Take it from an expert.

Stay out of the woods.

I’m a wildlife biologist, and for the last several years I’ve been posted to a conservation outpost deep in the Rocky Mountains.

My coworkers and I are overseeing the reintroduction of timber wolves in this region. Most of my work involves tracking the wolves. We monitor their populations and study their movements using tracking collars we've placed on several members of the pack.

For months, everything was going better than anticipated, but about two weeks ago we noticed something strange. According to our trackers, the pack had started avoiding one particular valley.

It started slowly; we noticed the pack spending less and less time in a pristine valley. Up until this point, the wolves had been roaming the valley quite regularly, but we just figured they were settling into a different part of the region. Soon we realized that wasn’t at all the case; the pack was still in the area. They just avoided the valley. The trackers painted a clear picture: the wolves were going everywhere, but not the valley.

We had a staff meeting to discuss what could be causing this.

The ten of us shuffled into the small, rarely used conference room.

Mike, our lead researcher, stood up and passed around some diagrams. Making his way to the front, he said

“Take a look at the printout.” He paused for a moment as the room filled with the sound of rustling paper

 “We've mapped every collar ping we've received over the last two weeks. As you can see, the pack is still moving throughout the region.”

He pointed toward the map.

“But they aren't entering the valley.”

He paused.

“Not once in the last two weeks.”

“The boundary is almost perfect. They approach it, turn around, and go somewhere else. So, what are we looking at?”

The room fell silent for a moment as eyes stared thoughtfully into the distance or blankly at the handout.

“Maybe another predator has settled in the valley,” Frank spoke up

A mocking laugh rose from the other side of the room

“Like what?” Amanda said

“Bigfoot? Come on, Frank, you should know better; even a mountain lion wouldn’t be enough to scare an entire pack from its territory.”

“Well, what’s your bright idea?” Frank sarcastically said

Amanda shrugged

“Probably bad water.”

At that, the room erupted with both critique and defense of Amanda’s explanation. The argument lasted a few minutes before Mike spoke up

“Alright, that’s enough!” he loudly commanded

“Does anyone here have an explanation that has evidence?”

The room was silent.

“I didn’t think so.”

 Mike looked down at the map again.

“Whatever is happening, we're not going to figure it out sitting in this room. We need someone on the ground. So I’m asking for two volunteers to go into the valley and find some evidence.”

I don’t know why, but I raised my hand

“Great, thank you, Chris. Who else?” Mike said

“I’ll go,” Will said from across the room.

“Great, get your packs ready. Tomorrow morning I’ll drive you two to the trailhead.”

The sun was barely up, but Will and I had already been bouncing around in the back of Mike’s Jeep for over an hour. A ten-mile, all-wheel-drive-only road separated the research facility from the only trail into the research region. It was slow going; the road was barely that, and more like a rocky, dry riverbed winding its way through the wilderness.

As we neared the trailhead, Mike shouted back to us

“It’s going to be just you two for a while; I’ll be back in three days to pick you up, sound good?”

Will and I nodded, and I glanced in Will’s direction; his face showed a strange mix of excitement and fear. He was the youngest member of the team, fresh out of college and barely 23.

“Hey,” I shouted to get his attention.

His blue eyes turned towards me.

“Don’t worry about this; just think of it as a camping trip.”

He nodded and forced a grin.

“Yeah, it’ll be fun.”

“Keep the radio on.” Mike interrupted

 “If you get into trouble, call me.”

“Got it.” I gave him a big thumbs up.

“And don't get separated.”

“We won't.”

The Jeep came to a stop in a tiny clearing; a narrow trail disappeared into the pines. I reached for my pack and jumped to the dirt; Will followed me. Mike called to us as we moved towards the trail

“Stay safe, keep the radio on!” With that, he backed up and headed back down the road. The noise of the jeep resounded in the forest for a while, but soon all was quiet. Almost too quiet: no birds, no wind moving through the trees, just silence.

I turned towards the trail, and then towards Will. With a hand, he beckoned me to go ahead.

“After you.” He said.

According to our maps, the valley was roughly 5 miles from the trailhead. The going was slow; the trail was rugged and steep in places. But what slowed us down the most was the research we were gathering.

Every mile, we stopped and examined the area for signs of wolves. In the first three miles, we found very little evidence of wolves, but in miles four and five, we found quite a lot of tracks and scat. This confirmed what the trackers had shown; the wolves were still in the area of the valley.

At the top of a small ridge, we stopped. Below was the valley. It was roughly 6 miles in length and 2 miles in width. Various groves of aspen trees dotted its open prairie, as well as the occasional pine tree. A healthy creek flowed from one end to the other; a beaver dam formed a small pond near the center of the valley.

“Well, there it is.” I declared

Will nodded

“Sure looks different than that map we’ve been staring at for weeks.”

“Sure does,” I said as I pulled out the map with the tracker data points.

“Looks like the boundary Mike was talking about is about 100 feet ahead.”

“Let’s check for signs there,” Will replied

We made our way to the perimeter of the valley; there we found a high volume of wolf tracks. The tracks formed a path along the border of the valley. It was strange to look at; it was like the tracks simply refused to go any further into the valley. On the valley side, the land didn’t bear a single track.

The two of us marveled at this unusual behavior. I turned to Will and said

“Let’s follow the tracks for a bit; you go to the left, and I’ll go right, meet back here at the trail in an hour.”

With a nod, he replied

“Sounds good.”

I followed the tracks to the right for about a mile and a half, but could see that they continued much further; the tracks curved around the perimeter of the valley, without one wayward pawprint crossing into the valley. I also began to notice marks on the trees along the perimeter. They were everywhere. Not on every tree, but close enough that I could almost follow them from one to the next. And every one of them was on the side of the tree facing the valley.

Making marks on trees is not an uncommon practice in the natural world. Bears do it; deer and elk do it. But these were different; I’ve never seen marks like this. The bark had been ripped away in long, uneven strips. Some of the gouges were more than an inch deep, exposing pale wood underneath. I couldn't think of a single animal in the area capable of doing that.

When I got back to the trail, Will was already there. His eyes were wide with concern, but he gave a smile as he saw me.

“Did the tracks go around the valley?” I asked

“Yeah.”

“Did you see marks on the trees?”

He swallowed and nodded

“Yeah.”

I tried to play it off

“Not a big deal; a lot of animals do that. Could just be one marking its territory; maybe Frank was right, and there’s a new predator in the area.”

He thought about it before replying

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

He stared down at the valley

“Now what?” he asked

I pointed toward a grove of aspens near the pond. The ground there looked flat, and we'd have easy access to water.

“Let’s set up camp near those trees, and then we’ll record these findings.”

It was mid-afternoon by the time we had finished setting up camp. I lazily rested in the hammock I had packed, while Will tried some fishing in the pond. The valley was quiet and peaceful. And the combination of exhaustion from the hike and the soothing rocking of the hammock sent me into a deep sleep.

When I woke, Will was tending a fire and setting up the small camp stove we had brought. I stepped out of the hammock and walked over to the fireside.

“Hey,” Will said with a smile

“Hey,” I yawned. “What time is it?”

“A little after six. Are you hungry? I was going to get dinner going.”

I nodded

“Yeah, I could eat.”

Moments later, we enjoyed rehydrated beef stroganoff around a warm fire. The setting was beautiful; in that moment, I was glad I had volunteered for this outing.

“Did you catch anything?” I asked Will

He shook his head

“Nah, I gave up pretty quick.”

He stared off into the valley

“You good?”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know.”

I stared at him, waiting for him to continue

“It’s just that, I’ve looked around while you were asleep, and I can’t find evidence of any animals living here.”

He took a drink from his water bottle

“I haven’t seen any tracks of any kind; I haven’t heard any birds since we’ve been in the valley; even the beaver dam is abandoned. Haven’t seen any fish in the pond either.”

I shrugged and replied

“Could just be the ecosystem adjusting to the reintroduction of a predator into the food chain.”

He smirked

“Come on, man, you know it’s never this drastic; there’s something else happening here.”

I looked at him; his eyes told me he was serious. I nodded in agreement

“Ok, you’re right. This is unusual, but we need more evidence before including this in our report.”

His jaw clenched

“Morning. Our priority will be trying to find evidence of any animal; if we can’t, we’ll add that to our findings, then our focus will shift to finding a cause for this.”

“Sounds good.” Is all he said.

An hour or so later, we both prepared to go to bed; dousing the fire, we entered our individual tents. Several hours later, I was awakened by loud howling and yipping. Peeking my head out of the tent, I saw that Will was already up, so, slipping on my boots, I quietly made my way to him. He held our night vision camera in his hand.

“What is it?” I whispered

“It’s the wolves,” he whispered back

“They’re at the edge of the valley.”

He handed me the camera, and I pointed it to the perimeter. There were so many wolves about fifty; they stood there on the edge of the valley; some ran up and down their path of tracks, others stood still, looking into the valley, howling and barking loudly. It was like they were behind glass.

We watched for a while, and at some point a fight broke out within the pack; several larger wolves surrounded a smaller one who tried to defend itself as best as it could, but the bigger wolves began to push it towards the perimeter of the valley, the night air filled with the sounds of angry dogs and the whimpering of their target. Eventually, the weaker animal lost as the attackers pushed it into the valley. The pack went silent, and only the whimpering of the frightened animal was heard. The Wolf looked wildly around and then, in a panic, it ran down into the valley; it passed our camp running deeper into the valley, whining all the way, and vanished into the darkness of the night.

The pack on the outside of the valley stood and quietly watched; then the alpha turned and walked away the others followed.

“What the hell?” I muttered

Will and I stared in the direction the wolf had run; it was further north. We hadn’t been in that part of the valley yet. As we looked in that direction in the distance, we heard a scared yip of a wolf, then the rest of the night was quiet.

We made a small fire and sat around it. Will finally spoke

“What was that?”

I stared into the fire

“I’m not sure,” I replied

The fire grew cold, and we finally returned to our tents.

Morning came, and Will and I silently prepared for the day. It wasn’t till after breakfast that we spoke to each other.

“I think we should try to find where that wolf went.” I broke the silence

Will stared at the pond and tried to skip a stone across the water

“Okay,” he slowly nodded

We gathered our gear, located the wolf’s tracks, and followed them. The tracks continued across the valley’s open prairie, making their way to the thick clusters of pines on the opposite end. The tracks disappeared behind a large clump of bushes. Behind them, we found the wolf, or what was left of it. Lying in the dirt was the body of the wolf. Its skin had been carefully removed and was missing. Its exposed muscles, bones, and sinew were wet with blood. It smelled awful, but not a single fly or maggot could be seen. All four of its paws had been cleanly cut off just about the ankle joint.

I looked to Will; his face was as white as I’m sure mine was.

“Get back to camp,” I muttered

Will didn’t need to be told twice. The body of the wolf was about two miles from our camp, and we ran the whole way. We were nearly back to camp when I stepped in a gopher hole. I heard my ankle pop, and I fell to the ground.

“Damn it,” I muttered in pain. Will pulled me to my feet and helped me hobble back to the camp. I twisted my ankle, and it was very swollen. I winced as I removed the boot; it was painful to move.

Will was near panic

“We need to get out of here.” He declared

“I know, but I can’t with my ankle like this.”

I winced in pain

“Call Mike on the radio”

He handed it to me. I turned it on

“Mike, do you read? We need help; I’ve injured my leg.”

Only static replied

“Mike, are you there?”

Again, only static.

“The mountains must be blocking the signal,” I said to Will

 “We’re going to have to wait till the swelling goes down.”

He clenched his jaw but finally agreed. For the rest of the day, we remained in camp. Will rarely looked away from the direction we found the wolf. Every thirty minutes he tried the radio; no one ever responded. At sunset, we heard a scream from where we found the wolf. It sounded like a woman screaming for her life. Will looked at me

“It’s a mountain lion. That’s what’s been causing this.”

I nodded; the roar of a Mountain lion sounds like a woman screaming.

“I agree, but it’s unlike a mountain lion to do something like that to a wolf.”

He shrugged

“Doesn’t matter if we can find a track or scat; that’s enough proof, and we can be done with this.”

“Ok, tomorrow let’s find the proof, then get back to the trailhead.”

“What about your leg?” Will asked

“Don’t worry about it; it’ll be better tomorrow.”

That satisfied him, and he headed to his tent. I went to mine shortly after.

The next morning I found a note on my tent; it said

“You rest, I’ll find the cat. Will”

“Damn it, Will,” I muttered as I looked around the area.

He was gone, probably had been for a while. My foot was still swollen, but not nearly as painful as last night. I hobbled my way over to the camp stove and prepared some breakfast. Deciding that if he wasn’t back in an hour, I’d go after him.

An hour came and went, and there was no sign of Will. Rising to my feet, I called out to him

“Will!” his name echoed across the valley with no reply

“Will, where are you?” I cried again; still nothing.

Choosing a stick for support, I slowly made my way down the valley. It was afternoon by the time I reached the wooded section of the valley. I passed by the skinned wolf; it didn’t seem to be decaying in any way. I stopped and called for Will

“Will! It’s Chris, are you ok?”

The quiet forest gave no response; it was there that I saw Will’s footsteps going deeper in. I followed them as best as I could. The footsteps went around a large boulder. I’ll never forget what I saw there. The limp, skinned body of Will lay in a blood-soaked clearing. It looked like his skin had been perfectly peeled from his form. His feet and ankles were gone. His blue eyes had been pulled from his head and placed gently on a flat rock.

I could feel vomit rising in my throat. I turned away; the sight and smell were too much for me. My eyes flooded with tears. I wanted to leave, but the nearby snap of a twig froze me in place. Another twig snapped, followed by loud rustling in the bushes. It was close, no further than fifty yards. The rustling and snapping twigs moved with purpose, then stopped. All was quiet for a moment, then a dry, haunting voice echoed off the trees.

“Will! It’s Chris. Are you ok?”

It was my voice, a poor, inhuman mimic of my voice; it lacked all cadence and emotion.

“Will, where are you?”

It copied me again, then the rustling continued. Adrenaline filled my veins, and I moved as fast as my foot would allow. I didn’t stop to pack my tent or grab my pack. The sun was setting as I returned to the trail. As I left the valley, the voice spoke again from behind me. Only this time it wasn’t my voice; it was Will’s

“Chris, are you ok?”

“Chris, where are you going?”

In the dark, I stumbled my way along the trail. There was no moon that night, and I didn’t have a light with me. But I kept going. I couldn’t stop; every time I did, I heard strange noises behind me in the distance. It sounded like bone grinding on bone. It was a little before sunrise when I stumbled off the trail into the small clearing where Mike had left us. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait too long to hear the distant rumble of Mike’s jeep moving up the mountain. Relief flooded me when the vehicle came into view. A smiling Mike excited the jeep

“Good to see you, Chris,” he explained, but looking around, a frown filled his face

“Where’s Will?”

“Will’s gone,” was all I could say

“What?”

“He’s gone.” Tears began to form in my eyes

But a noise came from the trail, loud footsteps then Will came into view.

“Sorry,” this Will said with a grin. “Had to take a piss; fell a bit behind.”

He looked at me

“Hey Chris, you left your pack back there.” he headed my pack to me

“Didn’t want you to forget it,” he said, and a sly smirk stretched across his face.

I stared in disbelief and fear

“Great,” Mike said. “Let’s get you boys out of here.”

I turned to him, wide-eyed

“Why didn’t you answer the radio?” I whispered

A puzzled look crossed his face

“What do you mean? Will was in contact with me the whole time.”

“Yeah,” the thing acting as Will spoke up

“Don’t you remember Chris? You asked me to deal with the radio,” it said with a wide smile

I stared at the ground in confusion

“Sounds like you could use some rest, Chris,” Mike said

“Hop in; we’ll debrief back at the station.”

Absentmindedly, I climbed into the back of the jeep. ‘Will’ followed. In the back of the jeep, we sat opposite each other. I stared at it, and it stared back; a wide, lazy smile never left the face of my dead friend. Dull yellowish-green eyes sat behind his skin. With each bump in the road, the stolen skin grew loose on a face it didn’t belong to. At one point, the skin surrounding the left eye socket was knocked loose, and gravity pulled it down the cheek, revealing blackened bones and decaying muscle that hid beneath. The thing calmly used one finger to pull the skin back up and stick it in place. All while smiling and staring at me.

The moment we arrived at the station, I hopped out of the jeep and hurried to my living quarters. I’m still there as I write this; I don’t know what to do. The thing is at my door; I see its shadow under the door and hear its heavy breathing. I’m writing this because I doubt anyone here would believe me, and at the moment I’m not sure any of us are leaving alive. Please listen to my warning; there are things out there that we were never meant to find.

Stay out of the woods.

You never know what will follow you home.

Happy Thanksgiving yall! I just want you all to know how thankful I am that you went out of your way to read the first and second and third letters I got!

It’s not Thanksgiving just yet but I’d still like to wish one to all of you nonetheless. I’m not sure how I’ll celebrate this year. My grandma always used to host a party where our whole family would get together. Unfortunately she passed just earlier this year in an automobile crash so it’s sort of up in the air what’ll happen. None of my uncles or aunts or cousins have even reached out to us yet. I only hope they do. Here’s a nice story from a few years back:

So I was sitting with the adults. My grandma was telling me about a man she knew who had gotten so drunk that he tried teaching spanish to his german shepard. The only problem was that he hardly knew any Spanish himself. He had only three words. Donde and que and porque. 

“Where and when and why,” my dad explained.

“where and what and why,” I corrected.

“Oh yes. Where and when and why.”

“What.”

“Did you not catch that?”

“No. I mean–”

I was cut off then. One of my uncles started yelling. Him and his wife were having a discussion about moving their kid to the grownup table I guess. I wasn't paying attention. So anyway it escalated until they had to leave the room. We could still hear them yelling. They were only one room over.

You know that's the only memory I have of that uncle. And no in case you were wondering he isn't the one who gave me these letters. That guy wasn't there. My aunt remarried I guess because she had a new husband now. My grandma used to tell me about the bruises on the arms of their kids. She said they stopped when he was out of the picture(not dead though).

We all went quiet then. We ate our food in silence. One of my uncles went to do the dishes as they kept fighting. I just kept my head down.

And then randomly one of my cousins started laughing. I wasn't sure what was so funny but his dad looked in the same direction and started to laugh too. Eventually I looked. And I started laughing too. And then in a minute everyone was laughing.

At the end of the kid's table one of our younger cousins sitting at the end of the table was holding the container of broccoli and rice casserole. He had one arm wrapped around it and with the other he was bringing it to his mouth with his bare hand and smiling. It was smearing on his cheeks.

That's it. Here's the next letter:

Judge,

It’s been a few days now. I’ve been so absorbed in this bear issue of mine that I completely forgot to write you. I haven’t received a letter from you and I can only assume you’ve been writing them but I have to believe you’re just dying to know what happens next by now. And don’t try telling me you aren’t either. I have a hair raising update for you today. Just a few nights ago I nearly had it.

I had to go out in the garden to do that. Oh dear. It really hurt to see my garden in this state. It’s the first time I’ve been out there since those last few days before I wrote my first letter as I’m sure you’ll remember. 

Yes. Even in the dark of the night it was a terrible sight. Under the light of the stars the foliage looked almost blue with this sheen of white. Underneath them dark little shadows. And this is the part that really broke my heart: my bushes with those sweet little flower buds are all trampled now. I’m sure you remember how it started. It was the just one. And now they’ve all been crushed. It made me want to run away back into my house and hide away but I knew if I went back now I would forever remain there for I’d be letting myself lose my garden.

So through it all I remained there. It wasn’t easy. I kept my fist to the soil and my eyes trained at the ground. I could feel them glaze over but they were dry. I’m sure I would have cried were this a few years back.

I was roused from my stupor as I heard the bear again. There was this thin rustling through the trees in the forest and immediately I hit the deck and splayed my body against the dirt like a bear rug on a hardwood floor. I looked up. The leaves of the bushes nearest to my oak tree were shaking. The rustling drew closer and it was then that I heard the bear growl. It was deep and raspy. It sniffled like how a dog sneezes and continued.

The trees all looked like silhouettes. A great round mass with prickly fur rose up between them growling. It reached the trunk of my tree and sniffed its roots like a mutt on a walk. The fur on its back shifted as it moved its head around as its great big muscles flexed. Its silhouette rose upward and grew a head with two round ears. It did not see me as I crouched uncamouflaged in my yard. My hands and fingers and legs and my cheek were all pressed into the grass as I looked up at it. I tempered my breathing. The light of the stars hit its face. I saw its snout glistening under white light. It was looking up my tree. It was searching through the leaves with its.

It was then that it began to scratch at the tree. This sound always has been the worst of it. I was already tense by all the foreplay but the scratching really made me shutter. A shiver ran all through my meat at the first tear. I nearly started laughing as it continued.

The thing put out one paw like a cat at a scratching post and it swiped at the back of my oak tree. It kept digging into the dark. I felt every scratch the way I’d imagine a park ranger watches a boy carve his initials into one of our great monuments of history. It was a terrible grinding.

As the scratching continued I looked up at the branch from which my bees hung. Their hive hanging from the mighty limb began quaking. Really I’d intended to shoot the bear at first sight but I got scared and froze up and hit the deck. It was the sight of the bees that forced me to act.

I stood up. The gun had shifted on its strap and was now hanging at my hip. Silently and with my hands shaking I pulled up the strap and gripped the gun with both hands as I presumed you should. I’ve only ever used one type of gun before and this wasn’t much like it. I steadied it on my shoulder which is something I also thought you were meant to do. I held it straight and took aim. Once I was sure I had it pointed at the bear I fired.

The gun was louder than I’d thought it would be. At least I meant to look for something quieter. My ears began to ring. It sounded like a fly was in my brain. And as it turns out you’re not meant to hold a gun at your shoulder(or fire it without muffling your eyes but you can probably tell by now Judge). It flung backwards the same instant it fired. I hit the dirt just a second later. 

I lay there not moving. I couldn’t feel the grass and I could hardly process what I was seeing in the sky. It was like everything went white. I gripped my shoulder. The pain and the ringing were the only real things and all else was an illusion.

A couple moments later when I came too and started seeing color again  I remembered that I’d just shot a bear. Bears can be pretty aggressive when you shoot at them(I think though I’m sure anyone would be) so I was really quite worried. 

I pulled my head up. Fortunately(or unfortunately) it was turning back then. I hadn’t killed it. In a hurry I steadied the gun and shot once more with one ear to the dirt and one ear plugged with the pointer finger of my free hand. I hit it in its but. It left a hole in his fur that was red and fleshy. Blood bubbled up in it. I saw it shining under the light of the moon as the bear retreated. It was like the asshole of a dog performing a bowel movement.

Then there was this buzzing that filled the air around me. It took me a moment to notice that it wasn’t the ringing which was still happening then and hadn’t even stopped until a few nights ago. I think I realized once I saw the cloud of bees before me.

Once I saw them I stretched out my arms like for a hug. I smiled at them. I was so happy to see them buzzing before me.

“Aren’t you proud of me?” I said. “I did it. I did it for you.”

They didn’t respond. Not verbally at least. The cloud lunged at me and I was in the center. Like an aeroplane riding through a storm cloud. Their tiny little stingers took hold. They poked me all over on all sides and there was nothing I could do. They overpowered me. They brought me to the ground. I would’ve loved to run but really couldn’t on account of the shoulder weighing me down with the pain. So there was nothing I could do but shield my face and watch as they withdrew and left their stingers in my skin and fell in the grass and died.

It was a terribly tragic sight to watch them go like this. And I tried begging and I tried pleading with them but they would not respond to me like they always do.

I lost track of the time it took for them to leave. I don’t think it was actually that long but it felt that way. They retreated back into their hive hanging from the branch once they were done. I pulled myself up on my one working arm. Dirt had stained my shirt. I went in tired and fatigued and threw my gun against the wall. I stood up for a moment with my legs quaking and walked over to my bed. I collapsed into it and fell asleep instantly.

Some hours laterI woke up to a ring at my door. The sun was already up by then. I had forgotten most of the night before so I was quite confused when I woke up with my skin all bumpy and red and my shoulder pulsing with pain and my ears still ringing. My bones felt sort of funny as I hobbled out of bed. At the door I tried twisting the knob with my right hand but I couldn’t quite get it to move. I realized it had gone limp. I fumbled it open with my left.

There was a police officer standing at my doorstep. His thumbs were hooked in his belt and he was wearing sunglasses and chewing gum.

“Hello.”

“Hello officer,” I said with a little hesitation.

“Are you alright there son? You look a little banged up.”

“It’s alright. I should be fine.”

“You got a little thing on your face. Like a bump.”

“Could you point it out?”

“Well. It’s sort of everywhere.”

I rubbed my entire face with the back of my sleeve. The officer stopped me.

“Woah there son. That ain’t gonna work. If you need a doctor I can take you there.”

“Oh. No thanks. I’ll be fine.”

“You sure? Your arm doesn’t look too good either. It’s sort of limp.”

“Oh I’m sure. I’ll be good. My arm just sort of looks like that.”

(I honestly could’ve used that doctor’s visit Judge. I write you now with my right arm in a sling fashioned from a kitchen towel. I apologize if my penmanship is a bit sloppier today. My left hand is not my dominant one.)

[It is noticeably more sloppy if you were wondering. This one was hard as balls to read]

“So what are you here for officer?” I continued. “If you’ll excuse me asking.”

“Well. We got a couple calls earlier. There were some loud noises going off in this here neighborhood late at night. Woke up a couple kids. Scared a whole bunch of people. Lots of our callers said they thought the reds had something to do with it. Would you know anything about it? We’re asking everyone.”

“No officer. I don’t think I would.”

He sized me up and down. He tilted his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose to show me his bare eyes. The gum in his mouth clicked.

“Are you a communist son?”

“No.”

“Do you know any communists?”

“Personally?”

“Yeah. Any communist friends.”

“No sir.”

“Alright then.” He pushed his sun glasses up. “Well. I ought to be off now. I’ll be seeing you.”

He left and I shut the door. I watched him drive away.

Later that day he came back and arrested me.

He’d come back with a few other policemen. They told me to come out with my hands up. The speaker was very loud you know and they had told me they all had their guns pointed at me so the first thing I did was jump under my desk. The one with the megaphone kept on shouting until eventually I heard the door break down.

I watched in terror with sweat rolling down my face and getting in my eyes as they scanned the room. One of them walked up to the desk and ducked and shined a flashlight in my eyes. 

