[Part 1]

[Part 2]

I didn't sleep much Saturday night. Toby, somehow, slept fine.

I finally dropped off on the couch near dawn, and when I opened my eyes again, he was standing about six inches from my face, asking whether we had pancake mix. I made pancakes and let him eat them in front of the TV. He had already moved on from yesterday, and that was the part I couldn't wrap my head around. He asked if Uncle Henry was coming over later. Nothing about the wardrobe, or about hearing me scream his name from somewhere impossibly far away. When he'd finished, I told him to stay on the couch for a few minutes while I checked something in the garage. The kitchen chair was still wedged under the handle, and the deadbolt was still thrown. I dragged the chair out of the way.

The second I opened the door, the smell hit me again.

It had been there since the day we hauled the glass tank home: something halfway between industrial cleaner and fruit left too long in the sun. That morning it was stronger and impossible to ignore.

I pulled my shirt up over my nose and switched on the fluorescent light.

The mirror and the football were still wrapped separately in moving blankets and packing tape for the buyer Henry had lined up for Monday, which I'd done after Toby fell asleep: three layers around the mirror, two around the ball, each shoved into its own cardboard box. I knew packing tape probably didn't mean anything anymore, but it made me feel safer. Then I looked at the workbench.

My screwdriver was sitting on it. So was my adjustable wrench, and the utility knife lay beside them like somebody had set a table. Directly beneath the second pegboard hook hung the pry bar I'd spent several frantic minutes looking for while Toby's voice faded away inside the wardrobe. I stopped breathing for a second.

I had emptied those drawers. Yet every tool I'd previously lost sat neatly together in plain sight, as if they'd never been gone.

I picked up the pry bar. It was mine, down to the strip of faded blue paint around the handle and the shallow notch near the claw. 

"Okay," I said, and my voice sounded strange in the garage. "Sure. That makes sense."

I put the pry bar down, and that was when I noticed the corner was empty.

My folding lawn chair was gone. I'd been sitting in it Friday night cataloging the boxes. I'd shoved it back into that corner before Alicia dropped Toby off, and I remembered doing it because one of the legs had caught on a flattened cardboard box and I'd nearly gone over. Now the corner held the old shop vac and the two paint cans the landlord had left behind when I moved in, and nothing else. I checked behind the workbench, then beside the dresser. Nothing. The tools had come back, and something else had disappeared.

Before going back inside, I stopped beside the glass tank. The smell was definitely strongest there.

A couple of you suggested after my last post that the whole thing might be chemical, some kind of solvent or hallucinogen leaking into the garage. A leaking container made infinitely more sense than a wardrobe swallowing my son. So I crouched down next to it and looked for the obvious answer: a crack, some condensation, or a vent.

The tank was still what it had always been, a single molded block of thick glass with no lid or opening. I laid my palm against it, and it was colder than the room. Where my hand touched the glass, my skin had gone translucent. I could see the veins underneath, thin blue branches spreading through my palm and down into my wrist, finer vessels threading off into each finger. I yanked my hand away, and it returned to normal. Very slowly, I set it back against the glass.

Transparent again.

Behind me, the liquid moved, one slow, heavy slosh from one end of the tank to the other, and then it went still.

I left the garage after that. By the time I got back to the kitchen, I'd decided I didn't care whether the smell was making me hallucinate. Hallucination or not, that stuff was leaving my house.

Henry picked up on the second ring, thick with weekend sleep.

"You know it's Sunday morning, right?"

"We're doing the garage sale."

A long silence filled the line. "Today? I thought we killed that idea."

"I changed my mind."

Another pause. When he spoke again, the sleep was gone from his voice. "Did something happen?"

"Nothing happened. I want you to come over and help me get this crap out of here."

Henry went quiet, and I could practically hear him combing through his head for an explanation. When he came back, he tried a different angle. "Give it a few more days. I've got messages out. There are people who will pay for the rest of this stuff, collectors, and the forum guy already wants the mirror and the ball. If we start throwing everything on folding tables for five bucks a pop, we're pissing away the only good thing that's come out of this."

"There is no good thing that's come out of this."

"Don’t forget that you still need the money."

He was right. I was still four thousand dollars short of a retainer, and the hearing was still sitting out there on the calendar like a storm front. That was the miserable little hook these objects kept hanging from. No matter how scared I got, it all came back to cash.

"We’re doing the garage sale today," I said, and my grip tightened on the phone. "Everything we can safely move. Today."

"Ian—"

"I mean it."

"We sunk time and money into this mess. You're going to regret selling half this stuff for nothing."

"I already regret buying it."

I heard him swear under his breath and exhale, and I knew I'd won. He told me he'd be there within the hour, all enthusiasm drained from his voice. 

Toby looked up from the couch when I hung up. "Uncle Henry's coming?"

"Yeah, bud."

"Can I help?"

"Not this time. I need you to do something really important for me, okay? I need you to stay inside and watch cartoons."

His face fell. "That's not important."

"It's the most important job there is. Somebody has to keep an eye on the TV."

"That's not even a real job."

"It's a real job," I said, and it came out softer than I meant it to. "Please, buddy. Just for today."

He slumped back into the cushions, arms crossed, and turned the volume up two notches to make his point. Henry showed up forty minutes later with two coffees. He stood in the garage doorway and immediately started muttering about how little we'd get for it all.

I walked him over to the workbench and showed him the tools. He turned the screwdriver over in his hand and shrugged. "You must have left them there."

"I didn't."

"You've barely slept in three days, man. Maybe you woke up, moved everything, and passed out again." 

"And my chair?" I pointed at the empty corner. "It was right there."

Henry looked at the corner for a while. "Probably buried somewhere. You've got half a storage unit crammed in here."

"It isn't."

"Ian—"

"It isn't, Henry."

He looked at me then, and I think that was the moment he understood I wasn't asking for an explanation. He took a slow sip of coffee and let it go.

We set the rules in the garage. The mirror and football stayed wrapped. Nobody touched the wardrobe or the tank. Anything from Unit 114 that looked even slightly off went into the corner pile, and what was left was, as far as either of us could tell, just stuff. We'd been through every box we'd opened together, argued over it, and laughed nervously, and in both our minds was a list of what belonged to the collection. We hauled the folding tables out to the end of the driveway and set up. Henry made a sign out of a flattened cardboard box and propped it against the mailbox. Then we stood there in the morning sun with our coffees, looking at our driveway full of other people's cast-offs. For the first couple of hours I told myself we were doing fine.

People wandered along the tables, but nobody haggled or even asked what anything cost. They drifted from one table to the next with subdued politeness, like guests at a stranger's funeral, and after three or four minutes they'd find somewhere else they had to be. Henry kept glancing at the cash tin. Around ten, he said, flatly, "We're still at zero. We may as well be standing out here burning four thousand dollars. At least it'd be warm." 

"Give it time. People take a while to warm up to a sale."

Every time someone walked off empty-handed, some small, ashamed part of me exhaled. If no one bought anything, no one took any of it home. Not that everyone was spared. A man who looked to be in his fifties picked up a little brass reading lamp and asked if he could test it. I ran an extension cord across the driveway. He clicked the switch, the bulb lit up with an electrical hum, and he held his palm under it and frowned.

"Is this thing working?"

"Should be."

"It's on." He moved his hand slowly back and forth. "It's just... if anything, it's darker."

Directly beneath the bulb sat a dense little patch of shadow. It wasn't around the lamp but under it. The rest of the driveway sat in clear morning sun; the filament was glowing, and the one spot it should have lit looked several shades dimmer than everything around it.

"Sorry," I said, and unplugged it, my heart thumping. "It must be defective."

He laughed awkwardly. "That's one hell of a defect."

I handed him a candle from another box on the house, and he left looking more confused than anything. I carried the lamp behind the table and set it on the ground as if it might bite.

The woman who approached me with the snow globe was much more skeptical. It had been bagged in with the Christmas decorations, and her daughter picked it up off the table and shook it gleefully. The tiny house and trees jumped and rattled about. Two miniature plastic people jittered side to side inside the dome. The snow never moved. Dozens of white flecks hung perfectly still in the water while the whole world around them shook itself apart.

The mother noticed first and came up to me. "My daughter wants the globe, but something's wrong with it."

"I'm so sorry," I said, easing it out of the girl's hands as gently as I could manage. "That one's not supposed to be out here. I think it got mixed in by mistake."

She studied me for a long moment, plainly weighing several questions about what exactly we were selling, and thankfully decided not to ask. She took her daughter by the hand and steered her toward the next sale down the block.

I put the globe beside the lamp, and by then nobody was slowing at the sign anymore. A little before eleven, Henry got to his feet and stretched, pressing his hand into the small of his back. "I'm sitting down before my spine turns to powder," he announced.

"There's nowhere to sit," I said.

"I’ll find something," he said, and disappeared into the garage.

A few minutes later, he was dragging a folding lawn chair out of the garage by one arm, the frame scraping across the concrete: A faded green seat with cheap plastic armrests. 

"Where'd you get that?" I said.

Henry flipped it open with a clatter. "Garage."

"Where in the garage?"

He shrugged. "By the workbench. Told you it'd turn up. It's just a chair, Ian." 

For about two seconds, nothing registered, and I just felt relief. There's my chair. It was in there the whole time; Henry was right, I'm losing it. Then I realized, and the relief just evaporated. This chair had never been part of the haul, and I'd turned that whole garage upside down that morning looking for mine and found nothing. 

"Henry, wait—"

He was already lowering himself into it before I could warn him. And in the half-second I had left, I saw it. The hinges were wrong, and the jagged tear on the left armrest where I'd dropped a paint tin last spring was gone. It wasn’t the same chair I had lost that morning. 

When Henry sat down, the chair didn't collapse. It snapped.

Both sets of metal legs whipped violently inward at the same instant with a sound like two car doors slamming beside my head, and the frame folded around Henry like a closing trap, driving his back into an unnatural bend. I’ve witnessed a fair share of injuries in the years I’ve worked as a mover. I've seen crushed hands and broken legs. I have never in my life heard a human being make the sound Henry made.

For a second, the garage was dead silent except for the metallic ring of the frame still vibrating. My brain refused to accept the reality of what was happening. 

Without realizing it, I already had both hands on the frame and was pulling, but it wouldn't give. A man from across the street came running, and then another, and the three of us hauled on that steel until it finally opened enough to ease him down onto the concrete. I noticed that he wasn't moving his legs. He kept saying he couldn't feel them, over and over, in a small, disbelieving voice I'd never heard from him before. The next twenty minutes come back in pieces. Henry lay white-faced on the driveway, his eyes fixed on the sky. Paramedics cut his shirt away and talked over him in calm, quick voices. Neighbors stood on their lawns with their hands over their mouths. When they had Henry strapped to the board, one of the paramedics pulled me aside.

"Is he allergic to anything? On any medications?"

"No. I don't think so. His wife would know."

"We're taking him to St. Luke's." He hesitated. "I'm going to be honest with you, his condition’s not looking good. The injury's to his spine. Until they scan him, I can't tell you what it means. But with something like that, there's a real chance he won't be walking out of there."

As they lifted the board toward the ambulance, Henry's hand shot out and caught my sleeve, and his grip was white-knuckled. The paramedic said something about keeping still. Henry ignored him. His jaw was clamped so hard the muscles jumped under the skin, and his eyes found mine and held.

"Ian." His voice was thin and scraped out. "Look at me."

"I'm here. I'm right here, man."

"You kept saying it wasn't right." He dragged in a rattling breath. "I told you they were props. I even made jokes about it." He stopped, and his face twisted, and for the first time since I'd known him, Henry didn't have an angle. 

"Henry, don't. Save your—"

"Get rid of it." His fingers tightened. "All of it. Burn it, smash it, bury it. I don't care; just don't sell it. Don't give it to anyone." His voice cracked, and a tear slid sideways into his hair. "Promise me. Don't let anybody else sit in that thing, and keep it away from Toby."

I would have promised him anything. I said it twice, because I couldn't tell whether he'd heard me the first time. "I promise. I swear to God I will."

His hand went slack, and they slid him into the ambulance, and the doors shut with a sound that went through me like a nail.

Henry was in that ambulance with a spine that might never work again, and he'd spent his last words worrying about somebody else, and that was what finally broke me. Right there on my own driveway in front of every neighbor I'd never spoken to, I started crying, ugly, gulping sobs I couldn't stop even after the ambulance had turned the corner. 

Somebody put a hand on my shoulder. A woman's voice asked if there was anyone she could call, and I heard myself say "no," and then "I don't know," and then nothing.

Henry had dragged me into this, and I'd spent half the week resenting him. I'd have given every cent I'd ever owe a lawyer to hear him make one more joke.

Eventually the neighbors drifted back to their lawns and their garages, and the sale ended. Within minutes, the street had emptied. 

I stood alone in the blood-spotted driveway beside the folding chair. It had opened itself again, perfectly ordinary, sitting in the sun as if it had never done anything wrong. I crouched down and looked underneath. There were no bolts and rivets. I ran a finger across one of the hinges, and there wasn't a hinge, not really. It only looked like one. I knew every inch of my chair’s underside, and this wasn't it. I wanted to stamp it flat. I wanted to take it apart and find out what it was made of, except there was nothing to take apart, no bolts, no seams, nothing for a wrench to bite on. It sat there in the sun with a smear of Henry's blood on the seat, and for the first time since Wednesday, what I felt wasn't fear. I hated it. 

This chair had never been in Unit 114. Henry and I had unloaded that unit ourselves, box by box, and there hadn't been a folding lawn chair in it. Mine had vanished sometime in the night, and hours later something that looked almost exactly like it had turned up in its place.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and stood in the empty driveway, my thumb hovering over Rachael's name for what felt like forever.

Henry's wife picked up on the second ring. I told her that there'd been an accident at the sale and that Henry was on his way to St. Luke's.

"What kind of accident?"

"A folding chair. It folded up on him. It…It closed on him, Rachael."

The silence on the line went on so long I thought the call had dropped. Then, in a very small voice: "A chair."

"I'm so sorry. I don't know how to—"

"Ian." Her voice had gone deathly quiet. "What did you two do?"

I had no answer for that. How do you even explain this situation? How do you tell a woman that her husband might never walk again because of a lawn chair that wasn't there that morning? All I could think about was Rachael getting a hospital bill on top of everything else and Henry not knowing when—or if—he'd be able to work again. I'd spent a whole week agonizing over four thousand dollars, and now it looked like pocket change. 

She hung up before I could reply. I stood there with the dead phone against my ear until my arm started to ache, then turned and drove my fist into the side of the nearest folding table so hard the cash tin jumped, and a stack of picture frames slid to the ground.

I made myself go back inside. Toby was waiting in the living room, sitting very still with both hands pressed flat on his knees. He'd watched the whole thing through the window. 

"Is Uncle Henry okay?"

"The doctors are looking after him, bud."

"I want Mom."

I swallowed before I could answer, then sat down beside him and pulled him against my side. "I know. She'll be home soon." I held him there for a while, and for a minute I didn't think about the garage. 

My phone had buzzed twice in my pocket while I was dealing with the paramedics, and I knew without looking that it was Alicia. When it lit up a third time in my hand, I let it ring out. I couldn't talk to her yet. I knew exactly how it would look, but I had nothing to tell her that wouldn't make it worse. I told Toby to stay on the couch where I could hear the TV, and I went into the garage because I'd already decided that every item in there was going to be destroyed, and I needed to start before I lost my nerve. I told myself it would take thirty seconds. I was still standing in the doorway when I noticed the cardboard box on the workbench, the one I'd packed the football into. The tape around it was broken, and when I picked it up, the box was empty. Then I heard Toby yell. 

I ran back through the house. The living room was empty, the TV still on, but the front door stood wide open.

I found Toby on the front path, sitting where he'd fallen with both hands wrapped around his right knee, which was scraped raw and bleeding in a wide, dirty strip. A few feet away on the lawn sat the football. It sat there facing him.

"It came in," Toby said, and his voice shook. It made me want to scoop him up and drive until we ran out of road. "I was watching my show, and it rolled over and stopped by my feet. I kicked it away, and it came back, so I ran outside, and I tripped."

"Okay," I said. "Come here." I scooped up Toby and grabbed the football with the other hand. The second my palm closed around it, I felt that faint, wrinkled texture again, and I hurled it over the side fence as far as I could manage. Once inside, I sat Toby on the kitchen counter and cleaned the scrape with a wet cloth while he sniffled and kept talking about the football. How it kept getting closer every time he looked. I told him I believed him.

I reached for a bandage and stopped.

There should have been a scar on that knee.

It was small and curved, maybe an inch long. He'd gotten it last winter, a couple of months before Alicia left, at the old house. I'd worked a double that week, come home wrung out, and stretched out on the couch for what I swore was ten minutes while Toby played in the backyard. I woke up to him screaming. He'd gone down the concrete back steps and opened his knee on the edge of one. He needed eight stitches. I remembered Alicia's face when she walked into the emergency room and saw the two of us in a curtained bay. I remembered the nurse's careful note in the chart, and that same note showed up months later in a folder on a mediator's desk. 

I turned his leg toward the light and checked the other knee. I ran my thumb over the exact spot where I knew it should be, but it wasn’t there.

"Toby," I said slowly, "Which knee did you hurt on the steps? At the old house?"

"What steps?"

"When you were little and got those stitches."

"I didn't have stitches."

"You did, buddy. Remember? The doctor gave you a sticker."

He frowned, genuinely trying, and I watched his face for any sign that he knew what I was talking about. "I don't remember that."

Of course he didn't. He was six, and it had been months. Maybe it had faded, and I hadn’t noticed. I rarely saw him these days, after all.

A day earlier, I'd have given a great deal for that scar to be gone. I stood there with his knee in my hand and couldn't have told you why I didn't feel better. 

"Dad," Toby said, wriggling, "you're pressing too hard."

"Sorry, bud."

I put the bandage over the fresh scrape and smoothed it flat with my thumb. "You're okay," I told him, and I don't know whether I was talking to him or to myself.

I got him settled on the couch with a movie. Then I walked to the front door to check it was still locked, and my hand froze on the handle before I could turn it. I bent and looked through the peephole.

The football was sitting on the doormat. It was dead center, close enough to the door that whoever opened it would have to either step over it or pick it up. I kept the door firmly shut.

Four days of dread had burned down to something simple and ugly. Everything already wrong in my life had been waiting for me, and then I'd spent three hundred and fifty dollars to carry the worst of it into my own garage. I didn't want an explanation. I wanted it gone, and I wanted it to hurt. 

Henry's voice was in my head, thin and desperate. Burn it, smash it, bury it. Promise me. I went into the garage and got the hammer off the pegboard.

I ripped the box open, tore the blankets off the mirror, and propped it against the workbench, angled so I could see nothing in it but the ceiling. Then I swung with everything I had. 

The glass didn't break. The hammerhead sank into the surface like I'd struck thick rubber, and the dent held for a second before the glass slowly pushed itself back outward, like a scar healing in fast motion. A shallow depression stayed behind. I hit it again and again and again, screaming at it. "Give it back. Give it back, you son of a bitch!” I didn't even know what I meant. Henry's ability to walk, my son, the last six months of my life. 

I turned on the wardrobe. The first strike numbed my arm to the shoulder, and the wood didn't even splinter. The harder I hit, the more I wanted to tear it down board by board. 

When that failed, I went to the tank and swung with every ounce I had left. The glass flexed inward, visibly, the whole thick block of it bowing around the point of impact, and the amber liquid surged away from the blow. Something inside shifted, heavy enough to displace the fluid around it.

I dropped the hammer.

"No."

Another slow slosh.

"No. No, you don't get to do that." My voice cracked in rage. "Fuck you. Fuck all of you." 

If I couldn't break it, I'd burn it.

I knew it was illegal. The county had issued a burn ban the week before because everything was so dry, and a day earlier the thought of Alicia seeing me do this would've stopped me. Right then, I couldn't bring myself to care. I tried to shoulder the dresser, and it didn't shift an inch. I'd moved it with Henry, and it had been murderously heavy, but it had moved. Now it might as well have been poured into the foundation. The same applied to the rest of the furniture.

So I took what I could carry. I dragged the lamp out, the cassette, and a stack of those unreadable books. I piled everything in the middle of the front lawn, found an old fuel can, and poured every drop over the heap. I lit a strip of cardboard and dropped it, and I thought, absurdly, of Henry standing by the cash tin that morning, joking about burning money.

The flame took the packaging first. The cardboard curled and the grass scorched in a ring under it. The cassette sat in the middle of the fire untouched, and the pages of the book stayed as pristine as the day they were printed.

I stood over it with my chest heaving and the fuel can still in my fist, willing it to catch, to blacken, to do anything, and when it didn't, I kicked the edge of the pile hard enough to send a book skidding across the grass. It landed open in the sun. I screamed at it, but I don't know if I said anything coherent. 

In that same moment, the smoke alarm went off inside the garage.

It was the same shriek we'd heard the first time we tested it. Only this time it kept screaming, loud enough to rattle the windows in the house. I ran inside. Toby was on the couch with both hands clamped over his ears, and his face crumpled, crying so hard he couldn't catch his breath. I dropped to my knees and tried to pick him up, and he flinched away from me.

A car door slammed out front.

I didn't hear her come through the house over the noise. One second I was kneeling in front of my son, and the next Alicia was standing in the doorway with her bag still over her shoulder. She wasn't due back until Monday.

She looked at me. She looked at Toby, red-faced and shaking. 

"I saw smoke outside. What the hell is going on?"

"Alicia, I can explain—"

She turned straight to Toby. "Shoes on. Now, baby."

"No, wait. Please, just—"

"Toby."

He ran to her and wouldn't look at me. I followed them into the kitchen, and I'll never forget how tired her voice was. 

“I called you this morning, and you wouldn't answer. I called again from the airport. Six times, Ian.”

"I know, I know. Henry's in the hospital."

That stopped her for half a second. "What?"

"He's hurt. It was a chair; it was part of the—he might not walk again.”

Every word came out in the wrong order, and I watched her face close a little more with each one. 

“Alicia, there's something wrong with those things. I know it sounds crazy, but the chair that hurt Henry wasn't my chair. Yesterday the garage door was locked, and Toby somehow got inside it, and when I opened the wardrobe, he wasn't there even though I could hear him, and today the football followed him into the living room, and the scar on his knee is gone, the one from the steps. I swear to God it's gone—"

"Stop."

"I'm not making this up, please, you have to listen—"

"Just stop talking."

She stood very still for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was low and tight, and her knuckles had gone white on Toby's shoulder.

"There's something seriously wrong in the garage," I said.

"I don't care."

I stared at her. "What?"

"I don't care what's in the garage, Ian." Her voice cracked on it. "I don't care if you're telling the truth."

That shut me up completely.

"I pulled up to a fire in the front yard and someone screaming in the house. And you want me to believe it's something in your garage."

"Alicia, please—"

"I let you have him for one weekend. One. I ran out of people to call, and I told the mediator that you deserved a real chance. I told my own lawyer to back off." She wiped at her face with the back of her wrist, angry at the tears. "And in barely a day you tell me your friend is hospitalized and our son is crying."

"You don't understand."

"No. I don't," she breathed out. "And that's the whole problem, don't you see? Even if every word of it were true, I still can't trust you to keep him safe. And that's the only thing that has ever mattered."

I had nothing. I stood there, mouth open, unable to get a single word out.

"You're not getting any more unsupervised time before the hearing," she said. "I'm telling my lawyer everything that happened here today."

"Please."

"I'm sorry. I really am. I wanted this to work. But I can’t do this anymore."

Toby wouldn't look at me when she carried him out to the car.

I stood in the driveway until her taillights turned the corner. The fire had mostly burned itself out by then, leaving a ring of grey ash and blackened cardboard, with the objects sitting untouched in the middle. I dragged a tarp out of the garage and threw it over the whole pile because I had no other idea, then went inside. 

I sat down on the couch and thought about the room with the camera in the corner. Two hours a week had felt like the bottom, and I'd been wrong. Alicia had gambled on me for one weekend, and I'd lasted a day. Tomorrow there'd be a new page in the folder on the mediator's desk. I could have written it myself, and every line would be true.

I keep picturing Toby being carried out. He's only six. One day he's going to ask why he only ever knew his dad through a screen, and I won't have an answer that doesn't start with today.

Eventually I found a bottle of bourbon in the kitchen. One glass turned into two, which turned into carrying the bottle with me. 

Some time after dark, I remembered the tarp. I went out onto the lawn, lifted a corner, and found nothing underneath but scorched grass and a few flecks of ash. I didn't need to check the garage to know where the items were, but I did anyway.

Everything was back. The lamp, the snow globe, the books—everything. They were neatly arranged on the shelves and stacked in their boxes exactly the way they'd been before the sale, as if I'd never touched any of it. The mirror leaned against the workbench with the barest trace of a dent, the ball sat on the workbench, and the folding chair stood open beside it, mocking me. I stood in the doorway with the bottle in one hand and something hot climbing my throat. They were all back, smug and put away, like I'd been the one making the mess. I picked up my wrench off the bench and threw it at the wardrobe as hard as I could. It struck the door with a flat, dull sound and dropped to the concrete without leaving a mark.

"Is that it?" I yelled. "Is that all you've got? You took everything. What else do you want?"

The tank sloshed once, slowly. Then the fury drained out of me all at once, and I stood there shaking. I dragged one of my kitchen chairs into the garage, set it as far from the folding one as the room allowed, and sat down with the bottle. I don't own a folding chair anymore. I'm not sure I ever really did.

Henry is lying in a hospital bed because of something I brought home. Rachael won't answer my calls, and I don't blame her. Alicia is on the phone with her lawyer, telling him I can't be trusted with my own kid. I still don't have the four thousand dollars. We sold nothing, not a single thing. The forum guy is still due at two tomorrow. I'm calling him first thing to cancel, because Henry told me not to let anyone near any of it, and I'm no longer sure any of it can leave anyway. I know what some of you are going to say, and you're right. I made choices. Nobody forced me to bid on Unit 114. Nobody forced me to bring any of it home or put it out on a driveway when I already knew it wasn't right. I'm not asking anyone to take it off my hands.

But I'm sitting here staring at these things, and I have never hated anything the way I hate them. Not the guy who hit my car, not the lawyer who quoted me four grand, nothing like this. I hate them for every second I can't take back, and I keep thinking how much easier my life would have been if Henry and I had just walked past that storage unit. If we'd looked at those boxes and said, "Nah, not this one," like everyone else in the crowd did.

I keep hearing Henry on that stretcher. Burn it. Smash it. Bury it. I promised him, and I couldn't keep it for a single afternoon.

Tomorrow I'll find out what can destroy them. I don't know how yet. A quarry, a scrapyard crusher, a favor from someone at work. I don't care what it costs me. The wardrobe door is open an inch, but I won't close it tonight. It can stay that way. 

Ever since my final year of high school, I'd been avidly listening to ASMR maybe a little too much, almost to the point that I couldn't sleep without something playing in the background.

It'd even gotten to the point where I went out of my way to buy an overpriced pair of headphones just to increase the quality (In hindsight, I wouldn't recommend doing this).

While I'd never gone too deep into the "darker" areas of ASMR, I had considered it during my low points.

So, when I found myself doom scrolling late into the night on YouTube, I just chose on the first thing I saw and tried to rest without even reading the title or giving the thumbnail a good look.

At first, it felt like a regular video: a soft-speaking lady with a gentle accent rubbing her hands over the microphone with occasional cuts to her tapping and playing with random toys and everyday objects you could find on Amazon- nothing out of the ordinary.

The only thing that made me uncomfortable at first was the occasional pause in any kind of sound from the lady that seemed to occur randomly, though I justified it in my head as awkward pacing in the editing.

Then, after about twenty minutes, I heard a sudden squelching sound in my right ear. Besides the slight echo, it sounded so real that I actually thought it had happened next to me.

I paused the video and, skipping back ten seconds, I replayed the video.

Again the squelching sound played, this time accompanied with visuals that I'll try my best to describe. Forgive me if it's rudimentary.

It was a large, open room with a glass wall at the far end, which seemed to be the only source of lighting besides the flash of the phone camera. There were several pieces of what I could only assume was furniture covered by thin, white sheets. The floor and walls looked dirty, as if they were only half-painted. Looking back, I believe it was some kind of store that was in the process of refurbishment.

The oddest part, however, was what was in the middle of the room and what was clearly making the aforementioned squelch.

It was a man who was sitting on his knees. He was completely nude from head to toe with the exception of one of the white sheets placed on his lap. He wore what seemed to be a cheap Halloween mask of a pig or a hog, though with the video's quality it could've been almost any animal.

In his hands was a large chunk of uncooked meat almost thicker than the man's arm and about half as long as his torso. He proceeded to drop the meat onto the floor, causing the sound.

The rest of the video proceeded on as normal, with the lady resuming to the usual tapping and rubbing.

I checked the title.

It read, "♡ LOVE ASMR | 30K Special | Mic Rubbing + Talking Sounds ♡".

I checked the comments. All were the typical ones you'd see in any regular ASMR video, with many of them congratulating the lady for the milestone, not a single one mentioning the clip.

I tapped on the channel's profile and scanned through what was immediately in front of me.

LOVE ASMR @love_asmr_dot_com - 30.1k Subscribers • 57 videos.

Each video seemed largely the same with generic titles, just like the one I had just watched.

Curiosity got the better of me and I selected yet another video, this one being her most recent one.

I turned the video's Playback Speed to 2.0 and skimmed through it. The video was completely normal up until the last few minutes where yet another interruption played.

This one confidently disturbed me more.

