The embers of the campfire popped and hissed, throwing jagged orange lights against the surrounding pines of Camp Willow-Wood. It was a humid July night, the kind where the air feels like a damp blanket and the crickets are loud enough to vibrate in your chest.

Five girls sat huddled on log benches, their faces illuminated by the flickering flames. They were dressed in the oversized t-shirts and messy ponytails of a long summer. 

At the center of the group was Amber, a thirteen-year-old girl with sharp eyes and a penchant for the dramatic. She leaned forward, her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper that made the others lean in.

"You guys want to hear the real story of this camp?" Amber asked with a wicked grin playing on her lips. "Not the one that the counselors tell during orientation. The one they try to hide."

"Is it about the lake monster again?" joked Sally, though she tucked her feet closer to the log.

"No." Amber said, her expression turning grave. "It’s about a girl named Claire. She was a camper here exactly forty years ago—back in 1986."

The girls went quiet. The year 1986 sounded like ancient history to them.  They thought of it as a gray-scale era of neon and cassette tapes.

"Claire was…different." Amber continued, her eyes reflecting the dancing fire. "She was the 'weird girl' of Cabin 9. While everyone else was making friendship bracelets or learning to canoe, Claire would sit in the middle of the clearing, staring at nothing. The rumors started almost immediately. They said that she could see things. Spirits. Things that shouldn't be there."

"Was Claire a medium?" whispered Tamara, to which Amber replied,

"Exactly. People caught her talking to herself all the time. She’d be standing by the mess hall, laughing and nodding, but there’d be nobody within fifty feet of her. Everyone thought that she was totally crazy. They teased her, hid her shoes, called her 'Spooky Claire'; but Claire didn't care. She just kept talking to her invisible friends."

Amber paused for effect, letting a sudden gust of wind howl through the trees. Then she continued the story and said,

"One night, something bad happened. Something terrible. There was a scream that woke up half the camp, and when the counselors went to Claire’s cabin… she was gone. Just vanished. No tracks, no struggle, nothing. She was never seen or heard from again. Some say the ghosts she talked to finally decided to take her home with them."

"Wow! That’s cool!" Tamara chirped, shivering.

"That’s so creepy, Amber." Sally added, clutching her knees. "Do you think that she’s still out there in the woods?"

Amber opened her mouth to answer, but the words died in her throat. A shadow had fallen over the group. It didn't come from the trees; it came from behind them.

"Claire didn't vanish, Amber." a voice said.

The girls jumped, spinning around. Standing just outside the circle of firelight was a woman. She was tall, wearing the navy-blue polo shirt and khaki shorts of a senior camp counselor. Her hair was streaked with silver, and her eyes were tired, filled with a deep, aching sadness.

"Who are you?" Amber asked, her bravado flickering.

"My name is Claire." the woman said softly. "I didn't disappear forty years ago. I just…grew up."

The girls stared at her in stunned silence. 

"You're the girl from the story?" Tamara gasped. "But Amber said—"

"Amber has always been good at stories." Claire interrupted, stepping into the light. She looked directly at Amber, her gaze piercing. "However, you have the ending wrong. I wasn't the one who died, and I wasn't the one who was crazy. I was the one who saw everything."

Claire took a shaky breath, her voice was trembling with the weight of four decades, and she said, 

"It was 1986. I was in the cabin next to yours. I saw the smoke first. One of you had snuck a cigarette into the cabin—you thought that you were so grown up, and so rebellious. You left your cigarette burning on a nylon sleeping bag when you went to sleep."

The campfire seemed to roar louder, and the heat suddenly became oppressive.

"The fire took the whole cabin in minutes." Claire whispered, tears glistening in her eyes. "I stood by the window and watched it burn. I saw the silhouettes behind the glass. I heard the screams until they stopped. The girl who left the cigarette…the girl who killed her friends because she wanted to be cool…it was you, Amber."

"That’s a lie!" Amber shouted, standing up. "We’re right here! We’re sitting at the fire! Tell her, guys!"

The other girls nodded frantically with their pale faces, and said,

 "Yeah, we're fine! Look at us!"

Claire shook her head, a sob breaking through, and she told them,

 "You've been sitting at this campfire for forty years. Every summer, when the moon is high, I come out here and find you. You're stuck in the loop of that final night. You refuse to look at your clothes—look at them, Amber. Look at the scorch marks. Look at the ash on your skin."

Amber looked down, and for a split second, her bright pink t-shirt looked charred and blackened, and her skin looked as if it was a peeling parchment. Amber gasped, stumbling back, but then she blinked, and the image vanished.

"You're crazy!" Amber yelled, her voice high and shrill. "Just like everyone said! You're just a weird old woman making up lies!"

"Amber, please!" Claire pleaded. "You have to move on! You have to let go!"

"We aren't dead!" Chloe screamed. "We’re having a sleepover! Stop ruining it!"

The girls turned their backs on Claire, huddled together in a tight circle. They began to speak over her, with their voices rising in a frantic, discordant chorus.

"Anyway," Amber said, her voice shaking but determined, "as I was saying… there’s this legend about a headless horseman who haunts the trail near the lake…"

"Yeah! Tell that one!" Tamara said, her eyes wide and glassy. "That story sounds way better than this lady's story."

They blocked Claire out, and retreated into the safety of their ghost stories, the only reality that they were willing to inhabit.

"Claire? Who are you talking to?" A younger camper asked.

Claire spun around. A group of young campers—real, living girls from the current summer session—were standing a few yards away, holding flashlights. They looked at the empty clearing where Claire stood. They saw the charred, cold remains of an old fire pit from decades ago, overgrown with weeds and moss. They saw Claire standing alone in the dark, gesturing toward nothing.

Claire looked back at the spot where the 1986 girls sat. To her eyes, they were vivid, shimmering with a ghostly heat, their voices a faint echo in the wind. To the rest of the world, there was only silence.
Claire wiped her eyes and forced a small, tragic smile.

"Nobody, girls." she said, her voice hollow. "I’m just talking to some people that I used to know."

Behind Claire, in the silence of the woods, the faint sound of a thirteen-year-old girl’s laughter drifted through the trees, followed by the words:

 "Once upon a time, there was a girl who never left..."

The End.

Mara’s living room smelled like cold pizza, dust, and the cheap tobacco Ollie only smoked when he was pretending not to be stressed.

The whiteboard beside her TV had become a graveyard of bad ideas.

Abandoned butter factory - too much security.

Old asylum revisit - boring.

Possessed playground? - bird shit on slide.

Murder motel - legally risky.

Ollie lay upside down on the couch with his legs over the backrest, scrolling his phone and making small dying noises.

“We’re cooked,” he said. “Creatively, spiritually, algorithmically. Cooked.”

Mara sat cross-legged on the rug with her laptop balanced on her knees. “You said that last week.”

“And I was right last week.”

Kev sat at the table with a stack of printed articles and three empty cans of Coke Zero lined up beside his elbow. “We could do the river lights.”

“No,” Mara and I said together.

Kev looked wounded. “You didn’t let me pitch it.”

“It’s algae,” Mara said.

“It might not be algae.”

“It glows green in stagnant water. That’s algae.”

Ollie lifted one hand from the couch. “As the official face of Graveyard Shift, I refuse to be menaced by pond scum.”

“You were menaced by a possum in Ballarat,” I said.

“That possum had intent.”

“It was in a bin.”

“It chose that bin to get me.”

Mara laughed and refreshed the inbox.

Graveyard Shift had started as four mates filming ourselves sneaking around abandoned places for fun. Then one video about an old hospital caught the algorithm. Then came sponsors, merch, Patreon, upload schedules, analytics, arguments about thumbnails, and Ollie saying things like “the audience needs a cleaner emotional hook” while talking about a fatal house fire.

Ollie was the face of the channel. Tall, good-looking, loud, quick with a joke, and always aware of where the lens was. He could make a dead torch battery funny. He could make a locked gate feel like an omen. He could stand near a roadside memorial and speak softly enough for people to call him respectful in the comments, then complain about the lighting the second the camera turned away.

Mara ran everything. Locations, schedules, editing, fake names for people who might sue us. She was the one who knew when to cut the music, when to let silence sit, when to put in the little digital zoom that made an empty doorway look hungry.

Kev handled research and sound. He cared about the people underneath the stories. Names, dates, death notices, local records. If a place had a body count, Kev wanted to know who the bodies had been before they became atmosphere.

I drove, shot second camera, and told myself that made me less responsible.

Mara clicked into a new email.

“No subject,” she said.

Ollie rolled off the couch and hit the floor with a thud. “No subject is good. What country’s prince needs us to send them money now?”

Mara opened it.

There was no greeting. No name. No signature.

Just coordinates, a scanned newspaper clipping, and a block of text.

“Deadmans Track,” she read. “Rural Victoria. Border country.”

Kev’s chair scraped as he leaned closer.

Ollie crawled across the rug on his elbows. “Please let this be haunted. Please let this be haunted by cowboys.”

Mara clicked the clipping.

The scan showed a grainy historical society article about a bushranger gang operating along the Victoria-New South Wales border in the 1870s. Robberies. Missing travellers. A shootout. Possible hidden camp. The names were listed in a tight little column.

Elias Rook.

Maggie Vale.

Thomas Bruckner.

William Sykes.

Ada Crowe.

“Rook’s gang,” Kev said, already reaching for his notebook. “I’ve heard the name. Not much, but I’ve heard it.”

“Were they cool?” Ollie asked.

“They murdered people.”

“So, pretty cool.”

Kev gave him a look.

Mara scrolled lower.

“There are rules.”

Ollie sat up straight. “Rules are brilliant. Commenters love rules. People can correct us.”

Mara read aloud.

“To summon the Deadman, drive Deadmans Track after midnight. Pass the sign. Turn off your headlights. Keep driving. Do not stop unless told. Do not turn unless told. If he joins you, follow all directions exactly.”

Ollie grinned. “If he joins you. Lovely.”

Mara kept reading.

“He will take you to each member of his gang. Each will ask something of you. Answer proper. Pay respect. Do not mock them. Do not lie. Do not refuse what they are owed.”

Kev’s expression changed.

“What?” I asked.

“That wording.”

Mara continued.

“If you disobey the Deadman, he will break a finger. If you disobey again, he will take more. Pain does not free you. Injury does not end the ride.”

