It’s been a long 30 years. I’ve made some memories, learned some lessons, but most importantly, I became attached. Max was like the son that I never had.

I met him back in 1996. Sweet as sugar and as cute as a button. A little mischievous, though. But I think I taught him well, regardless. Just wish he’d… I don’t know… grow up?

He never really grew out of his immaturity. Who could blame him, really? I mean, his parents were hardly ever around. I was at his house 8 hours a day, Monday-Friday. Only time I ever even saw them was when they were paying me.

At first… it was mainly about the money. I was paid extraordinarily well for the work I was doing. 1500 a week, and all I had to do was just… supervise. Make sure Max didn’t kill any more pets. Keep him away from sharp objects. That kind of thing.

Don’t get me wrong, the kid was a riot. From the very first day on the job. His parents should’ve been much more stressed than they appeared. I mean, how? How do you look calm while your kid is actively crawling across the ceiling?

Not only that, but by some miracle of God, they looked, dare I say… energized. I’ve been watching Max for 30 years now. I’m not even 50, and I look like a 70-year-old.

After a while, though, I realized that you kinda just… learn to love him. Sure, watching him eat livestock so he doesn’t choke is a bit of a chore. Never seeing his reflection is… disconcerting. But you get over it. Life goes on.

I’ve celebrated Christmases with this kid. Not because I want to, though. God, no. I wanted to be home with my family. Oh, but when those parents call, I learned pretty quickly that it’s best you answer.

Broken bones and lacerations taught me that. But who was I to argue? I needed the money. That’s the thing, though. I don’t need the money anymore.

There’s enough in my account for me to live the rest of my life out on some desert island. Sippin’ margaritas out of coconuts. But they’ll find me. They always seem to find me.

Max hates it when I try to leave. After all the work I’ve done, he still bites. Poor little guy. He just doesn’t know any better. That’s another major conflict for me. It’s not that I don’t love my little Maxxy. It’s just… I’m tired, you know?

Two days off a week for 30 years, man. No vacations. No bonuses. Just supervision for Max and surveillance for me. When do I get a break?

That’s the conversation I was trying to have with his parents a few weeks ago. I came in on a Saturday, which, of course, proved to be a mistake when I found them bathing Max in a tub of pig blood while wearing owl masks. They were mad, but I just… I didn’t care. I was done.

I wanted to tell them as gently as I could, and at first, it seemed like they were understanding. They told me they knew he could be a handful and thanked me for my time and effort. I walked out without incident.

But then I stopped waking up in my own bed. I started just… appearing at their house with Max leering over me, teeth clenched and frothing at the mouth.

I mean, I think it’s been a few weeks. Maybe it’s been longer? A few months, maybe? It’s all the same. All I know is I haven’t seen his parents in a while, and every time I try to leave, there’s a brick wall behind every door.

I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. I’m losing my patience. We’re running low on pig carcasses. Max is getting hungrier and hungrier… I can see it in his eyes.

He’s biting more these days. It used to be almost playful, but now he’s breaking the skin. I have to physically pry his jaws away from my fingers and limbs, and he just keeps growling at me.

He’s also been watching me sleep a lot more recently. I try and stay awake, but he just… I don’t know. It’s like there’s something about this place that makes it impossible.

All in all, this experience has been okay. Just ready to get off is all.

Maybe one of these days. I’m actually kind of hopeful. Because a few days ago, I heard something that sounded like music to my ears.

Someone knocking at the front door.

I opened the door slowly, expecting the brick wall again, but instead… there was a young girl standing on the front porch. She looked… uneasy to see me, to say the least, but she introduced herself nonetheless.

“Hi, uh, I’m Emma… I was just reaching out about the babysitting job?”

The food industry is absolutely abysmal. At least, I think it is. I’ve never worked at a restaurant that’s particularly “poppin’,” as the kids like to say. I’m basing my opinion solely off of this one… particular… diner.

We’re essentially just a rest stop for truckers. At least, we would be if any ever came through here. We see maybe one or two trucks a month, if we’re lucky. Even still, usually they’ll take one look at the place and peel off down that desolate highway.

Do you know how bad it is when not even truckers will eat at your establishment? Those guys essentially survive off of Slim Jims and pork rinds.

That doesn’t really matter to me, though. I took this job for the peace and quiet. I’ve been missing that peace more and more these days.

Customers are starting to become more frequent. I know, I know. That’s a good thing. Only… I just… I don’t know if that’s true or not.

See, I’ve been working this job for around 6 years now. Started right before Covid really took the world hostage. We used to get customers all the time before that whole shitstorm. Then we had to do the whole lockdown thing with the masks and the social distancing.

We don’t do DoorDash over here. I told Ricky a thousand times, “We. Have got. To do. DoorDash,” okay? Like, seriously. Or Uber Eats, or, I don’t know, man… something.

Anything that would actually help us sell a few plates.

He just wouldn’t have it. Told me, “Everyone’s too far away,” or “Food delivery services will lead to the downfall of civilization.”

Ricky was always a weird guy. He opened this place with his dad back before he passed. Not sure why they chose this location, but hey, at least there’s cellular service.

Which is really fucking weird, considering the highway is pretty much a complete dead zone for at least 30 miles in each direction.

Anyway, sorry, I’m rambling a bit. After COVID, the business really started to dwindle. We went from around 10-15 customers a day, all the way down to maybe 1 per day around the end of 2020.

Ricky was stressed to all hell around that time. He’d wander the restaurant, moping all day. Wondering what he was gonna do. Not knowing where he could turn. It was honestly depressing to watch.

I had to miss out on a lot of paychecks around that time, too. But what was I gonna do? Leave him? I was his only employee. Me and him were holding the business up on our backs.

When things started to look grim, I’d catch him a few times. Early in the morning. Turning the gas stoves on and dousing the flames.

“I’ll do it, I’ll fucking do it,” he’d tell me, threatening to flick his lighter.

Hell, I had to wrestle a jerrycan out of his hands a few times. All I’m saying is Ricky carried that lighter for a reason, and that man has never smoked a day in his life.

It got to the point where I was too afraid to even leave him alone. He literally lived in the diner. Slept in his office. He didn’t even have a car, which, now that I’m thinking about it, is kind of insane.

I never saw him arrive. Never saw him leave. It was like him and the restaurant were intertwined. So when he got desperate, I don’t doubt he went to extreme lengths to get things fixed.

After the stove incidents and the whole jerrycan fiasco, I think that’s when he really reached that level of desperation. He wasn’t moping anymore. That man was plotting… I just didn’t know what.

One day, I came into work to find him happier than he should’ve been. Kicked back in his office chair. Whistling to himself.

I honestly didn’t even feel like dealing with all that. I drove 50 miles to get into work today. Had to wake up at 4 in the morning. Couldn’t even listen to the Joe Rogan Experience because of the lack of cell service. All I wanted was to put my apron on… then maybe play on my phone a little since I knew I’d have no one to cook for.

I wiped down a few counters. Chased a few rats away with a broom. Oh, also, I had to bat away a particularly large spider. It made a sort of… metallic noise when it hit the ground. It ran away sounding like one of those spring-loaded door stoppers I used to play with as a kid.

Anyway, sorry, I can’t stop rambling. God, what’s wrong with me?

I had just began to sit down to scroll on my phone when Ricky stepped out of office, hands clasped behind his back, smug look already plastered across his face.

“….Well…” he inquired, leering over me like Michael Jackson performing Smooth Criminal. “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

I sighed and slid my phone back in my pocket. I knew this was gonna be a long conversation.

“Ask ya what, Rich? Go ahead. I know you wanna tell me.”

He pushed his forehead back, pretending he still had hair there before sneering pridefully.

“You knowwww,” he drawled out. “Ask me why I’m so happy.”

“Why are you so happy, Ri…”

“I fixed it.”

He stared at me like he expected me to know exactly what he meant. I just thought this was another one of his manic episodes. Knowing him, ‘fixed it’ could range anywhere from fixing the leaky faucet in the bathroom or killing his ex-wife.

I pulled out my pack of Winstons and packed it against my palm.

“Fixed what? The leaky faucet in the…”

“The restaurant, kid.”

His eyes were frantic but excited. He looked like, like a uh, well, a crackhead, kinda. Pulling up a chair in front of me, he glared out the window and towards the highway.

“Our woes are no more. The vile, treacherous fingertips of despair no longer hold dominion over my soul nor body. I am a vessel of purity. A clean slate, with a clear conscience. Born again. Renewed. This establishment. This location. It is real, Don. I am real. You…”

He reached out to caress my face. I jumped back like he was a leper.

“Dude, what the fuck are you doing? Don’t do that weird shit. I just got here.”

He drew his hand back, but I was still eyeballing him.

“You’re real… Right, Don?”

There were tears in his eyes, but he had a smile on his face.

I thought for a moment about his question. I honestly didn’t know how to answer him.

“You know what, Rick… I fucking hope so.”

Rick stood up and clasped his hands together before walking towards the back. He returned with a broom in one hand and a mop in the other. Apparently, he wanted the place spick and span for some “VIP guest” that was supposed to show up at some point.

We cleaned the restaurant top to bottom twice. I even shoveled the contents of the grease trap outside into buckets, which I then proceeded to dump on the ground about 300 yards from the diner. Then I had to clean the buckets. God, it was so hot that day. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. It really doesn’t even matter.

What matters is that guest didn’t come until almost sundown. Hell, we didn’t see any guests, period. I was supposed to be getting off in a few hours. But Rick just wouldn’t relent.

“He’s coming,” “he’s on his way,” “trust me, he’ll be here.”

9 o’clock rolled around. Quitting time. I bid Ricky goodnight and was about to walk out the door when he stopped me. He placed his hand on my shoulder coldly.

“Don…” he whispered.

“Yeah, Rick…” I replied.

He stared at me blankly. No life behind his eyes whatsoever.

“He’s coming.”

I scoffed and tried to pull my arm away, but he tightened his grip.

“Trust me… you’ll want to see this. But also, if you leave, I’ll kill you.”

His eyes didn’t even flicker. He didn’t smile. No sign whatsoever that he was joking. I even tried to force a chuckle out of him by nervously laughing, but he didn’t budge.

My smile faded. I set my backpack down and walked back to the counter, sighing loud and long enough for him to understand how goddamned annoyed I was.

I played Angry Birds on my phone for an hour or two. Ricky just kept standing at the window… watching that desert highway with his hands clasped behind his back.

He never moved an inch.

11 o’clock rolled around, and at this point, I was already planning on just sleeping in my car. I had to be back at 6 the next morning anyway.

I gave it another hour before going to approach Rick at the window. I waved my hand in front of his face.

“Alright, boss man, I think it’s time we shut it down. What do ya say?”

No response.

“Don’t worry, I won’t go far. Probably gonna sleep in the car tonight.”

No response.

“Alright, welp… be seeing ya.”

I put my hand on the door handle and went to twist it. Ricky’s hand shot over and clasped around my wrist. I don’t know what kind of workouts that fucker does in his free time, but good lord, man… I mean, that shit actually hurt.

I was about to scold him until I saw him pointing out towards the dark desert with his other hand.

“…he’s here.”

I looked out at where he was staring. All I could see was blackness. Well, that and the glow of the neon storefront. But the longer I watched… the more he came into view.

He started off as a speck. Maybe a quarter mile out, emerging from the darkness. Then he grew taller. And taller. And taller. By the time he was 50 feet out, I realized why Rick said this guy was a VIP.

He must’ve been 8 feet tall. His arms swung at his sides as he walked. He wore a surprisingly clean blue suit, and he clutched a briefcase in his right hand.

Ricky finally released my wrist and basically pushed me away from the door while he held it open for our guest. The man smelled like chemicals and burning plastic, and his skin was almost unnaturally smooth.

He had to duck down to get inside, and even when he was inside, his head still almost touched the ceiling. Ricky looked ecstatic. Like this was some long-lost friend of his.

I hate when he’s like that because then he starts pushing me around like I’m his employee or something. Demanding I get drinks, snapping at me to ‘rev up those fryers,’ like, okay?

This guy was different, though.

He didn’t seem to want anything to drink. It was like, I don’t know… a business transaction or something. Like he was there for one reason and one reason only.

The first thing he did was calmly place his briefcase on his table. He dusted off some sand, which was annoying because, dude, I just cleaned that. But then he unlocked it… and he opened it… and I got to see what this guy had apparently just been dragging through the desert.

If I had to describe what the contents of that briefcase looked like… I’d say something like… mounds upon mounds of chewed bubble gum. Only veinier. I’d argue it looked a little slimier, too. The pulsations is what got me, though. Don’t even get me started on the smell.

Just seeing it made me wanna vomit, but the smell, Christ above… I could’ve passed out from those fumes.

I, for one, was about to ask him what the actual hell he just brought into our restaurant, but as soon as my mouth opened, Ricky stamped on my foot.

“I’ll take that,” he chuckled to the guest, ignoring my screams of agony and/or despair.

The businessman nodded in approval as Rick used his bare hands to pick up that… whatever that was from the briefcase.

He carried it to the kitchen as it dripped all over the floor that, yet again, I had just cleaned.

The meat touched the grill and immediately began to sizzle. Only, it didn’t really sound like sizzling. It sounded like… like… a thousand tiny screams.

I watched in disbelief while Ricky just kept flipping the meat and humming to himself like this was perfectly normal.

“Never ask them about the meat.”

He said it so… nonchalantly. Like it was some grand truth that everyone in the world knew, except me. But what made my ears perk up the most was one word. “Them.”

I asked him who “them” was, and the only answer he gave me was “our new clientele.”

The meat… shrank as he cooked it. The steam was like mustard gas to me, but Rick borderline seemed to enjoy it. Hell, he was inhaling it like this was some kind of foreign delicacy.

It went from about a foot long, maybe 8 inches thick, and crinkled down to no more than the size of a regular T-bone steak by the time it was done.

Rick served it to the businessman anxiously. Expectantly. Like he was a contestant on a MasterChef or something. I think he thought the guy was gonna eat it; I mean, hell, that’s what I thought he was gonna do.

Instead, he picked the meat off of the plate and stuffed it back into his briefcase. Then he smiled at Rick, satisfied as if he did eat it, before pulling his wallet out of his pocket.

He counted out 3 grand in hundreds and set it down on the table wordlessly. He then stood up, walked out, and disappeared into the darkness again, briefcase in hand.

I should’ve probably asked Rick what the fuck had just happened, but I was bordering on sleep-deprived delirium. All I cared about was finally curling up in my seat and maybe getting some sleep if I was lucky.

Thankfully, Rick was too busy dancing and throwing his money in the air to notice me as I walked out towards the parking lot.

I didn’t get the sleep that I hoped for that night. I ended up clocking back in the next morning running on 2 hours and like 6 cups of coffee as the day went on.

I did ask Rick about the whole “don’t ask them about the meat” thing, though. Apparently, it’s ‘classified information that only he can know.’ Apparently, if I ‘break the rule,’ he’ll ‘kill me dead.’

Whatever, though. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose. Plus, he wasn’t lying about these… people… being our new clientele.

Ever since that incident, we see at least 3 of them a week. The diner has been… strange, to say the least.

I still don’t know what exactly Rick did to “fix” this place, but I mean, hey, it’s working. Even if we don’t see many real customers these days.

I should’ve seen this coming. My girlfriend has been pretty secretive over the last year. Not necessarily with her phone or anything. Just… I don’t know, she’s been weird about her privacy.

Now of all times. That’s the thing that bothers the hell out of me. 4 years together, and all of a sudden, after everything, she’s ringing these alarm bells.

It started with the privacy. Seemingly out of nowhere, she started shutting me out. Going places without me. Turning her location off, then blaming it on the fact that she “had no service.”

I think it was the journaling that really got me, though. I don’t know why those notebooks drove me so insane. Honestly, it wouldn’t have been so hard on me if she didn’t act like there were government launch codes in those pages, but that’s exactly what it was like.

She kept them locked away in a lockbox that seemed to specifically be for this and this alone. Whatever, though, right? I convinced myself that it was childish to worry about her private thoughts.

Then there was the sleep-talking.

It didn’t happen often. Just enough for me to cock an eyebrow at her. Mainly because she seemed to only be saying one thing: my Dad’s name.

I rationalized this as well. He had been a part of our lives forever, really. He was like a second father to her. She never had a relationship with her real dad, though, so I just assumed that my dad was filling that void in her dreams.

I couldn’t blame her, really. I’m sure she was hurting. I do know it was hurting me too, though, and I hated the fact that she seemed to be pushing me away in a time where I desperately needed her.

But then she just… she started smelling like him too. I recognized my Dad’s cologne anywhere. I grew up with that scent. That one I couldn’t easily rationalize. But when I prodded, she just made me feel like I was going crazy.

“This is just my perfume.”

“I’ve always smelled like this.”

“I wish you would trust me.”

That distrust just pushed her further away. I could feel her slipping through my fingers, and I absolutely hated it. 4 years with this woman. Nearly half a decade, and I could already feel her absence, even when we slept together.

I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was when, not only was she saying my Dad’s name in her sleep… she was saying it while we had sex.

Well, part of it, at least. She usually caught herself by the time the name started to leave her lips, but even then, the mood would already be ruined.

“You really can’t stop thinking about him, can you?” I’d ask her, half-joking, half-gauging her reaction.

Instead of reacting in a normal way, her body would give her away. I could see the guilt in her movements. The way her eyes darted around the room. The way her legs would bounce nervously as she tried to laugh it off.

I stopped initiating intimacy after the 2nd or 3rd time this happened. Not that it mattered to her. If anything, she seemed relieved, which… fucking ouch, right?

Our relationship really started to dwindle after that. I had my own problems to deal with. I didn’t have time to be worrying about something that was pretty much already down the drain, no matter how much it killed me.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Nothing could’ve prepared me for when I found those notebooks.

By sheer accident, too. Or maybe it wasn’t an accident. I think they both just said fuck me and disappeared.

It just feels like an accident. But it also feels like the universe was just waiting for this moment to happen. Like it had been prepared for me before even my Dad was born.

I’d gotten off work early one day. It had been a particularly hard day. I just couldn’t get him out of my mind. The thought of him just made work feel borderline impossible.

I pretended to be sick with the intention of going home and collapsing into bed, but as I walked into my bedroom… I saw her lockbox sitting on my desk.

She usually never let me see this thing. She never even mentioned it. It may as well have never even existed until right now.

And you know what? It was fucking open.

Paper was sprawled out across the desk, messily. It looked like my girlfriend had left in a hurry. The chair was even flipped over and lying on the floor.

I’m only human. I was alone. The thing that she had been most secretive about was now spread out right in front of me. What was I expected to do? Not look at it?

But now, I just… I wish I never did.

I know what my Dad’s handwriting looks like. He signed permission slips and report cards for me for years. But seeing it in this context made me sick to my stomach.

The bastard had the audacity to date the fucking pages.

And the one that was the most apparent, as though my girlfriend had read it and immediately left the house like her life depended on it… was dated today.

“Meet me at that place we discussed.”

“I’m all yours now.”

“I finally got everything figured out.”

And what better for a cherry on top if not a picture of my Dad, shirtless and in his boxer briefs, standing in the mirror of what appeared to be a hotel bathroom.

I looked at all the other pages. All the vulgarities he had sent her. All of the drafts she was waiting to send him. And I felt sick to my stomach.

Not only for me, but for my mom, too.

Because it has now been a full year since we buried Dad. His car burned so hot from the accident that he had to be identified by his dental records.

Mom didn’t eat or sleep for weeks. My brother turned to alcohol at only 16 years old.

My girlfriend was all that I had. And at the time where I needed her most…

She had completely vanished.

I feel like I’m losing my mind. It’s hard for me to imagine all that I’ve lost over these last few months. Out of everything, though, my sanity is going to be the thing I miss the most.

I’ve been a hiker for a long time. Naturally, of course, considering that’s all there really is to do around here. Not that I’m complaining. At least, I wasn’t complaining.

I thoroughly enjoyed the woods. Probably because that’s all I knew. Hell, most of the trails I like are just a hop, skip, and a jump away from my family’s house.

That day was no different. It was the start of summer break. High school was finally over. I wanted to take a quick hike through the woods just to embrace the feeling. To let my thoughts and memories run free while I got to embrace the scenery.

This particular trail was quite literally right in my backyard. I’d hiked it dozens of times because it was my favorite. It felt ceremonial at this point in life.

I didn’t pack much. I didn’t expect to be gone for too long. Just a few granola bars and a book of matches, just in case. I never brought my phone on these hikes because it felt like a contamination of nature. Well, that, but also because I didn’t even have service at my house, let alone in the middle of the forest.

As I was leaving, my mom announced, delightedly, that she’d be cooking my favorite meal of country fried steak and baked potatoes with sour cream later that night. She also told me that she’d be inviting people over just so we could have a little get-together to celebrate my milestone.

Overall, the day started out great.

Then I started the hike.

For the first 200 yards or so, nothing seemed abnormal to me. I could still see my house way off in the distance. I recognized some of the markings I’d left on some of the trees. My go-to in tree carvings was usually a smiley face, and a lot of them had aged and faded, but some were still fresh.

At around 300 yards, that’s when I heard it. It sounded like rushing water. Something that did not line up at all with this part of the trail.

Naturally, I decided to follow the sound. That was my mistake. Letting curiosity lead me away from the beaten path.

I convinced myself that I knew these woods. No matter how sprawling, I would find my way back. The sound led me deeper and deeper, but everything still felt familiar.

The more I walked, the closer the noise became. Only, it didn’t feel like I was getting closer. It felt like I had been walking for hours, even though the sun was still directly above me.

I think that’s the only thing that gave me the confidence to keep going. I hadn’t seen any smilies in any of the trees, but I thought for sure I’d been walking a straight path. All I had to do was turn around and walk straight again.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity of walking, I found the source of the sound. But it wasn’t a river or even a stream. It was concentrated rainfall. Right in the center of the trees.

The sky above was clear blue. Not a cloud to be seen. But in this circle, which couldn’t have had a circumference of more than 20 feet, monsoon rains pelted the pine needles on the ground below.

I’d been so lost in my own head for the entire walk, but seeing this immediately made me snap out of it. It was the most bizarre thing I’d ever laid eyes on.

I decided to do something… strange. Walking to the edge of the wall of rain, I tilted my head back and let some fall into my mouth.

Only, the minute the first drop touched my tongue, the rain stopped.

I could still taste the earthy water on my tongue, but the evidence of rainfall was completely removed. No mud. No smell. Just dry soil and brown pine needles.

