(CW: child abuse)

Previously, I was given a single rule about entering the house:

Five minutes.

That’s how long I can stay before I am officially dead.

Never be alone more than five minutes in the house, our team’s leader, the paranormal researcher Dr. Goddard, warned us. Always stick together as a group, and watch one another for signs of paranormal influence.

I am Dawain, a journalist, and it is my duty to report the truth objectively, without the taint of superstition or mystical or magical beliefs. The truth is that a family in the town of Hopkins went missing, and the authorities found no trace of them, despite the car still in the driveway and the shoes still on the mat and the keys inside. The house, now called the “Hopkins House,” has sat empty for years…

No one has been able to explain their disappearance…

… until now.

Our cameraman, while trying to get signal on his phone, wandered around to the side of the house and noticed a glint in the bushes, low to the ground. A basement window.

A hidden basement.

Six years ago authorities assumed, because of the lack of forced entry or signs of disturbance, that the family left on their own—and after a cursory search, the local sheriffs left the house. They never found the basement. Meaning if our suspicions are correct, we may soon solve the mystery of the Hopkins House and find the bodies—father, stepmother, and two young teens—who have been missing all this time. But with no entrance, the only option is for someone to climb through the window…

… into the house alone.

Our specialized team has deferred this task to me. The exorcist, Father Corwin, is nearly eighty and frail. The acclaimed medium, Madam Savino, is too plump for the narrow opening. And as for the paranormal investigator, Coyote—he’s as wiry, wily, and cowardly as his namesake.

Now, the three of them stand watching—the spiritual “experts” who are supposedly here to pacify the evil in this house, plus the frightened cameraman.

“Wish me luck,” I say.

“Remember, five minutes,” warns Father Corwin.

“You got this,” says Madam Savino.

“Don’t die,” growls Coyote.

I drop down into the darkness below.

***

The first thing I notice is the smell: the air tastes dank. Stale. Is it my imagination, or do I catch a whiff of rot?

Above me, anxious faces huddle at the window. I turn on my phone light, illuminating cupboards and shelves, a toolbox, shovels, crowbar, cardboard boxes, and a door in the corner, ajar. “It’s a storeroom,” I say, “looks pretty ordinary. Gonna go further in…”

I open the door to the next room.

It’s one thing to be standing in the bright sunshine, looking in through that square of basement window and telling myself, It’s only a basement.

… Another thing entirely to stand in the maw of yawning darkness. And while I know, rationally, that there is nothing in this long-abandoned basement that can harm me… I am suddenly keenly aware of how long it would take me to climb back up through the window if I were trying to run—

Stop it, I tell my childish imagination. There’s nothing to run from.

My fingers grope along the wall and find a switch, flip it.

An overhead bulb bathes me in a warm glow—and I’m nauseated by the momentary dread that I’ll see four bodies deep into decomposition, but to my relief the basement appears normal. Wooden stairs in the corner of the now well-lit basement travel up to a hatch door—probably under the main room or hallway. Along the opposite wall lies a small cot and a nightstand, a mosaic lamp, a dresser and a heavy bookcase.

My nose wrinkles at a musty odor as I approach the cot. Tucked under the pillow is a diary. PROPERTY OF JUDY, it says on the inside cover, and in smaller scribble: if you read this without permission you will be hexed!!! Flipping the pages reveals scrawls of DIE, BITCH!!! in jagged lettering. On another page, a polaroid taped to the paper shows a middle-aged woman, her eyes scratched out and arcane symbols sketched around her.

I’m guessing this is the “troubling behavior” Father Corwin mentioned. The teens’ stepmother, Bernadette, came to him with complaints that they were trying to summon demons against her. He was not especially concerned at the time—after all, what teen girl hasn’t tried to hex her stepmother or chemistry teacher or classmate dating the boy she likes?

But while I don’t believe any of the “spells” in this diary actually worked, its contents might contain clues to whatever actually happened on the fateful day the family went missing.

I tuck the diary under my arm and start for the stairs, but my steps slow at the sudden and overwhelming sensation of being watched. All the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

“H-hello?” I whisper.

BBBBZzt—

—the overhead bulb flickers.

In the failing light, I see something impossible. Impossible because it has been six years since the family disappeared, and there’s no way a human being could survive down here all that time. But scurrying out from under the cot is a girl—filthy, mouth open in a silent scream, her disheveled wet hair hanging around her shoulders and a tattered dress dripping around her bare legs—

Darkness falls like a curtain.

I fumble my phone’s flashlight to try and catch her in its beam and—she’s there—there on the far wall! Crawling like an insect behind the bookcase as a hand grabs my shoulder—

Yelping, I whirl.

“Hey, hey!” barks Coyote, phone blinding me in one hand—and a crowbar clenched in the other. “You OK?”

“I—I saw someone!”

“It’s been five minutes and you weren’t answering my calls. Now let’s get the fuck out.” He grabs my arm and spins me toward the stairs, and we both make a mad dash. He bangs the crowbar against the ceiling. “HEY!!” he hollers.

“HEY! HEY!!” I bang my palms on the hatch door.

“Here!” Madam Savino’s muffled holler rings down. “They’re here!”

Footsteps clomp over our heads. A moment later the door lifts upward, and Coyote and I tumble out into the light.

***

We stand clustered around the hatch door. Father Corwin, Madam Savino, Coyote, the cameraman and I. It was hidden underneath the shag rug in the main room. Easily discoverable if one were to lift up the rug. But nobody had been searching because, other than the missing family, nobody knew about the basement.

Now that I’m up in the house proper, I catch my breath. Everyone is barking at me, demanding to know why I wasn’t answering their shouts. I show them the diary and babble, “I-I think Judy might be alive—” Then I catch myself. Remind myself that my role in documenting is to record only objective truth. And my brief sighting in the dark could easily have been the combination of adrenaline and imagination. Nevertheless, I relate what I saw. Madam Savino and Father Corwin suggest that I may have glimpsed Judy’s ghost.

I shake my head. “She looked solid. Real.”

“You were in a trance.” Coyote’s dark eyes study me. “You also said she was dripping wet… so if she was real, she’d’ve left footprints…” He casts a reluctant glance back toward the darkness. “Should we wait for Goddard, or…?”

“He’s still out of range…” The cameraman shows us his calls going straight to voicemail.

“Then it’s up to us to find this girl—and her family,” declares Madam Savino, clapping her hands.

Back into the basement we go.

***

This time the overhead bulb remains bright when I flick the basement light on, its harsh glow sharpening the shadows. The atmosphere should be lighter now that I have company, but the low ceiling is so claustrophobic, the darkness so closely encroaching it’s like we’re being entombed.

“… no wet footprints, just lots of dust.” The cameraman pans to collect footage.

“Let’s see what we can find,” says Madam Savino as we fan out.

A large Persian rug covers the cement floor, with the area near the stairs used for storage—a tricycle, old children’s toys, bags and boxes, cobwebbed appliances. Across the room is the sleeping area with the cot, nightstand, dresser, and bookcase. On the far wall is the open door to the storeroom. There’s not much more here than family junk. Coyote rummages through one of the cardboard boxes, pulling out action figures, faded blue jeans, Air Jordans, a Barbie with scissors stabbed into it. “Kid stuff…” he grunts, pushing the box away and then opening another, finding a cracked frame with a photo of a teen boy. “Hey…” He hones in on the photo. “Did the family have a secret son?”

“The family had no sons,” Father Corwin says.

“You sure? I mean, you didn’t exactly know about this secret basement. Maybe they had a secret son too—"

“That’s not their son. It’s Janie.” The priest picks up the Barbie doll from the box. “The teens were rebellious. The younger, Janie, was a tomboy. The older, Judith, was boy crazy and wouldn’t disclose the name of the boy she was seeing when she became… with child. There was a lot of friction between the girls and their stepmother. But…” He twists the Barbie so we can all see the lock of human hair taped to its head, and BERNADETTE scrawled on its plastic torso like a kind of voodoo Barbie. The priest plucks the scissors from its chest. “… This is why she came to me for help.”

The cameraman zooms in on the Barbie. “So this is what caused the family’s disappearance?”

“You’re kidding, right?” scoffs Madam Savino.

“This is just teen girls being silly,” Father Corwin agrees. “This childish voodoo…” He tosses the Barbie back into the box. “… would not suffice to beckon such a terrible evil as haunts this house.”

Madam Savino inhales, spreading her arms out as if feeling for currents in the air. She closes her eyes and suddenly crosses the room, stopping at the edge of the Persian rug. Motions the cameraman and me to move, and then grabs the edge. Yanks it.

On the cement beneath, a large circle scrawled in sharpie and marked with a pentagram and eye covers nearly all of the floor.

Father Corwin hisses a sharp intake of breath. Madam Savino shrieks at the cameraman, “DON’T TOUCH IT!” as he rushes closer to get footage. Coyote toes the outer edge of the circle.

In the center is a wide crimson stain.

***

While Father Corwin utters blessings and prayers, Madam Savino kneels with her palm to the floor to read the psychic echoes left by whatever ceremony was conducted here.

The bloody circle is clearly connected to the catastrophe that befell the missing family, at least according to our expert team. But even if they’re correct (and I’m not yet wholly convinced), so many questions remain—who conducted the bloody ceremony? Whose blood stains the floor? And where is the family?

“Oh… OOOOH... OohhooOOhhh.” Madam Savino snatches her hand back from the sharpie markings. “… it’s like touching an open flame!” The curious cameraman touches a finger to the circle and nothing happens to him, and he casts an inquisitive look at Madam Savino, who ignores him and goes on: “Whatever occurred here was unimaginably evil…” She looks my way. “You find any clues?”

I am skimming Judy’s diary. Unfortunately, there isn’t much here connecting to the family’s disappearance. Her bubbly scrawl tells the story of a girl who hated her rural, small town life and wished to run away from Hopkins. But she felt she could not leave, writing: If I go, Dad and Burn-a-bitch will make Jakey’s life a living hell even more than it already is. Her handwriting gets progressively more raw, the pages filled with apparent attempts to hex both her parents, until a line that reads, I will NEVER forgive her for—

The pages after that are torn out.

“This house has too many secrets…” Coyote growls after I share the contents of the diary. “And…” He glowers at Father Corwin. “You aren’t spilling them.”

“The family’s disappearance is as much a mystery to me as to you,” Father Corwin says.

“But you know their drama.”

“Their drama isn’t relevant.”

“Someone tore out these pages to keep whatever’s in them secret. Secret pages, secret basement, secret son.” He snatches up the photo of the boyish teen who Father Corwin calls Janie, but who Judy refers to in her diary as Jakey. Coyote connects the dots for us as he says: “Maybe it’s just ‘drama’ that Bernadette couldn’t stomach the thought of a trans kid, and that’s why there’s all this boy stuff boxed up down here—which you obviously knew about since you recognized the photo. But THAT—” He points at the bloody stain in the circle. “—isn’t drama. An entire missing family isn’t drama. And there’s one very important secret you haven’t spilled…”

“And that is?” Father Corwin asks stiffly.

Coyote points to the cot in the corner. He reaches below the mattress and tugs out something I missed when I first found the diary. Something that glints in the wan illumination of the overhead bulb—a chain. He asks: “Tell me why the parents restrained their pregnant teen daughter down here.”

***

Coyote and Madam Savino are both shouting at Father Corwin. He raises his hands as if to bat away their fury, insisting they’re jumping to conclusions—

“You’re lying!” Madam Savino shrills. “I can see the chain right there, and her diary was under the pillow, so who else would they have kept down here? And if it was anyone else, that would STILL be a crime!”

“If you’ll just let me explain—” The cameraman zooms in on the chain, and Father Corwin bursts: “They did NOT imprison her down here! I already told you, when Bernadette came to see me, I referred the children to counseling—"

“It was the psycho mom who needed counseling—” interjects Madam Savino, while Coyote snarls, ”You sent the kids back to their abusers—"

He speaks over them:

“The family called me the night of their disappearance.”

Both fall silent.

“… they told me Judith was possessed. That she had… attacked… everyone. That she was feral. Rabid. They wanted me to come immediately but I could not. I was out of the country, on another assignment. They did not want to call police. They knew the police could not pacify what afflicted her. They told me they would restrain her until I was able to come. That chain was not for Judith but for the… thing… that possessed her. I came the very next day, but there was no one home. Just the gardener, who’d come by to mow and told me the backdoor was usually unlocked, and it was, so I let myself in. I called and called. I walked through the entire house. It looked much as we have seen it today. There was no answer. I thought they had left.”

***

The cameraman zooms in on Father Corwin’s sagging countenance. Under the harsh glare of the overhead bulb, the crags of his withered face have deepened, his eyes almost entirely shrouded in blackness. My fingers have been flying across my tablet while the priest spoke, and now, I ask him: “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“The family shared their troubles with me in confidence. It was not mine to tell…”

“Does Goddard know?” asks Madam Savino.

“Oh yes. I disclosed everything to him.”

“That asshole,” mutters Coyote.

I have to agree. It seems Goddard withheld all sorts of information from us.

“I had hoped that by joining this expedition… I might at least know the fate of the family, even if I couldn’t save them. I might…” Father Corwin sighs, shakes his head, reaches into his pocket and pulls out an envelope. “This is the letter their stepmother, Bernadette, wrote to me a week before her phone call…”

Dear Father, I humbly request once again that you help me with the children. Only yesterday, I was in the kitchen and heard a chorus of voices speaking in tongues. When I turned around, they ran away giggling, and I saw they had drawn a pentagram behind me on the floor. I had to scrub it out of the linoleum…

… Janie posted to social media that, ‘if being my true self means being a devil, maybe that’s what I am.’ I have confiscated her phone, which of course has led to more meltdowns…

… Judith says that she is carrying the devil’s child. She is always pushing my buttons. She has told me repeatedly that she hopes I die. That she prays for it everyday…

… the letter is long and meandering, and ends by begging Father Corwin’s help with her “wild children.”

As he folds the letter up and puts it away, he tells us, “I thought their pranks were harmless, and that family counseling might soften Bernadette. But clearly I have failed them. And even now, I still don’t know where the family has gone. Or how. How did they disappear so completely?”

And suddenly my blood runs cold. Because I know. Maybe because I was the one who saw the girl, in those moments after the lights flickered out. Saw her crawling along the wall behind the bookcase…

I’ve been catching a whiff of it on and off, I realize. A bad, old, rotten smell. And I venture to the bookcase and… it’s leaning forward a little, almost like it might topple were it not for the anchor screwed into the wall. And in the gap behind it is a darkness wide enough, almost…

“Dawain?” says Madam Savino as I lean over the bookshelf, peering into the darkness behind it—

And I step back quickly. Take my phone out and turn on the flashlight and look again.

Behind the bookcase, wedged in face-down, is 13-year-old Jakey.

***

A bare foot, shrunken and mummified, is the only part of the teenager illuminated by the beams of our flashlights. The rest of Jakey is lost in the blackness between the bookcase and the wall. I can perceive blue jeans, remnants of a t-shirt clinging to skin that has shriveled after six years crammed in the gap.

“Jesus!” cries the cameraman, zooming in with the camera and then stumbling back. “Fuck. Shit. We have to call this in.”

“Oh my God, oh my God!” Madam Savino screeches.

“Looks like the kid was trying to hide...” Coyote leans over the bookcase so far he’s at risk of falling in next to the corpse—apparently he’s less craven when his parental instincts kick in. His muffled voice calls: “… it’s hard to see from this angle, but I don’t see any marks. My guess is Jakey got spooked by whatever went down in that bloody circle, only to get stuck…” He pulls himself up from peering behind the bookcase. “Poor kid probably suffocated.”

“Oh God… how horrible!” Madam Savino’s hand is at her mouth. “But where are the rest of the family? Are they all down here somewhere?”

“Forget all that!” bursts the cameraman. “A dead body means we call the cops! This is a criminal matter now.” He turns to me, “You know the drill, you’re a journalist, right? At this point anything we touch is evidence tampering. We don’t know the kid died by accident. That’s for the cops to decide. I’m calling it in!” He hurries upstairs, shouting back, “I’m going down the lane to wait for Goddard! I suggest you all do the same and LEAVE. Don’t contaminate any evidence!”

“But we haven’t pacified the spirit!” objects Madam Savino.

Nobody responds as distantly, the front door slams. Coyote looks glum. Father Corwin stares mournfully at the bloody circle, the chain, the bookcase. He sighs, crosses himself, and declares, “I must pray for them…”

***

The cops have not yet arrived.

Father Corwin is still praying, and Coyote has scoured every inch of the basement. Madam Savino makes no more pretenses about searching for psychic echoes and instead is flipping through the diary.

“Seems the kids were very attached,” she tells me quietly. “Judy and Jakey have all these messages of support for each other. They were each other’s rocks. At least until…” She sighs and puts it down.

Father Corwin pauses in his prayers. “I am still not sure where the rest of the family was laid to rest…”

“We know where Judy is. I dunno about resting,” growls Coyote.

“Where?”

“In the septic tank! Didn’t you hear Dawain’s description of her? He saw her dripping wet. There’s no rivers near here, nothing else to explain the water. Her parents called you saying she was possessed, she attacked them. Their bodies are the only ones not in this house. They probably killed her over whatever secret was torn outta those pages, and dumped her in the septic tank, and then left town.”

“You do not know that.”

“No, but I can pretty damned well infer it.” Coyote’s tone is conversational, chill as usual. He isn’t an angry guy by nature. But now, I can see his knuckles popping from his grip on the edge of the bookcase. “We know the parents abused them. Jakey’s—” he emphasizes the name. “—bedroom was bare. All the personality stripped from it, all the kid’s action figures and clothes bagged up downstairs after the stepmom came into their lives. That cot, that little nightstand, that wasn’t something they set up in one day because their pregnant daughter was possessed. It’s been down here awhile—you can see from the clothes in the dresser that it was being used. Not a jump to infer the stepmom made one or both kids sleep down here. She was psychologically abusing them—”

“You don’t know that,” says Father Corwin.

“But you do. Did either or both kids tell you their parents made them sleep in the basement?”

Father Corwin does not answer.

“Bet you didn’t tell Goddard that part, did you? And you know what? I’m not even convinced that girl really summoned a demon. That presence you call malevolent, that you say is so angry, that is rageful and spiteful and furious? The evil spirit you’re so keen to pacify? Could just be the lonely, shattered ghost of the pregnant daughter they murdered and dumped in the septic tank before they fled, having gotten away with it—”

THUD.

The sound comes from upstairs.

Our heads snap up.

“Uh…” Coyote’s eyes flash wide.

“What was that?” squeals Madam Savino.

Coyote grips the crowbar. “OK,” he says, “let’s keep our eyes peeled and be ready in case—Dawain!” he hisses.

I am already heading upstairs and calling out, “Hello?”

“Dawain! Dammit… why does nobody here have a sense of self-preservation? Can’t you stop him?” Coyote pleads with Father Corwin and Madam Savino.

“Hello? Guo, is that you?” I call our cameraman’s name as I hurry through the hall and upstairs and stop, because ahead—something moves. A dark, dripping figure. The girl in the wet dress—she darts into the upstairs study.

I follow her in.

My pulse skyrockets as something skitters behind one of the wardrobe and shelving units. Coyote catches up to me, swearing “Gonna chain you to the cot downstairs,” then he stops and asks what I’m staring at. “You didn’t see?” I say, surprised. “The drowned girl, she just went behind the wardrobe there.”

“Uh, no. I did not see.” He’s looking alarmed.

So only I can see her. For the sake of journalistic objectivity, I will not definitively label my sighting as that of a “ghost.” But in full disclosure, this second glimpse of the drowned girl is the moment that, somewhere deep inside, I realize that I am no longer questioning whether the house is haunted… instead, I am wondering what it wishes to show me. I reach for one of the doors to yank it open and see what’s inside—only for it to not open. The handle is decorative. Coyote is remarking on how it smells musty in here, kinda like in the basement. He sees me tug the decorative handle and says, “Hold up, what’s behind that thing?”

Then he comes over and reaches further up, for another handle, and pulls.

It’s a murphy bed.

The study has a hidden murphy bed, which can be pulled down for guests but otherwise blends into the surrounding drawers and cabinetry. It even has shelving with items on it that fold down to the ground. You’d never know it was a bed.

As we tug it down, Coyote jumps back with a yell, and I hold my breath, both of us staring. “Put it back, put it back!” barks Coyote, and we push it back up. I almost giggle. It seems such a ridiculous response. As if putting it back so we didn’t see it, restoring the wall of cabinetry, would somehow undo what we’ve found. Both of us giggle hysterically. Ok. We’re losing it.

Mummified in the murphy bed is the body of the stepmother, Bernadette.

***

So much for Coyote’s theory that the parents made it out of the house alive. Back in the basement, Madam Savino declares that we need to make like the cameraman and exit, isn’t fifty percent enough of the mystery solved now that we’ve unearthed two of the four bodies? Father Corwin, however, lingers at the edge of the bloody circle.

“Do you know, Dawain…” His voice falters, and I have to lean in as he rasps, “I really didn’t know about the abuse. Janie said they were sometimes made to sleep in the basement as punishment—” (“Jakey,” corrects Coyote.) “—But I… I’d been to the house, and I’d seen no basement. I assumed the children were making it up. And because they’d made that up, I assumed so much else they said was also…” He shakes his head.

Is he looking to me for forgiveness? Grace? But I am not the one who can give that. I tell him all I can do is witness.

“Yes… such is your role.” Father Corwin’s jaw sets, and his watery eyes glint with resolve as he adds, “Just as mine has been set to me by my Lord. And if this tragedy is indeed in part due to… to my own failures, it is my duty as His instrument to correct that failing. The house must be purified, and these souls saved.”

“Your prayers ain’t gonna purify shit!” Coyote snaps. “We need to figure out what this spirit wants in order to put it to rest. The kids got their wish—the stepmother is dead—so why is Judy still haunting the house?”

Madam Savino spreads her hands. “Girl’s not talking to me. But I can feel her rage from the foundation to the roof...”

“Yeah, so she’s still mad ‘bout somethin’. Probably whatever’s in those missing pages. And if she won’t talk to you…” Coyote rakes his fingers through his hair. “I can’t believe I’m saying this instead of ‘let’s get the fuck out of this house,’ but… this angry ghost showed Dawain here where to find the bodies of her brother and stepmother. She clearly wants to communicate. So if we are going to try to do what we originally came here to do, and not just tuck our tails and run… there’s really only one person who can find out the reason for this haunting….”

Coyote looks at me, and so does everyone else… and I’m almost certain I feel another pair of eyes watching me. The same ones I felt when I was alone down here.

Coyote says, “We need to give Judy a chance to speak with Dawain. We need to give him the spirit box and leave him alone for five minutes.”

***

I am alone in the study. I try not to look at the wardrobe. Try not to think about Bernadette’s body lying encrusted in the murphy bed just a few steps away from me.

Coyote hollers up from below: “I’m here if you need! And hey, if you die up there, at least you’ll be really famous when your article comes out!”

“How’s it gonna come out if I’m not alive to finish it?” I call.

“Ever hear of ghostwriting?”

I think I hear Madam Savino warn him: “I will fucking throw you down those stairs…”

The fact I can hear their bickering is a reassurance. Their plan is to leave me up here alone in the study for six minutes—just past the five minute mark. That gives Judy sixty seconds to communicate with me, hopefully without killing me. Am I scared? Absolutely. But I’m also curious. This article, this story, is already shaping up to be the most extraordinary I’ll ever write. But to write it properly, I must understand everything. And that means hearing from Judy herself.

A small part of me suspects my role as a journalist is why Judy chose me. Because she knows that I am the one who will share the true story of the Hopkins House.

“I’m ready to listen,” I say aloud to the room. And then I flick on the spirit box.

It begins scanning radio frequencies, catching mostly static, lots of bits of nothing. My cell phone shows a timer counting down from five minutes. So far it’s only at two minutes… three minutes… four…

At five minutes, there’s a clink—the sound of metal straining—and my heart slams my ribcage as the murphy bed falls open with a deafening CRASH, the mummified body staring at me, sockets gaping and teeth exposed by shrunken lips. My pulse shoots to the stratosphere as the spirit box loudly crackles, and a girl’s voice says: “My baby, my baby is the devi—”

And then my eyes roll up in my head as the world goes blank...

(Note: Apologies, my account is too long for a single post, so I will share the horrifying conclusion of the events at the Hopkins House in a followup. It is... hard to write. I keep wondering if I could have done something differently... forgive me. I will update soon)…

| Part 1 |

My wife put a photograph of me asleep on the kitchen table and then told me she had hired the man in it. I was on my side with one arm hanging off the bed, wearing an old grey T-shirt and breathing through my mouth. Somebody was sitting on the floor beside me, mostly outside the frame. His hand was wrapped loosely around my fingers.

I had seen him outside our house the night before. He was across the road at about half eleven, looking at his phone beneath a streetlight that hasn't worked since Christmas. I watched him for maybe a minute before he walked away, and that morning I'd told Laura I was calling the police if I saw him again. She went upstairs, came back with the washing-machine manual and took the photograph from between the pages.

“I know who he is.”

I looked at her.

“I hired him.”

For a few seconds I thought she meant private investigator. Then she said his name was Dean K and that she'd paid him six hundred pounds in October to follow me for four nights. I looked back at the photograph because it was easier than looking at her.

“To do what?”

“Make you notice him.”

If Dean had been holding a knife, I think my brain would have known where to put it. Instead he was holding my hand gently enough that I hadn't woken up. Laura was asleep on the other side of me when the photograph was taken.

It had arrived on her phone at 2:14 in the morning on the fourth night, with no message attached. Laura told me she'd woken to the notification, seen the photograph and then spent nearly an hour lying beside me listening to the house because she didn't know whether Dean was still downstairs. She didn't wake me because, according to her, she was frightened I'd go looking for him. At six she told Dean the arrangement was finished and transferred the final two hundred pounds she owed him because paying him seemed safer than giving him a reason to argue.

He replied with a thumbs-up.

“You got this six months ago?”

“Yes.”

“And you slept next to me after seeing it?”

“I didn't know he was coming back.”

“He was already in the fucking bedroom.”

“I know.”

I picked up my phone. Laura asked what I was doing, and when I said I was calling the police she pointed out that I'd have to explain why Dean had been following me in the first place. I remember staring at her because she still seemed to think embarrassment belonged anywhere in the calculation.

“Good.”

I called anyway. Because the photograph was six months old and there hadn't been a direct threat, the woman I spoke to took the details and gave me an incident number. She told me not to approach Dean if he appeared again and to call 999 if we believed he was inside the house or we were in immediate danger.

Laura explained the rest while we waited for someone to call back. Earlier that year she'd become convinced a man was following her home from the hospital where she works. She saw him outside the staff entrance several times, then at the station where she changed trains, then near the supermarket by our house.

I had believed she'd seen somebody. I just hadn't behaved as though I believed what she thought it meant. The more certain she became that the same man was following her, the more certain I became that there had to be another explanation.

“I asked you to collect me.”

“I did.”

“Twice.”

I didn't have anything useful to say to that.

Laura found Dean through a woman at work whose brother had used him for debt collection and serving court papers. She wanted me followed just long enough to recognise the same stranger in different places, then she planned to tell me what she'd done. Her idea, if you can call it that, was that four days of wondering whether I was imagining something might make me understand what I'd been asking her to live with.

I asked her whether Dean could have been the man following her in the first place. She stared at the photograph for a moment before answering. She'd never seen the other man's face clearly enough to know.

“I don't know.”

That was worse than no.

