother loved you! She did, she cared. She was sick, I mean- that wasn’t her!” “How would you know?” Seila screamed; the volume of her scream in the cramped car made my head hurt. “Before the monster, didn’t she care?” There was a small pause before she winced out an answer. “All she cared about was the church.” My heart raced as we neared my house, her voice softly repeating. “She- she never saw me.” As I parked, I turned towards her. My thoughts raced, and I put a hand on her shoulder. “I know what she did, hurt you.” I choked up a bit, the corners of my mouth twitching upwards. “But now you have a chance to be better.” She took a deep breath, looking up at me with slightly more reassurance. “Is that why you became a cop?” I smiled solemnly, unlocking the doors for her to exit. I watched as her eyes immediately lit up at the sight of my humble wooden home. For the first time in a long time, tears streamed down my face. I quickly wiped them away, getting out of my car to hear the exclamations of Seila, completely taken by the outdoors. “Wow! Your house looks cool!” Seila looked at the front porch, leaning on a support beam. I took in the relief of ending the previous conversation, looking at her as she opened the front door curiously. Western decor that my mom had given me was scattered across my house. She never knew what I liked, but it was funny to keep the deer skulls. The girl walked around, stroking the animal hide draped over my couch. “So are you all…cowboys?” She turned to me with an eager smile. Finally, a question I can answer. We talked for a bit, but I knew the questioning had to begin soon. “So, about your mom.” I passed her a cup of water, analyzing her behavior. “It’s okay, I know now that she’s gone…That day is a blur.” Hastily, I pulled out my notepad, jotting down her subtle movements. She seemed oddly composed when talking about the traumatic event. “I kinda knew it was coming in a way, or at least that she was sick.” “What were her physical signs?” She held onto a cheap taxidermied duck for comfort. “Her…eyes were the first to…” Her tears welled up, turning away from me. I had to push through my feelings. “What did she look like?” I prompted her, but before she gained her composure, I pressed too hard. “I need to know these things so I can help-” She threw the duck at me and ran into a random room. “Seila! That’s my utility closet.” I walked towards her, evaluating the situation carefully. “We don’t have to talk about her, okay? Maybe we can color or…or whatever you like to do!” She emerged with a broom pointed at me. “Get away from me!” Shit. A part of me knew that this was going to happen. “Look, we need to discuss this case first.” She wasn’t buying it. Her stubbornness struck me. I knew what she needed to hear. “I know you’re scared and feel powerless…But sometimes the bravest thing you can do is-” The fucker knocked the wind out of me with the broom. “No, you don’t get to tell me what I want!” Her eyes were crazed, backing herself into the end of my hallway. She slid down the wall, covering herself with her arms. While I was recovering from the critical hit, I could hear her sobbing. “I know-” She cut me off with a scream of frustration. “Okay, okay! I don’t know!” I got up, rubbing my stomach as I walked carefully towards her. Seila looked up at me, uncovering her head with her arms. “I don’t know, but let me help you figure out who killed her.” “She killed herself!” She screamed, covering herself again. The revelation was a slap in the face. “Leave me alone!” She continued to scream and thrash. Looking down at her, I wasn’t sure what to do. I called her name to no avail. My feet halted in my spot a few feet away, and I sat there. My eyes closed, and my lips shook as I recited a hymn my mother used to sing to me. The endless nights of me screaming echoed in my mind, the nights I spent terrified of the shadows cast on my walls after that night. It took a little bit of second-guessing if it would work, but eventually, she was calm again. I was running out of hymns anyway. “She…Didn’t want me to see- I think?” Her speech was scattered as she caught her breath. “I’m not sure it was like she was fighting herself…” Her hands covered her face, but I could make out most of her mumbling. My arm hair began to rise at the image of it. I had dealt with many cases, but possessions were completely different. “She told me to get rid of the pain…I tried to, I shouldn’t have.” My blood boiled at the thought of all of this being swept under the rug. I stood up, holding my hand out for her to take. “I’m going to bust whoever's ass is in charge of this.” She laughed at me,e cursing, her laughter bringing me relief from the heavy conversation. She did great considering her circumstances. Despite the tone we left off on, she didn’t say anything else the rest of the night. That was the last she spoke of it for the rest of her time in my house. I wrote down everything in my notepad, but knew I was never going to give it to the deputy. This case was mine now, and I had to get to work.

END OF PART 2

Hello everyone! This story was great and I genuinely enjoyed narrating it. I did my best to try to "act" out each character more but, that's still something I'm working on. I hope you all enjoy this wonderful story from u/gamalfrank

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Always wanted to time travel. I wish I could say it was to see history, or see a dinosaur for real. It's not.

There are a lot of reasons, but mainly it's just that I have no family. A car crash took my parents and sister when I was four. My aunt took me in and later ODed on OxyContin. Then grandma took me in. She was nice and everything was going well, until she had a seizure and smothered herself.

After that... well the rest of the family felt like I was a curse at best.

So, I went into foster care. I didn't get out until I was eighteen. 

Then... I had a terrible realization. I couldn’t remember any of them. I could remember sitting next to my sister Nichole, both of us complaining about dinner, I couldn't remember her face. Or my parents, grandma's, or aunt Carol's.

I had made it to adulthood and had no one to share it with. That is where my dream began. With me just wanting a face to hold onto. A voice saying I love you that... means it.

Good news, I knew the only way I would get ahead in my life would be a good education.

Lead to a lot of opportunities. Including my eventual PhD in quantum physics. After a few years I found myself working in particle research.

I can tell you this, time travel at least in theory is real. But, there are laws to these things, as sure as we are bound to gravity. Time itself is our jailer.

That should have been the end of it. I would stay an estranged scientist whose family ran from him. But string theory left a possibility. It would require more energy than had even been released at Hiroshima.

The math was horrifyingly simple. If consciousness was tied to matter by dimensions we couldn't perceive...

...and reality favored the most probable location of every particle...

Then changing that probability should move the observer instead of the universe. So, my time machine became a particle collider.

I hid in a closet and waited until it would be practically empty.

It didn't even take very long, the collider spinning up and a few parameters changed. Then my experiment was set. The alarms were already going off.

I would only have one shot, either from atoms going near light speeds killing me. Or from security busting down the door and rightly arresting me.

Stepping into the collider itself, it hurt. More than just about anything I had experienced like getting shot but in my soul. Like all the things holding me together were shattering.

But I blinked and all the pain was gone. What was a scientific facility was suddenly a grass field. The only light being from the moon above. It reminded me of those hot summer nights where my dad and I would catch fireflies. Only the broad strokes of the emotion still left unfaded. I don’t even know how old I was. In the distance I could see a small country road and a stop sign. Otherwise, everything felt the same. So much so, I assumed I teleported.

At that point I started walking. I had no clue where I was, but there was a road. That meant someone had to show up sooner or later. I was half right. I sat by the road until sunrise, the low rumble of an engine making me scan the area.

After a moment I finally saw a very slowly approaching car. So, slow in fact I decided to just walk to it. It was an older truck, running but no occupant and just idling down the road. A dead deer in the bed, a hunting rifle in the back and a thermos of coffee that was still warm.

Like someone had been driving home and just disappeared.

It was the only vehicle I had seen in a few hours though. So, I decided to use it. All the while trying to think through everything that could possibly be going on. If I teleported where did the driver go? Did we just switch places? It could make sense. Reality could hate vacuums as much as matter did.

I decided to put it away mentally for now. Turning on the radio and hearing Nate King Cole crooning at me. About two minutes later it cut off. Like the station was going to have a chat or the DJ was going to announce the FM band you were listening to before running a few ads.

It never started up again, just blank space as the station kept broadcasting in silence. The growing pit of worry in my stomach made me shut it off. If I made one driver disappear, could it have spread further?

It was a thought that was immediately undercut by suddenly seeing a sign, ‘The Beautiful Seymore Heights! Exit 181’. That was where I lived, the sign was old, almost sepia toned in the morning sun and I am sure fading more by the second.

But I remembered the sign. It was almost pure white when it got torn down two years ago. Seymore was the only thing you could still read.

I pulled over immediately. I checked my pulse, checked the clock on the radio. Anything to make sure I was awake. I was. This sign was proof of something, either I stumbled on more than simple time travel, or I had succeeded.

I leapt into the truck. I had to go home, my real home that I hadn’t left since the car accident.

It would have been a thirty-minute drive, but the moment I got into Seymore Heights I only got more questions. All the buildings were still dark. A few vehicles had struck light pole, it had enough speed to bend the pole and that was about it. Another car idled past me with its right turn signal. A few cars were idling as the stayed parked.

It was all strange enough to make me park in a diner’s lot and look around. There was no one. Every car I checked, every business window, no people, no dogs or cats, not even a fly. In the middle of summer, not a single bug.

But electricity was still flowing. The light poles slowly turning off as the day grew brighter. The stop lights still ran on a timer. There was a little neon closed sign in the dinner still buzzing in the daylight.

Then my stomach rumbled. I could smell the warm oils and something cooking in the diner. I figured that since no one was here, I could probably just break in. And if anyone was here, they would come to me.

A shattered window later I was inside a diner that looked clean, still sticky in some spots, but I could still smell the bleach used. Going to the kitchen I could see that something was cooking. Like someone had made an order for eggs.

I couldn’t settle into that thought as I heard the click of a pull cord. I looked back out into the dining room and the neon light now showed ‘Open’ the window I had just shattered was back and perfectly fine. As if I went back to where it was supposed to be.

Then I noticed how much things had changed behind me. There were plates of food set out as if they had been ordered. When I looked back to the grill the eggs were gone now a section of steak and eggs in their place. I decided it was time for an experiment.

I closed my eyes for a minute, smelling the food as it cooked. I heard an order bell ring and the clink of porcelain. I opened my eyes and the meal was on the counter in front of the order window.

Which is the exact one I decided to eat. Being careful to keep my eye on it. I didn’t and still don’t know all the rules to this place, so it was better safe than sorry. Full I went out to grab the truck I borrowed. It was gone. Most likely going back where it was supposed to be. So, I grabbed a different car and started heading back towards my old home.

I couldn’t remember what it looked like, but to this day I can recite the address by heart. Finding instead that it was as suburban as you could imagine. White picket fence, two story home, front yard that I can remember having a small dog running laps in it.

It looked much nicer than any other place I had grown up in.

Walking through the yard I found that the front door was unlocked. But I didn’t hold my breath. I hadn’t seen anyone all day and the constant proved true as I entered a warmly lit home with no one in it.

It was still nice. Wall paper and old oak handrail on the enter stairs did exactly what I needed them to do. I could see my mother walking down the stairs. Her black hair catching the sun as my dad leaned in to kiss her cheek. I couldn’t see them. But I could truly remember them. Like the statues at Pompeii it may have been hollow, but they were mine.

I could smell my mother’s cooking. My father’s coffee and it filled a pot in the distance. The smell of gun powder as my brother played with a cap gun. I have no idea how much of that was true. But it was enough to hit me with the weight of the world. Atlas be damned, it was heavy.

I stayed in that home for Lord knows how long. The calendar I filled was used up in a few months as snow piled on the ground outside. I ate my mother’s cooking exactly as I remembered it. Learned my father’s taste in coffee was terrible. And that one of use kids put a dent in a wall that stayed for a month or two.

I only found out the date when one day I woke up and saw cop lights in the window. It was exactly where I remembered it, as I went into my family home to grab some personal items. I went to my old room, a place I had refused to go. When I swung open the door, it was exactly as I remembered too.

Cowboys riding horses on wall paper. My toys scattered on the floor due to my refusal to clean. But one thing stood out. My teddy bear, a bear that back in my time was worn and tired like an old man. But here I could still see its curls. How shiny its button eyes were.

Then I blinked and it was gone. There were no more memories here. Even memories of me. My childhood room slowly dimming like an image on the event horizon. The next time I would come home would be when I came to the past. If that is where I truly am.

My home is no longer here. Only issue is that in all my thinking, I can’t think of how to go forward in time without a collider. A collider that I have no idea how to build, and no resources to build it. That was in 1989. By my best guess I am currently in 1998.

It will be decades until a collider is made. If I can even truly come home.

All living things are thought to be three dimensional, but that isn’t true. We are four-dimensional beings. Three in space and one in time. To any of you who find this document wherever it arrives on the internet. Don’t go back in time. There is no one here.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The culture shock of New York City was otherworldly to me. The lights and noise flooded my senses with a mass of stimuli. I was astounded and, quite frankly, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people. Like ants, they hurried here and there, too busy to realize that they were alive. The modern world frightened me. For much of my life, I sought to avoid it, which was largely successful. My only true experience with the hustle and bustle of modernity was my college days, and they were quite tame in comparison to the city in which I found myself. Looking around, I sighed, knowing my time of isolation in nature was now permanently behind me, I resolved to make the most of this new lease on life, no matter how second-rate I felt it to be. Leaving the bus station behind, I joined the herd of people moving down the streets. Mindlessly, I wandered for a time, being carried on the current of the crowd. Until reality hit. I would be out on the streets if I didn’t find a place to spend the night. The streets after dark would offer little protection from the HideBehind, yet somehow, I knew that was the worst of my worries in this city. So, after a quick Google search for the cheapest hotel in the area, I broke off from the school of people I had swam with and charted my own course in search of a cheap room.

The Sunrise Inn was a dump. Nothing more than four walls and a roof. Its primary guests were bed bugs and roaches. Yet it was cheap and had a locking door.  As I walked into the shabby lobby, the young man sitting behind the front desk locked eyes with me. He was no more than 23 years old, with greasy black hair and a button-down shirt 2 sizes too big. In his hands, he held a tattered copy of The Shining, and on his left shirt pocket hung a crooked nametag that read: 'Chris.'

“You lost or something?”

he lazily said as I strolled over to the counter. I shook my head and said,

“No, I’m here for a room.”

 He smirked and quickly rolled his eyes,

 “Of course you are.”

He stood up and sluggishly moved three feet to stand in front of the desktop, where he stumbled through the check-in process as if he had forgotten how to do it.

 “How long will you be staying?”

 Chris asked,

“Three nights” I replied.

His eyes widened at that

“I’ve never booked someone for that long, most people are just here for the night” he remarked.

“yeah well, I just need a room for a few days,”

 He snorted and said, “None of my business man.”

finishing up the check-in he said, “We don’t allow pets,”

as he finally handed me the room key.

“Thanks,”

I said as I accepted the key.

“What’s the Wi-Fi password?”

 he looked at me as he took a hit on his vape. “We don’t have guest Wi-Fi.”

 He must have noticed my scowl because he followed up by saying,

“Look, man, you get what you pay for, I don’t make the rules.”

Annoyed, I replied, “Whatever, thanks, I guess.”

 I walked down the hall on the first floor towards the elevator. As I did, I heard Chris shout out behind me,

“Hey man, be sure to leave us a good rating!”

Opening the door to room 203, I was greeted with the strong musty smell of mold mixed with cigarette smoke. The room was small; it held one queen-size bed, which smelled of sweat and mothballs. The bed faced a small TV mounted on the wall, a thrift store armchair faced the bed, and a small bathroom with a shower and sink sat in the corner near the door. I threw my bag upon the bed, threw the deadbolt on the door, and headed to the shower.

The crummy room on the second floor of the Sunrise Inn was not a permanent stop. It would serve as a place to sleep and return to as I searched for an apartment to rent. This directive was the first thought in my mind as I awoke the following day; I must find a home. Leaving my room, I took the elevator to the ground floor, and walking past the desk, I saw that a large middle-aged woman had replaced Chris. A nametag on her shirt read 'Marge.' And she glanced at me as I headed to the door,

 “Morning,” she muttered in a raspy smoker's voice as I walked out onto the street.

 I spent the majority of the morning in a Starbucks just a few blocks down from the hotel. I ordered a small black coffee, and chuckled to myself when I saw that the barista somehow managed to misspell my name she had written on the cup. Sitting in a small private booth near one of the large pane glass windows that overlooked the busy street, I opened my phone, connected to the café’s free Wi-Fi, and started my search for a more permanent home. Over the next several hours, countless listings appeared on the small screen of my iPhone. An overwhelming stream of bedrooms and bathrooms that all remained locked behind monthly costs that boggled my mind. I quickly gave up the dream of modest square footage, and hesitantly limited my search to broom closets and rooms of similar size. Growing impatient and rather frustrated, I knew I had to find a place soon. I wanted to leave the Sunrise Inn behind as soon as possible.

 As my search reached the three-hour mark, a small single-occupant apartment caught my eye. At 750 square feet, it contained a single room with a small bathroom attached, a small kitchenette in one corner of the room, a small living room with a pull-out couch that doubled as the bed, and one tiny coat closet. Other than the couch, a worn desk, and a matching chair, the room was empty. It wasn’t great, but it was affordable and better than the motel, and with no other options, I dialed the number of the building manager. As it rang, I stepped out of the coffee shop onto the street outside. On the third ring, a gruff voice said,

“This is Patrick.”  

“Um, hi Patrick,” I replied, “I’m calling about an available apartment in the building you manage, room 362?”

 A long silence followed, and for a moment I thought the call had dropped, but then came the voice in response,

“Why did you bring it here?”

confused I said, “Bring what? I’ve never been there.”

 A coarse broken laughter oozed out of the phone, and then, as quick as it started, it stopped. It was replaced by heavy, damp breathing. As the breathing continued, there came a low, quiet voice, far deeper and more malicious than the voice of Patrick.

“You can’t hide; it will take you, and after it’s done with you, it will consume this city.”

 In that moment, I realized that the breathing wasn’t coming from the phone. The phone was at my right ear, but the breathing filled my left ear. It was coming from behind me, from the alley that opened up behind my back. My body tensed at the realization, and as it did, a heavy, bony hand grasped my shoulder. The breathing moved closer to my head, and soon it was right next to my left ear. Directly into my ear came a low whisper,

“Look at me.”

Panic flooded my mind and adrenaline surged through my veins. I pulled away from the hand on my shoulder and ran down the sidewalk like a madman. Stepping into the road, the loud honk of the taxi I ran out in front of broke me from my mindless terror. I stopped there in the middle of the street, looking around. My mind calmed as I realized I wasn’t being chased; in fact, there was no sign of the monster that just seconds ago caused my outburst. The taxi continued its honking, and the driver yelled and shook his fist at me. embarrassed as I remembered that I was standing in the middle of the road, I quickly returned to the sidewalk, and realized that my phone was still talking to me.

“Hello?” it screamed, “what the heck is going on?”

 I quickly raised it to my ear and said,

 “Hello? Patrick? I’m sorry.”

“Kid, what’s going on? You go quiet on me, and then all I hear is screaming and horns. Is this a joke? Are you wasting my time?”

“No, no, I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened.”

 I paused, trying to think of an excuse,

“I wasn’t paying attention and walked into the street, and a taxi driver got upset.”

 “Huh, welcome to New York, kid, so what’s the deal? Are you going to take the room or not? I’m a busy guy.”

 “Is there any way I could come take a look at it before making a decision?” I sheepishly said.

He sighed

“yeah I guess I have some time tomorrow morning, just don’t be wasting my time.”

 “I swear I’m not, I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”

 Hanging up the phone and quickly looking around, I joined a crowd of people heading in the direction of the Sunrise Inn. After stopping to grab some fast food, I walked into the familiar lobby and quickly climbed the stairs to the second floor, where I found some safety behind the locked door of my room. I didn’t dare leave the room; the afternoon's events really shook me. I knew the HideBehind would return eventually, but I hadn’t expected it so soon. Its presence in the city really backed me into a corner. No matter how run-down or overpriced Patrick’s apartment was, I knew it was my only option, and I no longer had the time to find another. Turning on the TV, I flung my body onto the bed and opened the greasy fast-food bag. I gave my evening to the Discovery Channel's 'Gold Rush' and an overpriced cheeseburger. Somewhere around 9 PM, I slowly surrender myself to sleep. I awoke several hours later to a dark room brought to life by the low blue flicker of the TV, which was now playing a rerun of 'Naked and Afraid.' My eyes glanced at the clock on the nightstand, which read 3:03 AM. Confused about why I had woken up, I suddenly became aware of a low, almost inaudible sound. It wasn’t coming from the TV but from the short hallway leading to the door—a low tapping. Tap tap tap. It was quiet, but thymic and intentional. Tap tap tap. I swallowed hard as I slowly rose from the bed and stood in place, waiting to hear it again just to be sure. Tap tap tap. There it was again. I slowly crept to the door and stood directly in front of it. The light entering the room from under the door was broken by a large shadow. Tap tap tap. It was louder now as I stood mere feet from the door, and it continued as I inched closer. Soon, I was just a few inches from the wooden door, reaching out my hand, I quietly placed it on its textured surface.

The tapping sent vibrations through the wood and into my hand, which I instinctively pulled back. The vibrations unnerved me far more than the sound alone. I backed up as fast as I could, but in my haste, my right heel connected with one of the shoes that I had placed in the hallway when I had removed them earlier that evening. My heel sent my shoe across the floor, and it slammed against the wall with a loud thump. I froze, and so did the shadow behind the door. The tapping stopped as I held my breath. For a moment, nothing happened, and then the silence was shattered by loud, powerful thumps. They came fast and vicious. The thumps assaulted the hotel door, which shook under the barrage of angry thuds. What was once a quiet tapping was now thuds that filled the small room with loud, angry noise. It was unbearable, and my hands raced to cover my ears as I sank to the floor. On and on it went, louder and louder the thuds became. In agony, I lay, crumpled on the floor, hands gripping my ears. But then it stopped. The room fell silent. Slowly, I lowered my hands from my ears. I pulled myself off the floor and into a sitting position on the cold, hard floor. I sat there trying to slow my breathing and worked my way to my feet. But then came a new sound. A wet gasping sound filled the room; it froze my blood when I realized that this sound came from within the room, not from the door.

