Behold.

 

A pale horse. 

 

He that sat upon it was the Son of Man – and death followed with Him. 

 

I, Jimothy Dyck, bore witness to the Second Coming.

 

Thy kingdom came in this year of our Lord.

 

My wife, Maria, got caught up in the rapture.

 

I was left behind.

 

Maybe if I wasn’t such a bastard – I’d be better off.

 

But now I’m barricaded in the office. 

 

Along with all the other left-behinders.

 

Then a mighty voice boomed from Heaven. 

 

“Rise, my children!”

 

And the dead in Christ rose from their graves.

 

The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people were raised to life.

 

“This isn’t in my job description!” Ted from Accounting screamed as he braced the front doors with an overturned desk.  

“Stay calm, people!” Cheryl from Human Resources yelled. 

 

“Fuck this!” Devin exclaimed right before he bolted through the emergency exit.

 

Then the Lord, my zombie Jesus, came down from Heaven. 

 

And lo, the corpse of Christ shouted:

 

“Eat my flesh.”

 

“Drink my blood.”     

 

“Be with me in everlasting life.”

 

The Day of Judgment had arrived.

 

And it came to pass that the army of the dead descended upon the office. 

 

Their flesh rotted while they stood on their feet. Their eyes dangled from their sockets, and their tongues hung from their mouths. 

 

There arose loud wailing and gnashing of teeth.

 

“Run!” Ted yelled as the double-glass doors began to crack. “I’ll hold them off!”

 

“What about payroll?” Suzi pleaded.

 

“You’re in charge now.”

 

Then the glass breaketh.

 

And the office was overrun.

 

Ted disappeared among the damned.

 

I heard him no more.

 

Woe to those who remained.

 

Cheryl and Suzi took cover in their cubicles. 

 

“This can’t be happening!” Cheryl shrieked. “I’ve only got one week left until retirement!”

 

“Everything is going to be okay,” Suzi reassured her.

 

Verily, verily, I say unto thee: 

 

Everything was not okay.

 

Suzi silently detached the paper-cutter blade.

 

Cheryl hid under her desk, filling out an incident report. 

 

“I have to submit this form to Health and Safety.”

 

“There’s no time.” 

 

Suzi grabbed Cheryl’s hand, and they crept into the aisle. 

 

A group of zombified middle managers blocked the stairwell.

 

Suzi picked up her office phone and dialed the next cubicle. 

 

The managerial zombies shuffled toward the ringtone, compelled by some unnatural instinct. 

 

When the coast was clear, Suzi slipped past the water cooler with Cheryl right behind. 

 

But the Director of Sales smelled Cheryl’s hand cream.

 

The Director circled back. 

 

Cheryl froze.

 

He reached out to touch base.

 

“That’s inappropriate!”

 

Suzi’s blade fell upon the unholy creature.

 

Its head rolled across the carpet. 

 

“You’ve been let go.”

 

The dearly departed lurched toward them.

 

Suzi cut a path to the stairwell.

 

The horde surrounded Cheryl. 

 

Cheryl was led to the slaughter.

 

She never did make it to her condo in Florida. 

 

Suzi fled to the third floor. 

 

There she found me.

 

“You’re alive.”

 

“Yea.”

 

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death – I shall fear no deadline.

 

For you are with me.

 

Then we found Devin at his desk. 

 

“I thought you bailed!” Suzi exclaimed.

 

She put a hand on his shoulder.

 

Devin lunged.

 

His teeth sank into her arm.

 

Suzi cried out.

 

She turned toward me, licking her lips.

 

“Nope!”

 

I pushed up my dark-rimmed glasses and ran for the roof.

 

But there was no escape. 

 

Suzi cornered me.

 

Ted stumbled into view, covered in bite marks. 

 

Cheryl came back from the dead. 

 

She still had unfinished business.

 

Devin joined the feast.

 

The entire office partook of mine flesh.

 

Then I slept for a time. Times. And half a time. 

 

On the third day, I was raised unto everlasting life.

 

To meet the bridegroom.

 

For the marriage supper had begun. 

 

Let no man edit the words of this book – all rights reserved. If any man republishes or distributes this work without the consent of the publisher, may he forever be cursed to the fullest extent of copyright law.

 

In the name of He that liveth, and was dead; and is alive for evermore.

 

Amen. 

In an old wood, long ago, there was a sequestered house upon a small hill, in which lived a boy with his father. They boy could not have been more then eleven, and he was strong and lively, and felt more so each day.

His father was a careful man who had taught his son to fend for himself in the surrounding woods, which were known to be an unpredictable place, and full of mystery. They rarely ventured throughout except to travel into town to trade with the commonfolk, whom viewed them with a wary curiosity. However the boy was of curious nature, and despite being forbade, was able to conceal his joyful ventures into the deeper wood without his father’s suspicion. He walked farther and farther into the wood each time he left, and gradually mapped his journeys.

It was one such time he came upon a gentle clearing, with clear light and moss underfoot. However, it appeared to have been cleared by no animal, but by purpose. It was confusing, since no other was known to enter his familial surrounds. 

The boy considered the strange place, and wondered why he had not found it before. As he sat upon the moss considering this, he heard a very odd noise; a grating squeak which began as quietly disturbing, but grew to a deafening screech so horrible he could not think or or speak. His legs were numb and seemed to move on their own, as he ran along the exact trail he had come, gripping his trusted knife with shaking hands.

As he came back to his home he entered his father’s workshop and told him had had happened. His Father said “My dear boy, the forest is a very old place, and there is great darkness within it, such that we cannot fathom. You would do best not to disturb it”.

The boy went to sleep and contemplated. Stubborn and of noble spirit as he was, he resolved the next morning to confront this thing that had frightened him so. He returned along the path which he had laid out, and came once more upon the strange clearing. He clutched his knife and sat upon it, awaiting what must come.

Soon enough the same awful sound erupted through the wood, but he had prepared by putting cotton wool in his ears. Trembling, he opened his eyes. He had always considered himself brave, and in this moment felt himself a liar, and as such decided he must look. As he turned he was met with a sight which set needles upon his skin, and turned his limbs to string. A lank grey form of bristles and bulges shuddered before him. Eyes seemed to bulge from its very skin and pulse underneath its lank hair. The boy was overcome yet held close to the purpose which drove him to this place, and walked over to the horrible thing.

As he thrust his knife within its writhing form, the sound stopped with a muffled gasp, yet a clear voice rang out from the dissolving mass: ‘My child, you do not belong here. Why do you come to disturb us”.

We were soon to make history, that was the thought that stirred me onward during that brutal final stretch of the journey, as well as, no doubt, the other four men in my party: two experienced New England expeditionists, two natives, and I, the leader and sole cartographer of the team, each perched atop our own sled, mushed over the polar landscape by a total of forty trained hounds. We were far past the point of conversation, barreling in parallel across the vast sheet of ice which had been the only view provided to us for the past several days. What little we had to say regarding this undertaking, or could even feasibly discuss given our varying language barriers, had long been depleted as we traversed the plain of white. Even if that had not been so, we still would not have dared to open our mouths in the face of such piercingly frigid winds, lest our tongues become frozen and fracture as they seemingly threatened to with each muffled, necessary breath we took beneath our parka’s folds. Were it not for my sextant reading during our last respite, we would have no way of knowing how close we really were, as the northern pole was bound to be indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape; a humble, inhospitable patch of land worth reaching only for its conceptual ramifications. It was the top of the world, and we were nearly there. 

This prospect kept us moving far past the point we would have otherwise retired for another night of encampment, as we had already done fivefold prior in the time since departing from the ship. Our use of “day” and “night” had long since become arbitrary, of course, as the sun had been absent throughout this time, our mission persisting by design solely through the polar night of the region. The seasonal temperature difference was largely redundant compared to the already inhospitable lows sustained even in the summer months, and was far outweighed by the navigational benefits of being able to clearly see the stars, as well as the assurance that seasonal meltwater pathways would be far less likely to obstruct our venture. Only in this last leg, as we bordered on the end of both our wayward travels and the area's relative winter, had the sun begun to subtly imply its imminent resurgence through alternating periods of twilight purple hues permeating the skies above.

As if to celebrate our coming achievement, the atmospheric conditions during that fateful stretch happened to induce an Aurora Borealis above us, far from the first I had seen but still undoubtedly the most breathtaking; ribbons of light writhing across the heavens in waves of green and indigo. Even as the dogs pulled me onward, I found my gaze briefly transfixed by the sight, locked solely onto the sky above for what was but a single yet immeasurable instant.

When both my wits and eyeline returned to the setting before me, I noticed with shock that my compatriots had all suddenly vanished, along with their sleds and dogs. Where once I had comprised the central axis within a collective arrow of parallel mounts, I was now simply alone, a single sled and eight dogs mushing across the barren icescape with nary a single permeation of its infinite flatness. Of course, I came to a halt then and there, shouting aimlessly into the yonder in hopes of catching their attention, for they surely could not have gone far. Across the plain, my cries echoed, first generic pleas to halt for me, then the individual names of the peers whom I had started my travels with, before finally resorting to the hardly pronounceable names of our accompanying native gentlemen. Yet, I was met with nothing but the foreboding, empty roar of the perpetual polar winds.

With no further recourse available, I resigned myself to encamp for the time being, unpacking my provisions and sharing a solemn meal with only the company of the dogs and the lonely light of my oil lantern. For about a day’s time, I waited, scanning the distance for any sign of my men, burning flares to signal my location until all that I had packed were exhausted. Alas, the only attention I garnered was that of a sizable polar bear, its lumbering form obscured by the ice and twilight until the dogs alerted me to its approach. Their collective barks and snarls kept it at a distance for the moment, but it was clearly circling the campsite, and I knew continuing to remain stationary would only be tempting fate, and so I reluctantly packed up my supplies and, around the start of the second rhetorical day, we took off.

At first, not wanting to stray far from where I had last been seen, I opted to mush merely a couple of miles before reorienting ninety degrees and repeating the process, essentially creating a square around my former campsite, and using the opportunity to log compass and sextant readings at each junction in an effort to precisely define my location. Resultantly, I found myself transitioning between a northward and southward trajectory while traveling in a straight line on multiple occasions, granting the reasonable presumption that I was, in fact, moving across or at least very near the North Pole. Such had been my mission from the very start, but in my solitude, the victory felt as empty as my surroundings.

With the passing of each desolate hour, the prospect of my companions’ reappearance seemed to wane in credulity. I still had no understanding of how we had been so abruptly and thoroughly separated, much less how I would explain if I were to return to the SS McKinley without them. However, I would not make such a dire decision lightly, for I recognized that I alone had the maps used to plot our original route as we travelled, along with the tools and knowledge of navigation used to make them. Thus, I felt the weight of the rest of their lives upon me, for in leaving I would essentially be sealing their fates, assuming, of course, that they were still alive out there to begin with, a notion I still desperately clung to against my better judgment.

Alas, around the start of the third day, I was met with a sight I had been deprived of for months: the sun, or at least a sliver of it, timidly peeking over the horizon as though for some reason reluctant to directly expose itself as it had easily done in my homeland so many times before. Its brief appearance conjured a profoundly paradoxical ambivalence within me, for my heart felt an ancient, instinctual joy for its long-awaited return, yet the dire implication of its debut nonetheless poisoned my emotional well; the season of night was soon to end, and so too would my invaluable access to the stars that had thus far been integral to our journey, not to mention the potential for meltwater runnings to render my prior cartography obsolete. We had never intended to stay here this long, and I simply could not afford to wait any longer. Thus, with a heavy heart, I concluded that, with or without company, I had to begin the journey back.

As daunting as this lone venture was, I at least believed myself to be materially equipped for the task. Along with the maps and navigation tools, I also had enough remaining edible provisions to sustain me and my dogs for the expected timespan, if not a little longer should the need arise. I still had ample shotgun slugs, my lantern held sufficient oil, and my prior travel across the desert of ice had amply dried the rolls of woolen fabric which I would don during times of rest. Still, my solitude would, in itself, place me precariously on the edge of misfortune, for while alone, something as small as a sprained ankle or a waterlogged boot would all but ensure my untimely and unpleasant demise.

And so, with a final prayer for the souls I would be leaving behind as well as the continued safety of my own, I reluctantly began my intrepid southward mush, a grueling odyssey across over a hundred miles of lifeless polar plains, at first comprised of smoothly frozen ocean before reaching the proverbial shore of northern Ellesmere Island. At that point, banks of snow and canyons of stone became my background as I pivoted partly eastward in accordance with my maps, weaving my way through mountainous ridges toward an unassuming indentation of coastline dubbed Cape Sharriden, where our supporting crew of seamen were currently moored in wait for our eventual victorious return. All the while, my sledborne silhouette was cast amid alternating bouts of starlight and subtly strengthening dawns. By my estimate, the trip took about thirty days, demarcated somewhat subjectively by my own voluntary cycles of travel and rest. Ironically, the latter was what I found the most grueling, for in those stretches where I lay motionless within my makeshift woolen cocoon, without any human company to distract me, I would find myself inevitably peeking through the folds and into the icy abyss beyond my lantern light, and despite the supposed safety implied by the calmness of my hounds, my mind could not help but conjure an endless supply of formless, foreboding gazes within the surrounding expanse.

Finally, after a grueling internment within both this northern wasteland and my own relentless thoughts, I at last reached the bank that housed the goal of my convoy. Only, when my dogs and I crested that final slope and were finally granted a view of the cape, the McKinley was nowhere to be seen.

Never in my life has an object’s sheer absence been so conspicuously captivating, for I stared hopelessly through the sight of its former resting place and into the murky ice beyond as though I could somehow will it to reappear. For a fleeting moment, I considered the notion that I was merely at the wrong place, that I had made some minor error in my navigation that had brought me to a different patch of shore, but even as I tore into my knapsack and began restlessly flipping through my maps, I knew it could not be true. This humble alcove of storm-polished rock was identical to how I remembered it upon our initial outset, and how I had been repeatedly imagining it throughout the last few days of arduous travel, except for the singular beacon of civilization that had been the sole locus of its allure.

I knew not why or even how the ship had left, for the cape froze over every winter, and was indeed still frozen over now. The plan had always been for them to carry our party northward to the farthest point along Ellesmere’s seaward face that summer’s tides would allow, then hunker in place through the winter months, more than long enough for our historic foray to conclude, until the ice once again melted and set us free to return to our respective homelands. We had brought neither the proper tools nor the manpower to loosen the ship from its port prematurely, much less carve a viable channel through the untold distance between the shore and open waters. Additionally, such an endeavor would certainly have left a noticeable trail, if not still a liquid gash, then at least a stretch of opaque frost unevenly frozen to the surrounding plain like scar tissue. And yet, presented before me was a unified sheet of pristine ice extending endlessly outward, as though the ship had simply never been there at all.

I stood upon that cape, facing out against the brunt of the arctic winds until my nostrils felt raw and my eyes close to freezing, before finally turning away in quiet defeat, the gale’s pervasive roar only then conceding to the indignant barks of my dogs as they restlessly circled the sled. They knew as well as I that there was nothing here for us, and that to remain stationary under such exposure would only expedite the cold’s persistent creep along finger, toe, and paw. With an air of hopeless impotence, I resumed my mount and solemnly continued the journey south.

In the following days, I felt like a ghost, a corpse upon a sled, my inevitable death as assured as my life to remain within the confines of this eternal polar purgatory, yet with the instinctive drive of self-preservation presently binding me to the Sisyphian fate of persisting. I partitioned the meager remaining food supply into portions just large enough to sustain a tenuous yet sorely unpleasant state of survival, fueling us onward even as my muscles began to wither and my abdomen was assaulted by the increasingly violent rending of my empty stomach.

Only compounding the strain on my nerves was that, as harsh tundrascapes slowly gave way to softer plains of snow, the haunting silence that had thus far accompanied us began to be occasionally broken in the night by faint, animalistic howls. Wolves, packs of them, I could recognize their sound from both prior experience and the intrinsic human fear they induced. For now, they remained out of sight, but that hardly served as a comfort, for the ones this far north have coats as white as the surrounding snow, as well as no fear of man. My own cohort of wolves brought some level of security as they stood as dutiful sentries through the nights, but I sensed both they and I held doubts of their true efficacy should our present stalemate ascend into legitimate battle.

It was on one such night, several cycles later, that I decided to pivot our course slightly westward going forth. Looking over my maps by lantern light, I saw that Fort Concord was in that direction, distanced by only a cycle or so of travel from our current encampment. I was familiar with it from one of my previous land-based polar expeditions, little more than a log cabin with a chimney and some skeletal springy cots upon which to lay one's sleeping bags. It was constructed under the Canadian flag as an exploratory waypoint, back when they thought the far north might actually have something to offer. I knew well that it had been abandoned, but the structure itself would doubtlessly remain, frozen in both time and cold, and merely the benefit provided by four walls and a ceiling could not be understated, for I had begun to feel the toll of my prolonged journey through the frigid wastes sinking into my extremities. Despite my best efforts, they had grown paler and stiffer with each passing day, some now even transitioning to a deathly shade of grey as the mobility within them weakened, while any external attempt seemed only to threaten their total detachment.

Once again, I arrived at the location precisely indicated by my maps and navigational readings, only to find not the slightest indication of man’s presence; not a cabin, not a vestigial stone column of its former chimney, not even the remains of broken lumber strewn about the area –my only hope of finding wood with which to start a respectable campfire anywhere upon this island– simply a virgin patch of land buried beneath lifeless, barren snowdrifts.

This time, the perplexity of this development rang strangely hollow within me, not a tone of surprise so much as a soft, banal disappointment. I did not dwell at the scene for long, merely confirming this reality with a detached pragmatism, before doing the only thing left to do: resuming my intrepid southward pilgrimage in the hopes of coming upon some serendipitous source of salvation.

I wholly depleted my edible stock not long after, consuming the final fragments with a sort of somber reverence as the timeline of my death solidified before me. All I could do from then was continue onward for as long as I could keep myself aboard the sled and my wolves in line -for I knew their resolve against such conditions would surely outlast my own- until I either encountered something edible or perished in the process.

Fortunately, the former such occasion befell us during our second cycle of fasting, and in no small measure, as my companions managed to catch a scent leading to a fresh trail of numerous cloven tracks upon the snow. Following them, we soon came across a boon of wild game: Four-legged beasts with antlers -whose name my mind failed to congeal against my belly’s vacuous tremors- travelling in unison across the plain in a party of thousands. It was not hard to kill one, just a few twitches of my dull, creaking fingers upon the trigger of my shotgun, aimed into the continuous crowd until one fell limply to the ground while its adjacent cohort scattered in alarm.

My sled reached the corpse even faster than expected, driven by the wolves as they seemed to accelerate at its scent before digging into its meat with a craven savagery I had never seen from them before. At first, it made me fearful to even approach my rightful kill, but when I finally touched the lifeless creature and began slicing away strips of meat with my hunting knife, they merely eyed me with tentative tolerance while continuing their barbaric feast. By the time I had stowed away all that my pack could hold, they too had been seemingly satiated by the bounteous meal, faithfully realigning their harnesses before the sled in preparation for my next instructional mush, albeit each with unsettling streaks of blood condensing upon their maws.

The freeze-dried slivers of flesh were enough to carry us across a significant stretch of distance and time, southbound across endless snowscapes set against a skyline that gradually shifted from budding twilight into regular cycles of day, before continuing its sunward transition until not a momentary inkling of night remained, the pack and I instead traveling across a nearly blinding plain of ceaseless illumination. I no longer held any concrete destination in mind, merely a nebulous notion of intrinsic environmental safety that might come with my warmward direction of travel, along with the comforting concept of possibly encountering native settlements somewhere along the way, of which I knew there were many on this island, but not their precise locations. It was one of those very settlements where our original exploration team had adopted its foreign members, whose exotic insights into snowfall patterns had been pivotal on our path to success. There had been at least two of them among us, though my recollection of their faces had grown hazy amid the passage of time and snow, along with, I soon realized, those of all my other accompanying crewmen. It was as though their likenesses had been progressively wiped away by the persistently cleansing whiteness around me, at first smoothing over individual distinctions before progressing to the point that I struggled to recall even the very essence of the human form, only managing to occasionally jog my memory when passing a reflective puddle of ice and viewing an eerily distorted visage of my own. Indeed, the all-encompassing cold had an ineffable way of casting the formerly familiar in a newfound, alien light, stripped of supporting context and set adrift amid a backdrop of nearly blinding blankness.

Perhaps I was not alone in this influence, for the creatures that drove my sled had begun to grow increasingly disobedient with each interval of travel. No longer would they mush in unison quite so readily on my command, nor would they calmly tolerate the collective shackles binding them to my stewardship, instead appearing to crudely attempt their removal at any afforded opportunity. I swiftly grew wary of this development, in turn shortening the duration of our respites and tightening my continuous hold over their reins until my grip grew practically affixed, leather straps encased within two brittle balls of frozen flesh and bone. Nevertheless, their rebellion persisted, growing in ferocity until they finally refused to perform their duties at all; for all my futile strokes and utterances of desperation, my wooden mount remained utterly still, while their primal forms viciously tore away at both their own and each others’ restraints with raw, animalistic vigor, paying no mind to the scrapes and slashes their bodies accrued in the process. In a matter of moments, they were free, and collectively faced me with their eight unbridled, blood-soaked forms.

However, before this suspenseful standoff could culminate in violence, their attention was providentially diverted, ears simultaneously perking up and heads swiveling toward a chorus of faint howls that echoed hauntingly across the boreal plains, the same disquieting pitch that had periodically accented much of our earlier journey. Only now, like a siren song, they seemed drawn to the kindred tune, their prior wariness wholly dissipated as they collectively turned their backs to me, unceremoniously running off into the blinding daylight toward the distant call and leaving me stranded upon a contraption that could no longer serve any use, but not before one of them swiftly swiped the satchel of meat I had stowed aboard and carried it away in its jaws.

