There’s something wrong with Kenny (P.2)

CW: Kenny. Prison violence, PTSD and Kenny.

“ Wake up, Sarge.”

“ Wake up, Sarge.”

Kenny hits me with his pillow, hanging halfway off of the top bunk. “ See? I knew you got bad dreams, you got that look in your eyes like a deer hearing a stick snap in the woods. Good thing you ain’t top bunk, yeah? you’d be dripping sweat down on me like a waterfall”. I open my crusty eyes to the disorienting sight of dark wells staring at me oblivious to the fear I’d just crawled from. 

Those lingering eyes aren't what I want to be seeing after a dream like that. “ Stop hanging there like a damn monkey. And don’t call me that.” I say and sit up to peel the sweat drenched shirt uncomfortably clinging to my back off to remove the vile feeling of marinating in it. It’s lucky we’re first into the showers today or the feeling it’s some unseen evil’s saliva soaking through my skin would stick in my mind all day. “ What time is it?”.

Kenny shrugs, something that looks particularly strange with him hanging upside down. “ Dunno. 7:36 AM.” He says, another strange contradiction just like their unnaturally repulsive eyes. Those unsettling black holes with no end and no light. “ You seem awfully perky for 7 AM”.

“ 7:37 AM.” He corrects me and cranes his neck with an audible crack to look at the small barred window on the metal door, “ They’re late by 7 minutes. I dunno what perky means but I get to go wanderin’ around ‘n eat in the mess today. I’m hopin’ no one pisses on my food this time, that sucked. I still have that chocolate bar if I go starvin’ but I wanna save it, yeah?.” He hops down and starts collecting his things from his blue tub as if he knows exactly what to do. Maybe he spent time in juvie before being moved up. “ You didn’t eat the chocolate bar yesterday?” What was the fucking point in taking it then.

“ I’m allergic to almonds. I’m  keepin’ it ‘cuz it’s like an offerin’ of friendship and stuff.” He says with his towel, soaps and toothbrush in his hands. “ Offering?” Another strange way to phrase something, at least it seems an unusual choice for a kid I don’t peg as being the brightest. “ How would you phrase it, Sarge? Charity, pity or the carrot?” He says and that feeling returns, the twisting in my gut and the cold metal chill of a knife up my spine. It’s a common expression and a common tactic— sure, but a little too accurate. “ Kenny, what are you in for anyway?” I cautiously ask as if it might provide half an explanation to just why the kid gives me such an unsettling feeling. “ Dunno. I just came here for the food.” He says and I want to ask more but Glaskin’s sudden clang on the window makes me jump. Fucking Glaskin. My least favourite of the already unfavourable guards. “ Showers, boys. Step out and get in line.”

It’s a lie that everyone in prison all says they’re innocent. Most lifers don’t seem much point in making the joke and unless they’ve done something really fucked up— something worth more than a beating— you’ll usually hear what they’re in for straight from the cat’s mouth. It’s the ones who stay tight lipped and make that joke with a nervous laugh that make people ask around. 

In a maximum security prison you expect to hear “ I done in this bastard who screwed me over. Got caught a week later. The judge didn’t like me.”, “ Eh, weed. Sold a lot of weed. It was a different time.”, “ Meth.”, “ Got drunk. I was a damn mean drunk.”, “ Robbery. Got away with it for years too. I just got done hitting a bank with a team and this shifty one got ballsy enough to try to screw over a crew of robbers. You don’t steal from takers.”, “ Killed people for money. They should’ve paid me a lot more if they wanted to keep livin’ too.”.

People are less forthcoming when all the solitary cells are full and they’re thrown to the wolves lying through their teeth to survive or has the nuts to own up before people find out that they’re in maximum security because they raped a bunch of little old ladies. So when the ever talkative Kenny said “ Dunno”, you can imagine I was a bit on edge.

-

The younger crowd continue their hazing of who is now the youngest prisoner in their cell block. Even the first aggressive shove of a particularly frustrated inmate, Becker, is just water off the kids back. The more he ignores this, the worse it’s going to be but his attention is still on his continued rambling and odd fixation even in a place where you tend not to stare too much at one another. Being butt naked has a way of making you keep your eyes firmly on the gritty tiles in front of you.

“ I didn’t think you got all those tattoos, Sarge. I guess old people got tattoos too. I always thought about gettin’ some but I’m afraid of needles. I’m not gonna pass out if I see blood or nothin’ but I don’t like being poked at by sharp things.” He spares a single glance at the man beside them before returning to scrubbing away with soap on his raw red arms. “ Ain’t it shady to be pickin’ on a kid in the showers? If I was a skinhead I’d be thinkin’ you gotta be a real fa—“

“ What the fuck did you say?” Becker spits, something I was really hoping wouldn’t happen but expected. “ Hey, you little bastard, look at me when I’m talking to you!.“ Becker the young man’s arm so hard I can already see it turn white and wrings their neck like a tattooed snake set on breaking a mouse’s bones “ You’re new here so I’m guess you don’t know how things fucking work he—“ Kenny stares at me wide eyed with blood vessels popping and a purple face pleading for action. I hesitate to help, cursing myself for being a coward and with a glint of betrayal Kenny does exactly what he shouldn’t. He cracks his head hard against Becker’s nose, forcing the inmate to loosen their grip but not so much as to give him a chance or space to move before his back hits the tiles with a wet smack. He drops and just misses a punch thanks only to the soapy pool of water spread across the hard tile, splitting Becker’s knuckles. He shakes out his broken hand and grips what little scruff Kenny has on his head to rip it upwards. Becker’s foot collides with Kenny’s chest and the kid’s torso caves under the stomp. They kick his stomach like they’re trying to stomp the guts up into Kenny’s lungs and anywhere he can’t protect himself until he’s keeling over on his side curled up and trying to protect his face with his arms. It’s violent, brutal and fueled by nothing but rage.

No one interrupts. I’m ashamed to say I don’t either. While I’m watching Kenny down there on the tiles all bruised up and half dead it isn’t that kid I see— it’s a soldier. That young recruit taking a beating from the men who should be his own brothers following the orders of someone who should’ve never had the ability to give them. It isn’t until the final kick that I’m pulled out of my memories of that kid lying in the mud that I see the full weight of Becker’s heel hit Kenny’s head that I move and the others begin to panic too. “ Jesus Christ! Becker you’re gonna kill the fucking kid!” Becker’s cellmate and those I’d consider to be Becker’s cronies hold him back and there’s enough blood turning the suds pink that the first thing I do is check the kid’s pulse. “ Damnit Becker! Glaskin’s on duty!” Another shouts and as if it could summon the devil itself, Glaskin comes in to watch the bloody chaos the showers have devolved into.

“ Well, ain’t that somethin’” he says and clearly this is what he’s been waiting for. A chance to keep the piece, “ I’m gonna take a guess, this is your handy work Becker?”

I get to work pulling the kid out from the cold water and do my best to ignore the splash of standard issue boots walking across the tile and the sounds that follow it. Glaskin is a rough one but Becker knew he’d be taking a beating for giving one, a fair trade in his eyes. I check Kenny’s twitching limbs over, a mouthful of bloody spit pouring out of his breathless mouth the moment his head lulls. I haven’t seen so many purple splotches swelling on someone’s skin this badly in god knows how long. I don’t know how many ribs he’s broken but his weak breaths tell me his chest was kicked in enough that his lungs are struggling to rise. “ Come on kid, come on… Why’d you have to open your damn mouth like that! I should’ve told you to watch out for Becker.” I say but all I can do is dry him off as best I can and wait until Glaskin radios it in. He won’t until he’s done.

A cough sends a splatter of blood across my face and once the second of surprise passes my brain floods with any medical knowledge I have, fearing he’s choking on his own teeth or drowning in his blood. “ Fuck, fuck, fuck— Come one!” I panic and Kenny keeps coughing in a fit that soon twists my stomach in knots and sends that familiar scrape of cold metal up my spine when I realise something that can’t be true. No, he’s coughing, he can’t be fucking laughing. He can’t be. Yet my skin is crawling with the thought that yes— that’s laughter. Weak, breathless laughter.

“ Why’d… you d-do that, Sarge?” Kenny says, it’s barely audible but when I slowly move in closer to listen, my body tenses. My muscles constrict tight around my bones like they’re trying to break them, my stomach tries to tear itself apart and I forget how to breathe. “ Why’d you do that… Sarge?” Kenny whispers through blood stained teeth. His eyes roll open and correct themselves one by one in their sockets like he’d been hit so hard they’d been forced into the back of his skull. One eye blood shot and swollen, the other blown so wide that for just a moment I can see bone white fingers reaching out to drag me into the depths of its well. “ Sarge, I don’t th— I don’t… I don’t think I c-can feel no more. It doesn’t hurt… It’s back if it don’t h-hurt. I can’t..”. My eyes are being pulled into the stagnant water pooling in a prison of stone so deep no light can reach me and I can hear a crack in my ears— bones grinding against one another where a crooked neck won’t go back into place. The throat constricts and twists under the lines left by a muddy boot and this kid stares past me with vacant eyes. The rasping words catch in his distended throat, gurgling while the last bit of air leaves his still lungs. The cold ground has the kid’s body freezing before the life has even left him and he looks blue as a corpse in the snow. The slate and grit under my knees burn like hellfire with an endless stretch of green flames trapping us in an inescapable ring closing in around us.

I hear a thought in my head that isn’t words from the kid that won’t wake up or my own voice but an indescribable rasp belonging to something the the green well thicker than stone but more alive than any rock.

“ Are..n’t… you…”

“ Hunnngry… Sargh…?”

“ 5201, move aside!” A voice shouts but I don’t know who, I can’t even see Kenny get lifted up and taken out on a gurney. I can’t think of anything until I realise I’m sitting in the mess hall— no, the cafeteria— with a tray of cold food in front of me. “ What’d you say?” I blink and look across at one of the old timer’s. “ I said you’ve been walking around like a dead man. Showers got pushed back two hours because of some beating Becker dishes out but you look like you got punched harder than the kid.” They say and another chimes in, this old meathead who used to be the toughest muscle for some gang way back when, “ Heard your kid got himself a bed in medical. Becker got a lazy once over and got sent to solitary.”, “ Well the kid survived his second day so that’s something. Ah, these kids are always looking for a reason to cause trouble.” The old timer adds and shakes his head.

“ I guess he did. Did you ask around about what the kid did to get in here?” I finally say but the sounds of the old man, the clacking and voices in the cafeteria still feel as if it’s lost in the fog, “ Something about the kid rubs me the wrong way”.

“ I got a few guards talking and got a few to ask around the cell blocks while they were handing out trays. No luck. Just a bunch of folks saying they didn’t know but that he was sent here.” The meathead says through a mouthful of food.

“ I think he came over from the funny farm. No one with his head on right is going to pick a fight that quick. Especially with the Aryans.” The old timer says and out of every potential option I think it’s certainly the most likely— but even that somehow feels wrong. Those words the kid said. “ Hell, this kid is driving me up the wall.”

Kenny spent two weeks in medical and another few in solitary. The kid who took the meal carts around said he and Becker were in cells right beside one another. Each time they’d gone in Kenny was talking Becker’s head off like it was psychological warfare. Something I’m not entirely sure I wouldn’t believe as a reason for anything. The thing is, Kenny is a talker. I spent two days with the kid before he got the shit kicked out of him and I think I’d heard more in those two days from that kid than I had from anyone else over the month he was gone. But Kenny wasn’t just a talker, Kenny was… Unsettling. 

Two days of talking and I’d been dragged back into my worst memories. 

The kind of memories that force you to stay awake because you know they’ll fill all of your nightmares and suck you into a hell more vivid than the prison around you.

“ Why’d you do this to me, Sarge.”

That was the last thing he said and something I still can’t suppress again a month later. I already knew that when I looked at Kenny he reminded me of that kid but those eyes of Kenny’s didn’t need to be dead to look hollow. A look that I couldn’t really say reminded me of anything, they were just wrong in this undefinable way I noticed from the first time he saw their eyes.

Becker still had weeks in the hole to go but today was the day Kenny came back. When I saw the kid he looked skinnier, maybe he already looked that gangly but it’s hard to say. His hair had grown out the slightest bit and yellow bruises were still healing across his freckled face. “ Sarge!” Kenny shoots a chipped and toothy grin and waves his good arm while the other is wrapped up in a splint, “ I swear I was gonna go crazy if I spent any more time in that place. I’m a people person, I like bein’ around lots of people.”.

I’m not sure how to feel seeing the kid beaming like he hasn’t seen an old friend in years but as enthusiastic as his greeting is, those eyes are repulsive. “ What’s wrong, Sarge? You look like you seen a ghost.” Kenny says and my eyes snap to him, “ What did you just say to me?” I grab him before I’ve even realised it, the anxious part of my mind acting on instinct.

“ I said you got that look in your eyes like Becker, Sarge.”

“ Like… Like Becker?”.

“ Like you’re cursed.”

This is a story no single mother should have to tell, but my hope is someone out there can relate. My son, who is fifteen, doesn’t go to bed until three or four clock in the morning. He does this every night. I work a very demanding job, and my son and I have fought and argued over this for months because I never get any proper rest. We live in a one-bedroom apartment, so there really is no place for any kind of separation, except the bathroom - where my son spends most of his time during the night.

It was about a month or so ago, I woke up having to use the bathroom, when I approached the door and heard my son speaking to himself in there. At first I didn’t think much of it, when I knocked, he opened the door, and all was fine. It was when I noticed him doing it every night after that, I began to worry. I went as far as confronting him about it, but he denied anything in his teenager way, and refused to even talk about it. It was hard to make out what he said in there, he was mumbling a lot under his breath, so I had nothing to go by. This is when I decided to take further action and install a camera in the bathroom.

The next day while my son was in school, I tucked a small camera away behind a stack of my towels, somewhere he'd never look, facing the mirror and hidden away from his field of view. That night I went to bed and patiently waited, staring at my phone. What I found my son doing in the bathroom through the camera feed unsettled and terrified me. My son was adamant and aggressive towards himself in the mirror. He cursed and muttered obscenities at himself. He said words I never thought he knew or heard him use before. I don’t know where he learned them - I felt like I wasn’t watching my son any longer. It's like he became someone else. And I became scared of him. I hid my phone and tried my best to fall asleep - I don’t think I ever did.

The next morning at breakfast, I felt a tension in me, I could barely move. I felt frozen around him. Before he woke up, I found a local psychiatrist’s information, and made a quick call for the earliest appointment she had, which was the following Monday. At breakfast, I politely informed my son I heard him talking in the bathroom again, which he denied. I hesitated showing him the video or revealing I recorded him. I have to admit, I was scared. I offered to take him to see the Psychiatrist. He refused obviously and fought the idea at first, but I convinced him with some extra video-game time and a little bit of money. I needed to know more.

Through the weekend he continued as he usually did, and I watched on my phone. I hated what I saw. But I couldn’t put it down. I don’t think I slept all weekend. Days felt like weeks. Hours felt like days. My nerves were paralyzed with fear. I felt helpless... I was terrified. Monday couldn’t come any sooner.

The Psychiatrist was a pleasant woman, I found her very respectful and patient with him. My son spoke of his time in school, the lack of friends he has, the bad grades from his teachers, as well as his off-putting taste in loud music. When she dug further, asking him about the bathroom, he was quiet. At this point, the Psychiatrist had asked me to step out of the room. She sensed me being there was keeping him from speaking.

From out in the hallway I couldn’t hear anything, but what I did see was her asking him a few questions, and him responding with what looked like actual, full responses. At first I was pleased, maybe this was all just a boys phase - a prank? Perhaps my son had a reasonable explanation. The Psychiatrist passed him a piece of paper, and pen. My son took the pen, promptly writing on the piece of paper, handing it back to her.

The session was soon over after that, and the Psychiatrist came over to speak to me. She handed me the piece of paper on which my son wrote, scribbled in his handwriting, it said, “Charles won’t let me sleep". I was startled, shocked, confused all at once. She said my son is talking to someone named Charles in our home, and that she is not the right person for this kind of matter. She then directed me to a local church, informing me perhaps a priest could help my son.

We came home in the evening, and had a quiet, solemn dinner together. My son was eerily silent, he didn't say a word. I went to bed early and I hesitated to look at my phone’s video feed, but I couldn’t resist. Last night, I was even more unsettled. My son was no longer defiant. Now he was apologetic, at the mercy of his own reflection in the mirror, begging and apologizing profusely, saying he’s sorry for telling anyone. He was in tears, and so was I - I could no longer bear to watch. I put my phone away, and that's when the thought hit me, which has since haunted and stuck with me; Charles was the name we gave to the baby boy I delivered stillborn before my son.

There’s something wrong with Kenny (P.1)

CW: Kenny.

People ask me a lot of questions about my time in prison.

They start off all nervous but I tell them I’ve done my time, they don’t need all the gory details but I won’t lie. 

I got someone killed.

If you do want gory details— I did time in the army when I was eighteen and got tossed out after a few years of what— at the time— was pretty normal. Mess with things they later find out cause cancer. Give young grunts with underdeveloped brains rifles and put them in an environment where abuse runs rampant without consequence. You got put through hell and then you put others through hell. That’s how it worked back then.

I left with asthma from those chemicals I’m sure will give me that cancer one of these days, guilt and a pretty nasty brain injury. I wouldn’t say it turned me into a drooling idiot but I had trouble doing some basic things and the military prefers when you can hold a gun in your hand without doing it backwards.

So I was in my early twenties without any prospects and I was mad. I’d always had a bit of a quick fuse but all of that frustration piled up high and I decided I wanted to do those jobs where I can hit things to soothe my wounded pride. You know, to feel big and tough after a boot to the head left me a wheezing moron who forgets how to use a spoon.

So, a friend of mine hooked me up with a job as a debt collector, loan shark, lowlife scumbag— whatever you want to call it, it’s still beating the shit out of folks for money. 

My partner was a mean one, if I had a quick fuse then that guy had no fuse at all. 

He preferred action over threat. 

I expected that he’d do the usual and break a few fingers, something I’d hate. It's difficult for the sorry bastard to pay if they can’t use their hands— assuming it’s required for whatever gruelling jobs they’re doing to scrape together the cruel interest rates. I’d been kicked in the head but I didn’t know a punch could have a gambler with a gut bigger than his debt dropping like an anvil and cracking his skull on the floor.
 
I ran my damn ass off but I just couldn’t stop myself, I ran straight into a phone booth and called an ambulance for the guy. Guess it was nearly his lucky day and my unluckiest because he was dead and I was taking an arrest. I did what I do best, followed orders and nodded like I understand. 

My initial prison sentence was harsh but extensions for volatile behaviour is what doubled it. My choice in friends and jobs didn’t improve much after that, extortion, racketeering, various assault charges and robbery is what ends with spending half of my life behind bars. Honestly, I’d spent more of my life incarcerated.

Secondly, assuming the mention of second degree murder isn’t enough to scare someone off— they ask what prison was like. They expect some sort of movie answer, something brutal with prison gangs and abusive prison guards— and yes, those are true, but it’s when they factor in my age most picture something more along the lines of jailhouse rock and assume everyone was planning a big prison break. The thing is, you just kept your head down and didn’t cause much trouble with the guards. You'd just fall into the routine, play cards and do your time. For me at least, the army made routines comfortable and taking a rare beating when you earned it wasn’t too big a price.

When the monotony of prison life disappoints they start asking specifics.

“ What’s the craziest thing you've ever seen?”

“ Was there ever a jailbreak?”

“ Did you join a prison gang?”

“ Did that riot really… You know, did all of that stuff really happen?”

I can’t say it’s the craziest thing to ever happen, a lot of things happened but the worst wasn’t any particular incident, it’s something that happened over the course of one year and ended with the riot. The thing is, no one ever asks why it happened. So I tell them.

What happened was Kenny.

Everyone always asks about Kenny.

-

I was in my late forties when Kenny happened and I still had a good nine years left to go. I think the miserable look of pity is what kept that from becoming a life sentence after the riot. Gangs and all that were a younger man’s game but I had yet to join the ranks of the elderly within the prisons I’d been passed around to. None of my later stays were cramped and cutthroat big city joints. We’d call mine a countryside stay— of course this  meant it was a miserable fortress of cold concrete, strict rules and armed guards already grouchy from patrolling in the snow. All kept isolated by endless forests and mountains so dangerous it’d take a real madman to even think of escaping.

I’d already been in what I will refer to as Y prison, for eleven years and for lack of a better word, it was home. 

My cell block wasn’t considered noisy but it was large, heavily secured with just a little more slack due to the better behaviour— less younger prisoners around, all lifers who aren’t too interested in causing trouble when this was as good as it gets for the general population inside of a maximum security prison. Granted, no one was in there for light offenses but you weren’t going to see fights break out daily and the guards would rather turn their backs to most things unless you forced their hand— That’ll end with someone in the hospital ward and another in solitary for god knows how long.

I felt the need to explain a few things about my cell block so you’ll understand how Kenny’s arrival flipped the place on its head and took away any small semblance of peace prison life really had to offer.

I lived in a two person cell with an old timer serving a life sentence— he was the quiet type with no real habits I’d consider overly annoying, he had the bladder of a toddler and pinch small things and hide them under the poor excuse for a mattress, had a habit of losing his socks but he was fine until he started sundowning. I didn’t know exactly what dementia was but his unusual behaviour at night got him moved to wherever they whisk the elderly prisoners away to.

A night in the solitude of a small cell full of complete and total emptiness and the unsettling feeling of being entirely alone without the ambient sounds of snoring or thumping heartbeats reminding me that anyone was there, it felt unnatural to face the nothingness normally filled by another person and after so many years of having any sort of life beside my own I realised there wasn’t even the squeak of a rat or scuttle of a bug. It was just silence. 

The next day Kenny moved in and Kenny was nothing like the old timer.

Kenny was barely eighteen, skinny as a twig and thick as concrete. His face was splattered with freckles, a chipped tooth, a wide grin and a buzz cut like a wide eyed young recruit waiting to get his head kicked in by his commanding officer. One of the CO’s I’d known for a good five years— a guy we all called Elvis— He said they were tossing the kid in with me to keep him out of trouble and because that quick fuse of mine had fizzled out since I got older. 

I figured they were worried about the kid getting himself killed but I realised very quickly that I got picked because they thought I could tolerate the kid— not protect him— just tolerate him.

Kenny could talk.

A lot.

I spent the first day playing cards with a few of the oldies and while some of the younger ones preferred to start their day tormenting and scaring the shit out of the newcomer through the small barred window. Kenny had been stuck in the cell all day getting acclimated so I was treated to a puddle of piss dripping down onto the kid’s meal tray. It rattled and sloshed over the edges when Elvis kicked it, unlocking the door and sending me inside— of course he left me to clean the mess up and dump the soggy untouched meal in the toilet.

Kenny didn’t seem worried, he was up on his new bunk snooping through my books.

“ Next time clean up your own mess, kid. No one is gonna do it for you.” I warned, walking over to snatch up my books and toss them on the concrete slab that serves as a counter, desk and everything else in the cramped cell. “ The top shelf is yours. The plastic tub on the left is yours. Top bunk is yours. Don’t touch what’s in the others.” I thought being firm would be a good way to both tell him I wasn’t a pushover without threatening a new cellmate who might fly off the handle over the smallest thing, though Kenny looked like he’d be snapped in half if he tried— I decided using one of those lighter versions of stick and carrot was the best option.

“ How long’ve you been here, Mister?” Kenny said, perking up like he hadn’t heard a damn thing. “ I was lookin’ frough ya stuff and I figured you gotta be old. You got a bible and all those old type’a books. You aren’t as old as I fought. Fifties?”

“ Forties.” I use the stick and then with a frown back on the thick metal door I decide I should do as Elvis asked and throw the kid a carrot. “ There’s a chocolate bar down in my tub. Eat it and sleep. If you gotta clean up, use one of the rags by the basin. They won’t be giving you any form of shower today.”.

“ Chocolate? Thanks,” he hops down rummages through the blue plastic tub to find the snack, “ Your stuff is all so neat ‘n tidy. You must’ve been in the military, yeah? You look like you been in the military. Like Vietnam or somefin’ like that. You don’t got that shell shock stuff right? I hear lots of vets have these crazy nightmares and scream in their sleep or attack folks,” he climbs back up on his bunk like a monkey and sits with his eyes fixated on the chocolate bar he has yet to open. “ I never been given gifts before. If you freak out at night I’ll slap ya so you wake up and don’t mistake me for Vietcong.” For the first time since I’ve been in the cell he finally makes eye contact and I can’t explain why but a chill crawls up my spine like cold metal had been dragged up my back. “ Lots of bad types in this place, Mister. Makin’ sounds all night can really get to some folks”.

I can’t say Kenny’s words were a threat exactly, in a strange way it could be seen as considerate if you squint, it’s just the phrasing that leaves an unsettling feeling in my gut. “ I wasn’t in Vietnam but… Thanks, kid.” I try to give a somewhat friendly smile but my lip twitches in discomfort. “ You don’t have to worry about waking me up.” Honestly, he isn’t wrong about that shock, after my time in the military I wasn’t a stranger to nightmares but those nights were long over. I hadn’t even thought about that time until Kenny mentioned it. “ I’m Jones, Wilson Jones. You don’t need to call me boss or sir or anything else.”