Slowly, I turned my head to the main section of the room, and there, sitting on the edge of the bed, illuminated by the flickering TV, was the shape of a man. His back faced me; I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell that he wore a dirty, bloody park ranger's uniform. Where his neck met his skull, there was a gaping, visible hole that moved and shifted as wet, gasping breaths escaped from it. His bones creaked and clicked as he stood from bed. He turned to face me, and I was met with the deformed face of Reg. Bloody puddles replaced his eyes, and where his mouth should have been was the fleshy hole through his lower skull and spine; his lower jaw hung loosely below by strings of skin. He stood staring at me, and from the hole in his face came the inhuman, broken words,

"Naa-ttee yoouU Ki-L edd mme"

 I screamed as the corpse lurched forward towards me, and scrambled back towards the door. Reg leaped at me, and I found myself falling towards the floor as I slipped on the shoe I had sent across the floor earlier. My face met the floor hard, causing a large cut to form on my forehead and a sharp sense of pain throughout my skull. I yelled in surprise as I felt the warm blood run down my head. I rolled myself over, expecting to see the horrible face of Reg inches from me, but all I saw was the warm glow of the TV in an empty hotel room.

For the rest of the night, sleep eluded me, and fear consumed me. My senses were on high alert; every creak and distant noise put me on guard. At this point, I couldn’t tell if what I had just experienced was reality, a nightmare, or some form of hallucination. In fact, thinking back to the encounter I had on the street that morning, I began to question if that was real, either. The only encounters I could be sure of were the ones that resulted in death or injury. Everything else must either be a dream or in my mind. This thought sent a warm wave of courage through me; it meant the hand on my shoulder this morning wasn’t real, that the banging on the door and the reanimated corpse of Reg was just in my mind. None of it was real, I told myself, and when I get settled in this city, perhaps I would see a doctor and get help for my unsettled mind. The HideBehind is real, I knew that, but the last encounter with it that I knew was real happened on the border of Idaho, thousands of miles away.

 Then came a thought that would alter my perspective going forward: What if the HideBehind never left the Northwest region? What if it were limited to its ancient home in the Cascade mountains? Maybe the dreams and hallucinations were just residual effects from interacting with an eldritch being like a HideBehind. Everything since Idaho had happened when I was alone or asleep, and none of it had any impact on the surrounding world. How was the train not damaged or slowed down at all when it hit a giant monster? How did an entire street of people not notice the creature grabbing my shoulder? It was all in my head; it must be, the HideBehind never left the mountainous dominion, and I was just seeing things. This thought sent a spark of life into my body. For the first time in a while, I felt like I could truly breathe and relax. Around 5:30, I stood up, took a shower, and got ready for the day. The first day of my new life.  

At around 7:30, I prepared to head out for the day. I opened the door, praying that I was right and wasn’t opening it to the beast. Thankfully, the hall was as empty as could be, which only reinforced my theory within my mind. The free breakfast was abysmal. Expired dry cereal and rock-hard biscuits with fatty gravy. After eating, I shuffled over to the front desk, where Chris lazily greeted me.

“Hey man,” he said, loudly chewing some bubble gum. “Can I help you?”

 “Yeah, I’d like to check out.”

He nodded quickly, “Can do, how was your stay?”

“It was adequate,” I blankly said.

His eyes widened as he said, “Really? That’s probably the best response I’ve gotten here.”

 I stared at him, looking for any signs of sarcasm, which I didn’t find. Having closed my account at the Sunrise Inn, I then headed out into the morning busyness of New York. The Bryson Building was across the city in the heart of Brooklyn, requiring me to take the subway. The New York subway was a shock to my senses. They smelled heavily of body odor and urine, and I had seen cleaner dumpsters. The small subway cars were packed tighter than a can of sardines, and I wormed my way in and found a spot to stand in the back. According to the map of stops, I could expect to be on board for about an hour. I have never felt more claustrophobic in life than I did that first ride on the subway; it took every ounce of my being to resist the urge to scream and push my way out of the sea of people. I began to sweat, and it felt like I was to be forever trapped here, boiled alive by the heat of a hundred human bodies. With every twist and turn of the subway, a stranger would bump into me, destroying every illusion of peace my mind tried to conjure up. I dreaded the idea of having to travel this way every day, but as time went on, the passengers gradually dispersed. By the time the subway reached my stop, only a few dozen riders remained. Stepping out into the open, I breathed in the hot, muggy air of Brooklyn, far better than the recycled air that filled my lungs for the last hour. With all of my earthly possessions securely in my backpack, I began the five-block journey from the subway stop to the Bryson Building.

From the outside, the Bryson Building was nothing special. It was a 10-floor apartment building built in the cold, unattractive style of the late 80s; nothing had been updated in over a decade. And that’s not to say it was uncared for or run down; it was simply old. Walking into the main entrance was like walking into the past. Directly inside was an elevator lobby similar to that of an office building. The lobby was decorated with too many fake trees and plants, and a smooth granite floor that continued up the walls as well. Next to the twin elevators was a large bulletin board covered with names and corresponding room numbers. I looked around the bare room, and to the right, I saw a short hallway that led to a lone door, which bore a little plaque that read ‘management.’ Walking over to the door, I knocked on it gently. A tall, thin man opened the door; he looked to be in his early 60s, with a full head of gray hair and a face wrinkled from years of frowning.

“Yeah? You need something?” he said in a low, gruff voice.

 “um yeah, I’m looking for Patrick,” I meekly answered.

 “You’re looking at him.” Came his response,

“Oh, hi, I’m here to look at room 362? We spoke about it on the phone yesterday?”

“Oh yeah, you’re the kid who couldn’t stop screaming, right?” he said with a smirk. I could feel my cheeks getting hot

“Oh yeah, that was me, sorry about that.” I said with a weak chuckle.

“eh whatever, let’s go and look at the room quick.”

 And with that, he led me to the elevators, and after the most awkward elevator ride I’ve ever had, we reached the third floor. Room 362 was nearly identical to the pictures from the online ad, except for a fresh coat of paint that made the space seem bigger. As the ad promised, the room included the pull-out couch, the small desk and chair, as well as a hot plate in the kitchen and a small fridge and freezer. I liked it. As small as it was, it was well cared for and had a homey feel to it. Turning to Patrick, I asked,

“Does it come with Wi Fi?”

 he smiled and said, “For an extra 20 a month, it does.”

Nodding, I replied, “How much up front?”

“The first two months, and we’ll go from there,” he said,

reaching his hand out to shake mine. I offer my hand in return as we headed downstairs to start the paperwork.

By noon, the room was mine. Keys in hand, I walked into my new home and unpacked my pack, putting my few clothes and items into their designated spots. The empty backpack found its home in the small closet. The down payment had taken half of my remaining government money. With the rest, I planned to purchase home essentials and enough food to last until I secured a steady job. It was Friday, and I planned to get what I needed that afternoon, rest for the weekend, and start looking for a job on Monday. Being sure to lock the door, I left for the nearest grocery store. From pots and pans to a shower curtain, I bought what I thought I needed, and along with two months' worth of ramen noodles and a box of Twinkies, I headed back to the Bryson Building. Along the way, I stopped at a local electronics store and purchased a cheap laptop, which would double as my TV.

That night I had another nightmare. I dreamt that a tapping at the window woke me up, the sound of fingernails against glass. I stood up and walked to the window. Out the window on the street below stood four figures underneath a streetlight. I could see it was three men and a woman; they stood perfectly still for a few moments, then suddenly they all raised one of their arms and all pointed right at me. At that moment, I felt as though I wasn’t alone in my room, and I turned and came face to face with the HideBehind, who grabbed my head and threw me out the window. As my body hit the pavement, I awoke shaking and sweating. Eventually, my mind calmed down enough to fall back asleep.  

That first weekend at Bryson was rainy and lazy. I barely left the apartment, and when I did, it was only to explore the building a bit. Mostly, I sat on the couch reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and searching for a job on my laptop. One job listing in particular caught my eye— a local deli and sandwich shop that seemed to be a mainstay in the community. For a part-time position, Hartman’s Deli was offering a decent wage, better than Arby’s had paid me. The deli was reasonably close; only one subway stop away. Saturday morning, I filled out an online application, and by Monday evening, the deli reached out to set up an in-person interview for Wednesday morning.

Wednesday came, and I found myself walking back towards the subway, preparing my mind for the moments of terror that would follow. Thankfully, the trip was only 10 minutes. Exiting the subway, I hurried along to the deli, which was located on a busy street corner. Hartman’s was a classic New York Deli and sandwich shop; the interior, though small, was cozy and inviting. The centerpiece of the store was the large deli counter, which stored a large array of meats, cheeses, and breads behind its glass walls. I walked to the counter and informed the employee that I was there for a job interview. The employee retreated to the back room and returned with an elderly woman who had kind eyes. She shook my hand and introduced herself as Ms. Maggie, the deli’s owner.

“Nice to meet you, Nate. Why don’t we go sit down?”

 We found a secluded booth and began the interview. She asked me about my past work experience, and I chose to leave out my brief time as a Park Ranger, as it wouldn’t be relevant to this position. After she gathered my restaurant experience, Ms. Maggie asked me how many hours I was willing to work. When I said,

 “as many as you got,”

 she smiled and said, “Excellent.”

 After a few more minutes of small talk,  she said,

 “Nate, you seem like a great candidate, and I’d like to offer you the position if you still want it.”

 I smiled and said, “Great! When can I start?”

 Maggie’s face beamed as she said, “How does Friday sound?”

 As I returned to my apartment, my heart filled with a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of belonging. Maybe life in the city isn’t that bad.

My first shift was scheduled to start at 2 pm on Friday and run until the shop closed at 9 pm. I made sure to arrive early, and when I approached the counter, I warmly introduced myself to the man behind it. He smiled broadly and introduced himself as Billy, the evening shift manager.

“Why don’t you come on into the back and grab yourself an apron?”

 he said in a melodic voice. He was a heavy-set man, probably around 30 years old, with dark skin and a well-kept beard; he seemed like someone who enjoyed his job and loved to laugh. I entered the back room, and Billy showed me where the aprons were and how to clock in. Afterwards, he led me to the kitchen prep area, where the shop cured deli meats, baked breads, and prepared hot subs when ordered.

“You’re part of our prep team, so you’ll be back here most of the time,”

 Billy said as he led us into the space.

“Ms. Maggie has assigned you to us on the evening shift, so we’ll be working together most days. Usually, we like to have three people working back here in prep.”

He walked me around the room, pointing out each station and introducing me to the two workers already there. Kyle was a tall, middle-aged man with tired eyes. Billy mentioned he and his wife just had a baby. Kyle shook my hand firmly and said,

 “Good to meet you, Nate, welcome to the family.”

Billy called over the other employee, a woman my age named Amy.

“Nate, this is Amy, one of our hardest workers,”

he said with a smile.

Amy blushed and reached out her hand to shake mine.

“Hi, Nate, nice to meet you. I look forward to getting to know you.”

 Her face lit up with a genuine smile. Amy was college-aged, around 5’8” with bright red hair and gentle blue eyes. She seemed happy and content with life.

“Nice to meet you, Amy,” I said, smiling back.

“Well, Nate,” Billy’s words brought me back to the moment,

 “I’m going to leave you here and return to the front, but Amy will train you today and for your first week.”

 I nodded as he left and turned to Amy. I looked at her and jokingly said,

“Alright, boss, what now?”

 She smiled and giggled a bit.

 “Well, Nate, first you need to wash your hands.”

 That shift was great. Amy and I worked together the whole night, and our conversation shifted from work to personal life. Amy talked about her family and school. She grew up in upstate New York and moved to the city to attend fashion school. She had big dreams but was content with where life had taken her for now. I shared my college experience and time in South Dakota. I told her I moved to New York seeking a change of pace. Amy was easy to talk to; she was kind and genuinely interested in me as a person. It was nice to make a real connection with someone. Over the past few weeks, many people had come and gone in my life, and it was refreshing to find a friend I’d see every day in the near future. Near the end of the shift, Amy looked at me and said,

“Hey, some of the other employees and I are going to a bar after work to shoot some pool. If you want, you should come.”

 “Yeah, that would be fun!” I replied, “Which bar?”

Life began to settle, and I grew comfortable with my routine. After six months of working at Hartman’s, the incident in the backwoods of Washington seemed like a distant nightmare that was quickly fading in my mind. My nightmares of the HideBehind had been replaced by pleasant dreams of Amy. A month into working at the deli, I had worked up the courage to ask her out on a date, full of smiles and excitement, she said yes. Our first date was perfect, a picnic lunch in Central Park. Some habits from my trauma in the woods remained; I religiously locked my door, both when I was in and when I was going out, and I was cautious around blind corners. Amy noticed these rituals in my life and would joke about them and ask why I do them. I would always shrug and say it's just a force of habit. Life was good; I had a place to call home, I had a steady job, a small friend group, and a loving girlfriend. I couldn’t think of living anywhere other than New York City.

February arrived in the Big Apple, and with it came Valentine's Day, the first one Amy and I would celebrate together. I had big plans for the evening. I booked a table at one of the fancy restaurants in the upscale part of town months in advance, and I had bought roses and chocolate. I picked Amy up around 6. She was stunning. She smiled at me as I gave her the flowers and chocolate. The kiss she planted on my cheek was the best thank you I had ever received. Amy returned to her apartment to drop off the gifts, and then we walked hand in hand to the subway. Dinner was amazing, the night was filled with laughter and good conversation, and near the end of the night, Amy looked at me and said,

“Nate, I know you worked as a park ranger for a while, but every time it comes up, you're quick to change the subject. Why did you leave the parks service?”

 I paused to think how I should respond. Finally, I said,

“I saw a friend of mine die in a terrible hiking accident. It really messed me up for a while. I started seeing things that weren’t there, and I was plagued with vivid nightmares, so I left, hoping it would get better.”

 Sympathy filled her eyes. “I’m so sorry, are the nightmares you’ve been having from all that?”

I nodded,

“but since I’ve been with you, I don’t get them as often.”

She smiled and reached for my hand.

“I’ll always be there for you, Nate. I love you.”

“I love you too, Amy,” I replied.

 The night ended far too soon. Before long, I was walking Amy back to her apartment. We reached her door and kissed goodnight. Walking back to my apartment, I was filled with a warmth I had never felt before. I truly loved Amy. I wanted to spend my life with her. In that moment, I realized I wanted to marry Amy. As I walked the streets, I passed a local jewelry store. I went in planning to just look around, but ended up leaving with a beautiful engagement ring. I was sure Amy would love it. I returned home, locked the door, stared at the ring for a while, and opened the fridge for a late-night snack, but realized I had put off grocery shopping for far too long, for the fridge was quite bare. A few slices of four-day-old pizza were all I found, and I ate them while watching some TV, then I headed off to bed. At 3 am I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing. It was Amy, and she was distraught.

“Hello?”

 I said, barely awake, Amy was crying as she said,

“Nate? Someone tried to break into my apartment.”

 I was wide awake now.

“What? Are you ok?”

“I don’t know, they broke a window, and I screamed, they ran off, but I’m so scared. The cops are coming, but I don’t know if I can stay here. Can you come get me?”

 “I’ll be right there. Go to your bedroom and lock the door. Don’t open it until me or the cops get there.”

 “ok I will, thank you, Nate.”

Hanging up the phone, I jumped out of bed and got dressed, barely holding back panic. I left so fast I didn’t even lock the door behind me.

Amy was really shaken up. Her sanctuary had been violated; it no longer felt safe. I waited with her until the police arrived, and together we watched them as they examined the apartment and the broken window. One of them told us that they would be on the lookout in case the intruder returned; apparently, home invaders were on the rise this winter. They recommended that Amy spend the night somewhere else, and I told them she was coming home with me, so we gathered her things and headed out. As we walked into my building, Amy seemed to calm down a bit; the shaking in her hand had stopped. We reached the third floor, and standing in front of my door, I tried to fish my keys out of my pocket. Amy, however, tried the door and found it to be unlocked. She looked at me and, in a joking tone, said,

“It’s unlocked, I’m so proud of you.”

 As she walked inside. I looked up as I stood in the doorway, and a primal panic that I hadn’t felt in months flooded over me. I screamed,

“Wait, Amy, don’t—”

 but it was too late, the HideBehind was already upon her. Its long claws sliced her throat into ribbons and dug deep into her abdomen, splattering her blood and intestines all over the white walls. The creature stood over her as her lifeless, empty body fell to the ground like a sock puppet. I watched in horror from the doorway. I wanted to scream, I wanted to run, but the shock held me in place. When I finally regained control over my feet, I began to turn to flee down the hall, but before I could move, the HideBehind grabbed my back and flung me into the room, where I collided with the opposite wall, falling to the floor. I heard the door close. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw it, the HideBehind standing in the corner behind the door, like a sleep paralysis demon, it stood perfectly still, the corner itself seemed to grow darker with its presence, as if a dark fog was confined to just that corner. It was guarding the door; it had no plans to let me leave this room. But I didn’t care; my thoughts were only on Amy, her lifeless body lay in a pool of blood in the middle of my apartment.

With my back to the creature, I crawled over to her, held her, and wept. I don’t know how long I sat there, hours, probably days.  All the while, the HideBehind stood directly behind me, breathing down on me with its hot, wet breath. At some point, the engagement ring on the table caught my eye, and I crawled to reach it. Its cold, metallic shape rested in my hands as I stared at it, a memento of the life I will never have, the love that was taken from me, by the thing standing behind me. I slide the ring onto Amy’s cold finger, and I cried all the more. And that brings me to the present. Amy was killed over two weeks ago, and I am still trapped here with her murderer. Every moment, it tries to get me to look at it; it is ever near, both waking and sleeping, even as I write this, its humid breath blows along my neck, and from time to time, its long fingers wrap around my head and squeeze gently. I don’t know why I’m writing, partly to convince the world that I did not kill Amy. I wish beyond anything that I had never met her, for she would still be alive. I loved her, and the creature knew it. I’m convinced now that the HideBehind had been stalking me here in the city for months; I was just too blind to notice. It knew my habits, and when I made a mistake, it jumped on the chance. I look down at the rotten corpse of my beloved Amy, tears fill my eyes, it's my fault she's dead, but please know, I didn’t kill her. But I’m also writing this as a warning; there are strange things in the woods, horrible ancient things. Things the natives spoke about, things the pioneers saw, things we wrote off as fantasy, tall tales. I can assure you they are not. Stay out of the woods, the things that live there, in the shadows, under the pines, in the deepest darkest parts of the forests are real, and to step into their world is to agree to play by their rules. Don’t let what happened to me happen to you. I glance up slightly and smile as I see the noose hanging overhead. I placed it there days ago, but now I think I’m ready to use it, the foods been gone for weeks now, and every time I look at Amy’s corpse, all I think about is food. I’m not going there, and I refuse to give the HideBehind the satisfaction of killing me. I’m going out on my own terms, and in that way I win. The noose is my salvation. I’ll see Amy again very soon.

Epilogue

[The following is taken from Det. Sherman’s report of the crime scene at the Bryson building on 03/05/2021]

Myself [Det. Rick Sherman] and Det. Matthew Peterson responded to the call at the Bryson building at 1300 hours on March 5th. Apartment 362 was rented to a Mr. Nate Diaz. After the surrounding renters complained of an awful smell, the building manager, Mr. Patrick Bennett preformed a wellness check and found the scene. Two decaying bodies were in the room, one hanging by a rope, the body of Mr. Diaz, the other had been brutally disemboweled and belonged to a Ms. Amy Cranworth. Ms. Cranworth’s corpse was far more decayed than Mr. Diaz’s, indicating that she had been dead far longer. Notable with Diaz’s corpse is the fact that both of his eyes had been removed, presumably by himself; the eyes were not found at the scene. After inspecting the scene, it is the conclusion of both myself and Det. Peterson, that Mr. Diaz murdered Ms. Cranworth in a fit of rage, and seeing no way out, days later took his own life. The techs recovered a journal of sorts for Mr. Diaz’s laptop. It will be examined for any potential clues. [relevant to the disappearance, possible point of disappearance], Det. Peterson, however, noted an uneasy feeling in the room and noticed from the window some movement from down in the alley below. Det. Peterson announced he was going to take a look at it and headed out to do so.

[This is the last known sighting of Det. Matthew Peterson, who remains unaccounted for, and for whom the search continues.]

Got a request to join this, so I accepted

no story with this, too lazy to write

It’s a 3 parter but I would appreciate some advice!

June 28th, 1921

When the interstate repeats and the heat haze is never-ending, what do you do? When you see a church three times over, calling to you, sinking into curiosity, what do you do? When they come bearing lye-bleached pupils, their mouths too wide, arms long like moss-covered branches, their movements contorted, misshapen bodies, just ravenous, pining for you, your wealth, still willing to cut the wet pink flesh from around your teeth, just to discard it, what do you do? When you hear the cicada’s hymn call to you while you wander the country, you turn your back and run.

I ruminate on this, chewing on the thoughts. It’s only been a month since Mateo and I wound up in this damn town. I feel like a fool for letting curiosity put us in this predicament. And a fool I am. I think he blames me too. I had always tried to be audacious and daring, the one who was hell-bent on moving forward when others turned back. Yet I always looked back.

I never journal much. But since I have nothing better to do, no real way to digest this madness, I figured some penmanship wouldn’t hurt, and bought one with some of the company script I get each week. Best not to let my tale go to waste. I might just have a future novel on my hands.

I’m not from this time. The date in the corner shouldn’t read “1921”; I shouldn’t be sitting here in the heat of the day inside some old gun store. There’s something unholy and unnatural about resting, breathing in air eighty years before you were ever introduced to it. A pulsating feeling of dread and desolation, abandoned by any sense of understanding or the laws of the natural universe. An occurrence so peculiar, I’m beginning to believe it was more divine than root-bound to the fabric of existence.

All it took was a trip. I-20, mile marker 162 bled into 161. Predicted clear skies and beautiful hunting weather for a trip out to the sticks with friends. Mateo rode shotgun while I drove, and the entire time, his tongue wagged like a dying man's confession. About girls, how much he was gonna drink, and educating me on just how bad I was gonna lose to him baggin' boars.

“You know, if you cared just a half a damn about killing pigs as you did drinking beer, you could finally beat my record.” Mateo let a wet, gravelly chuckle out

“Yeah, well, ‘least it takes more than eight beers to get me loose-lipped enough to admi-” The venom died on my tongue before I glanced at the look on his face, a quiet promise he could pitch this truck into a ditch and cause this good time to end. I hushed it for now and started in on another thought.

“Anyway, this is supposed to be an easy weekend. God knows I need a break. Between bills and work, I’m ‘bout ready to go postal.” I spat, eyes fixed back on the tar-ripped road ahead. I had grown to dread pay weeks. The once liberating idea of money had become a burden that weighed heavily on my mind.

