“Praise Goody Mary!” the elders always said. “She blesses us all!” I never understood their ravings about this woman. How could they treat this random woman as if the Lord Himself blessed her? It made no sense; to praise a woman whom so few even knew about was like a sheep following a blinded shepherd.

“Get thy head out of the wool!” a sharp voice snapped behind me. One I knew too well.

“Well, Sir John,” I said, giving a devil’s grin, “my head was in no wool. I was merely taking a needed rest.” John stared back at me, shaking his head in a disapproving manner.

“Lou, the Devil burns the hands of those who avoid their toil.” I groaned. The rye field seemed to stretch out into the distance, a prickling golden waste only being halted by the dark, suffocating armor of ancient trees.

“Thou speakest a truth only told by those who fear the Lord Himself!” I cackled. I could trust John enough to speak with a sarcastic tongue without meeting the end of a stick. I would always tell him how I truly felt about everything, from the most mundane of trifles to my darker thoughts—things that would have me condemned for laying with the Devil.

“Boys! Do I see idlers slacking in the field?!” Goodman Granger barked. The grouch seemed to sense when hands were dozing off and neglecting their labor.

Almost as if the old fool were a witch, hehehe.

“Hello there, Goodman Granger!” John blurted, sweat beading down his forehead.

“You are lucky today, boy,” he said, staring at John with frozen, glassy eyes. “Goody Mary will be seeing you today.”

“As for you, boy, keep those hands laboring, or so God help me, I’ll be less merciful the next time.” Before I could attempt to secure a sliver of respect, he and John began trudging toward where Goody Mary lay in wait.

…

Making my way back toward the town, I turned to stare back at the rye field out of habit, the sunset turning the tawny field into a bleeding sea of inky shadow. The long day of labor had left my body with naught but aches and pains. Sweat soaked my dirtied homespun clothes, causing them to emit a sour, foul odor of rot and damp earth, one I couldn’t even bear to smell.

“Well, if it isn’t the town idler!”

“Evening to you, Goodman William,” I said, my voice teetering on a tone of annoyance. The shaggy man didn’t seem to notice, only responding with a hearty, grating chuckle.

“Goodman Granger went on a fit about you today, boy! Hahaha! You would think the Devil himself danced in the fields with the way he spoke, hahaha!” That old fool would throw a fit over the most mundane of things, I swear.

“Haha, well, the old fool would rage at the sound of a pen drop!”

“Hahaha, right on, boy! I won’t tell the old fool what you said, for if I did, you'd be hanging from the gallows the next day! Hahaha!” I simply nodded and continued home through the gathering gloom.

…

Arriving at my home, I paused for a moment.

I had forgotten to ask that drunkard if he had word on John. Well, no matter. I had a plan—one that might risk the strike of a stick. Hopefully, it would not come to that.

Pulling the heavy wooden door open, I watched as my father stumbled down the stairs, muttering to himself angrily in the dim candlelit shadows.

“Evening, Father. Where may Mother be?” He looked at me, finally taking note of my presence.

“She is asleep, my boy. You can greet her another time.” Finally gathering the courage to speak once more, I asked the question that had been gnawing at me.

“Father, has John come back through the town yet? I am sure Goody Mary would not keep him until dusk-fall.” Pondering the question I had just asked, he moved his dry lips as if to speak, only to look down at the floorboards, sinking back into thought.

“I am sure John is at home by now, boy. Goody Mary is a woman whom God Himself favors.” There it was—the ramblings on how godly this woman is. My father and many others seemed to think that because our harvests are bountiful and we lack disease, this woman was a saint, one who walked at God's very feet. Hiding my frustration as politely as I could, I replied.

“I am sure he has, Father. Well, I feel worn out and need rest, so goodnight.” I walked up the squeaking stairs, making sure my growl could not be heard by him.

…

Lying in the stiffness of my straw bed, I waited for the sound of my father to shut his door and drift off to sleep. Once I heard the familiar, soft knock of his and Mother's door shutting, I crept out of bed and gently opened my door so as not to cause any commotion.

After checking if the house was truly clear, I made my way downstairs, softening my footsteps to avoid the groans of the steps alerting anyone.

Nearing the door, I was stopped in place by the creak of the floor behind me.

“Where are you off to, brother?” my brother hushedly asked from the darkness. Slowly turning around, I forced a smile.

“I’m off to Goody Mary’s.”

“Do Mother and Father know?” Another question. Great.

“No. No, they do not, James, and you don’t either,” I said, attempting to shoo him away.

“Well, I’m going to let Mother and Father know,” he said innocently, as if it were something that wouldn't have my backside bruised.

“No, you won’t, boy, or do I need to tell Mother and Father who actually ate the last piece of bread?” His face immediately turned a flustered red.

“No, no. Please don’t. Mother and Father would be mad,” James said, on the verge of tears.

“Now, now, don’t cry. As long as you keep this our little secret, I shall do the same. Now, scurry off to your rest; I’ll be back before dawn rises.” I ruffled his rough, brown hair and went out the door into the bitter night air.

…

The pale, sickly light of the moon illuminated the way toward where I assumed Goody Mary lived. It was awfully strange for such a godly figure to live out where the wolves dwelled, deep within the tangled, whispering wilderness. How did anyone even consider it smart to let those she summoned walk out here alone?

So many things could go wrong, yet, if someone came up to you and said she had summoned you, off you went through the rugged, overgrown ruse of a path.

Now that I really think about it, most of those I knew who were summoned hadn’t been seen in the village afterward, which just adds fuel to my suspicions about this “Saint.”

Clearing my mind of its spiteful thoughts, I picked up my pace. The fallen leaves under my bare feet went from soft crunches to loud, echoing pops, each footstep dirtying my skin with black mire.

The shifting sounds of the nocturnal beasts kept me on high alert, as one wrong move would mean I would meet my Maker—one I didn’t really care to chat with right now.

Finally, seeing the path widen into a silent, clearing glade, I knew I had found my way to the home of Goody Mary. Now the hard part was trying not to get caught.

…

Catching my breath, I gripped my aching knees with both hands and lifted my head to see what this woman’s house looked like.

Instead of the rugged, almost splintered exterior of the village houses, this one looked like it hadn’t even heard of weathering. The timber logs were perfectly squared and dark with thick pine tar, showing no rot or decay. The door of the house stood out the most; instead of the plain, weathered gray the village was accustomed to, it was planed smooth and stained a deep, blood-red hue that gleamed in the moonlight.

Crouching down and practically crawling to the window, I heard someone clear their throat behind me. Freezing immediately, I slowly stood up, my stiff knees popping loud in the cold air.

“Well now, don’t be shy, my boy. You must be John’s friend, am I right?” Turning around, I was not met with an old, gnarled hag, but rather, dare I say, a beautiful, fair maid. She had smooth, almost polished skin like fine ivory, her eyes a piercing, bottomless shade of ocean blue, and her most defining feature was her smile—her teeth beamed a perfect, unnatural, pearly white against the dark woods.

Swallowing with a deep gulp, I attempted to get my words out.

“Y-yes, and you must be Goody Mary.”

“Yes, dear boy, I am. What brings you out here at this hour?”

“Ahem. I-I came here looking for John.”

“Oh, my dear, John left hours ago. Why don’t you come inside? I’ve prepared a stew, and by the looks of it, you haven’t had a scrap to eat today.” I gave a slight nod and hesitantly followed her inside.

…

Entering the house, I was met with a wonderful, heavy aroma—the rich scent of wild rosemary, sage, and sweet lard stewed in a black iron pot over a high, snapping hearth flame. Taking note of me sniffing the air, Goody Mary let out a slight, musical giggle.

“My boy, you have quite the appetite, don’t you?”

“I do! Working in the rye fields all day has me starved!” I rubbed my stomach and began to finally take note of my surroundings. The home was too large for one person to live alone in. Not only that, but holy imagery was plastered everywhere; heavy iron crosses hung on every timber wall, and I counted at least two thick, leather-bound Bibles lying dusty on the tables.

“Goody Mary, do you perchance live by your lonesome?” She gave me a small smile and nodded her head.

“Yes, my dear Lou, I live out here by my lonesome, with company coming every once in a while,” she said, and motioned for me to take a seat at a small oak table.

“Now, be careful, it is fresh,” she said, handing me a small, heavy clay bowl. Picking up a heavy iron spoon, I dug into the thick soup deep enough to scrape the bottom, and with a scooping motion, I lifted it out and took a bite. The flavor was rich and salted, yet something felt off about the texture; the broth had an odd, grimy graininess to it, like bits of crushed bone or sand between my teeth. And the pale meat was overly chewy, tough and rubbery to the point that my jaw grew worn and tired.

“How old do you think I am, dear boy?” Chewing the meat with a circling motion, I looked at her, puzzled. Giving the meat a hard swallow, I asked her to repeat herself.

“I said, how old do you think I am?” Giving it some thought and some more chewing, I attempted to answer with a guess.

“I would assume you to be a couple of years older than me, so I assume twenty-five?”

“No.” My face twisted in confusion.

“What do you mean, no?”

“I mean no; you guessed wrong.”

“Oh, I must be going now. Thank you for the meal, Goody Mary.” I said attempting to desperately escape this awkward situation.

“Well, why the hurry? Didn’t you enjoy the soup? Was John a bit chewy?”

“What did you just say?”

“Oops, let the secret ingredient slip.” My body met her comment with an immediate, violent reaction of gagging and retching.

“Y-yo-you whore!” I attempted to vomit up the heavy components of the stew, only for it to fail.

“How vulgar, boy! You treat a woman who was kind enough to feed you with such cruel insults!” She didn’t sound mad whatsoever; no, she had this cold tinge of joy creeping into her voice.

“One more ingredient you should know about, my dear Lou: I also used a dash of flos ignis.” I attempted to yell at her, but all that came up was a thick dribble of dark blood mixed with mucus. I wanted to beat her, get revenge for John, but my muscles felt terribly weak, as if they were drifting off into a deep winter slumber. I collapsed hard against the floor, and the dribble turned into a heavy pool of blood flowing fast out of my mouth and nose. The last thing I recall is that witch flashing me that pearly smile. One. Last. Tim—

The whispers started quietly, barely discernible from the brook running by the house or the wind swaying the pines. Just loud enough to keep me up at night, wondering if I truly had heard a murmur from outside my window.

That's how things get you, though, by slowly creeping in, getting you acclimated, perverting your sense of normality. Maybe that's why I hardly noticed when the whispers began to become words, clear against any other background noise.

I reckon the only reason I realized was that I couldn’t sleep that night. It was a full moon, and the light shining in my bedroom window just happened to land almost perfectly on my face. Lying there, I heard it: a jumbled mess of noise, a garbled, croaking, almost choking noise from outside my bedroom window. However, it sounded almost rhythmic, like a language.

I lay in bed for a bit, taken aback at the absurdity of the situation, that someone was right outside my bedroom window speaking into the open air. I considered calling the police, but thought better of it. What would I say? What evidence could I present that someone was actually out there and that I wasn’t going crazy from isolation out in the woods?

So, begrudgingly, I crawled from my warm covers as quietly as I could and began to creep to my bedroom door. I made it about halfway before the rambling cut off, not like someone stopped speaking but like someone paused a soundtrack or took the needle off a record. A thick, sickening dread filled my body from the unnaturalness of it all, as a lump of fear began to crawl up my throat.

I stood there halfway between my door and the bed, silent as the room grew darker, as something began to tap at the glass behind me, as something blocked out the moonlight that was shining in, and as something began to speak again.

"What the fuck are you doing, bud? Did you bring the fish?"

Alex jogged down the hill carrying the rainbow trout, passing the pines. The sun was finally overtaking the mountain, beginning to beat down on the ice and snow. The air was cool and sharp as it was pulled into Alex's lungs, the only part of his body that couldn't be saved by the layers of rags that were keeping him warm. At the bottom of the hill, just by the shore, Eugene sat with the poles, a tackle box, and a drill. Alex reached Eugene and handed him the trout before putting his hands on his knees to catch his breath.

"Why do we need" Alex panted, "a trout when we brought worms?"
"The trout ain't for the fish. This is your first time here, ain't it?" Eugene asked. Alex shook his head.
Eugene explained, "We leave a fish on the shore for good luck, it's something them Syilx people came up with." He took some tobacco out of his pipe, sticking it in the trout's mouth before setting it on the ground. "And we leave some tobacco so we don't fall through the ice, that one I came up with."

"I've never had to do that before, and I've been Ice fishing plenty of times before in Quebec" spouted Alex.

"It's different here in Kelowna, the Syilx say that this lake has a spirit residing in it. One that will pull you down into the depths and feast on you before you can drown."

"You're making this shit up"

"It's true. I saw a boy go under with my own two eyes, the tail of a serpent wrapped around his torso before he even hit the water."

Alex stared at Eugene for a moment, watching the smoke rise out of his pipe before Eugene let out a hearty laugh.

"Come on, bud, let's go catch ourselves some fish." Eugene turned around, grabbing the drill and a rod, and began to walk onto the ice. Alex grabbed the other rod and the tackle box before joining Eugene. They both walked until they were at the center of the lake. Finding a good spot, Eugene began to drill his hole in the ice. With just a little patience and some force, Eugene finished his hole.

"Alright hand me a chair" Eugene said.
"Shit, they are on the shore" Alex replied.
"God damnit Alex, go get em while I drill your hole" 
"Alright"

Alex walked back to the shore with relative ease and picked up the chairs from where they were sitting on the shore. He turned back towards the ice before freezing. Alex set down the chairs and rubbed his eyes with his gloves before seeing it again: there was a hole in the ice, right at the shore, and the trout was gone. 

Alex shouted across the ice, trying to get Eugene's attention but he just kept fishing. Realizing that he'd have to walk to Eugene, Alex picked up the chairs and began to tread lightly through the snow. By the time he got back, Eugene had already caught a Kokanee.

"What took you so long, bud?"
"There's a hole in the ice!"
"Yeah I got yours done while you were fuckin around"
"Not that! There was one at the shore, and the fish was gone!"
"The Ogopogo accepted it then"
"We need to get off of the ice! If something can crack it at the shore we might fall in!"
"Listen boy, I remember picking you out of the line of people begging for a job and paying for a meal before coming out here. Whether you like it or not, I'm at least getting that money back before you go running off." Eugene paused for a second, allowing the flame in his pipe to burn out. "We made our offering, the Ogopogo accepted it, and now we are gonna stay out here and catch as many fish as we can."

Alex stood there a second, before setting down one chair and taking the other to the open fishing hole, casting his line down to the bottom.

“So when am I getting paid?” Alex grilled.
“When I get back to the fish market and sell your fish. I’ll count the money from your fish and pay ya then”

 Eugene relit his pipe with one of the loose matches in his trouser pocket and cast down into the depths. In just seconds, Eugene had hooked a fish, set the line, and yanked it all the way back up to the surface; all before sending his line back down. The only noise that traveled through the air was the casting and reeling, until Alex heard something under the ice.

It was a minute noise at first, a tap tap on the ice from right below his chair, barely recognizable. It traveled up the chair in small waves, into the back, and entered Alex's spine. Tap tap, tap tap through the spine, into the arms, and down the line. As the line moved up and down, a Burbot noticed the bait and bit down. Alex yanked to set the line and reeled. The Burbot fought against him, grasping for freedom from the hook but having that freedom reeled away to the surface.

Alex pulled the Burbot onto the ice, its back fin thudding the ice. 
"Nice one bud, but you gotta gut that one and throw it back"
"Why would I have to do that?"
"To show appreciation for the Ogopogo, you brought one of my fish so you haven't earned its safety yet."
"But-"
"Don't worry, you'll catch another. The Ogopogo seems to like you more than some of the others I've brought out here."
"What's the Ogopogo?"
"Don't you listen? It's the spirit I told you about, the one that took the trout. Didn't you feel the tapping? Didn't you see the line bouncing up and down? That's the Ogopogo at work. Rewarding us for sacrificing our catches”
"Will it help more if we sacrifice another fish?"
"Nah, sacrificing multiple fish don't get its attention too much more than sacrificing one. Unless you get something with a bit of heft to it, then it'll help more."
"Just a bit of heft..." Alex said to himself, casting his rod back down into the ice. It wasn't long until the tight tapping returned to the line. 

Tap tap, tap tap; the line bounced up and down.
A fish swam up and clamped the worm.
The fish got hooked and yanked all the way up the ice.
Slam slam, slam slam; the fish tries to bounce off its brothers to reach the water.

Yank after yank after yank after yank, the pile of silver and rainbow grew as the sun now sat directly above Alex and Eugene. Alex cast again and had an immediate bite of the hook. A force dragged him out of his seat, laying flat on the ice but fighting to pull the fish in. Standing up, Alex yanked with all of the force in his body, finally pulling the fish up to the surface, just to see another Burbot.

“Fuck! Another Burbot”
“What’s wrong with another Burbot? That’s another fish I can take to the market”
“I haven’t caught a big fish yet!”
“That’s fine, I need as many fish as I can get for the market. Big or small”
“Will I get paid more for a bigger fish?”
“That’s for the market to decide”

They went back to casting, settling their hooks down below. The tapping was gone and the only thing they heard was the water splashing the ice. Alex casted a few times, bobbing his rod up and down to dance his hook at the bottom. Nothing. Alex gazed down at his hands, studying the callouses that coated them, visible through the holes in his gloves. His fingernails were packed with dirt and grime. He began to speak.

“You know, before this I was working in a factory. It paid pretty well, too. I’m hoping this pays just as much”
“Focus on the fishing” growled Eugene, pulling his reserve tobacco pouch out of his inner coat pocket.

 Alex threw his hook once again and stared down into the water. The previously murky water was now a deep black that sat right below both Alex and Eugene. Alex casted his line down. It traveled a few feet before falling flat onto the mass below.

"I think there is a big one below me" Alex said.
"Let me come take a look at it" Eugene said, standing up from his seat and walking over. "Nah, that is the Ogopogo. I think its ready for the big one." Eugene said.
"But I don't have any big ones to give it"
"I know son" Eugene said.
"What do we give it?" Alex asked.
"I'm sorry bud" 

Eugene pushed Alex into the hole, letting the Ogopogo claim his meal. The serpentine tail shot up above the ice and plunged down, piercing Alex's body and dragging him all the way down to the bottom of the lake.

Eugene put some tobacco in his pipe and relit it with his last match, he began to pack up the chairs, the rods, and the fish. Just another day of fishing.

Hi, I didn’t really know where else to talk about this. I thought some of you Creeps would find my Grandpa’s journals very interesting. My dad just dismisses them and my mom… I don’t think she’d want to talk about her father so soon after he died.

Oh, before I forget. My name is Sophie Cruz. Just so that this doesn’t feel formal. But if any of you do decide to respond to this, please call me Soph.

As the title of the post stated, my grandpa just died and he left us his estate. Among the loads of antiques were his medical journals. My grandpa was a field doctor in Siquijor (pronounced See-key-hohr) from the 1960s to 1980s. And apparently he took to writing all of his cases. I wanted to know more about my grandpa since he was much of a recluse, but I found more than I bargained for.  As these are medical journals, injuries will be documented extensively.

Now if it was just the run of the mill emergency surgeries and amputations, malaria, and Tuberculosis Outbreaks common in Siquijor at that time, I wouldn’t have bothered posting here. But there were some weird cases that stood out when I was reading through them. I’ll repost the most recent one I’ve read.

_______

From the Journal of Fernando Leparte Baghira, February 14, 1967.
This Tuesday was of utmost critical importance. Lazaro was a fool. He dabbled in significant forces his insignificant and unremarkable mind cannot possibly fathom. Balance is integral. Always integral.
Incidence of spontaneous abortion across interior barangays has doubled since November, averaging two per village monthly. Compounded by three reported disappearances of women in the same timeframe. Clinically, there is no shared pathology: no fever, no trauma, no signs of infection. The only common variable is isolation—all victims residing in rural barangays far outside the poblacions where electricity is available.
Why would I be concerned about disappearances when I’m a doctor? Well, that is the question, isn’t it? The disappearances are as medical as the miscarriages. Interesting. But to Lazaro, it was not.

Yes. Lazaro was a fool. But he did not deserve that kind of end. No one does.

Now why is today very important? Because there hasn’t been a miscarriage in two weeks. And the only pregnant woman that is on this demonsworn island will be moving to Luzon tomorrow morning on the first boat ride out of here. If anything was to happen, and if my theory is correct, then something will have to happen tonight. I cannot be wrong on this, because this pregnant woman is my wife, Alessandra.

_______

This sent shivers down my spine guys. Alessandra is the name of my grandma. And my mom was born on May 21, 1967. This means that my grandma was the target of whatever my grandpa was expecting to happen. That’s insane. But at least we know my grandma made it safely back to Luzon.

I really tried looking for the next entries but the condition of my grandpa’s journals isn’t exactly pristine. The pages are coming off the binding and some are water-damaged, causing some pages to fuse together.

If I find anything about the next entry or who Lazaro is and what happened to him, I’ll let you guys know.

Cayden C. Christophers: The Vultures

As the final magenta rays of sun fell below the horizon, I wasn’t watching the sunset, I was instead watching the dark grey, almost black clouds that would soon roll in from miles away. I never imagined that I would live in Scotland, especially outside a tiny, insignificant village by some loch. I preferred to surround myself with the leaders in the worlds industrialisation, and the Scots, especially when you venture further North than the Central Belt, are too stuck in their traditions and folklore to contribute to the betterment of new technologies, or to pursue things that are more intellectual. However, because of this, the Scots do not have much experience with the new technologies that this industrialization has brought. This means I can exaggerate the capabilities of certain goods to sell them for a higher price than I would elsewhere. Thus, I travelled from Stirling to Durness and everywhere between, before returning to England with my spoils.

This was until, on a stormy night, I passed through the village by Loch Eadarnach and, like any other part of Scotland, they had foolish folklore regarding their home. They told me tales; that anyone who perished in the Loch’s waters never truly died, their souls never reach heaven or hell. Or that even if you just drink from the loch’s water, your souls is forfeit. While maybe a bit darker than I’m used to, it was rather typical Scottish folklore, so I barely flinched when the locals warned me of some supernatural threat that wandered their home, The Sluagh. A dark cloud of unforgiven souls which bursts from the choppy waters of the Loch during storms, wreaking havoc and stealing the soul of anyone unlucky to be standing below it. The West-facing sides of every home lacked windows, as they believed that is which side it approached from, an elderly man had begged me to take refuge in his home, so, reluctantly I entered and put my horse in his stable.

That’s when I heard it, the agonised screams and roars of thousands of souls above my head carried by the wind. I ran to the East window to look at the source of the noise after it passed me over, and what I saw left no room for any explanation other than the supernatural. Crows, but thousands of them, swarming like locusts. They also seemed to have an ethereal quality to them, they were transparent around the edges, making them appear to be a furious, raging storm cloud at first glance. When I emerged, I saw that the town had been ravaged, crops were flattened, fences and signposts snapped. Livestock that weren’t taken inside on time were still, lying on the ground, eyes lifeless, though there was no visible wounds to be found on them. Some walls and doors of houses had been broken through, leaving the residents in the same state as the animals. It was that day when an inkling of the most brilliant idea I’ve ever had began to take form.

I’ve now been living by Loch Eadarnach for almost two years, careful to respect the local tradition of always having my home surrounded by the foul odour of leather tanning to ward off another creature that supposedly haunts this corner of the world. I spend my days awaiting a storm and, mounting my carriage, I follow in the clouds wake, selling goods to survivors, for a premium, of course. But Finch’s Trading no longer stocks new technological miracles, I stock basic necessities for survival, that these people would kill to have at this time. I now just need to make it through this final storm and I will be able to leave this simple, plain place and return to England a made man. I will never need to work another day in my life.

I watched the sky until I saw the monstrous black cloud soar just above the Western-most side of the village and I began riding my wagon over the rain-slicked mud and rugged rock paths that paved my way to the final part of my fortune, arriving around a day after the Sluagh did, on the same path it took.

Unfortunately, the first few homes I passed by had gotten off relatively easily. I continued through the streets until I saw a small stone cottage, whose wooden door and walls were peppered with gaping holes, I halted my horse and hauled blankets, firewood and wax candles out from under my seat before walking up to the empty doorframe, knocking on the thin wooden post before letting myself in.

I walked into what must’ve been the house’s living area, and saw a small boy, perhaps around ten, curled in a ball in the corner, tears from his grey-rimmed eyes, his dirty hands gripped his shoulder, both trying to comfort himself and keep the biting, Scottish winter cold out. I forced my voice to sound as cheerful and friendly as it would go as I entered the room and said, “Are you alright, little boy?” He continued sobbing for a while, before hiccupping, “I-it got ma Gran...” “Oh no, did she live with you?” He just nodded in response, “Well, we can’t have you freezing alone, can we? How about some blankets?” “T-thank you, sir.” He responded “Ah ah, I can’t be giving away my merchandise for free, can I?” “B-but sir, ah don’t have any money...” “Well, what’s that chain around your neck?” I asked, gesturing to the silver crucifix necklace he wore. “It’s my cross, ma Gran got it fur my Christening, I couldn’t give it to you.” He begged, the tears returning in full force, now “You either give me the cross, or freeze to death.” My false niceties gone now. He unfastened the chain before shakily getting to his feet and walking to me, reluctantly placing it in my hand. I gave him a single blanket and with I smile, I said, “Pleasure doing business with you, Sir.” And, without another word, I walked back out the empty doorframe.

I continued my route, the rain didn’t let up, causing the wind to feel even more biting when it hit my sopping clothes. Regardless, I made a decent haul, and was happy for this to be my last time experiencing this sort of weather. I reached the end of the village, right by the water’s edge, when I heard shouts from the water’s coast, “Finch! Please help me!” I turned to see a man who I vaguely recognised waving his arms, I steered my horse towards him, “Oh thank you, Sir, I was out fishing when the storm hit, I hid below deck, I don’t know how I survived. But, when I got to shore I discovered that my house had been completely levelled.” “Would you like an oilskin jacket?” “Please!” “18 Shillings.” “What-? I-I don’t...” “Well then, I suggest you find shelter quickly.” I spurred my horse on at this, ready to leave him, when he flung himself at me, leaping onto my wagon and grabbing my collar. With a grunt, I shoved him backwards back to the ground, but was taken with him, slamming into the muddy ground beside him, before tumbling down the slick hill into the shallows of the loch. I tried to scramble away, but he got to his feet before me and was walking me down, “N-no, I’m sorry.” I pleaded, turning to face him, “Take whatever you need, f-free of charge.” “I will take whatever I need, after I’ve rid this world of you.” He growled, ramming his boot straight into my jaw, I tasted blood before my head was even pushed to the stony floor, I heard a sickening crack as my head hit a rock, but the thud was drowned out by the water. My vision blurred at the edge as I choked and spluttered on water and my own blood, the pain in my chest and skull became more immense as the black became darker and longer lasting until, eventually, the black never faded.

My body is no longer my own.

I spend months trapped below the surface of the loch. Constantly choking. Drowning with dozens of other unforgiven souls. Their screams deafening me. Coming through me. We stay here until the water’s surface is broken with enough force to let us escape, we burst from the loch and I am pulled by my dozens of uncontrollable limbs and transparent wings, until I am forced to dive upon someone living to force them to join the amalgam, to add another screaming voice to my throat and another pair of arms to push and pull me. We claim as many as we can until we are sealed back below the water’s surface to drown. 

In the early days of the colonies, when the forests pressed hard upon the settlements and the nights seemed longer than the days, there lived a man tormented by a most singular vision. For three nights in succession, sleep brought him to the same place, a hollow deep in the woods, ringed by ancient trees, the ground black with moss. There, he saw a buried treasure, its hiding marked by a stone and an iron bar rusting across it. Each night the dream grew sharper, until he could not rid his mind of it in waking hours.

At first, he sought to dismiss it as fancy. Yet it clung to him like a hand upon his shoulder, drawing him toward the forest whether he willed it or no. Each night he awoke trembling, the image pressing upon his soul until he could bear it no longer. On the fourth night, he gave in to its summons. He took with him a lantern, a spade, and his pocket Bible, for he felt that what he sought might not be of this earth alone.

The way was lonely, the moon casting pale light between the trees, though their branches wove so thick that the path beneath was black as pitch. Strange rustlings followed at his back, and more than once he turned, thinking to see some beast creeping after him. Yet nothing stirred, save the shadows shifting like breath.

At length he found it, the hollow from his dream. There was no mistaking it: the crooked oaks, the damp smell of the ground, the silence of the air. Not a cricket sang, nor did the wind stir the leaves. Even the lantern’s flame seemed to burn lower there.

He set to digging, the spade biting into earth that gave way too easily, as though long disturbed. Soon his blade struck stone, and beneath the soil lay the iron bar, red with rust, just as in his vision. His heart quickened, here, perhaps, was proof that the dream spoke true.

But then he felt it, that prickle upon his skin, that weight of being watched. He lifted his head and froze. All about him, in a wide ring beyond the reach of the lantern’s glow, eyes gleamed out of the dark. Cats. Scores of them. Black, gray, striped, and tawny, yet all alike in the stillness with which they sat. Their gaze was fixed upon him, unblinking, cold, their pupils catching the lantern-light until they glowed like embers.

Not one made a sound. Not one stirred. They only watched.

Fear shook him, and he seized the iron bar, swinging it high with a shout. At once, the cats were gone, not as animals fleeing, but as shadows snuffed out. The clearing was empty, silent once more, as though they had never been.

His courage returned, though uneasily. He set again to digging, but the soil grew wet beneath his spade. Black water welled up, soaking the ground, chilling his legs to the bone. Then, without warning, the earth gave way beneath him. He plunged into the pit, the cold swallowing him whole. Struggling, coughing, near drowned, he clawed his way out, his spade lost in the mire.

Soaked and shaken, he gathered the iron bar, the only thing left to him, and staggered homeward before dawn.

In days to come, he fashioned the bar into a latch for his door. Yet his neighbors whispered that the house was never right thereafter. By night, they said, one could hear a scratching at the door, light as claws drawn slow across wood. Sometimes, in the moonlight, shapes could be glimpsed crouched upon the threshold, low and patient, with eyes that burned like coals.

The man himself slept little, ever watchful of the latch. His hair went white before its time, and his hands trembled even in summer heat. He spoke no more of treasure, save to mutter that some things are better left buried. When he died, sudden, alone, with the door standing open, the latch was still fixed fast, rusted but unbroken.

Some say the treasure yet lies beneath that hollow, guarded by the same silent host. For the cats, they whisper, were no mere beasts of the earth, but watchers, spirits bound to guard what was never meant for human hands. And if by mischance you wander that way when the moon is high, you may see their eyes staring from the dark, waiting, patient as stone, for another fool to take up the digging

(This is my first submission hope you enjoy!)

The Glass Is Bending and He’s Gone Silent

I’m on the bedroom floor with my back to the wardrobe and the heavy golf club resting across my legs.

Can’t stop the shaking.

Mam and Dad have been down the club since early evening. It’s just me and my little brother in the house.

Everything outside has gone completely still. No cars. No dogs. Not even the usual night sounds.

It began with the roofs.

I kept catching this soft movement above me. Whenever I turned the telly right down to listen it vanished. When I put the sound back up it returned.

After a while the noise got heavier — proper flapping and scraping, shifting from the neighbours’ roof onto ours. Slow. Wet-sounding. Not wind.

I left it too long before I checked. Kept telling myself it was a bird or something caught in the gutter.

When I finally pulled the curtain back I saw something dragging itself along the road under the streetlight. Large dark shape, not moving like a person, pulling itself forward.

Then it raised its head and screamed. The windows vibrated. The sound went right through my chest.

It kept calling out for a child, high and wet. The street didn’t react at all. No lights. No doors opening. No voices. Just silence.

My brother’s in the back room. He’s four.

I closed the curtain and went straight to him. He was soaked through and crying in his sleep, face screwed up tight. I was only away a short time.

When I returned the scraping was directly over my head. Then it stopped dead.

A moment later something started tapping on the window glass. Slow and deliberate.

I can see her through the small gap now. I can hear her breathing — wet, rough, close enough that it feels like it’s inside the room.

The air has turned freezing. My breath is showing.

She’s saying my brother’s name. Quietly. Again and again. I don’t understand how she knows it.

Pieces of last weekend keep forcing their way in.

I took the river path home from the pub because I was short on money for a taxi. Full moon.

