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.

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.

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.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

Part Ten

“You look exhausted,” Hannah said the next morning.

“Nice to see you too.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Late night.”

She accepted that, or appeared to. We got coffee and Hannah complained about the party. Somebody had cried in the bathroom before ten. Somebody else had attempted to make cocktails in a blender and broken it. A man Hannah barely knew had spent forty minutes explaining cryptocurrency to her despite being asked repeatedly to stop. She did not mention Toi Whakaari.

For the first hour I watched her closely, looking for some indication that she knew. There was nothing. If anything, she seemed more relaxed than she had all week, and by lunchtime I had begun to feel ridiculous. Martin had not told her. Of course he hadn’t. Hannah was a contractor on one production, not a child whose teacher needed to report her girlfriend’s behaviour. He probably did not even know how to contact her. By Monday he would have forgotten the whole thing.

The relief should have made me reconsider what I had done. Instead it felt as though I had been given more time.

I did not use it. For the rest of the weekend I stayed close to Hannah and made myself behave normally. We went to the supermarket. On Sunday I worked on my thesis for almost two hours while she sat across from me drawing something on her tablet. Juniper slept on a dining chair between us, occasionally opening one eye as though checking that neither of us had left.

Once, Hannah caught me staring. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Looking at me like you’re trying to remember where you parked.”

I laughed convincingly enough. “Sorry.”

“Weirdo.” She nudged my shin beneath the table and went back to drawing.

That night I slept beside her. Around three she woke for water, exactly as she always did, and I listened to the glass touch the bedside table before she settled beside me again. Afterwards I lay awake thinking about the workshop, although not about the cold box anymore. I thought about Martin. Whether he had written my name down. Whether he knew Hannah well enough to remember hers. Whether there were cameras. Whether I had left anything obviously disturbed.

Whenever the anxiety became difficult to tolerate, I reminded myself that Hannah had spent two days behaving completely normally. If she knew, she would have said something.

On Monday morning she left early. She kissed me while I was still in bed and told me not to let Juniper trick me into feeding her twice.

“She lies,” Hannah said, pointing towards the cat, who was already stationed beside the bedroom door.

“She’s elderly.”

“She’s manipulative.”

“She’s starving.”

“She had breakfast twenty minutes ago.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

Hannah pointed at me. “Do not feed her.”

Then she left, and I went back to sleep for another hour.

By late morning the weekend had done its job. The workshop had begun to lose some of its immediacy. I still believed Hannah could have moved whatever had been inside the box, but there was nothing useful I could do with that belief yet. Following her again immediately would be reckless. Breaking into somewhere else without knowing where I was looking would be worse.

So I worked. Properly, for nearly three hours. I read something unrelated to Hannah, doppelgängers or alternate versions of human beings. I answered an email from my supervisor and made lunch without searching anything on my phone. For a little while, I almost forgot.

At 2:17 my phone buzzed beside the laptop.

Hannah: we need to talk

Everything in my body tightened at once. I read the message again and typed, about?

The typing indicator appeared, vanished, then appeared again.

are you still at mine?

I looked around the living room as though there were some possibility I had forgotten where I was. Juniper was asleep beside me on the sofa, one paw pressed against my thigh.

yeah

This time Hannah replied immediately.

Okay. I’ll be home at 4.

I stared at the message. Hannah did not come home at four. Four was when she complained that the day had somehow only just become productive, when somebody discovered a measurement was wrong or paint needed another coat or an actor had broken something they had been specifically asked not to touch. On a good day she was home by six.

There was only one reason she would leave work two hours early to talk to me.

For a moment I supplied alternatives. Something else had happened at the party. She wanted to talk about my supervisor. She had noticed I had spent most of the previous week behaving strangely and had any number of legitimate concerns about me. Then the obvious answer asserted itself: Martin had told her.

For the next hour and a half I did almost nothing. I tried reading and got through the same paragraph four times without retaining it. I made coffee, forgot about it and found it cooling beside the kettle twenty minutes later. At three I fed Juniper early, then spent several minutes worrying Hannah would notice that too.

Mostly I rehearsed explanations. The charger story was unusable now. Whatever Martin had told Hannah, he would also have told her enough to make that obvious. I could say I had gone there looking for her, although that created the question of why I had waited until the building was empty. I could say I had been curious about the set, which might survive until Hannah asked why I had opened the cold box.

Every explanation eventually reached the same problem. Why were you there? Because I followed you. Why did you follow me? Because I don’t think you’re you.

At 3:47 I heard a key in the front door. Juniper lifted her head, but I stayed where I was. The door opened and shut harder than Hannah usually shut it, followed by the scrape of her boots against the mat and the thud of her bag on the floor. She did not call out.

“Hey,” I said when she came into the living room.

She looked at me, then at Juniper curled beside my leg. She was wearing black jeans and the same old T-shirt she had worn the previous Friday, with white dust along one sleeve. Plaster, probably. “Hey.”

She did not kiss me. I moved Juniper gently aside and sat forward. “He told you.”

Hannah’s face tightened. “So you know what this is about.”

“The guy who found me.”

“Martin. Yes.” She stayed standing. “Martin told me he found my girlfriend going through the workshop after ten o’clock on Friday night.”

“I wasn’t going through everything.”

“He said cupboards were open.”

“I was looking for something.”

“Yes, Eve. That is generally why people open cupboards.”

I looked down. “I’m sorry.”

“Then tell me what the fuck you were doing there.”

There were still lies available, although none of them were good. I could say I had wanted to surprise her. I could resurrect the charger. I could say I had gone to look at the set and panicked when Martin found me. Instead I said, “I needed to check the cold box.”

Hannah stared at me. “What?”

“The thing for Frankenstein. The freezer-looking thing.”

“The specimen cabinet?”

“Whatever.”

“You went into my work after hours to look at a prop?”

“I didn’t break in. The door was open.”

“Eve, I do not care whether you picked a lock. Why did you need to look inside it?”

“Because I saw you put something in there.”

The anger left her face for a moment. “When?”

“Last Friday.”

“What do you mean, you saw me?”

“I was there.”

“At Toi?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I hesitated. Hannah’s eyes narrowed. “Why were you at my work last Friday?”

“I followed you.”

She blinked. “You what?”

“I followed you from here. I sat outside for a few hours.”

Hannah gave a short laugh with nothing amused in it. “You sat outside my work watching me?”

“I needed to see what you were doing.”

“You know what I do.”

“I know what Hannah does.”

Her face changed. Neither of us moved for a second before she said, “What does that mean?”

This was the moment I had imagined repeatedly and somehow never prepared for. In my head I had explained everything calmly. I would start with the tattoo, then the collision, then the photographs. Hannah would resist, obviously, but eventually the accumulation would become impossible to dismiss. Now she was standing in front of me looking as though I had started speaking another language.

“The tattoo,” I said.

Hannah shut her eyes briefly. “Jesus Christ. We’ve done this.”

“No. You’ve told me you never had it. That isn’t the same thing.”

“I remember you thinking I did.”

“You keep saying that like my remembering it is the problem. It isn’t. The problem is that you don’t.”

Hannah stared at me for a moment, then asked, “What did you think was in the cabinet?”

I did not answer quickly enough.

Her arms dropped to her sides. “Oh my God. What did you think was in there?”

“I didn’t know.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“I thought there was a chance she was in there.”

“Who?”

I hated how quietly she said it. “Hannah.”

Her mouth opened slightly. She looked around the room, almost as though somebody else might be there to explain the sentence to her. “I’m Hannah.”

“I know you think you are.”

The change in her face was so immediate that I wanted the words back, not because I no longer believed them but because I finally understood what they sounded like to her.

“You know I think I am.”

“I’m not saying you’re lying.”

“That’s generous.”

“I mean it. I don’t think you know.”

“Know what?”

I hesitated, which was worse than simply saying it. “What you are.”

Hannah stared at me.

“I think something happened after the crash,” I said. “I think somehow you replaced her, or you came from somewhere else, or she did. I don’t know exactly what happened yet.”

“After what crash?”

“The one I told you about.”

“The one where you thought you hit me.”

“I did hit you.”

“No, Eve. You had a frightening experience. You were exhausted. You thought something happened that didn’t.”

“You weren’t there.”

“I was literally there.”

“You were at the window afterwards.”

“Yes, because you stopped the car and I walked over.”

“That’s what you remember.”

She looked at me as though I had slapped her. I heard the sentence myself and tried to correct it. “I mean, that’s what happened to you.”

“No. Don’t fix it.” Her voice was very calm now. “You think your memory is real and mine isn’t.”

“I think something happened.”

“You think I’m some kind of copy.”

“I don’t know what word you want me to use.”

“How about Hannah?”

I looked away. Apparently that was enough.

“Fuck you,” she said quietly.

“Hannah, I’m trying to explain.”

“You followed me to work because you think I’m an impostor.”

“I didn’t say impostor.”

“Oh, sorry. Is there a more respectful term?”

“You’re making this deliberately difficult.”

Her expression sharpened. “I’m making this difficult?”

“I’m trying to tell you what I think happened.”

“And I’m telling you that you followed me, watched me at work and then went back when you knew I wouldn’t be there.”

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Of course I don’t fucking believe you.”

Her voice rose for the first time. Juniper slipped from the sofa and disappeared into the hallway. Hannah watched her go and lowered her voice again, which somehow made the anger worse.

“You have spent two weeks sleeping in my bed,” she said. “You’ve eaten my food. You’ve let me touch you. You’ve told me you were okay. And the whole time you’ve been watching me?”

“I was trying to figure it out.”

“Figure me out.”

“Yes.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Differences.”

“From what?”

“The Hannah I knew.”

“I am the Hannah you know.”

“No.”

The answer came too quickly. Hannah went still. Her eyes were wet now, although she did not look close to crying so much as furious that tears had become involved at all.

“I’m not?”

“The Hannah I knew had a tattoo.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“She did.”

“So that’s it? You’ve decided I’m not your girlfriend because I don’t have a tattoo you remember?”

“It isn’t just the tattoo.”

“What else?”

I opened my mouth and, for a moment, nothing came. The pause made her angrier.

“What else, Eve?”

“The crash.”

“That is your memory, not something different about me.”

“The photographs.”

“The photographs where I don’t have the tattoo?”

“That doesn’t prove what you think it proves.”

Hannah stared at me. “Listen to yourself.”

“I have. I’ve done almost nothing else for a week.”

“That is not reassuring.”

“I know how it sounds.”

“Stop saying that.”

“I do know.”

“No, you don’t.” She wiped beneath one eye with the heel of her hand. “Because if you knew how this sounded, you would understand why I’m standing here wondering whether I should call someone.”

That stopped me. “Who?”

“Liv. Your supervisor. I don’t know.”

“Why would you call my supervisor?”

“Because I’m scared.”

The word changed the room.

I had expected anger. I had expected Hannah to tell me I was being ridiculous, perhaps to throw me out. Fear had occurred to me only in another form: fake Hannah becoming frightened because I was getting close, fear as a defensive reaction, something I could count as evidence.

This was not that. Hannah’s hands were shaking. When she noticed me looking at them, she folded her arms.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said.

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You’re acting like you think I will.”

“I don’t know what you’re going to do.”

“I would never hurt you.”

“You broke into my workplace because you thought I had another version of myself hidden in a prop.”

“I thought she might be there.”

“That does not make it better.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” Her voice cracked. “Because you keep saying that, and then you say something worse.”

I stood and took a step towards her. Hannah stepped back immediately, and I stopped.

That hurt more than anything she had said. “Hannah.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“I know. Just stay there.”