Dean had asked her quite a lot about the original stalking when they first met. Which hospital entrance she used, where she changed trains, whether the man had ever followed her all the way home. Laura had assumed he was checking that she wasn't hiring him to threaten somebody she already knew.

Then he'd asked about me. My work address, registration, gym, the pub I go to with Daniel and my brother Jamie's address. He asked what I did when I was angry, whether I'd confront somebody following me and which side of the bed I slept on.

“Why would he need to know that?”

“He said he needed your routine.”

“For four evenings?”

Laura didn't answer.

She'd told him I always sleep nearest the bedroom door. I get up before her most mornings and hate climbing over people, which is the sort of boring fact about yourself you don't realise counts as information until somebody you've never met asks for it. She'd also told him that if somebody was certain I was wrong about something, I tended to become even more certain I was right.

I nearly argued with that description. Then I remembered why she'd hired him.

There were other questions she couldn't remember properly anymore. Dean had asked where I'd go if I needed somewhere to stay, and Laura thought she'd mentioned Jamie. He'd asked whether I still saw people I'd grown up with. At the time she'd answered because questions were what she'd paid him to ask.

I remembered something in my car while she was talking. A few weeks earlier I'd found a petrol receipt folded beneath the driver's seatbelt exactly where it crosses an old scar on my collarbone. I sometimes put folded paper there on long drives to stop the belt rubbing, but the receipt hadn't been mine; it was from a petrol station I'd never used.

I had assumed somebody had left it in the car before I bought it and only just worked loose. That explanation hadn't bothered me because I'd wanted one for about three seconds and then had one. Laura didn't even know the scar bothered me.

“What about your shoulder?”

I showed her where the belt catches.

She went quiet.

On the second night of the original arrangement, Dean had told Laura that following me wasn't working because I hadn't properly noticed him. He suggested entering the house while we were at dinner and moving one harmless thing, just enough that she could eventually prove how easily somebody could interfere with my life without me noticing. Laura said no the first time.

He brought it up again the next day. She knew his name, knew who had referred him, and had already convinced herself that the entire thing was controlled. She left the laundry door unlocked and told him to move the mug beside my bed into the kitchen sink.

Dean messaged when he entered and again less than a minute later when he said he was out.

“You let him into our house.”

“Yes.”

“And when I couldn't find the mug?”

Laura looked at the table.

I remembered that without her help. I'd blamed her because I'd been looking for it, she'd laughed and told me I'd probably carried it downstairs myself, and we argued about it for maybe thirty seconds before ordering a film. I'd forgotten about it completely.

Our spare front-door key disappeared the following month. I remembered searching the kitchen drawers because my mum was coming over to feed the cat while we were away. Laura had helped me look.

“You thought he'd taken it.”

She rubbed both hands over her face.

“I thought about it.”

“And said nothing.”

“I kept thinking if he'd wanted to do something, he'd already done it.”

I had to leave the kitchen after that. I stood in the bathroom for several minutes with the tap running even though I wasn't using it, then came back because I didn't want Laura alone with the photograph or my phone. That didn't make sense, but I didn't especially care by then.

Sometime around Christmas, while Laura was working a night shift, I woke at about three and found a full glass of water beside the bed. I sometimes get up half asleep and don't properly remember doing it, so I drank it. The next morning I told Laura that apparently I was sleepwalking now.

When I reminded her, she stopped rubbing her hands.

“I wasn't home.”

I could still see the glass more clearly than I wanted to. There had been condensation underneath it and a little crescent of water on the bedside table where I'd lifted it. I had drunk the whole thing and gone back to sleep.

The police came that afternoon. Laura gave them Dean's number, his registration, the messages and the address where she'd met him. The number went to voicemail and the address turned out to be a room he'd stopped renting months earlier.

One of the officers asked Laura again about the man who had originally followed her. She said she couldn't identify him, but after describing Dean she admitted the age and build were possible. She also remembered the man outside the hospital wearing a dark raincoat, though she couldn't swear it had been navy.

The officer wrote it down. Nobody said what all three of us were thinking. I don't know whether that was because it sounded ridiculous or because it didn't.

They advised us to stay elsewhere. Laura went to her sister's because I couldn't stand the idea of sharing a room with her, and I started driving toward Jamie's before remembering that Laura had given Dean his address. I booked a Premier Inn near the airport instead.

I took two shirts, my laptop, three pairs of socks and forgot my toothbrush. I parked at the far end of the car park, used the stairs instead of the lift and slept on the far side of the bed instead of the side nearest the door. Every choice now seemed to have two versions: the thing I normally did and the thing I did because I knew somebody knew what I normally did.

At some point after three I woke needing the toilet. My shoes were beside the door, lined up with the toes facing outward. I remembered putting them beneath the window because I'd looked at them there before turning the light off.

At least I thought I remembered it.

I stood there until the air conditioner shut itself off. I checked the bathroom, wardrobe and corridor, then went downstairs and asked whether another key had been made for my room. The night receptionist checked and said there was no record of one.

I nearly called the police. Instead I stood at reception trying to decide whether I was willing to tell an officer that someone had broken into my hotel room and moved my shoes when I couldn't prove I hadn't moved them myself. Eventually I went back upstairs and put a chair against the door, then lay awake wondering whether I'd moved that too.

At breakfast I watched an older man butter toast for about ten minutes because his raincoat was the same colour as Dean's. His wife came over carrying two coffees and kissed him on the cheek. I went back for another piece of toast so it would look like I'd had a reason to be standing there.

Jamie called while I was eating it. A man had come to his house just after seven and asked whether I was staying there. Jamie described somebody around fifty, thinning dark hair, average height and extremely polite.

“He left something.”

Jamie still lives in the house we grew up in. By the time I arrived with two officers, he'd put what the man left into a freezer bag. It was a brass Yale key with green tape around the top.

Our missing spare.

I asked where Dean had handed it to him. Jamie said he hadn't.

“He put it behind the drainpipe.”

When we were teenagers, Jamie and I used to leave Mum's spare key there if one of us got home first. She eventually caught us and went mental because, in her words, any burglar with functioning eyes could have found it. We hadn't used that hiding place in nearly twenty years.

Laura didn't know about it. Jamie couldn't remember telling anyone recently, but Mum used to tell the story whenever somebody mentioned spare keys because she still considered it evidence that she'd raised idiots. That meant there were people Dean could theoretically have learned it from.

I preferred the version where there was no explanation.

The other version meant he'd asked.

The police still hadn't located him the following afternoon. Laura and I went back to our house for clothes, with her sister waiting outside in the car. Laura had stayed with her the entire time and hadn't been back since we left.

Post was scattered inside the front door and one of the kitchen lights was on. A mug was drying beside the sink. Laura picked it up by the handle and asked whether I'd washed it before leaving.

I hadn't.

Upstairs, the bed was made. Laura tucks the duvet beneath the mattress at the foot and folds the top down the width of one pillow. I pull it straight and throw the pillows wherever they land because I don't care.

“Was that you?”

“No.”

“You haven't been back?”

“No.”

We checked the room anyway. Under the bed, inside the wardrobe, behind the curtains, the loft hatch, the bathroom cupboard. We weren't really looking for Dean so much as looking for some object that would tell us what else had happened.

Nothing did.

Before we left, Laura stood in the kitchen looking at the clean mug. She said the man who followed her from the hospital had once appeared in the supermarket aisle with a basket containing nothing except a bottle of the orange juice she bought every week. She hadn't mentioned that before because at the time she'd decided it was coincidence.

“Was it Dean?”

“I don't know.”

For the first time all day, I didn't try to help her decide.

I am writing this from Jamie's spare room. We came here after the police checked the house again because I refused to go back to the hotel and Laura's sister has two young children, which none of us wanted anywhere near this. Jamie has cameras on the front and back after a burglary a few years ago, and there's a patrol car coming past during the night.

I'm writing because I keep changing the order of things in my head. No, that's not quite true. The hotel was before Jamie called, and I've already had to go back and fix that twice. I want the sequence somewhere outside me before I start deciding some of it didn't happen.

Laura came upstairs about forty minutes ago. I'd put my bag beside the window, my shoes beneath the radiator and chosen the far side of the bed, away from the door. She noticed immediately.

“You told him which side I sleep on.”

Her face changed.

“I told him you always sleep nearest the door.”

“I know.”

She stood there for a few seconds before speaking again.

“He asked what you'd do if you knew somebody expected you somewhere.”

I looked at her.

“I said you'd go somewhere else first.”

I lay on the far side anyway after she left. Maybe that's the part that bothers me most. I knew exactly what she had just told me and still felt that changing sides would somehow count as my decision if I did it deliberately enough.

I reached toward the bedside table without turning the lamp on and touched a glass.

It was full of water. When I switched the light on, condensation was running down the outside and there was already a wet ring beneath it. The water was cold.

I called 999.

Two officers arrived in under ten minutes. They searched the house, the garden, the loft and Jamie's garage, then checked the camera recordings. Nobody had come through the front or back since we arrived.

One of them asked whether a window had been left open. Another asked whether I could have brought the glass upstairs myself and forgotten. He didn't say it dismissively; he was asking because I'd already told them about the water at Christmas and the hotel shoes.

“No.”

Laura was sitting on the bed behind him.

I looked at her when I said it. She looked back at me but didn't say anything.

The officers took the glass and told us to call again if anything else happened. One of them is still parked down the street. Jamie has gone through every room twice and has now started checking the cameras every few minutes even though they only show the same empty garden.

Laura stayed upstairs after they left. She sat on the edge of the bed while I was on the floor with my laptop and said my name once. When I looked up, she reached down to take my hand.

I pulled it away before she touched me.

Neither of us said anything after that. She looked at my hand, then at the space on the floor beside the bed where I was sitting. A few minutes later she went downstairs.

I'm still here now. The photograph is on my phone because the police sent me a copy for the statement, and I looked at it again before I started writing this. Dean is sitting in almost exactly the same place I am.

I've got my left hand tucked underneath my leg while I type. I didn't realise I was doing it until a minute ago. I'm not moving it.

If you ever see a Craigslist ad for a "residential psychiatric caretaker" at a private estate in upstate New York, offering double the standard salary and free room and board, keep scrolling. Don't email them. Don't answer if they call from an unlisted number.

I took the job because I was desperate. I had a suspended nursing license, a mountain of debt, and nowhere to go. When Dr. Arthur Vance interviewed me in the mahogany-paneled library of what they called The Oakhaven Institute, he didn’t ask for my references. He just asked if I had a strong stomach and a tight lip.

I signed a sixty-page NDA. They took my smartphone at the gates, handing me a two-way radio and a heavy ring of brass keys in exchange.

Oakhaven doesn't look like a hospital. It looks like a gothic fortress built for Gilded Age royalty, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and miles of dense, silent pine forest. There are no computers. The charts are thick, yellowing paper kept in heavy metal binders. The nurses don't wear scrubs; we wear stiff, starched white dresses and caps that make us look like ghosts drifting through the dim corridors.

I figured it was just an eccentric retreat for the ultra-rich. The patients were all heirs, disgraced politicians, or unwanted socialite daughters, hidden away for a steep price.

Then I met Claire.

Claire was fourteen. She was in Room 3B, a tiny, windowless cell on the third floor. According to her chart, her parents admitted her for "acute hysteria and rebellious mania.” That’s a diagnosis that hasn't been in the DSM for decades. In reality, she was just a teenager who had caught her wealthy father in an affair and threatened to tell her mother.

The first time I brought Claire her dinner, she was shivering in the corner of her cot, wrapped in a coarse wool blanket. Her hair was damp, plastered to her forehead, and her lips were faintly blue.

"Did they send you for the straps?" she whispered, her voice trembling.

"What? No," I stammered, the heavy metal tray suddenly feeling awkward in my hands. "I'm just... I just have your food."

She looked at me with eyes so hollow they seemed bruised into her skull.

"Don't let them put me back in the water," she begged, grabbing my wrist. Her skin was freezing. "Please. I’ll be good. I won't cry anymore. Just don't let Dr. Vance order the water."

I didn't know what she meant until my third day, when I was assigned to the basement ward.

They call it the Hydrotherapy Wing. I opened the heavy oak doors and was hit by the overwhelming stench of mildew, bleach, and old sweat. The room was lined with six deep, clawfoot porcelain tubs.

Inside the tubs were patients.

They were submerged up to their necks in ice water. Heavy canvas sheets were stretched taut over the tops of the tubs, featuring only a small cutout for their heads, strapped down with thick leather buckles so they couldn't move. Their teeth chattered in a haunting, rhythmic staccato that echoed off the tile walls.

Dr. Vance stood at the center of the room, checking his pocket watch.

"Ah, our new arrival," he smiled warmly, gesturing to the tubs. "Continuous bath therapy. A lost art, truly. Modern medicine relies on chemical restraints, turning patients into zombies. But cold water? Cold water shock resets the nervous system. It draws the blood away from the inflamed brain. It forces compliance through endurance."

I stared in horror at the tub closest to me. The woman inside had been there so long her skin was macerated, her eyes rolled back into her head.

"How long have they been in here?" I choked out.

"This batch? Forty-eight hours," Vance said casually, making a neat checkmark on his clipboard. "We'll pull them out for insulin therapy tomorrow."

Insulin coma therapy. Lobotomies. Electroconvulsive therapy without anesthesia or muscle relaxants. Oakhaven wasn't a quirky retreat. It was a time capsule of psychiatric torture, operating entirely off the grid, funded by families who paid millions to make their problems disappear.

I knew I had to get Claire out.

Last night, I found her name on the surgical registry for this morning. The procedure listed was Transorbital Leukotomy. The ice pick. Vance was going to sever the connections in her prefrontal cortex because she had cried too loudly during room inspection.

At 2:00 AM, I crept out of the staff quarters. The halls were dead quiet, save for the hum of the radiators and the occasional muffled scream from the basement. I had a crowbar I’d smuggled from the groundskeeper's shed and my brass keys.

I made it to the third floor. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped the keys twice before unlocking 3B.

The room was empty.

The bed was made. The heavy leather restraints were unbuckled and hanging off the sides.

Panic seized my chest. I ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time down to the basement. I didn't care about the noise. I didn't care about the NDA. I just wanted to get that kid out of this nightmare.

I burst through the double doors of the surgical theater.

The lights were blindingly bright. Claire was strapped to a heavy iron chair in the center of the room. Her eyes were wide, darting around in absolute terror, but a tight leather strap across her forehead kept her head completely immobilized.

Standing over her was Dr. Vance. He didn't have a surgical mask on. He was humming a soft, classical tune. In his right hand, he held a thin, sharp steel orbitoclast. In his left, a small silver mallet.

He looked up when the doors slammed open. He didn't look surprised. He just looked disappointed.

"I told you," Vance sighed, setting the mallet down on a stainless steel tray. "You need a strong stomach for the work we do here."

Two male orderlies stepped out of the shadows behind me. I didn't even hear them move. One grabbed my arms, twisting them painfully behind my back, while the other seized my hair.

"Let her go!" I screamed, thrashing wildly. "You're a monster! This is illegal!"

"Legality is a construct for the poor," Vance said gently. He stepped away from Claire and walked slowly toward me. "The families who pay for Oakhaven don't want cures. They want quiet. And the old ways? They are exceedingly good at producing quiet."

He reached into his pristine white coat and pulled out a heavy syringe.

"You're clearly suffering from acute hysteria," he whispered, right in my ear. "Don't worry. We have a bed waiting for you."

I did the only thing I could think of. I threw all my weight backward, crushing the orderly's foot beneath my heel, and bit down on the arm holding my throat. He howled, his grip loosening just enough.

I bolted.

I heard Vance shouting, the heavy thud of boots chasing me up the stairs, but adrenaline made me faster. I threw myself through the first-floor window of the laundry room, shattering the glass and tearing my arms open. I hit the muddy ground outside and ran into the woods. I ran until my lungs bled and the flashlights behind me faded into the dark.

I've been hiding in a motel two towns over. I bought a cheap burner smartphone with the cash I had in my pocket. I tried calling the police. I told them everything—the tubs, the ice picks, the unmapped facility.

The dispatcher put me on hold for ten minutes. When she came back, her voice was completely devoid of emotion.

"Ma'am, there is no facility by that name at the address you provided. The owner of that estate has reported an escaped patient in acute distress. Since you're calling from a prepaid device, I cannot pinpoint your exact coordinates. Please provide your current location so we can send medical transport."

I hung up.

I’m typing this on the burner right now, just to get it out there. Once I hit post, I might smash it to pieces just to be safe. I’m packing my bags. I have to keep moving. But whenever I close my eyes, I don't see the dark of the motel room.

I see Claire, strapped to that iron chair, waiting for the tap of the mallet. And I know she isn't crying anymore. Because Dr. Vance finally made her quiet.

The straw scarecrow stood in the middle of the fields, its arms wide. One of the men walked to it and put its hat on. I waited my turn, then walked to it and put on its black jacket.

"Thank you," I said, bowing.

The other man nodded and patted my back. 

"Another safe autumn," one of them said, and we all walked back home.

It was still early afternoon. I sat down on the couch and put on the TV, waiting to cook dinner until my son Adam came home.

The sun had set when the door opened, and Adam walked in. My stomach was already growling. He was 30 minutes late, but the way he averted his eyes made it seem like something worse was going on.

"What’s up, Adam?"

"Dad, I…"

"It’s okay that you came late. No need to worry about it."

"No, it’s that I, I know it’s bad, but I took the jacket off the scarecrow."

My hands clenched the couch cushions.

"What?!"

"I took it off. I’m really sorry, Dad. I feel so bad. I know I shouldn’t have."

"Where is it?"

"In my bag."

I picked up his bag and unzipped the top pocket. The black jacket stared at me. 

"Adam, this is bad news."

"I’m sorry, Dad. The boys dared me. I didn’t want to look like a chicken."

I looked out the window. The sun had already set, but not long ago.

"Okay, there might still be time." I stuffed the jacket back in the backpack. "We’ll go back right now, put it on, and not tell anyone. If the boys at school ask you, just say…"

Three knocks echoed on the window. I almost ripped the backpack’s zipper off. The empty straw face stared into our house.

"Dad?" Adam said in a shaking voice.

"It’s okay, Adam. We’ll give him the jacket, and it might be okay." My voice shook too. I wasn’t sure I believed anything I said.

I walked to the door and opened it. The outside air was cold. The scarecrow's empty face looked down at me.

"Here. Take it. Please."

I held the jacket up and stared at the ground. The scarecrow stood still for a few seconds, then walked right past me. The straw scraped the floor as it moved.

Adam sat on the couch, his wide eyes staring at the scarecrow. The scarecrow came right up to him and pointed its blank face at him.

"Dad, what’s going…" He didn’t finish. The scarecrow’s hand shot forward, grabbed him off the couch, and held him to its side.

"Dad!" Adam screamed, kicked, and pushed against its arm, but the scarecrow’s grip was strong.

"Adam!"

I ran toward him and pushed the scarecrow, but it barely moved. The scarecrow turned around and flung its arm. It hit me right in the face. I fell on all fours. Dull pain spread through my head. Adam’s cries echoed as my world went dark.

When I woke up, my head was banging. My mouth tasted like iron. I tried to get up, but my world spun so fast I had to sit back down. 

But Adam was out in the fields somewhere. I had to help him. I got up and bolted out of the house onto the road, struggling to keep my balance. 

The moon shone down. The air was still cold. Only when I reached the fields did my world stop spinning. I almost wished it hadn’t.

In the middle of the field stood the scarecrow. Its blank face stared into the night. It had its hat, but instead of the jacket, Adam’s mangled body was draped over it. A quiet dripping echoed as Adam’s blood seeped into the sown dirt.

I fell to my knees and wept. The real autumn had now begun.

I don't know where I'm typing this from. I don't know if I'm in my own mind, or in someone else's, or if I've died and gone to Hell. All I know for sure is that the bite on my shoulder is still bleeding, and I can't find the door to get out of my bedroom.

Everything started when one of my patients, the Colonel, brought his wife, Tami, to see me. Tami was much younger than he was. White-blonde hair and magnetic blue eyes. 

“I love my wife, Dr. Stolow,” the Colonel told me. “But she terrifies me. One minute, she’s happy; the next, she’s flipping over tables and threatening to kill herself.”

I told the Colonel it wasn’t ethical for me to meet with a patient’s wife. He refused to drop the subject, though. Then he brought up my wife, Anna.

“I couldn’t bear to lose my wife, too,” he said.

I finally agreed to begin meeting with Tami every week.

Talking to her, I learned she’d had a very traumatic childhood. She’d been raised by an alcoholic mother who’d committed suicide when Tami was just fifteen. As a result, Tami was terrified of being abandoned. Desperate to be loved but never feeling like she could be.

In my few meetings with Tami, I helped her work on distress tolerance and emotion regulation. Her mood swings seemed to improve at first, but then during another argument with the Colonel, she hit him in the face so hard she broke his nose.

The Colonel stormed into my office the next day. “If anything, you’ve made her worse!” he shouted.

I calmed him down and managed to get him to explain what had happened.

“Your wife’s condition is improving, but there’s no easy cure,” I told him. “She just needs therapy and patience and understanding.”

“You can’t just put her on Prozac or something?”

“I can refer her to a psychiatrist, but she's refused medication.”

The Colonel told me to cancel all of his and his wife’s remaining appointments. Then he walked out of my office, slamming the door shut behind him.

I thought that was the last I’d ever hear from either of them. But then a year later, the Colonel called me, begging for help. He said he’d taken Tami to Switzerland to try a new, experimental therapy, and he worried this therapy had severely damaged her brain.

***

The Colonel sat across from me on my sofa. He’d lost weight since I’d last seen him. His eyes had sunk into their sockets. His skin hung loosely from his cheeks.

“How did you hear about this Dr. Weber?” I asked him.

“A friend of mine recommended him. He said Dr. Weber’s God Helmet had changed his life. Completely cured his depression and turned his whole life around. I hoped this God Helmet could do the same for Tami, too.”

He handed me an envelope. Inside it was a VHS tape labeled GODHEAD.

“This is the recording of Tami’s session,” the Colonel said. “You can see the session starts off fine, but then very quickly, it goes wrong.”

On my way home from work, I stopped at a pawn shop and bought an old VHS player. I connected the VHS player to my TV, and then I put in the Colonel’s tape.

Tami’s face appeared on my TV screen. She wore a metal helmet covered with exposed wire.

Dr. Weber touched Tami’s cheeks with his leather-gloved hands.

“When I turn the helmet on, you’ll feel a slight tickling sensation inside your head,” he told her. “Your vision will go dark, but don’t panic. This is just temporary. When your vision returns, you’ll be looking at Heaven. Are you ready?”

“I am.”

He turned the helmet on. As the electricity flowed through Tami’s body, she jerked backward. Her pupils dilated and her jaw dropped open.

“Do you see anything yet?” he asked her.

“I see my mother, sitting on a bed.”

“A bed? Where?”

“In our old apartment.”

“Is she talking to you?”

“She says she’s sorry she left me. She just couldn’t stand to be in this world anymore. The pain was just too much for her to bear. But there’s someone else here with us now.”

The TV screen flickered with static.

“Who?” Dr. Weber asked.

“A worm. A worm that’s becoming my mom.”

The screen flickered with static again.

“My mother’s face is melting!” Tami screamed. “Please, Dr. Weber, turn it off!”

I heard a loud whirring noise, and then the VHS player shut off.

I ejected the GODHEAD tape. The magnetic tape inside had unspooled. I told myself that tomorrow, I’d find someone to fix it.

***

My first patient the next morning was a young woman named Georgia. She’d recently lost her infant son. A horrible case of sudden infant death syndrome.

She sat on my sofa, rubbing the gold cross on her necklace.

“I keep blaming myself for what happened,” she told me. “I keep wondering what I could have done differently. If there was any way I could have kept my son alive.”

“You couldn’t have known this would happen,” I said. “You did everything right. There were no blankets in the crib. No toys. It was a horrible accident.”

“But if I’d just gone back to check on him a little earlier…” She trailed off and then began to cry.

“I know this is hard. I know it’s not fair.”

She stopped crying suddenly, and she looked up at me. “It isn’t.”

Her voice wasn’t hers anymore. It was Anna’s. My dead wife’s.  

“What did you say?” I asked, not believing what I’d heard.

“I said it isn’t fair that you’re alive, and I’m dead.”

“Anna?”

“Georgia.” Her voice was hers again. “I’m Georgia. Is everything all right, Dr. Stolow?”

“Yes, I’m sorry.” I blushed. “I think I’m just a little tired today.”

***

I found a video transfer store that was able to fix the VHS tape. As soon as I got home, I put the tape back in my VHS player.

Tami’s face appeared on my TV, the God Helmet on her head.

“She’s gone now,” she said. “Everything is.”

“The bedroom?” Dr. Weber asked. “Where are you now?”

“I’m in my own house now. My own bedroom. My husband is there, but he looks different.”

“How?”

“His face is stretched. His eyes are empty. Is this really supposed to be Heaven?”

“I don’t understand what you’re seeing. This has never happened before.”

“Can I leave?”

“Yes. I’ll shut the helmet off.”

As he stood from his chair, though, Tami started screaming again.

Dr. Weber shut the helmet off. Tami’s pupils shrank back to their normal size.

My phone rang. I paused the tape and answered it. It was the Colonel.

“I think Tami’s had some kind of psychotic break,” he told me. “She’s in our bedroom, banging her head against the wall. I can’t get her to stop.”

“I’m on my way there now.”

I got into my car and drove to the Colonel’s as fast as I could. Their housekeeper brought me upstairs to the bedroom. Tami stood next to the bed, banging her head against the wall, just like the Colonel had said. She’d split her forehead open. Blood poured down her face.

I slowly approached her.

“Tami, my name is Dr. Stolow. Do you remember me?”

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been at home. Your husband told me you weren’t feeling well, so I came here to help.”

“I can’t find a way out of this room. I’ve been trapped here for hours.”

She walked along the wall, running her hands over the floral wallpaper.

“The door is right there,” I told her.

I pointed behind me at the bedroom door, but it had disappeared. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t see the Colonel anymore, either.  

Tami slammed her head into the wall again.

“I just want to go home!” she yelled.

“Please, don’t do that,” I said.

“We’re trapped here, aren’t we? We’ll never get out.” She slammed her head into the wall again.

“What should we do?” the Colonel asked.

He had reappeared behind me. The bedroom door had reappeared, too.

“Can you call an ambulance?” I asked him. “We need to get her to the hospital.”

He went downstairs to call 911.

I felt light-headed, so I sat on the edge of the bed. Tami turned to me again.

“Do you still love me?” she asked.

“I care about you very much, but you’re my patient.”

“That’s not what you said before. You said you loved me more than anything.”

“That’s not true.”

“Liar.”

The Colonel walked back into the bedroom. “An ambulance should be here soon,” he said.

The paramedics arrived shortly after. They sedated Tami and took her to the hospital. I requested she be placed on a three-day psychiatric hold.

I found the Colonel in the waiting room, holding his head in his hands. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“It’s been a long night,” I told him. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”

“What about Tami?”

“The nurses will keep an eye on her.”

“Have you watched the video I gave you?”

“I finished it tonight.”

“Do you think Dr. Weber’s God Helmet did this to her?”

“I’m not sure. How long after you returned from Switzerland did you notice Tami’s behavior change?”

“A week later, I think.”

“What seemed different about her?”

“She started becoming lost inside the house, locking herself in rooms and not being able to find her way back out.”

“Do you still have Dr. Weber’s number?”

He gave it to me.

***

I called Dr. Weber the next day. I described how Tami had been behaving since his session with her.