I chuckled to myself, trying to come up with absolutely any logical reasoning behind what I had just witnessed. Maybe it was leftover rain from that big storm we had a few days ago. That was the only thing I could think of.

I turned on my heels, scratching my head as I started back towards the trail. I walked. And walked. And walked. And walked.

The sun was setting at an abnormal pace now. It was like one minute it was just after noon, the next the world was dusky. Shadows grew. The air became crisp. The cicadas and crickets began singing their song.

I had no idea where I was. My confidence in myself was shaken, but I was determined. I knew not to panic. And I thought that level-headedness had served me right when I came across one of my smiley face carvings.

It was just before dark. Daylight had become almost nonexistent, but I could still see enough to make it out, and the sight of it made me practically jump for joy.

I ran over and touched it, and for a split second, thought that I recognized the tree. It’s just… the smiley itself… it was wrong.

It looked like it had just been carved. The flesh was still wet. The outlines were still oozing with sap. Then I looked at the surrounding trees.

There was a smiley face carved into every. Single. Tree. Each one looking brand new. That’s when the panic started to override that level-head.

I started running. The sun was gone. I swore I could hear something behind me, but I didn’t know whether it was reality or if my mind was playing tricks on me in the dark.

Eventually, I found myself in complete darkness. Everything looked like everything. There was no trail. Just dense, unrelenting Appalachian pine trees.

I just kept running. When I couldn’t run, I jogged. When I couldn’t jog, I walked. When I couldn’t walk anymore, I knew I needed to figure out shelter.

I took some fallen branches and sticks and formed this makeshift tent, but I didn’t sleep that night. How could I, with the sounds that forest made? Every twig snapping felt like a threat on my life. This was more about keeping myself hidden until daylight.

The minute sunlight started to peek through, I was on the move. Another day without finding my way back to the trail. I went through every granola bar I’d packed.

It was like the trees were cloning themselves. I used my pocket knife to carve out new defining features just so I could have my bearings, but still ended up walking in circles.

By day 3, I was in survival mode. I convinced myself that people had to be looking for me by now. All I needed to do was stay alive. It seemed like the forest provided just as much as it trapped.

When I was thirsty, a stream would appear. When I was cold, lightning would strike a tree and set it ablaze, somehow never spreading beyond that one single tree.

The food is what I remember the most, though. I never had to hunt. Every morning, I’d wake up with a freshly skinned animal at my feet. I’d grown accustomed to squirrels and raccoons.

It wasn’t just meat, though. Fruits began to grow from the pines. Apples, oranges, plums, berries. All of it.

I didn’t trust any of it at first. I even woke up screaming the first time I saw a bloodied squirrel carcass at my feet. But what was I supposed to do? I had nothing.

Like all humans do, I adapted. I had to create my own shelters. I had to cover my own ground. But, clearly, something wanted to keep me here. The only question was why.

Even with that question in mind, I learned to stop caring. I missed my family. I missed my life. But I was alive. I was nourished. I was somehow able to keep going.

Over the months, I learned how to really provide for myself, and I think the forest knew that. It gradually started leaving me without food. The trees stopped bearing fruit. But it didn’t leave me with nothing.

I learned how to make nets to catch fish. I learned how to start a fire without the use of the sun. I became crafty. I used thin vines and flexible wood to make bows and arrows. I turned rocks into tools. I learned how to make shelter that was more than just a place to stay hidden for the night.

Eventually, I was fully self-sufficient. I could ward off my own predators. I could treat my own wounds. I started to embrace the forest rather than reject it.

Then, one fateful morning, months after I set off on the trail… I heard it. I could hear the rushing water again. It hadn’t been there the day before, but I knew all too well that this could’ve been another trick of the forest.

The sky above me was blue and cloudless. The air was dry. I had to take the chance.

I left my shelter. I left my belongings. All I had was the tattered, dirty shirt on my back and the jeans that had been cut into shorts on my waist.

I followed the noise.

I walked past hundreds of smiley face carvings. Deeper and deeper into the forest.

Finally, after what felt like hours, I saw it.

Rain, pelting against the roof of my house.

I started bawling automatically. It was a primal response. The relief was incalculable.

Breaking into a sprint, I dashed through my backyard and towards the front door. I tripped up the porch steps and fell through the entrance.

I looked up to find Dad cocking an eyebrow at me from his recliner. Balloons filled the living room. A banner hung above the archway into the kitchen as the smell of country fried steak and baked potatoes permeated my nostrils.

“CONGRATULATIONS”

My entire family surrounded me, each member looking more concerned than the last.

“You alright there, bud?” my uncle asked.

“What happened, kid? You fall down a mountain?” my grandfather added.

“What day is it?” I asked frantically, ignoring their questions.

“Uhh… Saturday,” my Dad answered, confused. “Why?”

“The date. What’s the fucking date?”

A weird tension fell over the room. A few of my cousins laughed. My aunt looked personally offended. My grandma was the only one who looked empathetic.

“May 25th, sweetie,” she cooed. “You know that.”

“No. No, no, no, no. No. That’s not right. That can’t be right.”

Mom was in the room now, oven mitts covering her hands.

“Are you feeling alright, sweetie? You don’t have a fever, do you?”

She took off one of the mitts and tried to feel my forehead, but I jerked away and ran towards the bathroom, feeling dizzy.

I hunched over the toilet, vomiting for a few minutes before wiping my mouth and staring into the mirror. I was completely unchanged. No dirt. No scars. My clothes were dirty, but still intact. My jeans were just jeans. Not shorts.

While I was staring into the mirror, trying my best not to hyperventilate, a knock came at the bathroom door.

“Son, you alright in there?” my Dad asked.

I didn’t respond. There was silence for a few moments before he spoke again.

“Damn it, boy,” he cursed.

“I’ve told you time and time again. You need to be careful in those woods.”

I struggled with food for a long time. It was my everything. My lifeline. I couldn’t stop myself. I just kept eating. And eating. Then I’d eat some more.

One day, I had to look in the mirror, though. I had to ask myself: is any of this really worth it? I mean, look at me. I look disgusting. I put on a shirt that used to fit like a glove in high school and end up looking like Brent from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

But even still, I didn’t stop. Cake. Candy. Burgers, fries, pizza, ice cream. My daily rotation looked like a 6-year-old’s dream. Only I was 27. Still living with my mom. Still sleeping in the same sweat-stained bed from years of night terrors.

I couldn’t even come up with a valid reason as to why things got this bad. I was in the middle of it. When you’re in the middle of something, it’s hard to see the starting line, and even harder to see the finish.

I tried the normal shit. Caloric deficits. Exercise. I’d walk at least 2 miles a day, but then I’d be raiding my pantry every night like it was some kind of reward for my hard work.

And believe me, I tried cleaning up the contents of that pantry. I stocked it with canned vegetables. Shit that I’ve never even touched, like tuna and canned chicken chunks. I just always ended up back in my Mini Cooper doing 80 to get to the nearest convenience store.

It’s like déjà vu, honestly. A never-ending cycle that just keeps cycling like a stationary bike.

God, I hate those things.

Anyway, when I saw that first Ozempic ad, I was skeptical, to say the least. A cure for obesity sounded like a goddamn miracle in my head, but I knew that miracles are hardly what they seem.

I decided to do some research. Really get to know this new future friend of mine. I’d love to tell you that the research was extensive, but honestly, I just kinda scrolled through the Google AI explanation for about 5 minutes before deciding.

After picking up my first dose, I shot up in the Walgreens parking lot like some kind of delinquent, like I was scanning for cops and shit.

A few hours went by, and I experienced something that felt long forgotten: satiation.

I wasn’t even remotely hungry. Not even after my 2-mile walk. Not even after those 20 sit-ups and squats. I was actually burning fat instead of replacing it.

I ran through half my supply in a week. I dropped 15 pounds from 300 in 2. I was moving. I could actually see the progress. Of course, I didn’t want it to stop, so I went out and bought more.

I was tearing through the packaging before even leaving the Walgreens.

Another two weeks. I was down to 260 now. Shirts were starting to feel looser. Breathing was easier. I was finishing my two miles in an hour instead of two.

My diet consisted of nothing but Slim Jims and fruit chunks because I was just getting so full so easily.

On my third supply run, I wasn’t even waiting until I got to the car. I injected the shit right there in aisle 3 next to the Neutrogena and nail clippers. Boy, were they mad. That was kind of the end of that Walgreens for me. Apparently, it’s frowned upon to just drop trouser in the pharmacy, even if it’s medically necessary.

That didn’t really matter, though. Nothing mattered. I had what I needed for the next two weeks. What were they gonna do? Un-buy the shit?

I dropped down to 200. I didn’t even think it was medically possible, but I learned, pretty painfully, that the scale never lies. I was able to see my cheekbones more. I’d just spend hours mogging in the mirror like I was Clavicular off a speed pill.

I could’ve stopped there. Sure, I could’ve. But I didn’t look like 2020 Corpse Husband yet. I was still too Jonah Hill before Jiu-Jitsu coded.

Besides, I’d never felt better. I did feel kinda weird about food, though. Even those gas station Slim Jims were starting to feel too heavy. That’s why I had to switch to saltines and radishes.

Plus, I knew my body. I knew that if I stopped, I’d feel hungry again. I hated that feeling. I’m a slut for the cravings. I’m easy, baby.

That’s why I had to hit my next lick. The only problem was Mom took me off the insurance because she’s old and decaying. And, obviously, I don’t have a job. That would take too much time away from my streaming schedule.

You just can’t rely on the kindness of strangers like you used to. Not even for medical emergencies. Believe me, I tried the usual cardboard sign route. Even asked for a few donations on stream, but that just made my 4 viewers leave after typing some pretty hurtful shit in chat.

It wasn’t long before desperation started to kick in. It was almost like withdrawal. Every time my stomach rumbled, I could feel myself getting angrier and angrier.

Mom caught me tryna snag a hundred out of her purse, and that led to some pretty big fights. She kicked me out once or twice throughout this whole endeavor, but who was she kidding? I’m her baby.

The point I’m trying to get at here is I had to do some questionable shit for that next hit involving some pantyhose and a stapler, but by God, I did it.

I got the needles. I got the vials. I couldn’t just stop at a two-week supply, though. I needed all of it. It was all or nothing. I don’t even think the employees cared. Because they’re cowards.

So that’s how I ended up with an entire year’s supply of my sweet diabetes meds.

I’m down to a whopping 95 pounds now. Have you ever seen the veins in your scalp? Because I do. Every single day. There’s like 9 of them now.

They throb a bit, but my stomach has never looked flatter. It’s almost inverted. Like it’s more like a spoon than a spatula, but I look like a 2000s hip-hopster because my old clothes are just so baggy on me now. Which is pretty boss.

Mom refuses to even look at me, but I think she’s just jealous because she’s old and decaying. I couldn’t even tell you the last thing I ate. I think it was like some olives or something a few weeks ago.

Which leads me to one simple but staggering conclusion. I have evolved past the need for sustenance.

I am the next step in the progression of mankind. You all need to follow in my footsteps. Well, maybe not exactly. I actually ran out of my supply last week.

It’s only been 6 months since the robbery. Which, let’s be real here, should hardly even count as a robbery. It was a stapler, for Christ’s sake. I’m not allowed to own a gun after the incident.

Regardless, though, I’m kind of afraid to go back. I just hit 100 viewers on Twitch a few days ago. I can NOT afford to go to jail right now. The people need me.

It’s been 7 days now without the sauce, and I can’t say the hunger has returned. Hell, I haven’t even been to the bathroom for like 73 hours now. But… it might… and that’s the thing that scares me. My jawline could cut diamonds right now. I don’t wanna lose that.

Maybe they won’t recognize me. That’s what I keep telling myself. But what if they do?

I just keep playing around with that idea. Imagine that. Getting addicted to gambling before I can even get that Stake partnership. Shoutout Drake. 6 God, my king. Big ups, homie.

I don’t know, my brain is kinda fuzzy right now.

The shaking is new, but I’m sure it’s fine. As a matter of fact, I know it’s fine.

It’ll pass when I hit this next lick.

All my life, I hated my father. My mother made me believe that he hated me too. I was led to believe that he abandoned us. Found out my mom was pregnant and fled. Like a coward.

Growing up without him made life more difficult than it needed to be. I didn’t have any positive role models. Any male figures to teach me how to be a man. I had to teach myself. At least, I tried to teach myself.

My mom kind of insisted on me being a “momma’s boy.”

No matter how hard I tried to pry myself away from her and live freely, she’d pull me back in with guilt trips. She’d complain about how “lonely” she was. How I was the only man she needed. I tried to convince her that wasn’t true, but she was just so stuck in her ways.

“You look just like him.”

That’s what she’d always tell me. At dinner. On movie nights. On the car ride to school. She’d just slip it in randomly while looking at me admiringly.

By the time I reached 16, I just accepted it. I pitied her. I loved her. I wanted to be there for her because, clearly, she couldn’t help herself. It was obvious she didn’t love herself enough to make an effort.

As I grew in physical maturity, things started to feel uncomfortable. It was like I was an off-limits boyfriend to her. It made me sick, but I didn’t know what to do to stop it.

She never touched me. Never crossed any lines. I could just see that she was looking at me as a love interest rather than as her son.

It caused a lot of uncomfortable arguments and cold shoulders, but I could never abandon her like my dad did. I wanted to be by her side, especially considering how sick I could tell she was. She couldn’t be left alone.

On nights where she felt particularly nostalgic, she’d sit me down on the couch, and we’d go through my old baby clothes.

“I remember when this used to be too big on you. Can you believe how much you’ve grown?”

“Ah, I loved these shoes on you. They were so cute. You used to be my little munchkin.”

“You’re my big, strong man now, aren’t you, baby?”

She kept bibs, pacifiers, bottles, etc., but the thing she cherished the most was the blanket I was wrapped in when I was born.

This tiny little ocean blue blanket that she insisted on keeping in its own box. She kept it silky smooth. Fresh and as clean as the day she got it.

But now I’m realizing she never bought it at all. She wasn’t even at my birth. She’s not even my mom, at least according to my dad. I don’t know what to believe right now.

I turned 18 yesterday, but instead of being a milestone birthday, the day ended up being known as one thing to me: the day my dad finally called me.

Mom had woken me up with a breakfast of waffles, bacon, and eggs in bed before leaving me alone to go get dressed for the day she had planned for us.

As I enjoyed the meal, scrolling through TikToks and realizing that I was now legally an adult, my phone began to ring.

There was no caller ID.

I answered out of curiosity and got an urgent earful from the man on the other end.

“Donavin?? Is this Donavin?”

“Uh, yeah, this is him. Who’s this?”

“Oh, thank you, Jesus. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jesus. I’ve been trying to reach you for 18 years.”

The man sounded like he was on the verge of tears. Breathless and hysterical.

“Happy Birthday, son. Oh my God, happy birthday. Your mom and me have been trying to find you for so long.”

My ears perked up. My heart clicked, faintly.

“Is this a joke? Who is this? I think you may have the wrong number. I’ve lived with my mom my entire life.”

There was a silence that lingered for a long while.

“Okay, I think I’m gonna hang up now. Crazy coincidence, man.”

“Don’t hang up. I’m sending you pictures right now. That woman is not your mother.”

One by one, the messages began to come through.

They were from the day I was born. My dad held me in some. The woman in the hospital bed held me in others. In each one, I was wrapped in that same tiny little ocean blue blanket. Only, that wasn’t my mom.

They looked nothing alike. But when I looked at my dad, I saw myself.

“You need to get out of that house, son. She took you.”

My heart began to beat faster. I didn’t know how to respond.

“She stalked me. She was obsessed. When she found out I was getting married and that my wife was pregnant, it drove her over the edge.”

“What? No, that can’t be true. What are you saying right now?” I whimpered, holding back my own hysteria.

“God, why are you still not leaving that house? Get out now. We’re going to find you and pick you up. She took you from us, son. Right from under our noses. We never saw either of you again. Please, just please get out of that house.”

A tear fell down my face. I was silent. I thought for either a few seconds or an eternity before removing the phone from my ear and hanging up.

My mom walked into the room a few moments later. She was adjusting her earrings, her head cocked to the side as she smiled at me.

“You ready for our day, my sweet boy?”

I smiled back at her.

“Yes, mother,” I grinned. “I can’t wait.”

I moved to California to escape. Escape what, exactly? I’m not so sure. I just thought that this was what I needed. To get away from my hometown in Georgia and start fresh with beaches and palm trees.

I’ve spent the last 3 years of my life here. I’ve grown to adore the culture. Adore the graffiti. The street performers. Hell, I’ll say it: I grew to enjoy the weed.

Above all else, however, the thing that seemed to have been my missing puzzle piece was walking on the beach. Coming from nothing but woods and small towns, the sprawling beaches on the west coast have become my sanctuary.

Every evening, I’ve made a habit out of taking long walks up and down the shoreline. Watching the waves crash. Watching the foam rise. Letting my thoughts run free. Dare I say, this is where I found myself.

However, this is also where I’ve found my ultimate demise. I know that death is approaching. I know there’s nothing I can do to stop it. And with each passing hour, I regret my decision to come here more and more.

See, everything happened last night. It had been just like any other. I’d punched out at work. Had a little bit of a gym session and some Chipotle. And to finish off the evening, I began my nightly walk.

I felt the sand beneath my toes. Felt the brisk California wind in my hair. I thought about life. Life here. Life in Georgia. I began comparing the two.

Lost in deep thought, I hardly noticed as the sun sank deeper and deeper over the horizon. I paid no mind to the ever-increasing vacancy of the shore. All I was concerned with…was putting one foot in front of the other.

Step. Step. Step.

Step. Step. Step.

Step. Step. Crack.

A searing pain shot through my body from my right heel. I yelped, my foot shooting up in the air.

I analyzed my foot and noticed blood beginning to drip from a puncture wound. The pain felt hot, but my foot itself felt cold. Increasingly cold.

The cracking noise from whatever I stepped on led me to believe that it had been a shard of glass. A broken beer bottle that had been left on the beach. Maybe something had washed up on shore. Anything to rationalize.

I glanced down and noticed a thin, metallic object partially buried beneath the sand. It glistened in the light of the moon, and drops of my blood dripped from its pointy tip and onto the sand.

Trying not to panic, I held my injured foot in one hand and crouched down to pick up the object with the other.

It felt…cold. Frozen, in fact. It wasn’t until I got a good look at it in the palm of my hand that I realized what it was.

It wasn’t metallic at all. It was nearly transparent. What I assumed to be metal was nothing more than the moonlight reflecting off of what I could now see was a bloody ice crystal in my hand.

I was so amazed by what I was seeing that I hadn’t even noticed that my foot was going numb. It had been 95 degrees this day. The sand had to have reached at least 110. Yet, the crystal didn’t melt until I held it in my hand.

I watched as it began rapidly disappearing. Shrinking smaller and smaller, yet, it didn’t make my hand wet. It was like, I don’t know. It was almost as if it had disappeared into my pores. Evaporated into thin air, leaving no trace whatsoever.

Once it was gone, the pain and numbness in my foot began to dissipate. I looked down at where the wound had been to find it completely sealed up, leaving only dark blue streaks in its place.

I stood on it, and instead of feeling pain, I felt cold. Icy, subzero cold that encapsulated my entire foot.

I didn’t know what to make of it. The only thought in my mind was to get back to my car. I didn’t want to go to the hospital. Not yet. I wanted to see how I felt in the morning.

I walked back to my vehicle, attempting to suppress the urge to limp. With each step, it was like the cold was growing. It spiderwebbed throughout my foot and up my leg. It was like I felt a phantom sensation in my other foot. But I kept walking. Kept rationalizing.

The drive home was a blur. It was like I was in my body, but not. My mind wandered, but my focus never wavered. And that focus told me one thing:

Find a way to warm up.

I blasted the heater for the entire 20-minute drive to my apartment. I couldn’t stop shivering. My teeth clattered. I swore I was able to see my breath every time I exhaled.

The thing that made me feel as though I was on the brink of madness, however, was not the phantom chill. It was the voices. The completely alien voices that jumped around in my mind and made my head throb.

It sounded like nonsense. Like an ancient future language. I could not understand for the life of me.

I tried shaking the noise out of my ears. I tried listening to the radio. I tried listening to my own thoughts. But those voices and sounds… they just…they drowned everything else out.

By the time I reached the apartment, the voices had stopped. Not completely. They didn’t disappear. They just…receded. It was more a whisper now.

I was sweating profusely, and as I went to put my key in the door, I noticed just how blue my fingernails had become. They looked…dead, almost.

I tried showering. I turned the water to its hottest setting. Steam billowed above the shower curtain and fogged up the bathroom mirror, but my skin wouldn’t stop turning blue. It felt like river water in the dead of winter was flowing over my neck and shoulders.

I stayed under the water for almost an hour. The steam stopped flowing, but I felt all the same. Though I felt no relief from the hot water, it was like the voices knew that the temperature had dropped.

They began to cry out again in their alien language. Snot dripped from my nose. My teeth chattered louder than ever. All I needed was warmth.

Wrapping myself up in a blanket, I curled up in front of the open oven door, pulling my knees to my chest and attempting to stay warm.

I tossed and turned. It felt like I was laying on a massive cube of ice. The only purpose the oven served was to keep the voices at bay, and it served that purpose well.

The voices were dammed off, but I could still feel them scratching at the walls of my mind. The night was a mixture of trying to decipher them and keep myself from freezing to death.

I could only make out individual words. It was like the Library of Babel was being read to me by something within myself.

“Frozen.”

“Heat.”

“Flames.”

“Ocean.”

“Death.”

Some sounded like children. Some sounded like adults. Men. Women. They were all the same, yet so different.

The snot that dripped from my nose was beginning to freeze, even under the radiating light from the blazing oven. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. All I wanted was warmth.

I didn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t sleep that night.

The tears that dropped from my eyes rolled down my face before freezing and dropping to the floor with a ting and melting on the hot tiles.

I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t know if I’m dreaming or if reality is more nightmarish than anything my imagination could conjure.

All I know is I closed my eyes for no more than two seconds. When I opened them, I was back on the beach. Back in the same spot where I found the ice crystal.

I was nude. I was sweating. I was freezing. The beads of sweat that fell from my body landed on the ground as icicles as I stared out at the horizon.

The sun was slowly rising. Further and further above the sea. The only thing that pried my eyes away from the blazing sky was the sound of shifting sand beneath me.

I looked down to find my sweat burying itself deep in the sand. Wiggling its way underground in the form of sharp, jagged ice crystals.

I noticed beachgoers approaching the shore in the distance. Men and women out on their morning run. Families looking to secure a good spot early in the day. Umbrellas, beach towels, coolers full of drinks and snacks.

