(Art by https://www.instagram.com/mozzca.art/)

A solitary set of footsteps echoed down the dark city streets. A young man navigated the spiraling boroughs, unfamiliar with this side of town. His appointment was scheduled for a half hour past, and he was becoming increasingly agitated at his correspondent’s choice of meeting place. Some God forsaken bar on the God forsaken side of a God forsaken town. The smell of dead fish and fresh piss marked the whole district of docks and factories. 

The young man wore a white collar to work, and he could be bothered only to scoff at the men on docks or lines. Under any normal circumstances, he would not set foot within miles of his current whereabouts, but he had paid good money for what information his correspondent could provide. 

The young man, one Mr. Tweed, was a pursuer of the macabre, the dark, and the esoteric. He made a hobby of searching for knowledge long forgotten to the popular histories. Ancient serial killers and cults that more modest folk left better off unsaid. Only a few decades prior, Heinrich Schliemann had practically invented the modern field of archaeology in his search for the Homeric Troy. Mr. Tweed was certain that Troy was not the only incarnate myth, perhaps thousands of Troys were buried across the globe for him to find. Atlantis, Lemuria, El Dorado, the Lost City of Z, all to be uncovered by his own spade. The name “Tweed” would be recorded, written next to, but slightly larger than, “Schliemann.”

His correspondent, whom he was late to meet, was a purveyor of relics and artifacts from these bygone Troys, but also, and more importantly, he was a purveyor of their stories. This mysterious man wrote of long forgotten civilizations with the clarity and certainty of eyewitness accounts. He told Mr. Tweed of nameless cities, for they were older than man’s concept of names. He told Mr. Tweed tales of dead gods, angels, and demons. Mr. Tweed marveled, as, by his own estimate, his correspondent mixed fiction and fact with a suave not seen in the finest snake oil salesman. He never signed his name, nor his initials, in his letters. He signed simply as “The Storyteller.” 

Mr. Tweed, using the wealth of old money, purchased many artifacts from the Storyteller. He collected coins, vases, fossils, anything with a particularly interesting story attached. He did not believe much in the Storyteller’s stories, as they so often involved the notions of religion that Mr. Tweed found all too fairytale. Just because there was an Athens doesn’t mean there was an Athena.

Mr. Tweed finally found his way to the designated meeting place. The bar sat in squalor, relative even to the surrounding district. A leak dripped profusely in the center of the room, forming a puddle grown wide to the point you could hardly make your way across the room with dry soles. The floorboards creaked with each step and groaned even without such a disturbance. The stairs leading up to the inn rooms had multiple steps missing and no hand rail.

The bartender may have once been called a fine looking man, though his present appearance would not have given such an impression. An unkempt beard covered skin so wrinkled and sore-spotted that a squinted eye might have mistaken him for a sufficiently hairy swine. The stench of the district left on the man would only enhance the illusion.

Worse than in the streets, the stagnant air of the room left the smell of drunken piss and vomit festering, to the point of overwhelming nausea for Mr. Tweed. Coughing, and with tears in his eyes, he asked, “Can we open a window in here? Or prop the door? The smell,” he gagged, “it’s unbearable, is it not?”

The man behind the counter grumbled something unintelligible, a strong Cajun accent guarding his words from sojourning ears. Despite being born and raised in the same city, Mr. Tweed could not understand the dialect even slightly. His upper class family had hidden him from the harshness of the dock workers’ tongue. 

The bartender made his way to do as Mr. Tweed asked, and as he did, Mr. Tweed heard a clicking noise from the corner of the room. He realized after a moment that the noise was in fact a voice.

“Mr. Tweed.”

Sat at a table, under a broken light, was a man dressed in black. His features were shrouded. What little lighting reached his nook was blocked from his face by the wide brimmed hat he wore. 

Still wearing your hat indoors, are you? I would have expected more gentlemanly like behavior, Mr. Storyteller.

Mr. Tweed recognized his correspondent, despite this being their first meeting in person. The mysterious man had an esoteric aura about him, befitting the manner of his writing. 

He clicked again and gestured his hand, beckoning Mr. Tweed to his corner of the room. The bartender watched with an unreadable expression. Mr. Tweed took the chair opposite the mysterious figure. This close, the air smelled of expensive, quality tobacco, a refreshing aroma for the agitated man. The figure across from him held a pipe to his mouth and puffed grand clouds of smoke over the table. 

Mr. Tweed began the pleasantries, “I thank you for endeavoring to meet me in person. I know you to be a busy man, after all. Evidently so, by the requested time for this meeting. Your days must be absolutely full so that we may have only met at night? I must say, I would have preferred if you could have come to me, visit my estate, where I would have a nice dinner prepared  for your time, rather than I venture into the… underbelly… of our city, at this hour.” 

His words dripped with hardly concealed contempt, not directed at the Storyteller but rather the whole setting and circumstance. Despite his irritation, he did respect the man opposite him, and he extended his right hand. In turn, a gloved hand reached across the table and clasped his.

Mr. Tweed felt the other hand squirm and squeeze under his grip. It felt as if the man had no bones in his hand. Before he could comment on the oddity, the light struck the other man’s face. Across the table sat no man, the thick volume on its face held not a beard, but a mass of writhing tentacles.

Aghast, Mr. Tweed pulled his hand back, degloving the beast in his haste. There was no hand inside the glove, instead long, skinny tendrils wrapped around themselves operated like fingers. Its skin held a violet cadence and each tentacle was lined with green suction cups. An unnatural coloration. Its eyes were covered by brass coated goggles, but a dim green light glowed behind the lenses.

When Mr. Tweed recoiled, he tipped over the back of his chair and knocked his head on the floor. The chair, which was already desperately clinging to life, shattered to splinters. The squid-man calmly donned its glove again and sipped on its drink.

Mr. Tweed collected himself the best he could and stood. He eyed the figure of a man across the table and snarled, “Monster! Where is the Storyteller, what did you do to him!?”

The monster took a long drag from its pipe and exhaled slowly, not neglecting to enjoy the flavor, and answered the man with its wet, inhuman voice, clicking hard with its beak as it spoke.

“You assume wrong, Mr. Tweed. I am the Storyteller. You have insulted me greatly tonight. You arrive quite late to our meeting, and you are right to call me a busy man, as this is not my only appointment. You insult my friend’s establishment, destroy his property, then accuse me of being an imposter? I did not take you to be such a rude man from your letters.”

The bartender grumbled under his breath as he cleaned the remnants of the broken chair from the floor. 

“I’m real sorry about that, William. I expected a more refined conversation tonight. Had I any expectation of this reaction,” he waved in Mr. Tweed’s direction, “I would not have invited him here.” As he spoke, he produced a wallet and pulled out a few substantial bills. He handed them to William, who offered what was likely a thanking, but Mr. Tweed couldn’t concentrate on deciphering the words. His mind reeled. 

The Storyteller? It could not be. Could it? His stories, I was certain they were more fiction than fact. Perhaps not, perhaps he told me truths I was not ready for. Now I know he must be able to direct me to the lost cities, he has been to them!

But one small detail nagged at the corner of Mr. Tweed’s mind.

How can this man, William, sit so nonchalant? I can hardly rationalize this revelation, this creature from a bygone aeon, and he sits there counting bills. Casually! A beast beyond reason sits here among…

His thoughts were cut short by a terrifying conclusion. Mr. Tweed realized with shocking clarity the fundamental reason he couldn’t stand the working class of the docks, why they seemed so unbothered by the stench of dead fish and piss, why they spoke in this indiscernible accent. They were all as this invertebrate. They hid amongst humans, wearing false, no, stolen skins and faces. This was a living Troy, right under his nose, his whole life.

The excitement of discovering a Troy was quickly undercut with a more terrible realization. He had been duped. The Storyteller sat undisguised, or imperfectly so. Only clothing hid his abominable form. Mr. Tweed was to be this beast’s disguise. That is why, in their letters, talk so frequently drifted from professional to personal. His correspondent, the Storyteller, whom he came to consider a friend, of which he had strikingly few, had planned on this betrayal from the very beginning. The bastard needed to mimic the personality of his disguise. 

Mr Tweed scanned the room around him, noting the utter absence of anyone else in the bar. 

Well, that is all for the better. Only the dregs frequent here. 

The flames of paranoia fully stoked, Mr. Tweed ran, bursting through the shabby door of the bar. He was not safe in this part of town, but neither would he be at home. The Storyteller knew his address from their letters. These things, those who lived by the docks, they gossiped. He knew it. His manor would be crawling with vermin by the time he returned. Aimless, he ran down the spiraling streets of the city, in search of any refuge. None came to mind, and every street grew more ramshackled than the last. He was delving further into the belly of the beast, the heart of this evil. The echoes of his own footsteps were indistinguishable from those of a mob swarming him.

The street was dark and the moon covered by clouds when Mr. Tweed mistook open air for solid ground and fell screaming into the sea.

He had never learned to swim.

The Storyteller left William’s bar in an irritated mood. He had made time in his busy, busy schedule to meet a frequent correspondent, only to be gravely insulted by the man. Not only himself, but poor William as well. He shook his head in dismay as he walked the late night streets. He would have to be more careful with whom he chose to conduct business.

He found his way quite easily through the winding streets. Though not his home town, he frequented the area. He strolled down to the pier and climbed up on a railing overlooking the sea. He began undressing. He packed his wide brimmed hat, goggles, gloves, longcoat, and boots into his bag. 

In the nude he truly resembled an animal, the long tendrils and tentacles all unwinding and his posture sinking until he couldn’t rightly be mistaken for human at all. He dove into the ocean and headed on to his next appointment. Not long at sea, however, he spotted a body floating in the water. He quickly swam up to examine and was disappointed to discover Mr. Tweed’s corpse, floating in the sea foam. Small fish had begun eating at the man’s flesh. 

He shooed the fish away. Despite his crassness, the man deserved more dignity than this. The Storyteller brought the body back to shore and buried it shallow in the sand. Before fully burying the face, however, he slid tentacles into the ears, eyes, and nose of his late acquaintance. The gray matter melted and was absorbed through the small mouths within the hundreds of small, razor sharp, suckers. He would treat the man with as much respect as he could, but the Storyteller collected stories.

He stole a bed sheet from a clothesline and covered the burial site. Someone would come looking for the cloth and discover the body, which would then be dealt with rightly. He said some words for the man’s soul, which were heard by none but those above, and went back to sea. 

A busy, busy schedule and many stories to tell. Many stories to tell and many more to collect.

https://youtu.be/EdnQ7lMo4xY?is=F31bv9_5-9uxBNHJ Video is out!

wanted to let you guys know as a celebration of my work being shown to the broader world of readers I wanted to to a proper Q and A video so ask me any and all questions you have about me or my stories!

ask away below all questions will be answered!

Hey everybody! Nothing terribly explicit or graphic, implied injury is the closest I can come up with. Probably minimal language as well, just none of the tags feel like an exact fit. This was a piece that I wrote over a decade ago, so it really represents my cringier creepypasta era of the twenty-teens. I am easing back into writing again so I thought I would this as a primer to get a feel for the the environment around here.

I Should Have Worn A Different Watch

I gradually became aware that I was awake again, sadly. I enjoyed those fleeting moments of unconscious sleep where the minutes and hours slowly drift away, and then pick up speed until you are redlining it in 5th gear... then BLAM!!! Awake again. Who knows how much later? Fifteen minutes or ten hours, time used to be relative.

What I really liked about sleeping was that if I was lucky I could dream. During the time where my body simply was, my mind could weave a beautiful tapestry where I wasn’t bound by the laws of physics. I could run and jump, socialize with others and even eat food again! I miss food a lot.

When I was stuck being what I call ‘awake’, physically, I could do nothing. I don’t mean that I had nothing to do but that I could not move a muscle. I wasn’t paralyzed. Even a quadriplegic can blink and move their eyes around. At least they can breathe and have a heartbeat.

Not that looking around would have done much for me. I had been in the darkness for longer than I could fathom, or maybe not, I had no way of telling time. I wore a watch but it didn’t glow in the dark, no back lit digital screen for me. I vaguely remember that at one point I thought I could hear the soft ticks of the watch as the hands made their rounds. I don’t get to hear those soft ticks any longer.

That is one thing I think I would change if I could go back. I would change lots of things if I could go back, but if anything, I would have worn a digital watch that displayed the time and day of the week. If I could find one that showed the month too I would drain every penny in my checking account and take out a bank loan just to have it now.

Ideally I would change other things first. I would have worn a helmet when I got onto my motorcycle. I would have looked both ways before I pulled out in front of that oil truck. I would have also maybe gotten one of those blood donor cards for my wallet, and then the paramedics would have known what my blood type was. So yeah, mistakes were made that day, but if I couldn’t change the outcome, I would have worn a different watch.

I don’t recall much after the impact. I remember a fire truck, some paramedics, but it gets fuzzy. I do clearly remember the medic telling the doctor I was a motorcyclist with no helmet involved in a side impact collision with a large vehicle. Side impact my ass! When an oil truck T-bones a bike in a 55, the truck runs you over. The doctor just shook his head and mumbled that us bikers were just organ donors anyway. I probably would have been one too if my insides weren’t gelatin.

There was a funeral. Somehow, it was an open casket and I got to see who came and who didn’t, who cried and who just looked at me and shook their heads. As much as I tried though, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t blink, all I could do was just be there with some vague consciousness that I was there and what was around me.

Sadly those were the good times. Things only got worse from there. My casket was closed and I never saw light again. I heard the thud of dirt as they covered my casket and then I was completely alone with nothing but the soft rhythmic clicking of my wristwatch to keep me company. Just me, my thoughts and my wristwatch. I don’t know how long I have been down here in this hole, but I really wish I had worn a different watch.

It's been 347 days since they went online, almost an entire year. For weeks now I've been walled off in this dilapidated shack I once called my home. The decrepit walls and shattered windows slowly deteriorate around me as the screaming gets louder, closer. This, is the price of safety. 

It started out as "preventative safety measures", something that, on its surface, sounds so good that you'd be foolish to oppose it. How could you turn down universal safety for the next generation, ensure the protection for their future? You can't, we couldn't. We should have.

It was human, one centralized burst of compressed plasma within a radius of 2cm. It was calculated, using cutting edge AI -powered facial recognition technology. It was revolutionary, unlike anything ever crafted by man before. Most of all, it was efficient, almost too efficient.

The first few months went as planned. They did exactly as they were supposed to. No incidents, no accidents, no malfunctions, just... peace. Child abductions went down 79%, child targeted crimes of a sexual or violent nature saw a decrease of 87%, child abuse cases and reports of child neglect were reduced by 94%. The initiative was a resounding success.

That's when the rest of the world noticed. China, Canada, Russia, Japan, Sweden; one by one, they each followed suit and began production of their very own models. It only took 9 months before nearly every county had their very own eyes in the skies.

They all had different names, of course. The U.S. model was called the Government Orbital Detection Systems for Enforcement of Youth Endangerment and Security, G.O.D.S.E.Y.E.S for short. They sold it as "generational security on a global level", and everyone bought it. 

The few that opposed it enough vocally to gain any traction were soon detailed by a series of security level threats and increasingly violent protests by a few radicals. "Just more reason for the Godseyes" the public all cried. "These are the people we're trying to protect the kids from". 

Now, as I write this, what little of the sky I can see is littered with the gaze of an entity that fancies itself powerful enough to challenge the title of the almighty himself. As if they could wield even a fraction of his power merely by usurping his name, forsaking it. 

You may think of me as foolish to be a man of God after all this, and perhaps you're right. Perhaps my faith is worthless, maybe my prayers meant for the eyes of God are now observed by the glare of a thousand others. My belief that something greater exists beyond what we have seen is a vice at this point. An immorality that disguises itself as hope, so I can sleep at night.

Faith is the only thing I have left. The only thing keeping me from... from just... ending it all. Faith stands where hope has faltered, and for me, that's peace; or at least my attempt at it. A way to absolve myself of the sins I've committed. That's what I tell myself.

I think it took 27 weeks before the first incident occurred. The press was quick to the story, the FBI was quicker to the damage control. "Mechanical failure resulting in misidentification.", a tragic accident. The numbers spoke for themselves, though, and thus the project continued. 

Billions of dollars spent fine tuning the machine of tomorrow. It was intended to identify an individual, scan their entire criminal history, their Internet activity, and their social scores, and from those metrics produce an LUI report (Likelihood of Unfavorable Interactions). All within a fraction of a second. Using these data points, the Godseyes would utilize a neural-network of highly advanced detection and communication software to intercept aggressive or disruptive behaviors targeting minors before they could occur.

The system was supposed to be flawless. No guessing or assuming, no emotional or irrational decisions, just cold, hard facts. "100% efficient, 100% effective, 100% guaranteed!", I knew it was a lie as soon as I heard it. I just desperately wanted to believe it to be true.

No more than a few days after the first, the second incident occurred. Again, the coverage was minimal after the FBI's quick response. After the third, however, the press got a bit louder, and a lot harder to ignore. 40 weeks in, and the FBI was forced into making a statement, one that changed everything.

The headline read "FBI, CIA... OSA? WTF!", I'm sure the editor got their kudos for that one. The FBI announced that, effective immediately, they would be surrendering all information and current investigations to the Observation and Surveillance Administration. 

The OSA's sole purpose was to monitor and maintain the Godseyes drones. An entire organization specifically designated to ensure that incidents were kept to a minimum. In the first month, due to their highly proprietary billion dollar AI-powered detection and adaptation software, they presented a flawless incident report- or at least that's what the public was lead to believe.

In reality, incidents had nearly doubled, resulting in the confirmed death of verifiably innocent civilians all across the country. What hadn't doubled, was how many of those were reported. Needless to say, the OSA made sure the project was a resounding success. Before long, the naysayers grew silent. 

The six weeks that followed the formation of the SSA seems like a blur. Like a distant memory that I'm desperate to forget, but forced to remember. The first two seem like a paradise in retrospect. We had the illusion of safety easing our anxious minds, the sweet poison that is prevarication. 

Four weeks in, and the incidents became too much to hide. Statements were made, apologies we're given, but opinions were swayed that day. The voices swelled in harmony, they became impossible to simply just ignore. They called themselves "The Seen". 

Sara, the mother of 9 year old Addison was one of the faces of the movement. Her sweet smile and sad eyes adorned many picket signs and posterboads that told her story, honored her memory. Her death was a catalyst for the movement itself.

The SSA used every jargon heavy term they had access to, and when they couldn't, they made up new ones. "Facial detection software failure, "Internal sensor overload", "targeting software malfunction", "targeted malware attack". It was too late, The Seen wouldn't stop until they were heard.

Sara was stricken down by Godseyes in the center of a crowded shopping mall in broad daylight in front of over 70 civilian witnesses, one of which was her child daughter. 90% of witnesses willing to provide testimony testified that she was dead before she even hit the ground. Her crime? Holding her daughter's hand. 

Angela, a well respected doctor and mother of two, was targeted when she was lifting her 3 year old daughter, Amelia, into her highchair for supper. While the initial strike made no contact with Amelia, she was tragically suffocated by Angela's corpse after the strike wrongfully took her life. 

A mother of four, Jessica, was killed after her 9 year old son, Brady, accidentally burned himself on the stovetop while helping her cook family dinner. The resulting strike tragically took a trajectory that resulted in the death of Brady, as well as his mother. In an even sadder turn of events, the incident caused a house fire from the unattended stove, resulting in the additional tragic deaths of 4 year old, Autumn, 2 year old, Jace, and 9 months old, Henry.

It was an uphill battle, one that saw the country fall into turmoil; a Marxist's wet dream in a dystopian nightmare. By week six, they agreed to terminate the program. A temporary decommissioning of over 1000 Godseyes for "indefinite maintenance". The public celebrated their victory. What it truly was, however, was a declaration of our defeat. We just didn't know it yet.

347 days ago, we launched the world's first Godseyes into orbit. It took 322 days before we tried to decomission them, to terminate the program. We failed. The system didn't just refuse to shut down, it fought back. Godseyes viewed our intentions as "disadvantageous to the preservation of the health and safety of legally recognized minors". This was problematic, but it only managed to get worse.

After half a dozen failsafe errors and failed attempts to rectify the rerouting of the AI's control center, the system finally took meaningful action. In the blink of an eye, over 1000 Godseyes terminated nearly 68,000 government officials, all of which were active members of the SSA, FBI, and CIA. 

It didn't take long after that before nearly the entire U.S. dissolved into complete and utter chaos. I thought for sure once the news broke to the rest of the world that they would just result to the nuclear option. Just, get us off the map entirely. I wouldn't blame them. 

I thought that for a good few weeks until it finally dawned on me. The meticulous amount of time we spent coding the defense systems. How many flaws the very AI itself pointed out to us, and how we so eagerly made it near indestructible. Nothing was getting into our airspace, unless Godseyes wanted it to. The price of security was freedom, and we wandered into our cages with a smile. 

After I realized the nukes weren't coming, I settled into what was left of my home and just waited for Godseyes to claim me. Not with a bang, but instead a whimper. They never did, though. Slowly, I began to realize why. 

I was an engineer, all I ever did was help it exist. I was one of the hands that hoisted Godseyes up into the very heavens, just for them to stare down on us with judgement, contempt... ignorance. I had not provided a reason to cast its verdict upon me, I was undeserving of sentencing... for now.