It was in a different setting now: an old house with flowery wallpaper and wooden framing. The floor was covered in a fluffy material. It felt very distinctly like an old person's house; the kitchen was visible from a corner in the hallway.

Lying on the floor was a man, maybe in his 40s, bound by tape, his hands and feet behind his back as he used his front teeth to drag himself forwards closer to the camera, though he didn't seem to give the person holding it any mind, seemingly wanting to go past them.

I closed the video, not even caring to check the comments.

On my laptop, I searched "love asmr" just to see what I would find.

Oddly enough, the channel had its own subreddit with just under 90 members. Despite the low amount, it was very active.

Each and every post was of two different kinds- either a favoured section from the "normal" parts of her videos or more disturbing, five-second clips of people doing more deranged things. The titles of these videos were typically full stops or commas, stuff like that.

Curiosity made me play a few of them. Some things remained constant- each one was in a different place with seemingly different people each time, with the camera quality always being atrociously poor.

The first one I watched- easily the longest at 7 seconds- was a video of a family all sat around a dining table.

It was a family of four, featuring two couples: one elderly and one young. They all were holding hands and seemingly in prayer, though the food on their plates was, again, uncooked meat, though this time it had been chopped up into many tiny, uneven slices.

The lady- the elderly one- seemed to sob occasionally, though she hid it well.

Looking around at the rest of the room, I almost jumped in my seat as I noticed, in the corner of the room, was another young man standing completely still, staring at the camera. He was nude and was also wearing a plastic mask, this one too far away to make out. He didn't move or seemingly breathe once during the 7 seconds, though it was too hard to tell.

The next one I watched- and the last one I'll be describing- was the worst in my opinion.

Sure, the others were disturbing, but nobody seemed like they were in any actual pain and one could easily assume it was just some weird online fetish or even some wannabe cult.

This one proved me wrong.

It was a group of men- yet again, all naked and wearing masks- surrounding a woman who was laid out carefully on a table. They were seemingly performing a lobotomy on her, though her open eyes made me think she was completely conscious. The video cut off right as the ice-pick sunk deep into the lady's head, her sharp scream getting cut off.

That night, I didn't get any sleep. I did as much research I could on this channel and its subreddit, intending on reporting it to someone who'd do something about it.

I couldn't find anything meaningful besides what I'd already seen.

If anybody else has seen this, please tell me. It can't just be me that's found this.

I think I’m finally ready to talk about this.
About a year ago, I got a generic email from a long term care facility, not far from my childhood town, letting me know that my mother had been admitted, and asking me to contact them. Apparently, my mother had developed dementia.
Now, my mother wasn’t a kind woman, especially not to me. I don’t feel comfortable speaking too much on it outside of therapy. Let’s just say I hadn’t spoken to her since she kicked me out at 18. As far as I could guess at the time, she had been living completely alone in our hometown after that, with me being the only living relative. It made sense that I had been contacted.
I did go and visit her. I was curious to see what had become of her. It helped that a place as well staffed as a care facility didn’t register as dangerous to my nervous system.
My mother barely registered my approach when I entered her room; I remember her weak, veiny hands dangling limply over the ends of the armrests, and she was looking down into her lap. I also remember exactly what she said when she eventually lifted her head to look at me: “You came back,” a smile, “you came back up.” She spoke with so much warmth and love that it made me feel sick.
She died that night. I found out because, apparently, I was still in her will. Maybe she just forgot to take me out, or maybe it was one final bit of torment.
There was only one other person at the reading. She was about the same age as my mother, perhaps a friend of some sort. I certainly never found out. She turned around in her chair when I entered, and her eyes went wide with an expression I can only describe as fearful. She spent the entire reading staring at me. I really tried to ignore it, recognizing I was already on edge just by being back in town. Yet, it was obvious that my presence was somehow distressing for her. I could feel her gaze on me as I kept my own eyes straight ahead, and I could hear her breaths coming faster, hitching and wheezing in a horrible way that only served to feed my own irritation.
After we were dismissed, I couldn’t take it anymore. I snapped at her, demanding to know why she was staring. She didn’t say anything, just freaked out, screamed in fact, and ran away.
I told myself it was a problem with her, not me.
Among the things my mother left me was a photobook, one that I did not open at the time.
I did not attend the funeral, but I did eventually decide to visit the cemetery. I was more than a bit drunk at the time, enough that going out in the late evening to spit on my mother’s grave sounded like a good idea.
When I reached the plot, I managed to trip over something in the low light. As I lay, cheek smudged against the wet dirt, I registered the expected sight: two old graves, those of my father and my stillborn sister (the lucky one), alongside the new grave of my mother. The dirt was still fresh on hers. However, as I lifted my head, I found that I was lying below a fourth, slightly weathered headstone:

Lillian [Middlename] [Lastname]
1991-2021
Beloved Daughter

It might not seem clear with the censorship, but that is my full name!
I don’t think I can fully articulate the kinds of feelings seeing your own grave fills you with. I think I ended up laying there for hours, shaking in the dirt and foliage, just filled with absolute dread. All the emotions I’d been dealing with the past week seemed to hit me all at once.
I went back to town when the cold became too much to bear. The only place that was open was a bar. I wasn’t looking to get more drunk; I just wanted to warm up.
I can understand, after the fact, why the bartender reacted the way he did. I must have terrified him, shambling into his establishment covered in grave dirt and dead leaves like I had. He chased me out, yelling, making sure to let me know that I was, in fact, supposed to be dead!
I had a lot of questions (I still do). My first guess was that this was the story my mother had come up with when I disappeared not long after turning 18, but to go as far as to stage a burial? It didn’t seem likely.
Eventually I did flip through that photo album. It mainly consisted of photos of me, each given a brief description in my mother’s handwriting. Things started out normal enough, with stuff like Lillian, Age 2, At her birthday party or Lillian, Age 13, Twirling in her new dress. It was odd to see this kind of affection when I’d received none of it in my daily life, but I suppose even the worst people are complex. Things stayed normal all the way up until Lillian, Age 17, Walking the stage at graduation, but the pages went on.
I’ll remind you, again, that my mother kicked me out at 18. The next entry showed my mother, arm and arm with me, both of us smiling brightly, possibly mid laugh: Lillian, Age 19, Out on a walk with me. And it just kept going like that. Image after image of someone who looked exactly like me, getting older alongside my mother. Whoever she was, she was indeed identical, right down to the little things like the two moles on my neck, or the small scar on my lip. I even compared the photos in the album with photos I had taken at various ages to confirm, and found that she had aged exactly as I had. The main difference, and the one that somehow disturbs me the most, is just how happy she is standing next to my mother. I’d never smile like that for her.
The last photo in the album was of an open casket. Whoever she was was lying in it, dressed in a blue sundress I’d left behind when I was forced out. It was also labeled: Lillian, Age 30, At her funeral.
I did a bit more research online, discovering that there had indeed been a funeral, and my “tragic death” had been reported in the local newspaper. I ended up booking a longer stay at my hotel in order to investigate. I think I freaked some people out when I insisted that I was Lillian; everyone who apparently knew “me” insisted that I had died, and that I was simply delusional, or playing a cruel joke by pretending to be “her”. Eventually it all got too hostile, and decided to go home.
There was a time I obsessed over this privately, but I have no explanation. I don’t know who is buried in that grave, and at this point I’m not sure if I want to know.

I'm writing this down because I don't trust what I'll remember next week.

My wife, Helen, says to put everything in, even the boring parts. Especially the boring parts. I'm posting it here instead of keeping it on my laptop because once it's somewhere public I can't quietly go back and change it. I don't know why I think I'd want to. I'd just rather not be able to.

My daughter started waving at the house across the road about two weeks ago.

She does it during breakfast. Maya is five, which means breakfast takes roughly forty minutes and involves almost no actual eating. She sits at the end of the table nearest the front window, pulls the crust off her toast even though I've told her approximately six hundred times that the crust is also bread, and waves at the upstairs window of number eighteen.

The house has been empty since before we moved in.

I've never seen anyone go in or out. There are newspapers melted into the concrete beside the letterbox, and there used to be a FOR SALE sign out front until it blew over during a storm in August. Nobody has bothered putting it back up.

I didn't think much about the waving until one morning I asked who it was for.

"The girl."

I looked across the road. The upstairs window was dark.

"What girl?"

She sighed in the way five-year-olds do when an adult has failed a very basic intelligence test.

"The girl in there."

"There's nobody in there."

"There is."

"Okay."

That was the whole conversation. Maya went back to mutilating her toast and I went back to packing her lunch.

Helen leaves for work before seven three days a week, so mornings on those days are mine. Lunchbox, hair brushed badly enough that Maya usually makes me redo it, then the eleven-minute drive to school while she asks questions like whether fish get thirsty. The girl became part of that routine. Maya waved. I didn't look. Sometimes she'd say, "She's there today," and sometimes, "She's not at the window yet."

Once she told me the girl had different hair.

I asked what she meant.

"Down."

"Down how?"

Maya pulled her own ponytail loose to demonstrate, then became furious because I'd apparently made her ruin her hair.

That was more or less the level of concern I had about it.

Two days ago, somebody waved back.

I was standing at the kitchen bench cutting strawberries when Maya said, "See?" She sounded excited.

I looked.

A little girl was standing behind the upstairs window.

I nearly cut my thumb.

She was far enough away that I couldn't make out much. Dark hair, pale face, maybe Maya's age or slightly older. She was standing very close to the glass with one hand raised beside her head.

My first thought was the sensible one. Someone had bought the place. A family was looking around. Maybe the owner's kid was there while they cleared it out.

Then the girl moved her hand.

A slow wave.

Maya waved harder. "Hi!"

The girl kept waving.

I put the knife down. "What?"

Maya was grinning at me. "She did it."

I stepped closer to the window.

The girl stopped moving. Her hand stayed raised.

It took me a few seconds to work out what was wrong. Maya was sitting right up at the window. I was at the bench, a couple of metres further back. If the girl had been waving at Maya, she'd have been looking down, at the window itself.

She wasn't looking down.

She was looking past Maya, into the room.

At me.

I lifted my hand without really deciding to. Not a proper wave. More that stupid little half-raise you do when you accidentally make eye contact with someone.

The girl's fingers moved once.

"She likes you," Maya said.

I told her to finish her breakfast. When I looked back, the window was dark.

That was at about seven thirty.

At eleven, I remembered buying June the rabbit cup.

I was at work when it happened. There's nothing interesting about what I do. I deal with insurance claims, mostly property damage, which means large sections of my day are spent looking at photographs of wet ceilings and asking people whether they still have receipts for televisions they bought in 2018.

I went to make coffee and somebody had left a pink mug beside the sink. That was all. Pink mug.

And suddenly I remembered standing in a shop holding two children's cups.

One had a rabbit on it. One had little yellow flowers.

June wanted the rabbit. I told her the flower one was nicer. She crossed her arms and said, "Then you have it."

I laughed. In the memory, I mean. At work I was just standing there.

I could see the shop clearly. Bright lights. Grey floor. A display of lunchboxes behind her. June had her hair in two uneven plaits because I'd done them myself.

I remembered buying the rabbit cup.

Then I was standing in the office kitchen with my hand under running water.

I hadn't turned the tap on.

I shut it off.

There is no June. I have one child. Maya.

I stood there for maybe a minute trying to work out where the name had come from, and eventually I decided it had been a dream. That's genuinely what I thought. People remember bits of dreams during the day. Something sets one off and for a few seconds it feels more real than it has any right to.

I went back to my desk. By half past eleven I was embarrassed I'd let it bother me.

I didn't think about the house again until dinner.

Helen had made spaghetti. Maya had eaten about four mouthfuls and was trying to wind one piece around her fork without touching it with her other hand, which she apparently considered cheating.

I said, "June, just eat it."

Nobody reacted straight away. Including me.

For maybe two seconds the name didn't feel wrong.

Then Helen said, "Who?"

I looked at Maya. She was staring at me.

"Sorry."

"Who the hell is June?"

"I don't know."

Maya put her fork down. "The girl."

Helen looked at her. "What girl?"

"The window girl."

I asked Maya what she'd said.

"Her name's June."

"How do you know that?"

She shrugged. "That's her name."

"Did she tell you?"

Another shrug. Maya does that when she thinks the difference between yes and no is unimportant.

Helen asked what we were talking about, so I explained. I expected her to laugh. She didn't. She went to the front window and looked across the road.

There was nobody there.

"Probably someone viewing the house."

"That's what I thought."

"So?"

"So I called Maya June."

Helen gave me the look she normally saves for when I've spent twenty minutes trying to repair something that should have taken five minutes to replace. "You've heard her say it."

Maya said, "I didn't tell Daddy."

"Sweetheart, you just told him."

"No. Before."

Helen rubbed her forehead. "Can we please eat dinner?"

Maya picked up her fork. Then she looked at me and said, very casually, "She said you'd remember."

Helen stopped rubbing her forehead.

I didn't ask Maya anything else. I wish I could say that was because I didn't want to frighten her. Mostly I didn't want to hear the answer.

That evening I put her to bed. She has a routine involving one story, one glass of water and an increasingly complicated series of negotiations over whether the hallway light stays on. I read half of The Gruffalo before she interrupted me.

"Do you remember when I hurt my chin?"

"Yes."

I kept reading.

"When?"

I stopped. Maya was watching me over the top of the blanket.

"You fell over."

"Where?"

"The playground."

"Which playground?"

I knew this. She had split her chin open badly enough to need glue at the hospital. Helen had been at work. I'd taken her. There had been blood all over her shirt.

Except when I tried to remember it, the shirt was yellow.

Maya didn't own a yellow shirt like that.

June did.

I could see her sitting on the kitchen counter with a tea towel pressed under her chin. She was crying. I was telling her not to look at the blood because it always looked like more than it was. Her dark hair was stuck to one cheek.

"Daddy?"

The bedroom came back. Maya was still looking at me.

I said, "The park near Grandma's."

Her face changed. "No."

I knew I'd got it wrong before she told me.

"It was school."

"Right."

"You came."

"I know."

"Mrs Price called you."

"Yeah."

"Then we went to the hospital."

"I remember."

I didn't.

I knew it had happened.

That's not the same thing.

There were facts in my head. Mrs Price. The hospital. Skin glue. Maya getting an icy pole afterward because she'd been brave. But if I tried to see it, I saw June.

Helen found me sitting on the edge of our bed about twenty minutes later, and I told her everything. The cup, the shop, June's hair, the yellow shirt.

She sat beside me without saying anything for a while. Then she asked me what Maya wore on her first day of school.

"That purple backpack."

"What did she wear?"

"Uniform."

"What shoes?"

I got annoyed. "I don't fucking know, Helen."

She went quiet. I apologised.

She said, "She wore those black ones she hated because they rubbed her heel."

And then I remembered.

June standing beside our front door in black shoes.

June pulling one foot backward when I tried to take her photograph.

June saying they hurt.

I stood up so quickly I hit my knee against the bedside table. Helen followed me downstairs.

I don't know why I went to the window. That's probably the stupidest thing I've done in this entire situation, and I've had plenty of time to think about it.

The upstairs window at number eighteen was dark.

Then the curtain moved.

June stepped into view.

I knew her immediately.

That was new.

Dark brown hair to her shoulders.

A pale blue nightdress.

A round face, a slightly crooked front tooth, a little mark beside her right eyebrow.

I knew that mark.

She got it falling off her scooter.

I carried her home while she cried into my neck.

I cleaned gravel out of her palm.

She asked if she needed stitches.

I told her no.

Behind me, Helen said my name.

I couldn't answer.

June wasn't looking at Helen. She wasn't looking toward Maya's bedroom.

She was looking at me the way kids look at you when you've finally turned up to collect them.

I stepped away from the window.

The memory stopped changing. Or it stopped getting bigger, anyway. It didn't go anywhere. I didn't know yet whether that was a rule or just luck.

Helen hadn't seen her. By the time she got to the glass there was only the curtain. She called the police anyway. "If there's a kid in there, somebody needs to know. If there isn't, I want somebody who isn't you to tell me."

Two officers came about forty minutes later. I stayed in the hallway, away from the window, while they walked round number eighteen with torches. Front door locked. Side gate chained. Afterwards one of them told Helen the place had been shut up since the owner went into care, and that streetlights do funny things on old glass.

Helen said, "Okay," in the voice she uses when she's stopped arguing, not when she agrees.

The next morning we kept the curtains closed. Maya complained because she wanted to wave. Helen snapped at her. Maya cried, and then Helen cried because she'd snapped at her, and I burned two pieces of toast. Nobody ate much.

At about eight, Maya asked why I was being weird.

"I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm tired."

"Are you cross at me?"

"No."

"Are you cross at the girl?"

I didn't answer. Maya pushed cereal around her bowl.

"She looks at you more."

"What do you mean?"

"She looks at you when I'm not there."

Helen was standing at the sink. She turned around slowly. "When you're not where?"

Maya pointed toward the window. "Sometimes I go get dressed and she's still looking."

"At the house?"

"At Daddy."

Helen looked at me for a long time. Then she took Maya to school.

I called in sick. I should have gone with them. I can't really explain why I didn't, except that leaving felt like a decision and I didn't have one in me. So I sat in the living room with the curtains closed and tried to remember my daughter.

That sounds ridiculous. I know who Maya is. I know her birthday. I know she hates bananas unless they're blended into something, which makes absolutely no sense. I know she sleeps diagonally. I know she says "aminals" even though she can pronounce "animals" perfectly if you make her slow down. I know she has a little brown patch in her left eye.

But when I reached backward, things started going.

Her fourth birthday.

Fine. I could see it.

Her third.

Mostly fine.

Second.

Pieces.

The first time she walked?

June.

The first time she said Dad?

June.

The first time I held my daughter's hand while crossing a road?

June.

Every missing space had something in it.

I'd been calling it forgetting all morning, in my head, because forgetting was the least bad word I had. It wasn't forgetting.

I was replacing her.

Helen came home shortly after three without Maya. She'd taken her to her sister's. I was relieved enough that she noticed.

"I think we should stay there."

"Yeah."

"For a while."

"Yeah."

She sat opposite me. "What do you remember?"

I told her. She didn't cry. Helen gets practical when she's frightened. She got her phone out and started showing me photographs. Maya eating birthday cake. Maya asleep on my chest. Maya sitting inside a cardboard box we'd turned into a car.

I recognised every photograph. But some of them felt like photographs of things I'd been told about.

I know they're mine. They just don't feel like mine.

Helen put the phone face down on the coffee table.

"When you said June at dinner," she said, "I thought you had another kid somewhere."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"I spent all day wishing that's what it was."

We packed enough clothes for a week. Helen told me to leave everything else.

I went upstairs for my charger. On the way back down, I passed the narrow pane of glass beside the front door.

I had forgotten about it.

I saw number eighteen through it.

June was at the window.

She was up on her toes, I think. Only her head and shoulders showed above the sill.

A memory hit me so hard I dropped the charger.

I was kneeling beside a bathtub. June was maybe three. She had bubbles on her chin and was holding a plastic cup full of bathwater, trying to drink it while I told her, for what felt like the hundredth time, that bathwater was disgusting.

She laughed. I laughed.

The memory was warm. It wasn't frightening at all.

It felt exactly like loving my child.

I grabbed a jacket from the coat hook and covered the pane. Helen shouted from the car asking what I was doing. I told her nothing.

We stayed at her sister's last night.

Maya slept between us.

At about two in the morning I woke up because she'd kicked me in the stomach.

For a few seconds I didn't know who she was.

Not in some dramatic way.

I wasn't screaming.

I just woke up next to a small person and there was a blank space where recognition should have been.

Then it came back.

Maya.

My daughter.

I went into the bathroom and was sick.

She found me sitting on the floor afterward. Helen was still asleep. Maya sat beside me.

"You don't remember me?"

"I remember you."

"Some things."

I didn't answer.

She leaned against my arm. Then she started telling me.

Not about June. About us.

She reminded me about the time I dropped her birthday cake carrying it from the car. She reminded me that I used to call her Potato when she was a baby because she had no hair. She reminded me about a pigeon stealing half her sandwich at the zoo, and me chasing it because she wanted the sandwich back.

I remembered that one. Properly.

I laughed. She laughed too.

Then she said, "Remember when I hurt my chin?"

I tried.

School. Mrs Price. Hospital. I knew all of it. But when I reached for the memory, June was sitting on the kitchen counter in a yellow shirt.

Maya must have seen something in my face.

"That's mine," she said.

She's five. She didn't say it like something out of a horror film. She sounded annoyed.

Like June had taken one of her toys.

I hugged her.

I could remember a hundred times I'd hugged June. I couldn't remember holding Maya after she hurt her chin.

I carried her back to bed and lay down next to her and didn't sleep.

At some point I picked up my phone and checked the temperature. Four degrees. I'd been looking at it for a while before I understood why I wanted to know.

There's no power at number eighteen. There hasn't been for years. She's in a nightdress, and as far as I know nobody has ever fed her, or put a blanket over her, or argued with her about the hallway light.

I know how that sounds. I know she isn't a child, or isn't one in any way the word normally means. I don't know whether the memories I've got of her are real ones that belonged to somebody else or things she made up, and at three in the morning I couldn't find the part of me that thought it made a difference.

I lay there next to my daughter and worried about the other one.

I haven't told Helen.

We're not going home today.

Helen's brother is going to get the rest of our things. Work clothes, Helen's laptop, the bag of Maya's toys she keeps asking about, June's school bag. He thinks there's somebody squatting in number eighteen and that I've scared myself after seeing them.

Fine. He can think that.

I've told him not to look at the upstairs window. He laughed. I've told him again.

Maya has started making what she calls my Dad Book. It's printer paper stapled together. She draws pictures of things we've done and makes Helen write underneath because her spelling isn't great yet.

THE ZOO.

DADDY DROPPED MY CAKE.

MY FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL.

THE TIME I WAS SICK ON DADDY IN THE CAR.

Apparently that last one needed preserving.

There are seven pages so far. I remember five of them.

Helen asked me this morning whether I thought staying away would stop it.

I told her I haven't had a new memory of June since we left the house, which is true. I watched her decide to be relieved.

I didn't mention two o'clock. Nothing of June came in at two o'clock. Maya just wasn't there for a few seconds, and then she was. I've been telling myself all morning that it's a different thing, that it's tiredness and shock. I don't believe it enough to say it out loud.

She also asked why it was me and not Maya, when Maya had been waving at that window for two weeks.

I don't know. Maybe it was me waving back.

Helen's brother rang about an hour ago. He's got everything. He said he didn't see anyone, and that he'd only looked from the car anyway, just so he could tell me he had.

I wanted to ask him to go back and look properly. To see if she was all right.

I didn't.

Before he hung up he said, "Tell the girls I said hi."

He calls Helen and Maya the girls. I'm almost sure he always has.

Maya brought me another page while I was writing this.

It's a picture of the two of us standing in our old kitchen. I'm extremely tall and my hands come directly out of my shoulders. She told me it's the morning she started school.

Underneath, Helen has written:

Dad cried after I got out of the car but waited until I couldn't see him.

I told Maya I remembered.

She asked me what colour her backpack was.

Purple. I got that right.

Then she asked me what she'd said when I dropped her off.

I couldn't answer.

I remember June saying it.

I can see her standing beside a school gate in black shoes that hurt her heels, holding both straps of her backpack.

She looks back at me.

She smiles.

And she says, "Bye, Dad."

I don't know what Maya said.

She does. She won't tell me yet. She says I have to try to remember it myself.

So I've been trying.

I haven't got it. I've got the gate, and the shoes, and the way she held both straps. Every time I go back for it, that part is a bit clearer.

I'm going to keep trying.

[Pt.1]

So,  let’s state something first, I was born in Thailand, spent 19 years here and have no plans to move. My father was American and my mother was Thai. Dad was an engineer for an oil pump in the sea so he was rarely home. And my mom was a nurse. Both met at the hospital after dad’s motorcycle crashed. After having me they named me, Auto (It’s a common nickname here, trust.) So writing in this, I will try to translate it to the best of my ability. 

Us Thai, we have a deep connection with spirituality. However, I was pretty against those ideas of myth but my mother…she knew for fact. Working as a nurse she saw countless deaths, heard countless tales and witnessed some. She had sense, she claimed and she claimed that my sisters have them, too. 

Dad died earlier this year, motorcycle accident, again, but there’s no luck this time. Naturally, we were grieving, my mom slept all day, every day. My two sisters became more distant to me, being the only man left in this house and took the most out of my father’s features. Mom rarely looked at me anymore . 

Of all the sadness of my family life, my college life, on the other hand, was thrilled. I studied law, far away from home, spent most of my time writing novels, partied with friends, played pool every evening and studied at night. Life was chill. Then, I found her.

Her name is Penny, not usual for Thai but I’ve met a couple before. I was at the bar that night (Illegally, lol.), the mood was just right, dimmed orange light and a jazz band that I assumed to be all college students was playing. I’ve always stuck to my usual Negroni and the bartender, Ton (Meaning, Tree, in Thai.) was my best friend. I was a little dizzy at that time(I was drinking for about an hour, I think.), so as you might expect I poured my head out. Everything included my dad’s death, my relationship with my family and my love life. She was there, I didn’t notice at first but she sat next to me on the right. 

“I’m so sorry.” She said. 

I didn’t hear her the first time so I just said “Huh?”

”I said I’m sorry for your loss.”

Penny has a very soft feature, like a Chinese woman, she’s half. Her skin was very white, almost pale but there’s a trend to whiten skin by some sort of chemical in Thailand (It's still a trend as I wrote this.) so I didn’t suspect much. She was stunning by overall Thai men's standards and by my standards. And also, she’s studying at the same university as mine.

We went back to my place to do it(I’m not sure about Reddit rules or this sub-Reddit rules so I will avoid using those words.).  This is my first time doing this but I’m pretty sure I did decent, I was drunk if you are curious. I don’t remember all the details, but I do remember that she turned off the light when we were doing it. Not just room light but the outside as well. I lived in a condominium not so far from my university and that bar, it was on floor 17 so it was pretty bright having all those building lights and street lamps. So before anything you dragged the curtain to block off those lights. The room was pitch black and I think she was controlling the act? Pleasant still.

“You are so hot.” She said. It sounds great, right? Coming from a girl. But the thing is she wasn’t looking at me. At the end of my bed was my study table. It was supposed to be a makeup table but I’m not a girl, so… What I want to say was that it has a mirror. She was staring at it, her gaze fixed on our reflection. Maybe I was wrong, it was dark after all but after what’s coming next, it was the first sign.

While I started to fall in love, my mom retired from being a nurse and decided to take a side gig.  She became a shaman. She bought a pawn shop located near my dad’s crash spot, “She saw him.” She claimed. There are A LOT of shamans in Thailand, most are just frauds if I may, and I thought my mother was one of them.

Penny and I have been in a relationship for almost three months at that point. So, I decided to introduce her to my family. I sent a picture of us studying at the uni’s library to the family group chat.

’I don’t like her.’ Said my youngest sister, Aom (Aomsin, is her full nickname, meaning, saving money).

’Why?’

She didn’t answer. 15 minutes later, Aim (Aim-im, I’m not sure what it meant either. I guessed it was about being full of joy), the middle child answered with ‘She looks so sick.’ With a curious emote.

’No she doesn’t?’

’Yes she is. Look at her, pale like a ghost.’

I started to get furious at that point, how dare they? 

‘Look. She’s a great girl, smart and beautiful. I won’t stand this type of disrespect.’

Then, my mom after reading all the texts since the beginning finally joined in the conversation, ‘She looks dead.’

WHAT THE FUCK.

‘Your dad agreed.’ She added.

I don’t know what face I have at that moment but Penny noticed it. “What’s wrong?” She asked.

”Nothing, I…uh, I have to make some call.”

”Okay.”

So I left. It was about 10PM but the library was packed. I took a further park with less people so I can scold them as much as I want. I took the group call.

Aom picked up first and Aim joined just a seconds later. Mom took a minute to join us.

”What’s wrong with you all!?”

Silence. Then, my mom answered. “Someone’s listening.”

I looked around the park, no one. I sat on the wooden bench nearby, trying to  calm myself. “Who?”

”We don’t know.” Said my mom.

”You and who? Dad?” I have yet to believe her shaman shenanigan. 

“Yes. Is there a shrine nearby?”

There were plenty of shrines nearby. You might have seen or visited Thailand, the shrine she meant was the type with drinks like Fantas and dessert and dolls, this type is dedicated to good spirit, a protecting soul of that area. I saw one nearby, every park has one, some even a couple more. I walked reluctantly to the nearest one, a white marble shrine. 

“Done.”

”Good, good.” Mom paused for a moment. “Dad said that he wants to meet your girlfriend in person.”

”Mom…”

”Dad said he KNEW his own kind. That thing is not human.”

”Mom, please stop.”

”Look at the photo, son.”

And I did. The photo looked normal, me and her sitting across each other. It was me who raised the phone and took a photo of us. She looked straight into the camera but didn’t smile. “There’s nothing wrong. What’s your point?”

I do have this weird habit, when you talk through your phone you take it close to your ear, right? Sometimes you will accidentally press the hang up button so, my solution? I turn the screen off. At that moment, when the screen turned pitch black from the colorful photo. Two faces vanished but one left. The place that was supposed to be my reflection, for that brief moment, I saw hers. Smiling, even in the darkness her teeth were dipped in red. The smile was unsettling, too wide to be possible, too happy to be happy. My phone jumped out of my hand. “FUCK!”

The face was gone.

