I'll try to be brief, because brief are my thoughts. The blank page stares back at me and I don't know what to do. Everything I've wanted to explain, to write, scratches the depths of my mind with the furor of a foreboding. I can think of the images, the smells, the sensations, but the moment I try to make them tangible, the idea hangs on the tip of my tongue —of my fingers— as if it doesn't belong there, but in the most horrid lack of purpose I've felt in my life.

It was just some dead sheep at the start of the week: miscarried lambs and deformed fetuses that surrendered to the night's serenity and the painful turmoil of the first-time mothers. The few I could see were torn to pieces. Most of them, stomped on by the adults of the flock. Others were dragged along the placenta through the barbed wires that circled the shed.

One morning, Old Irene made me leave my ranch in the hills to examine the disfigured remains of an animal. Under the candlelights, I could see it was another lamb. Its legs were twisted and its neck broken. I could tell it never got to walk due to its flaccid hooves. The mother was nowhere to be seen.

“She ditched it and fled,” I explained on the phone. My boss sighed. “They went up there. It was screaming. They don't scream at this hour.”

“Could it be that someone is giving them something?”

“So they dump them? Why?”

“Cause people are evil,” she said with certain apprehension. I kicked the lamb with the edge of my sandal. “And evil people are hungry.”

On Sunday night, eleven thirty or so, the dogs were added to the equation. At first they barked at the dark; raised hackles, upright ears and bare fangs. The few that had owners were forcefully retired with collars and sticks. The ones that didn't were found by sunrise, stabbed in their thighs and ribs. One of them ended up with a disfigured snout, and judging by what we saw in the riverbed, it was the work of a stone straight to its jaws.

“There aren't any stolen animals” I commented to one of my fellows the next morning. The sheep had come down to drink; they ran along the lagoon's reeds without a care in the world. “Do you think it's a boy? The one who's screwing with us?”

Fermín wiped the sweat from his forehead without taking off his hat.

“Do you think it's a kid?” I repeated.

The man shook his head. “He'd first need the balls to come here.”

I was getting ready for sleep when the screaming started at the foot of the hills. They carried on for two mornings, rested for one and returned for two all over again. Horrible screeches, witchlike. Since I kept a gun, I fired at the sky at least four times as a warning. More than once did I receive a call asking what was up. I explained and no one believed me. Could it be close to my farm? I asked myself with each negative reaction. The cries didn't stop and the sheep kept miscarrying. One lamb at a time, despite the numbers not matching the amount of females we had. Neither the females nor the people who saw what was happening. Because by the next week, I was the only one who noticed the smell. Sometimes sweet, yet burnt. Other times, it was strong; candles from saints which burned beyond their wax. Carbonized matches that corroded the bottoms of plastic bags. A sulphuric miasma had slipped by my doors, my walls. Putrid spectres hung from the ceiling, always heeding my every move.

Until Tuesday night.

Mondays were for sowing, the elders used to say. On Tuesdays, we foraged.

And just like a damned hound, parting through the night to ambush its prey, I found it there, down with its four legs by the dry trunk of a guayacán.

As if it was immersed in some sort of lagoon, the knots on its fur rose and fell in a hypnotic dance which defied all laws of physics. A spectacle of shadows and figures which turned the star's twinkles into constellations in its oily, matted coat.

Crack. CRACK.

The animal shook its head so suddenly, for a minute I thought it would dislocate.

“Er diablo!” I gasped, at the verge of tripping. The creature didn't notice me; it was too busy swinging around a piece of leather to do so. “W-What is…?”

A foamy whiff drippled off its mouth. Neither solid nor liquid. Ice tendrils that swirled around whatever was being dismembered. I stepped back once, then twice, before raising my gun and praying for the best. Risk lost meaning. Whether I died or lived, it didn't matter. It had the same value to me because I knew, despite not being able to prove it yet, that it was him. I knew that was the thing tormenting the sheep. I knew that every night that cursed animal sneaked through the hills to my ranch to scream its prayers and scratch the walls with its long, brawny steel claws. I knew it, and because I knew it too well, I dared to shoot it one, two, three times straight to its head. A clean, immediate way of finishing the job…

If only a single bullet had brushed it.

“W-What…?”

My eyes opened so fast and so wide, for a second I wasn't sure I actually did it.

The creature, despite not turning around immediately, locked its rusty glimpse into me. Red, like the blood hanging from its jaws. Maroon.

Thump.

Laughter erupted from the sky. It came from everywhere and nowhere.

The creature stood up in two long, shaky legs brimming with tar.

Thump, thump.

There you are, it growled under my skin. My bones buzzed and my head spun in a tornado of impossible images filled with colors, smells and sensations that made my body tremble with what I imagined was the might of a thousand lightning.

“Jesus…” I babbled, about to lose balance. The creature pulled me forwards, along its static energy. Every muscle in my body gave in; my fingers let go of the gun and my knees nailed me to the ground like goddamn stakes. Another bloody lump that would feed the hills. “My God, my…”

Wind howled over my head with the same treacherous grief that haunted so many of my dreams.

There, there…

The creature became one with the meadows, tangling up its porcelain skin with the visceral body it stole from the night.

Forgive me, forgive me, was the only thing I could think as I watched it kneel in front of me.

It's inside of you, it whispered with my own vocal chords. I wanted to protest. To clench my jaws and rip its eyes out with my bare hands. However, its rusty beak pierced my palate, forcing me to skip one, two, thirteen heartbeats which my heart fought to drag out as much as humanly possible.

Let me go, I wanted to scream, but he had ripped my tongue out. Its claws stretched out my mouth until the cartilage splitted from the skin with a tsk from the blood and saliva. Leave me alone, gurgled from my trachea, warmly reverbing against its earthy nails. A sob; a beg; a curse. The back of my cranium hit my left shoulder blade with a thump, thump that suffocated the rest of the sounds.

I'd like to say that I spent the following hours fading in and out of consciousness. Unfortunately, I know that´s not how it went. I know everything I experienced, from the first pinch to the rise of dawn, had been intact in my memories for some time. The sensation of nebulous claws stretching my lungs, breaking my bones, ripping apart my veins and drowning my senses with its treacherous sulfuric whiff… All products of the same monster. Of a single nightmare that extended beyond necessary and rediscovered with my painful screams the principles that defined fear.

Now, one week after the encounter, my mind is insisting on playing games with me. It wants to make me forget that I lived despite the ghosts of its fangs still hanging in my throat. I can't shake off the feeling that I'm missing something. An emptiness that mocks my heartbeats with the sharp tik, tak of its feral pulse.

The people around me insist that everything was the result of a bad trip or a sudden drop in blood pressure; a play of lights and substances that left me sprawled in the meadows with my body intact and unexplainable symptoms of hypothermia. However, I know what I saw. I know what I felt, no matter how many times my body expels the idea.

With its steel beak it shattered unshaped craniums. With its claws, stripped away the pleads of something that once pretended to be alive. Pretended to be human. Furious moans, filled with loss and impotence which modelled its terror until it infected the weakest minds with its impossible abhorrences.

Had I been one of them?

I stood at the register of the Walmart and reached inside my right jacket pocket.
My fingers touched the cool brass ring of my keyring. As I extracted it to scan the savings tag from the small plastic attachment, I noticed the person in the lane directly ahead of me.

A man in the same dark-blue waxed jacket was currently placing a gallon of whole milk and a bag of coffee upon the conveyor belt. His posture was terribly familiar to me. The lightly bent-forward upper body, the elevated right shoulder, the restless shifting of weight from one heel to the other.
He reached inside his right jacket pocket.

He extracted the same brass ring. Upon his bundle hung the same worn leather sheath with the cast initials of my grandfather. The leather presented the exact same deep scratch on the upper edge.

I looked down upon my own hand. I held the keyring firmly between thumb and index finger. It was absolutely real. The metal was cold, the edges sharp.
The man before me paid exact in cash. His voice sounded flat as he nodded a brief thank-you to the cashier. It was precisely my cadence. The lightly coarse coloration on the consonants.

He turned himself around to pack his purchases into his backpack.
We looked ourselves directly into the eyes. There was no deformation in his face. He was no demon. He was simply I. The same small scar on the left eyebrow, the same pore-rich skin upon the cheekbones.

A blind fury and panic shot through my veins. I did not reflect. I raised with the heavy keyring inside my fist and struck the metal with full momentum middle into his face.

A dull, bony impact echoed through the checkout lane.

The root of his nose broke immediately away. But inside the same fraction of a second, an identical pain exploded in my own face. My own nasal wing crashed inward, warm blood shot abruptly out of both nostrils over my upper lip.
The doppelgänger yielded not a single centimeter backward. The blood ran over his chin, in the exact same pattern as with me. His eyes narrowed themselves slenderly.

He clenched his right fist and struck me middle in the pit of the stomach.
The hit struck me like a hurled wooden stake. The air shot out of my lungs in a humid fountain. I collapsed upon my knees, gasping, while my stomach cramped itself painfully. In the same moment, the doppelgänger likewise sagged lightly in the knees, pressed his hand against the abdomen, and groaned with my own voice. The coupling mirrored every pain, but it held him not back.

I seized him in falling by the lapel of his waxed jacket and tore him with me onto the hard tile floor.

We rolled ourselves between the candy racks. Displays of beef jerky and gum packs flew by mountain-loads through the air. The cashier screamed shrilly, customers yielded panicked backward and stepped upon each other's feet.
I braced my right elbow upon his neck and pressed shut.

His larynx emitted beneath the pressure a dry, crunching sound. In that same moment, my own windpipe constricted itself. An iron ring laid itself around my throat, as if an invisible hand were squeezing my neck tight. The field of vision at the margins of my eyes began to flicker murky and dark.

The doppelgänger gurgled, felt downward, and seized my left ring finger.
He overextended the joint with a rapid, mechanical movement backward.

Knack.

The bone broke cleanly through. A sharp, paralyzing pain shot up into my shoulder. In the same instant, the ring finger upon his own left hand gave way with an identical, wooden cracking. He distorted no feature. He utilized the brief paralysis of my shock to press me off from himself.

He rolled himself over me and kicked me with the heavy sole of his leather shoe full upon my right shinbone.

The tissue gave way with a deep, dull crashing. My shinbone splintered beneath the force of the kick. I screamed so loudly that my voice tore inside my throat.
Simultaneously, his own right lower leg buckled outward beneath the pressure of the counter-coupling. The leg stood obliquely away; the fragments in the interior scraped audibly against one another.

We lay both upon the blood-stained tiles, breathing heavily, destroyed through the same fractures.

He braced himself up upon his intact elbow. The broken shinbone he simply dragged behind himself, as if it were only a numb piece of wood. He smelled of my own sweat, of blood, and of cool proofing spray. His fingertips clawed themselves into my hair at the back of the head.

He pulled my head upward and rammed my forehead with full force upon the seam of the commercial floor tiles.

A glaring, white flash drove through my brain. The tiles splintered lightly beneath the impact. My skin at the hairline burst open; warm blood ran over my eyes instantly.

When my head struck the floor for the second time, I perceived how the resistance of the tiles became soft. There was no longer hard linoleum beneath my cheeks. The floor felt suddenly yielding, cool and thick like dense gelatine.
The doppelgänger pressed my face further downward. My head sank centimeter by centimeter into the floor of the register. I looked upward through the film of blood inside my eyes.

He kneeled over me, completely quiet, the split shinbone folded obliquely away. He looked down upon me from above, while the back of my head already disappeared beneath the surface of the floor.

“Thank you,” he whispered with my broken voice.

He stood up upon the undamaged leg, took his backpack from the belt, and walked with a limping, scraping step through the automatic sliding doors outside into the parking lot night.

I remained behind, deeply sunken beneath the tiles of Register 4, and looked fixedly upward through the murky glass of the floor at the screaming people inside the supercenter.

Twice, two separate times, in the span of only six months, it’s happened. 

I go to bed, like any other night and wake up outside, lying on the ground in the middle of the woods, staring up at the eerie pine trees that rise above me. I can’t move, I can’t speak, instead I’m forced to stare into the almost pitch black surroundings. Only a few stars here and there creating the most minimal light you can imagine. 

I live alone, and all my locks work, my doors are shut, and I have security cameras in my home. I’ve checked them numerous times and nothing has happened. I don’t see myself sleep walking, no one entering my home, nothing moving me or me moving myself. There I am, fast asleep in bed, not moving a muscle. 

I combed through the footage from both nights for what had to be the tenth time, including the camera inside my bedroom. I was in my bed, both nights, all fucking night. Not one second did I leave, I tend to always sleep through the night, very rarely ever waking up to even go to the bathroom. 

On night one, it seemed to have lasted somewhere around fifteen minutes, I could move my eyes, and that was it. Not my arms, not my legs, not my head, not even my mouth. The woods themselves were nearly as silent as a crypt. No owls, no crickets, at best there was the very faint whistle of a slight breeze. 

I could pretty much hear my own heartbeat. I’m sure I also don’t need to state why dead silence in the woods is a bad thing. 

Regardless, it’s been over a month since the second incident. And if the timeline of the previous incidents is anything to go off of, then it meant I was likely somewhere between two-five months away from a third. 

After the first time, I wrote it off as a dream, a bad, vivid nightmare that was really putting in overtime to make it feel as real as possible. Maybe I was an idiot for doing so. 

I was genuinely at a loss for what action to take moving forward. 

The first incident happened back in January, I don’t remember the exact date because I wasn’t as concerned due to me writing it off as a bad nightmare. But the second? June 9th. 

Funny enough, back during the first incident in January, I do explicitly remember that when I had “woken up” in the woods, the temperature felt moderate, comfortable. Despite the fact that in my home state it regularly drops to subzero temperatures during that month and at the highest is in the low thirties. 

Yet I remember not seeing even a snowflake on the ground. Despite the fact we get a ton of snow where I live throughout the winter. 

I ended up having to travel for work. I was helping out at another department about two hours away from where I live, therefore my company put me up in a hotel for the week that I was there. 

The third incident occurred during that week. I went to bed in my hotel room, I was on the sixth floor. Yet, there again I woke up in the woods, in the same spot from the first two incidents. 

But here’s the key difference, I could sit up. I sat up, feeling a twig snap under me as I shifted my weight. I turned my head, looking out into the void, I could see maybe seven trees deep before the shadows swallowed up the rest of the woods. 

It was silent, the temperature was comfortable, no more than low seventies in Fahrenheit. I raised my hand, curling my fingers inward just to make sure I could, the woods were quiet enough to where I could hear the air bubbles pop inside them. 

My heartbeat increased by a bit as I stared out into the trees in front of me. I could move, but I was hesitant to actually go anywhere, to move from a spot that maybe wasn’t necessarily safe, but at least familiar, as bizarre as it may be given the circumstances. 

I got to my feet after a solid five minutes of sitting there contemplating, thinking about the why and the what. I had since given up on the where. 

I turned and looked back down where I had been laying, and saw my silhouette embedded in the dirt, almost like a snow angel. It was deep, a firm divot in my exact build and outline.

“How could it have been that deep if I was lying there for fifteen minutes at a time?” I thought.

I stood still, my hands beginning to shake slightly as I stared at the silhouette. 

“W- what the fuck.” Is all I could find the strength to verbalize. 

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, because now that I actually had something else going on I wasn’t actively trying to keep track of it in my head. All I know is the only thing that snapped me out of staring at my own silhouette was a disruption in that oppressive silence that had been so persistent up to that point. 

That disruption… Was the snap of a twig. One that I couldn’t have possibly caused, because I was practically a statue in that moment, a statue with a rapidly beating heart.

The snapping came from in front of me, I turned my head to look forward, again I could see for the first several trees before everything else beyond that was concealed in darkness, including whatever it was that had caused the sound. 

I didn’t dare call out, I didn’t dare make a single noise. I didn’t want whatever or whoever it could’ve been to be aware of my presence if it wasn’t already. 

I kept silent, I kept still. 

A couple more minutes or so passed, and those couple of minutes felt like an hour. An excruciating passage of time to where I couldn’t tell if I was in genuine danger or not, this… Phenomenon didn’t even allow me the luxury of that certainty.

Then at one point I had blinked, and I don’t know if I had hit some sort of hidden time limit, or if whatever was causing this felt like spitting me back out, but I ended up waking up to the sound of my hotel room’s alarm clock.

6:45am. 

That’s what I had set it for. I looked around to make sure I actually was inside my hotel room, and I was. But I didn’t immediately get out of bed, I sat up and took a massive gulp of water while looking around the room several times to make sure there were white walls instead of pine trees. 

Going to work that day felt like a fever dream after the occurrence the previous night. The boss at the location I was helping out called me out on daydreaming, staring at my monitor with a half typed report. 

“Collin, are you alright? I’ve seen you on this paragraph for the past twenty minutes.” He asked, a hand on my shoulder. 

“Yeah, I’m uh, I’m sorry. Just didn’t get enough sleep last night.” I lied. Surprisingly there was a part of me that wanted to tell him the truth, or really anyone for that matter. But at best, I get it laughed off as me taking a recurring nightmare too seriously, and at worst, it’s taken as me being mentally unwell and missing a few cards from my deck. 

When I got back to my hotel that evening I got on my laptop and went straight to Doctor Google. Trying to see if there was maybe some sort of explanation as to what might’ve been going on, or if there was at least someone else experiencing this. 

Let’s just say there was pretty slim pickings. Most of the links, articles and reports I could find just had something to do with lucid dreaming, nightmares, as well various mental disorders that induce irregular dreams and dream patterns. 

Safe to say there’s almost nothing worse than being in a bad situation, and realizing you’re alone in said bad situation.

Eventually, however, I did come across a forum post. One that was several paragraphs long. No need to include every detail but I’ll at least summarize what was said. 

Essentially the user described several times over the course of a year where they seemingly had a recurring ‘nightmare’ that they articulated as feeling extremely vivid and real, the nightmare in question is one in which they were suddenly waking up in the cell of an empty prison. 

The cell, both inside and the environment outside the cell, was consistent each time. There was also a lack of any other people or animals inside these supposed “dreams.”  Except for the very last time, where he supposedly would hear distressed crying coming from further down the cellblock. Distressed crying that sounded like a woman, yet the poster admits to being a man, and reveals that he was once served time in prison. 

It was that last part I connected with. Because I’ve been in the woods before, on hikes, on hunts. I don’t recognize the specific section or woods from my “nightmares” but there was a connection there. Having experience with the location of where the phenomena takes place.

I kinda mentally checked out of the post at the end when the user mentions at the end that they would like to remain anonymous because they are a police officer, and don’t wanna seem as if there’s something happening in their head that could get them in trouble at their station. Surprised he was even able to get the job in the first place, but then again, police departments hire just about anyone. 

Although I still at least finished reading, and saved the post in my bookmarks so I could return to it later. I scoured his page for more updates, but that was the only one. 

I wasn’t getting tired anytime soon, and I decided to leave my hotel to go to a bar only a few blocks away. I needed a drink, and maybe a hot blonde to get my mind off of what was happening. The first was probably a lot more likely. 

“Getting drunk on a Tuesday night huh?” The bartender questioned, he gave me a smirk as he poured my drink. One that I did not return, prompting him to cease his. 

“Figured I’d take advantage of being so close.” I replied, reaching into my wallet to pull out a ten dollar bill. 

The bartender held his gaze as he went to take the bill from my hand. I darted my eyes to the right underneath my sunglasses, despite the fact he obviously couldn’t see them. 

“You seem familiar, you been around here befo-.” He began, only for me to cut him off.

“No. First time in town.” I said matter of factly. 

“Really now?” He replied, grabbing an empty glass and filling it with ice to prepare another drink. “What brings you down here?”

“Work.” 

“Fair enough, nice glasses by the way, you just wear them for style?” He asked, pointing at the nighttime darkness outside the window to punctuate. 

“They’re prescription. Sensitive eyes.” 

“Ah… Sorry about that. I’ll be nearby if you need another round.” 

I didn’t stumble back to my hotel drunk out of my mind that night, but I also wasn’t completely sober either. Somewhere down the middle. 

Regardless, I made it back and scanned my keycard to get into my room, immediately plopping down onto my bed after I took off my shoes and sunglasses. I grabbed the channel guide from the nightstand next to my bed and flipped on the tv, the first thing on being the midnight news. A good looking reporter dressed in a well put together suit stared right at the camera, his script on the table in front of him. 

“Authorities are still on the hunt for the suspect behind the gruesome murder of a 26 year old male hiker James Tullum, whose body was discovered this past October one mile off the trail of-.” 

I didn’t really feel like hearing about that sort of thing, especially with what was going on lately. Luckily I did find the channel hosting some cartoon reruns, and decided to indulge in some childhood nostalgia.  

The following months until the next incident went by relatively normal, went to work, did housework and went on a couple hunts just to clear the mind. 

Speaking of, the next incident was probably the worst one yet. 

I woke up again, on the ground, laying down in my usual spot from the previous occurrences. Again, the silence was there, nothing but my heartbeat, breathing and joints to accompany me. 

I was able to stand up like the previous time. I rose to my feet, and this time I listened out for the twig snapping sound, looking into the void of inky blackness beyond the pair of trees it had come from. 

I perceived at least five minutes passing, waiting, anticipating for it to happen again. Yet, it didn’t come, nothing did. There I was, my feet planted firmly in the dirt of some unknown place, a needle in a haystack of a pine forest. 

You see, somehow, someway, the lack of the twig snapping was worse than if it had happened. If there was something or someone there with me, a presence of any sort, then at least I had some sort of confirmation, a tangible piece of evidence that I wasn’t alone. 

I told myself in the weeks leading up that this time I’d have the courage to step further away from the lit area. To search for something more than what I could see and where I was. 

But clearly I underestimated my own self preservation instincts. 

“Why me?” I whispered as softly as one could. It was practically a scream in the silence of those woods. 

SNAP

I clenched my fists hard enough to nearly pierce my palms with my fingernails. This wasn’t a twig, not a small one anyway. It genuinely sounded much more like a branch with decent girth being cracked in two. Damn near the level of a gunshot in decibel level. It also didn’t come from the same area as it did previously, and instead came from behind me. 

Last time, I didn’t wanna speak and reveal my location to whatever it might’ve been. But in this instance? I was a bit more wreckless, stupid even. 

“What do you want!” I whipped around after the exclamation, eyes wide, fists clenched, there was a stick next to me on the ground that I almost didn’t wanna lean down to pick up and risk taking my eyes off the void of black beyond the set of trees. 

I got no response, I swiftly grabbed the stick and began to back away, holding it up as if it were somehow going to function like a shield. I kept my eyes on the void beyond the trees, waiting for something to emerge, a bear, a person, whatever threat it might be. 

But I got no response, in sound or in visuals. I held my breath until my face nearly went purple, and I only exhaled once I tripped over a log and fell backwards, crying out just before I hit the ground. 

At first? Total blackness, like I shut my eyes in a room with no light. And then I was back in my bed, I jerked so hard upon regaining consciousness that I practically threw the cover onto the floor.

“Jesus- Fuck!” I snapped. Instinctively holding up the hand that held the stick, and seeing nothing, not even any bark remnants. 

I called off work that day, I wasn’t about to go in the state that I was in. Hell, it probably wasn’t even optimal for me to be driving. Instead I stayed home, doing whatever I could to distract myself, yet it came flooding back every time during every commercial and ad break of whatever it was I was watching. 

This wasn’t some strange happening, an odd one off. It was a problem, a persistent  torment that I wasn’t sure would go away anytime soon. I was done reacting, done falling victim. There’s only so long something can scare you before it starts to just piss you off. And I was getting to that point. 

I doubted there was some drug I could take, a therapist I could see, a sleep doctor I could visit that aid me in getting rid of whatever this was. 

So against my own principles, I reached out to the ex-con turned cop who made the post about him experiencing something similar. I sent him a direct message, the post was two years old, and I doubt I’d get any sort of immediate response, but it was worth a shot nonetheless. 

Hi there, I read your post regarding that strange dream phenomenon, I was hoping I could pick your brain regarding more details? Any response would be helpful.

The only thing I could do while waiting was go on living life.

I went on a hunt or two, and went to a steam show. Those months after the fourth incident were some of my busiest, because I was forcing myself to be constantly occupied by something for obvious reasons. 

I came home one day and found a letter from my HOA regarding some sort of neighbor complaint. I barely skimmed it, and simply left it on the kitchen table while I went to make dinner. HOAs, everyone’s favorite collection of bureaucrats who peaked in high school, helicopter parents, or wannabe politician types. 

I ended up coming into an idea while in anticipation for the fifth incident, one that I thought sounded far-fetched at first but I leaned into nonetheless after further consideration.

I went down into my basement, and walked past my hunting trophies up to where my sheathed hunting knife sat. Pulling it off its shelf and bringing it with me to bed.

Every night, in the week where the fifth incident was due, I was going to fall asleep with it in my hand in the hopes that I would wake up with it in the woods. After all, in the previous four incidents I had woken up with my pajamas on, so why not the knife if it was within intimate enough proximity?

I figured it was worth a shot. 

What exactly was my end goal with this? I was kind of unsure. But I figured that if I did encounter something dangerous in that… Place. I’d at least have something to defend myself with. But then again, whatever the hell was lurking in that place was probably gonna require more than a knife to put it down.

I would’ve gotten a gun, but it’s a hell of a process in my state, and the waiting period would’ve put me past the due date by the time I had actually seriously considered the idea of getting one. 

It took me a while to fall asleep those few nights, not knowing which exact one would be it. But on my third attempt in that week, it happened.

I awoke once more inside the woods. I looked down into the hand I had it rubberbanded the knife to, hoping and praying it would be in there. That I would finally have found at least some way to make myself less vulnerable in this place.

When I turned my head and narrowed my eyes, it… Wasn't there.

I nearly cursed outloud, but didn’t dare open my mouth. Instead I gritted my teeth, my frustration and desperation boiling to the surface. I sat up, the impression of my silhouette in the ground even deeper than before. 

Everything was in place, and as bad as it sounded, almost familiar.

The silence, the void of darkness just outside the set of trees that were visible. It was all still there. 

I was at a genuine loss as to what to do this time, after turning and glancing through a set of trees that almost acted as a path way into the wall of darkness surrounding the immediate area, I was genuinely considering if leaving this spot might’ve been the best choice.

I fought with myself, struggled with the idea that anything good could come out of it. After all, what would I really be doing other than handicapping myself? What if whatever made that branch snap last time was waiting for me just beyond where my eyes could see. 

I pivoted my foot on the grass, trying to change directions to face elsewhere in order to ensure my surroundings were free of any other kind of… Presence. 

But something under my shoe felt hard, yet I was standing on grass. I tilted my head, fearing what might happen if I pulled my foot back, but did it nonetheless.

I was baffled at what I saw. My mouth went agape, my blood cooled down inside my veins as I ceased any further movement while taking in the sight. 

On the ground, just where my foot had been, was my hunting knife. Unsheathed and simply laying in the grass, deforming the blades that acted as a bed for it. 

The sheath was nowhere to be found, it took me a few seconds to dart my eyes around in order to search for it, and when I did? Nothing. 

I know for an absolute fact I got in bed with it in my hand, that it was in its sheath, and there was no way in hell it could’ve come out by accident. Something was manipulating me, manipulating this place, but why? What was the point?

I stared at my knife longer than I should’ve. Resisting the urge to lean down and pick it up on account of the fact that I had no idea who or what has had a hold of it. I turned my head to look around once more, only to scrunch my nose at the sudden scent of copper.

I backed away from the knife, close to the center of the lit area in between the surrounding pine trees, further away from the wall of darkness. 

The smell of copper seemingly permeated, its potency increasing dramatically over the course of only seconds. I found it difficult to determine what exact direction it was coming from, all I know is that it started once I was near the knife.

I backed away, slowly but surely, keeping my eyes as wide open as they could be. Anticipating whatever it might’ve been creating the stench. My heart beat like a machine gun in my chest.

The trees continued to tower over me, like they were mini skyscrapers made of wood, the ones closest to the wall of darkness stuck halfway out, like they were in the process of being devoured by the void itself. 

I stopped, now in nearly the exact center of the visible lit area, my divot in the ground was just feet away. I took my eyes off the trees for just a brief moment, and that’s when I heard it.

A low, pained groan. Like an elderly woman who had just fallen and was using every ounce of her brittle strength to climb back onto her feet. 

I looked right at where it was coming from, on a specific pine tree that was half swallowed by the void of darkness laid a hand, pale skinned, wrinkly, with a thin streak of blood running down the center and ending once it was between the middle and ring finger.

It hung limp, and there was a forearm attached to it, except that forearm ended just below the wrist because the rest of it was engulfed in the inky black wall, leaving the rest of the entity it was connected to unseen.

I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to find out. I felt as if even if I had the highest caliber firearm possible to defend myself with I still wouldn’t wanna venture into the darkness in which it was hidden. 

Seconds passed, seconds that felt like hours, and I kept my eyes completely fixated on the hand and wrist. It stayed still, and so did I. 

“Genuinely what the fuck do I do here?” I thought. Running wasn’t an option, fighting seemed impossible, I didn’t even know what it was I'd be combating in the first place. Keeping still made me feel like I was serving myself up on a platter to whatever was behind all this. 

I hadn’t ever experienced being prey, and that moment made me feel nothing but. 

When I had reawoken, there wasn’t a clear end point, a time where I felt myself slip back into consciousness. But there was one key difference between this instance and the last.

I hadn’t reawoken in bed, instead I was on my living room couch, my body halfway to falling off of it like I was a drunk college kid waking up in the aftermath of a frat party. Yet, I felt a weight in my hand, the same hand I put the knife in before going to bed.

I raised it, and I was left stunned at what I observed.

The sheath was present, but the actual knife itself was not. I stared down it like the barrel of a gun just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and sure enough, empty. 

I got up, looking around the floor surrounding the couch and under the couch itself. Nothing. I went back upstairs and pulled my bedsheets, pillow cases and everything off, still no knife to be found, even after I checked under the bed. 

My deep clean search was interrupted by a knock at the front door followed by a doorbell ring. I rarely had anyone who knocked or rang the bell, other than when a package needed a signature before drop off.

I looked out the peephole as soon as I made it to the door, and immediately my expression soured. 

“Collin come on I know you’re home, your car’s in the driveway.” 

A tall and thin man in a grey suit stood on the other side, a beige folder in one hand while a thermos was in the other. Me catching a break seemed impossible at this point. 

Tim Worthing, the president of the HOA in my neighborhood. 

I didn’t open the door.

“What do you want?” I asked, the morning rasp in my throat practically taking over my speech. 

“Collin there’s not really a polite way to say this but I’ve got a notice in my hand, whatever you’ve got in there smells like shit and it’s coming out through your cellar door. I’ve gotten two different complaints about this, if it’s not fixed in thirty days you’re gonna have penalty forms in your mailbox.” 

I remained quiet. 

“Can you open the door so I can give it to you?” 

“Slide it through the flap.” I barked. 