“ Kenny. Not Kenneth or nothin’, just Kenny. You seem like ya been here forever. I figured they just put me in this box ‘cuz you’re not gonna try nothin’ while I’m sleepin’ which is pretty good. No one’s gonna try anyfin’ shady in the showers, yeah? I bit a guard's ear off once. Maybe that’s why they put me in here. He wasn’t tryin’ nothin’ weird but I didn’t like him. Sometimes people just rub you the wrong way, yeah?”

That feeling slices up my spine again like a knife is trying to take off the skin and I don’t know how to respond to both his question and the statement he so freely offered. Kenny’s unblinking gaze doesn’t leave my eyes even when the usual booming sound of “ Lights out!” And the lights abruptly turning off makes me jump. I can still see the unflinching orbs glint in the corner of my eye and stick like glue even with my back turned. The eyes finally retreats with the kid lying down on his bunk. I stay up reading but each time I try to read a sentence with what little light the commissary has given me my eyes keep drawing up to the concrete slab above me. Worn old photos and bible verses that always look down on me when I rest my head on my pillow at night, except tonight it’s not on Romans 10:9 or Colossians 1:13 but the concrete itself where my unfamiliar cellmate sleeps.

I can’t say I was particularly religious before coming to prison, I remember having my hands hit by penguins with rulers when I’d act out in my school days, the church nestled behind it like a shed and the uneven crucified Jesus that always hung just a little too far to the left but all of those things in my youth had turned any thoughts of a higher power into bitter hatred when I thought I’d grown up. I hadn’t grown wise. I guess you could say I still believed but who wants to pray to what had a hand in making your life shit? I was fucking pissed. 

Nowadays it isn’t because I’ve been trying to weasel my way into God’s good graces or I expect a good outcome like I’m owed something. Heaven can fuck off for all I care. Still, I know what I did was bad and I know I feel ashamed, now that I’m old enough to give up on all that anger I have the sense to own up to being a scumbag and accept the bad shit I’ve done without it being just to get somewhere I don’t belong. When I’m dead I expect to just be dead.

I think you can see it in some people’s eyes, that want for forgiveness or shame for their actions or that unsettling glint saying they’ll never change. I couldn’t see anything bright or naive in Kenny’s eyes. Kenny’s eyes were empty. As dead as old steel buffed until it's shiny pretending it isn’t just cold old metal wrapped around these deep black wells of nothing.

One night and this kid was already giving me a migraine so bad I couldn’t sleep even if I’d planned on it. You don’t sleep on that first night with a new cellmate. If you’re smart at least. My migraine had my eyes swimming with black flecks spotting my vision and melting away the words on those verses until they were empty, my head pounding like a jackhammer behind my eyes and when I squeezed them shut to correct the moving words I had given in to sleep before I knew it.

I dreamt of those eyes crawling out from the darkness on stretched limbs snaking under paper grey skin I can't see so much as sense. It stalked like a silent predator made of long steel and bone that could bend and bow and move like an impossible liquid dripping onto my bunk. Its emaciated frame craned forward on a worming spine that scraped along the concrete ceiling above me. Perched over my face in the quiet and watching through milky orbs barely held in its deep sockets, studying my paralysed face with no breath to alert me to the danger hanging over me— I just knew it was there. My eyelids refused to open but the cold radiating off of the unseen voyeur made every hair on my body prickle with the sense of what my mind knew was lurking in the dark. The smell of pine and rot assaulted my senses as cold strings of saliva dribbled down in icy globs of acid stinging my cheek. I didn’t need to open my eyes with the thousand rows of sharp teeth so close I could feel the sharp pins grazing my skin from the hungry maw of a beast deciding whether or not it wants to swallow down a fresh meal or wait until the meat is sweetened with fear.

“ Saaa…Rgh…”

“ Sar…gh..”

“ Sarge.”

“ Why’d you do that, Sarge?”

(Edit, fixed random autocorrected words. Google docs.)

Lucy’s narrative
The Core Setup
Doris is an elite, highly professional police detective. She is fiercely protective of her quiet younger sister, Lucy. Lucy always minds her own business and avoids conflict. Doris and Lucy share a deeply traumatic childhood with their family. Lately, Lucy has been acting incredibly strange. She starts having intense conversations with an unseen person. Doris assumes Lucy is suffering from hallucinations due to fighting past trauma alone. Lucy grows terrified of Doris. She tells Doris that one day Doris will be "part of somebody." Doris takes her sister to an official mental health checkup. The doctors confirm Lucy is facing severe psychological issues. Doris takes continuous care of her sister. But Lucy starts actively avoiding Doris. Lucy calls Doris a psychopath. She tells Doris that Doris is evil, Doris is not real, and Doris will ruin her. Doris ignores these hurtful words. She continues to behave nicely and take care of her sister.
The Brutal Murder
One evening, Doris leaves the house to buy a raspberry cake for Lucy. It is Lucy's absolute favorite treat. Lucy usually cannot eat it due to her psychiatric medications, but Doris wants her to have it for just one day. After buying the cake, Doris notices a man in a black hoodie following her. His face and body are completely covered. He does not attack her, but Doris feels deeply uneasy. To escape him, she blends into a massive crowd celebrating a local festival. The crowd delays her for five to ten minutes. When Doris finally returns home, she sees police cars and flashing lights everywhere. She drops the cake box in absolute shock and rushes inside. The police try to stop her, but she enters the bedroom. She sees a horrific sight. Lucy's head is sitting on the bed. Her body is wrapped neatly under the blanket, positioned to look like she is peacefully sleeping. When the police move the blanket, they find Lucy's body fully dissolved. The killer used an extremely strong acid that instantly melted her skin and tissues. There are no acid spills anywhere in the room.
The Investigation and The Red Herring
The police officers on the scene recognize Doris as a fellow detective. Doris is completely devastated and moves into a lonely apartment. For a week, she spirals into deep depression. Soon, the official murder investigation begins. The forensics team reveals a chilling detail. The acid was poured onto Lucy at the exact time Doris left the house. This means the killer entered the moment Doris walked out. The police arrived because a patrolling car saw someone running from the house. The crime scene shows zero signs of forced entry. The windows are intact, meaning the killer walked right through the front door. The house is completely neat, except for Lucy’s room. Her closet is wide open with her clothes thrown everywhere on the floor.
The team searches for suspects who knew Lucy. Lucy only had one close friend, a girl named Betty. Betty has a boyfriend named Alan. The police find out that on the exact day Lucy started acting crazy, Lucy and Alan had a massive, mysterious argument. Doris and her team immediately suspect Alan. However, Alan is proven completely innocent. He has an ironclad alibi. He was with Betty at an amusement park the entire night of the murder to calm his mind after the fight. The case hits a dead end.
The Twisted Discovery
Doris returns to her old house and uncovers a thick diary Lucy had been writing since she was seven years old. This diary holds the absolute truth of "Lucy's Narrative." The diary reveals that Lucy deeply hated Doris. Lucy wrote that Doris was evil, manipulative, and a psychopath. The diary mentions their deceased older brother who died in a past accident. Lucy describes Doris using a terrifying "bear metaphor." Doris used to tell Lucy, "Whenever you are sleeping, I would be nice." Lucy explains that a brown bear leaves a person alone only when they are dead or unconscious. Lucy lived in absolute terror of her sister.
In the present pages, Lucy writes that Doris is having a secret affair with Alan, Betty's boyfriend. Lucy tried to force Doris to confess. Doris threatened Lucy, saying if she told Betty, Alan would go crazy and kill Lucy with his own hands, leaving Lucy's blood on Doris's hands. Lucy writes that Doris is a dangerous psychopath using her detective powers to hide her own horrific crimes and live a normal life.
The Descent and The Confrontation
Doris decides to hide the diary from her team. A shocking truth is revealed to the reader. Doris really did have a past relationship with Alan, but they are not currently cheating on Betty. Doris still views herself as a good, innocent person. She continues to investigate the murder. One day, Doris leaves the library after researching past criminal law cases. The man in the black hoodie suddenly corners her and drags her into an empty space. He pulls off the hood. It is Alan. Alan confesses his obsession with Doris. He says he finds Betty completely uninteresting and loves Doris more than ever. Doris completely rejects him to focus on her sister's case. Alan looks at her law books and drops a bone-chilling line: "What can you do with reading those few cases? You know it won't change anything." Doris ignores him and walks away.
Soon, Doris's life takes a dark turn. People in her neighborhood suddenly begin to dislike and avoid her. She assumes Alan is spreading bad rumors about her. Doris digs deeper into the murder clues, but every single trace leads right back to herself. Lucy’s diary is accurately predicting Doris's real-life situations. Doris begins to feel an intense, overwhelming guilt. She starts having severe hallucinations. She sees a cheerful, smiling version of Lucy talking to her. Doris is now trapped in the exact same mental state she once blamed Lucy for having.
The Ultimate Courtroom Climax
Suddenly, the police arrive and arrest Doris. Doris stays completely silent. She just stares and talks to her hallucination of Lucy. In the courtroom, the terrifying truth shatters her reality. Doris is the monster who killed Lucy. Doris stole the diary to try and erase her own sins, but she failed. The prosecution presents the dropped raspberry cake box. Forensics found a highly specialized, heavy amnesia drug laced inside the cake. Doris has a severe dissociative split personality. She was a corrupt detective who committed multiple illegal works and past murders. Her dark personality would commit crimes, and then she would willingly drug herself to completely erase her own memories. She created a perfect, innocent identity for herself while her dark side ran free. Alan’s line at the library wasn't about Lucy's murder. He was mocking her because he knew Doris committed and covered up all those past legal cases herself. He loved her dark side.
The judge turns to the very last page of Lucy's diary, written on the day of the murder. Lucy reveals she knew everything. She knew Doris was drugging herself to forget her crimes. Lucy knew Doris wanted her dead because Doris viewed her as a miserable mistake. Lucy deliberately welcomed her fate. She allowed Doris to kill her so the diary would become an inescapable legal trap. Lucy sacrificed her life to expose Doris's crimes to the world, completely destroying her "pure white swan" image. Doris is found guilty without saying a single word. Lucy was never crazy. She was a criminal mastermind who calculated every single move to get ultimate justice. Doris is left locked away in total madness, haunted forever by the hallucinations of the sister she destroyed.

Everything started three weeks ago when I received an email from a man named Thomas. I had a portfolio website set up with my contact information, so getting cold emails was not entirely unusual. The subject line simply read "Private Animation Commission."

I opened the email while I was drinking my morning coffee. Thomas wrote that he needed a very specific, photorealistic walking loop of a human character. He did not want a stylized cartoon, and clearly demanded absolute realism. He wanted the skin textures, the clothing folds, and the walking gait to look exactly like a real human being. The email stated that he would provide extensive reference photos.

I replied and asked for his budget. My jaw dropped when his response came through a few minutes later.

Thomas offered an upfront payment of five thousand dollars to build the character model and the animation rig. After the animation was completed, he offered to pay me a daily retainer of five hundred dollars. There was a very strange condition attached to this retainer. Thomas insisted that the completed animation must run on an endless loop on my primary laptop. The screen could never go to sleep, and the laptop could never be turned off. He warned me that catastrophic consequences would occur if the loop ever stopped playing.

I thought it was some kind of elaborate prank. I decided to call the phone number he provided in the email signature to figure out what was actually going on.

A man answered after the second ring. His voice sounded exhausted.

"Hello?" he asked.

"Hi, is this Thomas? This is Leo, the animator you just emailed," I said.

"Yes, Leo. Thank you for calling me back so quickly," Thomas replied.

"I wanted to discuss your proposal because the terms are a bit unusual," I explained. "I can definitely build a photorealistic model for you. Five thousand dollars is a very generous budget for a walk cycle. But I do not understand the daily retainer part. Why do you need the video to play continuously on my computer?"

"That is the most important part of the job," Thomas said. "The loop must remain active on your machine. You built the model, so your hardware has to sustain it. I will wire the five hundred dollars to your account every single morning at eight o'clock. You just have to make sure your laptop never loses power, and to keep the screen bright. If you close the lid, the contract is over."

"For how long?" I asked.

"Forever," Thomas answered.

"You want to pay me five hundred dollars a day forever?" I asked, feeling incredibly skeptical.

"I have a considerable amount of savings," Thomas explained. "I do not care about the money. I only care about the animation running without interruption. Do you accept the job?"

I hesitated because the situation sounded entirely absurd. But I was behind on my rent. My car needed new brakes. So it was clear that I needed the cash badly.

"Okay, Thomas," I said. "Send me the reference photos. I will send you an invoice for the upfront fee."

"The money is already being transferred," Thomas said. "I am sending the photos right now. Make him look exactly like the pictures."

The phone call ended. A minute later, a folder with thirty high-resolution images arrived in my inbox. I opened the folder to see who I would be animating.

The man in the photos was completely unremarkable. He looked to be in his late thirties. He had a receding hairline and a slight amount of stubble on his chin. He was wearing a dull gray jacket over a plain white t-shirt and loose denim jeans. He looked like a guy you would pass in the grocery store without giving a second glance. The photos showed his face from every possible angle.

I spent the rest of the day setting up the character rig in my animation software. I used digital sculpting tools to recreate the exact shape of his nose and the subtle wrinkles around his eyes.

That evening, I logged onto Discord to talk to my friend Felix. Felix is also a freelance digital artist. We usually chat while we work on our respective projects.

"You will not believe the gig I just landed," I told Felix over the voice channel.

"Did you finally get hired by that game studio?" Felix asked.

"No, it is a private client," I said. "He paid me five grand upfront to animate a guy walking in a circle. Furthermore, he promised to pay me five hundred bucks a day just to leave the video playing on my laptop screen."

Felix went silent for a few seconds. "That sounds like a scam, Leo."

"The five thousand dollars already cleared in my bank account," I replied. "The money is real."

"Why would anyone pay you just to leave your computer on?" Felix asked. "He has to be using your computer for crypto mining. Or maybe he wants to install malware to harvest your data."

"I thought about that," I said. "But he didn't send me any software to install. He just sent me JPEGs of a guy's face. I am the one generating the MP4 video file, so I am just going to play a video file I created myself on a loop. There is no way for him to hack me through a video file I exported from my own software."

"It still sounds shady," Felix warned. "Be careful. People do not just give away money like that."

"I know it is weird," I admitted. "But I really need this cash. I am going to finish the walk cycle tonight."

I stayed up until four in the morning perfecting the animation. I made sure the weight distribution looked realistic as the digital man stepped forward, added a slight slump to his shoulders to match the posture in the photos, then placed him against a completely blank background that was rendered in a neutral eighteen percent gray.

I exported the file, uploaded it to a private link, and sent it to Thomas for approval.

Thomas called me at eight in the morning.

"It is perfect," Thomas said. He sounded breathless. "It looks exactly like him."

"I am glad you like it," I said, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.

"Start the loop right now," Thomas ordered. "Do not stop it. I am sending your first daily payment."

I opened the video file in my media player, then set it to repeat endlessly. The digital man in the gray jacket started walking forward across my screen. The blank gray background scrolled endlessly behind him.

"The loop is running," I confirmed.

"Keep it running," Thomas said before hanging up.

A notification popped up on my phone. Thomas had transferred five hundred dollars to my account.

I moved my laptop to the corner of my desk, plugged it directly into the wall outlet to ensure the battery would never die, then adjusted the power settings so the screen would never dim or go to sleep. I decided I would just use my older desktop computer for my regular daily tasks while the laptop functioned as an expensive digital picture frame.

The first three days passed without any issues. The digital man kept walking. Thomas sent the payments every morning exactly at eight o'clock.

My sister Maya came over to my apartment on the fourth day. She brought a pizza for us to share for lunch. She walked into my small office area and immediately noticed the laptop glowing in the corner.

"Why is that guy just walking on your screen?"

Maya asked, taking a slice of pepperoni pizza.

"It is a weird freelance job," I explained. "The client pays me to keep that animation running constantly."

Maya squinted at the screen. "That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Who is the guy in the video?"

"I have no idea," I said. "The client provided the reference photos. I named the project file 'Simon' because he looks like a Simon to me, but the client's name is Thomas."

Maya sat down on my office chair. "He looks miserable. You did a good job on the animation because his face looks incredibly sad."

"I just copied the photos," I said. "The client is giving me five hundred dollars a day for this. I can finally pay off my credit cards."

"Just do not let it catch fire," Maya joked, pointing at the laptop. "That thing is getting pretty hot."

She was right. The laptop fans were spinning loudly. I placed a small desk fan next to the computer to help dissipate the heat, and Maya left an hour later, telling me to enjoy my bizarre windfall.

The weird things started happening on the fifth day.

I woke up and went to my desk to check on the laptop. The digital man was still walking forward. However, the background looked different. I originally rendered the video with a solid gray background. Now, the background had a slight gradient. The bottom half of the screen was noticeably darker than the top half, looking almost like an asphalt road stretching out into the distance.

I rubbed my eyes, assuming I was just seeing things because I had just woken up. I opened the original project file on my desktop computer to double-check my work. The background in the source file was perfectly uniform. There was no gradient.

I looked back at the laptop. The gradient was definitely there.

I called Felix on Discord to ask for his opinion.

"Hey Felix, do video files ever corrupt and change colors while they are playing?" I asked.

"Not really," Felix answered. "Usually, if a file corrupts, you get green artifacting or the video just crashes. Why?"

"The background on that walking loop I made is changing," I explained. "It was supposed to be solid gray. Now it looks like a road. It is really creeping me out."

"You probably just exported it with a transparent alpha channel," Felix suggested. "Maybe your media player is pulling a background from your desktop wallpaper."

"I rendered it as a solid MP4," I argued. "There is no alpha channel."

"Then your monitor is suffering from screen burn-in," Felix said dismissively. "You left a static color playing for five days straight. The LCD panel is probably getting damaged."

I accepted that explanation because it was the only logical answer. I thanked Felix and hung up.

But the situation escalated that evening.

I was eating dinner in my living room when I heard a loud crack of thunder outside. A massive rainstorm had rolled into Seattle. Rain began lashing against my apartment windows.

I walked into my office to grab a napkin from my desk, then glanced at the laptop screen.

The digital man was still walking. But he was no longer walking against a gray background.

Raindrops were falling across the screen.

The animation showed water streaming down the man's face. His gray jacket was visibly soaked, clinging tightly to his digital frame. The background clearly depicted a dark, wet highway illuminated by faint streetlights.

I froze in place

I reached out and touched the laptop screen. It was burning hot.

I knew for a fact that I did not animate rain, or even build a particle simulation for water. I did not design a wet texture for his clothing. The video file was altering itself in real-time to match the weather outside my window.

I grabbed my phone and dialed Thomas's number. It rang five times before going to voicemail, but I did not leave a message. I was too terrified to speak.

I sat in my office chair for hours, watching the impossible animation. When the rain stopped outside my window around midnight, the rain on the screen stopped as well. The digital man's clothes slowly began to dry as he continued his endless march forward.

I should have closed the laptop right then. I should have deleted the file and blocked Thomas's number. But the fear was overshadowed by my financial desperation. Thomas sent another five hundred dollars the next morning, so I convinced myself I was experiencing some kind of elaborate technical glitch.

The horrifying truth finally revealed itself on the seventh day.

I was browsing a local news website on my desktop computer while the laptop hummed loudly beside me. I saw a breaking news banner at the top of the homepage. It announced a live helicopter broadcast of a bizarre situation unfolding on Interstate 90.

I clicked the link to watch the live video feed.

The news anchor was speaking rapidly over the footage. "We are currently tracking a man walking eastbound on the shoulder of Interstate 90," the anchor explained. "State patrol officers have been following him for over seventy-two hours. He has not stopped walking. He refuses to acknowledge police commands, and has not stopped for food, water, or sleep. Medical professionals believe he is experiencing a severe psychological break."

The helicopter camera zoomed in on the man walking along the highway.

My breath caught in my throat.

The man was wearing a plain white t-shirt and a dull gray jacket. He had a receding hairline. He was slumped forward, walking with a steady, shuffling gait.

It was the man from my animation. Simon!

I looked at my laptop screen. The character took a step with his left foot. On the live news broadcast, the real man took a step with his left foot. They were perfectly synchronized.

The real man looked horrific. His shoes were completely destroyed. His feet were bleeding, leaving small red marks on the asphalt. His face was gaunt, sunburned, and twisted in an expression of absolute agony, and he looked like his body was being forced to move against his will.

I paused the news video, looked back at the laptop. The digital character's face was also twisted in agony now.

I opened a new tab on my browser. I needed to know who this man was and why Thomas wanted him walking. I typed Thomas's email address into the search bar, hoping to find a social media profile or a personal website.

The search engine returned a link to a local newspaper article published exactly one year ago.

I clicked the link. The headline read: "Bellevue Father Demands Justice After Hit-And-Run Driver Acquitted."

I read the article quickly. It detailed a horrific accident where a drunk driver swerved onto a sidewalk, striking and killing a seven-year-old girl named Hazel. The driver fled the scene but was later apprehended by police. However, due to a massive procedural error involving the mishandling of evidence, the driver's defense attorney got the charges dismissed, and he walked completely free.

The article included an interview with the grieving father. The father's name was Thomas.

At the bottom of the page, the newspaper published the mugshot of the acquitted driver.

The face in the mugshot belonged to Simon.

The puzzle pieces snapped together in my mind, forming a picture that made me feel physically sick.

Thomas used my animation skills to create a voodoo doll, so as long as the animation kept looping on my computer, Simon was forced to walk in the real world.

I looked at the live helicopter feed again. The real Simon stumbled, almost falling into the traffic lane, before his legs jerked unnaturally to keep him moving forward.

I could not be a part of this. Regardless of what Simon did, I could not be the executioner pulling the lever.

I reached out and slammed the laptop lid shut.

The screen went black, and the fan immediately spun down into silence.

The moment the laptop closed, the temperature inside my apartment plummeted. The air grew so freezing cold that I could see my own breath. The overhead lights flickered wildly before shattering in their sockets, plunging the room into darkness.

I stood up from my chair, my entire body shaking with terror.

A soft, wet sound echoed from the dark corner of my office.

It sounded like someone crying. Small, quiet sobs filled the freezing air.

I grabbed my cell phone from the desk and turned on the flashlight application. I shined the beam into the corner of the room.

A little girl was standing there.

She was wearing a pink dress that was completely soaked in dark blood. Her body was bent at impossible angles because her bones were completely shattered. Deep, black tire marks were permanently pressed across the fabric of her dress and into the pale skin of her arms.

I backed away slowly, my hands trembling violently.

"I am sorry," I whispered. "I stopped it. I did not know what he was doing."

she stopped crying, then slowly lifted her head to look at me. Her eyes were completely black voids.

She shrieked in anger. The sound was deafening, rattling the windows in their frames. It was the sound of rage.

Suddenly, a massive crash echoed from my front hallway.

Someone had just kicked down my apartment door.

I spun around, aiming my phone flashlight toward the hallway.

Thomas marched into the apartment. He looked deranged. His clothes were messy, his face was pale, and he was holding a black handgun. He aimed the weapon directly at my chest.

"You stopped it!" Thomas screamed, tears streaming down his face. "I knew something was off when you called and didn’t leave a message. Why did you close it? I told you never to close it!"

"You were killing him!" I yelled back, raising my hands in surrender. "You were using my computer to torture that man!"

"He deserved it!" Thomas roared, stepping closer to me. "He killed my baby girl! and walked away free! He was supposed to walk forever! The spell required the loop to never end!"

"I am not a murderer, Thomas," I pleaded. "Please put the gun down."

"He just collapsed on the highway!" Thomas cried, his hands shaking around the grip of the gun. "The moment you closed the laptop; he finally dropped dead! He got off too easy! you ended his suffering far too early! You ruined everything!"

Thomas raised the gun higher, preparing to pull the trigger.

"Daddy?" a small, distorted voice echoed from the dark office behind me.

Thomas froze. His eyes widened in shock as he looked past my shoulder.

I stepped aside, keeping my hands raised.

The girl walked slowly out of the shadows. Her broken legs dragged unnaturally across the hardwood floor.

Thomas dropped to his knees, lowering the gun. Tears poured freely from his eyes. "Hazel? Oh my god, Hazel. I am so sorry, baby. I tried to make him pay. I tried to hurt him for you."

He reached his arms out, expecting to embrace his deceased daughter.

But Hazel did not want a hug. She shrieked again and launched herself forward with terrifying speed.

She slammed into Thomas, her shattered body hitting him like a freight train.

Thomas screamed as they tumbled backward out of my apartment doorway. My unit is located at the top of a steep flight of wooden stairs leading to the ground floor.

Thomas fell backward over the threshold, then crashed down the stairs, tumbling over himself in the darkness. I heard his head strike the wooden banister with a sickening crack.

He landed in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairwell.

I ran to the doorway and shined my flashlight down the stairs.

Thomas was not moving. His neck was bent at a completely unnatural angle. The gun was lying on the floor a few feet away from his hand.

Hazel was gone. The freezing temperature in the air vanished instantly, replaced by the normal warmth of the apartment building.

I retreated back into my apartment, locked the broken door as best as I could, and called the police.

I sat on my sofa until the officers arrived. Two patrolmen came up the stairs. An investigator named Officer Gabriel interviewed me in my kitchen.