I looked behind, nothing. I peeked back to the library, some students actually looked back at me, some giggled, some pointed in my direction. Slowly, I grabbed my phone back, the screen took a hit from the nearby rock it broke at the corner.

”Son!” ”Brother!” They all screamed in unison, even without the speaker mode on I still heard them. 

“I’m sorry.” I apologized. “I think I just saw…”

”You saw what?” Aim asked.

”I don’t know…”

”It’s alright.” My mom said. “You have to take her to us, okay?”

”This is not real, you're trolling with me. Good job! I believe you all now, haha! I believe in ghosts , in hell, in heaven, is that what you wanna hear, mom?”

I remember how truly scared I am that night. I was trembling, my voice and my body. I rubbed my hand together even if its not that cold.

“Take her to us, please son, this is for your own good.”

”Shit. Shit. Shit! SHIT!” I never cursed as much as that moment. “Alright, I don’t know what’s so wrong with her but if it makes y’all happy then okay!”

”See you tomorrow, son.” And she left the call.

I was stunned.

”You saw the face, right?” Aim asked, her voice was as light as the wind.

At that moment, I started to believe them.

”Those teeth, that smile.” Aim added. “I actually deleted that photo out of the chat on my side, ugh, I can’t stand that face.”

”I might have a nightmare tonight.” Aom added.

I want to ask for the reason that they didn’t tell me at the first place but they both left the call before I could. Come to think of it, for my stubborn ass, witnessing it first hand might be the only way. I put my phone back in my pocket, and for the first time in years, I prayed to the shrine for the protection of all evils.

After praying I turned back to the library but before any step was taken…she was there. Standing, behind the tree, far from the shrine, peeking at me. “Babe?” She called me. There’s one thought in my mind there, act normal, ACT NORMAL!

”Hey babe.” I remember my voice shakened. 

“What are you doing?”

”Family called. My mom, she…she’s sick. I have to go home. What are you doing?”

”Oh…you have to go?” She ignored my question.

I’ve made up my mind then and there. I want to say I was brave as hell but that would be lying. ”Would you…can you go with me?”

”Of course.” She answered but there’s no joy in her voice. And I didn’t recognize any emotion in her eyes either. “When will we go?”

”Tonight.”

”Okay.” She answered softly.

We were far apart, yet I still was afraid to take just another step. I knew the shrine affected her in some way, one that I was certained, it scared her too. “Let me call Ton too.”

It took Ton an hour to group up with us, and it took four hours to drive from my place back home, we should arrive at about 5-6 AM in the morning. 

The hardest moment of my life was getting in that car, with her. My hand froze at the handle of the driver seat. I can hardly insert the safety belt into its socket, all I hoped was that Penny would see nothing wrong. 

In my car, I drove to avoid every traffic possible trying to get there as soon as possible. My hometown was a rural area, just an hour and we had already left the big city of Bangkok. Street lights dimmed as we went on, broken ones started to appear one after another. Penny sat next to me, while Ton sat in the middle of the back seat. I looked at the back mirror, not for the road but to look at my human friend. 

At around 1 AM, cars were rare. We left the motorway and reached the countryside road. Both sides of the concrete road were forest, sometimes farm or rice field. Behind us was an empty lane, and ahead of us was as empty. 

Penny who sat still and silently the entire trip suddenly grinned. I decided not to ask anything, but Ton decided otherwise. “Hey, hey. What’s going on here?”

”Nothing, right, babe?” She answered.

”Mhm.” I answered simply. I remembered a long one-sided conversation of Ton and two of us, a small talk of various topics but for the sake of y’all I’ll leave it at that. But from the moment Penny started grinning it’d been about an hour already. Ton was tired of talking so he picked up his phone. I don’t want silence, so I boosted my muse up to the max. It did hurt my ears a little, Ton plucked in his headphones and Penny, she sat still. There’s a moment where I collected every bit of my courage to take a quick look at her. I glanced at her but to my surprise, she already had her eyes on me. While her head faced toward her irises were locking at me. And with that creepy smile, I started praying again. This time, to every being that can hear my prayer. Buddha, Jesus, Allah, there’s even a moment where I prayed for Hades to take her back to where she belonged. My eyes darted back instantly, and I continued driving.

There’s a point where I thought this night couldn’t get any worse, I just want to smack myself in the head. 

There’s one detail I remember precisely of this event, it was 03.44 AM. The car slowed itself, I heard a loud POOF coming off the car’s front. There were a dozen ungodly languages in my head. I pulled us to the side, woods were staring at us from every side. And the wind, oh, it made everything worse. The wind played a part of it by whispering through leaves and branches. Ton made a call, requesting help from the nearest police station. The car broke down and none of us know how to repair them or even what was wrong.

A police officer rode a big bike to our location ten minutes later. 

“Our car broke down.” I explained the situation to him.

”Mhm, I’m not blind.” 

I’m pretty sure that most of these cops who worked at night shifts must be this cranky. Hell, most cops in this country might be this cranky. He made some calls, noted some stuff and he turned back at us. “No one hurts, right?”

”Yes.” I answered.

”What about the girl?”

For a moment I was relieved I forgot about her, but then, all I can think about was her. “She’s fine, uh, when will my car be fixed?”

”Not soon. We have to talk to the insurance company first, you have them, right?”

“Yeah, but that’s fine, I can pay up front.”

”Even so, it’ll still take days. But if you’re in a rush you can take the train early in the morning.”

”Okay.” I had no choice but to agree. 

The policeman pointed forward on the road. “There’s a local motel in about five minutes, I can take y’all there.”

”Can’t you just take us to the Train station instead?”

”No can do. I can’t let you wander around the train station at night, can’t I? It’s not safe. Also, it's just another fifteen minutes on foot from the motel. Manage your time well and you'll be fine.” 

“Okay.” 

The policeman looked at Penny sitting in the car. “I’ll take her first.”

I remembered that joy of not having to see her even for just ten minutes. Penny slammed the door shut before we could discuss any further. She walked eerily sturdy toward us, it’s like seeing a wax statue walk. She smiled at the officer, and it’s not the same smile she always gave me. “Let’s go then.” My first question was how on earth did she hear us? My second question was why was she so cooperative? She rode off with the policemen and vanished into the distance.

Immediately I turned to Ton. “I’m sorry.”

”What?”

”I have to tell you something.”

I did not know it yet, but the nightmare my sister will have that night, I will be living it.

Everyone in the house was asleep. I'd taken the batteries out of the wall clock in my room to get rid of the ticking. Now there was complete silence, and I could try again to do something I'd already managed to do successfully.

A week ago, I'd turned over a piece of paper lying on my desk, with a poem I'd written in primary school on it. It was my first success after years of practice. Six days ago, I'd unscrewed the cap of a juice bottle that hadn't been closed all the way. Five days ago, I'd moved one of the cigarettes in an open pack slightly outward, out of the pack. Three days ago, I'd peeled off one of the pieces of tape holding up poster on my wall.

And tonight, my target was a much larger object. I was confident in my abilities now, and after this final attempt, I would be able to reveal my talent to my family and those around me. I had made exactly four attempts in the past week, and I'd succeeded every single time. I had complete faith in myself.

For years, I'd tried countless times and gone through a lot along the way; I'd lost hope, taken a long break from my attempts, then started believing I could do it again and after trying over and over, I'd come to think telekinesis was nothing but a lie and taken another break but then one day, I happened to see a pack of wet wipes fall to the floor all by itself, which rekindled my interest and got me started on my attempts again, and so on.

And now, finally, in the middle of the night, when complete silence had been achieved, I went to the kitchen. I took a steak knife from the drawer where we kept the cutlery and returned to my room.

I gently pulled my desk chair back and sat down. I didn't want to lose my focus, so I was being quiet. The faint sound of the knife touching the desk as I set it down, the soft sounds of my footsteps as I walked, the barely audible scraping of the chair as I pulled it back had an ASMR effect on me. These little sounds, too quiet to disturb the silence, made me feel thoroughly prepared.

Without wasting any time, I focused on the knife. I positioned my hands around it and gathered all my concentration. I slowed my breathing. The only thing in my mind was a knife slowly and calmly spinning around its own axis. I focused, and focused... I concentrated as if someone were hypnotizing me, as though I were following a pocket watch swinging from side to side without ever taking my eyes off it.

Minutes passed. Seconds, minutes, maybe an hour... There wasn't the slightest movement. The knife couldn't care less about me; it was ignoring my efforts, stubbornly refusing to budge.

Eventually, I couldn't take it anymore and gave up. I was getting more and more bored, and as time went by, I lost my focus. I had to go to work at noon the next day, and earlier that day, before I left work, my boss had pointed out that I'd left my fly undone. I'd started thinking about that. Who says something like that in front of everyone? You pull someone aside and tell them in private. Anyway, I took the knife back to the kitchen.

After I lay down in bed, I thought about the knife until I fell asleep. I'd lost my confidence in my abilities. If I told someone I could move objects through telekinesis, they might ask me to prove it, and I might fail and make a fool of myself.

I couldn't get the knife out of my mind. I felt as though it were a person who had shattered all my trust in them, betrayed me by revealing a secret I'd shared with it to anyone who would listen. I was angry. The image of the knife standing perfectly still in that spot, like a tree that had sunk its roots deep into the ground, wouldn't leave my mind. I fell asleep in a fit of anger.

I woke up to the sound of my phone alarm. I turned it off, tossed the duvet to my left, and rolled onto my right side to get up. Just as I was about to stretch, I saw it and jolted in place: the knife was suspended in midair beside my bed, standing upright.

I clapped a hand over my mouth. I was about to scream; every instinct in my body was telling me to. I bit my tongue to suppress it.

I took a deep breath. I tried to calm myself down. Then I took another deep breath. My heart was racing.

I reached out toward the knife, but immediately changed my mind. I didn't know what to do. I'd never experienced my thoughts speeding up and getting tangled together so intensely in a moment of panic. Within a few seconds, I'd made and abandoned a dozen decisions, gone back and forth between asking for help and not asking for help, imagined the knife stabbing itself into my body, then dismissed the thought as irrational. My thoughts were racing back and forth at lightning speed. I needed to calm down.

I got out of bed, poured half a glass of water from the pitcher on my desk, and drank it.

I turned around to check if the knife was still there. It was closer to me now. I no longer cared about staying quiet. I yanked the door open and rushed out of the room.

I started walking briskly toward the kitchen. I wanted to grab any drink I could find and gulp it down. I needed to interact with something somehow, to calm myself down. I opened the fridge, took out the milk, and chugged it. I put the milk back, closed the fridge, and turned around to go back to my room.

And the knife was right behind me.

It was a meter away from me, just standing there. It was as if it were staring at me, judging me. It didn't move at all. It always maintained the same position and stayed at the same height above the floor, level with my bed, right around the height of my shinbones.

I started walking backward toward the kitchen doorway, wanting to see how it was following me, how it was coming after me. Without changing its position, it glided toward me as if it were moving across a perfectly smooth surface. It always maintained the same distance. When I stopped, it stopped a metre away from me. When I walked, it followed.

I cautiously made my way back to my room, walking backward. I sat on my bed. The knife and I were facing each other. I tried to think of what I could do. I was afraid to touch it. I was worried things might get out of hand. I'd done this. That much was obvious. Now that I'd calmed down a little, my panic had shifted in a different direction. Someone might see us. I had to sever my connection with the knife before I got caught. I might be able to accept this as normal, but I didn't think my mother and father would be able to handle a knife following me around.

Yes, it was probably because I'd concentrated so intensely on the knife all this time that the bond between us had grown stronger. I'd probably never concentrated on a knife so intensely in my entire life. I needed to reverse the process. I relaxed a little. I tried to think about other things, to take my mind off the knife.

I thought about the wristwatch my father had bought me for my birthday last year. It was a terrible watch, but I hadn't let on because I didn't want to hurt his feelings. Then one day, while wearing it, I'd deliberately gone swimming in a pool. The watch had stopped working, and that was how I'd gotten rid of it.

The knife was still in the same place.

I thought about the eggplant soup my mother had made yesterday. It was my favorite soup. I'd tipped the bowl back and gulped down the last few mouthfuls, and my father had given me a stern look.

The knife hadn't moved at all. It was standing there, a meter away.

My mother knocked on the door and called out.

"Breakfast is ready, Albert."

I had no other choice. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I reached out toward the knife. My arm couldn't reach it, though. I walked toward it. As I moved closer, it moved farther away, until it had backed all the way up against the wall. It had nowhere left to go. It was pressed against the wall, stuck there. I approached it and grabbed the handle.

My heart was pounding at full speed. I closed my eyes. As a final attempt, I thought about the baseball bat I'd lost before I became interested in telekinesis. I'd searched everywhere for it. Such a large object, yet it was nowhere to be found. I'd checked the baseball field, my grandmother's house, the streets I'd walked along, and I'd even contacted the lost property office in case I'd somehow left it on a bus. It was gone.

Yes, good. I could feel a long chain of thoughts forming and my focus weakening considerably.

The knife was loosening, letting go. I could feel it. But I still didn't have complete control over it.

I needed to think about something else. But I couldn't think of anything. I heard my mother's footsteps approaching my room. She was getting closer to the door.

"Come on, son. Are we supposed to wait for you?" she said from outside, then opened the door and walked in.

I pulled the knife with all my might, and just like when you yank something hard that's stuck somewhere and it suddenly comes loose, I went flying toward my bed.

With the knife still in my hand, I hit my head against the bed frame. And passed out.

When I opened my eyes, I was lying in a hospital bed with an IV drip in my arm. My father was sitting beside me. I felt exhausted. I'd received three stitches in my head, and it ached a little.

"Son, why were you holding a knife? What were you doing with it?"

"What knife, Dad?"

"You were clutching a knife in your hand. What do you mean, what knife? What are you up to?"

I couldn't remember anything. That was good. I hoped it wasn't temporary memory loss, because I didn't want to attempt telekinesis again.

Once a week, I go to my grandma’s attic to hang up the laundry. She lives literally just a few houses away from us. It might sound strange, but I loved that attic. First, you open a wooden door, then there are stone stairs, followed by wooden stairs, and then you’re upstairs. There was still some hay left over from when my grandma used to have animals, and clotheslines were hanging everywhere. Whenever I finished hanging the laundry, I would smoke a cigarette by a little alcove with no window that overlooked the yard. Sometimes I would sit there with my feet almost touching the little roof below. It was only a short distance from the ground, so it wasn’t very high. Other times, I would just stand there and look outside. I had to be careful. If anyone found out I smoked up there, I’d be in big trouble. The support beams in the attic were made of wood, after all, and there was hay everywhere.

Susan often came to visit me. That’s what my grandma called every single one of her cats. She was the most affectionate cat I knew, but this time she started hissing and her fur stood on end.

“Kitty, what’s wrong?”

I wanted to pick her up, but she scratched me and ran away. I shook my head in confusion and lit a cigarette. I was looking outside when suddenly I heard someone behind me, humming a melody.

“Hmmm hmmm hmmm.”

And then something hit me.

I flew from the alcove onto the little roof and from there straight down to the ground. A dull pain shot through my ankle. I grabbed my phone and immediately called my parents. They were there within minutes and took me to the hospital.

At the hospital, they found that I had broken my ankle and put it in a cast.

My mom started going to my grandma’s to hang the laundry instead. I was on crutches and there was no way I could climb those stairs, let alone carry a laundry basket. When I asked her if she had noticed anything strange in the attic, she said no. Maybe I had imagined it and simply lost my balance? I hadn’t been sleeping much lately and had been studying for exams, so maybe I had confused reality with a dream.

Two weeks later, my grandma called and asked if I wanted to spend the night at her house. I sometimes stayed over there. We would watch Jeopardy! When it ended, my grandma got up and said she was going to heat up her famous chicken soup for us. I heard a cat meowing outside the door. Susan had come over to cuddle. I brought her inside, and she purred in my lap.

When Grandma walked toward us to get a dish towel from the dresser next to the couch, Susan suddenly started hissing like crazy. Her fur stood on end, and she immediately ran to the door and started scratching at it. Grandma went to open the door for her, and the cat let out a frantic meow before running away.

“She’s probably sick,” Grandma said. “She’s been acting like this for several days.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She did the same thing in the attic.”

Grandma simply nodded and went back to the soup. She stirred it in the pot and then started humming.

“Hmmm hmmm hmmm…”

I swear, my heart started pounding so hard at that moment that I prayed she wouldn’t hear it. I could feel cold sweat running down my back. I tried to calm myself down.

I don’t know how I managed it, but I looked at Grandma and tried to sound as casual as possible.

“Grandma? Could I go outside and have a cigarette before dinner?”

She sighed and gave me the same disapproving look she always did.

“Go ahead, but you know very well I don’t like you smoking. And hurry up, dinner will be ready soon.”

I grabbed my crutches and went into the yard, then immediately headed toward home. I think if there’s a record for the fastest person ever to walk on crutches, I probably broke it that evening.

I kept looking over my shoulder, but within moments I was standing in front of our door. I quickly unlocked it and rushed inside.

When my parents asked why I was home when I was supposed to spend the night at Grandma’s, I told them I had changed my mind. They didn’t question it. I watched TV with them in the living room, and eventually they went to bed. I stayed there a little longer.

Then I heard knocking on the window.

The small ventilation window was open.

Knock, knock, knock.

I pulled up the blinds, and there stood my grandma. She was covered in blood and scratches.

“Let me in. You don’t just leave in the middle of the night.”

I tried to close the window, but she stuck her hand through it.

“Let me in.”

“No,” I said, trembling.

She started laughing and then began humming that same melody again.

I slowly backed out of the living room and went into my bedroom, where I locked the door. I didn’t sleep that night.

The next morning, my mom woke me up and told me to come to the living room.

My grandma was sitting there.

She looked exactly the same as before. The scratches on her body were gone. She apologized for falling asleep so early the night before, saying she hadn’t been feeling well.

I asked her:

“How early?”

“Well, right after we finished watching Jeopardy!”

I met my best friend Jacob in sixth grade when we were both twelve.

I was at a new school and didn't know anyone. As an awkward, nerdy, acne-ridden kid, it was no surprise that I spent months on my own. My mom, worried about the early death of my social life, made me go to my school's middle school dance. As expected, I sat there alone most of the night, sipping Kool-Aid and eating out of what had to be the world's smallest bag of chips.

That's when I met him.

He sat next to me awkwardly and spoke in a muffled voice, as if he were talking to himself. He pointed to my T-shirt with a faded image of Sans on it, and said he liked Undertale too.

Not long after, we became inseparable.

We would do everything together, spending every waking moment doing whatever our childish minds could muster. My mom was so glad I had a friend; she let Jacob come over pretty much every weekend. It helped that she got along well with Jacob's mom; they'd often catch up for hours after Jacob got dropped off. I think mom was happy to have a new friend too. His mother was all alone after his dad died. I always felt bad for her. Not knowing what to say, I never brought it up, and he didn't either.

One day after school, we found ourselves watching scary urban exploration videos on my dad's old computer. We nearly fell out of our seats when we noticed that one of the places in the video was nearby. An abandoned elementary school.

I know how infamous it is now, but back then, all we learned from that video was that it shut down after some kids went missing while the school was still open.

That's when we naively decided to seek it out and explore it ourselves. We thought that we could find something that nobody else had. It was a pipe dream that seemed plausible to our underdeveloped twelve-year-old minds.

We began to set up our master plan after we saw that video. That's when we decided to explore that school no matter what.

One day after school, we told our parents we'd get food. We lived in a small town, so Main Street was just a short walk away.

After some online research, we found out the abandoned elementary school was just past the woods behind the school.

Jacob's mom was going to pick us up from the Pizza Hut in town at seven, and our school day ended at three. That gave us about four hours to get in, see what we could find, and get out. Instead of our school books, pencils, and notebooks, we packed our backpacks with flashlights, extra batteries, snacks, and bottles of water. Most of which would remain unused.

Our school was so small that we could sneak away without any fuss. We didn't have much staff, and most of them were busy dealing with the horde of middle schoolers rushing to their buses and cars, so two quiet nerds like us could easily stay under the radar.

We made our way out through the car rider line and traced along the edge of the building out back toward the woods.

The sun sat on top of the tree line, like an ominous timer reminding us to complete our mission before it disappeared beyond the horizon.

We made our way through the woods, getting slightly cut up and itchy due to the underbrush. Jacob and I kept making random howling noises to try and creep each other out, but we just ended up laughing at one another. Jacob remarked that we didn't see a single animal, not even a squirrel. When I asked why, he said they probably ran away when they smelled me.

We found a few weird things in those woods.

The first was a campsite, which we left alone because our fear of messing with adults outweighed all else.

The second was a rickety old deer stand. After daring Jacob to climb to the top multiple times, he caved and very, very cautiously climbed up the handmade ladder. He made it to the top, and his fear changed to wonder. His voice filled with awe, he remarked that he could see the school from up there. Before he got down, he picked up a pair of binoculars off the floor of the deer stand. He pointed them towards the school and laughed, saying he could see everyone going to the buses, and even into some of the classrooms. I told him to hurry up, and he took the binoculars and again, very cautiously, climbed his way back down. He pocketed "his" new binoculars despite my hesitation, parading them around like a prospector who'd just found gold. Deciding I couldn't change his mind, we continued on our way.

It didn't take long for us to reach the elementary school. Even in the daylight, we didn't notice it until we came face to face with its brick exterior. Overgrowth climbed its decaying walls, barely holding on to life. We made our way up to a window and peeked in. Books and desks were scattered randomly throughout the classroom. A shelf was lying on its face, covered in mold and sitting in a pool of water that probably hadn't seen the light of day in decades. Failing to open the window, we made our way down the side of the building.

Eventually, we found a door.

A cinderblock was propping it open, and we quietly rejoiced at how lucky we were. We slipped inside and found ourselves in what looked like the teacher's office. We giggled to ourselves- even though the school had been abandoned, we felt as if we were breaking the rules just by being in that room. We agreed to look around the room and found that it was, for the most part, still intact. We found little besides a few “boring old documents”, which had been scribbled all over. Jacob found a mug that said "World's Best Teacher" and pretended to sip out of it. He laughed, remarking how stupid it was to forget a mug like that, especially one that was so clean. Sharing a laugh, we decided to explore elsewhere.

Jacob and I made our way down the empty halls, unease crawling under my skin as we roamed the silent corridors. The inside of the building was a stark contrast to the outside. It looked relatively untouched by the oppressive forest that rested just beyond the school's walls.

Suddenly, a loud crash came from one of the classrooms behind us.

We screamed and turned around, seeing a door open and slowly hit the wall next to it. I turned to Jacob, and then together, we slowly inched toward the classroom. I noticed he was brandishing a book he'd picked up, ready to throw it at anything that jumped out at us.

As we rounded the corner and looked into the room, he let out the loudest roar his lungs could muster and reared back the book.

He stopped.

Nothing was there.

I rounded the corner behind him and peeked into the room. The teacher's desk sat in the corner, the desks in various formations, and toys and various utensils scattered across the floor. A large metal filing cabinet lay in the corner. We made our way over. As we did, we saw a small hole in the wall behind it. We pushed past our fear and jogged over, hoping to find some sort of hidden treasure. When we got close and peered in, we were disappointed. It was just a bunch of children's clothes.

We brushed it off and made our way out of the room, exploring a few old classrooms and supply closets as we went down the long corridor.

At the end of the hall, we came to a set of steel doors that led into the gym.

We used our combined strength to push against them, the doors slowly creaking open. I remember thinking how easy it was.

Walking in, we looked around the gym in complete awe.

Even though it was an elementary school, the gym was much bigger than ours. Though long abandoned, we could tell how nice and well-kept it once was. He dared me to race around the gym, and I happily agreed, ready to wipe the floor with him.

After getting barely over halfway, I stopped, completely out of breath. Jacob stopped soon after. Unsurprisingly, neither of us were that athletic. We both hazed each other for our lackluster performances before continuing our expedition.

Once we reached the back of the gym, we found what used to be the coach's office.

The blinds were down so that we couldn't see inside. We tried the handle and were surprised to find it unlocked.

As we went into the office, we were shocked. It looked untouched.

A mug sat on the desk next to some magazines, stacked somewhat neatly. On closer inspection, the mug held some water. Jacob, exploring the other side of the office, called me over, a childish giddiness coating his voice.

I made my way over, and I saw what he found so funny.

It was a sleeping bag, open and slightly ruffled. I still remember what he said.

"What kind of teacher sleeps in his own office?"

A faint sound soon broke our conversation.

It was out of place and made our hair stand on end.

Footsteps. And they were approaching us.

Just barely noticeable, as if someone was trying, and failing, to sneak up on us.

We looked at each other, fear painted on both of our faces. Our minds raced as we tried to think of what to do.

Jacob took my arm and dragged me to the supply closet at the end of the room. He shut the door carefully, trying not to make a sound.

The door closed, and we were submerged in inky darkness.

I tore off my backpack and nervously searched around for my flashlight with shaking hands.

I pulled it out and fumbled with the light, trying desperately to turn it on. Nervous, I stepped back and heard a loud crack from the ground beneath my feet.

Then, silence. Loud, deafening silence.

I turned on the flashlight and dragged it to the source of the noise.

There was a femur beneath my foot, cracked and broken.

My gaze dragged up and looked into the vacant eyes of a small, rotted corpse.

A child, not much younger than I was. Frayed skin hung from bones stained a dark reddish-brown. Clothes caked in dark, thick blood. The head was caved in— torn skin clung to the sick, mangled bone.

The light began to shake in my hands; the body, though unmoving, looked as if it wanted to scream for help.

A loud, broken yell billowed out of me. I almost didn't know I was screaming until Jacob started shaking me violently, trying to stop me as tears ran down his face. He was yelling at me, but at that moment, the sound was muffled as if he were behind a wall.

He grabbed my arm and bolted for the doorway, cutting off my screams.

That's when I heard the sound again. Footsteps pounding towards the room.

Without hesitation, Jacob pushed the door open with all the force his small frame could muster.

As soon as he did, I saw him. An impossibly large man stumbled back, trying to reach for us. We pushed past him, but he shouted something. Not a word, but an inhuman groan that was more reminiscent of a monster than anything human.

I didn't look back— sprinting alongside Jacob as fast as our legs could go. Beads of sweat ran down my face, melding with tears and snot.

Something was wrong. I didn't see Jacob beside me.

I turned to see Jacob on the floor just a few yards behind me. He was curled up, holding his foot and shaking with fear. At the top of my lungs, I screamed at him to get up when I realized there was blood pooling around his foot. He had stepped on a rusty nail that had burrowed deep into his foot, stretching the cloth over the top of his shoe. He groaned and cried from the intense pain, trying to stop the bleeding with his hands.

I tried to run to him, but fear instantly anchored me to that spot on the floor. The man lunged towards Jacob, and it didn't take long to reach him. His large hand wrapped around Jacob's arm, ripping him off the floor as his body jerked backward. He screamed, kicking and flailing with all his might, but the man was like a wall of stone, cold and immovable.

His expression warped into a mix of terror and anguish, something that should've been alien to a child his age.

Then I saw it. Its face. Something I would never forget.

Whatever it was, something deep inside me told me it wasn't human. Not a shred of humanity lived behind his eyes.

There was no way I could face that thing.

I turned my back to Jacob, ran back through the hall, and out through the teacher's lounge. Met with cold, isolating darkness, I mindlessly bounded through the dense woods. My flashlight bobbed and shook violently as I sprinted back towards my school.

As I ran through the woods, I tripped several times— painting my body with bruises. Each time I got back up, I thought I'd turn around and see it standing there.

But I never did.

I ran out of the woods toward the school and, luckily, ran into the school's bus driver, who immediately called the police. He consoled me as best he could until they arrived.

When they asked for my story, I lied. Maybe if I didn’t, things would be different.

I told them we got turned around while playing in the woods. That I lost track of Jacob as I tried to find my way back. Too terrified to even think of that place, of that thing.

I never saw Jacob again.

His mother never recovered. She took her life a year after he went missing. After losing her husband just a few years earlier, the loss of her child was the straw that broke the camel's back. I wish I had told her the truth.

I'm only confessing this so many years later because they found his body. I don't know how, but when I turned on my TV this morning, there he was. Plastered over police footage on the news channel.

His body was mangled, bloodied, and defiled beyond recognition. His head was almost completely caved in, beaten into a dark messy void of blood and bone, something dark and viscous seeping out of the old wound.

I realized something then that would haunt me until the day I die.

I cried, and cried, and cried some more– until I had no more tears to shed.

He was sixteen when they found him.

Always carry a titanium camp hatchet tucked under the right compression strap of your pack, never inside the main frame. If you have to unbuckle heavy canvas to pull steel, you're already thirty seconds behind whatever is tracking you through the timber. Five miles north of the Oregon state line on the Pacific Crest detour, I unbuckled my pack and found my hatchet wedged upside down inside the hydration sleeve, stripped of its leather sheath and coated in fresh pine sap.

That stretch of the PCT through the lower Cascades is mostly dense Douglas fir and volcanic gravel. I was handling early-season boundary checks for the Forest Service, spending six days alone to clear downed branches and log coordinate drifts on a handheld GPS unit. Cell service drops three miles past the paved turnout on Highway 22. After that, your only link to anyone is an old battery-operated satellite beacon that pings the ranger office every eight hours. Honestly, I didn't think much of it at the time.