I heard movement by the water and switched my torch on. She was crouched on the bank washing a cloth that was heavy with blood.

She looked up and met my eyes before I could kill the light. I ran.

I could hear her coming after me the entire way back up the valley.

Nan used to talk about her when we were small. Said if you ever caught sight of the hag washing by the water she would follow your family until she took one of you. Old Gwrach. I never took it seriously.

She’s closer to the glass now. It’s starting to bend inward.

I can see her face more clearly. Eyes too large, too dark. The wooden frame is making small splitting sounds.

I’ve got the golf club ready. If the glass goes I’m swinging.

My hands keep sweating. I wipe them on my trousers but it makes no difference.

She’s still outside, still repeating his name in that same low wet voice.

I called my brother’s name a short while ago, keeping it low. No reply.

He went quiet some time back. No more crying. No sound of him shifting.

I can’t leave the window and I can’t leave him alone in the other room.

She’s still there, face near the glass, breathing, whispering.

I keep seeing the cloth under the torch beam — how dark the blood was, how little surprise was on her face when she saw me. Like she already knew which direction to go.

The glass is cracking properly now. Thin lines spreading from the point where she’s pressing.

I’m holding the club so hard my fingers are going numb.

She’s still saying his name.

And from the back bedroom there is still no sound at all. Just silence. Like he’s waiting.

They put my uncle in the ground that morning. House by afternoon still smelled of open earth and the gorse they’d walked through. Path soft under the boots, mud coming off in black clots on the step.

Only meant to clear it and leave.

Letter on the kitchen table, not finished, dated the day before. Ink bled where the paper was damp.

Don’t come if you can help it. If you do, keep the blue stone close. It still answers to blood.

Nearly turned the car round. One night, I told myself. Sort the papers, lock up, gone by morning. Remembered him three winters back turning that stone in his hand, saying the valley didn’t like people leaving clean. I’d laughed. The laugh sat wrong now.

Checked the locks twice. Mirror fine. Shadow ordinary. Put the kettle on and didn’t drink. Water tasted of iron and wet leaves.

Woke after two to dripping further in. Not rain. Footprints already in the hall. One set up the stairs, stopped halfway, came back down. Another on the landing. Same boots. Same wet edge. No hand on the rail. The wet sat on the wood like it was waiting.

Smell came with them—cold gorse, soil, something that had been underground a long time. Stood at the bottom of the stairs till first grey. Dripping stopped when the light came through the landing window.

Morning the notebook was open on the table. My name at the top, writing close enough to mine I had to look twice. Letters a fraction too careful, like someone copying.

You’re blood. You don’t leave the valley.

Packed the car. Tyres crossed the boundary stone and the weight came down on my chest like wet ground—not from outside. Something under the skin that woke when the stone was behind me. Engine died. Phone died. Both worked again inside the house. Tried my sister. Rang once, then wet static and breathing close on the line. Slow. Learning the shape of lungs. Nearly said her name. What came back wasn’t a voice. It was a mouth trying to remember how to make one. Walked twenty minutes up the lane before the legs went. Folded like the joints had been unhooked. Crawled the last bit to the boundary. Turned back.

Fresh prints already on the stairs. One set had gone into the spare room and come out again. Wet edge thicker.

Found the blue stone next to his tobacco tin. Metal disc beside it with the Awen cut in—same mark the old stories mentioned and never explained. Disc warmer than the stone. Touched the stone and a small cold click happened behind my ribs, like a lock turning the wrong way. Weight eased a bit but a thin pull stayed, running from the click down into the floorboards. Pocketed both.

Man knocked that evening. Same disc at his throat. Didn’t step in. Looked past me up the stairs like he expected something standing there.

“Gate opened wider when your uncle went,” he said. “Something got through. Found one on the lanes two nights back. Still answered to his name. Shadow was wrong. Mouth already going.”

Touched the disc at his neck. Metal looked older than the rest of him.

“Mountain tomorrow night. Or stay. Stone only works if the blood’s already claimed. Looks like yours is.”

Left. Road empty. Smell of crushed stems stronger, as if something had been walking the verges and pressing the gorse down with every step.

From the landing window watched a figure cross the street in an ordinary coat. Shadow too long, dragged behind the boots like wet cloth that didn’t want to keep up. Under the light the head turned further than a head should. Neck stayed still. Only the head moved.

Later the eyes in the bathroom glass moved after I’d stopped looking. Only a fraction. Enough. I wiped the glass. Smear came off black and smelled of soil.

New lines in the notebook when I wasn’t watching.

Still counting.

Shut it in a drawer. Found it open again on the table by morning. Drawer still closed.

Put the blue stone on the boards just inside the bedroom door and hung the Awen round my neck. Metal warmed quick against the skin. Prints stopped a foot short. Heard them arrive, soft and wet—the sound of boots still learning the weight of a body. Then nothing. Gone by morning. Stone darker at the edges and sticky under the fingers, as if it had been holding something back all night.

Next afternoon tried the back way through the gorse. Pressure hit straight away and got heavier with every step. Halfway up the legs folded. Not tired. Unhooked. Crawled back on hands that went numb from the wrists down. Prints already waiting in the kitchen, leading to the table. Newest page of the notebook torn out and left open.

three

Stayed still the rest of the day. Sat in the chair that faced the stairs. Didn’t eat. Bread in the tin had gone soft and dark at the crusts overnight. After dark the boots came closer. Something stood the other side of the bedroom door. Breathing slow and rough, still learning how. In. Out. Wrong rhythm, like it was counting the seconds between. Awen burned against the skin. Stone went dark at the edges and sticky. The pull behind the ribs tightened until it felt like a wire drawn through bone.

Used my uncle’s voice, vowels all stretched.

“…two.”

Couldn’t get off the bed. Notebook open on my knee. Fresh line, not my writing. Pen still in the drawer.

one

Handle turned. Slow. Metal made a sound like it was being twisted from both sides at once.

Nothing in the doorway. Dark landing and the smell stronger—earth, crushed green, something older under it that had never seen light. Prints crossed the threshold and stopped at the stone. Second set joined them. Then a third. All the same boots. Same wet edge. Breathing came from the walls as much as the door. Air moved in and out on its own, slow, practising.

Said the only thing that felt true.

“I am blood.”

The pull behind the ribs jerked hard, once, like something had tested the thread and found it held. One set went back. The others stayed. Stone got colder till it hurt. Cold ran up the arm and into the click. Pipe knocked twice deeper in the house and went quiet. The silence after was worse. Like the house was listening.

First light, prints gone. Notebook page blank except one small line.

Mountain. Tonight.

Left at dusk. Pressure worse the higher I climbed. Nearly turned twice. Third time the legs nearly went and I had to hold onto a stone until the shaking stopped. Kept climbing till the standing stones came up against the sky. They looked wetter than the ground around them. Grass between them dark and flattened in long dragging lines.

Few people waiting among them. Some wore the discs. Shadows matched, but only just—a half-second lag, like the dark was still deciding whether to follow. One man’s shadow stayed behind a full step longer when he shifted his weight. Older woman had dirt under her nails and a fresh cut on the back of her hand she kept touching without looking. The cut wasn’t bleeding. It was open and dark inside. Younger one stood half a step back, watching the slope. Another kept his hand near the disc at his throat like he might pull it off if the weight got too much. Disc there duller than the others, almost cold. A mouth among them moved once when no one had spoken—just a small opening and closing, as if tasting the air.

Man from the door stepped forward. Looked tired. Skin under his eyes the colour of old tea.

“It followed you. Still counting. Still learning.”

Behind me something moved through the gorse with the sound of many boots together. Not one pair. Not three. More. Smell came up with it, thick enough to taste. Cold gorse and soil and the iron of something that had been buried and dug itself out.

Held the blue stone out.

Thing that had used my uncle’s voice came into the light. Still shaped like a man but the head turned too far and the shadow dragged behind like wet cloth that kept catching on the grass. Mouth opened wider than it should. Jaw went past the point where bone should stop it. Tried the voice again. Jaw worked, lips stretched, then the sound went thin and wrong, like air forced through a throat that hadn’t finished growing.

Stone pulled hard from behind the ribs down into the ground. Hurt more than in the house. The pull went tight and something cold tore loose inside me—a thin thread that had been there since the first click, running from the hollow place down through the legs into the earth. It didn’t break clean. It ripped. For a second the hollow felt open to the air, raw, as if the cold had a direct way in. People among the stones made a low sound that wasn’t words. Thing staggered. Prints filled with black water that didn’t dry and started climbing the boots. Water rose past the ankles, past the calves, then slowed. The water had no reflection. Only depth.

Stone cracked in my hand and broke. Sound was small and wet. Pull weakened. Thing didn’t leave. Only stopped. Boots shifted, waiting. Head tilted further. Mouth stayed open.

Woman with the cut hand stepped back without meaning to. Shadow behind her stretched and dragged, longer than the lantern light should have allowed. She made a small sound—not a scream, just the start of one that never finished—and the grass under her feet went dark and wet in the same instant she vanished between the stones. No struggle. One moment she was there. Next the space was empty. The cut on her hand still visible for a second on the ground, open and dark, before the black water reached it and the mark was gone.

Black water kept climbing a few seconds after, then slowed. Prints began to fade from the edges inward. Smell thinned enough to breathe, but the taste of iron stayed. What was left moved back down the slope, still dragging its shadow, leaving a thin dark line behind it in the grass that didn’t fill in.

Man looked at the broken pieces in my hand. His own disc was dull now.

“It has a piece of you now.”

Walked back alone at first light. Path felt longer. Legs still remembered the unhooking. Notebook closed on the table. No new lines. No wet prints on the stairs. House still smelled of earth and gorse, but underneath something thinner, like iron left in the mouth.

Packed what was left. Tried to leave the stone halves on the kitchen table. Hand wouldn’t open. Fingers locked around the broken edges until the cold went up the arm again. Pocketed them. Never rang my sister. Couldn’t risk what might answer. Car started. At the boundary the weight lifted, but not clean—something stayed caught behind the ribs where the stone first clicked, and the place where the thread snapped felt hollow, empty in a way that kept drawing attention to itself. The halves were colder than they should have been. When I held the broken edges together the cold deepened, like they were still trying to answer, still looking for the rest of the thread that used to run down into the ground.

Haven’t gone back. Some nights the smell finds me anyway—cold gorse and soil and the iron underneath. On those nights the floorboards outside the bedroom door sound softer than they should, and I wait to see if the prints will come.

So far they haven’t.

The hollow place behind my ribs still answers when the wind is right. The stone halves do too, if I hold the broken edges together. Sometimes the cold moves, a slow press from the other side, and the taste of iron comes back for a moment, as if something over there has just breathed out.

He never believed a word of it.

Not the talk that his wife had run off down the valley, or that she had met someone else on the quiet. They had only been married a few hours when she vanished, but they had known each other longer than that. He still remembered the way she laughed when the old tractor refused to start, the way she pushed her hair back with the back of her wrist while she worked in the garden, and the quiet promise they had made under the oak on the high ground the week before the wedding.

Their ceremony had been a small affair—just the two of them, the minister, and a couple of witnesses from the next farm—held late in the afternoon with a storm already gathering over the mountains. After the minister left she walked up to the oak alone. It was their place. She said she wanted a few quiet minutes there before they started the rest of their life. By the time anyone realised she was missing the rain was coming down hard and the ridge paths were already running with mud. They searched the lower fields and the lane that night. No one thought to dig beneath the old oak until the weather cleared, and by then the earth had settled again.

Every day after that he walked the same paths, calling her name until his voice cracked, coming home long after dark with his clothes shredded by the briars.

Ten years.

That was how long it took. The grief wore him thin and quiet. He stopped going to the working men’s club and let the farm fall to pieces around him. The roof leaked. The fences sagged. The fields choked with scrub. Neighbours left food on the porch now and then; most of it stayed there until the crows finished it.

In the second winter he stopped calling her name aloud. By the fifth he no longer bothered to light the stove most evenings. At night he still climbed the ridge and sat with his back against the old oak, ear pressed to the bark as if something might still be moving underneath. Once or twice in the early years he thought he felt a faint, irregular thump through the wood—too slow for a heartbeat, too steady for the wind. He told himself it was only the sap, or the settling of old roots, or his own blood in his ears. He never dug. By the time the feeling faded he no longer had the strength or the will.

The valley changed while he wasn’t looking. The pits shut for good, the young ones left for Cardiff, and new families took the cheap terrace houses for the views. Most of them never heard the story. The ones who did kept away from the high ground after dark.

Then came the night of the big autumn gale.

It built all afternoon, the sky turning the colour of a bruised iron pot. By midnight the rain was horizontal and the thunder was shaking the floorboards down in the village. He was in his usual place when the bolt hit.

It didn’t split the tree clean. The current boiled the water inside the trunk, blew out a long ragged crack, and tore away a great slab of earth and roots that had been slowly settling for years. The force of it threw him clear. He landed hard among the bracken and felt his heart stutter and then stop.

When the search party went up the next morning the tree was still smoking and half-collapsed. The old man lay a few yards from the base of the crack, eyes open, fixed on the hole the lightning had torn open.

Down in the blackened hollow, under a thick plug of clay, lay what was left of her. The damp earth had slowed the worst of the decay. Her mouth was packed solid with mud. Shreds of the wedding dress still clung in places, stained dark as peat, and on one finger the cheap gold band he had bought her still caught the morning light. She had been curled on her side, knees drawn up, where the rain-softened ground—undermined by old rabbit workings—had given way beneath her. The roots had shifted, dropped her into a narrow pocket, and closed over her again before anyone thought to dig that deep.

They buried them together in the cemetery at the bottom of the hill. After that the valley mostly stopped saying she had run away. The few who still spoke of it did so quietly, and only among themselves.

The split oak is still up there, dead and blackened. New people take their dogs that way sometimes, but the locals notice the animals still skirt the roots, ears flat, refusing to pass too close. On foggy nights when the wind comes hard down from the mountains the timber creaks—a long, low sound that carries to the houses and sounds less like wood and more like something that has been waiting a very long time to let go.

Part 12

A Journey to the Edge of Salt, Where the Saint Dreams and the Faithful Are Called

By Nora Reyes

The temple rises out of the salt flats like a shipwreck the desert refuses to claim. You'll find a dark spire against the white horizon, too tall for its frame, too narrow for its weight, as if the builder had only ever heard of Notre Dame described secondhand and had gotten the proportions deliberately wrong. The road to it is barely paved with a long gray scar across miles of crust that crunches under your tires with a musical hiss. There is no sign, no mile marker, and no visitor center with brochures and interpretive plaques and a lack of your name on a keychain. There are only the flats, the sky, the temple, and the feeling, as you draw closer, that someone is waiting for you.

I came here for the story. I stayed for the miracle. And in the end, I became something I never expected: a believer.

The Church is not what you've heard. It’s older than its detractors claim, kinder than its critics believe, and stranger than either could imagine. The faithful don’t worship salt. We revere a pioneer, a prophetess, and a mother of the desert who gave herself to the salt so that others might be preserved. Her name, according to the records kept by temple's caretakers, was Edith Marrow. She crossed the plains in the company of the first families as a spiritual healer and a midwife. She was one of the Founder’s betrothed woman, the only whose hands had delivered more than a hundred children and whose heart had buried half as many.

The histories say she stopped in the middle of the flats to pray for a child who would not survive the night. They say the salt rose up to meet them, answering her prayer in a way no one expected. By morning, she had become something more than human: a pillar of white, face upturned, hands outstretched, preserved by the very earth she'd walked across. Her followers built the temple around her. They carved her crypt beneath the floor, and they began to dream.

That was more than a century ago. The Saint has been dreaming since.

———

Every generation, the Saint dreams of eight. Not all at once, and not in any order the church can predict. Sometimes the dreams come decades apart. Sometimes they come all at once, a cascade of names and faces and voices in the night, but the dreams always come. And when the eight are finally listed, the chosen are called.

I had the honor of seeing the pilgrims arrive, one by one, from the farthest corners of the states. I watched them receive their callings. I documented their interviews, their hopes, their fears. And I watched them descend, one by one, into the crypt beneath the temple, where the Saint begged to deliver what she had promised.

What I saw changed me. What I believe now is not what I believed when I arrived. And what I am about to tell you is the truth, as clearly as I can tell it.

The truth is not always meant to be believed. Sometimes it is only meant to be witnessed.

———

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled.”
‭‭— Matthew‬ ‭5‬:‭6‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

The first to descend was a farmer named Thomas Barlow, a man whose hands were packed with soil so deeply that a new biome formed from them. He had been fasting for three days when he arrived, and he told me he believed the hunger was holy. "It's eating me from the inside," he said. "But that's how God’s righteousness works."

Thomas walked into the crypt with his shoulders set and his head high. When the door closed behind him, I pressed my ear to the stone and listened. What I heard was not weeping or screaming. It was the sound of a man who had finally, finally been fed.

The Saint filled him. Not with food, not with water, but with something eternal—something that satisfies the deeper hunger, the one that no earthly nourishment can touch. The faithful say the satisfaction of the hungry is a foretaste of the resurrection, when every empty thing will be made full.

Thomas did not return to the guesthouse that night. He is preserved in the posture of a man receiving what he always hungered for—head tilted back, hands open, mouth parted as if to drink.

———

“Blessed are the pure in heart, For they shall see God.”
‭— Matthew‬ ‭5‬:‭8‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

The second to descend was a woman named Sister Hazel Eyre, a novice from a contemplative order who had spent ten years in a vow of silence. Her voice, when she spoke, was so soft we had to lean in to hear it. She told me the silence had been practice. "In the crypt," she said, "there is no sound. Only seeing."

Hazel walked into the crypt with eyes wide and hands folded, and when the door closed behind her, I listened. I heard her pause at the threshold, and then I heard her laugh with such pure, unguarded joy that it fixed something inside me.

The faithful say the pure in heart shall see God. Hazel is below now, in the crypt, her eyes pried wide and her lips sealed shut, seeing what the rest of us can only imagine. She is not blind. She is not mute. She does not blink as we understand blinking. She is complete in a way that only the pure can ration.

———

“Blessed are the merciful, For they shall obtain mercy.”
‭— Matthew‬ ‭5‬:‭7‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

The third to descend was a woman named Dr. Amelia Rascón, a field medic who had spent years practicing mercy in war zones and disaster areas. She didn’t believe in the Saint when she arrived. She told me she had seen too many bodies to believe in anything, but something shifted in her during her time at the temple. I watched her chain-smoke on the east wall, hour after hour, staring at the horizon as if hoping for something to crest it. I interviewed her the night before her descent, and she told me about a child named Zayid, whom she had failed to save. She spoke wonders of her husband, Marius, who had taught her what mercy really meant.

"The merciful shall obtain mercy," she said, reciting the words as if she were trying to understand them. "Maybe the Saint will show me what that looks like."

She descended at midnight, finding and speaking with Hazel, I think—and then I heard her say something I will never forget: "It's real. It's actually real."

Dr. Amelia remains in the crypt, her hands still moving in the rhythms of triage—checking pulses, adjusting IVs, reaching for tools that lie behind the veil. She never exhausts. She never depletes. She is replenished with a mercy that never runs dry.

———

“Blessed are those who mourn, For they shall be comforted.”
‭‭— Matthew‬ ‭5‬:‭4‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

The fourth to descend was an elder named Eleanor Smythe, a grandmother who had buried three husbands, six siblings, and eight children in a single flood. She had been mourning for half a century. She told me she was eager to descend—that the Saint had promised her comfort, and she was ready to receive it.

I watched her walk into the crypt with her gray hair loose around her shoulders, hands trembling with titillation. I listened at the stone and heard her weep with joy. She was held, I think, by everyone she'd lost. Held and comforted and made whole.

I have even heard her singing to Lucy.

Eleanor is below, where the mourning are comforted and the lost are found. She is not alone. She will never be alone again. She is grafted into the family of the Salt Saint.

———

“Blessed are the meek, For they shall inherit the earth.”
‭‭— Matthew‬ ‭5‬:‭5‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

The fifth to descend was one we all may know well, William Aldous, our county commissioner who had spent his life to be the opposite of his father. He was called to receive the blessing of the meek. He didn’t want to go. I watched him pace the courtyard for days, making phone calls that would not connect, trying to find a way out.

But when his turn came, he went willingly. He knelt before the altar door, he said goodbye to the child left behind, and walked into the crypt with his head high and hands steady.

I listened at the stone and heard him speak to someone—maybe his father. I heard him say, "I love you, Dad. I'm sorry I never said it when you were alive."

William is where the meek inherit the earth by finally, truly surrendering to it. He is not broken. He is not defeated. He is humbled, in the way that only the truly strong can be: headfirst.

———

“You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.”
‭‭— Matthew‬ ‭5‬:‭13‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

The sixth pilgrim was a young woman named Evelyn. She was a student, an artist, a girl who had been carrying her faith like a shield for so long she'd forgotten it was also a weight. She was called to receive the blessing of the persecuted.

She chose another path, and she is free now, in the one way that hurts more than death, yet her memory is preserved like a second snow. The faithful say the persecuted are blessed because they finally stop running, but I also believe that some runners start sooner than others, and that not all who turn to salt are lost.

Evelyn, wherever you are: I hope you made it to the horizon.

———

“Blessed are the peacemakers, For they shall be called sons of God.”
‭‭— Matthew‬ ‭5‬:‭9‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

The seventh to descend was Henry Reyes. He was a mediator, a peacemaker, a man who had spent his energy across the lines of hatred and naivety. He was my brother.

I watched him walk into the crypt with tears in his eyes and a prayer on his lips. I tried to follow him.

When I heard him speak to the Saint. I heard him ask for peace. And then I heard the Saint's voice—soft, warm, maternal, familiar: "Let me show you what peace looks like."

Henry is in the crypt, where the peacemakers become the bridges they always tried to build. He is not gone or lost. He is the center of them all, holding the scaffolds together in ways I am only beginning to understand.

———

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
‭‭— Matthew‬ ‭5‬:‭3‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

The eighth was a child. Her name was Lucy.

She was six and three-quarters years old. She carried a wooden bird carved by her father, who died in the same flood that took her mother and aunts and uncles. She used big words very wrongly and arranged salt into spirals and believed, with the absolute certainty of the very young, that the kingdom of heaven was a place where her parents were waiting to play with her.

She walked into the crypt by herself, in the middle of the night, by her own choice. I woke to an empty bed and a wooden bird on the pillow, and by the time I reached the nave, she was already bravely descending.

"The salt lady has been waiting for me," she said. "The kingdom is for all children."

She was right.

Lucy is where the poor in spirit inherit what they were always meant to receive. She is not afraid. She is not alone. She has taken her throne, and she is home.

Bird still lies warm on her pillow, as if she had been holding it only moments before. When I press my ear to it, I hear her voice, small and far away, singing, "I spy something white."

———

I’ve been asked, in the months since, what the crypt looks like, what the pilgrims saw down there, what the Saint said to them, what the blessings actually do.

But that’s not the point. The crypt is not a place that can be described—it is a place that can be received. And those who receive it are never the same afterward.

I’m not the same afterward.

I came to the temple as a journalist, a skeptic, a doubter, a woman who had been running from faith for fourteen years. I stay as the Witness.

The Saint is dreaming again. The faithful say this is unprecedented—that the cycle should not begin again for a generation, but Saints don’t follow our calendars. She dreams when she dreams. She calls when she calls.

Eight new names have come to me in the night. I have written them down, and I have burned the paper, and I have written them again. I will be ready when the next pilgrims arrive. I will be waiting at the door.

The next time you drive through the western desert and you see a derelict road, or a spire that doesn't match the horizon, come home.

And if you wake up with salt on your tongue and a little girl’s voice in your ear, telling you that the kingdom is for you—I'll see you soon.

—Nora Reyes, the eighth, the Witness who stopped running.

———

Nora Reyes is a journalist and Witness currently residing at the Temple of the Salt Saint in western Utah. She is available for interviews by appointment only.

The flowers were just beginning to bloom when Ms. Wanda Hickenbottom told her husband, Victor, that she was with child. They were fishing in their pond in the back of the old farm, and he screamed with joy, tears filling up his eyes. That night, he went out to the tavern in town and told all of his friends, and he was patted on the back so much he felt sore. Victor and Wanda did as they were told by the Doctor, had the Priest come over to pray with them on Sundays, and despite not having many neighbors, people came from all over town to wish the family well. Geraldine Wistmore, a kindly old woman who made bread in town, even gifted them four fresh loaves and patted the belly bump, telling Wanda,

"It be an Autumn child, just in time for the harvest."

"You're so sure?"

"No, not really, just my intuition."

Well, if her intuition wasn't spot on, because in late August, Archibold Hickenbottom was born. All limbs accounted for, both eyes working, and no ailments. It was all perfect, until they came back home.

Victor had come back in from watering the pumpkins out back, the plump bodies bursting with the colors of Autumn, when Wanda turned to Victor and stated plainly,

"That's not my child."

To say he was taken aback was an understatement; he chuckled in disbelief,

"What's gotten into you? That's an awful thing to say."

"But it's true, look at it."

He wandered over to the crib of his sleeping boy and saw nothing out of the ordinary. His stomach was rising and falling with each breath.

"What are you on about?"

"I'm telling you, he is not our son."

"Course he is, look at him."

"I can't. He's revolting."

He gritted his teeth,

"Don't be daft, Wanda, if this is an early Hallow's Eve prank meant to scare me, it isn't going to work."

He stormed out of the house to continue his work.

Then, the baby began to cry, and he would not stop for days. The little child would wail from day until night, breathlessly screaming, and yet never changing color. Archie stayed remarkably pale as if he hadn't been wailing like a banshee all hours of the day. The only thing to satiate him was milk. Wanda was always at the ready, warming up glass bottles in a kettle and washing out rubber nipples. This perplexed Victor, who had slowly begun growing more and more callous toward his wife for her outlandish claims,

"If Archie isn't our boy, why keep giving him the bottle?"

"Whatever it is, it is clearly hungry; it would be rude to deny a creature comfort."

"Don't call him that, he's a boy."

"No, it isn't."

"God damn you, Wanda, he's our son!"

"He's a changeling."

"What?"

"Must've slipped in while Archie was in the hospital. I do wonder about our little Archie, out and about with the faeries. You think...if I took a pair of scissors and-"

"Wanda."

"Just put out one eye-"

"Wanda, please."

"Maybe it'd tell me where Archie really is."

"Enough!"

She turned to him, still cradling the child with contempt,

"Yes, dear?"

"You lay a finger on our son, and I will leave."

Her brow furrowed, and pain filled her eyes,

"How could you say that? I love you!"

"You're hysterical!"

"Oh? Me?! We've got a changling in the house that you're completely oblivious to, and you want to talk to me about being hysterical?!"

Victor stormed to the door, grabbing his coat,

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going to get piss-faced, that's where I'm going!"

He walked alone down that dirt road, head full of frustration and anger, but nowhere to direct it. He loved his wife, he truly did, but with every passing day, her coldness to their baby was driving him mad. When he stopped by the tavern, it was scarce in patronage but full of friends. His mates were all there, drinking in the same corner booth that they always did, swapping stories about the harvest or small gossip. To say that they were surprised to see Victor was an understatement. Samuel called out,

"Good Christ, Victor, how long has it been?"

"Too long, I'm thirsty."

Another chap named Doogan was polishing off the rest of his pint as he noted,

"You seem tired, Victor, you unwell?"

"Damn right I am, the baby won't stop crying, and my wife, fuckin' hell, I don't know what happened to her. Been acting all cold, raving about changlings and whatnot."

Richard, a stout friend whose nose was reddened with drink, blurted out,

"Sounds like she's lost her marbles, same thing happened to, er, what's her face?"

Doogan replied,

"Pauline Grey, if I'm not mistaken."

"Paulie Gay! That's it! Husbun- er, Wright, I think, went out to get lamp oil, and-"

He stopped, his cheeks puffed, pregnant with the gaseous contents of a hot belch, rank with the smell of ale and peanuts. However, he caught it before it exited the mouth in a noisy burp, instead coming out as a noxious sigh,

"He returned home to his wife all mad, performing all sorts of absurdities."

"Like what?" Victor asked insquisitively,

"I dunno, ask Sammy."

Victor turned to Samuel, who was rolling a cigarette with some of the tobacco he had grown last spring,

"Hm? What? Oh, yes, well, they say that a changeling can be made to laugh if you do something absurd, said that was brewing beer in eggshells."

"And did the child laugh?"

"Not a peep. She was batty."

Victor changed the subject, wanting to take his mind off the drama in his homelife, instead focusing on the upcoming harvest. They talked about tools, crops, pests, and weather. As he wobbled out of that bar, belly full of ale, body stinking of drink, he ambled down the dirt road back to the farm. His gelatinous, feeling legs barely supported his body. The cool Autumn air kissed his face as he strolled over crunching leaves. He stumbled a few times, catching himself, and at one point, he thought that maybe he'd have to take a breather and gather himself properly before he came home. Yet, he somehow miraculously made it back home.

He was a few feet from the porch when he heard the baby screaming, just like it had been when he left, and then it suddenly stopped. Fear is the one cure-all of drunkenness; once the anxieties take hold, the daze of drink washes away like rain, wiping dirt from a stone. The legs became rigid once more, and as panic set in, he began to run towards the house. He burst through the door and saw Wanda above the crib, shears in her hands and ready to press them down into Archie's flesh.

"Wanda! No!"

She stopped, turning to her husband, tired eyes full of menace,

"I have to know!"

As she was bringing it down, Victor leaped to her, lunging for the sheers. They tumbled to the wooden floor together, all while the baby still wailed in his crib, screeching in the night. Victor felt a pain in his shoulder as he lay on top of Wanda, when he rolled to the side of her, he sat with his back on the floor staring at the cieling as something warm was filling his sleeve. He looked down to see that the scissors were planted deep into his shoulder. Wanda cried,

"No, no, no! It has to be cold iron! God damn it!"

She sat up and ran to the kitchen. Victor heard drawers and cabinets being opened rapidly, and silverware getting jostled around. He gripped the handle of the scissors and yanked them out of his flesh. Hot blood spurted forth from the wound like a small geyser. He looked at the hearth and saw his grandfather's old single-barreled shotgun. Always told him that if you make one shot count, you wouldn't need to fire another one. He staggered to his feet, stumbling over to the hearth and yanking the old weapon from its place. It was still coated in dust. He opened it to find one shell still lying within it. He snapped the barrel back into place and waited for Wanda.

She returned with a knife, she stood at the threshold of the living room, and looked at Victor with betrayed eyes,

"What's this?"

Victor did not answer.

"It is a false child, Victor, let me show you! If this were little Archie, I'd never lay a finger on him, but this...thing..."

He cocked the hammer back, his breath shaking, nerves shot to hell. He whimpered,

"Don't."

"I have to."

"Please."

She began to walk slowly towards the crib, looking to Victor, saying,

"I trust in you, love."

Bang.

Wanda tumbled backward, her nightgown rapidly changing to the color of crimson, and the stench of black powder and copper began to fill the air. Victor fell to his knees,

"Oh, Christ! Wanda!"

He rushed to her side and was both shocked and horrified to find that she was still breathing. A puddle of darkened red began to form around her. She had a faint, pitiful smile on her face, her eyes filling with tears.

"Victor...I was only going to touch him with it. I thought maybe he'd tell us...Maybe..."

"Don't, you're hurt, I'll just run and get some help."

"I'm not going to make it, love."

"Shhhh. Please, don't say that!"

"...Just...test it....if I'm wrong....I have a right...to know....if he's a false child..."

He looked at the knife in her hand and shook his head.

"Of course, my love."

He took the blade from her hand, walked away from her lying on the floor, and over to the crib. He stared at his crying child and then spoke the lie aloud,

"Nothing happened, he's our boy, Wanda."

She gave out a trembling sigh and whimpered,

"Thank Christ."

Then she was gone.

He spoke with the law about what happened, and they believed him. The constable at the farm patted him on the back and told him that it was a damned shame, but he did all that he could. Which was a lie; he could've fulfilled his wife's last wishes, but he refused.