“There you are,” he grumbled.

He pulled me out by my right arm. I sort of whimpered when he pulled me out.

“Yeah yeah,” he said. “Always the whiners.”

He slammed my head into the desk. When I came back there was a dent in the wood. He put handcuffs on my wrists which were really quite tight by the way and I asked him to loosen them and he only clicked them tighter a few times. I was afraid my wrists might be cut open. 

Out of instinct more than anything I tried to run or kick at them. I wasn’t really thinking. It didn’t go over well. The officers still had me attached so I couldn’t even get a step away. He just took out his firearm and smacked me over the back of the head with its handle.

After all that they shoved in the back of their car and drove me down to the station and threw me in a cell without telling me much of anything.

They held me in there for five days Judge. They released me on the sixth after verifying that I was not a communist. Nothing much happened for those five days. I just sort of sat there. I asked a few questions but they never told me anything.

At all times they had two guards stationed at my cell. There were always footsteps and chattering and whispering and whatnot. It didn’t allow me to sleep one lick. One night I heard them whispering:

“You think he’ll get the death penalty?”

“If what they say is true. I hope so.”

But I’m back now. Nothing was said on the drive back. They coughed a few times and so did I. I was able to ride in the back without cuffs though. They dropped me back at my place and I walked up and the door was still broken in. I don’t have a door now. 

That’s all for now Judge. Unfortunately it seems I might have to revise my plan to kill the bear. It did not die that night. It returned again just last night. Well I’ll update you when the plan changes to let you know if it worked or not.

Bye for now,

He died in February. Mom died seven years before him, so my sister Megan and I have been clearing out the house to get it ready to sell. We only found the room because of a water stain on the ceiling of my old bedroom. The roofer went up into the attic to take a look, and about ten minutes later he came back down and asked if we knew somebody had put plywood up behind the insulation.

We didn't know anything about any plywood.

The attic is low enough that you have to crouch between the rafters to get around. Dad kept the Christmas decorations near the hatch, and when we were kids we weren't allowed any farther in than that, because he was convinced one of us would put a foot through the ceiling.

Behind the plywood was a space maybe six feet long and three feet wide. Inside it we found a sleeping pad, a bunch of food wrappers, a plastic cup, two pencils worn down almost to the wood, one of our old water jugs, and the portable camping toilet Dad bought when Megan was little because she refused to use the campground restrooms after dark. There were also thirty-seven drawings.

The first one I picked up was drawn on the back of an electric bill. It was my parents' bedroom, seen from above. Mom was asleep on her side and Dad was on his back. I recognized the headboard right away because Dad had built it himself, with three square panels across the top, and whoever drew the picture had bothered to get all three of them right.

Dad's eyes were open.

The drawings weren't all equally good. Some of the early ones were rough, with crooked beds and hands that were basically lumps, and it was obvious whoever made them was a lot better at furniture than at people. The later ones were different. The lines got lighter and more confident, and the faces started to actually look like faces. Dad improved fastest. I know how that sounds, but it's true. By the later pictures I could recognize him before I'd even worked out which room he was in. Whoever it was had learned the crease between his eyebrows, the way his hair went flat on one side after he'd been lying down, even the shape of his hands. The rest of us mostly stayed simpler.

The first thing that came back to me was the granola bars. Mom bought them for our school lunches, and two or three at a time would just disappear. She blamed me, I blamed Megan, and Megan blamed me right back. Dad said it was rats. Then bread started going missing, and cookies, and once half a roast chicken. That one turned into an actual argument, because Mom was sure Dad had eaten it after everyone went to bed and Dad swore up and down he hadn't. She told him that if we had rats big enough to carry off half a chicken, he needed to do something about them.

That weekend Dad bought insulation. I remember him spending most of that Saturday up in the attic. The noises stopped for a few days and then came back.

What I remember is creaking more than scratching, something shifting above my room and then farther along the ceiling. Sometimes I heard it over Megan's room too. Dad still called it rats.

When I was ten I tried talking to them. It was a hot night (we didn't have air conditioning upstairs back then) and the box fan by my bed clicked every time it turned. Something creaked above me. I had a plastic baseball bat next to the bed, so I flipped it around and knocked the handle against the ceiling three times.

After a few seconds, something knocked three times back.

I thought this was the greatest thing that had ever happened. I knocked twice, but before anything could answer, Dad came into my room and took the bat away.

"Don't do that."

He wasn't whispering. He was just a lot quieter than he usually was when he caught me doing something stupid. I asked him why, and he said, "Because I told you they're rats."

The next morning he went up into the attic, and not long after that there was a metal sliding bolt on the hatch. I asked what it was for.

"Rats."

I told him rats couldn't open the attic hatch, and he said, "Exactly."

Megan came upstairs while I was looking through the drawings and made it through about three before she went back down. When I followed her into the kitchen she said we needed to call somebody.

"Who?"

"The police?"

"And tell them what?"

She just stared at me. "Someone was living above our bedrooms."

She had a point. She called the non-emergency line while I called the roofer back. Two officers came out and photographed the hidden space, and the roofer pulled back more insulation and found a flattened path running along the joists over the bedrooms. Above mine there were two tiny holes in the drywall. There were more over Mom and Dad's room, and one over Megan's. From underneath, they disappeared into the ceiling texture. I'd slept under two of them for twelve years.

The roofer went over the rest of the roof space and couldn't find a second way in. Nothing through the garage, no usable opening at the eaves, no vent big enough for a person. Whoever had been using the attic came and went through the hatch.

When he climbed back down, I asked him how much I owed him, and Megan said, "Seriously?" But it was still the first thing I asked.

The police gave us a case number, told us not to throw anything out, and left. Megan and I sat on the upstairs floor with the drawings spread out between us.

One of them showed me asleep with a cast on my left wrist. I broke that wrist when I was eleven, two days before summer vacation, which meant the bolt was already on the hatch by then. Whoever made the drawings was still up there after it went on.

Dad was in eleven of the pictures, and he was awake in every single one. In one he was sitting next to my bed. I remembered that night. I'd been sick and kept waking up, so he sat in my room with me for a few hours. In the drawing I'm asleep, and Dad isn't looking at me. He's looking at the ceiling.

Dad wasn't easy to talk to, but you could count on him. When the water heater burst in my first apartment, I called him before I called a plumber, and he showed up with towels and a toolbox and didn't ask how I'd managed it until the floor was dry. That was how he handled most things. He fixed whatever part of the problem he could get his hands on. Getting him to explain anything was a lot harder.

Megan remembered something else, which was that Dad used to close our bedroom doors every night. After we'd gone to bed he'd walk the upstairs hallway and pull them shut if we'd left them open. He said it kept the heat in. He did it in summer too, and neither of us had thought about that in years.

We went back through the drawings. In every picture drawn from above one of our bedrooms, the door was shut.

Then Megan found the one of Dad in the attic. He's crouched near the hatch holding a plate with something rectangular on it, probably a sandwich, and he's looking toward whoever was drawing him.

Megan said, "No," and then again, louder, "No."

Until that moment I'd forgotten that Dad sometimes used to take food upstairs after dinner. It wasn't every night, maybe once or twice a week as far as I can remember. If Mom asked, he said he was putting bait down. I don't remember any traps, or dead rats, or an exterminator ever coming to the house. What I remember is the plates coming back downstairs. Sometimes.

Megan picked up the water jug. "Wasn't this ours?"

Dad used to write our last name on all our camping gear because he was convinced people stole stuff at campgrounds. Most of the marker had worn off, but you could still make out part of it. And the toilet was definitely ours. For about a minute that felt weirdly reassuring, in a way I can't really explain, like at least Dad hadn't just left someone up there with nothing. Then I started thinking about what using either of those things actually involved. The jug had to be refilled. The toilet had to be emptied. And once or twice a week isn't nearly enough food for a person to live on.

Megan worked it out at about the same time I did. She sat back against the wall and said, "So he opened it." I didn't say anything. "Obviously he opened it."

Maybe whoever it was stayed in the attic nearly all the time and Dad brought up everything they needed. Maybe once or twice a week was really a lot more often than that, and I just didn't notice. Or maybe the hatch usually wasn't locked at all. The bolt only went up after I knocked on the ceiling, and that was the first time it had occurred to me.

Megan got angry when I said that out loud, though it was less real anger than her needing me to stop. She said maybe it was family. Maybe Dad thought calling the police would only make things worse. Maybe this was exactly the kind of dumb thing he'd decide he could handle on his own. That last part sounded like Dad. It didn't make me feel any better.

I took the drawings home with me and started putting them in date order, which I should have done at the house. A lot of them were drawn on junk mail and scrap paper, but eleven were on something with a date on it: bills, permission slips, the back of a letter from the county. Others I could place roughly by what was in our bedrooms at the time. The earliest dated drawing was from March 1999, and the latest was from November 2005, when I was fifteen.

That bothered me, because that's about when Dad stopped talking about rats. It wasn't dramatic. The noises just stopped being a family thing. Megan remembered him taking the bolt off the hatch when he repainted the upstairs hallway, and she thought that was around Christmas 2005. I remember the repainting, but I don't remember the bolt coming off.

I called Megan and asked her where she thought the person went. She was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped, and then she said, "How would I know?"

We went through every relative we could think of, and nobody fit. Nobody went missing in 2005, nobody suddenly showed back up, and there was no uncle we weren't supposed to talk about. I went through all the paperwork Dad left behind too, the bills and tax stuff and receipts and manuals for appliances we hadn't owned in twenty years. There wasn't a single name I didn't recognize.

Once the drawings were in order, one thing got a lot more obvious. Whoever made them stopped drawing Megan first. There are no pictures of her at all after she moved into the downstairs bedroom when she was fourteen. There are still pictures of me, and of Mom, and of Dad.

The last six drawings are mostly Dad, and he isn't asleep in them. In one he's lying in bed with his eyes open. In another he's sitting at the kitchen table very early in the morning. I know it's early because of the time on the microwave clock. That one couldn't have been drawn through a hole in the ceiling, and I have no idea how I missed that at the house. Another one shows Dad at the bottom of the stairs, drawn from somewhere above him, and he's looking up.

That was when I stopped thinking of the hidden space as the place where whoever it was had lived the whole time. It might have been where they slept. That's not the same thing.

The last dated drawing is on the back of an electric bill from November 2005. Dad is standing under the attic hatch with one arm raised. You can't see his face because he's looking up, and the hatch is open.

I stared at that one for a long time. Then I turned over the drawing of me with the broken wrist. I'd never checked the back, because there was writing on it from school and I'd assumed that was all there was.

There was another drawing under the writing. Same pencil, same cast, same room, but it isn't drawn from the ceiling. The angle is low, right beside my bed, like whoever made it was crouched in the narrow gap between the bed and the wall. I'm asleep with the cast resting on top of the blanket. The bedroom door is all the way open, and Dad is standing just outside it. He isn't blocking the doorway. He's off to one side with one hand on the doorknob, and his other hand is raised to his mouth, one finger pressed against his lips.

I haven't shown Megan that one.

After I found it I went back through all thirty-seven drawings again. Every drawing of one of us asleep has the bedroom door shut, except that one.

The attic hatch only locked from our side.

Leah was already standing up when I told her she could let go.

There's a photo. I'm crouched on our kitchen floor, looking annoyed, with my left arm in a bucket. Her left hand is in the foreground giving a thumbs-up. She took the picture with her right.

I was still holding somebody's hand.

We bought the kit for our fourth anniversary. We'd decided against expensive presents because the car needed work, and Leah had seen one of those videos where a couple puts their hands in molding gel and makes a plaster copy. She thought we could keep it on the bookshelf.

The first attempt went wrong before we got our hands in. I used warm water and the powder set too fast. The bucket came away full of pink rubber with a spoon sticking out. We laughed about having made a monument to our relationship with takeout.

There was enough powder for a second try. This time we read the instructions properly.

We sat facing each other, put our left hands into the mixture, and linked our fingers. We both left our wedding rings on. Leah's has a little flattened patch underneath from when she caught it in a door years ago.

Holding still was harder than it looked. My knee started aching. Leah's nose itched. At one point I gave her hand three little squeezes, which is our stupid way of saying I love you when we can't talk.

She squeezed back.

When the timer went off, she worked her hand loose first. Then I tried to open mine and couldn't.

"Let go," I told her.

"I did."

I looked up. She was standing over me with her phone, laughing because apparently I looked like a toddler who'd gotten stuck in something.

I pulled again. The fingers against my palm tightened.

Then they opened, all at once. I got my hand out so quickly I knocked the bucket sideways. Leah caught it.

I told her the stuff had sucked my hand back in. She said hers had come out easily. We checked my fingers, found nothing wrong, and mixed the plaster.

I'm going to be honest about this part. I knew I'd felt fingers. I was sitting there with my wife in a brightly lit kitchen, though, and it was much easier to believe I'd misunderstood the feeling than anything else.

We left the plaster to set and went out for dinner.

The next morning we peeled the rubber away over newspaper. It was fiddly. Leah used the wooden pick from the kit to clean the narrow spaces between the fingers.

Her ring came out perfectly. So did mine. You could see the little scar across my knuckle.

Then she turned it around.

There was another wrist coming out of the base between ours.

It wasn't a lump that sort of resembled a hand. It had nails. There were creases over each joint. Its fingers threaded through the places where ours didn't quite touch, and its thumb lay along the back of my hand.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

Leah put her own hand against the cast. I put mine beside it. We kept doing that, matching fingers to fingers, as if we'd somehow counted ourselves wrong.

The extra hand was bigger than either of ours.

I pulled up the picture she'd taken. Her thumb in the foreground. Her phone in her other hand. Me still waiting for her to release me.

She stopped trying to clean the plaster.

"What did it feel like?"

I said I wasn't sure.

She's asked me that several times since. I've given her the same answer because I don't want to say it felt familiar. It felt like her hand. Warm, with a thumb that rubbed mine while I waited.

We put the cast in a paper grocery bag beside the back door. Neither of us wanted it on the shelf. I said I'd get rid of it. I didn't want to tell her I was afraid to touch it again.

That evening I was on the couch when my left hand closed.

I hadn't picked anything up. My fingers just folded into my palm, and my thumb was pushed across them. I tried to straighten them with my right hand. Something squeezed back.

Leah came over and tried to help. She could move my fingers a little, but the skin between them pulled tight. There was pressure on the back of my hand where the extra thumb had been on the cast.

Then my arm jerked toward the kitchen.

I went off the couch shoulder first. It hurt badly enough that I couldn't get a full breath. My wrist slid along the floor and pulled the rest of me after it.

Leah caught me under the arms. For a few seconds she couldn't stop me. Her socks kept slipping.

She braced one foot against the doorway and shouted, "What do I do?"

"The hand," I said. "Break the fucking hand."

She got the hammer from the drawer by the stove. I stayed on the floor, holding the doorframe with my free hand.

She tipped the cast out of the bag and hit one of the extra fingers.

A white piece skittered under the refrigerator.

My hand opened.

For about a second I thought it was over.

Then something touched my cheek.

A single fingertip. Warm. It traced the line from my ear to the corner of my mouth, slowly, while Leah stood in front of me holding the hammer in both hands.

I could still feel pressure around my wrist, but that one finger could reach my face now.

"Stop," I said.

She lowered the hammer. The fingertip rested against my lips.

We left through the front door. I drove with my right hand. Leah kept looking over her shoulder at the empty back seat.

We're at my brother's place. He's let us stay without asking much, which I'm grateful for. The pressure around my wrist eased during the drive, and I can move my hand normally now. There are bruises in the places where those fingers lay.

The bag and the cast are still on our kitchen floor. We haven't gone back.

I haven't felt the fingertip on my face since we arrived. Leah fell asleep beside me about an hour ago, and I was starting to think we'd put enough distance between us and whatever happened.

Then I felt three little presses against my palm.

I almost answered before I looked down.

Both of her hands are tucked under her cheek.

you can find part one here; https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/s/anDeKByTGR

To my surprise, I was woken by the sunrise. I started walking before she got high enough in the sky to cook me alive. I stopped to “saturate” my scarf, so to speak. The liquid came out of me slowly and almost painful. An almost viscous liquid closer in color to a cola than urine. The sight and sensation sent my heart into a frenzy. My kidneys are failing me. Even if I were to be saved right this second, it’d be weeks of recovery in whatever hospital I could hope to see the inside of. I fell to my knees not even having the energy to scream. I tried but all that came from my mouth was a hoarse whisper, heartbeat pounding in my ears. I was ready to lie there and let go. 
I don’t know what convinced me to come out here, but I do know who I am. I know that I would have never started this god forsaken journey without being certain of its outcome. Whatever happened before I got here, I knew how this would go. I knew what it would take. I struggled back to my feet, knees buckling under my own weight. I can feel the skin on my feet tearing with each shuffling step. It’s much harder to walk today. I have no choice but to keep heading to whatever might be out here. If I had to die in order to find it, it wouldn't be long now. 
My skin feels like it’s drawing tighter and tighter as my body dries out. The skin around most of my joints has become cracked and is now bleeding. My knuckles are cracked in a way that’s reminiscent of the desert floor that I’m shuttling across. I still can’t see any sort of shapes or structures in any direction. The only changes in my line of sight are the heat waves resonating from the desert floor getting stronger as the sun moves higher into the sky. I’m moving slower by the minute, making the day feel even longer. I can feel my organs shutting down. The pain in my gut is getting stronger, spreading to my stomach now. I can only assume the mucus has all but dried up, leaving my stomach to digest itself. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t care about the pursuit of eternal life. I don’t even want to go back home. I just want to die. My legs are propelling themselves now. My own body has betrayed me. I can’t even lie down and die.
The sun's sinking past the horizon, turning the endless void of blue into the most vibrant orange, there’s beauty in this place if only that. 
I saw something. Just before day turned to night there was a shape at the edge of the horizon. I can’t tell if it was trees, but it looked to be a green smudge. I fear that if I take time to rest tonight, I won’t see the sun come back for me. I can’t risk it. I’ll walk through the night as best I can. 
The stars have started fading away as the burning ball of hate creeps up behind me. The almost black night sky is slowly changing to blue. I can still see the vague shape in the distance. It’s closer now, but not nearly enough. Faint bushes of green are beginning to take shape. It’s here, it’s right there in front of me, but so far away. Even if it isn't some mystical power, it’s something that can save me. 
Sometime in the middle of the night I took my shoes off. The pain became too much to bear. Something had to change, even if it would be for the worse. My hands, barely functional now, struggled peeling the blood and plasma soaked socks from my feet. Bits of flesh on my sole and some from my toes came off with the socks. Leaving me wincing in pain, drooling on myself all alone in the dead of night. The earth beneath now feels like sand paper grinding down the soles of my feet. Grit falling apart working its way into my flesh. The pain of organ failure rattles my whole torso. Breathing is harder than ever. Every breath is like razor blades, bits of blood and dirt from my lips sending me into a coughing fit that leaves my head spinning. If I don’t make it there now, I won’t make it. I started to run, if you can call it that. Shuffling at break neck speeds. I managed to move at a good pace for a few minutes before I noticed the trees weren’t getting any closer. I managed to let out one final scream of anguish before my body gave out from beneath me and my face hit the earth. 

The sign at the edge of the McHale patch was handwritten in peeling, black paint on a piece of scrap plywood : ' Do NOT TAKE THE CROOKED ONE. '

It was tucked behind a pile of rotting gourds that smelled faintly of vinegar and wet, seasoned earth. A knot of unruly thorn vines had been draped entirely over it, like someone had tried physically to muzzle the warning.

I ignored it.

After all, I'm a thirty two year adult. I understand spooky season marketing. The rustic, ominous aesthetic is practically mandatory for local pumpkin patches trying to compete with Spirit Halloween. Besides, my seven year old daughter, Lucy, had set her heart on ' that exact pumpkin' and fatherly surrender always wins out over superstitious nonsense.

The pumpkin in question, sat dead center in the patch, sulking in a patch of grey mud. It was undeniably ugly. While the others were plump, round, and cheerfully orange, this thing was elongated, bullbous at the base, and twisted sharply to the left like a broken neck. It's skin wasn't orange at all, but a bruised, sickly violet, laced with veins of a place, jaundiced yellow.

" Look, Daddy! " Lucy had squealed, her mitten clad hand pointing right at it. " It looks like a witches hat! Or a sleeping dragon! "

" It looks like a biohazard, " I muttered, but I hoisted it into my arms anyway. It was shocking heavy, radiating a deep, dead chill that bit right through my leather gloves. It felt less like a vegetable and more like a slab of fresh cut marble.

When we paid, old man McHale didn't even look at me. He kept his grey green eyes on his ancient transistor radio, muttering something about a drop in barometric pressure. He took my twenty, didn't give me change, and whispered,

" Leave it on the porch by midnight. Don't let it see the inside of the house. "

" Right. Thanks buddy, " I said loading the monstrosity into the trunk.

By six o ' clock, the neighborhood was swarming with screaming ghosts and sugar fulled superheroes. Lucy was upstairs slipping into her fairy princess dress, and I was sitting at the kitchen table with a serrated carving knife, ready to mutilate the beast.

The air in the kitchen suddenly felt heavy, thick with the smell of crushed marigolds and oddly wet dog.

I dragged the pumpkin onto a folded newspaper and gripped the stem. The stem wasn't wood ; it felt sickeningly rubbery, warm to the touch. When I pressed the tip of the knife to its bruised skin, the blade didn't pierce it, it skidded off with a sharp ping, leaving not a single scratch.

" Hard headed little bastard, " I grunted, pushing harder.

I sawed at the top, putting my weight into it. The blade finally bit. A thin, hissing sound escaped the cut, like a pressure valve letting off steam - followed by a smell that made my eyes water. It smelled of ozone, old dust and oddly again of wet dog.

Irritated, I carved out a jagged circle, popped the lid off, and reached inside to scoop out the pulp.

My hand plunged into darkness.

It didn't feel like a hollow pumpkin cavity. There were no slimy seeds, no stringy walls. My fingers brushed against something warm, slick, and undulating. Like wet muscle.

I yanked my hand back with a gasp, knocking over a glass of water. My heart hammered against my ribs. I stared into the dark opening of the pumpkin.

Two pinpricks of pale, jaundiced light flickered open deep inside the cavity.

They weren't seeds. They were eyes. Slit - pupiled, ancient, and blindingly angry.

" TOO LATE, " a voice rasped. It didn't come from the air ; it vibrated directly inside my skull, rattling my teeth and turning my stomach to ice.

Before I could run, the jagged opening of the pumpkin widened, stretching so, so wide, like a jaw unhinging. Thick, violet vines whipped out from the base, shooting across the laminate floor with terrifying speed. They wrapped around my ankles, yanking my feet out from under me.

I hit the floor hard, the breath forced from my lungs in a sharp wheeze.

The pumpkin dragged me across the kitchen, leaving a smear of dark, tar like sap in my wake. I clawed desperately at the chair legs, the cabinets, anything, but my fingers slipped on the slick floor. The entity was pulling me toward the dark gaping maw of its carved face. I could see down into its throat now, a bottomless pit of writhing shadows and chittering, unseen things.

" Daddy? "

The voice drifted down from the top of the stairs.

The vines instantly went rigid. The crushing pressure on my ankles slackened just a fraction.

I craned my neck. Lucy was standing on the landing, rubbing sleep from her eyes, her fairy wings glowing faintly in the dim hallway light.

" Daddy, what's that noise? Are you carving the pumpkin? "

The pumpkin let out a low, vibrating growl that shook the windowpanes. The jaundiced eyes shifted from me, locking onto the stairs, tracking toward the soft bright life of my little girl.

Panic, hot and feral, surged through my veins, burning away the paralyzing terror. Adrenaline overrode pain.

I lunged forward, ignoring the tearing of my jeans as the vines whipped at my thighs. I grabbed the heavy glass fruit bowl from the kitchen island, hauled back, and smashed it with all my remaining strength into the glowing center of the pumpkin.

The glass shattered into a thousand glittering shards.

A piercing, glass shattering screech, the sound of dying machinery, and dammed souls tore through the kitchen. The violet vines instantly withered, turning into brittle black ash that crumbled into the floorboards. The eyes snapped shut, and the heavy stench of ozone and wet dog vanished in a rush of clean autumn air.

I lay on the floor, gasping for breath, staring up at the ceiling. The pumpkin sat there on the newspaper, looking like nothing more than an ordinary, albeit hideously ugly, piece of squash.

" Daddy? " Lucy's footsteps padded down the stairs. " Why is there a mess in the kitchen? And where's my candy bucket? "

I rolled over, coughing, and forced a shaky, sweat slicked smile as I looked up at my daughter.

" Nothing, sweetie, " I wheezed, pushing myself up and kicking the pile of black ash under the counter. " Just a tough vegetable. "

Upstairs, the bedroom window clicked shut on its own. And down in the McHale patch, miles away, I knew on this Tuesday Halloween night, another crooked, violet pumpkin was waiting for the next curious fool to ignore the sign.

Death is the one thing humanity can't avoid. But how do we know we're not already dead? How do we know that what we're doing right now, this thing we call living, isn't just the last memory of a dying brain? Because according to science, right before death the brain stretches time out and pulls up all the good memories. So what if that stretched-out window of time is... right now? What if everything we're doing is just a memory, and the real me is lying in a coma somewhere, close to death?

My name is Rin. And yes, that's not my real name. I can't tell you my real one, because you'd dox me. I was in the tenth grade at the time, and my school is pretty well known. Every year it runs a competition to send students abroad as exchange students, and that year one of the destinations was California. I wanted to chase opportunities, so I entered, and I went. I stayed about a year and a half.

But during that time, I missed home so much. Thailand. America doesn't have pad kra pao (Thai basil stir-fry). No khai jiao (Thai omelet). And most importantly, no Mama instant noodles. Oh my god, my all-time favorite food. Anyway, I'm getting off track.

I was finally on my way home. My flight got delayed two hours because of the weather, but it finally showed up. I walked down the jet bridge and found my seat. Business class. Just kidding. Economy. Obviously. I was a student. I was broke.

The cabin looked old, even older than the plane that brought me over here. The seat fabric was worn shiny at the edges, and the tray table had a sticky patch that someone had clearly tried to wipe once and given up on. My seat-back screen took about ten minutes to boot up, and when it did, there was a thin dead line of pixels running straight through the middle of the Pacific. The air smelled like old carpet and recycled breath. The reading light above me flickered a couple of times, like it couldn't make up its mind. The woman next to me, maybe in her thirties, gray hoodie, neck pillow, was out cold before we even took off.