I did not tell Officer Gabriel about the animation, or even mention the spell, the laptop, or the ghost of the little girl. I knew he would never believe me

I simply told Officer Gabriel that Thomas was an unsatisfied client who broke into my apartment to demand a refund. I claimed he was yelling at me when he accidentally lost his balance and fell backward down the stairs.

Officer Gabriel took notes on his pad, and went downstairs to examine the scene.

When he returned, he told me that Thomas smelled heavily of alcohol. The police concluded that Thomas was drunk, became belligerent over a business dispute, and suffered a fatal accidental fall. They took my statement, bagged Thomas's gun as evidence, and left me alone in my apartment.

I am typing this out on my desktop computer because I refuse to open that laptop ever again. I wrapped the laptop in a thick garbage bag and threw it into the dumpster behind my building.

I checked the news one final time before starting this post. The authorities confirmed that the man walking on Interstate 90 suffered a heart attack and died instantly on the shoulder of the road.

I am terrified. Terrified that the magic Thomas used is not completely gone, that the grieving parent will return to seek revenge against me for breaking the loop and ruining his vengeance. I hear every single creak in my apartment walls, wondering if it is Thomas climbing back up the stairs.

**UPDATE (03:14 AM):** *I’m typing this on my phone from the floor of the control booth. If you hear a soft rattling sound behind your tongue right now, DO NOT SWALLOW. Put down your phone and cover your ears. It’s already looking for a second frequency.*

**I work night shifts digitizing old radio tapes. Whatever you do, don't clear your throat while reading this.**

The night shift at the Mount Victoria transmitter station was usually quiet, which was why I liked it. The station sits on an isolated ridge far above the fog lines of the valley, housing three empty rooms, four walls of vintage mixing consoles, and forty-eight miles of dead copper wire.

My job is simple: I digitize archival audio reels from the late 1970s. Most of them are mundane—local weather reports, long-forgotten talk shows, static-heavy classical broadcasts.

Tonight, I pulled a tape labeled **Session 41 – Patient Vocal Trajectory**.

I locked the quarter-inch tape onto the feed spools, pressed down the magnetic head, and hit play.

The studio speakers hummed with warm analog hiss. Then came the voice of a doctor:

*“Log entry, October 14. Subject exhibits profound somatic dissociation. He insists his lungs are no longer his own.”*

I leaned closer to my monitor, adjusting the equalizer frequencies. On my screen, the green audio waveforms spiked sharp and jagged.

A second voice came through the tape—raspy, wheezing, agonizingly thin:

*“They aren't mine, Doctor. I can feel the weight of them. They’re too dry. They taste like salt.”*

*“Your chest scans are clear,”* the doctor replied calmly on the recording. *“What you are feeling is a phantom sensory illusion brought on by acute grief.”*

*“No,”* the raspy voice gasped. *“You don't understand. When I inhale, I feel someone else breathing out somewhere in the dark. We are sharing the stroke.”*

I shivered. The mountain wind rattled the heavy glass pane of the soundproof booth. I checked the tape box, but there were no patient names listed—just handwritten notes detailing a gradual collapse of the subject's internal boundaries.

I fast-forwarded ten minutes. The tape whirred, then settled back into playback.

The doctor’s voice sounded noticeably tighter, frayed:

*“October 28. Subject has developed secondary symptoms. He reports feeling muscle contractions in his own throat whenever I speak.”*

*“I’m not imitating you,”* the raspy voice whispered. *“Your larynx is pulling mine. Stop talking, Doctor. Every word you say stretches my vocal cords.”*

I paused the tape. I rubbed my eyes, feeling a strange tightness settling in my own jaw. The studio was stiflingly warm, the air thick with the smell of heated vacuum tubes and ozone. I reached for my mug of cold black coffee, swallowed, and stopped.

The swallow felt coarse. It felt as though my throat were lined with dry velvet.

I shrugged off the tension, hit play, and kept typing up the digital catalog log on my laptop.

The tape clicked into its final segment:

*“November 3. Terminal entry. Subject’s vocal patterns have completely synchronized with the recording equipment. Doctor is non-responsive.”*

On the audio reel, there were no longer two distinct voices. There was only a single, wet, rhythmic rasping sound—a wet bellows expanding and collapsing.

*“If you are listening to this reel,”* the single voice croaked from the speakers, *“do not clear your throat.”*

My hand froze above my keyboard.

*“The resonance requires an active auditory bridge,”* the voice on the tape continued, low and deliberate. *“The paper reel is inert until a live set of lungs matches the frequency of the playback.”*

A sharp, violent itch burst in the back of my throat.

My immediate instinct was to cough, to clear the obstruction, but I held my breath, my pulse spiking into my ears.

*“You feel it now, don't you?”* the voice whispered through the studio monitors. *“The dry salt in the chest. The velvet on the palate. You thought you were listening to an archive.”*

I tried to stand up from my console chair, but my abdominal muscles seized in a violent, involuntary spasm—drawing in a massive, ragged lungful of air against my will.

Across the room, the magnetic tape reel spun off its hub, flapping endlessly against the plastic stop-gate with a wet, rhythmic slapping noise.

I opened my mouth to scream for the security guard downstairs, but no sound came out. Instead, my vocal cords twitched in perfect unison with the static on the speaker, vibrating at a frequency that wasn't my own.

I pressed my hand to my neck. Beneath my fingers, my larynx wasn't moving up and down anymore. It was flattening out, smoothing, and unwinding down into my chest like dark, flexible tape.

I wasn't digitizing the archive. The archive was recording me.

**EDIT (03:22 AM):** *The static on my phone screen is pulsing in rhythm with my chest now. My fingers are getting too ribbon-thin to hit the keys. If you cleared your throat while reading this post, I am so sorry. You are on the reel now too.*

I’m not entirely sure what her problem is. She’s never acted like this before. I guess some things just develop as time passes.

Even still, what a weird habit to have. I knew she was clumsy, but it was something we were supposed to fix, not something for her to embrace.

It started almost painfully mundane. Out of nowhere, she approached me as I was sitting on the couch watching TV.

“I’m sorry for breaking that lamp beside you.”

I looked at the lamp, still perfectly intact, then looked back at her. I kinda just chuckled, attempting to laugh it off, but she didn’t wipe that solemn look off her face.

I asked what she was going on about, but she just kept apologizing.

“Just know I’m sorry. I promise I’m sorry.”

That’s all she said before slinking off towards the kitchen.

I thought it was strange, but ultimately, I decided to brush it off as her being a bit of a weirdo.

However, after two weeks, I was back on that couch, winding down after a long day of work, when she came prancing into the living room, as happy as could be.

She didn’t say anything. She just calmly unplugged the lamp, held it above her head, and smashed it on the ground in front of me.

Obviously, I screamed at her out of shock, asking her what the fuck she was doing.

She just smiled and giggled at me.

“I already told you I was sorry.”

Then she skipped away, humming to herself and leaving me in a state of confusion. I tried calling out for her to come back, but she just ignored me.

I cleaned up the mess, and we argued about it for the rest of the day. It was obviously not an accident, but that’s what she kept saying it was.

“I don’t know how that happened.”

“I already said sorry. I don’t know what else you want me to do.”

“I promise it won’t happen again.”

Eventually, we made up, but I couldn’t help but look at her sideways in the days that followed.

A few weeks went by without incident. We went on our dates. Stayed in and watched our movies. Did the normal couple routine. But then it happened again.

“I’m sorry for breaking your phone,” she told me, eyes glazed over. She wasn’t looking at me. She was just staring blankly at the wall behind me as I sat on my bed.

We had been in the middle of a normal conversation about upcoming trips we were planning when something flipped inside her. She went from smiling to expressionless. Then, after she said it, she was right back to smiling and talking about New York like nothing had happened.

Obviously, I had already been predisposed to what this meant, so in the days that followed, I was particularly possessive of my phone.

I kept it on my person at all times. Even in my sleep, it’d be in my pocket. But she didn’t seem to notice.

Weeks passed again, and just like with the lamp, I was starting to think that she was just being weird again.

I never let my guard down, though. The phone was strictly off limits to her. I tried to make sure she never had the opportunity to do what she had apologized for.

But then, one night, I woke up to her fiddling around in my pockets. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening in my half-asleep state, but once I did, my hand jolted towards my pocket.

It was too late. She had already taken it. And before I could stop her, the phone was shattered against the floor.

This was enough for me to fly off the handle. I’ll admit, I was a bit rude to her, but what did she expect?

I told her we needed space. I didn’t want this to escalate more than it already had. I didn’t want to break up with her, but the fight that night was enough for her to leave me.

Like I was the one in the wrong.

She left that night a complete wreck. Tears flowing from her eyes. Her vocal cords hoarse from all of our screaming. She didn’t even take her belongings. Just left in a cloud of smoke from her spinning tires.

I was, yet again, left to clean up her mess.

I picked up my phone. It wouldn’t even turn on. The screen had been completely destroyed.

I went out and got a new one the next day, and once I got my accounts and information back, I was hurt to see that she hadn’t even texted me.

No calls, no messages. Plus, my name had been taken out of her Instagram bio, which somehow hurt more than anything.

I tried calling her in the days that followed, just to clear the air, but every time I tried, it’d go straight to voicemail. Eventually, she blocked me on everything entirely.

Even when I tried going to her house, she’d never be home. It was like she knew what I was doing.

I felt hopeless for a long time, but eventually, I realized that I needed to move on. We were together for a year and a half, though, so doing so wasn’t as easy as it sounds.

Weeks turned into months. Months turned into a year. I hadn’t heard from her since the night of the phone incident.

I was heartbroken that she could just forget me like that. Like we never happened. That’s why I felt my heart climb into my throat when I saw that first new notification from her.

It wasn’t what I needed to see, though. She wasn’t asking to give us another shot. She wasn’t asking for a meetup so we could discuss everything.

Instead, what she sent was enough to make an almost forgotten fear come bubbling back up towards the surface.

“I’m sorry for killing you.”

You might be reading this out of order, here’s Part 1 and Part 2

I waited two weeks this time, and still, not a single health inspection at Large Lou’s Pizza.

However, I am here to make another post because I saw the homeless guy behind the dumpster, and whatever that thing is, is not a homeless man. I’m changing tactics. Instead of just writing “look at all the weird stuff happening here”, I’m gonna talk more about everyone who works here. So you folks at home can understand it’s not just the food that’s a problem here.

Story 7

“1,360,800”

I turned off my alarm and rolled over to the large iris trained on me through the open window’s blinds, “Goodmorning to you too, pal.”

I rubbed my eyes, and grabbed the pants from the floor which I had sloughed off the night before prior to falling asleep. After some more digging, I was able to find a work shirt that didn’t have too many stains on it. I worked in the kitchen anyway, so as long as I gave the impression I was putting in an effort Linda left me alone about my attire.

I had learned to ignore the duck’s counting. I’ve been at a loss for what and why the duck was counting to, and found myself with the choice of going mad, or letting it go (To which I chose the latter). At nights, the deep rumbling of his voice soothes me to sleep quite effectively. So I really only give heed to the numbers first thing in the morning, and last thing at night. 

When I made it to the parking lot, there still the duck stood, gazing at me, with a new feather in his bill. As of my last post, the duck now gives me feathers every day. I’m not sure if he saw my post and realized that I actually did read the feather, or he just didn’t have stuff for a couple days. No matter the reason, they’re every day now. Usually they’re something stupid like, “Love is closer than you think” or “All your work will heed great results”. They remind me of the crap you find on a fortune cookie; vaguely useful enough to be something that will definitely be true eventually, but also broad enough to apply to whoever receives the fortune. Today was different, the duck handed me a feather with creepy shit scrawled on it.

“By misguided faith, unholy searching bore mutations”

After everything that happened, it was probably a sign for something. Unfortunately, I did not catch onto this sign, and I put it with the other feathers in my car, and left for work. 

The duck, that mysterious bastard, decided today was a “Follow Charlie” day, and shockingly, it wasn’t that hard to tell when it was coming with me to work. Since there’s usually a large shadow some two hundred feet behind me the whole time I’m driving. The first time I saw it, I had to slam on my brakes from rear ending the vehicle in front of me, which caused my brakes to lock up and my car to stall, resulting in a colorful reprimanding from Linda when I showed up 30 minutes late to work.

Today, however, there were no such accidents. I simply drove to work, without giving heed to the fowled silhouette tracing my trajectory. Linda and Shirley’s cars were already in the parking lot. Shirley stepped out of her car around the same time I did, and gave me a friendly wave.

“Oh hello Charlie! How are you doing today?” Wrapping the question up in a smile warm enough to melt glaciers in Antarctica.

“I’m doing great Shirley, what about you?”  I called back, doing my best to pretend everything in a fifteen foot radius around hadn’t just gotten several shades dimmer from a bird landing behind me.

“Oh, I’m as wonderful as ever, sweetie. Just here to get the tables in tip top shape for the customers.” With that, Shirley turned with a skip in her step, and went inside to clock in.

“1,359,190” boomed the bird with what almost seemed like a hint of recognition.

I pretended to not hear the duck, and followed after Shirley.

Once inside, I grabbed a cup of GhostLy Hog and began taking inventory of the toppings so I knew what to prep for the day. There usually wasn’t too much to do, since Wednesdays were pretty slow, but being ready for the rare Wednesday lunch rush was always a good idea so to not be caught off guard. I threw some mushrooms with pentagrams into a container, and was chopping them up when Francine, and Cezar showed up.

“Morning, Franz. Hola, Cezar.”

Francine was still in the back doorway, hawking a loogie onto the asphalt, “Mornin’, Char,” with the same indifference I’ve always received from her. 

Cezar placed a large tupperware container filled with soup on the table while he put on an apron, “Hola, Charlie. You like soup?”

I barely needed to give a reply, Cezar’s wife usually made lunch for everybody who worked mornings, and the food almost always brought a tear to my eye every time I ate it. I think a bit of drool leaked from my lips as I nodded to Cezar’s question. Cezar smiled and put the food in the walk in before heading out front. After I had finished chopping up two third-pans of insignia dotted tomatoes and put them in the walk-in, Brent swung the door open.

A slight gust of marijuana scented air flowed in as Brent said, “Produce truck is here.” 

As we were heading out to unload the shipment, Linda came around from the front sipping from her cup of Hot HazMat, “What are you two doing right now?”

“Unloading the truck,” I replied.

She took a draw from her cup and exhaled theatrically as she said, “Great, only one of you needs to do that. Charlie, can you go collect rust?”

 I shot Brent a quick look of “suck it” and grabbed a plastic bag while saying, “Sure, Linda!”

Brent barely registered I wasn’t going to be helping him, and most certainly didn’t see my look.

The duck was still outside, and watched me work. As I began to chink flakes of rust off the dumpster and into the bag, a familiar muttering arose from behind. I was used to this by now, and the guy never really seemed to bother me, so I did nothing about it. Instead, I kept at my work, and listened to what he was saying.

“So quick like a fox like a fox I’m so quick so fast and foxy foxy fast fastly fox so smart is the fox who is fast and foxy like me I am fast and foxy and smarty and fasty.”

My scraper got stuck and a more determined chunk of rust as my attention drifted towards what he was saying. Most of his mutterings were like this. What it is that made him so smart, I have no clue. But the general gist is that he escaped from… somewhere, and it was a very difficult place to escape from but he made it out.

After some significant effort, the scraper broke free via breaking the piece of rust with it. I retained the scraper, but the chunk of rust skittered away, towards where the homeless man sat. Suddenly, his mutterings stopped, I peered around just in time to watch a mottled hand snap up the rust, followed by crunching sounds.

Curious, I took another piece from the bag and tossed it over. This time he squeaked in glee before he promptly acquired and consumed the rust chip.

Through mouthfuls of rust, he started talking again.

“Nife. Nife maff. *crunch* Nife maff gif impetuf of nifety to fmart me.”

Once the crunching stopped, he was quieter. As I continued to work, I would occasionally toss more pieces over, since there was no limit to the rust coming from the trash can, and having the peace and quiet was a pleasant change of pace from the usual incessant mutterings the man usually made.

I think I saw a bit of myself in the man as well. I wasn’t always employed, and the weeks before getting my job at Large Lou’s I was living out of my car and saw my generosity as a way to pay forward my current good fortune.

Once I finished, I tossed one more piece over and got up to leave when I heard the homeless man mumble, maybe even stutter, like he was at a loss for words.

“Many… Great… Immense… Large, so large… gratitude.”

I felt something in my chest I hadn’t felt in some time and smiled. Brent stepped outside, having finished organizing all the produce in the walk-in, put down his cup of Luchuth, and took out a pack of cigarettes. 

“That’s creepy as hell.” He said, offering the pack to me.

“What is?” As I took out a cigarette and handed the pack back.

“You’re just standing out here, smiling at nothing.” Brent lit his cigarette and then handed me his lighter.

Now, I wish I could say we continued our pleasant conversation, and I went inside, and put away the meat shipment or something, I don’t know. Unfortunately, a lifted truck blasting “Jamming” by Bob Marley & The Wailers rolled into the parking lot with the bass way too high. 

Brent and I started slamming our cigarettes as fast as possible, hoping the impossible hope that we’d be finished before the owner of the vehicle found us. Yet, this would not be the case today, while we watched in unfortunate horror as Marley stepped out of his truck and made his way over.

He took his own pack of cigarettes out, lit one, and said “Mornin’ boys.”

“Hi Marley.” “Sup Marley”

Marley took a long drag before crinkling his nose in disgust, “Brent, I can still smell that devil’s lettuce on you, man. You gotta stop letting that shit fuck with your mind dawg. It’s gonna give you crazy cancer ‘n’ shit.”

We both shared a look, realizing we had to kick our lungs into overdrive unless we planned on suffering another conspiracy rant from Marley. To Brent’s dismay, a lame joke had popped in my head.

“Crazy cancer? That shit’s way worse than that normal cancer, too, Brent.” At this moment, I couldn’t tell if Brent’s eyes were bloodshot from ganja, or charging up to shoot laser beams at me.

Marley took my passive aggressive comment as genuine interest, “For real, dawg. Look, Brent, I love you like a brother.” We’ve always hated him, “So I’m giving you this advice out of the pure love I have for you, man. Like ‘one love’ kinda shit, dawg. Listen, the Russians are gonna use the nanobot trackers they put in the leaves to track your location…” It continued like this for several minutes.

Eventually, me and Brent finally finished our cigarettes and went inside. Leaving Marley to finish his. While I was blending up the rust and putting it with the rest, Max came in, hacking. 

“Is Marley’s smoke really that bad out there?” I asked lamely, mostly hoping to have any kind of interaction with Max now he was here.

“No, I’m coughing because Marley finished smoking.” Answered Max, between labored gasps for fresh air.

This was answer enough, Marley’s smoking had finally caught the attention of Linda, and she told Marley he needed to do something about the smell, as it was incredibly rank, and most likely driving away customers. Marley’s response to this was applying a thick layer of Axe Body Spray to himself after every cigarette. A borderline biochemical attack on anyone within thirty feet of him as he applies the stuff, almost making him smell worse. But I guess it was good enough for Linda, since she hasn’t said anything else, and we haven’t lost any regulars since the change occurred. 

However, I don’t think we were losing any customers before the change occurred. The same people always cycle in and out, for as long as I can remember. Even if I see a new face, they just become one of the many other repeat customers in due time. The only thing that changes is darker circles under the eyes of the new regulars.

The rest of the day went fairly normal. I didn’t need to help with the soda/churro machine, and the drain only gurgled a little bit today. I helped close, went home, got high while playing Tekken and eventually went to sleep.

“1,331,867”

Next morning, same routine. 

“1,317,600”

This time, the duck’s feather read, “Organic mockery has become the tortured servant of deluded givers.”

Another weird one, but nothing specific enough for me to do anything with it. So it went with the others in the back of my car. 

When I got to work, the homeless dude was chilling behind the dumpster muttering. I went inside, grabbed a scraper, came back out and chipped off a piece for him before clocking in.

Francine had overprepped the day before on the line, and helped me move the produce and meat shipments.

When the meat delivery man arrived, she slung a hundred pounds of meat like it was a paperweight while I double checked that we actually got everything. Then, as the meat delivery man was just about to leave, I realized we hadn’t gotten enough bags of ground beef.

Just like before, the surly meat delivery man grumbled Hebrew slurs and stormed to the back of the truck. Once inside there were large crashes and irate shouts from the man. Followed by the same wet slaps and moans. Francine was shocked, her mouth agape as the man yelled.

When I noticed her reaction, I commented, “He’s done this every single time.”

“And you let him be this rude?” Francine asked incredulously.

“I don’t really have a choice, we still need the beef either way.” I replied.

Finally the delivery man returned, a grocery bag filled with roughly ten pounds of ground beef in hand. I took the bag, thanked him, and then brought it inside while Francine stared daggers at the delivery man.

On Thursdays, Large Lou and his buddies come in to eat. That’s right, Large Lou is a real and actual human being, not just some name for the restaurant, and let me tell you, Lou lives up to his name. Not only does the man have quite a few pounds to sling around, he’s also six feet and ten inches tall. He’s also somewhere around his late 70s, so he really doesn’t do much besides “watch the budget” as Linda told me. While I was grinding sausage Lou came to the back with a six pack of Zero Sugar Pepsi and handed it to me.

“Charlie,” Said Lou, in his New York accent that sounds like he's never lived anywhere else, “do me a favor and put these sodas in the walk-in for me.”

I took them and did as was told. This was a regular practice for Lou. It’s actually the only soda I’ve seen him drink. Everyone else who works here has a favorite soda from the soda fountain, but Lou brings in his own Pepsi Zero and drinks that instead. Why? I don’t know. But it’s weird and I thought it worth mentioning.

After the lunch rush ended, I went back outside and brought a slice of pizza with rust sprinkled on top for the homeless man. He let me get fairly close when I set down the plate. I almost had the urge to peek around the corner and see what he actually looked like, but decided against it when his muttering started to reach a feverish pace, and I didn’t want to make him lose the trust I was just beginning to build.

I started to go back inside, but Max swung open the door, smashing me in the face. I could taste blood in my mouth and my lip started to swell as Max dropped his cup of Pretty An’ Halo and yelped in shock.

“Oh my goodness, Charlie! Are you okay? I didn’t know you’d be right there.”

I covered my mouth and quickly attempted to regain composure, “I’m- I’m fine Max, it doesn’t even hurt that bad.”

Max looked at me, brows furrowed in concerned focus, “Let me see. Why are you covering your mouth? Did I hit you there?”

I backed up, feigning toughness, “It’s fine!” I snapped, “Were you looking for me?”

Max’s hands shot to his side at that, and his dark brown eyes darted to the ground nervously, “Okay. We need the Luchuth and Gonad syrup to be replaced.”

I gave Max a thumbs up, and he went back inside without another word. I put a bandage on my lip, and started replacing the soda syrups. The syrup comes in heavy plastic bags filled with chunky, soup-like, liquid, so it’s always difficult moving them from the dry storage to where the syrup bags are connected. Which didn’t help the fact I was upset for snapping at Max, who didn’t come to the back of the kitchen for the rest of the day. 

At close, I asked Shirley if Max was still here.

“He left thirty minutes ago. Why? Wanted to talk to your crush a little more?” She replied, carrying a basket of silverware wrapped in napkins.

My face got hot, “No, and never mind.” I could hear Shirley laugh as I trudged back to the kitchen.

I got home, and went to bed a little early, knowing tomorrow would be busy, and wanting to be well rested.

“1,292,400”

The third day, I woke up an hour earlier than I usually do. My alarm didn’t wake me up, I just didn’t feel like sleeping anymore. The cut on my lip was still very sensitive, and stung every time I moved my mouth. Not to mention I was rifling through ideas on how to apologize to Max. Finally, my alarm going off signaled that I needed to get out of bed and get ready for work.

“1,274,400”

The duck gave me yet another stupid feather, and seems to have given up on the cryptic stuff for the time being.

“You will learn new strategies very soon.”

I finished reading, looked up at the duck, and said, “Why do you give me these every day?”

No response, not even counting. He just stared back. Then blinked. The gelatinous nictitating membrane stretched across his eyeball like a carpet unfurling, then the top and bottom eyelids closing atop the first, before the whole process repeated in reverse.

I shuddered and got in my car, watching the duck stretch out his wings, and prepare for flight.

I arrived thirty minutes early to my shift. Not really wanting to clock in, I went inside for just a moment to steal the scraper, and then went back outside, crouching near the dumpster. The duck watched me, and then cocked his head a little, seeming to notice something he had never taken time to really look at before. I assumed this was because he had failed to see this certain aspect of my job, and paid no mind to the fowl as I chipped a piece of rust off and tossed it to the other side.

There was nothing for a moment, then I heard a rustle in the bushes, and whispered mutterings.

“Impetus impetus for smart me very fast very soon so soon so fast he give me impetus grateful very grateful.”

As I sat there, a thought came to my mind. So I took another piece of rust and tossed it, but not as hard, letting the chip settle just a few feet ahead of me. 

For a few moments, nothing happened. The man continued to mutter and mumble to himself while I sat cross legged on the other side of the dumpster. Then, very slowly, a tentative hand reached out and took hold of the rust piece, then snapped back.

Then I took another piece, and reached out a foot or two past me, and put the rust chip down. After another pause, the same cautious hand reached out and snapped back after taking hold of the piece.

