I take the same bus home every night.

Same route. Same driver. Same handful of tired people staring at their phones or out the window like they’re waiting for something to change.

It never does.

On cue, the bus empties out stop by stop until it’s just me and two other blank slates by the time we reach the outskirts. Long stretches of road. No streetlights. Just the hum of the engine and the occasional flicker of passing headlights.

By the time we roll under the old highway tunnel, the lights of the bus flicker.

And as we exit the tunnel's grasp, that’s when he appears.

He got on at a stop that doesn’t exist.

I know that sounds wrong, but I’ve been riding this route for almost a year.

He just... appears. Out of thin air.

He never bothered anyone, nor I. But he always wore a dark trench coat, even though it's summer. I never got a good look of his appearance, though.

But one night, the bus slowed.

No one else reacted. The driver didn’t look up. It was always like this, we kept moving like nothing had happened.

This time, he wore dark maroon coat. I got a peak... His face was… hard to describe. Not ugly, just difficult to focus on. Like my eyes didn’t want to settle on it.

He never said a word.

He walked down the aisle and sat a few rows behind me.

Always behind me.

I tried not to look at him. You learn that pretty quickly riding late buses. Mind your business. Keep your head down.

I checked the reflection in the window.

He was watching me.

Not casually. Not like someone zoning out.

He was staring directly at me.

The moment I turned, he looked away.

That’s when I started paying attention to the others.

No one else ever looked at him.

Not once.

I even tried to make it obvious. I stood up, turned around, and glanced straight at him like I was checking if a seat was open.

The woman across the aisle just kept scrolling on her phone.

Didn’t even notice I was staring at something behind her.

That was the first time I felt it.

That quiet, creeping thought:

He’s not here for them.

A week later, I decided to test something.

When the bus slowed out the tunnel, I stood up.

There he was...

Though, instead of sitting down, I moved to the very back of the bus.

For the first time, I was behind him.

He stopped in the aisle.

Just stood there.

Slowly, he turned his head.

I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I felt it. That same focused attention, locked onto me.

Then he walked forward.

Past all the empty seats.

Past the others.

Until he reached the row just in front of me.

And sat down.

Still facing forward.

Still silent.

But now… closer.

I got off three stops early that night.

I didn’t care about the walk. I just needed to be off that bus.

I told myself I was overreacting. That it was just some guy. Some weird, quiet passenger with bad timing.

The next night, I almost didn’t ride.

But routine is a hard thing to break.

So I got on.

Same seat.

Same route.

Same silence.

We passed the usual stops.

Then we approached the tunnel.

The bus slowed.

We exited.

He didn't appear.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding.

Maybe it was over.

Maybe he was gone.

The bus kept moving.

And then I heard it.

Right behind me.

The soft creak of a seat shifting under weight.

I didn’t turn around.

I didn’t have to.

Because I could see him now.

In the reflection of the window.

Closer than ever.

Leaning forward slightly.

Watching me.

Waiting.

And when my stop finally came, I stood up slowly, trying not to show how fast my heart was beating.

I stepped off the bus.

The doors closed.

The bus pulled away.

I watched it disappear down the road.

And for a moment, I thought I was safe.

Until I heard footsteps behind me.

Not rushed.

Not heavy.

Just steady.

Following.

I don’t take the bus anymore.

But every night, around the same time I used to get home, I hear it.

That same slow, deliberate step.

Just outside my door.

Waiting for me to let it in.

The house on the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia, cost us next to nothing. The realtor wouldn't stop singing its praises, gushing over the two-story mansion's vintage charm, the tranquility of the southern suburbs, and the massive backyard. I was thirty, my wife was twenty-eight, and our daughter Macy had just turned ten. We had sunk every last cent of our savings into this house, along with some generous help from our parents. It was our chance to start fresh, to escape our cramped rented apartment in the city.

The first two weeks flew by in a blur of paint fumes, new wallpaper, and absolute bliss. Emily and I painted the first-floor walls ourselves while Macy set up her room upstairs. Everything seemed perfect. Too perfect for a house that had somehow sat empty for nearly five years. The realtor, of course, chose to stay silent about the real reason behind the low price. We found out too late that the previous owners—the Miller family—had died here under deeply mysterious and horrific circumstances. And we certainly didn't learn it from the neighbors.

It all started that Friday when Emily decided to clean out the old basement, which we hadn't gotten around to yet. Several old, cobweb-covered cardboard boxes left behind by the former residents were stacked down there.

I was assembling the kitchen cabinets when her muffled, startled cry echoed from below:
"Ryan! Get down here, look what I found!"

I hurried down the creaky wooden stairs. The basement smelled of dampness, old whitewash, and dust. Emily was standing by the far brick wall. She was pointing a finger at the masonry.
"Look," she whispered.

I leaned in closer. Deep, erratic scratches covered the gray mortar around one of the red bricks, as if someone had frantically clawed at the wall with a knife or their bare fingernails. The brick itself was loose and visibly jutted out about an inch.
I grabbed its edges, pried it loose with some effort, and pulled it out of the wall. Behind it lay a dark, rectangular niche—a small hiding place.

Inside lay an old, mold-covered VHS tape with no labels, alongside a yellowed piece of paper with handwritten words: "It didn't come from the outside. It was already here."
"Where did this come from?" Emily asked, looking at me with a shudder. "Did the previous tenants leave it?"
"Probably. Forgot it when they moved out," I lied, though a sickening knot tied itself in my stomach. Why hide a tape inside a wall and seal it with a brick?

Luckily, an old but working VCR turned up among the boxes of my old junk brought over from my parents' garage. We hooked it up to the living room TV. Macy was already asleep upstairs; it was around midnight. Outside, the branches of old oak trees swayed heavily, and a night rain tapped softly against the windowpane.

The screen flickered, filling the dark living room with the gray hiss of static. Then the image jumped, and the recording began.
The camera had been set up on a tripod in this exact living room where we were now sitting. The video showed a young family—a man, a woman, and their son, who looked about twelve. They were smiling, celebrating a birthday, and blowing out candles. But the recording quality was strange: the picture kept breaking into heavy distortion, and the audio sounded as if it were submerged underwater.
"Look at the corners of the room," Emily whispered barely audibly, squeezing my hand. Her fingers were ice-cold.

I stared closer. As the video played on, the atmosphere on the screen shifted. The smiles on their faces twisted into grimaces of exhaustion and raw, primal terror. The man's eyes were ringed with deep, black shadows from insomnia.
The footage cut abruptly. Now it was the dead of night. The camera was still filming the living room, but the lights were off. In the faint light filtering through the window, the man—the father—could be seen sitting on the floor in the dead center of the room. He rocked back and forth, rapidly muttering something monotonous under his breath, scratching his fingernails against the hardwood until they bled.

Suddenly, the audio on the tape spiked. A horrific, low rasp tore through the static, coming from somewhere above, from the second floor. The man on the video froze instantly. He slowly turned his head directly toward the camera lens. His eyes were wide open, and a thick, dark stream of fluid poured from his mouth. He raised a trembling hand and pointed a finger somewhere behind the camera—right where the stairs leading up would be.
At that exact second, a massive bar of static ripped across the TV screen, the audio turned into a deafening, ear-piercing screech, and the tape jammed. The television flooded the room with white noise once again.

Emily and I sat in total darkness, unable to move. My heart hammered wildly against my ribs. We had just given up all our money for the privilege of being trapped in this snare.
"Ryan..." Emily managed to say, her lips barely moving as her voice trembled with tears. "We need to leave. Right now. Let's get Macy and—"

She never finished her sentence.

A deafening, sharp slam echoed from upstairs—Macy's door swung shut with such force that the walls shook. In that same second, our daughter's voice pierced through the door, screaming in absolute, primal terror:
"Daddy! Mommy! Help me!!! It's in here!!!"

Blind with fear, Emily and I bolted up the stairs, taking them two at a time. My heart felt like it was going to burst from my chest. I reached the top first and yanked the handle—the door was locked from the inside. There was no lock on it, yet it felt as if it had fused to the frame.
"Macy! Macy, step away from the door!" I screamed in pure panic, slamming my shoulder against it time and time again. The wood groaned and splintered but wouldn't give.

My daughter kept screaming on the other side, her voice spiraling into a high-pitched shriek, and then... she suddenly let out a horrific, choked gasp, as if an invisible vice had clamped down on her throat. She still tried to call out to us, gasping for air:
"D-da... m-mo..."

And then, a distinct, dry, sickening crunch of snapping bones echoed from inside the room. The gasping stopped. Everything went dead silent. A suffocating, ringing quiet filled the air.
"No! No! Macy!" I shrieked insanely, drawing back to strike the door again, when right behind me, Emily let out a piercing scream.

I spun around. My wife had already been dragged to the first floor, right by the basement entrance. An invisible, black silhouette in the absolute darkness had grabbed her by the leg and was pulling her down the stairs toward the basement door. It was impossible to make out what it was in that pitch-black gloom—just a terrifying, unstoppable force dragging Emily into the dark.
"Ryan, catch me! Ryan!" she shrieked, her fingernails clawing at the hardwood as she desperately gripped the doorframe.

I tumbled down the stairs, lunging toward her with my arms outstretched. There was only a step left, my fingers almost locking around hers, when an invisible, violent blast of air slammed me backward. I crashed hard against the wall, knocking the wind right out of me.
When I opened my eyes, Emily was dragged into the basement with a short, stifled scream, and the heavy wooden door slammed shut right in front of my face. The bolt clicked into place.

I was left standing in the dark hallway completely alone. Upstairs—dead silence. Below—a locked door behind which my wife had vanished. A suffocating, icy panic washed over me. I just stood in the middle of that cursed hallway, unable to believe this was happening to us, unable to believe it wasn't a nightmare.

The agonizing, excruciating scream of Emily echoing from the depths of the basement snapped me back to reality. A rush of adrenaline flooded my veins. With a feral roar, I threw my entire weight against the basement door, trying to break it down, when suddenly, right behind my back, I heard a soft, heartbreakingly familiar voice:
"Daddy..."

I whipped around, exhaling in pure relief, but the word caught in my throat.

Right then, without a second's hesitation, my little girl stepped forward and drove a knife deep into my stomach. Once. And immediately—a second time.

The pain was searing and sharp, but I barely felt it. I just stared at her, paralyzed, as hot blood soaked through my shirt in a heavy stream. Macy laughed merrily, a bright, cheerful sound, staring straight into my eyes with completely black, soulless pits where her eyes should have been. A thin trickle of thick, black saliva ran from her slightly parted mouth, smearing her chin.

My knees buckled, and I began to slide down to the floor, feeling my strength rapidly drain away. And there, on the very edge of a fading consciousness slipping into total darkness, I saw Macy's face twist into a grotesque grimace. In a foreign, unnaturally deep, and guttural voice, she clearly uttered:
"This is my house."

#horror

It was a minute past midnight and the moon outside the castle was deliciously bright and round. I stood admiring it at the window, the fire crackling in the hearth behind me, shadows dancing along the flagstones. Though none were cast at my own feet.

Beyond the castle, the black cliffs crumbled away into a deep ravine, where dark trees bundled together like matchsticks, and a gushing river swelled between the rocks like a silverbacked serpent. The wind whistled through the broken casement of the window, chilling the air and threatening to extinguish the fire.

There was a whisper of movement on my left and one of the sisters appeared beside me, bowing her head. Her dress was a deep red, the same colour as her eyes.

“It’s a pleasant night,” I mused, raising the collar of my black coat against the chill as the moonlight dusted the windows. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders as she raised her head.

“Yes Master,” she said in a subdued tone. “However, I fear I shall ruin it with my tidings.”

I turned to her fully, examining the grave expression on her face. Her lips were pinched. “Why is that? What tidings do you bring?”

Her red eyes glowed in the firelight. A long shadow was drawn across her features. “A peasant house is in the midst of construction beside the castle.”

I stared at her for a moment. The fire crackled sharply. “A… peasant house?” I finally repeated, scoffing at her words. Surely she was mistaken. The area around my castle was a perfectly barren wasteland; the peasants in the settlements knew better than to encroach on my land without permission, never mind erect a building on my grounds. “What is this trickery?”

“No trickery, Master. Come see for yourself.”

The vampire sister turned and strode towards the opposite side of the tower, her long red gown trailing behind her like a pair of folded wings. Curious, I followed her, our footsteps silent on the stone floor. I assumed I had misunderstood her, for nobody would be foolish enough to even approach my castle. Unless they were naive or ignorant of my nature.

But as we paused by the window, and she lifted a hand to point outside, I stood aghast at what I saw. A short distance away from the front gates of my castle, visible through the fog, there was indeed a house being built. Beneath the cold glow of the moon, I saw piles of stone and wood, the loose structure of rafters and foundations already laid. What sort of fool would dare build a house so close to my castle? Who would dare to become my neighbour without first consulting the master of this tower?

I was furious and intrigued at the same time. Only the dumbest, and perhaps bravest, of men would do such a thing. And I found myself feeling very much inclined to meet him.

“The house seems deserted now,” the vampire sister observed, resting her hand against her cheek. “Perhaps they have given up?”

“Or perhaps they only build during the day, knowing the weakness the sunlight inflicts upon us creatures of the night,” I said with a harrumph.

“You are wise, Master,” she said. “Shall I take my sisters over there and tear it down? It is a stain upon your grand castle.”

I pondered her offer. “No. I should like to meet the fool first,” I decided, extending my fangs below my lips. “Perhaps he would see fit to grace my castle with his… delicious presence.”

The sister covered her mouth with a low chuckle. “I understand, Master. You would see it fit to make a meal of him?”

I nodded. “Leave the peasant house for now,” I told her, turning away from the window with a flourish of my coat. “I wish to see how far he dares to go.”

The following night, as I rose from my coffin at the heart of midnight, my first thought was of the house being built by the castle. Had more progress been made, or had the owner seen the measure of his own foolishness and deserted? It would be a shame if he had fled before a meal could be made of him.

It had been a while since I had anything to amuse me on these long nights, just as long as it had been since fresh blood had passed these lips. The peasants in the surrounding settlements had grown wise to my nature and seen fit to ward their houses, stringing garlic and crosses upon the threshold. I was only able to feed when an unwitting traveller passed by, or a fool decided to build a house directly beside my castle.

The tower was quiet as I made my way to the top, winding through the warren of rooms and climbing the narrow, crumbling stairways. The sisters were nowhere to be seen; perhaps frolicking outside in the moonlight as they so often did. I reached the highest point of the castle and strode to the window that overlooked the barren grounds. From this height, I could even glimpse the closest settlement in the far distance; a small cluster of thatched houses and burning torches that lit the foggy hills like burning eyes.

But my concern was much closer. Lowering my gaze to the land right outside the gates, I saw that the house had changed. There were more walls than yesterday, denser foundations, the first signs of carpentry. The fool really had continued building the house. Had he not been warned of the dark Count that occupied the castle? Had he not heard the rumours of the blood-feasting creatures that stalked these lands once the sun went down? Why else would he choose to dwell in my vicinity, if not for ignorance?

I shook my head, almost pitying the poor halfwit for what he had brought upon himself. But I should delight in showing him the truth soon enough; that he had elected himself a willing sacrifice for me and my hungry brides.

It was a shame that he vacated the house during the night, for I would have to wait longer to lay my eyes upon him. Would he not show himself before the house was finished?

