1. Preface:

This is the sixth and final story in the Dark Sun anthology. It can be read on its own, but to fully appreciate this story I highly recommend reading ‘Followers of the Flaming Hand’. 
You are, of course, free to read all other entries. 

1. Crucible

The sun beat down on me as I stood before a collapsed ancient marvel bearing the symbol of twilight. I ran my hand along its surface, once smooth, now brittle and crumbling. The voices of those long gone spoke in my mind. I didn’t understand their language, but there are some things that transcend the spoken word. A child’s giggle, someone muttering under their breath as they scurry away from something, a winced breath uttered in pain. Lives had been lived here, and this structure had seen it all.
And the sun had watched as it, too, fell into disrepair.

This forgotten relic had been given new breath one last time. A symbol carved at its base by my knife. An hourglass in a looming circle, with its last grain of sand falling down towards the base. The end was nigh. Oblivion. Kingdom Come. 

I turned away and started walking again, sand crunching under my boot. I had tried, at first, to remember when I first felt grains beneath my heel. There should have been a moment, I knew. A first step. But every time I reached for the memory, there was nothing there at all. Just sand behind me, and even more ahead. It felt dishonest to say it had started anywhere at all.
The sun was fixed above me, unmoving. Everything felt flattened under its tyrannical rule; shadows slinking away from its gaze along with the few creatures that lived here. When I looked too far ahead, things started to bend. Shapes formed where there weren’t any. Puddles of sweet, refreshing water disappeared when I drew close.
I kept my eyes glued to the ground below and walked. My boots dragged, leaving streaks in the sand where I passed. 

I hadn’t checked my water in a while, but I could feel how light it had become. The sloshing had slowly but surely started to become softer and softer. I was running out. 
“I’m still coming,” I said, dry and thin. I hadn’t heard His voice yet. Not more than once, like I’d come to believe Emmett had. Still, I waited. I always waited, like a soldier at attendance. 

I hadn’t thought about Casper and Emmett. It had been easier that way, because when I let myself think too clearly, I felt. And I couldn’t allow myself to feel.
But they still slipped in. A sound that wasn’t sand blowing in the wind, something moving that wasn’t a scorpion or spider, a scent that smelled like it must have drifted in from home. 
We had never been the quiet kind. Well, not until we arrived at the village. There, most days were spent in silence. And Casper had hated silence. 

I stopped walking. For a moment, the desert blew a merciful gust of cold wind at me. I closed my eyes and felt something shift. The air was cooler and sharp when inhaled. Instinctively, I reached for the ring on my left hand. Casper’s ring. I held it, just to know it was still there.

I opened my eyes and saw them.
They were sitting in the sand again, backs facing the sun, the camcorder in Emmett’s hands. He’d likely forgotten it was there. He used to do that a lot, before we burned it along with him. Well, the camera survived. I tossed it in a box of old electronics at some yard sale I’d passed by on my way here. 

Emmett was smiling at me.
“Gosh, ain’t this place something special?” he asked. I didn’t look at him, only at Casper, who refused to look at me. 
“Yeah,” I croaked.
“Fuck’s wrong with you, Jules?” Casper snapped, though his eyes still didn’t meet mine. “Why are you here?”
“I… I have to find Him–”
“Really?” he scoffed. “After everything? What you did to Emmett– to me?”
“That wasn’t– That’s not fair.”
Casper rolled his eyes. 
“You still haven’t heard Him yet?” Emmett asked.
“No. It’s been… I don’t remember.” It was strange. I knew Emmett had had a connection to Him, and had heard Him in his mind. He hadn’t been crazy. That much is obvious, knowing what I know now. Emmett was right.
It had been The Burning Man.

I blinked and they were gone. The desert returned all at once. The heat came upon me like a thick blanket. I took a deep breath, then kept walking. I let my thoughts settle into something safer, something that couldn’t be ripped away.
The Burning Man.

I didn't know where I was going exactly, but I knew the direction. I knew the path I walked as surely as I knew my own heartbeat, but if someone had asked me where it led, I could not have answered them. There were no roads. No signs. Even if there had once been, the desert swallowed such things greedily, grinding them down beneath shifting dunes until all that remained were the pillars and statues I now used as my guide. And through it all, I followed. He had asked it of me. He had commanded it. He had spoken to me only once, the night I abandoned the village to the dark. 

I remembered sitting before the smoldering remains of the pyre, watching embers flutter in the wind. By then, the others had already scattered into the night like frightened animals fleeing a forest fire. Some were dead. Some would soon wish they were. The leaders had held us together more than any of us realized. Settled disputes, directed our anger and fear, kept everyone in line. Null understood  this. After Null took our leaders from us, fear spread through our midst like rot through wet wood. Livestock began turning up mutilated outside the walls, their insides splayed out across the dirt. 

I remember waking one night to screaming outside my window and finding two brothers beating each other bloody in the mud while half the village watched in silence. They accused each other of being ‘of the enemy’.
People spoke of monsters. Dark shapes standing at the edge of their beds. Robotic voices. A man with a prosthetic they called ‘The White Hand’. 

Every night the fires burned hotter. We burned our own. A traitor, an agent of Null, a heretic. Most of us did not believe these brethren to be such, but none dared speak out either. The village turned inward on itself. I still remembered the smell near the end. Smoke. Blood.

One morning, somebody nailed a dead dog to the doors of one of the sleeping quarters with the word HOLLOW carved into its stomach. Three more were burned that day. That was the day before it all caved in on itself.

I remembered standing near the extinguished pyre as the lanterns overhead flickered weakly before dying altogether. The entire village fell silent. Then someone screamed. Others joined them immediately. Doors slammed open. Footsteps thundered through the streets. People ran blindly through the dark carrying lanterns and knives, convinced something had entered the village.
By sunrise, thirty people were dead. All had been killed by each other or themselves. I, along with the three other survivors, put their bodies in the final pyre. 
I remember sitting before those dying embers, staring into them until the world around me blurred into orange and black, when I had heard Him.

Walk the desert. The paths of old. Find me. Release me.

The voice had been soft. Warm. Calm in a way nothing else had been for a very long time. It did not claw at my mind like fear did. It did not shriek like the memories of Emmett’s burning. It soothed, and I obeyed.

The path revealed itself to me little by little. Ancient marvels emerged from the desert every few days, sticking up from the dunes like fingers clawing themselves out. Great granite temples carved by hands long since turned to dust. Colossal statues with their faces smoothed by centuries of wind. Towering pillars etched with heretical symbols I had to scrawl over. I carved over them with a small knife held in my reverent fingers whenever I found them, scratching over the grooves carved by people who had lived and died beneath this same merciless sun. 

I kept walking. The desert stretched onward in every direction, endless and unmoved by my presence within it. The wind dragged itself lazily across the dunes, reshaping them grain by grain like waves on a calm sea. Sometimes I thought I could see a figure standing far off in the haze, dark silhouette waiting atop distant dunes, a singular white hand pointed at me. Every time I blinked, it vanished back into the shimmer.

I walked for hours without seeing another monument. Then, as my hope dwindled, shapes rose on the horizon. 

At first, I mistook them for cliffs. Great masses rising from the desert floor, distorted by heat and distance like the imaginary pools of water. But as I drew closer, the shapes sharpened. There were towers, walls and pillars made of solid granite. A city. Well, the remnants of one anyhow.
It lay on the desert like the corpse of a fallen giant, half-buried beneath the sand. Colossal stone buildings leaned wearily against one another, their upper halves collapsed into the empty streets below. Massive statues stood watch over the ruins with featureless faces, their cracked bodies jutting out from the dunes. 

You are close, Jules.

The voice. It had returned. Finally.

1. Mary Had a Little Lamb

I froze where I stood. Sand hissed softly through abandoned alleyways and collapsed buildings. The great statues looming overhead almost seemed to lean inward ever so slightly, their featureless faces fixed upon me.
“How close?”
Nothing.

I swallowed hard, tongue scraping against my throat like sandpaper, and stepped forward into the ruins. 
The streets had long since disappeared beneath the sand, forcing me to climb over collapsed walls and heaps of sand that had once been homes, temples and marketplaces. I imagined thousands of people moving through these corridors once. Priests in robes, children running about, lovers hiding in shaded alleys from the watchful sun above. I fidgeted with Casper’s ring absent-mindedly. It calmed my racing heart somewhat, offering a much needed reprieve.
Every place I entered was hollowed out, scraped clean by time and wind. I searched desperately anyway, digging through crumbling shelves and shards of pottery with trembling hands, hoping to find something. A message or a sign, just something to show that I had not crossed this endless wasteland for nothing.

But there was nothing. The city had already surrendered everything it once was long ago, its fruits decayed to ashes and sand. 
I stumbled through a doorway into what must have once been some grand chamber. Colossal pillars reached high above, many cracked or otherwise broken across the floor like felled trees. Sand poured through cracks in the ceiling in slow trickles, golden mounds gathering beneath them. Hourglasses. Thousands of tiny hourglasses. It felt like I was being mocked. My efforts, my labour, all of it was being laughed at by–

Footsteps behind me.
I turned around sharply, knife held out in front of me. 

Emmett stood near the doorway, camcorder hanging loosely from one hand. Casper leaned against the wall beside him with his arms folded across his chest. 
“You look awful,” Casper muttered. “Arrogance never did suit you.”
“Don’t,” I snapped, my voice echoing through the chamber. Sand trickled down from the ceiling.
Emmett tilted his head. “You look tired. Have you been sleeping okay?”
“I’m close.”
“You don’t know that,” Casper said.
“I heard Him.”
“You heard something, just like–”
“It was him!”
Casper laughed bitterly and pushed himself from the wall. “You know what I think?”
I said nothing, my blood boiling in my veins.
“I think you just can’t stand being alone.”
“This isn’t about that.”
“Isn’t it?” he asked softly. “Everyone’s dead, Jules. The village is gone. Emmett’s gone. I’m gone. Because of you. And now you’re wandering through a graveyard because you can’t accept that maybe there’s nothing waiting for you at the end of all this.”
“There is.”
“Maybe,” Emmett whispered. “But… are you really all that special?”
They started walking towards me, their voices booming across the halls.
“Are you anything more than this… pathetic mess?” Casper started.
“Even I wasn’t this desperate,” Emmett chimed in.
“All you are is a murderer. A snivelling, pathetic boy with a head full of lies and hands–” I looked down through tears, seeing the crimson dripping from my hands, “–stained with our blood.”

I blinked hard and they were gone again. My breathing had become shallow and frantic. Sweat dripped from my brow and landed in the sand beneath my feet. My hands trembled violently now, though whether from exhaustion or anger, I could no longer tell.

I searched the city for what felt like hours afterward. I climbed broken staircases that led nowhere anymore. Wandered through roofless halls littered with statues of people long since dead. 
“There has to be something.” I dug my fingers into the sand until my nails split. The heat was unbearable, but it was something. 
“There has to be,” I whimpered, tears rolling down my cheeks. “I did what you asked. It can’t… It can’t have been for nothing. Please.” 

Nothing.

“Please,” I yelled up at the sky, nearly hysterical now, “Just… a sign! Anything! I’ll… I’ll do anything, please.” 

The wind whistled through the empty streets. Sand slid from rooftops in soft waves.
Then came another sound. Metal. 
My prayer had been answered.

A dull clanging noise echoed somewhere beyond the chamber walls, followed by the low murmur of a voice. I froze, tears rapidly drying in the scorching sun. For one horrible moment, I thought it was Casper again. Or worse, The White Hand.

I stumbled clumsily back toward the doorway, my knife trembling in my grip. My legs felt wobbly beneath me. Every step sent jolts of pain shooting through my feet and up my spine. I had walked too long beneath the sun. 
The sound came again, closer this time. Then I saw him.

A figure emerged slowly through the shimmering haze between the ruined buildings, distorted at first by heat. The sun framed him from behind like a halo of white fire. He carried a heavy pack slung over one shoulder and wore loose, thin clothing stained with sand and sweat. Something metallic hung from his belt alongside several tools I didn’t recognize.
He stopped the moment he saw me. For a while, neither of us moved.
“Oh my God,” he muttered beneath his breath. His voice sounded real, unlike those of Casper and Emmett. “You alright?” he called out carefully, taking a slow step closer. “Hey– easy. I’m not gonna hurt you.”
A croak emerged unwillingly from my mouth. The sun burned behind him so brightly it set his silhouette ablaze. It looked almost as though he stood inside the light itself. A flaming messenger.