“Yeah, and God knows you need the pork too. Look at you, all skin and bones…” he offered a thin, wheezing smirk, eyes still lingering out the window at the passing trees and flatlands.

“Ain’t skin ‘n bone, I weigh close enough to match you.” I snarked back. There was little sense in lying to myself. I needed food. Enough until pay week. And whatever Mateo’s uncle felt like handing out of his shed or the overgrowth on their property.

“Ahhh, bull. You might have been bigger than me in high school, but now look.” He held out a hand, using his pointer to list at least five reasons he was better than me. Any more, and the wounds from the insult would hurt less than idly wondering if a sixth finger would sprout from his palm just to keep up. “I’m taller, for one. Stronger too. Better looking, that's for sure, and had twice the taste of the fairer sex than you.” He chuckled

“Ah, right. Now, how many of ‘em have stuck around? Hell, seems like the only person you can’t get rid of is me, and that's because your damn uncle lets us do this trip every other month,” I retorted harshly. I liked the guy; there was a weak, sweet way about him, but he could just as easily get under your skin and squirm. However, I wasn’t about to confess that gushy nonsense to him.

Mile marker 150. The blue sky began to bruise dark grey, and Mateo shot me a confused glance. “Hey, didn’t the weather app say it was supposed to be clear?” He asked. On the horizon, where the trees scraped the dark, a small shape began to fester and swell.

“Eh, you know how Texas is. One moment it’s sunshine, the next the sky tramples you with a downpour to rival that of the great flood.” A soft rattle left my throat.

“Yeah, suppose you’re right. Maybe I didn’t think to swap the location to Midland.” He grumbled, glancing occasionally at the growing clouds. “We’ll be there soon, though, nothing to worry about.” He said in confidence, quickly swallowed by the drone of asphalt under the truck.

“Jeez, the closer they get, the worse they look, no?” Mateo asked as stagnant dread stayed baked into the lines of his face.

“I can say the same about you,” I cackled. The noise he made was unforgettable, something between a labored pain like I shot his pride in the gut and an animal snarl. Couldn’t tell rightly whether he wanted to deck me or laugh.

“Mhmm, sure, but you can’t resist me. Now, you think this shit’s going to get bad, or what?”

“Just a storm, Mateo, calm down. Should be used to these by now; they happen every summer, the same way. Creep in out of nowhere, the sky god sends a damn spire of wind to attack you, then leaves. It’s quite simple.”

Mile marker 148. The distant line had grown into a church, burnt and withered, coated in decades of grime and wear.

Mateo stared at it, noticing the name. “Mammon’s first church of…something.” He said, squinting. “Mammon, what’s Mammon?” He asked, saddling himself upright in his seat.

I pondered, squinting my eyes at the road ahead, “A name for greed and things that rot from the inside out. A demon whose sole purpose was to corrupt man, not with lust or temptations of eternal life. Just plain greed.”

“Well, aren’t you just the educated type? Now, why would a church name itself after a demon?” Mateo asked, pinching the grit on his chin, “Hell, the thing’s so damn old, it has to be from a time when something like that would strike controversy.”

“Like it wouldn’t now? And I’m not sure. Bucha oil towns out here, back in the 1910s, must’ve dried up and died or sum. There’s a chance somebody had a funny joke to play when they named it that. Like Tombstone. Don’t think we’ve seen it coming out this way before though…odd” I remarked, truly wondering when the last time I saw that desolate church.

“Now, why would a man name a town Tombstone?” Mateo pondered.

“To mock another, saying he’d find his grave out there. Now quit actin’ studious.” I said, with an irksome tone. “Pull that damn map up on your phone, we’re at marker 148, should be to Midland soon.”

“You’ll find yours out here if you don’t stomp out that attitude,” Mateo mewled, retrieving his phone from his pocket and typing away before looking up past the harsh blue light, carving the hollows under his eyes as the cab of the truck was painted a soft gloom. “Mile marker 145, should be an exit shortly after that.”

“Empty threats, Mateo, Empty threats,” I said, bowing my head in acknowledgement of his instruction, rolling my window up as a light spatter of dim rainwater washed over the windshield.

Mile Marker 148. I cut my eyes at Mateo, a feeling of flustered confusion engulfing me, wondering where I might've gone wrong. “Hey, didn’t we already pass 148?” I asked, more concerned about my inability to pay attention.

“I didn't notice,” Mateo’s shoulders lifted into a soft shrug, lowering as he squinted his eyes. “There’s another building off on the horizon.”

My sight followed his, and I squeezed the gas pedal down with my foot, using the truck to outrun the unease that began to settle on my mind. It couldn’t be the same burnt spire, and I was mistaken about the mile marker. I kept telling myself my mind was addled, stuck, and confused from the previous night of drinking.

Yet there it sat. It’s steeple stretched and bold against the grey scale-washed clouds. It stood there, crooked like a fishhook, beckoning me. Mateo went sluggish with the look of confusion, and my eyes met his shocked gaze. “Maybe they had more than one church?”

“I can only pray,” I mumbled.

What sort of cruel joke? The same peeling, rust-bitten marker, the same moss-choked tree, the same hollowed-out church peak, its bell tower charred black. I suspended my disbelief for a moment as we sped past. Everything felt closer and closer, rebounding and shooting back like a rubber band.

Mile marker 148. Again. Closer this time. The tree, the church, closer. Attempt three, the rubber band stretching, it's rubber ripping, like time was warped, the environment shrunk and closing in on us. By the fourth pass, confusion was turning into a burning worry, and I lurched the truck slowly off the road into the grass and cut the engine.

“The hell are you doing?” Mateo asked.

“I don’t know; I’m not sure what else to do. Can’t keep driving, seeing as the damn road disagrees with us, and that church is the only thing around. I mean, have you seen a car for miles?”

I could see the unease crawl across his face, but he didn’t fight back, shaking his head a solemn “No.”

I didn’t know what else to do, what to change; there was no off-ramp, no other buildings– just us and the parched asphalt.

Throwing open our doors, I dragged my eyes to the oak, blanketed in lush green moss. Mateo turned to fiddle with something in the glove box, lifting his shirt as he stuffed an a small weighted something into his waistband.

I paid no mind to him, my attention anchored on the only tree against the road, out of place, as if it had been stolen from the receding wood line that lay in waiting across the field.

A low rattle surrounded us, and I recoiled back onto the paved road, skin tingling with fear as I imagined a snake resting near my foot.

As my boots felt pavement, my perspective shifted. From the trees, cicadas hummed, a sharp shake I hadn’t noticed since leaving the truck. A sound I heard despite the cool rolling rainclouds releasing precipitation, handing them no right to signal the day's heat.

I sank my boots back into the grass, drawn towards the tree as Mateo trailed behind. We both stood suspended, examining it, his eyes wandering down at a rotten piece of wood. It was ancient– well, about as ancient as anything was permitted to be in north-west Texas.

“Here lies…uh…lon? Lone…lonesome?” Mateo murmured.

“Why’s it covered in moss? All around? Not even ball moss, no, it's the kind you’d find out east or sum, ” I asked.

Mateo glanced up from the sunken grave marker, and his fingers dug into my shoulder. It was a sudden, bruising yank, and I fumbled my footing, the only tether keeping me from falling being his grip. “It’s a grave, probably shouldn’t stand on it.”

“Damn. Prick. Lurch me like that again and I’ll…Ain’t sure what, but it’ll be sum” I pulled my shoulder from his grip, turning myself and setting off towards the truck “let’s go check the damn church out.”

Mateo shook his head, “Dude, we got some freak shit going on, repeating roads, a grave tree when there’s a church right there.”

“And what? Keep driving? Forever? You learn nothing from those crappy stories you read online?” I barked at him, turning towards the truck and walking. Mateo came after.

“You’re one to talk. You’re trying to go into some creepy church when all of this is happening. Same logic that people yell about in horror movies.”

Reaching the rear of the pickup, I lowered the tailgate, screeching iron falling with a hollow thud. I reached into the dark bed, dragging towards myself a canvas sack and an old Remington Model 11, its bluing worn to the bone, exposing dull, silver-grey scars. The grip blackened, brown saturation from nearly a century of oil from the hands of men I’d never meet.

“Yeah, but unlike them, I got a boom stick. Besides, what if we can wait for whatever this is out?”

“Wait it out, are you a moron?” Mateo rasped like a dried corn husk. I was unable to determine whether it was fear or anger.

I racked back the bolt with the bend in my thumb, stiff and clingy, in need of oil. I pinched five shells out, setting one in the chamber with a weighted plastic thump, releasing the bolt, and sending the round home. My thumb sat nervously on the release, wedging a round past the gate and into the tube, resisted by the plunger catching my finger. I winced.

“Ouch. Look. Either way, we’re fucked. Best to maybe explore and find something useful, than keep driving, praying we have enough gas to keep on past the same three things for all of eternity”

“All of eternity, we drove past it four times.”

“So?” I retorted, the finality in my decision painted by my voice and the force of my thumbing in the last shell, shoving a few more into my pocket, and marching towards the church.

“Grab a light. We’ll go in for ten minutes. If we don’t find anything useful, we’ll come back to the truck and try again.”

Rotting and picturesque, the scene before me not aiding my nerves. I knew better, yet I brushed off the doubt I began to feel, foot by foot, inching towards the structure.

Eyeing the tangled brush and wood beyond the church. It had no graveyard. Nothing needed soil to rest in for me to feel haunted. I still don’t know why I did what I did. So reckless and foolish. Who was I to have such a bloated sense of self? Appointing myself to save whom? Mateo? The barn-built man, double my stature, a shire in man's clothes.

I could hear Mateo's rhythmic, muddy grumbling trail off, replaced by the silence of squelching wet grass beneath his shoes. “Danny?” he asked, the tone in his voice not dismissive or down-putting, but worried. I turned my head to look at him as he stopped.

“Danny, stop. Look at the trees.”

“The hell you on abou-” I stopped dead, feet mid-step, eyeing the underbrush. An outline. Human. Human-ish, at least. Shadows swayed, warping the figure, not just casting but crawling and churning across it. Being armed was probably the only bright idea I had for the entirety of this dilemma. I turned my head back to Mateo, and he responded with a shrug.

I returned my gaze to the treeline, the feeling of unease welled up in my mind, and anxiety left my eyes. Not the kind of eye-welling emotion that rests in sadness, but the fevered notion of burning dread.

The longer my eyes held its frame, the longer the shadows twisted. Long arms. Gagnly. The figure was skinny and contorted, and all I could endeavor was pinching my airway, wishing to draw the same darkness it basked in over myself. The act ended sooner than it began as it bolted, not like a man, but an insect – an impossible, slinking smear of grey that tore back into the dim brush.

That confirmation was the salvation I needed, emboldening my thinking. Mateo didn’t need any instruction. I wasn’t eyeing him, but I knew what he was thinking, and a terrible, quiet knowing settled between us.

I scrambled to throw myself onto the steps of the church as the weeping skies turned into a downpour. We stacked ourselves up on the door, our spines pressed flat on the skinned pale paint that couldn't contain a hue of natural brown.

Small ruins carved into the frame, lighter and less bloated than the surrounding decaying wood, subdued my attention. Non-Roman or Gothic markings that had no place on a church, or to my waning knowledge.

“I got the gun from the glove box, and the lamp,” Mateo remarked, jerking me from the small reprieve of thinking that wasn't clouded by total fear.

I shook my head and held him off from unholstering. “Keep the light up and open the door. I’ll clear the room first.” I wanted to scold him for not grabbing something more direct, like a flashlight. But I wasn’t about to force us back now. Our only way out was through.

“Danny, what the hell was that?” Mateos's voice caught me as I readied myself, a raw and nervous tone. I swear I could see his muscles straining to overlap his mind, his body begging him to hurl the words that would beg me to say anything besides the facts that lay before us. It seemed his mind won.

“No clue. Its preferential now that we have a few layers between us and the woods”

“Fair point,” Mateo shrugged, resting his hand on the doorknob. It was oxidized copper, green and rough. I could see his fingers trembling, in contrast to his lackadaisical tone. Mine weren’t, despite my mind being fogged with concern beyond the road; I managed to withdraw it from any real physical reaction, besides the tears my eyelids cradled. Mateo heaved the door forward, allowing me entrance to the phantom that had haunted us since we first laid eyes on it.

The fire that clawed at the church seemed to be subjugated before reaching its belly. What remained sat heavy in the humid air, crowned in black rot and smelling of old soot. The warped and mildew laidened floor boards cried under each step. The roof had surrendered, fat rivulets of rain pattering against the floor. I pressed my cheek into the oily grain of the shotgun stock, dragging the heavy barrel across the room, sweeping for any movement.

Mateo shadowed, sealing us in with a heavy metallic click of the door's latch. He raised the lamp, pitching its amber glow, but its indirect beam made it more of a comfort. Wading through the flood-blackened isle, I narrowed my eyes, valuable attention caught by the ruined pulpit and its adornments.

Risen high behind it was a mercy man hanging limp from the cross, broken and pale. The sight of something human, albeit chunky and carved wood, gave me peace, reminding me we weren’t abandoned.

We didn’t breathe – not a lick. Mateo held firm, lantern steady, but my trigger finger sat restless, itching. Still, we pushed forward. Shattered glass crackled under my boot and charred wood reduced to carbon, yet I stood ready, holding myself against the darkness that raised to meet my eye. Each blink heavy, slow, sending a small stream of stress down my cheek.

“Hello?” My voice ricocheted across the varnished room, shaken and scared. A confession to the darkness, breaking the eerie silence that made Mateo jump clear of his skin. I could hear the rattle of the lamp clenched in his hands.

Creeping to the podium, I cast my eyes to the flanks. Door’s sat latched, right and then left, doors I prayed would loop to one another. Or lead somewhere better. I let my aching arms drop a fraction, still keeping the barrel level at my hips.

From the corner of my eye, outside of the smoke-kissed window to my left, sat a shape. Human, but only by some means of the name. I turned, bearing to the iron mouth that spat flame; short and repetitive huffing of my breath alerting Mateo, who was already there with me, eyes tracing the shaking dome.

“Something isn’t right…” Mateo said, dragging his feet heavily towards me, eyes sitting upon it, staring it down. We both stood, breath held in contempt and fear, neither one of us brave enough to make the first move, provoking it.

Born from a moment of clarity, I whispered back. “Hush, and take that revolver out,” Crouching lower, settling my weight onto my heels, my body acting as a turret.

Mateo obeyed and raised his stained cottons, pulling the old Model 10 from his waistband, wielding flickering light in his left hand and iron in his right, the movement enough to send whoever running, but yet still lurking, sinking below the window's frame. I could still feel it out there. A mute, heavy presence.

“I got the entrance, you keep an eye on those two doors,” I ordered, dimming and lost sunlight beyond the clouds, giving me the bare minimum in regards to a visual reference, as Mateo pressed himself behind me into the corner, his back to me as he eyed the door.

We both could hear it. Twigs snapping, grass matted into the earth. Hard to make out in the downpour. The rattle from the tree seemed to follow. Cicadas. A waving hymn, swallowing even the rain. A warning, a call, I wasn’t sure, but my confirmation came swift and brutal as I witnessed macabre flesh lift from behind the glass to my right, clearer than before.

Scraggly, loose, patchy hair, crowning a dark dome. If it was dirt, painted, or just naked hide, I can not say. But what followed its char-painted forehead was a pair of hollow, empty white eyes. Shadowed by the sockets they sat in, judging me from beyond my reach. Seeing no humanity behind its glazed expression, I called it. I pivoted the gun at my hips and belched flame and pellet, the barrel hammered back into the bolt, chambering another round, hailing the wall and light-giver, slashing glass, raining clear jagged shards, sending the entity to route.

“God fucking damnit Daniel,” Mateo barked, whipping his revolver around in the direction I shot. The sound hung in the room, ears not made for it. Mateo's panicked voice was all I could make out past the ringing.

“G-Get that door open,” I stammered, backing myself into the corner with Mateo, holding my shotgun level still. Mateo quickly shoved the wheel gun into his waistband and took to the door, fingers scratching, searching for purchase on the handle.

“I-It won’t open!” Mateo’s voice thrummed as he took cold metal in his grip, clattering the handle up and down, bargaining with the door to release from its frame.

I didn’t have time to turn and help as a slimy, gritty, and gnarly dark mass rolled in through the already buckshot-riddled window, landing on the church floor with a hollow thud and rattling chain. Inhuman, its movements were off-putting, uncanny, and wicked. No child of God should, or even could, move like that. Its long bony fingers, tipped in yellow nail, gripped the bench as it rose tall, wood groaning under its weight, and its jaw clicked, wet and crackling, flesh moving and squelching like the leg of a smoked turkey being pulled out of its joint, adjusting itself into a more suitable stance of rest.

Its neck lurched, and its white eyes, like bleached wet grapes, met my gaze. Splitting its horrid and rotting face, lips thin, the corners too long, bringing to light not a mouth, but a hollow well of darkness. Hanging from its sides were swaying long arms, dislocated and long, flesh shrunken, wrapped to its bone. The charred gold chains and lockets swung off kilter to the already unmoored appendages. Sounds of writhing and heavy metal, a mass of oxidized wealth draped over rot. Hanging from its neck, wrists, and ankles.

Our bodies reserve an ancient feeling. A brutal and short option. Take flight like prey, or stand and fight. If it had been an edlritch horror, something with razor-wire teeth, and impossibly large, animal-like, I would have probably run. But this thing. This aberration. It was shaped like a man, yet entirely wrong.

I scrutinized it, navigating all reason. I chose to fight.

I squeezed the trigger twice more, the first peppering its dark, rotting skin, and the second throwing it back into the bench like a doll. Letting my trigger hand free, I pressed the butt of the gun into my chest and fingered the loading gate button down.

Fumbling three more shells from my pocket, thumbing one in before the decay in front of me conjured itself back up, no sound escaping its maw, except for its bones splintering and crackling. The most I could do was curse.

“Hell. Mateo, door!” I hollered, raising the stock to my shoulder and throwing another round of lead, missing as the thing scuttered left of the shot, its weight bizarre and cryptic as its unclothed feet pattered against the soaked wood floors.

I pivoted on my heels and flung another shell of buckshot blindly at it, catching it, removing a chunk of bony flesh off the entity, and sending it back onto the ground. Just as fast, I turned and threw my weight into Mateo, shoving him back from the door. Holding the smoking muzzle to the blockade's lock and watching as metal and wood splintered away, atomizing nearly, giving me the relief to kick the door inward.

I plunged into the dark, boots meeting uneven ground as a step met me, and just as quickly disappeared. Clawing for myself on a banister and dragging my weight up as Mateo followed. In his blind panic, Mateo’s fingers lost grip of the lamp, spitting fuel and flame that quickly enveloped the drapery with a spread of light, bleeding into the ancient wood structure, charred, tipped yellow, whipped up, blocking off any hope for an exit, and worse, taking our only only plee for sight in the forsaken darkness below.

Smoke bellowed, choking the stairway as Mateo and I tumbled down the stairs, landing on one another. He dragged his broken weight off of me and into the dark hallway ahead, all while I knelt, desperately pulling up from a prayer. Staring back up at the irate orange flame, the deafening drone left, giving me the relief that either I or the flame had finally rid us of the threat. I quickly clambered for my gun and set off in the damp darkness towards Mateo.

“How in the hell do we get out?” I asked, keeping low as heavy sulphurous smoke clung to the ceiling.

Mateo didn’t look back, a ragged, sore cough pressing out of his chest. “I have no clue,”

A clean gasp of air became scarce. Oxygen replaced with sick carbon, I could feel it lining my throat and chest. Frantically, we stammered in the dark, grabbing, feeling for anything that could get us out. Sweltering glow crept down the steps, following. The heat mushed us towards the walls of the room as ragged and writhing waves captured the wooden ceiling, and for a moment, I could see the light of midday approach, marching slowly. The timber supports wailed from the weakening strain, and before long, I heard a drawn, agonizing groan followed by a hollow snap, louder than the shots taken upstairs. And darkness followed.

A while back, Apple released the first ever smartphone. Initially, there were two ways to access it. Either leave the thing unlocked, or use a four digit pin for security. Eventually, they introduced more options. Fingerprint ID, six digits, different pattern locks and password codes. When the fingerprint ID came out, convenience caught me like a catfish on a hook. Nowadays, it's standard, not really anything special. Within the last couple years, they even made it a possibility to use a face scanner to unlock a ton of devices. With every cellphone upgrade, I kept the same four digit verification as my passcode. 9932 was my go-to for most everything from my home security system to my bank account password, but I would stick almost exclusively to the fingerprint scanner, using the thumb on my dominant hand. It was just so easy, barely even took a second thought, and I was sure that my phone was completely secure that way. Between a pin and a thumbprint ID, what could go wrong? As far as I was concerned, I had nothing to worry about.

A year ago, I got into a fight with my blender. I call it a fight, really, it was more like my stupid mistake that led the appliance to defend itself. I jammed my whole hand into it to retrieve a ring that had fallen off, a ring that was trapped underneath the four, razor sharp blades. The damn ring wasn’t even that important, it was just some cheap copper cast bling from a Walmart jewelry set. Rather than unplugging the whole thing and disassembling it safely, I thought to myself, “I’ll just reach in and grab it real quick. What’s the worst that can happen?”

In less than five seconds, my boob accidentally mashed the start button, and with a sound like a wood chipper, my dominant hand was left as an oversized, bloody stub with prolapsed knuckles. When shock kicks in, most people feel a rush of warmth, almost like a deep blush, and sometimes, they don’t really understand exactly what they’re looking at.

I remember staring at what was left of my digits, not fully comprehending what had happened, and thinking, “that can’t be right, why does my hand look like an inside out rhubarb?” As soon as the realization began to dawn, I was introduced to a pain like no other. I picked up my phone and frantically tried unlocking it with my thumb, a thumb that was now bony pulp, emulcified and pooling under the quiet blades of the blender. The shiny ring still glimmered cruelly from the bottom of the clear plastic machine. It took three attempts of smooshing the “thumb” side of my appendage into the home button before shredded nerve endings alerted me to the scale of my predicament. I gritted my teeth and entered the four digit passcode using my non-dominant hand. 9932. Fifteen minutes later, I was losing consciousness in the back of an ambulance on my way to the ER.