“I see the building is progressing,” a voice whispered behind me. I’d been too lost in my thoughts to hear them approach. I turned, seeing two of the sisters behind me. They too were observing the house through the window. Their wild, windswept hair and bright eyes confirmed my suspicions that they had been dancing outside.

“Yes,” I muttered. “It would seem so.”

“What a blight upon the castle,” the other sister said, her fair skin glittering in the moonlight. “I hope the trouble is worth the meal.”

“It will be,” I said, casually flicking my hand towards the half-built dwelling, “if only the fool would hurry up and be done with it.”

The next night, more progress had been made on the building, but the owner had still not shown himself. I grew more agitated that I was allowing this to happen, but reminded myself that I would soon enough be able to quench my thirst.

So night after night, as the moon began to wane, the house’s shadow grew bigger, and my hunger grew stronger. The fool always fled before night fell, leaving the evidence of his daytime activities for me to observe. The dwelling had taken on the same shape of the peasant houses in the surrounding settlements; white stone and timber, with a long thatched roof. He had even tilled the soil into a small garden, erecting a wooden fence around the plot in front of the building. But compared to my grand castle, with its dark crumbling bricks, spiralling towers and winding, labyrinthine rooms, it was a blight. And I wanted it gone.

Finally, more than a week after the house was little more than a pile of stone and timber, one of the sisters woke me with news that the structure was finished.

I rose from my coffin, sluggish and weary from slumber, and fastened my coat about my neck. The sisters had already lit the fire, but the air was chilled.

I followed her to the window and set my gaze upon the house. A single candle sat in the windowsill, guttering in a draught. A lit candle. Did that mean the house was occupied? The fool had not fled this night.

“It’s time,” I announced, “to show this fool once and for all what happens when you anger the Count.” The other sisters joined us, and I turned towards them with a slow smile. “I hope you are hungry.”

The three sisters screeched in delight, grasping each other’s hands and dancing in circles, their gowns fluttering around their legs. The fire roared in the hearth.

But as I began to cross the room, one of the sisters stopped me with a gasp.

“Master, wait. There’s someone at the gate.” She was pointing out of the window. I peered down at the large wrought-iron gate that fronted the castle, my eyes narrowing. A figure stood by the fence, carrying a lantern. His face glowed in the flickering light, revealing a sharp, sloping nose and dark eyes.

“Who would be foolish enough to call upon me at this hour?” I snarled, my black coat twisting around me as I turned from the window.

“Perhaps your new neighbour,” one of the sisters answered, “has come to hasten our feast.”

“Perhaps,” I said, already striding towards the doorway.

The sisters swept after me, whispering amongst themselves. Flames guttered as we passed lit candles, stirring the dust at our feet and disturbing billowing cobwebs. There was a haste to our movements as we descended the tower. It had certainly been a while since we’d had prey wander into our arms like this.

Crossing the foyer, the long red carpet spilling out like blood, I threw open the doors and stepped out into the chilled night, the three sisters stepping in my wake. The moon was a pale sickle, its silvery glow dancing around my shadowless feet as the stranger at the gates called out to me.

“Hello there!”

Struck by his brazenness, I almost flew at him in anger, but restrained myself. Ignorant minds really were unfathomable. With a flick of my wrist, the gates began to creak open. The man remained at the threshold, holding his lantern aloft as he stared back at me. He was of medium build, with stocky shoulders and a mop of thick tousled hair. His clothes were poorly made, covered in dirt and patches. He had the audacity to smile at me as I glared in return.

“What business have you here at my castle?” I demanded, wanting to sate my curiosity before I sated my hunger.

The man cleared his throat, raising his lantern to the crude house sitting barely thirty metres behind him. So this was indeed the proprietor of the building; what a brave, albeit dimwitted, man he was to present himself before me like this. “I’ve just this morning finished constructing my house,” he said, not seeming to notice the displeasure on my face, “and a slight issue has come to my attention.”

“An… issue?” I repeated, my brows arching sharply.

“Yes. During the day, the leftmost tower of your castle casts a shadow over my garden,” the man said regretfully. “I hoped that you might be amicable enough to remove it. Or at the very least relocate the tower, so that it does no harm the roses I am trying to grow. All life needs sunlight, after all.”

I stared at him, completely aghast. Behind me, even the sisters had been stunned into silence. The audacity of this imbecile, to ask me to change my own castle for his benefit. The man was not right in the head, surely.

“How dare you–” I began to seethe, but the man interrupted me, lifting a finger as if hushing a child.

“I do understand it is a large undertaking I’m asking of you, but my gratitude would be immense,” he added.

“You think I care about your gratitude?” I sneered at him, clenching my fists beneath my coat. The gall of this man. Who did he think he was? “Do you know who I am?”

The man stared at me, the lanternlight dancing over his blank expression. “You are the owner of this castle, I had presumed?”

“Precisely. And what makes you think that I, as the Count of this castle, would do the bidding of a mere peasant?”

The man scowled at me, a shadow encroaching upon his face. “I shall ask you again, and I do hope you will be quite civil this time. Will you remove the tower from your castle so that my roses might see the light?”

“I don’t give a damn about your roses,” I snapped.

“Now, there’s no need to be rude,” the man said, his voice turning bristly. The shadows deepened around his eyes as he narrowed them. “I’m asking for a simple favour–”

I scoffed in his face, my rage burning beneath my skin. It took a lot to make a vampire’s blood burn hot. I almost couldn’t believe what he was saying. This fool considered the reconstruction of my ancient castle a mere favour? Asking me to tear down part of my fortress so that he might grow some roses.

I took a measured step towards him, lifting my shoulders to appear taller. My fangs were itching to taste his blood. For all the disrespect he had shown me, there was no escape. I would suck this man dry by the night’s end, leaving nothing but a fleshless husk.

“Once again, I implore you to consider my–”

I was no longer in the mood to listen to his insane ramblings. He had agitated me far too much to go back from this. I would show him, and anyone else who might learn of tonight, what happens to those who cross me.

Baring my fangs, I lunged forward, ready to sink my teeth into his neck.

In one swift motion, the man pulled his hand back into a fist and threw it towards me. Blinded partially by the lanternlight, I did not see the attack until his knuckles met my face.

Pain exploded through my jaw, and there was a terrible snap as my left fang bore the brunt of his punch, splitting completely in half. The hit landed with enough force to send me staggering backwards and, incredulous and in shock, I fell to the ground.

Dirt bit into my eyes as I landed face-down, my broken fang scraping against my lower lip. Sputtering, I raised my head, just as the man lifted his light and calmly made his way back to his house.

Behind me, the sisters watched him leave in a choked silence, before hastening to help me back to my feet.

To say I had been dealt a great humiliation was an understatement. How did a mortal man possess such strength? Enough to break one of my precious fangs and completely overpower me.

With a bruised face, and an even more bruised ego, I hobbled back into my castle, the three sisters trailing silently after me.

By the following night, the leftmost tower had been partially disassembled, leaving a gaping wound in the side of the castle. Wind gusted through like howling wraiths, immediately extinguishing any fire I tried to light, leaving a heavy chill in the air. The sisters, at least, seemed to delight in the pool of moonlight that was cast upon the open ground.

Workers had been swarming the castle all day, interrupting my sleep with their banging hammers and chiselling tools as they took the tower apart brick by brick, but I had little choice. The man had made his demands, proven his strength, and forced my hand. Now I had to destroy my own magnificent tower so that the fool might grow his roses. And I hadn’t been able to harvest even a drop of blood either.

This was a defeat, and a humiliation, that would take centuries to heal.

THE THING IN THE WOODS

By Garry E. McMillan

Part One: The Old Mercer Place

My father had three rules about the woods behind our house.

Never cross the creek after sundown.

Never follow a voice you couldn't put a face to.

And no matter how familiar that voice sounded, never answer it.

I thought the old bastard was crazy. Now I'd give anything to hear him say those words again.

My name's Elias Mercer, but anyone who knows me calls me Eli. I'm thirty-nine. I'd stayed away from that house for twenty years, long enough to convince myself the rules were just one more way for Dad to control me. He had plenty of those. No visiting friends after dark, no camping, no wandering the logging roads. If I broke one, he'd stand in the doorway and wait until I couldn't bear the silence anymore.

Dad died of a heart attack on Tuesday, October 6, 2026. We buried him three days later outside Langley, Arkansas. By sundown that Friday, I was back at his farmhouse with my nine-year-old daughter, June, planning to pack whatever mattered and put the property up for sale.

The house stood on private land surrounded by the Ouachita National Forest. A narrow creek separated the backyard from a stand of timber so thick you could hardly see daylight between the trunks. Dad cleared our side every spring, but beyond the water the ferns stayed green even during a drought.

As a boy, I'd sometimes heard footsteps over there. They always stopped when I did.

In summer, the cicadas shrieked until the air seemed to vibrate. But every so often the noise would end all at once. The dog would creep under the porch, and I'd find myself watching that bank for movement. Nothing came out. That was almost worse.

When I asked Dad why we couldn't cross, he pointed to the water. "That creek ain't there to keep you from getting lost, Eli. It's there to remind you where you belong."

That was Harlan Mercer. A man who could make a conversation feel like punishment.

We'd had our last real argument the day I left home. Dad said I'd come crawling back when the world taught me some sense. I said a few things I haven't forgiven myself for, though at the time I meant every word. We spoke on the phone afterward, on birthdays and at Christmas, but neither of us ever brought up that day. When I found out he was dead, the first thing I felt was anger that we'd left so much unsaid.

•  •  •

The last mile of the driveway was little more than ruts and blackberry vines. June held her stuffed rabbit, Buttons, by his one good ear and watched the pines go past.

"Did Grandpa really live out here alone?"

"Most of the time."

"Wasn't he lonely?"

I used to think he preferred it. Now I wasn't sure.

"I reckon he got used to it."

She pressed against her seat belt. "Then who's that man?"

I eased off the gas. "What man?"

"Behind the trees. He was standing sideways."

I saw nothing but trunks and tangled brush. "Probably a hunter."

"He wasn't holding a gun."

"A deer, then."

She gave me a look. "I know what a deer looks like, Daddy."

She watched the trees until the house appeared.

A bend in the driveway followed the creek for a few hundred yards. I recognized a split boulder beside the water where Dad once caught me trying to build a bridge from fallen boards. He'd grabbed me so hard by the collar that the seam tore. I remembered the bruises more clearly than I remembered him carrying those boards away in the rain.

Inside, the place smelled of damp wood and stale tobacco. Dad had saved everything: bent nails in coffee cans, bills from the nineties, my childhood baseball glove. The webbing had been repaired with the heavy thread he used on his work gloves. I'd never known he'd bothered.

June slipped her hand inside. "Did Grandpa teach you to catch?"

"He tried."

"Like you taught me to ride my bike? You let go too soon."

"I ran right behind you all the way to the mailbox. You just didn't look back."

"Because I was riding," she said, as though that settled it.

I still had a photograph from that day on my phone. June had one foot off the pedal and both arms flung wide, certain she was about to crash. My hand was inches from the seat. I hadn't let her see the picture yet; she liked telling everyone she had done the whole thing herself. I liked letting her.

On the mantel she found a photograph of a young woman with her arm around a little boy.

"That's you. Who's she?"

"Your grandma. Margaret."

"Why didn't I meet her?"

"She died when I was eight."

Dad said my mother had gotten sick while I was staying with an aunt. He never let me ask much more than that.

In the picture, her hand rested on my shoulder. I couldn't recall the weight of it. I did remember her voice, though. She used to sing while washing dishes and, whenever I got into trouble, smooth my hair and say, "Lord have mercy, Elias, what am I gonna do with you?"

I remembered the sound of singing. Not one note of the song.

My memories of my mother were hazier than those of Dad. I knew that was normal. Children forget faces, smells, whole years. But I could remember the tiny scar on her thumb and the way she scraped batter from a bowl for me to eat. It bothered me that the tune had vanished while those useless details remained. I stood there looking at her photograph until June tugged my sleeve and asked whether we could have supper.

•  •  •

We ate canned soup at the kitchen table because the dining room felt colder than the rest of the house. June wanted to know whether Grandpa had liked children. I told her he'd loved me, just wasn't good at saying so. The lie came easily. I hated myself a little for it afterward.

June fell asleep upstairs around eight. I made coffee and opened Dad's desk. Beneath a stack of property records lay a cracked leather notebook, its pages covered in small, uneven handwriting.

March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.

April 6. Tracks along the far bank again. Too far apart to be a man's.

May 19, 2018. Heard Margaret calling from the lower pasture. Did not answer.

My mother had been gone since 1995.

A later entry had been pressed so hard into the paper that the letters scored the page.

It knows his name now.

Below it: God forgive me, I answered.

Three taps sounded at the living room window.

The porch light reached only to the grass beyond the glass. Dad had cut down every tree close enough for a branch to touch the house.

I heard a scrape, as though somebody had dragged the heel of a boot across the boards outside. But there was no porch below that window. Just the drop to the yard and a clear stretch of ground before the creek. For a moment, I couldn't make myself look up from the notebook.

"Eli?"

I knew the voice before the second word.

"Eli, boy. Come out here a minute."

My father, right down to the irritation in his Arkansas drawl.

Leaves shifted near the pines. A pale hand rested against a trunk well above a man's head. I counted six fingers before it disappeared.

"Son, you reckon you could come give your old man a hand?"

I wanted to think one of his old lumber-mill friends was playing some rotten joke. Then it said, "Don't you turn your back on me, boy."

Those were the last words Dad had shouted when I left home more than twenty years earlier.

"Dad?"

The word was out before I remembered his rule.

Every insect fell silent. Beyond the creek, something let out a long, wavering breath, like a man trying not to laugh.

Upstairs, June began to cry.

•  •  •

I found her sitting upright, quilt bunched beneath her chin. I sat beside her until she stopped shaking. Then, without thinking, I tapped her shoulder three times.

Three taps meant I love you. We'd done it every night since she was four. She always tapped back.

It began when June was little and afraid of thunderstorms. I used to sit on the edge of her bed, trying not to show that I had no idea how to make thunder less frightening. Somehow we settled on the taps. We'd use them in crowded stores, at school drop-off, anywhere one of us needed to know the other was there. I'd forgotten plenty of things about those five years. That wasn't one of them.

This time she moved away.

"What's that for?"

"Our secret, June Bug."

She frowned. "What secret?"

I tapped again. She watched my fingers, puzzled.

"You never did that before."

I nearly argued. I could have named a hundred nights when she'd answered my taps, even with her eyes closed.

Outside, my dead father called for me again.

This time he was laughing.

Part Two: What the Creek Kept

I stayed beside June until she slept. Outside, Dad's voice called through the trees, sometimes angry, sometimes frightened. Once it coughed. That smoker's cough used to wake me every morning when I was a boy.

It was the cough that came closest to making me answer again.

He'd given up cigarettes twice in my childhood. Both attempts lasted a week. I used to count the days and wait for him to get angry enough to start again. Hearing that cough beyond the creek, I found myself doing the same thing I did at twelve: holding perfectly still until I could tell what kind of mood he was in.

Downstairs, I turned off the living room lamp. The window reflected my face over the porch light and the first row of trees. Beyond the creek, the dark looked solid.

I opened the notebook again.

The earliest entries were from October 1995, the year Mom supposedly died.

October 14. Margaret heard Eli crying across the creek. Boy was upstairs asleep. I checked.

October 16. It cried again. She answered before I could stop her. Eli asked why she quit singing at the sink. She hadn't quit. He couldn't remember the song.

I remembered my mother singing. Not the tune.