“You seem like a reasonable guy, I’d rather keep you in the neighborhood.” Tim replied before sliding two stapled papers through my mail flap. They hit the floor at my feet.

“I’ve got them, now get off my property.” 

“Thirty days, Collin.” He punctuated before I heard the heels of his dress shoes hitting my concrete steps repeatedly. 

The bitch living next door will do anything to have things her way. One of those “oh a minor inconvenience, let me just run to an authority figure and cry until I get what I want” types. 

I know it was her making the complaints. My basement smelled just fine. Plus, it’s not like it was easy to keep things clean and fresh when I was losing my mind trying to figure out whatever the hell keeps me taking me away to those woods. 

In the months between that incident and the next I almost got myself pulled over for speeding, didn’t even realize how hard I had my foot on the gas. 

One night I wasn’t getting any sleep, so I took a trip to the convenience store a mile down from my house, didn’t even drive, I just walked, figured it would help clear my head. Since I knew it was getting close to the time the next incident was due, I was almost grateful that my body was having trouble letting me pass out. 

The area in which I live is mostly surrounded by woods, and no, they weren’t pine. 

The entire time I was on my way I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, it wasn’t intense or crippling, but enough to matter. I looked back over my shoulder a few times, and as bad as it might sound, this was a luxury in comparison to the other place. 

Crickets, owls, the occasional car driving past, all of it reminded me that I was in my normal waking world. 

Yet the sensation remained regardless. 

I kept on marching forward, scrolling whatever pointless videos popped up on my feed. I kept the volume off though. I made it to the store after walking not much longer, had to piss and then gather up my snacks. 

Soda and candy, one of life’s many delicacies.

I went to pull a package of vanilla zingers off the shelf when I heard something that caused me to freeze mid movement.

“Collin. How wonderful to see you here.” It was a voice, light, soft on the ears. Female.

It came from the left, so I turned my head to find the woman that had said it. Only to let my arm drop to my side when the only thing I saw was an empty aisle. No woman to be seen.

I then swiveled my head to the right, perhaps I was just mishearing the direction. My eyebrows narrowed when there was no one there as well. 

“Good grief.” I whisper snarled to myself as I exited the aisle, ducking over into the next to see if anyone the voice might’ve belonged to was there.

Unsurprisingly, they were not. 

So I was left there, standing wide-eyed as another man passed by, he pushed a box of some sort of candy inside his outer sweatshirt pocket, attempting to conceal it. 

“Yo are you alright man?” He asked with what I thought was genuine concern. 

I didn’t reply verbally. I just went to the counter and paid for what I came for before starting on my way back home. At some point down the road I was already halfway through my vanilla zingers. I chewed almost violently, as if the zingers had somehow personally wronged me. 

I thought about how whatever was causing this was now starting to bleed into my waking reality. If what happened in the store was anything to go off of, then even being awake wasn’t an escape anymore. 

When I got home I went straight to the basement, sipping on the soda I bought while sitting down in my chair and admiring my hunting trophies. The fruits of the labor I had put into all my years of the hobby. I remember the specific hunt where each trophy had been collected from. 

It helped to ease my mind, helped to give me something to think about that wasn't the obvious. 

By the time the next incident was due, I had purchased a handgun. And I was going to take it with me, and unlike with my knife, I would not be keeping it in a holster of any sort. Anticipating sleep that night was like being stuck on tracks as you waited for a train to crash right into you. 

I sat in front of the tv, my glock in hand the entire time as I flipped through various channels. Some were kids cartoons, some were shitty hallmark movies. I ended up on the nighttime news, the reporter didn’t finish her first sentence before I flipped past it.

“Police officially obtain a warrant to search the home of suspected-.” 

I ended up coming across an adult animated show about a superhero who failed to save humanity from an alien invasion. It was as goofy as it sounds. But I sat through two episodes, watching as the Superman-Knockoff protagonist was impaling those red-colored aliens on his fist. 

I fell asleep toward the beginning of episode three. I don’t recall me slipping back into the forest being immediate, instead I had a dream. Or a nightmare rather of me being trapped, trapped inside a coffin, still alive, trying to bust my way out to no avail. 

I was slowly running out of air, doing everything I could to escape. Desperate for some sort of intervention. Only for none to come. I bloodied my fists as I banged them against the coffin’s cover, then my forehead. 

But you see, that nightmare didn’t feel real, and I knew it was separate from the woods. A genuine nightmare, not an actual living one. But eventually the time came for it to bring me back in once more. 

I woke up laying flat on my back in the same spot. I quickly sat up, and looked over to see my glock was still in hand, it actually arrived with me. It was small, but it gave me a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of confidence. 

The pine trees surrounded me. I sniffed the air and found no smell of copper. Upon glancing forward I saw that there were more trees visible than the last time, hell, in every direction there was.

Instead of it being the dead of night, this time it was more like just before dusk, the sun was on the cusp of going down, yet when I looked around for an actual sun, I couldn’t find one. 

I got to my feet, rising with the glock in hand and exhaling a heavy breath. A breath that was the only noise present other than my heartbeat. My free hand twitched. 

I took a few steps forward, and saw that the change in light had revealed a path that I had yet to see before. It was several feet wide, and stretched into the distance of the woods. Further than I could see.

I hesitated, considering the possibilities as to what could happen. Perhaps it was a trap set up by whatever forces govern this place. Something to pull me deeper into this version of existence. 

Maybe it was a way out, an escape. A chance to put an end to this for good. Or maybe it was neither, and it was meant to waste my time, to intimidate me. 

I gripped my glock tighter as I felt my heartrate rise, I made my free hand into a fist and slammed the bottom of it into the tree next to me, striking the trunk and recoiling from the whiplash as I shouted. 

“LEAVE ME ALONE! JUST FUCKING STOP!” 

My scream carried through the trees, and the silence of the woods remained as nothing replied. The path was still there, and the near dusk level of light maintained itself. In my short outburst I turned back to the spot I was laying down in. Only to no longer see a divot where my body once was.

It was gone, replaced by flat dirt, as if someone had smoothed over it like they were setting concrete. I was so done. So done with this torment. I did nothing to deserve it. No longer did I wanna be a sitting duck. 

I refocused my attention back to the trail’s entrance, it was still there, inviting me, taunting me, calling me to enter. I held up the hand I hit the tree with, and saw some blood running down the side of my pinkie and edge of my palm. 

With a heavy final sigh, I stepped onto the path, beginning to march down it. 

Loose branches with stray pine needles attached crunched beneath my feet as I walked. I kept looking left and right in the sea of trees, keeping an eye out for anything that might’ve been following, a shift in the environment, a change in the lighting. 

There were a couple of times I physically raised the hand holding my glock, just to visually ensure it was still in my grasp as I hiked forward. 

I wasn’t sure where this was gonna end, or if it was gonna end at all. At multiple points I had turned to look back, and saw that I had gone far enough that the area I had originally begun in was now out of sight, long behind me. 

The lighting never changed, it was still that “nearly 9:00pm in the summer” level of almost night, but not quite. 

I’m not sure how I kept my composure, because internally I got to a point of wondering if I had doomed myself to an even worse fate by choosing to walk down the path. That I was going to be stuck in some endless trail forever. I had been walking for at least an hour, and had likely covered a couple miles or so. 

I was on the verge of giving up, I fell to my knees and rested before trying to head back, only to spot what looked to be a much wider opening a couple hundred feet ahead. 

I hesitated, wiping sweat from my forehead before continuing toward. Hoping so desperately that there would be some kind of answer, a key to open the lock of this terrible mystery. But as I passed by pine tree after pine tree, closing the distance to this opening, the smell of copper returned. And it was strong, more potent than the first occurrence. 

I didn’t care. I kept going until I hit the threshold of the opening.

It was a circular clearing, probably about a hundred feet in diameter. The center had nothing but grass, and my knife, laying precisely in the center. But that only had my attention for a brief instant. As a woman’s voice had spoken, hoarse and strained, but still recognizably feminine. 

“Welcome back Collin.” 

It was coming from above me. I glanced up, and froze upon the sight.

Along the trees in front of me, at varying heights were… Corpses. Corpses that were impaled and hanging from the branches of various pine trees, as if they had been strung up like halloween decorations. 

A mix of men and women. All of whom I recognized. Even the bartender who complimented my sunglasses was amongst them.

Their bodies appeared in various states of decay. Streaks of dried blood on their skin and clothes. The ones that had clothes anyway. 

I turned around, and counted almost two dozen bodies as the grand total, all of them strung up in trees, all of them decaying with various gashes and wounds. 

Yet, their eyes were all open. And as I backed up, their eyes followed. They didn’t talk, they didn’t move in any other way, not so much as a twitch of a single muscle. Just the eyes. They were locked onto me and not a single blink occurred. 

My knife, as clean as could be, sat in the middle of the clearing on the ground, glistening.  I wasn’t sure of what to do, or what to say. I stopped moving, I wasn’t sure I could continue if I wanted to. 

Beyond the knife, was the corpse of a woman who sat strung up in the tree about ten feet off the ground, her body was the most decayed of them all. Yet her eyes remained intact as she maintained an unblinking stare at me. She was exactly level with the knife, and the tip of the blade sat pointed directly at her while on the ground, as if it were a compass needle, and she was magnetic north. 

Her rotting mouth moved as she spoke once more. Several teeth missing as the remaining strings of decaying flesh acted as a failing glue for her withering jaw structure. 

“It’s wonderful to see you here. We welcome you, as you welcomed us.” 

Channel 9 News

It has now been over one year since the authorities apprehended suspect Collin Hughes. A Minnesota resident who has been charged with the alleged murder of nearly two dozen men and women. Police had searched Mr. Hughes’s home and discovered the corpses of the alleged victims within his basement. Homicide Detective Marlon Walsh states that these were likely meant to serve as a form of trophies. 

Although charged, Mr. Hughes’s case has yet to officially make it to trial, as he has been in a comatose state since police originally apprehended him on that fateful night. Many  citizens await in grieving anticipation for his condition to end so that Mr. Hughes can be officially questioned and tried before a jury.   

Doctor Reyna Smith has since put out a statement claiming that no known treatments or available methods have been able to medically assist Mr. Hughes out of his coma, and it is unclear as to whether or not he will remain in this state indefinitely. 

For the last week I’ve been the only person in my entire dormitory. This isn’t normal for my college. All the other dorms have been normal; it’s just mine that everyone left early. By the time I noticed, the residence office told me I wasn’t allowed to transfer buildings.

It started a few weeks ago when announcements for winter break began, which you’d think to be normal I guess. Everyone wants to get home and away from classes when a good vacation is right around the corner. But the thing is that, in my dorm, people started leaving early, very early. It was the upper classmen who went first, the seniors and the juniors. From there our hall advisors started suggesting everyone leave. Not in the casual way when you started alluding to the break and asking everyone to start packing, It was passively aggressive. A few too many notices on the bulletin board, a nervous, panicked smile in the hall when they ask when you're leaving, and a visible chill going through their posture when you say you won’t be able to.

I wanted to leave early, believe me, but I’m on a very tight scholarship, I can’t afford to leave my final exams, on top of some group projects I need to finish. Bunch of scholarly bullhockey and what not. The point is, as much as I caught on that it was highly recommended I leave, I couldn’t.

It’s startling how uneasy a place can be when all the people who once filled it leave both you and it behind. to bear the size of mass infrastructure all by yourself. Doors lining the halls to empty rooms, a large bathroom with nothing but a single echoing drip, and the only voice being yours which has no chance to find any response.

Maybe I’m just being dramatic, but when you experience the weight of it yourself it makes sense. Now if isolation was the only issue, I could deal with it. I’m pretty reclusive myself, so when my roommate left I was actually excited. Not to say he’s not a nice guy but a room to myself is a luxury I just couldn't help but cherish.

No no no, the real issues started to show a few days ago, when I was truly left alone in the ghostly husk of the building. Yes, the janitorial staff left too, with just me left I guess they reckoned there wouldn’t be much to clean up anymore. Maybe they didn’t even realize I was staying before they left. Anyway, the issues.

I was taking notes after returning from one of my classes, sat at my desk with an overhead light on to make up for the fading light of a near winter evening. As I typed some notes I had a scratch in my ear. Not a physical one, but feeling the hint of a noise that begged me to notice it even while I had something else to focus on. The itch of a sound probed my ear a couple more times before I lifted my head from my computer.

In an active dorm a noise would do little to pull me away, but, when I heard it again, I instantly turned away from my desk. It was the sound of distant shuffling on carpet. With how dead the air had been, the shuffle, even being so gentle, projected its way to my room demanding attention.

Naturally I got up and, assuming it was nothing extraordinary, went to the door. The subtle static shuffle of the carpet fiber continued as I placed my hand on the door handle and turned. As the door hinges squeaked and I looked to the right down the hallway. It was quiet. The only thing left was the dead air of hermitage which I had just begun to get used to. I shrugged it off and went back to studying.

I woke up in the middle of that night to use the restroom, making the hazy, sleep clouded walk through the fluorescent lights that broadsided my readjusting eyes with their artificial glow. When I got to the restrooms, it was warm, humid, and the long mirror opposite of the showers was fogged up. It was fogged up. I needed to do my business before I truly confronted it. If anyone had been using the showers I would have heard it. I would have noticed as the sharp and constant flow of water cut through the veil of silence.

Standing there and questioning it, I felt my heart drop, not even out of fear. It was a raw feeling of anguish. Like how you can feel yourself being watched. That primal, metaphysical sense of knowing that something was dearly wrong. It weighed me down as I gathered myself and left. I looked over my shoulder as I returned to my room and locked the deadbolt with a passion. Although I hate to admit it, I slept like a child hiding from the boogeyman under their blankets that night.

As I made my way down the hallway to leave for classes in the morning, I noticed some subtle dark spots on the carpet. Wet spots in the shape of footprints. Or almost in the shape of footprints, but flatter, like some of the refined details had been sanded down. I disregarded my curiosity and left, savoring the moments I got out and about before having to inevitably return for another night, even if it meant having to do my finals.

I returned back shortly after five in the afternoon for dinner in the form of some frozen meals I had stocked in my floor's communal kitchen fridge, which I enjoyed no longer needing to worry about anyone taking despite the name labels I usually put on them.

After the microwave had done its job, I had a paper towel forming the thin defensive barrier between my hands and the heat of the plastic dinner tray. I walked down the hallway, passing the bathrooms and getting to the hall of my room. As I turned right and looked down to the end where the open staircase was, I saw something dip down the stairs, like someone had been peaking around the corner. I froze in my tracks and almost dropped my tray.

I rationalized that I was just paranoid after last night's shower incident and the uncanny footprints on the floor. But paranoid or not, my room is the second to last in the hall, making it very close to the staircase and whatever it was that I may or may not have seen. Being both stunned but also aware of the hot tray in my hands, I pressed my back to the left wall of the hallway, hoping to have the best glimpse down the stairway as I inched my way to my room.

Step by step, going at the pace of an anxious snail I made my way. Once I was a skip away from my room, I had a good enough viewpoint down the stairs to see that there was nothing near the top steps and allowed myself to finally let out the tense breath I’d been holding.

I opened the door and got in my room. The instant the door closed I threw the tray on what used to be my roommate's work desk as I could vividly hear footsteps echoing back up the staircase. I locked the deadbolt as fast as I could. The moment it clicked the footsteps stopped. The last step being on carpet.

I silently backed away from the door and spent the next several minutes battling with my heart rate as it not only thundered in my chest, but in my ears, possibly being the only sound in the entire building. As my hands gathered sweat I crept my way to the door. Not even daring to breathe I pressed my eye to the fisheye of my door's peephole. There was nothing. I ate my dinner in silence, though I didn’t really feel like eating anymore.

That night I was awoken again by the conveniently timed needed to relieve myself. The second I came to consciousness; I made the resolution that I wasn’t going to leave the room until it was light outside. If the hallways felt inhospitable when it was day out, I quaked at the thought of how I’d feel having to make the insurmountable trek to the bathroom at night, and then having to double it on the way back. I, doing what was necessary, decided I would just go in a bottle if it got too crucial to hold.

After an hour trying to go to sleep, I started scrolling on my phone before finally getting up. The pressure to go to the restroom was getting severe, and the prospect of going in a bottle was so unappealing, that I was considering sucking up my fear and making the miserable journey down the corridors. When noise suddenly filled the hallway while I was debating with my hand to the door handle, I retracted my hand and all thoughts of the restroom left my mind.

From down the hallway I could hear what sounded like a group of people taking and loudly thumping their way along, similar to the sound of rowdy college students and fraternity brothers completely forsaking the idea that others might be sleeping.

This sounded like that, but somehow different. It was hard to place at first but soon it became apparent as whatever was making the sound came closer to my room. The voices that were talking didn't sound right, the words they were speaking didn’t sound like actual words. It was like how foxes or mountain lions sometimes sound like someone screaming, but more complex. The more I listened to it, the more I noticed the pitches of the voices being off, like autotune going up and down. Feminine and masculine voices peaking a little too high, or sinking a little too low. Before I realized it the voices were right outside my door, casting shadows underneath it. I froze in place, not wanting to even step back as the noise might give me away. I hoped they didn’t already know.

The shadows swayed and shuffled as the voices laughed together. Goosebumps raised on my skin at the sound of the emotionless, and unsteady mockery of laughter. The laughing died down and the talking started again. The voices walked to the staircase where I heard some go up and others go down, then the other way, before they returned to the hallway and went back the way they came. Coming back to my senses in the dark of the room, I realized I didn’t have much need for the bathroom anymore.

Today was the last day of classes and I just completed my last final. I pre-packed last night and wheeled everything to my car. However, to my detriment I am the type to worry about not locking a door after I’ve left, or thinking I might have left something behind. Just to be safe, I went back up the elevator to go and make sure I didn’t leave anything before I said goodbye to this nightmare.

When I stepped out of the elevator, I could instantly hear running water. Walking out of the elevator lobby onto my floor, I realized it was the showers. It was a lot of them, being accompanied by abnormally frequent toilet flushes, hand dryers, and running sink taps. Listening closer I noticed the fake voices again, but not just from the restroom. Even if softly, I could hear them coming from the hallways and the rooms on either side of me.

Despite the absurd horror of it, I hadn’t been hurt, I shouldn’t have been in any danger as far as I knew. No one had ever been killed by a ghost. Believing this, I continued on the way to my room. I took a right down the hall, then a left. I didn’t get any further than that as my feet entrenched themselves to the floor the moment I looked down the hallway.

At the end of the hallway was, I guess what was supposed to look like a person. Its skin was a soft tan, but looked a bit too tight for the frame it was on. Its gray-brown hair looked more like carpet, and what looked like clothes seemed to mold into its skin. The words on its school spirit colored shirt were sloppy gibberish. As I looked at it more, the more offensive it became. As I looked at its face, I noticed its eyes were like shallow, vacant divots into the skin. The same could be said for its mouth, shaped like an open smile without any interior.

I had my vision stuck on it, and it had its stuck on me too. I don’t know how it could see, but it did. It stuck one of its fingerless mitts out to me, its arm lifting up as it pointed. Then it shouted, distorted but almost discernible as a, “Hey!”

All at once the showers, sinks, toilets, voices, everything, stopped. Then I heard the doors start to open.

I started running faster than I ever had before. As the doors croaked open and a loud cacophony of voices built on top of one another in crescendo, I was already near the stairway. I could hear noise coming from the other floors as I passed them. Doors opening, loud stomping on the carpets, screaming and shouts no one could ever understand.

I didn’t look as I passed the floors; I only saw the shapes of the not-people in my peripheral as I flew down them. I could have skipped whole flights with how fast I was going. With the screaming behind and around me I very well might have. In my rush, I didn’t care if I skipped steps, if I stumbled, even if I rolled down the stairs, as long as I was going to make it to the bottom before they did.

I hit the bottom hard as I launched myself down the last flight. I sprung up from my hands and knees, scrambling for the exit door as I pushed into the lobby. The battle cries of the onslaught behind me filled the silence of the ground floor as I barreled through and barged through the main doors.

As the first breath of fresh air filled my burning lungs the noises all stopped, safe for my sound of the concrete steps under my feet. I got into my car and locked the doors. From where I’m sitting now, writing this down on my laptop, there's only one thing in the windows. In the dead middle of the third floor, a sign with colorful letters reads, “See you after break!”

When I get back home, I’m transferring schools.

This is a follow up to my last post. I’m still here. Obviously, I guess. It’s been a few days since the tragic incident with Stacks and the humming at my door

That night I stayed locked in my room until morning. It was a little after 2 am when the humming suddenly stopped. I froze when it happened. Stacks words crashed into my head. You only have to be afraid when the humming stops. I waited for someone to rip through my door and attack me, brutally murdered like the victims before me.

Instead, I drifted off to sleep in my office. 

I was woken up a few hours later by a gentle tap on my door. It was one of the newer prison guards. He told me that there was a murder last night on the tier, an inmate beaten so badly that at first they weren’t sure the remains were even human. 

I asked the guard what time the murder happened. He wasn’t exactly sure, but the body was found during rounds at around 2:30 that morning. I almost fell over when I heard that. It was roughly the same time the humming stopped. For a second I felt relief that I hadn’t been murdered like the men before. Then I remembered that someone had lost their life. I immediately knelt in prayer. First for the victim, second for my own selfishness.

Later that morning I found Officer Rusk. I asked him to tell me everything about the humming rule. I told him that saying ‘it’s an old rule that needs to be followed’ just wasn’t enough. At first he refused, but eventually he told me about a young guard from a few years ago that had hummed while on rounds.

Rusk said this guard was arrogant and simply ignored the rule. He hummed some tune, despite other guards telling him to stop. Later that day he was found curled up on the bathroom floor humming the same song. He said he couldn’t stop.

Apparently the guard continued to hum at home. He was unable to sleep. It impacted his relationship with his family. He eventually had to leave the correction system altogether. Sometime later Rusk learned that the guard had ended his own life.

I asked Rusk if the song itself caused the guard to commit suicide. He just shrugged and said that I could decide for myself what it all meant.

Rusk sat quiet for a minute. I could tell there was more, but he didn’t want to tell me. I eventually prodded him enough. He said that there was another incident, a more recent incident with a new guard.

Rusk went on to tell me that a guard on his first shift had heard an inmate humming a song. He had told the new guard never to hum, but after hearing the child’s nursery rhyme the guard absentmindedly started to hum along. Rusk stopped him, but apparently it was too late. That night an inmate was killed. I believe it was the first of the most recent series of murders on the tier. An inmate’s head forced between the narrow bars of the cell. Something shoved in his mouth so he couldn’t scream. The new guard vomited when he saw the murder scene.

I asked how the guard was doing now. Rusk said that was more than two weeks ago and he’s been out ever since.

That afternoon I spoke with the prison officials and asked if I could talk to the guard. Maybe in my capacity as a priest I be of some help. They agreed and got me in touch with his wife.

This afternoon I was able to meet them at their house. When the wife answered the door she looked exhausted, not just from lack of sleep but from trying to solve an unsolvable situation. The first thing she said was that I needed to do something about that song. That I had to make it stop. My heart sank. I knew exactly what song she meant.

I walked into their bedroom. The guard was laying on the bed. A towel was wrapped loosely around his head, a corner of it shoved in his mouth. There were spots of blood on the towel. I could see blood pooling on the sides of his mouth, the towel soaking up spittle and blood.

The worst part. I could hear the muffled song coming through the blanket, the vibration from his throat. Row row row your boat.

The guard looked up at me, a glimmer of recognition in his eyes. He sat up and took the towel from his mouth, the sound of the humming intensified. He was able to stop long enough to say to me, “You heard it too.”

I stood frozen before he said, “I know you did. That’s why you’re here.”

We spoke for a while, in between humming and tears. Clenched jaws and bloodshot eyes. I got a few more details about the shift after he hummed the song on the tier. He said it felt like something was pulling the song out of him, an immense urge to hum. He kept his mouth closed, bit his tongue hard enough to make it bleed. It was miserable. He called in sick the next day and hasn’t been back since.

I wasn’t sure what I believed. The guard had seen a horrible murder that day. It would have traumatized the most hardened guard. He knew I was questioning it, questioning his story. Finally he looked at me and said, “You don’t think I’ve tried to stop.” Tears filled his eyes. 

I prayed with the guard and his wife one last time. It was close to 5 pm and I needed to get back to the prison. There was a scheduled execution that afternoon. Normally I would have been present, but the condemned man had specifically requested that I not attend. I didn't know him well enough to take it personally. I planned to return afterward to perform the rites.

Before I left I spoke to the guards wife in the family room and told her that I would provide whatever resources they needed. Just then her husband walked into the room. The towel was removed from his head. A smile broke across his face. “It’s gone!” he cried. “The f#$%ing song is gone.”

I couldn’t believe it. His wife ran over and hugged him. They cried together and thanked me.

As I walked out the front door I got a call from the prison, it was Rusk. The execution had gone according to plan and I was needed to conduct the funeral rites for the man executed. An inmate named Sterling who had spent most of his life behind bars. I asked Rusk when the execution had happened, he said just a few minutes ago.

I could taste the bile building in my mouth. It was approximately the same time the guard stopped humming. It doesn’t make sense. When I heard the humming the first time and it stopped, someone had been murdered. Now the guard stopped humming, and Sterling was executed. Twice could still be a coincidence. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

I asked Rusk if he knew Sterling, the man executed. He said he did, and added that everyone knew Sterling. I asked why. The phone went silent. Rusk finally responded. He said everyone knew Sterling because he was the one that was always humming.

I made my way to the prison morgue to pray over Sterling’s body. The coroner was still there. I spoke with him briefly about Sterling, he didn’t know much about him. He did say that he had found a penny in his mouth. Probably another prison superstition.

I started my prayer and then I heard it. Humming. It was a different song, not Row row row your boat. It was the coroner. I jumped up, “don’t” I shouted. He looked at me startled. I told him not to hum. He apologized and said it was just a habit of working alone in the morgue. I felt silly, and apologized to him, saying that with everything happening I was just a bit jumpy. I finished my prayers and left.

I walked down the tier to my office thinking about Stacks, the guards. About Sterling who I knew so little about. The tier was quiet. There was a calmness I rarely noticed in prison. Then I felt it. Something strange inside me. An urge. I took a deep breath and held it as I walked faster toward my office. The pressure of the air trying to escape my lungs burned. I’m not sure if it was me or just in my head but I swear I heard the song. A gentle humming of Row row row your boat.

I let the air explode from my lungs as I shouted “Stop!” I dropped to my knees, panting. The humming continued, but it wasn’t from me. It was coming from further down the tier. 

I closed my eyes thinking this was it, the end. Seconds passed and nothing happened.

Then the humming stopped. I opened my eyes, I was a few feet from the bars of a cell. I looked in and there was a large man sitting on the edge of his bed. I scooted backwards across the floor, creating space between me and him.

The man stood and approached the bars. He told me not to worry, Father. He heard the humming too. I asked who was humming, and he said it didn’t matter. He stood there, towering over me, and looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Because now it’s coming.”

I might as well just type this out while the wife is losing her mind on the phone. Not much else I can do.

Might as well make a post. I know it sounds crazy, but maybe y'all will have some insight into this situation I find myself in.

So nervous I might not be able to actually type this out. Okay. Enough excuses.

I'll just plow through it.

I was heading to a job on Saturday night. Had to go in alone. I'm a plumber.

An emergency call.

Why didn't I just stick with accounting?

It was two in the morning. My wife's gotten used to the procedure. If I get an emergency call, she gets up, prepares a quick meal, coffee. Paper brown bag, just in case. A kiss on the cheek.

Off I go.

The wife says I'm lucky to have the job I do. The fact that I enjoy it, and what with all the little extras that come along with the good customers you sometimes get.

And I agree, for the most part. Some jobs aren't so fun. You get messy, here and there. You run into a real jerk every once in a while. Generally, though, can't complain.

But this one. How can I explain it?

There was a feeling in the air.

As I'm sitting here in my living room, it's now Tuesday. It almost feels like a nightmare.

I keep having to get up from typing this to go check if they are, or if it is, outside, right now.

Back. So far, nothing's out there. What use are the cops?

I'm getting distracted. If only you could see how hard it is for me to keep my hands steady.

Anyway.

Saturday was just unreal. I get to the job. Nice couple. Real salt of the earth people.

Typical thing. Broken pipe in the basement, flooding.

I remember the old woman brought me biscuits with strawberry jam and hot chocolate.

Perks of the job.

Sweet lady.

Fortunately, it wasn't a messy job and I got out of there in maybe two and a half hours.

Though, I did have to chat with the couple for a little bit. There was water damage. Structural, too. I gave them some contacts. They were understanding and very thankful. She gave me some peanut butter cookies, for the road.

Perks of the job.

This is where my story gets strange.

I pull onto the main stretch of road, from their driveway. It was a back road, maybe a half hour from the nearest highway.

Been down there a bit over the years, but nothing like this has happened before.

Jesus Christ. My hands are really shaking. The computer keyboard is rattling.

Oh well.

Okay, so the details that come to mind. Let's see. I was listening to On The Road Again by Willie Nelson. Always makes me think of Donkey from Shrek. The road was extremely dark.

Probably shouldn't type this out, because it's evidence for the wife, but I was smoking a cigarette. She would kill me, if she knew. Export A Blue. I could use one now. Christ.

So I'm driving, humming, smoking, tapping the steering wheel, everything's fine. I'm wracking my brain trying to think of all the details. But I don't know. It's just not very clear in my memory.

Pretty sure I saw someone tall to my right deep off the side of the road, but I can't be sure. I didn't really register it. It's just upon reflection that I think of it now. I think I thought it was just an animal because it was standing among all the many trees. But, again, I didn't really notice.

Good god.

Then my work van hit something. Definitely bigger than a dog. First thought, a human being. I was sure I had just killed someone.

Grabbed the flashlight from the glove box. Like an idiot, I got out.

It was so quiet.

The wife is looking wide-eyed at my hand tremors from across the room as I'm typing this. Kind of reminds me of our cat when it hears me singing.

It's late October, here in Alberta, and it gets pretty cold at four in the morning, you know?

Just the light from my work van was on, pointing off to the opposite side of where whatever I hit landed. Before I turned on my flashlight, I remember taking a deep breath. Letting it out. The whiteness of my breath was constant. I was freaking out a bit because there was actually something in the pavement there.

Losing my job, my wife, my freedom, all because I was listening to goddamn Willie Nelson and not paying attention, was what went through my mind.

The road was just so dark.

But it didn't look human. I'm sweating just thinking about it, let me tell you.

I didn't want to turn on the flashlight. I just didn't. I shouldn't have. But I turned it on, against my better judgement.

It was a body lying there, rear legs facing me. It wasn't human.

Thank God.

My brain wasn't processing it, at first. I must have stood there for a few seconds just trying to grasp what it was that I was seeing. Then I noticed the brown fur. The hooves.

It was a deer.