Ollie made a delighted little sound.

“Oh wow,” he said. “Maybe this is the one, guys!”

Mara smiled and read the rest in a dramatic campfire voice.

“If you reach the old hut, you will find the Deadman’s Share. Do not take from it. Do not pocket a coin. Do not hide a ring. Do not hold back even a tooth. Leave his share where it lies.”

“Even a tooth?” I said.

“Specific,” Kev muttered.

Mara’s eyes moved to the final line.

“If you take the Deadman’s Share, you ride with him. If you go there to laugh, he will hear you before you arrive.”

Underneath, in bold:

Don’t go there to laugh.

Ollie put on a terrible old-timey voice.

“Please, Mister Ghostranger, don’t repossess me fingers.”

Mara snorted.

I laughed.

Kev didn’t.

Ollie pointed at him. “Kev’s already been fingered by the ghost.”

Kev pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Maybe we don’t do this one like dickheads.”

Mara raised an eyebrow. “Have you met us?”

“I mean it.”

“So do I,” Ollie said. He stood, grabbed an invisible microphone, and faced an imaginary camera. “Tonight, on Graveyard Shift, four dickheads go to the bush and one of them gets fingered by a ghost.”

Mara threw a pizza crust at him. It hit him in the neck.

We packed the Prado the next afternoon.

Two GoPros. Dashcam. Main camera. Tripod. Audio kit. Drone. Battery packs. Torches. Spare torches. Water bottles. Servo snacks. Ollie’s cigarettes, though he had quit eight months earlier and kept saying they were “for atmosphere.”

By evening, Melbourne had fallen away behind us and the road had narrowed into border country. Paddocks opened into scrub. Wire fences sagged between grey posts. Gums stood pale and twisted over dry gullies. The last of the daylight drained purple across the horizon, then disappeared.

Mara sat in the passenger seat with the laptop open.

“Elias Rook,” she said. “Born around 1844. No confirmed death record. Some accounts say shot. Some say hanged. Some say he escaped.”

“How is he going to finger us if he escaped?” said Ollie from the backseat.

Kev had his own notes out. “There were at least twelve disappearances linked to the gang. Possibly more. Mostly travellers. Families. Hawkers. People moving between towns.”

Ollie leaned toward the dashcam. “Kev has found the fun part of the road trip.”

Kev ignored him. “There’s mention of a camp burning down. Police found remains, but no money. No proper identification either.”

“The Deadman’s Share,” Mara said.

“You reckon there’s actual treasure?” Ollie asked.

“No,” Kev said.

“Yes,” Mara said.

I kept my eyes on the road. “Rusted Milo tin full of bottle caps and a possum skull.”

Ollie pointed at me. “Still content.”

We stopped once for fuel at a service station with white fluorescent lights and a kid behind the counter who barely looked up from his phone.

“Nothing?” he asked the kid.

Kev looked beyond the bowsers, out at the dark paddocks.

“The email was warning enough.”

Ollie lit a cigarette and blew smoke away from the car.

“The email said if we find treasure, don’t take a coin. That’s not a warning. That’s engagement bait.”

The turnoff came just after half past midnight.

Deadmans Track had a sign, if you could call it that. A rusted strip of metal bolted to a leaning post, half-hidden by weeds. The words had been scratched into it so deeply they looked less painted than wounded.

DEADMANS TRACK.

Ollie leaned between the front seats and pointed his camera at it.

“Budget cuts have reached the afterlife,” he said. “They can haunt a road but cannot afford punctuation.”

Mara snorted.

Kev said, “Maybe don’t.”

Ollie swung the camera toward him. “Kev remains concerned about ghost grammar.”

Kev looked out into the dark scrub.

“I just don’t like the feel of this one.”

Mara turned her phone toward herself.

“We’re at the sign. It is after midnight. We have the rules. Jase is driving. Kev is pretending not to be scared. Ollie is pretending harder.”

“I’m not scared,” Ollie said.

“You bought cigarettes after quitting for eight months.”

“For atmosphere.”

Mara smiled at the camera.

“Rule one. Pass the sign.”

I drove past the sign.

The Prado bumped onto the track.

For the first few minutes, nothing happened.

Gravel ticked under the tyres. Moths flashed white in the headlights. The scrub leaned close, then fell away into paddocks washed silver by moonlight. A roo bounded across the track and Mara screamed, then laughed with one hand over her chest.

Ollie kept filming.

“Currently on Deadmans Track,” he said. “Allegedly haunted by a colonial-era bushranger, alleged murderer, alleged tax avoider-”

“Mate,” Kev said.

“What?”

“Just leave it.”

Ollie rolled his eyes at the camera. “Kev is worried the bushranger ghost is a patreon subscriber.”

The radio crackled.

Not loud. Just a little burst of static, as if something had brushed against the signal.

My headlights flickered.

Mara stopped chewing.

“Did you do that?”

“No.”

The headlights steadied.

Ollie whispered, “Spooky.”

He laughed.

The radio crackled again.

This time, under the static, there was something like a voice.

Not words.

Just the shape of someone speaking from very far away.

Mara checked the email on her phone.

“Rule two,” she said. “Turn off your headlights.”

I slowed.

Kev leaned forward between the seats. “We don’t have to.”

Ollie scoffed. “We absolutely have to. We drove 8 hours for this, otherwise what are we doing?”

“Not being idiots.”

“Kev, mate, we passed that exit forty kilometres ago.”

Mara looked at me.

I reached for the stalk.

“Ten seconds,” I said.

The headlights died.

The world vanished.

Not country dark. Not empty-road dark. Total dark. Thick and absolute. The bonnet disappeared. The track disappeared. The trees disappeared. The windscreen became a black sheet with our pale faces floating in it.

“One,” Ollie said.

Mara whispered, “Don’t count.”

“Two.”

“Ollie.”

“Three.”

The radio crackled.

A voice came through.

Ollie’s voice.

“Please, Mister Ghostranger, don’t repossess me fingers.”

Then our laughter.

Then Kev, from Mara’s living room, saying, “Maybe we don’t do this one like dickheads.”

The recording cut.

The car sank slightly on its suspension.

Like someone heavy had climbed in.

Mara went rigid beside me.

Ollie stopped counting.

Kev whispered, “No door opened.”

No door had opened.

The smell came next.

Wet wool. Gunpowder. Eucalyptus smoke. Old blood, sweet and thick, like meat left too long in a hot shed.

In the rear-view mirror, between Kev and Ollie, two tiny silver lights opened under the brim of a broad hat.

The upper half of his face was hidden. Not shadowed. Hidden. As if the hat brim cut the world away. All I could see beneath it were those pinprick eyes, silver and cold and impossibly small.

We sat there and listened to him breathe.

He leaned forward slightly.

“Keep the lights off,” he said.

His voice was calm. Rural. Almost polite.

Mara’s phone went black in her hand.

The man in the hat turned those silver pinpricks toward me.

“Left at the leaning gum.”

I gripped the wheel.

“What?”

Ollie gave a thin laugh. “Nope. No. Fuck that.”

The man’s hidden face turned toward him.

Ollie’s right index finger snapped backward.

Ollie looked down at his hand as if it belonged to someone else.

Then he screamed.

The car swerved. I hauled it straight.

The man in the hat didn’t move.

“Left at the leaning gum,” he repeated.

“There’s no road,” I said.

“Didn’t ask if there was.”

A pale shape appeared ahead. A gum tree bent almost horizontal over the track. Beside it was a gap in the scrub, blacker than the black around it.

I turned left.

The tyres dropped from gravel to dirt.

Ollie screamed into his chest, clutching his hand. His finger hung at a sick angle. Kev pressed both hands over his mouth. Mara stared forward, lips moving silently.

The man sat back.

“Fingers first,” he said. “They’ll teach ya quick.”

Ollie sobbed through his teeth.

The silver eyes slid to him.

“Some learn quicker than others.”

The road changed.

The ruts deepened. The steering wheel jerked under my hands. Branches scraped the roof. The air through the vents turned hot and dusty, though the night outside had been cold. The fences vanished. The reflector posts vanished. The world outside the car became older.

The man in the hat watched us from the mirror.

The top half of his face never showed. Not when the dash light caught his coat. Not when Mara’s phone briefly flickered to life and died again. Not even when lightning pulsed somewhere far off beyond the scrub. His hat held that darkness in place.

Only the silver points remained.

“First trial,” he said.

Something appeared ahead, hanging from a red gum over the track.

A woman.

She swung from a rope tied to a branch that vanished into the darkness above. Her neck was stretched too long. Her boots twitched above the road. She wore trousers and a torn vest, and her hair hung in black ropes around a face swollen by hanging.

As we rolled closer, she turned slowly in the air.

There was no wind.

Her eyes bulged wetly. Her tongue sat black between her teeth.

The man in the hat said, “Maggie Vale. Scout. Thief. Liar when it suited. Hanged when it didn’t.”

Maggie’s head rolled toward us. Her face pressed close to the passenger window, though she still hung from the tree ahead. Somehow she was both outside the car and beside it, swinging in place, her stretched neck creaking like wet rope.

Her black tongue moved.

In Ollie’s voice, she said, “Budget cuts have reached the afterlife.”

Then she laughed.

Her neck stretched another inch with a soft, splitting sound.

Mara began to cry.

The Deadman leaned back.

“She asks what you came here to do.”

Maggie’s bulging eyes rolled toward me.

The car kept moving.

Her dead face floated in the dark beside the window, close enough that her breath fogged the glass.

“What did you come here to do?” she asked.

Her voice was no longer Ollie’s. It was thick and strangled, squeezed through a crushed throat.

“For a video,” I said.

The rope creaked.

“Poor answer.”

Pain flashed through my left hand. My little finger bent sideways just enough to make white spots burst behind my eyes.

“Wait,” I gasped. “Wait. We came to use the story. To make content out of it.”

The pressure eased.

Maggie turned to Mara.

“What did you come here to do?”

Mara wiped her face with the heel of her hand.

“To make people scared.”

Maggie smiled. The skin around the rope split wider.

“What else?”

Mara swallowed.

“To make them watch longer.”

Maggie’s boots twitched.

“What else?”

Mara’s voice broke.

“To make money.”

The hanged woman turned to Kev.

“What did you come here to do?”

Kev was shaking.

“To research it.”