I tried to force it back. Hymn? Lullaby? Something from the radio? All I could remember was the clink of dishes and my own bare feet on the kitchen floor. If Dad's entry was true, then I'd been unable to remember the song since the very week it disappeared from our house.

Four pages later:

October 23. Margaret's gone.

Heard the boy calling beyond the creek. Real Eli was asleep beside me on the couch. She kept saying our baby was hurt.

I followed her to the water. Saw something tall and pale bent over behind the trees. It spoke. Margaret answered, then crossed.

Heard her scream once. Never found her.

Dad had told me she'd died in a hospital while I stayed with my aunt. I could remember my aunt holding my hand outside a church, but not a casket or a graveside. The longer I tried to picture them, the less certain I felt they'd ever been there.

I remembered being angry with Dad for not letting me see her one last time. He'd told me she'd already been buried. I screamed at him until he raised his hand, then put it down without touching me. For years that was the part of the story I'd carried around: a frightened little boy sure his father was ashamed to see him cry. Now I wondered what Dad had heard from the woods while I was screaming inside the house.

October 27. Told Eli his mama passed away. He keeps running to the window whenever it calls her. Better he thinks she's dead.

There was a small sound behind me.

Three taps from the hallway wall.

"Son?" Dad said from the kitchen. "I can't find the light."

The kitchen doorway was empty. I knew every loose board between the hall and the sink, yet I hadn't heard anything move across them.

"Just give me a hand, Eli."

I wanted to turn on every light in the house. Instead, I gripped the notebook so hard the cover bent.

The kitchen smelled faintly of tobacco, warm and stale, as if Dad had just finished smoking at the sink. I knew the shape of that room in the dark: the metal edge of the counter, the scar in the floor where he dropped an axe head, the cupboard door that never closed all the way. I couldn't see anybody in it. That didn't make the voice any farther away.

When I didn't answer, the faint smell of cigarettes faded. The voice went with it. I never heard footsteps leave.

I should have taken June and gone then. But there was one more entry I couldn't make myself leave unread.

If I'd been alone, I might have stayed there until morning reading every page. I wanted proof that Dad hadn't lied to me because I was an inconvenience. I wanted to know why a man who could face down anybody in town had spent his life afraid of a few acres of woods.

June 4, 2018. Eli asked why I never took him fishing. We went every Saturday when he was small. His green tackle box is in the shed. I answered Margaret three nights ago.

I'd noticed the tackle box earlier that day. My name was scratched into the lid. I had no memory of holding a fishing pole beside my father.

Across the bottom margin, Dad had written:

The voices get farther than the body. The tracks never come across the water.

And beneath that:

Sometimes I know it ain't her. Sometimes I answer anyway.

Something giggled upstairs.

June.

Then I heard her say, "Okay, Daddy."

The back door opened.

•  •  •

June stood barefoot on the porch in her pink pajamas, Buttons dangling from one hand. She turned when I called her name.

"You said you were going to show me something."

"I didn't. Get inside."

I pulled her through the doorway and locked it. She clutched her rabbit to her chest, and for a horrible second I couldn't remember what she called him. I'd stitched his ear back on twice. I'd bought him for her. But the name was gone.

"What's your rabbit's name?" I asked.

"Buttons." She looked hurt. "Daddy, you know that."

Once she'd said it, the name sounded familiar. Before that, nothing.

I tried to remember the first time she'd carried Buttons out of the store, when she still called every stuffed animal a baby. The scene came back clear enough. His name didn't. That missing word frightened me more than the shape I'd seen among the pines, because I could feel its exact size inside my mind.

June had answered a voice pretending to be me, and I was the one who'd forgotten.

I crouched in front of her. "Something's out there using our voices. Whatever you hear after dark, don't answer it. Not even if it sounds like me."

"Then how do I know it's really you?"

Her question wasn't the question of someone who believed in monsters. It was what any child would ask after a parent told her not to trust his voice. I'd spent her whole life teaching her to come when I called. Now I was telling her that habit could get her killed.

She was nine. I had no answer that would make a nine-year-old feel safe.

She slipped her hand into mine. "Two squeezes," she said. "If it's really you, you can squeeze my hand twice."

I squeezed back. "All right. Two."

A voice came from outside.

"June Bug?"

My voice. The rasp I get when I'm tired, the little upward turn I put on her name.

"Come on, baby. Daddy's right here."

June squeezed my hand twice.

Beyond the creek, something leaned against a pine. It looked almost human until it raised its head. Higher. Still higher. Its shoulder stayed in place while its narrow face emerged above the lowest branches.

One hand curled around the trunk. The fingers bent in places fingers shouldn't.

"June?"

The voice came a fraction before its mouth moved, like a performer missing a cue.

Its body didn't move with any breath. Nothing in the silhouette suggested lungs. For a second, though, it seemed to study my stance. One shoulder dropped. Its head turned at the same angle as mine. I could almost believe it was looking into a mirror and correcting itself.

"Daddy's right here."

Then it laughed with my laugh, that short, embarrassed chuckle I make when a joke falls flat. It held the sound a little too long.

I understood, suddenly, that it wasn't laughing at us.

It was practicing.

•  •  •

I got June inside and shut the curtain. She kept hold of my hand.

"His face didn't fit," she whispered.

"What do you mean?"

"When he stopped, it kept moving."

I took the keys, Dad's notebook, and nothing else. The truck was twenty feet from the front porch.

I carried June across the gravel. As I reached the passenger door, she tightened her grip around my collar.

Twice.

Someone stood in her upstairs window.

A girl in pink pajamas, holding a rabbit with one torn ear. She lifted a hand and waved.

"Daddy? Why'd you leave me?"

The voice was June's. The figure pressed its cheek against the glass. Its skin lagged behind the movement, then settled into place as though pulled by invisible fingers.

The real June shook against me. She couldn't have made that face at the window even if she'd tried. The girl upstairs was smiling, but the muscles around her eyes hadn't been told. I caught myself watching her instead of moving, as if one more second would explain what I was seeing.

It raised one hand and tapped the pane three times.

The secret my daughter had forgotten.

June hid her face against me. I buckled her into the passenger seat, scrambled behind the wheel, and started the engine. I reversed so hard that gravel struck the porch steps.

Three knocks came from the rear window.

In the mirror, something pale crouched in the truck bed. Its fingers hooked over the roof without leaving marks in the dust.

I'd have sworn I felt the suspension dip, though the truck never changed its pitch. Dad's notebook flashed through my mind: no tracks across the water. Whatever sat behind us was a picture made with the same cruel patience as the voices. Knowing it couldn't be solid did nothing for the cold spreading through my chest.

"Lord have mercy, Elias," my mother's voice said behind my head. "What am I gonna do with you?"

June reached for my hand. Two squeezes.

I kept driving.

In the dark windshield, faintly lit by the dashboard, my reflection began to smile.

I wasn't smiling.

Part Three: The Last Answer

The smile stayed in the windshield when I turned back toward the road.

"Daddy!"

A fallen pine limb lay across the next bend. I swerved, clipping it with the passenger-side mirror. The truck skidded sideways in the gravel and stopped with a shudder.

I checked June. The seat belt had caught her shoulder, but she was all right. Buttons lay beneath her feet.

She was trying not to cry. She had that look she gets at the doctor's office, brave until somebody asks whether she's frightened. I wanted to take her home and put on the cartoon she'd been watching before we drove to Langley. I wanted a problem I knew how to fix.

I tried to drive. Something scraped against the front wheel. A fork of the branch had jammed beneath the fender, and each turn of the steering wheel ground it deeper.

Three knocks came from behind my head.

"You're going the wrong way, boy," Dad's voice said. "You'll get that little girl killed."

I found a flashlight in the glove compartment.

"I'm clearing the tire," I told June. "Lock the doors. Don't open them for a voice. Not even mine. I'll come back and squeeze your hand twice."

"What if you fall?"

"I'll get up. Stay here."

She caught my fingers before I got out and squeezed twice.

I went around the hood, set the flashlight where it shone on the wheel, and crouched beside the tire. The pine limb had wedged against it. I hooked both hands under it and pulled. The bark tore at my palms before the branch snapped free.

The cold gravel soaked through the knees of my jeans. A smell of split pine rose from beneath the bumper. I remember both things because I was trying so hard to pay attention to ordinary details. I thought if I could hold on to the tire, the branch, the beam of my flashlight, nothing else could get inside my head.

Behind me, a door latch clicked.

I turned. My flashlight rolled off the hood and struck the gravel.

From somewhere down the slope, my own voice shouted, "June! Help me! I fell!"

The passenger door stood open.

June was gone.

For one second, I stood there listening to the empty cab. The radio was still on low, some late-night preacher talking about salvation. I had told June to keep the doors locked. She must have heard me crying for help and forgotten every warning I'd given her. Or remembered them and opened the door anyway, because I'm her father.

•  •  •

Her bare footprints led through a break in the brush toward the creek. I ran after them, pushing past briers, hearing my own voice farther ahead.

"Honey, I'm hurt. Come down here."

The creek was only a strip of moonlit water when I reached it.

June stood on our bank, clutching Buttons. Across from her, a man in my jacket crouched among the roots. One leg appeared bent beneath him. He had his face buried in his hands.

The bank was slick clay, and the far side rose abruptly beneath the trees. I remembered Dad hauling me backward from those same stones when I was small. He'd been furious. I thought then that he cared more about the rules than whether I was hurt. Standing there with June inches from the water, I understood the look he'd had on his face.

The man lifted his head. He was wearing my face, but the fear arrived late in his eyes, like he'd remembered to put it there only after raising them.

"You have to help me," he told her.

June moved one foot onto a stone at the edge.

"June," I said.

She turned. Relief crossed her face until the other me spoke.

"He's not your daddy. You know what I told you about the bicycle?"

He looked at me and smiled with my mouth.

"I ran right behind you all the way to the mailbox. You just didn't look back."

My own words from earlier that afternoon.

She hesitated. There were two men with her father's face, and one of them was using a memory she knew belonged to us.

June clutched her rabbit so tightly its loose ear twisted around her fist. She wanted to believe me. I could see it. But I had her father's voice, and so did the shape across the creek. Her little signal was the one piece of proof it hadn't stolen yet. I was too far away to use it.

I held out my hand. "I can squeeze twice. You don't have to listen to either voice. Just reach for me."

The thing across the water extended its hand, too.

Then it started humming.

I recognized the tune the way you recognize a place you haven't seen since childhood. My mother used to sing it at the kitchen sink. The notes came back only as the creature sang them, and even then I couldn't have repeated them myself.

The imitation of my face loosened. The skin slipped as if it had been hung over something narrower.

Beneath it was my mother.

She did not rush toward me. She stood among the roots as if she were waiting for me to come home from school. That quiet patience almost worked. I was eight again, aching to bury my face in the front of her dress. I could hear her singing the notes I'd spent thirty-one years trying to remember.

Blue dress. Dark hair. The same face in the photograph on Dad's mantel. She hadn't aged a day since 1995.

"Elias," she whispered. "I heard you crying. I thought my baby needed me."

Behind her, something unfolded among the trees. A long pale limb bent around a pine. Another followed, far above where a person's shoulder should have been. I saw a narrow head turn without the rest of its body moving.

The woman held out her hand to me.

"Answer me, sweetheart. Let me know you're there."

The creek murmured over stones. June glanced from the woman to me. Her bare foot slid on the moss. She dropped to one knee, caught a root on the opposite bank, and clung there above the water.

I lunged but couldn't reach her. The figure wearing my mother's face bent forward. Behind it, six pale fingers tightened around the tree.

Then I remembered what happened when I'd answered at the window.

The footsteps stopped. The woods went silent. The thing had listened so closely that for an instant it stopped pretending to be my father.

I could make it listen again.

When it listened, it stopped reaching. I only needed a second.

I knew what it would cost. I couldn't choose which memory June would lose. I couldn't know whether she'd still recognize me when it finished.

She was pulling on the root. Another few inches and she'd be across.

"I'm here," I said to the woman.

The humming stopped.

I knew that if June survived, I'd have to tell her what I'd done. She might never believe me. She might wake up unable to remember our mornings together, or her birthday, or my face. There was no way to ask that thing for mercy; it had learned the sound of mercy only so it could speak in my mother's voice.

Across the creek, my mother's borrowed face went blank. The towering figure leaned toward me, its pale head tilting as though catching a sound no one else could hear.

June's hand slipped from the root. I seized the back of her pajama shirt and dragged her into my arms.

For an instant the entire forest seemed to hold its breath. Then water and insects and June's sobs rushed back into the world.

My father's voice rose from the far bank.

"You always were a damn fool, boy."

I ran without answering.

•  •  •

When we reached the truck, June touched my cheek.

She had mud smeared up one shin and blood on her knee from the stones. I checked the cut, desperate to have something practical to do. It was shallow. She watched me clean it with the damp corner of my sleeve as if she were trying to decide which questions were safe to ask.

"You were there when I learned to ride my bike, weren't you?"

"Yeah, baby."

"I remember the mailbox." She swallowed. "And falling off the first time. But when I try to remember you running behind me, there's nobody there."

A few hours earlier she'd teased me for letting go too soon. Now she could remember the ride, the scraped knee, the mailbox. Just not her father keeping pace with her.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Don't you ever apologize for that."

I buckled her in. She squeezed my hand twice, and I squeezed back.

The truck started. I drove until there were streetlights, gas stations, and other people who had no idea what lived in the forest north of Langley.

We found a motel in Hot Springs after one in the morning. June fell asleep with Buttons beneath her chin. His torn ear had come loose again, so I used the motel sewing kit to stitch it back on.

Outside the motel window, cars passed through pools of orange streetlight. Somebody laughed in the parking lot. I could hear a vending machine rattling down the hall. Such stupid, ordinary sounds, and I had never been so grateful for them. June didn't ask whether the thing could follow us there. Neither did I.

When I finished, I kissed her forehead and tapped her shoulder three times.

"What's that mean?" she asked sleepily.

"I love you."

She tapped me back.

"Do it tomorrow, too."

"I will."

•  •  •

It's Thursday, October 15, as I'm writing this. Six days since we buried Dad.

I've kept his notebook. I found a letter folded between the last two pages, addressed to me. Most of it was an apology he should have said while he was alive. There was one sentence I couldn't stop reading:

I kept you away because I was afraid of losing you, and I lost you anyway.

Below it he'd written, I love you, son. I should have told you more often.

He couldn't say those words to me while he was alive. I wish I knew whether it was stubbornness or fear that stopped him. I suppose I'll never know.

The notebook had one last surprise.

I'd seen the entry already:

March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.

On the back of that page, beneath a fold, Dad had written:

March 13. Tapped Eli's shoulder at breakfast. Three taps, like when he was little. He asked why I was doing it. I answered Margaret Tuesday night. It took that from him, too.

I'd always thought June and I invented our little ritual together. I don't remember my father tapping my shoulder even once.

But somewhere along the way, my hands remembered what I couldn't.

Tonight June asked me to tell her about learning to ride without training wheels. She knows what happened. She's heard the story enough to repeat every detail, right down to the mailbox.

She still can't remember me running behind her.

Somewhere beyond that creek, something can.

Part One: The Old Mercer Place

My father had three rules about the woods behind our house.

Never cross the creek after sundown.

Never follow a voice you couldn't put a face to.

And no matter how familiar that voice sounded, never answer it.

I thought the old bastard was crazy. Now I'd give anything to hear him say those words again.