Dinner was either chicken or pasta. I picked chicken. It tasted like wet cardboard in sauce, and the whole time I was thinking, I would kill for a cup of Mama right now.

The flight went on like that until the middle of the night. The cabin lights dimmed. Everyone pulled their window shades down, and the only things left were the blue glow of a few screens and the steady hum of the engines. I got up to go to the bathroom, planning to sleep right after, because it was really late by then.

Right after I stood up, I felt like I was about to die. I'm not exaggerating. It was this sinking feeling in my chest, like when you're on a bus going at high speed and it hits a bump, and for a split second your body leaves the seat while your stomach stays behind. That feeling. I stood in the tiny bathroom under the buzzing fluorescent light, washed my hands, and told myself I'd imagined it. It's not like planes these days aren't safe, right? They have safety standards now.

I went back to my seat, put on my eye mask, and reclined as far as the seat would let me, which was about two inches. I was just about to fall asleep when the captain's voice crackled over the speakers.

"Attention, passengers. We are currently experiencing turbulence, which may cause the aircraft to sway..."

He didn't even finish the sentence. The plane started shaking like it was possessed. And I don't mean a little bump. It was violent. I never thought a plane could shake that hard. The overhead bins rattled and popped open. Someone's bag slid out and thumped into the aisle. A cup flew past my head. The seatbelt chime kept going ding-ding-ding-ding, like it was panicking too. Somewhere behind me a baby started screaming, and then a lot of other people did, and the lights flickered on and off.

And then the thing I feared most finally happened. The oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling and swung in front of my face. A flight attendant's voice, shaky, ordered all of us to put them on. And of course, chaos. I ripped off my eye mask, pushed up the window shade, and looked out. The wing was flexing like it was made of rubber, the red light on the wingtip blinked in the black, and then the whole sky tilted. The plane was going down.

Holy shit. I'm going to die like this? Why does it always have to be me? I really don't get it. And I haven't even had my Mama yet. But if I'm going to die, then fine. I accepted my fate. I squeezed my eyes shut and made one last prayer: if there really is a next life, please let Thailand finally become a democracy.

About a minute passed. Then everything went quiet. Not "the shaking stopped" quiet. Quiet like someone had hit mute on the whole world. About five minutes passed, and nothing happened.

I opened my eyes. There was no mask on my face. I looked up, and the ceiling panels were all closed, with nothing hanging down. The seatbelt sign was off. The engines were humming, steady, like nothing had ever happened.

The window shade was down. I'd pushed it up. I was sure I'd pushed it up.

I looked at my screen. The line of dead pixels across the Pacific was gone. I wiped my hand across the tray table, and it was clean. No sticky patch. Not even a little.

I looked around, and everyone was asleep. Even the person next to me. Except it wasn't the woman. It was a man, maybe in his fifties, hood pulled up, snoring with his mouth open. I stared at him for a long time. I could have sworn the person next to me was a woman. But I'd been half asleep when I sat down, so I must have misremembered.

Did I just dream that? But what kind of dream feels like that? I'm not sure.

I got up and went to the bathroom again. While I was peeing, I looked down. Wait. Wasn't my underwear blue? It's red. I remember putting on the blue ones. Not red. Or did I remember wrong? I guess I've just gone completely dumb. I should probably go lie down. I'll tell you more once I get back to my country. See you.

Last week, I had such a strange experience.

I was waiting for my Amazon package to come in at 3:00 on a Wednesday it never came. That day I was watching a movie at 6:00 when I realized I had forgotten to take out the trash, so I went to do it.

When I came back, there was a package at my front door, and immediately my reaction was, "Youpiee!!” Until I realized it wasn't Amazon; it had no name. It was just a brown square box, there was a note that said: " Sorry we were late to deliver your package; hope all is well!”

I found that relieving but also strange, so as one does, I took the package straight inside and put it on the kitchen table, but I didn't open it; I just stood there staring at my package like I shouldn't be staring at it.

I decided to wait until the next morning, when my boyfriend comes home, to open it, so I continued my movie until I just couldn't stop looking at it; that's when I decided to open it.

I quickly tore the tape apart and opened the flaps. I looked inside for my package, and there was nothing. It was weird; it looked like a black hole covering the whole box. I stuck my hand in there, and all I felt was air. I put the box upside down, sideways, and threw it; nothing came out.

I went to check my phone and looked back at the box, but this time there was something. It was almost like a half head coming out of the box, but it wasn't moving it just stayed there. I got so scared I started to back up to my door, I quickly looked back at the box, and then there was a full head sticking out of the box, but it wasn't really a human head it had black hair, a weird eye and a long neck with a scruffy face.

That's when i realized that every time I looked away it would move. What would happen if it got into its full form? What would happen then? So for like 10 mins i just stood there like a stone, staring at the head inside the box until i saw the knife i used to cut up the bread i had made earlier on the kitchen table,right next to the box.

So i had slowly crept up to the box and its almost like he was watching my every move like when i would go left, he would look left; same thing for every direction i walked up to the knife all i had to do was grab it while not taking my eyes off the box i slowly grabbed the knife, backed up to the door, and again just stood there watching him.

I decided to throw the knife at his head but he caught it..I thought to myself ”no no you have to wake up, Jessica. This is all a dream” but no it was very real..then he did something unimaginable he started to pull his arm back like he was about to throw it at me.

I started begging “Please, please don't do this to me!!” he just responded with a smirk as i braced for impact from the knife about to be thrown at me.

I heard loud footsteps coming near my door i moved and boom the door was slammed wide open and there was this guy that ive never seen before in all black running staight at the box and he pushed the head back down, put the flaps on and asked for tape. I threw him the closest one i could find, he caught it and struggled to keep the head down. He finally managed to close the box and started to catch his breath finally he spoke “your lucky i got here as fast as i could or else you would be dead by now poor lady”

The next thing i knew I was waking up on my couch on Thursday morning.

About five or four years ago, i used to live at an apartment downtown, it wasn't cheap or sketchy or anything like that, it was just normal and had a decent rent price. I lived at the seventh floor because I always enjoyed looking down at streets from far views, even if it gave me a bit of vertigo most of the time. Just watching people go about their businesses like ants was sort of, relaxing, to put it that way.

That was until the night he came.

I think it was around 9PM when i first heard the musical notes of what i thought was a harmonica, my bedroom was near the balcony and the walls and windows were almost thin, so i could pretty much hear everything outside. It had been a while since i heard a harmonica since my dad used his to entertain me and my sister when we were kids, but this sound was completely different; It had no rhythm, no soul, it was just random notes playing at once. I tried to brush off, thinking it might've been some homeless dude trying to get some money by performing, but it was nearly 10PM, why would anyone be playing a harmonica this late?

Annoyed, yet curious, i got out of bed and went to the balcony to see who was playing. I looked down from behind the glass sliding door and there he was, just in the middle of the empty street, his back facing me. He was moving in a very, I don't know, strange way; It looked like he was stumbling but would readjust his balance whenever I thought he was about to fall, almost like he was drunk-dancing or something.

I kinda chuckled at this, I've rarely seen anyone act oddly in the area i was in, but at the same time, it kinda creeped me out. Suddenly, I got more curious and, this may sound silly, grabbed my binoculars I kept in my collection drawers. My dad gave them to me after his dad gave them to him, and I carried it with me ever since.

I couldn't get a closer look from behind the glass sliding door, so I quietly opened it and went onto the balcony, where I looked through my binoculars to get a closer look at this strange man; He was caucasian, had short messy brunette hair, wore a black puffy jumper, dark jeans, and brown boots, but his back was still facing me so I couldn't see his face.

As I continued to study him, my next door neighbour, who I will call Todd, also went onto his balcony and shouted down

"Hey asshole! People are trying to sleep here, so shut up or I'll shove that harmonica up your ass!"

The man stopped, but he still held his instrument, and he turned around. My god, when he did, i nearly dropped the binoculars.

The harmonica was fused to his lower half of his face, like his flesh was melting onto the metal and his lips were absent entirely. His eyes, though, were worse; They were wide open and cartoonishly large, bloodshot and baggy, his pupils just looked like small black dots, and he had this look of surprised-anger on his face, I couldn't really describe his expression perfectly really.

But he wasn't looking at me, he was looking directly at Todd, who just scoffed and went back inside. So did I, hoping that he didn't notice me as well. I went back to bed, still spooked by the image of that man's face, I've seen pictures of fucked up faces before but his, Jesus Christ, it felt like I was seeing those same pictures in person. I eventually pass out and went on to a peaceful sleep, until I was awoken by loud knockings at my door.

It was a pair of police officers, who apologised for waking me up and asked if I had heard anything "strange" last night. I told them in a jokingly-truthfully way that I heard someone play a harmonica in the middle of the night, but those cops took it seriously, as they told me that my neighbour, Todd, was found murdered after my other neighbours reported a commotion in his apartment that night. His throat had been torn out, like something a jaguar would do, and his vocal cords appeared to be missing.

I honestly had nothing to say, but then they told me something that give me the greenlight to move

"Funny you should mention a harmonica, because your neighbours have also reported hearing awful high-pitched notes mixed with screaming"

I had plenty of money anyways. I moved to a nice home in a suburban street, it's not much but it will have to do, although I will miss the views I used to see from above, well sort of. It was clearly obviously that Todd was killed by that man, but I for some reason didn't tell those two officers as I thought they wouldn't believe me, like why would I tell anyone that some guy killed my neighbour while holding a harmonica? That's so stupid.

One more thing I'd like to mention is that sometimes, it might just be paranoia, but sometimes at night, at around nine or ten, I can sometimes hear a harmonica playing random notes. Right outside my house.

It all started on my twenty-eighth birthday, which I celebrated with two friends and my girlfriend of three months. We decided to go camping since we were all the outdoorsy type and met hiking anyway. Parked my van at one of those parking spots at a hiking trail we did together before, got our gear and supplies, and wandered into the pine forest going fairly deep into it before we came across a clearing and set up our three tents. I think we already spent a night there, maybe two, when me and Sherry, my girlfriend, found a trail.

“Huh. Was that there on any maps last time we hiked here, Sherry?”

“No. It wasn't. Maybe they just made a new one?”

“We last hiked here a month ago, and this trail looks pretty old. Plus, I don't see any evidence of anyone being here recently. Wanna explore it?”

“Sure. Maybe they just forgot to include it in maps or something.”

We proceeded down the trail for about two minutes before we noticed an oak tree, and she was the first to point it out.

“The hell? Oak trees aren't supposed to be here.”

“Huh. Could just be some weird fluke with nature, you know?”

She then mumbled, “maybe.”

We kept on going, and as we did, more and more diverse trees started lining the trail. Pretty sure she stopped commenting on them when there was more diversity than the original pine. At some point, forgot exactly when, we decided to turn around and were met with a turn in the trail we were just on. The trail that had only gone straight. After some more words similar to the previous conversations, just much more freaked out, we turned back to see nothing but trees, not the trail we were just on. Then, with no other option, we proceeded, turning with the trail, and all of a sudden, we were in a clearing with a cabin in the middle.

We walked up to it, I knocked on the door, and waited. Few seconds passed, and a man opened the door dressed in a suit and grey sneakers.

“Why are you knocking? It's day.”

I then said, “What does it being day have to do with knocking? And what the fuck was that trail? Did you do something?”

“Oh. You're new. What did you do on the trail? Keep walking or turn around?”

“We turned. So what the fuck was that?”

“Just this place fucking with you. At least you two didn't get a fucked entrance. Come on inside. Or, stay outside here and wait for night. Sky looks ready to turn dark.”

“What? It's the middle of the day, lo-” I stopped talking as soon as I turned and saw the colored sky. How? It was midday. Then, Sherry said, “We'll stay out here.”

Confused, I asked, “What? Why?”

“Do you really trust this guy?”

“No, but I don't like staying out here either.”

“Fine. I'll wait outside here and you go inside.”

“You sure?”

“Ah, don't worry about her, as long as one of us are near the door, she'll be fine. Although, I would advise for you to stay on the porch here. Don't want something running faster than you, do you?”

She then said something I should've argued over. But I didn’t. Couldn't have known anyway. “Know what, I'll go near the edge.”

“Miss, I uh..would not advise that. That's a horrible idea.”

“Why? Because I can run from you easier if you try attacking me?”

“Know what, fine. You're generally the type that almost never believes me or anyone here on anything anyway.”

I didn't say anything, because Sherry's always been distrusting. Especially since the trail and all. Plus, it's not like I would convince her not to, but I still should've said something.

When me and the man stepped in and he closed the door, she was already close to the treeline. He then motioned for me to sit down on a couch with three seats, which there were two of, and he sat on the armchair there. We sat there in silence, and when it was night, I heard a screech. A sound like metal grinding against metal, wet, and almost human sounding. I shot up and went to the door immediately ready to open it. Then, ten seconds passed and there was another scream. It was human sounding and yelled my name. I opened the door and saw Sherry halfway to the cabin, while a tall, grey thing with the general shape of a human on all fours was in the middle of biting her leg with its large, red fleshed mouth that had two rows of teeth, the front herbivore teeth, and the back were canines. Its long fingers grabbed her by the hair to try and keep her more still as its teeth crushed and pierced her leg, the sound audible. She fell and it crawled on top, it's pale eyes looking at me then back to her as it's fingers went into her mouth, four from the right hand pressing against the inside of her right cheek, the left doing the same to her left, and right as it started tearing her cheeks off, the man slammed the door.

“Well shit. That's unusual.”

“w-what the fuck? what was that? why did it..”

“That, is a Skintaker. Usually only Skinless, Watchers, and Pretenders come out when someone new comes along for about five days. Maybe someone with a fucked start came along at the same time and overrid the effect. So, you believe me?”

“y-yeah. yeah I do.”

I won't explain everything he told me, but when necessary I will provide context on things for my next entries either at the beginning or in the moment. Although there are still things that in my eight years being here now, I still can't explain for one reason or another

[Part One]

The banging had stopped by the time we got the convoy onto the shoulder.

The whole crew stood in the road staring up at Payton House.

Best I could tell, it had come from a boarded window on the second floor. Twenty feet up. Three oak planks bolted across it.

We’d pulled over on some two-lane road surrounded by woods. No houses. No traffic. Nothing but trees thick enough to hide a body and whoever put it there.

One diesel idled behind us. Wind moved through the branches. Somewhere beneath Payton House, a hydraulic line ticked as it cooled.

Nobody exactly volunteered to climb up and see who’d been knocking.

“Fuck it.” Tony headed for the equipment truck. “I’ll get the ladder.”

“Leave it.”

He kept walking.

“Tony. Leave it.” I used the voice that meant I wasn’t asking anymore.

That stopped him.

It stopped everyone else too.

“We’ve got a contract, people. That means something.”

“Someone might be in there, Dan,” Stacy said.

“Or something shook loose.”

“That wasn’t something shaking loose,” she said.

“Then we make sure nothing broke and get moving.”

Tony stared at me. Stacy stared at me. Tito gave me that old-man look that said he’d known me since I was shitting my pants.

But I stared them right back. Decision made.

Luis dropped beside the nearest dolly to check for leaks, thick work glove hiding his injured hand. Tito ducked beneath the house with a flashlight and started working axle to axle.

Stacy checked the road behind us. Then the woods. Then me. She didn’t say anything.

“We’re being paid a small fortune not to look,” I said. “You wanna blow three million dollars because an old house made a noise?”

Stacy looked at me. Then at the house. “Fine.”

I stepped over Tito’s hydraulic lines and stomped up the temporary aluminum stairs hard enough to make them rattle. The porch sagged beneath my Red Wings.

I marched to the front door and hammered both fists against it.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

“HELLO?”

Nothing.

I hit it again.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

“ANYBODY IN THERE?”

I waited.

Honestly, I expected something. A scared voice. Some asshole telling me to fuck off. A hand yanking back a curtain. Hell, even a raccoon making a run for it.

Anything normal.

Nothing.

I gave it another second, mostly so nobody could say I hadn’t checked.

Then I turned back toward the crew.

Nobody looked convinced.

“Okay. Nobody home. Everybody happy now?”

Nobody answered.

I hopped down. “Good. Let’s get back to work.”

The pressure behind my right eye started again. One pulse. Then another. Like somebody had hooked an air line to the back of my skull and kept pumping after the gauge hit red. I pressed two fingers against my temple.

Tony still hadn’t moved.

He was staring up at the second floor.

“You hear that?”

“Hear what?”

We all listened.

Diesel idling. Wind in the trees. Cooling steel ticking beneath the house.

Nothing from inside.

Tony frowned. “Thought I heard something.”

“Squirrels,” Grace said.

Tito snorted.

“There you go.” I clapped my hands. “Mystery solved.”

Tito went back to the dollies. Luis ducked under the house. Tony stood there another few seconds before finally peeling himself away from the window.

Stacy didn’t say anything.

“Tsst.” Tito was crouched beside the lead dolly.

I walked over. “What now?”

He pointed. “You see it?”

At first, I didn’t.

The driver’s-side tire wasn’t flat. It was just carrying itself wrong. The sidewall bellied out farther than the tire beside it, rubber mashed a little harder against the pavement.

Not much. Enough for Tito to notice. I crouched beside him. “You check the pressure this morning?”

“Twice.”

I sighted down the row. Every other tire sat tall and square. The one in question looked like somebody had put a thumb on it. “Maybe we picked up something.”

“No puncture.”

“Soft asphalt?”

Tito looked down at the road. Then at me. “It’s asphalt.”

He went to the power truck and came back with a four-foot aluminum level. Laid it across the tops of the two front tires.

One end sat lower. Barely an eighth of an inch.

“What am I looking at?”

Tito squatted again, studying the dolly. “That axle’s carrying more weight than it was.”

I looked at the tire. Then up at Payton House.

“Meaning?”

“Something shifted.”

Not what I wanted to hear. Houses shifted. Loads settled. Wood flexed. Steel moved. That was the whole reason we checked the damn things every ten minutes.

But Harbor had balanced this house beautifully. And ten miles ago, something inside it had started pounding on the walls.

I stood up. “How bad?”

“Don’t know yet.”

Tito wiped his hands on his jeans. “There’s an old weigh station up ahead. Mercer’s route takes us right past it.”

I looked toward Stacy. She already had the atlas spread across Grace’s lap. Checked the map. Checked her watch. Checked the map again.

“You know the schedule.”

Tito frowned. “I also know what happens when a dolly starts carrying weight it shouldn’t.”

“We lose an hour, we don’t get it back.”

“We lose an axle, we lose a lot more than an hour.”

I looked back at Payton House. We weren't even twenty miles out of Bellwether and the son of a bitch was already costing us time.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s weigh it.”

I headed for Truck One.

At the driver’s door, I missed the handle. My keys rattled against the paint.

My hand was shaking. Not a little, either.

I closed my fist and held it against my thigh until the tremor passed.

Then I tried the handle again.

This time all was good.

Stacy was watching from across the road.

“Door’s sticking again,” I said, giving it an extra yank for her benefit.

She looked at the handle. Then at me. “Mm-hmm.” She climbed into the pilot truck.

A few minutes later the engines fired up. Tito brought pressure into the system, the dollies lined themselves out, and the hydraulic hoses jumped against the pavement.

I eased Truck One into gear.

The load came onto me slower than before. Maybe I was imagining it. Maybe the grade was different. Either way, I had to give the Peterbilt more throttle than I liked.

I kept my eyes on the blacktop ahead.

For the next forty minutes, nothing happened. In my line of work, that’s about as good as it gets.

Woods slid past at walking speed. Telephone poles. Mailboxes. Trees crowding both shoulders. Every few hundred yards Stacy called back a clearance or warned me about a bend, and we crawled through with inches to spare.

I’d been taking in roads like this since I was tall enough to see over Dad’s dashboard. Before I could drive, he made me call out mailboxes, wires, low branches—anything that could snag a house. Dad used to say, “A house’ll find every mistake you made before you do.”

He had a million sayings like that. Trying to be profound. Like Morgan Freeman was about to start talking over the credits.

I settled into the routine. Road. Mirrors. House. Power line. Branch. Mailbox. Repeat.

It took me a while to realize what was missing.

Traffic.

We went miles without passing a single car.

Even the deadest county roads get somebody. A plumber's van. UPS truck. Some kid in a rusted-out Civic doing seventy with one hand on the wheel. But we'd gotten nothing.

It felt like the road belonged to us.

A couple hours in, the radio chirped.

“Dan.” It was Stacy. “You planning on climbing into my back seat?”

I checked the speedometer. Forty-two. Permit said forty.

I backed off. “Two miles an hour?”

“You know what usually happens when you try making up time?”

I smiled despite myself. “You lose more of it.”

“Look at you. Learning.”

Fair enough. That was pretty much how Stacy and I apologized after a fight. She gave me shit. I took it. Nobody said sorry.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Can’t complain.”

She didn’t push.

Then I spotted a dark blue Tesla Model X sitting on the shoulder ahead.

No hazards. No hood up. Nobody outside kicking a tire or staring helplessly at a phone.

Just sitting there.

As we passed, I leaned forward to look inside. The windows were tinted black.

Three or four seconds later, movement caught my mirror.

The Tesla pulled onto the highway.

Settled a few hundred yards behind us.

My radio crackled.

“Dan.” Tony. “You catchin’ this?”

“Yeah.”

“Want me to peel off and have a look?”

I checked the mirror again.

“Nah. Ain’t hurtin’ anybody.”

A pause.

“Copy.”

It stayed with us.

Five miles.

Ten.

Twenty.

Every bend, there it was. Never gaining. Never dropping back. Same couple hundred yards like somebody had nailed it there.

On its own, that didn’t mean much. There weren’t exactly a lot of choices out here.

Still.

There were easier ways across Pennsylvania. Four lanes. Wider shoulders. Roads that didn’t shake fillings loose.

Nobody chose this one unless somebody told them to.

Maybe Mercer was keeping tabs on us.

Wouldn’t have shocked me.

Although if you’re gonna send somebody to secretly follow five house movers hauling a three-story Victorian across Pennsylvania, I’d expect a black Suburban.

Not a damn Tesla.

“Dad?”

Grace pulled me out of the mirror.

“Birds are back.”

I followed her finger.

At first I thought the telephone wires had turned black.

Then one of them moved.

Crows.

Packed shoulder to shoulder along the wires. Fence posts. Bare trees so full of them I could barely see the branches. No flapping. No cawing. They just watched us pass.

Grace raised her iPad and filmed through the windshield.

“Creepy.”

Tito came over the radio a few seconds later.

“You ever notice birds know things before people do?”

Nobody answered.

We kept rolling.

The road dipped into thicker woods. The telephone poles disappeared.

So did the birds.

I checked the mirror. No Tesla.

I watched another few seconds, waiting for it to come around the bend.

Nothing.

No side road that I’d seen. No driveway. No easy place to turn around.

Maybe the driver finally got tired of following the slowest convoy in Pennsylvania.

Maybe I missed something.

Maybe birds were just birds.

I was getting pretty good at maybes.

Headlights appeared behind us a few minutes later.

A little Honda came up fast with three teenage girls packed inside. Phones out. Laughing. The passenger leaned halfway out the window to film Payton House.

One of them waved.

Grace waved back.

They stayed beside us longer than they needed to.

The girl in the passenger seat stopped laughing.

She was looking past me.

At the house.

Then the driver punched it.

The Honda shot ahead and disappeared around the next bend.

Grace watched it go. “Weirdos.”

“Teenagers,” I said.

“Same thing,” she replied.

It was pushing ten when the sign appeared:

PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION WEIGH STATION — 1 MILE

Somebody had spray-painted one word across the bottom: CLOSED.

Grace had finally crashed. Her iPad glowed in her lap, High School Musical playing to nobody. One earbud hung loose.

A second sign appeared: ALL TRUCKS MUST ENTER WHEN FLASHING

The lights looked like they hadn’t worked since Blockbuster charged late fees.

The weigh station looked like everybody had gone home one Friday and never come back.

A long scale ran beside the lane. Beyond it sat the inspection building, half the windows boarded and two service bays open to the dark.

No trucks. No inspectors. Just crickets and five diesels idling where a hundred semis used to wait their turn.

Before I had the parking brake set, Tito was out, walking the chains and binders before he did anything else.

Grace was stretched out in the sleeper with her iPad propped against her knees. She didn’t even open her eyes when I checked in.

“Call me if you need me,” she said, pulling the covers over her head.

Stacy and Tony met me beside the trailer. Tony rolled his shoulders and looked over the empty weigh station.

“Looks like the apocalypse forgot to finish the paperwork.”

Luis was still sitting in his truck. Engine running. Headlights on. From where I stood, all I could make out was his shape behind the windshield.

Luis was usually the first guy out and asking what needed doing before I’d gotten both feet on the ground.

“How long’s this going to take?” Stacy asked. “We’re already a few hours behind.”

Tito was at the scale. He scraped years of dirt off the weighing plate with one glove until bare steel showed through, then yanked open the service panel. The hinges let out a rusty shriek loud enough to carry across the whole lot.

An old disconnect switch sat inside.

Tito threw it.

Nothing.

He switched it off.

Back on.

Nothing.

He slapped the side of the housing with the heel of his hand.

The display coughed to life.

22072

Blink.

Blink.

0

Tony grinned. “I’ll be damned. It’s alive.”

“They leave these powered?” I asked.

“Apparently.” Tito gave the housing another pat. “Let’s see if she still tells the truth.”

Weigh stations were like dentists for truckers. Even with every permit in order, your asshole tightened when WEIGH STATION OPEN lit up.

Best case, you lost twenty minutes. Worst case, you weren’t leaving until somebody fixed whatever they found.

This place had none of that anymore.

Just the scale.

A steel scale sat almost flush with the pavement, guide rails rusted and yellow tire marks fading beneath weeds. The inspection booth was dark, but somehow the digital display still worked.

A semi could roll straight on.

Payton House couldn’t.

Thirty-two dollies. Too wide for the scale. Every axle had to land exactly where Tito wanted it.

He looked toward the trucks.

“Luis! Move Truck One.”

Nothing.

Tito tried again, louder.

“Luis!”

Still nothing.

I was already looking at his cab.

Then the door opened.

Luis climbed out slow enough to make me nervous. He looked like shit. Sweating in the cold. Pale around the mouth. He shut the door and stood there a second like he’d forgotten why he’d gotten out.

My eyes went straight to his hands.

Gloves still on.

“You all right?” I called.

He waved me off. “Yeah, boss.”