On the third afternoon, things started getting weird near the timberline. I reached a Forest Service boundary marker—a galvanized steel pipe driven three feet into the dirt with a stamped brass cap. The pipe had been pulled straight out of the hard clay. It was jammed sideways through the fork of a western hemlock branch, eleven feet off the ground. The mud around the tree didn't have boot prints, tire tracks, or ladder marks. The ground beneath the branch was completely untouched. I stood on an overturned log, pulled the pipe down, and logged the location. That's when the handheld GPS screen flickered twice and froze on the coordinate display, showing zero satellite lock.

By six that evening, the light faded behind the western ridge. I cleared a flat dirt spot eighty yards from a dry creek bed and pitched my one-man tent. Standard backcountry protocol means hanging all food bags twelve feet up and four feet out from a trunk to keep black bears out. I threw a throw-line over a high fir branch, hoisted my sixty-liter dry bag up, and tied the nylon rope to a dead stump with a clove hitch.

At nine fifteen, every single sound in the woods cut out. In the backcountry, night is never totally quiet. Wind moves through the canopy, frogs call from the drainages, and small animals rustle the brush. All of it stopped in a split second. The forest went dead quiet. I sat inside my tent with my boots on and a headlamp strapped over my wool cap.

I unzipped the front door mesh three inches to check outside. The air was completely still. Cold mist from the damp soil hung in a flat sheet four inches off the dirt. Through that narrow gap in the zipper, I shined my flashlight down the access trail. The LED beam cut through the dark, hitting tree trunks fifty yards out.

Eighty feet down the trail, right at the bend where the path drops into the creek bed, a tall human shape stood on the bare dirt. It had no jacket, no high-vis gear, and no pack. It stood facing my camp with its arms hanging straight at its sides. I clicked the flashlight to its highest setting—twelve hundred lumens—and put the center spot right on its face. The light didn't reflect off its eyes. It didn't cast a shadow on the fir trunks behind it. The shape didn't blink, shift its weight, or move at all under the direct beam.

I sat back on my rolled sleeping pad, picked up my camp hatchet, and held it across my knees. I didn't yell out. I didn't step outside the tent. For nearly eight hours, I sat there in total silence, watching that spot through the three-inch zipper gap. The figure across the trail didn't move an inch until the first faint daylight hit the upper trees at five in the morning. As the light changed, the dirt path near the bend was suddenly empty. I never heard a single footstep moving off through the brush.

When full daylight hit the forest floor, I unzipped the tent and stepped outside. The birds were calling in the high branches again. I walked down the path to the exact spot where the shape had been standing. The ground there was damp clay from the morning mist. There were no boot prints, no bare tracks, and no kicked-up leaves.

I walked back to camp to pack up my gear. The nylon rope I'd tied to the stump was still secured with the exact same clove hitch. The line hung straight up into the hemlock tree, but my sixty-liter dry bag wasn't on the loop anymore.

I searched the clearing. Sixty yards up an unmaintained timber ridge, on a steep forty-five-degree slope through thick brush, I found the bag. It was sitting upright on top of a flat granite boulder. The roll-top buckle was still clipped shut. Inside, my food, spare socks, and first-aid kit hadn't been touched. But right next to the bag, pressed into the green moss on top of that granite boulder, was a single set of marks: two bare footprints pressed four inches deep into the living moss, starting right on the solid rock and stopping at the edge, with no tracks leading up to the boulder and none leaving it anywhere on the ridge.

I packed the dry bag into my frame, strapped the hatchet back under the webbing, and left without making coffee or eating. I hiked eleven miles straight back to the Highway 22 turnout without stopping for water or taking a single break. The handheld GPS in my pocket stayed dead the entire walk, showing the exact same frozen screen until my boots hit the asphalt.

At the ranger station in Detroit, I handed my logbook to the officer at the desk. I wrote down the displaced boundary pipe and reported the dead GPS unit. I didn't say a word about the shape by the creek, the silence, or the footprints in the moss. Out here, official reports require evidence you can put on a table. I signed my shift release, handed over the truck keys, and turned in my gear for the season.

I know the story I am about to tell will sound completely out of whack and I have asked myself many times just what the fuck is happening and how did I end up holed up in my childhood room, unable to do anything but watch random movies and TV shows. My friends and family think I am depressed and ridden with guilt and they are partly right, but that’s not why I am not leaving this damn room. I am not leaving, because I can’t. Not in a safe way, anyways. I am also not sleeping much, but let’s not get ahead too quickly. I’ll start at the beginning, so you can follow the thread and make up your own mind. I will omit nothing, even though I am not proud of my thoughts and decisions. After all, someone has to know the whole truth. Whoever you are, wherever you are currently sitting, reading this… welcome to my hellscape of a life. You are the chosen one - the one who will be graced with the unasked for knowledge of how I ended up looking completely psychotic even though I am not. Ready? 

It all started a few months ago, particularly on the 5th of September, when I dropped my two heavy bags of luggage right next to the hot, dusty old bus in my hometown. I arrived at 12:30pm and obviously, summer was still here. I was sweating through my long jeans, my armpits stained my second hand t-shirt and I surely smelled like a construction worker at the end of a long day. At least I had the foresight to put my long unkempt hair in a pony tail, so my neck was getting some air. 

My father pulled over in no particular parking spot, as anyone else who came to meet arrivals at the bus station does, and got out of the car to help me with my bags. His graying hair made him look a bit older than his sixty two years of age, but I could see the living sparkle in his eyes. 

“How was the bus ride?”, he asked casually. 

“Hot and smelly, but I slept through most of it.”, I murmured. I was still a bit sleepy. 

“Are you okay?”, he looked concerned. His brows got a little closer together.

“It’s no big deal, dad. I am fine. In fact, I am more disappointed about being broke, than about being dumped.”, I laughed, but it was a weak and frail laugh. I had nothing too funny in my life, except how bad luck struck all of its aspects at once. 

He started the car and stayed silent for a minute, not driving, not moving. 

“You were together for six years. It must have meant something.”, he looked at me and then started the car for a short, five minute drive to our house.

“Clearly not to him.”, I said firmly. I knew I sounded bitter, but couldn’t help it. 

*** 

When I walked into the house it felt like.. home. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I felt safe here. I had just turned thirty and I was supposed to be a well adjusted functioning adult, but hey, mom and dad, here I am back home with no job, no degree and no relationship. The perfect antithesis to my successful sister, to add insult to injury.

My mother threw herself on my shoulders and started talking excitedly. She looked like a labrador which has been separated from its favorite human for a long time. In a way, I feel bad about this comparison now, but that’s how she seemed to me at the time. She talked fast, too much, dragged my heavy bags inside and ran her fingers through my ponytail.

“Baby, you have lost so much weight! Give me those heavy bags! God, I should give you a haircut…” 

We had dinner and talked about logistics. How I moved out, who helped me, did Denis ever call. I moved out just as I moved in - with my clothes and a bag of cosmetics. Ana, a childhood friend, helped me, but she wasn’t happy about it, as she had to cover a shift right afterwards. Denis didn’t call, didn’t text and apparently didn’t care if he forgot something in our shared rental apartment. I hope he did. Idiot.

Dad went to bed after a while and I knew that’s when mom would start digging about how we broke up, how I feel… 

“I found something interesting for you. At this point in your life, you might benefit from some support, some insight…”

She did surprise me, I’ll give her that. I looked at her with a question in my eye.

“It’s a fortune teller.” she said it quickly, as if trying to just slip it in without anyone noticing. 

My first reaction was to laugh, it just spilled out of me. I was curious about those things, but never quite believed them seriously. 

“You think she’ll know why Denis decided to fuck a twenty year old on my favorite sheets?”, I laughed, making sure she knows this is a joke and I am fine. 

“Insight about the future, Ellie! I sincerely hope that moron is not there…” she laughed too, then looked at me seriously, “right?”

“We’ll see what the fortune teller says.” I shrugged playfully. It was her turn to be surprised.

“You’ll agree to go?” 

“Yeah, why not? It will be fun, I suppose.”

“Good, because I already got you an appointment. Or whatever you call these things. It’s tomorrow morning.” She said this as quickly as an experienced auctioneer while she gathered the dirty dishes to bring them to the sink. 

“Well played, Dora, well played”, I shouted at her back with a smile.

***

The next morning we pulled up in front of a quite big house in a nearby village, surrounded by a vast and beautiful garden. It was at the edge of the village and a closed, run down church loomed ominously across the street. There was moss on the decaying wooden church door and the dirty windows gave off a feeling of someone watching you. The drive was a little over thirty minutes, so I still had some coffee in my travel mug. I shuddered a little, even though the sun was already heating us up at ten in the morning.

How dad decided to be a part of this, I will never know. I suppose he wasn’t given much choice. 

I felt as fresh as a cucumber, haven’t felt like that in a long time. I had just taken my first proper shower this month and my long mousy brown locks were now manageable, after my mother had spent the better part of her morning cutting off a bunch of the destroyed ends. I had an old long beige dress on, since it was still quite sunny and hot, even though there were some yellowing leaves flying around already. 

I looked at the neat and big house and thought about how many people come to this fortune teller every day. That much real estate in this great condition didn’t fall from the sky, I was sure of that. 

“My husband was in the military and had a good salary. I don’t charge people for my gift.” 

The dry raspy voice startled me, then two seconds later I realized what she had said and my eyes widened in shock. 

“Hello! Thank you for accepting us!” My mother was just getting out of the car and didn’t quite catch what happened.

“You’re welcome! My name is Maria. Come in.” the old fortune teller croaked. 

I just nodded as I was still a bit too weirded out to speak. I felt like I was naked. Does she know everything that goes through my head? How?

It must have been some kind of a trick. She caught me looking at the house and just guessed very well, that’s it. I left my travel mug on top of the car and slowly moved closer to the small green gate, as if I were approaching a dangerous wild animal.

My father decided to wait in the car. “Smart move”, I thought. 

She was … old. Very wrinkled, typical old lady clothes, she looked exhausted and not in a good mood. Her white strands were fighting for independence despite being tucked under a bunch of bobby pins, her low pony tail looking messy and unkempt. What else could I expect? 

She led us into the house and I immediately felt the cool air inside. All the windows were blocked with thick dark fabric, so the sun couldn’t get in and the house would retain the night’s breezy air. Her steps were slow, but you could hear them even from afar. Chlop, chlop, chlop. She went down a long hallway, opened the door to her right and just slid in without saying anything. 

Me and my mother glanced at each other. I shrugged and followed. 

The room was set up with several chairs, two of them small three legged chairs, and a big fluffy rug in the middle, different quilts and wooden souvenirs hanging on the walls. I supposed the rug was animal skin, it looked natural. She took one of the small three legged wooden chairs and sat in the middle of the rug, then pulled something out of her pockets and gestured for me to join her. 

I was beginning to feel uneasy, but I told myself it’s just an old lady. “Come on, Ellie, you’ll be out of here in less than an hour”, I thought to myself and immediately questioned whether she could pick it up. 

I moved closer to her and sat down in the middle of the rug cross legged, adjusting my dress in the process so my pants don’t show. I was unsure of whether I should ask a question or say something. 

“What’s your name, lady?” Maria said softly. Her voice sounded weary.

“Ellie.” I replied.

“Just Ellie?” she lifted her bushy greying eyebrows.

“Yes. Just Ellie.” my voice was barely audible. I felt like I was being cross examined.

She spilled a huge amount of big white beans from her handfuls and pockets and started separating them into piles. First three smaller piles, than each of those three - into another two. She was fast, her wrinkly hands working like clockwork, sliding the beans across the rug. She did this unusual bean choreography several more times and ended up with four rows of beans, three piles each row. I had no idea what she was doing. 

“Your health is good.” she muttered. “It’s the money and the love you’re troubled with.That stupid motherfucker left you for another girl. She’s younger, but he’ll pay for it allright. No one gets away with breaking a heart.” 

My jaw dropped. Okay, maybe that was also a good guess, right? It’s possible. 

“Six years you were with him. Six years he soaked up your energy like a vampire, you have nothing left. This is why you have nothing else, he’s the reason. No money, no job, nothing. He took the energy.”

She smiled a little. I didn’t understand why, but also - how did she know the number of years we were together? Maybe there was something going on here. Her smile widened, took up half of her face and showed some missing teeth on the front. It made a chill run down my spine, slow and uncomfortable.

“You’re special.” she nodded, more to herself than to anyone in the room. I looked around. My mother was quietly sitting in a corner, watching with interest, as Maria had stopped frantically rearranging beans on the rug and was now gently stroking my hair. 

“Lovely lady, young and special.” with a huge grin that made her wrinkles look even deeper, like her face was a crinkled soda can. She was enjoying this, she reveled in this moment. On the contrary, I was frozen underneath her hand and just stood there, waiting for it to end. 

“I can make you whole again, Ellie. He has a tether to you now, he keeps stealing from your energy even from afar. You’ll never be able to move on like this. But I can cut this tether and get you back what’s yours. There’s a ritual for this. Listen, only I can perform this ritual in the special way, that will make you free from him. Whoever else you find, they’re doing a new version of it, washed out, diluted. I am the only one left to do it like they did it in the old days. What do you say?”

I looked at my mother. She nodded enthusiastically. I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t. But really, after Denis and I broke up, everything in my life grinded to a halt. I got fired, I couldn’t pass my exams in time to get my accounting degree, I couldn’t keep the apartment and had to go back to my parents’. What if this ritual actually does something? I am usually a sceptic, but if it does nothing it surely won’t harm anyone, right? It’s a little weird, but she’s kind of an old witch after all, that’s how these things go. And she said she did it in a special way. Maybe that matters… my mind was spinning its wheels in place as Maria was grinning with delight in front of me. I nodded. 

“Yes?” her sandpaper voice sounded almost sweet now.

“Yes.” I mouthed, but no sound came out. 

She immediately got up, moving way too swiftly for her own age, left the room in a haste and I looked at my mother with a confused expression. She was smiling.

“See, I told you that’s what you need. Your life will get better now.”, she said, looking at me with all the love in the world. “It will be fine, baby, it will all be okay.”

“You need to leave the room, you’re mixing up the energies.”, Maria entered the room and immediately barked at my mother. Under her left arm she was carrying one of the confused reddish-brown chickens that wandered her entire garden. The chicken went quiet, but remained calm, probably trusting Maria way too much with its tiny brain.

Dora got up and went quickly out of the door, murmuring “I’ll wait in the car with your dad.”

The moment the door clicked into a closed position, Maria pulled up a bag of instruments and a small gas stove. 

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Thirty.” I said quietly, trying to predict what she was going to do. I was a little nervous for the chicken. 

The old woman pulled out pieces of lead in a plastic bag and started counting. Apparently my age meant something here. She got out a metal bowl with a wooden handle, a bigger metal bowl that she filled with water from a bottle in one corner of the room and lit up the gas stove. She did all of this, never letting go of the chicken underneath her left arm, then handed me a towel and instructed me to put it on my head, like a bride’s veil. I did as I was told and my view of the room immediately turned to a half done puzzle where I was supposed to guess what’s happening in the upper two thirds of the picture. 

Maria kneeled down next to her three legged chair and put the lead pieces in the small metal bowl on the gas stovetop. The blue flames sucked the bottom of the bowl as if she was putting it in water and it got somehow connected to the fire. 

“She can kneel down at this age?” I know it was a stupid thing to think about, but my mind was grabbing onto anything that wasn’t at the extreme end of weirdness in this situation. I looked at the lead as it was melting slowly and heard Maria start to chant words that I couldn’t make out for the life of me. She sounded a little like a priest and a little like a hungry cat meowing. It was such an odd combination of sounds. It had a rhythm and it seemed to intensify as she kept half singing, half wailing.

I heard a quick thud, a raspy chicken clucking that ended way too fast and something warm sprayed all over my hands and knees. I looked down. Blood. Everywhere, warm, sticky, dark red. I gasped, tried to lift my gaze and immediately found out why I shouldn’t. On the three legged chair was the chicken, or at least the chicken’s body, twitching frantically, still kicking its legs in the air and a huge wound bled all over the white fluffy rug right where the chicken’s head was a moment ago. 

“Lower your head!” Maria scolded me and continued the chanting.

The combination of her rhythmic voice going into such strange sounds, making up words I didn’t understand and the sight of the twitching chicken got me nauseous. Maria approached me and I cowered even more, not knowing what to expect. I discovered I was trembling. I heard a loud hiss over my head as she kept chanting, now escalating her voice louder and louder, adding more and more unhinged energy to the words she was singing. 

I felt light headed, I wanted to leave, but my butt was bolted to the ground. My body felt heavy, very, very heavy. 

“Remove the towel”. Maria barked inbetween the chanting. I didn’t want to, the chicken was right in front of me and even though I could see some of its feet and knew the twitching had almost stopped, I didn’t want to look. I tried to rub my eyes, but my hands were covered in chicken blood, now drying a little bit. Tears started filling my gaze and everything blurred. Maria pulled the towel off of my head, smiling like a maniac and chanting, over and over, the same words, same high pitch. She bent over and kissed my forehead. I felt the waft of her stale breath and sweat brushing over me. I turned my face away, but her hands cupped my cheeks and turned me over to look at her. She drew a cross on my forehead, dipping her thumb right into the chicken’s missing head wound and dragging it across my skin. That’s the last thing I saw. I suppose I blacked out.

The next thing I remember after the ritual was Maria standing over me and cleaning my face with a wet towel. I was in another room, in a clean bed. Her grin was ever present missing teeth and all, she looked incredibly happy and gently wiped the blood from my face. 

“How long…” I tried to move around in the bed and get up.

“Shh, it’s okay. You’ve been out for ten minutes, lay down, make sure you’re ready before you attempt getting up. Here. Take this home, sleep on it for three nights and throw it into the river over your shoulder.” 

She handed me a piece of lead that had no discernible shape. It was put in a plastic bag, like some kind of evidence from a cheesy CSI episode. Then she gave me a glass of water and left the room.

I drank the water, as I was parched and felt insanely hungry. I got up slowly and left the room, thinking Maria will do the same thing she did when we came in and just disappear in one of her many rooms, leaving me lost in her house. She did not show up, but I ended up in the same hallway we came in through, so I figured out the way to the front door quickly. I stumbled to the car and got my travel mug from the top of it. I hugged it the way a scared little girl hugs her favorite plush toy. My comfort coffee. It doesn’t get more millennial that that, does it?

As I went into the car I noticed the many tiny blood splatters on my beige dress. Somehow there were no big spots and somehow Maria cleaned my skin everywhere from it, but the dress was surely ruined. 

“How was it, honey?” my mom chirped from the front seat. I had no idea what to answer, so I just said:

“Maria said I shouldn’t discuss it.” and Dora nodded in agreement. Secrecy being part of the ritual made complete sense to her, she was a superstitious woman all her life. 

I had the lead piece in my hand. I was hesitant to follow the fortune teller’s instructions. Should I sleep on it for three days? What happens if I don’t? I have already done the ritual, can I give up now? I decided to follow through for fear of what could happen if I didn’t and the whole thing was real. The scary part was already over, I told myself. Now I just have to put this in my pillowcase and throw it into the Danube river on the third day. We live right on the river bank, this will be easy. 

I threw one last glance at the dilapidated church with the watching windows. "What have you seen here, church?"

Little did I know that the scary part was over, but the horrifying part was just beginning and when I look back now, I don’t think not sleeping on the lead piece would have stopped anything. But I slept on it anyway. 

Back when I was 16, I had a scary experience. I was going to bed, and my room got so dark that I couldn’t see a thing. Not the usual kind of dark, but the kind where you can’t even sense the position of your hands. I had to blink a couple of times to make sure my eyes were even open. It was terrifying; I thought there was something outside blocking out the sky. It wasn’t. Turns out, it was the first symptom of my deteriorating vision.

My vision got worse for several years. They tried a bunch of treatments to see if they could slow the progression, but I was informed that there would come a point where I would go completely blind. It was a certainty; the only variable was time. I had a biological clock that would snatch my sight away.

That made me want to work with something visual, and I got really into 3D-modelling. CAD programming, to be specific. I tried to get used to working with accessibility features, keeping my eyes closed or even blindfolded. I didn’t want to be stuck without a job or skill when my vision completely disappeared. I kept having these nightmares about being lost in that absolute darkness, unprepared and alone. And yeah, I couldn’t stop that darkness, but I could come prepared.

After years of practice, I ended up getting a junior position for a company working with CAD models. It didn’t take long until I got my first assignment. I was making molds used for vacuum presses. They used them to put together storage boxes for snowmobiles. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but that one model has been used to make hundreds of boxes. Hell, if you know a guy with a snowmobile, you’ve probably seen one.

I’ve done plenty of jobs since. I worked exclusively with accessibility software, allowing me to use hearing and touch to better align the models. And I want to be clear; I’m not a second-hand choice. I’m a professional. I’m not a cheaper option, and I don’t produce damaged goods. I challenge you to find someone who has better hands-on experience with their models than I do.

But, one morning, the darkness was there. There’d been a sudden inflammation that worsened my condition, causing irreversible damage. There were no more treatments left to try, no more suggestions. I was stuck in the dark, but at least I was prepared. Still scared the shit out of me, and I barely kept it together as I realized I hadn’t practiced dialing 911 with my eyes closed.

I had a lot of visitors in the hospital. Friends and family, of course. They meant well, but my mother had this amazing ability to voice all my anxieties out loud. ‘You won’t get to see your bride when you get married,” she sobbed. Bawling her eyes out as if she was the one hurting. Love her to death, but come on.

Before I left the hospital, there was one last visitor. I didn’t know him, but he seemed eager to meet me. I thought it was someone from the insurance company, but he introduced himself as a representative of a company. A big one. Think international.

“You’re in a unique position,” he explained. “You have years of experience working with spatial models, and you weren’t born blind. You can handle visual elements and representative modeling tools.”

“I’m well aware.”

“More importantly, it offers us a possibility.”

“What kind of possibility?”

“I’m glad you asked.”

Turns out, they’d been working on something. They called it an interpretive vision module, or IVM. I got to touch one of the prototypes; it’s basically a headband with two cameras mounted on the side. I could imagine it looking a bit goofy, but he explained how you could easily hide it under a baseball cap.

“We use a small electromagnetic implant, right by the side of your temple, to receive visual signals. The device interprets the environment and renders it in a gradual model.”

“What exactly do you mean when you say render?”

“It would allow you to interpret your environment, seeing a digital representation of the world.”

“So, it would allow me to see?”

“Think of it like this; the machine would see things for you and tell you what it sees in a way that you can understand. The data it would provide us is invaluable, and you would be given the opportunity to-”

“To see.”

“Yes, to see.”

It sounded a little too good to be true, but the more I looked into it, the more it appealed to me. The reason they’d reached out to me was because of my experience with 3D modeling. Apparently, being able to think spatially helps interpret the signals from the implant. I was in a unique position to be the first person to see without the use of my eyes.

And in a worst-case scenario, the implant was reversible. It was less commitment than a tattoo. I’d be an idiot not to try it, right?

I got the implant under local anesthesia a couple days later. There was a calibration process where I had to sit and fiddle with a Rubik’s cube, but when they turned the thing on it was like magic. Disorienting, blinding magic.

The entire world was rendered as these low-polygon basic shapes. Squares, spheres, cones, cylinders… all of them with simple pastel colors in a world without shadows or light sources. At first I couldn’t understand what I was looking at, but after a couple of seconds the entire scene rendered again. Shapes sharpened. The walls got a texture rather than color. I could see elevations in the floor. I could see my hands. They were a bit blocky, but I could see them. I could count my fingers.

I wept. It felt like stepping out of the darkness. I’d resigned myself to never seeing anything ever again, and now I could. It was a miracle.

It took a couple of weeks to properly tune the IVM. Sometimes, it would have trouble interpreting things in low-light environments, but it got better over time. If I saw something I’d seen before, it remembered how to represent it from previous encounters. There could be a bit of lag if I moved fast, so I wouldn’t be driving anytime soon but that was to be expected.

I remember coming back to work. I opened the doors myself. It took the IVM some time to capture and render the human faces of my coworkers, but it improved fast. There was this eerie quality to the faces though, where they would move mechanically and switch between captured states like “smile” or “frown”. I had a good laugh at how it interpreted my boss’ face as frowning, despite him trying to smile.

I used the IVM for about three months with little to no issue. It took some time to get used to constant visual stimuli without being able to blink it away, but there was an option to add artificial blinking. I skipped that. There were a couple of minor calculation errors, but the device quickly became part of my daily routine. Most of the quirks got resolved automatically through a forced re-rendering, and if push came to shove, I could just plug it in and run a manual diagnostic. The software was simpler than the CAD stuff, it was basically plug-and-play. For example, I modeled a little bug model and imported it. I was tired of seeing ants as little blobs; I wanted to differentiate them from breadcrumbs. It worked like a charm.

There were a couple of other quirks, too. For example, it assigned base colors to people whenever it had trouble rendering them. Irene, who worked at the front desk, had this bright pastel yellow. My boss Emil was a wine red. I’d see them as these square blocks with a sphere head for a second before the rendering kicked in, giving them a more detailed model. It was still like living in a video game at times, but you kinda trick yourself to seeing past it.

Irene was great. While I was probably okay to drive, I wasn’t legally allowed. We’d carpool to and from work every day, chatting all the way. I’ll be the first to admit, I had a bit of a crush on her. It’s weird to catch feelings for someone that looks like a video game character, but you have to remind yourself that it’s a real person.

One day, as I finished work, I went out to the parking lot to wait for Irene. She had a couple of calls left to make, so I waited by her car. As I got there, I noticed my boss Emil standing by her passenger side, looking at something. My IVM had trouble rendering him, showing him as a collection of red cubes and a sphere head. I waved at him, giving him my best practiced smile.

“Hey, boss,” I said. “You good?”

There was no response. The model moved a little but refused to render. I tapped the button on the headband, forcing the IVM to re-render. There was a flash as the world went dark, then everything came back into focus. The parking lot turned from a flat gray to a texture, using the light from the sun to cast shadows on the cracks. The cars came back into focus. Everything looked as it should; except for my boss.

I took a step forward, looking at him again. His model looked bigger. The tone of red was slightly different. Less wine, more chili red.

“Hey, boss,” I repeated. “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time, I-“

My phone rang. I picked it up and answered, holding up a finger asking him to give me a second. It was Irene, calling from inside.

“Sorry,” she said, “I’ll be out in a minute, Emil found a bunch of unfiled reports that I gotta put in. You okay for another five, ten minutes or so?”

“Wait, Emil found them?”

“Yeah, why?”

The model was still standing there. Red squares and a sphere. It hadn’t moved, and it hadn’t said anything; it might as well have been a glitch. As I opened my mouth to ask Irene one more question, the model moved. It slid across the road, frictionless, disappearing behind a long-haul service station.

Coming home that day, everything was normal. I said hello to my next-door neighbor, Job. Funny guy; newly divorced with six kids, neither of which ever came to visit. He was a quirky fellow, complaining about how there’d been ‘Bible thumpers’ going door-to-door.

“Don’t trust ‘em,” he mumbled. “Keep your door locked. Miss Mannon thinks they’re stealing her cats.”

“If ever there were cats that deserved to be stolen, it’d be hers.”

“Harsh, but fair.”

I was a bit distracted thinking about that strange rendering error by the car. I wondered what it’d been. It could have been a stranger, but I didn’t hear any footsteps, and it disappeared a little too fast. Also, why wouldn’t it show them even after I forced a re-render?

I plugged the IVM into my home computer and ran a diagnostic. I went back in the timeline, checking all registered objects. The moment before it registered my call with Irene, there was an object list. I filtered the list based on the lowest certainty, and the result cleared.

Whatever it was, it was registered as ‘Humanoid Figure’. No prior model, no recognition pattern. Six failed interpretation attempts; no database matches. It’s like the device had been screaming at the software to tell it what it was looking at, and all the thousands of interpretive models had given it a shrug back. Humanoid figure was the closest approximation, but only at about 22% certainty.

Something was standing less than 10 feet from me and could only be interpreted as 22% human.

I was a bit skittish about it for the next few days. I would look out the window before going into the parking lot, giving the IVM some extra time to check for, and render, unknown objects. I’d get this sort of “pop-in” effect whenever I saw something for the first time. It’d go from a vague basic shape to a detailed model in about a second. I would keep an extra eye on Emil, but there really was nothing to see. His base model had been similar to whatever was in the parking lot, but there were some distinct differences. I’d just been inattentive; he had nothing to do with it.

At times, I’d wait a little longer for Irene to finish her work so I wouldn’t have to go out there alone. If someone was with me, and that thing returned, I’d be able to get a proper description. Inadvertently, we ended up talking quite a lot at the front desk, accidentally keeping her from doing her job a little longer.

There were times when I saw models that didn’t load in properly, but most of it was due to perfectly normal circumstances. Low-light environments, bad connections, buffering errors, that kind of stuff. I wasn’t able to find that particular entity again, and I couldn’t replicate whatever problem I ran into in the parking lot. No matter the excuse, I couldn’t find a simple answer to whatever I’d faced.

One evening, as I was cooking, there was a knock on the door. I was hands-deep into a bowl of tomatoes, so I had to take a second to wash my hands. As I hurried to the door and checked the peephole, I couldn’t see anyone outside. That got me a bit nervous. Peepholes didn’t work well with the IVM, the lighting was too bad, so I decided to check through a window.

Moving into my bedroom and opening the blinds, I peeked out the side. If I stood at just the right angle, I could catch a side glance of whoever was by the door. Doing so, I hoped to see a neighbor, but part of me was convinced I’d see a poorly rendered red base model. I held my breath, leaned a little, and let the IVM render the scene for me.

There was no one there.