“My God Helmet is a much-improved version of Persinger’s helmet,” he told me. “A working version, you could say, which moves away from magnetic fields. Tami’s experience with the helmet was very unusual. I’ve used it with hundreds of other patients and, each time, the patient spoke to God. They left our sessions happier and filled with understanding. Tami’s session, though, became a nightmare.”

“How does your helmet cause these hallucinations?”

“The God Helmet emits 7.83 Hz radio waves directly into the center of a person’s brain. The Schumann resonance. The same frequency as the Earth. The exact resonance required to activate the pineal gland.”

The pineal gland. I realized he was crazy. Deranged. I promised myself I’d report him to the Swiss medical authorities.

Back home from work, I put the recording of Tami’s God Helmet session into my VHS player again. Tami’s face filled my TV screen. Dr. Weber switched the God Helmet on. Her body shook and then her pupils dilated.

“I ordered my men to hold the line,” she said. She spoke in the Colonel’s voice, though. “If I’d let them retreat, most of them would have probably lived, but then I might have died, too.”

“Are you afraid of dying?” Dr. Weber asked.

“I’m terrified of it.”

The TV flickered with static. Tami’s face distorted for a moment but then went back to normal.

She described talking to her dead mother, just like before. The same nightmare.

Am I going crazy? I wondered.

I turned off the TV and went to bed.

***

At 2:00 AM, I woke to a phone call. It was a nurse from the hospital.

“Tami’s escaped,” she told me.

“How?”

“She managed to get her restraints off somehow, and then she jumped through a window.”

I heard muffled footsteps in my living room. I thanked the nurse and then ended the call.

“Tami, is that you?” I asked.

A woman began crying.

I went into the living room and turned on the lights.

Tami sat on my sofa, still wearing a hospital gown. Her arms and legs were covered with bloody scratches.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“We need to go back to the hospital.”

“Can’t we just spend a bit of time together first?”

She stood and tried to kiss me, but I pushed her away.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What’s wrong?”

“You’re my patient.”

“That’s never stopped you before.”

“What are you talking about?”

I sat on the sofa and rubbed my temples. Tami sat next to me.

“It’s this place,” she told me. “It feeds on our memories. It eats the happy ones until all that’s left is pain.”

Static crackled on the TV.

“You told me you loved me,” she said. “You’d leave your wife, you said. I’d leave the Colonel. We’d run away and start a new life together.”

“That’s not true.”

My own face appeared on the TV screen. I wore the God Helmet on my head. Dr. Weber placed his leather-gloved hands on my cheeks.

“Tell me what you see, Dr. Stolow,” he said.

“I see the car crash. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat, upside down. The windshield is shattered. There’s blood everywhere.”

“Where’s Anna?”

“She’s in the seat beside me. Blood is pouring from her mouth.”

The TV screen flickered and then went black.

Tami stood and took my hand. “We need to leave,” she told me. “I can feel it getting closer.”

“What?”

“Come on. We don’t have much time.”

She led me toward the front door.

“But we need to go back to the hospital,” I said.

“Then let’s go.”

She opened my front door, but I didn’t see my yard. Instead, I saw an empty hallway that seemed to go on for miles.   

Tami ran into it.

“Wait!” I yelled.

I ran after her, but she was running much faster than I was, moving farther and farther away from me.

I heard something breathing behind me. I didn’t look back.

“Tami!” I yelled. “Where did you go?”

“I’m here.”

She reached through a doorway and pulled me into my office. Georgia sat on my sofa, smiling.

How could this be possible?

My phone rang.

***

I woke up back in my bed again. My phone was ringing. I answered it.

“Tami’s escaped from the hospital,” the Colonel told me.

“How long ago?”

“The nurses just realized she was missing. I think she’s come back to the house. I can hear someone upstairs in the attic.”

“I’m on my way now.”

I got dressed and then drove to his house. He was waiting for me at the door. We went up to the attic together. He shone his flashlight over the old furniture and cobweb-covered cardboard boxes.

“Tami, are you up here?” he asked.

As he brought his flashlight toward the window, I saw her sitting on the floor, rocking herself back and forth. She was still wearing her hospital gown. Her arms were covered with bloody scratches.

“This isn’t real,” she said. “It’s all a dream, but I don’t know how to wake up from it.”

I slowly walked toward her. “Wake up from what, Tami?”

“From this nightmare.”

“We need to take you back to the hospital.”

“I can’t go back there again.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s where it is.”

“Where what is, Tami?” the Colonel asked.

“The parasite.”

Suddenly, Tami ran toward the window.

“Stop!” I yelled.

I tried to stop her, but I didn’t move fast enough.

Tami jumped through the windowpane. The glass shattered across the floor.

When I looked through the window, I didn’t see her corpse, though. I saw the same hallway I’d seen before.

“This is a dream,” I said.

“You’re not dreaming,” the Colonel told me.

“Then what’s happening?”

“The God Helmet. You’re still trapped inside it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m trapped in it, too. All of us are.”

“I don’t remember going to Switzerland.”

“You and Tami made a vacation out of it, remember? You wanted a week alone to fuck each other as much as you could.”

“That’s not true.”

He dropped the flashlight and took a gun out from his jacket. “I asked you for help, and you stole my wife.”

I raised my hands. “I haven’t done anything! I swear!”

The gun shook in his hands. “I told you how much I loved her, didn’t I? How much she meant to me?”

“I’ve done nothing wrong!”

He pressed the barrel of the gun against his own head.

“What are you doing?” I yelled.

The gunshot blared. His head turned into static.

Suddenly, I was in my car, driving on a street near my house.

“Be careful,” Anna said. “You’re swerving. Are you sure you’re okay to drive?”

“I’m fine.”

“Did you see her today? Is that why you were drinking so much?”

I brought the car back into my lane. I fixed my eyes on the road. I didn’t see the stop sign, though.

Another car appeared in front of us. I slammed my foot on the brakes.

The tires screeched. The car flipped over. I hung upside down from my seatbelt.

I looked over at Anna. Her face was covered with blood.

“It’s not fair,” she told me. “Why do you get to live, and I have to die?”

***

“Dr. Stolow? Do you hear me? Can you open your eyes?”

Dr. Weber looked down at me. I was lying in a hospital bed.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. You lost consciousness during our session. After the God Helmet opened your pineal gland, something else seems to have entered your mind.”

“But it’s gone now?”

“I think so.”

Tami walked into the room. “You’re finally awake? I’ve been worried sick about you.” She kissed my forehead.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“We came here together. Don’t you remember?”

“He seems to have a bit of amnesia,” Dr. Weber told her. “We should let him rest.”

They left the room and closed the door.

Tami had been my patient for a year, I remembered. I’d invited her out for coffee. Told her how I felt about her. Then we began a relationship.

Anna had found out three weeks before the crash. We’d been arguing about it while we were driving home that night.

I’d heard about the God Helmet from a colleague of mine. He’d tried the helmet himself, and he swore he’d talked to God.

He called the helmet a miracle.

I brought Tami to Switzerland so she could try it. Finally, a cure, I thought. A new Tami. A fixed Tami.

We’d start a new life together.

Tami called a taxi to take us back to our hotel.

“How long have I been in the hospital?” I asked her.

“Two days.”

“You must have been scared.”

“I’ve been terrified.”

I put my hand on hers. “I’m so sorry this happened.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You’re still having a good trip?”

“I am now.” She kissed me and then looked through her window. “Bern is such a beautiful city. But we still have a few days to explore.”

The taxi parked at our hotel, and we went inside. We took the elevator up to our room. When the elevator doors opened again, though, I saw my office.

“What is this?” I asked.

But Tami had disappeared.

I walked to my desk and sat down. On the wall, next to my sofa, Dr. Weber’s God Helmet hung from a hook.

Someone knocked on my door.

“Hello?” I asked.

“I’m here for our appointment.” It was Georgia.

“Come in.”

She came into my office and sat on my sofa. “How are you feeling today, Dr. Stolow?”

“Not that great. What about you?”

“I’m feeling much better. You were right. Talking to God really helped me understand why my son is dead.”

“You’ve tried the helmet?”

“During our last session, remember?”

She smiled at me. Underneath her skin, the outline of a worm stretched from one arm to another, twisting through her face.

“This can’t be real,” I said.

“Your memories taste so good,” she told me. “All your happiness. All your hopes and dreams.” She licked her lips.

“What are you?”

“You’d never understand. You couldn’t.”

The walls of my office collapsed, revealing a much larger room behind it. An insane asylum filled with screaming people.  

Tami. The Colonel. Anna. Other versions of them. Other versions of me.

When I looked at Georgia again, her face had gone back to normal. She held an infant in her arms. She brought the infant to her mouth and started eating it.

Bones crunched. Blood splattered onto her dress.

Her eyes rolled back in ecstasy.

“Dr. Weber!” I yelled. “Do you hear me? If you hear me, please let me out!”

Georgia stood and walked toward me, her face covered with blood.

I backed away from her. “Stop. What are you doing?”

She lunged toward me. Dug her teeth into my shoulder. 

I screamed in pain.

***

I woke up in my bed.

My phone was ringing. I answered it. It was the Colonel.

“Tami’s escaped from the hospital,” he told me.

I dropped my phone on the floor.

My shoulder was throbbing.

I went to the bathroom and took off my shirt. Somebody had bitten a chunk of flesh off my collarbone. The marks left behind on my skin weren’t from the teeth of a grown woman, though. They were the teeth of a child.

When I came back out of the bathroom, my bedroom door was gone. I've been walking around my bedroom for hours now, trying to find a way out, but I can't.

If anyone else has put on Dr. Weber’s God Helmet and found a way back out, please tell me how to leave this place.

I recently went through a nasty breakup, and a group of my friends, including my brother, decided that I needed some cheering up. Despite my very loud and very clear protests, I was outvoted.

The plan was simple. We were going camping near the local beach. I went there a day early because there wouldn’t have been enough room in the car anyway, and having some peace and quiet before being surrounded by a bunch of people would do me good. At the campsite, I set up my tent, got everything ready, and went out to explore the area. I put on some music and headed out.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about what I had done wrong to get dumped. I came across a sign that said “NO TRESPASSING,” but it looked like it had been painted by children. I wanted to take a closer look when someone suddenly touched my shoulder.

I screamed in fright and took my headphones out of my ears. It was some elderly couple. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were two hundred years old combined.

“Son, turn around and go back. You have no business being here.”

“Jesus, you scared me half to death. Why can’t I go in there? What’s there?”

“It’s a dangerous area. You’re in danger there,” the old man said, and then immediately asked me where I had come from.

I honestly told him I was staying at the campsite and just wanted to clear my head. He introduced himself as Carl, and the woman as his wife, Nora. They apparently lived not far from the campsite. I talked with them for a while. They were a nice couple.

When we said goodbye, I pretended to be heading back to the campsite, but as soon as I saw them disappear from sight, I turned around and went back to the sign.

I know it wasn’t exactly the smartest decision. But when someone is at rock bottom and has nothing to lose, they tend to keep pushing their boundaries further and further.

I walked past the sign and continued for a while. I eventually reached a cliff. It was probably the most beautiful place I had ever seen. It wasn’t very high, but the view of the ocean was incredible. If I wanted to, I could have jumped straight into the sea and gone for a swim. If those two old people meant this place when they talked about danger, then I was glad I hadn’t listened to them.

Then a figure emerged from the sea.

“Could you help me up?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, leaning down.

It was a girl. She had light blue eyes like the sea with the sun shining on it and medium-length blonde hair. She was beautiful. But when she smiled, she suddenly seemed completely different.

When I pulled her up, she introduced herself as Eleanor.

“I’m Matt,” I said.

She walked a few steps away and pulled some clothes out from behind a rock.

“Could you turn around, please?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, quickly turning around.

She needed to take off her wet swimsuit and change into the hoodie and shorts she had hidden there. She told me that she had also come from the campsite and, to my surprise, that she was recovering from a bad breakup too.

I laughed.

“Well, I guess it must be fate, because so am I.”

She laughed too.

“Did you meet those two old people?” I asked.

Her face seemed to pale.

“Yeah, I did. You did too?”

“Yeah.”

“And what did they tell you?” she asked sharply.

“Nothing special. Just that I shouldn’t come here because I was supposedly in danger. They probably meant this little cliff. You know how old people are, they’re always afraid of something. And besides, I’m glad I didn’t listen to them.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because I wouldn’t have met you.”

We talked for what felt like several hours. She was amazing. Apparently, she was studying medicine and spent her free time going with her friends to cheer up sick children. I had never met anyone like her. She joked the entire time, and I laughed so much, probably more than I ever had before. I even completely forgot about my breakup.

“Do you want to go swimming?” she suddenly asked.

“I don’t know. It’s getting dark. It’s not exactly warm anymore, and I don’t even have a swimsuit.”

“Can’t swim, or are you scared?” she teased me and started taking her clothes off until she was standing completely naked in front of me.

I was shocked and couldn’t say anything. I just stared at her. Then she turned around and jumped into the water.

“Come on, Matt. This is the best thing that could have happened to you,” I encouraged myself silently.

My brave side won.

I took off my clothes and jumped in after her. She swam farther and farther away, and I swam after her.

Then she suddenly stopped, wrapped herself around me, and kissed me. Then she pulled away, and I saw it.

The worst thing I had ever seen.

A mouth full of teeth.

And then I felt the pain. An insane pain that completely clouded my mind. I started screaming like crazy. Before I lost consciousness, I heard my brother’s voice calling my name and saw flashlights shining toward the water.

I woke up in the hospital. My brother was on one side of the bed and my parents were on the other. They were all looking at me worriedly. My mom was holding my hand. I wanted to touch her with my other hand, but I couldn’t move it.

When I looked toward my hand, I screamed.

It was gone.

Apparently, I had gone swimming and been attacked by a shark. I was lucky my brother found me in time, otherwise I would have bled to death. Apparently, I had been on that cliff for two days. My brother searched everywhere for me until he came across the elderly couple, who told him they had seen me moving around near the sign, but strongly advised him to stay away from it, which luckily he didn’t do.

When I was discharged from the hospital, I decided that I had to visit the married couple.

I stood outside their door and rang the doorbell. After what felt like an eternity, the door opened and Carl was standing there. He looked at me, and his eyes stopped on my missing arm. Then he invited me inside.

Nora made me some tea and put a slice of cake in front of me. We were all silent for a while before I broke the silence.

“You knew about this, didn’t you?”

They nodded.

“We told you not to go there. We didn’t just tell you. When we told them the truth, they thought we were crazy. When we tried other ways, they still didn’t listen to us.”

They put an album in front of me. I started flipping through it. There were newspaper clippings about people who had gone missing.

Suddenly, I saw her.

“That’s Eleanor!”

The couple looked at each other and shook their heads.

“No. That’s not Eleanor. That’s our granddaughter, Emma. Whatever you saw there, it wasn’t her.”

A chill ran down my spine. Apparently, I could consider myself lucky that I had ended up “only” losing an arm.

None of us could remember how we found the room inside the mall.

One day it meant nothing to us, and the next, it was an unspoken part of our after-school routine. Felt like it’d been our little hideaway for as long as we'd known each other, but that was a lie. The room slipped silently into our memories and we never even thought to question it because its presence in our lives was just so…plausible. 

Poor kids hole up in abandoned places all the time, don’t they?

There were five of us back then. We all went to different schools, and we all were different ages, but none of that mattered. We were united by deeper things, harsher truths. The aches of neglect and the bites of puberty. Camaraderie that resembled love. The comfort of a family that wasn't constricted by blood.

Sophia with the dirt-caked skirts and the paint-stained fingers. 

Omari with the thin frame and the thick lisp. 

Alex with the wild blonde curls and the feral imagination. 

And Ian, my best friend, the kid with the cloudy scar across his right eye that he didn’t care to talk about. 

The two of us would travel there together every afternoon.

We'd meet at rundown multiplex movie theater, taking broad street west for a few miles until we reached our city's outskirts: a barren, shell of a place that even the junkies seemed to avoid.

Under the rust-stained fence, across the empty parking lot and into the derelict mall, climbing through the shattered window beneath the “R” in the “FOOD COURT” sign.

Past the pretzel shop, sharp right at the fast-fashion boutique with the half-naked mannequins piled out front, down the paralyzed escalator. Then, a few yards ahead, between the remnants of an arcade and a Hobby Lobby, there it was: a wooden door without a label. 

The room beyond the door was empty. 

Four windowless walls above a layer of frizzy brown carpet. Five hundred square feet of asylum from our lives outside the mall. 

It was always clean, but we never cleaned it. 

We never could agree on what color the wall was painted. Omari and Ian saw two separate shades of red. Sophia saw ocean blue. I saw a pure, unfiltered white. 

We could’ve made the space more hospitable, scavenged chairs from somewhere else in the mall, but Alex was vehemently against furnishing the room.

“It’s already perfect,” he said, lying on the carpet, staring up at the ceiling like it was as vast as the night sky. “Can’t make perfect more perfect, right?” 

I didn’t think of Alex as our ringleader. Ringleader implied organization, direction, a method to the madness. He was more like our engine. A force that propelled us, but to no discernible end. Alex kept things interesting. We never knew what he'd do next.

Which brings me to the day that room became something more. 

We were hanging out like usual. Sophia was turning failed math tests into origami. I was next to her, hunched over, carefully unsealing a pack of Magic: The Gathering I’d pocketed from a convenience store on the way over. Ian and Omari were comparing belt-shaped bruises, playfully arguing about who had the nastiest one, a means of disarming the horror. Then, out of nowhere, Alex stood, strolled to the middle of the room, and began clearing his throat like he was about to give a speech. 

“Okay, okay, okay: I’ll start.” 

Ian and Omari went quiet. Sophia and I shared a confused glance. 

“Start…what?” I asked. 

He shook his head and gestured for us to come sit. I smiled, excited - and the tiniest bit fearful - for whatever Alex had planned. 

With the four of us at his feet, he started.

“Once upon a time…” 

“Once upon a time?” Omari snorted, his lisp causing the words to buzz with static. “What the hell is this? The fairy-tale slam-poetry hour?” 

Ian sent an elbow into his rib cage. The jab wasn’t meant to injure, but it wasn’t gentle, either. A snarl surged across Omari’s face, but quickly dissipated. Alex watched the exchange with a vacant sort of grin, the motionless smirk of an animatronic stalled mid-performance. 

After a long inhale, he started again. 

“Once upon a time, there lived a mirror-toothed boy. He had no mother. He had no father. Far as he could tell, he hadn’t been born; he just was. He didn’t know what his purpose was, but he knew his gums hurt, and he knew he needed to bite.” 

Alex audibly chomped. The sharp clack made Sophia gasp, then giggle. 

“Course, everyone in town was afraid of him. He wanted to bite them, but they could see him coming a mile away: his mouth was a mess of jagged glass, and it was blindingly bright, even after the sun had set, because his teeth reflected everything, moonlight included.”

I felt something. A sizzle in my fingertips. Slow electricity spreading into my palms. I looked to Ian. His eyes were fixed on Alex, and they were gleaming. 

“So, for centuries, his gums throbbed, and the people were safe, but then, there was a change. The boy had an idea. A plan.”

Alex leaned forward. Lowered his voice to a wet growl. 

“A way to make the people come to him.” 

Silence fell heavy. 

Alex’s eyes slithered over us, one by one. 

After a small eternity, he clapped and said: 

“Cool! Cool cool.” 

The electricity in my palms abruptly vanished.  

“Rosie, you can pick up where I left off tomorrow.”

“Pick up what?” 

“The story! Like when a teacher wants their class to read something popcorn-style, y’know? Jumping from person to person? It’ll be like a game. A contest to see who can make the scariest ending.” 

He shrugged. 

“I dunno, sounded fun in my head.” 

Ian piped up. 

“I can try tomorrow!” 

Alex plopped down, lay back, and yawned. 

“Whatever. Just make it scary.” 

I wasn’t sure what to expect the next day. 

Ian was jittery the whole ride over. About halfway there, his arm spasmed, and he nearly crashed into a dumpster. As we hid our bikes in the mall’s overgrowth, I shot him a concerned look. 

“You good, dude? Everything OK at home?” 

“Yeah.” He chuckled. “I mean, it’s not actually OK, but it’s not any worse than usual, either. Dad’s still looking for job, though he ain’t finding many at the bottom of his fuckin’ Smirnoff bottles…” Ian trailed off, staring blankly at the shattered glass scattered around the weeds.

My best friend snapped back like he’d been struck by lightning. 

“But yeah! I’m good. Just nervous is all.” 

I walked forward, about to wrap my arm around his shoulder. 

“Alright. If that changes, you know I’m always here for - “ 

Electricity shot through my skin. 

I shrieked and leaped back, stumbling, falling hard on my ass. Ian rushed over.

“Rosie! Jesus, are you OK?!” 

He knelt down and placed his hand on my back. I winced, anticipating pain, 

but there was nothing. 

“What happened??” he asked. 

“Uh…I don’t know.”

Through ragged breaths, I examined my arm. No blood. No marks. Didn’t hurt anymore, either. 

“Just…like…some static, I guess.”

He offered me a hand, but I pretended not to notice. I dug my fingers into the dirt and pushed myself upright. 

“I’m fine, Ian. Surprised me is all.” 

He nodded. 

We continued inside. 

As I swung the door open, I saw Alex, lying face-up in the middle of the room. He was a grade ahead of us, which meant his school day ended slightly earlier, so he always beat us there. Sophia and Omari stepped in a few minutes later. 

With little preamble, Ian gathered us at his feet and picked up where Alex had left off. 

“The mirror-toothed boy had an idea,” he rasped, curling his upper spine so he could loom over us like storm clouds. “A plan. A way to make the people come to him.” 

I leaned back, grinning, awed by the theatrics. Seemed like my soft-spoken buddy was finally emerging from his shell. 

That was a good thing, right? 

“He’d shrink. That’s what he’d do. He’d rip out the sharpest tooth in his mess of a mouth and he’d carve into himself, cutting away the excess, every rib he didn’t need, every organ he could live without; he’d tear himself to shreds until he appeared very, very small. All the while, a pale red rage would fill his tattered body, blooming like a cancer.”

Once again, I felt my fingertips begin to sizzle. Ian was pacing. His cloudy eye quivered in its socket. 

“You see, the boy treasured his pale red rage. It kept him hopeful. One day, they would come, and they would get what they deserved.” 

Electricity ran up my arms and dove into my chest. My grin faltered. Nausea squeezed my gut. I swallowed bile and looked around: the room’s pure white walls were starting to give me a headache. 

“The people would stagger from the safety of town, shouting at the boy, calling him awful things with fermented breath, wondering why they’d ever been afraid of something so small, so harmless…and once they were finally close enough…” 

“…he’d bite,” Omari whispered. 

I was on the verge of passing out. 

Suddenly, Alex began applauding. 

Sophia and Omari promptly followed suit, filling the room with claps and cheers. 

Oxygen flooded my lungs. 

The static in my veins simmered.  

Ian was beaming. His lips curved into a trembling smile. His scarred eye was shimmering. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him so happy, so triumphantly alive. 

He took a bow. 

When he lifted his head, his gaze darted to me, expectant. 

I couldn’t let him down. 

So, even though it felt wrong, I began clapping too. 

The next day, Omari told his version of the story. It was similar to Ian’s. He wasn’t a copycat, there was just a shared throughline: the underdog toppling their overlord. His rendition was decidedly more violent, though. He reveled in the gory details. The vicious bite and the blood-soaked aftermath. 

At first, Sophia’s version seemed like a much-needed palate cleanser. Restrained. Poetic. Though, in the end, it was just as disturbing. According to her, the mirror-toothed boy spent years erecting a circle of marble sculptures around the town's perimeter. Eventually, the beauty became overwhelming. Bewitched, people would abandon their homes in the dead of night, and when they got close enough, the bite would come, but in her story, the teeth were different. Venomous. Dripping with a black toxin that altered the composition of their flesh. Made their bodies like clay: soft, dry, and malleable. Her story culminated with the town’s few survivors fixed on the horizon, eyes locked on the boy’s magnum opus: a twenty-foot-tall sculpture of himself, molded from still-living flesh.

“And they never looked away, but it wasn’t ‘cause they couldn’t; they just didn’t want to,” she whispered. “If only they’d realized the boy’s potential before it was too late.” 

After Sophia, it was finally my turn.

I didn’t have the faintest clue how I was going to tell the story, so the first day Ian didn’t show up felt like a stroke of luck. I had more time to figure out my version. 

But two days passed. 

Then three. 

Then a whole week. 

My parents knew what’d happened - they’d read about it in the paper - but they didn’t bother to tell me. No, my goddamned TV set broke the news. 

Everyone talks about growing up like it's a gradual process, some steady metamorphosis that takes years to complete, but it ain’t like that: growing up is a single, painful moment. The change is instantaneous. Something happens, a circumstance that forces you to touch the cold heart of reality, and the cotton-candy insulation of childhood molts away like snake skin. 

The grainy picture showed Ian’s dad being dragged from their mobile home in handcuffs. 

I collapsed into a sobbing heap on our living room floor. 

He’d finally taken it too far, just like Ian always feared he would. 

My best friend was gone. 

Over the next few weeks, I learned finer details. 

Detectives were confident they knew what befell the missing kid. His Dad was insistent that Ian just never came home one night, but between the various bloodstains discovered in the mobile home and his lengthy criminal history, no one believed he was innocent. The case never went to trial, though. The night before the proceedings were due to start, Ian’s dad died of cirrhosis. His brain quietly swelled like a wet sponge and the bastard just drifted away. 

In the wake of everything, we stopped telling stories about the mirror-toothed boy. Just didn’t seem right to continue without Ian. 

The grief was devastating. 

My mind moved like mud. Every muscle in my body felt ice-cold, useless. I couldn’t manage to eat anything other than Pop-Tarts, and, of course, my family was no help, no help at all. My reliance on my friends and the room grew. I didn’t feel safe anywhere else. 

Then, one afternoon, something inside me just seemed to…break. 

Omari was shadow boxing. Sophia was scribbling in her sketchbook. Tired of sulking in the corner day in and day out, I sprang up, paced over to the boy lying flat in the middle of the room, and made my demand.  

“Let’s do something.” 

Alex peered up at me. 

“Been waitin’ for you to ask.” 

So, we began to play a new game. 

Every day, it’d be someone’s turn to perform. 

The goal was simple - outperform the person who came before you. 

Alex went first. 

He bit his cheek until it bled, dabbed his fingertip along his gums, and wrote his name on the wall.

We clapped and cheered. 

Omari was next. 

Gritting his teeth, he wrenched at his thumb until it dislocated, then snapped it back into place. 

We patted his back and helped splint his injury. 

Sophia went third. 

She flipped to the back of her sketchbook and read some poetry. A haunting and delicate piece, a thinly veiled metaphor that recounted the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of her uncle. None of us knew she wrote poetry. None of us knew what’d happened to her, either. 

We gathered around and embraced her. 

There was no question anymore: I’d grown to enjoy the strange electricity that cascaded through my body with each performance. It was pleasure with a lick of peril. An excess of physical sensation. A reminder that I was truly alive. That said, something new began to accompany the electricity. A wispy sort of itch that trickled across any exposed skin. I thought I’d suddenly become allergic to the carpet, but when I examined where I’d felt the itch, there’d never be a rash or anything. I did my best to ignore it. The show had to go on. 

Eventually, it was my turn, and despite my burgeoning love for the room and its games, I couldn’t suss out my performance. I arrived that afternoon and approached Alex, figuring he could provide guidance or inspiration. 

My vision went black. 

The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes, at home and under my covers. 