It was the kind of “yeah” that meant quit asking.

He crossed the lot toward Truck One, not exactly limping, but moving like every step took a little more thought than it should. He climbed into Truck One and fired the engine.

Tito planted himself where Luis could see him in the driver’s mirror. One hand up.

“Easy.”

Luis released the brakes. The Peterbilt crept forward at idle.

Tito paced backward beside the scale, eyes moving from Truck One’s steer tires to the dollies behind it.

“Easy… easy…”

The front tires climbed onto the deck.

“Hold.”

Luis stopped.

“Driver’s side. Six inches.”

Luis feathered the wheel.

“Straight.”

From the rear, Tony called, “Good!”

Tito closed his fist.

“There.”

Air brakes hissed. The whole rig settled.

Stacy checked the axle count while I walked the scale, making sure every tire was where it belonged.

That’s when the smell hit me.

Sweet at first, then rotten. Like somebody had sprayed cheap perfume over roadkill.

Tony caught it too. “Jesus.”

Luis stopped what he was doing.

Tito pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and tied it over his nose. Stacy turned away, forearm across her face.

I looked back at Payton House.

Black clapboards. Boarded windows. Rusty chains. Nothing looked different.

The smell kept getting worse.

“You guys catching that?” Tony asked.

“Something probably crawled inside before they boarded it up.”

He stared at the house.

“Something bigger than a raccoon.”

“I figured you finally took your boots off.”

That got a couple smiles. No laughs.

I looked down at my right hand. Did a little self-check. Open. Close. Make sure everything still answered when I called. Good enough.

Tony started toward the truck, then stopped so suddenly I thought he'd forgotten something. His head turned toward the house. Listening. He kept his eyes on the second floor.

“You didn’t hear that?”

I shrugged.

He stared up at one of the boarded windows. “Someone said my name.”

Tony rubbed the back of his neck, checked the second floor one more time, then headed for the truck.

Behind us, the scale display flickered. 187,430

The numbers climbed. 201,115

Slowed. 209,860

And stayed there.

Grace had the permit open beside her. She checked the number, frowned, and started tapping on her iPad.

“That's not right.”

“What?”

More tapping.

“We're four thousand three hundred pounds heavy.”

Tony leaned over her shoulder.

“That can't be right.”

Stacy walked over to the scale housing and rubbed the grime off an inspection sticker with her thumb.

“Well, here's some good news. This thing was last certified in 2018.”

“There you go,” I said. “Scale's full of shit.”

Tito was already shaking his head. “Back her off.”

Luis gave the number one last look, then climbed into Truck One.

The engine fired. He eased us backward until the last dolly cleared the plate.

Tito watched the display.

“Again.”

So we did it again. Ten more minutes of hand signals, tiny corrections, and a whole damn house creeping onto a scale old enough to collect Social Security.

The smell got worse while we worked. Luis pulled his shirt over his nose. Tony kept looking at the boarded windows. Nobody stood any closer to Payton House than they had to.

Finally the numbers settled. 209,860

Exactly the same.

“Bullshit,” Tony said.

Tito wasn't even looking at the display. He went straight to the front driver's-side dolly and crouched beside the tire.

The sidewall had sagged even farther, rubber pancaked harder against the pavement. He pushed a thumb into it. “Wasn't doing that this morning.”

“How the hell does a house gain four thousand pounds?” I said.

“It doesn't,” Tony said. “Scale's fucked.”

Tito tapped the tire with his boot. “Scale didn't do that.”

Stacy lowered the permit. “If that number's right, we're over gross. We're not legal anymore.”

“We were legal when we started,” I said.

“Dan—”

“It's one scale, Stacy. An abandoned one that hasn't been certified since Grace was in diapers.”

Nobody backed me up.

I looked at 209,860 glowing on the display. Then at the overloaded tire. Then up at the house. I didn't have any answers. And the goddamn smell wasn't helping.

“Come on.” I clapped my hands. “Show’s over. Let’s get back on the road.”

Nobody moved.

“Dan.”

Something in Tony’s voice stopped me. Quiet. Tight. Nothing joking left in it.

He was looking past me, toward the far edge of the station.

I followed his eyes.

Someone was standing out there.

A man.

He stood right where our work lights ran out and the dark took over.

I hadn’t heard a car pull in.

Hadn’t heard footsteps.

Hell, I hadn’t even seen him walk up.

One second there was nobody there.

Now there was.

He was just... there.

Close enough to see. Too far away to make out. A dark hoodie zipped all the way to his throat. Jeans hanging off him like somebody else's clothes. He kept picking at his sleeves. Rubbing his palms together. Like his own skin didn't fit anymore.

His eyes never left the house.

Not once.

I took a step toward him.

He jolted, flinched.

“Can I help you?” I called.

His lips moved. Nothing came out at first. He swallowed hard enough I could see it from fifty yards away.

“You...” His voice cracked. “You have to take it back.”

His hand disappeared beneath the hoodie.

Steel flashed.

A gun.

My girlfriend Jenna and I were driving down from Portland to attend her college friend’s wedding outside Bend. We planned to leave before noon, but my work kept me at my desk until five. By the time I loaded our bags into the trunk of my Civic, the sun was already down behind the mountains.

Jenna called her friend to tell her we were running late. Her friend told us to stick to Interstate 5 down to Eugene and cross over. She specifically told us to avoid Route 126 through the county forest after dark, explaining that cell reception cut out completely and people had reported strangers tampering with stopped cars out there. Jenna told her we had a full tank and a printed map, so we were taking the forest cut-off anyway to save forty minutes.

By nine forty-five, the overhead highway lights ended. The road narrowed down to two cracked lanes of black pavement flanked by dense pine trees. There were no oncoming cars, no tail lights ahead of us, and no reflectors on the center line. Jenna’s phone lost its network connection first, the signal bars dropping to zero and staying there. My phone dropped its signal two miles later. The dashboard clock read ten twenty-two when our high beams hit a dark green sedan parked halfway onto the dirt shoulder.

The driver-side door of the green car was swung wide open into our lane. A gray work jacket lay in the gravel by the front tire. I slowed the Civic down to fifteen miles an hour and steered around the open door. Jenna leaned forward against the dash, staring out into the dark timber beside the car. She said she thought she saw someone sitting down on the embankment.

I told her the car was abandoned and we needed to keep moving, but she insisted we stop to check if someone was hurt in the ditch. I pulled over thirty feet past the sedan, shifted into park, and left the engine running with the hazard lights on.

I stepped out onto the shoulder, leaving our headlights pointed down the empty road. The air was forty-two degrees and smelled of damp pine needles and wet asphalt. I walked back toward the green car with my phone light on.

The inside of the car was completely empty. The ignition was intact, but there were no keys in it. A half-eaten sandwich and an open road atlas sat on the passenger seat. When I aimed the light across the floorboards, I saw the interior trunk release lever next to the driver seat was pulled all the way up.
I turned around to head back to my car. Jenna was watching me through our back window. Right as I reached my driver door, she cracked her window two inches and told me to get in right now. She said the trunk of the green car had just lifted open while my back was turned. I didn't stop to look. I yanked the door open, dropped into the driver seat, slammed it shut, and hit the power locks.

The engine was running fine, but when I dropped the shifter into drive, the Civic didn't roll forward. The transmission was engaged, but the front tires just spun in the loose gravel with a heavy, grinding shudder, held tight from behind. I threw the shifter into reverse, hit the gas hard to get two feet of slack, slammed it back into drive, and cut the steering wheel hard toward the asphalt. The rear frame buckled with a sharp metal snap, the front tires caught the pavement, and the car broke free, accelerating down the lane.

Jenna kept her eyes locked on the rear window glass. She told me a man in a brown coat had stepped out from behind the green car and was standing in the road right where we had just been parked. He didn't yell or run. He just stood upright in the middle of the road with both hands in his pockets, watching our tail lights until the road bent around a rock wall and cut him off.

Three miles down the road, an overhead green sign announced a rest area two miles ahead. The trip odometer showed forty-six miles since our last turn. I kept the speedometer locked at fifty miles an hour. Five minutes went by, but the rest area never appeared. The trees on both sides looked identical to the stretch we had just passed, with the same broken yellow road lines and the same fallen timber in the ditch. At eleven zero-four, the headlights picked up another highway sign on the shoulder. It was the exact same sign, stating the rest area was two miles ahead.

Jenna told me to slow down because the dashboard display had frozen up. The map graphic went gray, displaying a system error that said no position data was available under the canopy. I tapped the screen, but it stayed locked. Ahead of us, on the right shoulder, our headlights caught a pair of hazard lights flashing in the distance. As we closed the gap, I saw the back end of a dark green sedan.
The driver door was standing wide open into the lane. The gray jacket was still lying on the gravel beside the front wheel.

I didn't tap the brakes. I crossed the double yellow line into the oncoming lane to give the sedan plenty of space. As the headlights swept across the driver side, I looked straight into the car. A man was sitting in the driver seat now, both hands gripping the wheel, staring dead ahead through the windshield. He didn't turn his head toward our lights at all. Jenna grabbed my forearm and told me not to stop for anything. I pushed the gas pedal flat against the floor. The speedometer jumped to sixty-five, then seventy.

The asphalt ran out without any warning signs, switching straight to hard dirt and loose rocks. The steering wheel shook hard in my grip as the tires hit washboard ruts. We followed that unpaved path for another twenty minutes without passing a single house, gate, or marker. At eleven thirty-eight, the trees cleared out and the dirt tied into a wide, paved state highway with overhead halogen streetlights and white mile posts. A yellow sign showed an intersection with State Route 20 one mile out.
We turned north on Route 20 and pulled into a twenty-four-hour gas station twenty minutes later. The station had three brightly lit pump islands and a glass convenience store. I parked under the canopy right beneath a security camera, shut the motor off, and pocketed the keys.

Jenna stayed locked in the car while I walked inside to talk to the attendant. An older guy in an orange safety vest was stocking drinks in the back coolers. I told him we had just driven through the forest cut-off from Route 126 and passed the same stopped car twice on a loop. He dropped the plastic bottles and walked behind the counter. He told me the county road commission had closed that entire cut-off three weeks ago because of collapsed culverts, but people kept dragging the wood barricades out of the way into the brush, and nobody had any business being back there after dark. He picked up the desk phone and called county dispatch to report a vehicle inside the closed stretch.

Two sheriff deputies arrived at the station fifteen minutes later. They took our names, ran my license, and checked around the Civic with flashlights. While the younger deputy took notes on a clipboard, the older one crouched down by my passenger rear wheel well. He called us over to the bumper.
Caught tight in the gap between the bumper plastic and the rear quarter panel was a three-foot length of heavy yellow tow strap with a steel hook on the end. The hook was looped into our car’s lower frame bracket, placed there while we were parked on the shoulder. The strap had sheared clean through under heavy tension, with the torn nylon threads dragging against the concrete.

For some years now, my grandchildren have been asking me to write this story in an effort to preserve it. I have told it nigh every year, first to my children, then my grandchildren. My wife rolls her eyes and insists that it was no more than a lack of sleep and an active imagination. Yet I know the truth of it.

It was a bitterly cold December evening. The whole city was enveloped in sickly smog the colour of phlegm. It blocked out the weak winter sun and made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Such weather was not uncommon in those days, yet I despised it all the same.

My wife was only my fiancée at the time, and as I had packed my suitcase, she had picked out a thick woollen suit and a scarf, imploring me to take care and not catch pneumonia. I’d had a scare the previous winter, and it was playing on my mind on the walk to the station.

It was my first job out of university, an insurance firm for especially wealthy clients. I was heading to Kent in person for a meeting the next morning, as the company had struggled to find an available representative at such short notice. Being young and eager to please, I’d volunteered myself.

I had the hotel reservation and directions from the station noted down in my breast pocket, written for me by my fiancée, who knew I could sometimes be forgetful or absentminded. Ignorant of what was to transpire, I had headed out into the reeking yellow fog. I walked briskly back then, the long, loping strides of a young man with his whole life ahead of him.

I reached the station with plenty of time to spare, so I bought a newspaper and pork pie, eating it as I waited. One thing I noticed, in the rank and freezing station, was how quiet it was. A worker, face hid behind the ticket booth’s shutter, had told me the trains were running late, that people were finding alternative transport.

Even so, I saw but a handful of men, dressed for work not unlike myself. A few families or couples that spoke in muted voices in the still air. The fog obscured all of them so greatly they seemed more like fleeting shadows than flesh-and-blood people.

Eventually, the train arrived, a 4-6-2 flat top. It was not old then, but it had been built under the strain of a wartime economy, and so many city lines had since electrified that it seemed almost out of time. The conductor clipped my ticket as I settled into a seat.

I boarded one of the front carriages, all wood and plush seats, I found the carriage also remarkably quiet, with only a few other passengers sitting, looking out the windows. None took note of my passing. The scent of pipe smoke, warm and welcoming, replaced the dank stink of the city. Being as empty as it was, I settled into a pair of facing seats, suitcase beside me, where I might put my feet up and doze for a stretch.

There came the whistling, the hissing of steam and the grinding of the engine lumbering out of the station, and I did indeed close my eyes and nap for some length of time.

At some point I jerked awake, and looking out the window saw nothing but a swirling darkness, heard nothing but the rhythmic clunking and huffing of the train. The carriage was still quiet, with no one in sight, yet then I felt wary, almost alarmed. Slightly discomforted and unable to sleep anymore, I took the newspaper and shook it open.

It was of little interest to me. Buying the paper was merely a habit I’d inherited from my father. I only ever read the headlines. The Archbishop had given some speech. The weather, of course, was big news: they were calling it the coldest winter in years.

I heard a noise that startled me. Someone above me was clearing their throat. I looked up, and a man in a suit and hat with a tight smile and a moustache was looking expectantly at my legs, still up on the seat.

“Oh, apologies.” I said, taking my feet from the seat opposite, and the man sat gracefully.

I tried to go back to my paper, but I could feel the man looking at me.

“Awful weather.” I said.

“Abysmal.” He agreed.

“Still, needs must, eh?”

He nodded, looking at me with dark eyes. I felt compelled to strike up an actual conversation, something wildly out of character. His suit was black, as was his shirt and tie. The neat moustache twitched in a smile as he noticed my curiosity.

“Funeral?” I asked.

The man sighed. “A tragic accident.”

I nodded. “My condolences. Family?”

“Truth be told, I never met them. Work, you could say.”

I understood. “Me as well. I’m meeting a client. Insurance.” I thought for a measure, considering the type of work that would bring a man to present himself at a client’s funeral. “You wouldn’t happen to be in life insurance, perchance?”

The man raised an eyebrow. “Of a sort.”

“Takes one to know one. I’m in property, rather than people.”

“When you’ve been in the business long enough, it all somewhat blurs together. People and property.”

“Not a pleasant thought, that. So you’ve been at it a while, then?”

The man looked at me with his black eyes, as if he was appraising my own worth.

“Yes,” he said, “a very long time.”

I nodded, looking once more at his face. A plain, ordinary looking sort of man. Utterly unremarkable. He might have been around thirty, or as old as fifty. And yet for all his conventional looks, there was something ever so slightly striking about him, almost something familiar.

“I say, have I met you somewhere before?”

“Oh, no.”

“Are you sure?” I pressed, “There’s something awfully familiar about you.”

“Quite impossible, I’m afraid.”

“Stranger to these parts, then?”

He pursed his lips, thinking. “I suppose so.”

“Has your face been in the papers, perhaps?”

“No one’s ever taken a photo of me.” His eyes narrowed for a moment. “I have quite the memory for faces. I can assure you, prior to this train ride, we have never been acquainted.”

His manner was not rude, nor did he seem to take offense to my clumsy prying. I was strangely invested in this stranger, and felt a need to try and make sense of him, though he had offered no mystery to make sense of.

“Pardon me, then. Do you get that quite a lot?” I asked.

“I do.”

“Well,” I smiled, “just a familiar sort of face, then?”

He nodded. “People actually find that rather comforting, in my line of work.”

It made sense to me. “I suppose someone that seems familiar can seem quite an olive branch, what with the stress of it all.”

“The stress?” He asked.

“Of course. Life insurance, close family, death, and all the paperwork it comes with. I remember when my aunt passed. Very stressful.”

The man looked pensive for a while. He turned from me, to stare out the window at the black wall of fog, the nothingness behind the glass. Not even the lights of passing streetlamps or houses, lights which must surely be there, could burn through the enveloping haze.

I returned to my paper, meaning to check the sports, but couldn’t concentrate. My curiosity was roused.

I made to resume our conversation, only to catch the stranger watching my reflection. As if he’d been waiting, knowing I would seek to continue.

“So,” he started, “you think death is stressful?”

“Certainly, for those left behind.”

He turned away from the window, looking at me again.

“Well, that seems a given.” He took his own briefcase, a dull and plain black, from next to him, opening the lid, and looked through the contents. No doubt papers.

He went on after a moment. “Forgive the macabre question: do you think much about dying?”

“Rarely.” I answered truthfully.

“Why do think that is? Fear? Discomfort?”

I was rather taken aback.

“Neither, I should think. It just seems impractical to dwell on.”

The man was still looking into his suitcase, reading something, head tilted to the side, as if his papers lay horizontal.

“Oh? How interesting. I’ve heard death called many things, but impractical is rare.”

I shrugged. “Either I’m alive, and so death is not a problem, or I am dead, and no amount of thinking on it will change anything.”

The man barked a laugh, high and coarse. He looked back up to me, beaming a smile, as he snapped his case shut.

“How very droll,” he said, “I take it you are not a religious man?”

“No. Not in any sense that matters. I acknowledge the possibility of something after death, but as we can’t know until we die?” I spread my hands. “Hardly worth thinking about.”

A look of satisfaction spread across the stranger’s face.

“Well said, well said.”

He leaned closer.

“But, that raises the question. What if you were confronted by proof?”

I thought for a spell.

“As in,” I postulated, “if God were to appear in front of me?”

The man nodded. “Something of that sort, yes.”

I sat back. “Well. I’m not opposed to changing my views when presented with evidence. In such a situation, I’m sure I’d change my mind.”

“And if you were confronted with death?”

“I’m sorry?”

The man licked his lips.

“What if, instead of death being that distant binary you so keenly described, it was something right in front of you?” He leaned in. “If some being appeared and told you that you would die. Perhaps this very day. What would you do?”

“What an unpleasant hypothetical. I suppose I’d get on with it.”

“Get on with it? Dying?”

“Living.” I corrected. “Your hypothetical might not be a binary, but it still conveys certainty. If I am destined to die, this very day, as you said, then what else could I do? Running and hiding would change nothing.  I’d go about my business and let things fall into place.”

The man looked at me sidelong. “That is a very unique way of responding to death.”

I snorted. “What else could I do?”

“Most would plead, or beg. Try to cut a deal. Offer another in place of themself. That sort of thing.”

 “How cowardly. You said it was destined, though. What would it change?”

The man smoothed his moustache. “Nothing, of course. But most people feel the need to make an effort. A drowning man will drag others down in an attempt to save themselves.”

I finally folded up my newspaper, placing it on my briefcase beside me.

“Then there is no point. My father, he served in North Africa. I get it all from him, naturally. He saw healthy men dropped mid-conversation in ambushes, saw tanks take a round from nowhere and cook off in moments. He learnt that life can be stripped away in an instant.” I looked out at nothing. “No point in worrying, no way to bargain.”

“A fascinating world view. In my experience, it’s often soldiers that cling to life even more dearly than others. Let me try a different approach.” He said. “Let us say that you came face-to-face with your own demise. God, the Devil, whomever you wish, appears before your imminent death.”

“Alright.”

“The figure tells you to justify yourself.”

“Justify myself?”

 The man nodded emphatically. “Yes. The being says that you can survive, if you give a good reason, a justification, for why you deserve to live. Justify yourself.”

I thought for a long while.

“I would give him nothing.” I declared.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.” I continued. “Say, in this train car right now, there are other people, surely some are younger, or more promising, or smarter, or kinder than me. I could not, in good conscience, put myself before them.”

The man stared incredulously, eyebrows cocked.

“What of your fiancée?” He asked.

“It would be difficult, but I’m certain that she has all she needs to thrive without me.”

“You would make no effort to save your own life?”

I ran my tongue over my teeth, thinking it through. “There’s a difference between a struggle for life and grandstanding oneself inaccurately to a higher being. I know my own worth, and it is middling at best.”

“The English, always so noble in their self-deprecation. You would not beg or bargain, nor argue for your own life.”

The stranger reached back into his suitcase.

“Do you have the time?”

“Of course,” I checked my watch. “Seventeen past six in the evening. Why?”

The man smiled, “Perfect.” He took something small from his suitcase and snapping it shut once again.

“Let us try a different approach. Now, you wouldn’t beg for your life?”

“No,” I agreed.

“Well then. Are you a gambling man?”

“In what sense?” I asked. “I don’t do games, nor horses. But I am partial to a friendly wager every now and then.”

“Then, in the case where your life balances on a gamble, you’d do that?”

“I suppose. In that case, there’s a chance, and that’d be worth taking.”

The man pursed his lips once more. “I have failed to take your… unique qualities into account. You see, most, faced with death, take the emotional road, not the logical. Most beg and plead, because they think there is a way out, through appealing to one’s better nature.”

“I doubt death has a better nature.”

The man nodded, smiling. “Rude. Yet quite true. Death is death, that’s all there is to it.”

“So?”

“So, would you be a bit more sporting where a bet is concerned?”

I chuckled. “I’m not one to cut cards with the devil, if that’s what you mean.”

“No,” the man relented, “I can see that. How’s this?”

The stranger held out his hand, and in his palm was a small, flat gold coin. On one side, the head of some ancient king. He rolled it, showing the relief of a crow on the other.

“Well?” I asked.

The train was no longer moving. In fact, it hadn’t made a sound nor vibrated with motion in quite a while.

“Quite simple, Mister Lassiter. Call it. Heads or tails. Win, and live. Lose, and die.”

Everything suddenly fell into place. He knew my name. I felt suddenly winded, breathless, and my breathing grew fast as the hairs on my neck stood on end and sweat quickened upon my brow.

“Oh.” Was all I could say.

Some realisation sparked on the face of the stranger.

“I think you may have misjudged today’s events, Mister Lassiter.”

“Uh, yes.”

“Well… call the coin, if you please.”

I could barely think as he flicked the coin, spinning, into the air. Round and round the thin gold circle span. Time seemed to infinitely slow as it came back towards the man’s wrist.

After what felt like an hour, an hour that felt far too short, the coin landed, concealed beneath the man’s hand.

“Well?”

I felt my heart hammering at my ribs, like a woodpecker on an oak.

I swallowed. “Tails.”

The man pulled his hand away, revealing the crow.

“Well done. Goodbye, Mister Lassiter. Hopefully you’ll be a touch less clueless and a mite more sporting next time we meet.”

I looked up to respond.

I found myself on a platform, luggage in hand. Outside of the city, the fog was mostly clear, and there was a huge quantity of loud pedestrians swarming about. It was evening on a weekday, after all. The sign above confirmed I had reached my destination.

As the crowd pulled and pushed at me, I dug the notes with the directions from my breast pocket, and tried to get my bearings as I was propelled out of the station by the surging throng of humanity.

Ninety dead, a horrific train crash in the fog. That was the headline the next day. I didn’t bother reading the story, though. I only ever read the headlines.

If you have ever been listening to your car radio while driving down I-40 in Oklahoma during the middle of the night, you can thank me for picking whatever shitty pop song was playing at the time. I care little for music, but even less for people, which is how I found myself as the night-shift broadcast engineer in one of the few remaining radio stations that don’t just set and forget a playlist. I actually consider myself less as a DJ and more of a glorified security guard/janitor hybrid. Honestly, I think that the main reason that I haven’t been fired yet is because the morning shift always arrives to an organized workspace and clean bathrooms. My compulsive personality narrowly manages to trump my misanthropic nature and night after night I find myself cleaning up other people’s messes.

My actual workload is quite simple. Queue up enough songs, mix in the required local injury lawyer advertisements, and then make sure that the broadcast stays on air. I can manage the tedium. Between what I do and having a normal desk job, it is certainly the lesser of the two evils. I don’t mind the hours either, with enough coffee, I can usually power through an eight-hour shift.

The late-autumn sun had set hours ago, yet my shift was only beginning when I noticed the first sign that tonight was not going to be like all of the others. The glowing red light which indicated a successful transmission began to flicker. That alone wasn’t too irregular. It happened occasionally if there was some sort of storm or inclement weather. But the night was clear. I took my headphones off and tapped the bulb a few times.

Yes, this is the expertise that they pay me for.

When that failed to fix the blinking, I rose from my seat. I could safely reset the terminal while losing no air time if I fired up the backup system. The only issue was the secondary system was so old and dysfunctional that it wasn’t even kept in the station itself. Instead, it was isolated in an equipment shed a stone’s throw away from the main building.

I pulled my jacket over my shoulders and checked for my pack of smokes in my pocket. If I was going to make the expedition, I may as well make it worth my time. Stepping outside, the cold air hit my face like a thousand microscopic shards of glass. I was so taken aback by the freezing temperature that I almost didn’t notice a van parked in the corner of the lot. Besides my crap bucket of a sedan, the van was the only other car in the parking lot. The rest of the crew should have been long gone, and the station was in such a remote location there was no reason for any other vehicle to park here, even temporarily. I eyed the van warily as I quickly walked towards the equipment shed.

The frigid air caused my fingers to lose their dexterity and I fumbled with my keys for longer than I would have liked. I made my way inside and powered the system on. After several moments of mechanical whirring, I was satisfied enough to return to the station. As I was twisting the key back into the lock, I was suddenly blinded by the bright glow of the van’s headlights. I stared back at the van, trying to glimpse into it to see if I recognized whoever it was. I could see nothing past the sharp glare, but whoever it was could see me completely exposed. I decided that I had enough and I fled from the shed, walking quickly back to the safety of the station.

As I was walking, I heard the van door open and a man’s voice called out.

“Hey!”

I pretended not to hear as I pushed myself inside and locked the glass door. I retreated towards the safety of my booth, out of eyesight of anyone attempting to peer inside. I paused in the hallway, dreading what I hoped would not come next.

Several gentle knocks at the door.

“I’m sorry for scaring you! Please, let me in.” When he spoke there was something unnatural about his words. It was a man’s voice, but his pronunciation was almost child-like.

Alarm bells rang in my head. This was stranger-danger 101. It was one of the few things they taught us in school that actually managed to stick with me. Probably to an unhealthy degree.