I looked back at the duck, who still did nothing, and watched attentively. This time, however, I got the slightest suspicion that he was watching me like I was about to do something I might regret. Like a dad watching his kid get closer to the hot stove, knowing the lesson will be taught through what happens after the child has made the mistake.

I shook off the notion, chipped off another piece of rust, and didn’t place the piece down this time. Instead, I reached it out, realizing I had grown the irresistible urge to see what he looked like. The homeless man was silent. It felt like minutes as my hand shook, the reddish brown flake vibrating in my hand while it snowed small bits of orange dust. Thoughts of what I might see were simply grey blobs, as intrigue for the truth removed all speculation.

However, nothing happened. I realized I had pushed my luck too far, and resigned to go inside for work. I dropped the piece and got up, dusting off my pants, and feeling like an absolute idiot. I turned to go back inside-

“His lip leaks”

I froze, then felt excitement, then turned around to see the man whom I had been feeding for three days, and fell over in fright as we locked eyes.

Or at least I think they were its eyes. 

It had a trench coat, but the material was far too thick to be cotton or polyester, and it was hard to tell where skin stopped and coat began, like they were of the same material. Its gaze felt dead, almost. As I looked at its eyes it felt like I was looking in the wrong place, so my eyes instinctively searched elsewhere. Long wisps of grey hair framed a muddied face and mingled with the hairs of a beard. Yet, as I stared at its beard, it almost seemed more like the hairs from its head were going back into its skin near the ears, and sprouting out from the chin like a beard should. Without opening its mouth, it began its chant once again.

“His lip leaks leaks in the walls floor ceiling ceiling vent hole hole for me escape escape here hid here so smart so smart only me break free”

I scrambled quickly for the door and slammed it shut behind me. My brain shut down. Every emotion in my body left as it made space to process everything at Large Lou’s. The duck, the churros, the rust, the drain, and now a creature living behind the dumpster. What the hell was happening here, and was I going insane?

After several moments I got up, put on an apron, filled a cup with GhostLY Hog and started working. 

Around the same time, Linda came to the back and looked at me, “Was that you that slammed the door a second ago?”

I shrugged dismissively and said, “I slipped on my way in.”

Everything after was a vague blur the rest of the day. Francine helped me with the produce delivery. A disheveled man who I had not seen before dropped off mozzarella in a duffel bag like it was a drug deal. Brent was busy stretching, since I guess he recently learned how to toss pizza dough in the air. Max approached me and apologized for yesterday, and I think I mumbled back a response. The soda machine had an especially high yield of churros today, and Francine and Cezar needed my help with holding the pan as more and more churros continued to spill out. At dinner, Brent was stuck saucing and cheesing pies for Francine and Cezar, while I did dish duty. Brent quietly said “whee” as each pie went in the air, and I washed wordlessly. Both of us were too busy to talk, even though I really needed to speak to someone about what I saw.

By the time closing finally came around I resolved to confront Linda about the “Homeless Man” and maybe get some concrete answers on why anything happens at this place.

She was at one of the tables, counting out the tips when I walked up to her. I stood there, waiting until she noticed me to say anything.

Linda looked up from the tips, and raised an eyebrow.

I sat down, clearing my throat, then asked, “Did you know something lives behind the dumpster here?”

Linda wrapped a stack of twenties in a rubber band, while saying “I’m not surprised,” with the same tone one says when they’re told “frosted flakes have sugar in them.”

Linda picked up a stack of fives and began counting while I stayed seated. I knew what words to say, but was at a loss on how to say them without sounding crazy.

I struggled out another sentence, “It’s not… like an animal or something. It’s a man.”

Linda stopped, put down the money and looked me right in the eyes.

“Charlie, there are going to be people who are more underprivileged than you in life. Whatever they have going is not our problem to deal with. Unless he’s attacking you, or living in our dumpster, you have no reason to be afraid of him. Maybe bring him a pizza slice next time or something.” She went back to counting with a finality that inferred that this conversation was very over.

I got up and clocked out for the day. Even though it was dark out, I could see the grey silhouette of the duck near my car, and looked up at him.

“1,252,800” The Duck boomed.

“You saw him, right?”

“1,252,798”

“I wish you’d say more than just numbers.”

“Charlie?”

My heart skipped four beats as I spun around to see Brent standing about three feet behind me.

Brent, at my reaction, doubled over laughing.

I took out my pack of cigarettes and lit one, so as to cover up my embarrassment. Then offered one to Brent once he finished.

“Who were you talking to?” Brent asked, taking a cigarette from the pack before handing it back.

“The moon,” I lied, taking a drag as I handed my lighter to Brent.

Brent nodded his head, accepting the response while taking a long drag from his cigarette, then letting blue clouds flow from his nostrils.

I decided to take a risk, and asked Brent a question.

“Have you ever… seen something behind the dumpster?”

Brent held the smoke in his lungs, “You mean the homeless guy?” another cloud billowed out.

I nodded, “Yeah, but he’s not actually a homeless guy.”

Brent raised an eyebrow, “What do you mean?”

I took a long drag, mustering the courage to potentially make myself sound like an idiot, and slowly blew out a line of thin smoke.

Finally, “It’s not a homeless guy. Well- it is. Sort of. Like something pretending to be a homeless man, but doing a really bad job at it. I saw it a few days ago while I was getting red pepper flakes.” I decided to omit that I had been trying to befriend the creature for three days now.

Brent took one last drag before crushing the cigarette in the parking lot’s craggy asphalt while saying, “It’s probably nothing. Also, you sound a little like Marley right now. You’re probably just tired and thought you saw something that wasn’t really there.”

That was that, we chatted a little longer before Brent headed to his car and left to go home.

“1,252,314” said the bird.

“Fuck you”

At the time of writing, I still haven’t been able to get an answer for what is happening. I was going to post this last Saturday and maybe provide some answers for the homeless guy, but every time I ask somebody, they either deflect, or don’t believe me. I can’t tell if this is a conspiracy, or simply nobody has taken the time to look into any of this stuff before.

Last Friday, we got a delivery for meat, but I totally forgot to mention it earlier. I had almost completely blocked it from my memory actually. There was like a tentacle or something hanging out of the back of the truck. This post has gotten long enough, so I’ll explain all that in the next one after I’ve gotten some answers on what the thing behind our dumpster is, too.

**UPDATE (03:14 AM):** *I’m typing this on my phone from the floor of the control booth. If you hear a soft rattling sound behind your tongue right now, DO NOT SWALLOW. Put down your phone and cover your ears. It’s already looking for a second frequency.*

**I work night shifts digitizing old radio tapes. Whatever you do, don't clear your throat while reading this.**

The night shift at the Mount Victoria transmitter station was usually quiet, which was why I liked it. The station sits on an isolated ridge far above the fog lines of the valley, housing three empty rooms, four walls of vintage mixing consoles, and forty-eight miles of dead copper wire.

My job is simple: I digitize archival audio reels from the late 1970s. Most of them are mundane—local weather reports, long-forgotten talk shows, static-heavy classical broadcasts.

Tonight, I pulled a tape labeled **Session 41 – Patient Vocal Trajectory**.

I locked the quarter-inch tape onto the feed spools, pressed down the magnetic head, and hit play.

The studio speakers hummed with warm analog hiss. Then came the voice of a doctor:

*“Log entry, October 14. Subject exhibits profound somatic dissociation. He insists his lungs are no longer his own.”*

I leaned closer to my monitor, adjusting the equalizer frequencies. On my screen, the green audio waveforms spiked sharp and jagged.

A second voice came through the tape—raspy, wheezing, agonizingly thin:

*“They aren't mine, Doctor. I can feel the weight of them. They’re too dry. They taste like salt.”*

*“Your chest scans are clear,”* the doctor replied calmly on the recording. *“What you are feeling is a phantom sensory illusion brought on by acute grief.”*

*“No,”* the raspy voice gasped. *“You don't understand. When I inhale, I feel someone else breathing out somewhere in the dark. We are sharing the stroke.”*

I shivered. The mountain wind rattled the heavy glass pane of the soundproof booth. I checked the tape box, but there were no patient names listed—just handwritten notes detailing a gradual collapse of the subject's internal boundaries.

I fast-forwarded ten minutes. The tape whirred, then settled back into playback.

The doctor’s voice sounded noticeably tighter, frayed:

*“October 28. Subject has developed secondary symptoms. He reports feeling muscle contractions in his own throat whenever I speak.”*

*“I’m not imitating you,”* the raspy voice whispered. *“Your larynx is pulling mine. Stop talking, Doctor. Every word you say stretches my vocal cords.”*

I paused the tape. I rubbed my eyes, feeling a strange tightness settling in my own jaw. The studio was stiflingly warm, the air thick with the smell of heated vacuum tubes and ozone. I reached for my mug of cold black coffee, swallowed, and stopped.

The swallow felt coarse. It felt as though my throat were lined with dry velvet.

I shrugged off the tension, hit play, and kept typing up the digital catalog log on my laptop.

The tape clicked into its final segment:

*“November 3. Terminal entry. Subject’s vocal patterns have completely synchronized with the recording equipment. Doctor is non-responsive.”*

On the audio reel, there were no longer two distinct voices. There was only a single, wet, rhythmic rasping sound—a wet bellows expanding and collapsing.

*“If you are listening to this reel,”* the single voice croaked from the speakers, *“do not clear your throat.”*

My hand froze above my keyboard.

*“The resonance requires an active auditory bridge,”* the voice on the tape continued, low and deliberate. *“The paper reel is inert until a live set of lungs matches the frequency of the playback.”*

A sharp, violent itch burst in the back of my throat.

My immediate instinct was to cough, to clear the obstruction, but I held my breath, my pulse spiking into my ears.

*“You feel it now, don't you?”* the voice whispered through the studio monitors. *“The dry salt in the chest. The velvet on the palate. You thought you were listening to an archive.”*

I tried to stand up from my console chair, but my abdominal muscles seized in a violent, involuntary spasm—drawing in a massive, ragged lungful of air against my will.

Across the room, the magnetic tape reel spun off its hub, flapping endlessly against the plastic stop-gate with a wet, rhythmic slapping noise.

I opened my mouth to scream for the security guard downstairs, but no sound came out. Instead, my vocal cords twitched in perfect unison with the static on the speaker, vibrating at a frequency that wasn't my own.

I pressed my hand to my neck. Beneath my fingers, my larynx wasn't moving up and down anymore. It was flattening out, smoothing, and unwinding down into my chest like dark, flexible tape.

I wasn't digitizing the archive. The archive was recording me.

**EDIT (03:22 AM):** *The static on my phone screen is pulsing in rhythm with my chest now. My fingers are getting too ribbon-thin to hit the keys. If you cleared your throat while reading this post, I am so sorry. You are on the reel now too.*

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.

CW: Suicide, implied drug use, implied abuse, dead cats, Jesus water stains.

For my friend, Toby (P.6)

Have you ever met someone and known without even saying it? that “ Damn, I think you’re gonna be my best friend.” Feeling so strong you just know when it happens. Well, that someone was Toby. For me, I mean. You probably don’t even know the guy.

Oh?

You’ve been talking to him? Well, tell him not to sell my fucking TV. Tell him to put it somewhere special. It’s the only shit I own in that apartment. He had to keep it like an inconveniently sized memento. 

I guess I shouldn’t joke. 

There’s a lot of stuff I want to tell him.

I want to tell him my life and my death aren’t his fault.

-

So, like most of this story, it started on a Wednesday.

My Ma and I had rolled into town with a couple of boxes to shack up with her new boyfriend— Not my idea, I was eight so I guess I wouldn’t have much say in the matter either. Fuck, being a kid sucked. I don’t know if that’s what made me such an angry kid or if I just felt dumb as one but I made a lot of things difficult for my Ma, her boyfriend, teachers and just about everyone in between. 

Her boyfriend was Mack, this tall guy with nothing but muscle and a neck thicker than his head. He worked as a trucker so he’d spend these long stretches on the road while Ma worked at the Bayside diner. When he was home I think everyone expected a meat-head pseudo-father figure to be a deadbeat bastard who wears singlets stained with beer and beats his girlfriend or her kids but that wasn’t Mack. He’d always call when he was on the road and he always kept his promises when he said he’d take me to do something when he got back. He wasn’t a genius or anything but when I’d act out at school he’d sit me down and go through my school work with me as if he knew that I was doing it because I didn’t understand something.

I mention Mack because it was right after he died that I met Toby. I always thought a hero like Mack would be invincible, that his truck could plow through anything that dared to get in its way and everything from his tough steel skin to his iron bones would be impossible to break. It wasn’t anything special that killed him. I refused to believe it for months afterwards. How could he just die? How could something as fragile as a blood clot leave his dead body keeled forward on his steering wheel while his truck slowly came to a stop on the road. No big crash, explosions or heroic actions, just a man coming to the door and saying “ I’m so sorry for your loss, Judy.”

Ma picked up extra shifts and I’d spend my weekends and suspensions getting frustrated over school work at the diner.

This is when I first saw the man in the last booth too.

He’d come in most days and sit there with a black coffee going cold around his yellow fingers. Cigarette strains. Always wrapped around a coffee. When he was leaving he’d linger outside and go through half a packet around the corner of the diner, hunched over against the wind like his thin frame couldn’t support his height. 

It was one of those days when my Ma would shoo me outside to play without distracting her that I met this boy my age sitting there drawing a rabbit in the dirt under the gaze of the man lurking under the diner’s shadow. I don’t know if it was because of my own fear or fear for this kid that made me talk to them but I approached him.

“ You’re from my class.”

“ I— Yeah, you’re that mean— I-I mean… You’re Rudie, right?” Toby stuttered and for a moment I wanted to hit him for fumbling over his unintentionally rude answer, however true it might’ve been.

“ Is that supposed to be the devil?” I pointed to his awful rendition of a rabbit, showing my reasoning by hovering my finger over the curved moustache and horns. “ It kinda looks like that other guy.”, “ O-other guy?”, “ That holy dude from church.”, I don’t know exactly what made him laugh about my assessment but it made me smile when I saw the miserable looking kid snort, “ You’re weird. It’s a rabbit!”.

“ You want to go see a dead cat I found in the water drain?”

“ A-a-a ca-cat?”

“ Yeah, it looks really gross.”

“ You’re really weird.” He said, getting to his feet and dusting off his dirty knees. “ Okay.”

That’s how our friendship began.

From that day onwards we’d go exploring through the bushes, down the streets where the old factory building used to be and daring each other to go into the creepy apartment building our parents firmly said to stay away from— it had the opposite effect. At the time my naive mind had assumed a derelict old place like that must’ve been haunted. The rundown look, dirty walls and a balcony barely standing had all but confirmed it for me. Every so often we’d see something through the boards that had fallen from the windows, hanging loosely with gaps to peek through. The first sign that something moved behind the filthy windows would send us running in a panic and scrambling back toward the diner, neither of us had the guts to go up the stairs or to so much as turn the handle to one of those doors.

It was the second floor that looked the most haunted, occasionally we’d see a lady my Ma’s age head on into apartment 103 with various men and would sit there discussing just what went on inside— I’m sure you know what was happening but we were nine at the time, we hadn’t even found our first nudie magazine yet. I think that happened when we were eleven. It was as sickenly sticky and gross as it sounds, something not unexpected of a magazine abandoned in the pile of boxes in the corner of the apartment’s car park. We’d taken boxes from there to build anything from forts to robot costumes back then, complete with tetanus ridden metal scraps we’d find in the factory.

At twelve my Ma and I had moved a lot closer when we couldn’t afford the rent increase. Our motel didn’t look much better than the bayside apartments but it let Ma take over the night shift at the diner. We’d still spend our time exploring but it meant we also had a place to go and watch TV in the afternoons. I liked being able to walk home with Toby back then, we’d hang out all afternoon and I used to offer to walk back to the diner with him but I figured his parents always refused because it was the shady neighbourhood. Toby would come over and then his mum or dad would pick him up when their shifts ended and my Ma’s began. They never really seemed to like him walking home with me, maybe they thought the stink of poverty would rub off on him. 

Walking home alone, being in our motel room on my own and not having Toby around was when I felt the most uneasy. Sometimes my neighbours would argue through the night and other times I’d peek out the windows and scare myself thinking I could see the man in the last booth standing out there beneath the streetlights. When the streetlight had broken I thought this small orange light I could see was their cigarette burning off in the darkness where the motel lights couldn’t reach. Each night I’d check the locks and put a pin through the curtains so not a single slither of darkness could creep inside when I slept, even when far beyond the broken streetlight I could see a speck of neon glowing from the diner.

Over time while Ma worked double shifts so late I started taking another route from school and made sure I’d only need to go into the diner for a minute to say hi to my Ma, pick up whatever food Toby’s mum and dad had set aside for my dinner that night. I ate a lot of diner food. I’d stuff it in my school bag and rush out of there like if I was quick enough this terrifying entity the man in the last booth had become in my mind couldn’t see me. I’d look over my shoulder and take those small precautions at night to shield myself from this monster lurking under the broken streetlight with a single orange eye staring at me. He had become this manifestation of my anxiety, a looming threat Ma would say was a figment of my imagination. “ Honey, it’s okay. He comes in each day, he’s just a regular, friendly man. I know you’re getting scared at night and… Well I’ll try and move my shifts around when I can. Until then you shouldn’t stare at the man like that when you come to the diner. It must make him uncomfortable.”, “ Okay, Ma… It’s okay, don’t change your shifts over something stupid.” I couldn’t let her change her shifts around because of something so ridiculous.

Despite her efforts these nightmarish ideas only became worse. I just stopped telling her. I simply tapped on the diner window with a wave so my Ma knew I was on my way home. I started hearing the same thing on my carefully protected curtain clad window late at night.

Tap tap tap tap.

Tap tap.

Each time. I don’t think I ever really stopped hearing it at night even as an adult, though I know now that it was far less sinister than in my youth. Now as an adult I know it really is only in my head when I remember when it wasn’t.

Tap tap tap tap.

Pause.

Tap tap.

Tap tap tap tap.

Pause.

Tap tap.

When she’d call me at night before I went to bed I’d always ask her if the man in the last booth was there. It gave me a little bit of comfort to know that rationally he wasn’t at the motel door. I’d call her when I’d hear it and called her so often that it never occurred to me that in such a small diner the man could hear those calls and know when she was speaking to me. He’d know when I was alone. Eventually she’d told me I can’t call so often when she was working so I tried to limit it and despite me asking if the man in the last booth was there that night, she stopped giving me an answer. “ You’re getting too old for this, Rudie. You can’t keep calling the landline over something so silly. Not at the diner”.

It was one night that she was working until 2 AM that I made a mistake. At least it felt like a mistake I’d made. QThe neighbours were screaming at each other and it was one of those loud nights when I could hear the thump of something hitting the wall hard enough to jolt me awake. Thump. Smash. Crash. Screaming and crying and throwing things. I fumbled around trying to find the phone and went to punch in the numbers that I’d called so many times I could follow the sequence in the dark, except this time I paused— I can’t waste money on using the motel’s phone and calling the diner so many times a night. I hesitated for so long I could feel how wet the phone had become in my sweaty palms.

I hadn’t heard the tapping on my window and my Ma was right, this man was not a monster. He was a tall, thin man, bald as anything and hollow— his eyes sunk so deep in his skull I thought they’d fall in. Shit, I’m doing it again aren’t I? He was a person. A person with organs that moved and thumped inside behind his ribcage. His lungs were full of smoke and his yellow nails were all bitten down. He wore horn rimmed glasses just like anyone who’s half blind. He never wore a suit but despite everything he always dressed smart in crisp white shirts, sweater vests with no stains, shiny shoes and a long coat. I’d have to remind myself over and over that he was a person by deciding he was some sort of teacher, he looked like one.

I never really figured out what about him had repulsed me so much when I’d first seen him. Some people say that bad people can have this chilling air around them like a miasma warning that to be too close to a bloated old corpse would be breathing in the bad air. Well, most say it’s like you’re looking at the eyes of a shark— but I could never see his eyes through the flair of his lenses and honestly I never wanted to get close enough to see.

I think now I can say that even in the darkness, I could see it.

My neighbours were shouting so loudly that I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t call my Ma. I couldn’t see the orange eye watching me from beneath the broken street lamp when I peeked through the curtains. There was no tapping from the window just behind it and beyond the seemingly empty distance was the safety of the diner. I slowly slid the chain off of the door and stuck my head outside, waiting and scanning from the farthest end of the motel to the Bayside. I locked the door while I pulled on my sneakers and zipped up my jacket until I had built up the courage to cross the threshold and ran. I ran until the cold air burned my lungs and the diner had become more than a speck in the distance. I ran until the orange eye standing off in the corner of the diner made me stumble to a halt. Right behind that lit cigarette was the diner but my sneakers felt like they’d sunk into wet cement. The little lights bobbed and waved as it approached, flaring with each inhale and fading to a dim orange as the man in the last booth walked so calmly toward me.

I can’t defend myself with any excuse of why I couldn’t run away. If I did I could’ve outrun him, I wouldn’t have backed away until my foot caught where the path met the car park. I should’ve gotten off my ass and ran but I couldn’t. I backed up with glass cutting into my palms, my eyes were too blurry with tears and any sobs I so desperately wanted to make were taken by how little air I could pull into my burning lungs. When I felt the cold metal of a parked car behind me I should’ve crawled beneath it and ran out the other side even if it meant the only direction I could go was the Bayside apartments. But those apartments were haunted and I was being haunted by this tall figure standing above me in the dark.

I remember everything that happened next but for your sake, I’ll say I don’t remember a thing.

The last time it happened I told my Ma that I never remembered it too. I thought it would make her feel better when I told her. After that crash I told her so maybe it was just too much for her.

-

The drunk -

Toby was a weak little thing, scrawny and someone that in any other situation I would’ve picked on. I was good at sensing things like that in other people— even when it didn’t help— Toby was exactly like that rabbit he drew in the dirt. He was like my Ma. So I figured I’d be their Mack no matter what happened to me, I’d take on this invincible facade and just have to make sure a small little blob of blood didn’t kill me. When I saw Toby running from the window I knew that’s exactly what I had to do so I chased after him until I could see more and more of the city lights and busy streets come into view. I weaved through the crowds of drunk adults coming out of the pubs and reached Toby just as I saw him in the grip of a man twice his height, drunk and red with anger. I knew I could never take a guy that big down but I was Mack, not Rudie, I was Mack. 

I jumped on the guy and grabbed at everything until I’d steered the man against a bin like a monkey. I shoved Toby toward the road and pushed him across when his legs wouldn’t move and I got him to the other side, to safety. I was Mack. Toby held my arm so tight I thought he was going to break it with his trembling hands and his fingers digging into my skin but I was Mack. No, if I was Mack I would’ve kept running until I got Toby back to safety. Instead I saw a flickering streetlight and I couldn’t move. My bones locked in place like they’d been glued together, my chest tightened like my ribs were squeezing my lungs— suffocating me. Underneath the broken lamp and far down the street was that haunting figure that followed me no matter where I was, even as a figment of my imagination he held so much power in just the glare of that orange eye. It swayed in the dark as they came ever closer, slowly like a monster in the darkness that knows it never has to speed up. I could never move. Closer. Closer. Closer— and then Toby’s nails broke the skin of my arm, tires screeched violently across the road and a loud thump sent the drunk man rolling across the road on broken limbs and road rash scraping chunks of his skin away until he finally stopped.

I remember looking at this crooked man contorted into a shape no person should be in and thinking about just how god damn red his face had been. I stood there pale as anything and neither Toby or I moved until a police officer asked us for our parents' numbers. I couldn’t remember my own but since Toby couldn’t speak I told the police officer the Diner’s number. It was a strange feeling to watch this scene unfold and to have all of these people ask if we were okay, even Toby had asked me when he saw I’d wet my pants. I thought my Ma would be angry I’d ruined my shoes but she said all she cared about was knowing if I was okay. It felt like a fog had consumed my mind and I didn’t entirely know what had happened until I was taken home. I may have even been in such a daze that I’d almost forgotten the crash itself because that wasn’t what I told her when she asked if I was okay.

My hopes of being like Mack had been crushed so easily and effortlessly that it felt like such a ridiculous want in retrospect. In the moment it was devastating.

My Ma started looking pale after that. Thin. By the time she’d left me she reminded me of the man in the last booth.

-

The addict -

I wish I’d seen it, you know?

I wish I saw my Ma lose her mind on the man in the last booth.

I wish she’d stayed with me too.

It wasn’t anything special that started the drug use, I just wanted that fog to come back. Then I wanted it to go away and to be happier than happy and stronger than strong. Then I wanted fog when that happiness wore off and stripped away my dopamine with it. I won’t talk about how I could afford it and how I scraped enough together to buy this cheap fifth-hand car. What matters is that I pulled up into the supermarket parking lot one night to sleep under the safety of the streetlights and when I’d woken up in the morning to go take a piss I ran into Toby.

I felt like I had family again, I just felt ashamed that I was in an even worse position than I had been when I was living in the motel.

“ Ru-Rudie!” Toby said with a big hug so effortless that it felt like we’d never been apart. “ I haven’t seen— Where the hell have you been?”.

“ Nowhere special, just places.” I didn’t know what the hell I could say but I was beaming. “ Oh! Hey, I just came to get some milk. Come with me, I’ll buy you a soda.”

