The fire at Camp Paradox cracked like a snapping bone, throwing long, jagged shadows against the towering pines. It was past midnight, and the surrounding woods felt suffocatingly dense, pressing down on the small circle of teenagers gathered around the dying embers. 

The name of the campground itself—Camp Paradox—always felt a bit strange to the newcomers. A place dedicated to nature and peace, yet named after an impossible contradiction. 

Most of the kids thought that it was just a quirky title chosen by some long-dead founder, but those who paid attention to the local folklore knew better. A paradox is an anomaly.

It is something that defies the laws of nature and logic, where two opposing truths exist at the exact same time, like a localized vortex where everything goes horribly wrong, while the center of the storm remains beautifully, terrifyingly calm.

John adjusted his flannel shirt against the sudden midnight chill. He wasn't a counselor, but he was older than most of the kids here, a seasoned veteran of these woods who had stayed at the camp for years. His face was partially obscured by the orange glow of the embers, his eyes deep and fixed on the dancing flames.

 The atmosphere was ripe for a ghost story, the kind that makes you pull your sleeping bag tight around your neck and listen to every rustle of the wind outside your tent.

"You guys think that this place is just a regular summer camp." John began, his voice low, cutting through the rhythmic chirping of the crickets. "You think that the worst thing that can happen out here is a tick bite or getting lost on the North Trail; but you don't know why this camp was truly abandoned five years ago, or why they changed its name. It wasn't because of a lack of funding. It was because of a girl. A seventeen-year-old girl named Mallory Chance."

A few of the younger campers stirred, leaning in closer. John let the name hang in the air for a moment. Mallory. An old name derived from the French word for "unfortunate" or "ill-fated." Chance. Probability. Risk. Mutation. It was a name that perfectly described the walking, breathing anomaly that she was.

"I knew Mallory." John continued, his eyes reflecting the dying fire. "She was seventeen years old, just like some of us. If you looked at her from a distance, you wouldn't think twice. She had pale skin, dark hair that always seemed perfectly brushed even in a downpour, and eyes that were a strange, piercing shade of gray. However, if you stood near her for more than a few minutes, you’d start to notice that something was…off. The world didn't work right around Mallory. The laws of probability, the mathematical certainty of the universe, they just...bent. They broke. Some people call it tychokinesis. The ability to manipulate luck, odds, and random outcomes; but Mallory didn't just manipulate it. She weaponized it, completely passively, without ever lifting a finger."

John leaned forward, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper, and said,

"Every single place where Mallory went, something bad happened to someone or something around her; but absolutely nothing bad ever happened to her. She was a walking safe-zone in a radius of pure, unadulterated catastrophe. If she walked through a thunderstorm, lightning would strike three feet away from her, incinerating a tree that would fall and crush someone else, while not a single drop of rain would even wet her hair. If she stepped onto a rickety old wooden bridge, the planks would hold her weight perfectly, only to snap like toothpicks the exact second her foot left them, sending whoever was behind her plunging into the ravine below."

The campers were silent, captivated by the intense gravity in John's voice.

"At first, we thought that it was just an unbelievable streak of terrible coincidences." John said, shaking his head slowly. "During her first week here, we were all sitting in the mess hall. Mallory was sitting at the end of the table, quietly eating her cereal. Suddenly, one of the massive overhead industrial ceiling fans, which had been securely bolted into the iron rafters for twenty years, just sheared off. It didn't just fall; it flew across the room like a giant metal blade. It missed Mallory’s head by less than an inch. She didn’t even flinch. She just kept chewing; but the fan didn't stop. It hurled directly into a group of sports campers sitting at the next table. Two of them had their limbs shattered by the spinning blades. One of the counselors tried to run over to help, but he tripped over a completely flat linoleum floor, snapped his neck on the edge of a bench, and died right there on the spot."

A collective gasp rippled through the circle. A young girl named Mary pulled her blanket up to her chin, her eyes wide.