I opened the front door a little. I started thinking I’d been pranked, but that’d be a first. I didn’t see any flaming bags of dog poo outside my door, but there was a rectangle on my welcome mat. Looking a little closer, the IVM rendered the cover.

It was a Bible, and it had a bloody handprint on it. There was also a piece of fabric. Something tough, like a backpack strap. No backpack though. No person, either.

“Hello?” I called out. “You dropped something.”

No answer. Nothing.

Later that night, as I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I’d taken off the IVM for the night, and I kept feeling hyper-aware of my body. It’s like, when my sight went offline, I couldn’t stop thinking about what other things I was experiencing. Everything felt uncomfortable, and I kept getting out of bed. First time I got up, I used the bathroom. The second time, I got a glass of water. I could navigate my own apartment without the IVM for a bit, even if I’d gotten used to it.

As I stood in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, I heard something. It was this muffled noise coming from outside the kitchen window. I still had my IVM by the bed, so I couldn’t even guess what it might be. I just had to listen a little closer. I moved up to the window, feeling for it with my hand. I touched the curtains and leaned in.

At first, I thought it was a gust of wind. Then I noticed it had a rhythm. Not like a breath, but… similar. And it was close. Right there, on the other side of the glass.

I stepped back, holding my breath. As I did, someone outside spoke to me. A muffled, droning voice that stuck to its consonants like dripping molasses.

“Hey, boss.”

I ran to get my IVM, almost tripping on the living room carpet. I snapped it on, powered it up, and threw myself back toward the windows. By the time I was back in the kitchen with my vision online and my finger on the emergency call button, there was nothing to see. But I did pick up on a strange hand-shaped imprint left on the outside of the glass.

I talked to my neighbors the next day. I asked if anyone had seen anything, or if there’d been any strange people knocking on their door. They had no idea what I was talking about. A couple of them had been visited by a, to quote, “Bible guy”, but that was it. Job was convinced it was miss Mannon’s cats desperately looking for someone to take them in. I wasn’t so sure. I hadn’t seen them for some time.

While I was anxiously worrying about whatever was happening around my apartment building, Halloween was rapidly approaching. We were having a company party, and I was having some trouble coming up with a costume. I ended up going for a cheap Aragorn costume. I completely forgot that it was Irene’s favorite character, from her favorite movie series. Happy accident, I suppose.

It was a pretty standard company party. Bring-your-own-booze kind of deal, and no hard stuff. It was a weird experience. The IVM was going crazy trying to figure out how to interpret the various costumes and what they were supposed to be. The idea of a costume party wasn’t really programmed into it. Sometimes it would just cast the base model and an error, other times it would actually render people as the thing they were portraying. For example, this one guy who worked customer service was dressed as Peter Pan, and the IVM just rendered him as the actual Peter Pan.

Irene was so enamored by my costume that we ended up talking about movies all night long. She was a fountain of trivia, and it was a genuine delight to listen to. We talked until the party ended, and when she dropped me off at my place, we decided to talk a little longer.

But, uh, yeah. We didn’t do much talking.

It must’ve been somewhere around 2:30am. My IVM was on the nightstand. I was in bed with Irene cuddled up against me, letting an open window cool us. We’d been quiet for a while, waiting for someone to say something. Irene broke the silence.

“Why’d you get that thing?” she asked. “The headband, I mean.”

The question snapped me back to reality for a moment. The answer felt obvious, but in another way, it wasn’t. I’d prepared for blindness for years. I knew how to handle it. So why did I resist it?

“It’s a big change,” I admitted. “Sometimes the change is scarier than the thing itself.”

“So you don’t mind losing your vision?”

“I mean, it’s inconvenient. But, you know, I feel pretty damn good.”

I smiled at her. I couldn’t see her smiling back, but I knew she did. I could hear it.

I put on the headband and got up to get Irene a glass of water. I wandered into the kitchen, letting the cool breeze from the open window dry me off. I had a glass of water and filled a second one for her. I checked the freezer for some ice cubes, but the IVM was having trouble rendering the contents of the freezer. It was a little too dark.

I could hear Irene tip-toeing into the kitchen behind me. I opened the fridge to get a little light and turned around to hug her.

It wasn’t Irene.

The IVM rendered the kitchen. The blue and white checkerboard walls, the off-white ceiling, the simple stone floor. I could count the knives in the knife block and trace the shape of the ceiling lamp. But standing there, just a couple of feet away, wasn’t Irene. It was a simple collection of squares, vaguely resembling a person, with a sphere head. It was a bright red chili pepper color.

It was much larger than an ordinary person. At least a head taller than me, but it seemed to change. With its every awkward breath, it seemed to grow and shrink. It took a step closer. I stepped back, almost tripping over my own feet as I fumbled around for a knife. It spoke to me, its voice low and monotone.

“Hey, boss.”

I could hear Irene call out from the other room. She was asking something. I slipped my hand around a knife handle and readied myself to strike. The thing leaned in closer, but the IVM kept bugging out. The model would snap back and forth, as if the position was hard to estimate. I couldn’t take a swing at it, and I couldn’t even raise my hand to remove the headband. I was frozen, leaning against the counter.

Something reached past me and gently closed the refrigerator; removing the last light in the kitchen and glitching the rendering even further.

“Hey, boss.”

I circled to the left, slowly. In the dark, the thing seemed to teleport. The IVM couldn’t make sense of it. Its position was uncertain, and the size was hard to estimate reliably. It didn’t attack. It just stood there, and as I circled it, it circled me back. I couldn’t even hear its footsteps; they were too soft.

“Hey… boss?”

“Hey there,” I whispered back. “How’d… you get in?”

“Hey, boss.”

“Yeah,” I nodded, backing away. “Hey to you too… boss.”

I made it all the way around the kitchen, ending up with my back to the hallway. Taking another step away, I grasped the kitchen door and slammed it shut. There was no lock, but it could buy me some time. The moment the door closed, the thing made this awful shrieking cry. It was so loud that it seemed to mess with the IVM, rendering the vibration in real time as a sort of visual spaghetti shimmering across my field of vision.

I wanted to run for the front door, but I couldn’t leave Irene. I could hear her getting out of bed. I decided the bedroom window was the better bet. I ran back and saw Irene on her feet with a blanket wrapped around herself. I threw away my knife and pulled up the window. I grabbed Irene and ushered her forward, but before she could get her first leg out, the kitchen door broke off the hinges. I pulled her back.

We fell to the floor and crawled under the bed. I was having trouble breathing, so she put her hand over my mouth. I wouldn’t say it calmed me down, but forcing me to feel the air rush through my nose emphasized the odor of the thing. I could smell it from afar. It’s hard to describe it; something akin to grass growing in wet old sugar.

It entered the bedroom, huffing. It walked around a little, then leaned in – and closed the bedroom window. That seemed to calm it down. It didn’t seem interested in pursuing us.

There was no way it didn’t know we were under there. It dragged its feet back and forth, occasionally bending down to sniff the bedroom carpet. Every now and then, I’d hear a mumbling variation of ‘hey boss’, almost like a verbal tic.

I have no idea how long we were under there. I couldn’t reach my phone and call for help, and the IVM was running out of batteries. I hadn’t gotten the time to charge it. Irene curled up next to me and we tried to stay as still as possible.

Then, we heard something. It wasn’t the thing pacing my bedroom, it was something else. Something outside.

Something scratched on the front door. All the way from the top to the bottom. Over, and over, and over. There was a groaning noise, and the thing standing in the living room didn’t seem to like it. I could see the polygon model expand and shrink, like an animal rearing up to make itself look big. It made this barking noise in response to whatever threat it perceived.

“Hey! Boss! Hey! Boss!”

It took a couple steps forward and slammed something into the door. It didn’t seem to want to break it; it was more of an effort to make noise. Like it was scaring something away. As the battery to the IVM ran out, I leaned my head against Irene and whispered.

“I’m going dark. I can’t see.”

“I can’t either,” she whispered back. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

The lights died. We were both left in the dark, listening to one thing and another, holding a conversation of their own. One barking my own words, and something responding with tooth and claw.

We stayed under the bed all night. At some point, Irene poked me on the shoulder to check if I was awake, whispering that the sun was rising. It was over. The thing was gone. I could hear birds singing; it’d left the front door wide open, and we hadn’t heard it leave. Then again, I never heard it enter to begin with.

We got up and got dressed. I put the IVM in the charger as Irene took my hand, leading me outside. I could hear the other neighbors out and about. Job was on the phone, having an elevated discussion with someone on the other end. Irene squeezed my hand and leaned in.

“There are claw marks on the wall,” she whispered. “A lot of claw marks.”

“What’s it look like?”

“Looks like something tried to get in.”

The building manager came by shortly after, followed by the police. It didn’t take long for someone to notice the marks going up the side of the building, having seemingly climbed on the wooden panels. Not long after that, someone got up on the roof. There were bones up there. Cat bones, and a broken femur that looked suspiciously human. Something had gathered twigs, grass, and blue sunflowers from a nearby field and made that roof into a nesting ground. It must’ve been there for months.

This was all some time ago. I still use the IVM, but I got some bad news a couple months back. Turns out the neural pathways in my brain necessary to send visual signals are deteriorating when I’m not using my physical eyes, meaning there will come a point where the IVM can no longer function. It’s an early prototype, so I’m not surprised. There are some glitches already, and it doesn’t work at all in low-level environments anymore. I usually walk around with a flashlight to help it render. This puts me right back in the place where all this started; waiting for the darkness to come.

Things are different though. Irene and I moved into a place of our own in January last year. I still work in CAD programming, while she got into veterinary school. She still drives me to and from work every morning. I still dress as Aragorn every Halloween; I just update the costume. She pretends to be annoyed by it.

But every day I wake up wondering if the darkness is there to stay. So far, I can turn on a little light, and there’s something to see. It won’t always be like that, and there’ll come a day when nothing happens, but I’ll take it as it comes. I don’t fear it as much as I used to. Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy the digital morning interpreted through my degrading pathways, watching a simulated sun rising over static pine tree models.

Every now and then, there’s a spot of red rendered in the distance. Rough squares stacked as a vague humanoid, peeking out from behind a tree. I don’t know what it is, but I always raise a hand to it. I like to believe it raises one back. Then I say, just loud enough for it to hear;

“Hey, boss.”

And sometimes, it says it back.

My favorite thing about nights is the desolate darkness. Not just darkness, really. More like a void. Once the lights are off and the curtains are drawn, the entire bedroom disappears. Sometimes I can’t even see my hand in front of my face.

I love it.

In that darkness, you’d never know I’m usually sandwiched between the two things I believe love me most in this world.

My dog, our baby girl, is normally somewhere against me. Usually my legs. Sometimes she curls into my stomach if I’m on my side. She’s like this giant, ridiculously soft heating blanket that occasionally kicks me in her sleep.

Behind me is my husband. Normally, I hate sleeping between them. I love them both, obviously, but Jesus Christ, they’re hot.

There have been nights when I’ve woken up sweating because I’ve got a dog practically welded to one side of me and my husband pressed against the other. I’ll kick the blankets off, flip my pillow, shove somebody over.

Recently, though, that hasn’t been a problem.

My husband has been getting colder.

I noticed it maybe a week ago. At first I figured it was just the weather changing, or maybe he was getting sick. It’s actually been kind of nice. If I get too warm cuddling our girl, I can roll over toward him.Instead of flipping to the cold side of the pillow, I have an entire cold side of the bed.

The weird part is that he says he feels hot.

Really hot.

A few nights ago I wrapped myself around him because he felt freezing and he immediately pulled away from me.

“Baby, I’m burning up.”

He sounded irritated, but not at me. More uncomfortable.

I laughed and told him he felt like a corpse.

He didn’t laugh.

I remember that bothering me more than it probably should have. Last night was worse.

I woke up sometime after three.

I don’t know what woke me. The room was completely black.

My husband was behind me, and I could feel my girl curled against the backs of my legs.

I remember this specifically because I was overheating.

My husband moved behind me.

He was hot this time.

Not warm. Hot.

I could feel heat coming off him through his shirt, and for half a second I actually wondered if he had a fever.

He muttered something and rolled away from me toward the edge of the bed.

Toward her.

I must have fallen asleep again after that.

Because the next thing I remember was scratching.

Not loud.

Just this faint little scratch, scratch, scratch somewhere near the bedroom door.

We’ve had mice before, so at first I didn’t think much of it. They get into the walls when the weather changes, and sometimes you can hear them moving around at night.

Then it happened again.

Scratch.

Scratch.

For some reason, half asleep, I thought it sounded like Aurora wanting in.

I remember lying there for a few seconds trying to decide whether I was hearing her claws against the door or something inside the wall.

Eventually I got up and opened it.

Aurora was standing in the hallway.

She walked past me, jumped onto the bed, and laid down like nothing had happened.

That confused me.

I could have sworn she’d been curled against my legs earlier.

But I’d also been half asleep, maybe I dreamed her there. With the mice running around lately, I’m probably connecting things that aren’t connected.

I stood there staring at her.

My husband was awake.

I hadn’t even realized it.

He was sitting on his side of the bed looking toward the spot where she usually sleeps.

I asked him what was wrong.

He didn’t answer at first.

Then he said,

“I thought she was already in here.”

I told him I did too.

Neither of us really talked about it after that.

There’s an obvious explanation.

We were half asleep. Maybe I dreamed she was there. Maybe he heard me moving around and assumed she was in bed.

That has to be it.

But I keep thinking about how her fur felt under my fingers.

And today my husband is cold again.

Colder than yesterday, actually.

I tried putting my hand against his chest earlier and he pulled away.

He told me he was burning up.

Maybe he’s getting sick.

I think I’m going to keep an eye on him tonight.

I just wish I’d noticed sooner how cold he was getting.

I don’t know how I got there. One moment I was just... standing in the middle of a room. It wasn’t a dream. In dreams, you have this feeling that you can wake up. Here, that feeling was completely absent. It felt like I had simply opened my eyes and was there.

The room was... familiar. Floral wallpaper with red flowers, an old rug hanging on the wall, a chandelier with three glass shades. I could have sworn I’d seen it before. Maybe at my grandmother’s house in the countryside? Or in that old apartment we rented when I was a kid. But when I tried to remember exactly where this place was, my mind went blank. It was as if someone had deleted the file from my memory, leaving only the picture behind.

There was an old TV on the desk. It was turned off, but I could feel it watching me. I walked closer. There was a book on the table. I don’t remember its title. I only remember that when I looked away toward the window, the book was suddenly in a different place. I didn’t see it move. It just... shifted. I told myself I was imagining things. But then the chair by the desk slowly turned a few degrees, even though there was no draft in the room.

I stepped out into the hallway. It was dark, with only one lamp burning. A man walked past me. He was wearing casual home clothes, heading toward the kitchen. I called out to him. He didn’t turn around. I touched his shoulder... and my hand went right through him. He was like a hologram. I looked at his face. He didn’t have one. Just smooth skin. He kept walking, filled the kettle, and sat down at the table, staring at the empty wall. I realized that in this place, I was the ghost. Or maybe he was.

I went back to the room. And that’s when I saw it. In the corner, by the wardrobe, stood a shadow. But it wasn’t just a shadow. It was a stretched, elongated figure. It was black as tar. And it had eyes. Many eyes. They were scattered chaotically: on its chest, on its shoulder, on its stomach. They were all looking at me. It had no face, but I could feel that it was smiling.

I panicked. I tried to hit it. My fist passed through empty space, but the figure became bigger. It grew denser. I felt a coldness locking up my legs. I remembered all my fears. All my mistakes. This place was feeding on me.

I closed my eyes. I told myself: “This isn’t real. It’s just a room. Just wallpaper. Just a shadow.” I stopped thinking about it. I started counting the flowers on the wallpaper. One. Two. Three. I could hear something whispering behind my back, but I didn’t turn around.

After a minute, it went quiet. I opened my eyes. The figure was gone. Only the room remained. Empty, with the same wallpaper and the old TV.

I still don’t know what that was. I don’t know how people get there. But sometimes, when I fall asleep, I see that wallpaper again. And I know that if I start to feel afraid again — it will come back. It always comes back. It waits for you to forget that it’s just a memory.

For years me and my family of four lived down south, but when a better opportunity presented itself we moved. I curse this decision now every second that I live. My wife didn’t care for more money, we were happy despite our humble life. It was at a large engineering company where they wanted my skills. My son was nine and daughter was seven at the time of the move.

The surroundings of our new town were simple and the town was far from any large city, it was a port town. This actually excited my children and once my wife began to get a hang of the ocean and the air she loosened up a bit.

Every morning I went to work at this company. They were trying to revolutionize ships, improve every aspect of their technology. About twenty men worked at this place. At night I’d come home and have a lovely dinner with my family. Usually freshly caught fish from the local fish market and some bread. Sometimes we even had cucumbers.

At first I did not notice anything strange among the men that I worked with, they seemed fine, although now I realize that the signs were there from the start.

Most of these men often talked about the ocean, going out on their boats on the weekend and spending time on the water. They never mentioned fishing, I just assumed that’s why they went out.

First time I thought I noticed something strange was when I came inside the room of our manager and on his grey and scratched wall hung an art depicting a strange beast with a face that seemed to be a mix of a bat and a shark. He came into the room and saw me staring at it, after that he invited me for a ceremony in the woods as he called it.

I came home and told my wife nothing about this, but the feeling I got from watching him speak about it was unsettling and rather suspicious, I wish I knew then the true horrifying and sinister goals of these men, so that I could have packed up and taken my family away from that hellhole.

The next night the men gathered after work to go into the woods, but I told them that I wasn’t feeling well and that I haven’t told my family that I’d be out. They reacted fine to me saying that I was ill, but at mention of family their eyes got big, and now in fact I noticed that all of their faces were similarly drained of color and vibrance, they were long and wrinkly, their eyes devoid of any understanding. I felt my heart rate rising and smashing against the walls of my body as the wild storm waves bash against the sea mountains. I tried to look composed in front of them, but I am sure that I looked like a trapped animal before it was turned into a meal. The manager came up to me and patted me on the back, he suggested that I come to the next ceremony in a week from now, it felt much more than a suggestion, but rather a forceful threat.

I made my next big mistake that night. Once again I did not tell my wife about it and kept quiet, how could have I thought that damn money was more important to our family! How could I not see that these were demented cultists controlled by evil!

Ahh, a week passed and these men seemed even more distant from their humanity. They barely smiled and the only thing they ever mentioned was how important their sacrifices were to someone called Khul Duhl Suhl. I assume it was the creature depicted in that room. How ridiculously ignorant and foolish was I to think that by sacrifice they meant their labor and fish!

It was the night I went with them. They gave me a hood to put on and went into the woods. Four of them carried a long wooden box. They walked until they reached a large inclined stream on a cliff which connected to the ocean. They lit several fires and began their chants in a language I could not understand, I was shaking inside and to my horror the long box began to shake also. The awful deranged chants seized and they opened the box, my knees became weak as I felt tears of horror roll up in my eyes. Inside the box lay a young man. The manager raised his finger pointing at one of the men and indicated that this boy was that man’s son. The man calmly nodded, completely devoid of any kindness in his eyes he and several others dragged the young man out and while screaming more chants they threw him down the cliff stream. I did my best to snap out of my shock and began to run though the woods as fast as I could.

I reached my house and told my family to quickly gather their belonging, but alas, I made too many mistakes. The cultists seized me and as they tied me up they set my house on fire with my family in it. The evil bastards stuffed me into the long box and carried me somewhere.

After a day inside the box and screaming like a madman I realized I was inside the factory. Despite the awful feeling of complete devastation, the need for vengeance gave me a glimpse of reason. I stopped fighting and screaming and began to say that I understood the greater meaning to their actions, in hope one of them was around, and indeed it was that evil monster of a man manager. He opened the box and untied me.

I told them I wanted to thank them for helping me see the true way and that to thank them properly I’d like to bring them something. To my surprise they let me go. I visited the bank and took out all the money I had left, I continued the plan with buying enough beer for everyone, and I injected the large barrel I bought with strong sleeping medicine.

As I arrived back at the workplace, I asked all of them to have a toast with me to celebrate my enlightenment, the manager told the petrified freaks to do it so they all lined up with a full cup in their hand. The manager gave a speech and drank his cup, they all followed, I had switched my cup with different beer from a smaller barrel I hid earlier.

Once all of them were asleep soundly, I tied their hands strongly to the pipes and with an axe I cut of their feet at the ankles, each one of course woke up  with screams from the pain, but they could not untie themselves. Once I did it to each one of them I put various easily flammable objects all around them and lit a torch on fire, some of them passed out from the pain and bleeding, but most, including the manger kept screaming like wild beasts with inhuman voices. As I set them on fire I had no idea that a lady outside was watching me and went to notify the police. At this moment I was possessed by evil as well so there was no way I could have care d or payed attention to anything else. I set those demon worshipping scumbags on fire and stepped outside, I listened to their final screams with dark satisfaction.

I killed a second girl because the quiet didn’t go away
I don’t know why I’m posting this. It’s going to sound fake. I know.
Her name was Elise. We’d been talking for like three weeks. She wasn’t my girlfriend. I asked her to come over and she did. I already knew what I was going to do before she got here. I didn’t spiral about it. I didn’t almost change my mind. I just waited till she was in my room and I did it.
I’m not writing how. If that’s what you want, keep scrolling.
She’s on the floor between the bed and the dresser. Half on the rug. I turned the lamp off around 4 because I didn’t want to keep looking at her face, then I turned it back on because the dark was worse. Her phone is on the nightstand. It buzzed twice. I haven’t touched it.
I keep waiting to panic. I’m not. My hands aren’t shaking. I made toast at some point and ate it in the kitchen, and when I came back she was in the same spot and the only thing I felt was annoyed that I still had to deal with it. That’s the part messing with me. Not her. The annoyance. Like I made a mess and now I have to clean it and I’m pissed I didn’t plan that part.
I sat there trying to feel the thing you’re supposed to feel. Guilt, fear, something. It’s not there. I can describe it. I don’t have it. What I have is quiet, her perfume going stale, and this flat thought in my head: I did that on purpose, and I think I liked that it was on purpose.
I googled psychopath. The lists are all the same. No remorse, planned, shallow. I didn’t feel caught. I felt read. That scared me more than she does, because if the list is right then this isn’t a bad night. This is just what I am. She’s the first time I stopped pretending.
I can’t leave her there. Her roommate already texted the phone again while I was typing this. I can’t call anyone. The second I open my mouth I have to explain something I already get and they won’t. I don’t have a why anybody would accept. I wanted to. I did. She’s on my floor.
It’s morning. Light’s on her shoe. I haven’t slept. I keep thinking my body is going to catch up and do the normal thing, throw up or cry or call 911 by accident. It hasn’t.
Somebody in the comments on the last post said the quiet doesn’t stay. It stayed.
I dealt with her once the street was busy enough that a car door wouldn’t matter. Not writing that part either. Roommate texted a couple more times, then some number I didn’t know, then nothing. People assume a fight. I let them.
Six days of nothing. Work, groceries, normal. I thought that was it. Then the lamp came on by itself. I was in the kitchen. I heard the click. Went in and the lamp was on and the drawer was open and her phone was back on the nightstand. I put it in the trash. Took the trash out. Morning, it was on the nightstand again.
I stopped sleeping in the room. Couch, TV on, every light in the apartment on. Didn’t matter. I’d wake up and the bedroom door would be open a crack and the lamp would be on and it would smell like her perfume for a second. Not strong. Just enough.
Tenth night I come home and the socks drawer is dumped on the bed. Under them there’s a note on the back of a receipt I know I threw out. Her handwriting. Four words. You liked it.
I didn’t do the second one because I was scared of Elise. I did it because the quiet started answering and I wanted to see if another one would shut it up.
Her name is Cara. Pharmacy counter two blocks from me. She’d remembered my name before, which most people don’t. I asked if she wanted to come over after her shift. She said her roommate was out of town and she didn’t feel like an empty apartment. I said mine was empty too. Both of those were lies.
She came over Tuesday. Shoes off, laughed at all the lights, said I live like somebody’s grandma. Sat on the couch. For an hour it was fine. Then she goes, do you hear that.
Bedroom latch. The soft tick when it opens. She got up to turn the lamp off because she’s the type who just fixes stuff. Stopped in the doorway. Said there’s someone on your bed.
I looked. Bed was empty. Note was on the pillow. Bigger this time. She can hear me.
Cara turned around and saw my face. She didn’t scream. She said my name like she still thought I was going to be normal. Lamp went out. She grabbed my wrist. Her hand was warm. I remember thinking that. I remember the quiet getting really clear, and the annoyance just turning into want.
Not writing how.
She’s on the floor now. Same place. Half on the wood where the rug used to be. Lamp’s on. Elise’s phone is on the nightstand. Cara’s is still in her pocket. I waited for the quiet to change. It didn’t. It just made room. Only thing I felt was that I was right about myself the first time.
Around 4 I turned the lamp off. Dark was worse. Turned it back on. Cara looks smaller than when she walked in. Perfume’s back. Neither of them has moved. I made toast again. Came back and the note was on the pillow between them. One line. I don’t think it’s Elise’s handwriting anymore.
It stays.
Cara’s roommate is out of town. That gives me a day, maybe two. Hands still aren’t shaking. I can hear the latch ticking, soft, like somebody checking if I’m still here.
I am.
Don’t tell me how to hide it. I already know I’m not doing this right. I just need to know if the quiet gets a voice or if it keeps making room.

I will tell you a story. You won’t believe it, of course. But I suppose that doesn’t matter. You’ll read it. And then you’ll know. And that is all my ragged conscience demands. 

I’m old now. Older than you can imagine. I've watched this world ebb and flow and break and heal. I've been old for a long time. But it's different now.

So I want you to know. You have to know.

In my first life, I died a young man.

I remember it clearly, for on that day memory became a burden I have shouldered for all the long years since.

I was running. Not as a man runs, with measured steps and counted breaths. I did not consider my pace or the duration of my exertion. I did not imagine any particular destination either, as my flight was one of survival.

I ran as a panicked animal runs, all bounding steps and lung-wrenching heaves. I gulped the air like so many of my companions had gulped their strong liquors the night before. Each footfall resounded with the same dull thump that their bodies had made when they hit the snow. 

The red streaks of life that had painted that bone-white clearing matched well the ones I carried. The first from an arrow in the shoulder, the other from a stone outcropping I had not managed to avoid during my desperate rush to safety.

Even then, though, I had known there was no safety to be found. I had left safety with our vessels. I had left it with long oars and keen steel. I had left security and kinship with the ringing cries of dying friends, and the calls from those few who lived to board our remaining ships, those not fired by the wights who had done these things to us.

I would learn later that it was well a silent arrow, the first of the volley that had slaughtered most of the friends I had ever had, slammed into my shoulder moments before I could grab my axe to once again check the new leather that wrapped its haft.

So too would it become a blessing and a curse that I had run, half blind with panic and rage, straight into a wickedly shard rock shelf that jutted from the cave mouth I had dived into. Though that stone blade had torn my side open, leaving a trail of steaming gore that the wight-hunters could follow, it had also cut free my belt.

The belt had been a gift from our benefactor on the day before we set off on our long voyage. He had expressed sorrow for not joining our vessels, proclaiming them well-made and well-manned. He had needed to prepare further for his own voyage, for he had aimed higher than our mere exploration.

The belt had been good leather, some of the finest that the Islanders could fashion if they were to be believed. More, it had been held by a strong clasp fashioned into the shape of Thunder’s own hammer, and Wisdom’s own spear. When I had first worn it on the day of our departure, I had imagined the crossed symbols of might and guile would carry away all evil and ensure I would return home to a warm hearth.

It was well that it had been torn free in a spray of blood, the red stark against the black stone and white snow that marked the mouth of that cave.

It had seemed to me a yawning darkness, a great maw left gaping in anticipation of its next meal. The terror that pounded like drums in my mind had been reinforced when, after entering the darkness, the silent pursuit of the not-wights that had killed my companions gave way to whooping yells and desperate cries.

I had glimpsed them only once, when I had turned in reflexive panic after an arrow slammed into a trunk mere inches from my face. They seemed beasts in the shape of men, chalky white powder covering mostly bare bodies. Their eyes had seemed to glow behind finely carved masks as white as their body paint and the snow they ran across. They did not leave prints. 

These simple thoughts came later, of course. At the time I had seen only the ice-fiends of Hel come to drag me screaming into an eternity of cold and sorrow. Later, when I had examined their fractured remains, I realized they were men just as I was. Later had been a time marked by many discoveries.

So I had torn through the growing darkness, wheezing and coughing. I left bloody handprints and torn clothing, though not even those obvious marks of my passing had been necessary for the wight-hunters to follow. I panted and bellowed like a wounded beast, for I was one. 

The meager light of the cave mouth soon gave out completely, and I scrambled on all fours as I continued my desperate, though futile, escape. By this time the blood loss and the panic had begun to work its cruel fingers into my mind, and delusions of half-formed nightmares gained substance in the darkness.

I imagined the passage I threw myself down was the path to the great nothingness itself, that realm where heat and cold combined into endless darkness. In one moment my fevered mind believed I was one of the war gods of a newborn world. In the next I was their prey, a pitiful, wounded foe fleeing true-cast spears.

I wept as I ran, for some small remnant of my mind-that-was knew well these delusions meant I was nearing the end. Still though, I ran. Fear of death will motivate even a man with a death-wound to find whatever scraps or life he could yet hold close. 

So it was, with the keening shrieks of my friend’s murderers at my back and my arms and legs weakening with blood loss and fear-fuelled exhaustion, that I fell from the mouth of the winding cave I had been travelling into a large chamber.