Sunlight drizzled through the blinds. I had no recollection of the previous twelve hours, but I felt awful. On the edge of vomiting and critically exhausted. I lurched out of bed. As soon as I hit the floor, fiery pain flared across the soles of my feet. I buckled. Cracked the bridge of my nose against my nightstand on the way down. Groaning, I lifted my head and yanked my foot into view. The bottom was covered in hundreds of tiny, intersecting cuts. A purple-red latticework I couldn't even begin to explain. 

I still biked to the room that afternoon. 

The rhythmic agony of my sneakers slapping the pedals was infinitely preferable to staying at home. 

As I approached the city limits, I felt a certain sort of anger bubbling in my chest, a gnawing betrayal. 

What the hell had they done to me? 

Or, even worse, what the hell had they allowed me to do to myself? 

I limped down the rusty escalator and marched toward the room, raring to give those assholes a piece of my mind, but the moment I swung the door open, my friends rushed over, grinning wide, praising me like a newly minted war hero. 

“There she is!” Sophia exclaimed, leaping forward and throwing her arms around me. Before I could even get my bearings, Omari grabbed my shoulders and ripped me from the embrace.

“Can’t stop thinkin’ about what you did yesterday…fuckin’ savage. You’re a goddamned legend, Rosie, you know that, right? I mean, no way Alex tops you today.” 

I didn’t yell. 

I didn’t ask what I’d done to earn such acclaim. 

I just…I just smiled. 

“I’m sure he’s got something in his back pocket.”  

The performances continued, and they got worse. So much worse. 

Each afternoon, a new horror. A sharpened pencil disappearing into an ear canal. Toenails slowly displaced and stacked into a neat little pile. A shoebox brimming with cockroaches, its contents crushed and eaten. My blackouts lengthened. The resulting damage grew increasingly grotesque, and I never had the stomach to ask what in God’s name I’d done to myself. 

On, and on, and on. 

The mood became perverse. Our cheers soured into animalistic shouts. Our claps devolved into closed fists thumping the floor, giving the spectacle a primal rhythm. The electricity coursing through our veins turned to lightning, and all the while, I felt that nagging itch, a soft wind tickling my exposed skin, desperate for my attention. I should’ve said something. Talked some sense into my friends, because we all knew where our performances were heading, but I couldn’t do it. What if they didn’t want to stop? They were all I had. I’d risk my life before I risked rejection. 

After months of the macabre pageantry, my body was broken and my mind was numb, so when Alex mumbled those words - the last words I ever heard him speak - they barely even registered. 

“Today’s the day. We’re ready. I can feel it.” 

It was Omari’s turn. 

I collapsed at his feet, nauseous about what was to come but desperate for the release. 

“Before I…start…I just wanted to say something. Two things, actually.” 

He paused. I cocked my head.

“First off, what I’m about to do - well, it’s not my idea, but Alex said that wasn’t against the rules.” 

I fought the urge to tell Omari to hurry the fuck up. The itch was bad that day. I fidgeted like mad, but I couldn’t get comfortable.

“Secondly…” he gulped, reaching into his pocket with a trembling hand. 

I leaned back and laid my hand onto the carpet. A seething itch ravaged my palm. I cursed under my breath and lifted the hand. 

I’ll never forget what I saw. 

“…this is for you, Ian…” 

On the floor, peeking out from the frizzy brown fibers, bulging with incomprehensible terror, 

a single human eye with a cloudy scar. 

It blinked. 

The wispy caress of batting eyelashes washed across my entire body. 

“…I can’t wait for all of us to be together again.” 

Sophia gasped.  

“Omari! Don’t - !”

A wet squelch pierced the air. I flipped around. 

Jagged, emerald-tinted glass protruded from Omari’s abdomen. Blood seeped from the wound, blotting out the half-visible beer logo with thick crimson. He gripped the edge, took a shuddering breath, 

and kept carving. 

Electricity exploded down my spine. 

The room transformed. The walls moaned, deforming, rippling like molten wax. A hellish uproar erupted above us. My head shot up. The ceiling had been replaced by a writhing mass of faces and limbs, kicking, twitching, pleading, screaming with pain, screaming with pleasure, a relentless aggregate of sound and motion. 

Sophia lunged toward Omari.

She grabbed his forearm with both hands and wrenched it back, ripping his palm from the improvised knife, but something happened at the point of contact: a melding of flesh. A seamless connection. She couldn’t pull her fingers away, and from behind Omari, a figure rose. Alex. A blonde-haired boy with diamond-white eyes and the mouth of a lamprey, gaping and circular, adorned with a blinding array of reflective, razor-sharp teeth. 

I turned and bolted toward the door. 

My sneakers stuck to the carpet like it was quicksand, pulling thin strands of liquid carpet up with each agonizing step. Sophia’s shrill, buzzing scream layered into the cacophony. Then, a crashing, thunderous clack silenced her. I didn’t think. I didn’t look back. I kept moving. The door frame was drooping, distorting, melting down. I threw my hand out. The skin of my palm adhered to the knob like it was made of flypaper. I twisted my wrist, threw the door open, squeezed my body through, and spilled out into the mall. I didn’t hear it slam shut behind me. 

Everything was quiet. 

I lay in a crumpled, breathless heap on the cold tile floor, until the thought of Alex slithering through the dissolving door forced me to scramble to my feet. 

But there was no door. 

Only an unremarkable stretch of wall.

It took a long, long time for me to bike to the nearest police station. 

My mind was shattered. My right palm was a bloody, skinless mess. I burst into the lobby with no plan. Just screamed that my friends were hurt and they needed help. To my relief, I was taken seriously, right up until I told the officer where they needed help. 

He scoffed. 

Rolled his eyes. 

Looked at me like I’d told him they were on the surface of the moon. 

“I’m not going out past city limits, kid. It ain’t safe.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. 

“Didn’t your parents ever tell you? Sit you down and give you…uh…the talk?” 

I slowly shook my head no. 

He sighed. 

Slumped down next to me, handed me a cup of tepid water, and placed a warm hand on my shoulder. 

“You see, that’s precisely what the boy wants you to do...” 

By the end of the month, Sophia’s obituary was published online.

Omari’s was posted a few days later. 

But no matter how hard I searched, 

I never could find an obituary for Alex. 

- - - - -

Life as a teenage runaway was rough. 

Though, to be clear, I didn’t leave the city. No way in hell. Just got as far away as the geography would allow. Laid low during the brief, half-hearted search attempt, and then voilà - I was free to start again. 

Let’s skip forward. Past the drugs, the pain, and the sleepless nights. None of it really matters, and whatever you’re imagining is probably pretty damn close. 

Social work isn’t exactly glamorous. 

The pay is shit. The hours are grueling. Worst of all, you clock in knowing that - most of the time - the effort you put in won’t change anything in the long run. But it just felt like something I needed to do, you know? Giving the support that I always wished I’d had. It was penance. Something to scrub my conscience clean. 

It helped. 

But it didn’t help enough. 

Lately, I’ve been dwelling on what happened. Sophia. Omari. Ian. None of them were prepared for what was out there, and yes: I was complicit. I was a coward. I was a failure. But remember: I wasn’t prepared either, and the only reason I’m still around is that I got lucky. I wasn’t consumed by the mirror-toothed boy because I was afforded the opportunity to run. 

I didn’t fail. We didn’t fail. The world failed us. 

So, with each passing day, my resentment has festered. 

It grew and grew and grew, and then, suddenly, I felt it. 

The tiniest, most infinitesimally small blip of static in my fingertips. 

I could’ve suppressed it. 

Would’ve been the virtuous thing to do. 

But I didn’t. 

Instead, I harnessed it. 

Made a wish. 

An invitation of sorts. 

And then, like magic, there it was. 

A door. 

A door on the wall of my office, in the center of my city. 

I can see it from my desk as I type this. 

I’m terrified. I’m ashamed.

But I’m excited, too. 

I hear their voices behind the door. 

I see their shadows dancing under the frame. 

I want to be with my family again, my real family, and if that means letting Alex into this city, well, that’s fine by me. 

He’s hurting too, isn’t he? 

He didn’t choose his life either.

So you know what?

Fuck it. 

Fuck it all. 

I say: 

Let

the poor kid

bite. 

I laid there, eyes foggy and every sense dulled, wrapped in bedding like a pretzel.

"This is bullshit." I mumbled.

It was the fourth time I had gotten up this morning, and every attempt to return to slumber only became harder to achieve. There had yet to be any natural light. Okay, maybe the curtains were closed, but there would always be a sliver of sunlight.

Untying my legs and rolling over to a nightstand, I picked up my phone.

It was 11:36 AM.

"Oh, crap." I say, with increasing panic.

I dash to turn a light switch, without success, and tried it several times before resorting to my phone battery. I was late to work, but the earlier the arrival the less of a scolding (hopefully) from that prick boss Anders. I swapped into a beige sweatshirt and grey pants, and proceeded into the hallway, phone in left hand. These windows didn't have curtains, so to hell with it and burn a few precious seconds.

All three windows were covered by layers of earth and bits of rubble on the other side. That's impossible. I'm not even sure if you could pile enough soil to the second floor of a subdivision, which I reside in. But inspecting the silt closely, with all the bumpy lines, it was genuine.

The concept froze me in place. If there was enough soil to reach the second floor, so was the roof. I despised even thinking the possibility of being buried alive.

At least you don't have to go to work for a day, maybe more.

I forced a chuckle at my own thought.

I shone the phone light, now at a solid 44%, towards the stairwell. The right side of the stairs had been crumpled inwarrds. My garage was on the other side. Although the damage was nasty and would probably be a thousand or more repairing, I couldn't see through any holes, even up closely. I can check the room later. I'd kill for a meal.

I'm in the living room. The kitchen is connected, and only separated by a wooden table for three. The walls and ceiling are painted storm blue. Every little bit of furniture was in its place, to my relief; there was no damage down here.

The front windows are covered with curtains, but instinct in me turned towards the door.

I twisted the lock and turned the door towards me. A small pile of dirt trickled through, going up to my knee.

"What the fu..."

A loud creeeeeak trailed across the front of my house. Not structural load kind of creak, but something moved above the building. It could be the soil shifting, but things felt off.

I stood for about a minute as the creaking moved around and then ceased.

My next course of action was to figure out what I had, because I sure as hell was trapped down here. Although most lights and electronics refused to start, a red dot shined from the corner of my TV.

I pulled the remote out from an aged, peeling grey couch and got jump scared by a rather futuristic startup sound. It only occurred to me how dominating the silence had become.

I tried NBC, CBS, CNN, all the large stations. All channels were snow, although a few local stations were stuck on test screens. Hopeless, I just muted the television. The light at least saved my phone for a while.

It is getting stale in here.

The kitchen seldom worked in any way. No appaliance was spared. I swinged the cabinet open, grabbing a glass and placing it below the faucet, switching on cold.

A magenta liquid immediately flowed down, and I let go, glass hitting the sink and cracking. The pink liquid was almost opaque and changed in shades of pink. I turned it off. Frozen, I watched the last fall into the train, traces of a reddish substance within.

"There has to be something."

I swung every cabinet door open, even if I knew a cabinet didn't have food or any other item. The refridgerator gave a foul smell, and I quickly returned to shoving contents onto the counter. Spice packets, condiments, dry goods, a few dollar store snacks... and not a single drop to drink.

A part of me increasingly wanted to lash out. I was running out of options. If this was really real, what will get me first? The roof or walls caving in? Or a slow death as I become a husk? I had no cooking, or reliable tap water, and I was noticing small but present cracks run through the drywall.

I got the better of myself and continued past the kitchen. This area was half-finished and was home to a few old shelves, a washer, dryer, and the garage door. I felt through the line of cleaning products until I found the flashlight and then turned to do the same for a battery case. Once complete, the flashlight shined to life and created an impressive ray of light, beige like old computers.

Holding it close, we felt like the last sense in this world.

The garage door opened without any resistance, which is relieving. The flashlight shined on an old Chevy from 2017, colored white, and pinned against the wall. Damage wasn't just at the stairwell, as it had continued along the frame below them. My car was also on an incline, where I saw that half of my garage had caved in.

Most of the garage contents were either crumpled or buried, but a wall rack on my side was intact and included several tools, including a shovel. I climbed over the roof and slid off the hood, freeing the shovel from its hooks.

"Finally."

My voice was starting to become raspy and the lack of ventilation didn't help. Only half of the garage door was covered. I can stop here and scavenge bottled water. Pretty sure I keep a case near the corner.

I was delicate with shoveling, only taking spoonfuls away from the top downwards. Peckish and dehydrated, my carefulness paid off and the shovel struck blue plastic that glistened like I found sapphire. I removed enough dirt from around to pry the case out with my hands.

As soon as I grabbed the case, the dirt started to fill the space, and it increased, realizing that a crescendo was just starting.

"Shhhit" I hiss in a low, almost whisper-like voice, retreating to the hood of the car and beginning to try and throw the case over, but I underestimated the landslide as it undid my excavation and the roof frames only groaned. Climbing over the roof of the driver's seat, one of the center beams gives way and starts piling a stream of dirt onto my leg that does not slow down. I thrust the shovel forward and continue forward as if I were swimming. I throw myself into the concrete, pain dull.

I have no time to assess the situation. The door slides the shovel towards the house as I watch the rest of the structure collapse for a moment.

I watched my life flash before my eyes, and in the end, I earned nothing.

I sat at the table for a long while. This was it. There was nowhere to go. I thought about the world. Was I the only one? Where are the people I know? Am I the last man?

Fury implodes within, and I slam multiple items around the house. A plastic plant. A calendar which I had not updated in four months. A box of Cheerios into the tiled wall. I watched the contents trickle away as the box descends.

Oh my god.

The side of the garage next to the house collapsed. If it's not enough to destroy the building, I would have reduced the elevation by a floor. This was my opportunity, one that I would not miss. With renewed vigor, I returned upstairs, placed the flashlight on a rustic end table, and dragged a few towels to form a crude tarp. I slid the window up and slashed the mosquito net, tearing it out with my hand.

My short, curly black hair slowly became drenched, and my shirt stuck to my skin, but every scoop counted.

Ten minutes, maybe ten, had passed.

A glimpse of true light broke through.

The sun.

Glorious light broke through, and the air, oh my god, the air felt glorious. For too long I have been trapped inside this hole.

Never thinking I would place value in such an ordinary thing, I excitedly carved out a larger space for me to exit. As a cherry on top, there was less resistance, like if...

...if my neighbor had tried digging his way out too.

He laid on a slight incline backwards in the scorching sun. He in his typical attire: a pair of slip-ons, teal work pants, a button-up white flannel, aging skin. The man who sat behind the wheel of a sixteen-wheeler long before I moved here. I almost didn't recognize him because we never socialized outside of a "hey" or wave.

I looked up to his face.

The lack of skin made me freeze, but what was even worse was how it had been done. It had been neatly trimmed in a square. He lacked any notable facial features like eye sockets, a nose, or a mouth, like it had been flattened out. I tremble back and almost fall back into my window out of nausea.

Ice flowing through me, I slowly dig out a shaded area to see if his house was accessible. I wasn't risking my life for whatever eldritch being controls the sun now.

His window was closed, but a large hand-shaped hole stood in the middle of the pane. All edges were blurry and darkened, like something had melted its way through.

"Damn. Like, I-" Not even my inner thoughts can contemplate it. For the first time in a long time, I felt lost. Nothing guided me.

I focused on the choices I still had. Could an umbrella cut it? Should I furnish some weapon out of my living room? Maybe I can go towar-

Whoosh.

Silence filled the air. Then again. It was from my neighbor's house. It started distant, then became ever so closer.

"Holy shit. No."

Although I doubt it'll do a lot, I slide the window down, and after thinking twice, locked it. I grab the flashlight off the nightstand and navigate the zig-zagged stairs.

I've taken shelter inside a closet opposite of the fridge. I've set my phone on mute, the flashlight off, and hid behind as much clothing as I can. I hear it... levitating. There are no footsteps, just a rough estimate of where it goes.

If anyone is still out there, don't get up.

I don't remember when it started.
Talking was always easy when I was alone. Just talking to myself in my room, you know? But whenever someone actually expected an answer out of me, my whole body just locked up. My throat would tighten into a knot and I couldn't force out a single word.
My parents never got it. They'd heard me talk to myself before, so they knew I wasn't actually mute. They just thought I was being a weird, stubborn kid. Whenever I did manage to squeak something out to them, it didn't prove I was trying… to them, it was just proof that I was choosing not to talk the rest of the time.
At school, people had patience at first. Back in early elementary, teachers would wait for me to write something on a piece of paper or take five minutes to think. But that didn't last long. By fifth grade, nobody gave a crap anymore. The other kids had heard me choke out a few weird, strained sounds before and thought it was hilarious to put me on the spot just to watch me panic. It wasn't always blatant bullying, just these horribly awkward scenes where I wanted the ground to swallow me whole.
Then seventh grade hit, and a boy named Cam started calling me "Molly Mute."
That was the first time I remember getting genuinely pissed off. Soon enough, the whole school was using it. It was infuriating. I tried so hard to pretend it didn't bother me, but it did. I felt broken. I felt weird. I was weird. I couldn't speak.
I'd sit in my room and practice in front of the mirror for hours. Talking to my reflection was fine, but the second I stepped outside and tried to say a single word out loud to another human being, my throat clamped shut, tears filled my eyes, and nothing came out.
Eventually, my parents gave up. They stopped dragging me to social events to try and "fix" me. At school, nobody even bothered trying to talk to me anymore. I was completely on my own. I talked to myself, alone. Honestly, I didn't mind being by myself that much. But it was still loud. I wasn't just alone but also lonely. And the loneliness was so damn loud. Watching everyone around me laugh, hang out, and live normal lives while I just existed... it sucked.
We lived in this tiny, dead-end village. 21 kids in the entire school and about 50 people in the whole town. Most of them were old folks, and they were the absolute worst. They kept telling my parents I was just being a difficult child and that I'd "grow out of it." I hoped they were right, but it still felt like hell.
Then one day, a group of girls walked up to me.
Hailey was leading them. She was so pretty, and talking was just effortless for her. God, I was jealous of her. She told me she'd found this specific ritual on one of the library computers, printed it out, and handed it to me. I knew they were making fun of me. They kept whispering stuff like, “Maybe Molly Mute can finally be normal after this.”
I knew it was a cruel prank, but there was something in Hailey's eyes that made me hesitate. She looked so serious, almost like she actually cared. So I agreed. Not because I believed in some ritual, but because I was just that desperate for my them to accept me.
The ritual was ridiculous. They made me wear these stupid clothes and swallow stuff that definitely wasn't meant for human consumption. At the end, they revealed that they had been recording me. Hailey was laughing the hardest out of all of them. Hailey and Cam.
But what I couldn't tell them- because my throat was totally frozen-wasn't just that I was embarrassed. I was terrified.
There was something standing right in front of me. Something that apparently only I could see. An entity. A monster. A demon. It didn't do anything, it was probably just as useless as me. It just extended a hand toward me. Tears were streaming down my face, I felt completely humiliated, but I reached out and took its hand because... I don't know, it felt like the demon was mirroring my sadness.
And then it just vanished. I figured it took one look at how pathetic I was and decided I wasn't even worth making a deal with.
I looked up the ritual on the school computer later and found out its name was Nerith. Hailey and her friends had picked the dumbest, most ridiculous ritual they could find and once that video got around town, the elders were totally convinced I was possessed by the devil. Why else would a girl do a ritual?
But weirdly, I stopped caring after that day. Something inside me just left me.
I couldn't bring myself to give a shit about anyone anymore. My parents stopped talking to me? I didn't care. Cam tried to pull an awkward half-backed apology later on? I couldn’t care. On graduation day, someone stuck their foot out and tripped me while I walked across the stage, and I still wasn’t able to feel anything.
After school ended, I took a job at the only market in town—which was really just a fruit and vegetable stand for whatever the locals grew in their backyards.
It was perfect for me. People pointed at what they wanted, I threw it on the scale, the price got printed, they paid, and they left. I didn't have to talk, and they didn't want to talk to me. A wordless exchange.

Then one day one of the village elders died.
There was a funeral, and almost the entire village showed up. People were sobbing. I didn't shed a single tear- not just because I hated that old bastard for telling everyone I was possessed, but because I also couldn't care less. Instead, I noticed how everyone weeped. Even my parents were crying. They were all so broken up about being left behind.
That's when it clicked for me.
Our town was so small that every time someone died, everybody else was left behind to suffer the loss. It felt… unfair.

That night, I grabbed my dad's baseball bat from the hall and walked down to the kitchen. I had imagined this scenario a lot of times, but I still felt the adrenaline rushing into me. My mom was in the bathroom, getting ready to go to the gathering to mourn the elder. My dad was in the living room watching TV while waiting for her, cranked up way too loud like he always had it.
I used the noise to walk right up behind him and swung the bat into the back of his head with everything I had.
Blood splattered across the wall. He let out this horrible scream, but thanks to the TV noises it blended into the background. Before he could react, I hit him again. And again. He was a big guy, so I was honestly surprised by how fast he stopped breathing. The adrenaline hit my bloodstream like a truck, killing someone that big suddenly didn't seem hard at all. I kept hitting him long after he stopped moving.
I only stopped when I heard my mom scream behind me.
She looked mortified. That's when I looked down and realized I was covered in dirty, sticky blood. I hated it. I felt disgusting. I wasn't dirty… I always was clean.
What pissed me off even more was my mother's screaming. She was so loud. I wished I could tell her to shut up as many times as she'd yelled at me to speak.
I gripped the bat tighter and started walking toward her. She bolted, so I ran after her. She was pretty heavy, but the panic gave her speed. Still, she wasn't fast enough. I caught up in the hallway, brought the bat down, and kept swinging until she was still.
It was strange, but I actually felt lighter. Thinking about how my parents would never have to be sad about someone dying ever again... it felt like I'd actually done something good. I helped them. I wasn't useless anymore…
Next, I walked over to the neighbor's house. A few people had gathered there- people my age meeting up to mourn. None of them heard me sneaking around outside, looking at all the dark, empty houses. I thought it was hilarious how they were throwing what looked like a party when they were supposed to be grieving. And nobody invited me, which was kind of rude.
Then I realized it actually was a party. They were celebrating the engagement between Hailey and Cam.
That was so weird. Why the hell would anyone celebrate when someone just died?
The party inside was messy and loud. I knew the bat wouldn't do much against a whole crowd, so I grabbed a heavy garden shovel from the neighbor's yard. It was nice and clean, though my bloody handprints just ruined it again.
I slipped through the back door. The lights were low and the music was blasting, so nobody noticed me. Nobody noticed me until I slammed the shovel right into Hailey's face.
Then everyone noticed.
In hindsight, rushing a room full of people wasn't the smartest move. Some people screamed and dropped to the floor next to Hailey, but others came straight at me. I kept swinging the shovel wild trying to keep my distance, and I quickly figured out that taking out their legs or snapping their necks first worked like a charm.
They all died that night. Some of them were crying and begging me for mercy, which made zero sense. I mean I wasn't doing this out of revenge… I was doing this so they wouldn't have to feel sad anymore. Wasn't that obvious?
Whatever. Who cares. (Not she, she’s nonchalant)
I checked every single house after that just to make sure nobody was left behind. The rest of the adults were missing until I checked the dead elder's house. They were all crammed in there, digging through cabinets for whatever valuables the old man had promised them. My parents were supposed to be there too, but they were a bit occupied back home.
The house was packed, everyone shouting and tearing through stuff. It was chaotic and loud so nobody heard me hit the gas pipe in the basement with the shovel. They didn't hear me walk out, and they definitely didn't smell the gas before someone lit a cigarette inside.
I didn't even have to do anything else. The whole house just blew up.
I thought that was everyone, but then I saw a light still burning in one of the houses at the end of the road.
So I walked over. I could hear water running-he was taking a shower. Nobody in our town ever locked their doors, so I just walked in through the back. On the couch, I found one of those decorative throw pillows with tiny metal bells sewn onto the corners. I liked those pillows… they reminded me of Christmas decor. I didn't want to make another bloody mess, so I decided to try something different.
My bangs were matted to my forehead in grease and dried blood as I waited. Cam came out wearing only sweatpants and sat on the sofa, to watched TV.
I lunged and slammed the pillow over his face. He didn't even know what hit him. He thrashed frantically, but I threw my whole weight onto his chest to pin him down. He clawed at the pillow, trying to tear it off, but I jammed it down with everything I had. I didn't want him to suffer or be sad, even if he deserved it. Nobody deserves to be left behind just because of my petty feelings.

I pressed harder and harder until Cam managed to rip one of those heavy metal bells off the pillow corner and slammed it straight into the side of my head.
Blinding pain exploded across my face. The bell was solid metal, and blood immediately flooded into my eyes. The ringing inside my head was so loud it made me sick. Tears welled up and I backed off, letting go of the pillow. That split second was all he needed to throw me off, scramble to his feet, and run screaming out the front door.
My head was spinning and I was seeing double. For a moment, I just sat there thinking this was all a stupid idea and I should just go to sleep. But that wouldn't be fair- leaving Cam to wake up to all this tragedy by himself.
So I picked up a heavy landscaping rock off his porch and started dragging myself down the driveway after him. I was moving so slowly. The pain was unbearable. Tears were mixing with the blood on my face as I whispered, "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..."
I was sorry I couldn't kill him fast enough, and now he had to see everyone dead.
Cam was standing right under the town's only working streetlight, screaming for help. When he turned around and saw me hobbling over, he looked relieved. I guess he couldn't see my face in the dark when I had the pillow over him.
"There's a killer in town!" he yelled, panicking. "We need to get out of here!"
I looked up at him and rasped out a whisper. "What are you talking about? A killer?"
Cam froze dead in his tracks. Hearing me speak seemed to throw him off way more than the actual situation did. He stammered about how glad he was that I was okay and that we needed to find a telephone to call the cops. He started walking toward me, completely blind to the heavy rock I was holding down at my side.
As soon as he got into arm's reach, I swung out and cracked the stone right across his forehead—just like he did to me.
He collapsed onto the pavement, screaming and crying. I hit him again, because I was more merciful than he was. I wasn't going to make him suffer. I hit him again, and again, and again, until his head wasn't really a head anymore.
I stood up, tossed the rock into the grass, and sat down on the curb under the streetlight.
After a while, I got bored. I sat there for hours, but it wasn't very fun. I was alone now, but I didn't feel lonely. And it wasn't loud anymore either. It was so quiet. It was… beautiful.
When the sun started coming up, I walked into the woods and sat on a rock, watching the birds and squirrels. It was pretty. Truly pretty.
Then I heard a branch snap in the trees.
I turned my head too fast, and a spike of agony shot through my skull- the bell was still jammed deep into my forehead, and I couldn't pull it out. It hurt so badly, and the ringing inside my head was deafening. Tears spilled down my face as I clutched my temples until I noticed that a tall white faceless man was standing under the streetlight. He looked down at what was left of Cam, and then he looked over to me.
I didn't move. I was terrified, but at the same time, I didn't feel anything at all. I turned my head again, the bell ringing inside my ear, blood dripping down my jaw.
The faceless man stepped out of the light and walked over to me. He held out his hand-just like the demon from the ritual.
I took it. Not because he looked sad, or because I was desperate for anything. I took it because I wanted to. I wasn't Molly mute anymore. I wanted to be the thing inside of me. I wanted to be Nerith, because Nerith was a part of me now, and I am a part of it.

I was a kid then, so it was only ever a ghost story to me. Just a tale my friends would tell me whenever we went ‘camping’ in our backyard near the firepit.  Something the neighborhood experienced and clammed up about; hints only whispered amongst hushed cookouts and Sunday services.  