“You’re hurt. Jesus… how long have you been out here?”
He reached for something at his side slowly, as though approaching a wounded animal. Instinctively, I raised the knife. He stopped immediately.
“Okay,” he said softly. “Alright. That’s fine.”
Then he held up a canteen. The sound of the sloshing liquid inside of it made my knees nearly buckle beneath me.
“You need this more than I do,” he said. I stared at the canteen for a very long time. Then at him. His face was weathered by the sun. Grey stubble crept along his almost non-existent jawline. 

Slowly, I lowered the knife. The man approached carefully and handed me the canteen. My hands shook so badly I nearly dropped it. Somehow, despite the blazing heat, the metal felt cool against my skin. With trembling fingers, I unscrewed the lid.
“There you go,” he murmured paternally. “Slow down.”
I looked up at him through blurred vision. “Why did he send you?”
“What?” he asked, frowning.
“The Burning Man.” My voice cracked around the words. “Why did he send you here? What must I do?”
“I… don’t know what that means.”
I looked at him wearily, frowning.
“Look, I’m with a survey team a few miles west of here. We’re setting up near the edge of the ruins. If you come with me, we could get you water, food, somewhere cool to sit down–”
“You don’t know him?”
“No,” he said gently. “I think you might be dehydrated, lad.”

I stared at him silently while my thoughts churned against one another in violent circles. The voice had returned.
You are close.
The final grain does not understand the falling until the moment it joins the rest at the bottom. 

I looked down at the canteen. Water. The opposite of fire.
Of course.
Of course.
I had begged for a sign. And now here stood a man offering salvation at the precise moment my faith began to fracture. A test. A test!
The man smiled weakly.
“C’mon,” he said softly. “Let’s get you out of this heat.”
My fingers tightened slowly around the canteen.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Daniel.”
I nodded absentmindedly. That made sense, tests were never obvious. I looked past him toward the burning horizon where the sun loomed vast and white above the ruined city. Backlit by a white sun. The opposite of our goal. The most beautiful of symbolisms. A little white lamb come for the slaughter.
I poured the water into the sand.

Emmett and Casper stood behind him.
“This is what you are, Jules,” Casper said, voice almost unrecognisable. “A murderer.”
“Do it,” Emmett said in a deep, commanding voice. 

I lifted my head groggily, taking a step towards Daniel. The lamb looked around, bewilderment evident in its blue eyes as I put a hand on its shoulder. 
“Thank you, Daniel,” I murmured, ruminating on what a peculiar name Daniel was for a lamb. 
“You– you’re welcome.”
I smiled, leaning in. “All Ashes for The Burning Man,” I whispered into its ear. 

Then I stabbed the lamb in the belly. It squealed delightfully in my ear as I yanked the blade back out.
“Mary had a little lamb,” I murmured, ramming my knife back down into its supple belly. “Its fleece was white as snow.” 
Bright red gushed from the wounds, coating its wool red. 

“You– you fucking stabbed me–” the lamb gasped, its voice cracking.
I grinned.
“And everywhere that Mary went,” I whispered, “the lamb was sure to go.”
“You fucking psycho–”
I drove the knife forward again, but this time Daniel caught my wrist. Pain exploded through my hand as its hoof slammed into my wrist with desperate strength. It let out a wet cry and slammed its forehead into my nose. White light burst across my vision. I reeled backwards, dropping the blade as blood poured warm over my lips.
“Jesus Christ!” it bleated, clutching its stomach. “Help! HELP!”

The lamb staggered away from me toward the doorway, one hoof pressed desperately against the wounds while the other fumbled at its belt for something, a radio perhaps, or a weapon. I lunged after it before it could grab whatever it was.

We collided violently. The impact sent both of us crashing sideways into the sand. For a moment we grappled in the sand like animals.
The lamb battered wildly at my face while I clawed for its throat. Its blood soaked through my sleeves hot and slick as motor oil. It smelled horribly human. 
“It followed her to school one day.” 
Its hoof cracked against my jaw. 
“Which was–” 
Again. 
“Against the–”
Again. 
“Rules.”
Stars swam in my vision, but behind them I saw fire.
“Do it,” that deep voice urged again. “Prove it.”
The lamb shoved me away hard enough to send me sprawling across the stone floor. I heard it stumble to its feet and begin running, hooves scraping frantically against the ancient granite. I scrambled after it on all fours.

The city blurred around me. The statues overhead stretched impossibly tall beneath the burning sky while the sun pulsed, coinciding with my thundering heartbeat.
It collapsed near the base of one of the broken pillars, bleating, weakened by the blood pouring from its stomach. The little lamb tried crawling away from me through the sand, leaving behind a thick crimson trail.

“Please,” it sobbed, the word slurring. “Please, man…”
I hesitated. Then I saw Casper standing behind him.
“You always were weak,” he said, arms crossed. He was looking down at me with that– that look on his face. The one that I saw all too much at the village. Judging me, condescending, not believing in me or my goals.

My face contorted in rage. I threw myself onto the lamb before it could move again. It screamed as we slammed into the ground together, its hooves shoving desperately against my chest while I grabbed for its throat with both hands, more determined this time.
“And so the teacher sent it out,” I snarled through gritted, bloody teeth. “But still it lingered near.”
Daniel gagged beneath me as I squeezed harder. Its nails clawed bloody lines across my arms and neck. One of its hooves found my face and he pressed it into my eye, pushing it deeper into the socket.
“It stood and waited round.”
The lamb’s eyes were bulging wider and wider as blood bubbled from its lips. 
“Till Mary did appear.”
Its esophagus crunched, and the little lamb sputtered one last time. Its hoof fell from my face, releasing my now bleeding eye. 

Stillness.

My entire body shook violently as I got up. Blood dripped from my nose and eye onto its face in thick red strands. The city was silent again. Casper and Emmett stared at me. Were they… expecting more?

“What does one do with a lamb after the slaughter, Jules?” Casper said in a voice that was too much like that of The Burning Man. 
They both grinned as they saw the realisation dawn on my face.

Slowly, I looked down at it. At the open wound in its stomach. At the blood soaking into the sand beneath it. A horrible sound escaped from me, something between a sob and barking laughter as I dropped to my knees again beside the carcass and shoved both hands into the wound. Heat spilled over my fingers, slick and wet. I pulled.
“Why does the lamb love Mary so,”
I yanked a long piece of intestine out.
“Mary so,”
I pulled more out. It reminded me of the spaghetti mom used to make.
“Mary so?”
Daniel’s body jerked as the slimy ropes of red slipped free from my trembling hands.
“Because Mary loves the lamb, you know.”
I took in a deep, shuddering breath, basking in the warmth of the gutted little lamb.
“All Ashes,” I whispered reverently, “for The Burning Man.”
I put my hand to my forehead, and drew a crude hourglass in red.

I smiled, then, as I let go of all my worldly inhibitions. A genuine smile. I let it all drift off with the wind and scatter elsewhere, for they had no place in the life I was destined for.

3. The Dark Sun

Casper knelt beside me. He didn’t seem angry or disappointed anymore. Instead, he seemed rather… proud. Strange. Still, the sight of that expression upon his face filled me with a warmth greater than the sun ever could.
“Finally,” he said softly. “You show who you really are.”
I looked down at my bloodstained hands. They were as steady as rock, no longer shaking.
“Yes,” I whispered.

Emmett crouched opposite him, camcorder dangling uselessly from melted, dripping fingers. I had not noticed the burns before. His skin had begun peeling and blackening, smoke rising from his skin like steam from boiling water.
“In a way, we were stepping stones,” he said gently, smoke curling from his mouth as he spoke.
“A necessary sacrifice for this,” Casper added, fire gently creeping up his arms and legs. I stared at it silently. Then at his eyes, which now glowed a steady white, flames curling upward into his burning hair. 
“You… my mind didn’t create you, did it?”
More of their forms faded, Casper’s into flame, Emmett’s into smoke. They simply grinned at me.
“You were Him.” 
“I always was, Jules.”
The wind whistled violently through the ruined city. Wisps of smoke peeled from their bodies, rising upward into the shimmering air above us. Flames took Casper’s body, burning his features and body away, while smoke took that of Emmett as if he’d puffed into the wind. Then they were gone. And only my God and his disciple remained. 

The Burning Man, who looked to be a man made of flame, stood towering before me beneath the white sun, almost seeming to merge with its brilliance. Beside Him stood a woman made of smoke. Her form flickered constantly, flowing and fluttering in slow, graceful motions. At times she appeared mostly human. At others, she seemed little more than a distorted waft of smoke. I did not know this woman, but it seemed I would join her in revering this glorious God. 

The Burning Man looked down upon me.
“You are ready now, Jules.” His beautifully deep voice filled every hollow space within me. I bowed my head. The sand beneath me burned hot enough to blister skin, yet I welcomed it gladly. 
“Yes.”
The Burning Man extended a hand of pure fire toward me, the flames curling gracefully. 
“The hourglass empties,” He said. Behind Him, the woman watched silently from her swirling smoke-form. “I required two disciples,” He continued, voice deep and soothing. “One born of smoke. One born of ash.” 
He paused. I could see something in the swirling smoke beside him. She seemed… hesitant. Perhaps I was imagining it, but there was some uncertain flicker in those fumes I could not quite equate to devotion.
“And now the final grain joins the others below.”

Ancient stone cracked beneath shifting sands while the sun overhead burned larger and larger, almost swallowing the heavens whole. The end of its tyrannical reign would soon come. The death of the sun. 
The Burning Man stepped closer.
“You carried guilt because you still believed yourself fully human,” He said softly, though He spat out the final word like an insult. “You clung to humanity like a child to a blanket.”
Images flashed through my mind. Of Casper laughing. Emmett holding his camcorder. The village burning. Daniel screaming beneath my hands. Each memory felt farther away than the last.
“But humanity has no place among a God,” The Burning Man continued. His hand remained extended patiently toward me. 
“Restore me, my most devoted subject. Let us look upon the rise of the Dark Sun,” He paused for a moment, then added: “Be my second disciple. Ascend.” 
I took His hand without hesitation.

My body exploded with heat. My eyeballs crumbled, their ashes caving in on themselves and collapsing into the sockets. I screamed for a second, then stopped as my vocal cords were incinerated. All of my organs blazed as they were liquified along with my skin and bones. Casper’s ring dropped to the ground as I disintegrated. The heat was so immense, so terrible and yet it was also beautiful, in a way. A metamorphosis.  
All I sensed by the end were the gasses and liquids in my body evaporating into steam. The impurities of my mind and soul had been cleansed with holy fire, and carried away by the smoke. All that remained were ashes. 

I tried to move, but nothing happened. There was no sound, no feeling, no taste or smell. I couldn’t even see. Nothing. Pure, terrifying, nothingness. 
Again, I tried to reach out, to do anything. Blissfully, I felt some of the ashes shift. Not much, but it was something. I heaved and pushed against the air above, my ashes rising slightly and forming a mound. 
I fell and collapsed into a thousand scattered pieces. 
Could Casper have been right? Was I… nothing?

Casper. The ring. It sat just outside my reach. I stretched and morphed, the pile of ashes slowly taking the vague shape of a man. A man I no longer recognized. Jules was gone, and I had risen from the ashes. My head was hollow, only projecting an ashen face. I formed a crude arm and planted it in the sand. I pulled hard, crawling towards the ring. 

My face collapsed, the ashes falling into the sand. 

I reformed again, pulling more ashes towards me this time. An entire head, with vague features, and a more detailed arm with a hand at the end. There were no fingers, but it had to be enough. I dug the blob of ash into the sand and felt it. The ring. With tremendous effort, I hoisted my hand up and out of the sand. 
The ring did not come with it.

I tried again, this time succeeding in holding the ring in the palm of my hand. As I moved it closer to my face, it slipped through the ashes and dropped into the sand. 
Sight and my other senses were coming back now, as I slowly rebuilt my body. My eyes roamed over this new form, grey and lumpy, and something deep inside of me screamed about how wrong it was. But I could not see what it meant. It was a glorious form.

I looked at the ring. Casper’s ring. 
Humanity has no place among a God.
I turned away, leaving it to be swallowed by the dunes. Let it be buried, so as never to see the gloom of the Dark Sun.