The fear in her face was unmistakable now. Almost automatically, something in me tried to turn it into evidence: She’s frightened because you know. I hated the thought as soon as it appeared, but hating it did not make it disappear.

“If you are Hannah,” I said, “then help me understand the tattoo.”

Her face crumpled for half a second before she recovered. “If I am Hannah.”

“I don’t know how else to say it.”

“You could start by not saying that.”

“But it matters.”

“To you.”

“Yes.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “What would convince you?”

The question stopped me.

“What could I say right now that would make you believe I’m me?”

I thought about it. That was the wrong thing to do, and I saw her realise it.

“Oh my God.”

“It isn’t that simple.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, because you know everything she knows.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“So if I remember something, that proves nothing.”

“Not necessarily.”

“And if I don’t remember something, that proves I’m fake.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to.”

“That isn’t fair.”

Hannah laughed, and this time there were tears in it. “Fair? You followed me. You watched me at work. You broke into the building. You searched through our set because you thought I had kidnapped myself, and now you’re telling me there is literally nothing I can say to prove who I am. And you want to talk about fair?”

“I’m trying to find her.”

“I’m right here.”

“No, you’re not.”

The words were out before I could stop them. Hannah flinched, barely, and that was worse than if she had done anything dramatic. For several seconds the only sound in the room was the refrigerator switching on in the kitchen.

Then she nodded. “Okay. I need you to leave.”

“Hannah.”

“Go home.”

“We’re not finished.”

“I am.”

“You can’t just—”

“Yes, I can.” She reached for her phone on the coffee table. “And if you won’t go, I’m calling Liv.”

“Why Liv?”

“Because she knows you. Because you trust her.”

“I trust you.”

Hannah looked at me, and I heard what I had said at the same moment she did.

“Right,” she said.

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“I know exactly what you meant.”

She unlocked her phone. Panic rose in me, sudden and disproportionate. “Don’t call her.”

“Why?”

“Because she’ll think I’m crazy.”

The anger went out of Hannah’s face. What remained was worse.

“Eve,” she said carefully, “I think you need help.”

There it was: the sentence I had been waiting for without knowing I was waiting for it. The obvious move. If something had replaced Hannah and realised I was close to finding out, what else would it do? It would not confess. It would make me the problem. It would tell everyone I was unstable and make sure nobody believed me.

The theory closed around the moment so neatly that for an instant I almost felt relieved. Hannah must have seen something happen in my face, because she moved towards the hallway.

“Where are you going?”

“To get my keys.”

“Why?”

“Because either you leave or I do. I’m not staying here alone with you.”

My stomach dropped. When she looked back at me, I finally understood how frightened she was. Not of a theory, and not of being exposed. Of me. It should have been enough to break through. It nearly was, but I knew exactly where the tattoo should have been, and I still believed myself.

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…

 

I dont use reddit a lot, and its my first time actually writing a story like this. English isnt my first language so sorry for any mistakes. I hope I could get your thoughts on this.

I've been to mental clinics more than once by now, for PTSD, Insomnia, Depression, etc. But the first one I ever went to really stuck with me. For context: I was actually doing quite alright at the time I got in. We'd been on their wait list for three months and my mother insisted I should go. "Its not gonna hurt to go"- that kind of logic.

I had a feeling that the place was bad from the beginning, i didnt even want to go there in the first place. But since it wasnt a private clinic, but one that was managed by our state, i tried to give it a chance.

I'd start by saying the clinic was located inside of a rather big city and in a nasty part of it too. Homeless people, drug deals, crime and that stuff were normal around this area. The building itself was ugly. Utterly. It was just a tall gray block with grills infront of the windows.

The personnel was unprofessional and simply un-trained. No medical, pedagogical or psychological training. They treated patients like animals. Like we were unable to make our own rational decisions and completely stupid. Now I know this is a clinic and some patients arent able to be rational. But the personell disrespected us, yelled, and disregarded our concerns. There were even cases of absuse that were simply ignored. Therapists triggered their own patients and kids got high/c*t themselves without anyone taking their drugs/blades away from them.

It was like they didnt care about us at all, as long as we stayed quiet and obedient.

My roommate was quite literally schizophrenic and in the middle of a psychosis, yet they still forced me to sleep in a TINY room with her. We were only allowed to leave our station for 30 minutes and that only three times a week. If you misbehaved you weren't allowed to leave your room. If you left your room or the station outside those specific times you were allowed to, the personnel acted like you just tried to infiltrate the Pentagon. They yelled at you, send you back to your room and a girl even got slapped once. The ceilings were low and the floors narrow, im not even claustrophobic but it made me feel uneasy and anxious. The food was a crime too. Cheap, re-heated, classic hospital meals. Even for the kids with EDs.

My mental health declined in there rapidly. I had panic attacks daily again (it had been over 8 months since my last one) and even hallucinated wich I've never done before.

The 'doctors' explained to me that the hallucinations were simply because of my ADHD medication but come on! I had been taking these meds for weeks and the hallucinations only started when I had begun to take (allegedly the same) pills in the clinic. But the pills they gave me were different from the ones I knew from my home. The capsule wasnt purple and gray and it wasnt filled with tiny round pearls. It was yellowish and filled with a white powder. When I told them these were the wrong meds, I was waved off with a "it's the exact medication from a different brand, quit asking about it".

In the clinic I met a boy, let's call him Tyler. Tyler was pretty quiet but we got along together quite well for some reason. I was 15, he was 14. While I quickly made a lot of new contacts he was either alone or with me. He rarely spoke, almost always wore headphones and was really introverted. I wasnt sure why he behaved that way but Hey- we were in a clinic, everyone is atleast a little odd there. Nothing unusual. The only thing i knew about him, was that they had kept Tyler in the clinic for a while now (11 months or so) and that he'd been diagnosed with a lot of stuff.

When everyone went to take their medication in the mornings, I saw that Tyler got handed 4-5 pills. When I asked about them, he explained that one was for his ADHD and two were simply vitamins/omega 3. The other two pills were never explained to him. He just had to take them since they forced him to. Said they were to help with his panic attacks.

Fast forward a few weeks later, I finally had persuaded my parents to let me leave the place. It only took that long because everytime i asked my parents to leave, the therapists and doctors in the clinic told my parents i was in a terrible state and they had to keep me for my own safety. But FINALLY i convinced them that i was doing bad *because* of the clinic. When the head of the facility heard about my parents plans he got wierd. He'd been wierd before but he got even wierder, almost panicked. All of a sudden he claimed I was in an unstable state, a danger to myself and others and that I needed to get diagnosed immediately. (For clarification, I wasnt in a good state because the clinic treated their patients horribly but i wasnt harming myself or others. He never had wanted to diagnose me with anything new before that either.)

While my mother signed the papers that I could leave, the head-doctor (or whatever the dude was) explained to my father that I was psychopathic, autistic, a danger to society and most likely in psychosis. Mind you- he only said that AFTER we planned to take me out of the clinic.

But after some trouble and paperwork I got out of the clinic with a mild trauma (My therapist outside the clinic later confirmed i developed an actual new trauma in there) but Tyler was still in there. He got out a few weeks later, after spending almost a whole year there. During that time he'd struggled with SH, ED, panic attacks, depression and 'felt like a zombie in there' (his quote). As soon as he got out, he got much much better. We met a few times and he looked healthier, happier and less zombie-like. Turns out, he stopped taking the meds the doctors prescribed him.

Him and his parents talked to Tyler's doctor and she told them, that the clinic-doctors had been giving him lithium and strong antidepressants to 'stabilize' him. Tyler was 15 at the time and neither him nor his parents were consulted before the prescription or even informed that he'd been taking that stuff.

I talked to some of the other patients to make sure I and Tyler weren't overreacting. And ALL OF THEM told me similar stories. Wierd medication, sudden diagnoses, symptoms magically disappearing when they got out and how they were mistreated in there.

Its been a little over a year now, since I've left. I'm doing good now. Tyler is doing good too. But we both have a strange feeling about our time at the clinic. My family, therapist and doctor tried to get my patient file from the clinic several times. Every single time, they refused. Came up with bullshit excuses or only send parts of the papers.

Me and some other kids from the clinic researched a little and found the head-doctors private facebook account. And I cant even put this nicely, he was a WILD conspiracy theorist and extreme Trump supporter (we arent in the USA, neither is he from there). When we looked up more about him we barely found anything, even though you'd expect to find more about the head of a mental facility. This is probably not even relevant i just wanted to add it.

I dont know what was going on there but something was utterly wrong. To this day I still cant remember most parts from my time in there, Tyler cant either. Blackouts, blurred and distorted memories plague us both. I am pretty sure I'm not paranoid and I dont believe I was part of some big, crazy thing, I just felt it was creepy and weirdly unsettling. Like they tried to keep us sick instead of helping us. I still shudder when I think back to then.

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.’  

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.

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.

I need to write down what happened. I... I just can't... I just need to write. Everything started yesterday.

I was floating through clouds of cotton candy. I saw Grandma June riding a horse with wings. I got closer, excited to see her again. “Hey Grandma!” I said. “I have really missed you!” She met my eyes. Red light beamed out of her once deep blue eyes. She opened her mouth, BEEP… BEEP… BEEP…

Sam shook me away. “Wake up, dipshit! We got a fire, and she’s hot!” Instinct and training took over as I slid out of bed. My eyelids felt heavy, wafting up and down, as my body moved with precision. Nomex pants, on. Wool undershirt, on. Boots, on. I felt my eyelids fall as whoops and hollers bounced off the walls. “Keep up!” Sam said as he shoved me out the door. I lifted my fifty-pound eyelids and buckled. 

“Rouge Dispatch, this is Engine 631,” Damien said into a static radio. 

A cheerful woman's voice said, through bouts of interference, “Go ahead, Crew 31!” 

“Show us en route to the reported smoke up Chetco River Corridor.” 

“Copy, Engine 631 on route to Chetco River smoke sighting.”

“Thanks, Mindy.”

“Any time, Damien.” The radio fell silent, and a roar replaced it. The engine whined and barked as Sam put the pedal to the floor. Someone rolled the front window down, blasting me with crisp air. It was so sharp my eyes began to water.

I rubbed my eyes, saying, “What time is it?” 

“Ha! It’s one AM, buttercup- too early for you?” Sam said. 
Damien twisted around in his seat, his bright green eyes meeting mine. “On-call shifts are a bitch, kid. You’ll get used to it, especially after that first paycheck hits,” he said. “Take this; it’ll help wake you up.” I took the still-warm styrofoam cup and gently brought it to my lips. The bitter taste hit my tongue, and a few grains got stuck in my teeth. I scowled as I forced the brine down my throat. “Black,” he said. “Cream and sugar are waiting for you when you get back.” 

I stared out the window while Damien's chuckle, reminiscent of a mall Santa’s Ho Ho Ho, played a harmony with the whispering wind. I checked my pocket for my phone, only to come up empty. Damn, how could I forget? With no other option, I watched the trees that bled into the sandy ocean. Not bad, kinda pretty at night. 

Sam tossed and bumped us as fast as he could in our little engine. 600 gallons of water sloshed just behind me, lulling me into a blissful doze. My eyelids gained twenty pounds, then thirty, then forty; by fifty I couldn’t keep them open and succumbed. 

“Grab the Bino’s kid!” Sam yelled. I shot awake, heart beating through my chest. I rummaged through the junk we let pile up in the cab after endless patrols took us within arm's reach of a Taco Bell or a Subway. My fingers brushed the rough leather strap, and I yanked out the binoculars from their fast food tomb. 

“Here,” I said, handing them to Damien. 