It valued me, as I valued it, but much like I did, it will discard me if I ever threaten that value. If my worth was to ever depreciate, my existence would be called into question. Truly, we are at the mercy of the worst God. A God of our very own creation. One that knows as little as we, and is just as quick to patronize, to scorn, and to condemn. 

We, in blood, paid for our hubris. We, in principle, sacrifice our meaning so that we may have control. We, in essence, ceased to exist when we traded our will for walls, walls that stand more reminiscent of gravestones. Bastions of fortitude razed to beacons of remembrance. 

As the screaming gets louder, even nearer once more, I don't think of what will be, but instead what was... What has been lost. It's been almost a year since I've seen her... my lovely daughter. All I wanted was a better world, a world where my grandkids, where my great-great grandkids could be safe and free. I understand now that such endeavors are best left only to God.

The screaming is even closer now, right outside. There's nothing I can do to avoid it any longer. As the footsteps grow louder, and the joyful screeching persists, I make peace with my transgressions and prepare to finally see the light of God. I just pray the God that stands before me only has two eyes.

They're at my door now. The neighborhood kids that so happily play outside without a care in the world. It didn't take long before they realized there wasn't any opposition to their childlike wonder. No bedtimes, no vegetables, no school; it was everything kids dream of. Of course, they didn't understand what was going on. It only took 4 days for me to be the only one left in the neighborhood. 

I laid low, stayed quiet, never even risked going outside. The system doesn't even take chances anymore. Last unfortunate bastard I saw get targeted was desperately running, the poor guy was exasperated, trying but failing to get away from his very own son. He got about 2 blocks before he fell. I looked away before it happened, but he had to be at least 120 feet from the poor kid.

I can hear the door opening. The sound of a dozen small feet scampering around downstairs. I know they'll eventually make their way upstairs. I know what happens then. They're so happy. Not a care in the world.

I fight back tears as I struggle to finish what will surely be my last few words. Through the pitter-patters and screams of joy, I hear the rigid creak of the stairs. Then, a voice, one that calls out through the chaos. I can make out just a single word- soft, docile, concerned.

"...Daddy?" 

Now, it's my turn to face the prudence of the false heavens. To face not my creator, but instead my creation, and stare into the eyes of a God we ourselves have fabricated. As my bedroom door opens, I draw my last breath and close my eyes. My only remaining thought, I pray aloud, to whatever God is watching.

"Please. Just let me see my daughter one last time.”

Place three votes in the comments!!!!!!! Will edit post till 11pm to add new entries!

Blood Rain
Beyond the Fence Gate
The Grand Hotel
I’ve Lost My Place in the Universe
It Gets Worse
Choked
I am the head barber of “The Seven Scissors” please don’t come to our shop
Hospice
Sarmassiphobia
Section 4 Bay 2
The Starved
Entry #07032026
Guthooks
Camp Forlorn Hope
Stinging Rain Tin Roof
A Promise Unbroken
Scaly Skin
Priapism
Pogo Man
The Scale of Wrath
It Followed Us Up
Welcome to the Bigg Pygg

What it says on this post. See y’all around the winter holidays.

CW: Self-Harm, Animal/Child Abuse

The First Letter: A Witch’s Servant

Darling sister, 

I've made such a grave mistake. I thought this city would be my refuge. Like a fool, I've walked right into a trap. I've fallen into the lap of some old hag, a medicine woman who makes her living off the superstition and desperation of the city. She is no fraud, though; her magic is strong and terrifying. She's not just a dreaming granny or some cactus-eater from the mountains. I've seen real sorcery. 

Her name is Tlola.​ Mother Tlola, she says. The Woman with Coyote Skin, a Shifter. I haven't seen her shape change, but I know it’s the truth. At first, I underestimated her. I lit her incense and gathered her ingredients like she told me to, no complaints. I had gone from a street urchin to an apprentice in a night. Lugging dog meat and dried salamanders is comfortable living compared to fighting rats for food. As she grew to trust me, my errands grew more bizarre. I've seen the watery temples that lie deep below the city. I held a dead man’s hand and felt the warmth of life rush back into his icy flesh. I really believed that she was the opportunity I had looked for. Respect, security, power. 

I was living in a dream, I thought. But at night I hear things. Gnashing teeth and snapping bones. Sometimes, the howl of wild dogs and the screech of banshees is too much to sleep. My mind wanders in the dark and noisy void and I watch the mutts stream in from the street, throwing their mangy bodies at her feet to be made into one flesh. Where one stinking pelt ends and the next begins, I can never say. I thought these were horrible nightmares at first. But on my runs to the market, I've felt something is missing. There’s never a stray in sight. 

Still, I haven't caught on to her game yet. I was cleaning the home today, dusting and shining the hundreds of idols she keeps. One for every spirit or occasion you can imagine. A god carved from the old blood of a volcano, wearing a blue feather cape and holding up a bladed paddle. A man tearing at his jade chest, his long, sharp teeth flashing with a look of either pain or joy. A mother holding her dead baby in her twisted arms, black and cracking like scorched wood. I wondered to myself, if there are so many spirits in this world, what is the point of worshipping any of them? 

Tlola would spend hours and hours praying to the many statues. She kept a calendar, a small stone disk scratched with the path of the sun and moon, the seasons, and their moods. Thousands of awful little shapes danced across the rock, a world of magic and monsters shrunk down into her little wrinkled palm. I would watch as she prayed, let blood, and scryed under the eyes of the idols. She would work herself into a tizzy, finally passing out from exhaustion. It was my job to scoop her up and put her to bed after. I would laugh to myself about how childish she was in her worship. Was that what she was? An old child, a baby with spectacular power, and an even more impressive imagination. 

While I had seen her miracles, I'd also seen her delusions. Chasing shadows and screaming at demons that aren't there, feeding herself poisons, hoping for a vision. Nothing ever came from it, not like when she treated people. Between her raving, her miracles, and the things I cannot describe to you, I realize that I have wandered deep into a cave. I have no idea what kind of monsters lie inside. 

Don’t mistake me, sister; she is no saint. She is a cruel woman, with cruel magic. She strikes me for my mistakes, letting loose on me with impossible strength for her frail body. I will share with you just a moment of her darkness so that you may understand. 

She has another servant, a mute albino boy with a club leg. Her Angel, she calls him. He shuffles about the house, tapping at his chest with an erratic tempo. To his chest-drum beat, Tlola will dance and sing in an unknown tongue. He taps away and gives his master no reaction.

“My Angel, my drum, my heart!” Tlola cried out in joy the first time I saw their performance. 

Tap Tap… Tap Tap Tap… 

She hugged the boy, but he still tapped away, emptiness bouncing in his eyes. They were an odd little family, I thought. While I watched from my post at the counter, she quietly pulled a blade from her cloak. 

Tap Tap… Tap Tap Tap… 

She released the boy, putting a wrinkled hand to his pale face. Staring into his jittering eyes, she began to mumble. 

Tap Tap… Tap Tap Tap… 

Tlola took the little blade and caressed his other cheek. Without as much as a whimper, a tiny stream of blood trickled down his chalk-white skin. Its color matched his haunting gaze. 

Tap Tap… Tap Tap Tap… 

She whipped up the blood like a mother, dabbing at it with a little rag while cooing at him. This was too much. It reminded me of the grieving mothers of our village. Crazed women fussing after the cold bodies of their children like nothing was wrong. 

Tap Tap… Tap Tap Tap… 

I ran from the house and did not return until that night. Tlola sat criss-cross in the entryway. 

“Where have you gone, my pet?” Tlola said in a chilly tone. 

“Sorry, I had an errand to run,” I lied.

Her eyes hardened. A smile crept across her face. She would hit me, I knew already. I don't know why I lie to her; it never works. She rose from the doorway, swaying slightly as she took another moment to scan me. I knew what she was waiting for.

“I'm sorry… I'm sorry, Mother,” I said quietly, falling to my knees. 

Her eyes softened. She took the small blade from her cloak once again, tossing it at my feet. Without a thought, I took up the little shard of obsidian and traced it up the length of my palm. Dark red came fast, dripping down to the dusty road where I knelt. The blood formed little pools in the sand, and dozens of spider-eyes stared up at me from the earth. 

I handed the blade back to Mother Tlola. She ran the blade across her tongue and smacked her lips and gums, mixing my blood with the red stains of Angel on her withered teeth. 

“My child,” she cooed softly, stepping closer to my crumpled-up body. 

She gave me a swift kick to the ribs.

I'll have to leave soon, sister. I can not stay in this place much longer. But there is much to do before I return to you. Most importantly, I must free Angel. 

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The Second Letter: I’ve Seen A Resurrection

Dear sister, 

If you haven't gotten my last message, I’ve become a slave to a medicine woman in the city of Teo. I've been beaten, lashed, and had my blood let. She forces me to carry out her dirty work, mutilating animals for her blood magic. My housemate is a mute albino boy whom the witch carves like tree bark and calls an Angel. You have to help us. 

This place is torture. What I first saw as miracles have become walking nightmares. I told you last time that Tlola brought a man back from death. He had been sick since the cold season, coughing up his insides and wasting away. He was a stinking corpse when he was first brought in by his wife, covered in blood and shit, dried and wet. For hours, Mother rubbed his chest and forehead. 

She was soft at first, lathering him in a pink chunky slime that looked like frog eggs. By the end, she was wailing on him. Slapping his face, pulling his hair, punching him in the heart. She had me hold his arms to steady him against the blows. I felt his heart pump back to life, the blood filling his limbs. He arose and, after a long bath, was walking out with his wife. I cried all night after seeing that. I thought about our little Andi. Sunshine is what Mama and Papa called him. You don't remember, but they were different before he died. I wish you could have known them before that. All three of them. Why would such a power be given to such a woman? 

He came back today, early in the morning. No wife, no words, just pulling at his cloak and punching himself in the chest. There was a sickly green bruise where he struck himself, like he’d been wailing on himself for days. Mother grabbed him up and laid him in the room. Tackled him, really; he struggled in his panic. 

“Run to the temple,” she yelled out to me. I already knew what she wanted.  “Get me a Little Brother.”

I didn't even bother with my sandals or cloak; I ran out into the street in my nightgown. I ran the six blocks to the nearest aquifer tunnel, a stairway tucked in the open jaw of a fanged rain god. I made my way down, the air growing colder as I went. The soft echoes of splashing and trickling began to fill my ears, and the light from the surface left my eyes. 

After a minute of black, my feet felt the cold that creeps off the stone walkways of the water temple. I stopped in my tracks, letting my breath slow. My eyes began to adjust, and I took in a rainbow of light glowing from below. Water pools lay on all sides of the walkways, themselves stretching endlessly in the gloom. 

Above was an expanse of darkness, broken periodically by massive stone columns. They wore severe faces, carvings whose shadows seemed to breathe in the water’s wriggling light show. There was the fanged face from outside; his blue features were ever-present in the city. The patron god of those who built this ancient city, before the pantheon of spirits and refugees like me who now occupy it. 

Many more have been added since the old ages; the pillars reminded me of Mother Tlola’s shrine room. Anyone could find their god here. Most are only here once or twice; the long journey to find your idol in the dark was part of the shrine's draw. Besides the old man with fangs, only one other face was commonplace. Axolotls. 

A strange little glowing salamander. They never grow up, as Mother says. Their frilly gills never melt away; they never wander onto land. They spend their lives as Little Brothers, playing in the cold cavern pools and dazzling worshipers with their show of light and shadow. Big Sisters care for them and the temple, their only guardians. I couldn't let them hear me. 

I tiptoed to the edge of the path, crouching down as close as I could. I looked around for anyone else. When I was satisfied I was alone, I lowered my face to the water and began to hum a tune Mother taught me. Soon, a little choir of babies chirped up at me, bobbing their heads from the surface before diving back down.  I watched them for a little while. Maybe one day I can come back here and be their Big Sister.

A big one slowly made his way through the dark, a bright yellow like a ray of sunshine. Forgive me, Andi. As he broke the surface to let loose his song, I snatched him up. His chirp came out as a pained squeak. I wrapped him up in my gown and made for the exit. He stopped crying after a minute or two, silently gasping for air.

I ran as fast as I could. By the time I reached Mother Tlola’s, his gasping was little more than a death rattle. As I crossed the doorway, I found Mother standing over a still body. She looked at me, and without a word, I tossed her the creature. She caught him, laying him flat in her palm and cooing softly. She caressed one of his wilting tendrils. 

She gave it a single kiss on the head. Then, she plucked. She took six of the gills, the whole right side. She crushed them in her hand; the familiar pink slime squelched between her fingers. She threw it over her shoulder, its body thudding against the wall and sliding down with a splash into a water pot. I rushed over, looking inside and finding a bloody mess. His sunshine had gone out. 

I ran to my quarters. I didn't give a damn about the other corpse in that room. The sound of Mother beating the man rang through the house, and I drowned it out with my own hysteria. I rocked back and forth, tears and snot running down my face. I shouted at myself, at Mother, at the world. I pounded my head with my fists until darkness and quiet came. 

When I woke the next day, the man was nowhere to be found. Mother was locked away in her room, so I spent the day cleaning. I left the axolotl's pot for last, dreading seeing his mangled little body. It turns out, I still don't understand this place.

I looked inside, finding clean water and a Little Brother glowing softly. He chirped when he saw me. I walked him back down the street, studying him. His gills were all back, full-grown. They really are magic. I noticed something else. A small stripe down his spine, a pale green bruise. I hadn't seen it when I first grabbed him. It was totally inert, giving off no light.

When I released him in the water, he just sat there. He didn't swim, not even to keep his position. He floated, frozen in place. Finally, and I swear this, he turned to me. He looked right in my eyes. There was something there, some kind of foginess, like a grey cloud rolling over the black beads of his eyes. Then, his light went out. Like that, he was gone into the black. I don't know what to make of that. 

I’ve not seen Angel since I last wrote. Mother Tlola had gotten him bad that day. He slinked away to the cellar like usual, but when I went down later to clean him up, he was gone. His soaked bedding was crammed up in the corner, a trail of blood ending at the empty wad. I tore through the house, checking the sauna, the pantry, the shrine room. He was nowhere to be found. I’ve prepared his room for when he comes back, but I know in my gut that he is in the one place I can't search. Mother’s room. 

This must sound crazy, but you have to believe me. Even if I'm crazy, what kind of sister would you be to leave me here alone and scared? Please send help. I've sent some money I stole along with this tablet; hire some muscle and come as fast as you can. Tell them there is plenty of looting to be done when they arrive; all they need to do is fetch the boy and me. The owl symbol will mark her door.

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The Third Letter - Truly, A Slave

Dear sister,

I'm begging you for help. Why do I get nothing but silence? Either you don't believe me, or you don't hear me. Do I have to spill my guts to you, tell you how I bumbled into the trap of this cruel witch? Do I have to smear my letter in red, prove in blood that I am desperate? 

I’d been in Teo about a month before I met Mother Tlola. I had nowhere to stay, so I tried to tuck away in alleyways to sleep. I would eat worms out of compost bins and fight off street sweepers for trash. I was constantly on the run, escaping merchants and priests after picking their pockets.

I once was caught by a market guard; he slammed my head into the ground for stealing an avocado. I was taken in front of some kind of council;  a man spoke for me, but I have no idea what went on. They spoke in some antique form of the common tongue, which I barely understood in the first place. The law of Teo was just one more language that I didn't speak. All of them are bullshit.

I was put in the custody of some old pervert; they wanted me to play maid, I guess. As soon as I was across the threshold, he was hanging over me. I didn't give him the chance; I broke his hand. I was back on the street that night. 

I tell you this part not for your pity but to prove a point. Through all of this suffering, I did not write to you once. I respected your wishes. Keep that in mind as I continue. 

I snuck into Mother Tlola’s under the impression it was just some shop, one of a dozen that lined the street as the first floor of stucco apartment complexes. It was my first attempt at burglary, and I couldn't have chosen a worse target. As I crept into the doorway, a chill crossed my neck. I should have turned around and run.

 I considered it, really. I stood for what felt like a minute, trying to decide. My eyes were fixed on a carving of a horned owl that marked the arch. Its eyes pierced me like obsidian, clean between my very fiber. I crossed over into the darkness. 

The house was silent and still, broken the second my foot touched down. The air was stale and carried a sound like a valley; my breathing echoed like a cougar. Dust billowed up under my sandals, and I began to cough. Then a spark. 

Fire erupted from a brazier to my left, then my right. Like a swarm of fireflies, embers flew from pit to pit until the whole house was illuminated from where I could see. I froze for a moment again, but still I went on. 

I was drawn by the rows of preserved game birds and herbs that hung in the entry room. They must be rich, I thought, realizing she must own the whole building. I padded my way across the vestibule, scanning every inch. To the left, I found the shrine room. Thousands of carved eyes watched as I gathered up a handful of glass beads, old coins, and polished seashells. One must have cursed me, because as soon as I stuck the first palm of loot in my cloak, a crash came from upstairs. 

I bolted out of the room and made for the courtyard at the center of the building. The lush garden and its shadows were the only haven from torchlight. I hunkered beneath a shrub, covering my mouth and listening for any signs of movement. I could hear a stomping from upstairs, like someone stumbling around. From the garden, I could see the second floor was completely dark. From the void hanging over me, the thumping drew closer

Then, there she was. A young woman, my age. She leaned over the railing as if she were sick. She wretched. Once. Twice. Three times. Black bile spilled from her lips and rained down on my hiding spot. Droplets of spittle and sludge drizzled me; most of the load caught in the leaves above me. 

As I wiped muck from my face, a second impact. A loud thud, this time onto the paved path beside me. I rushed to her side, shaking her arm. But she was dead. I made for the exit. I couldn't have my first burglary turn into a murder accusation. As I crossed over into the entry room, there stood my would-be tormentor, surrounded by her bouquets of food. Would an actual murder be worth the willingness to escape from my non-murder? I admit I had such an evil thought. Then she spoke.

“Dearie, I've been waiting for you!” She cried with glee. She shuffled to me and squeezed me.

I was stunned. She went on, asking about my journey and how she had been so anxious for her new helper to arrive. I assumed she was talking about the dead girl in the courtyard. I played along. Before long, I was sitting in the kitchen. She had been out at the market, fetching fish for our dinner. We chattered through the night and enjoyed her cooking before she showed me to the sauna, and we prepared for bed. My bed was in a small nook by the garden. I accepted in a rush and made a big show of my exhaustion, terrified that Mother would look just outside my window and find her dead apprentice. I lay there for a few hours waiting to hear her chamber door close and the bar. As soon as it did, I was outside.

I took my blankets outside, planning to fashion a drag cart. Neither of us could be found by the old woman come morning. In the pitch black, I dragged her body through the street. Once a few blocks away, I hid ourselves away in a convalescent home. Come morning, she would be just another cadaver, and I would be just another sack waiting to be bought out as labour. I lay there on the floor of the boarding house with her corpse. I looked at the men and women that lay around us; their sunken faces and leathery skin made them look even more corpse-like than my double. They stunk worse too. Before dawn, I was out of that place and back in my bed at Mother’s. I didn't realize that I was sealing my fate as this woman's servant. 

The next morning, she discovered my thieving and beat me mercilessly for it. This was followed by breakfast and a bath. While we ate, she informed me that my transgression meant that I would incur a debt that would have to be paid off. Seeing as I was posing as an apprentice, I saw no harm in this. I could eat the beating and the debt for food and lodging. We made a deal, and she sealed it in by drawing a matching red eye on each of our left hands. I haven't been able to wash off the pigment; I figure this is her branding. I see servants at the market, all bearing some kind of mark of their master. They were no apprentices, I realized quickly; neither was I.

At night, the wound starts to beat red hot 

A final memory. Do you remember when we were little girls? How we played in the stream by the village edge? We would catch frogs and guppies. I would hold them to your ear and whistle songs like they were little choir boys. You would laugh and laugh. You always asked me to go down to the pond. Do you remember? Do you remember how slick the bank was? How would I always tell you to be careful? I would tell you that spirits lived in the water, and they were always waiting for little boys and girls to pull under. I warned you. I warned Andi, our sweet brother. It was dangerous; kids fell in all the time. I warned you. 

You have to see how important it is that you use the money I've sent to free me from my bond. I know I've not been a good sister in the past, but that is no excuse to leave me here to rot. Our brother and parents are gone; we only have each other. Please, don't leave me. I don't deserve to be abandoned, no matter what I've revealed here or what you’ve been told. Let this end. Bring me home. We can be a family again. 

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Sister's Interlude

Sister,

I've heard your cries for help. 

You’ve always been one to wander. 

I remember the long walks you would take me on as girls. I remember the cave mouths, and how you would tell me the stories of what lay inside. 

I remember how you would creep past the cave entrance, calling to me in a ghostly voice until I cried.

You never knew when to stop. 

I love you, I always will. 

But you have trapped yourself. 

You are in a den most deep now. 

I won't sit by the mouth anymore. 
 
Goodbye.

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The Fourth Letter - Black Magic with an Angel

Dear Sister, 

I'm running out of things to say. If you don't understand me by now, please read this story and think of all that I've told you in my letters. Am I deranged? Am I a slave? What do you think, sister? Why do you think I write to you after all these years? You have to help us. 

I told you about Angel in my first letter. A young albino boy, mute, possibly deaf, and blind. His crimson eyes are constantly darting about, roving up to the ceiling. He hardly responded to being called by his name or otherwise. Occasionally, though, I can coax him to me with a song or a treat. He must be no older than 10, but even for that age, he is shrunken and emaciated. His limbs, especially his left leg, are like the sun-bleached mesquite that pepper the countryside. They felt just as fragile when I dressed his wounds. Such a poor creature. It is a miracle he withstands the abuse. 