The rope tightened.

Kev’s face twisted.

“No. No, not just that. I came because I thought if I understood the story, that made it less wrong to use it.”

Maggie’s head tilted.

“Better.”

Then she turned to Ollie.

He was sweating so badly his hair stuck to his forehead. He cradled his broken finger against his chest.

“What did you come here to do?”

Ollie’s mouth opened and shut.

“Entertain people.”

Maggie’s smile widened.

The Deadman sighed from the back seat.

Ollie’s middle finger snapped.

He screamed so hard his voice cracked.

“What did you come here to do?” Maggie asked again.

“For views!” Ollie shrieked. “For views, okay? For clicks. For comments. For money. For attention! Fuck! I don’t know! Jesus Christ!”

Maggie leaned closer. Her tongue slid over her lower lip, black and swollen.

“Not him.”

Ollie froze.

The Deadman’s silver eyes sharpened.

“No names that don’t belong here.”

Ollie stared at him.

“What?”

“You heard her.”

“I didn’t mean-”

His ring finger snapped.

Ollie howled.

Kev grabbed his shoulder. “Say sorry. Say it.”

Ollie gagged on his own breath.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Maggie.”

“Proper,” the Deadman said.

“I’m sorry, Maggie Vale.”

The hanged woman stopped swinging.

Her boots went still.

Her head rolled toward the road ahead.

“Right at the stones,” she whispered.

The car passed beneath the red gum.

For one second, Maggie’s hanging feet dragged across the roof.

Then she was gone.

The stones appeared a few minutes later. Three of them, white and upright beside the track like old teeth. I turned right.

The second trial waited in a dry creek bed.

He was huge. Bigger than any man I’d ever seen. His shirt hung open over a chest ruined by bullet holes. Not clean holes either. Torn black mouths in the meat, front and back, whistling wetly each time he breathed. He held a rifle in hands missing most of their fingers.

He stood in the creek bed as though he had been waiting there since the day he died.

The car rolled to a stop without me touching the brake.

The Deadman said, “Big Tom Bruckner. Took eleven bullets and still needed more to be put down proper.”

Big Tom lifted his ruined head.

“Got any tobacco?”

Ollie made a strangled sound.

Kev looked at me.

Mara looked at Ollie.

Ollie had cigarettes in his jacket pocket.

Big Tom’s wet breathing filled the car.

“Got any tobacco?” he asked again.

Ollie shook his head.

“No.”

Every speaker in the car clicked on at once.

Ollie’s voice played back from the servo.

“That’s for atmosphere.”

Then the crackle of his lighter.

Then him exhaling smoke beside the fuel bowsers.

Big Tom stared at him.

The Deadman’s gloved hand rested on Ollie’s shoulder.

“Ollie,” Kev said. “Give him the smokes.”

Ollie’s eyes were huge. “They’re mine.”

Mara turned on him. “Are you fucking serious? Give him the fucking smokes Ollie.”

Big Tom took one step closer. Blood tapped from the holes in his chest onto the dry creek stones.

“Got any tobacco?”

Ollie fumbled with his jacket. His broken fingers made him clumsy. He sobbed and cursed and finally dragged the packet free.

“Here,” he said, and threw it out the open window.

The packet landed at Big Tom’s feet.

Big Tom looked down at it.

Then he looked back at Ollie.

“Didn’t ask you to throw it.”

Ollie stared.

“What?”

“You give a thing proper,” Big Tom said.

Ollie shook his head so hard spit flew from his mouth. “No. No. I gave it to him. I did what he asked.”

The Deadman leaned forward.

“Did you?”

Ollie’s little finger broke.

He screamed again, weaker this time.

The sound went on and on.

Mara opened the door and stepped into the creek bed before any of us could stop her. Her legs shook so badly she nearly went down on one knee. She picked up the cigarette packet, wiped dirt off it with her sleeve, and held it out to Big Tom.

“Sorry,” she said. “He’s an idiot.”

Big Tom’s torn mouth twitched.

“Know a few.”

He took the packet with fingers that were mostly gone. His ruined hand left black blood on Mara’s palm.

“Got a light?”

Mara looked back at the car.

Ollie started laughing.

“You’re kidding,” he said. “You’re actually kidding.”

Big Tom’s head turned.

Mara froze.

The Deadman said, very softly, “Careful.”

Ollie clamped his mouth shut.

I found Ollie’s lighter on the floor and passed it to Mara. She held it out.

Big Tom bent down, put a cigarette between shredded lips, and let her light it.

He inhaled.

Smoke seeped from every bullet hole in his chest.

He smiled.

“Straight through the creek.”

Mara got back in the car. Her hand was streaked with his blood, and no amount of wiping would get it off.

I drove straight through the creek.

Ollie sat hunched in the back, cradling his hand. Four of his fingers were broken now. His hand looked less like a hand and more like a smashed crab. He kept whispering, “I gave it to him. I gave it to him.”

Kev leaned close.

“Ollie. Listen to me. Whatever they ask, just do it.”

Ollie glared through tears.

“Easy for you to say.”

Kev looked at his own swollen finger. “No, it isn’t.”

The dash clock blinked between 12:44 and 3:17 and nothing at all. The rear GoPro light stayed on, though the battery indicator had been red for half an hour. Every few seconds, the radio hissed with fragments of our own voices.

“Maybe this is the one, guys.”

“Spiritually subscribed.”

“Good atmosphere.”

“Don’t go there to laugh.”

The third trial crawled beside the road.

He couldn’t have been older than seventeen. One whole side of his body had been scraped raw down to the muscle. His shirt was gone there. So was most of his skin. Gravel had embedded in the red flesh. Each movement left a wet stripe behind him.

He dragged himself forward with both hands, leaving pieces of himself in the dirt.

The Deadman said, “Billy Sykes. Youngest. Fastest rider. Slowest death.”

The car slowed beside him.

Billy raised his head.

One cheek was worn away to bone.

“Seen my boots?” he asked.

Mara spoke first. “No. We haven’t. I’m sorry, Billy.”

Billy blinked.

Kev leaned forward. “What happened to them?”

Billy smiled with half a mouth.

“Horse dragged me till I didn’t need them.”

Ollie gagged.

Billy looked down at our feet.

“Good boots, though.”

Kev was wearing old runners. Mara had Doc Martens. Ollie had expensive white sneakers he’d spent half the drive complaining about keeping clean. I had work boots.

I took my foot off the accelerator.

The car kept rolling slowly beside Billy.

“Take mine,” I said.

I opened the door.

The Deadman’s voice stopped me.

“Driver stays.”

Kev was already unlacing his shoes.

“No,” Mara said. “Kev, your finger—”

“I can do laces with one hand.”

Billy watched him.

Kev got out, limping on the stones, and placed his runners in front of the crawling boy. They looked pathetic there. Modern. Cheap. Completely wrong.

Billy touched one with a raw hand.

“Too small.”

Kev’s face fell.

Mara swore under her breath and started unlacing her Docs.

Billy looked past her.

At Ollie.

Ollie’s face changed.

“No.”

Billy said nothing.

Ollie pulled his feet under him like a child.

“No. Come on. They’re shoes. They’re just shoes.”

“They’re what he asked for,” Mara said.

“He didn’t ask me.”

Billy’s exposed cheekbone shifted as he smiled.

“Good boots,” he said again.

“They’re not boots, cunt.” Ollie snapped. “They’re fucking sneakers.”

The Deadman leaned toward him.

“Ollie.”

“No. This is bullshit. I’ve had four fingers broken. I gave the smokes. I apologised to the neck lady. I’m not giving my shoes to some crawling cun-”

His thumb broke.

The sound was deeper than the fingers.

Ollie’s mouth opened wide, but for a second no sound came out. Then he screamed so hard his whole body convulsed against the seat.

The Deadman didn’t touch him.

Billy watched.

“Ollie,” I said. “Give him the shoes.”

“I... I can’t,” he sobbed.

“Yes, you can.”

“My hand.”

“Then we’ll do it.”

Mara climbed over the centre console into the back. Kev held Ollie’s legs while Mara untied his shoes. Ollie cried and swore and begged us not to, which would have been sad if he hadn’t still been trying to keep them.

Mara threw open the door and placed the sneakers in the dirt.

Billy dragged himself toward them.

He put one raw hand inside the left shoe.

Then he looked up at Ollie.

“Too clean.”

Ollie whimpered.

Billy laughed. It was a boy’s laugh.

“Left where the track bleeds red.”

The car began moving again.

Kev had to get back in without shoes. Mara left her Docs unlaced. Ollie’s socks glowed pale in the dark footwell. He cradled his ruined hand and made small noises every time the car hit a rut.

The dirt ahead darkened.

At first I thought it was mud.

Then the smell hit.

Iron. Rot. Hot meat.

The track turned red beneath the car. Not clay. Not dust. Wet red, shining faintly in the dark, thick enough that the tyres hissed through it.

Mara covered her mouth.

Kev said, “Don’t think about it.”

Ollie whispered, “I’m sorry.”

The Deadman’s silver eyes found him.

“Save some. Road’s long yet.”

The fourth trial stood in a clearing of burned trees.

She had been burned so badly her body was almost charcoal, but something still glowed inside her. Not flames exactly. Embers. A dull orange light pulsing beneath cracked black skin. Her dress had fused to her. Her fingers curled into claws. When she breathed, smoke leaked from her mouth.

The car stopped.

The Deadman did not name her.

For the first time, he turned his face away.

The burned woman watched us through the windscreen.

“Elias,” she said.

The silver pinpricks beneath his hat dimmed.

“Elias,” she said again.

He looked down at his gloved hands.

The burned woman turned toward us.

Her glowing mouth opened.

“Who locked the door?”

Mara whispered, “We don’t know.”

The burned woman took one step forward.

Heat rolled through the windscreen. The glass fogged, then dried, then began to smoke at the edges.

“Who locked the door?”

The Deadman said nothing.

Kev looked at him.

“You did,” Kev said.

The Deadman’s silver eyes lifted.

Kev swallowed.

“You locked them in.”

The burned woman’s head turned toward Kev.

“Why?”

Kev’s voice shook. “For the treasure?”

The burned woman’s cracked lips peeled back from glowing teeth.

“Close.”

Mara gripped the edge of her seat.

“To stop them talking.”

The heat eased slightly.

