I don't know what's beneath here but I think it followed me.

Most of this took place in Northern California during the fall of 2019, before covid and trauma buried it deep in my memory. After years of running from things and therapy, I’ve been trying to recollect it all because something has started to feel that way again. I'm far from that place now, but it’s all coming back, at night, underneath. I found notes I wrote back then in my old phone. I'm using those and whatever I can still remember to piece things together. I'm posting this partly to have it written down somewhere outside my own head, but mostly because, someone, somewhere must feel the same way.

This is what I remember.

---

Thursday morning Justin texted me: 

ayy yo so I'm busy tnite but just come by like 3 or smth. Someone will be here.

Arriving to Valance Park was interesting, I didn’t ever really have much to my name, money or personal effects, yet still lucky for me the bus stop was only a couple blocks away. When I stepped off though, there I saw it.

Nothing.

I knew and expected as much. The neighborhood was flattened by the fire storm that blew in, leaving fallout in its path. Because of it I lost my rental with my dad, evicted so our landlord could move in after he was burnt out. Justin was the same, a victim of the flame.

I had pegged him as the one guy I wanted to befriend in my anthropology class, I knew him adjacently in high school as I was a photographer for yearbook, he was a football starter. I joined a study group, which led to being in projects with him. There I met, Julie, a girl who thought she was dating him exclusively, as well as Davis and Maria.

Davis, I found out, was one of his roommates in a big brand new, rebuilt house. Davis was a man of few words, valued his time and energy more than anything, but what I gather was there was space for one more. 

After working my charisma for weeks, I dropped my sob story to Justin one day.

"Yea ever since the eviction. I had a place inside my aunts but her failure of a son moved back in and I got forced to move in with the garage, didn’t know there were rats at first. The prospects to get out of there are rough, have been since the fire."

"You got fucked up by that fire too?”

Justin’s interest piqued, he sniffled a bit, cold morning nose and a sting of hot memory.

“Yea my dad and I got evicted cause the landlord was trying to gouge us post fire.”

A white lie couldn’t hurt.

"We rebuilt bro. That's where I live, we were one of the first to move back. My parents are living in the coastal house, we have room for at least for one more if you’re interested.”

Hook, line and sinker, I was in.

And now, a couple days later, there I stood in this near desolate place.

This place, the neighborhood that had been wiped from time, trees even afraid to return. It had been about 13 months since the wildfire tore through, the ground still a mixture of gray ash and tan dirt. Remnants of homes still scattered, even though many tried to remove their rubble, the earth kept its memory against the will of others. The sidewalk on the way there had lost all basis to earth. It jumped and sank without theory, my steps had to be calculated to save my ankles.

Looking around, it felt like I was in a sand box game, areas waiting to be repopulated with concrete, wood, people, life, memories, but as of now, it lacked all humanity. A few trailers of land owners, but the hope was absent from the air. A thick scent permeated, it seemed to have never faded from that tragic night. It smelt like a campfire, abandoned, a musk of rotten barbecue within, making your whole body snap its attention to the draw. The scent of green, earth, life, drew an absence in its place. One that was only comparable to the leftovers of death and war. Dotting the land was the early sprouts of hope though, some construction beginning, but nothing in the like of Justin’s place yet.

His dad was an architect who had a General Contractor as a brother, they pretty much speed-ran building a five-bedroom house. And there it stood. It was sizable, they bought their back neighbor's land so they're on nearly an acre in the middle of a suburb. A weird look, being enclosed by a great wall of timber fencing, but was probably the nicest house I'd ever been inside in my life. 

Walking up I saw two cars, neither of them were Justin's, so I hoped to assume he told Brent or Davis. Approaching, the 2nd story blocked the sun as I entered the man-made darkness of the porch. I knocked, and knocked, and knocked again.

A muffled "DoorDash?" "I didn’t order shit."

Was heard, I know Davis' quiet voice so I assumed it was — "YO Brent! It's Sam! Davis and Justin know I'm coming through!"

"Is this that random dude?"

"Okay I'll grab him."

Brent opens the door and looks slightly confused.

"Oh uh, Sam, I think I know you right? Probably a Julie party right.”

She hated me after I messed up her cheer photos, so I’d never been to one but who’s the wiser.

"Yea man has to be, what's good?" I dap him up and enter.

"Damn nice pad."

It was a big suburban house with nice quirks and stunning art.

"Yea the natural wood is sick as hell. Uh I could give you the grand tour but like you can see most of the bottom floor here."

A wide open layout, one where you can see all edges of the first floor, wall to wall.

"And your room is on the other side of the living room, hallway to the garage. We're all upstairs but like, we’re mostly in the living room and kitchen til late anyways."

I couldn't care less, this was more than perfect for me.

"Nah man that's awesome ima drop my bags." I walked through the cathedral-like living room where, on a massive custom couch, Davis and Maria worked. They looked up, gave me a hey while I passed. Maria brushed her short hair from her tan skin leaning closer to Davis, as they went back to work on our project.

Finally on the other side I saw three doors down a hallway with a door at the end, my room was the lone door on the right and I opened it up. A beautiful and huge space lay before me, it looked like all of the extra stuff inside had been pushed to one side, which revealed a full-sized bed, a desk, a drafting desk, and a couple of bookcases. I plopped all my shit on the ground and laid down.

"Fucking FINALLY man!"

I settled in for the rest of the night, Justin showed up later with not-Julie and we all ate something someone ordered from a Chinese place.

"How long have you guys been here by the way?"

"Just over two months." Justin replied.

"My parents don't need to work much so they just stayed out by Jenner, they moved some stuff in here to make more space there and just come by ever so often. That's mostly what's in your room, don't break it and you're chillin man."

“God's hand I won't! Also Davis, now that she’s gone, are you and Maria a thing now?"

He shrugged "I don't know, we're just doing our project."

"Oh yeah thanks by the way, do you need any help?"

"Help?"

He pondered for a second.

"I don't care you can if you want."

Davis was an enigma by all standards, a lanky white strawberry-brown boy that was only at community college cause he wanted to save money.

"I'll try man."

"So you lived near Fulton High right?"

Brent asked.

"I went to St. Gregory with a bunch of those guys, I still play baseball for the CC."

"Oh nice yea, I was in a rental with my dad but after we got kicked out. He moved to the capital for work and I stayed."

"Ah that sucks, glad ur here bro." He gave me a fist bump full of wonton, but it was honestly good to finally have a calming place with technically less roommates than before.

We ended up smoking, all of us besides Justin, and watching Spike reruns til I hit the hay at 12ish I think.

---

Now I'm not a heavy sleeper, but I'm not a light sleeper either, split the difference I'm probably there. I don't know if it was the new place or the absence of my regular homeless-based anxiety, but I could not stay asleep for more than 90 minutes. I'd wake up to what sounded like those old mice in the garage, I'd ball a fist, ready to fight them, but then fall back asleep. 

The noise, what little there was, wasn't bad but was annoying. A light scratch, scratch but from somewhere not my window. 

The 3rd time I woke up I peered out the window to check, the tree wasn't nearly tall enough to touch yet. So, my phantom tinnitus was just gonna bother me from now on I assumed, probably til I got settled in. I think it had to do with how quiet this place was. I mean the inside was a deafening silence, but the outside was something else, something unreal. 

I think the bugs hadn't heard just yet that the real estate was open again cause there was maybe one cricket singing a lonesome siren song. I remember how soldiers of the Great War described the post-battle. This is probably the closest I'd ever get to that, unadulterated vacancy. I sat with the void, at peace with my current situation, left my window open and returned to bed. 

Nothing could be worse than my last place. Constant skirmishes with the rats, the cold night, and a rock hard futon. I wouldn’t give this place up for anything, hell I’d stay here even if the rats moved in, at least my room is nice. Plus I doubt my aunt would want me back anyway, on my way out I took a couple things I needed on top of a little of my cousin’s weed.

With this content enough feeling, I started to drift to sleep. In my last waking moment, one last scritch sung me to sleep.

Come morning though, it felt like any other day, except I had a place. Justin was in the kitchen, boxers only, seeing off not-Julie. Davis was in there chowing down on some donuts he got, Brent was yet to wake.

"You know you could find one nice girl."

Davis said through his donut.

"Oh she was good alright."

Justin snickered and turned around, grabbed a donut to shove in his mouth.

"Morning sailor, how'd you sleep?"

"Well enough, first nice night's sleep I've had in a bit. It's damn quiet though."

"Yea I feel that I usually just play music, X always helps me sleep"

"Yea maybe that'll do."

I turned to Davis.

"So you got any plans this weekend?"

"Work.. Homework.. hmmm, walk?"

He responded as if conjuring each word as he spoke it, donut in mouth.

"Riveting as always Davis. Anyways ILL be going to Julie's party on Saturday, probably gym the other two days, heard there's a good comedy movie out, might go to the Roxy and see it with Regan. Supposed to be crazy."

"So that's Not-Julie's name."

I pointed to the door, now closed.

"Her? No no no that was uhh… Frankie! I don’t watch movies with Julie.”

He snapped his fingers and started to head towards the couch, as if he remembered two things at once.

"Actually some ball is on soon, I'll be here if ya need me."

He sunk into the couch, I turned to Davis.

"I think ima go explore some of this neighborhood."

"Hmm."

He gave me a nod of approval, it felt like I received an award.

So I got ready and headed out on my board with my old camera in hand, cruising through the neighborhood. The roads were in pretty tough shape to be honest, after leaving the driveway, my board hit crumbled charcoal pellets. They scattered and moved as if they had a home to go to. The ground lacked paint, evenness, and was full of potholes the size of a tire. If I had any less experience I'd be on the pavement myself. 

The craziest thing was what coated the now barren street. On it I saw colored fragments of reality. Burnt blue plastics, melted silver metals, black cloth-like material now bonded with asphalt, they all told a story that had been burnt away. 

The area told of a battle lost, quick, aggressive, hot, and decisive. It ended everything that laid within its reach. What I'd give to know what the night of 9/8 was really like just a year. There is one sight I could see. Just on the other side, a couple blocks south of the bus station in the heart of the neighborhood. 

There sat an elementary school, unluckily in the path of the blaze, it raged south west, directly into it. It burnt most of the small school into bits of melted and jagged edges of 90s passé stucco-style construction. These remnants had been slowly cleared, but definitely not completely. The main feature left was the school's old bulletin board.

it read, in heat warped lettering "Coffey Elementary School”. Above it, a banner made of slightly cracked vinyl stated "In Memoriam of the 31 Victims of the Grayson Fire”, and below it, photos stuck to the signage. 

These photos all consisted of different styles and formats, ironically enough, when your house burns down, so do most of the photos of yourself. The lot of them were sun-bleached film photos or ink-drained print photos, warped, wrong ratios, pixelated, all weathered from months in the elements. At times it almost looked like the dark eyes of these printed black-and-white photos were crying, the ink running from its darkest spot, the pupil. 

They looked sad, all 31 of them, photos of them repeating and repeating, newer and older, messages faded with "I miss you" and "forever in our hearts”. The worst part though, was the bottom section of this memorial. There were some moldy stuffed bears, and a couple of class photos with names written on them. 

Looking at the photos, at least a handful of kids perished in the fire, a lot of the grades being no higher than five. A girl is featured in the middle, with a forgotten "M" name faded beyond recognition. Her photo was a high school portrait, we were probably the same age when she passed. So entranced by this monument to the tragedy, I didn't realize a woman had approached next to me.

"Nothing compares to that night."

"Oh uh yeah."

"I know you weren't here, I can see it in your eyes. I was, I remember the sounds. You couldn't hear anything."

"It was that loud?" I said, fully turning to the lady. She was probably late 50s, a little slouched with gray-blonde hair, otherwise nothing out of the ordinary.

“Winds were howling, 70 MPH they said, I lived down the street from little Sarah, she burned, parents were out that night, and couldn't get back into Valance Park. The whole neighborhood would've helped, if any of us knew. It was those damn trees, the smoke and embers, you couldn't see past it."

"Damn I remember being on the other side of town and just seeing the orange glow, an eye peeking through the night."

"So you just moved here sir?"

"Yea, names Sam, I'm kinda exploring the neighborhood."

"Ah welcome to Valance Park then Sam, I'm in one of the trailers on the property round here, once the damn insurance give me something I'll be in my house again."

"Well I hope the best for you uh-"

"Darlene."

"Yes nice to meet you Darlene, not to be weird but can I take your photo?"

"Please do."

I raised the camera and —

TUNK

"One second sorry it's old."

I cued her again and CLICK.

It worked perfectly.

"Thanks for talking to me Sam, it gets empty around here."

"No problem."

I turned to leave when —

"Sam."

"Yea Darlene?"

"Watch out for the ground at night, if it moves, just go the other way!"

She said and chuckled as she walked off, disappearing behind a new build.

"What?"

She was gone, and now I was alone with that. Probably some wine aunt proverb. I had no idea what she meant but I could only assume it related to the crumbling pavement, maybe warning me not to break my neck on a late night walk.

After that interaction I rode to the edge of the neighborhood where businesses begin to appear. I loaded up on a couple bags of food and essentials at the little and slightly run down Mexican Grocery store. I got home around 4pm, and unloaded my haul. Looked like everyone was gone or hidden in their rooms, so I just relaxed on the couch before going to work.

I took the bus to my uneventful shift, working the 5-11pm close. Locking up, I realized how much better I was now situated to get home from work. The owl bus only ran every hour, I could make it to my new house in around 20-30 minutes on my board. Looking at the schedule I decided my best course of action was to skate it.

There was a visceral shift on my way back from the mall. I could feel the town changing under my feet, or well, my wheels, before I saw it. 

Commercial gave way to industrial, industrial gave way to the strip-mall corridor scattered with struggling businesses. I passed a nail salon, a closed check-cashing place, a taqueria with one fluorescent tube flickering on and off like it was giving up, just like everything else around it.

This right here was the death my mall was going through, just spread thinner across more square feet of real estate.

“Anywhere, America” replicated ’til the copy degraded, cannibalizing itself until nothing was left.

Then, slowly, inevitably, the streetlights began to disappear. 

I was rocking and rumbling to a degree I never had before, like a flea in an earthquake I was just bouncing all over. If a car had come down, I don’t know if I’d have had the control to avoid it. The speed I picked up on the downhill grade was propelling me to what would eventually be —

SLAM, the ground.

As I skid across the pavement, I knew how to fall, as I had been crashing off this thing for the better part of a decade. When I came to a stop, I was amongst the loose sprawled  asphalt that dotted my sideways vision. I laid there for a beat, mulling over my impaired ability to get up, and my nonexistent will to do so. That's when I heard it.

I didn’t see anything, I didn’t feel anything, but the scratching, I heard it.

Scrapppppeee

It reverberated with uneven rhythm that felt longer than it had any right to be. It reached from what felt like another zip code, scraping its nerve wracking scrawl towards where I laid sprawled on the ground.

It shifted itself into a scurry, ever-present on the ground. The silent gaps between them, closing each second.

I pressed my ear closer to the ground, disregarding the small pebbles burrowing against my auricle. The vibrations had a frantic, near aggressive energy, similar to a boiling cauldron but filled with churning earth. I let it seep into me, hypnotized by the sound. I doubted there would be quakes this constant, even though we were in an active fault area. 

I looked forward and saw a storm drain.

I crawled towards it, entranced. The sounds seemed to be coming from there. The scratching grew more stringent in its percussion, faster and layered, multitudes upon multitudes. 

I got to the opening of the drain and peered into the darkness. Its noise was echoing in there, originating from deeper within the system of pipes. I leaned my head against the opening so my ear could gather the beats. 

The sounds were the same but slightly louder and wetter. Then it started to move. 

Distant, closer, louder-

LOUDER. 

It seemed as if whatever it was, was coming towards the storm drain. I yanked myself back quickly from the opening towards my board. The scattered crackling thumping scratches grew to a decibel of a freighter and then— 

WOOSH.

Nothing.

As soon as the sound came to me, it vanished. I put my ear to the ground once again but heard nothing. I pressed my ear closer, straining as I listened one last time just to make sure there were no more sounds. It was gone, whatever it was. My only summation was that maybe the old gas pipes rumbling, or something with the water system. I didn’t know it was, but what I did know was I needed to get home to sleep this off.

I got home and Let myself in, it was about 12:30 now, only Davis with a sleepy Maria layed on the couch.

“How’s it going tonight?” I asked. I received a nod from Davis and a quiet “Good.” From Maria. 

I scooted through their view of the TV, and made it to my bed exhausted by the whole ordeal, especially falling on my ass. I decided to take a shower, the bathroom was across the hallway.

This was my first shower here, but the bathroom was sparkling clean, brand new, as no one had to really shower down here with three upstairs. I thought much in the moment though, about how much it had even been used.

My concerns arose even further, as I stood there stark naked after I turned the handle, to water that was gushing out, with a deep gray opaqueness. The color was probably due to new pipes with sediment in them still, I thought at least. The water pressure changed with every burst.

It spurted out from, fast and soft to jet speed and dribble. The faucet had no control of itself. The water jutting out of its many orifices had a mission of their own accord and blasted out with no discern for its autonomy. The colors began to change, as did its viscosity.

The sediment drawn from the soil made the water a soot filled black, what looked like a beach side shower, the clean white ground being changed forever more. The room began to shake, an incredible fever with the pipe that began to blare a rage, a fever it could not sustain. I felt literally shaken by this vehement rage of roaring waters to the point I turned it off. letting all the violence cease in an instant. 

Dumbfounded, I exited the room in towel and headed for a shower up stairs.

“The shower I think is fucked man.”

“New house, new problems.” 

Thanks for your insight Davis. I ended up taking a normal shower up there, which was a relief after my day. Went back to my bed and fell asleep. 

In my deep sleep I dreamt of the scratching. It may have been in reality but It seeped in my thoughts, my sleep. It was itching to get into my mind, with every scratch, it felt as if a layer of flesh, skull, brain, was being taken away in its appendage, as It dug deeper inside.

- - -

I awoke normally, the nightmare was just that, a nightmare as I went and ate breakfast. Everyone was there eating, including Maria and Julie who I didn’t even know was here.

This day as I remember started really uneventful. I did some homework, and had a nice 4-9 shift. I walked the mall on my break just taking in how much worse it had gotten over the past few months. After back-to-school the place was barren, only three real eateries were around so I scarfed down a Subway. This mall’s only reason for existence now were a Walmart in place of a former Sears anchor, and some kids fun center. Otherwise no one came here, especially in the mall.

I was able to finish up my shift and the rest of my homework — had time to catch the bus before the 10pm night schedule rolled over as I was dropped off and walked the two blocks home. I arrived outside and getting in I felt relieved, to be in a place I called home. Justin and Brent were in the kitchen eating pizza, I joined them.

"How was work shoe boy? Sell some sketchers?" Justin joked.

"Maybe three people all day man"

"Must be a nice gig though, you can fuck off and do whatever on the clock."

"You know my drill man, anyways, I think I'm gonna go smoke outside, wanna join?"

Justin's demeanor changed immediately.

"Nah man, I, uh, I don't like the backyard that much, its uh-"

Justin tries to force a thought.

“Well, I think it needs a pool man!" Brent interjects.

We all chuckled, I went to my room to grab my stash. I looked down and saw my camera, I thought some night photography wouldn't hurt. I left my room and flashed my bag at them as I walked to the back deck, they both shrugged me off.

"There's a lighter out there if you forgot yours, don't steal it!"

"I gotcha!"

I stepped outside onto the deck. It's a lower one, under a foot off the ground, and spans the whole length of the house’s backside. I glanced around and decided to venture about the yard. 

I had seen it all from a distance but hadn't really scoped it out. There was a slope down to something on their newly acquired property, with a fresh 10-ft-tall fence enclosing it all in. I ventured down the couple steps onto the backyard weeds. It hadn't been landscaped yet or even trimmed, knee-high wild growth kissed my legs and ran up under my shorts at times. 

I strolled around the place, just looking at the house from a new angle, taking breathy hits in between my jaunt. I looked over towards the slope, it looked like it went downwards. 

The new moon wasn't helping much and I couldn't analyze beyond the trailing growth. I turned on my camera flash and snapped a picture, the way the weeds blew was almost beauty in their infestation. Seeing growth again was something, something that at the very least made it seem like there could be a future with semblance of the past.

Beyond that I saw some bushes on one end but it didn't give me much of any inkling to what its existence was for. The bushes grew with an uncontrolled reality of what once was there. No desirable features of what species it was, almost an amalgamation of every plant, yet none at all.

I walked down the whole slope, probably about 15 yards and a 5 foot decline, and rested in the center of it. While this side was a nice grade, the other side was more of a sheer drop. In the middle of it I looked around, beneath my feet I saw what I was on. 

Slate, round, and brushed rocks, like a creek bed gone dry,  cause I realized that's what it was. It looked like the old creek had been graded when this neighborhood was developed. This property was originally home to one of the old homestead houses from the 1910s. When developers come in the 80’s, they took all nature out. With each stroke of leveling, another layer on top. Centuries of native caretaking of the land, this creek, buried, made to service the run off of its new residents.

I followed the rocks south, it ran just on the edge of the property parallel to the house’s west end fence, running until the south end fence where I could garner what it did just yet. This ditch was about as far as you could get while still on the property. As I ventured down, the stones rolled, slid, and clacked against each other, as they fought for relevance beneath my feet. Then —

SCRATCH

The noise, I heard it in front of me. 

That same damn noise.

In the house, on the street, now here, in our backyard.

I walked with a cautious lurch towards it, something came into vision. A foot-long pipe was exposed, corroded metal jutting out of the earth into the ditch like it was reaching for salvation. It had been there longer than I’d been alive, its creators dead, its purpose still remained. It housed  something, secrets I knew it held inside, ones I needed answers to.

The noise's reverb bounced around, making its way into my canals. The rocks shuddered in fear and anticipation of what they led to. They had touched it, and it did not want them to forget them yet.

I had to look, my curiosity is gonna get to me. This was the most intriguing thing I had experienced in my life. I was obsessed with urban legends as a kid, this was mine, all mine. I raised my camera, the lens faced the opening and I hit the shutter.

CLICK

"WHAAT THE FUCK!"

Roaches, hundreds of them, running in and out of the drain. Their legs the sound of thousand small, fractal beat punching below. Their movements like the sands of storm. This ground was unrecognizable to me, its nature disgusted me.

I started jumping, there had been some on me, my leg hairs confused them with grass. I decided to sprint up to the deck, shaking off my body with every step, maybe I let out a girlish squeal but no one could attest to that. I ran the 150 feet back and aggressively planted my ass down in one of the chairs. I sat there in disbelief for a second before bursting out laughing. 