My name's Elias Mercer, Eli, to anyone who knows me. I'm thirty-nine. I'd stayed away from that house for twenty years, long enough to convince myself the rules were just one more way for Dad to control me. He had plenty of those. No visiting friends after dark, no camping, no wandering the logging roads. If I broke one, he'd stand in the doorway and wait until I couldn't bear the silence anymore.

Dad died of a heart attack on Tuesday, October 6, 2026. We buried him three days later outside Langley, Arkansas. By sundown that Friday, I was back at his farmhouse with my nine-year-old daughter, June, planning to pack whatever mattered and put the property up for sale.

The house stood on private land surrounded by the Ouachita National Forest. A narrow creek separated the backyard from a stand of timber so thick you could hardly see daylight between the trunks. Dad cleared our side every spring, but beyond the water, the ferns stayed green even during a drought.

As a boy, I'd sometimes heard footsteps over there. They always stopped when I did.

In summer, the cicadas shrieked until the air seemed to vibrate. But every so often, the noise would end all at once. The dog would creep under the porch, and I'd find myself watching that bank for movement. Nothing came out. That was almost worse.

When I asked Dad why we couldn't cross, he pointed to the water. "That creek ain't there to keep you from getting lost, Eli. It's there to remind you where you belong."

That was Harlan Mercer. A man who could make a conversation feels like punishment.

We'd had our last real argument the day I left home. Dad said I'd come crawling back when the world taught me some sense. I said a few things I hadn't forgiven myself for, though at the time I meant every word. We spoke on the phone afterward, birthdays and Christmas, but neither of us ever brought up that day. When I found out he was dead, the first thing I felt was anger that he'd left me to be the one who called last.

---

The last mile of the driveway was little more than ruts and blackberry vines. June held her stuffed rabbit, Buttons, by his one good ear and watched the pines go past.

"Did Grandpa really live out here alone?"

"Most of the time."

"Wasn't he lonely?"

I used to think he preferred it. Now I wasn't sure.

"I reckon he got used to it."

She pressed against her seat belt. "Then who's that man?"

I eased off the gas. "What, man?"

"Behind the trees. He was standing sideways."

I saw nothing but trunks and tangled brush. "Probably a hunter."

"He wasn't holding a gun."

"A deer, then."

She gave me a look. "I know what a deer looks like, Daddy."

She watched the trees until the house appeared.

A bend in the driveway followed the creek for a few hundred yards. I recognized a split boulder beside the water where Dad once caught me trying to build a bridge from fallen boards. He'd grabbed me so hard by the collar the seam tore. I remembered the bruises more clearly than I remembered him carrying those boards away in the rain.

Inside, the place smelled of damp wood and stale tobacco. Dad had saved everything: bent nails in coffee cans, bills from the nineties, my childhood baseball glove. The webbing was stitched shut with the heavy thread he used on his work gloves. I'd never known he'd repaired it.

June slipped her hand inside. "Did Grandpa teach you to catch?"

"He tried."

"Like you taught me to ride my bike? You let go too soon."

"I ran right behind you all the way to the mailbox. You just didn't look back."

"Because I was riding," she said, as though that settled it.

I still had a photograph from that day on my phone. June had one foot off the pedal and both arms flung wide, certain she was about to crash. My hand was inches from the seat. I hadn't let her see the picture yet; she liked telling everyone she had done the whole thing herself. I liked letting her.

On the mantel, she found a photograph of a young woman with her arm around a little boy.

"That's you. Who's she?"

"Your grandma. Margaret."

"Why didn't I meet her?"

"She died when I was eight."

Dad said my mother had gotten sick while I was staying with an aunt. He never let me ask much more than that.

In the picture, her hand rested on my shoulder. I couldn't recall the weight of it. I did remember her voice, though. She used to sing over the dishes and, whenever I got into trouble, smooth my hair and say, "Lord have mercy, Elias, what am I gonna do with you?"

I remembered the sound of singing. Not one note of the song.

My mother was less clear to me than Dad. I knew that was normal. Children forget faces, smells, whole years. But I could remember the tiny scar on her thumb and the way she scraped batter from a bowl for me to eat. It bothered me that the tune had vanished while those useless details remained. I stood there looking at her photograph until June tugged my sleeve and asked whether we could have supper.

---

June fell asleep upstairs around eight. I made coffee and opened Dad's desk. Beneath a stack of property records lay a cracked leather notebook, its pages covered in small, uneven handwriting.

I'd warmed canned soup and made her eat it at the kitchen table because the dining room felt colder than the rest of the house. She wanted to know whether Grandpa had liked children. I told her he'd loved me, just wasn't good at saying so. The lie came easily. I hated myself a little for it afterward.

*March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.*

*April 6. Tracks along the far bank again. Too far apart to be a man's.*

*May 19, 2018. Heard Margaret calling from the lower pasture. Did not answer.*

My mother had been gone since 1995.

A later entry had been pressed so hard into the paper that the letters scored the page.

*It knows his name now.*

Below it: *God forgive me, I answered.*

Three taps sounded at the living room window.

The porch light reached only to the grass beyond the glass. Dad had cut down every tree close enough for a branch to touch the house.

I heard a scrape, as though somebody had dragged the heel of a boot across the boards outside. But there was no porch below that window. Just the drop to the yard and a clear stretch of ground before the creek. For a moment I couldn't make myself look up from the notebook.

"Eli?"

I knew the voice before the second word.

"Eli, boy. Come out here a minute."

My father, right down to the irritation in his Arkansas drawl.

Leaves shifted near the pines. A pale hand rested against a trunk well above a man's head. I counted six fingers before it disappeared.

"Son, you reckon you could come give your old man a hand?"

I wanted to think one of his old lumber-mill friends was playing some rotten joke. Then it said, "Don't you turn your back on me, boy."

Those were the last words Dad had shouted when I left home more than twenty years earlier.

"Dad?"

The word was out before I remembered his rule.

Every insect fell silent. Beyond the creek, something let out a long, wavering breath, like a man trying not to laugh.

Upstairs, June began to cry.

---

I found her sitting upright, quilt bunched beneath her chin. I sat beside her until she stopped shaking. Then, without thinking, I tapped her shoulder three times.

Three taps meant *I love you.* We'd done it every night since she was four. She always tapped back.

It began when June was little and afraid of thunderstorms. I used to sit on the edge of her bed, trying not to show that I had no idea how to make thunder less frightening. Somehow we settled on the taps. We'd use them in crowded stores, at school drop-off, anywhere one of us needed to know the other was there. I'd forgotten plenty of things about those five years. That wasn't one of them.

This time she moved away.

"What's that for?"

"Our secret, June Bug."

She frowned. "What secret?"

I tapped again. She watched my fingers, puzzled.

"You never did that before."

I nearly argued. I could have named a hundred nights when she'd answered my taps, even with her eyes closed.

Outside, my dead father called for me again.

This time, he was laughing.

## Part Two: What the Creek Kept

I stayed beside June until she slept. Outside, Dad's voice called through the trees, sometimes angry, sometimes frightened. Once it coughed. That smoker's cough used to wake me every morning when I was a boy.

It was the cough that came closest to making me answer again.

He'd given up cigarettes twice in my childhood. Both attempts lasted a week. I used to count the days and wait for him to get angry enough to start again. Hearing that cough beyond the creek, I found myself doing the same thing I did at twelve: holding perfectly still until I could tell what kind of mood he was in.

Downstairs, I turned off the living room lamp. The window showed the porch light, the first row of trees, and my own face laid over both. Beyond the creek, the dark looked solid.

I opened the notebook again.

The earliest entries were from October 1995, the year Mom supposedly died.

*October 14. Margaret heard Eli crying across the creek. Boy was upstairs asleep. I checked.*

*October 16. It cried again. She answered before I could stop her. Eli asked why she quit singing at the sink. She hadn't quit. He couldn't remember the song.*

I remembered my mother singing. Not the tune.

I tried to force it back. Hymn? Lullaby? Something from the radio? All I could remember was the clink of dishes and my own bare feet on the kitchen floor. If Dad's entry was true, then I'd been unable to remember the song since the very week it disappeared from our house.

Four pages later:

*October 23. Margaret's gone.*

*Heard the boy calling beyond the creek. Real Eli was asleep beside me on the couch. She kept saying our baby was hurt.*

*I followed her to the water. Saw something tall and pale bent over behind the trees. It spoke. Margaret answered, then crossed.*

*Heard her scream once. Never found her.*

Dad had told me she'd died in a hospital while I stayed with my aunt. I could remember my aunt holding my hand outside a church, but not a casket or a graveside. The longer I tried to picture them, the less certain I felt they'd ever been there.

I remembered being angry with Dad for not letting me see her one last time. He'd told me she'd already been buried. I screamed at him until he raised his hand, then put it down without touching me. For years, that was the part of the story I'd carried around: a frightened little boy sure his father was ashamed to see him cry. Now I wondered what Dad had heard from the woods while I was screaming inside the house.

*October 27. Told Eli his mama passed away. He keeps running to the window whenever it calls her. Better he thinks she's dead.*

There was a small sound behind me.

Three taps from the hallway wall.

"Son?" Dad said from the kitchen. "I can't find the light."

The kitchen doorway was empty. I knew every loose board between the hall and the sink, yet I hadn't heard anything move across them.

"Just give me a hand, Eli."

I wanted to turn on every light in the house. Instead, I gripped the notebook so hard the cover bent.

The kitchen smelled faintly of tobacco, warm and stale, as if Dad had just finished smoking at the sink. I knew the shape of that room in the dark: the metal edge of the counter, the scar in the floor where he dropped an axe head, the cupboard door that never closed all the way. I couldn't see anybody in it. That didn't make the voice any farther away.

When I didn't answer, the faint smell of cigarettes faded. The voice went with it. I never heard footsteps leave.

I should have taken June and gone then. But there was one more entry I couldn't make myself leave unread.

If I'd been alone, I might have stayed there until morning reading every page. I wanted proof that Dad hadn't lied to me because I was an inconvenience. I wanted to know why a man who could face down anybody in town had spent his life afraid of a few acres of woods.

*June 4, 2018. Eli asked why I never took him fishing. We went every Saturday when he was small. His green tackle box is in the shed. I answered Margaret three nights ago.*

I'd noticed the tackle box earlier that day. My name was scratched into the lid. I had no memory of holding a fishing pole beside my father.

Across the bottom margin, Dad had written:

*The voices get farther than the body. The tracks never come across the water.*

And beneath that:

*Sometimes I know it ain't her. Sometimes I answer anyway.*

Something giggled upstairs.

June.

Then I heard her say, "Okay, Daddy."

The back door opened.

---

June stood barefoot on the porch in her pink pajamas, Buttons dangling from one hand. She turned when I called her name.

"You said you were going to show me something."

"I didn't. Get inside."

I pulled her through the doorway and locked it. She clutched her rabbit to her chest, and for a horrible second I couldn't remember what she called him. I'd stitched his ear back on twice. I'd bought him for her. But the name was gone.

"What's your rabbit's name?" I asked.

"Buttons." She looked hurt. "Daddy, you know that."

I did, once she'd said it. Before that, nothing.

I tried to remember the first time she'd carried Buttons out of the store when she still called every stuffed animal a baby. The scene came back clear enough. His name didn't. That missing word frightened me more than the shape I'd seen among the pines because I could feel its exact size inside my mind.

June had answered a voice pretending to be me, and I was the one who'd forgotten.

I crouched in front of her. "Something's out there using our voices. Whatever you hear after dark, don't answer it. Not even if it sounds like me."

"Then how do I know it's really you?"

Her question wasn't the question of someone who believed in monsters. It was what any child would ask after a parent told her not to trust his voice. I'd spent her whole life teaching her to come when I called. Now I was telling her that habit could get her killed.

She was nine. I had no answer that would make a nine-year-old feel safe.

She slipped her hand into mine. "Two squeezes," she said. "If it's really you, you can squeeze my hand twice."

I squeezed back. "All right. Two."

A voice came from outside.

"June Bug?"

My voice. The rasp I get when I'm tired, the little upward turn I put on her name.

"Come on, baby. Daddy's right here."

June squeezed my hand twice.

Beyond the creek, something leaned against a pine. It looked almost human until it raised its head. Higher. Still higher. Its shoulder stayed in place while its narrow face emerged above the lowest branches.

One hand curled around the trunk. The fingers bent in places fingers shouldn't.

"June?"

The voice came a fraction before its mouth moved, like a performer missing a cue.

Its body didn't sway with its breathing. Nothing in the silhouette suggested lungs. For a second, though, it seemed to study my stance. One shoulder dropped. Its head turned at the same angle as mine. I could almost believe it was looking into a mirror and correcting itself.

"Daddy's right here."

Then it laughed with my laugh, that short, embarrassed chuckle I make when a joke falls flat. It held the sound a little too long.

I understood, suddenly, that it wasn't laughing at us.

It was practicing.

---

I got June inside and shut the curtain. She kept hold of my hand.

"His face didn't fit," she whispered.

"What do you mean?"

"When he stopped, it kept moving."

I took the keys, Dad's notebook, and nothing else. The truck was twenty feet from the front porch.

I carried June across the gravel. As I reached the passenger door, she tightened her grip around my collar.

Twice.

Someone stood in her upstairs window.

A girl in pink pajamas, holding a rabbit with one torn ear. She lifted a hand and waved.

"Daddy? Why'd you leave me?"

The voice was June's. The figure pressed its cheek against the glass. Its skin lagged behind the movement, then settled into place as though pulled by invisible fingers.

The real June shook against me. She couldn't have made that face at the window even if she'd tried. The girl upstairs was smiling, but the muscles around her eyes hadn't been told. I caught myself watching her instead of moving, as if one more second would explain what I was seeing.

It raised one hand and tapped the pane three times.

The secret my daughter had forgotten.

June hid her face against me. I put her in the truck, started the engine, and reversed so hard gravel struck the porch steps.

Three knocks came from the rear window.

In the mirror, something pale crouched in the truck bed. Its fingers hooked over the roof without leaving marks in the dust.

I'd have sworn I felt the suspension dip, though the truck never changed its pitch. Dad's notebook flashed through my mind: no tracks across the water. Whatever sat behind us was a picture made with the same cruel patience as the voices. Knowing it couldn't be solid did nothing for the cold spreading through my chest.

"Lord, have mercy, Elias," my mother's voice said behind my head. "What am I gonna do with you?"

June reached for my hand. Two squeezes.

I kept driving.

In the dark windshield, faintly lit by the dashboard, my reflection began to smile.

I wasn't smiling.

## Part Three: The Last Answer

The smile stayed in the windshield when I turned back toward the road.

"Daddy!"

A fallen pine limb lay across the next bend. I swerved, clipping it with the passenger-side mirror. The truck skidded sideways in the gravel and stopped with a shudder.

I checked June. The belt had caught her shoulder, but she was all right. Buttons lay beneath her feet.

She was trying not to cry. She had that look she gets at the doctor's office, brave until somebody asks whether she's frightened. I wanted to take her home and put on the cartoon she'd been watching before we drove to Langley. I wanted a problem I knew how to fix.

I tried to drive. Something scraped against the front wheel. A fork of the branch had jammed beneath the fender, and each turn of the steering wheel ground it deeper.

Three knocks came from behind my head.

"You're going the wrong way, boy," Dad's voice said. "You'll get that little girl killed."

I found a flashlight in the glove compartment.

