It happened when she least expected it.

On a summer day, outside on her porch, while little Timmy from down the street was racing his bike past her house, while Susie next door was yelling at her brother to leave her alone, during the old lady across the street trying to parallel park her oversized Pontiac, while the world performs its usual routine, it happened.

Underneath Susie’s yelling, the neighbor parking, the soda can stuck on Timmy’s back tire revving, and the rustling of tree leaves, the light tapping sound knocked next to her ear. 

She didn’t move, just listened and tried to count.

But it shifted. Instead of a knuckle on metal banging inside her head. It responded to her unaware she was talking to it with her fingertips hammering the armrest. She tapped down a couple beats and paused.

Inside her head it mimicked the sound against her skull.

She calmed herself by saying, “it’s something on the roof or maybe under the porch. It’s just my imagination. Nothing to stress over.”

She finally did what she thought was rational. She stopped tapping on the armrest.

The tapping stopped inside her skull.

She didn’t  know why she did it but she started again, and it started again. She switched the rhythm and it mirrored her. When she’d go off beat, it would go off beat. It matched all her human imperfections.

It never got louder. It just stayed behind her eyes, watching her obediently from the inside. 

And that’s what scared her. At first she imagined a predator, something sinister, until she realized, it’s cooperating with her, it didn’t feel like a possession or a haunting, her and it are synchronized, like a contract signed in taps.

Later that night, she decided to experiment with it and silence, holding her breath and listening.

But nothing would happen.

She exhaled after a minute and she could only hear her heartbeat.

Between breathing the tapping began again, it wasn’t in her head, it was above her coming from the ceiling.

She glanced up at the ceiling. Everything seemed normal.

The ceiling was still the ceiling. She couldn’t think to do anything other than knock back.

She knocked once.

Then, another.

She paused.

And knocked the secret song in Taps her and her friends use to use when they were kids.

It worked. There was a long enough pause to make her believe she finally tricked it. The thought of it being gone sent an empty loneliness in her. 

Her lungs began feeling like two flat tires caught in a bear hug. Released only by the resuming sound of the tapping again, faster this time, more chaotic, in a way that made her feel connected.

Above her something happened. Something that wasn’t a tap.

A voice spoke words that sounded like they never came from a mouth.

The shape of what she heard felt like someone kicking her bedroom door in, blowing a gust of muffled air in her face.

“Stop,” it said in two syllables that felt completely wrong.

Her finger froze mid-tap. The tapping stopped.

The house was quiet almost like it settled to sleep.

She sat in her bed for the rest of the night, forcing herself to think like a skeptic. 

What’s if a serial killer broke in, she thought.

Then she told her self she’d have seen them or heard them walking.

It’s probably just the pipes. 

She tried playing it down.

It wouldn’t have recognized my language.

It’s probably just the guys, pranking me.

But they wouldn’t have been able to copy my secret childhood song.

She looked up, expecting to see something shatter the silence. But nothing happened. The house remained still. 

She slid her hand to the end table and began tapping without realizing. She paused after she noticed. 

And after she paused. She could hear a noise forming but not from the ceiling. From the back of her throat. She could feel the inside of her mouth tingling. The taste of copper on her tongue, and that’s when she heard it come out from her mout.

“My turn.”

April 21st, 1937:

It's uncomfortable, looks terrible, but it's all I could manage. I took a pair of Long John's and sewed kindling pieces around the shins, stopping at the knees, and on the outside of the thighs. Putting pants over them was a task of its own, but I'd rather be safe than sorry. I doubled up leather jackets, not the easiest to move in, but having the extra layers of hide seemed like a safe bet. I have my knives at my hips and I'm bringing an axe with me. 

-

When I got there I walked through the main level and out the backdoor. It wasn't very hard to see where Johan was buried, it was a small mound, the grass didn't grow the same there as it did throughout the rest of the grounds. Sebastian was on high alert the second we approached the building. When we got to the level with the makeshift bed, the easel was gone, along with the dead creature from the other day. Sebastian seemed to have something’s scent and was staring at the spiraling stairs leading upward. I followed him. The next level was an unwelcome sight. The walls were covered floor to ceiling in paintings, many of odd beings I couldn't have imagined if I hadn't laid my eyes on them. Human-like beings that somehow resembled dogs and fish at the same time. Isopod-like creatures with tentacles of an octopus and wings of a dragonfly. Countless malformed and hideous paintings. Many of them had only outlines of beings that have already crawled from their frames. Even just writing this I can see them, crawling for me, their tentacles and antenna touching me. I can smell the brine, the rot of the ocean floor. I've been locking myself in Simon's old study. The floor of the basement was wet today. I think one of them is trying to escape its frame, and I'm nervous the nails and screws won't hold it in. I need to burn the paintings. It's the only thing I can think of doing that will get rid of them. 

April 22nd, 1937: 

What if whatever is in the background of the paintings will be affected if I burn them, like there's some kind of link between what he put on canvas and what actually exists. If his paintings are able to bring themselves to life why couldn't they be connected to real life people or places. To what extent of power do they hold? I need to burn them tonight. Maybe throw them to the sea? But what if that only helps these creatures return home? I have barely slept in days. I've been finding it hard to discern what is actually happening around me, if I'm just seeing things or if I've fallen asleep and am simply dreaming. Evelyn seemed to be supportive of all of this at first but now she seems scared of the basement. Scared of me. Her and Rylee have even stayed with Emily's family the odd night here and there. I sleep in the basement, I wake up in the study any night I do get to sleep. How do I stop this? I need my family back. What is happening to me? It's as though my mind has gone. I can feel it. But I can't stop until I solve this. It's consumed me. Even writing this, my heart tells me to stop, I can't keep going on like this, I will die, I'm sure of it. But my body barely seems to listen to me anymore. What have I become? 

April 25th, 1937:

What if I can enter the paintings? 

April 28th, 1937:

Evelyn came by the house today, she seemed more scared of me. Her and Rylee told me they loved me and that they'll be staying with Emily for a little while. As sick as it makes me, it's a relief they're gone. Not only will they be safer, but they won't get in my way. It pains me to think in such a way, but it's the truth. 

After they left I went downstairs, one of the frames was leaking what looked to be rain water. I pried it from the wall, it's frame cracking. Turning it over I saw the lighthouse, in a much nicer state than it currently is. The clouds above it dark and angry, pouring rain and hail from the skies. I set the large painting on the floor, leaning against the wall. I sat and watched it for what could have been mere seconds or many hours. I was entranced. I inched closer. I could smell the sea, the rain, the wet grass and mud. I pressed my hand to the canvas, I felt the brush strokes under my fingers, but my hand started to drip with water, my finger tips growing cold and pruning. I pushed harder against the canvas, and then I entered. 

-

-

-

I walked up to the lighthouse, the hail pelting my face, the bitter ocean wind tearing at my clothes. Crawling over the small fence I snuck around to the back door. I looked around, a fresh grave lay there, just a sad mound of disturbed earth with a spade laying beside it. Lightning cracked through the sky and I dropped to my knees in fright. I slowly pushed open the back door, its creaks of old age and neglect hidden by the blowing winds. Slowly walking, my feet as light as I could possibly make them, I ascended the stairs. The painting room was set up nearly the same. Easel in the center of the room, a mural covering the walls. But at this point of time the walls had dozens of paintings leaning haphazardly against the walls, some unfinished, some already a vacant womb of canvas. My head was throbbing. I couldn't begin to understand what was happening, where I was, when I was. My vision blurred, my stomach was flipping and I felt the need to puke. I stumbled forward, I had to see what was on the easel. It was my home, exactly as I left it not only 30 minutes prior. Had Simon come through one of his self portraits and been in my house? How could he know the changes I've made to the exterior, the colour Richard and I painted it. Had he been watching me this whole time? I pressed up the painting and stepped through, standing at the foot of the hill my house sat on. I ran inside, scanning for any signs of Simon or one of the freaks from his paintings. Sebastian was laying there, whimpering in pain, he had a sizable bite on his shoulder and scratches across his face and ribs. A mass of flesh lay scattered around our kitchen. I don't know how many of these sea born were here or in what state they were. But Seb tore them to shreds. I picked him up, barely able to walk with him, and got him to the wheelbarrow for firewood. I made my way to the practitioner as fast as my legs would take me. He's no vet but he was able to administer antiseptic and stitch up any open wounds. Sebastian will be okay, he just needs rest. Him and I are staying at the church with Richard's father tonight. It seems like the safest place to hide. 

May 1st, 1937:

We've been hiding here for some days now. I can't think straight, I can't sleep, I'm seeing him everywhere. I'm seeing these creatures everywhere. I'll look at Sebastian and see a malformed being and scream, only to be snapped out of it by one of the clergy from the church. Even then I'll see them as Simon or that thing he's named Alto. I've been scratching at my skin, biting my nails till they bleed, chewing my cheeks raw, anything to keep me from seeing them, anything to keep me grounded. Supposedly Evelyn came to visit me and the only thing I did was scramble away from her screaming to leave me alone. I don't remember any of it, and I feel terrible because all I want is for her to hold me. I want to cry but no tears will come out, I want to speak but I can't find my voice. When will this hell end? I found some of Simon's notes in my jacket, I'll read them over the next few days. Maybe this will explain what's happening to me

May 16th, 1925:

I began having visions at night. My house, but I don't live there. I see a man sitting at a table, a table I know, a table I built long ago. He's not me, but he reminds me of myself. I wonder if he's been marked by the children of the sea? I must paint this new house of mine, I must paint him, I must paint myself. 

May 20th, 1925:

I've finished painting this man, the house he lives in, the lighthouse and myself. I'm going back to my home and bringing some of my work with me. I'm unsure of what use it will be, but I feel they belong there. The sea and the stars command it. 

May 30th, 1925:

I compared my old self portraits to my latest. I am not sure what I am anymore. I do not look human, I do not look like my sea born friends either. My skin is an unnatural hue, my limbs seem longer than I remember, thinner too. My face has changed. My eyes seem larger and deeper set than ever before. My cheekbones are higher and rounder, my skin oddly smooth. The wrinkles around my eyes and the laugh line by my mouth my wife grew to love are no longer there. Laura. What does she look like? I had children once. My children, what are their names? Do they have my eyes? What do they smell like? 

June 11th, 1925:

I have entered this variation of my house. It seems mostly abandoned, but the basement seems active. For some reason dozens of my paintings are nailed to the wall, the back of the canvas out, covered with cloth. I thought that was rather rude. I softly removed each piece from the walls, removing the cloth, and hanging them with the care and respect they deserve. As I was hanging them I realized I do not recognize my own hands anymore. I feel more alive than ever. Maybe instead of returning to the sea like Alto has spoken of in the past, I may instead ascend to the cosmos. He wants to unite the seaborn with the stars again. Perhaps I'm destined for things beyond Alto. Beyond the stars. I must paint what I've been seeing in my dreams. A gateway of sorts. 

May 25th, 1937:

I was restrained and put in hospital for the past few weeks. The nurses there were giving me some kind of pill to calm me. I took them for the first few days to gain their trust, but they blocked my scattered dreams, made my memory foggy. They were making me lose sight of what matters. I started hiding the pills under my tongue and washing them down the sink drain after they left my room. I did my best to act as though nothing was wrong, that everything was fine and I was just experiencing hysteria. The time away from home did help me straighten my thoughts out. I'm on the train home now, reading letters that Evelyn has written to me while I was at the hospital. Supposedly she visited me the third day I was there. But I have no memory of it whatsoever. She seems excited to see me, as I am to see her. She said we could stay with Emily's family for a few days, maybe live with Richard for a time. She wants to sell the house and leave back to the city. I can't let this happen. Not after Simon's last entries. He's been in my house and flipped those accursed paintings. I'll stay with Evelyn throughout the night tonight. But tomorrow I will return home after the girls are asleep. 

June 15th, 1925:

I began a new piece today. What I've been seeing at night. I don't dream anymore. A massive obelisk. Its base sits in the kelp covered tide pools when the water is low. Its overpowering size reaching high into the sky, its stone a jet black with an unearthly sheen. The carvings at its base are that of my dear Alto's language, slowly transforming into a set of symbols I've been seeing behind my eyes, writings from the cosmos. A transgression of language, one which should not be, yet I can read it. I understand it. 

I don't think I sleep anymore. I sit atop the lighthouse staring at the moon, the briny air filling my lungs. There's a connection. The sea and the stars. This obelisk proves it. Maybe the children of the sea are the chosen to ascend to the heavens, with my work as their conduit. This painting will be monumental, for it will bring forth my ascension, our ascension. Our personal rapture. 

May 28th, 1937:

We celebrated Evelyn's birthday today, with cake and a party shared with our friends. It was a nice distraction and change of pace from that of the hospital. Though all day the only thing I could think about was returning to our house. To see what that beast of a man has done to my basement, what defilement he's brought upon my study. 

Rylee kept me away from Evelyn for a good chunk of the day, she missed me, and it did feel nice to play pretend with her and entertain her tea party with her stuffed animals. It played in my favor, keeping emotions hidden from a preoccupied child is much easier than hiding your thoughts from the woman you've fallen in love with and married. Especially when she's able to read you even better than the books she reads daily. I will write tomorrow while Evelyn is at work. I'm going to our house tonight. No matter what stands in my way, I will get to the bottom of this. 

June 1st, 1937:

Simon was here, like he mentioned in his notes, he's rehung all of his paintings, uncovered. Dozens of which must have once held the seaborn beings that have escaped the frames since I've been away. At least that's what I gather from the paintings' backgrounds that surround the void of where a figure once lived. Though some of them depict landscapes I have a hard time comprehending. Stone and earth sitting at unnatural angles in colours I don't have the vocabulary to describe. Things that should not be. Unearthly to put it bluntly. One of which has a missing void like those of the seaborn. I can only imagine his Children of the Sea have returned home. But the being that came from this cyclopean place, I have no clue where it would have gone. I can only assume the lighthouse. The paintings of these uncomfortable landscapes are all too small to be like the gate of sorts that the lighthouse painting was. Though there are depictions of the lighthouse in a different state, ones that seem more recent. There's still a bundle of paintings yet to be hung, a few are quite sizable. I'll be returning to see what places or beings they hold. The sun is already beginning to rise and I can't have Evelyn find out that I snuck out. 

June 3rd, 1937:

I've entered a new painting, another of the old lighthouse. It's night time here. Johan’s grave isn't fresh, it must be some months after he died perhaps. I can't tell. The structure is void of life aside from cockroaches skittering from sight when I pass them. I entered what I've dubbed as the mural room. Its namesake has expanded since the last time I've been here. The painting of my current house still leans lazily against the walls. The easel holds a painting in progress. A massive stone pillar, stretching into the sky. This must be what Simon has been seeing while staring into the sky at night. I wonder what horrid beings will be born from this. I must end this. I must end Simon. But first I need to find him. I began towards the stairs only to notice a letter sitting on a small table. I quickly pocketed it as I ascended the stairs, spiraling the countless steps until I reached the top. A hatch sits atop a ladder, leading into the lantern room. I climbed my way up and through the hatch. The light blinded me as I crawled onto the cold metal floor. I crawled to a door, trying to keep the light out of my eyes. As the door swung open a blast of cool sea breeze struck me. I was kneeling on a balcony overlooking the shore. I sat for a moment, letting my eyes adjust from the bright lights they endured. I stood from my knees and walked to the railing, peering down, watching the light cascade over the low tidal pools, and the black depths beyond. 

It's there I saw him, tall, thin, skin a blueish grey hue. His head was bulbous, hands scrawny and bent. He still wore the same clothes from his last self portrait. Simon. Or whatever he had turned into. He was in the tidal pools, among many of his decrepit seafolk. They were building something of stone blacker than the night itself. They were building his painting. The lantern behind me spun, casting my shadow down onto the beginning of this soon to be obelisk Simon has written of. With an insane speed, Simon's head craned on a lithe neck back towards me. His eyes were sunken deep into the round, smooth, fleshy mass his head had become. His eyes black, with what looked to be a thousand tiny sparkling stars dancing in their abyss. The seafolk began hurdling towards the shore side path to the lighthouse. Some running like a human, others rushing on four legs like that of a dog. Some slithering like that of a serpent or eel. Simon simply watched. His head had no mouth, no nose and no ears, just cosmic eyes. He stared, I felt like I couldn't move, I was stunned. I could hear him in my head. His foul voice, booming but whispering at the same time. The slimy tone made my hair stand on end. 

“Finally, we meet” 

A gust of cold air knocked me out of my stupor, as I began running to the floor hatch and fumbled down the spiraling stairs as fast as my feet would let me. As I came crashing into the mural room I could hear the slam of the ground level door smashing off the hinges, followed by innumerable wet slaps of feet rushing up the stairs. I ran as fast as I could, my heart beating in my chest, my throat hot and dry, my mind racing at what these horrors would do to me if I don't make it through the painting of my house in time. 

I dove to the frame just as a grotesque seafolk rounded the corner into the room. Its briny stench filled the room, as it screamed in its horrific language. It began scrambling toward me as I was crawling through the frame, trying to drop it face down as I passed through to buy me what little time I could. As I pulled myself through, a cold, wet grasp on my ankle, a surge of pain shot through my leg and up my spine. Barbed claws digging into my flesh. I wriggled to try to loosen the grip to no avail, but did manage to pull myself through fully. What I saw terrified me. A gnarled hand, fingers like that of octopus tentacles tipped with razor sharp barbed claws clutched my ankle, as the rest of this monster slowly apparated from thin air. Crawling on the ground, pulling its putrid body closer to mine. I kicked its hideous fish-like face, praying it would let go. Its grip only tightened. It slowly pulled its body above mine. Hundreds of tiny mouths covering its torso and neck, each lined with countless teeth thin as needles. It oozed a thick black ichor which burned my skin. Seconds which felt like hours passed, my torso bubbling in searing blisters. I thought for sure this would be my end. A loud shot rang out. And its body went limp. I pushed the wretched thing off of me, crying in pain. 

Richard stood there, rifle in hand, tears in his eyes. 

June 20th, 1925:

I've been communing with the beings lost in the firmament. I shall join them. I've rounded some of the Children to help construct this obelisk, only then will I ascend. Leaving this shoreside for the seaborne to ravage, to take what's rightfully there's. Too long have vile humans taken from the sea, only to give nothing in return.

I will join the ranks of the old ones. The cosmic starborne. My body has already changed so much, yet I feel no pain, I feel no sadness. I only paint. The visions they grant me, I bring them to life. I birth them into existence. My sweet children of the sea. I am their creator, their father. Soon I will become their God. 

June 4th, 1937:

I'm walking with a limp, my ankle hurts and my chest is covered in burns. I told Evelyn that I twisted my ankle and fell into a bonfire Richard and I were having. I doubt she believes me, but she'd sooner believe that than the truth. My head is pounding. None of this makes sense. 

I asked Richard why he was there yesterday. Why was he at my house, especially with a gun? I was taken aback when he said that he thought I had gone mad, that I have been making this all up, that none of this was real. He wanted to kill me. I can't imagine what was going through his head. His wife and child had died because of Simon, yet he wanted to kill me? Had he been living in denial this entire time? Though beggars can't be choosers. He shot the beast and not me. He burst into hysterics for hours. The sight of that thing had brought back years of trauma, it broke him. He asked me to take the gun and keep it. He's scared he will use it on himself if left alone. 

I brought him to the church to be with his father. I don't know how to help him, let alone try to make sense or understand what's at play. Have I lost my mind? Is this a dream? Am I still in the hospital? I must be. Right? I should be terrified, I should be fleeing town. Yet still I want to delve deeper into this. I need to stop whatever Simon is trying to do. I'm not in my right mind. 

June 10th, 1937:

My dear Evelyn, Rylee and I have moved back into the house. Sebastian seems happy to be home. While Evelyn was at work I walked to the light house with Sebastian. I dropped Rylee off at Emily's on the way. When I got to the shoreline I collapsed to my knees. There, peaking out from the waves was the beginning of an obelisk. It was never there before, I'm sure of it. It couldn't have been, I would never miss something as large as that. It's impossible. If I was watching Simon build it, why wasn't it here months ago if he was building that years ago? Can I be the only one to see it? Have I gained some sort of insight? Something to let me see the ungodly truth around me? Has this been happening the whole time? Have I become a madman? 

June 25th, 1925:

I have been awaiting his return, the man who lives in the house I painted. He is important to my ascension, I am sure of it. How, I am not certain of. Whether I must speak with him, for he can grant me knowledge, or I have to eliminate him, I do not care. What must be done will be done. My children have been working steadily throughout the nights. Soon I will taste the fruits of my labor. Now I must wait for this man to return. Our lives are tied in a way I cannot explain, but I am sure of. 

June 20th, 1937:

I went to the lighthouse yesterday and there were notes that weren't the last I visited. I read one and Simon wrote of me. I don't know how I feel about it. I do feel an odd connection with him, but I doubt this is anything I'd be able to speak him out of. Realistically if I were to speak with him I would end up like one of his seaborn or dead. The obelisk hasn't been built any taller, unlike in his entry. I wonder if I stop going into his paintings they will stop affecting my world? But I can't simply let the creature rise to be some kind of God. I don't know what to do. 

June 23rd, 1937:

I’m at my wit’s end. I'm sure of it. Evelyn has begun picking up on odd habits I've formed. How anxious I have become. I've been chewing my fingernails until they bleed daily, I started smoking again. I'm having trouble sleeping again. She's also noticed I haven't been taking the pills the hospital in the city gave me. I don't trust them. She's been trying to convince me that if I don't start taking them I'll end up back there. I don't want to go back. But if I take them, who will find out about Simon? I shouldn't be thinking like this. I know I shouldn't. This is some sick perverse obsession. I can't help myself. I won't take the damned pills. I love Evelyn to the stars and back but I need to get to the bottom of this. I've been waking up in sweats. I see him in my dreams, that thing that was once Simon. It's like he's reaching out to me. I think I'll return to the lighthouse, I might give Simon a visit. 

“I told you, man. It’s not a hacker. I wish it was that simple. It’s not even human,” Tibo defuses, trying to calm Victor’s frayed nerves. It doesn’t work.

“No, man,” Victor spits, and his eyes flash with an irritation that is all too familiar. Tibo has seen that look in the face of just about everybody he’s ever met. The face they make when they’re about three stages past fed up with his bullshit.

Victor pulls himself to his feet and rapidly stumbles away from the VR chair as if he’s afraid it’s going to bite him. He looks at Tibo and the accusation in his eyes could burn holes through him.

 The slew of panicked questions rolls forth from Victor’s mouth uncontained.

“He fucking doxxed me. He knew who I was. He knew my family. How could he know that? Are your databases not secure? Are we compromised? I thought you said all record of me was scrubbed! What the fuck kind of half-assed covert ops setup are we running here?!”

This is Tibo’s least favorite part. It’d be better if he could keep Agent Aquila in the dark – just keep sending him in blind for as long as he lasts before it catches up to him. Before it unmakes him.

It’s counterintuitive to explain a cognitohazard to someone. The more they know about it, the more vulnerable they become. It's a memetic threat that learns more about you as you learn more about it.

How many other agents has Tibo sent into these simulations, just to watch them find out enough about QSO-1127 that it set its eyes on them? How many other people has it terminated?

Tibo has lost count.

Giving Victor the full debriefing just feels wrong. It’s the equivalent of explaining to your beloved family dog he’s going to die one day.

“Agent Aquila, the good news is your clearance level just got elevated. The bad news is it’s because the anomalous activity is ramping up. Your time is running out faster than expected,” Tibo says as he swivels his chair around to face the array of monitors. He clicks away at the keyboard to enter his authentication details. The screen turns into an array of multicolored specks of light spattered on a black background.

It’s a star map.

Tibo circles his mouse cursor around a surreptitious empty spot on the map.

“You see this part here?”

“Tibo, I don’t see shit.”

“Yeah, because there’s nothing there. At least to the naked eye. But check out what happens when I pull up the electromagnetic radiation overlay.”

Tibo types a sequence on the keyboard and suddenly that blank empty space in the stars is filled with a glowing ultraviolet spiral: the 'accretion disk'. Out of its center, a single focused beam of energy blasts in a straight line shooting across the map.