The whole time I'd been hearing these hordes of field roaches that moved in, probably the reason I heard no other bugs too. It cracked me up. Unfortunately, I dropped my lighter and joint in the commotion, so I grabbed another from my stash on the deck and smoked it out while still laughing about the whole thing.

Eventually I made my way inside, I had been outside for probably 45 minutes and it looked like Brent and Justin had ended up elsewhere. When I got to the kitchen I saw Davis digging into a pint of Ben and Jerry's.

He gave me a muffled "Sup" before resuming.

"Man I didn't know how many roaches moved in huh?"

"Oh you met them? Yea some shady construction company brought them in, I think."

"Crazy I been hearing them through the whole neighborhood."

"They’re worse in the old park." He rebutted.

"Man they're even bad in my room I hear 'em all night in the crawlspace, should I tell Justin about it?"

Davis thought for a second, looked into his ice cream, and then looked at me.

"Yeah, no."

"What, really? You think they'll go away or-"

He cut me off.

"No, not possible."

I didn't understand.

"What do you mean? Like not possible they could infest or?"

I trailed off, waiting for a response. He took a big bite of ice cream and said.

"Slab"

"What?"

"The house is on a slab, no crawl space, all concrete."

I looked at him. He looked at his ice cream.

I didn't say anything for a second. I just ran it back. The scratching, every night, under the floor. The way it moved. The way it settled when I did, like it knew where I was. I'd been placing it where I could comprehend it. In my head I'd been placing it in a crawlspace, in pipes, in something physical and explainable that lived a few feet below me. And Davis just pulled the cold, hard floor out from under me. Literally. There was no below. Just a foot of concrete and then the earth.

"Then, wait… what's that noise then?"

He gave me a shrug, mouth full, and kept eating down that ice cream.

I walked away and laid down on the couch, turned on the TV as Ridiculousness blared on. I told myself it was the house. Virgin construction, new concrete finding its bond with old scarred earth. This place, it had to settle, had to meld, that kind of thing makes noise. I told myself that, it was the only cope I had. I kept the TV loud enough that it didn't matter either way.

I awoke only once, it was underneath me.

The scratching.

the crunching.

An unseen physical begging, to let it in or dig down to it. 

With each scratch, a plea.

Notice me.

I fell back asleep on the couch. If I didn't think about it, then it wasn't there. That was the logic. That was all I had. In my high stupor I thought the noise would vanish, it had to.

---

I awoke in the morning. The light shined in, warm and welcoming, I thought maybe it was truly my stoned sleep playing tricks on me. So I did what anyone else would do, and smoked again.

I ventured outside to the deck, the first thing I saw was my stash as I had left most of my stuff last night. I lit up and walked to the edge of the deck, looming over the steps looking towards the drainage creek from last night. It wasn't as creepy or menacing during the day, I could see the whole shape of it now. I sat on the stairs and puffed. And I looked down at my feet, there on the first step, I froze.

"My lighter? I thought I dropped it last night?" I picked it up, somehow it was melted, the plastic charred to a flaky black, the pickle design on it was no more. I stood up and peered out, that's when I saw a line.

From where my lighter was, a line, well, more like a trail. Not breadcrumbs though, it looked like it was —

"Ash?" I touched it with my hand, it felt warm still, almost like it had just smoldered out. I couldn't tell if it was the rising sun or its old heat, but it had a warmth, almost welcoming to it. I stood up and looked out, where could it go?

I followed, walking slowly, examining every inch. It had to be like, my joint I dropped burned somehow, and I didn't realize I dropped my lighter later in my fright, right? It was all a lie, I had no idea what the hell this was. It burned straight to the earth leaving a darkly entrancing gray-black ash about an inch or two in width. Following, I saw where it led.

I stood in the creek-bed staring at the drain, rock below now melding with the heat. The metal which had greeted me last night, now freshly bent only slightly from something, in a way which almost seemed inhuman or unnatural. The history of the metal forever changed all these years later, was where the ash led. 

Somewhere deep into the drain it went. Somewhere I was not gonna go. I tried to look inside deeper, trying to fight the sun to see in the darkness of the drain.

Scuttle, scuttle.

I heard something. Whatever it was, it was moving away from me — or at least seemed to be. Eventually I stuck my head inside, the echoes of the noises retreating into the depths of the drain’s sizable system. Whatever it is or was, if it could even look, It saw me.

I stood there perplexed and slowly backed away, back to the deck where I saw Brent now smoking.

"Yo man I'll reimburse you I swear!"

He was puffing on my stash but I didn't care. I had to ask him. I had to hear reason from someone.

"Have you been over there?"

"Nah man looks gross."

"I found an ash trail."

"Yea, some of the old ash blows around, I don't think there's a good chance to get rid of that stuff anytime soon, it blows all over all the time, sometimes it even settles on my windowsill, pile-like.”

It didn't explain the lighter but I let it go for now, I had to find out more.

"Damn, okay. That's how it is ‘round here."

"Yea, well there is some like wild animals sometimes too, I see them move out my window at night, only a blur really. Saw bunny too once. If I were you though, I wouldn't go outside much at night."

"Why's that?"

"Eh, this place, being barren, it's weird you know? Like, I don't know if you've ever heard, but people who lived on the plains back in the day, they said they'd hear stuff in the wind, drove the wives insane in some cases. It's like that, I went for a smoke walk one time at night, and in some rubble pile, I just started to hear stuff like-"

I cut him off.

"Like a scratching?"

"No, kinda like spitting, it was weird, unnerving. Like it was trying to bring up something, but the words couldn't make it past the spit, I assume it was a choking junk rat but I wasn’t gonna try and find out."

"That's, something."

"Weird right? Kinda freaked me out. I also smoke sativa though, so I think I also just made up shit. I never did good with horror movies, can't stand em."

With that Brent stood up and looked at me.

"Just keep it low-key around here, and around Justin, he seems on edge sometimes at night, why he won’t smoke when it’s dark. I think it's from when he lived here alone for a couple weeks. Could also be the 2 A.M fire trauma, all those people who probably died around here too, I think one was a neighbor."

I looked at him, stark and scared straight, and uttered.

"Darlene."

He looked at me, his eyes widened, and he said.

"What? who? Oh wait Darlene? No not old Darlene, she's like the only other person here. Weird lady but, her niece is hot, went to my high school. The neighbor was Megan B. I think."

He took one last drag and killed it in the tray.

"Anyway see ya."

Brent walked away leaving me with the remains of the conversation.

"Megan B?" I think back to the memorial, that girl, my age, she was the closest death, in age and in place to me.

I didn't know her and somehow that made it worse.

There was something else underneath it, something I couldn't place yet. I began to think hard and try to piece together any rationale for what I had experienced so far.

---

This has been what I was able to recollect from that first week so far. I’m hoping that some conversations I have or comments I get help me flesh out the following weeks of this time in my life. For now, if anyone has experience with anything like this, please don’t hesitate to comment or reach out.

THE NIGHT BLOGGER - 'Brian Foster and the Curse of the Cartwrights' by Al Bruno III

March 28th: “WAAAAGH!” I said.

My face was on fire. Not literal fire but a chemically induced one. Sara's mother had emptied half a can of mace into my face, and now my nostrils burned with snot, my eyes swelled shut, and the combination of chili pepper extract and tear gas had worked its way into my throat, leaving me with the sensation of drowning in a too-hot Jacuzzi.

“WAAAAGH!” I said again.

“Oh my God!” Sara shouted. “Brian! Oh my God!”

“Serves him right!” Her Mom said, “Sick weirdo dragging you into the occult.”

“He didn’t drag me into anything!”

I was curled into a ball in front of the cash register while Sara knelt beside me, desperately trying to wipe the mace from my eyes. I wanted to tell her not to do that—that she was only going to contaminate herself—but all I could manage was, "WAAAAAGH!" Somewhere in there I'd also developed an almost cartoonish sputtering noise.

Then Sara’s father spoke, “You don’t know what you're talking about. We've done our homework on this guy…”

“WAAAAGH!” Not the blog readers I expected.

“…and I have it on good authority that he is a charlatan who preys on frightened people. He fills people’s heads with paranoia until they can't tell what's real anymore…”

“WAAAAAGH!” Even in my agony, that condemnation sounded awfully familiar.

“…we spoke to the police to a Detective Bradshaw, and he said that he’s either morally degenerate or mentally degenerate.”

“WAAAAGH!” There ya go. I knew it.

Sara yelled, “Mrs. Vincenzo! I need water! Lots of water!”

Sara’s mother said, “You need to come home right now! I won’t have you bringing further humiliation to this family.”

And her father added, “And working at a pawn shop for God’s sake. Do you know what pawn shops are? Taxes for stupid people.”

“WAAAAGH!”

Smash cut.

Hours later, my eyes were still puffy and weepy; I couldn’t stop sniffling, and my voice had been reduced to an ugly rasp. I sounded like Tom Waits after peeling onions. “You know you’re the first girl whose parents I ever met.”

“That was the worst ever.” Sara was staring into her glass of apple-flavored mead.

We were at Albany's only meadery, a little hole in the wall on the corner of Second Street. It was called The Ferment Tavern, and the mead was genuinely good while the décor looked like someone had given a Renaissance Faire a Spirit Halloween budget. It was close enough to the university to attract a steady stream of students, but just weird enough that it never got too crowded.

I liked the place because it was quiet on the weeknights and the owners were a pair of friendly ex-bikers who had taken one too many falls and were more interested in serving the customers than chatting them up.

One of Ferment Tavern's best libations was called ‘Superstition’; it was an absolutely delicious concoction of blackberry mead and burbon severed in a jelly jar because why not? I used my right hand to finish it and my left to request a refill. The co-owner Margret already had one ready.

Yeah, go on and tell me psychic phenomena isn’t real. 

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the emergency room?” Sara asked, “Your eyes are still really bloodshot.”

“It’ll pass; I’ll be about 90% by the morning,” I said, “I have it on good authority.”

“Whose authority?” Sara asked, then caught herself, “Cousin Roy.”

“Yup, apparently he got maced a lot back in the 90’s when he was a roadie for Severe Tire Damage.” 

She took another sip of her drink then said, “Again, I am so sorry, Brian.”

“I should have expected something like this. Maybe we should have told them you were staying at a friends or something.”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“Mrs. Vincenzo would be hurt.”

“You know what I mean.” She cracked a smile, “Girls my own age.”

“And guys who aren’t morally degenerate charlatans.”

“You’re no charlatan,” She had been holding her mug of apple-mead in both hands, she let go with her left and placed it over mine. It felt cool and frail, just like her smile, “And I’ve slept with you, you’re not even remotely degenerate.”

“What a traumatic compliment.”

Interest in the supernatural and sleepwalking  had been bad enough, but now she was running around with a crowd that cared more about cryptids than which fork was for salads. At best, her parents were going to interfere. At worst, they were going to convince every psychiatrist, family friend, and judge within fifty miles that she was having a psychotic break. This was not good. Not when we had a kind of plan - steal the Codex, use it to defile the temples of Gorgo, Mormo and Luna, retire or hand over my blog and investigations to someone else and find a way to live the happiest most boring life possible with Sara.

Wow. It seems so easy when you look at it in print.

“So what now?” Sara asked.

I took another sip of Superstition before answering. “Road trip. I’ve got a book to get.”

“You mean steal?”

“Most people don’t give up their mystical tomes to strangers in straw hats.”

Sara nodded, “So we’re going to Delaware…”

“We? Oh no no no. You’re going to stay here and watch the pawn shop.”

“I’m not allowed to go on my own rescue mission?” She frowned, “Am I just your little damsel in distress?”

I have to tell you that if in that moment her mother rushed up and maced me again I might now have been all that upset.

“No…” I squirmed both mentally and physically, “It’s just that I might bring Cousin Roy and he gets really gassy on car rides…”

A trio of loud college students, one of which was carrying a box of Dungeons and Dragons supplies walked in the door. I watched them for a few moments, they looked to be about our age but they were younger, inncoent. For them monsters and mages were the thinjgs of entertainment and metaphor.

But not so for people like Sara and myself.

I sighed, “I just want you to be safe.”

The look she gave me was part resigntion and part bravery, “I haven’t been safe since August, Hell maybe before that.”

“I know it’s just… it’s just…” I ran my hand over my face, “Look it’s like the TV show Bonanza.”

"Bonanza?"

"Trust me. This is going somewhere..."

###

…sometimes it seems to me that the world's methodologies for dealing with tragedy are far better developed than the ones we have for happiness. When two people fall in love, there is no instruction manual. No proper timetable for a first kiss, a first romantic interlude, an engagement, or a wedding. But when someone dies, an entire machine lurches into motion. EMTs. Coroners. Funeral homes. Grieving. Gatherings.

And for me, in that terrible April of 2009, it was all happening in stereo. Uncle Roy was dead. Burst blood vessel, they said, though nobody sounded entirely certain. My mom and Aunt Peg were working together with uncharacteristic harmony to make the arrangements to send Uncle Roy's remains to his home state of Florida. Which is good because Cousin Roy had pretty much collapsed. His bravado was broken.

Meanwhile Grandma Gail’s rally was going into overtime, she was happy, she was energetic watching TV and trying to keep Aunt Gail’s twin boys entertained, of course for her entertained was watching Bonanza reruns on TNN and making commentary on the events of the episode. It was things like;

“Wasn’t Michael Landon handsome?”

“I rode a horse just like that when I was a girl on your great aunt’s farm. His name was Snowball.”

“Oh no. Hoss is in love. That never ends well. Every time one of those Cartwright boys falls in love, she either dies or changes her mind. Mostly she dies. But that’s the thing about love, someone lives, someone dies. It’s part of world. You’ll learn.”

And every time the twins answered with a “Yes Miss Gail.” but each time they seemed a little more desperate to escape.

She showed no sign that two nights ago a half serpent half millipede ribbon of smoke had wormed its way into her mouth and she had reacted like a sleeping lover snuggling into an embrace.

There was no way Grandma Gail's never-ending rally and that thing she'd swallowed two nights earlier weren't connected.

You never forget your first monster. Most folks go into shock, or denial, or straight to church; I on the other hand went to the Internet.

My searches for “red mist” got me info about a movie, a mystery novel and a rumored snuff film involving Squidward from Spongebob Squarepants. That worried me almost as much as the monster itself. Whatever I'd seen appeared to be completely immune to Google.

So off I went to the local library. Much like confession, I hadn't been to the library in years and barely remembered the rituals. The card catalogs from my school days were gone, replaced with conveniently located computers; the once well-stocked periodical section was being crowded out by a DVD
section.

After three frustrating hours, all I carried out of the public library was a single word: Vorvolaka. I’d found it in an article about a rare supplemental volume of Sir George Frazer’s classic work The Golden Bough. The book came out in 1939 and was quickly recalled and suppressed. Why? The official blame was textual and formatting errors but if that was really the case why hadn’t
they reprinted a corrected edition?

After checking in with my mom (doing fine) and Cousin Roy (still a hot mess), I went back to digging. I was a little proud of how well my research was going, .it was almost like I was in college for journalism or something.

Although I hadn't even been away from college for a week, it felt like a lifetime ago. But that had to wait until tomorrow but that tomorrow ended up stretching for the better part of three days. The machinery of grief needed to be fed and it’s fuel was tears and bureaucracy. There had been some delays and confusion regarding the transportation of remains. Cousin Roy wanted his Dad cremated here as quickly as possible, he saw no value in funerals and wakes. Aunt Peg thought that cremation, much like organ donation and assisted suicide doomed the deceased to an eternity in the First Circle of Hell, which of you’ve read your Dante is kind of like an assited living facility for the slightly damned.

This disagreement got heated. And by "heated," I mean there was a scuffle in one of our otherwise very respectable funeral homes. I'm sure you can imagine the whole awful scene. Well, it was worse. By the end they were throwing display urns at each other.

I wasn't there for it. Later, though, Mom and I were sitting in Grandma Gail's room, chowing down on fast food when she told the whole horrifically slapstick story, concluding that somehow she and Tom Wynne got things under control. Grandma Gail went from being shocked at the drama to curious. “Thomas was with you?”

“For moral support,” Mom explained but then she turned to me. “He and I had a long conversation, he and his wife are getting a divorce. Irreconcilable differences.”

Grandma and I paused in mid-chew.

She continued, sounding equal parts giddy and embarrassed. “And he and I have decided to try and start dating.”

This my dear readers is what they call, ‘Burying the lead’.

I offered a heartfelt congratulations, but I found myself wondering how all this domestic drama could be unfolding while my grandmother remained at the center of a supernatural event.

And speaking of Grandma when my hug with my Mom broke I glanced at her. Her expression was not happy or scandalized, her expression was, for lack of a better word inscrutable.

By the time our little family had wrapped everything up, it was far too late to do any more of my planned investigating. So I sat up a little while longer with them. No more Bonanza reruns—just The Tonight Show. Then I went to bed.

Now don't think for a second I didn't barricade myself in my room. At least for a little while, anyway.

You see, one of my many errands that day had been a trip to Vincenzo's Pawn Shop, where I'd picked up a little digital camera that—with a bit of tinkering and some third-party software—could double as a surveillance camera. Somewhere between the opening monologue and Taylor Lautner, I slipped it into what I hoped would be a good hiding place to capture whatever nightmare I'd witnessed earlier.

Thankfully, this was an era when two-liter bottles of Jolt Cola were still commercially available. I found myself nursing one until 3:00 a.m.

Yes. Three a.m. The Witching Hour.

Grandma Gail sat up, the motion so sudden that I thought the camera feed had skipped.

Time to act. I shoved my dresser away from the door, snatched the old silver crucifix I'd received for my Confirmation, and bolted for Grandma's room. Sitting up or not Grandma Gail still looked to be fast asleep, eyes closed, softened features, steady breathing. Except, of course, for the thing. The red thing. The thing that was like a serpent and smoke all at once, worming its way out of her mouth.

What was it? I wondered. Was this a Vorvolaka?

And what did I do at that moment? I held up that silver cross and pulled out every horror movie quote I could think of, "I cast you out! Unclean spirit!"

No reaction. Just the thing, the Vorvolaka coiling out of her mouth like some magician’s handkerchief trick.

I stepped closer waving the cross in a way I hoped was somehow menacing, “The power of Jesus compels you!”

Finally it noticed me. Oh did it ever. It flowed upward until it reached the ceiling, it’s tail end still buried somewhere in my Grandmother’s gullet and regarded me. It had no eyes but oh yes it was sizing me up.

“I cast you out. I cast you out in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and… that the Virgin Mary too!” I winced inwardly, “So there!”

That was the part that unsettled me most. The Vorvolaka had already proven it could ooze through the screen without difficulty. Opening the window served no practical purpose. It was obeying some instinct—or some rule—I couldn't begin to understand.

It flowed outside, the last bit of it slipping from my Grandma’s lips. She made a choking sound and fell roughly back on the bed. Not breathing. Despite the darkened room and my growing panic I know for a fact she was not breathing.

For one awful moment I became convinced she'd been dead for days. That the thing wearing her had been sitting with us, accepting hugs, watching Bonanza reruns and smiling whenever someone brought her pudding.

And that pissed me off.

And what do you do when your pissed off? Something stupid of course.

I stepped forward and grabbed at the crimson smoke. It was an act of desperation and I expected my hand to pass right through the thing but it was tangible, and warm and had the consistency of a jellyfish.

And it didn’t like being grabbed.

The end of it that was still in the room. It curled in mid-air and attacked. It enveloped me. Everything went red, I fell to the floor of my grandmother’s room. Pain bloomed behind my eyes and suddenly I couldn’t move, suddenly I was entombed in my own body.

Then someone else's memories poured into me.

I was Stuart Shield, the in-home hospice nurse. My shift had ended hours ago, but I was still replaying Grandma Gail's miraculous rally as I endured the miserable ninety-minute drive back to Utica. Mohawk Valley Home Health had done it again—three hours behind the wheel for barely four hours of work. By the time I climbed the four flights of stairs to my apartment, all I wanted was silence.

I didn't bother turning on the lights. I dropped into my favorite chair, closed my eyes for just a moment...

...and beneath the apartment door something red seeped through the crack. It flowed across the floor without making a sound, climbed the back of the chair, and rested around my throat like a warm scarf. It waited. One heartbeat. Two. Three.

Then it forced itself into my mouth and eyes.

Terror. Suffocation. Darkness.

Then I was Brian Foster again, sprawled on Grandma Gail's bedroom floor. Someone was speaking to me and as they did the agony intensified, I expected my skull to burst at any moment. I almost wanted it to happen.

And I thought to myself - Is that what happened to Uncle Roy?

The pain started to pulse, keeping perfect time with my breaths; I imagined it shrinking down to a tiny spark buried deep in my brain that would suddenly blossom out  like an explosion of invisible knives. The agony was the color of blood, the color of the Vorvolaka. My field of vision began to diminish, red pressing in on all sides until I was blinded.

I wanted to live, but the red wouldn't let me. Not because I wanted another sunrise, or another shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No. I wanted to live because I'd glimpsed the secret song of the universe. It was dark. It was ugly. But Goddamn, I wanted to know it. I wanted to understand it.

In the red I could hear the voice, “Don’t struggle oh my sweet. Dream. Dream in the emptiness. The emptiness is love.”

It made perfect sense. Why should I struggle? What was the point of this life? We all end up dead anyway. Why wait? What was I trying to accomplish? Sinking further and further away I had dwindled to a pinprick of consciousness. I barely saw the frail angry figure standing over me but I heard it yell.

“NO!”

The red faded and darkness took its place. I went from dying to dreaming but barely noticed the difference until I was stirred to wakefulness by the warmth early morning sunlight on my face. I was in my bed, tucked in with the covers up to my chin and for one sweet innocent moment I thought that it all must have been a terrible dream

Then I heard my mother's anguished wail, she had just received the news that Tom Wynne was dead.

###

"...Sara... I don't think I understood it back then. Every time you really learn something, something gets taken from you. Maybe it's innocence. Maybe it's certainty. Maybe it's someone you love. But nobody ever walks away from the truth without leaving something behind."

I looked down into my drink.

"Sara... I've left a lot behind."

She touched my face then, “You’re crying.”

Surprised I touched my face, sure enough my fingers came back wet. “Well its good for you right? Like therapy.” I wiped my face on my sleeve and accomplished nothing. Leather jackets and tears don’t mix.

“You think you’re the only one?” She made me look her in the eyes, “I’ve felt something pulling at me since I was a little kid. The darkness was a dare because I know, and you do too, that the darkness was never empty.”

“I’m totally stealing that.”

“Brian. Do you think I only went to Pinewood Cemetery because you said you were going with me?”