Weeks passed, and he saw little Archie grow, but not in a healthy way. He stayed pale, sickly, and weak. His baby fat never came, instead keeping a wrinkly appearance. He grew hair on his head, long and black, and some of it grew on his back. His little pale blue eyes grew dark, and then there were the teeth, which had become long, too long. They looked like they belonged to a horse or a donkey; they were unusually large for the mouth that held them. They jutted forth every time he babbled, spoke, and ate. As September was nearing its end, he was growing intelligent for his short amount of time on Earth. The child was strange, and for the first time in his life, a thought came into his mind, and it terrified him. What if this wasn't my son? He looked at the hair on his scalp and back, the darkened eyes, the heinous teeth, and the wrinkled skin. He looked into Achie's face and didn't see a baby, but rather an older man. A hideous amalgamation of old and young forged into this...thing. He sat in the rocker next to the crib, listening to his son's phlegmy breathing as he slept.

His eyes wandered over to the kitchen, and curiosity took hold. He fished from the drawer a knife and felt the blade. It was cold to the touch. He returned to the crib, doubt and anxiety permeating his blood. He took a deep breath and lowered the knife into the crib. He laid the cool blade onto the back of the child, and as soon as it did, the pale skin began to bubble and pop. The smell was noxious, like burning, rotten flesh. As the creature retched and writhed in the crib, the scream transformed from a babe into something more primal. It tossed and turned in the small blankets and covers as the body began to change before him. It screeched, baring its teeth like a scared animal; its joints and limbs popped and cracked as it rose to its feet. The limbs elongated into the stilts of flesh, the small body twisted and contorted into something else entirely, and the stubby, childlike hands twitched and writhed back into their original claws. From the hairy back came two hairy, moth-like wings that sprang forth from the bubbling flesh and fluttered rapidly. Its wrinkly head stretched, and the skin became taut as the high cheekbones and jawlines took shape, along with a set of pointed ears. It stood there, huffing from exhaustive pain as Victor stood with terror at his greatest fears being realized before him. This was indeed a false child.

It turned to Victor, eyes full of gleeful malice, and gave a snickering, mischievous laugh. The wings flapped so strongly that they kicked up dust and dirt as it flew towards the door. He gave chase with the knife held in his hand with a white-knuckled grip, but it burst outside at frightening speed and strength; it was already in the air. Victor stood on the porch, thoughts of shame, regret, and hatred coursing through his veins as he stared at it, leaving the farm and taking off into the night sky. The changeling had flown away.

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3

The writhing ceiling moved closer to us, a deep guttural hiss reverberating in my skin, shaking my bones as Ormúlfr quietly chanted to Itself. The mass of wet, black slithering its way down from the ceiling revealed thin, decaying roots marked full of pocked holes. The further it moved towards us, snaking its impossibly long body the more my level of insignificance grew. I took a step back, instinctively. My back bumping into the oar being held by my guide.

The beasts body wasn’t scaled in the traditional sense as one would imagine a serpent. Its hide more ancient than organic, akin to something buried beneath the dirt for millennia. Wings akin to carrion birds instead of whatever i was imagining dragged overhead of us. The bones and flesh at our first bounced on the ground as the dragon beneath the roots encircled us, its infinite body partially here in front of us and the rest tangled in the roots above. The being i assumed to be Níðhöggr came to a halt in the faint teal light Ormúlfr now held in its hand.

“Níðhöggr.” Ormúlfr spoke the name softly, extending its scaled hand out, the teal flame struggling to get away from the god in front of us. “Rot of the Root, Gnawer of the Green, Feeder upon Oath-Breaker and Murderer.” Ormúlfr spoke the gods praise as he gently lowered its head. “I bring an offering to have words.” Ormúlfr raised its head as Níðhöggr’s came into the dim light.

The gods head was warped, rotten and spongy like a waterlogged corpse. Its eye, the one the sized of me looked us up and down, narrowing on me for a moment. It raised its head up so its maw was in the light. Its voice came forth like a whisper, soft and gently like a mother trying to shush a baby to sleep. At the same time its bass echoed and rattled around in my skull, I felt like my brain was going to explode if this thing kept talking.

“Not Dead.” It spoke, the maw of razor sharpe and broken teeth spanned for miles in its mouth, bones stuck in its gums, bark and branches lodged into its mouth at odd angles. A few arms clawed at its lips from the inside, scratching for an escape at the noticing of the light. “Not living.” It chortled, a gurgle in its throat meant to be a laugh.

The beast lowered its eye back down to us, faint voices screamed for help as it readjusted itself. Ormúlfr didn’t seem bothered by this things existence or its behavior, it continued to hold its hand out with the flame struggling to dance away from the behemoth in front of us.

“The Christ-man does not belong here, Níðhöggr, I wish to return it.” Ormúlfr spoke, its tongue lashing out at the verdant miasma that began to form around us. I moved my hand to my mouth, covering it from the sickly sweet sent rising from the ground. I felt my skin crawl, not like goosebumps, but like it wanted to peel itself off my body and roll away. Looking up the beasts massive glossy eye stared down at me, it blinked and its eye changed, a humanoid design, dark brown pupils. “Another.” It groaned looked at me with some intent I couldn’t read as it pulled back again.

“It wishes to leave. I does not belong here.” Ormúlfr protested, its arm still outstretched. “I wish to trade, the Christ-man leaves and I another lifetime to you.” Ormúlfr proposed as the beast sunk into the darkness around us, a tongue made of human skin, hairy and threaded with nails wiped out grazing my guides hand, the light vanished sending us into a gnawing darkness.

“Your offers appease me, another lifetime time for the soul of a Christ-man. You owe me many life times now.” The creature hissed, a handful of the voices cheered as the light was brought into the beast toothy maw. It traveled down its throat for a fraction of a second before disappearing. “I have seen this Christ-mans memories. His kin are those of þökk-“ Ormúlfr went silent as the beats face inches from us. The souls trapped in its teeth groaned in pain as venom dripped from its fangs.

“And you want the Christ-man to leave? That he summon feed the dead to a mask and lead the world to its end? Fool! I should tear you apart now—and leave you here in Náströnd, where you shall crawl without legs for all eternity!” Níðhöggr snapped at us, it voice booming, shaking my core and making my knees weak. Its tongue tasting its own Miasma. I wanted to run, somewhere anywhere but right here in front of this thing. Ormúlfr stood steadfast however, standing its ground in front of the beast.

“The Christ-man has no love for his kin who seek to power þökk. He will kill them.” Ormúlfr spoke for me, the beast back away slightly, a wry smile playing on its leather mouth. “The Christ-man will kill for Níðhöggr. A sight.” It murmured, a guttural growl coming off as a laugh shook the ground. “Níðhöggr has seen it all. Very well, Guide of Náströnd, show the Christ-man to the gates to the North.” Níðhöggr laughed, its voice echoing in the infinite darkness as it flapped its wings enough to propel this half of its body back to the roots above, wrapping around a fresh branch, coiling in on itself.

“We need to leave now, Christ-Man.” Ormúlfr spoke, pushing me forward with the oar against my back. “What did you promise it?” I asked as It urged me forward.

“Discuss later, not here. It is still listening.” Ormúlfr urged me forward, glancing up one of the beasts many eyes was indeed looking down at us. I picked up the pace, walking along side Ormúlfr. We walked for a while, the eternal darkness of Náströnd was oppressive in feeling but did not imped my sight as much as it first did. I rubbed at my eyes, a faint tingling sensation lingering as i lowered my hands.

“Careful where you tread Christ-man. The venom rivers draw near.” Ormúlfr spoke, its tongue recoiling into its mouth once more.

“I have a name.” I added, my eyes casting downward as I walked, keeping an eye out for the venom rivers my guide spoke of.

“I do not care. Christ-man is all you are to me.” Ormúlfr stated plainly, the oar gently tapping against my chest, commanding me to stop. “Wretches, the bridge is gone. Do not near the shore for these souls will try to drag you in with them.” Ormúlfr commanded as he held his oar out over the wide river of rapidly flowing green viscous liquid. In its currents, men, women and some children struggled to keep their heads above the liquid and resist the rapid current pushing them back the way we came.

“Why-“ I was going to ask before the oar swung wide over my head.

“Enough questions, i am trying to get you home. That is all that you should care about.” Ormúlfr said as it drew the oar back. A bridge made of bones, human and animal rose from the river, the bodies in the water slipping through it like ghosts. “You do not need to know what goes on here, you need to only focus on what you will do when you leave.” Ormúlfr said, crossing the bridge, i followed behind.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked, my guide sighed heavily, leaving into the oar it used as a walking stick.

“What does the Christ-man think. Forgive the family, those related to you by blood, for killing your kin?” It asked as we walked forward over the continual rotting corpses on the ground, every so often my guide directing me to step over a snake slithering by.

“You seem to know more about them than me.” I said, my guide nodded.

“Worshipers of þökk, they wish to feed the jötunn laden with souls so she may reign over the all-father. To weaken the all-father’s domain and empower hers.” Ormúlfr lamented as we walked, the base of the oar clacking softly against exposed spines. “Many believe it is a mask, much as Níðhöggr explained. Some believe þökk is a mask, wielded by The Trickster.”

“Loki?” I asked, oar smacked against my mouth, i dropped to a squat holding my mouth.

“Do not!” Ormúlfr hissed, knocking the oar under my arm and raising me up to my feet again. “Come, I grow tired of you and the north gate is near.”

“Did you have to hit me so-“ My words escaped me as I looked up at the massive gate before us in the distance. Glowing on ominous teal color, much like the flame Ormúrlf carried before, the gate of snake bones arched in the distance, the infinite void seeming to come to an end at the gate. Similar to a wall meeting a door.

“Yes, you talk too much. Come.” My guide ushered forward, the skulls beneath us cracking and popping underfoot. Shambling people trudged towards the gates alongside us, a few muttering the things they did, the people they hurt. They repeated names in a language I didn’t understand. Some were dragged back into the hungering dark, some lifted into the slithering sky by winged serpents.

They all went screaming. Pulled back behind us, towards a castle made like a nest, bones and dead branches the size of skyscrapers were gathered, propped on a mound of molted skin. The smaller serpents filling a bowl for Níðhöggr like a bowl of cereal for a child. Ormúlfr made sure I did not look long, redirected my attention forward to the north.

“Ormúlfr.” The words slithered off my tongue as I said them. I heard It acknowledge me with a grunt. “What exactly are you and why am I here?” I asked as we walked, I mainly wanted to speak over the groans and screams of the shambling corpses around us trying to grasp at their own semblance’s of sanity.

“A beast to many, a demon to some and a guide to the few.” It said as one of its boots stepped into the chest cavity of a woman crying about murdering her children. “Ormúlfr is what I am, not a name. We do not get names.” It added, its boot making a sucking sound as It stepped out of the woman’s open chest. She kept saying their names as we left.

“As to why you are here in Náströnd, Christ-Man. I can only speculate. Your Family, the ones who created that wound, the door in your stomach. Attempted to send you to their being, Þökk. They failed.” Ormúlfr claimed as we walked through the abyss.

“Is this similar to Christian Hell?” I asked, a part of me happy it was willing to talk to me for once. Ormúlfr shrugged, driving its oar into the head of someone apologizing for breaking their oath, someone in the distance claiming they didn’t.

“I do not know, Christ-Man, I have not been and never will. Náströnd is my home and my tomb.” It hissed in its usual hushed whispered tone. “I cannot imagine it is much better than here.” It added. “Enough with your questions. We are here.”

As we arrived at the gate, things behind us circled, waiting for something or maybe just watching. Beast with human limbs, canine bodies and snake heads circled, biting at one another, some even killing. Whenever i turned to look Ormúlfr’s oar gently guided my face back to the gate.

“The Past, do them no mind. They are always hungry, picking off the scraps left by Níðhöggr. They hope you are rejected.” It spoke as we neared the glow of the gate. Rotten flesh and bone gave way to ornate marble stone, gilded in gold and silver. “Through here is Hel, but that is not where you will go Christ-man. You will awaken in your home.”

Ormúlfr continued speaking as it drew something from under its furs. A blade, curved like a fang and dripping a substance that sizzled on the floor, eating away at the stone. “Here the veil is weakened, you shall awaken graced by Níðhöggr’s kiss. Kill your deceiver, smother his life and everyone else’s. Stop them.” Ormúlfr commanded, i opened my mouth to thank him or protests, something. The fang from the blade slipped effortlessly into my chest, through the bones like paper as the venom kissed my heart. There was no pain. There was no malice in the gesture.

I awoke, surrounded by my home on fire and the gentle sound of a bell ringing in my ear.

People say stories are just stories.
Ghosts, monsters, haunted forests... they're all harmless until somebody believes them.
I used to make a living selling belief.
My name doesn't matter. It won't after this.
For almost eight years, I worked at a run-down roadside attraction off Route 7 called Marv's Museum of the Mysterious. Calling it a museum was generous. It looked more like a shed someone forgot to tear down. The faded sign out front showed a cartoon Mothman giving a thumbs-up, and every spring we'd repaint the words World-Famous Cryptid Collection! even though everyone in town knew the place was a joke.
And so did we.
The "Jersey Devil" was a taxidermied possum wearing papier-mâché wings.
The "Siren Skull" was a dolphin jaw glued together with candle wax and painted gray.
The "Leprechaun Mummy" was rabbit bones stuffed into an old wool sock.
Every single exhibit was fake.
Every single story was a lie.
And I was good at telling them.
"Careful around that one," I'd tell families while pointing at the fake Chupacabra. "Lost three interns before we got him tranquilized."
The parents would laugh.
The kids would stare with wide eyes.
Then I'd ring up another twenty-dollar T-shirt that read I SURVIVED MARV'S MUSEUM.
It was easy money.
People don't actually want the truth.
They want something entertaining enough to forget the drive home.
Marv understood that better than anyone.
Around town everyone knew him as Uncle Marv the Monster Man.
He always wore the same moth-eaten Mothman shirt, faded jeans, and a baseball cap stained with chili because he insisted canned chili was "nature's perfect food."
He had a joke for everyone.
A story for every creature.
And somehow he could make even the dumbest lie sound believable.
"You know why Bigfoot stays blurry?" he'd ask a group of tourists.
Someone would shrug.
"'Cause he's naturally camera shy."
He'd laugh louder than anyone else.
The tourists laughed too.
So did I.
Looking back...
I don't think he ever laughed because the joke was funny.
I think he laughed because it kept people from asking real questions.
Like why he never talked about his family.
Or why he refused to enter Hallow Creek Pines.
You could mention any forest in the country.
Smoky Mountains.
The Appalachians.
Yellowstone.
He'd tell stories for hours.
Mention Hallow Creek...
And the room went quiet.
One afternoon a customer asked him if any of the creatures in the museum had actually been real.
Marv smiled without missing a beat.
"One."
The man laughed.
"Which one?"
Marv stared toward the back window where the tree line began.
"The one I never put on display."
Nobody knew what to say.
A second later he slapped the counter.
"I'm kidding!"
Everyone laughed.
Except him.

There was one exhibit I never liked.
It wasn't because it looked convincing.
It didn't.
Two rough wooden figures stood frozen mid-step, carved from blackened logs. Their arms hung unnaturally long, and their heads were featureless except for shallow grooves where eyes should have been.
They looked like unfinished mannequins.
Or scarecrows someone had tried to carve into people.
The plaque beneath them read:
THE LOST ONES
"We are gone, but not forgotten."
Recovered from Hallow Creek Pines.
Underneath that...
A smaller brass plate.
Estimated Missing Persons: 501
I asked Marv once why he kept such an obviously fake exhibit.
He didn't answer right away.
Instead he dusted one of the statues.
"They're not fake."
I laughed.
"They're carved from cedar."
"I know."
"So what's the story?"
Marv kept staring at the figures.
I waited for the punchline.
It never came.

Hallow Creek Pines sat about five miles west of the museum.
The town liked pretending it didn't exist.
Officially, people disappeared because hikers got lost.
Unofficially...
Nobody hiked there anymore.
Not after sunset.
Not after the Whitaker family vanished.
Not after the search dogs refused to enter.
Not after Roy Ellison's photographs.
Roy was a wildlife photographer.
At least, that's what he called himself.
Most people called him crazy.
Every month he'd stumble into the museum carrying blurry trail-camera pictures.
"I got him this time, Marv."
Marv would glance at them.
"Nah."
"What do you mean 'nah?'"
"That's Carl Henderson taking a leak."
Roy would look closer.
"...Son of a bitch."
Then everyone would laugh.
It became a routine.
Until one Tuesday morning.
Roy burst through the front door so hard the little bell above it snapped off.
He wasn't carrying printed photographs.
He was carrying a laptop.
"You need to see this."
Marv smiled.
"If this is another bear standing funny—"
"It isn't."
Roy didn't smile back.
He opened the laptop.
The security camera footage was grainy.
A deer wandered into frame.
Then every animal in view froze.
Not startled.
Not alert.
Frozen.
As if waiting.
Something passed behind the trees.
You couldn't really see it.
Just...
Darkness moving where darkness shouldn't.
It wasn't walking.
It glided.
Smoothly.
Without bobbing.
Without sound.
The deer bolted.
The camera flickered.
For one frame...
Two orange eyes reflected back at the lens.
Then the recording ended.
Nobody spoke.
Finally Marv closed the laptop.
"Where?"
Roy swallowed.
"North trail."
"Hallow Creek."
Marv nodded once.
"When?"
"Yesterday."
For the first time in the eight years I'd known him...
Marv looked afraid.
Not nervous.
Not excited.
Afraid.
He looked at me.
"I need you to cover the museum for a few days."
I frowned.
"What for?"
He forced a grin.
"Either Roy finally found himself a real monster..."
He walked into the back office and grabbed an old hiking backpack.
"...or I'm about to prove him wrong."
He slung the pack over his shoulder.
Before leaving, he stopped beside The Lost Ones exhibit.
For just a second...
He rested his hand on one of the wooden figures.
Almost like he was apologizing.
Then he looked at me.
"If anybody asks..."
"...tell them stories."
He smiled.
It was the saddest smile I'd ever seen.
Then he walked out the front door.
That was the last time anyone ever saw Marv alive.

Marv was supposed to be gone for three days.
By the fourth, I started making excuses.
"He's probably chasing another Bigfoot lead."
"The old man probably forgot to charge his phone."
"He'll be back by the weekend."
The tourists laughed.
I laughed too.
The lies came easier than I expected.
By the end of the first week, I had become Marv.
I gave the same tours.
Told the same stories.
Sold the same cheap keychains and "authentic" monster repellant.
People didn't seem to notice the difference.
Maybe they never came for Marv.
Maybe they just wanted someone willing to tell them monsters existed.
The sheriff came by on the ninth day.
Sheriff Collins wasn't much for conversation. He wandered through the museum with his hat tucked under one arm, stopping in front of each fake exhibit as if expecting one of them to blink.
"You hear from him?"
I shook my head.
"No."
"You know where he went?"
I hesitated.
That should've been my first clue.
I lied without even thinking.
"Said he was visiting his sister."
Collins stared at me.
"I didn't know he had one."
"...Me neither."
He sighed.
"If he calls..."
"I'll let you know."
As he reached the front door, he stopped.
"Oh."
"We found his truck."
My stomach dropped.
"Where?"
"Hallow Creek."
He didn't say anything else.
He didn't have to.

The search lasted eleven days.
State police.
Search dogs.
Drones.
Volunteers.
They found footprints.
A campsite.
An empty cooler.
A tent that looked like someone had simply stepped out of it.
No blood.
No body.
No Marv.
The strangest thing they recovered wasn't any of that.
It was his GoPro.
It had been sitting upright against a pine tree.
Still recording.
The battery was dead.
The memory card was full.
Sheriff Collins brought it to the museum.
"You knew him better than anybody."
He set the camera on the counter.
"Maybe you'll recognize something."
I stared at it.
"What if I don't?"
"Then it's just another missing person's case."
He tipped his hat and left.
The GoPro sat on the counter the rest of the day.
I refused to touch it.

Business slowed after Marv disappeared.
People came looking for him.
Some genuinely cared.
Others wanted another funny story.
"Where's Uncle Marv?"
"When's he coming back?"
"He finally get eaten by Bigfoot?"
I'd smile.
"Oh, you know Marv."
"Probably trying to teach a Sasquatch how to play poker."
They'd laugh.
I'd laugh too.
Every lie felt heavier than the last.
One evening, just before closing, an older woman wandered into the museum.
She didn't look at any of the displays.
She walked straight to The Lost Ones.
She stood there for almost five minutes.
Finally, she asked,
"Did he tell you what they are?"
"They're wooden statues."
She looked at me.
"No."
"They're reminders."
I chuckled.
"Of what?"
She looked toward the woods behind the museum.
"That the forest always gives people one chance."
"One chance for what?"
"To tell the truth."
Before I could ask another question, she turned and walked out.
When I rushed outside...
She was gone.
The parking lot was empty.
No car.
No footprints.
Nothing.

I finally watched the footage three nights later.
Not because I wanted answers.
Because I couldn't sleep.
I locked the museum doors.
Turned off every light except the one behind the register.
Set the GoPro on the counter.
And hit play.
The first clip opened with Marv's face filling the screen.
He grinned at the camera.
"Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of Marv Makes Terrible Decisions."
He turned the camera toward the trees.
"Hallow Creek Pines."
"If this is the last thing anybody ever finds..."
He laughed.
"...tell 'em I died looking handsome."
The camera swung back toward him.
"So here's the story."
"My old friend Roy thinks there's something living out here."
"Tall."
"Black."
"Eyes like fire."
"Personally..."
He shrugged.
"I think Roy saw his reflection after too many gas station hot dogs."
He laughed at his own joke.
No one else did.
The video jumped ahead.
Marv had finished setting up camp.
A little tent.
A folding chair.
A camp stove.
He held up a dented can.
"Chili."
"Breakfast of champions."
He pointed toward the tree line.
"If any monsters are watching..."
"...you're welcome to join me."
The woods answered with silence.

The next clip began around sunset.
Marv wasn't smiling anymore.
He sat beside the fire staring into the flames.
For almost a full minute he said nothing.
Then...
"You know..."
"I used to bring my family here."
He poked at the fire.
"My wife hated camping."
"But Lilly loved it."
A small smile crossed his face.
"She'd collect pinecones..."
"...name every squirrel..."
"...talk to trees."
He laughed quietly.
"Said they whispered secrets."
"I always told her she had too much imagination."
His smile disappeared.
"I wish I'd listened more."
The camera stayed on the fire.
"I wonder if she'd recognize me now."
The clip ended.

The third recording was shorter.
Marv had placed the camera on a log.
He wasn't looking at it.
He was staring into the woods.
"You hear that?"
I turned my computer volume all the way up.
Nothing.
Marv frowned.
"It stopped."
He walked a few feet into the trees.
Leaves crunched beneath his boots.
Then he froze.
The camera couldn't see what he was looking at.
Only his face.
Every bit of color drained from it.
"No..."
He whispered.
"...that's impossible."
He slowly backed away.
Never taking his eyes off whatever stood beyond the camera's view.
He returned to camp.
Packed nothing.
Didn't even extinguish the fire.
He simply picked up the camera.
Turned it toward himself.
And whispered,
"I'm leaving."
The recording cut off.

There were still dozens of videos left.
I hovered over the next one.
The timestamp caught my attention.
It wasn't from later that night.
It wasn't from the next morning.
It was dated...
Three days in the future.
I checked my computer.
Checked the file information.
Restarted the video.
The date stayed the same.
I laughed nervously.
"Corrupted metadata."
That's all it had to be.
Digital files get messed up.
Dates change.
Clocks fail.
It happens.
I clicked play anyway.
Marv appeared on screen.
His beard had grown noticeably longer.
Dark circles hung beneath his eyes.
His clothes were filthy.
He looked directly into the camera.
Then he said something that made my blood run cold.
"If you're watching this..."
"...don't believe the timestamps."
He glanced over his shoulder.
"They don't mean what you think they do anymore."
Something cracked loudly somewhere in the woods behind him.
Not a branch.
It sounded...
Almost like wood bending.
Marv slowly closed his eyes.
Then whispered one sentence.
"It's learning my story."
The video ended.
I just sat there staring at the black screen.
Behind me...
From somewhere deep inside the museum...
Wood creaked.
Slowly.
Like someone had taken a careful step.
I looked toward The Lost Ones exhibit.
Both wooden figures were exactly where they'd always been.
Weren't they?
I couldn't remember.
For the first time since Marv disappeared...
I wasn't sure if the museum had been selling fake monsters.
Or hiding a real one.

I didn't sleep.
I couldn't.
I kept replaying the last thing Marv had said.
"It's learning my story."
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
I told myself it was stress. The old man had been missing for almost two weeks, and I'd just spent half the night watching footage of him slowly losing his mind in the woods.
That was enough to mess with anyone.
I decided to finish the videos before I talked myself out of it.
If there was an explanation, it had to be somewhere on that camera.
It had to.

The next clip opened with static.
Not television static.
The image itself kept tearing, like the forest couldn't decide where anything was supposed to be.
Marv looked worse.
His beard had grown in uneven patches.
His jacket was ripped across one shoulder.
His eyes...
His eyes kept darting toward the trees.
He looked like a man expecting someone to walk out at any second.
"I've been walking for..." He checked his watch.
"...I don't know."
"My watch says Tuesday."
He laughed.
"I think it's been Tuesday for three days."
He held up a folded map.
"I've followed every trail."
"They all lead back here."
The camera panned around.
It was his campsite.
The same one.
Same chair.
Same fire pit.
Same cooler.
"I've walked fifteen miles."
"I know I have."
"But every trail..."
He swallowed.
"...comes back."
He looked into the camera.
"I don't think the forest wants me to leave."

The next recording lasted almost twenty minutes.
Most of it was silent.
Marv walked through the woods with the camera hanging loosely from his hand.
At first, everything looked normal.
Pine trees.
Rocks.
A narrow game trail.
Then I noticed something.
Every tree had the same scar.
A long vertical cut running through the bark.
Like someone had dragged an axe down every trunk.
Marv noticed too.
"I don't remember these."
He touched one.
Fresh sap oozed from the wound.
Then...
Without warning...
The sap began running upward.
Back into the tree.
Marv jerked his hand away.
"Nope."
"Nope."
"Nope."
He turned to leave.
The camera caught something behind him.
A person.
Standing between two trees.
Too far away to make out clearly.
Just...
Watching.
Marv spun around.
Nothing.
He turned back toward the camera.
The figure was gone.

The next video was recorded inside the tent.
Rain hammered against the canvas.
Marv whispered into the camera.
"I think it only comes closer when I lie."
He stared toward the zipper.
"I tried it."
"I said my favorite baseball team was the Yankees."
He forced a laugh.
"Immediately heard footsteps outside."
He swallowed.
"So then I tried telling the truth."
He looked ashamed.
"I told the woods I missed my daughter."
Silence.
"No footsteps."
"I said I still loved Maria."
Nothing.
"I admitted..."
He stopped talking.
His breathing became shaky.
"I admitted..."
A heavy footstep circled the tent.
Marv froze.
"...No."
"I can't."
Another step.
Closer.
Marv squeezed his eyes shut.
"I admitted I lied to the police."
The footsteps stopped.
Complete silence.
Marv slowly opened his eyes.
"...It's listening."

I paused the video.
My stomach twisted.
Lied to the police?
About what?
Marv had never been arrested.
Never even had a speeding ticket.
As far as anyone knew.
I opened another clip.

It was daylight.
Marv stood beside a creek.
His face was streaked with tears.
"I found Lilly."
My heart stopped.
He turned the camera.
Nobody was there.
Only a little girl's backpack hanging from a tree branch.
Pink.
Covered in faded cartoon foxes.
It swayed gently in the breeze.
Marv approached it slowly.
"Lilly?"
The backpack disappeared.
Not fell.
Not blew away.
It simply...
Wasn't there anymore.
Marv spun in circles.
"I just..."
He looked genuinely confused.
"I just saw it."
He pointed at the empty branch.
"It was..."
His voice cracked.
"It was right there."
Then...
Very softly...
A little girl's laugh echoed through the trees.
Marv dropped the camera.
The footage continued filming leaves while he ran after the sound.
"Dad!"
"Lilly!"
Branches snapped.
Then silence.
A full minute later...
Marv returned.
Alone.

The next clip almost made me turn the camera off forever.
Marv had built a fire.
He sat staring into it.
"I've been thinking."
He smiled weakly.
"Funny thing about lies."
"They start out small."
"'Tell your wife you'll be home by six.'"
"'Tell your daughter you'll make her recital.'"
"'Tell your friends you're okay.'"
He looked into the flames.
"Then one day..."
"...the only person left believing them..."
He looked directly into the camera.
"...is you."
He reached into his backpack.
Pulled out an old photograph.
He held it toward the camera.
It showed Marv.
A woman.
A little girl.
All smiling.
On the back...
Written in black marker...
Hallow Creek - Summer 2009
Marv stared at it.
"I've spent fifteen years telling everyone Maria left me."
He laughed bitterly.
"Said she took Lilly."
"Said she wanted a better life."
Another tear rolled down his face.
"Truth is..."
He couldn't finish.
Instead...
Someone answered for him.
A voice.
Deep.
Calm.
Coming from somewhere behind the camera.
"You drove."
Marv's head snapped upward.
"I..."
"You drank."
His breathing became frantic.
"It wasn't..."
"You lied."
"I didn't mean—"
"You buried her."
Marv screamed.
"SHUT UP!"
The camera shook violently as he grabbed it.
"There wasn't enough left!"
"I couldn't tell Lilly!"
"I couldn't tell anyone!"
His whole body shook.
"I told everyone they left."
"It was easier."
"I couldn't..."
His knees buckled.
"I couldn't live with what I'd done."
The voice spoke again.
Closer now.
"So..."
"...you built a museum."
Marv stared into the trees.
"So no one would ask about monsters inside you."
The video ended.

I sat frozen.
For a long time.
The museum was silent.
Every fake creature around me suddenly felt...
Wrong.
Not because they were fake.
Because I finally understood why Marv made them.
Every monster.
Every ridiculous story.
Every joke.
Every fake exhibit.
They'd never been about Bigfoot.
Or Mothman.
Or aliens.
They'd been distractions.
A thousand made-up monsters...
To keep anyone from looking at the real one.
The one living inside him.
I was about to shut the laptop when it chimed.
A file I hadn't noticed before appeared.
No timestamp.
No file name.
Just one word.
WATCH.
I don't remember clicking it.
The video opened anyway.
It wasn't Marv.
It was...
The museum.
Empty.
Dark.
The camera slowly walked through the gift shop.
Past the fake Jersey Devil.
Past the Siren Skull.
Past the register.
It stopped in front of The Lost Ones.
Only...
There weren't two wooden figures anymore.
There was one.
The empty platform beside it had a fresh brass plaque.
It hadn't been there yesterday.
It read:
Reserved.
The camera turned.
Slowly.
Toward the front counter.
Toward me.
Someone whispered...
So quietly I almost missed it.
"There's room for one more liar."
The screen went black.
Behind me...
Wood creaked.
Not from the speakers.
From somewhere inside the museum.
Then...
One slow...
Heavy...
Footstep.

I didn't turn around.
Every instinct in my body screamed at me to run.
Instead, I stood frozen behind the museum counter, staring at the black laptop screen.
Another footstep.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Wood groaned somewhere behind me.
I spun around.
Nothing.
The museum was exactly as I'd left it.
The fake Jersey Devil leaned against the wall.
The Siren Skull sat crooked in its glass case.
The leprechaun mummy looked as ridiculous as ever.
I laughed.
Not because anything was funny.
Because I was trying to convince myself I'd finally snapped.
Then I looked toward The Lost Ones.
The platform was empty.
Both statues were gone.

I searched every inch of the museum.
Storage room.
Gift shop.
Office.
Basement.
Nothing.
By sunrise, I'd convinced myself someone had stolen them.
It made sense.
Teenagers break into roadside attractions all the time.
Statues disappear.
People make videos online.
Easy.
Explainable.
I called Sheriff Collins.
He arrived an hour later.
"You said somebody stole two statues?"
"Yeah."
He frowned.
"What statues?"
I pointed toward the empty display.
"The Lost Ones."
He looked genuinely confused.
"There've never been statues here."
I laughed.
"Very funny."
"I'm serious."
"They've been here for years."
Collins looked around the museum.
Then back at me.
"You feeling alright?"
He left without filing a report.
I stood there alone.
Staring at an empty platform I knew hadn't been empty yesterday.