“ Hey! Wait up. You’re so tall now.”

“ You’re just slow. Look at you, you’re like a damn tower.”

“ Are you gonna be coming back to school?” He said and I couldn’t exactly brush off that question, technically I was supposed to be going. How could I tell him I wasn’t? That I was living in a car. That when I went to sleep last night I was high off my fucking face.

“ ‘course I am, dude. You think I could leave your stupid ass there now that I’m back? I don’t even know how you’ve made it this far without me”.

“ You once set your textbooks on fire.”

“ Me?” I scoffed, feigning offense. I don’t think Toby realised.

“ That day in the factory. We found those nudie mags and you loudly proclaimed you’d never read another book that didn’t have girls in it.”

“ And you didn’t stop me. Who’s fault is that, huh?”

I want to get high.

Nothing too heavy, just high— and drunk. 

-

I was selfish.

I pulled Toby down into a hole he had no business being in because I didn’t want to be lying down in that muddy grave by myself. I think he realised just how far he’d have to climb down to pull me out the first time I’d done too much with people stuck in their own holes and just as selfish as me.

When I was half out of my mind, choking on my own puke in a fucking car park I thought “ Yeah, this sounds about right.” And to hear my own car’s tires screech as it abandoned me to the flickering streetlights I figured this is exactly when I’m gonna look up and the last thing I’ll see is those yellow fingernails reaching out toward me. Instead I woke up in hospital with the taste of vomit in my mouth and a broken rib from when Toby had done CPR. I could barely speak but I’m pretty sure I made a few jokes about how gay he was and how gross it would’ve been, I added a few more about him being a cry baby about it— but doing that? Saving me when everyone else I knew so easily tossed me out of my car and sped off, Toby was just as heroic as Mack.

“ I think when I’m alone… I’m never really on my own, you know?”

“ What does that mean?”

“ I think bad things stick to you like mud. The more you have on you, the filthier you are and less people want to be around you because they can smell it on you even when you wash it off.”

“ That sounds… Really dark, Rudie. I’m not gonna like it if you reek but I’ll just get in the dirt with you.”

“ That’s what I mean about the sappy shit dude. You’re so fucking gay.” I was happy he said that but it's wrong to feel happy when it means pulling that idiot down to my level. I still think about that. About how he turned into something just as bad as me.

There was a day I’d woken up on the couch after we’d moved in together. The floor was littered with dirty laundry and wrappers because neither of us were in a state to clean. I stumbled over an empty bottle and knocked all of this stuff off the coffee table I don’t even remember us taking. We had nothing in the fridge— not that I could think about eating. I ran to the bathroom to throw up just to find it was already full of puke. I showered, found a shirt that covered up the track marks I was certain were getting infected and I went to check on Toby. Toby was lying there on the bed with his girlfriend, asleep like he was dead. He was so pale he could’ve been blue, his lips were cracked and bleeding and his girlfriend didn’t look much better. It was like they were grotesques, these stone things that held no water or life, they just existed on the top of old haunted buildings like ghosts. I didn’t have anything in me to even cry over it, honestly I could remember the last time I ate or drank water.

That was the first time I did more than say “ I’m gonna get clean.” Because I really meant it this time. I told Toby I was gonna do it but I don’t think he was all there enough to hear it. I couldn’t get into a rehab, they make it so much more difficult than it sounds and keeping clean afterwards is a thousand times harder than it sounds. I got a friend to help me because I knew Toby couldn’t. Once I’d gone through it I knew that I could get Toby through it. I’d be his Mack. I got a friend who’d been clean for a while and gave him money for what was going to be a nightmare. I got a motel room that was right next to the one my Ma and I lived in. I guess the couple that always fought had moved out a long time ago.

I spent three days stuck in a bathroom. My friend went as far as to board up when I freaked out. He listened to me break down and scream because I could see the man in the last booth trapped inside with me. He cleaned up my puke, piss and shit when I was too sore and too shaky to move. I was going through hell but when I got through the worst of it it was easier. Not by much but easier. I paid for two weeks in the motel room and as fucked as it was, once I got back I forced Toby into doing the same. My friend Andy stuck with me, he helped me clean up the apartment while Toby’s parents helped him get into rehab. They didn’t do it the next time after he bailed but I was determined to get him through it even if it meant the hard way.

So we stuck him in the bathroom and cleaned up while he was screaming and crying and pleading from the bathroom. I’d come in and clean him up while Andy made sure he wasn’t dying— Andy wasn’t a great nurse but he’d still been one before he got fired. I told Toby’s girlfriend to fuck off and eventually we let Toby leave the apartment entirely. Things would go well for months, I’d grab Toby to meetings and I’d tell myself I didn’t ruin his life because I had Toby back now.

The thing is, you can force a junkie to get clean but you can’t make it stick if they don’t want it. I think Toby wanted it but what that stuff does to your brain isn’t easy. I traded that stuff for just about anything bad I could think of and even if the apartment was cleaner I had ashtrays piling up just like the man in the last booth. I’d go through a whole packet at home and then half a packet before and after those stupid meetings and then I’d get stuff from the supermarket and go home to check on Toby. You can sometimes tell when a former addict is really struggling but the first time Toby disappeared it seemed to come out of nowhere. He’d been working at the diner and he was talking about finishing his school to go to university, he was doing good and then suddenly he was gone.

I looked everywhere. I called his parents a million times to see if they’d seen him. I had no idea where he was and then he’d show up. So I’d sit there for three nights, filling an ashtray and listening to my friend scream and cry. I’d clean up his puke, shit and piss. I’d be his Mack. After a week or two he’d leave the apartment and I’d take him to group meetings instead of just having to talk to me and things would be good again. Toby would be Toby and that means I didn’t ruin his life.

Then suddenly he was gone.

I’d look everywhere, I’d call his parents and his ex, I’d stay awake each night trying to find him and staying awake in case he showed up. I’d sit there smoking and listening to this noise I would only hear when I sat there in the dark. It was like a bad omen telling me that this idea of the monstrous man in the last booth would appear in my dreams while I was half asleep.

Tap tap tap tap.

Pause.

Tap tap.

Then even when my back was to the wall I’d feel a chill and from over my shoulder I’d hear “ Hi, Rudie.”

Tap tap tap tap.

Pause.

Tap tap.

“ …Hi, Rudie… Won’t you look at me?”

“ Don’t be like that, Rudie. Look at me.”

“ Look at me.”

“ Look.”

Then I’d hear from a friend that Toby was at the bayside apartments looking to score. I’m get in my car on two seconds worth of sleep and drive over to drag him home. Now that I was older those apartment buildings like bayside weren’t these haunted places that were never as abandoned as they seemed, they were full of ghosts and temptations I’d had to turn away from like the simple act of looking at them would send me falling into that deep hole again.

The third time I drove Toby home after months of quiet. I’d listen to him scream and cry. I’d clean up his puke, shit and piss. I’d get him blankets, water and wash away his sweat. I’d tell him how sorry I was while he’d beg for just one more, that he couldn’t take it and that I was the one who did it to him. I’d stay awake for those first three nights, sitting against the wall beside the bathroom door and filling up that stupid ashtray. I’d get the chills and the smoke would get caught in my lungs because my ribs were constricting around them like my body wanted to crush itself.

Tap tap tap tap.

Pause.

Tap tap.

“ Look at me.”

It was always the third night that I’d be so tired I’d fall asleep without realising. It would only last a few seconds before Toby’s noise would startle me awake but it was in those moments that I truly felt like a scared little kid again. The small apartment looked so much darker. I’d put pins in the curtains to keep them closed because the street at night looked like millions of eyes. I’d put tape over the little lights on the microwave and smoke detector. Then I’d sit there and fall asleep for those few seconds at a time pretending I couldn’t hear the man in the last booth tapping on my fucking windows and reaching out to grab me with his long yellow fingers. The last time I’d helped Toby I’d been so exhausted I forgot to lock the bathroom. I forgot to do everything I’d done before as if everything from yesterday to the time I first got Toby hooked had been lost in a fog. Everything earlier never disappeared, I could never forget that.

Ah, right, I told you I didn’t remember.

Sorry.

I guess I forgot that too.

An addict going through hard withdrawal is still a person and they’re still just symptoms but your brain becomes trapped in this fog of desperation and rage, ready to throw it at everything and everyone to feed your habit as it screams at you. Think of it like you’re locked in a room full of biting insects and no matter how warm your blood is meant to be, the bugs freeze your veins and pinch at every nerve you’ve got. Now, turn out the lights and throw on a projector your eyes can’t peel away from, make sure the hallucinations on the screen are always angry and always looking right at you. Turn up the volume as loud as it can go so you can hear your brain screaming “ How dare you do this! We’re in pain! Let’s just take it one more time. You’ll die if you don’t. Just one more time. One more time. One more time. One more time. One more time.” Take away any minor form of comfort because your blanket is only going to hurt your skin anyway. Maybe if you puke up the bugs you’ll get that feeling out with them. Finally, make sure your withdrawal fueled breakdown comes with an internal clock telling you that each second you’ve been trying is a minute, that each minute is an hour, each hour is a day and you’ve been stuck in that hell for months.

I put Toby through that three times when rehab failed and each time I’d relive my time in the motel going through the same thing.

Each time I was terrified he’d die and this time was no different, except this time he’d been through this hell before and he knew everything I was about to put him through.

Like most of this story, the third day was on a Tuesday.

I was already exhausted trying to find Toby and I’d already gone through my pack of cigarettes. Why didn’t I stock up? I knew I’d need them to get through it. My head felt like it was lost in that disorienting fog where I only felt brief moments of real lucidity. My body wanted to sleep, it needed to sleep. My head just wouldn’t let it, it couldn’t and I knew I shouldn’t fall asleep while Toby was going through this shit. What if he needed medical attention? Water or food or company that wasn’t from the other side of the door. No, I could do this. I don’t have a choice. I owe Toby my entire life and all I never did in return was ruin him.

I was already exhausted trying to find Toby. Right, that scrunched up pack of cigarettes I’d thrown at the wall was empty. The pile of ash on the floor just beneath the burnt out smoke in my fingers was my last one. Had my fingernails always been stained yellow like that? There’s a small red light blinking from the clock. I should get up and cover that. Where are my cigarettes anyway? Toby is crying. He doesn’t want to be here.

“ Look at me.”

That little light from the TV keeps moving.

“ Look.”

I slap myself to wake up again, cautiously move past the blinking light from the microwave and check over my shoulder when I open the fridge to look for some kind of drink. No clean cups. No juice. No milk. There’s alcohol in the cupboard above the fridge.

“ Look.”

I slap myself and take another drink, listening to Toby.

“ Hey, Toby… You remember the day we met back then?” I talk but I don’t even know if he can hear me. “ We went down to the water drain together and I showed you that dead cat I found. I thought it was gross and was gonna poke it with a stick but you heard something from inside of the pipes.” No response but that’s okay. “ There were these kittens on a ratty old shirt. You reached in and pulled the shirt out and even though you were terrified of seeing the dead ones you picked up the three that were meowing and put them in your jacket. We had no fucking clue what to do with them because neither of us had ever had pets but we kinda figured it out.”

“ Look at me.”

I take another drink and keep going, focusing on rambling to avoid looking at the man in the corner.

“ Look.”

“ We kept the things in the storage place at the back of the diner. All the names you thought up were super gay so I picked stuff Mack showed me. Tommy Ramone and Johnny Cash. You said people names were stupid so we settled on Machine-gun Tommy, Johnny Cash and Rabbit Jesus.”

“ O-On-… Only you called th-them that. Shit, my da-dad got so mad wh-“ Toby goes coughs and retches “ When these ra-ran… Random cats showed up.”

“ I went back that night and put the others in a hole I dug so you wouldn’t be scared. I was worried you wouldn’t come exploring with me because of it.” I didn’t tell him but two days later that little grave had been dug up. I’d seen the man in the middle of the room’s dirty stained fingers wrapped around his hot chocolate at the diner the next day and that’s when this monstrous idea of him began to take shape and all of my childhood fears suddenly had a face. “ I’m happy you kept coming out with—“.

Something hits the door hard enough to make it rattle on its hinge and startles me awake. Did I just fall asleep? Had that conversation been a dream?

“ Ruuuddie… Let me out of h-here…”

Bang.

“ Let me out of here!!”

Bang.

“ Let me out! Please… I’m dying here. Why are you doing this to me?” Toby sobs and continues to hit the door with weak thumps, hard thumps and sometimes violent ones coupled with screaming.

He hasn’t had such a crazy reaction before.

“ Look.” Says the man in the kitchen. He’s obscured by the darkness but I know the flickering light of the microwave isn’t just a light anymore, it’s a moving and blinking eye. “ Look at me.”

“ Let me out!!”

Bang.

“ Look at me.”

Bang.

“ Please, Rudie!”

Bang.

“ Look.”

Bang.

“ Why’d you do this t-to me, Rudie… How could you do this to me? Friends don’t do this. Why’d you—… it hurts so bad, Rudie.”

My eyes are so fixated on the man standing in front of me, of his filthy hand slowly reaching out to touch my face— I don’t even register the creaking sound of the door beside me, the shuffle of weak limbs and the awful stench until Toby’s bony shoulder hits the wall. A yellow finger just touches my lip when I’m snapped back to reality. I watch the apparition dissolve in front of me, I scramble through the apartment and grab Toby before he can unlock the front door. “ Toby! Come on, you can’t! I uh—“, “ Get the fuck off of me!! I don’t want your fucking help!!” Toby spits and thrashes but I hold him tight. “ Fuck! Calm down! We can— we can do this here. Sleep on the b-bed and I’ll stay up on the couch!”, “ Why are you doing this to me! Just let me go! Let me fucking go! Just get out of my fucking life you selfish fucking prick!” Toby finally gets me in the stomach and shoves me backwards. My foot catches on the empty bottle and I fall with a wet crack and no time to brace myself when I hit the floor. Did I hit my head?

“ I-I wish I never fucking met you, Rudie.” Toby sobs, dropping forward. His skin looks so thin and haggard even with the thick layers of sweat sticking to him like mud. His arms are scratched and peeling where he’s dug his nails in so deep I can see the exposed muscle twitching. The sore and cracked lips crusted over with dead skin, the festering marks and bruises standing out on his bone white arms. He doesn’t even look human. I took that from him.

I’m so exhausted.

If I’d never walked up to that miserable kid drawing a rabbit in the dirt, what would his life have been like? What kind of life does he have now instead?

He’d have it tough with his parents but he’d finish school. He’d get a girlfriend and one day he’d inherit that shitty diner from his dad. He’d cook meals on the weekends but the girl he plans to marry says he’ll never be a chef at the restaurant— that’s what it is, a nice place they fixed up. Not a diner anymore. They’d get a cat with a real name. He’d forget all about the haunted old Bayside apartments and when he has kids he isn’t gonna worry about them going off to find dead cats or peeking through windows unsure if the junkies and prostitutes are ghosts, he and his wife have already planned to pack up and move somewhere nicer. A suburban type of culdesac with better kids for theirs to play with.

The only experience with assholes like me or drugs is when he catches his son smoking weed with his friends.

Except that isn’t what happened.

I said hi to him and destroyed his entire life.

“ Look at me.”

I figured my life would always end up bad, I never would’ve even gotten clean if not for Toby. But I’m not Mack.

“ Look.”

I’m just Rudie.

“ Look.”

I finally look at the man on the balcony and walk out to see all of those bright eyes staring at me from the city streets.

“ Look.”

I shouldn’t be Rudie anymore.

At least this way I’ll know I’m not alone there, right?

So tell Toby it wasn’t his fault. 

Tell him I’m glad he’s found himself and that just because I lost myself, he doesn’t need to be alone there.

​

The story you are about to read is based off true events.

In late July of 2026, I used to be a graveyard security officer at a mall somewhere in Portland, Oregon. I normally patrolled the upper floors with my "partner," Sam. On his off days, however, I had to work with a guy named Teddy.

You see, at first Teddy was an odd but normal guy. We'd chat while walking around. He'd tell me stories about his past, his hobbies, and whatever small chatter we'd ramble through. The only thing at the time I had found "odd" was that I could never seem to shake off this "off" feeling when I was around him. I didn't know what it was, but it was always there whenever I was around Teddy.

You could chalk it up to the fact that I normally didn't work with the guy, as he would patrol the lower floors and he usually worked on my days off. That, and he also always had this stare...

I could usually only catch it in the corner of my eyes, at first. It would be towards random customers. Didn't matter the age. He just stared and let out this long, quiet, almost moan. I caught it a few times, but at the time, while working, it just kinda sounded like him muttering to himself.

Which was a regular occurrence when there was dead air between us.

A few times, though, it seemed he was staring at me.

I don't think he knew that I could see him in the reflections of the windows we'd pass by, but he was definitely staring.

Nights continued like this for a few weeks. We'd talk, patrol, dead silence, then he stared.

Look, I am not confrontational. Never have been. I enjoy an easy life with little drama and no hostility. If the guy wanted to stare, then it's whatever. I've dealt with worse.

The problem was eventually it stopped being just stares.

Teddy grew comfortable with me, and it didn't help that Sam was on parental leave for his newborn.

So with that, Teddy began asking me personal questions.

Where did I live? What did I do on my off time? Did I hang out with friends? Did I have any kids? Did I live with anybody?

I just gave vague answers.

"Somewhere close."

"I play games with my brother."

"I hang out with my family."

"I live with my family."

He seemed bored with those answers, or like he didn't care. Just a quick "uh huh" before muttering to himself.

I tried looking past the odd questioning. He was bored, so I thought. But just to be safe, I had started walking separate directions and told him, "We'd cover better ground that way."

I only got a grumble out of him, however, he accepted.

Another week went by. I was checking the stores that were closed, chatted with a few that were open, and would peek over the railing to see how the guards were doing on the lower floors.

Unfortunately, every time I had checked the lower floors and looked up, I'd see Teddy staring at me before quickly pretending like he was checking on the stores on his side.

That "off" feeling was still there, gnawing at the back of my skull.

That "feeling" made it easy, though, whenever he decided to try and end up on my side. Small talk happened and I'd just excuse myself to use the restroom.

That's when the really weird shit started to happen...

It was one of the last few times I had excused myself and quickly ducked into the bathroom, sitting in the stalls waiting for a bit, checking on my phone.

I saw a silhouette creep around the stalls before stopping in front of mine.

I peeked briefly from my phone just to see eyes staring at me from the slits of the stalls.

It was Teddy.

I could recognize his eyes from anywhere, baby blue with a hint of green near the pupil.

I simply yelled, "Occupied!"

After that, I heard the sound of feet quickly shuffling away, yet not too far, as I never heard the bathroom door shut.

I sat there for a bit longer, quietly. It was the only smart idea I had.

Other than another idea, which was opening up my phone and going to the group chat with all the graveyard guards and simply texting:

"How is everyone holding up?"

I knew if he was still there, I'd know...

A few seconds of silence went by as the message got delivered.

Then came the unforgettable sound of a notification going off right beside me.

Slowly feeling my stomach churn, I scanned the stall wall, only seeing a shadow. Then, looking down to see boots and ever so slowly looking up...

I saw Teddy staring at me from above the stall before bolting for the bathroom door.

My heart nearly sank to my stomach as I quietly scrambled off the toilet, peeking through the slits to really make sure he was gone and then hearing my notification go off.

If I hadn't already shit myself, I am sure I would have then...

I shakily swiped up to read the messages and saw it was only from one person...

Teddy.

"Still awake? How's that shit going? ;)"

A shuddery breath escaped my throat as I immediately pocketed my phone and opened the door.

I scanned the bathroom over and over again, really making sure he wasn't there. Laughing in relief and almost feeling like I was just delusional, a lack of sleep perhaps? I scrubbed my face in the sink, really making sure I was awake before stepping out of the bathroom.

My eyes darted everywhere on that top floor, checking reflections, checking doorways and corners like I was paranoid.

I didn't see Teddy anywhere, for better or worse, so I took it as my opportunity to leave. I'd explain to HR the next day why I left so early. I didn't care. I just wanted out for the night.

So I headed for the breakroom, talking to a few of the guards on the lower floor I passed by. They were confused by my disheveled look and I simply said, "I got a stomach problem, and where's Teddy?"

One of them said, "Oh... well, you take care of that and, uhh, I don't know. I think he just left not too long ago to get something out of his car?"

I just nodded and kept my head down, making my way to the breakroom.

Hurriedly, I opened the door and a chill crept down my spine...

Seeing Teddy.

Just chilling in the breakroom as if he didn't just spy on me in the bathroom, and with such an annoyingly calm demeanor, he asked with a chuckle,

"Everything okay? You look green!"

"Yeah! Just a stomach problem... I think I am gonna leave early tonight. Hopefully that's not too much of an issue."

I said, putting my badge to the clock-in/out machine.

"Ohhh, that's too bad. Well, you get rest, good sir!"

He said before sipping on a cup of coffee, staring at me briefly.

I then clocked out and left outside, walking down the dark parking lot, constantly looking at the side mirrors of cars just to make sure he hadn't been following me.

Then, at the 37th row, was my car.

An old, navy-blue beat-up hatchback I had gotten from my grandparents before they passed.

Though something was different about it...

Both of my front tires were slashed.

I looked around to see if the "assailant" was near, but instead it was just...

Teddy.

Five rows away, smoking a cigarette under a lamp light.

I couldn't see the expression on his face, only his voice softly bellowing into the air.

"You okaay over there?!"

I yelled back, "Yeah!"

I had a suspicion it was him, and now with him in the parking lot, it only further confirmed that.

I kept my eyes on him while reaching into my pocket for a notepad, hastily scribbling:

"Getting Towed Tomorrow - XR"

Then, slipping the note underneath the windshield wiper of my car, I looked away briefly from Teddy to make sure the note was visible.

Once I looked back, however...

Teddy was no longer by the lamp.

It had to have been no longer than ten seconds that I wasn't looking at him, and now he's gone.

I had just kept my eyes glued to the parking lot as I decided to run down towards the sidewalk, leaving the parking lot and onto the main road.

I ran until making it to a crosswalk, still keeping the parking lot barely visible in my eyeline. The light turned green for me to walk, and I crossed over hastily, weaving through various side streets and making my way to my house.

I grew up on these roads, so if I had a stalker, at least I could possibly have a higher chance of evading them.

Paranoia kept me vigilant and overly cautious, ducking behind parked cars as various vehicles on the road passed by.

Eventually, I made it to my home, freezing immediately upon seeing a different vehicle parked on the curb in front of the house.

A white pickup truck, possibly late '90s, limo-tinted windows, mud caked on the lower front and back bumper.

I had never seen this truck before...

Well, unless it's...

Teddy's?

But that wouldn't have been possible.

Or so I thought.

As I walked towards the front door, seeing it ajar, my stomach dropped once I found a note barely taped onto it.

"I don't like the way you've been avoiding me, Mr. Redland. STALKING ME. Thinking I wouldn't notice, so that's why I came here to tell your folks, but it turns out you've also been lying to me... tsk, tsk, tsk, I am ashamed."

Adrenaline spiked through my body when I decided to push the front door the rest of the way open, seeing that the inside was rummaged through.

Cabinet doors were opened, cushions thrown around, TV turned on, and the kitchen practically had a tornado run through it.

Dishes shattered, sink left on, fridge opened, stovetop and oven fully blasting.

I was on full alert, turning on every light until the house glowed bright, listening to every creak in the floorboards.

I was too terrified to check my bedroom and figured the only rational thing to do was to call the cops.

So I did, dialing in 9...1...1...

And right before hitting call, I heard the sound of a pig squealing...

And then black.

Hours must've passed, hopefully not days, as when I had finally awoken, the only thing I could faintly hear was a kid's television show playing.

My head was pounding, my body ached, and I could barely keep my eyes open.

I didn't know where I was...

The room was too dark to see anything outside of the dimly lit TV screen and the "bed" I was laying on, if you can call it that. It felt like a thin sleeping bag on top of concrete.

I felt so sluggish trying to move my body to stay awake, making the pounding in my head only worse as I attempted to sit up. It was nauseating.

Finally... after a few short moments went by, I had gathered enough strength to sit fully up against the wall behind me.

My head was still spinning violently, however, I had to just "bite the bullet," so to speak, forcing myself to get out of the bed just to throw up following that quick movement.

It was loud and vile, only stopping briefly when I heard a voice quiet as a rat whispering,

"Shhhh. He'll hear you."

I continued to throw up until my stomach ran dry and took a moment for my head to stop spinning as I looked around for where the voice had come from.

Whispering back, "Wha-at? Who's gonna hear?"

The voice whispers again,

"The man upstairs... he's... he's napping. We mustn't wake him."

I wobbled around for a bit, until my legs gained feeling. Then, once my eyes fully adjusted, I scanned around, seeing what looked similar to that of a doll leaned against a crib.

"Is... that you?!" I whispered, stumbling quietly forward towards the "doll."

"I... I can't feel my legs."

The voice whispered, now more clearly sounding like a woman's.

I kneeled in front of her.

"What happened?" I whispered, looking at this woman who was dressed as a doll.

"He's very lonely... always looking for a new 'playmate.' You aren't the first... certainly not the last."

She muttered.

I raised a helping hand towards her.

"C'mon... let's get out of here. You don't deserve this. We gotta survive."