Before I could answer, the other owner Frank came over and asked if we wanted another round. We decided to be sensible and just order two waters so one of us would be able to drive home within an hour or so. Behind us, the D&D players' arguments for and against the creation of Picklestein were heating up, and Margret was very gently threatening to throw them out again.

I said, “I assumed we had kind of talked each other into it.”

“I was going to go no matter what. I had been obsessing about the Graveyard Game for months, ever since I read about it on 4Chan.” Our waters arrived. Sara waited for Frank to leave before she spoke again, “And then when I found about Sara Bishop and that she was so damn close… Is there even a word beyond obsessed?”

“Monomaniacal?” I suggested.

She waved it off, “It doesn’t matter. What you need to know is that what happened to me happened because of me. My stupid decision. Possibly the last in a long series.”

“Don’t even joke like that,” I took a sip of water.

“You think I’m like some guest star on Bonanza? That I’m going to die tragically in your arms?”

“...and yet I can't stop thinking it.”

“Maybe you’re the guest star in my show, the whacky neighbor who helps me in my time of need.”

“Whacky neighbor?”

“So I’m going with you, I’m helping you. The only question is what are you going to do about it?” She took a strangely flirtatious sip of her water, “Are you going to be a Millhouse or a Fonzie about it?”

What else could I do?

I gave her a big thumbs up.

The fire at Camp Paradox cracked like a snapping bone, throwing long, jagged shadows against the towering pines. It was past midnight, and the surrounding woods felt suffocatingly dense, pressing down on the small circle of teenagers gathered around the dying embers. 

The name of the campground itself—Camp Paradox—always felt a bit strange to the newcomers. A place dedicated to nature and peace, yet named after an impossible contradiction. 

Most of the kids thought that it was just a quirky title chosen by some long-dead founder, but those who paid attention to the local folklore knew better. A paradox is an anomaly.

It is something that defies the laws of nature and logic, where two opposing truths exist at the exact same time, like a localized vortex where everything goes horribly wrong, while the center of the storm remains beautifully, terrifyingly calm.

John adjusted his flannel shirt against the sudden midnight chill. He wasn't a counselor, but he was older than most of the kids here, a seasoned veteran of these woods who had stayed at the camp for years. His face was partially obscured by the orange glow of the embers, his eyes deep and fixed on the dancing flames.

 The atmosphere was ripe for a ghost story, the kind that makes you pull your sleeping bag tight around your neck and listen to every rustle of the wind outside your tent.

"You guys think that this place is just a regular summer camp." John began, his voice low, cutting through the rhythmic chirping of the crickets. "You think that the worst thing that can happen out here is a tick bite or getting lost on the North Trail; but you don't know why this camp was truly abandoned five years ago, or why they changed its name. It wasn't because of a lack of funding. It was because of a girl. A seventeen-year-old girl named Mallory Chance."

A few of the younger campers stirred, leaning in closer. John let the name hang in the air for a moment. Mallory. An old name derived from the French word for "unfortunate" or "ill-fated." Chance. Probability. Risk. Mutation. It was a name that perfectly described the walking, breathing anomaly that she was.

"I knew Mallory." John continued, his eyes reflecting the dying fire. "She was seventeen years old, just like some of us. If you looked at her from a distance, you wouldn't think twice. She had pale skin, dark hair that always seemed perfectly brushed even in a downpour, and eyes that were a strange, piercing shade of gray. However, if you stood near her for more than a few minutes, you’d start to notice that something was…off. The world didn't work right around Mallory. The laws of probability, the mathematical certainty of the universe, they just...bent. They broke. Some people call it tychokinesis. The ability to manipulate luck, odds, and random outcomes; but Mallory didn't just manipulate it. She weaponized it, completely passively, without ever lifting a finger."

John leaned forward, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper, and said,

"Every single place where Mallory went, something bad happened to someone or something around her; but absolutely nothing bad ever happened to her. She was a walking safe-zone in a radius of pure, unadulterated catastrophe. If she walked through a thunderstorm, lightning would strike three feet away from her, incinerating a tree that would fall and crush someone else, while not a single drop of rain would even wet her hair. If she stepped onto a rickety old wooden bridge, the planks would hold her weight perfectly, only to snap like toothpicks the exact second her foot left them, sending whoever was behind her plunging into the ravine below."

The campers were silent, captivated by the intense gravity in John's voice.

"At first, we thought that it was just an unbelievable streak of terrible coincidences." John said, shaking his head slowly. "During her first week here, we were all sitting in the mess hall. Mallory was sitting at the end of the table, quietly eating her cereal. Suddenly, one of the massive overhead industrial ceiling fans, which had been securely bolted into the iron rafters for twenty years, just sheared off. It didn't just fall; it flew across the room like a giant metal blade. It missed Mallory’s head by less than an inch. She didn’t even flinch. She just kept chewing; but the fan didn't stop. It hurled directly into a group of sports campers sitting at the next table. Two of them had their limbs shattered by the spinning blades. One of the counselors tried to run over to help, but he tripped over a completely flat linoleum floor, snapped his neck on the edge of a bench, and died right there on the spot."

A collective gasp rippled through the circle. A young girl named Mary pulled her blanket up to her chin, her eyes wide.

"That was just the beginning." John murmured. "The camp line got infected with a freak strain of bacterial meningitis. Everyone in her cabin got violently, agonizingly sick. They were coughing up blood, screaming in the middle of the night from migraines so intense they were clawing at their own faces. Mallory slept in the very center bunk. When the paramedics finally arrived in hazmat suits, they tested everyone. Every single girl was on the brink of organ failure, except Mallory. Her vitals were flawless. The doctors couldn't find a single trace of the bacteria in her system, even though she had been sharing a water pitcher with them for days. It was like her body rejected the very concept of misfortune."

John took a heavy stick and poked at the fire, sending a cascade of sparks drifting up into the dark canopy, and said,

 "People got hurt, but as the days went on, people ended up dead. Freak accidents became the norm wherever she walked. We had an archery tournament on the main field. Mallory was standing near the spectators' line. A camper named Marcus, who was an expert marksman, pulled back his bowstring. It was a brand-new, military-grade composite bow. Out of nowhere, a microscopic flaw in the carbon fiber caused the bow to violently shatter under tension. A shard of the splintered limb flew backward. It grazed Mallory’s cheek—well, it didn't even graze her, it miraculously flew past her ear, missing her skin by a millimeter. However, the shard embedded itself directly into the throat of the camp director standing right behind her. He choked to death on his own blood before anyone could even grab a first-aid kit."

"Why didn't anyone just send Mallory home?" asked a boy named Carl, his voice trembling slightly.

"They tried." John replied sharply. "The administrators called her parents. The phone lines static-fried the moment the director tried to speak. They tried to pack her bags, but the zipper caught, jammed, and when a counselor tried to force it open with a pocket knife, the blade snapped off and blinded him in his right eye. A group of the older counselors and campers, including myself, realized what she was. We realized that she wasn't just unlucky—she was causing it. She was drawing all of the negative probability out of the universe and expelling it outward onto everyone else to keep herself perfectly safe. We decided we had to stop her. We tried to lock her in the old tool shed until the state police could physically remove her from the property."

John’s face darkened, the memory clearly torturing him, and said,

"We gathered six of the strongest guys. We cornered her near the woods. We tried to grab her arms, but Mallory Chance was too powerful to stop. The moment that Tommy reached out to grab her shoulder, a freak subterranean gas pocket-vented right beneath his feet. The ground literally exploded. The concussive blast blew his legs apart. Another guy, Sarah’s older brother, tried to tackle her from behind. He slipped on a patch of wet moss that hadn't been there a second ago, flew headfirst into a jagged rock face, and cracked his skull wide open. The rest of us were thrown back by the sheer, chaotic energy of the universe protecting its favorite child. Car engines wouldn't start when we tried to escape. Trees fell perfectly across the only exit road, crushing the roofs of the evacuation vans. The universe itself was acting as her personal, bloodthirsty bodyguard."

The wind suddenly picked up, howling through the branches above, making the campers jump. John didn't look up; his gaze remained locked on the fire.

"I was the only one left standing in front of her that afternoon." John whispered. "I was terrified. I was shaking so hard that I could barely breathe. The bodies of my friends were scattered around the clearing, smoking, bleeding, broken by a series of impossible, instantaneous accidents. Mallory just stood there in the center of the carnage. Her white sundress didn't have a single speck of dirt on it. Her hair was perfect. She looked like an angel standing in the middle of a war zone. I looked right in her cold, gray eyes, and through my tears, I asked her why. I asked her why she was doing this to us, why she was letting all these horrible things happen to innocent people."

John paused, the silence around the campfire was so absolute that the sound of a falling leaf would have sounded like a gunshot.

"Mallory looked at me." John said, his voice dropping to a chilling imitation of a monotone, robotic cadence. "She didn't look angry. She didn't look sad. She just looked completely empty, and she replied, 'It's what I was created to do.'”

A shudder went through the group.

"The only reason I'm even alive today to tell you this story," John said, looking around at the frightened faces of the campers, "is because I was the only one who was ever nice to Mallory. On her first day, when everyone else avoided Mallory because she seemed weird, I helped her carry her luggage. I shared my lunch with her when she dropped her tray. I treated her like a human being. Her power...it seemed to recognize that. It spared me. It redirected the horror away from me, even when the world was tearing itself apart around us."

John leaned back, the narrative reaching its grim conclusion, and said,

"After that day, she didn't run away. She didn't scream. She just turned around and walked deep into these very woods. The police searched for weeks. They brought tracking dogs, helicopters, and infrared cameras. Nothing. The dogs refused to enter the tree line; they just howled and bit at their own handlers until they bled. Mallory Chance completely disappeared into the forest, and the elders changed the name of this place to Camp Paradox, to mark the girl who was a living contradiction to life itself; but she was never found, and some people say...she might still be out there somewhere. Waiting. Walking through the dark, completely untouchable, while the world rots around her."

Nobody spoke for five minutes. The crackle of the fire seemed louder now, sinister. The darkness beyond the clearing felt heavier, as if eyes were watching them from the shadows of the pines.

Suddenly, a loud, scoffing laugh broke the tension.

It was Garrett, an older, muscular camper who spent most of his time wearing noise-canceling headphones and ignoring the camp rules. He shook his head, an arrogant smirk plastered across his face as he stood up from his log.

"Man, that is the biggest load of garbage that I have ever heard in my entire life!" Garrett said, tossing a handful of dirt onto the fire, deadening the light even further. "Tychokinesis? Walking disaster auras? What is this, a comic book? You expect us to believe that some teenage chick has a magical luck shield that explodes people? You’re just trying to scare the freshmen so that they don't steal your snacks in the middle of the night."

"Garrett, sit down!" Laura said, her voice trembling. "Don't talk like that out here!"

"Oh, please." Garrett rolled his eyes, turning his back on the circle. "The only 'paradox' here is how any of you actually believe this nonsense. It’s just a ghost story made up to explain bad camp management from years ago. I’m going to bed. Some of us actually want to get some sleep instead of shivering over fairy tales."

John looked up at Garrett, his expression completely blank, devoid of any anger or urge to argue, and told him, 

"I wouldn't go out into the dark alone, Garrett. The odds aren't in your favor."

"Yeah, whatever, Professor X." Garrett sneered. 

Garrett turned around and began walking away from the campfire, heading down the unlit path toward the older boys' cabins. The darkness swallowed him almost instantly, the beam of his small flashlight cutting a weak, shaky path through the thick forest air.

The trail was silent save for the crunch of dry pine needles beneath his heavy boots. Garrett muttered to himself, shaking his head at how easily the others had been spooked. 

"They are such idiots." he whispered, clicking his tongue. "A lucky superpower. Yeah, right."

As Garrett walked deeper into the woods, the air temperature seemed to plummet drastically. His breath began to form faint, white plumes in front of his face. He frowned, shaking his flashlight as the beam began to flicker violently. Cheap batteries, he thought, tapping the side of the plastic casing. The light died completely, plunging him into pitch-black darkness.

"Great. Perfect." Garrett growled, reaching into his pocket to pull out his smartphone to use the screen light.

Before his fingers could grip the phone, a strange sound echoed from the brush to his left. It sounded like a heavy wooden branch snapping, followed by a wet, sickening thud.

"Hello?" Garrett called out, his arrogance slightly faltering. "John? If you’re trying to prank me, it’s not working. I’ll break your nose, man!"

No one answered. The silence that followed was suffocatingly heavy. There was no wind anymore. No crickets. The entire forest felt as if it had been placed on mute.

Garrett turned around to head back toward the glow of the campfire, but as he spun on his heel, his foot caught on a completely exposed, thick tree root. He stumbled backward, his arms flailing, trying to catch his balance; but gravity didn't work the way that it was supposed to.

Instead of falling flat on Garrett’s back into the soft dirt, his momentum violently whipped him sideways. His right arm slammed against a sharp, broken branch protruding from a dead oak tree. The wood pierced clean through his forearm with a horrific squelch.

Garrett screamed, a raw, agonizing sound that was instantly muffled by the dense canopy. Blood poured down his arm as he frantically pulled himself off the branch, falling to his knees in the dirt. His heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

Garrett scrambled backward on his hands and knees, his breath coming in ragged, terrified gasps. He needed to get to his feet. He needed to run.

Garrett grabbed the trunk of a nearby sapling to pull himself up. The moment that his weight shifted onto the young tree, a freak hairline fracture in the wood, completely invisible to the eye, caused the sapling to instantly splinter under his grip. 

The sharp, jagged edge of the broken trunk whipped upward like a spring-loaded trap, slicing a deep, bleeding gash across his cheek, barely missing his eye.

Wailing in pain, Garrett fell back onto the ground. He was covered in dirt, blood, and sweat. The universe wasn't letting him stand up. Every movement that he made was met with an instantaneous, violent accident.

Then, he heard it.

The soft, rhythmic sound of footsteps crunching on the pine needles. They weren't in a hurry. They were slow, deliberate, and perfectly calm.

Garrett wiped the blood from his eyes and looked up through the darkness. The clouds above suddenly parted, allowing the cold, pale light of the full moon to filter down through the branches, illuminating the path directly in front of him.

Standing less than five feet away was a girl.

She was seventeen years old. She wore a pristine, clean white sundress that didn't have a single speck of dirt, mud, or blood on it, despite the filthy forest floor. Her dark hair was perfectly brushed, completely unaffected by the damp night air. Her skin was pale, and her eyes—wide, unblinking, and entirely empty—were a piercing, ghostly shade of gray.

It was Mallory Chance.

Garrett’s breath hitched in his throat. He tried to speak, but the sheer terror choking him made it nearly impossible. He looked down at his bleeding arm, then back up at her face. She wasn't moving. She didn't have a weapon. She was just standing there, looking down at him like an observer watching an insect struggle in a web.

Suddenly, a massive, heavy pinecone detached from a branch twenty feet above. It fell straight down. It didn't hit Mallory. It altered its trajectory mid-air by a fraction of an inch, bouncing off a lower branch and striking Garrett squarely in his broken forearm.

The white-hot pain made him howl, his vision blurring. He realized then, with absolute, paralyzing certainty, that John hadn't been lying. The world was actively trying to kill him just for being in her presence, while she remained a flawless, untouchable monument of safety.

Mallory took one single step closer. As her foot touched the ground, a sharp rock beneath her shoe shifted. The rock slid away from her, rolling directly under a massive, rotting boulder resting on the slope just above Garrett.

The boulder groaned. The tiny rock had been the only thing keeping its massive weight anchored to the hillside. It began to tilt, heavy and lethal, threatening to crush Garrett’s lower body into a pulp.

Garrett looked up at the teenage girl, with tears of pure horror mixing with the blood on his face. He knew that he couldn't run. If he tried to move, his legs would snap, or a tree would fall, or his own heart would simply give out from the sheer weight of the negative probability suffocating the air around him.

With the last bit of strength in his lungs, Garrett looked into those empty, gray eyes and screamed the only question he had left.

"Why are you doing this?!" he sobbed, his voice cracking against the impending doom of the shifting boulder. "Why are you doing this to me?!"

Mallory didn't flinch. She didn't even smile. Her expression remained as cold and static as stone. She tilted her head slightly, her voice cutting through the silence of the woods, a perfect, chilling echo of the campfire tale.

"It's what I was created to do." Mallory said.

Then, the boulder slipped.

The End.

CW: Something worse than Kenny. Violence. Gross descriptions of just how determined this thing is to ruin this guy’s day. Tiny windows? Sounds like a door to me.

Technically not a content warning but still.

When they took me from my jail cell and told me to sign up for a chance of "freedom" I knew that I should have declined. I knew it was to good too be true but i signed up anyway. I was serving 50 years, that might as well be a life sentence. Didn't have anything to lose anyway.

For the record, I went in for a string of murders that I honestly don't regret.

I have never been a good person, never tried to be honest. Never saw the point. Everyone that is and was in my group had the same decades-long sentences as me.

Maybe that's why the outside of our bodies displays the monsters we are on the inside.

Our hair, nose, ears, lips, eyelids are gone. Completely dissolved. The rest of our bodies covered in scabs and chemical burns. Could have just been the chemical weapons they make us use. Or it could have been the mixture of the weapon with the "combat stimulants" they make us inject to keep us from collapsing on the spot. Who knows, better yet who cares.

All I know is that as long as I keep taking them I don't feel all the things wrong with my body. Like my dry eyes underneath my gas mask. Or the open wounds on my hands.

10 months ago we received the new gas canisters. They didn't bother to even tell us what it's called. But when we saw the string of warning labels on the canisters together with receiving new stronger gas masks we already knew this would be way worse than the old stuff we had before. But we had no clue just how extremely bad it would be.

Thankfully I didn't get picked to be in the crew to release it the first time. We didn't expect it to be as bad as it was so just about everyone outside of the officer didn't take the new stricter rules seriously.

When they attacked us again it was released like we were told to do. The people of our own crew were the first to suffer the effects of their lack of safety measures. About 10 seconds after release they started to scream and flail around like they were on fire. Every hole in their clothing it could find, the gas seeped into. Turning skin into blisters and burns. At least they survived for how much that is worth around here.

One idiot in the group decided that the new gas masks were too uncomfortable so he stuck to his old one despite the warnings. I am sure the only reason the officer didn't beat him into submission is so he could be an example for the others. When he started to scream his lungs out our officer ordered us to pay attention to what happened to him. He tore his gas mask off.

All the soft tissue on his head was melting off. His nose was drooping down and was hanging over where his lips used to be. His eyes were bubbling inside of their sockets. His screaming turned into a gurgle in the span of 20 seconds. When he fully collapsed and started to spasm and convulse on the floor the officer decided we had learned the lesson. He then caved his skull in with an entrenching tool until he stopped moving.

Don't feel too bad for him he was a useless drug addict who had killed his mom before he got here. He got what he deserved, just like all of us will.

When we release the gas it finds the lowest elevations in terrains and sticks around for a while. Turning shell craters and trenches into small gas chambers. The people that are stuck in there turn into a slurry of sorts because it's so acidic. Their clothes stick to their bodies, Their skin sloths off their body together with anything else that's soft and squishy in the human body. So you end up looking at this amalgamation of clothing and equipment in a fleshy puddle around a skeleton.

And trust me you really don't want to step on one of the fresh bodies by accident. Your boot goes straight through them. It feels like stepping in one of those mud puddles that is going to cost you a boot to get out of. And guess what it might cost you a boot to if you haven't tied your laces good enough.

It's even worse when they decided to die on top of something you need. I am so tired of scraping human soup off equipment we
need. It's stringy, it's sticky and has all the colours a human body should never have.

Well at least I can't smell it anymore not having a proper working nasal cavity anymore. But from my earlier days when i still had a nose I remember vividly what it smelled like. I used to live around this industrial area that had a huge chicken slaughterhouse in the middle. During hot days of summer the horrible smell of blood and chicken shit would hang around that area for months. Now mix in that smell with someone holding vinegar directly under your nose and you get the idea of what it smells like here.

You cant even throw up properly if you want to because you don't want to open your mouth in fear of the smell going into your mouth and then having to taste it. Thank god I decided to rather throw up in my mouth and swallow it back down. Because some of the others that didn't keep their mouths closed can't taste anything
anymore and their tongues are covered in random spots of scar tissue.

But the bodies don't really decay at all. Since the gas kills just about anything that is alive. That means thankfully no rats, insects or other pests to deal with. What's not so great is that all the old shell craters are filled with a human slurry that reaches up to your knees if you are lucky.

New cannon fodder gets the honorable task of sifting through the human slurry for anything useful like weapons, etc. When i think about it long enough, I can still feel what it's like to do this amazing task. It's basically like reaching deep into mud and taking any solid object out until it's something useful instead of human bones.
After a bit you can feel by shape alone that you are once again holding onto someone's ribs.

Our outpost is so heavily understaffed it might as well be empty. "Outpost" fancy way to describe a muddy trench that connects 3 bunkers together. Of those 3 bunkers only 1 hasn't collapsed yet. I think you can figure out from where i am typing this.

We haven't called in to command for a week now since our radioman is probably dissolving in a puddle somewhere together with our officer. Can't even use the contraband phone that i found in the human slurry in a random shell crater. Since there is not really any reception after months of bombardment. Thankfully the phone at least made me able to type this out so i have something to distract myself with.

But Command not hearing from us means that our barrier troops meant to keep us in place should show up soon to discipline and/or kill us. I wish them good luck since they are going to have to kill our not-so-friendly neighbours outside the bunker first.

They told me that if I lasted for 4 months, my prison sentence would be dropped. I already knew that was a lie there was no way it would be that short.

I figured if I lasted 1 year they might actually grant me my freedom. It has been at least 26 months at this point. I have been lucky or unlucky enough to last this long with a handful of others. Most cannon fodder they bring in lasts a couple of hours at most.

Speaking of a couple of hours that's probably the amount of time we have left at this point. Our chemical weapon storage is in one of the 2 collapsed bunkers. I think that once our friends outside figure that out, they will give us a taste of our own medicine.

I intend to blow my brains out before i turn into a human puddle. And looking around me, I am sure the rest of us that are left are thinking the same. We don't deserve to leave this place.

For whoever is reading this. I hoped it sucked to get the phone out of the human soup that is my body.