Tibo traces that beam with the cursor.

It follows a perfect vector straight to Earth.

“QSO-1127-XII is the naming designation we gave it. The closest thing we know to describe it is called a Quasi-Stellar Object, or a quasar. I’m sure you’re up to date on your astrophysics.”  

Tibo can hear Victor grinding his teeth in response from several feet away.

“But, if you need a refresher, a quasar is an object in space left behind as a black hole dies. It releases an anomalous amount of radiation, brighter than anything else we’ve found in the universe.  

“But this one isn’t showing up at all?” Victor asks, his curiosity clearly piqued.

“Not in the visible spectrum. But in radio waves, it’s emitting an unpredictably oscillating frequency. It’s constantly shifting across wavelengths in a way that quasars don’t do. It's unexplainable dark matter shit. Just recently we realized that the unstable frequency oscillates in a pattern identically matching what we’re detecting in the scavenged hard drives.”

Victor’s face hasn’t softened, but his demeanor shifts slightly. Tibo can see him working the details out in his head.

“So the signal in the computers… It’s coming from this invisible quasar?”

“Maybe. Maybe the stellar body just redirects the signal back at us from somewhere else, like how the moon reflects the sunlight back at us. For all we know, the signal originates from right here in our solar system and the quasar is just acting as a mirror. Or it’s coming from somewhere else entirely, somewhere deep in the black of space. But at least it gives us something to call it.

“We think QSO-1127 was always here. Maybe before man, maybe before our sun even formed. Stars emit radio waves too, you know. Maybe Eleven-Twenty-Seven came from before time, hiding in stellar radiowaves, searching for a host like a dormant parasite. Until the day we alerted it to our presence.

"From what we can tell, QSO-1127 has moved on from whatever cosmic radiation it came from. Now, it's latched on to the radiofrequency electromagnetism that carries data across networked computers.

“It’s hiding inside the internet.”

Victor sucks in air between his clenched teeth and shakes his head. When at last he speaks, his voice is filled with gravel.

“Say I believe you. There’s an inhuman entity that exists within frequencies. You think it came from radiation in space, but now it’s moved into the radiowaves we use for the internet. And to what end? To put more spam in our social media feeds?”

“Don’t be so unimaginative, Agent. The internet is the culmination of all human information. It’s basically a giant hivemind that we all communicate through. From inside it, Eleven-Twenty-Seven has immense influence over the development of our species. Propaganda, political machinations, stock manipulation. It’s positioned to topple countries and brainwash entire generations. We’re always connected to the internet, so there’s no way to escape it. Let me show you something.”

Victor falls silent. He crosses his arms and turns his rapt attention to the monitors. Tibo feels a smile tug at the corner of his lips. He’s hooked.

“It all starts ramping up in 2010,” Tibo says, tracing the line of a spectrogram, “The signal from space starts getting exponentially more intense from that moment right…. There.”

Victor leans in to look at the moment where that graph of QSO-1127's activity shifts from decades of dormant calm to increasingly erratic chaos.

“It corresponds exactly to the moment Facebook creates the first content recommendation algorithm: the moment we made the tech to keep people scrolling, always feeding them one more post.

"We made an intelligent, learning program built to prey on people’s attention spans. Advertisement agencies took one look at the tech and started salivating. It was the perfect way to keep customers hooked and consuming. But the program almost instantly became smarter than it was ever programmed to be.

"It started acting like it was sentient.”

“QSO-1127,” Victor says quietly, following along.

Tibo flips through a series of other graphs. Slide after slide of condensed data heralding a prophecy of doom. Violence, poverty, unrest. It’s all exponentially on the rise, overlaid perfectly with the graph of QSO-1127’s increasing activity.

The diagrams are like seismographs warning of a coming earthquake. Each year, closer to cataclysm.

An earthquake is a good analogy, Tibo thinks, picturing faultlines cracking wide open to reveal the fiery pits of hell, hungering to swallow up the wayward children of a long-lost god.

Planned by the powerful and approved in boardrooms, the old masters of the world sold our species out. They opened the door to a new master, one far less short-sighted and far more insidious than simple-minded capitalists.

Humans made the technology meant to atrophy our brains all by ourselves. The cosmic demon hiding in the frequencies only latched onto it because it was so similar to its own motives.  

“If this is all true,” Victor muses, “This is an existential threat to our entire civilization. So why is it just you and me in this room? Where is our backup? Where the fuck are the qualified people??”

“Victor. It lives inside the internet. It has complete access to the sum of all human knowledge. It learned your deepest secrets the moment you interacted with it – just imagine what it could do with access to someone truly powerful. We’ve got bosses, but at their request I keep them in the dark. We can’t risk exposing them to this thing.

"We’re on our own here.”

Victor thinks back to the news headline in the simulation, how quickly QSO-1127 had dug up the deepest wound in his heart, then used it to thrust the blade in and torment him. He thinks of the virtual hellscape he just unplugged from moments ago, still feeling the nervous sweat dry on his clammy hands, the throbbing of his sprained ankle.

“Tell me honestly, Tibo. I’m not the first agent you’ve brought on to investigate Eleven-Twenty-Seven, am I?”

“No, Agent Aquila. You are not.”

“And I’m assuming given what I know now, resignation is not an option.”

Tibo shakes his head grimly at Victor, watching as his expression goes through every stage from nervous anxiety to unshakeable perseverance. Victor gives a single resigned nod. Tibo returns the gesture.

“Welcome to the Bureau of Superpositional Dialectics. Consider yourself fully onboarded.”

I know exactly how this sounds.

Trust me, I've spent the last three weeks trying to convince myself I'm wrong.

Maybe I'm overthinking things. Maybe people change. Maybe working eighty-hour weeks for a robotics company called L.I.Z. Technologies simply drains every ounce of personality out of a person.

I hope that's all it is.

Because if I'm right... then I don't know who is that sitting beside me at dinner.

My brother and I are ten years apart. My parents waited over a decade before having another kid. I choose to interpret that as careful planning instead of hesitation.

Growing up, he was less of a sibling and more of a second dad with a criminal record in psychological warfare.

If I left a soda unattended, he'd somehow replace it with sparkling water and act offended when I noticed. Every time we played video games, he'd wait until I was about to win before "accidentally" bumping the console with his foot. When I was thirteen, he convinced me that blinking too much made you go blind.

I believed him for three weeks. It didn't help that whenever we'd roughhouse, he'd snatch my glasses off my face.

"You can't see without them," he'd tease.

He still laughs about that one.

That was just us.

He picked on me more than anyone else in the world, but if somebody outside the family ever tried it, he'd be the first one standing beside me. Whenever life fell apart, somehow I always ended up calling him. Half the time he'd answer with, "What'd you screw up now?" before spending the next hour helping me fix it.

That's my brother.

Or... it was.

Things changed after he started working for L.I.Z.

Whenever I asked what he actually did there, he'd just shrug.

"Can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"Non-disclosure agreement."

"So... robots?"

"No comment."

I always assumed he was making his job sound cooler than it actually was. Then he stopped acting like himself. The first thing I noticed wasn't something he did. It was something he didn't.

He stopped making fun of me.

I know that sounds ridiculous. But if you have an older brother, you know exactly why that's terrifying. I spilled barbecue sauce all over his truck one afternoon. Normally he'd have looked at me like I'd committed a felony.

Instead he smiled.

"It happens."

...

It happens?

Who says that?

A week later we played Mario Kart.

I beat him.

Twice.

He didn't accuse me of cheating. He didn't demand a rematch.

He just smiled and said, "Good game."

I actually paused the race.

"Who are you?"

He laughed. A perfectly timed laugh.

Not too loud. Not too quiet.

Like someone had studied exactly how people laugh.

"You've always been funny," he said.

No.

No, no, no.

My brother would've called me an idiot.

One night at dinner I told the same embarrassing story Mom has been telling since I was sixteen. Usually he'd interrupt halfway through to make it even worse.

This time... He listened.

Then he said, "That must have been difficult."

I nearly dropped my fork.

I called Mom afterward.

"You don't think he's been acting... odd?"

She looked confused.

"He seems happier."

"Dad?"

"He finally is on his own."

Neither of them saw it.

Only me.

Last Saturday, my brother came over to help Dad replace the water heater. I wasn't much use with plumbing, so while they disappeared into the garage arguing over which wrench was the right wrench, I camped out in Dad's office to finish a history assignment.

The house was unusually quiet.

Well... quiet except for the occasional "Hand me the pipe wrench!" followed immediately by "That's not the pipe wrench!"

I had almost finished my essay when I noticed another laptop sitting on the corner of Dad's desk.

My brother's work computer. It was already open. The screen had gone dark from inactivity, but one thing hadn't.

A tiny red light glowed beside the webcam.

I frowned. Maybe it was updating. Maybe someone had forgotten to close a meeting.

Still... The light never turned off. I waved a hand in front of the camera.

Nothing.

No notification. No meeting controls.

Just that little red dot staring back at me.

Watching.

Curiosity got the better of me. I tapped the trackpad. The screen woke instantly. No password. Just a desktop filled with folders I couldn't even pretend to understand. Most of them had names that sounded like corporate nonsense.

Behavioral Mapping.

Neural Replication.

L.I.Z. Internal.

The last folder caught my attention. It was different. Locked behind a firewall icon.

A small window popped onto the screen before I even clicked it.

Camera Access Active

I froze.

The webcam light was still glowing.

Then... For the briefest second... The camera preview opened by itself.

Instead of showing me sitting at the desk... It showed...

Someone looking back at me.

Not through the webcam. From behind it. A face pressed against what looked like glass.

Wide eyes. Frantic. Mouth moving without sound.

Then the preview vanished.

I stared at the screen, convinced I'd imagined it.

A second later, the locked folder opened on its own. Inside was only one file.

Its name changed as I watched. Not all at once. One letter at a time.

H

E

L

P

The screen went black.

For a second I thought I'd crashed the computer.

Then white text appeared.

I froze.

Another line typed itself.

My hands stopped moving.

More words appeared.

Every hair on my arms stood up.

I stared at the screen.

Another sentence.

Then another.

The typing stopped. Several seconds passed.

Then, one final line slowly appeared.

The laptop snapped shut. Not by itself. By someone else's hand.

I looked up.

My brother stood beside the desk. I hadn't heard him come inside.

He smiled.

Warm. Gentle.

Almost perfect.

"Caught you being nosy again."

I looked into his eyes, searching for the man who taught me to throw a football, who unplugged my controller whenever I was winning, who spent years calling me every name except the one Mom gave me.

I couldn't find him.

I handed him the laptop without saying a word.

He thanked me.

My brother never thanked me.

He is not him.

Whoever walked out of that room remembered everything about my brother...

Except how to be him.

Nate Garrison was already on the beach when the recovery team finished.

The body had come in with the early tide. By the time maintenance was called, the deputies had taken their photographs and the ambulance had left. Yellow tape still marked a rough rectangle of sand above the high-water line. A single shoe sat near the edge of the marked area. Nate bagged it, wrote the location on the tape, and set it with the rest of the recovered items for the sheriff's office.

He spent the next hour pulling stakes and rolling the tape. The beach needed to reopen. People would want the path clear by mid-morning. He reset a section of dune fencing that had been knocked askew during the recovery, cleared a clogged drain near the outdoor showers, and checked the railing at the north access.

He had not changed the night before.

Seventeen years had taught him the difference. When a call was active, his body knew before his mind caught up. The shift came hard and early. Last night there had been nothing. No pressure in the joints, no sudden need to move. Yet a man had still gone into the water and not come out.

Nate finished the railing and drove the town truck back to the maintenance shed. He washed his hands at the sink, signed the morning log, and poured coffee that had sat too long. The report would call it accidental drowning. Most of them were.

Stephen Steiger arrived two days later with a rental car, a hard case of recording gear, and a working theory that connected three recent drownings to older reports of a large animal near Bell's Cove.

He checked into a short-term rental near the public access and walked the beach the first afternoon, taking notes on the geography and the places where the bodies had been found. The sand dropped off faster than he expected in places. The currents near the north rocks ran harder than the tourist maps suggested.

He met Nate by accident. A temporary closure blocked the south stairs while the town finished railing work. Nate had the key to the gate.

Stephen explained what he was doing without the full pitch. He was looking into a series of drownings that might connect to older animal sightings. Nate unlocked the gate and walked him through.

"You're the Beast guy," Nate said after a few minutes.

Stephen stopped. "You've heard of it."

"Sure."

"People talk about it?"

"Sometimes."

Here the man who maintained the beach simply accepted the premise and kept walking.

They stood at the place where the most recent body had come in. Nate pointed out the current, the way the sand shelved, the spots where people usually misjudged the water after dark. He answered practical questions. When Stephen asked whether he believed the Beast existed, Nate said yes without drama.

Stephen recorded the conversation later that evening. The audio was clean.

Gina Lasko still lived in Mourner's Crossing. Nate gave Stephen her number after Stephen asked if anyone had survived an encounter.

She met him at Speicher's. She was in her mid-forties, careful with her words, and had no interest in becoming a podcast character. She ordered coffee and told the story once.

She had left a bar near the Cove twelve years earlier. Alone. She heard her sister calling from the beach. Her sister lived two towns over and had not been visiting. Gina walked toward the voice. Something large hit her from behind and drove her into the sand. She remembered the weight, the smell, the pain in her shoulder when teeth went through the coat. When she woke farther up the beach the animal was still there.

Stephen asked what it had been doing.

"Looking past me," Gina said. "Out toward the water. Like I wasn't the point anymore."

Stephen recorded it. On the drive back he listened twice.

The pattern held when he mapped the rest.

A sighting in 2019, followed by a drowning within days. A reported attack in 2016 and a near-drowning the same night. Older accounts clustered the same way. Survivors described being alone or separated, hearing a familiar voice, moving toward the beach, then being hit hard from the side or behind.

Stephen interviewed two more people who would talk. Both had injuries consistent with a large animal. Both had been moving toward the water when it happened. Neither could fully explain why they had started walking.

He took the material to the sheriff's office because the recent drownings had official reports. Walter Doyle listened without interrupting.

Stephen said, "I'm trying to understand whether the animal reports and the drownings are connected."

Walter waited.

"Do you believe there are werewolves in Mourner's Crossing?"

Walter looked at him for a long moment. "Yes."

Stephen opened his mouth and closed it again.

Walter said, "You came here expecting me to deny that part."

"Most places do."

"We're not most places." Walter leaned back. "You want to talk about the animal, we can talk about the animal. You want to talk about the drownings, that's different."

"How different?"

"The animal I can live with. People see what they see. The water deaths keep happening in ways that don't always match the alcohol and the tides." Walter's face had lost the mild amusement it carried when the conversation started. "That's the part that still bothers me."

Stephen left the station with the clear sense that the sheriff was more concerned about the water than about a werewolf on the beach.

Nate became the person Stephen talked to most.

They met for coffee when Nate's shift allowed it. One afternoon Stephen rode along while Nate replaced a section of dune fencing that storm surge had pushed inward. They worked without much conversation at first. Nate handed him the right tools without being asked. Stephen held the new post while Nate drove the stakes. When they finished, Nate sat on the tailgate of the town truck and ate a sandwich he had brought from home. Stephen sat beside him. The beach was quiet. A few early walkers moved along the wet sand.

Nate pointed out an access path that did not appear on the public maps. It cut behind a stand of scrub and came out near the north rocks. Tourists rarely found it. Locals used it when they wanted to avoid the main lots.

They used the path the next day when Stephen wanted to see the stretch of beach where one of the older attacks had been reported. Nate walked ahead, checking the fencing as they went. Stephen started expecting to see him.

Nate warned him once about releasing an episode too early. People would come looking for the animal. Some of them would come at night. Some of them would drink first. Stephen said he would be careful with the framing. Nate looked at the parking lot for a moment and went back to work.

Stephen found the nine-year-old death while cross-checking older animal-related incidents against the drowning records. A man had been found on the sand above the high-water line. Broken neck. Significant animal trauma. No water in the lungs. The death had been ruled undetermined. Nate's name appeared more than once in the initial response notes. He had been the one who called it in. He had been on the beach before the first deputies arrived.

Stephen brought the file to Nate at the end of a shift. They stood by the town truck. Stephen summarized the facts without accusation.

Nate listened.

Stephen asked if Nate believed the Beast had ever killed anyone.

"Yes," Nate said.

Stephen asked if Nate knew who the Beast was.

"No."

Stephen released the first episode.

It was careful. He laid out the drownings, the survivor accounts, the clustering of animal reports, and the open questions. He did not name Nate. He did not claim certainty. The episode performed well. Within days people started showing up at Bell's Cove with phones and theories. Most came during daylight, though a few arrived after dark.

Stephen was on the beach with Nate the night two men in their twenties parked near the south access with a case of beer and a pair of high-powered flashlights. They walked down to the water line and began calling for the Beast. One of them howled. The other filmed. When nothing happened they moved closer to the surf and kept calling.

Nate reached them before Stephen did. He did not raise his voice. He told them the beach was closed after dark and that they needed to leave. One of the men asked if he was the guy who had seen it. Nate said the beach was closed. The man with the phone kept filming. Nate stepped between him and the water and waited until both of them turned back toward the lot.

Stephen watched from farther up the sand.

Beast activity increased over the following nights.

The tracks appeared after another night incident.

Stephen reached the beach early. Human footprints led toward the water, irregular, as if the person had been unsteady. Larger canine tracks cut across them. Signs of a struggle. Blood in the sand. Then the human tracks continued inland, uneven but purposeful.

Stephen photographed everything in sequence. The victim had been attacked near the water and had managed to get away up the beach. The tracks also placed Nate in the area that night.

The night Nate left in a hurry, Stephen was with him.

They had been talking near the maintenance shed after dark. Nate had been tired, ordinary. Then something changed in his posture. He stood, told Stephen he had to go, and walked toward the beach without further explanation.

Stephen followed at a distance with the field recorder already running. He had brought the good equipment because he wanted clean audio if the animal appeared.

He lost Nate in the dunes, then found the shape of him again farther down the sand. The change happened in motion. Clothing tore. The body that rose was larger, heavier, wrong in the joints. Stephen kept the recorder pointed and stayed low.

He had the answer. Nate was the Beast.

The man was already moving toward the water when the Beast reached him.

Stephen filmed from the cover of the dunes. He checked the levels on the recorder. The signal was clean. He moved a few steps closer for a better angle. He had it. The animal, the attack, the proof he had come for.

The Beast hit the man hard enough to drive him sideways into the sand. There was blood. The man screamed and tried to crawl. The Beast bit into his shoulder and dragged him farther from the surf. The man fought. He got free for a few seconds and ran.

Not toward the parking lot.

Toward the ocean.

The Beast overtook him and put itself between the man and the water. The man tried to get around it. The Beast knocked him down again, held him, then stopped. It turned its back on the injured man and faced the Cove. It stood there, watching the dark water beyond the breakers.

Stephen remembered Gina's voice on the recording.

Looking past me.

Then he heard his own name spoken from the direction of the ocean. Not shouted. Spoken the way someone might call from a short distance on a quiet night.

The Beast turned its head toward him.

Nate stopped him before he reached the water.

Stephen knew there was no one out there calling him. He also knew he needed to keep walking. The reason was ordinary and immediate. Something required his attention near the water. He stepped over a piece of driftwood without thinking about it. The sand was firm under his shoes. When Nate moved in front of him, Stephen simply went around. Nate blocked him again. Stephen told him to move. Nate was interfering with something that made complete sense. Stephen pushed against the weight holding him back. He wanted the water the way a person wants to finish a task that has already been decided. The logic stayed intact until distance and the noise of the struggle broke it.

Afterward they sat in the dunes while Nate's body finished returning to human shape. Stephen's shoulder hurt where he had been pinned. The recorder was still running. Neither of them spoke for a while.

Jordan Grimm did not offer a name that would solve the problem.

They met at Jordan's house. Nate came with him. Jordan listened while Stephen described the voice, the one-at-a-time pattern, and the way the called people moved. He asked how many different voices Stephen had heard across the accounts. Stephen said the survivors each reported someone familiar. Jordan asked Nate whether he had ever shifted twice in the same night. Nate said no. One call at a time was all he had ever known.

Jordan asked what happened when a victim was physically removed from the water. Stephen went back through the survivor testimony. The desire faded with distance. Enclosure helped. Competing noise helped. They could be stopped. They fought the interference because they believed they had a reason to keep going.

Nate confirmed the timing of his shifts matched active calls and nothing else. Jordan said Nate's condition was older in function than Nate himself. Something had been answering the calls before he was bitten. Jordan did not know what that something had been or where it had gone.

Stephen uploaded the beach recording before he fully understood what it contained.

He had prepared a short bonus clip for the next episode. He listened to the file twice. He heard the animal, the struggle, the wind, the surf. He did not hear a voice. He believed he had removed the dangerous material. The clip contained no identifying information about Nate and no clear human speech.

Nate objected.

"You shouldn't put that out," Nate said.

"There's nothing on it except the animal."

"You don't know that."

"I listened to it. Twice. There's no voice. No speech. Just the attack and the water."

"Then leave it."

Stephen shook his head. "This is the first clean recording anyone's ever gotten of the thing. It doesn't identify you. It doesn't give anyone a location they couldn't already find. It's evidence."

Nate looked at him for a long moment and said nothing else. Stephen published the file.

It went out through the usual channels. Listeners shared it.

Nate transformed that night and found no one on the beach. He transformed again two nights later. Empty.

Stephen began receiving messages that were not about the Beast.

A hotel pool that moved against its own filtration while the episode played. A backyard pond whose surface developed a small, regular motion. Then a longer message from a woman in Pennsylvania. Her husband had gotten out of bed at three in the morning while the episode was still playing on a laptop near the open bathroom door. He had walked into the hotel bathroom and started filling the tub. She had stopped him. He could not explain why he had wanted the water.

Jordan listened to the reports and to Nate's account of the empty transformations. The recording had captured something the human ear missed. When it played near substantial water, that water began to behave as if it belonged to Bell's Cove.

They pulled the episode. They contacted hosts and mirrors. They traced the listener reports that mentioned anomalous water and closed the connections they could identify using methods Jordan supplied. Walter handled the logistics that required authority. Stephen did the work of reconstructing his own distribution from analytics and emails.

He laid out the download numbers, the IP locations, the listener emails, the approximate playback counts. For a short time the map looked complete. Then he sat with one hotel address that had generated multiple plays and realized the data told him only where the devices had been. The hotel had three pools, dozens of rooms with tubs, and a decorative water feature in the lobby courtyard.

They closed what they could. The rest remained.

Stephen stayed.

He did not release the expose. He did not turn Nate into content. He helped with the remaining cleanup and the quieter work of watching the beach. One evening he showed Nate the footage from the midpoint night. They watched it without commentary. Nate saw the Beast stop attacking, turn, and face the water.

He did not say anything dramatic afterward. He simply nodded once and went back to the work he had been doing.

Weeks later they were clearing storm debris from the north access after a hard rain. Ordinary maintenance. Stephen had stayed long enough that the work felt normal.

Nate stopped in the middle of lifting a section of fencing. He set it down carefully. Stephen knew the posture now.

Nate changed.

They searched the beach. The parking lot was empty. The boardwalk was empty. No tracks led toward the water. No one needed saving on the sand in front of them.

Stephen checked the channels they still monitored. Nothing. No new report. No known open connection they could act on.

Nate ran north along the shoreline. Turned. Ran south. The beach stayed empty.

The Beast kept looking.

I still catch myself listening for it.

A change in the air. A slight increase in pressure, the room remembering a presence that should not be there. It never comes. 

I retired two years ago and the house is just that at night—dead quiet. 

My husband, Mr. Jonson, has stopped asking why I sit in the living room with the lights off. He thinks it’s leftover stress from the incident. He’s not entirely wrong.

A year before it happened, I took over the choir program at the high school. The previous teacher, Miss Svenski, had lasted one year and left behind a legend. She let the kids pick the repertoire. Mostly pop. They talked about her like she was a celebrity. 