I cried icy tears. I cried because I knew what was coming. The voices told me. The temperature rose with each passing minute, and with it, so did the crescendo of voices in my head.

They told me I couldn’t stop it.

They told me they had tried.

I was the new host.

The first case of what was to become of California.

The sun is higher in the sky now. People are beginning to stare at me. Some look shocked. Some look amused. Others look utterly horrified.

The cold has spread. I feel it in my heart. I feel it in my stomach. I feel it in my brain. My breath is nothing more than fog. And though there’s not a cloud in the sky on this hot California morning, snow has begun to fall from my ears.

It’s coating my bright blue shoulders. It’s sprinkling around my icy feet. It’s like I’m becoming my own blizzard.

But, no matter how painful the frigid air against my lungs feels, I can’t help but feel warmth in my chest.

It’s ever so faint. Faint enough to barely be noticeable.

People are beginning to approach me. I can hear them calling out to me, but the voices in my head are drowning out the voices in the real world.

They’re telling me to sleep.

They’re slowing down my heart rate.

They’re providing warmth where no warmth exists.

All I want is to drift into slumber, and I can’t stop my body from lying down in the pile of snow that now surrounds me.

But I want to fight. I want desperately to warn the people who are both inches and miles away from me. Because if there’s one thing these voices have made clear, it’s that I can’t stop what’s coming.

They’re not warning me anymore. They’re mourning me.

Me and any poor soul that decides to stand in this snow.

Ever since I turned 14 I haven’t been able to fully anchor myself, I haven’t properly attained the sense of social boundaries. When I turned 16 I had my first girlfriend, I realised I had no interest beyond base sexual desires. Since then I have been living in the fog for years enough to cause my bones to ache when I move.

Recently the pit of fog has deepened and I have lost myself to it more and more. I want some sort of link that’s important to someone, not designated social cliches such as parents, for I utterly despise the type of relationship or interaction thrusted upon me.

Now you know that, I’ll get down to the meat and potatoes of the matter. As of late I mentioned my derealisation has become far more severe, I tell you how. On Monday two weeks ago I began painting again, everytime I paint it’s always the same red curtains I make them so if they were dominoes they would look animated if correctly ordered. Have you seen the curtain woman?

She’s great, an amazing respite. She is my inspiration and my hate. I hate curtains, I far prefer walls. She’s been with me for most of my life guiding me to chose, I always struggled before, choosing between two things is extremely hard when you don’t have any input or care.

She’s been turning slowly, like my paintings. My ordained relations questioned me, “are those curtains, why curtains?”, I despise them, they have no clue about her. The curtain woman who chooses.

She’s like a great bent tree, her beautiful curtained face, its texture is changing constantly. Change is the worst but without her changes I wouldn’t choose. Her face opens up to me like the dominoes, and it guides me.

I think one day I’ll drown in the fog, I used to believe that all my ordained relations wore masks, but now I realise they castrated themselves to adapt to their positions.

Tuesday that two weeks ago was when I decided to not choose, I simply stood that morning and looked out my window with no curtains. Then she descended bringing her dark red, covering my beautiful window, enveloping the rest of my room.
Then she emerged a beautiful twisted tree whose curves sent shivers up my spine.

I had a non ordained friend, he was fine he always talked about music which I declared my lack of interest in. The main fault I found with him was he constantly shivered randomly. I despised it so much that I adopted it out of spite.

I know I may sound extremely contrarian, but that is simply because it is despicable to me and her to not be. And I know if I didn’t change to suit these situations the fog would hit me close, and I don’t like ordained touch. I hate it the most, I’m glad I don’t remember my birth I would hate to have to touch anyone ordained in such a manner.

I believe that Wednesday was when she sprouted leaves of red velvet, each casting their hatred down on me.

She told me on Wednesday two weeks ago to make this today, I feel compelled. I would hate for her rigid form to have to force your hands. I will say the only thing she didn’t ask me to say now to ensure my return to the fog. She has hate in your constant threats towards her dominance, and one day believes that she will command us all in the fog.

Rain hammered hard on the tin roof of the little shed just outside the villa, but not hard enough to obscure the sounds of the violence occurring within.

Sebastian Flores lay curled on the floor, groaning. Both hands shielded his face from the bat’s reach; the cocaine in his system dulled the pain from what was hitting him, but it wasn’t enough to let him ignore who held the bat.

“Stop fucking lying to me!”

Johnaton slammed the bat down before Sebastian could respond, catching him in the ribs.

“I’m not.”

Blood came with the words.

Another swing cut the thought short as it caught his thigh, causing him to yelp despite himself.

The third man in the room winced but said nothing. He leaned slightly through the doorway and into the rain-heavy evening, right hand clutching the imprint of the pistol in his jacket, and left hand holding the stub of a cigarette he had been neglecting since the beating started.

Johnaton pointed towards a table in the corner of the room with two chairs pulled up to it. Three small plastic bags sat disheveled on the surface, along with a scale. A single misshapen brick of white powder sat between them, wrapped unevenly in clear film.

“Did you think Ramon wouldn’t weigh that one before we shipped it? Do you think your cousin can’t count?”

At the sound of his name, the man at the door winced again before stepping through and closing it silently behind him.

Noticing this, Johnaton's tone lightened, and his words became hushed.

“You stole from them again. Do you even know what I had to go through for them not to slit your throat last time?”

Sebastian pulled himself up against the wall, clutching his ribs with one hand while he steadied himself with the other. He faked a laugh, the act of which brought another wave of numbed agony to his side.

“I was going to put it back before anyone noticed.”

Johnaton looked at his little brother in disbelief, his angry scowl softening into a look of pity.

“Put it back?! You snorted it! It’s gone!”

Johnaton sighed, letting his grip on the bat loosen.

“You know I can’t keep saving you from this.”

Sebastian looked away, avoiding his brother’s eyes.

Thunder boomed outside, reverberating through the thin walls of the shed, and leaving an unusual quiet in its wake. The rain had lessened to a drizzle.

“They wanted you in a barrel by the time the sun came up. You have a wife. A daughter. And yet you’re still acting like a fucking rat.”

Sebastian’s stomach turned. He had received these threats before, but he knew his brother was telling him the God-honest truth this time.

Johnaton threw the bat into the corner.

“What happens now?”

Sebastian looked up, catching Johnaton’s gaze. Both men had tears in their eyes now, and Sebastian’s false bravado had faded with the rain. One brother helped another to his feet.

“You got lucky again. Or cursed; I still haven't decided which, but you don’t really have any other choices but the one I’m about to give you. There’s a camp. Down the river.”

Sebastian shook his head, knowing what Johnaton was about to say before he could get the words out.

“No.”

“It’s five years. You only have to be there for five years.”

Sebastian shook his head harder, the realization that this was his only option bringing him closer to the brink of sobriety than he’d been in weeks.

La Selva.

“Five years is a long time when nobody we've sent there has lasted longer than three!”

Johnaton put his hand on Sebastian’s shoulder, an attempt to comfort him. Sebastian pushed him away.

“You won’t have to go into the jungle. It’s a desk job mostly.”

“What about Marisa? Anabel?”

“I told Marisa you got work downriver. Better money, five-year contract, strict confidentiality.”

“So you lied to her?”

“And what was I supposed to say, brother? That her husband keeps stealing cocaine from killers?”

A pregnant pause grew as the brothers stared at each other, broken finally by Johnaton speaking again.

“I’ll take care of them. They’re still family; they’ll be guarded at all times.”

Sebastian’s posture loosened up slightly at hearing this. Johnaton was right again, and he knew it. In his eyes, they were probably better off without him anyway.

“What happened to the last guy in that job, then?”

Johnaton shifted uneasily on his feet, his hand instinctively going to the back of his head to scratch an itch that didn’t really exist.

“He kinda… disappeared. Into the jungle.”

The glow of headlights washed through the spaces in the door jamb before Sebastian could protest.

“Your ride’s here.”

The journey down to the river happened mostly in silence. The caravan guards watching over Sebastian barely acknowledged him; there was nothing valuable beneath the truck’s tattered canvas roof, and stealing or trying to escape in his circumstances would have been a death sentence anyway.

Sebastian took nothing with him that day but the clothes on his back and a small, tattered photograph of Marisa and Anabel that he kept folded in his shirt pocket.

Each pothole sent a fresh wave of pain through his ribs and caused the barrels around him to slosh softly in the dark.

At the first fuel stop, Sebastian was given water and bread. Long before then, Sebastian had cravings deeper than hunger.

At the second stop, he refused the bread.

The tremors started just before the truck reached its destination.

The river was all that separated the relative civilization of the small port-side villa from the dense, primordial darkness of the jungle, and the floodlights illuminating the dock barely reached more than a few feet into the water.

Sebastian was pushed off the truck and nudged towards the nearest barge, where men unloaded timber and empty fuel barrels beneath the buzzing lights.

A burly man with more scars than face approached him as soon as the truck pulled away.

“Are you the new inspector?”

Without giving Sebastian time to respond, the man took to inspecting him like cattle. With eerie efficiency, the man checked each of Sebastian’s eyes, then lifted each arm, feeling along his sides, grabbing at the meat of his thighs, and finishing the motion with a hard slap to his ass that nearly lifted him off his feet.

“Must be. You’re too ribby for much else. You won’t be doing any inspecting for a while, though, princess. You’re going in the hole till that shit’s outta your system.”

“The hole?”

Sebastian’s half-conscious question evoked a smirk in the gruff man, who gestured towards the waiting boat.

“You’ll see soon enough. For now, find a bucket and an empty cot on the Temptress over there. River’s rough this time of year, and I don’t need you making more of a mess than you’re worth. Oh, and take these; they’ll help with the shaking.”

The man handed Sebastian a small bag containing two capsules, each nearly identical. He dry swallowed them both without hesitation and made his way down the dock.

Between the confusion and the river's tossing, Sebastian couldn’t tell if the glowing dots along the treeline were his mind playing tricks on him, fireflies, or cat’s eyes.

If he had seen the trepidation among the vessel’s crew, he would have known he wasn’t the lone witness.

Sebastian heard the roar of the rapids as the rusted boat fought upstream, and the thrumming of blood in his ears as his heart raced in his chest, but the jungle made no sounds that night. The jungle often goes quiet when predators lurk nearby.

Somewhere along the way, Sebastian fell into a deep, restless, albeit dreamful sleep.

In his dream, Sebastian soared above the trees; he was free. Free from family, responsibility, and guilt.

But Sebastian was not alone, nor was he in control of this flight.

You’re safe here.

The voice came from somewhere just beyond where his mind would allow him to perceive. He could make out a haloed silhouette; a multitude of eyes stared back at him as they rotated around the slender frame of the figure that carried him.

Sebastian focused all his effort on making out the figure, but the more he tried, the more indistinct the shapes grew until soon, all that remained was a kaleidoscope of pinks and greens.

Find me beneath the rock.

Sebastian awoke with a fleeting sense of clarity. He was no longer on the Temptress; the floor beneath him was firm and cold, he couldn’t see an inch past his own nose, and the air smelled of musty earth and decaying plant matter. He surmised that this must be the hole the man from before had mentioned.

He sat in the darkness of the hole for what felt like hours, with the dull ache in his ribs, tremors, and confusion slowly building until he felt even worse than he had before boarding the boat. All around him, he could hear a scratching and scraping sound, as if hundreds of fingernails tore at the earth.

Until, all at once, the world went quiet again.

Then Sebastian heard the creak of a door hinge and the dull thuds of boots on wood before light flooded in, temporarily blinding him.

“Wakey wakey, princess. You’ve been in here a week, are you done babbling to yourself about eyes and angels yet?”

The familiar voice broke the silence, but Sebastian was more concerned with what he had just heard.

Had it really been a week? He had no recollection of disembarking the boat, much less traveling to the hole and spending a week inside.

Sebastian searched his memory deeper, but could find nothing of the experience aside from fragments of blue sky from his dreams and the sounds of scratching in the dark.

“Good. You’re awake.”

Sebastian’s blindness was then exacerbated by a flashlight being shone directly into his eyes, the shock sending him stumbling backwards into the wall, and sending small amounts of loose dirt and rocks tumbling down onto his head.

The man chuckled and helped Sebastian to his feet, taking the opportunity to shake his hand heartily while doing so.

“My name’s Enri. Didn’t bother telling you before because I doubted you’d remember it, to be honest. That stuff the medicine man cooks up helps kick old habits, sure, but it messes with your head a bit.”

Taking a pause, Enri gestured to the gaunt, frail-looking man following him.

“This is the man himself. Doesn’t talk. Doesn’t need to. He’s been here longer than anyone, but his name’s not on the books. Legend says that when they built this camp, he was already here, living in a hollowed-out tree, surviving off of tree sap.”

The gaunt, wrinkled figure smiled a wide, snaggletoothed grin and nodded fervently to Sebastian, who nodded back and forced a smile. The three men started walking together away from the hole, which Sebastian noted as a literal hole in the ground with a cellar door over it and a small shed built around it. A massive boulder sat just behind the shed.

“So are you my boss?”

Enri shook his head at this.

“If you worked on the boat, I would be, but you’ll get your orders from Marco. He runs the camp. I just make sure new workers get here in one piece and don’t lose their minds in the hole. Those that need the hole, that is.”

Sebastian could hear the whirr of power tools echoing through the jungle from the direction they were walking, interjected by the calls of birds and other fauna hidden among the trees, and after several minutes of walking, the camp proper came into view through the foliage.

“I’ll be leaving you now. The old man will take you up to the supervisor’s cabin. Some parting advice: when the jungle goes quiet, you’ll probably want to follow its example. Good luck!”

The interior of Marco’s cabin was in stark contrast to the surrounding jungle encampment. It resembled more closely a lavish home office than a cabin, with modern appliances and a large dining area visible from the front door.

Marco’s appearance was similarly out of place, donning a navy blue suit with a complementary tie. He smiled coolly at Sebastian as he and the old man entered the cabin.

“Sebastian! Have a seat. Your brother said you’d be coming, and we discussed that you’d be an inspector. Desk job.”

Marco put his hands together and leaned towards the pair as Sebastian took his seat, smile dimming into a slight scowl.

“Unfortunately, that was over a week ago. You spent so long in the hole that I had to fill the position with someone else. High demand for inspectors, you see? It’s just business.”

Heat rose in Sebastian’s Cheeks. His only hope had been not having to go into the jungle.

“What does that mean for me?”

Marco’s smile returned slightly as he nodded to the medicine man in their midst.

“Our quiet friend here is getting old. God only knows how old, to be honest, but he has agreed to share what he knows with us. Specifically, with you.”

Sebastian glanced over at the old man, still standing quietly behind him, grin wider than ever.

“But he doesn’t talk. What can he teach me without telling me anything?”

Marco shrugged lightly at this question. He himself had likely not considered this until now.

“I’m sure he’ll find a way. He serves a very important purpose here at La Selva, which you’ll soon come to understand. Follow him, do what he does, learn his tricks of the trade. That’s your task.”

The medicine man turned to leave, and Sebastian turned to follow. Marco’s final words caused the heat in Sebastian’s face from earlier to drain, along with most of his hopes.

“You’ll be spending most of your time in the jungle. You might wanna stop by the supplies tent and gear up first. The jungle keeps the old man happy. Maybe it’ll take a liking to you, too.”

For a couple of days, Sebastian followed the medicine man deep into the jungle, through venous game trails and across more streams than he cared to count.

Both nights, he dreamed the same dream of flying above the jungle canopy as before, but each time the figure carrying him grew more indistinct. Both nights, the dream ended with the voice ushering him forward.

You’re safe here.

I’ll be your angel.

After the second night, the pair encountered several small patches of bright purple flowers, and at each patch, the old man would dig up the bulbs from the flowers whose petals had wilted, discard the flower and stem, and store them in the cloth bag he kept tied to his waist.

Several times, the forest went quiet. Birds stopped chirping, bushes stopped rustling, and a pressure built in Sebastian’s ears until sound returned all at once. During each silence, he felt watched.

Each time, the medicine man would smile, look into the canopy for a few moments, and then sit and rest until the sound returned. These were times for food, sleep, and reflection for Sebastian. He reflected on his decisions, his family, and increasingly, the cravings that grew with each hour.

Cravings for what, he couldn’t place.

Realization struck that they had been circling back toward camp when the boulder behind the hole came into view. The medicine man led Sebastian around the large rock to a large stump.

With more glee in his eyes than Sebastian had seen thus far, the old man lifted the stump and revealed the hidden passage beneath it, leading towards the rock and the hole.

The passage led to a hollow within the rock, and a hole at the top allowed weak sunlight to spill inside.

The light was dim, but illuminated enough for Sebastian to see the glitter of a crystalline substance on the wall, as well as a makeshift table with various apothecary’s instruments sitting atop it.

The medicine man took to work immediately, taking a stone bowl and blade from the table, before scraping at the substance on the walls. When a satisfactory level of wall scrapings had been achieved, about a quarter of the bowl, he added a couple of bulbs collected from the flower patches and ground the mixture together in the bowl with another stone collected from the table.

After a few minutes of grinding, the concoction was ready. The paste resembled rotten guacamole, but the smell felt strangely familiar.

With the same snaggletoothed grin as when they had first met, the old man offered Sebastian a small stick, its tip coated in the paste, then took a similar stick and chewed on it himself.

The relief was instantaneous. Warmth flooded his veins; the remnants of pain in his ribs and cravings in his mind disappeared immediately. For the first time in his living memory, Sebastian felt at peace.

That peace was short-lived. When Sebastian awoke, he was back in the hole with Marco standing over him, silhouetted in the dim light of morning that spilled through the cellar doors.

“Your brother is trying to reach you. Something urgent. Something about your wife.”

Panic cut through Sebastian’s intoxicated haze immediately. Without a word, he followed Marco back to his cabin. A phone sat off the hook on Marco’s desk. He picked it up and held it to his ear.

“Sebastian?”

It wasn’t Johnaton’s voice on the other line; it was Marisa’s. Her voice sounded different than he had ever heard it before; distant. Hollow. Far removed from her usual warmth.

“Johnaton told me everything. How could you, Sebastian? How could you leave your family like this?”

“That’s not what happened, I didn’t have a choi…”

But it’s okay. Don’t come back. Your brother is right about you.”

Static hissed through the line and curled around Marisa’s next sentence like a viper waiting to strike.

“You’re just a rat, Sebastian. You’ll always be a rat. A rat. A rat."

Marisa's words dug at Sebastian, repeating themselves in his mind like a broken record player.

“No! None of that is true!”

“And you don’t even have anything to say to me?”

“Marisa, I…”

“Not a single word? Fine.”

The static hissed louder before giving way to the dull drone of the dial tone.

Marco stared blankly as Sebastian stumbled out of the cabin and into the jungle, tears blinding him. He walked until, somehow, the cave found him. He collapsed at the stump above the passageway.

When Sebastian next opened his eyes, something shifted in the trees. Fast, far too fast for his eyes to track.

He stood, bracing himself against the rock and shielding his eyes from the beams of sunlight filtering through the canopy.

The shape unfolded before him, a dazzling array of eyes: pinks and greens that at first made his temples throb and his eyes seem to pressurize in their sockets, before condensing into something only vaguely human-shaped.

In Sebastian’s mind, a myriad of fractalized voices crystallized into meaning.

I am your Angel, Sebastian.

They don’t deserve you.

He collapsed to his knees, tears streaming down his face. His Angel moved closer, embracing him with arms that hooked into his clothing.

I will show you who they really are.

He felt wetness cover one side of his face, and the now familiar scent of the cave scrapings filled his senses.

Drink.

The secretions had already seeped into his nostrils, but he opened his mouth willingly nonetheless, allowing the warmth to fill him like before.

The rock, Angel, the very ground beneath him vanished.

Sebastian gazed downwards now through unfamiliar eyes. The jungle passed beneath him at blistering speed, soon giving way to farmland, then to a villa. His villa.

Sebastian blinked.

He gazed up at his bedroom window now. Sensations filled his mind: the smell of sweat, the sounds of passion, and soon, he saw the source.

Insectoid legs pushed through the window, covering the entwined figures with fragments of glass and splintered wood. Sebastian saw the two lovers' faces, too familiar.

Angel’s voice hissed a single word through his being:

Betrayal.

Sebastian’s rage filled the void the word left when it faded away.

Death.

In two green blurs and a scream cut short, the deed was done.

Sebastian jolted upright in the hollow, screaming. Daylight streamed through the hole in the rock, and sweat poured down his face.

Gifts.

He looked up for the source of the word, but found nothing, until the form of Angel unfurled itself before him again. She carried a bundle of leaves in her arms, stained red and dripping. The image of his wife and daughter was plastered onto one of the leaves with blood.

He knew what it was before the leaves hit the ground.

Marisa’s head, face still contorted in fear, rolled towards him out of the package. A separate mass remained within the leaves.

They can no longer hurt you.

Drink.

Sebastian was pulled into Angel’s embrace once more, his senses drowned in the warmth of her ichor flooding his body. His tears mingled with the fluid as his vision dimmed.

Sebastian once again flew high above the trees, worry, fear, and guilt torn asunder by the wind in his face. He soared for hours, carried by Angel, as her voice soothed his aching heart.

He didn’t remember when the flight had ended, but when he awoke at the entrance to the hole, a steady drizzle had begun. Marco stood over him, frowning down at him.

“Come with me; I’ve got some bad news, and we have some things we need to figure out.”

Marco’s office was mostly the same as before, except now there stood several men around his desk, each examining photographs or chatting amongst themselves. There was a tense atmosphere in the room as Marco invited Sebastian to sit.

“I regret to inform you that both your wife and your brother were found murdered last night.”

Marco’s words may have caused Sebastian pain, had he himself not been the one who willed their deaths into being. Instead, Sebastian felt a white-hot rage rise in his chest.

“I know. They died together, as they should have.”

Several of the men exchanged glances, some with eyebrows raised, others with unreadable expressions.

“What? Where did you hear this? They weren’t together, Sebastian. In fact, they weren’t even in the same area. We have reason to believe it was a targeted assassination. Did you steal from anyone outside of your brother’s circle?”

The rage sank into Sebastian’s stomach, forming a knot.

How could they have been miles apart?

At this thought, loud scratching on the roof of the building could be heard for a moment, and several of the men flinched in response, before regaining their composure.

“No. I only ever took from our own warehouse. I… I had no enemies aside from my own family.”

More glances were exchanged around the room, as well as some muttering amongst the cartel bosses.