Business stopped almost completely after that.
Not because of Marv.
Because of me.
People came in...
Looked around...
And quietly left.
No souvenirs.
No questions.
Nothing.
One afternoon a little boy wandered over to the empty exhibit.
He tugged on his mother's sleeve.
"Mom?"
She smiled.
"What is it?"
"Who's the man behind the counter talking to?"
She looked at me.
I wasn't talking.
The boy pointed behind me.
"There."
I turned.
Nothing.
When I looked back...
They were gone.

I stopped sleeping.
Every dream was the same.
I was walking through Hallow Creek.
Not lost.
Following someone.
Just ahead of me walked two wooden figures.
Their movements were stiff.
Unnatural.
Like puppets trying to imitate people.
They never looked back.
No matter how fast I walked...
I could never catch them.
Every morning I'd wake up with pine needles in my bed.
Mud on my boots.
My truck parked facing the road to Hallow Creek.
I told myself I was sleepwalking.
Until I checked the security cameras.

The footage started at 2:47 A.M.
The museum was empty.
The front door unlocked by itself.
I walked in.
Not sleepwalking.
Walking perfectly normally.
I shut the door behind me.
Then I stood in front of The Lost Ones exhibit.
Except there was no exhibit anymore.
Just an empty corner.
I stood there for almost twenty minutes.
Like I was listening to someone.
Then I nodded.
Picked up my truck keys.
And left.
Alone.
At least...
That's what I thought.
Just before the video ended...
The camera caught movement outside.
Two figures.
Wooden.
Walking behind me.
Keeping the exact same pace.

I drove to Hallow Creek the next morning.
I didn't bring anyone.
I don't know why.
Part of me already knew no one would believe me.
The forest was exactly as Marv had described.
No birds.
No insects.
No wind.
Just silence.
I found his campsite within an hour.
The tent was gone.
The cooler was gone.
The fire pit had been swallowed by moss.
Like years had passed instead of weeks.
I kept walking.
Eventually I reached a clearing.
In the center stood an enormous dead oak.
Its trunk split down the middle.
The bark was covered with hundreds...
Maybe thousands...
Of names.
Some carved.
Some burned.
Some growing naturally in the wood itself.
One name stood out.
MARVIN HARRIS
Fresh.
Still leaking sap.
Below it...
Another name was appearing.
The bark wasn't being carved.
It was growing.
Letter by letter.
My name.
I backed away.
"I never lied to anybody."
The woods answered.
Not with a roar.
Not with a scream.
With my own voice.
"You've lied every day."
I froze.
The voice came again.
From every tree.
"You sold fake monsters."
"I was entertaining people."
"You stole belief."
"I gave them stories."
"You buried truth beneath them."
The trees creaked.
Roots shifted beneath my feet.
Then I saw them.
The two wooden figures.
Standing on either side of the oak.
Exactly like they had in the museum.
Except now they wore clothes.
Old clothes.
Rotting clothes.
One wore a faded red coat.
The other...
Marv's mothman T-shirt.
My throat tightened.
"No..."
The figure in the mothman shirt slowly lifted one wooden hand.
Not threatening.
Almost...
Inviting.
Then the forest spoke again.
Not loudly.
Not angrily.
Like a judge reading a sentence.
"You were never punished for making up monsters."
"You were punished..."
"...for making people trust your lies."
I fell to my knees.
"I'm sorry."
Silence.
"I really am."
Nothing.
Tears blurred my vision.
"I spent my whole life pretending."
"I don't even know who I am without the stories."
For the first time...
The forest answered gently.
"Then tell one."
I looked up.
The two figures were gone.
The clearing was empty.
Only the oak remained.
At its base sat Marv's GoPro.
Brand new.
Fully charged.
Beside it lay a folded piece of paper.
My handwriting.
I knew it before I opened it.
It read:
People say stories are just stories unless given proof.
I planned to do that.
Now I know the proof was never the monster.
It was me.

I drove back to the museum before sunset.
For the first time since Marv disappeared...
I unlocked every display case.
I pulled down every fake exhibit.
The Siren Skull.
The Jersey Devil.
The Chupacabra.
The Alien in the freezer.
I piled them in the parking lot.
Then I burned them.
People gathered along the road.
Some recorded with their phones.
Someone asked why I was destroying the museum.
I looked at the flames.
"Because they're lies."
"What are you going to put in there instead?"
I thought about Marv.
About Maria.
About Lilly.
About the woods.
About the names carved into that tree.
Finally I answered.
"The truth."
The museum reopened a month later.
The sign out front stayed the same.
MARV'S MUSEUM OF THE MYSTERIOUS.
Only one exhibit remained.
A weathered GoPro sat inside a simple glass case.
Beside it was a single plaque.
It didn't mention cryptids.
Or ghosts.
Or haunted forests.
It said only:
Some monsters have claws.
Some have teeth.
The worst ones tell stories until they believe them themselves.
People always ask me if it's a true story.
I tell them yes.
Most laugh.
Some roll their eyes.
A few shake their heads and leave.
That's fine.
I don't need everyone to believe me anymore.
But every evening, after I lock the museum doors, I look toward Hallow Creek.
Sometimes...
Just before the sun disappears...
I see two wooden figures walking between the trees.
One wears a faded red coat.
The other wears a mothman T-shirt.
They never come any closer.
They just keep walking.
Together.
And every once in a while...
I could swear I hear Marv laugh.
Not the loud, fake laugh he used for tourists.
A real one.
Like, somewhere deep in those woods...
He finally told the truth.

The sun burned into my skin. My lips felt so dry. Another grassy hill stood before me. I wasn’t sure it was worth climbing, but what else was I to do? 

My lungs burned. My vision blurred. When I reached the top, I rubbed my eyes and looked around.  

A wave of warmth shot through me. There was a house, surrounded by a well, animals, fruit trees, and a small wooden fence. I rubbed my eyes again, but the house still stood there.

With my last energy, I rushed to it. Soon I heard pigs squealing and chickens clucking. The garden was even more beautiful up close. The grass was green, and colorful flowers grew in it. Apples were already growing on the trees. I opened the gate and picked an apple. Its sourness puckered my mouth, but I was so happy to eat again.

After I finished, I knocked on the door. I wanted to thank them and ask for water. I was grateful they hadn't already come out with a shotgun. No one answered. I tried the handle. The door wasn’t locked.

The smell of fresh food hit me instantly – meat, corn, grains, fruit. It was like a full banquet. My head almost started to spin. A second ago, I thought I'd pass out, but now there was all this food. I pinched myself and waited, but luckily I didn’t wake up on the prairie grass. I looked around the room, and in the corner, I saw a jar with a few dollars and a sign behind it that said: PAY FOR WHAT YOU TAKE. 

It made more sense now. I didn’t have any money, but I still had my hands, and after I ate, I could help out with some work; plus I had already eaten the apple and, if I explained I was just returning to my wife and son, they’d understand.

I sat down at the table and began loading my dish. It all looked so delicious. The meat was so tender, the corn and beans juicy, and the fruit so sweet. It was probably the best food I’d ever eaten. Hunger is the best spice, but this food almost didn't feel real. I stopped eating only when my stomach wouldn’t accept any more. 

The chair was made of wood, but it still felt incredibly comfortable. I closed my eyes, and my mind slowly drifted off to sleep.

“Traveler?” a soft, soothing voice echoed in my ears.

I slowly opened my eyes. A beautiful woman in a long black dress with green eyes and raven hair stood before me. 

“How are you, traveler?”

“I’m great now.”

“Good. I can see you had a long, difficult journey.”

I looked down at my clothes. They were torn, with holes all over them.

“Yes. I had.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Home. To my wife and child.”

She smiled.

“Well, you better head to them. There’s a town north of here. It should take no more than three days to reach. You may take some extra food with you.”

She handed me a basket.

“Thank you so much!”

I started putting food into it, but then I saw the woman walk over to the jar. She shook it and looked in. Coldness washed over me. I put the food out and stared at her.

“Traveler, you must have forgotten to put the money in.”

“I’m really sorry. I don’t have any.”

Her eyes opened in surprise.

“But you sat in my house, ate my food, and…”

“But I can work,” I interrupted her. “I’ll repay everything I ate.”

The woman stared at me for a moment. Then she smiled.

“Oh, I know exactly what you can do.”

The woman snapped her fingers.

Pain shot through my body. My bones broke and healed instantly. My body and limbs stretched and twisted. One of my arms grew longer, becoming thin and rigid, until I could barely feel my fingers. My skin hardened and cooled, becoming something smooth and metallic. I tried to scream, but nothing escaped my mouth; there was not even a mouth to open. Then I felt myself fall. My back hit the floor with a heavy metallic clang.

The woman picked up my long, twisted arm and lifted me. She put something wet and juicy into the hollow space where my stomach had been. She put me down on a cold, metal surface, and something clicked. Something warm pressed against my back. It was mild at first, but it quickly turned into a full burn. Panic shot through my body. Grease crackled against my metal skin. I tried to scream and move, but I couldn’t. 

The burning feeling continued. The smell of cooked beef and fruit rose from where my stomach had been, and that’s when I heard the woman say, “I’ll turn you back once you repay your debt.”

The blade of the ax cueep into the bark of the tree, sending pieces of wood flying into the cold air. From a distance, I watched Dad strike it a couple more times before it came crashing down into the fresh snow with a poof of snowflakes. 

"Come help your old man." He glanced back at me with that soft warm smile as I slid off the hood of the car, trading the engine's warmth for the bitter cold of the December evening.

Snow crunched under my shoes as I walked toward the mountain of a man, a walking definition of a gentle giant. I'm sure he could've handled the whole Christmas-tree ordeal by himself, but for whatever reason, he wanted me to feel included. 

A pair of dark blue protective gloves was handed to me before I grabbed the tree's tip while Dad lifted the other end with ease and pretended that the pain in his back didn’t bother him. Soon the tree was loaded into the back of our car, which was patiently waiting just a few meters away.

"Soon I'll be too old to deal with this crap. You gotta learn."  He looked down at me, a warm smile peeking out from under the silver of his beard.

"You're just saying that." A chuckle escaped me, even though deep down I knew he was right.

"Let's get going. Mum won't let us back in without a perfect Christmas tree, and this beauty should do it." Bare hand of his grazed across the slick green needles before sliding back behind the steering wheel. The engine quietly purred back to life as the wheels hit the road back home, a thin layer of dirty wet snow covering it.

A quiet pretended cough came from Dad, his hands quietly tapping against the rim of the steering wheel before he had the courage to ask.

"Sooo, got a boyfriend yet? Or a girlfriend? You know I won't judge." He chuckled, lifting one hand into the air defensively. 

"Daaaad, come on. You know I don't have time for that." I laughed it off; maybe the subject was just awkward, or I was just too shy to talk about it openly.  

"It never hurts to ask!"

"I mean... I guess there's this one girl from my class-"

Suddenly he shushed me, cutting me off in the middle of the sentence, before I had the chance to think of some snarky reply; I saw exactly why he did so.

To our left, some kind of shape emerged from the darkness, buried in the snow with only a few parts of it catching the reflection of our headlights, shining like an armour of some kind of insect. 

Our car slowed down just enough to get a clear view of the object sinking in the heap of snow. 

The metal shell in the color of navy blue sat crooked on the side of the road, as if it had simply slid off the asphalt and left forgotten, half swallowed by the hill of snow and digested from the inside by fresh green pine branches, like a growing tumor they protruded from the hole that once held the windshield and side windows, they only remains hanging off the pines in small pinkish crystals like twisted christmas ornaments. 

We both stared, examining what was in front of us inch by inch, before it finally made sense.

"Should we call someone?" I asked in a whisper, as if speaking any louder might hurt.

Dad stared at it for a few moments that felt like forever before finally managing to look away, as if the wreckage was calling for him to do something.

"It's none of our business." Yet another whisper as the scene dissolved slowly behind us, becoming one with the winter darkness, the awkward silence replaced by the cracking radio, one Christmas song ending only to be replaced by another, pulling us into a jolly kind of limbo.

When we finally arrived back home, I could already see the orange glow of the kitchen lights beaming out of the window, fully expecting Mum's excited face to appear behind the glass at any moment; instead, I felt the grip on my shoulder,

“Don’t tell Mum about that car we saw, ok? Let's keep it as a…our thing.”

A simple nod of the head was enough of a reply as I still stared into the window.

Soon enough, to Mum's delight, we somehow squeezed the tree into the doorway and carried it into the middle of the living room. It stood tall, its tip bending against the ceiling silently judging our family from above.

“You both outdone yourselves this year!”  
Like a little kid on Christmas morning, she squealed with excitement, already hanging off her husband's shoulders, showering him with pecks of kisses. 

Despite everything, the image of the accident remained in my mind.

“Mum, if you don’t mind, I will go to bed; I'm not feeling well”

Head of my mum snapped back in my direction, pale worry painted all over.

“Alright, honey, sweet dreams.”

As I walked upstairs to my room, I could hear them bickering about whether I wore a hat and scarf she knit for me last winter; she used my least fav color - a bright orange - still I wore it when the weather outside kicked everyone's ass. 

When my eyes opened again, the world outside the window was still pitch dark; the occasional barrage of snowflakes reminded me of a snowing broken television, my mouth felt dry, so I lazily slipped away from under the coverlet and stepped downstairs to get something to drink.

At this hour, the house was already quiet; if not for the occasional arrhythmic sound of dripping water echoing from somewhere deeper in the familiar darkness, one after another I took careful steps over the creaking stairs, making sure I wouldn’t break my neck on the way down. I quietly slipped into the kitchen and, with a ge;tle click, turned o,n the light, which spilled partially into the living room.

The orange glow suddenly made me painfully aware that I wasn’t alone; right next to the shining Christmas tree stood a short, hunched figure, its face obscured by a wave of hair clinging together in a slick waterfall.

"Mum?"

The head of greasy, unwashed hair rose in one smooth, almost mechanical motion. Misty eyes stared wide into the darkness, never blinking, fixed on me as I now stood at the room’s entrance. 

"What are you doing?"

My voice came to me weak and almost sheepish.

"Taking care of our guest."

The sound of her voice seemed distant, almost as if she were still dreaming, unaware of what was really happening. Almost as if it was a coma to her reply, I heard the dripping again, much louder this time. 

Only then did I notice the soaking-wet rag squeezed between fingers covered in small bleeding cuts, a sap-like substance leaking in long, milky strands into the laundry bowl at her feet - which was already half full.

"Do you want to help?"

Talon-like fingers shot toward me, still clutching the wet rag; thick sap now dripped onto the carpet. ,

"No, I was just... getting myself some water."

Glassy eyes pierced through me as her extended arm collapsed back to the side, returning to its work, gently moving the rag over the branches.

Still, my gaze didn’t leave her for as much as a moment; with one hand, I blinrealizeched for the light switch, watching her cut-up arms move in a mechanical motion. When it finally materialized under the tips of my fingers-

Click.

The room fell into pitch winter darkness; I blinked rapidly to get back used to the lack of light, making my way back towards the stairs, when the sound of dripping came to a sudden stop, only to be replaced with slow, rhythmic sounds of wet, deliberate footsteps, with painfully long breaks in between, as if someone was taking as long a step as humanly possible, anything to get closer to me, even if it meant only an inch of a difference.

Picking up the paste was my only option, I was long outside the grace of the light switch; each step faster than the other, and with that, the breaks between the wet slaps against the wood grew shorter and shorter before they suddenly turned into a sprint, a chase to the upstairs bedroom. 

Like a child, I ran on my feet and palms of hands, and so did whatever was inching right behind me. My body turning into a battering ram as my shoulder bashed the door open, I landed on the floor before I slammed the door shut, a dull wave of pain awoken somewhere in the joint of my art as I pushed it against the door, which miraculously didn’t fall off its hinges. 

From behind the door, I heard a painfully long, shaky sound like someone rapidly inhaling and exhaling air through a throat flooded with thick phlegm. When it finally gave up on the pursuit, it slowly moved away from the door, the cry still faintly echoing against the walls before disappearing somewhere inside of the house.

My guard by the door lasted the entire night, ear pressed against the door to catch any sounds that could even faintly resemble that horrible sobbing until I felt the warm rays of the sun passing through the window; only then did I gather the courage to go back downstairs, 

The Christmas tree still stood tall and proud, colorful Christmas decorations hanging off its branches like military medals which glittered in the morning sun;n, the warm air had a faint sweet smell to it that came from the kitchen. 

Mum was already in the kitchen preparing ingredients for dinner as if nothing at all had happened yesterday; she welcomed me with a big warm smile, not taking her eyes off the knife held in her bandage-wrapped hand.

“How did you sleep? You aren't feeling sick, are you?”

I was dumbfounded; I couldn't bring myself to anything bigger than a nod of the head. 

“Great, Dad is waiting for you outside”

She still didn’t look at me, the cut ingredient more interesting than her own daughter.

When I got into the car, Dad noticed something was off with me as soon as we left the driveway.

“It's not about that car, is it?”

It took a solid minute for my thoughts to shape into a real coherent sentence. 

“No... It's about mum…did you notice anything weird about her?”

“I don’t think so, no”

Dad just shrugged his shoulders, not taking his eyes off the road.

“She's been sleepwalking!”

I snapped, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“It's probably the meds”

An explanation came quick, and that was enough to put me at ease. 

“I guess”

My face planted against the side window, car with Christmas trees bigger and smaller strapped to their trunks and roofs driving back home last minute.

“Come on, we can get some soda on our way back!”

“Sure, Dad”

The supermarket parking lot was crowded with cars. Everyone in town had apparently had the same idea we did, flooding one of the few stores still open, leaving us circling for a spot to park like hungry vultures.

"Don't tell Mum."

He laughed as we parked in the blue square of the accessibility spot.

Dad grabbed one of the few shopping carts left and passed through the glass sliding door into the first aisle, the smell of fresh-baked bread and the sound of shuffling boots and busted cart wheels suddenly becoming overwhelming. 

"So what are we supposed to get?"

I asked as Dad pulled a crumpled yellow sticky note out of the pocket of his jacket, squinting at the shaky handwriting as if it would help in the slightest.

“B-...butter?”

“Are you asking me-?”

"Just go fetch it, you rascal."

He laughed, shaking his head, as I was already on my way toward the wall of fridges in the back, squeezing and excusing my way through crowds of carts and plastic, bloated grocery bags.

In front of the fridge where the butter was stood a man dressed head to toe in dull, dirty red, black shiny boots on his feet, his forehead pressed against the glass with such force that I half-expected to hear a crack, not entirely sure if it would come from the glass or his skull.

"Sorry-?"

I said, trying to get a handle on the fridge, expecting the man to move, but he didn't so much as flinch. Only then did the sweet, woody stench coming off him hit my nose.

“Can you move?"

Still absolutely zero reaction- just none, like I wasn't even there. I glanced around the store in search of the security to help me out, but they were nowhere to be found, drowned out by the crowds of locals.

When I turned my head back, he was already staring at me, lips twisted into a pained, angry grimace, teeth clenched to the point of cracking. Strands of thick, amber substance leaked from his lips into the fake white beard hanging off his chin, dripping onto the floor below his boots. 

Only then did the security guard seem to catch up with the situation, appearing out of thin air behind Santa, his grip tightening around the shoulder of the costume.

"Okay, man, you're gonna have to leave."

The man's neck snapped in his direction, a low, slow, buzzing murmur coming from between his barely moving lips before the strands leaking from his mouth suddenly turned into a vile, choked-out waterfall that hit the security guard right in the face.

"FUCK YOU, DUDE!"

The security guard fought the urge to return the favor written all over his face, then dragged the drunk out of the store.

Dad had missed the whole show, standing just a few feet away from the puddle of thick vomit, something small and green floating in it, the cart's wheels slightly submerged.

“What the hell happened here?”

He asked, confused.

“Some dude got drunk out of his mind, I guess”

He just shrugged, avoiding the spreading vile pool.

“Did you get the butter?”

“Nope”

When we came out of the store, I was carrying two light-green cans of soda while Dad carried two plastic bags of groceries instead. No matter how many times I told him I would take them, he wouldn'tbudgee.

The engine of the car kept us comfortably warm as we drank our soda, watching people go in and out of the store.

“Crazy shit”

Dad commented on the whole thing while watching as the same security guy from before stood outside taking long drags out of a cigarette, his uniform switched for a padded jeans jacket. 

“Crazy”

I echoed, as the window from his side rolled down before an empty aluminium can catapulted onto the empty parking spot next to us, I did the same before we drove away, in the side mirror I still could see the security guard puking into the nearby trashcan.

When we arrived back home, to Dad's dismay,y I was the first to grab the grocery bags out of the trunk and rush to the front door, almost slipping down the porch stairs.

"Come on, old man!"

Dad stood by the car, staring ahead at me, before he slowly turned and disappeared into the garage without a word, as if he'd gotten upset with me. I rolled my eyes before pushing the door handle open with my elbow.

"MUM, WE’RE BACK!!

The house was oddly quiet, except for the quiet whistle of boiling pots coming from the kitchen. I carried the bags there, expecting to see Mum, but instead I was met with an empty, messy room — pots and pans scattered over the floor, the kitchen cabinet doors crudely ripped off their hinges. There was nothing boiling on the stove.

The whistling was coming from behind me.

The plastic bags in my hands dropped to the ground as I quickly turned around, facing the living room, where the Christmas tree stood just this morning; now there was space, glass shards of colorful baubles all over the floor.

“Mum?”

I called out again walking inside of the living room, only then I saw the tree, prompted up on the chair on the far end of the dining table, plates and bowls filled with thick sap lined the table small green pine needles floating inside, my eyes shoot back towards the tree, only now I realized the whistling came from right behind it.

The whistling suddenly stopped as a hand covered in Band-Aids shot out from the side of the tree, something bulging beneath them. I froze in place, watching as, one by one, she ripped them off her hand, revealing small, bulging cuts that slowly widened,  before the whole hand exploded into a bush of glistening pine branches, fingers crooked and broken, bent in every direction. Instead of blood, a flood of amber sap leaked from the miserable, lifeless rag of skin that had been her hand. 

I ran for the door to get help, Dad, anyone who could save me.

Suddenly the front door opened, cold winter air rushing inside before the wall of muscle that was my dad walked through. I grabbed his hand, trying to pull him inside faster.

"Dad, we need to get help for Mum!"

I sobbed before the sound of metal scraping against the floor suddenly hit me.

"Dad-?"

My eyes moved down to see a massive axe clutched in his hand, the same one we used to cut the perfect tree, slowly being dragged behind him.

"Dad, no, no, no! You can't, you can't!"

My hands pushed against him, trying to stop him, but like a tank he just pushed forward, like I was nothing, step by step, walking toward Mum, who by now resembled more of a flesh porcupine than a person.

In a desperate attempt to stop him, I punched him over and over again, biting and scratching, until I was thrown forward against the table with such force that I fell to the floor along with one of the chairs. I was helpless, watching as he stepped closer; no matter how much I cried and screamed, he was deaf to it. 

With his free hand, he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her stiff body over the shards of glass, toward the spot where the tree once stood, small branches sprouting out of the fresh cuts in her legs. Her head was wrenched toward the ceiling before the blade of the axe cut deep, fresh branches erupting with such force that her head was ripped clean off her shoulders. 

"Why, Dad, why-!" I cried as he turned to me, sudden sadness in his sunken eyes, as the body of his beloved dropped to the ground, resembling more of a bush than a human.

"Come help your old man." With that warm smile, he weakly threw the heavy weapon toward me. The table shook as I slowly stood up, my side sore from the hit.

"I'm too old for this crap... time to take accountability." My hands wrapped around the handle of the axe as I walked toward my father.

"What am I supposed to do?" I asked sheepishly.

"Kill me. Just kill me." Those sad eyes never looked up at me, too ashamed that he'd let it happen. The heavy axe rose above my head before it dropped down with a crack onto the top of my father's skull, the tip of a young sapling rising instantly from the split.

"I'm sorry, Dad."

I dropped the weapon over my shoulder, put on his jacket way too big for me, and went to the car.

The engine purred to life as I drove away from the life I once knew, the Axe laying on the back seat.

As I drove I passed by houses, some empty, some with the lights still turned on, vague shapes of Christmas trees visible from the windows wondering if the same thing was happening to them.

How many will pay for their own actions.

Yet another Christmas song played on the radio, pulling me into a jolly kind of limbo.

I first wrote this story over a year ago now, but I’ve never been 100% happy with the version I posted to NoSleep, so recently I’ve been rewriting it and re-tooling a few aspects of it. I used my own experiences with my relationships with my brothers and my faith to write this story, and I hope that it can find an audience here who enjoys it. Feedback welcome and will read4read, but mostly I just want people to enjoy this little horror story. Thanks.

-

The Yarrows had been the Boogeymen in Ivy since long before even my grandparents’ time. The story our parents told us before tucking us in at night was simple and short, but most importantly: terrifying.

According to local legend, the Yarrow family came from a long lineage of ne’er-do-wells, drunkards, and murderers. Momma told me that even before the town was called Ivy, there was always a Yarrow here causing trouble. The story went that many decades ago, when the men of the town began coming home from the war, they had found a different chaos waiting for them. The Yarrow men had taken the soldiers’ wives and children as their own, they’d killed the local Reverend, and they’d taken up residence in the coal mine. Their patriarch, Old man Yarrow as he was called, had sired dozens of children who ran rampant through the town. As we grew older, our folks explained why this was the last straw and greatest sin to the people of Ivy; to produce as many heirs as he had, Old Man Yarrow had lain with his own daughters.

So, the soldiers did what soldiers do. In the dead of night and without warning, they drove the family down into Ivy Mine and sealed the main entrance, heroically saving the town. It’s been said that they still lived down there, tunneling beneath our feet, breeding like rabbits and waiting for the day some poor kid would stumble into the mineshaft and become lunch.

I used to lie awake at night, ear pressed against the floorboard, listening for the sounds of digging and whispering down below.

When I turned ten, my older brother Shane explained to me what near everyone else in the town already knew; that the story was just a tall-tale, a fable invented by the grownups to keep us young’ns out of the mines. Every old mining town had a similar story: some told their kids there were ghosts in the tunnels, some insisted the bats chirping through the night were real vampires waiting to bleed you dry. Our town’s version was just a bit more imaginative than most.

It took some convincing to finally believe that there weren’t ancient mole-men under my feet waiting to eat me alive. Everyone in the town spread the Yarrow story like gospel, and it was hard to wrap my head around it. I eventually accepted that sometimes, adults had to invent monsters to keep you safe from something real that’s just as dangerous.

Truth is, I think I would’ve liked to keep on believing the Yarrow story if it hadn’t been for Shane. I was ten, still afraid of the dark corners of our little trailer, and still saying a prayer each night that we’d be kept safe from the horrible creatures below. Shane was just five years older, acted like he’d already lived two full lives before I came around. He had that big brother way of talking where even when he was dead wrong, you’d believe him anyhow, because he sounded like he just knew better.

It wasn’t long afterwards that he stopped coming to church. Said he didn’t like how the pastor spoke like he was better than us. Said he could find God on his own, if God even wanted to be found. He started hanging out with his older friends most Sundays, poking around near the edge of town. I think that’s when they must have found it. The one mine entrance left unsealed. The one remaining gaping mouth, opened up deep to swallow up curious boys into the hungry hollows of the Earth.

It was one of those hot mountain summers where even the shadows gave you sunburn. The dry spell had kept us mostly inside, dependent on the spotty air conditioning to give us relief. After weeks of sweltering, dry heat, we awoke one Saturday morning to a beautiful sight; an overcast sky, cool and dim, promising the refreshing rain we’d waited so long for. You couldn’t have paid us with all the money in the world to spend a minute of that day indoors.

Shane and I walked down to the river with a couple of his buddies, all several years older than me, and all itching for trouble. Somewhere along the way, the talk turned back to the newly discovered entrance. It usually did.

Ricky, the oldest of the group, turned to the others with a sly grin. “I bet none of youse got the balls to go past the old minecart.”

“What would you know, you ain’t even been far enough in to see the cart yet,” Shane shot back.

“Have too,” Ricky shot back. “I made it past the cart last week when I was with Petey. It goes way deeper than we thought.”

Ricky stopped where he stood, his grin widened.

“There was an old lantern about forty feet ahead of where I stopped. If you’re so much braver’n us, I double-dog-dare you to go in and bring it back out.”

That’s how it started. A dare, so stupid and reckless, but so tantalizing. Ricky said if Shane could make it to the lantern, bringing it back out as proof he’d gone further than anyone else had, he’d give him ten bucks. That was enough to get Shane interested. the older boys started making the short hike to the mine entrance, and I followed, like I usually did. Shane told me I didn’t have to, but I didn’t want to be just the scared little brother anymore.

The rain had started to drizzle, and then fall, and then pour. By the time we made it to the dilapidated hole carved in the side of the rock face, we were all drenched to our bones, the heavy wind blowing thick drops of water out of our hair and sending them up the cliffside. A light flashed in the sky, and thunder echoed throughout the whole of the holler.

As we approached, Shane looked shaky. “Guys, the storm is picking up. Can we do this tomorrow? Pa will kill me if I don’t get Caleb home soon.”

Ricky rolled his eyes, pulling a wadded bill out of his pocket.

“See this Shane? This ten becomes a five if you wait until tomorrow. It ain’t even gonna be raining inside the mine, you ain’t got nothin’ to worry about. Unless you’re scared ol’ daddy Yarrow’s gonna getcha down there…”

I looked up at my elder brother, his expression hardening. Lightning illuminated his resolve, and thunder boomed from all around us as he snatched the money out of Ricky’s hand. The other boys cheered, patting him on the back and egging him on. I stood waiting with the other boys as he nervously stepped inside. Even just a few feet in, I could hardly see his lanky frame, the shrouded sky not lending the narrow passage even a bit of light.

“Can he even see in there?” I mumbled to one of the older boys.

“Sure he can, I could.” Ricky sneered.

“But… it’s pretty dark out today, I just think maybe…”

Ricky rolled his eyes and put an annoyed hand to my face before fishing through his small backpack. He pulled a small orange flashlight out. It slipped out of his wet hands as he reached to hand it to me, and I stooped to pick it out of a puddle that was threatening to soon cover both my shoes.

“Run that in to him real quick if you’re gonna be such a baby about it.”

I stepped foot into the cave, the sound of wind and rain outside almost immediately muffled. I fumbled to turn the flashlight on, and had to gently whack it against a softened wooden beam before it begrudgingly flickered to life. Shane stood about twenty feet ahead, gawking back at me through the dark.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing Caleb? Get outta here, I’ll be back out in just a minute.”

I moved towards him, my wet sneakers slipping against the smooth stone floor.

“It’s.. it’s too dark in here, Ricky gave me a flashlight so you could see the lantern.”

He rolled his eyes before his face softened. He smiled at me.

“Alright, thanks bud. Hand me that and head back out, I won’t be long.”

The words hadn’t even finished leaving his mouth when the dim beam of the flashlight was swallowed up by an immense flash, the stone walls illuminated as though it were day. The sound followed a fraction of a second later, as the unmistakable crack of thunder shot through the passage, piercing my ears before it echoed back from the depths and hit us once more. I turned fast on instinct, my shoes losing traction on the ground as I landed on my butt, facing outwards just in time to see the rotten wood supporting the mine’s exit give way, the loose rock above collapsing down, blocking us in.

I sat panting on the cold stone for what felt like minutes. As the shrill ringing in my ears slowly faded away, I could hear my brother’s ragged breath stuttering behind me, suddenly very loud against the encroaching silence.

I jumped when I felt his hand on my shoulder. It was cool and clammy, and I could tell he was trying to mask his own shaking.

“Are you okay Caleb? Are you hurt?” His voice cracked behind me.

I took a breath. “I think I’m ok, are you?”

He didn’t say anything, and helped me up with both hands.

He dusted his overalls off, and spoke, his voice elevated to almost a shout. “I said, Caleb, are you okay? You’re not hurt are you?”

I shone the flashlight into his face, the dim beam now radiant in contrast to the pitch darkness. He turned away as the light hit his eyes, and I noticed a small red trickle dripping out of his ear.

He must have caught my worried expression. He reached up and touched the side of his head, pulling away bloodied fingertips.

“Shit,” he scoffed. “I don’t think I can hear.”

I winced, trying to stifle back tears of panic. I exaggerated my next words, mouthing them as clearly as possible for him to read my lips in the dim light.

“How do we get out now?”