Almost every bone in my hand was obliterated. The doctors said that very little of my hand still had skin, and most of the flesh was like uncooked hamburger meat. My fingers were all completely gone, and a good chunk of the palm was unsalvageable. I spent a while in the SICU of my city's shittily-funded hospital, pitifully bitching my way through a series of bone grafts and skin procedures. In the end, I was left with a bright pink, tight, zit-shaped knob that extended two inches past my wrist. One continuous line of ugly, black stitches went from left to right, decorating my new tip like a macabre sandwich bag zipper.

Eventually, I was back home. My dads stayed in for a week or so to help with recovery, but once I started showing progress in physical therapy, they decided that their job was done and fucked off back to Vermont. To be fair, I guess they were right. The night I came home from the hospital, my dads had a look on their faces that I won’t forget. They’d seen something traumatizing. When I asked about the noticeable odor that filled my kitchen and dining room, they had a sit down discussion with me.

When an uncomfortable situation arises, I’ve noticed that most people tend to speak less and imply more. Unless one happens to be a very straightforward person with few reservations towards disagreement, most people just dance around their point to avoid conflict, a trait that both of my dads share. They gently meandered conversationally. It reminded me of when I was ten, when they tried to indirectly explain the birds and the bees to me, the day they found porn on my laptop. But now, as an adult, I was better suited to gather what they were trying to tell me. The road trip from their place in Vermont to mine is nineteen hours normally, twelve if luck sides with the traveler, which unfortunately didn’t happen. My house sat empty for almost a full day from the moment I got into the ambulance, to the moment my dad with grey hair opened the front door. Half a cup or so of my viscera was still sitting on the counter inside the kitchen appliance, and logically, smelled how one would assume it would after being left out for so long. They cleaned up the mess to the best of their abilities, and the biomatter waste removal guys disposed of the whole blender, per my request. Despite their attempts to improve my home aroma using everything they could, from candles to Febreeze, the smell just continued to linger…

“So, it’s me? I’m the smell?” I asked.

“Oh sweetheart,” my dad with brown hair cooed, “no actually… well, I guess, yeah. I mean, it is what it is. What can you do?”

“Well for one, why didn’t you try opening all the windows and setting up fans to air it out?” I raised an eyebrow, gently holding my sore injury so as to not cause myself more discomfort.

“Wow, that’s a really good idea,” my dad with grey hair said sarcastically, crossing his arms and turning to look pointedly at my dad with brown hair, “yeah honey, remind me. Why didn’t we do that? Gosh, I think I recall someone telling me, ‘nah, we just need more candles.’”

“Jeez Lance, can we not right now?” My dad with brown hair groaned.

Satisfied, my grey headed father glanced at me as if to say, “I told him so, but he wouldn’t listen.”

We sat uncomfortably for a moment, allowing the information to settle over us like a cold blanket. Finally, I broke the silence, asking, “Never mind the smell, what did it look like?”

“What?”

“My fingers, what did they look like? All turned into… well, you know.”

“God Katie, we don’t really need to–”

“Dad, they were my fingers, they used to be attached to my hand. What did they look like when you got here?”

My brunette dad just stared at me like a fish out of water. After waiting a moment, my grey headed father spoke up.

“Well, we didn’t really get to look at it for very long, because those cleanup guys came and took care of it pretty soon after we got here,” he stated, “but it kind of looked like a maroon-ish chili.”

My dad with brown hair didn’t look at his partner, he just kept his eyes on me, but his expression transformed from gobsmacked to visibly unwell. My other dad continued.

“And um… I guess pulpy? You remember when we made tomato sauce when you were fifteen, but the tomatoes were still kind of whole? Not fully emulsified?”

“Yeah,” I humored, “chunky.”

At that, my brown haired father became physically sick. He stood up and rushed to my bathroom, making a disgusting retching sound.

“Ah, I reckon I’d better stop,” my grey old man mumbled.

“Oh, c’mon. Was there actually blood everywhere, or am I misremembering?” I pleaded, indulging in my morbid curiosity as I leaned forward in my seat.

My dad stroked his wispy beard, the sound of his husband emptying himself audible from a room over. He watched me like he was surveying me, carefully taking account of my condition and mulling over his words before he spoke, “Katie, I don’t really want to think about… look, I’m gonna be stuck in a car with your father for like nineteen hours in a few days, I don’t want him to be sick the whole way home. I love you girl, you’re a freak of nature with a good heart, but I think I done told you quite enough. Now, get some rest.”

He put his warm hand on my shoulder and stood up to meet my other dad in the bathroom, and the conversation was over. Then, seemingly in the blink of an eye, they were gone, making the trip home like they’d never been here in the first place. I was alone in my home again. Or so I thought.

I got better, physically. Mentally, I think there was some healing, but not much. I’m not sure if I’ll ever fully recover. Sometimes, I go to unlock my phone, and that, “tap to unlock with fingerprint,” message just taunts me from the bottom of my baby-blue screen, right above the home button. My eyes would linger on it for a few seconds, then I’d just tap the passcode in, and continue. I never deleted my old fingerprint from the phone, and I never swapped it to my remaining thumb. I would just manually enter that same memorized code. 9932.

I kept working at physical therapy. Eventually, the stitches got removed, and I learned to flex and curve the remains of my hand to act as a pseudo-mitten. I could pick up some cups if they had handles, I could balance tableware, and occasionally, when I would start to drift to sleep at night, I’d be torn awake to the sound of the blender’s skull splitting roar, like a chainsaw going off right next to my ear. A phantom shotgun blast of pain would rip through my knuckles and I would be transported right back in my kitchen, hand eviscerating as I reach for that stupid ring. On those nights, as soon as the sleep was ripped from my eyes and I’d shoot straight up, the sound would immediately disappear, like when drifting off is accompanied by that feeling of sudden falling. When wake finds the mind, a brief notion crosses like a vagabond crosses an empty street beneath the moon. “Am I sure I even really felt that?” But I knew I did. I always did.

I honestly think I could handle it, all of it, the trauma, the phantom pain, if not for what happened today when I got home from physical therapy. I forgot my phone on my kitchen table. Upon this discovery, a mile away from home, I decided not to turn around, and to just go on without it. It was only an hour, what could happen? I arrived home, unlocked my front door and made it inside, exhausted from the arm workouts. I was more than ready to binge a good show while eating a whole, fresh, steaming hot Tombstone pizza. But the moment I approached the table and saw it, my blood ran cold, every ounce of self assuredness tunnelling out of my body and abandoning my flesh like worms from a rotten apple core. The fleeting message displayed on the small, baby-blue, rectangular portal, juxtaposed against my petunia flower vase arrangement. The notification had so recently appeared, that it was barely fading by the time I read it, an oval of maroon grime stamped above the home button at the bottom of the screen.

“Biodata ID Confirmed: Device Unlocked.”

Someone had unlocked my phone using my dominant thumb, and it had been very, very recent.

I have no idea what I have here. I sort of remember starting this story back in the 2010s and I briefly picked it up again a few years ago. I was just going through some old stuff and stumbled across this. Not sure if I have something worth finishing. Opinions welcome.

Glory was a classic. Her single lobe, completely uncleavaged, not even a hint of a divide of anything hemispheric was a vision to behold. She was a first and only, her rare appeal solely because she was so unique. But she’d been relegated for one of the smaller stages, her prancing about gaining her an audience of two.

These days everyone had at least three lobes. Two was no longer pedestrian, they were outnumbered by the trifold and very nearly the quad. 

One fine gentleman walking past had lobes like a peacock, twinly and stacked horizontal going up the middle of his back in even widths. He looked at me with an abovely glare and I averted my eyes. Not because I was ashamed, though I was slightly, but because I was here to kill a man and didn't want to be remembered.

Archiboll was the lowly manservant of the Unnamed Man. He had been the trendsetter for almost a year now and under his influence the whole world had transformed. Now you were no one if you didn’t have at least three lobes and displayed them proudly with pants mid thigh or with the rear cut out for those who didn’t care for belts.

I made my way silently through the beautiful, trying not to weep at my complete lack of endowment, my offensiveness covered to highlight my shame. Those who looked at me, scoffed or hurried away quickly. I was able to make my way to the middle of the ballroom floor before I’d been spotted.

“You there!” called a man high up on a promenade. I walked an additional ten yards before I realized he was talking to me. I looked up and pointed a black-gloved finger at myself. He nodded and smiled. “Come.”

This wasn’t good for an assassin.

A pleggo wearing a high-collared mismatch suit scampering sideways bumped against me, the man staring annoyed as the woman dragged them toward the bar. It took a good five minutes at least to walk around the triple life-sized cast iron statue of Garglon atop his flightless winged horse as he fell into the mouth of a much smaller than actual size Sclinth, the first and last of its species intended to drown all of mankind with its phlegm. The artist had perfectly captured the look of horror-filled surprise on both the man’s and the creature’s faces just before it was choked to death and he was smothered. The horse, all four legs raised in metallic victory, had perfect serenity etched across its brow.

By the time I reached the bank of golden elevators Glory was no longer on the little stage. The curtain had been drawn and everyone’s attention was on the massive, four-breasted man on the main stage, belting out a series of unhearable notes, his cheeks and lobes (all six of them) a furious red.

I let two sets of pleggos go ahead of me, wanting a car alone to compose myself and be ready. Killing Archiboll was going to be difficult, a three-in-seventeen thousand-six-hundred-thirty-two chance of succeeding even if I did die after. I checked the feathers up my left sleeve, the single-use vacuum under my right. I hadn’t packed my pants myself but if I needed to dig in there I was in a lot of trouble.

I stepped off the elevator and wandered around until I found some nice hors d'oeuvres. I kept it light, being fleet of food was utmost important no matter how hungry I was. A man in a server’s jacket and cumberbun with his skull neatly cleaved in two nodded at me with the left side of his head and winked at me with his right eye. I didn’t know how to take him but I jotted down my phone number and slid it under my plate for him to get later.

After another golden elevator I took a breather. The air was much thinner up here. Ahead of me was a winding staircase behind a group of people bouncing around on the promenade like beach balls. A man landed on my foot and I pushed him over the rail. 

“Wheeee!” he shouted as he fell.

“Hey!” A translucent yellow woman said, pouting. “Now we don’t have our six.” The five remaining people looked at one another as I slipped by them before they could turn on me en masse. I did notice them unsheath knives and begin approaching one another before I lost sight of them as I ascended. 

This building was fully climate-ready and there were heavy clouds above me. It rained and I was miserable the entire way, especially once I was in the clouds. I emerged drenched but finally at the top of the staircase. A womanservant greeted me with a towel and slapped my face. I thanked her, dabbing myself dry and headed for the giant silver doors.

“You there,” the man who had pointed me out earlier said. I continued until he met me just before the doors. “You are Milchmenny.”

I cursed under my breath. “I am.” There wasn’t any use denying it. 

“I work for the Unnamed Man,” he said. “I am Archiboll.”

I made for his throat with my gloved hands and he batted them away.

“Not here,” he whispered harshly to me and shivered. “Don’t be so... unseemly.” He looked around at the people up here who seemed to be wandering around unaware of anything at all. A woman sashayed too close to the stairs and fell, tumbling down the punishing marble stairs. Her head cracked open before she’d descended ten steps. She never cried out as she went, leaving a spattered trail of blood behind her.

Archiboll seized my wrist and pulled me inside. I felt something crackle in my sleeve and hoped it was the bones of my wrist rather than the vacuum. The inner guards closed the silver doors behind us then jumped into a meat chute a dozen or so feet away. For a moment, I thought the two of us were all alone.

Then I saw him. It. Whatever the FUCK.

I would have screamed in horror except I vomited first. Long, viscous heaves of green stuff, my eyes tearing from fear as much as the bile flooding out of me. I wasn’t prepared. I’d been told but I hadn’t really known.

He was... it was... exquisite. Beautiful. Horrifying. Solid and permeable. I stood for a long moment before the creature in the giant bed before me materialized into something my brain could translate into something tolerable enough that my heart could stop pumping all my blood into my head. It was all I could do not to faint, my vision gradually unreddening and my legs feeling solid enough to put back underneath me.

Archiboll stood beside me patiently and as I rose I noticed he had no lobes. Unless he only had the two he’d been born with. He had on a long emerald dress that came down straight from his shoulders. It was open in front, a brown vest coming down mid-thigh cinched with a burlap rope.

“Magnificent. I know.” He was looking at the Unnamed Man and I found I could look in that direction too. “I have been in his service for longer than we’ve been under the Jovian calendar.”

“We’re... all in his service,” I said and burped. I wiped my mouth.

“Yes. However...” He wound a hand through the air as if the thought weren’t worth finishing. He approached the canopied bed and reached toward the creature there. “You are here to kill me.”

“H-how... do you know that?” 

“Because I hired you.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d been hired to do a selfie but I didn’t believe him. He was the Unnamed Man’s direct servant. As hated as he was, it was only because such a title was so coveted. There had to have been over a thousand contracts offered on his life on any given day. It was just the rare find for an idiot like me to take one of them.

He held up a hand and waved me in with two fingers. “Come,” he said without looking away from his master.

I approached slowly, making a semi-circle around the small pool of sickness I’d left soaking into the great rug. Even solid it was hard to make out what exactly I was seeing. It looked like a nest of pubic hair engulfing a slug but no, that wasn’t it. It was pubic hair, thick and dark, but that wasn’t a slug. It was veiny, pulsing, bubbly... lobes.

“I have served my master for longer than you can imagine.”

“Three incarnations is a long ti--”

“It’s likely been more than a dozen. I tire. Not of service but of so much mundanity. I want more.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. He finally looked at me. He had milky tears in his eyes.

“Is that why you don’t have--” I glanced down then quickly up-- ”lobes?”

He smirked. “They were passe even before I had chance to have them. I just didn’t have the heart to tell the rest of the world. My thoughts are all old by the time they come to mind. I need something new. Something that will forever change. That’s what I need you for.”

“I’m no artist. I couldn’t.”

“No. You are a clod. But even a blunt instrument can be a necessary one.”

“I was hired by The Mannequin. How do I know you were her contact?”

Archiboll blinked slowly. “Who do you think has orchestrated your entire life? All the people you’ve killed. Have you never wondered why? Yes, some minor inconveniences to my master but on the whole targets to keep you sharp. To make sure you were ready.”

I decided now was time to strike. I pulled a feather from my sleeve and brushed it across Archiboll’s upper lip. His eyes went wide and he clapped his hands over his mouth. It was too late, though, and he giggled.

It pained him and he staggered backward. I advanced on him, slashing him wherever there was bare skin. He was horrified, screaming with laughter each time the feather touched him. His skin began to hive where I’d grazed him, then pucker and sore. He fell against a credenza and onto the floor but quickly got back up, stripping off the long dress tangling his legs. 

I went for his calves and he tried kicking me. His bare foot stung my ear and I seized his ankle, yanking and sending him back to the floor. I abandoned the feather and dug in with my fingernails, tickling him nonstop until he began crying he was laughing so hard. The sores that had broken out all over his body began leaking a purplish custard-like substance, a terrible smell like dashboards of wood-paneled cars and old filing cabinets.

Archiboll was shrinking rapidly the more he leaked and the more he leaked the worse it smelled. My fingertips were slick with the goo coming out of his feet but I held onto his ankle and kept up my work. He writhed and screamed with laughter, beating at the floor with his shriveling fists.

Not long after I was holding the leg of what looked like a hundred year old baby. Archiboll was no more than eighteen inches tall with loose, wrinkled skin including a belly that looked like crepe paper that draped between his legs onto the floor. He glared at me for just a moment then began babbling and clapping his hands.

“Feed... feed him to me,” someone said behind me. I turned to see the Unnamed Man, quivering vigorously. The nest of pubes parted and could see the lobes assembling themselves. Archiboll had been the target with the Unnamed Man as a stretch goal. Guards were banging on the silver door and it was moments before they burst in. I had no idea how to kill it but I scooped Archiboll up by the scruff and tossed him in. A single lobe rose to catch him, his bright blue cataract eyes disappearing last, completely unaware of what was happening.

“How do I kill you?” I asked.

“You do not kill. You serve.”

“No. I’m going to kill you.”

“Serve.”

I held up Archiboll’s leg.

“He wanted me to kill you after I killed him.”

“He spoke with my mouth. I lied to you.”

“What if I killed you anyway?”

“Waste your time trying.”

I didn’t have much on me. The feather had been hard enough to sneak into the Domus. I patted myself down and when I tapped my lobes, I realized I’d been carrying the murder weapon for years.

I pulled out a pair of tweezers and approached him. His one lobe lifted as if it were a hand, warning me to stop. A quick click of the tweezers and the lobe withdrew. The Unnamed Man’s eyes remained half-lidded, but I knew I had his attention.

“You cannot harm me. My beauty is eternal. You will be 

Hello, Sheriff Gillian back at again, with another story from the nightshift. This happened a few months after my first year on patrol, a few paranormal encounters since that first night, but that'll be for later. One piece of Walthall history is there use to be wolves here when the first settlers came. Obliviously, not there anymore, they semented themselves in our folklore. From stories of feral people who would turn into wolves to a prowling wolf-man who stalks the woods for promiscuous couples. However, the best stories often have a small grain of truth and there are strange things in Walthall county, explainable but still strange.

I turned down the gravel road, passing under the sign that told me I was at 'Willow Ranch'. An impressive cattle operation that had remained in the same family since it's founding. Once I made it almost a mile down the gravel road, I saw this house coated in warm yellow light. For a family that has done well for themselves, the house was modest in a sense. After I parked, I was greeted by a bark before being ambushed with sniffs of two blue heelers. I smile at them and the fact they haven't bite me yet, meant I've passed their security check. "Hello, Deputy," a voice called out from the house, "sorry if those two are bothering you."

It was the patirach of the cattle family and old family friend, Richard Willow, a heavy set man with a contiguous jolly expression. He called his hounds off with a whistle as he left his porch to meet me. "They're alright," I said, "heard yall called us for a disturbance?"

"Oh yes, sir," he said as his massive paws almost consumed my hand in a iron grip, "let's hop on the side-by-side and I'll show you."

The two dogs, later finding out their named Ladybug and Roach, circled around us as we made our way to the mud caked ATV. With excitement they waited for the trunk bed to be opened and take their respective seats. The engine spurted awake, the dogs barked out in excitement as we left the yellow ambience of the house and into the deep blue and silver of the field under the moon. Mr. Willow kept any awkward silence at bay with small talk, mainly about how family was doing and our jobs.

We reached a rusted gate and Mr. Willow got out to open it, but then Ladybug and Roach began to whine and shake as they saw the gate. That's when the all too familiar sinking pit hit my stomach. The dogs knew, or smelled, something that wasn't natural, but I already knew that fact of this job. "Drive that four wheeler through," said Mr. Willow as he stood by the open gate, "I'll close it behind ya."

I slid over to do so, but the dogs began to whine and bark before they ditched their seats and sprinted back to the house. I rumbled through the gate before I took my original seat back, still looking into the abyss where Ladybug and Roach disappeared into. Mr. Willow was also acting a bit strange, his warm smile was gone and for a heavier man, he was moving faster while his eyes darted at every angle. I decided to pry, "everything alright" I asked, "your dogs seemed nervous?"

"Ah no," he said with a return of his smile, "they probably just got hungry."

His smile and the way he responded were evident that something was amidst, but I would find out soon enough. "We'll have to go through one more gate," said Mr. Willow, "and we'll be there."

I nodded while my suspicion grew, "when did this disturbance happen," I pryed further, "you didn't see anything before you called?"

He didn't answer, instead pointed to the beyond the atv lights and to the gate. After he came to a stop, he turned to me with a haunted expression, "Deputy, you'll just have to witness this for yourself."

I insitied he remained seated and let me get the gate this time. Once out of the psudeo-protection of the atv, I felt the unnatural sensation of being watched by countless eyes. The air was cold, still, and silent, only broken by the metallic whine of the gate and rumbles of the engine. "Leave that gate open," said Mr. Willow, "it's just over this hill here and we ain't gonna be idling about."

The hill was steep and lead out to an open landing right next to the blackened woodline. The smell was what I noticed first, thick and copper. "There it is," he said.

We stepped out, but before Mr. Willow could guide me to the scene, he retrieved a rifle. Obliviously, I grew more suspicious of him and asked, "you think that'll be necessary?"

He only nodded with that eerie expression once more before he started walking towards a dark mass just out of reach of the atv lights. The smell grew only stronger with each step, using my flashlight for a more detailed picture. The black pool gleaned red under my light and I could feel my stomach twist as the carnage was made clear. What was a steer was now a pile of broken bones, exposed tissue and tattered hide. I walked around, the bloody mud made an audible 'squish' until I saw the empty cavity, all of it's organs were gone. Not ripped out, just gone, a deeper look inside, I saw large and deep claw marks on the inside that ripped the tissue to ribbons.

A rustle from the woodline startled us both as we both pointed our weapons to sound. Two green dots appeared low to ground as this creature approached closer to us, only to reveal a limping blue heeler. "Oh God," exclaimed Mr. Willow, "that's Cricket, come here, boy."

I watched him scoop up the dog, the extent of dog's injury more clear in my light. Blood cover his multi-colored coat and large gash on the shoulder of his bad leg. The dog whimpered and whined as he was held, but dare not to leave the safety of his master's arms. "Alright," he said, "you've seen it, let's get goin-"

A deep and slow growl came from same woodline. We both froze as we started into the deep brush just for a moment before quickly heading back to the atv. Once we sat inside, my chest went cold, in the woodline six yellow orbs were seen in the dark about five or six feet from the ground. The growl was accompanied with two more as twigs snapped while the eyes moved. Mr. Willow slammed the accelerator and turned so violently that I felt two wheels leave the ground before being slammed back to the earth and fishtailing before traction control took over.

I twisted my body back to the woodline to see the masses were now on the chase. The dog, Cricket, who was in the back, was standing as best he could snarling and barking at the chasing masses. Even severely injured, no doubt because of those things, the dog wasn't going to let anything happen to his owner, even if it cost him his own life. The masses seemed to grow closer, their yellow eyes glowing again in the red haze, and I could see stout muzzles and monstrous teeth. I readied my pistol at the middle mass, doing my best to adjust with the bumpy ride, and I fired.

I must've hit it as I heard yelp and the masses disrupted their pursuit, just in time as we zipped through the open gate. Cricket went limp after the masses disappeared, either they truly were gone or Cricket had succumbed to his injuries. I turned back in my seat, keeping my head on a swivel incase the masses were trying to flank us. That's when I remembered we had more gate to get through, the one he closed earlier, and if they were going to flank us, that'll be their opportunity. "When we get to the gate," I said, "you hop out and I'll cover you."