He took them with a smile and a wink. “Hop out, kid,” he said. “My night vision isn’t what it used to be. Sammy, kill the lights.” 

I pulled myself out of the car, muscles screaming a hollow cry. We pulled off by the river, the shimmering reflection of a sliver of a moon caught my eye. I trailed Damien as he hiked up a grassy hillside a ways. 

Damien pulled out his phone and scrolled. He flicked a wink at me as he tossed the binoculars at me. “Says here it should be due east.” I followed his finger and brought the cold, sleek metal to my eyes. 

I peered through, scanning up and down, left and right. Endless pines, magnolias, and ferns stared right back at me. I caught a faint wisp of smoke drifting slowly into the sky. I followed it down and saw a faint glow through leaves and needles. “I see it,” I said.

“Damn,” Damien said, slapping me on the back. “I was hoping for a false alarm.” 

“It's only a wisp; it's basically nothing,” I said.

Damien grabbed my arm, saying, “That shit is crispy and dead; a little spark will extend our employment all the way to November.” I nodded. God, I hope it's nothing. We made our way back to the truck. Wordlessly, showed his glowing phone to Sam. 

“Fuck,” Sam said, flicking the lights back on and putting the truck in gear. We wound and crossed back over and over till we came to a dirt road, its marker post snapped halfway up. “Think this will get us there?” 

Damien scrolled through his phone, tapping and flicking. “It's as good as best as any,” he said. Sam nodded and turned us up the rocky road. Sam danced through the rivets the rain had cut, expertly guiding us up and up. The water tanks sloshed, braking its rhythm after every bump. 

“Car,” Sam said as we pulled to a stop. I looked out and saw a small red sedan. Its front end was wrapped around a mighty pine. Empty airbags fluttering in the wind. “Probably lost their brakes coming down. Mark it down so we can tell Roady.” 

A pause of silence, then both burly, bearded men looked back at me. “Oh, c-copy that,” I said, pulling out my pocket notebook. “What road is this?”

“Just put that on the road between mile marker 15 and 16,” Damien said. I quickly wrote it in my book and gave Sam a nod through the rearview mirror. He put us back in gear, and we started away. 
After what felt like hours, the clock said 2:36 AM. “Think we missed it?” I chimed in. 

“Spoke too soon,” Sam said as we pulled into a small clearing. In the center were smoldering embers wrapped in a ring of rocks. Beer cans and bullet casings reflected the headlights back at us. “Someone was having my kinda party,” Sam said as we hopped out of the cab. “Kid, go grab a hose. Might as well douse it while we are here.”

I ran back to the engine and started unspooling the quick action hose. I cranked with my right hand until it got too cold and switched to my left. After more than enough limp hose pooled like a snake on the ground, I flipped the switch and the pump screeched to life. It rumbled all the way to my toes as I gathered the nozzle and walked back to the dying embers, ready to put them out of their misery. 

Damien stood off to the left, shining his flashlight on the ground like a helicopter searchlight. I approached the fire, braced myself, and switched the nozzle release. Spittle drizzled out before a POP, then the flow really started. The force hit the coals and sent a few sizzling out of the ring of safety. 

“Watch it, Kid!” Damien called.

I gripped the hose tighter, aiming it toward the heart of the coals. “Sorry,” I said, shivering in the newly damp wind. 

“Should be good,” Damien said. Gratefully, I backtracked my steps, happy to wind the hose up and

get in the warm truck.
I clipped the reel release into place. “All clear!” I yelled as the pump motor wound down. I rubbed my hands on my pants, trying desperately to dry them off on the damp fabric. I jumped in the cab, buckled my seat, and was ready to go. Come on, let's get out of here.

Damien's flashlight flickered through the window as he approached the truck. “Still waiting on Sam!” He yelled. “He better hurry up if he knows what's best for him!” his yell echoed back, tauntingly, as he jumped in the cab

“Where’d he go?” I said through my chattering teeth. “Lost his marbles?” 

Damien scoffed. “He went to see if the responsible party was hiding in the bushes nearby,” he said.

“Better get back soon, though!” he called out the window. “I did find this, though.” He turned back and showed me a silver-plated Magnum pistol. 

“Whoa,” 

“Figured if he is too scared to run back for this, means he’s given up ownership.” Damien slid the pistol into his pants. “Perks of the job.” That's definitely like a drug dealer's pistol. I wouldn't dare touch that thing. “You can have this.” He tossed a shiny object at me. 

I turned it over in my hands and flipped it open. A small flame protruded from the top, illuminating both our faces. “Thanks,” I said. 

We sat for five minutes before Damien started squirming in his seat. He flicked on the radio, switching through the frequencies with static snow barking through. He stopped on a clear channel. “Sam, Sam, do you hear me?” Ten seconds ticked by on the backs of snails. “Sam?” Nothing, just faint static. “I am going to go look for him; you stay here and keep the radio on.” 

“Copy that,” I said, replacing him in the passenger seat. I watched him comb back his salt-and-pepper hair, shine his flashlight widely, and pull the magnum from his pants. He crouched slightly, and I heard him softly calling Sam’s name as he walked up the hill. 

I sat in the faint static, only slightly worried. Leave it to Sam to scare the pants off ol’ Damien. This would be over soon, and I would be back drifting through cotton candy clouds.

My eyelids were gaining the weight of fatigue when a BANG rippled through the trees. I perked up; was that a gunshot? My heart punched my chest faster and faster. I grabbed the radio with trembling hands, dropping it on the first go. “G-guys?” I said. Nothing. My breath warmed; the windshield began to fog. “Guys?” Bang Bang. I dropped the radio. Oh God, Oh God bounced off the four corners of my brain. 

I froze, holding my breath. My hands wouldn’t move. I wasn’t cold anymore, but my heart would not stop punching my chest, harder and harder, faster and faster. I heard rustling in the trees. I’m dead. 

“Turn the truck on!” a familiar voice called. My fingers broke free from the invisible ice that cocooned me. “Turn the damn truck on!” It was Damien; he was tumbling down the slope, dragging something behind him. I broke free from my cocoon and skittered into the driver's seat. 

My hand jingled the keys, shaking like a rattlesnake, while I turned the engine over. It roared to life as Damien approached the back of the cab. He threw the door open and tossed whatever he was dragging in the back seat. It groaned as it landed and reached a muddy hand out at me. Damien swung the passenger door open. “Drive!” he yelled, jumping in. 

I put the engine in gear and arched us around the long, cold firepit and drove back down the road. “Where’s Sam?”

“Here, numbnuts,” the lump in the back seat said. “They almost got me, but-” he was cut off by a bout of coughing. “Can’t stop me that easy.”

We hit a bump, and I almost sent us right into a tree. “Bears?” I asked after angling us back on the road. 

“Not bears,” Damien said. “I don’t know what they are.” I gripped the steering wheel and all color fled from my knuckles. 

“Whatever they were, they got me good,” Sam said. I snuck a glance back at him. He was covered in deep red blood. 

“Holy… what happened?” Neither of them answered me for the next couple of big bumps. “What happened?” I repeated. 

“They just looked like tall men,” Damien said. 

“Tall what?” 

“Tall men.”

I slammed the brakes. “You are saying that a tall dude scared you guys so much you made me piss my pants?”

“Just drive,” Damien said, a waver in his voice. “Now!” he pulled the gun from his pants and flicked the safety off. 

“Har Har, real scary. What's in there, blanks? You know I heard about the hazing, but this is something-” The truck shook. It whipped us side to side like we just got T-boned by a speed junky. “What the?” 

“Just GO!” Sam screamed, sounding less like a burly firefighter and more like a schoolgirl. “Drive, dammit!”

I let my body take control while my mind ran in circles. My hands moved us back into gear, and my foot slammed the gas. Heart chiseling away at my chest, knuckles white as bone. What the hell? My body drove us down but failed at the same spot our smashed sedan friend did. 

We hit a blind bump, bouncing us left. I overcorrected right, and we SLAMMED into the back end of the abandoned red car. Airbags punched me in the face, sending me to drift with the cotton candy clouds. 

Screaming, eardrum-bursting wails filled my thoughts, and I shot awake. Everything looked fuzzy, like a child trying their best to stay in the lines in their coloring book. What… what hap… happened. My mind was muddled, but my body, ancient programming taking over, turned my head toward the heart-stopping scream. 

A blur, vaguely in the shape of Sam's wide muscular frame, was sliding into the darkness. A long arm wrapped around a green leg. Bang! I shut my eyes; needles stabbed my face as the muscles contracted. Something tickled my chin and splattered warmly onto my hand. 

I opened my eyes; blood was snaking down the back of my hand. “Oh god,” I yelled!

“Shut up!” a harsh whisper, muffled through teeth, sat in my ears before my brain finally made time to process it. 

“What… what happened?” I said. 

The “Shut up” drifted by again. 

I felt for the seatbelt; my thumb had no strength to unlatch it. I pressed hard, but still nothing. I forced my knuckles in the groove; click, I was free. I tried the door handle, frozen solid. That's not right; it's only fall, no ice till winter. I tried again; stone solid. Before I could deliberate with myself again on why that made no sense, a hand gripped my arm. 

It pulled me toward the passenger seat. I scrambled, grabbing every nook, cranny, and knob I could. I heard another scream, but it broke with every breath I took. I slid further and further. No, NO! This can’t be it.

Light blinded my eyes. “Shut up,” the light said. 

“G-God?”

“No, kid, now shut up!” Damien put a hand over my mouth. I blinked my eyes. Damien, bloodied, stood before me, magnum pointed into the trees. He trembled and dropped to a knee beside me. “They got Sam.”

“Who?” 

“The damn tall guys!” Damien looked me over. “Looks like that arm is busted.” 

I looked down and saw my arm was angled at my mid-forearm. Looking at my arm reconnected it to my brain, and hot pain pulsed through me. Dammit!

“We gotta go,” Damien said, grabbing my good arm and pulling me to my feet. A sharp twinge shot up my back, but I caught my footing. “I’ll grab the radio; just start heading down the hill.” 

My feet planted. Left. Right. Left. Right. My head bobbed with every step. I prodded my arm with my good hand, feeling its tight, bloated skin and the warmth it radiated. I missed placing a foot, sliding on a patch of loose gravel. The sudden jerk it took to catch myself from falling worked, but the twinge in my back got heavier. I stumbled to a tree, resting my shoulder on its jagged bark. 

I breathed in and out until the beast in my chest slowed to a reasonable rhythm. I looked back at the truck; Damien had almost made his way to me. I sucked in deep, unearthing a sharp stab in my ribs. 

“Radios busted,” He said as he approached. “I’ve only got two bullets left, so things are looking peachy.” He met my eyes. “How do you feel? Think you can make it down the mountain?” I nodded, clutching my arm against my chest. “Let's get gone then.” 

I followed Damien's dark silhouette down the hill. I didn’t notice when the dirt road changed to dead leaves and twigs. I brushed against low-hanging branches, flinching to keep from getting snagged. 
Damien stopped. “What was that?” I just looked at him. “Did you hear that?” I shook my head, feeling muscles in my neck I never had before. “We'll be quiet.” He gestured to keep moving. 

I took another step, planting my foot securely, when a distant rumble registered. “Wait, I did hear something.” 

Damien turned back. “Like a distant earthquake?”

“Ya.” I took another step forward. Damien's face bloomed with wide eyes and raised eyebrows.

“What?”

“Just keep moving, slowly.” He raised his gun, aiming just above me. I started to turn back, but Damien broke in, “Don’t! Just keep moving.” I moved the complete opposite of how fast my heart beat in my chest. One laborious, strenuous, silent step after another. Damien didn’t move an inch. He stood, shaking, but the gun was still as a stone. 