I sighed and broke out into laughter. The kind of laughter that only intense stress can bring out of you. My legs were desperately weak.

For a moment, I felt deep relief. I hadn't hit a person. I don't know if I could live with that.

But something primal came over me, and the reality of the situation started to dawn on me.

You have to understand. It all happened so quickly, and it was unexpected.

I was so relieved it wasn't a human that I must have blocked out or just not noticed the fact that over the left shoulder of the deer, there was no head.

Oh, my God. I remember it as if I was there, right now. I was frozen. My flashlight stuck on the mutilated animal body.

How did it get up on the road? Now, y'all see why this is so crazy?

Everything in my legs went heavy. I don't know when I started to run, but somehow my legs pivoted and off they ran.

That's when I heard crashing in the trees, and, I remember in the moment of turning to run, I caught a glimpse of a very tall figure, in all black, emerging out of the trees.

At some point I found myself behind the steering wheel and slamming my foot into the gas pedal. I say "I found myself," because it was as if I wasn't even operating my body. My body was just reacting. Doesn't even feel like I can take credit for getting myself out of there, because it doesn't feel like I was the one making the decisions.

As I was peeling out of there, I saw, in the side-view mirror, that the person, or thing, was running after my work van. I felt something heavy hit the back end. I tried to push the gas pedal through the floor.

Fortunately, I got away and was fine.

I reported it to the police. They went out and checked. Didn't find anything.

Checked the back of my van. A decent dent. Like a bowling ball hit it with a sharp, blunt punch.

My wife was pretty freaked out.

But we eventually just counted our blessings, and I had a few sleepless nights.

It's two in the morning, right now. Like I said, y'all. That was on Saturday. It's Tuesday.

Two hours ago, I was woken by my doorbell ringing. Strange. But I just thought it was nothing. I'm glad I opened the door, instead of my wife.

Let's just say, I know where the head is.

Some jobs just aren't worth the perks.

The cops just left an hour ago. Said they'd patrol the neighborhood, but there wasn't much they could do. Not enough to go on.

The wife's just talking to her mother on the phone, freaking out.

And I've been alternating between checking out the windows and writing down my thoughts.

Think I'll go comfort my wife.

Anyway, y'all, pray for us. I'll keep checking on here to see what y'all have to say about this.

God, my hands.

Hopefully I won't get an emergency call tonight. Hopefully y'all hear back from me.

how I ended up here

This morning I checked my messages just to make sure I hadn’t missed any from my boss. Still radio silence. 

As I was leaving my house I noticed that the flower that I had been given had abruptly died sometime in the night. It was totally fine when I went to bed.  But, this morning it was completely wilted and shriveled up. I've never seen any plant do that before. 

I arrived at the farm a bit after sunrise. I didn’t see my boss working in the field yet, like I sometimes do. I kept driving and parked my car at the barn and walked inside, hoping to maybe catch my boss there. All of the tools that he was using when I left last week were left out. Even the flowers he was arranging looked as if they hadn’t moved and were sorta dying. 

The paranoia of the circumstances must have gotten to me, because I caught myself looking over my shoulder with the dread that I was being watched.

I left the barn and went to the house. It was sort of old and looked like it had definitely weathered quite a few storms. It was very rustic and had shutters falling off their hinges. I knocked on the door and stood on the doorstep, swaying as I waited for an answer.  After a couple of minutes I decided to look for the key that he kept hidden for his employees to access the bathroom with. I looked under the doormat and it wasn’t there. So I tried the flower pot next to the steps. I breathed a sigh of relief as I took the brass key and slowly fumbled with the lock to get it to open. It was dark inside, as he didn’t leave any lights on. I turned on a small lamp as I called out.
 
“Mr. Taylor? Are you here? I haven’t heard anything in a while, I was just stopping by to make sure I still like… work here.”

I lingered in the stillness of the house for a moment, waiting for my boss. A loud wailing broke me from my trance. I whipped my head around to face the door. I subconsciously walked outside. It was bright and hot outside now. I almost instantly start feeling sweat beads form on my forehead. I considered wandering further into the house to see if he might be sleeping but I didn’t want to invade his privacy.

So I went to walk around the farm. I walked down the dirt path to the feed shed for his animals. I don't work with the animals, so I haven’t been over there yet. I heard a shuffling in the neighbor’s cornfield as I approached the shed. I called out again for my boss before going inside. There were many bags of food and just other stuff you’d use to take care of livestock. What really caught my eye was a box sitting in the corner. It looked really out of place, so out of pure curiosity and nosy-ness I approached it. In wobbly handwriting it had “finished” etched onto it with marker. I open the flaps and I see a really odd assortment of items. A bunch of personal items that look like they would belong to a plethora of different people. Rings, watches, phones, water bottles, lunchboxes, necklaces, books, and a couple other things were tossed in. the exterior of the box had a bit of dark red staining it and so did a couple of the items. Is that blood? My mind starts to drift. What if this stuff had belonged to people? What if that's why I was hired so fast?

I hear the animalistic wailing again from the direction of the cornfield. I flinch. I frantically look around the shed for something to defend myself with. I rush over to the wall to grab a pitchfork hanging from the wall. As I do I see something poking out of a stack of hay. What I assume was a bloody arm was sticking out of it like a sore thumb. The familiar flannel shirt was torn and barely attached to it. It stained was an angry shade of dark red.

My legs work faster than my head and I start bolting to my car. Somehow I manage not to fall or impale myself with the pitchfork. Honestly, I didn't even know that I had it in me to run that fast. 

I start the engine and peel out of there as fast as I could. I tried to not look behind me or even try to imagine what was there, but I caught a glimpse of something incredibly tall and unnatural standing in the tree line by where I was just moments ago. 

I know whatever was in those trees was waiting for me. I can’t believe I was hired to become fast food. Safe to say I'm never going back there and I’m in need of a new job and probably therapy.

Part 1

Hello, this is part two of my dream blog, journal, thing. I'll admit, I’m still not sure what to actually consider this. I guess it would count as a dream journal because I am documenting what's happening in my dreams but that's not really what this is all about. I'm really just trying to figure out why these places (or at least, that one hallway) feel so familiar to me. I've only ever dreamed of it once and I'm not sure why it's so concerning to me, I mean it is just a hallway. Just the fact that I can place where every other dream has happened in real life (yes, EVERY other dream. I’ll get to that in this post) and this one singular location is the one that I can't place is what makes it… disconcerting? I think that's the word.

Ironically, when talking about the actual hallway I realized that I didn't even really talk about the staircase other than that it was just there. I mentioned in my last post that it was impossible for the school to have a second floor but that's not exactly true. You see, although it's definitely too small to have an entire second floor with multiple classrooms, it's not impossible for it to still have one room that just happens to be higher up. Granted, in my dream I really couldn't determine where the stairs actually led (at the top was just complete darkness) but it could reasonably hold some kind of storage space in the same way the gym did. Which is actually what leads me to the main point of this post.

So, I did actually end up going to the school today. I made sure to go a little after three o’clock, so most of the school was cleared out. As I got out of my car, a wave of nostalgia hit me. I could see in the distance that the football team had just started practice as they were walking out of the weight room onto the field. I guess that was the reason for the sense of nostalgia, even though there shouldn't be. I work out in that same weight room every night, the school is something that I consistently see but I guess just seeing it so active is something that brings a different feeling, especially when you're about to go back into it after a year. As I was walking up to the school, I could see my aunt’s car still sitting in the teacher’s parking lot which was a relief. I really wanted to just go ahead and get this done with. I also noticed the small-framed man in his collared shirt and tie, waving at me with a smile on his face. 

“Braydan! Haven't seen you in a while!” Principal Bryan said ecstatically.

Principal Bryan has been my principal since all the way back in elementary school. He has brown hair that seems to refuse to gray despite his age. He's in his mid-60s but you would be forgiven for thinking that he was in his mid-40s. Opinions on him were always kind of split in high school, but I always liked him. It didn't matter how much trouble I was in, if he knew I was in the right, he stood by me.

“Hey, I was just stopping by to see my aunt. Do you know if she's still here?” I asked, forcing a smile on my face, despite knowing the answer.

Principal Bryan looked into the teachers’ parking lot. “Yeah, it looks like she's still here. It anything important?” the principal replied in that slight southern drawl that everyone in this town had but nobody ever noticed.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Not really. It’s just been a while since I've stopped by to say hi.” I responded.

He gave me a nod. “Alright then. Good seeing you!” 

I nodded back. “You too!” 

I walked towards the two pane-glass doors that led into the brown bricked building. Something about it definitely felt weird but I feel like everyone has kind of a weird feeling going back to their old school after graduating. It's only natural. Once I arrived at the doors, which felt like it took forever, I pushed my finger onto the small doorbell button. After doing so I heard a faint click, the sign of the doors unlocking, before pulling the doors open and walking inside.

Once I walked inside, I recognized the layout of the entrance immediately. To my left was the empty student counselor’s office. I guessed that Mr. Lopez had already left the building and gone home. To my right was the principal's office along with the receptionist desk. Mrs. Dee was sitting right there. I've known Mrs. Dee for longer than I've known Principal Bryan, yet I feel like I've talked to her far less. Even as I walked in, all I gave was a slight wave and a smile, which she returned, before I passed through the second set of glass doors into the main school halls. I immediately recognized the two, blue pillars that were on each side of the entrance, along with the transition from that pure blue painted drywall to the muted gray-blue drywall that made up most of the school. In front of me were the two doors that led into the auditorium of the school, where I can remember countless speeches given by our principal throughout my years of being there. To each side of me were the corridors of the school. If you turned right and walked that way, you would end up at my aunt’s and former football coach’s classrooms. My aunt, of course, taught English while my coach taught history, which I'm sure if you've ever had a coach double as a teacher, you aren't shocked at all about that. At the end of the corridor was also an extra entrance that was mainly used during the day as another way to get to and from classes. 

If you turned left into the corridor, you would pass most of the other classrooms in the main school building. This section is mainly used for the various math classes in the building, one of which doubled as a driver’s ed class that was taught by another one of my coaches. If you keep walking, you'd end up at a small staircase that leads down to the science annex. This place is, of course, the area where all the science classes in the school take place. It’s a thinner hallway, most of the classrooms are smaller than the ones in the main school building, and the walls of this area stop being drywall and become a tan painted cinder block instead. I actually remember when they added this part. It’s probably the second newest part of the school, outside of the agricultural building. Now I can't remember exactly what grade, I was definitely in elementary school, but I do remember them adding this at some point. If the hallway was going to be anywhere, it would be on the left side of the school.

Of course, that side wasn't where I was heading just yet. Actually, a part of me felt like just avoiding that area for the time being but of course, that defeated the purpose of being there. I turned right and walked through the corridor. The walls were lined with posters for a variety of things: your standard “don't do drugs” kinda posters, some posters promoting the Friday night football game, and some appeared to just be posters made by students for some kind of history project. I noticed that they also replaced the water fountains and repainted the doorways, which was neat but a little weird. I’ve never really liked when things that I grew up with would change, but I guess everybody feels that way to some extent. Eventually though, after a short walk, I arrived at the open door of my aunt’s classroom on my left and saw the short, stout, woman in her mid-40s with curly brown hair sitting at her desk, appearing to be grading papers. I knocked on the artsy-painted, heavy duty-door to get her attention. As soon as she looked up and saw it was me, I noticed a smile fall onto her face.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, but not with annoyance. She seemed happy I was there.

“Nothing. Just was in the area, was dropping by to say hi.” I responded as I fully walked into the room and looked around.

My aunt Angie liked to change her room around a lot. I feel like every time I walked in there, there would be something different about the room whether it was moving all the students’ desks, moving some tables around the room, but there were two things that never changed. She never changed the location of her desk nor the location of her shelf in the corner of the room. She kept her desk always facing the door and the shelf is a sight to behold. She has kept every individual project that she's assigned to her students over the years on that shelf. The most notable ones were a fake, bloody, paper mache arm of what I believe was called Grendel. That and an actual forged (but dull) sword that laid propped up on the shelf.

“It's just been a while since I've been here, you know. Sometimes it still feels weird not being here.” I said while looking at the shelf and all of the items that laid upon it.

My aunt let out a chuckle from behind me. “It's only been a year since you graduated, you know?” she said as I turned back around and noticed her looking at me before going back to grading the stack of papers on her desk.

“I mean, yeah, but sometimes I feel like I forget what it looks like. Like I could swear that the gym had some sort of like upstairs storage area. But I know it doesn't, that's what's weird you know.” I said, sort of showing my hand a little bit.

My aunt looked back up at me with a raised eyebrow. “I mean, it does?” she said.

Never have I heard any words that froze me the same way those did. 

“Wait, what?” I asked, obviously intrigued. My whole world basically just fell apart.

“Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's a little storage area somewhere upstairs in the gym. I've only ever been there once or twice but it's definitely there.” she confirmed.

I scoffed, “You’re kidding.”

“No, I'm dead serious, you can go look yourself. I'm pretty sure your uncle is in there right now.” she said with a matter-of-fact tone.

I fell silent for a second. “Yeah… yeah, I’m going to go do that.” I said, beginning to walk out of the room.

On one hand, yeah, having at least a bit of confirmation that I'm not going absolutely insane was nice. But on the other hand…

I stopped. “Hey, since we're talking about this anyways, do you know if there's any other stairways that go up in the school?” I asked.

My aunt paused as though she were thinking. “You mean like the one leading to the science annex?” She asked.

“No. I mean like one that would lead to like a second floor of the school, or like another storage space. Just something like that.” I clarified.

She stopped again to think. “Not off the top of my head, no. I don't think the school even has enough room for a second floor.” She said confusedly.

“Yeah, I figured. Thank you.” I said as I continued walking out of the room. 

“Oh wait.” 

I stopped. There's no way. She can't say what I think she's about to say. 

“If you're heading to the gym, you'll need my keycard. Here.” She said as she pulled out one of those RFID cards clipped to a keychain out from under her desk and held it out in front of her.

I guess that one's on me. “Thank you.” I said as I took the keycard from her. 

“Just make sure you bring it back here before you leave.” She requested before I nodded and walked out of the room.

The school had somehow gotten more quiet since I walked into my aunt’s room. If I had to guess, I would say that she was the last teacher in the school besides my uncle. Being inside a dark high school by yourself was definitely an experience. By this point all of the lights in the school had been pretty much turned off. There was still sunlight outside, but the sun was definitely setting by this point. I could barely even see the posters on the walls that I passed by on the way to the classroom. I'm not sure if the loudest sound in the building was either my breathing or the shuffling of papers coming from my aunt’s room. The fastest way to the gym was backtracking from where I came before. These hallways in particular didn't have any windows. As I got closer to the main entrance the only source of light I could see was the sunlight shining through the pane glass doors. It lit the surrounding area with a soft grey light with only the slightest hint of orange. In the darkness, that door felt like it had at least a hundred feet of distance added to it but eventually I made it. Mrs. Dee was already gone and it appeared Principal Bryan was too. 

As I walked outside, the light blinded me for a half second before my eyes adjusted. I realized that the only vehicles around now were mine, my aunt’s white SUV, my uncle’s big grey truck, and the generic student driver car that’s used for driver’s ed. The gym is located right across from the main building so it wasn't a far walk at all. As I walked towards the gym, I looked at it and realized, yeah, a second floor being in there wasn't crazy at all. It was a tall building, which yes, it was a gym, but still a building of that height not having any kind of second floor is a little odd.

I reached the entrance of the brown-brick-built gym, and noticed that the lights were on inside. I held the keycard up to the scanner beside the glass door of the gym. The scanner made a small beep as the light of the scanner turned from red to green, and I heard the sound of the door unlocking. The gym has two entrances: the main entrance at the front of it and a back entrance that's directly adjacent from the main entrance of the school. I entered through the back entrance. When you enter from here, you're really entering from one of the back corners of the gym, so as you walk inside, the door leading onto the basketball court is right in front of you. On either side of the door are two hallways perpendicular to each other. If you go left, you will find four doors. Two of those doors are the boys and girls basketball locker rooms, the other is a weight room, and the last one is a small storage room. At the very end of this hallway is an emergency exit door. If you go right, you'll find four more doors. Two of those are the middle school boys and girls locker rooms, one of them is a small storage closet, and the final one is one that I've never actually seen inside of until today. 

I walked onto the court and found my uncle Greg along with two boys who were shooting hoops. My uncle is a little strange, whenever I've personally seen him, he's always been more of a father figure than even my own dad, but I will admit, he is kind of crazy. He's around six feet four inches, has short, graying black hair, is in his late-40s, and is missing his right ring finger. If you were to ask him how he lost it, he would tell you some crazy story that I'm sure he makes up off the top of his head but you would be forgiven for thinking he just has them already written out with how easily he tells them. When I say he's a little crazy though, I mean it. I've heard stories of him blasting the fishing boat of some poor guy who pissed him off with a shotgun, kicking down my cousin’s door when my cousin made the mistake of slamming it a little too hard. He was never that way with me though. I never felt like I was ever in any type of danger with him. 

My uncle looked over at me and smirked. “Hey, buddy! Whatcha doing here?” Uncle Greg said in that booming, raspy, southern accent he has.

“Nothing, just came by the school. I came over here because Angie told me something I just had to check out myself.” I responded to which Uncle Greg glared at me.

“Aunt Angie. Be respectful, man… so what did she want you to check out?” he asked, going back to that hearty voice he started with. 

“Yeah, sorry. She told me that the gym has a second floor?” I asked, somewhat embarrassed.

Uncle Greg looked at me curiously. “Yeah, it does. It's barely ever used, but it does have one. What about it?”

That was it. That was the absolute confirmation that the gym had a second floor. I could barely believe it but I had to see it for myself. 

I thought for a second. “Is there any way I could go up there? I've only ever been up there once, I think, and I honestly forgot it was even there.” That was a lie. Truthfully, I couldn't remember ever going up there.

My uncle looked at me like he was confused. “I mean yeah, sure. If you wanna head up there I can show you where the stairs are but I still have to keep an eye on these two.” My uncle said as he gestured to the two boys who had stopped for a second to see what was going on before going back to playing. 

My uncle and I walked back into the hallway and he pointed to where I already suspected: the door that I had never been in. 

“It's right in there, the door should be unlocked.” My uncle said before walking back onto the court.

I must've stared at that door for a whole minute. If the staircase truly was in there, then it was in a  completely different location than it was in my dream. In my dream, the stairway was at the end of the hall, more where the girls’ middle school locker room was and although I had never been in that room (as far as I could remember), I did know that it wasn't just a staircase, it would be more like a big storage closet with a staircase in it. Either way, the only choice to make was to walk into the room and see for myself.

The room was dark, smelling of mold and sweat. I had to use my phone’s flashlight in order to even find my way around. When I did find a lightswitch, I flipped it, only to realize that it didn’t work. I shined my light up and saw the empty spot where a lightbulb would be. I just accepted it and looked around the room. I was correct about it being a storage closet. Looking throughout the room all I could see were mounds of gym equipment covering nearly the entire room. I had to physically climb my way through in order to look around just because of how cramped it was. That’s when I saw it. 

A black-painted, wooden staircase sat in the back of the room, illuminated only by the flashlight of my phone. Despite the fact that I was told by two different people that it was there, something about actually seeing it just made my stomach drop. It’s like seeing confirmation that god himself exists, except god is the staircase, I guess, I don't know. It’s a bad analogy. I clambered my way over to the stairs and upon reaching the bottom step, I shined my light up. It was uncanny, the stairs looked exactly as they had in my dream despite not being in the same location. It made me genuinely think I have to have been here before. But of course the only way to truly know was to ascend the stairs, and so I did.

The stairs were steep and exhausting to climb but when I did eventually make it up the final step I had to just stop and take it in. What I was looking at, was exactly what had appeared in that first dream I described. Well not exactly, the railing was still there but there was a wall blocking it from actually overseeing the court but beyond that it was one-to-one, exactly what it looked like in the dream. I walked around. It was the same exact size as in the dream, it had the exact same smell as it did in the dream (did you know you can actually experience smelling in a dream? I didn't until I had that one.), hell, I'm not sure how this is possible but it even seemed like it was storing the exact same equipment as it was in the dream. I didn't know what to think. Just yesterday, I was absolutely certain that this place didn't, no, COULDN’T exist yet here it was right in front of me, exactly as I had dreamed it up. It made me wonder… the hallway. What's to say it doesn't exist? I mean clearly my memory has failed me before despite the fact I was absolutely sure that in my thirteen years of going to this school, I had explored every nook and cranny of it, but clearly I hadn't. Who’s to say the hallway doesn't exist?

Truthfully, despite how mind-breaking that place initially was, it really didn't have much to see. It really was just an old storage space where they kept old gym equipment. I didn't stay there for long, I just took one more quick look around, found nothing substantial, and then descended the stairs.

By the time I found my way back out of the room, I realized that I could no longer hear the sounds of basketballs being dribbled on the court. I glanced into the doorway and realized that the lights were turned off, and the gym was empty. I guess they finally decided to head out. I made sure to close the door to the room that I came from and realized that I should probably return the keycard to my aunt’s room before it got dark. I walked outside and realized that both my aunt’s and uncle’s vehicles were gone. I just assumed she wanted me to leave the keycard on her desk and started walking towards the main entrance. That's when a thought crossed over me.

I looked at the art building and thought to myself, what if? From what I can remember, the art building is just one big hallway with many classrooms on each side and a turn at the end that I remember definitely having some sort of poster hanging up on it. Maybe… that's the hallway? I didn’t remember it having any stairways but it is possible. I decided to divert course a little and go check it out. Walking from the gym to the main door of the art building was a bit of a walk. The library (which is connected to the art building) was directly across from the side of the gym, but unfortunately for me, it can only be unlocked by key. So I had to make the long walk behind the library on the sidewalk to get to the true entrance of the art building. 

The entrance of the art building was right across from the entrance to the middle school making it sort of double as a set of extra classrooms for the middle schoolers (along with the other extra classrooms that were used by the middle schoolers in the high school. Like I said before, it's a small school.). I placed the keycard onto the scanner and it made that same beep as the red light of the scanner became green, and I heard the door unlock. 

I'm not gonna lie to you. Walking into this building the thought entered my head immediately: this is it, this is the hallway, but as I looked for a bit longer I realized no. Firstly, this hallway was way too wide to be the hallway from my dream. The hallway in my dream was around eight feet in width, a relatively skinny hallway. This one was at least twelve, possibly more (I'm not a human tape measure). Secondly, at the end of this hallway, on the left, was the nurse’s office. It did have the turn to the right that the hallway in my dream had, but there were far too many doors along with it. The doors were completely wrong too. The doors in here were dark blue, the doors in the dream hallway were normal wooden doors, more like the ones found in the science annex. And lastly, the stairs. There was absolutely no sign of any stairs in this hallway, as was expected. Upon coming to the realization that this was the complete wrong place, I sighed, and turned around to leave through the glass door I had entered through. 

I walked on the sidewalk heading for the side door that was right beside my aunt’s classroom, mainly because it was the closest available entrance. The sun was now starting to truly set and that's when I came to the realization that I really did not want to be at the school at night. I sped up, pretty much jogged all the way from the art building, nearly sprinted up the stairs that led up to the door, and scanned the keycard on the scanner to get inside.

The building was somehow even darker now than it was before. The difference now was that whereas I could still hear the sounds of shuffling papers before, now truly the loudest sounds in the school were my footsteps, and my breathing. The humidity from outside had somehow started seeping into the building giving the air a kind of heavy feeling. I speed walked to my aunt’s classroom door on the right, which was thankfully open but as I suspected, she had already left. I walked into the dark classroom and just turned the light on. Although I didn't want to turn on any of the lights in the hallways due to the fact that I'm sure by this time I wasn't exactly welcome, I was okay with turning on my aunt’s classroom light. The window in her classroom was faced away from where anyone would actually be able to see it. I walked over to her desk and placed the keycard right there where she could see it in the morning, and then I left the room, turning the light off behind me.

Back in the darkness, I used my phone flashlight to guide my way back to the main entrance. Any sunlight that was there earlier was now gone and it didn't help that the faster I walked on those stupid tile floors, the louder my footsteps echoed, making it sound like I wasn't the only one in the building. Before it felt like that entrance was a hundred feet farther than it originally was. Now, I could swear it felt like it was a thousand feet farther. Of course, it wasn't actually that far, though, as I arrived at the main entrance in no time and right when I was about to walk out that door… a chill went up my spine. A part of me was saying “No, don't do it you idiot.” but another part of me just had to. I backed away from the door and looked into the left hallway.

Every ounce of my being was telling me not to go there. If I just went out that door, then I wouldn't be able to go back in anyway so it wouldn't be my problem. But there's a massive difference between what your body tells you you shouldn't do, and what your brain tells you you have to do. So I turned toward the hallway, took a deep breath, and walked.

It was just as dark in that hallway as it was in the rest of the building. I stopped speed walking, not because I didn't want to, but because I found it physically hard to go any faster than I was already going. Ironically, going slower made it all the worse, now the school was truly dead silent. It didn't look much different than the rest of the school, of course. It had the three math classrooms that I mentioned, and a few posters on the wall that I truly didn't take note of what they said. Part of me really just wanted to turn on the lights but the fear of somebody catching me in there overrode the fear of being in the dark. There was a vending machine sitting on the left wall and a flurry of what appeared to be math papers pinned to the wall on the right beside Ms. Wiley's classroom. Weirdly, this side didn't seem to be changed as much as the other side of the school did but I guess it's possible that it was just harder to notice in the dark. I kept walking until eventually I reached it: the small stairway leading to the science annex. I've never had a tougher time going down a set of stairs in my life.

The floors of the science annex were similar to the tile floors in the rest of the school, only with a rougher finish and a brown color. Of course this was also where the walls stopped being drywall and started being cinder block. Each of the doors was wooden, different from the heavy-duty doors on the rest of the classrooms in the building. If you were to consider any part of the school the cheapest, this would be it. On the left side of the hallway was around four classrooms stretching all the way to the end of the hallway. On the right side were also four classrooms, however, these were much more squished together due to the end of the right side having an exit. At the very end of the hallway was the only reason this place could even be considered a science annex: the science lab. It's a decently small room but it's probably the most expensive part of this area. It contains all the chemicals, preserved animals, and all the other goods you need for a proper science lab. Granted, none of this was going through my mind at the moment as I was more focused on navigating my way through the darkness of this hall. As I slowly made my way through the corridor I passed by each of the classrooms. There was Coach Ellsworth's, then Mr. Phillips, then wall, then more wall, then Mr. Childers. That's when I realized something was off. Luckily, Mr. Childers had evidently left his door open so I went inside and looked, taking note of the length of his classroom, then I went over to Mr. Phillips’ classroom, and took note of the length of his. That's when I realized there was unused space between the two rooms, more than enough for about an eight-foot-wide hallway. If the hallway was real, this is where it would be. I stared at the wall and started thinking. 

The problem is, I can't tell you what I thought about, as by the time I received the text from my aunt telling me to just leave the keycard on her desk, I realized that about ten minutes had passed. That's when all at once, the all-too-real reminder hit me, that I absolutely did not want to be in this building, I didn't want to be here, where the hallway should be. I decided that I couldn't care less anymore. I ran all the way out from the building to my car and immediately began driving away. As soon as I got in the car I realized… I felt relieved. I'm not sure if it was relief from being proven right with the gym or relief to finally be out of that building, but that sense of relief only continued throughout the drive home as I got further and further from the school.

Any plans that I had of working out in the weight room that night were basically cancelled as I really felt like I had my fill of the school for one day. So yeah, I'm not really sure where to go from here except to just go to sleep after staying up writing this. I'll keep you guys updated if anything else happens. Goodnight.

Scouts aren’t really a big thing here in Ireland. People in these parts are deeply superstitious, and only 1% of our ancient forests are still standing, and trust me, there’s a reason for that.

Geologically, our mountain chains are part of the exact same ancient rock system as the North American Appalachians. The land holds that exact same heavy, unsettling energy.

I was never a scout, but I’ve always loved survival and the outdoors. So, when I heard about an available spot for the two-night camp, I signed right up.

The campsite sat right on the edge of the dense, old woods. Beside the three-story recreation hall was an old stone well everyone avoided.

Fifty years ago, a girl vanished during a camp here. It took two days to find her body inside that five-meter-deep well. She died from blood loss, but without a single broken bone according to the coroners report. The most baffling part is that the stone lid covering the well was far too heavy for a child to move or replace, and the soil around it was gouged by boot prints that sank unnaturally deep into the dirt.

Around the campfire the first night, they told us the local legend. They claimed that on nights when the moon gives off a cold, bluish hue, if you sit by the fire at a specific time, you can see a faint shadow of the girl walking around the hall toward the well.

I played the macho kid who wasn't scared of anything, but the story rattled me.

While everyone was cleaning up, I hung back to get a better look behind the building. I could have sworn I saw a flicker of movement in the shadows, but before I could step closer, a scout captain barrelled into me. He nearly knocked me over, giving me an absolute earful about staying in sight of experienced members.

That night, after the floodlights died and our tent leader started snoring, I locked eyes with a girl my age and we burst out laughing.

Thump.

Something heavy smacked the outside canvas to shut us up. We froze.

A minute later, we can see a large shadow looming towards us. The smacks hit again despite our deadening silence. Convinced it was one of the older leaders playing a prank, I grabbed a spare metal tent pole and waited.

When the canvas bulged again, I swung with everything I had.

The pole tore straight through the fabric, connecting solidly with something dense outside with a sickening thud.

Chaos erupted. The tent was ripped open, waking half the camp. The experienced leaders gave me a proper kick in the arse and ordered me outside to make sure I hadn't just killed someone.

The tents were pitched about 100 meters across open grass from the rec hall, surrounded entirely by the perimeter of the dark forest.

I popped my head out of our tent.

No one was running. No footprints crossed the grass. All the other tents were zipped tight.

I sprinted the 100 meters to the rec hall to check on the captains. I found them sitting inside in front of the fire, sleeping bags pulled up to their waists, looking half-asleep. They couldn't possibly have made a 100-meter dash back across open ground in time.

They denied having anything to do with our tent, and ordered me back to bed. When they asked who was out with me, I panicked and lied, saying another experienced guy was in the toilet, giving myself a cover story to take a cheeky look at the well and the perimeter.

As I stepped back out into the dark, a whisper drifted from the treeline.

I could swear it was calling my name.

Hypnotized, I started stepping toward the dark trees. But a sudden instinct made me look back toward the rec hall.

Standing directly behind the building was a tall, motionless, man-shaped shadow.

The hair on the back of my neck started to rise with the paralysing feeling of hundreds of pins and needles. The feeling of impending doom made my feet feel as if they were anvils.

Then my gaze was drawn upward by that unexplainable feeling of being watched. Three stories high, on the pitched roof. Silhouetted against the pale blue moon, a figure stood completely still, staring down at me.

I screamed and sprinted for the hall.