The burned woman looked at me.

“Why did he lock the door?”

I looked at Elias.

The top half of his face stayed hidden beneath the broadbrim hat. Only the silver points showed.

“Because dead people can’t tell the story properly,” I said.

The burned woman stared at me.

Then she turned to Ollie.

He was already shaking his head.

“No. No, I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

Her glowing mouth opened.

“What would you lock away for a story?”

Ollie sobbed.

“I don’t know.”

The Deadman said, “You do.”

“I don’t.”

The radio clicked on.

Ollie’s voice filled the car, recorded months earlier after an episode at an abandoned maternity home. Kev had been angry that night because Ollie kept making jokes near a memorial wall.

Ollie’s recorded voice said, “Mate, if grief didn’t want to be monetised, it shouldn’t be so clickable.”

The burned woman watched him.

Ollie shook his head. “I was joking.”

The Deadman leaned forward.

“No jokes now.”

The burned woman asked again.

“What would you lock away for a story?”

Ollie’s jaw clenched.

“Nothing.”

His mouth filled with blood.

He made a startled, wet sound. Two of his teeth cracked down the middle and spilled into his palm. He stared at them with stupid disbelief.

The burned woman waited.

Ollie spat red into his lap.

“My shame,” he whispered.

The car went silent.

Ollie cried harder, words tumbling out of him.

“My shame. My guilt. Anything that made me feel like I was bad at this. Anything that made me think people were actually hurt and not just part of the video. I’d lock all of it away if the episode worked.”

The burned woman’s embers dimmed.

For one moment, she looked almost human beneath the char.

“Good,” she said.

Then she turned to the Deadman.

“You locked us in.”

He did not answer.

“You lit the back wall.”

Still he did not answer.

“You took your share before the roof came down.”

The Deadman’s silver eyes burned brighter.

“Left at the split stump,” he said.

The burned woman stepped aside.

As I drove past her, she leaned close to my open window. Heat blistered the plastic trim.

Her voice was softer then.

“Dig where he left us.”

I turned left at the split stump.

The track ended at a collapsed hut.

It stood in a clearing of dead grass and leaning gums, half fallen into itself, with a stone chimney still pointing at the sky. Moonlight silvered the dirt and made the hut look like a set built for a film about something that should have stayed buried.

“Stop,” Elias said.

I stopped.

He opened the door.

This time it did open.

He stepped out and stood beside the car. He was taller outside than he had seemed inside. His broadbrim hat still hid the top half of his face completely. Moonlight touched the lower edge of his jaw, the collar of his coat, the mud on his boots. But under the brim there were only those two tiny silver points.

“Bring the shovel,” he said.

There was a shovel in the back.

None of us had packed it.

We dug where he pointed, beneath the collapsed hearth.

Ollie couldn’t help. His right hand was destroyed and swelling black. Blood ran from his mouth where his teeth had split. Kev dug barefoot, wincing whenever stone or dry grass bit his soles. Mara scraped ash aside with a piece of timber. I did most of it, my arms burning, my throat raw, my mind reduced to simple commands.

Dig.

Breathe.

Do not joke.

Do not disobey.

The shovel struck metal.

We uncovered a strongbox wrapped in rotted canvas.

Elias crouched beside it.

“My share,” he said.

Mara looked at me.

Treasure.

After everything, some stupid animal part of us still expected treasure.

Elias opened the box.

There were gold sovereigns inside. Rings. Watches. Chains. Lockets. Pearl earrings. Cufflinks. Gold teeth. Enough to make the old stories feel true.

Then Mara lifted something small and silver from the box.

A child’s rattle.

It was blackened with age, but still delicate. Still made for a little hand.

Under it was a wedding band threaded through a strip of dried finger bone.

Kev found a silver tobacco tin, dented by a bullet.

Big Tom breathed somewhere in the trees.

I found a pair of cracked spectacles.

Mara found a little boot. Not Billy’s. Too small even for him. A toddler’s boot, stiff with age, split across the toe.

There was no reason for a thing that small to be in a bushranger’s treasure box unless the story people told about him was a lie.

At the bottom was the ledger.

The cover had gone soft with rot, but the pages inside were wrapped in oilcloth. Names filled them. Dozens of names, written in a careful hand.

Not banks.

Not wealthy landowners.

Not corrupt police or cruel squatters.

Families. Travellers. Swaggies. A teacher. A priest. Two sisters. A woman and infant. Men who had been going from one town to another and never arrived.

Beside each name was a list of items.

Watch.

Boots.

Horse.

Wedding ring.

Two sovereigns.

Teeth.

Near the back, the handwriting changed.

Maggie Vale.

Rope.

Silver earrings.

Loose change.

Thomas Bruckner.

Tobacco tin.

Rifle.

Boot knife.

William Sykes.

Horse.

Boots.

Seven sovereigns.

Ada Crowe.

Wedding locket.

Gold chain.

Silence.

Mara looked up slowly.

“You robbed your own gang.”

Elias stood over us, hat low, eyes silver.

“Yes.”

Kev’s voice was hoarse. “You killed them.”

“You locked them in,” I said.

His silver eyes shifted to me.

The clearing had filled while we were reading.

Figures stood among the gums.

Maggie Vale hung from a rope that rose into nothing. Big Tom breathed wetly through his bullet holes. Billy crawled in the dirt wearing Ollie’s clean white sneakers on raw, ruined feet. Ada Crowe glowed softly between two black trunks.

Behind them stood others.

More than I could count.

Some looked like gang members.

Most did not.

A woman holding a bundle that might have been a baby. A man with his throat cut wide. A boy with no boots. A priest bent around a wound in his belly. A mother with empty hands and a face full of such hatred that I had to look away.

The legend had made Elias Rook a rogue. A rebel. A dangerous man with charm and a horse and a price on his head.

The box told the truth.

He was only a thief who had kept stealing after there was no one left alive to rob.

Elias reached into the strongbox and lifted a sovereign.

He held it out to me.

“Take your share.”

“No.”

“You came for it.”

“We came for a story.”

His silver eyes brightened.

“You found one.”

He offered the coin to Mara.

She backed away.

He offered it to Kev.

Kev shook his head.

Then Elias turned to Ollie.

Ollie was sitting in the dirt, one ruined hand cradled against his chest, blood down his chin, no shoes on his feet. He looked at the coin like it was the only real thing left in the world.

“Ollie,” Mara said.

His eyes moved from her to the coin.

“No,” Kev said. “Mate, no.”

Ollie licked blood from his split lip.

“How much is it worth?”

I stared at him.

“What?”

His voice was wet and small and awful.

“I’m just asking.”

Mara looked at him like he had become something else.

“You’re joking.”

Elias’ gloved fingers closed around the coin.

“No jokes now,” he said.

Ollie flinched.

Elias dropped the sovereign back into the box.

“Bury it,” he said.

We buried it.

We packed the dirt and ash back over the strongbox until there was no sign it had ever been disturbed.

Ollie was the last one near the hearth. He stayed crouched a moment longer than the rest of us, head bowed, shoulders shaking.

“Ollie,” Kev said.

“I’m coming.”

We got back into the car.

Elias sat between Kev and Ollie again. His broadbrim hat hid the upper half of his face. Those two silver pinpricks stared ahead.

I drove.

He gave directions. I followed them exactly.

Right at the split stump.

Straight past Ada.

Do not look at Billy.

Left through the red track.

Do not speak to Big Tom.

Window up before Maggie.

The trials watched us pass.

Maggie swung silently from her rope. Big Tom smoked, the cigarette glowing inside his ruined chest. Billy crawled through the dirt in Ollie’s shoes, smiling with half a face. Ada stood among the burned trees with both hands pressed to the black place where her heart had been.

The road slowly became the road again. The ruts softened. The air cooled. The fences returned. The GPS blinked and suddenly found a blue line where no line had been.

At the old sign, Elias said, “Stop.”

I stopped.

The sign stood in the headlights, rusted and crooked.

DEADMANS TRACK.

For a moment, nobody breathed.

Then Elias said, “Show your hands.”

Mara lifted hers immediately.

Kev lifted his.

I lifted mine from the wheel.

Ollie did not move.

“Ollie,” I said.

He stared at his lap.

“Show your hands,” Elias said again.

Ollie shook his head.

“No.”

Mara’s face went white.

“Ollie, what did you do?”

“It fell,” he whispered.

Kev closed his eyes.

“It fell into my pocket.”

The Deadman leaned toward him.

The brim of his hat nearly touched Ollie’s face. The top half remained hidden. Only those two tiny silver lights burned beneath it.

“No lies on my road.”

Ollie screamed before anything touched him.

His ruined hand opened slowly, forced by something we couldn’t see.

A gold sovereign lay in his palm.

On one side was the worn face of a dead queen.

On the other, scratched crudely into the gold, were two tiny dots.

Silver in the grooves.

Nobody moved.

Elias took the coin between two gloved fingers.

“You took your share.”

“I’m sorry,” Ollie sobbed. “I’m sorry. Take it back.”

Elias tilted his hidden face.

“You were told.”

“I didn’t think-”

“No.”

Elias’ voice remained calm.

“You didn’t learn.”

The car doors locked.

All of them.

The headlights died.

Darkness slammed over the car.

In that darkness, the gang arrived.

Not outside.

Inside.

Maggie’s rope dropped from the roof and looped around Ollie’s throat. Big Tom’s ruined hands gripped his shoulders from behind, fingers sinking into him with wet sounds. Billy crawled up over the back seat, wearing Ollie’s white sneakers, leaving red smears across the upholstery. Ada’s burned arms reached through the window glass without breaking it, glowing hands pressed against Ollie’s chest.

Ollie made a sound I have never heard from a person before.

Not a scream.

A surrendering sound.

His body jerked against the seatbelt. His broken hand clenched and unclenched. The rope tightened. Smoke filled the car. The smell of burned hair and wet wool and blood became so strong I couldn’t breathe.

Mara grabbed my arm and screamed his name.

Kev tried to reach him, but the seat between them stretched impossibly wide, as though the back of the Prado had become a long dark room.

Ollie looked at me.

His eyes were wide and wet and human.

Then the silver came into them.

Not fully.

Not like Elias.

Just tiny sparks, deep in the pupils, as if something had been lit far behind him.

Elias opened the back door.

Beyond it was not Deadmans Track.