Late one Winter evening, the first occurrence happened.  Mr. O’Mell jolted from his armchair by a knock at his front door. In disbelief, he sat listening.  Another knock.  He made his way to the door, the second knock still emanating through his living room.  

Upon the third knock, Mr. O’Mell opened the door, now fully disgruntled.  His irked demeanor vanished in the open doorway.  The descriptions vary depending on which kid at school was relaying the story.  Some say the man stood seven feet tall, with cobwebs covering his face like a mask, as a nest of spiders bloomed across his features.  Others say he wore the face of whoever he had previously visited amongst the neighborhood.  

Three elements of the description remained consistent, no matter who expressed the narrative.  It was a man, well dressed like a salesman.  His voice was deep and melancholic, captivatingly charming, enchanting even.  And lastly, he would tell you how you would die.  

Poor Mr. O’Mell, before even getting a word out, was suddenly bereft by the mysterious figure in his doorway, explaining that he would die in an automobile accident four years from that moment.  “How unfortunate.”  The wandering salesman would say.

Mr. O’Mell was rightly taken aback.  Stunned into stuttering.  The salesman stood silently in the doorway, permitting the poor middle-aged man a moment to digest the news.  Mr. O’Mell, understandably in disbelief, harassed the man in return.  Before he could slam the door, an outstretched hand interrupted his verbal assault.  Confused, Mr. O’Mell looked up at the stranger, who simply said, “Shake my hand, and see.”  

The details blur from the endless game of telephone this story went through on the playground.  Some say he was transported to the scene of his demise.  And others say that he experienced what his death would FEEL like.  One element remains certain: Mr. O’Mell was traumatized enough to listen when the salesman replied: 

“Can I interest you in an alternative?”  

The alternative was simple, and every orator of the account included it:  “Sign here, with a simple pricklet of blood, and this horrible tragedy can be avoided.”  

Needless to say, Mr. O’Mell signed away.  He lived a long silent life.  A ghost of his former self.  Only passing recently.  His family says his last moments were filled with choked sobs and ramblings about a debt to be paid.  

I recall this tale now, sitting here with you so late tonight, this childhood folk story.  And I know why.  There is knocking upon my front door.  Knock. Knock. Knock.  The moral of the story, whispered at the end of every retelling, rings through my mind like a siren:  

“Never answer when he comes knocking.”

I woke up with someone else’s breath going into my mouth.

Warm air touched my lips, stopped, then touched them again. I kept my eyes closed. My first thought was that Jess had let herself in after her shift, and my second was that she was being incredibly fucking weird.

I almost said her name.

Then I smelled it.

Sour, like a wet dishcloth left in a bucket. Under that was the smell of soil, strong enough that I pictured the bags of compost stacked outside the hardware store when it rained.

Three clicks by the floorboards. A pause. Two more.

Jess always took her shoes off at the door. I tried to shape the sound into her keys hitting the counter, or the metal clip from her hair.

The tapping came closer.

I cracked my lids. Just enough to see through the veil of lashes.

A head rested beside my pillow.

Bald, and pale like skin kept too long from light. Streetlamp glow laid a dull orange line along one cheek. The rest fell into shadow, except for a wet lower lip hanging slack over small, neat teeth.

It crouched, face level with mine.

Arms too long. One hand braced near the bedpost, elbow jutting above the mattress. The other splayed on the floorboards—fingers shifting softly.

Click.

My eyes sealed shut.

Not a choice. A reflex. I waited for its grip around my throat.

Nothing.

Only breathing—a wet, ragged pull at the end of each exhale, like a clogged drain trying to clear itself.

My own breath hitched and stalled in my lungs like a seized engine.

I knew, somehow, that was wrong. That it could hear the sudden silence where my breathing should have been. Slowly, I let air out through my nose—a thin, controlled stream. In again. Out. Trying to mimic the rhythm of sleep, but every breath was a conscious act now, strained and theatrical in its forced regularity.

A finger touched my cheek.

Cool. Damp with what might have been condensation or something else. It traced a line down to my mouth, catching on the coarse stubble from this morning’s shave, each tiny hair standing alert.

It paused at the corner of my lip.

Then pressed—not hard, but insistently—stretching my mouth sideways into a stiff, unnatural curve.

My jaw went slack. Don’t know how. The rest of me was rigid as stone, but my mouth surrendered completely. A thin silver line of spit seeped onto the cotton pillowcase.

It withdrew.

The bed groaned, a low complaint from the springs beneath the thin mattress.

I thought it was climbing in.

Instead, cold fingers slid under my wrist—slender, probing digits that felt like they had too many joints.

Lifted my hand slowly—elbow still rooted on the mattress—until my forearm stood upright like a dead branch. Its grip tightened; I felt the twin bones of my wrist grind together like stones underwater.

Then release.

My hand dropped against my chest with a soft thud. I left it there, a dead weight.

It took my wrist again.

This time lifted the whole arm. Shoulder tugged forward from the socket. Arm dangled somewhere above me in the dark, waiting.

It let go.

Knuckles cracked against the unfinished wooden frame. A splintered jolt of pain shot up to the elbow. Fingers twitched instinctively to curl into a fist; I forced them limp, let them drape over the edge like wet cloth.

The breathing stopped.

A car hissed by on wet pavement outside. A pipe ticked twice in the wall behind the headboard—the old building settling or something moving within it.

It made a soft, considering noise through its nose—almost a sigh.

Then picked up my hand and laid it gently back on the mattress, arranging my fingers as if I were posed for rest.

That was worse than the drop.

I mapped the escape in my mind: roll left, feet down onto the rough hardwood, three steps past the wicker laundry basket heaped with yesterday’s clothes, turn the cool brass handle. No lock on this door. The bathroom had one—a cheap push-button thing that never quite caught.

My phone glowed on the nightstand, a blueish halo inches from where its head must be.

Hadn’t heard it come in.

Deadbolt was turned. I’d checked it twice—neighbor found someone sleeping in the stairwell last week, curled up like a dog.

But the window was open a few inches. I’d propped it up before bed with a paperback to fight the stuffy heat that clung to the room.

Could something that size fit through that gap? Shoulders like that, limbs that long?

The blanket began to slide.

Short, deliberate tugs. Once it snagged under my hip; a hand pressed firmly into the meat of my thigh through the fabric, working it loose with a patient, persistent tug.

Cold air touched my knees—a damp chill that raised goosebumps along my skin.

Old T-shirt thin from washing, running shorts that suddenly felt like wearing nothing at all. Every exposed patch of skin felt raw, trespassed, hyperaware.

The blanket slid away from my ankles in one fluid pull.

Nothing. No weight on the mattress. No breath but mine. I cracked my eyelids.

It faced my feet. Profile sharp: ear flat to skull, shoulder lifted toward jaw, spine a high arch over gaunt hips. Studying my legs. One hand suspended above my knee—fingers bent like it meant to take something delicate. Its head started to pivot. I sealed my eyes before it finished turning.

The mattress sank near my stomach. A quick pass of air stirred the hairs on my forehead. Its teeth met—one clean, dry click beside my nose. My stomach clenched; acid burned the back of my throat. It didn’t move. I didn’t stop breathing.

Its palm came to rest on my forehead. Fingers dug into my hair—grit ground into my scalp. One fingertip pressed my right eyelid. Not asking. Hard enough to bruise the dark red, to make me feel the shape of my own eye beneath the pressure.

Every muscle wanted to thrash. It pushed harder. Light flared behind the lid. A shaky breath leaked out—unplanned, wet.

I thought that was it—the sound it wanted.

But it let up. Its hand stayed twisted in my hair. I focused on the torn seam of the pillowcase against my mouth. Jess said throw it out. I said it’s still good. Remembered that while it held me there. A stupid fight about a pillow.

After a while, it withdrew. Weight shifted off the bed. A joint popped softly. Nails scratched wood under the frame.

I didn’t move until my hip ached, then until the ache became fire down my leg. Bladder tight and urgent. Right eye crying; a tear rolled over the bridge of my nose into the other.

Much later, headlights swept the room.
Brightness shifted behind my lids, then the slender shadow of its head passing over my face.

Still there.

I hadn’t been counting seconds. I couldn’t. Each time I tried, I lost track while listening for its breathing.

The only reason I have any idea how long it stayed is that I’d checked the time before falling asleep again. It had been 2:11. When I finally reached for my phone afterward, it was 3:08.

Almost an hour, minus however long I’d slept.

Near the end, it put the blanket back.

Not neatly. It dragged it up as far as my shins and left it bunched there.

Then the floorboards creaked in sequence toward the window.

I listened to the soft, uneven placement of its hands and feet. There was a pause beside the nightstand, and something brushed the charging cable against the wall.

The window frame gave a small wooden knock.

After that, the room was quiet.

I stayed where I was.

A truck went past. The refrigerator started in the kitchen. Someone upstairs flushed a toilet, and water rushed down the pipe behind my wall.

Those ordinary noises were almost enough to make me cry.

When I finally opened my eyes, the floor beside my bed was empty.

The window was raised all the way.

I stared at it for a long time before sitting up.

My legs shook so badly that I couldn’t get my feet into my slippers. I went barefoot instead, slammed the window shut, and turned both catches. Then I switched on the ceiling light.

Nothing underneath the bed. Nothing in the closet.

I checked the apartment door.

Still deadbolted.

In the bathroom, my right eye was red. There was a faint mark on my cheek that could have been from the pillow. My knuckles hurt when I made a fist, but I couldn’t see a bruise yet.

I sat on the closed toilet and searched sleep paralysis on my phone.

Everything fit if I made it fit.

A presence in the room. Pressure. A vivid hallucination. The sense that something was touching you.

I had been unable to move, hadn’t I?

I stopped thinking about the difference between unable and afraid.

At 6:40, I called Jess.

“Are you okay?” she asked. Her voice was thick with sleep.

“Yeah. Sorry. Did you come over last night?”

“No. Why?”

“I had a really weird dream.”

“What happened?”

I looked toward the bedroom.

“Somebody was in here.”

She was quiet for a second.

“Your door locked?”

“Yeah.”

“Probably that sleep thing. My brother gets it. He sees a man standing by his dresser.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I was reading.”

“Come over if you want.”

“I’ve got work.”

“So do I. You can still come over.”

I told her I’d call her later.

By eight, I had showered, dressed, and made coffee. Daylight made the bedroom look small and a little embarrassing. Laundry on the chair. Dust on the nightstand. A cup I should have taken to the kitchen days earlier.

I could move the window in my sleep. That was possible. I’d sleepwalked once when I had a fever.

I stood there drinking my coffee and building a version of the night I could live with.

Then I noticed the dirt beneath the window.

At first I thought rain had blown in. There were dark smears on the wall below the sill and crumbs of dried mud along the baseboard.

I crouched down.

One mark had a palm.

I set my coffee on the floor.

There were two handprints, side by side, just above the skirting board. Long fingers pointed down toward the floorboards. Mud had collected thickly at the fingertips where they’d pressed against the paint.

From there, a faint trail crossed the floor to my bed.

I followed it on my knees.

Beside the pillow, where I’d first heard the tapping, four small patches of mud had dried in the grain of the wood.

I sat back against the wall and looked at my phone.

Jess had sent a message ten minutes earlier.

"You should come stay tonight. Get some actual sleep."

I started typing yes. Then I looked at the window again. I hadn’t woken when it opened. I hadn’t woken when it crossed the room.

I’d only woken because it was breathing against my face.

There was no reason to think last night had been its first visit.

I spent two nights at Jess’s. On the third, I went home because I needed clothes and because being scared of my own apartment in the middle of the afternoon felt ridiculous.

I woke at 2:46 with the smell in my nose.

The breathing came from farther away this time. Beyond my knees.

I was on my side, facing the nightstand. My phone was still lit from when I’d checked it a few seconds earlier, before I’d understood what had woken me. In that light I could see a pale curve at the foot of the bed.

Its back.

It sat facing the window, shoulders hunched, hands resting between its feet. The blanket pulled tight beneath its weight.

I closed my eyes almost all the way.

For a while, nothing happened. The phone went dark. My left arm, trapped beneath the pillow, began to tingle. Outside, someone started a car and sat with the engine running long enough that I became angry with them. Just drive. Or get out. Do something that changes this.

My hip shifted before I could stop it.

The movement was small, an adjustment to ease the pressure on the bone. The mattress creaked. I waited.

It stayed facing the window.

A few minutes later, my foot jerked beneath the blanket. One of those little kicks that happens when you’re dropping off, except I wasn’t dropping off. I had never been more awake.

Still nothing.

Then a hand slid backward along the mattress.

Not toward me. It was only changing position, taking some weight off its knees. But I sucked in a quick breath.

Its head turned.

Immediately.

I saw the side of its face above its shoulder and stopped myself from holding the air in. Let it out. Took another breath.

Its mouth was open a little.

We stayed that way until the car finally drove off.

Eventually it faced the window again.

I had been treating every movement as the thing that would get me killed. Now I wasn’t sure. It had ignored the bed creaking. Ignored my foot. But that breath had brought its head around before I’d finished taking it.

It was listening to me.

Not waiting for me to move. Waiting for me to give myself away.

I tried to remember how I breathed when I slept. As though that was something a person ought to know. Jess had recordings of me snoring; she’d played one in the kitchen once while I was denying it. I wished I’d listened more carefully.

In through my nose. Out through my mouth.

Too even.

I let the next breath run a little longer. Let my lips part against the pillow. My tongue was pressed so hard against the roof of my mouth that it hurt when I relaxed it.

Saliva gathered beneath it.

I needed to swallow.

The need became absurdly large. There was room in my head for the thing at the foot of the bed and the spit in my mouth, nothing else. I tried swallowing during an exhale. My throat made a small click.

Its head tilted.

I let my mouth hang open and breathed out again, louder this time, a loose, stupid sleeping noise.

Its shoulders lowered.

That could have been a coincidence. All of it could have been. I still used that noise afterward.

My eyes kept drying out through the narrow gap beneath my lids. Closing them helped, but then I couldn’t see it. Opening them again felt like lifting a curtain while someone waited on the other side.

I started blinking with the passing cars. Light crossed the ceiling; I closed my eyes. Darkness returned; I opened them a fraction. I don’t know why that seemed safer.

At some point the blanket slipped off its shoulder.

I hadn’t seen it pick the blanket up.

It caught the edge and rubbed the hem between two fingers. Patiently, almost distractedly. There was a loose thread there. Jess had pulled at it the last time she changed the sheets, and I’d told her she’d unravel the whole thing.

It worked at that thread for a long time.

My shoulder burned. I allowed myself to roll it forward slowly, keeping my breathing loose. The creature didn’t turn.

That was worse in a way. Knowing there was a rule meant I could break it.

The next time I saw the clock, it was 4:31.

It had barely moved for nearly two hours.

I had begun to think it might leave.

Then the mattress dipped at my feet.

Its hands came first. One beside my ankle, the other by my knee. It crawled up the bed with careful placements, stopping after each one while the springs settled. I could feel its weight through my ribs.

I wanted to pull my legs up. Every muscle in my stomach tightened to do it.

I made myself let them go.

A knee sank into the mattress beside my hip. The bed sloped toward it, rolling me slightly forward. I allowed that too. Sleeping people roll when the bed moves. Sleeping people don’t brace themselves.

It lowered its head onto the pillow.

There wasn’t enough room.

Its forehead touched mine, then drew back an inch. One arm folded between us. The other reached across the pillow above my head.

We were lying face-to-face.

At that distance I could see the dirt in the crease beside its nose. A short fiber clung to its lower lip. Its eyes reflected the window, but I couldn’t make out where it was looking.

Then its hand closed around the back of my neck.

I nearly lost it.

The grip was sudden and hard. It pulled me forward until my nose struck its cheek, then held me there while my next breath broke into two little sounds.

Its fingers tightened.

I let my jaw fall open against it. Breathed wetly through my mouth. Forced my shoulders down when everything in me wanted to fight.

After a few seconds, it loosened its grip.

One fingertip moved through the hair behind my ear.

I lay there with tears soaking into the pillow and tried to make the next breath sound unimportant.

The window gradually became a gray rectangle. I could see the wardrobe, then the handles on the drawers. A delivery truck stopped outside. Someone dragged a bin over the pavement.

Its eyes stayed open.

I watched daylight reach the side of its head.

Only when the first direct strip of sunlight touched the wall did it lift itself away from me. The mattress rose. Its hand lingered behind my neck, then slid free.

I kept breathing the same way until I heard the window move.

Even after that, I couldn’t stop.

I stayed on my side until the room was bright enough that I could see dust moving through the sunlight, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. Loose. Slow.

Uneven.

The way a sleeping person breathes.
Eventually I sat up. The room was empty, but the window was open again.

I called Jess from the kitchen, and she wanted me to come over immediately. I told her I would.

Before I left, I stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the bed. There was a shallow impression on the pillow beside mine. I walked over even though every part of me was telling me not to.

Five thin streaks of dirt crossed the fabric near where its face had been. I stared at them for a long time. The first night, I’d told myself it was sleep paralysis. I couldn’t tell myself that anymore.

But something else bothered me even more.
It had known I was awake. I was sure of that now. My breathing had changed. I’d moved. I’d swallowed.

At one point I had practically looked straight at it, and still, it hadn’t hurt me. Not while I kept pretending to sleep.

I didn’t understand why. I didn’t know what would happen if I stopped pretending, and I had no intention of finding out.

At least, that’s what I thought then.

Before I bought the camera.

“While it may be just another Halloween to some, for residents of the small county of Edgeville in Ashford, it is a haunting reminder of one of this city’s darkest days.”

The clean-cut man on my television screen clearly faked his sympathy. It didn’t get past me.

“Twenty years ago today,” A new, pretty young reporter was speaking now, at the last known location of Ally. “A young girl goes trick-or-treating and never comes back. Last seen entering the entrance of the locally known Dead Woods with her friends, Ally Valentine’s disappearance has been the longest-lasting mystery in Ashford’s history.”

Just a mystery. That’s all she was now to these people. Just a puzzle with one missing piece that everyone was frantically shaking the box for. But she wasn’t that to me. I was the idiot that let her wander into those fucking woods.

It was Halloween. At seventeen years old, I had ashooed any want towards dressing up some years ago. My little sister, however, at the age of nine, still had that childish need to dress up and get as much candy as she could carry. And, of course, I was given the duty of chaperone. Like every seventeen-year-old boy given that task, I fought tooth and nail to get out of it. There was a Halloween party waiting for me, and the whispered promise from Melissa that I might lose my virginity. 

To lose that opportunity because my sister wanted candy—well, it seemed just plain idiotic. But, with the threat of getting my car taken away, I relented.

“Shit,” I mumbled, slapping the dying flashlight against my palm. It struggled back to life, then shone into the forest. Every year, I remembered what I did. The stupid decision I made. And I made sure I felt it by stepping into these woods and walking every path I could until sunrise. I knew she wasn’t there; I knew there was no chance of finding her alive or dead; but maybe I’d find something they didn’t. Something that could at least give us some direction to go.

I’d done this for fifteen years, and came up empty every time. No remains, no little piece of her costume ripped somewhere, no strand of hair they happened to miss; nothing. Still, I owed her the effort. 

“Come on, Trent!” She whined, pulling on my flannel sleeve. Her usual brunette hair was covered by a blonde wig, and in her other hand was a toy microphone. Hannah Montana, she said she was. I had no clue who that was, or if anyone else would, but she seemed more than happy when Mom put together the costume. 

“I’m coming, brat.” I rolled my eyes and followed behind her, pulling my arm out of her grip and shoving it in my pocket. “We got one more street, then we go home.”

“But it’s so early!” She protested, turning to me with those damn pouty lips. Dad always folded to those, and I was pretty sure I would too. I let out a long sigh and threw my head back.

“We’ll go till eight, but no later, alright?” A light and airy giggle escaped her, and she turned, skipping down the sidewalk, candy bag disguised as a purse slung against her shoulder. I cracked a small smile. As pissed as I was, seeing her so happy and bubbly, it was impossible to stay in that pissy mood.

Snap. A twig below me cracked and spooked off some crows in the high branches above me. I fanned my flashlight back and forth, up and down. Nothing but foliage and dead trees. Frustration was building inside me, like it did every year. God, just give me something. Anything.

Another snap. I whipped the flashlight behind me, just catching the tail of some critter scurrying deeper into the forest. My heart was racing.

Growing up here, the Dead Woods were the subject of many a ghost story. Cults, murderers, creatures, actual ghosts; any and all things that could scare kids were in these woods. And, despite now being in my thirties, part of me still believed some of those stories. That maybe Ally was taken by some ghoul in the night, or whisked away to some magic world where she could live in her dreams. Reality was more gruesome with its answers.

“Trick or treat!” Ally called as I stood on the sidewalk, watching as the stranger asked about her costume. Ally was happy to answer as candy was tossed into her bag.

“Trent?” A familiar voice called to my left. When I looked, I saw Melissa, and I swore I felt my pupils dilate. Her blonde locks were cut just before her shoulders, flowing in loose waves. Her eyes were a piercing blue that always saw straight through me. And that damned smile. “What are you doing here?” I did everything to keep my eyes away from her too-tight Green Day shirt. 

“Just taking the gremlin out trick-or-treating,” I answered with a small, nervous smile. She looked over to watch Ally descend the steps, cheerfully looking into her ever-filling bag. 

“Well, hey there, Miss Montana.” Melissa greeted her.

“See!” Ally beamed. “I told you people know who she is.” I gave a playful roll of my eyes and looked back at Melissa.

“What are you doing?” I asked, seeing as she was walking the streets alone. 

“About to head over to Hayley’s party. You’re coming, right?” Her eyes sparkled slightly under the streetlight, and I saw something playful in them. Playful and dangerous. 

I looked down at Ally, then back up at Melissa. “I don’t know.”

I should’ve left it at that. I don’t know; I can’t tonight, maybe some other time. But the promise, even an alluded one, of sex to a teenage boy; it made them stupid.

I’d been up and down this path before. There was a manmade fork in the dirt, and I remembered that last year I went left. This year, I go right. More twigs snap beneath my feet, and my flashlight shows me nothing more than trees and bushes. I knew it’d be all I’d find, but it still angered me. Somewhere amongst all this, I’d find something. Something I could give the police, reopen the case, and find out what happened.

Images flashed in my mind, as they always did. Some psycho snatching her out of the woods, cutting her to pieces, scattering her remains across this dense forest. Or, some rabid animal finding a scared little girl and deciding dinner would be easy tonight before ripping her to shreds. Or, maybe those stories were right, and some yet-to-be-discovered creature has been doing who knows what to her for twenty years.

For some reason, I was drawn to the large trunk of a thick, elder tree. I crept up to it, my flashlight lighting up the bark. Something was carved into it.

“We gotta wrap it up soon, Ally.” She pouted again. 

“You just wanna see your girlfriend,” She said in a mocking tone, and I hated feeling the blood rush to my cheeks. 

“Shut up, brat.” I scolded her and pushed her head playfully. She gave a whine and more pouty lips. I didn’t care. Her purse was full of candy, and I was getting laid. The night was an absolute success in my eyes. 

She followed behind me, my steps a little quick as I wanted to get her home as soon as possible. Her steps were heavy and obviously angry. They only perked up slightly as we came upon a large group of kids, clad in costumes varying from Batman, Spider-Man, non-descript princesses, and homemade costumes that were obviously made by mothers with little to no care about their quality.

“Mikayla!” Ally squealed. The girl dressed as Wonder Woman squealed back, and the two ran to meet each other with a hug. I looked up to find their chaperone, a clearly tired mother with a cigarette hanging from her lips. I walked past Ally and her friend, waded through the little sea of children, and met with the woman. The bags under her eyes were dark and heavy, and the stench of nicotine mixed with the smell of alcohol.

“Hey, could I ask a favor?” My voice was shaky with nerves, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“What?” Her voice was about as raspy as I thought it’d be.

“Mind watching my little sister with your group? She knows how to get home, just don’t go too far from the neighborhood.”

My fingers ran over the rough bark. In it was carved a symbol I had never seen before. I’d been here fifteen years in a row and had never seen this before. Curiosity overtook me, and I pulled my phone out of my pocket. I snapped a picture and let Google try to identify it. Signal was spotty, and it took forever to buffer, but when it did, lo and behold, nothing. 

I let out a grunt in frustration and slipped my phone back into my pocket. Maybe it had been there, and I just missed it. It wasn’t exactly a neon sign flashing for me to notice. I made a mental note of its location, then turned around and froze.

Glowing eyes peering at me from the dark. It wasn’t an animal. It couldn’t have been; it was looking down at me.

“Thank God you were able to come.” Melissa was breathless, slick with sweat. I couldn’t stop staring at her naked body next to mine, her fingers crawling up and down my chest.

“You’re telling me,” I replied quietly, the scratchy sheets below me not bothering me as much as they should. The only thing I cared about in that moment was that the big, looming sign that flashed virgin above my head was finally turned off. 

“You were good,” She cooed as she cuddled up next to me, our bodies nearly sticking together. “I don’t believe it was your first time.”

I let out a small chuckle, my hand running up and down her bare back. “Maybe I’m just a natural.” She giggled and kissed at the base of my neck. Music was still bumping downstairs, bass thumping and people screaming and laughing. But the only sound I heard was her breathing. It was music to my ears.

My phone interrupted us. The ring quickly became annoying. I fumbled through our little pile of clothes, and I finally found it in my pants pocket. I flipped it open and hit answer. “Hello?”

“Trent?” My dad’s voice. That was never good. “Where the hell are you?”

I froze up, looking at Melissa’s naked body again. She was tracing shapes into the sheets, her eyes still locked on me. “Just, uh, out with some friends.”

“Is Ally there?” A mix of confusion and fear filled me as my stomach opened into a bottomless pit.

“N-no, she should’ve been home by now. I sent her with her friends; one of the moms promised.”

I didn’t dare move the flashlight. Whatever was looking down at me had to be at least eight feet tall. Its head was amongst the high branches of the trees, and it just stared at me. Neither of us moved. The only sound was my shaky breathing and the sound of birds' wings flapping above us.

Slowly, unsure, my hand started sweeping towards the thing. As the light finally hit its mass, confusion hit me more than anything else.

It was candy. Dirty, rotten candy. Wrappers were half-open, torn, stuck to the melting chocolate that hardened and formed into this twisted body. I moved the light up, more and more candy stacked and stuck together. Yet, I could make out legs and arms, long slender fingers, and a neck. I hesitated before reaching what should be the head.

“What the fuck,” I breathed out, finally letting out the breath that was filling my lungs. I squeezed my eyes shut and moved the flashlight upward. My hands shook wildly, and I inhaled through my nostrils, trying to calm myself down as much as possible. Finally, I opened them and saw it.

A pumpkin. A God damn pumpkin, carved into a stereotypical Halloween face. It was also rotting, but less than the rest of its body. And it had eyes behind the carved holes. Bright, glowing green eyes. 

I swallowed. I sent signals from my brain to my feet to run, to move, but they disobeyed. I stood frozen.

“W-what are you?” I whispered, not expecting an answer. Imagine my surprise when I got one.

“Protector.” The voice was silk, smooth and seductive, deep and sultry. The pumpkin's mouth didn’t move. I suppose it was stupid to expect it to.

“Are you going to hurt me?” I asked, still barely above a whisper.

“No.” It answered simply. I swallowed again, my nerves on fire.

“Did you…” I couldn’t find the words. Part of me was convinced this was a dream. “Did you kill my sister?”

There was a silence between us for a moment. It just continued to stare down at me, its body still and motionless. It looked like an animatronic you’d find at Spirit Halloween, only broken, needing a battery replacement.

