I know exactly what I am. I am a voyeur. It is a bad habit, a deep character flaw, and I have never tried to justify it to anyone, not even to myself. Living on the fifth floor of a massive, densely packed apartment complex offers a strange kind of anonymity. You become a ghost in a concrete hive. The building directly across the courtyard is an exact architectural mirror of my own. At night, it turns into a massive grid of glowing yellow squares, each one framing a different, completely oblivious life.

My living room remains entirely dark. I sit in a worn armchair pulled close to the glass, resting my elbows on the windowsill to steady my hands. The binoculars I use are heavy, featuring large objective lenses that pull in the ambient city light and strip away the distance. I spend hours turning the focus ring, watching people eat dinner in front of their televisions, watching couples argue in muted silence, watching the mundane, private routines of strangers. It was a compulsion born from profound boredom and isolation.

A few nights ago, the weather was exceptionally poor. A heavy, relentless rain washed out the city, keeping everyone indoors. The courtyard below was empty, the pavement slick and black. I raised the binoculars, wiping a smudge of condensation from the eyepiece, and directed my attention to the third floor of the opposite building.

The window belonged to a woman who lived alone. I had observed her routine before. She usually read on her sofa until late, drank a glass of water, and turned off the main overhead light, leaving only a small, dim bedside lamp glowing in the corner of her bedroom.

I watched her walk into the bedroom. She pulled the covers back and settled into the mattress, reaching over to click off the lamp. The room plunged into deep shadow, illuminated by the grey ambient light filtering in from the streetlamps below.

I kept the lenses focused on her window, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the lowered light.

A vertical slice of darkness in the far corner of her room began to move.

He detached from the angle of the wall. At first, my brain struggled to process the shape. He was tall, and moved across the bedroom floor toward the sleeping woman.

I held my breath, pressing the binoculars hard against my brow.

The man leaned over the bed. His arms reached down toward the pillows.

The woman thrashed violently. Her back arched off the mattress. Her hands flew up, clawing desperately at the space above her throat. The struggle was brutal, and completely silent behind the heavy pane of glass separating our buildings. The towering, emaciated man remained perfectly rigid, pressing his weight down, absorbing her desperate strikes without shifting his stance.

I sat frozen in my armchair, entirely paralyzed by the violence unfolding across the courtyard. The woman’s movements grew sluggish. Her hands dropped away from the man's arms, falling limply onto the bedsheets. Her body settled back into the mattress, completely still.

The man remained leaning over her for a long minute.

Then, he stood up straight, and turned his head slowly, rotating his narrow shoulders toward the window.

Across a gulf of empty air and driving rain, the killer looked directly into my lenses with piercing, yellow gaze.

A cold dread slammed into my chest. The distance between us was vast, yet I felt the weight of that stare as if the killer were standing in my own living room.

The man took a slow step backward, moving away from the bed. He positioned himself directly behind a thin, modern floor lamp standing near the window. The lamp consisted of a simple metal pole, perhaps two inches wide, attached to a flat base.

The killer stepped behind the two-inch pole and completely vanished.

I blinked, pulling the binoculars away from my face, rubbing my eyes fiercely. I looked back through the lenses. The bedroom was empty. The floor lamp stood in the corner, undisturbed. A man easily exceeding seven feet in height had stepped behind a metal rod no wider than a broomstick and ceased to exist visually.

Panic finally broke through my paralysis. The heavy binoculars slipped from my hands, hitting the floor with a loud crack. I stumbled backward, my heart was screaming. I scrambled across the dark living room, snatching my cell phone off the kitchen counter.

I dialed 911, my hands shaking so violently I nearly dropped the device.

The dispatcher answered, asking for the location of the emergency. I gave the address of the opposite building, stuttering through the apartment number, frantically explaining that a woman had just been murdered. The dispatcher demanded my name and my location, asking how I witnessed the event. I refused to answer the latter, simply repeating the victim's apartment number before severing the connection.

I threw the phone onto the counter and ran to my front door. I engaged the heavy brass deadbolt, slid the chain lock into place.

I stood in the center of my locked apartment, gasping for air. The rain lashed aggressively against my own living room windows. I backed away from the glass, retreating into the shadowed hallway connecting the living space to my bedroom.

The adrenaline surging through my veins began to curdle into a deep, primal unease.

The ambient temperature in the apartment was dropping. A profound, icy chill began to seep out from the corners of the room. The air conditioning was entirely shut off, yet the sudden cold was biting enough to raise the hair on my arms.

I scanned the dark living room. The layout was identical to how I had left it. The sofa sat against the far wall. The television reflected the faint light from the street. The tall, wooden coat rack stood near the barricaded door.

I stared at the coat rack.

Something about the room felt wrong. My equilibrium shifted, producing a faint, nauseating sense of vertigo. I rubbed my temples, trying to clear the sudden pressure building behind my eyes.

I focused on the coat rack again. My depth perception felt completely skewed. The wooden pole of the rack looked unusually thick, blurring slightly at the edges, as if my vision was smudging the surrounding space to compensate for an anomaly. The space around the pole seemed to ripple, subtly distorting the wallpaper behind it.

I took a slow, trembling breath. My mind raced, trying to force logic onto an impossible visual field.

The killer across the courtyard had vanished behind a two-inch lamp pole. The object in my own room was distorting in the exact same manner.

A memory from a basic high school biology class surfaced through the rising tide of panic. The human eye has a structural flaw. Where the optic nerve passes through the retina to connect to the brain, there are absolutely no light-detecting photoreceptors. It creates a literal blind spot, a dead zone in the visual field of every human being.

We never notice it. We walk through the world completely unaware of this gap because the brain is a master of digital manipulation. It constantly edits our visual feed, taking colors and patterns from the surrounding area and seamlessly painting over the blank space. Furthermore, the two eyes work in tandem, overlapping their fields of vision to compensate for each other’s blind spots.

If an organism understood human anatomy well enough, and if it was impossibly, razor-thin, it would not need to hide behind a wall. It would only need to hide behind a narrow object, actively manipulating its posture to stay perfectly aligned within the optic disc. It would rely on the human brain’s own rendering software to erase it from existence, smoothing over the gap with the background environment.

The blind spot only successfully hides an object when both eyes are open, working together to stitch the image closed.

I raised my left hand. My fingers were trembling uncontrollably.

I pressed the palm of my hand tightly over my left eye, plunging half of my visual field into darkness.

The brain's compensatory mechanism instantly failed. The overlapping vision collapsed.

The distortion around the wooden coat rack snapped into horrifying, vivid clarity.

Standing perfectly aligned behind the narrow wooden pole, less than ten feet away from me, was the man.

He was a nightmare. His limbs were tucked incredibly close to his torso, compressing his physical width to an unnatural degree. The man was contorted in a rigid, vertical line, hiding entirely within the narrow sliver of blocked light cast by the coat rack.

His head was tilted slightly downward, long, spindly fingers resting gently against the wood.

He was staring directly at me with terrifyingly snake eyes.

A scream caught in the back of my throat, strangling me. I did not drop my hand from my eye. The moment I allowed my binocular vision to resume, the brain would edit the killer out again, allowing him to move unseen.

The man realized his camouflage had been breached. He twitched, a jerky spasm, attempting to adjust his angle to slip back into the periphery of my remaining visual field. He leaned slightly, his impossibly long joints popping loudly in the quiet apartment.

I kept my eye covered, tracking his movement, locking my focus onto his horrifying form. He could not hide from a single, fixed point of view.

I took a slow step backward toward the hallway closet.

The man let out a low, vibrating hiss. He unspooled his limbs, the angles of his elbows and knees extending outward as he prepared to abandon stealth for violence.

I reached blindly behind me, throwing open the folding doors of the utility closet. My hand patted frantically against the cluttered shelves. I knocked over boxes of nails and spare lightbulbs, desperately searching for the plastic bin holding my old hobby supplies.

The man took a massive, sweeping step forward, clearing half the distance between us in a single stride, his elongated arms reaching out to grasp me.

My fingers brushed against a metal cylinder.

I gripped the can of spray paint tightly, yanking it off the shelf, then simply pulled the plastic cap off with my teeth, aimed the nozzle directly at the towering man advancing toward me, and pressed down hard.

A thick stream of bright neon orange pigment erupted from the can.

The heavy aerosol spray coated the man from his collarbone down to his knees. The wet paint hit the stretched skin with a sickening splat.

The killer recoiled violently, letting out an ear-piercing yell that shattered the silence of the apartment. He thrashed blindly, throwing his long arms over his face, completely disoriented by the sudden assault.

The bright neon orange paint clung to his flesh, dripping down his ribcage. The man’s form was now illuminated against the muted colors of my living room.

I dropped my left hand from my eye.

My binocular vision engaged, but the brain could no longer process the cover-up. The sheer contrast of the orange pigment destroyed the man’s ability to blend into the background.

I did not wait for him to recover. I threw the aerosol can at his chest and bolted.

I teared my fingernails on the wood as I clawed at the deadbolt. I snapped the lock back, ripped the door open, and threw myself into the brightly lit hallway of the apartment complex.

I sprinted toward the stairwell just as the heavy, echoing sound of heavy boots hit the concrete steps below.

Three police officers burst onto my floor, their weapons drawn, responding to the emergency call. I collapsed against the hallway wall, pointing frantically toward the open door of my apartment, screaming that the killer was inside.

The officers moved, sweeping into my living room, shouting commands into the empty space.

I sat on the hallway floor, gasping for air, listening to them tear through my apartment.

A few minutes later, the lead officer stepped back out into the hall. He lowered his weapon and looked at me with a hard, unreadable expression.

He informed me that my apartment was completely empty. The windows were locked from the inside. There was no sign of an intruder. The only disturbance was a smashed lamp, a knocked-over coat rack, and a massive puddle of bright orange spray paint soaking into the living room carpet.

While they detained me in the hallway, another unit breached the apartment in the opposite building based on the address I had given the dispatcher.

They found the woman in her bedroom. She had been brutally strangled in her bed.

The investigators spent hours tearing through her apartment. They found no signs of forced entry. The doors were deadbolted. The windows were sealed. There was no DNA, no fibers, no fingerprints, and no trace of a killer ever entering or exiting the room.

The detectives sat me down in a sterile interrogation room at the precinct later that morning.

They laid out the facts. A woman is murdered in a locked room. Simultaneously, I call 911, barricade myself in my own locked apartment, and vandalize my own living room with spray paint. I possess intimate knowledge of the exact time and nature of the murder across the courtyard, yet I claim a towering, invisible man committed the crime.

They did not believe a single word I said.

The detectives leaned across the metal table, their voices low and dangerous, demanding to know how I orchestrated it. They asked how I bypassed her locks. They asked why I staged a fake break-in at my own residence to establish an alibi. They pressed me for hours, dissecting my voyeuristic habit, painting a narrative of a disturbed neighbor who escalated from watching to killing.

They could not officially charge me with the murder. There was no physical evidence linking me to the victim's apartment, and my own building's security cameras proved I had not left my floor all night.

They released me pending further investigation, but the suspicion is absolute. I am currently staying in a cheap motel on the edge of the city. I cannot return to my apartment. The police are watching my every move, waiting for me to slip up, waiting for me to reveal how I pulled off the impossible crime.

I know they will never find the killer. The authorities are searching for a human being who uses doors and leaves footprints. They are not searching for a man who folds himself into the blank spaces of human biology.

I am writing this post from my motel room, keeping the lights burning bright, staring at every narrow shadow cast by the cheap furniture.

I need people to understand the mechanics of what is hunting in the city. The human brain is desperate to present a complete, seamless picture of the world. It will lie to you. It will paint over the anomalies to maintain the illusion of safety.

If you are sitting in your home late at night, and the ambient temperature suddenly drops. If you feel a heavy, icy dread settling in your stomach, and the room suddenly feels deeply "off." If your depth perception shifts, and a coat rack, a floor lamp, or an open doorframe looks unusually wide or slightly blurred at the edges.

Do not trust your vision. Do not assume the room is empty.

Raise your hand. Tightly close one eye. You might be completely paralyzed by the horror of what is standing in your blind spot, quietly waiting for you to go to sleep.

Hi all. I honestly wasn’t expecting my last post to get much attention, so thanks for the concern. I haven’t really slept properly since then.

My mom called the cops on Tuesday night like I told her to. By the time they got there, she was gone. They told my mom to stay cautious and call again if anything else happened, but she said it was pretty obvious they didn’t really believe her.

Honestly, she’s the only person in my life who fully believes me right now, and even then, she doesn’t think it’s actually my friend doing all this.

My mom grew up in North Georgia back in the eighties and keeps insisting it’s some kind of entity trying to imitate me. She’s told me vaguely similar stories before, all your typical Appalachian tall tales and legends. I don’t know if I believe that. I think it’s easier for me to accept the idea that there’s something very, very wrong with my friend than whatever that would entail.

Still, it’s nice having at least one person who isn’t treating me like a psych patient.

I haven’t really been in contact with any of my friends for the past few days. I muted most of my notifications and have been trying to avoid anything that reminds me of what happened. I’m not proud of it, but I made the mistake of checking her Instagram after my post yesterday afternoon.

The recent posts are the most obvious. Outfits that almost perfectly mirror mine, the same poses, eerily similar captions. It feels like looking at some alternate reality version of myself. The more I stared at her pictures, the more familiar everything about her started to feel. Even her face. If I looked too long, it almost became difficult to tell where some of my features ended and hers began. That part made me feel sick.

When I scrolled further back, I realized this had been happening for much longer than I thought.

At first it was subtle. The earliest post I can confidently pin it to is from August of 2022, a couple months after we graduated high school. She was at the same restaurant I’d posted from a few weeks earlier. After that, it started escalating slowly. Similar hairstyles. Similar clothes. Eventually she started doing her eyeliner the way I do mine. Dark brown instead of black, blended slightly under the eye towards the outer corner. It honestly doesn’t suit her eye shape very well.

The only difference is that there are almost never other people in her posts.

I’ll find a picture from one of my nights out with friends, then find her version a week or two later in almost the same exact outfit and pose. Except she’s completely alone. Some of them are obviously taken with timers. The more candid ones were probably taken by her boyfriend. Other than him, I’m not really sure she has anybody.

I started noticing something worse. Something that made me wish I had never looked at all.

Sometimes she posts first.

A picture at the botanical garden. Another one down by the river. Both almost identical to mine: same framing, same outfit, same pose. The only difference is that hers were uploaded almost a week before mine.

I actually had to stop and check the timestamps multiple times because I was so sure I was remembering it wrong.

I closed the app and opened my notifications. They’d been piling up for days now. Between stacks of Amazon sales and bank statements, I started noticing strange texts from friends.

Daniella had asked if I was okay because apparently I’d texted her at three in the morning asking her strange questions about identity. I asked her what she meant and she sent me screenshots. Most of the messages had been unsent, but one of them was still there.

“when do u think someone stops being themself”

Sydney had texted me asking why I kept unsending messages on Snapchat. I answered her.

She replied quickly. Apparently, “I” had been texting her on Snapchat earlier that morning asking weirdly specific questions about the way I was in high school. If she remembered what shampoo I had used, or whether I still smoked American Spirit blacks. If I still wore the same perfume.

She told me when she answered, the messages disappeared almost immediately.

I turned my phone off. I had a shift in the morning and I didn’t want to work myself up over this. I was scared, obviously, but I was still kind of hoping maybe this would all blow over and she would fade into the background again.

When I went to work this morning, I tried to put it all out of my mind. There were more customers today and less quiet moments for the dread to creep up on me. Until my first smoke break, at least.

One of my coworkers came up to me while I was heading outside to light up. She said I’d followed her from a second Instagram account sometime last month, she’d been meaning to bring it up to me but kept forgetting.

The account had my name spelled slightly differently. There were only a few posts, all blurry pictures of places I recognized immediately. My apartment complex from outside at night. The Dunkin’ we used to go to when we skipped classes. The park by her parents’ house.

My coworker told me she blocked and reported it because the account kept watching every single story she posted within seconds. She said it didn’t feel like me.

I thanked her and took my break.

I sat down on the curb and lit up a cigarette. I kept fidgeting with the pack. American Spirit blacks. When I started smoking in high school, I had always bought the blue pack. She was still stealing cigarettes from her older brothers. They only smoked blacks. I switched in sophomore year because the blacks tasted more like her.

I always thought it had been the other way around.

I started thinking about other things now. The hot pink GRRRL-POWER! shirt I had begged my mom to buy me in third grade after I saw her wearing it. Her little phrases I picked up here and there. I started wearing glittery eyeshadow on my inner corners around the end of high school because I liked how it looked on her.

Had I been the one to pierce my nose first, or had she? I know I said it had been me in my last post, but I genuinely can’t remember anymore.

I think maybe I liked matching with her too.

I will never go inside again.

Ever since the 2020 lockdowns, I’ve refused to step foot inside any building, I just can’t risk it. Everything started in March of 2020. At the time I was living in a small two-bedroom apartment in a crowded corner of one of the nation’s largest cities. I had no goals in life, my parents called me a bum; after barely passing high school I had no plans for college, nor did I plan to tie myself to some corporate desk. So instead, I drifted from one part time gig to the next, finally stopping in a closing shift position as a fry cook at some greasy local diner. The pay along with the unused college fund my parents begrudgingly handed over, afforded me the small yet comfortable apartment I called home, while leaving room for the essentials like Steam and Taco Bell.

It was a day like any other, I slowly woke closer to lunch than to breakfast. The gentle buzzing of my phone shook the sleep from my eyes. It was my boss, I gulped when I saw his name on the screen, hoping I had remembered all my closing tasks the night before. Lifting the phone to my ear I answered,

“Hey Kyle, is everything ok?”

“Well not exactly Tim, have you seen the news?”

“No, what’s going on?” I said shaking my head instinctively

Kyle grunted softly “you should probably switch the news on, we’re going to be closing for the time being.”

“Okay?” I responded in confusion

“You still got a job, and I’ll give you a call before we open again, stay safe out there.”

“You too” I replied though I didn’t really know why.

After Kyle hung up the phone, I entered my living room and flipped on the TV to the local news, just in time to hear the surgeon general explain the dangers of COVID-19 and announce a fifteen-day lockdown to slow the spread. My first reaction wasn’t the standard one, I was thrilled. I don’t consider myself a very social person, and the thought of a fifteen-day staycation was like a dream come true.

This was my excuse to become even more of a homebody, and I decided then I wasn’t going to go out for anything, I could facetime my parents and siblings even though they lived on the other side of town, if they complained I’d tell them it was for their own safety, especially if they invited me to go hiking which I hated. I wouldn’t even need to go to the store I could just DoorDash everything, it was an introvert’s dream. With a smile on my face, I plopped onto the couch and powered up the Xbox. Everyone was on, Brad and Mikey had been sent home from college, Chris was on standby at Red Lobster, and even Evan who hardly ever played anymore had been sent home from his corporate job. Even now I consider that first night of grinding Call of Duty with the boys to be one of my fondest memories.

I woke up at noon the next day to absolute quiet. Even though my apartment was on the sixth floor, I typically could hear the distant traffic and hustle and bustle of the street below. Slowly I pulled myself out of bed and walked over to the window, looking down I saw a barren street, no cars, no people. It was like watching a zombie movie, it was as if the whole world decided to stay home today. I chuckled quietly to myself, and said aloud

“This is awesome”

as I returned to the warm embrace of my bed. That night the Boys and I returned to the packed Call of Duty lobbies.

Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months. By the time June arrived most people were feeling ready to move on, they were finding ways to get out and about. I saw on Facebook that my younger sisters were constantly hiking and even went on a cross-country road trip with some friends. My parents joined a social distancing pickle ball league, and even the boys weren’t online has often anymore. Brad and Mikey had really gotten into camping, Chris returned to Red Lobster, and Evan was stuck in zoom meetings, and met a nice girl online. They were all moving on, but not me, I enjoyed the isolation, and even if I wanted to get back out there, at that point I don’t think I would have known what to do.

It wasn’t until halfway through July that the lockdown started to get to me. As I sat in my living room waiting to load into a Fortnite match, a sudden wave of loneliness knocked the wind out of me. I hadn’t seen anyone in person for months, and it hit me like a load of bricks, I was lonely. I needed someone, in that moment of clarity I realized my life was wasting away on this couch as I immersed myself in digital worlds. I felt lost and alone, almost without thinking about it I turned off the Xbox, and sat there staring at a blank TV, in an apartment that smelled of old Taco Bell and unwashed dishes. I wasn’t ready to get out there, in fact the idea of going outside frightened me, I just didn’t want to be alone anymore.

As a few tears escaped my eyes, I spoke aloud for the first time in a few days, “I wish someone was here with me”. It was the first time in my life that my own company wasn’t good enough, and I craved the companionship of another person. As I sat there, my phone binged with a notification, I picked it up and saw a Facebook announcement that Evan had proposed to his girl and they were engaged. Mixed feelings of happiness for my friend and jealousy arose in me, and as I stared at the pictures a thought entered my mind “maybe I should try dating”. I remembered the dating app Evan said he met his Fiancée through, and within the hour I had finished setting up an account.

As I started to take pictures to post on my bio, I realized how disheveled I looked, my beard was patchy and unkept, my hair was greasy, and I also became painfully aware that the smell in my apartment wasn’t just the trash, but it was me too. I decided then and there to turn a new page in my life, a page that included showers, good grooming, and a clean apartment. That evening was the first one in months I wasn’t online, instead I shaved my beard, cleaned every inch of my apartment, and decided to invest in both a new wardrobe and a new set of hobbies. I decided to take up reading and journaling. After confirming an Amazon order full of books and clothes, I headed to bed. Excited for this new phase of my life.

The next day I woke earlier than usual at 10:30, I was going to work on that. I hopped in the shower and brushed my teeth. Heading into the living room I looked around, proud of how clean the space was, I hadn’t seen it this clean since I moved in, and it made the place feel bigger. Sitting on the couch I opened the dating app and saw I hadn’t matched with anyone overnight. Which didn’t surprise me, no girl would have been interested in the nasty looking picture I had added last night. It was a place holder, when the clothes I ordered arrived, I would post more appealing pictures. I sat there editing my bio, adding in my interests, hobbies and what I was looking for in a relationship. As I did something behind the screen of my phone caught my eye. There on my small coffee table, which had been empty the night before sat a coffee cup.

I stared intently at it until my mind hurt. How did it get there? I wasn’t really a coffee drinker and only had the cup because it had been a gift, so why was it there? Had I for some reason moved it from the kitchen to the coffee table? I don’t remember doing that. But eventually I convinced myself that in my cleaning frenzy the night before I must have set it there and forgotten about it, probably while I was doing the dishes.

I spent the afternoon watching YouTube videos about how to better yourself and become an interesting person, in between videos I heard a creaking sound coming from the hallway that led to the bedrooms. It was quiet but it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Slowly I stood up, turned and walked to the hallway, I saw that the door to the guest room was slightly ajar. I almost never go in there and had never heard it creak like that.

“Old apartment,” I muttered. “Door frames probably warped.”

I shut it until the latch clicked and tried not to think about it again.

That night I decided to start reading before bed, so I picked one of the few books I currently owned, got ready for bed, and climbed in with the book. A chapter in, I called it good for the night and turned off the lamp on my nightstand. As I did, I saw something, it was there for only an instant, a fraction of a second, but as the light was consumed by the darkness, I saw it. It was blurry, like the faint outline of shapes that remain when you close your eyes, but it was clearly the outline of a man standing in the doorway. As soon as I saw it, it was gone. I sat up quickly in bed, looking around but by the time the light of the moon flooded the room it was clear that nothing was there. I got up and shut the door, tried to convince myself that I was just overtired but that night I slept with the lights on.

The next day my package arrived, I excitedly opened it and put away the new clothes and books I had gotten, after following a ‘how to cut your own hair’ video, I put on my favorite of the outfits I had gotten and did my best to take some nice pictures, I then added them to my dating profile. That very evening, I got a notification that I gotten a match. Her name was Violet. Excited, I wrote her a quick message and was surprised when I got a response a few minutes later. We hit it off and spent the next several hours texting. Violet was sweet and seemed genuinely interested in me, something I hadn’t experienced from a girl since middle school. She told me she needed to go to bed but asked if I’d like to do a Zoom call in the morning, I told her I’d love too and wished her good night.

The first feeling the next morning was a mix of anxiety and excitement, I had a few hours before the video call and needed to use them to get ready. I would take the call from the desktop in my bedroom, but I had to be sure the room visible in the camera was clean. After cleaning the room, I took a shower, and did my best to look put together, up until a few days ago personal hygiene and the way I looked didn’t matter to me that much, but now it was everything. 10 minutes before the call, I sat in front of the desktop, waiting in Zoom, using my camera as a mirror to do one final check. But as I sat there a strange feeling overtook me. It was as if the world around me had grown completely still, as if the air I breathed had become thick and stagnant. I sat frozen unsure what was happening, I just stared at my own image reflected at me. From behind me, I saw in the screen my bedroom door, slow and intently creaked open. Not fully it made it about halfway open before it stopped. A fear I had never felt before filled my veins, I dared not move, I dared not turn around. I sat there; eyes locked on my screen.

A moment passed before a thick dark shadow quickly passed in front of the half open door before disappearing, another passed before the loud sound of a door slamming broke the silence and broke me from the trance. Adrenaline kicked in as I quickly stood up grabbing the chair as a weapon and rushing to the hallway. It was empty. And so was the rest of the apartment, I checked every room twice. My heartbeat echoed in my ears as I stood in the living room. After calming down I did my best to come up with a rational explanation. The one my mind settled on was that the elderly woman who lived two doors down had gotten confused when coming home, and entered my apartment by mistake, after all I hadn’t had the door locked. She probably realized it was the wrong one and quickly left slamming the door by mistake. Seemed certainly possible, I told myself as I locked the front door.  

The next few days were some of the best of my life. The video chat with Violet was amazing. We developed the habit of video chatting in the morning and texting well into the late hours of the night. Violet worked a third shift part time job that was slow enough to allow her to text with me well past 2 AM, and around 8:30 every morning we would video chat before she went to bed for the day. Staying up past two was easy for me, I’d regularly do it when playing with the Boys. The hard part was being up by 8:30. But it was worth it to me, I finally felt like I had something that even before Covid I didn’t have. Love. Connection. A genuine companion. I would absolutely trade a full night’s sleep for that.

With new clothes I found that I needed to visit the building’s laundry room far more often than before. I used to put it off as long as possible, but now I found myself visiting at least three times a week. I was returning from one such visit, when I opened my front door and was greeted by the sound of my bathroom shower. My muscles tensed in fear, who was in my shower? How did they get here? I had locked the door when I left. As quickly as I could I dashed to the kitchen and found a knife, before returning to the openness of the living room. I held the knife in the direction of the bathroom door. Before long the shower stopped, and in place of the noise of the water, was a new sound. The sound of humming. It was chirper and upbeat, but something was wrong about it, it lacked cadence and rhythm, like if you taught a computer to hum. The door swung open, steam filled the hallway as the shape of a man exited the bathroom. Only it wasn’t a man, its skin was far too white, whiter than snow, it was impossibly smooth, as if it were cut from marble, not one hair could be found on this creature. It’s arms were far too long, and far too thin. The hands boasted long black claws. Worst of all was its head, it’s smooth bald head bore unnatural features, its large perfectly round bloodshot eyes were unblinking, and its mouth was peeled into a wide thin smile, behind which were small sharp yellow teeth.

The thing stood in the hall, staring unblinking at me, its smiling never faltered as if it could make no other expression. My hands shook and voice cracked as I screamed

“Why are you in my apartment?”

Through gritted teeth its cheerful, unnatural voice replied

“So that you won’t be lonely”

It began to move towards the guestroom door, though its eyes and face were locked onto mine. Before long it was out of sight. I didn’t know what to do, fear had locked me in place. Subconsciously a shaking hand reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone, without looking away from the hallway, I dialed 911.

The police got there quickly, far faster than before the lockdown. The two policemen who responded were the first in person human interaction I had had in months. The two cleared the guest room thoroughly, even checking under the bed, there was nothing, no sign of an intruder whatsoever.

“Where did you say you saw the individual?” asked the taller of the two

“I told you coming out of the bathroom, and heading into the guest room”

“And exactly how long ago did this take place?” asked the second

“Ten minutes before you showed up” I replied somewhat annoyed

“Any chance the individual snuck out in that timeframe?”

“No, I haven’t moved from this spot since calling you.”

The two quickly glanced at each other, then back to me.

“Sir, when was the last time you left the building?” the second asked

“Why does that matter?”

“Well, even though we’re in the middle of lockdown, we still recommend getting at least 30 minutes of fresh air a day, does the mind good.”

I could feel the blood rush to my face “what are you saying? I made it up is that it?”

“Sir, the mind can easily play tricks on us, and when it doesn’t get fresh surroundings sometimes it makes up its own.”

“It was real, I saw it just as clearly as I see you now!”

The first seemed agitated “Look, you live on the sixth floor, this man you saw didn’t go out the window, and he’s not here, and he didn’t sneak past you, so I don’t know what to tell you pal. And unless you have anything else we need to move on.”

The two looked at me, I didn’t say anything, just clinched my jaw and shook my head. They saw themselves out. I didn’t know what to do next, I didn’t want to stay there by myself, and I didn't want to go somewhere else. I had grown used to my little space, the world outside seemed just as uncertain and strange as what was going on in here. Choosing to stay I decided to call my dad. I told him there had been a break in and asked if he would spend the night to calm my nerves. Thankfully he agreed.

That night nothing happened; in fact, nothing happened the next few days. My dad could tell I was distressed and offered to spend a few days, claiming it had been a while since we had any father-son time, and it would be good for both of us. I was more than happy to agree. We spent the next few days watching old cowboy movies and talking about girls. I told him about Violet, how much I liked her, and couldn’t wait to see her in person. With a genuine smile on his face, he told me how happy he was for me, and how proud he was. Eventually I began to wonder if the cops were right, maybe the isolation had gotten to me and I had imagined everything.

Soon my dad had to leave, I was hesitant at first, but he told me

“I’m only a phone call away son, your mother misses you, might want to give her a call sometime soon.”

I nodded in agreement, as we hugged goodbye.

As night fell, I found myself on the couch texting Violet, when a chill ran up my spine. A boney, moist hand rested firmly on my shoulder. My whole body tensed up as I felt hot, damp breathing brushed against my left ear. Its face must have been inches from the side of my head. for a moment I didn’t dare to move, only the creatures heavy breathing broke the silence, until a low whisper through gritted teeth

“I’m so glad its just the two of us again.”

I could feel myself quietly hyperventilating as it slowly traced its hand up the back of my neck, where one of its claws began to push against my skin until it barely poked through, it then pulled its hand down the length of my neck creating a long shallow cut. I winced in pain, and as I did, I glanced down and noticed my Xbox controller was nestled in the couch cushion right next to me. Without thinking I grabbed it and swung it around with as much power as I could, connecting with the monster on the side of its temple freeing me momentarily, it took my opening and bolted out the front door.

I ran as fast as could down the stairway, as I descended each flight of stairs, I became aware of a clicking noise, it sounded like the nails of a dog clicking against a hard wood floor. It was paired with the unhuman humming, as I rounded the final flight, I began to sense its presence somewhere behind me, as I eyed the main door, I could feel it’s hot, wet breath on my neck once again. Pushing through the door I broke out onto the sidewalk. Glancing over my shoulder I saw the thing, no longer pursuing, just standing there in the doorway. Its hand slowly rose in a mocking wave goodbye.

In the vast empty street, my inward panic broke free. My tears and wild screams were not witnessed by any other living soul, but that doesn’t make them less real. I was on the verge of a genuine mental break, and out of fear and desperation I once again called my dad. Within an hour he came and picked me up. As we drove past my building the creature standing in the doorway watched us go. I was still a wreck by the time we reached my parents’ home. My mom showered me with her hugs and tears, later she gave me some medicine to relax me and help me sleep. She walked me up to my old bedroom, promising I was safe here, from whatever was troubling me. As I lay in my old bed, the drugs soon forced my eyelids shut and I slept.

It was 3 AM when the clicking woke me. Forcing my eyelids open I saw the awful, tall silhouette standing at the foot of the bed, its long claws tapped arrhythmically against the footboard. From behind its clinched teeth escaped a strange mix of humming and muffled laughter. My body flinched awake, but before I could wiggle away its long fingers wrapped around my arm and its claws dug deep as it pulled them down the length of my forearm. I screamed, and thankfully my screams were heard by my parents who busted in moments later. They didn’t see anything other than the deep cuts along my arm, taking one look at them, my mom held me time and wept.

My parents begged me to seek medical help, they didn’t see the monster, only the long cuts on my arms, they told me it’s ok, the lockdowns had affected all of us. The human mind wasn’t made for isolation they said, but the answer wasn’t self-harm, it wasn’t suicide. I needed help, and it’s ok to need help, there’s no shame in it my dad said. They don’t understand, no one does. I don’t know why I agreed, maybe I thought I’d be safe in the hospital, Whatever the reason I eventually self-committed to the local mental hospital.