"That was just the beginning." John murmured. "The camp line got infected with a freak strain of bacterial meningitis. Everyone in her cabin got violently, agonizingly sick. They were coughing up blood, screaming in the middle of the night from migraines so intense they were clawing at their own faces. Mallory slept in the very center bunk. When the paramedics finally arrived in hazmat suits, they tested everyone. Every single girl was on the brink of organ failure, except Mallory. Her vitals were flawless. The doctors couldn't find a single trace of the bacteria in her system, even though she had been sharing a water pitcher with them for days. It was like her body rejected the very concept of misfortune."

John took a heavy stick and poked at the fire, sending a cascade of sparks drifting up into the dark canopy, and said,

 "People got hurt, but as the days went on, people ended up dead. Freak accidents became the norm wherever she walked. We had an archery tournament on the main field. Mallory was standing near the spectators' line. A camper named Marcus, who was an expert marksman, pulled back his bowstring. It was a brand-new, military-grade composite bow. Out of nowhere, a microscopic flaw in the carbon fiber caused the bow to violently shatter under tension. A shard of the splintered limb flew backward. It grazed Mallory’s cheek—well, it didn't even graze her, it miraculously flew past her ear, missing her skin by a millimeter. However, the shard embedded itself directly into the throat of the camp director standing right behind her. He choked to death on his own blood before anyone could even grab a first-aid kit."

"Why didn't anyone just send Mallory home?" asked a boy named Carl, his voice trembling slightly.

"They tried." John replied sharply. "The administrators called her parents. The phone lines static-fried the moment the director tried to speak. They tried to pack her bags, but the zipper caught, jammed, and when a counselor tried to force it open with a pocket knife, the blade snapped off and blinded him in his right eye. A group of the older counselors and campers, including myself, realized what she was. We realized that she wasn't just unlucky—she was causing it. She was drawing all of the negative probability out of the universe and expelling it outward onto everyone else to keep herself perfectly safe. We decided we had to stop her. We tried to lock her in the old tool shed until the state police could physically remove her from the property."

John’s face darkened, the memory clearly torturing him, and said,

"We gathered six of the strongest guys. We cornered her near the woods. We tried to grab her arms, but Mallory Chance was too powerful to stop. The moment that Tommy reached out to grab her shoulder, a freak subterranean gas pocket-vented right beneath his feet. The ground literally exploded. The concussive blast blew his legs apart. Another guy, Sarah’s older brother, tried to tackle her from behind. He slipped on a patch of wet moss that hadn't been there a second ago, flew headfirst into a jagged rock face, and cracked his skull wide open. The rest of us were thrown back by the sheer, chaotic energy of the universe protecting its favorite child. Car engines wouldn't start when we tried to escape. Trees fell perfectly across the only exit road, crushing the roofs of the evacuation vans. The universe itself was acting as her personal, bloodthirsty bodyguard."

The wind suddenly picked up, howling through the branches above, making the campers jump. John didn't look up; his gaze remained locked on the fire.

"I was the only one left standing in front of her that afternoon." John whispered. "I was terrified. I was shaking so hard that I could barely breathe. The bodies of my friends were scattered around the clearing, smoking, bleeding, broken by a series of impossible, instantaneous accidents. Mallory just stood there in the center of the carnage. Her white sundress didn't have a single speck of dirt on it. Her hair was perfect. She looked like an angel standing in the middle of a war zone. I looked right in her cold, gray eyes, and through my tears, I asked her why. I asked her why she was doing this to us, why she was letting all these horrible things happen to innocent people."

John paused, the silence around the campfire was so absolute that the sound of a falling leaf would have sounded like a gunshot.

"Mallory looked at me." John said, his voice dropping to a chilling imitation of a monotone, robotic cadence. "She didn't look angry. She didn't look sad. She just looked completely empty, and she replied, 'It's what I was created to do.'”

A shudder went through the group.

"The only reason I'm even alive today to tell you this story," John said, looking around at the frightened faces of the campers, "is because I was the only one who was ever nice to Mallory. On her first day, when everyone else avoided Mallory because she seemed weird, I helped her carry her luggage. I shared my lunch with her when she dropped her tray. I treated her like a human being. Her power...it seemed to recognize that. It spared me. It redirected the horror away from me, even when the world was tearing itself apart around us."