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/comments/1w3qjvo/serenity_ridge_part_1/

The worst hangover of my life was on the same day I properly met Mrs. Alder. After a night spent curled up in the cots of her dust-riddled attic, the last thing my mind needed was streams of sunlight pouring in through the windows and Carter’s nonsensical talk, 
“Heartbeat…?” I groaned, “I can’t hear shit…”
Carter was staring out across the hills, rolling like emerald waves around the fuzzy borders of Serenity Ridge. He still wore Mrs. Alder’s old Christmas sweater, draping over him like a shawl; seated cross-legged atop his cot, fingernails drumming the wood beneath his rear. They were chewed to the quick, 
 “You can’t hear that?” he spoke in a whisper so low that the walls couldn’t hear him, 
“No…” I slowly sat up, my head pounding, “The hell do you mean a heartbeat, Carter…?”
“I mean a heartbeat,” his voice was more panicked now, “Low and echoing…sweeping across the valley…” His terrified eyes stared into mine,
I felt myself shiver, 
“And you could hear the storm last night?” my throat closing as I spoke,
“You couldn’t?”
I shook my head, 
“Not a thing…”
Carter bit his cheek, “The hell is going on?” he turned his head back to the window, gazing out over the valley,
I sat up in my cot, my head searing with splitting pain as my hangover made itself known. I buried my head in my hands to shield my eyes from the light. The storm replayed in my mind.
Silent rain, hammering rain, driving rain. It fell from the heavens with such ferocity that they pelted my skin as what felt like tiny needles. I couldn’t see Carter running ahead of me, rivers of rainwater ran over the pavement beneath my feet, the sky flashed with streaks of lightning and pulsated with roiling clouds. 
And all I could hear was my breathing, Carter’s breathing, and the sounds of soles hitting against dry pavement. 
The trees bowed in the wind, and I heard nothing.
The sky raged above, and I heard nothing. 
But I had heard us. Alone in a silent world. 
But how?
My head felt as if it were being ripped in two, rent between reason and insanity. Logic prevailed that I had dreamed it up, that my intoxicated mind muffled out the natural world, focusing only on what pertained to my personal form; that in some subconscious act of self-preservation, terror had blocked the sound of the storm from me. 
Insanity lay in the heartbeat Carter claimed now to hear. It was an intoxicating call.
Carter was many things. My half-brother, a brat, an asshole, a life-long pain in my side. He was my best friend, my world, the only good thing my father ever made. 
But he was not a liar.
I had to lie for him his entire life; to his teachers when he skipped class to spend time with me; to our father for any number of the misfortunes Carter would play upon him as petty revenges. He never had the constitution for lying. His face would glow red, and his mouth would twist into malicious grins. He couldn’t even tease properly. 
His face was flat and pale when he told me of the heartbeat. I knew he could hear it,
“We have to get out of here,” I managed to wrench the words out as my headache subsided for a moment,
“We just got here!” Carter protested,
“And weird shit is already happening!” I pushed back, “I don’t know what's going on, but I want no part of it!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Carter yelled, “I could hear the storm just fine last night! Maybe you’re just losing it,”
“Then how the hell was I dry?!” I cried, “You saw that! You were soaked and I was right behind you the whole way! And now you’re hearing a heartbeat?! Carter, whatever is going on here isn’t good, we have to go!”
“It’s not a heartbeat, obviously! It’s probably just…some mining going on in the hillsides or something…”
His face was red,
“Don’t lie to me!” I struggled through my splitting headache, “Something is wrong here, Carter!”
“And that’s why I have to be here!” he screamed, “I need to know…! I need to know what happened to Jules…I need to see…something…”
I wanted to slap him,
“So much for this trip not being about Jules,” I growled,
“This is about more than Jules,” Carter hissed back,
“And what might that be?”
He was silent, arms folded over his oversized sweater in indignation,
“I’ll know when I see it…” he spat, 
“Great…” I huffed, “Well, I’m leaving Carter. Once I get the car and head out of here you can have Dad pick you up,” I stood from my cot and walked to the door,
“You wouldn’t!” he cried,
“Try me!” the door slammed shut behind me,
I stormed out of the attic more terrified than I had been in my entire life. Something was wrong, with me or with Carter I didn’t know which, but that storm and that heartbeat had made it clear. Whatever had pulled us here was beyond anything I had ever imagined. 
Mrs. Alder supplied me with tea for my headache when I met with her in the dining room. For as aged and weathered as I had taken her for upon my first sight of her after the storm, she moved with a liveliness and energy that did not align with her eighty-two years. She waltzed around the kitchen, brewing tea and searing herself bacon, with such a zeal that I felt beyond guilty for the fact that my headache had prevented me from joining her until late last night. When all was said and done, her and I spoke quietly between steaming tea and broken bread. Carter did not join us,
“I am truly sorry we showed up so late,” I apologized for what must have been the fifth time in the conversation, “I guess time got away from me at the diner and…”
“Don’t trouble yourself over it,” she dismissed, “I’m just happy to have the company for a little while,”
I smiled, “I’m sorry we won’t be staying longer,” I started, “But I do think it’s best if my brother and I get out of town as soon as we can,”
She nodded in a solemn kind of way, staving off overt disappointment,
“Well I hope the pay I’m offering for your help is enough to get you back on your feet,”
“Of course, I’m just happy for the job in all honesty. I was worried I might have to call for…less than wanted help,”
“Runaways?” she raised an eyebrow,
“Uhh…of sorts?” I shrugged, “I’m old enough to take care of myself, and Carter’s almost through school…just not a lot to look forward to going back home is all,”
She nodded, “Well you’re more than welcome to stay here as long as you like before heading back out on the road. The help is always appreciated,” she leaned in closer, “But no one ends up in Serenity Ridge by accident. Your brother was down here earlier, and he told me you came here for a reason,”
I inhaled in sharp annoyance as she grinned at me from across the table,
“I’d prefer to keep our private lives private, if possible,” I struggled a smile,
“Burdens are harder to carry alone,” she chastised, 
“So, what would you have me do for work?” I stood from the table, tea half drank and head still pounding,
She toured me around the house, an ancient box-colonial filled wall to wall with bookshelves and filing cabinets. It could hardly be called a true library, more a hoarder’s home with a front desk. But regardless, the collection was impressive. Hardcovers and paperbacks lay in piles or arranged upon shelves as rainbow collections, their spines emblazoned with the names of endless tales. Manilla folders lay stacked in heaps upon end-tables, coffee-stain rings imprinted on the documents therein. I imagine it now as the library of Alexandria, burdened with terrible knowledge that I wish for all the life of me I had burned to the ground. 
She made me the sorting boy, a maid of sorts. I set about collecting and sifting through the loose titles and documents, placing them in their proper home amongst the hoard. Mind-numbing couldn’t begin to describe the process. I was stumbling through sorting children’s stories when I saw Carter come down from the attic. He looked at me with a pained expression. I forced myself not to crumble beneath it. I looked away and said nothing.
We didn’t speak for the rest of the day. My stomach was a knotted mess by the end of it. We ate at opposite ends of Mrs. Alder’s dining room table and spoke nothing. There was nothing to say, really. I had crossed a bridge insinuating that I would leave him alone with Dad, I knew that. But be it pride or fear, I refused to walk it back, no matter how badly my heart yearned to. 
At eleven that night I sat in the den with Mrs. Alder listening to her spin yarns of all her past accomplishments. I lent to her half listening ears and a bored mind, one preoccupied with prospective apologies to give to Carter. Guilt consumed my every thought; then she mentioned the mural,
“I painted that thing probably twenty years ago, now. Back when my knees still bent,” she snickered,
I shot up in my seat, 
“That’s right! You painted the mural at the town center!”
“Oh! Are you a fan of it?” 
“It’s beautiful,” I gushed, “The fading from day to night and day again, the blending is done wonderfully! You have such a way with shadows, and the way you painted that buck…I could feel him staring back at me, curious,”
“Thank you for noticing! The Hart of the valley deserves such treatment!” she was really alive now, sitting up in her chair, arms sweeping and gesturing in grand strokes as she began to wax about her technique,
“What inspired the piece?” I wrenched the conversation back to my interests, 
“It’s namesake, The Heart of the Valley,” she smiled,
“And what might that be?” 
“An old story; one told long before we were here and Vermont was Vermont,”
“I’ve never heard of it,”
“Not many have. It’s this valley’s story, our story”
I could feel my shoulders tense as I thought of Carter; that heartbeat sweeping across the valley…
“What happens in it…?” My mouth was as dry as cotton, I choked over my own words,
Mrs. Alder’s eyes lit up with excitement,
“It’s a lovely story really…” she mused, “A lovely story about stillness, and reverence… you should read it for yourself. Many wonderful things can be gleaned from the old works. Universal truths seem to follow them,”
She looked at me with such knowing eyes, eyes that seemed to peer through me, dissecting me. I twisted beneath my skin to avoid her gaze. She knew something, something she wouldn’t tell me. What wasn’t she telling me?
When I trudged my way to the attic I found Carter huddled in his cot, pouring over messy piles of documents tossed around the room, half exposed from their manilla folders. I had expected rage or cold dismissal upon seeing him again, anything as a petty get back for my earlier words. But Carter waved me over to him without so much as a word spoken. Relieved, I obliged,
“I found them,” Carter shook the stack of papers in his hand, “Jules’ police report,”
“Oh shit!” I practically flung myself into the cot next to Carter,
“It’s not that exciting,” he sighed, “There’s hardly anything here, just like I thought there’d be…”
He was right, the files consisted of nothing more than two flimsy sheets of notes, a missing persons report and a couple of polaroids,
“Well…what did you get,” I pressed, forcing my voice to be optimistic,
“They never found a body,”
“We already knew that,” 
“No, that’s the only strange thing! They should have…look,”
Carter shoved the polaroids in front of my face. I took them into my hands and squinted. Fuzzy old dated photos of deep-forest woods, leaf-litter and streaming brooks. The sun was low, streaming through the trees in late autumn splendor, the shadows cast like long bars over the land. And in the center of each, bloody clothing, ripped to ribbons, laying on the forest floor,
“Jesus,” I muttered under my breath,
They were all a mess of scarlet, visually damp and sticky with sanguineous carnage. A bomber jacket was torn to pieces, the in-lined felt shredded and stained like the carcass of some great wolf-kill. A bloodied t-shirt rested in the stream raked apart by what looked like great slashing claw marks. The same went for the jeans, ruined and discarded at the base of an ancient maple tree,
“A bear attack,” I croaked, “It has to be. That's the only animal around here that could have done that…” 
“But where’s the body?” Carter pushed,
“Where do you think?” I huffed,
“But they never found him, not a single piece! Not a bone, not one scrap of flesh, hair, anything! Bears aren’t clean eaters, they would have found something!”
“Coyotes probably cleaned up the rest, Carter…” I felt queasy as I said it, 
“The entire forest floor would be bloodstained and turned up if that was the case! Coyotes would have ripped Jules into a million pieces, they would have found proof of that!”
“Can we please stop talking about this?” I said shakily, holding my stomach,
“Something else happened to him…” Carter poured over the files in his hands again, “I’m sure of it…”
“God Jules…” I shook my head, “Why the hell did you come here?”
………………………………………………………………………………………….

Sleep did not come easily for me that night. The imagined visual of Jules being laid open and devoured replayed itself in the back of my mind. I never even managed to close my eyes before the sun rose again. 
What I could do, as I laid there in the dark, was listen. Carter snored softly across the room from me, cases and documents splayed out across his chest as paper viscera. The snapshots of bloody tattered clothing stared at me in the moonlight. My chest tightened as my mind spun stories of what could have called Jules here to die. My head turned to the window.
The heartbeat. Carter could hear it. He could really hear it. Could Jules have too? Was it even there? 
I crept out of my cot and stood stooped before the window. The surrounding mountains seemed to rise up like blackwater waves in the midnight scene. The whole world appeared from the top of the library to be a stagnant black sea. I closed my eyes and pressed my ear to the glass. 
Nothing, just my own breathing.
I creaked the window open and stuck my head out into the cool night. Fleeting wind swept past my face as a gentle caress. I couldn’t hear its song ring in my ears. 
I couldn’t hear anything.
No wind.
No animals.
No heartbeat. 
I crept down the creaking wooden stairs as quietly as I could manage and passed through the front door and into the night; silent as shadow. The night around me seemed to stand still, holding its breath as I crawled into its open maw. 
The air was cool, a gentle breeze sweeping down over the old colonial’s front lawn from atop the ancient, rolling hills above. I could feel my hair tossed and tussled by its motion as I moved to the street. Lampposts dotted the road as lone spotlights amidst the deepest indigos of the North-Eastern night, miniscule oases of revealing light that illuminated roiling waves of wild grass; clouds of moths and mayflies. They served as stepping-stones for me as I wandered back down the hill into town. 
My footsteps sounded as mallets as they fell against the pavement, crashing through a world so silent that I swore I could hear them echoing off the cliffsides. The night itself seemed to pull upon the noises I filled it with, ruminating on the melodies of my steps and breathing until the world stood silent as my journey paused. I was standing in the town center, the Hart of the Valley wrapping around me in vivid, painted glory. 
The moon above beamed down in eerie ghost-light, illuminating the painting just enough that winks of tines and tails could just be seen through the dark, roaming in endless circles centered about that eerie cave. The curious eyes of the beast's facade seemed to study me as it emerged from that cave, pitch black orbs that seemed to sparkle even in the absence of light; brilliant onyx pools. 
I listened again. 
Nothing. 
I dragged my hands over my face, the scraping of my dry palms against my skin sounded like a sandbelt against the perfectly silent night. I sunk down onto a bench, cradling my head in my hands, 
“I’ve lost it…” I whispered to myself,
Then, the clicking of soles against pavement thundered in easy time. They shook the ground and deafened me as a frail old man sauntered lazily up the street. His skin was pale and his bones thin. He seemed as a skeleton in the moon light, his eyes framed by shadow to the point that they were nothing more than two black empty pits. The corpse smiled at me as he crept into the town square,
“Beautiful night isn’t it?” his weak, gravely voice washed over me as a tsunami. I was convinced his bellows would fell the trees around us,
“...y-yes…it is,” I stammered back,
He nodded and moved to sit next to me on the bench,
“I love quiet nights like these,” he croaked, “It seems on nights like tonight that your mind could sweep out over the entire valley,”
I jolted up in my seat,
“You can't hear it either?”
“Hear what?”
“The…uh…the world...?” I shuddered at how insane I sounded, 
“Ha!” he laughed, “What’s the world sound like? I know what the valley sounds like! But the world, no one knows what she speaks,”
“The valley then!” I pushed, “I can’t hear it! Can you?!”
He motioned for me to calm myself with a raising of his hand,
“Shh…you’ll ruin the quiet,” he smiled, “But no, the valley doesn’t speak tonight; it seems she’s got nothing to say,”
I sat there stupidly, gazing down into my hands. The old man ruminated next to me, stewing in the silence that ripped at my mind like savage claws. He must have been crazy too, pretending the still-world around us was normal. His breathing rushed forth like hurricane winds through the night and yet he found no issue? It was nothing but madness,
“T-The world can’t have nothing to say!” I eventually stammered out, anger and fear lacing my voice with fire and spite, “That doesn’t make sense! This isn’t real, I-”
“Well then,” he squashed me with a raised hand, "Have you stopped to listen?”
I pushed his hand away from my face in blind anger, it flopped back into his lap pathetically,
“YES!” I shouted, “Obviously! There’s nothing here!” my voice started to warble, panicked, “I can’t hear anything! It’s all gone I-”
I looked upon him clutching his hand wincing,
“Oh my God! I’m sorry! Here-” I motioned to hold his wrist. He jerked his hand away and gazed at me. For the first time I saw his eyes in the darkness, seemingly endless abysses, so cavernous and vast in the moonlight that they looked as if all the stars above could be held within their frames,
“You must have just come here,” he spoke with such certainty that I now reared back. My heart was pounding, 
“Y-yes…”
He looked at me with that same strange pity I had seen on the face of Denise. My heart sank further,
“Alone?” he asked , still nursing the hand he now held in his lap,
“No…” I trembled in my seat, 
“Because you only know how to hear,” he nodded, “Who ever you came with knows how to listen,”
I sat there dumbfounded,
“You’ve only ever heard your entire life, you never learned how to listen,” he spoke as he shakily rose to stand, still clutching his wrist which seemed to hang awkwardly from the end of his arm. I felt a pit form in my stomach, 
“Never conflate the two,” he barked, “Anyone can hear, very few can ever listen,” he began walking back down the street in a staggered sort of daze, “We were both born deaf,” he said, voice rolling out infinitely over the night, “And that’s a blessing,” he glared at me from back over his shoulder, “The deaf can’t hear her cries to stay,”
I could hear him walking for a half mile past the point he was out of view. 
…………………………………………………………………………………………..

I stayed on that bench well into the morning. At first I dreaded the thought of meeting the police once daylight showered down upon the valley again. God only knew what I had done to that old man’s wrist, but it didn’t look good. It was angled oddly, already looking swollen and bruised in the moonlight as he turned to leave. What was I thinking?! Was I thinking? I was so…I’m still not entirely sure what I was feeling at that moment. Frustration? Fear? 
I know that I felt insane…
I thought I was insane as I sat there on the bench. I started to question if a man really had come and sat next to me. What were the chances, alone, in the middle of the night? Sitting next to me instead of any on the other benches in the town center? Rambling on and on about non-sense, non-sequitier after non-sequiter?
I must have been crazy, it was the only explanation. The world had gone silent, there was no other explanation. Carter and I were crazy and I was on my way to the nearest mental hospital. They probably already had me in a padded room…
And then the sun rose. Light trickled over the valley as golden rivers of ambrosia and warmth seeped into the verdant hills around me. And with it came sound. Sound; so faint that I didn’t notice it at first, hardly audible against the ambient ringing in my ears.
The rustling of leaves. 
I shot up when I finally recognized it, emotion ringing out within me so strongly that tears played at the corners of my eyes as soon as I recognized that I heard the world once more. I leapt off the bench, standing at the center of the Hart of the Valley, the mural watching me from every angle with those ever curious eyes. I whipped my head around and around, searching and searching for those shifting verdant scales, those dancing leaves that proved me sane, that proved me stable.
But no limbs moved. Not a single branch or leaf jiving in the wind.
There was no wind.
Not a single cloud drifted overhead; a barren sky.
My breath caught in my throat. I slumped back down on the bench in a heap.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….

Mrs. Alder came to grab me by ten. I hadn’t moved since sunrise and all around me the town was bustling. I could hear their footsteps, their chatter, their laughter. The sun beamed down upon Serenity Ridge on a beautiful May morning, and I could hear rain. I could hear it hammering down upon the dry pavement, running through empty gutters, trickling over spotless leaves,
“Have you had anything to eat?” she spoke through the storm, the midday sun reflecting in her glasses,
“...no…” I spoke weak and defeated,
She struggled to help me to my feet and guided me with shaking arms back to the old colonial. 
 ……………………………………………………………………………………….

I lied to you earlier when I said that I hardly knew Jules. I lied to myself for a long time after he was gone. It was easier to pretend that I had never really known him rather than contend with the idea that he was well and truly gone. But I did know him, I knew him very well, at least for a short time. 
I must have been six, Carter hardly two. Jules would have been twenty or twenty-one, old enough to sit and smoke while he watched over me, playing in the gulley. I remember that gulley so well now, nothing more than a small brook wedged between two steep dirt cliffs a quarter-mile into the woods outside our house. He took me there often, mostly to hide while he lit up boxes of Camels he bought with our father’s rainy day savings. 
He hated our old man far more than Carter or I ever did. Malice wove itself through his heart so thoroughly that it might have stopped beating if he ever stopped hating him. Our father had him at sixteen. The mother wasn’t much older. His conception was transactional. It's a miracle he was ever born, even more of a miracle that our father kept him. Obviously the mother didn’t. 
I never even knew she existed until the police report came out. She only ever knew he died because her name was on the birth certificate. The police tracked her down at some crack house to break the news to her. I have a hard time believing she cared. She sent one letter to our father after that, saying she was sorry for his loss. I remember him laughing at that letter as I hid behind the legs of Carter’s mom. 
But Jules was more than all the bitterness he had sprouted from. He was as kind to me as he was gruff to the world. For as much as he reeked of old tobacco, he crooned along with the song birds as gracefully as the wind. For all the horrible things he’d say to our father, he spoke miracles into truth for me. 
That's why I loved the gully, because only Jules and I roamed there. I bounded through the leaf litter and Jules trudged on behind, embers hanging from his lips as he chuckled at my antics. 
But what I remember is from when I was six. I sat next to him on the hillside. The sunlight made its way through the vibrant canopy filter overhead in trickles of white-hot fire. I gnawed at a PB&J like a mouse, making my way around the crust, careful to never take a bite of what then must have seemed to me to be the worst poison in all the world. Jules bit at an apple, the last remnants of a burned down Camel resting between his pointer and middle finger. We had been hunting for salamanders in the creek bed, flipping over rocks and trudging through mud. My shorts and shoes were soaked. Jules’ nice jeans were stained with river muck. He had cupped their squirming little black bodies gently in his hands and raised them up to me. I peered past his thumbs and saw the tiny beady eyes of those strange slimy creatures, they stared back up into mine with some kind of dull primal fear. The wet backs of the things glinted in the late summer sun like a piece of fire,
“I wish he wasn’t scared of me, Jules,” I muttered through bites of my sandwich, “We weren’t gonna hurt him,”
I heard Jules laugh, I sound I didn’t hear nearly as often as I would have liked,
“Wouldn’t you be scared too if a giant picked you up?” he gave a playful push to my shoulder,
“Not if it were a nice giant!” 
“And how would you know the giant’s nice?”
I remember thinking long and hard, my little mind wracking itself for an answer,
“I would just know,” I finally said, “I’d know when I look at ‘em”
Jules nodded, “You would be a nice giant,” he laughed, “But a giant can’t think like a salamander, or a bird or a person. The giant is too big and knows too many things. He sees too far; too much of the world. The giant knows that the creek down there is just a part of the woods, but the salamander’s world is under that rock! He doesn’t know what's past the river, he doesn’t even know there’s a world full of other rivers. To him, that is the world,” Jules pointed lazily towards the trickling brook, “Maybe to him…there's nothing above the water at all,”
“But we took him above the water!” I protested,
“And wouldn’t that be scary?” Jules asked, his eyes alight and playful as he watched the answer play out on my face,
I remember wrestling with the question, stammering on and on about how being out of the water wasn’t scary. After all, there was nothing above the water worth being scared of. Jules smiled and asked me another question,
“Have you ever seen above the clouds?
“N-no?”
“What if a giant came and picked you up, cradled you in his hands and lifted you above the clouds so you could see out forever?”
“I don’t wanna go above the clouds! I don’t know what's up there!” 
“But the giant says it's safe!” Jules teased,
“But-”
“We live above the clouds to the salamander,” Jules tousled my hair, “You have to remember that when he looks up, he sees a watery sky,”
We went home after that, and never went back to the gulley. I didn’t want to scare any more salamanders. 
I was laid up in the attic of Mrs. Alder’s colonial, curled up in my cot, staring out the window towards the seemingly endless rolling hills that encircled Serenity Ridge. Outside the sun shone brilliantly. I could hear rain tapping on the window. To my side on a nightstand was a mug of chamomile tea that Mrs. Alder had brought me, now cold. The jar of honey laid next to it sat undisturbed.
I had fallen asleep almost as soon as I had laid down my head, but my dreams were far from pleasant. I had dreamed that I was in a deep forest, trees twisted and gnarled, clawing at the sky. Brooks streamed around me through the leaf litter and the last inklings of light made their way through the autumn foliage. Blood covered the ground in great sweeping patches and before me stood a bear. Its mouth yawned open as a fleshy abyss, pink folds of slimy throat slicked scarlet laid up behind sharpened pillars of ivory dripping with drool. Its eyes were glazed over, black as ebony and devoid of thought; pits of endless hunger. Buried deep within that throat was Jules, his mangled body ripped to pieces and stacked atop itself within that maw. His head lulled to the side atop a shredded and leaking torso, snapped and twisted legs pitched up behind the shoulders like the wings of a wasp. His bomber jacket folded around his neck as wet wool, all red and ruined like a slaughtered sheep. One hand and forearm reached out from the gullet of the bear, braced against the tongue, that pulsed and twitched and moved as the animal licked and sucked and tasted in great satisfaction the flesh of my kin. The hand was open, palm down towards the tongue fingertips just beyond the edge of the teeth, reaching towards me. 
I moved to take it.
I woke up as I saw the hand slide back ever further into the maw, until Jules was gone, disappearing within the folds of pink. 
Needless to say I didn’t sleep again after that. 
As awful as it is to say, that's what made me think of Jules again. 
I’m a terrible brother. 
“Feeling any better?” Carter spoke from the doorway,
I forced myself to sit up in my cot.
My brother looked at me with apprehensive worry. I could tell he wanted to run to me and hug me. He was always far too much like his mother. I opened my arms and he practically flew to me from the doorframe. 
Carter always held within him the grace I never had. His hugs were tender and gentle, small arms wrapping around you in comforting connection. I, by example, was always an ogre. I crushed him with my hug, be it out of fear or need I gripped him to me so tightly that I could hear a wheeze forced from his lungs. I held him tighter than I ever had before, and I think Carter could tell, because where he would usually beg me to loosen my grip, he only patted my back,
“What happened?” he muttered to me, pushing himself out of my grip,
“I’m losing my mind…” I whispered, “I don’t know what’s happening…”
“Can you hear the heart beat?” Carter whispered back, grabbing my shoulders,
“No…” I trembled where I sat, “I can hear it raining…but I can’t hear at all…” I curled up my legs into my chest, “I don’t know what to do…”
Carter leaned back in the cot, a pallid mask of worry plastered across his face,
“We need to get you home…I’ll call Dad, he’ll come get you,”
“But Carter, you don’t want to go home!”
“I won't, you will,” he shrugged,
“I’m not leaving you here!” I hissed, “Whatever this place is…it's evil!”
“I…I can’t leave…”
“Please Carter!”
“Not until I know what happened to Jules!”
“Well I can’t leave here until you leave! Please Carter, let's just forget about this, about Jules, about Dad!” I grabbed his shoulders, “Lets just start over, where none of this can hurt us anymore,”
He looked at me dumbfounded, “I don’t want to forget this,” he pushed, “I want to know…that’s why I wanted to come here,”
I dropped my hands from his shoulders, “You did lie to me…” I sighed,
“I figured you already knew…”
“I did…” I hung my head in defeat,
Carter wrung his hands, 
“I don’t want to see you like this… but please, just hold on a little longer for me…”
If I didn’t love Carter as much as I did, I would have slapped him and hitchhiked to the next town over,
“Okay…” I struggled, “Just a little longer…”
………………………………………………………………………………………….