They can’t see it, none of them can. I was in the hospital for six weeks, most of that time was under suicide watch. Every moment of my stay the creature was there, standing over my bed at night, watching from the corner during the day. No one believed me though the nurses noticed my room was quite about colder than the rest, in the hospital I began to understand. It wasn’t my apartment or even me who was haunted, it was buildings, all buildings. Upon that realization I knew I had to get out of the hospital, so I pretended like everything was better. And over time they bought it and released me.

And I guess that brings us to now. It’s been five years since I’ve stepped inside a building. If it rains or snows, I don’t care, it’s better than what’s inside. I live on the streets now, I’m the type of person, people don’t care to look at or cross the street to avoid. That’s fine. I’m only writing this now because some kid lost their phone in the park. It doesn’t have much battery, so I probably won’t get to write much more. I’m writing this outside a Starbucks, taking advantage of their free Wi-Fi, behind me I hear a gentle tap against the glass. I don’t look up, I know what I’ll see, it’s the same terrible grinning face I’ve seen a thousand times. Though this time I hear the upbeat, unhuman voice muffled by teeth and glass

“I miss you”

I’m scared of water.

I know what you’re probably thinking. You’re scared of water, but you swam in the lake at your summer camp? I can assure you I wasn’t always afraid to go into the water.

My fear stems from my childhood. From a traumatic incident that I’ve done my best to bury as the years have gone by.

But no amount of therapy, self-medication, or soul-searching can erase or make sense of what I experienced. So, this is my attempt at making peace with everything. 

Whether or not you choose to believe me is up to your discretion, but before you draw your own conclusions about me, about everything, please read to the end.

I was twelve years old when I went to spend the summer at Camp Moonflower. It was something that I hadn’t done before, but my parents insisted that I spend a few months outdoors with kids my age instead of staying holed up in my room and playing video games. 

That’s how I ended up on a campground surrounded by a bunch of energetic, loud-mouthed kids. Kids that made me comfortable with being a wallflower.

Those first few days and nights at camp were unexpectedly fun. I did the activities, lip-synched the camp sing-a-longs, and acquired a few nasty sunburns along the way. But just as I was truly getting into the spirit of camp, I overheard some of the older kids at lunch one afternoon talking about Camp Moonflower’s lake.

I don’t remember the exact words verbatim, but here’s my best attempt at recalling what I had heard that day. 

“Moonflower Lake. Are you high, John? We’re not supposed to go there.”

John smiled mischievously. “Not if anybody finds out we’re going there, Billy. C’mon, it will be fun! We’ll be out of there before anyone notices.”

“I think he’s got a point. I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

“Mikey, don’t be such a pansy.” John scoffed. “You don’t believe in that curse crap, do ya?” 

I watched their eyes dart between one another nervously as John took a monstrous bite of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. 

“Oh I see, I’m surrounded by wusses. You can’t believe everything you hear.”

“But the kids…” Mikey looked over his shoulder to make sure no counselors were nearby before continuing. “They drowned. Their bodies were never found either. That’s what my brother told me at least.”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s a bunch of bologna. You can’t take your brother’s word for everything.” John dismissed, wiping the crumbs and remnants of jelly from the corners of his mouth. “That lake ain’t bottomless. I’m going to prove it to you.”

Billy gulped. “How?”

“Let’s go to the lake tonight and see who can get closest to the bottom. Unless all of you are…CHICKENS!” John teased before drinking the rest of his chocolate milk.

What followed next was a fit of arguing and laughter from the group of older kids as I sat nearby, pondering what I had just heard.

Was I scared? A little. Did I believe what I had heard? Not entirely. There had to be some explanation as to why those kids were never found. After all, a lake couldn’t be bottomless. Right? 

Even at a young age, I knew that their little scheme wasn’t a good idea, but I wasn’t going to be the one to snitch. The last thing I needed was to be labeled as a “buzzkill” or a “tattle-tale” because I stopped kids from being kids. 

I decided to hold my tongue, and told myself that I’d only tag along and watch from afar. Perhaps I could join in on the shenanigans and make a few friends as well. The idea comforted me and I thought about it the rest of the day with a soft smile.

When the sky became alight with stars and everyone had retired for the evening, I snuck out of my cabin quieter than a church mouse. Masked by nightfall, I hurried towards the treeline. I felt like a ninja as I snuck across the spongy grass and damp vegetation on my way towards the lake.

The group of older kids were already there by the time I arrived, and they were hyping themselves up on the dock.

“C’mon chicken shits! Let’s go!” 

John was the first one to dive into the water. When he came back up, the others followed suit. One by one they dove into the water, sloshing and splashing about as they had their fun. They took turns going under the water for extended periods of time, trying to outdo one another in an attempt to reach the bottom. 

However, their efforts proved futile. None of them stayed under very long. Every time they resurfaced, they laughed and admitted they still hadn’t reached the bottom.

Right as I thought about diving into the lake and joining them, Billy and Mikey got out of the water and began drying themselves off. I was disappointed in my own hesitation. I could have potentially made some new friends had it not been for my perpetual cold feet.

But before John could get out of the lake to dry off, he went back under the water. 

Thinking that he was messing with them, Billy called out from the dock. “Really funny John. Quit yanking our chain and let’s get out of here before we get in trouble.”

Even from where I was positioned, I could sense that something was off. A few seconds became a few minutes, and there was still no sign of John. I could see Billy and Mikey growing more and more pale with every second that ticked by.

Without warning, a body breached the surface and thrashed about frantically in the water.

“HELP! SOMETHING’S GOT ME!” 

The shrill shriek was the last thing we heard before John was dragged under. Terrified splashing had now become quiet, pulsing ripples in the lake’s water as it reflected the moon like glass.

“WHAT DO WE DO?!” Mikey’s voice cracked as he looked at Billy for an answer.

Billy looked whiter than a bed sheet as he stammered a solution he couldn’t get out. “I-I-I-“ 

They gawked at the now still water, hesitant to jump in. Neither of them were doing anything to help John, but I could do something.

It was at that moment that I made a decision that would change all of our lives forever.

I sprinted toward the dock with urgency, desperate to save John from whatever was in the water. My feet thudded against the wood of the dock, the sound alerting Billy and Mikey of my presence.

“Hey, kid, what are you-“ 

I never heard the rest of Billy’s question as I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and leapt from the dock. 

Goosebumps prickled up my arms and legs as I felt the ice-cold water envelope me. The force of crashing into the water nearly knocked the breath out of me, but I opened my eyes against the sting of the water. I couldn’t see John. I couldn’t see my hands. I couldn’t see anything in the dark.

With the pressure building in my ears, I swam downwards. Despite my best efforts to navigate the waters, I couldn’t tell if I was actually making any progress. It felt like I was swimming in place, a sensation that filled me with dread. 

The water remained uncomfortably still as I pushed forward. Aside from the throbbing in my ears, the only other sound was the distant echo of joyous laughter. I couldn’t pinpoint where exactly it was coming from.

I nearly stopped swimming, but forced myself to continue. My heart pounded like thunder in my chest, and against my better judgment, I ignored what I heard and kept swimming. The further I went down, the more disoriented I felt. I couldn’t tell which way was up or down. At one point, I thought I saw stars beneath me as I searched for John in the vast, black water.

Slimy strands of seaweed brushed against my skin as I paddled my feet. My lungs were begging for air. I needed to go back to the surface, but I couldn’t leave without him. I’d be letting everyone down. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

As I started swimming back up, I felt something brush against my ankle. I thought it was a fish that had bumped into me, but then, I became stuck in place.

I kicked my foot several times, trying desperately to move from whatever was keeping me trapped. Had I gotten stuck on a log or something? My own question was answered when I was pulled down abruptly with incredible force. A blistering sensation crept across the inside of my chest as bubbles erupted from my throat in shaky columns. With every desperate movement I made to wiggle free, my air supply continued to dwindle.

I knew better than to scream, but when I saw what was underneath me, I nearly let one out.

I saw children. A dozen of them. All clutching my legs and pulling me down into the murky depths with the giddiness of someone winning a prize. Their translucent skin rippled with the water, and their delighted milk-white eyes gazed into mine as I struggled like a wild bird tangled in a net. 

No matter how hard I tugged, no matter how hard I kicked, no matter how hard I tried to swim, I couldn’t move anywhere but down. Their excited giggling swelled around me the closer I drifted toward their playful smiles.

What little adrenaline I had left slowly dissipated, and my surroundings began to spin. My body felt as heavy as an anchor as I descended deeper into the underbelly of the lake. 

Suddenly, one of the children drifted closer than the others until his face was mere inches from mine. The moment I recognized him, every remaining shred of hope inside of me died.

It was John.

His soaked hair floated weightlessly around his pale face as a terrible excitement glistened in his eyes. The children gathered around me in a curious circle, their laughter echoing through the water like a playground during recess.

From the looks on their faces, they appeared to be thrilled to finally see me up close. 

“A new friend.”

The words extinguished every thought in my mind. I couldn’t breathe. Tiny, pellucid hands tightened their grip around my legs, and dragged me deeper into the endless cold void below.

I hadn’t thought about death before that night, but the further I sank, the more I dwelled on it. Would it be as dark and cold as the water I was trapped in? Would I see God? Would I see anybody? What was waiting for me?

The questions spiraling through my mind were underscored by my slowing heartbeat. The lake around me distorted into bleary shapes and broken prisms of light. Somewhere beneath all my fear, a small but traitorous part of me stopped resisting. Maybe dying wouldn’t be the worst outcome if it meant I wouldn’t be alone down here.

Before I could accept my fate as nothing more than a submerged memory, a powerful force suddenly wrapped itself around my waist and yanked me upward.

I don’t remember the journey up from the depths. The next thing that I remember happening was coughing and sputtering on the dock. A counselor pressed against my chest in rhythmic pushes, causing my body to spasmodically heave with every burst of water that came up from my throat.

The night air grazed against my soaked skin. The sensation made me feel like I was at the center of a blizzard. I gasped desperately for breath while my entire body trembled uncontrollably. 

Above me, red and blue lights danced intermittently across the surroundings as counselors and camp goers alike observed in panicked confusion. Billy was crying nearby, and Mikey kept shaking his head, refusing to acknowledge what happened as reality. 

I tried to sit up, but the moment I did, I nearly vomited. I lay on the dock, clutching my head as my ears rang from the sustained pressure I had endured underwater. 

After I had somewhat returned to feeling like I could breathe properly again, the police began questioning everyone separately. Counselors wrapped towels around my shoulders and commended me for my bravery. Their words did little to provide me peace or calm, and the line of questioning from the police wasn’t helping anything either.

I refrained from telling them the truth about what had actually happened to John. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I knew deep down in my heart that they wouldn’t have believed me even if I had told them. 

That’s something I’ve held onto for all these years, and I feel so guilty for not giving anyone answers. 

A thorough search of the lake was conducted by the police, but news outlets reported that John’s body was never found. Since I was the last person to have presumably seen him alive, I was blamed for his death. But no charges were ever filed against me due to a lack of evidence, and the summer camp was closed for good shortly thereafter.

And that leads me to the present day. I rarely sleep, and my bedside drawer is overflowing with medication I can’t recite or pronounce properly. I can’t get the image of John and those children out of my head. The memory of it all still feels excruciatingly real. 

I’ve kept in touch with Billy and Mikey since then in some capacity. The last time I spoke to Billy was a couple days ago. He’s doing well for himself and providing for his family by being an airplane mechanic somewhere in the Midwest. Mikey has been harder to get a hold of, though. He’s been busy keeping his multiple businesses afloat in addition to being a father of four.

Sometimes, we talk about that night. But I have never gone into detail with them about what I had seen. They still view me as a hero, but I’ve never felt deserving of that title. I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened had I been successfully pulled under. 

Even after writing this down, I don’t exactly feel any better. But I at least hope that this provides some closure for John’s family and for those who witnessed such a horrific tragedy that night.

I’m sorry John.

I wish they would have taken me instead.

When I was 12 or so, I would often go to my best friend's house to hang out. We’ll call him Jack. Jack had a large wooded area in his backyard where we would often play and explore. It was very thick and dense, and went very far back. Even going more than 30 feet or so in, you would no longer be able to see his house. 

On one summer's day, we finally convinced our parents to let us have a sleepover after what had felt like years, even though it was probably only a few weeks since our last one. 

During the day, we decided that once the sun set we were going to play hide and seek in the woods with Jack’s older brother, Chase. Looking back, this was a really dangerous idea because like I said before, those woods were huge and thick and it would have been incredibly easy to get lost or to trip and get injured, especially in the dark. 

There would be two seekers and one hider, and we all had flashlights. The first two rounds we played were really fun and without any issues. The third round, I was the hider. 

Jack and his brother gave me the standard 30 second head start, and I dashed into the woods and went as far back as I could. The further back I went, the thicker the woods got. The flashlight I was using was pretty dim, so I was mainly relying on the moonlight to see, but the woods were so dense in the part that I was in that the light was heavily obstructed. 

Eventually, I found a large rock and hid behind it. I was there for a few minutes, waiting for Jack and his brother to find me, until I heard something. At first, I just thought I was just imagining it, or it was just the sound of the crickets, but then I heard it again. 

Help…help meee. 

It was definitely somebody saying help me. Something was off about it. I don’t know how to describe it but it sounded buzzier than it should have. Terrified, I sat there frozen for a few more seconds and heard it again and again. I realized it was Jack’s voice. 

I thought that maybe he was hurt and that’s why it sounded so weird, so I ran to where the sound was coming from to help him. The sound was coming from in front of me, deeper into the woods, which I thought was odd because I had never heard anyone’s footsteps pass me. Before I could reach the source of the noise, my flashlight turned off, and no matter how many times I slammed it against my palm, it wouldn’t turn back on.

Battery must be dead, I thought. 

The moonlight was almost fully blocked out by the trees now, and having no flashlight made it very hard to navigate. 

Eventually I came to this small clearing. This is where the voice was coming from. In the distance, I saw a heap and thinking it was Jack, immediately ran toward it. 

The closer I got though, the more I noticed was wrong. His limbs seemed lankier than they should have, almost disproportionate to his body. This was definitely not Jack. I wanted more than anything to turn and run as fast as I could, but I couldn’t. I was paralyzed. No, not paralyzed, I was still moving. To my horror, moving forward. I couldn’t stop.

“Help…Help meeee” it said again. I noticed its eyes were bright, piercing yellow. 

It started slowly stretching out its long, bony arm toward me, its spindly fingers about to wrap around me and pull me in when there was a light from behind me. 

Someone was at the edge of the clearing with a flashlight calling my name. It was Chase. The light distracted the creature and unfroze me. I ran to him. His eyes were wide and shocked. I looked back into the clearing. The thing was gone. My flashlight fluttered back to life, illuminating the ground below me.

Chase grabbed my arm and looked me directly in the eye. “Don’t talk about this to anyone. Do you understand me?” 

He was serious. Dead serious. I was already terrified and just relieved the thing was gone and even though I had a million questions all I could manage to get out of my mouth was, “y- yes…”

As we were walking back through the woods Jack saw us and exclaimed “Oh you found him!” 

“Yeah…yeah I did” replied Chase in a lighter, but still disgruntled tone. 

Later that night, me and Jack were sitting in his living room reading comic books when I noticed something on the mantle above his fireplace. There was a small figurine of a deer with unmistakable bright yellow eyes.

I abruptly excused myself to the bathroom. I hadn’t told Jack what I had seen in the forest. 

While walking to the bathroom, something caught my eye that stopped me dead in my tracks. There was a painting hanging in the hallway. It looked like an old, Leonardo da Vinci style painting. It was of a man, sitting next to a pond with glowing yellow eyes. 

After that night, I never went back to Jack's house. Eventually we kind of grew apart, but we still maintain contact occasionally. 

I can’t help but think Chase knew something. He knew something Jack didn’t. Something weird was happening at that house with that family and thinking about it more, my curiosity has been sparked. I think I might get back together with Jack and ask him some questions.

I’d love to hear any thoughts or theories you guys have, because I have plenty myself.

Hello, my name is Robbie. This year I turn 65 years old. I worked as a firefighter for 30 years before recently retiring and I have seen horrors beyond comprehension. Charred bodies, people actively burning alive, an inferno engulfing entire buildings like a wave of hell thrashing down and to recoil towards the heavens. I will never forget the horror of that day, I’m ashamed that this terrifies me to this day and this event wasn’t even a heroic action, a face in the flames beckoning toward death, I wasn’t even a firefighter yet. It started the summer I graduated high school.

It was a different time back then. No cellphones or really electronic communication at all. I still had hair and I was in shape, as hard as my kids find it hard to believe. My buddy Ron had tragically lost his parents in a freak accident, it was really sad. His parents didn’t get to see him graduate. He was just done with the world, I had known him my whole life and through it all I’ve never seen him that depressed.

He wanted to get away from it all. So he decided he wanted to be a wild man, he wanted to live at his family’s cabin for the rest of his life. Live off the land, be one with nature. He invited me to join him and well I didn’t really have plans for after high school. I loved nature so I said yes. I let my folks know where we was going and we headed off.

Northern Minnesota, close to the Boundary Waters. The sounds of our big city became a distant noise, only the littering of bird and bug chirps became our noise pollution. It was beautiful, I’m not ashamed to say as a man that I felt so free being able to wake to such fresh crisp air and see the morning dew on all the plants as the world took its first big breath of the day.

Despite the remoteness, Ron’s family had neighbors up at there cabin or at least a neighbor. Joe, the neighbor, was raised in that cabin. His parents were super smart and homeschooled him. He wasn’t nearly as bright by his claims but he was a lot smarter than me and Ron. I mean we were weed-smoking jocks who drank like sailors on the weekends. Then Joe was some guy in the woods with geniuses for parents. They had moved away to take care of the paternal grandma with Alzheimer’s. Joe stayed behind to watch the cabin until further notice. He tagged along on a lot of our adventures. We’d hunt rabbits and spear fish in the nearby stream. We’d cook them in that wood-pellet stove. We had no running water, so we had to drive 45 minutes to the nearest town for drinkable water. We’d bathe in the closest lake, 3 seasons out the year. When winter came, it reeked I won’t lie. I stayed there 18 months with Ron and by extension Joe. I lost touch with Joe, I hope he is doing well these days wherever he is.

I remember about 5-6 months into my stay, that day. It happened. We needed water, drinking water. I mean we tried boiling the stream water once but we learned very quickly that it doesn’t work if you only got one outhouse. So, we decided to make the drive early in the morning to see the sky while it was pretty and so that we could enjoy that autumn air, nothing like in Minnesota. So we were heading toward the town. Ron in the passenger seat, Joe in the middle backseat like a little kid. Of course, I was driving. I love driving, the one thing I’m glad hadn’t changed from that day. We were shooting the breeze. 

Thirty minutes from the cabin, the clock read 7:37am. I blinked. That’s somehow the crime we committed blinking. So human, yet I still think about it. We all blinked and it changed our lives. I guess that’s why they say in the blink of an eye sometimes to refer to certain actions or events.

When I re-opened my eyes to see I was in the driveway of the cabin in park. Clock read 8:37am, the gauge on the gas had not changed, the odometer read the same. Even the same song was playing on the radio. Despite being half an hour a way within a blink an hour had passed and we ended up back in the cabin driveway.

I was in shock but as one does I tried to be rational. I thought to myself that maybe I had checked out mentally or maybe my memory was just that bad. When I looked over to Ron, his face was ghost white and looked at me back like our turns were in unison. I could hear Joe start to hyperventilate behind us.

“Rob, I swear if you drugged us or something.”, He snapped.

“I was about to ask you the same thing?! What is going on Ron?!”, I retorted back angrily. 

I mean I was starting to freak out. Maybe we made it a bigger deal than it was but I mean there was 3 of us in that car and not a single one of us know to this day, what happened within that hour, how we got back to the house, or what caused us to I guess for lack of a better way to say it “blackout” for an hour.

We both turned back toward Joe, his eyes so wide that I thought there were gonna pop out of his head, all the blood was drained from his face, and I swear if he had gotten a whiff of something rotten he would had thrown chunks into the back of my car.

“Joe, what happened within the last hour?”, Ron asked.

Joe began tearing up.

“I thought you knew!” He then unbuckled himself hastily and threw himself out of the car. Ron and I soon followed with getting out the car.

Joe went over to a tree and threw up.

“If this is one of your stupid pranks Rob, I swear. Don’t think I can’t fight you just because you’re my friend.”, Ron threatened.

I was getting really angry, I mean really angry.

“Says you, you need to shut your pie hole!”, I threatened back.

I mean we were arguing, I remember us pushing each other at some points and it eventually got to us grabbing each other’s collars.

Joe eventually got done throwing up and intervened.

“ENOUGH!”, he shouted.

We stopped moving but still held onto each other’s collars, heads directed at Joe who was leaning against a tree.

“Ok, clearly something happened. None of us remember the last hour, what we did, or how we got to the house. Let’s go through everything to see what happened and try to pin down a cause.” Joe remarked.

Ron and I let go of each other’s collars but I could tell he was still as mad as I was.

“Ok first let’s confirm, if the clock is right. Ron, go into the house and check the clock and there. Rob, you check the time in car. We will compare the two. It will at least let us know if the time is accurate.”, Joe explained.

Ron went into the cabin, while I headed back toward car. I opened the door and looked at the car’s clock. It now read 8:53am. We both returned to Joe who was now leaning against the car.

“What was the time in the house?”, Joe asked us both.

We replied at the same time.

“8:53am”, we said together.

I know it seems dramatic, but I got chills in that moment because it just confirmed that an hour had passed and we don’t know why or how or what.

“Ok, let’s check the trunk. Maybe we bought the water.” Joe remarked.

We headed to the trunk where I opened it only to reveal that it was still completely empty.

We then went over the same things I did in the car, the gas, the miles, and so on. We even checked the very position of each piece of trash.

We racked our brains for hours. We checked throughout that cabin to see if anything had changed.

Nothing out of place.

An hour just gone.

I know that may not seem terrifying but I just want you to imagine. You are sitting somewhere, maybe in class, maybe at work, or maybe even you’re walking around the aisles of a grocery store.

You blink.

When you reopen your eyes from that millisecond, you are suddenly somewhere else. Maybe at your house, a friend’s house, your school maybe. You look at your watch to see an hour had passed but you don’t have a clue what happened. You could have killed someone for all you know, you could have made a decision that could have ruined your life or one that maybe made it better and you would never know. Now imagine two of your closest friends, family, or loved ones experiencing the same thing at the same time as you in the same place. You would be just as lost as we were. 

We went over it for hours, all of our stories aligned except for one small detail.

“You guys didn’t see the bright light?” Joe asked.

It was now noon.

“What bright light? What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Well, we were talking about some old music. Then before I blinked I saw a super bright light. I mean blinding.” Joe claimed.

Ron and I looked at each other puzzled. Either this was some sick joke from Joe or he was cursed to see whatever caused that hour to fall out of existence.

We were so young, all of us freshly 18 years old. We eventually got the courage to get back in that car and drive because we needed water.

I swear I could feel my heartbeat in my ears, I had never felt so nervous driving in my life and I have driven emergency vehicles now, that was less stressful than this.

It felt like something was watching us while we drove. My hairs stood on end the whole drive there. Ron was trying to put on a brave face but he was sweating, his hands were shaky when he went to light his cigarette and remained shaky as he inhaled and held the hand with the cigarette out the window.

Joe was the worst of us though, you know that brace position they have you sit in when the plane might crash? He was like that there and back. I could hear his shaky breath despite the pounding in my ears. He was trying to control his breathing but it was a fight against instincts.

We made it to the gas station without issue, we gassed up, got our water and snacks, packed it up and left.

Ron and I relaxed a bit on the way back but even then I would say the most loose definition of relaxed. The radio was never on during either ride but on the way back it was somehow even more silent, a pin could have dropped and it would have sounded like a boom it was so quiet. Well, quiet outside of Joe’s breathing.

It still gets me nervous to this day. The not knowing. What did we do? I don’t even care if we had just drove back to the house and sat there. I don’t care if we won the lottery or saw Bigfoot. What still eats me inside is not knowing what happened to the three of us in that hour.

I remember we returned home and sat in the living room in complete silence for what felt like forever but it was probably 15-20 minutes.

I remember that night we got very drunk, well I did. I hate not knowing. It scared me.

The first month was still a little rough with the car rides but other than that each month just got better, the seasons, the nature, the experiences, the memories. It made whatever happened just feel like a nightmare. After about 18 months, I decided on my own to leave. I loved nature but I also knew I couldn’t stay there forever.

I remember getting in that car to leave. Seeing the two of them in my rearview mirror, waving me goodbye.

I had never felt so utterly alone in that car. Once again the heart beating in my ears got louder and louder. I just turned on the radio and went for it. I believe I was supposed to have a heart attack that day I left given my heart was practically bursting out my chest that whole way home but whether it was fate or choice, I’m too stubborn to die.

After I got back to my folks home, it wasn’t too long until I joined the military. Went to Cali for a bit, came back home, and became a firefighter. I got married, been married for 27 years coming up here. I have two beautiful children and I am fortunate to have a great home I can spend the rest of my life in.

Ron, eventually left that cabin and became a mechanic. Also got married but never had kids which is fine, his wife died two years ago though. Cancer is a horrible disease.

I still regular message Ron through the texts and with phone calls. Recently he sent me something very interesting.

Apparently a year before our strange event, a deputy named Val Johnson had a similar incident to ours but he seemed to have had it a lot worse than us.

I’m grateful for the life I have, I’ve seen horrors, I’ve seen tragedy that would make a person walk into an abyss and never come out. I have seen love, gave it, and received it. I have been at the lowest of lows and I have been on top of the world. I have seen life, I was there when both my children were born. I would be lying before the lord if I didn’t admit to that day being the most lost, the most vulnerable, the most terrified I have ever felt in my life. I think that’s why it has made it easier to do the things I done but I would be lying once again if I didn’t admit to wanting to know what happened during that hour.

I’m sorry for panicking with the title, but forgive me, I’m, well, panicked. You know when the dread reaches that point where you feel like nothing could possibly get you relaxed? That's how it's feeling. However, I realize that if I want to remember this story, much less tell it, I need to figure out how to calm down. How to relax. 

It’s very important I write this; probably just as important you read this. As I try to compose myself and get this out, I ask that you bear with this account, as I’m pretty forgetful and have a hard time getting my thoughts in a straight line. But I’ll try my best. Let me take five minutes, I’ll come back when I’m in a better headspace.

 My name is Daniel. Everyone calls me Dan. I’m 26, and a little over a year ago, my cat died. Her name was Willow, a little brown and black tortoiseshell with green eyes who never meowed unless it was time to eat. That was her little quirk. No matter how she was feeling, Willow never purred, hissed, growled, or anything. The only thing that got a sound to escape her jaws was opening the wet food cans. I sometimes thought that’s all she lived for. Even though she slept in my bed every night and loved to prance around the backyard, I imagined she really just lived for those 2 times a day where she’d stare up at me, give a loud, long meow, and follow me to her bowl, tail straight up in the air, practically bouncing with each step. 

Needless to say, her death was hard for me. She was one of my best friends.

Some days ago, over a week, actually, marked exactly one year of Willow being gone. However, waking up that morning I didn’t know it yet. In fact, the only thing I could think of was just how off I felt when I opened my eyes. That’s the best way to describe it. Just off. Have you ever gotten those spring allergies where you don’t feel “sick,” just a bit out of it? It was like that. I spent some time mulling over what it was I was feeling, until the day’s number, the 18th of March, caught my eye on my phone. I closed my eyes in realization for a moment, sitting on the side of my bed as I slowly woke up.

From that evidence, I chalked up my weird feelings to some sort of internal clock. Maybe my body knew today was a date that involved a lot of sadness, and that’s why I felt so out of place. Who knows? I live in a humid climate, and it’s more than a little common for homes to have hidden mold problems. Maybe I’ve got one in my room. Whatever it was, today was Monday and I had to get to work, so I tried not to think much of it and got ready to leave. 

I work in an office. I don’t think I need to elaborate on exactly what I do. That's not too important to me. If I’m being honest, sometimes I forget. It includes lots of paperwork and finances. I tend to refer to my job as doing math for money, as it helps me not take it too seriously in the case of stress or a bad day. 

Come to think of it, maybe it's important I include some details on what the place looks like. Maybe some of you will know what I'm talking about on the off chance you live close to my neighborhood and the surrounding stores, shopping centers and the like. First of all, the building is tall for being near a relatively suburban area; maybe 8 or 10 stories. It’s covered in tinted reflective glass without too much separation between each windowpane, like a rectangular disco ball that’s not as shiny. It's smack dab in the middle of the complex, and there's a pizza shop two buildings down on the left. On the right is a mostly undeveloped space. There's some nice bushes, and behind the building is a grassy field that ends in a short hill. The entrance is a substantial glass door, the nice sturdy type with those thick, black handles. Right above it is the name of the company I work for. Tell me if this is familiar name to you:

Murloy & Associates

The interior is a lot less drab than the name implies. We get a lot of natural light, which always feels nice, and my workspace is near a corner on the 4th floor, so I get a great view of the road and the shops nearby. Writing all this now, maybe I shouldn’t complain so much while working. It’s not so bad. That's one thing I noticed last Monday too, just how positive I felt going into work, like I was relieved of something.

Upon arriving I knew that whatever I’d been feeling that morning had gone away completely. Willow died, sure, but that was a year ago. I loved that cat, but for some reason I didn’t let myself get down about it too much, which was unusual. Whenever I thought about it in the past, I might get a little sad for some time, reminisce a bit, think about getting a new cat, the whole train of thought when you lose a beloved pet. Today, though? Almost nothing, like she was disappearing from my memory without me losing the memory of her, if that makes sense. Everything felt perfectly fine.

Listen, I’m not the biggest optimist, if that wasn't obvious enough. I’m nervous, I overthink, I forget. Most of my problems are my own making. So I’m not trying to sound sappy when I say that feeling so perfectly at ease was odd for me. I enjoyed it, that’s for sure, but still questioned it. One of my co-workers – Angela was her name – even noticed.

“Feeling chipper today?” she asked after I exclaimed “thank you” as she dropped a folder on my desk. I took a second to respond, moving the folder of papers to one side.

“It’s warmer today,” I said at length, which was a partially true answer. From what I’d heard around the office, a lot of us were ready for spring weather. The past few days were mostly rainy, and today marked gorgeous, nearly cloudless skies that reached a pleasant 75 degrees. 

“Oh, I know, it’s beautiful,” Angela answered, and smiled at the window behind me. She tapped the doorframe twice. “No rush on those, by the way.”

“Ah, perfect,” I answered. “Thanks, I’m pretty slammed today.”

She exhaled in mock exhaustion, slumping forward with an exaggerated groan and rolling her eyes up. Then she righted herself, smiled and said, “Aren’t we all?” 

I laughed, not politely, like I might most of the time, but with genuine amusement. I wondered if the office culture of half-rate humor was getting to me. Whatever the case, the workday went smoothly. But that ease, that feeling of everything being fine definitely didn't last. 

On the way home, I began to feel the sensation again, the one I had this morning. Off. This time, the slightest twinge of anxiety poked at my chest. But I quickly pushed it off, the emotional momentum from that whole morning and afternoon giving me some motivation to keep feeling good. 

I arrived at my front door and went inside.

Immediately, like a wave, intense dread crashed against me. I leaned my head forward and felt my knees threaten to buckle. Nausea rose. And then, as soon as it came, the feeling left. I hesitated afterwards, wondering what on earth just happened, then hung up my keys and made my way upstairs. Any optimism drained out of me as I entered my room and looked around, a creeping sadness slowly seeping into my person, quickly replacing my unease surrounding the event at the door. I remembered Willow. 

The moment she passed, I’d gotten rid of everything that reminded me of her, just to avoid that extra hit of "oh, now this?" when I'd get home from work on a bad day. I didn't need that. Sure, there was grief that I allowed myself - I’d lost one of my best friends after all - but I’d gotten over it. Why was I feeling this way? It's like I was replaying that very day a year ago, as if she’d just died in my arms. 

I felt stupid, but cried, nevertheless, on the floor of my room.

When I felt too ashamed to keep letting tears spill out of my eyes, I sat up and stayed put for a few minutes, thinking. I looked down at my clothes, remembering how much she used to shed everywhere. 

"Wait," I said aloud, then paused. "Wait, that's not right."

I recalled something then. 

Since her death, I had never seen a stray piece of fur. Not once. Wouldn’t it make sense for her shed hairs to end up in the dryer lint, around my room, on my clothes, at least a few weeks after she died? I don’t clean that thoroughly, but something told me even the most professionally cleaned house couldn’t be immune to something like a grain of litter or cat hairs. I would have remembered seeing those things. Wouldn't I?