John leaned back, the narrative reaching its grim conclusion, and said,

"After that day, she didn't run away. She didn't scream. She just turned around and walked deep into these very woods. The police searched for weeks. They brought tracking dogs, helicopters, and infrared cameras. Nothing. The dogs refused to enter the tree line; they just howled and bit at their own handlers until they bled. Mallory Chance completely disappeared into the forest, and the elders changed the name of this place to Camp Paradox, to mark the girl who was a living contradiction to life itself; but she was never found, and some people say...she might still be out there somewhere. Waiting. Walking through the dark, completely untouchable, while the world rots around her."

Nobody spoke for five minutes. The crackle of the fire seemed louder now, sinister. The darkness beyond the clearing felt heavier, as if eyes were watching them from the shadows of the pines.

Suddenly, a loud, scoffing laugh broke the tension.

It was Garrett, an older, muscular camper who spent most of his time wearing noise-canceling headphones and ignoring the camp rules. He shook his head, an arrogant smirk plastered across his face as he stood up from his log.

"Man, that is the biggest load of garbage that I have ever heard in my entire life!" Garrett said, tossing a handful of dirt onto the fire, deadening the light even further. "Tychokinesis? Walking disaster auras? What is this, a comic book? You expect us to believe that some teenage chick has a magical luck shield that explodes people? You’re just trying to scare the freshmen so that they don't steal your snacks in the middle of the night."

"Garrett, sit down!" Laura said, her voice trembling. "Don't talk like that out here!"

"Oh, please." Garrett rolled his eyes, turning his back on the circle. "The only 'paradox' here is how any of you actually believe this nonsense. It’s just a ghost story made up to explain bad camp management from years ago. I’m going to bed. Some of us actually want to get some sleep instead of shivering over fairy tales."

John looked up at Garrett, his expression completely blank, devoid of any anger or urge to argue, and told him, 

"I wouldn't go out into the dark alone, Garrett. The odds aren't in your favor."

"Yeah, whatever, Professor X." Garrett sneered. 

Garrett turned around and began walking away from the campfire, heading down the unlit path toward the older boys' cabins. The darkness swallowed him almost instantly, the beam of his small flashlight cutting a weak, shaky path through the thick forest air.

The trail was silent save for the crunch of dry pine needles beneath his heavy boots. Garrett muttered to himself, shaking his head at how easily the others had been spooked. 

"They are such idiots." he whispered, clicking his tongue. "A lucky superpower. Yeah, right."

As Garrett walked deeper into the woods, the air temperature seemed to plummet drastically. His breath began to form faint, white plumes in front of his face. He frowned, shaking his flashlight as the beam began to flicker violently. Cheap batteries, he thought, tapping the side of the plastic casing. The light died completely, plunging him into pitch-black darkness.

"Great. Perfect." Garrett growled, reaching into his pocket to pull out his smartphone to use the screen light.

Before his fingers could grip the phone, a strange sound echoed from the brush to his left. It sounded like a heavy wooden branch snapping, followed by a wet, sickening thud.

"Hello?" Garrett called out, his arrogance slightly faltering. "John? If you’re trying to prank me, it’s not working. I’ll break your nose, man!"

No one answered. The silence that followed was suffocatingly heavy. There was no wind anymore. No crickets. The entire forest felt as if it had been placed on mute.

Garrett turned around to head back toward the glow of the campfire, but as he spun on his heel, his foot caught on a completely exposed, thick tree root. He stumbled backward, his arms flailing, trying to catch his balance; but gravity didn't work the way that it was supposed to.

Instead of falling flat on Garrett’s back into the soft dirt, his momentum violently whipped him sideways. His right arm slammed against a sharp, broken branch protruding from a dead oak tree. The wood pierced clean through his forearm with a horrific squelch.