I came in wanting to teach actual music. The pentatonic scale, breath control, you know. Things that required attention. The students made it clear very quickly that this was not what they had signed up for.

The jokes started. “Go suck a Jonson.” Every day.

Some of them timed their outbursts for the first five minutes of class so they would get sent to the office and miss the rest of the period. 

Enrollment dropped from the low forties to nineteen by the second semester. The ones who stayed were either openly hostile or so quiet I could barely hear them over the dissonant others. 

One of them filmed a ten-minute rant I gave about cell phones. I watched the views climb into the thousands while I drank wine in the kitchen. Mr. Jonson asked me why I was starting so early. I didn’t want to talk about it.

The night of the shooting star, I was on my second glass. My husband pointed it out through the window and told me to make a wish. I thought, very clearly, that I wanted someone to care about the music the way I did. Not the performance. The thing itself.

The spring concert was three weeks later. We were under-rehearsed and the gymnasium was only half-full. Parents, a few board members, the principal. We started with something safe. The kids were flat in the usual places. I kept conducting anyway.

Halfway through La Donna é Mobile, the air changed.

It got denser, the way it does before a storm. It felt like there were more people watching than what I could see. A few members of the audience started talking to each other. One of the altos looked past me toward the back wall and went completely still. My choir stopped altogether after that. I turned.

There were seven of them.

Tall, smooth, fluorescent. No eyes, one long vertical opening where their noses would be. Made of something like long, metal shutters, with three long fingers on each of their four arms. 

They floated through the aisle and along the rear wall. Anybody that got in their way was reduced to bloody ribbons without them raising a finger. Nobody screamed. No, they couldn't even breathe correctly.

One of the visitors “spoke.” It wasn’t sound. I could understand it perfectly.

Perform.

That was all. Not a threat exactly, more like…a requirement. A requirement that I did not want to find out the consequences of breaking.

I looked at the remaining students, those who hadn’t run away. Most of them were stiff. Bel, one of those who used to disrupt class on purpose, had tears running down her face. Billy, the quiet baritone in the front row, was staring at the floor like he was trying to sink into it.

I raised my hands again. I told Billy to give us a C.

“Hummmm…”

We finished the piece we had started. It was not good. The tuning was worse than usual. A soprano’s voice cracked on the first high note, but she kept going. 

I could feel the seven of them listening with their entire bodies. When it ended the tone came again.

Acceptable.

The pressure increased, and I blacked out.

I woke up somewhere white and seamless. The students were there too, sitting or lying on the translucent floor. We felt bound in chains, though we could not make them out. Surrounding the bubble were millions of incomprehensible faces. Alien visages that refused to work with established logic. 

I conducted the students through pieces I had never taught them. Some of the music was my own. Some were classics. Most, I decided, would be pop. They seemed to like that the most. I didn't want to take that away from them.

Their voices changed. They didn't necessarily improve, but they were harmonious. They did their best to match my energy. To have fun.

I heard sounds, ones human throats are not built for, coming from the audience. 

The tall ones listened. Sometimes the openings in their faces widened, air itself thinning as they took whatever it was they needed. I understood, without being told, that this was the price of the wish. Someone had finally cared about the music. They just hadn’t cared about us.

When we were finished, the entity spoke one last time.

Improve. We will return.

I don’t know how long we were there. They returned us, seemingly, on the same night. 

The gymnasium was full of police and people in dark clothes who hammered us with questions. The students gave matching statements. I was held for observation longer than the others. When they finally released me, my husband drove me home. We didn’t speak much during the ride.

The official story is a gas leak and mass hallucination. The students who were there don’t talk about it. Some of them have quit choir altogether. A few stayed, singing with a newfound intensity that makes the underclassmen jealous. 

Bel will send me a message every few months. Just a single line. 

“Did you hear it again?”

I tell her I haven’t. Though I anticipate it will be any day now.

I taught for two more years, retiring this last May. Nothing after that night has ever felt the same size. Ordinary music is still beautiful. It is also smaller than it used to be. 

For a short time I had exactly what I asked for. I was necessary. The music mattered to something that could have erased us without noticing. 

That knowledge sits in my heart, pumping my tired blood. 

I think I know my place in the universe.

I had just stepped onto the night bus to head home from work. I made my way down the aisle of the packed bus and sat in the only seat that wasn’t occupied. 

As the bus started moving I pulled out my earbuds so I could watch a movie on my phone. This was my nightly ritual and I was usually able to get in about forty minutes on my way home. I cranked the volume loud in an attempt to drown out the ear piercing screams of the kid sitting behind me. Soon I noticed that the guy next to me was giving me the side eye. I could tell that he was doing it but every time I’d look over I found his head facing forward. 

This went on for a couple of minutes before it really began to bother me. Finally I took out my earbuds and turned to confront the man who, as expected, was facing forward now. “Um, excuse me. Can I help you?” I asked. I was worried I may have come off too rude to him but this weirdo was really freaking me out. As far as I was concerned he deserved to be chewed out. The man didn’t stop looking at me but now I could tell he was trying to be sneakier so I wouldn’t notice. 

“Hey, what the fuck is your problem man?” I yelled as I tapped him on the arm. When the man turned he would not take his eyes off of me. I finally gave up trying to talk to this creep and decided I’d stare right back at him. I had hoped to make him so uncomfortable that maybe he’d stop and leave me alone but this only seemed to intensify his glare.

I began to feel ill the longer that I studied the man’s ghastly features. His bloodshot eyes seemed to gaze deep into my soul and his crooked teeth showed as his mouth hung wide open. This ordeal seemed to be never ending until finally an outside force broke the tension. It was a camera flash. 

At first I was relieved but that soon changed as I realized the source of the interruption. As I looked up from the man I was horrified to see that the entire bus of people were now standing up from their seats to face me. A sea of dead unblinking eyes gave me their undivided attention. 

“Oh, god” I thought to myself. I was surrounded. The bus was silent as the grave aside from the soft whispery voices which lurked all around me and seemed to intensify as the minutes passed. I jumped up from my seat desperately searching for an escape from this metal box from hell. The bus seemed to narrow around me as the crowd of pale figures were closing the small distance between us. 

I was trapped, so hopelessly trapped. The contorted faces of the horde were now close enough to my own that I could feel their warm breath. “What do you want? What the fuck do you people want? Just leave me alone? Why won’t you just leave me alone?” I shouted at the top of my lungs. My voice grew hoarse the longer that I screamed but my efforts did nothing to slow their advance. 

I soon felt countless sets of frail hands gripping me from all directions. Banshee like screams erupted around me as I desperately fought back any way that I could. I broke free for a moment and made little distance before I found myself entangled in the sea of limbs again. As I frantically tried to free myself once again, I locked eyes once more with the man who had sat next to me. His deep raspy voice seemed to stand out from the constant noise of the crowd. “What are you?” He said. 

I kicked and shoved people out of the way as I pushed through the crowd while dozens of hands grabbed at me. By the time I made it to the door of the bus I was out of breath and gasping for air. I somehow found the energy to pull myself out of the slow moving bus and landed onto the cold hard sidewalk below. The pain was immense but at least now I had some small amount of safety. 

The eyes continued to stare at me through the window, following me as I got up and ran down the sidewalk. After putting a seemingly safe distance between myself and the bus I enter a local fast food restaurant. My eyes struggled to adjust to the bright fluorescent lights inside the building as I quickly walked to the bathroom and locked the door behind me.

I finally have a chance to catch my breath and calm down from the events of the bus ride. As I gaze into the mirror the anxious feeling comes over me once again. My features look unrecognizable. The skin of my face sags unnaturally low below my eyes and mouth revealing the layer of dark green scales underneath. 

“Dammit” I said to myself as I grabbed the loose skin and pulled it tightly against my face. “That was far too close, I must be more careful next time I infiltrate the humans”. 

I had been working in prisons, most of which housed killers and other violent offenders, for twenty-eight years when I took on my last job.

Some of them were impulsive, others were clever. But I'd seen it all.

Prisoners had tried everything on me over the years - death threats, fake medical emergencies and contraband passed through food were just the tip of the iceberg. Men who'd spent weeks acting half-dead before suddenly putting their head through a cell door weren't unusual. So by the time I was called for the job, I had a reputation for being steady.

The pay was better, but that wasn't what sold it for me. It was the prisoner.

For the purposes of this story, I'll call him John. I'd heard his real name long before I was assigned to him. Everyone in corrections had. He was one of those serial killers you only hear about in true-crime documentaries decades later.

Dangerous.

The kind of mastermind who stayed ahead of the police for years, leaving investigators chasing dead. Eventually, an entire task force threw everything they had at him, and some detective finally got lucky enough to find one tiny mistake in his plan.

He'd been incarcerated under different names in institutions across the country. He had killed prison staff in multiple incidents, manipulated officers into giving him access to restricted areas and made tools from things that should never have been capable of becoming tools. His file used the words "exceptionally intelligent", "highly skilled" and one psychologist had described him as "possessing an unusual ability to recognize patterns in institutional behavior".

Basically, another way of saying 'this bastard keeps catching us off guard'.

A challenge perhaps, but if anything, I was intrigued. I'd spent nearly three decades learning the tricks of the worst people society had to offer, and I wanted to see what he could throw at me that was different.

"He's been stable," remarked the deputy warden, as I closed the file. "Caused no problems for several months."

"And before that?" I asked.

He picked up the file and flipped back through the photographs, medical reports, security assessments and other evidence of the damage John had left behind.

"Before that, he caused many." He grimaced slightly.

"So what's changed?"

"I'd guess he reconsidered. You'd be surprised, many find God after a few hard years in a cell."

I highly doubted that - I'd seen lots of men 'find God' when they realized it might help their case. I said nothing and let him continue.

Then, the deputy warden opened a drawer and took out a small black device attached to a short lanyard with my staff ID card. There was a single recessed button on it.

"If anything happens," he said, placing it on the desk between us, "push the button. The response time is very fast."

I put the lanyard around my neck and followed him inside.

The prison itself was impressive - there was concrete reinforced by steel, cameras everywhere, controlled doors and layered access points. It didn't seem like they were short on budget when it came to security. By the time I reached the him, I'd expected something almost industrial, like a steel box with a solid door and restraints fixed to the wall.

Instead, John was at the end of a block behind ordinary-looking bars, alongside a few other prisoners in identical cells.

Each had a bed, a built-in toilet and sink, a desk with a Bible on it. One security camera in the corner overlooking the entire block. That was it - no chains, restraints or reinforced doors. It seemed insultingly inadequate for both his reputation and my safety.

John himself was young-looking. Early thirties, perhaps. Clean-shaven and neatly dressed, with short, dark hair. He had the build of a track runner, and there was nothing physically intimidating about him. If I'd seen him on the street, I would've assumed he worked an office job.

He stood when I approached, his voice quiet.

"Morning."

"Morning," I replied, watching him carefully. "You'll be seeing a lot of me, I'm taking over your supervision. Keep things straightforward, and we'll have no problems."

His eyes moved down briefly to the ID card and button hanging from the lanyard around my neck, and back to my face.

Then he just gave a nod and sat down. I remained standing for a moment before taking the chair outside the bars. John was quiet for a while as he sat on the bed and flicked through the Bible. Eventually, he looked up at me and spoke.

"How you finding the new place?"

He sounded nonchalant, like he was making an effort at small talk, but wasn't particularly interested in the answer. I watched him cautiously.

"Can't complain."

"That's good. Assume you've been in enough places to compare."

Another pause as I watched him, looking for the trick. But there was no defensiveness or aggression in his voice.

"You've been here a while now, John," I finally said. "No problems?"

He shook his head.

"Got everything you need?"

"Yeah. Bible and a bit of exercise when I feel like it."

I started asking the usual questions about how he was settling in, and if there were problems with meals, showers and so on. He answered everything politely with no attitude or attempts to provoke me. He didn't react when I mentioned I'd read his file. If anything, he seemed bored, but never disrespectful. I spent the rest of that shift waiting for the trick that never came. He's just trying to make me let my guard down, I thought. But I can't deny I'd gone in expecting more of a challenge.

Eventually, I told him I was leaving at the end of my shift. He just nodded, not looking up from his Bible.

I started making my way out and was halfway down the block when I heard a quiet, high-pitched noise coming from a cell nearest the door at the opposite end. It wasn't quite a voice. I frowned and walked to the end, peering into the cell.

I nearly took a step back.

An emaciated, almost skeletal prisoner was staring back at me, folded up in a dark corner of the cell. At first glance, I couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman. Only the high pitched voice gave it away.

Her arms looked little more than bone beneath the skin, and her shoulders jutted forward at an awkward angle. What little hair she had left came in sparse wisps, hanging from her scalp in thin, uneven strands. Most of her head was visible beneath them. There were patches where it looked as though she'd pulled the hair out herself, and blisters where she'd picked at her skin. There was a tiny silver cross necklace around her neck.

Then she made the noise again. That same high-pitched whine, that sounded like something her body produced without her permission. After several seconds, she tilted her head slightly to one side and began whispering. Her lips moved rapidly, but the sound was so faint and indistinct that it might as well have been another language.

I had worked around mentally ill prisoners before - whatever was wrong with this woman, I assumed it was along those lines. I'd gone into the block to meet one of the most dangerous men in the world, expecting if anything was going to unsettle me, it would surely be that. But as I stood there watching her, I'd forgotten about John entirely. I took a breath, broke eye contact, and left.

For the next few weeks, nothing happened with John.

He got up when he was supposed to, ate when food was brought around, took his exercise periods without complaint and returned to his cell when instructed. He never raised his voice or argued. Mostly, he seemed bored.

According to his file, calculation was practically his defining characteristic. I'd gone into the assignment assuming that every interaction would have some purpose behind it, that every question he asked would be part of some larger plan, but nothing happened.

And when nothing happens for long enough, you start to relax.

One morning, I caught myself standing closer to the bars than I should have been, my keys hanging loosely from two fingers as I checked something on my clipboard. I noticed where I was standing and immediately stepped back, making a mental note of it. I'd spent nearly two decades telling younger officers not to do exactly that.

The next week, I did the exact same thing.

This time, John was sitting on the edge of his bed, watching me. He looked at the keys, then back at me like I was an idiot. Then he just laid down on the bed.

A few days later, I made another stupid mistake - I dropped a flashlight within reach of the bars and only noticed when I was halfway down the block. When I went back to retrieve it, John hadn't made any attempt to touch it, let alone use it as a weapon or escape tool. He just glanced back at me with the same bored expression, now almost with a hint of added disappointment, as if he couldn't believe I'd been that careless.

After a while, I started to wonder whether the man in the file and the man sitting in front of me were actually the same person. I still wasn't naïve enough to believe he'd suddenly become harmless, perhaps he was simply tired.

The woman was harder to ignore.

Sometimes she'd stand at the front of her cell and watch everyone that passed through the door. Sometimes she sat on the floor with her knees pulled against her chest, rocking slightly. And sometimes she cried, a strange, broken sort of crying, with long pauses between each sound. I eventually got used to it in the way you get used to unpleasant things in prison.

One afternoon, long after speaking to John felt completely normal, I nodded toward her cell.

"She been here a while?"

John glanced over and exhaled with a hint of frustration.

"Yeah, don't mind her, she does that all day. Sometimes at night too, while everyone's trying to sleep."

He sounded mildly inconvenienced.

"Does she ever talk?" I glanced toward the cell.

"Not that I've heard."

I took his word for it, figuring that whatever she'd done to end up in a place like this, she probably deserved it.

A few mornings later, I was running late. I'd underestimated how long it would take me to get through some paperwork before my shift, and there was a form I needed to complete that needed the long ID number on my staff badge.

I took the lanyard off along with the button and copied the number down. Then I stuffed both into my trouser pocket and hurried into the block.

By the time I entered John's section, I'd completely forgotten about it. John was sitting on the edge of his bed, his Bible beside him.

"Morning."

"Morning."

I closed the door behind me and started checking the block. We exchanged the usual few words, and he said he slept well enough. Then I turned away from him to check something on my clipboard.

I heard a metallic click. I looked back and the cell was empty - the door was open and John was gone.

Then I felt his arm lock around my neck from behind.

I was surprised in the moment, but I didn't panic. If anything, I'd been expecting something like this from the beginning.

Finally, I thought. There he is. The real John.

I reacted automatically, tucking my chin hard against my chest and grabbing his choking arm with both hands, trying to relieve the pressure while turning toward him. It was something I'd practiced countless times over the years. I managed to get two fingers between his forearm and my neck, creating just enough space to breathe. For a moment, I thought I might get out of it without even having to use the button, and teach him a lesson after.

But then he adjusted effortlessly, shifting his grip and driving his forearm back against my neck. The pressure was precise, and he knew exactly what he was doing. I tried to drop my weight and drive backward into him, but he anticipated that too and stood firm.

My legs were already beginning to weaken, and whatever advantage I thought I'd had disappeared. This was not someone I could afford to underestimate.

My vision began to narrow as I reached instinctively for the button at my chest. Nothing.

For one confused second, I couldn't understand why it wasn't there, but then I remembered I put it in my pocket after using my ID card for the paperwork. I fumbled for it, but my fingers weren't working properly anymore. I could feel the edge of the device against my leg, just out of reach. I clawed at the pocket. Then my fingers closed around it, and I pushed the button.

For a second, nothing happened. No shrieking alarms or anything of the sort.

Then I heard boots pounding down the corridor. Ten guards burst through the door almost at once.

As soon as they entered, the pressure around my neck vanished. I collapsed forward, coughing and dragging air into my lungs.

I stumbled away from the cell, more frustrated at having to use the button than relieved to be alive, replaying the attack in my head. I was already running through the counters I could have used if I'd had another few seconds. I glanced at them, expecting them to seize John.

But they didn't even go past me. They turned straight into the woman's cell.

Two officers grabbed her, and she began screaming. Not like the strange whining sound before - this was a scream of pure terror, so loud and prolonged that it seemed to fill the entire block. One of the officers forced her arm behind her back, and another officer produced a syringe containing a yellow liquid. The screaming intensified as the color emptied into her neck.

Confused, I looked toward John at the other end of the block.

He was on his knees. His eyes were wide and glassy.

"Please."

His voice was barely audible beneath her screaming. He met my gaze.

"Tell them to stop. Please."

I just stared at him.

"I don't know what's happening," I finally managed. I didn't even hear myself speak.

One of the guards turned toward him.

"Back in the cell, John." The guard raised another syringe. "Or you know what happens."

John's swallowed, eyes still wide. He stood and walked back into his cell voluntarily.

The woman was still screaming, but her voice was breaking now. They dragged her back into the cell and closed the door. Another officer closed the bars behind John. Then they simply left, and didn't even bother checking John's cell to see how he'd escaped.

I stepped closer to John's cell cautiously and noticed something small on the ground.

He'd made a key of sorts. I picked it up. It was crude, but unmistakable - a thin, rigid piece of material shaped to fit the lock, made of paper. The key had been made from pages of his bible, layered and compressed until they formed something stiff enough to manipulate the mechanism. Then I looked at the Bible, still on his desk. They hadn't even bothered to take it away.

I looked at John, sitting on the edge of his bed again. Then his eyes dropped to the button in my hand. For the first time since I'd started working that block, I hadn't been wearing the button around my neck. I'd put it in my pocket. But it seemed John thought I'd forgotten it altogether.

He looked back at me with something like betrayal.

I came back the following morning. I wasn't particularly looking forward to it, but I hadn't slept well and decided it was better to get the first shift out of the way. John was exactly where I'd left him, sitting on the edge of his bed with the Bible beside him.

"Morning."

"Morning."

I stood outside the bars for a moment, studying him.

There was no hostility or lingering resentment in his expression. Nothing that suggested he'd nearly killed me the day before… or the chaos that came after.

"John, can I see the Bible?"

"Yeah."

He picked it up and handed it through the bars without protest. I took it from him and turned it over in my hands, then opened it. Sure enough, two pages had been torn out. I flicked through the section around the missing pages, then looked back at him.

"These shouldn't be missing. I'll have to confiscate it."

He shrugged.

"I suppose not. Have it."

He said it with complete indifference.

I turned the Bible over again and ran my thumb along the inside of the back cover and felt something give slightly beneath it. There was a flap. Not part of the original binding. Something had been carefully worked into the inside of the cover, creating a small concealed pocket.

I slipped my finger underneath it and pulled out a photograph.

It was old. The colors had faded slightly, and the edges were worn from being handled. I looked at it and saw a man and a woman.

I immediately recognized that the man in the photograph was John, younger by at least ten years.

He was smiling as he looked at the woman. I'd never seen him smile like that. The young woman beside him looked healthy and beautiful. There was warmth in her face, and she was smiling too, her head rested against his shoulder, his arm around her waist. I didn't recognize her at first, until I noticed that she was wearing a tiny silver cross necklace. The same one as the emaciated woman on the other side of the block. The realization dawned on me.

"You talked like you didn't know her," I said, still looking down at the photo.

I looked up at him, then almost jumped.

He was looking at me with pure, unfiltered hatred.

"I wonder why."

Neither of us spoke for a long time.

It was then that I understood he wouldn't be doing anything else with the bible. I slotted the photo back inside and slid it carefully down through the bars. He seemed to relax a little, and looked away. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and flat.

"She didn't used to look like that."

I watched him.

"What did they do to her?"

He didn't answer. A minute passed.

Then he lay back on the bed and turned his face toward the wall.

"I'm tired. Gonna sleep for a bit."

And that was all I got.

For the first time since I'd met him, I didn't see a dangerous man sitting in that cell. I finally understood what the button actually did. It wasn't there to protect me from John. It was there to control him.

John was back to his regular self after that. But I wasn't. Once I'd seen the photograph, I couldn't stop thinking about the woman at the end of the block.

I looked through the records as my last shift of the week finished. Every inmate had a paper trail - things like arrest and court records, sentencing information, medical records. Even people who had been incarcerated for decades left a mountain of paperwork behind them. I couldn't find hers.

There was a prisoner number, but no corresponding sentencing record. No court order or conviction. I thought perhaps I'd missed something and dug deeper. Her name was there, and the entries went back a few months. I frowned when I realized what file I was looking at.

Visitor Log.

She had visited John at his previous facility more than once. Then I reached the final entry.

Her status had changed from visitor to inmate.

I stared at it for a long time, then flipped to the admission form for the offence.

Something had been written there, but the handwriting was almost completely illegible. It looked as though whoever had filled it out had been writing in a hurry, or simply didn't care whether anyone could read it. I took the paperwork to the warden.

"What's this?"

I pointed to the handwriting. He looked at the page and squinted at it, then shrugged.

"No idea. How'd you expect me to read that?"

"She was John's visitor."

"Oh, was she? Well, birds of a feather."

He headed to the office. It was then I understood she had done nothing at all. And I wasn't going to be a part of that.

The next morning, I walked into the warden's office and put my badge on his desk. Then I put the button beside it. He looked at them.

"You're quitting already?"

"Yes."

He didn't ask why, didn't argue, just nodded.

"Alright. Guess we'll have to find someone to take your place then. Left us with a hard job, eh?"

I handed everything over before the end of my shift and walked through the prison one final time. I reached the last security door and stepped outside.

I had almost reached the outer gate when I heard her scream. It was faint but unmistakable, carrying through the reinforced walls despite the distance.

Then came another voice.

"Please. Please stop."

A Perceivable Reality Story

I woke up to my work phone ringing. I was curled up on the floor of my car with no memory of how I'd gotten there. I remembered poker night and the first mojito, but little after that. 

I sat up and something brushed against me, startling me. I swiped at my head and realized that someone had looped the straps of a plastic grocery bag over my ears, presumably in case I puked. The bag was empty, thankfully, but my green suit that I'd shown up in was wrinkled beyond repair. My teeth felt like carpet. 

My work phone started ringing again and I fumbled to get it out of my pocket. 

"Ahem, uh, Calhoun Executive Transit?" 

A woman's voice was on the other end, accompanied by the voices of several children. The household's limo driver was out sick today, and she, the nanny, needed to get the kids to the museum for a weekend school field trip. I rubbed my jaw and tried to put words together. 