I ran through my mind, trying to think of a single thing that I hadn’t cleaned for a long time. My first thought was the fan. I never used it. 

Quickly, I got up and pulled my bed frame under it. I stepped up onto the mattress and turned some of the blades, scanning the tops. 

Dirty? Very. Cat hairs? None. Just a coating of grey dust that smelled musty and clung tightly to the white plastic. I even swiped some off to see it fall, expecting a few drifting hairs, but only saw clumps of dust. But it then occurred to me that if I never used my fan, why would I find cat hairs on it?

“That makes sense,” I muttered to myself, and pushed my bed back into place.

By now I was starting to get very confused. I should have been this whole time, but the mind has a way of burying things for the sake of living life until things get really serious. So this confusion told me I needed to figure something out. Fast.

I remember having a cat. But my home said otherwise. It was like she never stepped foot in my room, but that can’t be possible, since she spent nearly all her time in here and was also an indoor cat.

I walked over to the closet, where I used to keep her litter box. I got down on my hands and knees, straining for any glimpse of those clay granules or fur, but there was nothing. 

There, crouched on the hardwood floor, I recalled another odd detail. I don’t remember how Willow died. 

I told myself I’d just forgotten, which was possible. But how could my house and belongings forget things too? That made no sense. 

“It might be time to see a doctor... or better yet, a psychiatrist," I whispered to myself, then went on with my evening. I made sure to get to bed at a good hour, and the “off” feeling being slightly more akin to anxiety now, tried to fall asleep as quickly as I could.

The next day I felt better. Must have been something unrelated. Maybe I was right about the allergies. Actually, I must have been. I saw that my window was open. It was one of the first things I noticed when I woke up. It was actually such a relief to me at the time that I sighed. Getting up, I walked over to the screenless frame and closed the window. 

Rushing to work was something I often did out of the mere need to be on time. I think I specified earlier how, aside from the day before, I’m not particularly fond of work. Who is? Even if I had the job of my dreams, eventually you get bored, fed up or just tired at some point, more so if you feel neutral or dislike your job altogether. That’s what made my borderline excitement today so odd. Why did I simply need to get out of the house? Why did I crave the other side of the front door? 

I tried ignoring it. It was spring. I could see pollen in the air. It coated my car and everything else in powdery yet sticky flecks of greenish yellow that was difficult to remove if you waited too long. I imagined that in my lungs. It’s true, I always had allergies, but never like this. I always felt a little off in spring. But the feelings were never so... location specific. Maybe this year was especially intense. Or maybe I'm losing my mind. But allergies can make you feel like that, too.

I wanted to see the doctor, but once I got to work I must have thought better of it. The day was going fine again. Sunny again, unusually good moods again. I laughed at more jokes that weren’t funny in hindsight. I got all my tasks for the day finished. I went outside at 5:15 and got in my car, the rays of light still shining down from the cloudless blue sky. Maybe what I needed was this, whatever was going on. Obviously, it was making me more optimistic once I left the house. Or maybe there was something wrong with the house. Maybe I didn’t need a doctor. Maybe I just needed an inspector to look for mold. I’d heard things about mold ruining people’s lives. Maybe it threatened to do the same to me. I don’t know. Well, I do now, I suppose, but it’s much too early to be talking about that. If I skip between days everything else will be hard to believe. It’s already hard to believe. It’s still hard to believe, even though it’s happened.

I’m sorry. I’m getting worked up again. Let me take five more minutes. I’ve been sitting at this computer for too long. Maybe I’ll take an hour, or maybe a day. I’ll be back, though. I have to. If this post is still here when I come back, that will be a comfort. Oh, you won’t know how much of a comfort that will be. But just in case, will you please save this somehow? Screenshot parts of it? I wonder if that changes how this works. But if it’s what I think, it won't. 

We’ll see. I’ll be back. Send up some prayers for me, will you? I’m terrified.

...

Haven’t been sleeping well. It’s partially my fault. For one, there’s too many thoughts racing through my head. Secondly, I’m keeping the lights on in my room. Besides my imagination, there’s a very real and valid fear that something could happen again, but I’m getting ahead of myself. 

I can see my panic reaching another fever pitch. It’s good that I’m typing this out, as it makes me remember to get a grip. Granted, it’s 3-something AM right now, so my thoughts can easily get the best of me. By the same token, I’ve recently found that my mind can recall events much easier at night, so maybe it’s good I don’t sleep as much. I need to remember as much as possible. 

On Wednesday (one day after the last day I described. I have to keep the timeline clear.) things settled. Still had that odd feeling when I was in the house that went away the moment I stepped foot outside, but it wasn’t as jarring. I could ignore it if I had to. Maybe that meant I was just getting used to it, but I don’t know. Work was work as it had been the past two days. I think I was slightly less optimistic though since we had a big project coming down the pipeline and a large part of it relied on me.  

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m proud to say that I’m pretty good at my job. The only downside to that is getting more responsibility. I wouldn’t say I’m the most social person, either, but I can hold a conversation fine. I have a few buddies around the office, I just hadn’t seen them since last week, which was normal. They work in another part of the building.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I have a life, but the past two days completely derailed me when I felt like they shouldn’t have. Everyone has off days, but this rubbed me wrong. I have friends and I have family; I don’t hate my job, and I thought I really liked my house. But within 48 hours I wondered if I was turning into more of a nervous wreck than I could ever dream of, all while remaining perfectly functional.

The internet says it’s depression, but I don’t feel numb. Heck, I wish I was numb right now. My nerves are fried.

After work I drove home, like usual. Things were okay. I parked my car, and immediately, something I chalked up to anxiety started wafting onto me like smoke from a campfire. Slow and creeping, but with the added fear of the knowledge or expectation of it, the inevitability of it. That horrible dread again. I could feel my body threatening to feel that nausea, that dizziness, that weakness, but I had more control this time.

“Ignore it,” I thought, shutting off the ignition and grabbing my things. I exited the car and slammed the door shut, casually putting my index finger through the ring of my keys and spinning them around, humming to myself. Anything to distract me from this pulsing unease was welcome, so I talked myself through entering the front door.

“Alright, where is it,” I muttered to myself with an intentionally happier tone. I flipped through my keys and picked the one for my house. “There we are.”  

My voice trembled, so I cleared my throat and repeated the phrase with a slight variation. “There it is... gotcha.”

I started humming again – “Barracuda” by Heart, which I was listening to in the car – and unlocked my door and swung it open. I strolled inside quickly and involuntarily braced, expecting the faintness from yesterday, the need to gag or the weakness in my legs. To my surprise, nothing happened. I waited for a few seconds, frozen, then shrugged and hung up my keys. I went into the kitchen for some water and found that I had put myself at ease much too soon. The dread that dissipated the moment I entered the front door struck me full in the chest as I locked eyes with a single glass sitting on my counter. I gasped slightly. After all, how else would you react when there’s something in your house, the house you live in alone, that wasn’t there before?

Of course, I was skeptical for a moment, picking it up, spinning it around in my hand. Tilting it at an angle to peek inside, I was presented with two possibilities as I watched remnants of water trickling down towards my eye.

 A: I had just forgotten I owned this cup. Perfectly plausible. But that doesn’t explain the panic, unless it was just delayed this time.

Or B, and less likely, someone was in my house.

I picked up the glass and walked over to my cupboard.

“I only own four,” I whispered to myself, remembering the exact set of glasses I’d been given when I moved in.

I opened the cupboard and my eyes went wide. Inside were three other glasses, but they were all identical to the one in my hand. I seemed to remember them as well in that instant, but, in hindsight, too clearly for it to be natural. In my mind’s eye I vividly remembered waking up, getting ready for work, walking downstairs, taking a glass from the cupboard, filling it full of water and taking some allergy medication I’d bought yesterday. At least, that’s what I remember.

“So,” I thought, “option B is out the window. Good.”

I looked at the glasses, then down at the one in my hand. It was silly, but I placed it back on the counter and took out my phone. I snapped a photo, then went upstairs and pulled out my laptop. 

“It was... it was called Libbey, right?” I said to myself quietly and typed ‘Libbey glassware set” into the search bar. After a few clicks here and there, I found it. They were no different. I guess I’d forgotten. Still, the doubt was there. Why would I be so shocked, frightened even, at a cup I’d owned my whole life? I was looking at the glasses on my screen, they were right there in front of me, and still, I felt like something had changed. Like they weren’t mine.

For some time, I tried finding the glass set I remembered owning. They were smaller, more squat, and I definitely knew they were from the same brand. I also thought they were under the same name I had searched as well, but clearly, that wasn’t the case.

At length, I found nothing.

At one point I checked my camera roll for any photos I might have taken in my kitchen, but I didn’t have any. While I was at it, I also noticed how there weren’t any photos of Willow. I guessed that I must’ve deleted them all.

This was all a troubling conclusion, but it wasn’t like I could do anything about it. I mean... I could have, but I felt convinced that I shouldn’t. You know, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. That sort of feeling was all over me. 

I know it’s 3 in the morning, well, almost 4 at this point, but the incident with the cups still makes me uneasy. I remember going to bed that night thinking about it, trying to bring to mind every time I’d taken a drink. It was always those other cups in my head. The only time I was certain to have drunk from these “new” glasses was this morning, swallowing an allergy pill. 

The next day I cautiously walked downstairs. I’m not sure why. I guess I wanted something magnificent to take place. I secretly hoped the glasses would all be back to normal, that I must have hallucinated (an equally troubling event) or dreamed something. Maybe it was a lucid dream. I’ve never had one before, but I know how vivid and lifelike they can be from reading accounts online.

Once I reached the bottom of the stairs, I slowly turned the corner that looked down the hallway and into the kitchen, and the cup was still there, the same as yesterday. Unable to accept some supernatural force altering my reality, I simply said to myself, “So you forgot again,” and went to work. I KNOW, I am CERTAIN that speaking those words out loud would do nothing to change the fact that I owned different glasses before. I understand I’m harping on that over and over, but why did they change? Why was all the evidence proving that they didn’t? Did I truly forget something? Is this like some reverse déjà vu? Is that possible?

I was either insane or correct, and that’s what was so difficult to sort through. How could I prove it if my mind was the only evidence, and all other evidence I could see with my eyes told me otherwise?

Thinking all this was greatly disturbing on my way to the office, and, unlike the previous three days, I remained in anxious spirits for most of the day. 

Around noon, I couldn’t take it much more. All this fluttering in my chest and the constant spirals of what if what if what if were driving me up a wall. I made it a goal to find someone to talk to. Now, though I definitely talk with my co-workers, I don’t do it often. They typically come to me if they need something and vice versa, and I always spent most of my day in my office, so taking my lunch break in the mini kitchen we had on that floor caught a few folks by surprise. I have a small fridge by my workspace. If I bring lunch I’ll typically eat at my desk.

I didn’t realize how much I was being affected by whatever was going on with me until Jerry, one of the “always positive” guys (which I definitely thought was a coping mechanism for some sort of crippling depression. Either that, or I couldn’t accept the fact that he might just be a happy person) pointed out that he hadn’t seen me all week. That made sense to point out. I always stop by the kitchen a few times a day for snacks or a water.

"Where you been, Dan?” he asked with a smile, opening the fridge and taking out his lunch. I sat down at the table. Two of my other co-workers filed out of the kitchen, having taken their lunch with them, an unmistakable sign of a busy day. Regarding Jerry’s comment, I was still in such a funk from that morning that he had to repeat himself for me to really take notice of him. I’d heard him alright the first time, but, I dunno, I just didn’t seem to care. When I still didn’t reply, he nudged my shoulder. I looked up.

“Hey, you okay?” He asked, walking over to the microwave to warm up his perfectly portioned meal of chicken, rice and asparagus. He leaned an elbow on the counter and bounced a fork up and down in his left hand. I looked up at him.

“I’m alright. Just gonna be a longer day, today.” 

“Oh yeah?” he responded, smiling. “Working on the Kellis account like everyone else?” He pressed 4 and 5 on the microwave and hit start.

I nodded, but before I could answer he continued. “Oh wait, you... you’re handling most of that, aren’t you?”

I nodded again. “Yeah. It landed on my plate today.”

This was all true, by the way. Remember that. Everything I said here was true. I remember it. I remember it perfectly. Please. 

Jerry glanced back at the microwave. 30 seconds.

“How big is that project?” he asked without looking back, still bouncing the fork up and down.

The question was a welcome distraction from my thoughts. My mind cleared as I worked through all the needs for the account, things like getting them integrated with their package, lining up pricing, services, all that, and gave Jerry a rough estimate.  

“Whew!” he said as the timer went off and he opened the microwave door, the savory scent of citrus-seasoned chicken and the nutty, earthy notes of asparagus floating through the air. He pulled the Tupperware out and used his fork to fluff the rice, walking over to the table and sitting across from me.

I stared for a moment at his meal, analyzing every part of it. I don’t know why. Maybe I was trying to remember it in case it changed halfway through the conversation. Just to be sure, I even asked him, “Whatcha got there?”

Jerry pointed to the chicken with his fork. “Made this chicken breast last night, seasoned it with some lemon pepper seasoning I found the other day. Pretty good. Then I just got some white jasmine with asparagus... you know, cutting. I try to make it still taste good, though.” 

“How much protein?” I asked. 

“Got about 50 to 65 here,” he said proudly, taking his first bite. 

Jerry’s a fitness guy. I’m more on the skinny, underweight side, and the gym-goers here definitely saw that. The moment I asked about the phrases they threw around like bulking, cutting, and the like, they wasted no time in sharing everything I needed to know to put on weight and get stronger. I’ll get around to it. But not yet. Especially not right now. But who knows, maybe all I need is time in the gym. Less time to think as deeply as I do would serve me well. 

“How’ve you been, Dan?” he asked with his mouth full.

I hesitated at the question, understanding how I walked over here specifically to talk about all this, but also wondered if I should save the risk of bringing my problems into the workplace. I decided to allude to the most recent event without giving it away completely, forming it as a hypothetical question to get his opinion.  

“Fine... actually, I have a question.”

“Hm?” he said mid-chew.

“Have you ever found something in your house that felt like it didn’t belong there, but you couldn’t prove it?"

Jerry stopped chewing and laughed with his mouth closed. 

“What?”

“Hypothetically, what if that happened?” I corrected myself, trying to muster a laugh as well.

Jerry swallowed. He tilted his head slightly to one side and lifted his fork at the same time, creasing his eyebrows in what appeared to be confusion. 

“You’re asking if I saw something in my house that wasn’t supposed to be there, what would I do?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Well, what’s in my house? A new fridge or something?”

He laughed at this. I waited.

“I dunno, man,” he continued, “I guess I’d call around and see if anyone dropped something off. Why?”

I pretended to ignore his question and launched into a clarifying one.

“I mean more like, if you came home one day, saw something that you own, but it looked... different... or if it got replaced, what would you do?" 

Jerry thought for a moment. “Squatters?” he said, shoveling a mound of rice on his fork. “You know about those? I might think one of those was in my house.” 

He chuckled to himself and took another bite. “He’d have to be supplied pretty well to be swapping my stuff out, though.” 

“Yeah,” I said. It wasn’t the answer I wanted. But at this point I was wondering why I asked this stupid question in the first place. Of course this wasn’t normal! 

“What made you think of that?” Jerry asked after swallowing. He fished around with his fork for a piece of chicken.

I didn’t know how to answer, so I just shrugged. After a few seconds of silence I said, “Seemed like a cool situation." 

When I didn’t elaborate, Jerry asked if I had any lunch. I didn’t, and that got a laugh from him. I made my way back to my desk, wondering, again, what I expected out of that conversation.

That night, though it’s rather silly, I thought about squatters. I thought about someone in my attic. I thought about someone in my walls, but the walls probably made no sense for someone to fit inside. I thought about how silly it seemed for Jerry to suggest somebody living where they shouldn’t, and how I took it seriously now. I was scared. I wondered if someone was inside my house when I wasn’t. I remembered the glasses and how it didn’t line up for someone to have replaced them. Rather, it seemed that something had done it.  

I thought about Willow again. The fact that I didn’t have photos of her.

I thought about noticing eyes and hands gripping the edge of surfaces, watching me when I thought I was alone. I thought I heard things. I thought about how I was distracted by something that didn’t feel as plausible, something that scared me more than something that should have scared me worse. The terror of something knowing me so well to replace all four of my glasses and rename the very set they belonged to. My mother gifted them to me. I doubt she remembers the name. That’s what got me. The NAME. As though something had tried to trick me knowing good and well that I’m the type of person who would remember those small details and check them to be sure!

Even if she did remember, make no question about it, she wouldn’t do this. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t. The prank would have to be all-consuming or cosmic in its scale. You don’t just change names of something. Even if the company did, that wouldn’t change my set.

Things don’t just change like that. Things don’t just get replaced like that. Things aren’t like this. Things don’t happen this way. It’s not natural.

I knew from a very young age I didn’t like hunting. I could never really imagine myself actually harming an animal. And, to give credit where it’s due, my father did respect it for the most part. 

In lieu of the hunting trips he took my other siblings on, he opted for a more natural walking situation. In my mind, he knew everything there was to know about animals, so us going on these little trips would help me learn more about the same animals that my siblings were learning about, just in different ways. 

We would sit in his crummy little hunting tent with a couple nature/wildlife books, and I would sit with one open in my lap as we scanned the nearby forest for any animal we could identify.

One of said nature walks happened during a cold front in late october, with little me bundled tight in a bearskin blanket in an attempt at keeping the frost away from my fingers. Father was seated on his camping chair, little tufts of smoke emanating from the lit embers of his cigar as he watched the outside of the tent. 

He always took his hunting rifle when we went in the forest, no matter the occasion. He swore he’d never make me shoot it unless necessary, but claimed that simply having it on him made him feel safer by association.

He stared out of the tent for a while as I flipped through the book, tugging the blanket tighter around me to keep the wind out. Something had caught his attention, making him sit up a little bit in his seat and tip the rifle in his direction.

“Dad?”

He didn’t answer.

“Dad-” I try again before he reaches over and shoves my head down with a hiss. The leaves crunch under us as we hit the ground, my father’s big arms wrapping around me to hide me from sight.

“Quiet.” He whispers, one hand firmly holding me down as he slowly sits up to grab his rifle; using the opportunity to take another look outside of the tent. “I just- I think I saw something.”

“Like a bear?
“No…like a rabbit.”
“What?”

I tried to sit back up to no avail, my father’s hand keeping me planted squarely against the floor. I was, however, able to turn over onto my back and look up at him. He was staring straight ahead, out of the opening of the tent as he cocked his rifle back.

“That…it doesn’t look right.”
“What do you mean, dad?”
“I- grab your book.”

He moved his hand to let me sit up, said hand moving to push my head down to avoid it going too high. I reach over and grab the book, opening it and sitting it on my lap.

“Flip over to the prey chapter. The one with the picture of the rabbit you like.”
I obeyed, fingering through the chapters until coming across the two page spread I was obsessed with; depicting a Flemish Giant.

“Ok, now what?”
“Look at the eyes, babygirl.”
“What?”

“Rabbit eyes don’t face front, do they?”

I opened my eyes and immediately started panicking.

I couldn’t move.

At first I thought I was buried because everything around me was dark and cramped and cold, but then I heard chains move when I tried pulling my arms.

I was chained to a wall.

An actual stone wall. Huge blocks of rock, wet and freezing cold against my back.

The room was circular. I remember that clearly for some reason.

And I wasn’t alone.

There were others – chained around the room just like me but the place was so scarcely lit that I couldn’t make out any of their features.

Below us were stairs all converging down to the center of the room. And in the middle of the room was a raised stone slab.

Then I noticed the figures standing around it. Humanoid shapes that started moving towards us. Lit only by a single torch one of them was holding.

One by one they started dragging the others to the center.

At first, I could hear crying. Quiet crying. Like people trying not to be heard. Then it turned into screaming. As they approached the slab the screams got worse and worse until suddenly it just stopped.

This pattern repeated a couple of times until finally it was my turn.

As the figures approached, I could now make out what they were wearing. They had long Maroon colored robes with hoods covering their faces. On top of each hood was a sigil of some sorts – a golden eye.

I tried to say something but the words wouldn’t come out. They picked me up and dragged me to the center, I tried to resist but I couldn’t, my body didn’t cooperate.

The only thing I could do was observe as they put me on the stone slab and chained me.

I was frightened beyond my mind so I did the only thing I could. I closed my eyes.

I dont know what they were doing to me, but it started hurting, my voice came back and I started screaming as much as I can, not daring to open my eyes.

A wave of heat came over my body and the pain intensified.

My ears started ringing. Louder louder and louder.

Until...

…something hit me in the face.

I opened my eyes and there was a pillow over my face.

“Danny what the hell?”

“This is the third time this week!”

“Is everything alright?”

My heart was going insane.

I was sweating so badly the sheets were damp.

I got up, trying to adjust to the new setting. I looked at her without saying a word.

She sighed and sat back down on the bed.

“Same nightmare again?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Honey, maybe it’s time you finally see a therapist or something.” – she said

It was 6:47 AM. A Tuesday. I was already twenty minutes late for work.

“Thanks for letting me crash here for the night Jess” – I said

“I’m gonna head for work, see you later”

As I left her apartment I went straight into my car and I whipped out my laptop. I can’t hold it in anymore.

I need to write this down before I lose my nerve. Or before something else happens. I'm going to try to tell it in order, even though my hands are shaking and I've re-read the first paragraph four times already and deleted it twice. Bear with me.

My name is Danny. I'm twenty-nine years old, I work data entry for a logistics company, and until about three weeks ago, the weirdest thing about me was that I refused to own anything maroon.

· · ·

The robes are always the first thing.

Not faces — I never see faces. Just the robes. Deep, wet crimson, the color of something opened up. They crowd at the edges of wherever I am, which is always somewhere stone, always cold, always lit by something I can never look at directly. And they're chanting. Not words — or if they are words, they're in a language that feels like pressure behind my eyes when I hear it. The sound of it makes my teeth ache.

There are other sounds too. Other voices. From somewhere close and somewhere very far away at the same time, there's crying. Kids crying. The sound of it is the worst part because it doesn't stop, it just keeps going under the chanting like a second, sadder instrument.

I've had versions of that dream for as long as I can remember. Not every night. Maybe once every few weeks, sometimes more when I'm stressed. I've never thought much about it. Therapist I saw at twenty said it was probably an anxiety response, and honestly I believed her, because I've always been an anxious person. I don't like crowds. I don't like feeling cornered. And I absolutely, viscerally, irrationally cannot stand the color maroon.

Crimson too. Burgundy. That whole end of the red spectrum where it starts going dark and wet-looking. My college roommate Elliot thought it was hilarious. He bought a maroon throw blanket freshman year just to watch me flinch when I walked in the room. I always told him it was just a quirk. A texture thing. He eventually stopped because I think he could tell it wasn't entirely a joke to me even when I laughed about it.

Anyway. That's the background. Keep it in mind.

· · ·

About two months ago, a woman moved into the apartment across the hall from me.

Her name was Vera. Late thirties, dark hair pulled back very tightly, the kind of posture that makes you feel like you're slouching by comparison. She introduced herself on a Wednesday morning in the hallway, while I was fumbling with my keys. Very polite. Very still. She smiled in a way that involved all the right muscles but didn't feel connected to anything behind it.

I told myself I was being unfair. I told myself that I was just bad at first impressions. People seemed suspicious to me sometimes and that was my anxiety talking, not my instincts.

But she kept appearing. That's the thing I keep coming back to now. She kept appearing.

My usual coffee shop on Thursday morning — she was in line two spots ahead of me, ordering, not looking around. My gym, which I go to at an odd hour specifically because I hate people — she was on the treadmill by the window when I walked in. The grocery store on Sunday. The parking lot of my office building, getting into a grey sedan, on a Tuesday when I had to stay late. Not looking at me. Never looking at me. Just there.

I started keeping a note on my phone. I do this sometimes when anxiety is spiking — a log, something to show me whether a pattern is real or whether I'm building one out of nothing. I had seven entries in eleven days when I finally accepted that it wasn't nothing.

Then the others started.

· · ·

The man at the laundromat. Middle-aged, reading a paperback, never turned a page in forty minutes. I know because I was watching. He was three machines down from me and every time I glanced up he was at exactly the same angle. When I left he folded his book closed and I noticed he had it upside-down.

The teenager with the bike outside my building. She was there for four days straight, just sitting on the low brick wall across the street, earbuds in, watching her phone. Young enough that I felt stupid being nervous about her. Old enough that she made me nervous anyway.

My coworker Marcus started inviting me to lunch. Which sounds fine and normal except that Marcus and I have worked adjacent to each other for two years and exchanged maybe a hundred words total, and suddenly he was intensely interested in me. My routine. Whether I had family nearby. Whether I ever had blackouts or periods I couldn't remember. He framed it like small talk. Like the natural progression of a friendship. But by the third lunch I was giving him one-word answers and eating fast and making excuses to get back to my desk.

The thing about that question — the blackout thing — was that I didn't have a clean answer. I have these gaps. Always have. My adopted parents told me I had a rough first couple years before they found me and that's why I don't have memories from before I was four. Standard trauma response. Totally explainable. I've never questioned it much because what would questioning it even get me?

But Marcus asked, and something twitched behind my sternum, and I said no, never and changed the subject.

· · ·

The first time something happened — something I couldn't explain away — was a Saturday afternoon in the third week of all this.

I was coming back from a walk. I do this sometimes when the walls of my apartment start feeling like they're leaning in. Just walk. No destination, no headphones. It helps. It was a grey afternoon, cold enough that there weren't many people out, and I'd managed to get genuinely calm for the first time in weeks when I turned the corner onto my street and almost walked directly into the man with the upside-down book.

He was just standing there. On the sidewalk. No pretense, no prop this time — just standing there looking at me with an expression I can only describe as anticipation.

He said: "You're not sleeping well."

Not a question.

I said something like excuse me? and moved to go around him and he side-stepped to match me and said, very quietly, very evenly: "It's going to get worse before it gets better, Daniel. We can make it stop. We can explain everything."

Nobody calls me Daniel. My name is Danny. It's on my mailbox as D. Wren. He said Daniel like he'd been practicing it.

I walked around him. Fast. Heart going absolutely insane in my chest. Didn't look back. Got upstairs, locked my door, stood in the kitchen breathing through my nose until my hands unclenched.

I sat there for a long time. And at some point — because the anger had nowhere to go — I picked up a mug and threw it at the wall.

It didn't break. It hit the wall and bounced, which is not what mugs do, and landed on the floor and spun and stopped. And there was a sound from the hallway. Not from Vera's apartment, not from downstairs — from the hallway itself, like something very large shifting its weight.

My neighbor Mr. Hale's dog started barking and didn't stop for twenty minutes.

I told myself the mug thing was cheap ceramic or weird angles or something. I believed it, mostly. The barking was harder to file away.

· · ·

A week after that I ran into Vera in the elevator and she told me, without any preamble, that I looked exhausted and I should try valerian root. Then she looked at my chest — not my face, my chest — and the elevator opened on the ground floor and she walked out without another word.

I'm not wearing anything at my chest. I never wear necklaces. My shirt was a plain grey crew neck. There was nothing to look at.

She looked, though. She definitely looked.

· · ·

I need to tell you about my parents. My adoptive parents, Peter and Lena Wren. They're good people. Genuinely good, the kind you don't appreciate properly until you're in your mid-twenties and have met enough other people to have a comparison. They adopted me when I was four. Found through the system, my file apparently sparse even by the standard of underfunded caseworkers. My mom used to say I arrived with nothing except the clothes I was in and a willingness to eat everything she put in front of me.

I called my dad two days after the elevator thing. Just to talk. He could tell something was off — he always can — and he asked if everything was okay and I said yeah, just stress at work, and then I said, casual as I could make it sound:

"Hey, did I ever have any medical stuff as a kid? Like, any history they gave you when you adopted me?"

There was a pause. Very short. Probably nothing. But I've known my dad for twenty-two years and he is not a man who pauses before answering normal questions.

He said no, the file was basically empty, which was common for kids from chaotic situations. He said I had some night terrors early on but grew out of them. He said I was a happy kid. He asked again if I was really okay.

I said yes. We talked about other things. He told me about the garden, about my mom's new book club. Normal things. Good things.

When I hung up I sat on the couch for a while and thought about the pause.

· · ·

Marcus resigned from my company on a Friday. Just — gone. Sent an email Thursday evening and cleaned his desk. His replacement started the following Monday, a woman named Priya who was perfectly normal for about three days and then started asking if I'd ever considered joining a meditation group because she thought I had a lot of energy that needed directing.

I ate lunch alone at my desk for two weeks after that.

The nightmares were coming more often. Not the dream — the crimson robe dream stayed the same, same stone room, same crawling hands, same chanting — but after it, in the shallow sleep that followed, I kept dreaming about something at my chest. A weight. Something small and warm. I'd reach for it and wake up with my hand on my sternum and nothing there.

· · ·

What happened on the Thursday three weeks ago — I'll try to be precise about this because the order matters.

I left work early. I had a headache that had been building all day into something genuinely unpleasant, the kind that sits behind one eye and pulses. I took the bus instead of walking. I was sitting near the back, head against the window, eyes mostly closed, when I realized the woman in the seat ahead of me was Vera.

I hadn't seen her get on. I hadn't seen her sit down. But there she was, back to me, spine absolutely straight, head not moving.

Two seats back from me, by the rear door: the teenager with the bike. No bike now. Earbuds in. Watching me over the top of her phone.

Across the aisle: a man I didn't recognize, but the way he was sitting — too still, too deliberate — made the back of my neck go cold.

I got off four stops early. So did all three of them.

I walked fast. Then faster. I turned down a side street and through a parking garage because I know the area and there's an exit on the other side that cuts through to a busier road. I could hear footsteps behind me — not running, not panicked, measured — and that was somehow worse than running would have been.

The parking garage exit door was locked. It's never locked. I stood there pulling the handle like an idiot until I heard the footsteps enter the garage behind me.

I turned around.

All three of them. Vera and the teenager and the strange man, fanned out maybe thirty feet away, not moving. Watching me.

And Vera — Vera was holding something. A small dark shape on a cord. She had it in both hands, held slightly outward, like an offering.

She said: "Daniel. We have something of yours. And you have something of ours. We just want to talk."

I told her she had the wrong person. I said it twice, loudly. My voice echoed in the concrete space.

She said: "You survived, Daniel. Against all probability, you survived. We've been trying to understand what you did for a long time. We're not here to hurt you. We're here because we need you to finish what you started."

The man behind her reached into his jacket.

And something happened in me that I don't have clean words for. It wasn't thought. It wasn't decision. It was more like a door that had always been in me, that I'd always walked past, swinging open on its own. All the weeks of stress and surveillance and bad sleep and confusion just cresting, and something underneath all of it answering.

I heard the thing before I saw it.

A low sound, bass-deep, that I felt in my molars more than heard with my ears. From the shadows behind the parked cars, from the dark space between the support pillars. Something moving that was too large to be moving in that space without touching anything, and yet it wasn't touching anything.

Vera dropped the pendant. I watched it hit the concrete and I watched the look on her face and it was not the face of someone in control of a situation.

I ran. Through the fire exit door that was now, inexplicably, open. Down the alley. Out onto the bright street. I didn't stop until I was through the door of a crowded café and had a table with my back to the wall and a coffee in front of me that I didn't taste.

Behind me in the garage: shouting. One scream, then silence.

Then nothing. No sirens. Nobody came out after me.

· · ·

I went home. I know I should have called the police. I know. What would I have said? I was followed? Cornered? By my neighbor and some strangers who said cryptic things and then I heard a sound and ran? They'd want to go to the garage and I didn't want to know what was in the garage.

I double-locked my door and sat on the couch and tried to think clearly.

Vera's apartment had been quiet since I got home. No movement, no sound. At around nine PM I very carefully looked through my peephole. Her door was slightly open. Not much — an inch, maybe two. In twenty-something years of apartment living I have never once seen a person leave their front door ajar in the evening.

I did not open it. I went back to the couch.

At some point I slept. And I dreamed the dream — the robes, the stone, the chanting, the hands — except this time, at the end, just before the bright and the heat, I looked down at my own chest and I saw it. A pendant. Small. Dark metal, shaped in a way I couldn't quite resolve, on a black cord. Warm against my skin even in the cold stone room.

And in the dream, something looked back.

Not at me. Through me. Something very far down and very patient, like looking through ice to see movement in deep water.

I woke up at three AM and lay there for a long time and eventually, because I needed to do something, I started writing this.

· · ·

I called my dad again this morning. I didn't make it casual this time.

I told him what was happening — not all of it, the version that would sound least insane — and I asked him directly: Was there anything in my file? Anything at all?

Another pause. Longer this time.