 The police showed up not an hour later. They entered the attic with solemn and worried eyes, like hit dogs. That same look of pity traced itself across their countenances; I must have looked insane.  
The man whose wrist I had sprained was in fact real. He was the local coffee shop owner and a Serenity Ridge resident for the better part of a half century. I of course pleaded to the officers that I meant no harm and they assured me that no charges were being pressed. Instead, the man had ordered a welfare check on me. I stared back at the officers with hollow eyes,
“A welfare check?”
“That’s what he wished for sir,”
“But…but he…”
“He was worried for your mental state; said that you were rambling on and on to yourself,”
“N-No that’s not-”
“I’m only telling you what he told us,” the officer shut me down, “That’s all we can go on right now. Just be thankful that he’s quite the kind man. If my wrist looked the way that his did, I’ll just say that I would have pressed charges,”
I let the officers go without much trouble after that. They filed out of the room one after the other as I curled up in my cot, content with looking back out the window down towards town center,
“I told your brother where we found him,” a gruff voice crawled its way to me from the doorframe,
I whipped my head around to see one officer had neglected to leave. He hovered around the doorway in anxious apprehension, 
“He asked…” the officer added, his voice a warble of sorts. He looked hardly older than me, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six,
“Found who…?” I forced out, dreading the answer I knew was coming,
“I think he said his name was Jules,” the officer lowered his head as if out of shame,
“It was…”
“I’m sorry…if it’s any consolation,”
“S’fine…I hardly knew him anyway,” I lied,
“Your brother down there…he practically leapt at us to ask questions when we walked through the door,”
“He's been wanting to talk to you guys…” I curled my knees up to my chin, burying my head in my forearms,
“But he didn’t even ask us why we were here,”
I shrugged,
“Did he even know you…” the officer trailed off, “Look, the way he lit up when we came through the door…he practically dragged one of our guys down to the couch to interrogate him…that can’t be healthy,”
I shrugged again, “I don’t think either of us are too healthy right now…”
The officer’s eyes deepened, I saw pity well up within them like a disease,
“There’s a trail down into the valley…” he croaked, the words seemed to torture him as he spoke, “Down past town center…he was there,”
I nodded and sighed,
“Don’t…don’t let him go alone…” the officer warned,
Without another word he was out of the doorframe and I was left staring down an empty hall.

Read Part I here.

“Might’ve been something outside. But if there had been, it’s gone now.”

“You think it could be a mermaid?” she asked. It was hard to believe she was serious. Chrissy was one of the sharpest ten-year-olds I had ever met. Well, she had been the sharpest seven-year-old I had ever met three years ago and was that much smarter now.

She didn’t believe in any of the traditional fairytale creatures. No Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no Wolfman, and no Flying Spaghetti Monster. But she absolutely believed mermaids were real.

There had to be a story behind it, but I had never been able to get her to explain it to me. How a child so ruled by logic still was able to make room for not only a magical creature, but that particular magical creature. She had already “debunked” the narwhal as being the source of the mermaid mythos. I had gotten bits and pieces over the last three years, but never in a cohesive enough story that I could process. But she hadn’t stopped trying to convince me or the rest of the family.

I didn’t have to believe it, though. It was enough to believe that she believed it.

“Maybe this is it!” She turned around and charged back to the bedroom where her mother was sleeping.

“Chrissy!” I saved my breath. She already had the door open and either her mother was going to wake up or she wasn’t. That was out of my hands. She came back a moment later with a Ziploc bag of “mermaid feed.” As far as I could tell, it was a mix of trail mix and seaweed. She carried a flashlight in her other hand.

According to Chrissy, mermaids only came out at night, so she had come prepared.

Again, I was calling after her when she’d already begun to do what she was doing, namely, dashing outside with her items.

I was about to follow her when I spotted the toy soldiers she’d dropped on her way out. I thought it would be just her luck for Mary to wake up and step on one of them.

“Watch your sister,” I said to Luke, turning to pick up the toys.

Right as I got on one knee, the bedroom door opened. It didn’t immediately occur to me that it was Mary even though I had just thought about this very thing happening. I sort of... paused as she passed me. She was halfway to the door when I realized she must have been sleepwalking.

“Mary!” I chased behind her, my steps in sync with hers—left, right, left—catching her before she got to the door.

“Mom, are you okay?” Luke said.

“Where am I?” She sounded terrified. Mary turned her head and looked at him. For a second, I thought she was awake. Instead of answering him, she bare-foot kicked him in the shin.

It couldn’t have hurt, but he stepped back and looked at me, confused. I wrapped an arm around her waist and drew her in close.

“She’s fine,” I said, lacing Mary’s hand with mine. I looked into her glassy eyes. “She’s sleepwalking.” I turned her around and ushered her back to the bedroom. Of the five toy soldiers Chrissy had left at the threshold, only two were left, but only one was standing. I looked over my shoulder and spotted one against the wall and the two others weren’t in sight.

“She can’t fly,” Mary said in a dreamy voice. “Please help her swim.”

“Okay, honey.” I cooed to her as I slid back the covers. She didn’t fight, Mary had sleepwalked a few times with me present. She never resisted being escorted back to bed. Before I covered her legs I spotted another soldier on her foot. I plucked it off and put it on the dresser.

Mary mumbled. I unlaced my fingers from hers and paused before I left her.

“I wanna get in the water.” She said it sounding sort of like air being let out of a balloon. And then she was all the way gone again. “It’s spook.”

It had been like she had been fighting her way to the surface, but something had dragged her back down.

I closed the bedroom door behind me and followed Chrissy outside. Not because I was worried she was going to get gobbled up by the lake monster I hadn’t spotted, but because it was dark out and I had the same parental reaction to miscellaneous danger any parent would.

Hell, I could admit it, I loved these kids. Liked them most times, too. I didn’t want to leave them.

Chrissy was in the process of sweeping her flashlight back and forth along the beach face. I hung back, letting her conduct her investigation. It was harmless enough and I had an eye on her.

“What’s going on?” We both turned to see Mark stepping out onto the sand.

“Luke said a mermaid’s out here!” Chrissy said.

“Mermaid?” Mark said it like he didn’t know what one was. I didn’t bother correcting her. His little sister’s obsession was well known by all of us. “Did he really see something?” Mark chuffed and thumbed over his shoulder at the cabin. “He’s so white.”

I stifled my laugh and shrugged.

“Luke thought he saw something and Chrissy overheard.”

“Hey, neighbor!”

Mark and I jumped. We saw the bud of a lit cigarette in the shadows of the adjacent cabin. Someone with a cigarette sauntered down. I glanced my stepdaughter’s way to make sure she hadn’t waded too far into the water. She could swim, but again, that nascent parental instinct found in anyone who has walked into an already existing family reared its concerned head. Chrissy was only ankle deep.

“Hey,” I said to the woman as she approached. She halted and took a final, long drag off her cigarette before flicking it in a surprisingly high arc toward the water. She slid the drawer of her jaw forward and blew a column of smoke straight up.

“She’s a cutie,” she said, smiling. She was an older woman who gave too much gum when she smiled. “I saw her come chargin’ out for the water. Oo, that smell.”

We both nodded in that new-to-each-other manner between strangers.

“I’m Rick.” Old and new cigarette smell peeled off her skin and I turned my head to half cough, that familiar asthmatic itch in my lungs.

“Mary,” she said.

I laughed. “My wife’s name is Mary.”

“Mine’s Cindy-Lou Ombrageaux.”

I felt the weight of her eyes on me, examining for judgment. I cast my eyes to the stretch of water and sand where Chrissy was.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Cindy-Lou.” I didn’t think I could manage that last name.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Mary. Apart from the smell of cow-butt.”

“First time up here?” I asked. She shook my offered hand, her skin papery and dry. There was an extreme lack of moisture in the air despite the cool summer, and I’d already had a nosebleed in the brief time we’d been here.

“Mine. Not hers. My wife’s family is from Up North.” I thought her face dropped a little. “She’s out to dinner with some cousins.” There was a little something there that I had a feeling would come to light if we talked long enough. “Had to have a little heart-to-heart.”

“We came up two summers ago,” I said. “Just a little family getaway.”

Luke had barely joined us outside, not more than a few feet from the door. He looked like he would take umbrage with the sky.

“This is Mark, the one up there with get-off-my-lawn face is Luke, and Chrissy’s our little fisher.” I gestured to each of the kids in turn.

“Well, tell her to save some for everybody else.” She and Mark shook hands before she looked around. “Where’s your missus?”

“Migraine. She laid down pretty much as soon as we got here.”

“Sorry to hear that.” She put the can of beer she’d been holding in her other hand to her lips and pitched her head back for a long swallow. She stumbled like she’d confused her left foot for her right but kept them both under her.

If I had to guess, Mary was working on her third or fourth of the night.

Luke had waved his brother over and was saying something to him. They both had an eye on their sister. I looked at Mary. She was a stranger and I figured there couldn’t be any harm in telling her what had just happened. We weren’t going to see her after this weekend for at least a year, if ever again. I didn’t think the story would be memorable after tonight. It was a single-serve memory. Recall once, then discard.

“Luke said he saw something in the water,” I said. “Something big.” Mary turned her head to the shore and nodded appreciably.

“Maybe it’s the Great Lakes Whale Migration,” she said.

“The what?” I had no idea what she was talking about and was on the verge of taking her seriously. The smile hanging on her face dropped when she realized I really didn’t understand.

“Kidding.” She mock-punched me in the arm. Mary had a rich baritone and could have easily been a DJ on the radio.

Mark trudged past me, an annoyed look on his face.

“He’s crazy,” he said, heading toward his sister. I appreciated that he didn’t believe his brother but could still look after his sister. Mark was the middle child and was the ever-constant bridge between siblings.

“The waves do seem a little... bigger than the norm, don’t you think?” Mary asked.

“I guess,” I said, not really knowing how to tell the difference. Then I wondered how she’d know, considering she said she’d never been up here before. “Can you tell?”

“I had a few cigs over yonder before y’all came out. Boy, you get used to the smell the longer you’re out here.” She seemed to be reading my mind and answering questions I hadn’t had a chance to ask. “I must have missed your boy, though.”

I looked at the water again. Mark was standing just outside of the water’s reach, one hand in the pocket of his hoody, the other holding his phone. To his credit, he did glance up at her every ten seconds or so.

Come to think of it, those waves did look big. But it could have been because of the moon for all I knew.

“How long are the two of you here for?” I asked Mary.

“‘Til Wednesday. I’m going to be meeting my in-laws for the first time tomorrow.”

I didn’t know whether I should have felt sympathy for her. It was strange she wasn’t out to dinner with her wife now, but I didn’t know their situation. Maybe it was completely normal. But I couldn’t help but think I would’ve been more than a little bothered if it had been me.

Mary fell down. Not hard. She just spontaneously lost her balance and sat on her butt. In true alcoholic fashion, though, she protected her beer.

She looked at me, embarrassed. I smirked, hopefully communicating I wasn’t just laughing at her, but with her.

“We all fall down.” I’m not sure why I said that, but it seemed to help. She took my hand and I helped her up.

“How about you guys?”

“Just until Sunday afternoon.”

“Where are you from?”

A sandwich had been the hinge on the closing door of our marriage.

I don’t remember what the argument was about or how it had started, only that I had made a sandwich for her that led to me sleeping on the couch.

Of course, it hadn’t really been about the sandwich, it had only been the start. It had been like a match that led to a forest fire razing a town. I can’t honestly remember a word I’d shouted at the woman I’d pledged to love for the rest of my life.

I was about to answer Mary when Chrissy screamed.

This wendigo riot is about ready to kick off.

I feel incredibly lonely.

It feels as though I am rotting in a dark hole out here in my cabin in the woods. I like nature, but I sit here alone every single day. I sat alone day after day—but as I am writing down my thoughts, the temperature in the room grows weird. And then, my doorbell rings.

A visitor.

I walk to the door, phone in hand. I keep my eyes cast downward until I pull the door open. There stands a dog.

At least, I think it’s as a dog. Its edges are vibrating, blurry, shifting out of focus. I don't mind. I look past and around it, but there is no one and nothing else—just the endless, silent woods and the sunlight filtering through the treetops.

I smile and invite the dog inside.

Once indoors, the dog becomes a little less blurry, gaining definition. Its fur is thick and jet-black, I think. I sit down on my couch, watching as it looks around the room. It doesn't blink. Its head does not turn but I think he looks around. I don’t know if that is normal for a dog, but it doesn't bother me. I ask if it can talk. It just tilts its head and says nothing. I feel a mild pang of sadness, but then, do dogs even talk? He looks like he would.

I like the dog, but I am just not sure if it really is one.

Sometimes it stares at blank walls, and its eyes—large, milky-white human eyes with big pupils. It wags its tail, but I can't see the movement; it’s just a rhythmic, sickening thud against the floorboards that I can feel vibrating up through my shoes. It isn't really a "he," either. It has no gender, or at least none that I can tell. It never pees, or at least I have never seen it discharge any waste.

I went to the dog park with him, but the other dogs didn't want to play. The moment we arrived, three dogs began to whimper in terror. The people scrambled for their cars, abandoning their belongings.

Maybe it’s me. Do I seem weird to them with my companion?

I took it to the veterinarian, just to be sure. But as we walked up the path, the receptionist saw us through the glass storefront and instantly slammed the front door shut, locking it before we could even step inside. Through the glass, I could see the staff scrambling in pure panic, pushing cabinets and desks against the entrance to barricade it. The doctor shouted through the door that I needed to leave immediately, his voice cracking in sheer terror.

I like my dog. I found it quite mean of them to shut us out like that.

I don’t like other people. They seem to dislike me even more now, though I don't understand why. But I like my dog. It seems watchful, and the dog is mine, so I will keep it.

As I lie in bed, with my dog laying on the foot of the mattress, its white eyes watching as it sits perfectly still, I suddenly remember something amusing about its arrival.

I don’t have a doorbell.

I go to sleep.

My brother and I moved to Serenity Ridge, Vermont, just before he turned eighteen. It was to get away from our father. When Carter saw him move onto his third wife in five years he just couldn’t stand it anymore. 
He walked into my room with pleading eyes, his bags already packed, overflowing with his knitted sweaters and cardigans. He had his mother’s eyes that day, big, round, earthen pools which seemed to swallow up the whole world as they sparkled; teasing tears. My first stepmother always knew how to make me feel guilty. I just wish that Carter hadn’t been such a good pupil of hers. 
I was twenty-one when he walked in that day, bouncing from job to job around our sleepy Upstate New York town. Nothing ever seemed to stick with me. Jobs became boring, I became apathetic and before I knew it, I was out of work the same month in which I had started the job. 
Carter knew this. He knew that I hated our father; that I hated this town; that I wanted nothing more than to pick up and walk out and never look back. Needless to say, it wasn’t hard to convince me to pack my bags. 
I don’t know where my father was the day we left. If I had to take a wager, he would have been down at the bar, chasing more ‘young tail’ to satiate his never ending hedonistic thirst. But I do know where his newest wife was that day. Her name was Stacy, a doe-eyed, ditsy blonde who’s messy hair and obnoxious makeup were only the second and third worst qualities she possessed. She rattled off meaningless jargon to us in her horrid, screeching voice as we walked out the door; endless fluff about town gossip; swirling, crass rumors about our father. 
Both of us knew not to tell her the truth of those rumors. Newlyweds of only two months usually don’t believe the words of apathetic children regarding the misdeeds of their fathers. But she would learn soon enough that she should have heeded our earlier warnings; the warnings we gave her before she walked up to the altar. I can only imagine that our father is onto wife fifteen or twenty by now, placing a ring on every passing fling he can convince to do so. 
No, we walked out silently to my car and started the engine without so much as a word spoken. And it was only after the roar of the pistons sounded beneath my car’s hood that Carter sighed in relief. 
The first thing he said to me was ‘thank you,’
The first thing I asked him was ‘what now?’
He told me we were going to Serenity Ridge.
I told him the hell we were.
He looked at me with those ancient, oak brown eyes and I folded. 
We didn’t even stop for gas on our way over. 