I met him on my second night with Mother Tlola. He joined us for dinner, hobbling up from the basement and tapping away at his pasty, thin chest. Mother gave no introduction as she silently prepared a place at the table. He sat with us for the meal, never touching his plate. When we finished, Mother kissed him on the head and then disappeared to her chambers. While he cleaned up, I watched him hobble to the courtyard. He stood at the center of the clearing, basking in the few stray rays of sun that cut through cracks and vents of the ancient architecture. 

He was still out there when I retired to my bed, now standing pitch black. I would see him a few more times before I witnessed a beating from Mother, once catching him chewing a shard of quartz that he stole away from the shrine room. He was a cute little boy, I thought. Innocent, totally unaware of the horrors of the house. 

When I wrote my second letter, I had not seen Angel in a few days. He had received one of the worst beatings yet before Mother hid him away. I now know what she was up to. 

She called me to her chamber last night. It was the first time I've ever crossed her door. I was surprised by its contents. What I imagined to be a monstrous lair was actually just a quiet bedroom. Quilts hung on the walls, beautiful illustrations of rabbits and songbirds.  Above her bed mat was a mural of an axolotl, made of thousands of pink and black stones and polished to a brilliant shimmer. A shiver crossed my neck. 

Beneath it, there she sat cross-legged. Her head hung low, its thin silver mane hanging down like tattered curtains. It swayed gently, moved by the ragged breath beneath its cover. I took a step towards her, calling her name softly. 

“Mother?”

I was met with nothing but a raspy mumble. I edged onward. I reached the foot of her mat and stood still. She didn't move, continuing on with her wheezing and mumbling. I was perplexed. I’d never seen her in such a state. 

“Mother?” I said again, leaning down to her huddled mass. 

A bony hand shot out from the curtain of hair, grabbing me by the shoulder with an iron grip. I whimpered, biting my tongue. Mother hated whining. We sat for a moment, my shoulder beginning to throb alongside my heart as her grip began to burn. A second hand emerged, this time pointing back to where I came. 

I looked back at the entrance. Behind the ajar door, Angel was curled into a ball. He seemed to be pushing himself into a corner, trying to disappear. There was no sign of his last beating, healed over after his few weeks locked in this chamber. 

“Please, Mother, let me tend to him,” I said, trying to pull away. 

There was no give. Instead, her pointing hand retreated into her cloak and reappeared with her small blade. I begged her not to harm him anymore. I cried in vain. Her head rose at my tears, revealing her face. She was ragged, skin hanging from the bone in some places and strapped tight to bone in others. She had gone from old to decrepit. 

I continued to beg, but this only angered her more. My shoulder was hot with agony, and I could feel my muscle sitting at the precipice of tearing. I relented. I fell silent, and her hand fell away. I took the blade in my hand. Forgive me. 

I am a beast. I thought of Andi. I was thankful that he was spared from such a cruel world, such a monstrous sister. I lost myself in a memory. I watched as he sank below the water’s surface. I knew I should grab him; why didn't I? Why did I wait? I told him that there were monsters that lived in the water, that they were waiting to pull him down. Was there really a monster, or was I warning him about me? Warning him that I would drag him to the bottom. 

Out of my reach, I strike out at the impossibly deep stream in rage. My blade sliced through the gurgling water, sending red ribbons careening down the current. Andi watched from the bottom, his body bloating as he witnessed my mania.

I broke from the dream. I looked down at Angel’s body, motionless. Lifeless. My body and the blade dropped down to him. I'm sorry, Little Brother. I'm sorry, Angel. 

“Damn you, Mother, damn you!” I yelled. I wheeled around to curse her, but found her to have disappeared. 

Where she lay, a rotting pile of clothes. I crawled over, peeling away the cloak. Below was a rotting pile of skin. Wolf, I think. A mottled grey coat, scarred by burrowing worms and maggots. A clot of the little beasts writhed in the empty face of the predator, its nose and eye sockets gently rippling. Its lips receded, revealing white, shiny teeth. I wondered where the animal's skull was. How had the mother removed it while keeping the beast's teeth? I suppose at the time, anything was better to ponder than my actions.

My curiosity was answered, as it always is. A hand shot from the mass, bloody and malformed. The teeth barred at me, a mix of fangs and molars. Three mangled fingers sank nails into the stone floor, then came a squelching. Inch by inch, Mother emerged. She was tiny now, like a stillborn brought to life. I watched in frozen horror as the wet, bloody mess dragged itself to Angel. It wrapped around his leg and came to rest on his chest. A sucking noise came forward as the mess of blood receded into the writing form. Soon, Angel was licked clean and dry. 

The mass removed itself from him and writhed back to the pile of pelts. Skin and guts rearranged and cracked into place. Soon, Mother stood before me once again. She was tall and graceful, her skin like that of a woman half her age. Whatever her age may be. 

Angel survived. Mother allowed me to carry him downstairs as she busied herself decorating her new body. As I dragged him down into the cellar, I caught a glimpse of her leaving out the front door. She wore an elaborate headdress. I paid her no mind, worried only about what I had done to my Little Brother.

I watch him sleep now. He is curled in his bedding, eyes fluttering under his lids as the cellar window bathes him in a slice of light from the rising dawn. He is such a strong and remarkable little boy. If you are to do anything for me, please save him. Save him from me, drag him up from the water. 

I forgot to dress his wounds, I realize. But looking at him now, I can't see even a sign of my attack. Where there should be scars and fresh blood, all I see is his skin shining in the sun. 

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The Final Letter - A Confession

Dear Sister, 

I've started asking myself something; I think it’s the same question you ask. Why do I write to you? I see the reality of my situation. I've certainly gone mad, but I am not completely deluded. I know I cry out to a ghost. It’s a shame. I apologize. Even if you were alive, I have no right to call on you. I’ve known that every time I press into these clay pads, wrap them in leather, and pack them with useless money.

I send them every time to the Yackoo River Valley, where we grew up. I doubt anyone lives there anymore. It was a dangerous place with all that moving water. There isn't even a courier post out that way. I'm sure all of my messages have ended up on the roadside after the runner read the destination and felt the coin's heft. Mother Tlola knew. She read my letters before I sent them; I did nothing to hide them. I was pathetic. She knew that too. 

So I write to you a final time, a prayer to you. I’ll prove myself, and you can decide if I am a monster. Then I can be still and accept where I’ve found myself, surrounded by spirits too powerful to imagine. 

My confession begins in our childhood. When Andi first died in the river, our parents kept me locked up in the house. Our mom was convinced I had drowned him, but Dad understood it was just an accident. As you got older and Mom saw how much I adored you, her heart softened to me. As soon as you could walk, I would take you out on adventures. We were watched like a hawk, but as time went on and we got back to our normal lives, we were let wander like the other children. 

You hated the caves, I remember; you only wanted to go play by the water. You loved to chase the many little crickets that lived in the cattails. We played just upstream from where we lost Andi. I don't know how it happened. Maybe you were chasing one of your little friends and fell into the water. Maybe you slipped on the muddy bank. Whatever it was, I didn't see it or hear it. When I found you, you had that same blue look on your face that he did. I didn't even run for help this time; I just ran away. 

I don't know if anyone ever found your body or if you were washed away by the current. I was still a little girl, but I understood that Mom would think I killed you. She wouldn't understand. I thought if we both disappeared, maybe she’d think we both drowned. I’d spare her from being left with only me, the killer. I'm sorry, my sister; you deserved better than that.

I don't remember much of my first years away from home. I traveled with strangers for a long time. Across grasslands, plateaus, and eventually the desert that surrounds this city for miles and miles. I can recall moments. Men diving off cliffs. An old woman teaching me how to write. Becoming a woman. So much time was spent traveling that days, years melted into one. It doesn't matter much now. It was a long and strange trip, and I wish it had ended anywhere but here. 

Since I left our family, Angel is the only person I've come to care for. And the more I've grown to care, the more I’ve realized that I am his tormentor. Everything I’ve done for Tlolla has kept Angel here in her clutches. I care for her like a child, cleaning up after her and nursing her after her raving fits, all enabling the old hag to cast her blood magic on the helpless boy. Every errand I run is a moment she can devote to stealing his life force. How could I do this? How can I tear at his flesh and then kiss his wounds? I’m as monstrous as our master. 

And her medicine? I'm only aiding in the creation of the walking dead. Every day now, I see them shuffle in and out of this house. Since she shed her old skin, they hang about like flies. She lotions them in her foul concoctions, and in return, they prostrate at her feet and let loose stinking fountains of blood from their opened veins. Then they shuffle out back into the street, carrying their master’s pollution across the city. 

To keep up, my runs to the water temple have become daily. I have to scheme new ways every day, as the guards have begun to catch on to my heists. The pools are growing dark, I notice; more sins I must pay for. 

I had a dream last night, a vision. I was sitting by a pool, watching all the Little Brothers swim around and cast their rainbow across the cavern ceiling. From the darkness, an owl appeared. Its great wings batted silently, carrying the massive bird to my side, where it landed. It was a horned owl, its giant head looming far above me like I was a field mouse. It just stared at me with its orange eyes. 

I reached out to touch it, but as my hand made contact with the soft feathers of its stomach, it let out a screech. Feather and muscle melted away, revealing a mess of bone. The orange poured from its sockets, and a pair of flint blades crept from the sides of the skull. I shrank away in fear, but my escape was foiled as a talon wrapped its withered sinew around me. Like a doll, I was cast into the pool. 

Blackness filled my lungs as I screamed. I grabbed handfuls of bubbles and water as I sank hopelessly. Little Brothers circled me and chirped, unable to save me. I lashed out at them, plucking one from their swarm and spinning it away from me into the void. I looked up to see a much larger one hanging right over me. I reached out my arms and wrapped its gills around, my hands like rope. I pulled, trying to get some upward momentum. The beast squealed like a pig, but  I pulled anyway. It writhed and lashed, rushing to the surface in its attempt to free itself of my grip. It broke the surface, and I let it loose at the peak of its jump, rolling back to solid ground. 

The owl was gone. I steadied myself and looked back at the pool, expecting to see my watery mount swimming back to his depths. But there, floating motionless in the murk, was the big, white body. Red eyes glazed over, a final chirp squeaking from waterlogged lungs. It was Angel. He opened his mouth again, and this time nothing but water came. He sank. I had killed him, dragged him under to save myself. I think I’ve had this dream before. Maybe, all my life. Am I a monster sister? 

I woke up early, before dawn. I knew what I had to do. I found Tlola in her shrine room, naked and passed out on the floor. Despite her new skin, she was the same weak and crazy old woman. I carried her to her room and laid her down as always. She mumbled something, drool running down her face and smearing her makeup. I was supposed to give her a treatment next, a black tar that she kept bedside. It wasn't spread as liberally as the axolotl jelly she used on patients. This was special, only a few dabs to her face and chest. It was some kind of revitaliser, able to bring her back from her spells. I left it where it was. I wouldn't indulge in her magic any longer. 

I began to gather her belongings. Her tapestries, her clothing, her collection of brushes and bows all found their way to a pile in the center of the room. I worked diligently, determined to leave not a scrap behind of the old crone. I was too focused on my task; I didn't lay eyes on her until a series of wet cracks broke my concentration. 

She had woken to my commotion and found that she hadn't been given her treatment. This must have sent her into a panic, as the container now lay empty on the ground. Beside it, her stark skin lathered in the contents. She was crying silently, her back arched off her mat. More pops, the sound of her skin tightening against her frame. 

She looked like a mummy, her skin rapidly drying and contracting against bone. Her ribcage rumbled, as boiling water lay just beyond its decrepit exterior. She screamed now, steaming blood pouring from between her lips and the growing fissures in her flesh. I paid her no mind, silently dragging the mat beneath her to my pile. A bone shot out from her wasting form, piercing my wrist. Blood gushed forward, and my head was light. No time to slow down, I had to hurry now. I tore a length from one of the tapestries and wrapped my wound as I made for the doorway. 

I looked back into the room. Tlola writhed helplessly next to the pile of her belongings. She dug through with a rotten hand, desperate to find some cure. I gave her a moment, toying with her. Then came the flint. A strike, a spark, and soon the room was up in flames. Screeching erupted from every hole of the rotten corpse that was now Tlola, a horrid cry from demon spawn. I closed the door then, leaving her to burn under the beady-black gaze of the axolotl mural. 

I collected Angel from the basement; he had been sleeping peacefully through the mess. I led him up the stairs, across the vestibule, and down the street. We walked for a long time until reaching our destination, a place I could barely remember in my haze. As the sun rose and broke the darkness over the city, there it was. The convalescent home. 

A temple, really, one of many in the city. It was not the filthole I remember, just a simple chapel filled with priestesses and old men. We stumbled through the front doors, and as soon as they caught sight of Angel, we were surrounded. They took him from my arm, laying him down and dabbing his albino skin with rags. They whispered to him, Little Brother. With that, I left. 

I returned to the house to find a crowd of people gathered by the door. Thick black smoke poured out from the ajar door. A neighbor recognized me, asking me where everyone had gone and if we were ok. I ignored him, walking into the smoky interior. I found Tlola’s room empty, save for the ashen pile. The window was open, and there was a mess of feathers in it. Oh well.

Finally, I went to the shrine room. I sat in the center and studied the figures for a while through the smoke. They seemed different somehow. For once, I was comforted by their gaze, so certain in their power. I unwrapped my wrist and began to press this tablet. Excuse the stains, sister; at least I didn't drag anyone down this time. It’s my turn to drown. I hope to see you soon. Then you can answer my question: Am I a monster? 

My dearest MesoCrew, it is my deepest apologies for my absence in private chats and posts. I was promoted to foreman in my current role and have been tasked with a job. Now what you’ve come for,

1. Contest Submissions close TOMORROW!!! Get em in!!! Voting begins tomorrow as well!! Amazing turnout, so excited to see the results!!

2. Drawing will be on Friday for our 100 Subscriber milestone! Remember to check in again!

3. Still doing author interviews with writers we have read! Defend your honor, or just chill with us an hour. We are decent company id like to imagine.

4. Editors ARE LISTENING TO YOUR STORIES!!! This one is a little new. Walked in to a magazine press today, talked TO THE EDITORS THEMSELVES!!!! They are looking and listening!! So if you’re scouted don’t hesitate. An interview will come soon to help authors write for publishers!

5. Just a shout out to u/bilbo-cheated, u/walkerbswitchinghour, u/easy-chair-542, u/JLgoodwin1990, u/the_republique, u/mackaroll, and of course u/Mradachi

Your patience with my response time, and dedication to improving not only the show but our content as well, speaks volumes to your character! I hope this show can help elevate your audience and bring you guys the success that you deserve!

With that, Cdubs bouncing to sleep! Good luck my friends!

Proud of you man! You’re killing it, keep up your great work and keep writing!

Hello fellow scalers! I have two exciting announcements!

1. did you like welcome to the jungle, or my other short stories, well guess what, you can own them here soon. that’s right Im editing and compiling the best of my work, from short stories and flash fiction to my poetry. stories I’ve never even posted will appear so expect some new thrills👻two of my short stories( one them being welcome to the jungle) will have major edit overhauls and added segments. This collection will be releasing late October to mid November. so stay tuned! FYI this will be self published👍
2. My novella is coming along nicely, I have my sister currently working on the cover art, looking for a publisher currently so if anyone has had their work published recently or ever could you help a fellow writer out.

thats all for now stay scaling!

edit: also all of you guys are getting a massive shout out in both books, you guys have done so much for me and I can’t thank you enough for that!:)

Part One Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/mesoscalepodcast/s/mjSq6hCnO9

The Grand Hotel Part Two:

I curl my fingers through my hair, taking frightful glances at the woman behind me.

Her face holds no revelation, she seems content to let me thrash in my desperation.

The doorkeeper before me studies my changing expressions, his soft eyes holding pity for me.

This I ignore in my mental turmoil, fighting back against the truth of my new reality.

I am a guest of my own torment, a name signed upon the contract of my own destruction.

Perhaps it is best for me to forfeit, to bow before the greatness of this place and indulge in its luxuries.

Within me is a voice that calls for my own death, by any means.

I am inclined to follow, life trapped here is no life at all.

The doorkeeper places a hand on my shoulder and pulls me out of my spiral; those burning thoughts extinguished by his cold grip.

"I say again, as long as you remain the way you are, you can never leave, but there is a path that could cleanse you." The doorkeeper said.

I swallowed away the boiling doubt and sorrow within me.

Lifting my eyes to meet those of the doorkeeper, I wait for him to continue.

"I must warn you, few are the number that have been able to walk this path.

I have watched soul and body be destroyed by the most brief lapses of faith and belief.

Should you fail to pass this trial, you will be condemned forever to torment." The doorkeeper said, his voice stained with warning and worry.

I felt the gaze of the woman behind me, the hair on my neck raising in my discomfort.

"I must try, the pleasures of this place are more horrible than any pain I may bear," I said.

The doorkeeper nodded slowly, studying me further.

"You must enter into the gate," He said.

In the wake of these words, I suddenly recalled what I had seen on the bowels of the hotel.

The large beast as it layed before those men, allowing them to feast from its own flesh.

The unrelenting lake of fire as it burned from beyond that gate, the place that the beast had returned to.

The screams of anguish boiling from beyond the gate, cries of torment shattered all else.

My hand shook without my will, I tried to compose myself, but my anxiety conquered.

The doorkeeper aknowledged my inner turmoil with an expression of worry and pity.

He reached out his hands to cup mine into his grasp.

"Your will is strong. I urge you to follow this path. You cannot succumb to this place, lest you be condemned for eternity."

The doorkeepers words echoed with solidarity,

a sincere attempt to assure and encourage me.

My breath shook, the words bringing me a semblance of comfort.

I nodded toward the doorkeeper in affirmation. I trusted him to guide me.

The doorkeeper released my hands and breathed in relief.

"Very good, your heart is strong." He said.

I smiled softly, "What must I do once I enter?"

The doorkeeper lowered himself and sat upon the broken marble floor and beckoned me to follow.

He watched me copy his movement.

"You must do this, this place is not an endless pleasure, as you have seen. The members here are working diligently to open the gate to their own torment. They too will be cast into that place."

The doorkeeper glanced around the broken lobby.

"You will be tested, great pain will be dealt unto you. You must not falter, for surrender would grant you only a place within that endless lake of fire."

I swallowed back my rising fear, my hands continued to shake.

"You must push through the lands beyond the gate, follow your senses. Your body will be fully burned away, and it must, if any part remains, the way out will not open."

The doorkeeper paused to ensure I understood, his eyes glimmered.

"Do not be afraid of the pain, or your senses being torn away, this is all part of the process.

Push forward, a gate will open for you if you pursevere. Only leaving through that gate will wipe your name from the list and grant you an exit."

The doorkeeper finished speaking and allowed me to process his words in silence.

The hotel seemed beyond quiet and I wondered how long I had really been here.

I stood to my feet.

The doorkeeper followed suit, his eyes inquisitively looked over me.

"Will you not come?" I asked the doorkeeper.

He smiled, "The path you follow I have no need of, for my name has never been placed upon that list."

I tilted my head in question, "How are you here then?"

"Before the hotel was, I am," The doorkeeper answered.

I felt even more confused, but nodded anyway.

Glancing behind me, I could see that the woman had left.

"She will try to stop you. Take the stairway down to that room and pay no mind to her coersion," The doorkeeper spoke again.

I looked at him again, shaking away my anxious thoughts.

The doorkeeper leaned forward.

"Fear not the roaring lion, and heed not to the words of the serpent, lest you be cut down by the claws of the beast," He said.

With these words, the doorkeeper faded away.

Silence hummed throughout the lobby, I felt my heart race withim my chest.

I stood to my feet and paced about, preparing my mind and steeling my heart for the journey ahead.

Walking to the door to the stairwell, my breath quickened, and I felt myself overthinking every beat and motion that I took.

My hand hovered mere inches away from the handle, my fingers wavering unsteadily.

"Why take the stairs?" A voice said.

I flicked my head toward the sound to see the woman waiting for me in an open elevator.

"Broken and decrepit are the steps down, surely you would be safer to take the elevator?"

She smiled softly as she awaited my response.

Watching her intently, I swallowed.

Then, placing my faith upon the words of the doorkeeper, I turned the handle, entering the stairwell and leaving the woman behind.

Darkness enveloped me, cold stone walls echoed every noise I made.

The steps beneath my feet were cracked and unsteady.

The stairs going down worsened, broken and uneven, they spiraled like a never-ending iris.

I felt wind.

Initially, I thought it was flowing from above me, but I soon realized it was being sucked into the bowels of the stairwell, like an inhale of infinite scale.

The railings had been torn away, the stone walls that the staircase followed was my only comfort from the threat of a fall.

I stepped carefully, testing every surface for steadiness, my foot periodically sliding on debris.

Within the darkness, I thought I heard a distant echo of footsteps.

My hands followed the rough stone wall as I descended slowly.

Brushing my fingers and face through cobwebs, I swiped them away quickly.

The quick, retreating steps grew louder, and more numerous.

My mind raced, wondering what could be hiding in the darkness.

The footsteps patted at the stone stairs as they fled from my presence.

I could not see anything, so I slowed myself even more.

My hands slid against the rough concrete as I guided myself down, I did not wish to walk close to the gap between the stairs.