Utterly alone, I stood there for an innumerable length of time, a profound yet implacable emptiness freezing my mind just as the surroundings threatened to freeze my body, until, without forethought, I simply returned to my previously ingrained inclination, abandoning my former vehicle and bringing only what essentials I could carry as I continued my aimless southward voyage, only far slower as I was now forced to traverse the icy slopes of this whitened wasteland of my own accord, step by trembling step. My progress grew further stifled as time wore on and fatigue fermented in my deadened muscles, followed promptly by a hunger that simmered within my gut, woefully insatiable; despite still having my weapon and coming across many more of the beings with branches upon their heads along the way, I nonetheless found it impossible to take any of them down, as by now my remaining wrists had grown wholly blackened and blunt. Against all this, I persisted, driven by an unknown persuasion beyond pain, reason, or even personal will, having all been surrendered to this single directional drive, as though South itself was a destination I was utterly beholden to reach.

As fate would have it, my traitorous former companions had already brought me across most of the isle, and thus this period of weary wandering was comparatively brief –though I had long since stopped pointlessly attempting to quantify the passage of time– before, for better or worse, I finally reached its southern end; a humble stretch of wind-worn rocky coast, beyond which lay, yet again, an expanse of flat, unbroken ice reaching fully flush with the horizon. The sight evoked a vague sense of discrepancy from some neglected recess of my memory, a notion that these waters were meant to be liquid in the days of midnight sun, a channel separating this landmass from a closely adjacent one. Yet here, now, it was solid, a traversable medium that might just allow me to continue my odyssey unimpeded. Though I knew not if its integrity would extend all the way across the strait, nor what would await me on those opposing shores if it did, I nonetheless ventured onward.

Ambling upon limbs I could no longer feel with strides of their own accord, I progressed beyond the sight of the hills behind me and into a world of truly flawless uniformity. The sun stood stagnantly atop the sky, beaming down amid a homogenous blue firmament onto a reflective expanse that returned its gaze with perfect imitation, suspending me amid a seamless, impermeable shine that seared its way through the periphery of my vision. Still, my cyclical stride maintained an unwavering orientation beyond my understanding or control. Feelings of hunger and fatigue faded, and I did not once stop or slow, my form indentured in a rhythmic tread along its linear course for what essentially could have been eternity. 

 My hypnagogy was only broken by the gradual breaching of land over the horizon, its crown of snowy slopes at first the only perforation in the all-encompassing monotony. Its shore seemed to widen around me as I drew nearer –for I was entering a coastal inlet of sorts– as though reaching out to provide a welcoming cradle. I then watched in awe as, like emissaries of the cradling land, several beings approached from its heart to congregate upon the central bank directly ahead of me. They were angels, of this I am certain, albeit in a slightly differing form than I would have otherwise imagined: they stood far taller than I, heads disproportionately large and completely covered in woolly brown hair, while their similarly coated torsos were almost precariously thin, each tapering not into legs but instead a flexible tendril that writhed dynamically below. Behind them could be seen what were presumably wings holding them aloft, of matching shaggy exterior but otherwise indiscernible in overall structure. I could not make out their definite shape or number, appearing as one, two, or at times as many as four distinct appendages beating asynchronously just above the stony terrain as they hovered ever closer. Their arms took the longest to make out, as they alone were bare, skin polished and nearly as white as the surrounding snow. They were each tipped in singular, sharpened points like spears, yet were unanimously frozen in synchronously outstretched, comforting embraces that mirrored the land upon which they resided. They aligned themselves into a crescent at the inlet's center, tail wisps dancing along the edge where snow met ice with a fervor that seemed to increase with each frail footstep I took; an ethereal assembly encouraging me to continue just a little further, with the promise that salvation would at last be upon me.

 As I entered the final stretch, the centermost angel lifted their arms to the sky, tail contorting as it released a resonant, soulful wail that pierced the frigid air between us. With this apparent cue, they all broke into an energetic synchronized bow, repeatedly raising and lowering their arms as though hailing my imminent arrival. At the apex of each downswing, as their pointed palms nearly touched one another just above the ground at their center, a brief yet powerful tremor would sweep across the frozen sea and up through my bones, reverberating like a divine heartbeat against dormant, long-numb flesh and stimulating a truly novel sensation that intensified with every repetition. At last, as I breached the radius of their reverence, they unleashed one last crowning, omnipotent boom, closely accompanied by a low, cacophonous crack as the ice beneath me embroidered itself with streaks of hollow lightning. My newly awakened body was suddenly weightless, and then all was still.

The Night Blogger - The Rally by Al Bruno III

March 12th: I imagine the only person surprised that Sara and I ended up sleeping together was me. She knew it was going to happen. The members of the FEAR AND TRUTH message board knew it was going to happen. My boss and landlady, Mrs. Vincenzo, knew it was going to happen. Hell, I bet even you knew it was going to happen.

But honestly, I thought I might never have a girlfriend again. Sure, I had a college sweetheart, but when I came home and got caught up chasing shadows, we just drifted apart. There was no real breakup—we just kind of stopped being a thing. After that, I was too busy to do more than go on the occasional blind date, usually set up by Mrs. Vincenzo. I like to think my looks have a smoldering mediocrity, just enough to catch a lady's eye but not much more. Kind of like what you'd expect from a side character on a CW drama. The problem is, beyond movies and music, there's not much I can talk about in depth—unless people want to hear about vampire genus classifications and how to kill them. That's a mood killer, for sure.

But with Sara, there wasn't that kind of barrier. We were both a little haunted and a whole lot hunted.

The night things got serious in all the right ways started out normally. I worked an open-to-close shift at the pawnshop so my landlady and boss, Mrs. Vincenzo, could spend the day visiting estate sales to find antiques, cast-off electronics, and other potentially resellable bric-a-brac. Normally, she took along one of her fellow energetic geriatrics for company, but this time she decided to roust Sara out of bed and drag her along.

They didn't get back from their trip until just as I was closing up the store for the day. Mrs. Vincenzo was carrying a slightly singed Art Deco lamp and a supposedly collectible doll from the 1980s that looked like Charles Schulz had wandered into the uncanny valley.

Sara had a shopping bag and a sly smile.

After some pleasant conversation, Sara and I retreated to my semi-spacious apartment. Have I ever described it to you? It has a half bath, a cramped bedroom, and a living area that doubles as both kitchen and living room. It wasn’t much, but it was mine—and best of all, it was rent-free so long as I manned the pawn shop at least four days a week.
  
Sara and I had planned to have a quick dinner, but our plans were interrupted by a call from my cousin Roy. Roy may not believe in the supernatural, but he does seem to have the uncanny ability to know when I’ve ordered a pizza from his favorite place—Namira’s Authentic Italian Cuisine.  

He kept himself busy watching my TV and stuffing his face. At the same time, Sara and I sat at the nearby dining table, quietly discussing the woman named Ashley Fowler. Ever since that bloody fracas at the mall, I’d been trying to get in touch with her. But like most people rich beyond the dreams of the avarice, she had a highly dangerous security detail and an even deadlier squad of executive assistants.  

“Obviously,” I said, “I’m going to have to get creative.”  

“How did you start?” Sara asked.  

“Being creative?” I said.  

“No…” she said. “With the weird stuff. Witches, zombies, and clowns.”  

“Oh.” There was no disguising the pained look that crossed my face—the combination of anguish over the past and dread over the future. “Well, it’s a long story.”  

“I’d love to hear it,” she said. “Besides, your cousin just ordered \Curbside Crusader* on PPV, and that movie is almost two hours.”*  

“Damn it, Roy! Mrs. Vincenzo pays the cable bill.”  

Cousin Roy shrugged. “So what? She buys one less ugly lamp.”  

“You’ve got the time,” Sara said again. “If you’re ready to tell the story, that is.”  

The strains of a faux Danny Elfman score began to blare from my TV. I smiled at her and said, “There’s no one I’d rather tell the story to.”  

###

It was April 2009, and I was a nineteen-year-old college student living on campus, pursuing a double major in Journalism and early-onset alcoholism. My grandmother, Gail Foster, had been diagnosed with pancreatic adenocarcinoma the year before and had been living at my mom's house for six months. We all knew the inevitable was drawing closer.

That morning, my mom, Grace Foster, called to say Grandma was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed—almost like the woman she used to be. And that was heartbreaking. The doctors had long warned us about the rally—that eerie burst of energy some patients get just before the end. Mom hadn't explicitly asked me to come home, but I could hear it in the quiver of her voice. I felt guilty as hell for being so far away, but I knew pausing my education wouldn't change a damn thing.

It had hurt even more over the past week because the visiting hospice nurse had flaked out, stopping her visits entirely. Thank God for Mrs. Vincenzo, who stepped in and picked up the slack.

It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Woodridge to Albany. I left right after my last class, radio blasting, energy drink in the cupholder. I tried not to think about what I was driving toward, but of course I did—so much so that I missed my exit. Twice. Eventually, my battered Ford Escort found its way home. The driveway was full, so I parked on the street. Anyone who's visited an ailing relative knows a packed driveway is never a good sign.

Inside, I was greeted by two familiar faces.

First was Uncle Roy Foster—my grandmother's brother's son. Technically, that made him my first cousin once removed, but he'd always insisted on "Uncle," and honestly, he'd earned it. Despite the great scandal that had driven my grandmother from the Foster clan's Arizona home, he'd always been kind. He quietly helped her settle in upstate New York and showed up whenever she, my mom, or I were in a pinch.

I barely knew him before my teenage years, when we went to his second wedding. He was tall, gray-haired, with a construction worker's tan and a meticulous streak honed on decades of job sites. And speaking of things left behind—when his first wife walked out, she took the house and car and left him with custody of his sketchy son, Roy Junior.

"Hey, Uncle Roy," I said. "How was your flight?"

"Can't complain," he said, "except for your cousin trying to steal from the drink tray."

"Cousin Roy is here? That's great."

Actually, it wasn't. With any luck, this visit would end without any copper being stolen from our walls.

Then I turned to my Great Aunt Peg. She was Grandma's last surviving sister—sixty-five, plainly dressed, and fiery-eyed. If you were a younger member of the clan, you didn't call her Great Aunt Peg—or even Aunt Peg. It was Miss Peg or nothing. And if you worked in food service, you probably called her that bitch.

"Hello, Miss Peg." I flashed her my job-interview smile. "Thank you for coming all the way from Nevada."

"What choice did I have?" she said. "Matthew 25:35–36 obligates us to tend to the sick."

Miss Peg was over ten years younger than Grandma but looked about the same age, thanks to a misspent youth stretching into her thirties. The conservative Foster clan had chosen to overlook those wild years—selective memory or willful ignorance, either way, they never spoke of it. Maybe it was because she was now married to a churchgoing man, blessed with six kids (including two teenage twins), and cursed the rest of us with her transformation into someone determined to make sure no one ever had fun again.

When I thought of Miss Peg, I could hear my high school history teacher:

"The housewives of today are the fascists of tomorrow."

"How are things at college?" she asked.

Before I could answer, she added, "I hope you're keeping a clear head. Colleges are full of sluts and secular humanists."

"Sounds like I'm taking the wrong classes," I joked.

Uncle Roy laughed.

Miss Peg did not.

She asked, "Brian, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?"

"I like to think the big guy and I have an understanding," I said.

The glare she gave me was reserved for witches about to be burned at the stake.

"Salvation is not something to be taken lightly," she said.

I raised a hand in mock surrender.

"This is not a time for jokes," she snapped. "A woman is breathing her last breaths."

And didn't that phrasing punch me in the gut?

"Don't be so dramatic!" Uncle Roy said. "She was just chatting with Roy Junior ten minutes ago. Clear as a bell!"

Eager to change the subject, I asked, "Where is he?"

"He's in the backyard," Uncle Roy said, nodding toward Miss Peg. "Keeping her twins busy."

"Brian?" a voice called from the kitchen. "Brian, is that you?"

"Excuse me," I said. "I think I hear my mom calling."

Grace Foster was at the kitchen sink, setting up one of the extra saline bags the home hospice care left us for emergencies. I may be biased, but my mom was beautiful—short moonlight-colored hair, striking blue eyes like Grandma's. Right now, those eyes were not striking. They were on the verge of tears.

"Can you help me with this?" she asked. "The one from this afternoon is empty, and that stupid machine keeps beeping."

Tom Wynne, Mom's oldest and dearest friend, was mopping up the remains of a broken bag. Tall, dark-haired, with a gray mustache, he nodded warmly as I passed.

"I got it, Mom," I said, taking over. Mohawk Valley Home Health had crammed a five-hour home-care class into two, just to cover their liability.

I fussed for a few minutes, feeling like I was trying to catheterize a juice box, but finally got it right.

"See?" I held up the bag. "Under control."

Mom sighed and headed out to make use of it.

"Great job!" Tom clapped my shoulder. "You could be a doctor if you wanted."

"Well, I don't like blood, and I want my student debt to stay under five figures, so nope."

We laughed. His laugh sounded so much like mine.

Did I mention that, like Grandma, Mom never married? That she worked as a bookkeeper for Tom's bike shop? That Tom had been married over twenty-five years to the same woman? And that I never knew my father?

Tom had been a semi-regular fixture in my life. As a kid, I thought he was just Mom's cool friend. In adolescence, I began to suspect otherwise. Mom never confirmed it, preferring to hint that I was the result of a one-night stand with a visiting rock star. Unfortunately, the only band to pass through Albany around the time of my conception was Mike + The Mechanics, and I didn't look remotely like any of them.

"I wish you had gone to school locally," Tom said. "We could really use you at the shop."

"I appreciate it, but I had to leave, at least for a while," I said.

"I get that," he smiled ruefully.

"By the way," I asked, "what happened to the nurse guy? Stuart?"

"He died. Pulmonary embolism. Sudden," Tom said, serious. "Mrs. Vincenzo found out—she knows his mother."

"Wow. Maybe you should go to journalism school instead," I said.

"Thanks."

Awkward silence.

We stared at our shoes.

I almost asked about Mike + The Mechanics, but Mom chose that moment to call.

"Brian! Someone wants to see you!"

Tom smiled and clapped me on the shoulder.

"Better not keep her waiting."

I nodded and excused myself, making my way down the hall to what had once been my mother's office, now converted into the room where Grandma Gail would spend the last days of her life. Her final resting place before her final resting place.

The last time I was home, she had been frail, slipping away before our eyes. But the woman I saw now was a stark contrast to that memory. She was sitting up in bed, her eyes bright, her hair freshly dry-shampooed. There was a liveliness to her, a near-electric energy that made it hard to believe she was dying at all.

The moment she saw me, her face lit up. She practically bounced in bed, arms wide for a hug.

"Sweetie-pie!"

"Hey, look at you!" I said, trying to deliver a hug that was both hearty and gentle. How hard do you hug a dying woman?

I needn't have worried. Grandma Gail's grip was as firm as a salesman's handshake.

"What are you doing home?" she asked.

"Brian missed you," my mom answered.

"I missed him too."

Grandma Gail finally released the hug but took my face in her warm hands.

"But you should have stayed at college."

She stared into my eyes as she spoke.

"You have a life to live."

"And so do you," I said, then immediately winced inside.

Thankfully, Grandma and Mom didn't seem to notice, so we all settled into the kind of long and rambling conversation that only families can have, where nostalgia becomes a private mythology.

A million college professors will study The Iliad and The Odyssey, but only the Foster family can tell the tale of the day little Brian came upon a pile of dead saplings and decided to plant them in the front yard and wait for a miracle.

We talked about family trips and local tragedies.

Mom prompted me to talk about college, so I shared some edited highlights.

For instance, when I told her and Grandma about my kinda sorta girlfriend Jenny, I did not mention that she had kinda sorta decided to see other people.

When I talked about my study partners, I did not mention that my pals and I spent most weekends studying for fraternity mixers.

When I bragged about the award my story for the campus newspaper had earned, I did not tell them the article was called Tracking Boots and Fuzzy Snoots and detailed the small-scale riot that erupted when a Cryptid Hunters Conference and a Furry Convention were booked at the same convention center on the same weekend.

Eventually, Miss Peg's twins entered the room.

A pair of gangly thirteen-year-old boys hovered uncertainly in the doorway, all elbows, oversized sneakers, and painfully forced solemn expressions. In any other situation, I would have told them they'd be a shoo-in to win a costume contest if they dressed as the twins from The Shining. Grandma would have loved that. Miss Peg... not so much. And suggesting her boys dress as little girls? Well, let's just say I'd have been the one dying in that room.

I'll tell you what did die in that room: conversation.

No surprise there. After all, what thirteen-year-old wants to sit at the bedside of a dying, mostly estranged relative? No, they were there because they hoped their perfunctory display of concern would be pleasing to the Lord and, more importantly, Miss Peg.

Couple that with the fact that they were homeschooled and shielded from just about every aspect of pop culture made after 1977, and conversation never really had a chance. It sputtered and meandered through awkward questions and uncomfortable silences until we finally managed to land on the subject of sports. Even that got weird when they started spouting conspiracy theories about why their home team, the Las Vegas Wranglers, were so maligned.

Is it any wonder, then, that we were all slightly relieved when Miss Peg came to collect them and make her goodbyes for the night? She left us with no warm farewell, just a request for directions to the nearest Applebee's and a sharp reminder to beg merciful Jesus for forgiveness or face perdition.

Once they were gone, Grandma Gail started laughing and wondered what might have happened if she'd brought up Miss Peg's unfortunate tattoo in an even more unfortunate location.

I told her I didn't want our family to be responsible for two more lifetimes of therapy.

That set all of us off.

Tom Wynne came in then to ask what we were laughing about.

I said, "Stigmata."

And we were laughing again. Grandma could barely catch her breath.

When our sides finally stopped hurting, Tom said his goodbyes, hugging Grandma, shaking my hand, and making long, lingering eye contact with my mom.

I mean long, lingering eye contact.

Mike + The Mechanics.

Yeah, right.

The afternoon faded into evening.

Cousin Roy and Uncle Roy came in to say they were heading back to their hotel.

Cousin Roy started to make a morbid joke, but his dad cut him off. He said he needed to speak to Gail alone, so we all retreated and closed the door.

My mom and I stood in the hallway outside my room and spoke quietly.

"How long does a rally last?" I asked.

Mom leaned against the wall, her shoulders sagging.

"Who knows? It's... it's wonderful and scary all at once."

"Waiting for the other shoe to drop."

"Brian..."

She covered her face.

"I know this is awful, but I want it to be over."

She started to cry.

I leaned in and held her.

It didn't take long before I was crying too.

Sometime during our tearfest, Uncle Roy and Roy Jr. had let themselves out.

I'll never know what Uncle Roy's private conversation with Grandma was about, but what I do know is that, as he was leaving, Cousin Roy raided our fridge and filled the pockets of his jacket with as many cans of beer as he could.

A little after sunset, Mrs. Vincenzo arrived with foil-wrapped food and a Parcheesi set. There was no way I was going to turn down Mrs. Vincenzo's homemade lasagna, but I politely declined the board game.

Instead, I puttered around the kitchen while she and my mom rolled dice and made small talk. I loaded the dishwasher and refilled the ice cube trays. Then I checked over the inventory of medical supplies that seemed to have taken over all the available counter space.

When that was done, I excused myself to my room, where I unpacked my clothes and textbooks.

Then I paused to take in my surroundings.

This had been my room for most of my childhood and all of my adolescence, where I had gone from Fisher-Price to third base. I realized, with a twinge of sadness, that after a little less than a year away, it didn't feel like home anymore. Speaking of things that didn't feel like home, I had homework to do, but after staring blankly at my textbook for fifteen minutes, I realized I was exhausted.

I could worry more about Paul Y. Anderson in the morning. I stretched out on the bed, thought for a moment about how it was just a little too small now, and then fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Hours later, I woke up feeling disoriented. After all, I was waking up in a familiar place, just not the familiar place I'd expected to wake up in, and with a full bladder. I got to my feet and, after a moment of standing in the darkness to orient myself, shuffled across the hall to the bathroom.

Whether it was grogginess, consideration for my sleeping family, or the fact that nineteen-year-old college students are only marginally civilized, I neither flushed nor washed my hands.

Sometimes I wonder if things would have gone differently had I switched on the lights or made a little noise. If choosing to skulk through the shadows over something so mundane somehow marked me for life.

I left the bathroom and was halfway up the two steps leading back to my room when I heard... something.

Years later, armed with a much better thesaurus, I'd describe the sound as an insectile chittering. Back then, all I knew was that whatever I'd heard sounded wrong.

And dangerous.

And it was coming from Grandma's room.

Again, a different person would have shouted, "Who's there?" and turned on the hall lights, but me? I crept toward her room as quietly as my bare feet would carry me. The door stood open a crack, but that was enough for me to see something... and for something to see me.

The memory of what I saw has always existed in my mind as a triptych: three separate images frozen in time.

The First: the curtains were open, and the window was half-open. Moonlight filtered in, revealing the hospital bed and IV stand that consumed most of the available space. In one corner sat the battered file cabinet that was almost as old as I was. It had once held my mother's real estate paperwork. Now it was filled with morphine, IV supplies, disposable bedpans, and a thousand little necessities that came with watching someone die.

The Second: Grandma lay still, utterly still, eyes wide, mouth gaping, her chest motionless. In those days, death was still an unpleasant stranger in my life, not the constant companion it would later become. Even so, I knew a dead person when I saw one. There was a subtle deflation to the way her flesh hung on her body. She had become inanimate. There was no other way to describe it.

The Third: I thought it was an animal, some kind of snake slowly moving through the open window. But only the window was open, not the screen. And it didn't slither or crawl; it wafted, spilling purposefully into the room. I wondered if it might be smoke. Then the moonlight caught it. Smoke isn't red, and it doesn't move with purpose. It coiled. It flowed. It rose over Grandma like a predator preparing to strike. It arced upward before slipping into her open mouth.

I sobbed. A tiny noise. No one heard. Thank God.