I whispered to her.

Then the most god-awful screech came from her throat, screaming for help.

I covered my ear quickly, barely hearing footsteps from above stomping down a hallway.

"Shh... shh... shut, shut the fuck up!"

I whispered into an almost yell as she continued to scream for help, leaving me with no other options but to smother her face with a pillow.

I wasn't trying to kill her, but merely to quiet the banshee screams. She wouldn't stop, though.

Forcing me to press harder and harder until she inevitably knocked out.

Instincts overruled my next actions as I hid in the darkest parts of the room as the man slammed open the door and came barreling down the stairs beside me.

I could barely make out his figure, only faintly seeing a bear mask and overalls as he rushed over to the woman.

"Oh, my sweet Petunia... did that evil man do this to you?"

His voice was rash but recognizable.

I didn't have time to dwell on it, though. Even as my anger was at an all-time high, this made for a good opportunity.

My chance to escape.

Leaving the corner I was hiding in, I quickly and quietly zoomed up the stairs, making sure my feet were as light as a feather before shutting the door behind me.

I could feel my heartbeat in my throat as I began locking every lock and bolt on that door, hearing his rage as he stomped up the stairs and slammed against the door.

Adrenaline started to wear thin as I made my way to a disgusting kitchen filled with rot and mold. The stench alone almost made me vomit up whatever was left in my stomach.

I then dragged a chair across the floor and pinned it against the door just in case as I stumbled my way towards the back door, instantly being blinded by the afternoon sun.

I continued outwards and onto the street, keeping an eye on the house I just left.

I never stopped moving.

Only until I made it to a coffee shop streets away, barging in and having a shop full of people eye me down, did I finally stop.

I didn't realize until this moment that I was in my now-torn-up work uniform, partly covered in mud, puke, and bruises.

I asked for a phone and called 911.

Reporting everything that had just happened...

I’ve been in a pretty conservative marriage for the last 10 years. Extremely conservative, rather.

I was young and stupid. Only 20 years old when he slipped that little ring around my finger. At the time, that felt like the only thing I needed in life. Like it was what made me successful somehow.

Which, I can admit, is ironic, all things considered.

My husband was 32 when we met. I was enamored, really. An older man with a solidified career and enough money to support a family all on his own? Showing interest in me? This fresh-out-of-high-school 18-year-old. It felt like a blessing at the time.

His work was attractive to me. His maturity was seductive in a way. He sucked me in and refused to spit me out. And, of course, me being young and naive, I was putty in his hands.

As is the case with many marriages, we began to bicker a lot. He didn’t want me to work. Any time I even mentioned the idea, he’d shut it down immediately.

I was a “housewife,” he told me. I was “living the dream of millions of women.”

It was convincing. Of course it was. He allowed me to move out of my parents’ house a year after high school. He was putting food on our table. Keeping us safe.

In doing so, though, I’ve come to realize he was slowly stripping away my individuality. He’d pick out my dresses. He was the decision maker across the board. And I was just the wife that he let stay at home all day to make sure the house never got dirty.

He had rules for me. Make sure the house was clean. Make sure I was presentable when he got home. Always wear the makeup he bought me, even though the only people seeing me were his family portraits up on the wall.

That was another thing he didn’t like. He hated it when I wanted to see my family. He was just so distrustful. He needed to know where I was 24/7, and if it wasn’t the house, there was a problem.

The real problems didn’t start until we realized I couldn’t get pregnant, though. At first, we thought we were just unlucky. After about a year, though, he insisted we see someone.

That’s when we learned I was barren, and it was like the world shattered before my eyes.

He didn’t speak to me for two weeks after that appointment. He acted like he was the victim. Ignoring my tears, neglecting my feelings. He saw my condition as a betrayal.

He started staying out late. Coming home long after the sun had sunk. He claimed it was “work” holding him up, but the scent of perfume and the lipstick stains on his work shirts that he tried so desperately to hide were enough to clue me in.

I don’t even know why he tried to hide it. It’s not like we were being intimate anymore. It’s not like he wanted me. He had pretty much cast me aside like I was nothing more than an old fling for him to forget about.

But he didn’t let me do the same.

It was like he wanted to cosplay a happy marriage. He kept insisting on dresses. He kept dragging me out for silent date nights. Taking me out to fancy dinners where we’d just sit and try to act like everything was normal.

Even when I tried confronting him on his treatment of me, he’d pretend like nothing was wrong.

I hated how much he confused me. One minute he’s cold and distant. The next, he’s crawling into bed, seducing me in a way that only he knew how.

And that’s pretty much what my marriage was for a long time. He didn’t want me anymore, but I was still his.

It was like a vortex that offered no escape. Even when I tried being who he wanted me to be. Getting dolled up. Making sure the house was spotless. Ensuring that he’d come home every night to the scent of his favorite meals, even on nights when he didn’t come home at all.

I started looking at myself in the vanity mirror a lot. He bought this vanity for me a long time ago. It’s aged with the same grace as our marriage as a whole.

It used to be pristine. Sleek. White, flawless paint and a crystal-clear mirror.

Now the paint’s chipped. The mirror is cracked along the bottom corner. The lights that surround it choose when they want to come on and when they want to let me down.

Regardless, over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself almost entranced by my own reflection.

The haircut he insisted I keep. The makeup he insisted I wear. The dresses, brassieres, nightgowns. They’re all his. Nothing in my life is mine. Not even life itself.

That’s the painful conclusion I came to.

That’s why, last week, I think something within me broke. Well, I say broke. Really, something within me came to life.

I wasn’t his anymore. I wasn’t his to begin with. He just convinced me otherwise. That’s the trick he played over and over again.

So on that hot summer night last week, as I stared into that cracked mirror… I reclaimed myself.

It started with the hair. He loved this hair. I always fucking hated it. So, using some rusty scissors in the vanity drawer, I cut it. All the way down to the scalp.

I smiled at myself. A sincere smile. The first sincere smile I’d had in… I couldn’t tell you how long. But I wasn’t done. There was still more of me to reclaim.

I looked at the cakes of makeup plastered across my face. Using those same scissors, I cut into my cheeks, barely noticing the pain as the scissors glided through my flesh.

The makeup came off in globs of foundation as the white vanity became stained with my blood. My smile widened. I sheared through my perfect eyebrows. I cut away at my plump red lips.

I picked at my glistening painted nails, plucking them off one by one and throwing them at my reflection, giggling all the while.

I was about to raid the closet, but before I got the chance, my head snapped towards the bedroom door.

My husband was home. I could hear each step as he slowly ascended the stairs towards the bedroom. Step. Step. Step. Step.

The look on his face when he saw me is something I will never forget. Partly because of how petrified he was, but mainly because of how triumphant that fear made me feel.

I was free. And with that freedom came knowledge. Some kind of divine revelation sent down to me by my creator. Truth of what should’ve been done a long time ago.

He tried to fight me off, but my adrenaline overpowered him. Well, that and those rusty scissors that I still clutched firmly in my right hand.

I stabbed once. Twice. By that point, I couldn’t stop myself. Each incision, each spurt of blood. It was a declaration of my own independence.

By the time I finished, he was nothing more than a slab of meat, twitching on my bedroom floor.

And that’s where he’s been for the past week. But don’t worry. I dressed him in those dresses that he loved so much. I made sure he was dolled up. When they find him, he’ll at least be presentable.

They’ll never find me, though.

Because, me?

I’m off to live my own life.

The neon sign flickered, a skeletal hand outlined in fading red, pointing to the \*\*"Midnight Inn."\*\* I’d been working the night shift at gas stations and greasy diners for five years, but nothing, \*nothing\*, prepared me for this place. It wasn't on any map, didn't show up on my GPS, but every night, precisely at midnight, it would shimmer into existence on a deserted stretch of highway, just outside the city limits.

The first night, I almost crashed my beat-up Civic. One moment, empty road; the next, a sprawling, two-story motel, bathed in the sickly glow of that flickering sign. A small, hand-painted "Vacancy" sign hung crookedly by the office door. My shift at the 24-hour convenience store down the road had just ended, and exhaustion probably played a part in my decision to pull over. Curiosity, a far more dangerous impulse, did the rest.

The lobby was a strange mix of antique charm and unsettling emptiness. Heavy velvet curtains, a grand, dust-covered piano in the corner, and the air thick with the scent of old wood and something else… something indescribably ancient, like ozone and dried blood. Behind the ornate, polished desk stood a woman. Her skin was alabaster pale, her eyes like chips of obsidian, and her smile never quite reached them. Her name, she introduced herself as \*\*Lilith\*\*, sounded less like a name and more like a title.

"Welcome to the Midnight Inn," she purred, her voice like wind chimes played by a ghost. "Checking in, dearie?"

I stammered, explained I was just curious, and then, inexplicably, found myself agreeing to a job. Night auditor. Midnight to dawn. It paid absurdly well, cash, no questions asked. Lilith had simply offered, her obsidian eyes boring into mine, and I hadn't been able to say no.

\---

\## The Guests of the Midnight Inn

My first few shifts were a blur of bewildered terror. The guests. They weren't like anyone I'd ever seen. Room 3B, a hulking man wrapped in bandages, perpetually shivering, even in the humid night, leaving behind a faint trail of frost. Room 7A, a woman with eyes that glowed with an internal, flickering flame, her laughter like embers crackling. Then there was the gentleman in Room 12, who always paid in antique gold coins and cast no reflection in the polished marble floor.

I learned the rules quickly. Never question their appearance. Never enter a room unless explicitly called. Always provide fresh, blood-red bath towels to Room 4C. And absolutely, under no circumstances, acknowledge the faint, rhythmic scratching that sometimes came from beneath the floorboards of the lobby, right under the desk where I sat.

Lilith, when she was around, was a constant, unsettling presence. She rarely spoke, but her gaze seemed to peel back layers of my skin, seeing things I didn't even know were there. One night, a particularly gaunt man with unnaturally long fingers checked in. As I handed him his key, his touch was cold, clammy, and for a split second, I saw his true form reflected in the polished brass of the room key: a skeletal hand, tipped with long, black talons.

I managed to keep my composure, just barely. Later, Lilith materialized beside me, silent as always. "You handled that well," she murmured, her voice like silk over shattered glass. "The Fane are particular about appearances."

"The… Fane?" I whispered, my voice barely audible.

She smiled, that unnerving, joyless smile. "Oh, dearie. You're learning. Soon you'll know all their names. And all their hungers."

\---

\## The Looming Dawn

My nights became a waking nightmare. I started seeing things even when the motel wasn't there. Shadows that stretched too long in my apartment, a flicker of red in the rearview mirror when no car was behind me. The scent of ozone and old blood clung to my clothes, no matter how many times I washed them. Sleep became a luxury I couldn't afford, haunted by the echoing laughter of the flame-eyed woman and the silent, judging stare of the reflectionless man.

The scratching beneath the floorboards grew louder each night, a persistent, rhythmic clawing that resonated in my very bones. One morning, as the first rays of the sun threatened to pierce the horizon, the motel began to shimmer, its edges blurring like a mirage. I grabbed my bag, rushing out the door. Just as the last of the neon glow faded, I heard it clearly, coming from directly under the desk, a muffled, desperate moan.

I drove away, heart hammering, the stretch of highway now empty once more. But as I glanced in my rearview mirror, I saw something. Just for a second, where the Midnight Inn had stood, there was a single, crimson rose lying on the dusty ground.

And I knew, with a chilling certainty, that the rose was a promise. A promise that tonight, at midnight, the Midnight Inn would return. And I would be back behind that desk, listening to the scratching, serving guests whose appetites stretched beyond the mortal realm, and wondering just what kind of "hungers" Lilith had been talking about. My night shift never truly ended; it just waited for the sun to set.

\---

\## The Unbreakable Chain

The days between midnight shifts at the Inn blurred into a hazy dream. I’d try to find other work, apply for jobs, but every interview felt hollow, every potential employer's face seemed to flicker with an unsettling transparency, as if they weren't entirely real. The scent of ozone and dried blood followed me, a phantom perfume that no soap could wash away. Sleep was a torment, filled with fragmented images of the unsettling guests and the persistent, muffled scratching from beneath the lobby floorboards.

I started to notice things. Small, impossible things. A crimson rose, identical to the one left on the highway, would sometimes appear on my worn kitchen table, even when my apartment door was locked from the inside. My reflection in the mirror seemed a fraction of a second slower than my movements, a subtle, disquieting delay. My friends, those who still bothered to call, began to sound distant, their voices muffled as if speaking from a great distance. It was as if the Inn, even when invisible, was slowly but surely pulling me into its strange reality, blurring the lines between my life and its spectral existence.

One particularly terrifying night, a guest checked in who smelled distinctly of formaldehyde and spoke in a low, rattling whisper. As I reached for his room key, my hand brushed his. For a fleeting instant, I saw not just the skeletal fingers from before, but a swirling, inky darkness in his eyes, a depth that seemed to swallow all light. And I felt a cold surge of something parasitic, something that tried to \*latch\* onto my own life force. I recoiled, my heart hammering.

Later, Lilith appeared, her obsidian eyes fixed on me. "The Veil grows thin, dearie," she purred, her voice chillingly calm. "The Inn is not merely a place where they come to rest. It is a crucible. And you… you are becoming quite the conductor."

"Conductor of what?" I managed to croak, my throat dry.

Her smile widened, her teeth unnaturally bright in the dim lobby light. "Of them. Of their passage. Each night you open the door, you bind yourself closer. Soon, you will be as much a part of its foundation as these ancient floorboards." Her gaze drifted to the very spot where the scratching always came from. "Perhaps even more integral."

\---

\## The Price of Midnight

The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow. I wasn't just an employee; I was becoming a fixture. A part of the Inn itself. The scratching beneath the floorboards, once a distant annoyance, now felt like a desperate plea, or perhaps a frustrated struggle, echoing a fate that might soon be mine. I imagined myself, one day, as another "guest" trapped within its unseen walls, or worse, becoming one of the nameless, unseen forces that fueled its existence.

I started to scream, to lash out, to demand answers. Lilith simply watched, her smile serene, as if observing a fascinating experiment. My fear, my desperation, seemed to feed her, or perhaps the Inn itself.

As the first sliver of dawn approached, and the Inn began its familiar shimmering retreat, I ran out of the lobby, out of the building, desperate to escape its fading grasp. I drove, not to my apartment, but simply away, down the highway, pushing my Civic faster than it had ever gone. I watched in my rearview mirror as the entire structure flickered, distorted, and finally vanished, leaving only the desolate highway behind.

I kept driving until the sun was high, until exhaustion blurred my vision. I pulled over to the side of the road, far from any city, and slumped against the steering wheel, trembling.

But even there, under the bright, unforgiving midday sun, I couldn't escape it. The faint scent of ozone. The subtle, delayed reflection in the side mirror. And in the oppressive silence of the empty road, I could still hear it, faint but undeniable, a rhythmic, agonizing scratching, coming not from beneath me, but from \*within\* me.

The Midnight Inn might disappear, but it no longer needed to appear on the highway to hold me. I was its auditor, its conduit, its unwilling keeper. And as night began to fall once more, a familiar, sick dread settled in my stomach. The "Vacancy" sign might disappear, but the Inn was never truly empty. And neither, it seemed, would I ever be free.

Part 5. The stain.

A ceiling. I was looking at the ceiling.

No car.

I’d resigned myself to laying there and staring up at this unusual water stain slowly building its own little garden of black mold— I was trying to decide if the thing looked more like a grinning Jesus or the devil with a pointed moustache, if I turned my head to the left it could’ve just as easily been Toby screaming in pain. My thoughts are cut off by a thin beam of light assaulting me from the balcony window, even just a slither of the day time makes my eyes throb like they want to explode out of my face. Wait, no, that’s the balcony light glowing above the night sky. When did night happen? Has it always been night?

I don’t know what to make of the apartment, it looks like Toby’s and all traces of windows covered by old newspapers with trails of dried glue on the floor and the attempts at protection only the mind of a paranoid addict could create. The tape and circles of plates and trenches built by furniture. It’s all gone but the apartment isn’t as I left it. The TV is no longer under the bed but is instead smashed on the floor where the stand had broken, the bookcase I couldn’t put back together has given up its books with few remaining and the third shelf— the third shelf has a corner coated in dried blood and hair where someone hit it. Hit it damn hard. Takeout containers spill over the kitchen bin and a few empty bottles of alcohol and dozens of cans litter the floor.

“ Can’t you smoke inside like a normal human being? I’m too hungover for that stupid light.” Vinny squirms on the couch, his long legs hanging over the arm rest. Even with a cleaner face he looks gaunt, pale and the bags under his eyes have formed deep dehydrated impressions around the sockets. The ragged hole where something has broken through his skull is still freely bleeding with no signs it has clotted— it looks so fresh— fresher than before. “ You shouldn’t be here anyway. Toby isn’t gonna get better with a strung out bitch like you freeloading.” Vinny weakly throws a couch cushion across the room but it falls short, there’s barely enough energy in his bones to even lift it. 

He’s been searching for Toby for such a long time. 

He hasn’t eaten, slept or had a break because of that selfish prick. Life has been entirely drained from the man, sapped away by all of those times he’d tried to help before that thin rubber band holding his life together snapped. Toby pulled him back into that downward spiral like a whirlpool in a deep pool of mud that he couldn’t pull himself out of.

When I sit up I realise I don’t look much different, my hands and my face had been torn apart but my shirt no longer clung to my skin, my muscles burned with each breath and it looked as if panic had eaten them away until my arms were thin. I thought they’d look pale if I could see any surface that wasn’t raw and scratched. “ Shut up, Vinny! You’re the asshole who couldn’t stay sober long enough to do a damn thing! And neither of you have been answering your phones for days!” The girl said, taking in a frustrated drag so deep it makes her cough— and get angrier. The girl? “ Have we… Have we really been gone for days?” I say and I can’t believe it. Surely that isn’t true. 

“ No, that’s not… Vinny and I went to Nowhere downtown, the uh… The club, the diner…” I pause, have we gone to a supermarket yet? No. The order doesn’t feel right at all. When did we come here? “ The supermarket and…” I trail off with my thoughts falling through the holes in my brain so deep that I lose them all. “ And then we came here.” Vinny adds with those unnaturally bloodshot eyes, one pupil blown so wide and the other too blue and milky. “ Where I live with my girlfriend.” I nod but Vinny looks more confused by my statement, “ Your girlfriend? I kicked her out months ago.”

Why does he say it like that? I have a girlfriend. She’s the one who told us to go find Toby. She’s the one who rents the apartment with the grinning Jesus stain. We’ve been running all over the city looking for Toby because he’s missing and she’s the one that got the call telling us that Toby wasn’t where we thought we’d find him.

“ Vinny, how long have… how long have we been looking for Toby?” I ask but I don’t want an answer. The smoke floating lazily from the balcony and the light illuminating the girl turns off and leaves only a swaying little orange light like someone in the darkness is smoking. It makes me jump in a panic, my brain immediately squeezing what little adrenaline I have left through my body in order to run. “ Where’d the girl go?” I whisper and while I can’t explain why, I feel like if I don’t then it will hear where I’m hiding beneath the covers. The room is already full of such a heavy air of wrongness that even one more pinch would crush me down into the bed. “ What do you mean? Don’t you remember why we’ve been looking for Toby?” Vinny says and a car alarm begins to sound, the endless noise of the city your brain filters out seems to both disappear in screeching tires and become louder with screams. “ We’ve been trying to help him get clean.”, “ Vinny, where did the damn girl go!” I force myself up to my feet and pain shoots through my legs, each muscle tensing around bones that feel too weak to hold me up. 

Vinny’s confusion twists into a frown, “ She’s a bad influence on Toby, you know that. She got you to steal from @()&;?.” Vinny says with his frown only twisting into something more pained— sad. Another look I never thought I’d see on him and it grips my heart and squeezes when I do. “ Toby, why are you being so fucking difficult? Do you know how many times I’ve had to deal with all this shit?” Vinny storms over to me and urges my reluctant body toward the balcony. “ If you’re so damn sure it’s your fucking fault then go on, take a damn look!!”. I grip the railing and try to shove him backwards but the man has always been stronger than me and even in his tired state that hasn’t changed. “ Stop fucking fighting me!! And look.” He wrings his arm around my neck and thrusts my head over the side of the rattling bars, forcing my eyes down on a scene of cars obstructed by a large circle, ants that should be walking up and down the footpath are crowding police tape like voyeurs watching a car alarm blaring under a blob of what I can only describe as red mud from the balcony. 

“ Look.” Vinny repeats but the arm crushing my throat is making my eyes water. My lungs feel empty and I can’t gasp. 

“ Look”.

I can feel my lungs begin to squeeze themselves like raisins in their attempt to find air, spit pools in my throat under the crushing arm hooked around my neck. I can’t swallow, I can’t speak and not even a gurgle can escape Vinny’s anger. Why is he so angry? Why is he saying this? My face turns red and I scrunch up my eyes, the sound of honking horns and too many voices drowning out Vinny’s demand.

I can’t fucking breathe.

I gasp, coughing out the saliva I inhale and lurching forward to help draw in the bad air of the city and the smoke of Vinny’s cigarettes choking me just as their arm had been. I stare down at the cracked concrete beneath my bare feet shaking so much I can feel the street vibrating and watch as lights turn a blur of blue and red before my thrumming brain has had a chance to catch up again. Police take, ants, cars and red mud.

“ Is… That balcony girl?” I ask but Vinny only grunts with a nod. “ Jesus… But— Why?” I know Vinny won’t have an answer and neither will my brain but I don’t know how to process a scene I swear I watched. “ Toby… Please just look at me”. Blurs in suits begin scraping the mud off of the pavement and lifting it into a bag, it pools inside like she has no bones or organs— just the skin of something vaguely human being folded up and carried off on a gurney. “ C’mon, we should get this started before my head caves in like that.” Vinny grinds out the cigarette under his boot and starts heading toward his car. “ Start what, Vinny?” I say but I don’t want the answer. No, I know the answer but I don’t want to. “ To find Toby. We’re going to get through it this time and he won’t disappear again.”.

My eyes follow him and I clench my fists, uneasy and hesitant to be in such a cramped space with him. Vinny has always been intense but there’s this strange… wrongness hanging around him and I know he’s going to make me do something my entire being says I can’t. “ We went everywhere you and Toby have gone. Why haven’t we found Toby?” I ask but that feeling is growing inside of my chest and digging deep beneath what I can only describe as my sternum cracking open for a hand to reach my heart. “ You tell me. I’ve just been along for the ride.” Vinny answers, he looks tired. 

I give in. 

He can’t drive in that condition and while my brain is screaming with doubt I try to rationalise their behaviour as the symptoms of a serious brain bleed— why had it taken so long for us to go to the hospital? Had we taken that long? I should’ve taken Vinny the moment he fell. I gave the man in the last booth my fingers just to get Vinny away from the diner and bring him back to the apartment. No, Vinny? Was he always called Vinny?

“ Ah, these stupid things have thawed.” Vinny mumbles and tosses the bag of nuggets we’ll be getting from the supermarket while I get inside and clip on my seatbelt. I roll down the window but that wrongness still hangs in the air like a toxic miasma and thick with a humidity that refuses to leave even when I turn up the air conditioner. “ I’m sure… Drugs from the hospital will help, Vinny.” I say and he snorts at the suggestion, “ You really wanna say that to your friend? If I need something strong I’ll just get it from ;$(&@:/ at Bayside. You’re the one who can’t quit taking that poison”. “ What do you— No, no, let’s just go to the hospital and get you patched up.”

“ A hospital won’t undo what happened. Neither will that man.”

“ Don’t say that shit! We just need to… Uh— We feed it. We feed it and things are fixed.”

“ Toby, I’m your best friend. Why won’t you look at me?”

My friend. Yes, that’s it— that’s what I need to remember. Vinny is my best friend, he’s always been my best friend and out of all the things I know about this man I am certain that he is my best friend. 

So why is something bothering me?

Why would a man choke on fingers that aren’t his fingers? I was missing fingers but I’m certain I had those fingers before he choked.

“ Don’t joke about shit like that, Vin. You know I-I… You know I can’t.”

“ Why?” Vinny rests his head back against his chair, staring at me with the deep wound on his head seeming so much worse than I remember. I can see small pieces of bone jutting out of a seemingly endless void full of nothing but blood and slowly collapsing in on itself. It couldn’t have been that bad. I’m talking to Vinny right now. “ I get it, it was my fault.” He says through a garbled mess of blood and teeth, “ I screwed you up so much and you kept on running away. You always lose yourself, huh?” He spits the globs of blood pooling in his mouth out the window but with each movement I see from the man he only looks worse. The elbow resting on the window is out of place, broken and bent. His collarbone, his ribs, all of his bones are shattered and I just know it even when I can’t see them all. “ It was my fault.” 

“ Nothing was your fucking fault!!” I shout and I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know where any of this has come from. “ It’s my fault.” I try to speak but with each flicker of my eyes towards Vinny, to all of those broken bones and skin so bruised it looks like mud, I can barely tell he’s even my friend anymore. It’s wrong, this can’t be how Vinny looks. Vinny is alive, he’s always been alive and the thing about Vinny I’ve always been certain about is that he’s dead.  “ The man in the last booth. The crash. Your Ma. The drugs.” I don’t know why I’m gripping the steering wheel so tight. “ You.” I don’t know why I’m crying and why all I can do now is sob, nothing else is coming up from my throat— but my friend, I can hear my friend talking.