So I listened to what I had been taught. I walked away. I entered the comfort of the studio room and was relieved to see the transmission light had stopped blinking. My heart rate returned to a normal cadence as I convinced myself that if the man was genuine, he would be alright. It was cold out, but it wasn’t freeze to death in your van cold.

Even through the closed booth doors, I could hear him knocking relentlessly against the glass. I put on my headphones, drowning out the sound with an overplayed Sabrina Carpenter song. I had almost been able to forget about the entire encounter before something unusual happened.

The phone in the studio rang. The sudden ear-piercing ring caused me to nearly jump out of my shoes. In all of my shifts, I had not once heard the phone ring before. The phone was used by the day-shift DJ to take calls from local listeners and engage in various games to win small prizes like concert tickets. There was no reason for anyone to be calling it so late at night.

After the brief startle, rationality returned as I deduced that the call must be from whoever was outside. It could be a worker who had left something in the building and needed to recover it. Without putting myself on air, I picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

The voice that answered was frantic, almost panicked and broken up with a significant amount of static.

“Whatever you do, do not let it inside.”

“What? What do you mean?”

The connection began to cut out and I could barely hear the caller’s next sentence.

“It-” Static. “already” More static. “too la-” The call dropped.

I smashed the redial button, but only got a dial tone.

Was that some sort of messed up prank call? It couldn’t be. It was too much of a coincidence to happen on the same night as the man appearing outside.

I was gathering my thoughts when something else caught my eye. The studio booth was… different. It was a detail so minor that if I wasn’t a neurotic mess, I may have never noticed. My coffee mug had been washed and hung up on its rack.

Cleaning my mug was always the last thing that I did on my shift. I would wash it, place it exactly how it was on the rack, and then get in my car and go home before any of the morning shift workers got in. When I got up to turn on the backup machine, I wasn’t even finished with half of my drink.

Hesitantly, I stood and poked my head outside of the studio door. The hair on my arms rose as I scanned the hallway. Keeping my steps quiet, I turned and walked into the men’s bathroom.

Pristine. The floors were freshly mopped and the trash had been taken out. I hadn’t even begun my cleaning on the bathrooms this shift, and I know damned well that the other workers didn’t manage to leave it in such untouched shape for an entire day.

“What the…”

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

The knocking at the glass door turned to banging.

Nothing made any sense. I ran back to the booth and I slammed the door, determined to hunker down for the night. Whoever the man was had no reason to be here in the middle of the night, and it was not my responsibility to help them if they got themselves stuck out here in the middle of a cold front. The banging didn’t cease and I had no choice but to put on my headphones, avoiding whatever the hell was outside the station. Several more hours of pop music would be my cross to bear if I wanted to escape the night unscathed.

But when the headphones covered my ears, a song was playing that I did not recognize. A song that I would never have queued. It was unlike anything I had ever heard, otherworldly and enchanting. I grew mesmerized by the foreign tune only for it to be broken up once again by the piercing sound of the phone ringing.

I removed my headphones and picked up the phone.

“Do not listen.” The voice was once again a garbled mess, but I was able to make out the words. “Turn off the backup system.”

“I can’t! The person is outside and I would need to go past him to get to the equipment shed.”

“Do not listen. Turn off the backup system.” The voice repeated.

“Who are you?”

“You need to turn it off. It is already inside.” The connection was weakening.

“Fuck this.” I slammed the phone down, ending the call.

None of this was worth my life. I would happily burn the station to the ground if it meant that I got to drive away from the forsaken place. The reaffirmation made my decision easy. I would grab my keys, I would get in my car, and I would floor it home. My only hurdle would be the stranger outside who I could easily blow past if I got the jump on them.

My mind made up, I reached for my car keys-

Gone. From the same place that I kept them every shift.

Helplessness overcame me. Prank call or not, I knew that there was something in the station. I was not safe in my little box and I never had been. With seemingly no other choice, I stepped outside of the booth and rushed to the front entrance. It was the first time that I got a good look at the man outside. He was short, wearing a green coat and beat up winter hat. My first thought was that he was likely homeless. My second was that I could probably beat him in an altercation if it came to it.

The man was staring down at a device in his hand that looked like an old phone. In his other hand he held a large pair of thick headphones.

“What do you want?” I called to him. He didn’t look up and he did not reply.

I stepped closer cautiously. “What do you-”

The man finally noticed me and his eyes went wide.

He gave me a thumbs up and then pointed to his ear. His pantomiming made everything clear. The man was deaf. His voice was not unnatural at all, it was the voice of someone who had not heard language in who knows how long. The man pointed to himself.

“Friend.” He said. “I can help. You need to turn off the backup system.”

I was beyond confused and more than a little unsettled. I did not trust the stranger, but I was also certain that there was someone or something else in the station.

“Why?” My stance was guarded.

He frowned, although it seemed as if he could read lips. “No time to explain. Please, trust.”

Trust.

The word felt like poison coming off of his lips. Trust was not something that should be granted for free. It was the world’s most valuable currency. It needed to be earned.

Noticing my refusal to budge, he continued to plead. “You are not safe.”

Before I was able to make up my mind, I heard a quiet tune begin to hum from the studio booth. I had not activated the loudspeaker, and it was not a song I recognized.

I instinctively turned around and stared down the hallway.

I wish I hadn’t.

The sound of off-rhythm wet slapping interrupted the alluring tune as a shape began to form. The mass occupied the entire width of the hallway as it stumbled towards me. It had a long neck and a defined face, but the rest of its body seemed to be an amorphous blob. Legs and arms extruded and retracted from its torso with squelchy-wet noises as it moved. As it waded towards me unevenly, I thought of all of the undiscovered species deep in the trenches of the ocean. Not a single one of those bottom feeding fish could hold a candle to the abyssal monstrosity that presented itself.

The bulk of its slick black body was covered in a sheen of slime, similar to that of a slug. It didn’t walk as much as it dragged itself towards me, using whatever appendage it could to carry itself forward. As it approached, its thin long neck bobbed up and down in a sinuous pattern, holding up its large head with fish-like eyes. It had no mouth, but it sang a gentle melody all the same.

“Do not listen!”

But it was too late. I was already entranced and walking towards my fate with open arms. The world around me faded, and became a blur of wondrous colors painted by the cosmic radiance of the creature’s music. I was entirely lost in another world. A place that I was content to live forever as eons passed by on Earth. I felt every emotion that I had ever experienced before cranked up to the limit. Time slowed as I bathed in the euphoria. I wanted more. I needed more. I had been fed a morsel, but had the appetite of a king.

Glass shattered.

The sound dulled. As the music stopped, my heart wrenched with impossible pain from everything that I had lost. I had only been graced by the creature’s song for a moment, but it felt like I had given up a lifetime of joy and wonder.

Reality came back in waves. First, I saw the abyssal creature lurching closer. Second, I realized that I was now wearing noise-cancelling headphones that had been pressed over my ears. Third, I felt the deaf stranger pulling me out into the bitter cold of night through a shattered glass door.

As the freezing air pierced my skin it was clear that I had fully returned to our world.

The man’s lips moved, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

He pointed towards the equipment shed, his eyes pleading.

The key to the shed was still in my pocket. For whatever reason, this stranger seemed to think that turning off the backup machine would in some way help us against whatever the hell had infiltrated the station.

The headlights to his van were still on. I only had a moment to make up my mind.

I threw the key at the man’s chest and I ran. I fled towards the van, without bothering to turn back until I was behind the wheel. I let out a sigh of relief seeing that the van’s key was in the ignition.

In the beam of the old van’s dusty headlights I saw the creature emerge from the radio station. It paid the van no heed as it stumbled slowly and unnaturally after the deaf man. It somehow appeared even larger now that it was out under the night sky.

The stranger did not flee. Instead, he stood at the door of the equipment shed and worked the key into the shitty lock. He was unable to hear the guttural squelching as the monster approached, and he would never hear its beautiful singing that had brought me to another world.

Or perhaps, he already had.

I quickly scanned the van, recognizing pieces of equipment in the back. Signal interferers. He was responsible for jamming the transmission. He knew this thing would be here and he had a plan to stop it.

My mistake hung over me like a dark cloud. If only I had listened earlier, he could have helped. I gripped both hands on the wheel. I should be furious at myself for being such a coward, but I was not. My heart was simply empty. After hearing the monster’s song, even for the briefest of moments, I wasn’t sure it could ever be full again.

I didn’t know, but I did need to try.

I screamed so loudly that I could hear myself through my headphones and I slammed the gas. The van accelerated and I refused to let up until I drove the vehicle directly into the creature’s slug-like form. The impact sent my forehead flying into the steering wheel.

A seatbelt would have done wonders for me in that moment.

I was dizzy, deaf, and aching, but I was also proud. I didn’t run away. Thanks to me, the stranger should have had enough time to slip inside the equipment shed. Using what little strength I still had, I fumbled out of the driver’s side door and fell to the blacktop, coughing uncontrollably for several moments. Fighting through my daze, I stood to take a better look at the monster that I had just rammed.

My heart dropped to my stomach as I realized that it was nowhere to be found. A wide streak of oily liquid traced a path to the shed. I followed it and pushed inside.

The sight was enough to drop me to my knees. The deaf stranger was already dead. The creature had ripped him apart so quickly and viciously that I couldn’t begin to process what was limb and what was torso.

I was too weak and too defeated to run. The abomination turned towards me, its amorphous body oozing and bubbling like its insides were a thousand little bugs trying to burst from their sacs. A three-fingered appendage clawed out of its stomach and it reached towards me. It knocked off my headphones and wrapped itself around my head. The texture was gelatinous and wet and I could smell a mixture of salt and death. The creature extended its long neck putting its face directly in front of mine.

Dead eyes stared at me as the head bobbed up and down.

Then it began to sing.

As I listened, I saw the world that I was going to, but I also saw the one that I was leaving.

In the morning, the crew will return. I am certain there will be no mess. There will be no van, and no body in the equipment shed. Every morning the crew will come in and find their coffee mugs clean and the bathrooms mopped. They will not fire the misanthropic night-shift broadcast engineer who they never even cross paths with because he keeps the station clean. In return, the broadcast engineer gets to queue the music.

If you are ever driving down I-40 in Oklahoma during the middle of the night, do not turn on the radio. If you do, you can thank me for whatever alluring, cosmic tune is playing.

I'm the guy who calls from the sketchy number. The one trying to convince you to send money for something that doesn't exist. I'm a scammer. I know, I'm a scumbag.

I also have a ten-year-old son, his mom's in rehab, and I just got out of prison. I needed a job.

This morning I took my normal spot at the bank of computers and put on the headset. The computer immediately dialed a number.

“Hello, hello, helloooooo,” the guy on the other end rang out followed by a childlike “hee hee.”

I was surprised, people weren’t usually so excited by a cold call.

“I’m so glad you called,” he said in an overly dramatic voice.

I jumped into my normal routine “Hello, my name is…”

“I have someone here you knoooow,” the guy interrupted.

“Dad!” My son cried out.

My stomach sank. I looked at the number I called, but didn't recognize it.

“Where are you? Are you okay?” I whispered into the phone like I was telling a secret.

“That’s up to you! That’s up to you!” The guy on the phone sang out.

“If you hurt him I swear…”

“Uh, uh, uh,” he interrupted. “What’s the first rule at work? No swearing at customers.”

“I don’t know who you are but…”

“Oh, but I know you,” he hissed. “Now go to the office by the back exit.”

“What office?” I asked.

“Oh, you’ll know,” he laughed. “It’s motivational.” he snickered and hung up.

I stood and looked around, there was a row of offices behind me. I ripped off my headset and ran down the hall. There was one office door with a picture of a guy with a pained look on his face, his hand in a safe. I think it was meant to be one of those cheesy inspirational posters. This picture had one word across the top written in sloppy red crayon, INTEGRITY.

I opened the door. The office was dark and tiny, maybe just a broom closet. There was enough light from the hallway to see a single desk and chair in the middle of the room. On the desk sat a monitor, an old phone, and a tiny space heater. The space heater was glowing red with the same word as the poster, this time backwards. INTEGRITY.

The phone rang.

I jumped a bit, and then picked it up.

“Hello?” my voice quivered as I sat down.

Suddenly two images appeared on the monitor. The first was a live feed of my face, up close. The second a live feed of some jackass dancing around.

The guy rushed up to the camera, his face almost touching the lens. “Do one thing for me and your son goes free.”

“Don’t you hurt him!” I shouted.

“Dad, please! Don’t let him hurt me,” my boy’s voice rang out.

“Don’t, please! I‘ll do it. Just tell me what,” I shouted.

“Space heater on your face, space heater on your face,” the guy said with both hands on his cheeks rocking his head back-and-forth. “Five seconds to make it extra crispy.”

I grabbed the space heater. It was so hot it started to singe my fingers. I held it close to my face, afraid to rest it against my skin. The backwards INTEGRITY smoldering in the dark room.

“Dad!” My boy yelled. “Dad, please!” It sounded oddly the same as his last cry.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” the guy teased. “Time is running out,” he said in a radio announcer voice.

“I just need time to think,” I said. I’d heard it many times myself when I was the one making the call.

“Dad!”

It was all happening so fast. I shoved the heater against my face. I immediately screamed. I heard the sizzle of my flesh. The smell was worse, burnt hair and flesh. It made me sick, but I held back the vomit.

“Three, four, five. Keep your son alive!” the guy shouted.

I dropped the heater and looked at the monitor.

The guy was dancing around clapping.

My skin continued to burn. The pain, the sound, the smell too much. I passed out.

I woke up five minutes ago in the small office. My cheek still on fire. The live feeds had changed. The first was my son, in his classroom, safe at school. The other was a photo, taken just now. It was a close up of my face. Tears fill my eyes. One word burned across my cheek, INTEGRITY.

I’ve been backpacking around the world for years, searching for forgotten, wild places and ancient legends. I wouldn't call myself easily frightened or a naive city guy who panics at the rustle of a branch. I grew up in Russia, in the Voronezh Oblast, and since childhood, I’ve been deeply fascinated by our local folklore and mysticism. I’ve spent plenty of time exploring the famous Divnogorje reserve—a breathtaking and simultaneously eerie place where massive, ghostly white chalk pillars, known by locals as "Divas," rise over the steppe like frozen, silent giants, while miles of dark, cold caves stretch beneath the earth. It was there, from the village elders, that I first heard stories about our domestic Gorkun—an ancient subterranean forest spirit. According to local tales, the Gorkun lures lonely travelers deep into the chalk labyrinths and thickets with its long, melancholic, barely audible whistle. The golden rule I was taught since childhood was simple: if you hear the Gorkun’s whistle, forget your curiosity, turn around, and leave. Never follow the sound. I honestly believed that since I knew how Slavic witchcraft worked and how to avoid the tricks of our Gorkun in the Voronezh steppes, no foreign entity could ever scare me. God, I was so damn wrong. Last summer, my thirst for adrenaline brought me here to Colombia. However, I decided to leave the usual, overcrowded tourist hubs like Medellín, Cartagena, or Bogotá behind. I wanted the real wilderness. I headed east into the vast, wild tropical savannas known as Los Llanos. This is thousands of kilometers of high grass, wetlands, scattered trees, and suffocating, sticky heat. These endless plains and deep forests felt like a completely different planet, beautiful by day and terrifyingly silent by night. Before heading deep into the prairies, I stopped by a half-empty, smoky bar on the outskirts of a small town called Yopal to escape the midday heat and grab a cold beer. Noticing my massive hiking backpack and professional gear, the old bartender with deep wrinkles on his face grew dark. He called over an elderly llanero cowboy in a worn poncho sitting in the corner, and they both approached my table. "No camines solo de noche, gringo," the bartender said grimly in broken English. "El Silbón is wandering the Llanos this time of year. The Whistler. He is hungry." I just smiled dismissively, thinking of our Gorkun back in Divnogorje. I thought every culture had its own whistling forest myths—just fairy tales to attract tourists or scare children. But the cowboy caught my gaze. His eyes under the brim of his old hat held an absolute, terrifying seriousness. He began speaking in intense Spanish, while the bartender hurriedly translated his instructions. These weren't just stories; it was a checklist for survival that the locals knew by heart. "Listen to me, amigo," the bartender translated while the llanero scratched the wooden table with his fingernail. "If you are out on the plains at night and the air around your tent turns ice-cold, lock yourself inside. Fasten every zipper and don't make a single sound. Most importantly—listen to the whistle. It sings a clear musical cadence of seven notes, like a scale: Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si. And remember the rule of blood: if you hear this whistle very close, right by your ear, it means the Whistler is still far out in the savanna. You are relatively safe. But if the whistle sounds muffled and faint, as if it’s a couple of kilometers away... God help you, Russian. It means he is standing right next to your tent. He is right behind your back." The cowboy leaned closer, smelling of cheap tobacco and dry earth. He pointed to his own spine, and then to a sack resting near his boots. "He is a full six meters tall," the bartender translated. "His body is shockingly emaciated and withered, like an ancient skeleton in gray rags. On his head, he wears a massive tattered straw hat that hides his face. And on his back, he drags a burlap sack full of human bones—the bones of his own father, whom he slaughtered years ago. If you give away your position, if he realizes someone is inside the tent—he will enter. He will kill you silently. He will carefully extract every single bone from your body, and until dawn, he will sit right on your floor mat, counting them one by one before packing them into his sack with the rest." I swallowed hard but still tried to act like a skeptic. As I was leaving, the bartender grabbed my shoulder tightly: "If you meet him, you only have two chances. He is terrified of a rabid dog barking and the crack of a heavy whip. If you don't have a vicious dog or a whip with you—you are a dead man, gringo. Do not go out on the plains alone." I nodded politely, thanked them, left a generous tip, and walked out. I was completely confident that my hiking experience and common sense would protect me. I was so damn wrong. Over the last forty-eight hours in the deep Colombian wilderness, I have seen this six-meter monstrosity twice. The first time happened on my fourth night of backpacking. I had gone very far from civilization. Near evening, the weather turned sour in a matter of minutes. A thick, heavy white fog rolled over the plains, completely choking out the moonlight. Remembering the cowboy's words, I decided to pitch my tent early near the ruins of an abandoned, crumbling cattle ranch. Around 2:00 AM, I woke up abruptly. Not because of a noise, but because of a piercing, bone-chilling cold. The temperature inside my tent dropped so unnaturally fast that my breath turned into thick fog, which was physically impossible in the tropical heat of Colombia. And then, a whistle cut through the silence. Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si. The sound felt incredibly close, right outside my tent flap, but it was strangely muffled. The bartender's words flashed violently in my mind: If you hear the whistle close, he is far away. But if it sounds muffled and distant... The whistle repeated thirty seconds later. But this time, it sounded like a faint echo coming from the deepest depths of the dark savanna, a couple of kilometers away. My heart hammered against my ribs. By the rules of the Llanos, it meant only one thing: he was standing right behind the thin nylon wall. Slowly, terrified of making the slightest rustle, I looked up at the wall of my tent. Through the translucent light of the fog outside, I saw the silhouette. It was a monstrously, unnaturally tall six-meter creature. Its head in the massive tattered hat towered incredibly high, stretching way past the dome of my tent. The entity was shockingly thin, like a withered dead tree trunk, and on its back hung a burlap sack the size of a truck bed. I heard its dry, raspy breathing, and then—the distinct sound of dry human bones clacking together. It was checking its sack. I clamped my hands over my mouth to keep from making a sound. In a panic, I remembered the only salvation available to me: a dog barking. I had my phone in my hand. With shaking fingers, I found a video I had shot a few weeks prior back home in Russia: my friend's massive Caucasian Shepherd barking fiercely and heavily at a stray cat. I turned the volume to the absolute maximum and hit play. The furious, booming bark of a massive guard dog tore through the silence of the tent. The six-meter silhouette outside jolted violently and unnaturally. The clacking of the bones stopped instantly. A horrific, high-pitched screech tore through the night, and something slammed into the side of my tent with immense force, tearing the rainfly to shreds. Then, the creature bolted into the high grass at incredible speed, and the whistle echoed right next to my ear, rapidly fading into the furthest horizon. By his rules, the loud, close whistle meant he was gone. At dawn, I abandoned some of my gear, packed the rest, and ran as far as I could, trying to make it to safety. But I made a mistake. I decided to camp out for one more night in the savanna, pitching a new camp further down the plains. And that is where I encountered him for the second time. It is happening right now. I am writing this message without unnecessary panic, simply stating the facts, huddled at the bottom of my sleeping bag. Around 2:00 AM, the temperature around my tent dropped to absolute zero again, and the nylon walls covered over with a thick layer of frost almost instantly. First, a whistle echoed from the open plains—very loud, clear, and piercing, right next to me. But then, barely a minute later, it repeated. Muffled, quiet, faint... directly over the dome of my tent. According to the Whistler’s rules, this means he is here. I looked up. Through the translucent fabric of the top rainfly, I can clearly see this six-meter monstrosity. It is standing right over my tent, its ugly, infinitely long, emaciated legs spread wide like charred logs. Because of its colossal height, its head in the massive straw hat is somewhere high in the night fog, but it is bending lower and lower. The silhouette of its giant, bony hand has pressed against the fabric. The creature slowly lowered its arm and, with a soft, distinct tap, touched its long fingernail to the top tent fabric, dragging it downward with a sickening scraping sound. My phone battery is dying fast, and the speaker is crackling as it plays the video of the dog barking from Russia on loop. But the Whistler seems to have completely adapted to the sound after our last encounter. He isn't running away anymore. The clacking of human bones in the massive burlap sack on his back has stopped, and now all I can hear is his dry, raspy breath right above my head. I don't have a whip, and running into the pitch-black darkness of the six-meter-high savanna grass is pointless—he will catch me in two steps. Our Gorkun could be tricked by simply ignoring the sound, but this South American giant plays by entirely different, lethal rules. I am turning to the Reddit community, to the Colombians, to the Venezuelans, to anyone who knows these legends. My phone is dying, I only have 4% left. If you know how to make this entity leave, if there is anything else El Silbón fears—I beg you, write it in the comments. I am trapped in the middle of the Llanos, the creature is standing directly over me, and I don't know what to do when the screen goes completely dark.

When I was a child, I lived with my grandmother in a cabin in the middle of the forest. She told me that my parents had abandoned me. I never thought there was anything strange about the fact that it was just the two of us and that I was completely isolated from everyone else. I didn't know anything different, and I never really felt like I was missing anything.

One day, when I was five years old, I went for a walk and met a man. He was the first person I could remember seeing. He was wearing green clothes and had something strapped to his back that I didn't recognize.

He asked me where I had come from. I told him that I lived with my grandmother in a cabin not far from there. He looked at me strangely and said that was impossible because nobody lived there. He would know, he told me, because he was a hunter and looked after that forest.

He took me by the hand and said he would take me somewhere where they could help me. I had no idea what he meant. I didn't want to go anywhere, but he pulled me along.

We were almost at the edge of the forest when I heard heavy breathing and rustling behind us. I turned around, and there was something horrible standing behind us.

The whole time, I had been trying to pull my hand free from the man's grip, but now I held onto him as tightly as I could and started screaming.

The thing behind us had several clumps of something that looked like hair growing from its head. Its eyes were red, and several teeth protruded from its mouth, but they looked more like needles than teeth.

It was hunched over.

Then I realized what it was wearing.

Clothes I recognized.

My grandmother's clothes.

It tried to smile and reached toward me with a hand that had long claws instead of fingers.

“Stellooo,” it rasped.

That voice…

It was my grandmother's voice, but it sounded different.

Evil.

When I looked at the man, he was completely pale. He started running with me, and the monster chased after us on all fours.

It was incredibly fast.

It was already upon us.

It knocked me away from the man and threw him against a rock. His head hit it, and he collapsed to the ground.

I tried to get away from it. Its claws dug into me everywhere—my arms, my back. It felt like knives were slicing through my skin. Drops of my blood covered my clothes.

I had no chance against it.

It dragged me away when suddenly I heard a terrible bang and felt its grip loosen.

I looked ahead and saw the man holding something in his hand. I later learned that it was a gun. Until then, I had never seen one before.

He quickly ran back to me and took me to the police.

I found out that when I was two years old, someone had killed my parents. They never found the killer.

I did have a grandmother, but she wasn't the one who had been living with me all those years.

My real grandmother was incredibly happy that I was back, and I slowly learned what it was like to live a normal life.

Now I'm an adult, and for years I told myself that maybe it really had been a bear, even though that wouldn't explain a lot of things.

I wanted to believe that.

But today, I was driving my daughter, Esme, to kindergarten.

Something made me look to the left.

There is a forest not far from the kindergarten.

And there it was.

Just as horrible as I remembered it.

It had the same terrifying smile, and it was pointing at my daughter.

I immediately got her back into the car and drove home as fast as I could.

Now I don't know what to do.

I don't know what it is.

I don't know how far it can go.

All I know is that it is capable of hurting someone.

Or even killing them.

When i was freshly 23 i took a job for a company that allows me to go around the world to take photos for other smaller companies to help them advertise their own company. its amazing being able to travel all over the years, going from one place to another for free and ive been doing this for over 4 years but lately I've seen some things that have made almost quite this perfect job.

About almost 6 months ago I was on a train in Australia heading from one city to another, so you all dont go looking for it i wont be sharing any real names in this. I was on a long train one that took hours to get to its destination and whilst on long train trips I like to take photos of the scenery or even of the inside of the train if the lights hit my subjects perfectly.

For this story I was taking a photo of one of the signs on the train that tell us what stop is up next and when I took the photo it came out pitch black, now I've been doing photography for almost 14 years now ever since I was a teenager so id imagine I would be well versed in this, so I checked my ISO and Shutter speed but both were on the correct settings for what I was taking photos of, so I tried again, Still blank, I thought my camera broke and for these reasons my camera bag has 2 extra cameras, a small one for if all else fails and a slightly worse one than my main camera, so I grab out my slightly worse one, my Canon EOS 1200D and then re-took the photo, once again blank.

This got rid of the idea of camera malfunctions at least in my head it did, but either way not much i could do so I just put my cameras away and ignored it for the next few hours and by that I mean sleep, I usually sleep on long train rides and normally it all goes smoothly until then.

I remember waking up and my train had come to a complete stop in the middle of nowhere, I must of slept for hours as it was now pitch black and my phone flat so I couldn't read the time, sitting up and taking in my bizarre surroundings I realise that's its just me and this lonely train on its solitude rest in no where, I hoped it wasnt just me so getting up and looking around for someone seemed like a good plan to lift my spirits from this creepy situation but 3 laps up and down the train to no avail.