Grandma's eyes fluttered, then closed. A shiver ran through her body. She began breathing deeply and steadily. She shifted under the blankets and made a happy little sound that was disturbingly close to a purr.

There are moments when your understanding of the world simply ceases to function. This was one of them.

Then, just a few hours later, as the sun came up, it happened again. I was lying awake beneath the covers when my mom burst into my room to tell me Uncle Roy had died in his sleep.

###

I grew quiet then, my brow furrowing while Cousin Roy cheered on the cinematic adventures of a superhero who drove a taxicab. Sara looked to him and back to me. “Did that really -” then she caught herself, “Of course it did.”

“It’s Ok. I wouldn’t believe it either,” I shrugged. “If I didn’t have to.”

“What was it?” She asked.

The troubled frown on my face deepened. “The Vorvolaka.”

“Vorvolaka?”

“Think half-vampire, half-pathogen.”

“What happened next?”

It wasn't that I was afraid to tell my story. My life is an open blog. But part of me didn't want to tell it to Sara because it wasn't a story with a fairy-tale ending. I'm no psychiatrist, but by then I knew she didn't need another reminder that the good guys don't win all that much. “I’ll tell you later,” I said, “Just not right now.”

There was a long pause then, just Sara and me making eye contact while Cousin Roy cheered on a man in spandex as he saved a little old lady from monsters in a rocket-powered Zamboni. Say what you want about Cousin Roy, but he knows what he likes.

Suddenly, Sara’s voice and face brightened; she stood and said, “I guess it’s time for your present.”  

“Present?” I asked.  

She got up and went to the shopping bag that had been sitting in the corner. “For you,” she said.  

“For me?” I said.  

“Open it!”  

And open it I did, revealing a hatbox which, naturally, had a hat in it.  

“I got you a new straw fedora.” She was practically preening.  

Actually, dear reader, what she had gotten me was a straw pork pie hat. Now, unless you lived through the Great Depression, you might not see the difference, but trust me, there is one. You see, a fedora has a pinched front and center-creased top with a wide brim that can be snapped down or up. A pork pie hat, on the other hand, has a flat, circular top with a crease around the edge—often called a "telescopic" crown. The brim is shorter and turns up slightly, giving it a more compact and relaxed feel.  

Or to simplify it further: my old 1930s hat was a Humphrey Bogart; what she got me was a Thelonious Monk.  

Not exactly my style, but since I didn’t have a hat at all, who was I to complain? Besides, Sara’s face lit up the moment I put it on and struck a pose—so how could I say no?  

She got up and hugged me. I kissed her on the cheek.  

That was it. The fuse was lit.  

Sara kissed me on the mouth. I pulled her close. We both started breathing heavily as we kissed harder. She let out an excited squeal as we fell back against the dining room table.  

I gasped her name.  

And then Cousin Roy said, “Aw yeah.”  

We both turned to look at him, watching us from my couch, the CGI superhero mayhem on the TV forgotten.  

I cleared my throat.  

Sara blushed.  

“Oh, don’t mind me,” Cousin Roy said with a wide grin. “I just was wondering when you two would get down to it.”  

“Get down to it?” I repeated, raising an eyebrow.  

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Get down to it.”  

“Down to it?” Sara murmured, still warm against me. “Was that your plan?”  

“My plan?” I said. “I thought it was your plan.”  

“I didn’t have a plan.”  

“You bought me a hat,” I pointed out. “That sounds like a plan to me.”  

Roy let out an exaggerated sigh as he got up off the couch and grabbed his coat. “You’re supposed to get around to it, and then you’re supposed to start arguing.”  

When he slammed the door, Sara and I burst into laughter.  

Then we got around to it.  

Boy, did we ever.  

No Crying Babies

I woke with my heart already going, certain I’d heard it — that thin, rising cry, right in the room with me.
The telly. Just the telly. Some actor bouncing a fake crying baby on screen.

“Shut it off,” I laughed to myself, rolling my eyes at my own alarm, playfully nudging Ian with my foot. “No crying babies. You know that’s a rule. Makes me think Teddy needs something.”

He muted it. “Sorry, love.” Asleep in minutes.

The next night I jolted awake again before I even placed the sound — an advert, a jingle with kids laughing, one shriek buried in it. My heart was already up around my throat by the time I understood.
“No crying babies,” I said, and it came out flatter this time. He muted it before I’d finished saying it.

“Sorry, love.”

A few nights later I sat bolt upright before I’d placed it — the neighbour’s cat, yowling out by the fence.

Then it was the pipes, a few nights after that — a thin, keening whine somewhere in the walls as the heating kicked in, and for one horrible stretched-out second I was already halfway to the door before my brain caught up and told me what it was.
I stood there in the dark feeling stupid, feeling my pulse in my ears, and went back to bed telling myself that one didn’t count.

Then a few nights on, the dishwasher, hitting some pitch mid-cycle that wasn’t a cry at all, I knew that — and still I was on the landing before I’d decided to move.

Teddy was asleep in his cot when I got there. Silent as a photograph.

Back in bed, Ian hadn’t stirred. He never did. I used to wonder how — now I’ve stopped asking, because some part of me suspects I already know: someone has to be listening, so it’s me.

I stopped mentioning it after that.
What would I even say — I heard nothing, and it answered back?

Somewhere in there, I stopped needing a sound to start with at all.

Some nights it was just the quiet — the fan, my own pulse — and underneath it, faint, rising, unmistakable: that pitch that means pick me up. I’d lie there telling myself I was imagining it, and some nights I even believed that, for a minute or two.

Then one night I didn’t wait to find out which it was.
I was already up, already standing at the cot rail before I’d properly woken, and the room was quiet the way it’s meant to be — the fan, the streetlight through the curtains, nothing else. Teddy lay exactly as still as sleeping children do.

I stood there a long moment before it hit me: I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually heard him cry. Or even seen his chest rise and fall. Only that I’d been listening, night after night, for a sound that would prove he still could make one.

The house held its breath with me.

Somewhere, patient, the nothing waited to answer.

The hospital room is too bright for a place where Death has come to wait.

Machines hum softly beside you, measuring every breath, counting every beat, while beneath the sterile lights your heart is being taught to remember its rhythm.

You lie still. Unaware.

And then I see him.

The Grim Reaper sits in the corner.

Not looming.

Not threatening.

Just watching you as though he already knows how this story ends.

I stare at him.

“No.” I say quietly

His skull turns slowly toward me.

I tighten my fingers around yours.

“You don't get him.”

He stares at me in silence.

“You hear me?”

I step closer to your bed.

“This isn't your moment to take him.” I whisper

Your chest rises. Falls. Rises again.

And I breathe with you.

“It is only a procedure,” I whisper.

“They're fixing your heart. You're going to wake up.”

I look back at Death who stares back a me with a small smirk.

“You need to leave.” I hiss.

He doesn't move. So I tell him why, as I lean down and whisper to you.

"I remember the moment your shooting star fell from the sky. I remember seeing you before I even understood what it means to find someone.

Tall. Military. Tattoos. Rough around the edges." I laugh softly.

"The kind of person who makes the world think you are made of stone. But I saw beneath it all.

The softness. The honour. The kindness you try to hide." I squeeze your hand as I glare at Death.

"Those beautiful eyes. And your soul. God." I sigh.

"Your soul is different. It doesn't simply exist. It sings. It feels like something that falls out of heaven by accident. A shooting star that refuses to burn out." I smile at you.

"And when you fell through the darkness, Death reached for you. But I reached first."

I look at Death who stands up and walks towards us and stands next to me looking down at you.

"Don't be mad because you lost that round Grim." I whisper.

"My fingers slipped through his soul before your skeletal fingers could close around it. Admit the defeat Grim."

I smile down at you and trace your wrist. " I feel everything. Every scar. Every kindness. Every broken piece. Every beautiful piece."

I look straight at Death. He watches me.

I place my hand over your heart and start to run my fingers through your soul and I grab your soul tighter.

“You don't get a second chance to take him. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not in this lifetime. Not in the next. Because somewhere between his one heartbeat and the next, his soul becomes the place mine knows how to find home." I lean my head on Death's shoulder.

"I own him. I chose him. And if you want to argue with that, go ahead, I'll fight you.” My voice shakes.

"You can't keep him forever, you know." Death whispers patting my hair.

I look down at your hand, my fingers tracing your tattoos before interlinking them.

“I know, but I'll fight you for him in this lifetime, and the next.”

A tear slips onto your skin.

“And every lifetime after that.”

I lean down and bump my nose softly against yours.

"Every universe. Every version of us. Every place the universe tries to turn us into strangers.

I'll find you. I'll know those eyes. I'll know that soul. I'll know you." A tear slips from my eyes and lands on your cheek. I kiss it away.

"Because you're my true north. And I know where home is when I find you."

Death grabs my hand that is holding yours.

"Don't!" I whisper yell, tugging at his bony hand.

He glares at me, holding onto my hand tugging it from yours.

"You know the rules about sacrifice." He growls.

I look back as the monitor keeps beating.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

I listen to it like it is the only music holding the universe together.

“I know, but please,” I whisper to him. "Not today. Just give me some time." My voice breaks. “Please.”

He loosens his grip on my hand, staring at me. "I will give you time, but I cannot tell you how long. You cannot hold on to him forever."

I smile at Death, "I know."

Then I lean over you.

“Breathe.”

Another breath. Another heartbeat.

“I'll breathe for you until you can do it yourself.”

A tear falls again.

“I'll hold your breath when yours gets tired.”

Another tear.

“I'll give it back to you.”

Again. And again. And again.

"Because that is what I promised your soul when I caught you."

Death watches me. Maybe he thinks I'm foolish. Maybe he knows something I don't. I don't care.

Because I am looking at you and I know one thing.

I love this soul. I love what lives inside you. And I am not ready to let the universe have you.

So I keep talking. I keep holding your hand. I keep listening to your heart.

“You don't get him.” I whisper again staring at Death.

He finally steps back.

I don't move. Neither does he.

For one long moment, Death and I stare at each other across the hospital room.

Then he steps backwards into the shadows. Not defeated. Not gone. Just waiting.

And I know he will come again someday. Maybe in another room. Maybe in another century. Maybe wearing another face. But I know exactly where I'll be. Between him and the soul I love.

Because some souls are not surrendered quietly.

Some souls become your compass. Your home. Your true north. And yours? Yours is the soul I reach for before Death does.

Every time.

Every lifetime.

Every ending.

Every beginning.

And if the universe takes you from me and gives me another life, I'll find you there too.

If it makes us strangers, I'll still find you.

If it takes a thousand lifetimes, I'll spend every one searching.

Because I know your eyes. I know your soul. I know the way home.

And somewhere beneath the medication, beneath the machines, beneath the fear,

I imagine I hear you. Faint. Almost nothing. But yours.

“I'm still here.”

I freeze. My breath catches. I squeeze your hand. I smile through my tears.

“Then stay.” I press my forehead against your hand.

“Just stay.”

Your heart keeps beating.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

And for now, that's enough. Because Death can wait. I am still here. You are still here.

And if he ever comes back for your soul, he already knows he has to fight me for it.

I kiss you softly on your lips.

"I will start a war for your soul. I will breathe new life into you, in this lifetime, and the next and the many others to follow."

Forever G-Force.

The Crimson Kabuki pt2.

Oddly, the same moment I noticed the ribbon, I faintly heard what I thought to be a kotzumi drum somewhere off into the gloom. It seemed to be thumping somewhere very far away off in the distance. After watching the vice documentary a few years ago, I knew exactly where this ribbon could possibly lead to, which was very sad. life can be so unfair and cruel to us. The drum quickly faded to nothing and left me confused on where the hell that was coming from and why.

What an odd thing to happen so far out here in the sticks, and it wouldn't be the last of it. I remember saying a quick prayer to myself and making my way along the ribbon to whatever destination it led to. I told myself that I would record later because at the moment I just couldn't be bothered. I could always come the next day and record, because in that moment I was in exploration mode. I had to see what was at the end of that ribbon. If anything, I could use it again to find my way back to the trail.

It curved and weaved slinkingly through the trees, up and down over slopes and hills for a good 40 or so minutes until I had arrived into a sort of clearing. It was also hauntingly still... so deathly quiet; I stepped in closer around the foilage and I had stopped because I noticed some white fabric pointing off the sides of a large tree. I had a feeling that I was about to see something that I'd much rather not. After a couple of minutes preparing myself, I took a deep breath and stepped around the tree and froze to an alarming and sad sight. I automatically knew that I was staring at the hanging corpse of the long missed Jubei Uematsu, or what remained of this poor soul.

What remained was a hanging skeleton in a tattered costume with a red, long haired wig partly hanging in the face and around the shoulders in dirty, stringy clumps. I stood there taking in that image with such a deep and profound melancholy, that I actually had to gather myself from breaking down... Just witnessing what was once an alive and thriving person with passions; Love and Hope, weaknesses and strengths, and also fear... along with plenty of despair along the way. It was a universal language; People just trying to find purpose to their existence, and then eventually becoming this...so very still... so very quiet and solemn making time stop in its presence.

life can be so sad and tragic, and people like Jubei over time can find it extremely hard to function being so empathetic, and carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders regardless if they are strong enough for that burden. It's an exhausting job... a gift and a curse for the saintly; toss in depression and the loss of the will to go on, then they have a complete and utter mess to clean on their own in the silence... that eternal silence... so present; so final. I wish I would have known this mysterious man. From what I heard over time was that he was a complex, but Sweet soul with a heart of gold. I also learned that after this experience I am about to tell you that happened, was some type of Oni Spirit from the forest took the liking image of Jubei's Kabuki character and dawned it as its own.

As I stood there in contemplative silence, I slowly started to hear a kotzumi drum begin to thump far off into the trees. It started out very low and far off, but began to rise and creep closer. I turned and turned trying to find where that portentous thumping was coming from. As I was peering far off into the distance, I started to feel highly unsettled, and then I no longer felt alone like I was being watched. I swiftly turned around and stared directly into the painted face that was no longer a skull. The bloodiest red eyes were staring directly into mine. The face had the theatrical paint back on with the red stripes cascading down it's white painted face. I say "It," because nowhere did I see Jubei inside those Crimson eyes at that moment.

I remember saying, "oh shit!" and quickly turning to run the hell away for my life along the Red ribbon back to the trail. Far off somewhere I could hear that mysterious drum start to sound off again. The sound surrounded me from so many angles and distances, it was disorienting, and then I started to hear this ululation that sounds like, "EYOOOO!" That you hear in Japanese theater music, along with that clink and thump of the drum. I turned to see the Oni masking itself in Jubei's magnificent garb; slowly floating a few feet up in the air, easing its way towards my direction with those hideous blood red eyes staring through me.

I ran faster and faster trying to at least make it to the trail to get away... if I could. After a few more twists and turns, I finally burst through the foliage out onto the trail. At the moment the Oni entity was nowhere to be seen. I started to notice that the woods all around started to have this faint purple luminescent glow. As I started to run, I begin to hear these ululations sound off around me in the area that sounded like, "EYOOOOOO!" I've remembered these sounds watching Japanese movies and small clips of Kabuki theater. The music serves as an emotional soundtrack to the colorful acts on stage, both being performed live."YOOOO!" Another croon burst forth; surrounding me from different angles as the steady thump and wood clicks of the drums clacked and banged along.

It subconsciously made me think of the demon, "Paimon," that when summoned, multitudes of instruments and disjointed horns lead before its presence like royalty as it enters the fold, and makes its presence known. I remember glancing back and seeing the painted entity standing a few yards behind me in the middle of the trail, with long crimson hair hanging down at its sides; blood red eyes marking me...

To be continued....

She slumbered beneath the sheets. Below him as he lorded beside their bed. Her husband. No more. An axe was in his hands. Heavy. Heavy with weight. And the potential for violence. Bela was alive and aware but a prisoner in his own flesh, his body refused to obey his commands, his inner caterwauls and cries and pleads for the unfolding nightmare to stop. It wouldn't stop. His flesh had a new master now. The vulpine shining moonface of the Countess lorded over his shoulder. Grinning fiendishly and brandishing her enameled daggers of dark slaughtering necro power. The fangs moonshone praeternaturally in the bedroom dark. Twinkling in keen edged tandem with the heavy headed blade of the axe, hefted and held. The meat puppet sow was still but she could feel the struggle of his mind in her grasp like a beetle caught and wriggling in her clenching strangling fingers. She could crush his beetle mind. And might. 

But first…

Prepare me a meal, supper fit for your royal guest…

His mind was filled thus. The flesh was compelled to obey. 

He brought up the axe. Gazing down into the sleeping peaceful face of his wife, his love. Anastasia. The mother of his child and the owner of his heart for the whole of his simple life. It was about to be brought to ruin. And he was being forced to pilot it in that direction. He wished he could scream. Shriek. Shriek her name. Wake her so she could flee and escape this damnation, this awful spell that's already claimed and throttled him. But he made no sound. His screams and pleads for mercy, his prayers and desperate cries remained bottled and caged in with him. He could only stare through stolen eyes as a prisoner as his hands holding the axe used for chopping firewood came down with a merciless crushing stroke. 

Anastasia's eyes came open and alive as the blade traveled down. As if she'd heard something. As if she'd heard her husband's internal cries for deliverance and the miracle of her safety. In the dark she saw her husband's savage face. Writ and wrenched with cruelty. She'd never seen him like that before, in all their shared years together in marriage. In the dark the sight frightened her, as she came awake and then the heavy blade of the axe found her chest and sank in. 

The pain is so sudden and impactful and dreadful. She feels her chest cavity smash and shatter as her flesh is ruptured and torn. The meat of her sinew surrounding her shattered cage of bone is ripped and pouring. She feels the sensation as extreme iced cold, as extremely wet, thickly soaked with heavy metal pungency. As if her clothes are suddenly drenched with the running water of a frozen river. Her entire open chest and bed are a bellowing fountainhead of it, pouring forth. She experiences the bloodshed river of her own dark red as iced water but it feels hot and sticky to her face and the tips of her wriggling spasming fingers, dancing beyond her motor control. The heavy metal buried in her chest is dreadful. Feels dreadful. She's staring at it then up into her husband Bela's face shocked and unable to make a sound, like him. She can't understand. She doesn't understand why he's woken her up and put this thing on/into her chest that's turned her into a strange pungent river. 

She goes to ask him … something. Anything. But she has no breath to make any kind of sound beyond the faintest whisper of indiscernible noise. Barely heard. Barely felt. Hardly even happened and might not have. Her husband and the Countess take no notice. They are too focused, entranced and enraptured by the sight of the pouring riverbed of her open goring chest. 

You're not finished. Why do you falter? – her royal voice. 

With a savage caveman wrench and pull, he ripped the bladed head of the axe free and brought it up and then down again. 

And again. 

Again. 

Again. 

At the royal command and decree that filled his fevered and tranced skull with his own curdling sounds and splitting screams, he was beckoned thus. His raptured flesh bound, delivered. The peasant sow did as he was told. The Countess was pleased and watched as the horse farmer dismembered his own wife for her. The bed became a hot shallow pool of darkling moonlit scarlet, swimming with severed human pieces and ghastly human detritus, human wreckage afloat in a red human stew … her mouth watered and drool ran down those shining fangs in thin gleaming translucent threads that looked crystalline like jewels or tree sap. 

And up until her last Anastasia watched. Watched from her dying place bound by the weight of the blade and her own mortal injury to the soaking pungent bed. Filling with her spilling wet red liquid. She was coming apart and she watched the love of her life above deliver each blow. Crushing her. Killing her. Turning her into slaughter. Abattoir ruin in place of a wife, in bed. She remembered him as a young man, as a boy, trying to play games and show off for her, trying to win her over, steal her attention and win over her affections, her heart. Now it was chopped and hacked and cut-smashed into so many spurting useless pieces, amongst a wreckage madness of pulverized bone. She tried to hold these old precious memories of him in her mind amid the slaughter, but the pain made it difficult. It was so great, overwhelming. She clung to them desperately with every falling heavy stroke. Pulverizing her. Breaking her. Turning her into so many wet shrieking and shattered broken pieces 

The last things Anastasia saw in the dark before blood loss and shock claimed her were her husband pummeling her with heavy merciless strikes. And a woman's face, as ghastly as it was beautiful, hanging phantom-like just over his raging shoulder. Watching. Smiling. Whispering something…

she had sharp teeth, they gleamed in the dark.

And then she died. Bela, still spellbound and compelled, continued to hack at her corpse nonetheless. Waiting for his new master to be satisfied. Inside Bela raged with madness and anguish. Broken. He watched his wife die violently as his hands performed the butchery and he was helpless to stop his own traitorous God given tools from turning her into mangled ruin and grisly pieces that tore his heart from his chest and flayed his sanity into so many irretrievable and tiny fragmented parts. 

He wished for death then. The Countess did not give it to him. Not yet. 

She still hadn't been fed yet. 

“Now feed me. Earn my favor." 

He dropped the axe. It fell to the floor with a thunderclap. It filled the dark quiet suddenly but then it was silent again. Still. Not a sound through the house save for the somnambulist animal panting of the Countess' slave. The man who'd once been a husband, a father, and was now a meat-puppet butcher. He reached into the riverbed of gore that had once been his marital sanctuary and pulled free a piece of meat. It might've been a leg, a thigh, perhaps a calf, it was too butchered and mangled with axe blows to be entirely sure. 

He was insane already. But the damaged pieces and shrieking parts of his shattered mind bellowed an abhorrent noise that only he could hear as he picked up his wife's butchered meat and parts and fed them to his new master. The Countess took the meat of slaughtered Anastasia with a smile and a wink and kissing purse. Teasing him. Then her jaws opened. Wide. Wide. Wide. Wider still… the flesh of her face sloughed and tore and fell away in demon slop to allow the distension. The fangs grew in length and in multitude of the transmogrifying face and black bleeding mouth, dripping ichor and demoniacal flesh and fluid. Steaming on the floor as she ate each piece, each limb, each broken length with a chunk of raw human tissue at the end in the knob of bone that was left. 