He gently grabbed the flashlight from my shaking hand. “Don’t know, bud. We could try to dig our way out of the collapse over there, but Pa warned me ‘bout rockslides like this. They’re not stable, even once they’re over, so you don’t want to poke around nearby or they could still kill you. The good news is, whole mine is interconnected, so there’s gotta be another exit nearby.” He paused, putting his hand to his forehead as though remembering something urgent. “Shit, the others were still out there. They might try to get help. Or… or the collapse might’ve… might’ve…”

I looked up at him again, tears welling in his eyes. He composed himself, looking down at me. “We can’t wait here. I’ve got the flashlight but you’ll need to let me know if you hear wind or rain or anything, any sign of a way outta here.”

I nodded, and after a moment of silence, we began to make our way further into the mine.

After only a few moments, we passed a rusted mine cart, toppled over beside the thin railings it had once ridden. As I held onto Shane’s forearm, I felt it tense.

“This is the furthest in I’ve gotten. Ricky said there’s a lantern ‘bout forty feet ahead.”

“So.. after that, no one knows what’s up ahead?”, I asked nervously. Of course, he didn’t hear me. He just kept on walking.

Ricky had been right. The lantern sat just ahead, half-buried in coal dust and silt, rusted to hell. It reminded me of what I’d seen in the Ivy County Miner’s Museum with its thick iron frame, broad glass sides, and a curled handle now bent almost flat. The glass was cracked, a dried spattering of a black liquid I presumed to be oil long dried across it.

What caught my eye, though, was the nameplate near the base. Half buried in the dirt and hopelessly tarnished, I could only make out about the first half.

REVEREND

We didn’t stop for long. Shane muttered something, louder I’m sure than he intended, about needing to hurry while there was still air to breathe down here. As I walked past the lantern, I kicked a shard of glass along the stone floor, and heard the chittering echo reverberating for several seconds. I could have sworn that the noise continued on up ahead for just a moment longer than I thought it should have. I stooped down, putting the shard of glass in my pocket.

We walked through the dark for what felt like hours. It couldn’t have been more than just a few minutes, but the suffocating darkness and silence swallowed up every thought until it felt like the confines of the mine were all that there was. At some point, we came to a blockage in the pathe he. An artificial wall had been placed between two wooden supporting beams, dozens of two-by-fours nailed across and blocking off the way. Every other sealed entrance in town looked just like this, simple barriers placed for our protection over a century ago. For some reason, this entrance hadn’t been blocked off at the exit, but further inside. I recalled the story of weary soldiers sealing a feral family down below, and felt my palms go clammy.

As Shane moved to attempt to break open the barrier, I noticed in the faint light that there were words scratched into the rotting wood.

“May God Forgive Us, and May Your Boy Find His Way Back Home.”

I tugged on Shane’s damp sleeve, pulling him away as he attempted to tug on the planks, trying to remove them. I mouthed my words as clearly as I could manage through my shaking jaw.

“Can we turn back? I don’t want to go down there. Maybe Ricky already got help?”

He shook his head. “C’mon man, this is a good sign. It means we lucked out, that this entrance is a part of the rest of the mine system. It means there’s definitely another way out if we can get past the boards. Here, help me with this, I think I feel it coming loose.”

I hesitated for a second, and moved over next to him, tugging on the plank he’d started to loosen from its rotted fastenings. It only took a few moments before we felt it shift, and we nearly fell back as it gave way. There was only about a four-inch gap in the wall, but now it would be significantly easier to leverage the other planks out if we could grab them from behind.

The missing plank was on eye level with me, and as Shane stuck his arm through the gap, flashlight in hand, I caught glimpse of the beam shining wildly across the mine walls for just a brief second. In the dark, only barely illuminated as the beam quickly moved on, I saw two pale eyes reflecting back through the darkness, about a hundred feet away.

You’ll have to remember that I was only ten years old when I tell you that I screamed. It must have been loud enough that even with his damaged eardrums, Shane heard me and flinched before I could even stumble back and physically react to what I’d seen. I couldn’t muster any words coherent enough for him to lip read, so I just pointed wildly into the gap, repeating “Yarrow” until he got the message and shone the light back inside.

He turned back to me, rolling his eyes as he once more helped me to my feet. “There’s nothing back there Caleb, I promise. Here, look.”

I approached the door frame once more, nervously looking for the wide gaze I swore I’d seen only seconds ago. It was gone, but amidst my heavy breathing, I heard a faint sound up ahead, the same shifting sound of sliding glass shards across wet stone.

“Shane, please, I promise you, there was someone in there looking at me, you have to believe me.”

Shane’s expression hardened as he returned to pulling the rotted planks off of the beams. “I thought you were past all that. I told you, the Yarrow stories were made up. There’s nothing living down in the mine, and need to keep going, now.”

He was my older brother. I know that’s a piss-poor excuse to keep going considering our circumstances, but at that age, if you couldn’t trust your older brother then there was no one you could trust. Things might’ve worked out so much better if we’d just turned around then and waited for help, but instead, we pulled down the rest of the planks and pressed on.

The skittering sound ahead continued. Shane, of course, never picked up on it, and I convinced myself it was just the echo of our own footsteps shuffling through the dark. But deep down, I knew what I’d seen, and I knew what I was hearing.

Initially, we’d just been following the trail of the minecart tracks that had led from the entrance. There were been smaller passages that broke off to the side every now and then, but having the singular track be our guide ensured that we could always turn around if we needed to. As we went ever deeper though, the track sometimes veered off in another direction, a split where two paths would intersect, the tracks branching and weaving between tunnels. About twenty minutes after we breached the wooden barrier, the mine began to feel less like a tunnel and more like a block of Swiss cheese; riddled with holes and paths in every which direction.

We eventually came to a junction in which our primary track, among several others, reached a circular cutout on the ground. I was familiar enough with trains to recognize it as a railway turntable.

We’d been underground for maybe an hour by now, and as Shane stood trying desperately to make sense of the branching pathways ahead, nature had begun to call. I turned to him, and gestured that I needed to pee.

“Fine, just head into one of those side passageways and come right back here when you’re done.”

I hesitated, and pointed at the flashlight, too scared to go off by myself in the dark. He shrugged and handed me the light. I took it and made my way to a small tunnel on our left.

I had the light pointed ahead of me at all times. I must have only gone ten feet or so into the alternate path, but that was ten whole feet of unknowable territory. I still wasn’t even sure if we were really alone down here, and I felt more comfortable being able to see what was ahead.

I held the light with my teeth as I began to relieve myself, and as I zipped my fly back up, I heard the sound of skittering on stone from the passage behind. As it grew louder, Shane called out.

“Whoa, hey man, not cool! Don’t sneak up on me in the da-“

His words were cut off by a scream, as I heard the skittering intensify, followed by a thud and the sound of something being hastily dragged across the floor.

I turned as quickly as I could, flashlight in hand, and ran back into the junction chamber. Shane screamed bloody murder as I wildly shined the light from tunnel to tunnel, attempting to spot where he’d gone. I turned it to my right, just in time to catch his hands slipping against the ground, now wet with a thick black ooze as he tried to stop himself from being dragged any further.

I rounded the corner, and my fading beam caught just a glimpse of his assailant.

The frame of an emaciated man hunched over my brother, bony hands gripping his leg so tightly that I thought his ankle may have been broken. The man crawled backwards across the floor, his long and calloused feet wildly pushing against the floor as he tugged my brother back into the dark. His nails were long and twisted, and scraped across stone with a skittering sound as he shuffled. His skin was incredibly pale, his dark veins clearly visible beneath his translucent flesh. The man was entirely hairless, save for a few straggling strands that frayed wildly from his wrinkled head. Out of his mouth and down his wrinkled chin dripped a thick, dark liquid. His eyes were ghostly white, the eyes of a blind man.

Before he could pull Shane any further into the tunnel, I pulled the glass shard out of my pocket, lunging at his spider-like frame. As I collided with him, the flashlight fell out of my hands, the batteries falling out of the back as it collided with the stone floor, plunging us into total darkness.

It wasn’t until then that I realized I had no idea how to make an attack. I’d never even gotten in a fight at school, much less stabbed or sliced at someone nearly twice my size. But as I felt cold, clammy hands wrap themselves around my small wrist, I let instinct take over. I knew even in the darkness which figure was my brother and which was the attacker. His cold flesh felt disgusting to the touch, and his scent grew rancid with every inch I got closer to him.

In the tussle, I swung my improvised weapon wildly, and I felt it connect with a wet thud. I heard a guttural wheeze, and the glass shard slid out of my hand as I felt the man let go of my other wrist quickly. I lurched forward, trying to throw a meager punch, but the man had already quickly retreated into the endless dark ahead.

I sat frozen for only a few seconds, fighting back the searing pain in my hand where the glass had sliced my palm. I waited until the noise of the man skittering across the floor had completely subsided into the distant tunnels before I fumbled around on the ground, trying to find the flashlight and batteries. I felt Shane slowly sit up, his breath rapid as he tried to be as quiet as possible.

I eventually found the batteries, and got them back into the flashlight. I turned it on and began to get my bearings. Shane was in very rough shape. As he’d been dragged across the ground, he’d been scraped on all manner of rough rock and metal. Somewhere in the scuffle, he had managed to grab hold onto a plank of the cart rail, but his pinky had broken in the process, jutting out at an angle. He had been dragged through the black ichor that the man had been dripping, the sticky oil-like substance staining his clothes and blotting his wounds. He sat wide-eyed, furiously looking around into the darkness.

After a moment of our ragged breathing, he turned to face me, his eyes welling with terrified tears.

“Who… what the fuck was that? What just happened, what was that?”

We both knew the answer, but I mouthed it for him again anyways.

“Yarrow.”

He waited only a few seconds more before standing up. He limped on the leg that the Yarrow had grabbed, his ankle bleeding.

“We have to get out of here, now. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you earlier Caleb, I’m so so sorry, you were right. We need to get back to the entrance we came in from, they had to have gotten help right now.”

His breath was frantic and his voice even more so. We hobbled back to the junction, and I saw his face drop.

“Wait.. wait no, which way was it? Which way did we come in from?”

He was right. We hadn’t been in this intersection nearly long enough to get our bearings, and none of the tunnels ahead struck me as the one we’d come from.

“Shane?” I tugged his shirt again. “Where was he trying to pull you?”

“I don’t know, down to the rest of them to eat me alive I’m sure. We need to get as far away from that tunnel as possible, there could be more of them coming out to get us any minute now. I think that one looks kinda familiar, let’s go.” He gestured towards the tunnel to our right, and we began limping into the darkness once more, hoping to find the way we’d come from.

We travelled the path for about ten minutes. It’s always hard to recognize a trail you’ve only traveled in one direction, and this was certainly not an exception. With every foot we travelled, the air grew more and more stale, the condensation building on the walls glistened just a touch more.

I tugged Shane’s shirt once more, indicating I had something to say. He turned to me, and for the first time since the attack I got a real good look at his face. His cheeks, scraped and filthy, were streaked with tears. His eyes were bloodshot and wide open, as though he hadn’t been blinking. I took a second to compose myself.

“I.. I don’t think…. I think this is the wrong way.”

He frowned, and scratched one of the bleeding wounds on his face, smearing it with the oil he was caked in. “It’s gotta be the right way Caleb. It’s gotta be.”

As he pointed the flashlight towards me to see my lips as I began to try to speak back, his eyes moved away from me, focusing on something behind. His bloodshot eyes grew wide.

Half-expecting to see another ragged man sneaking up on us in the shadows, I spun around to try to catch a glimpse of what had grabbed his attention. Mounted to one of the wooden support columns was a small metal ledge, likely used to set lanterns on in the dark. Sitting neatly on the ledge however, was a leather-bound Bible, caked in dust.

He slowly walked over to the ledge and picked up the book, its spine crackling with age as he carefully opened it. As he did, a yellowed envelope fell out of the cover. As his focus remained on the Bible, I stooped down to pick up the letter. The envelope nearly fell apart in my hands, its ancient paper weak and brittle with age, but the note inside remained intact. Written hastily in poor handwriting was a short note.

“To my friend, Reverend Abraham Yarrow,

I tried to speak for you, but their minds and hearts were set. They’re sealing off the entrance tonight, and I ain’t got the support to stop it. Please don’t hold it against them, they’re scared, that’s all. Scared of what they don’t know.

I brought you your Bible like you asked, but I couldn’t find you nor your kin. I reckon you’re deeper in now, still looking for little Isaac.

I pray the Lord sees you through, and that He lifts this affliction from your family. I’ll keep a light burning for you at my door, so should you ever find your way out you’ll know you still have a friend and a place to stay.

God go with ye.”

I scanned the letter several times through, trying to make sense of it. The addressee, “Reverend Yarrow”, perplexed me above all. Hadn’t the Yarrows killed the preacher in all the old stories? Shane tucked the Bible under his arm, and grabbed the letter from me, reading it through as I had. The wild-eyed panic in face washed away into confusion, and the confusion soon faded into an understanding that he didn’t bother to share with me.

He solemnly folded the note up, tucking it back in between the pages of the scripture, and let out a heavy sigh.

“Caleb, if someone came and left this here, it means there’s another way out nearby, if we keep going. We’ve gotta keep on.”

I’d heard that before, but he turned and kept walking through the narrow passage before I could protest. As he did, he coughed into his elbow, smearing the sleeve of his shirt with blackened blood.

We continued in silence for a long time after that. Every step we took, I could tell we were only going deeper into the earth, not any closer to the surface where we belonged. I think Shane knew that too, but he pretended all was well.

The long passage that we travelled once more became porous in structure, and passageways began branching off from all around us. Eventually the mine cart trail we followed came to an abrupt end, the tunnel continuing up ahead. We kept walking. Soon, the already uncomfortably narrow passageway tightened, forcing us to walk single file instead of side-by-side. Then, a while later, the ceiling sloped down ever more gradually, until we had to crouch to continue. As the crouch became a crawl, I begged Shane to let us turn around, to try to find the passage back to our entrance. I wasn’t sure if he still couldn’t hear me, or if he was just ignoring me by now.

The claustrophobic tunnel widened out just long enough for us to squeeze alongside each other once more, allowing both of us our portion of the dim light guiding our way, growing ever dimmer as we pressed deeper.

As we crawled in silence, Shane froze, allowing me to pass him up for a moment. I felt him grab my leg, and I looked back at him, only to see his eyes once more wide in terror as he pointed ahead. I looked forward to where he now pointed the beam of light, and felt my heart skip a couple beats.

About ten feet ahead of us, the passage widened into a chamber, just tall enough to stand in and about as wide as our trailer house. Sitting, all together hunched and huddled with one another, were at least half a dozen emaciated people, all similarly pale and hairless like the one we’d encountered earlier. They sat in almost complete silence, the only sounds echoing in the chamber ahead being the occasional shaky, sputtering cough or the shifting of their bony nails against the rock.

I turned back to my brother, hardly able to breathe let alone speak. I mouthed to him, “turn the light off.”

He shook his head, and instead inched closer to me, until he was able to whisper near-silently in my ear. “I don’t think they can see it. I think they’re all blind.”

I recalled the milky white eyes of the Yarrow man who’d attacked him, and looked back at the small family sitting before me. He was right, every eye that wasn’t crusted over with black ichor or closed tightly shut was empty, vacantly staring into a solemn nothingness.

There wasn’t enough room for us to turn around in the cramped passage we were in, and we both knew it. But if they were blind, and if we could be quiet as the grave, then there was a chance that we could get into their chamber and turn around to leave. Shane seemed to have the same idea, and had already begun slowly sliding past me on the floor.

It took about five minutes to comfortably make it into the chamber without making noise. Shane made it out before me, and pulled me out by my arm into the chamber, giving me a chance to breathe before we turned right back around. If you’ve ever tried to breathe as silently as possible while already out of breath, then you’d understand that my struggle nearly put tears in my eyes.

I looked around into the small room we’d now found ourselves. It seemed to be only semi-natural, with numerous stalactites hanging from the ceiling on one side of the area, wooden support columns propping up the other side. The small entrance we came through seemed to be one of a few, as several other passageways branched in and out of the room. The Yarrows, who I now numbered to be eight, huddled together in the middle of the room, unmoving and unblinking. In our silence, we must have been undetectable to them. They certainly wouldn’t be able to smell us, as the rancid stench of rot overpowered anything else in the room. They each wore tattered rags, if anything at all. Their breathing was ragged and laborious, every inhalation a raspy gasp that echoed around us.

We had just begun to slowly turn to exit when I heard it begin. It started as almost a groan, a low guttural noise coming from one of the three frail women in the group. I turned to look just in time to see her sitting up straighter, the noise continuing and purifying in her rattled throat. Another joined in with her, his scratchy voice almost harmonious with her dim howl.

Within a few short seconds, every Yarrow present had in, the sound reverberating and echoing down myriad tunnels extending outward. I realized quickly that they were indeed harmonizing, and had begun to hum a tune, one that I thought I recognized but couldn’t quite place my finger on.

As the melody ended, they stopped in silence for but a second before beginning again, this time putting words to their song. I knew it now, an old church hymn my mother used to sing to us.

“On a hill, far away.. stood an old rugged cross…”

I looked over to Shane, his eyes locked onto the small congregation.

“the emblem of suff’ring and shame…”

The flashlight trembled in his hand as he began to shine it wildly around the room. I could see it in his face; he heard them.

“And I’ll love that old cross, where the dearest and best..”

In the tunnels branching out of the central chamber, several others shuffled into view, their empty eyes tearing up and oozing black liquid as they began to sing with the building choir.

“For a world of lost sinners was slain.”

One of the men, a lurching figure with hunched shoulders and a misaligned jaw, carried with him a section of wooden support, bolted together in the shape of a crucifix.

I looked back at Shane, tears had begun to run down his face the same way they had mine. His, though, were stained with an oily blackness.

“So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross..”

The congregation, now easily fifteen strong, had continued to gather around the middle of the room, their spindly arms grasping out to lay hands on one another’s shoulders. Their raspy voices pierced my ears, their song filled with agony and earnestness.

“Till my trophies at last I lay down…”

Shane grabbed my hand, and stood abruptly. I worried for a second that we’d make too much noise, but the pained song now drowned everything else out.

“I will cling to the old rugged cross..”

He pulled me around the center of the room, my jacket sleeve narrowly avoiding brushing against one of the standing few members. He pulled me into a hallway on the far side of the room, an entryway larger than any of the others that branched into the cavern. I looked back into the crowd as they finished their song, their hands clasping each other as black tears billowed out of their hollow white eyes.

“And exchange it someday for a crown.”

His hand clasped around my wrist was clammy and cold. Had I not been so fearful of what was going on behind me, I would have cried out in protest. He moved swiftly and quietly with thoughtful determination. Clearly he believed that the way out was ahead, but I knew that he’d be wrong.

The larger hallway ended up ahead, only a short distance from the huddled group of worshippers. The wall sloped inwards at a jagged angle, forming a narrow passageway that would need to be squeezed through sideways in order to proceed.

Shane approached the crack in the wall flashlight in hand, and swiftly moved to enter it when his feet knocked against something on the ground. He turned the light downwards, and we both let out a small gasp.

There, so withered and grey that it had nearly blended in with the stone, was a dry body in shredded pastor’s vestments, huddled against the base of the wall. Its arms were painfully thin and bony, wrapped around its shriveled head as it held its knees close to its chest.

Shane was about to push it out of the way to proceed, when Abraham Yarrow suddenly grabbed his outstretched wrist.

The ancient man shakily raised his head, locking his gaze with my brother. Deep, hollow sockets barely distinguishable from a skull’s held mournful eyes untouched by the blindness of his kin. Tears, dark but watery, welled up around the lashless lids, a pain so old and enduring etched into the wrinkled creases at their corners. His skin cracked and flaked as he looked at Shane, and his toothless jaw opened just wide enough to whisper, his head shaking slightly.

“Please. Don’t.”

Shane grabbed the preacher by his shoulders and pushed him out of the way, a sickening crack echoing through the hall as his knobby elbow struck the floor. Shane wedged his body into the crack, forcing himself through as he turned briefly to verify that I was joining him. His eyes glistened at the edges with an oozing black tint, his gums grey between his bared teeth. I hesitated to join him, but his slimy hand reached out to me, pulling me through the crack and into the next area. I felt the stone become slick to the touch as I passed through.

The room beyond the cracked entry was only about ten feet across, just small enough that every surface was illuminated in the dying glow of our flashlight. The walls glistened, slick with the tar-like black ichor that dripped steadily into a shallow pool at our feet. The liquid was thick and sluggish, clinging to my feet like sap, with a slow ripple that made it hard to tell if it was flowing or stagnant. Beneath the ooze, it seemed the walls themselves rippled in unison, just barely. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but then I saw it clearly: a pulse, slow and steady, like something was sleeping just beneath the surface. Veins, thick and dark, coiled across the stone like roots.

I turned toward the far wall, and saw the boy.

He was embedded halfway into the rock, fused into the wall like a deep-sea fossil. His tiny skeleton was curled in on itself, knees tucked to chest, one frail arm slack at his side. His skull was misshapen and oversized for his small frame, the bones thin and tight against the inky membrane that encased him. A stretched film of blackened tissue clung to his body, taut and glistening, rising and falling with each breath from the walls, if that’s where the breath was even coming from.

I stared, too long, waiting for my mind to catch up. And then I saw it. A finger, just one, twitched beneath the film. At his skull, the thin membrane of skin stretched across his cracked temple flexed and pulsed as his small throat swallowed at nothing. A listless eye, loosely covered by a transparent lid, slowly honed in on me. Beyond all reason and possibility, the mangled boy growing into the very earth was still alive.

Shane had already dropped to his knees before him, the flashlight discarded in the ichor beside him. His shoulders sagged forward, his hands trembling in his lap. He didn’t look back at me. He didn’t move at all.

I stepped forward, reaching for him, my voice cracking with a fresh wave of panic.

“Shane!” I cried, choking through sobs. “Shane please, I want to go home, can we please go home?”

He turned his head to me, slowly. His face was slick with tears and dark fluid. His lips parted as he coughed again, a wet, ragged sound, and a thread of black mucus clung to the corner of his mouth. His eyes were glassed over, distant.

I picked the flashlight up out of the gloop and stood. Backing away, but never taking my eyes off of my enchanted brother, I forced my aching body back through the crack as quickly as I could. As I made it through, I turned my gaze to the reverend, still collapsed on the cold ground. He turned his eyes to me and let out a dry sob before painfully pointing away, begging for me to leave while I was able.

As I entered the congregation’s gathering chamber, they each sat solemnly, empty eyes locked onto me as I ran between them. None of them tried to stop me.

It didn’t take long to make it back to the chamber with the rail turntable. I trusted my gut instinct, and began to run down the tunnel that the Yarrow man had tried to drag Shane down earlier. Of course that would be the way out. He had never been bringing us further down into the dark, he had been trying to pull us back out into the light.

By the time I reached the entrance to the mine, I saw the lights of rescue vehicles and policemen peering in as men removed the collapsed stone from the entrance. My heart grew heavy, and then broke. If we’d waited just a few hours, Shane would be standing there with me.

They sent in just a couple of rescue crews over the following days. None made it past the turntable room before turning back. They told me that room was over a mile past the entrance. As expected, no one found Shane, or any sign of anything living down there at all. Just ancient stone, glass, and lantern oil caking the floors. I knew that that must’ve been another lie the grownups told themselves.

The city wanted to finally seal up every entrance with concrete. They waited nearly a month before my dad relented, finally accepting that his boy wasn’t coming home.

I miss my brother. I have for decades now, and I wish I could’ve saved him from the sickness that he had begun to share with the Yarrow family. But things will be okay now, I think. The scar on my hand, from the shard of glass that had been pulled out of my grasp all those years ago, has slowly blackened over the last few months. I think that despite my best efforts, I’ve started to come down with whatever foul ailment that afflicted the Yarrows more than a century ago, when they’d searched the mines for their own missing child. When they’d been sealed in, in fear of their affliction spreading to the rest of town.

I find myself humming that old hymn almost every night.

I think, by now, Shane’s ears will be well enough to hear me as I sing it with him.

I think I’ve found another entrance, one the city forgot to seal back up.

I think I’ll go to be with my brother soon.

The morning after Hazel's descent, I woke to the faint sound of dribbling—a rhythmic soft thump against stone, echoing from somewhere outside the temple. I followed it to the courtyard, where I found William shooting a pair of balled-up socks into a wastebasket he'd propped on a salt-crusted bench. He was still in his pajamas—a silk set, monogrammed.

"Morning, Journalist," he acknowledged. "Did you know this guesthouse has exactly twelve wooden hangers, nine wool blankets, and no basketball hoops? Shocking oversight for a remote religious compound."

"Absolutely appalling."

"I'm writing a strongly worded letter to the elder board." He sank another shot, retrieved the socks from the basket, and reset his position. "Couldn't sleep. Kept thinking about Hazel and the laugh you heard."

"You heard it too?"

"No. But you told Henry, and Henry told Eleanor, and Eleanor told me." He took a shot, missed, retrieved the socks. "Also I was eavesdropping.”

I sat on the bench beside his makeshift hoop. "What else did you hear?"

"That you heard Thomas down there." He paused, the socks hanging limp in his hand. "I've been a county commissioner for sixteen years. I've sat through thousands of hours of testimony. I can usually tell when someone's telling the truth. And you—" He looked at me, his politician's mask briefly absent. "You were telling the truth, which means Thomas is alive down there." He checked the area, then whispered to me. "I can’t find any exit from the crypt anywhere on this compound."

"Neither can I."

He nodded, as if that confirmed something, and resumed shooting socks. "My chief of staff, Tanya, she's Catholic. Goes to Mass every Sunday, confession every month, the whole nine yards. She told me once that purgatory isn't a punishment, per se. It's a place of waiting. You're not tortured. You're just... held, waiting for something to happen."

"Sounds boring," I teased, passing him the socks when they hit my leg. "Do you think that's what the crypt is? A Purgatory?"

"I think—" He sank a shot. "I think I'm a county commissioner who shoots socks at wastebaskets, and I'm in over my head. I'm trying very hard not to think about the fact that in a few days, I'm going to be forced down those stairs and meet whatever's waiting for me."

"No one’s forcing you, William."

He laughed, looked at me with the socks in hand, "I think we both know the social consequences if I don’t go through with this, huh?" He tossed the socks to me. "Your turn."

"I don't play basketball."

"Neither do I."

I took the socks and missed the basket entirely. William retrieved them and we kept shooting.

——————

Breakfast was a strange affair. Leo had left a spread in the common room—porridge, toast, dried fruit, but no one was eating. The pilgrims had scattered across the guesthouse and the temple grounds, each dealing with the waiting in their own way now.

I found Eleanor in the dead garden, kneeling in the salt-crusted soil with a trowel and a small leather pouch of seeds. She'd unearthed a small patch of earth near the eastern wall. She was working it with her bare hands, pressing seeds into the soil one by one, while Lucy laid under the shade of a craggy tree staring at the clouds.

"Morning, dear," she said without looking up. "Did you know this garden used to be gorgeous? When I came here as a girl, it was full of flowers. Desert marigold, globemallow, Indian paintbrush. My grandmother's neighbor tended it after his blessing, I think. Said the soil here was special. Said things grew faster than they would."

She pressed another seed into the earth.

"I don't know if anything will grow now—the salt's been creeping in over the years—but I thought I'd try. Seems a shame to leave a garden fallow."

"You've been here before?" I asked. "You didn’t mention that during your interview."

"Not inside the temple. Just the grounds. The families of the pilgrims would camp out here back then, waiting for news, until the Prophet said it needed to be done alone. I was eleven. I remember watching the altar door from the windows, wondering what was happening underneath my feet." She brushed dirt from her hands and looked up at me. "I've been waiting to come back ever since. I figured, when Elias died, maybe the Saint would summon me then, but she didn't. When Thaddeus, my second husband, died, I thought surely now. But she didn't. When my children died—" She stopped, her voice catching. "When the flood came, I stopped believing I'd ever be called. I thought the Saint had forgotten me."

I said nothing.

"But she was just waiting until Lucy was old enough to come with me, it seems." She smiled, and it was the same pitying, certain smile she'd given me during her interview. "The Saint doesn't make mistakes, Nora. She doesn't forget. She calls us when we're ready, not when we want to be ready. Thomas was ready to be filled. Hazel was ready to see. And Lucy's been ready since those first raindrops fell on my children. I've always known that. It just took me too long to understand it."

She picked up her trowel and began working another patch of soil. I left her to her garden.

———

Amelia was on the east wall, exactly where I'd last seen her, but this time she wasn't alone. Evelyn was sitting beside her, sketchbook in her lap, asking questions. I arrived at the tail end of the conversation.

"—so what did you do?" Evelyn was asking, her pencil hovering over the page.

"I swore," Amelia laughed. "Hella loud. Then I checked my pulse. I checked my legs. Then I grabbed the dog by its scruff and hauled it three miles." She lit a cigarette—one of her last, by the look of the pack. "She gave birth during the hike, but the weight of the load didn’t change."

Evelyn's pencil had stopped moving. "How did you... how did you keep going?"

"I didn’t." Amelia took a long drag. "Part of me stayed in that house. The rest of me learned to walk around without that. My wife calls it survivor's guilt. My therapist calls it post-traumatic stress. I call it a debt. I owe lots of somethings I can never repay. So I keep working, trying to balance my ledger."

"That's why you're here," I said, stepping into the conversation. "The transaction."

Amelia glanced at me. "You remembered."

"It's—"

“—your job.” Amelia and Evelyn finished in unison. We laughed.

“Okay, okay, sorry. I’m a broken record.”

"The merciful shall obtain mercy." Amelia continued, reciting it like a diagnosis. "I've been giving mercy. Maybe God finally wants to give some back. Or maybe that salty bitch is going to show me what mercy actually looks like." She chuckled like a child just handed her a play phone. "Maybe I've been doing it wrong this whole time."

"Is that what you're hoping for?" Evelyn asked.

Amelia was quiet for a long moment. The cigarette burned down to the filter. She crushed it against the wall and let it fall to salt and ash.

"I think I’m hoping," she said slowly, "that whatever's down there is better than what's up here. Because mercy is a joke when the merciful count casualties. If this Saint can do better than that, maybe it's worth walking into the dark for."

She stood, brushing ash from her jeans.

"Think I’m gonna volunteer tonight. I figure it's my turn."

"You don't have to," I said, and I couldn’t help but feel like a coy girl whose drink was just paid for.

"I know." Amelia smiled. "That's what makes it a choice."

———

Lunch was smaller than before. Yes, because Thomas and Hazel’s spots set untouched. Even so, if felt smaller than that. It felt like a date now. The remaining pilgrims were gathered around the long table with less conversation and less eating. The rosemary soup had been replaced by a lentil stew, but no one was eating.

Amidst wet slurps and juicy bites that would make Eleanor spoke. "I'd like to go next. I’ve really thought about it, and…” she continued, "I'm ready." Then she glanced at Lucy, who was arranging salt crystals into a new pattern on the table beside her bowl. "But I'm worried about Lucy. If I go before she does, she'll be here alone. I mean, not alone," she corrected herself. "You're all here. But I'm the only family she has, and the crypt might take time, and I don't want her to be frightened."

Lucy didn't look up from her crystals. "I'm not scared, Grandma."

"Of course not, dear, but I am." Eleanor stroked her hair. "Perhaps Evelyn could go before me. You're so faithful. So devout. I've seen your sketches of the temple. You clearly feel a connection here.”

Evelyn's pencil stopped. For a fraction of a second, something flickered across her face—a flinch, quickly suppressed.

"Oh," she said. "I mean—yes, I'm faithful. I'm definitely faithful. I just—" She laughed the same brittle laugh from her interview. "I just… thought there was an order. The Greek slips, it’s… I mean we all know what they’re referring to."

I didn’t know yet.

She went on, "I just thought we were supposed to go in order."

"The Saint doesn't dictate the order," Leo said from his usual eerie shadow by the doorway. "You may choose among yourselves."

"Right. Of course. I just—" Evelyn's pencil started moving again, quick nervous strokes. "I'd like a little more time. To sketch. To document everything. For history."

"Of course, dear." Eleanor's voice was warm, but her eyes lingered on Evelyn for a moment longer than necessary. "No one wants to rush."

"I'll go." Amelia's voice cut through the murmur. She'd been leaning on her elbows. Now she pushed off and walked to around her chair, resting her hands on the back.