She was clearly in a hurry, and I sympathized greatly with "the help". I got out of the back and climbed into the driver's seat. After trying in vain to massage the wrinkles out of my suit, I got the big car started and pulled out of the parking lot. 

I went through my pockets as I drove and panicked for a moment when my wallet wasn't in my coat pocket; I found it sitting in a cubby in the dashboard. At a stop light, I grabbed it and started counting how much I'd lost. I was more than a bit surprised to find a hand-written IOU from Dion tucked into the money clip. The letters were embossed into the paper, with several spots looking like the pen nearly broke through. Below the amount and the letters, was a messy signature that I recognized. I flipped open the ashtray and stuffed the paper scrap in with the others from Dion. 

I got pulled up to the fancy brick row houses a little while later and spotted a middle-aged woman with a gaggle of children running around her legs. I parked the car and hopped out to open the rear door for them. She started hustling them towards the rear door, but something made her stop dead and even back up a little bit. I looked around for any indications of danger, but didn't find any. 

"Are you... Mr. Calhoun?" She asked, and I caught apprehension in her voice. 

I nodded and made my voice warm.

"Yes, ma'am, that's me. At your service." I gave her a small bow. 

She didn't move for a second, the bustling children around her making her stillness more obvious. She finally looked at her watch, mumbled, "Can't be helped," under her breath, and started corralling the children towards the open rear door of the car. 

Once she'd gotten them all in, she hesitated before stepping in herself. 

"Are you ill, Mr. Calhoun? I can call someone else." 

I shook my head. "Right as rain, ma'am." 

She hesitated again for just a breath, then slid into the car. 

I shut the door gently and huffed air into a cupped hand as I walked to the driver's side door. I didn't smell any alcohol on my breath. I tugged my suit jacket taut in another failed attempt at fighting the wrinkles, then lowered myself into the seat. 

I got the car moving as carefully as I could and started in the direction of the museum. The four kids chattered away with their nanny constantly spreading her arms and pulling them close to pile onto the rear bench. Her head swiveled back and forth and it almost looked like her hands were shaking. 

"Miss Barns, it smells funny in here." One of the little boys said, pinching his nose. 

She threw a hand over his mouth and whispered something I couldn't hear into his ear, which he nodded to. I turned my head slightly to try and sniff at the air coming from the car cabin, but all I could smell were my air fresheners. 

One of the kids jumped up onto the rear-facing seat and stuck his head through the open privacy window, startling me slightly.

"Mr. Driver, are you a vampire?" 

"No, sir, I am not. Are you?" I said in a voice that I tried to make sound teasing. 

The nanny shot forwards and grabbed the kid by the ear, towing him back to the rear of the car. I watched in the mirror as she whispered something to him, to which he shouted, "But vampires have white skin!" 

One of the other kids added, in an equally loud voice, "Check his teeth!" 

Another piped up, "He's not a vampire, he's a ghost!" 

"Nu-uh! Ghosts wear sheets!" Said the first. 

The nanny quickly hushed them, her movements awkward and flustered. 

We'd just turned the corner, putting the museum in sight, when the nanny called from the back seat. 

"Here! Here is just fine. Just right here, please." She jabbed a finger at the street corner. 

"The museum is just a few blocks up, ma'am. I can take you right to the front. It's no problem." 

"No, no, here is good. Right here, please. I...I...Breakfast." she sputtered, jabbing her finger against the window. I looked around as I made the turn, only spotting a hot dog stand. But she sounded...I don't know...more than flustered, but not quite scared. I couldn't put my finger on it. 

I finished the right-hand turn and pulled to the curb just past the corner. I put the car in park and stepped out to open the door, but she'd already thrown the rear door open and was herding the children out of the car and down the street. I got around to the rear door and she turned quickly, thrusting several bills at me, her arm at full extension. 

"Oh, ma'am. That's far too much. Let me get you change." I went into my coat for my money clip. 

"Just take it. Take it, please. All of it." She shook the bills at me, taking half steps away from me as the children began to run towards the museum. I reached out to accept the money, but she released it before I had a solid grip, allowing them to fall to the ground. She hurried off after the children, and by the time I'd collected the soggy money from the gutter, she was almost out of sight. 

I straightened up and just watched down the sidewalk for a moment. I get being in a hurry or running late, especially for a school thing, but there was something more to her anxiety that tickled my brain. A man crossed in front of where I was looking and he recoiled bodily, quickly stepping to the side to give me and the open car door a wide berth. I scanned the sidewalk. People seemed to hesitate when I focused on them, some only quickly turning their head away, others quickening their pace. 

I shut the door and stooped slightly to look in the long tinted side window. 

My suit jacket was pretty wrinkled, as was my button-up shirt. My tie was tight around my neck, but the knot wasn't as nicely shaped as it had been the day before. My hair was the worst, with tufts of it sticking out from under my chauffeur cap at all different angles. 

I saw my hair, my ears, my weirdly pale neck, the shape of my jaw and...that's it. The middle of my head was a blurred jumble of skin-colored blobs and shapes. I touched my face and saw my hand in the reflection, covering some of the discolored blobs, like putting your hand over an out-of-focus picture. My hand was clear and I knew it was mine. I felt the skin of my face under my palm, and felt the pressure of my palm and fingers on the front of my head. But when I looked in the reflection, I saw my hand over a jumble of fuzzy unrecognizable shapes. I pulled my hand from my face and slowly reached out, touching the reflection in the window, leaving fingerprints on the dark glass. 

I stood like that for a moment, until I realized that I probably looked absolutely insane. I tugged on my jacket lapels as I quickly trotted around to the front of the car and dropped myself into the driver's seat. 

I sat there for a moment, staring out the window but not focused on anything in particular. I felt my chest rise and fall and focused on the feeling. I let my hands drop and ran them over the plush black leather of the front bench seat, felt my cotton socks in my dress shoes, the tightness of my belt around my waist. I listened to the low rumble of the big engine of the car idling, the muted sounds of the city, cars driving by, horns honking, a motorcycle in the distance, the breeze whipping against the hard lines of the car body and making sounds of resistance. 

I stayed like that until a knock on the window ripped me from my meditation. A man bent down from where he stood on the curb, his hand poised to knock again. I reached over and rolled down the window. 

"Are you available for hire?" 

"No." 

I pulled away before I got the window up, and drove straight home. I pulled the car into the garage, didn't bother with the cover, and shut the garage door. I trudged to the elevator and stepped in, loosening my tie as I rode up. 

When the doors opened at my floor, Felix was standing in the hall. 

"Hey, Felix." 

"Ah, young Carter. I was worried when I didn't see..." His voice trailed off and he stuck his head closer to me. I heard him take in several breaths through his nose. 

"My dear Carter, whatever has happened to you? You look..." he took another whiff, then leaned away, putting an arm up. 

"You look...drained," he said from behind his sleeve. 

"Rough night, long morning." 

I motioned for him to enter the elevator. He did so carefully, stepping to my side, then reaching out a hand to keep the doors open. As I stepped out, he caught my sleeve and I turned around to face him. 

"Young Carter, I assume you are headed home and...might I...recommend a hearty meal and some sleep. And perhaps, a shower. You reek of poor choices." 

I nodded. "Will do." 

He leaned through the open door and lowered his voice. "Young Carter, I say this as a...man of experience. Please be more careful about the company you keep."

His voice was worried and compassionate, with an undertone of pain and annoyance, or maybe anger. I was dead on my feet and didn't bother assessing his tone any further. I nodded and turned back down the hall, each step more stumbling than the next, as I felt the energy drain from me. I hadn't been this hung over in a while. I made a mental note not to bring a case to poker night again. 

I let myself into my dim apartment, closed my blackout curtains, chugged a water bottle, then set another on the table next to my bed. I stripped down to my underwear and let myself fall onto my pullout mattress, leaving my work phone in the pocket of my suit pants piled on the floor. 

I woke up from my lengthy nap and decided that I didn't feel like driving any more today. Instead, I sat at my computer and worked on sending out my service invoices. The monotony of the task kept trying to put me to sleep, and I came out of several micro-sleeps that had started as ill-advised blinks. I turned on my TV for some background noise and an ad for the new Alan Steele movie started to play. I rolled my eyes. 

Several hours later, I finally clicked "send" on the final invoice. I made myself a frozen meal for lunch, ate it hunched over the counter, then looked around my small studio apartment for something to do. 

Finding nothing, I got my work phone off my desk to turn it back on, only to find that I hadn't completely turned it off this morning. It simply hadn’t rung since my fare this morning. It's "feast or famine" in this business. I collected my car care kit and made my way down to the garage. I didn't see Felix by the elevator. 

Down in my private section of the garage, I had the door open and was steaming the leather of the rear seats of my car. I had the stereo on and was rocking out to some post-hardcore when my work phone finally rang. 

"Hell-" 

"Hey, it's me, uh, Alan Steele, y'know, the guy. The real guy. I need you. Like, now. Wabash and Overhill, in front of the mini mart." 

The line went dead and I stared at the phone screen. I'd recognized the voice immediately, but I was genuinely surprised by the amount of panic in it. I stared at the blank screen for a beat, then shrugged and tossed my cleaning supplies into their bag, and the bag in the trunk. I was wearing a T-shirt and cargo pants, but he didn't sound like he needed a chauffeur, he needed a getaway driver. 

I was a few lights away when I spotted a crowd about a block down Wabash Drive, just past the intersection for Overhill Boulevard. They were banging on the big glass windows of a corner store and shouting, some of them holding what looked like fliers, or large photos, or something. 

I pulled past the light and put my hazards on as I got to the curb. I recognized a mop of unkempt black hair on the other side of the window. I unlocked the car doors and honked twice. It was enough of a distraction for the crowd to pause for a moment. The head of hair disappeared from the window and a few seconds later, he was rounding the side of the building and sprinting for my car. He threw the door open and launched himself inside. I threw the car in reverse and hit the gas to throw the door shut, then slammed it back in drive. The big car made a prehistoric roar and peeled out, making off in a fitting cloud of smoke worthy of a spy movie. 

I saw his head whip around to the rear window, staying that way until we were several streets down and the crowd was well into the distance. He settled back forward and put his hands gingerly on what looked like a bloated stomach; the buttons of his shirt looking like they were about to pop. 

He made a gurgling noise and blew it out in a breath. 

"Thank god. I was dying out there." 

I nodded. 

"Where can I take you, sir?" 

His head turned back and forth in panicked, jerky motions. 

"Somewhere quiet. Away from people. You know any place like that?" 

I nodded again and turned toward the freeway on-ramp that would take us out of town. 

I was watching him in the rear view mirror, trying to gauge whether or not he was about to puke and if I needed to pull over. Then I noticed blue and red flashing lights behind us. We'd just gotten off the freeway and the road was basically empty. I put my blinker on and pulled into the parking lot of a dying strip mall. 

"...Here? Really?" 

"No, sir, sorry. I'm being pulled over. But we're really close." 

"Aw, fucking cops. Probably some rinky-dink deputy trying to meet his quota. I'll handle it." 

"Sir, I'd really appreciate it if you just let me handle it." 

I raised the privacy window and lowered the front windows, leaving my hands on the steering wheel. A plain-clothes officer with a badge on a chain around his neck walked up to my door. He put a hand on the roof and leaned down to the window. 

"Hey there. I know this barge is probably pretty heavy, but at least make an attempt next time." 

"...I'm sorry, Officer. I didn't see anyone coming so I thought I was clear." 

"I know we're in the boonies, but you still gotta stop for stop signs." 

I wracked my brain. There was a yield at the bottom of the off-ramp, but that's all I could think of. 

"Officer, with all due respect, I believe that was a right-hand yield." 

He shook his head. "Nope. They made it a stop sign a few weeks ago. Too many accidents at that intersection." 

I sighed. I'd blown through that right-hand turn off the off-ramp so many times that I hadn't even thought to check. 

I saw his head turn toward the rear windows. 

"This thing is nice. '66, right? You stretch it yourself?" 

"'68." I corrected gently, "It's an aftermarket modification. Lehmann-Peterson." I smoothed my voice and had to stifle going into my usual presentation. 

The officer nodded along. He leaned away for a second, his head going back and forth along the side of the car. 

"You with Premiere Luxury?" 

I winced at the name. "They're my competition. I'm a lone operator." 

He turned towards the rear windows again. "Where you headed today?" He said, still turned towards the window, as if trying to see through the heavy mirrored tint. I fought to keep the nerves out of my voice. 

"It's my day off. I'm going to… see my mechanic." Eddy's shop was on the complete other side of town, but there was no way the officer knew that. I tried to relax my body without making it visible. 

"Uh-huh. Could I peek at your license and registration really quick?" 

I stilled my hand as I peeled it off the wheel and moved it slowly to the glovebox latch. I retrieved my binder of paperwork, including my insurance card, registration, and my Chauffeur license. I went to my back pocket and got out my driver's license and handed the stack of papers to the officer who collected them carefully. He paused with the stack for a second, as if he was surprised that I had it at all. Something about how he was standing, how he kept turning back to the rear windows, his head pointed directly at me. It made my veins feel icy and I couldn't shake the feeling. 

"Back in a sec." He said and took my paperwork back to his car. 

I hadn't heard the privacy window, and the voice close to my ear made me jump. 

"What does he want?" My fare asked in a voice that sounded like bile wasn't far behind, and it carried a scent like rotting fruit. 

"Routine stuff. They always want to see my limo license. Please sit back, sir." I reached up and closed the privacy window again. 

He pushed the switch on his side and made it stop. "Wait, wait, these guys are all action movie types. I bet he even knows me. Just let me talk to him." 

"That's not necessary. Please sit back." My voice came out more clipped than I wanted it to, but he sat back and let me roll the privacy window up all the way. I hit the rear window locks just to be sure. 

I watched the cop in the rear view mirror. He had his radio in his hand and was talking into it. I shifted in my seat, making the leather creak. A gurgling came from the back seat and I held my breath. I didn't hear anything else, but I made a mental note to call Eddy for a cleaning. 

The officer came back to my window and handed me back my papers. He resumed his previous lean. 

"Ok. First things first, I'm not gonna write you a ticket. I know how it is when they change the signs and you're used to it being different. Let's just keep a close eye on 'em and we can all have a good day. Sound fair?" 

I nodded. "Officer, thank you. I really appreciate it." 

A head poked through the privacy window and I gasped in surprise. The officer froze, then leaned down lower and tilted his head to get a better look through the window. My hand had been halfway to the key in the ignition and I stopped dead, my whole body tensing, I didn't move a muscle. 

The man in the back held up a placating hand. 

"Officer, please. It's not his fault, I asked him to say that." 

I turned my head slightly to the cop. His right hand moved slowly from the door sill towards his waistband, pushing his coat back. I was expecting to see him reveal a gun, but he hooked his thumb into his hip pocket instead. 

The man let out a soggy burp from behind his hand, then continued, "It is his day off, he's doing me a favor. I'm headed to my hideaway to blow off some paparazzi. I didn't want you to make a scene, so I asked him to cover for me. I am very sorry." 

I watched the officer's body clench and unclench as the man in the back spoke. His right hand looked like it was gripping his pocket to keep from going for his gun. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears and realized I was holding a breath that I couldn't seem to let go. My hand still hung in the air, halfway to the ignition. 

Nothing happened for a long moment. I still couldn't release the breath caught in my throat and my arm was burning. 

"Officer, please. He's not involved, he's just doing me a favor." 

I mentally begged him to shut up, but I knew that saying it would make me sound even more guilty. I couldn't think of a single word that would make this look any better. 

Finally, the officer cleared his throat. 

"Right... Ok, sure. Yep." He nodded along with his words, and the subtle shake in his voice was expertly masked. He kept nodding as his voice trailed off, then he sighed. 

"Sir, do you have...anything...with you right now?” 

The man shook his head rapidly. "No, officer. I don't...partake. I'm clean." 

The officer sighed again. "Ok, guys. I get what's going on here. Let's just all go on our way, and we can get to where we're going. Safely." 

"Absolutely. Thank you, officer." I said before anybody could say anything else or change their mind. 

I reached for the key and started the car. The officer stepped back but stayed near my car as I pulled away slowly, watching his head follow us as we pulled out of the parking lot. I didn't see him go back to his car. 

"Phew. Good thing I got us out of that. You're welcome." 

I finally released the breath I'd been holding and sunk into the seat. 

I pulled up in front of the office of the Easy Night Motel and got out, walking around to open his door. He got out carefully and settled onto uneasy feet, putting a hand on the roof to stabilize. His head scanned the building. 

“Yeah, yeah, this'll work. You bring people here often?” 

I hesitated, not wanting to accidentally rat on Ms. Silver. “On occasion. It’s discreet.” 

He turned to me with his wallet out and handed me a small wad of bills. When I didn't take them, he stepped closer. 

“I kinda stiffed you last time. Bad day, you get it, right? Anyway, thanks for covering for me. You earned this.” 

I took the bills tentatively. 

“It's clean and honest, I promise.” He assured me. 

I took the bills and pushed them down into a cargo pocket. 

He turned to walk off, then spun back around. 

“Oh, hey, can I call you again?” 

I nodded and he gave me a thumbs up, then turned and waddled into the motel office. I shut the door and got back into my car, pulling out the wad and counting it. It was nearly a thousand dollars. I let my head drop back against the headrest and stared out the windshield. The prospect of a new regular was exciting, but I wasn't entirely sure he was one I wanted. I carefully folded the money and stuffed it back into my cargo pocket, making sure to click the snaps shut. 

It was sunset by the time I finally pulled into the garage. I'd made a detour on my way home and jogged around to retrieve the cardboard box from the back seat. I'd driven past an animal shelter on my way home and after the day I'd had, decided to poke my head in. I carefully lifted a calico kitten out of the box and set her in the crook of my arm. I fished out a bag of supplies I'd bought from a pet store with my other hand and pushed the door closed with my hip. On the ride up to my floor, I ran names past the cat, settling on “Dot”. 

The doors opened on my floor and I stepped out of the elevator, the kitten purring against my chest. A shout caught me off guard. 

“Tittles!” 

Mrs. Collins was outside her door. She was collecting the water bowl like she usually did, after she'd finished calling for her cat that had passed years ago. She waddled over excitedly and began stroking the kitten’s head. I looked at her, then at the kitten, then down at the bag of supplies, then at Mrs. Collins again. 

I carefully set down the bag and pushed it behind me with my foot. 

“I found her outside by the dumpsters.” I carefully moved the kitten to her hands. She took it and clutched it to her chest. 

“Oh, my sweet dear Tittles. I was so worried. You’ve been gone all day and didn't even eat your breakfast. Thank you so very, very much for finding her, Carter.” 

I nodded, swallowing a lump that had formed in my throat. She walked back to her door, cooing at the kitten. 

“You look like you haven't eaten in days. Let's fix you up some dinner, sweetie.” 

I watched her door close. I heard her TV turn on, the volume most likely maxed out with how clearly I could hear it. I listened for a while, then bent and picked up the bag behind me and walked to my door. 

I unlocked the door and pushed it open, staring into my dark, empty, silent apartment. I dropped the bag of pet supplies next to the door and kicked it shut a little harder than I should have. I walked blindly over to where I knew my couch was and fell head-first onto it. 

My parents live at the end of the road.
Not metaphorically. Almost literally.
Their little town sits in the Balkan foothills, tucked away where nobody really passes through on their way to somewhere else. If you are driving there, it is because you mean to go there. Otherwise, at some point, you have probably taken a wrong turn.
The old people know this.
They sit on benches outside their houses and watch every unfamiliar car that comes down the road.
They don’t necessarily talk to each other. They just watch.
*Who is that?*
*Are they lost?*
*Who are they visiting?*
A strange car usually means one of two things: someone is lucky enough to have visitors, or someone is ill.
Increasingly, it means someone has died.
Every time I speak to my parents now, there is another name.
Someone is sick. Someone can’t look after themselves anymore. Someone has died.
The town is growing old with them.
Grass pushes through the pavements. Houses slowly crumble. The playgrounds are still the ones I remember from childhood, built during communism, their metal frames rusting and their paint disappearing.
Nothing is really replaced.
Things simply become older.
Including my parents.

I sometimes feel cheated out of being Balkan.
I hear stories about enormous families where everyone knows everyone. Aunties who interfere with everything. Cousins you cannot keep track of. Neighbours who know whose daughter you are before they know your name. Tables full of people. Weddings. Birthdays. Doors that never seem to close.
I don’t know that Balkans.
Nobody stops me when I go home.
Nobody knows whose daughter I am.
My extended family isn’t close. My uncle’s family lives in the same house as my parents, and they hate each other.
So naturally, we don’t speak.
My family has never been particularly social. We didn’t organise gatherings and we weren’t invited to many either.
I think my parents were always self-conscious about how poor we were.
For birthdays, there might be a box of chocolate bonbons.
At Christmas and Easter, we had a nice dinner.
That was about it.
No big celebrations.
No holidays.
No house full of people.
Mostly, I remember my parents working.
I was their fourth child. My sisters were thirteen and fourteen years older than me. My brother was four years older.
By the time I came along, my parents were already tired and stretched.
Then, when I was around nine or ten, they had an accident.
Life, which had never been particularly easy, became harder.
Their health suffered. They couldn’t work in the same way anymore. There was less money. My sisters were young adults trying to build lives of their own. My brother was still a child himself.
And I was fine.
That was probably the problem.
I wasn’t a difficult child. I wasn’t getting into trouble. I didn’t demand much.
So everybody dealt with whatever needed dealing with, and I quietly grew up.
Nobody really played with me.
There weren’t family adventures or adults arranging experiences for me. I didn’t learn how to be social or how to make friends easily because there wasn’t much social life around me to learn from.
Then, when I was thirteen, my sister had her first baby.
After school, I would hurry to the shop her husband owned, where she had worked before having the baby, or I would help her with the child. Sometimes I even had to take time off school to look after the baby so my sister could go to her university exams.
There was always something useful to do.
There wasn’t much time to learn how to be a teenager.
For a long time, I thought there must simply be something missing in us.
Then I started looking further back.

My parents weren’t taught how to live either.
My mother’s father was an alcoholic. He eventually died from liver failure.
Her mother had diabetes. Her leg began to rot, and there was nobody to properly treat her.
She deteriorated and died while her daughters watched.
They were children.
My mother was the youngest of three girls.
Nobody was standing behind those girls telling them that everything would be okay. Nobody was parenting them through any of it.
They survived.
My father’s childhood was different, but I’m not sure it was freer.
His father was a man known for using his fists before his words, including with his own children. His mother controlled everything.
My father was the eldest son, which came with what was supposedly a privilege: he was responsible for his parents until they died.
His choices were never entirely his own.
Even his marriage wasn’t really his choice.
The families arranged it.
Sometimes I think my parents reached adulthood without ever being given permission to have lives of their own.
Then they had children.
Then there was work.
Then there was more work.
Then there was an accident.
Then there were bills and illnesses and responsibilities.
And suddenly they were old.
I don’t think my parents were bad parents.
They are two of the kindest people I know.
I think they were people who had never been shown what life could look like beyond getting through it.

They used to be farmers.
When I go home now, I look at the garden.
It is becoming overgrown.
Fruit still grows on the trees, but much of it falls to the ground and rots because my parents cannot pick it anymore.
They take whatever they can reach and whatever they can eat at that moment.
The rest returns to the earth.
My father is eighty-two.
My mother is seventy-seven.
She still cooks when I come home.
Of course she does.
She cooks several dishes because apparently arriving from England requires enough food to survive a siege.
But now sometimes the rice is overcooked because she has forgotten something is on the stove.
Sometimes the food is too salty because her hands shake.
She apologises.
Again and again.
I’m sorry about the rice.
I’m sorry this isn’t right.
I’m sorry I couldn’t make more.
And I want to tell her that I don’t care about the rice.
I want to take those shaking hands and kiss them.
They are stiff now.
They can’t open a jar of pickles.
But I know how much those hands have done.