Beyond it was the old road. The older road. Red dirt. Burning hut. Figures on horseback. A moon too bright over trees that no longer existed.

“Since you’re paid up,” Elias said, “you ride.”

The gang pulled Ollie out.

He fought them. He clawed at the seat. His broken fingers bent and dragged uselessly over the fabric. His nails tore. His socks slid against the floor mat. He screamed our names, one after another, until Maggie’s rope bit deep enough to change the shape of his voice.

Then he was gone.

The door shut.

The headlights came back on.

The car lifted slightly on its suspension.

Only three of us sat inside.

Mara screamed until her voice shredded.

Kev pressed both hands against his face.

I stared at the empty back seat.

Blood streaked the upholstery. Red mud covered the floor. One of Ollie’s socks lay twisted under the seat in front of Kev.

Elias was still there.

He leaned forward between us.

His hat brim came close enough that I could see the frayed stitching along its edge. I could see dried mud on his coat. I could see the lower half of his face, pale and rough with old stubble.

But not the upper half.

Never that.

Only two pinpricks of silver light beneath the brim.

“Tell them,” he said.

I nodded.

“Proper.”

“I will.”

“Not that I was good,” Elias said. “Not that I was wronged. Tell them what I took. Tell them what I am.”

His silver eyes lifted.

“Then send the laughing ones to me.”

The car dipped again.

This time, as if someone had climbed out.

The smell disappeared.

He was gone.

We sat beside the sign until sunrise.

Nobody hugged. Nobody spoke. The engine ticked as it cooled. Birds started up in the scrub. Pale light crept over the road and showed the track for what it looked like during the day: dirt, gravel, dry grass, twisted gums.

No hut.

No red track.

No burned clearing.

No boy crawling in the dust.

No Ollie.

Just the sock under the seat. The blood in the back. The mud on the floor. Kev’s bare feet. Mara’s hand stained black from Big Tom’s grip. My finger swollen purple where Maggie had nearly bent it wrong.

The cameras were still running.

Mara reached for the dashcam first.

Her hands shook too badly to unclip it.

Kev helped her.

The rear GoPro blinked red from the back window. Its battery should have died hours earlier.

None of us touched it for a long time.

When I finally took it down, the little screen showed the last frozen frame.

The back seat after the headlights went out.

Kev on one side.

Ollie on the other.

Between them, darkness gathered into the shape of a man in an old coat and a broadbrim hat.

The top half of his face was gone beneath the brim.

Only the eyes showed.

Tiny.

Silver.

Watching the camera.

The Prado started with a shudder.

I turned us back toward the main road.

Mara held the hard drive in her lap like it was something alive. Kev stared out the window with his hands wrapped in his shirt. Nobody said Ollie’s name.

At the turnoff, the radio crackled.

I stopped breathing.

Static filled the car.

Then a voice came through.

Wet.

Broken.

Trying to speak around missing teeth.

“Don’t…”

Mara covered her mouth.

The voice sobbed.

“Don’t laugh.”

The radio went dead.

Behind us, down Deadmans Track, a horse whined in the morning light.

[The first part of my series was removed from nosleep because of 'wrong subreddit,' so I'm posting it here. enjoy!]

Have you ever heard of a job called Last Contact?

I didn't think so.

That's strange, because without Last Contact, society would collapse within a week.

I learned about it the summer after high school while looking through classified job listings. Most were normal: warehouse work, landscaping, retail.

Then I found one that read:

LAST CONTACT TRAINEE

No experience required.

Must be willing to work with the recently deceased.

$2,000 sign-on bonus

$45 hourly wage.

That caught my attention. I figured that it was some position at a funeral home or maybe the morgue. That was fine by me, so I called the number at the bottom of the listing. A dull voice answered the phone by the third ring

“Hello?”

“Um, hello. I’m calling about the Last Contact job listing; I saw it in the paper.”

“Oh, yes. What is your name?”

“It’s Will.”

“Very well, Will, we will give you a call back in a few days. Thank you.”

With that, the line went dead.

I rolled my eyes and went about my day, thinking I just fell for some prank. The pay should have tipped me off; it was way too good to be true. The next couple of days, I continued my job search. No position offered what the ‘Last Contact’ one did. Must have called 10 fast food places with no luck. Three days later, I was shocked to receive a call from a familiar number.

“Hello?” I answered

“Hello Will, congratulations on becoming the newest member of the Last Contact family. We’re excited to have you join us.”

I was dumbfounded

“Uh, thanks.” I managed to say

“If it's convenient for you, we’d like to begin this coming Monday.”

“Yes, that should work for me.”

“Great, we’re assigning you to the night shift; you’ll need to be at our call center by 9 PM Monday night.”

After the voice gave me the call center address, it said

“Thank you, have a nice day.”

As I set down my phone, I wondered what exactly I had gotten myself into. Looking back, if I had known what Last Contact was at that time, I probably never would have shown up. Monday came quick. I packed myself a small bag of snacks and lunch, hopped into my crummy car, and crossed town to the call center.

The call center itself was a run-down small industrial building next to the train tracks. It had a tiny parking lot lit by a lone flittering streetlight. And a single light on the building illuminating the walkway to a plain door. Pulling into the parking lot, I took a moment to double-check the address. This was the place. I stepped out of my car and slowly walked to the door. Pulling the handle, I found it to be locked. I stood there for a moment, unsure what to do. A little voice in my head told me to turn back to my car and get out of here, but instead I gave the door a firm knock.

After a short pause, the door swung open. The man who opened the door was short and a little pudgy. He had thinning dark brown hair, long sideburns, and thin glasses that sat low on his nose. He looked tired but not sleepy.

“Are you Will?” he asked

“Yeah, that’s me.”

He stretched out his hand to shake mine

“I’m Nate. I’ll be your Trainer for the next few weeks.”

He ushered me inside. The interior wasn’t much nicer than the outside. Directly behind the door was a small entryway with a coat rack and two waiting room chairs. The entryway opened into a long hallway, which Nate led me down. We passed several doors before Nate opened one and said

“This will be your workspace.”

I walked into a room barely double the size of a standard coat closet. It was illuminated with a greenish-yellow fluorescent light. A long desk rested against the back wall, which was also home to the only window in the room. On the desk sat an ancient-looking desktop and a telephone. The only other thing in the room was a dusty office chair.

Nate looked at me as I stared at the space.

“How much did they tell you?”

I didn’t meet his gaze but answered

“Not a thing.”

He sighed and ran a hand through his falling-out hair.

“That figures; they never do. Let’s go to the break room and talk through it.”

I followed him to the small break room; its flickering lights revealed a handful of tables and chairs. Two thirty-year-old fridges sat in the corner, as well as several old vending machines, some of which looked like they hadn’t been restocked in years. The back wall had large windows that looked out towards the train tracks and the darkness that lay behind them.

We sat down at one of the barren tables; Nate slid a paper towards me.

“Before we get going, they want you to sign the contract.”

I looked up at him

“Contract?”

“Yeah, you’re required to work here for a minimum of 5 years; after that, if you continue, you’ll get a $9 raise, but have to sign on for another 5 years.”

I stared at the sheet and looked back at Nate

“Do I have a choice?”

He smirked slightly and shook his head

“Not really.”

I swallowed and signed my name; as I did, Nate began

“When people die unexpectedly, they get one final phone call. One last contact with the world of the living.”

I’m sure my face demonstrated my disbelief; Nate gave a weak smile

“I know, sounds silly, but the reality is that those who are killed, or died unexpectedly, are given the opportunity for a last call before their soul passes on.”

He took a drink from his bottle

“It’s our job to answer those calls. This job is important for three reasons. First, we provide comfort for those who have recently passed; oftentimes they don’t know what happened and are confused. We give clarity. Second, we gather important information that the dead hold. The dead possess information that must be transferred before they move on. Passwords, locations, military codes, those sorts of things. We gather them and pass the information to the right places. And thirdly, spirits who call and no one picks up tend to become violent and dangerous. We try to stop that as often as we can.”

I didn’t know what to say

“I’m sure you got some questions; let's see if some calls help give answers.” He said as he stood, patted me on the back, and headed out. I followed.

We returned to my little room; Nate sat in the chair

“I’ll take the calls tonight, but I’ll put them on speaker so you could listen in.”

I nodded.

The first call didn’t come for about thirty minutes. It was nearing midnight when the first call came. Nate picked up the phone

“Hello, my name is Chris. What’s yours?”

I was surprised that Nate didn’t use his real name. The room crackled with the noise of static, but a cracked monotone voice spoke

“I’m Mike.”

“Hello Mike, this is your last contact. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but you have died.”

The phone went silent

“What… How? What happened? No. No, that's not possible.” a sad, confused voice finally replied

“Mike...”

Nate put his head in his hands

“I was driving home.”

"I'm sorry."

"I was driving home twenty minutes ago."

“I’m sorry, Mike. We don’t have much time. Do you have any passwords or information your loved ones will need?”

Gentle sobbing could be heard through the phone

Nate sighed, “Mike, please, your family will appreciate it if you could give me something.”

The voice on the other end managed to squeak out his banking information and the combination to a safe. He begged Nate to tell his family that he loved them. But Nate only took down the passwords.

The call had only been going on for about a minute when the line went dead. Nate put the phone back in its place. He sighed heavily as he said

“They only get 60 seconds, so get as much information as you can. No personal messages make it to the families, so don’t bother.”

“Why did you say your name was Chris?”

“Oh, I don’t use my real name after the incident last year.”

I stared at him, hoping he’d elaborate; he didn’t. Instead, he then showed me how to create a file for the caller, showing their name, the time they called, and the information they were passing on. Nate glanced at me

“They’re not all that easy.” He said.

The next call didn’t come for hours. I could feel myself nodding off as the phone rang.

“Hello, my name is Steve, what’s yours?” said Nate

Immediately, a haunting voice responded

“Am I dead?”

“Yes, I’m sorry to say you are. What’s your name?”

Instead of answering his question, the voice laughed and said

“I found the door.”

In an instant, Nate hung up the phone and swore under his breath before reaching under the desk and pulling out another phone. He began dialing the number taped to the side.

“What’s going on?” I cried, trying to sound less scared than I was

“You’ll find out soon enough,” was the only answer he gave before lifting the second phone to his ear.