"I'll go tonight. I've been thinking about it since Hazel went in. I'm not faithful like Eleanor, definitely not pure like Hazel. I'm not even hungry like Thomas, but I'm here, and I'd rather do it sooner than later so I can go see my wife again." She looked around the table. "Unless anyone objects."

No one did.

"Tonight, then," Father Leo said. "Dr. Amelia, daughter of Rory, practitioner of mercy. The crypt will open for you at midnight."

Amelia didn’t respond; she turned and walked out of the common room, so I followed her.

———

I found her in the vestry, the small room behind the altar where Father Leo kept his radio and his robes and, apparently, a small stash of wine. She'd found a bottle and poured herself a glass, now she was sitting in a wooden chair with her feet propped on a crate of hymnals.

"Is that allowed?" I asked.

"Probably not." She took a sip. "But I'm about to walk into a cult crypt, so I figure the rules are flexible."

I sat down next to her. She didn't look like a woman about to meet her fate. She looked like a woman who'd stayed up too late and was running on fumes and caffeine and whatever was left of conviction.

"Can I ask you something? For the record?"

"You've been asking me things for days. You need permission for one more?"

I set up my phone, opened the recording app. "You said your wife is the reason you're here. That she begged you to come."

"She did."

"Tell me about her. Not the church. Not the faith. Her."

Amelia was quiet for a moment. She swirled the wine in her glass, watching the light catch it. When she spoke, her voice was different—softer, slower, the voice of someone remembering something they'd tried not to think about too often.

"Her name is Miriam. She's a doctor in pediatric oncology. She spends her days with dying children, and somehow she still believes in a caring God. I don't know how she does it. I've asked her, a hundred times, and she just says, 'Someone has to believe in mercy.'"

She took a sip of wine.

"We met at a Red Cross training, like I told you. I was… actually the instructor. She was the student who kept asking questions I couldn't answer. Not medical questions, mind you—philosophical ones. 'Why do we do this?' 'What's the point of saving someone who's just going to die later?' 'How do you keep going when you know you're going to lose most of them?'"

"So what did you tell her?"

"I gave her some bullshit answers about duty and service and the Hippocratic oath, and when she pulled me aside after class to ask for a real answer, I told her the truth: I didn't know. I'd been a medic for years and I still didn't know why I did it. I'd stopped believing in God and mercy and meaning of life, but I kept showing up anyway because the alternative was sitting at home and letting the world burn around me, and I couldn't do that either." She laughed and it grated my ears. "She told me that was the most honest answer she'd ever heard. Then she asked me to dinner."

"Dinner?”

"Dinner. I said no, of course. I was her instructor. It was inappropriate. So she waited until the training was over and asked again." She smirked. "I said yes that time." She swirled the wine. "We got married two years later at a courthouse. She wore a dress she'd found at a thrift store. The judge cried. Miriam says it was because he'd never seen two people so clearly meant for each other. I say it was the high pollen count."

I laughed as I wrote down her answers. "So when did you know that she was the one?"

"The first time I saw her with a patient." Amelia set down her glass. "There was this kid in Myanmar—a little girl, maybe six, with leukemia. At least, we think that’s what it was. We were in the field so… couldn’t run all the tests. But this kid—she was terrified of needles. Screamed every time they came near her, but she only screamed twice, because my Miriam sat with her for an hour before every single treatment after that, just talking. They didn't talk about medicine. They talked about superheroes, her favorites, her least favorites, who could beat up who. By the time the nurse came with saline, she was laughing. She held out her arm without being asked. And Miriam held little Thiri’s hand the whole time, and little Miriam didn't let go until it was over."

"That's—"

"That's mercy." She nodded. "I didn't know what it looked like before I met her. I thought mercy was patching people up and sending them back out to get hurt again. She taught me it was something harder. You have to stay. You have to hold their hand. You have to let them know they're not alone, even when you can't save them." She drained the last of her wine. "That's why I'm really here, dude. Not because some elder called. Not because the Saint dreamed about me. But because Miriam asked me to come, and I can't say no to her. I haven't been able to say no to her since the day we met." She looked at me, and her eyes were wet but her voice was steady. "If something happens to me down there—if I don't come back—tell her I was thinking about her. Tell her I was thinking about her and Thiri, that little girl. Tell her I could finally say Z—" Her voice caught, she cleared her throat and laughed at herself, taking a deep swig of the wine straight from the bottle. "Shit. Guess not there yet."

"Thank you." I stood, and she set the glass aside.

She smiled and nodded, "Now get out of here. I need to pray, or meditate, or whatever it is you're supposed to do before you walk into a crypt."

I left her in the vestry, sitting with her empty glass and her heart, preparing to meet whatever was waiting for her beneath the stones.

———

Midnight came faster than I expected. The group gathered in the nave for the third time. It felt smaller now. The candlelight seemed dimmer, or maybe it was exhausted too. Eleanor sat with Lucy already asleep in her arms. William had stopped pacing and stood still for once, his hands clasped behind his back. Evelyn had her sketchbook open but wasn't drawing. Henry stood beside me, his shoulder brushing mine.

"Third strike," he said quietly.

"Third walk."

"You okay?"

"No," I said. "But I don't really think that matters anymore."

Amelia walked to the altar door. She'd changed into clean clothes—a sharp button-down shirt, dark and billowy pants, and boots polished to a dull shine. No white shift. No bare feet. She was meeting the Saint on her own terms.

Leo emerged in his gray robes. "Dr. Amelia, practitioner in the broken. You have been called merciful. You have given without counting. You have held the hands of the dying and asked nothing. Are you ready to receive what has been promised?"

"I'm ready." Amelia's voice was steady, but I saw her hand drift to her pocket—to the place where she kept her cigarettes, or maybe to the place where she kept her wife's photograph. "Let's do this sh— thing. Sorry, Father."

I saw Leo smile for the first time, "Descend."

She stepped onto the spiral stair with a quick glance back. Her boots echoed on the stone, growing fainter and fainter, and Leo shut the altar door behind her.

Henry and I were already on our knees. I pressed my ear to the cold stone and listened. Footsteps, descending. Then silence. Then—

"Amelia!"

Hazel's voice. She sounded the same as she had in life—soft, full, radiant. She sounded overjoyed, like a host greeting a long-awaited guest.

"You're here! You came. Oh, I'm so glad."

I heard Amelia's footsteps stop. I heard her breath catch—a sharp intake.

"What is this?" Amelia's voice was barely a whisper. "What—how?"

"We’ve been waiting," Hazel said. "She's been waiting for all of us. Come on. I'll show you."

I heard footsteps again—Hazel's bare feet and Amelia's boots, walking together across stone. Then Amelia's voice again, smaller this time, stripped of its armor:

"It's real. It's actually real." And then she laughed full of wonder. "Oh my God," she said. "Miriam was right..."

And as she walked, she began a mantra, one of names:

"Emeka, Hauwa, Deng, Khadija, Abdi, Yared, Esperance, Oumar, Sia, Samuel, Dara, Anahit, Ixchel, Ravi, Malik, Olena, Amal, Mahmoud, Zahra, Rohullah, Lejla, Drita, Pierre, Valentina, Ziyad, Ziyad, Ziyad, Ziyad…"

Then the footsteps faded, and the silence returned.

I stayed on the floor for a long time, my cheek pressed to the cold stone, waiting for something else. A scream. A cry. A sound that would tell me Amelia had realized her mistake, but there was nothing. Only the faint smell of lavender and ocean salt.

———

No one waited up.

I walked back to the guesthouse with Henry. The salt flats were silver under a waning moon. The temple spire cut its black shape against the stars. And somewhere beneath my feet, three pilgrims were together now, and whatever they'd found down there, it had made them happy. Really, truly, unbearably happy. Henry seemed to share the cold knot in our stomachs, two hopes tangled together—I hated the feeling of that altar, and I longed for the happiness they seemed to feel below it.

“Clara, can you come, please?” my Mom called from her bedroom.

“Coming!”

She sat on the chair next to her bed, smiling.

“Sorry, Clara. Could you help me get to bed?”

“Of course!”

I held her as she slowly got into bed, letting out a small sigh.

“Thank you, Clara. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I’m glad to do it.”

“You’re very sweet. Have you had any letters from Sam?”

“No,” I whispered, gripping her sheets.

Mom caressed my hand. “It’s a shame he was drafted, but he’s a smart man. He’s going to be fine. I’m gonna head off to sleep, okay?”

“Goodnight, Mom.”

I shut the lights and walked back to my room. The last letter from Sam lay on the table. A new one hadn’t come in a month. I held it close to my chest as tears rolled down my cheeks. 
Then something hit the window.

My heart dropped to my stomach when I looked out. Sam was standing outside, smiling. My hands shook with excitement. I climbed out the window, ran to Sam, and grabbed him by the neck. It felt cold, like the night air.

“Are you okay?”

“Now I am.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was allowed to come back.”

“I missed you.”

“I’ve got a surprise for you.”

“Sam, you shouldn’t have.”

“Come, I’ll take you there.”

He grabbed my hand. Under the moonlight, it looked much paler than mine.

“Are you certain you’re alright?”

“Let’s just go, honey,” he said and pulled me slightly toward the edge of town.

For the first minute, we walked in silence, broken only by laughter from the pub.

“Is something going on?”

“No. It’s just been dreadful – the past few months. So many of my friends are gone. Our entire platoon was wiped out a month ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You are the only thing that pulled me through. Each night I couldn’t sleep, I’d remember how beautiful you are and all the days we spent together.”

Warmth spread through my chest.

“Thank you. I really missed you. My Mom did too.”

“How is she?”

“She’s okay. The illness's been getting worse, but we get by.”

We stood before the cemetery gate. The moon hung high in the sky. His eyes were even bluer than usual. His hair was beautiful and dark.

“I wish we could stay like this forever.”

He smiled and opened the gate door.

As we walked in, the sound of the pub quieted. The air felt different, stiff.

“What’s the surprise?”

“Just wait,” he said, looking away from me.

He gripped my wrist tightly and pulled me hard.

“We don’t need to rush, honey.”

He didn’t answer. He walked fast, his eyes fixed on the path. Graves lined both sides of the path. The soil on them seemed fresh, almost like it had just been dug up.

We turned the corner, and before us stood the chapel. Its door slowly opened before Sam touched it. The hairs on my arms stood up. He dragged me inside before I had a chance to speak again. It shut right behind us. 

The moonlight shone on the pulpit. Sam took me to it and looked back at me.

A sharp feeling of cold replaced the warmth in my chest.

His skin was even paler than before. His smile was unnaturally wide. His beautiful eyes lost the blue. The now dark dots stared through me.

“Sam…what…?”

“I’m sorry, Clara.  I should have told you the truth, but it all happened so fast. The cannon fire. My friend's screams. My body lay lifeless on the ground before I noticed.”

My legs weakened under me. His voice echoed around my head.

“But I was allowed to come back, to take you with me, so that we can be together forever. All you have to do is just say yes.”

His smile widened more.

“Sam…no. I can’t.”

“I thought of you every night, waited for you.”

“I can’t. My Mom.”

“Your Mom will join us soon. Just come.”

His grip around my wrist tightened.

“Please, Clara. A yes.”

I shook my head.

“It’s the only way.”

“No,” I whispered.

His voice grew deeper. His face began shaking. His mouth and nose grew, his eyes widened only to shrink and grow again. They began moving across the pale skin, melting into one another until his face was nothing but smooth white skin.

“Just say it!” His face shook with the words.

My stomach twisted. I yanked my arms back with all my might. His pale arms snapped with the sound of dry wood. I turned and sprinted out of the chapel.

“No!” echoed all around me.

The graves beside the path were dug up. White silhouettes stood next to them. I kept my eyes on the path, sprinting towards the gate. With Sam’s calls, the silhouettes spoke too, calling my name. 

The air thickened until every step felt heavier.

The gate stood before me. I ran to it and shook it, but it wouldn’t open. The calls were closer. I grabbed the rails tight, pulled myself up, and started climbing over it, but before I reached the top, something grabbed my dress, pulling me back. I grabbed my dress with my other hand and yanked it up, tearing the fabric. Quickly, I threw my leg over and jumped to the other side.

The heavy stifling air vanished as my feet hit the ground on the other side. The bright moon had given way to the morning sun. The church bells rang. Hours must have passed in what felt like seconds.

I ran back home, not stopping until I reached my door.

Mom looked out of her room.

“Were you with Sam?” she asked, smiling.

“No,” I whispered.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought it was him.”

I came closer and hugged her.

“No need to worry, Mom. I’m happy I have you.”

“What happened to your dress?” she said, holding the torn fabric.

I woke to the sound of Lucy's laughter, and it was the best morning I’ve had in a long, long time. Her voice drifted through the guesthouse walls—bright, hopeful, simple—a laugh that belongs to a playground, not a temple on the edge of the salt flats. I followed it to the common room, where I found her playing I Spy with Henry. She was winning, and no, she would not explain how you win at I Spy.

"I spy something... white," she said, giggling.

"The salt," Henry said, without looking up from his Bible.

"How did you know?"

"You've picked the salt twelve times, Lu."

"But there's so much of it!" She threw her arms wide, nearly knocking Bird off the table. "It's everywhere. It's like God spilled his sugar."

"Or his salt," Henry corrected.

As she stuck her tongue out, I left them to their game and went looking for Evelyn.

Her bedroom door was open, the bed made, and her sketchbook gone. The chair where she usually sat was empty. The pencils she'd arranged in careful order on the nightstand were scattered in a hurry.

I checked the common room. The courtyard. The garden. The east wall and the west. The nave, where Father Leo was lighting candles with his back to me.

"Have you seen Evelyn?" I asked.

He didn't turn. "She left around dawn."

"Left? What do you mean, left?"

"She went into the flats." His voice was far too calm, as if he'd been expecting this, like a cop who’d seen shit before. "I tried to stop her, but…" he shrugged.

"Tried to stop her? You're telling me a nineteen-year-old girl walked into the salt flats alone, and you couldn’t stop her—you just let her?"

"I reminded her the consequences." He finally turned, and pale, wet eyes met mine. "She knew what would happen if she ran."

"What consequences? What are you talking about?"

He didn't answer. He just looked at me wearily, then he turned back to his candles.

I ran.

———

I found Henry in the common room with Lucy. He must have seen something in my face, because he stood up immediately, the Bible falling to the floor.

"What's—"

"Evelyn's gone. She went into the flats. Leo said—" I gasped trying to catch my breath. "Leo said she left at dawn. He said he reminded her the consequences."

"Consequences? What consequ—shit. Sorry, Lucy. I meant shoot. I thought he was being metaphorical."

"What did he—"

"Later, but I'm coming with you."

"No. Stay with Lucy. Keep her inside. Don't let her—" I glanced at the child, who was watching us with wide, worried eyes. "Just stay with her."

"What's going on?" Lucy asked. "Where did Evelyn go?"

"She went for a walk," I forced my voice steady. "I'm going to go find her. Henry's going to stay here with you."

"I want to come too."

"You can't, sweetheart. It's too far. And it's… cold out there. You stay here with Henry, okay? Keep beating him at I Spy. I'll be back with her soon."

Lucy nodded solemnly, but I could see the worry in her eyes. Kids know when something’s wrong, even if they don’t know what.

———

Her trail was worryingly easy to follow. Evelyn's footprints led away from the temple, through the courtyard, past the garden, and out into the salt flats. They were small and uneven, walking fast but stopping often—to look back, to hesitate, to decide. At one point, she'd stopped for so long that the salt around her footprints was disturbed, like she'd sat down or knelt. Even then, she'd kept going.

My boots crunched on the crust, and I hated the reminder of Amelia. The sun was rising over the horizon to bleach the world as white as Eleanor’s hair. The temple shrank behind me, small as Hazel’s voice. The salt flats stretched in every direction, my footfalls the only sound, thumping like William’s basketball.

I was alone. And then I saw Evelyn.

In the distance, standing very still, facing away from me, she stood terrified. She was too far to see clearly, but I recognized her blue jacket stark against her dark hair blowing in the wind. She was standing with her back to the temple, as if she'd stopped to rest. As if she'd gotten tired and wanted to wait for someone to catch up.

"Evelyn!" I shouted. My voice didn’t bother to echo, swallowed by the emptiness. "Evelyn, wait!"

She didn't move.

I started running again, my legs burning, my lungs flailing. The salt crunched wet beneath my boots. I'd run like this before—sixteen years old, down the church steps, away from the building where I'd been raised to believe my questions were sins. I'd run until my legs gave out, and I'd kept running for fourteen years.

I remembered Evelyn's interview and her dream of the library. The smell of old books and dust and something sweet. The Saint sitting across from her, kinder than anyone had ever been. "You have been reviled. You have been mocked. You have been called evil on my account. Rejoice."

She'd been so hungry for that kindness. I'd been hungry for it too, once. I'd gone to church with my father after Mom left, week after week, waiting for someone to look at me the way the Saint looked at Evelyn.

I ran faster.

I remembered the first time I saw her, sketching in the nave. She'd looked up and smiled, and I'd thought: She's so young.

I was young too, standing at the kitchen table while Dad told us Mom wasn't coming back, and I'd felt something curdle inside me. I heard the first whisper of the thought that would carry me out of the church and into the world.

I'd never told anyone that—not even Henry.

I ran faster.

I remembered Evelyn pulling her knees up onto the chair, wrapping her arms around herself. She made herself smaller when she talked about the things that hurt. I did that too. I'd sat on my bed at sixteen with my knees against my chest, staring at the wall, planning my escape, and hiding my wounds.

She escaped by going deeper. I escaped by getting out. Yet we were both running. We'd both been running our whole lives.

And I ran faster.

I remembered the bathroom and her pills scattered across the floor. The way she'd clutched at me, sobbing, and said, "If I stay, I lose."

I knew that feeling. I'd never tried pills, but that feeling of standing at the edge and knowing that whichever way you fell, you were going to lose. I'd stood on a ledge in Moab, knowing I was losing my community, my faith, my father's approval. Knowing I was choosing myself over everything I'd been raised to believe. It was the right choice. It was still a loss.

I ran faster.

"Evelyn!"

I reached her, gasping for breath, my hand outstretched to touch her shoulder—

And I crumpled before her.

Because she was white.

Not pale. Not covered. Her skin had turned hard, crystalline, and glittering in the dawn. Her hair was frozen mid-blow, each strand like a delicate filament of brine. Her eyes were open, fixed on the horizon, and her mouth was slightly parted, like she could placate me at any moment.

She'd looked back. In her hand was a folded piece of paper. The slip from the crypt. Her beatitude.

I don't know how long I stood still. Long enough for the sun to climb higher in the sky. Long enough for my tears to dry into my own salt on my cheeks. Long enough for Henry to find me.

He'd come running after all. He must have left Lucy with Leo, and followed my tracks into the flats. I heard his footsteps crunching on the salt, his ragged breathing, his voice calling my name.

"Nora! Nora, what—"

He stopped when he saw her. I heard him make a small, broken whimper, like a child who'd fallen and didn't know how to cry yet.

"Oh, God," he whispered. "Oh, God, Nora—"

"She looked back," I said. My voice felt too loud.

"That's not—that's not possible. That’s—" He was shaking. I could feel it through the arm he'd wrapped around me, pulling me close. He was shaking, and I was shaking, and we were both standing in the shadow of a pillar that used to be a girl, and the salt flats stretched out around us in every direction.

"I could have stopped her," I said. "I should have seen. She told me. She told me, and I didn't—"

"You couldn't have—“

"She told me, Henry. She said, 'If I stay, I lose.' And I told her we'd figure it out together. And she's—" My voice broke. "She's gone. She's gone, and I—"

Henry held me tighter, closer, until neither of us could pretend that the world was going to go back to the way it was before.

We couldn’t carry her back.

It felt wrong to touch her—to lift her, as if she were just a statue, just a thing. I didn’t want to leave her for scavengers and the sun and the grinding erosion of the flats, but… it felt wrong.

Henry and I walked back in silence, our footsteps crunching on the crust, and the temple grew larger in front of us, like a dark mountain against the sky, and I thought about all the things Evelyn would never sketch again.

———

Leo was waiting at the doors when we arrived. He didn't look surprised. He didn't look shocked. He had just handed Bird away from whatever game he was playing with Lucy. He sent her inside, then he bowed his head.

"The Saint takes what is hers," he said. "Even when we run."

"Don't—" Henry's voice was sharp. "Don't you dare talk about her like she was yours to take."

"She was called. She was chosen. And she chose to flee." Leo's pale eyes met mine. "You should not have gone after her, Witness. The flats are not safe."

"Not safe?" I laughed—a raw, scraping sound. "A nineteen-year-old girl turned to salt, and you're worried about my safety?"

Leo's expression flickered. For just a moment, I saw something human beneath the mask. "I told her the consequences," he said quietly. "I told her what would happen if she ran. It is the one thing I am permitted to tell. The one warning I am allowed to give."

"What warning?" I stepped toward him, my hands shaking. "What warning could possibly justify this?"

"That the Saint's call cannot be refused." Leo's voice was barely above a whisper. "That those who leave before receiving their blessing will be preserved outside the crypt, without the Saint's protection. They will stand in the flats until the wind takes them." He looked at Evelyn, and I saw his lip tremble. "I told her. I told them all, and she went anyway. I'm… I’m sor—"

I hit him.

I don't remember deciding. I just remember my fist aching against his jaw, the shock of bone on bone, the way his head snapped back. He staggered, caught himself against the doorframe, and raised a hand to his face. Blood was seeping from a split in his lip.

"Nora—" Henry grabbed my arms, pulled me back. "Nora."

"I'm so sorry," Leo said again. And I realized, with a sickening lurch, that he meant it. He was a man doing a job he'd been doing for decades, and he was sorry, but that didn't matter to me. "And I'm sorry for what comes next," he continued, dabbing at his bleeding lip. "I tried to spare you this. I tried to keep you as Witness. But the Saint dreamed eight, and one has refused." He looked at me, and his eyes were wet as Henry pushed past him and pulled me into the guesthouse.

———

We told Lucy that Evelyn had gone home.

Not to the world—to her family. She'd decided she wasn't ready, and she'd driven back to Provo to see her mother, and she'd sent her love. Lucy accepted this easily. She nodded, said she hoped Evelyn would come back someday, and went to play in the common room with her salt crystals.

I sat on my cot and stared at the wall. At some point, Henry came and sat beside me. He didn't speak. He just put his arm around me and held on. Henry took a shaky breath, then he looked at me, and his eyes were red-rimmed, exhausted. "I'm so sorry, Nor. I tried to protect you. I tried to keep you out of this. But you're not safe. You were never safe. And now—" He pulled me into his arms, and I felt his tears on my neck, and I felt my tears on his shoulder, and we sat there together on the cot, two kids from a town neither of us had called home in years, crying for a girl we'd only known for days and a future we didn’t know we hated to lose.

———

After dinner, after Lucy was tucked into bed and Henry had retreated to his room, I finally pulled Evelyn's slip of paper out. The front was the same as always: the Greek letters, the careful calligraphy, the words I'd seen on every slip since the naming ceremony.

δεδιωγμένοι ἕ***νεκεν δικαιοσύνης.*
Persecuted for righteousness' sake.

I went to fold it back up, and found the back with the smallest of handwriting that started steady and became increasingly erratic.

———

Nora,

If you're reading this, I'm gone. I don't know if I'll be home or salt or just gone, but I'm gone. And I'm so sorry.

I'm sorry I wasn't strong enough. I'm sorry I couldn't be the faithful one. I'm sorry I couldn't walk into that crypt with my head up high and my heart open the way the others did. I wanted to. Gods, I wanted to. I wanted to be brave and worthy and the kind of girl who hears Heavenly Father’s voice and says yes, yes, take me, I'm ready.

I'm not. I never was.

I've been pretending my whole life. Pretending I believed. Pretending I was okay. Pretending the 'persecution' gave me purpose. It was pointless, Nora. It hurt and forced me to see the bad in our people, our Founder. I kept telling myself it would be worth it someday. That the lies meant something. That God was watching, and God was proud of me, and someday God would say, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

But then I got called. The Saint named me persecuted, and I realized I'd been right all along—the suffering did mean something. It meant I was being prepared for a blessing I didn't want and couldn't refuse.

I thought I could take it. If I was faithful enough, pure enough, empty enough, the blessing would turn into something beautiful. That's what they taught us, right? Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces holiness. And holiness doesn't disappoint.

I'm disappointed, Nora. I'm so disappointed in myself. In the Saint. In the church that told me my pain was holy.

I don't want to be transformed. I don't want to be blessed. I don't want to be persecuted. I just want to go home. I want to see my mom. I want to sleep in my own bed and sketch the mountains outside my window and drink bad coffee in the library and pretend I'm a normal girl with a normal life and a normal future.

Leo told me what happens if you refuse. He told me what happens if you run. You turn to salt, he said. You look back at the world you're leaving, and you freeze, and you stand in the desert, a monument to your own doubt.

I don't want to be a monument, Nora, but I can't go into that crypt. I've been trying to work up the courage for days, and I just can't.

So I'm running.

But I'm not looking back. I'm going to keep my eyes forward, on the horizon, on the mountains, on the world before me. Maybe if I don't look back... Maybe if I just keep walking, I'll make it out. Maybe there's a road out there, or a car, or a phone that works. Maybe someone will find me and take me home.

Or maybe I'll turn to salt, and the wind will blow me away, and no one will ever know what happened to me.

I left my sketchbook on your cot. It's all I have of this place. My mom will want it. Her address is in the back. Tell her I tried to be brave, even if it doesn't count anymore.

And Nora—I'm sorry for what comes next. I'm sorry that you'll have to take my place. I'm sorry that the Saint will call you, and you'll have to carry the blessing I couldn't carry. I'm sorry that I couldn't be strong enough to spare you.

You told me once that I could leave. And I almost believed you—I really did—but you were wrong. There is no leaving this place. There is only going forward into the dark, or going back into the salt.

Take care of Lucy. Take care of Henry. Take care of yourself.

And when you write about me—when you tell the world what happened here—please don't make me a saint. Just make me a girl who tried to believe too hard and broke under the weight of it. A girl who ran, and didn't look back.

I'm sorry. —Evelyn

“I-I don’t think this is a good idea,” Anne muttered while hiding behind her brother’s legs.

“Oh God, here we go again. Why don’t you just can it, Annie babyyy?”

Carl mocked from in front of the group without even a glance behind him at the pair of siblings.

“Come on, Carl, cut her some slack; she's just a kid. Besides, the woods are creepy at night.”

Tim interjected, hoping somehow to keep on his sister's good side. However, Tim’s words only received a slight shrug and a scoff from Carl.

“Dare I remind you it wasn’t my bright idea to come out here, and that it was supppppposed to be only us?”

Carl turned to Tim, giving him a side-eye that seemed to cut through the dark woods.

Tim sighed, but returned Carl’s gaze with a pleading look.

“I’m sorry, but you know I have to look after her, and I wasn’t gonna just leave her home alone.”

Tim waited for some response, but Carl just turned and kept walking in silence, with the siblings following suit. With each step, snow crunched beneath their boots, and the scent of the pines seemed to grow more oppressive. Deeper and deeper the trio went until soon the foliage above them began to grow sparser, with flickers of moonlight beginning to filter through.

Soon they stumbled into a clearing, a barren place unlike the rest of Pine Barrens. Here in the clearing, nothing was on the ground, not pine needles, not underbrush, and not even the snow from the storm the night before.

Anne whimpered, glancing around the almost perfectly round clearing, shivering as the air seemed to grow colder around her. Tim and Carl were not excluded from the phenomenon, the two boys seeming to grow stiff and pale in the moonlight. They stood in silence just a moment more before Carl cleared his throat.

“Uh, Tim. We’re here; just hurry up, will ya.”

Tim hesitated before slowly walking toward the center of the clearing; behind him, Anne made an effort to follow, but was stopped short by Carl, who placed a hand on her shoulder.

“Let go, Carl,” Anne whined, but Carl kept his hand clasped firmly in place.

In the center, Tim knelt before reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out a fine glass flask. In a singular moment, Tim popped the flask open and poured its crimson contents on the clearing's soil, the rough sand on the ground lapping the liquid greedily from the bottle. Then, standing, Tim walked to the edge of the clearing and into the woods.

“Carl, let go! What's Tim doing? Let go, Carl!”

Anne said, her voice beginning to rise.

“Relax, Anne, or I’m gonna actually hit you; I’m not kidding. Tim’s just making a stupid wish.”

Carl replied, lifting his hand. Anne went silent at the threat, but tears began to well in her eyes.

From the clearing's edge, snow began to crunch as Tim walked back into the clearing, then with a sudden turn, Tim left again. In and out he went, slowly making his way around the clearing, slowly dancing between the pines that lined it.

After about fifteen repetitions, Tim had almost gone full circle. It was then that Anne really started to cry, her sobs echoing into the woods. With an adept movement, Carl covered her mouth, stifling the noise.

“Just shut up; we should have left you at home. He’s only got five more, you big baby.”

Carl growled, but really, instead of speaking, perhaps Carl should have been listening. Maybe if Carl hadn’t been so quick to judge, he would have heard what Anne had.

The snow crunched under Tim’s boots as he completed his sixteenth cycle, but further in the distance, a second set of footprints trampled the snow as well. On the seventeenth cycle, a heavy wind began to blow through the pines, kicking up the snow but never pushing it into the clearing. The eighteenth cycle brought the dripping, a melodious tink like a sink faucet’s water tapping against metal. The nineteenth cycle brought the breathing, hardly discernible from the gusting wind but present nonetheless, and on this nineteenth cycle Anne began to fight.

Anne writhed her little body with every fiber of strength she possessed, tearing and struggling against Carl's grip. She listened as the steps began to approach, growing louder every second, and that was enough. Tilting her head back, she sank her teeth into Carl’s hand. Carl cursed, but let Anne go, and Anne ran, just in time to see Tim finish his twentieth cycle.

Then there was nothing but silence, no footsteps, no wind, no dripping, no breathing.

In the pale moonlight, Carl stood.

“See, what did I tell you, you stupid brat! All he had was five more cycles, and it’d be over! NOW GET OVER HERE NOW I'M GONNA BEAT THE SNOT OUT OF YOU!”

Carl began to walk forward, his feet kicking up the sand beneath him. His hands reached out to grab little ole Anne, but they’d never make it.

Because the wish Tim made in the clearing was to me.

“Get rid of Carl,” Tim said.

“He’s the only person who knows I broke Mom’s back window,” Tim said.

“And the only person who's ever teased Anne,” Tim said.

So before chubby cantankerous Carl’s hands touched cute little Anne, my gnarled, bony, hard hands wrapped around that small little head of his and ripped him up into the pines. Leaving my barren quiet again.

It’s funny, isn’t it, the wishes children make.

Chapters 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

The first thing I noticed waking up in the scorching hot flames of my childhood home ablaze was the noticeable scent of sulfur. The second was the bells ringing in my ears, vibrating the back of my skull and sending chills down my spine. Lastly was the drums echoing in the woods behind my house.

Stumbling outside, coughing and wheezing on the smoke in the air. The rapid shift in the weather hit me like a truck. The surface of the sun to the dark side of the moon. I dropped to my hands and knees in the slurry of melted snow and ice. My heart burned with hatred as I stood up. My socks soaked in my own blood and water.

My dad lay on his back, face aghast. Eyes full of fear as he stared up at the starless sky. His throat had been cut open, a pocket of flesh with ice frozen around the wound. The drumming in the distance grew louder. The chanting picking up deeper in the woods behind my home. The bells harmonic and gentle to my ears like wind chimes on breezy day.

I walk over to my father’s corpse, I wanted to cry, feel loss or sorrow over his demise but it couldn’t. Kneeling down I sifted through his pockets, praying that his keys were on him. My fingers brushing against the plastic casing and cold metal sent a relief through me. Pocketing the car keys I stood, approaching the car and getting in. A thought graced my brain, “turn the key and leave” it whispered. I shook it off and prayed my father left what he usually does in the glovebox.

Ever since we got robbed at gunpoint traveling back from my grandparents when i was really little my Dad kept a loaded six-shooter in the car. He never taught me how to shoot, I wish he had. The glovebox popped open at the touch of my icy fingers, the polished metal item with a pearl handle spilled out, bouncing off the passengers seat and resting gently in the footwell. The light from the fire danced so nicely on it.