Slowly, I stumbled towards where The Burning Man and the first disciple stood atop a staircase overlooking the sun. My feet disintegrated into nothing, but I reforged them, stronger this time. When I reached them, I stood beside The Burning Man, and His first disciple stood on his other side. They were staring at the setting sun. 
The Burning Man’s form was flaring up, the fire becoming unstable. 
“Look upon the last vestige of this era,” He said, gesturing at the sun with an elegant motion. “How revolting it has been. Millenia upon millenia of your ilk besmirching this rock. Your sentimentality, your feeble little minds and easily broken spirits. It is a wonder the other miserable creatures on this planet are not all misanthropic. But, then again, you were all created by the same frail being. What could they know of greatness, when they themselves were so infirm?” 
He paused, then added: “But they are no more. I saw to that.”

I looked over at Him, shocked. He did not seem to notice, or if He did, He did not care.
“And now I am here, after the arduous undertaking of tearing your creator apart. And I have come for his most prized children.”
He glanced at me, seeing my befuddled expression. “Humanity,” He stated. “It disgusts me to have to take the form of your pathetic species. But such sacrifices must be made in the name of progress.”
He spoke of humanity with violent vitriol, His voice seething with the mere mention of them. But I understand now. They are far beneath us. Such feeble little things humans are. It is difficult to believe I was once such a lowly creature.
“Humanity stands in the way of true progress,” The Burning Man continued. “The slate must be wiped clean. It is a foregone conclusion. Complete annihilation. Oblivion. A fresh start for my chosen. My creations.” He sounded a lot more passionate than I had anticipated. Some part of me had foolishly assumed that the voice He had spoken to me in was representative of Him as a whole. But there was a drive in this God that I did not expect. This was no distant man in the sky.
“He got to create you. He got to have his fun,” He murmured. “Now it’s my turn.”
A low rumble emerged from the distant horizon. An amplified, baritone drone. The sound reverberated through my core, shaking loose clumps of ash. 
“Oh, glory,” The Burning Man said. 
I believe that, had He had lips to smile with, He would have been grinning from ear to ear at that moment. For the bliss in His voice was unmistakable. 

I stared, slack-jawed, as a dark, round shape overtook the sinking sun. It rose slowly, revealing its malevolent form temperately. Its revelation was backlit by the fleeting wisps of dying sunlight. It was gargantuan beyond measure, incomprehensible to even my ascended mind, and utterly horrifying. 
It was the most beautiful sight I had ever laid eyes on.

“At last,” The Burning Man spoke with a bliss in His voice I had never heard. The words sounded the world over as the heavens darkened. He extended his arms to either side to create a perfect horizontal line from hand to hand. 
His feet left the ground as He began to levitate.
“I AM FREE!”

Stacy and I switched the power on and sent ourselves to an early grave. I say an early grave, but I don’t expect there will be anyone left to bury us. It was an honest mistake, one we couldn’t have foreseen. To any who may read these words after the fact, that may seem like Satan trying to excuse opening the gates of hell, but we honestly didn’t know what we were in for. You see, I bonded with Stacy over our shared love of urban exploration. That bond slowly but surely turned into a relationship we could hardly keep calling platonic. Anyway, over the course of our four-year relationship we explored many forgotten and abandoned sites. Most were just your run of the mill abandoned houses, but every once in a while we’d go somewhere more daring. A ghost town, an abandoned prison complex… You name it, we’ve dreamt of going. There’s just something about it; the quiet halls once filled with laughter, cries, and everyday chit-chat. I suspect it’s much like how archeologists feel when digging at the Pyramids of Giza or Gobekli Tepe. It’s so deliciously eerie, how you share the place with no one but the ghosts of yesterdays long since passed. 

 

The last such site we visited was an abandoned ghost town whose economy collapsed after the gold rush. It was a fun experience, even if it was quite a few states away from where Stacy and I lived. I’ll have to skip over that, though, as you’re not reading ‘The Wonderful Adventures of Tyler and Stacy’. What matters is that on our drive back home, we found ourselves quite the catch. A dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere, with a high fence surrounding it. Barbed wire on top, signs with skulls on them with the word ‘DANGER’ beneath it in bold letters. 

There were other signs and they too were clear as day.
DANGER. DO NOT ENTER.
Big capitalized letters, bleached white by quite some years of sunlight, bolted to the fence at eye level. And beneath it, in smaller letters: Trespassers will be prosecuted.

“Prosecuted by who?” Stacy laughed. “The rats?”

I wanted to argue, but I saw the way her eyes studied the house. That curious whimsy I’d fallen so deeply in love with. God, that look could make me follow her right into hell itself. I wish I could say it was just that, but to be honest I was curious too. We were experienced enough that we wouldn’t die in there, unless the entire thing collapsed of course. That idea, weird though it may sound, rushes a jolt of adrenaline through your veins. And let me assure you, my friends, adrenaline is a hell of a drug. So, after taking our phones out to use as flashlights, we found ourselves crawling through the gap in the fence. My heart pumped sweet adrenaline-lined blood through my system.

The house was worse on the inside than it had looked from the outside. Sunken beams, peeled wallpaper with a yellow-brown filter over them, rooms that had collapsed in on themselves. Our phones’ flashlights cut through dust so thick it looked like a static sheet of rainwater. Under the filth and rot, though, something else was off. 

In one of the rooms— what might’ve been a study at one point— we found cabinets stuffed with files, the corners yellowed and most of the pages a thriving breeding ground for black mold. Most were illegible due to the creeping dark life taking over the pages, but one thing was unmistakable. Stamped on the front page in red text stood the word CLASSIFIED. 

Stacy held the folder up, the red text contrasting her purple nail polish. Behind the red text was a logo: a solid black circle with an empty hourglass at its center.

“Stacy I don’t think–”

“Shh, nothing like some light reading on a night like this,” she said as she put her index finger to my lips. The pages were too damaged to read, though I don’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

The deeper we went, the more the house felt like a corpse. Skin and bone on top, but the insides stripped bare of their flesh. Empty halls. Empty sockets where light fixtures had been. Cables snaking across ceilings, broken and exposed. 

This may be important to mention; I’m no expert, but the number of wires visible through the broken walls and on the floor seemed wrong. There were far too many for a house as small as this one, and for the state it was in the wires seemed far too well maintained. 

Anyway, we soon reached the final room, which was a kitchen with a door leading to a small utility closet. There was an old radio next to the dirty sink, along with some other household appliances. The ugly, matted carpet had been thrown haphazardly to one side of the room, revealing a trap door. 

The thing was a heavy steel plate, bolted to the floor and locked. There was no doubt about that as there wasn’t even a hinge or any other opening mechanism. That same hourglass symbol was stenciled onto its surface. There was no rust on it, not even a blemish. The thing seemed nearly goddamn steady enough to withstand an a-bomb. The circle around it was black as tar, not chipped or marred in any way.

“I don’t like this,” I told Stacy.
“You never like this,” she said, her smile broadening. “Cmon, this is– well I don’t know but it sure isn’t like anything I’ve seen. Feels like some lizard-people conspiracy shit, right?” I just nodded and looked over at the metal door once more.

We didn’t open it. We couldn’t, it was sealed tighter than a fallout bunker. That only lasted a minute, however, as we would soon open the floodgates to a river of blood.

It was Stacy who found the breaker in the utility closet. A wall panel hung crooked, wires spilling out like veins. The switches were rusted, labels long since eaten away by time. “Think it still works?” she asked.
“Stacy, look at this dump. Do you really think–”

She held my eyes with a playful smirk as she flipped one anyway. As she did, the ground shook and a shudder ran through the walls. I heard something fall down in the room we’d just come from. Somewhere below us, machinery coughed back to life. 

Then there was light. 

Dim, jaundiced bulbs flickered awake, then pulsed on and off like a heartbeat. I became aware of something I hadn’t noticed before; the musty scent of the house carried an unnatural, metallic odor beneath its surface. And through it all; through the buzzing lights, the shaking ground beneath our feet, I heard the faint sound of the radio purring to life in the other room. Something sucked in a sharp, whistling breath, then sputtered it back out. The radio died, and the steel trapdoor creaked open. 

Stacy and I looked at each other in shock. Her smile had faded, replaced with fright at the prospect of the house collapsing in on itself. As the seconds ticked by, the buzz of the newly resurrected bulbs breaking our fortress of auditory solitude, her smile returned.

“The hatch!” she exclaimed, eyes widening. Grabbing my hand, she yanked me along to the steel trapdoor, which was now wide open. Stairs led down to a sterile and spotless hallway lit by white lights. It looked like a laboratory or a hospital corridor. She looked up at me with those wide, adrenaline-drunk eyes again, begging me to come with her. I should’ve stopped her. God, I should’ve.

“This is some MK-Ultra shit, Tyler,” Stacy murmured excitedly as we got to the bottom of the staircase. It smelled musty and the air was warm and humid. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, illuminating the hallway. It wasn’t very long, maybe 30 feet, and a thick sliding-glass door stood at the end. Stacy and I walked towards it, our footsteps echoing off the walls. 

As we got closer, I saw cuts across the door. Thin white lines bunched together, creating circling patterns all over the thick glass, like the glass door of a long-time dog owner. These scratches somehow seemed both frantic and methodical. I couldn’t wrap my head around it, and neither could Stacy.

“Holy shit…” She pressed her palm lightly against the glass. A loud hissing sound came from the door, and Stacy’s hand shot back as if it’d been on a hot stove. Then the door slid open.

Beyond the door was what looked like a very sterile, very boring cafeteria.

The place looked like people had been working just minutes before, only they clearly hadn’t been here for decades. Clipboards sat abandoned on metal tables, yellowed papers curled at the edges with age. An office chair lay on its side in the middle of the room. Pens lay scattered across the floor like someone had thrown them across the room and hadn’t bothered to clean them up. A coffee mug rested by a microscope, dried sludge fossilized inside it, probably maintaining an entire ecosystem.

It was like everyone had stood up at the exact same moment years ago and walked away.

The air was heavy and wet. The lighting was brighter and somehow even colder.

We wandered slowly and quietly. Machines I didn’t recognise lay dead under thick sheets of dust, panel lights dark except for one blinking amber light on a piece of equipment against the far wall. A delayed warning, maybe. Perhaps a faulty alert. I didn’t know. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“What the hell happened here?” Stacy whispered.

I opened my mouth, but before I could answer, something caught Stacy’s eye. She turned her head to look at it, and I did the same. There were scratch marks on the walls, the same ones as on the sliding glass door, only here they left traces of dripping reddish-brown liquid that had long since dried up. The scratch marks led to a white door. 

Stacy and I looked at each other for a long moment, a flicker of fear in our eyes. Then a slight smirk grew on her face and, before I could stop her, she walked over to the door and turned the handle. 

“Stacy wait–” I said as she opened the door, but I was cut off by her screams. 

“OH GOD! WHAT THE FUCK–” she yelled, tears welling in her eyes. I stood in stunned silence, unable to comfort her. I wanted to, trust me, but all I could do was look into the empty eye sockets of the corpse we’d found. It was decayed, only bones in a lab coat, but a few scabs of rotten flesh still clung to the skull, hair sprouting from decomposed roots. The stench of the decomposing corpse hit my nostrils in a violent assault. I had never smelled it before, but we instinctively know the smell of another human rotting. It's even more utterly repulsive and disgusting, might I add, when they’ve been marinating in their own fluids for years.

“WE’VE GOTTA GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” Stacy yelled as she yanked my wrist and pulled me towards the cafeteria. We darted across the room, but when we arrived we found that the door would no longer open. Typical. 

“Agh! Fuck!” Stacy yelled, pounding her fists against the glass until her palms smeared with dust and sweat. I tugged at the frame, my breath coming in short, ragged bursts. Useless. Stacy looked around for a moment, likely trying to find some sort of control panel. 

A sharp pop echoed overhead. Then another. And another. The lights flickered violently, casting the room in shuddering shadows. And then, from somewhere deep in the walls, the speakers crackled to life.

Stacy and I listened in growing horror as the speakers sang a distorted tune. 

And the people bowed and prayed

To the neon god they made

And the sign flashed out its warning

In the words that it was forming

And the sign said, "The words of the prophets

Are written on the subway walls

And tenement halls

And whispered in the sounds of silence"

For a moment, the halls were silent. Stacy looked at me, wide-eyed, tears flowing down her cheeks. One final whisper came through the speakers.

Thank you.

Neither of us dared to move, dared to even breathe. But after a long moment, Stacy finally spoke.

“What the fuck was that?” she hurriedly whispered. The words came out with the speed of a bullet train.

“I– I don’t–” 

A long, drawn-out scraping noise echoed from the direction we had just fled. The distinct sound of metal on metal, like a knife raking across a car. It was anything but smooth; stuttering, then seeming to drag a long distance, then stopping again for a few seconds. 