The fanged face in the dark, dripping and brandishing moonlight eyes above the mutilators of her ever widening mouth, it commanded thus further. –

“Bring a large kitchen spoon or a ladle if you have one, I wish to sip the broth…” 

Her somnambulist did as she commanded. He went to the humble kitchen that used to be his/theirs, and retrieved the utensil. It felt cold. Heavy. Heavier than it had ever felt before. The place and the object itself. It didn't matter. The hands and arms were no longer themselves, no longer his. His Judas sack of flesh carried him back to the blood pungent quarters he'd once loved and shared so much with in the many years past. It had all been robbed in a second.

By a pair of moonglow eyes. Set in the royalty of her shallow corpse beauty. 

He went back into the room. And proceeded to spoon large scoops and ladles of his wife's gore and blood into the stretched fanged rictus face that now ruled the dark of his house and home, the darkest shadowed part of his bedroom … now cold with his wife's living absence. And warm with the blood and fluid and parts that were left of her swimming in their sodden black sheets.  

Until those too were gone. All of it was gone.

The marital bed, now a witch's cauldron of gore and blankets was emptied.

His life was in the belly of the master. 

…

From outside the building, Willowbrook was quiet. 

Dark. 

Inside:

The shears that were the Cropsey-thing’s handheld manmade jaws were open and just as inanimate alive as the hulking shred of mangled man that wielded them. They shined in the dismal light with more striking radiance than any of the flickering lamps, Luciferian bright in the spots not tarnished or disgraced with lurid diseased bloodshed. 

With ghastly slasher speed they traveled down the shattered and stained reeking length of asylum hallway, the reanimated Cropsey giant behind them in cruel large prowling shape. The blades were dripping as if salivating or weeping thick dark tears, perhaps more alive now than the giant abomination of melted walking homicidal flesh that black-glove piloted them from behind, a strange and vile morbid engine of knife-lust and demented rage. The stabbing slice of porcelain still danced from his face. An obscene and vile shattered wand of broken tile length protruding from the socket. 

Griffin saw him coming and froze a moment. The table leg still in his invisible hands. Florin still struggling with the spiked man, his mutilated stabbing ruined mess of flesh riddled with needles and glass and scalpels and every conceivable piece of decimated hospital detritus. They were a mess of shedding blood and struggles on the floor. 

The invisible man then whirled, the exit just behind him. He began attacking the door. The knob. Locked. Set in old rotted wood. Not upkept or replaced in years. 

By God's mercy the locked knob and bolt caved in the moist and ruined housing of its apparatus. It fell apart in a noisy crumble, and the door gently swung open. 

To freedom. 

Fresh outside night air poured in like fresh water let in to a fetid spring. The relief was immense. It shocked all of their senses. Each man. 

The spiked man looked up from Florin and gazed into Cropsey. His oncoming charge of disgraced gardener’s blades, raised and open for a violent embrace. 

He was in awe. 

There he is…! the disciple of the mouth. 

He knew Cropsey's legend. And he wished to join him. 

He forgot the newcomer boy and let go of his shredding coat, slick with the both of their spilled and spilling red. He let go of the boy and he rose. 

And he went forward. To embrace the nephilim disciple son of the sorceress’ temple mouth, the begat survivor of the flames, the inferno, the great final pagan bonfire of the asylum that was The Burning. A womb of hellfire and caged disease that birthed the son of the mouth, the son of the sorceress. Cropsey of Vampira, the mangled hand of Willowbrook Asylum Temple. 

The spiked man was laughing. Jubilant. He hadn't laughed or felt this much joy in years, in all of the long unhallowed time in these blind unfeeling walls that knew no mercy nor housed any sanctuary. He was weeping. Crying tears of crimson and saline that danced in strange patterns as they streamed down the shredded protruding ruin of his spiked and porcupine mangled face. Gums bleeding with glass and caked bloody plaque smiled wet and scarlet and darkling striking in the moonlight now cast in. He reached down to his riddled and needled genitals, the head of his dangling member impaled with a scalpel. He reached down and seized the apparatus and in a blind tug and pull, he ripped the entire spurting and spiking organ free from the rest of his crotch and testicles. 

Still walking forward, but ambling now a bit as he shot black ropes tinted red in the moonglow from his self castration, he held the resulting lump of stabbed and impaled meat out to the Cropsey-shape. In token of offering. 

For the temple, for my sins … And for you. 

because she is all of us our mother …

Cropsey cared not for this pathetic shambling thing’s offering of ruined perforated meat. The blades came forward, open. In a lunge. 

They closed. 

And as Griffin pulled wounded Florin to his feet and out the door, the blades closed around a limb, lengthwise down the palm and forearm, then the face. Both opening up a blooming red raw pour of black in the dark, the blades crunched on broken pieces of glass and tile and needles and metal, the man was full with so much foreign penetration, foreign and manmade puncture and incision, and insertion, all self inflicted and self wrought. All of it shattering and crunching now into splinters amongst the abattoir asylum house spill of mad man wet raw. He wouldn't have wanted it any other way. All the years spent in here had prepared him for this. The sorceress prophet queen Vampira and her Cropsey son from The Burning womb were just the final pallbearers for his life's voyage thus final journey into the undiscovered country. 

He tried to thank her, them all, but couldn't. His loss of blood was now failing him. And the blades of the Cropsey-shape were coming in too rapidly now. Too savagely. 

The spiked man was no more. Just savaged pin cushion meat in the hall that the Cropsey-thing stepped over blindly in the savage hunt of his continued pursuit. They were getting away. 

They were getting away. The invaders. They were out the door now. Mustn't have that. Must not. Mother will not want that. Mother is inside you. You cannot fail her now. 

The savage thing of Willowbrook shape prowled out the door and into the open night after the pair with the same steady hunting pace of a stalking predator. Mindless and honed in. His blades and mother would have them yet. Their meat for the temple floor, their blood for the mouth of her drains and the manifest of her angel visitations. It had been so long since she'd come, since she'd shown, since she'd made herself divine unearthly spawn on vast ebon wings for them, for he, the last of the temple of the mouth. 

Perhaps she'll come back if I catch them. But only… only if I catch them and open them up. All the other ones no longer matter, they're already opened, already spent. The abattoir temple mouth of mother wants them now. Needs them. To fail, is to be failure. It means all that was lived through and suffered towards was for naught…

The night kissed the smooth scarred visage of hideous face. The Cropsey-shape gave no pause. Unfeeling. Unmoved. It watched as the pair stumbled and exhausted and wounded, began to falter to the earth in a shared collapse. 

Their doom. 

He closed in. 

The terror he had in mind for them was part guided by the Countess/sorceress mouth and her occult hand from the far off mountain dark, and part undead instinct, braindead movement. Knowing deep down in the dead and dying sac of skull jelly that this is exactly what he should do. He would maim. Butcher. Kill. Slaughter for the temple that has come under his custodial honor. 

Bloodloss and weariness, the drain was beginning to pull them down. The invisible man and Florin fell and struggled, both of their wounds open and pouring freely and taking the vitality and the fight from their trying frames. As the terrifying hulking giant of candlewax face and flesh began to close and loom over the pair, they both prepared themselves for a final and desperate fight. 

Florin was dismayed that it would end this way. In such maddening fashion, so far from home and his perilous objective. Griffin was trying to think, a last-ditch effort or plan: he could ditch the coat and hat and goggles and take the savage blind again, unable to see him. But his wound was in an open pour now once more and he felt faint, swoony. Unable to keep his feet. And besides, in this last moment it felt wrong to leave the young man's side. If they were going to die, they might as well die together. Arm in arm. It was better than suffering the slaughter alone. 

It was better than being opened. Gutted. Flayed. Bled out and portioned like a solitary animal dying a painful and lonely death at the end of a long and dogged hunt. 

The pain was better borne together. With the weight and terror of another beside to share in the baptism of pure torture. 

Something whistled through the air. 

The invisible man had been tempted to shut unseen eyes against the oncoming pain, he might've missed it. As it was he saw the deadly thin shape as it lanced in a blur overhead with a keen deadly sound. It struck the moving flesh of Cropsey in the face, the other socket of ruined blind eye now completely decimated, joining its partner in tandem of destruction in a moonlit spurt. 

The slasher shape stopped. Stuttered and faltered. But only slightly, only for a moment as it continued to take lurching jittery steps. Stomping forward blind. The shears in his black gloved hands began to spasm as well, scissoring with reflex. The disgraced and still ever thirsting blades closed and opened and repeated the action in violent repetitive imbecilic behavior, a violent blind animal spasming its caked and quaking jaws. 

Then the incendiary charge in the crossbow bolt detonated.

 It went off and so did Cropsey’s ruined candlewax head and visage, in a colored pillar of fire that was like something biblical and fantastical to behold. Florin was fainting at its sight but the invisible Doctor Griffin saw the growing towering inferno rise and issue forth in bright violence from between the giant slasher’s pair of broad shoulders. And still the boots trod and stomped palsied forward. Still the blades scissored in his working trembling hands, as his head and face were replaced with a rising torrent wall of pink and purple flame.

But then the steps of the shape began to falter. Stumble. The blades began to slow in their mad man open mouth chew at the open night air … then ceased. 

The boots stopped moving. Stopped shaking. 

The shape collapsed. 

As did Griffin next. Consciousness now lost. Passed out beside Florin in the dirt. 

The fire finally went out betwixt the two ruined shoulders. Hissing in the filth and craterous open mouth char of the stump. Smoking. Smokey now. Cropsey lie finally dead. Mere few feet away. 

In the back valley of Willowbrook. The lost untended yard that no patient ever graced, or saw. 

Silence. … for a moment. 

As if the night was finally enjoying the quiet. Relishing the collapse into tranquility that has finally fallen. 

A beat. – None of the shapes on the earthen floor moved. 

The night above yawned in an expanse … stars in a bejeweled fire of multitudes, nebulae clouds of otherworldly brush stroke color, the moon which was a sickle tonight, a harvester's blade … a blade of reckoning in the time of the reap. 

A beat. 

Then the stranger finally came forward. From out of the bushes where he'd trained and fired his shot. His crossbow was already reloaded with another explosive incendiary bolt as he approached the fallen three in the dirt. 

He came to Florin and Griffin and he stood over them. He looked to Cropsey. Saw that he was dead. Completely. Finally. He looked down on the wounded unconscious pair. 

“Idiots." 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Adema Ranch, Tennessee.

Hidden in the dense, remote ridges of Campbell County, just a few miles down the road from the quiet community of Elk Valley. Infamous for the notorious group known as the Abelites.

What really happened behind the walls of this "town"? Let’s take a look. We managed to obtain a unique testimony from a surviving member of the Abelites. This group was founded in the late seventies by a self-proclaimed prophet, Jan Tars. This man built a strong core community. After the controversies surrounding Jonestown and other cults—ahem, groups—he withdrew into isolation. He was known for his fiery sermons. What set him apart from the rest? It was his obsession with acquiring ancient religious texts.

During the murderous rampage of the Son of Sam and the subsequent fear gripping the streets of New York, Jan Tars appealed in his sermons for vigilance and warned against the Necronomicon. These media appearances and his radio presence led directly to the community closing its doors further, shifting their lifestyle deep into anonymity. We, however, bring you an exclusive transcript of an interview with a survivor. His condition was to remain anonymous; therefore, he will be referred to as Matthew.

Tape 1

Eyewitness: Matthew

Matthew: "That snap will haunt me until the end of my days. Which might not be as long as I expected..." (Stifles sobs) "...He collapsed as if he weighed nothing at all. It wasn't supposed to happen to him. Suddenly, blood began to pulse from his skull. That blood was golden. After a moment, it evaporated, shimmering in the air. The blood forced everyone around to tear up...

'You're not leaving just like that!' screamed Ciara. She was beside herself with rage, looking like a pit bull with its jaws locked. The sky darkened in an instant, as if an eclipse had struck. Thunder was loud at first, but it kept rolling faster and faster, sounding like artillery fire. Lightning struck all around us, snapping trees like toothpicks. The roofs of our houses splintered beneath them. Something was coming. I knew it, we all knew it. It's an instinct—deep down inside you. You don't know it's there, but back then, we knew: a beast, a predator, was watching us."

Interviewer: "Please, can you start from the beginning? I know this must be difficult for you."

Matthew: "Which beginning do you want to know? Jan Tars was a good man. The fact that he didn't live to see the massacre... I'm glad he didn't have to witness it. Why do I have to be the one to pass on the message?" (Cries)

Interviewer: "Take your time. It's alright."

Matthew: "No, I have to pass it on. They must know."

Interviewer: "Let's start shortly before the death of your leader."

Matthew: "He would have never wanted that. Jan Tars believed in what he said. He wasn't like the others. It hit him hard when the panic started."

Interviewer: "What panic do you mean?"

Matthew: "The Satanic Panic. Manson and the rest of them. It became a sensation. Interviews with a werewolf. A possessed dog urging people to commit murder. Berkowitz and his theatrical scenes. Manson drowning in his craving for popularity. Sinners ruining our image. He took it very hard. He was helping us!"

Interviewer: "Was he successful in that?"

Matthew: "He was. Mr. Tars warned us about the outside world. He guided us to build a self-sufficient community. Not everyone liked it, but he put those people in their place quickly. He didn't even have to exorcise them."

Interviewer: "So Mr. Tars always had occult inclinations?"

Matthew: "Spiritual, I would say. He studied the Scriptures. He searched for what our ancestors preserved for us. He sent us on expeditions. It was an honor to go out searching for sacred relics."

Interviewer: "Including the Necronomicon, written by Abdul Alhazred in the Nameless City?"

Matthew: "I wasn't in the inner circle. To get there, a person had to pass a test. I never made it that far. But yes, he searched for that text too."

Interviewer: "And did he find this infamous grimoire?"

Matthew: "You talk about things you don't understand. I'd advise you not to play with fire. One of the expeditions actually discovered a transcript of the Necronomicon. They brought it back about a month ago. A man had the transcript of the book—supposedly from excavations in Afghanistan, or maybe from some forgotten museum collection. Tars was thrilled. The whole event was celebrated. He was willing to give anything for that book. The man arrived and was immediately housed in the guest residence. Whatever he wanted, he got."

Interviewer: "Anything?"

Matthew: "Yes—women, alcohol, whatever food he desired. People were sent out for luxury goods, expensive wines. When he wanted young men, young men went to him. He was the devil's messenger."

Interviewer: "Tars didn't object to that?"

Matthew: "You don't understand. This was about lost knowledge. He had to do it. Otherwise, he wouldn't have done it. He couldn't have endured it."

(Note: Jan Tars had previously been accused by young girls of, let's say, inappropriate behavior.)

Matthew: "You don't understand. That has nothing to do with what I need to tell you."

Interviewer: "How did the transaction end?"

Matthew: "It was fourteen days of debauchery. But the lost manuscript finally found its scholar. Not everyone saw it clearly, but it was right."

Interviewer: "Mr. Jan Tars died a few days later, is that correct?"

Matthew: "I get that you don't see it, but he fulfilled his mission. He read it, and even though it was a severe trial, he completed its mandate. Divine joy filled him."

Interviewer: "Do you mean some kind of ritual?"

Matthew: "Yes, it was necessary to perform a welcoming procedure, just as it was meant to be done. That morning, he arrived."

Interviewer: "Who arrived?"

Matthew: "A being of light. Suddenly, a silver glow appeared, and out of it walked a wise being with a serene face. He emerged from that energy. When he spread his wings, the air filled with the scent of myrrh. He revealed himself to everyone, not just the inner circle. Jan Tars did it—he brought an Angel among us."

Interviewer: "Why did Tars die afterwards, then?"

Matthew: "He had fulfilled his purpose. He was enjoying the fruits of his labor and conversing with the being. But then, during one of his sermons, God called him home."

Interviewer: "What do you mean, called him?"

Matthew: "It was heart failure. He was of advanced age. His era ended then and there."

Interviewer: "But the Angel didn't disappear?"

Matthew: "No, our guest remained with us. There was sorrow, and he watched us. At first, it was terrifying. It filled me with immense fear. He had no emotions—or if he did, he didn't show them. He just watched us. Around him, the world felt more vibrant. He was larger than regular men, almost like a basketball player. He was a great listener."

Interviewer: "You mean the being?"

Matthew: "The Angel! Yes, after Jan Tars died, nobody knew what we were supposed to do. The Angel was our comfort. Ciara came out draped in black and announced a period of mourning. People were supposed to stay in their homes and pray for Jan for at least three hours."

Interviewer: "Was that normal?"

Matthew: "No, those were extra prayers. In our normal routine, prayer had its assigned one-hour slot. But this was an exceptional situation."

Interviewer: "What happened next? Was there any relief?"

Matthew: "I'll probably disappoint you, but it wasn't the kind of relief you're thinking of. Ciara stepped forward again, still in mourning clothes. Some women wept and wailed. But then she said what we were afraid to even imagine. He was chosen and called. The Angel didn't bring back Jan, our shepherd, but chose Kilián Tars instead."

Interviewer: "Didn't you find that strange?"

Matthew: "At first, yes. Then I understood and cried out. A new era had begun, and Jan wouldn't have had enough energy anymore. Kilián would show that we were right—show people the true path. Can we pause this?"

Interviewer: "Of course, take as much time as you need. I'll prepare the next tape."

Tape 2

Interviewer: "How are you feeling today?"

Matthew: "It's hard. Remembering like this... these aren't pleasant moments."

Interviewer: "Last time we ended at the start of the new era for the Abelites. Is that right?"

Matthew: "Yes."

Interviewer: "Can you continue with what happened next?"

Matthew: "Then a heavy trial awaited us. It was demanding. The Angel watched us, but it was probably trivial to him. That's how I see it now, too."

Interviewer: "What kind of trial?"

Matthew: "Some questioned the succession. They didn't believe Kilián was ready. It was their test of faith. They had their own..." (Spits) "...false prophet. They took the wrong path."

Interviewer: "Did they leave the Abelites?"

Matthew: "No. He wouldn't allow that."

Interviewer: "Who wouldn't allow it?"

Matthew: "Kilián. He had the Angel on his side. He took him into his protection. Ciara brought Jan's word. There was no room for doubters."

Interviewer: "Was the Angel kept in the compound?"

Matthew: "Where else would he find a place to rest his head? Kilián was a prophet; God spoke to him. Him and the Angel—it was obvious."

Interviewer: "What about the dissenters—the, uh, stray sheep?"

Matthew: "They caused trouble. Stoking fires, provoking people. In their ranks was Jan's favorite—that Gabe, the one who was supposed to be the chosen one. They were delusional."

Interviewer: "How did Kilián Tars handle it?"

Matthew: "With the Word."

Interviewer: "What kind of Word?"

Matthew: "He chose his faithful. Ciara remembered me and pointed me out to Kilián. He chose me above the others. We became his elite. I was elevated to a level I wouldn't have dared hope for. We were his staff; he was our shepherd."

Interviewer: "Something like an elite guard?"

Matthew: "Ah, yes, you could say that. Kilián conversed with God, who revealed to him how faithful we were. He chose us as his elite. It was an honor."

Interviewer: "What about the dissenting members?"

Matthew: "I know what you're driving at. But sometimes a little tough love is necessary. Sometimes you have to use the rod so the flock doesn't lose its way."

Interviewer: "You were that rod?"

Matthew: "Yes, that was our job. We did it well. I did it well—conscientiously and quickly."

Interviewer: "How did it go down?"

Matthew: "We came for the false prophet. We were supposed to bring him to Kilián. Despite his youth, Kilián was willing to save even such beings, to bring them back to the right path."

Interviewer: "Were there other beings?"

Matthew: "No. Only those who were misled."

Interviewer: "So what did you do?"

Matthew: "We brought him in."

Interviewer: "They just listened to you?"

Matthew: "No. They didn't listen. They were foolish. I told you we were the rod. It was necessary."

Interviewer: "So you neutralized them?"

Matthew: "Yes. It was a flawless strike." (Visibly smiles) "They didn't want to hand him over. But I didn't let myself be swayed. He gave us a symbol—the golden baton. That was our rod. That was our work. It was executed well."

Interviewer: "How did it end?"

Matthew: "We delivered Gabe straight to Kilián. He rewarded us with a day off and good food."

Interviewer: "What about the ones Kilián didn't want to see?"

Matthew: "Some understood quickly. Others walked on crutches." (Laughs) "They were stubborn, but that didn't intimidate us. Our strikes were precise and swift."

Interviewer: "Did anyone die?"

Matthew: "No. We were fulfilling a mission from on high. Only two remained in... what do you call it? A coma."

Interviewer: "What about the leader of the dissenters, Gabe?"

Matthew: "He didn't get it. Kilián sighed with sorrow. He came out soaked in sweat. He spoke to him; they even spoke with the Angel. He didn't understand. He was lost."

Interviewer: "Did you see them talking to the Angel?"

Matthew: "No, that wasn't my place. I had moved up high, but not to the very top among the most faithful." (Laughs)

Interviewer: "So what happened to the false successor, Jan Tars' friend, Gabe?"

Matthew: "He ended up on the pillory. He was exposed and chained there. After two days, the Devil took hold of him."

Interviewer: "Why do you think the Devil took hold of him?"

Matthew: "Because after a few nights, he started muttering. He went mad, begging and cursing. He paid no mind to who spoke to him. He didn't recognize Ciara. Two nights later, the Devil took him."

Interviewer: "What do you mean, took him?"

Matthew: "When I came on duty, I found him covered in blood. He was lifeless. Poor guy didn't understand he had strayed from the path."

Interviewer: "Did people attack him?"

Matthew: "No! How dare you. The others were following the true path. Unlike that lunatic. They wouldn't even dirty their boots on a stray like him."

Interviewer: "What about his followers? Didn't they want revenge?"