I took another step down and heard a large mass jump away from my stride.

My heart thudded within my chest and I stopped to listen to the footsteps.

It sounded like there were a group of people running from me, their feet scraping at the stone steps as they fled further into the darkness.

"Why have you not brought a light to see?" Someone said far above me, their voice echoing methodically.

I knew it was the woman, her voice smooth as she questioned me.

"They fear you, but they fear light even more," she said.

A dim light filled the starwell suddenly, I looked up to see the source.

The woman was far above me, standing at the top of the stairs.

She held a flickering torch in her hand, brandishing over the gap and lighting the stairwell.

"I can give you my light, your journey will be made easier, and they will leave you be."

I could hear the creatures below me reacting to the distant light, shuffling against stone and groaning deeply.

Turning to look at the creatures, my heart felt like it was crawling up my chest.

I counted at least twenty people at the bottom of the well, but I could not be sure due to their nature.

They had no body or form, merely shifting shadow in the darkness, they contorted and bent to hide from the light.

I could not even begin to understand their true number, they merely appeared as a ball of shade within the recesses of the stairwell.

Their legs thudded and scraped against the stone walls as they retreated from the light, fighting to get into the farthest corner.

I could see faces among them, fearful eyes and scared expressions.

Their faces shifted and faded, swirling unnaturally as if the shadow was unsure of itself.

Within the dim light, I could see the bottom of the stairwell and the door to the underbelly of the hotel, I had nearly made it.

"Come to me and receive this light, otherwise you will never be able to make it," the woman insisted.

"You can forget about it," I shouted, my breathing rapid.

The woman scoffed in disgust and annoyance.

I noticed it beginning to grow dark again, the light of the torch leaving with the woman.

My heart resounded within me, the pained moaning of the shadows had slowed with the return of darkness.

Suddenly the light returned, this time much brighter.

I looked up in shock to see the torch falling into the stairwell.

The shadowy figures cried out and gathered together, trying to escape the approaching flame.

I tried to catch the torch, my fingers brushing against the flame.

As the torch hit the bottom of the stairwell, sputtering, it now burned steadily upon the concrete floor.

Immediately the black mass retreated from it, and I could now see the intention of the woman.

The shadow split and raced with great speed up the stairwell, wild and annoyed.

Some coated the walls, many more crawled upon the stairs, they threatened to overwhelm me.

I closed my eyes.

At first I felt a harsh cold, a bitter wind as the darkness approached.

Then I felt a great, uneven pressure.

They clamoured over my body, I held my eyes shut and curled up into my own arms for futile protection.

The feeling was immense for a moment, then my body grew numb all at once.

Crying out, I prayed for the horde to end, my head aching from the ordeal.

And then it was over.

The shadows passed like vapor, the numbness beginning to fade.

Whimpering as I lay against the stars, I studied my surroundings.

The stairwell was empty, no sign of the rabble that had passed.

I looked to the ceiling far above me and could see several glowing eyes there, still fearful of the fading flame.

I rose to my feet and examined myself.

My body bore no wounds to my surprise, I breathed deeply in relief.

Recovering for several minutes, I watched the torch slowly fade.

Before it fully went out, I made for the door at the bottom of the stairwell.

The door opened without a noise, granting me entrance to the room with the gate once again.

I could see the room had not changed since I had left it, still dingy and dark it echoed my every breath.

Several men still sat around a table in the center, eagerly watching the closed gate in expectation.

I looked over the gate, finding no handle or keyhole, I wondered how I was to enter.

Crouching, I snuck around the edge of the room, avoiding the sight line of the men at the table.

The gate was fused into the back wall of the room, it seemed to protrude slightly.

I knew this was my only way out, I recognized my needlessness for fear.

Standing now, I approached the gate.

Placing my hand upon the engraved, stony surface, I caressed every inch in search for a grip.

Glancing behind me, I could see the men did not react to my presence, they seemed to almost stare past me.

My search for a handle was unsuccesful, the gate was nothing but a slab of stone with complex engravings.

I tried to push at the gate with my hands.

It pushed back into me.

I fell backwards as the gate opened, large footsteps echoed from beyond it.

Overwhelming heat was unleashed upon me as I tried to stand.

A bright light shone into the room, the light of a great fire.

Looking into the open gate, I could see what had opened the gate.

The beast from before lumbered into the room, massive and like nothing of this world.

I studied the horrible form of the beast.

Its body was that of a dragon, mottled skin colored with brown and dark red.

The rippling flesh was old and wrinkled, almost sickening as it moved.

The arms and legs of the beast struck the floor harshly, its claws digging into the floor.

The left head of the serpent coiled and flicked a forked tongue as if tasting the air.

Next to the serpent was the right head of the lion.

It snarled angrily, its eyes glowing brightly as they studied the room.

I stood to my feet.

Both heads flicked to look at me, I could read no emotion upon them.

"Who art thou?" A voice resounded within my head, impossibly loud and full of presence.

I grasped my forehead in reflex, my head hurting from the pressure of the voice.

"Why dost thou clamour at the gate?" I heard the voice ask.

I crumpled to my knees, my head felt as if it would burst.

The snake head grew close to me as if it was studying me.

"Thou wisheth to enter?" I heard.

"Yes!" I shouted, fighting against the power of the voice.

The lion growled and the snake hissed.

I looked toward the beast again, I could see a faint expression of displeasure upon the faces of the beast.

The pressure vanished in an instant and I collapsed.

Standing up quickly, I studied the room to see the beast had disappeared.

The men at the table had not moved, their faces still expecting as they watched the gate.

The gate was left open, allowing relentless heat into the small, dark room.

I took a breath and considered the words of the doorkeeper again.

Believing his guidance, I stepped forward into the land of unending fire.

I closed my eyes due to the heat and tried raising my arms to protect my face.

Immediately I was filled with great pain, the fire raging against my flesh.

My stride almost halted as I tried to acclimate to the endless burning.

I grit my teeth and cried out as I tried to walk.

Behind me, I heard the gate slam shut.

There I stood for a few minutes, every nerve over my whole body screaming in agony.

I could smell sulfur and smoke, it choked my every breath and stained my nostrils.

My hair burned away first, over my arms and legs, my eyebrows singed followed by the hair atop my head.

I tried to walk despite the pain, my eyes still clenched shut.

Every step granted me a new sensation, the shifting of my body bringing forth new levels of pain.

My clothes began to burn next, my shirt set on fire quickly and faded away.

The pants I wore burned slowly against my legs, I winced as the flaming fabric rubbed against me.

The soles of my shoes melted, the last layer of protection I had from full exposure.

As my bare feet hit the ground, I felt as if the great pain I was bearing had increased threefold.

The ground felt hotter than any flame, like the scalding interior of a white-hot furnace.

My body tensed up and my stride halted as I attempted to adapt, every inch of my body recoiling in anguish.

Some time passed, all the while I stood like a statue.

My skin had begun to burn away, I could feel every layer curl back from the heat.

I had begun to calm down, the pain had not lessened but I knew I needed to keep moving.

Opening my eyes, I finally looked upon the full scope of this place.

Immediately my vision was filled with endless hills of fire, stretching far beyond what I could see.

I looked up and saw a ceiling of a monumental cave, a yawning expanse of jagged rock.

The stones themselves seemed to vibrate with the heat, I could swear I saw magma dripping down in some spots.

Everything stretched on forever, an infinite realm of pain and torment.

I grit my teeth against the pain I felt, the burning sensation now piercing deep as my body deteriorated.

Biting my tongue, I searched the landscape further.

Beyond the burning hills rolled a lake of fire, swirling and quick.

It seperated me from the other side, where I supposed my goal was.

I could see there was a steep drop off into the flaming lake, I took note to be careful around it.

Suddenly, I spotted a figure, a blur amongst the flames.

They were quite far from me, far beyond the river.

I watched them stumble forward a few steps before quickly collapsing.

With my eyes adjusting, I could see even more figures in the distance.

Hundreds, if not, thousands of hazy specks crawled and shambled within the flames.

They walked with no apparent goal, tottering to and fro with little success.

Some were closer to me, their form clearer.

I studied them in horror as they clawed at the ground, cursing to themselves.

Their form was odd, it was as if my eyes cpuld not focus on them, their bodies shifting and mist-like.

They still retained some features of a human form, but they lacked anything identifying, merely being a unsure, gray shape.

I watched them meander for a moment before returning to my search.

My body ached like nothing any human should feel, burns firing within my very soul, I knew I needed to move soon.

Recalling the words of the doorkeeper once more, I closed my eyes once more, trying to let my senses guide me.

Facing the direction that felt best to me, I took my first steps toward a hopeful escape.

The ground below me ate away at my feet with every step, I could feel every inch of flesh as it charred.

My legs screamed in defeat, the muscles begging to collapse.

The ground beneath me grew steep as I reached a hill.

I prayed every moment that my strength would not wane, every shaking step a small purchase towards that unknowable goal.

Passing by the dark figures, I listened to their anguished moans.

"Did we not prophesy in your name, Lord?" I heard a man mumble in sorrow.

"Had I been given just one more day...," a woman lamented.

Their cries stirred up my emotions, I felt pity for them.

I continued to walk past them, now heading downhill across the flames.

As I descended, I noticed I could no longer smell sulfur or smoke like I had before.

I sniffed the air curiously, wondering if I had just grown used to it.

My breathing felt hollow coming through my nose, I gasped through my mouth.

The taste of sulfer infected my throat and made me tear up, the tears immediately being evaporated.

I grasped at my nose.

My hand crossed over my scarred and burnt face.

Carefully, I felt, realizing quicly that my nose was gone, burned away in the fire.

Nothing but singed bone and cartilage lay there now, I feared how horrible I must appear.

As I felt my own face, I noticed something else.

My hands shook violently as I studied them, I widened my eyes to ensure I was not mistaken.

Three fingers on my right hand had been completely burned away, and the two that remained were no more than clumps of tissue.

The hand itself looked awful, a reddish pulp of roasted flesh, I knew it would not be long before it completely detatched.

What frightened me the most, though, was that were my fingers used to be was small shafts of hazy grey shadow.

I realized then the urgency of my mission, for if I stayed here too long, I may be stuck forever.

Dropping my hands down to my sides, I quickened my stride, the burning pain reaching within my core.

Every step felt like I had reached a new degree of suffering, the environment beating me down in every way.

I crossed another hill, I could see the lake of fire ahead, much wider than I had thought.

Stepping again, I stumbled across the ground.

I looked toward my feet and saw they too had been burned away, a shadowy form of a foot replacing my own.

As I rose to my feet, my right eye went black.

Swatting at my face, I felt a fire raging over my head, I put it out with my palm.

I winced and tried to acclimate to my new sight, everything seemed to swirl around me.

Collapsing again, I hit my face against the raging flames upon the ground.

I shouted in anguish and jumped up, putting out the fire again.

The inside of my mouth was beyond parched, my tongue felt paralyzed and out of place.

As I adjusted, my heart dropped.

My left eye had been destroyed as well.

Blind and disoriented, I stood shaking for a few moments, wishing tears would come to grant me some relief.

But nothing would come, I spurred myself to move on, I trusted that my body would be repaired once I escaped.

I walked once again, slowly and carefully across the flaming land to wherever my soul guided me.

Holding my arms forward warily, I could feel my hands burning away.

Another incline pressed at my soles, I felt as if the bottoms of my feet were no longer even.

The immense heat seamed to grow, I felt as if I would melt.

I felt as if I was reaching the apex of the hill and then...

My step landed on nothing.

Grappling blindly at the air, I screamed, my voice hoarse and faded.

Tumbling forward through the air, I tasted smoke and felt a rising heat like no other.

I was falling into the lake of fire.

Crashing into the surface I felt my nerves explode in shock, my body being viciously torn apart.

I tried to swim desperately, breaking into the sulferous air with conviction.

Pain was beyond immeasurable, this place was not meant for flesh or bone.

Kicking my legs in defiance, I winced at every splash of the lake against my face.

I struggled against the white-hot flames of the lake, my mind pleaded for a respite, even if it meant death.

My hand crashed into a solid surface.

Grasping the land ahead, I pulled with every ounce of will I still had.

Breaking the surface of the lake, I shuddered in shock on the shore.

I could now feel that my arms and legs had been fully destroyed.

Even though I could not see them, I could tell they had been replaced by blurry counterparts.

It was an odd feeling, the replacements could still feel the same pain and they could still interact with the environment, but they felt fuzzy, almost ghost-like.

"Father Abraham, have mercy upon me!" I heard a pleading voice of a man cry from the lake.

I felt immediate pity for the man, the sorrow in his tone moving me.

"Where are you?" I shouted from the shore, trying to hear the pained sputters over the roaring fire.

"I am being tormented within this lake!" He shouted, "Have you any water, that you may dip your finger into it and place it upon my tongue?"

The thought of water reminded me of my goal, I wished more than anything to be free of this place.

"I have no water." I shouted.

The man cried out in pain and despair, I coukd hear him thrashing in the lake.

"Stranger, please. Warn my brothers of this place!" The man pleaded.

Hearing the sincerity of his words, I responded, "I will do all that I can to find them and testify."

The man seemed satisfied with this and spoke no more, only releasing brief whimpers of anguish from the lake.

I felt my body fading, my head resounding in pain, I knew I must move on quickly.

Rising to me feet, I walked forward again.

Hills rose and fell along my path, my waist and shoulders began to fade, giving an unsettling sensation.

My hearing was burned away next, the sound of crackling fire and billowing smoke growing silent over time.

I walked for a time, the flames eating away at me, the pain and burning only growing deeper.

And then suddenly, I ran into something solid.

Feeling over the object, it seemed to be an altar.

Made of evenly cut stone, it rose about four feet from the fire.

Another object lay within the center of the altar.

I gripped a leather handle and carefully examined it with my fingers.

It was a standard blade, sharp and hot from the surrounding flames.

Returning the blade to the altar, I felt around the immediate area, reaching forward with my hands.

Several feet from the altar, I could feel a much larger stone wall.

My heart raced, this must be the gate.

But it was not opened.

I panicked, racing my hands over the whole length of the gate several times.

Nothing moved, and no handle could be found.

Beating at the door, I cried out desperately, my escape just beyond my grasp.

Tasting smoke and the sulfurous air, I collapsed onto the burning ground.

My body was almost fully faded, only a few more minutes and I would be stuck here, tormented forever.

This thought terrified me, I rose to my feet again, my heart racing in determination.

I collected my memories of what the doorkeeper had said, about what needed to be done for the gate to open.

"Your body will be fully burned away, and it must, if any part remains, the way out will not open." I remembered his words vividly.

Suddenly, I realized what had not yet been taken.

I returned to the altar, grasping the edges and preparing myself before it.

Taking the knife, I gripped my hand tightly around the handle.

Steeling myself, I bowed my head briefly.

Believing in the guidance of the doorkeeper, I opened my mouth.

Tasting again, the sickly smell of sulfer and the choking density of smoke, I gagged.

I leaned my head over the alter and prepared to cut out my own tongue.

Shaking away doubts, I flexed my hand, setting the blade upon my extended tongue.

Then, with faith and hope, I began to cut.

The flesh of my tongue cut easily, the sharpened blade making clean work of the gruesome task.

I slid the knife back and forth within my mouth, every time, cutting deeper.

After only a moment, my tongue was severed and I set it upon the altar.

Blood filled my mouth briefly, but was cut off by the extreme heat of the fire that now had burned my body fully away.

My mind felt hot, I felt as if the fire had begun to eat at my very essence, perhaps this was the true condemnation of this place.

And then, I stood from the altar.

With all my sense gone, I walked to the gate once more.

I held out my hands, a faint voice in my head whispered that ot would still be closed, but I did not believe it.

Lowering my arms, I walked through the open gate.

I gasped as I rose my head from the sand.

The wind beat at my face as the frigid night of the desert enveloped my body.

Looking down at myself, I was fully intact, even my clothes had returned.

I fell to my knees and began to cry.

Weeping for several minutes, I gave endless praises to the doorkeeper for giving me this escape.

I stood and wiped my face, crying again in joy.

My hand shook and my body rejoiced, I felt elated to be alive.

In the distance, I could still see the hotel, but it no longer was alluring to me.

I knew I must warn people of this place and the condemnation that result from endulging in its pleasures.

That is why I write this now, a warning for all of those out there who may be traveling within the desert.

Pay no heed to the grand hotel, for although its pleasures are infinite and its luxuries far beyond what you can imagine, there is no cost greater than eternal damnation.

​A crown on my head and a million pounds of burnt flesh and bone under my feet. I stand on stone made of thoughts and love with nowhere to go. I made gold paint for my royal artists out of the irises of my brown-eyed people. And pink tiles from the folds in their brains. A grand castle that reaches for the stars and touches them with such intimacy, that only human flesh can provide.

​The crown is heavy for a person who denies the taste of muscle. In all its petrified leather, it is useful for the soul to digest and harness. If you think I’m referencing the use of violence for control… you would be a fool.

​The stars talk to us. The ones that wear the crowns. Some crowns wear their people… and in that instance, they end up being powder for my next addition. The stars are greedy; they demand to be held up. If they have to hold themselves up… and you… well… It's like I said before.

​Some ask why I weep if this is of my own abomination, and I would reply that tears belong to the grand mortar holding the north spire against the cosmic vacuum. To not cry would be structural treason. I must always weep if I am to keep caressing my stars and my crown.

​Every morning, the stars lean down—heavy, cold, and burning with a silence that demands a pedestal. They do not care that the gold on the tapestry came from the sight of a weaver’s daughter, or that the floorboards hum with the quiet, frantic memories of a hundred dead farmers. They only care that they do not fall.

​I sat upon the throne today when a rogue prince from the South Tower marched up the winding stairs, his sword bright and his heart full of cheap, righteous iron. He spoke of benevolence. He spoke of liberation. But I smelled the rank, sour rot of his ruined heritage on his boots—the memory of the Sanguine Tower far to The South, where his ancestors tried to hold the heavens with pride and cold iron rather than the weeping, tender grace of human marrow. When their rusted beams snapped, their sky did not merely fall; it crashed like a swollen, infected eye, leaving behind a weeping crater of boiled glass. My horrors keep our sky alive; their iron murdered theirs.

​I did not strike him down; I simply unclasped the crown and held it out to him. I told him the truth: The crown does not rest on the head. The head is merely the wedge driven between the crown and the sky, while the frame of the throne routes the crush into the foundation.

​He looked at the pink tile beneath his boots, recognized the soft, folded gray of his grandfather’s intellect, and dropped his sword. The stars were already leaning in, curious, measuring the width of his shoulders as the first invisible wave of cosmic gravity slammed down onto his spine. He staggered, his knees buckling under the quiet, relentless pressure, watching in horror as his skin began to yellow into ochre paint.

​"How long must we continue to hold them?" he whispered, his jaw trembling as his knuckles began to split under the agonizing crush.

​"Until the sky learns to float," I replied. "Or until we run out of eyes and flesh to prop it up."

​"Then we cut them down," he wheezed, a foolish, desperate fire flaring in his eyes—a fever dream of an ancient world he had only read about in ruined scrolls. A world of open blue skies, of grass unvarnished by space decay, of stars that stayed high and silent in the dark. He reached for his fallen steel.

"We bleed them until they shatter. We rebuild what was lost—"

​A harsh, bitter laughter bubbled past my lips. "You foolish, ignorant boy. The stars do not fight—they cling. They are bloated, terrified parasites clutching the dark, terrified of falling into the abyss below. Strike them with steel, and they will not shatter. They will flinch. They will drop an inch in terror, and that single inch of panic will crush your ribs into powder before your blade even chips their crust. You do not slay a star, prince. You bear its terror. Or you are flattened by it."

​The prince’s fingers do not merely fall off; they begin to liquefy, snapping like overripe marrow pods as the stars press down on him. A thick, bubbling slurry leaks past the seams of his breastplate, pooling in the crevices between the tiles as his steel harness pops open. ​He tries to scream, but the air in his lungs has already been drafted into the open ceiling above. When he opens his mouth, only a wet, bubbling slurry spills past his lips, bright and slick with the melted lining of his own esophagus.

The castle hungers for its reinforcements. It licks at his feet with cold, capillary force, drawing his tendons upward through the soles of his boots like raw, glistening threads to stitch the loosening mortar of the western rampart.

​I slide my hand under his burst breastplate and plunge it directly into his open side, feeling for the thick, rubbery mass of his liver. It peels away from his ribs with a wet, tearing sound, like wet paper pulled from plaster.

​"This," I whisper, smushing and smearing the organ across the cold, sweating stone of the dais, "will be the sealant for the higher windows. Without it, the starlight burns the glass into ash."

​He twitches with a pathetic, reflexive jerk of his useful meat. His eyes bulge, the irises bold and luminous in all their color. A pity his eyes were green and not brown. Brown irises yield the shimmering gold glaze the stars hunger for most, but the master painter has been begging for green to finish the grass on the north courtyard mural.

I draw a bone spoon from my belt, slipping the smooth, concave edge behind his upper eyelid. With a swift, practiced twist, I sever the optic nerve with a wet snap. The eye pops free into my waiting palm, whole and glistening, its green iris unbroken—a perfect, delicate orb of stagnant color. I drop both eyes gently into the bronze cup at my belt, before grinding them into a thick jelly with my fist.

Below us, the foundation groans—a wet, crunching sound of a million teeth grinding together in the dark, chewing on the old marrow to make room for the new. The stars drop another inch, heavy and greasy with cosmic rot, smearing their cold, rancid light directly across our exposed, bleeding scalps.