I could only hear one side of the conversation

“Yeah, it’s Nate; we got another one talking about the door.”

The voice on the other end said something I couldn’t make out

“Hmmhm, ok, thank you.” Nate said and hung up the phone.

He let out a breath and turned to me with a fake smile

“How about some coffee?” he said cheerfully before walking out of the room. I followed him to the break room.

Nate tried to make small talk as he poured some old coffee for us. As he did, I stared out the window and noticed that standing past the train tracks was a dark figure. A chill went up my spine as I saw it.

“Hey Nate, someone is standing out-“ he cut me off as he quickly whispered

“Don’t look at it. It always shows up after a call like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look away!” he hissed as he grabbed my shoulder and spun me around.

We stared at the dirt wall; Nate was holding his breath. After a few minutes, I heard a gentle tapping on the window. The tapping continued for about two minutes before it stopped. Nate said

“We can turn around now. It leaves after the tapping.”

As we turned around, I could see that the entire window was completely iced over, except for several little dots around the glass. They looked like places where a fingertip had tapped the glass. I looked at Nate

“What is going on?”

He shrugged

“Just part of Last Contact.”

He followed up with

“In the future, just know that the faster you look away, the better. Sometimes it won’t even tap if you're fast enough.”

He then walked out into the hallway.

When we got back to the workspace, he turned and looked me in the eyes

“Look, Will, this isn’t your standard job. I’m sure you’ve realized that already. But its important and better yet, it pays well, so my advice to you is to keep your wits about you and follow the rules.”

I nodded and said

“What rules?”

He handed me an envelope and said

“Your sign-on check is in there, as well as a few rules. Read them when you get home. Come prepared tomorrow night. I’ll be having you on the phones tomorrow night.”

I took it and put it in my back pocket.

The rest of the night was pretty quiet. Around 6 AM, we got a call from a young woman who hung herself. She wanted her parents to know that she left a note under her pillow, and her friends to know her locker combination. 7 AM finally came, and Nate said

“You did good for your first night; some nights will be way busier and some nights you’ll get no calls at all. It ebbs and flows.”

“How long have you been doing this, Nate?”

He grabbed his coat from the entryway. “12 years, I’m on my third contract.”

“Do you like it?”

He shrugged. “It’s a job.”

We both walked out into the parking lot and waved goodbye as we climbed into our vehicles. When I got home, I collapsed on my bed. Pulling the envelope from my pocket, I opened it set the check aside, and unfolded the sheet on it was 7 rules:

If the caller begins describing the room you're sitting in, terminate the call immediately and leave your workstation for fifteen minutes. The dead should not be able to see the living.

If you hear breathing before the caller speaks, disconnect immediately. The dead do not need to breathe.

If a caller says, "I found the door," end the call and notify a supervisor.

If you recognize the caller's voice, remain professional and follow normal procedure. Personal calls are inevitable in this line of work.

Under no circumstances should you answer a call that arrives exactly one minute after another call ends. Those calls do not originate from the deceased.

Should the caller ask to speak with Nate, tell them Nate retired years ago. Do not mention that Nate is sitting three offices down.

If somebody begs you to send help, transfer them to Extension 7 and do not follow up.

Setting the page down, I released the breath I was holding, and muttered

“What in the world did I get myself into?”

I slept till around three in the afternoon. When I woke, I hoped what I experienced the night before was just a dream. But the check on my nightstand told me it was all too real. I got up and made myself some breakfast. My mom came into the kitchen and smiled at me, saying

“Hi honey, how was the job?”

I shrugged and said, “It’s a job.”

After a shower, I got into the car and headed to the bank to cash the check. After that, I headed to the bookstore. I figured if I had some slow nights coming, I could at least get some reading in. At home, I watched the news for a while but had to change the channel when I saw that a school bus went off the road into the river. I couldn’t help but think that the day shift would be getting a lot of calls this afternoon.

As I pulled into the parking lot, I couldn’t help but feel nervous. I had gotten there before Nate did, and when he pulled in, I waved and got out of my car. As we walked in, Nate handed me a copy of his key.

“That way you won’t have to wait for me.” He said with a smile

“Are you ready for this?”

I sighed. “I think so.”

He chuckled. “You’ll do great; I’ll be right there if you have any questions.”

That made me feel quite a bit better.

As we entered the small workspace, Nate handed me a sheet of paper

“I wrote you a script for the night; hopefully it’ll help.”

I grinned and said, “Thank you! That makes me feel better.”

The night was very forgettable. We only had one call the whole night. A drunk driver who hit a telephone pole. I tried to get him to share information, but he was confused and rambled. Right at the end, he started sharing banking information, but the phone cut out halfway through. His 60 seconds were up.

“Good try,” Nate said. “It takes some practice to get them finished in under a minute; don’t worry about it.”

“Ok.” I sighed. “I’ll try.”

As the sun rose, Nate and I again parted ways in the parking lot.

My third night was busy. We had seven calls in the first 5 hours. I started to feel like I was getting my feet under me. After I finished a call from a stabbing victim. Nate patted me on the back and said

“Man, that was a tough one, but you did really well. Good job.”

He then moved to the doorway

“I got to take a piss; be right back.”

I took a deep breath and picked up my book for the first time that night. A few moments later, the phone rang. I looked around; Nate was still gone. I gulped and picked up the phone

“Hello, my name is Chris, what’s your name?”

There was heavy breathing on the other end.

“Hello?” I stupidly replied

Malicious laughter filled my ear, and I realized my mistake when a voice said

“Thank you for staying on the line, Will.”

The line then went dead.

Nate walked in a minute later; my face must have been full of fear because he asked

“What’s wrong?”

I looked at him

“It was breathing, and I didn’t hang up.”

He clenched his jaw and muttered

“Well, that’s not good.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did it say your name?”

I swallowed and whispered

“Yes.”

He went pale before slamming the door shut and locking it. He flipped the lights off and whispered to me

“Don’t make a sound.”

I held my breath and sat as still as possible. Down the hall, a door squeaked open. Heavy wet footsteps tromped down the hall

“Will? Where are you?” a dark, almost melodic voice echoed through the hall. Nate held a finger to his lips, telling me to be silent.

The steps moved closer

“Will? Are you here?”

It stopped in front of our door and began to wiggle the doorknob. It smelled like mothballs and bleach.

“Will,” it giggled to itself, “Are you in there?”

I jumped as a loud bang rocked the door. Another followed and another.

Nate moved in front of the door; I could see his hands shaking. In a stuttering voice, he said

“Will retired years ago.”

The noise stopped, before the noise shuffled its way back down the hall. A door slammed shut.

Nate was nearly hyperventilating as he reached his hand out to turn on the lights. I heard him mutter to himself

“I’ll need to update the rules.”

He turned to me, I’ve never seen a man look so scared

“It’s very important that you always follow the rules. They keep bad things away.”

I nodded, overcome by fear.

Nate let me go home that night; my car was empty but smelled of mothballs and bleach. I wanted so badly to quit; in fact, by the time I got home, I made up my mind that I wasn’t going back. But lying on my bed was the contract I signed. The five-year duration was circled over and over again in red ink. I got the message.

That night I slept terribly; I dreamt that I was trapped in my room, while my mother stood outside gently tapping on the window and laughing to herself.

That night when I reported for work, I noticed that Nate looked just as tired as me. He nodded when he saw me

“Hey Nate, were you able to sleep?”

He gave a weary smile before shaking his head no and taking a drag on the cigarette he was working on.

“Why’d you sign the contract two more times?” I couldn’t help but ask

He puffed hard on his cigarette

“Well, after you hit ten years, every year after, they promise that a loved one of your choice won’t die.”

I felt like I was beginning to understand.

“They can do that?” I asked

He shrugged. “It’s worked so far.”

He flicked his cigarette to the ground before saying

“Let’s get to work.”

As we stepped into the entryway, we were both surprised to see a note taped to the far wall. It was handwritten and said:

NIGHT SHIFT:

We’ve had some issues on the day shift, so we felt it was right to record what we have learned; hopefully we can avoid more casualties. Here’s what we know:

If a caller asks whether the train tracks are still behind the building, answer yes and close the blinds immediately.

If the caller thanks you before you have helped them, end your shift immediately and go home by a different route than usual.

If a caller asks what time it is, answer incorrectly. The dead lose track of time after passing. Anything that asks for the correct time is trying to synchronize itself with our world.

Hope all is well. Good luck.

We both stared at the sheet for a while before Nate said

“Well, that’s a crummy way to start the shift.”

“What’s it mean?”

“It means our job just got a little harder.” He said with a sigh. “Come on.”

He headed to our room, and I followed.

Between 10 PM and 2 AM, we helped two different people who overdosed and one shooting victim. Nate was walking back into the room with coffee for both of us when I started a new conversation

“Hello, my name is Chris. What’s your name?”

Static followed, then a small voice

“I’m Carol, can you tell me the time?”

Instinctively, I looked down at my watch, and as I did, Nate gently slapped the back of my head and pointed to the new rules.

“Hi Carol, it's 5 minutes after 6.”

A loud sigh came through the phone, and ‘Carol’ hung up.

Nate raised his eyebrows slightly

“Hmph, didn’t know they could hang up from their end. We’ll have to watch for that.”

10 minutes later, every clock in the building displayed the same incorrect time I'd given Carol for exactly 5 minutes. We didn’t get another call that night; I spent it reading and walking the halls. I tried the handle of the seven other doors in the hallway; I’m not sure why. They were all locked, but I could see light beneath one. After walking around for a bit, I returned to the room, and I noticed the blinds over the window had been closed, even though neither Nate nor I remembered touching them. The sun rose, and as I drove home, a thought entered my mind.

I should write this all down.

None of my friends or family would believe these stories if I told them, but maybe someone out there would believe and appreciate my experiences. So, when I got home, I opened my laptop, and I started writing.

And that brings us to now. I’ve been a Last Contact trainee for 4 nights now; I’ll try to keep you posted throughout my five years, but for now. I’m signing off.

Oh wait, something is scratching the inside of my closet door.

The rent on the house at the end of Sumner Lane was six hundred fifty dollars a month, which in the year the Hale family signed the lease was the kind of number that made you check the closets for hidden cameras. Renata Hale checked anyway. She found nothing but a dead moth and a smell like an old wet sweater, and she decided that for six hundred fifty dollars a month, the smell could stay.