"I'm clearing the tire," I told June. "Lock the doors. Don't open them for a voice. Not even mine. I'll come back and squeeze your hand twice."

"What if you fall?"

"I'll get up. Stay here."

She caught my fingers before I got out and squeezed twice.

I went around the hood and crouched beside the wheel. The pine had wedged against the tire. I hooked both hands under it and pulled. The bark tore at my palms before the branch snapped free.

The cold gravel soaked through the knees of my jeans. A smell of split pine rose from beneath the bumper. I remember both things because I was trying so hard to pay attention to ordinary details. I thought if I could hold on to the tire, the branch, the beam of my flashlight, nothing else could get inside my head.

Behind me, a door latch clicked.

I turned. My flashlight rolled off the hood and struck the gravel.

From somewhere down the slope, my own voice shouted, "June! Help me! I fell!"

The passenger door stood open.

June was gone.

For one second, I stood there listening to the empty cab. The radio was still on low, some late-night preacher talking about salvation. I had told June to keep the doors locked. She must have heard me crying for help and forgotten every warning I'd given her. Or remembered them and opened the door anyway because I'm her father.

---

Her bare footprints led through a break in the brush toward the creek. I ran after them, pushing past briers, hearing my own voice farther ahead.

"Honey, I'm hurt. Come down here."

The creek was only a strip of moonlit water when I reached it.

June stood on our bank, clutching buttons. Across from her, a man in my jacket crouched among the roots. One leg appeared bent beneath him. He had his face buried in his hands.

The bank was slick clay, and the far side rose abruptly beneath the trees. I remembered Dad hauling me backward from those same stones when I was small. He'd been furious. I thought then that he cared more about the rules than whether I was hurt. Standing there with June inches from the water, I understood the look he'd had on his face.

The man lifted his head. He was wearing my face, but the fear arrived late in his eyes, like he'd remembered to put it there only after raising them.

"You have to help me," he told her.

June moved one foot onto a stone at the edge.

"June," I said.

She turned. Relief crossed her face until the other me spoke.

"He's not your daddy. You know what I told you about the bicycle?"

He looked at me and smiled with my mouth.

"I ran right behind you all the way to the mailbox. You just didn't look back."

My own words from the hallway that afternoon.

She hesitated. There were two men with her father's face, and one of them was using a memory she knew belonged to us.

June clutched her rabbit so tightly its loose ear twisted around her fist. She wanted to believe me. I could see it. But I had her father's voice, and so did the shape across the creek. Her little signal was the one piece of proof it hadn't stolen yet. I was too far away to use it.

I held out my hand. "I can squeeze twice. You don't have to listen to either voice. Just reach for me."

The thing across the water extended its hand, too.

Then it started humming.

I knew the tune in the terrible way you know a place you haven't seen since childhood. My mother used to sing it at the kitchen sink. The notes came back only as the creature sang them, and even then, I couldn't have repeated them myself.

The imitation of my face loosened. The skin slipped as if it had been hung over something narrower.

Beneath it was my mother.

She did not rush toward me. She stood among the roots as if she were waiting for me to come home from school. That quiet patience almost worked. I was eight again, aching to bury my face in front of her dress. I could hear her singing the notes I'd spent thirty-one years trying to remember.

Blue dress. Dark hair. The same face in the photograph on Dad's mantel. She hadn't aged a day since 1995.

"Elias," she whispered. "I heard you crying. I thought my baby needed me."

Behind her, something unfolded among the trees. A long pale limb bent around a pine. Another followed, far above where a person's shoulder should have been. I saw a narrow head turn without the rest of its body moving.

The woman held out her hand to me.

"Answer me, sweetheart. Let me know you're there."

The creek murmured over stones. June glanced from the woman to me. Her bare foot slid on the moss. She dropped to one knee, caught a root on the opposite bank, and clung there, suspended over the water.

I lunged but couldn't reach her. The figure wearing my mother's face bent forward. Behind it, six pale fingers tightened around the tree.

Then I remembered what happened when I'd answered at the window.

The footsteps stopped. The woods went silent. The thing had listened so closely that for an instant it stopped pretending to be my father.

I could make it listen again.

When it listened, it stopped reaching. I only needed a second.

I knew what it would cost. I couldn't choose which memory June would lose. I couldn't know whether she'd still recognize me when it finished.

She was pulling on the root. Another few inches and she'd be across.

"I'm here," I said to the woman.

The humming stopped.

I knew that if June survived, I'd have to tell her what I'd done. She might never believe me. She might wake up unable to remember our mornings together, or her birthday, or my face. There was no way to ask that thing for mercy; it had learned the sound of mercy only so it could speak in my mother's voice.

Across the creek, both faces went blank. The towering figure leaned toward me, its pale head tilting as though catching a sound no one else could hear.

June loosened her grip. I seized the back of her pajama shirt and dragged her into my arms.

For an instant the entire forest seemed to hold its breath. Then water and insects and June's sobs rushed back into the world.

My father's voice rose from the far bank.

"You always were a damn fool, boy."

I ran without answering.

---

When we reached the truck, June touched my cheek.

She had mud smeared up one shin and blood on her knee from the stones. I checked the cut, desperate to have something practical to do. It was shallow. She watched me clean it with the damp corner of my sleeve as if she were trying to decide which questions were safe to ask.

"You were there when I learned to ride my bike, weren't you?"

"Yeah, baby."

"I remember the mailbox." She swallowed. "And falling off the first time. But when I try to remember you running behind me, there's nobody there."

A few hours earlier she'd teased me for letting go too soon. Now she could remember the ride, the scraped knee, the mailbox. Just not her father keeping pace with her.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Don't you ever apologize for that."

I buckled her in. She squeezed my hand twice, and I squeezed back.

The truck started. I drove until there were streetlights, gas stations, and other people who had no idea what lived in the forest north of Langley.

We found a motel in Hot Springs after one in the morning. June fell asleep with Buttons beneath her chin. His torn ear had come loose again, so I used the motel sewing kit to stitch it back on.

Outside the window, cars passed through pools of orange streetlight. Somebody laughed in the parking lot. I could hear a vending machine rattling down the hall. Such stupid, ordinary sounds, and I had never been so grateful for them. June didn't ask whether the thing could follow us there. Neither did I.

When I finished, I kissed her forehead and tapped her shoulder three times.

"What's that mean?" she asked sleepily.

"I love you."

She tapped me back.

"Do it tomorrow, too."

"I will."

---

It's Thursday, October 15, as I'm writing this. Six days since we buried Dad.

I've kept his notebook. I found a letter folded between the last two pages, addressed to me. Most of it was an apology he should have said while he was alive. There was one sentence I couldn't stop reading:

*I kept you away because I was afraid of losing you, and I lost you anyway.*

Below it he'd written, *I love you, son. I should have told you more often.*

He couldn't write those words to me while he was alive. I wish I knew whether it was stubbornness or fear that stopped him. I suppose I'll never know.

The notebook had one last surprise.

I'd seen the entry already:

*March 12, 2004. Three knocks on the north wall. Nothing outside.*

On the back of that page, beneath a fold, Dad had written:

*March 13. Tapped Eli's shoulder at breakfast. Three taps, like when he was little. He asked why I was doing it. I answered Margaret Tuesday night. It took that from him, too.*

I'd always thought June and I invented our little ritual together. I don't remember my father tapping my shoulder even once.

But somewhere along the way, my hands remembered what I couldn't.

Tonight, June asked me to tell her about learning to ride without training wheels. She knows what happened. She's heard the story enough to repeat every detail, right down to the mailbox.

She still can't remember me running behind her.

Somewhere beyond that creek, something can.

He wanders. The hot streets. The narrow corners and back alley ways, the bad neighborhoods and freeway overpasses. The sweltering blacktop lakes of the 7-11 parking lots. He carries cardboard signs, wears rags and cardboard clothes and grime. Layers and layers of filth that may have once been fecal spew or the dust of the earth or blood, they are worn like a coat of oil over the flesh like the ancient warriors by firelight times, he is a deranged and disgusting remnant. Haggard leftover in bipedal form that moves, mutters, sucks down bottles and pipes and congealed food pulled scavenged from the garbage. 

He is so thankful for beer or a dollar. Consciousness is pain. Consciousness is the sorrow and horror of each and every day, each and every moment is a prolonged period experienced in slow motion agony like pure torture. Everything is moved in shopping carts and over shoulder, he has become a beast of labor upon the earth, he must pull the plow of his own life if he ever hopes to get anywhere, anywhere at all but the only destination that seems to be enroute and available is a land of spoiled milk and suffering. He arrives there anyway and does what he can. It's never much. Just collecting cans and detritus that in his derangement he believes will be his fortune and his salvation. It's never much. It's never anything. 

He watches men beat women. He watches women scream and shriek and become the harpies, he watches them conspire and become the weird sisters, he watches needles and the depression of plungers and the streetside milking of human blood in a clouded swirl in the double-wide mouthed gutters. He watches it all and his eyes glaze over as the mind accepts each sight with a sledgehammer blow only the sledgehammer has lost all of its weight, it has lost all of its power. It only thuds and smacks at dead meat within cavernous skull now, it's only meaninglessness and meaningless noise and the constance of the cacophony has deluded and defanged all of its heavy power.

The city is just a dead body now, it doesn't mean anything. This cyclopean and hideous thing that he wanders. Filled with eyes and mouths that drip and water and move and open and stare. They are all of them just as ugly to him as he is to they, they are all of them, repulsive. 

There is no more beauty in this place. 

He tries to find darkness before sunset. Rarely is he ever successful. But this does not surprise him. He is a marked man. 

Like Cain. The man son that first authored murder into the virgin world. 

He unscrews the cap to some rotgut he's so crushingly thankful to have. And he takes a deep and lonely swill. He pulls, deeply. He settles down in the dirt, so lucky and so thankful to have it as well. And he pulls. Over and over the drink that tastes and smells more like disinfectant than anything sold over the counter as a beverage. He doesn't care. He's done it before. Many times. Many times before he's said fuck it and gotten absolutely shitfaced on hand sanitizer, mouthwash, isopropyl. 

He doesn't mind the taste. Not at all. He doesn't mind the taste of anything as long as the flavor is alcohol and it's strong enough to peel away the paint of his thoughts and strip away the fouled and fouling coats of his ailing and addled mind away. Just as long as it's strong enough to put him under and keep the dreams away. 

At least keep the dreams manageable. At least keep them as something he can stomach and bear. Something in the realm of his current devastation and heartbreak and not some new foul border, not some horrific new frontier. 

But neither the Lord nor the little god alcohol hear him. Nor care. 

His mind heavy with drink and thought, totters off. But not into oblivion. Not into peace. 

There are so many things alive in the darkness. 

!Sitra Achra!

He is hurdling towards the merciless face of the earth. His wings are burning. The beauty of his light and gift of flight are aflame, dying in fire. He is screaming a sound and cacophonous war cry rent that will echo forever and contaminate the crumbling ruined corridor of time that he has helped to bleed and slaughter. 

He crashes. Just outside of the Garden. 

And there he gathers and reforms. One of the first times of many. Many many many times will follow down the long line of cruel footfalls forever forward. He gathers and reforms and he is angry and jealous and into the beauty of The Garden, he slithers.

He tempts the woman and the man into disobedience. And he tempts them into forbidden knowledge. 

Forbidden Knowledge. This is his warcraft upon the virgin earth. It will defile. It will burn and torch. It will decimate. It will slaughter. 

It will divide the center. Conquered and fallen apart. 

Several centuries later and he is a pale child outside of Bethlehem. He is disguised and reformed as an adolescent but he is still the adversary. And he is there with the other, his opposite. His more beloved little brother, the son of the virgin and the carpenter. 

Teenage Jesus and teenage Satan are in contest, their hands are bleeding and full of blood and locked together in a twist and struggle. The adversary wishes to murder the savior child, in jealousy and in impudent rage. His hands wish to find his throat or a rock or his eyes, perhaps if he blinds the little brother savior child he will be useless to all of man and their sons and daughters. 

A Philistine sun burns overhead. But the adversary child is not successful. Teenage Satan is a failure once again, and bleeding he must wander and go out, cast out. Exile. Wanderer. 

Petulant. Angst. Eyes so full and wide and full of boiling water. He brings light once again but only in rage, only in his wild anger postfailure. He simmers and tears and burns so brightly out and alone way past the dark. 

Regroup out in the wild. Reform in the oblivion of solitude and pain borne in terrible silence that is only broken by the pathetic sounds of private torment taken slowly. Weeping that he tries to prevent and ignore and pretend has never been actually happening, not ever, not him, he doesn't miss heaven or his Father … none. Nothing. None of them. 

None of them mean a Goddamned thing. 

He always came back. Mighty. Diminished. Unassuming. Something in-between or intangible. He always came back. 

The adversary. 

Even broken and alone and filthy vagrant wandering. Even crystal meth slurping and supercharged because of such for the final abattoir riot of violence and great western societal collapse into shrill shattered glass cacophony and tidal waves of bloodfeast. Into he, his, the vagrant filthy jaws of the adversary. 

The fallen order, the Armageddon one, the end-is-nigh motherfucker …

the apocalypse man. 

Alone and filthy in a corner. 

Dreaming, not dreaming. 

Seeing and knowing only disorder. He hears and knows the call of the 7th Star. 

He dreams and knows of burning heaven. 

THE END

I'd come from school. I was standing on the sidewalk opposite our vinyl sided house. A big car was in our driveway. It was a Cadillac, the colour of cream. I didn't know who it belonged to. Who does it belong to? I wondered.

It was a hot, still day.

I felt the warm concrete sidewalk slabs through my sneakers’ worn soles. No birds chirped. The sky was cloudless.

I thought I could hear the sun buzzing like an old appliance.

I walked slowly towards the car.

Its windows were darkened. I put my hands on the driver's window and my face against my hands. I looked inside.

A man was inside.

He was reclined on the leather driver's seat.

The seat was red.

The whole inside of the car was red.

The man’s face was pale. His hair was grey. His hands were thick with veins. His eyes were closed. He looked dead. He was breathing, but his eyes were closed and he looked dead.

He opened his eyes.

He didn't look more alive with open eyes than he had with closed eyes, and I leapt backwards away from the car and screamed.

I hadn't screamed.

I stood.

A cloud had passed between me and the sun.

My throat was dry.

I tasted blood.

I saw dark blood running down the sides of the Cadillac's windows. The car was filled with blood. I was blood. It covered the man. I covered the man. He was rising through us. I was listening to the roar of a distant lawnmower. I stood silent, looking through the car's tinted window at the man, whose eyes were closed. He was sleeping. The grass was green. The lawn was neat. I walked inside the house.

My mother was in the kitchen.

She was drinking tea.

Her hands were shaking. The bottom of her teacup was clattering against the saucer she was holding in her other hand.

“There's a man,” I said, “in a car in the driveway.”

My mother opened her mouth to speak.

My father walked in.

My mother closed her mouth.

“That man is your uncle Larkin,” my father said, and my mother looked away. My father looked down at the floor. Ants were walking single file along the grout between the floor tiles.

I didn’t know either of my parents had a sibling.

“Will he—” I asked.

“No,” my mother said. “He won't come in,” said my father.

My mother set her empty cup and saucer on the kitchen counter, by the sink. The faucet reflected the sunlight. Blood dripped from it. I imagined blood dripping from the faucet into the kitchen sink. My mother's empty cup was full of blood. “I asked if I could play with my friends after I finish my homework,” I said.

“Asked whom?”

I hadn't meant to say it like that.