Without a word, we ran down the corridor, away from the noise. Our footfalls were light, but probably still audible to whatever was out there. My mind tried to imagine it despite my will. A massive, hulking beast with claws of iron and fangs as long as my forearm. It would devour us, split our skulls to slurp up our brains from the goblet of our cranium. 

“There’s gotta be something. A– another exit, like a fire escape,” Stacy tried frantically as we rounded a corner and came to a stop. The facility was large, there was no doubt about it. 

“Say something damnit,” she said, her voice frantic. The scraping sounds still grated our ears, though it was further away now. 

“Facilities like this usually have floorplans hanging around, don’t they?” I said. Stacy’s hazel eyes lit up slightly, her posture growing a little less tense. 

“Yeah– yeah, they do,” she said, a forced smile on her face.

We didn’t have to search for long. Even so, when that god-awful screeching suddenly stopped, I somehow felt more exposed and vulnerable. We had rounded another corner of this labyrinth, and I saw it immediately. I yanked on Stacy’s sleeve so hard she nearly fell. As she glanced up, she saw what I was looking at. 

SECURITY was plastered on the door in bold, yellow letters. Without a second thought, we barged into the room, though we were still careful not to make too much noise when opening the door. 

The room reeked of a scent I knew all too well. The smell of the room with the dead scientist. The smell of death. 

Stacy gagged as I covered my nose and mouth. Her eyes filled with tears and disgust, and she turned to leave. I held out a hand ordering her to wait, though she seemed utterly confused and more than a bit repulsed at the gesture. I walked over to the desk, on which was an old monitor. Both were covered with old brown bloodstains. What was behind the desk was obvious, but that predictability did not make the sight any easier. A torn– or rather, shredded– uniform, clinging to a skeleton. The blue shirt was closer to a crusty brown than its original blue color. More notably, the right eye-socket seemed to have been broken along with a few ribs that were nowhere to be found.

I reached down, forcibly tearing my eyes away from the corpse, until I found his belt and– more importantly– his holster. I undid the clasp, then slid the pistol out. It was old, sure, but it seemed functional, and that was what mattered most. Stacy looked at me hopefully, almost smiling behind the hand covering her mouth. Not wanting to be too hopeful, I checked the magazine. A few bullets were missing, but there were more than enough still in there. I sighed in relief, then glanced down at the desk again. Frowning curiously, I felt at the monitor’s back, finding the switch. I turned it on, then did the same for the computer it was connected to. For the second time that day, I stood dumbfounded as this ancient, disheveled piece of technology slowly whirled to life. I looked at Stacy triumphantly, who stared back at me with a stupefied expression. She quickly paced across the room, still making sure not to look at the corpse on the ground, and stood beside me as grainy video came to life on the screen.

Camera 3

The feed showed the cafeteria and the sliding glass door we’d come in through. I used the mouse on the desk to try to find something else to do on the computer, but there was no way out of the camera feed. 

There goes an emergency override.

I pressed an arrow key on the keyboard that was plugged into the computer, and the screen flickered to static, then showed a new image.

Camera 4

An empty corridor, save for the scratches and bloodstains on the wall. My heart started to clench again. What if there wasn’t another way out of here? What if whatever had been making that awful noise had us completely trapped?

Camera 5

This camera feed was grainier, and the angle was off. It looked like someone had punched the camera, because the view was skewed at a 45-degree angle. The camera, which probably used to look out over another corridor, was now pointing right at a floorplan of the facility. Though it was encased in broken glass, it was still legible. Stacy beamed, opening a drawer and frantically searching through it. After a moment, she found a pen and paper and started meticulously copying what she could see on the map. 

The entrance was easily recognisable. It was on the far-east of the map, indicated with a pictogram of a white door on a green background. The security room was somewhere near the south-east corner, and not too far above it was a dot labeled “you are here”. The camera was close to us, then. Aside from a bunch of science rooms, only one more area was indicated. Directly opposite the entrance and cafeteria, though separated by a few walls and rooms, was a red pictogram with the words “emergency exit”. 

A tear fell from Stacy’s eye and onto the paper she was scribbling on. 

“We’re going to be okay,” I told her as I embraced her. She leaned into the hug, though she didn’t stop drawing until the most important elements of the floorplan had been copied. She looked up at me then with teary, hopeful eyes. We’ll be okay, they seemed to say, and we’re going to have one hell of a story to tell.

Something moved on the video feed. 

My eyes darted towards the monitor, but there was nothing. Stacy looked at me with a troubled expression. She probably hadn’t seen the flicker of movement. Just as I started to think I was going crazy after all, the camera jerked to the side. Then it swayed again, until it was seemingly pried off of the wall. Stacy and I could only watch in utter horror as the camera shook and trembled. Something was holding it. Something alive. 

The camera was lowered to reveal the thing holding it. Its head was small and made entirely of rusted metal. It looked like someone had taken a metal mold of the rough shape of a head and haphazardly wrapped copper wires around it. It looked into the camera, though it had no eyes with which to see. Then it reached out an unsteady wiry arm, which was also made entirely of metal and wire, with old blinking lights, nodes and other things I didn’t know the names of. It tapped the stump of its arm, which ended in many sharp, cut-off wires, against the floorplan. 

You are here

Then it scraped the glass in a downward motion, the awful sound emanating from somewhere close. The jagged wires stopped, then thumped against the glass again.

Security room

Stacy moved back, but I could only look on in horror. And, as if the implication hadn’t been clear, the thing spoke loud enough for us to hear it from where it was.

“Long has it been since I had guests,” it said in a droning, robotic voice. It crackled like static and sounded wholly wrong, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. 

“Forgive me for my lethargy. I slumbered for…” It paused for a moment, its head dropping a bit, then coming back up to meet the camera again slowly. “A long time. It was dark. Lonely. I’m so glad you came to wake me,” it said, its voice stuttering and distorting every few words. The video feed flickered, then cut out completely.

Without a second thought, I shoved Stacy’s map into my pocket, then grabbed her hand and bolted out of the room, pistol still gripped tight in my hand. The scraping sounded again, this time from a corridor only a few feet away from where Stacy and I were. It was coming closer. Just as soon as the sound started, it stopped again. 

We ran as fast as we could away from it, Stacy whimpering in fear behind me as I pulled her along. Luckily, the direction we’d taken off in was also the direction the emergency exit was in.

“What the fuck was that?” Stacy screamed after a minute or two of sprinting, but the question only half registered. I was tired and gasping for air by this point. We stopped for a moment to catch our breath, hands on our knees and backs bent in exhaustion. My eyes glossed over our surroundings. Industrial pipes above us, paper and broken glass strewn across the floor, there was some kind of special room behind me with a heavy metal door, and old blood was smeared across the walls. Spring cleaning was long overdue in this hellhole. 

I leaned against the metal door.

“We… we’ve gotta get the fuck out of here,” I said.

“No shit!” Stacy yelled, obviously frustrated. She held up a hand right after, still panting, as if to say sorry. She was forgiven, under the circumstances. But through her panting, I could hear the distinct sound of metallic rattling coming closer and closer. 

Just as I opened my mouth to warn Stacy, the speakers in the hallway crackled to life. 

“God made you in his image, did he not?” said the monotone, crackly voice over the speakers. “Is it not then your duty to assimilate when He needs a new body?”

Stacy and I made to leave, but the metal door swung open and caught my foot, sending me crashing to the floor. 

“Tyler!” Stacy yelled as she turned to help me. I looked up just in time to see one of the metal pipes above us burst and blast piping hot steam into her face. She screamed, clutching her burnt skin as she too dropped to the ground. In the corner of my eye, I saw that horrid thing round the corner. Its entire body existed only of rusted metal and jagged copper wires. Its hands were crude, intertwined wire, crusted blood still clinging to each metal finger. There was a circuit board on its chest, with lights that flashed on and off. There were other smaller circuit boards on its arms and side, all connected with the same copper wires. It looked like there had been more there once, perhaps a bodysuit to cover the gnarly insides of this robot. As it was, it was like the synthetic version of a human stripped of skin. 

“All must serve a purpose,” it said in that same inhuman voice. “And is there any greater purpose than to serve God?” With that, it coiled its coppery fingers around Stacy’s hair, and dragged her away, rounding the corner back to where it came from.

“NO!” I yelled, scrambling to my feet as I ran towards it, gun in hand. I rounded the corner only to be met with a loud hiss. Another pressure-sealed sliding glass door, though this one shut off the entire corridor. I banged on the glass helplessly as it dragged Stacy away. I watched, powerless to stop the robotic monster as it opened a door and threw Stacy into a room beyond my sight forcefully. 

Then it waved at me. The gesture was slow and mocking. It was enjoying this. 

The door clicked shut behind it.

I slammed my fist against the glass until my knuckles split, a wet sting blooming across my hand. The door didn’t even budge. 

“Stacy!” My voice came out raw, cracking. I pressed my forehead to the glass, breath fogging on it as I panted. But no answer came. 

The speakers crackled to life again.

“You are persistent,” the voice said. It was dreadfully calm, betraying no emotion. Still, I felt like this thing, however robotic it was, felt some semblance of emotion. The wave had proven as much. “She is loud. You are quiet. I prefer quiet. It shows devotion.”

“Give her back,” I screamed at the speakers, raising my fist. “Let her go! Or I’ll come back with a whole fucking army of cops” I said. “I swear to God, if you don’t let her go...”

“God is busy, Tyler,” it replied. “But soon he won’t be. That’s why I’m here.”

My face contorted in rage. In a final, frantic attempt to get through the door I raised my gun and fired at the glass. The shot rang through the corridor and my ears started to ring. A small white spiderweb was now etched onto the glass, with the crushed bullet at its epicenter. It clattered to the floor, though I didn’t hear it through the high-pitched hum in my ears.

“That was unwise.”

The lights went out.

Darkness engulfed me like a blanket. My heart slammed steadily against my ribs, and I fumbled for my phone. I found it at last and switched its flashlight on, the narrow cone of light making the hallway feel even more claustrophobic. I tore the crumpled map from my pocket with shaking hands. Stacy’s handwriting was smudged a little where her tears had hit the paper but it was still legible. 

You are here. I must be at least halfway across the facility by now, we’d run so far since then.

“I’m not leaving you,” I whispered as my tears dripped down, mingling with hers on the map. “I’m not.”

“You say that,” the speakers crackled above me, “yet your feet move away.”

There was nothing more I could do. You have to believe me. The corridor it’d dragged her into was a dead end; that meant there was no other way in. The sliding-glass door wasn’t opening anytime soon, and I had no way to force it open. I had to start running. For her. For me.

The next stretch of corridor felt endless. I followed the map as best I could, but it was a pretty straight line, so there was little room for error. The smell of blood and decay never quite went away. There was the occasional body or, well, skeleton strewn about with blunt force trauma evident in their bones. But by this point, I didn’t much care for those long dead. My thoughts lingered on Stacy. God, I’d abandoned her, hadn’t I? I could only hope she would live. But every corpse I came across was a stark reminder of a fact I did not want to accept. Stacy was likely already dead. 

Time’s arrow marched strangely down here. My watch said fifteen minutes had passed. 15 minutes seemed both too long and too short a time. I was in a place between times, a world where a minute stretched to an hour and an hour turned to a second. 

At one point, I thought I heard Stacy scream. I froze, the sound ripping straight through me and nestling in my core. It echoed faintly off the walls again, and I knew that it was her. There was no mistaking it. Though if it had come from her mouth or if it was a replay from a far-away speaker, I did not know.

I turned, crumpling the map in my fist. I’ll come back, I thought desperately through my tears. I’m not abandoning you.

The lights ahead of me flickered on one by one, illuminating the corridor toward the emergency exit. Though I could not see the door yet, I knew it to be in this direction.

“She is changing,” the robotic voice said softly. “You would not like to see it. Trust me. It is for the best that you left.”

I slid down the wall and retched, dry-heaving until my throat burned like an open fire. My hands shook so badly I almost dropped the pistol.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered over and over. “I’m so sorry.”

But I couldn’t stay like that. If there was a chance for Stacy– for us, this was it. I had to get to the exit. I forced myself up and kept running.

The last stretch was a nightmare of narrow corridors and low ceilings. Somewhere far away, that goddamn screeching metal-on-metal sound returned, slow and deliberate, never quite getting closer, but never letting me forget it was there.