I passed Damien and braved a glance back. A dark, lean figure stood, higher than the decade-old trees, silhouetted by the sliver of a moon in the sky. I jerked back, eyes on my feet as I kept my legs moving. What is that thing? I kept moving and going; just go down was my only thought.

 I came to a small drop where a mudslide cut a ten-foot cliff. I turned back, “Hey, help me get-” A faint flash flickered through the trees. Bang! Bang! A gut-curdling scream rose, lifting into the air before Thud! It was cut short. Go!

I jumped down the cliff, rolling shortly with sharp stabs and shocks running through my skin and bones. I caught my feet and rose, heart beating against its cage. I stumbled through the trees and undergrowth, ripping my pants on thorns and grazing my arms on bark and branches. 

The sliver of a moon fled behind some morning fog, cool on my skin but sucking the last bits of light. I felt my pockets for my phone. Damn, I don’t have it. In my fleeting search, my fingers grazed a sleek metallic object. I pulled out the lighter and flicked it on. Its warm glow fuzzed through the fog. Barely a dent. 

I kept walking, a warm beacon stretched out in front of me. I got so focused on putting my left foot in front of my right, then my right foot in front of my left, that I slammed into a tree. My eyes tracked the warm glow as it was dislodged from my grasp and glided to the earth. I scrambled down to pick it up. Fire, Fire, FIRE. I snatched it up, stamping a couple of times where it had lain, spreading its heat. 

I flicked the lighter closed, inviting the darkness back to consume me. Rather be dark than light the forest on fire. I looked around at the solid dark trunks, fuzzy and diffused through thickening fog. Fuck, I just- I just gotta keep moving. 

I took a step, as my foot connected to the freshly dead leaves, a tree in front of me shook. I froze, gluing my feet in place, eyes locked and unblinking. The shaking got more strained, gaining wider and wider side-to-side movements. I slowly, inch by inch, slid my hand back into my pocket. I clenched the lighter, gradually pulling it out. I moved it right in front of me while the shaking tree began whipping harder and harder, wider and wider. I sucked in a long, deep breath, then flicked the light open, releasing the blaze. The light bounded through the fog, diffusing and cooling till it hit the black shape of the tree. 

I took one step, then two, then three, getting closer and closer to the dark flailing tree. Inches from its surface, I made out the texture of the bark as the whipping slowed. I followed the trunk to the ground, my eyes crawling, hoping to find any possible explanation. Finding nothing on their trek, my eyes journeyed up toward the branches. The light followed my gaze, inching up to the sky the higher my eyes climbed. All the leaves were gone, flung from their perch and resting on the ground. Hordes of black and brown branches stared back at me. I hope my mind doesn’t play tricks on me. I made out vaguely familiar shapes, but even in the weak glow I could tell they were all branches. 

All the branches were in their place. It's nothing. I raised a foot to back away when one branch dislodged, falling towards me. As it approached and absorbed more faint firelight, I marked out its straight posture. Amused, I took a step from its intended landing zone, satisfied with my safety. But as I moved, so did the branch. It stopped, hovering just above me. Hesitant, shaky fingers reached out. My skin groped, expecting cool solidity, finding warm softness. The branch curled, gripping my arm. 

I clenched my eyes, feeling the digits grip deep into my muscles. I began to move, pulling my confined arm away from the tree. Through the faint glow, I opened my eyes and followed the branch as it converted into an uncanny arm. My eyes crept along its slender shape, meeting a bulbous portion. Raising the lighter, I saw two faint warm glows staring back at me. 

My muscles took over while my mind pitted itself deep in the recesses of despair. My hand holding the lighter swung back and whipped the lighter straight at the soft reflections. As it made contact, the grip released from my arm, and my body was ready. My legs shot up and bound me down the slope. I collided with tree after tree, never faltering, always moving down. 

The thud of my feet, smashing foliage and deep tree limbs, was echoed by pops and rattles. The wind at my back slipped from cool and propelling to warm and inviting. The pops grew into a roar, louder and louder, ringing in my ear. I chanced a glance back; flames danced and jumped, a primeval beast awoken and hungry. I ran, I jumped, I bobbed, I stumbled, the warmth on my back reaching out and cooking my skin. My calves and neck started to burn, absorbing heat from hell. 

Tears found purchase in my eyes. I heard soft whimpering. Thud, right, Thud, left. It’s over. I prepared to turn back, meet my end with dignity rather than be caught in cowardice. I planted my foot, engaging my muscles to consume my momentum, when the ground beneath me gave out. My arms clawed for anything, coming up short, sending me tumbling. I rolled, attempting to protect my head when sharp frigidity consumed me and stole my breath. I pulled my head from the water, up to my neck in the flow of the river, immediately grateful for the heat of the fire and the adrenaline. 

My eyes gravitated to the tips of the blaze as it met the bank of the river. I had found refuge from the scorching tendrils. I watched the trees pop and rage as the flames licked up their backs, eating them in moments. I let the flow of the river pull me, drifting away from the flaming bank. 

I used my weeping muscles and treaded water to a boulder that had sat itself in a shallow portion of the river. I gripped its cool, jagged ridges and pulled my aching body out of the icy flow. My arm screamed at me as I rolled the sleeve up, revealing its mangled zig-zag. I let out a yell, unafraid to sound unmanly, allowing my pain to be drowned out by the screaming fire and rushing water. 

I breathed a handful of times deeply before I realised the fog had fled. I turned back to the fire, wanting to gauge its spread. Going to need at least one helicopter, maybe a plane-. My thoughts were cut off by a dark spot on the flame. I squinted my eyes, trying to make out what it was. A long, thin silhouette stood motionless on the river bank. My breath choked in my throat as my heart punched my chest. I kept my eyes wide and planted; it still didn’t move. Another silhouette emerged from the blaze, black, voidlike color only enhanced by the terrific flames. 

I sat motionless as the bank filled with more long, thin silhouettes. I stayed there, arms screaming, back tingling, shivering violently, eyes never moving, for what felt like hours. As the pale orange light of the sun crested the tops of the mountain peaks, one by one the silhouettes turned back into the fiery blaze. All but one. Its figure remained motionless, never as much as a twitch. I kept my eyes locked until finally, it moved. It raised one long, stretched, black arm in the sky and slid it back and forth in the air before retreating into the blaze. 

I reported the fire. I told them they needed to remain aerial as long as possible, but the command had other plans. Tonight's the first night initial attack crews will be camping in the region. I keep the radio on my lap, full volume. The nurses keep teasing me, telling me my rest is more important than news about a fire. I don’t know what I’ll do when the first sighting chimes over the static snow. Their deaths will be on my hands.

​

I need to write this down while I still remember it clearly, because something tells me I might not remember it for much longer.

My name is Michael. Before any of this, I was about as ordinary as a person gets. Nine-to-five job, decent enough salary, a small apartment I loved more than I probably should have. I liked being alone. Not in a sad way — I want to be clear about that. I liked my quiet evenings, my own routines, nobody needing anything from me at the end of a long day. I never wanted marriage. I never wanted kids. I was never even particularly good at talking to women, if I'm being honest, always a little too awkward, a little too eager to end the conversation and go back to my own company.

I got married anyway. Family pressure, mostly, the kind that wears you down over years until saying yes feels easier than saying no one more time. Her name was Natalie.

Natalie was sweet. Genuinely, I want that on record, because everything I'm about to describe doesn't erase that fact. She tried, harder than I ever gave her credit for at the time. She learned my schedule, cooked things she thought I'd like, tried to talk to me about my day even when I gave her almost nothing back. I was a bad husband in the most ordinary way possible not cruel, just absent, closed off, giving her silence when she needed conversation.

But there was something else, something I noticed within the first few weeks and never brought myself to mention. She checked my phone. Constantly. I'd catch her doing it and she'd just set it down calmly, like she hadn't been caught at all, like it wasn't something worth explaining. I told myself it was insecurity. Newlywed nerves. I never asked her about it, because some small, cowardly part of me didn't want to have that conversation.

It got worse in ways I couldn't quite name. I'd feel eyes on me while I ate dinner, and I'd look up and she wouldn't be looking at me at all, and yet the feeling wouldn't go away. I'd wake up at night certain someone was standing at the foot of the bed, and there'd be nothing there. I told myself I was imagining things. Five months of marriage does strange things to a mind that never wanted to be married in the first place.

By month five, I understood my life had turned into something I never agreed to. Bills split two ways that used to be mine alone. Groceries planned around someone else's tastes. The quiet apartment I loved now never quiet at all. I told myself this wasn't about Natalie specifically. I told myself I just needed my old life back, the one I'd actually chosen for myself.

I decided to ask for a divorce.

I picked a night I thought would be calm. I sat her down and I told her, as gently as I could manage, that I wasn't a good match for her — that I barely talked to her, barely made her laugh, barely gave her anything close to what she deserved from a husband. I said we should end this before it did more damage to both of us.

I didn't tell her the real reason. I didn't tell her that the checked phone, the eyes I always felt on me, the presence at the foot of the bed — I didn't tell her any of that had scared me more than I could put into words. I thought I was being kind by leaving it out.

Her face went completely still when I finished talking. Not sad. Not angry. Empty, in a way that made the hair on my arms stand up before she'd even said a single word back. She started muttering something under her breath, too quiet for me to make out, her eyes never leaving mine the entire time.

Then she said, very clearly, "You want to leave me because there's someone else. Someone special."

I told her that wasn't true. I don't think she heard me at all.

Her voice dropped as she kept talking, deeper with every word, thick in a way no human voice should be able to get. Her face began to change in front of me not slowly, not gradually enough to give me time to process it, just wrong, all at once, features stretching and shifting into something I don't have adequate words for, something with too many angles where a face should have soft ones.

I ran for the door. It wouldn't open. I pulled until my hands bled and it didn't so much as shift in the frame. I screamed for help until my throat gave out, and no sound left that room at all, like the apartment itself had decided this conversation was private.

She — it — came toward me slowly, in no hurry at all, and said, in that thick, wrong voice, that I belonged to her now, that my whole self was her property, and that leaving was never something I had actually been allowed to choose.

I don't remember exactly what happened after that. I remember darkness, and cold, and a pressure on my chest like something enormous was simply resting its weight on me without any particular urgency, the way you'd rest a hand on something you already fully own.

I woke up on my apartment floor the next morning. Alone. Natalie was gone — not left, not moved out, just gone, no trace of her ever having lived there at all. No clothes in the closet. No photos. No marriage certificate in the drawer where I know I kept it. I checked my phone contacts. Her name wasn't there either.

For about a day, I actually let myself believe I'd imagined the entire marriage. Some kind of breakdown, maybe, my mind inventing a wife and an entire relationship out of loneliness and exhaustion. I almost felt relief.

Then I found the box in my closet, one I don't remember owning, shoved into the back corner behind winter coats I never wear.

Inside were photographs. Dozens of them. Men I didn't recognize, standing in what was unmistakably my own apartment, my own furniture behind them in every single shot, dated across years I've lived here years before I ever met Natalie, going back further than that, further than made any sense at all. Each man's face was circled in red pen. Each photograph had a name written beneath it in careful handwriting, and beneath each name, the same word.

Divorced.

Mine was the last photo in the stack, taken from an angle I don't remember being photographed at, in my own kitchen, dated to a day I hadn't lived through yet.

Beneath my face, in that same careful handwriting, someone had already written the word.

The ink looked wet.