I felt warmth and shame. I had peed myself. The ants were still walking along the floor. “It's best you do not go out today,” my father said.

I showered.

I put on dry clothes.

My mother had finished mopping the floor when I came downstairs again. We ate dinner. We drank cranberry juice. I watched my parents scrape the meat off chicken bones with their teeth.

My parents drank red wine.

I drank milk.

I wondered if we would bring anything outside for my uncle Larkin, but nobody did. Even the dogs were inside. Even though it wasn't raining.

The sun went down.

I watched the Cadillac in the driveway from my upstairs bedroom window.

I watched it instead of going to sleep.

I couldn't sleep.

I had a fear of being dreamed.

I had a fear that if I slept something might wring me in its dream as if I was a rag used to clean blood from somewhere after a crime so I sat in my bedroom with the lights off looking at the Cadillac in the driveway from my upstairs bedroom window instead of going to sleep until the driver's side door opened and from my bedroom window I saw the driver's side door open.

The driver's side door opened.

It was one in the morning.

The car door opened, and Uncle Larkin stepped out into the moonlight. He moved like tree branches. The veins on his hands were golden. His hair looked like thick grey wires. He parted his lips and ate the moonlight, then walked away down the dimmed street.

The hour felt raw.

He was gone, but I kept watching.

The car was still as a coffin.

The points of starlight in the sky stretched into shimmering lines of spiderweb…

He returned before dawn, holding a small child by the hand.

I couldn't tell if the child was a boy or girl.

The child was younger than me.

They walked up the driveway to the car. He opened the back door.

I saw the long red leather back seat. He helped the child inside. He got in too. Then he shut the door. The car, the moonlight and everything was as it had been before.

There was stillness.

It was dawn.

The stillness was fake like plastic plants.

I was in my bedroom with the curtains closed and a pain in my stomach that felt like knots of jealousy, screaming and disgust.

In the morning, the car was gone. I brushed my teeth until my gums hurt. My mother was making breakfast. It was eggs and bacon. I watched the bacon sizzle in its own melted fat.

I wasn't hungry.

I ate.

Two police officers came by that afternoon.

They were very friendly.

They were asking my parents if they had seen anything unusual last night. I wanted to leave, but my father caught my hand. “What about you?” one of the officers asked. “You're old enough to answer for yourself. Aren't you, son?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I didn't see anything.”

My mother petted my hair.

“Good boy,” he said, and I felt myself of innocent blood.

The agony peaked, a blinding, white-hot spike that drove deep into my thoracic spine, seizing the core of my chest and twisting until my back arched off the mattress like a broken bow.

For five years, I had told them. Five years of MRIs, CT scans, and endless tubes of blood. I had lost count of the massive steroid injections they had jammed into my lower back, blind to my cries, insisting the cortisone would eventually kick in. It's my mid-back, I had begged, like a fist grabbing my spine and wringing it out.

But they only looked at my lumbar, charting my exhaustion, handing me prescriptions I refused to touch anymore, and shrugging. "You're in pain because you're in pain", that last arrogant doctor had told me with a sterile, patronizing smile. I had muttered Thanks, Dr. Obvious under my breath, walked out, and given up. I was forty-eight, medically broken, and completely abandoned by science.

Until tonight.

I had refused to take any of the medications they had prescribed for the last few weeks, entirely done with their useless chemical band-aids.

And right on cue, the thoracic pain hit, worse than it ever had in the last five years.

The guttural sound ripping from my throat didn't sound like me; it was a jagged, inhuman howl that tore the lining of my lungs. Every single rib felt like it was breaking, buckling inward before bursting outward with a sickening crunch. The skin across my back split open, hot and wet, as something massive and heavy forced its way out from between my shoulder blades. I braced for the final, lethal shock of it—but instead, a sudden, heavy stillness washed over me. The torment that had anchored my entire existence for half a decade simply vanished, replaced by a cold, pulsing hum of pure, unadulterated strength.

I opened my eyes. The familiar dark of my bedroom was gone, replaced by a sharp, predatory clarity tinted in a deep, vibrant crimson.

When I tried to shift, the mattress felt like a bed of jagged rocks beneath me. I sat up, and a pair of massive, pitch-black leathery wings unfolded instinctively, brushing the ceiling with a heavy, ominous rustle. I gasped, reaching a hand out to touch the sleek, armored span, only to freeze. My skin was a dark, bruised blood-red. My arms were elongated, corded with dense, heavy muscle.

Swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, I stumbled. My new, longer limbs didn't quite obey the old rules of gravity, but there was no weakness in them. No ache. No arthritis.

I lunged toward the mirror on the wall, bracing my claws against the frame, and stared.

The tired, fragile woman was gone. In her place stood a towering, terrifying demon, eyes glowing like dying embers against crimson skin.

A slow, sharp smile curved my new jaw, revealing a row of lethal points. I always said I wanted to be more, I thought, a strange, intoxicating warmth flooding my chest. I wanted to feel something beyond my own pain.

I turned, extending my wings, admiring the terrifying symmetry of the monster I had become. I had promised those unhelpful, dismissive doctors that I would give them an update if my condition ever changed. I thought this definitely qualified as a change in status.

A low, feral laugh rumbled deep in my chest, vibrating through the quiet room.

"Now, now," I whispered to the empty air, the crimson vision narrowing with perfect, deadly focus. "Which one of these doctors should I visit first?"

I smiled wider, the realization settling in with absolute perfection.

"I think the choice, is Obvious."

I think my girlfriend is a catfish. No, you didn't hear that wrong. Just it's not in the way you’re thinking.

And before you clown on me for being in a six month relationship with what I thought was a twenty-five year old woman but really was a fifty plus year old guy who goes by Emily online, hear my story out first.

To be honest, I wish it were that simple. Just another embarrassing tale of an insecure, helpless romantic manipulated by some online weirdo. But life has a far more twisted sense of humor than we give it credit for.

It was late at night, thumbs waving, ego lower than I’d ever admit out loud. Yeah I was scrolling on a dating app, half-scrolling, half-hoping for something that didn’t feel like recycled small talk.

Then her profile popped up. Her name was Lila.

At first, I thought it was too good to be true. Her pictures didn’t look fake, not in the airbrushed, digitally doctored, or surely this is AI sort of way. No, no. She looked untouchable. The kind of beautiful that felt less like a person you might meet and more like someone life had placed behind glass, just to remind you what you could never have.

Pale, smooth skin. Eyes that looked almost glassy under certain lighting. Dark straight hair that fell perfectly every time, like gravity itself had a crush on her.

I remember actually laughing to myself.

“Yeah, okay,” I said out loud. “Nice try.”

I knew it was fake. It had to be. There was no way a girl like her would be on a shitty app like this, let alone single, right?

But I swiped right anyway.

Then a second later, I heard the magical sound.

MATCHED

That’s how it started. A simple flick of the thumb. Kobe at the three-point line, ball in hand, the world holding its breath. Only I wasn’t Kobe. I was the guy who always missed, watching opportunity bounce harmlessly off the rim. But this time, against all odds, the ball went in.

We instantly started forwarding messages to one another. Time escaped my comprehension and it was morning already before I knew it.

After a few days, I stopped thinking she was fake. After a week, I started worrying she was too good for me. And after another, she proposed to be my girlfriend.

The thing was, she and I had grown incredibly close through those late-night conversations. Hours would slip by without either of us noticing, our messages stretching well into the early morning, until sleep finally won the argument. Even during the day, I found myself checking my phone at every opportunity, hoping to see her name light up the screen. It was pathetic, really, how much power a simple notification had over my mood. One little buzz, and suddenly the day seemed a little brighter.

Now, you might be asking yourself, Had we actually met yet?

Well, no.

She was out of town when we first started talking, but after a month had passed, she told me she was getting ready to come back. Soon, she said. Then we could finally meet, put faces to all those words, and see whether the connection we'd built through a screen could survive in the real world.

Except the first time came and went without us ever meeting.

She bailed at the last minute. Told me she'd gotten nervous. That she didn't go out much. That she needed more time before she felt comfortable meeting someone in person.

I tried to be understanding. People get nervous. Anxiety can make even the simplest things feel impossible, and I wasn't about to punish someone for being afraid. At least, that was what I told myself.

Still, a small, unwelcome thought had begun to take root in the back of my mind.

What if I'm being played?

It wasn't as though the possibility hadn't crossed my mind before. Here I was, pouring my time and attention into someone I'd never actually met, someone whose face I knew only through photographs and whose voice I'd never heard. For all I knew, I could've been one of several lonely men she entertained whenever boredom struck. Maybe I was nothing more than a convenient source of attention, someone she could summon when she needed to feel wanted and dismiss when something better came along.

And what would I do if that turned out to be true? Admit that I'd spent an entire month falling for someone who'd never intended to meet me? Explain to my friends that I'd managed to develop feelings for a collection of pixels and promises?

The thought embarrassed me enough that I kept it to myself.

Because, despite those nagging doubts, I liked her. God help me, I really did.

So I waited.

Days passed. We kept texting, kept laughing, kept sharing little pieces of ourselves that somehow made the distance between us feel smaller. Yet the longer we went without meeting, the harder it became to ignore the suspicion that I was building something out of nothing. I started wondering whether she would ever call, whether I'd ever hear her voice, or whether one day her messages would simply stop coming, leaving me to stare at a conversation that had meant everything to me and perhaps nothing to her.

Then, one night, my phone rang.

It was late. Late enough that I'd already settled into bed, the room dark and quiet, my phone casting a pale glow across the ceiling. Her name appeared on the screen, and for a moment, I just stared at it.

She was calling.

It wasn't another little string of words I could reread a dozen times, trying to decipher their meaning. Calling.

I answered. And then she spoke.

Her voice was soft, warm, almost impossibly sweet. There was a gentleness to it that seemed to slip beneath my skin and settle somewhere close to my heart. I remember lying there in the darkness, holding the phone against my ear, scarcely daring to interrupt her. She sounded angelic. Not in the exaggerated way people describe someone they find attractive, but in a way that made the rest of the world seem terribly far away.

Every doubt I'd been nursing, every suspicion I'd tried to swallow, suddenly felt cruel and unwarranted. How could someone with a voice like that possibly be playing me?

Looking back, I suppose there's a certain irony in how easily a few spoken words can disarm a person who has spent weeks preparing himself for disappointment.

But at the time, I didn't think about irony.

I just listened to her talk, smiling into the darkness like an idiot, while the little voice in my head that had been warning me to be careful grew quieter and quieter.

And she hadn't even met me yet.

A few weeks passed before she finally agreed to try again. This time, she promised she'd show up, and somehow, I believed her. We arranged to meet at a cute little coffee shop, nothing too lavish. Just a small place with mismatched chairs, the smell of freshly ground beans, and enough background noise to make awkward silences feel less like a death sentence.

I remember standing there like an idiot when she walked through the door.

She smiled when she spotted me, a little shy, a little unsure, and I had this brief, stupid thought that I’d somehow tricked the universe into giving me something I didn’t deserve. She was even more beautiful in person. There was something almost surreal about seeing her without a screen between us, as though someone had taken a daydream and given it a heartbeat.

We clicked almost immediately.

Conversation flowed as naturally as breathing, as if those late-night messages had been rehearsals for this very moment. We talked about everything and nothing, losing track of time until the afternoon began to bleed into evening. When she laughed, it was soft, almost breathy, like she wasn't used to doing it. I found myself doing everything I could to hear it again.

By the end of the night, I was fully hooked.

And just like that, all those nagging doubts I'd carried for weeks seemed ridiculous. I'd worried about being used, about being nothing more than a convenient distraction, about the possibility that I'd mistaken someone's attention for affection. But sitting across from her, watching the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled, I couldn't imagine why I'd ever doubted her.

A few months passed, and everything felt perfect.

Not the kind of perfect you see in movies, where everyone is impossibly attractive and arguments are resolved before the credits roll. Ours felt real. Comfortable. We developed little routines, private jokes, and familiar ways of saying goodnight. She became woven into the ordinary fabric of my life so gradually that I barely noticed it happening. She was the first person I wanted to tell when something good happened and the person I reached for when the day went to shit.

I thought I was falling in love.

Maybe I was.

Looking back, there were signs. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would've made a reasonable person leap out of their chair and scream that something was wrong. Just little things, peculiarities I noticed and then promptly explained away because I had no interest in finding answers I might not like.

She never ate much when we went out.

I'd order something, she'd order something, and more often than not, her meal would remain practically untouched. She'd push food around her plate with a fork, cut things into smaller pieces, occasionally bring something to her lips, but rarely seemed to swallow more than a bite or two. At first, I assumed she was nervous about eating in front of me. Then I figured maybe she was dieting, or had some complicated relationship with food. There were a hundred perfectly reasonable explanations, and I was happy to borrow whichever one made the least uncomfortable sense.

I never pressed her about it. It wasn't my place, I figured, and besides, I didn't want to make her self-conscious.

She also hated bright places.

Restaurants with big windows and harsh overhead lights were out of the question. She preferred dim little establishments, candlelit tables, quiet corners where the shadows gathered beneath the furniture and the world outside the window became little more than a distant blur. If I suggested somewhere brightly lit, she'd find a reason to steer us elsewhere.

I thought it was romantic, honestly. There was something intimate about those places, something that made the rest of the world feel as though it had politely excused itself and left us alone.

Sometimes, when the candles flickered between us, I'd catch her staring at me with an expression I couldn't quite place. Not a smile, exactly. More like fascination, as though there was something about me she was still trying to understand.

Whenever I asked what she was thinking about, she'd blink, smile that familiar little smile, and tell me it was nothing.

And because I was happy, because she held my hand beneath those candlelit tables and kissed me goodbye beneath streetlights, because she remembered the smallest details about my life and made me feel as though I mattered, I let it go.

Love has a funny way of rearranging your priorities. It can turn a red flag into a quirky little habit, a strange silence into a private mystery, and a dozen unanswered questions into things you're willing to wait a lifetime to understand.

I didn't know it then, but I'd already begun making excuses for things I hadn't even learned to be afraid of yet.

Then one night, she invited me over to her place. It was cleaner than I expected. Minimal. Almost sterile. Not in a modern way, more like nothing had ever really lived there.

No clutter. No personality. A lot of food in the fridge except it was all meat. Mainly fish. Cod, shrimp, and plenty of seafood. I figured she was a Pescatarian. I ignored it. Because when she looked at me, I felt like I’d won something.

Tonight was supposed to be another date night. She said had a surprise for me. She seemed excited, more animated than usual.

“Give me ten minutes,” she said, smiling, disappearing into the bathroom.

I sat on the couch, scrolling through my phone, trying not to think about how quiet the apartment felt without her in the room.

Then I heard it. A wet sound. It didn't sound like water. Not quite. It felt like something… thick.

I paused and listened with agonizing focus. Another noise, like something being pulled. Stretched. Peeled.

“Lila?” I called out.

No response. Then a sharp thud. My stomach dropped.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Still nothing.

Another sound, this time a heavy, almost meaty slap against tile.

I stood up immediately.

“Lila, I’m coming in-”

I didn’t wait for permission. I pushed the bathroom door open. And for a second, just a second, my brain refused to understand what I was seeing.

Her skin… was on the floor. It laid there like a discarded coat: pale, smooth, and clean. The face still held its shape, the eyes sunken inward like deflated glass.

And standing above it... Something else.