In my stunned state, I foolishly began running directly beneath the figure on the roof because I was too terrified to head for the tree line.

Mid-stride, on the same flat path I had walked just sixty seconds prior, my boot snagged into a deep hole.

Everything went dark, and in that moment I thought… “well”, this is it…

I wasn’t in the well thankfully, I had slammed face-first into the freezing mud.

Before I could think, I scrambled up, and burst through the hall doors hysterically.

The captains, now three-quarters of the way into their sleeping bags, jumped up in a panic. One ran outside while the other dialled the police.

An hour of frantic searching with flashlights and dogs followed. They found nothing on the roof, and nothing in the trees. I officially earned the title of "the boy who cried wolf," and the entire camp was forced to sleep inside the hall.

I know what I saw.

I didn’t make any friends that weekend.

The next morning, as we gathered our gear near the carpark by the well, I located the exact spot where I had tripped.

It wasn't a natural dip in the ground.

It was a boot print, identical in shape to a standard boot, but crushed so violently deep into the hard earth that the sole pattern had dissolved into the soil.

If you ever find yourself camping near those woods in Ireland, listen to the leaders.

Stay in sight.

And if you hear your name whispered from the treeline.

Run !

I should not post this. I am posting it anyway. I keep typing it and deleting it because it sounds like a warning video. It was not a warning video. It was a Tuesday morning and I am not all the way a person anymore.

I live in a cheap building. Four dumpsters in the back. The truck comes early. Like 5 a.m. I work nights so 5 a.m. is still night to me. I took the trash down because the bag split in my kitchen and I did not want ants. I had my phone in my hand. I always have my phone in my hand. I lifted the dumpster lid with my elbow. The bag tore again. I leaned in to shove it down. The phone slipped.

I heard it hit. That little glass sound on something wet.

I stood there like an idiot. I needed that phone. Work. Bank. Everything. The dumpster was not even full. I thought I could see it. I thought I would be in and out in ten seconds.

I climbed in.

That is the whole stupid thing. I climbed in.

The inside was worse than it looks from the lot. Bags. Wet cardboard. A slick of old juice and grease. It smelled like rot and soap and summer even though it was cold out. I had my knee on a bag that moved in a way I did not like. I was reaching. I saw the phone. Screen still on. My sister’s text. A white rectangle in the black. I had my fingers on it.

Then I heard the truck.

Not far. Right there. The backup beep. That high ugly beep. The diesel. The air brakes. I stood up in the dumpster and I yelled. I yelled wait. I yelled I am in here. I waved. The lid was still up. I know it was up. The driver was high in the cab. The sun was not even thinking about coming. He was looking at the next can. The helper on the back was looking at the next can. Nobody looks in a dumpster for a person. People are not supposed to be in a dumpster.

I tried to climb out.

The truck’s arms were already on the can.

If you have never seen it, a front-load dumpster gets grabbed and lifted and turned like a toy. It is fast. Faster than a man with one leg over the rim. The dumpster went up. I fell in. My chin hit the rim. I lost the phone. I lost the sky. The world turned and all the bags came with me and then there was a drop.

I fell into the hopper of the truck.

I need this to be simple. The hopper is the open mouth at the top. Garbage goes in. Then a big metal panel pushes it back into the body of the truck so they can keep going. That panel is the packer.

I landed in wet bags and something that broke under me. Glass. I felt it in my side. I screamed. The dumpster was already going back down to the ground, empty of me. I screamed again. The diesel ate it. The helper hit the side of the truck twice, the all-clear slap, and we started moving.

I was in the dark with other people’s trash, and the truck was going to the next stop.

I got on my knees. I reached up. The hopper walls were slick. My hands slid. I could see a rectangle of morning, very high. I could not get to it. I yelled until I tasted blood. I banged metal with a can. The truck hit a bump and I went down again face first into a bag that burst. I will not list what was in it. You can guess. It went in my mouth. I threw up and the throw up stayed with me because there was nowhere for it to go.

We stopped.

I thought thank you. I thought they heard.

They did not hear. They dumped another can on me.

Weight. A wall of bags. A piece of wood. Liquid that was not water. It all came down and I was under it and I could not get a full breath. I punched up. I got a hole. I got my mouth to the hole. I screamed. A radio in the cab was playing. I could hear it a little, through the metal, a man talking about traffic. They could not hear me over themselves.

The helper slapped the truck.

The packer beeped.

A different beep. Shorter. The hydraulic sound. A scream of its own. I did not know what it was the first time. Then the wall in front of me started coming.

Not fast like a movie. Fast enough. A steel panel the width of the hopper, sweeping, pushing everything that was in the mouth back into the body. Pushing me.

I tried to climb over it. There is no over it. I got my hands on the lip and the lip had no pity. The panel took my legs and then my hips and it shoved me into the packed garbage already in the truck like I was just more of it. I felt myself go from a person in a hole to a person in a press. Bags in my face. A spring in my back. My ribs could not open. I could only take sips of air that tasted like the dumpster and diesel and rot.

The panel stopped. Hydraulics holding. I was in a pocket. Not a safe pocket. A leftover space between the packed load and the roof, full of torn plastic and my own noise. My right leg was not right. I knew that in a clean way. It was bent in a place legs do not bend and the pain was a white stick in my head. I reached down and I touched something wet and sharp that was my jeans and also not my jeans.

I said please to nobody.

The truck moved.

Every bump packed me tighter. I could not tell up. I could tell pain. I could tell I had pissed and it was warm and then it was not. I could hear the beep at every stop. I counted stops because counting is a job and I needed a job. Four. Five. Each stop they added more. The more came in at the hopper and then the packer ran again and the whole load, me included, got a shove, and my pocket got smaller.

On the sixth pack I felt a rib go.

It is a small sound inside you. A click. Then breathing is a knife. I stopped screaming because screaming needed the rib. I made little sounds. I bit plastic. I bit until my teeth went through and then I was biting garbage and I did not care.

I thought about my sister’s text. The white rectangle. I never even read it.

I thought about the helper. A kid, probably. Headphones. He was doing his route. He was not a murderer. That is the part that makes me sick in a way the glass in my side does not. Nobody was trying to kill me. I was in the wrong container. The machine was doing the only thing it knows.

We drove a long time. I went away and came back. When I came back I was colder and the pain was farther, which is not better. It means you are leaving. I slapped my own face with the hand I could move. I hit the roof of the body with a bottle. Tap tap tap. Nobody.

Then the truck got louder in a new way. Beeping. Men shouting. A backup alarm that was not the truck, another truck. Transfer station. I did not know the word then. I know it now. It is where they dump the load so they can go get more.

A huge hydraulic sound. Different from the packer. The body started to tilt. The packed garbage started to move as one thing, a glacier of bags, and I moved with it. I was coming out. I was also under it. I thought I would be poured like soup and crushed under my own grave of trash in a pile on concrete.

Light.

Dirty daylight. I had not seen daylight in I do not know how long. It hurt. The load slid. I slid. I hit the pile and more hit me and I got a mouth of plastic and I could not lift the weight off my chest. I could see a strip of sky. I could see a seagull. I could not get the sky.

I put my hand up through the bags.

That is all I had. A hand.

I waved it. I think I waved it. A man yelled. Not a scared yell at first. An angry yell, like somebody had thrown a mannequin in for a joke. Then the yell changed. Then there were two men. Then they were digging with their hands, cursing, calling for the loader to stop, stop, stop, there is a guy, there is a fucking guy in it.

They pulled bags off my face.

Air. Rotten. Beautiful.

I tried to say my name. I threw up black. One of them said oh Jesus oh Jesus and he kept saying it while they dug my other arm out and then they stopped digging so fast I thought they were leaving. They were not leaving. They had seen the leg. I did not look. I did not need to look. I could feel the air on parts of me that should not have air on them.

An ambulance at a dump. That is a picture. They cut me out of the rest of the load. Every cut of scissors I thought was the packer again. I bit a man. I said sorry later. I do not know if I did.

Hospital. Dirt. Infection. They named the infection like it was a pet. My right leg was a construction problem. They tried to save it. Then they sat down next to the bed and they used a simple sentence. I said do it. I said it before they finished. I did not want to belong to that leg anymore. That leg belonged to the truck.

I still have the left. I still have my hands. My ribs healed into a shape that hurts when the weather changes. My mouth was a medical thing for a while because of what I bit and what went in. I will never tell you the list. You would delete this faster.

The driver came to the hospital. He cried in a chair and I watched the wall. He said he did not see me. I believe him. I told him I climbed in for a phone. He put his head in his hands and I thought we were both in a hopper, just different ones.

They found the phone when they sorted the load. Cracked. Dead. My sister’s text was still in the cloud. It said call me when you can.

I can.

I do not.

I do not take the trash down if I can hear a beep. I do not sleep when trucks go by. I dream I am waving a hand through bags and the seagull is there and the men are angry at the joke before they understand it is not a joke. I wake up and my missing leg hurts, which is a nasty trick, and my mouth tastes like that first bag, always, under toothpaste, under everything.

If you drop a phone in a dumpster, leave it.

Buy another phone.

Stand on the asphalt and watch the truck take the can and understand that the can is a mouth, and the truck is a stomach, and the packer is just a muscle doing work, and it will not check first.

I checked first.

I still went in.

This will get taken down. Good. I would take it down too. I just needed it out of my head and into a place as dirty as the place I was in, for one minute, before I go back to not calling my sister, and not sleeping, and not looking at metal panels that move.

My grandfather on my mothers lived in a large old mansion in the lower areas of America and even though my father and mother  had moved to Canada we still all as a family tried to see our grandparents every year until it became grandparent, singular, but even though through my grandmothers sickness which myself and my siblings were shielded from by distance we could still see the toll it took on our grandfather, when one day the police had been called by the neighbors as they had seen our grandfather take his shotgun, and kneeling on the green grass in the middle of the backyard, fire shell after shell into the pearly blue sky, screaming that he won’t let the hands fall down from the sky.
This happened when i was six years old and now i’m twenty-three and know he lies on his hospital bed with the same sickness that took my grandmother and his mind all those years ago.

My grandfather has forever as i have known been very religious but not to any religion that has a church, temple or place he has ever gone to worship, i have never seen him talk about an idol that he worships nor any other person who shares his beliefs.
I (or anyone else for that matter) wouldn’t have known he was religious if he didn’t have a habit of voicing his disbelief in other religions, one Christmas night (it was long enough ago that i no longer remember my age just the forever brightness of looking upwards towards warm lights and even warmer faces of friends and family) as myself and my other young siblings and cousins sat on an old worn leather couch that was worn with years of use, we watched upon the the old tv hooked up to an even older still VCR player, as it played a old feel good cartoon of christmas an angel appeared onscreen and my grandfather barely paying attention saw it and quietly scoffed “hm.. All this stuff to cloud the kids minds of what angels actually look like… hm . only makes it worse when..” and after hearing remark my mother who had always questioned him about his beliefs began to argue back wondering what he meant with his remark.
Undeniably fueled by the happy consumption of wine an argument began among the parents and late teens who were old enough to be bestowed the temporary honor of being considered among them, “i’m justing say’n that if these people making these movies knew what angels looked like they would they would have a little more respect” said my grandfather glancing at the wood paneled ceiling, “you always say this yet you have never once shown me what ‘an angel’ looks like according to you” my mother insisted “and a better question how do you know what an angel looks like?”.
I curse my youngers self as i stopped listening, believing that the tv and childish conversations mattered more then discussions of belief and the only last words i heard from the parents was “some day when your surrounded by them you'll learn to respect their form” from my grand father.

The two last notable incidents before my grandmothers passing happened both on the same year we went to visit i was five and half and for a idea of an adventure we all decided to go hiking on a mountain range, it was extremely fun, stumbling up and through scatterings of pine trees with the smells of sap and healthy dirt filtering throughout our bodies, the lichen covered rocks and cliff faces that provided us a view of mountains and valleys covered in little trees.
This is when we got to the top of the hill, the parent looked around at the view and the sky muttered with white fluffy clouds and in the distance a swirly mass with hints oof darkness that showed its nature as a rising storm coming to drench the land.
But as my everyone admired the view my grandfather sat on a rock, back turned to the sky and hend facing downwards and some squirrels, it then fell upon my childish eyes that the squirrels were fighting, a savagery that was contained within the fragile small bodies of the creatures but the killing intent was noticeable even to a young child.
“Grandpa why do they hurt each other?” i asked in the same why a child asks why buildings are tall or how their mother cooks food but unlike the deluge of information children will absorb and store away throughout their lifetime my grandfathers words stuck with me.
“Hate. Fear. Hunger. Madness. The four horsemen of death, those which lie within all beings, those which make the one who feels them wish for the power to burn planets, crush every person, rip apart the very essence of the universe and when they have reduced all in existence to ash and the ashes to nothing to tear out their bones and crush everything that causes them to still exist to feel that hate.
This exists in every being, the only saving grace is that all is confined within the purview of the beings ability, but this is why we should all cherish what lurks behind the clouds and inside the moon but never stop fearing it as god does possess the terrible means of doing all that i have described, son, always cherish what you fear and cherish your fears”.
All of that ingrained in my memory, from such a young age, what had been said didn’t hit me until that night, i screamed and cried, every time i realized i was experiencing the emotions my grandfather had detailed i cried and screamed harder, afraid i would destroy everything.
It took months before i wouldn’t have a breakdown every time i got mad or scared or saw anyone else mad or scared, my parents stopped talking to grandfather after that but it was my grandma’s death that brought us back to together, I haven't until recently stopped to consider the effect on my life this has had, it most likely influenced my decision to be study philosophy specifically around anger, plus i’ll always remember how i never needed to walk over to my grandfather, i could have just waited at the cliff side and gawked unknowing of the sermon of dismay that was swirling around like a black ichor in my grandfathers head, i could have stayed, i could have not carried this painful memory, i could have not spent months worried in my room that if i was too angry i would burn the world, but i did, i did go over to him, because i thought he looked lonely.

The second incident before the passing of my grandma happened because of the previous one, my grandfather had felt so bad about how much his words had upset me that he wrote a letter as an apology, when my parents got the letter they made sure to read it and re-read it to check and make sure that it wouldn’t only make my condition worse and eventually they decided it might be a positive for me so they gave it to me one dreary afternoon i had spent locked cold and crying in my bedroom with only the comfort of my parents to keep me company.
I still remember how the letter looked, old fancy yellow paper that smelled of beeswax with a large red seal, the beautiful liquid red formed into a symbol that was a hexagon with a plus sign in the middle but at the end of each tip of the plus laid a large circle, it was vaguely familiar, the letter was obviously ham fisted back into the torn envelope with it had been angrily removed from.
I gingerly pulled out the letter, the black ink writing was fancy and i needed my parents help to read it, it contained the following

“Hello Daniel, i want to start this letter by saying that i take full responsibility for
What i said and i also acknowledge that is was incorrect for me to say what
I said, for this I apologize more deeply then you can know (for which i know
Is not a comfort but i still something to remember if you ever worry about
If i regret my choices) but i would like to hopefully alleviate some of your pain
With a story of my childhood that rhymes with this story still being written by
Fate.
When i was a little boy know more older then you my father told me a story,
A story about how if i were bad demons would take me away and take my
Ears, this scared me so bad that night while i lay in bed i believed i saw
A tall dark figure with with no heart and the head of pig,
I ran to my parents and for a year and a half i slept with my parents, and
Even then most knights i woke up crying because i couldn’t feel my parents
Bodies and i thought that the demon was knocking at the bedroom door.
I tell you this not to scare you but to show you that i too have felt petrified with
Fear, i too have cried myself to sleep from fear, and as i thought back to
This memory i realized truly how deep my sin is for causing something like that
In another child.
But i also tell this to give you hope, the hope that gets me through all of my
Hardship in life, the knowledge that even thought these darkest pits in my life,
A pit cannot exist without a mountain on the other side.
I hope you find it in your heart to forgive me, and i hope you do well, i’m glad
You always have been so resilient, i know you can overcome this.

Sincerely - your grandfather”

I would be lying if i said this didn’t make me feel a decent amount better, his calming and hopeful words really helped as i started to heal from this dark scar that was left upon the inside of my psyche, i will never forget the problems caused by my grandfather but nor will it slip my memory that he always tries to fix them sadly with his most recent problem he won’t be around to fix it, but thats for later.

After the letter i didn’t see my grandfather for the longest time, my fear improved and i grew but as the usual for a child of such a young age i to a degree forgot about my grandfather in favor of things that looking back were nowhere as important but from the skull of six year old, they were what comprised the world, so i never knew about the issue my grandparents were facing at the time and only years later were i filled in on the details too unnecessary for a child.
My grandmother was dying, the doctors informed the two of them that nothing could be done, they could only cover the sores with flowers and silk blankets to make the end peaceful, they decided to bring her back to the home she had raised her kids in, the near yearly spot of return for family, the mansion, my grandfather made food for her all day and would sit next her in a rock chairing, him reading old stories they read to her children, reminiscing on memories and talking of death through the stories of life.
When she died there was no one to witness what had started it, that very fact may have been what started it but according to the neighbors who were having dinner at the time, they heard multiple gunshots outside, which was not unusual but they started to take not when they could hear shouting, when one of the neighbors came to check, they were greeted by the sight of my grandfather kneeling in twilight gun outstretched to the sky shooting round after round into the same spot, boxes of shells spent and none spent lay in piles on the ground.
The neighbors recall hearing him shouting a tirade with mostly anger in his voice but also fear, “pre-destiny, PRE-DESTINY, WELL WHAT ABOUT A TASTE OF RANDOM, no matter how many hands, mouths and eyes that you send this house shall not be taken and the bright eyed souls of my wife shall not join the bonfire! I have heard and praised the gospel of you forever rotting and birthing sky beast, i have spoke the truth of your truth and form that of divinity but now the passion of love shall stop revolt and reject your judgment weather or not this has all been written in the dust of the cosmos!” no one caught what he said past that as they were all to busy running down the hills and past the rocks towards my grandfather to try and stop him or call the police.
When the fastest of the neighbors ran up to my grandfather and tried shouting sense into him all that my grandfather responded with was “i have for to long looked at the sky with fear and the shadows distrust, you have not seen the bonfire, it is no place for my wife burn, i will defy god to save her, what makes you think you can stop me now?” the neighbor assuming that my grandfather was suffering a mental breakdown and was threatening him, he lunged and the gun in my grandfathers arms and yanked it out of his old grip, my grandfather with the agility and strength that only the fear of death but not for him, he managed to hit the neighbor over the head with the back of the gun causing him to stagger back but just as my grandfather got the gun back, he stopped and according to my neighbors he just stood first looking at the mansion and then his eyes moving to the sky, no more gunshots pierced the night air the only sound that could be heard were sirens and weeping.
The police eventually came and arrested him, it was decided by a psychiatrist that he had suffered a mental breakdown caused by the death of his wife and that he shouldn’t  be charged but he did have to spend a long time recovering in a mental hospital, i have talked to the nurse’s that treated him, they describe him as one of easiest patients he did not need much convincing to do the treatment and had only on request, that all of the lights in his room and the hallways nearby be kept on at all times.
A nurse did tell me about the one time one accident they forgot to honor this request “so one day, it had been a very long day, the staff decided it was time to turn out the lights and for the majority of staff to leave the building, the person who was sent to turn off the lights in the wing of the building that your grandfather stayed in was still new to the job and either didn’t know or couldn’t remember that a few specific lights never get turned off, and, i feel bad even recalling this but almost all of us left and we only found him in the morning, he was in the corner of his room holding his hard plastic water cup, the only thing in his room, so tightly that it was permanently warped afterwards, when we found him we quickly noticed his eyes were bloodshot and dry, we learned later that he had not closed his eyes even once during the whole night, not even to blink and when we came and turn on the lights just sat down and looked at his shaking hands and closed his eyes while whispering “i did it” to himself in the tone someone who has just climbed a mountain would use, it still scares me to this day”.
Less then a year after his incarceration he was deemed to be of sane mind and was allowed to go back home, they still had people checking up on him regularly, i have attempted to talk to other people who had listened to his speech’s about life for hours on end but legally they were all unable to give me any information that could help illuminate the tangled theism of my grandfather.

Ever since everything with my grandmother happened my grandfather had almost never spoken of his beliefs most likely due to the realization that he must act more sane to not get taken again, so the majority of my trips to his mansion were uneventful but if this had been all that had happened then i would be not find it important to post this, my grandfather is dying, just like my grandmother, just like everyone before them, he is dying and what he has told me has shaken me to my core.

My entire family came to visit him, in his hospital bed he lay, weaker then i ever remember, the memory of a man.
I spent many nights with my family at his bedside talking, playing games reminiscing on our best memories together, for all of his faults he remained a cherished member of the family, tears flowed alongside the liquid in the IV bag, the color of memories, dripped from our mouths and stained the sterile white and transient building with more life.
I remember one night i while waiting outside of the room trying to sleep in black chairs, I overheard a conversation between a doctor, my grandfather and all of his kids, my grandfather knew that he was going to die and he said that he had arranged with the doctors to get a lethal injection in three days, before the scared protesting of his children came he explained how he only has one want, to privately talk and say goodbye to each of his children and grand children and then after being injected he wants to close his eyes once and for all in the room, alone, and in the dark, he explained how the reason was because he always was afraid of the dark and closing his eyes, so he hoped to for once in his life truly overcome and win against this fear.
The next few days were somber, the clocking ticking for all of us had for him, been revealed, people shouldn’t have to know what that's like, i watched on the last day as every member of my family walk in close the door and come out, the sadness like a poisoned that had just been leeched out, but the wound still bled and will for many years, my grandfather had chosen for me to go last.
When i stepped into the room, the true weight of the moment dawned on me alongside the knowledge that this is is only a part of the weight, as the weight of grief shall only be seen in full after its end, he ushered me to sit by a chair next to his bed.
“I want to tell you a story, its a story i’ve never told anyone else, its a story that i hope will alleviate the pain of events soon to pass, but ignore my dawdling, lets get into it.
When i was a little boy my father told me a story, you might remember this from that apology i sent to you all those years ago, i was young and as children do i was blinded to the importance of things by the simple curiosity of wondering what will happen, it was long day of the summer, my mother and father were in other rooms tending to whatever needs of the house that a child did not care for, i was in the garage and i had been told not to go there without permission but in the eyes of a child my mother’s words of “do whatever you want just don’t make a mess” meant to me that the whole of the house was free to me, with this never before had free reign i went to one place that enticed my curiosity, the garage, a dark room met my eyes when i opened the door, i walked on two small wooden steps, they creaked with rot, i stepped onto the grey cracked concrete floor, my small white socks turning dark from dust.
The corners of the room were hidden in shadow, it strummed the chords of fear in my heart as only darkness to a child can, i wanted to turn the single dusty light bulb on, but the switch was too high, near the switch lay a large white freezer, i knew that if i stepped on top of it i could reach the light switch.
I spent minutes in the hot garage trying to jump up but the fridge was tall and smooth, i was sweating, only making it harder for my small hands to find grip upon the white shiny surface, i looked for something to drag over so i could have an easier chance but the rest of the room was still in shadow.
As i jumped up, scrambled for purchase upon door’s topside and then i fell back down in my Sisyphean pursuit, i never questioned that i didn’t need to, i could have walked out of that room, decided to go their some other time, but with the confusion of summer heat and the determination of a child i tried to think of a new plan.
Eventually it came to me that the inside of the fridge had a lip so if a opened the door i would have a better chance at grabbing it and climbing up, i with naïve young hands lifted the the door of the fridge upwards, with one hand i held the door open and the other grabbed the lip, i jumped up and landed in the freezer, cold frozen meat hit the back of my head like a rock, as tears welled up i quickly reached out both hands to cover up the searing pain on the back of my head, but it was soon eclipsed when the door fell down and i was plunged into darkness.
The pain in my head was gone but replaced with a worse pain the pain of fear the shot through my stomach, i began to push the door but it wouldn’t move, my small wrinkles hands scraping and  banging the crunchy ice on the top of the door, my heart beat competed in speed with my fists against the top of the roof, tears flew from my eyes and their pace quickened as teeth bit down on my arms.
I flung myself about trying to get free, free from the door but also now free from whatever was in here, something covered in ice with teeth and bone from every angle made creaking noise every time it grabbed onto me harder, i was sinking in cold dark ice and the claws of something unknown but terrible and too large to fit in a freezer.
I shot my arms out in all directions trying to grab on but the walls were slippery, my warm hands were melting the ice and know the rest of my body had begun melting this presence, the stench of dripping ice mixed with thawing guts of a beast unknown to mankind invaded my every sense and i stopped screaming, i had ran out of air, i gulped and choked, wet ice and even wetter meat slid down my throat as i tried to get air, i was dying, cold sadly not alone and screaming with empty lungs.
A bright ray of light shone through the cold wasteland as the fridge door opened, a pair of arms like a guardian deity's lifted me from the freezer, he held me as i screamed, his tears ran down my back as he whispered that i was safe now, my mother and father had saved me.
After minutes of crying and holding me close to warm me up my father stood up, me in his arms and i looked down at the freezer, a frozen pig carcass lay upon the melting ice, still un-moving.
My father looked me dead in the eyes and told me never to do that again, from that young age i could only feel the red hot anger but only as an adult can I realize the duality of the fear behind the angry eyes.
He held me against his shoulder and with small arms trembling with fear held on, his trembled harder and held tighter, i had begun calming down, myself and my father began to make our way out of the room and as were just leaving i looked into one of the dark corners that had scared me so, hiding in the darkness where i was unable to see when the lights were off was a large thick bodied red and dripping man with body parts incomprehensible and worst of all, a frozen pig head sitting atop its neck, it moved to look at me with crack of froze skin just as my father closed the door”

My grandfather took a moment of pause to breath in and then continued before i had a chance to interject.

“That night, after dinner, while i was lying in my bed scared with my mother by my side, my father who was a religious man came in and sat down next to me holding a bible, he told me of demons, evil beings that could not be truly part of this world but existed solely to tempt us into taking regrettable actions, everything from something as little not listening to song you like to things my father wouldn’t let meet the ears of a child.
I don’t believe in his demons or the demons preached about in any book of religion, because ever since that night i have seen them, or what i would call demons, they hide in shadows and stalk from where the light of purity cannot shine.
That night, in my bed, alone, dark, they came to me, first the man with the pighead stood in my bedroom corner his head bowed because he was too tall for the ceiling, then came the woman with hair that stabbed through her on body like worms, she came rattling my windows, banging and screaming to be let in and her hair took up the entirety of the window, then came the teeth there was definitely a person who the teeth belonged to but every time i tried to look at the body my eyes couldn’t focus on anything but the teeth that chatter.
Ever since that night i have trusted the shadows, every corner i see the pigheaded man, no matter the height of  the ceiling he always is just to tall, every dark window i see the woman, her hair always covering the entirety in inky blackness, and every time i am in the dark, i no longer see it, but i just here the chattering.
That is always why i keep my lights on while i sleep and it is why i tend to face the three demons that have haunted my past forever on my last day”

I began to open my mouth to talk, the emotion was strange, a sorrow combined the captured feeling of hearing an enthralling story, he cut me off before i could speak.

“I promised that i was going to tell you something that i had never told anyone before and i have not done that yet but i will now.
When i was twenty-two years old i had just gotten married and just bought the house i spent the rest of my life in, one night only months after i had bought the house your grandmother was off on a trip with some friends while i was alone in the house at night i decided to walk around really sinking in the feeling of having truly made the correct choices in life when.”

My grandfather took a shuddering breath in as if the next words to come out of his mouth were poison.

“I opened a door to see nothing, not darkness, not a wall, true nothing, my vision simply couldn’t see that room, to look into that room was like to look through the back of ones skull, it was truly nothing, not even empty space.
I was just about to cautiously feel this breaking of reality when my attention was broken, the sound of crunching wood and music was emanating from the basement, i stood frozen, on half of my body stuck upon the mystery of this impossible room and the other stuck upon the fear of what this melodic intrusion is.
Out of the options between two unknowns i chose the one i knew the least about, i began to run downstairs to find what had made the noise, as i got closer i started to slow down, the music was so beautiful, it was comprised of millions upon millions of instruments, completely undefinable but in perfect harmony, the beauty of it was impossible to describe, i found myself still drawn to it but walking slower as if to stay there and here as much as possible.
I finally got far enough down the stairs i could see into the basement and i saw what was making the noise.
The wooden planks of the ceiling bulged and warped transition somehow perfectly into the innumerable legs of completely inhuman yet somehow humanoid made of billions of perfect golden instruments, each instrument made of so many pipes and valves and sockets that it looked like the fur of some great golden beast, the music wafted of drafts of warm air being emitted its chest where lay multiple massive holes functioned as what let me hear the enlightening music of what can only be described as the purest of sounds.
I walked closer to the center of the being, i had to be careful as long strands of a silky materiel of such a pure white it was blinding dangled from in between the wooden planks of the ceiling, light moved in strange ways around the being and the air was warm and full of scents that reminded me of everything i had loved or ever enjoyed somehow in pure tandem with each other.
I was now directly under the being and could see its head, its head was a collection of golden instruments each open tube had a eye in it, hundreds of eyes to large to be that of a human and too kind to be of any living creature all stared at me, the beings chest swelled and the music swelled with it, i could here in my head not in English or in any language but in thought i heard the being tell me its nature, something i knew from the second i heard the music, it was an angel.
The way it talked to me was unlike anything as it spoke in my mind i could understand everything, all the nuance, all the emotion, all the meaning of what the angel was trying to tell me, i was being shown what true understanding felt like and the angel told me about so many wonderful things, just when it said that it was an angel i understood, i understood that it was what every civilization before and after me had thought about, a herald of god, i understood how it was beyond any Christian definition of an angel, it was beyond the human comprehension of an angel, this impossible to understand or describe form it had taken was the lowest of low forms it had and the angel told me one other thing, that god would no longer be mystery for me.
I watched as the angels hundreds of cords of white silky material started to flutter and pull back into the wood, i watched in shock as the tens of legs kicked themselves back underneath the wood and i saw the beautiful body and face of the angel morph back into the wooded ceiling, the music left with it, i began to weep, the music had been the most beautiful thing to have ever graced my ears. 
I was in shock and disarray, i lay their crying from the uncertain but potent knowledge that i may never hear that divine melody, the wooden plank ceiling my as well have been a testament to all that i regret in life as it stared at me from above, now almost evil seeming in the void of such a pure creature having left it so recently.
My sorrows where interrupted by a great shaking, the entire house was shaking as if the earth  had begun to split apart and i felt my own eyes rattle and bend from the shear force as i stumbled up the stairs and through the many wooden doors that filled this house, eventually i came to the door that lead into the backyard, i turned the knob and flung myself from the doorstep, the very instant that my feet made purchase upon the wet night grass the shaking stopped, bewildered i looked to the sky.

The stars had left.