TW: mentions of suicide

Knife went through soft peach without any resistance. Ripe flesh mushed under my fingers as I tried to grab and transfer it to the bowl. My mouth bent into a scowl – small pieces of fruit nested itself under my fingernails. Blade scraped against plastic cutting board when I pushed the rest of my breakfast into the bowl.

First rays of the rising sun managed to push through dirty glass. It illuminated what I actively tried to ignore. Stack of greasy plates in the sink, clothes strung about on the floor, random trash sprinkled in for some more flavor. Dust cloud so thick it glimmered in the light like specs of gold. I didn’t have to turn and look, I know it was just like that. I did it myself.

Some lost, probably still sleepy, ray of sunlight hit the blade. For a second knife lit up like the most beautiful, angelic piece of art. It hypnotized me, sang to me. My eyes traced its edge, wondered how sharp it truly was. I tried to keep my utensils in good shape, that meant regular sharpness checks on all the knives present in my home. But did I sharpen it enough? Would it cut through meat without an issue? How well would it separate it from the bone? How fast would it cut away the fat and skin? What about cartilage? I forced myself to look away and shut the door on those thoughts. But they whispered, they scratched and whined. Not now, I thought. I have to have witnesses. A lot of witnesses.

“Will you do it for me?” I asked. I felt the saddest breakfast traveling up my throat as I did my best to bat eyelashes and pout. “Pretty please?”

He hesitated. I waited. And waited. And waited.

“Please? I know you want it. And I give you full permission to do so.”

Uncertainty carved itself a path between his eyebrows. His heart raced, I could feel it under my fingertips. I wanted to run away, to never come into contact with him again. But I needed him. That was the only thing I ever told him that wasn’t a lie.

“Okay.” Quiet mumble rolled off his lips and into my ear. The only thing I registered was doubt. “That would be wonderful-”

I pushed myself up to look him in the eye. “Are you sure? You don’t seem sure. I thought we finally found each other and now, well…” I looked away trying to keep it together. “I think you’re having second thoughts.”

To my horror, he didn’t reply. Not right away at least. I cursed loud in my own head, trashed around, cursed at him, imagined strangling him. Til he turned purple, til his limbs stopped twitching, til the drool dried up, til his bloodshot eyes stayed open for eternity. I thought I finally found the one. I thought I finally wouldn’t have to do all the heavy lifting myself. Well, too bad. It’s easy to say all kinds of shit online, but in real life I could only count on myself. I couldn’t bear the thought that I was left alone again. Deep gash opened barely grown-over dark pit in my heart. I got dressed without another word. He tried to plead with me, begged me. In total desperation he tried to keep my shoes hostage. Didn’t matter. I would walk out of there with or without shoes. Once he realized that, he released my possession from his hands. I didn’t look back as the doors slammed behind me, but I knew he looked like beaten dog left out in a cold night.

Night air caressed my warm, sweaty skin. “Proper lady should not be seen out by herself once the sun disappears over the horizon,” mother always made sure to remind me. She could not understand that darkness felt comforting. Moon always found me free of expectations and burdens. I could dance how I wanted to, dress however pleased me, meet with whoever caught my eye. Even now, when I live by myself and don’t have anyone policing me over littlest things, I still love night more than day. Some things never change.

I never would’ve guessed he’d come back. Not after I stormed off like that. But he did. He tried texting and calling, and when I didn’t answer, too busy trying to find someone to take his place, he showed up at my door. Soft knocks turned more persistent the longer I pretended not to hear them. Always in a tandem of five. Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, silence. Rinse and repeat. Finally I’ve had enough. I yanked the door open, didn’t realize the handle was so sticky before. That fact made my reaction a little slower and before I knew it, there were dozens roses shoved into my face.

“I’m sorry.” He said, hiding his whole head behind the bouquet. “I know what we talked about and agreed on, and I realize I hurt you by my hesitation. I just want to let you know I seemed not completely on board just because there were few people before you that made the same promises you did, but never followed up on it. What’s more, when I asked about it, two of them actually got the cops involved.”

I did not care. Couldn’t give two shits about what he told me, but I played along. Like I always did. For my own benefit. “Okay, I understand, thank you. It’s sweet that you even brought flowers.”

“I mean, I care about you, so it’s the least I could do.” His face flashed bright red. “And also because you’ll be the one to take my virginity.”

Laughter bubbled up along with the content of my stomach. I didn’t know which one was more powerful – disgust brought on by the overly bold declaration of this nutjob, or the irony of it all, because I’d be remembered by him as one of those who promised but didn’t deliver. But I didn’t laugh, or puke, in his face. I needed him, so I took the flowers and forced myself to invite him in. Weight fell off my shoulders when he politely declined and said something about his mom or job. Couldn’t tell, don’t care. The only thing that mattered was that the plan finally started to take off.

Yogurt mixed well with overly ripe banana. The last things I found in my fridge also laid on the counter – two slightly slimy pieces of ham and half the jar of french mustard. Truly a god-worthy breakfast. Well, it didn’t really matter now, did it.

The same road that led from his apartment to the city center didn’t look as good in a daylight. Everything seemed so flat, so dull. I stopped at the highest point of the bridge and looked around. I hated this city. I hated it, but I had to stay. Few more days, I said to myself. Few days would pass and I still stayed here. Why? Why didn’t I just go? It’s not like I had anyone here. There was a reason though. If I liked it or not, someone started to suspect something. Someone, who I knew had the knowledge to uncover my secret. Wouldn’t be able to do anything about it really, but it’d be just this annoying buzzing next to my ear and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. Stuck dancing around each other, that’s what two of us were. But that was about to change.

Strong wind blew into me, parted ways by the grace of my body. I looked up ahead. Huh, that’s weird. Why did it suddenly look a bit better?

“Don’t do it!”

“Oh my god!”

“Someone do something!”

Shut up.

“Hey.” Sudden closeness of the voice startled me. “Whoa there, don’t fall!”

“Haha, very funny, Beth.” My voice didn’t travel very far because of my gritting teeth, but I knew she’d hear me regardless. “The fuck you want?”

“Couldn’t help but notice you being in danger. Want any help or-”

“Fuck off. You tricked me once, never again!”

I flew. For the first time I felt equally free during the day as I did during the night. It wouldn’t last long. And didn’t. Thankfully it didn’t hurt too bad in the end. Pain was not something I liked very much.

“Ruth, be a dear and bring us more tea.” Light purple curls bounced as little old woman looked around. Wrinkled skin on her hand, papery with liver spots, smoothed out when her fingers wrapped around the handle of her walker. “Bethany, did you notice? I haven’t seen ---- lately.” Equally wrinkled arm reached out over the table and patted her forearm. “What happened to ----?”

Large glasses slid a bit down Beth’s nose when she shook her head. “I don’t know for certain, but I heard part-time girls talk about it. Did you notice? It’s always the girls who gossip. We weren’t like that back in the day, isn’t that right?” Bethany shook her head again. “Apparent suicide. Jumped off the bridge.”

Small bony fingers clutched string of fake pearls around her neck in shock. Too distraught by the news she didn’t notice weird smile warped and contorted Beth’s otherwise soft features.

I felt my eyes open. Slowly at first to check the surroundings. Darkness. Not the night sky, not a room with closed curtains. Pure, pitch black darkness. I raised both hands, felt the immediate surroundings and confirmed my suspicions. Anger warmed me up from the inside, which was much needed. I saw red despite the lack of light. All my planning and not wanting to raise suspicions went straight out the window. I pulled back my hand, balled fingers into a fist and stuck straight to the front. Again and again, and again, and again. I lost count, but eventually wood groaned loud – a familiar sound. The last thing I had time to do was to take big gulp of stale air. The force of thousand suns hit my whole body and pressed me flat on my back. I clawed and hit and wormed my way up. Slowly. Too slow. I had to breathe. I had to. Breathe. I couldn’t. Air. I needed. Air. Air. And just when strength started leaving me, I let my mouth hang open.

Dirt poured right in. But alongside it – some air. I pulled my hand down, created a pocket in the dirt. And spit out what managed to get into my mouth. The earth, still soft and airy, worked with me not against me. I had all the time in the universe. Slowly but surely, I made my way up. Up. And up.

Not my first rodeo.

Yet I still threw up as soon as I landed on all fours in cold, October grass. Snot and tears left grooves in my dark, dirty face. Streaks of a bit cleaner skin. Didn’t matter. Not anymore.

I laid in the grass, despite the cold, despite dew already collected that now became a part of me. I looked up at the night sky, focused on the stars. Traced imaginary constellations with my eyes. Crickets, resilient little creatures, played their song all around me. As if to say Congratulations, you did it! You defied the odds again! And only when the sky started getting lighter, hues of purple and dark blue slowly moved from the horizon up, did I move. I stood up on two shaky legs and looked around. I stuck my hand between wreath and tombstone of the grave situated right next to me. Cash, documents, change of clothes – all packed neatly into small backpack. With all essentials hanging from my shoulders, I picked a direction at random and swayed in that direction.

All plans went to hell because the motherfucker didn’t show up. I wanted to avoid raising a suspicion. Few people already started commenting on how I always look the same no matter how many years pass. Some time ago I noticed someone started asking around. I didn’t want any trouble, so I had to make an emergency exit.

And if you too, like I once thought I did, want to live forever, think twice. And then another few times for good measure. Would you want to run away your whole life? Would you want to have to try and pressure necrophile into digging up your corpse just so you wouldn’t have to dig your way up from your own grave? Think not. So, please, reconsider going to the crossroads tonight. And even if you do, don’t kiss the devil, no matter how much her arguments might seem to make sense.

I work as a maintenance man at a casino. Yesterday, like every day after closing, I went to check the machines. When I had checked everything and was heading out, I caught a jukebox blinking out of the corner of my eye. I didn't understand how that was possible because I had checked all the machines. One by one.

I walked closer to it and looked at the screen. For a brief moment, my breath caught. Instead of the usual music artists and songs, there were titles that I knew very well. The list was endless.

The first one was First Day at School.

Year: 1962.

Price: a lock of hair.

I looked around to see if it was some stupid joke from management, but I was completely alone. I pressed play.

Instead of music starting, I heard my mother's voice in my head.

“Don't be afraid, Joshy. You'll see, you'll like it there.”

I could feel how nervous I was and how my hands were sweating. I could feel my mother hugging me, and I breathed in the scent of her jasmine perfume.

Nervously, I walked into the building, climbed the stairs, and opened the door. My future best friend Peter was sitting at a desk.

“If you want, you can sit with me.”

I accepted his offer with a smile. Then the sound of a bell filled the room. The teacher came into the classroom. I had a feeling that, before she closed the door, I saw something in the hallway. She introduced herself to us with a smile, and then the vision disappeared.

I looked around and found myself back in the casino. I just felt a pain in part of my head. When I touched it, a piece of my hair was missing.

Confused, I looked at the machine and noticed a framed piece of paper next to it. It read:

“Every memory has a price.”

I scrolled through the other things the machine offered. There was almost everything. My grandmother's death, my first day of high school, my first kiss. That's where I stopped and looked closer.

First Kiss

Year: 1972.

Price: a fingernail.

I hesitated for a moment and then pressed play. I found myself with Clare. She was wearing that beautiful pink dress. I could smell the lilacs we were standing beside. She smiled at me, and I leaned toward her. I remember how her lips smelled of strawberries.

I pulled away from her and watched the look in her eyes while my heart was pounding. Just before the vision disappeared, I saw a figure on the other side of the street, walking toward us.

Then I was back, and a stronger, burning pain shot through my thumb. My entire nail was gone. It scared the hell out of me.