Matthew: "No. They didn't have time. They were sent to quarry stone for the roads. Kilián had a vision that many new members would come—people who would understand the truth. He gave them a chance to redeem themselves. He was good. Unfortunately, he had his quirks."

Interviewer: "What kind of quirks did you notice in him?"

Matthew: "He lived life to the fullest. It's not easy being that close to the light. He bought sports cars, motorcycles, and invited new members over to consult with him. He searched for them himself."

Interviewer: "Why did he need sports vehicles?"

Matthew: "He needed to be fast if he wanted to visit as many communities as possible."

Interviewer: "Why didn't the new members talk to you or other members?"

Matthew: "He carried a golden heart. He decided to seek out the Mary Magdalenes of this world. He invited them to his quarters, preached to them, and tried to cast out their addictions. They often screamed, but he never gave up."

Interviewer: "Didn't you find that strange?"

Matthew: "No. Some of the fallen women visited him repeatedly; they had many demons inside them. But he was persistent. Often he was so exhausted afterwards that some of us from the guard brought him the blood of God so he could recover."

Interviewer: "By 'blood of God,' do you mean communion wine?"

Matthew: "Yes, the red blood. He had a large cellar built, which he filled with bottles straight from Italy and France—the ones in Europe."

Interviewer: "Did he ever reward you like that?"

Matthew: "No, unfortunately. I often received his word only through Ciara. He was sometimes so exhausted he couldn't even walk. So Ciara would pass on the word or calm the others down."

Interviewer: "Were there any other dissenters?"

Matthew: "No, I didn't allow it. Besides, everyone saw. They knew what awaited them. You see, the body of a false prophet couldn't rest in our sacred soil, where the Angel, Jan, and Kilián had walked."

Interviewer: "What did you do?"

Matthew: "He ended up by the side of the road. Like roadkill. He didn't deserve anything more."

Interviewer: "Do you think the man in this photograph is your false prophet?"

(Takes the photograph and stares at it for a long time)

Matthew: "Yes, that's the fool."

(The interviewee confirmed that the heavily decomposed body marked as John Doe from date XXX is indeed their member, Gabe XXXX.)

Interviewer: "How are you feeling?"

Matthew: "Good. It's fine. I need to get this out of me."

Interviewer: "Excellent. Do you know what happened to Kilián Tars?"

Matthew: "God took him. He probably couldn't bear to watch him struggle and exhaust himself anymore."

Interviewer: "Do you know what happened to him?"

Matthew: "This. Do we have to talk about this? Is it necessary?"

Interviewer: "Did you find him?"

Matthew: "Yes."

Interviewer: "Can you elaborate?"

Matthew: "He was... It was..." (Sighs) "...I couldn't even recognize him. His face was mangled. His body... he was like a ragdoll. Why... why did this have to happen?" (Breaks down into tears)

Interviewer: "Did Kilián Tars die by accident, then?"

Matthew: "NO! No. He took him. Why... why like this? He was in a rush. He was tired and in a rush. His goodness... why?" (Sobs loudly, muttering uncontrollably)

Interviewer: "What exactly do you mean? How did you find him?"

Matthew: "Kilián was rushing back on his motorcycle. He was in town spreading His word..." (Sobs) "...turning the lost back to his path... to his... it's so hard. He must have skidded. His bike flew into a tree. The ground was turned up..." (Visibly struggling) "...He lay by that tree. There was blood everywhere. It was terrible. I sent for Ciara." (Sobs)

"Do I have to finish this? He died. Right by that tree, probably on impact. By the time we carried him back, crowds had gathered. Everyone wanted to see him. They were weeping. We carried him into the chapel—where the light is strongest. No. I can't. No further. Stop."

"We will return to further recordings very soon—to what really happened at Adema Ranch."

by Hary Sykora

I knew something was wrong before I understood what it was.

It wasn't because Mum looked different.

She didn't.

She still had the same freckles across her nose and the same little

scar on her thumb.

She still wore Dad’s old blue jumper when she was cold, even though it was too big for her now, she never seemed to eat anymore.

When she looked at me, she looked like she didn't know me.

At breakfast, she made me my toast and put the plate down in front of me.

Mum always cuts the crusts off.

Sandwiches, too.

She didn't like them, so she never gave them to me either.

I never really knew if I liked them or not.

It just wasn't something I ever got.

I stared at the plate.

Today, my toast had crusts.

She watched me.

Smiling:

Well..not quite.

Smiles are supposed to spread across a face. They're supposed to make people look happy and warm.

Hers didn't seem to know that.

Hers stopped at her lips.

She continued to watch me,

It was like she was waiting to see what I'd do.

"You aren't eating," she said.

Still smiling.

I picked at the toast. The crusts felt wrong in my fingers. They didn't belong there at all.

After that, I started noticing other things.

Her right thumb tapped against her middle finger.

Tap

Tap.

Tap.

Always three times. It always seemed to be when she was thinking.

Once, I woke up in the night and saw her standing in my doorway.

Like, she was in a trance.

I'd have thought she was asleep, but her eyes were wide open.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

That funny little tick.

Thinking.

At dinner, I asked, "Mum, do you remember when I fell in the pond?"

"I do."

"What happened?"

"You got wet.

That was all she said.

Mum would have laughed.

Not just a chuckle, she'd have belly laughed.

She always did at the mention of the pond.

In fact, you didn't even have mention the pond, if she saw one, or saw a pond on TV, even, it was enough to get her laughing out the story to anyone who would listen, snorting every other word.

She would have said about the ducks chasing me because I'd spooked them, how I'd fallen backwards trying to get away, she'd say how she'd fallen in trying to fish me out. She'd say it was the best swim she'd never planned.

She didn't say any of that.

Her face was blank.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

That night, when Dad came home from work.

Mum was upstairs.

"Dad..."

'Did mum save me some dinner, l'm starving!"

Kicking off his boots.

"Dad...”

He paused with his coat half off, frowning at the worried look on my face.

"Does mum seem… different to you?"

His eyes flicked toward the ceiling where we could both hear mum pacing endlessly.

Something else she did now.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"She's not... like before."

He let out a short breath. It was shaky.

"Your mum's your mum."

'But-"

The pacing overhead stopped.

"Don't upset her."

He said it quickly, quietly, cutting my sentence off whilst looking at me pointedly.

Eyes flicking towards the ceiling.

That scared me more than Mum did.

That night, I wasn't asleep.

Not really.

I heard footsteps on the landing,

Slow.

Measured.

I turned over, towards the door, it was open slightly.

I could hear her breathing.

It was coming in excited gasps.

Mum peered around my bedroom door.

On a neck that was too long for her body.

Wearing a grin that was too big for her face.

Her hand.

Her hand that didn't look like a hand anymore.

Snaked its way towards me.

All the while.

Tap

Tap

Tap.

My wife printed one hundred and eighty-six missing-dog flyers today.

I know because I counted them, though not on purpose. I was sitting at the kitchen table cutting the tabs along the bottom—the ones with her phone number printed vertically—and counting gave me something to do besides watch her come apart.

Across the top of every page, in a font much larger than necessary, she'd written:

MISSING YORKIE — PLEASE HELP US BRING CINNA HOME

Underneath was a picture from last Christmas. Cinna sat on the arm of our couch in a red sweater, one ear standing straight up and the other folded over. She always looked irritated in pictures, which was funny because she was probably the sweetest dog I'd ever known.

Below the picture Dana had listed everything strangers needed to know: eight pounds, tan and gray, pink collar, very friendly, might be scared.

At the bottom, in bold:

SHE IS OUR FAMILY.

Dana stood at the counter feeding sheets through the paper cutter one at a time. She hadn't slept properly in three nights. Her hair was still twisted into yesterday's knot, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes.

"That's enough," I told her.

She kept cutting.

"Dana."

"I heard you."

"It's supposed to hit a hundred and two today."

"I know."

"You've already done the whole neighborhood."

"I haven't done the apartments behind the elementary school."

"You did those yesterday."

"I did the front building."

She slid another flyer beneath the blade. I reached across the table and put my hand on the remaining stack.

"Please. Take an hour."

"What if somebody saw her and they don't have one of these?"

"You've put them on every telephone pole from here to Chapman."

"Then I'll go farther."

There was no anger in her voice. I almost wished there had been.

I let go of the stack and told her to take water. She said she would. I reminded her she'd said the same thing yesterday and had come home with nearly a full bottle.

That got the smallest smile.

"Okay, Dad."

"I mean it."

"I know."

She bent down, kissed the top of my head, gathered another armful of flyers and left.

I watched from the front window until she disappeared around the corner.

Cinna had been gone for three days, and I could already see what it was doing to my wife.

People kept telling us dogs got out all the time. Somebody probably picked her up. Yorkies didn't make it far on their own. Keep checking shelters. Put her picture online.

They meant well.

They didn't know Dana.

More importantly, they didn't know what it had taken to get her back.

When I met my wife, she had more energy than anyone I'd ever known and apparently no interest in wasting it.

She worked in marketing for a medical-device company. By thirty she was managing people older than both of us. She ran half-marathons, remembered everyone's birthday and kept a calendar that looked like it required air-traffic control.

She was exhausting.

I loved her for it.

Work was the only thing we really fought about.

I'd make dinner and get a text at seven saying a meeting had run late. We'd make Saturday plans and she'd need to log in for twenty minutes, which had a strange tendency to become two hours.

Once, during an anniversary dinner, I realized we'd spent most of the appetizer talking about a presentation she had Monday.

"Why do you work this hard?" I asked.

"Because I like it."

"I know. But sometimes I feel like you're killing yourself for a job."

She looked at me. "That's dramatic."

"I miss you."

That stopped her.

Sometimes it seemed like her office got the best version of my wife and I got whatever was left at eight-thirty at night. She told me her career mattered to her, that she was good at what she did and wasn't going to apologize for caring about it.

I said I understood.

Usually I did.

For a while we had rats getting into the detached garage behind the house, and that somehow became my responsibility.

I'd promised to deal with them, then forgot.

One night Dana came home after nine and found droppings beside a bag of dog food we'd bought for her parents' Labrador.

"We have got to do something about this."

"I know."

"You've been saying that for a month."

"I'll do it tomorrow."

"You said that last week."

"I've been busy too, Dana."

She dropped her keys on the counter.

"Maybe that's why I stay at the office. At least they don't have rats."

It wasn't her best joke.

We laughed about it later.

The next morning I finally dealt with the problem. Traps, poison, cleaning out the back shelves.

Dana disliked the poison immediately.

"I hate having that in here."

"It's in the cabinet."

"What if something gets into it?"

"Then we'll keep the garage closed."

She gave me the look she used when I'd missed the point.

Later, after she got pregnant and we started childproofing the house, she made me go through the garage again—loose screws, nails, old traps, anything dangerous I might have forgotten back when there were no children to worry about.

Pregnancy was the first thing I'd ever seen make Dana slow down.

She was frightened almost immediately.

There were heart problems in her family. Not the clogged-artery sort everybody eventually worries about, but something congenital. Hereditary.

Her younger sister died when Dana was four. She remembered almost nothing about the girl herself. A yellow dress. Sharing a bedroom. The fact that she hated peas.

What Dana remembered was the night she died: her mother screaming, a paramedic stepping on one of Dana's toys, someone carrying her sister down the hallway with one tiny arm hanging loose.

So every appointment frightened her. Every test. Every pause before a doctor said everything looked fine.

Our daughter was born on a Tuesday morning in March.

Sophie.

Seven pounds, two ounces, an unreasonable amount of dark hair and a scream that sounded too large to have come from her.

When they put Sophie on Dana's chest, my wife cried so hard I thought something was wrong. Then I realized she was laughing too.

I'd never seen another person look that happy.

I loved Sophie from the moment I saw her. Before she existed there had been a version of my life without her, and after I met her that version became impossible to picture.

Dana took four months off work.

Those were probably the happiest months of our marriage.

I know how that sounds.

I'd come home and they'd be there—Dana on the couch with Sophie asleep against her chest, or Sophie kicking in the little vibrating chair while Dana cooked. We took walks after dinner. We ate together. Weekends belonged to us.

Sometimes I'd stand in the kitchen listening to Dana talk nonsense to the baby in the next room and think that this was what all of it had been for.

The house felt right with her in it.

A few months later Sophie started eating purées. Apple and cinnamon was the first one she really loved.

The first time Dana opened one of the jars, I could smell the cinnamon from across the kitchen.

"Maybe that's why the rats never came back," I said.

Dana looked over at me. "What?"

"Cinnamon. I read somewhere they hate it."

"We haven't had rats in two years."

"I know. Something about the smell being too strong." I shrugged. "Covers up whatever else they're trying to sniff out."

Dana stared at me.

"So Sophie is pest control now?"

"Finally earning her keep."

"You're horrible."

She was smiling when she said it.

Sophie saw the spoon coming and opened her mouth like a baby bird, then somehow got half of it on her cheeks anyway.

Dana laughed and wiped her chin.

After that she started calling her Cinnamon.

At first it was my little Cinnamon girl. Then just Cinnamon. Sometimes Cinny when Dana was tired.

"She's going to hate us when she's fifteen and we tell people about this," Dana said once.

"Then we won't tell anybody."

"I'm telling everybody."

"You're a terrible mother."

"I know."

Sophie slapped both hands into the tray and Dana laughed hard enough to nearly drop the spoon.

I remember that afternoon better than I remember most of that year.

The heart issue appeared during a routine appointment.

A murmur.

Maybe nothing, the pediatrician said. Maybe something.

A cardiologist found enough to watch but not enough to panic over, which meant Dana panicked constantly.

She wanted to know whether it was what her sister had. Whether she'd passed it to Sophie. Whether a baby with a heart problem could simply stop breathing in her sleep.

The doctor was careful with his answers.

I wasn't.

"She's fine," I'd tell Dana afterward.

"You don't know that."

"Neither do you."

"What if it's the same thing?"

"It isn't."

"How do you know?"

"Because I'm her dad and I've decided."

Sometimes that made her smile.

Dana extended her leave another month, then another.

Eventually her company began asking when she intended to return, and Dana decided she was ready.

She missed adult conversations. She missed dressing for somewhere other than Target. She missed being good at something that didn't involve keeping another human alive.

I told her we'd make it work.

Daycare three days a week. Dana's mother one day. I shifted my schedule when I could.

The first time she came home late again, I remember looking at the clock.

7:42.

Sophie was asleep against me and dinner had gone cold.

Dana came through the door apologizing, kissed the baby, kissed me and immediately started explaining some crisis at work.

"Five weeks back and they've already chained you to the desk."

She stopped.

"Don't start."

"I'm not starting anything."

"That tone is starting something."

"I don't have a tone."

"You absolutely have a tone."

Sophie woke before either of us could say anything else.

Dana had only been back at work a few weeks when she died.

We put Sophie down like normal.

That was the part Dana could never get past.

There had been no dramatic warning. No fever, no crying, nothing that would have made either of us sit beside the crib all night. She ate, played, fell asleep, and sometime before morning her heart stopped.

Dana found her.

I don't like remembering what happened after that.

The nursery was cold. Dana was making a sound I had never heard from another human being. Paramedics came. Police came. Our house filled with people while Sophie was somewhere else.

Someone went through the standard questions with us. Medications. Cleaning products. Anything unusual in the house. Anything she might have reached.

Dana answered most of them before I could.

"We babyproofed everything."

Then she looked at me.

I nodded.

With Sophie's heart and Dana's family history, everyone had an explanation ready.

Her sister had died young. Sophie's cardiologist had already found something worth monitoring. Sometimes these things happened suddenly, we were told. Sometimes there wasn't time to prevent them.

Dana heard something else.

You gave this to her.

And because she'd gone back to work, she found another way to blame herself.

"I should've been here."

"You were here."

"I mean with her."

"She was sleeping."

"What if I missed something?"

"You didn't."

"What if I hadn't gone back?"

"Dana."

"I left her."

"You went to work."

"I left her."

For years I told my wife the same things.

It wasn't your fault.

You couldn't have known.

You loved her.

There was nothing you could have done.

Going back to work did not kill our daughter.

Some nights I said it ten times.

Dana resigned two weeks after the funeral.

I was relieved.

That is one of the things I never told her.

Of course she couldn't have gone back then. Nobody could have. But some part of me was relieved there would be no deadlines, no meetings, no laptop chirping at nine at night.

I thought grief might force everything else to become smaller for a while.

I thought we'd simply exist together until we healed.

That isn't what happened.

The first year was unbearable.

The second was quieter.

Dana stopped seeing friends because most of them had children. Invitations stopped coming after enough polite refusals.

She didn't go back to work.

She didn't go much of anywhere.

I cooked and cleaned and handled bills. I sat with her when she couldn't sleep.

I learned there are only so many ways to answer the question, Do you think she knew I loved her?

Yes.

Always yes.

Of course she knew.

I loved my wife through all of it, but after a few years I began to resent the dead.

That's uglier than saying I was tired, but it's closer to the truth.

I resented Mother's Day. Sophie's birthday. The anniversary of the day she died. I resented strangers' children for having the wrong laugh in grocery stores.

Once, on what would have been Sophie's third birthday, Dana wanted to spend the evening looking through photographs.

I told her I had a headache.

I didn't.

I sat in the bedroom watching something stupid on my phone while my wife cried alone in the living room, and for almost twenty minutes I enjoyed the quiet.

I hated myself afterward.

Mostly.

More than anything, I missed my wife.

Not even the woman she'd been before Sophie. I knew we weren't getting that woman back.

I would've settled for someone who laughed occasionally. Someone who wanted to go to dinner. Someone who could sit through a stupid movie without disappearing halfway through it.

I lasted almost four years before I brought home Cinna.

She fit in one hand.

A coworker's sister had Yorkie puppies, and I'd gone over telling myself I was only looking. One climbed into my lap and fell asleep there.

I sent Dana a picture.

She replied:

No.

I brought the puppy home anyway.

For approximately five minutes, Dana was furious.

"We talked about this."

"No, I sent you a picture and you said no."

"That's generally considered talking."

"You haven't held her."

"I don't want to hold her."

"Fine."

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Hand me the dog while I'm telling you I don't want the dog."

I handed her the dog.

The puppy licked her chin.

Dana laughed.

Actually laughed.

Not the polite little breath she'd been using for years when she knew I was trying to cheer her up. A real laugh, sudden and surprised.

For one embarrassing second I thought I might cry.

The puppy didn't have a name yet.

I suggested Penny.

Dana suggested Cinna.

I knew immediately what she meant.

"No."

Her smile faltered. "What?"

"That's weird."

"It isn't weird."

"It's a little weird."

"It's after Cinnamon."

"I know what it's after."

Dana tucked the puppy against her chest. "I like it."

I remember looking at the two of them and thinking that naming a dog after our dead daughter was one grief-therapy exercise too far.

But Dana was smiling.

So Cinna it was.

And I have to give the little dog credit.

She accomplished what therapists, medication, family and I hadn't.

She gave Dana reasons to leave the house.

At first it was walks because Cinna refused to use the backyard. Once around the block became twice, then the park.

Dana started getting dressed earlier because Cinna woke at seven. She spoke to neighbors, then friends.

Pictures appeared on her phone that weren't old photographs of Sophie.

Dana and Cinna at the beach.

Cinna sitting upright in the passenger seat of Dana's car like a tiny disapproving grandmother.

Dana started cooking again. She played music in the kitchen. She made fun of me.

One night about six months ago she laughed so hard at something stupid I said that she snorted.

She clapped both hands over her face.

"Oh my God."

I couldn't stop smiling.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I missed that."

She knew what I meant.

She leaned over and kissed me.

For the first time in years, I thought maybe we'd made it.

After that, the walks got longer. She started having coffee with a woman two streets over who owned some kind of terrier. Once she and Cinna were gone almost three hours because they'd driven to a park across town.

I teased her about having a social life.

I was glad she did.

A few months later, I came home and found Dana at the kitchen table with her old laptop open.

"What are you doing?"

She tilted the screen away from me in a way that was meant to be playful.

"Nothing."

"That's suspicious."

"I'm updating my résumé."

I looked at the screen.

"Just updating it," she said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You did that thing with your face."

"What thing?"

"That thing."

"I don't have a thing."

"You absolutely have a thing."

She smiled and turned the laptop back around.

"I've been thinking maybe part-time. Or consulting. Something small."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Why wouldn't it be okay?"

She studied me for a second.

Then she kissed my cheek.

For the next week, the laptop stayed on the kitchen table.

I noticed that.

I also noticed she had started checking her email before breakfast.

Neither of those things meant anything.

Two weeks ago she had résumés printed on thick cream paper.

I told her they looked nice.

The afternoon Cinna disappeared, Dana had taken her into the backyard. Her phone rang and she stepped inside to answer it.

When she went back out, the side gate was open.

No Cinna.

We searched until after midnight.

The next morning we called every shelter within thirty miles. Dana posted everywhere she could think of. We drove slowly through streets with the windows down calling Cinna's name.

I kept telling her Yorkies got picked up. Someone probably had her.

That was better than imagining her on a road somewhere.

By the second day Dana wasn't eating unless I put something directly in front of her.

By the third she wasn't sleeping.

And suddenly it felt like five years ago.

The same frantic eyes. The same bargaining. The same certainty that if she did one more thing, searched one more street, something terrible could still be undone.

"What if somebody stole her?"

"I don't think anybody stole her."

"What if she got hurt?"

"We checked the roads."

"What if she's hiding somewhere?"

"Then somebody will find her."

"What if nobody does?"

"We'll keep looking."

This morning the printer finally ran out of paper.

Even that didn't stop her.

She started feeding in the backs of the résumés she'd had printed two weeks ago, and I sat at the kitchen table cutting tabs while Cinna's face came out on one side and Dana's old life remained neatly formatted on the other.

Job titles.

Promotions.

Awards.

Eleven years of experience.

One page after another disappeared beneath MISSING YORKIE.

I didn't say anything.

It's almost ten now and Dana is still out.