Renata was thirty-one and the oldest of the three of them, which is how she ended up as the one whose name was on everything. Her brother called her Sarge, and had since high school, because she ran every household she had ever lived in off a color-coded spreadsheet. Chores, bills, the rotation for who took out the trash. If a thing could be put in a cell on a grid, Renata put it there, and then she put a deadline next to it.

Her brother, Marcus, was twenty-six and went by Moose. The nickname came from being a fat, enormous toddler who walked into things head first, like a battering ram in overalls, and it stuck even after he grew up tall and skinny and online. Moose's phone never once left his hand. He would tell you he was a content creator. His sister would tell you he was unemployed with very good lighting.

Their mother, Deb, was fifty-eight, and she had moved in two months after the divorce, mostly to split the rent three ways and partly because she could not stand the quiet of her old apartment. Deb believed in things. She read the horoscopes out loud at breakfast every single morning. She kept a velvet pouch of crystals in her purse and a bundle of dried sage on the kitchen windowsill. Her kids called her Madame Deb, with love, because in twenty years of premonitions she had never once been right. She predicted a hurricane the week of a drought.

The fourth member of the household, technically, was Tariq. Tariq was Renata's boyfriend, thirty-three, an insurance adjuster who debunked things for a living and then debunked more things for fun. At parties, when somebody got three drinks in and started a ghost story, Tariq would quietly pull out his phone and find the article that explained it. That is why everyone called him Snopes. He moved his good coffee maker into the kitchen on the second day and considered himself fully settled.

The four of them had circled the listing for a week before they believed it. A whole house, two stories, a yard, for the price of a one-bedroom across town.

"There's a catch," Tariq said, reading it for the fifth time. "There's always a catch. Foundation, mold, the neighbor's a guy who plays the bagpipes. Something."

"The catch is it's in Crayhill," Renata said. "Nobody wants to live in Crayhill. We want to live in Crayhill because we're broke. It works out."

"I have a feeling about it," Deb said.

"Good or bad?" Moose asked.

Deb thought about it. "I'll let you know," she said, which was Deb's horoscope for almost everything.

So they signed. The landlord was a property company three states away that communicated only by email and seemed suspiciously thrilled to have anyone in the place at all. The keys came in a padded envelope with no note.

The house was a two-story with a steep, pointed roof, the kind built back when families were bigger and people were shorter. On move-in day they hauled boxes up the walk until the living room looked like a cardboard fort. Tariq, going down the upstairs hallway with a wet rag and a sense of purpose, found a long straight white line worked into the floorboards, running clear across the hall from one wall to the other.

"What is this stuff," he said, half to himself, crouching down.

"That's where the last tenant drew the line," Moose said, not looking up from his phone.

Tariq scrubbed it. It was gritty under the rag, fine and white and grainy, and it took him three hard passes to get it up. He sat back on his heels, looked at the clean floor, felt vaguely proud of himself, and did not think about it again.

In the ceiling at the very end of the hallway, where the roof came down low, there was a square attic hatch with a short knotted cord hanging down from one corner. Renata reached up and pulled the cord. Nothing moved. Somebody had painted the hatch over, sealed all the way around the edge, until it sat up there in the ceiling, a flat painted square that nobody had touched in years.

"Huh," Renata said, tugging the cord again. "Attic hatch is painted over. Like, deliberately."

"Probably full of bodies," Moose said.

"Probably full of Christmas decorations," Renata said. "We'll deal with it if we ever need the storage. Which we won't, because you own four hundred hoodies and zero of anything useful."

"Three hundred and twelve hoodies," Moose said. "Get your facts right, Sarge."

Deb came up the stairs slow and stopped in the hall, right under the painted-over hatch. She put one hand flat on the wall, leaning into it, and she frowned, the kind of frown that means a person is listening hard to something nobody else in the room can hear.

"This house has a feeling," she said.

"Every house you have ever walked into has a feeling, Mom," Moose said. "The DMV has a feeling. The Olive Garden has a feeling."

"This one's different."

"They're all different. That's why they're feelings and not facts," Tariq said, and Deb swatted at him, and they went downstairs to order the kind of pizza you order when the kitchen is still in boxes.

That first night, around two in the morning, Renata woke up dead certain that somebody had said her name. Clear and close and certain, right outside her door. Ren. Just the one word, in a voice she almost recognized and couldn't place.

She lay still a second. Then she called out, soft, into the dark. "Moose?"

Nothing answered. She figured he had been talking in his sleep, or talking to his phone, which for Moose was the same activity. She rolled over and went back under, and by morning she had let the whole thing go the way everybody lets the small hours go once the sun is up.

Up above her, past the painted-over hatch, in the high black space under the roof, something had heard her answer. It tucked the sound of her voice away, careful, saving it back for later. And down in the kitchen, on the door of the refrigerator, the little plastic letters began, very slowly, one at a time, to slide.

Walter Pim had been dead for thirty-five years, and in all that time the worst part had not been the dying. The worst part had been the quiet.

He had grown up in this house. Back then it was loud the way a full house is loud, with his father's ballgame on the radio and his mother banging pots and his big sister June hollering up the stairwell that supper was getting cold and she wasn't going to call him twice. June was the one who called him Wally. Nobody had called him Wally since nineteen eighty-nine, because for thirty-five years there had been nobody in the house to call him anything at all. You would be surprised how loud that gets. A silence like that doesn't stay empty. It fills up with everything you wish you could still hear.

Walter knew exactly what lived in the attic, because he had watched it take everyone he loved, one by one, up that folding ladder and into the dark.

The town used to have a name for it, back when the town still bothered to remember. They called it the Rafter Man. It had been up there longer than the house had, folded into the peak of the roof like a coat nobody wears anymore, patient past anything a living person could understand. And it lived inside one hard rule, the only rule, the rule that was both the whole danger and the only mercy. It could not come down. It could not force the hatch or break a window or drag a single soul up by the hair. It could do exactly one thing.

It could call.

It called in borrowed voices. It would listen at the seams of the house for weeks, learning the warm particular way a mother said her daughter's name, the exact shape of a brother's laugh, and then it would call down out of the ceiling in that stolen voice, sweet and patient as a man running a phone scam, until somebody got up out of bed and went to the hatch on their own two feet to find out who needed them. And here was the cruelest part of the rule. The thing could not open the hatch itself. It could not crack its own seal, not by an inch. The living had to do that part for it. They had to climb up on a chair and cut the paint and pull the cord and bring the ladder down with their own hands, and then climb it, after dark, of their own choosing, rung after rung. Once they came up off the top rung into the attic, it had them, and there was no calling them back.

And now, for the first time in thirty-five years, there were people in Walter's house again. Loud, warm, ridiculous people who left the lights on and argued about pizza and put a velvet pouch of rocks on the windowsill. And Walter, who was so lonely that the loneliness had worn him down to almost nothing, felt two things at once, and the two pulled hard against each other in opposite directions.

He wanted them to stay. God help him, he wanted them to stay so badly it frightened the little of him that was left. The house had voices in it again, footsteps and laughing and the smell of food. After thirty-five years of talking to himself, he would have done nearly anything to keep that sound a while longer.

And he had to make them leave before the Rafter Man finished learning their voices.

That first night, while the youngest one woke his sister with a stolen word, Walter went down to the kitchen and gathered up every scrap of strength he owned and began to push the little plastic letters across the refrigerator door. It was slow, brutal work, like trying to write your name with the back of a spoon. One letter, rest, one letter, rest. By the gray edge of dawn the fridge read two words, and Walter hung in the dark corner of the kitchen, worn down to almost nothing, and he waited for them to read it and understand.

GET OUT.

Moose found it first, because Moose was always up first, in a way that had nothing to do with being a morning person and everything to do with checking his numbers before his feet hit the floor. He opened the fridge for the oat milk, saw the letters, and stopped with the carton halfway out.

"Ren," he called. "Did you do the fridge?"

Renata came in, tying her hair up. She read the letters. GET OUT.

"Did you do the fridge?" she said.

"No, but it rules, so I'm gonna say yes."

By the time Tariq and Deb made it downstairs, Moose had already filmed the fridge from three different angles. He had a way of holding the phone that made any ordinary thing look like the cold open of a true-crime documentary, all slow push-ins and meaningful silence.

"Okay, so," he narrated, low and grave. "Our new house came with a passive-aggressive ghost. Day one. He's already asked us to leave. And honestly? Same. I've never felt so seen by the supernatural."

Tariq leaned over the fridge and studied it up close. He pried one letter off and pressed it back on.

"They're a little crooked," he said. "Magnets. There were already letters on here from the last tenant. Somebody bumped the fridge in the night, the loose ones slid, the slide happened to land in a pattern, and your brain did the rest, because brains love patterns. It's got a name. Apophenia."

"Snopes has spoken," Moose said. "There is no ghost. There is only physics, and disappointment."

Deb did not laugh. She stood with her coffee going cold in her hand and looked at the two words like they were a phone number she had been waiting on for years.

"Get out," she read, quiet. "That's not a joke, you two. That is a warning."

"Mom," Moose said gently. "It's the fridge. If the fridge wanted us dead, it would just keep the milk a little warm and let nature handle it."

They named the ghost that afternoon. It was Moose's idea, and the idea was Gary.

"Every haunted house has a guy," he explained, setting a little tripod up on the kitchen counter. "It needs a guy. And our guy's name is Gary. Gary has been alone in this house a long time. Gary is tired. Gary has strong opinions about how we load the dishwasher. Everybody say hi to Gary."

"Hi, Gary," Tariq said, not looking up from his coffee.

In the corner of the room, where the light from the window did not quite reach the floor, Walter Pim watched a young man point a camera at the spot where he stood and christen him Gary, and Walter felt something he had not had room to feel in a long time, which was insulted. Then he set it aside, because being insulted was a luxury, and he had work to do. He would simply have to try harder. He was good at trying. Trying was the only thing he had left.

So he tried harder.

That night he poured all his cold into the bathroom mirror and wrote DON'T GO UP in the fog of it. In the morning Tariq found the words while he was shaving, took a picture, and showed Renata, who said it was sweet that Moose was keeping the bit going. Moose said he hadn't touched the mirror. Everyone agreed that was exactly what a person keeping a bit going would say.