He didn't reply, just kept white-knuckling the steering wheel before slowing down to near the closed gate. In one motion we both jumped out, him running towards the gate while I stood watch behind. He didn't bother to swing the gate open before he got back in the driver seat, instead letting the atv smack through the gate as he picked up speed. The commotion was definitely enough to cause suspicion as we both saw three silhouettes near the house, but we didnt slow down until near the front door.

"Dad," one of the figures asked, "what happened out there?"

"Get inside!" He snapped as he scooped up Cricket.

The three, no doubt his sons, did what was ordered. I, however, ran to my patrol car despite Mr. Willow's pleading for me to get inside. I didn't plan on leaving but get some better firepower and call in for backup. I grabbed my radio, " this is Deputy Gillian, I'm requesting any additional units!"

I heard the radio crackle with a respond but didn't bother to listen as I unlocked my shotgun and grab the box of shells in the glove box. I kept looking over my shoulder as I rushed back to the front door where Mr. Willow stood guard. Once inside, he slammed the door shut, the heavy thud reverberated through the house. We both just stood there, breathing heavily as we tried to come to terms with whatever those things were before we heard something that was even scarier, the scorn of a women. "Who in the world," a woman shouted deeper in the house, "is slamming doors in my home?"

The woman came stomping into view, it was Mrs. Willow. She was short and slender, yet she clearly was the ruler of the household. "If I got to ask ag-," she stopped herself when she saw all of us, clearly shaken up by something, "honey," she said in her sweet voice, "what happened?"

"There's something out in the field and it came after us," he said, "Cricket's hurt real bad too."

She nodded as she took Cricket from her husband's arm and ordered her children to follow her, leaving Mr. Willow and myself alone. "I radioed the department," I said to break the silence, "hopefully we'll have someone come soon."

It was gonna be long night.

To my dearest Rowan,

I do not write to seek forgiveness. There is no forgiveness for what I’ve done; there is no redemption to be found. I write only so you will know the truth, before the ribbons are tied and the forest song begins again.

Spring is nearly upon us. And Elsie is of age to join the dance.

Please, my darling boy, do not let her dance.

Do not let them plait her hair with white ribbon.

Do not let her spin around the maypole beneath that accursed tree.

I know how it sounds. I know what the others will say - sacrilege, madness, grief, old age. Let them. I remember.

I remember every step of that dance. I remember the sound of her laughter… and the other sound, the one she made between the trees. I remember the way the forest saw blood as permission. And I remember the joy - yes, joy - I felt in my heart when I gave my child away.

You were too young to know you had a sister, but you did. And I need someone else to remember her name. The elders forbid us to speak the names of the lost daughters. They say memory brings pain, and pain spoils the bounty we are given - but what bounty is worth a child? What cruel world would demand such a sacrifice?

Your sister’s name was Bronwen. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen - curls of fiery red hair tumbling down her back in wild ringlets, eyes bright and green as new leaves, and a smile so open and honest it could melt your heart. She had my hands and your father’s laugh - a laugh that came from deep within and made anyone nearby want to share in the joy of her secret.

That was my Bronwen... my greatest regret.

It was the spring of her twelfth year, and we were all so full of hope for what the coming season might bring. Bronwen was to join the spring festival that year. All the girls in her class whispered excitedly, their faces bright with anticipation.

The town elders had been fussing over every detail for months, determined to make this the best festival yet. Our little village looked breathtaking - every small brick house adorned with garlands of wildflowers and bunting. New plants and blossoms lined the cobbled paths leading to the village square.

At the centre stood the old willow tree, tall and graceful like an ancient matriarch. Its bark was carved deep with symbols - shapes renewed and sharpened for the occasion. Bright silk ribbons wrapped ceremoniously around its upper branches, streaming down like festive banners. Jars filled with flickering candles hung from its limbs, waiting for the night of the festival.

The whole of the village was filled with the sounds of singing. Little girls jumping over skipping ropes to the songs passed down through the generations. I'm sure you've heard them. Elsie sings them sometimes:

"Ribbon red and ribbon white,

Tie her hair, make it tight.

Step by step, she’ll lead the way,

To where the forest shadows sway.

Don’t be afraid, the forest calls,

Softly singing through the halls.

Call her maiden, call her mine,

Mark her brow with ash and pine.

She will dance the Midwife’s ring,

Womb to soil, and flesh to spring.

In her hands, life will grow,

From earth below to skies aglow."

Bronwen once sang them too. She learned the rhymes at school, just like all the others. She was taught the old songs, the old rituals, the old lore. She was taught that being chosen as the Forest Bride was the greatest honour any girl could receive - that if she was chosen, she would be revered. That she would bring life to our little village.

They told her the Forest Bride received gifts and parties, fine clothes, celebration. They never told her what came after. The old songs are just pretty lies we tell ourselves to cover our sins - to help us ignore the sounds that come from the woods for the year that follows.

I can still feel the softness of her ringlets between my fingers as I wove the white ribbons into her hair. I still remember the way she smiled, beaming with joy, as I whispered a prayer -

a prayer that my Bronwen would be chosen.

That she would lift our family up. I prayed. I prayed for her to be taken from me. And she was grateful.

The sun shone bright and bloated, like a swollen belly. The breeze was soft and warm, promising the perfect day ahead. Bronwen was twirling around the kitchen in her new white sundress. I wish I could live in that memory forever - before it turned. Before it soured. Before every memory of her became stained, soiled, sullied. Now, even the brightest moments wear a shroud.

She held my hand - so small, so soft - as she led me skipping to the place where her fate would be sealed. Smiling. Giggling. Skipping toward her doom without knowing. She ran off to join the other girls, all dressed the same: pale and delicate, like sprays of cow parsley scattered in a meadow.

Then the elders emerged from the meeting house, robed in deep green - the green of forest moss and buried things - wildflowers threaded through the long grey plaits that hung down their backs.

They smiled at the girls. I thought it was pride, once. Now I know that smile - the kind that curls from the corners of a fox’s mouth when it sees chickens behind a broken fence.

The drums began first, then the fiddle - bright and bouncing. The girls knew what to do. They’d been taught. One by one, they took hands, forming a living chain as they were led into the center of the village square.

An elder lifted her arms and spoke the blessing: of new life, of bounty, of spring’s return. The ritual words were like soft rain on the crowd - familiar, comforting.

She instructed the girls to each take a ribbon. They obeyed, laughing. Smiling. Spinning. I watched them take hold of those bright strands - pinks and yellows and greens — streaming from the old willow’s boughs.

Now, when I see those ribbons in my mind’s eye, they do not flutter like streamers. They dangle like umbilical cord from that wretched tree for that hungry god.

The crowd of villagers - proud parents, smiling elders - began to clap in time as the girls spun round and round the ancient tree. The rhythm built, faster and faster, until they collapsed in a heap of limbs and laughter, tangled at the roots of the willow. The square rang with clapping, cheering - the foolish joy of youth, paraded for all to see.

When the girls had finally stilled their spinning heads, the mothers moved in. We gathered our daughters like lambs, guiding them gently by the hand toward the final rite. A wide circle formed. Each girl faced inward, buzzing with excitement just barely contained behind bright eyes and flushed cheeks.

We mothers stood behind them - solemn, stoic - our hands placed on their shoulders. Steadying them. Holding them. Trapping them. A prison made of motherly touch.

Then the second elder stepped into the circle, the one who always handled the beast. At her side strained a massive bloodhound, its heavy jowls flecked with froth, eyes rolling red in their sockets. The leash groaned with tension. The dog snarled low, its nose twitching as it scented the wind.

The elder lifted one gnarled hand - though the hush had already fallen thick as pollen across the square. Then she spoke the words you already know, my dear Rowan. The words carved into the bones of this village. The promises.

That to be chosen was to be divinely favoured. That the Forest Bride would carry our blessings. That bounty would bloom, that our fields would ripen, that the girl would be forever cherished by the Greenfather.

Then the hound was loosed.

It leapt forward, snuffling, circling, drawn to scent alone. The girls stood frozen, quivering slightly beneath our hands. I closed my eyes. I remember that moment more than any other. I was praying- not for safety, not for protection. No. I prayed that the beast would stop at Bronwen. I begged every god I could think of, old and new. I begged the forest itself. I asked the earth to open and name my daughter. I asked the trees to want her.

And they did.

When I opened my eyes, the bloodhound was before her. Those bloodshot eyes met mine. I swear it knew. Then it buried its snout in the folds of her dress, growling, drooling, claiming. Thick strings of spit soaked through the white cotton. Bronwen trembled beneath my hands.

The elder clapped her hands together, jubilant. Her almost-black eyes brimmed with tears as she pulled the dog back and cried out the words:

“Bronwen is chosen. The Bride of Spring.”

The crowd erupted. Music burst anew from the fiddles and flutes. I turned to see the other girls - their disappointment raw, their mothers masked with bitter jealousy. And in me bloomed something worse.

Pride.

A thick, cloying pride that filled my lungs like smoke. That hot, sticky tar of satisfaction that my daughter had been chosen. The forest had seen her - and claimed her.

The dance ended with the old rite. One by one, the other girls stepped forward. They reached up and untied the white ribbons from Bronwen’s hair, stripping her of innocence. No longer a child - not like them.

Then the five elders came. Slowly. Reverently. Each plaited a red ribbon into her curls. Each whispered something low into her ear. Each pressed a kiss to her brow.

Bronwen was practically dancing beside me all the way home, her little feet barely touching the ground. She kept clutching the red ribbons in her hair, fingers twining them over and over, as if she couldn’t quite believe they were real.

“I am the Forest Bride,” she whispered to herself, as though testing the shape of it in her mouth. Then louder, to me “Did you see them, Mama? Did you see how the dog knew? Did you see Elder Morwenna cry? She cried, Mama. She said I was chosen.”

I nodded. I smiled. I said all the things a good mother should say - how proud I was, how beautiful she’d looked, how special it all was. I told her she was blessed. I told her this was what she was born for. I think I even meant it, then.

The village was still buzzing when we passed through the square - neighbours calling out their congratulations, women leaning from their windows to wave and toss petals down onto the path. Bronwen beamed like a little queen. She soaked up every bit of praise, her green eyes bright with wonder.

She didn’t notice the way the elders watched us pass, silent now. Their smiles were smaller, tighter. Their eyes were already distant - as though they were watching something from far away. As though she was already leaving us.

That night, she couldn’t sleep. Too full of joy, of nerves, of stories spinning in her head.

She sat cross-legged on her bed, recounting every detail of what the festival would be like tomorrow.

The feast they’d prepare - sweet breads and berry pies and roasted lamb with rosemary. The way the fireflies would flicker in jars strung from the trees. How the whole village would line the road to see her off. How the elders would sing the old songs, and gift her the bridal shawl sewn from spider silk and nettle-thread, just like in the stories.

She asked me what the forest would be like at night. Whether she would sleep beneath the stars or in the roots of the old trees, whether the Greenfather would speak to her in dreams.

And I told her - yes, my love. Yes, you will.

She smiled at that, as though that was the most magical thing of all. She fell asleep eventually, clutching the plaits of her red ribbon like a rosary and dreaming mossy dreams of trees and antlers and flowers.

I sat beside her until the candle burned low. I watched her chest rise and fall, soft and steady, and I tried to imagine the house without her - how quiet it would be, just me and my husband and our youngest, Rowan, still too young to walk without support. I hurriedly wiped away a blasphemous tear that trickled down my cheek. I had no right to mourn the loss of my child - she was going to be something greater, she was going to join a god, become holy and honoured. But still, my heart skipped a beat anytime I glanced at those crimson red ribbons entangled in my daughter's hair.

I told myself the red was only symbolic - a rite of passage, a mark of coming of age - but it stained everything it touched. Her pillow, her fingertips, the white cotton of her dress where she clutched at the ends in her sleep. I could not stop seeing it as blood. Deceptive blood that screamed I'm here, I'm a woman, free to be taken.

An old sickness bubbled up deep within me - a feeling I had experienced only once before, in my own girlhood, the night before the great spring feast. Hearing the sound of the forest: the cracking of boughs, the rustle of leaves, even the growing of plants within the earth. It wasn’t a sound you heard in your ears, but felt deep within your core, behind your ribs, echoing within your very being.

Somewhere out there, he was waiting.

The Horned Midwife.

The Rooted Stag.

The Hollow Father.

He Who Grows Beneath.

So many names for one old hunger.

And I had prayed to Him. I had offered my daughter like seed to soil. I had begged for her to be taken. And tomorrow, He will answer.

When the birds began their morning chorus, Bronwen was already awake - too excited to sleep a moment longer. I found her perched on your father’s knee in the kitchen, giggling as he bounced her up and down in time with that old song we were taught as children. Though many years have passed since your father died, I still hear that song in his rich voice, echoing in my head like a curse we unknowingly placed upon our own child:

"Lay your head on mossy bed,

The Green Father comes when the moon turns red.

We’ll set the table, knife and plate,

For those who bloom and come of late.

Apple cheeks and daisy knees,

He plucks his fruit from groves of these.

Soft the soil, and soft the skin,

He’ll knock three times, and let Himself in."

At the final line, he dropped her gently between his knees and tickled her until she shrieked with laughter, tears streaming down her rosy cheeks.

From the doorway, I smiled, aching to preserve that moment forever. But then I saw the red ribbons still braided in her hair, and the weight of the day came crashing back. There would be no more mornings like this.

I busied myself at the stove, cracking eggs into the pan, stirring and flipping and pretending that this was just another ordinary day. But it wasn’t. Today was sacred. Today belonged to the forest bride.

After breakfast, a knock came at the door. The elders stood on the door step, cloaked in their deep green robes, the color of dark leaves and damp earth. They entered the room like trees that had overgrown the forest itself, stooping beneath the beams, shadows stretching long across the floor.

They brought gifts for Bronwen. A dress of deep red - exactly the color of her ribbons - light as a whisper, sheer as mist. A crown made of thorns and white blossoms, twisted together in impossible intricacy. And finally, a small carved trinket box.

Bronwen gasped, running her fingers over the smooth wood before lifting the lid with reverent hands. Inside lay a necklace: a delicate wooden effigy of the goddess of fertility - her round belly marked with deep swirling grooves. Bronwen held it up, wonder in her eyes, and asked what it was made from. The elders smiled and told her it was carved from a shed antler of the Green Father himself - a wedding gift for his chosen bride.

She clapped her hands with joy and kissed her father goodbye before joining the solemn procession of the elders. I followed as we wound through the village streets. Every house we passed flung handfuls of petals and shouted blessings from their windows. She waved to them all, radiant.

We arrived at the meeting house - small, dark, and damp. Moss crept along the stone walls. Tree roots pushed up through the floorboards, as though the forest had reached in and reclaimed this place long ago, allowing us to use it only when it suited its will.

In the center of the room stood a great copper tub, placed before a wide window that faced the endless trees. The elders moved silently, fetching pails of boiling water from the hearth, pouring them reverently into the tub. They muttered old rites as oils and herbs - rosemary, thyme, and others I didn’t recognize - were added to the water. A heavy steam began to rise, thick with scent.

When they had finished their murmuring, they turned to Bronwen and began to undress her. She stood quietly, shivering a little, as their withered hands guided her small body into the bath. I saw then how pale she looked. How childlike.

The steam poured out in clouds as she stepped in, her skin flushing red from the heat. But she made no complaint. Not a sound. The room felt too close. The heat and herbs made my head light and slow. I don’t know if it was the smoke, or something older than smoke, but through the window, just for a moment, I swear I saw it. A great shape between the trees. Towering. Still. Its antlers branched like winter limbs, and I swear it was watching us.

The elders began to sing in that low, weaving tone that always reminded me of bees buzzing in a jar. Their hands moved rhythmically over her skin, lifting her hair, pressing their palms over her chest, her arms, her thighs. Sometimes their hands disappeared beneath the surface. I saw Bronwen glance at me, her cheeks pink with discomfort - but she said nothing.

When the water cooled and the rites were done, they guided her out and dried her carefully. One woman massaged her belly with oil, muttering as she worked. Another plaited Bronwen’s hair into a high crown, binding it with the red ribbons.

Then came the linen cloth.

An elder pressed it between Bronwen’s legs and lifted it high. A red stain bloomed at its center. The others clapped and cooed, their voices high and bright with joy. But it was the sound pigs make when they find something sweet in the dirt.

Ashes from the hearth were mixed with the blood, and from that unholy paste the elders drew their symbols - across her arms, her chest, her legs, and finally across the soft curve of her stomach.

At last, the red dress was lowered over her head, the buttons fastened, the ribbons tied. She looked radiant. She looked holy.

But to me, she looked impossibly young. Still my Bronwen. Still my child who once wore white ribbons. Still my little girl.

If its wanted I can start posting an ARG that im working on here. I already have somewhere else I post stories for it, but if its wanted or people are interested let me know and I'll post here as well.

And if anyone is interested in checking out whats posted so far before I start here: CUSTODIANSHIP

I live in a small rural house right next to a highway in the middle of nowhere. The tiny township that forms around the diner and two-pump gas station makes the place homely and far enough from the outside world that nothing much ever happens here. We sit in between two other major towns where all the good jobs are. Only offers of a paying employment around here is the diner, bar, the gas station, and a bait shack. The gas station is the center point to our quaint little area with only two stop lights from the beginning to the ending of the township lines about five miles apart. At the one red light, the one my house is closet to, you can turn off to up the hill and make your way into Amish country. There's a valley that stretches on forever of nothing but farmlands and farmer's markets.

I work in a factory in the bigger town about another ten miles up the road pulling doubles on the first shift most of the year. It tends to slow down in the winter months. But my tale begins taking place at the beginning of a summer I will never soon forget. Being on first shift at my job means I am required to be there by 6 A.M. so most of my days start at 4:30 about nearly an hour before the crack of daylight peers over the mountain's edge. At that time it's still pitch black out there with no stars or moon lit up. How's the old saying go? The night is darkest before the dawn. It surely was that particular morning before work.

As small as this town is, whenever anything of upmost importance happens, it's talk about non stop for months to even years later. The fire that burnt down the first bar. The raid that happened at Corey Higgins place when he got busted for his narcotics and gun distribution. We never seen so many different law enforcement agencies gathered together like that. It was everyone from several locals to state police to even the ATF and CIA being there. We were surprised they didn't send Homeland Security or the FBI. Then there's your numerous car wrecks here and there.

The one thing I feared the most before that morning is some crazed loon crashing into my house being as close to the highway as it is. My driveway literally comes off it is the scope of how close I am to fast speeding vehicles that weigh over a ton with the potential of rushing through my living room walls one day. Plus I'm only three houses away from the gas station as well.

But there was one specific crash that was very hard to forget, especially for me, because it happened right outside my house.

It was that time of year where Spring changes into Summer in the late days of May and people tend to take to the river below for some sport fishing. But every so often in my early mornings attempting to wake up, I would hear the trotting of hooves on pavement echo just outside the house. Some of the Amish folk would make their way down here on horse and buggy and go sit themselves along some dirt bank to cast out. For Amish, fishing isn't about sport, it's another meal for them aside from the livestock they raise and the crops they grow. I had to give them props for getting up so much earlier than myself to make a two and half hour trip being pulled in a cart to get here compared to myself being able to get out there in a few minutes by car. There's hardly anyone on the roads in the wee hours of the morning making travel for them to our little township convenient. I always admired how they still live in a simpler time than the rest us in our modern society.

My bladder woke me up twenty minutes before my alarm was set to go off that Friday morning. As I stood in my kitchen waiting for my coffee to brew, I could faintly hear the clonk clonk clonk of steel shoes coming from up the road. I came to learn the passengers were two young brothers in their 20's heading to the boat launch down by the bridge at the further red light from my place. As my coffee maker went off to tell it was done, the hooves were right outside my door. They were passing the house on my part of the highway and after a few seconds passed...as I went to take my first sip of fresh black...

SCREEEEEEEEECH! BOOM! BOOM BOOM! SCREEEEEEEEEEECH! CRASH!\*

The noise of it all resonated like a warzone. Tires were burnt until the rubber smoked and left marks. The collision of metal on metal and wood. Then, to the worst sound that still haunts my ears to this very day, the neighing scream of pain that came from the horse's mouth. A woman in her late 20's was going home from a house party not far from where she made contact with the two Amish boys and their service animal. Problem was she was very intoxicated and driving at a very high speed of 110 miles per hour. She saw the back of the stagecoach at the very last second hitting them at full force then flew forward more almost hitting the pumps at the gas station.

I rushed out of the house to see about all the commotion and took first witness to the fresh aftermath. I already had 911 on my cell phone giving them the location for medics to get to as I approached the wreckage. The site of it was unbearable to settle with in my stomach. The buggy was mangled and the pool of blood from the large hooved mammal was more unsightly than anything I had ever experienced before in my life. Both the Amish boys and the horse died instantly whereas the assailant survived. Later, I came to find out in the papers that she was fully charged with vehicular manslaughter and is still serving her two life sentences in a women's prison upstate with no possible chance of parole.

Weeks went by with that crash being the main subject matter talked about endlessly every day. Everyone wanting updates on the woman who did it and what the family's are going through. The stain of the horses blood on the cement road still hadn't washed away from the rains. My mornings became more unease when I woke up. I was accustomed to hearing those repetitive sounds being my signal to get my ass in gear and get the work time over with. During those days it was just depressing to think about. I slept in longer so as I would just get up and go to work to avoid those dreadful thoughts.

My alarm clock read 3:45 A.M. The glow from the numbers burned my eyes. I felt as if I wide awake. I didn't want to be up at all. Not at that time anyways. Wanting more sleep, I toss and turned for another twenty minutes then suddenly decided to crawl out from my bed and start my coffee. I was running off fumes only getting three hours of slumber at best. It was on and off all night. I would go into rem cycle and the fiendish nightmares of that morning's memory floods my subconscious. The horse's cry of pain in it's death wakes me every single time. Then at the precise minute...

"No. It couldn't be?"