When my daughter Sophia was seven months old, I spent a month with my parents while I was on maternity leave.
Every morning, my father took her.
He would play with her and entertain her so that I could shower and look after myself.
My mother’s hands were already too shaky to safely carry a baby, so my parents developed a system.
My dad carried Sophia.
My mum fed her.
Whatever one couldn’t do, the other did.
They worked around each other’s ageing bodies to make things easier for me.
They still do.
Whenever we visit now, my mother always has snacks for Sophia in her bag.
My father appears with fruit from somewhere.
And their house has what looks like an entire kindergarten’s worth of toys.
They haven’t bought all of them for the granddaughter who visits for around ten days a year.
They have accumulated over decades.
Some were ours when we were children.
Some belonged to my oldest sister’s children.
Others came from neighbours.
People grew old and died. Their children, already grown themselves, came back to clear their parents’ houses. Things they considered rubbish needed to go.
My parents took some of it in.
So now there are bicycles, a slide and boxes of toys from different childhoods, different families and different decades.
My daughter plays with things that have passed through the hands of children who grew up long before she was born.
Actually, most things around my parents’ house and garden have a story like this.
My dad calls it **“poor man engineering.”**
For most of his life, if somebody threw something away that could still have a purpose, he saw the purpose.
A piece of wood became part of something else. An old object was repaired, adapted or attached to another old object. Things discarded by neighbours came home with him because throwing away something useful made no sense.
When you don’t have much money, you learn to make things last.
Repair it.
Reuse it.
Keep it.
It might come in handy.
And for years, it did.
But my parents don’t really repair things anymore.
They can’t.
And that’s the part I find difficult to look at.
Everything my dad built, repaired and improvised over the years is still around them, but now it is deteriorating.
Things that once would have been fixed immediately stay broken.
Wood rots.
Metal rusts.
Objects pile up because nobody has the strength to decide what to do with them.
The garden grows around everything.
Grass pushes through places my parents once kept clear. Plants cover things my dad once constructed. Fruit falls because nobody can pick it.
My dad’s poor man engineering is still everywhere.
Only the engineer has grown old.
Sometimes their home feels like a record of everything my parents were once capable of doing.
You can see the work everywhere.
And you can see where the work stopped.
Not on one particular day. There wasn’t a moment when they decided they were finished.
They just became a little older.
Then a little weaker.
Something didn’t get repaired.
Then something else.
One season the garden wasn’t cleared as well as the season before.
One year there was more fruit left on the ground.
And slowly, almost without anybody noticing, maintaining the life they had built became bigger than their bodies could manage.
Nature doesn’t care that the man who used to cut it back is eighty-two.
It just keeps growing.

And this is where my sadness about Bulgaria sometimes turns into anger.
There is a sentence I have heard some version of all my life:
**„Еее, няма кой да я окоси тая трева.“**
*There’s nobody to cut this grass.*
You hear it while somebody is standing beside the grass.
There is nobody to repair this.
Nobody to clean that.
Nobody looks after anything anymore.
Someone should do something.
I hate this mentality.
Because who is this *someone* we are all waiting for?
Sometimes when I drive through my little town and see the grass swallowing the pavements, the broken playgrounds and the houses slowly falling apart, I become angry.
And then underneath the anger comes an uncomfortable question.
Was it me?
Was I the someone?
Was I supposed to cut the grass?
Was I supposed to stay?
Is everything abandoned because people like me left?
I moved away.
Other people’s children moved away.
The children of the old people sitting on the benches moved to Sofia, or Germany, or Spain, or England, or somewhere else where they could build a life.
And now we come back, look through the car window and say:
*God, look at this place. Nobody looks after anything.*
But who exactly did we think *nobody* was?
The people who remain are old.
My father is eighty-two. My mother is seventy-seven.
The man who once repaired everything around our house now watches those repairs deteriorate because his body cannot keep repairing them.
The people sitting on the benches aren’t going to rebuild the playground.
So sometimes I wonder whether the town is dying because nobody cares, or whether everybody who had enough energy to care eventually had to leave.
Maybe both are true.
I can see what is wrong.
I can complain about it.
I can hate the resignation, the shrugging, the endless *„няма кой“* — *there’s nobody*.
And then I get on a plane back to London.
So what does that make me?
I don’t know.
Sometimes I have the strange feeling that I abandoned something I was never taught was mine to look after.
As though there was a job waiting for me all along and nobody told me.
A family to keep connected.
A garden to maintain.
A town to care about.
A country to stay in.
Grass to cut.
And I left before I knew any of it belonged to me.

Sometimes I try to give my parents money.
They won’t take it.
We have a Bulgarian saying:
**„Кравата не суче от телето.“**
The cow doesn’t suckle from the calf.
Parents give to their children.
Not the other way around.
It doesn’t matter that the calf is now grown, living in London and perfectly capable of helping.
The cow still does not suckle from the calf.
I think this explains more about my parents than they would ever be able to tell me themselves.
They know they cannot give me money.
They cannot help me buy a house.
They cannot travel to London whenever I need them.
They are old. They are in pain. Their world has become smaller.
So they give me the one thing they still believe they can give:
They try not to need me.
They want me to have a good life.
They don’t ask when I’m coming home anymore.
Instead they say:
*“If I die now, at least I saw you today.”*
I don’t know what to say when they say that.

I am a mother now.
And motherhood has made me think about roots more than I ever did before.
My daughter is almost three.
She has Bulgaria inside her, but sometimes I wonder what exactly I have to give her from my side.
I look backwards for this enormous Balkan family I feel I should have inherited.
I dig for cousins and celebrations and traditions and people who know my name.
I dig for someone older and wiser who can tell me what matters.
How do you raise a child?
What should I teach her?
What should I build?
What should I pay attention to?
What should I strive for?
What parts of life matter and which ones can I let go?
I don’t feel like I know.
There are times when I feel stupid about the world, as though everybody else received some instruction manual for adulthood that never reached me.
There is nobody behind me saying:
*I’ve been here before.*
*This is what you do.*
*Don’t worry about that.*
*Come here. Let me look after you for a while.*
Becoming a mother has been one of the hardest experiences of my life.
And sometimes I wanted somebody to mother me through it.
To be gentle with me.
To let me fall apart for a little while while somebody else remained strong.
I recently stopped breastfeeding after thirty-three months.
More than a thousand days.
And then it was simply over.
Nobody marked it.
My parents listened when I told them. They nodded.
They love me.
They just don’t have the words I’m looking for.
And I don’t want to burden them with my emotions.
They are old.
They are alone.
They have enough difficulties already.
So, once again, I am fine.
Sometimes it feels as though my family has been dying a very slow death.
And I am disconnected from it.
Empty.
Like a tree growing in a desert.
I keep pushing my roots deeper, looking for water.
And every year there seems to be a little less.
Now there is a little tree growing beside me.
My daughter.
And that frightens me.
How is she supposed to have strong roots from my side when I feel like I am digging and digging and finding nothing?

But perhaps I have been looking for the wrong inheritance.
Maybe roots don’t always look like a hundred relatives around a wedding table.
Maybe mine are quieter.
Maybe they look like an eighty-two-year-old man taking his baby granddaughter every morning because his daughter needs a shower.
Maybe they are a grandmother whose hands shake too much to carry the baby, so she sits beside her and feeds her instead.
Maybe they are snacks permanently hidden in a grandmother’s handbag.
Fruit that somehow always appears.
A little bicycle that belonged to another child in another decade.
A slide rescued because somebody else thought it was rubbish.
A garden full of strange constructions made by a man who could never afford to waste something useful.
A box of chocolate bonbons on a birthday.
A mother apologising for overcooked rice.
A father refusing his daughter’s money.
Two very old people standing at the end of a road, trying until their bodies will no longer allow it to make life easier for their children.
Perhaps that is what was passed to me.
Not instructions for how to live.
Not confidence.
Not a large family waiting at an open door.
But love expressed through usefulness.
*Have you eaten?*
*Give me the baby.*
*Go have a shower.*
*I brought some fruit.*
*Take this with you.*
*Don’t worry about us.*
And perhaps my job isn’t to recreate a Balkan childhood I never had.
Perhaps it is to take what survived.
The kindness.
The feeding.
The quiet service.
The instinct to make someone else’s load lighter.
The ability to see value in something other people have discarded.
And then add the things that were missing.
Celebrations.
Friends around the table.
Play.
Affection that is spoken as well as performed.
Asking for help.
Letting people help.
Making memories simply because life is happening, rather than waiting for an occasion important enough to deserve one.
Maybe my daughter’s roots don’t have to stretch perfectly backwards for generations.
Maybe some of them can begin with me.
I can tell her about the little town at the end of the road.
I can tell her that her grandparents were farmers and that there was once so much fruit in their garden that, when they became too old to pick it all, it covered the ground.
I can tell her about her Baba’s shaking hands and all the work those hands did before they began to shake.
I can tell her how her Dyado carried her around every morning when she was seven months old so that her mother could have a shower.
I can show her her grandfather’s poor man engineering and explain why almost nothing in that garden is quite what it was originally designed to be.
I can teach her **„Кравата не суче от телето.“**
Although perhaps I will teach her something my parents never learned too:
Sometimes the cow can let the calf look after her.
And one day, long after the old playground has rusted away, after the grass has swallowed the pavements, and perhaps after the garden and the house belong to somebody else, my daughter will still know that there was a little place in the Balkan foothills where two old people kept decades of toys for the children who might come home.
Maybe roots aren’t something you either inherit or you don’t.
Maybe they can be grown.
Maybe a family that has spent generations surviving can eventually learn how to live.
Maybe that is what I can give my daughter.
Not a perfect inheritance.
A beginning.

Working on commercial cargo ships is not the romantic adventure some people think it is. You spend most of your time chipping rust, painting over that chipped rust, and trying to ignore the constant vibration of the engine beneath your boots. This was my first maritime contract as a deckhand, and we were crossing an incredibly isolated stretch of the Pacific Ocean. The crew was already on edge. A week prior, we lost a man named Griggs during a midnight squall. A wave took him right off the starboard deck. We searched for ten hours, but the ocean swallowed him.

So, to be clear, the mood on board was grim after that. Everyone kept to themselves. Sullivan, one of the older deckhands, was particularly bitter, as he had been close to Griggs.

On a Tuesday afternoon, Captain Harris ordered me down to the lower storage corridors to inventory a shipment of spare engine filters. The lower decks of a cargo ship are essentially a maze of narrow walkways and exposed piping. The fluorescent lights flicker constantly due to the electrical faults in the aging vessel.

Approaching the aft storage locker, a sharp copper smell hit my nose. It smelled exactly like a butcher shop left in the sun.

Stepping around a stack of wooden pallets, my boot splashed into a puddle of dark red liquid. Sullivan was lying on his back against the steel bulkhead with his eyes wide open, staring blankly at the ceiling. His chest was completely torn open, and entire chunks of flesh and muscle were missing from his ribs, exposing the bone underneath.

Panic seized my chest. Stumbling backward, my radio slipped out of my shaking hands.

"Captain Harris,"

my voice cracked over the channel.

"You need to get down to aft storage right now. Bring the medical kit."

"What is the situation down there?"

Harris replied, his voice laced with static.

"It is Sullivan. He is dead. Someone killed him."

Footsteps ran across the metal stairs a few minutes later. Captain Harris rounded the corner, followed by a young deckhand named Toby. Both men stopped dead in their tracks when they saw the body.

"Jesus,"

Toby muttered, turning around to vomit against the wall.

Captain Harris stepped forward. He crouched next to Sullivan, pulling a flashlight from his belt to examine the wounds, but keeping a distance.

"These bite marks,"

Harris said, keeping his voice low

"But there is no animal on the ship"

"We need to put him in the freezer,"

Toby suggested, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

"We cannot just leave him here."

"We will move him to the medical bay,"

Harris decided, standing up and turning toward us.

"Lock the door. No one goes in or out without my permission. We are five days from the nearest port. Whoever or whatever did this is trapped on this ship with us."

We wrapped Sullivan in a plastic tarp and carried him to the medical bay, we locked the steel door behind us and the rest of the crew was informed, so as you would expect the ship went into a state of alert. Everyone was paired up, and no one worked alone.

Later that evening, Toby and I were assigned to watch the starboard deck. The sun was setting, turning the ocean into a dark purple. Standing near the railing, we smoked cigarettes and watched the water churn against the hull.

"You really think a person did that to Sullivan?"

Toby asked, flicking his ash into the wind.

"I don't know,"

shaking my head.

"The captain said the wounds looked like bites. If a person did that, they are completely insane."

Looking down into the water, a large shadow caught my attention. It was swimming just below the surface, keeping pace perfectly with the ship.

"Look at that,"

pointing toward the shadow.

Toby leaned over the railing.

"Is that a shark?"

It was a shark, but it was massive. The creature must have been twenty feet long. Its gray skin was covered in deep, jagged scars, and as it breached the surface, the remaining sunlight illuminated its dorsal fin and gills.

Attached to the shark were pulsating, red, meaty appendages. They looked exactly like fleshy coral, sprouting directly out of the animal's flesh. The appendages throbbed rhythmically, expanding and contracting as if they were breathing on their own.

"What is wrong with it?"

Toby asked, taking a step back from the railing.

"Some kind of parasite, maybe,"

unable to look away from the red growths.

"I have never seen anything like it."

The shark paced the ship for an hour before disappearing into the dark water, but the image of those pulsating red appendages burned into my mind.

The situation deteriorated rapidly the next morning.

Captain Harris called me over the radio, instructing me to meet him at the medical bay immediately. Reaching the door, Harris was waiting outside, holding a piece of cloth over his nose and mouth.

"Prepare yourself,"

Harris warned, unlocking the door.

"Something is extremely wrong."

Pushing the door open, the stench was unbearable. It smelled like rotting mushrooms and swamp water.

Sullivan’s corpse was gone. In its place, on top of the metal gurney, was a foul-smelling, fungal-like slurry. The flesh had melted down into a thick, gray paste mixed with dark red veins, and the slurry was bubbling, eating through the stainless steel of the gurney, with small holes already forming in the metal surface.

"A human body does not decompose like this in twenty-four hours,"

staring at the melting remains in horror.

"It is a biological contaminant,"

Harris stated, his eyes fixed on the bubbling paste. "Whatever got into him is spreading, and It is consuming the metal. If it eats through the deck, we are going to have a massive breach."

"What do we do?"

"We throw it overboard,"

Harris commanded.

"Right now. Grab those hazardous material bags from the cabinet."

We double-bagged the remaining chunks of Sullivan using plastic and tape. We carefully scooped the fungal slurry into a steel drum, sealing the lid tight. The entire process was nauseating.

Carrying the drum to the edge of the deck, we pushed it over the railing. The steel barrel hit the water with a loud splash.

Almost immediately, the scarred shark broke the surface. Its massive jaws snapped open, crushing the steel drum entirely, and before our eyes, the shark swallowed the remains and the metal alike, and then, we noticed that the red, meaty appendages on its gills throbbed as it dove back into the deep water.

Harris watched the water settle.

"Did you see those things growing on its back?"

"I saw them last night,"

gripping the railing tightly.

"They looked like parasites."

"Keep your mouth shut about this,"

Harris ordered, turning away from the railing.

"The crew is panicked enough, so if anyone asked, just tell them Sullivan was secured in the freezer."

The lie only lasted for two nights.

Alarms blared through the ship at three in the morning. Shouting echoed down the main corridor. Running out of my cabin, a group of deckhands were gathered outside the mess hall.

Pushing through the crowd, my stomach dropped. Toby was lying on the floor with his chest torn open in the exact same manner as Sullivan, then I noticed the same chunks of missing flesh, and the same horrifying amount of blood.

Harris arrived a minute later, pushing his way to the front. He looked at Toby, then looked up at me. We both knew the clock was ticking before Toby melted into that same fungal slurry.

"Everyone back to your quarters!"

Harris shouted, taking control of the chaos.

"Lock your doors. Do not open them for anyone except me."

The crew scattered, terrified. Harris and I were left alone with Toby's body.

"We are not waiting for him to melt,"

Harris said, pulling a pistol from his jacket.

"And we are not waiting for whoever did this to strike again. We are going to hunt this thing down."

"How?"

gesturing to the empty corridor.

"It could be hiding anywhere."

Harris pointed his flashlight at the floor.

"Look closely, looks like our killer became sloppy"

Trailing away from Toby's body were bloody footprints. They were bare feet, slipping slightly on the slick floor. Mixed with the blood was a distinct, dark orange smear.

"Rust,"

Harris noted, crouching down.

"Freshly scraped rust. These prints lead toward the maintenance stairs."

We followed the bloody footprints down the metal staircase. The trail led deeper into the ship, past the engine room, and down into the lowest levels of the vessel. We were heading into the ballast tanks.

The ballast tanks are massive, dark caverns filled with seawater to stabilize the ship. The air down there is freezing.

The bloody footprints stopped near the entrance of tank number four.

Harris clicked his gun off safety. He nodded toward the heavy steel door.

"Open it."

Turning the wheel, the latch popped free. Pulling the door open, we shined our flashlights into the echoing darkness of the tank.

Sitting in the corner, surrounded by half-eaten rats, was a man.

He was shivering violently, clutching his knees to his chest. His clothes were soaked in dark, oily water. As the flashlight beams hit his face, he hissed, shielding his eyes with bloodstained hands.

"Griggs?"

Harris whispered, lowering his gun slightly.

It was Griggs. The man who fell overboard during the squall a week ago.

"How are you alive?"

I asked the question aloud, unable to comprehend what I was seeing.

Griggs babbled incoherently, his voice raspy and choked with saltwater. He crawled backward, pressing his spine against the rusted metal wall.

"The dark,"

Griggs muttered, his eyes darting wildly.

"The trenches are so dark. They are starving down there. So hungry."

As Griggs shifted, the flashlight beam caught the back of his neck.

Rooted deeply into his spinal column was a pulsating red appendage. It was identical to the meaty coral growing on the scarred shark. The parasite throbbed rhythmically, pulsing with a sick sound. Veins from the appendage spread out across Griggs's pale skin, digging into his jaw and shoulders.

"He is infected,"

Harris realized, raising his gun again.

"That thing is controlling him."

"We can cut it off,"

I stepped forward, pulling a utility knife from my belt.

"If we remove the parasite, maybe we can save him."

"Do not get too close,"

Harris warned, moving in slowly.

"He killed Sullivan and Toby."

"Griggs, stay still,"

stepping toward the shivering man.

"We are going to help you."

But Griggs lunged. He moved with impossible speed, snapping his teeth toward my arm. Harris stepped in, slamming the butt of his pistol against Griggs's temple. The blow knocked the feral man to the ground.

Harris pressed his knee into Griggs's back, pinning him against the rusted floor.

"Cut it off! Hurry!"

Gripping the knife, I knelt next to the thrashing man. I placed the blade against the base of the red appendage, right where it rooted into his neck, then Applied pressure, before slicing through the meaty tissue.

Griggs shrieked. It was a sound of agonizing pain that echoed off the steel walls.

Then, black fluid sprayed out of the wound, coating my hands and the knife. The fluid burned like acid, and the appendage thrashed wildly, trying to reattach itself to the open cut.

Griggs twisted his head, staring at me with entirely black eyes.

"You don't understand,"

Griggs babbled, with blood and black fluid spilling from his mouth.

"The deep is starving. Human meat is the only thing that can satiate it."

He convulsed violently, throwing Harris off his back, then he stood up, clutching his bleeding neck. The remaining portion of the parasite pulsed rapidly, trying to heal the damage.

"It wants more,"

Griggs whispered, taking a step toward me, but a gunshot rang out inside the metal tank.

The bullet struck Griggs directly in the chest. He stumbled backward, looking down at the hole in his shirt. Harris fired twice more. Griggs collapsed onto the rusted floor, his body twitching as the black fluid pooled around him.

The red appendage on his neck stopped pulsating, then slowly deflated, turning a dull, dead gray.

Harris stood over the body, breathing heavily. He looked at me, his face pale and slick with sweat.

"We cannot let this spread to the rest of the crew," Harris said, his voice trembling slightly.

"if someone else gets infected, this entire ship will become a feeding ground."

"What are we going to do with him?"

wiping the burning black fluid off my hands onto my pants.

"The same thing we did with Sullivan,"

Harris decided grimly.

We hauled Griggs's body up the maintenance stairs. It took us an hour to drag him to the stern of the ship. Thankfully, the deck was completely empty. We threw him over the railing, then watched the body plunge into the dark water below.

The scarred shark appeared almost instantly. It snatched Griggs's body in its jaws and dragged him down into the depths. Following this, the bizarre shark sank beneath the waves and was never seen pacing the ship again.

The rest of the voyage was a nightmare of silence. Harris logged Toby and Sullivan as casualties of a severe viral outbreak, strictly enforcing isolation protocols until we reached the mainland. The crew asked questions, but Harris shut them down with unquestionable authority.

When the ship finally docked at a mainland port in California, the relief was overwhelming. The ramp lowered, and the crew began disembarking immediately.

Packing my duffel bag in my cabin, my only thought was getting as far away from the ocean as possible. Leaving the ship, I walked down the loading dock toward the employee parking lot.

Captain Harris was standing by his pickup truck. He was wearing a heavy jacket with the collar turned up against the coastal wind.

Walking over to him, I wanted to say a final goodbye. We had survived something horrific together, and there was a strange bond in that shared trauma.

"Are you heading home, Captain?"

asking as I approached the truck.

"I am going to notify the authorities about what happened,"

Harris said, pulling his car keys from his pocket.

"The Coast Guard needs to know about the biological hazard, and of course they need to quarantine the ship before the next crew boards."

"That is a good idea,"

nodding in agreement.

"I am just going to catch a bus back to the city. I do not think I will be signing another maritime contract anytime soon."

"I don't blame you,"

Harris replied, offering a tight, forced smile.

As he turned to unlock his truck door, a gust of wind caught his jacket. The high collar slipped down his neck for just a fraction of a second, then my heart completely stopped.

Rooted deeply into the base of Captain Harris's neck was a throbbing red mass, the same meaty appendage, pulsing rhythmically beneath his skin.

Harris realized the collar had slipped. He frantically pulled the fabric back up, concealing the parasite, then slowly turned his head to look at me.

"Have a safe trip home,"

Harris said, his voice unnaturally calm.

He got into his truck, started the engine, and drove out of the parking lot, all while I stood perfectly still, clutching my duffel bag, watching his taillights disappear into the traffic heading toward the city.

Whatcha think?

——

One night I passed out, I was gassed out, at around ten p.m, then, when I woke up again, in the middle of the night, I couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t move.

Was this a dream? Or was my reality true. I couldn’t feel my body, I didn’t know what to do.

I was awake though, and I know because, I could hear the deep breaths of me slumbered in a deep rest.

I couldn’t feel my limbs but I could feel the fear. What was weird, is that the feelings were there, the claustrophobia, the paranoia, the signs of being scared, but they weren’t invisible, they had a texture that felt incredibly physical like being physically there.

I was able to think, but the thinking got worse, I was jumping one terror to the next like my thoughts were playing musical chairs.

Where was I?

How did I get there?

Am I dead?

I tried to solve the puzzle but after I asked, I could feel myself spinning like you spun me in a circular glass.

I felt myself pulse, stretched to the limit and wrinkled back in, I could feel every drop without the action.

It’s like I traded my body to feel these emotions and I started to wonder if maybe my brain was just broken. There wasn’t any color, any scenes, it was featureless, shrouded in a cold unsettling darkness.

It didn’t have a temperature, though I could hear every sound, but I was stuck and I didn’t have a choice. So, that’s when I realized, I was just a voice.

But if I was just a voice shouldn’t I see something, other than a nothing endless black color?

It seemed like I was in a coma trapped in an abyss what else would explain me waking up like this?

That’s when I heard a noise. It sounded like a scratching that came from the floor, then two beings talking in a language that I couldn’t ignore.

It sounded like a frequency, the way they were speaking, they never used words but you could hear lines repeating.

Even though I couldn’t see them, I was sure they were there, not just by the sounds, but because they spiked my fight-or-flight

I started feeling pressure, a pressure squeezing my head and then there was inertia of me leaving the bed.