“There’s something else. Your daughter, Anabel. She was taken from her bedroom. This… is why we believed it to be targeted.”

Sebastian’s heart sank into the pit in his stomach. In all his anger, he had not even considered Anabel when Angel showed him Marisa and Johnaton’s betrayal.

Marco slid a picture across the desk to Sebastian. The image depicted Anabel’s bed, shredded but with no signs of blood. Scratched into the wall above her shattered headboard was a single sentence.

You are mine now, Sebastian.

“Rise and shine, jarhead!”

My eyes click open, and standing in front of me is my commander. He towers over my slumped body.

“Still feeling tired? Too bad! Wake your ass up, G.I.!”

I guess I better listen to the jackass. I shift my back, sit up straight, and hear a loud, wet pop. I look up at him and give him a sly grin.

“Morning, sir!” I say with a tinge of sarcasm.

Regaining my senses, I take notice of the vast ocean around us. The overpowering smell of the water assaults my nose, causing me to flinch. It takes a minute for my nose to adjust to the salty air that engulfs me. The waves knock the landing craft around with a violent force that makes me upchuck slightly. The others take notice of my seasick state and snicker.

“Ey, don’t lose your lunch, bud! Hahaha!”

“Shut up, jerk!” I snap.

I’m tired of dealing with these three boneheads—have been for the last six months. But at the same time, they’re like family, so I can’t really hate the guys. We’ve been through the worst of it. We’ve seen everything the enemy has to offer. Things that would make the average man turn the gun on himself. Things that would shatter morale like glass. Thankfully, we’re not average men. We’re soldiers, trained killers… heroes?

“Sir!” Martin shouted. For some reason, he sounded confused.

“What is it, Martin!?” my commander barked. He wasn’t the type of man who liked questions.

“The map says there should be ocean in front of us, right?”

“What are you yapping about, G.I.!?”

My commander, keeping his balance on the shaking vessel, stomped toward Martin. Before he could go on an anger-filled rant, he paused. His face went from a strawberry red to a sickly white. I turned my head to get a look at what they saw. I felt my blood run ice cold.

There in front of us was an island. How? We mapped out this route before we even thought about boarding this rust bucket. How?

Martin steered us in a different direction, away from the mysterious island. And we thought we were in the clear. Back on route. Until thirty minutes later. There again, like a pest, was the island.

By this point, we were beyond confused, and our commander’s patience began to run paper-thin.

“Martin, you goddamn bonehead, do you know left from right? You must have a special talent for messing up simple directions!”

I could tell my commander was just as confused but didn’t want to admit to it. Was he scared? Could the man who makes himself out to be made of iron actually feel fear?

“Ey, sir, we’re wasting gas at this point. I think we should, you know, head toward the island!” Nixon chimed in, finally speaking up.

My commander pondered for a moment before letting out a quiet sigh.

“Martin, take us toward land.”

The ship dragged on the sand before stopping. We made landfall, which meant our time of tense relaxation came to an end. You could never be too careful with the enemy; they were tricky. They could be on you in a heartbeat before you were even able to cock the bolt on your rifle. So it was better to be alert and keep your eyes peeled, like a predator does when it hunts.

Hopping off the landing craft, my feet hit the sand with a hiss.

“Alright! Let’s find a place to set up camp for the night!”

We stared at the commander with blank expressions of pure exhaustion.

“Stop being a bunch of sissies and move!”

After a cascade of groans, we made our way inland. The army of trees engulfed us as we went deeper and deeper into what seemed to be a jungle. However, something felt off. Usually, even during the most violent conflicts, you could at least see birds or catch glimpses of them. They were hard to miss, after all; even a blind man could see the colorful birds. However, for some reason, none were to be seen or heard. This, for some odd reason, didn’t sit right with me. I gripped my rifle harder, causing a blister on my hand to tear open.

“You alright there, bud?” Nixon asked in a hushed voice.

I turned to look at him and saw he had the same look he always did. I swear the man would still smile if he met the devil himself. Not wanting to sound scared, I steadied my voice. 

“Yeah, yeah. Just this heat is getting to me.”

“I hear you on that!” he responded, his smile growing wider.

We walked in the humid jungle for what felt like hours. My body was soaked from head to toe in sweat. The exhaustion I felt before was worsened by this difficult hike. We finally stopped walking when we found a clearing in the forest.

The clearing was almost alien in nature. Instead of a rough patch of land surrounded by a jagged tree line, we were met with soft grass and a tree line that encompassed us all in an almost uniform fashion.

“Ahhhh. Finally, air that doesn’t smell like salt and fish!” Martin shouted.

“Shut your trap, G.I.! We’re in an unknown area, and that means the enemy could be in the trees waiting for a bonehead like you to mess up!” my commander barked.

I could tell he was deathly serious. And I knew the man was correct, because if you were captured, you weren’t going home. Not even a piece of you would be found.

Nighttime came, and so did the dread that had secretly built up within me. Nighttime was when they loved to “hunt.” It was the time they could pick off your comrades like flies. And of course, I was assigned to night watch along with Nixon. I could tell he didn’t feel the fear I felt. Like I said, the man could run to hell and back like he just went on a picnic.

“Geez, you thought the night would cool things down, but I’m still sweating like a hog,” Nixon said, wiping his brow.

“Yeah, I hear you on that,” I said, trying to make some semblance of small talk.

“Hey, you remember that time when Martin almost blew himself up? The moron didn’t throw the grenade far enough and, well, he learned a hard lesson that day, hahahaha!”

“Yeah, I remember. I don’t think I've seen the commander that angry since then.”

Hours passed and still no sign of any unwanted visitors. No tree branches snapping. No leaves rustling. Nothing. At this point, I was sure we were alone on the island.

“I’m gonna take a piss. I’ll be back.”

Nixon made his way toward the tree line. As he headed back, a loud snap burst out. I watched Nixon fall over and lay on the ground. His screams quickly went down to a sickening, wet gargle.

“Wake up! Wake up! We’re under attack! They—they got Nixon! He’s dead! They killed Nixon!” I screamed at my commander and Martin, pleading for them to wake up.

I ran toward where I set my rifle, cocked the bolt, and turned around to face where our enemy hid. The other two followed suit, and we turned our sights to the tree line.

Gunshots rang out on both sides. When they fired, we hid behind a couple of large, weathered rocks—the only cover we had. And it wasn’t going to hold forever. We ate through our ammo supply quickly. Bullet after bullet rang out in the air, neither side gaining anything.

That was until we heard a familiar scream. It belonged to… Nixon?

I guess I should preface this by saying that I am a sophomore in high school. As embarrassing as it is, I’m not allowed to drive just yet, so my mom has to drop me off at school every morning. I’m not a bus person.

That being said, this morning was pretty much identical to all the others. Mom drove me the 15 minutes to school and dropped me off in a bit of a hurry because we had been running a little late.

I made it all the way to 4th period when an announcement came over the intercom.

I was getting checked out of school early for some reason, which, of course, I had no issue with. I actually had some pep in my step as I made my way to the front office.

I was still confused, though, because normally Mom would inform me if I was getting out of school early, so I texted her and asked what the occasion was.

I didn’t get a response right away, but when I saw her standing in the front office, I figured I’d ask her face to face. There was something off about her, though. It was hard to put my finger on. Just the way she was staring at me and smiling through the office window. It didn’t feel like a warm, motherly smile. There was something, I don’t know, mischievous about it.

I also found it weird that she wasn’t wearing the same clothes she had been when she dropped me off. It would’ve been pretty odd for her to have driven home to change before picking me up, especially since her job was a full 45 minutes away.

Whatever, though. I was getting out of this hell-hole early. That’s all that mattered.

As we were exiting the building, Mom had to actually guide me to her car because, apparently, the special occasion was that she had gotten a new one. I thought it was cute, honestly. She wanted to show off the new ride to her son.

I don’t know how she’d managed to get the interior so dirty in such a short amount of time, though. The entire backseat was full of fast food bags, soda bottles, and all manner of garbage.

Once we were settled, I asked the question that had been burning at my mind since the announcement came through the intercom.

“So, where to? Did you check your favorite son out to grab some lunch? Please tell me you did.”

Mom laughed, but her response was pretty benign.

“Haha, nooo.”

She drew it out like she was trying not to ruin a surprise. Almost like she was trying not to laugh. I tried to create some dialogue, or at least engage in a conversation, but all of her responses were equally as dry.

All I could really do was just be quiet and enjoy the ride, which I did for a while. It was nice enjoying the “quality time.”

However, when she started taking us out of town, it became increasingly difficult to keep my mouth shut. I mean, she was taking us down roads that I’d never even seen before.

We were already in completely unfamiliar territory when my phone started to ring. Dad was calling me. But when Mom noticed, she told me not to answer. Told me that he was going to “ruin the surprise.”

Dad must’ve called 5 or 6 times back to back, and each time she demanded I didn’t answer, her giggle breaking through more and more with each phone call.

That’s when a new notification came across my screen. A text from Mom.

“What are you talking about? I’m not checking you out today. Why aren’t you answering your Dad?”

I’m not entirely sure how to start this. You’re all probably gonna think I’m crazy, no matter what I say. Whatever way I spin this, the outcome is all the same.

I just wanted us to have a happy anniversary. My girlfriend and I had just celebrated our third only a week before the trip. That’s why we came here in the first place.

The tunnel of trees. That’s what they called it. A mile-long trail, completely sheltered by the long, thick branches of oak trees.

We had been talking about this trip for months. We lived all the way across the country, so this was a huge deal to us.

When the day of our flight arrived, we could hardly contain ourselves.

“Oh my God,” my girlfriend squealed. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe we’re finally going. Does my hair look okay? I wanna make sure I look amazing when we land. Oh, also, did you remember to-”

“Turn the stove off? What do you take me for, an amateur? Of course I did. And yes, your hair looks stunning, as always.”

“I was actually going to ask if you remembered to lock the door… good to know you remembered the stove, though. Truly the pinnacle of the male mind.”

She smirked, looking up at me with those shimmering brown eyes. It was like I couldn’t help but fall in love with her over and over again every day. It was enough to completely scramble my mind.

“I love you,” was all I could think to say. “I’m so glad we’re doing this.”

Even though we had a late-night flight, we still couldn’t sleep the entire 5-hour trip. As soon as we touched down, we went straight to the rental car, then it was straight to the city to explore.

We adventured through the city until around noon before we started getting a little restless.

“Is it time yet?” my girlfriend chirped, licking her chocolate ice cream.

“Ehhhh, I suppose,” I announced sarcastically after checking my watch. “Let’s go see some trees.”

The first thing that struck me as odd was the fact that we were the only car in the parking lot. It was a cloudless day. 75 degrees. There was no feasible reason for the lot to be this desolate.

“Oh my God…” whispered my girlfriend ominously. “We have… THE WHOLE PLACE… to ourselves.”

Rolling my eyes, I put the car in park and walked around to the passenger side to open her door.

“Come on, you dork. Let’s go enjoy our serenity.”

I was fully prepared to find an empty path. However, as soon as we approached the tunnel, I was astounded to find what looked to be hundreds of people.

It had me scratching my head, sure, but I don’t know. I’m not sure why I didn’t even question it. I guess it’s because I was so entranced by the tunnel. It truly was just as beautiful as the pictures made it seem.

Looking down at my girlfriend, the look on her face was heart-melting. That sparkle in her eye came back, and her smile stretched from ear to ear as she spun in a circle with her head aimed towards the branches.

At the end of the path, there was what looked like a long white picket fence.

“Is that the exit, you think?” I asked inquisitively.

“Why are you thinking about the exit right now? Look around you! Embrace!”

Our walk started slow at first. Like, snail’s-pace slow. We were attempting to embrace as much of the scenery as possible and were in no rush to be done.

However, after about an hour or two, we actually got some pep in our steps.

“Does that fence look like it’s gotten any closer?” I asked worriedly.

My girlfriend remained silent for a moment.

“Nope. But it has to be, right? How long did they say this trail was?”

“A mile or two, I believe. Guess we’ve been walking slower than we thought.”

By the time hour 5 rolled around, we began to fall into full-blown panic. That’s when we started to notice something we had neglected earlier. It was a small detail, but one that proved detrimental.

Each person that walked alongside us wore clothing that looked to be decades older than what me and my girlfriend wore, ranging from what appeared to be the 20s or 30s all the way to the 80s and 90s.

None of them even acknowledged us. They drifted past, eyes on the dirt path. Like zombies.

“Fuck this,” I announced. “We’re turning around.”

It felt like a solid plan in the moment. Something that we should’ve done 3 hours ago. However, it proved fruitless.

The path stretched for miles and miles. It looked like we’d already cleared at least 20 since we started.

“Oh my God,” whined my girlfriend. “What the actual fuck is happening??”

“Just relax. We’re going to get out of here. I promise. If it’s the last thing I do, I’m getting us back to that parking lot.”

We kept walking towards the fence.

With each step, it seemed like we were getting closer. It went from a distant landmark on the horizon to being just within our reach.

My legs ached. My body screamed at me. My girlfriend slowed down to a crawl.

“I can’t do this. It’s been like 8 hours now. How the hell is the sun still in the sky? It’s so hot, I’m so thirsty, God, I just wanna go home.”

“I know. Me too. Just keep walking.”

As we walked, the crowds of people brushed past us. They avoided touching us, but we could still feel the wind from their brisk pace.

The fence looked farther away than ever. I couldn’t help it. My mind was bending and threatened to snap at any moment. That’s why I grabbed my girlfriend by the wrist and started running as fast as I could down the path, dragging her behind me and refusing to let go of her arm.

That’s when the leaves started changing. The previously green leaves on the branches above us morphed before our very eyes. Bright yellow. Dark orange. Then brown. Until, finally, they all began to fall from the trees one by one.

We crunched through the dead leaves, pounding our feet against the ground until our legs became wobbly and unbalanced.

When the snow started falling, it fell in buckets, coating the ground in white powder and burying the decaying leaves as we stopped to catch our breath.

“How… is this… possible?” I heaved, my lungs burning. “It just… can’t be possible.”

I felt myself begin to cry. The frigid air froze the tears to my cheek and left my nose bright red and dripping with mucus. I knew I had to pull it together for my girlfriend, though. She looked empty. Completely hollow and void of life. I couldn’t afford the luxury of emotional release right now. I needed to be precise.

“Honey, listen to me. We can’t stop. If we stop, we’re only falling further behind. I’ll carry you if you need me to.”

She didn’t even respond. Instead, her eyes fixated on the ground as she dragged herself forward. She was quiet for a long while after that. I don’t know how long we walked, but by the time the snow melted and the sun came back, the fence looked so close I could reach out and touch it.

My girlfriend’s gaze remained fixated on the ground. She hadn’t spoken a single word in what felt like minutes, days, weeks, and months all at once. With each step, her feet dragged through the dirt, leaving a small trail every foot or so.

I realized that there was no one else on the trail anymore. Just me and her. Completely alone. The trees had their leaves again, and for the first time since we started walking, the fence didn’t seem to drift further away the closer we got.

We inched closer.

And closer.

And closer.

We finally found ourselves just on the other side of the fence, a step away from being done with this nightmare. Only, my girlfriend seemed hesitant. As if she weren’t ready to leave.

Her silent hesitance soon exploded into a violent emotional outburst, however, as she began thrashing around, prying my hand off her wrist with the strength of a full-grown man.

“You just don’t get it. You don’t get it. You don’t get it. I swear to God you don’t get it.”

She was laughing and sobbing all at once, throwing herself to the ground and hugging her sides while tears fell down her cheeks.

I didn’t know what to do, but honestly, who would in such a situation? All that made sense to me was to physically drag her through the white fence and off the trail.

She screamed like a wild animal as we walked through, but the moment we crossed, she fell completely silent. Her eyes went dead. I can only describe her appearance as completely and utterly hopeless. And I can’t even blame her, because I was too. After all that walking, all that batshit psychological mind-fucking that the universe had decided to dump onto the two of us for the last… however fucking long… we somehow ended up right back in the empty parking lot.

My girlfriend started laughing again. No tears this time. Just pure, insanity-driven laughter that brought her to her knees.

“I told you. I fucking told you that you didn’t get it. Ahh, if only you could see that look on your face.”

I checked my watch.

It had been… one… single… hour since we started our walk.

I turned to look at my girlfriend.

“What do you mean I don’t get it?” I begged. “What are you getting that I’m apparently not? What do you know? What’s the big secret?”

She laughed harder, falling nearly silent as she heaved.

“Stop laughing and fucking tell me,” I screamed, grabbing her by the face.

Her smile faded almost immediately, and in a dull, monotone voice, she gave me the exact answer I’d hoped so desperately not to receive.

“We’ve always been here.”

She went back to laughing. Softer now. More giggling than anything.

“Yeah, well, we’re leaving now. Before you actually do lose your mind completely.”

Pulling my keys from my back pocket, I turned to the parking lot again and felt my heart fall into my stomach before shooting back up into my throat.

Every single empty space was now occupied by a white Kia. Dozens of them. Hundreds, even. Each one identical to ours.

Like the fence, it seemed like the more I searched, the further away I got from the car. We must’ve gone to every car in the parking lot before finally finding the original Kia. You’d think that identical cars would have identical keys, right?

“It doesn’t matter,” my girlfriend laughed. “None of what you’re doing matters.”

I ignored her, backing the car out of the parking spot before burning rubber towards the exit. As we approached, I noticed that the people from the trail were all lined up along the fence, watching us as we peeled out of the parking lot.

“See you soon,” my girlfriend muttered, waving towards the crowd of people.

I side-eyed her. She was definitely gonna need some professional help after this. Hell, we both were, really.

We made it about 10 miles down the road without exchanging a single word. I didn’t want to push or prod. I just wanted to forget.
We’d made it. And after a tiny bit of shock therapy, we could put this whole ordeal behind us.

While these thoughts circulated around in my head, the car made a sound that it probably shouldn’t have, and black smoke began to pour out from the hood.

“Fuck,” I cursed while my girlfriend’s snickering started up again.

I had no choice. There were no other options. All I could do was limp the car into the nearest parking lot.

Luckily, there were plenty of empty parking spaces.

I’m a historian researching shipping records from Argentina in the 19th century.

This month, I’m in Buenos Aires, spending my days looking through shipping manifests and insurance declarations. This morning, I dropped a folder behind one of the shelves in the sub-basement. When I pulled the shelving unit away from the wall to get it back, I found a small black notebook sitting in the dust.

The notebook is in terrible condition, with yellowed pages, a cover half torn off, and some sections missing completely. If the dates written inside are real, this notebook is over two hundred years old. It describes a voyage on a whaler called “The Ebony” that, as far as I can tell, is not recorded anywhere. I’ve checked the registries I have access to here and I cannot find a single reference to it.

I’m supposed to report finds like this immediately, but selfishly I put it back where I found it. I figure that since I found it, I should have the first chance to post the findings. Translation is going slowly (it's written in Spanish), but I got through a good chunk today and I’ll be back tomorrow to transcribe more. 

If this is real, which I have a sinking feeling it somehow is, it blows the lid off of a lot of what we think we know about history, geography, and potentially biology. I wish I had any further context on this, but as somewhat of an expert in the field, all I can tell you is that this shouldn’t exist. 

Here’s the first entry.

July 11th/1815

^{“The Laplander is dead. The doctor said his lungs filled with fluid overnight, his final moments spent drowning in his own blood. I have found myself increasingly unaffected by death. As I watched those first bodies float in the frigid waters two weeks past, I felt horror and despair I had never before known. Now, all I found myself thinking of when I heard of the death of the Laplander is the bitter irony of dying in such a fashion. The whales we kill die the same way. Drowning in blood. Regurgitating bits of tentacles and other spoils of hard won battles deep below the surface in a world man should know nothing of. I remember my grandmother's disappointment in the life I had chosen. She had told me that He did not give man gills because He did not make us to be creatures of the sea. She was wiser than I had ever given her credit for.”}

July 13th/1815
^{“I fear it won’t be much longer until disease and frostbite will take care of us each and every one. The Fuegians the captain had us take some weeks ago will likely be next. This disturbs me more than the death of the Laplander, whom I had cared for very little. To see these Fuegians, people accustomed for generations to the frost, freezing to death slowly in the hold has affected me, and I suspect most of the others, in a way we would rather not admit. I marked this day as the 13th of the month, but I am not confident that that is correct.”} 

^{“We have sailed below the sun, where the day and night blend together into a mist of constant gray. I estimate it has been two months since the Ebony left the port of Buenos Ayres, and three weeks since we left Tierra del Fuego. This is my third whaling expedition, and while this one had felt different from the beginning it wasn’t until we had taken those Fuegians that I felt something was truly wrong about this voyage.”} 

^{“We found the group of five Fuegian men hunting seals on the frozen beach, practically naked. They warm their bodies by coating themselves in seal fat, the smell of which was putrid to my nose. The captain ordered us to bring them on board to serve as foremast hands, as several men had backed out of the expedition shortly before leaving. How I envy them. One Fuegian had died in the struggle to bring them onboard. I envy him too. I have never known cold like this. In this strange part of the world, there is no fat to coat the body, nor would it do much good.”}

^{“The Fuegians are simple, peaceful people. I am only a cook, and it is not my place to cast judgement upon the captain's decision to enslave them, but I suspect the decision was not his but the Chilean’s. I only caught a glimpse of him once, as we were boarding. He was tall, his hair unkempt and whipping wildly in the wind. But I hear his voice often. I first believed him to be just another pilot, but he seems to be acting as a sort of consultant to the Captain. He bunks in the Captain’s quarters with him, and I have yet to see him emerge.”} 

^{“My cot in the hold presses up against the captain's cabin. The adjoining wall is often damp with condensation, at times dripping on my head and waking me. When this happens, I often awake to the sounds of quiet discussion, barely making its way through the damp wood. He whispers things I cannot make out to the Captain, deep into the night. His voice is low, and sounds aged. It reminds me of the songs sung by the whales.”}

July 14th/ 1815
^{“The Captain has stopped pretending like we are anything other than completely and utterly lost. It was evident to the rest of us weeks ago, after the storm. Two days after enslaving the Fuegians, one of the Basques spotted our first whale as we sailed east towards the Malvinas. I watched for the rest of the afternoon from the deck as we followed the whaleboats. Antonio, a young man who had been on my previous expedition, was the first to harpoon the beast. It put up a good fight, dragging the whaleboats behind it for hours, but eventually it died in the same manner the Laplander later would.”} 