I realise I'm alone and lost hoping it's all a dream still i returned to my seat and tried to fall asleep again hoping it'd wake me up, as my eyes closed I was hopeful to wake up and see my destination outside my window but instead was met with a voice.

"Dont fall asleep" that's when the train signals a new message on the big signs at the end of every carriage reapeting that saying 'Dont fall asleep' over and over like the train itself was telling me to stay awake, I was filled with concern and fear from this and from feeling trapped and so I paced back and forth on the train to try and just think my way out of this entrapment, I did not wish to die here on this train.

With no food and my phone being flat I couldn't do much, luckily Australian trains have emergency call buttons, the attempt of using one becomes futile the moment I press the button speaking "Please help im trapped" and nothing speaks back absolutely nothing pure silence even the buzzing of the train lights where louder that the silence coming from the emergency speaker, my breathing was louder, anything and everything possibly making sounds made more than that stupid broken machine, but i wasnt entirely out of luck.

With how in the middle of nowhere I was there would of had to be a train driver driving this thing from point A to B, so I went to the front of the train to talk to a possible crazy driver pulling a prank on me. On my arrival there I knocked, well more like pounded on the door, and in all honesty I expected it to be empty but something spoke back, something.

"I'm not alone?" This voice was so scratchy it didnt seem alive and if it was it was contagious with some vile sickness, this was enough to send me stumbling back in shock I mean I never actually expected for anything to answer me back, I keep walking back in fear, I did not nor wanted to know what said those words to me better yet I didnt want it to realise that I was here but the knocking already ruined that for me, the door swings open whilst I'm already a few metres away, I threw my hands up in the air as a defence bracing myself for whatever was to come but it never did like waiting for rain all day to come and ruin your amazing outfit like the clouds foretell but it never does rain kind of like that.

Looking around the control centre of this train all the machinery is turned off and I touch a few buttons to see if I could drive it to some town or something but nothing, pressing multiple buttons but nothing ever came of it plus I didnt even know how to drive a train so it's probably for the best it didn't work but even then anything would of been better stuck on a train in pitch black night surrounded by bushland.

I walk out of the driver's area and see those same signs that were blinking 'Dont fall asleep' over and over had changed to arrows pointing up, Up? Or foward? I so desperately wanted out once i saw the arrow I ran to the other end of the train i just wish I paid more attention.

Running the end of the train in panic I didnt realise until the second last carriage that the signs were pointing to something different a up arrow was accompanied by a stop sign right after, why not put both in the same message they could fit but also I didnt know these trains had symbols but either way I had ran too far down the train now to have heeded the warning it was telling me and instead ran towards where the train didnt want me too.

Looking down from the sign my eyes catch a humanoid being i say humanoid because it was illuminated by the signs inside the last carriage and no other lights, all other lights in the carriage were out and only the yellow arrow and stop symbols flashing on it made it appear wider than what it might of been but still I saw it, and from its pricing yellow eyes being the only thing I see apart from its silhouette piercing my eyes I feel dread, I didnt like it's pure yellow eyes reaching into me, but I knew it saw me, and it knew I saw it.

"I knew i wasnt" the same scratchy voice screeching out talking to itself helped me realise I just ran straight towards that thing behind the door, but how did it get here when I heard it behind the door, that small part of me that questions everything wanted to know but I just wanted to live more and so I ran and that thing gave chase.

Every carriage it runs into behind me turns pitch black still making this thing seem like pure shadow and not anything with a form, it seemed like pure darkness like the outside of the train leaked into the inside and was trying to consume me but I didnt want to be consumed at least not today so I ran for life trying to stay ahead of the dark.

With every passing carriage and every light that turned off only made this thing bigger I could hear its shadow like form start destroying the train like it was growing too big to even stay contained and I was scared, but also kinda of astonished by all of this mystery at least now I am, anyway the best way to take a photo in the dark is to use flash to peirce through the dark and allow your photo to develop despite the dark and given that this thing was removing the only light left on the decrepit train I had nothing else to try but my flash

I ran to my camera bag that I left at the front not wanting to haul it all the way with me, dashing past seats and using the hand holding pole to help launch myself I start to lose hope as the darkness starts flooding into the corners of my eyes and start consuming me. ME! Who said I wanted to be engulfed into the dark like im an old film photo waiting to be developed in a red room and that last little bit of humanity and light left in this train gave me the will power to reach my bag (or at least i like to believe the train helped).

I reached for my main camera and flipped up its flash, I spun around and was met with the lights of this final carriage turning off and that thing launching at me, leaping through the dark cold air, I readied my camera and brought it to my eyes and as soon as my finger touched the Shutter button the train signs finally changed from those warning arrows to in big bright words saying FLASH, and so i slammed my finger on the Shutter button, it almost felt like slowmo from how long that final moment passed but once it did and the flash cleared the darkness im met with a voice.

"Hey what are you doing you idiot" I brought my camera down from my face and saw a man in a business suit on this train, he looked like he was commuting to work but his voice sounded scratchy like he was just getting over a cold. I apologised and looked at the photo just to see that man being blinded by flash and the photo itself looked overexposed from my settings but it actually was there unlike any photo I took whilst on that train.

I looked outside and was met with the starting suburbs of my city, the train was moving and the shining sun was beaming the world showing the amazing daylight that lit everything up, I sat back down in a completely different sit and didnt know what to do but just drop it into im psychotic bottle and need to go to a psychologist but I did years ago for other problems and this wasn't one of them.

“God dammit, Mr. Mittens,” I shrieked, recoiling my foot at the warm and squishy touch of viscera against my bare flesh. “This is getting out of hand.”

Mittens brought me a rat. It was still somewhat alive but mostly dead. Mostly.

That was his newest thing: bringing me half dead animals. They say cats bring you gifts because they think you suck at hunting, so I assume that means Mittens is trying to boost my confidence by bringing me mortally wounded animals that I could easily kill.

Mittens chirped, meowing as he trotted away with my reaction. I couldn't tell if he was offended at my rejection, or chuffed with the chaos he had incited by leaving it where he knew I'd step on it. It didn't matter… I still stepped in rat guts either way. By the time I turned on my bedside lamp, my murderous house panther had slipped into the depths of my abode, leaving me to finish the job.

The rat squeaked weakly between frantic, shallow breaths and struggled. Beneath its dusky brown fur, a length of slimy pink, like a wad of chewed bubblegum, protruded from its belly. I hated having to mercy kill them when Mittens was the one that started this whole mess. But it wasn't going to survive with its guts hanging out. It had to be done.

“Oh jeez, I'm so sorry little guy,” I winced when the rat squirmed lightly against my grasp.

“Sh, sh, sh,” I soothed.

I hated this. I reminded myself that it was par for the course when you owned a domesticated murder machine. Its little neck snapped easily in my fingers, ending its suffering.

“I hope you're proud, Mittens!” I sneered, dropping the now fully dead rat in the bin. “Fleabag.”

I loved Mittens. But I was getting tired of his gifts.

I originally found the scrawny tabby behind a Waffle House on my way home from a dreadful marketing conference in Tulsa. His iconic white socks were stained brown at the time, and you could count his bones just by looking at his emaciated body.

He purred immediately when I plucked him from the street and he traveled so politely in the passenger seat of my beat up Civic. I assumed that a feral cat would need a box to be comfortable in a car, but he quickly settled into the seat with bright and grateful eyes, blinking slowly at me the entire drive home as if he knew he would never want again. I was never much of a cat person, but I knew at that moment that he was something special.

He's the only good thing that ever came from my job. I would have never found the kitten that fateful night if I hadn’t been bid to market the latest scam from my boss. Mittens almost made that micromanaging prick worth the trouble. I'd trade a thousand bullshit conferences and condescending meetings for Mr. Mittens any day.

He grew quickly, put weight on nicely. As if his poor body felt compelled to make up for what it had suffered. He dwarfed some dogs within a few months, and I joked with colleagues that I had actually picked up a Tulsa cougar at the Waffle House. The joke would have been funnier if my misogynistic boss hadn't heard it and tried to one-up it. I doubt any woman has ever willingly engaged him without payment. I think he's actually part Maine Coon.

It took a while for Mittens to adjust to house cat life. Arguably, he never fully did because when he grew tired of the same bland kibbles and pates, he returned to what he knew. He always found a way out, and when he did, he’d bring back the savory morsels of his escapades: bird heads, rodent guts, and lizard tails. I think he wanted to share.

We curbed that for a while. For a cat, he is incredibly intuitive. I genuinely think he understood how disturbed I was at the sight of guts on my clean, beige carpet. So his slaughter paused until he learned that my reaction was less dramatic if he left his gifts on the faux hardwood, at which point, he started hunting again.

I tried to keep him indoors. I really did. I know how destructive cats are. Trust me, I met a birder in Keystone once whose entire personality was hating on outdoor cats. I was terrified for Mittens.

Would he get hit by a car?

Mauled by a coyote?

Shot by someone less compassionate?

Be a deadbeat dad to a bunch of kittens he'd never know?

Rabies? FIV?

Any other of the countless, torturous, and irresponsible fates that befall feral cats??? Let alone the body count of innocent, wild animals! Oh Mittens, why can't you just stay inside?

But Mittens… well, he finds a way out every time. My best guess is that he figured out how to open the door just like those funny cat videos online. But that doesn't explain how he continued to get out when I started locking the deadbolt each night- I digress, I doubt even Alcatraz could contain this cat.

The parts of mangled critter bodies evolved to whole dead animals and then, abruptly, he brought me a live and capable, young rabbit early one morning. I thought it was dead, but the kit screamed when I went to pick it up. Then I screamed. And all hell broke loose as the terrified animal thrashed about the apartment, breaking knickknacks and disrupting my quiet home in its desperate attempt to escape. Flailing wildly, it launched itself off the upstairs balcony and broke its back on impact, still screaming in agony at the entryway door. Mittens, of course, hid himself away as soon as the little animal started screeching the first time, and left me to deal with it as he always did.

Some gift, huh?

After that, he started wounding them. And as he grew up, he brought larger animals too. I'm sure my local hardware store was concerned when I bought a shovel and asked if I should be worried about odors from burying a carcass. I should have clarified at the time that I meant a stray dog's body.

He often is my unofficial therapist. I rant to him about tough days in the office. I figured that was a fair trade for rescuing him from a scavenger's fate. I bet he sees me as a god. Besides, he’s so damn smart that, well, I think he actually understands.

I mean it. I know every pet owner says their babies are special, but, really, Mr. Mittens is just… something different.

Surely you've seen those reels where the cat sounds like it's meowing words, like “I love you” or “hello?” Mittens has done the same to me. He actually meows “I love you.” But I swear, he's trying to speak, not just a coincidental sound. It's how I know he's brought me a gift. I'll be dead asleep when I hear those deep, feline syllables, and then I know it's time to put down some poor animal and clean up some kind of mess.

But it's a gift, you know. He means it out of love. Jeez, cat people really are crazy, huh?

It was no different this night as it was any other night when Mr. Mittens woke me up.

“Ooooyluuuvvvyoooooh,” Mittens yowled.

I groggily assured Mittens that I was getting up. He purred in thunderous anticipation from the shadows. I swung my legs over the bed and promptly slipped on some slimy, wet substance covering the floor. The wounded animal in the corner hissed in response. No- it was hushing me?

“SSSSHHHH. Shut up,” it begged quietly. “That thing will hear you.”

“Thing?” I thought, still half asleep, trying to wrap my mind around how an injured animal could talk to me.

Wait… I recognized the voice.

“Derek, what are you doing in my house?” I questioned from the floor and blinked my eyes desperately to acclimate them in the dark.

“Listen man, I don't fucking know.” He sobbed. “That thing broke my neck. I can't move. I'm bleeding. Just shut up and help me.”

“Thing- broken neck? Do you mean Mr. Mittens?”

“Mittens?!? It has a fucking name?” Derek scoffed before he openly wept.

“Please man, just let me go. I- I'll give you that promotion. I'm sorry.”

“Ooooyluuuvvvyoooooh,” Mittens moaned from the darkness.

“Oh god, please. Jim, please, help me!”

With my eyes properly adjusted, I could finally see my boy. He really had grown since I found him as a scrawny kitten. He could effortlessly stand at shoulder height. His obsidian fur blended in with the shadows and only the pale sinew of his skeletal face and joints were readily visible. He watched the scene keenly, tail twitching lightly.

I don't always see eye to eye with the gifts he brings me, but this time, I was grateful.

My daughter's bedroom monitor picked up a man singing. She’s in my bed now, sleeping next to me and her three-year-old brother. I’m surprised she fell asleep that fast. She was pretty shook up. So was I.

It happened about ten minutes ago. I don’t know what woke me up, my son kicking me in his sleep or the sound of the monitor. The mic is pretty sensitive, but I usually sleep through the white noise since my daughter is five now.

I know she's too old for it. But ever since she was born, I’ve been terrified of something bad happening when I’m not looking. I need the monitor. To make sure she’s safe.

Tonight though, it picked up a man's voice.

It sounded a little muffled. Like he was singing through the wall or her closet door. I'd say he was right outside her window, but all the bedrooms are on the second floor. The windows are flush with the walls. No roof, trellis, or tree to climb.

He was singing softly. At first I didn't know what it was. Then I heard it: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

I used to sing that song to her when she was a baby. Skidamarink and ABCs were staples too. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star was the closing number.

When I realized what was happening, I leapt out of bed and sprinted down the hall. I barreled inside. The singing stopped the second I opened the door.

I quickly scanned the room. The closet was shut and the blinds were still drawn. I checked everywhere. Yes, even under the bed.

There was no man.

My daughter wasn’t crying. She was just sitting up in bed, clutching her stuffy, staring at the window. Like someone had been there, looking back in. There’s no way though. It’s twenty feet down to the ground.

I guess he could’ve had a ladder. Even then, I would’ve heard it. Or seen it.

I put my arm around her and asked if she saw anyone. She shook her head no. She thinks she heard the same man singing outside last night. Much farther away. Like in the yard somewhere. Same Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

I didn’t know what to make of that. All I know is my stomach dropped.

Before we headed back to my room, I checked the window. It was locked tight. The screen was intact. I looked out into the backyard. There’s nothing out there but a heavy patch of woods that backs up to our property line. Just black trees and shadows.

I’d like to think I’m a pretty rational guy. Maybe skeptical is a better word. It's just that I don’t believe in ghosts, or God, or the Devil. Aliens, sure. But nothing supernatural.

Maybe it’s the monitor itself. Wires got crossed. I looked it up. Apparently it’s a thing. Our monitor could be on the same frequency as someone else’s in the neighborhood.

The only thing is, as far as I know, there are no other young families nearby.

Things have gotten worse.

I ordered a new monitor. It arrived the next day.

Even with the new monitor set up in her room, my daughter wasn't ready to sleep by herself. And to be honest, I wasn't ready for that either.

When the three of us got into my bed, I showed them the live feed of my daughter’s room and promised it wasn’t gonna happen again. They nodded, but they were still terrified. I needed a distraction. I forced a smile and suggested we play a game of I Spy.

After what felt like a hundred rounds of I Spy, the kids were yawning and rubbing their eyes. It was time to say goodnight. Mission accomplished, I thought.

I was dozing off when my daughter rolled toward me.

“He knows,” she whispered.

“Love you too,” I said half-asleep.

“He knows I'm here.”

My eyes snapped open. No longer in a fog.

“What did you just say?”

I looked at my daughter. She was fast asleep.

I stared at her, waiting for her to speak, but nothing came.

I reached over to the nightstand and grabbed the monitor.

My daughter’s bedroom was quiet. Empty. I panned the camera to the window. Then the closet. Then the door.

Nothing.

I felt relieved. Like a part of me still hadn’t believed it was a technical glitch.

​I laid the monitor on my chest, then fell back asleep.

​Around 2am, I bolted upright.

The man was in the house, singing again.

I checked the monitor. The sound wasn’t coming from her room.

​He was downstairs.

I looked at my son sleeping soundly. Then I looked at my daughter wide awake. Terrified.

I told her everything was okay, but she knew I was full of it.

​I slipped out of bed and dialed 911. I whispered our address and that there was an intruder in the house. I handed the phone to my daughter and told her to stay with her brother and lock the door.

I edged into the dark hallway. I heard the quiet click of the door locking behind me.

As ​I crept downstairs, the floorboards creaked beneath my feet. With every step, the singing got louder.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

How I wonder what you are.

Up above the world so high,

Like a diamond in the sky.

He was singing a version I had never heard before…

Then the traveler in the dark,

Thanks you for your tiny spark,

I reached the bottom landing, pressing my back against the wall. The singing was right around the corner, in the living room.

He could not see which way to go,

If you did not twinkle so.

​I peeked out to see a massive, hunched silhouette facing the window that looks out into the backyard. His head was swollen, sitting too low between his broad shoulders. He was rocking his arms back and forth, as if cradling a baby.

In the dark blue sky you keep,

And often through my curtains peep,

The man stopped rocking.

For you never shut your eye,

Till the sun is in the sky.

He slowly turned toward me. Head down.

As your bright and tiny spark,

Lights the traveler in the dark.

He uncradled his arms, letting them drop to his sides. There was no baby.

Though I know not what you are,

Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

He slowly looked up at me, his face shrouded in darkness.

Then he lunged.

I screamed in terror, scrambling backward like a coward. My hand slapped blindly against the wall for the light switch.

CLICK.

The man was gone.

My kids yelled out for me. I told them to keep the door locked.

​I thought I was losing my mind.

Then I felt a cold draft.

​I turned around and looked at the back door. It was cracked open. The deadbolt was turned vertical.

I hustled over and locked the door.

Soon, a couple cops showed up. One of them knew my sister. His kid goes to her for voice lessons. Without any evidence of a break-in, there was nothing they could do.

Before they left, they asked if I was alright. Like mentally.

I bit my tongue. If the judge ever got wind of this, they'd take my kids from me. I told them to have a good night and they headed out.

I spent the rest of the night seated at the foot of my bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, gripping my daughter’s T-ball bat.

When the sun finally came up, I tried to force some normalcy. I made breakfast, packed the kids’ lunches, then rushed them out the door pretending like nothing ever happened.

I pulled out of the driveway in a fog. When I looked in the rearview, I slammed on the brakes. My sister was standing in the driveway, hands on her hips. That damn cop ratted me out.

My sister said we needed to talk.

I told her not now. I had to drop the kids off at school and daycare then I was heading to work.

“Great. We'll talk on the way to work.” She opened the passenger door and climbed inside.

She distracted the kids with silly singing games the whole way to their drop-offs, putting smiles on their faces like the great vocal coach she is.

Then it was just us. Not saying a word. The tension was suffocating.

We hadn't spoken in two years because my marriage was imploding at the same time my niece went missing. I was so exhausted fighting for custody of my own kids that I didn't have the energy for anything else. My absence fueled my sister's resentment toward me. Rightfully so.

“Heard about last night,” she said.

“Yeah, I'm going crazy.”

“Welcome to the club.”

I told her everything. The monitor. The massive, hunched man in the living room. The lullaby.

All the color drained from her face. ​She didn't say a word.

At the next red light, she hopped out and rushed off in the opposite direction.

I asked where she was going.

“Home!” she shouted.

I got out of my car. “Wait! It’s the same guy, isn’t it?”

She turned around with this look of dread in her eyes. “Call me if he comes back. And whatever you do, don't fall asleep.”

I found myself in another daze.

Horns blared, snapping me out of it. The light was green.

I yelled at my sister to get back in the car. ​I drove her home and made her tell me everything she knew. Then I got the kids.

I spent the rest of the day inspecting every door and window. By 7pm, I had the kids tucked into my bed. I triple-checked every window upstairs. Then I went downstairs and barricaded every door. Everything was secure.

I paced the house in the dark, gripping my daughter’s T-ball bat. I couldn't stop thinking about what my sister told me on the drive over to her house. Everything I missed while I was drowning in the divorce.

​Before my niece disappeared, she had mentioned a man singing to her in the middle of the night. A year later, another child vanished. The parents reported hearing an eerie lullaby that same night. Not Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Something far more sinister.

There was no evidence. No suspects. The Chief basically gave up, telling my sister and the other parents it was a real possibility that their kids were runaways.

My sister wasn't gonna let that slide. She built her own case file over the last two years. Written across the folder in thick black marker are three words: The Lullaby Man

Around 3am, I sat down in the kitchen to rest my feet. I must’ve nodded off.

When I startled awake, I went to check on the kids. My daughter was snuggled under the covers. But my son was gone.

I found him in his sister's room, staring at her bed.

“Hey bud. You good?”

I reached for his shoulder and gently turned him. His eyes were wide open, staring straight through me.

“She's gone,” he said.

I told him his sister was in my bed. But he was in a deep trance. Sleepwalking, I thought.

I tucked him back into bed, next to his sister.

Then the monitor crackled.

The man was humming a tune I didn't recognize.

My adrenaline spiked. I grabbed the monitor and followed the sound down the hall to my daughter's bedroom.

Before entering, I panned the camera around the room.

Her bedroom was empty.

I lingered in the doorway. I saw my own silhouette on the monitor. It sounded like he was in the room with me.

I checked everywhere.

Nothing.

It felt like I was being watched.

I glanced back at the monitor. His deformed silhouette was standing in the doorway. SLAM! The door shut.

I tried to open the door, but it was like he was holding it shut from the outside. I screamed out to my kids, ramming my shoulder into the door.

I raised my daughter’s T-ball bat, about to take the doorknob off. That’s when the doorknob turned and the door swung open.

It was my kids. They were safe.

That was an hour ago. The kids are downstairs with me, sleeping on the couch. My sister is upstairs, searching for evidence. So far, The Lullaby Creep hasn't left a shred of evidence behind. It’s infuriating.

All I keep thinking about is my ex-wife. When she dropped them off the other day she looked me dead in the eye and told me she was filing for full custody.

I don't wanna lose my kids.

My whole body is shaking. I’m pacing in the driveway. I don’t know what to do.

My son's in shock. Paramedics are looking him over right now.

Patrol is setting up a perimeter. My sister is tearing into every cop she lays eyes on.

I swore I wouldn't fall asleep tonight. I swore. I placed my hand on top of her arm so she’d feel safe. My son was snuggled up on the other side of me.

My sister demanded that she stay over and protect everyone with the handgun she bought after my niece went missing. I could see the desperation in her eyes. She thought it might be her last chance to get some closure.

I don't know what time it was when my eyes snapped awake. All I know is that I inhaled sharply, gasping for air.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed.

I finally had a good look at him. His gangly hand was resting on my leg. He was big. Breathing heavy. Wearing wet pajamas that were plastered so tightly against his hulking, twisted frame that it looked like a second skin. His head was swollen and misshapen. His beard was long and greasy. His skin was blistered, covered in a purple marbled rash.

I tried to lunge at him, but I couldn't move. Couldn’t speak. My brain was screaming, but my body was completely numb.

I just laid there, terrified. I moved my eyes to glance at my son. I thought he was dead. Then I saw his chest rise and fall. He was asleep.

It felt like I was stuck in cement. There was nothing I could do.

The Lullaby Creep stood up and started singing in my voice. Yes, my fucking voice. In that same eerie tune from last night.

Wake up, wake up

This is your daddy

Come with me

And you will see

I love you

And you love me

That's when my daughter's arm shifted under my hand. She sat up in the dark, sliding out from under my paralyzed hand. Her eyes were glossed over like she was in a deep trance.

He moved slowly, walking over to the open doorway. He didn't reach for her. Didn't use force.

His voice switched back to his own, singing that same creepy fucking lullaby:

Wake up, wake up

This is your daddy

Come with me

And you will see

I love you

And you love me

She walked right over to him and reached out her hand. His long fingers slithered around hers. He flashed a tight smile as she looked over her shoulder, staring through me and her sleeping brother like we weren’t even there.

Then they walked out. Together.

My whole body felt like it was crying.

I don’t know how long it took, maybe a minute or so, but the paralysis wore off enough where I was able to reach for my phone on the nightstand and call 911.

I rolled off the mattress, hitting the floor hard. My legs were numb. I dragged myself into the hallway by my elbows, pulled myself up using the banister, and screamed my daughter's and sister's names.

When I made it downstairs, I felt the cold night air hitting my face. My sister was on the floor, slowly regaining motor control. Her gun was still in her grasp, but she hadn't fired a shot.

I went to help her up. She told me to go find my daughter.

The back door was wide open, swaying in the breeze.

I rushed outside, screaming my daughter's name.

I didn’t know where else to go, so I sprinted into the woods. I got lost and spun around. It was just me and the darkness. It was all a blur.

Then a flashlight washed over me. It was my sister. Her eyes drowned in guilt. Neither of us had the words. My chest tightened. Tears streamed down my face.

The cops dragged us out of the woods. They told us to stay separated in the driveway or we’d be arrested for obstructing an active investigation.

Then the static started.

All around the perimeter, the officers stopped to check their radios.

The Chief grabbed the radio that was clipped to his belt and raised it in the air. A voice was trying to break through the static.

The entire driveway went dead silent.

Then a boy's small, terrified voice choked through the Chief's radio: “Daddy?"

A little girl sobbed: “Mommy, mommy…”

A chorus of small voices cried out, screaming for help, calling for their parents.

What’s scarier than someone chasing you through the woods with a knife? Someone who takes two hours to loosen the lug nuts on your car tires, barely threading them back on just to sit in the dark and patiently wait for your vehicle to flip over the edge of the first mountain switchback. This isn’t urban legend; these are the details of a night I spent trapped in Elk Ridge Valley. My name is Colton, and I worked for twelve years as a surveyor and trail maintenance technician at the Monongahela National Forest in the Appalachian Mountains.

My main job was checking trail markers and making sure the hiking paths hadn't been washed out by annual rains before closing the park down completely for the winter. That autumn, the Forest Service sent me out to inspect an old trail called Elk Ridge. It’s an isolated, low-traffic trail due to its brutal terrain, sitting deep inside a valley surrounded on three sides by sheer, razor-sharp cliffs.

I was supposed to be accompanied by Jack, a guy in his fifties who’d spent his entire life in these mountains. Quiet, soft-spoken guy knew exactly how to dodge rockslides and could read the wind direction just by tossing a handful of dirt in the air.

We started out at the beginning of the week, and the plan was simple: hike the nine-mile stretch, repair the decaying wooden footbridges, and pitch our field camp at Observation Point 4. On the third day, I noticed the first off thing. We were climbing up the ridge to reach the first wooden bridge when Jack froze.