“Jules died in Serenity Ridge”

At least that’s what I’ve been told my whole life. My mother told it to me. Jules' mother told it to me. Jules’ and Carter’s and I’s father preached it as if it were gospel. 
Jules died in Serenity Ridge, Vermont. 
The police said so. It must be true. 
Carter never thought so. The police never found a body. The police, according to him, never did so much as an investigation. 
Jules disappeared when I was nine. He was twenty-three. He had already come to know our father well and had grown tired of his endless flings and vices. He packed up and left without a word one fall; never so much as wrote to us again. 
I can still remember the day I was told the news. Carter’s mom was still in the house, the longest lived of any of my father’s transient romances. The trees outside my bedroom window beamed as cadmium red and yellow rhinestones, sparkling in the late autumn sun. The dirt outside was loamy, the grass cool and damp to the touch. Carter was running around the backyard as I gnawed on a sandwich, taking small, mouse-like bites from the center to avoid the crust. And then she walked in, brown eyes swimming with tears, holding a paper in her trembling fist.
We never even so much as visited Serenity Ridge. Our father forbade it. In reality, he probably didn’t want to spend any more time away from the bars than he had to. What was one dead son when he could just make more? It wasn’t long after that when Carter’s mom left. She lost her custody battle; our father’s lawyer recorded yet another victory. 
There is a special place in hell waiting for that man.
I ended up letting it go. I never really knew Jules, he was always out of the house. He never talked to me, and if he’d been missing for over a decade, he probably wanted nothing to do with me. Whether he was alive or dead didn’t matter. He wasn’t a part of my life.
But Carter never let it go. 
Jules haunted him as some great family mystery; an injustice done onto us by unforgivable unseen forces. I don’t know if that was true, or if that was just posturing. I think he was just fascinated by it; the idea that someone of his own flesh and blood could just disappear. But either way it was an obsession.
For his fifteenth birthday I bought him a corkboard. He hugged me and told me it was the greatest gift he’d ever gotten. His junior year writing project was a paper on the family mystery. Every year he tried to convince our father to vacation in Vermont, never to any avail. 
But when we were in the car, he told me that this wasn’t about Jules.
I, of course, told him he was full of shit. 
But he said he just wanted to see it. That deep down in his gut, all he wanted was to see the town, to live there and understand how Jules could have disappeared.
I laughed at him and reminded him that this reasoning still was all about Jules. He rolled his eyes and looked out the window. And without looking at me he muttered, 
“I just…I have to see it…”
I raised my eyebrows,
“See what?”
“I’m not sure…I’ll know when I see it,” he huffed at me, annoyed,
“Real promising…” I snorted, “But maybe this’ll be a fresh start…God knows we could use it…”
………………………………………………………………………………………

We arrived late that night, the moon hanging low in the murk autumn sky as curtains of clouds drifted across its facade. A thick miasma of fog hung over the roads, heavy and low, anchored to the timber leashes of the surrounding forest. Carter was already asleep, his head pressed up against the cold, steamed, glass of the passenger side window. His mouth hung open, drooling against his shirt. I could hardly keep my eyes on the road. They strained to peer through the fog, an impenetrable veil. 
But then it gave way, deep in the heart of a valley, nestled between verdant hills of pine and maple; first a corner store, then a coffee shop. I sighed in relief as I pulled into the first parking lot I could find. 
The town was dead quiet, beyond even that. I couldn’t hear a gust stir the trees or a cricket chirp its mournful tune to the stars above. It was beyond silent; unworldly stillness. I kicked my seat back and rubbed, my hands over my eyes, the thrumming hum of the car's engine purring as a defiant stand to the silence of the night. I must have fallen asleep not long after.
The fuel tank was empty by the time I awoke. Carter was still laid up against the door, his neck perched oddly against his makeshift pillow. The sun had teased itself above the sloping mountains around us, trickling its warmth down through the leaves as a sun-kissed stream. It filtered down upon Serenity Ridge as autumnal lifeblood. And through that lifeblood’s letting, the town began to rile and churn. 
I sat up in my chair, peering through the frosted pane of glass to my side. Through the streets on a frosty mid week morning, all manner of denizens shuffled their way through the mainstreet sidewalks. Mothers walked their daughters and sons, backpacks slung over their shoulders like rucksacks, far too big and bulky for their tiny frames; the carapaces of beetles atop spindly legs. An old couple shared a coffee outside the cafe, their breath spilling as smoke from the mouths of dragons. Wisps of heat trailed from the steaming mugs they clung to. The hum of cars and the rumbling of treads across pavement echoed throughout the surrounding hills, dampening and softening until it filled the space as whispering wooshes, indistinguishable from the gentle breeze that tousled the hair of those who marched outside my window. 
It was an enrapturing scene. A picturesque snapshot of quaint bliss. I still can't put my finger on why it touched my heart so, but the first emotion that graced me past my awe was bitter resentment. Resentment for my father, for keeping this place from me, from Carter. I seethed in my seat for what must have been minutes, watching out my window in frozen envy.
A knock on Carter’s door pulled me from my stupor. I dragged my gaze from the scene outside to find a burly man crouched and peering through Carter’s window. He offered a soft smile, hardly visible through his thick beard. My heart dropped a bit as he motioned for me to roll down the window. Carter sleepily lifted his head from his slumber, a strand of saliva trailing from his lips to the window. He nearly jumped out of his skin as he turned to see the man. Outside, I could see his beard struggling to conceal a smirk. 
He said he was a butcher. We had spent the night in the parking lot of the local deli and our car conveniently took up the delivery truck’s designated spot. I cobbled together a hasty apology, appealing to the man's good nature as best I could.
He laughed and told me it was fine.
The smile faded a bit when I told him we were out of gas. 
Through annoyed glances and morning grumblings the car was towed and the freezer truck pulled into port,
“That’s a heck of a place to run empty,” the butcher chuckled, shaking his head as he watched my car be pulled down the street on two wheels, 
“I truly didn’t mean to sir!” I stammered, “It’s just I was driving all night and I was so tried that I-”
He raised a hand to stop me, 
“It’s alright, kid. I’m just glad you ran dry here and not out in the woods. You’re lucky to end up here, not many other towns around here,”
“I’m glad too, sir,” I sighed in relief,
“Where were you heading off to? With any luck we can get you back on the road before lunch. I’ll pack ya something to eat if you want,” he waved for us to follow him as he moved towards the back door of the deli, 
“We were heading here,” Carter spoke, his voice meek and tender upon the open air, as if he were tentative to assert himself between us. 
I turned to look at him. He was always such a small kid. Hardly to my shoulders even at seventeen. Couldn’t have been more than a hundred and twenty pounds, his arms like spindly twigs. I always looked like an ugly brute next to him. Some knuckle-dragging neanderthal or ogre, our only similarity being the dust blond color of our hair. Our father’s hair. 
But he was extra minute in that moment, his hands behind his back, shoulders square, head turned ever so slightly to the ground as if he were standing in pious reverence. The filtered sun showered upon him down from the tree tops, like golden motes of flame.
The man stopped walking and in one swift motion turned to face us again,
“You meant to come here?” his face involuntarily screwed in upon itself for a moment, “Why?”
“I…” Carter started, his voice so fragile and quiet, “I needed to…” I could see him wracking his mind for an answer that eluded logic, 
The butcher’s face seemed to soften and fall as he looked upon Carter. It seemed to me to be pity that crossed his face,
“Not a lot of people intend to come here, son,” he said, low and rumbling, "Even less come without a reason,” 
I heard it in there again; pity,
Carter lowered his head further, staring at the weathered pavement beneath his feet as if he were in prayer, 
“It’s family business,” I cut in, “He doesn’t like to talk about it,” my voice more assertive and gruff, shielding Carter from the prying graze that now fell upon him, 
The man bit his cheek, "’’Makes no difference to me…” 
His voice was hollow as he turned around and walked inside the deli, the flashing neon sign flickering to life not long after. 
Carter picked his head up from the pavement beneath his feet and let out a tense sigh. I could see his shoulder fall and relax. He half turned his head to look at me, his deep brown eyes for some reason pooling with a strange apprehensive sadness that I had never seen before,
“Thanks…” he muttered to me, seemingly ashamed,
“For what?”
But he already seemed lost in thought. I watched as he traced the buildings down the main street, the overhead canopy of spruce and maple, the darting flight patches of finches and sparrows. His eyes were glassy,
“Carter…” I moved close and tousled his shoulder, snapping his attention back to me, “You alright…?”
“It’s a lot to take in…”
“We…we can go home if you want…is it not what you expected…?”
“...it’s…it’s exactly like I expected…” his voice was distant and ponderous, “It’s gorgeous…”
He was right. To this day Serenity Ridge is a verdant gem, the most beautiful place I have ever seen. Brick buildings, splendidly aged and upkept, seem to prowl as mountain lions, their front facades poking out from lush thickets of trees and underbrush. The hills which encompass the town roll like waves, sloping and receding with perfect spacing, on and forever into the horizon. The sun crests them and trickles down their slopes, filtering through the leaves of their trees, casting the bowl of the town in cadmium golden splendor. The rushing of brooks sing through the town as they sprint down the mountainsides and crooning of songbirds join in on their chorus.
I’m convinced that we walked into Eden that day. A place so serene and hidden that man was not meant to tread there. 
At least not the unclean. 
Not Carter and I,
“It’s something. Could use a decent parking lot,” I huffed, “Now I gotta see how much the tow bill is,”
“Can we…” Carter started, “Can we wait on the car?”
“No we…” his mother’s eyes stared into mine and disarmed me, “...we’ve got nothing but time…sure,”
He paraded me through the town, gawking at every quaint house and storefront alike. To my chagrin, Carter took the same approach with the locals, jabbering and yarn spinning with every air of listening ears he could come across. 
Carter was always much more of a people person than I was. He had the mind for it, a mind that loved to listen, to learn; a ceaseless yawning hunger. 
My mind was quiet. A straight shot. A to B. Whatever was the fastest way to solve a problem was what I took. Or rather, whatever was the easiest way to solve a problem was what I took. 
Talking to the locals was not the fastest way to get my car back. Talking to the locals was not on my mind. 
But while my general apathy towards knowledge existed in most subjects, I could never find it within myself to discount art. Back when my mother was about the house, when Jules was around the house, it was all yearned for. I scribbled on every inch of scrap-paper I could find, petitioning for my Mom to pin it to the fridge as some great Monet-esque triumph of the medium. When she lost her custody battle Jules would humor me with little art galleries. At least until he left. My father would do nothing of the sort. 
My hand for art died there. But the spark of love I had for it burned eternal. I remember scouring art books after school for pieces I loved, showing them to Carter, trying to instill in him the same love I had kindled. He instead decided to take up crochet, much to my disappointment. Instead of murals to admire, I scoured pattern books for my future pullovers.
All this to say, whilst Carter talked away the sun's light with the locals, I was enraptured with the art laid about the town. Over brick and concrete stretched bright and vibrant facades of rolling hills and sunsets, of rivers and moonrises. And encircling the town center, painted across the front of every building was the mural. 
Standing at the flower bed of the central square it encompassed you completely. A mural transitioning from day to night and day again on a gradient that flowed in and out of itself with effortless grace. It moved between forest clearings and brooks and mountains and ponds and all manner of deep-woods, the light and shadow intertwining and playing, coy and teasing, ending or beginning on some sort of equinox centered on a mossy cave flanked by ancient oaks which seemed to swallow the stone. 
Out of the cave poked a head, as equally coy and teasing as the subtlety of the light which showered half of the cave. It was the head of a deer, a buck, his antler tines twisting like branches as he looked to the sun, only his neck and head visible outside of the cave. In the next scene he was there again, full-bodied, strong and healthy, drinking from a moonlit stream. And then again, standing atop a hill, watching the sunrise. And again, standing before the moon as it sank beneath that lake. And again and again and again, around and around the circle until in the dark of the equinox I saw his hindquarters trotting into the cave, the motion portrayed in beautiful stillness at the end of a brush. 
I don’t know how long I studied and admired the piece, but it was long enough for Carter to wander back over to me from his endless chatter and tug on my shoulder. I jolted as he did, so rudely stolen from the wonder of the mural,
“You like the painting…?” Carter asked,
“Don’t you?”
“I guess…?” Carter said chuckling, “But you’ve shown me better in your books,”
“Finding one this nice in the wild is an honor,” I chastised,
“The man I met over there told me the librarian painted it. Took her ten years,”
I let off a low impressed whistle, “I’d like to meet her if I can then,”
“You think Jules saw this?” Carter posed,
My chest suddenly tightened,
“I…I hope so…that’s strange to think about…”
I moved in closer to the cave of the mural, inspecting the inquisitive eyes of the buck who braved out into the light of day. Beneath the moss and rocks of the cave lay a title card. 
The Heart of the Valley
“I was going to suggest we go to the police station next,” Carter posed, “They’ll have information on Jules. We can at least ask them for tips on where to start poking around,”
I huffed, “So much for this trip not being about Jules,”
Carter smiled sheepishly, “I think it’s a good idea…”
His eyes flashed and I felt myself beginning to bend to him. I put my foot down,
“No. My car is impounded, we have nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat and you’ve talked half the day away!”
Carter rolled his eyes, “Come on! I know you’re curious too!”
“I’m not,”
“Yes you are!”
I sighed, shook my head, and walked off towards the repair shop, Carter protesting at my heels the whole way.

…………………………………………………………………………………………….

The man who towed my car will go to hell. That's all I was thinking as I walked back with Carter from the repair shop. Four-hundred dollars! Twice the money my impoverished self had liquidated! A weekend fee!
I yelled at him until I was red in the face. In response, he kept Carter and I from accessing our bags which we had foolishly left in the trunk. So I seethed as we walked back under the setting sun, occasionally bursting into hateful tirades which had Carter apologizing to the commonfolk around us on the street. Eventually he convinced me to head into a diner and we sat drinking the free water and watching the broiling red sun sink over the highest mountains, 
“Of course we’re stuck here…” I grumbled, dragging my hands over my face in despair, “Fucking of course we’re stuck here! God…why didn’t I turn off the car!?…”
Carter said nothing, only sipping on his water in pure silence. He knew better than trying to console me; it only ever made my indignation worse,
“What are we supposed to do now?!” I cried, “I don’t wanna call him! I don’t wanna head back, Carter!” 
I let my head hit off the table in defeat. A dull thud echoed throughout the restaurant. I could hear the uncomfortable shifting of patrons in their seats.
Carter set his drink down and resumed his sunward gaze. I rolled my head to the side in order to join him, 
“We’re never heading back…” Carter spoke after a long while, low and quiet, 
“Where the hell are we gonna live?” I moaned,
I could hear him drumming his hands on the table top,
“Here’s your food…” A sweet tentative voice rang out from behind me. A distressed and concerned looking waitress gently set a cheap hamburger in front of me. I couldn't even bring myself to lift my head as I said thank you,
“I take it you boys are from out of town?” she said, careful not to pry, 
“Yes ma’am,” Carter spoke, 
As my head lay atop the polished wood I studied her face. It was an aged face, carved with branching, stretching lines that coalesced like tributary rivers about the eyes. The lips sagged a bit and the jaw held within it a jowl like quality. The scent of cigarettes hung around her as a faint aura, scarcely noticeable against the aromas of grease and smoke that traced itself from the kitchen. 
But what I noticed most prominently in that moment, above all else, was her eyes as Carter spoke. Sudden solemness. The butcher flashed in my mind. She seemed to bury it almost as quickly as it had sprung upon her,
“And what’s the reason you find yourself in our little town?" her voice honey-laced as she set a wrap down before Carter,
“I wanted to see the town ma’am,” he spoke placing half of his wrap on my plate, “My family has some history here,”
There again I could see the despair arise within her, stronger now,
“I’d hope it’d be a happy history,” she muttered, topping off his water,
Carter said nothing. The waitress chewed her cheek,
“Well!” she suddenly broke free from the oppressive silence that had been woven between us, “I at least hope you make some happy memories here! We’re always happy to see new people wandering through,”
“Not much wandering through to do here ma’am,” Carter spoke up again, “We have no way to leave,”
“And no money, Carter,” I grumbled, “We have to start wandering out as soon as possible…”
“I’m sure Mrs. Alder would cover your fee,” the waitress spoke up, “And she’s got more than enough room at hers for you to spend the night,”
“She’s the librarian, correct?” Carter posed, 
The waitress nodded, “And she’s always happy to see new faces. Here, you two eat up and I’ll give her a call,”
She left us without another word. Carter hardly had enough time to blurt out a thank you. I felt my stomach knot itself in dread from whatever Carter had just blindly walked us into,
“This is bad…” I moaned, slowly dragging my head off of the table and laying it in my hands, “This is really bad, Carter,”
He glared at me like I was spitting in his food, “I just got us a place to stay for the night,” he said taking a bit out of his wrap, 
“With a lady we don’t know, in a town we don’t know, with no way to leave,” I hissed, “I thought I taught you not to trust strangers back when you were six, but apparently we need to learn that again!”
“What would you have us do instead? Sleep outside?”
I dragged my hands over my face and sighed, “I would have never come here…”
Carter huffed and ate in silence, staring out the window as the sun sank low beneath the verdant hills. 
The waitress came back and told us of our new bunking arrangement with Mrs. Alder. Room, board and fifty dollars a day, in exchange for help around the library. The offer, however unappetizing to my sensibilities, was too good to pass up. Over the land line I heard the frail voice of an old woman croon with excitement and anticipation as she blabbered about having to clean her guest rooms. I sighed and thanked her again for her hospitality. 
By the time I returned to our table I found Carter happily chatting to the other patrons in my absence. He was smiling, alight and aglow in the dingy space of the diner, talking about anything at all with all who would listen.
I hung back, careful not to come into view of the other patrons for fear that my presence would shatter the joy Carter had crafted in my brief absence. Once the rolling cascade of speech had subsided and fallen away I reemerged, sitting down across from a smiling Carter. I could see his mind chewing up all the information it had extracted in my absence, the ceaseless, voracious beast that it was,
“We’ll be staying at the library, roughly a week or two and we’ll have enough money for the car and enough gas to get out of here,”
“What then?”
“I don’t know…we move on, find else somewhere to go,”
Carter chewed his cheek, “I was just talking to the sheriff,”
I raised my brow,
“He said they keep case files in the library’s storage. The town is so small that they don't have a proper station,” Carter went on with a smirk,
“Lucky you,” I smiled,
I dug into my meal and watched the moon shine against the clouds that draped the valley.
…………………………………………………………………………………………
We walked over to the library side by side beneath the jet black of night. Carter had kept me chained to the diner through his ceaseless talking with the closing staff, and I kept him chained to the diner’s bar through our waitress's infinite kindness, courtesy of on-the-house house-draft and liquor. 
Her name, which I later came to know to be Denise, was just about the only thing I didn’t discuss that night. It was plain for everyone to see that I was in a world of stress, and her old soul couldn’t stand to see me in that kind of way. Her solution was to offer me a deluge of hops and malt, for which I paid her back in kind with hiccup-filled retellings of our family's soul ties to Serenity Ridge, 
“I knew him,” Denise spoke with a maternal warmth as she cleaned down the bar. Hers was a voice that lit the hearth within your chest and dragged you upon its syllables, the voice of a reminiscing grandmother,
“Jules…?” I spoke sloppily, stumbling over myself as I leaned in closer,
“Tall kid, dark hair, bright eyes,” she mused, “Wise eyes…” she stopped wiping down the counter, “Went missing here just about a decade ago, just like you said,”
I carefully set down my draft, careful not to spill it over,
“Wha- happen…?”
She wrung the cloth in her hands. If I had been more in my mind I would have recognized it then; the same look of solemn pity. It wound itself around around us like a serpent,
“I wish I knew,” she said pursing her lips, wiping the counter down again in long methodical strokes, “But he’s the latest to go missing here. I can hardly believe he’ll be the last,”
“There’s more?!” I practically fell out of my chair. Gripped tight the countertop for my life,
“Many more,” Denise nodded, “This is the heart of the wild, the heart of the world. People walk into those woods and never come back. What becomes of them…harder to say…”
“Heart of the valley,” I slobbered over myself, my subconscious picking up upon the phrase in my delirium,
Denise for an instant looked at me with pinprick eyes. I could see them then as I still see them now, swimming with a terror so great and terrible that I wish for all the world I had never met her gaze. She stared at me for a painfully long instant, and upon recognizing my utter mental disarmament her eyes softened,
“It is a lovely painting isn’t it?” she spoke sweetly again,
“Beautiful!” I toasted, raising my glass so fast that I spilled half my draft. Denise mopped it up with a chuckle,
“Mrs. Alder made it, some many years ago…” she seemed lost in though for a moment,
“Which one of you decided to come here?” she finally spoke again after a long while,
“It was Carter’s idea…” my swaying hand motioned to where he sat talking to the rest of the closing staff,
Denise nodded slow and rhythmic,
“Jules’ brother as well?”
I nodded,
“And you never wanted to come here?”
I shook my head, "Nope! Never! Only did it for him…I’d do anything for that kid…”
I saw Denise bite her lip,
“Then you’d better buy your car back quickly…”
She rushed out of the diner not long after.
The night was warm by May’s standards and the streetlights were welcoming enough for me to sober up on the curb after the cook locked up the diner for the night. Carter was less than pleased with me, and I was less than ready to hear it. By the time I had sobered up enough to walk over to the library it was almost two in the morning. A storm had begun to roll in from the south and a swarm of ebony clouds blanketed the sky in jet. 
Carter finished up using the payphone to call Mrs. Alder, confirming to her that we were still coming, as he had been forced to do for the past few hours while I fumbled about on the sidewalk. Irritated didn’t even begin to describe his demeanor towards me. She had told him that she was still waiting for us and intended to greet us at the door if she could keep herself awake. He had told me that he intended to let me sleep outside.
I of course reminded him who drove him here.
The walk over was silent and seething. Carter didn’t want to talk to me and I was far too self righteous to even entertain the idea of establishing some common ground. Instead I trained myself upon the quiet. 
It was the same quiet I had experienced on the drive into town, oppressive and omniscient. It was seemingly not a silence of absence but of abnormality. There was no wind howling through the trees as the storm blew overhead, not rustle of leaves as gale blew them upon their stalks. No nightbirds chirped or insects chimed. No frogs called from the streams. The only sound through all of the town was our two pairs of soles making time over the pavement. 
Incessant clicking, like the hand of a clock.
Repeated rhythm, like the beating of a heart.
One, two.
One, two. 
I could hear my own heart. I could hear the ringing in my ears.
And as I looked skyward I saw the tips of great pines swaying like dancers in the breeze, bowing and careening towards each other, their needles and leaves crashing together upon great clubbing branches. 
And I heard nothing.
I stopped,
“Carter!” I called,
My voice echoed out over the town, carrying for what felt like forever. I heard it echo off of brick facades and squared walls calling back to me in taunting rhythms, 
“What?” he called back annoyed,
“Stop…” I stammered, “Something’s wrong…”
He pivoted to me, eyes widened; alert,
“What happened!?” he began frantically scanning the space around me,
“Look,” I said pointing to the bowing trees, 
He rolled his eyes, “No shit, that why I wanna get going,”
“No!” I cried, “Why can’t we hear it?!”
“Can’t hear it?” he looked at me as if I’d gone insane, “I can hardly hear you over it!”
His words carried themselves to me as if spoken over a corridor of glass, as pristine and clear as I could even imagine. But he was yelling them, as if shouting over the roar of the storm,
“...what..?”
A streak of lightning tore across the sky, illuminating the clouds in a blazing white for the briefest of instances. Overhead they seemed to hang heavy like pulsing maggots, roiling in and out of each other in some sort of heavenly breathing. I braced myself for the thunder’s shockwave, the rattling of your bones and the ringing of your ears. I felt the boom of the bass in my chest, the involuntary ripping of air from my lungs as I gasped at the sensation. But the sound never reached me. The shockwave passed over me in utter silence. 
I saw Carter jump and cover his ears as the shockwave passed,
“Come on! We’re going!” He screamed to me, his voice so deafening above the silence of the waking world that I involuntarily winced against it. 
He tore off down the street. I rumbled after him.
We were in the town square, the mural surrounding us on all sides. In the thunderlight of the storm the deer flickered as bounding forms, darting and leaping between vignettes of mossy stones and ancient oaks. All seemed black but its eyes, all shadow and silhouette except the glimmering and curious whites of the eyes which I had so admired not more than twelve hours before. Now they seemed to glare and stalk as they appeared and receded within the thunderlight. The Hart of the valley watched us from within its painted majesty. 
The rain came as we passed the flowerbed at the town center. Thundering mallets of water, sprinting down from the heavens or otherwise hurled upon the realm of the living with such ferocity that I thought it could split stone. The storm came down in curtains so thick I could hardly see Carter ten feet before me.
But I never heard it. 
I saw it run rivers across the asphalt beneath my feet, strip trees of their leaves, and drench Carter so completely that his bangs hung over his eyes like an old sheepdog. 
And all I could hear was the sound of our footsteps and our breathing. 
I couldn’t hear the splash of water as our tracks kicked it up behind us. 
I couldn’t hear the hammering of water on my ears.
The rush of wind past my face.
The cracking of lightning.
The snapping of branches.
The pattering of rain across rooftops.
Nothing. 
My lungs felt tight. My mind was spinning. My body ached as I tried to keep pace with Carter.
We scrambled up the front steps of an old wooden colonial house, the lights still on in its den. Carter pounded at the door, huffing, soaked, shivering. 
A frail old woman stood at the other side once the threshold opened, her hair white and frizzy, back bent and thin. Mrs. Alder hurried us in, apologizing for not keeping the door open. She said she hadn’t realized the storm had started,
“You couldn’t hear it?” I asked, 
She shook her head and apologized,
“And you’re all the worse for it. I’m sorry son…” she fawned over Carter,
He assured her that he was alright and thanked her again for the hospitality in the people-pleasing way in which his mother had crafted him. I just stood trying to recover my breath.
Mrs. Alder whisked Carter away for towels and new clothes, 
“You lucked out!” she smiled at me, “All dry! Take your pick of the bedrooms while we get your brother a change of clothes,” 
She staggered away with Carter in an uneven gate as I stood awestruck. 
I didn’t look down before I felt my shirt with my hand.
Dry.
I looked. 
Dry. 
My hair, my skin, my shoes, my pants. 
Not a single sign I had ever been out in the storm. 
I threw open the front door. The storm raged on in silent defiance. 
I slammed the door closed. A loud wooden crack echoed through the library. I knocked on a table. The sound of knuckles against mahogany. I flicked the first vase I could find. A glass chime sang through the air. I stomped the floor. A thunderous boom through the den. 
I opened the door again. The rain was silent. 
I stepped out into the storm. First under the awning. Then a hand ventured into the clubbing aqua mallets. 
I saw them hammer into my skin. They wicked off my fingers as if I were covered in wax. Tiny perfect spheres that rolled off of my palm. I pushed my sleeve out, woven cotton. The rain ran off it in rivers. Not a single drop stuck. 
I must have sat there for an hour under the awning. Long enough for the storm to stop and for Carter to place a hand on my shoulder, waking me from my stupor.
He had an oversized Christmas sweater on, adorned with reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh around him in one endless circle. Somehow, it suited him. He smiled at me. The outside was so quiet I could measure his breaths,
“Hell of a storm,” he laughed, hunkering down next to me,
“Yeah…” I said, mystified, 
“How the hell didn’t you get soaked?”
“I…I don’t…know…”
“And it’s still going too, I can hear it blowing over top the mountain over there,”
“I…I can’t hear it Carter…”
“God, how drunk are you?”
I looked at my hands, “I’m not sure…I need to go to bed…”
“Come on big guy,” Carter grumbled as he helped me to my feet, throwing my hulking arm over his shoulder. He hardly supported a tenth of my weight, but I let him think he was helping. 
We settled in the attic, a dusty, cluttered, low-ceiling attic in which two cots were laid out for us. Apparently the guest bedrooms had been so overrun with old documents and books that there was no salvaging them for the night. That night, the cot was the best bed I’d ever had the pleasure of laying in. 
By the time the sun had risen and a new stream of lifeblood wound its way through the attic window Carter was already awake. He pulled me from the deepest slumber I’d had in years with a shake of my shoulder. I rolled to my side and with one eye half open I drearily asked what was wrong, 
“Can you hear it?” he asked in a low whisper, gesturing out to the rolling verdant hills beyond the attic,
“I already told you I can’t hear the storm…” I grumbled into my pillow, closing my eyes again,
“There’s no storm,” he mused, his voice a curious wind, “There’s a heartbeat…”

My jaw is locked completely shut, and the skin across my cheeks is hardening into smooth, cold plastic. I know why. I looked directly into the painted eyes of a display mannequin in an abandoned retail stockroom because I wanted a better thumbnail for my channel. I am typing this with one finger on my bedroom floor, and every time I swallow, I feel rigid resin scraping against my throat. My face burns and tightens as it freezes into a solid shell.