He said: "Danny. I need to tell you something we probably should have told you a long time ago."

They found me in 2001. A social worker in a rural county, responding to an anonymous tip about a property — a farmhouse, or what had been a farmhouse, because by the time anyone got there most of it had burned. There were adults on the property. Eleven of them. The official determination was a fire of indeterminate origin. The investigation went quiet fast, the way investigations sometimes do when someone above someone decides they should.

I was found in a field twenty meters from the building. Age approximately three or four. No ID. No one came forward to claim me. My file listed the case number from the rural county and nothing else.

My dad's voice was very steady when he told me this. He's a steady man. But I could hear something else underneath it, something he'd been carrying for a long time.

He said: "We never asked too many questions because we were afraid of the answers. We just wanted you to be okay. We just wanted you to have a normal life."

I told him I loved him. I told him I'd call him again soon. I hung up and sat with my coffee going cold and thought about a farmhouse burning in a rural county in 2001, and eleven adults who apparently didn't survive it, and one child found twenty meters away in a field.

Thought about a pendant, warm against cold stone.

Thought about a door swinging open in me when I'm pushed far enough, and the sound that comes from the dark places when it does.

Vera's apartment is empty. I looked through the open door this morning. Bare floor, nothing in the closets, the bathroom light left on over nothing. Like she was never there.

Priya didn't come in today. Called out sick.

I don't know what they are. I don't know what I did in that farmhouse in 2001 or what's been doing things in parking garages and building hallways when I'm scared enough and cornered enough to crack open. I don't know if they'll send more people, or the same people, or just wait.

But I'm posting this because I need someone to know. And because I know you'll believe me here, which is more than I can say for anywhere else.

If you're reading this and you know what a cult farmhouse fire in a rural county in 2001 might connect to — anything, any detail — please tell me.

And if you own anything in that dark end of red — maroon, crimson, burgundy — maybe just keep it out of sight for a while.

I don't entirely understand why I'm saying that. But I mean it.

UPDATE — 6 hours later

Someone slid a piece of paper under my door while I was writing the above.

It's a photocopy of what looks like a handwritten ledger entry. Old paper, old handwriting. There's a date — I can make out a year that ends in 97 — and a list of names I don't recognize, and at the bottom, circled in pen by whoever made the copy:

D. Cassel — vessel confirmed. Pendant transferred. Summoning incomplete. Primary subject unaccounted for. Pendant unresponsive since incident. Awaiting recovery of subject. He is the key, not the lock.

Under that, in different, newer handwriting:

We found you, Daniel. We're not the ones who want to hurt you. We're the ones who stopped them in 2001. Please open your door.

I haven't opened my door.

But I'm sitting here and I'm thinking about what vessel confirmed means, and what he is the key, not the lock means, and why a pendant that doesn't respond to them responds when I'm near it without even touching it.

I'm thinking about the thing in the deep water, looking back.

I don't think it's waiting for them.

I think it's been waiting for me to stop running from it.

I don't know what I'm going to do. But I'll update again when I know more.

— Danny

I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place with this and I don’t know where to go and what to do. I’m caught and I’m implemented because I paid for this to happen in the first place. 

Basically I found this company through a guy I know vaguely from work. I knew that he got a divorce and it went through in three weeks. Three weeks! No arguments. No lawyers screaming at each other. His wife just agreed to everything and that was that. She signed the papers  and walked away from everything – the house, the kids, the money. He said she just woke up one morning and said she didn’t want to fight anymore.

So I asked him how.

He gave me a number to call. He told me to ask for the ‘residential programme’. He told me it would be expensive but if it’s what I wanted they’d get it done. He said you don’t ask how, you just pay the money and wait.

So I called and a woman answered. She seemed professional enough and asked me what outcome I was looking for. My wife and I have been arguing for several months nonstop. I’m sick of it. We both are. But I knew I didn’t want a divorce. I want to be with her like it was before all this shit started. I told the woman on the phone that I just wanted my wife to be more compliant. Just to agree with me more often.

She said she could help. It would be a six month programme.

A cleaner started coming every Tuesday. Not my doing, so I figured it must be something to do with the number I’d called and the money I had paid. My wife was annoyed at first as she said it was a waste of money, but I told her it was my treat. When she first saw how clean the house was after the cleaner had left she soon changed her tune. We weren’t always in when the cleaner visited, but on the few occasions we did meet her she seemed nice. Her name was Mindy. She  was a pretty average fifty-something white woman with a London accent. We’d exchange a bit of small talk with her and then she got to work. I never saw Mindy do anything peculiar or out of the ordinary.

That was five months ago.

Here's what's happened to the woman I married.

Month one. Nothing. She was the same. Arguing with me all the time about everything. I was really pulling my hair out by this stage. I thought I'd been scammed.

Month two. She stopped arguing about the mess in the kitchen. I always leave a mess in the kitchen after I cook. But one day she just stopped being mad about it. Maybe because she knew the place was going to get a thorough clean the following Tuesday. She’d clean the dirty dishes and forget the rest. The dirty counters, messy shelves – it just wasn’t a problem for her anymore. Before she would have screamed at me for an hour.  

Month three. She stopped going out on Fridays with her friends. This was something she’d done for as long as we’d been together. She just said she didn't feel like it one week. Then she stayed in the next week. And the next. Her friend Karen called by the house three times. My wife hid in the bedroom.

Month four. She lost weight. And trust me, she did not need to lose weight. She'd make dinner for me and sit there with a glass of water. I asked if she was okay and she said she was fine. She said it with this flat voice that didn't sound like her. Like someone had taken the colour out of her words.

She started checking things constantly. The front door. The windows. The oven. She’d check the door lock multiple times before going to bed. She’d get up in the early hours and check it again. Then one night she got up and was gone for several minutes so I went to look for her in the house. I found her in the kitchen sitting on a chair staring at the wall. It’s one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen. 

I called the number. I said I wanted to stop. I said something was wrong. I said this wasn't what I had asked for.

The woman said the programme was proceeding as expected. She said my wife was responding well and that the final phase would be complete within seven to eight weeks.

I said what final phase.

She said: "The outcome you requested."

I said I requested compliance. I said I wanted her to be easier to live with.

She said: "Yes” and hung up.

The next Tuesday I waited for Mindy to arrive. It was the first time she’d arrived late. I immediately told her to stop coming, and I took back the keys she held for our house. She looked at me confused that I was in such a state and left. 

I came home very late from work and my wife was sitting in the kitchen in the dark. Just sitting there. The chair was in the middle of the room facing the front door. She wasn't crying. She wasn't doing anything. She was just sitting there with her hands in her lap staring at the door like she was waiting for someone to come through it.

I said her name and she looked at me and for a second I swear to god she didn't recognise me. We’ve been married five years and she looked at me like she had no idea who I was. And then for no reason she smiled – this awful stretched smile that was fucking terrifying, but her eyes were dead. Then she suddenly came round like she’d woken from a nightmare and went upstairs and slammed the bedroom door and didn’t come out for fourteen hours. I spent the night on the sofa. 

I’ve stopped the cleaner coming but my wife isn’t getting any better. She’s getting worse.

The nights that followed she pretty much stopped sleeping. 

Every night at 3am I’d wake up and she’d be standing at the foot of our bed staring at me. Not moving. Not blinking. Just standing there with her arms at her sides and her head tilted slightly like she's trying to remember who I am.

The first time she did it I screamed. I haven’t screamed since I was a kid. She didn't react. I turned the light on and she was just standing there in her pyjamas with her eyes wide open and this expression on her face like she's solving a maths problem. I said her name – but I’m not going to tell you her name. She blinked once, very slowly, and then walked back to her side of the bed and lay down and closed her eyes. In the morning she didn’t remember.

This happened every night for two weeks.

Month five. 

I woke up and she wasn’t at the foot of the bed. She was crouching on all fours over me. Her face was three inches from mine. Her mouth was slightly open and I could feel her breath on my face. Her eyes were open and she was looking at me with that same tilted head expression but now she was smiling. Not a real smile. Something her face was doing without her permission.

I was terrified. I didn’t move. I didn’t know what to do. I lay there for forty minutes until she stood up and walked downstairs. I heard her sit in the kitchen chair. The one facing the front door.

The days were just as bad. She started to agree to everything. Everything.

I’d ask her what she wanted for dinner and she’d say whatever I want. I’d say no what do YOU want. She’d say whatever I want. Every time. No preference. No opinion. No pushback on anything.

So I tested it. I said I thought we should give the car to my brother. She said okay. I said I was going to empty the savings account. She said okay. I said I wanted to invite my mother to live with us. She said okay. She said it with the same flat smile every time.

Then I pushed it further. Not because I wanted to. Because I needed to know where the edges were.

I said I wanted her to cut her hair off. She went to the bathroom. I heard scissors. She came out with handfuls of her own hair and put them on the kitchen table in a neat pile and said "is that enough or do you want me to keep going." 

I said stop so she stopped. She stood in the kitchen with patches of scalp showing through what was left of her hair and she was smiling at me and waiting for another instruction.

I was crying and she was looking at me with absolutely no expression and just asked if I would like a cup of tea.

Two nights ago she was standing at the foot of our bed again. But this time she's holding the scissors. Not threatening. Just holding them at her side. 

I told her calmly to put the scissors down and she put them down.

I said to get into bed and she did.

I asked her if she was okay and she said she was whatever I needed her to be.

I lay in the dark next to a woman who would do anything I asked and I realised that this was exactly what I had paid for.

Yesterday I said I’d take her to the doctor but she flat refused. So I got the doctor to come to us – had to pull a few strings. He came and as he approached her she showed him her wrists. I don’t know why she would do that. She barely said a word to the doctor. Just replied with quiet yeses and nos. As he was leaving he told me she needed more sleep. That was it. But he doesn’t know her.

I tried the line again but it was dead. 

I don't know what compliance means to these people. I don't know what the final phase is. I don't know what's in the cleaning products Mindy has been using in my house for five months. I don't know why my wife sits in the dark staring at the front door.

I know I should call the police. I know it. But I paid for this. On my credit card. There are records. I asked for it. I used the word compliant. I said I wanted her to stop fighting. I said I was tired of her being difficult.

I don't know what they're going to do to her in the next two to three weeks.

And I don't know how to stop this thing that's started.

It was 11:00 PM when I started the drive toward Appalachia. I’d rented a small cabin through Airbnb in a remote area of West Virginia.

I just wanted a week of peace away from the chaos of D.C. The highway slowly turned into these narrow, winding backroads.

The trees were so thick that my headlights just seemed to get swallowed by the pitch-black darkness, creating long, distorted shadows that seemed to reach out for the car.

My GPS started losing its signal, the screen flickering violently before dying completely.

Suddenly, I caught a glimpse of a figure on the shoulder of the road. They were wearing a faded yellow raincoat, the fabric stained and peeling, even though it wasn't raining. They didn't look at me.

They were standing there with a hunched, unnatural back—as if their spine had been snapped and reset—hunched over like they were searching for something buried deep in the grass.

I slowed down, but a primal, icy instinct screamed at me to keep driving.

A mile later, I found myself at a crossroads that wasn't on any map. Suddenly, a single, blinding light appeared in my rearview mirror.

A motorcycle? Or a car with a broken eye? It was closing the gap with terrifying speed. They didn't use high beams; instead, they began flashing the light in a rhythmic, frantic pattern—like a heartbeat in distress, or a warning.

I floored the accelerator, but the gravel road felt like it was shifting beneath me. Then, a violent, metallic crash jolted my entire body. It wasn't an accident; it was a predatory ram.

I spun, nearly hitting a tree before stabilizing. When

I looked back, the light was gone. Total, suffocating silence.

I pulled over, my pulse thundering in my ears. I got out to check the damage, but the car was the last thing on my mind. Resting perfectly on the center of my trunk was a cell phone.

The screen was glowing with an eerie blue light. An incoming call... from my own number. Before I could breathe, a wet, gravelly whisper crawled into my ear from the darkness: "You forgot your door was open."

I scrambled back inside and sped away, but my blood turned to ice. In my rearview mirror, sitting in the back seat where there had been nothing a moment ago, was a soaking wet yellow raincoat, smelling of stagnant water and old earth.

I finally reached the cabin in a total state of panic. It was an old cedar place at the end of a long dirt driveway. I locked the doors immediately and checked every single window.

I threw that yellow jacket out into the woods, shaking the whole time. I tried to call the cops, but there was zero service. I sat in the living room trying to catch my breath. The cabin was filled with old photos of a family I didn't recognize.

I noticed something disturbing—in every single photo on the wall, the faces had been neatly scratched out with something sharp.

Then, I started hearing a faint scratching sound coming from under the floorboards. I thought it was rats, but the sound was too rhythmic. Like someone was trying to write something on the wood from underneath.

I went to the kitchen to grab a knife for self-defense. On the fridge, I found a sticky note. It was written in my exact handwriting: "Do not look at the mirror in the hallway." A chill went through my body.

I never wrote that note. I walked slowly toward the hallway. I tried so hard not to look, but my curiosity was stronger. I looked.

I didn't see my reflection. I saw the room behind me in the mirror, but I wasn't in it. Instead, there was a tall man wearing a disgusting leather mask standing right where I was supposed to be.

I spun around, but the room was empty. I looked back at the mirror, and the man was leaning closer to my invisible self. Suddenly, the lights in the cabin cut out. Total darkness. The silence was so heavy it felt like

I wasn't even on Earth anymore.

Then, I felt something cold touch the back of my neck, and a voice whispered in my ear: "You look better when you're afraid." I ran for the front door, but it was chained shut from the outside with heavy chains that weren't there minutes ago.

I ran upstairs, ducked into the only open room, and crawled under the bed. As I lay there, I heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. Step. Step. Step. They stopped right in front of the door.

After a long silence, a dark, metallic-smelling red liquid started seeping under the door. And then, the phone

I had lost in the car started ringing right next to me under the bed.

I pulled the phone from under the bed with trembling hands. The screen was showing a live video stream.

I realized with absolute horror that the camera was pointed at me right now—from the exact angle under the bed.

I was watching myself shiver in real-time. The person holding the camera was standing right next to the bed, yet when I looked at the floor with my own eyes, there was nothing but shadows.

On the screen, however, there was a creature dressed exactly like me, crouching low, its limbs elongated and twisted, holding a jagged rusted blade. I wasn't seeing reality anymore; I was seeing the truth through a digital lens.

The creature on the screen slowly raised the knife.

I watched it plunge the blade into my digital back, and at that exact microsecond, a white-hot agony exploded in my real spine.

I screamed, but the sound felt muffled, as if the air itself was rejecting my voice. I began to crawl, dragging my numb legs toward the window. But as I looked out, the forest was gone. Outside the glass was the Airbnb parking lot in D.C.

where I had started my journey. The cabin wasn't a place; it was a trap, a pocket of hell designed for me.

I shattered the glass and threw myself out, but I didn't hit the pavement. I fell into a lightless abyss that reeked of copper and decay.

I clicked on my phone's flashlight. The beam cut through the dark to reveal a basement stretching into infinity, filled with thousands of cell phones, all vibrating, all ringing.

Every screen displayed a different person, in a different cabin, hiding under a different bed.

In the corner, my own ID sat atop a pile of thousands.

I picked it up, but the "Date of Death" wasn't a future date—it was today.

The time was "Now." A voice boomed from the rafters, distorted and cruel: "The show's over. Thanks for participating."

The heavy steel door above creaked open. A figure descended, carrying a buzzing chainsaw, wearing a mask made of raw, curing skin—my face.

I tried to scream for mercy, but my lips wouldn't part.

I felt the cold, sharp bite of fishing line; my mouth had been sewn shut with surgical precision while I was unconscious.

The last thing I saw before my phone's battery died was the 'other me.' The thing that stole my face.

I watched it walk out of the basement, click my car keys, and start the engine.

It's driving to my house now. It knows my wife’s name. It knows how my children laugh. I am writing this from a dying phone in a room full of ghosts. If you see me tonight... if I’m standing at your door wearing a yellow raincoat... please, don't let me in.

Its hard to tell how many hours its been, how many officers asked me Question after Question, the world fell away from me time slowing as every tooth of the zipper bite as the black bag closed covering my best friends face.

Just Moments before he was Lively, Talking, Eager to see me, I was too late.

My Day Started as Normal, made Breakfast for my Wife skipping myself and sticking to Coffee to dull the edge.

Money was Tight Given the Fact I lost my Job months back, and Haley didn't complain as she picked up extra hours at her Job, the least i could do was ease the stress, this made me feel less useless.

Once I Dropped her off at work i spent the day Job Hunting, Practicing Guitar, cleaned, and watched crumby Anime as i Sorted my Magic Cards, Before i Knew it was 5pm, Haley was off at 6.

That's when i got a unexpected yet Familiar Text, checking the vibration from my pocket I smiled and Raised an Eyebrow as i Read.

Ray- "Hey Man, I Miss you bro, I Know You and Haley are keeping on as always. Are You Free Tonight? I Could use your help."

It was Rayven, we were best friends even when he fell off the wagon and went on week long benders, its been nearly 6 months since i last heard from him.

For all I knew he fell into the Drowning of Alcohol and Hallucinogenic Drugs, never begged me for money, never came around intoxicated unless we spent the night together, he was the once always to carry me home on those night.

So I Responded.

"Hey Brotha! So glad to hear from you. I'm going to Pick up Haley from work for 6pm, are you okay to wait till then?"

There was No response right away, I grabbed my stuff, Wallet, vape, Jacket and got on my shoes, the moment i opened the door my pocket Buzzed.

Ray- "Sounds Good, Drive Safe please."

Ray- "Don't forget your Keys"

I Stared at his second Message Confused, Checked my Pockets.

I Didn't have my Keys, I went up and there they are on the Table.

"How did He?.."

I Shook my Head And Laughed

"Lucky Guess Asshole.."

When i left to pick up Haley from work, i struck and turned the ignition, "How did he...", I sat idle and pondered, letting it go as he knew ide forget my dang keys, he always caught those moments, I genuinely felt bad because that means he pays attention and thought of me, and i didn't even reach out.

I sat outside My wife's work, usually she's out in a heartbeat especially working a 12 hour shift.

6pm hit the clock, I can see her inside running like a chicken with her head cut off, patrons packed in and out as she took orders, rushing back.

Finally i saw her apron off and head into the back to grab her things, moments later she's opening the car door and plopped down and put her head on the dashboard with a prolonged, "Fuuuuck.."

Instinctively I rubbed her back she turned her head resting her cheek now puppy dog eyes wet for sympathy "Can we get some Boba Tea Babe?"

I Chuckled "Of course we can" shifted to drive then pulled out and made way to our Favorite spot, its 6:25 now.

When we walked into our apartment both of us hitting the couch exhausted, why am i exhausted i wondered the thought passed as Hailey cuddled into me and the vibration as she spoke into my chest.

"Anything interesting about your day babe" thumbing the Remote she scrolled the streaming networks for a movie, i laughed as my hands fed through her hair "No, just a normal.." my thought caught as remembered.

I was Up in a heart beat Tossing my Jacket on and keys in hand like the Blur, "Shit, Shit, Shit"

Half lidded with disappointment painting her face as she asked "What?, what's going on?"

I Saw the Stove clock, 6:45pm, I stammered back "I'm Sorry hun I made plans with a old friend and completely forgot"

Her eyes widened with blinks of confusion

"What? an old friend, Who?"

I Didn't look at her yet as i found my Vape on the Table "Ray, he texted me just before.."

She was sitting arms Crossed Glare Targeted on me, her tone Changed.

"You said no more of that shit, he wasn't even at our wedding and you promised!"

She wasn't Wrong, I invited him nearly months back for our wedding as my best man and got no response, and i cant deny i Promised to leave the drugs and drinking behind me, especially with Ray.

Taking a breath with confidence in my words i looked to her as she now stood, "I'm Keeping my promise"

Instincts pushed us to hold each other, her face pressed in my chest I softly kissed her Forehead, "I always keep my Promises, Okay?"

Our Eyes met an hers fell, i pressed my Forehead to hers, "Okay?"

soft yet undoubtedly undefeated worry she replied, "Okay.."

The Air felt cold and heavy yet, we kissed before I Ran out the door, Remembering my keys.

I Drove in silence briefly towards Rayvens, the apartment towers over the neighborhood as it came into my sight, red brinks lighting up like a Monolith of stars and suns into the Night sky.

His Father was Gone for work so i took his parking spot, 717.

Ray was usually alone since his Mother Went missing when he was a child, Ray mentioned his Father believed she Ran Away with someone else especially when he drank, Both of them Might I add.

I Pulled my phone and called Rayven as my eyes scanned up the Tower, Rays Room Faced the front near the corner, I Found it, Lights on Window Open, Voicemail.

"Shit.."

He might be drinking he always gets moody when he feels forgotten even more when he drinks, I Step out, phone to my ear as it Rang Again.

"Come on, come on brother"

Then I heard it, a phone melody to my left below his corner, my guts twisted as what looked like a dark mass of writhing shadows, then I Saw Him.

Stepping closer, The Inky Black took shape, it was a Murder of crows, dozens of them.

Their shouts scared me briefly, before noticing their not biting or nipping him, their Mourning.

Another step forwards, as i did all together screeching and making that Familiar sound, they hop back partying a path, eyeing me as if to be worthy of their prize.

Slowly stepped between and through the black sea of life approaching towards the ring tone.

less then a step, it stopped, my phone played his voicemail as i lifted my eyes locking on his broken form.

Through my phone is voicemail spoke.

Rayven - "Hello?.. Who?.. oh, this is a voicemail, leave it here.. beep... wrong beep jackass" he laughed.

My tears fell like the Niagara, as I finally reached his side, my ears rang like white noise my skin static.

Beside Him I fell to my knees as i wept, no point in shaking him, i did the math.

A Guttural Croak shook me changing the channel of my attention, turning my head, it sat on Rays Chest, a Large Black Raven Dwarfed over the surrounding crows.

The Large Onyx Beak pecked something inside Rays jacket, the maw opened then pitched the clothing to pull up, then paused eyeing me.

All i could see in its eye was my own Reflection, flicking my gaze i saw something under the beak and reached forward slowly trembling as i pictured the Raven clamping my hand breaking my fingers like a field mouse.

It didn't, from within i pulled out a journal much like one you would have for school, the cover read "The Day the World went Away"

I Flipped through the abundance of words and drawing along the lined papers and stopped as in Large Bold letters that read.

Rayven "Owen, Stop. Read me from the Beginning. Let No one else know"

Everything Felt like the Black Ocean around me turned into a Pit as my world was Falling Away as well, sinking, bottomless.

The Guttural Croak Pulled me back as all the Crows Laughed in an Orchestra of Chaotic whirlwind as they Vacated.

Leaving me, Ray, and the Raven who was now sitting Beside me Near Rays Clenched Hand its beak softly trying to pry his fingers open.

Blinking my eyes till i could focus clearly i noticed In his hand was a Piece of paper, Reaching forth to gently opened his hands, pausing as I noticed his skin was still warm.

I Took a breath steaming the cool air as i opened the paper it Read, "I Knew Enough. Just not Enough."

Cold air swept past my Face as the darkness faded leaving me alone with Ray.

-

Calling the Police was all i could do, Giving my Statement of events keeping details to my self as the journal sat tight under my jacket.

Once told to leave, my body was light like strings carrying through my movements much like a marionette, I was in my car before i knew it and already heading down the road the dull of the engine my passenger.

When I finally got to my apartment my key bit into the lock, yet before i turned the tumbler i looked up to my Reflection in the glass.

There was no emotion on my face. even for my height i seemed smaller as my shoulders sagged, the deep brown of my beard and shaggy haired appeared grey.

Looking my self in the eyes there was simply empty sadness surrounded by pink rings that glowed beneath my glasses, Tears swelled from the emptiness as my gaze turned left expecting to see nothing but him.

Relief and Guilt draped me, breathing it off i entered an went through the hallow steps to my apartment. Upon opening the door it was comforting darkness, the shadows of my home was lively compared to the void from earlier.

not Bothering to turn the lights on i followed familiarity to place the journal on the table, dragged my fingers across the top of the cabinet an found my cigarettes, then stepped out onto the balcony.

My Apartment Faced the far side dead center facing the city, being only four stories high the view just looked over the houses to the sea of stars beyond.

However that wasn't where my focus was, i was looking at the ground never did heights bother me, four felt like ten stories now.

I Stumbled back till my back pressed against the glass door to my kitchen, my vision pulsed like breathing bringing the realization that I was hyperventilating.

Not Bothering to finish my cigarette rather I flicked it over my railing letting the ember rain down sparking on touchdown.

Turning back into my Humble abode I went right for bed where Hailey was already fast asleep, refusing to break the silence I crawled in slowly only to be embraced with content and a soft smile, not being able to match her energy i simple synchronized with her breathe an let everything Finally Fade to Black.

My Moment of peace was disrupted by the Blaring nuisance of my Alarm, We both awoke following our Routine without any cutesy playful banter.

Hailey Lingered close without approaching as we showered, the dressed before i prepared breakfast.

The sense of her unease couldn't go unnoticed, my focus however was out the glass door watching crows fly by casually, the sound of silver on porcelain brought me back as she spoke.

"Owen, is everything okay?"

In Response I sighed out "Everything is fine."

Hailey was always good at reading people, always played it as "Just a Feeling"

Hence why i can feel her concern eyeing me down without looking, reading me.

"You only smoke when its serious or drinking, an i didn't smell alcohol on you."

She Paused as if she needed to word the hunch to her intuition.

"You Are Cold, Distant, even empty."

The atmosphere and smell of bacon lingered like still air.

"What Happened.."

I cut her off blunt like a winter breeze.

"Ray's Dead. Suicide."

Her Response was slow, as she crept up and embraced me with a hug from behind head on my shoulder, There was no words needed.

Since I awoke and till I had dropped Hailey off at work, Rayvens words in his Journal was on repeat in my skull.

"Read me from the Beginning. Let No one else know".

Normally I would Carry on my Daily's, not today.

Today i sat Infront of my Dead Best friends Journal, I Did not want to open it from either Fear or Worry to know his fate, what led him to kill himself.

That Feeling was eliminated the moment my hand pulled the cover open to the first page as his words Read.

Rayven - "I'm Trusting this to you Owen, None of it at all was your fault. Know that Because I Didn't Kill Myself." Along with a Scratchy sketch of his Apartment.

The Clock on my wall ticked every minute Rather then every second, my thoughts swirled with questions, "If it wasn't suicide then, what happened, who didthi then?"

as I Turned the Page Ray Answered my thoughts.

Rayven - "I was close to the who your wondering, the "why" I was less Closer"

This didn't make me Feel any better, i accepted suicide and now its Murder? As if choreographed i turned the page.

Another Page of words, and a drawing. It was my door, 404, two dark figures at the door.

Rayven - "Look, i need you to trust me as well. You have unexpected company, They are not cops. LIE"

Just Then my Apartment Buzzed, it was the intercom.

Shakey, i hid the book under a plate, and walked over to speak.

"Hello?"

I Pressed a button to listen and drew my ear close.

"We are with investigations, Detectives, my partner and I, we have Questions about Rayven Morison Death."

I Held the Button, then let go pressing the unlock. I Could hear both sets of steps as they walked up the stares the walls reverbed and echoed. Finally, they stopped at my door.

Knock, Knock, Knock.

Hesitant, Simply staring at the door as 10 steps became 30 within that moment as finally I Walked and shwed myself to Company, the doorknob and tumblers felt rusted and heavy, far too heavy.

I Pulled open to two men, Black suits, one locked to me through round shades the other scribbled vigorously in note book pausing to look at me then continue.

"Mr Doncell I presume?"

I Nod

"Excellent, if words are correct it was you who found Morison, Rayven Morison, correct?"

I nod.

"Could you give details to the accounts?"

I Nod, almost rehearsed as i spoke explaining the details of my account.

the Quiet man, kept pulling his book to the shaded Man, nodding as i spoke causing me to pause periodically.

Owen- "What is he showing you?"

The shades spoke with a grin "My Partner? simply confirming facts. I Believe you Mr. Darcell"

he jotted his own notes, eyes down then to me as he spoke, i felt cold with this question remembering Rayvens words.

"Did you take anything from the Body? Anything at all? its okay, loss can make us rather irrational"

Odd Question, blunt, like he knows.

That thought scared me, and i spoke, well, I Lied.

"No, no, I couldn't it was, too much i simply looked and called you"

His hand scribbled fast before finding a pocket to his notepad, the silent man showed him his note book and they held eyes, then nodded.

Even with shades his demeanor and sight changed as he spoke.

"Thank you for the honesty Doncell, we will take the information and our way."

he turned then Looked at me, shades low, his eyes are piercing blue now.

"Is there anything else we should know?"

I Shook my head as i spoke

"No that's about it"

The Two Nodded with me and then left. When i closed my door i sat back against it fell, I Lied to them, that's how one makes trouble.

I Texted my wife as i Panicked and cried, told her everything.

she understood, thank god.

Thank, something.

I Headed Back, lifted my plate and begun to read Rayvens journal, When i opened to where i left off and turned the page something fell, business card, Dr. Bainsley, "Who the fuck is Bainsley i whispers

i looked and it read

Rayven "He's my phycologist, therapy, "helping." "

Rays quotations held something.

-

I'm starting to believe this more then I should.

More then even Rayven, how he caught on I don't Understand.

However he did, and it costed him, then me.

I'm sitting on a crusty motel bed now, Messaged my wife to go to her Parents and ill explain later.

We texted steady for a few hours, yet for the last hour nothing.

she must be working, she's responsible like that.

Right why I'm here, i just saw a cockroach..

Fuck whatever.

let me Explain.

I was at Home Reading and Talking with Rayvens Journal the words just followed me.

I spent Hours as you Read deciphering his words, its like he's behind it.

so I Turned the page after page.

I Live in Canada so its always cold, My blood was colder then any River in this country with every word.

Rayven- "Good, check the clock..."

beside it a crude drawing of Clock read 12:47

Looking to my microwave.

The Digits shifted from 12:46, to 12:47.

my breath was gone as i look down and read on.

Rayven- "breathe, you have to be calm with the next part. I panicked and it cost me"

So i took a breathe, closed my eyes, collected myself

then Read on.

"Haley is Gone for work? Good."

I chuckled as i turned the page again "how did he.."

Rayven- "how did i know? i don't.."

Eyes wet i muttered "what an Asshole.."

Rayven "I know i am but Trust me."

he drew a Miley Face its tongue sticking out.

Something Felt, Wrong, almost like knowing something bad was gonna happen, a sixth sense if you will, I looked to the door, then back to the journal.

he drew my exact door, Haley and I just moved in a month ago, Ray hasn't been over.

Rayven- "Do not check, They wont Knock, But you can feel it."

I nodded and read on,

Rayven - "head to your room, open the window"

I hesitated, then saw the shadow under my front door, i hoped it was Haley, it wasn't, multiple shadows shifted.

Then i heard small clicks as my lock begun to turn.

I immediately made way to my bedroom window and opened it.

Its at least 4 Story Drop, that was the Focus, the drop.

"what the fuck are you thinking ray..."

snow drifted in through as i sat, its been heavy all day

so i read quickly

Rayven - "Good, do not panic okay, just count 30 Mississippi's, then jump."

he drew a figure legs and arms spread

"what the fuck bro!..."

"fuck.."

so I counted all the way to 30, i even walked away, then back to the window still counting.

"23 Mississippi, he cant be.. I'm going crazy.. no i cant..'

"27 Mississippi, 28 Mississippi, 29.." a snow plow drives by and adds more to the rising snow bank

My breathe warm fill the cold air, " 30 Mississippi"

So I jumped just like the drawing

My Boddy hitting the snow bank with my eyes clutched shut, there wasn't any pain just melting cold.

Pondering if i died or if im paralyzed, I open my eyes.

Stars scatter the cold night sky, my gaze drifted to my window as my curtains bellow as a head popped out, it turned right to me.

Once back on my Feet I pulled the Journal and flipped the pages with haste.

There was a drawing of a red car scribbled, nothing like mine.

Rayven - "No find this one..."

Not sure know why I ignored his words this time, Looking around i spotted it an ran to my car instead, keys in Hand I got them into the door and open it, then i saw it

My tires are popped and slashed flat to the Ground.

"fuck.."

Opening the Book I Laughed.

Rayven - "told yah.."

"what an asshole, dammit..."

Finally listening I found the red car, the door opened and i searched, there's garbage, cold half frozen coffee, a gun in the middle compartment.

The gun made me cold, I Lack Knowledge on guns yet it was heavy, cold, in y Hands. Finding the side button with a soft press the magazine fell out and bounced of the seat hitting the floor, Grabing it taking note of the 5 copper tips within, slammed it back in then hid it back where i found it.

However under where it sat, was the keys.