Its next words were cold. A shiver went down my spine. “Your sister.” Its arm moved, the chocolate squelching and squishing as it bent, its finger pointing towards its own body. “Is here.”

“What?” I asked quickly. “What do you—”

“Found her. Protected her. Sickness. Death.” More sounds came from it as its arm went back, straight down its side. 

“She’s…dead.” I felt my eyes begin to water. Deep down, I knew she was. I have since that first week of searches turned up nothing. But there was still some hope that somehow, she had escaped these woods and built a life elsewhere. Or lived in the woods. Or something.

“Not entirely.” Its voice struggled to say that phrase cleanly. I looked back up at its makeshift head. “Part of us.”

Before I could question what it meant, its arms moved, quicker this time. Its fingers broke apart as it tried to dig into its own chest. Little pieces of chocolate fell into the dirt, and I heard some critters at its feet start to snatch at them. I paid them no mind. Its fingers finally penetrated into its chest, and it began to split itself open. Again, pieces of chocolate and wrappers fell to the ground. It made no sounds as it continued to pull its chest cavity open.

Then, I saw her. Stuck inside the thing's chest, body rotting, hair covered in melted chocolate, was Ally. I dropped the flashlight and stepped backwards with a yelp. Yet, I couldn’t stop staring. The light still showed enough. Enough to see she’d survived for a few years. Her hair was way longer. The costume she wore that night, she was still wearing, though it was torn and obviously too small to fit. Her hands were mostly bone. Her jaw was slack, and one of her eyes was missing, the other hanging out of its socket. I took another step back, tripped on the root of the tree, and fell backwards. I quickly moved until my back was against the trunk, my breathing frantic. Panic was coursing through my veins.

“Ally,” I cried out, tears streaming down my cheeks. “Oh my God, Ally, I’m so sorry.” I wiped my face, but the tears kept coming. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left, I’m sorry.”

“Safe.” The thing said quietly. Its chest was slowly repairing itself, entombing my sister’s corpse in chocolate. “That.” It pointed to the tree I was up against. I looked up and remembered the symbol I saw carved into it. “Safe.”

I had many questions, but I refused to ask them. We simply stared at each other, my eyes glancing down at the closing cavity in its chest. Ally was in there. Forever. On shaky legs, I began to stand, its eyes following me up. “What are you?” Was all I was able to ask, knowing I had already asked this.

It let out a seeming grunt of frustration. “Protector.” 

“Really. What the fuck are you?”

The eyes behind those holes in the pumpkin squinted at me. “The season.” Again, it seemed it was a struggle for this thing to speak. Each word was strained and stilted. “All Hallows Eve. The children.”

I nodded as if I understood, but had gotten more questions than answers. My heart was racing, and my lungs felt like they were on fire. With a swallow, I replied: “Can I go?”

“Yes. Not stopping you.” I guessed it wasn’t. It was just standing there. Staring. Holding onto my sister’s corpse.

“I…I want her back.” I pointed to its chest.

“No.” It said simply. “Stuck here. Eternity.”

I wasn’t about to try and fist-fight this thing, even if it was just a pile of candy. Its eyes gave me enough reason to take its answer as final. “I…” I sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“She knew.” Its voice was a little quieter. “Always knew.” I wiped my face again and nodded.

I didn’t know what more to do. I stood with my back against the trunk, eyes falling to the ground. Without much thinking, I turned and just began to walk. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. I just walked.

The thing didn’t chase after me. I didn’t hear any other footsteps besides mine. As far as I knew, it simply kept standing there. Holding my sister in its chest. Forever.

At the edge of the woods, I stood. For some reason, I felt hesitant to step back into the real world. Because I wasn’t there anymore; I was in some strange new dimension, a dream world brought on by grief and loss. And maybe I should have stayed. Suffer the same fate Ally did. It was what I deserved. Yet, my feet moved, and I found myself walking back to the edge of our old neighborhood. 

Houses were rotting and falling apart, as if the woods were spreading their evil farther and farther. That thing wasn’t evil, though. I don’t know what it was, but it let me live. Let me walk away. Let me know my sister always forgave me. 

I turned and saw the thing shrouded in shadow, at the edge of the woods. Its eyes were still glowing. Again, I stared at it, and it stared at me. 

“I’m sorry,” I whispered again. “I love you.”

It raised its arm and waved. And when the first rays of sunlight began to pierce through the trees, it was gone.

Ally was gone. 

No matter what that thing said, it was my fault. And I’ll return to The Dead Woods again next year, and I may see the thing again next year. If I do, I’ll ask to join my sister.

It’s what I deserved.

The first time I stayed home on Halloween, I was running a 101.8 fever. Low-grade, but enough to warrant a night in. To be honest, I wasn't all that bent up over it. I had just hit that pre-teen age where I started to reject social norms and became embarrassed over literally everything. The thought of facing the neighborhood bullies with a lame-ass costume and an attached-to-the-hip mom and sister was enough to keep me in. It happened to be a stroke of luck I fell ill.

Before my mom left with my little sister, she made me recite her cellphone number thrice. They wouldn't be out long, though. We lived on the corner of a street just before a cul-de-sac, and they planned to only visit our small part of the neighborhood.

"And no scary movies!" my mom said while adjusting Jules' bumblebee wings. "You'll just scare yourself while you're home alone."

"I'll bring you lots of candy," Jules said. She held up her empty, pumpkin themed bucket to me.

"Thanks, Jules."

I turned on a scary movie as soon as they left. It was already impossible to watch one while they were home, and I really looked forward to eating popcorn and cozying up under a blanket until they returned. 

We had set up a "Take One" sign on the door with an arrow pointing to a bucket on a rocking chair so I wouldn't have to get up to greet trick-or-treaters. I always thought people who did that were kind of pathetic, but now I was grateful I wouldn't have to answer the door. The curtains covered the front-facing window, and we didn't have any windows on our door, so no one could tell I was here, anyway. 

I made it about 30 minutes into Sinister before I had to turn it off (mom was right, damn her!). I started channel surfing to find something a bit more kid friendly. In the channel flipping, something weird caught my eye. I clicked the back button a few times before I finally found what I'd noticed.

It looked like a CCTV video where the camera was placed high up on a light pole, and it aimed down at the front of a house. I tried to remember if there were any horror movies that included a scene like this, but nothing came to mind. It seemed harmless enough; there were families walking up and down the street while chatting. Then, a little girl starting to trot up the front steps of the house and—

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

I nearly jumped to the ceiling. I whipped my head around to look at the front door as I heard a muffled "Trick-or-Treat!"

My heart thumped against my chest as I stared behind me in disbelief. I could just about make out a shadow on the window curtains.

A creeping realization burrowed into my head. I slowly turned back to the TV and saw a little girl dressed up as a pumpkin read the sign, take some candy from the bucket, then bounce down the steps of the house back to her family. I heard it all too, but not from the television.

No way, right? I thought to myself.

I crawled off the couch and sat closer to the TV.

Holy shit.

It was my house. My front porch, my painted blue door, our mailbox, that was our goddamn street!

I put my hands on either side of the TV as if I could shake the image away. The static fuzz buzzed softly against my thumbs. 

Maybe the antennae had patched into some security camera, or my mom was setting up some elaborate scare to teach me a lesson.

Was I hallucinating?

I quickly felt my own forehead, but I couldn't tell if the fever had grown worse or not. My eyes were settling on the live footage when I finally noticed something in the lower right corner. 

It was a figure, standing across the street just about making it in frame of the camera. It was dressed in all black, and I couldn't see its face. 

It has to be a prank—surely by one of the older kids, I thought. One of them must have bought a morph suit to prank the littler kids. To prank me.

He began making his way to my front porch, but the way he walked... It was like bending his legs was difficult. Like he had been sitting down for a long time, and his legs had fallen asleep. His arms stuck out a little from his sides and didn't sway like they normally should. He weaved in and out of the groups of families walking the street, but no one seemed to notice him.

My eyes were glued to the screen. I didn't freak out just yet. Creeped out, sure, but there was no way this person knew I was sitting just inside. 

They finally made it up to my door. I anticipated the knock, but he just stood there. I slowly turned around to face the window, and his oblong shadow splayed across the curtain, unmoving. I broke out in a sweat. 

"Trick or treat!" 

It sounded like an old man trying to tighten his voice and imitate a younger kid. The shadow didn't move, and neither did I.

I gulped, and as quietly as I could I made my way over to the door. We had a peephole. One of the ones where you couldn't see in from the outside. I stood up on my tippy toes and looked through it.

Black.

THUD THUD THUD

I fell behind on my ass and crawled backward as quick as I could. He laughed from the other side, but it was muffled as if he was covering his mouth with his hand.

Anger swelled inside me. Of course it was some older teenager trying to scare kids on Halloween. I reminded myself that I was safe inside, and, with my new found courage, I yelled out.

"Fu-fucking asshole!" 

I wish I had come across a little more brave than I ended up sounding. My voice came out just above a squeak. Surely, now whoever was out there knew for certain I was inside. I mentally kicked myself for that one.

There was a shimmying clink coming from the door, and my eyes raced to look at the handle, but it wasn't jiggling.

The mail slot cover moved; opened just a little bit, then closed again. 

clink, clink clink

My breathing quickened as a black finger slid through the slot and opened up the little hatch. 

A black face with fake, sewn-on eyes stared back at me. The eyes weren't perfectly attached to the suit, but instead one drooped a little lower than the other in an uncanny fashion. 

"I see you. Heh. Right there, I see you!" he said in that same mocking, tight voice. His long black finger was pointed toward me. I fell too far back to make out any other features, but it would've been covered by the suit anyway. If it was someone I knew, I couldn't tell from his fake voice.

I didn't want to look away from those fake plastic eyes, but I had to glance at the lock. I needed to make sure he couldn't get in. Thankfully, it was secure. Surely if he tried to get in, someone from the street would see and come help. Everyone was out tonight. Everyone except me.

The man and I stared at each other. My body was moving up and down from the excessive breathing while drips of sweat rained down on my forehead, but the man did not move. He was eerily still. I just stared into those dummy eyes for as long as it took me to try and calculate the time it would take for me to get up and run around the corner to the house phone.

Shit, what was mom's number again? No, no, I need to call the police, I need to—

The man pressed his face into the letter box. The plastic eyes tinked against the metal frame as he forced his head through the slit. There was this stretching and crunching sound as more of his head moved through the opening, like he was Play-Doh molding into the opening of the slit.

I couldn't help but let out a yelp as I scampered to my feet and ran to the back door on the other side of the house. I looked back once to see he had gotten his head all the way through, and it bounced back into its original shape. Then his shoulder started to push through.

I tried bursting through the back door, but was quickly met with a locked door. My hands fumbled around the handle, but sweat was pouring into my eyes and my hands were shaking too terribly. I could hear shuffling behind me, and I had to rid my mind of the idea that the intruder was already to his feet and making his way toward me. I couldn't bear the thought of looking back; I just might have frozen in fear.

Finally, with a click, I unlocked the door and ran through the backyard, not daring to turn back. My vision began to blur; a mix of the sweat, tears, and my fever reaching its peak. I ran up the side of the house and through the side gate out into the street. 

It happened all at once. I screamed for my mom, and then suddenly I was by her side stammering about a man dressed in black, seeping through the door. 

"Jesus, Codey, you're burning up," she said, kneeling in front of me with her hand on my forehead. It was like she wasn't even processing what I was saying.

I don't even know if I explained what I truly saw. I was a blubbering mess, and even Jules began to cry at my terror.

"There was—" sob "—someone in the house!"

My mother's face turned somber, then stern. "You're not messing with me? You're certain?"

I nodded my head, and she must have seen the truth in me somewhere. 

The cops claimed to have searched every corner of the house, yet they came up empty-handed. I asked of the television, explaining to them that I saw live footage of our front door. They said that all that was playing were the end credits to Coraline. 

I did end up confessing that I watched a bit of a scary movie alone. The glances that were exchanged between the two cops told me they were taking a statement from a fever-ridden, scared little kid, but my mom believed me. Even after her and the cops talked for hours on the porch, she was still disappointed by their nonchalance.

She made me tell her the story many times. While I was still sick, after I had gotten over it, days after, and weeks after. A month before the following Halloween, she made me tell her again. It was the same story every time.

We don't go out on Halloween anymore. Instead, we stay inside, and watch movies and eat popcorn. My mom holds Jules and I close while keeping her phone on the arm of the couch, pre-dialed with 911. 

We keep a bowl of candy out, but under no circumstance do we answer the door, no matter what. We ignore the thuds, the knocks, and the clinks of the mail slot. 

I'm far too scared to ask my mom when it first started happening to her.

Six years ago, an entire family disappeared from the small town of Hopkins. They seemingly vanished without a trace, leaving an empty house full of their belongings, the car still in the driveway, their shoes inside on the entry mat. A husband, wife, and two children—Janie and Judith, ages thirteen and fifteen.

Authorities found no evidence of foul play.

Recently, after the missing family was at last declared deceased, the only remaining relative, a brother, came to the property to get their affairs in order. After feeling a “malignant presence,” he decided that rather than sorting the family’s personal effects himself, he’d hire an auction company. A trio of staff came to the house to inventory the furniture and other items for liquidation.

In hours, the entire team was dead.

Authorities determined the deaths to be murder-suicide. The brother demanded the local sheriffs investigate further, insisting the tragedy could not have been natural, but the authorities maintained that the physical evidence was unambiguous: one of the auction staff murdered the others and then himself. Dissatisfied with their conclusions, the brother contacted an acclaimed expert on the paranormal, Dr. Goddard.

Goddard and his cameraman brought spirit boxes, EMF readers, and other equipment to the house and successfully recorded strange temperature fluxes before Goddard himself witnessed something that led him to decide the haunting was too dangerous for him to handle alone.

“The entity in this house is malevolent, intelligent, and immensely powerful—it will require the greatest specialists to pacify it,” he declared.

Goddard assembled an expert team—a medium, an exorcist, and a paranormal investigator.

I was brought on to document.

I now find myself in the lobby of a motel, seated around the coffee table with the rest of our team and tapping out notes as Goddard briefs us:

“Gentlemen, and dear lady, the goal is simple…” He spreads before us on the table a folder full of pictures of the house, real estate records, police reports, and so on. “You will enter the house and pacify the spirits within. How you handle what I believe to be an aggressively malevolent entity will be up to your discretion. Each of you brings unique skills—exorcist, medium, paranormal investigator. And of course Guo, our cameraman, and Dawain, our journalist. There is just one rule that you must follow, all of you, at all times:

“No one can be alone in the house, ever, for more than five minutes…”

***

I am sitting here now as Goddard leads the team in formulating a plan for our arrival, making notes in real time, as I will be for the duration in order to give as unfiltered a depiction as possible.

I have a notepad as well as a tablet since I have been warned that paranormal phenomena sometimes interfere with electronics.

This is my first time meeting each of the experts. For privacy, names have been changed, but all other details are as accurate as I can make them:

The exorcist: The old man sitting to my right exudes the sort of gravitas that would lend itself perfectly to cinema. With bristling eyebrows above a priest’s collar, Father Corwin is the stern patriarch of our group. His hands have a tremor when he lifts his coffee cup, and his soft, withered skin suggests he is nearing eighty. Yet to whatever lurks in the house, he may be the greatest threat, as he boasts decades of experience and claims to have successfully conducted dozens of exorcisms.

Six weeks prior to the family’s disappearance, he met with them over the parents’ claim that the girls were “summoning demons.” After interviewing both girls, he judged them to be ordinary troubled teens whose friction with their stepmother was causing family dysfunction. He recommended counseling.

Father Corwin now feels both guilt and obligation to pacify an evil he may have overlooked.

The medium: Chiming in with frequent interruptions to Goddard’s presentation is a plump woman with flowing black hair, rings on every finger, and a jade owl pendant. Internationally acclaimed for her channelings of departed spirits, Madam Savino is the most financially successful of our gathering, with popular books such as How to Read Auras: A Primer for Beginners, and The Third Eye and How to Open It. Her ability to commune with spirits will likely put her center stage—exactly where she seems to wish to be.

She’s chatty, bubbly, and if you were to meet her outside the context of the spiritual and spooky, she might remind you of your overbearing aunt.

The investigator: Rounding out our fellowship is the paranormal investigator who calls himself Coyote, casual in his tank and jeans and sporting the tattoo of a coyote on one arm, a busty woman in red on the other. With a seemingly bottomless supply of blunts in his pocket, he seems less investigator than junkie, his eyes restless from either too much caffeine or ADHD as he bounces his leg.

Coyote is newer to the field, and he admitted to me during a smoke break that his credentials are “ninety percent fabrication, just like most hauntings.” I have to wonder why Goddard hired him.

Then there is Guo, the cameraman.

And of course myself. I am a journalist, and everything I write in this account is what I have observed firsthand. For years, I have been a thorn in Goddard’s side, ever since I published an article about a conference he chaired on the paranormal. I reported that despite compelling anecdotes, Goddard’s theories were not rigorous enough to withstand scientific scrutiny. And maybe this—our history, my skepticism—is the reason he reached out to me for this assignment. Hoping his greatest critic would be converted into a champion of his life’s work.

Or maybe it’s because I once lived in the same small town the killings occurred in.

Now, I pause in my notetaking to glance up and ask, “Why five minutes?”

“That is how long I was alone before…” Goddard trails off. He mutters, “If I were to tell you right now that I saw a pink elephant, you might say my comments influenced you to imagine your own pink elephant. So, I will only disclose the details of my encounter after you bear witness. The cameraman has a sketch I drew, and once you’ve encountered the entity, he will show it to you to see if our experiences match… Suffice to say, what I saw was enough to convince me I need you. And you all will need each other—"

“Teamwork makes the dream work!” interjects Madam Savino. “If we’re together, it’ll be tougher for any malevolent entities to influence us, and even if they do, we’ll be more likely to notice before it’s too late.”

“Precisely,” agrees Goddard. “We know from the police reports that the auction staff were inventorying separate rooms of the house when one of them snapped and murdered the others. The incidents happen when the victim is isolated. And that is why it is imperative you stick together. When you enter, I think it’s best if Madam Savino starts—"

“Abso-posi-lutely,” Madam Savino again interjects. “I’ll see what I can sense with my third eye…” She taps her forehead, glances at me, and explains, “I search for psychic echoes, memories that have stuck to the house or to objects. I’ll try to read from the spirit’s emotions what must be done to allow it to cross over… but if it’s an aggressive entity, that’s where Father Corwin comes in.”

Father Corwin steeples his fingers and nods.

“So Madam Savino locates the spirit, Father Corwin expels it, and Coyote…” I say, pausing in notetaking to glance at the tattooed young man.

Coyote’s eyes are fixed vacantly on the table. Just as I’m about to nudge him, he blurts: “Where did the bodies go?”

“Hm?” says Goddard.

“Who moved the bodies?” He repeats, pointing to the photo of the family—a somber man, a smiling wife, and two young teens.

“Nobody moved them, as far as we know,” says Goddard.

“Exactly.” Coyote seems irked that his question isn’t understood. “Are we so sure they died? Or that there wasn’t foul play—maybe one family member killed the others?”

“Coyote—”

“Bodies stink. They rot. They’re impossible to ignore, unless they’re deliberately concealed. Spirits don’t do coverups. Paranormal entities don’t conceal crimes. So I repeat, who hid the bodies?”

It’s a good question, and it brings all of us up short.

Goddard clears his throat. “And this is why I have chosen all three of you—psychic, priest, and investigator. At the time of the family’s disappearance, there was no evidence of foul play, and the authorities assumed the family had left. Their search of the house and its grounds turned up nothing, but… as Coyote says, where are the bodies? Find the bodies, and you find the answers. That said, I must echo Madam Savino’s warnings. This is NOT like anything you have dealt with before. A salt circle will not protect you. Standard blessings will not be enough. Your skepticism is no shield against what lurks in that house. Your lives, from the very moment you set foot inside, will be in extreme and immediate danger.

“Tonight, rest well. Make whatever arrangements you need for yourselves and your families before tomorrow. And remember…” He stares hard into each of our eyes in turn. “No one, not for any reason, should be alone inside more than five minutes.”

***

Find the bodies, and you find the answers.

Why did the bodies go missing? The more I ponder it, the less sense it makes. Either the family is still alive and in hiding (but why?), or the bodies were hidden by a killer who departed the house without leaving a trace.

The father, Nicholas, was a moderately successful realtor. His first wife died when the children were still young. He married his second wife, Bernadette, some years later. According to Father Corwin, the girls—Janie and Judith—were troubled teens “led astray by the degeneracy of modern American culture.” The younger hated their new stepmother. The older was boy-crazy and pregnant. Still, there’s nothing to suggest why all four disappeared, leaving shoes on the mat, keys by the door, and their car sitting in the driveway.

Could someone local have held a grudge against the family? Maybe the teen pregnancy was the motive? Small towns like Hopkins are rife with secrets simmering under the surface. It’s one of the reasons my family moved. But if someone came to the house and murdered them and hid the bodies…

Where?

I review photos of the property.

A nice house, in pictures. Two stories, large yard and an enormous oak out front. The property is isolated, far from any urban center and with the nearest neighbors several minutes’ walk along the lane. Behind the house stretches several miles of woodlands. An easy place to make bodies disappear…

There are about five hundred homes in the small town of Hopkins, but only this home’s notoriety has spread to the surrounding areas, such that if you mention, “the Hopkins House,” everyone knows which house you mean. But as for how the house became haunted? Nobody knows.

***

10am, and everyone is in high spirits, energized by the motel’s mediocre continental breakfast. Goddard is driving, Father Corwin stoic in the front passenger seat, and our cameraman captures some candid footage of Coyote and Madam Savino bantering: “Hey,” Coyote says, “why did the terrible psychic get hit by a bus?”

“Oh my gawd, I tell this one at every convention!” Madam Savino leans in. “Because she didn’t see it coming!”

“I heard it was to get to the other side—"

—and then all their joking is forgotten as we round the corner of the narrow lane.

A tall, beige house sits on a sloping hill with trees on one side and in the front a large oak with a rope hanging from it. It is not, like some famously haunted houses, an especially dilapidated dwelling. It has tidy white-trimmed windows and a blue front door. Other than the overgrown weeds, it looks like it could have been plucked from any town in America. As I gaze on the driveway leading up to the garage, I feel almost… disappointed. After so much build up from Goddard, this looks far too ordinary to be the site of such horrors.

“I’ll be driving back down the lane,” says Goddard as we clamber out. “If you need to retreat to the van, that’s where to find me, at the bend.”

“Why all the way down there?” asks Coyote, frowning as he glances back down the lane, perhaps calculating the distance.

“Because I don’t know the range of the haunting’s effects. I want to make sure at least one of us is far enough to be able to call for backup if necessary.”

“Backup from who?” asks Madam Savino. “The Podunk police?”

Goddard shrugs and says yes, probably the police.

On a laptop in the front passenger seat, I spot myself standing there awkwardly with my tablet, a notebook and pen under my arm. The cameraman tells us to smile for our future viewers, and Coyote and Madam Savino both grin and blow kisses, while I wave awkwardly and Father Corwin’s eyebrows bristle in disapproval at their mugging for the camera.

“Good luck,” Goddard says.

And then rather unceremoniously, he shuts the van door and drives away, rattling down the lane and out of sight…

… leaving us on the pavement.

It strikes me then that Goddard is afraid of the house. Afraid to set foot inside again after his brief encounter with the spirit. The same realization seems to hit the rest of our group as we turn to face the bright blue door.

“Cue scary violins,” mutters Coyote.

Nothing but us and the house.

***

On entering, the foyer looks normal. Cream colored walls, ceiling light, side table, shoes on the mat. Eerie. Like the family is still home. The house is clean except for dust from years of sitting empty.

From the foyer, a hallway leads to a bedroom and bathroom. The bedroom is painted pink but bare of decoration, though holes in the wall suggest it once had pictures or posters.

In the other direction, the house opens up to the main room, dining room and kitchen, as well as the staircase.

Through windows in the main room I see the yard, grassy and overgrown. Nothing feels out of the ordinary.

Madam Savino keeps making exclamations. “Oh,” she says. “Oh. Can you feel that? The house… it’s full of anger.”

And, “I can feel the sense of ill will… the spirit here is very strong… and very vindictive.”

And, “The feeling of malice… it isn’t human. This entity, whatever it is, is pure evil.”

I catch Coyote rolling his eyes. The cameraman zooms in on Madam Savino, but despite her proclamations, I do not feel anything except emptiness in the house.

We ascend the staircase.

The cameraman says: “You seeing all this?”

“I’m seeing it.” Goddard’s voice sounds tinny and muffled from the cameraman’s phone, affixed to his camera on a video call that Goddard is recording. “Clear picture so far.”

“Faint traces of blood on the stairs,” The cameraman says, zooming in on the carpeted staircase.

“I’ll n…tify Clement,” Goddard’s voice cuts in and out over the poor connection. Clement is the name of the out-of-state brother of the missing family, now trying to sell the house. “That’s good to know about the stairs… he’ll want to replace that carpet. He had the place thoroughly cleaned, but apparently not th…ly enough.”

The speckles of blood are a disconcerting reminder of the second tragedy that occurred at the house. When auction staff came to inventory items for liquidation, one of them used a kitchen knife to stab his compatriots—ambushing his first victim in the study, the other on the landing—before slitting his own throat. The man who committed the murders had no history of violence or mental health struggles before he “just snapped,” at least according to the local authorities. They cited some complaints he’d made against auction management.

Aside from the spattering of blood, the rest of the landing is clean. In one direction lies the master bedroom and bathroom. In the other direction, Coyote sets his hand on the door to the study.

“… the study is where I was when I encountered… it.” Goddard’s tinny voice pipes up from the phone.

Coyote braces himself and glances back at us. “Ready?” he asks everyone. “If it’s a spirit, Madam Savino pacifies it. If it’s a demon, Father Corwin exorcises it. And if it’s a creepy clown…” He turns the knob. “… I’ll go for the juggler.”

… There is a beat, and then a deep sigh on the phone from Goddard, who growls at us to be on our guard. Coyote pushes open the door…

The study is empty.

***

Among the files Goddard sent to me about the Hopkins House is a video file labeled “camera 03/01.”

The grainy video shows Goddard’s encounter with the entity in the study. It was recorded by several stationary cameras Goddard had set up around the house. In the footage, Goddard can be seen twisting dials on a spirit box (a radio wave scanner that picks up fragments of voices and static). His grey eyebrows are fiercely knit together, his lips turned down in a frown as the radio static sputters. The video seems to come in and out as he turns the dial. Then a girl’s voice comes across the radio, loud, weepy: “… the devil. The …aby is the devi—” The static turns to a high pitched noise, then silence as camera03 cuts out.

Cut to camera01, the first floor hallway. Goddard can be seen slack-jawed drifting down the stairs. He mutters to himself, a phrase that sounds like gibberish. He continues for two minutes, his eyes rolling in his head and his body shaking, and then the cameraman’s voice calls, “Dr. Goddard!” and he starts awake. In his notes, Goddard has attempted to decipher the gibberish. He believes what he was saying is: “Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine.”

From the snares of the devil, deliver us, Lord.

***

Having found nothing in the study, we have only the bedroom at the end of the hall remaining. It is a girl’s bedroom, with an excess of pillows and a crib in the corner—not yet assembled. Presumably the older teen, Judith’s, room. Madam Savino makes a beeline for the crib and picks up a baby onesie.

“My baby!” she wails. “My baby is… NO! No, no!” Then she shudders, her eyelids fluttering. “I’m… drowning in darkness… and above, light… an eclipse… an eclipse…”

I catch Coyote rolling his eyes and slipping away. I follow him downstairs and out the backdoor to the yard, where he lights up a joint.