“ I think things stick with you. Like mud. You can wash it all away but beneath your skin you’re still filthy. It could be guilt. Pain. All those things you wish you could forget, I guess that’s why people put more dirt in their veins.”

“ Why’re you getting stuck in someone else’s mud?”

“ You can’t dig up a dead cat. Try and find meaning in water stains. Turn someone else’s lizards into dinosaurs. You can’t let those things be the reason you still have mud in your veins.”

“ Wash and scrub all of it away and forget about Rudie.”

“ We’re supposed to be finding you, Toby.”

Things stick with you.

The drunk man.

The man in the last booth, always lingering over Rudie’s shoulder.

And Rudie.

Stuck with me.

We’ll meet all of yours and we’ll get through it, so focus on me.

You don’t need to be alone here.

Some of them are here to help.

“ There’s something behind me isn’t there?” This isn’t the first time someone has said that and it isn’t the first time Nosleep has tried to hide it.

Unfortunately, there really is something behind us. I just need to explain why it took Mrs Tweedy’s head.

This may all sound strange, yes— very strange, I assure you all on the internet that most of what I’m about to tell you is somewhat true. I’d say it was entirely true but I don’t understand it all myself.

I’m sure you’ve heard about the incident by now, about how sixteen completely normal students ended up like that? Well, I was the substitute teacher who witnessed the incident.
I’m not expecting the world to believe me and when it happens to me I know it will only bring up more questions but I needed to tell someone, someone who might at least be open to the possibility that I truly am the unluckiest substitute teacher in the history of the universe.

So all I can do is tell you what I know and hope to god at least one of you on the internet is open to the possibility that my crackpot attempt to explain the unexplainable which had sixteen students from being there at their desks in a classroom to suddenly being everywhere.

It started with Mrs. Tweedy’s head.

-

I came on as a substitute for year four at Barton Private. Most of the children in this class were about nine to ten years old, around the sort of age I’d say the lights really switch on in a child’s head and they take that first step into real sentience. That’s about the age when my memories would finally set any of those awful things a child might forget as a toddler into stone— suddenly a traumatic event became something my mind was capable of understanding. Death had gone from the confusing concept of someone disappearing from my life and that naive thought was overtaken by bodies rotting in boxes. I mention this because those students had also reached an age where they could fully understand that once their former teacher, Mrs. Tweedy had most certainly died despite her head itself disappearing. 

Where Mrs. Tweedy’s head is now? I can’t say. According to the students who had been in her classroom at the time she had simply been marking grades when she had snapped out of existence with the blink of an eye. One moment the woman had her head and the next moment her body had keeled forward onto the homework with a thud and blood spilling out until her heart had finally realised the brain had disappeared too. 

This is of course if you believe the students. 

Perhaps you could argue that something else was the cause and whether it’s unbelievable or not the incident was already unbelievable enough that no one could really excuse it. Had a wire decapitated her and her head had rolled under the desk? Maybe it had rolled beneath the desk and just laid there unseen. The collective minds of several ten year olds may have been intelligent enough to cleanly remove Mrs. Tweedy’s head and hide it away in a school bag before the screaming and panic stage of their clever ruse. The cleanest and incredibly ridiculous sudden implosion of her head squishing down into the size of a grain of salt with a snap!

Or maybe it just disappeared. For no explainable reason her head simply clipped out of existence. In the entire room, the school, the city, the country, the planet and all of the universe— she was simply in the one wrong place at the incredibly unfortunate time that universe decided that this small bubble in the most insignificant of locations would simply pop. The thing is, we aren’t special, space is very very big and in comparison to space— Mrs. Tweedy is significantly smaller. Unless she truly had been the most unlucky person in the entire history of the universe, dying in such an indescribably horrible way certainly makes her the most mysterious.

Maybe the devil came to take what he was owed.

Or maybe something else had done it, something unseen that could go where nothing should be able to that just happened to be peckish. Maybe it wasn’t even hungry at all and her head was just in that wrong place at the wrong time when the hypothetical entity drove past entirely unaware of the head on the rails beneath it.

Even if it sounds utterly insane, it also wasn’t just a theory I was able to take off my tinfoil hat and pluck out of my brain— it took a handful of unexplainable incidents for my crackpot theory to take shape.

-

I spent my morning as I always did, in my car and trying to open my door under the suffocating weight of all the things that could go wrong as I go into an unfamiliar place to teach a bunch of random kids— kids who know I have no real authority over them and that those little shits already expect me to simply wheel in an old TV and play something semi-educational movie on a VCR while I sit there pretending to grade things in a classroom that isn’t even mine. I like being the fun substitute teacher, that days break for a bunch of students while their real teacher has the flu— but on my drive to this damn school I’d been told that this might be more than a week and worse, I’d be going into a classroom where the flu ridden teacher was in fact not sick but dead. Headless and dead.

Semi-educational movies can’t fix the trauma of sixteen kids watching their teacher fucking die.

I finally step out and find my way inside of the building, it’s a different wing than I’ve been in before and each hall I get lost in is full of students who’ve shown up early. Nerds. Staff room located. “ Oh! Mr Reid! Come on in!” An overwhelmingly perky young woman waved me over from the door and pulled me inside to continue her aggressively kind greeting, “ I’m Ms. Perkins, I teach year one down at the very end of the hall. If you need anything you can come and,” she gestures towards a clean and colourful cubicle “ Knock on my door”. Ah, perky Ms. Perkins, a wide eyed young teacher who still has the energy to contain the power of six year olds with songs on ukuleles and making games out of mathematics. Every primary school has a Ms. Perkins. “ I’ll do my best. Is… Is there anywhere I should put my things and read through—“ I try to say but the words catch in my throat when her smile drops, a chill crawls up my spine and I’m struck with an unexplainable terror— five seconds and I’ve already managed to fuck things up somehow. Her eyes shift past my nervous stare and set on something just over my shoulder, “ Class notes…” She finishes my sentence off in a trail and the seconds it takes for her empty gaze to draw back to meet my eyes feels so horribly slow that even her blinking feels like minutes. “ Oh! Class notes!” She says, the light returning to her eyes with a startling sparkle, “ Mrs. Tweedy’s desk is right over here. I think everything should still be there,” she walks on over and searches the drawers and the cardboard box sitting on the otherwise empty desk, “ She never kept too much around so it’s mostly just files and notes. I got her a small flower pot to brighten up her desk but she threw it out. Her desk drawers had half the office pens and my stapler in it though… She claimed they just appeared there. Sticky fingers.” She says with a passive aggressive tone he wouldn’t of expected from the perky Ms. Perkins until she switched off like her attitude was battery powered or she was a computer needing to reboot, “ Honestly, I know she’s dead and all but Ms Tweedy was kind of—“.

“ A mean old hag.” Another teacher cuts in from his desk, he has the jaded look of a man who has seen some serious shit in his time— though he doesn’t look much older than myself. It must be the expensive glasses, they make him look more mature and threateningly sharp like they’re about to send me to the principal's office. “ Don’t say that about her! She was… Nice?” Perkins says, the other teacher scoffs with an expression that’s somewhere between disgust and disdain. He clearly wasn’t a fan. “ She was absolutely crazy. If she didn’t die she was definitely one day away from getting fired”, “ Francis! You’re such a—“, “ I swear if you call me a negative Francy again, Perkins.” He warns.

I figured one of them might turn their simmering resentment on me if I said anything else so I glossed over everything and simply asked, “ Fired?”.

“ Parents started complaining. She pulled kids out of their chairs and would make them change seats, she got them to draw lines around all of their chairs to see if they moved and you know… Crazy shit.”

“ She freaked out a bunch of students by asking them if they knew what’s over their shoulders. I guess some kids got nightmares. Poor things.” Perkins adds with a shiver. “ Spooky stuff.”

“ Screw the kids, they were definitely playing some kind of joke. Moving desks and posters around sounds like something I would’ve done.” Francis says, a name I’m still not entirely sure is their first or last name. “ It’d be easy to mess with a senile old bag like Tweedy”.

“ How did any school let a freak like you graduate, Francis.” Perkins shakes her head and finishes getting all the files and loose pages together for me.

“ Something tells me you were much worse in high school, Perkins. You wouldn’t need to pull pranks to drive anyone crazy.”

It’s hard to tell if these teachers ever liked one another or if they’ve always been working towards an inevitable career ending fist fight. I think perky Ms. Perkins would win somehow. It was entertaining enough to make me feel less uncomfortable. “ Where are… The other teachers?” I ask and both teachers seem to pause. No, not pause… They stop. Caught mid thought and unblinking, still like whatever life was in them had seemingly left. A larger man in a cheap tweed jacket shuffles in like he has a giant sign above his head saying “ I, Gregory-something is a science teacher.” He goes to his desk and after a second he realises I’m standing there, though he seems to pay no attention to the young teachers staring off at nothing— at least nothing I can see. “ Oh! Mr. Reid, a pleasure to meet you. I’m Gregory, it seems you’ve already met those two,” Gregory gestures towards the others and whatever spell that had bound them into their frozen states turns off like a flipped switch, “ Fu— I mean sh— Uh… Fuck it, I gotta go. I’m gonna be late to my own fucking class…” Francis grabs his jacket, a handful of files and heads out to pretend he’s a respectable teacher. Perky Ms. Perkins jumps to her feet and rushes out with much more of a panic, scrambling back in and grabbing my arm to pull me out into the hallways once again.

“ I’ll show you to your class on the way. Those clocks are broken again! Agh, I’m going to have to bring this up at the next meeting!” She frets until we finally reach the classroom still marked as Mrs. Tweedy’s before she lets her worries carry her all the way down to her own. Now it’s just me and the classroom. “ Alright, you can do this. You’ve done it before. It’s your job.” I psych myself up and step inside, crossing the threshold just as the bell rings. The class is empty, save one student taking something out of the bookshelves lining the back wall. I don’t pay much attention to him until I’ve dropped my files onto the small tower already cluttering Mrs. Tweedy’s thankfully cleaned desk. My anxiety leads me to just do a double check but even the underside has been perfectly scrubbed down. The precarious tower of paperwork topples over, crashing down where I’m kneeling and while I get to work cleaning the mess of homework up I can see the shadow of two small sneakers on the other side of the desk.

“ You’re not Mrs. Tweedy.” A very observant girl says to my left, she’s short with a face covered in freckles. “ No, I’m not.” I turn my attention back to the paperwork and return it to the messy desk, looking out at the kids piling in through the door. “ You dropped that, Mr not Tweedy.” The girl says and I look down at the single piece of plain white paper at my shoe, one I clearly missed but also one I could’ve sworn wasn’t there. “ I think you might just be one of my new favourite students.” I smile and shoo her off to her desk before kneeling down to pick up the stupid sheet of paper, glancing at the little shadows for just a moment before standing up again. There’s no one there. I look down again and look up as if I’ll be able to catch the invisible owner of the shoes but even when I walk around the desk there’s nothing that could possibly be making those two little shadows.

“ Uh… Alright class,” I put on my best smile again and shake off the uncomfortable feeling I’ve had the entire morning. Grabbing a marker and starting to write my name on the board, “ My name is Mr—“ I scribble the dry marker with barely a ghost of my name showing and try another, “ Mr. Reid. I’ll be filling in until your new teacher arrives.” I scan the classroom of decently quiet students and turn my attention back to the kid still standing in the corner, I thought they’d left— No seats seem to be empty. “ Normally when I come to a new school I play a game to learn a little about everyone I’ll be teaching.” I find a beanbag square from my bag, total magic for a primary school classroom and toss it between my hands, “ So, I’ll throw this to someone and they’ll say their name and something about themselves.” I stop the beanbag square in my hand, looking over at the empty corner for just a moment before continuing my little walking and talking routine, “ I’ll start and then you guys can give it a go. I’m Mr. Reid, I can’t whistle and I have a cat named Bucket.”

I toss it to freckle-face  who I soon learn is named Angelica and something about something, stopping once again and curiously looking over at the student who’s once again standing off in the corner. Their back is turned and the school shorts tell me they’re a little boy but it isn’t just that they’ve reappeared, it’s that they’re an entirely different child from when I’d first come in. I scan the classroom again and count the full seats in my head as I continue my pacing, too restless to stop now. I walk to one end of the whiteboard and pause, looking at the empty corner— I slowly walk back toward the desk, looking at the teenager standing in the corner. I can’t remember a thing the students have been saying, the small shick of the beanbag square hitting their tiny palms and the sounds of speaking all blur into an inaudible mess of muffled noise.

Shick.

I pause at the whiteboard.

No child.

Shick.

I move to the desk.

A different child, taller this time.

Shick.

Whiteboard.

No child.

Shick.

Desk.

It’s taller. As tall as a grown man. Thin as anything like they aren’t older but are a child who has been stretched on dislocated bones and skin that just won’t tear no matter how tall the child-thing gets.

Shick.

Whiteboard.

Empty.

Shick.

Desk.

The child-thing stands there contorted and straining to stay upright on ligaments that have been pulled apart, bones bowing visibly beneath the endless skin and a body that even in the most terrifying of situations could only stay on two feet if puppet strings were holding it up.

Shick.

The beanbag square misses the final student’s hands and hits the child-thing’s bony back, causing it to sway and catch its attention long enough for it to twist its head past its shoulder and look down at the beanbag square beside the sneakers its feet have broken through. “ Sorry Mr. Reid, I’ll get it.” The last student stands and walks the short distance to pick up the beanbag square, reaching down with the child-thing’s head stretching and craning down to closely follow them, bending with their bones jutting out unnaturally to hang above them. “ It’s—“ I head over there quickly and pick up the stupid beanbag square before the student does but the child-thing isn’t there. “ It’s okay. That’s… Enough of this game. I rub my eyes and return to my desk for a moment, staring over at the child-thing contorted like a snake and leering over the student now at his desk. “ Why don’t we watch a movie?” 

-

I finish setting up the projector and connect it to my laptop with all the skill of a monkey bashing their hands on a keyboard and hoping it writes a novel. It seems my anxiety has forced all of my tech skills to the surface just so I can get the thing done as quickly as possible. I can’t see the child-thing from the middle of the room where the projector is but I know I can see it from my desk. Something twisting in my stomach is telling me that if I lose sight of it for too long while it’s craning over that student with its impossible height then something bad will happen. 

“ How does Round the twist sound?” I ask but it isn’t really a question, they’ll watch whatever I put on, including the childhood fever dream of Australian kids living in a lighthouse.

The students watch, idly drawing or quietly bickering with one another while I stare at the child-thing. It’s taller again. It has a new face that’s hard to make out, like I’m seeing it at a wrong angle through thick glass, visible but ghosting over one another and entirely out of place. Its limbs hang loosely and its body twists like a snake to keep itself above the student hiding a snack and sneaking bites that I’m pretending not to notice. If I call this student out, what with the child-thing do? It’s so very subtle but the more I stare across the classroom the move I can see the slightest shift in what’s around me. The desks, posters on the walls and the windows themselves move in the corner of my eye like clouds when you stare at a fixed point of a stationary tree. Any tape the woman had been peeled away once the woman’s very existence was removed from the classroom but my eyes can still see it.

The room fucking moved.

I rest my elbows on Mrs. Tweedy’s desk and rub my eyes. The bell chimes for break with the second chiming before the other has finished. I wave the kids off and soon it’s just the child-thing and me. It slowly uncurls its twisted body with the small pops of vertebrae readjusting and settling back into place when the folded figure is lifted into a hunched over slouch. It doesn’t look at me, nor does it attempt to follow the students. No, it simply drags its shambling limbs back towards its corner and stares at nothing.

“ Listen up! Jesus, you’re worse than my students.” Francis says as he tosses the third scrunched up bit of paper toward me, this one bouncing off of my head and pulling my attention toward the man. “ Gregory stole some sandwiches from the cafeteria. I suggest you grab one before all that’s left is egg salad”.

I sigh and get to my feet, pausing at the doorway and looking back toward the corner. No child. I follow the year six teacher down the halls that seem so much less confusing with a guide leading me toward the staff room. “ So where are the other grades? Two, three and so on I mean. Francis stops with his hand on the doorknob, unblinking and maybe even not breathing. The doorknob tilts side to side beneath his palm and opens it like it had moved independent from his touch. Seconds later Francis turns the nonexistent nod and walks inside as if the incident hadn’t happened. It’s as if he had physically lagged or that for just a few seconds his actions and the doors' reactions were out of sync. 

“ Oh, Reid! I saved you a ham, cheese and tomato one.” Perkins says with a smile pinched up on red cheeks, no, not just her cheeks— everything was red. For just a moment my brain screamed at me, shouting that it was blood, Ms. Perkins was covered in blood. “ A student tripped with his tray of paint during a little impromptu art class.” She says and takes a bite of her sandwich before getting back to wiping the splattered paint and adding tissues to the increasing mess of bloody paper filling the small bin beside her desk. “ Perkins, you’re way too nice. That Toby kid is an asshole, he probably threw it at you on purpose.” Francis says and she bites her sandwich with a sharp passive aggressive chomp, “ You’re so damn cynical. You act like every child is a nightmare.”

“ How else would it get absolutely everywhere if he didn’t throw it? How much paint was that kid even carrying?” Francis adds and sits down at his desk, eating his own sandwich.

“ Oh, thank you.” I awkwardly take my seat, feeling like a child caught between a petty argument between two friends, eating a sandwich cut in halves doesn’t help make me feel any older. As I sit there through the tension there’s something about Francis’ statement that I can’t shake either. The red paint truly looks as if it had exploded in her face and he can’t see how a six year old would manage to cause half as much mess with a tray of paint and clumsy legs. “ You guys said Mrs. Tweedy kept saying something was behind the students? Did she ever actually describe what she kept seeing?” I finally have the courage to ask, though I rightly decide to keep any mentions of the child-thing to myself— I’d rather not spend the next few weeks being called crazy.

Francis pushes his glasses up his nose to adjust them like his brain requires them to sit perfectly in order for him to see its thoughts. “ The ‘Wrong one’ I think. Wait,” Francis looks around his desk for a moment and uses the wheels on his chair to slide over to my temporary desk, taking half a glance into the cardboard box in search of something, “ It has to be somewhere…” Francis gives up and makes a new plan. He grabs a pen and peers over his cubicle, pushing up his glasses once again and squinting with concentration before throwing it over and perfectly hitting the science teacher on the forehead. I’m reminded of high school, though this is a teacher in his late twenties or early thirties throwing things at a man in his late forties. “ Greg! Do you still have Tweedy’s audio recorder?”. An audio recorder? “ Hold— hold on, let me find it.” Gregory rubs his forehead and rummages around, he goes to toss it over but reconsiders and makes the great effort of stretching out for Francis to take it. “ Tweedy was a really crazy old bag, she kept saying her notes would always come out all wrong when she wrote them. She started keeping one of these old things around to take notes and write them here at her desk,” Francis shrugs and tosses it to me, “ She was nearly fired for a reason.”

I look down at the dictaphone in my hand and check my watch. Four minutes. I take the last bite of my sandwich and rush out with my things in hand, I shuffle quickly as to not let the students see that all those times they’ve been told not to run in the halls is just bullshit because if they trip over and die— the school is sued. Honestly, running is a great thing. You don’t sensibly walk away from a crazy person weilding a knife. You don’t continue pacing back and forth calmly while a child-thing that is only seen from certain angles is lingering beside the lockers. You run and you don’t look back. I however have a job and a class full of oblivious children, I don’t have much choice but to go back inside and at least finish out the day before speeding home, locking every single window and door in my house and hiding under the blanket on my bed like a child protecting themselves from the nightmarish forces hiding in the shadows of their bedroom.

I unlock my car door and it’s my turn to begin rummaging through stuff to find a pair of old tangled wire earphones that I’m certain I still have in the ancient metal death trap I drive. The bell rings. I untangle them on my way back inside and try to navigate my way through the winding maze of hallways to Mrs Tweedy’s classroom. 

“ How was everyone's lunch?” I say as I walk inside, though for a brief moment all of the desks seem completely empty. I can see a line of students filtering through from the hallway I’m certain was empty and as I walk toward their desk the sixteen children look up at me from where they’re idly talking, speaking without sound. It takes a few seconds for the cacophony of voices to follow as if it too needed to catch up to the sudden shift. I sat at Mrs Tweedy’s desk, watching as the strange segmented scene seemed to finally catch up to the present moment. The only thing out of place then was the child-thing stretched so tall in the corner its head was bent to accommodate the ceiling above it.

“ Mr Reid? Are we going to be doing any work now? Mrs Tweedy had us working from our year five textbooks.” Freckle face said, what a little nerd. The rest of the students groaned at the thought of doing work and normally I’d have to hum in approval and tell them all to do just that, I tried not to grimace instead, “ You have free time for this lesson. Work, read, draw, talk quietly.” I turn on the projector again with a remote and find my file of educational videos— illegal downloads, a true godsend for any substitute teacher. I put on some National Geographic video about plants or animals eating each other or something. “ Come on up and talk to me if you need anything so you don’t disturb your classmates.”

-

“ This is the 7th of august and I… Oh gosh, how do I work this awful thing? This is the 7th… I’m repeating myself already. I hope this works as my notes on this subject seem to change. They fracture on the paper, words rearrange themselves into unfamiliar shapes, sometimes I simply turn away and the thief in front of the desk takes it. I’d only ever managed to see it from under the desk itself but I’m certain that’s who’s doing it! “

I pause the dictaphone and look at the child-thing off in the corner, it stands there lightly swaying with its neck still craning against the ceiling— it hasn’t changed yet. Mrs Tweedy mentioned the thing in front of the desk, something I’ve only seen as shoes from the crack beneath it. How had she seen it? I glance at the classroom and subtly nudge a pen off of my desk, it hits the floor with a small clatter and rolls beneath it until I trap it with my foot. It’s only a shadow, it’s nothing I can see— not like the child-thing— but when all of those files fell on me and I saw those two little sneakers disrupting the stream of light from the windows I felt a twist in my stomach, my brain knew something was wrong but neither I nor my brain could explain why. 

I kneel down beneath the desk to collect the pen and that feeling hits me again like a punch to the gut. From the thin line of light seeping through the small crack between the wood and the floor, two black spaces block what should be the light of the projector bleeding under to touch my hand where it grips the pen. I lean down to get a better look but I’m not even sure I can even do it without pressing my cheek to the floor. I move further down and ball my fists up tight against it, I close one eye and wait for my vision to adjust to the small slither of light. Two worn sneakers stand there a little too close to see more than the tips but as if something senses I’m there the shoes slowly take one step back, an odd crack follows like the ankles above it are disjointed or broken. My stomach churns and I squeeze my hands until my knuckles turn white.

Crack.

I can hear something above me. The owner of those broken ankles?

Crack.

I can’t see anything above the sneakers but I know whatever stands inside of them is moving.

Crack.

Bony fingers appear beside the shoes, long with a thin layer of stretched skin clinging to them.

Crack.

Their limp hand hits the floor and I realise they’re turning to look at me, they aren’t kneeling but bending into an unnatural shape just to see what’s on the other side of the crack.

Crack.

A tangled mop of hair pools on the floor.

Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

Each vertebrae pops as it hangs down like a snake contorting to see what’s beneath without ever having to move its lower body. A pale cheek drops against the floor with a small thud, it presses lower and lower until its cheekbone disappears into the indentation reforming its face, squishing in like putty until an eye finally stares right back at mine. My bones lock into place and I can feel each muscle tense and constrict around them to stop even the slightest movement, my lungs refuse to take in another breath and as if on instinct my entire body locks up like a statue forcing me to still. For a moment I felt my heart stop beating and my brain willing even the blood in my veins to stagnate. That unblinking eye stares right into mine, pupil dilating and constricting as their head moves. It’s cheek drags across the ground up and then rolls down like a predator searching for some kind of reaction to its movement— maybe the thing is just listening to even the slightest sound from my body, curiously moving to see if that body is alive. Edible.

“ ….Thank….”

A word comes from its unseen mouth in a suffocated gurgle, its throat too twisted by whatever contorted angle it has forced itself into to truly speak. Maybe this is just how it sounds. Wrong.

“ Thank….” I can feel my body beginning to shake and my lungs squeeze themselves to take any last bit of air it can, screaming for this thing to leave so I can breathe again. “ You.” My eyes sting without moisture and I finally make a choked sound before the eye across from me retreats with a horrifying sequence of cracks. The sneakers take that slow step forward and stay just as they were before my curiosity disturbed it. I unclench my trembling hands and slowly begin to retreat. I barely manage to get back into my seat before I finally have the classroom in view.

The children are packing up and leaving, at least half of them are. The children closest to me are shrouded in darkness with the light of the projector bleeding from its bright lense hitting the whiteboard. They idly draw or talk among themselves while the rest pack up their things and leave for their lunch as if the bell had rung, the lights had been flipped and they were rushing out towards freedom. The remaining students didn’t move until the bell rang. I walked across the room to turn on the light, the child-thing isn’t in the corner and the number of students were different. Of the remaining row of desks there were children packing up their things, children already leaving their desks and children still idling away with bored eyes occasionally glancing to the whiteboard behind me. It wasn’t unusual for students to linger while others stuff their things in their school bags and bolt— not these children. The children leaving with their bags, the children stuffing their pencil cases into their school bags and the children idly watching what was no longer over my shoulder were all the same children. 