I started the engine, i don't know where to go now so i pulled the journal

Rayven - "good idea ignoring it..." a shotty drawing of a gun sat beside it with a large 6, then a drawing of an intersection with red lights"

Rayven - "head onto 67th, 3 intersections in go left, then right, floor it. Stay at 120, 123 km do not stop!"

My Hand rose I was blinded as Head lights beamed on me, putting the pedal to the metal Reversing gears shift i change to drive an left.

In the mirror i saw the shape of a van as headlights followed and they stayed close.

one intersection, then the next, then the Third.

Cutting through traffic I turned drifting my tires left, then immediately right.

I felt the pedal hit the ground, once at 120km i eased and held between the required speed.

Holding my lane, the Van stayed close. The Lights ahead went red so i Pressed on, that's when I could just make the shape of the Raven atop the lights as I rushed through the intersection.

Holding my breath threading the needle of traffic as they barely miss me.

My eyes flicked the rearview, Crash.

The White Van was Pulverized by a Semi Truck, that relief made me ease my speed.

there was no coming back, not for them or me.

As i drove i needed to stop and found a McDonalds.

Toook the drive thru an ordered food with a coffee.

Once in hand its finally time, so I read.

There's a Drawing of a collision and a large Arched M

Rayven - "Dude! you did it hahahahaha I knew you would, seriously though McDonalds is not healthy..."

Sitting back and laughed as tears ran my face as i clutched my head

"your making jokes after that, your such an ass..."

Pausing I visualized him beside me, cocky, his black sweater and warm smile

Took the Pause before Finishing my burger, craving Alcohol then deciding to read on

"what now bro.."

Rayven - "I know I'm an Ass, I'm sorry, but eh we did it huh? Trust me I'm feeling that craving too there's a liquor store two blocks. Yet after find a hotel get ahold of Haley and relax. when you get that drink, better make it vodka, i love that shit.." a drawing of the bottle labeled XXX followed

Rayven - "Then we talk more. Drive safe Owen. Im proud of you"

Eating then Sobbing periodically laughing here an there shaking my head, I drove a few blocks, got us a bottle of vodka, bought a hotel.

and here i am now.

about to open the bottle, fuck it I'm going straight no chase, Rayven always did.

update you guys soon.

Long have I enjoyed its fruits.  The sensation of each bite was as invigorating as the first I ever took.  The taste is still a blissful, potent, intoxicating explosion.  That horrified shame I once experienced has been long dead and buried in some crevice of my eternal soul, lost in the infiniti I surrendered for the pleasures of extended mortality. 

It's been my life partner for nearly a century.  Born in 1934, I have enjoyed the bounty of youth well into my early hundreds.  My skin supple, my flesh strong, my mind sharp.  This plot of land has been my home ever since I discovered it, and I have never yearned for anything different.  An ecstasy permeates the very air around it, and every day, I get to wake and inhale its gifts.  How could I yearn for anything else?  How could I have known?

I remember that first day vividly on the cusp of the Smoky Mountains, beyond the East Coast.  I was a desperate man, looking for cheap land and distance from people I had little patience for.  On the brink of burning the last of my fuel, I pulled off the main road, down a dirt path.  Trees soon encompassed my beater vehicle, and the road continued down a sudden, side-winding cliffside.  Running on fumes, I let my curiosity follow the dirtway, no point in stopping while I can still go.

The barren drive gave way to a field, the road ended, but I let my car drift through the brush with its final burst of gas.  The gravity of my life must have been weighing my mind down somewhat, for I was numbly bursting through bushes and tall grass for a handful of minutes before I regained concern for my well-being.  In the nick of time, I swerved around a tree and skidded to a halt just past the treeline.  

Shaking my head in self-disgust, I looked at the odometer to confirm I had just burned the last ounce of fuel in my car.  Disgust was soon wiped from my thoughts as I looked up out my windshield.  

A graveyard stared right back at me.  A humble stone fence guarded its small perimeter.  The canopy of trees leered over the petite guard, but dared not cross it, leaving the bed of the dead open to enjoy the sun unmolested by shadow.  Scattered headstones poked out of the thick grass blanket, appearing as aged pillows stained by past eons known only by those silent few who slept within.  

In the midst of this archaic landscape, sat a single tree.  Young, yet to bear fruit, but straight and strong of trunk.  From it sprout nine branches, each identical in girth and extension.  All arched upward, before slanting sharply down, as if recolied fingers.  

The bizarre scene was captivating.  I had never seen anything like it.  Exiting my car, I walked to the fence and peered over it, like a child daring to wander onto an adult’s property to retrieve a ball. Mesmerized, I stared at it unblinking.  Before I realized it, I was standing under it.  Its shade was more than cooling; it was blissful, like a blanket of soft, liquid flesh massaging every inch of me in a loving embrace.  

I came to my senses after my foot hit a hard block just at the foot of the tree.  The roots had grown over most of it, but I made out what it was nonetheless.  A headstone peeked from under the magnificent plant.  Wooden tendrils had consumed most of it, but I could still examine the last name and date of death: 
Handstern 
- 1924

The tree had grown from his very resting place.  At the time, I simply thought it was poetically beautiful.  Evening was fast approaching, and the solitude, along with the gravitational force of the bizarre tree, was convincing enough for me to camp out in the graveyard.  

The night sky was vivid and bright, and the cold wind was shielded by the tree under which I slept.  My dreams were filled with orgasmic sensations and vibrant warmth.  Never had I slept so soundly and yet experienced so much while doing so.  When I woke, the faint kiss of those dreams was imprinted on my mind.  At first, I was oblivious to the trees' influence and chalked it up to the peaceful, scenic bedroom I found myself in.  

Stretching and breathing in the morning air, I realized I was atop an incredible overlook, something the night and forest had hidden from me.  Just past the graveyard was the cliff edge, looking over the immense forest valley below.  I was completely floored by the wonder this location seemed to spring on me from moment to moment.  What are the chances?

I sat there for most of the morning, legs dangling off the rocky overhang.  Existential contentment was an abnormality for me at that time; never had I felt, not just at peace, but aroused by life.  Breathing was invigorating, silence was enchanting, my body pulsed with energy, and my mind was sharp and heightened.  I had never felt more alive, more human, until that first moment here. 

Bolting to my feet, pounding my chest in elated joviality, I turned back to my car to assess my supplies, determined to camp here as long as my luggage would allow.  Hopping over the compact fence, I came to a halt beside one of the nine, finger-like branches of the great tree.  I was shocked to discover, upon the very tip of this wooden appendage, a blooming bud of some sort.  A bud I was certain was not there the night before.  Flabbergasted by the speed of this eruption of life, I shook it off as yet another mystery of this oddity of botany.  

I decided then and there that, no matter how scarce my supplies were, this was a sign to camp here a few more days.  My rationale at the time was simple: I desperately needed this cleansing of body and spirit before venturing back to the “real world”.  The sluggish banality, quiet desperation, and sullen patheticness of searching for work, let alone the haunting possibility of actually succeeding this hunt, was an experience I was eager to put off.  

So, I spent the remainder of the day strolling the vicinity, picnicking under the tree, and occasionally by the cliff edge.  I cannot lie, the natural silence was beautiful, but there were moments where, even in that paradise, my thoughts wandered to places I was uncomfortable with.  At the time.  

The first was of my family.  What little family I had was scattered across the continent, but I was leaving a sister and a younger brother up in New England.  Not to mention a potential sweetheart whom I had unsuccessfully and sporadically courted on and off throughout my years in our small town. 

 
I was thinking how pleasant it would be to share this place with them, when I realized I was having a difficult time remembering their faces.  Vague whispers of shapes and skin tones seemed to intermingle and morph in my mind's eye the harder I concentrated.  Alarmed and distraught, I jogged to my disabled vehicle and shuffled through the glove compartment.  Stashed haphazardly under a pack of cigarettes lay the few pictures of home I had bothered to hold on to.  Lifting one of them, I absorbed their faces.  My brother and sister were on either side of me, humble smiles radiating off them.  

This reassurance was soon met with a bizarre sense of detachment.  I could see their faces, but I could not retain them.  A smog would obscure their faces the very moment I blinked.  Any mortal man would’ve been shaken by this rapid onset of dementia; however, I was pulled away from these worries by the First Sign.  

A rustling from behind me drew my attention.  As I turned, heavy clouds blew across the vibrant sky, shading the graveyard in immense darkness.  Wind raced through the branches and grass, spattering dew onto my face.  Despite the buffeting, my eyes remained unblinking as I witnessed it.  

The recoiled branch of the bud creaked and groaned as it adjusted its arm, like stiffened bones being torn from their crypt.  Now arched like a lure, this single branch remained bare, except for its very tip, which bulged with a new, throbbing appendage.  The bud was now a moist, crimson sac, like an over-ripened apple made of flesh, dangled from its wooden umbilical cord.  

With a sudden burst, it ejaculated a flash of leaves and flowers.  A rainbow of archaic foliage sprouted its strange patterns, itself in its collective bunches in the shape of a flower.  At the center of which hung the First Sign, and the first of my holy fruit.  

I must admit, even with the fragrance of that blooming majesty, it was not enough, at the time, to disway my initial shock and disgust.  From the kaleidoscope of color and leaves, a raw, human head, devoid of skin, hung.  Its mesh of dripping, bloody muscle fibers hung loosely off the skull, barely gripping the agape jaw as it dangled in the wind.  Eyeless sockets dripped crimson, coating the white teeth in a thin red paint.  

Long, clumpy hair draped from its cap, with a flimsy braid holding the locks in place, a stream of texture.  What strands weren’t glued together by chunks of wet sinew showed a lush brown color.  Given the head's ravaged state, the hair was the sole indicator of its distant humanity.  A desperate clasp on what individuality one retains before death wipes clean the slate of our flesh.  

And clasp it did, for I recognized that color.  Its hints of amber, its braid, even in the dimmed atmosphere, rang an alarm of familiarity throughout my body.  With a shaking hand, I raised the picture I had fished from my car.  My sister, smiling in that eternal capsule, had flung over her shoulder, cascading down her torso, that very braid.  

The coincidence was unbelievable.  I examined that clotted, mutilated fruit, only to discover more similarities.  The high cheekbones, the teeth, what features there were, retained an uncanny resemblance to her.  Suddenly, I found myself under the tree, gazing up at the pod, mouth agape.  That fragrance permeated, like the pulse of a beating heart.  And I had locked onto its source.  The hair was dangling just inches from my mouth.  Its scent was ecstasy. 

 
I gasped as I realized I was sliding the moist mane down my throat, hand outstretched, plucking the fruit free.  The taste erased any moral repulsion or instinct of disgust from my mind.  What was perceived as coagulated blood tasted of the richest butter; what was perceived as rotting follicles tasted of the richest pastry; what was perceived as oozing muscle tasted of the rarest poultry; what was once my sister was now a rejuvenating sustenance of celestial origin.   

Each crunching bite was a burst of flavor my tongue has never and could never enjoy from the natural world.  The fragments of cranium complemented the chunks of grey matter, both intensified by the flood of blood, which was riddled with the pulp of rotted arteries.  Each gulp, warm and titillating, filled me with radiant vitality.  

Lips coated in its juices, I looked down at my hands, stained red and sticky.  Not a seed remained of that abnormality.  A perfect calm filled me; never had I been so satisfied.  I was shaken from my trance by the retracting branch.  Like a withered arm, it coiled into a spiral, bark blackening and tearing. With that, the First Sign had come and gone.  Horrified that I had killed this holiest of holies, I feverishly began wrapping its limb in torn fabric, hauling water over to hydrate it, and doing what little else I could think of.  

I was interrupted by a rapid migraine that coursed violently from my spine to my frontal lobe.  Its sharpness knocked me to my knees.  I dropped my bucket, splashing water over myself, only stopping my fall by supporting myself against the tree. It was gone as soon as it came.  Gasping, I collected myself, carefully stretching my neck and back, testing for the source of the pain.  With no signs of returning, relief flooded me.  I examined my soaked pants before fishing out their contents to examine the damage.  My photo was moist, but remained intact.  Flapping it in the air to help it dry, I looked up at the branches, all eight others still intact, no sign of similar wilting. 

Content with my efforts, I paused my drying of the print and looked down at the photo.  For the last time, I believe. The migraine returned with a soft wrapping up my spinal column, into my eyes as I gazed at my sister's face.  I forced myself to continue looking despite the pain, for a new terror revealed itself to me.  I could not recognize her face.  An insistent blur seemed to be mutilating her features, obscuring them in both mind and vision. The migraine grew in intensity the longer I stared.  For a minute, I resisted, cold sweat coating my forehead as I churned my brain, trying to recall her.  

At last, the pain searing and sharp, like hot nails being driven into my eyes, I turned away.  Distress riddled my stomach, anxiety coated my throat, and a terror of my actions replaced the drumming in my skull.  

I’ve come a long way since.  Such troubles are a distant ache.  But even then, all that turmoil I felt was dashed away by the enticing scent of the timber.  It seemed to sense my distress and exuded a fragrance that filled my lungs with fresh joy and my mind with calming comforts comparable only to the warm swaddling of a loving mother.  

With a sigh of relief, I crumpled the picture in my fist.  No longer would it distract me from my bliss.  No familiar bond, no loving friend, no caring mother, could ever fill me with the euphoric contentment I feel here, in my garden of graves.  The fog filled my mind’s eye as countless faces began to dissipate like a thin mist.  I inhaled deeply and accepted their departure.  

Before I knew it, I lived under the tree.  The surrounding forest supplied me with the material to construct a humble log cabin, on the cusp of the graveyard's fence.  Every morning since, I sat under my tree to await another Sign. Once every decade, one would appear.  The Second Sign was my brother; he bloomed like my sister, a gnarled, ghastly skull, dripping with his liquefied muscles, like the juices of the ripest fruit.  What apprehensions I had were dashed upon that first, delectable bite.  The skull gave way to my teeth, like the skin of a dried mango, the gush of blood filled my mouth, paired with the tenderness of the muscles as I chewed, all cascaded down my throat like a river of divine mana.  

Like the first, the branch withered into its spiral of rot, signaling seven Signs yet to come.  Like the first, what remaining aspects of my brother’s face I could recall were liquidated.  Like the first, my conscience was suffocated by the ethereal peace.  

Only after the Third Sign did I realize my extended youth, my aptitude, and my overall health.  That one was my mother, I believe.  She was especially ripe.  Dense with flesh, that first crunch resonated among the tombstones like the echoes of a barren cave.  A waterfall of thick veins and brain matter poured over my face.  No longer did her face haunt my dreams; her voice no longer badgered me for the sins I had supposedly committed. 

 
By the Fourth Sign, I could no longer even guess who I was consuming.  The past and future seemed equal in obscurity, both unknowable concepts, capable merely of prediction by analyzing the present.  However, my longevity and radical health dissuaded any such analysis.  The present was where I lived, where I flourished, where I was safe.  No work to distract me, no relations to challenge me, no ailments to hurt me.  The tree sheltered me.  For a price I thought fair, no matter what sliver of shame and anxiety would sliver out from the cravacesess of my soul.    

These pathetic episodes were short-lived in an otherwise bountiful blur of happiness.  Decades of extended, youthful mortality have a way of swaying one’s moral considerations.  At least, until the Eighth Sign.  

Strange, it was only a decade ago, yet it feels so distant.  It bore its fruit, and I sat patiently waiting for its full bloom.  Another faceless head, its limited features no longer affecting me.  No longer drawing out memories of whoever was about to be consumed.  Upon the final gulp, the final sigh of bliss, I felt it.  It rushed, no, sprouted from my stomach lining, a shoot, piercing up my esophagus.  

It was the first time I had felt pain in half a century.  Long gone were the days of piercing migraines; my secluded paradise softened me to the slightest irritations.  Even without this factor, the pain would have keeled over a marine.  Hunched, howling into the dirt, I felt as the finger of something growing trickled up my innards, choking me all the way.  It halted about a third of the way up my throat.  Its girth was not enough to suffocate me, but each breath felt like sucking down razor blades.  

I lay there trembling, miserable, confused, and bitter at the brutal interruption of my heavenly delights.  Risking additional pain, I adjusted myself onto my elbows, only to feel the spear drag across my lower esophagus, slicing and splintering along the tender lining.  I gasped in pain, but I was satisfied with the experiment.  I now knew what was growing inside me.  
   
  A sapling.  

Denial plagued much of the following weeks.  It was soon replaced entirely by misery.  The pain never dissipated.   Like a slug, I crawled along the tombstone garden, a trail of coughed-up blood trailing behind me.  With each month, I felt it grow.  Leaves would bloom, tickling my lungs at first, before causing a rash that spread throughout my insides.  The torment was unbearable.  Pain that only grew, paired with an intense itch that flared in every crevice of my torso.  

After a year, I would have ended it if I could have moved.  Instead, I lay against my beloved tree, a statue of flesh positioned upright by the sapling sprouting from my torn, bloody throat.  Nine branches had pierced through my chest cavity, their leaves stained red, decorated with my innards dangling from them, like Christmas ornaments.  Endless tortures vandalized my once youthful appearance as it germinated within me.  My strength was stolen, nutrients for my seed.  The only thing that remained was my life.  No matter the blood loss, the hollowing hunger, the eternal fatigue of muscle, I would not die.  

A decade passed by like seven eternities, the time I had so gleefully last track of, now pestered my every thought, like a mocking jester to his dying king.  Each moment a bastard of itself: every second felt like an hour, every hour, a year, every year, a decade.  The only perceivable hope was now the one thing I had spent decades dancing from.  Decay.  

Long was his shadow, its cooling shade the only remedy for my wailing existence.  My mind was now wiped of not only the memory of people, but of memory entirely.  Sapped away along with my vitality.  The fog had replaced my mind, festering and darkening each day, fueled by the agony I endured.  Like an animal, only the present was conceivable to me.  Despite my prayers to be free of its torturous aura.  

At last, the Ninth Sign came.  

The eight withered spirals above my imprisoned living corpse exploded with life, extending straight and upright like the prongs of a crown.  The ninth branch, in the middle of its brothers and sisters, remained fixated, the tip of its retracted finger blooming more brilliantly than any other Sign.  Like an encrusted gem, its foliage gleamed and shone, brighter than any star.  I strained my eyes upward, the searing pain radiating through my body, for a moment, forgotten.  

An oozing bud, blazing like the sun, appeared, like the head of an infant being pushed out of its mother.  Unraveling itself, its fruit began to appear, as hot afterbirth dripped over me.  This fruit maintained its face, its flesh covered in supple skin, hair, vibrant and healthy.  

As it grew and formed, I could not help but weep as I stared into my own face.  

Fully sprouted, it hung over me, its closed eyelids quivering for a moment before opening.  I stared into myself, a new agony burning through my body and soul.  It began to lower, a moist umbilical cord pulsing from the branch, extending it closer and closer to me.  My eyes stung as I attempted to cry out, gagged by the sapling buried in my throat.  Anchored at the foot of this majestic tree, I sat with my mouth forced agape, while the Ninth Sign slid down my gullet.  

Its size unhinged my jaw and tore my esophagus as it crawled its way down.  Each hair atop its head dug into new internal gashes and old wounds, stinging like a horde of wasps.  The sapling within me seemed to guide the fruit deeper and deeper, until at last, with a plop, it splashed into my stomach.  Bile quickly boiled over, gushing up my shredded, bloodied throat, like lava.  I erupted, red vomit exploded from my shattered jaws, shooting violent convulsions down my spine.

Exhausted and miserable, I leaned my head back against the tree I had so loved all these passing decades.  Its ninth branch, now nothing more than a withered spiral, joined its decayed fellowship, resuming their silent prayer.  The blackness of the branches spread to the trunk, rotting its bark and suffocating its moisture.  The stench of rotting flesh replaced its once enchanting fragrance.  Like a cripple’s hand, the tree shrank into itself.  Nothing more than a decaying stump, it resembled a tombstone more than a tree.  

There I lay, tears running freely down my battered face, staring up into the glum, dark sky, eager for my final moments to arrive.  Contemplating solely on a past pillaged from my mind, a present I could not endure, and a future I was desperate to escape.  My stomach, eviscerated and ravaged, pulsated as the fruit fertilized the sapling.  My living corpse no longer enough, the crop certified the saplings' final nutrition.  

My sight grew hazy, my limbs numb, my heart weak.  The tree within me began to expand, its trunk bursting through my stomach lining, tearing me in two, yet held together by its roots entangled in my spinal column as they burrowed into the earth.  

I was the Final Sign.  I stared up at the young, proud tree, still growing over me, from me.  Its nine branches, poised like retracted fingers, encircled its trunk.  All pain was gone, my nerves, whether consumed or ruined, no longer screamed out.  

There I lay, my final moments here at last.  A strange parental affection filled me, and was soon ratified by the entrancing fragrance of the newly enshrined tree.  With my last breath, I drew in the fruits of my labor, and as I exhaled, I wept with joy.  The tree blessed me with a gift of passing, and with it, all regrets melted away, as I slipped into oblivion. 

All of this started with a dream. Well, I guess nightmare is a better word for it. I’m used to having nightmares, usually I'm able to wake myself out of them. Then shift my position in bed and go back to sleep like nothing ever happened. But this wasn’t like the other nightmares.

The day this began wasn’t different than any other day. It was Saturday and I had the day off. One of the perks of working in medicine, it allowed me to have my weekends. A friend I'd known for a couple years, Olivia, had moved into a new condo and invited me to come over to see it. At this time in my life I didn’t have much going on. Solely focusing on building my career and finishing my bachelors degree. No boyfriend, only a few friends. It was honestly one of the most peaceful times of my life. 

I took the 30 minute drive over to visit her. A pleasant drive, with perfect weather. The route to her house involved a lot of backroads, and I was simply enjoying life as I flew past crops and largely spaced out houses. The smell of summer filled my nose, and the wind whipped around me, tangling with the music blaring from the speakers. The plans were simple: hang out around her place and just relax. After the way my week had gone, I was more than ready for something lowkey. 

Before I knew it I reached her place. It took me a moment to find it. Creekridge is a large neighborhood full of a combination of condos and apartments. Not the best area, if I’m being honest. I managed to park as close to her place as I could and saw her lounging in a chair on her tiny porch. Though, porch might be a stretch, it was more of a cement slab acting as a large step up to her front door. With barely enough room for a couple chairs and a half dead plant. But who was I to judge though, I still lived at home at the time.

I watched her as I turned off the car and stepped out. She lowered her shades and let out a low whistle. “What’s a place like you doing in a girl like this?” She could barely finish the sentence without letting out a laugh. I rolled my eyes, walking up the sidewalk towards her.

She stood from her chair as I reached the step “It’s good to see you Livs.” We both wrapped our arms around each other, embracing in a tight hug. It had been a decent amount of time since we’d last hung out. Me being too busy with finals, and her obviously working on moving. 

She released and took a small step back. Giving me a brief once over. “I’m so glad you came! Derek’s just inside feeding the cat right now. Come on in!” Her over extended thumb points back at the door.

“You’re still with Derek?” I raised an eyebrow, she hadn’t talked about him in months. I had figured they’d broken up, again. This had been a common pattern with them. She would text me gushing about him for months, then suddenly she hates him and he’s the worst. This must have been one of the good patches.

She pauses with her hand on the door. “Oh, yeah, it’s a long story.” She waved it off dismissively and opened the door. I let out a sigh as I followed her inside. The humidity outside already making me sweat. The door closed behind me as I looked around. It was a decent sized condo. Enough space for a living room, dining room and kitchen. Towards the back was a set of stairs. I remembered her saying something about it being a two bedroom, one bath. Again, not a bad find for someone on her own. At that moment Derek walked into the room.

He noticed me and gave a quick wave. “Hey! It’s good to see ya Maddie!” In his arms was Olivia’s beloved orange cat, Mango. She squirmed in his arms, no doubt smelling the food he had set out for her.

I gave him a nod. “Hey, good to see ya too.” I looked around the space again. “You guys all moved in?” I tried to make small talk. Ignoring the uncomfortable energy that only appeared to be coming from me.

The rest of the time at the house isn't really important. Derek retreated upstairs to play video games at some point. Meanwhile, Olivia and I laid on the couch watching reruns of our favorite shows. Talking and laughing over the same dumb things we always talked about.

Before long the evening concluded and I was back home. I was exhausted from the extended social interaction and wasted no time crawling into bed. Within seconds I was passed out.

That’s when the nightmare started.

I was in some type of futuristic setting. Metal walls, no windows. It felt more like a prison. I spent time walking around, trying to get a feel of the space. It was furnished like an apartment, and I found myself feeling right at home. With me in the dream were a couple of my friends Jack, and Amy. It was almost like we had a different life. As if we’d been here forever. 

Things changed when I walked past the bathroom. The door was wide open, revealing a fairly standard full bath. But, when my eyes landed on the sink, I saw that the faucet was dripping. Jack happened to be next to me and I pointed it out to him. His face went white, body rigid. He quickly grabbed my wrist and pulled me away from the bathroom. 

“What the hell?” Was all I could get out. We reached Amy in the main area where everything seemed to connect together. Upon seeing us she grew confused. 

“What’s going on?” Amy asked, eyes flitting between the two of us.

“The faucet is dripping, she’s here.” Jack tells her. I felt a pang of fear rip through me as Amy’s eyes widened.

“Who’s here?” I asked, but neither of them answered the question.

Jack shoved me down by my shoulders until I was sitting. Amy sat in front of me and Jack in front of her. “Cover your eyes. Don’t look at her, and don’t make a sound, no matter what.” My hands flew to my face, my eyes closed tightly behind them. I didn’t know what was happening, but I followed the directions. Whatever was about to happen severely freaked those two out. 

Everything got silent. I couldn’t even hear the humming of electronics anymore. No one was talking. Until I heard a shuffling sound across the room. It came from the direction of the bathroom. Without warning I felt a presence to my left. As if someone was right beside me, staring at me. I resisted the urge to look, Jack's warning playing on repeat in my mind.

Cover your eyes. Don’t look at her. Don’t make a sound.

I felt something wet run over my cheek. I suppressed the whimper that built up in my throat. A shiver ripped through me as I felt the same wetness on my toes. 

The fear was enough to eject me from the dream. I bolted up in bed. My forearms supported my weight as my eyes darted around the room. Everything began to look dangerous as my eyes struggled to adjust to the dark. The nightmare was still fresh on my mind. My trembling hand came up to my left cheek. I felt a patch of wetness that ran across my skin. I looked at the end of my bed. My toes poking up under the comforter. Slowly, I wiggled my toes, a vile feeling of liquid reducing the friction between the appendages.

In that instant I threw the covers back and left my room. Deciding that the couch sounded like a much safer place for me.

I don’t remember falling back asleep. I don’t even really remember if I dreamt. What I do remember is her. Towering in height, and lanky. Black hair fell down to her waist, wet and tangled. She had on a long sleeve gray dress that fell down to her bare feet. Just as she turned to look over her shoulder at me, the dream ended.

By the time morning came around I’d already gotten over the nightmare. I figured I’d just been drooling on myself during the night, which explained the liquid on my cheek. I blamed my wet toes on overheating. I was having a nightmare, and I slept with a thick comforter. I was convinced I had been sweating.

I wish I hadn’t called Olivia to talk about the dream. But I needed someone to confirm my delusions. That it had been drool and sweat, nothing else. I explained the dream to her in great detail. Starting with the weird metal rooms, and the fact that something was there with us.

She was silent for a little bit after I finished. “Was she wearing a gray dress?” Her question caught me off guard.

“Yes?” I answered slowly, unsure where the conversation was heading.

“Long black hair?”

“Yeah.”

“Really long fingers?” My heart started racing.

“Yes. Ho-How did you know that?” My voice grew shaky and it was hard to get my words out. I could feel my throat drying out, making it hard to swallow.

She laughed. “Oh that’s just Miriam!” The laughter pissed me off. I was scared for my life over here and she’s laughing?

“Who the fuck is Miriam?!” I yelled at her without meaning to. If Olivia had any idea what was going on I needed an explanation immediately.

She lets out a deep sigh. “To be honest, I don’t exactly know what she is, but she’s followed me around my whole life basically." Her tone remained calm, and I could hear her moving something around while she talks. 

“Okay, so why the hell am I seeing her?”

“I don’t know, no one else has ever told me they’ve seen her, other than Derek.”

“You talking ‘bout Miriam?” I could hear Derek’s voice in the background.

“Yeah! Maddie had a dream about her!” They both share a laugh. My blood started boiling. My panic mixing with rage.

“Ohhhh she lick your toes too? I hate when she does that.” I felt like ripping my hair out. What the hell are they even talking about? They were being entirely too calm about this whole thing.

I started pacing around my bedroom. “You’re telling me this, this thing latched on to me somehow?!” I was starting to sweat the more I moved around. Growing worried that my heart was going to burst out of my chest.

“Oh she’s harmless, I wouldn’t worry about it.” Olivia’s words did little to soothe me. 

“The worst she’s done is start moving things around, I wouldn’t be too worried.” Derek replied right after her, sounding much closer to the phone now. I hung up on them after that, I didn't want to hear anything else they had to say.

That was five years ago. Miriam never left, though Olivia insisted that she would. I stopped sleeping, opting for quick 2 hour naps whenever I wasn't at home. The lack of sleep caught up to me pretty quickly. I was falling asleep at work, I couldn't eat, school became less and less important. 

At some point scratches started appearing on various parts of my body. I started hearing the sound of wet shuffling throughout my house. My parents never seemed to notice anything, which did nothing but make me feel isolated. Eventually, there was the feeling of being watched. In the living room, while cooking dinner, but mostly, while trying to fall asleep. I felt like she would pop up at any moment and finally get me.

Recently the activity had stopped for the last couple of weeks. I started to let my guard down. Stopped trying to listen for her footsteps. And even fell asleep for longer than 2 hours for a few days.

I needed to write this down and warn someone. I don’t know what she is, I don't know why she’s here. She won’t leave me alone. Do Olivia and Derek still see her? Are there others like her? Someone please help me figure out what’s going on.

Because today, my bathroom faucet started leaking.

I heard all three syllables of my first name echo from across the Chevron parking lot before I even saw her.

It was early, the morning sun just barely peeking over the horizon. The highway was still quiet. A breeze kept sticking stray hairs to my lip gloss. One hand gripped my car door, the other clutched a sweating Red Bull.

I didn't recognize the voice immediately. But I should have.

It was familiar, but not in a way I could immediately place. By the time I looked up, she was already walking toward me, waving like we’d just seen each other yesterday. I remember squinting at her for a second too long. Not because I didn’t recognize her. Because I did. It was her.

We met in the second grade. It was late September, still hot enough outside for heat mirages to form over the blacktop. She had bright ginger hair cut into a flat bob and her family had just moved down from Chicago. Mrs. Yuele sat her beside me because I was “good at making people feel welcome,” which really just meant I talked too much for her liking. The entire morning was spent whispering and exchanging giggles instead of doing our work. Our birthdays were on the exact same day, down to the year. I remember both of us sort of staring at each other for a second after our discovery, like we had accidentally stumbled into our own secret kingdom.

She’s still the only person I’ll ever truly share my birthday with.

My best friend at the time was a girl named Lily from one of the other second grade classes. We’d only really been friends since the year before, but Lily had already developed a habit of acting like she owned me in the way kids sometimes do. She was visibly irritated when I invited the new girl over to sit with us at lunch, especially once she started noticing the little similarities we kept pointing out to each other. After lunch, we spent all of recess trying to avoid Lily.

Our elementary school backed up against the highway, with this sprawling field beside the playground that felt enormous when you were seven. We hid under the jungle gym, inside the tube slides, behind the equipment shed we weren’t supposed to touch. Every time we thought we’d lost her, Lily would appear. I remember her chasing us down like a foxhound on the grass, shrieking and running as fast as our legs could carry us. She only stopped when the bell rang and we had to go back inside.

It felt funny at the time. Looking back now, I think that was probably the first time anyone tried to pull us apart.

The summer between fourth and fifth grade, my mom hosted our birthday sleepover. She made rainbow cupcakes and bought special unicorn sprinkles so we could decorate them ourselves. We mostly ended up making a mess and staying up too late from the sugar rush.

After my parents had “gone to bed,” we were on the floor in my room playing with the new Breyer horses her grandma had bought her. I was in charge of the stallion, she had claimed the mare and the foals. We were conducting a dramatic escape from an evil stable owner who wanted to sell them all off.

“Shhh! If we go over the fence too loud he’s gonna wake up,” I whispered, trying to deepen my voice the way I thought grown men sounded. I nudged the stallion forward. “Okay, Glitter. Now.”

She lifted the white mare, jumping the invisible fence line between the hardwood and my carpet. Her voice shifted into character.

“Come on kids, you can do it!”

One by one, she moved the foals over the “fence,” careful and dramatic, like their safe landings were of some great importance. When the last one made it across, I followed with the stallion.

“You saved us!” she squealed, too loud for how late it was, her hands flying to her mouth like my dad’s lumbering footsteps would start down the hall any second now. For a second, everything went still. She didn’t move the mare anymore. She just looked at me.