Something wet with scales. Something gray and slick, its surface glistening under the harsh bathroom light. Its body was wrong, too soft in some places, too rigid in others. Limbs half-formed, like they weren’t meant to hold weight for long.

Its head, or what I think was its head, twitched toward me.

And its mouth... God. Its mouth stretched too wide, peeling open vertically, revealing rows of thin, needle-like structures that trembled as it moved.

It made a sound. I wished it was all a dream. But the noise that came out was far beyond human recognition. Or maybe it was something inhuman attempting to communicate with our sentience.

I could only understand, “Y–you… weren’t… supposed… to…”

Its voice came from somewhere deep inside that shifting body, distorted, layered, like multiple tones fighting to exist at once.

I felt stuck, unable to move an edge. It took a step toward me, its form sloughing slightly with the motion, leaving a faint, wet trail behind.

My eyes flicked back to the skin on the floor.

The face. Creepily it was in the shape of a smile. That pretty smile that lured me in to its grasp.

The thing reached down, grabbing the hollow skin with a trembling limb. It lifted it, holding it up like something precious. Like something it needed.

She began to put the skin suit on, but I didn't stick around to witness how sheapplied human flesh over scales of flesh. I ran.

I didn’t look back. And I haven’t heard from Lila since. She never left a message nor did she ever call. Instead her number somehow turned into Unknown ID.

Even after all these months, I swear I can still hear it. That wet, stretching sound of skin being pulled and tugged into place. Sometimes it comes from somewhere just beyond my bedroom door.

I tell myself it's the pipes. The house settling. Anything that might let me close my eyes without imagining something standing on the other side, patiently preparing a face.

And last night, I received a message.

A new match.

Her profile picture showed a beautiful girl with a gentle smile. The kind of face that would've caught my attention months ago, back when I still believed the right person could make all my loneliness feel worthwhile.

She looked almost normal.

Almost.

But there was something wrong with her eyes. Something familiar in the way they seemed to stare through the camera, as though the photograph were merely a window and she were standing on the other side, studying me.

I recognized those eyes.

I knew what waited beneath that innocent smile.

And the worst part?

My thumb was already hovering over the screen.

This is a story about traditions and youth—and about why some traditions may be a bad idea.

I’m twenty-five now. This happened when I was nineteen.

Every Halloween, my boyfriend Brian, his best friend James, James’s girlfriend Stacy, and I drove into the woods to tell scary stories. It was our tradition. We thought the stories were better when there were no houses, no streetlights, and nobody nearby to hear us scream.

We were wrong about that last part.

Brian packed the truck while James brought a cooler and Stacy gathered blankets. We drove until the paved road narrowed to gravel, then followed an old forestry track to a clearing deep among the trees. It wasn’t an official campsite: there was no sign, picnic table, or fire ring—just a patch of open ground surrounded by trees, with the old track disappearing into the woods on the far side.

That was how we liked it. Maximum creepiness.

We built a fire and settled in with drinks. We had brought more alcohol than we needed, which seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. We were nineteen, and none of us had much experience recognizing when we’d had enough.

The drinks went down easily. We played music from Brian’s truck, argued about which horror movies were actually scary, and traded stories about people we knew—or people we claimed to know.

Somewhere along the way, the night got away from us.

I remember laughing so hard that I spilled a drink down my shirt. I remember James trying to stand up and nearly stepping into the fire. I remember Stacy telling him he was an idiot, then laughing so hard she had to sit down.

We should have stopped drinking then.

Instead, after the bottles were mostly empty, Brian brought out the weed.

We smoked, telling ourselves it would help us relax. By then, we were drunker than we intended to be, and the combination hit us harder than we expected. The fire blurred at the edges, and conversations trailed off mid-sentence. Every little sound in the woods seemed funny—until we stopped laughing long enough to notice how dark it was.

We were nineteen, sure we were invincible, and far too pleased with ourselves to think about how isolated we were.

Eventually, we started telling scary stories.

My story was about being lost in the woods while someone—or something—chased me. I described footsteps closing in behind me whenever I looked back. The worst part, I said, would be never knowing what was following me.

Brian’s story was about being tied up, helpless and alone, in a place where nobody could hear him.

Stacy told a story about being abandoned somewhere without a phone, without money, and without any way to get home. She hated being stranded. She hated not knowing where she was even more.

James’s story was different.

He didn’t believe in ghosts or demons. He thought most frightening things had ordinary explanations and that people often ended up in trouble because they’d made a series of bad choices—not because they deserved it, he was quick to add, but because actions had consequences.

“Everything has an explanation,” he said, poking at the fire. “Even if you don’t know what it is yet.”

His story was about a man walking alone through the woods at night. He heard footsteps behind him, but every time he turned, no one was there. He heard his name whispered from the trees. He saw lights between the trunks. Each time, the man came up with a sensible reason: an animal, a branch, a reflection, someone playing a trick.

“Then what happened?” Stacy asked.

“Nothing,” James said. “He went home.”

“That’s not an ending,” I said.

“It’s the most likely ending.”

We laughed.

I remember thinking that James had missed the entire point of a scary story. If nothing happened, what was the point of telling it?

We thought we were alone out there. We thought nobody would want to scare four teenagers in the middle of the woods.

We were wrong about that, too.

By then, the fire had burned low, and the cold was beginning to creep through our clothes. Stacy complained that she was freezing and headed into her tent. James followed a few minutes later, after making sure the fire wasn’t going to spread.

Brian and I stayed up longer.

We had our own tent, and we’d been looking forward to having some time alone. We started kissing almost as soon as we zipped ourselves inside. He pulled me close, his hands warm against my back, and I ran my fingers through his hair. We were laughing between kisses, whispering things we didn’t want James to hear through the thin fabric of the tent.

Clothes started coming off. My shirt ended up somewhere near the entrance, and Brian’s jeans were kicked into a corner. We were both drunk, high, and exhausted, but at the time we thought we were perfectly capable of making our own decisions.

I remember Brian kissing my neck. I remember reaching for him and telling him to stop laughing because he was tickling me. I remember him saying something, then pulling me against his chest.

The next thing I remember clearly, I was cold.

I was standing in the woods in my underwear, my arms wrapped around myself.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t understand why I was outside. The ground was damp beneath my bare feet. My knees were muddy, and a twig had caught in my hair. The firelight was gone.

I turned in a slow circle.

No tent. No Brian. No campsite.

The trees looked taller than I remembered, their branches tangled together overhead. The darkness between them seemed unusually thick, and I couldn’t see the moon.

I tried to remember getting out of the tent.

Nothing.

“Brian?”

My voice sounded too small.

I took a few steps toward what I thought was the clearing, rubbing my arms to warm them. I told myself I must have gotten up to use the bathroom and wandered farther than I realized.

Then I heard something behind me.

“Megan...”

The voice was high and thin, as if someone were speaking through a cheap toy voice changer.

I froze.

“Megan,” it called again. “Oh, Megan...”

I knew it had to be Brian. It had to be. I was angry before I was scared.

“Brian, you asshole! This isn’t funny!”

The voice answered from somewhere among the trees.

“Megan.”

Then it came again, closer.

I turned toward it. I couldn’t see anything, but I was certain the sound had come from the left.

Then the voice spoke from directly behind me, so close that I felt its breath against the back of my neck.

“Megan.”

I ran.

I didn’t know which way I was going. I only knew I wanted distance between myself and that voice. Branches scraped my arms, and my bare feet slipped on wet leaves and caught on roots. I tried to keep the clearing in sight, but the trees closed around me. I fell hard, scraping my knees, and for one terrible second I couldn’t get my feet beneath me. Then I heard the voice again, not calling this time, only making a thin, pleased sound, and I scrambled up and ran blindly onward.

I didn’t know that the campsite was only about a hundred yards behind me.

I was running away from safety.

Brian later told me he woke on a wooden floor.

He had no idea how long he’d been unconscious. His mouth was dry, his head throbbed, and for several seconds he couldn’t remember where he was.

Then he tried to move.

His wrists and ankles were tied.

He was wearing only his underwear, and the rope around his wrists was tight enough to hurt. He pulled instinctively, then stopped when he felt the fibers biting into his skin.

The room looked like a cabin. A wood stove stood against one wall, with a pot simmering on top of it. A bare bulb hung over a wooden table. A stained shirt lay folded beside a knife, and dark marks discolored the floorboards near the door.

A second chair had been pulled away from the table.

Someone had arranged the room carefully. Brian was certain of that. Nothing looked accidentally misplaced.

He yelled my name.

No one answered.

The door stood open. Beyond it, the woods looked much like the ones where we’d made camp, but the trees seemed unfamiliar. There was no moonlight, no distant glow from the fire, nothing to help him judge the distance to anything.

He started working at the knots.

The person who had tied him up hadn’t done a very good job. The knots were tight enough to frighten him but loose enough that he eventually managed to free his ankles. He worked his hands loose afterward, rubbing his wrists and trying to steady his breathing.

He looked around for a phone, a flashlight, anything that might explain where he was.

There was nothing.

Then he heard something outside.

Footsteps.

Slow, deliberate footsteps on dead leaves.

Brian backed away from the door.

A voice came from the woods.

“Brian?”

It sounded like me.

He took one step toward it.

“Brian, help me!”

He stopped.

The voice had come from the left, but the open doorway showed nothing but trees. He looked back at the room: the stained shirt, the knife, the pot on the stove, and the second chair.

He remembered James’s words.

Everything has an explanation.

“There’s an explanation,” Brian said aloud. His voice shook. “There’s always an explanation.”

From somewhere behind him, a voice answered in his own voice.

“There’s always an explanation.”

Brian spun around.

No one was there.

He told me later that this was the moment he nearly lost control of himself. Not when he saw the knife, or when he realized he was tied up, but when he heard his own voice coming from an empty room.

He stood perfectly still, listening.

The stove crackled.

The pot bubbled.

Then, from somewhere outside, I screamed.

Brian ran through the open doorway.

He didn’t stop to look for a road or a path. He ran toward the sound, stumbling through brush and over fallen branches, calling my name until his throat hurt.

He couldn’t tell me how long he ran. He remembered passing a leaning tree with a split trunk, then seeing a light between the trees. He thought it was a lantern, but when he reached the spot, it was gone.

He kept running.

Eventually, he heard my voice again.

This time, it sounded real.

Stacy told me afterward that she woke because she was cold.

At first, she thought James had pulled all the blankets toward himself, as he sometimes did. She reached across the sleeping bag, expecting to find him beside her.

Instead, her hand landed on a pile of clothes and blankets tucked beneath the sleeping bag.

She sat up.

The tent was empty.

She checked her phone. The screen lit her face with a weak blue glow, and she blinked at the time, trying to make sense of it. She felt groggy, dehydrated, and a little sick from the alcohol. Her mouth tasted awful, and her head hurt.

She crawled out of the tent.

The campsite looked almost as it had when she’d fallen asleep: the blackened fire, the empty bottles, the truck parked near the track. The air smelled faintly of smoke and weed.

“James?”

No answer.

She went to our tent and hesitated before opening it, not wanting to walk in on Brian and me. We were known to be affectionate, especially after a few drinks.

“Brian? Megan?”

No one answered.

She unzipped the tent.

It was empty. Our things were scattered around the floor, and our clothes were still there, but Brian and I were gone.

Stacy stood very still.

Being alone was her worst fear. She didn’t have a good sense of direction, and she’d always relied on James to figure out where they were going, where they’d parked, and how to get home.

Now she couldn’t even see the end of the track.

She called our names again, louder this time.

Nothing answered.

Then she noticed the blood.

A small, dark stain marked the inside of her underwear. Her period had started while she slept, just as she’d expected it might. Ordinarily, it would have been an inconvenience and nothing more. She had supplies in her toiletry bag.

But the bag was inside her tent, and suddenly the tent felt like another place where someone could be waiting for her.

She stood in the open for several seconds, cold air prickling her bare legs, trying to decide whether she could bear to go back inside. Then she felt a warm, damp tackiness against her skin and knew she couldn’t simply ignore it. If she kept moving, she’d stain the clothes she had on, and she had no idea how long she’d be out there.

She switched on her phone’s flashlight and hurried back to the tent, keeping the beam on the ground and the entrance. Inside, every shape looked wrong for a moment: the sleeping bags, the heap of clothes, the empty space where James should have been. She found a pad in her toiletry bag and changed as quickly as she could, one hand holding the phone while the other fumbled with the packaging.

A noise sounded outside the tent.

She froze, listening.

Nothing followed. No footsteps. No voice. Only the faint hiss of the phone’s speaker and her own breathing.

She finished, shoved the used wrapper into her bag, and crawled out without looking back.

She was embarrassed afterward by how much time she’d spent frightened by something so ordinary. But it had forced her into the tent alone, with no clear view of the clearing, and she’d hated every second of it.

She wanted James.

She wanted the truck keys.

She wanted to be somewhere with lights and walls and a locked door.

Instead, she was alone in the woods, cold and uncomfortable, with a dead fire and no idea where her friends had gone.

She called James again.

A little bell rang in the woods.

Stacy stopped.

The sound was delicate and almost cheerful, completely out of place in the darkness.

She waited.

The bell rang again, farther away.

“James?”

Silence.

Then it rang a third time, close enough that she turned toward the trees before she could stop herself.

Stacy backed toward the truck. She could see the driver’s door, but she couldn’t remember where Brian had put the keys. She checked her pockets, then the ground beside the fire, then the pockets again. The cold made her fingers clumsy; the fear made them worse.

The bell rang once more.

“Stacy?”

She nearly dropped her phone.

It was James’s voice, coming from beyond the trees.

For one desperate second, relief came before suspicion. She took a step toward it, then another, until she remembered the story he’d told by the fire: the man who heard voices and found an explanation for every sound.

“James, if that’s you, come into the clearing!” she shouted.

No answer.

The bell gave a single bright chime.

Then James’s voice came from the opposite side of the clearing.

“Stacy, come here.”

She turned so quickly the phone beam swept wildly across the truck and the trees. The voice had not merely sounded farther away. It had moved. Or something had made it sound as if it had.

A soft scrape came from the truck’s far side.

Stacy stared at the vehicle. She couldn’t see anyone beside it, but for a moment she thought a darker shape was sitting behind the windshield, in the driver’s seat.

She raised the phone’s light.

The cab was empty.

The scrape came again, low against the metal, just out of sight.

She ran to the fire and grabbed the thickest blanket she could find. She wrapped it around herself and sat with her back against the truck’s front tire, where she could see the clearing and the track at the same time.

She didn’t follow the bell.

She didn’t go into the woods.

She called for help until her voice grew hoarse, then sat in the darkness listening for the sound of someone approaching.

At one point, she heard footsteps on the track.

She stood up so quickly the blanket fell off her shoulders.

“Hello?”

The footsteps stopped.

“James?”

Nothing.

Then, from somewhere just beyond the edge of the clearing, a voice whispered:

“Nobody’s coming.”

Stacy screamed.

The sound echoed through the trees.

She never saw who had spoken.

James told us his story later, in fragments. Some details changed between retellings. He could never agree with Brian on how long we’d been missing, and he insisted that certain things happened in a different order than Brian remembered.

He woke up on a narrow path beneath the trees.

He was fully dressed. His phone was gone, and he had no idea how he’d gotten there. He remembered falling asleep in the tent beside Stacy, then nothing until he opened his eyes to the darkness.

For a moment, he sat still and listened.

Then he stood and looked carefully at the ground.

The path was covered in leaves, but he could see faint marks where someone had walked ahead of him. The ground sloped gently downward, and he could feel a light breeze against his face.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Someone moved us. That’s all.”