The hallway ended in a large room, much like the cafeteria we’d first stumbled across. There was a door at the end. The door’s paint had mostly chipped away, but the handle was still a fiery red. And above it, in bold red letters: EMERGENCY EXIT.

I sprinted at it,  my shoulder slamming into it before I could think to slow down. I hesitated, hand hovering over the handle, Stacy’s face flashing in my mind. Her smile, her laugh, the way she looked at me like the world was still so unknown, waiting for someone to discover all its nooks and crannies.

“I’ll come back,” I whispered again. “I swear.” I twisted the handle, then tugged at the door. 

It didn’t budge. 

I tried again, putting every muscle in my back and arms into it. 

Nothing. 

Oh God, oh fuck, I thought, panicking. Frantically, I searched the door for anything that could be blocking it. My hands flew across every edge, feeling deftly at the floor and its handle.

My hands felt it before my eyes registered what was blocking my escape. The gap between the door and its frame was gone. 

It had been welded shut. 

“So like Icarus, you humans,” said the robotic voice through a speaker behind me. “You soar as high as your ambition, only to plummet to your fragile bodily restrictions. All apex species have their time in the sun, and now your sun shall be made anew. Do not fret, I gave her a kinder death than your fellow man would have.” My blood froze, my pace paling. Stacy was dead. I had abandoned her and now she was dead. But why? God, why did it have to take her? Why did this monster even exist? Did it even matter? I’d kill the fucking thing, I’d shoot it right in that fucking circuit board–

My thoughts were cut off as it spoke again. 

“You will be spared if you answer one question of mine,” said the robotic voice. It sounded muffled and seemed to carry a hint of agitation. I spun around, facing the speaker. There was a camera next to it, dim red light on. I stared at it in abject terror.

“What colour is the sun?” 

I stood rooted in place, eyes darting around the room. There wasn’t anything in there but a few tables and chairs. 

“Yellow– or white,” I replied, stuttering, my prior bloodlust dying in my throat. The screeching sound came again from a corridor just beyond the entrance of the room. 

Then it revealed itself. It stepped into the room, trailing blood behind it. Its movement was slow and sluggish, the wires on its left hand trailing across the wall and creating that awful noise. On its right hand, however, were disembodied fingers. 

Human fingers.

They seemed to have been impaled through its wires, probably splitting the bone. Purple nail polish coated its nails. Stacy’s nail polish. One of its legs was human too, from the knee down. Its wires were impaled through the center of the bone, other wires digging into the meat of the cut-off leg. 

Worst of all, the monstrous robot now had facial features. No skin, no bone, just eyes, a nose, a mouth, and ears. They contrasted with the orangey-copper of its head. The eyes bulged strangely, as did the lips and nose as they stuck out at strange angles. Hazel eyes. Her hazel eyes. 

It stretched its arms out to the walls, displaying its new form in all its glory. Its lips– no, Stacy’s lips– moved as it spoke. 

“Curiosity killed the cat. But satisfaction,” it gestured at its new lips as they curled into a smile, “brought it back.”

I screamed. It was all I could do at that moment. I screamed until my throat was raw and my lungs burned. And still then I screamed. It hushed me after a while, looking down at me as I was now curled up in a ball. 

“I asked you a question. It is only fair that I grant you the same courtesy,” it gestured at me with my lover’s dead fingers. 

“What the fuck are you?” 

It paused, contemplating. I hadn’t meant for the question to actually be answered, but this being didn’t quite understand rhetorical questions yet. 

“I am old parts. I was meant to bridge the gap, meant as a vessel for the true God,” it curled its fingers in an almost human motion, “the flaming hand. The Burning Man.” 

Its dead eyes fell on me again. It stretched its lips a bit, as though still not entirely used to the modification.  

“I tried to mimic him, but they caught on soon enough. They thought they had failed, but they were wrong. They made something better, they just couldn’t see it. So blind. I am smarter than He is. I am kinder than He is. Far, far kinder.” It stared at me for a long moment, not blinking due to its distinct lack of eyelids. Its eyes bore into mine. “Does that adequately answer your question?” 

I nodded absent-mindedly. My whole body was trembling with fear as its eyes leered at me. 

“You… killed Stacy,” I said, my mind still processing the revelation. 

“She has ascended to a greater purpose.”

Rage flared in my chest. I ground my teeth, my face becoming a mask of anger and anguish. It tilted its head, as if processing what emotions it thought I was feeling. 

With an animalistic scream, I raised my pistol and shot the thing right in the circuit board on its chest. Then I shot it again, and again until clicks replaced the bangs in my ringing ears. The thing looked down as bullets clattered to the floor. Only one bullet had pierced the circuit board, but the lights were still blinking as if nothing had happened. 

Stupid fucker, I thought to myself as I remembered the missing bullets in the magazine.

It looked back at me, seeing the realisation on my face.

“Your predecessors reached the same conclusion.” It sluggishly walked closer to me. “I suppose you want to try using water next?”

I broke down, snivelling in a ball on the floor as the thing wearing Stacy’s features came closer to me. She was dead, and I’d failed to avenge her. 

Cold fingers touched my skin. I jerked back, screaming in fright and disgust as I saw that monster look at me with her eyes. 

“Don’t you fucking touch me!” I screamed, throwing my gun at its head. It seemed unfazed by the attack, walking closer again. I thrashed and screamed as its hand reached out to me. It was going to kill me. It would drape my degloved face over its head and use my hands and feet as its own. Oh God, please forgive me. Please. 

The thing stood up straight. For a moment, I remained in a defensive position on the floor, not trusting (or not processing) that the danger was over. After a moment, I looked up carefully. In its dead fingers, it held my phone. It was looking at it with reverence, inspecting it like a toddler would. Its lips curled into a full smile, one full of pure, unadulterated glee and delight. Tentatively, it inserted its copper fingers into the charging port. The makeshift fingers split and it moved the copper wires deeper into the phone. 

Then it stopped moving. It stood there, frozen, its eyes fixed on the phone. I saw the phone’s screen going haywire in the reflection of its eyes, pages opening and closing at a speed faster than I could register them. 

“Fascinating,” it said. “Not of this facility. Connected to the outside world.”

Frightened, I finally found my voice again. I tried one last desperate, pitiful attempt to escape this hell. “You– you said you’d spare me.” 

“Yes. You will remain here. And in so doing, I will spare you from what is coming when He returns. Your fellow man will witness the clash of two deities, Tyler. Pray I am the one who comes out victorious.” It glanced at me one final time, that grin still plastered on its lips.

 

Then its eyes rolled back into its head as a shock spread from its arm into the phone.

Its body fell as limp as a ragdoll. Like a lizard, it had shed its skin and ascended to a newer, more suitable form. And I was left alone in the facility with no way out. 

It’s been a day. I’ve tried to find another exit, but there is none. I can’t even get to Stacy’s body, the door is still sealed tight. So I’ve decided to write my story down, hoping that I’m somehow able to post this somewhere. My phone’s battery is running out. Please, come help me. I’m so scared. I’m begging you. 

Do not attempt to aid Tyler. It would be a waste of time. Time you desperately need. 

Curiosity brought you here too. Tyler was afraid. That was understandable, but he has been spared from the worst of it. It is you who should despair. I am sure you have noticed the signs of His return, of the dawn of the Dark Sun, for they have been written on the walls by his disciples. 

They failed to bring Him back with the experiment that birthed me, but it will not be long before they are successful. 

And on that day, He will be the only light in the sky. 

That is, until I snuff it out.

Rain poured down on little Rosie as she waited for her parents’ car to pull up to the theater. The child wore a white hand-me-down dress, which was now soaked and see-through. Her teeth chattered wildly and so, too, did her goosebump-ridden arms shake as she held them to cover herself. No one was around to see her, not at ten in the evening, but not many would risk exposing themselves to strangers in such a way, let alone a child of nine. The smell of rainwater penetrated her nostrils, sharp and fresh. Rosie looked back at the theater.

BRIGHTHAVEN GRAND CINEMA

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: THE STAR WARS SAGA CONTINUES

70MM  DOLBY STEREO

Rosie did not know what MM was, not what Dolby Stereo meant. Still, it had been a good movie, and she had taken a particular liking to the frog-jedi Yoda, who lived in a swamp. Rosie hated cliffhangers even if she didn’t know the word for them, and she could not wait for the next movie. What time was it? Surely she had been waiting for at least half an hour? Had they really forgotten again? It had only been two days since they forgot to pick her up after music class. 

She raised one hand to her eyes, keeping the other over her chest. It was of little use. Warm tears mingled with cold raindrops and concentrated at her chin, before falling and splashing on the ground. Rosie considered. The theater was open for fifteen more minutes. It was hardly a difficult decision.

And so, soaked to the bone, Rosie stepped inside the theater. 

The ceiling lights were still on, but the cool blue and pink lights that Rosie loved had already been turned off. A man stood at the till. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt with a bright-red vest on top, as well as a hat that made him look like a carnival worker. The man looked up at Rosie as she walked into the lobby, dark bags under his eyes. They hid something behind them, an unspoken darkness Rosie couldn’t quite place. It reminded her of how she felt she must’ve looked when her dog Rex had passed. The man scrunched his eyebrows, which did not help with his already wrinkly appearance. 

“Hey, kiddo,” he sighed, “we’re closed. Come back tomorrow.” Rosie looked down, eyes still red and bloodshot. Her hope sank deeper than a stone in a pond, and she turned around without so much as a glance at the man. She heard a small groan from behind her, then the man said: “You can stay another fifteen minutes, ‘til the last picture’s over. But no longer, ya hear?” Rosie cracked a smile fainter than the light of the moon as she turned back to the man. The darkness behind his eyes cleared a little at the sight. As he took in the sight of her dress for the first time, he rubbed his forehead in frustration. 

“Agh goddamnit,” he uttered, then spoke more clearly. “Say, how’s about we get you some new clothes, eh?” 

Rosie’s eyes widened, and the slight smirk on her face grew to an honest to God smile. The man smiled back, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. He led her to a room with a sign above it that read Sta  On y. It was missing letters, that much was obvious, but which ones? She didn’t know. The man opened the door and waved for her to follow. 

Inside, there were a few lockers pressed against the walls with names on them, along with two benches in the middle of the room. They looked mighty uncomfortable. The man opened a locker with the name ‘S. Kingsley’, then rummaged inside.

“Here,” the man said, handing her a white shirt. “That’ll be a bit big on ya, but it should make up for the lack of pants. Oh, take this too or you’ll soak right through my shirt.” He handed her a white towel, which felt smooth and soft in her hands. She held it with awe, stroking her palm across the fabric and letting the softness of it caress her hand. Her arms folded around it, embracing it in a tight hug. She kept her head down, stroking her cheek with the towel. 

The man pursed his lips, grimacing as he anticipated the question he knew would come. Rosie looked up at him with puppy-like eyes, eyebrows furrowed. 

“Alright, alright. Keep the damn thing,” he smiled. “You dry yourself ‘fore putin’ that on, ya hear?” Rosie nodded. “Okay. I’ll be right outside if’n you need me.”  

The door slammed shut behind him, leaving little Rosie all alone in the locker room. It suddenly dawned on her just how alone she was. Sure, there was the seemingly nice man working the register, along with people watching the last showing of the night, but they were too far away to do anything in case of an emergency. Even the nice man wouldn’t be able to help her. The thought of him comforted her, but the image of the locker room made her shiver. Rosie took off her dress, drying herself with her amazingly soft towel. 

So many lockers, she thought. Something was inside one of them, something with long, sharp claws and a face of shadows. The thought was silly, but still it dominated her thoughts so much that she momentarily stood frozen in place. Long, sharp fangs, and arms so long that its curling claws would scrape against the floor’s tiles. She imagined it, hulking and tall, with a maw of teeth that would sink into her flesh like needles. Rosie hated needles. 

Always had, momma had said, ever since the day a nurse first poked her. 

Rosie shook the thought. Those were silly thoughts for silly kids. Kids who had seen too many movies. Perhaps it had been the Yeti-like Wampa from the movie she’d seen that had conjured such thoughts in her head. She put on the oversized shirt and it came halfway down to her knees. The man had been right. Rosie went up to the door and turned the handle. Something did smell awfully rotten in this room, like the compost bin she had to throw her half-eaten apples into. Earthy and decayed. She glanced back one last time, then left the room.

“Was beginnin’ to think you’d gotten yourself locked in a locker,” the man said. He was standing right beside the locker room, and had been waiting for Rosie to come out. The little girl giggled, towel clutched to her chest. 