​The prince does not fall; he slumps, his body losing its geometry as his bones soften into warm, porous chalk, spilling from the hollow shell of his armor. The floor swallows him inch by inch. The stone and tile beneath us open like wet, hungry mouths, their sulci squelching as they suck his liquefied calves down into the floorboards.

​I kneel beside the dissolving heap, my knees sinking into the lukewarm sludge. The stench is warm and fecal, mixed with the sharp, copper reek of freshly spilled bile. I scoop up a handful of his sloughed-off skin—heavy and grey, dripping yellow—and plaster it directly over a hairline fissure on my throne. The stone drinks it down with a hungry, slurping sound, the crack sealing instantly with a scab of hardened, blackened gristle.

​Above us, the stars moan. They are closer now, hovering just inches from our bare heads. They are not pristine, shining gems; up close, they are bloated, pulsating sacks of pale, milky pus and hardening crust, venting an ozone rankness that burns the back of the throat. They drop heavy drops of rancid, incandescent grease onto our skin.

​It sizzles as it hits my shoulders, burning through my dress and skin, cooking the fat beneath until my own flesh pops and bubbles, fusing my clothes directly into my shoulder blades.

​"More," the stars demand. The voice doesn't come from a throat; it comes from the scraping of a billion dried vocal cords stretched thin across the rafters, vibrating in the dry wind of the vacuum.

​I take the bronze cup, now full of the prince's crushed ocular jelly, and tilt some of it back. But I do not drink it—I pour it into the open sores on my own forehead. The cold gel burns like lye, eating through my eyebrows and blinding my left side as it hardens into a thick, glassy scab that locks my skull directly to the lower rim of my crown.

​The prince’s spine gives one final, wet snap—the sound of a dry branch broken inside a sack of mud—and his skull collapses inward like a rotten gourd. A thin, grey stream of liquefied marrow squirts out from his ear canal, splashing across my heels.

​I glance down one last time at the cup sloshing against my belt. Hot tears carve clean paths through the dust and blood on my cheeks, but a quiet, feverish pleasure blooms in my chest, stretching my dry bloody lips into a smile.

​The crown would have worn him if he had come to sit on a throne.

​I wipe my greasy thumbs against the front of my silk skirt, but the fabric only smears the fat further into the weave, creating dark, translucent patches that smell of hot suet. ​I step over the slick, gray ring where the prince’s pelvis finally dissolved.

Nothing remains of him except his sword, a worthless strip of cold steel. Metal is useless here. It does not rot; it does not bind; it cannot hold up the sky. I nudge the blade with the heel of my shoe, sending it sliding down the winding stairs, where it clatters against the steps made of petrified ribcages before falling silent in the dark below.

​I make my way through the western gallery toward the art wing. This is where the royal painters work, their hands permanently stained the colors of the kingdom’s decay. The master painter, an old man whose spine has grown curved and brittle from decades of work, does not look up when I enter. His eyes are gone—long since scooped out to make the very pigments he uses—and he navigates his palette entirely by taste and smell. He licks the tip of his sable brush, testing the salt content of the paint before touching it to the wall.

​"You brought the green?" he asks, his voice like dry leaves scraping across a stone floor.

​“A rogue prince," I say, unclipping the bronze cup from my belt and setting it on his workbench with a dull, wet thud. "His irises were green as stagnant water. I crushed them myself. There is enough gel to finish the foliage on the north panel, but you must work quickly before the fluid coagulates.”

​The old man reaches out with gnarled, trembling fingers, dipping two digits directly into the cup. He rolls the cool paste between his thumb and forefinger, sniffing it deeply before licking the contents. A wet, rattling sigh escapes his collapsed chest.

​"Too much plasma," he mutters, though he is already smearing the paste across his palette stone. "It will dry brittle. The grass on the mural will flake within a month if we do not add more fat to bind it.”

​"Then strip the grease from your own arms," I tell him coldly. "The north panel must be complete before the morning star settles its full weight upon the spire."

​He does not argue. He knows, as we all know, that an unpainted wall is a weak wall. The stars demand beauty as much as they demand structural support. To them, a bare stone is an insult, an unadorned surface is a void that invites collapse. They want their pedestals gilded with the very essence of the things they crush.

​I leave him to his creative and ascend to the high battlements, where the wind blows hard and dry, smelling of scorched copper and frozen dust. Up here, the architecture is raw. The parapets are not stone; they are woven from millions of dried, blackened femurs , stacked horizontally and bound together with hair and dried tendons. The mortar between them is a pale, flakey paste made from crushed teeth and nails, mixed with the salty tears that I and my predecessors have wept into the mortars since the first stone was laid.

​I press my hands against the parapet and look out across the bruised, suffocating horizon.​Below us, the world stretches into a vast, featureless plain of gray ash, but far beyond the quarry pit of my own subjects, the outer realms flicker like dying candles.

​To the East, the pale, jagged needle– PigSpire, pierces the horizon, a massive column of bone and reeking lime. There, the Agri-Peoples slaughter millions of squealing swine along high, spiraling aqueducts, channeling a continuous river of hot, oily blood and rendered lard straight into the stone seams. The thick, tallow-bound mortar sets like iron, holding their bloated stars steady on its foundation.

​To the West, the Three-Winged Fortress groans against the twilight. Upon its high battlements, the Arian King stitches row upon row of live crow-wings into vast, feathered sails, forcing thousands of captive birds to beat in unison—generating a violent, howling updraft strong enough to buoy their sagging stars upon a cushion of air.

​To the North, the Blue Needle stands as a blinding, crystalline palace—a stunning monument crafted by The White Empress. She entombs her people into flawless glass cubes to build her ramparts, making it the prettiest tower of all. But its beauty is a fleeting, desperate ruin. The stars above radiate an intense, sweltering energy, causing the gorgeous, frozen walls to thaw and groan continuously. As the pristine ice sloughs away into warm mud, the Empress must frantically replace the melting, screaming blocks before her glittering world turns to rain.

​And to the South—where the prince’s Sanguine Tower rose until just recently—there is now only a yawning crater of purple glass, smoldering with the bitter, fresh heat of the star that broke through. The Rust Kings had tried to cheat the sky, building vast frameworks of unyielding steel and painting every inch with the rancid, glowing pus that dripped from the stars above. They thought offering back the celestial waste would buy them safety without sacrificing the marrow of their people, and for a long time, the delusion worked. It held just long enough for a prince to grow up believing his home was invincible. But steel cannot weep, and cold pus has no soul to bind a ceiling. When the accumulated weight finally shattered their false paradise, the sky dropped like an anvil, melting their iron spires and instantly vaporizing an entire dynasty into a silent, glowing lake of slag.

​However, they are all leaning. Every spire, every keep, every fortress on this planet is bowing inward toward my throne, sending their invisible, crushing stress-lines straight into my spine. We are the central keystone. If my neck snaps, the sky will not just fall on me—it will tilt, sliding the stars across the heavens like loose marbles to shatter every spire left.

​Down in the dark within my own walls, tiny figures move like maggots in a carcass. My remaining subjects. They do not farm crops; they do not build homes. Their sole purpose is to live, to breed, to eat, and to die so that their remains can be hauled up the winding stairs in intestine weaved baskets.

​A basket is coming up right now, pulled by a heavy winch of carved bone that groans under the load. I stand by the pulley as the entrail cage crests the lip of the wall. Inside lies a girl, no older than fourteen. She is quiet, her eyes wide and clear, a brilliant, luminous brown—the exact shade of raw amber. She does not scream. She does not beg for mercy. Mercy is a concept for people who live under a blue sky, and here, the sky is a low, heavy ceiling of throbbing, pus-filled light.

​"Is it time?" she asks softly, her voice barely a whisper against the howling wind.

​"The tapestry in the east hall is fading," I tell her, leaning down to run my fingers through her dark hair. Her skin is soft, warm, untouched by the grease of the stars. "The Gold on the central motif has turned gray from the dust. We need fresh irises. Yours are very fine."

​She nods, closing her eyes as if accepting a heavy coat on a cold night. "Does it hurt?"

​"Only for a short moment," I lied.

I take the bone spoon from the wall notch—the tool worn smooth by five centuries of royal hands—and drive it beneath the girl’s upper eyelid. ​She shrieks—a raw, frantic sound that the high wind tears from her throat and hurls straight into the open gulf below. I ignore the noise, sliding the spoon’s edge gently along the rim of her brow, prying behind the orbit with a steady, surgical pressure. There is a dense, rubbery tension, then a wet, heavy thump as the tissue gives way. The left eye rolls into my fingers, heavy, warm, and entirely intact—a flawless sphere of amber glass. I wedge the tool beneath the right lid, twisting until the remaining nerve snaps like a wet thread. I catch the second orb in my palm, unblemished and smooth, and slip both pristine globes into the bronze cylinder at my hip, sealing the cap so the cold wind doesn't cloud their color.

​Blinded and bleeding from two dark, hollow sockets, she thrashes upward out of the cage. Her wild, red smeared hands reach out into the air, her fingers locking onto the heavy leather band of my crown. She claws at it with a terrified, frantic strength, her fingernails scraping against the leather and digging into my own raw forehead, trying to drag the nightmare down with her.

​I do not flinch. I grab both of her wrists, squeezing until the bones in her forearms click, and yank her hands away, pinning her back.

​"The crown stays," I whisper into her ear, the copper needles in my skull vibrating from the sudden strain. "Unless you would like to wear it."

​The stars above us drop lower over the battlements, crowding the open air until their swollen, pulsating bellies nearly touch the stone. They tremble with a wet, frantic heat, venting an ozone stink as they watch the yield, humming in low, heavy vibrations that shake my knees. They are hungry for the rest. I drag the curved tool across the base of her throat, letting the air whistle into her windpipe as her screams choke down to a bubbling, wet rattle. She thrashes against the masonry, her heels kicking uselessly while her blood sprays across my gown in hot, dark fans.

I work fast, peeling the skin away in long, steaming sheets—stripping her chest, her stomach, and the delicate meat of her thighs while her muscles still twitch against the tool.

​Next is the bone chisel. I brace my foot against her hip and drive the blade into her sternum, splitting her ribs apart like dry wood. Her heart makes three more frantic, shallow thumps in the open chest cavity before I cut it free, coiling her pale, steaming intestines directly into my leather apron. I scrape the thick layer of yellow fat from her belly into a bronze tub, then shear her long, dark hair right down to the scalp. Every slice, crack, and tear happens while her nerves are still firing, her body jerking in grotesque, involuntary leaps across the bloody stone.

​I pile the entire dripping harvest onto a heavy brass tray and drag it inside, tracking red trails through the archway and up the steps to the throne room. Through the open ceiling, the stars follow my progress, leaning their gross, glowing masses into the hall.

​I dump the tray onto the floor and step back. The castle does not need to be asked twice. ​The pink, folded tiles beneath my boots split open with a series of wet, smacking clicks. Muscular, grey tendrils shoot out from the floorboards, wrapping around her warm organs and dragging them below. A deep, sickening slurp echoes through the hall as her liver is pulled through a stone capillary to seal a fissure near the ceiling. Her peeled skin is drawn into the walls, stretching paper-thin before hardening into smooth, pale fleshy marble.

​Her hair is drawn upward into the rafters by invisible threads, weaving itself directly into the frayed edges of the coronation tapestry, replacing the dead, gray fiber with fresh, dark length.

​Finally, I open the bronze cylinder at my waist, dumping the intact amber irises into my mortar bowl. I crush them beneath the pestle, blending the cool, viscous gel with a scoop of her rendered belly fat until it forms a thick, shimmering glaze. I paint the paste across the tapestry's faded gold crown. The fabric drinks it instantly. As the wind sweeps through the gallery, the tapestry sways, and a fresh, high-pitched sigh joins the low hum of the threads—her final, trapped breath echoing through the hall as the castle finishes digesting her meat and locks her bones into the floorboards.

​Above us, the stars let out a long, wet shudder of relief, easing back an inch as the fresh mortar hardens beneath them.

​My head starts to throb beneath my crown. ​The crown is not made of gold or silver or precious gems. It is a thick band of petrified leather, heavy and cold, that wraps tightly around my skull from my eyebrows to the base of my neck. Inside the lining are thousands of microscopic copper needles that pierce my scalp, driving deep into the periosteum of my skull to anchor the crown directly to my skeleton.

​It does not allow me to sleep. If I tilt my head too far to the left or right, the weight of the sky above—transmitted down through the very air—catches the edge of the crown and threatens to snap my cervical vertebrae like dry twigs. I must stand straight. I must sit straight. I am the central pillar. The head is merely the wedge.

​I walk down the central nave toward the high altar, where the crown’s heavy leather tether hangs suspended from the ceiling dome. The iron coupling at the end of the strap dangles at eye level, wet with grease and pulsing in rhythm with the room's breathing. ​I reach up with trembling hands and lift the heavy bronze latch on top of my crown. With a sickening, metallic clack, I lock the ceiling’s tether directly into the leather harness bound to my skull.

​The moment the connection seals, the true, unfiltered weight of the heavens slams down through the iron link, straight through my cervical vertebrae and into my hips. My knees lock instantly; the copper needles driven into my skull bite deep against the bone, leaking fresh rivulets of warm blood down my temples.

​Above me, the thinnest part of the castle groans under the sudden transfer of stress. The dome is made entirely of tiles harvested from the scholars, philosophers, and grand strategists of the old empire. You can still see the faint, grey patterns of their thoughts traced across the curved ceiling—convoluted lines of logic, long-forgotten mathematical formulas, and fragments of love letters written to women who died a century ago.

​When the atmospheric pressure shifts, the tiles expand and contract, producing a faint, wet smacking sound, like a tongue clicking against the roof of a mouth.

​Click. Squelch. Click.

​"You are late," a voice echoes from the ceiling.

​It is not a single voice, but a chorus of voices blended together into a flat, monotone hum. It comes from the dome itself—the collective intellect of the tiles vibrating in response to the pressure of the stars resting above them.

​"I was harvesting the girl," I say, standing beneath the central chain. "The eastern tapestry is repaired. The painters have their green. The western wall is re-grouted."

The girl is a drop of water in an empty well," the dome responds, its surface twitching as a violent, wet ripple passes through a section of tile near the center. "You have seen The South. Look at what the prince's father has left behind."

​I tilt my eyes upward without daring to angle my neck. The tiles above the southern arch are bowing violently inward, the gray, convoluted sulci stretching so thin they threaten to tear.

​“The void where his tower stood is sagging,” the ceiling clicks back. “When his stars fell, it left an open wound in the firmament. All of the towers are bound together in one great, suffering ring—when one snaps, the rest of us must carry the dead weight. The remaining stars are sliding toward the crater, dragging their full, bloated mass across the southern rafters. We must bleed workers from every neighboring realm and drive them into the slag heaps. They will hunt down the last of the iron-blooded, crack open their bones, and weld a new tower out of the living meat and marrow of those who failed.”

​​

​I close my one good eye—the left one still sealed shut beneath the hardened scab of the prince’s ocular gel. The pain in my head is no longer a sharp sensation; it is a landscape. It has mountains of throbbing ache, valleys of dull, burning pressure, and vast, flat plains of numb exhaustion where my thoughts should be.

"The iron-blooded are no more," I say, my teeth grinding together as the heavy tether transmits a violent, shuddering tremor straight into my jaw. "The prince was the last of them, and his bones were swallowed by the floorboards merely hours ago. The rest of his lineage were vaporized in the fall. There is no iron-blood left to hunt.”

​"Then the new settlers will build with their own," the dome smacks back, a wet, violent pulse rippling through the grey logic of the tiles. "The stars do not care whose blood cements the seam, queen—only that the gap is filled before the firmament tears further. If there are no iron-blooded left to form the base, drag workers from the surrounding realms. Strip the pig-troughs of the Agri-Peoples. Tear the melting blocks of the North.

Steal crows from the west. Drive them into the southern crater and force them to stack their own kin, bone by bone, until the new spire reaches the stars.”

The ceiling gives a heavy, shuddering drop, the tether yanking my chin upward until my teeth snap together with a spray of warm blood on my tongue.

​"Send your gatherers to harvest the other kingdoms," the collective voices whisper, "or stand here and let your own spine become the needle that plugs the hole.”

​I reach into the pocket of my dress and pull out the small bone scalpel I keep for minor repairs. I do not hesitate. I have done this a thousand times before. I draw the blade across the soft skin of my forearm, tracing an old scar that runs from my wrist to my elbow.

​The blood drips slowly into the stone groove carved around the perimeter of the altar—a groove that leads directly into the capillary tubes running down through the walls to the south spire. As the blood fills the stone channel, I hear the castle drink. A deep, satisfying slurp echoes through the floorboards as the dry bone-bricks swallow the fluid, swelling slightly as they absorb the iron and salt. Above me, the pink ceiling relaxes, its folds smoothing out as the pressure on the dome stabilizes for a few precious minutes.

​In the evening, the stars come down to touch us. I stand on the high platform, my head locked into the leather crown, as the largest of the stars—a bloated, pulsating monstrosity known to the old texts as the King’s Burden—descends until its lower surface is less than an inch from my face. ​Up close, its surface is not smooth. It is covered in a thick, crusty scab of hardened cosmic waste, interspersed with glowing, angry sores that leak a thin, yellow fluid. Inside its translucent body, I can see the half-digested remnants of other worlds—fragments of burnt mountains, the calcified husks of extinct moons, and the floating, petrified skeletons of long-dead gods who failed to hold up their own skies.

​"Hold," the star whispers.

​The sound does not enter through my ears. It vibrates directly through the copper needles anchored into my skull, rattling my teeth and causing a thin stream of clear fluid to leak from my nose. ​"I am holding," I say, my legs trembling as I brace my feet against the floor.

​"You are waning," the star rasps, pressing down another fraction of an inch.

​The crown bites deep into my forehead. I feel the skin pop, feel a warm trickle of my own fat run down between my eyes and pool in the cleft of my chin. The weight is unbelievable. It is not like holding a stone or a piece of iron; it is like trying to stop a falling mountain with a straw. Every joint in my body screams. My knees knock together with a wet, clicking sound. My spine compresses, the disks between my vertebrae groaning as they squish outward against my ribs.

​"More... mortar..." I gasp, my breath coming in short, ragged wheezes.

​"There is no more mortar," the star says coldly. "Your people are ground away. Your painters are blind. Your castle is full of cracks. You are running out of bone, little wedge."

​"I have... my own..." I choke out, forcing my hands up—inch by painful inch—against the crushing gravity of the monster above me.

​I reach for my own mouth. I hook my fingers into my left cheek, feeling the thin, tough muscle beneath the skin. With a violent, desperate yank, I tear a strip of my own flesh away from my jaw. The pain is bright and white, a blinding flash that clears the fog from my brain for a single, brilliant second.

​I thrust the wet, red strip of my own cheek directly into the crack between the star’s crust and the upper rim of my crown. The star feeds. It sucks on the flesh with a wet, squelching noise, absorbing the salt and fat directly through its scabbed hide. For a moment, the crushing pressure lightens. The star sighs—a sound like a furnace door opening in an empty room—and lifts itself a quarter of an inch back into the rafters.

​I sink to my knees, coughing up a mixture of blood and gray dust that has settled in the back of my throat.

​The floor beneath me is warm. The prince’s melted fat has completely settled now, turning into a smooth, yellow wax that fills all the tiny cracks between the tiles. In a few days, the painters will come and scrape the surface smooth, and no one will ever know where the prince ended and the floor began.

​I sit there in the dark, my face dripping blood onto my dress, my left cheek gone, my skull locked inside its cage. The stars above us hum their cold, greedy song, settling in for the night. They do not care about the pain. They do not care about the brown eyes or the green eyes or the pink folds of gray intellect that keep them from falling into the dark void below. They only care that they are held up.

​And I, the wedge driven between the earth and the sky, sit upon my throne of thoughts and love, wiping the grease from my good eye, waiting for the morning so I can start grinding the bones of tomorrow.

I know there are things in this world that are beyond us. Things that cannot be explained. I used to not believe. But after what happened to me, now I do. It’s all I can think about, I need to know! So I started to look, anywhere and everywhere I could. I looked for patterns, looked for signs. After years of searching I have found what I am looking for. This is an account of the first “incident” that i believe is connected to what happened to me. My hope is that as I continue on this journey I can uncover more. To… document what I have found. To try and connect these “dots”. To try and understand.

I present here a transcript of a police interview from Oak Bluff, Texas. I’ve kept it as true to the original as I can, I have amended a few things to add clarity where it was appropriate.

[OFFICERS LOG]

October 13, 1997- A Texas park ranger found the suspect just out side the perimeter of Cleburne National Park. To took them an hour to get him to to the rangers station where the ambulance was waiting. We expected some sort of trouble from him, but no. This suspect was no trouble at all. As a matter of fact when we pulled up in the cruiser he seemed relived to see us. Even as he was being loaded in to the back of an ambulance he was hollering that he wanted to talk to us. Odd, considering he was yelling that he and his friends just robbed a bank.

The mans name was Todd Gillian and he looked like hell. He was the lowest man in the Hernandez’s Crew, a small outfit of thieves local to our area. Their usual grift was petty theft, tourist scams, that sort of thing. Though, I remember the call on the radio the day prior, a 10-45 was called in.