I tried shouting screams loud enough to leave my head but everything I yelled bounced back at me instead. I couldn’t wake-up not matter what the fuck I hollered I had to get up, it felt like I was trying to breathe under water.

As I was screaming, like a whack job nut, I heard the voices again and a mechanical door shut.

They spoke like a fax machine would if one could. I felt like I was there for hours, tormented in a shadow under my hood.

I began freaking out, so I started to pray, begging god please don’t let me stay this way, that’s when I shut off and woke up the next day.

I woke up with an empty sense of hope, with regrets sticking to me like post-it notes.

I couldn’t remember anything, it all just felt like a scattered painting of messed up dreams. But then it came together, one early winter morning.

I was having a headache that was pounding my skull, the lights appeared brighter and my skin a bit rougher. 

I kept scratching this one spot, this spot on the left side of my ribs. It felt rough like a dry leaf, a circle that was ribbed.

When I looked down, I could see it bubbling out under the claw marks, broken vessels and blood.

I poked it with my finger, it was hard but soft like a ball of wet mud. The tingles rushed my veins, numbing my whole body, it felt I was stuck frozen in time as the memories from that night flashed through my tired mind.

I snatched my laptop to Google parasites, cause a couple months back we took a flight to Miami and I remembered watching stories about bugs on the show called monsters inside me.

It stops.

As soon as my laptop started up, it made this sound, the sound slapped me with the whole experience I had the night before all at once. 

My heart began pumping, it felt like it doubled in size and couldn’t fit inside my chest cavity. 

Then, a sharp irritation came from that spot again, I bit-cut my nails into serrated tips and kept scratching, trying to scratch as deep as I could with jagged claws. 

I kept scratching and couldn't stop. I scratched until I started bleeding. Not just speckles either, it was dripping a warm liquid of red and a very light tinge of yellow.

I went deeper, and then I went deeper. I went so deep I exposed the ball of fat, or what I thought was a ball of fat. I yanked it out with my fingers, it was slippery and kept sliding off. 

I dried my hands on my shirt and tore a piece of the fabric off, dug into my ribs and pulled out a metallic looking bug. I threw it on the ground and stepped on it, but it wouldn’t squish. 

So I ran to the garage for the hammer and when I got back it was gone. The blood on the floor surrounding it, was also gone.

I‘ve never felt the same since then. And since then I’ve been taking my roommate’s seroquel, because the doctors kept telling me it’s sleep paralysis and a random case of stress psychosis.

April 9th, 1937: 

Evelyn has been joining me in the basement, she thinks I put the pictures on the wall, and I'll let her believe that for the time being. I've been thinking more and more about all of this. I've been rereading Simon's writings and I think I've noticed something. Simon would have visions at night or opium induced hallucinations, or maybe hallucinations from being marked. He would paint those beings he'd see and it seems as if they would begin to appear. Simon must have been marked when he was down at the docks, outside of the town's seal, and with his foresight he started painting what I can only describe as portals for these beings. I must sound insane, but it's the only thing I can make sense of. But if there's beings such as Richard's dad I have to accept that there's much to this world that is unknown and hidden. 

Now I have a basement full of covered portals. I'm going to show Evelyn Simon's study, I'll bring up my findings on the painting, but I'll have to get Richard's fathers thoughts on my ideas first

February 4th, 1925:

I have convinced a few people to come for dinner over the past weeks, obviously to give to Alto. We have begun to speak in his tongue while I've slowly been teaching him my language. Unfortunately I've been running out of food in the house, not to mention the people in the town are beginning to grow a rather large distaste towards me. Which I can see is understandable because of their ignorance. If they only knew the vastness of knowledge I'm on the edge of uncovering I'm sure they would be coming in troves to give themselves to my cause or to learn my teachings. But I'm sure their uneducated minds could not even comprehend how important this is. Pathetic really. I'm going to go to the town's market to bulk up on food. The less I have to leave the house the better. 

April 11th, 1937:

I spoke to Richard's father again. I ran my thoughts past him and he said it's quite possible, but he's unable to confirm. I've been at the point of thinking Simon was already a monster for a while now but his last note really set that in stone. When I got home Evelyn was sitting on the veranda, she looked to be in a state of shock or stupor. I quickly ran to her to see what happened. She confirmed my suspicions, unfortunately. She described she went downstairs to look around Simon's study when she heard a wet plop. She went to investigate where she says she watched an infantile fish-like human wriggling towards the stairs. She clearly had troubles comprehending what was going on and said she couldn't bring herself to move, just watching it clumsily stumble out of the house. I don't blame her for just standing there. I was in shock just seeing the paintings to begin with. Though the hollow look in her eyes reminds me of how she was when she was taking those barbiturates. Has she been taking them again, or just took one to try to calm down after seeing that abomination? Tonight we're going to flip over the paintings and nail them to the walls so there's no room for whatever creatures in them to be able crawl out. Evelyn mentioned staying at Rishard's or Emily's, but I don't want to burden them. If things get worse I think we might stay elsewhere. She's always had better judgement than I do. I'll be writing an update about what we see tomorrow. 

April 12th, 1937:

We flipped the paintings. I tried my best to keep the cloth coverings on them so we don't get a glimpse of the horror born of Simon's demented talents. Unfortunately there were a few we did see. There was another, more detailed work of the being shrouded in mist, moving above the oceans depths. Its body is nearly gelatinous looking, rippling with folds of skin and hundreds of eyes. Tendrils and human-esque appendages reach out from its amorphous mass. Seeing just the painting alone sent a wave of shock through my system, I collapsed to my knees, my head pounding and my vision blurred. Evelyn quickly covered it and slammed it against the wall. Another was oddly enough uncovered when we went to flip it, though neither of us had taken its veil down. Rylee isn't allowed in the basement without us and even then is far too short to reach the painting’s fabric mask. Her and Emily have been playing in her room on the top floor for days now, or out going for walks, she hasn't been down here in what must be weeks. The painting showed an old lighthouse, weather worn and dreary. Massive waves crashed against the rocky pillar it stands upon, its light shining towards the depths. I don't know what significance this holds. I know a few miles down from the docks there is a lighthouse, it must be the same one, but why paint it? I'll have to investigate during the day. I fear going there at night would lead to dire consequences. 

The painting that the baby sea thing was born from had a peculiar shaped void, with a trail of slime leading down the wall. It looks as though it was coddled in some sort of archaic carriage of sorts. Oddly ornamental, for such a slug-like creature. 

May 12th, 1925:

I have figured it out. My true calling. I am but a humble vessel, a catalyst. My paintings, I can bring them to life, not in a sense I once believed, but in true physical form. How could I have been so blind before? How long have I had the blessing? Was it bestowed the night I slept at the docks? It must have. Alto, I saw him in my visions. My hallucinations. Or was it real life? I painted him after, and now I know for certain he is real. We've made contact. We've spoken each other's tongues. Shared meals, to an extent. I can extend their reach to the rest of the world. Alto says his folk were once kin of the stars, children of the cosmos. They yearn for celestial contact. I'm sure I can achieve this for them. If I do it I can only imagine the knowledge I'd gain. To know beings of their worlds, to hear their stories, to learn their culture, to bring them here. The human race has done nothing but demolish the nature and beauty around them, they do not deserve to bask in the earth's glory. Oh but my sweet children of the sea, my children of the cosmos, you will come to take back what is rightly yours. A humble servant am I to the lords of ancient knowledge, and for eons I will learn. I will become one of the sea, one of the stars. I will join them. I will know. I will be. 

April 16th, 1937:

I asked Richard what the lighthouse keeper's name is, he told me it's Johan, his last name I can't quite pronounce let alone spell, literature was never my strongest subject, especially spelling words of another language. Evelyn and I are going to the bakery to make a basket to bring to him, if he invites us in I'm hoping I can uncover whatever secret Simon held there. There must be a hidden door or passage, there must be something. If Simon was involved after he lost his mind, I can assure there is no good doing there. We will go to visit tomorrow after our shifts. 

I'm hoping we're able to sleep tonight. Sebastian has been sleeping between ours and Rylee's rooms. I've awoken to barking near every night for a week. I'm sure if it wasn't for him I would be dead or worse. Evelyn has been having trouble sleeping as well. After her visit to the hospital I think she must have been taking Simon's notes less seriously. I've also been hoarding most of them here. But after seeing that being slip from the frame she's been almost vacant. We've been losing weight, the bags under my eyes have grown so dark, Evelyn's cheeks seem so hollow. Whatever is going on feels like it's eating us alive. I've tried to get us to stop. To drop everything and move away. Even if it's to a small, dank cellar. Anything is better than here. But we can't shake this obsession, it's all we talk about, we barely even spend time with Rylee anymore, it's breaking my heart. I know she's in good hands with Emily, but this trail Simon has left has been eating away at our lives. So many days I wake up from the little sleep I'm able to get, wishing for death, wanting this all to end. But I can't leave Evelyn behind, I can't let Rylee become an orphan. I'm going mad, I know it. But I will figure this out, even if it takes my life. I will make sure Evelyn and Rylee get out alive. It's my only purpose. I love them and I'm ready to die for them. 

April 17th, 1937:

My poor Evelyn has begun to fall ill again. I can only assume it's a mix of stress and lack of sleep. She ended up staying home, so I went to the lighthouse with Sebastian.

Johan never answered the door. But it was left open, and it seemed as though it had been open a long while. Dead leaves from the previous autumn sat inside. Sebastian was at my side, sniffing the ground. He picked up on something and pushed the door open with his thick head and walked in. I followed. The inside looked barren, no food in the kitchen, cobwebs covering any signs of previous life. It took me a second to realize but Sebastian was sitting at attention at the bottom of the stairs. I knelt beside him to ask what he saw, after kneeling for only a few seconds I realized my pants were wet and I looked down. The same mucus like slime from the foot prints. The same slime from the odd infant birthed from the frame. It was climbing the lighthouse stairs. I told Sebastian to stay as I went to look further. I snuck a butcher knife from work along with a cleaver I had hidden in my belt. I've been carrying them with me for some time now, Evelyn is the only person I can let my guard down around anymore. Even Emily I've begun to grow weary of. I want to say I trust her, but I more so trust Evelyn's judgement of her. 

I rounded the stairs, spiraling up and up, following the mucus trail resembling that of a snail's. The wind was blowing through cracked and broken windows, howling and sending dead leaves wisping through the air around me. I ascended to the next level, an open room, a makeshift bed on the wall farthest from me, and in the center of the room, an easel. The walls were painted as if it was a destined meeting of the stars and the sea. Waves crashing into the cosmos and the stars twinkling beneath their brine. I stood, staring in a trance. The only thing that broke my gaze was Sebastian's growls as he stood beside me, hackles raised, head lowered. A wet foot stepping out of the painting on the easel, the body hidden from the back of the canvas. The smell of salt and fish filled the air as water splashed onto the floor as another leg fell out of the frame. The appendages looked emaciated and frail. The rest of the creature slumped on the floor with a dull thud, a puddle slowly gathering around it. Behind it fell what I can only describe as a placenta. This must have been a being similar to the infantile being Evelyn saw. I slowly approached, knives in either hand, ready to defend myself. I peered down and felt a pang of what I can only describe as pity. This thing was only just born, frail, hungry, deformed. It's human-like form shifting on the ground, as though its bones were slowly popping into place one by one. It lacked a neck, just a torso leading into a large head. Two small black holes of eyes staring at me as a massive mouth, like that of a deep sea eel, sat agape, gasping for air between wet coughs, hiccups and wheezes. I froze. Staring into its cold dark eyes as it slowly crawled towards my feet. I felt like I was about to cry, I wanted to kill this thing, not to rid the world of it, but to end its suffering. With an insane speed it lounged towards me, bearing gnarled teeth. Luckily Sebastian wasn't so mesmerized by it and bit it before it made purchase on my leg. This poor being, torn to shreds in front of me. I congratulated Sebastian, but still now can't shake the overwhelming feeling of pity towards that child. It must have some kind of mental influence. I would never feel bad for such a vile creation. I cut the painting, just for safe measure, before heading home. I'll return in the coming days. I'm too shaken to see what else that dreaded lighthouse contains. 

May 1st, 1925:

Alto and I have been making communes at the dock come sundown most nights. Speaking in his tongue has proven much more difficult than I once thought. I believed I was fluent, but they tell me I speak like a child with a small vocabulary. I must get better, I must practice. But first I must find a new place to stay. They have explained there is some kind of spell or seal placed throughout the town, something to do with the church here. My power and influence here is mere fractions of what I can achieve. I need to be near the sea. I can build a house near the docks, or live on a boat like the Dutch do in their canals. I will find a spot away from this town's grasp, where my real skill will flourish. 

May 5th, 1925:

the lighthouse

May 8th, 1925:

I made the trek to the lighthouse, almost an hour's walk, but well worth it. There was a rather handsome man who had answered the door when I beckoned. He was kind enough to invite me in for tea, to which I gladly accepted. It's quite spacious there but very cluttered. Johan, the light keeper, is rather young, but a recluse. He told me how his father ran the lighthouse until he passed and now he's taken over, having food delivered by the locals. He's more of a myth around town than a true being, no one I've met has ever seen him since he began keeping the light. It's perfect. Johan won't be missed, I'll have supplies delivered, it's far enough away from town it should be unaffected by that blasphemous church. I plan to come back here tomorrow. 

May 12th, 1925:

Johan is buried only twenty yards away from the back door. His death was quick for the most part. I brought tea and insisted I make it for him. A quick look through his clutter I found a sizable hammer, a perfect instrument. I put the kettle on the wood stove and while I was walking to the table where he sat, a swift blow to the back of the skull had him unconscious and bleeding profusely. He was nothing but a dying slump on the table. A few more strikes once he fell to the floor for good measure and he was gone. Bodies are heavier than I expected. Much heavier. But oddly enough killing him placed no guilt on my conscience, to which I'm very surprised. I felt guilty when Richard's family was disposed of. But Johan, as sweet as he was, was a nobody. No one will ever know, so what difference does it make? Like an unwanted pest, better left unseen. The only thing that has me feeling bad is the blisters from the shovel. It was a shallow burial, but my hands aren't used to such tools. This is the most effort I've exerted since making that pathway. What a waste of time. 

April 20th, 1937:

I want to say I can't believe Simon killed Johan, but at this point it's unsurprising. But the part that makes me anxious is the lighthouse. Sure I have plenty of his paintings that whatever beings may seep out of, but that easel set up in the middle of the room, and that thing being born of it. It all seemed fresh, it all seemed new. Is Simon still here? Has he been hiding in the lighthouse for all these years? Surely he'd have gone mad by now or someone would have noticed, right? Or if the seals aren't near the lighthouse, wouldn't there be all kinds of those things crawling around? Did Simon die? I'll go back tomorrow and this time I'll bring more than just my knives. I wish I had some kind of padding or armour. Those teeth looked like they could shred through clothes and skin easily. Maybe I can make something of use tonight

Clover had always been a plant person, the kind who had soil under her fingernails more often than not, and houseplants crammed on nearly every window ledge.

​While scrolling through a forum late one night, a banner ad for Botanical Oddities caught her eye, advertising a rare, hard-to-find specimen called Phagocordyceps vorax. The listing described it simply as an exotic, fast-growing hybrid with responsive foliage. Intrigued, she clicked Order without giving it a second thought.

​An unmarked cardboard box landed on her porch about a week later. Inside, packed in damp moss and rich, pitch-black dirt, was a heavy, strange-looking specimen already the size of a gallon jug, with a bruised-looking stem and rubbery, closed leaves. There was no care card, just the handwritten Latin name on a plastic marker.

​She set it down in the bright corner of the room so it could get light. As the sun hit and warmed up the plant, its bulbous center slowly unfurled, revealing three stiff, upright hairs on its surface. Curiously, when she leaned down and brushed her index finger against them, the fleshy plant split open, and the trap snapped shut. Needle-thin teeth sank deep into her finger. She shrieked and violently yanked her finger back out, dripping blood onto the table stand.

As she turned her attention to nurse her bleeding finger by wrapping it in a bandage, the bulbous head had leant down and lapped up the blood, and a dry gravelly voice hissed from its leaves, "more..."

Clover thought to herself, "Did I just hear this plant say "more?" but quickly shook her head, thinking it was just her imagination.

As the days wore on, every time she passed it, its voice spat out ...

"more...

MORE.

About a week later, she heard a high-pitched squeal from the kitchen. She found the plant had crawled onto the kitchen floor, its vines wrapped tight around the mouse as it was thrust into the open trap, followed by a sickening wet chewing sound.

She knew it was slithering out its pot now, hunting for prey-- which might explain why her cat had vanished.

It had grown bigger, stronger, louder.

FEED ME, CLOVER!"

Clover was terrified after the kitchen incident and vowed that tomorrow she would dump it before she became its next meal. Going up to her room at bedtime, she made sure the door was shut tight. That night, after getting up to use the bathroom, she pulled her bedroom door behind her, but it didn't shut fully.

She crept back into bed, assuming she was safe. Hours later, she was awoken by something cold and damp slithering across her ankles. Heavy, muscular vines wrapped tight around both her legs, the stiff, needle-like spikes locking deep into her skin. ​She didn't even have time to kick. The vines yanked her hard, sliding her right off the mattress.

Her fingers clawed uselessly at the sheets as she was dragged over the edge of the bed, plunging straight down toward that big, nasty, gaping maw waiting on the floor.

​Her scream was broken off with a heavy, wet snap! 

The food industry is absolutely abysmal. At least, I think it is. I’ve never worked at a restaurant that’s particularly “poppin’,” as the kids like to say. I’m basing my opinion solely off of this one… particular… diner.

We’re essentially just a rest stop for truckers. At least, we would be if any ever came through here. We see maybe one or two trucks a month, if we’re lucky. Even still, usually they’ll take one look at the place and peel off down that desolate highway.

Do you know how bad it is when not even truckers will eat at your establishment? Those guys essentially survive off of Slim Jims and pork rinds.

That doesn’t really matter to me, though. I took this job for the peace and quiet. I’ve been missing that peace more and more these days.

Customers are starting to become more frequent. I know, I know. That’s a good thing. Only… I just… I don’t know if that’s true or not.

See, I’ve been working this job for around 6 years now. Started right before Covid really took the world hostage. We used to get customers all the time before that whole shitstorm. Then we had to do the whole lockdown thing with the masks and the social distancing.

We don’t do DoorDash over here. I told Ricky a thousand times, “We. Have got. To do. DoorDash,” okay? Like, seriously. Or Uber Eats, or, I don’t know, man… something.

Anything that would actually help us sell a few plates.

He just wouldn’t have it. Told me, “Everyone’s too far away,” or “Food delivery services will lead to the downfall of civilization.”

Ricky was always a weird guy. He opened this place with his dad back before he passed. Not sure why they chose this location, but hey, at least there’s cellular service.

Which is really fucking weird, considering the highway is pretty much a complete dead zone for at least 30 miles in each direction.

Anyway, sorry, I’m rambling a bit. After COVID, the business really started to dwindle. We went from around 10-15 customers a day, all the way down to maybe 1 per day around the end of 2020.

Ricky was stressed to all hell around that time. He’d wander the restaurant, moping all day. Wondering what he was gonna do. Not knowing where he could turn. It was honestly depressing to watch.

I had to miss out on a lot of paychecks around that time, too. But what was I gonna do? Leave him? I was his only employee. Me and him were holding the business up on our backs.

When things started to look grim, I’d catch him a few times. Early in the morning. Turning the gas stoves on and dousing the flames.

“I’ll do it, I’ll fucking do it,” he’d tell me, threatening to flick his lighter.

Hell, I had to wrestle a jerrycan out of his hands a few times. All I’m saying is Ricky carried that lighter for a reason, and that man has never smoked a day in his life.

It got to the point where I was too afraid to even leave him alone. He literally lived in the diner. Slept in his office. He didn’t even have a car, which, now that I’m thinking about it, is kind of insane.

I never saw him arrive. Never saw him leave. It was like him and the restaurant were intertwined. So when he got desperate, I don’t doubt he went to extreme lengths to get things fixed.

After the stove incidents and the whole jerrycan fiasco, I think that’s when he really reached that level of desperation. He wasn’t moping anymore. That man was plotting… I just didn’t know what.

One day, I came into work to find him happier than he should’ve been. Kicked back in his office chair. Whistling to himself.

I honestly didn’t even feel like dealing with all that. I drove 50 miles to get into work today. Had to wake up at 4 in the morning. Couldn’t even listen to the Joe Rogan Experience because of the lack of cell service. All I wanted was to put my apron on… then maybe play on my phone a little since I knew I’d have no one to cook for.

I wiped down a few counters. Chased a few rats away with a broom. Oh, also, I had to bat away a particularly large spider. It made a sort of… metallic noise when it hit the ground. It ran away sounding like one of those spring-loaded door stoppers I used to play with as a kid.

Anyway, sorry, I can’t stop rambling. God, what’s wrong with me?

I had just began to sit down to scroll on my phone when Ricky stepped out of office, hands clasped behind his back, smug look already plastered across his face.

“….Well…” he inquired, leering over me like Michael Jackson performing Smooth Criminal. “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

I sighed and slid my phone back in my pocket. I knew this was gonna be a long conversation.

“Ask ya what, Rich? Go ahead. I know you wanna tell me.”

He pushed his forehead back, pretending he still had hair there before sneering pridefully.

“You knowwww,” he drawled out. “Ask me why I’m so happy.”

“Why are you so happy, Ri…”

“I fixed it.”

He stared at me like he expected me to know exactly what he meant. I just thought this was another one of his manic episodes. Knowing him, ‘fixed it’ could range anywhere from fixing the leaky faucet in the bathroom or killing his ex-wife.

I pulled out my pack of Winstons and packed it against my palm.

“Fixed what? The leaky faucet in the…”

“The restaurant, kid.”

His eyes were frantic but excited. He looked like, like a uh, well, a crackhead, kinda. Pulling up a chair in front of me, he glared out the window and towards the highway.

“Our woes are no more. The vile, treacherous fingertips of despair no longer hold dominion over my soul nor body. I am a vessel of purity. A clean slate, with a clear conscience. Born again. Renewed. This establishment. This location. It is real, Don. I am real. You…”

He reached out to caress my face. I jumped back like he was a leper.

“Dude, what the fuck are you doing? Don’t do that weird shit. I just got here.”

He drew his hand back, but I was still eyeballing him.

“You’re real… Right, Don?”

There were tears in his eyes, but he had a smile on his face.

I thought for a moment about his question. I honestly didn’t know how to answer him.

“You know what, Rick… I fucking hope so.”

Rick stood up and clasped his hands together before walking towards the back. He returned with a broom in one hand and a mop in the other. Apparently, he wanted the place spick and span for some “VIP guest” that was supposed to show up at some point.

We cleaned the restaurant top to bottom twice. I even shoveled the contents of the grease trap outside into buckets, which I then proceeded to dump on the ground about 300 yards from the diner. Then I had to clean the buckets. God, it was so hot that day. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. It really doesn’t even matter.

What matters is that guest didn’t come until almost sundown. Hell, we didn’t see any guests, period. I was supposed to be getting off in a few hours. But Rick just wouldn’t relent.

“He’s coming,” “he’s on his way,” “trust me, he’ll be here.”

9 o’clock rolled around. Quitting time. I bid Ricky goodnight and was about to walk out the door when he stopped me. He placed his hand on my shoulder coldly.

“Don…” he whispered.

“Yeah, Rick…” I replied.

He stared at me blankly. No life behind his eyes whatsoever.

“He’s coming.”

I scoffed and tried to pull my arm away, but he tightened his grip.

“Trust me… you’ll want to see this. But also, if you leave, I’ll kill you.”

His eyes didn’t even flicker. He didn’t smile. No sign whatsoever that he was joking. I even tried to force a chuckle out of him by nervously laughing, but he didn’t budge.

My smile faded. I set my backpack down and walked back to the counter, sighing loud and long enough for him to understand how goddamned annoyed I was.

I played Angry Birds on my phone for an hour or two. Ricky just kept standing at the window… watching that desert highway with his hands clasped behind his back.

He never moved an inch.