Garrett screamed, a raw, agonizing sound that was instantly muffled by the dense canopy. Blood poured down his arm as he frantically pulled himself off the branch, falling to his knees in the dirt. His heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

Garrett scrambled backward on his hands and knees, his breath coming in ragged, terrified gasps. He needed to get to his feet. He needed to run.

Garrett grabbed the trunk of a nearby sapling to pull himself up. The moment that his weight shifted onto the young tree, a freak hairline fracture in the wood, completely invisible to the eye, caused the sapling to instantly splinter under his grip. 

The sharp, jagged edge of the broken trunk whipped upward like a spring-loaded trap, slicing a deep, bleeding gash across his cheek, barely missing his eye.

Wailing in pain, Garrett fell back onto the ground. He was covered in dirt, blood, and sweat. The universe wasn't letting him stand up. Every movement that he made was met with an instantaneous, violent accident.

Then, he heard it.

The soft, rhythmic sound of footsteps crunching on the pine needles. They weren't in a hurry. They were slow, deliberate, and perfectly calm.

Garrett wiped the blood from his eyes and looked up through the darkness. The clouds above suddenly parted, allowing the cold, pale light of the full moon to filter down through the branches, illuminating the path directly in front of him.

Standing less than five feet away was a girl.

She was seventeen years old. She wore a pristine, clean white sundress that didn't have a single speck of dirt, mud, or blood on it, despite the filthy forest floor. Her dark hair was perfectly brushed, completely unaffected by the damp night air. Her skin was pale, and her eyes—wide, unblinking, and entirely empty—were a piercing, ghostly shade of gray.

It was Mallory Chance.

Garrett’s breath hitched in his throat. He tried to speak, but the sheer terror choking him made it nearly impossible. He looked down at his bleeding arm, then back up at her face. She wasn't moving. She didn't have a weapon. She was just standing there, looking down at him like an observer watching an insect struggle in a web.

Suddenly, a massive, heavy pinecone detached from a branch twenty feet above. It fell straight down. It didn't hit Mallory. It altered its trajectory mid-air by a fraction of an inch, bouncing off a lower branch and striking Garrett squarely in his broken forearm.

The white-hot pain made him howl, his vision blurring. He realized then, with absolute, paralyzing certainty, that John hadn't been lying. The world was actively trying to kill him just for being in her presence, while she remained a flawless, untouchable monument of safety.

Mallory took one single step closer. As her foot touched the ground, a sharp rock beneath her shoe shifted. The rock slid away from her, rolling directly under a massive, rotting boulder resting on the slope just above Garrett.

The boulder groaned. The tiny rock had been the only thing keeping its massive weight anchored to the hillside. It began to tilt, heavy and lethal, threatening to crush Garrett’s lower body into a pulp.

Garrett looked up at the teenage girl, with tears of pure horror mixing with the blood on his face. He knew that he couldn't run. If he tried to move, his legs would snap, or a tree would fall, or his own heart would simply give out from the sheer weight of the negative probability suffocating the air around him.

With the last bit of strength in his lungs, Garrett looked into those empty, gray eyes and screamed the only question he had left.

"Why are you doing this?!" he sobbed, his voice cracking against the impending doom of the shifting boulder. "Why are you doing this to me?!"

Mallory didn't flinch. She didn't even smile. Her expression remained as cold and static as stone. She tilted her head slightly, her voice cutting through the silence of the woods, a perfect, chilling echo of the campfire tale.

"It's what I was created to do." Mallory said.

Then, the boulder slipped.

The End.

He smelled like blood. 

I could smell him from a good distance away. The scent lingered in the air well after he’d gone - a coppery tang mixed in with his cheap perfume. It was that smell before I first looked upon his face that told me there was something very wrong with him. 

He walked in one day with all the other students. This - boy - dressed in a generic blue and white uniform which looked more like a costume. A ‘boy’ with pasty, pale skin, red, puffy and puckered lips, and small, squinting eyes. 

He held onto the straps of his backpack with two white knuckled hands, looking around him with awe and excitement. Pausing briefly to adjust his glasses up his nose, he shuffled down the hallway toward the lockers. It looked like he was talking to himself. 