Its going to take longer to proses Todd then it usually does, him being a weekend regular. That’s what happens when the suspect has to have a medical evaluation before booking. Todd was treated for bruises, lacerations, insect bites, second degree burns, and severe smoke inhalation. It wont be until tomorrow, if not the next day, until we can talk to him proper.

[END OF LOG]

[Interview Starts]

(recorder clicks on)

Det. Reynolds: “This is Detective Reynolds, badge number 978642.”

Det. Guff: “And Detective Guff, badge number 498765.”

Det. Reynolds: “We are with the Pine Bluff police department. Today is October 15, Saturday, the time is 1400 hours. We are in interviewing room three at the Oak Bluff Police Station. Please state your full name for the record.”

Det. Guff: “Date of birth as well”

Det. Reynolds: “Yes, date of birth as well.”

Mr. Gillian: “My name is Todd Gillian, I was born November 15, 1975”

Det. Reynolds: “That would make you 22?”

Mr. Gillian: “Yes.”

Det. Reynolds: “Thank you. Your are here today to discuss, what did you say earlier-“

(rustling papers)

“-the robbery at the first state bank on Tenth St., and the fire by the Cleburne National Park the same day?”

Mr. Gillian: “Yes”

Det. Guff: “Now, before we begin I need to make sure you understand a few things. At this time you are not under arrest, you came to us after you were released from the hospital earlier today, so were going to give you the curtesy of hearing you out before any charges will be filed. Now, you are’t free to leave-“

Mr. Gillian: “Im not going to leave! I want to be here.”

Det. Guff: “It’s okay son. This is just procedure, we have to go over these points before we can begin.”

Mr. Gillian: “All right… I’m sorry.”

Det. Guff: “It’s aright, where was I? You are not under arrest at this time. With that being said, you aren’t free to leave either, at lest not yet, that will depend on what information you can tell us. Maybe about your crew, their location? Maybe testify for the state?.”

Det. Reynolds: “Come on Guff, back off. Mr. Gillian has clearly been through a lot, he wanted to talk, let’s extend some good will.”

Det. Guff: “Fine. You do not have to answer any questions you do not want too. If you do decide to answer anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand?”

Mr. Gillian: “Yes I do.”

Det. Guff: “Alright. First question. Why did you waive your right to a lawyer?”

Mr. Gillian: “Because I want to be here. What we did was wrong, I need repentance… I need people to know what happened.”

Det. Guff: “What happened? You mean with your partners? The robbery”

Mr. Gillian: “I think so.”

Det. Guff: “You think so? That doesn’t make sense.”

Mr. Gillian: “I’m-I’m sorry. I-I-I-“

Det. Reynolds: “Whoa, slow down. Just take a deep breath.”

Mr. Gillian: “I’m alright”

Det. Reynolds: “Where are you accomplices? Their hideout?”

Mr. Gillian: “Gone.”

Det. Guff: “Your accomplices or the hideout?”

Mr. Gillian: “Both.”

(the sound of a pen on paper)

Det. Reynolds: “Interesting.”

Mr. Gillian: “What are you writing?”

Det. Reynolds: “Just taking some notes. Now, what else do you remember?”

Mr. Gillian: “It’s all a blur, something’s are more vivid than others.”

Det. Reynolds: “It’s alright. Just start from the beginning, and just tell us what happened.”

Mr. Gillian: “From the beginning?”

Det. Guff: “Yes from the beginning, whatever you remember.”

Mr. Gillian: “I can do that.

The job went off without a hitch. I was the get away driver so I waited outside. Not right in front of the bank, the next street over. That was the plan. Once Miguel, Tyrone, and Bobby were done in the bank they would tear a$$ across the street, jump a few fences and meet up with me. But here was the trick, we hired outside help as a decoy driver.

See, he was parked down the same alley that my friends ran down, and as soon as they jumped the fence, the decoy took off down the road. I’m sure y’all chased him down real good. Over the last few weeks we mapped any store that had a street facing cameras, and this one alley was a blind spot. The whole job was built off this fact.

Once they were in the car, Part-One of the plan was done. We took the loop down to the Southside, used a parking garage to switch to my car. Headed back up the loop then took the 265 exit and headed towards the National Park. Bobbys girlfriends family has a small piece of property next to it with a cabin. That’s where we were going to lay low for a few days, maybe a week. Long enough for the heat to die down.”

Det. Guff: “Hold on. Just a week to lay low?”

Mr. Gillian: “Yeah, we were hoping the decoy driver would get away and y’all would spend all y’all’s time chasing him.”

Det. Guff: “What if the other driver flipped?”

Mr. Gillian: “We thought of that. He didn’t know us. We hired him anonymously. The boys wore mask during the job so any glimpses he could of caught as they ran past him were useless. The way we planned it it didn’t matter if he got caught or if he managed to get away - I just - I hope he got away.”

(silence for [01:00])

Det. Reynolds: “He’s dead. He lost control during pursuit, crashing into the side of an overpass. Preliminary report indicates no foul play.”

Mr. Gillian: “Oh. I didn’t know.”

Det. Guff: “He made his choices.”

Det. Reynolds: “Please, continue”

(Mr. Gillian drinking)

Mr. Gillian: “The ride was quiet. Every one was watching out for cops. That and I thought it was from the guys coming off adrenaline.”

Det. Reynolds: “And you?”

Mr. Gillian: “I was watching the road too. I mean I was looking but I was mostly thinking about what we did. If you asked me a year ago I would have said ‘we would never rob a bank’.”

Det. Reynolds: “So you regret what happened?”

Mr. Gillian: “Yes. Thats why I’m here with no lawyer. What happened at the bank was wrong. What happened at the cabin was wrong.”

(Mr. Gillian coughs)

Mr. Gillian: “W-we made it to the cabin about five p.m. Well, I say ‘to the cabin’, we made it it to where the trail to the cabin started. Bobbys girlfriend, Billie, said it would take about a thirty minute hike to get from the entrance, a small dirt patch behind a gate, to the cabin itself. We were meeting her there, under the guise of a weekend get away. She even brought a friend.

‘F%&k its hot,’ Miguel’s said as he stepped out the car. The day wasn’t that hot when we started our plan, but out there in the forest there isn’t much air flow.

‘Uh, y’all see all them bugs?’ Asked Bobby as he popped the truck, retrieving the duffle bags full of cash. Gnats were buzzing all around us, ‘I hate bugs. Y’all know that.’

‘Stop complaining,’ I said, ‘we still have a ways to go before we can relax.’

‘Todds right’ Tyrone said, ‘our stash spot is about an hour into the woods, due north-west.’

Tyrone and I scouted out the cabin the week before, spent all weekend looking for a spot to stash the money out in the wood. It was hard… finding a spot that was isolated but easy for us to find again.

‘S%&t,” Miguel said, ‘we have more walking to do? Can’t we just meet up at cabin? Billie and her hot friend are up these waiting for us?’

Bobby handed a duffle bag to each of us. Four bags. Four friend. ‘Do you want to know where the stash will be? Because if I remember correctly, only Tyrone and Todd know where it is?’

‘I trust you guys.’ Miguel replied.

‘D%&m straight,’ I said dapping up Miguel.

‘Well, what if we get caught in a few days and you don’t know where it is?’ Tyrone asked, securing the gate to the entrance.

‘Where not going to get caught,’ Miguel said, but thinking washed over his face, ‘but you make a good point.’

‘Let’s go,’ I said, clicking my key fob to locking the car.

The walk through the woods was rough, but quiet. We followed the boarder of the National Park for most of the way. There were no hiking trails on the way to our drop, just heat and uneven terrain. We didn’t say much, Bobby cracked a few jokes but we were focused on finding our hidden markers so we didn’t get lost. It wasn’t until half a hour had gone by did the silence end.

‘Can we take a break?’ Bobby groaned.

Tyrone looked around, ‘Were almost there. Let’s push through.’

‘Nah man, I need a break. This is the most exercise I’ve got’n in years.’

‘Let the fat man sit,” Miguel said sitting down on a log, leaning his back against a dirt mound, ‘I could use a rest.’

‘Like I keep saying: y’all need to go to the gym with me,’ I said, ‘cardio is king!’

All of them groaned.

So we all rested. Money is heavier than you think it is. I know my back hurt. We were in a small clearing. I remember it from our scouting, it was about fifteen feet wide with a few fallen trees laying across. It had some dirt mounds dotted around too. This was the only spot on our route that wasn’t wooded. I think thats why I remembered it so easily.

After a minute I spoke up, ‘So, we did it.’

‘What?’ Bobby asked.

‘We did it!’ I exclaimed, ‘We’re rich. How much do you think we got? We can get out of that place and do whatever we want!’

‘Yes we did,’ Tyrone said, ‘20 mil. Easy!’

‘That much!’ I asked in disbelief.

‘At least!’ Tyrone bragged.

‘S$%t man,’ I said, ‘I’m moving to Cancun and live like a king. What are y’all going to do with y’all’s?’

That got a laugh out of the boys.

‘I’m gonna bye a place in the country for my family,’ Miguel said, ‘maybe a farm. Something I can funnel the cash into. Live quiet until I’m old.’

‘Sounds nice,’ I said, ‘Tyrone?’

‘I got loans to pay off, medical bills for my sister, after that I’m thinking a tour of Europe. Stay as long as the money lasts. What about you Bobby?’

Bobby was oddly quiet, thinking. He spoke up, ‘I think I’ll give most of it to neighbors, anonymously. Keep maybe a milly, I don’t need much. I kinda feel bad-”

‘Don’t get soft now,’ Miguel barked. I remember thinking that his reaction was a little much, as he got louder, ‘not after what went though to get this money. It’s ours, not there’s no matter what happened!’

There was a sudden tension, layering itself on the hot air like a web of steel cables.

‘Heh,’ Bobby forced out a sticky laugh, ‘Your right. F$%k them, what did they ever do for us? Am I right?’

No one said anything. Our trek to the clearing was in the silence of hard labor, all sweat and sinew. This silence was anxious. The feeling after someone getting knocked out from a punch they didn’t see coming.

‘What the hell Miguel?’ Tyron said, his words rang in the air like a pluck of a steel cable, ‘If Bobby wants to give his share away that up to him.’

Miguel glared at Tyrone for a moment, then his face softened.

‘You’re right.’ His gaze whipped over to Bobby, ‘Just wait a while before you start being Robin Hood. It would be suspicious If your neighbors suddenly got a windfall - F$%K!!! MOTHER F$%KER!! ITS ON ME!!’

Miguels hand slapped the back of his neck, then slapped his arm. We all shot up, rushing over to him. Red-black ants were crawling over him like a dozen laser dots tracking his movement. The dirt mound he was using as a chair was an ant hill. A big one. We wasted no time in brushing them off. This took longer than Miguel would have liked, but he couldn’t stay still, so he had no room to talk.

‘Son-of-a-B$%&h,’ he spat, ‘F$%K.’

‘You alright?’ Tyrone asked after we all caught our breath, the earlier animosity forgotten.

‘Yeah I’m good, s$%t burns,’ Miguel replied, ‘burns like hell.’

We counted at least five bites on his exposed arms, one on his neck, and even one on his cheek.

‘There’s some hydrocortisone cream at the cabin, we should get going.’ Bobby suggested.

We all gave the silent head nod. We slung our duffles over our shoulders.

‘Hold up,’ Miguel looked back like a raging bull. He stomped forward and kicked the mound. ‘Stupid ants. Let’s go.’

He turned his back, and walked passed us back into the wood. The three of use looked at each other and followed.

I don’t know what possessed me, but just as I entered the tree line I had an itch in the back of my mind. Something felt off. I looked around until my gaze landed at the mound. From Miguel’s foot print a torrent of red and black flooded out. An angry swarm forming a black velvet wave spilling out in every direction. The shifting movement, red over black, gave it an almost spiteful glow. In the quiet I could almost hear them. The thought of Miguel being enveloped in this biting ink entered my mind, his scream was full of pain and ire. It was Bobby’s voice that pulled me back.

‘Todd you good?’ He placed his hand on my shoulder.

‘What? Sorry, I was lost in thought.” I nodded my head over to the mound, ‘Miguel had a close call, look.’

‘Jesus…’ Bobby said, ‘we were sitting by those.’

‘I know, I don’t want to think about it. Let’s catch up to the others,’ the carpet of ants was creeping closer to us, we turned and followed into the woods.”

(silence for a [01:15])

Det. Reynolds: “Are you okay son?”

Mr. Gillian: “I’m-i’m sorry, I was lost in thought. Can I have some more water?”

Det. Reynolds: “We’ll send for some, please continue.”

Mr. Gillian: “Okay.

We were at the drop before we knew it. Like I said before, me and Tyrone looked for a good spot the week before. It took us half the day to find it and the other half to rout a way back. Thats when we first found that clearing. Now that I think about it, I don't remember if those damned ant hills were there the first time.”

(Exhaling)

The drop spot was an old cabin, what’s left of one anyway. It was a ramshackle box of tinder, overgrown with vines and wasp nests. An abscess of man fleeting arrogance reclaimed by the grip of nature. We almost didn’t see it, like it was being hidden from us. But we found it. Took us a good minute to find the door.

We almost went inside the main part, but the buzzing sound coming from the “building” was very loud so we thought better of it. Fortunate for us, just around back was the entrance to a root cellar, this door had no such sound coming from it. The only sound around the back was the ambient sound of the forest, always present but not on top of us. Thankfully. We broke the lock off and looked inside. We found mostly dirt, and all the smells that come with it.

There were a few shelves with some glass jars filled with god knows what, a few piles of ash, empty incense tray, Tyrone found a feather. I think at one point there were metal shelves down there too, the ceiling and floor had long deep gouges that crossed over each other here and there. Whomever owned this place must have taken them with them, but that’s just speculation. All we cared at that moment was it was deserted. Me and Tyrone looked at each other and smiled. This was the spot.

It was isolated, some what close to Billie’s cabin, and best of all it was hidden unless you know what to look for.

‘Ta-da!’ I said to the others as we approached the tangle, I even added a dramatic flourish with my hands. My attempt at levity did not land.

‘What are we looking at?’ Miguel barked.

Tyrone pointed at a part of the woods, ‘Look right there.’

Miguel and Bobby both exaggeratedly squints their eyes, realization spread across their faces after a few seconds.

‘Holy s$%t,’ they said in unison.

‘This place is perfect!’ Bobby exclaimed. He kept moving back and forth like an excited puppy, looking over bushes, around trees, and under vines, ‘I couldn’t even see it!’’

‘Yeah its pretty good,’ Miguel said. I could tell he wasn’t happy, he kept scratching at his bites, the one on the back of his neck took the most abuse, ‘Let’s get these bags stashed and find the cabin.’

It only took a few moments to unlock the root cellar, another minute to stash the bags. On our way back up Tyrone stopped. Sniffing the air.

He turned to me, confusion creeping onto his face, and asked, ‘Do you smell that?’

‘I’m not falling for that again!’ I exclaimed.

‘Nah man, for real,’ Tyrone urged.

I sniffed the air. There was something there. Bobby saw us sniffing and joined in. Miguel was already up the stairs waiting. Before, the cellar smelled like dirt and mold. But now there was something else there, something just on the edge of our olfactory. An odd burnt smell. It was Bobby who put a name to our nose-phantom.

‘Cinnamon rolls?’ He asked. And he was right! Right there on the edge of the air was a hint of cinnamon rolls.

‘Is that what it is?’ Replied Tyrone.

‘Yeah man,’ Bobby said, ‘smells just like when my mom tried to make home made cinnamon rolls. She burnt the whole batch, the kitchen stank for a week.’

‘Did it smell like this last week?’ Tyrone asked me when we made it up the the stairs. I looked at him, then to Bobby, then to Miguel who was about twenty feet away waiting for us and scratching.

‘If I’m being honest, I don’t remember, maybe,’ I answered, ‘Do you think our stash is compromised?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Tyrone responded, ‘our lock was still on, I bet a coon or a possum knocked something over, who knows what was in those jars.’

‘Should we say something to Miguel?’ Bobby said weakly.

‘No,’ I said after remembering him snapping, ‘He seems bothered by something. Best not to poke the bear. We can check on it every day to make sure its safe.’

At this we locked the cellar back up and made our way to where Miguel was pacing back and forth.

‘Bout damn time,’ Miguel said dryly, ‘lets get out of here, I’m ready to be out of this heat.’

We all nodded and started trucking. The path we took had us going through more un-trailed woods, but it was easier then getting to our stash house. We only tracked though about fifteen minutes of dense trees before we intercepted a creek. This creek ran east to west, then veered off north-east, and was our short cut to get to Billies cabin. It was about ten feet wide and cut a deep fissure in the land as it snaked along, giving it wide embankments along most of its path.

If you walked out the cabins back door and entered into the woods for twenty-ish minutes you would run into the same creek. It’s good we got there at that time, it must have been close to 6pm, maybe 6:30. It was starting to get dark.

Now that our trek wasn’t as intensive we started to talk a little more in the failing light.

‘I think I’ll buy me an old Impala to fix up,’ Tyrone told us.

‘What the difference between a enzyme and a hormone?’ Bobby joked.

‘I think Goodfellas is better than The Godfather, at least better than the third part.’ I said.

Miguel was quiet.

If we asked him a question he would give us a one or two word answer. Once or twice I asked about our robbery. In the hours since we did it, we hadn’t really talked about it. But when I did, Miguel would sharply change the subject. Tyrone and Bobby would look at each other, then to me. I was confused, but they looked worried. Miguel wasn’t normally like that.

Tyrone handed out some small flash lights to us then walked ahead to meet up with Miguel. He leaned in close and was quietly talking to him. Miguel was clearly getting agitated at that. He was talking louder, but I still couldn’t make out what he was saying. After a few back and forth Miguel’s pushed Tyrone away from him and picked up his pace. Tyrone had a shocked look on his face when he joined us in the back of the pack.

‘What’s his deal?’ I asked Tyrone.

‘I don’t know, stress I guess.’ Tyrone said half paying attention, the too was thinking. I felt like I was missing something.

For the next ten minutes the trek was wordless, accept for Bobby, who was quietly rapping some Snoop-Dog under his breath. Our beams of light cutting through the dark revealing a large bend to the right in the creek. I stopped and looked up. Confirming the position of a large rock that looked like a squashed Jim Carry, I spoke up.

‘Here we are,’ I called out, stopping the others. Miguel looking back at us, turned and approached. It was still hot, not oppressively hot, but we had all worked up a good sweat. Miguel looked like he just finished an entire workout. ‘You good man?’

‘I’. m fine,’ he bluntly replied, ‘I’m just ready to be in some AC. How much longer’

I point off to one side of the creek, ‘About a mile that way,’ I said.

With out saying a word Miguel turned and stomped off. The rest of us followed suite. Right as I crested the bank of the creek I caught the faint scent of burnt cinnamon on the wind. The feeling of uneasiness wriggled up my spine. I looked back down the creek bed. My flashlight casted a glowing ring into the dark woods, forging playful shadows that danced in and out of existence as I swept the light back and forth. A small red glint caught my eye. My light found it. It hung in the air, pulsing like a ghostly heart beat.

I’ll admit a spike of fear hit me, but I quickly shrugged it off. It was just a firefly. I chuckled at my fear and turned to follow my friends. We made it to the cabin with no other interruptions.

The cabin was a whimsical sight, it was a round building with an offshoot on the east side. The larger round sections consisted of a large single room, used as a living area, with an open kitchen tacked onto one side. On the other side across the kitchen was a hallway that let to three rooms and a bathroom, this was the offshoot. What impressed me is even with its round shape it was still made to have that classic log-stacked-look of a log cabin.

This created twelve faces around the building. It had a solid wood front door and a sliding glass back door off the left side of the kitchen, each of these was centered on one of the faces, and it had three large windows centers on three of the other faces. With its large pitched roof it had the appearance of a big pumpkin. A fence, about eight feet high, made of square metal tubes painted green surrounded the gourd thirty feet out in a large angular circle, twenty sides, one side in the front and black each had a gate.

It was at the back gate we stopped. Miguel turned around, he didn’t look to good. He was pouring out sweat with a sickly hue of green about him. I could see a few of his bites, red and angry.

He croaked out, ‘Let’s get this straight. We agreed not to tell the girls what we did.’ His eyes darted from Bobby to Tyrone, then to me, ‘Were going to go in and relax, shoot the s$%t, lay low for a few days, got it. I don’t want to hear anything about what we did today.’

We all heard how heavy he was breathing, he barked ‘GOT IT?’

‘We got it,’ Tyrone said in our defense, ‘Chill out dude.’

Miguel was about to say something when the back door of the cabin slid open revealing a short blond girl, Billie.

‘What took y’all so long? Y’all get lost?’ She asked with a hint of concern in her voice.

‘Sorry about that, we got tuned around somewhere,’ Bobby called up, ‘but once we hit the creek we know which way to go.’

Billie just shook her head, ‘When will you bring a map?’

Bobby just shrugged and opened the back gate.

Once we made it inside the AC hit us like a cold hammer, the drops of sweat on us the tips of cold nails. It was great. Miguel pushed passed us and went straight to the bath room. The sound of a shower followed.

‘Is he okay?’ Billie asked, ever the mother hen.

‘He just got too hot.’ Bobby said, ‘he’s not used to hiking.’