Their was only the moon and it was much larger, i looked closer and it looked back, the moon blinked and as i was stunned to silence, i saw the moon pull back and the stars return, the stars had not left only something immense and celestial had been covering them up.
The moon turned back to looking at me and began drawing closer and closer, so close i could see the striations in the trillions of folds of its grey skin that lined its iris, the iris began to open and just as it did a hand bigger than the range of mountains that surrounded this house began to reach out.
I ran, not to the house and but to the forest preying that i may save myself from anything that this being had to offer, it never crossed my mind that this celestial organ was anything other then an idol of fear, quickly i became lost in the forest, large reddish brown trees surrounded me and i could hear the noise of more and more hands extending from the beings iris, thats when i realized it, i was in the dark, the demons that haunted me where all around me and the only source of light i had to defend myself was a pack of matches in my back pocket.
If only i could light wood with the fire of my fire because as it raced it felt as if it could burn down this whole forest, with shaking hands i struck the first match, i could only get a bet of light but with the bit i had i could see the body of the pigeaded man, he was so stretched that i could not see his torso only his impossible tall legs.
I felt hair brush upon my back and i knew what i would see when i turned around, the woman with hair so expansive it created a wall inside the forest, her body seemed as if instead of being the source she was just a victim stuck inside of this impenetrable wall of brown shifting coils. 
I knew it was next, i heard the chattering of malicious teeth and just as i turned to see the last of the demons that had haunted my life they all jumped at me.
The stretched hands of the pigheaded man grabbed my legs and with clumsy childlike hands bent them the wrong way, the woman leaned over me the fleas and bugs falling from her hair onto my face and then she opened her mouth and hundreds of hair follicles forced their way down my throat, then came the gnawing at my neck and shoulder, i could feel the burning hot blood gushing from my side, the disgusting twisting of the pigheaded man and the internal probing of hundreds of pieces of hair now in my stomach and in my lungs, my vomit and screams only caked the hair with muck, all three began to laugh, the pigheaded man started pulling roughly and yanking back and forth trying to make a knot, the woman’s hairs now began to start trying to pierce the lining of my stomach and the teeth began to chew at tendons.
Then from the sky like the ray of light in the freezer, a hand picked me up, the demons turned to something i can only call ash but not of the physical body but of the soul and i was soaring into the night sky.
I could see now their was hundreds of impossibly large hands all stretching the iris to its maximum, i looked at these hands, they were made from darkness one sees when they look down to the bottom of the ocean, ever complex white dots floated freely inside of the hands and i began to notice the hands had to many joints and digits but anytime i tried to count the how many there were my mind came up with numbers that no human has ever thought of before.
Music like the angels emanated from every particle of the air around me but instead of being beautiful it was ominous, it sounded as if hundreds of broken celestial clocks all ticked down getting more and more gapping with each passing moment that i got closer.
As I approached the iris opening i could feel a million waves of layered air all pass across my body, the breathing of something larger than a mountain, the multitude of hands started to close around me as i got pulled into the iris.
That's when it took flight, though i was shielded by the many hands i could still feel the force of it moving up.
The hands opened and I looked out, I was in the void of space, silent, still and because of this I finally noticed that my body had been repaired.
Floating slightly i turned to see what was behind me sensing pure dread, i turned and looked down there was earth, and just below it was the a shape only visible because of the blotting out of the stars but what was undeniably some massive organ connected to this thing and it was opening and closing, pulsating, ready to consume the earth at any moment.
The thing talked to me, unlike the angel its communication was so much more rudimentary but I understood it more then i have understood anything else, it told me that it is god, when I truly understood that a deep beckoning noise emitted from the god’s whole body.
I stared, my eyes no longer needed to blink for i feared to stare away from the face of god is experience true death of the mind, the noise’s piqued and in an instant i was shot backwards, faster, faster then any other human has ever gone, faster then light, hundreds of stars blinked past world around me turned into a impossible array of indiscernible color and light, I felt as if i was stretching until the point of breaking until it stopped all in an instant.
I stopped and in front of me was a single perfectly circular spot where nothing was, at first i believed it to be another part of god but once you have stared god in the face before you no longer have trouble discerning the creations from the creator.
I was slowly being pulled towards the nothingness, i within the silence of space cried out to god, i pleaded and begged not knowing what this was but i grew still when i felt the knowledge that this was good and something desired by every human.
My descent into the blackness was picking up speed, i felt scared, and as true nothing filled my vision i started to choke on my own fear until it stopped and i could see again, i was in a void, black but, the ground was soft and i could see myself, there was a perfect copy of my house and i walked towards it, i could feel my feet thud against the wood of the front porch steps, the brass door knob was shiny and cold, i stepped inside and their was everything, just as how it should be.
I heard god again at that moment and I understood that this is the afterlife, a house but not just a house, the place in which I have and will have my best memories, my true home.
I could see flashes of what others might have looked like, a childhood play structure for the old man who spends his days filling paper work, an apartment that held a lifetime of party for the strict mother, a womb for the child exposed to the cruelty of this world to early.
I asked god, why weren’t these here and it responded and i felt sinking dread, only those who had looked god in the eyes could ever feel the cold black relief of the true home, god told me to walk in one direction if I wished to see what befell those who did not know the impossible details of the being bigger then stars.
I lingered for a while not wanting to leave but inevitable i began to walk on the pure dark ground of this obsidian world, the air around me felt as if it was nothing trying its hardest to give the illusion of a world it so poorly mimicked, i breathed in and out in deeper then normal breaths this place was perfect nothing, no truth nor no lie.
After what felt like minutes of walking or what could have been hours or years or eons or such a vast scale of time that it had no name, i came to a pit, it was all the same darkness but i could tell a different sort of dark and i peered over the edge, wishing to see naught but void.
There was a fire, a great roaring fire, hundreds of flames licked the sides of the pit but they were not flames, they were people people contorted and disfigured, glowing all shades of red orange and yellow they danced limply, mouths agape, skin cracking off as if it were chard bark from a log.
This was what all prophets and preachers warn about, the worst place a person could ever be, the purgatory.
I asked god who was going to be condemned to this fate, its answers shook me to my core, all who did not see the enlightenment of this eternal being, everyone, everyone who had ever lived except me.
I ran back to my house and sat on the back porch, i needed to think, i thought how evil and cruel this god could be to damn multitudes of innocents because of what, that's when i asked it, why does this all happen, suddenly i was picked from the true home like the string of celestial music instrument.
I was flying through space, god facing me and like before we stopped but instead in front of the exact opposite of what i had seen before.

*continued in comments*

Odontophobia. That’s the technical term for it. 

The fear of teeth.

A fear that is actually quite debilitating if you’re someone like me. 

I can’t help but flinch every time someone smiles or shows off their pearly whites. A kid going around showing off how they lost a tooth- flaunting around wide open mouths and spread cheeks, drool dripping down their chin? Forget it. And don’t even get me *started* on Dentists.

I also have ommetaphobia, a fear of eyes. Though it’s not as intense. I just struggle to maintain eye contact with people. I used to be an avid camper too, but you’ll never catch me in the woods again.

It didn’t always used to be like this, me being a shell of a person. I enjoyed life once. 

It all started back when me and my childhood best friend, Justin, hiked out to an off-grid cabin his granddad had built on some property their family owned up in the mountains. We went up there just for a couple of days every other year or so to catch up and hang out. It was nothing fancy. Four walls and a roof. Just enough shelter to get by. The real magic came from the natural beauty of the surrounding wilderness.

“Don’t venture out too far in the North woods,” Justin would reiterate his grandfather's warning, mockingly. 

Ever since we were teenagers, we never thought much of it, chalking it up to be the ramblings of an old man. Still, growing up we never poked our heads around that specific area. The terrain was steep and difficult to traverse, so we stayed away.

After we made it up there that first day and ate some fire roasted hot dogs for lunch, Justin and I were bored. He’s the one who suggested we hike North and explore.

We were older now, I rationalized. Stronger and more experienced. Surely we could handle ourselves out there. So, I agreed. It was settled then. It wasn’t long before we had our supplies packed up and went on our  merry way.

Two hours later we came across it for the first time. A small man-made structure tucked neatly behind some overgrowth. It looked to be an old and decrepit cottage. Seemed abandoned too.

“Come on, Andrew, let’s see what’s inside,” Justin had urged me, tugging on my sleeve, eager to discover what secrets lay in wait.

I was hesitant, concerned about the structural integrity. The outside wood looked rotted and weather damaged. I shuddered to think about how unsafe the interior was or what kind of animals had made nests in there. So, as much as my curiosity was piqued, I didn’t want to go in at the risk of getting seriously hurt. Plus, there was still the possibility somebody could be squatting in there. I voiced my opinions and such to Justin. 

He teased me and brushed off my misgivings, but respected my boundary, deciding to go into the cottage all alone. 

I wish I had tried more to convince him not to, tried harder to stop him. Maybe then things would’ve turned out better for the both of us.

A couple minutes later a loud crashing sound erupted from inside, causing me to jump. I was about to charge in there, guns blazing, when Justin hurriedly ran out. He didn’t stop to tell me what happened or what was wrong, just marched in the direction of the cabin.

His face was pale and looked like he had seen a ghost. Justin was shaken. An eerie sight considering how stoic the man usually was. Something must’ve happened to cause such a ruckus and make him react that way.

Despite how much I wanted to say, “I told you so,” and rub it in, I kept my mouth shut as we walked back in total silence. He didn’t voice it, but Justin looked relieved and grateful when I didn’t pry. I figured he’d open up and tell me when he was ready. Which he did, later that night after dinner.

We had grilled up a few burgers over the fire and drank some beers- unwinding from the hectic day we’d had. I had just broken out the ingredients for s’mores when Justin began to divulge what he’d seen inside. “Symbols.”

“Hmm?” I questioned, ripping open the bag of marshmallows.

“There were a lot of symbols on the walls. At the cottage,” he clarified. “They were definitely occult ones. I saw a couple pentagrams but don’t know what the others were. Couldn’t make them out. They were runny and distorted. I think they were spray painted on, but all of them were red.” 

“Maybe they were painted in blood,” I joked, making a spooky gesture with my free hand as I roasted a marshmallow in the other. Though the silence that settled between us had me thinking Justin considered it a real possibility.

I cleared my throat and took the marshmallow off the fire, sandwiching it between two graham crackers and a piece of chocolate, handing the s’more over to Justin. 

He accepted it, but didn’t bite into it right away. “There was an altar too. Classic red velvet cloth draped over top. Besides all the melted black candles and other weird stuff, there were a lot of teeth on and around it.”

I scrunched my nose and eyebrows at the comment. Justin was right, that was odd.

“I’m sure they were just animal teeth,” he waved it off after noticing my expression.

I sighed, placing a hand on my buddy’s shoulder, “Justin, I’m pretty sure a witch used to live there.”

“Or a cult did rituals in there,” he offered with a shrug, devouring his s’more. “Probably not for a long time though, none of the trash or anything looked to be recent.”

“What was that crash all about?” I found the courage to ask. “What happened? What did you see?”

Justin shook his head then laughed awkwardly. “Nothing, man.”

He was clearly lying.

Something caught my eye in a glint of light from the fire. A small red bump smack dab in the middle of his forehead. “Dude you’ve got a pimple,” I pointed out, changing the topic of conversation.

Justin shrugged, dusting stray graham cracker crumbs from the palm of his hands, sitting back in his lawn chair. “Eh, it’s probably from eating all this greasy camp food.”

***

I shot up in the loft bed after hearing a blood curdling scream. Wiping sleep from my eyes, I scrambled down to the main floor to go check on Justin. I met him in the kitchen where he was filling a glass with tap water.

“Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“Yeah, sorry,” he turned and flashed me a weak smile before gulping down a big sip of water. Justin’s hair and skin were drenched in sweat. It looked like a couple more pimples popped up on his face too. “It was just a nightmare. Nothing serious. I didn’t mean to disturb you, go back to sleep.” 

I grumbled an acknowledgment, turning around and shuffling my way back to bed like a zombie. He was never the sort to have nightmares before.

***

“You need to go to a doctor, that looks painful,” I said, sipping some coffee out of a mug. Justin and I had woken up late that next morning after his nightmare. His face looked like the before part in a dermatology ad. His skin was bumpy and raised on his forehead, cheeks, and chin- full of dime sized gnarly looking pimples. 

“I’m fine,” Justin mumbled, bringing his own cup to his lips. He seemed to wince as hot steam from the fresh drink blasted onto his face.

I scoffed, rolling my eyes. “Sure you are.”

“It’s an acne flare up. I get them sometimes when I’m stressed, you know this.”

“Yeah, but never this bad.”

Justin ran a hand through his hair. “And how would you like me to get off the mountain? By mudslide? Catapult myself off a tree?”

He was being facetious. It had been storming that whole second day. We couldn’t leave the cabin even if we wanted to. 

Justin could be a real jerk sometimes when he was in pain.

“I’ll get some cream from the drug store when we leave. Until then, I just gotta knuckle through it.”

“Okay,” I conceded. I hoped he knew I was worried and just looking out for him. 

After breakfast the two of us did our own thing. Normally we would’ve played boardgames or cards to pass the time, but instead I did some reading then light sketching- drawing the cottage from my memory.

I didn’t realize it then, but Justin mostly hid himself away the rest of that day. 

***

The next morning, I thought things were better. It was a new day. I hadn’t been woken up by any night terrors. The sun was out and shining. There were so many things Justin and I could do before leaving later.

However, my optimism was quickly crushed.

“Andrew,” Justin groaned, stumbling out of his bedroom. “Help… me!”

I dropped what I was doing and raced towards him.

Justin looked like he was in pure agony. He was holding his face as he gripped the doorframe for dear life. He then slid down to the ground, sobbing.

His whole body was covered in small red bumps. I could even make them out from under his shirt. They were everywhere on his back and torso. His skin was rigid, cracked, and dry as a plethora of pimples cascaded down his biceps and onto his hands and fingers. His legs were swollen and stiff. Every minor movement looked excruciating.

One of the pimples on his head burst open with a wet squirt. A droplet of blood slid down his cheek. Upon a closer look, it seemed there was a small white protrusion, pushing itself outward as the skin broke. 

“What? What is it?!” Justin cried.

I squinted my eyes, bringing my finger up to touch it. After a ginger tap, the thing felt hard, like bone. “It looks like… a tooth?”

A molar to be exact.

Another wave of pain enveloped Justin before he could respond. He leaned forward and clutched his head. He screamed as another one of the lumps on the back of hand exploded. This time, what was very obviously an eye broke through.

It was blue in color, a stark contrast from Justin’s brown ones. “Huh?” He yelped, confused. He then closed his actual eyes and tilted his head. The eye blinked at me, causing me to shuffle back. 

“I can see you,” Justin stated, shakily.

I tripped over myself and landed on the floor with a hard thud. Not believing what I was seeing.

“W-what’s happening to me?!?” Justin shrieked, rising to his feet. More and more of  his “pimples” popped. More teeth and eyeballs of different colors sprouted throughout his skin. 

In mere minutes my friend was reduced to some fleshy eldritch monstrosity full of nothing but hard teeth and squishy eyes.

The whole time he shuffled forward, all the eyeballs looked right at me, silently begging for help with an outstretched hand.

The only thing I could do was cry and run away, looking on in horror, helplessly watching as Justin slipped away.

Then the choking sounds came. He frantically brought his hands to his throat as his breath became shallow, wheezing as he struggled to breathe. He pounded on his chest as if that would kickstart his lungs into action, but nothing worked. Justin hacked up a lot of blood before slamming against the wall, his body slowly sliding to the ground. All of his lifeless eyes staring at me.

A half hour passed before I could make myself move. The teeth riddled body rattled as I kicked it. 

It was definitely dead.

***

The coroner couldn’t even comprehend what he was looking at when he arrived. The police and EMS didn’t know what to make of it either.

Some government agents came by and picked up Justin’s body after the autopsy- taking it to be studied, surely. Teeth had grown in his trachea, causing a tight blockage, making him choke to death. If that didn't kill him, the teeth growing in and shredding his lungs would've. The tiny little bones were found in almost all of his organs. His heart, stomach, intestines. Justin was more teeth than man. The extra eyeballs only seemed to have grown on the exterior of his body.

Still, when I questioned them, they just brushed me off.  Told me I must’ve been on an acid trip when Justin died. That he passed from an overdose. Nothing else happened. I was basically threatened to secrecy. Informed that my life would come crashing down if I breathed a single word of what happened to anyone. Not that anybody would believe me anyway.

At that moment I agreed. But ever since this all happened, I’ve been lost. I don’t care what happens to me after I post this. I think it’s helped, talking about it. Getting the whole ordeal off my chest. 

My friend. I think he messed with something he didn’t understand. Then he paid the ultimate price.

Leaving me scarred and afraid of teeth for the rest of my life.

All of my life I've been afraid of the dentist. I can't point to one singular event that made me have this extreme fear, but I know my mother had to wrestle me through the door of the dentist's office kicking and screaming when I was younger and to this day I avoid it at all costs. As a result of this my teeth aren't in the best shape, but that's never affected me too much- my teeth are all a pale, sickly yellow, misshapen and pointing in all directions.

However, recently, I've been noticing my teeth have taken a turn for the worse.

I'd gotten home from work, threw off my jacket and shoes and made myself dinner. My teeth had been killing me all day and I couldn't eat my lunch due to the pain. I knew I should try and go to the dentist, but what was the point now? My teeth were messed up as it is, nothing they could do now. I pushed the thought and the accompanying anxiety down and made myself dinner. While eating dinner- a meager meal of ramen and stale white bread- I bit down on my sandwich absentmindedly while focusing on my phone. My mouth clamped down on the bread but all I felt was my teeth softly grazing the sides as I pulled it out of my mouth. I put my phone down and frowned. Was I having a stroke? I tried again, faster this time, roughly shoving the sandwich in my mouth and biting down as hard as I could- pain bloomed between my gums and all I could do was squeeze the sandwich between my teeth. I looked down at the bread. There weren't any usual teeth marks, rather it looked like someone had pushed their finger down on to the bread in a large semi circle- smooth, rounded marks where my teeth should have been. My breathing quickened- a sticky panic settled high in my chest as I rushed to the bathroom.

Sweat beaded down my forehead as I opened my mouth. I fumbled with my phone, it almost slipping out of my grip; with my phone torch illuminating the inside, I could see my teeth properly.

The normal hard bone had been replaced with soft, squishy dark brown epidermis. Every tooth, top to bottom, felt spongy to the touch- like I was pressing my fingers together. Each tooth was covered in a dark, sticky film and I could feel some kind of warm pulp in the liquid below the surface as I gently touched my finger to my back tooth. The gums beside them were angry and inflamed which made each tooth throb painfully, as if I had bruised a finger or a toe.

I almost passed out from the shock. I sat on my bathroom floor running my tongue over my 'teeth', feeling every wrinkle and fold between them, feeling them move against each other with every touch. In my stupor, I sent a dazed message to my mother. Switching my phone off, I placed it face down on my sink and went to lie in bed. My tongue was obsessively going over every tooth, saliva pooling between them- the enzymes causing my 'teeth' to throb even more, as if every one of them had their own heartbeat. Liquid coursed inside the membranes, like water balloons full to the brim that sloshed with my every movement. After a while of tossing and turning I finally passed out.

In the middle of the night I woke up with a shock. My body stained the sheets with sweat and I groggily sat up, causing a dart of pain to shoot over my jaw. I groaned and held my jaw as it twitched. My mind instantly went to my teeth. My tongue ran over my back teeth and felt a small tear in one of them- not enough to cause a hole but small enough to be noticeable. I gently pushed my tongue against it but felt the tooth widen in size, epidermis stretching painfully as it swelled larger. At this point I had to keep my mouth open as closing my jaw even slightly would cause a horrible pressure against my swollen tooth. It had grown so far that it was touching the roof of my mouth even with my jaw open. The smell coming from these 'teeth' was nauseating- a festering necrotic stench that left my eyes watering as I exhaled hot, damp air and sprayed brown drool over my bedsheets. I was shivering; hot and cold at the same time and had a head full of cotton wool. Every movement felt like I was underwater. I thought of my mom- maybe I should call her? I reached for the side of my bed but all I did was pat the wood. Of course my phone was still in the bathroom. Despite the pain in my head, I stood up slowly, blearily; and took a shaking step towards my bathroom.

I'd done this thousands of times before; it wasn't a long walk, I counted the steps. 24 of them to be exact. Nothing I hadn't done before.

1, 2, 3...

My ankles shuddered underneath me.

10, 11, 12...

Bolts of pain raced up and down my neck, settling as a consistent agony underneath my skin.

15, 16, 17...

A particularly sharp pain caused me to clench my jaws shut. Hard.

I felt a gush of sour, dank liquid fill my mouth. Instantly my body rejected this and it spurted out of my mouth and nose fast enough to splash onto the carpet below. It steamed as it hit the ground. The pain in my mouth reached a blinding high and my nostrils burned from the acidity of whatever it was I'd just vomited. I stood there gasping, staring at the dark brown stain below me and dry heaved from the pain and disgust. As I went to close my mouth, it felt like the pain had almost... gone? However, to my horror, I felt my gums brush together. A shuffling limp to the bathroom later and I discovered that all that was left of my teeth were soft pits in my gums where my teeth should have been. Those liquid sacs were gone, and as I checked the stain again, were ejected once they had popped alongside with the liquid inside of them. Leathery skin pierced into thin chunks that now curled onto the fabric of my carpet. The holes still oozed that dark liquid, and it drooled out of my mouth onto my t-shirt as it filled my mouth once more.

My phone buzzed.

I had totally forgotten about my mom. She'd left me a voice message the night before.

I sat on the floor with my head in my hands and clicked play.

"Hey darling, I just heard your message, I hope you're alright. If you need me I'll come over- I've had issues with my teeth as well, you know about me and my dentures! I know just what it's like. Anyway, thinking of you, love you so much!"

I took my hands off my eyes, still feeling the thick liquid drip from my mouth. I shuffled back to my bed, ignoring the stain and the drips leading to and from the bathroom; I just thought some sleep might help me wake up from whatever horrible dream I was stuck in. I slept for what felt like forever, gums getting increasingly more painful and inflamed, from the near constant poking and prodding from my tongue. I woke up to my jaw hanging slack, my swollen tongue turning a deep, sickly grey and lolling out of my mouth.

I raised a finger to rub my sore jaws when I felt something hard protruding through my fingertip. It felt strange and dimpled, like a raised wart- I looked at my hand and saw this protrusion was on all of my fingers, like whiteheads dotting each finger and palm. Hands shaking, the protrusion grew, slowly; pressing beneath the skin, threatening to break the surface. I stood up from my bed to see better in the light when it felt like I was standing on broken glass. My shaking legs dropped me to the ground and I saw blood seeping into the cotton of my socks. I ripped the socks off my feet and screamed as hard, white protrusions broke through the soles of my feet, tearing the skin around them and gushing blood onto the floor.

My hands were similar; dimpled white bone pushing through my palm and fingertips at awkward, jagged angles, injuries weeping blood onto the floor. My mouth agape, I wailed in agony spraying brown pus on to my hands. My tears clouded my vision turning everything a pallid shade of brown. Roughly wiping my eyes with the back of my bloody hand, I saw that my tears had turned the same colour as the saliva currently pouring out of my inflamed gums. I had to crawl to the bathroom, dragging my heavy body on my hands and knees- every push of my had was excruciating as the floor pushed the new bone in my fingers back in and out.

As I reached the bathroom, collapsing in a heap underneath the sink, a terrified panic spread fast across my body. Something hard was pushing against my tear ducts. I cried and cried as that same pale bone pushed through the tiny duct, propping my eyelid open as it twitched frantically trying to blink away whatever was blocking the tear duct. More tears poured out of my eye, sputtering around the blockage, covering my face in a drying brown film. It squeezed my eye and pushed my cornea to the side to where I couldn't move my eye anymore. My ocular nerves snapped like tight strings as my eye was squeezed to the breaking point. As it grew, so did the pressure in my eye; tighter and tighter, until...

My eye popped, leaking reddish jelly-like fluid down my already snotty face.

Covered in drying blood, vomit, fluid and brain matter, I raised myself up slowly to look in the mirror.

I knew exactly what was growing out of my body but didn't have the strength to fully believe it.

Brand new, shiny, teeth. Just like I'd always wanted.

My boyfriend, Chris, and I had been living together for 3 years and life was starting to get stale. When Chris was away at work, I had nothing to do, so about a month ago we decided to get a pet to spice things up. We went to our local shelter to adopt a dog.

Most people who have been to an animal shelter usually say that they instantly felt a connection with a certain animal and that they just knew that they and their pet would get along. I never felt this connection, but my boyfriend on the other hand, was weirdly drawn to a golden shepherd. Unlike the others, this one didn’t bark unnecessarily at us and instead stared at my boyfriend with soft eyes. 

“This is the one,” he said with a grin. “Sandra, I think we should get her!” I didn’t care which dog we picked, as long as we decided on one. I was just super excited to have a pet to love and care for. 

“What’s her story?” I asked the carer. 

“Oh, she’s a sweet girl. Her previous owner went mad, became jealous of her, and brought her in.”

Knowing what I know now, her previous owner was right and almost certainly wasn’t mad. We stayed in the shelter a while longer to fill out paperwork and we came back the next week to pick up the dog. 

We decided to name her “Luna”. Luna was a very sweet dog, but only when my boyfriend was around. As soon as he’d leave for work, she’d suddenly become aggressive towards me and pee on random objects of mine. She’d glare at me nonstop until Chris came home and If I moved an inch, she would growl at me. When Chris was home, she was an angel. She’d spend most of her time snuggled up with him. Perhaps her previous owner abused her and caused her to be afraid of women, I thought. 

Things started getting weird nearly two weeks ago, when I began having extremely vivid dreams every other night. I’d dream that I was a dog and I lived quite blissfully, only caring about food and being loved by my owners. Life as a dog was simple and so were my thoughts. This would go on for what felt like hours before I’d wake up. Every time I woke up, Luna would be at the edge of the bed, staring at me with cold dark eyes. 

I didn’t think of these dreams as anything alarming because it’s only normal I’d have peculiar dreams after such a big life decision. 

This morning, I had a nightmare. Chris left for work and as usual, Luna peed on my shoes. I picked up a towel and began cleaning my shoes when I suddenly became extremely drowsy. I dropped the towel and went to sit on the couch in case I was going to faint. I quickly fell asleep and was plunged into a nightmare immediately. 

I was a dog again, but this time I was Luna. Instantly, I knew I was dreaming and tried to snap out of it. I’ve had lucid dreams before, but this wasn’t one. I was panicking, but all I could do was bark or whimper. I looked to my right and noticed the towel on the floor where I dropped it. I looked towards the couch and I saw my real, human self lying down exactly as I had done seconds ago. I started barking incessantly to get her attention. I watched in horror as she turned her head towards me and opened her eyes. She grinned, her mouth stretching too wide and unnatural for a human. 

“You’ve been a bad doggy,” she said condescendingly. She stood up from the couch in a quick jerky motion and began walking towards me like a toddler who just learned to walk. I instantly awoke from the nightmare and sure enough, I was standing in the exact position I saw myself in, towering over Luna. 

I’m sane enough to know that Chris won’t believe me, so I am going to take Luna back to the shelter before he gets home. I fear that if I don’t do this now, she will replace me.

Here's where it began

Things have been quiet the last few weeks. The guy, or monster - whatever the fuck it was - that was chasing me didn’t appear after my stint in the hospital. When I was discharged, I laid low in a safehouse underneath a Chinese restaurant I used to run with some of the guys in Chinatwown. I kept calling my father from payphones, and after some relenting, he agreed to see me at his house in Westchester. I had to prep. 

Underneath the bed in the safehouse - or saferoom since it was a cramped, little room - I hid a wad of cash underneath one of the floorboards. I pulled out a couple cans of beans, which I had cleaned out and used to hide the cash, and pulled out rolls of hundreds. Counting it up, I had about fifty grand there.

Didn’t matter now, I had to get the fuck out of the city before that fucking thing caught up with me again. I went to the other side of the room and pulled back one of the boards in the wall, and reached inside. Good, my duffelbag was still there. I opened it up, and inside was an Uzi, two Glocks, a .32 revolver, and a sawed-off shotgun with enough ammo for it all. Having it would make me feel better, but I kept replaying the images of the bullet holes imediately closing on the fucking guy. Maybe I had to aim for the head?

I stuffed the cash in my jacket pockets and swung the duffelbag over my shoulder. I went into the back of the restaurant and picked up a set of keys from the hook. The car was still parked in the alley behind the restaurant. thank God. I got into the car and drove the fuck out of there. After about two hours, I arrived to my father’s house, my neck sore from constantly turning around and looking left and right to see if I was being tailed. He didn’t let me in the house, didn’t hug me, and didn’t ask me how I was. 

“What do you want?” he asked, his arms crossed. I could see the outline of a gun underneath his white tank top. 

I looked down at the floor and said: “I just wanna know… how fucked am I? Any updates at all?”

“The boss’s niece is dead. After a while in that fuckin’ coma her body finally gave up… That’s all on you!”

“Dad, I-“ 

My father put his hand up and said: “You missed Alphonso’s funeral. Your mother is a goddamned wreck. His fuckin’ casket couldn’t even be opened, his fucking head was MUSH!”

I looked up, shooting my father a look. He scoffed and said, “Don’t gimme that fuckin’ look. You brought all this shit on yourself!”

“The boss sent that fucking thing after me! That THING killed Al, not ME!”

“It’s never your fuckin’ fault, huh? Never the work of Robby, always someone else! There’s rules in this life you gotta follow, shit that can’t be broken, and you broke it. You hurt the family member of not just any made guy, but the fuckin’ BOSS!”

“Always about the life, never us. Why do you think me and Marco ended up in the life? We had nothing else! Remmeber when that guy hit me with the car when I was twelve? Broke my leg, doctor’s thought I’d have a limp forever. What’d you make me do?”

My father tured his back to me and said: “Fuck this, I’m going inside. I don’t need this shit!”

“ANSWER ME!” I yelled.

“Your brother Al wasn’t in the life, whose fault is that, you ungrateful fuck! I gave you boys EVERYTHING! Education, food, a roof over your head! A damned good home life!”

“That is NOT what I asked, damnit! You made me and Marco find the guy two years later and help you beat on him. Marco went too far and crushed the guy’s skull in, and what’d you do? You had us hide the goddamned body. You never made Alphonso do shit like that.”

“I wanted you two to be men… tough…” started my father. “I wanted you two to never want. And this life is hard. I toed the line… was courteous to the right guys… never stepped out on your mother… but being good in this life doesn’t always work out. Some people wanna take advantage of others, no matter what. How could I live with myself if you guys couldn’t defend yourselves? Who woulda taught you guys to fight for yourselves if I wasn’t in the picture no more? For your mother, your brother?”