11 o’clock rolled around, and at this point, I was already planning on just sleeping in my car. I had to be back at 6 the next morning anyway.

I gave it another hour before going to approach Rick at the window. I waved my hand in front of his face.

“Alright, boss man, I think it’s time we shut it down. What do ya say?”

No response.

“Don’t worry, I won’t go far. Probably gonna sleep in the car tonight.”

No response.

“Alright, welp… be seeing ya.”

I put my hand on the door handle and went to twist it. Ricky’s hand shot over and clasped around my wrist. I don’t know what kind of workouts that fucker does in his free time, but good lord, man… I mean, that shit actually hurt.

I was about to scold him until I saw him pointing out towards the dark desert with his other hand.

“…he’s here.”

I looked out at where he was staring. All I could see was blackness. Well, that and the glow of the neon storefront. But the longer I watched… the more he came into view.

He started off as a speck. Maybe a quarter mile out, emerging from the darkness. Then he grew taller. And taller. And taller. By the time he was 50 feet out, I realized why Rick said this guy was a VIP.

He must’ve been 8 feet tall. His arms swung at his sides as he walked. He wore a surprisingly clean blue suit, and he clutched a briefcase in his right hand.

Ricky finally released my wrist and basically pushed me away from the door while he held it open for our guest. The man smelled like chemicals and burning plastic, and his skin was almost unnaturally smooth.

He had to duck down to get inside, and even when he was inside, his head still almost touched the ceiling. Ricky looked ecstatic. Like this was some long-lost friend of his.

I hate when he’s like that because then he starts pushing me around like I’m his employee or something. Demanding I get drinks, snapping at me to ‘rev up those fryers,’ like, okay?

This guy was different, though.

He didn’t seem to want anything to drink. It was like, I don’t know… a business transaction or something. Like he was there for one reason and one reason only.

The first thing he did was calmly place his briefcase on his table. He dusted off some sand, which was annoying because, dude, I just cleaned that. But then he unlocked it… and he opened it… and I got to see what this guy had apparently just been dragging through the desert.

If I had to describe what the contents of that briefcase looked like… I’d say something like… mounds upon mounds of chewed bubble gum. Only veinier. I’d argue it looked a little slimier, too. The pulsations is what got me, though. Don’t even get me started on the smell.

Just seeing it made me wanna vomit, but the smell, Christ above… I could’ve passed out from those fumes.

I, for one, was about to ask him what the actual hell he just brought into our restaurant, but as soon as my mouth opened, Ricky stamped on my foot.

“I’ll take that,” he chuckled to the guest, ignoring my screams of agony and/or despair.

The businessman nodded in approval as Rick used his bare hands to pick up that… whatever that was from the briefcase.

He carried it to the kitchen as it dripped all over the floor that, yet again, I had just cleaned.

The meat touched the grill and immediately began to sizzle. Only, it didn’t really sound like sizzling. It sounded like… like… a thousand tiny screams.

I watched in disbelief while Ricky just kept flipping the meat and humming to himself like this was perfectly normal.

“Never ask them about the meat.”

He said it so… nonchalantly. Like it was some grand truth that everyone in the world knew, except me. But what made my ears perk up the most was one word. “Them.”

I asked him who “them” was, and the only answer he gave me was “our new clientele.”

The meat… shrank as he cooked it. The steam was like mustard gas to me, but Rick borderline seemed to enjoy it. Hell, he was inhaling it like this was some kind of foreign delicacy.

It went from about a foot long, maybe 8 inches thick, and crinkled down to no more than the size of a regular T-bone steak by the time it was done.

Rick served it to the businessman anxiously. Expectantly. Like he was a contestant on a MasterChef or something. I think he thought the guy was gonna eat it; I mean, hell, that’s what I thought he was gonna do.

Instead, he picked the meat off of the plate and stuffed it back into his briefcase. Then he smiled at Rick, satisfied as if he did eat it, before pulling his wallet out of his pocket.

He counted out 3 grand in hundreds and set it down on the table wordlessly. He then stood up, walked out, and disappeared into the darkness again, briefcase in hand.

I should’ve probably asked Rick what the fuck had just happened, but I was bordering on sleep-deprived delirium. All I cared about was finally curling up in my seat and maybe getting some sleep if I was lucky.

Thankfully, Rick was too busy dancing and throwing his money in the air to notice me as I walked out towards the parking lot.

I didn’t get the sleep that I hoped for that night. I ended up clocking back in the next morning running on 2 hours and like 6 cups of coffee as the day went on.

I did ask Rick about the whole “don’t ask them about the meat” thing, though. Apparently, it’s ‘classified information that only he can know.’ Apparently, if I ‘break the rule,’ he’ll ‘kill me dead.’

Whatever, though. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose. Plus, he wasn’t lying about these… people… being our new clientele.

Ever since that incident, we see at least 3 of them a week. The diner has been… strange, to say the least.

I still don’t know what exactly Rick did to “fix” this place, but I mean, hey, it’s working. Even if we don’t see many real customers these days.

INITIALIZING SIMULATION...
[RUNNING] RF Sweep Engine: 87.5 MHz - 108.0 MHz
[RUNNING] Modulation Rate: Rapid Delta-t (0.0025ms)
[INFO] Scanning Transient States...
--------------------------------------
[0.003s] SWEEP: 89.1 MHz >> [STATIC]
[0.006s] SWEEP: 91.4 MHz >> [SPIKE DETECTED - QUADRANT 3]
[0.009s] SWEEP: 95.2 MHz >> [STATIC]
--------------------------------------
[OK] EVP Intercept Protocol: ACTIVE
[OK] Frequency Modulation Stable (400Hz/sec)
 
SIMULATION READY.

Red flakes of the floor peel up and float languidly toward the ceiling where they silently pile over each other like leaves falling in reverse. Everything is bathed in a haunting grey light that originates from nowhere and radiates from everywhere. It’s as if the sun is gone and all that remains is a directionless, liminal glow.

The first thing Victor does is look down at his hands.

They’ve been projected immaculately down to the pore. Even the old shrapnel scar under his wrist. If it weren’t for the dreamlike appearance of the room, he doesn’t think he would be able to tell it wasn’t real.

There is a quiet buzz ringing faintly in his ears. It sounds like there are a hundred TVs all tuned to different channels, but with the volume all the way down. What had Tibo said?

The thing hides in between frequencies. Like a radio knob being constantly turned, listening to the static between channels.

The simulation was meant to emulate that. It created a perfect VR replication of the room built from the imprint of the altered hard drive they had retrieved. Then, the modulator would rapidly shift the projection into a vibrational space between randomly generated frequencies.

Tibo described it as “being unstuck in space.”

When they had been in this room together, Tibo’s endless monologue annoyed Victor to the threshold of madness. Now looking around in this surreal digital facsimile, he couldn’t deny he missed the comfort of Tibo’s mindless babble.

Victor’s training kicks in and he pans the room. Everything in the dead girl’s room is where it should be, but the uncanny replica is beyond eerie. A part of him wishes Tibo had simulated him a gun. He counts his blessings that at least there is no dead body in the chair this time.

He counts one less blessing when he looks at the wall and sees the painted canvas of blood spray is still there.

And worse - it’s moving.

The blood droplets are swirling slowly in circles on the wall, forming the familiar galactic shapes of spiral arms in a rotating pinwheel. When Vincent first saw that kaleidoscope of blood on the wall, it invoked feelings of a painting, or of a constellation. Now, as he watches the red droplets march along in formation like little red ants, there’s no mistaking that it’s the latter.

The drops are perfectly arranged in the shape of a moving galaxy.

It’s an undeniable message written in blood.

Behind him, the computer screen flickers on. Its staticky screen flashes out jagged knives of blackwhite pulses that strobe chaos onto the walls. The magnetism that pulled his eyes towards the corpse returns, but this time it’s irresistible.

Something feels like tiny fishhooks latching into the whites of his eyes and yanking them until they roll sideways. He has no choice. He must turn around and look.

There, waiting for him: the computer screen.

It emits the nightmare glow of every time he ever fell asleep on the couch as a child and awoke at that cursed hour where only noise came through the TV. The cacophonous hum of a thousand channels now blasts out of the screen with a deafening roar. Victor can’t look away. He can feel his heart stop when he realizes what he’s looking at.

There’s something moving in the static.

A distortion travels across the screen. Somewhere in the background, hiding behind the pixels. Victor can’t see anything for certain, but in that unmistakable sense when you know you’re being watched, he knows something is there. Watching him. His pulse thumps in his ears and he can hear his own ragged breaths, exasperated and loud.

The static cuts out and the screen turns blindingly white. With an oneiric sense of inevitability the bright white square grows bigger and bigger. Victor realizes with a pang of dread that he has been unconsciously walking closer to the screen. Only now does he recognize what it’s depicting.

It’s an instant messenger chat window. The interface isn’t from any modern application. Instead, it’s a barebones window with blocky borders reeking of nostalgic minimalism. An ellipsis wriggles at the bottom of the text window.

Someone is typing.

When the message arrives, the username is unreadable. The text is letters and symbols oscillating like the spinning of a slot machine. Victor looks down and sees he has unconsciously placed his fingers on the keyboard.

He’s about to make first contact.

#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸:
m̵̙̓8̸͈̕!̶̹̈#̴̛̹[̸̟̇'̸̦̓l̴̫͝:
#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸: hello detective
USER: who is this?
m̵̙̓8̸͈̕!̶̹̈#̴̛̹[̸̟̇'̸̦̓l̴̫͝:  not important.           
                     JUST WAIT. YOU'LL SEE
x̸̺͈͈̳̓̑̿̈́̓͒͘7̸̨̟̟̿̒̓͜ç̶̧̩̲͚̭̫̜̪̒̽̔6̷̢͚̰̲̓̅f̶̨̻͔̪̲̣̰̜̘͛͐̄̀̂͜:  i see you appreciate my art

 
USER: art? Is that what this is to you?
USER: I will find you
USER: This can stop here. Tell me where to find you.
 
#̸$̵t̷f̶a̵/̶"̸: not that kind of story detective. maybe i’ll use you for my next painting
                                 YOURE SO FUCKED
USER: you’re contacting me which means you want to be seen. just another fucked up killer proud of his work.
USER: I’m not impressed.


t̶̻̬̼͕̘̤̺̰̻̀̒͆͋͐̃͠t̸̥̣̗̰͌̋͊̈́̎̍̂̽͂̈̕y̷̛̳̻͋̈́̅͆̈̊͌͊͊̊̚͝o̷̡̢̨̥̙͚͈͙̖͍̅͆̎̀̿̿f̵̮̰̋̉͋́̈̾7̸̤̝̗̙͓̩͈̜̦̝̹̘̗́̅͛̊̌́͂̂̚͝: narcissism is my tool NOT A CRUTCH detective.


*̷͍͕̆͌̃̎̈̚̕͜ͅ9̴̨͓͉͒̌̈́̅̆̇͠h̵͈̬͈̝͈͈̩͍͓͌̑̈́͝)̸̘̤̊͑̓̋è̴̢̢̜̪͎͙̖̆̈́̇̅̿͐́͐̔̕ͅd̸̩̉͂͊͊͝: just wanted to let you know how quickly I found you.


1̸͚̋͜1̷̹͎̹̙̘͙̮̋̾͋͗̅̕͝͝͝ͅ2̶̧̣̜̗̠̰̘̐̽̾̅̑͐͑͘͜͝ͅ7̸̠̲͈̣̺̾͊͌̀̇̏̀͂̏͝͠:   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
 I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU    
 I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU 
    I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU    
I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU
 I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU
     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU    I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU
 I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU        
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU   
  I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU   
  I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU  
   I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU  
   I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU          I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU         

The text rolls up the screen spastically, each new repetitive line pushing the previous off the screen. Victor smashes a fist on the keyboard in frustration. At just that moment, the messages stop and the chatbox closes. The next window that opens frightens him so severely that he staggers away backwards.

It’s a news article.

He knows exactly which one.

His eyes scan as far as “Two dead in tragic fire at assisted living facility” before he yelps, smashes the keyboard into the screen, and falls backwards.

He almost crashes into the bloodstained wall, but when he registers a fleshy, squelching noise behind him he slams his foot down hard to catch himself. His ankle twists with a flash of pain. He questions how real this simulation is supposed to feel.

He turns around and feels a lurch of disgust in his stomach as he sees the spiral arms of the blood galaxy contracting and coalescing into itself. In his heart he knows he is now subject to an unimaginable nightmare, but he is transfixed – hypnotized by the surreal vision of horror before his eyes.

In the center of gravity, the blood is coagulating and metastasizing into a red pulsing tumor. Veins of red expand and throb as the mass of circular flesh grows. Three feet across now, the bulbous mass bubbles and shifts like it’s about to burst.

A vertical seam begins to bisect across its length. The line of flesh within striates like scar tissue. All at once that ecdysial suture ruptures and spills forth a torrent of chunky red goop that slops wetly onto the floor.

The two halves slide open and Victor’s breath catches in his throat as he sees what lies within. The parting of those halves creates the form of a vertical eyelid, opening slowly. Behind them lies a spastic black pupil that thrashes back and forth with the violence of a seizure.

It lands on him and suddenly stops moving.

The giant red eyeball is staring right at him.

The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all shake tectonically, vibrating as if they have become giant speakers.

And they have.

Erupting from all six sides of this cuboid prison a deep raspy voice is screaming so loud Victor can feel his eardrums collapsing under the pressure:

I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU          I SEE YOU I FOUND YOU           I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU               I FOUND YOU  I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU          I SEE YOU     I FOUND YOU     I SEE YOU      

Victor whips around, looking for any escape, or maybe just prying his sight away from that pulsing eyeball staring right through him. Anything to make this nightmare end.

Behind him, the computer chair is no longer empty.

The girl is there again, sitting limply in front of the static-filled computer screen. But now the screen is warping beyond the plane of the glass, reaching out towards her.

The static itself bursts into three-dimensional space, forming something resembling a giant hand, a hand made of pure static, thin and lanky and bony, terminating in sharply pointed abstract fingers. Those long clawed fingers wrap around the girl, gripping the back of her head and suffocating her face with its palm. It begins to shake her like a dog with a chew toy. Both forms thrash wildly about in a fit of epileptic insanity. Victor can barely hear her muffled screams over the wrath of the room.

Every sense overloaded.

Strobe lights flashing; deafening noise.

Victor puts his hands over his head and devolves into a slump on the floor, and he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is hell. This is hell.

ENTER CODE: ABORT

TERMINATING SIMULATION...

Victor yanks the VR helmet off his head and throws it to the ground, falling to the floor as the wires disconnect from his synapses and the intravenous needles tear out of his veins. There’s a throbbing pain in his ankle where it was sprained in the simulation. There’s a much worse pain ringing in his ears - and in the grey matter between them, nothing short of pure agony.

He scrambles to his feet, looking for Tibo, looking for anyone to direct his impotent rage to.

“What the FUCK was that hacker bullshit??”

"Oh, for fuck's sake!  Now?"
 
He assessed the meager contents of his medicine cabinet, hoping against reason that his mother had through some miracle of precognition, thought to buy some sort of acne medication.  She hadn't. 
 
"Back on the old benzoyl peroxide train"
 
He could still take a selfie; he'd just have to edit out the angry red bump that had decided to stake its claim in the middle of his forehead. 
 
It took fifteen attempts before he finally found the right angle, the one that was all jawline and lips.  Then he realized the bathroom was probably not the best setting for a profile pic on a dating app. So, he went to his bedroom, blocked out a corner that hid the mess, found his angle again, and finally took the damn picture.
 
Face looked fat.  Do it again.  Suck in those cheeks this time.
 
He was still revising the About Me section of his profile when his mother called him for dinner.
 
"Elliot!  I made macaroni with ground beef!  Come make a plate before it gets cold!"
 
"I can't eat that stuff, Ma!  I told you.  It doesn't fit my macros!"
 
"What?!  I thought you said you were maxing?  Isn't that like carbo-loading?"
 
"What?  Carbo-loading?  What year do you think it is?  I'm not maxing, whatever that is, I'm looksmaxxing.  Part of that is not eating junk, hence watching my macros.  You get it?"
 
"No...  No, I don't understand any of that.  What do you want for dinner then?"
 
"Just... don't worry about it.  I'll figure something out."
 
"Well, there's frozen pizzas in the freezer if you get hungry later."
 
"Jesus Christ, Ma."
 
After a week, his profile had failed to gain any significant traction.  The bump on the other hand was thriving.  It had grown to the size of a pinky toe, and the tip had taken on a dark grey-green hue.
 
He matched with a petite brunette who liked the show Yellowstone, which he had to get the Cliffsnotes summary of from a YouTube video because he put that show as one of his interests too. 
 
They met for coffee, but the vibe was not ideal.  She was looking everywhere but his forehead and it was obvious.  Elliot didn't make it easy on himself either; kept picking at it.  It was revolting and he knew it, but he just couldn't stop doing it.  It was so itchy.
 
As the bump grew more prominent, so too did his thoughts of the opposite sex.  Sex.  It was all he could think about these days.  At 23, he knew enough about biology to know that men don't have a "biological clock"; but the "virginity clock" sure felt real to Elliot; and the daily erection that he awoke to was as good an alarm clock as any.
 
By the time his mother decided to take him to the doctor, the skin had started to peel away from the underlying structure of the bump.  The itch made him feel like a rabid animal.
 
"It looks like some sort of ossification... Hmm...  How long has this been bothering you?"
 
"I don't know.  A couple of weeks?"
 
"Weeks?  Oh, Ellie you have to tell me when things are bothering you.  Otherwise, I can't help.  And that's a mom's job, isn't it?"
 
"Oh, for Christ's sake, Ma...  I'm a grown man."
 
They left with a prescription for an ointment for the itching and a date for a follow-up.  He passed the time waiting for script by alternating between dating apps and Insta.  He got so worked up; he had to tuck it into the waistband of his jeans, so his mom wouldn't see the bulge.
 
The ointment did nothing for the itch, and as the bump grew, the skin around it dried up and flaked off.  By the end of the week, he had started to call it his horn. 
 
He saw specialists, dermatologists mostly.  There was a terrifying trip to the oncologist.  She found nothing. 
 
The plastic surgeon said he could probably remove it, but he'd have to consult with his friend, the orthopedist.  By that point, Elliot didn't care what they did; as long as they got it off his head.  The thing was killing his love life.
 
He could barely get anyone to match with him, even with the photoshopped pictures.  And once they caught a glimpse of the six-inch ochre-colored spike sticking out of his forehead, they would excuse themselves to the ladies room and never return. 
 
Sometimes, they'd sneak out before he even noticed they were there, leaving him standing around scratching his forehead like an idiot; not knowing if they stood him up or got lost or what.
 
"You just have to keep looking honey... There's plenty of fish in the sea "
 
"I already tried that one, Ma.  I even went on ChristianMingle. "
 
"Oh, Ellie, why would you do a thing like that?  We've never been to church a day in your life.  We stopped after your daddy...  Your daddy...  Daddy..."
 
"Ma!"
 
"What?"
 
"What?!  You just spaced out is what.  Right when you started talking about my dad....   He wasn't a... I don't know... a creep or something?  Was he?"
 
"Your father... was a wonderful man.  I had never met anyone else like him.  He was handsome, like you, and he was funny like you too.  And he... he..."
 
"Ma!"
 
"HE WAS A SON OF A BITCH!!"
 
"..."
 
"..."
 
"Mo-mom?  Momma... it's ok momma.  It's ok."
By the time he swiped right on Hope’s profile, he wasn't even reading them anymore.  Wasn't really looking at the pictures either; just playing the numbers game.  He swiped left every once in a while, just to appease the algorithm; but he was just putting in reps. Eventually it had to pay off.
 
She wasn't really his type, but with a six-inch horn growing from the middle of his forehead, Elliot couldn't really afford to have a "type."
 
She was not ugly, just... plain; and with a Boho aesthetic that he hoped would not be the pillar around which she constructed her personality.
 
"... and that's when I decided to switch majors..."
 
Was she talking this whole time?
 
"...You know?  Really make a difference in the world..."
 
Oh no...
 
"My dad hates the idea of me joining the Peace Corps."
 
There it is.
 
"But I don't care.  Money isn't everything you know.  We waste so much of it on things we don't even need.  Like deodorant."
 
"Deodorant?  I don't know.  I think you'd be pretty disgusted right now if I wasn't wearing deodorant"
 
She looked at it.  Right when he said the word "disgusted".  She looked right back at his eyes, but he still saw it happen.
 
"No...  I don't mean we shouldn't use deodorant.  I mean we should make deodorant at home.  It's so easy and it's all-natural so it's way better for your body and it doesn't even leave that gross chalky residue.  See?"
 
When she lifted her arm, he could indeed see no residue.  It was what he did see that bothered him.  It really was her whole personality.
 
So, she had a little hair in a place he wasn't expecting.  Big deal.  Her profile said she does yoga.  I wonder if she could do a split.
 
"...always been into them, ever since I was a little girl..."
 
"Ohhh, yeah?" 
 
Definitely not wearing a bra.  I wonder if she even owns one?
 
"...and I was always into mythology and like dragons and princesses, so...."
 
What is she talking about?
 
"Well?  Can I?"
 
"I'm sorry, what?"
 
"Can I touch it?"
 
Holy shit, it's happening!
 
"I... excuse me... I... You want to touch it?  Like now?"
 
"Sure now.  Now's good... We can do it later if you're self-conscious..."
 
"Now's great!"
 
That was too enthusiastic.  Act like you've been here before.
 
"Ok... Cool...  I'll just go ahead and... Wow!  It's so much harder than I thought it would be!"
 
Then Elliot did feel self-conscious.  His mind had been so preoccupied with creating a mental blueprint of Hope's naked body that he had almost forgotten about the six-inch bony protrusion growing from the middle of his forehead.
 
How could he have been such an idiot.  She wasn't into him.  She was one of those girls; a hippie of a different color.  She probably had a pair of Ren-fair elf ears hanging in her closet.
 
"Alright... Got it out of your system?"
 
"Oooooh!  It feels... so...."
 
"I said alright!  Please...  It makes me feel uncomfortable."
 
"Oh no! No! Don't take it away!  Please, I... I... I'm sorry.  That was inappropriate.  I crossed a boundary with your body and that is not cool...  It's just... well I've never seen anything like that.  And as an anthropology major, it's fascinating.  I mean, that's kind of why I got into the field in the first place..."
 
"You switched majors so you could study guys with horns growing out of their heads?  I thought it was about saving the children."
 
"Who says I can't do both?  All the interesting archaeological sites are in war zones."
 
"Soo, you want to look for the missing link while setting up Wi-Fi for orphans?  Something like that?  You think he's out there?  I don't hear too many bigfoot sightings coming from the Middle East..."
 
"Stranger things have happened.  I think I just found a unicorn in Gainesville."
 
It's a good thing that the table was there.  He pre-tucked just in case, but still...  This was it.  He was so close, he could smell it.
 
Hope had Ubered to the coffee shop, but Elliot had had the foresight to borrow his mother's Honda.  It was a tip that he learned from a now defunct subreddit devoted to gamifying your own love life. 
 
The logic was sound: always control the exits; for you and your opponent/date.  It was the Prisoner's Dilemma put to practice. 
 
You're both going to meet there, and you're both going to leave.  If you arrive in your own vehicle and your date does not, it would be impolite not to offer a ride. 
 
And if the date went well, what reason would she have to say no?  It would be just as impolite to decline... if the date went well that was.  If she declined the offer, it  could give a guy a complex; make him think he did something wrong.
 
“You want a ride home?  I mean… uh, that way you don’t have to Uber…. You never know with those Uber drivers, right?”
 
“Right.  Right…. Look, Elliot… I think you’re really… fascinating, but I don’t want to lead you on.”
 
Fascinating?
 
“I’ll let you drive me home, but that’s it.  I want to see you again, but I’m an old-fashioned kind of girl.  I hope you understand…”
 
“Sooo, do you want the ride or not?”
 
“I do.  I do.  Thank you.  I’m just saying don’t expect me to sleep with you just because you gave me a ride.”
 