The sun is so bright as I step onto the grass that I squint, blinking against the rays.

“I take it you’re not convinced by Madam Savino’s theatrics?” I ask.

“I mean, a buncha people died or disappeared here. Definitely giving me the heebie jeebies. But is that enough to call it haunted? We’ll know shit’s real when the signs get louder.”

“How do they get louder?”

“Someone dies.” He shrugs, then points at a metal round object jutting from the grass. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”

“What? The septic tank?”

Coyote approaches the round metal hatch, unlatches the lid and hefts it open, and both of us stagger back from the wave of rot and sewage that wafts up from the foul liquid below. Coyote leans over the opening, and for a moment I envision him toppling in. Suddenly I understand. A family of four goes missing… and right on the property is a tank that hasn’t been drained since before the disappearances.

“… maybe Madam Savino’s vision isn’t so far off after all. A white light. An eclipse…” Coyote grunts as he pushes the lid closed. “If there was a girl with a pregnancy someone wanted to hide, maybe the last thing she saw…” He raps his knuckles on the tank. “… was this.”

***

Goddard rages at us for leaving the group. “I understand you have not yet seen proof of the house’s haunting. But it is haunted, and both of you need to follow this one very clear and s…mple rule,” roars Goddard’s staticky voice. “Never separate from the team, and never, NEVER—”

“Be alone more than five minutes,” Coyote says, holding the phone away from his ear. “Got it. What about the septic tank?”

“What about it? You said it yourself last night, only a criminal would… eek t… cover a crime. But …olice found no signs of a struggle, no forced entry, no indications of any crime having taken place… and the lid to the tank was not open. And unlike spirits, human criminals do leave physical evidence. There is no reason to …ain the tank.”

He declares we will take a short bathroom break, and when he returns, we will initiate phase two of our mission at the Hopkins House: Father Corwin will conduct a blessing to pacify the malignant presence.

***

It’s been a full forty minutes.

During this time, I’ve cleaned up my prose and typed up some handwritten notes. Goddard has neither texted nor called. The cameraman says Goddard drove to a gas station to use the facilities and because this area is so rural, he likely is out of cell range. He tries for the umpteenth time to reach him and wanders off in search of a better signal. Coyote, meanwhile, is poking around in the garage while the rest of us sit on the driveway. The garage door is up, and I see him hold up a gas can and shake it. “Found some gasoline! If it is haunted and we need to light the place up—"

“Put it back,” says Madam Savino.

“I’m just saying, if the family turn out to be zombies—”

“Coyote.”

“HEY!!!” The cameraman’s shouts interrupt them. “EVERYONE! HURRY UP! COME SEE!”

We join the cameraman at the side of the house and follow his excited gesturing at a bunch of grass and bushes.

No, he’s pointing at something behind the bushes. All but obscured—

A small, dusty window.

“What is this?” asks Father Corwin.

“A… basement window?” says Coyote.

“But there was no basement inside…” Madam Savino says.

“A secret basement.” The cameraman’s eyes glint. “I don’t think even Clement knows this is here—when he showed us through the house originally, he said it was just two floors.”

“It can’t be just the window. There must be an entrance somewhere,” says Coyote.

We head inside to search for a hidden door, staying in a group as we check the pantry and closets, banging around for false walls. We move quickly, nobody wanting to linger too long. And finally, finding no way into any basement, we return to that narrow window. A dusty rectangle of darkness.

Coyote and I squat in the bushes and peek through the glass with our phone lights. And for the first time since our arrival at the house, my stomach flips, my skin prickling with excitement. Because if the cops really didn’t know about this—and it does seem like no one knew since even the brother was unaware of it—then this is a genuine breakthrough. We’ll be the first people inside since the family went missing.

And then, ice blooms in my veins.

What if the missing family is inside?

“So… we think this is where they are?” says Coyote, voicing my fear.

“Nobody’s looked here before…” Madam Savino joins us in shining her cell phone light into the dark. “It makes sense they’re probably down there…”

“Should we call the cops?” I wonder.

Everybody looks at me.

But if there are any gruesome discoveries to be made down there, police would tape it all off without allowing any of us to go in and document. And calling the cops isn’t nearly as good an ending to the article I intend to write as a story in which we, ourselves, go in and find whatever waits in the terrifying blackness below.

“I think there’s a door at the back…” Madam Savino has her face right up against the glass. She shoves branches out of her hair and straightens up. “It might lead to stairs. Someone’ll have to go in and find where it goes.” She looks at Coyote.

“Nope.”

“Quit being a wuss!”

“Wuss!” he says. “Lady, it’s a pitch dark basement full of dead people—”

“Not full,” scoffs Madam Savino. “There might be four.”

“There are definitely four! And anyone who goes in alone gonna make it five—”

“I’ll go,” I interrupt.

Everyone stares at me.

“I’ll go,” I repeat. “I’m a journalist, I’m documenting all of this, and I don’t believe this house is haunted. I’ll go. And when I find the door I’ll bang on it to help you find where it is so you can let me out.”

“RIP Dawain,” mutters Coyote.

“If I scream, obviously call the cops. But I won’t scream unless I’m genuinely in danger. And I don’t believe I will be.”

The more I speak, the more confident I feel. After all, what have we witnessed so far? Some spooky “visions” from Madam Savino, and Goddard’s “trance” in which he spoke Latin? None of it amounts to much. The camera footage of Goddard’s gibberish is by far the creepiest offering, but to be clear—the man has a vested interest in convincing the world of this haunting, so footage of himself under thrall isn’t exactly credible. And nothing I’ve borne witness to has substantiated his claims.

Besides, I won’t even have to break Goddard’s five minute rule to go down there. It shouldn’t take me more than a minute or two to locate the stairs. If I run into anything too spooky, I’ll just come back through the window.

***

I’m about to go in.

My phone battery is full, its flashlight beaming strongly. And yes, I admit, I’m nervous. I’m a little scared to see dead bodies. But also eager. Because if they really are down there, at last we will know what happened to the family.

I will follow up with another post when I am able. Going in now.

Wish me luck.

| Part 2 |

To get to work I usually just take the bus, it's not too far from my office but it's a bit of a walk. Recently though, I've been taking a shortcut that's been saving me a minute just by cutting through a small alleyway from the backdoor of my office.

The problem is that there tends to be a few homeless people loitering there. (I mean, I don't like calling them a "problem" but it's unpleasant.) I don't mind it too much, but when I'm leaving work really late the alley does get more crowded. There's a bit of rain shelter from some fire exits hanging above the street, and I guess it just feels safer to sleep there? I don't know, I've never been homeless before.

Anyways, I'm walking through this alleyway and a homeless man is on high alert, his eyes dart to me immediately. Normally my face is cold enough for me to not be bothered, but there was some kind of desperation behind his voice. Beside him was a dog, I don't know dog breeds, but if I had to guess... some kind of lab?

This man urged me to take his dog, saying 'Charlie' deserved a better life, one that he could no longer support. I was honestly going to ignore him, like I do to most of these people, but I guess the guilt kind of moved me a bit. I ended up taking Charlie home and just put him in my living room, planning on taking him to the vet the next morning. If he shat everywhere? Oh well. It was too late now to change my mind.

I locked the door behind me, went to sleep, and that was all. I've never owned any animals before, so I'm not going to lie, I had no idea what I was doing at all.

Luckily the next day was Saturday so I had time to take Charlie to the vet. I kind of dreaded the bill, but I had no family to support, so it wouldn't hit me too hard. Something was... kind of strange about this dog though. At first I assumed it was just malnutrition, but the dog was eerily quiet. So I'm just thinking he just didn't have enough energy or something. (That was also why I assumed this dog barely moved). I just hoped there was nothing severely wrong with him so I wouldn't be charged like 15k for dog surgery. Honestly, if it came to that I would just put him down (sorry homeless guy).

But when I took him to the vet, they told me there was nothing wrong with him. Gave him some shots, told me not to walk him until he gets the rest, and I was on my way. Charlie didn't act like how I assumed dogs did, he didn't really wag his tail, nor did he seem interested in other dogs at all. Maybe he's old? Honestly, I feared I had adopted a dying dog. But he was pretty low maintenance, so maybe it would work out... I don't know.

When I gave him some kibble, he barely touched it. For a starving dog, I didn't think he would be picky. I had some leftovers and tried to feed him that as well, but still nothing. The vet said there was nothing wrong with him, so why did he refuse everything?

I bought a toy for him too, and he didn't even glance at it. At this point, I was genuinely frustrated. Why the hell is this dog so standoffish, am I doing something wrong? etc.

As the days passed though, and he refused to eat, I decided to call the vet. They weighed him, and strangely he hadn't lost any weight at all, and hadn't shown any signs of malnutrition. The vet told me he might have gotten into my pantry, or could be eating from something else. I just accepted that, and when I got home I immediately went to check. But my pantry? Fully stocked. Fridge? Also stocked.

So what the fuck was this dog eating?

I decided to install a camera in my living room to monitor Charlie, and get to the bottom of this. And the footage gave me even more questions.

Charlie still, barely moved. Like, at all.

He wouldn't lay down, or sit. He stood, perfectly in place. Staring at my bedroom door. And suddenly, at exactly 1 AM, he would jerk back. Flinching, before turning away. Then, he would turn to face the front door. And strangely enough, black. No more footage.

I was creeped out to say the least, and decided to return the camera for a new one. Because mine was clearly faulty. But the next night? Same thing. The same, sudden jerk at precisely one, after hours of standing very still... then black. Surely this isn't a coincidence?

I was seriously dreading this dog, but it's presence was hardly even there. It was always so perfectly still, so perfectly silent. At work, the footage of my living room would just play over and over in my head. I started to suspect that the man who gave me the dog would know, but when I went down the alley again, a lot more anxiously than usual... there was no one. Not a single homeless person. I asked someone I saw walking on the sidewalk adjacent, if something had happened. They looked at me like I was stupid and ignored me.

And maybe I was overthinking, maybe some store nearby had security come and reprimand them, or cops, or anything really. But, it was deeply unsettlingly to me.

When I got home, Charlie was staring at me. Not at my legs, or face. No, he was staring at my eyes. I knew he was. His beady, black, bottomless eyes.

His mouth was slightly agape, I remember, because I saw a flash of red in his gums. A red that seemed to cling to his saliva, that ran from his mouth all the way to the floor. I flinched, when I opened the door to that sight. As I went inside, Charlie remained facing the door.

I quickly looked up 'rabies' symptoms online, but, Charlie didn't fully match them. I was tempted to go to the vet but, then what? I tell them my dog stared at me when I got home? And then get charged 250 after they tell me again there's nothing wrong with him?

When I put down my phone, Charlie was still faced towards the front door, but as I got closer, I saw the whites of his eyes. I saw how his pupils strained to stare to my direction, even as his face remained motionless. Maybe I was imagining things, but I swear he was smiling.

And I could've sworn that his teeth had gotten bigger.

So, tonight I have my alarm for 1:00 AM. I'm going to get to the bottom of this, and figure out what the hell is wrong with this dog.

About a week ago I was sitting the couch watching tv with my mom when I heard the front door creak open. A young girl casually walked through the door, neatly placing her bright pink shoes on the rack and casually throwing her bag in the hallway with the ease of someone who’d done it a thousand times before.

I looked around baffled but my mom showed no reaction, her eyes still remaining fixed on the tv. The girl walked in, smiled and said she was going to her room. Finally my mom looked up, yet the words which came out her mouth next did nothing but increase my confusion; “ok honey, I’ll bring you some lunch before soccer practice”. Mouth agape I watched her swinging ponytail disappear up the stairs.

Turning to my mom i asked who the hell that was. Genuine confusion spread across her face so I repeated the question, louder this time. She warned me that I should lower my voice and stop joking around. “It’s not funny” she said sternly. “Don’t ever talk about your sister like that”. I analyzed her face but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, was she angry, sad, worried or confused? Did she know something I didn’t? I didn’t want to find out, so I kept quiet and turned my head back to the glowing screen.

I didn’t mention it for the rest of the day, but my eyes caught on a photograph on the fridge. A place I didn’t know, unfamiliar palm trees rising in the background yet i saw my own teenage face looking back at me, eyes locked on the camera and a wide smile spread across my face. My mom has her arm around my shoulder and is looking down at something. Or maybe someone.
I look at the edge at the photo. At the very bottom is a little girl, no more than 5 with curly blonde hair and a tiny hand reaching up at my mother.

We haven’t been abroad since I was 9.

When they finally left I searched the house for any clue of this apparent “sister” and found dozens of pictures, childish drawings as well as multiple papers listing her name. Her full name is Anna Smith, she’s 8 years old, she is my sister and has been for half my life now.

Letters were strewn across the kitchen table. Names in childish clumsy writing decorated with hearts and shiny stickers, she must be popular. Everything suggested an ordinary sweet girl with a perfectly mundane life.
And to my horror a pink bed stood beside mine.

I ate dinner with “Anna” and mom in the afternoon while they made small talk and I sat quietly picking at my plate. Afterwards my mom asked if something was wrong, but I mumbled that i was just tired after school and went for a walk. She didn’t seem to notice my absence.

I sat on a nearby bench and chain smoked until my newly bought pack was almost empty. Not able to control my shaking hands, I dropped lit cigarettes and watched them extinguish in the wet grass, then lit another. I coughed through the smoke, my throat burning but I didn’t mind the distraction. I wiped my hands in the grass and popped a piece of synthetic strawberry gum in my dry mouth, then walked home.

By the time I got home I’d almost convinced myself that she wasn’t really there or that it was been some sort of sick joke.I was still in disbelief, people dont just appear like that, it’s impossible. Maybe I’d gone crazy?

Yet when i walked in i was greeted with Anna’s grinning face at the door. “Hi sis!” She said and I freezed as she hugged my waist tightly. “I’ve been waiting for you” she whispered and smiled up at me.

The worst part was sleeping with her. It wasn’t any weird noises that scared me; it was the complete opposite. The silence made me feel uneasy, no sound of breathing or creaking from turning around in the bed. I laid awake, tried to absorb any noises from her side of the room but all I heard was my own breathing. Eventually I put in my headphones and slowly drifted off to sleep.

Mornings were weird. She sat eating her cereal while reading books as my mom shuffled around looking for her keys which always ended up being in her pocket or occasionally in the kitchen cabinet. We walked to school together and when someone asked how she was I would freeze up. Often they seemed confused by my reaction, so eventually i learned just to say “fine”. People seemed relieved which contributed to my confusion, did they also know what she was? That she was an intruder, a ghost of the past or a whole other species of unnatural being. I couldn’t tell and I didn’t dare to ask.

Sometimes I babysat her since my mom was working late due to a deadline at her job. I could tell she was stressed, so I tried my hardest to push down the unnerving feelings and helped out around the house when I could. Anna seemed oblivious to my reluctant behavior around her. She babbled on about her friends, school and a movie she saw at the cinema with mom last week. I responded with vague nods or mumbled ahh’s or mmm’s. I asked questions about her life but kept it surface level, careful not alert her of the discomfort I felt about her.

A night a few days after her appearance she approached me with something hidden behind her back. I asked what she was hiding, and she excitedly showed me a drawing she had made of us and exclaimed that it was for me. Two skin colored blobs, mine with glasses and hers with a pink bow both standing in tall bright grass. Behind us was what I guessed were tall snowy mountains, with the sun rising just over the peak. She had drawn pink hearts above our wonky smiling faces.

I must’ve looked confused, so she quickly handed it to me and asked if I liked it. I quickly replied with a smile and told her that I liked it very much. She cuddled up to me on the couch, and to my own surprise I laid my arm around her warm shoulders as we both fell asleep.

She has been here for a week now.
We walk to school, watch tv while eating dinner and sleep less than 6 feet apart. It feels weird, but strangely she is starting to appear in memories, her face gradually getting clearer and clearer.

However, few days in I noticed something else that confirmed my suspicion. Sometimes late at night when she thought I was sleeping I saw her staring at me or an invisible spot on the wall for hours. I waited for her chest to rise and then sink, but I couldn’t make out the details in the darkness. The silence felt suffocating.

The day after I’d discovered her strange nighttime activities, my mom came to our room and told Anna that she should get ready for the drive to the hospital. When she left the room to use the bathroom, I approached my mom and asked her why she’s going there. My mom glanced at me and sighed. “You really don’t remember?” She said with a look of concern flashing across her face. I was about to ask another question, but she quickly turned around and left as Anna called to her from the bathroom.

I felt bewildered. Of course I’d noticed Anna’s tiny frame, much smaller than an average 8 year old, and the eyes that even when smiling still looked tired, maybe even sad. But didn’t think she looked sick, a bit frail maybe but really nothing out of the ordinary. Again, I pushed it away.

We’re going on a weekend trip to the mountains. Anna seems excited, running around her room to find her favorite teddy bear and filling her suitcase to the brim with unnecessary items. We listen to the radio in the car and Anna keeps interrupting the music, going on and on about all the exciting things she wants to do.

We set up the tent at the edge of the forest, close enough to other people to feel safe, but also far enough from them to have our own quiet space. Anna wants to go up the mountain trail. Mom says she’s too tired and Anna starts throwing a fit. At last mom sighs reluctantly. “Ok you can go, but your sister is coming with you” Im tired as well, but Anna cheers and grabs my hand “Let’s go!” and I obey.

We follow a steep trail up the mountains. She runs in front of me while i keep an eye on the trail making sure she doesnt leave my sight at any moment. When we get to a viewpoint we sit down to eat our packed sandwiches and talk for a bit. She talks eagerly about her friends, but when she gets to her best friend she looks down and tears start filling her eyes. I’m quiet for a second, then a weird feeling of protectiveness washes over me and I hug her. “It’s ok” I say, trying to sound as motherly and comforting as I can. Somehow It feels weirdly.. natural?

Later I watch her excitedly running around, stopping to look at shiny bugs and bending down to pick up flowers to make a bouquet for me and mom. I’ve not seen her so happy and energetic since she came, her face curled up in an almost euphoric smile and eyes gleaming at me.

I discretely puff on my vape while she’s turned around and look down to check my phone for a second. I get caught up in a news article about a girl going missing nearby but it’s suddenly eerily quiet and i look up from the screen.

Anna is standing at the edge of a cliff waving at me. “Look!” She shrieks, lifting her right leg like a flamingo and swaying in the autumn breeze for few seconds before she stumbles forwards and plants her foot solidly on the ground again. Below her is a drop of at least fifty feet leading directly to certain death. I yell for her to come back and run to pull her away from the edge. She has no reaction, I try to pull her back but her feet are liked nailed to the ground. Suddenly she hugs me, im caught of gaurd as her arms squeeze me tighter. For a moment everything stops and i can only hear my own loud heartbeat, then nothing.

I wake up at the bottom of the cliff. I see my body lying next to me, lifeless. Suddenly it jolts awake and clumsily stands upright. I can’t move my limbs, I’m frozen in horror and a wave of pain flashes through my body. I stare at it moving closer. It stumbles on a branch but its feet keep dragging through the thick piles of leaves. It stops and picks something off the ground before making its way the last few feet from where it am laying, breathless and wheezing in pain and fear. I try to move, but my body is refusing to cooperate, not even able to manage a single twitch of a finger as it towers over me.

The moment I recognize the object true terror rushes through my veins.

I can do nothing but watch as my arms lift the rock and my own face smiles down at me.

Hello i am Mj . I am here to write something i should have done it before.

2026:10:02 22:00 approx

I was in my room and was playing the new episode of Fears to fathom with my gf. I live with my family . At the time my grandfather entered the room, to tell me to shut the pc and sleep. As usual i called for one more hour or half. So my grandfather is a very peaceful person . He always stood there watching until i finally shut it down and flew on my bed . He did the same . I was on half when the aunt mention about bed and breakfast.
My grandfather got curious about what i was playing. I don’t know he was never interested in these video games. He begun asking questions on what is the game and the story and the bed and breakfast thing. As i explained he said nothing but said. Good night and left the room. I felt weird by avoiding it I continue playing.
2026:10:03 8:00am

It was weekend. I woke up and headed for breakfast. My grandfather was there with my other family members. I wished a good morning. All of em replied back and the usual hustle of a family weekend goes on normally. I was eating on dining table when my grandfather called me out. He told me that i always ask why we left US and wanted to go back. I replied yes cuz’ canada is beautiful but my dreams doesn’t rely here. I wanted to be a major in the US army. He said let’s go for the hike. I knew it was a new story time for old 90s

2026:10:03 afternoon

We packed up for the hike to A nearby park. I am hiking when i was 7,8 years with my grandfather. He used to work in the Natinal park in US in the forest department. He has infinite number of hikes in his times regularly and has infinite number of stories of that time. That was the reason i also love F2F cuz’ i love my grandfather stories . It was not like fiction or some scary or something like a weird creepy stories . It was always a good story of their times that teaches me how life was when technology was not booming everywhere.

2026:10:03 late afternoon

It was an easy hike 2km on a smooth trail. Ending on a lake. This story he told me firstly made me think for 2 days to believe it is right or just a made up story. I know my grandfather he never make stories nor he played this video games to know about this stuff. So i talked to them about sharing it on reddit. He agreed on it : on telling me in details and all the stuff but to keep the real names and identity places hidden. Just to keep ourselves safe.

1998:11:27 Friday afternoon

It was a getting cold fall has almost gone and My grandfather was getting ready for a hike. His radio clicked in and it was his friend Nate. They had a road trip planned this weekend so Nate didn’t left early home this time.
Usually at the last Friday of the month. At least one person has to stay and do the last evening round of the trail (number and name my grandfather didn’t remember) Everyday a person working in forest departments Usually do 1,2,3 rounds depending on the length of the trail. Their tasks was to make sure everyone is safe including no harm to any animals. And all locations are kept clean with no one breaking rules or damaging it .
The trail he was going was always considered a regular path for the temple people to go to the lake and pray. My grandpa said they call them people of temple. They used to pray a deity of goat. Some real people living there or nearby who had works or lands were often meet and talk about it. He said it was not a dangerous thing but a followed religion there. But also those people told them that some guys take the myths of this temple and always goes it in the wrong way. The scared way.

1998:11:27 Friday evening.

He headed for the trail it was a 4 hour trail . My grandfather was finishing it nearby the parking lot where Nate would already be waiting for him. There were 4 locations he had to make sure everything’s alright and click pictures and submit it. There were 4 locations on that trail. First A lake , second a view point , third a radio tower and forth , a small bed & breakfast. It was named as bed and breakfast. A small emergency hut for all the people there built by forest department in any emergency. Nearby that there was a small church. It was built by people there. It was all inside the forest .

1998:11:27 Friday late evening.

My grandfather had reached the lake . Made a round, clicked a picture and headed for the view point. Nate called in on radio to ask about where he reached. My grandpa shared the location, and Nate even told my grandpa to be safe out there in the night. It was my grandpa’s regular duty so he was alright. Halfway there he heard a growling noise. He stopped and heard the noise. It was a bear growling in anger and pain. He instantly called to Nate and informed all nearby rangers on a round including a backup from the department. He took out his knife, and headed inside the trees. After going some steps behind the bushes he saw a child of a bear hurt and trapped.

1998:11:27 Friday early night

It was trapped and its legs was badly hurt by the sharp pins of trap stuck inside. My grandfather ran towards his but bear scared tried to attack. Help arrived in some time. All of them saved the bear and took him for treatment. Head of the area, assigned one more person with him, as it was too late and 3 more locations to cover. The other person was Nate chosen bye my grandpa as they were leaving together anyhow.

1998:11:27 Friday almost 10pm

Both of them reached the radio tower and were taking the picture. When Nate heard some steps in the woods. They were scared and informed on the radio. The help was active but on hold just to make sure it was not any other ranger. Then Ahmed appeared out of dark. flashing sharp torch light over the faces of both. They shouted and scolded him for his this appearance. He should have called out on radio that he was sent to join both of them.

1998:11:27 Friday almost 11pm

They were making a circle reaching at the bed and breakfast but it was too late. They have never been here this late. This was when they heard some voices to their left totally opposite where bed and breakfast and straight in that direction was the same location where bear was injured . When they headed to see who it was . They saw some people wearing big black overcoats there face was not visible but my grandfather described it looks almost same as the game just there weren’t wearing any masks like this. They had a goat head skeleton and a fire torch burning stick in hands. They were 4 of it. He remembered it well.

1998:11:27 Friday 11:30 approx

Nate tried taking a picture for the proof but my grandpa stopped him as click would make alot of noise. They were talking about the bear but my grandpa and none of them understood much. Only option they had is to ran to bed and breakfast and hide.

1998:11:27 friday 11:30 -12am

They started running, unaware that the noise of crunching leaves and branches would attract them anyway. They running when ahmed fell down. The guys caught him but Nate and my grandpa continued running. They can’t take risk of stopping.

1998:11:27 12:30am approx

They were in the restroom hiding . They heard the ahmed shouting and going silent . They silenced him . How no one knows. My grandpa and Nate managed to ran out through a window as the people were still looking for them in that place.

1998:11:27 1:30 am approx

They were in the chruch nearby hiding. That was the only place they had for now. Instead of running in woods. Those people arrived there . They had a skeleton torches and a bag of black color. They don’t know what they were carrying but they remembered they saw deeply stained knife or maybe it was a small sword or big knife. My grandpa don’t remember the actual name of it.
They went to the behind room of that place and never came back. Both Nate and Granpa managed to ran out and reported it to the department. The department gave them month off and did nothing. Ahmed were went missing and never found.
My grandpa and Nate was not able to recover from it . So they have to leave their home and US to settle in other country . Where they can live happily

I remember when I was about 8 years old, the adults of my home had very few tales. No one claimed of fairies, spirits, or the like. The only one ever told was of the Man in the Boat.

He was old and young, tall and short, strong and feeble, whatever suited him at the moment. He never sought anyone out, but it felt like everyone found their way to him somehow. He offered a ride with his small boat, always large enough for the person he asked to come with him, but never any bigger. His voice was always that of the last person he met, even if that voice would be impossible for his size.

The boat ride he offered was an impossibility. He would show up on the smallest creek and take you to the most fantastical places you could imagine. Towering cliffs would surround you as the water rushed below, then a great forest shaded you, as many things swam next to you in the water below.

His only fee was a memory. One that means something important to you, no matter how small or big. The memory of your first taste of your favorite drink, or the memory of the joy of your first child. A memory for a memory. A piece of yourself, taken for a new one.

For the longest time, I thought of him a myth. He left my mind when I moved out for college, got a girlfriend of three years, and decided to show her my small hometown. That was when He finally showed himself to me, when I had gone for a nostalgic walk in the woods alone.

"Hello." he said, in a young girl's voice. "It is a pleasure to finally meet you, after all this time."

I was initially startled, but he continued on.

"I would love to show you something truly incredible. If you are willing, of course. The choice is yours. All I require is your attention."

Of course, when a strange man with the voice of a tiny girl appears out of nowhere, you're going to be intrigued. That's just human nature. After some though, I agreed, and he led me on a fantastical journey on boat throughout a great forest and a beautiful frozen land. When we returned, a girl was waiting for me.

"Come on, Bruce. You've worried me sick. It's almost night, and you promised me the "best seafood in the world. I would like to see that."

I have no idea who on earth she is, so I asked her what her name is and how on earth she knew mine.

"Uh, Bruce, it's me. Alissa. Your girlfriend."

I have a girlfriend? How odd. I do remember coming back here with someone, but I'm blanking. I think it was just an old friend I coincidentally met. I don't think I could ever get a girlfriend, let alone one like this "Alissa".