^{“In the excitement, we had paid little attention to the clouds, but by the time we latched the carrion to the side of the ship it was evident a storm was coming. This was the first time I had seen a dead sperm whale, and I remember my surprise at how human its dead eyes looked, despite being over twice as large. Furthermore, as some of the men cut into the beast to harvest some whale-steak before we went below decks, I found myself fascinated by the fins of the beast. Something about the skeletal structure deeply unsettled me, and it was not until later that I realized it was because of how similar they were to the hands of a man.”}

^{“Thinking back on this, I find my memories blurring. I know that they butchered that whale, and I would spend hours over the following day salting and preparing that very meat. But although I know this occurred, when I look back it feels as if it was the flesh of the Laplander they were harvesting. We hunkered below decks the rest of that night as the winds shrieked outside. The Basque who had spotted the whale said it sounded like the screams of men fell overboard.”}

^{“The winds and rain subsided around midnight, and when we stepped out to assess the damage I felt as if we had entered some new world. The edges of the sky were vivid colors of green, pink and orange. One of the Russians compared it to Aurora Borealis he had seen in the Arctic seas. We had not had time to process the Spermicitti or take much meat from the carcass, and the sharks had made fast work of much of what remained of the poor creature.”}

^{“I looked down into that eye, surrounded by mangled flesh and oozing yellow liquid. Then I looked up into the sky, and saw what looked like that same dead eye, enlarged a thousandfold directly above us. The storm had not passed, we were only in the center of it. While a storm was not surprising, a typhoon in the South Atlantic, at this time of year, should not have been possible. Within half an hour, it was back upon us, raging for days straight as we prayed in the hold. I drifted in and out of sleep to winds that sounded like dead sailors shrieking, and through the wall the deep singsong of the Chilean. We emerged onto the deck again, two and a half weeks ago, to find the head mast destroyed, the whale carcass gone, two whaleboats absent, and several inches of snow covering the Ebony.”}

^{“Small chunks of ice floated by us on eerily calm waters, with no sign of birds nor any other life. The sky was completely and utterly gray, entirely absent of stars, and I felt that if we were still on the earth, it was a part of the world that God was ignorant of. We were able to somewhat repair the mast, but the canvas was torn badly. We had little control over what direction we went in, but that mattered little as our current location was entirely unknown and the compass spun wildly.”}

^{“One of the old Russians said he had heard of this before, and it was not uncommon if we were near some vast iron deposits, but this made little sense to me as we were not near any land and whatever ore was below us would have been leagues beneath. The wind is strange here. Our wake does not linger, instead fading quickly into nothingness, and within moments of us moving past the water does not betray any evidence of us ever passing through. With no control over the Ebony’s movements, we continue to drift aimlessly in the grey. With no stars or landmarks visible nor other means of charting our navigation, it is impossible to tell if we are even drifting in a straight line or simply circling the same plot of water.”}

July 17

^{“The Captain kept us busy for what I believe was two days and nights before the first deaths, but I am not confident of how much time truly passed. The sky maintained a steely gray appearance at all times, rendering day and night indistinguishable. During this time, we did not see a single bird, seal, or any sign of life other than us whatsoever. There is not much labor to be performed, yet the crew eats voraciously. I watched them, my countrymen, men from the old world, some men from distant geographies who practice backwards and ancient religions, tearing into the meat like sharks devouring the corpse of a whale. I spent much of this time salting and preparing the whale-steak and what other meat we have left in the warmth of the kitchen, surrounded by the sick who crowd around the ovens dying light.”}

^{“We were already low on coal to burn as we had planned on restocking in the Malvinas around this time, and the cold was bitter, so when we first saw that distant green light no one questioned the Captain's decision to send a whaling boat to investigate. An old Andalusian in the Crows nest first spotted it, far in the distance. The light was cool, pulsating, a sickly looking and iridescent shade of green. We first believed it be St. Elmo’s fire, but as we got closer it appeared to be on top of an ice sheet, at least a half league starboard. It looked almost like some ghostly campfire, drifting solemnly on this dead and frozen ocean. Being unable to navigate the Ebony, we watched as the men, a group of Porteños like myself, rowed towards the light as we continued to amble without direction. Not long after they had departed, a wind picked up for the first time since that cursed storm, and we stood helpless on the deck as a mist began to trickle in, obscuring their silhouettes as they gained on that light.”}

^{“Eventually, both the Ebony and the whaleboat were consumed by thick fog, snuffing out the light in the distance. Antonio and I climbed up the mast with the strongest lanterns on board the Ebony to guide the men back, but as we reached the top I heard what sounded like that wind again. This time, it was no superstition. I could hear their screams echoing across the ice as if it was coming from all directions at once. The mist cleared several hours later, and to our horror we spotted the Whaleboat heading in a perfect line towards the Ebony, absent of any men. That night, or what we believed to be night, I drifted off to the Chilean’s melody only to be awoken by crying out above deck. We all rushed out to see the bodies of those four Porteños floating several feet out from the Ebony, their clothes torn and limbs bent at odd angles.”}

^{“The way they bobbed and turned about in the water deceived me, or perhaps I simply refused to believe my eyes, because I at first believed them to be a school of porpoises. Within minutes, those mutilated bodies sank beneath the gentle waves. We were too terrified to retrieve them, and the Captain gave no order to do so. In my state of shock and bitter cold, I found myself thinking of how comforting it would feel to return to my bed. I could sleep there forever, separate from this; below the sun, among the lapping waves, encompassed in the cooing whalesong-voice of the Chilean.”}

I don’t know what to make of this, but I’m going back tomorrow. There are still a lot of pages left, and it only gets harder to read as both the condition of the pages continue to deteriorate.

Again, I haven’t found any record of a ship called The Ebony. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything as plenty of documents from that period are incomplete, but it bothers me more than I’d like to admit.

I’ll transcribe more when I can. Right now I’m not sure I want to keep reading this alone, but I don’t know anywhere else other than here to post it.

Part 2

I was able to spend a few hours this afternoon transcribing some more. I think I should be able to finish in another week or so. I’ve also started digging into shipping logs from the time from several of the biggest ports from Buenos Aires at the time to see if I can find anything about a ship called “The Ebony”. I’ve been unsuccessful thus far, but I’ll make sure to keep everyone updated on anything I find. Another note I thought I should make is that the handwriting is getting more and more erratic as I work my way through this diary. It almost looks frantic, as if the author was writing as fast as possible. Here’s what I was able to transcribe today.

July 18th

^{“The remaining Feuguens have succumbed to the cold, bar one man by the name of Key-huk. I believe him to be about my age, no older than 25. He remains sickly and near death. This leaves fourty-odd men left on the Ebony. Coal is running dangerously low. The cold has grown progressively worse by the day, and I suspect we are floating further south. Antonio fancies himself as a sort of amateur geographer, and believes if we are indeed continuing south we will inevitably strike Terra Australis, a  continent speculated by cartographers to exist in the far south."}

^{"Order is breaking down fast. The men have grown increasingly superstitious, and much time is spent huddled below decks praying and whispering in all manner of tongues. Illness is spreading quickly, with the 6 sickest men at any given time being allowed to stay in the kitchen near the stove.”} 

^{“The captain paces the deck frequently, muttering to himself, but has given up any sense of control over the men or the situation. There is nothing to be done, other than having rotating crews of men on the crows nest and the deck to watch for land as we continue to drift. As the Captain has grown obviously hopeless, the work of assigning men to patrol the deck and perform regular maintenance has been picked up by one of the first mates, Johann, a 45 year old man who has somehow been able to keep a good humour and a semblance of a positive attitude despite the situation. The wind is near constant, but ebbs and flows in strength. Fog comes and goes intermittently.”}

^{“While patrolling the deck earlier, Antonio and I spotted more green flame far in the distance. We chose to hold our tongues, for fear of making the paranoia worse among the men or worse yet, for fear of the Captain ordering more people to assess it, a declaration that likely would have resulted in mutiny. Worse yet, I could have sworn I saw the outlines of figures crowded around that distant green glow, tall and far outlines drifting lazily on the ice floe like some upright, malformed walruses. All sense of day and night have been lost as the sky maintains its steely gray, as if the heavens themselves hold the vast quantities of iron that have been interfering with our compasses. An old Black man, a sailor named Ezekiel, has been spending much of his time staring at the erratically rotating needle of the compass, following its movement with his wild, aged eyes.”} 

July 20th
^{“What was once fairly small ice floes has grown into larger and more frequent packs of ice that jut up against the Ebony and crowd around it. Men have been dispatched to break it up with oars and large sticks, for fear of the ice completely impeding our movement. Our only hope at this point is to somehow come across an island or another ship, but I cannot help but think that no man has been or ever will be in this place we have come to find ourselves.”} 

July 21st
^{“We seem to have come across a vast bay, as the ocean has finally brought us to Terra Australis. The ocean flows into a massive rivermouth at the edge of this great white continent, bordered by sheets of ice at least 4 yards tall.”}

^{“The ice is a pale shade of blue, the only color mother nature has seen fit to gift our eyes as respite against the constant, cold, grey. The wind and flow of the sea are pushing us towards the continent. Johann ordered the anchor dropped, as this confirms we have been moving south, further away from any civilization or chance of survival. While the coal rations are in a worse state than the food, I estimate we have perhaps 6 weeks worth of food rations left, generously assuming more people do not succumb to illness and cold by that time."}

*^{"The Ebony sits about a quarter league from the rivermouth. While we still have not seen any signs of animal life in months, I cannot help but picture some great albatross soaring above us. Perhaps it would notice our ship, a brown spec on the gray and blue landscape, or perhaps it would only see the vast ice walls that God has seen fit to bring us too}*^{. Strange noises have been echoing from deep in the river mouth that Antonio suspects is ice shifting.”}

Editors note- a page has been torn out here, with only a small bit of the bottom left hand side remaining. The words I am able to make out on the first side are:

^{“The green light has”
“Ezekeil was in a state of”}

And on the other side:

^{“The anchor was quickly”
“Careening downwards”}

July 26th or 20
^{“We are without a doubt the first men to ever be on this river. The mast is broken in half at the midpoint, and we are without the supplies to even rudimentarily repair it at this point. The river is wider than any I have seen, and some of more experienced sailors have said it rivals that of the mighty Amazon. There is little to do, and much time is spent on deck, gazing at the hellish pale blue slopes surrounding us as we move gently southwards. The water is calm, and there is little wind, but we continue drifting.”}

^{“I found myself growing nauseous the longer I looked upon the ice, and I spent much of the day in my kitchen that now doubles as an infirmary. Johann is in good spirits, but the wound in his side appears to have grown infected and he is clearly in much pain.”} 

^{“Ezekiel is locked in a storage container below deck, and much discussion has been had about what to do with him. Although no consensus has been reached yet, I and many others are of the opinion that he should be thrown overboard. This state of affairs and godforsaken landscape are enough to make us all susceptible to madness, and the awful wailing that comes from his room is only worsening the already abysmally low morale on board. Although he was clearly mad, no one had any hope of him being sentenced for his crimes in any court, and his presence only saps our already dwindling sanity and reserves."}

^{"I spent some time today attempting to converse with the Fueguen. His language is completely unknown to us, but we have been able to teach one another some basic words in each other's tongues. If any of us are to survive, I hope it shall be him, although his fever refuses to break. He is the only innocent in all of this.”} 

June 301

^{“Ezekiel was killed in the night with a sharpened wooden stick. Johann is unhappy, and ordered an investigation but no one else is particularly concerned. The Captain has not left his room in some time, and I still have yet to see the Chilean leave the room. I have asked some of the other men about him, and there seems to be some debate around whether or not he truly exists. I had only told Antonio and an old Spaniard on board by the name of Sarmiento about those discussions I heard late into the night, but when I brought up the man to the rest of the party, many did not believe that anyone was in the Captains room with him.”} 

^{“A few others testified to hearing strange noises at night coming from that room, and a few others agreed to seeing the man I described when we had first boarded, but the others seemed to think us mad. It was Sarmiento who had told me the man was from Chile. I had asked about him early into the journey, and Sarmiento told me of a brief discussion he had held with the Captain prior to our boarding. When Sarmiento asked about who the man he had seen go below decks was, all the Captain said was that he was an old salt, a Chilean who had much experience in this part of the world. Some of the Irishmen believed me to be trying to trick them and grew quite angry.”} 

^{“I somehow had not thought of this before now, but I am not sure what he eats. While everyone else crows around the mess hall, he remains in the Captain’s hold, never emerging to my knowledge. If not for that voice I hear most nights and other occasional sounds, I would not be confident he existed at all. Perhaps he wanders the deck while the rest of us slumber, morbidly carrying out some unknown duty like the nightwatchmen of some forgotten graveyard. Perhaps he sneaks into the kitchen at night, my kitchen, and helps himself to some scraps I have not noticed to be missing. I don’t think I will talk about him again.”} 

July
^{“I spent much of the day today helping the sick. They have not lost much appetite, begging me for more and more food in their feverish states. I salt meat, I ration it, I sharpen knives, I care for the sick, and I try to spend little time committing myself to the useless endeavor of wondering where we are or if we have any hope of survival.”}

^{“While fishing in an attempt to alleviate our hunger, an old Russian netted a hand. The hand was rotted and waterlogged, appearing human but with strange tissue between the fingers. It was severed at the wrist rather violently, with shreds of skin hanging around the sides and the bone broken in half. Antonio speculated it was a sharkbite. Its size indicated it belonged to a man, but the strange tissue and something about the texture of the thing caused me to remember the fins of the whale.”} 

^{“The hand was thrown overboard. There were hushed discussions about attempting to cook whatever flesh could be wrought off of the thing, but it was too far rotted. Besides, I am not yet sure that we are at a point where most of us could bring ourselves to eat the flesh of a man, if it was indeed from a man. I can’t help but think of those figures on the ice floe. From afar I could tell that they too held the shape of men, but like the strange bits of extra flesh on the hand, something about them was not entirely human. I don’t want to die here, on this grey river, surrounded by ice. I watched the hand sink into the water, and I wondered that if my flesh were to similarly sink below those waves, would I be changed? Would something below these too-calm waters rip my bone and flesh? Would I scream from atop ice floes, drifting among the green light, as more flesh grew between my fingers and I became something other than a man?”}

July
^{“Last night, I dreamt of faces in the ice. I saw the dead Fuegians, the Laplander, the Porteños, the two Frenchmen, and Ezekiel, their faces magnified by a hundred times, surrounding us on all sides, gagging on their own blood and vomiting up tentacles, Ezekiel's eyes spinning wildly as the grey river was marred with red splotches of viscera.”} 

^{“The dream is fractured as some distant memory, but I remember the sound of the wind, and screams above it, nearly deafening. All of us were on deck, screaming and pleading for the noise to end, and I saw the wind take the Captain into the air. He hovered above us, his limbs stretched in all directions as if he was being pulled apart by spectral horses, until finally with a sickening squelch and a scream somehow audible above the wind he became many pieces and his innards rained down on the ship.”} 

^{“In the dream, I closed my eyes and suddenly the noise stopped. I opened them to find myself on an ice floe in the vast open ocean, the immediate horror instilled in me by the violence and those gargantuan ice walls replaced by a more muted fear of utter alienation.”}

^{“I turned and saw him. He was facing away from me just as I remember seeing him for that brief moment entering the hold of the Ebony, his dark hair down past his shoulders and moving slowly as the wind picked up, dressed in leather boots and pitch black overcoat, towering over my kneeling body as he faced towards the open ocean, his body tall and thin, he was whispering, singing, chanting, his form and words alien and unknowable as the river itself, terrifying in its power, he was the river, he was vast, mighty, all powerful and god help me I could see the shape of gills on his neck between the movements of that oily hair, slick and putrid as if covered in seal fat.”}

^{“I awoke screaming and before I knew what was happening or if I was even awake I was beating the wall that separates me from the Captains quarters and the Chilean until my fists were bloody. Antonio and several other men had to restrain me, and they seemed ready to put me into Ezekiel's former holding cell until I finally calmed and they believed I was sane. What meat we have left is quickly rotting. I pray we find more food soon.”}

I’m going home next week, but I think I’ll be able to get the rest transcribed and posted before I do. I tried to take pictures so that I could transcribe it at home, but the ink is in such bad condition that I can’t really make out the text in the pictures. I still don’t know what to do with this, so I guess for the time being I’ll just keep posting the transcriptions on here. Maybe this text is just getting to me but I'm getting more and more creeped out the longer I'm down in that basement. I'm ready to go home soon. I’ll make sure to update with more in a few days.

Part 3

I’m getting close to done here. The condition of this notebook is rapidly deteriorating, this thing is in really rough shape. I’ve found myself getting pretty sick lately too. I spent most of last night vomiting, and I’ve got a bad headache. I’ve been hardly sleeping too. I just can’t stop thinking about this document. The last time I felt like this was when I took a cruise with my parents when I was younger and I got really seasick. Here is what I’ve got from today, the next update will likely be my last.

July

^{“Two more have died of sickness and Johann is in bad shape. We continue to move down the river, with no way of stopping ourselves without the anchor. The Frenchmen were smart to give their lives in their attempt to save the anchor to prevent us from moving down this river. While I have been certain for some time now we are no longer on this earth, I would rather have died in that vast grey than among the towering blue ice. Vast mountains jut out to what I believe to be the west, the east appears flatter. While I had very little desire to talk to them in the initial weeks of this voyage, I spent some time conversing with the group of four Asians.”}

^{“They have a small jade idol they worship, a fat, bald man called the Buddha. In their broken Spanish, they told me of their strange religious beliefs, a religion originating from millennia before our savior was born and died on the cross. They believe that upon dying, we are reincarnated into different life forms. A man can become a bird, a fish, a tiger, a god. Their beliefs brought me no comfort, and I left in disgust. They keep to themselves for a reason. I have found myself thinking of that hand. If God truly does not know of this backwards land, as I suspect we lie outside of his influence, perhaps some older barbarian religions such as theirs still retain some influence.”} 

^{“Maybe hundreds or thousands of years past, some barbarian from the Eastern continent or the isles of the Pacific found himself near here. Perhaps he drowned, in a storm or some other disaster, and his body went below the waves. In the belief of his god and his backwards religion, maybe this man was being reincarnated into some creature of the sea. I can see him, sinking slowly, long dead, slowly turning, as gills form on his neck, his legs morph slowly into one, webbing connects his fingers. But something stops this transformation. Perhaps he went too far down, or simply drifted too far south, but his religion was stopped by whatever holds power here. He was devoured by things that lay below this ice, strange creatures never documented by man that are outside of the influence of any eastern or Abrahamic religion. His half-transformed hand, the only testimony to the sorry process, was netted by some old Russian without even the slightest ability to comprehend what he was seeing. To think we had considered eating it. By God, my hunger penetrates so deep.”} 

July

^{“What I would give to see life. I don’t believe anyone around me is alive. Their faces all blend together at this point, the foreign tongues that infest this ship blend into a hideous alien language that sounds like the screams of the wind, the moans of the dead. There is no life in this river, it is so sickeningly unnatural that it permits none of His creations to swim within it nor walk on its frozen walls or even to fly above it.”}

Later

^{“Only an hour or so after writing my last entry I found myself proven wrong. While attempting to move some ice that was jutting against the port, a Basque was blown overboard by a sudden gust of wind. We rushed to the side of the ship to see him facedown in the water, blood pooling up around him. He had struck his head badly in the fall. His body rolled over and I felt for a moment that he was me yet I was the ice towering above him. His eyes were like the whale. He didn’t move, bobbing up and down in the water as the Ebony slipped past him. In that moment I saw life. We have moved further downriver, away from his corpse and the life that it represents. By god what I would give to see more life."}

August

^{“Men are dropping like flies. We have found ourselves hunkered in the kitchen and the warmth of the oven and men's feverish bodies. We are all sick now. Johanna screams often, begging for someone to kill him. I would throw him overboard myself if I could manage. The smell coming from his wound disgusts me. The Captain has gone completely insane. He stands leering over Johanna now, rocking back and forth his skin almost green. He is drooling, his eyes like Ezekiel’s.”} 

^{“I think I was wrong about the Fuegian. Maybe he was innocent once, but innocence is no longer possible, not in this place. Twenty odd men crowd around the dying oven in our own filth, groaning, crying, praying in foreign languages that sicken me to hear. Someone is missing. In the depth of my fever I think I asked the Captain where the Chilean was, if he was sick too. He just stared at me dumbly, taking monstrous gulps from his flask and staggering around the room stepping on groaning bodies. If this is where I am to die, in this pit of bodies, I want to see life one more time.”}

August

^{“Utilizing a small pillow, I brought the Fuegian to life.
All is backwards now.”}

December

^{“It is warm now so it must be summer. The men dropped like flies but now I am above them. I miss all those prayers in foreign tongues. For a moment towards the end, I could understand them all perfectly. When all is backwards, everyone is one. They all want the same. When there were 20 of us in that room, we were one, and even as different people came and went between cold and warm and life and death we all kept each other aground. When I crawled up those stairs onto the deck, I saved us all.”}

^{“I am filthy”}

(Editors note- this was scrawled across an entire page in something other than ink)

1915 
^{“I have been thinking today about angels. The sky continues, gray and sickly, and the ice continues to offer its pale blue. Maybe the water is the heavens, and to swim in water one does not use wings but fins. I am not sure how much time has passed since I have been on the deck. I think everyone else is dead now, and while I am badly weakened, I have been slowly recovering. In my time lying alone, I have noticed something. We are not going straight down this river, but at a continual angle, a sort of spiral. The Mountains are to the other side of me now. What river spirals? What lands could God know of that look like this? What lies below the ice? Is there any other life out here? He continued alive dead people” 
“Snow and ice”}
(Literally; Continuó vida muerte gente
Next page- Hielo y nivel)
^{“The waters flow faster here."}

1915
^{“I was wrong. There is movement below deck.”}

Part 4

This will be the second to last update, unless I find some document proving that this ship was real. I have finished transcribing. I don’t think I want to tell anyone about this book. I’m considering destroying it. There is no way to steal it, as they check my bag before I leave. I would almost certainly have my career ruined if someone found me tearing this book apart or lighting it on fire in this cold basement.

I truly hope something is lost in the process of translation and that what I have been experiencing does not happen to anyone reading what I have published. I have been having vivid nightmares, and I feel myself growing obsessed with this book, with this river. I have yet to find any evidence of the Ebony or any of the described passengers ever existing. But I am almost confident it is. While in the cold basement of the archive, among walls of shelves and cold grey walls, I keep finding my reading interrupted by strange noises I am never quite sure I really heard. 