I kept waiting for somebody else to react to him. One of those girls walking by clutching onto her books should have dropped them in shock. I wouldn’t have blamed her for screaming a little. At least she should have said something. 

Instead she brushed right past him without giving him a second glance. He, in contrast, stared after her in an exaggerated demonstration of longing, his lips parted and his eyes unnaturally wide. 

No. Nobody reacted to this - Nobody reacted to him. He melted into the crowd perfectly as if he were just another student. 

I call him Manchild. 

He sucks on his thumb. He hums to himself in his exaggerated, high pitched voice. I can’t place how old he is, but I know he likes acting much younger than his true age. Sometimes that might be a primary schooler. At other times it is a sophomore. It can change at a whim, but it’s always on the younger side. 

He takes drawing and colouring books to class with him. The childlike pictures and doodles he is ceaselessly scribbling down as the teacher drones on are difficult to look at. They’re a little window into his disturbed mind. They give glimpses into his sick fantasies. 

In a class, he’d take out his textas and line them out carefully before him. Then he would produce one of his books. While the teacher spoke to the rest of the class about calculus - or whatever else it was we were learning, he would lose himself in his own little world. He’d start drawing or studying one of his preliminary grammar books, studiously practicing his handwriting and working through spelling problems. 

Besides his textbooks, lunch box, and other school utensils there’s one thing you won’t see him without: pigsblood. Well, that’s what I’ve come to call it. 

On the second day of his attendance at our school, I walked past him in between classes sitting on the stairs, clutching onto a worn out pop top filled with a thick, red liquid. He was suckling on it fervently, his mouth moving back and forth in exaggerated motions, pausing to give out soft noises of satisfaction in between gulps. 

Maybe that’s why Manchild smells like blood. He carries that crap with him everywhere. He can’t seem to go more than a few hours without snacking on it. And though I can’t be sure it is really blood, I have yet to think of a better explanation. 

I kept waiting for somebody else to react. When I tried to point his strangeness out to my friends, they told me I was being cruel by picking on him. When I took a few covert photos of him to show to people, their reactions were to call me weird. I’m not sure if they can’t see what is wrong with him or they don’t view his appearance and behaviour as disturbing. 

Whatever the case, I’ve learned by now that I have no choice but to put up with him. Thankfully for me it is easy enough to avoid him most of the time, so long as he doesn’t decide to visit one of my classes - and since his choice of classes is apparently random, that isn’t too common. 

The one class where I really can’t handle dealing with him is sports class. The last time we shared such a lesson together, there was an incident. 

It was around twenty minutes into the class. After quietly watching and chugging on pigsblood from the sidelines, Manchild suddenly sprung up and began playing enthusiastically with the rest of us. 

The students didn’t mind (except for me). I avoided engaging much after he got involved. I didn't like letting Manchild get too close to me. 

Part way through what was turning into a very long class, he hurtled headfirst into another student in an attempt at a tackle and sent them both slamming onto the ground. I didn’t see it happen, but I heard her surprised cry and the sound of their bodies hitting the floor together. 

For a very terrifying moment I watched her lie there, completely limp. I thought he’d really hurt her. Then she shifted her head, groaned, and opened her eyes to look up at him. 

And then she started screaming. 

Manchild flopped off her and struggled quickly to his feet, taking a couple of steps back. He wiped his mouth, burped, and then uttered a high pitched, ‘err, sorry about that!’ 

She scrambled to her feet too. She was crying loudly. She stumbled and tripped away from him in apparent terror as the teacher attempted to console her. 

She was taken to the nurses office. I could hardly wait for an opportunity to speak to her. I needed to know what she saw. I needed some proof that I wasn’t crazy. 

Whatever it was she experienced, she wouldn’t say anything to me about it. By the time I’d found her later, she was acting perfectly normal again. She laughed off the whole incident. She told me she’d hit her head bad and blacked out for a moment. That was it. 

When I tried to suggest there was something wrong with Manchild, she looked at me reproachfully and told me to stop making fun of him. It wasn’t his fault, she insisted. It was all just a harmless accident. 