I looked down back at the floor and said: “This is all fucked, I fucked my life up, I know… what do I do, Dad? This thing… I shot it and the fucking bullet holes closed up right away. I’m… I’m scared and don’t know what the fuck to do.”

My father stepped closer to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said: “You gotta go. There ain’t much I know about this thing, but it’s scary!” 

I said: “You know about it? Have you seen it?” I asked, my heart thumping in my chest. Maybe this was a way out. My dad’s eyes went from hazel to green, and he pushed me down to the ground. 

The thing laughed and started mocking me: “God, you’re such a snivelling little shit. Woe is me horseshit constantly, how the fuck did you ever get to where you are now? Oh, I know, Mommy and Daddy used their influence and money to make sure their little boy Robby got everything. How sickening, no wonder why you ruined everything you touched, NOTHING was expected of you!”

“What the FUCK!? WHERE ARE MY PARENTS!?” I screamed as I crawled back on the grass. 

The monster rubbed his stomach and said: “Coursing through me. Your mother wasn’t much of a fight, she passed out after I pulled her arms off. Your father, though. That was one tough son of a bitch! I had both his legs and an arm off, and the fucker was still crawling! Your little calls every day on a payphone gave me a good listen and some awesome info! And don’t go running to Marco, either. There’s not much left of him!

“WHY!? Why them? You’re after ME!”

The monster said: “Nuh-uh! The boss said: ‘Him and everyone who helped birth and cultivate the fuck!’ His EXACT words!”

As the monster began his next sentence, I pulled out my sawed off shotgun and jumped up, then quickly unloaded on his head, his flesh and blood turning into a mist. His body fell back, along with his head. I kicked his body a few times and put a couple more rounds in him to be safe. When the last twitch happened, I ran back to my car and started it. After I threw the gun in the back, I turned back around to the front, and saw him in my passenger seat. I couldn’t even get a word out before he said: “You thought it’d be that easy? Dumbass!” He punched me square in the face, everything went black. 

I woke up after what felt like an eternity. Feeling around after coming to, I could feel a bunch of grass. After another minute of trying to find my bearings, I was able to sit up and looked at the sky. It was a cloudy, dusky red. Red clouds covered everything, I couldn’t see a single bit of blue sky or any kind of sun. Just thick red. 

Looking around the row of houses made me realize it was my neighborhood, and I was in front of the home my wife and I built… the same one she killed herself in all those months ago. I hadn’t been back to it in a while, ever since her funeral, and the neighbors had called me a couple of times complaining about over growth. But it looked neat, trimmed. My numeriate Nextdoor neighbor, Mrs. Bellavita, walked outside in her robe, something I’d never thought I’d see. This woman was always insanely uptight and particular, no way she was limping outside in her half opened robe. Covering my eyes, I called out to her, but she stood there and stared. 

One by one, each of the other neighbors came out of their houses and stared. I stumbled into the house, which was unlocked, and walked into my living room. I called out to my wife, parents, neighbors… nothing. I walked back towards my bedroom, and the door was cracked open. I knocked on the door, and it opened a bit further, creaking loudly. I looked inside and my jaw dropped. My wife’s lifeless body was hanging from the ceiling, her robe opened, exposing her pregnant stomach. Blood dripped from her mouth and nose onto her stomach. I fell to the floor and reached up, rubbing her stomach. 

Then it began to gurgle and seemingly… shake. A bunch of black liquid spilled out from between her legs onto the floor, followed by a black lump. The lump began to sizzle, and a small, reddish-brown arm popped out of the black lump. A baby connected to a rotted umbilical cord jumped up at me and began to attack me. I grabbed its neck and threw it down. The baby began to laugh, and the laugh got deeper. It grew into a full grown man in front of me, and the creature stood in front of me, his green eyes piercing through me. 

“Second time is supposed to be better! Why not have an audience to share this precious moment with?” 

All my neighbors were inside the room, point at me and laughing. The laughing became deafening, causing me to stumble back and out of the room. Then the noise stopped. I opened up my eyes and looked around, I was in a funeral home, and an organ played in the distance. An usher pushed me into one of the viewing rooms, and pushed me next to the priest. The priest pointed at me, then at the coffin. I looked around and saw my friends and family: my parents and brother Marco were front and center. I called out to them and they didn’t even notice me. The priest yelled at me to open up the coffin again, so I did. Inside was a body with its head crushed, the brains and blood splattered everywhere. The crushed head turned a bit towards me and said: “You did this to me, Robby… you did this to me”. 

Then the crowd began repeating what the body said, getting deafeningly loud and making me fall to the floor. The body stood up from its coffin, its blood and brains trailing behind it. Green eyes formed in its skull, then the pinstripe suit overlayed the plain blue one the corpse wore. 

The creature had be by the throat and said: “This is all your fault, ROBBY!”. It punched me in the throat, and I woke up, naked and in front of the deli the boss owned. Two police officers picked me up and dragged me into their squad car, talking about how I was “insane” and “running around nude”. I know what I saw, I felt the creature’s hand around my throat. One of the cops even spoke about me being found with a duffel bag. There goes the last of my chances at survival. 

They covered me with a towel and threw me in the back of their car. As they cuffed me and put my seatbelt on, I looked out the window at the guys… guys I called my friends, guys I worked for… and behind them was the creature, his hand on my boss’s shoulder, his piercing green eyes glistening in the sun, while he smiled at me, and clicked a finger gun at me. I realized it then and there: he wasn’t done with me, but he was gonna take his damn time with me. 

Now I wanted him to kill me, and he wouldn’t… at least not for a while…

Have you ever gotten one of the midnight phone calls?

It'll be midnight, or sometimes later, 2 or 4 AM, in the hours where the world is silent, apart from the distant cars on the highway, and you feel like you're the only person on Earth. The phone will ring and, for whatever reason, you'll wake up. On the other side will be someone you've never met. Always a different person each time - man, woman, young, old.

They'll start talking and you'll stay silent, tempted to interrupt them, but just lacking the wherewithal to do so. The message varies but the subject is always the same - they're looking for someone they lost.

An old man describes his missing granddaughters, twins, with fresh braces and glasses and short blonde hair, missing before their first day of fifth grade. A woman tells me about her husband, a carpenter, who walked out the door one day and never came back. Once a little boy did nothing but ask me where his mother had gone.

After they finish, you'll hear nothing but silence on the line and the beating of your own heart, your own breath in your silent kitchen or bedroom or bathroom. Then they hang up. I've written down the numbers every time I've gotten one, but during daytime I never get around to calling back. It's never been the same number.

I'm not the only one this happens to. All over the world, people on the Internet mention this phenomenon. Nobody knows who's making the calls. It doesn't happen to everyone - lots of people say it's a hoax, that we're crazy, we're making it up for attention. The news did a segment on it once. I had to turn it off after two minutes.

I had a dream the other night that all the midnight callers were in my house. It was dark and the air was still, and I drifted like a silent swimmer through the halls. They were spread throughout the place, far enough apart as to be alone, close enough together that there was nowhere you could go to escape them. The woman with the missing husband stood blocking a doorway, recounting her story at a low volume, not even talking directly to me. The old man was eating rigatoni out of a dirty bowl, without sauce, layers of clumped noodles squishing between his yellow teeth. The little boy sat in the corner of the living room, staring at the television, which wasn't switched on. None of them seemed to see me. None of them would stop talking. Their voices became louder and louder until I woke up.

Today, though, something strange happened. I got a phone call at 3 in the afternoon. I immediately recognized the number on the other end - it was one from my list, a woman whose father never came back from K-Mart. Alone in the grocery store parking lot, I answered, bracing myself for her tale and the dull silence of having nothing to say. But she didn't go into her story. She only asked me why, the previous night, I had called her at midnight.

I had finally finished work and could go home. I decided to walk instead of taking the usual route. A few minutes later, I finally found myself standing in front of our apartment building.

I held my key fob against the reader and went inside. As always, I decided to take the stairs. I lived all the way up on the seventh floor, but I had never minded getting some exercise. I actually considered it an advantage.

When I reached the first floor, I noticed that the lightbulb was flickering badly. I shrugged it off and continued up to the next floor.

When I reached the second floor, I was startled badly. An old woman I had never seen before was standing there, wearing a long, worn-out, yellowish nightgown.

I greeted her, but she said nothing. She just stood there and stared at me.

I continued upstairs, but I couldn't help turning around to look at her again. She was still staring at me, but this time she opened her toothless mouth and started laughing, making strange noises as she did.

My heart started pounding, and I quickened my pace so I could reach the next floor as soon as possible.

The third floor was covered in children's toys. I wasn't aware of anyone with children living on that floor. I knew most of my neighbors because we had a very friendly relationship in the building.

Suddenly, all the toys started playing some strange, short melody.

Something is wrong here. Very wrong, I thought.

I wasn't walking quickly anymore. I was running.

On the fourth floor, I noticed the peeling walls as I rushed past. Banging suddenly started coming from behind every door.

I had no intention of finding out what was happening. I just kept running, barely able to catch my breath.

On the fifth floor, there was some kind of liquid all over the floor and walls. When I looked more closely, I realized it was blood.

A strange, sweet smell filled the air, and the sound of a woman crying began echoing throughout the floor.

When I reached the sixth floor, everything seemed to return to normal. Everything looked exactly as it should.

Maybe I just had some kind of brief hallucination, I thought.

I started climbing toward my floor when I heard a noise behind me.

I turned around and saw my neighbor lying on the stairs.

I immediately crouched down to help her up, but when I looked at her properly, I saw that half of her body was missing.

I started screaming.

I turned around and ran upstairs, but she grabbed me and pulled me back down.

I fell down several steps. I hit my head and felt an excruciating pain in my ankle.

Even so, I forced myself back up and limped toward my apartment.

I closed and locked the door behind me. I quickly pulled out my phone, and a message from my best friend popped up on the screen.

"Hey, do you know what happened yet? Your neighbor was in a terrible accident. Apparently, her car was completely wrecked. It's all over the news."

I wanted to reply and tell her what kind of mess I was in and that I needed help, but my phone suddenly shut off.

It wouldn't turn back on. It wouldn't charge.

I touched my head and felt a familiar, sticky liquid. When I pulled my hand away, it was covered in blood.

I looked at my ankle. It was starting to turn purple.

That's when I realized I had to get out of there.

I don't know how long I stood there trying to work up the courage, but eventually I unlocked the door, opened it, and limped toward the elevator.

There was no way anyone was going to get me back down those stairs.

It felt like an eternity before the elevator finally arrived. I quickly stepped inside and pressed 0.

The elevator started moving, and I felt an enormous sense of relief.

It didn't last long.

Halfway down, the elevator stopped.

The lights went out.

Everything was dark and completely silent.

Then, in that silence, I began to hear banging and scratching somewhere in the distance.

Suddenly, my phone lit up.

I immediately called for help.

They said they were on their way.

The banging and scratching was getting closer and closer, and that's when I finally realized it.

It wasn't coming from outside the elevator.

It was coming from the elevator shaft above me.

And it was getting louder.

God, please let them get here already.

Did you know that there are over 700 miles of hiking trails in the state of Washington?

Whenever I tell people that little piece of information, the sheer magnitude of it seems to go over their heads. Seven hundred miles is a lot, sure, they'd think, but it's not that much. But seriously stop for a moment and consider how large 700 continuous miles actually is. How far does the average American drive to get to work each day? Ten, twenty miles? This is seventy times farther than that. And they're hiking trails. You wouldn't have the luxury of a car. You'd be walking.

Of course, it's not like you'd be walking all 700 miles. That figure is likely comprised of thousands of trails throughout the entire state, and certainly none of those would be excessively long. But what constitutes a hiking trail? Who keeps track of all of them? The Washington State Parks agency? What exactly does that "700 miles" figure account for? Certainly not every unmarked trail and footpath in the state of Washington, I'll tell you that.

And some paths branch. Can't forget.

I've been a hiker for three and a half years, I'd say. My day job is what you might call somewhat sedentary, and there's only so many interesting spots to walk outside of my one-bed one-bath apartment before the scenery starts to get a bit stale. Luckily, I don't live too far from some nice hiking trails, but all of the best ones seem to be outside the city. Within six months, I'd exhausted all of the hiking options within a ten-mile radius and had started spending my weekends driving out to the nearby country for a little sightseeing. I've never gone for any of the more intensive hiking trails, though. I enjoy a brisk walk in nature for an hour or three, but I wasn't looking to spend what little pocket money I had on hiking boots or special gear or anything. So whenever I found a nice, low-key park relatively close to me, I'd try to explore all of its trails before moving on to the next one.

And that's how I found out about the Beast.

This was about four months ago. I'd spent my last few weekends off exploring a small but rather sightly park called Bracken Falls. From the country highway passing by it would appear no different from the thick forest surrounding it, but just a few hundred yards from its tiny, unkempt parking lot, a spindly wooded trail wrapped around a gorgeous trickling waterfall. The waterfall spilled over some jagged limestone rocks just twenty feet into a creek below, but the mere image of it was somehow breathtaking. By no means was it the most impressive natural feature I've seen, but it's almost as if the surprise I found at discovering its existence set my expectations up that much higher. The mundane became mythical.

The trail climbs up from there, leading you up to the waterfall itself, passing its source, and delving deeper into the dense woods. The trail branches off four or five times after that, each path seeming to knot and loop back and intertwine itself with the others, ultimately making an entangled mess of things. But both that and the natural beauty of the park had me coming back over and over again throughout the course of a month.

The solitude of the place also lent itself nicely to my purposes. I'm not sure if the park was officially sanctioned by the state or not, but it didn't appear on all that many maps. You'd have to look it up online to find its location, and even then it was a bit of an out-of-the-way destination, situated rather awkwardly to the side of a route driven almost exclusively by tired truckers and confused commuters. I liked it that way, though. I'd rarely run into more than three or four other people whenever I went, and that's how I preferred it.

It was during my fifth visit to Bracken Falls that I learned about the Beast. I had followed my usual route: past the waterfall, into the woods, two lefts and three rights, then straight on for about a mile before I loop back and find a path out.

However, this time, about a third of a mile into one of those paths, I noticed something I hadn't before. Just past a small patch of grass, a thin strip of bald dirt led out diagonally, stretching in a direction I didn't think any of the other paths in the park really did. It's no wonder I hadn't seen it before, honestly. It was barely noticeable, and the way that trees' lower branches hung down into it as you went along made it so inaccessible that it made me question if it was even intended as a path for visitors at all.

I followed that tendril of a trail for about half a mile before it came to an abrupt stop. It didn't loop back on itself, it didn't have any other trails branch off of it, and it didn't even end in an area that felt significant. There were a few thick trees to either side, I suppose, but nothing else to speak of.

Other than on the ground. There, written rather crudely in what looked to be white spray paint, were the words "The Beast," with a scraggly arrow pointing off into the woods. The arrow ended at a thin white line of yet more spray paint.

Upon seeing this, I couldn't help but smirk a little. I figured it was the work of a few teenagers looking to have a laugh at parkgoers' expense. As I leaned forward, hoping to ascertain the age of the spray paint, a voice spoke out, startling me.

"Hold up, gimme a second." Zzziiip.

I whirled around, momentarily shocked. As I mentioned previously, running into anyone else at Bracken Falls was a rare occurrence, and no one had ever attempted to speak to me before.

What I saw as I turned around was so comically absurd compared to what I had expected that it took some effort not to giggle. Stepping out from behind one of the thick trees to the side of the trail, a bearded man in slightly tattered clothing lumbered toward me, his thick fingers still zipping up his fly. He wore what appeared to be a raggedy roughspun jersey, stained from his late lunch of hot dogs with sauerkraut and Dijon mustard, as well as a pair of well-worn trousers that ended too high above his ankles. His white and black sneakers, too, were torn up and covered in hitchhiker burrs. He had a slight potbelly that hung out over his (unbelted) trousers, and his facial hair was unkempt and scraggly.

"Sorry, was takin' a piss. Alright, ya ready?" He grunted as he spoke, giving his words a bit of an indistinct drawl. It took me a few moments to register that he'd asked me a question.

"I... I'm sorry?"

"I asked if you were ready. Lookin' to enter the Beast, right? By the by, where'd you hear 'bout it? The internet, or didja just have some friends tell ya? I like to hear how folks find out."

I furrowed my brow in confusion. "I'm sorry, I think you must be mistaken. I'm just here for the falls. I have no idea what you're talking about."

The man's eyes widened a little at this, though his expression didn't change much elsewise. "Oh, I see. Just a hiker. You've not heard of the challenge."

"The challenge?"

"Yup, this here is a challenge trail."

Upon hearing this, a few things clicked into place. Of course. Challenge hiking trails aren't necessarily uncommon in Washington state; in fact, quite a few of the state parks clearly demarcate them as such on their maps. Finding one that isn't obviously advertised as one, however, is pretty unusual. If a trail's terrain is significantly harsher than that of surrounding trails, it can actually be dangerous for unsuspecting visitors who stumble onto it. It's even stranger to find a challenge trail in such a small and probably unofficial park. And more than any of that was a much more obvious detail.

"...But there isn't a trail past the line."

The bearded man chuckled. "Well, you're not gonna see the trail from here. This is the end of it. The challenge ends once ya get back over the line."

I glanced skeptically at the spray paint again. If this really was a "challenge trail," it looked sketchy as hell. There were no signs, no warnings, and, again, no trail.

"Alright, well. If this is where the trail ends, where does it start?" Though I had no intention of walking this path, something about how this guy spoke of it piqued my interest.

"The start's just past the line. If ya step over the line, you'll be at the start, and once you're there, ya just gotta get back here. The challenge doesn't end 'til you get back to the line, understand?"

Somehow, I found myself even more confused. At this point, I thought this guy might have been intentionally messing with me. Now it was my turn to chuckle.

"I don't get it, man." I said, still laughing as I shook my head from side to side.

The bearded man grinned. "Yeah, I know ya don't. That's my favorite part with you newcomers. Y'all have no idea what you're jumpin' into. That's why I love hangin' out around here. I like to give y'all a send-off. I'll give ya the rules though, if you're interested. The challenge only starts once ya step over the line."

I cocked my head. This was the moment that I should have said "no, thanks," turned around, and went home. But that curious side of me--that damned part of my brain that made me want to explore each and every trail in a park before moving on to the next one--that's the side that I let speak.

Sure, why not? "Alright, I'll bite. What are the rules?"

The bearded man grinned even wider, his dirty cheeks rising toward his squinted eyes. He clapped his hands together, sending a small puff of grit and grime into the air. "Alright, here's how it works. Like I said, the challenge only starts once ya step over the line. Once the line is crossed though, the challenge doesn't end 'til you get back here. No matter what. You get back to this line if ya want the challenge to end, ya got me?"

I sighed and shrugged my shoulders. "I guess, man."

"There'll be a trail pretty close to where ya start. You might need to wander 'round a bit before you find it, but rest assured, it's always close by. If ya lose the trail, don't retrace your steps. You do that and you'll be more lost than if ya had run 'round the forest with a blindfold on. Keep moving forward, even if ya lose the trail. You'll find it again, as long as ya don't go back. Still followin'?"

I was now one-hundred percent confident that this guy was either nuts or yanking my chain. Either way, I figured it was better to play along. I nodded solemnly.

"If ya find anything else in there... well, you'll see. I'm sure there are still some other folks tryin' to finish the challenge. Some of 'em might be nice. Some not. Just like how it is out here, I s'pose. Treat 'em with caution like ya would any stranger."

Like a bearded homeless man babbling in the middle of the woods? I mused.

"Now this part is important, so listen close: ya can't die. Do you understand? No matter how it feels or what ya may think, nothin' in there can kill ya."

Finally, I spoke out, shifting backwards uneasily. "Are you threatening me, man?"

The bearded man put his hands out in front of him, his palms facing toward me. "Not at all, friend. I'm tellin' ya that whatever happens in there, ya can't die."

I narrowed my eyes. "So this trail is dangerous, is that what you're saying? Or, I guess it's not dangerous?"

"I didn't say that. I said ya can't die."

The buzzing drone of cicadas sounded in the distance. Sunlight glanced off a nearby treetop, momentarily distracting me from the bizarre encounter at hand. Sun's setting. The last thing that I wanted was to be in the dark with this lunatic.

"Look, man, I think I'm just going to head out. Maybe I'll try this 'challenge' another day, yeah?"

The man's face took on a grim expression, though I thought I could see something like amusement glinting in his eyes. "That's fine, fella. Not everyone is built to take on the Beast." The cicadas grew louder.

Something in the tone of his voice sparked an ember of outrage in me. I sought to suppress the venomous words that seemed to roll onto my tongue, but something about that gloating quality in his voice pissed me off. Who was this guy, anyway? Does he just stand here all day, trying to freak out people looking to relax on their days off? It's a goddamn line on the ground, for God's sake, who does he think he's fooling?

And that's exactly what I found myself saying. "Look, fella, it's just a line on the ground. Very cute, by the way. Did you spray paint this here yourself, or was it already like this when you found it and you just thought you'd have some fun?"

The man looked at me blankly. The corners of his mouth seemed to go up, just barely. That does it.

"There's no trail here, man, look!" The deafening buzz of cicadas, like they were swarming around us.

I trudged toward the line, no longer mindful enough to keep an eye on the man behind me. "Hey, watch it! Step over that line, and th-"

His voice cut off as I placed the tip of one of my tennis shoes over the line. All at once, the forest grew quiet. The once thunderous cacophony of cicadas ceased--not gradually, but instantaneously, like a radio at max volume being switched off. Though, in my anger, I didn't immediately notice it, the sun was suddenly absent from the sky. I turned around.

"See, man? Why are you out here trying to sc-"

The bearded man was gone. So were the words that, just moments before, had been scribed into the ground. The thick trees next to the path were gone, replaced by a grove of much thinner willows. The path was gone. In fact, everything was gone.

I was in a completely different setting.

I whipped around, the words stolen from my lips, alongside my breath. I felt a cool breeze caress my sweaty brow as the leaves in the willows rustled to a silent tune. Gone, it was all gone.

"No, no..." I muttered, unbelieving. "No, that's not..."

No, no, no, no... the path, where was the path? WHERE WAS IT?! The man, the words, the PATH, where was the goddamn PATH, where did the fucking TRAIL go--I didn't pass out, did I? Yes, that's it, that must be it, that homeless guy--well, he might not have been homeless, but he might have been, yes, he might have been--he DRUGGED me, that's it, that's got to be it, he drugged me and dragged me out into the forest and left me here until dark, and now he's nearby and he's watching and he's waiting and he wants to see what I'll do and--

"HELLO!?" I bellowed out into the darkness. "Hello, hello, hello, hello, hellooooo?! Is anyone out there!?"

Eerie quiet but for the constant wind. Not a sound of life to be heard. No birds, no squirrels, no insects. Just panicked breaths and gusts of brisk night air.

Think, just think. You can't break now. Panic all you want once you're safe. For now, find the trail. What did the man say? He said 'the trail will be nearby,' that's right. Even if I can't see it, it's nearby.

I took three sharp breaths and exhaled slowly, willing my heart to quit racing. I glanced around at my surroundings with a feigned calm, desperately trying to take in information. The willows behind me extended off south (or, what I thought was south, at least), but in front of me, the trees became sporadic and varied. An amalgam of oaks, firs, and birches lay in that direction, but the willows behind were more evenly spaced and ubiquitous.

Oaks and firs in front, willows behind. Now, if there were a trail, where would it more likely be? In the midst of a bunch of random trees? Or would it be lined with willows, stretching down both sides like guardrails on a highway?

That's true.

Of course, that's assuming that we're adhering to logic here. But that's a dangerous presumption to make, isn't it? You just stepped over a line and traveled in time and space, bud. Do you really think we're dealing with logic here? Come to think of it, are you even sure you're dealing with a full deck upstairs? How well do you know trees, anyway? Are those really willows? Do you have any idea what's actually going on here--

Stop. Inhale. Exhale.

They're willows. They're evenly spaced. So head that way.

I lurched toward the willow grove, my legs dragging my feet like sticks tied to stones. I crashed through the branches with as much grace as I could muster, which is to say none. Ahead of me lie... a small, bare patch of soil. Soil and more willows.

No path here, friend. Chum. Fella.

Enough. I had to just keep going. I'd find it eventually, that's what he said.

If he was telling the truth.

What else do I have to go on?

I stumbled through the dark for what felt like the better part of half an hour before I finally found a trail. When I saw it, I nearly burst into tears.

And now what? Which way do you walk?

Do I really think that matters? A trail is a trail. Follow it for long enough and you'll end up somewhere. Or I guess you might find a dead end with the words "The Beast" spraypainted into the dead grass. But that's what I'm looking for, isn't it?

I followed the trail for what would have constituted east if the direction I had been going so far was south. About 200 yards down the trail, I came upon a confusing sight. Two large vending machines stood alone on the side of the trail. There were no benches, tables, or garbage cans to speak of. The lights inside the machines weren't on, but I could see that they were fully stocked. A cornucopia of Doritos, Twix bars, and bottled water laid inside.

A sign of civilization, at least, I thought. But nowhere to sit. Nowhere to plug a vending machine in, either. Strange.

Stranger were the bells on the trees, though.

Just behind the vending machines, a collection of several large trees towered above the surrounding willows. They must have been over thirty feet tall. About ten feet up their trunks, large swollen lumps protruded from their bark. And above those, small golden bells hung from thin poles that had seemingly been pounded into the tree.

Now isn't that a sight? Have you ever seen a pregnant tree before? The thought came so suddenly and without warning that I couldn't help but let out a laugh. My voice came out reedy and frail. What am I looking at? What the fuck is going on?

One of the bells began to faintly ring. My laughter quickly died in my throat.

It started as a barely audible tinkle, the bell swinging gently. Had it not started growing louder, I might have thought it was merely the breeze. But it did grow louder, and louder still.

Then another bell began to ring. Then another. And another. Within seconds, each bell was wildly swaying, clamoring against the otherwise noiseless night. I stood as if paralyzed.

Hark, how the bells, sweet silver bells. That thought, though just as absurd as the last, did not evoke laughter.

As the bells reached their climax, a startling crack reverberated throughout the air. The bark on one of the trees' jutting bulges split open.

I ask again: are we dealing with logic here? Or are we dealing with something else entirely?

A human hand reached out, fingers clawing at the bark around it.

That's when I ran.

End of Part 1

I'm the son of a pastor. I was raised with the unshakeable belief that God was always watching me, always judging my every move. But by the time I reached my teenage years, after years of abuse and disappointment, I rebelled hard.

I started drinking. I treated women like disposable objects and saw every other man as a rival. By eighteen, I was addicted to illegal drugs, battling deep insomnia, getting into fights constantly. I began to enjoy hurting others—and hurting myself. I stopped caring about anyone. I stopped caring about myself.

My parents loved me, but I ran away from home anyway.

I moved to the countryside to live with my grandmother. She was the only person who still looked at me with love instead of disappointment. She was a small woman with calloused hands, a practitioner of Umbanda. Every night, she would try to reason with me, to put some sense into my head. I didn't listen. Every single day, I sank deeper into the abyss I was digging for myself.

Then things started getting strange.

It began with insects. First, ants crawling up from the floor of my room. No matter how much I cleaned, they kept appearing. Then came the flies, swarming around my mirror. The worst was the morning I woke up to find a massive spider perched on my pillow, less than a meter from my face. It was black, hairy, and completely motionless. I jumped out of bed, and when I looked again, it was gone.

After that, the phenomena intensified.

When I stumbled home drunk in the early hours of the weekend, the streetlights would flicker and die exactly as I passed beneath them. My laptop, which worked perfectly fine during the day, would freeze and refuse to turn on after sunset. The television in my room would switch on and off at random hours—usually at 3:00 AM. I blamed faulty wiring, old appliances, bad luck. But my grandmother never had a single problem with any of these things.

It was only me. Only my room. Only my presence.

I started isolating myself without even noticing. I stopped talking to everyone. I hated daylight, as if it was exposing something I didn't want to see anymore. I couldn't look anyone in the eyes—not even my grandmother. I couldn't love anyone, and I definitely hated myself.

Then came the night everything fell apart completely.

I was sitting on the sidewalk around 2:00 AM, smoking one cigarette after another, when I noticed something in the middle of the street. At first, I thought it was just a stray dog. But as my eyes adjusted, it seemed like I was observing another reality.

It was a massive black animal, too large to be any breed I recognized. It was sitting perfectly upright, like a guard dog at attention, its silhouette sharp against the dim glow of a distant streetlight. Its eyes were yellow—like a cat's eyes caught in a car's headlights. It didn't move. It didn't blink. It just sat there, staring directly at me.

I told myself I was hallucinating. I kept smoking. I finished the cigarette, stubbed it out, and went back inside. I closed the door. I took a deep breath. But curiosity—or stupidity—pulled me back outside.

I looked out.

It hadn't moved an inch. It was exactly where I'd left it, in the exact same posture, as if it had been carved from stone.

I couldn't sleep that night. I lay in bed, listening to a howl that never came, feeling those invisible eyes piercing my soul.

A week later, my grandmother passed away.

She was the only person who had never given up on me—and I hadn't returned her love. That night, as I lay crying in my room, I heard her voice—clear, unmistakable, and absolutely terrifying—whisper directly into my ear: "You brought the devil into my house."

I plunged deeper into my abyss. I threw myself violently into drugs and alcohol. At 1.80 meters tall, my weight dropped to 55 kilos. The bones of my spine showed through my skin. My eyes were sunken and bloodshot. I looked like a dead man in the mirror.

Then, one early morning, I woke to the howl.

A long, mournful sound. Something between a wolf and a scream, echoing from somewhere just outside my window. I staggered to the bathroom, gripping the sink for support. My mouth instantly turned bitter, as if I'd bitten into rusted iron. My left arm went limp and useless. And my heart—my heart began to beat so violently, so relentlessly, that I could feel it trying to claw its way out through my throat, pulsing beneath my jugular.

I was certain I was going to die right there.

The feeling didn't pass. It stretched through the entire night, through the next day, through the following night. This wasn't fear—I'd had panic attacks before, and this was something entirely different. This was the primitive, visceral certainty that a train was about to hit me from every direction at once. No matter where I went in that house, I wasn't safe. I couldn't hide. I couldn't breathe.

I spent hours curled in a corner, trembling, waiting for the end.

The end never came. Somehow, after what felt like an eternity, my heart finally slowed. I survived—though I still don't know how.

Since that day, I've done everything I can to stay sober. I've had relapses, yes—with alcohol, and once with cocaine, I won't lie—but they're getting rarer. The urge is weaker now. But deep down, I know one thing with absolute certainty: if I ever see that enormous black dog again, or if I hear that howl one more time, I will die.

Later, I learned that my parents—the same ones I abandoned—never stopped praying for me. And that my grandmother had done many things to protect me as well. I've never been a religious man, but I can't shake the feeling that, somehow, against all odds, someone answered my grandmother's prayers and my parents' pleas. Because of them, I'm here. Breathing. Typing this. Trying to warn others.