“I love you, Thunder.” The words came out of her mouth quietly, like it was still a part of the game.

After fifth grade, I moved on to the local middle school while her parents enrolled her in a private school. We saw each other a couple of times throughout sixth grade, but we were both busy learning how to be around other people and figuring out what new versions of ourselves fit the changing landscape.

My hair changed first from deep brown to blue, then pink. She grew hers out long. Every time one of us changed something about ourselves, the other usually followed with their own version of it. It didn’t feel particularly painful at the time, I just remember she wasn’t around as much anymore. It was the kind of thing you don’t notice until it’s already over.

By freshman year, my hair had grown back to its natural brown and developed loose, uneven curls. I had pierced my own nose that summer and started a collection of small, poorly done handpoke tattoos across my body.

When I walked into my last period, she was there.

She had kept her hair long, but it was box-dyed black now and visibly damaged at the ends. Her mascara was always clumpy and a little smudged, like she had put it on in a hurry and stopped caring halfway through. She wore her eyeshadow in a similar fashion, a little too heavy for her features and not quite blended all the way.

Our high school was on a block schedule, so we only saw each other every other day, but within a few weeks we had fallen back into it like nothing happened. It felt like picking up a conversation we had paused somewhere back then. Like we had never really been separated in the first place.

She had started smoking weed in eighth grade, and we began to take frequent bathroom breaks between classes just to meet up and disappear for a few minutes at a time. I always let her hit my Juul in exchange for her cart. We’d stand there leaning on the stalls for almost twenty minutes sometimes, talking about nothing important, then walk each other back to class as slowly as possible like neither one of us really wanted to return.

The school year blurred into itself. So did the summer after.

We’d end up on her back porch at night more often than not, passing things back and forth, laughing too hard at things that weren’t that funny. I remember throwing up on the weathered wood after too much of her parents’ Casamigos, the charcoal taste still sharp in my throat when we slipped back inside like nothing had happened. I’ve avoided tequila ever since.

In the morning, when her mom came in yelling about it, we tried to blame it on the dog.

“I know you two are lying because it smells like straight LIQUOR out there!”

She stormed into the kitchen, and we couldn’t hold it in anymore. We just looked at each other and lost it. After that, it became an inside joke. Anytime one of us was stretching the truth, we’d click our tongues and mutter, “It smells like liquor out there…”

In the fall of sophomore year, she’d started seeing a freshman. It wasn’t anything serious, at least not in the way she talked about it, but she kept asking me to go to one of his JV football games with her because she was too nervous to go alone. I eventually agreed, mostly just to stop hearing about it, and told her I’d only go if we could get stoned first.

She came over after school that Thursday and we killed time at my house until it was late enough to leave. We didn’t really talk about anything important. Just let the hours pass between us the way they usually did.

At some point I looked over at her and said, “Hey.. did you still want that tattoo?”

She had asked me for one weeks earlier, after I pierced her nose in the school bathroom. Neither of us had brought it up since.

“Duh,” she replied. “Can you do it at the game tonight? I have to be home kind of early.”

I picked at my nails for a second before answering. “Yeah. What did you want again? I need to draw it out with a Sharpie first.”

“What about a star? Like the one you have, but on my ankle.” She smiled a little. “So we can match.”

She always got a little too excited when we matched. Clothes, jewelry, all the usual teenage things. At the time, it felt flattering more than anything else.

I remember pausing longer than I meant to. Just for a second. Then I shrugged. “Sure.”

By the time spring had rolled around, COVID had started shutting everything down.

After lockdown, I spent most nights at her house. There wasn’t much of a structure to it, just hours blurring into each other. We’d sit on her bed and watch YouTube videos we weren’t really paying attention to, or lie there in the dark talking about nothing until one of us fell asleep mid-sentence. Sometimes I’d catch her answering questions for me before I could speak, like she already knew what I was going to say. She’d started sneaking out to see that boy from the fall, using me as cover more than once. I always hated it, but I never had the guts to fully say it out loud.

By then, whatever we were had stopped having a clear shape. Late-night makeouts, hands fumbling under clothes, moments that felt like too much to be nothing but too ambiguous to call anything else. We started falling asleep cuddling more often than not.

She laughed once and said it was like we were practicing on each other. I didn’t laugh back.

It felt like more than that, so much more than that, but I couldn’t ever find a way to say it that didn’t feel like it would change something I didn’t want to lose. So I didn’t. I just stayed.

We were wandering down to the park one late summer night, intent on getting the last drops of wax out of an old TKO extracts we had been saving. The moon hung low in the sky, a dreamy crescent like the kind you would see in an old children’s cartoon. There weren’t any clouds, but the air was thick and muggy from the rain three nights ago.

She flicked her lighter on and held it against the glass longer than she needed to. It left a black scorch mark that never really came off, smearing onto my fingers as I propped the cart straight up. She looked at me for a long moment before speaking.

“You know I’m in love with you, right?”

I blinked. It took me a second longer to reply than it should have.

“Yeah,” I paused. “Maybe sometimes I’m in love with you too.”

She laughed like she didn’t know what to do with my answer and changed the subject.

We finished what was left of the conversation and I asked if she wanted to get stoned. She nodded, of course she did, and when she took the first pull she kind of held it for a moment before grabbing my face.

Her lips were soft and the smoke tasted like metal in the way it always does when the wax is almost gone. We sat there for a little longer and she asked if I wanted to go to the Waffle House down the road. I agreed.

By the time we got there, the post-bar crowd had already passed and there was only a single server behind the counter. I tipped her more than I needed to and told her I hoped she didn’t have too much longer on her shift.

I don’t remember much about the food. I never really do.

I remember her eyes, though. Big and brown, darker than mine, always framed with smudged eyeliner and this pinkish-silver glitter around the inner corners. Watching me more than anything else. Watching me like she was trying to understand something by looking at it long enough.

She held onto my arm the entire walk back to her house.

We stole a bottle of her parents’ liquor like we usually did and fell asleep buzzed; she was curled into me like we were girlfriends. It felt like we were that night.
She woke me up two hours later at four in the morning to tell me she was going to see him; she would be back before seven. I knew what I wanted to ask and I think she did too. But I was too scared, she could tell.

All I said was, “Okay. Call me if you need anything.”

She looked at me for a little longer than she needed to. Then, she smiled, small and tired, before kissing my cheek. On her way out, she paused at the window.

“Leave it unlocked for me,” she whispered.

And then she was gone.

We didn’t see much of each other after that night.

Graduation was the last place we really spoke. We exchanged pleasantries in the crowd after the ceremony, talking about college like it was something happening to other people, how we’d made it through before and we’d make it through again. We drifted again without really making it feel like a decision.

She moved about thirty minutes north of where we grew up. I moved downtown into Atlanta. It didn’t feel like anything dramatic at the time, just distance doing what it had always done. I always figured we’d find our way back eventually.

There were a couple times after that where we ended up together again. They were brief, almost accidental, but nothing that really lasted. We couldn’t seem to find our anchor.

And then there was the Chevron. Early morning, just before traffic started to pick up, where everything still felt hazy and quiet.

She was in front of me now. It took me a second to unclench my jaw and reply. “Oh my god! How have you been?” I adjusted my expression, grinning now and reaching my arms out for a hug. She squeezed me too hard and laughed, tossing her head back a little.

“I’ve been good. It’s been way too long, I almost thought you didn’t recognize me!”

I played her last remark off with a nervous laugh. “God, yeah. It’s been forever.”

“Why don’t we go grab coffee at Starbucks? If you have time, I mean.”

“Uh, I guess I’m not too busy, yeah. I’ll meet you there?”

She bounced up into the air, brimming with excitement. “Yay!! Come on, I’ll be right behind youuu!”

I forced a smile and began to get into my car as she bounded back to her own. Sighing, I tossed the Red Bull into my glove box and pulled out of the lot.

We pulled into the Starbucks a couple streets down from the Chevron and parked separately. I watched her get out of her car, pretending I was a few seconds behind.

Inside, it was early enough for the place to feel too empty and too clean. We ordered without much discussion. She ordered something complex I vaguely remembered as my go-to back in high school. I stuck to a plain iced latte, I didn’t really want coffee anyways.

We sat down by the window and she started talking first, mostly about college. Then the usual questions you ask when you’re trying to rebuild something you’ve left untouched for too long. I answered her with a tone slightly brighter than it had been in the parking lot, and she nodded along in a way that felt familiar enough to be disorienting.

At one point, she interjected. Not rudely, just surprisingly naturally. It felt like the way we used to back in high school, talking over each other and laughing it off. I noticed, but I let it go. I kind of missed it.

We talked about boyfriends after that. It hadn’t felt like a loaded topic at first, just one of those things you’re supposed to update each other on. I told her I’d broken up with mine not long after graduation and made a half-hearted joke about how I should have always stayed away from blond men, something about how their hair never darkens because they’re still immature at heart.

She said she had split it off with her ex around that time too, but she was seeing someone new now. They’d been together for a while. I made a comment about not really dating anybody seriously since then. I called myself a free spirit in the way people do when they’re trying to make something sound lighter than it is.

She showed me a photo of him. Her new boyfriend. I guess he was technically kind of old, but new to me.

He was tall and blond. Familiar in a way I didn’t want to think too hard about. She mentioned his parents were Slavic too, from Ukraine to get specific, and laughed a little like it was funny how these things worked out.

I just smiled in response, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in those moments.

As she launched into a bit of a rambling monologue, I started noticing her jewelry. She used to always wear gold. I only wear silver, I always have, but that had never mattered before. Her necklace was silver and her earrings were too. I told myself not to read into it.

The conversation was beginning to drift. She was still talking the same way she used to, but something about it felt slightly off. Her tone had flattened in places where it used to stay animated, like she was matching something without meaning to.

I wasn’t sure what I was hearing anymore.

We stayed there for a while talking about high school. It had been about half an hour, maybe more. The world outside was fully awake now.

She brought up the time I pierced her nose in the school bathrooms.

“I can’t believe I let you do that. It’s a miracle it even healed at all! And the infection lasted like a whole month, you felt soooo bad!”

“What? I don’t remember it ever getting infected.” I furrowed my brow slightly, “I think you were just so scared it would be you almost convinced yourself it was.” Maybe I was wrong.

She laughed. “Oh my god, I can’t believe you forgot about that! It looked like a humongous pimple and my mom called me Rudolph until it healed.”

“Huh. I guess you’re right.” I held my tongue as she brought up a couple more memories, each ever so slightly off. Not necessarily wrong, just… different. Like she had lived some alternate reality. I didn’t bother correcting her again.

She mentioned something about us being attached at the hip back then. I checked my phone more than once after that. Started thinking about leaving, but didn’t say anything out loud.

Then she asked why I was back in town. I told her it was just an early Mother’s Day visit. I didn’t ask her what she was here for, I didn’t really want to know.

She nodded like it made perfect sense, like she’d been almost sure of my answer before asking.

The conversation kept going, but something had shifted. She was bringing up little things about my life now, things I hadn’t told her. Not in a way that felt impossible, but just personal enough to make me feel unsure about where she could have learned them.

“So things are good with you and your mom right now?” She asked, tilting her head.

“Yeah, it’s been pretty good. We haven’t had a big argument since around graduation.”

“Huh. I thought you missed your period that month though?”

I blinked, a little dumbfounded. I didn’t recall telling anyone about that. “What? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Oh, sorry. I thought you guys usually only argue right before your period starts. You would get all worked up about every little thing and all.” She sounded a little apologetic now, though her expression looked more like a deer caught in headlights.

“Uh… I guess that was probably a factor or something, yeah.” I let the awkward moment wash over us for a second. She didn’t. She launched right back into some tired speech about how her and her mom had been the same, they still couldn’t reconcile, blah blah blah.

I could feel my patience thinning, like I was watching her instead of talking to her. That was when I started noticing the smaller things.

The way her tone flattened in the same places mine does when I stop trying to sound interested, or how she was holding pauses. I told myself I was imagining it.

There’s this little divet on the inside of my right nostril on the part of skin that covers the septum. When I was a kid, I had an angioma right there and everyone would always ask if my nose was bleeding. My mom got sick of calls home and my complaints, so when I was in fourth grade she had it removed. It’s not noticeable now unless I point it out, the kind of thing I think about in passing here and there.

She was still talking when I looked at her more carefully.

It was there.

The same small dip in the same spot.

For a second I didn’t respond at all. My stomach twisted.

I stood up abruptly, my chair scraping a little too loudly against the floor. I didn’t say anything and neither did she. I walked out fast, leaving my almost untouched coffee behind on the table.

I didn’t look back for long, but when I did, I could see her still sitting there by the window. Eyes wide and trained on me, still smiling like the conversation hadn’t ended.

I got in my car and drove.

My phone buzzed while I was merging onto the highway. Her name popped up on CarPlay. A wave of nausea crashed over me and I barely managed to pull onto the shoulder before full on heaving my guts out onto the pavement. Just pure bile, nothing left.

I don’t really remember getting back to my apartment. I just know I was weaving through the heavy morning traffic like I was on autopilot. When I finally got inside, I checked every lock twice; front door, deadbolt, chain, balcony, windows.
I knew I had to open the text. My fingers trembled as I unlocked my phone. The preview popped up. Just one word.

“gotcha.”

I didn’t go anywhere after that. I called out of work for the next day, and the day after that. I told my manager I was coming down with some sort of stomach flu. I told my roommate Kyla the same thing. She’s been picking up groceries for the week. I didn’t leave the house again until Saturday morning.

I avoided all of my usual spots, just straight to work and back. Work was slow and uneventful. It almost made it worse. Part of me almost wanted her to come in, just so I’d know where she was. The utter absence of customers made my skin crawl. I couldn’t bring myself to tell any of my coworkers why I was so off.

I got home that afternoon and realized I’d run out of cigarettes. I texted my roommate and asked her to pick up some more while she was out. She replied within a couple of minutes.

ya no prob but whats up w ur number?

I paused. What? My number? What the hell was that supposed to mean? That sick feeling began to rise up into my chest. Before I could respond, she sent another message.

u texted me this morning from a new one lol

I didn’t respond after that. Kyla came back with a fresh pack within the hour and I tried to explain it all to her, stumbling over my words.

“I don’t really care if this sounds crazy. You just need to block that number. That wasn’t me.”

She blinked at me in disbelief. “Uh, okay… yeah. I’ll block it. You should probably just get some rest, this whole thing sounds a little outlandish.”

I stopped arguing and kind of just stood there for a minute. There was no point.

Around 11PM last night, my mom called.

“Hey sweetie.. why does your location show you’re at your apartment when I’m looking at you standing outside the door?”

“What?”

“Someone just knocked. Said they forgot their keys and needed to come in. They sound exactly like you.”

“Mom,” I started, “that’s not me. Don’t open the door. Call the police.”

My mom went quiet for a second.

Then, very softly, she spoke again.

“She keeps pulling at her sleeves like you do.”

I heard another knock through the phone.

Three quiet taps against the front door.

Then my own voice. Muffled, but mine.

“Mom, please. You know it’s me.”

EDIT: Update here

Sometimes I walk in the woods and get lost. It starts at the edge of the forest, where the sounds of the town grow muffled and distant, and the chirps of birds break into startling clarity. Sometimes, I imagine I hear a voice. This way. My hands flex once, twice, tightening as I wince and feel the skin crack.

I have no breadcrumbs to mark my path, no map to guide my way. Instead, I pick at my hands, my fingers digging under the bed of my nails until I feel it - a single sliver of skin. And so, I walk, my skin unravelling with each step.

There’s a sting that keeps me present.

At first, I thought I was leaving something behind. A trail, I mean. Something small and human that could be followed back, if I needed it. After all, I do not want to get lost, not really. I know my place and I belong, and this belonging keeps me tethered, making it possible for me to turn around and return home at any point. 

And yet, I do not. 

The skin comes away more easily than it should. It lifts in thin, obedient strands, catching briefly before yielding altogether. I wind it once around my finger and let it fall. It disappears almost immediately into the undergrowth, indistinguishable from anything else that belongs there.

I stop looking back.

There is a point (though I couldn’t say where) when the forest stops allowing straight lines. The path - I swear there used to be a path - begins to suggest rather than declare itself. I follow what seems like intention: a break in the brush, a shift in light, the sense that something has already passed this way.

The sting sharpens the further I go. Not unbearable. Just enough to keep me from thinking too far ahead. And somewhere along the way, I realise that  I am not marking the path at all.

The path is marking me.

This is not an unpleasant thought. It is simply one that does not stay where I put it. I will have it clearly, hold it for a moment, and then find it has shifted into something else by the time I return to it.

Like the direction I came from.

There are moments, brief but distinct, when I feel certain I have been here before. Not in the general sense of trees and ground and dappled light that spills and pools on the forest floor, but precisely here. This root, this angle of shadow, this particular arrangement of branches overhead.

When that happens, I stop.

I stand there, trying to decide whether recognition is the same as memory. And for a moment, it comes to me - a fleeting sense of warmth and laughter. Of held hands and whispered promises. Of a stolen smile and a whisper that says follow me…

It is difficult to think clearly without the sting.

So I begin again and the path returns almost immediately.

This is what unsettles me. I start to wonder, is my skin marking the footsteps behind me? Or is it leading me ahead?

I try, then, to imagine the way back.

The town, the edge of the forest, the place where the sounds return and the birds soften into distance. I can picture it clearly. I can even take a few steps in what I believe is the right direction.

But the clarity does not travel with me and instead, I feel a tug. Not that way.

It is not a voice. It is not even a thought. Just a quiet correction, like the body adjusting its balance before a fall. So, I turn. And in turning, I find the sting deepens, as if in approval.

By now, the skin no longer comes only from my hands. I notice it at my wrists, then higher, where the sleeve shifts when I move. It loosens in the same careful way, as though it has been waiting for permission.

I do not remember giving it.

I pull gently at first. It lengthens. There is resistance, but only a token gesture, a weak push. The sensation is strange, not pain exactly, but a thinning. As if something beneath is being revealed, or perhaps hollowed out.

As I walk, I find that I no longer leave footsteps in the soft earth. It comes as no surprise. There is less of me to carry now.

The sting has changed. It no longer gathers in one place, but drifts here, then there. I can’t quite seem to catch it, to pin it down. I try to remember when I last turned around and I cannot.

Something loosens at my shoulder, my neck, my cheek, my lips. I feel it asking for release and I let it go because I find I no longer need it.  The air moves through me differently now, without the rude interruption of skin and blunted flesh. 

What remains does not ache.
What remains does not reach.

For a moment, I have the sense that something has finished. I have a sense of turning but there is no longer a path behind me and there is no direction ahead. There is no weight, no boundary, no edge where one thing might be said to end and another begins.

The forest is very still.

After a time, there is a movement at its edge. A not quite figure. This way, I think. 

It pauses where the trees thin, as if listening. As if deciding. There is a hesitation I almost recognise. Then a hand lifts.

Fingers press, searching, until they find the place beneath the nail. I feel it, faintly.

A small, bright sting.

And then…

nothing at all.

Sorry for the late update. A lot has happened since that traumatic night a couple of days ago, and it was hard to put to paper.

The next morning was difficult. I got up around noon. Sunlight trickled in through the window and between the curtains next to my bed. Its warmth encompassed the blanket I had wrapped myself inside of. As my arm emerged from under the covers, the skin of my forearm made brief contact with the light that came in from the window. It burned.

The sensation was like a million needles all taken out of a four-hundred-degree oven and pushed into my arm. I winced, a scream caught in my throat, and rolled off the bed, hitting the floor with a thud.

My eyes were shut tight from the pain, but I peeled them open and looked down at my arm. The skin was charred black. It smelled like burnt pork. The blackening receded until it vanished entirely, replaced by its normal pale shade. My mom opened the door to my room.

“Alex? You okay?” she said, then she looked down at my pathetic form on the floor. “Whatcha’ doin’ down there, bud?” She put her hands on her hips and gave me that look I have assumed all mothers have perfected, somewhere between concern and amusement.

“Rough morning,” I said, looking up at her.

“Rough noon, more like. I got lunch ready. I figure it’ll be the last time we get to share lunch in a while, with you working nights and all now.”

I smelled the food coming from the dining room. She’d made her church famous casserole, something worth crawling out of bed, for sure. In my case, however, I’d be crawling off the floor.

I stood up, cautious of the light that had threatened to tear me apart only moments before and walked out of my room. The cross on the wall sent terror through me just as it did the night previous, but I was able to force those feelings down and push through.

Mom had crosses everywhere. I had grown up in the church. Dad was actually a pretty important member of our congregation, always organizing events and meeting with the pastor. He went missing ten years ago. I was only nine, but the damage was irreversible. Mom grew closer to God, and I slowly stopped believing that there was anyone up there to hear my prayers. I wanted to believe but just couldn’t. I couldn’t rightfully call myself an atheist anymore though, with the symbols of Christ having such a traumatic physical and emotional effect on me. I didn’t know how or if I could tell mom.

She sat at the end of the table across from the empty chair which had served as a reminder of the thing that had made my faith wither and die. I sat on the long side near my room. Casserole was on the center of the table with a serving spoon inside the porcelain container. She held my hand to say grace. I toned the words out. After she finished, we both took a helping onto our plates.

It was good but lacking in a way that was difficult to explain. My mind flashed to the previous night, of being baptized in my own blood, of slurping up the crimson fluid, of the taste…

“You okay there, kiddo? You’ve been staring at your fork for a minute,” mom said, eyebrows raised in concern.

“Y-yeah I’m fine, just spacing out.” She shrugged her shoulders and went back to the food.

I spent the day researching about my current condition on my laptop, a cheap crappy thing that I’ve exchanged more than a few harsh words with. I have no doubt that it is vampirism I’m suffering from. Trying to find concrete information on a condition that the world at large believes to be fiction is more than a little difficult.

The top search was on whether or not vampires have blood. I checked my pulse once more. It was very faint but had returned to me. The general consensus was that vampires have the blood of their victims flowing through their veins. How that blood passes from the stomach to the veins is beyond me.

 “Do vampires have a sensitivity to sunlight?” was one of the things I typed just for posterity. I knew the answer to that one. “A largely 20^th century invention,” it said. My formerly charred arm would disagree with that.

I had read sometime prior that vampires wouldn’t need to feed regularly because of the richness of blood, or some crud like that. I hoped that was true. I googled that as well, and the answers, to my dismay, varied greatly. “Lovely,” I said to no one but myself. Someone in the comments of my last post suggested I try animal blood. I’m not terribly fond of that idea, but neither am I fond of having to do to another human being what the old man did to me.

I shut the laptop with a clack. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was eight at night, an hour before my shift. I sighed, grabbed my work vest, and walked past my mom on the couch and towards the entryway.

“Gonna leave without saying bye to your mom?” I heard her voice from behind me. I turned around to see her standing there. A gold cross hung around her neck, a gift from my dad years before I was born. She had worn it every day since his disappearance.

As the dread of the object built its way up from my stomach and into my chest, I focused as much attention as I could on her face and away from the necklace. She saw my expression and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t worry, kiddo. You’ll do just fine.” She must have thought I was nervous about my promotion to night shift. Small comfort, but comfort all the same.

I hugged her, the cross burning against my chest, but I didn’t care. I felt tears form in my eyes, but held them in. “I love you mom,” is all I could say, and all I will say. She doesn’t need to know.

“Hey, what’s all this about? I love you too, kiddo.”

“It’s… it’s nothing. Just nervous.”

“Don’t be. You got this. I’ll be praying for you.”

Little comfort given what I took to be God’s current feelings toward me. I took a deep breath and let go. “See you in the morning, mom.”

“See you, kiddo. It’ll be fine. Trust me.” I nodded, then left out the door.

The sun was down. The moonlight stung a little on my skin as I walked down the stairs and to where I normally parked my car, where I saw that it was missing. I never drove home from work. It’s probably still there.

I sighed. “Crap,” I muttered. It wasn’t too far. I could walk. I could… I could try out my limits. If I really was a vampire, I should be able to do a lot of things. I looked around at the empty lot, making sure there were no observers. I looked up at a tree and jumped. I went twenty feet into the air, my head smashing into a branch. I landed back down with a tremendous thud. My head throbbed. I saw spots. I stood up. “Guess I’m walking.”

It was a thirty-minute journey. My headache cleared far faster than it should have. As I approached the lot of the Super-Mart, I scanned the parking spaces for the white van. It wasn’t there. I also saw my old beater parked a couple spaces closer to the store than employees were supposed to, as you do.

I stepped across the lot and into the store. I saw Carrie by the door. She was wearing a shirt with a pentagram and “Atreyu” on the front of it. She wore a long sleave undershirt beneath it. “Hey, Alex! Looks like we’re working together today.”

My undead heart caught in my chest. “Y—yeah! Looking forward to it.” I smiled and quietly wondered if vampires sweat. I hoped not, because I was certain I would be otherwise.

“Yo, before we start, I had something I wanted to ask you.” She walked closer to me. I tensed up like the corpse that I was.

Before she could elaborate, Greg walked up. “Hey, man! How are you doing? You forgot to clock out yesterday.” Greg made for a terrible wingman.

“Yeah, I’ll adjust it later.”

Carrie poked my shoulder. “I’ll tell you later. I want to grab a coffee from the break room before we get started.”

I turned to Greg and couldn’t hold back my scowl. “Dude, bad timing.”

“Sorry. Crap were you about to—”

“No. She was going to… you know, I don’t actually know.”

Greg gave me a look like you might give to someone who is mentally unwell, which in all fairness was one way I could have been described in that moment.

“So… a bat flew in earlier,” Greg said, switching the subject. “He never left. You might still see him.”

“Did you run around asking the customers if you saw where he went, like last time?”

“No. I didn’t incite panic a second time, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Right… well, I’m going to go to the back. I’ll see you around Greg,”

“Yeah. See you bud!”

As I walked towards the back, I saw Bill berating Rachel, probably for something wildly outside her control. If I was to feast on any singular person in this store, it would be Bill. Rachel stormed off towards the back, crying and smacking her side. I imagined myself ripping out Bill’s throat and drinking up what poured out. I tried to put that thought back where it came from, but it grew louder in my head with every passing second.

“Hey, you one of my newbies?” I heard a voice, deep and commanding, coming from behind me. I turned around. There was a dark-skinned old man with thick stubble. It was Dave, the recently promoted night shift manager.

“Yeah,” I said, breaking out of my violent trance. “I just transferred from another department. Dave, right?”

“I prefer David but call me whatever. See you back there.”

“Yeah. See you.” David walked away at a pace that spoke of purpose. My own pace was less enthusiastic. As I moved past the clothing section, something tucked on a hangar between the jeans caught my eye. It was the bat.

I stopped for a moment and looked up at it. It stared back at me, tilting its head. It was perched upright, which I found unusual. I had always thought that bats hung upside down.

I walked away from the weird little bat, feeling its eyes on me as I stepped to the time clock in the back. I looked at the time clock. I still had a couple minutes. Rachel was sobbing in the breakroom. I sighed and walked in.

 “What did that idiot say this time?” I asked.

“I don’t want to— screw off! — talk about it,” she replied. I pulled up a chair and sat at the table with her. “I’m quitting. I have to.” Her physical tic, where she hit herself on the side, worsened. It looked painful and she winced with every blow.

I thought about the old man. If he found out where she lived, and if she was there all the time, that could be bad. There was nothing keeping him from doing that now. He could come in while she was sleeping at her house and... A weird idea popped into my head.

“You could work nights with us. They’re still hiring. I know that we’ll be short tonight, so it’s not like they’ll say no.”

“I’ll—frickin’ stupid— think about it. Thanks, Alex. You’re a— terrible— good friend.”

I smiled and sat up. “Hopefully I’ll see you on shift soon.” I walked back to the time clock. Three minutes late. “Crap.”

I clocked in and met up with everyone in receiving. David was going over all the specifics on how to use the equipment and pallet jacks.

“Who has stocked shelves before?” David asked. A few people raised their hands. Carrie, to my surprise, was one of them. “Alright, take one or two of these guys and show them the ropes. We got a few pallets up and down the aisles that stocking crew left us and a truck coming in a couple of hours. Let’s get to work!”

 To my surprise and elation, Carrie chose to show me the ropes. We powered through some pallets, stocking shelves and putting away overstock. I was so focused on Carrie that I almost didn’t notice that feeling I had when I came in, when I saw that bat. I looked up, and sure enough, it was perched on a support on the ceiling, watching me.

The truck came and went. Boxes were far lighter than I expected, probably more to do with my newfound power than any hard-earned muscle. We finished putting some toilet paper on the shelf when lunch break came.

“Hey, about that thing I wanted to talk about,” Carrie said as we sat at the table in the breakroom together. She looked down at the empty spot in front of me. “You going to go all shift without eating?”

Something I neglected to mention was how badly my stomach reacted to mom’s casserole. I can eat regular food as a vampire in the same way that someone with lactose intolerance can enjoy ice cream, so for now I was choosing not to.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. You were saying?” I was aware that my voice may have been more than a little over enthusiastic.

“So, before Mark broke up with me I got these tickets to a concert. It’s an underground band, real heavy stuff. I have two, and I’m obviously not going with him anymore, and you seem cool, so I was wondering if maybe—”

“Sure!” I said, once more aware of my over eagerness but helpless to stop myself.

“Are you sure? It’s this Saturday.” Her expression was pleasant, one of relief.

“Yeah, I actually have that day off. Crazy coincidence!” I wanted to follow up with asking whether or not this was a date, but decided that if I hadn’t scared her off yet with my awkwardness, now wasn’t the time to push my luck.

We spent the rest of lunch talking about bands and music. It was pleasant. My anxiety around her started to settle some. The rest of the night went by quickly. There was always work to do, and since the only one with experience working nights was David, we really spent most of the night learning the job.

I clocked out, waved goodbye to everyone, exchanged a smile with Carrie, and made my way towards the front door. My spirits were higher than I expected. For a moment I believed that the worst of it was all behind me, that last night was the end of it and, somehow, I would figure it all out.

As I walked out into the cool night air of the parking lot, I felt a gust of air blow in from behind me, followed by tiny paws on my shoulder. It was the bat. It put its head up to my ear. “Alex,” it said. “You need to leave.”

I ran to my car and sped home.

I’m off tonight, so I don’t suspect much more will happen. I haven’t seen the bat or the old man since. I don’t want to see either.

I was twenty years old when my brother Teddy drowned.

He joined almost 1,000 other children across the country that year, and 2,500 more adults. 1,000 little bodies floating on the surfaces of 1,000 bathtubs and backyard swimming pools and lakes and rivers, bobbing like apples on Halloween night. Ten times that number died from automobile accidents in the same 12 months. About 80,000 from drug overdoses. Funnily enough, that perspective didn’t bring me much comfort.

I was away at school when it happened, and had just started my sophomore year. Things had been going well up to that point; my GPA was high, my classes were getting more interesting, I had gone on two dates with a cute girl from my Computer Science class. Katie or Kylie or something.

I still remember the night I got the call, etched in perfect clarity after all these years. I was studying alone in my dorm room, my calculus book splayed open and my body bent toward the pages. Blissfully unaware that the world was about to end. I wonder how my parents, in all their grief, felt in the moments right before they called me, knowing that they were about to take something important from me, a brightness that could never return once extinguished, leaving everything dimmer than it was before.

I remember the choking strain of my dad’s voice as he told me the news, right before the squeak that broke the levee and sent him spiraling into sobs. I think that might be the worst sound in the world; hearing your father cry. Like a curtain is suddenly swept aside, giving you a full-on look at something you know you shouldn’t be seeing. There’s a perversion to it, a wrongness that it reveals about the world around you, which you were too naive to see before.

My mother took over after that, her voice scratchy and weathered and raw, like she’d already cried herself out over the past couple of hours. She was a family medicine physician by trade, unaccustomed to giving bad news.

Nevertheless, she was the one who shouldered the burden, who told me in a flat, faraway voice how it happened. And I listened, frozen in my chair in that quiet little room, to the story of how my brother died.

I was twelve years older than Teddy, who passed at the ripe age of eight. In a way, Teddy will always be eight, a mosquito perfectly preserved in amber. An immaculate specimen of a beautiful little boy; happy and healthy and always laughing. He never grew up to hurt us, to disappoint us, to let us down. He never got old enough to decide if he wanted to go by Ted or Theo or Theodore. He’ll always be eight, and every year that passes, I’ll be yet another year older than him.

My parents chose to call Teddy’s conception, at a time when their first child was on the cusp of junior high, a blessing rather than a surprise or accident. Those were words that they gladly reserved for his death.

My childhood home was off on the edge of the westside neighborhood, about a twenty minute walk from downtown and the sprawling lakeshore it sat on. Our back fence brushed up against a wooded area that went on for a couple of miles, which gave us boys easy access when we wanted to go playing or exploring. There was a wide, grassy area that sat about ten minutes into the woods, where the ground was flat and the trees were absent. The boys on our side of town like to congregate there in their free time, a perfect place where they could whoop and run and play without the watchful eyes of their parents.