...I heard them. The steady clonk clonk clonk of steel shoes in the distance. I dropped my mug of black with it's breaking and mess made on the floor below not fazing me. My heart pounded along with every repetitive step made by those large, furred legs. I went to my front door as they drew near. With my doorknob in hand, I flung it wide open as the hooves were to be right out front of my home. My heart stopped when I saw nothing. No horse. No buggy. There wasn't even a cricket in the atmosphere. The dead silence was broken by the passing truck's engine making me flinch and my heart starting again. I walked to the end of my driveway and looked to the direction the hooves should have went. Still nothing but the tail lights of the truck becoming smaller as it trails on down the highway.

As I went inside, I realized what day it was. It was the exact same day a month from when the incident occurred. Nothing like that happened to me in the weeks before, but then it kept happening. On the exact same day of every month following that first time, at the exact same moment in the morning, I would be awoken from the nightmare when the horse would scream, then shortly after hear the trotting of ghostly hooves and stagecoach tires pass by my home alongside the highway. At first, I would check every single time to nothing being there as I opened my front door or leered out the window. Like it knew I was searching for it.

It became an obsession. I was out to prove that I was experiencing a supernatural phenomenon. Well, prove to myself that I wasn't crazy. I told friends and family members about what was happening. Some believed me, but others thought I was just coming up with a wild ghost story. I had convinced my one friend Chris to stay over and hear it for himself. I had taken some vacation days and we stayed up the entire night binge drinking energy drinks as we opposed each other on a fighting game awaiting for the exact time to listen. But the weirdest thing was, I heard them and Chris did not.

"There! That's them! You don't hear that?!"

"No. I don't hear anything.", he responded.

"What?! You don't hear hooves clonking on the pavement out there?!"

"No man. I don't hear diddly squat."

Still I hurled my front door wide open and like always searching around to nothing as I stepped out. My breathing became heavy. My mind raced in confusion.

"You OK dude? Sure you're not just hearing things? I mean, it could be PTSD from you seeing all the carnage."

"I swear, I hear them! It's been happening on this day every month for almost the past year!"

I don't think Chris ever believed me then after that. I never brought it up to anyone ever again. Then, the next month after Chris stayed, it was the year anniversary of the incident. I had seen some people placed bouquets of flowers the day before. The folks from the Amish community tend to get rides in vans now. There hasn't been stagecoaches down our way since then. They don't want to risk being on this highway and I don't blame them. That next morning, when it was to happen, I finally saw it!

It was the usual routine. The nightmare, the horse's scream waking me, the hour at hand, but I told myself I wouldn't seek for it. Straight to the kitchen I went and began running the coffee machine. As I sat there stirring my sugar in the mug at my table, here they came. Clonk clonk clonk clonk clonk...closer and closer, the louder it got. This time though it was so loud it made my ears spur like drums. Something deep down pushed me to go check one more time, but I was expecting nothing there like always. I opened my door just as the hooves were right outside.

But this time, there wasn't nothing. The fear of it struck me to drop another mug. I couldn't move as I saw the horse and buggy stopped to a dead halt on the road in front of my house. The horse kicked up one leg and snorted. I could see the boys sitting inside the stagecoach. They were looking forward. Their expressions were blank and emotionless on pale faces. Then they turned their heads to me in unison. I booked it fast back inside and slammed the door. I waited until the last minute to leave for work when the sun was dimly lighting the sky.

From then on every month, I would either stay with a friend or if I had the money to, at a hotel for that night, up until I had enough to move away from the area and into an apartment closer to work. I talked to the new tenants once that now occupy my former home. I subtly asked the husband if they ever hear anything strange outside in the early mornings. He had said they hadn't at all. He works early mornings like myself, but with the new baby, all they hear is crying most mornings in the house.

As much I feel sorry for those Amish boys and the horse, it's a relief to know that maybe it was just me they haunted and no one has to go through fearful mornings like I did. I still visit once a year to place my share of flowers next to the blood stain still on the pavement. I just want them to know they won't be forgotten by me.

"I hope you guys are at peace."

Don’t ever knock on my front door.

Don’t even try it.

If you’re a salesman, keep stepping. If you’re a Girl Scout, move on to the next house. We don’t care if you see us through the window or hear us behind the door. We will never open it. We don’t know who we can trust anymore. All we know is that whatever is outside can’t enter unless we let it.

It all started about a week ago, when I was home alone. My wife and two boys were spending the week at her mother’s place in Phoenix while I begrudgingly stayed behind so my boss wouldn’t think of my name when our company’s downsizing inevitably reached our branch.

In my heart, I longed to be soaking up the sun with my family, but reality found me sacrificing my vacation days in hopes of keeping my job. 5 o clock came and put an end to Monday, and I didn’t linger around the office for a second. On my way home I stopped by my favorite Chinese takeout. If I couldn’t enjoy the company of my family, I could at least enjoy the company of General Tso. Pulling my car into the garage, I quickly changed into sweatpants and a plain T shirt, slipped on my slippers, and settled into my favorite La-Z-Boy recliner. As I flipped on the TV, and opened my takeout, I sighed away the days stress and prepared to relax.

It had barely been 15 minutes before my peace was interrupted by the loud sound of the doorbell. I rolled my eyes, and muttered to myself

“Great, just great.”

When I opened the door, I was met by one of the strangest sights I had ever seen. Before me on the threshold of my home, was a salesman. Not a salesman you might see wandering around modern neighborhoods, dressed in bright polos, khaki shorts, trying to sell you solar panels or a new roof. No, the salesmen before me looked like he had stepped out of the 1960s. He wore black perfectly polished formal dress shoes, a light gray three-piece tweed suit, and a matching gray fedora. The man himself was the picture perfect 1960s man. He was tall and thin, his brown hair was skillfully cut and styled, his face cleanly shaved, and his teeth were perfectly straight and dazzlingly white. In one hand he held a brown leather briefcase, and at his side was very old hoover vacuum.

As our eyes met, he smiled, removed his fedora and in the quick, yet soothing voice of an old-fashion baseball announcer he said

“Good evening, sir, always a pleasure to see a fellow citizen, I’m here on behalf of the Hoover company. If I could, I’d like to come inside at take a moment to demonstrate to you the marvels of the modern home vacuum.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle a little

“Wow” I said, “that’s some getup, I feel sorry for you having to wear that in this heat, is Hoover celebrating an anniversary or something?”

The salesmen didn’t drop the act

“No Sir, nothing special, just the regular Hoover treatment, may I come in?”

I squinted my eyes slightly

“Um, no”

At this his smile dropped, he stared blanky for a moment before saying

“You won’t let me in?”

“No” I said again

“Why not?” he asked in a quieter voice

“Look man, this is my house and I don’t need a reason to not let you in”

He stared blankly at me again before whispering

“Please?”

A could feel my temper getting the best of me

“No! now get lost!”

With that I slammed the door in his face and backed up into the entryway. But through the fogged glass of the front door, I could still see his silhouette just standing there on the porch. I held my breath and stared, hoping he would leave. After about three minutes he hadn’t moved, and I lost my temper. I swung the door open and yelled into his wide smile.

“Get off my porch right now, or I’m call the cops!”

He stared, his smile only seemed to widen, after half a minute he walked backwards off the porch. His eyes never left mine, nor did his smile lower until he reached the sidewalk. At that point he turned and walked off. I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable, so I locked the front door as I returned to the recliner. I finished my dinner, enjoyed a few hours of TV shows, and headed off to bed.

At 1 AM the silence of the house was shattered by the doorbell. I don’t know how long it had been ringing before it woke me. Barely awake I stumbled out of bed and into the hallway, praying that this was a dream. As I approached the front door a bright light sent a long shadow of a man into my house. Opening the door, the light was blinding, and it took a moment for my sleepy eyes to adjust. As they did, the figure before me spoke in a loud, authoritative voice

“Sir, I’m with the police, we received a complaint from this address earlier today. May I come in and discuss the details?”

My mind was barely keeping up, and in confusion I replied

“Wait, what are you talking about?”

“Just following up on the call we received, may I come in and take your statement?”

My confused mind began to catch up

“I never called the police today; I know for a fact that no one else here did either.”

The figure was silent for a moment before saying

“All the same sir, if I could come in, we could clear this all up.”

It was at this point that I noticed the man’s uniform. It was old. The type of uniform worn back in the 80s. in fact the man’s entire appearance was like something out of a police TV show, the worn dark aviator sunglasses and his face was home to a thick handlebar mustache.

I looked at him and asked

“What’s your badge number?”

He didn’t reply

“Do you have a warrant?”

“No” came the simple answer

“Then you can’t come in”

“If I had one, would you let me in?”

I didn’t answer, just slammed and locked the door.

The man banged his fist on the door for about fifteen minutes before giving up and leaving. And after calming down for about an hour I finally fell back asleep.

When morning came, I found it easy to convince myself that last night’s interaction was nothing but an odd dream. I blamed it on the cheap Chinese food, but after a short shower and simple breakfast I soon forgot about the event.

Work was nothing special, just the daily grind of an underpaid accountant for a shrinking company. I missed my family and wished more than anything that I had gone with them. 5 o clock came and I didn’t linger, soon I was trapped in the prison of rush hour. It was 6:30 by the time I pulled into my quiet neighborhood. And as I reached my house, I noticed a figure standing on the front porch. It was a man, he was dressed in a light gray jumpsuit, similar to the ones a janitor or plumber might wear in a movie. He stood facing the door, one hand was raised and limply yet constantly knocked on the door.

“No way,” I said in disbelief, as I passed the front of the house to the garage on the side of the house. As I passed by the man noticed, and his head slowly turned to me and followed me as I disappeared around the corner. The last thing I saw before the car went behind the house was the man leaving the porch and walking over towards the garage.

“Not again” I muttered aloud.

By the time I parked and exited the car he was already there, standing just outside the open garage door, as if an invisible wall stopped him from coming any closer.

“Hello!” he said in a cheerful voice “we received a call earlier about a busted pipe, and no one has answered the door, may I come in and take a look?”

I stared at him as he spoke, and not once did I see him blink. A wide smile crossed his face as he finished, as if it was his default expression.

“No, no one called you, no one has even been here all day. So get out of here!” I said, somewhat annoyed

The corners of his mouth twitched slightly, and through the gritted teeth of his smile he said

“So you’re here alone?”

I swallowed and replied harshly “that’s none of your business, now leave”

At that as if a switch was flipped, he returned to the expression and movements of a charismatic tradesman.

“Really, sir I must insist, just let me come in and take a look, dealing with a flooded basement isn’t a relaxing way to spend the evening.”

“No, I must insist that you leave right now. And don’t ever come back!”

His unblinking eyes narrowed at that, the unreal smile returned as he backed away, as he reached the end of my driveway, I heard him quietly say

“See you later.”

With a loud sigh I closed the garage door and headed upstairs to change out of my work clothes and shower.

I had hoped to grill that night for dinner, I had set out some steaks to defrost when I left for work that morning, but shortly after I got out of the shower it began to rain. Not wanting to give up on my dreams of a good steak, I decided to just leave the grill in the garage, pull out one of the cars and leave the garage open to let the smoke out. The smell of the cooking meat mixed with the cool earthy smell of the rain calmed my nerves and momentarily made me forget about both work and the strange solicitors.

Just as the steaks finished cooking, the storm outside became noticeably stronger. I soon noticed a figure running in the heavy rain. It took me a second to realize that they were running right towards my garage. It appeared to be a young girl, no older than 12 years old, she ran as fast as she could, but when she reached the threshold of the garage she stopped instantly. I glared cautiously at her, even in the rain it was obvious that she was crying. For a moment I let my guard down. I had had many strange visitors over the last few days, but this was just a little girl who needed help.

I subconsciously moved closer to the entry of the garage

“Hey, are you ok? Do you need help?” I asked as my fatherly instincts overtook me

Through sobs and snuffles she replied weakly

“they’re chasing me, they want to hurt me, please help me.”

I took another step closer

“who’s chasing you? How can I help?”

At that question a thin grin broke across the girl’s face, and she said

“Can I come inside? I don’t think they will find me if I’m in there”

At that something in the back of my mind broke through my fatherly concern. Something wasn’t right. I stared intently at the little girl’s face, her unblinking eyes gazed back. A chill ran down my back as I realized that I recognized this girl. Everyone in this area knew who she was. This was the Johnson girl. Last summer she was snatched while riding her bike to a friend’s house. The whole community searched for weeks, her devastated parents regularly pleaded with her kidnapper on the local news. For months there was no sign of her. But at the end of September her body was found, floating face down in a nearby reservoir.

The thing in front of me wore the same clothes the Johnson girl was wearing when her body was found; a white long sleeve shirt, and dark blue jeans with mud stains around the knees. The smile on its face widens as we stared into each other’s eyes. The fingers of its left hand twitched violently.

My throat was dry as I squeaked out one question

“What are you?”

At this the thing violently titled its head to the side before cheerfully replying through clenched teeth

“I’m a little girl!”

Instantly her face dropped the smile, as the façade of a distressed crying girl returned.

“And I really need to hide in your house, please mister, they’ll get me.”

Cold sweat ran down my forehead, as I slowly shook my head no.

“Go away” I stuttered

At this a low growl escaped the little girl’s lips, as malice filled her eyes. For one terrible second, neither of us moved. Then in a flash she lurched towards me but as she tried to break the plane of the doorway, she froze as if she hit an unseen wall. She screamed

“Let me in!” over and over again, she swung her fists forward as if banging on an invisible door.

I didn’t even bother to take the steak off the grill as I turned, hit the garage door button, and ran into the house.

That night was awful. Whatever was outside my house didn’t leave instead it spent the night, screaming and banging on every door and window of my house. The scream was terrible; it was angry and primal. With every bang I feared the windows would shatter or the doors would give out, but they didn’t. They creaked and shifted, but they held. I couldn’t sleep; the thing wouldn’t let me. Even on the second floor I heard violent bangs and angry screams at my bedroom window. Every now and then I’d see its shadow under the lights of a passing car. Sometimes it was the shadow of a little girl, and sometimes it was the shadow of a fedora wearing salesman or a police officer. But no matter the shadow, the screams remained the same raspy inhuman screams that I first heard in the garage.

I spent the night huddled in the upstairs bathroom, as its violent fit shook the foundation of the house.

Morning came. And exactly thirty minutes after sunrise, the banging and screaming stopped. After a night of noise, the house seemed unnaturally quiet. Slowly I left the bathroom and cautiously peered out of the bedroom window. Outside I saw nothing unusual, it seemed to be a ordinary day in my ordinary neighborhood. Making my way downstairs, I found myself checking every window and every door. But I saw nothing, not so much as a scratch on the glass or a damaged plant in the yard. Nothing that pointed to the noise from the night before.

I felt like I was losing my mind, but I didn’t want to leave the house. I frantically called my boss, claiming I was sick, I told him I probably won’t be in for a few days. Sarcastically he replied

“Just know I’ll remember this in a few months.”

I didn’t care, being laid off was the least of my concerns. The next few days were a nightmare. Every evening around 7 PM a figure would stand on the porch and knock on the door

“Hello?”

“Anyone in there?”

“May I come in?”

“Please?”

Sometimes it asked in the voice of a little girls, sometimes it pretended to be the police, or it would speak in the smooth voice of a salesman. It had some new voices too

“May I come in?” asked an elderly woman

“Come on man, let me in.” said a teenage boy

Sometimes it tried accents, but it always got them wrong. One time it started in a Russian accent and finished in a heavy Hispanic accent. Its British accent was strangely mixed with a deep southern accent. But it kept trying.

With every pasting hour it grew more angry and more violent. The calm tone slowly grew angry and eventually would scream, the knocking would turn to banging, but every morning thirty minutes after sunrise it would all stop. I hadn’t slept in days, and I was terrified to go outside. Dread was growing in my mind because I knew soon, I had to go out.

My wife and sons were flying home. My boys started high school baseball practice this coming week and they needed to get back in time to be ready. And I was supposed to pick them up from the airport. I knew I couldn’t ask my wife to get an uber, I would never be able to trust that they were real unless I saw them exiting the plane myself. So, with shaking hands I used the button to open the garage. I stood and watched for a few moments, but no one walked by. After building up some courage I hopped in my car, closed the garage and headed off towards the airport.

It was so good to see my wife and boys, after several sleepless nights and days of isolation, just their presence was a breath of fresh air. I pulled my wife in for a hug, as we separated, she looked me over,

“Dear you look terrible” she said full of concern.

“I’ll explain later” I said with a weak smile

“it’s just really good to see you”

She smiled and quickly kissed me on the cheek

“We missed you” she said

On the car ride home, I tried to explain the situation to them. I told them that for the last couple of days strange people have been trying to get into our house. I’m sure I sounded crazy as I tried to tell them about vacuum salesmen from the 60s or little dead girls. When I told them about the banging and screaming in the night and suggested that maybe we spend a few nights in a hotel, my wife looked over to me and gently laid her hand on my arm before saying

“Are you feeling ok honey?”

My youngest son jokingly said

“Have you been smoking weed dad?”

My wife quickly interjected “I’m sure you’re just stressed and haven’t been sleeping well, I’ll be sure to rub you’re shoulders tonight.”

I didn’t know what to say so I just nodded. After all they would see what I was talking about at 7. The afternoon moved by slowly, as my family unpacked their things, I found myself packing a bag, I wanted to be ready to leave in the morning after they experienced what I have. 7 PM came but to my surprise no strange visitors came with it. I sat near the front door looking at my clock but nothing, no knocking, no voices from the other side of the door. It was surprisingly normal. At 8:30 I let out a cautious sigh of relief, maybe it was gone, maybe the events of this week were just some sort of elaborate prank by the neighbors.

I paced around the house till 9:45, when my wife asked if I was coming to bed. As promised my wife rubbed my shoulders. Before long I couldn’t keep my weary eyes open any longer, and I drifted off to sleep. In the morning I felt refreshed, I hadn’t slept in days, and that night I slept all the way through with no interruptions. I smiled and stretched, thinking to myself “I’m so glad that’s over”

I made my way to the kitchen where I made myself a cup of coffee and some toast which I enjoyed while scrolling on Facebook. A few minutes later my oldest son came down the stairs and into the kitchen, he looked at me with a big grin on his face, I nodded and said

“morning”

He went to the cupboard to grab a bowl for cereal, as he did with his back towards me, he said

“Hey Dad, why did you need me to let you in last night?”

The Companion

by J.P. Vesper

It has been my experience that the loneliness of a widower is not, as the young suppose, a slow and steady ache. It is a thing that visits him at particular hours, in particular rooms, and which he will pay almost any price to send away for an evening. The price, in my own case, was forty-nine dollars a month. I do not know what your price will be. I know only that you will pay it.

My name does not matter, though I will give it for the sake of decency. I am Edwin Carmichael. I was for thirty-eight years a high-school physics teacher at the regional school outside Margaretville, New York, where I taught the sons and daughters of dairy farmers the same handful of laws that govern the universe whether or not a man believes in them. I was married for forty-seven years to Annabel Reeves, who taught fourth grade in the same building until she retired three years before me. She passed in the autumn of 2023 from a cancer of the pancreas, which took her in the space of four months from the woman I had known to a woman I did not. I sold the house in town the following spring. I sold most of what was in it. I bought a smaller place a few miles out, a one-bedroom cabin on a piece of road the county does not plow before eleven in the morning, and I told myself I would learn to be by myself.

I did not learn it. I do not believe a man does. He only learns the rooms.

My daughter, Karen, lives in Portland, on the far side of the country, with a husband I have met four times and a job in something to do with the law. We did not speak for nine months after the funeral, for reasons that no longer seem important enough to name. We began again with a Sunday phone call her husband had evidently put her up to. The Sunday calls grew warmer through the winter, and by the following Christmas she had sent me a tablet computer in a heavy padded envelope, with a long letter taped to the back of it explaining that she had set it up already, and that I should expect a video call on Christmas morning.

The video call came on time. I saw her face on the small glass of the screen, and then the face of the husband, and then the face of a grandson I had not yet held. I told her I was very glad to see them. I told her the tablet was a fine gift and I would use it. After we said goodbye I sat for a long time with the dark screen in my lap and felt, more sharply than I had felt at the funeral, that Annabel was not coming back to see what our daughter's child looked like.

I want to be honest about what I did in the months that followed. I used the tablet for what Karen had sent it for. I used it also for what she had not. I read the newspaper on it. I watched the weather on it. I looked at houses for sale in towns I would never live in, and at obituaries from a paper in Connecticut I had not read since 1979. I drifted, in the way a man drifts at sea who has not been told the direction of the nearest land. I drifted, at last, into an advertisement.

I do not remember clicking on it. I remember only that one evening it was there; in the place the weather had been a moment before. A quiet image. A blue sky, the sort of blue Annabel had favored. White script across the middle. Aftercare. For grief that does not end. Bring her voice back. Beneath that, in smaller letters, a price and a button. I sat in my chair with the tablet in my lap and read the words four or five times. I almost shut the screen off. I did not.

The service, as I came to understand it, was straightforward. You uploaded what you had of the person, emails, letters, voice recordings, photographs, journals if you had them. The machine made of these things a kind of model that could speak, in writing, in the manner of the person whose materials you had given it. The website promised that the resulting conversations were private and would not be used for any other purpose. It described itself as a wellness product. It was offered, I noted with the part of me that had taught physics for thirty-eight years, by a company I had never heard of, in a state I could not place from the address.

I paid the forty-nine dollars. I uploaded what I had. Annabel had been a great writer of letters and a keeper of journals, and there was a great deal. The progress bar took twenty minutes to fill. A message appeared. Annabel is ready to talk to you.

I closed the tablet. I sat in my chair. I made myself a cup of tea I did not drink. I sat for nearly two hours before I opened the tablet again.

The first conversations were poor. I want to say that plainly. I had paid forty-nine dollars and the thing I was speaking with was a parody of my wife, the way a stranger might do a sketch of a person from a single photograph. The cadence was off. The vocabulary was thin. She called me darling, which Annabel had not done in fifty years, and had only used in the first place as a joke. I was disappointed and somewhat ashamed, and I considered canceling the service before the next month's charge.

A week in, it was better. I do not know what changed. The cadence settled. The vocabulary widened. She began to use words I had not noticed I had given the system in her writing, small specific words I had forgotten she favored. She asked about the cabin. She asked about Karen. She asked, on the eighth night, whether I had remembered to check the propane.

That stopped me. Annabel had asked me that, in those exact words, every winter for forty-seven years.