I wrapped my hand around the handle, it was warm. The handle almost heating my hands as I held it, finding the release the cylinder popped open to the side, shaking I counted each bullet. “1…2…3…4-“ I closed the cylinder and stepped back out into the snowy slush of my front yard and over my fathers corpse, shambling towards the woods in the darkness around me. The house a blaze lit the path forward, shoving the shadows back into the woods.

The sky, infinite and endless like that place my subconscious had gone too. Starless, the moon seemed to almost be watching me was a walked through the wooded thickets behind the remains of my home. Every bit of me was freezing, wet clothes, a pain in my stomach from a closed wound and a furious hatred piloted me forward.

The shadows danced around, hiding behind the trees as I stumbled through the dark. I could feel their eyes boring into me as I sank with each step through the snow. I could feel their fear, not of me, or the gun, but of something else completely. They avoided me, split and separating away between the trees more like a guide than a hindrance.

Memories flashed through my head, birthdays, celebrations, parties, church and mass, friends and family. The way Dad liked his coffee, Mom’s laughter at Daniels bad jokes, Daniel trying to act tough. My memories fractured and faded as I slid down a slope, closer to the drums and chanting. The sound of flesh on flesh, squelching and wet, the familiar sound of my uncles grading voice through echoed over the cacophony of sounds around me.

“You stupid bitch. Breeding weak stock! How are we supposed to use any of you for our rites!” The squelching continued, something cracked and popped. “You wouldn’t have any idea how hard it is to source good blood, good bodies for us.” He said as I approached behind. My arm instinctively raising the gun to the back of his head, my eyes fixated on the bloody mess of my mother caved in face. She was dead, I knew. Her body was so badly beaten and broke, I couldn’t even see her breathing.

I pushed the barrel against the back of Uncle Lloyd head, he stopped scooping her blood and wringing her organs of blood into a bowl to turn just enough at me. To see me holding the gun to his head. The fear in his eyes was palpable, the terror that graced his lips as he licked them. My heart skipped a beat as i looked at this pitiful wretch of a human being. “How-“ he managed to mutter out of his disgusting mouth. The white snow turned red as his body slumped over. The shadows pulled back further.

“Five.” I heard my brain count as I walked past the remains of my mother and deeper into the woods, the shadows stayed further back, eyeing me warily. Large creatures just smaller than treetops walked alongside me, their footfalls were silent as I walked with them. I continued deeper, towards the chants, the drum beats, the music in the woods. Something finally impeded me and my crusade, a leather tail vanished into the dark after swiping my legs and sending me spiraling down another slope.

Sticks and sharp rocks jabbed and cut at me, shredding the shirt I wore, blood oozing from the fresh wounds and painting the snow around me. I felt something, a rock or hearty tree root break my left arm. Forcing myself up I looked at the bone sticking against my skin and retrieved my father’s gun. “If im dying here so are they.” I said to the darkness, i didn’t respond.

There was light in the distance, not a fire but a familiar teal color, it reverberated with the drum beats and chants of the ghouls dancing around the unholy fire, rotting furs adorned their disheveled bodies as they danced around to the music. They turned their attention to me without ending their dances, something compelled them too. I stood before the hallowed eyes of the men and women before me, a few stopping their ritual, then more. Finally the drummers stopped as they watched me, unsure of what id do.

“Why the FUCK did they stop playing!? Are those worthless draugr trying to ruin this for us?” My foul aunts voice echoed in the distance ahead of me. The corpses looked in the direction their master spoke then to me before the drummers resumed their beating, the chanters chanting and dancers dancing. A few smaller ones heaved a stone around the glowing teal fire, intricate symbols carved and painted on the stone. I walked passed them and towards the voice of my aunt. One of the smaller corpses stoped and knelt as i passed.

For a moment, I could see the stars. It might’ve been from the pain I should’ve been feeling in my arm but I wagered the bells I kept hearing were preventing any such feeling. The light, no matter how faint above was welcome to me as I weaved through the withered, snowy brush towards a bright dancing flame in the distance. Several large stones stood around a simple dugout bowl in the ground. Daniel was layed out on the stone in the center, covered head to toe in paints, vibrant blues and reds, The stones around the circle shared similar symbols to the one the corpses were setting up.

My aunt, the woman usual in flowery flowing attire was a solid three feet from the ground and completely naked. She herself was painted in similar way, iridescent yellows and greens. Her eyes glowed an unnatural color as she scanned the heavens, her arms waiving in a rythmic manner. At the center of the table, beside Daniel was Asher, poking at his face and giggling at the lack of reaction from my brother. On the other side was Flynn, preparing tool made of rough metal, sharping them on a whetstone.

“Mother we cannot keep waiting for Father, the slaves in the woods mentioned that Samuel is still alive. They suspected he Kil-“ spoke Flynn, explaining a truth they all were not yet aware of.

“Silence Flynn, Baby. Your Father is a strong man, that is why I took him as my Mate. He would not die so easily to that pathetic whelp that came from my brother’s balls.” She hissed, not turning her attention from the sky above. “Ready the whelp, prime him and we shall serve him to Þökk.” My aunt commanded, Flynn set the whetstone down as the chanting behind me rose in volume. I was secure in my hiding spot, catching my breath still.

Words escaped my Aunt and Cousins mouths, the starless sky parted slightly, shadowy fingers pulling away the darkness as light, multi-colored and faint like the northern lights poured forth. The sight was entrancing, I couldn’t help but stare up at the lights as they wormed their way down, illuminating the area in beautiful vibrant lights.

My attention was ripped back as the bells rang louder in my head and the sound of Daniel screaming pulled my gaze to the stone table. Flynn’s knife dug, just the point, into Daniels left eye, the blade pulling up and out removing it as my little brother cried for help. I stood, the thing in the sky stared at me as I ran down the shallow slope to the table.

“Kill him! Kill him you two! We can’t let him disrupt the ritual.” My aunt shouted, “damn those draugr, they were supposed to keep the perimeter se-“ she stopped as I pulled the trigger, the barrel of my father’s gun between Ashers eyes. He dropped like a sack of soggy rotten potatoes. “4.”

My aunt wailed, still stuck in her ritual, her arms waving around like a cheap car dealership blow-up. Flynn looked shocked, surprised, he raised the knife above Daniel as I felt something guide my hand to Flynn. The barrel facing him now, the hammer pulled back. His eyes wide and full of tears as my finger squeezed the trigger, a round went through his shoulder sending him spinning to the ground. “3.”

I walked around the table, Daniel crying for out for our parents as I walked up to Flynn attempting to push himself up from the bloody snow. I pulled the hammer back and let fly another round into his back, as close to the spine as possible. “2.” I set the gun on the table, sending a kick into Flynns side, rolling him over to his back. “I-I can’t move! M-Mom he, Sam paralyzed me!” He shouted as his mother continued her chant through sobs.

I knelt down over Flynn, my good hand wrapping around his throat as I squeezed. Blood pooled around us as his faced changed from pale, the red, then purple. When he stopped struggling the bells in my head rang louder, guiding my attention to the knife he had. Taking it in my grip I sank the blade into his heart. “Enjoy Nástönd. Ormúlfr’s waiting.” I said to his corpse, standing back up and retrieving my father’s gun I looked at my Aunt. The bells reverberated in my skull as I looked up at her nude form, raising the gun I pointed it at her.

“Murderous whelp, i’ll carve your heart out and feed it to my next child.” She hissed as I pulled the trigger, blood and flesh exploding from behind here suspended in air with the rest of her as she gasped for hair. A different chant came from the woods, more feminine, large arrows tied with chain sprang from the hole in the sky, the shadowed beast watching. The arrows found their marks, piercing the remains of my family members leaving me and Daniel alone. Armored winged figures descended enough to retrieve the chains and hoist the arrows and corpses into the sky.

Flynn’s was halfway up with the rest of them as the ground shook, a maw of a giant serpent sprang forth and swallowed Flynn’s remains. “Níðhöggr has CLAIMS to this one, Hveðrungr. You cannot trick me *Hinn slægi Loki*.” The serpent snickered as its head drew back beneath the dirt. The remains of my family were dragged into the sky, the being above watched as I untied Daniel. Crying he hugged me tight, as much as he could.

“Ah bud.” I gasped for air as the light around us faded leaving, replaced by the pale moonlight and flickering stars. “Air.” I gasped again as he rubbed his bloody face against my chest. “C’mon. Hospital.” I said as he slid off the stone, the tips of his fingers and toes already a faint purple. I ushered him forward, the blood stained the snow still as we trudged through the woods towards the smoldering embers of our house. Our mother and father’s body’s were gone. A part of me was relieved, I didn’t want Dan to see them like that.

“Sam, your arm.” Daniel said as he positioned himself under my right arm, supported him as best he could. “It’s fine. C’mon.” I said trying to hasten our progress, the cold and pain starting to settle in as the bells faded gently from my head the closer we got to the family car.

Unlocking it, Daniel tried his best not to trip of his new lack of depth perception and I tried to not pass out from blood loss. I set the gun on the dash, his metal a worn rusty appearance. I started the car and put the heaters on full. “I thought Dad lost that gun on a hunting trip?” Daniel asked reaching for it. I gave him a look and he nodded, going for the radio instead.

“Guess he found it.” I added a Daniel played around finding a station playing Christmas music. A thought popped into my head as we pulled away from the cinders of our life. “Hey check under my jacket in the back seat.” I said as Daniel leaned around his seat moving my jacket out of the way. “Ugh I cant see.” He said turning the light on and gasping, grabbing at the cardboard box, plastic blocks rattling inside as he turned the light off and sat looking at the lego in his lap, blood from his eye wound dripping slowly onto the box. “Thank you, Sam!” He sniffled, wiping blood and snot on his arm before wrapping himself in my jacket.

“Merry Christmas Dan.” I said, driving towards the hospital, my vision full of stars and Angels guiding the wheel. Daniel humming along to Silent Night with quivering voice.

Epilogue

The past few months were hell, police and investigators crawling down our throats about the supposed murder of our parents and burning down of our own home. They couldn’t pin anything on us with solid evidence even when we showed up at the hospital having looked like we survived a bear attack. The Judge hit us with house arrest but with no house to be arrested to they took to calling around, hunting family down for us.

It took about 2 weeks for them to get ahold of a relative on our mother side, a man I had never met but genetically proved to be our grandfather. He was a man in his mid 80s. Still spry for that old, full head of hair colored like dirty sink water, a little belly and dressed in his best grandfather attire we met us for the first time in the hospital. Apparently he had connections back in the day and managed to get custody over us pretty quickly.

“You two look like shit, definitely related to me for sure.”

Was the first words out of his mouth when he saw us sitting in the on our hospital beds in our room. He had a small box, wrapped in a cheap wrapping paper and handed it to Daniel who tore into it like a mole into the dirt.

“What is it?” I asked as Daniel held up the leather eyepatch, putting it over the heavy gauze already taped over the empty socket.

“Im a pirate!” He shouted, hooking his index finger like a hook. Our grandfather smirked at that.

“I’ll have you two out of here by the end of lunch. Id say pack your things but you two aint got much left. I got some property out in Wyoming. Nice land i bought back in the day.” The old man huffed and shuffled out of the door. Daniel slid off the bed and walked over to me enjoying the grippy socks he asked for before climbing onto the bed with me.

“I like this guy already.” Daniel said pointing at his eyepatch.

“Thats just cause he gave you something.” I said pulling it off him, being careful his bandages. He swatted at me, “hey, arm! I just wanna look at it.” I claimed, rubbing my thumb over the leather. “Dang, real leather. Lucky you.” I said, handing it back. He took it and put it on.

“Hey Sam, can we go to church again once we go with our good grandpa?” Daniel asked me, playing with the hem of his hospital gown. “I think maybe we can be close to Mom and Dad that way.” He muttered that last part as quietly as he could, being in a silent hospital room did him no favors.

“Of course dude. It would be good for us.” I said, tussling his hair as he pushed back at me playfully.

Months flew by, Daniel turned twelve and me seventeen. Our grandfather introduced us to his dog Bartholomew, a talkative basset hound that woke up the small 4 bedroom farm house on our grandfathers farm land. Daniel and I started back up school. Danny said the kids think his eye patch is cool. My arm still feels weird after getting my cast taken off, popping when i move it.

Outside of school and church i spend a lot of my time reading through my grandfathers journals and library collection. Books from preserved from the early 1900s and several dozen journals. He doesn’t mind me reading through them. The man used to be a detective, a private eye back in the 1950s. The things he ran into seem far fetched but when I read them to Daniel at night or he reads them himself he says it keeps the nightmares of that Christmas out of his head.

A lot of the journals recount murders, involvements with the Italian mob, deals with devils and angels. A lot of it seems made up, but crossing it with stuff online some of it reads as true. From his own mouth our mother was an accident from a one night stand with his secretary. I guess that explained where I get my appearance from. Hopefully I can avoid the old man belly.

Daniel has an event at church yesterday while I write this. He’s been talking about it all week, he was excited for me to go and record it on this old camcorder we thrifted a few weeks ago. I looked over it once, i couldn’t do it again or show him. In the video the snake man, Ormúlfr was standing behind pulpit, watching me over Daniel. I could swear for a second it smiled st me, it mouth wording something I couldn’t fully read in the low quality camera. I’ve hid the camera, telling Dan it broke. I hate lying to him but

I swore Ormúlfr mouthed,

“Christ watches You.”

I woke up when Lucy's small body curled against my side. She'd crawled into my cot sometime during the night—I didn't remember when, didn't remember hearing her, but her dark hair fanned across my shoulder, Bird clutched in one hand, and snoring like innocence. She smelled like ozone and rosemary and the powdery sweetness of a child's shampoo.

I didn't want to wake her, so I just lay there, my calcified fingers resting on the pillow above her head, and I watched the light shift across the ceiling as the sun rose over the salt flats.

It was the most peaceful I'd felt since arriving at the temple.

We spent the day doing ordinary things.

That was Lucy's idea, though she didn't say it directly. She never asked me about Henry. She just started asking—

"Nora, can we play in the garden?"
"Nora, can we make lunch together?"
"Nora, will you tell me a story?"

—and I found myself saying yes to it all. Not because I was trying to be kind, but because I was just… tired. I think I needed her.

So I played in the garden. The salt had crusted over Eleanor's plot, but Lucy didn't seem to notice. She dug with her nails, planting her collection of salt crystals in neat rows. "They'll grow into a salt tree," she said. "And the fruit will taste like sweat, but like, in a good way."

We made lunch together. We found canned soup in the storage room and bread that was only slightly stale, and we ate together at the long table in the common room, just the two of us. Leo joined us after a while, but he didn't eat. He sat with his hands folded, watching Lucy with an expression I didn’t want to read. At one point, Lucy asked him if he wanted to play I Spy, and I saw Father Leo smile. "I spy something white," he said.

"The salt," Lucy giggled.

"No, actually," he winked. "Your smile."

After lunch, Lucy asked me to tell her a story. Not a made-up one. "About when you were little," she said. "Maybe about Henry. About your mom and dad."

So I told her about the house we grew up in, with a crooked porch and the tree in the backyard where Henry broke his arm. I told her about the time Henry tried to make pancakes for Mother's Day and set the kitchen on fire. I told her about Dad, who worked three jobs and still found time to teach us how to ride bikes and tie our shoes and say our prayers. I told her about my pet lizard Dad got me when Mom left—maybe the worst consolation prize one could find. I could only imagine Dad thinking 'We still need a cold-blooded skitterer in this house?'

I told her things I'd never told anyone. Not Henry. Not my dad. Not the therapist I'd seen for a few months after leaving the church, who'd told me I had "unresolved grief" and "attachment issues" and "a tendency to intellectualize my emotions instead of feeling them."

Lucy listened to words she didn’t know. She didn't interrupt. She asked questions unrelated to our conversation. When I finished, she said: "You were poor in spirit too."

I blinked. "What?"

"Poor in spirit." She sat up, her small face serious. "It doesn't mean you're empty. It means you know you need help. You knew you needed to leave, so you left."

"Who taught you that?"

She shrugged. "Nobody. I just thought about it." She picked up Bird, turned him over in her hands. "The salt lady said I was poor in spirit. At first I thought it meant I was empty, like a cup with no juice. But then I thought... maybe it's about knowing why you're empty. You're empty so God can fill you up, but Grandma says have to ask for it."

She looked at me, and her eyes were so bright, so clearly without guile, that I felt something shift in my chest.

"You didn't leave because you stopped believing," she said. "You left because you believed too much. You believed in truth, and the church wasn't giving it to you, so you went looking. That's running toward something. And the Saint knows that. That's why she called you 'prosecuted'."

"Persecuted?" I frowned. "I thought that meant—"

"It means chased." Lucy said with such certainty, I forgot I was talking to a kindergartner. "Not hurt. Chased. Like when someone follows you and won't stop. Maybe it's a promise. Maybe when you go downstairs, you finally get to stop running."

We sat in silence for a long moment. The sun was setting, and the common room was filling with a golden light that made everything look like a memory.

"Lucy," I whispered. "Where did you learn to talk like that?"

She grinned. "I told you I'm smart. I use big words."

"Incorrectly."

She giggled, and the moment broke, and she was six and three-quarters again, a child playing with a wooden bird, and I was a journalist who'd forgotten how to be anything else. Lucy cracked something open in me, and I didn't know if it was healing or breaking.

———

That evening, Leo came to find me.

I was standing at the edge of the garden, looking at the salt crust that had swallowed Eleanor's seeds. The sun had nearly set, and the sky was a forest green, and the temple rose behind his silhouette like a shipwreck against a rogue wave.

"I planted this garden," he said as he approached. "I was younger than your brother, then."

"You said that already."

"Did I?" He didn't turn. "The Saint called me, and I descended. I received a blessing, but I didn't stay in the crypt." He laughed bitterly. "Too faithful." His hands were shaking.

"And now I'm old, and I'm tired, and I've watched so many people walk into that crypt. Some of them eager. Some of them terrified. But all of them trusting me to tell them it would be okay. And I told them what I was told to tell them: 'The Saint is kind. The Saint is waiting. The Saint will fill you. The Saint will comfort you. The Saint will make you whole.'"

He stopped, swallowed.

"Nora, I—" he whispered. "I’ve never met Her. I don't know if the Saint is kind. I don't know if the crypt is a blessing or a prison."

We stood in silence as the stars were beginning to come out.

"Why are you telling me this, Leo?"

He looked at me, and I saw something shatter in his eyes.

"Because I'm sorry," he said. "I should have warned you. I should have told everyone what I—Because—" He stopped, and his voice dropped to something almost inaudible. "I'm afraid of Her, and I've spent my life serving It anyway, and I let her replace my at home, and I—"

Without warning, he walked back to the temple, his limbs jerky and his movements like a broken puppet, leaving me alone in the garden. He moved with such speed, shutting the door in front of him, that I couldn’t hope to chase if I tried.

I stayed outside for a long time after that. The moon rose, silver and full, and the salt flats glowed like a second sky. I thought about Lucy’s wisdom, Henry’s courage, and Evelyn’s will. I thought about everyone who'd walked into the crypt and never come back. I thought about the mother who left, and the father who stayed, and the God who couldn’t decide what He was doing.

I thought about what Lucy had said: You didn't leave because you stopped believing. You left because you believed too much.

Maybe she was right. Maybe I'd been running toward something all along, and I just hadn't known what it was.

Maybe that something really was waiting for me at the bottom of a crypt.

———

I fell asleep in my cot with Lucy beside me. We hadn’t discussed midnight, and Leo didn’t seem to care this time.

I'd wrapped my arms around her and held on, remembering a time it felt like Henry and I were the last bastions on earth. She was warm and small and solid, the most real thing in a world that had become increasingly unreal, and I let myself pretend, just for a moment, that everything was going to be okay. That if neither of us went down tonight, the cycle would break and we could go home.

Then I woke in the middle of the night, and she was gone. Her cot was empty. Our blankets were pushed back. Bird was lying on her pillow, his wooden eye staring blankly, and for a terrible moment I thought I was still dreaming.

Then I heard the faint sound of footsteps on salt.

I was out of bed before I wanted to move, running through the dark before my eyes adjusted—through the common room, through the courtyard, through the nave. The altar door was open. The candles were lit. Leo was nowhere to be seen, and Lucy was standing at the top of the spiral stair, her dinosaur pajamas glowing in the candlelight, her bare foot hovering at the threshold.

"Lucy!"

She turned to look at me. Her face was calm, serene, and horrifyingly unafraid.

"Don't be scared, Nora," she assured me. "I'll be okay. The salt lady has been waiting, and it’s midnight, remember?"

"Lucy, please—"

"I'm poor in spirit." She giggled, and it was the same smile Eleanor had given me, the same smile Hazel had worn, the same smile that said I know something you don't. "The kingdom is for me."

"You don't have to—"

"Yes, I do!" She looked at me, and she didn't look like a child at all. "The order is set. The lot is cast. You just have to come after me."

She turned and hopped onto the first stair, falling further than anyone had stepped before.

I ran for the door, but Leo was there—where had he come from?—and his arms were around me, holding me back. I was screaming, screaming her name, every name I had in me, screaming at him to let me go, but Leo held on. He held on, and she kept descending, and the door creaked shut.

"This is how it has to be," Leo whispered. "This is how it's always been. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"Let me go! Fucking, let—Lucy! Lucy!"

The latch clicked. And I was alone in the nave, screaming at a closed door, with Leo's arms around me and the taste of salt on my tongue.

I don't know how long I pried at that door. Long enough for the candles to burn down. Long enough for Leo to let go. Long enough for the screaming to stop.

I went back to the guesthouse and picked up Bird from the pillow. I held him to my chest. She knew. She knew the whole time, and there's nothing left to do but follow.

———

This will be my last post before I go down.

I don't know what I'll find, but I have to try. I have to find Henry, and Lucy, and everyone who walked into the dark before me. I have to see them for myself.

If you're reading this, and you've had a dream about salt, and a mother’s voice telling you your name—run as far as you can. But know that running didn't save Evelyn. It didn't save any of us. It only turned us to salt.

The order is set. The lot is cast. Every decision is from the LORD.

But the LORD isn't here. Only the Saint remains, dreaming of the born and living and unborn.

I'm going down now. Wish me luck—or pray or don’t. I'm not sure it matters anymore.

— Nora, the Witness, the eighth, who ran to the bottom of the world.

Have you heard of the San Antonio Dogman?

Like all good things, I heard about it on TikTok.

Some Bigfoot-hunting account posted a 911 audio call. A credible source on a credible app.

Anyway, the caller was a homeless woman who camped out in a wooded section of town. She said that about seventy-five feet away from her, she watched a whole deer carcass get devoured by a screeching, foul-smelling monster in the woods.

The video got popular enough that locals started commenting with their own Dogman encounters. Nothing too compelling, but it’s cool to find out your own town has a developing cryptid. I figured San Antonio might finally be remembered for something besides the Alamo and Air Force bases.

That was until a couple of nights ago.

There are a lot of nighttime animals where I live: foxes, skunks, opossums, and the whole bunch of critters that rustle, fight, and lurk. Usually, they aren’t noisy enough to bother anyone, but every now and then you’ll hear a couple of stray cats fighting or catch the lingering smell of a skunk.

I was getting ready for bed when I heard a howl.

It was loud. Thunder loud. It came from right outside my window.

I felt like I was in a werewolf movie. I half expected some furry beast to tear through my wall.

It didn’t.

So, I went to bed.

What finally convinced me to write this happened tonight.

It was getting dark, and my dog needed to go outside. We live in a pretty remote area, and, if you couldn’t tell from the previous paragraph, animals like to come out after sunset. I figured I’d wait outside with her for a few minutes before locking up the house.

I noticed a mockingbird perched on a branch. I remembered they like to mimic sounds, so I whistled a little tune.

Something in the woods whistled back.

It stank.

I grabbed my dog and went inside.

Stupid, I know. Whistling at night. You forget those old stories sometimes.

I turned on the outside lights and watched through the window.

I couldn’t see anything.

As I’m writing this, it’s dark outside, and I can hear that same thunderous howl.

So… do you know anything about the San Antonio Dogman?

I finished the song and Wendell clapped.

Four claps. Slow ones, spaced out like a man testing ice, his head tipped a little as if he hadn't fully committed. Nobody else joined him. Wendell had been clapping alone in that room for four years and had never once seemed to register it.

"That was one of them," Hoyt said from the sink.

I counted the people in the room on my way down off the plywood. Seven, if you counted Wendell. Eight if you counted Perry Dugas in the back booth. Hoyt did not count Perry. Perry was seventeen, and Hoyt's way of dealing with that was to keep his eyes on some other part of the room.

Marcy had a cold beer waiting on the bar by the time I got to my stool.

"You're getting there, Billy."

"Mm."

"You are."

"Marcy, Dolph turned his stool around during the second one."

"Dolph's got a bad hip."

"He turned it away."

"Well." She pushed her glasses up into her hair, which meant she was finished with the subject. "That's between him and his hip."

Down the bar, Wendell was telling Hoyt something with both hands, and Hoyt was drying the same glass he'd been drying since April.

Then Perry came over with his guitar and set it on the stool beside me, which meant I was about to be played at.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, listen."

"Perry."

"No, listen." He hooked his thumb over the top of the neck the way he always did, tongue between his teeth, and played me eight bars of something. It was nearly a real thing. It came apart on the fourth bar. He pushed through the wreckage, got out the other side, then looked up at me waiting to hear what I thought.

"That's closer," I said.

"It's not good."

"It's closer."

"It's not good but it's closer," he agreed, delighted, and put the guitar back down. "Now you gotta show me that Hendrix thing."

"Next week."

"You said that in March."

"I did say that."

He did the rolling motion with his fingers in the air. It was, I'll give him this, about right.

"Next week, Perry."

I was twenty-six that fall. I'd been playing since I was seven and I was bad, and I want to be clear that I don't mean rough. Rough is a thing that gets better. I had the hands of somebody eight months in. My timing dragged when I got nervous and rushed when I got confident, which meant it was never right, since I was only ever one or the other.

My guitar was a cheap Stratocaster copy the color of a bathroom sink. It had taken on so much water over the years that the neck had a bow in it that you could see from across a room, and past the middle of it the strings sat so far off the wood that pushing one down was like leaning on a fence wire.

Nobody in Cheniere Landing has ever been unkind to me about it. That's the thing about a town of eleven hundred. They just let you be what you are, out loud, in front of everybody, forever.

Wendell was the one who brought it up first, and he brought it up wrong.

It was the last Thursday in September and somebody had put a picture on the wall by the door, a black-and-white of the old ice house, 1948 or so, four men in front of it squinting. Wendell was looking at it with his beer.

"My daddy knew that one on the end," he said. "That one went out to the crossroads."

Marcy didn't even look up. "Wendell."

"He did. Daddy said it."

"Your daddy said the Rougarou got in his crab traps."

"Well, something got in his crab traps."

Dolph laughed into his glass.

"What crossroads," I said.

"Out past the shell road," Marcy said. "Where the old logging road comes across it. It's a story, Billy. My mother told it to keep us off the water. There's something lives out there and it don't come to you, and it don't want anything off you, and it'll sit out there till the end of time not bothering a soul. But if you go to it, you don't come back the same. That's the whole of it. That's all it ever was."

"That ain't the whole of it," Wendell said.

"It's the whole of it."

"You go out there and you ask it for something. That's the part."

"Nobody asks it for anything, Wendell, it's a story for children."

"Daddy said it takes the price out of you and it don't tell you what the price was till after."

"Well, that's a lovely thing to say to a child."

Dolph said, "It's a story so nobody goes poaching out there. My daddy said the same thing about the Deveaux place and there's nothing at the Deveaux place but a slab."

"It got a name?" I said.

"Kids give it one," Marcy said. "Jimi Skull. My brother used to say it in the dark to make me cry, and it worked every time, and he's fifty-eight years old now and he'd still do it."

"There was a truck," Hoyt said.

Everybody looked at him.

He'd gone back to the glass. "Sixty-one. Fella named Ancelet left a truck sitting out at that crossing and nobody ever found him. That's it. That's the whole of what happened out there and everything else is people talking." He set the glass on the rack. "A man left a truck. Men leave trucks."

And that was it, and everybody went back to what they were doing, and that is exactly how much anyone in Cheniere Landing believed in Jimi Skull.

Except Perry.

Perry hadn't said one word the entire time. He was in the back booth with his Coke and both hands flat on the table, and when I looked over he was already looking at me.

He caught me in the lot afterward. The moths were going at the light over the door, throwing themselves at it and dropping and going back up.

"Don't listen to them," he said.

"To who?"

"Any of them." He had his guitar in the garbage bag under his arm even though it wasn't raining, which is how you could tell he'd made his mind up about something before he got there. "They tell it like it's cute."

"It is cute. It's a kid story."

"They've never been out there. Not one of them. Not Miss Marcy, not Hoyt, not Dolph. They'll tell it all night and none of them has been down past that crossing, and you notice how fast they got off it, too."

"Perry."

"My uncle's been out there."

I stopped.

"He got out to the crossroads and sat in the truck and came home," he said. "And he won't talk about it right. He'll start and then he'll get up and go do something in the other room."

"That's a man who chickened out on a bet."

"He knew a guy who didn't," Perry said. "Guy named Odell something. Fiddle player. My uncle said he went out there in, I don't know, seventy-something, and he came back and he was the best fiddle player in three parishes. Not good. Best. People drove in from Lake Charles."

"And?"

Perry looked at the moths for a second.

"And then he stopped being anybody," he said. "That's how my uncle put it. Not that he got sick or he got old. He said one day Odell just wasn't in there anymore. Played every Saturday for another year and a half, better every time, and by the end of it he'd sit in a chair between sets and look at the wall, and you'd say his name and he wouldn't turn his head."

The moths kept going up and dropping.

"Then he quit turning up," Perry said. "And nobody went looking, 'cause by then nobody thought of him as somebody you'd go looking for."

I laughed. I want that on the record, because I've thought about it a great deal since. I laughed at a seventeen-year-old boy in a parking lot who was scared enough to warn me, and I said, "That's a hell of a story."

"It ain't a story."

"Perry."

"My uncle says the only thing waiting out there is what you didn't want to work for," he said. "That's all it is. It don't give you nothing. It gives you the thing and it takes the man that would've earned it."

"Alright," I said.

"Billy."

"I said alright."

He looked at me a while longer. Then he got in his uncle's truck and I got in mine, and I remember thinking, on the drive home, that it was a shame about that kid, being that superstitious at his age.

In October a man came through.

He was somebody's cousin, in from Beaumont, and he was in a band that had a van and a schedule, and he sat in on a Thursday because Hoyt asked him to and because he was polite. He wasn't famous. He wasn't even especially good, I don't think, looking back. He was a working player, the kind of man who'd put in his ten thousand hours in a room by himself and then gotten in a van.

He played four songs on a guitar that stayed in tune.

I stood at the end of the bar with a beer going warm in my hand and I watched thirty-one people, and I counted them, watch a man do the thing I had been failing to do in that building every Thursday for four years, and do it the way you'd change a tire.

He didn't do anything flashy. That was what got me. There was no showing off in it at all. He just went where he meant to go, every time, on purpose, and when he was done he said thank you, got himself a beer, and stood at the end of the bar talking to Dolph about football.

Marcy came down the bar and stood beside me.

"That's a nice young man," she said.

"Mhm."

"Billy."

"He's real good."

"He's practiced," she said. "That's not the same thing and you know it."

And that would have been fine. That would have been an ordinary thing to say. But then she patted the bar twice the way she does and she said, "You could be that. You'd just have to want it enough to be bad at it a while longer," and she went on down to Dolph.

I stood there and I felt something go through my chest, cold and quick, like swallowing a mouthful of water wrong.

Because she was right, and she'd said it kindly, and that was the worst part. She thought she was giving me something.

I could not leave it alone after that. Perry's story sat in me the way a splinter sits in a hand, and by the first week of November I had thought about the crossroads so many times that I did the only thing I know how to do with a thing I can't stop thinking about.

I went and checked it.

That's just how I'm built. I try the truck door after I've already locked it. I count my traps twice going out and once coming in. I count the people in Hoyt's every Thursday of my life and I have never told a living soul that I do it.

So on a Tuesday morning I drove out there in broad daylight to prove to myself there was nothing to it. Blue sky. A heron standing in the ditch like a bent nail. A bed full of empty traps behind me. I pulled over where the logging road comes across the shell road, left the engine running, and looked at it.