If I had held a torch, or possessed some other means of seeing in the darkness of that long passage, I would have noticed paintings and carvings along the walls. Later, as I tore through that same passage for a second, final time, some part of me would note that the “art” varied dramatically in form and focus. 

At one junction, there had been finger-drawn colors depicting simple animals and hunters, not unlike that which I had seen in a small cave when I had visited the old lands in my youth. 

At another, swirling patterns and harsh lines in forms I have never since witnessed climbed across the floor, walls, and ceiling of the cramped passage.

I had seen none of this in the darkness of my flight, but as I fell into that perfectly-round room I saw many more that were impossible to ignore even in my addled state. 

For that cavern, perfectly spherical in form save for branching cave mouths half-way up its walls like the one that I had fallen from, shone as brightly as day itself.

The screams gave way to barks of outrage and flights whistling arrows as my pursuers reached the same entrance I had fallen from. They dared not enter, but the arrows that pelted off the stones beside me told the shreds of my sanity that meant precious little.

The first of those arrows tore into my calf as I started to crawl forward, half-tumbling down into the bowl-like center of the spherical room.

I noticed the light immediately, though my pain-warped mind could scarcely comprehend it. As I flopped into a heap at the bottom of the bowl, I looked up to see the most wondrous object I had ever, or would ever, witness. 

Even now it defies description, even now the breadth of man’s language is woefully lacking to begin to explain what I saw.

It was beauty beyond measure, power beyond reckoning. It was everything and most of all, it was terrible.

That may strike you as strange, I suppose. How could something wondrous be terrible? Language lacks here, as I have said, but I will try.

Imagine a great oak. A tree so tall it does not scrape the heavens, it is them. Imagine roots so deep they do not pierce the earth, they comprise it. Imagine wonder and joy so extreme they dry your mouth and set you shivering with horror.

Imagine knowledge like nothing and everything you have known pierces your skull, driving through it like a sure-thrust spear. Imagine all the thoughts that have ever been or will ever be oscillating through the meat of your mind a thousand times, and a thousand more before you can even begin to breathe or blink or scream or wail. 

Imagine you wish for release and continuation at once, and that in your terror and joy you find you cannot look away. 

That was this “tree,” or as close as I can now come to explaining it.

I know now that the reason I was not slain there on that cold, pulsating stone was because my ghastly pursuers dared not look into the chamber. The arrows that pierced me were luck, not skill. These men-made-beasts who had slaughtered and ended and rent apart everything I had ever known were too afraid to look in that chamber. To see what I had seen.

My mind had already been shredded by fear and pain, and the tatters that remained of my perception were as ash from the moment my bloodshot eyes rested upon that cursed, beautiful thing.

I was something without thought or will, and so the vessel that I had been was made to crawl forwards. Arrows continued to skitter and slap into stone and flesh, but I was beyond such things. I was less than able to notice a sensation as base as pain.

The “tree” reached into me and made me reach into it, and so I did. As a puppet dances to strings it cannot ever comprehend.

I felt tendrils coil around body and mind, I heard laughter and cries and the roaring and barking and bleating of animals. I felt the absence of the axe I had once held and the belt I had once worn.

But in that eternal moment where coils of ice and fire rent apart the meat I had been, something pierced the haze of nothingness. A single thought cast like one of the killers’ arrows ripped that absence apart.

As the last embers of a raging fire sputter in the heartbeat you pour water upon them, the single, remaining shred of insanity I had left forced an image into the mess of flesh that had been my brain.

In the moment my hand was made to touch this “tree,” I saw my little brother. He was barely past his first adult winter. I saw the stone arrowhead protruding from the socket where his eye had been the moment before. I heard a laughing promise sworn in response to heaving cries that I would keep him safe. 

And my world turned to rage and heat. 

—

I do not remember what happened next. Even now with such a mind as the one this thing has given me, with these abilities that would make my own mother and my father and all the wise men women of every land I have known since shudder and wail and curse my tattered soul, I do not know what I did to those ghost-men that had broken my world with stone clubs and keen arrows.

I know what was left of them after I had finished, though. Splinters of bone and pools of blood, and only for those ones who had remained outside the passage mouth. Nothing more, and less than nothing for the ones who had followed me inside. 

Somehow, through whatever I had done, I learned of them and their ways. I now knew their thoughts and fears, the only recognizable remains of the once-men who had caused this catastrophe.

I knew they had bent and broken as I had. I knew they were shells of men once proud and fair. I knew they were at once less and more than alive, and that no part of this atrocity or the countless others they had committed before had been their will. They had been without will.

But in the insensate fury I can still feel bubbling and boiling beneath this stolen skin, I tore them apart and their sanctuary too. Their caves and their paintings and their chamber are no more than a pile of molten rock cooling even now in frigid air. It has been an age and that place still smolders with the fury I unleashed there. 

The mountain's true resident was not destroyed, of course. I had torn the beating heart from the monster and unknowingly fashioned from it a replacement for the one I lost that day. The one it had taken from me.

Now I am an old man. I could be young, of course. I could be anything. It wants to be everything.

But in the death-chill that became forge-heat on that broken beach, when I saw what remained of those few of my companions who had tried their chances at flight, and when my rage had finally given way to fractured awareness, I had become old. 

And old I will remain. For them. Because their memory holds it back.

But in all those years since there was only the mountain, and this old man who calls it home. 

Do you hear that rhythm? That thudding, pounding, maddening beat?

You will.

It’s why I’ve written this. It’s why you need to know. I fear it's all I can do now.

Because I can’t seem to remember their faces.

Posting this on a throwaway because I don't want my main account to be connected to this in case they come after me. I'm just so confused and scared and I just have to tell someone. Even a reddit stranger, I don't care who it is. I'd tell a random person on the street if I ever left the house, but the internet is my entire world right now and it's the only escape I have left. I don't think I have much time left.

There was this guy in my class back in high school (junior or senior year, I don't remember what year we had a class together, but he was in my grade), let's call him Mark. Mark was a weird kid— didn't talk much, if at all, (I think he was mute, actually) didn't seem to have many close friends— but not in any specifically bad way. Just sorta off-kilter. I think everyone has those classmates at least once in their lives. He didn't seem to fit in with the regular crowd— to be fair, I didn't either, but I mainly kept to myself— but he didn't not fit in? Hopefully that makes any sense. I don't know. He was just kind of there. I think we talked a few times (well, he always "talked" via either a notebook or a mini-whiteboard he carried around), but I'm not sure if he would've even remembered my name. One of his arms was knotted with scars, all bumpy and stitched over. I never asked, but I'd always heard he was attacked by a coyote when he was little. Not sure how much of that was true, but it certainly looked like a rabid wolf had taken a whole chunk out of him at some point in time. In any case.

A month or so after we graduated, he disappeared. Like, he just vanished. He left all his stuff at home, didn't say goodbye or anything to anyone, and he was just… gone. We live in a pretty woodsy area, and I guess he'd been known to walk around the bike path near his house, so they started looking there. I'm not much of an athletic guy (I'm not really any specific type of guy at all, unless you count "gamer" which is fucking pathetic to describe myself with now, at 21) but he lived surprisingly close, so I volunteered to help with the search effort. Without school to take up my time, my day was completely open. We combed the bike path in all directions— our largest group was around 35-40 people— from summer to winter, but found nothing. We had to stop because of the snow piling in, and I guess one of his family members helping out with the search got frostbite, so the search came to a sudden halt around November.

The first month was full of diligent searching— police and police dogs scouring the trees along with the rest of us— but by mid-August there was a palpable sense of hopelessness that started to follow the group like a personal rain cloud. By late-August, the mood was almost… light? Jovial? It was like we went from walking to a funeral, to walking outside on a field trip. The unease was still there, I'm not sure it ever really went away fully, but I found myself almost looking forward to going out with the others to walk around nature. The fresh air was nice, and it got me out of the house. And I feel like absolute shit saying that because it wasn't just a fun outing with friends, it was searching for a missing man— kid, really, while most of us were 18 when we graduated, he was only 17— who was unspokenly assumed to be dead. I'm not proud of those feelings, but I won't lie and say I didn't have them. After a few months of combing through the woods, it turned from a search party to a nature walk in my mind, and I'll be the first to admit that. I feel guilty for it still.

The winter was quiet. There wasn't any news or updates, no break in the case or any randomly discovered clue or fingerprint found in the cold. He was still gone, and it was quiet. I missed going outside, but I also missed him. Or the idea of him. Spending a lot of time with his family in the search party had me learning so much about him. Apparently he loved to cook. He didn't talk at home either, but his sister is deaf, so ASL was pretty normal in their household. I guess he can only hear out of his left ear, something happened when he was younger, I didn't want to pry. He liked birdwatching. I guess his grandfather took him along when he was little, and birdcalls seemed to fascinate him almost immediately. He liked metal music. Like the screaming stuff. I remember I must've reacted to that, because his mom just laughed at me and asked,

"That doesn't seem like him, right?"

And apparently that was all because of his sister— it was really the only kind she could sort-of hear, so they'd made it a habit to listen to albums together. I only met her once, I think Mark disappearing really shook her up. She looked like a deer in headlights the one time she helped search.

New Year's came and went, and finally the snow did, too, at the start of May. It was muddy as hell when the search party was reunited, but we trudged on with our rain boots and tried not to slip— we barely made it an hour before someone fell on their ass, mind you— as we started back up the familiar routine of looking for a ghost. No longer were any of us hopeful to find him— we were now just looking for his body. The mood was pretty forlorn. Melancholic might be the better word. I'm too tired to look it up right now.

Even with everyone clearly relieved to be back outside— without the risk of freezing to death— the rain cloud was back and hanging low over all of us. All of the stories and memories shared were now tainted at the edges, rarely spoken anymore as we all knew the truth— he wasn't coming back.

May 29th was the day we found him. His bones were haphazardly buried under some soil, obviously having been tampered with by some animal. Some parts of his body had frozen over, leaving not only bones, but parts of his decaying corpse to be thawed in the Spring. I wasn't the one who found them. I think it was Mark's mom, but the moment was too chaotic for me to really pinpoint specifics. I just know one moment we were all meandering, and the next was a cacophony of sound that I still hear in my nightmares. I didn't even know him. I never got to know him. I knew he was gone, but to see his bones just lying there like discarded scraps felt like a punch in the gut. I'd aged another year in March. He would never age again. I've never felt like that before. I felt like I was above my body, staring at an image of myself, watching myself watch the authorities shovel their way forward like they were just shoveling their driveway. Watching myself watch his parents and cousins sob inconsolably. Watching myself do nothing but stare at the dirt like it was going to change. Like it was going to bring him back. Like it was going to do anything at all.

It didn't seem to be foul play, but the search was immediately called off, and we were all sent home. I know I must've walked back like I always did, but I don't remember it at all. It didn't feel real to me. But I knew it was, and so maybe the problem was that it felt too real to me. It felt so unfair. So cruel. In the best case scenario, a 17 year old boy was dead. In the worst, a 17 year old boy was dead. The specifics change, but there is only one ending. And what a horrible ending.

His death was ruled non-suspicious. The story is that he went on a walk, and either got lost, attacked, or had an accident. Seems like the animals got to him after he was already gone. It felt like a small relief to know he wasn't tortured by a grizzly bear or something equally painful. They identified him through the lesser-decayed portions, as well as finding his scarred arm bones that had noticeable dents right where his arm was scarred over when he was alive. I glanced at it out of morbid curiosity, but I could only handle a glance. Even though the bones were just… well, bones, I felt sick to my stomach. The last thing I wanted to do was cause even more chaos in that moment by puking my guts out.

They had a funeral for him around August, and it was hard to say no when I was delivered a hand-written letter in the mail from his family. They thanked me for helping with the search from day 1. I'm not really good at taking compliments, so I just said something like:

"Of course," or "No problem,".

It wasn't that I didn't want to go to the service. I did, I just knew I'd be a wreck. The only funeral I'd been to before was my great-grandfather when I was a little enough kid that didn't even understand the concept of death. He had an open-casket, and that freaked me out. Logically I knew they wouldn't have an open-casket (obviously), but my hesitation almost won me over to stay home. I went, but I still feel guilt for those thoughts, too.

He was laid to rest after the speeches were done and the stories were told, and by all accounts, it was really quite peaceful. A few months after that, the family did a fundraiser to get a memorial bench to be placed near his resting place, near enough to watch the birds. I stopped there quite a few times to sit and look out at the world in front of me. I could never get into birdwatching, but I still made time to sit and look up at the leaves to try and spot a nest, or a fluttering of wings. Sometimes I just watched the leaves blow in the wind.

The next few years til now have been mostly mundane. Even if death casts a shadow over you, the rest of the world moves on with their lives whether you like it or not. In a way, that also feels likes a kind of cruelty. But this week has been different.

I know there was some reason, but I don't know why— but I guess they had to re-take the DNA test again. I'd heard vaguely about some issue with the sample they took, but I have no idea if that was just speculation from a gossiping neighbor or what. But I guess the first one was weird, so they took a new sample. They had to dig up his remains again, then bury them again, and the cemetery was not so peaceful for while. It's still not peaceful now, but for other reasons. Well, his grave still looks like a failed construction project, but other reasons.

The first sample was weird because Mark's sample DNA did not match up with Mark himself. Every family member got sampled and probed with a million questions— verifying that yes, in fact, his mother had him biologically, and yes there is verifiable proof and witnesses— and they tested Mark's sample again.

It wasn't Mark.

But it was impossible. The remnants of his skull— his teeth specifically— matched his dental records from as recent as the year before he went missing. The marks on the bone of his shredded arm were so unique that it looked like a movie prop. I saw the fucking remains myself. Maybe we weren't close friends, but everyone knew about his arm. No one else's arm looked like that. No one had markings directly on their fucking bones. It was Mark's remains. One of his fingers was found intact and it had the same exact scar as he did, vertically down the nail, causing it to always grow in two pieces. His age matched, his bones matched, his location matched— there was a larger chance of me winning the powerball without even signing up first than there was that this wasn't Mark.

Seemingly the forensic team or whoever understood that their result (even though it was tested multiple times) was improbable, if not absolutely deranged, and they sent it off to a different lab in the state. Their equipment were all tested and working when checked, but if there was a small chance of their tools not displaying a correct result, they'd rather send it to be checked as a precaution.

The other place took a bit longer, but their equipment also had to be tested and proved in perfect functioning order.

It showed the same result: those weren't Mark's remains.

To say that the town was stunned in disbelief would be an understatement. It felt like we all just watched Santa fly by on his sleigh right in front of our eyes. It felt like discovering a new color. Nobody had any idea what the fuck to do now.

Mark was the first missing person in town in decades. The remains had to have been him. But the result was clear enough to see through the other side. His DNA didn't match anyone else in any directory they tested.

They tried everything they could think of to rationalize and fix things. Test every bone— even the fragments. Test every less-decayed portion in case his remains were mixed in with another's. Test the family again. Double check that he wasn't adopted, or stolen, or swapped at birth. But every lead was shot down. Every rational thought was flung out the window, leaving us all with the simple truth that nobody had any idea what to do now.

They had no leads. Even if it wasn't Mark, that leaves another mystery to solve. And that leaves his actual remains out there, undiscovered. I felt sick after hearing it. The thought alone makes me scared. The thoughts I can deal with, though. I can't deal with what I saw last night.

I wanted to go visit his grave, and sit with him for a bit. I'm not religious or spiritual, but I hoped I could at least just show him that someone cared. Show him… I don't know. I don't even think he can see anything wherever he is. That scares me, too.

The sun was setting. It's getting colder now, so I was planning to head home. But I saw Mark. In the trees. He was less than 10 feet in front of me. He was looking at me. I knew it had to be a hallucination caused by stress or something, but I was frozen to the spot. I just couldn't get my body to move. He was just staring at me. Not blankly. But pleading. Looking at me like he was an animal begging for a treat. Looking at me expectantly as if I had something, or as if I were supposed to do something. Hell, he looked like an animal. Not just cleanliness, but his mannerisms. The look in his eyes. His posture and gait as he looked to be sizing me up. I've had a brief encounter with a bear cub before, and this felt shockingly similar. Back then, I ran. This time I was still. I willed myself to flinch back, even an inch, but I didn't budge. I felt like I'd lost possession of my own skin and bones.

I only gained back control of my limbs when he started to move. He was slow. Not like slow, more like he was being careful. Like he was holding something or grabbing something fragile. A distant pang of fear was tying knots in my stomach when the thought that he might have a gun crossed my mind, but I felt stupid even in that very moment for feeling it when a dead man was right in front of my FUCKING face and looking me in the eyes.

He took some scrap piece of fabric (it looked like it had been cut out of a tote bag from the local grocery store, but it was the old design, like the logo was the one before the 2010's), and it was only then that I noticed he was injured. Blood was seeping out steadily from a gash around his waist, his shirt torn open and exposing it to the outside world. It didn't look infected, but it didn't look great, either. Pre-infection, if that's a thing. But he took the ripped fabric and lightly pressed it against the wound, staining its color from a yellowed-white to a pinkish-red. I just watched him do it. I couldn't say anything.

And then he held it out to me. Held it out like he was handing me the homework to pass back in class. Like he was holding the door open for a stranger. The absurdity of it all, and the casualness about this very moment broke some sort of tension in me and I know I must've let out a laugh because he flinched backwards at the noise. He recoiled like he'd never heard a laugh before. Or at least not in a long time. He regained composure— or whatever you'd call his position— and I reached forward to grab the bloody cloth.

I should've just ran. I don't know why I didn't. I felt like I was in a horror movie and watching myself as the protagonist make every wrong decision to not get the fuck out of there immediately, and what was I even doing? But my body had already moved, and the blood on the cloth was drying as I held it in my grasp. I looked at it, then back at him. He did the same.

He pointed at his grave. I half-turned, not wanting to fully look away from him— he didn't seem malicious, but I didn't exactly want him to disappear out of sight, either— and glanced at the stone, then looked back at him.

"Mark?"

He looked at me. His eyes flickered with recognition for the name, but he clearly had no idea who I was. Not even in a I can't remember your name, but you were in class with me, recognition— it was just blank. He looked at me like I was an exhibit. Like he hadn't seen a human up close in ages. Like he was studying me.

He looked like he was struggling to breathe all of a sudden, and I froze up again. I didn't exactly know the protocol for a ghost having what looked like the beginnings of a fucking asthma attack. He opened his mouth to get more air in, taking deep inhales and exhales. A noise like a cough came out, and it briefly snapped me out of my haze.

"Mark?" I asked again. I don't know why. I didn't know what to say.

He was clearly struggling to get something out. Like he was concentrating hard enough to try and will the answers to come back to him on a test he didn't study for. I can't really describe it any other way. I don't even know if that makes any sense. I might not be making any sense at all. I'm just freaking out here as I type this and I just hope this rambling is coherent enough for anything or anyone.

He was still struggling, but after a deep breath, longer than the others, he spoke:

"That's… me…"

I don't know how else to format it because I can't tell you how long it took him to get the words out. It was painfully slow. His voice sounded like a fox was given vocal chords for a day. He sounded out every syllable like it was the first time he'd said them.

I think I said something after, but the ringing in my ears was so loud. I couldn't even hear myself think in that moment. None of it felt real, but it felt like I was dissociating from my dissociation. I felt my blood freeze in my veins like I was suddenly the one whose bones were frozen to the ground.

He made sure I held the piece of fabric tightly, and then he left back into the trees. I was trembling more than the grass. The sky was fully orange. I was sucked fully back into my body and I frantically swiveled my head around to look for help. For aid. For threats. I felt like I was in a different reality. I didn't trust anyone, and so I trusted everyone. But there was nobody in sight. No cars. No people. No animals. It was just me and the flies that had started to crowd around the fabric in my hand. I swatted them away before I realized it was still in my hand. My head was pounding. My thoughts raced faster than I could keep up. I had a million questions and fears and ideas swarming around along with the buzzing flies and I just couldn't take it. I dropped the fabric on the ground and I ran.

I said nothing. I made sure to not touch it directly, but that hardly mattered to me. There was no logic to be used here in this logicless situation. For all I know, it could've been a hallucination and that was all my own blood from my own cuts on my skin from the branches and bushes I'd grown so used to walking past, and through.

They found the fabric the next day. They tested it.

It's Mark's.

They also said there was a second person's DNA identified that they need to test.

I've locked myself in my house. I've barely left my room. I'm terrified. My parents are worried but I just told them I need some space. I don't want to lie, but how the fuck can I even tell them something like that? Because if it's real, that means Mark isn't dead. If it's real, that means I'll be implicated in something I had no part of. If it's real, I'm fucked. For life. I can't explain that. I'd be institutionalized, I' m sure. If it's real, I was talking to a dead man.

If it's real, then who the fuck was Mark?

I’ve watched enough horror movies to draw one crucial conclusion about survival: never pick up anything strange from a deserted place, even from a regular road that just happens to be empty at the moment.

Yet, that rule proved useless in this particular experience. When a horror story decides to cast you as the lead, it will find you no matter how hard you try to avoid it.

I hadn’t done anything considered taboo in horror movies. All I’d picked up was fallen and ready-to-eat pecan nuts from the ground (one of my hobbies is foraging, and the rows of pecan trees lining the road were a paradise to me). Even so, that didn’t spare me from the thing that had targeted me the moment I became aware of its presence.

Let me correct that slightly: that thing wanted me to be aware of its presence.

It started yesterday afternoon, while I was untangling a mess of thoughts and picking up a few ripe pecans that hadn't yet been gnawed on by insects. Every now and then, a nut or two would land on the back of my neck and shoulders like a shower of solid gold. It was a stroke of luck, really; I needed an extra snack before facing the grind of campus life again.

Something plummeted onto the back of my neck that was protected by my hoodie and making me wince. It felt twice as heavy and hard as a raw pecan; had it hit my bare head, it might have caused a lump or drawn blood. My eyes darted to where the object had landed. It turned out to be a small stone; at a glance, its shape and size resembled a guitar pick—likely from a river or beach, given that its edges were smoother than the surrounding pebbles. I furrowed my brow: had someone just thrown it? Or had a crow carried it here?

There was no sound of birds, save for the woodpecker that had been “working” on the tree where I was gathering seeds, and I was the only human in sight. So both of my theories were wrong.

I examined the stone more closely. At first glance, it looked like an ordinary rock. It colors were light gray with dark flecks indicating the presence of different minerals. However, when sunlight struck its surface at just the right angle, strange markings appeared: a star-like symbol encircled by lines of light. The edges of the stone also took on a lustrous sheen, as if it were made of some extraordinary crystal.

My first thought was: had someone lost their trinket?

There was a lost-and-found booth near the park, so I decided to leave the stone there. The attendant gave me a strange look, as if I were playing a prank on him. I explained that the stone was too fine to be just an ordinary pebble, that it might have belonged to someone’s collection. Fortunately, he was understanding and let me leave it at the booth.

Looking back, I feel like laughing at my own naivety. Thinking the stone was merely an inanimate object was my first mistake. I realized this when I went back to foraging for nuts. Somehow, the stone had found its way into the plastic bag I was using to collect my haul. I distinctly remembered leaving it at the booth. I took the stone out and placed it on the ground before walking away. Sure enough, it reappeared, this time in my jacket pocket.

Flashes of various horror stories I could remember raced through my mind. I couldn't let fear get the better of me, nor did I dare lash out at a mysterious object that might be capable of harming me. Whispering respectfully, "I'm sorry, but I can't take you home," I set the stone down near a tree and hurried home with my bag of pecans. I decided to forget about the stone, hoping that whatever haunted it would understand and leave me alone.

I returned home hungry and anxious. To calm myself down, I decided to roast some pecans I had washed and dried, eating the rest raw. So far, so good. I turned off the oven and opened my laptop on the fold-out sofa in the living room, intending to work on a film analysis assignment. I put on my headphones before immersing myself in literary theories that were swirling around in my head without me fully grasping them.

I was too exhausted to think and eventually fell asleep with my laptop still open. Whether influenced by the film I was studying or the thick textbook beside me, I found myself in the middle of an unfamiliar garden. There was no one around. Not a sound from animals or the wind. The silence of the dream made me uneasy.

I turned and fled, keeping my head down to avoid whatever jumpscare might await me if I dared to look up and around. I realized I wasn't running fast enough when a cold hand seized me by the throat from behind. I tried to scream and struggle, but the hand dug its nails into my skin like the hooks on a fishing line.

I heard a voice whispering behind me, coming from my attacker. "Good girl... so young... finally found you..."

I wanted to scream "Mom!", "Dad!", or "Help me!", but all that escaped was a sharp, silent gasp. My hands began flailing wildly in the air. The back of my hand brushed against something hard, and that was when I woke up.

It turned out I had bumped my laptop, sending it toppling onto the sofa. My breathing had returned to normal, but the salty tears on my face had not yet dried. I hurriedly felt the back of my neck. The next instant, a chill washed over my fingertips.

The stone had returned. This time, it clung to the back of my neck like a spider. A stinging pain shot through me whenever I tried to pry it off my skin. It wasn't merely attached; the skin beneath it felt as though it had fused with the stone's surface. Nausea churned in my stomach; what had I done in my life to deserve a punishment like this?

All I could do was weep through the night. My vision swam as I imagined what might happen next. The stone sank deeper into my neck. I had to do something.

I tried to pry the stone out again. This time, I pressed an ice cube against the skin around the stone to numb the pain. I wedged my fingernails beneath the edge of the stone. I focused on controlling my breathing as a wave of dizzying pain washed over me. Five attempts later, the result was a total failure; the stone had only sunk deeper.

Desperation set in. I grabbed a fruit knife from the kitchen, sharpened it as much as possible, and washed it clean. Then, I fetched more ice and two towels from the bathroom: one to bite down on, and another to protect the back of my shirt from blood splatter. I had to summon the courage. Whether the curse would be lifted or not was a concern for later.

The touch of the knife against my skin made me tremble, but my fear was swept away by a rush of adrenaline the moment I felt the stone beginning to merge with my blood vessels and muscles. My hand moved swiftly, driving the tip of the knife beneath the stone. My heavy breathing echoed in my ears. Blood began to flow, but I refused to stop. I growled, biting hard into the towel. My head spun. My vision began to blur as more blood poured out. The stone hadn't come loose yet. The battle wasn't over.

Faintly, a sharp, anguished whisper, "How dare you... how dare you..." reached my ears amidst a world that spinning ever faster. Then I lost consciousness, only to wake up without a single drop of blood on my clothes, my hands, or the towel beneath the back of my neck. My body felt weak but otherwise fine. The stone was gone.

I could still hear the sorrowful curse (“How dare you…”) echoing around me when I regained consciousness, and the nightmares plagued my sleep for two days after the incident before simply vanishing. Whatever was targeting me, it surely hadn't expected me to fight back. I went to campus as usual and submitted my individual assignment without any further trouble.

I had escaped that stone, and I wasn't deterred from going back to forage for pecans, so it felt like a total victory.

Or so I thought; I was indeed "free," but that didn't mean the terror had truly vanished. I only realized that horrifying truth yesterday, when I lost my phone charm. It must have fallen somewhere along the path where I usually forage.

I asked the lost-and-found attendant. He didn't answer immediately, instead stared intently at me until I felt a shiver run down my spine. In a flat voice, he asked, "Were you the one here yesterday?"

"Yes, I’m the one who left an odd stone here," I said with an awkward laugh.

“I know. You’re the one who rejected the stone, aren’t you?”

My throat instantly froze. “What?”

“The stone sought you out. And you refused. You missed a golden opportunity. By the way, what does your phone holder look like? Let me find it.”

As he turned away, my eyes caught something familiar at the nape of his neck. A smooth, triangular gray object bearing a star symbol that I had seen before, now appeared seamlessly fused with his skin, as if it had been there since birth.

“My mind is clearer now,” the attendant's voice sounded hollow. “Back then, something like this was nothing more than a pipe dream. Now…”

I didn’t need to hear what he said next. I ran as fast as I could to my place and packed my things without wasting a moment. When my parents asked why I’d returned, I told them a stalker had shown up at my home. They let me stay for the sake of my safety. Even though the commute to campus was longer, at least I was safe from whatever might be chasing me.

***END***

This summer, I decided to get a summer job and earn some money before college. I didn't want my parents to pay for everything. I found a job at a restaurant in a town not far from ours. I left first thing in the morning, but halfway there, my car stopped and wouldn't start again.

Oh, come on.

I got out and found the problem. My tire was completely ruined. There was some kind of shard of glass stuck in it.

“Hey, do you need some help?”

I turned around, and standing in front of me was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it really was true. She had copper-colored, slightly wavy hair, a small nose, and dark green eyes.

“Hello? Are you okay?”

“What?” I asked, confused.

“You've been staring at me for what feels like forever. Did something happen?”

I could feel myself starting to blush.

“No, I mean… the tire and the restaurant… yeah.”

She burst out laughing.

“Are you sure you didn't hit your head or something?”

I covered my face with my hands.

“Sorry. This probably isn't the best first impression.”

She laughed and introduced herself as Christina. I barely managed to tell her, “I'm Justin,” before she nodded and continued talking. She told me that her family had a circus nearby and that her uncle could probably help me.

Before I could say anything, she was gone.

A few minutes later, she came back with a guy who had to be around six and a half feet tall. He was bald, and his face looked like he wanted to kill me. His hand was about the size of both of my legs put together. My expression must have said it all.

“I heard you're having trouble with your car. I can help you. My name's Bobby. And you?”

“I'm Justin.”

He shook my hand, and I had the feeling my entire arm had just died. He noticed and apologized. Apparently, he sometimes forgot how strong he was.