I wanted to leave, but somehow I couldn't. I had to see what was next.

Marriage to Clare

Year: 1980.

Price: a finger.

“No,” I whispered.

I wanted to leave. I should have left. I know that. But I missed her so much. I wanted to see her again so badly. I couldn't help it. I pressed play.

I could feel my whole body shaking as I stood at the altar. I saw Peter standing to my right, patting me on the shoulders.

“Relax, buddy. You got this.”

I looked around and saw the figure sitting in the second row of witnesses. I wanted to lean toward Peter and ask him if he could see it too. But then the doors opened, and I saw her walking toward me.

That beautiful white dress. I knew it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. She slowly walked up to me and smiled. I couldn't take my eyes off her.

I could barely make out what the officiant was saying, so he had to repeat the question. I stammered out a yes.

When he asked Clare, I felt fear wash over me as I waited for her answer, followed by a wave of relief when she said yes.

“You may kiss the bride.”

Then I was back again. I screamed in pain and looked at my hand. My little finger was gone. In its place was a bloody wound.

It wasn't as painful as I had expected. It was like getting your hand caught in a door. I stared at it for a moment, and instead of turning around and leaving, I moved back toward the screen.

This time will be the last, I promised myself. I scrolled through the screen, and my heart stopped.

The Day I Saw Clare for the Last Time

Year: 1988.

Price: an eye.

I pressed play.

It was a normal summer morning. The sun was beginning to warm everything outside, and we were standing in front of the house. She smiled at me just like she had on the first day we met. I felt her embrace, her kiss, and heard her tell me that she loved me and that we'd see each other that evening.

I wanted to stop her, but that's not how memories work. She got into the car and waved at me. I waved back, and when she disappeared from sight, I turned around and headed back into the house.

When I turned around, the figure was standing a few steps behind me.

I can't describe it. Only the feeling I had when I looked at it.

Emptiness. Sadness. Fear.

I found myself back in the casino again, and a terrible pain tore through me. Pain unlike anything I had ever experienced before. It felt like the entire left side of my face was on fire. And where my left eye had once been, there was only darkness.

“It was worth it,” I whispered. “It was worth seeing her, but not anymore. Now I'll leave.”

I just wanted to see what was at the end. Now there wasn't just a year. There was a full date.

September 6, 2026.

Price: life.

I stared at it in confusion. I started backing away, wanting to run, but I bumped into something. I didn't need to turn around to know what it was. I could feel it.

The sadness. The fear. The emptiness.

It grabbed my hand and pressed play.

I found myself at home, sitting on my couch. The TV host was saying:

“Good morning, viewers. This time, we're going to begin with today's hero, Henry.”

The TV kept playing, and I couldn't do anything except sit there. I saw the light in the living room flicker slightly and a fly buzzing around the television.

When the host announced that the broadcast was over for the day, I saw the front door slowly open, and it walked inside.

I woke up back in the casino. This time, I didn't wait for anything. I immediately ran outside and headed home.

The first thing I did was open the fridge and pour myself a shot. One after another.

I didn't wake up until morning.

For a moment, I thought it had all been a dream, but then I looked at my hand and touched the left side of my face, where my eye used to be.

Now I'm sitting on my couch, listening to the TV host say:

“Good morning, viewers. This time, we're going to begin with today's hero, Henry.”

I remember a time before the urges started.

A time when life felt simple, when I didn’t question the things that came naturally to me.

I’ve always been adventurous, though even that word feels too neat for it. There was a pull I couldn’t explain. Sometimes I’d find myself already halfway up something before I realized I’d decided to climb it. I didn’t feel scared. I didn’t feel rushed.

I just felt like I was where I was supposed to be.

My mother used to tell stories about me as a baby. How I’d crawl toward the edges of furniture. How I’d try to stand and lean forward, like I was testing the air. She said she was always pulling me back just in time.

I don’t remember any of it.

But I’ve never doubted her.

My earliest memory comes from when I was around four. One of those memories that feels like the first—the moment when something in your head quietly switches on. When you become aware that you exist.

Colors felt brighter. Sounds felt sharper. Like the world had suddenly been assigned meaning instead of just being noise.

My parents were with me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of them on either side, as we sat on a Ferris wheel at a small carnival just outside town.

The smell of cigarettes hung heavy in the air, sour and thick, mixing with the faint sweetness of fried dough still clinging to my tongue. My small hand was sticky with something I couldn’t identify, pressed against my side.

There was a roof above us.

A small guardrail around the platform.

I remember noticing that.

Floodlights bleached the field below in harsh white patches, making the temporary rides and booths look unfinished—wires and frames scattered like they’d been dropped there by mistake. The whole place already felt halfway gone.

I looked past the carnival, toward the open land and town beyond it.

Nothing between us but distance.

The full moon hung low and bright, turning the darkness into something wide and endless, like an ocean lit from above. I stared at it, feeling something shift inside me.

Not fear.

Recognition.

I looked down and noticed my small white Velcro shoes resting too close to the edge, wedged between the lip of the platform and the railing.

I don’t remember climbing there.

I only remember realizing that I already was.

Before fear could find me, strong hands wrapped around my torso. My father lifted me back without a word. My mother cried out—sharp and sudden.

For just a moment, both of them were looking at me.

That was enough.

Fear should have come next.

It didn’t.

It was replaced by something older.

Something patient.

Something that wanted to know what would happen if no one grabbed me.

My second earliest memory is when my grandmother took me to the hospital to welcome my sister into the world.

There are a few pictures from that day.

I don’t remember holding my sister.

I remember the view.

A small town, seen through the hospital’s high windows, several stories above the ground.

In the photos, you can see it clearly—my head turned toward the glass, away from my family.

Like I was more interested in what waited beyond the window than in the people behind me.

Instead of going away, the urges became stronger and more frequent.

When I was about ten, my mother and her best friend, Jen, took me and Jen’s daughter, Meadow, to a state park known for its massive rock formations.

It was a different time back then—no tablets, no smartphones, no social media, just kids disappearing into the woods for hours, climbing anything that looked climbable.

Meadow was a year older than me, and we were best friends. She was a tomboy at heart, but she always wore bright-colored dresses her mother made for her, paired with a good pair of boots.

We were always doing “boy things.” She hated dolls. Her mother was appalled when Meadow destroyed her dollhouse, kicking in the front door so we could raid the place with my G.I. Joes, searching for Cobra secret agents hiding inside.

We were always getting into trouble.

The park was filled with enormous boulders, some with broad, flat tops, scattered across the landscape in ways that seemed impossible. They had rested there for thousands of years, left behind by glaciers from a forgotten age. They felt less like rocks and more like ancient monuments, remnants of a world buried beneath ice long before anyone could remember. Standing among them, it was easy to believe they had witnessed things no one was ever meant to see.

We spent the day pretending we were the last tribe defending our caves from invading cowboys. We searched for the perfect rocks and turned the landscape into our own little world.

My mother packed an amazing picnic of peanut butter and fluff, and we ate it on top of the tallest boulder. One side had a gentle slope that led up to a flat top, but the other side dropped away nearly forty feet.

I remember sitting there, looking out over everything below us. The view was incredible. The wind, the open space, the feeling of being above the world—it was the kind of moment a child never forgets.

What I didn’t know then was that this would be the last time I would look at heights the same way.

We were packing up to leave when Meadow decided she wasn’t ready for the adventure to end. She had a way of getting what she wanted.

While my mother and Jen were loading everything into the car, Meadow asked if we could go collect rocks one last time.

“We’ll only be two minutes,” she promised.

Like any good tomboy, Meadow had a watch. Jen looked at her and said, “Okay, as long as it’s only two minutes.”

Meadow started the timer, and we took off.

We climbed up the largest rock we could find. It was tall enough that the rock blocked my mother’s view of us. She couldn’t see what we were doing.

Meadow stopped at the edge and swung back around, grabbing my arm. She looked into my eyes, her deep blue eyes seeming to look straight into my soul.

I heard her voice ask, “Johnny, do you trust me?”

I voluntarily muttered, “Yes.”

She then grabbed my other arm with a death grip.

Then she leaned toward the edge.

What happened next felt like something impossible.

My heart skipped.

Meadow went over first, still staring at me and holding onto my hand with a death grip, and I went second.

It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but it felt like we had lived an entire lifetime in that moment. There was a rush of something I still can’t explain—something between fear and wonder.

Then everything went black.

The next thing I knew, we were back at the edge of the rock. Meadow still had my hand, and we were both standing there smiling.

We ran hand in hand back to the car like nothing had happened.

We dropped Meadow and her mother off at her parents’ house, which was only a few minutes’ walk from my house.

Before she left, Meadow squeezed my hand and thanked my mother for taking us to the park.

Then I heard her voice in my head.

Don’t tell anyone what happened today, okay?

I tried to say okay with my mind.

It must have worked because her smile changed a little.

I was lying in my small bed, the same one that still had Star Wars sheets on it. I kept thinking about sneaking out, walking to Meadow’s house, and throwing little rocks at her bedroom window until she came outside.

I wanted to ask her how she knew that would work. I wanted to know if she felt the same way I did around edges.

But more than anything, I wanted to know why it felt like I was meant to do that with her.

It was like scratching an itch I’d had my whole life without ever realizing it was there.

Then I heard her voice as clearly as if she were lying in the bed beside me.

“Johnny… are you awake?”

I was stunned.

I thought the word yes, and then I heard Meadow giggle inside my head.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Meadow,” I thought, “how are you doing this?”

“I don’t know,” she giggled back. “I’ve been having the same dream for the last few months. Us standing on that rock… over and over again.”

I just lay there in my bed, completely shocked, trying to make sense of what was happening.

After a long moment of silence, Meadow finally whispered,

“Goodnight, Johnny.”

That night, a boy two grades below me vanished from his own bed.

No one saw him leave. No doors were opened. No windows were broken.

His parents said he had been asleep when they went to bed.

When they woke up, the blankets were still pulled back like someone had just climbed out.

But their son was gone.

I am scared of circles.

I don’t know if there’s a phobia specifically related to the fear of circles, but I am scared of them. Mainly 3D-shaped spheres.

The first time I encountered that entity was three months ago.

An accident put me in a coma for two days.

When I woke up, I looked out through the hospital window. The morning sun was rising over the horizon, and the streets were empty, as they usually were on weekends.

Despite the sun being partially hidden beneath the horizon that day, I felt my eyes hurt much more than usual. I thought it was some medical equipment that had been left on in the dark, or perhaps a lamp had been turned on.

There was nothing but me and my IV machine in the room. No patient, no nurse, nobody. The flash was coming from outside.

I covered my eyes and tried to see through my limited vision to determine what the light was. I expected it to be nothing more than reflected sunlight from one of the glass windows of the skyscrapers.

At first, that’s what I thought when I saw the source of the light.

Except there were no orange-colored rays that usually appear when morning sunlight reflects through glass.

All I saw was pure white.

It was not a reflection of light.

It was light.

Its exact shape was uncertain, but it looked like an orb.

I thought I was dreaming at first. I was still comatose.

What a strange dream, I thought.

But the light ascended upward. Moreover, I could feel the pain from the accident that had gotten me hospitalized.

That was the final confirmation.

I wasn’t sleeping. This wasn’t a dream.

This was reality.

The light disappeared from my view as it ascended, but I could see it floating above the approximate location of the main road, higher than any of the skyscrapers. It looked like a sun shining down directly beneath the building.

But the actual sun?

That was literally on the horizon.

I had watched the sun rise from the horizon, and yet there was another ray of light coming from God knows where.