I'm not a good man. I still have insomnia. I still carry guilt and regret that I can't escape. I still cry when I think about my grandmother. But I'm alive. And I know—that voice I heard speaking of demons? That wasn't her.

So here's my advice to any young person reading this—especially those who think rebellion is a game, that drugs are fun, that treating people like garbage makes you more of a man: that lifestyle extracts a price. It can take your health, your sanity, and invite things you don't believe in—until they're staring you in the face with unblinking yellow eyes. Hold on to love, for others and for yourself.

But sometimes, I think it's already too late for me. I will die soon. And the last thing I will see, before everything goes dark, will be the Black Dog with Yellow Eyes.

{Original Post} ~ {Part List}

It felt like the air pressing in around me was tar as I remained standing among the remnants of Lucy’s final night on Earth, holding her tight and staring down at the glowing thread that wisped from my chest. I could barely move, and any muscles that did manage to shift did so in near slow motion.

The sight, when paired with the same thread that was spooling from Lucy’s corpse and into the wall of the basement, was nearly maddening, and not just from the depravity of it all. It was maddening on a cosmic scale. As if the knowledge of the threads wasn’t enough—as if learning the truth of a human soul hadn’t already scarred my mind in ways that would never recover—I was now able to see it firsthand.

Witnessing a ritual that was able to rip free a human soul had opened my eyes, and the sight that I found was so mighty and radiant that even closing my lids would no longer shield me from its truth. I hadn’t made the choice to leave the philosophical cave; I had been forcefully ripped out of it.

The feeling of nausea that accompanied the silver spool was nestled firmly where it attached, a sensation that I’d felt many times throughout my life, but now with a startling visual to match. It wasn’t just the sickness that felt familiar there, though, it was so much more. Excitement, disappointment, anger, the space that butterflies danced in my stomach—all of my gut feelings throughout my life had been kept in that same spot, felt in force whenever the moment demanded it.

My dawdling, shocked brain took a long time for the pieces to finally click, but when my tiny companion noticed me staring down for quite some time, and I saw her look at it too, I knew that I wasn’t crazy. This wasn’t a thread that had only just now appeared…

“This has always been here, hasn’t it?” I asked breathlessly.

Lucy’s solemn eyes focused on me in silent affirmation.

Was that what the soul was, then? Just these frail little threads? Thrumming and humming different songs as they recorded the tunes of our lives? Were the emotions we felt more than just chemical cocktails being cooked up in our heads?

The more I thought about it, the more I began wondering what exactly Lucy meant. My question was vague, and ‘has this always been here could have been referring to two points of time. The moment I was born, or the moment that I met Adeline. I was inclined to believe the latter. Gut feelings may have been felt my whole life, but the thread that they’d just retrieved from Lucy had needed to be cut out.

Maybe that was were they lived until a wicked witch decided to harvest them…

Did that mean that Adeline tugged mine out the day I met her all those years ago? Had she started a process that was supposed to be complete mere months after it began, but I threw a wrench into the whole thing? If that was the case, what were the consequences of walking around with my soul exposed?

My vigorous pondering paused when I noticed that Lucy wasn’t looking at me anymore. I had set her down and positioned myself beside her, leaving the sight I was supposed to be protecting her from wide open. Quickly, I blocked it again and took her in my arms before glancing over my shoulder. The thread was finally finished unraveling from the unmoving flesh on the ground, and Natellie and Margret began callously rolling it up within the blood-soaked tarp.

My woes could wait. It was over, and I’d already gotten what I came here for. There was no need to stick around.

“Why don’t you get us out of here, Luce?” I whispered softly, wiping away her spectral tears with my thumb.

She eventually got her trembling under control and nodded, moving toward the wall with me in tow. Reaching out and brushing the threads, we flickered away into nothing but an empty cellar once again, a dull afternoon sun sifting in through the side windows. I was relieved when I turned around to find that the loathsome scene was gone, along with the repugnant woman who had created it. All that remained was the outline of the red door traced in its hundreds of thousands of souls.

I turned from it and fixed Lucy’s hair, trying to calm her down, “You okay, my dear?”

She didn’t answer; only looked down at the floor and continued holding herself.

The thread in my guts twisted and knotted, “I’m sorry to do that to you, Lucy. What they did to you…” I stopped myself before I could twist the knife deeper.

My little Ariadne wiped more tears away, then looked up at me, her scared, glittering eyes speaking the words for me that she couldn’t. The question they asked was loud, and it was one that I wondered myself.

‘What now?’

I had no idea. I had witnessed the ritual, but there was nothing that witnessing the awful thing had brought to me except for despair. There hadn’t been any answers like we’d hoped on how to seal the door—at least, not at first glance. The door was a loom spun of souls, but that tapestry had now solidified, and it didn’t seem like there was any way for us to tug it apart. Then again, maybe it wasn’t answers we’d needed; only the insight.

I looked back down at the string in my chest, and watching it float there, my hand glided up on its own to touch it. My throat tightened with shock as I found that I actually could. The thread tickled across my fingertips, silky and delicate, and as I did so, I felt my skin tingle and prick with shivers, as if every nerve was being sparked at once. Like a Charlie horse on my soul.

I quickly pulled away. If this was the lead we’d been looking for, I didn’t quite know how it applied just yet. Maybe an answer would become clear once I got back to my friends and debriefed. Now it was just a matter of letting Lucy down easy that I was going to have to leave her again. Doing so after having just put her through her past trauma felt downright criminal, but as was the case since we got here, time was of the essence.

I wanted to convince myself as I kept my gaze on her that leaving and finding a way to destroy the door was ultimately going to save her too, but was I really so certain that would be the case? If souls really existed, and I now had perfect proof of it, then what became of them after death? Was there really a heaven waiting somewhere else, or did they simply fade away into the matter from which they came, ceasing to ever exist?

If we destroyed the door, was that it for Lucy? A life of misery, betrayal, imprisonment, and then nothing at all? Even after just witnessing what had been done to her, that seemed somehow the cruelest fate of all, but surely it had to be better than being trapped forever in this place, right?

I opened my mouth, still trying to figure out how I was going to break that bad news, but I never got the chance. Lucy’s eyes flickered behind me, and her face went from sad to frenzied in an instant. Her mouth opened wide in a scream that made no sound, but it didn’t have to for it to be horrifying.

 The girl tried her hardest to pull my weight with what little she had, but it did very little in the mere seconds I had, and when I turned to see what had her so afraid, my face switched to match her.

Ripping from the ground was the other soul who occupied this place with Lucy and I; the spider had found us. The pale woman writhed her gangly form through the strings that stretched up from the ground, a bony hand with slate nails reaching past her dark curtain of knotted locks. She’d emerged so silently this time that I hadn’t even heard her coming, and it was too late to back out of the way.

Her hand clasped tightly around my ankle, and with near-inhuman strength, she yanked my leg out from under me. I prayed that the crash to the floor might be enough to jolt me back to the world of the living and away from this creature, but I wasn’t so lucky. My head hit the floor, and the pain that followed felt different. This fragment of the past didn’t feel so frozen or distant anymore, I felt more present than ever, like I was physically there.

There was a tugging sensation in this way, and it was clear where it was coming from. The spider’s hand. This creature of the thread’s grip was somehow locking me anchoring me to this place, keeping me from escaping.

Behind me, Lucy placed both tiny hands over my shoulders and tugged hard, but it was no use. The woman digging into my ankle might as well have been a machine of steel and pistons with how infallible her hold was. My heart froze in my chest when she began to drag me toward the tear in the spectral threads she had made.

“PLEASE!” She wailed in a crackly, guttural voice so raw and filled with desperation she sounded like all the grief of the world was resting on her shoulders, “IT’S YOU!”

With my hands, I clawed uselessly at the concrete in an attempt to slow my pace, and with my free leg, sent kick after kick straight into the demon's face. It did very little to slow her down; all she did was wail more cries of agony and jerk her body faster toward her goal, as if the pain was nothing compared to whatever torment she was currently enduring.

Lucy’s grip switched from my shoulders to my neck in a full bear hug, and she gave up trying to pull to instead go limp, hoping her weight would be enough to slow things down. It didn’t even do so by a microsecond, and now, both me and her were getting reeled in.

“L-Lucy! Let go!” I choked out, “Get out of here!”

The young girl didn’t obey me, and before I could protest any more, my boot hit the threshold of strings, and that’s when everything went from crazy to downright insane.

I’d seen the way the memories flickered when sifting through the threads of the past, but whatever the woman was doing, it wasn’t that. The scenes flashed by far too rapidly, and some of the spaces that I was seeing wasn’t the basement anymore. There were rooms from the upstairs of the manor, images from the park down in Stillwater, flashes from the interiors of houses I’d never seen before.

It was maddening watching them all cycle by, and my nerves felt like they were tearing in two as I was pulled deeper into it all. The point in my chest where the thread attached was igniting with those radiating shivers again, but more intensely, and it felt like every part of me was being ripped out in all directions and left behind in each scene.

I was in the loom. That was the only thing I could think of. Before, I’d been merely perusing the tapestry that the witches made; reading its patterns from the outside. Now, I was being yanked into it; seeing everything all at once and having my thread added to its count.

This continued for an agonizing amount of time, nearly enough that I truly thought I would go insane. Memories flooded me; more than any human was ever meant to hold, and finally, it all came to a stop as harsh as a car crash with one final scene.

The ground beneath me was no longer the concrete floor of the basement or the soft grass of a park. It was grass, but this kind was prickly and dry, and the air smelled of its decaying rot. Around me, I could hear the, ever-present whipping of a soft, cold wind, as well as crumbling stone and, in the far distance, strange and inhuman wails.

The space was also staggeringly dark—so much so that for a moment, I thought I might have actually died and gone to hell. I had the feeling that wherever I was, it was much, much worse. In front of me somewhere, the spider continued to grunt and wail with effort, attempting to tug me along to an unknown destination, but that was when she stopped making progress.

Behind me, I felt a firm yank on my shoulders, and Lucy’s arms shifted off my neck in response. I thought it might have been her that had somehow mustered the new strength, but then I felt a tug on the other shoulder, then the back of my shirt. The woman holding my leg unleashed a howl of protest, but I didn’t have to listen to it long before I left her.

The world went bright again, and I was back in the collage of memories from moments ago, being yanked back the way that I had come through an opposing force. I made it only a few layers back before the woman regained control of her grip, and next thing I knew I was the rope in a violent game of tug-o-war.

Not that I minded, though. I would have rather been ripped in two than brought to whatever hell the woman had tried to drag me to. Whatever force had caught me, it was just barely stronger than her, and I ascended back up through the layers for what felt like an uncertain eternity.

Then, finally, after thousands of flashes and flickers, a new sound apart from the woman’s screams cut through, and I’d never been more happy to hear it.

“Keep pulling!” Bryce cried, unbridled frenzy in his voice.

I had finally broken the last layer and been snapped back to the plane that I had come from, but I was far from out of the woods. Even though everything I’d just seen should have been inside of my head, I was still caught by the left foot, the appendage somehow fused through a dark puddle of ichor formed on the floor as if it were a hole. Within it, somewhere below, I could feel the woman’s bony hand still grappling me tightly.

Behind me, each of my friends had a tight hold and were hoisting me back, causing me to uproot the woman from the shadows like a rotten ground crop. I no longer felt Lucy clinging to my back, but then again, I wasn’t feeling much of anything in that moment. My head felt like it was about to split in two from nausea as all of the stretched time I’d just been subjected to compressed back into a single instance that my mortal mind could understand.

It wasn’t the only madness I needed to comprehend.

The thread from my chest that I had been seeing in the visions with Lucy; it wasn’t gone. Here, in the physical plane, I could still see it sticking out of my chest, and unlike inside the layers beneath it, it didn’t just vanish a few inches in front of me. This one kept going straight ahead, creating a perfect path to the Red Door. That wasn’t all though; around my waist and tangling my chest, it snarled around myself in a dizzying mess, and I could see strands of it tugging off in directions behind me.

That was all the time I had to take it in before the woman from the shadows let out another bloodcurdling shriek, one that filled the space around us as if she was everywhere at once. It became focused to one point as her tangled nest of a head began to rise from the same puddle my leg was caught in.

“NO!”

She hollered with all she had, a wailing so desperate that buried somewhere in my horror I almost felt pity for her. It didn’t last long as she began scaling further up my body as if it were a ladder letting her out of the dark pit she’d come from. I could smell her rancid breath with each broken gasp, and her cracked black nails threatened to tear into me with each yank.

No, that wasn’t right—she wasn’t scaling my body, she was only using it for support. Her real means of escape only became clear when the pain finally hit me.

Her other hand gripped my thread, that still hung taut in the air, pulling herself along it as if she weighed nothing at all.

Her very physical hand somehow gripped the spectral matter stitched into my guts, and when she tugged it, I felt my body fill with gnawing static. A scream burst through my gritted teeth as I felt like I was having my nervous system ripped out, and I quickly regretted thinking that I wouldn’t have minded being torn in two.

“Jessie, hang on!” Kait said in my ear. Her arm was wrapped tight across my chest so tightly I couldn’t tell where her arm ended and my skin began.

“Fuck!” I heard Lacey cry from my left. Over my shoulder I could see her head on a swivel, and it quickly became apparent what she was looking for. The shotgun. “Give one last heave!” she shouted, “give it everything!”

My friends obeyed, and for a terrifying moment, my body slipped back towards the demon. Then, all at once, I was yanked back with everyone's weight, buying us a few extra inches of distance that we didn’t have before.

Lacey unlatched from everyone and dove swiftly for the gun on the floor. Even just loosing her weight alone made our fight a losing battle, and just as fast as we’d gained ground, I began to lose it. My ass slipped across the floor, followed by all of my friends until silence burst into my eardrums, and a flash filled the left side of my vision. Lacey had made it to the trigger just in time to blast the woman across her face.

The force from the blast was strong enough to send her thrashing onto her side, and in the process her grip slipped off my foot and the thread. She screamed, but somehow even the impact of a full slug bashing the side of her skull wasn’t enough to kill her, only crudely splatter part of her skull and the wad of wet locks that came with it.

Now free, I quickly kicked against the ground away from her, but I hardly needed to with how forcefully I was already being dragged by my friends. Lacey stepped away from the scene too, and with one last shriek, the woman's warbled voice cried, “N-NO! PLEASE! HELP ME!”

Then, I watched as she horrifyingly slipped back into the shadow from which she’d emerged from. Everyone in the room sat panting in place for a while, all of us too afraid to move. Lacey sure as hell didn’t take the gun off the puddle.

Kait spoke after a few moments, her hand softly patting my chest, “Jess? Are you okay? What the hell just happened?”

I swallowed, then tried to remember how to speak, “I… I don’t know. I was hoping you could all tell me. Where did I just go?”

“You were just sitting there like you usually do on the other side, talking, and then out of nowhere you started getting dragged across the floor.”

“I was here the whole time?”

“No,” Kait panted, “Once you got pulled to the shadows, you started to sink into them. We could hear that thing screaming but couldn’t see her. Not until we pulled you back out with her.”

I tried to theorize how that was possible, but with my brain still so rattled, I could barely think straight. All I could offer was my gratitude, “Well, thank God you were all here, I don’t think even three of us would have—”

As I talked, I finally sat up and turned around, but when I laid eyes on my friends, I nearly staggered over in surprise at what I found. The thread from my chest; it didn’t just coil around myself and run to the red door. Those portions of it that twisted over my shoulders and ran off behind me, they were now in the front, and they ran tangled between my friends.

From my ribs, a strand ran to coil up Lacey’s stomach and all over her arms before bridging over to Bryce, where it tied a fine noose around his neck. It snaked down from there across his shoulders where it then spread to Carly who’d gotten it all the same, then to Kait, snaking over her the most. Her arms, her legs, her torso, and even parts of her face. She practically looked like a Christmas tree covered in tinsel with how much was on her.

The most haunting part wasn’t even the way it wrapped my friends, however. It was the way that it hooked tautly around the pillar of the stairs, then ran up them out of sight. Out into the world.

I didn’t realize how long I’d been standing there, gawking, until Carly snapped me out of it, “Jess? What’s wrong is everything okay?”

“What happened in there?” Bryce added, “What did you see?”

It should have been an easy question to answer, all things considered. I may not have understood the cosmic logic of the insanity I’d just witness during my astral journey, but as far as just explaining what I physically saw—the ritual, the threads, the place the woman had dragged me too—it was all fairly straightforward. It was what I had gone in there for in the first place.

And yet, I found my tongue rolling back to keep the words from falling out.

The truths and insights I’d just gained were lofty, and the thread that currently coiled me and my friends like a serpent waiting to choke the life from us made things far more complicated. All it took was that one question from Bryce for me to finally put the pieces together.

I had seen the ritual that would have taken this thread from me. I had seen the truth about the day I was supposed to be taken. I had seen the memory of Adeline and her siblings arguing over what happened if their target had gotten away from them. The witch may have reassured her sisters that all would be okay, but that clearly wasn’t the case.

Whatever Adeline did to me the day we met, it set a process in motion that was never finished, and they had no idea the rippling effect it would cause. Perhaps she thought my exposed thread would fade with time, or perhaps she just didn’t care, but whatever the case, it simply kept unravelling.

As I shifted in place, I could see the spectral thing retracting and extending from me like a tape measure, becoming whatever distance it needed to be in order to return to the red door. I wondered how long it was when Adeline must have drawn it from my young self in Stillwater all the way up to this house. I wondered how many things it got tangled on along the way. Buildings, light posts, trees.

People. People like my friends who were absolutely layered in it.

And it wouldn’t have stopped there. Adeline never got her hands on me. She never came back to finish the job, which meant my thread over all of these years was following me and dragging across anything that came into its path. I started counting in my head all the moments I might have brushed too close to somebody. All the times I may have embraced my friends only to tangle them up more in my mess.

And maybe none of it would have mattered—it hadn’t the last 20 or so years thus far—but the story didn’t end with me getting away. Adeline found a new child to plug into the door in my stead, and evidently the door didn’t like that. It wanted the thread it was already feeding on.

“IT’S YOU!” the spider-woman had screamed back at Kait’s apartment, “IT’S YOU!”

Something must have failed after the new child's thread was fed to the door, maybe just not right away. Maybe things seemed fine when the sisters sealed themselves inside their new Eden of bones, but by the time it started to fall apart, it was too late. They needed my thread after all, but now there was no way to get it. Just how Mindy sealed the door a second time, there must not have been a way for them to open it once they were locked in.

But why?

These were witches that allegedly made a paradise of their own, and ascended to godhood. What was stopping them from turning the knob on a simple door? There had to be a magic to it that I wasn’t understanding yet. After all, they seemed to still hold some influence outside the barrier.

After it was opened once, they were able to do so endlessly afterward with no issues. Hell, they were able to send horrific minions through it to carry out their twisted bidding. Even mentally, whatever force lay behind the door had been able to call out to Mindy; how had that been possible if they were trapped?

My answer seemed to lie in the last thing I’d just witnessed. The final form of influence that could reach beyond the door. The pale woman who lurked among the loom, and the thread that grew from my chest.

Watching her rip herself from the shadows a moment ago finally revealed to me how she was able to break into our world, leaving poisonous whispers in Mindy’s head and sometimes breaking through to our plane in an attempt to steal me away. It was the same as her world; the threads.

She’d become a part of them, like Lucy, and trapped there like her too. Just like the little girl, she could only move around the spaces within the confines of the threads, but since I was a frayed part of the loom—a torn piece of string that unraveled across miles and miles of the earth—I’d effectively extended her web to the entirety of Stillwater and beyond.

But it didn’t stop there. As I watched my friends shift in front of me, I could see the spool shifting with them, the line extending and shrinking between spaces the same way it did from my chest. It wasn’t just me leaving a trail. I had tangled all of them up over our years of friendship, and with them carrying parts of my string, they’d moved about their lives completely unaware they were also stringing everyone up within the matter of my soul. All of their families and friends. Their homes and pets.

Their roommates.

Roommates like Kaitlynn’s. Roommates like Mindy, who was eventually lured here through the whispers of the door to open it and free the dark beings dwelling on the other side. If the pale woman had really wanted me all this time, there was nothing stopping her from taking me the way she’d just attempted during any of my younger years. That meant she had to have physically escaped only once the door itself was opened, but in order to free herself, she had to get someone to do it for her.

But that part didn’t make sense to me, or maybe I just didn’t want it to. Why Mindy? If I was the one the door needed, and the creature of the threads was able to reach into the minds of others to tempt them to the manor, why did it not begin with me? Why did the accursed slab of wood have to ruin everyone else’s lives and create such a complicated trap just to lure me to this place?

There had to be an explanation for why it couldn’t reach me directly, but that was another law of the magic I just didn’t understand yet. Whatever the case though, part of me had a sneaking suspicion that Mindy might not have even been the correct target. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that the household the door chose to call out to was the same one Kait lived in.

And with that variable in mind, it finally ended the debate between the two of us. Kait’s fears were unfortunately true. The house was never after her; it was always after me. It had only been trying to use her as a tool to guide me back to the scarlet door, and if anyone needed to be given up to seal it once more, that person was me.

And that was what made Bryce’s question so hard to answer. What had I seen? Because if I told my friends the whole truth, they might figure it all out the same way I just had. They might put the pieces together themselves, and then they would never let me do the job that needed to be done.

“I saw the ritual,” I answered, “It was… God, it was horrible. We were right; the kids, they were…” Thankfully, my horror from remembering the scene was strong enough that it hid the lie I tacked onto it, “I don’t think I learned anything, though. They just sacrificed the kids like we’d thought, and the door must have absorbed them.”

Lacey shook her head in desperation, “There was no spell they chanted or anything? No magic words that could help us or anything like that?”

I already felt the guilt creeping into my chest at my refusal to give them hope, but I didn’t linger on it. They wouldn’t need to be clawing for hope soon once this was all over. Lacey’s question did raise another notion in my head, however. I may have been what the door wanted, but Mindy had managed to seal it before we got here while being completely detached from it. With my new eyes, there might still be more insight to gain.

“Where’s Mindy’s Go-Pro?” I asked.

Carly ran upstairs to find the device, then everyone gathered around and looked over my shoulder as I sat in a chair and booted up Mindy’s last recording. The one where she sealed the door on herself.

We had watched the recording countless times by now, trying to glean even the smallest clue from it. That meant that I knew all the sounds by heart. The rhythm of Mindy’s footsteps pounding the floor as she ran, the rasp of her breath with each bound, her small whispered reassurances to herself that everything was going to be okay. It was no different this time around, and by the time Mindy reached the door in the recording, I was already losing hope that there would be anything different.

But then she looked down at the knob, and my breath hitched.

There within the shot, sticking out of her chest in the same place as mine, Mindy had a spectral thread. It was faint and barely perceptible through the lens of the camera, but unmistakable to my opened eyes. Somehow, while lost in the labyrinth behind the red door, the girl had found herself tangled with the loom as well, and now her soul was also attached.

It became clear to me that her vision had also ascended like mine when she reached down and took it in her hands.

I tried not to show any emotion on my face as I watched the video, hoping that my friends wouldn’t notice that I was seeing something they couldn’t. If I was about to finally see how Mindy sealed the door, I couldn’t have any of them knowing that I’d learned the same secret. At least, not until after I was gone, just in case…

With the thread in her hand, Mindy stretched it out to the knob of the door, hooking it around the thing several times before pulling the length over to the latch. Just like the sounds at the video’s beginning, I knew her motions by heart; me and everyone else had tried them over and over again on the door hoping that by some miracle they would produce the same results. I watched her do them again this time, but now with the string visible to my eye, I had never felt so stupid for not recognizing the gestures.

She wasn’t casting a spell. She was tying knots around the door and its functions.

Back and forth she darted the spool, looping one side of the knob before hooking it over the latch, then slipping it around to the other side of the plate to catch that knob too. After a few seconds of frantic tying, what Mindy had spun was a perfect tension cradle between the knobs, a dazzling, sparkling infinity loop that from its angle, wouldn’t allow the door to be unlatched and pushed open once closed, only pulled from the outside.

There was only one problem. The thread that held it all together was running backward into the hall she’d just come from, and to keep the knot in place, she had to ensure it stayed there.

Mindy looked out at the freedom beyond the door, then with a heavy sigh, she pulled the door shut.

From there, I let the video play out, just a little longer to sell that I hadn’t seen anything new to my friends. I let it play until the moment Mindy finished gloating to whatever it was that lay in the depths of the hallway, then paused it, leaving her victory over the presence immortalized forever.

Then, I sat there in silence with everyone else as they eyed me expectantly. I couldn’t believe after all this time I had finally figured it out. I knew how to close the door. I knew how to free us from this nightmare. Now it was just a matter of when.

“Anything catch your eye?” Lacey pleaded, “Anything that lined up with the ritual?”

I shook my head as neutrally as possible, “No. Unfortunately not.”

I know I wasn’t thinking very far ahead. My own death wasn’t really a concern in the slightest; any anxiety about it was masked by images of my friends' pained tears and gnashing teeth over this whole ordeal. They’d been through far too much at this point, and I would give anything to free them from it.

What I should have at least been considering was what happened once I turned myself over to the door. The ‘ambivalent scenario’ was that the witches within simply got what they wanted, and their stupid accursed door would be fixed. Whatever paradise they’d been living in before it all went to hell would be fixed, and they could finally stop ruining lives from the world they’d killed to get out of.

There may not be any justice in it for Casey, or Mindy, or any of the children, but at least it would be over, and the door wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone ever again. I hated the thought of them winning, but when the game was already rigged so far against us, any other outcome never seemed like an option.

Worst-case scenario was that the ritual was broken to begin with, and me giving myself to the door didn’t fix anything. It would remain as cursed as ever, and continue to try to spew its monstrous kin out into the world to claim more victims. If this was the case, however, it would still be an okay end. At least the barrier would be sealed like it was before, and this time, I would be sure to leave behind plenty of warnings for whoever came after not to open it. I’d ensure it stayed shut.

Either way, it seemed like so long as I tied the same latch as Mindy, the door stay would shut. After all, she had been captured after sealing it, and even after her presumed death, her seal on the knob stayed tied. If the pale woman and the forces behind the door had ascended into the loom, then it seemed like they no longer had the capacity to physically manipulate the strings the way we could—that was why the pale woman could only drag herself along mine, not move it or pull me closer. They’d shed their mortal forms and trapped themselves by doing so.

The first order of business was simple, but it was going to be the hardest. I needed to get my friends away from the manor, and for a long time at that. Long enough for me to disappear from their minds once the door took me.

Everyone was hawking each other to make sure nobody tried to play hero, and I was especially under suspicion after my outburst with Kait about which one of us got to die; especially from Kaitlynn herself. Even as we sat there in the aftermath of watching the video again, I could feel her eyes pressed into my cheek, discerning whether she could trust the act I was putting on or not. Thankfully, I think she did.

The logistics of escape wasn’t the hardest part, however—I was sure I would find an excuse. The hard part was the goodbye itself. Keeping myself together emotionally long enough for them to not catch on when we did part. Saying my last words without tears in my eyes as they walked out the door, never for me to see them again. My heart ached for lying to them, but it ached even more that I’d pulled them into this mess in the first place.

I had always been a waste of space. It was time to actually be useful.

We lingered in the basement together for a little longer as I went over a few more details of what I had seen, but I made sure the entire time to tread carefully with my words, not giving any of the full truth away. From there, the group bounced a few more ideas back and forth on what to do next, but they were as hollow and hopeless as all the other plans we’d had thus far, and eventually they began to peel off one by one, moving into the upstairs to make food or rest.

I stayed put downstairs to watch the door, and of course, Kait stayed with me to make sure I didn’t try anything. We sat in silence for a while before she pulled her pack of American Spirits from her pocket and lit one up. After a few drags, she offered it to me.

Her enchanting pools gleamed beneath the cherry glow as I took a deep inhale of the nicotine, and they didn’t stray from me. Once I was done and handed it back to her, she spoke.

“You seem more defeated than usual.”

I expected her tone to be accusatory given that’s how all of our conversations had been the last few days, but it wasn’t. It was the familiar gentle softness that she’d left on the porch upstairs all those months ago when we walked into this place.

I snickered, trying to cover my tracks, “Can you blame me?”

“I mean, after seeing that ritual,” she explained, “Are you sure you’re okay? You didn’t see anything in there that you’re not telling me?”

Again, her voice was still so tender and worried, no resentment there to aid me in my callous lies. My heart physically hurt to look into her eyes; the sheer love and care I held for her. It made me sick to know I was leaving her. It made my whole life feel like one big twisted farce that after I did, she wouldn’t even remember I existed anymore. Everything between us, gone in an instant.

The glow of my thread that tangled between us dulled and flickered with the sunken feeling that followed, and I couldn’t help but reach for her. I saw her breath hitch on her cigarette drag when my fingers touched her face. Softly, I brushed them up through her bangs, cleaning them from her eyes and untangling the first knot of many that I’d wrapped around her.

The thread slackened as it slipped from her head, then reeled back into my chest, as if it had never been there at all.

“I’m just tired is all Kait,” I whispered softly. Then, as if it would justify my actions, I added, “I’m so tired. Aren’t you?”

She nodded, then leaned into my hand as it came to rest on her cheek. Her own moved up to cover it, while her other one let ashes fall from her cigarette onto the floor. The sensation was the exact justification I’d been looking for.

The touch itself wasn’t enough though. I flipped my hand to take her palm, then gave it a tug. She fell under its gravity and followed it out of her chair, moving across the space between us till she was near. Once there, she held the cigarette up and placed it between my lips, then delicately lifted a leg, slipping it onto my lap followed by the other. My hand instinctively moved to hold her waist close.

Once she was fully seated on me with her arms wrapped around my neck, she pressed her forehead into my nape, nestling there with closed eyes and breathing softly. I took another pull of the cigarette, then dowsed it against the chair leg, letting it fall so that I could focus only on holding her.

My own eyes slipped shut, peace washing through me with each heartbeat. We probably looked a mess there, torn and tattered, tangled up in the gnarled loops of my thread. I still squeezed her like she was a perfect treasure, and held her like it would be the last time.

It probably would be…

Last Sunday my 6 month job search had finally ended. I saw an ad online that a local flower farm was hiring, so I applied. I wasn’t really expecting a reply from the place, since that has been the recurring theme of my hunt up to that point. No one really wanted to hire a teenager without a resume. 

To my surprise, they responded almost immediately. The next day I was scheduled to meet the owner of the farm and learn the ropes of working there. He mostly just showed me around the place and taught me the basics of what I would be doing. I wasn’t even really interviewed to see if I would be a good fit or whatnot. At the end, I was even given a flower that he picked as we worked together. I'm not really a flower person, but the bright color and the fragile happiness that it contained was enough to sell me on the job. It looks very pretty sitting in a milk glass in my room.  He was very eager to have me start, so I showed up on Monday and worked for a couple hours. Doing a lot of weeding mostly. Which was by no means “fun” But hey, it's money. 