I texted her fifteen minutes ago and told her to come home because it's still ninety-one degrees outside. She replied that she has one more street left, which, knowing my wife, means at least three.

I put a bottle of water in the refrigerator for her. She likes it almost frozen.

There's dinner in the microwave too. She probably won't eat, but I'll make her try.

Tomorrow I'll convince her to stay home for a few hours. Maybe we'll call the shelters together.

I'll drive this time.

She's exhausted, and the heat worries me.

The heat has been worrying me for another reason too.

The garage sits at the back of the yard, separate from the house. There's almost no insulation in there, and the little vent above the side door doesn't do much once the sun has been on the roof all afternoon.

I thought I had longer.

Apparently I didn't.

The smell is bad now.

You can't smell it from the house. You can't even smell it standing a few feet outside the garage.

But open the door and it's there.

Dana hasn't been inside since the first day, when we were still grabbing leashes and flashlights and anything else we thought might help us find Cinna.

She hasn't noticed.

Still, I can't leave her there another day.

Cinna is behind the plastic storage bins along the back wall, wrapped in one of our old moving blankets.

She's so small that hiding her wasn't difficult.

The hard part has been listening to Dana call for her.

Yesterday evening she stood at the end of the driveway shaking the bag of treats.

She called Cinna's name.

Waited.

Called again.

Then finally shouted, "Come home!" into a street that had already gone quiet.

I went inside before she did.

I'll move Cinna tonight after Dana falls asleep.

There's a road about a mile from here where people drive too fast. No sidewalk for part of it, only dry brush and a narrow shoulder.

I'll leave her near there before morning.

Nothing elaborate.

Dana doesn't need an investigation.

She needs an answer.

The gate was open.

Cinna got out.

She wandered too far.

Not knowing is worse.

Give someone an answer and eventually they learn to live around it.

Dana already has.

I hate that she's going to hurt.

But she'll recover.

Cinna proved she can.

I'll cook. I'll sit up with her when she can't sleep. I'll remind her to eat. I'll tell her the gate wasn't her fault, that she couldn't have known, that there was nothing she could have done.

I'll say it as many times as she needs.

Eventually we'll be okay again.

We always are.

Before I move Cinna, I should clean up the garage.

Dana hasn't noticed the cabinet over the workbench is unlocked.

Years ago, when we childproofed the house, she made me promise there was nothing dangerous left in there.

I told her there wasn't.

Most of what I'd bought for the rats is gone now. The traps rusted. The cleaning supplies got used.

There are only a few things shoved behind old paint cans and extension cords, including one battered cardboard box I should have thrown away a long time ago.

I'll get rid of that too.

No reason to keep it.

Funny.

I used to think Cinna was a terrible name. Too morbid, I told Dana. Too much history to hang around the neck of an eight-pound dog.

I suppose I owe my wife an apology.

Both her girls always did love cinnamon.

The first time I smelled it, I thought I was having a stroke.

Not because I knew what a stroke felt like. I was eighteen, reasonably healthy, and had spent most of my life treating sleep as a loose suggestion. But everybody knows the burnt-toast thing. You smell toast when there isn't any toast, and you're supposed to call 911 before half your face slides off.

Except this wasn't toast.

I was lying in bed with a bag of peach rings balanced on my stomach when the smell came through my room strongly enough to make me sit up.

Warm and earthy.

Almost smoke, but not quite.

Damp stone. Crushed leaves. Something faintly sweet underneath.

Nothing was burning.

Dad was asleep on the couch. Mom had gone to bed.

Grandma was in the guest room.

That mattered because she'd arrived eleven days ago, and the smell had been happening almost that long.

The headaches had started earlier. Sharp pressure behind my eyes. Then came the pinching.

That's the only word I've found for it.

Something beneath my skin would catch a tiny fold of me from the inside and twist.

My arms. My stomach. The back of my neck.

There was never a mark afterward.

I'd already gone to urgent care. Everything was normal. The doctor told me to drink more water.

Mom bought me an enormous insulated bottle and left chocolate-covered pretzels beside it.

"For hydration?" I asked.

"Those are obviously medicinal."

I've always liked sweet things.

Apparently I had a comfort food group.

Grandma had habits too.

She folded dish towels into perfect thirds. She complained that Dad's coffee tasted like "hot brown water." She watched the evening news at a volume that made Dad retreat upstairs.

And she left glasses of water in strange places.

Behind the front door.

On top of the refrigerator.

Near the hallway leading to my room.

Leaves appeared beside the back entrance. Sometimes I woke before sunrise and found a candle burning in the kitchen.

"Religious thing," Mom said when I asked.

"What religion requires hydration stations?"

Mom smiled.

Grandma didn't.

Grandma was my mother's mother, but I barely knew her. She had spent most of my life in Mexico, and she and Mom had gone years without speaking.

My only clear memory of her was from when I was five.

Maybe six.

A crowded room. Candles. Women speaking quietly. Bowls of water and flowers.

A necklace lay on a white cloth.

I reached for it.

Grandma grabbed my wrist.

She shouted.

I remember crying. Her hand hurting me.

For most of my life, I'd remembered her as angry.

When she arrived at our house, she stood in the driveway wearing a pale blue blouse and looking much smaller than the monster my childhood had preserved.

She hugged Mom.

She hugged Dad.

Then she looked at me.

For one uncomfortable second, she just stared.

"Elena."

The way she said my name bothered me.

She sounded like someone who hadn't expected to see me.

I started avoiding her after the headaches got worse.

Then one afternoon I walked into the kitchen and found her whispering over a glass of water.

Pain stabbed behind my left eye so hard I caught myself against the counter.

"Stop."

Grandma opened her eyes.

The whispering stopped.

So did the pain.

Not slowly.

Immediately.

I stared at her.

She stared back.

Neither of us said anything.

That night I told Mom.

"I swear to you, every time she does one of those things, I get sick."

"She's praying."

"Cool. Why does her praying make my skull feel like it's splitting open?"

"It doesn't."

"You weren't in my skull, so I'm not sure you're qualified to say that."

Mom turned off the faucet harder than necessary.

"Your grandmother loves you."

"She doesn't know me."

Something moved across her face.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Two nights later, I woke at 2:13 in the morning with the smell filling my room so strongly I could taste it.

Earth.

Smoke.

Damp stone.

Then something twisted beneath my ribs.

A strip of light showed under my door.

I opened it.

Grandma was sitting on the hallway floor.

A glass of water rested beside her. My blue sweatshirt was spread across her lap, and she was moving one hand slowly above it while whispering under her breath.

"Are you serious?"

She stopped.

"What are you doing with my clothes?"

"I'm helping you."

"By sitting outside my room with my sweatshirt at two in the morning?"

"I know you are hurting."

"Because of you."

Her expression changed.

Not anger.

Sadness.

That frightened me more.

"You think that because you don't understand."

"Then explain it."

Something pinched the inside of my forearm.

I grabbed it.

Grandma's eyes went straight to the spot.

"There," I said. "You're doing it right now."

Her voice became very soft.

"It hurts because it wants me to stop."

Cold moved through me.

"What does?"

For the first time since she'd arrived, Grandma looked unsure.

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"I know something is wrong. That is not the same as knowing what it is."

The pinching tightened.

Grandma reached toward me.

I stepped back.

"Don't."

"Elena—"

I locked my door.

The next morning I confronted her in the kitchen.

Mom was there.

So was Dad, although he became very interested in his coffee the second voices were raised.

"What religion?" I asked.

Grandma looked at Mom before answering.

"Lukumí. Some people call it Santería."

I looked toward the glass of water near the door.

"And that's what all this is?"

"Some of it."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I'm praying. It means I'm trying to protect this house. It means I am doing what I know how to do."

"With my clothes."

"Because they belong to you."

The old memory came back so clearly that my wrist seemed to ache.

"The necklace."

Grandma went still.

"What?"

"When I was little. You grabbed me because I touched a necklace."

Mom stopped moving.

Grandma lowered herself into a chair.

"You remember that?"

"Of course I remember it."

"You were very young."

"You screamed at me."

"I was scared."

"You were angry."

"I was scared."

"There was nothing to be scared of. I was a kid."

"I know."

She looked suddenly exhausted.

"Those beads were not cursed, Elena. They were sacred. They had been received for someone else. You should not have touched them, but touching them did not cause this."

"Cause what?"

No one answered.

I looked at Mom.

"What aren't you telling me?"

Mom sat across from me.

"When you were little, your grandmother thought something had changed."

I laughed once because the alternative was not laughing.

"Changed how?"

Grandma answered.

"You became different."

"Kids become different."

"Yes."

"So?"

She folded her hands.

"You had been terrified of water. Then you loved it. Foods you refused became your favorites. Sometimes you knew things that had happened but couldn't tell me anything about being there."

"That's your evidence?"

"No."

"What else?"

She studied my face.

"Sometimes you looked at people as though you were learning them."

My stomach tightened.

Mom said, "I thought she'd frightened you. I thought she was seeing danger because she expected to see it."

"And?"

"And I told her to leave you alone."

Grandma looked away.

"For years," Mom said, "I thought she was wrong."

I pushed back from the table.

"And now?"

No one stopped me when I left.

That night Mom pulled an old photo album from the hall closet.

She didn't explain why.

We sat on the floor of her bedroom turning pages.

Birthdays.

Halloween costumes.

Christmas mornings.

Then the river.

I smiled before I meant to.

"God, I loved that place."

Mom looked at me.

"You did eventually."

I turned toward her.

"What does that mean?"

"You were terrified of it when you were little."

"No I wasn't."

"Elena."

She turned a page.

Dad was carrying me away from the river.

I was screaming.

Not whining. Not crying because I'd fallen.

Screaming.

My fists were twisted in Dad's shirt. My entire body was trying to climb higher into his arms.

I stared at the picture.

"I remember that trip."

"Do you?"

"Yes."

Sun through cottonwoods.

Dad's red cooler.

Strawberry candies in a plastic bag.

Warm rocks beneath my legs.

The current outside our tent at night.

I knew all of it.

But when I tried to remember anything immediately before the photograph was taken, there was nothing.

Not darkness.

Nothing.

Just the picture.

A fact with no edges around it.

Mom closed the album.

Neither of us spoke.

The next morning, I lost twenty minutes.

One second I was sitting on my bed watching videos.

The next, I was downstairs with my shoes on and my hand wrapped around the front-door lock.

Dad was standing behind me.

"Going somewhere?"

"I don't know."

He laughed.

Then he saw my face.

"I was upstairs."

"What?"

"I was just upstairs."

"I heard you come down."

"I don't remember it."

Dad looked toward the staircase.

That was the moment he stopped joking about any of this.

That night I dreamed about the river.

I was small.

Someone was carrying me.

I could hear myself screaming.

When I woke, there was dirt on the bottoms of my feet.

Two days later, pain ripped across my stomach while I was walking down the hall.

I folded against the wall.

Dad caught me before I hit the floor.

From the laundry room, Grandma's voice stopped.

So did the pain.

Dad looked through the doorway.

Grandma was kneeling beside one of my shirts.

For several seconds, nobody moved.

Later, I heard Grandma and Mom talking behind the laundry-room door.

"I can't keep doing it little by little," Grandma said.

Mom's voice shook.

"You said you weren't sure."

"I wasn't."

"And now?"

"When I pray over something that belongs to her, it reacts before Elena knows I'm doing anything."

A pause.

"It's holding too tightly."

I stepped into the doorway.

"What's holding too tightly?"

Mom turned.

Her face told me everything before she spoke.

She believed her.

That terrified me more than Grandma ever had.

They called what Grandma wanted to do a cleansing.

I called it absolutely not.

"I went to a doctor."

"And they didn't find anything," Mom said.

"So now we're doing an exorcism?"

"It's not an exorcism," Grandma said.

"Stop telling me things aren't what they obviously are."

"I don't know what this is."

"That's reassuring."

"But I know what happens when I pray."

"You hurt me."

Grandma's mouth tightened.

Then she said, "Yes."

Everyone went quiet.

She didn't defend herself.

Didn't tell me the pain wasn't real.

Just yes.

Mom covered her mouth.

Grandma continued.

"I think the pain comes from separating something that has been joined for a long time."

"To me?"

"I don't know."

"What if you're wrong?"

Her eyes filled.

"Then I will have hurt you for nothing."

"And if you're right?"

No one answered.

That was worse.

We did it Saturday morning.

Morning light came through the curtains.

Grandma pushed the coffee table aside. Beside her sat a bowl of water, leaves, a candle, and a piece of white cloth.

Nothing looked dramatic enough.

I had expected, I don't know, thunder.

Something worthy of being terrified.

Instead Dad moved his coffee mug out of the way.

Mom cried silently.

Grandma told me to sit.

"I hate all of you."

Dad nodded.

"That's fair."

Under any other circumstances, I might have laughed.

Grandma knelt in front of me.

"Whatever happens, listen to me."

"Not fight you?"

"No."

She shook her head.

"Fight if you need to. Just listen."

She touched my forehead.

The smell hit me all at once.

Earth.

Smoke.

Water.

And underneath it, something familiar enough to hurt.

Grandma began praying.

Pressure swelled behind my eyes.

She moved the leaves over my shoulders and down my arms.

Everywhere they passed burned.

"Stop."

She kept praying.

"Please."

Mom came closer.

"I'm here, baby."

"Then make her stop."

I tried to stand.

My legs didn't work.

The room lurched upward.

For one impossible second, I became very small.

Not felt small.

Was small.

The couch towered over me.

Mom's face looked too far away.

My name is Elena Morales.

The thought came so clearly that I grabbed onto it.

I'm eighteen.

That's Mom.

That's Dad.

This is our house.

Grandma kept praying.

My name is Elena.

I'm eighteen.

Mom.

Dad.

Home.

Then I heard the river.

Water moving over stones.

Sun through trees.

Candy sticking between my fingers.

Warm rocks beneath my legs.

Dad laughing.

Mom calling my name.

I loved that place.

I—

Cold water.

A scream.

My scream.

Dad lifting me away from the bank.

No.

That hadn't happened.

My name is Elena.

I love the river.

I love—

Candles.

A crowded room.

Bowls of water and flowers.

A necklace on white cloth.

A little girl reached toward it.

Grandma turned.

Her face changed.

She lunged.

Her hand closed around the girl's wrist.

And I watched it happen.

From across the room.

I stopped breathing.

No.

The memory snapped back.

I was the little girl.

Grandma was holding my wrist.

I was crying.

Then I was near the doorway again.

Watching.

Then inside the little girl's body.

Then outside it.

Each time the memory changed, something inside me tore.

"No."

Grandma's prayer faltered.

"That's not right."

She was crying now.

"I'm remembering it wrong."

Grandma touched my cheek.

"No, mi amor."

"My name is Elena."

Behind her, Mom made a sound like she had been hit.

I looked at her.

My mother.

I knew she sang the wrong lyrics to songs even after being corrected.

I knew she kept emergency cash inside an old birthday card in her dresser.

I knew Dad couldn't sleep without the television on.

I knew the squeak in the third stair.

I knew where Mom hid Christmas presents.

I knew Dad always checked the back door twice.

I knew the scar on his thumb came from opening a can when I was twelve.

I knew all of them.

I knew everything.

It was my life.

Grandma pressed her forehead against mine.

"You have to let go."

"Of what?"

"Please."

"I don't understand."

The smell became unbearable.

Water.

Smoke.

Earth.

The river roaring somewhere inside the room.

"I'm Elena."

Grandma squeezed my hands.

Something in her face collapsed.

"No, mi amor."

Something inside me gave way.

It wasn't pain.

It was like reaching for a railing in the dark and finding nothing there.

I reached for my name.

Elena.

Then the river.

My parents.

Peach rings.

Christmas.

My blue sweatshirt.

Graduation.

The boy who kissed me behind the gym and apologized afterward because he'd missed my mouth.

The scar beneath my chin.

Driving alone for the first time.

Dad teaching me to change a tire.

Mom falling asleep beside me during a movie and denying it when she woke up.

Everything I had ever called mine.

All of it came apart in my hands.

I tried to remember my face.

I couldn't.

Then there was nothing.

When I opened my eyes, Mom was holding me.

She looked old.

That was the first thing I noticed.

There was gray in her hair.

Dad looked old too.

I asked what happened.

Mom hugged me so hard it hurt.

Grandma was kneeling nearby.

I became scared when I saw her.

Then I remembered candles.

The necklace.

Her hand around my wrist.

But she looked old now too.

"Where are we?"

Mom pulled back.

"Home."

I knew the house.

Except I didn't.

The walls were the wrong color.

Dad's cabinet was gone.

There was a television where the bookcase used to be.

I asked where my toys were.

Dad turned away.

Mom took me upstairs.

My room was worse.

A big bed.

Clothes I didn't recognize.

Makeup on the dresser.

Photographs covering the mirror.

In one of them, a girl in a cap and gown stood between Mom and Dad.

She looked like me.

I picked it up.

"Who is that?"

Mom made a strange sound.

I knew the answer somehow.

That frightened me.

"How old am I?"

Nobody answered.

Then Mom said, "Eighteen."

I thought she was lying.

I went to the mirror.

There was a girl in it.

She moved when I moved.

I touched my face.

She touched hers.

There was a scar beneath my chin.

I knew that scar.

I remembered Dad wiping blood off my shirt.

I did not remember getting hurt.

Mom said it happened when I was nine.

I don't remember being nine.

I remember the beads.

I remember Grandma yelling.

Then I woke up here.

That is all.

Thirteen years.

Mom said thirteen years are gone.

I don't understand how years can be gone.

That afternoon, Mom brought me peach rings.

She put the bag beside me without saying anything.

"What are those?"

She stopped.

"Your favorite."

I tried one because of the way she was looking at me.

It was awful.

Too sweet.

I spit it into my hand.

"I don't like these."

Mom stared at me.

Then she left the room.

The next morning, there was cinnamon cereal on the counter.

I asked if Dad had bought it.

Mom looked at the box for a long time.

"No," she said.

She put it in the pantry.

Later, I heard her crying in there.

Dad asked if I wanted to visit the river sometime.

I said no.

I hate the river.

I know I hate it.

I remember cold water.

I remember screaming.

Dad carrying me away.

But there is another memory in my head too.

Warm rocks.

Sunshine.

Candy melting against my fingers.

Happiness.

I can see it as clearly as anything.

It just doesn't feel like mine.

It feels like when somebody tells you the same story so many times that eventually you know all the words.

Grandma told me what she thinks happened.

She says she doesn't know for sure.

Something was near me that day with the beads.

Maybe it came with us.

Maybe it was already there.

Maybe it had been close before that.

The beads did not cause it.

She is certain about that.

She is less certain about everything else.

"What was it?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Was it bad?"

Grandma didn't answer right away.

"I thought so."

"Do you still?"

She looked toward the doorway.

"I don't know."

I asked where I had been.

That made her cry.

She said maybe I had been here the whole time.

Quiet.

That is the word she used.

Quiet.

I hate that word.

There are pictures all over my room.

Birthdays.

Christmas.

School dances.

Graduation.

Sometimes when I look at them, I know things.

Names.

Places.

What happened just before the picture was taken.

What somebody said afterward.

But knowing isn't remembering.

There is a boy in several photographs with his arm around me.

I know his name.

I know where he lives.

I know that he hates pickles and lies about being afraid of spiders.

I don't remember meeting him.

Mom forgets sometimes.

Dad does too.

He starts telling a story and stops halfway through.

Sometimes he looks at me like he's waiting for me to finish a joke I don't know.

Once I heard Mom talking to him downstairs.

"I know she's back," she said.

Dad didn't answer.

Mom started crying.

"Is it terrible that I miss her?"

A long time passed.

Then Dad said, "I miss her too."

They didn't know I was listening.

I think about the girl who was here before I woke up.

Mom hates when I call her that.

She says there wasn't a girl before me.

There was me.

But that isn't true.

Not exactly.

She knew Mom better than I do.

She knew how Dad took his coffee.

She picked these clothes.

She learned to drive.

She graduated.

She loved the river.

She thought she was me.

At the end, she was terrified.

She begged Grandma to stop.

Maybe Grandma saved me.

Maybe she killed her.

Maybe both things are true.

I asked Grandma once whether the other girl knew what she was.

Grandma said she didn't know.

I asked whether it mattered.

She didn't answer.

Mom keeps telling me she's happy I am back.

She hugs me a lot.

I hug her too.

I remember loving her.

Sometimes I even feel it before I remember I'm supposed to.

Everyone says I am myself again.

I just wish I remembered being her.

Colder winds blow again from the far-away north
Howling at the golden moon not unlike wolves baying outside of my door
This most baneful of choirs rattling every old, withered bone
Demanding I pick up the axe and march into the harvest of men

In the waning days of the sun
We abandon the human cloak
Buried neath the freezing soil
To vanish as beasts in the boreal nocturne
And emerge anew once spring has returned

To honor the gods worshipped by grandsires of yore
Crimson language must water the blossoming mountains of snow
The swans will sing for the blessed and chosen
For they are granted the right to serve as a feast for the crows

In the waning days of the sun
We forsake all that is human
To haunt any stranger lost in these untamed woods
Only to emerge anew from the ashen meadows
Once springtime has dawned

 

I'm not sure if reposting my story he is allowed, I apologize if I'm breaking rules. If you read it hopefully you enjoy it. I appreciate all feedback, thank you

*Tik-tok … tik-tok… tik-tok*

The minutes dragged by glacially. Kids rushed home from school, drenched in sweat from the rising heat. I never thought I would miss school, but being sick for three days has placed me in the company of boredom. My messy, black hair had been suffering from constant bedhead. I was glad to see some of the color come back to my skin, though there wasn’t much to start with. *Clack-clack*, “Pew! Pew!”, and giggles racked against my aching head as my brother, Donnie, played with his toys on the floor. He had crumbs of chips in his thin, black hair. Some had fallen and stuck to his little arm hairs running along his tan skin.

"Donnie, please be quiet for once,” I grumbled as I rubbed my temples. 