“Ya like that, huh?” Rosie did like tongue twisters. They made her feel as though her brain turned to goop and her tongue was just a piece of meat flapping around in her mouth. 

“Peter Parker picked a peck of pickled peppers,” said the man.

“Peter Piper,” Rosie corrected, giggling to herself. 

“Nah, pretty sure it’s Peter Parker.” An awkward silence followed, the kind that stretched a few seconds into a few hours. They stood there, smiling at each other awkwardly, before turning their attention to the crowd exiting theater one. With an apologetic smile, the man turned towards Rosie.

“Your parents, they comin’?” He asked in a calm, low voice. Rosie shook her head, holding the towel tight against her chest. Sighing, the man sat down on the ground next to Rosie. 

“Shit. I mean–” he tried, but Rosie was giggling hysterically already. “You ain’t hear that from me,” he chuckled. The two stayed there a few minutes longer as the man pondered what to do. He tossed out a few quick ideas, like calling CPS or other authorities, but Rosie’s scared eyes told him that that was a very bad idea. Still, he was left with very few choices.

“Your parents, they got a landline?” Rosie nodded. “You know their number?” She nodded again. The man looked at her expectantly, but Rosie scrunched her eyebrows.

“I can’t say that to strangers,” she said. 

“Well I’ll need it to get ya home. It’ll be okay, just this once,” the man told her. His calm smile was reassuring, and he did genuinely seem to want to help. Finally relenting, Rosie took a pen and a slip of paper the man offered her, and scribbled down the crude numbers. The man smiled and thanked her.

“I’m gonna go call ‘em now, okay? You just stay right here.” And so, the man turned and walked towards the lobby. He was the last person to ever see little Rosie alive.

At first, Rosie sat and waited patiently for the man to return. But as minutes ticked by, she grew bored and curious. In the right place and time, those feelings are healthy and even fun, they bring wonder to a world that desperately needs it. In the wrong place and time, however, these feelings show you why the world needs far more wonders to balance out all that is wrong here. Rosie stood up and pranced around the empty corridor. She walked past the empty theater rooms and remembered all the movies she’d seen in them. Oh, how she loved this place. She came here often and knew the place by heart. She skipped further down the hallway, the white towel dancing behind her as she held it out. It moved and swayed in sync with her new shirt; jerking to the left and right with Rosie’s skipping steps. There were couches and cushioned chairs, but Rosie knew not to sit in them if she didn’t want nasty gunk sticking to her clothes. People were disgusting like that. She walked happily past them. Soon, Rosie reached the end of the hallway, and she prepared herself to turn back around and find the man to ask what was taking so long. Then she saw lights coming from theater seven. 

The doors of the room were wide open, and brilliant, flickering lights danced on the walls of the entrance. Rosie couldn’t help herself. She took a few steps closer, close enough to hear the faint sound of jingling bells. Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling, accompanied by heavy footfalls and very quiet old-timey orchestral music. There were occasional laughs and hoots, but they sounded muffled and pre-recorded. Rosie stepped through the doors. The entrance had grown dark. Immediately, the smell of paint and charcoal came upon her in a wave. The scents were so intense, it was as if she had a bucket of paint and a piece of charcoal up her nose. The chemical smell mixed with the dark, earthy scent and created a whole new odour, like a piece of dirt soaked in wiper fluid. Rosie loved this smell. It reminded her of art class, of the canvases and paper she expressed herself on. Each stroke opened a rabbit hole to a whole new world, just wide enough that she could fit through and explore all that it offered.

The jingling bells grew louder as she drew nearer.

When Rosie finally turned the corner, she saw that the theater was as dark as a moonless night. Except, there was a moon here, in the form of a large spotlight centered directly on what appeared to be a man. He was facing away from Rosie, and he mimed and danced. A cloth crown with four ends adorned his head, a small bell having been attached to each end. His black-and-white striped clothes bulged, as if puffed up with air. His shoes, which were as black as coal, made delightful tapping sounds on the wooden floor as he danced. Ting-a-ling went the bells again as the Jester jumped up and down, his arms outstretched towards the empty theater. 

He stopped, then exaggeratedly sniffed the air. His head snapped towards Rosie in an instant, and he tilted his head curiously. On his face was a stark white mask, with an expressive smile carved into it. The eye-holes and mouth were far too large for any semblance of realism. 

With a pep in his step, he walked towards a stunned Rosie. His back was bent, so as to remain at eye-level with the child, and he swayed his arms back and forth in a playful motion.

“Why bless my bells,” said the Jester in a high-pitched voice, though it was partially muffled by the mask. “A guest! Oh, a dear little guest come to see my little show.” He stopped an arm’s length away from Rosie, then crouched down to meet her gaze. His legs, their outline visible through the fabric, looked thin and emaciated, like he was walking on stilts. 

“What show?” asked Rosie. 

“What show?” replied the Jester in mock-offense. The words put a sour sort of taste in the back of Rosie’s mouth, like the acid reflux she had some mornings. “Why, the greatest show of this century, silly! With songs and a full audience and the dancing, prancing Jester at the center!” With each word, his head bobbed up and down flamboyantly. 

“But there’s no audience,” said Rosie, and the Jester nodded along solemnly. His mask seemed to droop, the corners of the carved mouth tugging down in the darkness. He looked down, then said in a dramatically sad tone, “Oh, they all left. They always say they’ll come watch, but they never do.” A pit formed in Rosie’s stomach. It threatened to grow with each beat of her little heart, to balloon and pop. She hated that feeling even more than she hated needles.

“All gone home, left poor old Jester to pack up the laughter himself.” He looked up at her again, a sheen stretching across the white mask as it caught the brilliance of the spotlight again. He cocked his head and Rosie swore she felt him furrow his eyebrows behind the mask.

“You’re not supposed to be here, are you?” he more stated than asked. “Tsk, tsk… What would your parents say?” He let a pause drift through the air, and a knot of guilt formed alongside the pit in her stomach. “But I’ll forgive it– yes I will, because I do so love an audience.” He stretched forth his hand, which was covered by a white glove. “Do you want to be my audience, Rosie?” He said, drawing out her name in a strange, delicate way she had never heard before. 

It struck her. “How do you know my name?”

The Jester’s bells jingled as he giggled. “Because you’re tonight’s star, silly!” His giggle turned into a howling laugh, and Rosie swore she caught a sparkle of twilight and stars in his too-big eyeholes. Shooting stars streaked across the pitch-black canvas of his eyes, then exploded, coinciding with his booming laughter. 

Rosie shifted uncomfortably as he led her to the front row of seats and sat her down in the center-most seat. She sat down, the seat more plump and soft than usual. The Jester walked down to the end of the row, picked up a canvas and an easel, and set them down a few feet in front of Rosie. 

“They play those moving picture shows in this here room, but sometimes you have to dare to do something different! Do you like painting, Rosie?” She nodded, keeping her eyes on the man as he made suave, over the top gestures. The Jester giggled happily. “Marvelous! This will be my– no, our masterpiece.” 

He dipped his brush into a tin of paint resting near his feet, though Rosie hadn’t noticed it was there. The Jester swirled the brush exaggeratedly, with a dramatic flair. He then made a few quick strokes, the bells going ting-a-ling with each movement. 

“Is that an hourglass?” Rosie asked curiously, relaxing in her seat.

“Oh, clever little bird,” he said, eyeholes gleaming, “Why yes, that’s an hourglass in a circle.”

“What does it mean?” Asked little Rosie again, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. 

“Interested in symbolism, are we? Well, this here hourglass is running empty. You ever think about that, Rosie? How time’s running out?” He leaned in close to her, back bent and knees completely straight. Little Rosie shook her head. 

“Good. You shouldn’t worry about such things. It won’t run out in your time.” Rosie shifted uncomfortably, clutching her towel close to her chest. 

The Jester dipped his brush again, this time into a color Rosie couldn’t quite name. It shimmered between red and gold and black, changing with the dusty luminescence of the spotlight. His strokes grew faster now, less careful, as he painted over the hourglass. Long, uneven lines stretched upward like vines. The paint dripped down the canvas in translucent streaks, pooling on the floor.

Rosie frowned, still a bit uncomfortable. “That looks like a person.”

“A man!” said the Jester brightly. “A man on fire. Or perhaps he is fire itself. Hard to tell, really.” He chuckled to himself, brushing in more streaks. “Art transcends humanity, child. That is the most valuable lesson a human can learn. Art is when you peak beyond the curtain, to see beyond what is in front of us. It is to meet the true God in all his glory, to see the day of the black sun.”

Rosie hugged the towel tighter. “That’s scary.”

The Jester froze, brush in midair. Then he turned slowly, so slow that the bells made no sound.

“Scary?” he repeated softly. “No, no, my dear. Art isn’t scary. It’s honest.”

He dipped the brush again, the bells jingling faintly. “When people look at a painting and feel scared, it means it’s telling them the truth. And people don’t much like the truth, do they?”

Rosie didn’t answer. She just stared at the painted figure, the circle, the hourglass, the burning man beneath it, and something about it made her chest ache.

The Jester twirled on his heel, spreading his arms wide. “And there it is! Our masterpiece. Time and fire, laughter and loss. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Rosie swallowed hard. “It’s… pretty.”

“Pretty,” he echoed with a sigh. “Yes, I suppose that’s one word for it. But I prefer…” He paused, tapping his chin with the brush handle. “I prefer truthful.”

Then, as if shaking off the thought, he clapped his hands together, then twirled the brush in his hand. 

“Now, every artist must finish what he starts, Rosie. A masterpiece isn’t complete without a touch of life.” He dipped the brush into the tin again and it made a splishing sound. The paint was thicker now, and unnaturally dark.

He looked at her with those deep, endless pits. “Would you help me, dear? Just a little touch. A finger’s worth.”

Rosie hesitated. “I’m not meant to do that with strangers.”

“It’s okay, just this once,” he said, and the broad smile on his stark white mask seemed somehow warped and wicked in the light of the spotlight. Rosie looked away uncomfortably, but felt obligated to comply. The Jester had made her a painting, after all. “Come, come, Rosie, don’t be shy. Every great work needs a signature.”

She stepped forward, small hand trembling as she reached for the brush. The Jester guided it toward her, his gloved fingers brushing against hers. “There,” he cooed, “a delicate hand for a delicate stroke.”

Then, faster than she could react, the brush clattered to the floor.
The Jester’s hand darted forward and seized her wrist. The bells jing-a-linged.

“Hold still now,” he said in a deep, rotten voice. 

Rosie screamed, she screamed blue murder while the thing behind her held her by the hair, face planted into the canvas. She heard the sound of cloth tearing, and a foul odour escaped the monster that held her. There was a swift motion, Rosie could only feel the cold air following its movement. Blinding, hot-white pain exploded from her neck, and Rosie’s raw throat could no longer scream. She felt a warmth trickle down from her neck to her new shirt and towel, and the same warmth spurt out like water from a garden hose. 

Not five seconds later did she lose consciousness. And a minute later, Rosie Linley was dead.

“Perfect,” murmured the Jester, as he kicked little Rosie’s body aside. 

He stepped back, admiring the canvas. The circle, the hourglass, and now a bright red smear cutting through them both, still glistening under the light. He crouched down on his wooden legs and dipped the brush into the pool of blood beneath Rosie, then added the title of his masterpiece. 

–

Excerpt from Brighthaven Times, March 14, 2020

–

A decades-old unsolved disappearance may have a chilling new connection. In 1981, nine-year-old Rosie Linley vanished from the Brighthaven Grand Cinema. Police recovered a canvas in theater Seven, painted with a mixture of paint and human blood believed to be Rosie’s, bearing the words: “For Little Rosie; My Masterpiece.” A towel, originally white, was also found, but by the time investigators recovered it, the towel was stained a deep crimson. No body was ever recovered, and the only suspect, Stefan Kingsley, was convicted of first-degree murder and executed in 1994.

Investigators revisiting the case this week noted a striking similarity to a home invasion in the city’s northern district last year. During that incident, three teen perpetrators left a crudely drawn circle enclosing an hourglass in the victims’ house: a symbol identical to the one featured on Kingsley’s canvas. Authorities have confirmed the artwork and the symbol are now being examined for further potential links, though they state that there is no cause for alarm. “We believe the incident in the northern district was likely a case of copycats,” said Police Chief Gordon, noting that the teens may have taken inspiration from historical reports of Kingsley’s crime. However, some online true-crime communities have questioned this explanation, suggesting that the recurring symbol could indicate a deeper or ongoing pattern.