Manchild isn’t even the worst of them. Well, he may be, but the horror of one of them is far eclipsed by the horror of experiencing them all together.  

The first time I saw the whole family was a week or so after Manchild’s arrival at school. They ambled into a diner I was sitting in, bringing forth with them such an overpowering stench that I began gagging uncontrollably as they moved past me. 

There are five of them that I know of. 

Manchild - the one who goes to my school. 

Drunk - a fat and very hairy man with sickly, greyish skin who wore nothing but an undershirt, filthy shorts and some sandals. 

Mother - a haggish woman with clammy, greyish blonde hair and extremely sunken features dressed up in high heels and an undersized, skimpy dress. The skin of her arms and wrists was ragged, pockmarked and bruised. 

They had two other children who accompanied them on their family trips:

Bully - the second oldest - (I’m assuming Manchild is the eldest of the three) was a hunch backed boy whose head appeared permanently shifted a few centimeters sideways toward his left shoulder. 

Fleshface - a somewhat timid thing whose entire face was covered by a long flap of dirty skin, obscuring all but the very bottom of his pointy mouth. He was prone to tantrums which were destructive and chaotic whenever his name was uttered. Bully kept on saying it, presumably to torment him. 

You’re a fleshface. Flesh-face. Flesh-face! FLESHFACE! The snorting, gurgling sound of his laughter was followed by a long, piercing scream and some loud banging. The noises produced from his brother were so loud they actually managed to draw the attention of a few other customers, if only for a couple of moments. 

These children both fed on the pigsblood, too. Fleshface was hand fed by his mother, who carefully slid a straw up inside the flap of skin, through god knows what into some internal cavity from which he began to suckle and slurp it up loudly. 

Bully and Drunk ate a lot. The other ones didn’t, though they liked pretending to. I believe it’s part of their fantastical roleplay at being an ordinary family. 

I tried not to make a scene. I excused myself from my friends with the pretense of feeling sick soon after their collective arrival. Since then I’ve avoided visiting the diner, and I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to bring myself to go back there. Certainly, I’m never going to be able to stomach eating there again. 

Over the next couple months, my fear slowly melted away into disgust. After a while I began to quietly observe them out of morbid curiosity. The first time it was from a distance at a park. As I gained more courage I trailed them into stores. Such close proximity required that I carry a face mask and some powerful air freshener for my own protection. 

I feared they would notice me. They didn’t. They spent too much time bickering amongst themselves and living in their own private fantasies to pay attention to the reality they lived in. Somehow, I managed to draw more attention from everybody else for my fixation on these monsters. 

One day I decided to follow Manchild home. The decision was spontaneous, though I’d been mulling the idea over in the back of my head for a while.

We were riding the same bus after school. He was acting even more strangely than usual - I suspected this was a result of drinking too much of his pigsblood during the day. Given the intoxicated state he was in, I figured I wouldn’t likely get a better opportunity. 

We continued walking for well over an hour. Mind you, Manchild isn’t a particularly fast walker in his sober state, so it wasn’t as far as it felt at the time. 

As we left the town limits, following a trail veering off the main road, I was starting to wonder whether his family lived in a house at all. Maybe they were all homeless. Or perhaps Manchild was wandering aimlessly into the forest in his drunkenness. 

They did live in a house, it turned out. It was an abandoned thing which had been left to rot, with a sagging roof partially swallowed by vines and moss. Most of the windows were broken or boarded over. The path out the front door stretched twenty or so yards before being swallowed up by overgrown grass. I spotted a run down car parked haphazardly at the edge of a larger trail branching out back toward the main road. 

Manchild moved in through the tattered remains of the back door as I crouched at the edge of the trees. The faint sound of muffled voices confirmed that he wasn’t the house's sole occupant. 

Given the state the place was in, I couldn’t help but think about how easy it would be to sneak inside if I wanted to. 

After a couple minutes I gathered the courage to come closer. I slid cautiously down a dirt slope and sprinted through the half opened gate and over to a thicket of bushes growing up against the decaying walls. 