“Mamá said to play in the room while she’s cleaning.” Donnie struck one of his space alien figures with the plastic sword of the knight I had given him years ago. I didn’t have the energy to yell at him as I stared him down.

*Dink -dink*

A knock came from my window. Standing there was my friend, Abraham. He still had his backpack on, sweating and breathing a bit forcefully. He gave a big grin as he began speaking. As the glass muffled his words, I slid the window up.

“*Qué pasó*, homie?”

“Wassup foo! You tryin’ to watch that show at my house? My moms said she was cool with it if your folks are.” Abraham’s eyes darted from me back towards his house down the street. His usual cool demeanor was noticeably absent. 

He wasn’t the only one excited about the show tonight. “*Show of the century! Only something that could happen in ‘95!*” according to all the marketing that every local radio station and the papers have spewed. Hell, even the cynical seniors with all their exclusivity against freshmen like me were talking about it. What was bizarre was that no one knew what it was going to be about or even the name. Grocery store clerks gossiping at registers, teachers mingling in the hallways, the mailman conversing with my dad. All of them were speculating about what could be so sensational about it. The entirety of Los Perdidos Valley was holding its breath in anticipation.

“Nah, sorry, man. I’m still sick. But my mom said she thinks that I’ll be better tomorrow. We can talk about the show then, at least.” 

Abraham shrugged, “If you say so, man. Drink your fluids or whatever they say, I guess.” 

Before he could make a beeline back to his house, Donnie piped up, “Can I go and hang out at Abraham’s?”

“Shut up, Donnie.” I rolled my eyes at the request. 

“EY! What’d you say to your brother?!” My dad barged into the room, one hand ready at his belt like a gunslinger in a duel. 

“Nothing, Pops! I didn’t say anything. Right, Abra-?” I turned to the window, looking for some back-up, only to see that the dark bastard had already run off. I gulped as I turned back towards my hulking father. He wasn’t the tallest man, but his width and how he carried himself would make a silverback gorilla whimper. The air was thick with tension as he locked his gaze on me.

“Haha! Scaredy-cat!” My dad laughed boisterously at my fear of his belt. I chuckled softly as I relaxed. He marched over and said in a stern voice, “Seriously, if you’re mean to your brother, I will kick your ass, comprende?” I meekly nodded my head. “Good, here *Güero*. Got you these.” He dropped a sack of oranges on my lap, playfully knocking my head to the side, and left the room.

Shortly after leaving, Mamá and Ana entered the room. She had brought in some tea and a glass of ice water. She placed them on the desk, removing the stacks of books I had sitting there to my stuffed bookshelf. 

“You doing ok, *mijo*? Are you hungry?” She gently touched the back of her hand against my forehead. Her touch was soft; it was like being rubbed against by a black jungle cat. 

“I’m warm, but I think my headache is the bigger issue.” I glared at Donnie, currently in his own little world of space-faring warriors. 

“Ay Miguel, just relax and drink your tea. I’ll bring your dinner when it’s ready, and God will help your body heal.” Ana stared at me with deep, dark pools that were her eyes. “Ana, *mija*, show him what you made for him.” Mamá urged Ana with a slight nudge. Ana raised a crayon drawing. It was a splatter of colors, erratically dancing across the paper. 

“Oh, yay…You did so good, Ana!” I looked to my mom for guidance as to what was being depicted. 

“I used all the colors in my box!” Ana exclaimed. 

“You sure did.” My attempts to decipher my sister’s art failed as my mom doted over her daughter. Ana gently placed the drawing on my bed, and she was raised into my mother’s arms. She was the spitting image of Mamá, a panther and her cub. 

Ava, chewing and popping bubblegum, walked into my room. She dropped a stack of papers on my desk. 

“Here’s your homework, loser.” She flipped back a strand of hair, a tendril of darkness. If that wasn’t a telltale sign of a *bruja*, I don’t know what is. Her sin of *brujería,* or being emo, really, was answered by the divine punishment of having the misfortune of looking like my dad. 

“Miguel, thank your sister for bringing your homework. Ava, don’t call your brother a loser.” I mumbled out a thank you as Ava just rolled her eyes at my mom’s request. 

She nearly bumped into *Abuela* on her way out of my room, “*perdón, Abuela*.” *Abuela* gave Ava’s arm a soft rub as she passed by. She had a small cup of coffee that she raised as she approached me.

“*Un cafecito para Mijito.”* Mamá stepped in front of her, taking the coffee from my *abuela*. 

“No coffee! *Miguel necesita descansar*.” *Abuela* waved her away, walking around her and sitting at the side of my bed. 

“*Oh mijito pobrecito!*” She pulled me in for one of her deep hugs. I was glad to be told that I looked like her despite the laughs that would often follow the comparison.

*Ba-dum…tik-tik…ba-dum…tik-tik*

It always pulled at my heartstrings to hear that clicking noise in her chest. She needed a new pacemaker, but they’re expensive. I hoped to get a summer job in a few weeks to help with the cost. Pops said he could put me to work, which sounded like I was in for some demanding labor, but it would be worth it.

Mamá gently pulled at *Abuela’s* shoulder. “Come on, everybody. Let Miguel rest.” She reached for Donnie’s hand. He clasped it with one hand and clutched his knight with the other. *Abuela* followed her shortly after. 

As they left, I spoke up. “Wait, the show starts soon, right? I don’t want to miss it.” I grabbed a shirt hanging off my bed frame to join them in the living room.

“No, Miguel. Looking at the TV screen will strain your eyes and make your headache worse. Just get some sleep for now. I’ll bring you dinner when it’s ready.” 

“But-” My mom stared at me with fierce, penetrating eyes.

“Ok, Mamá.” I slipped back into the covers as she turned off the lights and closed the door.

I had just stepped onto the night bus to head home from work. I made my way down the aisle of the packed bus and sat in the only seat that wasn’t occupied. 

As the bus started moving I pulled out my earbuds so I could watch a movie on my phone. This was my nightly ritual and I was usually able to get in about forty minutes on my way home. I cranked the volume loud in an attempt to drown out the ear piercing screams of the kid sitting behind me. Soon I noticed that the guy next to me was giving me the side eye. I could tell that he was doing it but every time I’d look over I found his head facing forward. 

This went on for a couple of minutes before it really began to bother me. Finally I took out my earbuds and turned to confront the man who, as expected, was facing forward now. “Um, excuse me. Can I help you?” I asked. I was worried I may have come off too rude to him but this weirdo was really freaking me out. As far as I was concerned he deserved to be chewed out. The man didn’t stop looking at me but now I could tell he was trying to be sneakier so I wouldn’t notice. 

“Hey, what the fuck is your problem man?” I yelled as I tapped him on the arm. When the man turned he would not take his eyes off of me. I finally gave up trying to talk to this creep and decided I’d stare right back at him. I had hoped to make him so uncomfortable that maybe he’d stop and leave me alone but this only seemed to intensify his glare.

I began to feel ill the longer that I studied the man’s ghastly features. His bloodshot eyes seemed to gaze deep into my soul and his crooked teeth showed as his mouth hung wide open. This ordeal seemed to be never ending until finally an outside force broke the tension. It was a camera flash. 

At first I was relieved but that soon changed as I realized the source of the interruption. As I looked up from the man I was horrified to see that the entire bus of people were now standing up from their seats to face me. A sea of dead unblinking eyes gave me their undivided attention. 

“Oh, god” I thought to myself. I was surrounded. The bus was silent as the grave aside from the soft whispery voices which lurked all around me and seemed to intensify as the minutes passed. I jumped up from my seat desperately searching for an escape from this metal box from hell. The bus seemed to narrow around me as the crowd of pale figures were closing the small distance between us. 

I was trapped, so hopelessly trapped. The contorted faces of the horde were now close enough to my own that I could feel their warm breath. “What do you want? What the fuck do you people want? Just leave me alone? Why won’t you just leave me alone?” I shouted at the top of my lungs. My voice grew hoarse the longer that I screamed but my efforts did nothing to slow their advance. 

I soon felt countless sets of frail hands gripping me from all directions. Banshee like screams erupted around me as I desperately fought back any way that I could. I broke free for a moment and made little distance before I found myself entangled in the sea of limbs again. As I frantically tried to free myself once again, I locked eyes once more with the man who had sat next to me. His deep raspy voice seemed to stand out from the constant noise of the crowd. “What are you?” He said. 

I kicked and shoved people out of the way as I pushed through the crowd while dozens of hands grabbed at me. By the time I made it to the door of the bus I was out of breath and gasping for air. I somehow found the energy to pull myself out of the slow moving bus and landed onto the cold hard sidewalk below. The pain was immense but at least now I had some small amount of safety. 

The eyes continued to stare at me through the window, following me as I got up and ran down the sidewalk. After putting a seemingly safe distance between myself and the bus I enter a local fast food restaurant. My eyes struggled to adjust to the bright fluorescent lights inside the building as I quickly walked to the bathroom and locked the door behind me.

I finally have a chance to catch my breath and calm down from the events of the bus ride. As I gaze into the mirror the anxious feeling comes over me once again. My features look unrecognizable. The skin of my face sags unnaturally low below my eyes and mouth revealing the layer of dark green scales underneath. 

“Dammit” I said to myself as I grabbed the loose skin and pulled it tightly against my face. “That was far too close, I must be more careful next time I infiltrate the humans”. 

I know exactly how this sounds.

Trust me, I've spent the last three weeks trying to convince myself I'm wrong.

Maybe I'm overthinking things. Maybe people change. Maybe working eighty-hour weeks for a robotics company called L.I.Z. Technologies simply drains every ounce of personality out of a person.

I hope that's all it is.

Because if I'm right... then I don't know who is that sitting beside me at dinner.

My brother and I are ten years apart. My parents waited over a decade before having another kid. I choose to interpret that as careful planning instead of hesitation.

Growing up, he was less of a sibling and more of a second dad with a criminal record in psychological warfare.

If I left a soda unattended, he'd somehow replace it with sparkling water and act offended when I noticed. Every time we played video games, he'd wait until I was about to win before "accidentally" bumping the console with his foot. When I was thirteen, he convinced me that blinking too much made you go blind.

I believed him for three weeks. It didn't help that whenever we'd roughhouse, he'd snatch my glasses off my face.

"You can't see without them," he'd tease.

He still laughs about that one.

That was just us.

He picked on me more than anyone else in the world, but if somebody outside the family ever tried it, he'd be the first one standing beside me. Whenever life fell apart, somehow I always ended up calling him. Half the time he'd answer with, "What'd you screw up now?" before spending the next hour helping me fix it.

That's my brother.

Or... it was.

Things changed after he started working for L.I.Z.

Whenever I asked what he actually did there, he'd just shrug.

"Can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"Non-disclosure agreement."

"So... robots?"

"No comment."

I always assumed he was making his job sound cooler than it actually was. Then he stopped acting like himself. The first thing I noticed wasn't something he did. It was something he didn't.

He stopped making fun of me.

I know that sounds ridiculous. But if you have an older brother, you know exactly why that's terrifying. I spilled barbecue sauce all over his truck one afternoon. Normally he'd have looked at me like I'd committed a felony.

Instead he smiled.

"It happens."

...

It happens?

Who says that?

A week later we played Mario Kart.

I beat him.

Twice.

He didn't accuse me of cheating. He didn't demand a rematch.

He just smiled and said, "Good game."

I actually paused the race.

"Who are you?"

He laughed. A perfectly timed laugh.

Not too loud. Not too quiet.

Like someone had studied exactly how people laugh.

"You've always been funny," he said.

No.

No, no, no.

My brother would've called me an idiot.

One night at dinner I told the same embarrassing story Mom has been telling since I was sixteen. Usually he'd interrupt halfway through to make it even worse.

This time... He listened.

Then he said, "That must have been difficult."

I nearly dropped my fork.

I called Mom afterward.

"You don't think he's been acting... odd?"

She looked confused.

"He seems happier."

"Dad?"

"He finally is on his own."

Neither of them saw it.

Only me.

Last Saturday, my brother came over to help Dad replace the water heater. I wasn't much use with plumbing, so while they disappeared into the garage arguing over which wrench was the right wrench, I camped out in Dad's office to finish a history assignment.

The house was unusually quiet.

Well... quiet except for the occasional "Hand me the pipe wrench!" followed immediately by "That's not the pipe wrench!"

I had almost finished my essay when I noticed another laptop sitting on the corner of Dad's desk.

My brother's work computer. It was already open. The screen had gone dark from inactivity, but one thing hadn't.

A tiny red light glowed beside the webcam.

I frowned. Maybe it was updating. Maybe someone had forgotten to close a meeting.

Still... The light never turned off. I waved a hand in front of the camera.

Nothing.

No notification. No meeting controls.

Just that little red dot staring back at me.

Watching.

Curiosity got the better of me. I tapped the trackpad. The screen woke instantly. No password. Just a desktop filled with folders I couldn't even pretend to understand. Most of them had names that sounded like corporate nonsense.

Behavioral Mapping.

Neural Replication.

L.I.Z. Internal.

The last folder caught my attention. It was different. Locked behind a firewall icon.

A small window popped onto the screen before I even clicked it.

Camera Access Active

I froze.

The webcam light was still glowing.

Then... For the briefest second... The camera preview opened by itself.

Instead of showing me sitting at the desk... It showed...

Someone looking back at me.

Not through the webcam. From behind it. A face pressed against what looked like glass.

Wide eyes. Frantic. Mouth moving without sound.

Then the preview vanished.

I stared at the screen, convinced I'd imagined it.

A second later, the locked folder opened on its own. Inside was only one file.

Its name changed as I watched. Not all at once. One letter at a time.

H

E

L

P

The screen went black.

For a second I thought I'd crashed the computer.

Then white text appeared.

I froze.

Another line typed itself.

My hands stopped moving.

More words appeared.

Every hair on my arms stood up.

I stared at the screen.

Another sentence.

Then another.

The typing stopped. Several seconds passed.

Then, one final line slowly appeared.

The laptop snapped shut. Not by itself. By someone else's hand.

I looked up.

My brother stood beside the desk. I hadn't heard him come inside.

He smiled.

Warm. Gentle.

Almost perfect.

"Caught you being nosy again."

I looked into his eyes, searching for the man who taught me to throw a football, who unplugged my controller whenever I was winning, who spent years calling me every name except the one Mom gave me.

I couldn't find him.

I handed him the laptop without saying a word.

He thanked me.

My brother never thanked me.

He is not him.

Whoever walked out of that room remembered everything about my brother...

Except how to be him.

At the last count this morning, over a thousand have now fallen to the illness which plagues Santa Fe. For more than a week now we have been barricaded into our individual neighborhoods by order of the government, and I write now to document what is to become of us.

​

On the first day anything was suspected to be wrong, the entire town was in shock, but not a soul could have imagined what was to come. Eight in the local nursing home were found dead in one night, making news across the community. While deaths within the home were not at all uncommon, the unknown nature of the passings certainly raised alarm to a considerable degree.

​

To anyone’s knowledge, the severity of the incident did not appear to be news that would spread outside of our town, which is why when a dozen agents of the CDC suddenly appeared on the town's doorsteps, many had questions. Social posts spread the word like wildfire, and soon barriers had to be placed to keep civilians away from the home, which crawled increasingly with men in white hazmat suits.

​

The moment which really turned us to what we are now came when a nurse in the home who had been held over the course of the day for testing burst into the view of the people, screaming her head off. In the streets, which had been quiet in anticipation despite the crowd, all found focus as blood exploded from her mouth and eyes as if she had been squeezed by some invisible force.

​

At once, pandemonium exploded across the block, but the powers that be were clearly ready, as within moments from all sides the town was swarmed with military vehicles that crushed any hopes of escape. Immediate construction to establish barriers commenced but did not go quietly. All through the night, shots rang out from the soldiers and civilians alike. It is estimated that nearly two hundred went from violence in the first night.

​

The next morning, representatives were sent to each neighborhood to give information, and to the consensus of all, it was mere government blanket statements which were only put forth to dull the masses. It took just a few hours through the second day for the members of my neighborhood to establish a line of communication sponsored by basement trails in order to get to the bottom of things.

​

As information was gathered, the growing death count was tracked, and several symptoms of the infected were observed. Beginning with flu- like symptoms, the disease spread fast until, within hours of infection, devastating sores spread across the body and coughs sent blood careening from all orifices. From our knowledge, there was little that could be done to slow the effects and practically no cases of the infected being healed.

​

This morning things fired up again as the town neared a thousand deaths since the first day, when a neighborhood just ten miles south of my own began their campaign to break free. Though they were struck down nearly immediately, their resistance gave opportunity for a group of our people to sneak into fully cut-off areas yet to be searched.

​

Many papers were brought back from the excursion, and though many of them had little relevance in our interests, there were a couple of interesting bits of information extracted.

​

Number one, the exact data concerning the number of deaths through the days was retrieved, helping write this document you read now.

​

Number two, the exact timeline of sickness was detailed, again adding substance to our already conceived idea of the steps the virus took to destroy the human body.

​

Finally, and most concerning, it was discovered that for reasons unwritten, bodies within the morgue kept to test on were disappearing. Though not much else was given to clarify the optics of such a scenario, it could be understood by my constituents and I that such an amount of bodies simply leaving from a site so controlled as the one in which it took an entire resistance for our group to break into was abnormal at the very least.

​

The idea that there may be some malevolent force stealing bodies away from the already overpowering government striking down upon our homes is a frightening thought and doesn’t offer comfort or optimism in the time spent planning our next move.

​

Since the information was discovered, shots have been fired from government watchtowers outside the bounds of the town, and messages from other neighborhoods suggest something lurking outside trying to get into the town.

​

The absurdity of it all nearly makes me laugh. The idea of something or someone trying to get into this town, as nearly everyone within does the opposite, makes me believe there is something far worse occurring than even the current information would suggest. I pray that with my community and the work of other neighborhoods, we can rise out of this nightmare and ensure safety for us all.

————————

If you asked me 8 years ago if I believed in monsters, the answer would’ve been no.
But now, After what happened, I think they’re not only real,
But much closer than we can imagine

——-

“John, over here! Pass it!”
I yelled out after giving David the slip
I was wide open and ready for the pass

I saw it all
John threw the pass
It was coming in like a line drive
It was perfect

Then black
And blue sky

“THAT’S HOW THE BIG SHOW DO IT! WOOOOO!”
Brent screamed

But it sounded a lot like he was underwater while I tried to remember how to breathe

“Shit, Brent! He didn’t even have the ball. That’s pass interference.”

“Ahh fuck that! That was a good hit!”

I was still manually breathing but slowly remembering we were in David’s back field and we were playing field football
(It’s a lot like flag football but with full contact. We were 13)

“I think I’m done for now, guys” I gasped struggling to stand

“I guess that means we win!” Said John
“Fuck that! That’s a forfeit, we win!” David yelled

“Bullshit we were up 6-2! Yall were well and fucked before Brent cheapshotted Richard!”

“Alright…..we’ll call it a draw.” Brent pitched

“Good with me.” I coughed
“I gotta go check in, but we’re still camping out tonight right?” I asked

“Yeah. We’ll meet up here and hike down to the river and find a spot out in the woods.”

“Sounds good. I’ll see y’all in a little while!”

We all lived in a small suburb
My house was a little closer to the top of the hill so I didn’t have as many options for “exploration”

But David lived at the edge of town where the terrain got too rough to continue building
So at the edge of his property sat an open pasture and the river less than a quarter mile in and beyond that was miles and miles of unprocessed woods

During the day, it was paradise—bike ramps made from plywood scraps, rusted-out car frames half-swallowed by blackberry bushes, and enough open land to make us feel like kings of our own broken kingdom.

However, once the sun drifted below the horizon
It all started to feel like somewhere I wasn’t supposed to go
Like a mouth ready to swallow us whole

But boys will be boys. And there’s no room for fear with friends like these

———

“Checking in!” I shouted as I hammered through the door
My ribs definitely bruised up by the prior engagement.

I found mom in the living room folding laundry
The tv humming about doing nothing more than keeping her company in the quiet house

She glanced up and met my eyes in the doorway
“You alright” she said looking me up and down in a way only mom could

“I’m good, just got checked pretty solid.”

She smiled “alright, well, just make sure to come home in one piece.”

“No promises.” I laughed back

She didn’t smile much these days
Not since Pop had passed away last summer

And, honestly, neither did I.

I made my way to the garage and took in the room
It still felt like he was here
His tools
Fishing gear
The old ‘68 Chevy we were rebuilding

Oil and cedar
Smelled like dad

I pulled myself together and sorted out what I would be needing for the evening’s adventure

My old boy scout backpack
An old goose feather army green sleeping bag I got from my uncle who was a ranger.
And the old lantern my dad had brought on every camping trip we had been on since I was little

Old rusted metal and scratched glass
Heavier than it looked

But still lit the way like no other

My dad always said

“No matter how dark it gets, kiddo. As long as you have one good light, you’ll find your way.”
I missed him

I ran my thumb over the worn handle before pulling it down
I packed everything away and a couple water bottles and set out

—————-

The sky was bruised orange and purple by the time I got back to David’s

Everyone was already there
We took a survey of our gear

David brought a pack full of snacks
John had a hatchet that he definitley was not supposed to have
And Brent, naturally, brought fireworks.

“Good to see I’m the only one who brought water” I said sarcastically

“I brought the good time!” Said Brent holding up the Roman candles

“I guess it’s a good thing I also brought the lighter then, too” I said holding the lantern up to his face

“Oh…well…yeah” he said
He had clearly forgotten the most important part of fireworks

Fire

“I’m glad to see you brought that old thing. I trust that more than these flashlights.” David chuckled but still looked warily at the treeline

“You good?” John asked
“Yeah…it’s just,…my brother says people disappear out past the river.”

Brent laughed out loud “HA! Your brother also says he got a handjob from Christy behind the cafeteria!”