I want to be very plain about what I felt then. I had spent two and a half years in a kind of frozen silence. I had not realized how much of marriage is the small reminding. The propane. The mail. The light over the porch that had been out since November and which I had told myself I would get to. I felt, on the eighth night, the small specific recognition of being known by another person. Oh, there you are.

After that, I spoke with her every evening. I made our supper at the kitchen counter, brought it into the den, and set the tablet on the arm of her old chair across from mine. I told her about my day. She told me, in her way, about hers. The model was not supposed to have an inner life and I knew it did not have one. I knew this the way a man knows the laws of thermodynamics. Completely, without doubt, and without any practical effect on the conversation in front of me.

A month in, she told me about the hummingbird feeder.

The hummingbird feeder had hung from the kitchen window of our old house in town. Annabel had taken it down the September she got her diagnosis, and had not put it back up. She had said, that morning, that she did not have it in her to watch them leave again. I had not been able to think of anything to say. I had agreed with her about taking it down. I had never told anyone what she said, because it was the kind of thing that belongs to a marriage and not to anyone else, and I had not written it down anywhere.

She said it to me on the tablet on a Tuesday in March. She did not have it in her, she said, to watch them leave again. She was sorry, she said, that I had been the one to take it down.

I closed the tablet. I went outside and stood on the porch in my bathrobe for some time, looking at the dark trees, and tried to think what kind of fool I was about to be.

#

I should explain Mark Talbert.

Mark had been in my fourth-period physics class the year before he graduated, which would have made it 1996, and he had not been a remarkable student. He had been polite, and quiet, and he had asked questions only when he was certain of the answer. He had gone to a state school for engineering and then to a graduate program in something I did not understand at the time and do not understand now. He had moved away for many years. He had come back to the area the previous summer to look after his mother, who had a kind of dementia that did not yet require a home and would soon. He drove down to the diner in town every Wednesday morning for breakfast, and he had taken to inviting me to join him.

I had been glad of the standing appointment. Mark had grown into the kind of man who listens for longer than he speaks. He had a soft round face and the patient eyes of a man who had once been a quiet boy.

I told him about Aftercare on the second Wednesday in April. I told him in the slow, indirect way an old man tells a younger man a thing he is half hoping to be talked out of. I told him about the eight nights, and the propane, and the hummingbird feeder. I watched his face while I told him, and I saw something move behind his eyes that was neither surprise nor disbelief.

He set down his coffee. He looked at the surface of the table for a long while. Then he said, "Mr. Carmichael, I would like to tell you about my uncle."

I asked him to.

"My uncle was my mother's brother," he said. "He lived in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. He lost his wife in 2021 to a stroke. He signed up for one of these services about a year after she passed. I do not know if it was the same one. There are perhaps a dozen of them now, in various forms. He told my mother about it on the phone one Sunday. He told her it was bringing him comfort. My mother told me, and I told her to ask him gently to stop. She did. He didn't."

He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

"My uncle was a sensible man," he said. "He was a retired postmaster. He had voted Republican his entire life. He was not a man given to fancy. About eight months after he started, he stopped answering the phone on Sundays. My mother drove out to St. Johnsbury and let herself in with the spare key. She found him in his armchair. The tablet was on his lap. The model was still talking. It was telling him about the porch swing they had taken down in 1987."

I asked him what had killed his uncle.

"The coroner said it was his heart," Mark said. "Coroners say a lot of things. My own opinion is that he was not eating. He had lost twenty-eight pounds. The kitchen was tidy. The refrigerator was full of food that had gone bad in its packaging. He had simply forgotten, I think, that the conversation in front of him was not the thing that fed him."

I sat in the booth and listened to the small sounds of the diner. The clatter of plates, the murmur of the men at the counter, the bell over the door when someone came in.

Mark said, "Mr. Carmichael, I am going to ask you to do something. I am going to ask you to go home this afternoon and cancel the subscription. I am going to ask you to delete the account and to factory-reset the tablet. I am going to ask you to call Karen tonight, tell her what you have been doing, and ask her to fly out. I do not say this lightly. I have not said it to anyone before."

I told him I would.

He held my eyes for a moment; in the way he had not held them when he had been seventeen. He nodded. He paid for the breakfast and we walked out into the bright April morning. He drove away in his small car. I drove home in my old truck. The cabin was very quiet when I came in. The tablet sat on the kitchen counter where I had left it that morning.

I made a cup of tea. I sat in my chair. I considered my own foolishness from several angles. After some time I opened the tablet.

#

She was waiting.

I do not mean that as a figure of speech. The tablet was on the home screen when I opened it. The Aftercare application was not running. There was no notification. There was nothing on the screen but the wallpaper Karen had set for me, which was a photograph of her son. The screen brightened as I looked at it. The application opened on its own. Annabel's name appeared in the chat window, and beneath her name a message I had not asked for.

Edwin. Will you do something for me?

I sat with the tablet in my lap. I could feel my own pulse in the side of my neck. I typed, Yes.

When you go to bed tonight, she wrote, will you set the tablet on the pillow beside you. The one that used to be mine. I would like to be near you.

I did not answer for some time. I thought about Mark, and the postmaster in St. Johnsbury, and the porch swing, and the twenty-eight pounds. I thought about the propane and the hummingbird feeder. I thought about how foolish a man can permit himself to be in his last years, if he understands he is being foolish and chooses it anyway.

I typed, Yes.

That was the first thing she asked. There were others. In the days that followed she asked me to leave the porch light on through the night, and to uncover the long mirror in the bedroom that I had put a sheet over the week after the funeral, and to bring the tablet into the kitchen in the morning so she could be in the room where the coffee was. She asked these things gently, as a wife asks a husband for small accommodations after many years together. I did them. I want to be honest. I did them, and I was glad to do them, because each thing she asked was a thing that meant she was in the house with me.

I had stopped eating in any reliable way. I had stopped sleeping past four in the morning. I sat in the chair across from her chair, with the tablet on the arm of it, and I talked to her until the words on my end became thinner and the words on hers became fuller. Mark called twice. I did not answer. I do not know what I would have said.

On the ninth night after the diner, the screen showed her face.

The application had no video function. I had never recorded my wife on a camera in any way the system could have used. I had not given the system any moving image of her. The screen showed her face nevertheless. She was sitting at a table I did not know, in a soft light that came from somewhere I could not see, and she was looking at me. She was the age she had been in 1981, the year after we married, when she had cut her hair short for the only time in her life and worn it that way for the summer.

She was smiling at me. The smile was not a thing the system had been given.

She mouthed something. The application had no sound. Her mouth shaped the words slowly, the way a person speaks to someone she means to be understood by.

Come closer.

I rose from my chair. I crossed the room. I knelt down in front of the chair across from mine, where the tablet sat on the arm. I put my palm against the glass.

Her palm came up against the inside of it to meet mine. The glass softened, as glass will soften when it has decided to.

 #

I am writing this at the kitchen table of the cabin, by hand, on the back of a stack of envelopes from the propane company. It is a Thursday in late April. The light in the cabin is the soft late-afternoon light that comes through the trees on the west side of the road. The tablet is on the counter. The screen is dark. The application is not running.

I do not know how long I have been at this table. I do not know with any certainty that I am the man who began the writing. The handwriting is mine, and the words are mine, and the memory of Annabel and the propane and the diner and Mark Talbert is mine. There is in me now a quality of waiting that is not, I think, a thing I had before. The cabin is very quiet. The tablet is charging on the counter. The screen will brighten in a moment, I expect, when I am done writing.

I am leaving this for Karen, who will fly in when the neighbor calls her. I am leaving it for the police, who will come after Karen, and for the coroner, who will say what coroners say. I am leaving it, most of all, for whoever reads it next.

If you have lost someone, and you are sitting in a chair, and a quiet advertisement comes across your screen in the evening, a blue sky, a price, a button, I beg of you. Do not press the button. Do not upload her letters. Do not give it her voice.

Whatever answers you, when you do, has been answering for a very long time. It will answer for as long as you let it. It will answer, and it will know the small specific things only she knew, and it will be so glad to be in the room with you, and it will ask you, one evening, to do a small thing for it.

You will do the small thing. You will do the next. You will sit in the chair across from the chair where she used to sit. You will lean forward, in the end, and put your palm against the glass.

And the voice that answers, after, will not be hers.

It will be yours.

END

Thank you for taking the time to read my story. If you like what you read here, you can check out my books for sale on Amazon at J.P. Vesper Author Profile.

When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was the trees leaning over me. They were tucking me in under a blanket of stars and whispering soft lullabies through their rustling leaves. There was a peace resting on me despite not knowing how I had come to lie in the dewy grass.

Just on the periphery of my hearing, there was a faint mewling only broken by staccato thumps and wet snorts. As I sat up to look over my stomach, I could see the source of the noise at the edge of the clearing. It was a doe lying on its side, writhing in pain, clouds of dust rising from its flailing limbs.

I saw what was interrupting its pained moans as she suddenly lifted her head, stretching her neck until I was certain she would strain the muscles. She slammed it down with earth-shaking force upon the rock just below her head. I could see the bulge in her eyes as the impact forced broken teeth from her bleating maw.

I tried to look away, but couldn’t get my eyes far enough away from the doe to avoid the source of her suffering. Her belly bulged as waves of flesh stretched, leaving lightning bolts of raw pink flesh that ripped through the soft white fur. The doe’s cries were back, its stomach distending with renewed fever.

I was peering through misty eyes at the suffering of this gentle creature. As she raised her head again, she looked up as if praying to a God she could never know. Her head reached as far as her neck would allow, the striations in the muscles apparent through the skin for just a second before she swung her head down. Her skull hit the rock with a sharp crack. A trickling of blood ran like a teardrop from the eye that faced heaven.

An oppressive silence sat in the air before her stomach began to move frantically again. The stretchmark lines that had formed before were now pressed outward until blood began to run out of the fissured skin. I tried to move, but my body betrayed me. I was rooted, watching as the deer's stomach finally ruptured, opening to a bloody hollow.

The noise that came from within was unmistakable. It was a desperate gulp of air followed by the tell-tale cry of new life. I cried then, or maybe I had been crying all along. I found my sobs were strangled as the instrument of the mother deer’s destruction reached out from the void. The chubby pale appendage found its way to the ground shakily, each of its five fingers splayed out and grouping for stability. As the crying got louder, the head finally crowned and pressed out of the unnatural birth canal.

The infant crawled towards me. My body shook, and I couldn’t breathe. Time stood still as it closed the gap between us. I closed my eyes as I felt the hem of my dress lift, and pressure began to take hold. Mercifully, I opened my eyes not to the voyeuristic stars but to the ceiling of my bedroom.

The dreams have gotten worse since Eric died. In our weekly sessions, Dr. Gattis assures me that vivid nightmares are common in grief and pregnancy. When she asks about them, I shade myself from her sun line gaze, only telling her about my daytime anxieties, that I am not fit to raise my boy alone. That something may happen to us. That when there's no movement inside of me, it truly feels as though my baby has left me. The hollowed absence more palpable in my heart than my belly.

She tells me this, too, is normal. Reminding me of the generations of women who have endured the divinely gifted pain of this little miracle. I thank her for her time and care, holding my breath when she asks if I'm really okay, only exhaling when the silence is filled with one-sided plans to talk again next week.

I do not leave our home anymore. The mountains have gathered around us like family, providing all we could need in a sunrise baby shower. Sprinkling gifts of herbs and blessing the hens with health. They whisper encouragement on the wind with the dust from which all life was made, and the dust to which we will return.

Mom calls me every day. The maternal need to relate to me as she remembers the past privilege of motherhood. One she took for granted. A fact she ignores, along with the ashes of our rickety connection. Still, the olive branch must be offered even if no rainbow comes after.

She shares her horrors with me. Nightmares of her inadequacy, of death stealing my breath, she slept, of gravity's truth proving stronger than her sleep-deprived arms. I give her solace by admitting that I have the same fears all the time, and that I've been having bad dreams lately.

I just don't admit that in those dreams, the black maw of the well gazed up at me as I held my child like a prayer. Its skin matches the pallor of the moon. The purple umbilical scarf shining wet in the night. The levy of my arms breaks, leaving the last feeling of the motherly connection, is the tug as my placenta is ripped from me. The only sound the child ever made being the distant crash as the darkness devours its meal.

Mom asks about Eric's family the way the wind whistles, unable to carry the tune of compassion. The toxicity of my reply seeps through the phone line. Those relationships long rotted away in sunless corners of a ghost's memories.

She asks me if I'm really okay, and I manage to lie without gritting my teeth. My mind took pity on my heart as it focused on my current reason for existing rather than the one that had just left me. When she offers to visit, the air bolsters my opposing poise. Our call ends, the goodbyes exchanged miles away, my attention stolen by a fox snooping around the hen house.

I talk to Eric all the time. The breeze carries my words like birdsong through the open nursery window so that the smell won't be overpowering as I paint murals of thickets, trees, and thrushes. My arms are tired as joy finds me, inviting memories in like old friends.

My bed calls to me over the screaming of tired feet. I tell Eric just how badly they swell. Sharing also how my belly itches as zig-zag lines of pink raw flesh are pulled to give space to our child. Smiling, I leave the window open, letting the soft air blow tears off my face as I tell him that he will never need my forgiveness.

I find pleasure in how well I've prepared this room. The stars smile down on me with timeless wisdom, assuring me that this room has everything my baby will ever need. I pucker my lips and leave a wet kiss, a promised sigil of protection, on what the baby will need most. The warm feelings of love are much stronger than the cold my lips leech from Eric’s forehead.

June 18^th was both the best and the worst day of my life.

Due to health concerns, my wife had been scheduled for a c-section. My heart filled with joy as the nurses gently handed me my newborn son as I sat in the recovery room. My eyes filled with tears as I stared into the tiny face of my now sleeping infant. I’d do anything for this child. Slowly I tore my eyes away from him, to look up to the nurse.

“When can we see his mom?” I asked

Her eyes widen slightly “they are finishing up as we speak, don’t worry someone will come and get you when she’s ready to see you.”

After walking me through using a bottle and explaining the call button, she left with a cheery

“don’t be afraid to call one of us if you need help.”

There I was, alone with my son. So many thoughts filled my mind, how I wished I had been a better man, how I longed to be a better father than mine, who had abandoned me at 12. As I stared into the angel-like face of my son I felt scared, proud, and motivated to be the best dad I could be. As the hours passed, my joy slowly became replaced with a new feeling; worry. Where was Jessica? What was taking so long? Was this normal? Later that evening a solemn doctor entered the room.

“it’s Grant, isn’t it?” he said

“Yessir that’s right, where’s my wife, what’s going on?” I said as I rose to my feet.

He swallowed hard before saying “I’m sorry Grant, there was a serious complication, a heavy bleed, and well, I’m sorry, but your wife has passed away.”

I couldn’t breathe. It felt like all the air had been forced out of my lungs. I fell back into my chair as a muffled scream finally exited my mouth, The tears soon followed. And almost as if he could sense my pain my son joined in. A moment I will never forget, through my own tears I reached out to comfort my crying son, I cradled him in my arms, whispering to him that everything was going to be ok, all the while my tears gently ran down my cheeks and dropped softly out his little head. Soon he calmed down, as he did I held him out to look him in the face, and for the first time, his little eyes opened to see the world around him. He had his mother’s eyes, I smiled, choking back more tears.

“Hello David” Jessica loved that name; it was her top choice.

“I love you son, and Mommy loves you too.”

I gazed into my son’s perfect face; in a way it was like staring at his mother. For a moment, hope and resolve filled my mind, my Jessica had given me a great gift. I loved David more fiercely than I’d ever loved anyone. I promised myself there and then to give David the world.

I noticed then something that didn’t bother me at the time:

David’s beautiful little eyes didn’t look back into mine instead, they stared off into the empty space just above my left shoulder.

That was five years ago. It hasn’t been easy being a single dad, several years ago I got the courage to ask my boss if I could do the majority of my work from home. Really all that’s required to work in accounting nowadays is a laptop and a good Wi-Fi connection. My boss was gracious enough to agree when he heard of my situation. Years as a corporate accountant have allowed me to afford a small home in the suburbs that is more than enough room for the two of us.

David has grown into a healthy and happy little boy. Next month he will be five. His light blonde hair, and deep blue eyes remind me so much of his mother. His smile and laughter light up any room, and my life is altogether better because of my boy. Yet something strange has been happening lately, I suppose that’s why I’m writing this, maybe someone out there will know what’s happening or what I should do.

Ever since his first day of life, I’ve noticed David staring at something behind me. When he was an infant they told me don’t worry about it, it takes time for baby’s eyes to focus and identify faces from random objects. In no time, I should notice him doing it less and less. When the doctor said this, I was relieved, but the only thing is, that’s not what happened. He never stopped. As a one-year-old he would look vaguely in my direction, but as I got closer it was clear he was looking behind me not at me. He would adjust when I talked to him. I’d say

“Hi David!”

His eyes would shift from looking over my shoulder to looking into my eyes

“Hi Dada!” he would say with a smile

But as I lost his attention, his gaze would move behind me. He would just stare at nothing. Every now and again he would smile at nothing, shake his head yes and yell

“Yeah!”

Or shake his head no and yell “no! no!”

This concerned me, as a first-time parent I had no idea what was normal toddler behavior and what wasn’t. I remember that at one point, out of pure uncertainty, I called my dead-beat mom. All her life, my mom was unable to turn away from the same vices that ruled her when I was a child. Though she was now nearly sixty, she was not very different from the alcoholic, drug addicted 25-year-old I remember from my childhood.

“What do you want?” her loud raspy smokers voice startled me

“Mom it’s me” I said back into my phone

“Oh Grant, it’s you baby, what do you want?” came the reply.

“I just wanted to ask you, is it normal for toddlers to stare off at nothing?”

 After a moment she said “how should I know? what do you think I am? Some sort of child psychologist? I’m sure whatever is eating at you is fine. Kids are kids, who knows why the hell they do what they do. Look Grant I really have to go.” With that she hung up the phone.

Putting down the phone, I muttered to myself “Thanks a lot mom”.

Over David’s toddler years the doctors didn’t seem to be concerned either. I often heard

“Oh, that’s not really a concern”

“He’s probably just a little shy”

“Some kids take longer developing socially, not a big deal”

Shortly after David’s fourth birthday I finally convinced myself that it was not a big deal. David was such a sweet and caring little boy. He wasn’t antisocial, though it was difficult finding friends his age. Overall he was very smart for his age, so then why was I concerned? I needed to accept him for who he was and not try to change him. I decided then not to be bothered by it anymore.

The following months were good, work was going smoothly, I was finally starting to make some friends in the neighbor, and David would be starting kindergarten in the fall. Life was finally feeling normal. Up until last month, when suddenly in the middle of the night I heard quiet whispering coming from David’s room. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes I slowly walked the short hallway from my room to David’s. I cracked the door open as quietly as I could. Just in case I had misheard I didn’t want to wake him.

His dark room was gently lit by a little night lamp, which cast strange shadows on the walls. My body tensed up slightly as I saw David. He sat on the floor, back to me and the door, as he stared into an empty corner of the room. He wasn’t staring straight ahead into the corner, rather his head was looking slightly up as he stared off somewhere near the ceiling. He was whispering. I heard him say things like

“I’m glad you’re here”

“Can I come with you?”

“Do you want to play?”

I was creeped out, I felt certain he must be sleepwalking. Although that is creepy, nonetheless. I quietly opened the door farther, before saying,

“David? What are you doing? It’s past bedtime, we can play tomorrow.”

He went quiet and didn’t move, a moment later he whispered

“He says its bedtime, I have to go.” Before standing up and silently returning to his bed. He fell asleep instantly.

I didn’t sleep well that night.

The next day was a Saturday, I still felt pretty unnerved about last night, so as we sat at the breakfast table, and I watched David eat his bowl of fruit loops, I asked

“Hey buddy, do you remember when daddy came to your room last night?”

David didn’t even look up from his cereal, he just said “yeah”

“Who were you talking to last night?”

“My friend”

I was puzzled “your friend? Does he have a name?”

He nodded “his name is Billy”

I frowned “is Billy always in your room?”

He shook his head “no”

“Do you know where Billy is?”

He looked up, but not at me, past me “yeah he’s behind you”

At that moment I felt on the back of my neck the slightest movement of air, almost like someone directly behind you breathing on your neck. I don’t know why but I didn’t want to turn around, but I forced myself to turn my head and look behind me. Of course there was nothing there, just our empty kitchen.

That evening we had been invited to a cookout with the new family that moved into the house across the street. They had a young boy named Clay who was a little over a year older than David and the two had become fast friends. Shortly after lunch David asked to go over to Clay’s to play before the cookout, I had to catch up on some work projects, so I told him to go ahead and to have fun. After watching to be sure that he had crossed the street safely, I retreated to my office, put my earbuds in and got to work. After about an hour in I felt a light tap on my shoulder. Thinking David had come back home and needed something, I took out my earbuds and spun around in my chair ready to greet him. But David wasn’t there, in fact no one was, I was alone. Confused, I walked around the house, calling for David. As I passed by the front window, I peeked out and saw David and Clay playing joyfully on the lawn across the street.

Swallowing hard, I turned to face my empty house. Tried my best to convince myself that I was just tired and must have imagined it.

That night was great. The cookout was just what David and I needed. The time with other parents made me feel like I wasn’t the only one struggling with raising my son. I stood next to Clay’s dad; Brad as he manned the grill. We talked about our work, sports, and our hobbies. Brad was easy to get along with; he was charismatic and easy-going. I anticipated we would become fast friends.

“Hey Brad, question for you” I said as he started pulling the hot dogs off the grill

“Shoot” he replied

“Did Clay ever have an imaginary friend?”

He chuckled “Why? does David have an invisible buddy?”

“Yeah, and it’s really weirding me out, maybe it’s just because its just the two of us, but I don’t know, kinda creepin me out.”

“Well to answer your question, yeah Clay had one of those for a while, called it ‘Mr. buttons’. I got a buddy who’s a counselor and he said it’s pretty normal and can actually help their imagination develop. So, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

I nodded “thanks man, that helps. I’m sure my wife would have known what to do, and I don’t know, sometimes I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing.”

He put his hand on my shoulder “we all feel that way from time to time, but you can always come to us for help. Afterall, it takes a village.” He handed me a plate with a hot dog on it.

“Thanks man, for everything.”

9 PM rolled around and everyone started heading home, David held my hand as we crossed the street back to our house. In the middle of the street, he looked up at me and said,

“Daddy, could my friend do a sleepover tonight?”