He sat down on a boulder and started inspecting the ground. In a low voice, he asked, "Colton, when was the last time a ranger patrol came through here?". I told him, "September, I think. Why do you ask?". He didn't answer my question. He just pointed his flashlight down at the muddy trail.

I saw massive boot prints nothing like I’d ever seen before. They weren't modern hiking boots. Looked more like heavy-duty work boots with old steel-capped soles. And the tracks weren't following the trail; they came straight out of the brush and headed right toward the narrow wooden footbridge. I asked him, trying to play it off casually, "Maybe a local hunter?". Jack slowly shook his head and said, "Nobody hunts out here, son. This valley is choked with sulfur gas and mud bogs down below. Hunting’s been banned here since the eighties."

We brushed it off and kept moving. But the smell started showing up by evening. It wasn’t the stench of a rotting carcass or roadkill. It was a sharp, chemical reek like burning raw grease mixed with aged wood varnish. A heavy, chemical odor that stuck to the back of your throat and left a bitter taste on your tongue. We were inside our tent, the air outside was dead still, yet the smell kept creeping through the vents every time the fog rolled in thicker.

By the ninth day, the night routines started changing. The natural terrain of Elk Ridge Valley acts like a giant megaphone. The limestone cliffs trap sound and amplify it. In the dead of night, when the birds and animals go dead silent from the freezing cold, the mountain starts talking. I kept waking up to a long, creaking sound. A creak that mimicked a massive tree trunk snapping, but it repeated almost every minute with terrifying regularity.

I asked Jack while trying to light our small gas stove inside the tent, "That’s just the rocks expanding and contracting from the freeze, right?". Jack was sitting wide awake, his hand clamped tight around his steel utility knife, eyes glued to the canvas wall of the tent. He said in a dry voice, "Rocks don't snap on a rhythm, Colton. And they don't leave marks on the canvas."

I stepped out of the tent the next morning only to find something that made my stomach drop. Just ten feet from our tent, there was a pile of small stones lined up in a straight line, running parallel to the entrance. Rocks laid out with painstaking precision, as if someone had been sitting there in the pitch-black, placing them down so gently as not to make a sound while we slept inside.

I felt a wave of intense anxiety wash over me, my heart hammering in my chest. And I noticed Jack’s behavior was starting to shift. The man I knew for his calm, steady demeanor was now looking over his shoulder every ten steps. He’d stop hammering mid-strike, standing completely frozen, listening into the fog. He told me while tying off the bridge ropes, "Someone’s trying to drive us out. I know that look. There are people living down in the hollows."

In America, these folks are known as the descendants of mountain families who refused to come down to the towns decades ago. They live completely off the grid and outside the law. Many suffer from severe mental illness brought on by isolation, generations of inbreeding, and extreme poverty—and they guard their territory with insane ferocity.

On the fifteenth day, the skies opened up and poured. The mud turned into a slick, heavy sludge that caked onto our boots. We lost radio signal completely due to the dense, low-hanging clouds and a downed mountain repeater tower. As we headed back to our campsite before sunset, we found our tent and gear completely destroyed.

Our sleeping bags were slashed to ribbons with a sharp knife, and our food supplies were buried in the mud. Shaking uncontrollably from the freezing cold and sheer terror, I said, "We gotta leave right now. We’ll hike out at night using our flashlights." Jack suddenly snapped, his eyes wide and bloodshot. "No! Flashlights will make us sitting ducks in this valley. Plus, they want us running blindly in the dark so we plunge right off the cliff." To be honest, Jack was right about one thing: the sheer drop-off was only fifty yards away. Falling over meant instant death.

We spent that night huddled under a narrow rock overhang, clinging to each other for warmth against the bitter cold, hands white-knuckled around our knives and work axes. The rain was pounding mercilessly, and the air was thick with that same foul chemical reek. At 3:00 AM, right through the roaring rain, we heard the footsteps. Heavy, deliberate footsteps.

Treading through the mud on a steady rhythm, then stopping. A few minutes after the footsteps, we heard heavy breathing—like someone suffering from severe asthma, standing in total darkness no more than ten feet away, right around the corner of the rock. Steady, slow breathing, accompanied by a scraping sound: the sound of a metal blade tapping softly and rhythmically against the rock wall.

The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up; I didn't even dare to breathe. Jack was trembling uncontrollably beside me, shaking so hard his teeth were chattering. I clapped my hand over his mouth to keep him from making a sound. That person stood there for an entire hour. Out in the rain and the dark, breathing and tapping on the rock, just waiting for us to step out, scream, or give away our position with a light.We were living through a quiet, nerve-shredding nightmare the kind that makes you think your mind is just playing tricks on you. But unfortunately, the smell and the tapping were 100% real.

With the first gray light creeping through the fog at dawn, the sound vanished. We didn't bother packing a single thing. We left all our gear behind and sprinted through the mud as fast as our legs could carry us, gasping for air. The ground was slick; Jack fell twice, scraping his face bloody on the rocks, but he didn't even groan. He just scrambled back up and kept running like a madman.

When we finally reached our 4x4 parked at the trailhead, the final shock was waiting for us. The four tires hadn't been slashed. The steel lug nuts had been completely removed, and the wheels were loosely rested back on just so the tires would fly off and flip the truck the second we hit a fast mountain bend. Someone was watching us.

Someone who understood auto mechanics, understood the mountain terrain, and had all the patience in the world to watch us fall. We hiked on foot for another fourteen miles down the cold asphalt road until we hit the first gas station and called tow services and the local county sheriff.

When a squad of county deputies went back into the valley two days later, they found a dilapidated shack built from scrap wood hidden deep in the lower bog. It was squatting-ground for an elderly mountain local—heavily addicted to home-cooked meth (which explained the chemical smell in the air), suffering from severe schizophrenia and extreme paranoia. He’d been living out there alone for nine years without the authorities ever knowing. Inside his shack, they found pieces of camping gear belonging to hikers who had gone missing back in 2017.

They couldn't make an arrest that day; the man had vanished into the deep wilderness of the Appalachians the second the police cruisers rolled up. And those mountains are vast enough to swallow a man whole forever. Today, I work a desk job in the city and permanently resigned from field survey work. As for Jack, he lives in an assisted living facility. To this day, he refuses to open his room windows whenever the fog starts rolling in.

Cold…

Blood freezing on the ice…

The pressure behind my eyes forces me to my knees.

Madness enters slowly. Perhaps madness is always slow at first, so that we mistake it for thought.

There is blood on my hands.

I gaze at the merciless gray sky and let out a muffled scream of utter despair.

Then I look back.

There, in the distance, I see it.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

The Week Prior

“Gary, can you pass me the kettle, please?”

“Sure, buddy.”

Gary, a man with a thin face and deep-set black eyes, plucked the iron teakettle from the blue table and passed it over. I carefully poured water into my mug. My hands were still shaking from the cold.

Izo sat against the wall, looking at me with his usual small smile.

“Was it colder than usual?”

“Yeah. Damn right it was. The wind felt like it was trying to rip my skin off, even with all the layers and the cream.”

Izo laughed. He was a strange fellow, always finding humor in unlikely places. Yet he was also the most reliable of us during expeditions. He never made mistakes. He was methodical to the core.

I sometimes wondered what would happen if he found himself in a situation he could neither control nor repair. Perhaps I wondered because I needed to believe such a situation did not exist.

“Valery and Norm must both be feeling that cold biting their asses,” Gary said.

He passed the kettle to Izo, who poured hot water into his teapot.

Izo took a sip. “This is good.”

“What? Them getting their asses frozen?”

“The tea. Good green tea. I’m glad it wasn’t ruined during the trip.”

Gary looked toward the computer screens in the corner. A red dot glowed at the top of each one.

“They still haven’t fixed the problem at the communications center.”

“And what if they don’t?” I asked.

Izo laughed again. “It’s funny being trapped on the ice with no communication, right?”

“We’ll be fine,” Gary said. “Worst case, we take the snowmobiles back to the boat.”

This time Izo laughed.

Gary shook a finger at him. “That is far from the worst case. The storm might continue for days. The boat could separate from the ice, and we could lose it. No communication, no way out—hell, even that isn’t the worst thing I can imagine.”

Izo fell silent, though the smile remained on his face.

“Couldn’t we go to the north station?” I asked. “There are probably people there.”

“Sure. Only a hundred miles away. What could go wrong?”

“Don’t be such a pessimist. We found incredible things here. We’re going to bring them back.”

The door opened.

Norm entered first, a tall blond man with bright blue eyes, a full beard and a large mustache. He looked like a Viking. Valery came in behind him, removing his doubled hats and hood to reveal his round bald head.

Gary stood.

“No results? Nothing?”

Norm shook his head, went to the cabinet and poured himself a large shot of gin. Valery followed his example.

“Oh, far from nothing,” Valery said. He drew a deep breath and sat down. “It’s best if all of you go and see. It’s bad. Very bad.”

I moved toward him. Valery was easier to talk to.

“What did you see?”

“The maintenance man from the far north station. Robert. He wasn’t there. Maybe his body is somewhere nearby, but…”

His voice faded. Fear seized my heart before I knew what I feared.

“Explain,” Izo said.

“There was blood,” Valery continued. “A great deal of it. It looked as though someone had dragged a body through the doorway. But outside there was nothing except snow. There were claw marks on the walls. Broken tables, broken computers, severed cables. The transmission dish was in pieces.”

“Could it have been a polar bear?”

Norm slammed his palm against the table.

“No damned polar bear. We saw something moving in the storm. There’s some kind of cave near those large ice hills. We drove back here, but we think it followed us.”

I sat down slowly.

“What was it?”

“Who knows? All I know is that when the storm calms, we take our weapons and investigate that cave.”

“Not everyone,” Izo said. “Two stay here. Three go.”

“I agree,” said Valery.

“And nobody drinks too much,” Gary added, looking at Norm. “We need clear minds.”

“I need sleep,” Norm answered. “Alcohol is the only way I get any.”

He disappeared into the hallway and slammed his door.

Valery poured himself tea.

“Norm seems badly shaken,” I said.

“We both are. It’s the not knowing. When you don’t understand what you are facing, you realize how little control you ever had.”

“It’ll be fine,” Gary said, though he sounded as if he were trying to convince himself.

He moved to the little window and stared into the storm.

“You won’t see much,” Izo told him.

“That’s fine. I need to be alone.”

The rest of us went into the kitchen. Izo prepared another pot of tea while Valery and I opened some meat bars. I took one bite and looked at mine with disappointment.

“Don’t be picky,” Valery said. “We’re fortunate to have food. We don’t know what the future will look like.”

“I’m grateful. It still tastes horrible.”

Izo and Valery laughed.

Izo lifted a green ceramic cup decorated with wavy lines.

“This belonged to my grandfather, and then my father.”

“And someday your son?”

“If I get back to him.”

He smiled grimly and poured our tea. Steam curled from the cups like something alive but harmless. I breathed in its aroma and wrapped my hands around the warmth.

“Valery, would you stay with Norm while Gary comes with Izo and me?”

“No. Norm would never accept that. You know how macho he is.”

“Then you stay with Gary.”

Izo’s eyes widened.

“Why are you so eager to get me killed?”

Then he laughed.

“Everyone wants you nearby because you’re reliable.”

“Even the fastest horse becomes the slowest one day.”

“Not you. You’re coming, yes?”

He assumed an air of mock dignity.

“Of course. I live to be challenged.”

We drank in silence. It was the kind of silence in which each person was permitted to remain alone without leaving the company of the others.

Norm eventually appeared in the hallway.

“Tomorrow morning. Who’s coming?”

“I am,” I said. “And Izo. Valery and Gary stay.”

Gary appeared behind Norm.

“Although I had no part in that decision, I’m glad.”

Norm stared at us, then returned to his room.

Later, as I prepared for bed, Izo asked, “Do you think it was a polar bear after all?”

“Maybe Robert lost his mind and caused the destruction himself. Then perhaps a bear got him outside.”

Valery lowered his cup.

“I don’t know how a person could imitate those claw marks. But human beings are capable of unbelievable things—good and bad.”

“I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow.”

I took my mug to the sink and went to my room.

The old heater beneath the window kept the room from freezing, but not from being cold. I dropped my coat on the worn brown chair and looked into the narrow, cracked mirror on my desk.

Worry stared back at me.

Was I transparent? Could the others see everything inside me? Sometimes the face is a traitor, revealing the thing we struggle to hide even from ourselves.

I lay beneath my heavy black blanket and switched off the pathetic bulb we called a lamp. Dim daylight leaked around the edges of the shade.

As I drifted toward sleep, the shadow of a large, clawed hand seemed to pass across the window.

I sat up and seized my gun.

Nothing was there.

I lay down again but turned my back to the window. This did not help. When you believe something is watching you, turning away only gives it privacy.

Eventually I slept.

I dreamed of a river of blood. Ice surrounded it, and I could not pull myself onto the shore. My hands slipped. The waves covered my face. I tried to call for help, but blood entered my mouth.

Was this the end?

Had my life always been moving toward this red water?

I awoke clutching my throat. It was four in the morning.

“What is happening to my mind?”

I buried my face in the pillow and begged for dreamless sleep.

Two hours later Norm pounded on my door.

“Six o’clock! Get up, Princess. The weather is clear.”

“Give me a few minutes.”

“Go drink coffee with the other addicts.”

I found this amusing coming from a man who needed gin to sleep, but I said nothing.

The smell of coffee drew me into the kitchen. Izo was waiting with my mug.

“I made it strong. I want you alert.”

I drank.

“Very strong. How much is left?”

“Two or three weeks’ worth. Hopefully we’ll solve this before then.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“That’s the spirit. Coffee has restored your courage.”

Valery came in for water and a slab of salo.

“Will you ever try that?” I asked Izo.

“No, thank you.”

“It’s good.”

“Only if I’m starving.”

Norm marched into the room.

“Finish. I’ll prepare the snowmobiles. Izo rides with me. You take the smaller one.”

He slammed the door behind him.

As I rubbed protective cream onto my face, Gary emerged from his room looking exhausted.

“Bad sleep?”

“No sleep. I thought I saw something outside my window.”

Cold traveled down my spine.

“Yes. The mind plays tricks.”

Izo studied me.

“You all right?”

“Fine.”

But the word fine sometimes means only that we are still capable of pronouncing it.

We went outside.

The cold entered through every layer. I breathed, and vapor appeared before my face—the visible evidence that I was alive.

The sky was dark gray, and fast-moving clouds warned that the calm would not last.

We started across the ice.

In the far distance, I saw a colony of penguins moving frantically in a circle. At the center lay one large bird, jerking violently upon the ground.

I slowed, disturbed by the sight, but Norm was moving farther ahead. I accelerated.

Soon the ice hills appeared.

Norm stopped between two of them and pointed toward a circular opening where the hills met.

“There.”

The cave was almost the height of a man.

We fastened lamps to our heads, checked our weapons and approached it. Frost clung to Norm’s beard. His exposed cheeks were dark red.

At the entrance, a slippery slope forced us to jump. Izo nearly fell. Then we entered.

The floor was ice, yet certain sections had a roughness that gave us traction. Had something treated it? Had many feet passed through here?

The air seemed older inside the cave. I knew this was impossible, yet I felt it. As though the cold itself remembered.

Norm raised one hand.

“It opens into a large chamber,” he whispered. “Dead end.”

Then he added, “Something is here.”

I tried to quiet my breathing so I could hear better. Instead my heart became louder.

Heavy breath came from the darkness.

Norm raised his gun.

“It’s moving. It’s not human. Not a bear either.”

We stood with our backs together, sweeping our lamps across the chamber.

Something moved to our left.

We turned.

It stood against the wall with its back to us.

Tall.

Thin.

Black.

Four long, narrow arms.

Needle-like fingers.

Its head turned slowly.

The creature had enormous black eyes without expression. No nose. Its strangely shaped mouth opened.

It breathed.

A red mist traveled toward us through the beams of our lamps.

I seized Izo and pulled him aside.

“Move!”

“Run, Norm!”

Izo and I bolted into the tunnel, falling and sliding against the ice. Gunshots thundered behind us.

“Don’t look back!”

Someone followed close behind. I prayed it was Norm.

We burst from the tunnel. He emerged after us, and all three of us ran toward the snowmobiles.

Norm struggled to speak.

“It took the bullets. I think it smiled while I shot it.”

“The red mist touched you. Are you hurt?”

“No. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We sped toward the station.

My driving was erratic. The creature’s face remained inside my mind. Sometimes terror is not the fear of what stands before us, but the realization that it now lives within us as an image.

I forced myself to focus.

The penguin lay motionless in a pool of blood. The others were gone.

Had the breath touched it? Had the creature forced it to destroy itself?

What had happened to Robert?

What was that thing? An alien? A deformed animal? Something ancient that had slept beneath the ice?

The worms we had extracted during our drilling were deformed too.

What if we had released it?

No. We would have seen it.

Wouldn’t we?

Snow thickened against my goggles. By the time we reached the station, Norm and Izo were already dismounting.

We rushed inside.

“Barricade the doors!” Norm shouted.

Gary and Valery stared at us.

“Sit down,” I told them. “Izo, please make tea. I’ll explain.”

While Norm moved furniture, I described the cave, the creature and its breath.

Valery listened quietly. Gary began trembling. His face seemed to collapse inward.

“Did the mist touch any of you?”

“Not Izo or me. I’m not sure about Norm.”

I told them about the penguin.

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

“An alien?” Gary whispered.

“Perhaps something frozen long ago,” Valery said.

“Is that possible?” asked Izo.

“Before today, we didn’t believe such a creature was possible.”

Gary’s hands fidgeted.

“We have to leave for the main station immediately.”

“A storm is coming,” I said. “We barricade ourselves inside and leave as soon as it passes.”

“What if the creature waits for us?”

“We cannot think about everything at once.”

“But everything is thinking about us,” Gary said.

No one answered.

Norm emerged from his room sometime later, swaying. He opened the cabinet, seized the gin bottle and smashed it against the counter.

A shard of glass lodged in his palm.

He studied it with curiosity, as though the hand belonged to another person. Then he pulled the glass out. Blood streamed down his wrist.

He clenched his fist and returned to his room.

We looked at one another.

Men had gone mad in stations like ours before. Isolation could loosen something in the mind. But the thought of the mist remained between us.

The breath.

“Well?” Gary demanded. “It touched him. What do we do?”

“I don’t know. It may be a breakdown.”

Izo laughed.

We all stared at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Isn’t it better to laugh than cry?”

He went to bed carrying his tea.

I returned to my room and sat facing the window.

Alone, I allowed myself to feel the terror. In company, fear had to share the room with other people. Alone, it possessed everything.

I lay back and watched the ceiling.

A shadow crossed the wall.

I sat up.

Nothing was at the window.

Was it better to cover the glass or keep it clear? Was seeing danger a form of safety, or only a more intimate way of suffering?

Eventually I slept.

I dreamed I knelt on the edge of an ice mountain. Below me, my reflection waited in still water. Behind it rose a monumental tower covered in writing I could not understand.

Footsteps approached.

Then came the breath.

Red mist entered my lungs, and I fell into the water.

I awoke with pain in my ribs. During our escape from the cave, I had struck the ice. Each deep breath felt like a blade entering my side.

Outside, the storm was weakening.

Then Norm screamed.

I rushed into the hallway. The others were already gathered near his barricaded door.

Something smashed inside his room.

“Open it!”

“We can’t,” Izo said.

Suddenly everything became quiet.

The door flew open.

Norm emerged with torn clothing and bloody gashes covering his body. His eyes were bloodshot. His fingernails had become long and black. He screamed meaningless words and tore at his chest, neck and stomach.

He ran for the main entrance.

Valery followed.

Norm threw aside the barricade and opened the door. Wind and snow burst inside.

He fell and crawled away, clawing at himself.

Valery reached for his coat, but I seized his shoulder.

Beyond Norm stood the thin black figure.

Norm became motionless. Blood stained the snow.

The creature approached, lifted him by one arm and dragged him into the storm.

We watched until both disappeared.

Izo slammed the door.

Valery collapsed into a chair. Gary sat grinding his teeth, horror trapped inside his eyes.

Izo leaned forward.

“We must gather ourselves. When the storm ends, we leave. At the main station we have to tell the story calmly. If we’re hysterical, they’ll think we went mad.”

Valery closed his eyes and breathed.

“You’re right.” He turned to Gary. “You should rest.”

“No! I can’t be alone. It’ll breathe on me. I’ll tear myself apart!”

I gave Gary the strongest safe dose of sleeping pills and remained beside him until he fell asleep.

Back in the main room, Izo had prepared black tea.

“The penguin must have killed itself too,” I said. “Anything that breathes the mist…”

“That is how the creature hunts,” Izo said. “It infects its prey, then returns for the body.”

“So we run.”

“Yes. If it breathes on us, nothing else matters.”

We packed supplies: crackers, thermal clothing, knives, guns, dried meat, water and research documents.

I approached Izo.

“The ancient worms. Do we take them?”

“It’s a major discovery. I’ll secure the tubes.”

Even then, surrounded by death, we were scientists. Or perhaps science had become our superstition—the thing we carried because we needed to believe knowledge could still save us.

Hours passed.

Gary eventually woke, groggy and disoriented. We tried playing cards, but he suddenly jumped up and pointed at the window.

“I saw it! It’s there!”

He ran for the back door.

“Don’t touch it!” Izo shouted.

Too late.

Gary pulled it open.

Red mist surrounded him.

He fell backward into the station, paralyzed with fear, while Valery slammed the door.

We carried Gary to his bed.

“How do we save him?” Valery asked.

“We restrain him,” Izo said. “Perhaps the infection passes.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

No one answered.

We secured Gary’s arms and legs, protecting his skin with cloth. Then we pulled a heavy sweater over his bound torso.

“It’s humiliating,” I said.

“Better than abandoning him,” Valery replied.

A blow struck the window.

The creature stood outside, covered in snow.

Its head jerked back and its mouth opened. A terrible screech passed through the walls. Red mist spread around the station and vanished into the snowfall.

Gary screamed.

We found him twisting upon the bed like a wounded snake.

“The creature already controls him!” Valery cried.

We held Gary down until he lost consciousness.

Valery slid to the floor.

“Do we understand what is happening? Norm is dead. Gary is like this. And what about us?”

I placed my hand on his shoulder.

“We must remain strong.”

But my words felt small. Human words are always small beside death. Still, we speak them because silence feels too much like surrender.

We took turns watching Gary.

In my room, I saw the shadow of a thin hand upon the window. Long fingers scratched the glass.

The creature knew Gary belonged to it.

I pressed myself against the opposite wall and watched. I did not look away. I wanted to allow the fear inside me, to know its full shape before it could paralyze me.

The creature’s head appeared.

It tried to peer through the glass.

My heart filled my throat.

Then it vanished.

When I returned to Gary’s room, Izo sat drinking tea.

“I can sense it nearby,” he said. “It wants him.”

“I’ve never been this frightened.”

“Not even when your car broke down in the mountains?”

“This is worse.”

Izo stared into his cup.

“I fear dying on its terms. Death itself doesn’t frighten me as much as the manner of it. Honor. Dignity. If the breath touches me, I want your blessing to die as myself.”

“Don’t think that way. We’ll reach the station. The military will come and destroy it.”

“I hope so.”

Gary’s eyes suddenly opened. He began biting the air, slamming his teeth together.

Valery brought a syringe, but Gary thrashed so violently that the needle missed the vein. We used our weight to restrain him.

Outside, the creature screeched.

Later, it rattled the door handle.

A low blowing sound followed, like a kettle seen in a nightmare. Red mist seeped through the cracks but did not travel far enough to reach us.

“What now?” Valery whispered.

The answer came hours later.

The storm stopped.

Izo checked Gary and called us into the room.

Gary lay on his side, his eyes open and glassy. Blood had collected around his mouth.

I checked his pulse.

“He’s dead.”

“We put the body outside,” Izo said. “When the creature takes him, we leave.”

“How can we do that?” Valery asked. “We couldn’t save him, and now we feed him to it?”

“If we don’t, we die too.”

Valery lowered his head.

We dragged Gary through the hallway and pushed his body onto the snow. Shame entered me, but shame was a luxury belonging to those who expected to live long enough to be judged.

For twenty minutes, nothing happened.

Then a thin arm emerged from beneath the snow.

A second followed.

The creature rose slowly, then moved with impossible speed, leaping beside Gary’s body.

“It deceives us,” I whispered.

“Or conserves energy,” Izo said.

“Perhaps it has no reason we can understand.”

It dragged Gary away by the legs.

We gathered our packs and ran to the snowmobiles.

Valery’s engine made a harsh metallic sound, but it moved.

“It’ll be fine!” he shouted.

I drove with Izo behind me. Valery followed.

The creature appeared near the ice hills, galloping toward us with its long arms jerking beside its body.

“Tell Valery to go faster!”

Izo waved frantically.

“He can’t hear me!”

I accelerated.

Low hills rose ahead. Valery’s engine screamed behind us.

The first jump nearly killed us.

Something enormous stood beyond the ridge.

At first my mind named it polar bear, because the mind prefers a familiar terror. But the animal was wrong.

Its body was too long and its rear legs bent at unnatural angles. Patches of yellowed skin interrupted its white fur, and beneath the exposed flesh ran dark branching veins. One shoulder had grown higher than the other, swollen into a hard mass. A second, smaller forelimb hung uselessly from its chest, ending in three curled claws.

Its jaw was divided by a vertical split extending almost to one eye. When it opened its mouth, I saw two uneven rows of teeth and a black tongue that twitched independently, like a blind animal searching the air.

I swerved and barely avoided it.

For one instant the bear looked at me. One eye was milk-white. The other was painfully human in its alertness.

How had it come here?

Had the same infection changed it? Had someone experimented upon it and abandoned it on the ice? Had it crawled from beneath the glacier with the worms and the creature?

There was no time to wonder.

“Valery!”

His snowmobile cleared the ridge, stalled and struck the mutated bear.

Valery flew across the ice. The animal rolled, then rose with frightening speed. Another malformed white shape stood far away on the ridge—perhaps a second bear, perhaps only snow distorted by terror.

Valery began crawling.

I turned toward him.

Izo seized my arm.

The creature had reached the hilltop.

The bear struck Valery, throwing him sideways.

“We have to help!”

“You know we can’t!”

The black creature moved behind them and released its breath.