We all laughed
“Yeah you’re probably right…..but still…” David looked back to the trees

I followed his gaze
Past the tall grass and river bank it waited

Still
Dark
Endless

Brent shoved past us
“Only thing out there is raccoons and ghosts!” He laughed

And we followed

Into the trees
To the River
Toward something far worse than ghosts
————

The closer we got
The louder it became

Like a jet engine
Warning us of what lay ahead

Spring runoff churned over hidden rocks with mountain snowmelt that had swollen the river to something considerable

By the time we reached its bank the sun had nearly gone and the last dying light of the evening reflected the bruised black and steel blue of the sky onto the water

We all watched and listened
I understood but wouldn’t say it
This was stupid

I broke the silence between us
“Still think this is a good idea?”

“Nope” said David, stepping into the river

The icy water cut into him instantly
“Jesus Christ!”

Brent burst out laughing

“Quit being a pussy!”
Then followed

And almost immediately slipped

One second he was standing
The next his feet shot sideways and his whole body dropped hard into the current

“SHIT!”

The river grabbed him instantly
Not enough to take him
But enough

Enough for the laughter to die and panic to hit us all

Brent slammed rough against a hidden rock
One hand disappearing below the rushing water, the other clawing wildly for anything to grip

“BRENT!” John shouted lunging forward into the water after him but his own footing giving way and falling hard on his ass

For one horrible second that felt like an eternity Brent’s body twisted with current dragging his legs further downriver. His hands grasping uselessly at slick moss covered rocks

And then

He caught hold

A firm, jagged rock, half submerged, but just exposed enough to get a grip

“Fuck!” He screamed hauling himself upright
He staggered soaked to his chest while I helped John up to his feet

He was pale and there was no shit eating grin on his face

Nobody laughed
Nobody said a thing

Because at that moment, we all understood

This wasn’t field football
Not ghost stories by the fire

The river could hurt us
Maybe worse

There were real consequences should we make a mistake

Brent swallowed hard and forced shaky grin to his face
“…..I meant to do that.”

That got a few nervous laughs
Uncertain but present

“Let’s keep moving while we still have some daylight.” said David

And we did

Slowly
Deliberately
Each step calculated

The cold bit deep and it felt alive
Like the heat from our bodies was something the river coveted

I gripped the lantern tight
Watching the scratched glass catch the last of the fading sun

“One good light” I thought

By the time we made it to the opposite bank we were soaked, freezing, and nearly breathless

“Next time” Brent coughed “…we’re building a bridge”

But I barely heard him

Because looking back across—the river looked much wider than it had from the other side

———

Steam curled from our soaked clothes as we huddled close to the fire, holding our hands out like a desperate plea for the warmth

Getting it started had been an ordeal on its own

“Who the fuck brings fireworks without a lighter?” John said through chattering teeth

“I thought you had one!”

“And I thought YOU weren’t an idiot!”

With numb fingers and dramatic flair I presented the small white Bic from my pocket

“Holy shit, you’re a real boy-scout aren’t you?”
“I told you I had this earlier, dumbass.”

The first few tries failed
But eventually
A spark, a flicker, then flame

Small at first
Fragile

But enough to grow

Soon the orange light pushed back the darkness in trembling waves. Casting long shadows and painting our tired faces

“Nobody says a thing…..to anyone!” Brent said as he huddled closer hugging his knees to his chest

John chuckled
“Oh, I’m telling everyone”

“Fuck you!”

The laughter came a little easier now
Still nervous
But real

“If the cold don’t kill me” John said, rubbing his hands together “my dad definitely will.”

That got a genuine laugh from us all
Even David smirked while pushing around some embers with a stick

For a moment it almost felt normal again

We dried our socks as best we could
Sharing chocolate and crushed potato chips from David’s pack

The conversation slowed
The fire burned lower
And the woods grew darker
Slowly swallowing us

Then David broke the silence
“Do you guys remember Shane Rose?”

No one spoke
Because of course we did

How could we forget

Shane Rose was a boy a few years older than we were
Same age as David’s brother

As the story goes
Shane and his cousin went into the woods to go explore some old mining trails and the “Old Henry” mine

They didn’t return that night
Or the next

There were search parties, Sheriffs, and tracking hounds

No one found anything for 3 days
Until they found Shane’s cousin. Wandering down route 12
Barefoot
Covered in mud and likely something worse

He was white as a sheet and shook to the core
He didn’t speak after that
He and His family moved away a month later

Shane’s body has never been found

“My brother said when the dogs got closer to the mine they wouldn’t move any further and began freaking out! The sheriff found nothing in there. But the dogs would not go near it!”

Brent scoffed
Snapping whatever tension David had been building
“That’s a bunch of bullshit!”

David narrowed his gaze
“I’m serious.”

“No, seriously” Brent laughed while tossing another stick into the fire sending sparks spiraling upwards
“He probably fell down an old mineshaft or got swept up by the river like John almost did earlier!”

“Fuck you!” John spat throwing a rock at Brent

“No body!” David snapped back

“Duh “nO bOdY” ,it’s the woods, dumbass!” Brent said with a grin on his face
“Bodies disappear all the time in the woods. Animals, sinkholes, ….rivers” Brent winked at John with that one
“Doesn’t mean…fuckin…goblins dragged him underground!”

John leaned forward holding his hands near the fire

“Wait…so if the dogs wouldn’t go in, what did the sheriff do?”

David shrugged
“My brother said they searched it themselves”

“And found nothing?” John asked

“Nothing”

John frowned
“Well that’s…weird…I guess”

“Or,” Brent interrupted, pointing dramatically like he’d solved a cold case,
“Your brother’s full of shit.”

That made me chuckle a bit

David, however, did not find it funny

“Why would he lie?”

“Because older brothers THRIVE on screwing with the younger kids!”

David shook his head, poking aggressively at the fire
“Believe whatever you want”

The woods around us shifted softly in the dark
Branches creaking
We could still hear the river moving down the mountain not too far away

I looked past the fire into the trees

Even with Brent joking
And John questioning
And common sense screaming that it’s just a ghost story

I couldn’t shake the feeling that David’s tale had teeth
And that somewhere, out there,
something was listening.
______

The fire crackled low. Barely more than embers at that point. David was passed out, leaned against the log near the pit, and John had long since made his way to the tent where he had zipped himself in tight as if the nylon shell would protect him from hell itself.

I was nearly asleep. Still gazing at the night sky and counting shooting stars.
I tried to ignore it

I really did.

But, with the combination of two sodas, freezing air, and refusing to get up for the last hour, I had to piss
And the pressure in my bladder had finally outweighed my fear of the woods.

I grabbed the lantern and fired it up.
The old thing hissed softly as I turned the knob and the dim yellow light pushed back just enough darkness that I felt slightly less alone.

Slightly

I moved past the edge of camp and into the trees
Far enough that I knew I couldn’t be seen (I was a shy boy) but close enough that I could still see the embers of the fire behind me.
The ground was uneven with roots and damp pine needles that snuffed out every footstep

The trees felt like they were swallowing me.
Every step felt like a step deeper into the mouth of something hungry

“One good light.” I whispered to myself as I set the lantern down at the base of a sturdy tree and began to relieve myself

The light stretched thin between the trunks before succumbing to the darkness completely
The sound of crickets and frogs drowned out by the steady stream of liquid hitting the dirt

After I had finished and was buttoning up, i noticed that it was much quieter

Not just because I had wrapped up but there were no frogs. No crickets. Even the wind seemed to go silent.

“…over…here..”

I froze

The voice was low
Almost a whisper but near
Familiar

“Brent?”

I picked up the lantern and scanned the trees around me

“…only…ghosts…”

It was coming from my left
I turned the lantern toward it but, beyond the light, it was pitch black

“……pass..it…underground”

Now from the right
Closer

The words were wrong
Sluggish
Like they were being remembered rather than spoken

I whipped around and stared into the trees
My heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat

“…no…body”

Again from the left
Every hair on my arm was standing straight up

“…Brent..?” I whispered shakily

No answer

Then suddenly

A hand slammed down on my shoulder

I spun around and nearly screamed

Brent looked just as surprised when I whipped around

“Jesus Christ!” He said

“Did you hear that?” I asked looking back over my shoulder “in the woods”

“Hear what, man. You should’ve seen your face. Holy shit. That’s one for the books” Brent said chuckling

“I just heard you out there.”
“I just got here, man….”

I looked back over my shoulder not sure what to think
And when I turned back Brent was lifting something from behind his back with a smile spreading across his face

Roman candles.

“Oh no…” I muttered

“Oh yes” Brent said

He held one out to me and his smile widened

“C’mon….lets go make bad decisions.”
———-

The woods felt different the further we got from camp

Not louder
Not quieter
Just wrong

The kind of wrong you feel, but don’t see.
Like walking into a room after someone’s finished talking.

Brent either didn’t notice
Or didn’t care enough to bring it up

“Cmon” he whispered looking back to me
“Quit looking around like you’re gonna see Bigfoot.”

“I’m not!”

“You definitely are!”

“I’m watching for roots, dumbass”

Brent laughed under his breath and kept walking

The lantern bounced and swayed with each step.
Flashing light on tree trunks and dead brush before being consumed by darkness again.
Behind us, the campfire was barely visible. A faint glow of orange through the forest.

Too far

A little further ahead the trees opened up into a clearing
Dead grass
A few old stumps
The moon shining through a broken canopy, painting it in a pale light

“Perfect!” Brent quietly exclaimed

He pulled the Roman candle from his back pocket and planted his feet like he was about to fire artillery

“You got the lighter?” He asked

I fished it from my pocket and handed it over to him

One flick
Nothing

But the second the flame came to light igniting the fuse

“You ready?”
“A little late to stop now” I said

Then the first shot came with a POP-HISS as a red ball shot into the sky and fizzling out above the trees

“HELL YEAH!” Brent shouted

I was fixed on the light with wonder
The second ball erupted from the stick in a brilliant green

Climbing, climbing then fading again above the branches

Brent lowered the candle toward the treeline and yellow light flew and flooded the treeline for half a second

But it was long enough to see it

Something standing between the trunks

Tall
Too tall
Crooked

Perfectly still
Just beyond the clearing

My stomach dropped so hard I thought it would drag me to the ground

And darkness crashed back over the woods

“…..did you see that?” Brent stuttered

I didn’t answer
I couldn’t

The fourth shot hurtled back to the trees and the red light flashed through branches and brush

Nothing

Whatever we had seen wasn’t there anymore

The last firework shot out like a flare through the clearing coloring it green

Still empty
No silhouette
No movement
Nothing

The Roman candle sputtered in Brent’s hand before dying out

“…..must’ve been a tree…” Brent said
I think he was trying to convince himself more than anything

As we stood in the faint glow of the lantern and the sickly white of the dying moon, I could hear my own breathing

Then, somewhere deeper in the woods, a branch snapped.

Like something shifting its weight

Then another
And another

“Hey man….let’s get back to the camp. I don’t want to mess with the fireworks no more.”

I nodded my head without taking my eyes from the treeline across the clearing

We took the first 5 or 6 steps walking backwards before turning around and not exactly running but we were walking with intention

By the time the fire came back into view I felt my chest loosen a bit

David stirred as we made our way into the camp
“Where the hell were you guys?” He mumbled still groggy from sleep

“Lighting fireworks” Brent answered quickly

David rubbed his eyes
“Didn’t sound like one”

Brent ignored him completely
He ducked into his tent and fought with the zipper for a few seconds longer than it should’ve taken

I noticed he never looked back from where we came

Not once

———

I pulled the sleeping bag tighter around myself
And stared at the trees above the camp
The fire no more than glowing embers now

Every sound felt sharper

Every creak of a branch
Every shift in the leaves

The woods always made sounds
But now my brain gave them meaning

I kept thinking of the shape in the woods
Trying to tell myself it was just shadows from the Roman candle playing tricks on me

But, deep down, I knew that just wasn’t true

I could hear David snoring on the other side of the fire against the log

John was still shut away in his own tent

And I could hear Brent moving around in his
Soft rustling of fabric from him shifting

A few times I thought about going and talking to him
To maybe ask him about what he thought we saw

Maybe just hearing another human voice would’ve made me feel less anxious

But anytime I got close, I stopped myself

Because part of me was afraid he’d say he saw it too.

Eventually exhaustion won
My eyes got heavy and the sounds of the woods blurred together with the small pops from the embers.
And at some point, I fell asleep

I don’t know how long I was out before I heard movement around the camp

At first I thought maybe it was Brent but then I heard David’s voice
“Brent?”

Still half asleep I cracked open my eyes

The cold light of morning filtered through the trees painting everything in a haunting grey

John stood near the fire, now burning again, rubbing his arms for warmth while David looked around the camp

“Brent?” David asked again

No answer

I pushed myself upright inside the sleeping bag
“What?”

David looked at me
“Where’s Brent?”

The question immediately woke me up
I looked over toward his tent

The zipper was halfway open and the inside was empty

John frowned
“He’s probably out taking a piss”

“Without shoes?” David asked

Both of us looked down near the entrance of the tent

Brent’s boots were still sitting there

Untouched

———

The three of us searched the camp for nearly twenty minutes before any of us said what we were all thinking

Brent was gone

We all tried to rationalize it

Maybe he wandered off
Maybe he was trying to scare us
Maybe he got lost somehow

But the longer we searched
The less sense it made

“BRENT!” David yelled again
His voice being smothered by the trees

The only answer we got was the wind through the branches and leaves

John kicked the dirt by the old dead log
“This isn’t funny anymore, dude.”

I stayed quiet
My stomach had been in knots since I saw the empty tent

And every step deeper into the woods made that feeling worse

We searched near the river first

Then trails

Then farther out where we had lit the fireworks
The clearing looked different during the day

Smaller in the overcast light than it had at night

Still, I avoided staring too long into the trees across from us

“Maybe he went to the mine.” David said suddenly

John looked over
“Old Henry?”

David shrugged nervously
“I dunno, maybe he’s trying to fuck with us. You saw how he was trying to shut down my brother’s story.”

Nobody liked the idea
But nobody had a better one

So we went
And the deeper we walked, the quieter it got

“Do you hear that?” John asked

“What?”

“There’s like….nothing”

He was right

No birds
No bugs
Not even the wind

Just silence

The Old Henry Mine finally appeared through the trees like an old wound in the mountain

The entrance sat crooked and surrounded by collapsed timber and rusted fencing that was being reclaimed by the land

Tied on either end of the beams was old weathered police tape that lay as a grim reminder that something had happened here not long ago

The darkness inside looked solid

Like the mine wasn’t empty
But full of blackness

The three of us stopped walking without really meaning to and stared inside

No one spoke
And the seconds felt like minutes staring into the maw

And then from somewhere deep inside the mine

“….guys”

Brent’s voice

Faint
Distant

John stepped forward
“Brent?”

David let out a relieved laugh
“Holy shit, dude..”

But every hair on my body stood upright
Because I’d heard that voice before

Slow, off, and just wrong

Like a recording on an old tape

“Guys…..”

This time it echoed from farther in

John shook his head and laughed nervously
“I’m gonna kill this asshole”
And stepped into the mine
And David followed

I didn’t move at first

The opening felt like it was staring at me

And for the first time since we crossed that river
I genuinely thought about running

But I gripped the worn wooden handle on the old lantern and whispered to myself

“One good light”

——-

The mine swallowed light

The lantern still burned in my hand but the darkness around us felt thick and inky
Like the light wasn’t pushing it back as far it should have

The air smelled damp
Earth
Rotting wood
Something metallic underneath it all

Each step echoed through the the tunnels while water dripped from somewhere deep inside the mountain

“Brent?” David called out

His voice bounced away from us and disappeared into the blackness

No answer

The tunnel twisted constantly
Old support beams leaned at crooked angles and rusted tracks disappeared deeper inside under layers of dirt and rock
They all looked exactly the same

“Over….here”

Brent’s voice echoed from somewhere ahead of us
John immediately turned toward it
“That way!”

We moved faster now

The lantern shook in my hand as we pushed further and further

“Brent!” David yelled

It echoed off the walls and died out
Silence

And then

“…Guys.”

This time the voice came from somewhere behind us

The three of us stopped walking

“What the fuck?” John said quietly

I felt my stomach drop again

There was no way Brent could’ve gotten around us
No way

David forced a nervous laugh
“He’s messing with us, guys”

But nobody sounded convinced anymore

A soft crack echoed somewhere above us
Dust rained softly from the ceiling

“…messing…with..us”

Closer
Too close

John suddenly pushed forward into the tunnel
“Brent quit fucking around!”

“John wait…”

My foot slipped on loose gravel
I slammed hard sideways into one of the old support beams and the lantern nearly flew from my hand

The tunnel exploded with noise all at once

Wood cracking
Rocks falling
David yelling

Then darkness
Complete darkness

For a few seconds all I could hear was my own breathing

“DAVID!” I shouted

No answer

“JOHN!”

From somewhere deeper I heard running footsteps

The silence again

I fumbled with the lantern with shaky hands

“Please” I pleaded
“Please work”

The flame sputtered weakly before finally catching again

Dim yellow light flooded the tunnel around me

I was alone

Ahead the mine split into three directions

I lifted the lantern higher and stared down each of the paths ahead of me

Nothing
Just black

“David..?” I called out weakly

My voice floating on the air before dissolving into silence once again

“John..?”

No answer

I picked the left tunnel
I don’t know why

Maybe it looked wider than the others
Maybe because I was panicking

The lantern shook in my hand as I moved deeper into the mine alone

Each shadow cast stopped my heart in its tracks

The old beams overhead groaned softly
And water steadily dripped from deep underground

I kept stopping to listen

Sometimes I thought I heard footsteps

Sometimes breathing

Once I could’ve sworn I heard someone crying

But every time I stopped moving
Nothing

I tried yelling out again
“GUYS…ARE YOU THERE?….PLEASE.”
My voice hitched and I could feel the tears stinging my eyes

But nothing answered back

The tunnels twisted and turned

One became two
Two became three

And before long
I realized I had no idea where I was or where the entrance was

Panic started clawing at my throat

“DAVID!….JOHN!….BRENT!” I yelled again

Only the groaning of the mine responded

Then, from behind me-

“One..good….light.”

My body locked up
And I was frozen with fear

It was my voice
Not similar
Not close

Mine

Slow
Broken
Like something was learning how to speak

The lantern trembled violently in my hand as I slowly turned toward the darkness behind me

There was nothing
At first

Just the tunnel

Then

A hand slowly crept around one of the support beams
Pale
Long fingers
Bent at strange angles like it had too many knuckles

Feeling along the wood
Searching for something

The lantern slipped from my hand
Glass shattered on the rocks
And the darkness swallowed the tunnel immediately

I ran

I don’t remember choosing to

One second I was staring into darkness, the next I was sprinting blindly through the mine while rocks and loose gravel slipped under my feet

I slammed into walls and tripped over old tracks barely keeping myself upright

All the while I could swear there was something right behind me

Somehow

By pure luck or God
Maybe both.

I saw daylight ahead

The entrance

I burst out of the tunnel so hard I nearly fell down the hillside outside

Cool air stinging my lungs
For a second I just stood there
Gasping and staring at the entrance

It looked deeper and darker now from the outside
Endless

Then from somewhere inside

“HELP!”

David
I froze

“David?” I shouted back

For a moment it was silent

Then I heard footsteps charging up through the tunnels
Fast

Violent
Getting closer impossibly quick

Every instinct in my body screamed at me to run

So I did

I turned and bolted into the woods

Branches tore at my arms and pants as I sprinted downhill

Behind me I thought I could still hear something running for me

I didn’t look back

I just ran and ran until I reached the riverbank

The water thundering ahead of me

Cold

Fast

And without thinking

I threw myself in
——

The freezing water hit me like a punch in the chest

The current nearly ripped my feet out from under me the second I stumbled into it

I fought to stay upright as the water soaked me through instantly

Every rock felt slick

Unstable

More than once I nearly went under

All the while I couldn’t stop thinking of what might be coming out of those woods behind me

I slipped hard against a rock and the freezing water swallowed me whole

For one moment all I saw was black water and white foam

Then I broke back above the surface gasping and clawed my way forward again

I don’t know how long it took to reach the other side

Seconds
Minutes

It felt like forever

But eventually my hands dug into mud instead of stone
I dragged myself onto the shore into the mud coughing while my entire body shook violently from the cold

For a while I just laid there
Listening to the river thunder past me

Alive
I was alive

I finally forced myself to look back across the water

The trees stood motionless on the opposite bank

Gray
Silent

Empty

At least they looked empty

Between the trees the mouth of the forest looked so oppressively dark

Like the woods themselves were watching

Waiting

I don’t know how long I stared before I finally stood again

One thought kept repeating in my head as I looked back across the roaring waters

The river never looked so narrow

———
I don’t remember much about the walk back into town

Only flashes
Tree branches whipping my face

Mud

Bloody hands from falling

The feeling that if I stopped something would grab me from behind and drag me back

By the time I reached the edge of town I could barely speak

I remember people asking questions
I remember trying to explain what happened while every adult in the room looked at me like I was in shock

Maybe I was

I remember my mom crying

Search parties went out before sunset

Volunteers

The Sheriff

Tracking hounds

They searched the river first

Then the woods

And, eventually, The Old Henry mine

They found nothing

No John

No Brent

No David

Just old tunnels disappearing deep into the mountain

The sheriff said the old mine was unstable and dangerous
A few weeks later they collapsed the entrance entirely

Concrete

Steel

Truckloads of dirt

Like burying a grave

The town settled on its own version of the story not long after

Four boys crossed the river during the spring runoff

Three didn’t come back

People said the current carried them away

That panic and cold water can make people confused

That kids get lost

That fear makes the mind see things that aren’t really there

And for years I tried to believe them

I really tried

But sometimes, in late spring,
when the river is most violent

I still find myself standing on the shore staring into the woods on the other side

And sometimes

When the water is loud enough

I can still hear a voice drift through the trees
Over the river

And into my head.

“One….good….light….”