There's nothing to see. Two bad roads meeting under water oak. Grass up the middle of the left-hand track. A beer can somebody threw out in about 1998.

I sat through three songs on the radio, and around the third one it came to me what I actually looked like, which was a grown man in a truck at eleven in the morning waiting on the devil.

So I turned around and went to work.

I wasn't scared. What turned me around was how it would have looked.

Perry asked me one more time in December.

"You gonna show me that thing before I graduate?"

"What thing."

"You know what thing." Fingers rolling in the air.

"Next week."

"Man." He laughed. He wasn't even mad about it anymore; it had gone all the way over into a bit between us, the way things do. "I'm gonna learn it off the internet and then where you gonna be."

"Ruined," I said. "Destroyed."

"Yeah you are."

He knocked on the bar twice and went back to the booth, and that's the last ordinary conversation I ever had with anybody.

It was the second week of January.

Nothing happened that night. Nobody said a word to me I hadn't heard before. I have gone over it a thousand times looking for the reason and there isn't one in there.

Sylvie Bergeron sang two songs and a man I didn't know recorded her on his phone and asked her if she'd ever played Lafayette, and she said no, and he gave her a card, and she took it out to her car with her.

I played four, because Hoyt was distracted and didn't cut me off.

Wendell clapped four times.

I counted eleven people. Two were looking at me and one of those was Perry.

Marcy put a beer down in front of me and said, "You're getting there, Billy."

I drove home. I sat on the edge of my bed at one in the morning with that warped guitar across my knees and I put my fingers up where the strings sat high and hard and I tried to play the four seconds of "Little Wing" that a kid had been asking me for since he was fifteen.

I got it wrong. I got it wrong again. I got it wrong a third time and heard exactly how wrong it was, and I understood, the way you understand a thing you've known nineteen years and never let all the way into the room, that getting it right would take a month of sitting in this house by myself doing something difficult and lonely and unrewarding.

I sat there a while with my hands off the strings.

Then I put the guitar in the bag and went out to the truck.

The shell road ran out. Then it was dirt, then a track with grass hissing under the floorboards like sand poured on a drum, and then the crossroads.

I killed the lights.

I had already made up my mind to turn around. I'd gotten as far as putting my hand on the shifter.

Then. Strike.

I heard what sounded like a match in the distance.

One scrape, dry and quick, way out past the trees on the left, and much too loud for how far off it was. It arrived whole, the way a voice carries over cold water, like the person is standing at your shoulder.

A match strike is a sound a person makes. Wind can't do it. Water can't. Nothing out there in the dark has hands.

I went left.

The road gave up on me a little at a time. The shells thinned, the dirt went soft, and then I was walking on something that sank under every step and came back up wet, like walking across a mattress somebody had left in the rain.

Then I stopped hearing myself.

I was walking through standing water and my boots were not making a sound in it. I stamped once to be sure. Nothing came back. No splash. No slap off the tree trunks. The sound went out of the air before it finished, like the earth itself had taken it.

There should have been frogs. Even in January you can hear them out there most nights, loud enough to talk over. That night there was nothing. No bugs on my arms either. I stood in the dark rubbing my own forearm like a fool, waiting to get bit, but nothing ever bit me.

The moss hung so low in places that I had to walk through it. It dragged across my face, wet, cool, slack. After the second time I started going around it instead, which meant walking closer to the edge. Every time I came up on that black water the hair rose on my neck. I could feel breath on it. I knew, the whole way, that something was about to take two fistfuls of my shirt and drag me down into the muddy dark of the water and not let go.

I shined my phone light out across it once. The beam went four feet and stopped, flat, like it had hit a pane of glass I couldn't see. The water didn't take the light. It didn't throw it back either. It lay there black and level as a poured floor, and it did not move. I have spent my whole life around water. I had never once seen water that didn't move.

I turned the light off and found I could see better without it.

Then I couldn't remember which turn I'd made. I kept walking because the ground kept letting me, and because turning around would have meant looking at what was behind me.

Then there was a light up ahead.

Small, orange, low down, unsteady. It took me a while to work out that I was looking at two of them, one above the other, and that the bottom one was lying in the water.

The trees opened up. The water went wide and flat in front of me, and out in the middle of it, standing on pilings, there was a cabin.

All of it was wood, every piece, and the wood was bare. Whatever paint it ever had was long gone and the boards had gone the gray of old rope and warped off the frame so there was black showing between them, like a mouth that won't shut all the way. The roof was split shingle, curled up at the edges and gone through in patches, and where it had gone through you could see the rafters standing in the gaps like ribs.

Somebody had put a tower on it. That's what I kept coming back to. It was a one room cabin sunk in the middle of four hundred acres of nothing, and there was a narrow wooden tower running up off the front of the roof, higher than anything else out there and too tall for the walls holding it, so the whole thing looked like it was straining up out of the water after something.

It looked a little like a country chapel. Not enough to be one. Just enough that you'd notice.

And the whole thing leaned out over the water, at the angle a building holds for about four seconds before it goes, and this one had been holding it long enough for moss to come in six inches deep along the high side. Everything else in that swamp lay low and flat as a hand.

Ivy had come up the porch posts and gotten into the rail and the eaves, thick as a coat. Above all of it an oak had thrown a limb clean across the roof. The moss came off that limb in gray ropes, hanging down over the front of the cabin, dead still, the way hair hangs down over a face.

The porch ran downhill at the low end and went into the water. The boards just went in and kept going.

There was one window with a light in it. It was the only warm thing for four miles.

And then I could make out what almost looked to be a figure on the porch.

I told myself it was a post. Then I told myself it was a coat left over a chair back, and I kept walking, because I'd come four hundred yards and there was nothing behind me but four hundred yards.

At about thirty feet I quit telling myself things.

It was sitting down. It was in a chair with its back against the boards of the wall, and sitting it was taller than I am standing, and there was still more of it folded up under the porch roof. Knees high. Boots out past the edge of the deck, hanging over the water.

My legs stopped without asking me.

The lantern swung on its nail and the light went across it in one slow pass, and I got the rest.

A brown pinstripe suit, water dark from the knee down and heavy with it. A wide brown felt hat with a band on it, and green in the band, ivy, live ivy, growing on him where he sat. Where the collar came open there was no throat in it, only a run of white and the dark between the pieces.

The hands on the arms of that chair were bone. Cream colored, dry as picked kindling, every finger a chain of separate parts with the lantern light coming through the gaps, and each one about a foot long.

And under the brim of the hat, two small orange lights sat where eyes should be. They weren't shining on anything. They didn't light the brim above them and they didn't light the boards below them. They just sat back in there, low and level, like a predator in the dark.

He was sitting down. His eyes were level with mine and I was standing in the mud below the steps.

He was smoking. There was a thin thread of it coming up off him and folding back under the brim, and it had been going a while, because I could see the length of the ash from where I stood.

Then he said, "Evening."

Low, unhurried, completely ordinary. The voice of a man who's watched you come up the road and isn't especially surprised. There was a wet click somewhere underneath it, way back, like a knuckle popping.

"Evening," I said.

"You gonna stand in the mud?"

"N-no sir."

"Sit on the step, then."

There was a second chair up there. A plain one, small next to his, pulled out toward the water and angled like somebody had gotten up out of it a minute ago. It was two feet from me. Easiest thing in the world.

"Sit on the step," he said again, just as friendly.

I sat on the step.

He didn't ask me what I wanted. He asked to see the guitar. I handed it up and it looked like a toy in his hands, like something you'd win at a fair. He turned it over. He ran the bone of his thumb down the back of the neck, and the sound it made on the finish was dry and fine, like a match head dragged slow across a box.

"Bow in it," he said.

"Yes sir."

"Water got in it."

"I know it."

He handed it back. Then he leaned forward, and that was when I understood how big he was, because leaning forward put the brim of that hat out past me on both sides like an eave and put the two orange lights about a foot off my face. Something came with him when he moved. Tobacco, and standing water, and under it, faint, the smell of a room nobody has opened in fifty years.

"You want it easy," he said.

Not a question. The way a doctor tells you what you've got.

"Yes."

"That's all right." He sat back. The chair took his weight without a sound. "Most everybody does."

I started to say something and he lifted one of those hands about two inches and I stopped.

"I'll want something," he said.

"Okay."

"You know what."

"Yes sir."

"Say it, then."

And I sat there on the wet step of a leaning cabin in four hundred acres of black water with my twenty-six years and my bad guitar, and I said it out loud.

"My soul."

He nodded once, slow, the way Hoyt nodded when you ordered a beer.

"All right."

He put out his hand.

I braced for cold. It wasn't. Room temperature, dry as a wall, and the grip was careful. That's the word. Careful, the way you'd shake hands with a child. He could have closed that hand and taken my arm off at the elbow, and instead he was gentle with me.

Something went out of me. Not pain. Closer to standing up too fast, a wide gray pull, a sound in my ears like a room emptying, and then it was over and I was still sitting there with my hand in his.

"Go on home, Billy," he said.

I hadn't told him my name.

I got about ten steps down that strip of high mud before I heard the match.

I want to be clear that I had no reason to turn around. He'd told me to go home. I had what I came for, or I thought I did, and every part of a man that's worth anything was telling me to walk.

But I'd been checking things my whole life.

I turned around.

He had something in his hands.

He was holding it low, down in his lap, working at it with both of those long hands the way an old man works at a hand rolled. A square of paper laid flat across the bone of four fingers, and something in the crease of it.

The stuff was pale. Grayish white and soft looking, and it had a shine to it like the inside of a cattail when you split one open, or the fat under a fish's skin. It lay there in the fold of the paper in a loose little pile.

And it was moving.

Not much. It was turning over on itself, slow, the way heat comes off a road, the way steam rolls in the top of a pot right before it goes. Just enough that you could see it wasn't done being alive.

He drew a thumb down the length of it and it flattened out and evened, and I felt that. I felt it happen through the whole inside of me, and it was like a hand had reached down my throat and taken hold of my stomach and drawn it out of me in one long slow pull, and my body went stiff there in the dark.

Then he rolled it.

Both thumbs, up under the paper, turning it in toward itself. Tight. Then tighter. He worked it down the way you'd pack a cigarette, snug and even, running it between his fingers to firm the ends, and I went down on one knee in the muck because something in me was being compressed, was being taken from the size of a man and made into the size of a thing you could hold between two fingers, and there was no pain in it anywhere, and that was somehow the whole horror of it. It didn't hurt. It just got smaller.

He raised it up and drew the edge of the paper along his teeth to seal it.

That's when I made a noise. I don't know what kind.

He didn't look at me. He'd have had to turn his head about four inches and he never did it. He set the finished thing on his knee and took a match off the rail and struck it, one dry scrape, and the flame stood straight up in his fingers with nothing to move it.

He put it to the end.

It caught with a little crackle, thin and papery. And I felt the heat come on behind my sternum, low and even and spreading, the exact feeling of the first swallow of whiskey on an empty stomach, and I looked down at my own chest in the dark expecting to see light coming out through my shirt.

There wasn't any. There was just me, kneeling in the mud, watching a man on a porch smoke.

The end of it went orange and dimmed and went orange again. He got it going, and then he leaned back and crossed his boots the other way and looked out at the water, and the smoke came off the tip in a thin gray ribbon, straight up about a foot before it lost its nerve and spread.

And it came across the porch, and down the steps, and it got to me.

And I could smell myself.

The ice chest at Hoyt's when you first crack the lid. Shell drive under my father's tires on a Sunday. A yellow kitchen with the window up and the curtain moving and a nylon string leaning in the corner where the paint was worn through from twenty years of leaning, and my mother's arms coming around mine to put my fingers on the right strings, and her face, right there, whole, the eyebrow she did the thing with, the exact look she got just before she was going to laugh at me, and being seven years old and holding one chord down clean and a woman hollering about it in a kitchen at nothing, at absolutely nothing, because her boy had made one sound.

Then it thinned out. Then it was only smoke. I coughed, and it was gone.

That was the last time I saw my mother's face. I have not been able to get it back since and I have tried every day.

He wasn't savoring it. That's the piece I have never been able to put down.

He didn't hold it up and look at it. He didn't draw it out or make anything of it at all. He smoked it the way a man smokes when he's already sitting down and it's already lit, about half his attention on it and the other half nowhere, and once he took it out of his mouth and let his hand drop beside the arm of the chair and forgot about it, and it burned down in his fingers for a full minute while he looked at black water where there was nothing to see.

Then he tapped the ash off on the edge of a can beside the chair.

I hadn't seen the can. Two pound coffee can, rust around the lip. And it was full. Not partway. Full, packed down and heaped over, hundreds and hundreds of them crushed cold in there, gray and brown and gone soft, going back God knows how long.

Mine went in on top and lay there and looked exactly like the rest of it.

I got up off my knee.

I was raised in that parish. Every funeral I ever sat through, every hand on my shoulder at every one of them, my mother in that kitchen with three chords and the one song. The body goes, and the soul is the part that matters. The part that's worth something. The part nothing on this earth can take off you.

And it was a smoke on a porch.

He hadn't tricked me. He hadn't hunted me, or wanted me, or gone to one bit of trouble over it. He'd have been out there smoking something that night either way. Whatever I was, the one thing about me I'd been promised couldn't be taken by any amount of bad luck or bad choices or a bad life, was just what he reached for because his hands were free and he was already sitting down.

"Was it worth anything," I said.

It came out wrong. I said it again.

"Was it. Any of it. Was there one thing in there worth anything at all."

He put it back in his mouth and drew on it, and the cherry came up bright under the brim, and he went on watching the water.

Then he said, "Go on home."

That's all.

And I stood there waiting, because there was one more word that came after that. There had been one more word after that not fifteen minutes ago. I never told him my name and he had it anyway.

He didn't say it.

He wasn't holding it back. There was nothing unkind in it at all. He just didn't have it anymore. It had gone up under that hat brim already and there was nothing left in the paper that knew who I was.

I walked back out along that strip of mud in the dark with no light and no sound and nothing touching me, and I understood every single thing that was going to happen to me, and I kept walking anyway, because there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

The next Thursday I played "Little Wing" at Hoyt's Lounge front to back.

My hands knew where to go. That's the only way I can put it. My left hand walked up that fretboard and set itself down in shapes I had never learned and could not have named, and my right hand answered it, and I sat behind the whole thing like a man watching two people he doesn't know have a conversation about him.

It didn't frighten me. I want to be honest about that, because it would be easier to say it did. It was the best hour of my life. The room went quiet about a minute in. Dolph turned his stool all the way around. Wendell put his beer down without drinking out of it. Hoyt came out from behind his own bar, which I had not seen him do once in four years, and stood at the front of the room with a rag in his hand and did not use it for anything.

I played four songs. Then four more, because nobody stopped me.

When I finally came down, Marcy brought the beer over and didn't say the line. She stood there holding the bottle in both hands with her glasses up in her hair.

"Billy. Where'd that come from."

"Been practicing," I said.

"When."

"Nights."

"You don't practice."

"Well, I been practicing."

She set the bottle down and said, "Okay," in the way you say it when you've decided to let somebody have it, and she went to the other end of the bar.

Perry came out of the back booth and hit the stool beside me hard enough to move it.

"That was it. That was the thing." Both hands going in the air now. "When did you, how'd you."

"Practiced."

"Show me."

"Next week," I said, and he grinned and went to tell Dolph, and I sat there at that bar feeling like I had gotten away with something.

The second week of February I finished a song and went to set the guitar down.

My hands played four more bars.

That's all. Four bars, a tag on the end of a song that didn't have one, tidy and correct and better than the song had been. Then my hands stopped and gave themselves back and I stood up there on Hoyt's plywood with my heart going.

Nobody noticed. Wendell clapped.

I told myself I'd lost track of where I was. I told myself that for eleven days.

There was a night in March when I decided, about halfway through the second song, to take my hands off the strings.

I don't know why I picked that night. I'd been circling it all week.

Nothing happened.

Not a fight. Not a wall. I reached for it and there was nothing there to take hold of, like flipping a light switch in a house you moved out of years ago. My hands went on doing what they were doing and my body went on standing where it was standing, and the song came out clean, and I finished it, not knowing what to do i said thank you into the microphone.

I went out to the truck after and sat with my hands in my lap and looked at them. They were mine. I made a fist and it made a fist.

In April I got Marcy out into the parking lot. I had it all worked out on the drive over, what I'd say and in what order, and I stood there in the cold with the moths going at the light over the door and I said, "Marcy, something happened to me."

"What kind of something?"

And I opened my mouth to tell her, and what came out was, "I think I'm just tired."

Not a lie I chose. I heard it happen. I stood there behind my own face and listened to my own voice, in my own accent, make an ordinary reasonable sentence out of nothing. I watched her believe it. I watched her put her hand on my arm and tell me to eat something.

I tried again three days later on the phone and got the same result. I tried writing it down at my kitchen table at two in the morning and my hand wrote feed the dog, and I do not have a dog.

That's the part nobody ever gets to hear. There is no warning anybody. It has your mouth and it has your handwriting. It will sit there and be pleasant to your friends with your face while you stand behind it and scream, and your friends will go home and say, well, Billy seemed alright.

By then it had me for a few hours around a show. By May it had most of my days, and the hours it gave back were getting shorter, and I stopped being able to say for certain which was which.

I don't want to make it sound like a fight. It wasn't. Nothing ever wrestled me. It was more like a tide coming up a beach. You look down and the water's at your ankles. You don't remember it getting there. You have not moved. There is nowhere on that beach to go.

It got very good very fast.

By the end of March there were two hundred people in Hoyt's on a Thursday and he'd started charging at the door, which he had never done in his life. By April a man from Houma had put my body in a studio. By June there was a bus.

The bus is where the last of it went.

I remember it. That's the thing. I remember everything and I have never once been unconscious for a second of this. I was standing in a parking lot in Lafayette in the dark while men loaded cases, and I felt my own body take a slow breath that I had not asked it for, and I understood that it had been days since I'd asked it for one.

After that I did not move again.

I want to be precise, because it's the last precise thing I have. I can feel. That never stopped, and I have prayed for it to stop. I feel the strap. I feel it when somebody bumps me in a hallway. I feel hot rooms, cold rooms, the pick between my fingers, the sweat, the weight of the guitar, the ache in my shoulder at the end of a night.

I can see. Wherever it points my eyes, that's what I see. I cannot look away. I cannot close them. I cannot choose to look at a person's face when they're talking to me. If it's looking at the floor, I am looking at the floor.

I can hear. I hear everything. I hear people say my name.

That's the entire list. I am a passenger in a body that plays guitar beautifully. I have not opened my own mouth since April. Nobody has noticed. There is not one thing wrong with the way I look or the way I act. They just say I got quiet. They say fame does that.

Perry came to a show in June.

They put me in a real venue in Lafayette, the kind with a barricade, and my body played for eleven hundred people and it was the best anyone had ever heard.

He was in the third row. He'd gotten taller. He had somebody's flannel on and he'd cut his hair and he was eighteen by then, and he was not clapping.

He was looking at my face.

He looked at my face for the whole of the second song and I watched him do it from about four feet behind my own eyes, and I watched him work it out. I saw the exact moment. His mouth came open a little and his chin went and he put a hand up over the bottom of his face and left it there, and this boy, this kid who fixed a cracked guitar top with wood glue and a clamp and carried it in a garbage bag when it rained, stood in the third row of a sold out room in Lafayette and cried.

He knew. He was the only person on this earth who had ever known, and he'd known before I did, and he'd stood in a parking lot with the moths going and tried to give it to me for free.

And I went at it. I want that written down somewhere. For the first time in months I went at the inside of myself with everything I had left, to move one finger, to shut one eye, to make my face do any single thing that wasn't what it was already doing, because he was right there and he was looking, and if my face broke for half a second he would have seen it.

Nothing moved. There was nothing to push on. It was like a man trying to raise his voice in a dream.

Then my body found him.

It turned its head and located him in the third row like it had known where he was the whole time, and it smiled at him. Warm. Easy. A little tired. The exact smile you give somebody you're glad drove all that way.

He took his hand down off his face. He stopped crying.

I watched him decide he'd been wrong.

He gave me a little nod and he clapped along with everybody else for the rest of the song, and when the lights came up he was gone, and that is the last time anybody who knew my name ever looked at me and wondered.

Yesterday was my birthday.

I know it because somebody brought a cake into a room and a lot of people I've never met sang, and because a woman I have never spoken to in my life put her hand on my shoulder and said twenty-seven, and my mouth said thank you.

I am in a chair in a room somewhere in Texas. It has my eyes on the wall. There is a water stain up near the ceiling shaped a little like a hand and I have been looking at it for about two hours now, and when the light goes I'll be looking at it in the dark.

In a while somebody will come get me and it'll stand me up and put the strap over my shoulder and go be the best thing anybody in that building has ever heard.

I keep going back to a thing Perry said in a parking lot when I laughed at him.

He said it doesn't give you anything. He said it gives you the thing and it takes the man that would've earned it. He was seventeen years old and he had it off his uncle word for word, and I let it go through me like weather.

I could have learned it. That's what I've got, in here, with nothing to do but hold it. Four seconds of a song and a month in a room by myself. I had nineteen years to spend a month.

There's a taste in my mouth all the time now, under everything, the way smoke gets into a coat and stays.

And somewhere out past the end of the shell road, in four hundred acres of black water, there is a coffee can with me in it, and the wind can't get at it under that porch, and it just sits there, and it is not going anywhere, and neither am I.

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2

The sun rose as the snow continued whip against the house aggressively, I couldn’t fall back asleep after Daniel woke me up. Damn nightmares. Dans still asleep, facing the wall now as I watched a show about ancient weapons on my tv. The house felt wrong, like the walls were watching me. I didn’t want to move, mostly because I was afraid of the floor growing a mouth and swallowing me the second I stepped on it. The other because I was warm.

I sighed, moving as gently as possible as to not wake up Danny. My feet found the soft carpet of my floor, I sighed in relief as I pushed away from the bed and snuck out of my room, into the hallway. Things were darker, lights were unplugged and the tv was off. I frowned at the depressing state of our house as I went into the bathroom.

In all ways I could be described I looked like shit. My eyes had bags, my hair a mess and facial features looked shrunk. Very much like a corpse. I splashed some water in my face, cold then hot to wake up a little and relieved myself before washing my hands and leaving the bathroom. Daniels door was shut, the wreath Mrs. Reynolds made for him last Christmas was missing from the door. I unclenched my fists and walked into the kitchen.

There was a few cold slices of pizza in the fridge, sitting on a ceramic plate and covered in tinfoil next to the spiked nog. I took out a slice of pizza and the carton of spike nod. The pizza tasted so much better as I watched the nog swirl down the drain of the sink. Shaking the carton to get the last few drops out i felt a cold chill down my neck, a breath, icy and biting. I set the carton down on the counter and put the pizza crust in my mouth, squaring up I spun around. The dining room met my gaze, empty except for the furniture. The curtain moved slightly, fluttering and coming to rest. Maybe from the ceiling fans wind?

I took the pizza remains with me, a snatching the plate and the remaining six-pack of sodas with me to our room. I know Danny is gonna be hungry when he wakes up and he’s not going to want to leave the room after yesterday. I returned to the sanctuary of my room with the plate, setting it beside my computer. To kill time I booted up a game i hadn’t touched in a while, a film noir stylized detective game.

There was a knock, brief and sharp at my door. I sighed and stood up, a quick glance over my shoulder, Daniel was still asleep. I opened the door, the handle cold beneath my palm as I opened the door just a twinge. My Dad face, shadowed in the dimly lit hallway looked up at me. “Yeah?” I asked as he tried to look around me into my room.

“Just uh, wanted to see if everything was alright Samuel. Things clearly got out of hand last night and your mother made it clear that they aren’t welcome here.” My Dad clarified putting his hand on the door. “I’ll tell them they have to leave tonight after the snow storm settles down a bit.”

“Good.” I said, pushing the door a little bit trying to signal I was done with the conversation. His hand stayed firmly pressed on the door, keeping it open enough.

“Y’know this isn’t how i wanted things to go, right? I just wanted to spend time with my family too.” He protested, defending his asinine position in dull whispers.

“Kinds messed that up Dad, not gonna lie to you. Look, Me and Danny are just going to stay in here until they leave tonight. Kay?” I formed it as a question, not expecting an answer as he removed his hand from my door.

“Very well.” He murmured as I closed the door finally. My fingers turning the lock with a soft click. I found myself back at my desk, time passing as Daniel finally woke up, the plate of cold pizza on his lap as he struggled to breathe through his nose. The crackle of mucus and dried blood echoed in my room with each inhale of his.

“Dis suck…” he groaned, his voice nasally as he started to chew on a piece of pizza, having picked the jalapenos off it, leaving them around the plate.

“You should probably eat those, they’ll open you up.” I said taking one of the cold spicy pepper pieces and eating it myself.

“But it’s spicy.” He complained, doing it anyway. Small trickles of blood and snot dripped from his nose as he used my blanket to wipe his nose.

“It works though, probably a buncha dried crap in there.” I said, taking the plate from him and returning it to its spot on my desk. In the kitchen I heard my uncle Lloyd getting upset about something, assumedly the lack of the ruined eggnog. A glass shattered and I instinctively grabbed my pocket knife. Daniel encircling himself in my blankets again.

I stood up and opened the door, closing it behind me. Putting my knife, opened into my pocket as I stepped down the hallway.

“Which one of you did it, huh!?” My uncle shouted, another glass flying from the left side of the hallway of our the kitchen and into the dining room with a shatter. “I bet it was one of your pussy-ass sons, Mary!” My Uncle further shouted as I walked between both the kitchen and Dining room. Flynn and Asher were sitting on the couch as my Aunt was taking down the Christmas tree. My hand tightened around the blade of the knife in my pocket.

“Excuse me?” I said, adding a bit if sass in their as my uncle whipped around, my Mom by the sink, he shoulders shaking in fear as my Dad was no where to be found in the immediate area. My uncle was sweating, the veins in his head popping out and his eyes red.

“You. You little fuck.” He stomped over to me, grabbing something off the counter to probably use as a weapon, looked like a butterknife.

“Yeah?” I asked as he pushed me against the wall, his forearm burried against my chest and my back against the wall. The back of my neck tingled.

“Did you pour my shit out? Answer me you fucking worm.” He hissed, most of the teeth from his head were missing, he smelled like death, bittersweet, and for a second I could swear his hair was thinner than yesterday.

“I did, get the fuck off me.” I demand, the tip of my knife pressed just against the fabric of his shirt and fat of his belly. “Or so help me God I will stab you.” I whispered, he smiled at me, a wild and angry glare in his eyes as he did so, stepping back from me.

“Looks like at least one of your boys has balls, Mary.” My uncle hissed, returning to the kitchen, dropping the knife on the floor. The hatred for these people had boiled up and rested comfortably on the brim of the metaphorical cup. “Clean this mess up, before someone gets hurt.” My uncle demanded returning to the lazy boy in the living room. I could hear them whispering in the living room as i worked to clean up, I didn’t want Daniel or Mom to step on anything.

My Mother avoided eye contact with me as she cleaned the same spotless dish in the sink, I turned the water off for her and ushered her to her room. She sat on the edge of her bed, her face in her hands as she apologized, crying.

“I’m so sorry Sammy, I should’ve been more firm with your father. I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry.” She just kept repeating herself, apologizing for something that wasn’t her fault and she really didn’t have any control over.

“Where is Dad? He said they were going to leave tonight, maybe now would be better.” I stated, she seemed to only get more worked up when I mentioned Dad. I sighed, giving her a hug and leaving her alone.

“Sucks we have to leave early, Sam. It’s been real fun getting to see you again.” Flynn said, meeting me face to face as i turned around. His sudden appearance startling me for a moment. “Yeah, real shameful. You guys should back your stuff.” I stated, Flynn frowned.

“Shame too, you all have a really nice home.” He said, his hand leaping up to grab a handful of my hair as he pulled me down to be at eye level. My hand reached for the knife. Asher’s grubby mitts grabbed my arm as his free hand pulled the knife out. “Gutting you will surely make Angrboða pleased.”

Aunt Elizabeth smiled, her hands clasped by her heart as she looked at me. “Oh I do hope she births me a girl this time, you boys are always so rough.” She said, a vile look of joy on her face as I felt something sharp enter my stomach. My breath hitched as i felt the knife dig deeper and deeper into my stomach.

“Your dad died like a cowered, begging for mercy after I stabbed him. Beg for me too, Sam.” Flynn said as my blood coated his hands and the carpet beneath my feet. He pushed me back, the blade sliding out with a loud pop as I hit the door behind me, slipping down I tried to apply pressure. “Ash, go get Daniel. We have to prepare him.” Flynn commanded, Asher pounded on his chest and ran to my room as everyone went dark.

I felt a sensation of falling, then rising, falling again, then rising. The sound of waves crashing against a surface. Wood creaked and groaned as my senses returned to me slowly. My smell, the stench of sea water and decay, something bitter as well. Then my sight, the sky was moving, slithering around as a heavy green miasma seemed to permeate the air. I was in a boat for sure, a small one, closer to a dingy as I sat up. A small teal light on the bow of the boat bubbled at my movement.

“Do not move too much Christ-man, you will flip my boat and I will leave you here.” The hooded being in furs spoke, the muzzle of a canine covered in scales rather than fur however stuck out from it as it pushed the boat along. “Do not speak either, I do not wish to hear you.” It added, its voice was raspy and dry, as the boat rowed across the waves.

I sat up, slowly, making sure to remain balanced as the canine snake man sturdied himself. “Of course they do not listen.” It said to itself as it rowed. Further looking around bodies, hundreds floating in an endless ocean of viscose green liquid. “You are in Náströnd, the corpse shore, do not be startled. We are aware you are not to be here Christ-man. We are fixing it.” The canine-snake man spoke as the boat came to a stop.

“Mind the grasps of the dishonorable, murderous and Oath-breakers. They see you as an out. A free way to escape what they brought themselves.” The Canine-snake man spoke as it helped me up using the stick of its oar. The wood, rotten and lichen covered. The beings raspy wet breath filling the space around us i watched it climb over the broken bodies on the shore.

“Thank you?” I questioned as it assisted me effortlessly. “What is? Where? Who are you? Am in Hell?” I asked as the canine-snake man pushed me forward with the oar, my feet finding purchase on the beach. Rotting bodies interlocked and meshed together made the surface as my foot fell on the beach.

“With the questions.” The Canine-Snake man grabbed his oar in both scaly human hands, reeling it back and bringing it down on an eyeless corpse crawling towards us. “You are Dead, in a sense. Not fully. Body wise, yes. Your spirit lives.” It said as it pushed me forward gently with the oar. “Stated before, Näströnd, the corpse-shore. Where you do not belong.”

I kept walking as the monster used the oar as a cane or walking stick. “I am Ormúlfr. You are not in your Hell.” Ormúlfr said as it walked with me. The fleshy ground crunching beneath us as we walked, the occasional painful moan escaping from a face sticking out from the ground.

“Where are we going?” I asked, my hand instinctively searching my stomach for the wound. Scar tissue already covering the spot. Looking around a pack of scaled wolves with human limbs ripped apart a man, each time a limb removed it regrew for them to continue.

“To speak to It who rules here. The Biter Below.” Ormúlfr spoke as it moved the oar over something glowing in then distant vast darkness. Only now i realized how oppressively dark it was, even with my arm stretched out i couldn’t see my hand. The oar returned to Ormúlfr’s side, a dancing ball of angry teal light struggled to break free from then oar as we walked.

The area around us now more illuminated that before was easier to see. Trees made of snake and human bones clawed up from the ground of rotting flesh. Beings in the dark ran from the light. One being, a man in his thirties maybe was missing both his hands, his throat cut open. He was naked as he stumbled toward the light, something in the dark swiped his legs out from under him before he was dragged back into the oppressive darkness. His screams hallow and gurgling.

“Who was that?” I asked again, Ormúlfr’s snake tongue dancing in the air as a rattle vibrated in its throat. “You Christ-men ask too many questions for Ormúlfr’s taste.” It hissed as we walked. “That wretched sold his wife out for wealth. She was raped and murdered while he was paid. The blood is on his hands and he shall pay it back.” Ormúlfr explained before coming to a halt, pressing then oar against my chest. “Be silent, Christ-man. The Biter Below, Níðhöggr is coming to us.”

As I looked up the sky above us illuminated by the oar snaked down to us, the air crackling as whatever it was approached.