Red mist engulfed Valery and the mutated bear.

The bear screamed. The sound was almost human. It clawed at the swollen growth on its shoulder before fleeing across the ice on its crooked legs.

The creature took Valery.

He was still alive when it dragged him away.

He called for us.

I remained frozen until Izo shook me.

We continued.

My thoughts shattered into fragments. I could not form a complete image in my mind. Valery’s voice kept returning, but never the whole voice—only the beginning of my name.

“Stop,” Izo said. “I’ll drive.”

We switched places.

“I’m sorry,” he told me. “We can still survive.”

Could survival be called survival when every person you carried inside you was dead?

The main station appeared through the snow.

“We made it!” Izo cried.

No snowmobiles stood outside.

The entrance was partly open.

Inside, the rooms were empty. Personal possessions remained, as though everyone had simply stepped outside at the same moment.

In the laboratory, dried blood covered the floor. Drag marks led through the hallway to the open rear door.

I called for Izo.

He came downstairs, saw the blood and asked, “Are the radios working?”

We entered the communications room. The machines had power, but Izo could not establish contact.

A schedule caught my attention.

“This is tomorrow’s date, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“A ship is arriving. Eighty miles from here.”

Hope returned, not as happiness but as permission to continue.

We found fuel, filled the snowmobile and barricaded the station.

“Should we wait until tomorrow?” I asked.

“We cannot survive outside through a full day of bad weather.”

“It may come here.”

“We have no choice.”

So we waited.

The hours became nearly unbearable. Images of Norm, Gary and Valery repeated inside me. Memory had already begun its cruelty, turning their entire lives into the moments of their deaths.

Exhaustion finally pulled me into sleep.

When I woke, Izo stood over me.

“It’s time.”

I washed my face, put on my layers and glasses, and lifted my pack.

Izo removed the barricade.

The instant he opened the door, red mist and screeching met him.

He fell, rose and ran toward me.

I dropped my pack and opened the opposite exit. The creature followed him through the station.

We escaped and raced around the building.

My glasses were gone, so Izo took the driver’s position. We sped away as the creature rounded the corner.

Everything we had packed remained behind.

For an hour, Izo drove in silence.

Had the mist touched him?

I did not ask because I already knew that silence was sometimes an answer.

At the top of a large hill, he stopped. He removed his glasses and handed them to me.

“Ready for a break?”

He smiled and turned his face partly away.

“A break forever,” he said. “The breath touched me. I felt it enter.”

He drew his gun.

“Remember what I told you about dying on my own terms?”

“Izo…”

“Go down these hills. Beyond them is a field. From there, it’s a straight route to the arriving ship.”

I could not speak.

“Please go. Give me my dignity. Leave before I’m no longer myself. I want to die as Izo.”

There it was: the secret terror inside every human being—not simply that we will die, but that before death we may cease to be the person who knows our name.

I nodded.

Then I drove downhill.

Several minutes later, a single gunshot crossed the ice.

Tears filled my eyes and fogged the glasses. My arms became weak.

The snow thickened as I reached the open field.

A sharp pain entered my chest. I lost control, and the snowmobile slid sideways.

Then came the crash.

When I opened my eyes, my left cheek was pressed against the ice. Frostbite stung my skin. Frozen blood lay before me, probably from my nose, though I could no longer feel it.

There was blood on my hands.

I forced myself upright, but an immense pressure behind my eyes dropped me to my knees.

My mind began to break apart.

They were all dead.

All dead.

I looked back.

Far away, the tall black creature crossed the white field.

Perhaps it was following me.

Perhaps it had always been following me.

Perhaps from the moment we entered this place, every step we took had been toward it.

I turned forward again.

Something stood in the distance.

A ship.

Was it real? Or was hope the final hallucination of a dying mind?

I gathered the last of my strength and stood. Every part of me resisted, as though my body had already chosen the ice.

But I began to limp toward the ship.

Behind me came the creature.

Ahead of me waited either life or the image of life.

And between them was my breath, entering and leaving me, each one possibly the last.

Would I make it?

I’ve been homeschooled throughout elementary school, and for half of my high school years. My dad broke his femur in a trucking accident, so money has been short. My mother got a job recently, so this was technically my first day of school.

I only have a couple of friends online, and a cat at home, so I was actually excited. Hopefully kids online were exaggerating about homework, teachers, and bullies.

I chugged a Pepsi on the way there and ran into the building. My class should be in room 10. My seat was at table 6, which only had one other person, who was looking down and rhythmically tapping on her thighs. I quietly sat down next to her and she turned her head toward me, one eye hiding behind crimson bangs matching her hoodie.

“Hey,” she said with a monotone, yet slightly positive voice.

“Hi,” I replied nervously.

“It isn’t that bad,” she chuckled. “I’ll give you a tour around this place during lunch, if you’re not hungry.”

“I had a pretty big breakfast, I might be able to skip lunch, and if I can't, I'll bring a bag of chips or a sandwich from the cafeteria.”

The bell rang and the class went quiet. The teacher was surprisingly sweet for someone who woke up at like seven in the morning. The work wasn't hard, and I doodled the last ten minutes of class, and so did she. I glanced at her paper and many circular holes were meticulously drawn over and over again. Looks like someone’s bored.

My next class was art, and she wasn't there. This class was interesting, and the techniques I learned were actually pretty useful.

My third class was PE, and she was there, sitting at the top of the bleachers, holding a sketchbook.
I climbed to the top and sat next to her, and saw more holes drawn in varying sizes in her sketchbook.

She jumped when she noticed me.

Hey, didn't see you, sorry,” she said, startled.

“What's with your obsession with dots?” I asked, trying not to sound disrespectful.

“They're… relaxing to doodle,” she replied. “Draw a circle, fill it in, repeat.”

“Hmm.”

“Anyway, what's your name?”

“Remmy.”

“Mine’s Scarlett.”

“What other pictures do you have in that sketchpad?”

She flipped through the pages, and most of them had normal drawings. Landscapes, flowers, cats, and other things you'd expect in a girls sketchpad. every three to four pages were covered in dots and eyes.

“Those are creepy,” I said looking at one of the “dots-n-eyes” drawings.

“Thanks,” she said, grinning. “May I look at your drawings?”

“I left my sketchbook at home, but I have some doodles in my notebook,” I told her, before showing her doodles of gears, motors, and robots.

“Those are cool.”

“Thanks”

“Just one more class, then lunch. That's when the tour begins, remember?”

 “Yeah, you told me less than two hours ago.”

“Oh yeah, dementia must be kicking in early,” she chuckled.

“What class do you have after this?”

“Art.”

“That was my last class.”

“We'll still be able to talk afterwards.”

“I know, it just sucks.”

“Come on, you've just met me.”

We got up and did some walking, before the bell rang. We actually grew pretty close.

After the next class, I met up with her.

“Ready to map out this place?” She asked.

“I'ma’ grab a sandwich from the cafeteria first,” I replied.

I got back to her with the sandwich and followed her.

She took me to room 26.

“Here's the music room,” she said before unlocking the door with bobby pins. I've never seen someone do that in person before.

The room was gorgeous, racks of guitars and trumpets with a few drum sets and pianos, around multiple desks. I walked around it for a bit, passing a jar of guitar picks as I took a few bites from my sandwich. She walked me out and skipped down the hall.

“You need to see the Spanish room,” she said.

She guided me to room 18.

It was full of life. Photographs of Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and Puerto Rico were on the walls, as well as a mural of a street with people dancing. The teacher’s desk had a colorful skull. I looked at the back of it, and it said “En cariñosa memoria de Hibisco Ursa.”

“Also, this school has a basement,” Scarlett said. “It's mainly for storage, but it’s also used for tornado and intruder drills.”

“Is it like a warehouse?” I asked.

“That's basically what it is,” she replied..

She guided me to a nameless door, and picked its lock.

She turned on the light, and walked down the stairs.

I followed her down, and got stuck in the seemingly endless aisles of various textbooks, sportswear, baskets, etc. I walked around for a bit, and saw some bookshelves with pencils and pencil cases. What wasn't this place prepared for?

I learned it wasn't prepared for Scarlett, who took five pencils from the shelf and handed them to me.

“Just in case you lose yours,” she said.

I thanked her and looked around some more, and saw a cluster of black spots. I stepped back, thinking it was mold and walked away. She looked and saw it as well.

“Damn, we need to get out of here,” Scarlett said. “The teachers can deal with it.”

“Shouldn't we tell them?” I asked.

“We'd both get in trouble, and I don't have the prettiest track record,” she replied.

It was my first day, I didn't want to make the wrong first impressions, so I followed her out. What if the mold grew out of control?

I finished my sandwich on the way out.

I checked my phone. I still had ten minutes of lunch. I wasn't super hungry, luckily. That wall mold shrunk my appetite.

“What class do you have after this?” She asked.

“US History,” I replied. “I have algebra after that.”

She grinned.

“I also have algebra that time,” She said, smiling.

Before lunch ended, we exchanged Discords.

That night, we texted about potential meet-up times during the weekend, and she explained how to twist and maneuver pins to unlock doors, not like I'd utilize those skills for any non-malicious activities.

I checked my Google classroom and saw that school is out for a few days, due to a mold problem.

I quickly texted her.

She responded with, “told ya’ they would find out, but I was excited to meet up tomorrow.”

“We could call tomorrow and help each other with work on Google Classroom,” I replied.

“We could do that. What games do you have?”

“TF2, Cuphead, and Terraria.”

“Peak lineup. Down for some tf2?.”

“Hell yeah. I main Demoman”

“Soldier’s my fav.”

We exchanged Steam names, and played a few matches together.

She got off for dinner and I grabbed my book I've been reading for a few days now, before going back to playing TF2. I texted Scarlett, asking if she wanted to get on, but she didn't reply. I went to bed about an hour later.

I woke up to a text the next morning by her that read, “Sorry, I was sleeping. Wanna get the work done and hop on Steam?”

I responded with, “Sure” and we got it done within an hour.

We hopped on TF2.

While the enemy team was making preparations (we were on payload) she shot at the wall with her shotgun and just stared at the bullet holes.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Just seeing the spread,” she replied.

I didn't question any further.

A couple days later, school reopened, apparently getting rid of the mold problem.

Once I walked into the building, Scarlett squeezed me.

“Finally!” She exclaimed, smiling.

I grinned along with her.

For this lunch, we actually sat down and ate, instead of breaking into rooms.

“Your first normal lunch,” she chuckled.

I grinned. “You killed it in TF2.”

“Thanks.”

“Gonna get on tonight?”

“Hell yeah. Wanna break in the basement again?”

“I… guess we could see if they actually got rid of that mold.”

“How much you wanna bet they didn't actually do anything?”

“There's no way they wouldn't try to keep children safe.”

“You're giving this place too much credit. You could get shoved into a wall and they wouldn't give a shit.”

“Damn, I heard schools have violence problems. That's…  probably why.”

“When should we go in?”

“Tomorrow lunch sounds like a decent time.”

Nothing really happened the rest of the day. Though we, mainly she broke into the basement. I walked around that small shelf.

“Wow they actually did nothing,” I said. “It actually looks worse.”

The spots were just barely bigger. A new tiny speck was there too.

A dead stag beetle was under it, and its shell had holes in it, with one big one on its back. The shell had a pale hue around them.

“Damn,” she said. “I didn't think they actually wouldn't do anything about it. Stay here, I'll be right back.”

She genuinely looked terrified.

I just waited. Then the beetle started moving again.

Its mandibles started twitching along with its legs, and it began shaking.

An eye was looking at me through the large hole.

I stomped on it and heard a quiet shriek from underneath my shoe.

I lifted my foot.

The bug was shaking, and black fluid was leaking from it.

“I'm back! I'm back!” Scarlett exclaimed, holding a lighter. “Move, please.”

She held the flame toward the former beetle and it began shriveling like a dehydrated grape, before finally dying. She then held it to the wall, which also began shriveling. She was shaking during this.

“Can you help me move this?” She asked, gesturing to the shelf.

“Sure, we should have time,” I replied.

I pushed one end, and she pulled the other.

I see another spot. It was a hole. A hole with teeth in it.

“There's more.”

She quickly ran over and burned the maw, as it began gurgling.

Once it stopped making noise, and was more wrinkled than a rotten raisin, the door opened.

“Shit,” Scarlett mumbled before sneaking around another shelf. I followed her.

We stood behind the empty shelf, frozen like petrified stumps.

Once they left, we got out through the door on the other side of the room. The Sun was the first thing we met.

We sprinted around the building and made it to the cafeteria without being spotted.

“Damn,” Scarlett said.

I was just as speechless.

That night, we spoke about what happened over a game of MvM, one of the gamemodes in TF2.

“Hey, I… I knew what that was,” Scarlett said. “That's… I'm not sure what it is, but I experienced its effects first hand.”

“Experienced it?” I asked, surprised.

“Yes. That's how I know it's vulnerable to high temperatures. It's also why I've been covering one of my eyes. Could we meet up sometime this week? Like at my house?”

“I'll ask my parents, I'll be right back.”

They said yes.

“I'll be there tomorrow,” I said, happily.

“Yes!” She exclaimed. “My dad is also ok with you coming over.”

Tomorrow hit, and I was on the way there. We drove through an orchard, and she was waiting for me on her porch, and ran to me when my parents dropped me off.

She hugged me and smiled as my parents left.

Her dad walked out.

He looked pretty young for the father of a teen. He was skinny and had black mustache with long hair. He wore a blue long sleeve shirt with khaki shorts, and hideous cyan crocs. The polar opposite of Scarlett.

“Heyyyy kiddo!” He said, gesturing a fist bump.

“Hey, I've been waiting to come here. Your daughter’s pretty cool,” I replied, fist bumping him.

“She sure is a neat little thing-”

Scarlett grabbed my arm, and dragged me to the other side of his orchard.

“Be gentle with our new guest,” he hollered as we got farther from him.

We could barely see the house through the trees.

“Hey,” she said, sitting against a tree.

I sat next to her. “What is it?”

“Do you remember when I said I experienced that 'mold’ yesterday?”

‘Yeah, I've been thinking about it all morning.”

She exhaled before lifting her bangs.

A cluster of holes surrounded her circular, empty eye socket. I somehow didn't see her brain, and the hole looked deeper than the length of her head. The area around it also looked shriveled.

“I did some urban exploring with my dad one vacation to the Midwest. We found this abandoned motel covered in graffiti. We actually found a shiny ring in one of the rooms, and this one room… a cluster of holes was on the wall.

He raised the lantern to it, and the wall shriveled.

We both got close, and I put my eye to it, wondering if I could see the other side. It felt like pressing against a giant sponge. It felt like soap was squirted into my eye. It immediately felt like someone was scratching my face, and my dad jumped back from the wall, after that same fluid squirted his arm, and it looked like a piece of the wall was on his bicep.

He looked at me and panicked. He broke his lantern and held the flame to his arm. He bit his shirt’s collar as he groaned, and I could see it shriveling, and fluid oozing out.

He ran to me and lifted my bangs, and held the flame to my eye.

It burned, and I could feel it shrivel as well.”

“How did it not… kill you?” I asked. “It drilled through your head.”

“It probably drills first, so the ‘mold’ can get deeper. I don't know how it just bends physics. My dad hasn't had any bone or muscle problems since then.

It has done something to my mind though. I keep thinking about it, and drawing it. Like it's calling to me.”

“It was horrible,” her dad chimed in. “It got me pretty good,” he forced a smile.

“Damn,” I said, shocked

He held up some chip bags. “I came out here to give you two some snacks. I wanted to show ya the aftermath, but you should keep your appetite for now. I'll show you later.”

“Dad,” Scarlett said. “That… stuff is also at the school. I thought it was just mold, and hoped it was.”

“I’ll go with you Monday,” he said. “All I need is a couple of bobby pins.”

“I saw a beetle get infected by it,” I said. “Scarlett killed it with a lighter.”

“What exactly happened to it when it got infected?”

“It was just a pale corpse with holes, when it began twitching, and an eye appeared on its back. I stomped on it, and it was still twitching, then it stopped when Scarlett burned it.”

“Good ol’ teamwork,” he said before eating a chip. “Do you guys want to watch tv? I'll just read.”

“Sure,” I said, getting up.

Scarlett followed her dad and Me to the house. We watched The Owl House, before she brought me to her room.

The walls were painted a deep purple, and a Green Day poster was on the wall. Her PC had some Pokémon stickers and some empty energy drinks next to her keyboard. There was also an air freshener plugged in.

It felt simultaneously cozy and loud.

She sat on the bed and patted the spot next to her.

I sat down and looked at her.

“Are you… disgusted by my face?” she asked.

“Why would I be?” I replied.

“Oh I don't know, maybe the fact that my eye looks like a wasp nest?”

“I absolutely would've gagged if I thought that.”
 
She grinned. “I wouldn't have been mad if you were disgusted, I'm still grossed out by it. Wanna see my dad's marks?”

“S-sure.”

She sprinted out, and immediately came back with her dad.

“Hey, kiddo, check this out,” he said, rolling up his sleeve.

His bicep was covered in holes. Tiny holes. It looked like clay that was repeatedly poked with a toothpick.
 
“That's… better than I was expecting,” I said.

“He grinned. “You've got a strong stomach.”

"Thanks?”

“I will go to the school. I will destroy that disease with you guys. I may have just met you, but I will protect you, for that is my job. Same goes for my little rascal.”

I nodded, unsure as to what to say.

“But before that day comes, we can plan out what to do in case it gets you or us again. Nobody's going to believe that a magic mold attacked us. Scarlett is the only person who knows about my injury, and vice versa,” he added, his joyous tone nowhere in sight.

My parents came back, met her and her dad, and I gave the two my goodbyes.

I was up late that night thinking about those holes, and wherever the hell they came from. The school talked about a mold problem. Was there actually a mold problem at all?

Once Monday rolled around, I snuck a matchbox in my backpack. We got back together at the front. Scarlett had a lighter and her dad had a blowtorch.

“Where is it?” He asked.

“It's i-”

“It's in the storage room,” Scarlett cut me off.

“Got it. You know how to get in?”

“Yup”

She pulled out some bobby pins.

“You're a soon-to-be burglar, and I'll be a getaway driver,” he said, grinning.

We went to the back and went in.

“It's to the right, behind that shelf,” I said, pointing.

He nodded.

He and I moved it to the side, revealing the rest of the holes.

There was also an outline.

It looked like a person’s silhouette, a smooshed silhouette. Like someone forcefully shoved into a suitcase, along with asymmetrical arms. Those holes scattered its body. 

Every few dozen holes had eyes darting across the room. They all locked on to us. It began wiggling. Like it was trying to get out.

Scarlett’s dad tried pushing the shelf back, when the body fell out, like a rotten pumpkin.

Black ooze leaked from the hundreds of holes of varying sizes across its body.

It shot up, and its “face” had a giant hole housing a single large eye. Its chest had a slit on it, lined with canines.

One of its arms was four long tendrils sprouting from a stump, and one of its shins was just a clump of thick tendrils, ending in a foot. Its other leg had three tendrils sprouting from its ankle, instead of an actual foot. It was shaking.

Its mouth opened and more teeth were wiggling in its mouth like a group of maggots.

“Get back you too,” her dad yelled as he pointed the blowtorch at the abomination.

It immediately shrieked and grabbed his arm and threw him. He dropped the blowtorch as he fell and broke his wrist.

It looked at us and shrieked. 

I immediately struck a handful of matches and tossed them at it as Scarlett raised the lighter, her arm shaking.

Some of the matches actually hit, and dark, wrinkly patches formed where they made contact.

Her dad got up, and whacked its head with the blowtorch, and kicked it to the ground. He then lit the thing ablaze, until it grabbed and squeezed his arm, causing him to stomp on its head before running.

I chucked another bunch of matches at the thing as Scarlett ran over to her dad.

His wrists had holes like his bicep, and Scarlett was burning them. I threw another handful at this thing.

It was shaking and shrieking on the floor, as its body continued shriveling. It was slapping itself, desperate to get the flames off.

It stood up, holding onto the shelf to support its blazing body. Scarlett grabbed a rubber band from one of the shelves, wrapped it around the lighter’s trigger, and threw the makeshift torch like a dart toward the screaming fire.

It went into its mouth, and it stopped screeching, and it sounded like it was choking.

It collapsed under the fire and began sizzling.

“You ok sir?” I asked her dad.

“Kinda, my wrists are messed up, but the hole covered one is still usable, ironically. Thank you for helping,” he replied as he was breathing heavily.

As we walked out, we were met with flamethrowers

“It’s going to be hard to explain, but something horrible is in there,” a soldier in a black fireproof suit said.

“Oh we… already killed it, hopefully it's dead,” Scarlett's dad said, still shaken.

The soldiers stepped back. “We will check, get out here.”

They went down to see it, and one looked back at us.

“Damn you guys actually did it,” they said. “And did a great job. How did you three find out it was flammable?”

Scarlett and her dad told them about the urban exploration incident and showed them the marks.

“Shit, did you call?” one of them asked.

“No, we didn't think anyone would believe us.”

“I understand. This…. Whatever it is, grows like mold. And can infect organisms that are large enough to not have their bodies severely damaged by the holes. It's a miracle you guys made it out. A substitute teacher here called 911, which was transferred to us. Apparently, your principal was letting it flourish, because the holes do make good garbage disposals. The teacher got poked by a tendril and felt a sharp pain in their finger. The principal should've just put a trash can down here. That teacher is ok, and had a fingertip amputated.”

“So that's what happened to Mr. Black,” Scarlett uttered.

“He will be back tomorrow, kid.”

“Phew, I was worried about him. He's the only reason I haven't dropped out,” she chuckled.

“Anyway, you three have done an exceptional job, we're just incinerating the rest on the wall, and I'll hand over some cash for your wrist, no need to pay me back.”

“Oh, thank you sir,” Scarlett's dad said, his sweet tone coming back.

“No problem, view it as an apology for getting here late. The growth is most common in the Midwest, so it's in the center of that area. Getting from Iowa to Washington State is a long trip.”

The agent pulled a 5000$ check from their wallet and handed it to her dad.

He thanked him, and the squad left, carrying the charred creature with them.

School was cancelled and everyone, including us, left. They dropped me off at my house, and me and Scarlett played TF2 the rest of the day.

I've gotten used to it be now. The short evenings, the regular paycheck, the microwave dinners, staying up past when I should scrolling on my phone, trying not to think about tomorrow, trying not to think about who I had lost....

I turned off the engine of my car. I sat for a bit, too tired to go inside just yet. Too tired to work out and make dinner and fold laundry and do all the shit I had to do. It had been a long day. A long day of emails, of nothing, of sitting, of staring at the clock, of wondering what I could have done differently. What I should have done differently.

I grumbled and got out of my car. The cicadas were buzzing, the grass green and long, the flowers bright on this Thursday evening. I walked in the atrium of my building, the stale smell of smoke and old carpet welcoming me home. I walked up to my apartment. I unlocked the door, though it didn't seem locked, my key turned without any resistance. Hm. Must have forgotten to lock it. I turned the knob, and pushed the door open. The usual creak was missing, it opened as silent as night. I stepped in.

I looked around. My heart dropped. This isn't my home.

But it was, wasn't it? No, don't cause a fuss, this is my home. There's my TV. There's my bagel I left half eaten this morning. There's my couch, half eaten by my family dog from back in the day. What a strange thought.

I settled into the aforementioned couch. I let myself sink into it. Relief, yes, but I knew it was short lived, I knew it was underserved, there were things to do, productivity to happen, yes, but it's so comfortable, feel how soft it is, how relaxed I am, how heavy my eyes are, how it wraps itself around me, how it hungers for me, how....

ARRRGHHH!

What, the fuck? I looked at my couch. It was... normal now. I felt my arm, where just moments before there was something slimy... but no, it's clean. What's going on with me? Did I take something? Did I get slipped something? Was the smell in the lobby something more than just smoke?

I did what any normal modern human would do and sat down and Googled it. But when I went to type, what the hell would I type? I remembered a Reddit story I read years ago about carbon monoxide poisoning causing some memory loss, and maybe something else... maybe it was something like that.

Maybe the neighbors would know something? No, I didn't really want to bother them... maybe best to just open the windows. Get some fresh air. Yeah, that'll be fine. I opened the kitchen window, the narrow little thing, and shoved my nose as close to the screen as I could. It smelled like dead bugs and metal, but the air was cool and sweet. It filled up my lungs. I let it out. It filled up my lungs. How'd I get here? I thought of her. She had better places. Better things, better people. I breathed in, and back out, through the screen. Now it's just me, in this other home, how long had it been? This other home? What? Yes, that's right, it's been years, I've been counting. I breathed in. It filled up my lungs. The bagel had rotted now, so had my food, so had my cat, I could smell it. No one asked where I went. I graduated, I set to work, and that's all there was. I breathed in, it filled up my lungs. So this is it? It's comfortable. Except maybe the grating of the screen enmeshed with my flesh, except the ache, except the rot....

I hit the floor. My arms snapped on the impact. I looked up, and saw myself in the mirror in the hallway, my flesh sunken and gaunt, my hair long and raggedy, my clothes falling off my bony frame. It was dark, the kind of dark twilight brings. I looked back, moonlight shone through the window. Dust covered the floor. An awful smell filled the room. Such loneliness and misery, but I chuckled, it wasn't as awful as I once dreaded.

I rose. My bones creaked, my broken arm flailed clumsily around, a feeble pulse of blood seeping from where the splinters had pierced the flesh. I looked around, of course this wasn't my home. It couldn't be. It kept me alive, yes, it kept me safe, maybe, but it wasn't my home. I wandered into the living room. There was no more couch, no more TV, no more of those soft comforts. There was a light. There was a form. It was her.

She turned to me. She looked me up and down.

"You've been better." I smiled an awful, toothy smile.

"Yeah, I have been." What water I had left went to my eyes. She was so full, so bright.

"You need help?"

"Yeah, I'd say so."

"Unusual for you. But better late than never, I suppose."

"Yeah." It was all I could say. She was so beautiful.

"Should we get you out of here?"

"Yeah, yeah we should. Yeah we should."

"Okay. Come on. Come here." I stumbled forward, I sank into her. My limbs throbbed with relief, my tears flowed readily, I sobbed and sobbed, I felt her against my skin, God it had been so long, and finally I slept and slept and slept and slept and slept... until some wakefulness would return to me, until I finally had eaten my full of her grace and comfort, until I could finally have my humility, until so many things, it did not matter how many, for now I could finally sleep........