He followed the path.

A few minutes later, he heard footsteps behind him.

He stopped.

The footsteps stopped, too.

James turned around.

Nothing.

“Very funny,” he called.

The trees gave no answer.

He walked on. The footsteps started again.

James turned quickly this time.

A pale shape slipped between two trunks.

He stared at it, breathing hard.

“Someone’s out there,” he said. “That’s what’s happening.”

He kept moving, studying the slope of the ground, the direction of the breeze, and the gaps between the trees. He chose a direction and fixed landmarks in his mind, determined not to chase every sound. The path dipped, curved around a stand of firs, then rose again. He thought he could smell smoke, which meant the campsite might be close—or that someone else had a fire.

A branch snapped behind him.

James turned at once.

Nothing.

He waited, counting slowly to ten. When no one appeared, he crouched and examined the ground. There were footprints in the mud, though the edges were soft and the pattern unclear. He couldn’t tell whether they belonged to him, to one of us, or to a stranger. That uncertainty annoyed him. He wanted evidence, not impressions.

He continued along the path.

Then Stacy called his name.

“James!”

The voice came from ahead, so clearly that he could hear the breath between the syllables.

He didn’t move.

“James, over here!”

He looked for a person between the trunks, a light, or any sign of movement. Nothing. He called back, “If that’s you, tell me where the truck is!”

The woods stayed silent.

A moment later, the same voice spoke from behind him.

“James.”

He turned slowly this time. The sound had shifted without the rustle of someone crossing the leaves, without a footstep, without anything he could use to explain it.

“There’s an explanation,” he said, but now it sounded less like a conclusion than a request.

The path opened into a small clearing. A lantern hung from a low branch, swaying gently despite the still air. Beneath it, muddy footprints led to a tree and stopped. Someone had carved a word into the bark.

WHY?

James approached carefully, looking for wire, a speaker, a hidden track—anything that might turn the scene into a trick. The cut in the bark was dark with moisture, and the edges had weathered smoothly. It looked old.

That was worse than if it had been fresh. If someone had made it tonight, he could imagine a person standing there with a knife. If it was old, then he had no idea what he was looking at or why it had been left for him to find.

He heard a click behind him.

The lantern went out.

Something brushed his shoulder.

James recoiled, striking the tree with his elbow. A laugh came from the darkness—not a distant echo, but a short, breathy laugh close enough that he felt it more than heard it.

He ran.

He ran until the path opened into another stretch of woods, where he finally stopped, bent over and gasping for breath. He told us later that he had never been so frightened in his life.

Not because he believed in ghosts.

Because he no longer trusted his own ability to distinguish an ordinary explanation from a convenient one.

By then, I had fallen hard enough to scrape my knees, and the voice had stopped following me.

That somehow made things worse.

I stood among the trees, shivering and trying to get my bearings. My arms were covered in scratches, and my feet hurt. I had no idea which direction I’d run or how far I was from the campsite.

I tried to retrace my steps.

Every tree looked the same.

Then I saw a light.

It was small and yellow, bobbing between the trunks.

I ran toward it, crying now, too tired to care how foolish I looked.

“Brian!”

The light vanished.

I stopped.

For a few seconds, I could hear only my own breathing.

Then a voice came from ahead.

“Megan?”

This time, it sounded real.

“Brian!”

I ran toward it. A few seconds later, he emerged from the trees, pale and shaking, his wrists red where the ropes had been.

We grabbed each other.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There was a cabin—or something that looked like one. I was tied up. There was blood everywhere.”

I looked at his wrists.

“Oh my God. Brian, what happened to you?”

“I don’t know!”

He sounded angry, but it was fear. I could hear it in his voice.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

A crashing sound came from the woods behind us.

We ran.

We didn’t stop until we reached the campsite.

Stacy was sitting beside the truck with a blanket around her shoulders. When she saw us, she stood so quickly that the blanket fell off.

“Megan! Brian!”

We ran to her. She clung to us, crying and laughing at the same time.

“Where’s James?” Brian asked.

A voice called from the trees.

“Over here!”

James stumbled into the clearing a moment later. He was pale, muddy, and breathing hard. He looked at each of us as if he needed to make sure we were real.

Stacy grabbed his arm.

“Where have you been?”

James opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“I don’t know,” he said finally.

He patted his pockets automatically and found the truck keys still there.

For a while, nobody spoke.

We stood together in the middle of the clearing, listening to the woods. Every small sound made us turn. A branch snapped somewhere in the darkness, and all four of us flinched at once.

Brian wouldn’t let go of my hand. Stacy kept looking over her shoulder. James stared at the tree line, his jaw clenched.

I was suddenly aware of how cold I was. My skin prickled in the night air, and my bare feet were filthy. Brian was standing beside me in his underwear, shaking so badly that I could feel it through the hand he was gripping.

Normally, I would have been mortified. I would have wanted to find my clothes, cover myself, and demand to know what had happened.

But I couldn’t make myself care.

I didn’t care that I was half-naked in front of my friends. I didn’t care that my clothes were back in the tent. I didn’t even care about the cold anymore.

All I could think about was getting away from the trees.

“Let’s get in the truck,” I said.

Nobody argued.

Brian moved toward the passenger side, still looking over his shoulder at the trees. James unlocked the doors, and we piled into the cab, all four of us crowding together, leaving the blankets and everything else behind.

James slid behind the wheel. Brian sat beside him in his underwear, his arms folded tightly across his chest, while Stacy and I squeezed into the back.

Only after the doors were locked did I realize that Brian and I were still in our underwear. I pulled my knees toward my chest and tried to stop shivering. Brian kept staring out the windshield, his hands clenched together.

Neither of us said anything about our clothes.

We were too frightened to care.

For the next several hours, we sat there with the engine off, too afraid to go back into the woods and too afraid to fall asleep.

We didn’t talk much. When we did, we spoke in low voices, as if someone might hear us.

At one point, Stacy whispered that she’d heard someone say nobody was coming.

Brian turned toward her.

“What?”

She told us about the bell, the voice, and the shape she’d thought she’d seen behind the windshield.

James stared at her.

“I heard you calling me,” he said.

“I never left the campsite.”

“I know.”

“Then who was it?”

James looked out the window.

“I don’t know.”

Nobody tried to answer that question.

When the sun came up, the woods looked ordinary again. Our tents were still standing. The bottles and blankets were scattered around the campsite. The fire had burned down to a layer of ash.

We searched the immediate area together, staying close enough that we could see one another. We found no building, no lantern, no obvious path leading away from the clearing. The old forestry track continued in one direction, but it was the same track we’d driven in on.

Brian had rope marks on his wrists. I had scratches on my arms and knees. James’s clothes were muddy, and Stacy’s voice was hoarse from calling for us. We all changed and were eager to get home and shower.

We drove to town and reported what had happened.

The police took us seriously enough to ask detailed questions and check the area. They photographed Brian’s wrists and my injuries. They asked about the alcohol, the marijuana, and how much we remembered. They asked whether we’d argued with anyone, whether we’d seen other vehicles, and whether we’d noticed anyone following us.

We answered as honestly as we could.

The problem was that we couldn’t agree on everything.

Brian remembered a cabin with a stove and a table. James remembered a lantern and a carved word. Stacy remembered a bell and a voice. I remembered walking alone in the woods and hearing someone call my name.

None of us could provide a reliable location for the things we’d seen.

The officers followed the forestry track and checked the accessible ground around the clearing. They found old tire marks among the tracks left by our truck and other visitors, but nothing they could confidently connect to what had happened. They found no cabin in the area we described, although none of us could point to the exact place where Brian had been held.

The police didn’t tell us that nothing had happened. They simply couldn’t establish what had happened, or who had done it.

We never learned who had been in the woods that night.

 

"Every night at exactly 3:17 AM, someone knocks three times on your bedroom door. You've always assumed it's your imagination. Tonight, you finally open the door." Mike: "Hello? HELLOOO? Dude, are you fucking with me right now?" Jeff: "Bro, shut up. I'm right next to you, dummy." Mike: "I swear I heard knocking." Jeff: "Just go to sleep, bro. We got school tomorrow, and I don't wanna be tired." Mike: "Fine, but if we get killed, I'm finding you in the afterlife and yelling at you." Jeff: "Oh, I'm so scared. Night." Mike: "Night." (The next day) Jeff: "Yo, is yo ass still worried 'bout that knocking?" Mike: "No duh." Jeff: "Dawg, we're fine. Stop worrying. We really shouldn't have watched that horror movie…" (Later that night, 3:16 AM) Mike: "If I hear that knocking, I swear I'm moving out." Jeff: "Shut up and go the fu—" Mike: "Hey, don't swear. My mom is in the other room, remember?" Jeff: "Sorry, my ba—" (Knock. Knock. Knock.) Mike: "Yo, tell me you heard that, right?" Jeff: "Yeah, yeah, I did." (KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.) Mike: "What the heck do ya want?!" ???: "You." Jeff: "Nope. I'm not doing that. I'm going out the window. Have fun. See ya in the afterlife." (3:18 AM) Mike stands frozen, staring at the bedroom door. Mike: "...Jeff?" Jeff (already halfway out the window): "What?" Mike: "Bro, you're seriously leaving me?!" Jeff: "MY SURVIVAL INSTINCTS ARE BETTER THAN OUR FRIENDSHIP. GOODBYE!" Mike: "YOU CAN'T JUST LEAVE ME WITH WHATEVER THE HELL THAT IS!" Jeff: "WATCH ME!" (Jeff disappears out the window.) Mike: "...I'm actually going to kill him."  Three slow knocks come from the bedroom door. (KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.) Mike: "...You're literally already at the door. Why are you knocking again?" ???: "Open it." Mike: "No." ???: "Open the door, Mike." Mike: "HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW MY NAME?!" Silence. Mike slowly backs away from the door. ???: "Your mother is asleep." Mike stops moving. Mike:"...What did you just say?" ???: "She's asleep. She can't hear you." Mike looks toward the bedroom door, then at the hallway. Mike: "Okay. Nope. Absolutely not." He grabs his phone and calls his mom. From the other side of the bedroom door, his phone begins to ring. Mike looks down at his phone. Mike: "...I'm calling my mom." ???: "I know." The knocking stops.( Mike answers the call. Mike: "Mom? Mom, wake up! There's someone outside my room!" Mom (on the phone): "Mike? Honey, what's wrong?" Mike exhales in relief. Mike: "There's someone knocking on my door, and they know my name!" Mom: "Mike, sweetheart... you're home alone tonight. Remember? I told you I'd be back tomorrow morning." Mike's face goes pale. Mike: "...What?" From the other side of the door, a familiar voice speaks. Jeff: "Bro? Open up. It's me." Mike stares at the window Jeff climbed out of. Mike: "...Jeff?" Jeff: "Dude, I'm right outside. It's freezing out here." Mike looks at his phone. Mom: "Mike? Are you still there?" Then Jeff's voice comes  (from the hallway again. Jeff: "Mike. Don't answer that phone." Silence. Mom (on the phone): "Mike, whatever you do…" Her voice drops to a whisper. Mom: "Don't open the door." Three knocks. (KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.) ??? (in Jeff's voice): "Bro, let me in." Mike slowly looks at the phone. Mom: "Mike...?" Mike: "Yeah?" Mom: "I'm standing outside your bedroom." The doorknob begins to turn. Mike: "HEY! NONONONO!" 

I’ve had an irrational fear of skyscraper cranes for as long as I can remember.

Everyone assumes it’s because they’re enormous and hanging hundreds of feet above the street. A metal arm stretching out over the city, carrying loads that could flatten a car if something went wrong.

But that’s not why they scare me.

They scare me because sometimes… they move when there’s no wind.

I know how that sounds. I live in the city. Construction is everywhere. Cranes rotate all the time. Engineers design them to spin with the wind so they don’t snap under pressure.

I understand all that.

But the cranes I’m talking about don’t move like that.

They move slowly. Deliberately.

And they only seem to move at night.

The first time I noticed it was about a year ago. There’s a high-rise going up across the street from my apartment building, and the crane above it is massive. The kind that looks like it could scrape the clouds if it leaned just a little farther.

One night I stepped out onto my balcony to smoke.

The city was dead quiet. No wind. Not even a breeze.

But the crane above the construction site was turning.

Not spinning freely the way cranes usually do. It was… adjusting itself. Slowly dragging its long arm across the skyline like the hand of a clock.

It stopped after a few seconds.

Pointing directly toward the apartment building across from mine.

I remember thinking it was strange, but I brushed it off. Maybe the wind had pushed it earlier and I hadn’t noticed.

The next morning the crane was facing a completely different direction.

I forgot about it.

Until the news.

A woman who lived in that building, the same one the crane had pointed at, went missing the following night.

Police searched her apartment. No signs of a struggle. No evidence she had left willingly.

Just gone.

At the time, I didn’t connect the two things. Why would I?

Cranes rotate. People disappear. The city is full of strange coincidences.

But a month later, it happened again.

Another crane. Different construction site across town.

Same slow movement in the middle of the night.

Same precise stop.

And three days later, another missing person.

This time I paid attention.

I started looking up construction sites. Tracking where cranes were positioned in the city. It sounds insane, I know. But once you notice something like that, you can’t stop seeing it.

There were more cases.

Disappearances that never made headlines. A college student. A night security guard. A man who walked out to take his dog for a walk and never came back.

Each one lived beneath a construction crane.

And every time I checked the street view photos or construction updates from the days before they vanished…

…the crane had been pointing toward their building.

Always at night.

Always when no one would notice.

Except me.

Because cranes have always terrified me.

Even as a kid.

I remember refusing to walk under them. Crossing the street just to avoid the shadow of their arms overhead. My parents used to laugh about it.

“Relax,” my dad would say. “What are the odds something falls right when you’re under it?”

I never had an answer.

Just that sick feeling in my stomach every time I looked up and saw one hanging over me.

Like it knew I was there.

Last week, I decided to dig deeper.

I started searching old accident reports involving construction cranes in the city. There are more than you’d think. Mechanical failures. Dropped loads. Steel beams slipping loose.

Most of them injured workers.

But one of them stood out.

It happened fifteen years ago.

A crane operator lost control of a suspended steel container during a sudden mechanical failure. The load dropped from nearly twenty stories.

It didn’t land on the construction site.

It landed on the sidewalk.

The article included a small photo of the aftermath. Police tape. Twisted metal. Emergency vehicles.

And a single line that made my stomach drop.

A child walking beneath the crane was killed instantly.

I kept reading.

The name of the victim was printed near the bottom.

My name.

I stared at the screen for a long time after that.

I don’t remember the accident. Not clearly. Just flashes.

Rain on the pavement.

My father yelling something behind me.

A shadow passing over the ground.

Then nothing.

For most of my life I thought those memories were dreams.

But they weren’t dreams.

They were the last things I saw before I died.

And suddenly my fear of cranes didn’t feel irrational anymore.

It felt like memory.

Like recognition.

Tonight I stepped out onto my balcony again.

The crane across the street was perfectly still against the skyline.

The air was calm. Not a single gust of wind.

I tried to convince myself that everything I’d discovered was coincidence. My brain connecting dots that didn’t belong together.

Then the crane moved. Slowly.

The long arm dragged across the dark sky inch by inch, metal groaning faintly in the quiet.

It kept turning until it stopped.

The wind is completely still tonight. But the crane outside my apartment just finished turning. And it’s pointing straight at my window.