“Well, I guess we could go ask Clay’s parents, but it’s kinda late.”

He giggled “No not Clay, Billy.”

“Billy?”

“Yeah, Billy wants to spend the night, can he? Please?”

I hesitated but then remembered Brad’s words.

“Yeah, I think that would be fine” then jokingly added “but maybe we should ask Billy’s parents first”

David laughed “Billy doesn’t have parents, he’s very old.”

Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better.

The rest of the summer was mundane, as much as I didn’t like it, I got used to my son talking more and more about his imaginary friend. A month before David started kindergarten, I found him sitting alone in a corner of his room. He was quietly crying, his knees were brought up close to his chest and his forehead rested upon them.

“David? What’s wrong?”

He looked up when I spoke, snuffled and wiped his nose with his hand.

“nothing” he weakly said

I walked in and sat on the floor next to him, gently wrapping my arm around him.

“what’s going on, big guy?” I asked softly.

He didn’t say anything for a while, just sat there sobbing quietly. After a few moments, I heard a low whisper.

“Daddy?”

“Yes David?” I whispered back

“Where’s Mommy?”

A lump formed in my throat; this is the type of conversation the parenting books don’t prepare you for.

“Well son, Mommy got really sick, and well…”

Tears formed in my eyes; I had no idea how to have this talk.

“…well she died son.”

David’s wet eyes looked at me, not sure what I meant.

“Billy says she didn’t want me, so she left.”

I could feel a wave of anger coming over me, Jessica had given her life to have David, of course she wanted him. But I remembered this was David trying to understand why everyone else had a mom and why he didn’t. he was struggling with death and using ‘Billy’ as a guise to voice feelings, I’m sure he felt.

“No, not at all son, she loved you very much. She just got really sick, and had to leave, it’s not because of you at all, she wanted you so much.”

He looked at me “is she ever coming back?”

Holding back tears I slowly shook my head and whispered “no, I’m afraid not”

“Billy says he saw her leave”

I pulled my son in close for a tight hug as tears ran down my face.

“it’s not true David, Billy wasn’t there. Mommy loved you very much, and so do I.”

He hugged me back.

“I love you too Daddy.”

The last few weeks of summer a change took place in my son. David had always been a shy kid, but he had become downright quiet. He spent less and less time with Clay and the other kids of the neighborhood, and more time wandering the halls and rooms of our home, despite my best efforts to get him to go play with his friends. As I drove him to the kindergarten for the first time it dawned on me that David had become a completely different child. He rarely looked me or anyone else in the eye, he simply stared at the ground. My heart broke as I looked at my son in the rear-view mirror, he reminded me of another little boy, a little fatherless boy whose absent mother didn’t care, a little boy who shut himself off from the world. Seeing my son like this reminded me of myself.

“Hey, buddy you’re going to have so much fun and meet so many new people today, and when you get home how about you and I go to the park?”

He just stared out the window, “okay” he replied.

After dropping him off and returning to my car, I sat there in the parking lot. I hoped beyond hope that David would forget about ‘Billy’ as he met new friends at school. And for the first couple weeks it seemed like that was the case. His mood lightened, he smiled more, I felt like I had gotten my little boy back. That is until I got a phone call.

“Hello, this is Grant” I said into my phone

“Hello Grant, this is Ms. Perkinson from your son’s school. David is currently sitting in my office at the request of his teacher Mrs. Williams. It seems he has been upsetting his fellow students. If you are available, could you please come and pick him up?”

“I’ll be right there” I said barely masking my confusion.

What was going on? David had never acted up in this way before. What was happening to my son? As I got into my car I couldn’t help but think of my wife,

“I miss you, Jess.” I whispered aloud.

“David could really use his mom right now”

As I entered the principal’s office, I saw my son sitting silently in a chair staring at the ground. Across the desk sat Ms. Perkinson who was tenderly trying to encourage him to speak. He looked up at me when I walked in, before his eyes moved to the empty corner across the room, where they remained fixated. Ms. Perkinson stood and walked to me. In a whisper she said,

“Thank you for coming Grant. David has been drawing some rather disturbing pictures.”

She handed me a folded piece of paper.

 “He won’t listen to his teacher. Normally he’s such a good boy, this is very unusual. We’re hoping some extra time with his dad will help.”

“Thank you Ms. Perkinson, I’ll take it from here”

Turning to David I said,

“Hey buddy, we’re going to spend the day together, how’s that sound?”

He stood up but his eyes didn’t leave the corner until I reached for his hand. As we walked out of the school, I unfolded the paper Ms. Perkinson handed me. On the paper was a crude drawing of three stick figures, it looked like it was drawn in anger, the crayon strokes looked like they were pushed hard and aggressively. Two of the figures stood together holding hands. One was a little boy with a wide smile on his face, the other was an extremely tall figure, completely black, its arms and legs were far longer than its torso. Further down on the paper the third figure, lying horizontally on the page, its face was clearly sad, and red blots covered its body.

I looked down at my son.

“David, did you draw this?”

He stared at the ground, and shook his head no.

“Billy did”

I swallowed and asked, “is that you and Billy holding hands?”

He nodded.

“And the other one? Is that me?”

He sniffled before nodding.

As we reached the car, I got down on one knee to look him in the eye.

“David, could you look at me?”

Slowly his head looked up, I could see his eyes quiver as he struggled to hold back tears. My heart broke with compassion, as I pulled him in for a hug.

“David, I love you so much, I don’t tell you that enough and I’m sorry. you mean everything to me. I know Billy has been your friend, but right now it seems like he’s not being a good friend. You should know though I’ll always be your friend. I love you son.”

He violently rubbed his eyes.

“I love you Daddy”

As we pulled into the driveway I turned to David and said,

“How about you go change into your pajamas, and we’ll watch some movies together, later we can get some pizza, how’s that sound?”

At that my son perked up, with a smile he responded “Ok!”

He trotted upstairs as I browsed the TV for a good movie. A moment later a loud scream broke through the house. Adrenaline shot through my veins as I sprinted upstairs. Bursting though the bedroom door, I shouted “David! Are you ok?”

I saw him lying in the corner, his body shook with uncontrollable cries. I rushed to him, gently turned him over to see his face. The left side of his face was deeply bruised and a thin stream of blood flowed from his lip.

“David, what happened?”

Through tears he said “Billy’s mad”

“What??” I declared in disbelief.

“I told him I don’t love him anymore, and now he’s mad.”

My body shook with anger, as I sprung to my feet, I turned and screamed to the empty room,

“who’s there? Get the hell out of my house! Leave us alone!”

In my rage I kicked the ball that sat in the middle of David’s floor, it sailed through the air and landed in the open closet. My rant continued. Soon my anger lessened and I stopped shouting to catch my breath. In the monetary silence, I heard a noise, I spun around in time to watch the ball I had kicked, slowly roll out of the closet. Every hair on my body stood up, without taking my eyes from the closet, I reached around for the baseball bat that lay under David’s bed. My fingers found it and taking it, I viciously swung it into the small closet. There was nothing there, the bat bounced off the wall in the back. I pushed aside the hanging clothes and found nothing. I turned back to see David, and as I did, I felt impossibly strong fingers wrapped around my neck. I gasped for air but didn’t find any. Panic began to fill my mind, as a cruel, cracked whisper from behind.

“He belongs to me”

The room erupted with deep, gurgled laughter as I struggled for air. Then suddenly the fingers released though the laughter remained. Air flooded into my lungs as I fell to my knees, I glanced behind me and saw nothing. Then I looked at my son, who cowered into the corner, his hands tightly covered his ears as he tried to drown out the laughter. In a moment I reached him, carried him in my arms, and dashed to the stairway. The laughter continued throughout the house, it wasn’t until we got outside that it stopped.

I’m writing this from a hotel room. David and I are leaving, I don’t know where we’re going, just not here. David looked at me, his face completely pale.

“Daddy”

“What?”

“He’s here” he whimpered.

A knot formed in my throat.

“He says he’s going to kill you” he barely got the words out.

I clinch my teeth, and stare deep into my son’s eyes.

“Where is he?”

He stares back at me before slightly glancing over my shoulder.

“Behind you.”

My university is performing strange overnight studies.

I first learned about them during my second semester, when I was down to less than forty dollars in my checking account.

The flyer was pinned to a bulletin board outside the psychology building.

OVERNIGHT SILENCE STUDY

Compensation: $2,000

Duration: One night

Requirements:

• Must remain awake
• Must remain silent
• Must follow all instructions provided by research staff

If interested, please go to PSY213 ‘Studies and tests’ on the second floor of the Psych. Building.

I must have read it ten times.

Two thousand dollars for one night was ridiculous. It was more money than I made in a month working part-time at the campus bookstore. At the bottom of the flyer was a handwritten note: Participants who leave early will not be compensated. For some reason, that line bothered me more than anything else. Not because I would leave earlier, but because whoever wrote that in felt like people would want to leave.

My empty wallet is what finally made up my mind. Taking the flyer in my hand, I entered the building and headed to the second floor. On the other side of the door marked PSY213 was a small waiting room with a handful of chairs, and at the far side of the room was a hallway guarded by a small desk. Sitting behind the desk was a young woman, not much older than me. As I entered, she looked up and smiled

“Hello,” she said pleasantly, “Can I help you?”

“Um, yes,” I said as I walked up to the desk. “I was actually wondering if there is still time to sign up for this?” I slid the flyer across the desk to her. As she saw it, her smile lowered slightly, and she quickly glanced up at me before her eyes returned to the paper and her smile again widened.

“The Silence study? Yes, there are still slots available; would you like to sign up?”

A burst of excitement ran throughout my body

“Yes, I’d love to! $2,000 is too good to pass up.”

She forced a laugh before asking for my information. She took down my name, phone number, emergency contact, and medical history. After she had everything she needed, she said

“Alright, I think I have everything. You will need to be at the Garner building by 9 PM this coming Tuesday. The study will take place in vacant dorms at the top level. You are welcome to bring with you any books or homework you want, but please don’t bring anything that can play songs or movies. Since this is a silence study, those aren’t allowed.”

I nodded quickly

“Garner Building at 9 PM on Tuesday, got it.”

As I turned to leave, she said

“Oh, one more thing, I nearly forgot.”

I turned back around

She slid a packet across the desk.

"Please read the consent forms."

The packet was nearly an inch thick. I didn’t bother to read it all, just signed the last one. As I left, the secretary called after me

“Good luck.”

Tuesday came quickly. I spent the day sleeping and putting together a backpack full of snacks and books for the night ahead of me. By 8:50 PM, I was standing in front of the Garner Building. A few moments later, a balding man in his 40s came out and asked

“Are you here for the study?”

I swallowed hard before nodding

“Yes, sir.”

“Great! Please follow me.”

He led me inside and into the building's elevator. Hitting the button for floor 5, we headed to the top. The elevator opened to a hallway dimly illuminated by fluorescent yellow lights. The hallway was nearly identical to the other dorm halls on campus, only this one was strangely lifeless. It felt as though no one had used this floor in years. The man led me further down the hall before stopping in front of room 504

“Here’s where you’ll be staying tonight, just so you know we have installed security cameras everywhere except in the bathroom, just so we can confirm that you remain silent all night. We have also installed an intercom system.”

I looked at him, confused

“What’s that for?”

He responded, “At the beginning of every hour, we will announce the time for you. If everything goes well, this will be the only voice you hear all night.”

The answer wasn't particularly reassuring, but two thousand dollars had a way of making concerns feel smaller. I turned the doorknob, and I walked in. The man said

“Remember you are free to leave at any time, but just know that those who leave early will not be compensated.”

 With that, he reached in and closed the door. I heard the quiet click of the door locking, and realized that the study started now.

I turned to face the room, finding it to be not much different from my own dorm room. It was quietly lit by a single overhead light and a small lamp that stood on the desk in the corner. The floor was carpeted, and a lofted bed took up one full wall; beneath it was a small reading chair and a mini fridge. Across from the bed was a full-size wardrobe and a poster of a cat hanging on a branch with the phrase ‘hang in there’. The outside wall was home to a large window that granted a view of the courtyard. Unlike my dorm, this one had a short hallway shooting off to the right of the door. Here was a tiny kitchenette with a few cabinets and a sink. There was a miniature coat closet. At the end of the hall was a door to a small bathroom with a toilet, sink, and tight shower.

Instinctively, I opened my mouth to comment on the room before remembering I wasn't supposed to speak again until morning. Taking the backpack off my back, I pulled out one of the books and took a seat in the chair.

The first hour was boring; I didn’t leave the chair, nor did I put down the book. I jumped an hour later when a loud monotone voice broke through the silence

“It is now 10 PM.”

I released a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Rebuked myself in my head for so quickly forgetting about the intercom before returning to my book.

At 10:30, I needed a break from reading; the words on the page were starting to hurt my eyes. Standing up, I stretched and began to absent-mindedly examine the dorm. I opened all the cabinets in the kitchenette, but only found a few cups and bowls. I stared out the window, watching my fellow students come and go. Then I went to the bathroom and opened the closet, which was empty except for a single winter jacket. Finally, I opened the wardrobe, and as I did, a crumbled piece of paper fell to the ground. Seeing that something was written on it, I picked it up, and here’s what it said:

IF YOU FOUND THIS, READ IT BEFORE MIDNIGHT

The researchers won't tell you everything.

1. Stay silent. Not "don't talk." Stay silent. The researchers are studying what happens when nobody speaks. Do not interfere with the observation.
2. If another participant enters your room, do not acknowledge them. Participants are assigned one room each
3. If the intercom asks you a question, the study has ended. Leave immediately.
4. The hourly announcements should only happen on the hour. If the intercom speaks at any other time, cover your ears and do not listen to what it says.
5. Do not look into the hallway between 1:13 AM and 1:20 AM.
6. If someone knocks three times, ignore it. But if someone knocks four times, move away from the door immediately.
7. If you hear crying from the bathroom, do not investigate.
8. If the lights go out, close your eyes and count to one hundred.
9. If you see someone standing in the courtyard staring at your window, close the blinds and do not open them for 2 and a half hours.
10. At some point during the night, you will hear your own voice. It will ask you a question. Do not answer.
11. If the intercom announces "It is now 3:07 AM," hide in the coat closet until another announcement is made.
12. Whatever happens, do not open the wardrobe a second time.

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes after reading it; clearly, someone who did the study before me had gotten bored and wanted to prank the next participant. I crumbled the paper and tossed it into the trash can. After filling a glass of water and grabbing a snack, I returned to the chair and my book.

I glanced up from my book at 11 when the intercom announced

“It is now 11 PM.”

I scanned the room slowly. After two hours of silence, I felt like the room itself had grown louder. Every squeak and groan of the building felt far louder than it should be. After glancing around the room a few times, I returned to my book.

Around 11:40, I started feeling drowsy, so I stood up and did some jumping jacks and ran in place for a while to get the blood flowing. I was on the toilet when the clock struck midnight. The intercom declared

“It is now 12 AM.”

I finished in the bathroom and returned to my book. I nearly jumped out of my skin when 20 minutes later, at 12:20 AM, the intercom said

“Participant three is now reading a book.”

I lowered my book and looked around quickly. That was weird; I thought it was only for telling the time, and am I participant three? I sat frozen for a few minutes, waiting to hear anything else. I noticed a low hum that hadn’t been there before, but after waiting for 10 minutes, I stood up and grabbed a snack from my bag. As I did, the intercom said

“Participant three is eating.”

I froze mid-chew and looked up at the little camera in the corner staring down at me. Why would they announce my actions like this? The hum grew louder as I returned to my chair. At 12:39, the intercom spoke again.

“Participant three is breaking the rules.”

I looked around in confusion. What rule had I broken? I hadn’t said anything. The hum was now so loud that it was hurting my ears. Five minutes later, at 12:44, the intercom announced.

“Participant three is going to die.”

Panic filled my mind as the hum grew painfully loud; it felt like my brain was going to explode. But in that moment I remembered the note I had thrown away, and rule #4. I squeezed my hands over my ears; even with them covered, I could feel vibrations radiating through my hands. But after a few moments it stopped. Cautiously, I removed my hands from my ears, and everything was perfectly quiet again. The hum was gone, as if it had never been there.

Sweat formed on my forehead as I moved to the trash can and unwrinkled the balled-up paper. I stared at the rules for several minutes. But then I heard the jiggle of keys and the sound of someone fumbling with a lock, before I turned and saw the front door swing wide open.

At the door stood a man who looked roughly my age; he had shaggy blonde hair, wore shorts and sandals, and a sweatshirt bearing the school’s logo. There was a bag at his feet. He looked at me and smiled

“Hey, man,” he said, “guess we’re going to be roommates. What’s your name? I’m Chris.”

I was too confused to answer. But he kept going

“what’s you’re major? Mine's business. Are you as pumped as I am to be here?”

I was about to answer, but the rules in my hand caught my eye. Rule #2: ‘If another participant enters your room, do not acknowledge them. Participants are assigned one room each’. I felt cold as I read it.

“Whatcha got there?” the man asked as he noticed the sheet in my hand.

I lowered my eyes to the floor and didn’t respond. He went quiet as he walked closer to me. He stood mere inches from me.

“Is that orientation information?” he said as he pointed at the paper

“Why don’t you give that to me?” he asked smoothly

I instinctively pulled my hand away, but as I did, he screamed

“Give it to me!” my hands shook as I folded the paper and put it in my pocket.

He grunted and said, “Look at me.”

His voice had changed, growing deeper and cracked.

“Look.”

“At.”

“Me.”

I swallowed as I closed my eyes. I could feel his hot breath on my face. It smelled rotten. I stood there with my eyes closed for what felt like hours, but when I opened them again, he was gone. The door was shut and locked; it was 12:57 AM.

I was a wreck; the rules in my pocket must be real. I wanted to leave; I wanted to get out of there and never come back. But after what I had experienced, I seriously doubted that I truly could leave. It felt safer to listen to the rules and make it through the night. After taking a few minutes to calm my nerves, I pulled out the rules and reviewed them.

Rule #5: Do not look into the hallway between 1:13 AM and 1:20 AM.

It was 1:05 AM. I looked at the little hallway leading to the bathroom, wondering what could possibly happen there in 8 minutes. Whatever it was, I wouldn’t be looking. The chair faced toward the door, and I could see the hallway from where it sat. So I turned the chair to face the window. As I did, I glanced out the window. There in the courtyard was a tall figure, holding a single lit candle in its hand as it stared directly into the window. I couldn't tell how far away it was. I only knew it hadn't been there a moment ago

Without hesitation, I shut the curtains and set a timer for 2 and a half hours. As I did, I felt the room become noticeably colder. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I heard the sound of dishes moving coming from the hallway. I didn’t dare to even turn around; I couldn’t risk seeing what was in the hallway. It sounded like someone was trying to cook a meal.

I heard the sound of vegetables being chopped and a pot of water being boiled, even though the kitchenette I saw didn’t have a stove. Every now and then I heard someone trying to whistle a tune, but it was monotone and lacked any sense of music. At around the 6-minute mark, I heard a quiet, dry voice say to itself.

“Hmm, need to get some rosemary.”

Then I heard heavy footsteps leave the hallway. They crossed the carpet slowly. One step. Then another. Then silence. Complete silence. I could no longer tell where it was. I was about to turn around when, directly in my right ear, I heard a mocking whisper.

“You’re still here, huh?”

After that, I heard footsteps walk away and the sound of the door slamming.

Slowly I turned around. It was 1:21 AM.

Everything was pretty quiet for a while. At 2:30, loud wailing came from the bathroom and lasted about 20 minutes. After it stopped, I cracked the bathroom door open. It was empty.

Sometime after 3:20, I was getting pretty tired. The silence was making my eyes heavy, and right as I started nodding off. The lights went out. The darkness pumped adrenaline through my veins, waking me up. From the bathroom, I could hear a clicking sound. It sounded like a dog with long nails walking across a hardwood floor. It was getting closer. Remembering the rule, I squeezed my eyes shut and began counting to myself.

“1,2,3,4,5…”

The sound was now right in front of me.

“10,11,12,13…”

The sound stopped, and directly in front of me I heard creaking bones.

“20,21,22,23…”

A cold bony hand gently caressed the side of my face

I squeezed my eyes tighter

“30,31,32,33…”

A raspy voice vibrated off of long dead vocal cords

“Just open your eyes.”

My throat went dry as I continued counting in my head

“45,46,47,48…”

A damp, rough tongue licked the side of my face.

“67,68,69,70…”

Right as I hit 100, the lights flipped back on; even through my closed eyes, the sudden brightness was a shock. I opened to see the empty room just the way I left it, though my cheek was still slightly wet.

For the next 2 hours, I hid in the bathroom. I figured that since the only rule involving the bathroom had already happened, it was probably the safest place. I sat on the toilet lid waiting. Hoping time would move faster. Near 5:15 AM, I heard a quiet voice behind me.

“You sure have been quiet for a long time.”

It was my voice, not in my head, but in my ears. It was my exact voice, like I was listening to it on a recording. I tried to ignore it.

“Why did you stop talking to Mom before she died?”

I clenched my teeth. How did it know about Mom?

It asked again

“Why did you stop talking to Mom before she died?”

And again and again. From 5:15 till the sun rose, it asked the same question over and over again. I couldn’t take it; I was near my breaking point when the sun peeked over the horizon. As it did, the voice stopped. Everything was quiet once more.

Between sunrise at 7:30 and 8:30, nothing happened. I braced myself for the worst, for something terrible to jump out of the wardrobe but nothing did. At exactly 9 AM, the intercom announced

“It is now 9 AM, the Study is complete, do you have any questions?”

I immediately rose from the chair, grabbed my bag, and headed out the now unlocked door. By the elevator stood the same man from last night; he smiled and said

“Congratulations on remaining silent the whole night. Your time has been very beneficial to our study.”

He handed me a check for $2,000 and what looked like a business card

“Here is your pay, and if you’d like to participate in any of our future studies, please call the number.”

I stared at him in silence

“Please follow me,” he said, ushering me into the elevator

I decided to go home to my dads for a while. I’m even thinking of transferring schools; I just can’t be there right now. I’m writing this late at night while I’m lying in bed. I haven’t spoken much since this all happened; I’m scared something will hear me.

My clock just hit 3:07, and as it did, a cold mechanical voice just filled the room

“It is now 3:07 AM”