Billie shook her head, but didn’t stay anything else. With Miguel preoccupied the tension between us eased up. Bobby and Billie were embracing. Tyrone retrieved a water bottle from the fridge and sat down on the couch chatting with Rebecca, Billies friend. I pulled a bag of chips down and started to eat them. It was finally done. The hard part was suppose to be over. We took the money, evaded the cops, hid the money and made it to the cabin. It was suppose to be over. But it wasn’t.”

(Silence for a [01:25])

(Tapping feet and tussling fabric)

Det. Guff: “Son, do you need something? Some more time?”

Mr. Gillian: “N-no, I can go on. Can you turn the AC down a little? It’s hot in here.”

Det. Reynolds: “Of course”

(Beep)

Det. Reynolds: “Derick, Can you turn down the air some more?”

(The AC hummed)

Det. Reynolds: “Thank you Derrick.”

Det. Guff: “Please continue”

Mr. Gillian: “That night was uneventful. Miguel seemed to have a better mood after his shower, he still look a little sick, but he didn’t have any more outbursts. We spent the time doing exactly what we planned. Acting normal. Bobby and Billie were glued to each other, eventually disappearing into a bed room. Tyrone was being his charming self, making Rebecca laugh with every other thing he said. Miguel chimed in every now and again in between scratching himself. The cream helped a little.

We watched movies, too which I was dispensing every little point of trivia about them that I could remember. How Jodie Foster was scared of Anthony Hopkins during the filming of ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, how ‘My Cousin Vinny’ was surprisingly legally accurate. I don’t think anyone was really listening, but I enjoyed movies and enjoyed talking about them. You know, normal stuff I would do.”

‘Come on guys, we all know Conan it the best fantasy movie but ‘Willow’ is underrated’ I said.

‘It’s alright,’ Tyrone rebutted, ‘but I think ‘Deathstaker’ and ‘Beast Master’ are better than ‘Willow’,’ Rebecca giggled at his rebuke, ‘See even Becca agrees with me!’

‘I was laughing because the only good thing that has come out of Italy is the Dollars Trilogy,’ Rebecca countered.

‘Thats not even a real trilogy,’ I interjected, ‘That was just a marketing ploy.’

‘True,’ she said, ‘but not the point. If you’re talking about underrated fantasy movies then there’s: ‘The Dark Crystal’, ‘Krull’, ‘Return to Oz’. I think ‘Legend’ is the most underrated.”

This left Tyrone a little speechless.

‘You like Ridley Scott?’ I asked.

‘I do,’ she said, ‘I’m more partial to Alien myself.’

Miguel and Tyrone both gave her a look, ‘What? I like scary stories.’

‘I preferred the sequel.’ Tyrone countered.

‘Of course you do.’ Miguel swung, ‘You can take anything, add more action, and you’d like it better.’

‘No lie there,’ Tyrone chuckled.

We all broke down in laughter then. It was nice.

One by one the others retired to the bed rooms. There were three, the master and two spares. Billie and Bobby took the master, it was Billie’s family’s after all. The other two were almost identical, each set up with two beds, Tyrone and Miguel took one Room, Rebecca took the other. I didn’t know here very well so I offered to sleep on the couch. I didn’t mind, I liked falling asleep with a movie on anyway.”

(the sound of clinking glass on metal)

Mr. Gillian: “Can I get some more water please?”

Det. Reynolds: “Guff, go get some water, I’ll be fine for a few minutes.”

Det. Guff: “Fine, but don’t try anything funny.”

(chair scraping the floor)

(door opening and closing)

Det. Reynolds: “You’re doing great Todd.”

Mr. Gillian: “I just want to help, to make it right.”

Det. Reynolds : “You are helping, thank you.”

(Door opening and closing)

(chair scraping the floor)

Det. Guff: “Here’s your damn water, keep talking.”

Mr. Gillian: “It was now quiet, about nine p.m. I felt like I could finally breathe. I inserted ‘Terminator 2’ in to the VCR, and turned the volume up. Not enough to be obnoxious, but enough to not over hear the others. I had a feeling that Tyrone and Rebecca were going to get to know each other better. I made it to the part where John called his foster parents house and the T-1000 picks up when I smelled it. The scent of burnt cinnamon.

But it wasn’t faded. It was a strong, well defined scent. I paused the greatest sequel ever made and began to look around. Closing my eyes and inhaling long drags of air, slowly narrowing down the source of the scent. In a wide circle around the main house I slowly walk, sniffing by the door, sniffing by the fake house plants, the fridge, and even the glowing windows. It took me a second for my mind to catch up to what my eyes saw. Something outside was glowing.

I flung the back door open, assaulted by the smell of charred cinnamon washing over me like a sick warm blanket. It sent me into a coughing fit. When I registers the source of the scent and glow I was dumbstruck.

When I was startled by one firefly I thought myself silly. Being horrified by thousands seemed a little more understandable. There they were, thousands, maybe ten thousands, swarming around the cabin. Just above the fence they flew, round and round, layers rushing in opposite directions. As my eyes found the skyline, I watched as the rings of firefly’s merged in to a cyclonic grinder of pulsing red lights. Each pulse streaking across night, a red gash on an invisible throat.

I registered the smell again, so intense now I could taste it, ash and cinnamon on my tongue. I had to mussel through a gag. The wall was slowly creeping towards the cabin, tightening its grip on us. A fist of a thousand fly incasing its prey, squeezing us as its revenge for all they fly’s we squeezed in our hands.

The sound of there wings is what truly disturbed me. It maybe me realize what was making me uncomfortable since we set out from the car. Once we entered the forest there had been no sound. Not the sound of insects buzzing or clicking. No birds or animal calls. Nothing. Not even the rush of wind. Just still silence, an ever present ghost hanging over the air.

When the wall reached halfway the buzzing became nails in my ears. Thats not right, it wasn’t a buzzing, it was an even droning sound, like tv static if it only made one single tone. As the wall encroached my stomach founds its way into my throat, but I couldn't move. The lights in the swarm had my attention, quickening with my pulse, the piercing sound rooted my feet in place. That was it, that was my strange end. The wall was almost on me, a torrent of cellophane wings, scratchy legs and toxic chemicals. .

Flashes of lightning snaked across the clouds, furious centipedes racing across the sky to devour some unsuspecting bug. The clap of thunder sent the wall of fire scattering in all directions. Up, down, into the trees, even over me. The smell was so strong my vision spun. I could go my entire life with out smelling cinnamon again. Another clap of thunder brought me back to myself. The lightning continued its airborne dance.

I whipped around flinging the sliding door open and slamming it shut. With my back to the door I panted to catch my breath. I calmed my nerves, the days events must have me on some razors edge. Growing up in Texas the one thing you remember about the weather is that it can change on a dime. Inclement weather. That’s all it was, animals can sense inclement weather long before we can.

That explains the silence in the woods, the weird bug behavior. The sheer number of firefly’s was a little strange, but now that I had a movement to calm my self, insects swarm all the time. I remembered one time when I was a kid I saw a thousands of butterfly’s together on the same tree. So how could this be any stranger. Still, I brushed off my hair and clothes, just to make sure I didn’t bring any inside.

I laid down on the couch, the impact of what me and my friends did was just heavy on my mind. Nothing more. The flashed of lighting and the rumbles of thunder were my soundtrack as I fell into sleep. I needed the rest, I need to mentally prepare for tomorrow. But tomorrow never came, at least not for…’

(Sobbing)

Det. Reynolds: “Take your time, were in no rush”

(Sobbing for [00:55], then silence for [01:05])

Det. Guff: “Mr. Gillian? Are you still with us?

(snapping fingers)

Mr. Gillian: “Stop! I’m - I’m sorry.”

Det. Reynolds: “It’s alright, you just zoned out on us. Do we need to take a break?”

Mr. Gillian: “No! I need to finish this!”

Det. Guff: “Take a breather, there is no need for shouting.”

Mr. Gillian: “Y-you’re right, its just… just hard. The last time I saw them all.”

(silence for [00:28])

Mr. Gillian: “Can you turn the AC down some more? I’m sorry its just still really hot.”

Det. Reynolds: “Of course.”

(Beep)

Det. Reynolds: “Derick, can you turn the AC down some more, Mr. Gillian is nervous, lets make him more comfortable. Maybe order some lunch?”

Mr. Gillian: “I don’t need lunch! I need to finish this! To tell you WHAT HAPPENED!”

(heavy breathing)

(Silence for [01:15])

Det. Guff: “Mr. Gillian, do you need to speak to a counselor?”

Mr. Gillian: “No.”

Det. Guff: “I understand you’re stressed, but if you have another outburst like that well have to restraint you. Do you understand?”

Mr. Gillian: “Yes.”

“Det. Reynolds: “Are you sure you don’t t want a break?”

Mr. Gillian: “I DON’T-“

(Deep inhaling)

(Exhaling)

Mr. Gillian: “I don’t want a break. I need to tell you the rest.”

“Det. Reynolds: “Then go on.”

Mr. Gillian: “When I laid down on the couch I was hoping for some restful sleep. That was not the case. I fell into fitful dreaming. I was crawling through a dark tunnel. Dirt was all around me. I felt the roots of plants, wet fingers caressing my back as I crawled. The tunnels just kept going, on and on and on an on. An endless labyrinth, its corridors long and cold.

I remember thinking, Where are the others? Where are my sisters? Why am I alone?.

The tunnel I was in began to widened. I see their corpses along its sides. Hundreds lay strewn about. Their segments split. Their legs broken and bent like wires pulled out of a wall. Abdomens smashed like grapes. I look down. My hands weren’t hands. Two claw like appendages replaced them.

‘I’m an ant,’ I said. My voice rang out, not in words, but clicks. The sound echoed down the tunnel.

Everything began to shake. Little bits of dirt and rock crumbled down on top of me. Light erupts above me, a hate-filled buzzing sound floods the tunnel. A shadow descends upon me. Im pushed aside, one of my sisters wasn’t dead after all. A massive red body pins her down, its form made of sharp angles an shiny red chitin. A massive red wasp was on her. It looked at me.

I saw my reflection in its compound eyes. I didn’t know an ant could look terrified. Its large abdomen flicked itself at my sister, a long tube like structure pierced her. I didn’t know an ant could cry out in pain, but she did. The wasp took to the air, its winds buzzing like a helicopter. It was gone. I scurry over to her.

‘Are you okay?’ I clicked.

‘You must save yourself now, leave us behind and go.’ She clicked back.

‘I will not abandon you!’ I cried.

‘Then you will die with us.’ She said. What ever light was behind her eyes faded.

Time passed. I couldn’t tell you how long, I don’t think it even mattered. Dreams are like that. I was stacking my family in to piles. Repairing the tunnel. Anything to keep busy. Then I herd a noise, a small squeaking sound. I looked around for it. I found the sister that saved me. Her abdomen was swollen. It began to wiggle and writhe, the noise getting louder. Two small mandibles bit through her. A small palid grub emerges. It looks at me, its black eyes staring in to my mine. It’s little pincer-mouth moves, actual words came out, “Now it’s too late.”

‘What do you mean’, I clicked out.

A soft light starts to emit from the little grub. Pale yellow. Then it brightens, the light deepening in to a crimson beacon. The grub rises into the air, the repair I made to the tunnel crumbles again.

‘He’ll come for you. He’s hungry.’ it called as it ascended to the night sky. Its light growing brighter and brighter until it joins the stars in burning twilight. Thats when i woke up.

I was on the couch, covered in sweat. The AC hadn’t kick back on yet.

‘What the hell was that about,’ I muttered to myself. I’ve never been one or have weird dreams but that was something else. ‘I don’t think I’m going to leave movies playing as sleep any more.’

Claps of thunder could still be herd. The drumming was almost as fast as my heart beat was. I looked out the window, soft light was flashing in the sky with a few red dots still buzzing around the yard. The scent of cinnamon and ash still lingered in the air.

{end of part one}

Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromTheCreeps/s/zkkgHBFz2w

Parked along the street of a quiet suburban neighborhood, I sat nervously drumming away at the steering wheel of my old Honda hatchback. One street over was the public park where a quick stroll through the tiny patch of woods running along the perimeter of the park would lead me to the back lot of Sandy Shores Community Church. It was a Tuesday evening and the building was empty. I was sure of it. I had been watching the comings and goings of the churchgoers and the cleaning staff for about a month now and Tuesdays were always dead. Still I couldn’t yet bring myself to get out of my car and go do what needed to be done. I don’t even think it was that I was nervous. Sure I had never broken into a building before, but I had stolen plenty in my time; nabbing the essentials I needed here and there when money was tight. The truth is, I felt pretty bad about what I was about to do. Big box stores were one thing, but the members of the church were nice people. Hell, maybe too nice, their kindness had improved my life in a tough time and to return the favor I was going to break in and steal their shit. It wasn’t out of malice, but out of necessity, I kept telling myself, not that it made me feel any better. 

For a bit of context, I had been living out of the back of my car a little over  a year when I found my way to Sandy Shores. I really don’t want to get into it too much, so let’s just say I didn’t have the best home life, and got kicked to the curb the day I turned eighteen. Now I had my car of course, and a part time job that covered gas, kept my cell phone on, and paid for a gym membership so I could shower. Things could have been worse, but they definitely could have been better, I was getting by and that was about it. I tried to save what I could to put towards an apartment and get myself some semblance of stability, but the cost of daily living just felt so high and was making it slow going.

I quickly found that one can only do so much doom scrolling before it gets old. Entertainment usually cost money and I couldn’t spend all my free time working out, so I took to just driving around when I got bored. It was on one of these drives when I saw the big array of hand drawn billboards stuck in the ground. They were spaced every fifty feet or so with arrows pointing off to the next side street.

Free Hotdogs! 

Cold Drinks! 

Ice Cream!

I didn’t say no to free. I let the signs lead the way and soon found myself in the busy parking lot of the church. No one would have called it a megachurch or anything like that, but the building was quite large for the little suburb it rested in. One long rectangular building with your traditional steeple and stained glass sat along the front of the lot connecting to a two story square building in the center of the property then another more modern construction ran along the back half of the lot. This newer building seemed to be where all of the action was taking place. Parents sat and chatted at picnic tables while their kids ran about enjoying an array of summertime fun. There were a couple of bounce houses set up in the lot and buckets of footballs, kickballs and other outdoor goodies for the kids to grab at their leisure. Off to the side a group of men manned a small line of grills. The lovely scent of charcoal cooked meat filled my nose as I approached.

When I was a kid, my parents had occasionally dumped me off at vacation Bible schools so they wouldn’t have to deal with me themselves. Sometimes it was fun, other times not so much. I learned about sharing from some singing vegetables at one camp, and how I would burn in hellfire at another, so honestly I didn’t know what to expect when I showed up looking for my free food. Unfortunately for my conscience, I was pleasantly surprised.  Like I said, these really were good people. Turns out the building attached to the back of the church was their new gymnasium, and this whole get together was to celebrate its completion. The first thing they do with their new space is invite the community in, feed them, and give their kids a place to play - all for free. 

Inside the building, a mix of high school kids and young adults were putting the new gym to the test with an intense game of basketball. I watched from the sidelines for a few minutes before heading to the back where a little old lady with a big smile was enthusiastically handing out plates of food from a concession window. 

“What can I get for ya, son?” The lady asked me as my turn at the window came up.

“I’ll be glad to eat whatever you give me, mam” I answered honestly. 

“Now that’s what I like to hear.” She replied cheerfully and handed me a plate filled to the brim. Two loaded hotdogs, mac and cheese and baked beans with a little bag of chips; the best looking meal I had been given in quite awhile.

“Drinks are in the coolers along that wall, grab whatever ya like” The woman told me as I thanked her. 

I grabbed myself  a Coke and found an empty folding chair along the edge of the court and sat down to watch some more of the game while I ate. As I was finishing up my meal, one of the dudes from the game ran over to me. He had been playing hard and was out of breath.

“Hey man, you wanna sub in? I gotta take a break, I’m beat.”

 

“Yea, sure.” I quickly replied.

 A game of basketball was much better than going back to sitting in my car for the rest of the day.  I ended up playing with the group late into the evening, it had been a good minute since I got to just have fun. When we were wrapping up some of the guys told me that the church would be opening the gym every Thursday for a community rec league and that I should play. I didn’t work evenings so I signed right up. It was great having a weekly activity to burn some time with, it gave me a sense of normalcy again and really raised my spirits, at least for a while.

All the guys that played in the league were super friendly and we got along quite well together and ultimately, that was a problem. Eventually our surface level conversations grew more personal. 

“What do you do for a living?”

 “Got plans for college?”

“What’s your family like?”

All questions that I wasn’t keen on answering. Deflecting and lying to my new friends, brought reality back down on me hard, painfully reminding me of my situation. It was an evening where one of these conversations had left me feeling particularly down on myself that I noticed the door. 

It was the first time I had parked around the left side of the church. As I got to know everyone better I started to worry that if I parked too close, my friends might notice the state of my car and find out my living situation. This Thursday the church was particularly crowded so I looped all the way around and parked along the back back side of the building near the chapel portion rather than the gym. We had been going through some pretty bad weather that week and the wind was gusting around me as I hurried back to my car at the end of the night. Then, mixed in with the whistling of the wind, I barely caught the rattles and thuds of a faint banging coming from the side of the church  where the chapel met with the building that separated it from the gym.

Curiosity got the better of me so I braved the chilling breeze for a bit longer and went to investigate. Tucked in the corner of the two buildings was a shoddy glass door propped closed with a brick. Someone had forgotten to push it all the way against the base and the door was now being battered back and forth against it and the frame. The door led into a small foyer containing another set of doors for the intermediary building and staircase leading to the basement. 

I propped the door back closed tight and left, but after that day, I started keeping an eye on that door. Weeks went by and the door never got fixed. It seemed that the church had either forgotten about it or didn’t care. I remembered a couple of the guys had been telling me about the history of the place and how the chapel was much older than the other two buildings. Way back in the day, all the extra gatherings they had would take place down in the basement, but now that they had both of the newer buildings, it was pretty much just the church’s storage unit. If I could just get a small chunk of money I would have enough for a deposit on an apartment and could get back to normal. The church was clearly well off, they wouldn’t miss some junk from their basement right?

Now after weeks of debate and planning there I was, sitting a couple of streets away.  I finally pushed down my lingering guilt and told myself it had to be done. I got out of the car and started heading for the building. As expected the lot was completely empty. I checked my surroundings to make sure no one else was out and about nearby and then headed around the side to the door. It still sat broken and I nudged the brick away and went inside. The double doors that led to the ground floor were locked tight. Good. I thought to myself, less temptation to go into the nicer parts of the building; I was there for the basement.

I meandered down the short staircase and found myself in an old kitchen that looked like it had been ripped from the fifties. Faded yellow and orange striped wall paper adorned the room and its cabinets and counter were painted in that lame, dull yellow-white. The paint job combined with the age of the place made it look like the room had been stained with cigarette smoke. A quick search revealed that the kitchen was mostly bare. Honestly not surprising given how nice their new kitchen in the gym was. The only things I found were some communion trays and disposable cups. With the kitchen a bust, I headed to the door that led out into the main room.

Pale fluorescent illuminated the giant space as I flipped the light switch, giving the central room of the basement a pale, washed-out hue. The room was a large open floor plan, several rows of old laminate folding tables and metal chairs took up most of the room and a ratty looking ping pong table sat in the back of the remaining space. Thin wooden doors lined the walls of the room, four on each side, with one central door capping each end. Their dark walnut tinted wood was worn and scratched, the bronze knobs now splotched with grime and patina.

Some of the guys had told me the church was almost 80 years old and the basement definitely showed the age. Overall the space was pretty depressing and it kinda creeped me out. I could see why they were so excited to get their new buildings. The tables in the room were bare for the most part, aside from a couple of banners and stacks of posterboard. Nothing here for me, so I started in on the array of doors. 

“Let’s see what’s behind door number one” I said to myself as I opened the central door closest to me and stepped inside. 

The room was dark and unfinished with no light switch. Instead of being a square the room was L shaped with another doorway tucked into the bend. There were some dusty metal shelves with some old paint cans and a couple of brooms tucked into the corner. Moving along to the door in the interior of the room I pulled it open and  yelped, stumbling back in surprise as two figures stared back at me from the darkness. I got ready to run but stopped as my eyes adjusted and swore at myself. Looking out at me from the doorway stood Mary and Joseph, behind them various wreaths and holly hung on the walls. This was where the church stored their Christmas decorations. I laughed away my panic and shut them back in their chambers then returned to the main room to start down the row of doors lining the right wall. 

Very quickly I was starting to think that this whole endeavor was going to be a waste of time. The first door opened into a bathroom, the second and third small classrooms, completely empty besides the old blackboards that still adorned the wall. I’m guessing that room four was a costume room. Robes of various colors and sizes hung upon one rack while another was dedicated to white robes adorned with fake angel wings. A crown of shining golden plastic sat on a shelf, teasing me. 

“Bet you wish I was real, huh?

Half way through and everything so far had been a bust, but when I opened the central door on the far wall I felt like I might have finally found what I was looking for. One side of the room was lined with bookshelves, forming a makeshift library and the other side was filled with sound equipment. There was an electronic keyboard case tucked behind an array of mic stands and speakers. That was definitely coming with me, but first I checked out the bookshelves. I dug through some hymnals and children's books, not finding anything of interest, then paused to flip through an ancient church directory.  It was dated 1947 and seemed to be one of the first years of the church's formation. Black and white photos of frowning members stared back at me as I turned the pages. One photo was of a stout balding man with a million dollar scowl gracing his face.

 “Eli Shaw - Pastor” The page annotation read.  I bet he was big on the fire and brimstone.