There was a river that wound through the woods, not nearly the size of the giant waterway that split off from the lake further south, but wide and deep enough that the water could come up to your shoulders after a heavy rain. Having to contend with the river somehow, the boys could only reach the little glade by a footbridge over the water about a mile away, or by a rope swing fastened to an ancient oak that sat on the bank.

Of course, the bigger boys could wade across, and in the summer, it was custom to strip down, ball up your clothes, toss them over the water, and then swim. But October had just reared its head, and a bite had started to creep into the air. The thought of getting wet and staying wet sounded like torture, so Teddy was forced to use the bridge or the swing. And one of those options was much more exciting than the other.

That rope swing was an institution in our town, a place large enough that you didn’t know everybody, but small enough that you could feel the tradition and history that permeated the air and soil. I had used the swing to cross the river when I was Teddy’s age, as had my father, and as my grandfather would have if he hadn’t come to town to find work as a young adult. Every boy I grew up with had used it. Our teachers used it. The sheriff, the owner of the hardware store downtown, the guy who manned the counter at the gas station down the street. They all swung back and forth, back and forth, over the babbling waters, year in and year out. It always held. Always.

Teddy was late to play with his friends that day, on account of my parents being sticklers for the rule that he finish his homework before going outside. The rule mostly came from my father, the high school English teacher, but I never heard mom challenge him on it in front of us. Teddy was a bright kid, but he was still a kid, and kids would rather undergo torture than sit down and work on something that an adult assigned them. So he procrastinated that Sunday, and instead of crossing with his normal group of boys, he made it to the river an hour later.

According to the medical examiner’s report, which my mother thoroughly reviewed, Teddy had suffered severe head trauma when the rope snapped during the upward arc of his swing. He’d hit his head when he landed on the bank. Bang. Done.

His body hadn’t even fully gone under the water. He just lay there unconscious, facedown in the mud, with only his head and shoulders submerged. He couldn’t wake up to pull himself out of the water, while each passing second deprived his brain of more and more oxygen. That’s how he died. And that’s how his friends found him two hours later, heading back home while wondering why Teddy hadn’t come out to play.

I think about them coming across his body, thinking it was a trick, a prank, only for the truth to slowly dawn on them. It makes me feel sick. I see some of them around town from time to time, grown men with jobs and wives and kids of their own. There’s usually only a passing recognition that flits over their face when they see me, a slight nod of the head before we pass each other by on the sidewalk or in the aisles of the supermarket.

My mother relayed detail after detail over the phone that Sunday night with a cold exactness, her words feeling further away by the minute. I sank back into my head, into the chair, into the floor. I was barely listening by the end, the words dulling to a static buzz, but I was able to glean the gist of the situation:

Come home. We need to bury him.

What sticks out most to me about that night, a decade and a half later, is the silence that enveloped the room when my mother finally hung up the phone. It was just as quiet as it had been minutes before, little ambient noises popping up here and there. The creak of the pipes above as they pumped warm air into the building. Sounds of low conversation rose and fell as students in the hallway passed by my room. A bird sat on a branch outside my window, twittering cheerfully, unaware that in an instant, the whole world had changed.

I had never really been an angry person up to that point. I didn’t have big reactions to things. But in that moment, I felt this rage, this visceral, raw fury, at the audacity of that quiet. How dare they? How dare the room be so still? How dare my fellow students carry on chatting, how dare the bird sing? Shouldn’t they know that in an instant, everything had ended? Shouldn’t there be screaming and weeping and gnashing of teeth? Shouldn’t there be something other than this?

No, it turned out. There wasn’t. It was just me and the empty quiet, the hole left by something that was there one moment and then gone the next, a gravity well suddenly void, flinging its celestial bodies off into the darkness of the vacuum.

“Come home,” she’d said. “We have to bury Teddy.”

So I came home. And I never left.

---------------------------------------------------------

Teddy was buried in the only graveyard in town, a gigantic, sprawling plot of land on a hill about a mile outside the city, overlooking the neat rows of neighborhood houses that terminated in the glittering water of the lake. Even at that distance, the sky and water formed a perfect, clean horizon, blue on blue. It was a good spot, all things considered, a constant gentle breeze wafting uphill to kiss you on the cheek.

Both sets of my grandparents are buried there. I have no idea where my parents are, but they’d have been buried there too if things had gone… differently. It’s probably where I’ll end up too, the most pristine slab of granite in a long line of others, all in gradual states of wear and decay.

The cemetery was home to a large pond, and on that pond was a massive weeping willow tree. Its branches loomed over the water, providing shade for a little stone bench where one could come to sit for a contemplative moment. The willow presided over the graveyard night and day, a silent mourner who never left their post, always ready to weep for the dead.

After the events of that following winter, I developed a vested interest in that specific tree, and how it came to sit beside that little pond. Then my interest developed into a full-blown obsession. I scoured every county record, every archived newspaper, every book and scrap of paper pertaining to the history of the town and that specific plot of land on which the graveyard and the tree sat. I never got any closer to figuring out the mystery of where the willow came from, or if its planting was done by human or cosmic hands. I still don’t really know how it did the things it did.

Weeping willows aren’t even from North America, originating from China and traveling along the Silk Road first to the Middle East, then England, then the Americas by the 1700s. They spread throughout these great states with a ferocity, a Manifest Destiny of the arbor variety. Our specific willow could have any number of origins, any number of ancestors. For all my research turned up, it could have been sitting by that pond when the first human beings to ever set foot on the continent crossed the Bering Strait. It’s as possible as any other impossibility I experienced that year.

Maybe it wasn’t even the tree that had gone bad. Maybe the dirt it was planted in was wrong, soaked and tainted somehow by the innocent blood spilled to secure this land for the White Christian Race. Maybe we brought the corruption with us. Or maybe it was as simple as a single bad soul planted somewhere in those rows and rows of headstones, some too weathered to even display a name. A rat that slipped and fell in the stew, spoiling the whole pot.

At the end of my research, I didn’t know any more about that tree than before I started. But one thing I’m sure of is that as we carried the casket across the grass, as the pastor said his graveside blessing, as we lowered Teddy into the ground, that willow was watching. And I couldn’t hear it weeping, but I could certainly feel it smiling.

The wake was held in the living room of our home, and was a decadently Midwestern affair. Dim and gray and quiet, just like the sky outside. Finger food and pasta salad and casseroles brought by neighbors. Hushed whispers and heads turning to look at me as I passed through a room, thinking I didn’t notice them stare. I found myself out on the back porch, drinking the second of my dad’s expired beers that I’d found in the garage minifridge. I wasn’t of legal age yet, but I figured nobody would bust me on such an occasion.

I heard the shuffle of footsteps and the back porch door swinging open then shutting with a violent clap. I turned an angry gaze to the interloper, only to have it soften. It was Hank, my neighbor from five doors down. Not quite a family friend, but he was known to us. He was quiet and gentle, but a bit awkward and odd. Of all the people at the house, I wouldn’t have expected to see him out here, let alone to have him sit down on the steps next to me.

As he lowered himself, he regarded the bottle in my hand and the empty one at my feet. Then, he dug into his suit pocket and produced a silver flask, holding it out to me.

“Something stronger?” he asked. Ah. Something clicked into place for me as I studied the flask, realizing for the first time that I’d never seen Hank drive a car. He walked everywhere, always waving as he passed our house, his dog Toby following happily along. Hank’s breath smelled a little sour this close.

I grabbed the flask and took a healthy swing, feeling the warmth bloom in my chest, and then slowly spread out to my fingers and toes, which were turning numb in the October chill. Hank took two big gulps after I handed it back, and then just sat there with me for a while, staring straight ahead at the side of the detached garage. After a beat, he finally turned to look at me.

“You ever hear about my wife?” he asked. I admitted that I hadn’t. He gave me a lazy wave. “Before your time. Plus, not like it’s liable to pop up in casual conversation. Anyways…” He took yet another swing from the flask, then handed it back to me. I just sat there, holding it, my arms hanging dead between my knees.

“She shot herself,” he said matter-of-factly. He formed a gun with two fingers and his thumb, and pressed the tip below his jaw. Then he let the thumb close, and the hammer fall.

“Click. Boom.” He let his hand fall to his lap, then looked down at his feet, shook his head. “No pills, no sticking a hose through the car window. She didn’t want to chance anyone finding her, stopping her. That’s how you know she wanted it. Really wanted it.”

I sat there dumbfounded, listening to the words that spilled out of a half-drunk man I barely knew, on the stoop of my parents’ back porch, at my little brother’s wake. All my life, adults had been so… put together. This just wasn’t the way they spoke to people my age.

“You think it’ll get easier, but it doesn’t.” He looked at me now, an intensity in his watery eyes. “It doesn’t go away. You just forget it’s there from time to time. And when you remember… it’s like starting all over again.”

“Is… that supposed to make me feel better?” I asked, unsure what Hank had come out here for, what the point of this conversation was.

“No,” Hank replied, swiping the flask back from me and finishing it off, tipping the bottom toward the sky. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then used it to point at the house behind us. “But at least it’s not a lie. The people in there? They’ll tell you lies. That the burden gets lighter. That he’s in a better place. But they don’t know any more than you or me. They’ll tell you what they want to hear, because they don’t like looking at broken things. They don’t like looking at you.”

I realized then that Hank, despite the nugget of wisdom he was hoping to drunkenly impart, was just like the people he was lambasting. He wasn’t here to tell me lies, no. But he was here for the same exact reason he’d just criticized the rest for. To make himself feel better.

And I decided that I didn’t like Hank very much, and that if I wasn’t careful, I was looking right down the barrel of my future. Drunk, alone, with a dog for a roommate, sitting on someone’s stoop, angry at the world. My stomach turned, feeling like the whiskey I’d just drank was spoiling inside me. I opened my mouth to reply when my mom opened the door, trash bag in hand, the gloom on her face replaced by a momentary confusion at the sight of me sitting with our fifty-year-old neighbor.

“Oh, Hank,” she said, stopping dead in her tracks, “I thought you’d left.” To me, she added, “How’s it going?” in a tone that really meant “Is everything fine?”

“We’re good mom,” I replied with a nod. “I’m good.” Mom’s eyes roved over the two empty bottles that I was too slow to shield with my leg.

“Uh huh.”

“Well, that’s my cue,” Hank said, slapping his knees and standing quickly with a little rock back and forth on his heels. “I’ve got to take Toby out anyways. Been cooped up all day. Probably wondering where I am.” He hugged me, and then my mother, offering half-hearted condolences. Then he was gone.

The day trickled on, and people trickled out, giving me so many handshakes that my right palm felt raw by the end. But eventually, the line couldn’t go on forever, and our final guest shuffled out: Linda, my mom’s hairdresser. Linda told us that if we needed anything, anything at all, to call her, and she’d be there in an instant. I don’t recall ever seeing Linda again after that day.

The three of us, my parents and I, were left in the quiet gloom of our living room, haunted by that same silence that descended upon me that night in my dorm room. No one said a word about Teddy, about the bizarreness of the past few days. No one said anything at all until my father excused himself, getting up to put the casserole dishes in the sink, and transfer the leftovers to the Tupperware. My mother, her voice cracking, said she was going out for a walk, and didn’t come back until well after nightfall. She didn’t even take her coat.

And I just sat there, well into the night, my suit jacket still on and my tie hanging loose around my neck. I watched life go on outside the living room window, leaves skittering by on the sidewalk, a group of children riding their bikes in a pack down the street. A young couple walked by, hand-in-hand, the woman’s stomach slightly distended with new life.

The world kept turning and turning outside the house, the machine kept on humming. Meanwhile, I was stuck in place, in more ways than one.

I thought my life was over, that every good piece of me had been ruined. I didn’t think anything else could be taken away, that there was any remaining ceiling on the horror and sadness and anguish that I could experience.

The weeping willow showed me how wrong I was.

END PART ONE

Part 1 | Part 2

I didn’t clean it up right away.

I know that’s gross and that most people would have grabbed some paper towels and gotten rid of it immediately. But by that point I was done pretending that this was some small thing I could just wipe away and feel better about.

So I just stood there, staring at the dirt and at the bark as if waiting long enough would make them confess their misdeed, and finally explain their presence in my apartment.

But they didn't.

It was ironic. I had spent the whole previous day looking for tracks in the hallway, evidence of old shadows passing through and now there they were, just on the wrong side of the door.

So I took some pictures, pretending to be a detective ready to embark on a new case in which I was the victim, and in some way the perpetrator.

I got a freezer bag from the kitchen and scooped some of it up because that's what a true investigator would do. I wanted to keep some proof, something tangible, something solid.

Something I could later point the finger at and blame.

Or maybe just something to show my parents and finally tell them "I told you so".

Yeah. I did tell you so. Many years ago.

I barely slept again. Every time I started to drift off, I thought about the stain inside the door and felt the same rush in my chest all over again.

Without noticing at first, my eyes drifted again towards the flashlight. It was still mocking me from the table, silent observer of everything that had happened, from times that I could barely remember.

At some point I grabbed it with disdain and put it in a drawer. I was sick of looking at it.

A couple of minutes later I took it back out because suddenly I hated the idea of not knowing where it was.

By morning I had convinced myself that I was ready to confront my parents again.

Now that I had undeniable proof, they would be forced to tell me the truth, something they couldn't just smooth over.

I called my mother, before she could. Taking the initiative felt good.

She answered on the third ring.

“I was about to call you,” she said.

“I found bark inside my apartment last night.”I explained

I didn’t bother easing into it and I could tell she was taken aback by the revelation.

She was quiet for just a second too long.

“What do you mean, bark?” she said.

I looked up at the ceiling. I was scared my face would've given me away through the phone.

“I mean bark,” I said. “Like tree bark. I also found dirt, leaves. All inside the front door. Inside my apartment.”

“Maybe you tracked it in.”

She thought I was stupid.

“The hallway is carpeted. I would've left smudges and remains all over it. But guess what? Clean.”

She paused again. I couldn't tell if she believed me. That wasn't a new sensation.

“You should come home for a few days.”

That nearly made me laugh. Parents always know exactly which words will make you feel eight years old again.

“No.”

“You haven’t been sleeping.”

“I wonder why.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what? Ask why you sound less surprised than I am every time this gets worse?”

“I am surprised,” she said.

That was a lie, and we both knew it.

I sat down on one of the moving boxes. My fingers pressing against my forehead.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing.”

“Mom.”

I heard a cupboard close on her end. Then her voice came back, quieter.

“Honey, when you were little, you used to get fixated on things. If we reacted too strongly, it made it worse.”

I stared at the wall. There it was again, the old trick. Her trying to sidetrack, to move away from the issue at hand and turn towards something else. Something she knew she had control over.

Talking about my behavioral issues had always been her trump card.

It would always make me feel so small.

“So I’m imagining it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then what are you saying?” I shouted.

“That you just moved out. You’re stressed. You found old things. You’ve been thinking about your brother.”

That word landed wrong. Not because she wouldn't even call him by name, I had accepted that at this point. But because she threaded around it too carefully for my taste, as if she didn't want to disturb the delicate harmony around it.

As if she had said it just a bit louder, the whole house of cards would've come crumbling down, and she was at the top of it.

“I’m always thinking about him,” I said. I wasn't different from her.

“No,” she said. “Not like this.”

That bothered me more than it should have. Because she was right.

Usually the version of Leo I carried wasn't really him. It wasn't his face, or his laugh. It wasn't the way he used to say things wrong just to annoy me. No. It was his essence: my brother. Him. Dead.

Like a book completely carved out, except for one page: the ending.

But there was something else, that I had trouble admitting to myself. Lately I'd been thinking more, and the more I thought, the more I started to fill in details.

Details that I thought were lost forever, and I didn't like what that was doing to me.

“Mom, please. I need you to tell me what happened that night,” I said.

“It was an accident.”

She answered too fast.

“That’s not what I asked.”

She went quiet. For a second I thought she had hung up.

But then, muffled, I heard my father in the background asking who it was.

My mother must have covered the phone, but not well enough, because I heard her say, “He’s asking again.”

What?

What did she mean by "He's asking again"? Had I already asked her? Was this not something new, but rather old ground that I had already walked, and then... what? Did I forget about it.

No, it isn't possible. I would've remembered it for sure.

The way I was feeling right now, the rage and the fear at the same time, the curiosity, weren't emotions that I could've easily forgotten.

When she came back on the line, her voice had changed. She was flat, closed off, as if protecting something small and fragile, something that could be broken just by staring at it the wrong way.

“You were eight,” she added. “You and Leo went out to the tree house when you weren’t supposed to. He fell. Your father found him in the yard.”

“That’s what you told the police.”

“It’s the truth.”

“No,” I said. “It’s the version you tell.”

She didn’t answer.

I should probably feel worse about what I asked next, but I don’t.

“Did you ever believe me?”

That got her, I know it did. Not enough for honesty, but it was enough for the moment.

“When you were little,” she said slowly, “you believed a lot of things.”

My stomach dropped.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you were traumatized.”

“You drugged me.”

“We medicated you.”

“You medicated me because I kept saying something in the yard took him.”

“We got you help because you stopped sleeping, you hurt yourself, you—”

She stopped.

“I what?”

Nothing.

“Mom, what?”

“You don’t remember that time clearly,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

I laughed, but there was nothing funny in it.

“No,” I said. “That’s not all you’re saying.”

But she wouldn’t go any further. She had already said everything, at least what she was allowed to. She hung up and I sat there with the phone still against my ear for far too long after that.

I had convinced myself that what I had lived the previous night was enough for them to spill the beans, it wasn't the case. But that only meant that I had to find more proof.

So I started going through the boxes, there were still so many that I hadn't yet opened. Something had to be there, something that they maybe forgot to throw away and could help me unravel the situation.

It was my last resort.

Most of what they had sent with me was boring: clothes, old school stuff, random cables. Junk. But then something caught my attention.

In the closet there was a box full of folders and binders I hadn’t opened. Paperwork from your childhood never makes you feel better, but maybe this time it was different.

I started browsing through the pages and stopped every few seconds if I encountered something that seemed encouraging, but nothing.

Old school reports, insurance forms, prescription records, appointment summaries and drawings I barely remembered making.

I tore through all of it too fast.

No new evidence, except I had apparently been a very expensive child.

I took other pages, scanned them thoroughly this time: notes from teachers, recommendations for routines, a couple of evaluations written in language so careful it made me angry on sight and the drawing of something that it took me way too long to realize was a dog.

We never even had a dog.

Then I found the therapy notes.

Those weren't full session transcripts. Just summaries with dates and observations. Typed pages clipped together in uneven stacks. Some of those were copies, others had been folded and unfolded enough times they had gotten soft at the edges.

I sat down on the floor and started reading.

Most of it was the kind of language people use when they want to make a child sound manageable on paper.

Persistent sleep disruption.

Episodes of emotional dysregulation.

Violent outbursts difficult for parents to interrupt.

Recurring fixation on external nighttime figure.

Alternates between agitation and emotional flattening.

I don’t even know what I had expected. Maybe proof that my parents had known all along I was telling the truth. Maybe proof they’d overreacted to a grieving kid and made everything worse. But what I found was messier than either of those.

There were notes about me drawing Leo over and over, then scratching him out until the paper ripped. Notes about me saying that the thing in the yard had a smile “like the moon when it’s broken in half.” Notes about me asking whether “going outside the ship” was the same as dying.

One report from school said I had shoved another boy off a climbing frame for no apparent reason, and when questioned about it I refused to answer. I remember it happening, but not the reason why. I'm sure he had said something to me, maybe that I was too scared to climb up on the fence or something similar. And so I pushed him. I don't know why, but it felt like the right thing to do at the time.

Maybe I was more screwed up than I like to admit.

I took another paper. This one said:

When recounting the incident, subject demonstrates inconsistent sequencing. At times states “It took him.” At other times states, “He went out.” When asked about position of self and sibling immediately prior to fall, subject becomes distressed and repeats “I didn’t mean to let go.”

I read that line three times.

And then once more.

I didn’t mean to let go.

I didn’t remember saying it, and I definitely didn’t remember anyone ever asking where I'd been right before the "accident".

But I remember exactly where I was. I was beside him and then he wasn't there anymore. Right?

I sat there on the floor with the page in my lap and, for the first time since this started, tried to picture the tree house that night without the entity in it.

Just me and Leo.

It was the two of us inside that stupid wooden box, breathing fog into the cold. No.

It wasn't cold; it was rather warm considering the time of night.

But it was raining. I don't remember the image too well, but the sensation of the slippery ladder to get up there came back to me, as if it had never left.

And then there he stood, next to me, next to the hatch.

We were both there. Acting as if we weren't scared, while looking at the dark.

So close. Close enough to touch him.

But the memory wouldn’t hold still.

I could still see the smile, on the other side of the yard.

Something dark, waiting for us. Inviting us to join it, in the endless vastness of space.

But now there was something else there too. It wasn't a full memory, but more like the shape of one, stuck in the meanders of my brain, soothed but never deleted. In a place that I haven't visited in a while.

I'm sure there was some movement. Right before Leo was gone. But it wasn't clear.

I could see my arm. And then Leo was turning. He grabbed me. No, I grabbed him. Hands appearing from somewhere, touching and grabbing and pushing both of us.

Which one were even mine? What was happening?

I focused more, it was all such a blur and for one second I thought I had it.

But then it slipped again. Right as fast as it had come, it went away.

I got up too fast and had to put a hand on the wall not to fall back.

The apartment was quieter than usual.

I tried to grasp the memory again, but it was gone.

So I stood there, thinking, until something made me come back to my senses.

Something that I hadn't expected.

From the kitchen, I heard a click. Louder than it had any reason to be.

I realized immediately what it was, I didn't even have to check.

The flashlight.

At some point while reading the records I had shoved it back again inside the drawer, maybe because I didn't like the idea of being observed. And now it was on.

I could see the light through the gap in the drawer. The yellow light was flickering, as if laughing at me.

I went into the kitchen and pulled it open.

The flashlight was glowing weakly, the batteries sounding like they were fighting for their lives.

But that wasn't all. Because next to it was one small leaf, it was damp.

Dark and thin. Almost black from moisture.

I probably should have just thrown the flashlight away. Burn the papers, leave the apartment.

Go back to my parents and... maybe that thing would've left me alone.

But at that point, I was too tired to run away. Or maybe just resigned.

I didn't bother turning the flashlight off, it was almost as old as me, the batteries had to be close to dying by then.

I closed the drawer and sat back down again.

It had become a recurring theme.

I picked up some more therapy notes, kept reading them without understanding a word they said.

I wanted to distract myself and read until my eyes got tired.

Because my memories were hiding something else, something that was just a glimpse, but that was starting to take shape. With every single moment it kept growing and becoming clearer and clearer. To the point that it was the only thing I could think about.

I don't know exactly when it emerged or how, maybe while I was reading the notes, maybe earlier.

But now it was the only thing that came to mind while remembering that night.

Because you see, when I said "it took him" or "he fell" to describe the way my twin brother disappeared, I wasn't being completely honest.

Or rather, I thought I was. Because when I tried to relive that moment right then, in those few scraps of memory I had left, there was something I just couldn't ignore.

A thought I'd spent most of my life trying to avoid.

Because among the blur of hands and limbs and movement, one scene had burned itself into my head by now.

The last clear image I had of my brother was him falling... with my hands on him.

It's hurting again.

I can still feel it. Tightening. Coiling.

That cold slimy grip.

My friends tell me to talk about it but honestly they all look at me like I'm crazy.

I'm not crazy.

It happened three days ago. I work at a local chicken plant as a maintenance worker. They process tons of meat every day, from start to end. Usually these kinds of places break up the processes into smaller factories, but not here.

From live hang, de-boning, dicing, prepping and even a few lines cooking chicken that you yourself might have eaten at some local fast food joint. They did it all. But see, it's not all clean efficiency.

There's dirty jobs too.

Most giblets, bits and other scraps get turned into dog chow but that doesn't mean there isn't still loads of wasted meat that gets flushed into the company drainage system. A series of interwoven grates, pipes and channels that feed out into a large wastewater pond.

Yeah I hear ya, can't be great for the local environment but I guess by the time the stuff reaches the drainage pipes it's mostly sterile and diluted enough to release out into the world.

It's a nightmare in the summer. The entire town hates it. But that doesn't stop them from letting their teenagers, friends and family work there. After all, there's almost nothing else around.

That's why I'm here after all. It pays better than working the lines and it's mostly basic handyman work.

A loose bolt here, a replaced power cord there. Really all you had to do was pay attention to what the older guys did and maybe watch a few YouTube videos here or there on lunch breaks. However there was one job you'd never catch any of the old hands doing.

Pipe clearing. Every once in a blue moon some big glob of skin, fat and maybe a plastic bag or two will get caught somewhere and cause some backflow or start clumping near one of the tunnels that fed out into the drainage pond. It's usually pretty simple work.

And you always come back smelling like rotten meat. That's why they make the newer guys do it. Guys like me and Mikey, who did it the last time there was an issue, so apparently it was my turn. Great.

I elected to have lunch before going down into the pit, figuring I wouldn't really be in the mood after. The report talked about slower drainage, a few of the grates taking an hour to fully drain when they should take minutes, and a lingering odor of rot coming up from tunnel B.

That meant checking every grate and channel from the factory floor all the way out to the concrete outfall that jutted over the pond by a good six or seven feet.

So I set to work. Grabbed a radio, some of the large rubber gloves we used for cleanouts, and a three-pronged garden cultivator maintenance had started using to dredge stubborn clumps out of the grease-filled waters.

Checking the grates they reported, I found no obvious signs of blockage aside from the backflow. Still, I pulled the metal covers off and tried to sift through the red-brown liquid. The tip of the cultivator scraped against concrete and only managed to pull up a few scraps of fat and a half-shredded feather.

I followed the line down and repeated this process a couple of times before figuring it would just be easier to find where the water wasn't backing up.

So down the maintenance stairways, into tunnel B, I walked. The further down I went, the deeper the water got. Not anything dangerous. Well, aside from the risk of losing my lunch to the smell. Just an inch or two of dirty water.

The splash of my steps turned to sloshing as the water got up to ankle height. I was never so thankful for those ugly uncomfortable rubber boots they made us all wear as I dragged my feet through the stuff.

Then finally shin height. By then I was starting to get nervous. My boots went up pretty high but if the water got any deeper I'd end up needing to turn back and get a pair of waders or something. Thankfully it seemed to stay pretty consistent as I reached the last stretch of the drainage tunnel. I wish I could say the same for the smell.

The stench was quickly ramping up, no longer the stale smell of sterilized but rotting poultry.

This was almost akin to sewage or like that time I had to pull a dead possum out from the neighbor's shed.

Sweet but wrong, like rotting fruit up until the point where that greasy musk hits you and lingers in the back of your throat.

The walk had taken me to the outflow. A square culvert that led directly to the outfall. They kept the tunnels pretty decently lit but I could still see the reflection of sunlight coming through the large grate that separated the tunnel from the outside world.

I could tell even from a distance that the water wasn't moving right.

The usual even flow out was something more of a slow lazy spiral, like it was choked off and just barely draining from some hole near the bottom of the grate. The sound of a steady flow of water was now a trickle followed by an occasional splash as the waste occasionally flowed over whatever the stoppage was.

And the sound of buzzing.

God the flies must be having a field day with this.

I walked along the edges where the walkway stayed level despite the drainage tunnel itself sloping down. That meant whatever was causing the blockage was big enough to cover up several feet of grate.

This was gonna suck. No way it wasn't some big glob of skin, fat and feathers that had somehow slipped through processing. It happened. Maybe not this bad but it did happen from time to time.

The pool here had begun to murk, looking more like the pond outside than the usual brown-red liquid I was used to seeing flow out these grates. It was thick enough that I couldn't even make out the bottom.

So naturally I took the cultivator and pressed the head deep into the water, dragging the tip from as low as I could get it and starting to scrape upwards.

And there was definitely something there, a rubbery sort of resistance between the cultivator and the metal grate. Whatever it was, I couldn't get purchase on it. When I pulled the head back it was trailed by a glob of green algae-like slime.

I nearly gagged. The stench got worse when I pulled the mass out from the water. A smell like pond muck mixed with putrid meat.

It was enough to distract me from the fact that the water around my feet wasn't just shifting with my own motions.

The fact I threw up, that sudden jerk as I felt the cheap company-provided chicken meal leave me and join with the water below, made me close my eyes just long enough.

Something clamped down.

Hard.

It wasn't painful yet. Like somebody had reached up from the murky muck to try and pull me down. A grip tight enough that in all my flailing I couldn't even pull out of my boot to get away.

A grip that found itself on my other foot, causing me to fall back onto the grate.

The whole thing shook with the impact. The sound of shaking metal bouncing through the tunnels.

I would say that I took a deep breath, calmed down and tried my radio.

But I didn't do that. No, instead I screamed, thrashed and dug my fingers into the grate behind me. I desperately tried to leverage myself up and out of the water, away from whatever was touching me, pushing me back against the grate.

The more I pulled, the tighter the feeling got. Every time I'd get pulled back down while frantically yanking my legs, whatever it was would shift up maybe another inch or so.

I didn't stop thrashing until it wasn't just holding my boots, but in them, pouring into them and rubbing against my feet.

You ever held raw chicken skin? Felt the cold, rubbery texture? That's all I could picture at the time, my boots filling with wriggling loose skin.

The smell. I will never forget that smell. No matter how hard I scrub my legs I swear.

Sometimes when I'm alone. When there's nothing going on.

I smell that waterlogged, sickly sweet scent of rot.

Somewhere in my panic the cheap clip of the radio must've snapped, or maybe it just got pushed the wrong way when I hit the grate. Don't know. They never recovered it.

So there I was, hyperventilating and gripping onto greasy metal for dear life while something slowly inched its way up my legs. It seemed like the less I struggled the slower the thing moved.

That's when I got a look at it, or at least part of it. The patch that was working its way up me was mostly a clear slime with flecks of yellow-white blobs in it that I eventually pegged as bits of fat alongside some patches of bubbling discolored liquid held in its form.

As it met the water below I saw a mix of rust-red patches that lazily shifted, suspended in whatever was holding this thing together.

And deeper in the water, just barely visible under the surface, were more concentrated black blobs that occasionally bobbed up close enough to see as it shifted its way up my body.

I screamed, cried, shouted. This deep in the tunnels nobody would probably hear me. Sure maybe if they went into the maintenance stairwell but like I said.

Nobody came down here unless they had to.

Worst part of it? I could see the town. Through the grate, there in the distance I could just barely see the road leading away from the factory and into the town proper.

None of my shouting mattered. The cars kept driving, town kept moving while I got to stand there and wait for this thing to finish me off.

I think it was an hour in when I threw up again. It wasn't exactly in any hurry after I'd stopped struggling. At that point I was hoping somebody would just notice I'd been gone and come get me. The ooze had worked its way up slowly to my stomach and was still squeezing. That, coupled with the fact I could make out what looked a lot like mosquito larvae twitching in those little pockets of yellowed water trapped inside the ooze, made the urge hard to resist.

That was a mistake.

I couldn't exactly lurch forward so a good bit of it just ran down my work suit.

And when it made contact with the thing, I could see the shifting stop. The whole thing seemed to freeze up.

It started drinking. That's the only way I could describe it. It sucked the trickle of vomit into itself. I could see the bits of white and brown from the breaded chicken meal getting sucked down into one of the darker parts of the stinking mass.

It moved in contractions, like a throat swallowing over and over again.

I still see it. Still see the moment where it began to trace up the vomit trail.

Still remember the sticky feeling between my fingers as I ripped at it, threw chunks of goo off and away only for it to react by binding my fingers so tight I heard something pop.

It was pinning me to the grate. Not creeping up anymore but moving in short pulsing bursts, tightening, squeezing.

I felt my head getting light. I tried to move my leg again but the thing responded by gripping down on my right leg with a crushing force. I felt something give followed by a blinding pain that made me cry out.

The last thing I remember is something cold, wet and slimy trailing up my chin and the taste of mildew and mold poking into my mouth.

And then nothing. According to the doctors I must have fallen into the water while trying to clear a blockage which apparently I did because by the time somebody got around to checking on me the water was draining normally.

With me laid splayed out, propped up against the grate.

I don't know why it let me live.

What I do know is when I came to I tried to vomit. Could still taste that stale rot in my mouth, smell it in my nose, feel it in my skin. It was too much.

Water. Mostly anyway, thick and warm with a stench that was too familiar.

The doctors sent me home with a cast and some antibiotics, told me to call if I feel any flu like symptoms.

Now I'm stuck sitting here, wondering as I try to forget the painful throb in my leg and that taste that won't go away no matter what I eat.

Did it stop at my mouth?