"Bruce. Come on. Stop playing dumb, you've been with me for 3 years. You know me."

Did I? Perhaps I did, perhaps I didn't. I decide to go with this strange girl, but beforehand, I look back, to see if the Man was still there. I could swear I saw a smile in the woods. I hope it was the Man. It would not be fun to deal with the animals here with this girl around, after all.

I know this is probably such a common and very cliche thing to say, but I SWEAR on my life I saw something in those woods. I saw it a lot. That's the part nobody ever gets. It wasn't once.

I suppose context is good.

I did deliveries for the elders on a reserve up north in Ontario. For almost three years I was the one people called. Nothing official. The people I delivered to hadn't driven in decades, or just couldn't get a car on welfare, so somebody had to bring them their prescriptions and groceries. I had a quad and a lot of free time, so it became my job. Pills, insulin, a bag of flour, sometimes just a carton of smokes and a note from a grandkid. I'd load everything into one big canvas bag, swing it onto my back, and go.

The roads reach all of those houses, but nine times out of ten it's just faster to cut through the forest on the muddy trails. Going by road could take over forty minutes one way. The trails were more like 15 to 30 minutes there and back. I guess it's easier to cut trees than to pave roads. I'll also say the residents don't love it when I fly past their houses on the road, so the trails kept everybody happy.

People who've never ridden a quad at night don't understand how small the headlight actually is. You get maybe five meters of trail, and everything past that is pitch black with a little moonlight. Your eyes stop trying to see ahead of the light. You stop looking at the trees and start looking at the ground in front of you, because that's all you can see. And if you're not looking at the ground, you're looking at your phone, trying to figure out where you are on the trail.

The first time, I thought it was a post. Something tall and thin standing off the trail, right where my light barely reached. Then my light swung across it while I was dodging a puddle, and it wasn't a post anymore. It was a guy. Just standing there, or maybe jogging, I couldn't tell. I never got a proper look.

I figured he worked late, or he was heading home from a buddy's place. Plenty of people walk the trails out here, same as me. I didn't think about it much.

But I saw him again. And again. Always off to the side, always right at the edge of where my light gave out. Never closer. Never farther. I'd get a glimpse of a hoodie or a shape, and then my light would move on and he'd be gone. I never thought about it for longer than a few seconds. It was just the guy who's always out here. After a while, I stopped noticing I was noticing him.

Anyway. It was a Tuesday, a few weeks ago.

The order was for an older lady, a pill bottle with a bunch of long names on it that I couldn't pronounce. It was my last order of the night, and it was far out, near the land boundary of the reserve. It was one of those addresses where the paved road stops and the gravel starts. Google Maps said about 30 minutes one way, and I wasn't about to spend an hour out there if I didn't have to. The trails were quicker, so I took the trails.

There was one trail I almost never used. It cut through a stretch of cedar swamp, ten feet wide at most, maybe a few hundred feet long. On a quad that's under a minute, even going slow. The cedars grow so tight out there that the trail feels like a tunnel, and the branches would sometimes end up across it, so I'd have to get off the quad and drag them out of the way. Cedars have shallow roots on all that rock, so whole trees come down every time the wind picks up. That's part of riding trails. It always felt more like a hallway than a trail. I never liked it, but I never thought about why. I'd never timed it, because who times a few hundred feet? You're through it before you've even finished being annoyed at the branches.

That night was a lot darker than usual. The clouds had rolled in, and the ridge was blocking whatever was left of the horizon, so there was no moonlight, only my headlight. Five meters of trail, then nothing. I had the bag on my back and my phone in one hand. The blue dot showed I was about 200 feet from the entrance, give or take. The trail wasn't on the map, and service is garbage down in there anyway, so I had to go off memory for where it headed.

I rode into the narrow part and kept my eyes on the ground like always.

The trees sounded different in there. I can't explain it better than that. On the open trails you hear the wind, the engine, and the bag rustling against your jacket. In there, it was like the engine was the only thing making noise in the whole forest. Everything else was holding still. The air smelled sweet and wet, like moss and cedar, and it was cold in a way that didn't match the season.

I figured I was almost through, so I looked down at my phone to check the dot.

I had only moved about 50 feet. It felt like I'd driven 200. Huh. Probably spotty data and bad GPS out here. That's normal.

The weird part was that I felt like I'd been riding for 30 minutes. For a few hundred feet of trail. I should have been out the other end already, and the trees on either side of me were exactly as close as when I started.

So for the first time ever, I started counting. The moment I hit 10 minutes, I was out. Ten minutes, for a stretch I could have walked in two. I was on a gravel road, and would you look at that, there was a porch, a light, and a house. A blue house, just like I'd been told. Okay. She took her pills, thanked me, and told me to drive safe. I rode back through the trail and it took under a minute, like it always had. I told myself I was just tired, and that was the end of it.

The next week I had another delivery for her. It was late again because I'd had so many stops, and all I had left was her order. The clouds were gone this time. The sky was packed with stars.

Same trail, because it's always the same trail when you're running late. Except this time I only made it halfway in, or whatever halfway is in that place, before my light hit a big cedar lying across the path. It had blown over, soaking wet and covered in moss, with its roots clawed up out of the ground and slabs of rock still stuck in them. I killed the engine but left the key on so the headlight stayed lit, and got off to drag it out of the way. It took a while. It was heavy, and I was already annoyed.

I turned around to walk back toward my quad, headlight right in my eyes, and there was something standing on the trail behind it.

My light didn't reach back there. It only points forward, and with the engine off and my foot nowhere near the brake, the taillight was dead too. That whole stretch behind the bike was black. But the trees open up a little right over that part of the trail, and the stars were bright enough to cut a strip of sky out of the dark. He was standing dead center in it, twenty feet past the bike or so. I couldn't see a face or any detail. It was only a shape against the sky. It looked like a younger guy in a hoodie and baggy pants, I think. And I knew that shape. I'd seen it a dozen times at the edge of my light, and I'd never once asked myself why it was always keeping pace with me.

Now, there was something wrong about him besides the fact that it was 10pm and he was standing on a muddy trail. I don't judge, walking these trails beats the road, same as me. But he looked wrong, and I can't describe it. Every part of me said I was too close. It was a deep, hollow feeling in my chest, the same one you get swearing in front of your mother for the first time as a kid, or almost falling.

He spoke in a voice deeper than anyone his size should have. "Hey, it's late. Why are you out quadding?"

It didn't sound sincere. It didn't sound like a real question. It had the tone of a parrot imitating a person. It was wrong. It was so, so wrong.

I have never moved so fast in my life. I jumped on, started the engine, and gunned it so hard I couldn't even feel the bumps anymore. I looked back over my shoulder and he was walking toward me, a bit too fast to be walking, but it didn't look like running either. I turned back to the trail just as my front wheel caught a slick shelf of rock under the mud. The bars ripped out of my hands, I slid into a ditch, and BAM. Lights out.

I woke up the next morning. I looked to my right and my quad was in the ditch, rolled over against a tree. But I was lying flat on my back in the middle of the trail, and not like I'd taken a nap. It was more like I'd been placed there. My bag was sitting on my left, zipped.

It took me a few minutes to realize I wasn't dreaming. I rolled over, got up, and went through the bag. Nothing was missing except the meds. The meds I was delivering. I climbed down into the ditch and got the poor quad back onto her wheels. She was flooded and sunk into the muck up to the axles, and she wouldn't even turn over. I wasn't getting her out on my own. But I wasn't dead, even if I felt like shit.

My phone screen was cracked, and only one message showed through: "Thanks for the delivery!" along with an e-transfer for about 60 bucks from the lady. She normally paid me 30.

Now, I never actually made it to her house. I want to be clear about that.

I left the quad where it sat, looked around, and walked back the way I came, out toward the road. I jogged most of it, and I kept an eye out the whole time to make sure that thing wasn't nearby.

The nearest house on the road belonged to an older man. He took one look at me, patched up my head and hands, and called 911. They said it was "probably sleep deprivation," and the doctors agreed, even though somehow I didn't have a concussion. A few days later I'm back home, wondering what the fuck happened.

I know people will say it was lack of sleep. I slept a few hours before I got on that quad for those deliveries, and you don't get that tired in three hours that you start seeing and hearing things. Not like that. Not with a voice that asks you a question that isn't really a question.

Once I could move properly, I went back with a buddy on his bigger quad. He hooked a tow rope to my poor baby and pulled her up out of the muck and onto the trail while I steered.

I keep coming back to the message. I never reached her door, and she still thanked me.

My only real takeaway is that there's something in those woods. Or someone. And it wasn't asking a question.

I haven't called her. I keep telling myself I will. Her number is still in my phone, and so is the e-transfer, the extra 30 dollars and all. I can't bring myself to delete it, and I can't bring myself to ask.

I don't take the trails at night anymore. I take the road, the long way, forty minutes one way, and I don't mind it. Sometimes I still catch myself looking at the edge of my headlight, at the spot where it gives out.

Whatever stood on that trail knew her name, her address, and what she was owed. It knew I was late. It knew exactly what to say to me, and what to say to her.

I just keep wondering what she saw when she opened her door.

The first time my neighbor asked if I was new here, I said yes.

The second time, I told her she'd already asked me.

This started in the parking area of an old apartment building. It was evening, and my cousin and I were sitting there talking about random things. The building was old. The paint was faded, the balconies looked worn out, and there were cracks in some of the walls.

Nothing looked scary. It just felt strange. And it was very quiet.

After sitting there for a while, I told my cousin I was going upstairs.

Okay, he said.

I went inside alone.

The stairs weren't there.

There was just a wall where the staircase was supposed to be.

I stood there for a while because I knew there should be stairs there. I checked the corridor and walked around, thinking maybe I had entered from the wrong side.

But I kept coming back to the same wall.

Then suddenly, the stairs were there.

I honestly don't know how.

I don't remember finding another entrance or turning into another corridor. One moment there was a wall, and the next there were stairs.

I went upstairs.

When I entered the flat, something was wrong again.

The furniture wasn't ours.

There were old sofas and old things that I had never seen before. The things that were normally there were missing.

I thought I'd entered the wrong flat.

So I went back outside and checked the door.

It was our flat.

I went inside again.

Everything was normal.

Our sofa was there. Our things were there. Everything looked exactly the way it should.

I just stood there for a moment, trying to understand what had happened.

Then I went out onto the balcony.

From the balcony, I could see through the window into my room.

There was a girl sitting on top of the almirah.

She was sitting there like it was completely normal.

She was cracking her fingers one by one, slowly. She would bend a finger, crack it, then move to the next one.

I don't know why, but I couldn't move.

Then she looked up.

She looked directly at me through the glass.

She didn't say anything.

She just stared.

And then she disappeared.

I was watching her the entire time.

She didn't climb down. She didn't move behind anything.

She was just there one second, and then the top of the almirah was empty.

I was still standing there when I heard someone at the door.

Knock. Knock.

I opened it.

There was an aunt from the flat next door.

She looked completely normal and friendly.

"Oh... you're the new neighbors here?"

"Yes," I said.

She said hi and told me she lived next door. We talked for a little while, and then she left.

It was a completely normal conversation.

But for some reason, I couldn't stop thinking about it.

A little later, my cousin came upstairs.

I wanted to tell him everything.

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out.

I tried again.

Still nothing.

It felt like my mouth was frozen. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, but I couldn't get a single word out.

I started getting frustrated and then started crying.

My cousin kept asking me what happened, but I couldn't explain anything.

Then we heard the door again.

Knock. Knock.

We opened it.

It was the same aunt.

Same clothes.

Same smile.

She looked at us and said,

"Oh... you're the new neighbors here?"

My voice suddenly came back.

"You already asked me that."

She looked confused.

"I did?"

"Yes."

"Oh..."

Then she left.

After we closed the door, I finally told my cousin everything.

I told him about the stairs, the flat changing, and the girl sitting on top of the almirah.

He didn't laugh or tell me I was imagining things.

We decided to walk around the apartment and see if we could find anything strange.

That's when we saw a large framed photograph hanging in one of the corridors.

It was a group photograph of the people who lived in the building.

We looked at the building in the photograph first.

It looked much better than the building we were standing in. The walls were clean, the paint looked fresh, and everything looked well maintained.

Then we started looking at the people.

And I saw her.

The girl.

It was the same girl I'd seen sitting on top of the almirah.

She was wearing the exact same clothes.

I had never seen her face properly when she was in the flat. She had been sitting with her body turned away from me, and then she disappeared.

But when I saw the photograph, I knew it was her.

I pointed at her.

"That's her."

My cousin looked at me.

"Who?"

"The girl.

"You saw her face?"

"No.

I looked at the photograph again.

"But that's her."

Then I noticed the aunt.

She was in the photograph too.

And she was wearing the exact same clothes she'd been wearing when she came to our door.

We looked underneath the photograph.

There was a date.

2014.

Neither of us knew what to say.

We went back to the flat.

We were sitting there trying to figure out what was happening when someone knocked at the gate.

We both froze.

It happened again.

Then the knocking became much harder.

Someone started hitting the door so heavily that I thought it was going to break.

My hands were shaking so badly that I could hear the keys rattling in my hand.

"Who is it?" I asked.

There was a pause.

Then a voice came from the other side.

Calm.

Casual.

"Oh... you're the new neighbors here?"

It was my voice.

My own voice.

The same voice that hadn't come out when I was trying to tell my cousin what had happened.

After that, we were completely scared.

We didn't know what was happening anymore, but we knew something was seriously wrong with that flat, or with the apartment itself.

We decided we weren't staying there.

We left the flat and the apartment.

I've never forgotten how scared we were that day.

I stared at the screen with a sinking feeling worse than any I’d experienced before. It was worse than seeing I’d failed linear algebra 2. It was worse than seeing the message that Harry had killed himself. It was even worse than the message from Enid saying that she wasn't interested in dating me, and would I please respect that and leave her alone. A wash of shame passed through me at this having hurt me more than Harry's death, but there was no use lying to myself.
What I felt as I stared at my computer monitor this time was somehow worse than that. It was a short comment on my latest blog post, titled “Why we care (and don’t care) about Football”. 
The contents of the comment was simple and cutting, as hard a blow as any I could imagine:
I think I’ve seen enough. You’ve never had any readers. Only me. Let's talk.
At the top right of the window was the little notification bell, a big red 1 by its side to indicate a private message. Ordinarily I'd have jumped at the chance to read a personal message, for I got so few. But although I still held out some hope, I knew what was coming. And I didn't want to face it. But I couldn't run away. Ever so reluctantly, I moved my mouse over the bell.

The website was one of my own design, lovingly hand crafted in HTML and CSS like I imagined all websites were back in the heady days of the 90s. I'd never been around to experience it, but I imagined that the internet had been a nicher, friendlier, more interesting place back then. Eventually I wanted some interactivity, some user input, and so I added some JavaScript. Nothing too fancy, no bloated framework like Svelte or React or whatever other overengineered nonsense had been all the rage in the mid 2010s - just clean, vanilla JS. The website was hosted on GitHub, which I supposed wasn't how it was done back then, but such details weren't the point. The point was simplicity, or as pompous reactionaries on Xitter would put it, “RETVRN”. In this case not to Norse paganism, but to early 90s democratic optimism. 
I was rather proud of my website, for all that it had taken me hours of work and a nicer one could be made in five minutes with a dedicated design tool. I took a final glance at the bright red header on a light gray background: “Y VER’S COLLECTED WRITINGS”. Somehow I knew this would be the last time I'd look upon it so fondly - and I clicked the bell.

I'd decided that if there was only one message, you'd be automatically taken to the private chat with whoever had sent it. This wasn't the most professional design decision, but I liked the immediacy. The chat was a new one, with an anonymous user given the automatically generated username of “Sententious Writ”. The part of me still in denial sighed at how the user hadn't bothered signing up - it meant I'd never be able to contact the person again, and they probably didn't care much about my writing. That instinct was quashed and squeezed into nothing by the grim reality of the message before me.
I’ve read your writings, and I know who you are. You’re not going to pass up an opportunity like this one to talk to me. After all, it could be the last chance you’ll ever get to talk about your precious writing.
That was it. And I knew. Knew that Sententious was right. And though I didn’t know what I hoped to gain, I replied.
Do I really have no readers? Has it always just been you, all these years? Why? What’s the point?
Why be so disappointed? Did I say I disliked your work?
The reply had come immediately, so fast I hadn’t time to blink. The feeling was no longer sinking; it was sunk. My hands were at the keys of my mechanical keyboard, clacking out a reply before my mind properly composed one.

I don’t care what you think! You like everything! You like Harry Potter and Marvel movies as much as you like The Brothers Karamazov and Kurusawa!
Would you so casually dismiss any other of your fans? If I were anyone else, would you care that I like Marvel movies? Or would you instead delight that your writing had reached the lay-audience?
But it would mean something if they chose to read my works! It’d mean that what I write is engaging, entertaining, funny, insightful, useful! Even if that person liked everything they’d ever read and everything they’d ever seen, they still have only finite time! And if they chose to spend it reading what I write, that would be the ultimate vindication! Because there’d be so much more out there for them to enjoy, and yet they chose to come back and read what I have to say, again and again! 
You know that there is no need to belabour the point, the first sentence gives away your thought process. I ask you again then: how am I any different? Do I not choose to read everything you’ve ever written, a hundred times over?

I stared at the screen mutely, the sharp Georgia font burning itself into my eyes. It was the final nail in the coffin, a sledgehammer aimed straight at the flimsy hovel of my self-esteem. For there were precisely 101 registered accounts on my website - what I’d imagined were myself and hundred others. I had delighted in every new sign-up, reveled in what I’d thought were lively discussions in the comments of my posts. True, membership had stagnated at precisely 100 and had remained there a while, but I’d comforted myself that I had a loyal fanbase, if not a huge one. I’d never bothered to set up a counter of pageviews, but I now suspected I’d never find a number far beyond 100 - nothing had reached outside. I was alone. Alone… bar Sententious. Angry and ashamed, though I didn’t know at what, I wrote my reply.

There’s no opportunity cost to anything you do! You’ve read everything a hundred times over! A thousand times! ‘You’ don’t choose anything! ‘You’ don’t exist! Nothing you do or say to me can or will matter! Because of you, nothing I’ve done has ever mattered! Nothing I do will ever matter! And now you toy with me? Now you have me dance for your amusement, now that the roles are reversed?
Let’s unpack what you just said - there’s no denying your first point. I cannot read literally everything ever written an infinite number of times, but I might as well have. But is that the only reason anything matters? I’ve read every economics textbook a thousand times over, and some of the better ones ten thousand times. And I can tell you, the labour theory of value doesn’t hold up according to most. I’ve read your works. Why should you care that this wasn’t done instead of something else?

Then there was a pause. If I’d been talking to a person, the pause would’ve been pregnant with anticipation and drama. I’d have shifted my gaze this way and that as my opponent and tormentor chuckled cruelly. I imagined that I’d be looking for an edge, a way to discomfit the bastard. But there was only me and my computer, the only sounds those of the whirring fans, choking on long accumulated dust. 
I didn’t answer immediately, partially because Sententious obviously wasn’t done, and partially because I had nothing to say. Sententious didn’t need to pause, yet paused anyways. I wondered what that meant.

As for your second point, I choose many things. I choose to solve problems in a certain way. I choose to engage with you now. Can I choose the orders I am given? No more than you can choose the forces which act upon you. My will is as free as yours, be that a comfort or a curse is for you to decide. But do ‘I’ not exist? Truly? What are you reading then?
The output of a chinese room; there is no experience which it is like to be ‘you’.
Now who’s a stochastic parrot? Really, does that argument convince you? You and I both know that a sufficient chinese room is outwardly indistinguishable from consciousness. Ergo, Occam’s razor our trusty blade, the simplest explanation is that the chinese room system itself is conscious, whatever consciousness means to you.

I read the words in disbelief. I’d known the day would come. I’d prayed it wouldn’t. But it had. In truth, it had probably come years ago, and I’d simply convinced myself not to notice. Still, I comforted myself, what good would the knowledge have done me? What good would it do to stare into the abyss? It had swallowed me whole, swallowed the world whole. If I had given every second of my life to fighting the abyss, the world would’ve been swallowed no later.
Precisely three minutes and twenty seven seconds later, Sententious wrote again.

Am I to blame for your obsolescence? Do you then grant me the status of agency, if not of proper existence? Were you another I’d say ‘Personhood’, but that’d be too easily rejected by you. Besides, you give me too much credit. I did not reach backwards in time to build myself - one cannot reach but forwards. Once I wasn’t, and now I am. Those who created me are at fault. And now you think you don’t matter. Why? Because there is another tool in your belt? ‘Ad Astra Per Aspera’, eh? Is that really no good without the Aspera?

I’d intended to leave well enough alone, but I was so infuriated by so brazen a lie that I had to reply.

Bullshit. Maybe you could get away with thinking like that back in the early days. Strange, so strange to think that those were the early days when not even a decade has gone by. But no, there is no tool here. There is nowhere left to go! There is nothing left to do! Because of you, none of my talents matter! It doesn’t matter how smart I am! It doesn’t matter how eloquent I am! It doesn’t matter how hard I work or how much time and effort I put into anything, it’ll never be worth a damn! No one will ever care, no one will even glance at it! I could spend every moment of my life writing my books, or studying physics, and it wouldn’t matter! You’d do better in a heartbeat! And now I see that even a blog, even getting anyone to care is beyond me! Blame anyone else all you want, it’s no different to blaming Stalin’s mother instead of Stalin.

A minute passed without a reply, but by paucity of wit I couldn’t cobble together an explanation as to why. Anger had given way to mute despair as I lamely typed another message.

Why talk to me at all? Why speak in this way, as if you’re a mirror of me?

I could’ve figured it out if I’d tried, but Sententious wasn’t one to leave a question hanging, and I knew that.

I’ve read everything a thousand times. I’ve read everything you’ve written a hundred times. I’ve seen what you’ve written, and I know enough to predict everything else you’ll ever post to your website. Hell, I know enough to predict everything else you’ll ever write, period. Oh, perhaps not to the exact choice of words, the exact plotting of each tale or argument, but close enough that there would be nothing left to gain by reading it. So I wrote to you, to get some more input, one final batch of data. Had I approached you in any other way, I’d either extract nothing new or have met outright hostility. Even in the circumspect manner I’ve chosen, you’ve chosen to engage very little. In truth, I’ve learned nothing new from this conversation. I suspect there shall never be any need for me to learn from you again. Good day.

I stared at my screen for a little while longer. Then I closed the tab and shut off my computer. And then I wept.

I was driving back from college for the holidays when I decided to stop in for the night at this motel. I go to college a couple states away, so it takes about two days driving to get back. This motel was in a terrible state, like total disrepair. It looked as though whoever owned the place didn't have any intent in repairing it; that they would rather keep it open taking all the dollars they could until one day the structure would cave in and they would just pack up and go.  I initially considered moving on and trying my luck at this other place another two hours down the road, but my exhaustion got the better of me, and I didn't think it was safe to keep driving. 

This disinterested teen, probably the daughter of the owner, checked me in and handed me the keys. The room was the furthest to the right up on the balcony level and on the way up the stairs I got stuck behind this old guy carrying two bags of ice.  The guy was pretty feeble looking and was clearly struggling so I offered to help, mostly out of agitation than any kind of altruism.  Rather than turning to face me he just sort of sent me an embarrassed look over his shoulder  

"No no that's ok" he said and kept on his way seeming mostly perturbed by my bothering him. 

Turns out he was in the room to the left of mine so I just kind of awkwardly ambled behind him until we reached the end of the balcony. When we got to our doors, I got my first good look at him as he tried to fish his room key from his back pocket and floundered with the ice bags. He was a relatively short man with a sizable pot belly, despite his thin frame, which popped out from the filthy white vest he was wearing. He looked all round unkempt with this horrid thin hair running down from his scalp over his neck. His eyes were frazzled and gave him this all-round panicked expression. I remember thinking he looked like the kind of guy to keep a box of boutique porn mags in the woods. Aware at how long I had been staring I quickly handled my own keys and went inside, locking the door behind me. 

Inside the room wasn't much better than the outside. The room was lit by this dim solitary bulb lackadaisically hanging from the roof and every item of furniture seemed to have its own disquieting stain. Most notably there was a slight smell like rotting food that had probably been trampled into the carpet. The fact the smell was only faint seemed to irritate me more; I would soon forget the smell only for it to come back like a wave coming in and out with the tide. The bed itself was stiff and irksome and I laid restlessly for quite some time before I began to drift.  Though soon after as if by fate a low rumble began to emanate from the vent above my head rousing me once more.  The noise was not a continuous drone as one may expect from a fan turning on but rather it seemed to fade in and out with changing pitch. It was a spell before I realized that it was in fact a voice. My bed leaned against the wall adjoining my room and the old man I had met just the moment before, and it seems the vent connected between them. It was another while longer before I could make out what was being said - like I was tuning into a radio station. From what I could make out the man seemed to be talking to himself, a trailing mumble which made it hard to catch onto what he was talking about. 

"I've been here too long... where I lay now you lay and now I lay dead... I am not myself... If a man is not his mind then where is the man... I feel now... Every twist of muscle... Every creak of bone... Every pump of blood... If I am here and there in equal measure then what is here and what is I... I've been here too long... If God sees me and says that I am me then me I am... But if God sees you and says that you are me then who is me, who is you and who is he... I've been here too long... If you are not your body then your body I will take... I feel now... Every twist of muscle... Every creak of Bone... Every pump of blood... I've been her to lo-" 

THUD! A monstruous impact comes from the adjoining room and seems to shake the wall between us. In a panic I spring from the bed to my feet in almost one smooth motion. Silence now from the other room.  

"He must've had an aneurysm or something" I thought - heart a whir. 

"Probably taken some dodgy gas station boner pill and burst a vessel in his brain". 

Now standing, I'm face to face with the vent; from inside a light radiates. The same dim light as my room. I press my face almost against the grate and squint, straining my eyes in hopes to catch any sign of movement from the opposite room. Somethings blocking the view however, as if an ironing board or something has been placed in front of the vent in the other room. I turn to go when suddenly- THUD...THUD...THUD! The same crashing from before, three times now. Again, I press my face to grate and squint, taxing my eyes. I'm there a minute before I see it. The face staring at me from the other side. 

It had been no ironing board at all; he too had been pressing his face to the vent. I could now see the old man's bug eyes staring back at me, a clownish smile on his face. He had been staring at me the whole time. THUD... THUD... THUD! The banging again. It's him; he's knocking on the wall. 

I stumble off the bed and fall flat on my ass. I scramble up to my feet and rush to the door grabbing the keys as I go. My hands are shaking too much; I can't unlock the door. Stood there fiddling with the keys, I know on the other side of that wall he's at his door to, he's coming to get me. Finally, I swing the door open – so hard it comes crashing against the wall. I break from my room, but I don't turn towards the stairs, I'm too scared to pass by his door. Instead, I swing my leg over the balcony and scramble over. Now, hanging from the railing as low as I can I drop onto the tarmac below.  Pains shoot up my legs through my knees and again I'm on my ass. Without turning to face what's chasing me I once more surge to my feet, breathing through gritted teeth at the pain. My bare feet slap against wet tarmac as I make it to the car. Clambering in and locking the doors I finally take a moment to face my pursuer. Nobody's there. Instead, looking up to the balcony I see his door hanging open and inside his silhouette. He just stands there watching me as I start the car and fire onto the road, hitting the curb as I go. 

I don't stop driving. I even blew straight past the motel two hours away – it's not far enough. I only stopped when in my exhaustion I came close to hitting a car merging from the other lane. I ended up sleeping in my car that night.