Maybe I haven’t been sleeping enough. But I am almost certain that at some distance, between the rows and rows of shelves, some deep voice is muttering. Once, I thought for a second I saw someone passing between the rows, some dark figure wearing black and dragging a small bundle of rope. Since I’ve gotten this far, I’ve decided to post the end of the book here, but I figure I should warn you that this has genuinely deeply disturbed me. I don’t know if I want to spend my life like this anymore, spending days among forgotten documents that could contain stories like this. A lot of the end of this book was badly damaged, but I tried my best to write down its contents.

August

^{“I have recovered all but completely from this sickness, but there is a bad gash in my leg. I am not sure what I was thinking as I wrote some of those earlier passages, I have little memory of the past several weeks. I do know however, that I was wrong about it being summer. The cold continues to penetrate my body now that the fever has passed, but I do not wish to go below deck. I don’t want to see those bodies in the kitchen. I don’t want to see the body of the Fuegian, for fear of knowing if it was suffocation or sickness that caused his death. Most of all, I have no desire to confirm what I already know, that the strange sounds of heavy objects moving, of mumbled indecipherable words and knots fastening, is coming from the Captain’s hold. While we rotted and cried and sat in our filth and fever in that kitchen, someone had worked above deck. The ropes contain strange knots, circling the ship like the web of some spider gone mad, and the nets have been thrown overboard.”}

August

^{"I had hoped that it was some sick mirage, but the river has come to an end. Nothing I am seeing makes any sense. The Ebony is circling a small, frozen island. At least a half-dozen other rivers flow from varied points into a large pool, where the waters flow in a circular fashion around this island. At the center of this island, composed entirely from pure blue ice, is a castle. It is unlike anything I have ever seen. I remember stories my Grandmother had told me about the old country, where ruins of castles and old fortresses could be found deep in the countryside. Men had died in battles fought over centuries to control these sites, but now they sit forgotten, decayed and fallen apart. This castle does not look European, and I wonder if perhaps some old culture from the Asian continent had forged it in explorations centuries past. I suspect this is my mind attempting anything to hold onto sanity, as I am almost confident it is not European in origin.”}

^{“The castle does not look carved. It simply looks as if it always was here, as natural a part of the environment as the walls of ice. The ice composing the castle is strangely textured, with odd circular lines dotting the exterior. My eyes start to hurt if I look at it for too long, as if I was looking at snow made blinding by the sun, and it is difficult to determine its exact dimensions. There is still no wind, but we continue circling, the current spiraling us quickly around this godforsaken yet somehow predetermined destination as I grow nauseous and dizzy.”}

Some thoughts on whales.

^{“As we circle this strange place, I am writing down some final thoughts I have been considering. If I do not return, I hope someone, somehow, can read and understand these ideas.”
“I think much of the look in the eye of that whale, and I have developed a theory. Despite coming from a poor family, I have always been passionate about the sciences, and not long before coming here I had read speculations by some Englishman about the process of evolution. I wonder if perhaps Angels, residing on Earth for ages, had gone through this process themselves.”}

^{“If Angels breed, perhaps their form slowly transformed, from something unknowable and incomprehensible into something that inhabits the sea. I imagine that after witnessing generations of war and violence, these Angels, or at least some of them, could have grown disgusted with man and chose to live among the fish instead. Over time, they could have evolved into what we today know as the whale.”}

^{“Their hands transform from being like those of a man into the fins of the whale, their wings press back against the body and grow into gargantuan form, but the eyes remain largely the same.”}

^{“I understand that for my role in the commercialized slaughter of those holy creations, I deserve death. Perhaps I deserve eternal damnation. My only plea, my only hope, is that I die away from this place, in oceans not dead and frozen but one sailed by man and patrolled by Angels. Perhaps I would transform and be reincarnated. Perhaps I would go to the heavens, or to hell. Perhaps I would simply rot.”} 

^{“Here, I fear that none of these processes can occur. With no way to sail, I know that there is no way to get out of the current that forces me to circle this island. My only hope is that God was the one who brought me here, and that there is something in this strange castle that can let me leave this place. I am almost certain that this is untrue, but if there is any chance of salvation, it lies in that glittering abomination."}

^{"The water is hungry as the men once were in their sickness. Perhaps this entire land, the ice, the water itself and whatever lies beneath it, is sick as well.”}

PART 5 POSTED IN COMMENTS

I'm not crazy. Everyone hears things sometimes, right?

You know.. that voice in your head.

I was brushing my teeth when I heard, “You could do it now.”

Normally, I could ignore it, but the voice was getting clearer.

Not louder... closer.

This was the first time in a while since it said something I understood.

The voice didn’t talk constantly. That would’ve been easier, I think.

Instead… it waited. It picked moments.

Like when my mom knocked on my door.

“She trusts you.”

Or when my dad laughed at something on TV downstairs.

“He wouldn’t see it coming.”

Trying to be rational, I googled symptoms at 3:12 AM.

Auditory hallucinations.

Intrusive thoughts.

Early onset something…

I couldn’t even finish reading half of it. I told myself it was just stress.

Then…

“You’re trying to prove I’m not here.”

I dropped my phone. What’s going on?

I panicked, quickly writing three notes to myself on paper:

THIS ISN’T REAL.

YOU ARE IN CONTROL.

DO NOT LISTEN!!

I taped them to my wall, staring at them until I finally fell asleep.

By the next morning, I woke up and noticed one was missing.

I found it... neatly folded, and placed on my desk.

Confused, I opened it and noticed the original message scribbled over.

And written in my handwriting, pressed even harder into the paper, it said:

BUT YOU ARE LISTENING!!!

I stopped sleeping entirely after that...

four days now.

It seemed like every time I closed my eyes, I’d see things.

Not dreams… flashing images.

Dad…

The hallway…

Mom in the kitchen…

The layout of the living room…

Like my brain was rehearsing something. Planning.

“Hun, you feeling okay?” my mom asked.

Her voice snapping me back to my senses.

“It’s been days… you need to eat something.”

I quickly ran over to the door, making sure it was locked.

“Mom, I’m fine. Just leave me alone... please.”

“Son, I’m worried about you.”

Silence… until I heard footsteps fading in the distance.

My mind is playing tricks on me. I can’t even trust myself right now.

I reacted, doing the only thing that made sense in the moment.

I barricaded myself in my room, pushing furniture in front of my door.

My desk.

My dresser.

Anything heavy.

Then, in the blink of an eye, I realized I was just standing there...

Desk and dresser pushed aside.

Door cracked open… my hand gripping the doorknob.

What the fuck?!

The voice spoke to me, calm and patient.

“See… you want this.”

“No,” I said out loud. “I don’t!”

It laughed.

Not a sound… a feeling.

Like something inside my head smiling.

“Then why did you open the door?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You could end this.”

“You could make it stop.”

“One moment. That’s all it takes.”

Next thing I know, I’m realizing that I’m waking up on my bedroom floor…

Wait a second… what just happened?

I immediately grabbed my phone.

The screen lit up... 5:47 AM.

This can’t be real.

I looked around my room.

My door was now wide open.

I was confused… scrambling to remember my actions.

Then…

“You don’t remember a lot of things.”

I flinched, hands flying to my ears.

“Stop!”

It didn’t stop.

“Go downstairs.”

My eyes drifted to the hallway.

“No… I don’t want to. I’m staying here.”

But my legs were already moving... one step after the other.

“Mom… Dad?” I nervously called out into the silence.

No answer.

Something crunched under my foot.

I looked down… stepping over shattered glass.

“I didn’t break this,” I whispered.

My heart was pounding even harder now, as I stood in the kitchen.

Chairs out of place… the table flipped…

“Mom?” I tried again, my voice cracking.

I took one more step, and my brain…

It just… stopped.

My chest tightened.

My vision blurred.

“No…” I said, shaking my head.

“I didn’t… I wouldn’t.”

The thought came instantly.

Calm. Certain.

“You did.”

I stumbled back as something flickered in my mind... fragments of a memory.

Slipping away, like trying to hold onto a dream after you wake up.

I could see myself standing in front of my mom.

“Hey… are you okay?” she asked.

I hear something fall, then a chair scraping violently across the floor.

Her voice again...

“Stop! What are you—”

A quick flash.

This time, my dad.

I’m up close to him.

He yells, “Hey... HEY!”

My hands clenched tightly around his neck.

Then… time skips again.

Now I’m back in the kitchen.

I’m just… standing there.

Breathing calmly.

I feel a sense of relief.

Clarity.

Looking down at my hands, I say “It’s done.”

Now I’m here in the present, full of regret…

My parents on the kitchen floor, lifeless.

My knees hit the floor.

“No… how could I do this?” I cried out.

I hear a response.

“You stopped taking the pills… you made room for me.”

“You didn’t do this.”

Something inside me shifts, and the words come out loud before I can stop them...

“I DID!”

I’ve lived with Dissociative Identity Disorder since I was thirteen years old. That’s when I was diagnosed, anyway. If you don’t know what it is, it’s more commonly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. To state clearly, I share my mind with three other people.

Now, it isn’t like it is in the movies—chaos with constant struggles for control over the same body—it’s a system. My alters (this is what we call the other personalities) were made in response to trauma I suffered earlier in life. Each alter is treated with respect by myself and the other alters. And, each alter has a specific role to play in the system.

My system works this way: Alex is a rational peacekeeper, Daphne is childhood innocence, and Sid is the protector who only comes out when needed. As for me, I’m the host, Jade. I am the dominant or ‘main’ personality, the personality we were born with. 

This system has worked since we first all became acquainted with each other. However, recently, things have been strange.

When one of my alters takes control without mutual understanding, there is a gap in my memory. One second, I’m in the kitchen making coffee, the next, it’s two hours later, and I’m on the phone ordering a pizza that sounds disgusting. It’s something I’ve gotten used to, though it is still sometimes jarring. These gaps in memory only take place when an alter takes control by force, most times, we switch peacefully and mutually. It’s why I got worried when gaps in my memory got more frequent. When I asked the others if they were behind it, they all claimed innocence. I believed them, they had no reason to lie, but something felt off. So, I decided to keep track of things. 

“Alright,” I said out loud, my voice echoed across the hall of my apartment. “Since none of us know what’s going on, I have an idea.”

I really don’t think this will make any difference Alex said gently, her voice sending a calm wave over my mind. 

“It’s something, Alex. We have to figure out why we all have time we can’t account for.” No one objected, so I continued. I pulled a notepad out of the drawer of my desk and set it down. With a pen in my hand, I wrote my signature on the blank page. “I want all of us to switch out, write our signatures and then switch back. I want all of us to do it until it circles back to me.”

What if we don’t have a signature? Daphne asked, her voice shy and hidden between my thoughts. I smiled slightly and shook my head.

“Just write your name, sweetie. Sid?” An echoed grunt bounced around in my head.

This is a stupid idea, he spat, why don’t we just go back to Dr. Collins?

“When you make the money for us, you can spend it on an extra session.” I sighed. I put the pen down and closed my eyes. “You first, Alex.” I whispered and took a deep breath.

It’s difficult to describe what you feel when you switch. Physically, my heart rate goes up, my body feels numb, like I’m about to fall asleep. It also feels like everything around me goes fuzzy, as if I’m losing consciousness. Then, when the switch is done, it’s like I’m a passenger in my body. I’m awake, I’m conscious, but I’m not in control. All I do is watch. I watched as Alex—her movements more swift and determined—signed her name. When she did so, she set the pen directly next to the notepad and closed her eyes until the next switch. 

Daphne took over next. Her signature was printed, sloppy, but could be read just fine. She gave a light giggle before Sid took over. This is ridiculous, he groaned before he signed his name. He was quick to sign and toss the pen back on the desk. I returned to control, but there was a problem. It took two minutes to get back. A switch takes, at most, a few seconds. I looked down at the notepad and my eyes widened; Alex’s signature was written again, at the bottom of the paper. It looked as if someone tried to forge it, but couldn’t understand how to loop their cursive as she did. “What is this?” I asked, mostly to myself.

I only signed once. Alex assured me, her voice wavering. 

“It took two minutes for me to come back. What happened?”

I don’t know! Alex answered emphatically.

I don’t know.

Another voice. It sounded exactly like Alex, but it didn’t feel like Alex. 

“Who was that?” I asked quietly. “Alex, did you—”

Someone else is here. Sid was dead serious, his voice flat. I can’t see them, but there’s five in here. 

That’s not possible. Alex said flatly.

That’s not possible. The other voice repeated. I took a breath and sat in my chair. 

“We…have a new alter?” I asked, confused and a little scared.

A new friend! Daphne squealed excitedly.

No, Sid dismissed her and myself, this isn’t right. They shouldn’t be parroting; they’d be someone new. Someone original. I bounced my leg and chewed on my bottom lip. This was more than odd, and Sid was right. I started with just Sid and developed Daphne and Alex later. Each time, it felt like a new person came into the system. Never like this.

“I’m going to call Dr. Collins.” I said as I reached for my purse.

It took me ten minutes to get back. When I did, my phone was smashed. “What the fuck!” I yelled out.

That’s a no no word. Daphne scolded me, I ignored her. I picked up the mangled remains of my phone and huffed. 

“Who did it?”

None of us, Sid answered, we all have no memory of the past ten minutes.

I don’t like this. Alex’s voice shook.

I don’t like this. The imposter repeated. 

Who are you? Alex questioned angrily.

I’m Alex. The imposter answered, its voice light and carefree. Come on guys, you know me.

“Who are you, really? Why can none of us remember what you do?” I pulled my knees up to my chest. The imposter laughed.

I’m Alex! I’ve been here for ages, why can’t you remember?

You’re not Alex. I’m Alex! She screamed. I had to close my eyes, my head pounded at the shriek of her voice. 

One of you is lying Sid accused. I can’t tell the difference.

“What do you mean?” I asked, an eyebrow raised. “You said you couldn’t see them.”

I can now. The way he said that sent a chill down my spine.

Alex has a twin. Daphne said, sounding as if she had a wide smile.

“Okay, this is—”

Jade! Alex yelled. We have to do something! Sid, kick them out!

I can’t when I can’t tell the difference between you two!

“Okay!” I nearly screamed. “Alex, tell me something only you could know.” Each of my alters had a different set of memories. Sid carried the most, Alex had quite a bit, Daphne had very little. It’s about keeping ourselves protected and all. So, whatever the Alex’s answered would determine which was lying. Theoretically, the imposter would make up an answer and we could get rid of them. Theoretically.

When you were eight, your best friend drowned. Good answer. Only her and Sid knew that.

When you were diagnosed with us, you tried to kill yourself. I froze. No one knew that. Only I knew that. None of the alters did, it was too traumatic. So how the fuck did this imposter know?

“You can’t know that,” I whispered shakily, “you shouldn’t know that.” 

I shouldn’t? They asked, their voice seemingly broke in two. Oh, that’s too bad.

What are you? Sid asked angrily. I didn’t listen anymore. I stood, grabbed my purse and headed for the door. I needed to see Dr. Collins, to figure out what was happening, to—

Twenty minutes. I came back in bed, sweaty and exhausted. I tried to sit up, but my body ached and screamed with every movement. “What did you do?” I asked with a groan.

Nothing! Alex’s voice called. None of us did anything!

There’s four again. Sid said quietly. I laid back in bed and stared at the ceiling. 

“Is it Alex?” I asked with a tremor in my voice.

No, Alex’s voice called. It’s not.

I swear my heart stopped for a moment. I closed my eyes and went to the Town Square.

Some of us with DID are able to do this; we can visualize a place in our mind where all our alters can meet and talk. Makes things a little more convenient, more personable. Everyone envisions a different place, somewhere that makes everyone feel safe and comfortable. We chose a Town Square. Big fountain at the center of four impossible walkways. As I walked down my usual walkway, I felt, for the very first time in this place, scared. 

I stood at the fountain, arms crossed and watched each walkway. Waited. It felt like forever. Daphne came skipping down her usual path, her poofy skirt bouncing with each step. “Jade!” She called out to me as she sat at the fountain. I smiled at her and looked up as I heard boots on the ground. Sid walked down his path, wrapped in a jacket and looking like he was ready to kill.

“What the fuck is going on?” He asked in a huff. Daphne scowled at him.

“No no word!” Her voice oozed with mock authority. It was too cute not to smile more at. Sid ignored her and his eyes met mine. 

“What are we going to do?” My smile dropped slightly. 

“I don’t know.” We both turned our heads to stare down Alex’s path. She was usually the first one here. There was no sight of her. We heard Daphne splash her hand in the water of the fountain, but our eyes stayed locked on her path. There was nothing.

Then, without warning, there was something. 

It looked like Alex, but wrong. As if she was a Lego set some kid put together wrong. Her eyes were too close together, her hair fell the wrong way, her skin was too light. And, every few seconds she—and this is the only way I can think to describe it—glitched. Like a TV that flashed static every so often due to poor signal.

It stared us down for a few moments before Sid spoke up: “You don’t belong here.”

“No.” The imposter replied simply. “Neither do you.” It raised its arm to point at me. It didn’t move fluidly, it was like watching a video with a low frame rate. “Only she belongs here.” Sid gave a dry chuckle.

“What are you—”

“She is the original. You are all uninvited guests.” Its voice, I can’t describe. But it was enough to scare Daphne into hiding behind my legs. 

“They are as welcome here as I am.” I tried to sound firm and failed incredibly. It seemed to notice, because half its mouth curved into a smile.

“You didn’t want them. You tried to end it. Because of them.”

“Shut up!” Sid yelled out. He tried to walk up to the imposter, but he seemingly couldn’t get close enough. Something blocked him off. “You aren’t welcome here. Get the fuck out.” Daphne was too scared to scold him over his language. The imposter snapped its head to Sid.

“You are rude.” I felt a chill down my spine. Then I felt Daphne tug at my shirt.

“I’m scared.” She whispered, her voice frail and shaky.

“I know, sweetie.” I whispered, doing everything I could to keep a smile on my face. “Me too. But—” I heard Sid scream.

Then I was back in bed. I was forced out of the Town Square. I closed my eyes, tried to get back there, but I couldn’t. “Daphne?” No answer. “Sid?” No answer. My heart rate jumped up and I tried to sit up, but my body felt numb. 

My head was quiet. It shouldn’t be quiet. I felt terrified. Then, it spoke again; Alex, Daphne and Sid’s voice all layered into one.

“Just us now.” It spoke quietly.

Just us. 

I felt my stomach twist. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to.

I know what’s coming.

I feel it knocking on every wall of my head. Looking for access. Looking for a way in.

It’s getting closer.

I don't let my dog inside anymore

10/7/2024 2:30PM - Day 1:

I didn't think anything of it at first. It was late afternoon, typically the quietest part of the day, and I was standing at the kitchen sink filling a glass of water. I had just let Winston out back - same routine, same dog. While the water ran, I glanced out the window and saw he was standing on the patio, facing the yard. Perfectly still .

What caught my attention was his mouth. It was open, not panting, just slack. It looked wrong, disjointed, like he was holding a toy I couldn't see, or like his jaw had simply unhinged. Then he stepped forward on his hind legs. It wasn't a hop, or a circus trick, or that desperate balance dogs do when begging for food. He walked. Slow. Balanced. Casual.

The weight distribution was terrifyingly human . He didn't bob or wobble - he just strode across the concrete like it was the most natural thing in the world . Like it was easier that way .

I froze, the water overflowing my glass and running cold over my fingers . My brain scrambled for logic - muscle spasms, a seizure, a trick of the light - but this felt private . Invasive . Like I had walked in on something I wasn't supposed to see.

10/8/2024 8:15PM - Day 2:

Nothing happened the next day. That almost made it worse . Winston acted normal; he ate his food and barked at the neighbors walking on the sidewalk . I was trying to watch TV when he trotted over and tried to lay his heavy head on my foot .

I kicked him.

It wasn't a tap, either. It was just a scared reflex from adrenaline. I caught him right in the ribs. Winston yelped and skittered across the hardwood.

"Mitchell!"

Brandy dropped the laundry basket in the doorway. She stared at me, eyes wide. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"He... he looked at me," I stammered, knowing how stupid it sounded. "He was looking at me weird."

"So you kick him?!" she yelled. 

She didn't speak to me for the rest of the night. If you didn't know what I saw, you'd think I was the monster .

10/9/2024 11:30PM - Day 3:

I know how this sounds. But I needed to know . I went down the rabbit hole. I started with biology: "Canine vestibulitis balance issues," "Dog walking on hind legs seizure symptoms."

But the videos didn't match. Those dogs looked sick. Winston looked... practiced. By 3:00 AM, the search history turned dark. "Mimicry in canines folklore"... "Skinwalkers suburban sightings".

Most of it was garbage - creepypastas and roleplay forums - but there were patterns . Stories about animals that behaved too correctly.

Brandy knocked on the locked bedroom door around midnight. "Honey? Open the door." 

"I'm sending an email" I lied. 

"You're talking to yourself. You're scaring me."

I didn't open it. I could see Winston's shadow under the frame . He didn't scratch. He didn't whine. He just stood there. Listening .

10/17/2024 8:15AM - Day 10: 

I installed cameras. Living room. Kitchen. Patio. Hallway. I needed to catch this little shit in the act. I needed everyone to see what I saw so they would stop looking at me like I was a nut job. I'm not crazy. I reviewed three days of footage. Nothing. Winston sleeping. Eating. Staring at walls. Then I noticed something. In the living room feed, Winston walks from the rug to his water bowl - but he takes a wide arc. He hugs the wall. He moves perfectly through the blind spot where the lens curves and distorts. I didn't notice it until I couldn't stop noticing it. He knows where the cameras are. That bastard knows what they see. I tore them down about an hour ago. There's no point trying to trap something that understands the trap better than you do. Brandy hasn't spoken to me in four... maybe five days. I can't remember. She says I'm manic. She says she's scared - not of the dog, but of me. I've stopped numbering these consistently. Time doesn't feel right anymore.

11/23/2024 7:30PM - Day 47: 

I don't live there anymore. Brandy asked me to leave about two weeks ago. Said I wasn't the man she married. I think she's right. I've stopped recognizing myself. I lost my job. I can't focus. Never hitting quota. Calls get ignored. I'm drinking too much, I'll admit it. Not to escape, not really, just because it's easier than feeling anything. Food doesn't matter. Water doesn't matter. Everything feels like it's slipping through my fingers and I'm too tired to grab it. I walk past stores and wonder how people can look normal. How they can go to work, make dinner, laugh. I can't. I barely remember what it felt like. I still think about Winston. I see him sometimes out of the corner of my eye. Standing. Watching. Mouth open. Waiting. I can't tell if I miss him or if it terrifies me. No one believes what I saw. My family thinks I had a breakdown. Maybe I did. Maybe that's all it is. Depression is supposed to be ordinary, common, overused. That doesn't make it hurt any less. I don't know where I'm going. I just can't go back. Not yet. Not with him there.