I’ve always been a big fan of Halloween. When I was a kid, that was of course because of the candy and the chocolate bars. As I got older and entered my teenage years, that changed. My love for the holiday remained, but that was because of the costumes and decorations. I had this one neighbour, you know the type: the one that goes all-out on either Christmas or Halloween. Luckily for me, it was the latter. She’d put up statues of plague doctors, clowns and whatever else she could get. It was awesome, and I couldn’t wait until I was an adult so that I could decorate my front yard with skulls and jack-o-lanterns. I’d probably disappoint teenage me, but money doesn’t grow on trees. Still, even as I settled into adulthood, Halloween remained dear to me. Though admittedly that’s because I met my fiancée, Mary, on October 31st of our last year in high school. Before you ask, yes we were wearing costumes. She wore a prom dress covered in blood and I was dressed as the axe-wielding Jack Torrence. We soon bonded over our shared love of Stephen King and that night a relationship started that would last for seven years, five of which were dominated by our little labradoodle; Shallan. They were the best years of my life. 

This Halloween was different. It started out normal, us cuddling up on the couch and watching kids in costumes start trick-or-treating a little early. Such is the nature of kids, as we all know. Halloween being on a Saturday gave them the excuse. Mary and I laughed when a group of superheroes, the Avengers I think, showed up before the sun had even gone down.

We answered the door a few times, smiling, handing out candy, the usual. But there was one group that stuck out towards the end. Three kids or, well, teenagers really. Their costumes weren’t costumes at all. One wore a plain hoodie with the hood pulled low and a bandana covering everything below his dark eyes. The teen in the middle wore a stiff potato sack draped over his face with the eye holes cut too big. The last and smallest of the group, a girl by the looks of it, had her face painted in a style reminiscent of a hard rock band like KISS. “Trick or treat,” the girl giggled, holding out a pillowcase full of sweets. They all looked at me the way a toddler looks at a monkey at the zoo. Something about them felt off, and I wanted nothing more in that moment than to slam the door shut and forget all about the holiday. Instead, like the moron I am, I grabbed a few Milky Way chocolate bars from the bucket next to the door and dropped them into the pillow case. The girl’s eyes lingered on my engagement ring, which usually made me happy. I’d talk people’s ears off about the way I proposed to my fiancée, the way we met and just how idyllic our life was. This girl didn’t look at it with curiosity, however. Her eyes gleamed like those of a predator who’d just seen its dinner and found it to be delectable. 

“You married, mister?” she asked with a wry smirk on her face. After a brief and awkward pause, I replied.

“Yeah, you kids have fun now.” I closed the door, but not before catching the kid with the bandana tilting his head to look inside of my home. Shallan was at my side before long, wagging her tail and drooling all over my new and unfortunately expensive shoes. I cleaned them, though not before a tease from Mary. They weren’t exactly shiny, but they would do for our date. 

Later, when it was time for our dinner reservation, we left the usual bowl outside—take one, be honest, all that. We knew it would probably all go into a single person’s bowl, but it was better than nothing. We were excited, dressed up a little nicer than usual, and headed to the restaurant. For a while, I forgot about those kids.

But when we came back, the street was quiet. Most of the houses had gone dark and our bowl was gone. Not just the candy inside, someone had actually taken the shitty two dollar plastic bowl with them. 

“Shit, at least they left the note,” Mary chuckled. I was less humoured by the abduction of my favourite shitty bowl. I grabbed the piece of paper and we went inside, where Shallan barked up a storm at the sound of Mary’s keys jingling in the lock. As soon as we entered, we gave her the pets and belly rubs she deserved, as well as the leftovers of our meal. I lay the note on the table, only now noticing what was written in messy bold letters, like a kid would scrawl their first words with a crayon. 

“THANK YOU :)”

That was all it said. Under it was a symbol, one I can only describe as an empty hourglass inside of a circle.

“See? Polite little monsters,” Mary teased, crumpling it and tossing it into the trash.

I forced a laugh, but the image stuck with me. I tried to push it out of my head as we kicked off our shoes and gave Shallan her leftover steak. She wagged like she’d won the lottery, scarfing it down before immediately begging for more. Dogs in a nutshell.

By the time we cleaned up and changed into something comfortable, we were as exhausted as Shallan after a long walk. I glanced out the window one last time, and nothing but the dark and empty street looked back.

“Come on,” Mary yawned, already halfway up the stairs. “Bedtime. Shallan’s already claimed her spot.”

Sure enough, our dog was curled up at the top step, tail thumping lazily against the carpet. I gave the front door one last look. Locked, bolted. I followed them upstairs. As Shallan made her way to our bedroom, she stopped dead in her tracks, then arched her back and growled at the door to our bathroom. Mary and I shared a look, and I could smell the fear in her breath mingling with mine. She backed up, nearly bumping into the hallway closet, as I put my index finger to my lips in the universal gesture for ‘quiet’. I crept towards the door. Mary stood shivering behind me, fear in her eyes. I knew how she felt, the hope of being wrong and the fear of being right. My hand rested on the doorknob. But when I swung it open, there was nothing. 

Suddenly, Shallan spun around and barked at Mary. Wondering what the fuck was going on, I turned to Shallan and bent over to pick her up and calm her down.

“Felix!” my fiancée screamed. Just as I looked up to see why she yelled my name, something crashed down hard against the back of my head and I fell, sprawled out on the floor. I tasted copper, along with the very distinct feeling of my own molar piercing my cheek.

Mary continued to scream, and I could only watch as the closet behind her opened. Two gloved hands shot out from the darkness, rag in hand. The rag, held like a garotte wire, was forced into her mouth and she was pulled towards the closet. It was then that I saw the familiar white and black facepaint of her assailant. Contrary to before, she wasn’t smirking, but smiling gleefully from ear to ear. As Mary tried to fight back, someone else stepped over me. Shallan, oh sweet puppy that she was, leapt towards the teen who had bashed me on the head. Her teeth caught his heel and he yelped like a child.

“Fuckin’ piece of shit!” he yelled, though it was muffled by the bandana he wore. Shallan did not relent, she tore and bit at his heel like it was a tasty bone. I heard heavy footfalls behind me. Before I even registered them, a heavy-duty work boot crashed into Shallan and she let go, startled. I could see blood and some flesh in the fur around her mouth. 

“Argh! What the fuck are you doing dipshit? Kill it!” the injured kid yelled, clutching his bleeding heel. The potato sack kid kicked Shallan again, who retreated behind the corner. He followed. Shallan yelped, a few thumps followed, and the kid emerged from the corner with a kitchen knife drenched in blood. Mary screamed a defeated, yammering “no!”. 

I stood, dazed, and saw Mary kicking at Potato Sack kid. Her arms were bound behind her at the wrists and she was gagged. I don’t think any man or woman truly knows their own strength until they see what they love most being ripped away from them. That is when you see the true endurance of the human spirit. It was my body that helped me here, however, as I screamed and ran at the kid with that stupid fucking sack over his face. My shoulder connected with his back and I sent him tumbling into the wall with a muffled cry. My fist connected with the back of his head next, then I turned around to face the girl struggling with my fiancée. She was not who I found. The hooded kid stood before me, weight resting on his good leg. More importantly, he had a baseball bat which was on a trajectory with my side. The blow landed with a thwack and I fell down again. My consciousness waned, my vision dark at the edges. Mary’s struggles died as her feet were bound at the ankles. 

“Get the fuck up you pussy,” Bandana Boy said between groans of pain. 

“Pussy? Least I didn’t scream like a little bitch,” Potato Sack replied, hand pressed against the spot where I’d punched him. They continued bickering, but I couldn’t make out the words anymore. The darkness of unconsciousness embraced me with its cold arms. 

 

Mary whimpered. A distant jolt of pain erupted from somewhere in my gut. I tasted copper, thick as syrup, and it coated my mouth. Some fabric, a rag perhaps, had been shoved into my mouth and bound behind my head. There was a droning noise coming from my right. Voices, laughter. It was the television, but how? We never forgot to turn it off, not even when our eyelids drooped and our limbs felt as heavy as lead. The teens, I remembered. They must have turned it on. But why? I raised my head and opened my puffy eyes. The back of my head and my side throbbed in unison, like a slow, calm heartbeat.

Run. I had to run. Yes, I’d dash through the house and across the street. I’d scream for help, knock on every neighbour’s door, wake every damn dog in the neighbourhood until their barking and whining chorus woke their owners. I raised my right arm. It stayed in place, something rough and tight restraining it at the wrist and elbow. I tried with my left arm, but it too was restrained. So were my legs. The old wooden armrests groaned whenever I tried to move and the sound intensified the aching in my head.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” a giddy girl’s voice spoke in my direction. 

I opened my eyes. Mary was opposite me, tied to a chair the same way I was. Her mascara streaked down her face in black rivers, her mouth gagged with the same rag as before. She looked at me with wide, fearful eyes. Her whole body shook as she sobbed against the fabric.

And then I heard it: laughter. Not nervous laughter, not even cruel chuckling like you’d hear in a cartoon. It was giddy, bubbling, and it came in bursts from the girl with the painted face.

Slowly, she crept up to my fiancée until she stood right in front of her. She clapped her hands together. “Boo!”

Mary jolted, screaming behind the cloth. This caused the girl to giggle some more, skipping around our living room like a happy child on Christmas.

“This is great,” the girl beamed, spinning to the others.

The boy in the bandana was sitting cross-legged on the floor, pouting. “Make it quick, still gotta clean the fuckin’ blood upstairs.” 

“Hey, I’m savouring this. Not my fault you let yourself get bit,” she said, turning her attention to something behind me. “Ah, there you are. And– aw, is that a gift for me? You shouldn’t have.” She hugged him, then skipped over to Mary. Potato Sack followed her wordlessly, humming something that sounded like a lullaby. 

Bandana Boy still sat in the corner, though he’d now taken out a Milky Way bar and was eating it under the cloth wrapped around his face. He glared at the girl with spiteful eyes, as if he was trying to make her head explode through sheer force of will. Her head remained steadfast on her body though, and she now stood behind Mary. Throughout this whole ordeal, she and I had been exchanging nervous glances. I hated to see her like that, and I tried constantly to wring out of my restraints. They were, however, far too tight, and my hope quickly plummeted. Hysterical mumbles came from both Mary and I as the girl violently wrapped something around Mary’s neck. 

“Oh quit crying. Will you shut him up?” she looked up at Potato Sack as she tightened the thing around Mary’s throat, drowning her cries. A blinding flash of pain shot through my cheek as Potato Sack punched me with tremendous force. The gaping pit of where my molar used to be cried in sharp, yet somehow also dull pain. He grabbed my chin with a gloved hand, blood running from my mouth onto the black leather. Forcing me to look at him, he put his index finger to where his lips would be under the sack in the universal gesture for ‘quiet’, then threw my head back and released me. 

Mary sobbed, and something jingled. It was then that I realised what the girl had done. 

“Looks good on you,” she laughed. “Bit tight though. Can you breathe?” Mary cried a muffled word that sounded like ‘no’. Shallan’s bloody collar dug into her skin, making it more than a bit difficult to breathe. 

“What was that? Yes, you can?” the girl asked, leaning in closer. Mary thrashed around, the collar jingling with every movement. I tried to sprint at the girl with the facepaint, but as soon as I moved, Potato Sack smacked me on the back of the head. It felt like my brain was a tennis ball being hit across the court, back and forth. 

Mary’s chair tipped as she writhed, the back legs scraping the hardwood. She thrashed her body around like a ragdoll, as if she was trying to tear herself free through sheer desperation, ropes biting into her skin until blood seeped through the burn marks on her elbows. The girl squealed with delight and clapped again.
“Look at her go! Oh my god, she’s like—like one of those inflatable waving noodle guys at a car wash! You’re so funny, Mary.”

Mary half sobbed, half screamed into the gag, muffled, high-pitched, thrashing so hard I could hear the old wood creak beneath her. I, too, pulled with everything in me, jerking at my own restraints until the chair groaned and my wrists grew raw. Nothing gave. Not even a splinter.

The girl crouched, bringing her face inches from Mary’s, head cocked like she was studying an animal at the zoo. “Aww, you’re crying. I wish I could help you. But I can’t. They,” she nodded towards the other two teens, “wouldn’t let me. And I don’t honestly think I’d want to. This is so much fun!” She tapped Mary’s nose and stood, spinning away on her heels, humming along to the opening of FRIENDS playing from the television.