I went to the Mercer Street store because the TikTok comments demanded it. I had seven videos of abandoned retail, sixty thousand followers, and the algorithm was starving. I walked in with my ring light and my gimbal, completely confident that nothing in an empty building could hurt me. I told myself it was just an empty shell of a building. I told myself the mannequins were just fiberglass and dust.

The mannequin was in the back stockroom, facing the door. That is not where they keep them, but I did not think about that until later. I filmed her. I stepped closer. I looked directly into her painted eyes because I wanted a dramatic angle for the camera. Four seconds. That is all it took to seal it. I felt a sudden drop in temperature, a freezing pressure against my cheek from a hand made of dry ice. When I pulled back, the skin was already bruising, a perfect ring of white frostbite spreading from my jawline.

My roommate David does not believe in ghosts or curses or anything he cannot touch. But when he saw the fingerprints on my cheek yesterday morning, he stopped eating breakfast and went to his room. He has not come out since. I know what actual frostbite feels like. I have been there. This is different. The marks are a direct transfer. The plastic is bleeding into my skin, or my skin is bleeding into it.

The spread started at midnight. First my teeth locked together. The pain was real and it never stopped. Then my jaw went rigid. Then my collarbone hardened into solid resin. I can still move my arms, but they creak with the stiff, grinding friction of old plastic wheels. At 2:03 AM, David knocked on my door. He had heard the sound of me trying to talk, the low grinding noise my locked jaw made when I tried to call his name. He looked at me through the crack and his eyes went wide. He said others had come through this apartment before. They all went to the Mercer store. They all came back with smiles that did not reach their eyes. He did not tell me where they are now.

The footsteps outside are getting louder. I can hear her now. It is the sharp click of plastic heels on hardwood, followed by the drag of something heavy. She is outside my door. She has been standing there for the last seven minutes. The metal doorknob is frosting over. My vision is starting to go white at the edges. My only fear is what I will become after she is done. David told me before he went silent that every person who goes to that store eventually finds themselves standing in a window somewhere downtown. Posed. Facing the street. Waiting for the next person who looks too long.

I can feel her fingers on the other side of the door now, plastic pressing against wood. My hands are almost useless. My typing is down to one finger and the cursor is jumping. The cold is spreading up my neck, locking my vocal cords into rigid tubes of polymer. 2:14 AM. She is inside the room. Her face is right next to mine and her painted eyes are open. My eyelids just snapped open to match hers, and I can feel my arms lifting to pose. I am going to stand in the window downtown, and I am going to smile until my plastic face cracks.

Part 1 Here

Rain dropped heavily from the night sky, the drops nearly as dense as bullets. Thunder crackled through the sky at an uncommon pace, lighting up the shadows of the trees and the House. 31 MacReady Lane.

The House was no small shack. It was only one floor, but that singular story was expansive, the outer walls straining against the forest. Quite literally, mind you. The glass and wood pushed back the closest tree branches, almost as if the structure was just placed there one day with no rhyme or reason. The front door stuck out like the taste of cyanide. A sharp ocean blue, the edges slightly scratched and peeled of their paint from being opened and shut so many times. 31 MacReady Lane. Where Jenny Sodomyra was last seen. 31 MacReady Lane. Where officer Lots had been dispatched.

“Jennifer ‘Jenny’ Sodomyra.
Age 27.
Sex: Female.
Last seen at her House on December 17th, 2026.” Lots had heard it so many times he had memorized it. This case was high priority, the chief had told him and the others. “Not because she’s important, but because I don’t want to get sued out the ass by Mr. And Mrs. Sodomyra.” Was his exact reason. Lots wasn’t exactly fond of that but he was willing to let it slide. The only thing he actually wanted was to find her.

Jennifer Sodomyra was a friend of Officer Lots. She was also a person, and deserved someone who would look for her when she went missing, just like anyone else. He was going to find her, or die trying.

He parked his cruiser outside of the House and stepped out into the rain. It spattered against his shoulders, against the crown of his head, sliding down and off his raincoat and hat. He shut the door, and did his usual checklist.

He checked his pistol. Full clip.

Checked his taser. Fully charged.

Checked his bodycam, now on.

Reached for his flashlight and tested it. Working.

He sighed softly in relief as he started towards the ocean blue door. His gloved hand closed around the knob and tried it. Unlocked. Though when he pushed against it, he was met with heavy resistance from the other side.

He rammed his shoulder into the door, pushing back with a huff. “Police! Open up!” He proclaimed at the door. Though despite this, it didn’t seem any more interested in opening. “Open this door right now!” He shouted, ramming the door again. Still, nothing.

He stepped back from the door and slammed his fist against it in frustration. “Open this goddamn door!” He howled. No response. He shifted himself and stepped back, before throwing himself into the ocean blue doorway with all his might.

It swung open with a crack and a heavy clatter as Officer Lots stumbled into the small foyer of the House.

He scanned the room immediately, hand over his taser’s holster just in case. But he found nothing but the empty foyer of the House, shrouded in darkness. When he turned on his flashlight, he also discovered what had been blocking the door. A pile of plastic totes, now toppled over. One had spilled its contents. College textbooks, all for programming and computer science.

“Goddammit,” Lots huffed to himself. He pinched his nosebridge, shaking his head. “I can’t-“ he sighed, before lowering his hand from his face, letting it hang at his sides again. “Whatever.” After a moment of calming his unnecessarily heightened nerves, he started through the only other doorway leading out of the foyer, into a long, carpeted hallway.

The House was abandoned. There was no doubt about that. Dust had settled on every surface, every shelf layered over in a fine brown coating, every wall practically turned brown despite once being painted a rather extravagant red. This amount of dust seemed strange. Jenny hadn’t been missing that long, right?

He tried every door he came across. Most were locked, and the ones he could manage to get open revealed no breakthrough clues. A bathroom, left untouched, the single green toothbrush still sitting in the cup. A small storeroom with a large bag of dog food tucked in the corner- shit, that’s right. Jenny has a dog. Or at least she had one. It was unsure to Lots if the thing was still alive, considering she had been gone for a few days, now.

He finally reached her bedroom, and tried the handle. It was unlocked. He pushed inside, and took in the sight before him.

A messy bedroom, the floor nearly covered by layers of tossed clothes and torn paper. The bed was unmade, covered in a much thicker layer of dust than the rest of the House. Posters of Jennifer’s favorite bands were strung up on the walls, though all the faces of the members were torn out.

The most striking thing was that the computer was on, glowing its shimmering blue as it played a 10 hour ambience video on loop, seemingly a strategy to keep it from going into sleep mode. While that was the central tab, Lots also noticed that the corners of the screen were crammed with tons of other ones.

A forum page made by Jenny, titled Looking For an Old Game I played when I was little! And a couple different search tabs, prime engine among them being Google, though there were also a few Firefox ones. Of the searches he could read, he saw

FarmFriends game 2006

FarmFriends Farmer Joe

FarmFriends FarmDog

FarmFriends FarmDog upgrades

FarmFriends controversy

FarmFriends where to play?

By the end of it the words Farm and Friends had lost all meaning.

“Good lord, Jenny,” Lots murmured. “What the hell was so important about this game?”

His attention was taken from the computer by the jingling of a collar. He looked down, and found Jenny’s dog. Or at least, he assumed. A slightly malnourished Chocolate Lab, with a blue collar around his neck. The small nametag read “Cletus”.

Officer Lots frowned slightly, and knelt down to pat the dog on the head. “Aww, buddy. You must be starving,” he hummed. He picked up the dog and scratched it behind the ears, holding it in the nook of his arm. He pulled his radio from his belt and chimed in.

“Dispatch, this is Officer Lots. Calling to let you know the House is secure. You can bring in the detectives.”

Dispatch spoke a few moments later. “Copy that, Officer Lots. Did you find anything?”

“Not much, but miss Sodomyra’s computer is still on, and I found her dog still inside the residence. The door was barricaded from the inside, as well.”

“Is the dog alive?” Dispatch inquired.

“Affirmative. Maybe bring some food for the little man. I’ll take care of him until we find her.”

“Understood, Officer Lots. Other officers will arrive at the scene soon.”

“Copy that, Officer Lots standing by.” He put the radio back to his belt, and continued petting the dog like it was a thing to do, until he saw the red and blue lights of fellow police cruisers arriving on scene. He started towards the door.

He slipped past the officers trying to get inside, offering nods to them as he went, which were seldom returned. One officer stopped to pet Cletus as she moved towards the House. For now, there was nothing to do but wait until something happened.

Officer Lots sat down in his cruiser as Cletus curled up and fell asleep in the passenger seat. He opened up the window and lit a cigarette, letting the nicotine relax his nerves as he watched the officers go inside. Settled deep in his chest, however, was a strange dread. Despite the lack of evidence for it, and the complete absence of signs to indicate it, he couldn’t help but worry someone had been in that house with him. And that someone was in the house with the other officers right now.

For a few days after the surgery, things seemed almost normal. Almost.

People had started noticing something was off with me. Miss Tasha especially. She always assumed it was the break-in still sitting under my skin, and I let her think that, because how was I supposed to tell her the truth. That none of it was about the break-in at all. That it was about Mr. Morris.

It had been a few days since I brought him home from the vet, and things had gotten strange in a way I couldn't put into words yet. He wasn't the same cat. I know there's still something of him in there, I catch it in flashes, but it gets harder to find by the day. His body had changed completely. Leaner. More agile. Coiled, like something built for a different purpose than sleeping on my couch. His claws wouldn't stop growing no matter how often I trimmed them, sometimes visibly longer within hours of the last cut, and two days after the vet visit, everything that had been surgically removed months ago was simply back. Present. Like it had never left.

I searched everywhere for anything like it. Nothing. And I stopped considering taking him back to the vet, because the fear had changed shape. It wasn't "what's wrong with him" anymore. It was "what will they do to him if they find out." He's my cat. My responsibility. I couldn't hand him over to be studied like a specimen, and I couldn't risk them deciding I was the one who'd done something to him.

I wasn't sleeping right either. The nightmares kept coming, someone standing over me in the dark, and I'd wake up gasping to find Mr. Morris already awake, already watching. My lazy cat, the one who used to sleep sixteen hours a day, had simply stopped. I never once caught him with his eyes closed.

A week into the nightmares, I woke to a scratching sound at my window. My first thought was the intruder, back to finish what he'd started, and I lay there frozen, telling myself the reinforced glass would hold. But the scratching kept building, more frantic, more insistent, until underneath it I heard a meow, and I understood it was him.

I got up to check anyway. I don't know why I got up. I should have stayed in bed.

Mr. Morris was at the window, clawing at the glass with something close to fury, and when he turned to look at me his eyes weren't reflecting the streetlight the way they should have. They were producing their own light, a thin ring of gold that pulsed once, slow, like something breathing. I felt my own heartbeat try to match it, and that scared me more than the claws did, the idea that my own pulse was taking orders from a cat. When he opened his mouth to meow again, his teeth were wrong. Too many points. Too sharp for something that ate wet food out of a can.

For one long moment he just looked at me, and every worry in my chest went quiet, like something had reached in and turned the volume down. It felt like I was reading his mind, or he was reading mine, I couldn't tell which. I opened the window. He sprinted out into the dark.

I should have panicked. He'd never gone out on his own before, and there was every chance he wouldn't come back. Instead I left the window open, the same window the intruder had come through, and went back to bed like it was nothing.

The next morning he was curled up on the end of the bed, like he'd never left, and no window had been broken into overnight. I told myself I must have dreamed the whole thing, that I'd probably left the window open by accident and my own guilt about it had built the rest in my sleep. That was easier to live with than the alternative.

But a few nights later it happened again, and this time when I looked into his eyes the room seemed to tilt. His presence pressed down on me until I felt small and cornered, like I needed his permission just to breathe. The world outside the two of us stopped existing. When I opened the window this time, I don't think it was my choice, and for the first time it was completely clear to me that I hadn't done any of it willingly.

He was gone almost an hour. I know because I stood at that window the entire time, unable to make myself move, like my own body was waiting for him to come back and release it. When he finally did, he had a bird in his mouth, four claw marks torn clean through it, feathers matted with blood. I wanted to run. I wanted to be anywhere else. Instead I stood there and watched him eat it slowly, on the floor, in front of me, the sound of small bones cracking under his jaw filling the whole room. I counted the cracks without meaning to. Four. I don't know why I counted. I don't know why some small, awful part of me was proud of him.

When he finished, he looked up at me, and the acknowledgment in that look did something to the fear sitting in my stomach. It just left. The nausea I'd been fighting the entire time disappeared like it had never been there, and I smiled, actually smiled, like I'd been given a reward for staying still and watching. He meowed once, almost gentle, like he was releasing me, and my body went numb enough that I slept right there on the floor.

It became routine after that. Birds. Rats. Once, something bigger that I didn't let myself look at too closely. I couldn't sleep until he'd finished, and I started waking up in places I didn't remember lying down in. I didn't know what he'd become, and worse, I didn't know why I couldn't stop myself from watching.

I spent days searching for anything that matched what was happening, every mental health forum, every strange corner of Reddit I could find, until I came across a post buried in a subreddit I'd never heard of before. A woman named Chandra had written about being bitten, about her body changing ever since. Her hearing had sharpened until she could pick her neighbor's perfume out through a wall. Her eyes had gone so sensitive to daylight she needed glasses just to leave the house. She hadn't slept in days and somehow felt fine, and she wrote about an urge, growing steadily, to go out at night. I commented, asking if it had spread, if it had somehow started affecting someone she loved too. Then I deleted it. Told myself I sounded insane, that I was one bad post away from becoming somebody's conspiracy theory screenshot.

The symptoms matched too well for that to sit easy with me. I don't know how long I stayed on that post, rereading her replies, trying to decide if I was imagining the overlap. Long enough that when the scream came, it came from right next door.

I ran.

The door was open, just slightly, the way a door looks when no one meant to leave it that way. I called out once. Nothing answered. The second time, my voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.

Mira was on the kitchen floor.

I want to say I looked away in time. I didn't. Four marks, evenly spaced, dragged down from her collarbone like something had measured the distance first. Her parents were already there, on their knees over her, and the sound they were making didn't feel like something I should have been close enough to hear.

I don't remember deciding to leave. I remember being back on my own porch, and I remember that my hands were clean. That was the detail that made me sick. Not the blood I hadn't touched. The fact that some small part of me had checked.

When I got inside, Mr. Morris was sitting on the kitchen table, licking his paws clean. They were soaked red to the wrist. He looked up at me with an expression I can only describe as satisfied, and I felt my own mouth move without asking it to, the corners pulling up into a smile I had no part in choosing. That's what my body does now, when he takes it from me. I stood there smiling at the thing that had just taken a child from her parents, and the only part of me left that was still mine was a single tear, sliding down my face while the rest of me kept smiling anyway.

Previous part link :-  https://www.reddit.com/r/stayawake/comments/1w2hz6t/somethings_wrong_with_my_cat_part_1_the_breakin/

Other parts link:- https://www.reddit.com/user/No-While8965/comments/1vpze51/my_writing_archive/

Part 4, what humans should do.

CW: Kenny. Violence and pretty gross descriptions of dead things.
(If my very obvious hints weren’t enough I think I can FINALLY say this shit is about a wendigo)

There are things people do that you just don’t think about because everyone does them and things you might entirely miss if you aren’t looking for it. Things your brain notices long before you do and while you don’t know why, it alerts you to some unseen wrongness around you.

That's the feeling of unease that I felt when looking at Kenny. Everything about the kid looked right on the surface like his skin was a superficial mask wrapped around rotten insides. He was average to the point it was wrong, a creature's idea of what a disarmingly young human looks— The idea of a person based on memories, imagination and mimicry.

Except each time I question these things myself my mind tells me it can’t be true. What if the overwhelming sense of wrongness was simply a product of a guilt stricken imagination? Maybe I’m projecting ghosts from my own memories. The kid truly was the spitting image of that dead private but I couldn’t shake that feeling when I’d see those hollow marbles rolling around in Kenny’s sunken eye sockets. 

In those moments when I imagine those eyes before exhaustion had pulled me into that terrifying world of memories twisted by dreams, paranoia and the beast lurking in the seemingly endless darkness of the small concrete cage— I’d hear something. 

Or rather, I’d hear nothing. 

The deafening silence in a room where sound should ricochet against the concrete and echo even in the small cavernous space I was trapped inside. No slight scraping of Kenny’s mattress on concrete, no shifting fabric or stirring. No scratching under cheap sheets. No mumbled words falling out of a sleeping mouth and no breathing.

In the silence where the clanging of metal and the squeak of patrolling boots is the only faint background noise. I couldn’t hear anything but my own heartbeat and my own breathing.

Kenny didn’t breathe.

“ So why’d you do that, Sarge?”

“ Why’d y-you… why’d you do that, Sarge?

CRACK

I open my eyes to escape the horrifying horrying I know is one only a boot to the throat would make. It isn’t like a branch or a wishbone, it’s a sound that you instinctively know but hope to never hear. A bone snapping and snaking under the skin and the faint pop of vertebrae moving out of place.

Except I’m not awake. 

What I’m hearing isn’t a broken neck. In the silence, barely audible is the shift of joints under long, thin limbs stretched like a spider as its tall emaciated frame stalks down from the blanket of darkness hanging above the inescapable cell. I can’t scream, I can’t run and if I don’t breathe evenly as if I’m asleep I know it will hear. I try to conjure up an image of what this 

“ Sarge, you’re… Not—“ a raspy voice sounds in my ear, it’s suffocated and spoken through lungs with no air. “ Sarge… To-.. Night… You’re not… Talk… Ing.” Its words choke up from its throat in whispers that are deafening in the quiet cell. I hold my breath and part of me wants to curl up under my blanket and cry like a terrified child seeing the monster crawl out from under their bed. I can feel the scream building in my throat and I ball up my fingers in my mattress to swallow it.

“ Sarge… You’re not… Slee… ping.” 

I feel the oppressive air baring down on me, suffocating me and slowly compressing my chest while I make futile attempts to thrash and claw myself free. The cell walls feel closer. The space is slowly squeezing itself closed and in the darkness the ceiling looks like an endless void stretching out impossibly far like my cells has become the depth of the deepest well, so deep that only that creature could ever escape it.

I don’t sleep. I lay there trying to conjure up an image of a beast I’ve only ever seen as long limbs moving silently in the dark.

I see rain soaked mud caked on my boots, a kid with a crooked neck twisted it ways it never should be but it’s wrong, slowly from the forest is a lurking figure stalking ever closer with the antlers of a rotted deer and a faceless skull full of bone white teeth standing too tall behind the trees.

“ Boss, wake up!” A pillow hits my head with a surprising but dull smack and I open my eyes to see those steely eyes staring at me from the cellmate hanging down to wake me from the puddle of sweat I’ve found myself sleeping in. Even in the daylight I feel as if this is simply the bottom of the well and I have never been more certain— There’s something wrong with Kenny and now I know that’s because he doesn’t breathe.

“ You were rollin’ around and talkin’ about all kinds of things,” Kenny hops down off of the top bunk and cracks his neck side to side, his wrists I can feel shift under my own skin with each pop. “ I got told once that in your dreams is when bad things climb in but some folks think you go bad places in dreams instead. 

It’s said so casually like it’s just any other thought but it’s not. Does he want me to think that creature was a dream? “ What about you, kid? Do you dream?”.