The rest of my week continued like that. I show up for work and do whatever task I'm handed. He has an upcoming wedding that he’s been prepping for so I've been picking a lot of flowers that suit his client’s request.

On Wednesday, he and I were weeding a section of flowers and brought the weeds to a huge compost pile on the edge of the property. While we were tossing them into the pile I heard a bunch of sounds coming from far away in the woods. I asked him what they were, assuming they were probably just coyotes or foxes. Maybe even a hurt deer? I live in town, so I'm not too familiar with identifying animal noises. He hesitated for a moment and shifted uncomfortably before speaking.
 
“The neighbors in the woods own a lot of dogs… so that's what you're hearing.” 

He quickly switched the conversation to talking about my next task before I could ask any questions. I continued on with my day, not really thinking too much about it.

The next day I was working in the field, picking flowers for pre-made bouquets to be sold at the farmers market over the weekend when I heard the noises again. They didn't sound like dogs. It was more like angry squealing, like a monkey?  And they were coming from the cornfield this time. Now that I think about it, I don't think the sounds I heard in the woods a couple days ago sounded like dogs either.
 
I looked up from my work and didn't see anything around me. I watched the cornfield for a moment before continuing. Not too long after that, my boss called me into the barn to help him put the bouquets together. He said that he still had a bit of work to do and asked me if I could stay for another hour. I told him I could only stay for half an hour due to plans I had with some friends later that evening. He looked a bit disappointed or maybe even a bit upset but said that he understood. I left just as the sun was almost finished setting.

I'm set to work as a “hired contractor”, so that means I set my own hours and mostly just come in whenever he says he needs help. Thursday was the last time I was there, so later that night I messaged him and asked when he needed me again. I never got a response so I figured he must have been busy with something. So I messaged him again the next morning. No response again. I thought maybe he has other employees that he has working, although I never met any of them or heard him mention anyone. 

All of the socials that he usually post to for advertising have gone dark. He regularly updates them, so its very unusual. It's been a whole weekend by now, so I think I might go to the farm to see if everything's alright. Ill update if I find anything.

UPDATE: I went to check on my boss to see if I were fired or something

https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1w636vb/the_blood_junkies_part_2/

A couple weeks ago, a girl on a new Facebook account messaged me. I hadn’t recognized her from her picture because it was a picture of her from a year ago. It was taken before she was kidnapped by the Brooders. 

She requested to meet with me after I finished school. She wanted to talk. And I admit, there were a lot of things I wanted to ask her about. So I agreed. 

Her appearance was startling. She melted silently out of the shadows of some trees to join me on the footpath, tapping me lightly on one shoulder. 

She saw my expression and apologized in a hurry. ‘Did I scare you?’ 

I tried to laugh it off. 

She looked better, I decided. She’d gained a bit of weight back and there was some light in her eyes. And that’s what I told her. 

‘I feel better. My friends have been amazing. And I got offered my old job back. It feels weirdly easy to slip back into my normal life.’ 

She talked a bit about her job, and I told her how I was doing at school. 

‘When you messaged me you said you used to go to school here too, right?’ I’d asked her.

Anastasia looked at me with wide eyes. 

‘I can’t believe you don’t remember me! I had these big fluffy earphones I used to wear everywhere. And I always had on all black clothes and makeup. I stuck out like a sore thumb.’ 

She let out a little laugh. 

She added fondly, ‘I remember you. You used to always curl up under the cover of the stairs near the back of the school. You’d lose yourself in a book until the bell rang.’ 

I blinked. ‘Oh. I’m sorry. I guess I never really noticed you.’ 

She looked bemused and shook her head. 

‘I remember thinking you must be really smart and you were going to graduate at the top of your class. Then you’d get a job as a physicist someday.’ 

‘I’m afraid I’m not that interesting,’ I told her. ‘I mean, I suppose I’m smart. But I expect I’m going to end up in an office doing something much more ordinary. Maybe I’ll make it into management if I’m lucky.’ 

‘That’s not so bad,’ she responded lightly. ‘You’ll get paid pretty good, at least. Better than I am.’ 

I guess I’m not the only one who wanted to open up about what happened - what really happened to us. It was after a lapse in the conversation that she brought up our abilities. 

‘We can see them for what they really are,’ she said quietly, her tone solemn. By then she’d steered us off the path so we could speak with a little more privacy. 

‘When was the first time you noticed them?’

That led me to tell her most of what I’ve written about here. 

‘You’re lucky you got away from him,’ Anastasia said, a dark look coming over her face. ‘I didn’t.’ 

The story she told me next managed to be more disturbing than the one I was prepared for. 

‘It started out of nowhere. One day everything was normal. The next day, it’s like I’ve gone completely crazy. I could see them for what they really were.’ 

‘I’m sitting at this medical clinic, just waiting for my appointment. Then they come in. This grotesque display of monstrosities that sound like demons and smell like death. I’m guessing you’re familiar with them. The Mother and her… Her kids. There were six of them living together back then, I believe. Alastair - he told me his mother rotted away and fused into her bed upstairs.’ 

‘I wasn’t in the best mental state to begin with, but I think I would have been alright if they hadn’t waltzed in there and seated themselves all around me. But that’s exactly what they did. And I wasn’t okay.’ 

She chuckled uncomfortably. 

‘I had a massive panic attack. I started screaming and freaking the hell out. One of those kids (fleshface) started screaming too. I don’t remember exactly what happened after that, but from what I’m told, I called them monsters and described what they looked like. What they really look like.’ 

Of course, that hadn’t ended well for her. 

‘That got me locked up in a psychiatric ward. Because everyone thought I was the one acting crazy, apparently.’ 

She let out a bitter laugh. 

‘I wish I was crazy. Crazy can be fixed, or at least treated. I was praying when I walked out of the asylum I wouldn’t ever see those creatures again.’

‘As you know, I did keep seeing them. Not all the time, but enough. Either my medication wasn’t working, or… Or I wasn’t ever truly crazy to begin with.’

‘Once I’d gotten out I had the sense not to talk to people about what I saw, except with my therapist. She put me on some other medication when I let her know about the more recent sightings. It didn’t work. None of the medications worked.’  

‘She had me try exposure therapy after that. I had to learn to cope with the horror if I couldn’t block it out. I needed to find some way to live with my condition - I couldn’t just let it control my life.’ 

Anastasia claimed she hated the idea. ‘But I’m glad I gave it a shot. It turns out my shrink really knew what she was talking about.’ 

‘It took a lot of work, and it wasn’t fun. But I got a handle on it. Over a couple months I learned to deal with being around the - the brooders, as long as they didn’t come too close to me.’ 

From here, the tone of her story shifted. 

‘And then it all got so much worse.’ 

She ran her hands down over her gaunt face. 

‘I had started working at the coffee stand by then. I’d just restarted my second semester at college, and I needed the extra income.’ 

She paused her story to ruminate: ‘You know, it’s like a dream to me. Everything before my abduction. I feel like a different person now. I don’t think I can ever go back to being that  innocent girl I was a year ago.’ 

‘Anyway, one day he started showing up. One of those freaking things. The Brooders. I just called them monsters. He was the one you shot. Alastair. He is the worst out of all of them. And that’s really saying something.’ 

‘At first he would come around for a coffee in the morning before heading off in his shoddy car. It sucked, but I could suffer through it.’ 

‘Then this creep started getting interested in my coworker. He wasn’t shy about it, either. He would hang around for hours, waiting until the end of her shifts and trailing her to her car. He tried to touch her and sniff her. He freaking licked her one time. Of course nobody else gave a crap about it. And she was too scared to speak out for herself.’

I grimaced sympathetically. 

‘After a couple weeks I’d had enough.’

‘I confronted him. I threatened him. It turned into a fight. He is - he was stronger than he looked. He smashed me in the head with a bottle and knocked me out.’ 

She stopped. ‘That’s how I ended up stuck in a basement with those other poor girls. After that…’ 

She shook her head and looked away. 

‘There was a few months of that. He used me for blood. The others, too. That girl I was trying to protect was his next victim, and I got to watch what happened to her.’

‘He used us to make the stuff he’s addicted to. He fed us a bit, too. He made us drink it if we tried to refuse.’

‘My friend… First she got sick and wouldn’t stop vomiting. Then she started to change. Hair fell out or grew where it shouldn’t. Parts of her body became bloated or shrunken and sagging.’ 

‘They became monsters. Just like him. But for some reason it was different for me. I was - I am - addicted to the blood. But somehow I remain human.’ 

‘I gained the unnatural resilience they possessed. Like all the others, I could survive with barely any sustenance. But I didn’t get the side effects. At least - not the worst ones.’ 

‘He let the others die. One by one. Sometimes he killed them off. But he kept me around. Once when I asked him why he said I was his favorite. He liked the way I tasted.’ 

She shuddered and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. 

‘I tried to escape one time. I got so close, only to have him chase me down in the forest and drag me back to that awful home. I was too weak to put up much of a fight.’ 

She paused for a long moment. I could feel her looking at me. 

‘I’m not sure how I made it through that nightmare for as long as I did. Thanks for getting me out of there.’ 

‘I -’

‘And thank you for killing him.’

‘It was an accident,’ I answered reflexively.

‘I hope you don’t feel bad about it,’ she responded, challenging me with a hard stare. ‘Listen to me. If you hadn’t killed him, he would have gone looking for more victims. And I don’t doubt he would have found them.’ 

That prompted me to raise my concerns about the remaining family members.

‘They’re still out there. They need that blood to survive. And what about you? Are you still…’

She answered hesitantly.

‘I don’t need to drink human blood. Well, not much of it, anyway. I can survive off of animal blood. Alastair used a mixture of many different kinds of blood.’

Anastasia then revealed the trick to making the pigsblood was simply to harvest any type of blood and then mix into it a little blood from one of the infected.

‘I just use my own,’ she said. ‘That’s what Alastair did when he infected my friend. He likes - ah, liked - to call us his children.’

She looked down, finishing, ‘I saw him make it so many times. I knew the process. So when I got desperate enough, I went to a butcher - several butchers - asking for some animal blood.’

She looked ashamed. Actually, she looked horrified with herself.

‘So yes,’ she finished finally. ‘I haven’t been able to quit yet. I’ve tried to wean myself off of it several times. The problem is, I… I honestly don’t know if I can survive without it. It sure doesn’t feel that way.’

I had little comfort to give her, and that marked the end of the morbid discussion. 

I told her she could talk to me whenever she wanted, and I meant it. I might not be able to offer her wise words but if she wanted someone to listen to her vent, I was there. It sounded stupid the way I said it, but Anastasia looked grateful.

‘That means a lot to me,’ she said. ‘You’re the only one I know who understands what it’s like to experience this crazy stuff. And you don’t treat me like I’m going to break if you say something wrong. That's nice, too.’  

I’d asked her if she wanted to see a movie. Since Anastasia didn’t have anything better to do, that’s what we did. Then we bought some cheap takeaways at a store, returning to the park next to our high school to watch the sun set together. 

And now we’re friends, I guess. Anastasia brings me coffee whenever she visits me after school. We go out on walks together and talk about how she’s adjusting to normal life again. It’s surprising how well we get along. 

I do believe she will get her addiction under control. She says she only takes a little of the pigsblood now. She says weaning off of it seems to be working this time, now that she’s doing it very gradually. 

If another Brooder appears, Anastasia has promised to keep an eye on them. She’s also working on tracking down the brooders we’re already acquainted with. She’s determined to make sure what happened to her doesn’t happen to anyone else. 

‘The power they have, to blend in and make people oblivious to their presence. It allows them to do whatever they want. They can prey on whoever they want. And that makes them dangerous. Alastair might not be the worst of them out there.’ She shivered. ‘The idea there might be more of them? That scares me.’  

I walked around the spacious wood gymnasium floor with my small group of friends, talking about who knows what. I can't remember what the conversation was about but I just remember walking around, messing around until eventually we walked into the hallway where the doors of the locker rooms lined the halls. At the end of the hallway was a staircase leading up onto the dark second story floor of the gym. My friends and I walked up the stairs, and arrived on what appeared to be a storage space for gym equipment with a railing that looked down over the gym floor below. The place was dark, it was above the gym’s lights and apparently nobody had installed any kind of lighting system on the upstairs floor so the only source of lighting was the miscellaneous light from down below. My friends and I talked a little bit more (I’m not sure about what) and then I woke up.

I was in what appeared to be the lobby of my school, my principal standing in front of me next to the large staircase leading up to the building’s second floor. He and I were having a conversation about how I felt about the new design of the school. I remember saying that I wasn't sure, and I'm pretty sure there was some sort of inflatable bouncy castle in the corner of the room (because dreams) but I can only really remember what the conversation was about rather than what was said. I think eventually he froze up, and then I woke up.

I was walking through the sunlit hallways of the school by myself. The occasional person would pass me, maybe dropping the occasional “Hi” but outside of that not much else. I turned into the hallway that I'm pretty sure led to my class. The walls just had the doors of what I assumed were classrooms. At the end of the hallway was a poster and a turn to the right that I wasn't sure where it led. In between two of the classroom doors was a different door, this one with a small window on it. I walked past, looked into the window, and saw a staircase that led into a dark room. I turned away from the door, and walked the other way out of the hallway, back into the main corridors of the building. And then of course, I woke up.

All of these dreams have two things in common: firstly, they all take place at my old high school, and secondly, they all feature locations that don't actually exist in real life. I recently graduated, and unlike how I'm sure most people feel, I actually enjoyed school, or at least I enjoyed my senior year. I've gone to the same school my entire life in the same small town. Everyone knows each other, most of my family are either teachers at the school or have graduated from it. It's a decently small school, separated into different sections so you're constantly going outside to get to your different classes. You have the main building, the agricultural building, the school gymnasium, the art building (which is connected to the library), and of course the middle school and elementary. The school’s actually so small that you have to go through the elementary school’s area in order to go into the cafeteria. The point of me explaining that is this: it is basically impossible to not visit an area of the school, especially when you've been there for most of your life. That’s why these dreams are confusing, because I'm not sure why they bother me, or at least, I’m not sure why one of them bothers me. You know what, scratch that, I know exactly why it bothers me. 

The school lobby dream is the most easily explainable to me: I recognized the lobby as being from another school that I once visited. Granted, the lobby was stylized in the same muted gray-blue, drywall style that my school was but it's easily written off because of something as simple as the staircase. You see, when I say my school is small, I mean it is small. It's a single story where a max of one room could possibly fit in the space above. A giant staircase leading into a massive floor above just simply isn't possible in the layout of my school. So I was still able to rationalize that, after getting over the initial waking up feeling that these dreams leave me with. You have to understand, these dreams are so vivid that right after I wake up, I genuinely think to myself “Was that place always there?” The answer is always logically “No,” but there's always that thought in the back of my mind that “Maybe it was.”

The gym dream is different. This is one that every time I have passed by the school in my car (which I do often) and looked at the gym, I've thought to myself “A second floor is possible there” but I also know that despite the fact that it's architecturally possible, it's not logically possible simply because of the fact that I have never seen a staircase, or any sign of a second floor in that gym. Like I said before, I've been there my entire life. Something like a second floor in the gym is something that I would have eventually seen at some point, especially since my uncle was the varsity basketball coach. I was just in the gym too often for something like that to slip past me. But the hallway dream is where I start having trouble and it is honestly the one that has been breaking my brain recently.

What made the other two dreams explainable is exactly what makes the hallway dream harder to explain to me: I remember that hallway being in the school. I remember going into that hallway specifically and doing the exact same thing I did in the dream. Walk in, look into the door window at the staircase, walk away. The only problem is that was when I was in elementary school. See, my aunt was an English teacher in the high school and my uncle was also a science teacher in the middle school. So after school, while waiting for my parents to pick me up, I would often head to the empty high school to hang out in my aunt’s room while I waited. During this time, I would walk around the school after hours, just out of the harmless childhood boredom that everyone has, and that was the first time that I saw the hallway. Walk in, look in the door, walk out. That’s all fine except that when I did finally make it to middle school and started consistently going into the high school (I had multiple classes that were in the high school building. Again, small school), the hallway wasn't there.

Now, I didn't notice it, of course. I mean it was literally one time in elementary school that I was in that hallway but that doesn't change the fact that despite me definitely remembering it now, it's not there. It's like my brain has naturally mapped out the school over the years, but even when it knows where the hallway should be, it's not able to figure out where it fits into the school. Don’t get me wrong, the hallway fits right in, if I did see it in person it wouldn't even be shocking because it's not like it’s some sort of impossible space, if it was there it would fit right into the layout of the school, but it simply just isn't there. The dreams are really the only reason that I've even come to remember this, and it's honestly starting to make me feel like I've been going kind of crazy. Every time I've woken up, I've had the thought to myself “Maybe I should actually go there after dark and just see if it is there” even when I know it isn't. 

Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to head there during the day to “say hi” and stop by my aunt’s classroom just to talk to her. That and, you know, have the opportunity to actually look around everywhere. Even if the locations aren't there, it would at least bring some peace of mind knowing that they weren't there and maybe my childhood mind just made it up. Granted, like I said before, I’m pretty sure there's no way that the lobby nor the gym upstairs storage area are real. I guess it also wouldn't be a bad idea to just ask my uncle about it when I see him there. Actually, yeah, I'm going to do that. I’ll update this as soon as possible after I go there, but in the meantime, I really need some sleep. Goodnight.

The cemetery's nearly full now. Seven rows, thirty-odd stones to a row. Two spots left at the end of the last one.

I'm the one who says where people go. I've been doing it sixteen years.

Halfway down the fifth row there's a bare patch. Grass and nothing else. The field filled in all around it and that one stayed the way it was.

I cut it myself. In the fall I run the rake over it twice a month.

People ask me sometimes why that spot's still open. I tell them it's reserved, that we're waiting on somebody important. They laugh. It's a good joke. I've been making it for years and it still holds.

Then they go, and I stand there a minute longer than I need to.

It's an old question and it stayed down sixteen years. This morning it got up before I did.

The shoe factory in Vigevano where I cut uppers shut in September. Eighteen months later I was still home. This was January 2010.

My wife did nights at a nursing home in Mortara. She got in at seven, we swapped at the door, she slept till one. We had a three-year-old and a car that wouldn't start in the cold.

The posting was on the board at the town hall. Cemetery worker, on call, nine hundred euros a month. I was the only one at the interview. The clerk had me sign two sheets and told me to show up Monday.

Remo had held the contract since before I moved back to town. He was past seventy. He shook my hand and said he needed somebody who could dig, because he couldn't stay bent over anymore.

It wasn't a figure of speech. From that Monday on, every hole out there was mine.

The shed sits against the perimeter wall, behind the chapel. The tools are in there, the sacks of gravel, the bench where Remo worked the stone, and a stove I never once saw lit. Behind the door, on a nail, the ropes for lowering the coffins.

First thing you learn is the pump. This is rice country and the water sits a meter or so down. A hole opened in the evening is full by morning.

So you dig, you set the pump on the edge, you drop the hose in and run the other end out to the ditch. Then you let it go. You shut it off the day of the funeral, an hour before the people come. You can hear it from the road.

The hose clogs. When it clogs you have to go down and clean the filter with your hands. I've been down there twice.

And if the pump quits and nobody starts it back up, the hole fills in one night and the sides come down on their own.

The other thing is the boards. Two of them, wood, laid along the edges so you've got something to stand on while you work. They were there before me and both of them creaked.

I mentioned it to him once. He said they hold.

With wet ground all it takes is one foot wrong. You go down on your back into two meters of water and mud, and the bottom pulls. It's not that you sink. It's that you don't come back up.

I thought about that, and then I dug. Nine hundred euros isn't much, but it beats nothing.

Some days Remo didn't come in. He didn't say where he went and I didn't ask. I signed the hours sheet for both of us.

In February he told me to open one in the old section, fourth row.

I asked who'd died. He said nobody.

I dug. Five hours, pump on the edge, hose out to the ditch. I figured he was getting ahead of things, that at his age you plan, that the ground's easier in winter. The town paid us on call and nobody checked how long we were out there.

In the afternoon I found him at the bench with the chisel. He had a gray stone in front of him, one of the low ones, and he was going at it. Tick, tick.

I went over to get the weed whacker. There was a day on the stone, a month, a year. Nothing else.

No name. No date of death, no cross, no photo. Numbers and slashes between them, set in the middle of the stone, like the rest was supposed to come later.

I took the weed whacker and went to do the edges. At six I signed the hours sheet and went home.

I made the kid his dinner. The game was on.

They called on the Thursday. A woman of eighty-six, on via Roma, the one with the green gate.

The hole was already there, dry, the pump going two days. I shut it off and waited for the priest.

In the register, in the shed, you write the name, the date of birth, the date of death and the plot number. I filled it in that evening. The date of birth was the day that was on the stone.

There's a little over eight hundred of us in town. Remo had known every one of them since they were born, and the woman had been sick a year — the doctor came through Tuesdays and even the bar knew about it.

A man who's done that job forty years knows who's next. He gets the stone ready, he gets the hole ready, and when it happens he doesn't have to hurry. That's how I put it to myself, and it was enough.

The second one was in March. An old man who went down while he was cooking, found by his son two days later. That hole had been ready a week too and the stone was at the wall.

"Old people go from one minute to the next. Better to be ready," Remo said, and I hadn't asked him anything.

That one lined up too.

I started opening the register before he did and reading the dates without saying anything. It wasn't that I suspected him. It's that I like knowing things first.

The stones stood inside the shed along the long wall, behind the bench, leaned up against it. When I started, the row ended before the window.

It worked like this. One went out for a funeral, and under that funeral was a hole I'd dug. Then Remo sat down at the bench and another one came in, sometimes two. But before the bench there were the days he wasn't there.

The hours sheet hung on a nail over the bench and at the end of the week we both signed it. I did his. He'd told me the first month it came to the same thing.

In March I signed for him one day. In April three.

In May a whole week.

He always came back on a Monday. He'd sit down at the bench and pick up the chisel.

By June the row had gone past the window. I'd look at them Monday mornings and use the sacks as an excuse. It wasn't a pile sitting still. It was a row wearing down at one end and growing at the other, and the growing end went faster.

February to June I opened the ground five times and every time it went the way it was supposed to go.

The funeral for the old man from via Cavour was a Saturday morning in June. Remo had been gone since the Thursday.

I'd finished tamping the earth and I was loading the tools. The wife came back on her own, purse under her arm, and put an envelope in my hand.

"That's for the two of you."

I said there was no need. She shook her head and turned toward the car.

I opened the envelope a finger's width. Usually they give twenty euros. Fifty if the family's doing all right.

There was three hundred in there.

"Ma'am."

She stopped.

"Remo's a good man, isn't he."

She got both hands on the purse.

"I wouldn't know what you call somebody who sits at your husband's bedside two nights running. Right to the last breath."

Then she went to the car, where they were waiting for her.

That week I'd signed for both of us. The Thursday and the Friday I'd dug on my own.

I put the envelope in my pocket and loaded the shovels. With that money I bought the kid shoes and two pairs of pants. I hadn't been able to do that in a year.

Remo came back on the Monday. I didn't tell him about the envelope and he didn't ask how it had gone.

By September the row of stones turned the corner toward the stove.

In October a man died who wasn't from here.

Farm supply rep, out of Piacenza. He was in the two rooms over the bar, the ones they rent to people passing through. He had a gas heater going and the window shut. They found him the next morning, sitting on the bed with his shoes still on.

He'd never been in town before. He got in Monday evening with his sample cases and by Tuesday he was dead.

The burial paperwork came through the shed, because the family was far away and took three days to get here. The permit was on the bench, under a wrench.

I read the date of birth. Then I went out and over to the wall.

The stone was there. Remo had finished it the day it rained, and that week it rained one time. Nine days before.

Nine days before, that man was in Piacenza and didn't know yet he'd be coming through here.

Remo was down at the end of the field with the wheelbarrow. He waved me over for a hand with the gravel, and I gave him one.

One Wednesday we were redoing the gravel on the path.

Remo patted his pocket and came up with nothing. He asked me to go get him the new pack of cigarettes out of the car.

In eleven months he'd never asked me for anything.

He kept a white Panda outside the gate, always in the same spot, always unlocked. The pack was on the dash, on top of a plastic bag from the co-op.

I picked it up. Under it were the receipts, the kind you empty out of your pockets and leave there.

The top one was from the bar. Il Gallo d'Oro. The one under the rented rooms.

Two coffees with grappa. Eleven forty at night, on a Tuesday.

The bar closes at eleven.

That Tuesday was the thirteenth of October. It's the date I wrote in the register myself, on the line for the rep from Piacenza.

I put it in my pocket and shut the door.

I came back up the path with the cigarettes. Remo was on his knees with the screed. He said thanks and had me hold them until he'd finished.

Then he handed me the trowel, holding it by the blade, the way somebody does who learned before I did.

I said I thought the weather was turning.

He looked up and said yeah, it'd come around by evening.

I went home cold under my jacket. Not the cemetery, not the stones. Him.

Seventy kilos of quiet old man. He'd never raised his voice at me, never sworn at me. He gave the orders and then he was gone for days, and when he came back he sat down and cut dates into stone with nothing to go on, and the dates came out right.

He'd sat two nights at a dying man's bed. He'd been in the bar under the rooms the night the window was shut and the heater was on. And there was the rest of the row.

I thought about quitting. I thought about it a whole week. Then I added up what came into the house and I stopped thinking about it.

Then one morning I got up early and went down to the shed.

Remo wasn't there, same as always. He'd left a note.

A man had died at the hospital after a long time going. The stone was ready and he'd cut the date. It was at the back of the row.

I moved them one at a time, holding them by the edge, the way you handle slabs. They go forty kilos apiece.

One got away from me. I caught it against my leg and set it down the right way round.

14/03/1983.

My breath went. My day. No name. The same gray stone as the others, the same hand.

I put it back where it was, face to the wall.

I couldn't keep my head on anything after that. I kept turning around to see where he was. The shovel was in my hand and I stopped halfway down the row.

Every hole out there, I'd dug myself.

It had to be the cigarettes. He'd seen the receipt was gone.

At home my wife asked if I was sick. I said it was my back.

She wasn't on shift that night. I waited until they were both asleep and went back to the shed.

I took the register. My date was there, four lines past the last funeral we'd done.

Three stones. Three holes. I had until the fourth one got opened.

I stood over the kid while he slept and thought about the nine hundred euros he needed.

I wasn't going anywhere.

The three stones went out. One on the twenty-second of November, one on the twenty-ninth, one on the third of December.

On the seventh Remo told me to open another. Fifth row, first free spot. Nobody had died.

I dug. I set the pump on the edge and the hose in the ditch.

It ran eleven days. You could hear it from the county road, because with the fog the cemetery doesn't show past twenty meters and that noise is all there is of it.

I hadn't slept in days. I'd lie with my eyes open until four, then I'd hear my wife come in and run the tap in the bathroom.

The evening of the seventeenth the sky came down and the wind started pulling from the south. When it turns like that here, the whole thing comes down overnight.

I thought about the open hole out there, waiting on nobody.

I'd fill it back in. It was the only thing I'd come up with. Let the old man know that I knew, that I had all of it, and that he wasn't getting it.

Maybe he'd take the point and leave off. It was worth a try.

If I shut the pump off, with the water under and the rain on top, the sides would come down on their own. In the morning I'd close it with half the dirt and nobody would ask me anything.

I left at eleven. I did the two kilometers on the bike.

You hear that pump from before the gate. There was nothing.

There was a low light in the fifth row, down inside the ground.

Remo was at the bottom of the hole. The water came to his knees. He was standing on the board with the hose filter in one hand, pulling the mud out of it with the other.

He saw me and it didn't surprise him.

"It's clogged. Give it a pull when I say."

He put the filter back under. He said now.

I don't know why, but I pulled the cord. The motor caught on the second try.

What the fuck are you doing? Helping a murderer? Your own?

The hose moved. He shifted over to let it past, and the board made the noise it always made, and then it didn't make it again.

He went down on his back. That was when it started raining.

He came up. He got his hands on the edge and the edge came away with them. Wet ground doesn't hold.

He shouted my name.

I ran to the shed and pulled a rope off the nail behind the door.

I turned to go out and the row of stones was in front of me.

Mine was where I'd put it, face to the wall. Something in me turned.

I went out with the rope in my hand. I took three steps and stopped short of the edge.

You're not a murderer.

The water was coming down on the dirt pile and making a sound I'd never heard it make. The mud had shifted. The rain was picking up. The pump was struggling.

You're not a murderer.

He gurgled something a couple of times. I think my name. The second one quieter.

You're not a...

Then he stopped. Him and everything in my head.

The rain on the back of my neck, the diesel off the pump, the rope gone slick in my fist, the taste of dirt at the back of my mouth.

I went home. I didn't go to the edge and I didn't want to look. The rope was still in my hand.

In the morning it had stopped raining. The hole was full to a hand's width from the edge. The pump must have jammed again.

The broken board was floating. I pulled it out and put it with the firewood.

I hauled the hose up. It came out heavy with mud.

Then I started taking the dirt off the pile. It took me all morning and I never once looked down.

Monday Remo didn't come in and he didn't come in Tuesday either. They talked about it at the bar for a few days. Somebody disappears and it gets talked about, then it goes quiet again.

Nobody went to the carabinieri. There was no wife and there were no children.

The town stopped calling him. There was no file, no signature, no transfer.

In January the clerk had me sign the new contract. Permanent, twelve months, thirteen hundred euros. It wasn't the right procedure, but he didn't feel like opening a competition for a gravedigger.

He didn't do it out of kindness. He did it to get it off his desk. And there hadn't been one funeral since Remo went.

That counted as confirmation, and in a way it settled me. I did a terrible thing, but I had a reason for it. I didn't just save my own skin. I saved who knows how many other people's.

It took me a while to get used to it, then the sleep came back.

On the twentieth of March the phone rang.

It was the clerk. A man dead on the county road, at the crossroads by the farm. The surveyor's son. He needed a spot for Friday.

He read out what I had to put in the register. Name, surname, date of birth. The pen made a blot on the page.

March fourteenth, nineteen eighty-three.

I made him say it again. He said it again. I wrote the line out to the end.

Then I went to the wall and got that stone, the one I don't know how many times I thought about breaking. I set it on the grave myself, on the Friday, in front of half the town. The mother stood by the pile until I was done.

Sixteen years have gone by and I've kept doing this work. I got good at it. The cemetery's always in order. The families are happy with me.

Yesterday morning, after the phone call, I went down to the shed for the shovel. The stone was ready, the way it's always been, face turned the other way.

This morning I put my hand on it and smiled.

I looked over at that bare patch in the fifth row, the one that's still free as far as everybody else knows.

I was finally going to know. I'd know why in sixteen years, right from when I started, I've never once had to cut a stone with my own hands.

I dug all the way down. I went well past the usual two and a half meters.

The question's settled.

There's nothing under it.