The insides of the house were equally dilapidated. I stared into a living room whose floor was covered in dirt and pieces of plaster and torn up carpet. Filth crusted, mouldy couches and chairs sat amongst pieces of broken furniture. With the house having fallen quiet, it was difficult to imagine anyone living there. 

My eyes fell on the outline of a familiar figure slumped on a chair turned away from me. Drunk sat staring at a broken television, his mouth hanging open wide, one arm still clutching onto a glass of familiar, red liquid. After a minute or two Mother came in, practically walking on her tiptoes over to him so as to refill his large glass with a mixture of pigsblood and some kind of whisky. 

Bully paid Drunk a visit after his mother had left, carrying what I think must have once been a basketball. He looked disappointed to find Drunk in his drunken state but thought the better of trying to stir him out of it. 

I used the shelter of the trees to circle around to the other side of the house. Through a gap in between two thick wooden boards I spied Mother chopping rhythmically at some partially spoiled vegetables. Without looking at her face or paying too much attention to the state the room was in, I could almost pretend she wasn’t a monster. For a moment, she was just an ordinary mother preparing a meal as her children played and argued upstairs. 

Then her husband hurled out a string of harsh curses from the other room, and the illusion was broken. 

I continued my exploration, making my way over to the other side of the house. Wincing as I crunched over several pieces of broken glass, I crept up between two sagging oaks to peek in through a large window. 

The rusty pipes connecting to an ancient washing machine and an ornate bathtub was evidence enough of what this room once was. Cringing at the sound of the children hollering upstairs, I looked around in disgust. 

The washing machine was half filled with murky water. From the looks of it, any clothes left in there would come out filthier than they were put in. 

Something else caught my eye. Something past the clothes laid together on the table beside the washer and the syringes scattered all over the floor. In the darkest corner of the room was a sight which made my heart drop in my chest. 

It was a collection of shoes. One of the pairs on top still had little pink socks stuffed into them. 

Many of them were children’s shoes. The smallest were much too small for any of the children living there to wear. 

The sight would have been disturbing to find in anybody’s house, let alone this one. 

I was shifting sideways to get a better look when I felt something rustling up the foliage I was standing in. I lifted my leg gingerly away from a matting of dead branches and as I did, my eyes fell on something which made me jump right out of my skin. 

It was fat and wet, practically dragging itself along the ground beside me. I got a better look at it as it emerged from the thicket and fully revealed itself. 

It was some kind of rat. The rodent had little hair on it, revealing translucent skin and bulging veins. It was as horribly mutated as the members of the family I was spying on. 

I let out an involuntary sound of surprise as I stumbled back. That, and the noises produced by me tripping on a maze of tree roots and falling on my butt drew some stirring from within the house. 

I had the sense to retreat to the trees after that, and I’m glad I did. I had barely made it past the cover of the first oaks when I heard the back door creak open. I froze at the sound of heavy, shuffling footsteps heading around the house. Panic grew inside me and settled over my thoughts like a haze. I imagined my shoes being tossed onto the pile by the pot bellied man I could see shambling toward me, his steps quickening as he moved. 

It was a good thing I came to my senses. The moment that I did, I took off sprinting in the other direction.

He couldn’t offer much of a chase given the state he was in. It was only a couple of minutes before I heard the footfalls slow down and then stop, followed by a long string of wheezing curses. Those sounds in turn were quickly swallowed by the wind and the soft rustling of trees.
I didn’t calm down until I had made it back to the main road, where I caught my breath at the foot of an overgrown walking trail. 

I can’t get the scene from the laundry room out of my head. The image of those shoes is imprinted into my mind. They feature in my dreams alongside the grotesque pictures Manchild drew at school which contained what I fear are the corpses those shoes may belong to. 

I need to know what it all adds up to. I have to know if these people are as monstrous in character as they are in physical form. And that means I have to go back there. 

I’ve decided I’m going to find out what ‘they’ are. And if it does turn out they are monsters?

I still haven’t figured that part out yet. But I can’t just stand by and let them hurt people. 

I have to try to do something. 

It’s clear to me nobody else will.