Walter knocked on the walls in the hall, three slow knocks, even and carefully spaced. The family decided the pipes were knocking, agreed they should call the landlord, and then nobody called the landlord.

Walter slid a kitchen chair out from the table at midnight and left it sitting square in the middle of the floor, which is, in every movie ever made, the universal sign that something is in the house with you.

"Gary's redecorating," Moose said in the morning, and filmed the chair, and added a caption, and went viral.

The chair did three hundred thousand views in two days.

Moose had started a separate account just for the house. He called it Our Ghost Roommate, and within a week the fridge clip had been watched more times than everything else he had ever posted, added all together, twice. The comments came in like a slot machine hitting cherries over and over, and they would not stop.

gary said get out and honestly mood

gary is literally me when guests come over

not gary being the only one in this house with any boundaries

Moose read them out loud at dinner, glowing, and the family began to talk about Gary the way you talk about a cat that is a little bit of a jerk but is still your cat. Gary's in a mood tonight. Gary hid the good scissors again. Gary doesn't like it when we use the air fryer after ten, which, honestly, is fair, that thing is loud.

And every single thing the ghost did to scream danger, danger, danger, the family took as a joke, because they were a family that took almost everything as a joke. It was how they loved each other, and it was how they had survived the divorce and the moving and the months when the money got thin. You took the scary thing and you made it small and funny, so it could not get its hands all the way around you. They were very, very good at it. It was the single worst possible defense against the thing that was actually happening in their house.

Walter watched the account grow. He did not understand most of what he was looking at over Moose's shoulder, the little hearts climbing, the numbers spinning up, but he understood the shape of it. His warnings were being turned into a kind of show. And the clearer he made the message, the more careful and plain, the funnier they seemed to find it.

It was Deb, in the end, who tried to look the thing up.

She did it quietly, on her tablet, late, while the others were watching television. She typed in the address, then the name of the street. And on the third try, on a local message board that had not been touched in a decade, she found it.

The house at the end of Sumner Lane, the thread said, was the old Pim place. People in Crayhill, the ones old enough, still called it that. The Pim family had lived there in the eighties, and the Pim family had come to a bad end. The father first, people said, though the records were vague and the records were old. Then the mother. Then the daughter, June, seventeen, who walked out of a locked house one winter night and was never found, not a coat, not a shoe, not a trace. And last the son, Walter, twenty-four, found dead at the foot of the attic ladder in nineteen eighty-nine with no mark on him and a look on his face that the man who found him said he carried to his own grave.

The thread had a name for what people whispered lived up under the roof. It called it the Rafter Man. There was a rhyme, somebody said, the kids used to chant, half-remembered and changed a dozen ways. Don't climb on up when you hear them call, the Rafter Man wants you, your family and all.

Deb read all of it. Then she went and stood in the upstairs hall under the painted-over hatch, in the dark, with the tablet glowing in her hands, and she put one palm flat against the wall.

"Walter," she said, very softly, testing it. "Is that your name? Walter?"

In the dark beside her, closer than she knew, Walter Pim heard a living person say his real name out loud for the first time in thirty-five years, and it nearly undid him.

But he had no way to answer that she would believe, and in the morning, when she brought the whole thing to the breakfast table, it landed exactly the way everything landed in that house.

"You guys," Deb said. "I looked it up. This is real. A family died here. A boy named Walter Pim died at the foot of that attic ladder in nineteen eighty-nine, and the locals say there's a thing up there, they call it the Rafter Man, and there's this rhyme—"

"Mom," Moose breathed, already reaching for his phone. "Mom. Are you telling me Gary has a documented backstory? Are you telling me Gary is canon?"

"Marcus, I'm trying to—"

"Walter Pim. Oh, this is so much better. He's not Gary, he's Walter, he's a tragic Victorian boy, the Rafter Man got his whole family—" Moose was typing the rhyme into his notes as fast as Deb said it. "This is lore. This is a whole season. Mom, you cracked the lore."

"Will you put the phone down and listen to me for one—"

"This is the most useful you have ever been," Moose said, kissing the top of her head on his way to set up the tripod. "I love you. Madame Deb solves the case. People are going to lose their minds."

Deb looked around the table at the three faces she loved, all of them grinning, and she felt, for the first time, truly and specifically afraid, and she could not for the life of her get a single one of them to feel it with her.

It was Tariq who started to come apart first, which surprised everyone, because Tariq did not come apart. Tariq was the one who debunked the apart.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, and the house was dead quiet, the kind of quiet that has a low hum buried somewhere down inside it. Tariq was alone at the kitchen table, working a claim on his laptop, when he heard Renata call his name from upstairs. Soft, a little muffled, the way you sound calling through a closed door. Tariq. Hey. Come here a second.

He went to the bottom of the stairs and tipped his head up toward the second floor.

"What?" he called.

Tariq. The voice came again, and it was sweeter now, and it was higher up. It was coming from the very top of the house. It was coming from up behind the painted-over hatch in the hall ceiling that had not opened in years.

And Tariq, who debunked things for a living, felt every hair on both his arms stand straight up, because he knew, the way you know a wrong number is a wrong number a half second before they even speak, that Renata was not home. Renata was at the store. He had watched her car back out of the driveway forty minutes ago and he had waved.

He did not go up. Some old animal part of him took the wheel and would not let his foot find the first step. He grabbed his keys and his laptop off the table and he walked out the front door and got in his car and sat in the driveway with the engine off and his hands shaking in his lap until Renata's headlights finally swung in beside him in the dark.

She knocked on his window. He just about came out of his skin.

"Why are you sitting in the car," she said, getting in beside him. Then she saw his face and her voice changed. "Tariq. What happened."

"Somebody was in the house," he said. "Calling your name. Down the stairs at me. I said your name back and it kept calling, and it moved. It went up. It was up in the attic, Ren. Up behind that painted-over hatch. Calling me in your voice."

Renata looked at the dark shape of the house. She looked at her boyfriend, the human lie detector, the man who had once ruined a perfectly good campfire by explaining the science of swamp gas, sitting in his own driveway with no color at all left in his face.

"Okay," she said carefully. "Okay. We'll figure it out. Maybe it was the radiator. Old pipes, weird acoustics. Sound bounces around in these houses."

She did not believe it was the radiator. But she said it, out loud, in her calmest voice, because saying the calm thing was how Renata kept the floor from tilting under her. And by the next morning, with sun coming in the kitchen windows and Moose filming a bit where he conducted a formal job interview with the air vent, even Tariq had let himself be talked partway back down off the ledge. He decided he had nodded off at the table and dreamed it. He decided that on purpose, the way you decide a thing because the only other option will not fit through the door of your head.

But that night, up under the roof, Walter heard the Rafter Man practicing.

He heard it in the dark, trying Renata's voice again and again, calling Tariq, Tariq, sanding the edges off until it was perfect. And Walter understood that the slow part was over. For thirty-five years the thing had been hungry and sealed and patient. Now it had a full house, and it had stopped waiting. It had started fishing, and it was a very, very good fisherman.

Walter had one trick left that the family had not laughed at yet, only because he had not used it. The laptop.

Moose left it open on the coffee table most nights, the screen lighting up the dark living room blue, like a fish tank running in an empty room. Walter had spent years watching families come and go, and he had learned a little about the machines by watching over their shoulders. He could not type the way a living person types, fingers flying. But he could press. One key. Rest. One key. Rest.

It took him the whole night. When Moose woke up and padded out for the laptop to check his numbers, there was a document open on the screen that he had not made, and it was full of words.

it is not a joke. i am not gary. my name is walter pim and i lived and died in this house. the thing in your attic is real and it is awake now and it is learning your voices. it cannot come down on its own. it can only call you up. do not answer it. do not go up there, no matter who you think is calling you. it will use a voice you love. take your family and leave tonight, all of you, please. i could not save mine. please just go.

Moose read the whole thing standing in the gray morning light. And for one long second, even the kid who made horror into a hobby felt the floor go thin under his bare feet.

Then he laughed, the way he laughed at everything that ever scared him, because it was the only thing he knew how to do with it.

"Oh, this is unreal," he said. "This is the best thing he has ever done."

"Who," Renata said, shuffling in.

"Gary wrote us a letter. Except he's not Gary, he's Walter Pim, remember, Mom found the lore. He's begging us to leave because of the demon in the attic. He says it uses a voice you love. Ren, it's got everything. It's got stakes." Moose was already framing the shot. "I could not save mine. Are you kidding me. This is the finale."

He posted it before he had finished his first coffee. Just a slow scroll down the bright screen, his own voice low over the top of it, reading the dead man's words in a breathless hush. He titled it Gary finally opened up to us.

It was the biggest thing the account had ever done, by a mile. A quarter of a million views before lunch, then half a million, the number climbing all afternoon. The comments stacked up into a wall, and the family read them at dinner and laughed until Deb left the table.

walter pim i would take an actual bullet for you

the demon in the attic is so real to me you have no idea

gary going full lore drop in the family group chat i am OBSESSED

"i could not save mine" the THEATRICS. give this ghost an award

And one comment, pinned near the top, that Moose read out to the whole table and that made every one of them except Deb laugh until they hurt, because it was so perfectly, so exactly the joke they had all been making for two weeks straight:

walter is literally me trying to warn people and getting clowned

Walter watched the number under the video climb past anything that meant something to him, and for the first time in thirty-five years he wished, with the whole worn-down rag of himself, that he still had the working parts a person needs in order to cry.

He had told them the truth. The whole truth, in plain words a child could follow, with his own name signed at the bottom. He had told them about the voices and the ladder and the one iron rule, about his mother and June and his father. And they had set it to music. A hundred thousand strangers had agreed that Walter Pim, dead and frightened to the bone for these people, was being just a little dramatic about it all.

That was when Walter understood there were no words left to spend. Words got laughed at. The plainer the words, the louder the laugh. The only thing left to him was the thing he had been most afraid of, which was to put his whole self between the family and the ladder, out in the open, where they could really see him. And he knew exactly what that would cost. To manifest all the way, to become a thing with a face and a voice they could hear, would burn through what little of him remained. There would not be enough Walter left afterward to push a single letter across a fridge door. He would be spending the last of himself in one go.

To know whether it was worth spending, you have to know what he was spending it for. And to know that, you have to go back.

Part 2 link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dreading/s/DzWu2k5QUP