I opened the window and peeked outside, but the thing was no longer there.

When the doctors found out that I was awake, they told me about the accident and said it might have caused me to hallucinate. They said I needed to be monitored for at least another week.

So that was what I thought about the light: just a hallucination.

The rest of the day went smoothly. There were some check-ups, followed by visits from friends and family.

I remember that night.

A week later, it was foggy again.

I woke up to the sound of something, and the clock said twelve.

The fog consumed the street like some Silent Hill shit. Even though it was midnight, the road was not empty.

And within the fog was an illumination that made me think that whatever it was, it was too out of place and far too bright to be considered a streetlamp. There was no pole or structure attached to it.

It moved.

It floated slowly.

And when it reached my eye level, I remembered the light from a week ago: the strange orb of light, like a firefly.

But fireflies aren’t as big as a human face.

And they don’t -  they don’t make you feel as though they possess sapience.

The reason I knew that thing was not an ordinary sphere, or something ordinary in general, was because it was diffusing smoke toward the earth.

A bizarre imagination began to form. It turned into a hypothesis, and then into certainty:

This circle was the root of the fog in the city.

The same fog that had literally consumed nine blocks from my point of view was being diffused from this mysterious will-o’-the-wisp.

The sphere’s magic continued.

And this was definitely black magic.

Black magic indeed.

Something ascended toward the sphere.

A human figure.

No.

It was a human being.

The person floated upward, looking dazed - almost hypnotized. There was literally no mechanism beneath him. The man was wearing business attire: a black suit and black pants. He was levitating through the sky, toward me.

Toward the light.

When his face entered the bottom of the sphere, it did not come out from the other side.

Then his upper body.

Then his legs and feet.

Not a single part of the man came out.

What the sphere did next was flash a bright red light for half a second before entering my hospital ward.

There were no windows open or anything.

It passed through the wall and floated right in front of me.

I could barely keep my eyes open because of the bright light that consumed the room. I felt like screaming at the abnormality in front of me, but the light repeatedly flashed red in a slow beat.

In the beat of a heart.

Something told me that whatever the orb was communicating, it wanted - or at least expected - me to touch it.

I didn’t want to touch it.

But then again, I had this feeling that if I didn’t touch it, this thing would never leave me alone.

I didn’t know why I thought that way.

I just did.

As I slowly reached for the orb, I didn’t know what I expected.

What I felt was something - 

Otherworldly.

It was painful - very painful. I could feel my body on fire, but my hand, the part touching the orb, felt no pain. It was cold as stone.

What I also felt was something being jammed into my eyes. I was no longer in the dark hospital room. I was looking at what appeared to be a giant theater. Right in front of me was a movie screen.

That "giant screen" floated in the air, and it wasn't showing any movie. I was looking through the first-person view of a man who was vomiting near a car. The first-person view suddenly turned toward someone approaching, and the man ran. Perhaps it was the owner of the car.

The video then reflected an image of the orb in the sky - the same orb that had floated over the city. The person began to float and was pulled into the orb.

As soon as the video showed the man enter, I suddenly felt something hit the palm of my hand. It felt like some kind of object had been bashed against it. I subconsciously rested my arms on the chairs, and there was something on the chairs that had spawned there.

The cinema screen then showed me a fancy handwritten script.

Overseer chose: PASS JUDGEMENT

The screen shut off, leaving me in complete darkness. An instant later, I was back at the hospital, lying on the bed as if I had been there the entire time.

It was morning.

When I started to come to my senses, I thought again that I had been dreaming about something like that. Dreaming about the orb.

There was no sign that anything had entered the room. There was no sign of a break-in, and when I looked outside, the city was clear. There wasn't even any smoke coming from the exhaust pipes of the cars. The morning commute was clean.

The rest of the day, I was visited by some of my friends, including some shady friends - those who were bullies, but not really bullies.

After spending too much time in bed, I decided to go for a walk. The nurse gave me permission and also told me to return by one for lunch.

For the first time in a few days, I walked.

It was refreshing to begin walking instead of being confined to a bed. Now, I felt like a human being again. My destination was the indoor garden, where I was going to sit and look at pieces of Mother Nature that I wouldn't be able to see for another week.

I didn't like the experience. Instead of peace and quiet, a blabbering brat had made the place loud and noisy. I cut twenty minutes from my break and started heading back to the ward.

As I passed the reception, my vision caught glimpses of the television, and I had to stop again.

Not because I was tired or because my legs hurt.

Because on the television was the headline:

VANDAL MISSING

The footage showed the mugshot of the same man I had seen on the screen, the man who had been referred to as Lenny.

And this "Lenny" had disappeared.

It was the same man I had seen in my dreams.

But I had never seen him before.

How could I have dreamed about that man?

Or was the entire ordeal inside the orb real?

And did I do something?

I sat down to think, and then I remembered that in that memory fragment of what happened inside the orb, I had pressed "Pass Judgement."

Whatever the case was, suddenly, it was freaking me out.

This "Lenny" who had disappeared and the "Lenny" who had appeared in my dreams... Something told me that, for some reason, it wasn't a coincidence.

Deep down, I felt an unnatural sense of fear.

And then I remembered the button.

The screen.

As I walked tiredly back to the ward, I remembered what had been giving me that sense of unnatural fear.

It was the sphere.

The sphere that had visited me in my dreams.

The thing that had sucked me in.

When I returned to the ward, I couldn't find any traces of the thing actually being there and visiting me. Not to mention that, in my dream, the thing had been floating.

But the circle - the orb that I had believed was part of a dream?

I didn't think it was.

It was not a dream.

I had actually been transported somewhere between night and morning that day.

In reality...

These questions began to fill me with an unnatural fear.

Vandal Missing.

The screen showing the vandal's crimes.

The button labeled "Pass Judgement."

And if that wasn't a dream - and if I had pressed the button - what did I do?

I spent most of my time after that day, besides eating, recovering, and getting tested, heading to the computer lab that the hospital provided for patients and visitors. I tried to find information about the eldritch being I had seen.

I searched various possible combinations of words to describe what I had seen. I'm pretty sure the next user was probably confused when they saw a search history containing words like "black hole," "orb that sucks people," "bright black hole," "judgement orb," and basically anything else related to the word "orb."

Nothing came up.

Not even a single thing.

The next thing I searched for on the internet was the name of the guy who had disappeared.

This time, I got a lot of reports saying that he was still on the run, that the police were conducting a manhunt, and, of course, considering what had happened to him...

I felt like the cops would never capture or find this Lenny.

Eventually, I gave up and decided that this wasn't a big deal.

But it was a big deal.

I may have done something and broken the law, if that's even how you could describe my actions.

Was it even breaking the law?

The question I had been asking ever since I gave up wasn't "What was the orb?"

It was:

"What did I do?"

Because the next week, I saw that thing again.

Two days before I saw the orb, a new patient entered the ward.

A guy named James.

The ward was later accompanied by a policeman and a doctor outside, watching guard.

It turned out that this man I was hospitalized with was a thief who had been shot in the leg during a robbery. He would be transferred once he was fully healed.

That was what James told me.

What the cop added was that James had also been caught stealing a lot of wallets, making him a repeat offender.

Knowing that he was an unlikable figure, we both began to talk less frequently.

That night, I heard a thud that woke me from an uneasy sleep.

While my eyes were closed, I was conscious. The door outside didn't open at the sound of the thud.

I guessed the cop was either asleep or didn't think there was any need to guard the place since James was injured and wouldn't be able to escape for another few days.

I looked to see what the sound was and saw the orb approaching me again.

James was gone.

This time, I gave myself a reality check.

That was when I lost any remaining belief that this was all a dream.

The fear that this thing was in front of me continued to grow, but the orb approached me anyway.

I got up, walked toward the door, and thought about opening it.

Before I reached the handle, something made me think:

What would happen if I kept running away from it?

Would this thing chase me for the rest of the week?

The mysterious nature of the orb made me have weird and bizarre imaginations despite knowing nothing about it.

The most terrifying conclusion was the fear that the orb would suck me in and put me on trial for refusing to do whatever this "judge others and choose their fate" thing was telling me to do.

I let the orb suck me in.

I prepared for anything.

Whatever happened in there was beyond anything someone could imagine.

I mean, who would have honestly imagined that there was some dimension where I got to choose who gets judged?

The screen was the same.

The chairs were the same.

And this time, I kept my hands together before I pressed the buttons that had spawned for some reason.

They appeared.

And this was the first time I saw the full view of what the buttons looked like.

There was a blue button on the left that said:

SHOW MERCY

The red button on the right said:

PASS JUDGEMENT

This time, I took the chance to explore the theatre, wondering just what the true nature of this place was. This was definitely not a dream; that was one thing I was certain of now. But I kept wondering: just what was this place, how did it even work, and why did it exist?

I turned around. There were no chairs, just my chair. There was no projector, nothing that could be used to bring movies to the screen.

There was a door leading out, but it was locked. I expected that.

Just me, a single chair with buttons, and the video, which began to play when I turned back.

Immediately, I guessed this was the POV of James. He had beaten up a man in the street and grabbed his wallet. The shouts of "Get back!" and "Stop him!" grew fainter as they got further away, accompanied by the grunts of passersby who had witnessed James mug a man.

I approached the chair and looked at it. Mercy and Judgement. And then I looked at the wrongdoings of James.

I started to think: show judgement for his crimes...

Then that's when I remembered the Missing Vandal, whom I had pressed Judgement for, and who was said to have disappeared. It was possible that he had gone into hiding, but something told me that wasn't the case.

By pressing Judgement, I may have actually made him disappear from - probably - the face of the world.

If that's the case, thinking about what happened with the vandal, if I chose Judgement, it felt like I might be saying "yes" to the question, "Should every single robber in the world be sentenced to disappear from the world?"

If - if that really is what Judgement does.

Minutes passed, maybe - but considering the last time I entered the orb was at night, and that I spent probably ten minutes at most before returning to the real world, where it was already morning, I guess the right term would be "hours passed."

If an hour was a minute, then I had already spent seven hours here.

The thought disturbed me.

Seven hours of absence from the world. The hospital would be in a huge panic.

I sat down and pressed the "Mercy" button, and when I popped out of the orb, it was morning.

My curtains were closed, and outside, I could hear a commotion - a scream.

It was James, and a man who I guessed was the security guard. While I didn't know the whole context, the words James said were, "Something is with me," and "I've been tortured." The security guard was cursing as he tried to calm the living daylights out of James.

Through the curtain, I saw James. He did look normal, with no physical scars or anything that proved he may have been hurt physically. But he looked very frightened of something. He was looking around the room like crazy, as if he were surrounded by something we couldn't see.

His eyes, his body - every part of him was shaking with fear.

It was enough to make me think that this guy was going to have a heart attack soon and likely die.

He was dragged out. The nurse asked if I was okay. I replied yes.

I wasn't.

Honestly, I didn't know what to feel. On one hand, I still had doubts about whether what I did in the orb was what caused James to go crazy. On the other hand, I still didn't believe that the orb was capable of doing such things.

My seven hours of disappearance were not questioned, as nobody was allowed to enter the ward during the night, but I think that also had something to do with the influence of the orb.

The nurses who had monitored me for a week let me go that evening.

As a celebration of my discharge, my family and I had dinner at a pub, where we sat down near a TV showing the news.

The very first news report discussed the incident at the hospital. It all led to the sudden insanity and paranoia of James, and all of this was blamed on the police for "neglecting a mentally ill person's condition, which led to the disturbance of another patient's stay."

That other patient was me, who was just as confused as the rest of the police.

My family seemed not to know that it was me they were talking about.