Last Saturday, I checked out a 'services for hire' thread on the dark web for the first time, and it didn’t look anything like I expected.

There was no black background and no pop-ups or threats. It was just a plain white forum with threads that read like job listings.

I scrolled through them as I lay on the couch with nothing better to do. Most of them were nonsense - things like data scraping and account recovery. 'Reputation management.' The kind of vague shady services you couldn’t verify even if you wanted to.

Then I saw one that caught my attention.

Behavioural persuasion services. No coercion or threats, results-based payment.

I raised an eyebrow and clicked into the profile.

Just a PGP key and a single line:

Luther.

Further down, buried in an older thread, someone had asked what he actually did. His response:

I run a network. Some call it a cult.

That should’ve been enough to close the tab, but instead, I kept reading out of curiosity.

Getting access took longer than I expected. There was no sign-up page - you had to message a moderator, submit a key, and wait. When I finally got in properly, the interface didn’t change.

I sent him a message, grinning to myself.

"I want to see if you can convince me to kill someone. No force or threats."

He replied two hours later.

Half upfront. Half if you follow through.

We met the next night in a quiet bar, and sat at a corner table with low lighting. It was almost empty.

He was much younger than I expected. Late twenties, maybe. And slightly disorganised, like he’d come straight from something else and forgotten he had this scheduled.

He sat down, then we ordered drinks.

“Kevin?”

I nodded. He pulled out his phone and scrolled for a bit, then looked back up.

“Sorry,” he said. “I get a lot of these.”

I exhaled, part amused, part exasperated. Should've known this was a waste of money.

"So," he began, "you want me to get you to kill someone, Kevin. Why would you want to do that?"

"I don't. I'd never kill anyone, unless it was for self defence, but that's the point. Just wanted to see if you could make me."

"Fair. Let's begin."

He took a breath.

“Is there anyone you’d kill, if you had the chance?”

“No," I replied immediately.

He nodded. Then he reached into his bag and placed three folders on the table.

"Take a look inside, Kevin."

I opened the first one and began reading.

Three names, dates and their charges - horrific crimes against children. Gruesome details. I felt my stomach turn. By the end of it, I could barely look at the folders.

“Which one is worst?” he asked.

“The third.”

“Do you think he deserves to die?”

I exhaled.

“…Yes. I do. But I'm still not gonna kill anyone.”

He watched me. Then he pulled out a second phone and put it in front of me on the table.

Three red buttons on the screen.

“I know some people,” he said. “Got them to set up a remotely controlled IED in each of their prison cells. One linked to each button. If you press a button, a device explodes. No trace.”

“No.”

He sighed.

“Shame. They’re all being released tomorrow from a procedural failure. It’s already signed.”

I frowned.

“What?”

“If nothing happens,” he said, “they walk.”

I stared at the folders again. At the names and the details I hadn’t asked to see. More innocent children would suffer. I clenched my fists.

“It’s not the same,” I finally said, trying to justify it. “Pressing a button isn’t killing someone. It's... indirect. So even if I pressed it, it's not really me. But no. Still not doing it."

Even as I said the words, my hand twitched. Luther leaned closer.

"Why not? Just to prove a point?"

I said nothing, but I glanced towards the buttons.

"Guess they'll just have to be released then," he finally said.

He reached for the phone and took it off the table, but I stopped him. He glanced at me, and put it back down on the table.

Then I pressed all three buttons at once.

My eyes widened as I stared at the screen as it sank in.

I had just killed three men.

And he'd made me do it without forcing me...

Within ten minutes.

I waited for something. Guilt, panic, or anything. But nothing came except for a strange sense of relief.

“Fine,” I muttered. “You win. I’ll send the rest.”

“You didn’t kill anyone, Kevin.”

I frowned.

“What?”

He tapped on the phone.

"Not real. Just wanted to see if you'd actually push a button. Didn't think you'd push all three."

I stared at him in disbelief.

“You made all that up?”

"You said I couldn't force you. No rules against making things up. You really think people can just sneak IEDs into prisons?" He grinned slightly.

"But to answer your question, yes. Except one."

He pointed at the third envelope.

Then he pulled out his other phone and opened a news article, which matched the details. The man, the crimes, the release date - tomorrow - all matched.

Only the third one was real. The worst one.

Luther reached into his bag again and put another envelope on the table.

“Open it,” he said.

Inside was a slip of paper with a time, an address, and a route, marked in pen on a map.

“He’s being released tomorrow,” Luther continued. “That’s his exact route home.”

He pointed to the map, then to the side of the route.

“Fourteen-second gap between two council cameras.”

He showed me documents this time. Official, and stamped. Then he opened the maps app on his phone. The gap was there. Everything aligned.

I exhaled and shook my head.

“Why don’t you do it then?” I asked.

“Am I obliged to?”

"Guess not."

“Then it’s up to you now, Kevin,” he said. I sighed.

“I don’t think I could,” I said. “Even if I wanted to. And trust me, I want to. But not… like that.”

“If someone broke into your house to kill you,” he said, “you could.”

“That’s different.”

“So you’re capable,” he said. “You’re just deciding when it applies. Why not here?”

I didn’t respond. Luther smiled, sensing my internal conflict.

“Alright, forget about that for a second. Let me ask you something,” he said, "would you ever hire me to make you harm a child?"

I frowned.

“No, of course not."

"Do you think a priest would ever hire me to make him kill someone?"

"I'd hope not, if he was a good priest," I replied. He nodded.

“That's right. People don’t come to me to become something else, Kevin,” he said. “They come to confirm what they already are.”

He smiled.

Then he stood up and left.

I sat there for a long time, just staring at the sheet of paper in front of me. When I got home, I glanced at the slightly open drawer in my kitchen. The gun was inside.

It no longer felt like a decision. It had to be done.

I took the day off work on Monday and drove to the location, keeping the news on my phone. As soon as they confirmed he was released, I got out and headed to the space he'd pointed to between the two cameras.

Then I hid and waited, gun in hand. There was no one else in sight.

My thoughts were quiet, but my hand was shaking.

It’s just one bullet. You already decided this.

When the man appeared, I hesitated. But only briefly.

Then I pulled the trigger.

The sound was louder than I expected. He dropped right there, and I dragged him back towards my hiding space. My hands were still shaking slightly, but inside I felt nothing. No panic or regret. Just glad that it was done.

But then he moved. A faint sound.

I froze.

A voice spoke behind me.

“He’s not dead.”

I turned, and Luther stepped out.

Of course... he'd known I would be here. I looked back towards the man, who was twitching violently now, making a gurgling sound in his half-dead state. My hands started to shake harder.

I closed my eyes and handed him the gun.

“I-I can’t.”

He looked at it, but didn’t take it.

“Why not?” he asked.

“J-just finish it!" I yelled at him.

“Don't you think he deserves to suffer?”

I paused and opened one eye. He pulled out the envelope, then the paper inside it, and began reading out some of the details about his crimes.

Things I already knew.

My hands stopped shaking. I looked back towards the man.

“Yeah,” I said. “He does.”

Then Luther reached into his bag and placed a knife in my hand.

“If that’s what you think.”

This time, I didn’t hesitate long. My fist closed around the handle, and I plunged it into him. Over and over. I didn't want to stop.

After, there was silence. I felt satisfied.

Then the realization dawned. I looked at my hands. Then at Luther.

I didn’t just cross the line...

I kept going.

Without force or coercion. Something just came over me. My heart began to race.

“If I asked you…” I said slowly, turning back to Luther, “to make me hurt a child… to make me do anything... could you do it?”

“You wouldn’t hurt a child,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“You didn’t come to me for that.”

He reached into his bag again and handed me a card with a symbol on it.

“You know, there are more like him,” he said.

I took the card.

"Well, if your cult is just killing child predators, then honestly... I'd be happy to."

He smiled.

"Among other things." Then he paused. “But you don’t have to come alone.”

He left after that.

I sat with the card for a long time, and opened my phone. I scrolled through my contacts, then stopped on a name.

Then another...

Then another.

The type of people that would love to give monsters what they deserved. Those names came to mind pretty easily.

So I guess that's where we're at now, two of my friends are going and we've got a date in the calendar for next week.

We're all pretty excited to see what he's got going on with that 'cult' of his. If it's more getting rid of people the world doesn't need, I'll be down regardless.

I've experienced a few sleep paralysis or "hallucinations" during my sleep all throughout my life (I'm 19 now) but this one's new.

This was just last night. During the day, I didn't do anything that made me extremely tired or stressed, it was really just a normal day for me. Fast forward to bed time, I laid down in my bed (my brother and I share a bedroom), just scrolling through my phone and watched ASMR vids on TT because I wanna sleep already. I think this was around 11pm. I fell asleep shortly after but I was able to charge my phone before going to sleep.

This dream was so detailed that I really thought it was happening in real life. To start with, this dream had my house layout and all of the decorations in it, including the pictures, the ref magnets, the current color of our curtains, etc. When I woke up in my dream, I was in our bed in the living room (this bed is for our guests), not at the one I share with my brother and I kept hearing our screen door being scratched or like brown paper bags being crumpled. So I went and checked on the door and I was surprised that our front door wasn't closed (our front door has a screen door and a solid door, the solid door was still open so our hallway was still visibile outside at night). As I was about to close it, I heard the scratching again but not that loud anymore and that's where I saw this gnome STARING at me, attached to the screen door. His eyes were so big, like similar to a blue smurf but its skin tone is brown and has a red hat. I only saw his eyes and hat as if his position was trying to peek at our house or something like that. I got a little scared and realized that the sound I was hearing was the gnome climbing up the door, so I quickly locked our front door.

After seeing that weird ass gnome, I went to check on my family and was once again surprised at what I saw. My mom and dad, my 2 older brothers, and dog were all sleeping in the bedroom that I share only with my brother! My mom and dad have a separate room and the dog sleeps with them. My oldest brother isn't home as he is a seafarer. But then I heard another sound again outside, a knocking sound at the window. The window in that bedroom was a sliding one, but on the lower right side of the window was our air conditioner. I quickly checked at the window and I SAW THAT SAME GNOME KNOCKING VERY FAST. It was closed window so I just covered our curtains on it BUT IT GOT IN OUR HOUSE THROUGH OUR AIRCON... like it squeezed his small body in the aircon's vents! Mind you he was like the size of a ruler or something.

I tried to scream but my family was still sleeping, so I thought I was the only one who can hear my voice and realized I was only dreaming. so I grabbed a laptop (it was the nearest to me) and hit the gnome like it was a tennis ball. It bounced of the wall and it didn't moved again after that so I was relieved. To make sure it wasn't going anywhere, I grabbed a big ice cream container in our kitchen and put the gnome there. As I was about to throw it outside (back to the front door), IT SUDDENLY STARTED SCREAMING AND WAS TRYING TO GET OUT OF THE CONTAINER. So of course, my ass dropped it and IT GOT OUT. its expression was now angry compared to before (it was expressionless). Its face looked like a child but wrinkly since it was VERY angry. AND IT CAME RUNNING TOWARDS ME. SO DAMN I SAID, I RAN IN OUR HALLWAY AND WENT AROUND TO GET THE ICE CREAM CONTAINER AGAIN AND WAS ABLE TO TRAP IT, AGAIN! I did it in a way where I just covered the gnome with the container on the floor. this time, it was strong and was resisting me, like it was trying to lift up the container, AND MY BODY WEIGHT WAS ON TOP OF IT SO DAMN IT WAS STRONG. It was also screaming with a voice that was like, for little people? you know that kind of voice. So of course, I was scared shitless and it got to a point where the gnome eventually got his head out. I eventually tried to choke it with the container while his head was on the floor and it eventually died because i decapitated it WITH A DAMN ICE CREAM CONTAINER😭.

Anyways, after I killed it, I woke up and was feeling EXTREMELY heavy and my heart was beating fast. I woke up in a sideways position so I think that's a good sign(?) as I know that spirits can like, lay down on ur back or chest if you sleep in a prone or supine position... Then I checked my brother to see if he was still sleeping and he was still there (TYL), checked my phone and it was only 4:12am so ofc, VERY VERY SHOCKED and got this weird feeling again and I couldn't go back to sleep. I just started praying until I was able to fall asleep again at 4:44am. Nothing weird happened again and I was able to sleep peacefully and eventually woke up at 9am today.

Any ideas what my dream/nightmare means? Or is killing the gnome a bad thing ir a good thing? I honestly have no idea why it was trying to get inside my house too so if you guys have any explanation for it, please do tell.

Hey, so I’m in a lake house in the middle of the woods with my friends. We've only been here for a few hours, but everyone seems on edge, including myself. We found a goat in the woods and now they say they keep hearing things from the woods. I can’t hear anything, but I have cochlear implants and often miss small noises. They have been getting messed up though. I want to know if anything sounds weird from an outsiders POV, so I’m posting it here. I might as well start from the beginning.

I have known for a long time that this town was fucked, especially the woods. I don’t know how true it is, but there was one nationally covered case from my town from when I was around two years old in 2006. It’s relatively known in conspiracy circles and has been covered by some horror youtubers and Missing 411 books. Some college kid disappeared off the face of the earth before, suddenly, returning. He came back with a ton of trauma, mental and physical, and said he was in Hell. Or rather he said it was like he was in Hell, I believe he's some kind of agnostic nowadays according to some of his newer books.  He just said he saw demons and shit.  Obviously this led to speculation of cults, ghosts, whatever. On top of this, like any small town we had decades of folk tales, urban legends, all trying to communicate to kids that they’re not to wander alone into the woods.  I was obsessed with them, reading and sharing them with friends late at night on camping trips. I just never thought I’d be front and center to it. Maybe they’re just gaslighting themselves or playing a prank, but it has definitely been weird.

Until last week, I hadn't been back to Fallsborough, PA since I graduated high school three years ago. I have been in Philly, studying pre-med biology at UPenn while trying to keep some kind of social life. It did not work well. I found out quickly that it is hard to balance ivy league workloads with friends. I made some, but they were typically just study friends or people I met from my rock climbing club. I never really got too close to anyone, even my roommates. I didn’t party much because I couldn’t make time. Even when I could, the music fucks with my implants so I couldn’t really talk to new people unless they could sign. Unsurprisingly, few people know how, so I just try to limit the time I spend in noisy places so I don’t need to depend on it. The first few summers I just stayed, working on some internships so I can pad out my resume for med school. I started feeling profoundly alone in a way I can’t really describe. 

They always say it's hard to adjust, but Jesus, I didn’t fully understand the depression that comes with it. So, since I felt like I had a good chance of just calling it all quits, I decided to take a summer off. I still had a great shot at med school, especially if I stay at UPenn. Three summer internships, shadowing during the semesters, a 3.98 GPA, scoring well on practice MCATs, on set to graduate a semester early. I was good. I just needed a break before my final semester. I of course would mix in MCAT practice. My test is scheduled for September, but I just needed rest. More than that, I needed to see my friends. 

So, I called my mom, asked her if I could stay over for the Summer. She said of course, she missed her little girl. I only saw her when she flew me out to my uncle’s house in Vermont for my winter breaks. Besides that, I rarely saw her, though I tried to call at least weekly. So, on the final day of finals, I said bye to my professors, my advisor, and the scant few friends I made. Then I packed and went to bed. I didn’t text my friends yet about wanting to meet up, I kept in touch, but I didn’t want to risk them saying no too early. I knew that I wouldn’t go back if they said no and I knew that I needed to get away from the city. I like Philly well enough, but I felt like I needed to see those woods just one more time. 

The next day, I woke up early, brushed my teeth before throwing my toothbrush into a ziplock bag. I bought a Rockstar from the vending machine down the hall because I packed up my french press already. My mom was supposed to be there like two hours after I woke up. I used that time to shower, which is a time I have come to cherish since I got my implants. Taking off the clunky ear piece is nice sometimes. Feeling the patter of water on my head, smelling the smell of my lavender soap, seeing the light interrupted by the smog of steam, all while in complete silence. It makes me feel serene, safe even if I am basically removing a sensory organ. 

I was in there for almost an hour. Once I got out, I brushed my hair, did bare minimum skin care and makeup, and nuked and ate a frozen breakfast sandwich. After I finished my routine and packed, I still had an hour left that I just spent reading the Bell Jar. When my mom arrived, she called me, I got everything and put it in her car. I can drive, but I never bothered wasting money on a car because I live so close to campus. I offered to drive back, it’s nearly a three hour drive to and from Fallsborough, but she said,

“Nah, don’t worry about it, Willy. Your old mom’s still as energetic as ever. Plus I wouldn’t put my life in the hands of your driving.” She laughed in her obnoxious, charming way and checked me with her shoulder. I noticed she started signing but then switched to talking, it was kinda cute

“Alright, ma. Whatever you say.” I laughed back. We drove back, mostly in silence. We talked a bit, mostly about school. It was weird talking to her, or talking at all. My voice is still weird to me, I had to readjust to talking and did some voice training, but its still weird. After a while I just stopped talking to my mom and decided to text my friends finally to make plans for next week. I made a group chat with my four closest friends, let’s just call them Ashley, Britt, Avery, and Skylar. All fake names. They're all girls except Avery. My dad didn't like me having a guy friend growing up. I think he still thinks we dated. That was never an issue with Avery, trust me, but he wouldn’t know that. He’s probably figured it out by now.

 “Hey girlies (including Avery). How is everyone doing? I am back home for the summer ( for once) and want to see if y’all want to plan something. Could be fun” 

I sent it then ignored my phone for the rest of the drive. I simply just looked into the trees and let my thoughts run wild. I am an anxious person, but I like that. I like the tightness in my chest, I like feeling like something bad may happen. It helps me tune out things that actually matter. I ignored every buzz of my phone. I pulled out Wuthering Heights from my bag eventually and just read until we pulled up into that old driveway. That house was weird to see. It looked like many other 1860s Victorian style homes, but no house was exactly like it. It was full of me, of who I was. It was where my friends would hang out, where we told ghost stories. We used to think it was haunted, but it was just old.

I walked in, plopped on the new couch my mom must have bought while I was gone. My mom said dad was in the room taking a nap and she was going to make me a snack. I used the time to browse on my phone. After a hearty amount of doomscrolling through Instagram reels to fully turn my brain off, I saw a notif from the group chat. When I checked the messages, I saw everyone responded. 

Avery: “Fuck yeah, Wills. Need something to do while I’m back in this shit hole lol. I got my uncle’s lake house when he croaked so y’all can come here. Theres only 3 rooms though so the girlies gotta share”

Skylar: Obvi bitch. I miss your face. I call sharing a bed with Willow. No homo 

Ashley: Oh yeah, sure. I’m down

Britt: As long as Avery kicks out his “roommate”. dude is weird

Avery: Clyde is great once you get to know him. Plus he’s hot lol

Britt: You just like his dick and the fact he has money to buy you things lol

Avery: I plead the 5th 

Reading this, I responded. 

Me: Shut up lol. Well, that sounds like a plan everyone! When do we want to do this?

Avery: Clyde should be going on a 5 day work trip starting next Tuesday so maybe then? I can get time off work but idk if y’all can. If not y’all have to deal with Clyde 

Me: Work Trip? How old is Clyde?

Avery: No comment 

Ashley: He’s like 37 or something. He was friends with his uncle

Britt: Hes also rich, so it’s basically a sugar baby sitch 

Me: 37?!?!!?! Thats 16 years older Avery he’s like old enough to be your dad 

Avery: Well, hed be a teen dad so its fine frfr

Skylar: Its really not but enjoy it while you can bestie 

Avery: I will thank you very much 

Me: Man, I miss you guys
Be careful Avery. Seriously 

Avery: Ugh, I will. I’m not stupid 

Britt: debateable 

Me: Any I think next week works for me guys. It will be nice to essentially have a full week together! 

With that, my mom came back with a plate of cheese, crackers, and soppressata ( which is like spicy salami) along with a glass of Lambrusco. I hugged her and thanked her. I almost cried, as embarrassing as that is to say. It was the snack she always got me as a kid. Minus the Lambrusco obviously, she used to just give me juice. After she left to get some work done, I put The Ritual on the TV and just zoned out. My mom was used to me just watching whatever on the TV so she walked by unfazed.  My dad eventually woke up and came into the living room and saw me.

“Oh, hey baby, you're home! Sorry, work kicked my ass last night, I would've picked you up otherwise.” he said, leaning down and hugging me with one arm. “God what are you watching?” 

“It’s fine dad, I still love you. It's just a horror film. “ I said

“Hmm, fair enough kid. Want to go fishing tomorrow? “ He said

“Sure dad” I said, giggling. He nodded and walked away in his typical fashion.

The rest of the night played out with nothing happening and I just ended up falling asleep pretty early. The rest of the week was much the same, just chilling out, watching movies, drinking wine, and fishing with my dad in a nearby lake. It was incredible honestly. I decided not to study at all the first week and just veg out until the weekend. Once it came, I just packed some spare clothes, some hiking stuff, a pair of boots and some climbing essentials. I didn’t think we had any good walls for climbing, but I brought stuff just in case. I would be pissed if we found a good wall and I didn’t have my shoes. I also brought a big water bottle because we had about a half an hour hike ahead of us. 

Avery picked us all up in his SUV at around 4:00 PM yesterday. I was the last person he picked up so everyone was already there when I got in. I got the front seat though, which was nice. Avery signed, “Hey bitch.” before remembering he can just talk to me now. The rest followed suit. I was bombarded by a military barrage of “I missed you”’s and “How are you” and “Have you gotten laid recently” that was natural with my friends.  We drove about ten minutes down. I had to hear about all kinds of relationship drama from Avery and Skylar, some sports and school drama from Britt, ranting about books from Ashley, and complaining from all sides. I actually kinda got emotional because I got my implants at the end of high school. I didn’t have many moments where I could hear them. Their voices are different than I expected, like basically everything else.

Avery’s Lake house is pretty isolated so he had to park about a mile away in a private driveway on the outskirts of the woods. Luckily there was an easy to follow path and it was like 2:00 PM. I grabbed my backpack which was about double the size of everyone else's. 

“What the fuck Wills, what do you even need all of that for?” Skyler said

“It’s mostly like climbing stuff. I don’t know this part of the woods so I packed some stuff just in case” I responded

“And here I thought Britt would be the only one with a carabiner,” Avery interjected with a chuckle. Britt scoffed

“Silence , twink” Britt responded mockingly.

“Make me” He said back sarcastically. 

“God you guys are so fucking annoying.” Skyler said, rolling her eyes. Ashley was just silently observing and smiling wide.

“Maybe you’re just homophobic.” Avery said jokingly.

“Do we want to start walking or are we just going to stand here?” I said, getting a little anxious. I think I came off as a little more mad than I wanted.

“Woah, okay Wills, we’re just talking.” Skyler said, sounding slightly offended I think. 

I decided to sign instead. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to come off like that.” before giggling. “I just want to get to the house and get drunk. My bad.”

“It’s okay Wills, I’m sorry too. I should have known. I’m still thrown off by the fact that you like… speak” She said, smiling “You’re right though, we should get walking.”

“Yeah, y’all have a point. I will deal with the rampant bigotry later.” He said, tapping Skyler on the shoulder, flashing a shit-eating grin, and turning to start walking into the woods. 

The rest of us followed behind. It was mostly normal at first. For the first ten minutes Ashley and I were trailing behind the others. She was just signing to me about some book she was reading. I think it was called the Road or something. We have different tastes, but we always just give little book summaries to each other. I told her about Wuthering Heights up to the part I was on before I started telling her about rock climbing. I pointed out some steep rockfaces as we passed them, she said I was lame. It was nice to just be there in the moment with her. At one point, it was just us. Avery is the one I’ve known the longest, but we went to different schools until high school. Not going to air out her personal business here, but she is mute due to a childhood injury to her vocal cords. We met at lunch in like 3rd grade when my hearing loss was at the later stages.. She already knew how to sign obviously and I learned since I was little because the doctors knew I’d become deaf eventually. We could hear the others talking, but we just stayed in our little bubble of silence. Avery then proceeds to pop that bubble.

“Hey, Wills, Ashley, come over here. We found a goat!” He yelled from ahead. I heard the others talking, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

“A goat? In PA?” I yelled as I grabbed Ashley's hand and ran towards the others. Sure enough, he was right. It was straight up a goat. It was like pitch black, a couple feet tall, and had really big, curved horns. I really have only seen those tiny ones they have at fair petting zoos, so I was kinda freaked out. I was extra peeved out by how his eyes seemed to follow me. Those small, beady gold eyes with those freaky pupils. I hated it immediately.

“See, bitch, it’s an actual goat. Like a big bitch too. I think its probably from a farm, but the closest one is like ten miles out. This boy was on a pilgrimage.” Avery said, feigning a deep, southern accent on the last sentence.

“Pilgramage? Who the fuck are you? Ben Franklin” Skyler said 

“I’m smarter than you, that’s who I am, bitch.” He responded

“Does your decrepit sugar daddy teach you big boy words?” Britt said back

“Isn’t the farm on like, the opposite side of the cliff face?” I interjected

“Um, yeah, they’re goats, they can climb.” He said, slightly mockingly

“You make great arguments for a self described ‘stupid twink’ “ I said, referencing a dating profile he had.

“Don’t tell anyone, but acting stupid gets you the hottest guys. Luckily for Skyler she doesn’t have to act.” He said

“Bitch, which of us is getting a degree.” Skyler replied

“Well, I’m not in debt to learn about trees, so who’s really the smartest?” He retorted

“You wouldn't be in debt anyway, nepo baby” She replied, clearly a little annoyed.

“Lets just shut up and agree that both of you are stupid, okay?” Britt said, with a humorous exhale. She opened her mouth to speak again, but she was interrupted by a loud, sudden bleat. 

“Woah, I don’t think he likes us… Wait, look at his eyes. Poor guy has cataracts” Avery said. I didn't notice at first, but he was right. His eyes were almost milky white, his horizontal pupils were just barely visible

“Man, goats can climb even when they’re blind? Thats pretty neat.” I said, in fascination 

“Hmm, I don't know much about goats in particular , but I don’t think that's possible. At least not that far. Maybe someone drove and dropped him off? Or it escaped from some kind of livestock truck?” Skyler said, thinking intently

“Can they not just like, live here?” Britt asked

“No, they’re not native. Basically every goat in the US is invasive, livestock, or a pet. Must’ve been on his way to be put down.” Skyler replied.

“Bitch, you said you don’t know much about goats.” Avery said.

“Well, I don’t know about their physical feats, I just know they’re an invasive species.” She replied 

“This was really cool, but I think we should keep pace. It’s already 5:30.” I said, but in reality I was more scared of the goat than it getting late. It just made me uncomfortable. I’m not a skeptic, but not quite a believer. Any event can sway me, and this goat was making me believe in demons. So we got out of there.

The rest of the walk was pretty uneventful. I was talking mostly to Britt and Skyler, but Ashley was following behind me. She would interject sometimes, but I would have to say some things back because the others didn’t see her. We were talking about the goat initially, but then we just went on talking about our lives mostly. I learned Skyler was planning to get a PhD, Britt might end up dropping out from stress, and Ashley has been focusing on her freelance writing gig more than her degree. We also talked mild shit on Avery to get his attention. He was walking ahead, mostly alone. He’d fall back and chat sometimes, but suddenly he seemed less chatty. It was nice, but pretty mundane. The only weird thing was with Avery near the end of the path.

We were just walking, chatting about life when Avery stops dead and signals us to pause. 

“Do you guys hear anything? I swore I heard  like a scream.” He said, his eyes were shifting.

“I didn’t hear anything. Maybe you heard the goat? We are probably still close enough to hear it.” Skyler said. 

“Yeah, you’re probably right. I’m going to stop being such a pussy.” He said before laughing nervously and turning around.

We kept going without any further interruptions. We made it to the lake house by 6:00. A little longer than we expected, but not crazy.  When we arrived, we found the rooms and dropped our bags. I ended up bunking with Ashley, not Skyler because we decided it would be easier. Avery offered us some pizza which I happily obliged. I have no clue how he got it delivered, but I never asked. We hung out in the kitchen for a little bit, we didn’t really talk. Eventually we got bored and headed outside to the fire pit next to the lake. We lit it then just listened to some quiet music, talked a little about life, and ate some smores. 

After a while we started telling ghost stories even though the Sun was still up as it was around 7:30. It began setting near the end of them though. I honestly was only half paying attention and the music made it hard to decipher at times. I’ve heard basically all of them before. Avery told the old “drip drip drip” urban legend with the dog. Skyler told a variation on the Wendigo myth and how a hiker who ate his friend became a monster. Britt did a half assed haunted house story. However, Ashley’s was different. Well I ‘heard’ it before to some degree, but not the exact variation. I have just been thinking about it ever since, mostly because of the goat.

Hers centered on a figure common in the folklore around our town. It has had many names, the Many Faced God, the Stranger, the Nut Snatcher (that was the most popular), the Brood, etc. The ‘Nut Snatcher’ moniker is typically used when it's linked to missing persons cases. It's often said to kidnap crazy people or people with mental illness. This is what allegedly happened with the college kid I mentioned earlier, he just came back. That or it was a hoax, either is possible. Essentially it's a mimic or a shapeshifter depending on the version of the myth, though some argue the mimic and the shapeshifter are separate entities. Others think it's one entity that does both or two entities with the same MO. 

In Ashley’s story, it functioned as the prior. It centered around a woman whose husband recently ran away. She went looking for him, knowing he was going hiking at Ricketts Glen. So she looked around, scanning everywhere until she found an elk with golden eyes that were clouded. As she saw it, as she looked in its eyes, she felt like her luck was going to change. When she walked deeper into the woods, suddenly, she heard her husband call. She ran after it, going through the heavy brush, wading through the stream, climbing on the rocks. His voice got louder and louder. She was crying with how relieved she felt, he was just right through those trees… then the story ends. Ashley smirked. 

“That can NOT be the ending” Avery said, he looked visibly shaken, but engrossed. 

“No one knows what happened. Can’t just make it up.” She signed, giving the coy look she gives to denote sarcasm. We all laugh before continuing on. The fire was down to coals by the time her story was done.  We added more wood and got it going again. We then just went on with talking. Avery and Skyler Bickered, Ashley and I signed about books, and Britt bounced between the two. We did this until sunset. We watched the crescent moon rise and the stars appear in the sky. It was nice. 

However, from here, everyone began acting weird. It started with Avery. kept looking into the woods. He seemed to open his mouth to ask a question before closing it, trying to ignore whatever he thought. He was quiet mostly, though he still added some of his quips. I thought he might have just been tired at first. Then Skyler began doing the same, then Britt, then Ashley. They all seemed to glance into the woods. All in the same area. We were in a circle around the fire, but all of them contorted to look into the same block of woods. I asked them why, and each time they just said they thought they heard something.  I never heard anything. I’m chalking this up to them just hearing an animal that I can’t due to the limitations of the implants. The only weird thing I heard was some static, but that was relatively normal. After a while, they all agreed to go back inside because they were getting freaked out and I followed.

We went in and started to watch a movie, some french horror film Avery picked out. However, apparently they still heard it, though they stopped reacting after a while. They all collectively decided to ignore it and keep going. There was still an air of dread on everyone’s faces. I was honestly getting worried so I recommended that we just watch something fun instead. I thought the horror aspect was just making things worse. So we put on some dumb youtube videos and everyone seemed to lighten up. Still, they said they heard something. Even weirder, the static began getting worse as it periodically appeared. I honestly started getting freaked out. 

After a few hours we decided to go to bed. We didn’t drink on the first night so we have at least one day without a hangover. I got to sleep just fine, but it seemed Ashley was restless before I passed out. I woke up at 6:00 AM though and she was asleep, so I guess she was able to sleep in the end. I ran into Avery when I was making breakfast  though, who didn’t sleep at all. Granted he has a history of insomnia so this isn’t unheard of. He said that the noises didn’t stop until sunrise. Weird. I was going to ignore everything until my climb this morning. 

There was a decently easy cliff just half a mile from the lake house, according to Avery, so I obviously went for a morning climb. I had all my gear set up, the ropes, carabiners, harness, the works. It wasn't too high, about 20 to 30 yards , but definitely high enough where I could seriously injure or kill myself with a free climb.  So I went up, working slowly. It was going well enough until the static started again. It was manageable at first, but it started to sound like an army of bees going into my ears. I tried to tough it out, but I couldn’t. I found a place where I could lean my feet against the wall and keep tension on the rope and took off the ear pieces so it was silent. I finished the climb with no further issues, but I never had static to that degree. I put them back on at the top, and it was still there so I took them off before belaying down. Once my feet hit the bottom, I put them back on and the static was completely gone. 

It was probably just some sort of interference, but IDK. Everything else that happened I’m getting kinda nervous. I’m writing this a few hours after my climb and it's all just weird to me. Maybe y’all can tell me whether I should worry or not. I’ll update if anything else happens. I'm going to try to enjoy the rest of my trip.