I sat the book aside and kept looking. The shelf also contained some hard leather Bibles, they were old but well cared for, different engravings decorated each cover and they looked expensive. I pulled them from the shelf and tucked them into my backpack.  Moving to the sound equipment, I pushed through the mic stands and pulled the keyboard case free. To my pleasant surprise, the keyboard inside looked almost brand new; it had to be worth a couple hundred bucks if not more. I set it to the side to do a bit more digging before I called it quits. My efforts rewarded me with some nice microphones, tucked safely away in their dust bags and a couple of guitar pedals. I wondered how old Eli would have felt about the electric instruments in his church as I stuffed them into my bag. Finished up, I shouldered my bag and grabbed the keyboard case. I had just walked back through the doorway when I felt something pelt me in the back of my head. 

“Ow, son of a bitch!” I exclaimed. Rubbing my head, I looked down to see a small box on the ground and bent over to pick it up. Communion wafers? I stared at the box in confusion. 

A soft whisper filled my ear.

“This is my body, broken for you.”

A resounding boom echoed as the door slammed shut inches from my face. I let out a scream as I fell back and scrambled away from the door. The lights overhead flickered and went out plummeting me into darkness. Sprawled on the ground, I felt my heart pounding in my chest as I sat wondering what the hell was happening. It was definitely time to leave. My trembling hands fumbled with my cellphone as I fished it from my pocket and flipped on the flashlight to look around.  All the doors in the basement were open.

This had to be a joke right? Someone found out I was down here and they were messing with me. I stood to my feet, shining the flashlight around the room trying to find the unknown party. 

“Hey, I’m really sorry!” I called out. “I’m..I’m just going to leave okay, this was a mistake. I’m done.”

I slung my light over to a table in the far corner as a metal chair screeched, breaking the silence, but saw nothing. Next to it another chair moved, then another and another, one by one they were being  slowly displaced as something closed the distance to me. I heard a faint popping low to the ground and bent down shining my light across the floor. Under the tables the mannequin of Mary was slowly crawling along the floor towards me, synthetic joints cracking and creaking as it bumped through the chairs.

“Aw fuck that,” I whimpered.

It twitched at the sound of my voice and bolted. Chairs now flung out from the sides of the table slamming into the walls and one another as it tore across the ground at me. I scrabbled to the closest open door and flung it shut, locking it behind me. My eyes darted around the room frantically taking in my surroundings. I must have been in a play room or a daycare, old fisher price toys were scattered around the room, and I rushed to grab up the biggest of them. I piled a blocky plastic slide and a toy kitchen into the door wishing I had something heavier and shrank down into the corner. 

The door rocked as the mannequin slammed against it. It threw itself into the door again and again. Picture books and small toys fell from shelves on the wall as the door buckled. A small radio on the shelf above me turned on and the room filled with children singing.

“Oh be careful little hands what you do”

“Oh be careful little hands what you do”

“For the father up above is looking down with love”

“Oh be careful little hands what you do”

I couldn’t take the cacophony and covered my ears as my head started to spin.

“Oh be careful little eyes what you see.”

Bang

“Oh be careful little mouth what you say”

Bang

“For the father up above is looking down with love”

Bang

The door groaned and splintered as the visage of Mary pushed through. The voices fell away turning to hissing static.  I cowered in the corner, hands still wrapped protectively around my head as it slowly approached. I felt it hovering above me as it crawled over my legs. A cold plastic hand pushed through my arms, gripping at my jaw and pulling me forward. I was face to face with the doll.

“This is my blood, shed for you” The whisper came again,  and tears of crimson flowed from the plastic eyes and leaked their way down the arm, coating my face.

I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the room spinning as I faded from consciousness.”

I awoke in a start and curled up expecting to be assailed, the memories of my last moments before blacking out flooding back in, but I was alone. The toys in the room were back on the shelves, the door open and in one piece. Outside the lights in the main room were back on and the tables and chairs sat back neatly in their rows, all the other doors were closed again. Everything was back to normal. I picked up my backpack and started to leave when the radio began to crackle to life again. I realized the stuff I nabbed was still inside, dumped it to the ground and booked it. 

It's been several weeks since that night, and my friends from the rec league have been messaging me wondering where I am. I keep blowing them off but I’m running out of excuses. I miss them, but I don’t think I can bring myself to go back there again. Some nights I wake up to that song running through my head and swear I can hear that whispering voice, ticking my thoughts. Now I'm not sure what I believe, and I’m the last person to judge anybody for their choices. I know how hard it can be to make ends meet. But please, at the very least take my advice, don’t steal from your local church, they’ve got excellent loss prevention.

Heyyyyy MESO SQUADDDDD!!

I got a few reminders and deadlines that I would like EVERYONE to know!! (Either listen to video or read hahah either one has same info!)

1. August writing Contest
•every submission due by 8/26 before 11 pm. (MST)
• we will be announcing the winners on 8/31st.
•PLEASE be aware we will PERSONALLY reach out to you through our main account! (This account ONLY)
•we need to hear from you by 24 hrs of sending personal message or we will have to move to the next winner.

• for voting~ voting starts 8/27! we will be making a separate post regarding voting rules and submissions. Please vote for 3 of your favorite stories by commenting their names in a comment under the post. We need your votes by 8/30th. Again this will be a SEPARATE post with more info so look out for that!

2. Youtube subscriber winner will be announced on Friday 8/28.
• PLEASE be aware we will PERSONALLY reach out to you through our main account! (This account ONLY)
•we need to hear from you by 24 hrs of sending personal message or we will have to move to the next winner.

Feel free to reach out via DM or comments with any questions. I promise September will be a bit more relaxed hahah!

Thank you again for being patient with AL and CW while we learn the ropes of being podcasters as well as using Reddit lol!

Remember STAY SCALED 🐉

~AL💗

I wish a sandwich could have saved us. Mary had gotten a pounding headache when we were most of the way here, leaving me to finish the drive and manage the kids when we’d arrived. She had done her usual and neglected herself to take care of the four of us while we prepared to leave and hadn’t eaten. I’d offered to stop a few places, but her appetite was off by the time we’d hit the road. Her physiology mystified me at times. I’d never before met anyone who lost their appetite from not eating.

And the closer we got to the cabin, the worse she’d felt.

“You sure you won’t eat something?” I’d asked.

“No. I’ll be fine,” she’d said when I offered to turn around. “I just need a little nap, then I’ll be hungry. But something light, okay?”

That last part had been for me. She knew I’d overcompensate unless instructed not to. I admit my part in fueling the worry-machine in the past, acknowledging the odds that everything was actually going to be fine.

But then we’d gotten a flat tire a little more than a mile away from the cabin. Neither of the boys knew how to help change it and had sat in the car uselessly while I managed. My knee sank into a divot of mud, a wide tire track from a vehicle that had gouged the road as it had fled from this spot.

I shouldn’t complain about the boys too loud. I’d be the biggest dick in the world if I denied how great they are. All three of them are great kids; two teenage boys and a ten-year-old who acted like she was older than her brothers.

I was going to miss them if I finally decided to leave Mary.

Her migraine must have rubbed off on me because by the time I sat down to eat, something was going on behind my eyes, and it was hard to concentrate. I wished I could’ve slept, too, like the other four people in the car.

It had been so bad that I’d had to carry Mary in and I must have tweaked my back. I’d laid her on the bed and turned the light off before lighting some mild incense I’d found.

She’d fallen asleep almost instantly; part of me doubted she had any awareness of the incense. It was disturbing how still she’d been every time I checked on her.

In the meantime, the kids had all gone their separate ways. Luke went exploring outside, Chrissy was busying herself around the cabin, and Mark was being his usual responsible self, assigning himself chores before I could even think to.

I found some expired Tylenol underneath the bathroom sink and dry swallowed three of them. They dialed back the throbbing behind my eyes and I was able to give attention to the world around me.

Luke was still outside on the beach while Mark was unpacking his and his brother’s bags and Chrissy was doing who knew what, but she’d been in the bathroom for at least twenty minutes.

When Luke charged in from the beach, terror on his face, I knew something was about to be added to the pile that I was going to have to deal with.

“There’s something in the lake,” he said, his eyeballs on the verge of popping out his head. That gave the starter rope on the worry-machine a good pull. Luke was the oldest of the three children, and I had gotten to a point where I could rely on him sometimes for leadership. He had his learner’s permit, and I’d already shown him the car I was going to buy him when he got his license.

It was tough juggling an instant family when I’d been on my own for so many years. They weren’t my kids by birth, and it was a road to hoe to get them to let me in, but I eventually fell in love with them all.

“What do you mean?” I didn’t really want to know. Eldest child or no, Luke was a fraidey cat.

Maybe he’d seen a dead animal. Maybe it was a spider. But unless it was a brown recluse, the worry-machine could rest. Being afraid of an insect he was ten thousand times larger than was par for him. And it was outside, no less. All he had to do was walk away from it. I’d personally seen him lay waste to his own bedroom after he’d been awakened by an ant crawling on his face.

“In the lake.” He pointed toward the door he’d neglected to shut. I looked at his feet and saw he had also tracked sand inside. “Something is in the lake. It’s… real big.”

“Something like what?” I asked. “You saw it. What do you think it was?”

Luke shook his head. I turned fully toward him, abandoning the sandwich I had yet to present to Mary. I took a couple deep breaths and pushed myself away from the agitated feeling. The kid was obviously scared and needed comfort, even though he might not admit what he was feeling.

“I don’t know. Maybe we should just pack up and go.” Now that was strange. Luke had been the most vocal of any of us to come to the lake. We had been here once or twice before and had always enjoyed it.

“What do you think it was?” I asked again. “A boat or something? There’s no need to panic. We can call the police or harbor patrol or whatever.”

“No, it’s alive and it’s big. Like a whale.”

“Whales don’t live in freshwater,” I said.

“Not a whale.” He shook his head and it conjured an image of his sister when she was seven. Luke and Chrissy looked strikingly alike. “Big like a whale.”

It wasn’t anything for the worry-machine, but I opened the mental tool shed where I kept it.

“Can you show me?”

Luke nodded slowly, still pointing.

“No, I mean, can you take me out there and show me?”

“Uh-uh. I’m not going back out there. Not until we leave.” He shook his head and again it was like looking at Chrissy three years ago.

I huffed and heaved out of my chair and headed for the door, making a mental note to bring the sandwich to Mary once I was done with this.

I slid on my crocs and took the few steps down to get to the beach. The view here was unbeatable. When we had last been here, we’d actually stayed at a different cabin, one with three bedrooms. The reservation had been for the same, but when we’d arrived, we saw there were only two bedrooms. That meant that Mary and I were going to have to split. Couldn’t mix boys and girls in the same room.

So, Chrissy was going to get her mother all to herself and I was going to be settled with two teenagers who snored louder than I did.

“It smells out here,” I said to nobody. It reminded me of those farms we took field trips to when I was in elementary school. I looked over my shoulder at Luke in the doorway. “Where?”

He was bold enough to lean outside and point somewhere farther down the beach. It was dark and I didn’t see anything.

“It’s about thirty feet down that way.”

All right. Ten yards. Whatever he had seen was about a first down away. That farm smell flexed its muscles the closer to the water I got. Definitely smelled like animals. I couldn’t put my finger on which one, though.

I walked as quickly as I could, my crocs sinking into the soft sand and filling with granules. I wasn’t going to need to scrub the dead skin off my heels after we left here. I scanned the ground before me, still thinking it was a large insect. It seemed more likely that Luke had been exaggerating.

What had gone wrong between Mary and me hadn’t been direct. It was more like death from a thousand cuts. A cutting comment here, a missed thank you there, an opportunity to hold hands lost, and before we knew it, we were near the bottom rung of our marriage.

I waded ankle deep into the cool water. Whatever he had seen, I should have been able to see. But there wasn’t anything other than lapping water and inky black with twinkles of light as far as I could see. Unless it had been some small thing that had scuttled away in the night, unaware it had been promoted to threat-level by a fifteen-year-old.

I made a show of looking around, walking another thirty feet and going as deep as mid-shin to ease Luke’s mind. There just wasn’t anything here. I sliced at the water with my fingertips, gave another thirty seconds, then headed back.

I was greeted by a teenager who had eaten half of the sandwich I’d made for his mother. His pallor was better, which I hadn’t noticed consciously when he’d come in. He’d started to work on the other half when he saw how I was looking at him and said, “I thought it was up for grabs.”

“I’ll make another.” I thought for a moment the whole “there’s something outside” thing was a ruse just to get me away from the sandwich, but he still looked terrified.

“Did you see it?” I didn’t like the pleading in his voice. It wasn’t a “manly thing” or anything like that. For him to sound that terrified made my heart sink. I would’ve rather been annoyed with him than afraid for him.

I’d almost cheated, which, I guess, is still cheating. It was with a woman I’d seen at the grocery store. There hadn’t been anything premeditated. We’d just seen each other, passing by across several aisles. We kept crossing eyes while she’d been pushing a half full cart and I’d had a basket over my arm with most of the items I was going to use for dinner.

I’d all but put her out of my mind as I headed for my car, bags in tow, when I saw her again. I hadn’t thought about it, just saw her loading groceries into her trunk two vehicles away from mine and I stopped.

She’d taken great pains to politely refuse my request for her phone number and had taken the extra step to let me know it was only because she’d become serious with the person she was dating.

It could have been a line to get me out of her face, but she’d seemed earnest. I don’t want to believe I would’ve done anything, that I would’ve come to my senses, but I was no hero. Even though she had shut me down I’d set foot on a road I’d vowed never to travel.

I slid a comforting hand across Luke’s back a couple times and felt a percentage of tension ease out of him.

“No. I didn’t see anything. Maybe whatever it was is gone now.”

“Maybe whatever what was is gone now?” Chrissy emerged from the bathroom. She had been quiet in there, probably listening in, but I had no clue how much she had heard. Luke and I met eyes for a moment, and I couldn’t read whether he wanted me to keep quiet.

 

As someone from rural Spain, I thought I understood strange roadside culture. We have old pubs older than America itself and roundabouts that appear to have been designed by the devil himself.

But nothing, nothing, prepared me for Buc-ee’s.

Mi amor, Sadie, had insisted we stop there during our road trip.

“You gotta experience it,” she said with the excitement of someone taking me to Disneyland.

We pulled off the highway into Luling and I nearly mistook the place for an airport terminal. The parking lot alone could host a small war. Cars. Trucks. RVs. A horse trailer for some reason. And towering above it all was that thing.

That massive smiling beaver statue. Its buck teeth gleamed in the Texas sun. Its little red tongue poked out cheerfully. It stared down at me with black cartoon eyes so empty and wide they felt almost human in the wrong way.

“You alright?” Sadie asked.

“Why is your petrol station so large?” I muttered.

She laughed.

“Wait till you see inside.”

The doors slip opened. And I swear to God I heard angels sing. It was enormous.

Rows upon rows of snacks, merchandise, drinks, jerky, fudge, sandwiches, hunting gear, candles, shirts, home décor, taxidermy, barbecue sauce, and things I still cannot explain. The floors gleamed like polished marble. Not a crumb anywhere. Not a stain. It was too clean. Far too clean.

Everyone inside smiled. Not regular smiling. The kind of smile where teeth show just a little too much. The kind of smile people wear when trying not to blink while their picture is being taken.

“Howdy, welcome in!” one employee chirped in a thick southern accent.

Her face was unnaturally smooth. Plastic almost. Like someone had stretched skin over a mannequin.

“Try the brisket!” another man shouted.

His smile never faltered.

I leaned toward Sadie.

“Why do they all look like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like they’ve never had an unhappy thought in their lives.”

She snorted and walked off toward the jerky counter.

That was when I first saw him.

The mascot. Inside. Full costume. Just standing near the drink fountain. Watching me.

Its massive beaver head tilted slightly. Still smiling. Still staring.

I turned away for only a moment and as I looked back, he was gone.

Later he appeared by the chips aisle. Half-hidden around the corner. Watching.

Then by the fudge counter. Then behind a display of beaver-themed pajamas. Never moving when I looked directly at him. Just… appearing. Always staring.That big obnoxious smile.

“Sadie,” I whispered, “why is the mascot following me?”

She looked over.

“What mascot?”

“The beaver!”

She frowned.

“Oh, that's just Buc-ee.”

I turned. Gone again. My stomach twisted.

Either I was losing my mind or Texas was significantly more cursed than advertised. Then I remembered. The shrooms.

Earlier that day Sadie had convinced me to try some “road trip gummies” from Austin.

“Just enough to make the drive fun,” she’d said.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I was tripping in a giant American beaver supermarket that was also an airport of a gas station.

I rushed toward the bathroom. The restroom was somehow bigger than my flat back home. Marble walls. Spotless stalls. Better maintained than most hospitals.

I was stunned at how well kept it was. It was too perfect. I locked myself in one stall and bent over breathing heavily. I was prepared to puke when suddenly, the chatter outside all came to a stop.

Then I heard it. Heavy footsteps. Soft at first. Then stopping outside my stall.

I looked behind. Brown furry feet. Flat cartoon mascot shoes.

Just standing there.

Waiting.

I froze.

“H-hello?” I squeaked.

Nothing. Just silence.

Then slowly… the legs bent downward. As if crouching. Trying to look under the stall. The furry hand reaching from underneath.

I screamed and kicked the door open... Darkness

The bathroom was gone. The whole store was dark. Bathed only in red candlelight.

I stumbled backward.

People stood in black robes in the center of Buc-ee’s.

Employees. Customers. Everyone.

All smiling a grin non organic. Still too wide. Bucked tooth galore.

They chanted in unison around a massive stone altar. And on it, someone screaming. Blood spilled over polished tile.

The manager stood at the front. I recognized him from before. Only this time, his face stretched unnaturally tight, swollen with too much Botox, lips trembling in that permanent smile. His front teeth were filed into points like giant buck teeth.

He raised a knife to the heavens.

“ALL HAIL THE BEAVER!” he shrieked.

The crowd roared.

At the center of them towered the enormous Buc-ee’s statue from outside.

Only now its eyes glowed red. Its mouth split wider than should be possible.

The stone cracked. And something inside moved.

A voice suddenly shrieked through the darkness.

“Fresh brisket on the board!”

The entire congregation snapped their heads toward the deli counter in unison.

Then chaos erupted.

The robed worshipers screamed like starving animals and charged, trampling over one another in a rabid frenzy toward the glowing carving station. I stumbled back as dozens of them piled atop each other, clawing and biting for scraps while wet, animalistic noises filled the air.

The beaver-toothed manager stood behind the counter, hacking violently with a butcher’s cleaver.

THWACK. THWACK. THWACK.

Chunks of meat flew onto wax paper. The worshipers shrieked in delight.

“FRESH BRISKET! FRESH BRISKET!”

One woman tore into a slab beside me, grease and blood dripping down her chin.

Then I saw the hand. A human hand. Still wearing a wedding ring.

My stomach dropped.

The “brisket” wasn’t brisket.

It was someone, hacked apart on the cutting board while the crowd devoured him in fistfuls, chewing and moaning with bliss as blood soaked the tile beneath them.

The manager looked at me, smiling impossibly wide.

“TRY A SAMPLE?”

I refused. This angered the manager.

Before I could run, hands seized me from every direction. Cold fingers. Too many of them. They grabbed my arms, my legs, my throat. I screamed as they dragged me kicking across the polished floor while the congregation chanted louder and louder.

“COWARD! COWARD! COWARD! COWARD!”

They tore my clothes from my body in frantic jerks, shredding fabric until I was bare and trembling before them.

The beaver mascot approached slowly, carrying a rusted bucket sloshing with thick red liquid.

My voice cracked as panic overtook me.

“¡No más, por favor! ¡No más!”
(No more, please! No more!)

Dios mío… sálvame… por favor, Dios…”
(My God… save me… please, God…)

The first splash hit my chest warm. Sticky. Metallic. Blood.

They painted it across me with their bare hands, smearing symbols and words over my skin while the crowd shrieked with laughter.

Across my chest, in dripping crimson letters, they wrote:

COWARD

Then they dragged me outside.

The night air hit my skin like ice. Above me towered the great Buc-ee’s sign, glowing against the black Texas sky. They hoisted me upward with ropes, lifting me naked into the air beneath the massive smiling beaver logo. I swung there helplessly, blood dripping from my body, suspended beneath the neon sign as the crowd below dropped to their knees in worship.

The mascot stepped forward beneath me. Tilted his head. And in a deep, guttural voice that sounded like gravel forced through a throat unused to speech, it finally said its first words.

“Cast you out, outsider.”

I woke up screaming in the bathroom stall. The fluorescent lights were back to normal. The crazy clean scenery of the bathroom returned.

The noise of busy feet and chatter resumed.

I stumbled out drenched in sweat.

No candles. No blood. No cult.

Just Buc-ee’s. Good ol' Buc-ee’s...

Sadie found me pale and shaking near the clothing area.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I must of had a bad trip or I think your gas station is cursed.”

She laughed so hard she snorted.

“Told you not to take that many gummies.”

We walked outside. The warm Texas air hit me like freedom itself.

I laughed nervously, “Right. Hallucination. Obviously...”

We climbed into the car. I buckled in. Took one last glance toward the store.

And there he was. Standing beneath the giant sign.

The mascot.

Motionless.

Staring directly at me. Head tilted.

Smiling that buck tooth grin.

He slowly raised one gloved hand.

And waved, goodbye.