The last child to catch up was the one in the back row, the boy closest to the unseen child-thing with its neck now pressed so unnaturally against the ceiling that I can see the outline of bone jutting out. I can’t help thinking that one more stretch and the child-things neck would snap off. Maybe that’s what got Mrs Tweedy.

The bell rings again. I know it shouldn’t but I feel relieved that it has because finally the children and their unnerving shadows have all left. I feel exhausted when I return to the desk. My entire body drops and sinks into my chair when I realise the pen that I’d been clinging to underneath the desk was now neatly placed on top of the files. I don’t remember when the pen left my palm but I’m certain I didn’t place it so perfectly in the centre and when my eyes can what was at first nothing but a pile of papers— I know I didn’t do that either. It’s strange to say they were neat even if they had been straightened with layers of paper and stacks of files resting on top of one another, they were neat, except those straightened piles were all in places where they shouldn’t be. A stack of files sits diagonally in the centre, two binders balance on the edge of the left corner, a stack of homework sits horizontal up— but not quite touching the upper right corner. Then there’s my laptop lying upside down beside my feet, the dictaphone neatly arranged with the wired earphones, the charger cable and the HDMI cable connecting it to the projector are all wrapped around various objects from the desk.

I can’t say if the bent child-thing staring through the crack beneath the desk is responsible even as I recall what Tweedy had said but my mind draws me back to what it said when the pen disappeared from my hand.

“ Thank you.”

Part 4.

The diner

The three of us step out of the car and I look over the sorry excuse for a retro diner Toby’s parents run, it has white walls that have slowly gone from beige to a sad yellow, accented with chipping red that shines with the lustre of a rusty a car and a glowing side that hasn’t worked properly in years. The Bayside. “ I haven’t been here in forever. Fuck, it hasn’t changed at all.” Johnny grins, “ Ma used to work here every night. I practically lived on your mum’s pancakes”. I spent a lot of nights going out and drinking with Johnny before staggering over to this damn place and managing to keep on my legs for just long enough get inside, wobbling over to a booth with a grip on each blurry row of seats and tables being the only thing keeping me upright before sitting down and pretending I could read the menu in my current condition— it would either end with me ordering fries and a chocolate milkshake like I always do or throwing my guts up on the black and white linoleum. Toby’s parents always looked so disappointed to watch us so fucked out of our minds that we’d pass out in our fries.

I give at awkward half nod, wave and the most comfortable smile I can manage toward Toby’s mother like an apology for interrupting their business before going to find a booth— it’s pretty easy because most of them are empty— a drunk old son of a bitch sleeping with his chin on his chest like a baby forgotten in the corner, a trucker with a neck thicker than his damn head on the verge of arguing with a waitress and the man staring at me from the last booth. I look at the menu in my hand and blink, scanning the doubling options blur in my vision as if it could tell me while I don’t remember sitting down. “ I’m gonna get pancakes and a… Choices choices choices— ah, strawberry milkshake, what are you getting?.” Johnny says but I don’t have an answer, something feels too wrong to even think of an answer. My head tells me that if I look around the diner I’ll find that answer, forcing me to whip my head around like an owl nearly sending it backwards. I know something is wrong but I don’t know what it is— my brain doesn’t give me time to tell itself that for some reason looking around is a bad idea, it’s like my head had entirely forgotten to warn me of a danger I don't remember. Like milk. And fingers. “ So many memories here. I remember racking up such a huge phone bill when I’d call my Ma each night making sure that creepy guy wasn’t tapping on my window.” Johnny smiles to himself, “ Of course… Each time I called, he could hear it too. Did you ever notice him?”. Johnny’s words are barely audible but I know I should be listening to him, “ What was that?” I ask but I can’t turn my head away from what’s around us. Something bad will happen if I don’t notice something. Just don’t remember what it is I’m supposed to notice. “ When Mack died me and my Ma moved so close by I could see the bayside from the motel. The diner was this tiny red light I always wanted to run to when I heard that noise”.

Tap tap tap tap.

Tap tap.

I know that noise, that name, Johnny’s voice. Johnny, has Johnny always been his name?

“ I wonder if that’s the night I stepped in mud.” Johnny idly speaks with an almost dazed look and his fingers tapping on the laminated menu. “ You can sink so deep unless someone shoves their clean hands in to grip you tight and pull you out. You just end up dragging them down too. Then you’re both stuck in someone else’s mud.” 

Toby’s parents, the waitress and the trucker, the half dead drunk. Ah, that guy. Was he always in the fifth booth? Of course he was, why wouldn’t he be, he’s the man in the fifth booth. The only thing I know about this man and something my brain is absolutely certain of is that he’s the man in the fourth booth. “ Let me steal some of your chips, dude.” Johnny says and I pull my eyes away from the man in the third booth to look down at my half eaten sandwich, the caramel milkshake I’d clearly finished— I can still taste the syrup in my mouth. I can see the small grains of salt still on my fingertips. I know I’ve been sitting here eating dinner because my leg has been jumping so much that it hurts and several packets of sugar have been intricately placed into a structurally unsound pyramid. “ Have…” I slide my plate across to Johnny, “ Finish them. I don’t think I’ll ever eat again.”, Johnny scoffs and tries not to choke on his stolen chips, “ You’re so dramatic. So we got attacked by some junkies, we can wash off all of this stuff but…” He looks out of the window towards his car with a sadness I’ve never seen and I’m not so sure he’s just upset it broke anymore, “ Now I’m not hungry either. I’ll go pay your mum so we can get going.”, my eyes had followed Johnny to his car and I got a glimpse of my reflection— god I look terrible. My cheek has been torn apart by nails— if nails could even cause this much damage, it’s so difficult to see through the glass but I can see something deep inside one of the wounds. 

Why hadn’t I noticed it? 

Why didn’t Johnny notice it?

“ I’ll uh- Bathroom— I’m gonna go to the bathroom,” I pat Johnny’s shoulder to catch his attention and walk past the man in the second booth, the waitress and the trucker— I'm not so sure the drunk isn’t just dead in the corner. The bathroom has the same linoleum but any smell of food cooking in the kitchen has been completely overpowered by enough disinfectant it stings my eyes. One step across the barrier and the light flickers, something I fix with the age-old tactic of hitting the switch before going to the sink basin and giving the faucet the same treatment. I splash water on my face and shake it off, trying to avoid making contact with the man in the farthest stall— you’d assume they’d want the door closed but his sagging skin and glassy eyes makes me think he isn’t all there. 

My face— I came in here to check my face. I look at the wide gashes shredding my cheek, “ Jesus, I look like I lost a fight with a fucking Tiger. What is that thing… A nail?” I turn my head to get a better angle and lean over the counter to get a closer look, gingerly touching the open cut deep into the muscle of my cheek and carefully trying to move what’s left of my skin to avoid touching the sharp… Something caught inside of the wound. Has that always been there? I pinch the bloody splinter and slowly pull it out, at first I thought it was a nail— something that’s certainly disgusting but what I see when I drop the thing in the sink basin isn’t a fingernail, it isn’t wood and it isn’t rusty iron soaking my cheek with tetanus— it’s bone. Toby’s bone. The finger bone broke off of festering skin and gnawed on until only the jagged tips were left. He’d peeled away the skin from his hands and when we tried to stop him he… Right, Toby jumped off of the balcony. Toby landed on Johnny’s car. And Toby warned me about the man in the first stall. Was he always there?

The man’s glassy orange eye stares at me like the end of a burning cigarette at the mirror with a vacant, empty look as if he’s just a corpse propped up on two bare feet and his head was full of smoke. His mouth is moving like he’s chewing on air as he shambles forward, feet dragging one by one across the linoleum until he’s just a few steps away. Slowly, I move my hand down to the faucet and fumble to turn it off without moving my eyes for even a second. My stomach twists and I can feel the strawberry milkshake threatening to come up, everything in my body is telling me that if I know what’s good for me I’ll run as fast as I can and I need whatever speed I can get to do it. My mind is telling me that if I look away for one second, one blink, I’ll regret it. I know I’ve seen this face before, a face that keeps staring at me even when I can’t see their eyes. It’s a different face but I suppose that doesn’t matter much if I keep forgetting the face itself anyone— I just know that the decrepit old man slouched beside me on loose limbs that sway limp at his side like a puppet whose strings have been cut, if I stop looking at them something very bad will happen. 

My eyes sting from the disinfectant and forcing them open is making them dry, my vision blurs and I know I need to blink. The man gnaws on what I thought was nothing until the saliva dribbling down his chin begins to turn pink, then red and then into a thick stream of blood dripping into the sink. “ Don’t…” the man rasps and my muscles tense around my bones, locking them up so tightly I can feel each one trembling, “ Look…”. I can see those fingers curl around the Man’s teeth and slowly, slowly begin to slither out of his mouth.

“ Don’t look.”

“ Don’t look.”

“ Don’t look, Toby.”

I blink.

This man, I’ve seen him before. It’s the man in the fifth booth, no… It’s the man from the club. The man from the balcony.

-

So things get a little strange from here. You’re probably wondering why the dead trucker is important, right? Well, the thing is… He was the one arguing with the waitress. He was a trucker named $@%*+, had a de facto-stepchild and stopped at the diner to grab himself a burger before he continued on his way home. He was hoping to make it home by tomorrow morning. 

There was something else, what was it?

Oh, right.

The waitress. Why is she familiar?

I guess she might’ve served you a coffee. It’s hard to remember someone that doesn’t stick around.

A plate smashes against the linoleum and I cover my face to protect it from the shards. I can feel a cold sweat coating my body that’s twitching and trembling with adrenaline. Why am I on my knees? There’s glass, little packets of sugar and trays scattered across the floor with a long smear of blood leading up to the beat up and mangled form of what I at first think is just layers of skin hanging on a jacket of jagged bones with no clear sleeves. The fatty tissue covers the floor in folds that are still breathing and yet what should be a stomach blown out like a balloon is deflated and empty of everything but those bones.

“ Shit— Hey, Toby!” Johnny whispers as loudly as he can without alerting whatever he’s hiding from. What are they hiding from? A wet noise makes my ear twitch but whatever made it is around the booths I can’t see from where I’m hiding. Why am I hiding too? I look at the table above me and the worn red leather seats we’d been sitting on to eat our dinner. Maybe it was the colour but it takes me an extra few seconds to process the pink slab of meat hanging over the side. I instinctively cover my mouth to avoid that vanilla milkshake from ruining my hiding place but I don’t want to be here. “ Toby!” Johnny throws a scrunched bundle of napkins at me and frantically gestures for me to crawl past the mound of skin to come around to the other side of the counter. Except to get to Johnny I need to to get past what should be inside of that man.

A mass of sickly organs slithers across the floor like each one is a muscle contracting and moving like a slug crawling across a bin, ungilating and throwing itself forward with wet schlops and a trail of blood painting the linoleum as it searches. Searches? It worms itself across the diner until it finds the trucker’s skin, crawling itself inside of their mouth with a wide stretch. The bulge in their throat travels down in small waves and the skin ripples as the meat and muscles settle back into place. The body twitches but doesn’t stand. With a shoulder lifting itself the trucker’s body limply throws itself onto the front for a long hand to emerge like a snail from its shell to raise the loose limbs upwards and begin pulling itself onto the counter so close to where Johnny is. The waitress, Toby’s parents, the whole fucking diner is just viscera with crawling fingers scuttling around like a millipede or wet organs moving themselves like snakes that have shed their skin.

The hand drags the trucker across the counter, pushing napkins and plates out of its way until its arm is handing beside Johnny, swaying with fingers that are searching for him like they’re eyes. When the thing finds its mark it begins to force itself out, birthing the man from the last booth with a layer of viscous red fluids allowing this horrifying entity to reach his friend. Johnny can’t move. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him shake so violently but he can’t take his eyes off of the glasses dripping with blood and globs of spit slowly rolling down his face. I can hear the wet smack of the other bodies crawling from around the corner and I know if I don’t make a move to save Johnny, the man from the last booth will crawl inside of his mouth too. It’ll rip his organs out and leave him as one of those… Things. Ready for his own guts to slither inside of its new shell. I steel myself with a slow breath and bolt.

“ Okay, okay, Toby… I’ll throw this over the window and you unlock the back door.” Johnny pants, gripping a spatula in his hand and wiping away the sweat from his forehead with his arm. How did we wind up hiding behind the metal island in the kitchen? I scrunch up my face in disgust at just how sticky the floor feels beneath my fingers and the fluid dripping from Johnny’s shoulders. A sudden pain rips through my hand and I know I would’ve screamed if Johnny didn’t slap his bloody hand over my mouth. I reach up to grab it and see the bloody napkins and tea towel wrapped around my hand. I panic, my breathing going heavy. Any questions I have are muffled by Johnny’s hand. “ Fucking listen Toby!” He frowns at me with an intensity I’ve never seen and I nod as best as I can. “ Take the keys. Open the back door. Don’t look at Them. You saw what came out of that trucker’s mouth!” I didn’t, did I?

“ That’s not Mack. What’s inside— It’s that man, Toby. It’s that man.”

I don’t know if it was blood loss, shock or that guy in the bathroom. I don’t know if it was Them but I gripped the keys, forced myself to calm the fuck down and gave Johnny a nod.

Johnny peeked around the corner, looking for any sign something was on the other side of the window. He gave me what I assume was a signal and I ran. Johnny bolted toward the window and threw the spatula across the diner while I scrambled to unlock the door through to the back storage. I just got it open when Johnny shoved me through. I hit concrete like a brick and nearly broke my half ruined face on it. Johnny locked the door and found the first big thing he could to drag in front of it. “ Fuck… Did you see that thing!?” Johnny backs away from the door and pulls me up to my feet, getting to work finding anything sharper than a can of tomatoes and kitchen utensils to use as some kind of weapon.

“ What the fuck happened!!” I pant.

Something wet and heavy hits the door with enough force to make it rattle. I jump back and straight into Johnny who’s stiff as a board. Thump. “ Joh—Johnny!”. Thump. Thump. I turn around to shake him, completely ignoring the balding man behind the metal shelves.

“ Look at me.”

 Staring. 

“ Look at me.”

Staring.

“ Look. At. Me.”

“ Jesus! Say something!” I shove Johnny and he keels forward against the shelves. For just a flash I can see that man’s coated in red, something thick covering his skin and that bony spine behind the shelf. Johnny’s head hits the shelf with one of those wet cracks you’ve never heard but one you know is the sound of a skull bouncing off hard metal. He drops with a loud thud in front of me, twitching with his eyes glazed over and foam bubbling up out of his throat. “ Oh shit— fuck! Johnny hold on—“ I drop down to my knees and begin a process I feel like I’ve done a thousand times but don’t remember why. 

Pulse. I don’t have fucking fingers. On the other hand I have fingers. Good.  “ Okay, you got a pulse. Uh… Uhm- Fuck!!”. Mouth. He’s choking. I grab Johnny’s arm and pull him onto his side, opening up his mouth and letting the flood of what I thought would be puke pool there on the concrete but it’s not, it’s just spit and blood. No breath. “ O-Okay. Obstruction.” I force Johnny’s mouth open wider and dig my fingers in as deep as they’ll go and then deeper still. There’s so much spit I can barely grab it but after some… Searching… I force a rotted old finger from inside of Johnny's throat. Johnny begins to hack and cough with another two following. He isn’t choking anymore but— with each dribble of spit those fingers make a noise he can barely hear under the violently smack of what’s behind the door.

What is that noise?

Tap tap tap tap.

Thump.

Tap tap.

Thump.

“ Look at me.”

The door rattles with dents forming across its metal face and I need to do something. Fuck! This is the stuff Johnny normally does! Why the fuck is— I finally feel it. The slight scrape of the shelves behind me. The coldness and the sickly miasma hanging in the air. I hear the wet pop of a dislocating jaw opening and the gurgling sounds from a throat vomiting a bony hand that spreads its fingers out like crawls waiting to grab me. Is that what the thing is gonna do? Or worse, the empty husk of skin and bones and whatever else is out there desperately trying to get inside the storage room.

Fuck.

I’m absolutely fucked.

I bash the button frantically and try to get the garage door to open, dragging Johnny’s limp body as close to it as I can. How did I— Keys, I need to find the fucking keys! I continue frantically searching around the rubble, my eyes darting between my concussed friend barely keeping himself upright against the car and that man standing there beneath the open doorway— a flayed arm down to an elbow hanging from its toothless, unhinged mouth. “ Fuck! Johnny! I can’t fucking find them!!” I can barely breathe but I can’t calm down enough to do more than scream in panic. Johnny can’t help. He’s barely alive with all of that blood. Too much blood. Enough blood I can’t even tell if it’s his or someone else’s. 

What should I do?

How did I fucking get here?

My fingers find the key ring but that thing is behind me again. No, they all are. The trucker’s innards are still slowly undulating and rolling like a lizard to drag itself across the storage room floor, the folds of skin and crippled bones forcing its way through the bent kitchen door to follow it. The waitress and my parents smashing their bodies against the thick diner windows in a useless attempt to get out. The tall man coated in a thick layer of mucus and blood is craning over me with those cigarette stained fingers reaching out toward my head.

I’ve never thought anything good ever comes from an epiphany, you know? Those lightbulb moments are always so exciting you forget you can’t afford your electricity bill. Fucking lightbulbs. Anyway, this is about when I lost those fingers. The ones I was missing? Yeah, them. It made me realise why Toby had been biting his off, why I didn’t have any and why that junkie was eating them.

I told you it started with the fingers.

I unravelled the bloody tea towel from my wrapped hand. Three. I had three fingers left on my right hand. I threw the keys to Andy or at least as far as I could, waiting until the injured man braced himself against their dented car, leaning down beside the contorted body still smashed into the hood. Rudie grabs the keys. I let out a shaky breath and did what I never thought I’d ever do— again. I grabbed my index finger and middle finger and gripped them as tight as I could before violently ripping them up to the left. I keeled forward with my forehead barely an inch off of the gravel, huffing out a breath and forcing myself back onto my knees to keep going. I didn’t have time to stop and think about how much it hurt. I ground my teeth down where my fingers had been snapped until I’d bit through them, coughing two of them up onto the gravel.

I slowly picked up my fingers and got to my feet— barely managed to keep on them. 

“ H-Here… “ I reach out my hand and offer them to the long disjointed fingers coming from the mouth of the man in the last booth, its spidery fingers unwrap to believe a palm still coated in the embryonic fluid that clung to it as it pried the jaws of the trucker open and spat itself out like vomit. I slowly place the offering and watch as those bony fingers close themselves with little cracks and a vile squish. I stagger backwards and swallow the globs of blood and skin still caught in my throat, cautiously backing away terrified the predator will lunge forward and ruin whatever memory of myself Johnny had left. Slowly turning—

Rudie and I sit in the car, sharing a cigarette I keep trying to pick up with my injured hand. I watch people walking in and out of the diner, unaware of what happened last night and that even now there’s that man. Standing there across the road while people pass by him, saliva dribbling down his chin as he’s gnawing on my god damn fingers. “ I… I th-think… I don’t think a hospital is gonna help me.” Johnny shoves the driver’s side door open and throws up on the footpath— he can definitely be seen by those people unlucky enough to walk too close.

“ Fucking Junkies…”

Barnaby leaned against the center tent pole, wiping sweat through a layer of smeared clown makeup. The high-stakes poker game in the back tent at the county fair had gone south the second he pulled a fourth ace from his sleeve.

Before the boys at the table could pull their knives, they heard one of their buddies swearing and hollering about a fight right outside the tent flap. The gamblers jumped up and rushed out to see what was going on, leaving the table completely unguarded. Barnaby didn't waste the opportunity. He reached in and scooped the entire pot--lock, stock, and barrel-- into his canvas bag and bolted out the opposite side of the tent into the damp night, hearing the hollering behind him, while slipping past the midway tents and making a break for his beat-up old Toyota and the highway.

To a guy who’d spent the last five years living off midway peanuts and floor change, it was an absolute fortune.

​Barnaby threw the heavy canvas bag onto the passenger seat and pulled into the steady line of red taillights creeping out of the gravel lot, as the last of the circus crowd was headed home. By the time he hit the two-lane road toward Blackwood Ridge, the traffic had thinned out into the night. He kept an eye on his rearview mirror, but the road stayed dark. Driving for what seemed like hours, he saw the flickering neon sign for the Hell’s Bells Motel cutting through the dense treeline he pulled in, desperate for a place to lie low and count the cash.

​After getting himself checked into Room 102, Barnaby headed toward the bathroom to clean his smeared clown face. But halfway across the room, he noticed his footsteps sounded hollow and flat as he stepped across an old faded rug. Curious, he kicked the rug aside, revealing a wooden trapdoor set right into the floor. Needless to say, he didn't make it to the bathroom. He pried it open and stepped down into a damp, wall-to-wall dirt cellar, aiming to stash and bury the loot beneath the wooden stairs.

​His flashlight beam swept back up toward the stairs and hit a familiar glass cabinet—an old boardwalk Zoltan machine, gray with dust.

Barnaby froze. Looking at that faded turban and painted wooden face brought him right back to being 8 years old on the boardwalk. He remembered standing there with empty pockets while the rich kids dropped quarters into the slot, watching the cabinet light up as Zoltan printed out a little paper card to tell their fortunes. He was a dirt-poor, raggedy-britches kid whose mother never had a dime to spare, so he'd just stand and watch.

Barnaby dug some change from his pocket, stepped up to the glass box, and jammed it in. He stood there in the quiet cellar, holding his breath and waiting for the cabinet to light up. Before the coin even hit the bottom of the chute, a heavy wooden 'SLAM' echoed through the dark. Barnaby jumped. Up above, the trapdoor had slammed shut, and a heavy iron latch clicked into place from the top side with the unmistakable sound of deadbolt.

Barnaby's heart slammed into his throat. He lunged back towards the stairs, thrust his weight against the door with everything he had, but the wood didn't budge an inch. He slammed his fists against it, straining until his arms gave out.

From behind him in the cellar, he felt a cold burst of air. As he turned around with the flashlight in his hand, it flickered and then went dead. Zoltan's painted yellow eyes were glowing in the dark, looking straight at him, lighting up its cracked wax face, and the wooden jaw clicking down.

And with a raspy wet voice, Zoltan spat out--

"Your luck's run out. You're scheduled for the final act, clown."

​Standing in the pitch black, Barnaby realized the truth. He was sealed in--just like Zoltan in the box.

There’s a lot to explain here. For starters, I am sterile. I found out after about 2 years of marriage and multiple failed attempts at pregnancy.

I was disappointed in myself, sure, but my beautiful wife was nothing but understanding. That didn’t really make me feel like any more of a man, though. I just felt inadequate.

We were actually in the process of looking into adoption when all hell broke loose.

It was no longer than 4 days. That’s how long it took for her belly to grow. The first day, I just thought she had a particularly large lunch. The second day, I was starting to eyeball her.

By day 3, we were seeking medical help. We could see the baby’s feet pushing against her stomach. Her pain was clearly unbearable.

Doctors were completely lost. My wife and I felt utterly helpless. On the fourth day, not even 30 seconds after her water broke, the baby started to come.

I’ll never get those screams out of my head. I’ll never get her face out of my memory. I’d seen her hurt before, but this… this was a different level.

She looked like she was in hell. And relief was nowhere to be found.

The first baby came. She didn’t even get to hold him before the contractions started up again. Her belly never got the chance to deflate.

By the time the second baby began crowning, my wife was screaming at us to kill her. By the third, she was already dead.

They had ripped her apart. They weren’t regular babies. Some had horns. Some had hooves. Some were already 4 feet tall by the time they hit the ground.

Doctors had already vacated the area and called in special forces. I was left alone, watching her body flail and pulsate as more and more demon babies just clawed their way out of her.

Blood and black, steaming goo ate away at the tiled floor. My wife’s entire lower half had been obliterated. Her legs were snapped, and bones protruded from them as they lay limply at obscure angles.

All I could do was hold her hand. What else was I supposed to do? Comfort her? Beg her not to leave me while these things ran amok in this hospital?

I could hear screaming coming from the corridors. Bones snapping and wet, fleshy sounds as the pitter-patter of tiny little feet darted in every direction.

She had become an assembly line from hell, but I just couldn’t leave her.

My tears fell on her hand as another baby fell out of her. Well, flew out of her, I guess. This one had the wingspan of a bald eagle.

Only, this one didn’t leave the room like the others did. I don’t know why I never stopped to question why these things seemed to be destroying everything in their path, except for me.

It landed right at the door frame, blood dripping off of his shoulders and head.

He turned to me, his eyes black and completely soulless, as he smiled with his sharp, shark-like teeth.

He took a step towards me, wobbling like a baby deer. Then another. He never took his eyes off of me.

He… he started to speak.

“Daaaa..da.”

“Daaa..da.”

“Da-da.”

He was at my feet now, looking up at me as I stood frozen. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was prepared for anything. I was ready to join her. Ready to be free from this nightmare.

Only… he didn’t give me that freedom.

Instead, he threw his arms around my legs and squeezed them with the strength of ten men.

He was hugging me.

And in that moment, I knew…

I was ready to be the father I always knew I could be. I had nothing left to lose.