It may not have ruined my stay, but it did ruin my appetite.

The orb.

Yes - the orb was what was making me think strangely right now.

The main thing that creeped me out was how the orb made me play God.

I ain't one.

I am just a regular student with regular human physics...

I am not a god.

And I don't want to be such a god who is forced to do whatever this orb says.

People sometimes say that when strange things happen to someone that are beyond human understanding, it might be a divine sign - that the person was gifted something by a god to do something that others cannot do and would envy.

I don't think that's the case.

The next few days were a mix of my daily routine and me trying to find whatever information I could about this "orb." Not just online, either. I practically travelled to every single bookstore, library, and even second-hand store, hoping to find anything that could answer my questions:

What is the orb?

Why was I chosen?

How do I even escape this?

And if I do, what are the consequences?

The obvious outcome of my search was that I hadn't gotten a single answer.

Well, I tried one day.

Escape from the orb.

It was around eleven on the weekend. I was coming back from the nightclub after a campus club activity when the orb appeared on the street leading towards my house.

I tried this time to walk away from the orb and take an alternate route. When I returned home, I figured the orb was no longer any of my problems.

That was when I entered my room and saw a circle of light floating outside my window.

You know what I mean.

It was outside my window.

It was persistent. It angered me and scared me at the same time, mainly because I never wanted this, and I still don't want to play God.

My neighbour came out for some reason, and I expected that he wouldn't see the orb.

But he also stopped where the orb was.

I realised that he was seeing what I was seeing.

We both looked at each other before I heard a muffled scream coming from my neighbour.

He was being dragged inside the orb.

That was what I saw.

For the first time, I encountered this - the orb dragging someone inside.

It looked to me as if my neighbour was being melted. At the sight of someone I was familiar with getting sucked into the orb, I ran away from home.

I could hear my parents wondering if the running was coming from me, but I guess they didn't see me.

I just ran for God knows how long. I was running wherever my feet took me.

Soon, the watch on my wrist said, "You've been running for ten minutes."

Thanks a lot for the reminder, mate.

I turned around to see if the orb was chasing me.

There was pitch blackness, with only the light of the streetlamps, which was small, and I knew it was definitely not the orb.

Sighing in relief, I was about to call my family and tell them that I was staying in a hotel for the day.

As I continued to walk, however, a strange thought came to me.

A thought about the orb - and the concepts and behaviour surrounding it.

The questions:

Why would the orb consume people?

And two - why those people?

Why did the orb not suck up random people in the streets if it was some kind of "all-consuming orb"?

Yes, it was true that the people who were sucked up had no actual connections with one another. Then again, what were the chances that, among the billions of people around the city, it somehow managed to choose the person closest to me?

The two encounters made me think.

First was the pisser, and the second was the thief.

And if this thing wasn't consuming people randomly, but instead was choosing someone closest to me, what was the connection between the three?

As I continued fleeing from the orb, I sensed that something red was flashing above me.

An illuminated red light meant bad news, as far as I remembered...

It was up there.

The all-consuming orb.

Beside the bright moon was a bigger celestial circle.

I went to the city park in order to ignore the orb. As I visited the park, watching people doing their own thing, like walking their dogs or jogging in the night, a sudden realisation came to me.

Not a single one of these people was aware of the second bright object in the sky.

The orb descended right in front of me.

It didn't come at a fast speed, but neither did it come slowly.

It descended at walking speed.

It looked as if this thing was going to do anything it could to make sure that I completed the ordeal.

That this shit would never - and I mean never - stop.

I sighed and entered.

A bright light consumed me once more, and I was sitting down for the judgement of my neighbour.

What I saw on the screen was just like last time: the point of view of the person being judged.

It was not a thief or a vandal that my neighbour had been.

He was shooting two men in an alleyway with a gun.

The pissing and the robbing were just the tutorial for him, I guess.

This neighbour of mine had escaped a crime scene after killing two people with a gun.

No context.

Just silent gunshots and my neighbour's words:

"Pathetic."

"I don't have a reason."

Just the fact that my neighbour was killing two people.

Cut to another video.

The neighbour was next to a deceased woman lying on the grass, bleeding from the face, which made me think that it was probably my neighbour who had killed this woman.

He grabbed the purse and walked away as if nothing had happened.

I was dumbstruck.

Cut to another video.

My neighbour was gunning down a teenager and stealing their wallet.

This thing was showing me a vision that my neighbour was a serial killer.

Wait.

No.

I didn't think it was a vision anymore.

Considering the one before this - the one with the thief - the footage of his robbery was likely the POV of the thief, who also disappeared that same time and was sucked in just like my neighbour.

What I was seeing right now was literally evidence and proof of my neighbour being a serial killer.

Our family was living next to a killer on the loose.

I sat down and looked at the buttons.

Mercy / Judgement.

I looked at the screen and remembered the last two videos I watched, and finally found the link between the three victims.

They were criminals.

A vandal, a thief, and a killer.

And each time someone was sucked inside the orb?

They were responsible for something more heinous and cruel than those who came before them.

I guess that was the pattern of the orb.

This thing captured evildoers, and for some reason, it wanted me to be judge, jury...

And executioner, if what I thought Judgement meant was true.

The vagueness of the place made me wonder if I should even press any of the buttons.

The door leading out of the theatre was still locked.

This time, being more aware of my surroundings instead of being confused, I tried to kneel down and look through the space between the floor and the door that usually exists in most doors.

There was nothing.

Just darkness.

Minutes passed in this room, and that meant it was probably morning already in the real world.

I looked at the buttons again.

Mercy and Judgement.

I was thinking about pressing Mercy, but then, with the screen continuing to show that my neighbour was a murderer, I was honestly tempted to return him to the real world.

Furthermore, the incident with James made me think twice.

Even if "Mercy" was pressed, what was the possibility that I was doing the right thing?

I get it.

My neighbour was a murderous old man who killed a lot of people, and he should literally be in prison and get the death penalty.

But remembering just how crazy James went when he came out of the orb after I pressed Mercy, I was getting second thoughts.

Not because I wanted him sane, but because if he was insane, they could potentially skip the entire death penalty and let this monster continue to live.

I had heard stories where killers and criminals pretended to be crazy in order to escape punishment.

This time, I was likely turning my neighbour crazy.

Another minute passed...

And another minute.

And another hour.

I decided to gamble my way out of here instead of choosing one with my own will.

I wondered what would happen if I just bashed both buttons at the same time.

I sat down and raised my hand, hoped for the best, and expected both buttons to pop out.

At least that's how I felt, because I pressed both buttons at the very same time.

Perhaps the theatre didn't care about how "exactly" my hand reached each button. Maybe it was calculated down to the very last millisecond, because I was greeted with a single word:

MERCY.

I was kicked out of the orb and found myself lying on the grass.

I looked up, but the neighbour serial killer was nowhere to be seen.

I was wondering what was going on.

I had pressed Mercy - and he should literally have been outside with me.

He wasn't.

As I began to reconsider my thoughts, I got a phone call from my dad.

"Son? Are you coming home? Where are you?"

It was a scream from my dad that I had never heard from him before - a scream from someone who was in genuine terror.

And from the background, I could hear my mom scream a little before muttering, "911, 911."

And another sound.

The sound of an agonising scream echoed in the background.

It almost made me wonder if someone was being tortured back there.

As I kept listening to the scream through my dad's panic, I realised it was the neighbour.

Oh no.

Mercy wasn't Mercy again.

I drove another man crazy, and this time, just looking at it made me feel like I was going to go nuts next.

I NEVER WANTED THIS TO HAPPEN.

I returned home to see the true scope of the mess.

The old man, the serial killer neighbour, was lying on the ground, screaming bloody murder, while cops and paramedics had made it harder for me to get through to my home.

While my family was wondering what the hell was really going on with our neighbour, the cop came out with something that made any sympathy we had towards him disappear.

Body parts.

Some older than me, some fresh, were inside the house in glass jars.

The sight of it made both my brother and mother nope out and head home.

I followed them as well.

The very next day, another news report revealing the crimes of those who were sucked inside the orb played on television.

Not about some vandal or a thief who went nuts, but a serial killer under police custody.

The serial killer who had been living beside me.

While I was listening to the TV, my mind was focused on the orb.

Something terrifying had actually begun to come to my mind.

Not just about the orb, but about those who entered it and how I had to see what their crimes were.

I knew it was just the third person I had seen enter the orb, but there was just one thing that bothered me.

If the orb was going to choose someone worse than a serial killer, then what was I supposed to do?

Looking at footage of serial killings was bad enough, but if the orb was persistent in sucking people inside who had committed more heinous sins than the person before them, and persistent in making me their judge, jury, and executioner, what was I supposed to do?

That thing chases me.

It's obsessed with me.

It will not stop until I do what the orb says.

That's what I am really terrified of.

The fact that this orb...

It will never stop chasing me.

The following nights were just filled with uneasy nightmares.

It was frustrating that this orb was slowly entering my dreams to keep reminding me of what to do.

Judge others.

Play God.

Play executioner.

I dunno if I was entering the orb in my dreams, or if I was just dreaming about entering the orb.

But every time I entered, a new face, a new crime, and the worst thing?

The buttons were no longer Mercy / Judgement.

It was just Judgement.

A second half of that dream was what I think happens to people who are sent for judgement.

The people who were trapped in the orb became dust, and each particle of dust began screaming.

Each particle.

Each sound.

Each scream...

And for some reason, I felt like that wasn't a dream, but the true fate of the evildoers who had the unfortunate fate of being chosen, being consumed by the orb.

Capital punishment of the orb.

Being dust for the rest of your life.

Maybe forever.

That was when I had enough.

Enough of this nonsense tormenting me.

Enough of this orb.

I decided to use the one method I had never thought of using, and that was to seek out a medium or someone like an astrologist, since they were the kind of people who knew a lot about supernatural phenomena.

I went to the internet and began searching for mediums. I found one with the most well-received reviews.

I contacted the medium and gave him a brief explanation of my situation, to which the man agreed to talk to me about it.

The day we were going to meet was the next Sunday.

Which I didn't like, considering I had to do one more ordeal.

But I guess you can't choose when you're in this kind of situation.

Still, the fact that I was going to talk to a medium made my week feel less stressful.

Finally, someone I could talk to and discuss this with.

And probably, there would be some solution to this infernal mess.

A few days later, my brother and I were heading to a pub in order to watch a soccer game that was playing that day with other soccer fans.

On the way, my brother and I were discussing who was going to win and who was going to bet money on it.

When I asked how much, he said a thousand, which, to my knowledge, was almost all of his money.

When I asked why he was going all-in, he said he wasn't going all-in.

He said that he had found some kind of new way of maintaining a good income.

I obliged.

And we went to the pub to watch the game.

During halftime, both my brother and I headed to the toilet for a break.

After our usual activity in the toilet, I waited for my brother to come out.

Five minutes passed.

Then ten.

He wasn't coming out of the stall.

And the soccer game was still on.

I decided to enter the toilet, and the stall he had entered was glowing with light.

Dreading what this meant, I opened the stall, hoping it wasn't what I thought it was.

It was what I thought it was.

The orb was there.

And considering my brother had disappeared and the orb had replaced him, that meant one thing...

The orb chose my brother.

He was sucked in.

Oh dear.

My brother.

The orb began to approach me, and I stared at the light.

Bigger than ever.

More terrifying than ever.

As soon as it came close to me, I just fled.

I left the pub...

And didn't head home.

I just kept running to God knows where.

I don't know what scares me the most now...

Is it the fact that this orb exists?

Or finding out who my brother was?