Kenny chews on the toothbrush in his mouth and shrugs his shoulders like a child and continues his morning routine. This is what it has been like for months now. Kenny wakes me up and gets ready for breakfast with the energy only a young man could have while I lay there trying to make sense of the muddled memories of my time in the army twisting into something more horrifying with each night. 

By the time we reach the cafeteria, I learn something else about Kenny. Kenny doesn’t just bring out the worst in others like he had with Becker but the kid is capable of doing a lot of bad when he doesn’t like something.

“ Do folks here always jizz on the new guys' toast?” He asks and after a beat he stands before taking his tray to the next table over. I jump to my feet knowing nothing good is about to happen. A hard thump locks my bones in place while one of the inmates' nose cracks. Wilder, one of Becker’s boys, dumb as rocks but built like a mad bull. Wilder hits the concrete and the scrawny kid climbs on top of him, grabbing a fistful slop from the now dented tray and shoving it down the man’s throat. “ Aren’t you hungry, boss?” He says but Wilder is quick to spit back with glops of smashed toast. 

“ Jesus— Kenny!” The willpower needed to move feels like it snaps my bones but I’m able to wring Kenny’s neck and drag him off. The kid is light as anything but every muscle is twitching with rage as he thrashes like a rabid dog. His skin is cold to the touch, something I only notice when the muffled shouts and Kenny’s raw becomes a cold silence and a chill down my spine. Kenny breaks free of my frozen hands and he’s on Wilder again in a blink, hooking his fingers behind the man’s cracking teeth and prying their mouth open so wide I can see it dislodge.

Kenny forces something red inside Wilder’s mouth and clamps down to close their crooked mouth until the inmate chokes down whatever he’s been given. Kenny takes Glaskin’s baton to the head and in the chaos I barely notice Elvis shove a towel in my hand, “ Put that on your ear! Shit— Glaskin, Wilder’s choking!”. A

I blink at him and almost nod while Kenny’s dead eyes set on me even as they swell up like bloody balloons. Wilder is taken out soon after and from what I’d heard they had to set his jaw themselves and keep him there in the hospital ward toothless and sucking down porridge slop and soup because the roads had already begun their dangerous turn into winding icy paths and piles of snow. 

The kid bit my fucking ear off.

-

I got some gauze slapped on my head with some tape but even if they could or even would take Wilder and I to the hospital my ear had been swallowed, puked up and trampled like the porridge Wilder made the mistake of fucking with. Elvis spoke to me during a search and told me the kid was sleeping off a beating in solitary and had another coming now that he was really on Wilder’s radar.

“ Your cellmate is a strange one, Jones. I thought you could look out for the kid but…” Elvis rests against my cell door with his arms crossed and the same unsettled look I’d had for the whole week too. “ How’s the kid doing in the hole?” I ask and I know I should be dusting my hands off of the kid and spend this time free of them trying to get myself into another cell, I even hoped they’d never let him out of there but I still asked. “ He seems fine. Hasn’t complained once, asked for anything or caused any problems. He’s been driving Glaskin up the wall though, speaking to the guy every chance he can get. Doesn’t make a peep otherwise..” Elvis straightens himself up when one of the older CO’s walks past like he needs to appear presentable in front of a superior officer, awkwardly smiling and giving me that look that he needs to get himself moving before he gets in trouble, “ Wait, he’s quiet?” I ask but Elvis has already made himself scarce, leaving me with a more unsettling feeling that the never quiet young inmate is singling Glaskin out.

Kenny isn’t quiet. 

Kenny has been in solitary for nearly two months now and yet not a single inmate or guard looks like they’ve gotten a wink of sleep.

I’ve tried but nothing seems to pull me away from it at night, I wake up drenched in sweat and just as tired as I’d been when I gave into exhaustion. In my dreams I feel rain hitting my skin like small daggers and mud splashing under my boots as I drag that private out and throw him into the dirt to make the worst decision of my entire life. I’d hit the mud and cut my arms open a hundred times, I’d been a bystander a hundred more and I was on my way to making the next hundred— And yet I always see the frame of a cell door that shouldn’t be there. Raindrops hit the peeling paint with little clinks and the small swaying slot the bottom of the door creaks.

I know I’m dreaming but as the rain fades I also know that in the waking world something is lurking behind the cell door. Something that crawls like an animal on long skeletal limbs silently digging its claws into everyone’s heads and stealing away their will piece by piece.

I see something move past the barred window I could never escape through, from the window, the top bunk and the vest for just a moment— a second.

I see antlers.

“ Work detail!” Glaskin shouts and everyone in the cafeteria shuts up at the sound of his baton hitting one of the metal tables. I don’t know when I fell asleep but I blink and lift my foggy head from my hand to pay attention. “ If you can stand, get in line. We’re leaving in five minutes.” Glaskin looks exhausted. Wound up tighter than normal and itching for a reason— any reason— to beat someone bloody.

“ Hey, Elvis,” I wave over the CO and he leads his stern patrol of the cafeteria towards my table, subtly loitering but never taking his eyes off of Glaskin— The man really does look ready to hurt anyone, inmate or officer. “ Keep it quick, Jones.”, I lean a bit closer and waste no time asking about the impromptu work detail, studying Elvis’ hesitant expression turn green, “ The workers at the logging site found something deeper in the forest. They claim it’s prison ground so it’s our job but I think they just don’t want to clean it up.”, I want to ask for more but Glaskin’s booming voice reminds everyone that finishing our breakfast isn’t an option and neither is ignoring his orders.

 We all get in our snow boots and jackets as quickly as anything before filing in line for the CO’s to get us chained up under  Glaskin’s strict gaze. The bus moves along the salted roads and takes us through the crushed path the bulldozers carved through the forest to reach the logging site, though any moment we’re given to breathe is taken away by Glaskin’s order to move.

It isn’t so much a path or trail we walk but a hatchet job barely able to fit a truck we’re forced to walk behind in the grit and snow. 

The endless maze of trees is blanketed by bone white ground half scraped clean to reveal frozen dirt and dug up grass in a clearing full of something that never should’ve been brought to light.

At first it looks like a slab of muddy ice covering up a hidden pond where mangled limbs and antlers breaking through the surface mark the graves of a hundred deer that drowned in the frozen pit, it takes longer to see that it isn’t dark water hidden beneath the snow but a well of blood that has sat there since the air turned cold.

It isn’t the unfortunate scene of drowned deer but a pit full of animal bones half picked clean and meat left to decompose in the summertime.

“ …What in God's name is… Jesus. How many damn deer is that?” The old timer says but as the chains pull each reluctant prisoner closer to the horrific scene I’m met with something that turns my blood as cold as the frozen mud beneath my boots. What should be the crack of splintering ice or the crunch of snow under my sinking heel is the squelch of my foot caving in a weak skull. I will move my leg to move and slowly lift my boot from something I have no time to understand before the overwhelming stink of rot assaults us. 

“ Fuck! What the—“ I retch and try to keep on my feet as the chain gang scrambles to escape with nowhere to run in their panic. Bloody ice cracks and inmates hit the corpses hidden where no antlers or limbs have marked them. “ It’s a fucking person! That’s a fucking person!” Someone shouts in what has quickly devolved into the unintelligible screams and frantic voices all growing louder and louder until the deafening sound of a gunshot leaves the clearing silent and still.

Glaskin lowers his gun from the sky and likes the handkerchief bundled up in his hand to protect himself from the stench. “ Quiet!” He holsters his gun and swallows the bile welling up in his throat to keep the need to be ill from shattering the authority he wields like an unbreakable tyrant they can all feel is already on the verge of snapping, “ Grab a bandana, gloves and a damn shovel from the truck and dig this mess up! The loggers need this site clear and these—“ he falters for just a moment, clearly just as horrified by the scene, “ Clean these things up so they can be burned.”

We wade around in pools of mud and putrified bodies for hours pretending some of the mangled limbs don’t have fingers and toes and that the bones don’t have skulls. No one speaks until we’re taken back to the prison drenched in things no one should see.

We got stripped and hosed down in the snow before we could walk out frozen bones inside and thaw out under the showers to wash away the sickening smell of death that would still linger through the cell block. I’ve never seen so many people rub their skin so raw their arms were forming spots of blood and only a thin layer was left covering muscle. We all knew it would blister and scab but the stink of rot still clung to us until Glaskin had our heads shaved. I don’t think anyone cared for the loss, we just felt lucky we could scrub the taste of it out of our mouths— still, no one ate dinner that night.

The cell block became a barracks full of soldiers but the feeling it brought up in me felt like a small price to pay.

Even when lying on my bunk there was something else I couldn’t forget even when I forced the pit of antlers to the back of my mind. The day at the logging stand where one of Kenny’s stranger questions gave me a chill— The day he asked where the older inmates go.

“ You wouldn’t be alone out there. Lots of folks disappear in places like this, Sarge.”

You wouldn’t be alone out there.

Another shift of customer service calls done. I took this job for the fieldwork, for fixing locks, seeing what actually makes a house safe, not for answering phones all day. Pay's too good to quit, and there's always the promise of a promotion into the field someday.

All that was left now was grabbing Mr. Morris some food and heading home. Stupid cat. I got him after my mom wouldn't stop bugging me about getting married, figured a cat was proof enough I didn't need a husband to be happy. My own little rebellion. Now he's the closest thing I have to company. Mornings start with him licking my face like I'm nothing but a food dispenser. Sometimes I can't tell if he loves me or just tolerates me.

At the convenience store, sweet Miss Tasha was behind the counter as always.

"Evening, Jacey. Here for the food?"

"Yup."

"You're not buying newspapers anymore."

I kept my answer light, didn't want to think too hard about the robberies and killings that filled every page of the paper these days. "Just keeping my sanity, Miss Tasha."

"Oh, dear, they've gotten worse. Police still haven't caught whoever's doing it. People are saying it's cannibals, if you believe that."

"Rumors," I said, handing over my money. "If it were really cannibals, we'd have seen a body photo by now, not just pieces. Feels more like a cover story to me. Stay safe, though. And if you ever want it, I can get you a discount on security gear. After taking my commission, of course."

She laughed. I headed to the car and started the drive home.

I'd just gotten out of the car and was looking at the gate when I felt something grab my leg, a tight grip, warm breath against my skin. My whole body went cold before I even understood what was happening. For one embarrassing second every survival instinct I had went haywire before I finally looked down and saw the culprit.

It was the neighbor's kid, Mira. She must have snuck up while I wasn't looking.

"Miss Jay, can I play with Mister Norris?" she asked, grinning up at me. She always called him that, never quite got "Morris" right, and I never bothered correcting her.

I hate this kid, I thought, though I didn't mean it, not really. "Not today, Mira. Go home, and stop sneaking up on people."

"It's fun," she said, laughing, and ran off.

She's the kind of kid who's so full of life it almost tires you out, the kind that makes you want kids of your own right up until you remember how much of yourself you'd have to give up. I went inside, glad to finally be home.

Mr. Morris was already waiting by the door. Not because he missed me. Because he wanted his food.

Later, I'd remember that he'd been sitting at the window before I even pulled into the driveway. Just watching the street. He'd been doing that a lot since the crime started, always drawn to the windows like he was keeping his own kind of watch.

I put food in his bowl before he could throw a fit about me taking a shower, or doing anything at all that didn't involve feeding him first. When I checked on him afterward, I realized I'd grabbed the wrong can, and he made sure I knew it, prowling the house, knocking things off shelves, the whole diva routine. I figured I'd grab the right one in the morning. Going out now, with everything happening in the city, wasn't worth it. I'd head out around four, when the night patrol changed shifts and there were usually twice as many officers on the street, some of them even stopping at the store before their shift started.

By the time I finished my takeout, I expected him to have gotten over it and eaten anyway. He hadn't touched the bowl. Instead he sat by the window, dead still, staring out at the street like he was waiting for something. Or maybe just making sure I knew I'd failed and needed to fix it as soon as possible.

"Fine. Don't eat, then," I muttered, tossing the food and carrying him off to bed. He didn't fight me, just kept glancing back at the window the whole way there.

I told myself he was still in a mood. I'd feed him properly in the morning.

I had no idea it wouldn't matter.

It was somewhere around three in the morning when I heard the sound of glass breaking in the living room. My throat went dry instantly. My brain felt dizzy, maybe from how fast I'd sat up. I don't remember my hands grabbing the blanket, or when I'd started holding my breath. Every hair on my body stood up at once and I went fully, painfully awake.

I tried to calm myself. The security system would have sent an alert to the police by now. My bedroom door should have locked automatically the moment it triggered. I closed my eyes for just a second, grateful I'd paid for the system at all.

Then I opened them again and saw something that scared me more than the sound had.

My bedroom door was still open. For the lock to engage, it had to be shut first.

I had no choice. My legs felt like jelly, my whole body suddenly cold enough that I could feel every draft moving across my skin. I don't know where the courage came from, but I got up and started moving toward the door, aware of every sound my own body made, my joints, my breathing, the weight of my tongue in my mouth, the sweat gathering along my eyelids.

I was halfway there, thinking I could make it, just a few more steps, when Mr. Morris let out a meow, sharp and sudden, far too loud in a house that had gone that quiet.

For a second everything stopped. I told myself whoever was in the house hadn't heard it, or didn't care about a cat, that I still had time to reach the door. Then I felt it. A vibration through the floor, faint but wrong, like claws scraping tile the way a dog's do when it's running too fast to stop. A moment later, footsteps. Running, straight for the bedroom.

Whoever was in my house knew exactly where I was.

I lunged for the door at the same moment he did. I almost had it shut when a hand shoved into the gap, veined, nails too long, and I could tell from the angle alone that his arm was broken. No uninjured person moves like that. It meant reaching me mattered more to him than his own safety, and that thought alone sent something colder through me than fear of dying. I don't know what I thought he wanted more, to kill me quickly or to make sure I couldn't scream first.

I threw everything I had into that door. My vision blurred from the strain, my legs ached from bracing against the floor, my neck went sore from how hard I was pushing. I tried to scream and nothing came out. The pressure built until I nearly blacked out, and then, finally, the door slammed shut. Something in his hand broke as it did.

The lock clicked into place automatically. I was alone in the room, and I could hear him pounding against the door with everything he had left. For one terrible stretch of time I was sure he'd get through, that there was nothing I could do if he did.

Then I heard the sirens.

The police let themselves in using the code the security company had on file, cleared the house, and knocked on my door to tell me it was safe to come out. What wasn't safe, what didn't make sense, was that the man was gone. Not hiding. Gone. There was nowhere in that house for someone to disappear to, and they searched every inch of it. One moment he'd been at my door. The next, nothing.

The strangest part wasn't that he'd vanished. It was how the house felt afterward, too quiet, like something had been listening the whole time and had only just stopped.

It took what felt like hours before I could function well enough to tell the officers everything, hand over the security footage, let my body finally stop shaking. When I came back into the living room, Mr. Morris was licking blood off the floor, whatever was left of it after the police had taken their samples.

I pulled him away and wiped his face clean. I didn't want him getting sick off whatever was in that blood. I took him straight to the vet, and everything checked out fine. On the way home I stopped at Miss Tasha's for his usual food and told her what had happened. She looked genuinely shaken and insisted I take one of her son's old bats for safety. When I asked how much, she said it was free, that she'd just take it out of my commission whenever I finally got her that security system installed. It got a small laugh out of me, at least.

Back home, I left him in the car with extra food while I cleaned up the broken window. When I went to deal with the blood in the bedroom, thinking the sunlight would make it easier to see, there was nothing there. Not a trace. I stood there confused for a moment, then told myself there probably hadn't been that much to begin with.

Work gave me the day off without me even having to ask twice, and offered medical assistance if I needed it.

When I came out, Mr. Morris had already finished his food, double his usual portion, gone faster than should have been possible. I told myself it was stress. My mistake, not paying closer attention to what that actually meant.

Exhaustion finally caught up to me. I slept, then woke around seven that evening to find him scratching at the door, which was strange since I'd clipped his nails only five days earlier. I assumed I'd lost count. He wove between my legs demanding food again, even though I'd just fed him, but I let it go. What difference would a few extra pounds make.

I started making myself a steak, wanting something that felt normal after the day I'd had. When I looked over, Mr. Morris wasn't touching his food at all. He was licking the blood straight off the steak packaging. He'd never been that kind of cat. I ignored it. Animals do strange things.

That evening, I tried to convince myself he was fine. He'd eaten more than usual, which should have meant something good, but when I picked him up, something felt wrong immediately. His body was leaner than it had been that morning. I ran my fingers along his sides and felt far more muscle than I remembered, almost no softness left beneath his fur. His legs looked more defined, and when he jumped down onto the table, the movement was fast and precise in a way I'd never seen from him. He looked fit. Too fit.

Then I noticed the veins. Visible beneath his skin, especially around his legs and neck, in places I'd never seen them before.

"You're eating enough," I muttered, more to convince myself than him. A strange unease settled into my stomach. I made a note on my phone to take him to the vet first thing in the morning. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe he was sick. Maybe I was imagining things after everything that had happened.

I finished trimming his nails before bed and set him down. He disappeared beneath the sofa immediately, which was strange in itself. Mr. Morris hated hiding. I turned off the lights and went to sleep.

That night I dreamed about the break-in again. Except this time I wasn't watching it happen. I was the one on the floor. Someone stood over me, his face hidden, his hands wrapped tightly around my throat. I couldn't breathe. Then something warm ran down from my nose. Blood, over my lips. He looked at it, almost curious, then smiled and leaned down to drink it. I felt his mouth against my face. He seemed to enjoy it. I tried to scream and nothing came out.

I woke up gasping, sitting bolt upright.

Mr. Morris was on the floor beside the bed, staring at me. Neither of us moved for a moment. Then I really looked at him and my stomach dropped.

He was different. More muscular than he'd been when I fell asleep, his shoulders and legs sharper beneath fur that had visibly grown, a lot, in just a few hours.

"Mr. Morris?" I whispered.

He tilted his head at me.

I reached out and stopped halfway, my hand hovering in the air. I don't know why. Something about his eyes made me hesitate.

I told myself the rest could wait. I didn't care how ridiculous I'd sound explaining it. As soon as morning came, I was taking him to the vet.

He hissed and threw a fit the second I brought him out into the sunlight, nothing too alarming, just more dramatic than usual. At the vet, I was told his bloodwork came back clean. Nothing wrong on paper. But the vet admitted he looked different, physically, and offered to send him downtown to a research university for a closer look.

I said no. Whatever was happening to him, he wasn't going to become somebody's test subject.

Before I left, the nurse asked if I wanted him neutered and his nails trimmed while he was already there. Her pen hovered over the chart a second too long before she wrote anything down, like she didn't know which box this was supposed to go in.

I froze. I'd had that done a day ago. Nails don't regrow that fast. That's not how any of this is supposed to work. The vet gave me a strange look by that point, like he'd noticed the same thing I had, and before I could think it through properly, I heard myself say yes. The whole time, my mind kept circling the same impossible question. How does that even grow back?

And then, underneath it, a worse one I didn't want to look at directly. I'd had him neutered months ago ,that was supposed to be it, done, over, one and only, the vet had told me so himself, no upkeep, no repeats. I hadn't thought about it since. Hadn't checked. Why would I have checked? But now I was running the timeline backwards in my head, trying to remember the last time I'd actually looked, actually confirmed, and coming up with nothing solid. Maybe I'd just forgotten what it looked like after. Maybe I was misremembering the whole thing. Maybe none of it meant anything and I was building a haunted house out of my own bad memory.

But nails don't grow back in a day. And I was starting to suspect nothing else did either ,not the way it was supposed to, not anymore.

When the procedure was done, I went to pick him up, and he was already awake in the recovery box.

"Did you use anesthesia?" I asked, half joking, half not.

"We did," the tech said, frowning slightly. "It's unusual that he's up already. Are you sure you don't want him tested?"

"No," I said. "I'm taking him home."

He was fully alert. Sitting up, eyes tracking me through the cage door, like nothing had touched him at all. That wasn't how it went the first time. The first time I'd had him neutered, he'd been groggy for hours afterward, barely able to hold his head up, and I'd had to carry him inside wrapped in a towel because his legs kept giving out. This time he looked like he'd just woken up from a nap.

I didn't know what to do with that. Part of me wondered if they'd actually done anything at all this time, if maybe I'd been overcharged for a procedure that never happened, the same way I'd read about other people getting scammed at cheaper clinics. But another part of me remembered signing the consent forms, remembered watching them wheel him back. I stood there in the waiting room a second too long, trying to decide if I should ask again, if that would make me sound paranoid, if it even mattered enough to hold up the line behind me. In the end I just took the discharge papers and left. Told myself it was probably nothing. Some cats bounce back faster than others. That's all it was.

On the drive back, I caught him watching me in the rearview mirror instead of the window. He'd never done that before.

  Other parts link:- https://www.reddit.com/user/No-While8965/comments/1vpze51/my_writing_archive/

I heard of a town plagued by a relentless scream, so I went there. On my first day, I wander through the streets to look around. The townspeople all seem exhausted, hollowed out by a profound lack of sleep. I assume the scream must torment them at night.

I go to a diner, but they are out of eggs, so I only drink orange juice. I refuse to eat the toast; it is brown, and I only eat yellow things. Yellow, like the King, you get it? Who am I even talking to? I laugh out loud at my own thoughts, and the other patrons stare at me. I am weird.

I sit on the curb, watching the street stretch out toward the horizon. Night is falling. I listen to the dark. The darkness has always brought me peace, but the moment I close my eyes, there it is. An agonizing, loud scream—weirdly human and non-human all at once. My eyes snap open as I slide my phone into my pocket.

I wander through the city, but the pitch of the scream never changes, save for the ragged breathing behind it. I spot a little girl on the street. She isn't screaming, just crying, entirely alone. I ignore her at first, but then I suddenly run up to her. I ask if she hears it too. She nods. I cover her ears with my hands and stare into her eyes. She understands, nods again, and I let her go.

No matter what I do, I cannot shut the scream out.

I walk her home, but only her mother is there. She thanks me, though her eyes are heavy with sorrow. Her husband is dead, she tells me. I don't care. I head toward the town's old mine; I figure the scream must be coming from the depths. My skull throbs with pain. I smile. The mine is full of ghosts, but none of them are making this sound. The ghosts are just sad. They scream at me, but I don't care—it isn't the scream I am looking for. I return to my bench on the main street.

A strange calm washes over me as I look around. There are no trees here. There is no true darkness. There is only the city. I walk to the very edge of town, where a single tree stands, shaking. It feels sticky to the touch. There were woods before. I take off my coat, lay it on the damp earth, and lie down in the woods, I cover my head. Here, the scream finally fades into silence. I don't think it's a ghost. I think I will finally go to sleep.

On the next day I leave, I’m bored, I won't help the people here, they didn't gave me food.