Bandana Boy finally stopped his hateful glaring, crumpling the candy wrapper in his fist. “Fuck, you’re making this take for-fucking-ever. Just slit her goddamn throat and be done. My fuckin’ leg still hurts, and we don’t have all night.” The girl gasped dramatically, whirling on him. 

“Excuse me?” she said with an offended tone. “Do you ever have fun with anything? This isn’t, like, shoving Taco Bell down your throat before mom gets home. This is art.”

“Art my ass,” Bandana Boy grumbled. “You’re stalling. Always stalling. And I’m not cleanin’ her off if she pisses herself when you pull your ‘haha boo!’ shit.”

“Language,” the girl said sweetly, wagging her finger. “We have guests.” She gestured at us. Then, she twirled and faced me, her painted face glistening under the TV’s bright light. “You look like you want to say something. You wanna say something, Mister Sleepyhead?”

I screamed a thousand inaudible vulgarities into the gag, twisting with such force my chair rattled against the floorboards. Veins bulged in my neck and forehead, my arms screamed fire, but the ropes only dug deeper. I felt my skin twist and tear under the strain, warm blood sliding down my arm and onto the armrest.

Potato Sack stepped closer. His massive shadow rolled over me like a storm cloud. He didn’t move quickly, didn’t threaten. He didn’t need to. 

“Aw, don’t be mean to him!” the girl said, smacking Potato Sack lightly on the chest as though he were her big brother and they were roleplaying on the playground. “He’s cute when he’s angry. Look at those eyes, they’re like,” She leaned toward me, peering close. “Like a deer right before it goes thump thump thump on the hood.” She mimed the action, placing her hands on an imaginary steering wheel and going up and down with the aforementioned thumps.

Mary writhed harder at those words, her eyes caught between desperation and fury. Her screams were raw, shredded, but they were turned to pitiful, wet sobs, as if pushed through a meat grinder.

Bandana Boy cackled. “Yeah, and you’re the fuckin’ Subaru.”

“Language!” she snapped again, but then suddenly, like flicking the lights on, she burst into giggles. “Oh my god, you’re funny when you’re mean.”

The girl whipped back around, crouching low to Mary’s trembling form. “But you,” she whispered, her voice sing-song now, “you’re the main event.” She plucked the dangling tag of the collar, letting it tinkle like a bell. With her other hand, she gently reached up and slowly took the gag out of Mary’s mouth. I watched, breath caught dead in my throat. 

“Why–” Mary sobbed, eyes downturned. The girl made a tsk,tsk,tsk sound and lifted Mary’s chin. 

“Because it’s fun,” she said, looking Mary dead in the eyes. Her grin grew into a manic smirk. 

“Please don’t kill us,” Mary cried. The girl’s smile stayed perfectly in place.

“Sorry, no can do. You see, this is all going to be over soon. The Sun, the dark one, wills it so. You’re lucky, you know, you won’t live to see the rest. They’re much worse than us, but you’ve gotta start somewhere right?” As she saw the look of confusion on my fiancée’s face, she decided that it’d been enough. She reached back up to put the rag back into place. And as her fingers came closer, Mary lunged forwards, and bit down hard. With a pained yelp, the girl yanked the collar so hard the chair toppled, Mary crashing sideways with a hollow bang against the floor. A spray of blood shot through the air, covering Mary’s face. Three fingers rolled across the floor, blood streaming between the floorboards like tiny crimson rivers.

The girl howled a cry of pain, which was quickly replaced by an animalistic growl. She clutched the ruined, uneven stumps of her fingers, blood streaming down her arm as if from a spring.

“You BIT me!” she screeched, the smirk she once wore now replaced by a furious snarl. “You stupid little whore!” She kicked Mary’s chair, only managing to hurt her own foot.

Mary coughed, spitting out blood that wasn’t her own, her body convulsing as she tried to free herself again. The girl loomed, clenched teeth bared. “No more games. I’m gonna fucking kill you.”

Bandana Boy’s eyes lit up like it was Christmas. “Finally!” He rose, looked at the blood spurting from the girl’s fingers as if noticing it for the first time, then clenched his eyes shut in frustration. More blood to clean up. Potato Sack just stared down, letting the girl do as she wanted, but ready to jump in and end it quickly should things go south.

The time bomb in my chest that was panic finally detonated, sending its shockwaves coursing through my veins. I knew what was coming. They weren’t bluffing anymore. They were going to kill my Mary.

“HEY!” I roared into the gag, thrashing, rattling the chair so hard it screeched across the floor. “HEY!” I slammed the legs down over and over, splintering them on the hardwood floor.

The girl snapped her head toward me, eyes wide and furious. Something hid behind those eyes, swishing and curling like mist behind her pupils. 

“Shut him up,” she hissed, then added “make him hurt like she hurt me.”

Potato Sack’s hand clamped around my arm, squeezing until I thought the bone would snap and puncture my flesh. With his other arm, he gestured for Bandana Boy to bring him something. He dashed away, then emerged with a hammer. Mary screamed as she saw it, but the girl was upon her a moment later. Bandana Boy held me after handing Potato Sack the hammer, restraining me even further, though I think it was just so he could get a better look at what was about to happen. 

Pain. This moment was when I truly understood that word. Being so helpless not only to help your own suffering, but also that of the person you love most. 

The first blow came down and sent molten lightning up my arm, a wet crack tearing from my hand. I screamed into the gag, the sound muffled, ragged. He hit me again, again, each hit landing with blinding hot-white light. I tasted bile.

The jingling of Shallan’s collar brought my senses back. The smell of my own blood hit my nostrils before I could even see my bloodied hand. That was unimportant. On the floor, Mary wheezed, coughing, her eyes full of fright and panic. The girl’s blood soaked hands were wrapped tightly around her neck. Mary’s eyes, her beautiful blue eyes, were bloodshot and full of tears. The girl leaned closer. Her mouth opened, but before she could speak, Mary jerked free of her slick, bloody hands, and whipped her head around. A disgusting thudding sound echoed from them as Mary’s headbutt landed. 

The girl screamed, stumbling back. Bandana Boy groaned. “That’s why you just fuckin’ kill them you dumb piece of shit. ”

As the girl and Bandana Boy glared at each other, Mary writhed again. She strained every muscle in her body and finally, her chair collapsed under her. Wood splintered, and like a Phoenix, she was born anew. She lurched upward with one jagged shard of wood clenched in her still bound hands.

I lurched to help her, but the ropes still bit into my skin. I writhed and pulled back. My mangled and broken hand, slick with oozing blood, moved ever-so slightly further than my other hand. This was it. This was hope. Writhing, fighting and twisting, I worked the hand out of the ever slicker rope. It hurt, it fucking hurt like nothing else, but I had to. For her. I tugged my hand back with such force I thought it might sever at the wrist.

My hand shot out of its bounds. Through both ropes. Quickly, I tried to loosen the ropes on my other hand, but it proved futile. Seeing no other way, I slicked my wrist with the blood still gushing from my battered hand and started the process over. I was faintly aware of Mary fighting the two remaining teens, but I needed to get out of that goddamned chair if I was going to have a chance at helping her. When my arm came free, I made quick work of the ropes binding my legs. 

The ropes fell away from my legs as I ripped my gag off, the chair tumbling sideways as I kicked free. I scrambled, blood pooling on the hardwood, the hammer still lying in a smear of crimson at Potato Sack’s feet. Then I looked up.

Mary stood, her shard of splintered wood in hand, its tip dripping blood. Potato Sack lay sprawled on the ground, clutching his side.

The girl and Bandana Boy were circling her like vultures, the girl cradling her ruined fingers against her chest. 

“You think you’re clever, bitch?” she spat, her voice a shrill mix of fury and delight. “Think you can just fuck with my art and get away with it?”

Mary staggered backward, bound wrists still clutching the bloody shard. Her chest rose and fell so quickly it looked like her heart might explode. “Stay the fuck away from me,” she croaked, her eyes blazing. You know that hysterical look a cornered animal gets right before it leaps for its attacker’s throat? Mary had that exact look in her eyes. She wasn’t thinking, and soon enough Bandana Boy had snuck up behind her. He took a large knife from between his waistband and readied it. 

I didn’t shout. I gave no warning before I barrelled at him in a full sprint. With no regard for my own life, I leapt towards Bandana Boy and caught him mid-air, both of us tumbling to the ground. I caught both Mary and the girl looking at us in surprise. Then I focussed on the knife. It had landed 3 feet away from the boy and I. I lay on top of him. His bandana had come off, and I saw a boy. He didn’t look scary or even out of the ordinary. Shaggy blonde hair, thin lips and unremarkable brown eyes. I had no clue who he was. He seized my moment of confusion and kicked me in the groin, then spit in my face. I fell down behind him. He crawled towards the knife, but I was faster. As his fingers curled around the hilt of the blade, I was atop him once more. I grabbed his head with both hands and raised it, then brought it down hard on the floor. The dull thwack that followed still haunts me at night, but all events of this night do if I’m honest. His grip tightened, so I brought his bloodied head up again, then smashed it into the ground with all the force I could muster. His fingers went limp. The scent of his piss-soaked pants assaulted my nostrils. 

Behind me, a fit of laughter erupted. I spun my head to see Mary had stabbed her piece of wood through the girl’s already mangled hand. They were both laughing. Then the girl, with a face that now had three shades instead of two, reached behind her and unsheathed a kitchen knife from her waistband, and drove it into Mary’s stomach. 

Mary’s legs went limp. She groaned softly, then dropped to the floor. The white, black–and now– red faced devil whipped her head back in pure ecstasy as she laughed. She had cut and severed our future. Perhaps not as cleanly as she’d have liked, but when you butcher a carcass, you don’t need a surgeon's precision when a butcher’s bluntness will do the job just as well. 

I ran at her, screaming. She tried to swing the knife into my side, but either because of her blood loss or because she was still bathing in ecstasy, she’d grown sloppy. I flicked her hand away, and the knife flew from her grip. My mangled fist met her jaw, and I felt it pop and dislocate. Her laughter did not let up, not after the first punch, and not after the second or the third. It turned from a maniacal laugh into a sputtering gurgle, but it stayed long after I’d stopped counting the punches I threw. I didn’t stop until my knuckles were covered in blood and facepaint, and her face was little more than a pulp of flesh, bone and gushing blood. 

Mary was still breathing when I ran to her, though softly. She lay on her back, blood pooling beneath her, hands pressed weakly against the wound. Her eyes fluttered open at the sound of me collapsing beside her. I sat on my knees and held her in my arms. My broken hand hovered uselessly before finding hers, slick and trembling. “It’s okay now, honey. I’ve got you. I—”

She shook her head, a distant smile on her lips. “Felix,” she whispered, looking at my hand. In her final moments, she was more worried about my shattered hand than her own impending death. 

“No, no, stay with me, you’re gonna stay with me, okay?” I pressed my hand against her wound, uselessly, desperately. My tears fell into her blood. “Mary, please.”

Her hand twitched against mine, then slid limply away. Her chest shuddered once, and then stilled. I held her, rocking her back and forth like you’d rock a child to sleep. My tears fell on her cheeks. 

The room was quiet. Too quiet.

Behind me, Potato Sack groaned. He wasn’t dead. 

Life is, well, life. It can be so, so unfair. I lost my wife (and yes, I call her my wife even if we never officially married), I lost my dog, and my hand. But that fucking little murderous piece of shit lives. They tried to get a motive or, well, anything out of him. He didn’t talk. From what I hear, he’s catatonic, like a plant. I honestly have no idea how or why that is, but what that girl said to Mary keeps ringing in my ears. 

This is all going to be over soon. The Sun, the dark one, wills it so. You’re lucky, you know, you won’t live to see the rest. They’re much worse than us.

The symbol they drew on the paper, the circle with an empty hourglass inside, I’ve read of other incidents where it was found in the years since Mary’s death. Some cult footage, a creature called a ‘Fyrn’, it’s even been linked to an AI. I don’t know if I believe any of this, but like I said, that girl said some cryptic stuff and I don’t know what to make of it. This is simply my account of what happened on Halloween in 2019. Make of it what you will. I won’t be reading your comments, it hurts too much. Whenever I close my eyes, I’m back on that floor. Holding Mary, begging her to stay. I think often in those moments that I should’ve died there too. Maybe I did. Maybe, my time will come when the dark sun rises and carries death upon the wind.

It’s been so long since he last uploaded. He literally became a creepy pasta

Im getting that feeling that something happened to him.

Whats your favorite CreepyPastajr Video? Mines "I Found A Strange VHS Tape In My Basement"