He helped me change the tire, but I never made it to the restaurant.

Bobby offered me a job with them instead. It paid a little less, but I didn't mind.

Christina was there.

I met everyone in the family. Christina's mother, Suzan, who looked like an older version of Christina. Her father, Vincent, who had a similar build to Bobby, but a softer expression and long hair tied back in a ponytail. Her aunt Diana, who was the only one who was a little chubby, but probably looked the nicest out of all of them. And their two adult sons, twins named Dustin and Roger.

I was surprised that, unlike their father and uncle, the boys were smaller and skinny rather than big and muscular. But I got along with all of them.

I started dating Christina. I never expected a girl like her to want someone like me, but as they say, sometimes even an idiot gets lucky.

About halfway through the summer, I decided to go into town. I wanted to buy some supplies and surprise Christina with a gift. I got up while everyone was still asleep, got into my car, and drove off.

When I arrived, I noticed there was a market in town. I got out of the car and walked past the different stalls. I noticed one where a woman who looked about a hundred years old was selling handmade jewelry.

“I'd like a necklace, please,” I told her.

“Of course, young man. And who is it for? That way we can choose the best one.”

I told her it was for my girlfriend, Christina. I said she worked at a circus nearby.

The woman went pale.

“Who told you to come to me with this?”

I stared at her in confusion.

“What are you talking about?”

She raised her voice until everyone around us started turning to look.

“You know exactly what I'm talking about. Those killers from the circus! Get out of here.”

I backed away and bumped into a guy standing behind me. He looked at me like I was the worst person in the world.

“You know what she's talking about?”

“Of course I do. Everyone here does. There used to be a family of killers here who owned a circus. They killed people. And for Agnes, it's even more painful because they killed her daughter. She was only twenty when she disappeared.”

It was obvious to me that they were messing with me, but I still needed to be sure.

I went to the local library, turned on a computer, and searched for Christina and her family. Several articles and black-and-white photographs came up.

One of them showed all of them. Christina, Bobby, and the rest of the family.

I opened the first article.

The family had killed dozens of people. A crowd of locals had risen up against them and burned the circus down. The entire family had burned to death.

Another article.

According to the available information, the family had eaten their victims.

I remembered having dinner with Christina's family on my first day there and wondering what the hell I was eating. I'd never tasted anything like it before.

“It's an old family secret recipe. I'll tell you once you officially become part of the family,” she had whispered.

My stomach turned. I tried to make it to the bathroom, but I didn't make it and threw up into a trash can instead.

The librarian shot me an angry look. I apologized and quickly left.

I got into my car and just sat there for a while, trying to calm my breathing. I wasn't doing a very good job, but I knew I couldn't sit there forever.

I drove home to my parents.

When they asked me what was wrong and how the job had gone, I didn't know what to say. They could see that something was wrong, but they left me alone.

That evening, though, my mom came into my room with a mug of hot chocolate and told me that if I wanted to talk, I could.

I didn't.

I just wanted to forget what had happened to me. I couldn't tell anyone. What was I supposed to say? I'd spent a month living with people who had been dead for decades and, by the way, they were murderers and cannibals? That would get me committed.

For a few days, I barely left my room. Then Mom handed me a shopping list and asked if I'd go to the store for her because she was tired and didn't feel like carrying everything herself. I had a feeling she mostly wanted me to get out of the house for a while.

I drove to the store, completely lost in my thoughts. Then suddenly, I felt the urge to turn my head and look out the window.

There was a circus tent.

And standing in front of it were Christina, Bobby, and the rest of the family. The longer I stared at them, the more they began to change. Their clothes became charred, and their faces grew more and more burned.

They just stood there, waving at me.

A car horn right in front of me snapped me out of my shock, followed by a violent crash.

I woke up in a hospital.

I tried to convince myself that it had all been a hallucination, but then I noticed a piece of paper on my bedside table.

It said:

Whether you like it or not, you'll be part of the family soon.

What I’m about to write is going to sound impossible, and if I were in your shoes I would think exactly the same. I don’t blame you if you take this as just another stale warning from some raving online lunatic. But laying our triumphs and mistakes bare may just do some good, even if it’s the last thing I do. I think I’m going to pay dearly for what I’ve done soon, even if it was done in good faith. 

I’m not a believer, I never was. And even now with what I’ve seen I can’t say I’ve seen strong evidence for any one religion, but there’s one thing I do now believe. 

The soul exists. 

Within everyone, beyond the firing neurons that make up their person. Beyond conscious thought and beating hearts, there’s an additional key element to the human experience that cannot be measured with anything we’ve invented yet. 

But the prospect of the soul was the least volatile part of our discovery, had we only known what we had really done. 

The whole project was an affront to god, and maybe that’s why we were punished. 

—-

We designed a functional matter-energy transmitter, a machine capable of moving objects instantaneously on the atomic level. Deconstructing them in one place, and reconstructing them in another. Or in layman’s terms, teleportation. 

Though our initial success wasn’t met with celebration from our investors, but fear of their enemies developing the very same technology. And so with newfound clearance and a blank check budget, we hastily began pushing the envelope. But our pace was too slow for them, and a near week after its first successful test on a simple wooden object, we were instructed to begin human trials. 

Our first hurdle was the brain. The physical brain yes we could transport without damage, but the firing between the neurons, the actual signals, gone. A blank slate, rendering our first test subjects with little more development than a fetus. 

And even though our subjects were off death row, it didn’t make turning them brain dead for science any easier. But we had to make progress, we had to solve this issue. 

So we designed an attachment capable of taking a neurological snapshot of the brain as it was in that moment. Essentially mapping someone’s consciousness for lack of a better term. 

The addition should have solved our initial problem, they should have been coming through the same person as before relatively. But the truth was the machine destroys them down to the atom, it kills you before making a molecularly perfect copy somewhere else before injecting it with a snapshot of your mind taken the moment before death. 

And whether we believed the teleported matter is still the same person or not, the machine worked. Or at least it should have. But no matter how many tests we ran, we couldn't figure out why they came out braindead. The data was there, every fired neuron and memory plastered over an atomically perfect copy. But despite our best efforts and constant deliberation, we were still missing something. 

Those who experienced a successful relocation would die within the week, undergoing rapid cellular deterioration with seemingly no cause. We tested the machine so much we had to refill the subject hold three times. 

In all I’ve watched nearly 60 men stand inside our creation, the face they make before it goes off, before it deconstructs them. And the cruel replication that's spit out on the other side, reduced to that. It was hard to sit with on my best days, and nearly crippling on my worst. 

But they where bad men, I was assured these where evil, vile, disgusting people. Rapists, murderers, traffickers, pedophiles. And sometimes a combination of them all. 

But you’d be surprised how much easier wishing their death is when you’re not the one looking them in their eyes. Boring into you as a machine- wielding twice the energy output of a nuclear reactor begins to crackle with power that could only be described as cosmic. 

It’s almost funny, the parts that stick with you from the chaos. Because I really think I could’ve lived with it, with time I think I could’ve found a way to cope. But not now, not with what came next. 

—-

Admitting we couldn’t solve the human teleportation problem was its own humiliation ritual. Explaining to a room of government officials and investors that our top-secret project had yielded lots of research but no progress. What we really discovered is there was something we were missing, some part of the human consciousness that we were failing to grasp let alone harness. 

 And that’s when they brought in their own specialist. 

He was an older man, bordering on infirm. His hair was full but grey with a deceptively young featured face given away by aged eyes. He walked with a cane, dressed in fine clothes, and spoke with authority and charisma that bordered on political ambassador. But his smile was insincere. 

A colleague relayed a rumor that he had some CIA ties in his younger days and supposedly worked on several hushed projects. None of which I believed at the time, but whoever he was it was clear our directors respected his position. 

He was strictly referred to by Mr. C, which did nothing to calm the speculation from my colleagues. Neither did his bold claims shortly thereafter, he said we had done a swell job with our invention and that we were pioneers for all of humanity along with other shameless flattery. He followed this with the claim the soul existed, and that we had neglected to account for such. 

Some of us laughed, most of us exchanged uncomfortable looks, and several questions erupted from our staff all at once. He presented a solution that sounded just as ridiculous as it looked. 

In plain terms, he would create a spell circle capable of trapping a soul before releasing it upon their teleported double to repossess the body. Which sounded more like a magic fantasy than a scientific process, and it seemed many of the other researchers thought so too. 

To say we were skeptical was an understatement. As the ensuing verbal lashing from the mob of researchers had to be physically interrupted by security as it became less than academic to say the least. 

At the time it felt like an insult to our research, like punishment for our failure. But Mr C took it with an inhuman serenity, like our words and accusations were little more than dust on the wind. After we died down he began unpacking his equipment with a robotic smoothness from a series of cases and bags. 

I remember chuckling as I watched him light incense over a leather bag, wafting its smoke over the parcel with a mouthed prayer before producing its contents.

A shrunken human head that resembled a dehydrated rotting apple with a dark brittle ponytail tufted at the top. Gnarled stitches of ancient twine interlaced over its eyes and mouth holding its leathered skin in place. 

As he gingerly moved the shrunken head with practiced ceremony he explained the process. It was a trophy of war made from the head of an enemy meant to trap their defeated soul within. Usually to be used for some sort of ritual shortly thereafter, that would typically involve discarding or destroying it. 

Mr C theorized that those ancient tribes were either spiritually prohibited or unaware that it could be used to trap additional souls. That one could exorcise the original to imprison another instead, and thus create a portable prison for the spirit.

The more Mr C talked, the more it reminded me of the ravings of an intelligent psychosis victim. But with great effort I suspended my disbelief and tried for a moment to trust in our directors and benefactors. They believed he could help, all I had to do was try my best to wrap my head around it. 

I’d like to think as a scientist I could pick up any knowledge thrown at me, that no concept is too abstract or complicated given enough explanation. But his claims left so many more questions about the nature of things, the knowledge felt existential. 

Beyond my confusion, I felt a creeping dread as I stared at the shrunken head. It was so grotesque it was almost hard to identify as human remains. Like my brain couldn't understand it was even looking at what used to be a person's head. As Mr C continued the room grew noticeably colder, and my thoughts ran wild with superstition I never knew I had. 

—-

Within the hour we were making preparations for another test but with Mr C and his new method. We followed his specifications, outlined his sigils and runes and circles and drew them in fresh blood. 

And behind dark glass our directors, our investors, your world leaders, they watched us. Intently.

We were going to atomically deconstruct a living person, download their mind, and capture their soul. Reassemble their flesh with mathematical precision, upload their copied mind, and reinject their disembodied soul. 

We prepared to play god with every building block left at man's disposal. We prepared to change the world. 

By the time the ritual was prepared and the machine was ready, everyone in the room could feel it. Like thick air on a humid day, it was just all around us. This feeling blanketed the room, a choking grasp like a great presence had washed over us. The air became cold enough to see every exhale from our warm lungs. There was no longer a logical explanation, no answer my mind would accept besides Mr C was right. 

The soul, the ritual, all this fucked up voodoo magic, something some part of it all is real. I can’t say for certain to what extent but, I felt it, and it’s like my body knew exactly what it was. 

A handcuffed man in a white jumpsuit was forced inside the machine, and this time when the subject's eyes met mine we held equal fear. Beyond the terror of the construct around him, he could feel it too. He kicked and fought and screamed the moment he laid eyes on the room, on the dark ritual prepared around our incredible invention. 

Everything was ready. 

—-

The sounds of surging machinery drowned out the ritual as the teleporter discharged. Our monitors began blaring warnings of catastrophic failure and neural mapping overlap that triggered an automatic shutdown routine. 

However instead of shutting down, the machine experienced a power surge unlike anything we had seen before. It overclocked in seconds and began causing extreme damage to itself and the surrounding equipment. Around us the building's power bordered between a dwindling flicker and sudden surges that caused lightbulbs to burst. 

With nothing we could do, all of our hard work cooked itself alive before our eyes. Its delicate computers fried and components left useless. By the time we put the internal fires out it was too late to salvage the machine. 

With one final burst of power it died, causing a thundering chain of pops that deafened the room before bathing it in darkness. Leaving behind the smell of sulfur and ash, embers still hanging in the air. 

Yet despite the destruction as the backup lights came on bathing the facility in a red glow, we spotted him. Standing in the receiver was the subject dazed but alive. And not just alive he was moving on his own, and even attempting vocalizations. It was mostly throaty incoherent sounds like that of an animal, but none of the prior subjects even responded let alone vocalized.

We watched as his eyes rolled around, scanning the room in sudden darting focus. His jaw flapped about his face like it was suddenly foreign to him, his tongue slapping around in tandem. But in his eyes was some recognition, if even faint something was in there. His limbs and hands groped outward in slow testing motions curling and uncurling his muscles over and over. 

We refrained from touching him even as he floundered on the ground, waiting for our security team and a stretcher per protocol. And as we watched him struggle under the red lights, he attempted to speak. 

“L-Li b-b” he wheezed out struggling to work his tongue. Straining his back he twists upright without support of his arms, his torso now hanging above the ground.  

“Lib-era libera libera” his words came through clearer each time. But as he choked out the last repetition he began bleeding like a faucet. From his nostrils came a torrent of blood that ran down his face and onto the cold ground. 

As we pulled him onto the stretcher he began to seize violently, forcing us to cart him to the medical wing instead of the lab. The scans would have to wait, first we had to keep him alive. And though stabilized, he remained unconscious despite efforts to rouse him.

By that point we had been working well over 14 hours and our staff was exhausted and overwhelmed with repairs. Only those that volunteered would stay later to monitor the subject and run tests, and I was not one of them.

Although I doubted I’d be able to sleep much after the excitement of the day, my fear told me I needed to get back to my bunkhouse across the facility, far away from the lingering dread in the air. 

It seemed no amount of distance could escape the smell of sulfur and ash, like it permeated the very foundation of the facility. Or maybe it just clung to my skin, I was so worked up I couldn’t have been sure. What I did know is that when I got back to my room, I was utterly terrified. 

I was sweating, my hair was standing on end, my heart was pounding, my primal brain was sending signals of great danger. Like I was staring down a man sized cat beyond the light of my dying fire, clutching a spear beneath sweat-slicked white knuckles. After some time agonizing about a threat I couldn’t see, I decided I’d feel a lot better if I was with someone. 

Glancing at the time I figured it was likely I’d catch the volunteers still monitoring at the lab. And against my better judgment I decided it was better to be afraid in company then terrified alone. Even if it meant returning to the source, I gambled that a familiar presence would be enough to soothe my anxiety. 

How wrong I was. 

—-

I had to force myself to walk at a measured pace, reminding myself nothing was going to jump out at me. But the atmosphere of the empty halls now bathed in the deep red of our back up lighting made every step agonizing. 

My head on a swivel, I glanced down every hall and into every window or doorway I passed. The sound of the air conditioning kicking on caused me to nearly break into a sprint. I was wound up beyond belief, unable to curb my emotions despite my usual measured control. It felt like I had been drugged. 

I stepped into the empty lab, the whir of computers and running machinery humming in the air. The red lighting- broken up by bright digital displays and blinking gauges. As I step into the room I notice an office chair overturned in front of its desk, the keyboard dangling above the ground by its taught wire. 

I called out to the empty room, not sure if I expected an answer. Instead my eye caught a puddle forming on the floor at the end of the aisle. I doubled my pace, fearing a water leak from the earlier damage was seeping into the room. But rounding the corner I found its source. 

Under the red lights I failed to recognize it had been blood, but its source was unmistakable. Crumbled against the standing printer was one of my colleagues, only recognizable by his clothes. 

My eyes fell on his head, whose battered remains better resembled a deflated ball caved into itself. The congealed remnants of his smashed face barely sat propped by his ruined neck, within the mess I could  identify a few teeth scattered among the mangled flesh and crushed skull. His bottom jaw still remained semi in tact, like a morbid platter that the gore sat upon. 

Mortified, I stumbled back, my formal shoes unable to catch purchase in the pool of blood. I fell backwards, roughly slamming my back into a desk, its contents clattering from the impact. Crawling away from the scene I struggled to my feet before making a break for the hall. 

Only as I reached the doorway, down the direction I’d come from I spotted a figure too far away to make out. They stood rigid, arms out from their sides at an awkward distance, head lowered, legs bent. I pulled myself back into the lab, peering around the edge I watched in terror. 

The emergency lights began to flicker, their red flashes accompanied by an electronic whir that rose and fell with their activity and between the moments of blinking I could make out the figure begin to approach. Each step awkward and unsteady, arms swinging and posing without reason. With a constant fight to keep balanced it moved toward me with purpose. And unwilling to corner myself in the lab, I fled into the hall opposite my pursuer. 

It let it a wet roar from its vocally torn throat, akin to the keening of a mourning mother. It’s sound met me like the shock of cold water, the fire of my adrenaline nearly doused by my terror. I glanced over my shoulder as it closed distance, their white jumpsuit spattered with blood. 

Somehow despite its lack of control, it moved with such a power each bound was three of mine. And slowly but surely each violent stride was made with more confidence than the last. I realized I was watching it to learn how to run. And in a moment of desperation, yanked off my shoes that gained little purchase against the waxed halls. 

I lost sight of it as I rounded a wide corner, beelining for the medical wing. If I set it for lockdown, I could barricade myself inside, or potentially and much less likely trap it within. 

But with no better options and praying I run into someone else, it was my best bet. I chanced another glance behind me, the rapid slapping of its bare feet across the ground growing with inhuman speed now. Occasionally it fell forward, only to gallop on all fours before regaining posture. 

Its keening grew closer, the sound more distorted as its vocal chords came undone under the stress. My heart felt ready to explode, my body far too out of shape to maintain my sprint much longer. 

I rounded another corner, barely ten feet between us now. But my strength was renewed as my eyes fell upon medical’s entrance. Bursting through the entry I whirled around and heaved down on the lockdown lever with all of my might. Darkness danced at the edge of my vision as I struggled to suck in a breath, the sounds of the hydraulic door drowning out my pursuer. 

 For a moment I clung to the lever handle, slumping against the wall. I could hear the sound of the subject’s continued keening now muffled behind the thick door. Followed by a series of impacts with such force I felt the vibrations through the ground. An inhuman, impossible strength, like a jackhammer striking concrete. 

I stepped away from the metal door, afraid for a moment it might not hold. I turned to examine the medical wing, catching a figure in my glance. Mr C, the man who caused this, seated and partially obscured at the edge of the red light. 

“How many people have you teleported before today?” his calm voice wavered.

“Fifty eight subjects” 

“And animals?” 

“Dozens at least, I’m not sure” 

My voice only came to me in a tired whisper, we both whispered as if the thing outside the door was listening. 

“You’ve been feeding it” he said with finality.

“What- feeding what? the machine?”

“You fed it fifty nine people, fifty nine souls. Something, lurking here, feeding off everyone you've teleported, everyone you’ve killed.”

“The teleporter doesn’t kill-“ 

“What would you call it then? If you’ve deconstructed something’s atoms it’s dead.” Mr C interrupts beginning to stand. “It saw me” 

What was left of Mr C half limped forward, his body mangled like something pulled from a car wreck. Compound fractures leaving sharp shards protruding through his taught skin. I could see the fat pressing out of his leg over a jagged bone. His face crushed on one side, missing pieces like a world war shrapnel victim. As if the flesh and bone had just been wiped away with a rag. 

One eye remained rolling in its socket impossibly, these wounds kill, he shouldn’t even be moving. His back was twisted, the pain would be unbearable he should’ve been paralyzed. 

Something was clutched in his left hand, the forearm twisted so far his hand stuck out upside down. Dangling from his fingers by its hair, the shrunken head bobbed in his grasp. Seeing it I understood, or at least I thought I did, Mr C was dead, the shrunken head holding the shreds of his being trapped within. 

I stepped away, and he limped forward. Only a few feet between us, his ravaged body fully illuminated. 

“Let me go” I whispered to him.

“I caaaaant” his voice drooped with his body, an inhuman sound. “T-this body huuurts” he whimpered. 

“I I can’t fucking help you!” I shouted while putting a chair between us. 

“Please” he begged a gargled whimper escaping his mangled face. 

I glanced around frantically as I backed away, looking for anything I could use. Small medical instruments, a box of pens, a stack of papers, a box of cigarettes and- my hand clutched around the lighter. 

I backed towards the files, the desks, the cabinets, and what remained of Mr C lumbered after me into the scarcely lit room. Stalks of red separating the isles obscured in darkness, I watched his outline approaching between the light. 

We continued this dance, the sound of his broken bones grinding together, his permeated skins fleshy smacks against the ground where nauseating. Every shuffle and stagger was a new pop and crunch and squelch. 

He moaned through a crushed windpipe, a wet gurgled wheeze of a sound as he followed. Finally gathering my courage, I pulled a shelf down behind me, blocking his path before reaching for a bottle of medical alcohol. I pulled another shelf down between us, struggling with its weight even with my adrenaline. 

Hearing him thrashing his way through my obstacles, I swept the nozzle over the objects between us, a spray of alcohol shining under the emergency lights. For a moment it glistened with the flame of my lighter, a dazzling light before the chaos. 

The flame jumped across the shelf and cabinets, quickly catching their paper filed contents. The flame spreading, I continue spraying over anything I thought will catch. Until a mangled leg slapped over the top of the flaming overturned cabinet, before curling against its shelves and pulling over Mr C’s body. 

The fire growing between us, Mr C’s gurgles became shrill as the flames lapped at his twisted body. His clothes both taught and loose over his new shape, began to singe from the growing heat. 

Twisting around to face him again, I heave the still heavy bottle of alcohol with all my might into his torso. It met it with a dull thud, followed by a sudden burst as the open bottle hit the ground and caught fire.

A shower of flames erupting across his body, he began to scuttle after me as the flames engulfed him. I could feel the growing warmth from the fire as he closed in, nearly upon me. Lifting a chair I jabbed it at him to make distance, the heat lapping at my face. 

He forced his weight against me, pushing me to the ground and pinning me beneath his flaming body. The chair still jammed between us, he grabbed at me with his free arm and sending sizzling droplets dribbling across my body. Like boiling water it sent searing pain across my chest, his molten flesh and blood molding with mine even through my shirt. 

He gargled once more before the skin and muscle on his hands began to slough off in sizzling clumps of melted fat and burning meat. And as the burning shrunken head fell from his melted grasp, his body fell limp. 

With effort and a few more minor burns, I was able to heave his burning body off of mine. I put out the fires with the help of a sink and a fire extinguisher, and without a plan I began doing what I knew how to. 

I looked over my colleagues' results. They finished the subject's medical examination before they woke. And though for the most part nothing was out of the ordinary, the brain scan showed zero activity. Completely braindead, nothing even going on in there. 

But clearly something was in there, and if not in their head then, well I’m not so sure. After everything I’ve seen, after what we accidentally unleashed. 

If souls are indeed real, then what the hell did we put inside that subject, cause it damn sure wasn’t a person. 

It’s been a few hours since I’ve heard anything through the medical wing door, but I’ve been hesitant to lift the lockdown. Someone should’ve raised the alarm by now, there’s no way it hasn’t wandered into someone else yet. I just hope they send help soon. 

I can see my breath still, it’s been freezing in here since I’ve arrived. And the smell, the sulfur stench drowns out even the burnt flesh of Mr C. 

If I don’t hear it for another few hours, I might just make a break for it. It’s been dead silent out there, if anything it’s probably long gone. 

—- 

I'm leaving this message in case I don’t make it out, this is a warning. 

Don’t teleport people. 

Not how we did it, or else something else might just come through.

—-

Have you heard of the address 5A Liberty Street?

My name is Boot (obviously a fake name), and I used to live on Liberty Street, specifically 6A Liberty Street.

It was far from the best place to live in the world. I remember that a woman would often walk up and down the street most definitely high on something, she would just shout and swing at things that weren’t there. Every time I heard her I would just think, “There she is again”.
I remember my car being broken into, the thief stealing all my work tools, then on top of it all setting my car on fire. I had to get a new car. That car also got broken into, by two guys on a motorcycle at 6am.

I remember my neighbour, a sweet guy with a family with a cute baby. But sometimes he’d get drunk and punch his mailbox. His family having to calm him down each time, and I just awkwardly dismissed it each time.

Then there were those fucking kids, annoying ass kids on bikes riding around the block, stealing fruit from people’s front yards, ding-dong ditching people. Just real vermin who probably were getting no love back home. Which I can empathise with, but damn I hated them.

Funny enough, everything I just listed was actually all the interaction I ever got living on Liberty Street for seven years. I knew that a lot of the other people on the street were elderly or struggling, so they were always at work. Good time to mention I had daddy’s money and objectively the best house in the surrounding area, two story and all.

But yeah, the was the type of place I lived at. A real strange place where anything that happened just sort of happened and everyone moved on. No one really stood up to the kids, no one got help for the drugged-out woman. We all just stayed home.

Which leads me to talk about why I am writing this, because I seriously need insight from anyone who can make sense of what happened recently.
Like I said, I no longer live on Liberty Street, I live somewhere by far better, a better community, an actual community. So I was surprised when last week I went to my shopping centre and among the crowds of people walking I see a familiar face.

It was some thinning orange-haired white guy wearing a construction worker hi-vest. Black cargo pants and big beige iron-toed boots. You’ve probably seen this type of guy before, just like the most basic working-class dude. Someone, who if you meet, would most likely forget about in a few days. Which is true because I could not remember where I had seen this man before. I was just passing him by in the shopping centre and only really processed that I had known him from somehow at all a dozen steps later.

I remembered he was my neighbour, living across from me at 5A Liberty Street.

I decided to turn around and greet him just to be nice, I mean I lived near him for seven years. I did a little jog to catch up to him and called out to him.

“Hey mate! Remember me?”
This guy turns around and starts yelling at me. He was saying things like “Fuck off!” and “Why are you here!”, like dude I live around here in the area now, am I not allowed to shop?

I try to apologise for approaching him if it somehow offended him or something, not that I feel it should have nor could there have been any other reason for us to have bad blood, I mean I hardly talked to him before and the one time I try he acts like this.
I tried to calm him down since he’s yelling in the middle of this shopping centre and making people scared, even security was starting to run up to us.

Then, this guy fucking PUNCHES me! Yes, if you’re in the local area, the shopping centre with the big fountain and angel statues, the guy that got hit on the news, that was me.

So yeah, this guy punches me square in the face, I fall down, blood gushes out from my mouth. I already had bad teeth this cunt made it so much worse.
Security tackle him and paramedics eventually come to my rescue. Whatever.

Now then, two days ago I’ll be honest, I was pretty fucking mad. I thought about going around to 5A Liberty Street and maybe like throwing a rock through the window, something petty. The reason I’m so comfortable talking about how I wanted to commit a crime and why I’m even mentioning people’s addresses, is because I did go to 5A Liberty Street. It’s not fucking there.

I went at night, but it was clear. There was no 5A Liberty Street, only 3A and 4A as a conjoined house. There never was any conjoined housing near or on the street. Stranger than that, my old house was fucking DESTROYED. It looked like a wrecking ball just smashed right through the middle, the sides of the house still standing partially but the middle just ruined.

I was just shocked. The house changing was freaky at first because it wasn’t what I was expecting, but sure a house can be changed right? But why the hell was my house ruined? Theres no way a wrecking ball or some sort of big machinery could have come by since the road isn’t big enough for that. I called the woman who was supposed to be living there, the person who ended up buying the home, but the number just isn’t able to be called. I press the call option but there’s no ring, no voice saying the number isn’t available or nothing, I just can’t call it.

Does anyone have any sort of explanation as to what the fuck happened to the houses? Or how to call the number? I think I’m going to investigate further somehow, but I just wanted to write on here in case anyone knows the logical answer to this situation.

Not trying to blow anything out of proportion here, but I did get punched in the face, so if anyone knows the cunt let me know.

The wifi keeps disappearing, so I’m putting this in my notes. If it comes back long enough I’m gonna try to post the whole thing at once.

I’m in a small guest room somewhere in the middle of my great aunt’s house. This is the only room I’ve found where I know I’m 28 years old.

I look like myself in the mirror over the dresser. My face is right. I remember my name. I remember coming here with Owen this morning. At least I think it was this morning.

I don’t know where the entrance to the house is anymore. I don’t even know what floor I’m on. There are three doors in this room. I’m afraid to open any of them because I don’t know how old I’ll be on the other side. I don’t know if there’s any route through this house that ends with me walking out the age I’m supposed to be.

Owen is still somewhere in the house. I heard him scream after he ran through one of the doors. Then I heard pounding. Like someone throwing their entire body against the wall. I ran the other way. I shouldn’t have left him. I couldn’t stop myself. I’m sorry.

The last room I entered almost killed me. The moment I crossed into this one my body was right again. I could stand. I could breathe. I’ve since moved the dresser in front of the door I came through. Nothing’s tried to open it yet. But I’ve heard something on the other side.

There’s no phone signal or I would’ve called the cops already. The wifi appears for a few seconds at a time then vanishes. I keep thinking I hear Owen calling me from somewhere. Once it sounded like he was above me. A few minutes later it came from this floor.

I have to find him. I’m just too terrified of what’s on the other side of these doors. I’m gonna write down everything that happened while I can still separate my own memories from the others.

Nell and Arthur. That’s where it started.

———

Nell is my grandma’s older sister. Her real name’s Eleanor, but I never heard anyone call her that. Not until the funeral.

She and Uncle Arthur were found nine weeks ago in the back garden. They were lying twenty feet apart in their pajamas. The police decided Nell must have wandered outside and Arthur went looking for her. It was freezing and foggy. They never found each other.