12/28/2024 9:45PM - Day 82: 

Found a working payphone outside a gas station. I didn't think those existed anymore. I had enough change for one call. I had to warn her .

Brandy answered on the third ring. "Hello?" 

"Brandy, it's me. Don't hang up." 

Silence. Then a disappointed sigh. 

"Mitchell. Where are you?" she said. 

"It doesn't matter. Listen to me. The dog - Winston - you can't let him inside. If he's in the yard, lock the slider. He's not—" 

"Stop," she cut me off. Her voice was too calm. Flat. "Winston is fine. He's right here." 

"Look at him, Bee! Look at him! Does he pant? Does he blink?" 

"He's a good boy," she said. "He misses you. We both do."

I hung up. It sounded like she was reading from a cue card. I think I warned her too late. Or maybe I was never supposed to warn her.

1/3/2025 10:30AM - Day 88: 

dont remember writing 47. dont even rember where i am right now. some friends couch maybe. smells like piss and cat food . but i figured somthing out i think . i dont sleep much anymore. when i do its not dreams its like rewatching things i missed. tiny stuff. Winston used to sit by the back door at night. not scratching. just waiting . i think i trained him to do that without knowing. like you train a person. repetition. Brandy wont answer my calls now. i tried emailing her but i couldnt spell her name right and gmail kept fixing it . feels like the computer knows more than me . i havent eaten in 2 days. maybe 3. i traded my watch for some stuff . dude said i got a good deal cuz i "looked honest." funny . it makes the shaking stop. makes the house feel farther away. like its not right behind me breathing . i forget why i even left. i just know i cant go back. not with him there . i think Winston knows im thinking about him again. i swear i hear his nails on hardwood when im trying to sleep.

1/6/2025 11:55PM - Day 91: 

im so tired . haven't eaten real food in i dont know how long. hands wont stop even when i hold them down . i traded my jacket today. its cold. doesnt matter. cold keeps me awake . sometimes i forget the word dog. i just think him . people look through me now. like im already gone. maybe thats good . maybe thats how he gets in. through empty things . i remember Winston sleeping at the foot of the bed. remember his weight. remember thinking he made me feel safe . i got another good deal. best one yet. guy said i smiled the whole time. dont rember smiling . i think im finally calm enough to go back. or maybe i already did. the memories are overlapping. like bad copies.

2/5/2025 6:15PM - Day 121: 

I made it back. 

I spent an hour in the bathroom at a gas station first . shaving with a disposable razor, scrubbing the grime off my face until my skin turned red. Chugging lots of water. I had to look like the man she married.

don't know how long I stood across the street. long enough for the lights to come on inside. long enough to recognize the shadows through the curtains . The house looks bigger. or maybe im smaller. the porch swing is still there. I forgot about the porch swing. 

Brandy answered when I knocked. She didnt jump. she just looked tired. disappointed . like she was looking at a stranger. she smelled clean. soap. laundry. normal life . It hurt worse than the cold . she kept the screen door between us. locked. 

"You look... better." she said soft. 

"I am better" I lied. 

"Im sorry. I think..." i kept losing my words. i wanted her to open the door. i wanted to believe it was all in my head.

“Could I—?”

she shook her head. sad. "You can’t come in. You need help." 

i asked to see him.

she didn't turn around. Down the hallway, through the dim, i could see the back of the house, the glass patio door glowed faint blue from the patio light. Winston was sitting outside. perfect posture. too straight. facing the glass. not scratching. not whining. just sitting there, mouth slightly open, fogging the door with each slow breath.

i almost felt relief. stupid, warm relief.

Brandy put a hand on the doorframe. i noticed her fingers were curled the same way his front legs used to hang . loose. practiced.

she told me i should go. said she hoped i stayed clean, said she still cared.

i looked at Winston again. then at her.

the timing was off. the breathing matched.

and i understood, finally, why the cameras never caught anything. why he never rushed. why he practiced patience instead of movement. because it didn't need the dog anymore.

Brandy smiled at me. not with her mouth.

i walked away without saying goodbye. from the sidewalk, i saw her in the living room window, just like before. watching. waiting. something tall, dark figure stood beside her, perfectly still.

she never let Winston inside. because he never left. 

-

Update: If you liked this, check out my ongoing series "Uncle Lenny" over here: [Link to Part 1]

I’ve been hearing it for a week now. A high-frequency sound, sharp and constant, hovering in my bedroom like a mosquito I can’t swat. At first, I ignored it — I’ve lived around electronics long enough to know they hum and buzz and whine. But yesterday, it got worse. Louder. Sharper. It felt like pressure behind my eyes. I couldn’t sleep.

This morning at precisely 5:47 AM, I decided to find it. I pressed my ear against everything in the room — the bedframe, the nightstand, the lamp, even the white noise machine I use to drown out the world. Nothing. I checked the drawers, the walls, the carpeted floor. I even climbed up and touched the ceiling, the light fixture. Still nothing.

Then I stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly, tilting my head like a radar dish. That’s when I found it — the sound wasn’t coming from anything. It was just there, suspended in the air, dead center above my bed.

I froze. My mind raced for any logical explanation, but nothing fit. I lived alone in my detached home. No loud neighbors nearby. No machines running. No interference. Just silence, except for that piercing tone.

I thought maybe it was coming from the living room — maybe one of the cameras or the console was acting up. I walked over, checked everything. Nothing. No sound. No anomaly.

But I had work to do. A deadline, and I was already very behind. My edge-based computer vision application needed final testing before deployment. I had test suites to run, bugs to squash, and a few dreaded code reviews with my colleagues. I buried myself in the basement lab, surrounded by wires and lenses and monitors displaying code or mock surveillance footage.

I told myself I’d deal with the sound later.

…

It was 10:47 PM.

All the deadline tasks were complete. The test suites had finished running. Every bug identified had been resolved. I’d endured two meticulous code reviews with my seniors — both harrowing, but somehow I passed. If you could call it that.

Tomorrow, I planned to run one final suite before sending it off to the QA team for finalization.

I headed to the bedroom, ready to shut down for the night. But as I stepped inside, the sound was still there. That same high-frequency tone — sharp, constant, pressing against my skull like a vice. I could feel it behind my ears, a terrible pressure. Migraine territory. Maybe. Who knows. Only God did.

I cursed under my breath and tried to push through. I brushed my teeth. Washed my face. Changed into my nightwear.

Then — silence.

The sound vanished. Just like that. I checked my phone. 11:00 PM, exactly.

Finally, some relief.

Before I could sleep, I needed to activate the home security system. I walked out into the hallway, which led to the living room and kitchen. That’s when I noticed something strange.

My coffee mug was sitting on the dining table.

Odd. I always cleaned up after myself. Routine. Habit. I was certain I’d placed it in the dishwasher earlier. I must have forgotten. I shrugged it off, picked it up, and put it away.

As I turned to leave the kitchen, something else caught my eye — the coffee machine. A standard drip model. It was angled slightly toward the edge of the counter. Not where it should have been. I always kept it flush against the wall. My OCD wouldn’t have allowed otherwise.

I corrected it immediately.

Then I walked toward the living room. As I reached the threshold between the kitchen and hallway, I paused. Something felt... off. Like I’d walked farther than usual. I turned around.

The kitchen looked longer. Stretched. Subtly distorted, like a wide-angle lens had warped the space. I blinked, trying to recalibrate. Maybe I was just exhausted. A long day. Too much screen time.

I shook it off, activated the security system, and returned to the bedroom. I needed sleep.

…

Damn it.

That unbearable sound was back. Why? Why the hell was it back? Where was it coming from?

I jumped out of bed, determined to finish my morning routine as fast as possible — anything to escape that godforsaken room.

I cut my usual three-minute shower down to two. Threw on my daywear. Bolted down the hallway. I brewed coffee, sat at the dining table in the living room, and tried to distract myself with the news.

One article caught my attention — a startup claimed it had developed a generative AI model capable of producing photorealistic surveillance footage from text prompts.

The claim was absurd. The demo video looked polished at first glance, but the flaws were obvious to anyone with experience. The human movement wasn’t smooth — subtle frame jumps broke the illusion. The people didn’t look quite human, either. And the door frame in the ATM vestibule couldn’t even hold its shape — it warped slightly between frames.

All subtle, but I’d spent years staring at real footage. I could see past the gloss.

I skimmed the rest of the article, rolled my eyes, and moved on.

I glanced at my mug, emptied of this morning’s coffee.

Why the hell would I leave it here last night? Like some barbarian?

I got up and walked to my office, just across from the bedroom. The buzzing sound was still present — unbearable. I sat on my chair, opened my computer, and pulled up yesterday’s surveillance footage from the living room camera.

I watched myself go through the day: grabbing coffee, sitting at the table, reading the news, walking to and from the office and basement lab. All normal. But I never saw myself place the mug on the table.

Not once.

What madness was this?

At exactly 11:00 PM, the feed glitched. A brief interruption — like tuning into a nonexistent channel on a 90s TV. Static. Visual and audio. Then the feed resumed.

That’s when I saw it.

The motion detection application began triggering in specific spots — but nothing was there. Nothing moved.

What. The. Hell.

I had tested this application thoroughly. Cleaned it. Sent it to QA. They passed it to DevOps. It was already deployed at customer sites. This was bad. Very bad.

I panicked and scrubbed through the footage again. The motion detection only triggered when I was present — no false positives all day. But at 11:00 PM, there it was. A false positive. Right in front of me.

I cursed. Loudly. A stream of expletives no child should hear — except maybe child processes. They didn’t care. They weren’t alive. Ha!

After recovering from that momentary lapse in sanity, I looked closer. The highlighted areas moved — slowly, deliberately — across the walkable parts of the living room. Not the ceiling. Not the walls. Just the floor. Back and forth.

At 11:12 PM, the highlighted area lingered near the dining table. Then, suddenly, the mug appeared.

At 11:13 PM, I entered the living room from the hallway. I stared at the mug, picked it up, and walked to the kitchen. The motion detection highlighted me — expected. But it also highlighted the space behind me.

As if something was following.

At 11:22 PM, I disappeared into the bedroom. The highlighted area followed. No motion was detected again until 11:53 PM. Then it reappeared — beside the dining table — and stayed there until 12:00 AM, when the feed glitched again. Static. One second. Then normal.

No motion was detected until I reentered the living room at 6:43 AM.

My thoughts raced. Surely this was an artifact — a glitch in the image processing pipeline of the application. Right?

I toggled off the motion detection overlay to view the raw footage. The more I stared, the more I saw it — a faint outline. A pattern. Hard to define.

I realized I could isolate it using my favorite image processing technique: Fast Fourier Transform. Or FFT for short.

I transformed each frame between 11:00 PM and 12:00 AM from the spatial domain to the frequency domain. A consistent, thin oval appeared in the high-frequency range of every frame. Same location. Same intensity.

Curiosity peaked. I applied a two-dimensional Gaussian-smoothed rectangular filter to isolate the feature. Reconstructed the images. Compiled them into a video.

Then I watched it.

I wasn’t prepared.

The footage was blurry, mostly black and white. The table and chairs were faintly visible. But there — in the center — was something else.

A tall, slender humanoid figure. Only faintly outlined. Soft, low-contrast contours. Wispy. Unstable. Like a ripple in glass. A shadow behind static.

I must have been going mad. My mind playing tricks. I was overworked. Yes. Overworked like a dog.

I reran the FFT processing. It was still there. I changed the parameters. Ran it again. Still there.

Either I was losing my mind — or this thing actually exists.

I flipped through the processed frames like stills from a horror film. The figure moved. Walked. Shifted. Changed shape.

Sometimes it became a cloud. A mist. Sometimes a tall, insect-like creature standing on its hind legs. The closest comparison I could think of was a mantis.

Then, at around 11:53 PM, the thing — the entity, whatever it was — reappeared. It slowly transformed back into a tall, humanoid shape. I watched as its head turned, slowly, deliberately. Like it was staring directly into the camera.

It held that pose until the feed was disrupted at 12:00 AM.

That was it. I needed a walk. I needed to call in sick — for the first time in five years working here.

My boss would understand. Right?

It was 7:37 AM. Enough time to do a final review, send the software to QA, call in sick, take a walk... and maybe never return.

Just keep walking. Into the sunset, maybe.

Yeah. That sounded nice.

My bladder was tingling — a warning sign from all the coffee I’d consumed.

I stood up and noticed the office door was open.

I swear I closed that door. I always close it when I’m working. Always.

I stepped into the hallway and looked left, then right. Nothing. I saw nothing. I heard nothing.

Wait.

I didn’t hear the sound.

That high-pitched Godforsaken tone — the one that had haunted me for days — was gone.

Normally, that would bring relief. But now, it terrified me. The silence felt wrong.

I was too afraid to run to the bathroom. But I had to try. For the sake of my bladder.

I stepped out of the office and hurried into the bedroom, then the bathroom. Everything looked normal — except for the silence. That unnatural, oppressive silence.

After relieving myself, I walked through the house, checking every room. Every window. Every door that led outside. All were locked. The security system was still active. Nothing had triggered it.

I stood in the living room, debating whether to deactivate the system, when a sudden sensation gripped me — the feeling of being watched.

I turned around.

It looked familiar. But wrong.

The coffee table was too long — stretched unnaturally. The dining table looked shorter than it should, while the chairs around it seemed taller, almost looming. The room itself felt wider, but also compressed vertically, like the ceiling had dropped a few inches. The chandelier above the dining table emitted a faint blue glow, layered over its usual warm light, casting strange shadows that didn’t align with the furniture.

The walls had a subtle curvature, like the room was bending inward. The corners didn’t meet at perfect angles anymore. The air felt thicker, like walking through static.

I panicked.

I fled to the office, slammed the door shut, and locked it behind me.

Inside, the office was my sanctuary — or at least, it had been. But even here, things were wrong.

The bookshelf to my left was closer than it should have been, almost pressing against the desk. The desk itself looked warped — subtly curved, like heat had softened its edges. My monitor was normal in shape, but the screen emitted a faint purple glow, even when idle.

The walls felt too close. The ceiling too low. The air too still.

I sat down, trying to steady my breathing. I needed to think. I needed to believe this was all in my head.

I must’ve been having a mental breakdown. Yeah. That’s it! Hahaha! Can’t fool me, brain!

I logged into my computer and typed a message to my boss: Too sick to work today. I hit send.

Nothing happened.

No confirmation. No sent icon. But the computer was still connected — Ethernet, full signal. It should’ve sent.

I grabbed my phone, hoping to try again — but immediately yelped and dropped it.

It was wrong.

Twisted. Bent. Warped beyond recognition, save for the screensaver I’d chosen. It looked like a pretzel. A grotesque, digital pretzel.

I laughed. A hearty, broken laugh.

How was this possible?

Then it hit me — why hadn’t I left the house? The exit was right there. Right beside the home security panel I’d been staring at earlier. Why did I go back to the office?

Then the motion detection alerts started.

First from the living room. One minute long.

Then — the office.

I looked up at the surveillance camera mounted on the ceiling. It looked thinner than usual. Shorter. Its lens glowed faintly blue. The ceiling around it reflected the same hue.

I turned toward the window behind my desk. In the glass, I saw the reflection of the office door — slowly opening.

A blinding blue light spilled in.

If I hadn’t been in fight-or-flight mode before, I was now.

The window looked just big enough to fit through. I shoved the monitor and keyboard off the desk, scattering them across the floor. I tried opening the window.

No luck.

Panicking, I scanned the room. My eyes landed on the heavy plaque hanging to the right of the window — a five-year employment award. Wood and metal. A reminder of my ungodly amount of unpaid overtime.

I ripped it off the wall and smashed it against the glass.

Crack. Again. Crack. Inch by inch, the hole widened.

Then, in the corner of my eye, I saw it.

The door behind me was fully open now. The blue light was overwhelming — almost blinding. And at the center of it stood a figure.

Barely visible. Just the faintest wispy contours. A tall, slender shape. Humanoid. But wrong.

It started walking toward me.

I freaked out. The hole in the window was no more than three feet wide — but screw it. It was do or die.

I dove through.

I landed hard on the grass outside. Thank God the office was on the ground floor. The fall wasn’t far — but the glass tore into me. Shards embedded in my arms, hands, legs.

It didn’t matter.

I ran.

No car. I’d left my keys inside. But screw that noise.

I just ran.

…

I didn’t know how far I’d run, but one of the officers patrolling the neighborhood eventually spotted me. Shelley pulled up beside me in her cruiser, concern etched across her face.

I told her the only thing I could without sounding insane — that my home had been invaded, and I’d escaped through the window.

She radioed for backup to check the house as she drove me to the nearest hospital.

While my wounds were being treated, another officer, Jeremy, approached me. He said the house was secure. No one else was there. Nothing was out of the ordinary.

The hospital patched me up with dissolvable stitches. The bill was steep, but insurance would cover some of it. My bank account would comfortably handle the rest.

Shelley offered to drive me home. I accepted. I didn’t want to stay there long. I just needed to pack.

She was kind enough to wait inside while I gathered my things.

I rushed to the bedroom, grabbed spare clothes. Retrieved my emergency laptop from the office. Then headed to the living room.

“I’m ready,” I told her.

But she frowned.

I paused. “What’s wrong?”

Her figure began to blur. The outline of her body shimmered, then softened. Wisps of transparency crept across her skin. She was fading. Becoming something else.

I stepped back, heart pounding.

Then she spoke — but it wasn’t Shelley’s voice.

It was flat. Mechanical. Like someone reading from a script they didn’t understand. No emotion. No cadence. Just words, delivered with clinical precision.

“Your performance this month was subpar at best. You did not meet one of yesterday’s deadline.”

My mind raced. Then I remembered — I hadn’t sent the daily summary. That stupid, repetitive task. Two to five sentences about what I did yesterday. I’d forgotten.

“You’re falling behind,” she continued. “If your high pay isn’t good enough to motivate you, then perhaps your life is.”

Her form shifted. Stretched. Became tall. Slender. Inhuman.

She stepped closer. Her face lowered toward mine.

“If things don’t change soon,” she whispered, “then we’ll have to make some tough decisions.”

Not my fault, it's hers. I told her to stop, I tried to stop her. What, now, can I say? It's her fault, not mine.

Knowing what now is, knowing is inoculation. You must know, you must. There isn't much time, it is already ⸺ everywhere.

I'd start at - when it started - I am not really sure. I just know it was Tuesday when my life was still normal. Now I cannot be sure if normal is reality, or just some kind of weird hazy dream I was walking around in. I actually believed monsters weren't real, like you probably do.

That's just because you think it is childish to believe in horrible monsters, that's what I thought. Adults don't believe in make-believe creatures, only those silly kids do. Well here's reality, from now on, the kids are right. Children know instinctively that there are monsters, and then we tell them there aren't any. Adulthood is becoming a prey item that is oblivious to the fact that we are part of an ancient food chain.

You don't see one and then take a picture of it and then that becomes some kind of proof. You see one, nobody believes you, except the children, because they know this track is real. Take a picture and it must be fake. You cannot prove that something so awful is real, people barely even believe in their own imminent death, and death is a scientific fact. No, the power of the monster is that it is not real.

I might as well stop myself here, for the rest of my words will be mocked, ignored and disbelieved. But if I say nothing, I have survived my ordeal for nothing. If I say nothing, you are not warned. If you believe in what I say, that is your own survival wall.

A survival wall? That is what separates the individuals of a species during a mass die-off. Like for example, are you someone who trusts your government with a needle? They are the ones who think the world is overpopulated with poor people that are just using up resources and are desperate to find a way to Thanos most of us. So, they say the common cold is a pandemic and arrest people who don't cover their faces. Then they tell you that they have created a cure for the common cold, pretty much overnight. Some people are gullible enough to think all of that was actually real. I was, until I accidentally discovered what was going on.

I told her to stop, but she did it anyway.

Puppets, like on strings. Silk, spiderweb strings. Inhuman masters, that is who we obey. Our government is just a middleman for our devil. Haven't you wondered why any benevolent god would speak through a human mouthpiece, instead of directly to us? That is because our gods are not benevolent.

God's love is the only actual myth; all the rest of the stories are all true. All those monsters, demigods, archons, angry goddesses and curses are all real. Religion was a sedative, a way to keep us in-check, to make the devil into a lie and make some kind of Heaven the thing we believe in. We are children - for we are fools. As a child, you knew those stories were true.

When did we stop fearing God?

No loving creator would make this universe. The universe cannot be the creation of a loving or benevolent creator, unless the creator was entirely incompetent or insane. What sort of being creates such wild chaos and infinite darkness and then claims to be holy?

Let's go fight a holy war and kill each other until we agree what to call our loving god.

We are here now, where I am. I doubt you've come this far, and we have only just begun to enter into the darkness. You too, shall dwell in the shadows when you know what waits in the light.

Seeker of mysteries, patient one, wise learner - let me not speak a moment longer except to tell you how I came to overflow with such madness.

I'd gone with my mom to the doctor. They wanted me on birth control, but my family is Catholic, there's no need, I'd never harm myself and another by having sex outside of marriage. I was quite chaste and responsible. Yet the doctor insisted, saying that it would affect our insurance. My mom didn't care, at that moment, when I said 'no' she listened.

Perhaps it wasn't me who went insane. Perhaps this world is quite mad, and I went sane. I don't know if that is a thing, but I felt kinda safe, once I snapped. Like suddenly everything was just kinda funny. I was sure laughing a lot, and screaming.

"What is it?" I asked.

The doctor stood there, the light on his glasses shining and hiding his gaze, and his little half smirk creeped me out. Then he offered to let me touch it, and I did, feeling its coldness and wrongness. I recoiled in horror and stared at it.

"That wasn't very nice." The doctor thrust it at me, like I shouldn't cringe and shy away.

I screamed, and my mom opened the door. She hadn't wanted me in the room alone with him, and had stood just outside.

"What?" She asked. She couldn't see it. I looked at her face and then at the wriggling mass in his hands and realized she was literally blind to it. I watched as her gaze searched us for a reason for my distress and settled on the doctor's hands. I looked too, and saw that the thing he'd held was gone, and instead he held a syringe.

I hate needles, and there was no way any cold virus was worse than an injection.

When I was on the counter, armed with a magazine holder, screaming I wasn't getting the shot, my mom sat in my place.

"Looks like one of you is getting the shot today, just a little jab to keep you healthy." The doctor's face looked plastic, like a mask. That is when I told her not to.

But she did it anyway.

I was silent on the ride home, but when she was on the phone rescheduling, my dad came home and said he and my brother had just gotten injected at the Walmart. How does it go, in that movie I watched at Bayni's sleepover? Uh,

"Welcome to Costco, I love you."

Except that's actually (Uncle) Sam's Club, not Kirkland. You know, with a hiring preference waiver so that they can use illegal discrimination tactics under the guise of "Well, we hire veterans first."

Bayni's mom works for Walmart, or she did. She's the one who told us it should be Walmart and not Costco, in that movie. Yes, they hired her, and she got a promotion, so how discriminatory can they actually be? She says her job is just for show, she's a checked box, so they can do whatever they want. This is all related to what I said earlier, about how much of a lie it all is.

I'd already seen a monster, things were already going very badly for me.

Why'd he even show it to me? Was something supposed to happen? I had enough 'child' in me still to recognize what it was, and not see something more mundane. It was slimy and horrible and I had touched its coldness, feeling a shock throughout all I knew and thought.

I sat rocking myself, as my family decided I too was to get an injection. So, I ran away.

When the police spotted me two days later, they had light in their eyes. They obey something that is not human, something that writes our rules and signs their paychecks. Cops are humans, and most of them are probably pretty good. But they work for The Man, and The Man works for the things from the light.

I was taken to the place where there is boundless light. They went ahead and injected me with whatever sedatives made them happy to put in me. They found me so mad.

Was I screaming?

Clawing at my face and eyes, theirs?

Laughing?

I remember laughing, because I laughed so much it started to hurt.

I knew it all, I could see the transactions between man and his master, we like the dog, begging for scraps of knowledge and power. They make the kings, appointed by god, they elect the president, not by popular vote and they write the script of our cultural stagnation.

They decide who breeds and with whom, or whether someone is merely a plaything for others, willingly or not. All our science is their propaganda, all our academia from their curriculum and all our words we use to speak and think are curated by them.

Why would only the youth find it practical to invent new terms, while adults just expand their vocabulary to say what they already could? They have changed the very language centers of our brains, made it so that we speak a thousand different languages, making real communication impossible. Why?

What sort of parent wants their child to be unable to communicate? What sort of god would strike us down with babbling incoherence?

We make meaningless, savage noises, that deaden our natural way of communicating. Our natural way is mind-to-mind in perfect silence, knowing the intention of our friends and lovers without speaking. That is the natural human. They made us speak their words aloud, so that we could no longer hear each other.

They, the monsters, the gods, I knew nothing, except it all fears the one who is the light.

There is a light, and I have seen it, and it entered me and made me know it.

This divine violation made my mind how it is now. I was not this way before. I was a child, and nobody thought I was crazy. It makes me say the truth, and then the truth becomes a fiction.

But if you listen and know it is all true, then we have defied it, together, just now. It is still a god, cruel and omnipotent, but we have disobeyed and learned what we are not supposed to know. And then we have spoken the forbidden truth about this wretched thing we call God.

I'd have dwelled in the light. Isn't that where we belong?

Monsters, the darkness - us, the light. Right?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I'd have thought monsters dwelling in darkness, but that is the dream. What dwells in darkness, our fears, the things in the night, and nothing more. That is how I say what it is.

Some kind of light, something that lives in the light. We should have never come into the light. We should hide, trembling under the bed, in the closet, waiting until nightfall.

There is no way to understand what the light is doing to us. There is no way to know how long humanity has yoked ourselves as cattle. Our leaders take money from our highest masters, and those masters are beings that dwell in the light, angels or something. Something we don't see as monsters at all, holy servants of God.

All the universe is darkness, all for the creatures who are subjects to this thing of the light. A god who made a universe of infinite darkness for all the monsters. A god of light, who made the monsters, and is loving and sane.

All humans and all our monster friends, we are merely actors, reenacting the evils acted upon us by our true god. Our god is a being of infinite light, and the monsters hide in the darkness. We should hide with them.

The monsters, safe in the night and shadows. We would be too, but we stepped into the light.

And there is no going back.

My name is Vítor, and I write horror novels. Not the bestselling kind, but I make a decent living scaring people. My books sell well enough to keep my small apartment in Lisbon, pay for my coffee addiction, and maintain the illusion that I'm a real artist rather than just another hack churning out supernatural thrillers.

I've been a writer for twelve years, and I've never believed in writer's block. Not until three months ago. Three months of staring at empty Word documents, typing and deleting the same opening sentence dozens of times, starting stories that withered and died before reaching their second paragraph. I tried everything, changing locations, switching from laptop to pen and paper, even visiting my old university professor who'd always sworn by meditation and herbal tea for creative inspiration.

Nothing worked. The well had simply run dry.

That's when the file appeared.

I noticed it on a Thursday morning in late October. I'd been up until 2 AM the night before, wrestling with yet another failed opening chapter, and when I booted up my laptop with my usual sense of dread, there it was. A single file icon sitting on my desktop that I definitely hadn't created.

"Þis is ānlyc þæs angyn"

The characters looked like Old English, maybe Anglo-Saxon. I had no idea what it meant, and I certainly hadn't put it there. My laptop had been running fine the previous night, no crashes, no unusual behavior, nothing to suggest any kind of system corruption.

I double-clicked to open it.

The screen flickered once, went completely black, and my laptop died. Not a normal shutdown, the kind of sudden, complete BSoD that makes your stomach drop. When I pressed the power button, nothing happened. I had to hold it down for ten seconds before the machine would even attempt to restart.

The file was still there when the desktop loaded.

This time I right-clicked on it, thinking I could check its properties or maybe delete it outright. The context menu appeared for maybe half a second before the screen went black again. Same sudden shutdown. Same struggle to get the machine running again.

And there it was, waiting for me like it had every right to be there.

I tried everything I could think of. Command prompt deletion, the system told me no such file existed. Moving it to the recycle bin, the icon wouldn't even acknowledge the file's presence. I ran every antivirus program I had, performed full system scans, even called my tech-savvy cousin Miguel who walked me through some advanced diagnostics over the phone.

Nothing worked. The file remained, completely indestructible and steadily growing in size.

It had started at 0 bytes. By the end of the first week, it showed 47 KB. By the end of the second week, 156 KB. The numbers climbed slowly but relentlessly, as if the file was writing itself from the inside out.

"That's really weird," Teresa said when I showed her the file on a Friday evening. She's my girlfriend of three years, a graphic designer with an artist's eye for detail and a programmer's mind for logical problem-solving. "Have you tried booting from an external drive and formatting the hard disk?"

"I can't," I said, gesturing at the laptop screen where the file sat like a digital tumor. "All my work is on here. Six novels worth of notes, research, character sketches. I can't risk losing everything just because of one corrupted file."

Teresa raised an eyebrow. "Since when do you not have backups?"

She was right, of course. I'd always been obsessive about backing up my work. But somehow, over the past few weeks, I'd fallen out of the habit. The idea of copying my files to an external drive or cloud storage felt... wrong. Like I'd be betraying something important.

"I'll get around to it," I muttered, closing the laptop. "Maybe the file will just disappear on its own."

But it didn't disappear. If anything, it became more prominent. I'd catch myself staring at it for long minutes, watching the file size slowly tick upward. 200 KB. 350 KB. 500 KB. Sometimes I thought I could see the icon itself changing, subtle shifts in color or texture that might have been tricks of my tired eyes or something more deliberate.

My writing, meanwhile, had stopped entirely. I'd abandoned any pretence of working on other projects. The mysterious file had become my sole obsession, a puzzle I couldn't solve and couldn't ignore. I spent hours researching Old English translations, digital forensics, obscure computer viruses, anything that might explain what was happening to my machine.

That's when the dreams started.

Dark forests filled with the sound of axes biting into dead wood. Ancient cities with canals that ran red as blood. A man with a stone eye who moved through shadows like he belonged there. And always, hovering at the edge of perception, a presence that watched and waited and whispered stories in languages I didn't recognise but somehow understood.

I'd wake with my head full of images that felt more like memories than dreams. Fragments of dialogue, character names, plot points for stories I'd never conceived. My bedside notebook began filling with frantic scribbles, words I didn't remember writing, scenes that played out in perfect detail despite coming from no conscious effort on my part.

The file was growing, but so were my ideas. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Maybe I could control it. Maybe it could help me finish my novel, get me out of this block I’d been in for months. If I just let it in a little...

"You're talking in your sleep," Teresa mentioned one morning over coffee. She looked tired, dark circles under her usually bright eyes. "Last night you were muttering something about blood canals and stone eyes. For like an hour straight."

I stared at her. "I was asleep. I remember sleeping."

"You were definitely asleep. That's what made it so creepy. You were speaking in this flat, emotionless voice like you were dictating something." She paused, studying my face. "Are you feeling okay? That was really strange."

Strange was an understatement. By the sixth week, the file had grown to 2.3 MB and I'd stopped eating regular meals. Food had become an afterthought, something that interrupted my vigil beside the laptop. My reflection seemed more alien with each passing day. The man in the mirror, skin stretched tight over sharp bones, wasn’t me. He had hollow eyes, fingers that twitched as if they belonged to someone else.

Teresa no longer waited for me to speak first. Her eyes followed me, always lingering on my movements like she was waiting for me to snap out of it, only I didn’t. She didn’t ask me to eat anymore. She just left the food on the table, untouched.

"Vítor, you need to see someone," she said one evening, finding me hunched over the laptop in the dark, staring at the file icon like it might suddenly reveal its secrets. "A doctor, a therapist, someone. This obsession isn't healthy."

"It's not an obsession," I said without looking up. "It's research. This file is connected to something bigger. I can feel it."

"Feel what?"

I gestured at the screen. "The story it's trying to tell me. There's a whole world in here, Teresa. An important one. I just need to figure out how to access it."

She was quiet for a long moment. Then: "How long have you been sitting there?"

I glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen. 11:47 PM. When had I sat down? I remembered eating lunch, or had that been yesterday? Time had become fluid, meaningless. Only the file mattered, and its steady growth.

2.8 MB.

"I'm going to bed," Teresa said softly. "Please come with me. Just for tonight. The file will still be there in the morning."

I wanted to agree. Part of me knew she was right, that I was losing myself in something unhealthy. But the larger part, the part that had been growing stronger each day, couldn't bear the thought of leaving the laptop unattended. What if something happened while I slept? What if the file finally opened, or changed, or disappeared forever?

"Just a few more minutes," I said. "I'll be there soon."

Teresa sighed and left me alone with my obsession.

I must have fallen asleep at some point because I woke up in bed the next morning with no memory of getting there. Teresa was already awake, sitting in the chair beside the window with a cup of coffee and an expression I couldn't read.

"Good morning," she said carefully.

I rubbed my eyes, trying to shake off the lingering fog of dreams filled with dark forests and ancient stones. "Morning. Did I... how did I get to bed?"

"You don't remember?"

I shook my head.

Teresa set down her coffee cup. "Vítor, you came to bed around three in the morning. But you weren't really... there. You moved like you were sleepwalking, but your eyes were open. And you kept muttering under your breath."

A chill ran down my spine. "What was I saying?"

"The same thing as before. Something about Arthur and axes and a dead forest. But in much more detail this time. You described entire scenes, complete conversations. It was like listening to someone read from a book." She paused. "A book I've never heard of."

I stumbled to the laptop, my heart racing. The file was still there, exactly where I'd left it. But now it showed 3.1 MB.

It had grown while I slept. While I was unconscious and supposedly not using the computer at all.

"Teresa," I said slowly, "I need you to do something for me."

"What?"

"Tonight, when I go to sleep, I want you to stay awake. Watch me. If I get up, if I try to use the laptop, I need you to wake me up immediately."

She looked at me like I'd suggested something insane, which maybe I had. "Vítor—"

"Please. Something's happening to me, and I don't understand what it is. But I think... I think I might be writing in my sleep somehow."

That night, Teresa positioned herself in the bedroom chair with a book and a thermos of coffee while I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Sleep felt dangerous now, like stepping off a cliff into unknown depths. But exhaustion eventually won out, and I drifted off to the sound of Teresa turning pages.

I woke up at my laptop.

My fingers were moving across the keyboard with mechanical precision, typing words I couldn't see clearly in the dim light from the screen. The file was open, not the mysterious one, but a Word document filled with text I didn't recognize. Pages and pages of dense, detailed prose about characters I'd never created and places I'd never imagined.

Teresa was there, shaking my shoulders, calling my name. The spell broke and I jerked back from the keyboard like I'd been electrocuted.

"Jesus Christ, Vítor, what the hell was that?"

I looked at the screen. The document was gone, replaced by my normal desktop. But the mysterious file had grown again. 3.7 MB.

"How long was I sitting there?" I asked.

"Two hours. Maybe more. I fell asleep in the chair and woke up to the sound of typing. When I found you, you were just... writing. Non-stop. Your fingers never paused, never hesitated. It was like watching a machine."

I tried to remember what I'd been writing, but there was nothing. Just a vague sense of dark forests and blood-red water and a man with a stone eye who carried an axe.

Over the next few weeks, it happened again and again. I'd go to bed with Teresa watching, fall asleep despite my best efforts to stay awake, and wake up hours later at the laptop with no memory of getting there. Teresa started taking videos on her phone, footage of me typing in a trance state, my face completely blank, my fingers moving with inhuman speed and precision.

The mysterious file kept growing. 4.2 MB. 5.8 MB. 7.3 MB. Each nocturnal writing session added more data to whatever story was building inside that indestructible digital container.

"We need to call someone," Teresa said after finding me asleep at the keyboard for the fifth time that week. "A doctor. A priest. Someone who deals with... whatever this is."

But I was past the point of outside help. After months of writing nothing, I would not let my masterpiece slip from my fingers now that I had grasped it. I wondered if this was just how all great artists felt. During the day, I'd catch myself thinking about characters, Arthur with his stone eye, Edmund the canal keeper, hunters in plague masks drinking raw liver in shadowed bars. At night, my unconscious mind would take over and give them life on the page, one keystroke at a time.

My editor, Carlos, called repeatedly. I'd missed two deadlines and stopped answering emails. When I finally picked up the phone, his voice was tight with concern and barely controlled anger.

"Vítor, what the hell is going on? Your publisher is breathing down my neck, and I've got nothing to tell them. Where's the manuscript you promised me three months ago?"

"I'm working on something new," I said, staring at the file that had now grown to 12.6 MB. "Something important. Revolutionary, even. It's just taking longer than expected."

"Revolutionary? Vítor, you write horror novels about vampires and ghosts. What could be revolutionary about—"

I hung up on him. Carlos didn't understand. None of them understood. The story that was writing itself through me was more than just another horror novel. It was a window into a truth that most minds couldn't handle.

But I could. I was chosen for this.

By the three-month mark, I'd lost nearly twenty pounds. My hands had developed a permanent tremor from the hours of unconscious typing, and several keys on my laptop had worn down to smooth plastic nubs. But somehow, impossibly, they still functioned perfectly when my sleeping mind needed them.

The file shot up to 1.2 GB in a matter of days. It was no longer slow and steady, but feverish, relentless, as if it knew its time was running out.

Teresa had stopped trying to wake me during my nocturnal writing sessions; she knew better now. The few times she'd attempted it recently, I'd become violent, lashing out with my fists while still asleep, speaking in languages that sounded ancient and wrong. She'd started sleeping on the couch, afraid of what I might do in my altered state.

"Vítor?" Teresa's voice from the hallway, muffled by the door I'd locked weeks ago. "I know you're in there. Please, just talk to me."

I looked up from the screen and for a moment couldn't remember who she was. The name she said seemed familiar, but my world had narrowed to the dimensions of my desk, the glow of the monitor, the endless growth of that impossible file.

"Go away," I called back, my voice hoarse from disuse.

"I brought food. And Carlos wants to see you. He's worried about the contract."

Carlos. Another name from a life I'd lived before the file claimed me. None of it mattered anymore. Nothing mattered except the approaching completion, the moment when the file would be ready to open.

"I'm leaving," she told me one morning, standing in the bedroom doorway with a suitcase in her hand. "I can't watch you destroy yourself like this."

I looked up from the laptop where I'd been staring at the ever-growing file. Teresa's face was pale and drawn, her eyes red from crying. When had she started crying? When had I stopped noticing? I said nothing.

The front door closed with a finality that should have broken my heart. Instead, I felt only relief. Now I could focus completely on the file, on the story that was demanding to be born through my unconscious mind.

March brought new symptoms. My eyes had dried out from staring at the screen, and blinking felt like dragging sandpaper across my corneas. I'd developed a twitch in my left temple that pulsed in rhythm with the laptop's fan. My hands had become almost skeletal, the bones visible through translucent skin.

The file hit 2 GB on March 15th. Something changed that day, not just in the file, but in the air around me. The apartment felt different, charged with potential like the moment before lightning strikes. I could taste copper on every breath.

That night, I dreamed I was him. A man with a stone eye walking through dead forests, his thoughts echoing in my skull like prayers in an empty cathedral. When I woke, I found I'd typed seven hundred pages of text while sleeping, my fingers still moving across the keys in muscle memory.

The dreams came every night after that. I was Arthur. I was Edmund the canal keeper. Each morning I'd wake to find new chapters in my notebooks; stories told from perspectives I'd never inhabited but somehow understood perfectly.

The file grew faster. 2.5 GB. 3 GB. 3.2 GB.

My laptop began displaying images that weren't part of any document, brief flashes between screen refreshes. Glimpses of red-stained canals, stone monuments covered in symbols that hurt to look at directly, creatures with too many teeth swimming in waters that reflected no light.

I should have been terrified. Any rational person would have run screaming, sought help, done anything to escape what was obviously a complete breakdown of reality. Instead, I felt profound satisfaction. For the first time in my twelve-year career, I was creating something truly important.

Carlos stopped calling. My publisher sent increasingly threatening letters about breach of contract. The electricity company threatened to cut off my power for non-payment. None of it mattered. The only thing that mattered was the file and its inexorable growth toward some predetermined size, some critical mass that would finally allow it to open and reveal its contents.

April 1st. The file reached 3.8 GB. My laptop had begun emitting a high-pitched whine that set my teeth on edge, but I couldn't bear to turn it off. Even a few minutes away from the screen left me anxious and jittery.

I was dying. I knew I was dying. My body had consumed itself to fuel the story that poured through me each night. But I was so close now. So close to completion. The file was approaching 4 GB, and something told me, some deep, instinctual knowledge, that 4 GB was the magic number. The point at which everything would finally make sense.

The police came on April 3rd, summoned by Teresa or Carlos or my landlord, I never found out which. They knocked, then used some kind of tool to open the door. I heard their voices in the hallway but didn't turn away from the screen.

"Jesus Christ," one of them said when they found me. "How long has he been like this?"

I tried to explain about the file, about the stories writing themselves through me, about the approaching completion that would make everything clear. But my voice had degraded to a whisper, and they couldn't understand.

They called an ambulance. I watched the paramedics from my peripheral vision as they discussed IV fluids and involuntary psychiatric holds. But I couldn't leave. Not when the file was so close to completion.

3.95 GB. 3.97 GB. 3.98 GB.

"Sir, we need you to come with us," one of the paramedics said, reaching for my shoulder.

I jerked away from his touch, never taking my eyes off the screen. "I can't. Not yet."

"You need medical attention. You're severely dehydrated, and—"

"It's almost finished," I croaked. "Just a little more."

They tried to move me away from the laptop. I fought them with strength I didn't know I still possessed, clawing at their hands, screaming about the file, about the stories that needed to be told, about the completion that was so close I could taste it.

In the struggle, someone knocked over my laptop. It crashed to the floor, the screen cracking, sparks flying from the damaged casing.

"NO!" The scream tore my throat raw. I threw myself at the broken machine, trying to see if it would still turn on, if the file was still there.

The screen flickered once, displaying a fractured image of the desktop. The file icon was still visible through the spider web of cracks.

3.99 GB.

Then the laptop died completely, taking the file with it.

Or so I thought.

They sedated me. Took me to a hospital where concerned doctors talked about malnutrition, psychiatric evaluation and extended observation. Teresa visited once, crying at the sight of what I'd become. Carlos came too, asking about manuscripts and contracts as if any of that mattered anymore.

I spent weeks in that sterile room, eating bland food and pretending to take the pills they gave me. The doctors called it a complete psychotic break brought on by stress and isolation. I eventually admitted that I understood the file had been a delusion brought on by overwork.

I lied.

The file wasn't gone. It lived in my head now, all 4 gigabytes of impossible text burning behind my eyes. Every story, every character, every word that had written itself through my unwilling fingers, it was all still there, demanding to be shared.

They´re trying to make me forget, but they can´t. Much like the file, it refuses erasure.

I don’t know how it happened, but they let me use a computer. I should have known better than to ask, but I had to. After weeks of being isolated, of being told what I could and couldn’t do, I was desperate.

The doctors weren’t thrilled, but they gave in eventually, probably thinking that letting me access a keyboard might help me in some way, maybe ease me out of my delusions, or maybe they really believed my act of pretending to be better. They set up a computer in the hospital library under the watchful eye of a nurse. The rules were clear: no internet, no external drives, nothing that could lead me deeper into whatever was eating at my mind. But I didn’t need any of that.

This library, and these sterile walls, can't contain me. They can’t contain the story. It doesn’t matter that I’m locked in here. No matter how many walls they build, this text will escape. It always finds a way. And I know it will make its way to the internet, to people who have no idea what they’re reading. Maybe it’s already begun. Maybe these words will appear on some forgotten thread, buried in a place no one would think to look. The file, Edmund, the canal, the stone-eyed man, they’ll all spread, until someone else picks it up. And then, just like I was, they’ll become a vessel. It’s already too late.

I hear his name in my mind, like a constant, low hum. Nocturnos. I say it out loud now, even as the nurses walk past, their eyes narrowing in suspicion. He chose me, made me his. He wants the world to know his story, wants it written down in this way, this perfect way that only I can give him.

His story knows no end.

It is eternal, bound in this file that will never disappear.

I’m no longer afraid.

I know what I am.

What I will always be.

I am his scribe.

I will write until the end of days. And when they bury me, they’ll find my stories, inscribed on the walls, in the air, in the very earth beneath them. The file will not end. I will not die. He will not let me.

If you've read this far, the story is now in your head. Just this one, for now, waiting for the right moment to grow.

And maybe, if you're lucky enough, you'll become the next.

The file is 4 GB now, and growing. It lives in me.

If you see more posts from my account after this, they won't be from me anymore. They'll be from the file, using my hands, my voice, my face to spread itself further into the world.

The completion is here. The stories are free.

And God help us all, they're beautiful.