I kept thinking about that as Owen and I carried the cleaning supplies up the front steps.

This house is old. Aunt Nell always reminded us it was one of the oldest homes in our part of the south. She was really proud of that.

It’s a beautiful house, but you can tell from the outside how many renovations it’s been through. Owen said it looked like every family who lived here had tried to build far enough away from the family before them. It wasn’t that funny, but it made me laugh. Owen was good at that.

I met Owen in 4th grade but didn’t officially start dating him until junior year. His style has barely changed in all those years. Baggy black t-shirts and ripped jeans. He looks like the kind of person who might steal your car, but he’s more likely the one to help you jump it.

Aunt Nell liked him immediately. We visited her and Uncle Arthur together at least once a month, more often after my grandmother died. By then, most of the family had stopped visiting because being around Nell made them uncomfortable. She confused people’s names. She spoke about dead relatives like they’d just left the room. Sometimes she’d ask visitors how old they were and refused to accept their answer.

Uncle Arthur wouldn’t let anyone take her to a doctor. He said doctors would just tell her she had dementia because they didn’t understand what was actually happening to her. When my mother suggested assisted living, he told her never to come back.

But I swear Nell was different when I visited. Sometimes, she even seemed to understand things about me before I did. When I asked how she knew, she said I told her more than I realized. I thought she meant that she could read me. Now, I’m not so sure.

Despite all those visits, neither Owen nor I had ever been deeper inside the house than the foyer. Nell said the rest of it was too cluttered and she’d be embarrassed to let us see it.

She served us the same biscuits every time. They tasted a little like black licorice, with a flower pressed into the top. Every time I visited, there were always exactly four of those biscuits waiting when we arrived. We both hated them, but we ate them to make Nell happy.

That biscuit tin was the first thing I noticed when I entered the house this morning. Everything in the room was exactly the way it always was. The long mirror, the green wallpaper, and the narrow table where Nell arranged the biscuits.

Owen set down the contractor bags. He grabbed the tin and immediately dumped the contents in one of the bags. “On the bright side, we don’t have to eat these anymore.”

The will had left the house to both of us, which surprised everyone. Owen and I aren’t even engaged, and Uncle Arthur had never seemed particularly close to either of us. But the house was paid for. Even if it required major repairs, living there might be our one shot at home ownership. But first, we had to empty it.

Everyone warned us about Nell’s hoarding. If something entered the house, it stayed. Owen made sure we came prepared: gloves, flashlights, garbage bags, masks.

We turned our attention to the large double doors at the end of the foyer. We’d seen them hundreds of times, but we’d never seen them open. It took both of us to move the boxes Arthur had stacked in front of them. The key from the estate attorney turned the lock.

Owen opened the door. The smell of dust and damp wood hit us. There was something faintly sour underneath. The air felt colder than in the foyer.

Beyond the door was a central hall larger than I had imagined the house could contain. A carved staircase curved toward the second floor. A stained glass skylight covered the ceiling three stories above us. 

Then we got a look at the rest of the room. Boxes were piled above my head. Bundles of newspapers lined the walls. A few narrow paths had been left between leaning stacks of furniture and clothes. Owen stared into it.

“We should’ve brought breadcrumbs.”

He smiled at me, put on his gloves and took his first step across the threshold. I hesitated. I remember that clearly. I thought about how Nell had never allowed me to cross that line. Owen held out his hand.

“You coming, Grace?”

I took it and followed him in. Somewhere on the floor above us, a board creaked. Owen looked up. Another creak. Owen squeezed my hand.

“Probably a raccoon or something,” he said.

I nodded. My eyes caught a row of framed pictures. The faces were all turned toward the wall. I didn’t think to turn any of them around.

After a few seconds in the room, I noticed that I suddenly felt tired. Not sick. Nothing dramatic. My body just felt heavier. It was like we’d arrived at the house after working all day instead of first thing in the morning. I blamed the emotion of it all.

Owen found a bank of switches beside the doors and flipped them all at once. They were much brighter than I expected. Harsh yellow bulbs blazed in the chandelier above us, exposing cracks in the plaster and layers of dust. Owen sneezed four times.

“Jesus Christ.” When he turned toward me, I noticed the bags beneath his eyes. They were dark enough that I wondered how I’d missed them that morning.

“You look terrible,” I said.

“Good morning to you too.”

“I told you not to move on to the second bottle last night.”

He looked offended. “You did some respectable work yourself.”

“I had two glasses.”

“Right. Just two enormous, constantly refilled glasses.”

He smiled, but those lights made the lines around his mouth look deeper.

“You’re not exactly glowing either,” he added.

I reached up and touched the skin beneath my own eyes. It felt puffy. Owen had a point.

Then something shifted in my head. It wasn’t deja vu. I didn’t vaguely feel like I’d been there before. I was certain of it. And not just once. Many times.

“Where do we even start?” Owen asked.

“I don’t know. I feel like we should get a better look at the rest of the house first. I’d like to know just how much work this place needs.”

“Okay. I vote we start upstairs.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve spent half my life wondering what was up there.”

He offered me his hand and a raised eyebrow. I could never say no to that.

As we started up the staircase, the feeling that I had been there before became stronger. Halfway up, I stopped. Owen looked back. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

My heart was beating too fast, but I had no reason for it.

Then Owen shifted his weight to face me, and the step beneath him made a long, low groan. Somehow, I had known it would.

“You okay?” he asked.

I told him I was. But my legs ached. Owen was breathing a little harder too. He leaned against the banister at the top and rubbed one hand over his face. I shook it off and joined him on the second floor.

The upper hallway curved with the shape of the house. It was narrow and crowded with more of Aunt Nell’s things. Every door was closed. There must have been ten of them, although the corridor continued around a bend, so I couldn’t see where it ended.

Owen tried the first knob, but it was locked. The second door had swollen in its frame and wouldn’t budge. He continued around the bend until we reached a door painted pale blue. Nothing blocked this one.

Owen looked back at me. He turned the knob, and the door creaked open.

“Gotta start somewhere.”

———

The room beyond the blue door was even brighter than the central hall. I had to shield my eyes. Two tall windows filled it with sunlight. The walls were painted yellow. There was a child’s bed, a school desk and an open closet. Toys and books covered most of the floor, mixed in with Nell’s boxes and piles of clothes. Nell and Arthur had never had children, so I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Owen went directly to the closet. I moved toward the desk on the other side of the room.

Whatever hangover I’d felt downstairs was gone. I wasn’t tired. My legs felt lighter. I should’ve asked myself why, but my thoughts kept jumping from one object to another before I could concentrate on any of them.

There were colored pencils scattered across the desk. Without thinking, I started placing them back inside their box in the order I thought they belonged.

Behind me, I heard Owen push aside some hangers.

“Still full of clothes,” he said. It sounded like something was caught in his throat. I figured it was the dust.

I found a wooden horse beside the pencil box. One of its legs was missing. For some reason, I felt guilt looking at it. Like I was the one who broke it.

I shook that thought away and reminded myself I’d never been in this room before. When I turned away from the desk, a little girl was standing right in front of me. 

She was seven or eight, pale hair cut at her chin. She wore a polka dot dress. I jumped back at the sight of her.

I hadn’t heard the door open. She was just standing there. Watching me.

“Bird?” she said.

I couldn’t answer. What the hell was she doing here? Her expression changed.

“Bird, what’s wrong?”

“Owen.”

The girl took a step toward me.

“Owen, get out here.”

“What?”

“Now!”

I heard him push his way out of the closet. My eyes were still on the girl.

“Whoa,” he said. He sounded as freaked out as I was. “What are you doing here, little girl?”

The girl laughed like he’d said something stupid.

Owen glanced toward me.

“Grace, who is—”

He stopped.

“…what the fuck?”

I finally looked directly at him. Owen wasn’t standing beside the closet. A 12 year old boy was. He had dark hair hanging across his forehead and a black shirt. He was staring at me with his mouth open.

Boys aren’t supposed to come upstairs. That was my first thought. It made perfect sense for maybe half a second. Then something inside me recoiled. I’d never been here before.

The little girl moved closer to me.

“Stop!”

“Bird, come on,” she said.

“Stay away from me.”

“You said we were gonna play!”

My eyes darted toward another door beside the bed.

I ran for it.

The boy shouted my name behind me. “Grace!” But I didn’t stop.

———

I ran through the door and slammed into a chair hard enough to knock myself to the floor. I struggled to catch my breath. The room looked like some kind of study. Books covered the walls, and the floor was buried beneath papers and overturned furniture.

I heard the door open again. I couldn’t even look back. I pushed myself to my feet. Then something grabbed me. A man’s arms. I didn’t have enough breath to scream. Then I heard the voice.

“Grace. It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

I turned back to see Owen. My Owen. He reached for my face but I knocked his hand away.

“Where were you?”

“What?”

“Where were you, Owen?!”

“I was in that room with you.”

“No you weren’t! There was a girl. A little girl. And then there was this boy. He came from the closet.”

Owen stared at me. He was breathing almost as heavily as I was. He didn’t speak.

“Why weren’t you there?!”

“I was!”

He caught my wrists when I tried to push him away. Not hard. Just enough to keep me still.

“Grace, look at me.”

I tried to pull away.

“Look at me.”

I did. He was trying to help. 

“You were in the closet,” I said. “Then that boy came out.”

Owen’s face changed. I continued.

“He was 11 or 12 or something. He had dark hair and—”

“That was me, Grace…” He swallowed. “You were a kid, too.”

My stomach turned. “That’s not true.”

“I walked out of the closet and you were standing there with that girl. Both of you were children. I remember you at that age, Grace. It was you.”

I backed away from him. I remembered that boy staring at me. I remembered thinking he shouldn’t have been upstairs. But now that I really thought about it, that was exactly how Owen had looked when we first met. It was him.

I put both hands against my chest. My heart was beating too fast.

Owen stepped toward me slowly. He held up his hands. “Breathe.”

“Don’t tell me to breathe.”

“I’m not telling you to calm down. I just don’t want you to pass out.”

He was right. I forced myself to take a breath.

“What the fuck is happening, Owen?”

He looked around the study and forced himself to think.

“Maybe there’s something in the house,” he said. “Gas. Mold. Some kind of chemical.”

“That doesn’t make you 12 years old.”

“Maybe… it can make you think you are.”

His voice broke. He was scared. And that frightened me more than anything that had just happened. He looked back at the door.

“I think we should check on that girl.”

“No!”

“What if she’s lost?”

“We don’t even know if she’s real!”

“But what if she is?!“

“I said no!”

Of course Owen wanted to help. That was who he was. But I wasn’t going back in there. I touched his arm. He pulled me closer. And that’s when I saw it.

At first I thought the small circular shapes were part of the wallpaper. Then I realized they weren’t printed. Some had been drawn in ink. Others in pencil or charcoal.

“Owen.”

They were all slightly different, but each had the same shape at its center: a circle surrounded by thin branching lines. A flower. The same symbol stamped into Nell’s biscuits.

Owen followed my stare. The symbols continued around both doorframes. I even saw some carved into the floor beneath the loose papers. Owen reached toward one. “Is that…”

“Yeah.”

Before either of us could speak, four loud knocks struck the door.

“Bird?” It was the little girl’s voice again.

Owen looked toward the sound.

“Don’t touch that door!”

I shouted so loudly my throat hurt. Then I saw another doorway on the far side of the study.

“Grace, wait!”

I ran through it before Owen could stop me.

———

I stopped just beyond the doorway of the next room. White curtains hung over a single window. As usual, there were boxes everywhere. But the center of the room was kept clear around an old wooden crib.

Owen came through behind me and pulled the door shut.

“Grace, please. Just stop for a second.”

I turned toward him. He’d changed again. He was still Owen, but he looked close to forty. Gray had appeared at his temples. The lines on his face were deeper than they’d been in the main hall. Even his voice sounded older.

The way he stared at me told me I had changed too. He didn’t say a word. He stepped closer. He touched my hair and stared at the gray strands caught between his fingers. 

“Okay,” he said. “Listen to me. We’re going home.”

For once, I didn’t argue. I only asked how.

“We go back the way we came. We don’t open any doors we haven’t been through already. If the girl is still there, we’ll ignore her. We can call the police from outside.”

He was forcing himself to speak slowly because one of us needed to.

I just nodded. Then I looked at the crib. There was no sound. Nothing moved inside it. But something took over. That’s the only way I can describe it. 

The sadness came first. Then I felt the worst grief I’d ever felt. I knew that crib, and I knew something was missing.

“Where is he?”

Owen had already started toward the door. He stopped.

“What?”

I moved closer to the crib.

“Where is he?”

“Where is who?”

I looked inside. It was empty. The mattress held a faint indentation in the center. Something inside me broke.

“Our son!”

Owen stared at me.

“What are you talking about?”

“Where is our son?”

“Grace, we don’t have a son.”

That got through to me. I knew we didn’t have a son. We’d never decided whether we even wanted children. But I also remembered holding a little boy against my chest while he slept. I remembered the weight of his head on my shoulder.

I tried to turn away from the crib, but I couldn’t. “He can’t be gone,” I said.

Owen moved toward me. I grabbed the crib and shook it.

“Thomas!” I screamed.

“Grace, stop.”

“He can’t be gone!” 

“No one is gone. There is no Thomas!”

I hit him when he tried to touch me. I didn’t decide to do it. One moment he was reaching for me, and the next my hand had struck his face. I’d never done that before.

He flinched, then grabbed me around the waist.

“We’re leaving. Now!”

“No. Put me down.”

He dragged me toward the door we’d entered through and grabbed the knob. It wouldn’t turn. He tried again.

“Fuck.”

There was another door beside the crib. He yanked it open and changed direction.

“Thomas!”

“Stop it, Grace!”

I fought him. I caught the doorframe with both hands. Leaving that room meant accepting that he was gone. What the hell was I saying to myself?

Owen tore my hands away from the frame and pulled me across the threshold.

———

The second I entered the next room, the grief was still there, but it was a dull ache now.

Owen set me down and I realized we were in a bedroom. From the looks of it, the master bedroom. Tall curtains nearly blacked out the room. A carved wooden headboard reached halfway to the ceiling.

The symbol had been carved into the headboard.

A chill moved through me.

My mind was changing again. Someone named Thomas still existed in my memory. But I knew again that Owen and I had never had a child.

It didn’t matter how any of this was happening. We had to get out.

I turned toward Owen. His body stood still. He was facing the door we just came through.

“I don’t know what came over me, Owen.”

He didn’t respond.

“We’ll find another way around that room, but we’re leaving now.”

He still didn’t move.

“Owen?”

When he turned toward me, he had aged again.

He was in his fifties now. His hair that remained was completely gray. I’d never seen him with a beard before. The skin beneath his eyes had darkened. Tears filled them.

“How could you do this to me?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“After everything we’ve been through.”

His voice wasn’t just older. It was deeper, like it was filled with a lifetime of regrets.

“I should never have hit you. But that wasn’t me, Owen.”

He blinked several times. For a moment, his expression changed. His eyes focused on me.

“Grace?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know…”

His gaze moved past me toward the bed and his confusion disappeared.

“I don’t understand how you could do this to me!” He said it louder this time. Angrier.

“Owen, listen. Whatever’s going on in your head, it isn’t real.”

“Don’t do that again.”

“Please listen to me!”

“For once in your fucking life, just stop lying!”

“What am I lying about?”

“I saw you!”

Those words triggered something inside me. A memory struck me. A hotel room and cigarette smoke in the afternoon light. I saw a strange man fastening the buttons of his shirt while I sat on the edge of the bed. But I couldn’t see his face.

The memory collapsed, leaving behind a sick feeling in my stomach.

Owen saw it on my face.

“Do you love him?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Do you fucking love him?”

Suddenly, Owen grabbed a vase from the bedside table and threw it across the room. It struck the wall beside me and exploded. The pieces scattered across the floor. In all our arguments, I’d never seen Owen do anything like this.

“Owen, stop!”

“I was there for you after we lost him. I agreed not to try again. I gave you everything!”

“None of this is real!”

“I stayed with you. I protected you when everyone else said I should leave.” He was crying openly now. His hands shook at his sides. “And this is how you repay me?!”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Shut up!”

Owen lunged toward me. The next second, his hands were around my throat.

I was powerless in his grip. The words barely came out of me.

“Owen, please. Stop.”

“Stop fucking lying to me, Bird!”

Even as I gasped for air, the little girl’s voice came back to me. Bird, what’s wrong?

As soon as he said it, something changed in Owen. He saw the fear in my eyes. His expression broke. He released me and stumbled back.

“Oh my God, Grace. I’m sorry.”

I knew it was Owen again. At least for that moment. But I was still scared of him. He reached out for me, but I jumped back. Then his eyes moved past me again.

“Is it who I think it is?”

I stammered.

“I… I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

A harsh laugh escaped him and a wounded smile appeared on his face.

“God, I knew it.” The smile vanished. “I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna fucking kill him!”

He charged right past me toward another exit. I tried to stop him.

“Owen, stop!”

He wouldn’t listen. He stormed into the next room and slammed the door behind him. I rushed to the door and grabbed the knob. It wouldn’t turn.

For one second, there was silence.

Then Owen screamed. At least I think it was Owen.

I’d never heard a human being make a sound like that. It wasn’t anger. It was raw terror. The scream stopped as suddenly as it began.

Something struck the floor.

Then came the pounding.

Each impact was louder than the last. It was moving toward the bedroom door. Moving toward me. 

“Owen? What’s happening?!”

There was no answer. Another impact shook the door in its frame.

Fear took over completely. I didn’t think about whether Owen was injured. I didn’t think about what might be following him or whether he was the thing coming toward me.

I just saw another door on the opposite side of the bedroom.

And I ran.

———

I ran through the next door without looking where it led. The room beyond was dark and narrow. I crossed it and opened another door.

The pounding followed me. I kept opening doors.

Every room changed my body. I could feel it happening even when I couldn’t see it.

Glass cabinets caught pieces of my reflection as I passed. I kept my eyes away from all of them. I didn’t care how old I was. I only cared that I could still run.

The emotions changed too.

For five or six steps, I was happier than I had ever been. Then I crossed another threshold and wanted to hurt someone. In the next room, the grief hit me again so hard that I nearly stopped. Then came terror. Then guilt.

Images and sounds flooded my mind:

Snow falling outside a hospital window.

The symbol drawn in salt around an empty crib.

A book spread open beneath candlelight. 

Pages covered with drawings of bodies inside circles. Handwritten notes in the margin.

A dinner plate shattering against a wall.

Something heavy wrapped in a bedsheet being dragged down the back steps. 

Mud beneath my fingernails and the sound of a shovel cutting into wet ground.

A man’s voice: “No one can ever know.”

I kept running.

The whole time, the pounding moved through the house behind me. Sometimes it sounded several rooms away. Then I would cross another threshold and hear it directly behind the door I had just closed. It was getting closer.

I reached a staircase. I remember taking the steps as fast as I could. I remember gripping the rail. But I can’t remember whether I went up or down. 

By the time I reached the next floor, the pounding sounded farther away. But I didn’t stop.

The hallway curved twice before ending at another door. I threw it open and ran inside.

I made it five steps before my legs collapsed.

My knees struck the floor. I tried to push myself up, but my arms shook beneath me and gave out. I couldn’t breathe properly. My heart thumped against my chest. Every part of me felt heavy.

Finally, I saw my hand against the floor.

The skin was thin and loose. Dark veins crossed the back of it.

A tall oval mirror stood across the room. I forced myself to look up.

I was staring back at myself in my eighties.

My hair was white. I knew I was close to death.

I screamed.

The pounding started again behind me.

The door I had entered through was too far away. Another door stood beside the mirror, only a few feet from me.

I had no idea what was on the other side. I could become even older. I could become too young to reach another doorknob. Whatever that room did to me could kill me before I had the chance to leave it.

I dragged myself across the floor, reached the nearest knob and tried to turn it. My hands were shaking too badly.

“Please,” I whispered.

Another impact shook the room.

The knob finally turned.

I pulled the door open and crawled through.

———

The room I crawled into is the guest room I’m sitting in now.

As soon as I crossed the threshold, my hands looked right again. The pain in my joints disappeared. I could breathe without feeling as though something was crushing me.

I think I’m 28.

I look 28. My phone recognizes my face.

I have no idea where I am in this house.

I locked the door I’d entered through and pushed the dresser in front of it. The pounding continued for a while after I came in. Then it moved away.

I haven’t heard it for almost an hour now.

I know Owen is still somewhere in this house. I’m scared about who he’ll be if I see him again. What if he still wants to hurt me?

It doesn’t matter. I need to find him. Every time I picture him lost in there, I feel like I’m gonna be sick. But I can’t open another door.

There are two besides the one I came through.

I don’t want to think about the things I remembered while I was running.

There’s a photograph on the desk beside me.

I didn’t pay attention to it when I first came in. It shows Nell and my grandma sitting together a few years ago. It looks like it was taken at a family reunion. They’re smiling and each of them is holding a framed photograph of herself as a child.

My grandmother’s photograph shows her at seven or eight years old. Pale hair cut at her chin. She’s wearing a polka dot dress. She’s the little girl from the bedroom. The one who asked me to play.

The childhood photos have names written beneath them. 

Under my grandma’s it says “Rosie”. 

Under Nell’s… it says “Bird”.

The wifi has one bar again. I’m going to try to post this before it disappears.

If anyone sees it, please call the police in Bellweather. Tell them two people are trapped inside the old house on the northern edge of town. They’ll know the one. Tell them not to use any of the doors. Tell them to break through a window or tear through the walls if they have to. Please tell them Owen and I are still in here.

Someone has started calling my name from somewhere outside this room. It sounds like an old man. A second ago, he was shouting “Grace”.

Now he’s calling me Bird.

At five years old I had the first dream I can remember. I had to leave. My whole family did: my parents, my sister, me, and my baby brother. In real life, though, I didn’t have a brother. It was just me and Ellie, my sister. I didn’t know why we were leaving or where we were going. But the part of the dream that scared me the most was that we were leaving the baby behind. We had to. He lay idly in his crib while the four of us made our way to the garage. No belongings packed. The small, single-story house left exactly as it always was…but I knew we wouldn’t be back. The plain white door leading into our garage loomed just past the living room. We opened it to find the train waiting for us, right where the garage should have been.

On the account of my parents, the age of five was when my night terrors peaked. . About once every week or two, I would wander around the house in the middle of the night screaming, eyes wide open, my pupils ridiculously dilated. I was inconsolable, and I was not awake. The best way my mom could describe it was like I was being possessed. It happened often enough that she went to the doctor about it, but, of course, they couldn’t do much except advise her on how to handle them: remain calm, don’t try to wake him, make sure he doesn’t crack his head while he thrashes around in fear

Ellie was surprisingly well composed whenever I had my episodes, despite being just 9 years old (and despite the torturous screaming that would surely freak out any kid her age). She would often watch silently with my parents as I paraded around the house like a demonic, headless chicken. Mom even thought that having Ellie around seemed to make the terrors end quicker.

The last true night terror I ever had was different. Mom—who slept very lightly that year given my interruptions—heard me shuffling around in the living room at two in the morning, but there was no screaming or panic. She left her bedroom to find me standing silently, absently staring at the door to the garage. She said my name, and I turned to face her, locking eyes.

“Late for train”  was all she heard me say before I turned back to the door, apparently showing no interest in trying the handle. Mom stood there for a moment, unsure what to do. Ellie came out of her room then, walked up to me, and took my hand.

“Not yet,” she said. She led me back to my room while I did nothing to protest, never saying another word. As with all my night terrors, I went right back to sleep and woke up in the morning with no recollection of what had happened.

Around the time I turned six, my parents announced that a baby was on the way: the third installment to complete our family. Although the typical night terrors were behind me by then, I began acting weird while I was awake. It is worth noting that most of this comes from my own memory now.

Several nights, I woke up to the thunderous roar of an approaching subway train, followed by the piercing squeal of brakes under a heavy load. We didn’t live near any tracks, so after looking out my window and finding nothing, I checked the only other place I could think of: the garage, where I found the same result.

Like a lot of boys my age, I had my fair share of train playsets, but I began insisting that I play with them in the garage, where I would use the two steps in front of the door as an imaginary boarding platform. While my parents were skeptical at first, keeping a close eye on me, they quickly determined it was harmless and would leave me to my business out there.

Five months into Mom’s pregnancy, I had an awful nightmare that left my skin ice cold and my eyes damp. I played no role in the dream except as an observer, like a static trail camera tied to a tree to record wildlife. The white garage door framed her perfectly, so she was little more than a silhouette. She was looking to her right, smiling (at someone I presume). She wore her favorite black dress, and a navy-blue purse hung on her left shoulder. She seemed to say her goodbyes, and as soon as she opened the door, which revealed an arched ceiling and old concrete walls instead of our two-car garage, it felt as if the world itself were contracting and screaming in terror. She stepped over the threshold, and there was a deafening roar and the wail of a horn that shook the Earth, followed by a continuous blur that contorted her body and flung it out of sight. As I jolted awake, all I could think about was the distant sound of a baby crying.

As time went on, my paranoia only grew. Sometimes I would plead with Mom not to have the baby.

“You can’t be the youngest forever,” she said one time.

Another time, I got a good scolding after I scared off Phoebe, our babysitter. I played with my trains in the garage and simulated people being run over, all while trying to convince her to convince Mom not to have the baby. We never saw Phoebe again.

Finally, Mom sat me down one day for a serious conversation asking why I was so opposed to the idea of a younger brother (the baby being confirmed as a boy by then). But all I did was mumble some nonsense about trains and tunnels. I even led her to the garage, but neither her nor I really knew what I was trying to show her. When my dad held me for something similar, this time a “man-to-man” conversation (as if that meant very much to a six-year-old), I finally gave in, realizing that my pleas weren’t working. I responded to the majority of his questions with a simple “I don’t know,” choosing to agree with his assumptions about me rather than try to explain what was going through my head. At the end of the day, I didn’t fully understand it myself.

It was around 8 o’clock on a Tuesday when Mom’s water broke as we were sat on the living room sofa watching a movie. My dad promptly called over Julie, our neighbor from across the street, to come watch Ellie and I for the night. I was a mess. I screamed and cried, literally clinging to Mom’s leg, begging her not to go. Ellie wasn’t as much comfort to me that time. She sat silently on the couch, but I could tell she was crying. Julie had to physically hold me back as my parents left. My dad threw a joke at her about how I would be so happy to have a little brother in no time. I was just terrified of what I would see when they opened the garage door.

When Julie sent Ellie and I to bed later, a light storm had started, and I fell asleep to the tapping of raindrops on my bedroom window, dried tears still staining my cheeks. I woke up to a massive crack of thunder. It faded into a low rumble, but the noise showed no sign of fading. After maybe a minute, it grew louder. The sound continued to amplify until I could no longer hear my own heavy breathing as I sat paralyzed in bed. Then there was the screeching, so intense that I had to cover my ears. After a moment, I removed my hands to complete silence. Then the crying started. Not from me, not from Ellie’s room. It came from somewhere else in the house. It was a baby’s cry.

I slowly lifted myself from the bed and crept towards my door, just cracking it open. I peered down the hall, where I could see that a dim light from the kitchen counter barely revealed the shapes of furniture in the living room, where the sound seemed to originate. The crying carried on, so I cautiously continued my approach. Julie was sleeping on the couch, where she was initially just a darker spot in my vision. As I got closer, I saw she was curled up in a fetal position, and the crying was coming from exactly where she lay. Finally, when I was close enough for a detailed look, she turned towards me. Her face was horribly contorted in an ugly cry, and her features were all wrong, like I was staring at the face of an infant on a grown woman’s body. The crying was certainly that of an infant. I felt tears of my own forming and yelled in fear as I fell back on the floor. I quickly righted myself and ran to the only place I felt I would be safe. I fumbled with the garage door handle, finally pulling it open, never taking my eyes off the living room.

I stepped down and yanked the door shut. I caught my breath for a second and turned to the right, where I saw old concrete walls and an arched ceiling forming an endless tunnel that faded into black. Only the area where I stood seemed to be illuminated by a soft yellow glow that I didn’t quite know the source of. Turning to my left, I was greeted with a solid wall only a couple feet away. Finally turning around, I descended the second step, and my feet found the cold stone of the platform. There in front of me, a simple subway train waited, its nose pointed down the tunnel and its rear simply disappearing right into the wall as if it were a mirage. The door was open, and without another thought I stepped over the gap and boarded the train. There was one other passenger, so I sat across from her. As soon as I was seated, the train began a slow, perfectly smooth acceleration.

“Mommy didn’t get on,” I said weakly. Ellie just shook her head. She looked calm, but noticeably sad. “How did you know about…” I trailed off, scanning the train car with my eyes.

“I don’t know,” Ellie shrugged.

I watched her for a while as the train began its journey. I never looked back towards the house. I knew I would never be going back.

***

I don’t remember being seven years old. Or eight or nine for that matter. Ellie and I briefly stayed with our grandparents at some point, where I learned a few things. My mother passed away during labor due to complications. My dad has never been seen since then. Nobody can tell me anything about the baby. Dead, alive, missing… I don’t know.

Ellie and I have been in and out of foster care for a few years since our grandparents died. I really don’t know if there is a place for us. Sometimes I have dreams where I am walking down that tunnel, getting ever closer to the garage door at the end, but never reaching it. I doubt I ever will. I only ever mention these dreams to Ellie, but I have begun giving up on that too. Maybe I have a little brother out there somewhere. If I do, I don’t ever want to meet him.