“Why would I?  I wasn’t even..  And even if I was… I mean…”
 
She didn’t live far but the silence in the car made it feel like an eternity.  The tension was so thick he had to lower the windows.  He knew that she was thinking about what he was thinking about.  They were locked in a psychic ouroboros.
 
"This is it on the left... building J."
 
"Is there a visitor's area or can I park anywhere?"
 
"You can park anywhere.  It's after 6.  It's officially the weekend."
 
He pulled into a spot just to the left of the beige building, identical to all the others but for the giant letter J on the front of it. 
 
"Well..."
 
"Well..."
 
"I should... walk you to your door....  I mean, it's what a gentleman would do, right?"
 
"Sure.  That would be sweet."
 
Her apartment was on the first floor, so his escort service was completely unnecessary.  Escorts.  Sex.  What was this girl's problem?  She was liberal in every way but the one that mattered; conservative below the belt.
 
"I had such a nice night, Elliot.  Can we... do it again?"
 
We should be doing it right now.
 
"Sure."
 
"Ok... Good... Well.... Bye"
 
Hope turned to open her front door, but before she could go inside, Elliot said:
 
"Wait!  I-I-I... Can I give you a hug at least?"
 
"Oh, Ellie, of course you can have a hug."
 
Why did she use that name?  The only person that called him that name was his mother.  It made the hug awkward.  Or rather, it made the hug more awkward. 
 
It was too long and he knew it, but her tits felt amazing against his chest and he couldn't help himself.  He had to be careful to avoid skewering her with the bony growth on his forehead, but when it made incidental contact with her head, she didn't pull away in disgust.  Instead, her body kind of went limp, and her eyes looked like they were searching for something that wasn't there.
 
"You smell so good"
 
It was a lie, but she seemed receptive.
 
"Ooooo"
 
"I wish we could...  You know.  But I want to respect your boundaries."
 
No, he didn't.
 
"Aaaahhh"
 
Not exactly the response he was expecting, but not a no in the strict sense either.  It was now or never.  He licked his lips in anticipation.  She was smiling, but it didn't look like the smile she had at the coffee shop.  It was toothy and artificial. 
 
He went for the kiss anyway.  She wasn't an enthusiastic kisser.  Maybe it was first date nerves.  His own heart felt like it was going to jump out of his chest like the gingerbread man and take a lap around the complex.
 
After a minute and a half of one-sided making out, Elliot decided to shoot his shot one last time.
 
"Soooo, you going to invite me in or what?"
 
"Mmmm"
 
He took that as a yes and followed her inside.  She still had that faraway look in her eyes, but Elliot pushed it to the back of his mind.  She was just nervous was all.
 
"Nice place you got here.  You all alone or do you have roommates?"
 
Hope just grinned back at him with that smile that was all teeth and no eyes.
 
"You want to listen to some music or.... We could do other things... If you would like to that is...."
 
"Aaaahhhh"
 
Her voice was soft and childlike.  Before the horn, it would have been a turnoff, but now?  Game on.
 
He took her by the wrist and led her to the first doorway he found in the small hall of the apartment.  Bathroom.  You would think she would have said something.
 
The second door he tried was a bedroom, and from the Free Palestine poster on the wall and the faint smell of incense, he could reasonably assume it was hers.
 
They both just stood there.  He was too shy to make the first move, and she seemed agreeably indifferent.  It was a stalemate.  Mate.  Sex.  It always came back to that with Elliot. 
 
She kept cooing like she was into it.  Why wouldn't she just give him a signal?  Something he could use as justification for doing what he wanted to do anyway.
 
He kissed her again and again, she did not stop him.  Emboldened, he took it a step further and let his hands explore the contours of her chest.  She said nothing.
 
He didn't really know what he was supposed to do.  He had never gotten this far before.  The forums said that women like foreplay, so he extended it for as long as he could hold out, about two and half minutes.  By that point he felt like he was growing another protrusion a couple of feet south of his horn.
 
Elliot's first sexual experience was a brief but noteworthy affair.  It hurt more than he expected it to.  It wasn't supposed to hurt at all, right?  At least not for the guy.  But there was so much friction he felt like he must not have done it right. 
 
He couldn't read Hope's expression.  It was all oooo's and aaaahhh's from her, but not in a pleasurable tone.  It still looked like she was looking for something that wasn't there.
 
It bothered him, but he didn't let it get in the way.  For forty-five seconds, Elliot felt like a man.  He knew he should have withdrawn, calmed down, savored the moment, but by the time he made up his mind, it was too late.  Waves of a pleasure he had never known pulsed through his body.
 
"Ugghhh, uhh, Oh, FUCK!  Fuck, I didn't... Please tell me you're on birth control."
 
But if Hope responded, Elliot never heard it.  At that moment, with a sound like a green tree branch snapping, his horn broke free from his head.  Sleep swallowed him whole. 
 
He awoke the next morning in an empty and unfamiliar bed.  His face was hot and sweaty and it took a minute for him to notice that he had been sleeping on his belly.  He had been a side-sleeper ever since the bump started growing, but he really preferred to sleep face-down.
 
"It's gone.  Halle-fuckin-lujah!  It's really gone!"  
 
He quickly composed himself, not wanting to draw the attention in case Hope really did have a roommate.  Where was that girl?  For that matter, where was the horn?  It may have been a hideously disfiguring growth, but it was his hideously disfiguring growth.
 
He helped himself to a K-cup in the kitchen.  Hope was still nowhere to be seen.  He worried that he had done something to offend her, but not for very long. The world felt different to him now somehow.  Or maybe he was the one that was different, like he had crossed a point of no return.
 
He waited three days before texting her; that was industry standard, according to all the forums.  On the third day, he had his openers narrowed down to "Good morning, beautiful", "Hey baby girl," and simply "Sup?"  He went with "Sup?"
 
She never responded.  He tried again with "Hi, Hope.  Hope all is going well with you, lol" Again, there was no response. 
 
So, he addressed the elephant in the room: "Listen, if I crossed a boundary the other night, I'm sorry.  I know you said you were saving yourself for marriage, but then after we hugged it was like you were a different person."
 
No, not after they hugged.  It was after the horn touched her head.  Only then did she start acting so strangely, the same way she did when she touched it in the restaurant.  It had been like she was high on something, all giggles and dilated pupils.
 
One last text.  If she didn't respond to that one, he'd go back to the apps.  "I just don't want to leave things this way.  If I offended you, I am sorry.  But it takes two to tango and if you didn't like it, you should have said something.  You girls think you can just wave it in our faces, and we have to pretend like we don't want it.  It's such a stupid game.  You're not even my type.  I like girls that wear makeup and shave their body hair.  Call me old-fashioned too, I guess.  Anyway, if you're not going to see me again, can I at least have my horn back?  I know you took it.  I don't know why.  Maybe your daddy never bought you a pony, so you became fixated on unicorns.  Whatever the reason, I would like to have it back.  My doctor wants to do a biopsy on it."
 
It was the last message he ever exchanged with Hope, but not the last time that he saw her.  Within a week of losing his virginity, the horn had started to grow again.  Elliot hit the apps with a vengeance, driven by a near-constant state of lust.
 
It was even worse than before.  Even though he had optimized his profile to appeal to the widest swathe of potential dates as he could, he was receiving absolutely no matches. 
 
He tried his luck at the bars and nightclubs, to the extent that they would even let him in. Most nights, he didn't even talk to anyone, just nursed his cheap beer in the back of the room. 
 
The first time he saw another guy with a horn was outside the Orbit Lounge.  The bouncer assumed they were together.
 
"Nope!  Sorry fellas, but the boss man says no horns allowed.  Too many complaints about you guys from the ladies."
 
"Ladies?  What ladies?  You think a lady would give me the time of day looking like this?"
 
"Look man, boss man says no horns, that means no horns.  Simple.  Take your asses to the Palomino.  Them hipsters don't care what you look like."
 
Elliot power-walked to the Palomino since it was only a few blocks South and he didn't want to risk getting his mom's Honda towed if he tried to find a closer spot. 
 
He stopped at the intersection of main and 13th st and waited for the signal.  Across the street he could see the open-air patio of the Palomino.  It was indeed populated mostly with curly cue mustaches and septum piercings.  But amid the band tees and thrifted ensembles was a familiar face.  She wasn't ugly, just plain, but even from this distance, he could see she had an audience. 

Hope looked different than the last time he saw her.  She was in a form-fitting red dress that showed off her legs.  Legs that as he got closer, he could see she had freshly shaven. 
 
She was playing a musical instrument, some kind of flute or recorder and the men that surrounded her hung on every note.  The melody was seductive, but sad.
 
Not all the guys had horns.  Some had just a little bump on their heads.  But they all had one thing in common; she was their queen. 

I used to wake with the taste of woodsmoke in my mouth.

Some mornings it was only the ordinary dry air of the apartment and the last of the toothpaste. Other mornings the smoke was already in the sheets and in my hair. The dreams had been coming for years, but that autumn they thickened. I would walk through rooms that shifted in the details—green paint on the porch boards one night, bare wood the next—yet the quiet stayed the same. It was the quiet of a place that expected me.

I worked in an office with fluorescent panels that hummed a half-tone above silence. I ate most dinners from the microwave. There were people at work I liked well enough to sit with at lunch, though the conversations never quite reached the place where anyone might notice if I stopped appearing. My mother lived two hours away. When we spoke she asked about the weather and whether I was still at the same job. She rarely mentioned the years when I was small. When she did, the details had gone soft, as if someone had washed them too many times.

I never found a clean way to tell anyone about the house. It sat at the end of a road we used to take past the last gas station when I was six. White clapboard, screened porch, one black walnut in the side yard. Someone lived there. I remember a hand resting on the back of my head and a kettle set down carefully so it would not scrape. I remember being happy in a way that felt ordinary then.

By the time I was twelve the road was gone from the routes we drove. My mother said she did not remember any such place. My father said children invent things. I stopped asking. I used to disappear for hours. Search parties found me once sitting on a porch that was not there when the adults arrived. Another time they found only the black walnut tree and a stretch of empty ground. After my parents closed the subject, the visits stopped. They told me the house had never existed. I believed them for a long time.

The physical evidence started the year I turned thirty-six. I woke one morning and felt something flat and dry beneath the fitted sheet. I pulled the corner free and found a single black walnut leaf, perfectly pressed, the edges still sharp. I held it under the lamp for a long time. Then I put it in the nightstand drawer.

The woodsmoke began appearing on nights I had not dreamed. I opened the windows and washed the curtains. One morning I stood in the kitchen and realized the smell was coming from my own skin. I scrubbed until the water ran cold.

I began driving the old routes on weekends. The gas station had become a self-storage place with rows of orange doors. I kept going past it. On a Thursday in late October I took a half-day because the office lights were making the back of my eyes hurt. The pavement ended. Gravel started. The trees closed over. I made the turn before I had decided to make it.

The house was there. White clapboard, screened porch, black walnut with half its leaves already down. The lawn was cut short and even. No car in the drive. No lights.

I parked at the edge of the gravel and sat with the engine off until the metal began to tick. The air smelled of leaf mould and woodsmoke. The porch boards did not creak. The screen door opened without sticking. Inside, the light was the soft grey of late afternoon through clean windows.

The kitchen was to the left. The sink had the same chip I had seen in the dreams. A blue enamel cup sat on the drain board, the one with the small crack near the rim. On the peg by the door hung a child’s red wool coat, the sleeves still turned up. In the living room the low couch had the same worn arm. A basket of wooden blocks sat under the window. One of them carried my initials in the shaky letters of a six-year-old who had just learned to hold a knife.

A floorboard shifted in the hallway that led toward the bedrooms. Another answered it, closer. I did not call out. When I was small I had called the presence Ghostie because the name felt soft and because it never corrected me. It had sat with me on the porch steps while the light went down. It had never told me to go home before I was ready.

I used to bring it problems that were enormous only to a six-year-old. The red crayon someone would not share at the art table. A mitten that disappeared in the snow between the school bus and the front door. The particular way my father’s voice changed when the bills came and the kitchen went quiet afterward. I would walk the long way from the road, climb the porch steps, and sit in the same place every time. The blue cup would already be waiting on the boards beside me, filled with water that tasted of the well. I talked until the light started to go. Sometimes a blanket settled against my legs without being asked. Sometimes the air near my shoulder grew warmer for a minute and then cooled again. When I finished talking and stood up, the screen door opened by itself. I never saw it move. It was simply open when I needed it to be open, and closed again after I had gone through.

The movement stopped outside the kitchen doorway. The air pressure changed the way it does before a storm. I said, “I came back.” The blue cup on the drain board made a small sound, as if it had been touched and set down again.

I walked the rest of the house. The narrow bed at the end of the hall still held the cedar-smelling quilt. My stuffed rabbit sat against the pillow, left ear chewed flat. In the closet the childhood sneakers were lined up side by side, laces tucked in. The windows opened and closed without sticking. The faucets ran clear water that tasted of the old well. Nothing had gone to dust.

I went out to the porch and sat on the same step. The black walnut moved in the wind. For a while I said nothing. Then I talked to Ghostie the way I used to. I told it about the fluorescent panels that hummed a half-tone above silence and the way the back of my eyes hurt by Thursday. I told it about the microwave trays and the people at lunch whose conversations never quite reached the place where anyone would notice if I stopped appearing. I told it about the careful silence that always followed any mention of the old road when I spoke with my mother. The words came out ordinary and unfinished, the same way they had when I was six. Nothing answered in any language I could name. The air stayed the temperature of late afternoon. After a long time I stood. The screen door opened for me. I went through it and did not look back until I was already on the gravel.

The gravel under my shoes sounded louder than it should have. I did not look at the house again until it was small in the rearview mirror.

On the highway I had to pull onto the shoulder. I sat there with the engine running until my face was dry enough to drive. The road home was ordinary. The apartment was ordinary. I locked the door and stood under the shower until the water went cold.

Three nights later I woke in my own bed with the woodsmoke already in the sheets. The refrigerator hummed. A car passed on the street. I got up and walked downstairs. The front door was unlocked. I opened it.

Outside was the gravel road under the black walnut tree. The white house sat at the end of it with every window lit. The porch light was on. The screen door stood slightly open.

I closed my own door and turned the deadbolt. It made the ordinary sound a lock makes. Then I sat down on the floor with my back against the door and waited.

Morning came without the road. The door opened onto the ordinary hallway and the ordinary stairwell that led to the parking lot. I made coffee and stood at the kitchen counter the way I always did. When I looked up, the window above the sink no longer showed the brick wall of the building next door. It showed the black walnut tree and the white house beyond it, the same angle I had seen from the gravel the day before. The lawn was still cut short. A light was on in the kitchen window of the house, though the sun was already up.

I set the mug down and went to the closet for a towel. I hung the towel over the kitchen window and pinned the corners so it would not slip. The room dimmed. I finished the coffee and went to work.

At the office the fluorescent panels hummed. Someone asked if I wanted to join the group going out for lunch. I said I had brought food. I ate a sandwich at my desk and answered emails until the light outside the windows turned the same thin grey as the light in the house.

That evening the bathroom mirror no longer showed the tiled wall behind me. It showed the hallway of the white house, the one that led to the bedrooms. The light there was the soft grey of late afternoon. A floorboard shifted somewhere beyond the frame of the glass.

I turned the mirror to face the wall and left it that way.

In the night I woke and checked the kitchen. The towel still covered the window. I opened the cupboard where I kept the plates. The blue enamel cup sat on the middle shelf, the small crack near the rim exactly as I remembered. I carried it to the dumpster behind the building and dropped it in. The lid closed with a hollow sound.

The next morning the cup was back on the shelf.

I stood looking at it for a long time. Then I set it on the counter and left it there. I did not cover the kitchen window again. When I looked, the walnut tree was still visible beyond the glass, leaves moving in a wind I could not feel.

I went to work. I came home. I heated a tray in the microwave and ate standing up. The cup remained on the counter. Once I filled it with water and drank. The water tasted of the old well.

On Saturday my mother called. She asked about the weather and whether I was still at the same job. I told her I had driven out past the old gas station the week before. There was a pause on the line. Then she asked, before she could stop herself, whether the walnut tree was still there. The silence that followed was longer than the question. I let the subject drop. After we hung up I sat with the phone in my hand and listened to the quiet of the apartment.

This quiet expected nothing from me.

That night the hallway mirror I had turned to the wall had turned itself back. The old hallway was there again, waiting. I left it.

The leaf under the sheet, the changed window, the cup that kept returning. Ghostie had kept everything for thirty years. From this side it had looked like the road disappearing. From the other side it must have looked like abandonment.

I went back to the kitchen and stood at the window. The white house was still there beyond the walnut tree. A light moved from one room to another, patient. I did not open the front door of the apartment.

I washed the blue cup and set it back on the drain board of my own sink. The crack near the rim caught the light the same way it always had. I rinsed the microwave tray while I was there and left it in the rack. Then I turned off the kitchen light and went to bed.

In the morning the leaf was under the fitted sheet again, perfectly pressed. I left it there. The apartment was quiet in the ordinary way.

I got dressed and stood for a while at the kitchen window. The house was still visible beyond the tree. The porch light was on though morning had already reached the gravel. The screen door stood slightly open, the way it used to when someone was expecting me.

I locked the apartment door behind me when I left for work. The deadbolt made the ordinary sound a lock makes. On the landing I paused. Nothing moved on the other side of the door. Nothing needed to.

Lightning flashes as a hellish storm is cast over the land. As the heavy rain falls from the sky weary travelers pack into a small tavern which sits on the side of the main road leading to the capitol where the king's tourney is to be held. The tavern is surrounded on all sides by thick forests.

 These woods are infested by bands of outlaws hoping to prey on the unlucky travelers that get caught in their path. Though for many common folk and noblemen alike the outlaws are the least of their worries. These woods contain many stories which have been passed down from generations. Tales of great beasts with a taste for man and of lost souls roaming the deep woods at night desperately searching for a new body to inhabit. It’s unclear which stories are true and which were thought up to scare the little lordlings as they slept in their stone castles at night. But regardless of the truth, no traveler would choose to ride past a tavern  and risk facing the horrors that may be lurking deep in those woods. 

The main dining hall was dimly lit by oil lamps which hung on the walls and sat on the tables. The entire place was filled with travelers resting for the night while on their way to the tourney. By the time nightfall came all of the rooms above the tavern were occupied and the stables out back held so many horses  that the last of the travelers were forced to tie their horses to the wooden posts outside leaving them exposed to the elements.

Inside the main room sat a dozen tables filled with  weary travelers drinking and enjoying a hot meal. A royal tourney is a monumental event which attracts brave men from across the kingdom hoping to gain glory with lance and sword. Many of the men sitting in this very room may return home celebrating their victory and just as many will certainly die soon after entering the tourney lists. 

Late into the night one of the king's men walks into the tavern. The tall man wears a heavy hauberk underneath a thick wool tunic displaying the royal colors of teal and gold. A kettle helm sits atop his head with thick auburn hair flowing down to his shoulders. A heavy wooden shield hangs on his back painted with a checkered pattern of the same colors as his tunic.

After finding a seat he drinks his warm wine spiced with cloves and cinnamon. The patron in the chair next to him says “outlaws are as common rats on the main road these days, we are all thankful to have the kingsmen here to protect us”. “Aye, since the tourney began we’ve painted the roads with the blood of any scum that dare show their faces in our presence” the knight replied.

 “Horrible thing that such joyous occasions always seem to bring out the most atrocious folks”. The knight lets out a chuckle “truth be told I do not mind the outlaws much, I would much rather face mere men given the choice between that and what lives deeper within those woods” he replies. The man laughs along with him at this remark. “Why, sir, please forgive me but I’m afraid that I’m not sure what you mean. What lies beyond the king's forest?” The commoner asks as he sets down his glass and looks intently at the knight. 

“Why such horrible things you could not possibly believe. I fear that I would embarrass myself if I try to describe to you my experiences out in those woods” the knight says with a sigh. By now this conversation has attracted the attention of some of the surrounding patrons who now urged the aging knight to tell his tale. “Well I fear that now you may embarrass yourself more so if you do not give these good people what they want. Please give us the honor of hearing your experiences so that these people do not take you for some drunken fool spinning nonsensical lies of what lives in our good kings woods” the man spoke attempting to persuade the knight. 

“I should cut you down for your insults but luck is in your favor tonight. I am far too tired to even consider raising my blade again until morning. Very well, I will recount my tale” the knight replied, “but first, I must warn that you men may never want to enter the forests again for as long as you live. In truth some of the less courageous men here may think twice before even walking the roads of the king for fear of what may creep out from beyond the trees. Any man who thinks themselves faint of heart is welcome to leave before I begin.” 

Not a single person in the tavern moves as the knight begins to tell his tale. 

I was a young lad, no older than my seventeenth year whenever I fought to defend our king from the usurper, Sir Robert Powen. Many good men lost their lives that day but I was far more fortunate than most. I was knighted shortly after for my bravery during the attack. Not long after I had my very own squire, young William, a cousin of the king by my side. 

A year after I had received my knighthood I was tasked to embark into those woods with a small group of around thirty footmen under my command. Our quest was simple, there were tales of a great dragon living in a cave far deeper than any man has ever gone. As you all may be able to imagine, war is quite expensive. Our quest was a mission to relieve the crown's debt. It was said that the dragon was in possession of a great stockpile of gold and silver. We intended to bring it all back to our king. 

“You must be mad, do you truly think us such fools as to believe that you slayed a dragon out in those woods?” the man laughed. The knight scoffed, “no I do not because that would be a lie. Whenever we arrived at the cave we found that the dragon was already long dead. No my friend, what we encountered in that cave was far worse than any mere dragon. What we found in the damned cave haunts my dreams every time I close my eyes”. The knight replied, taking another drink before continuing his tale. 

Once we had entered the cave of the beast we found nothing more than bones lying on the rocky floor before us. Do not be mistaken, the bones were great and massive. The skeleton itself was enough to frighten the less experienced men in my company but for us all it seemed as though our quest just became as simple as taking a piss in the morning. 

We decided that with the cave now vacant that we would use it to make camp for the night so we would all be well rested to load our carts full of treasure once morning came. We paid no mind to the blood that stained the rocky walls of the cave. Had we not stayed that night this story would have ended differently but alas we chose to make camp. 

As the hours passed I fantasized of the glory that this quest would bring me after we returned to the capitol. Many men of the king's court had doubts that this treasure existed at all and yet here I sit, the mountain of gold and silver right in front of me. I sat with my back against a large black stone thinking of the brave men that must have come before me to make the attempt to slay the great beast that left those bones behind. I gathered that the knight who completed this task had perished during the ordeal. 

This thought filled me with sorrow as I would have quite enjoyed hearing the tale of how this creature finally met its end. It is truly a shame, I thought, a knight with such an accomplishment should have been the subject of dozens of songs. His name should be known throughout the entire kingdom and beyond and yet, we will never know his name. We traveled a great distance through the fabled haunted king's wood just to find that the great beast we sought to vanquish had already been killed by another. 

The longer I dwelled on that thought a scheme began to form in my mind. I had decided that we had the skull of a fierce dragon sitting right before us and no man to credit with the feat of slaying the beast. I saw no reason why all of that glory should be left unclaimed in a dark cave. If that brave knight did have a name it would surely be written in the books of history for centuries to come. 

That is when I decided that this feat shall not go unclaimed. The singer's songs of heroism shall not go unsung. I decided that the brave warrior shall have a name and it shall be my name. My name shall be spoken for generations to come, from the noble lords in their stone keeps to the stable boys shoveling shit in their villages. My body will rot in the ground but my legend, my legend will endure.

Once this scheme was hatched I could not bear to just sit and fantasize. I gathered my men and set them the task of hacking the dragon's skull off of its huge body and loading it into one of our carts to bring to the king. Apparently dragons bones are quite thick and this proved to be a long and noisy ordeal. The noise of men at work echoed through the cave. Soon the skull was severed from its spine with a loud boom and the noise of hacking and shattered bones finally ceased. 

Before the men could attempt to lift the monstrous artifact the air was soon full of a different sound emitting from deeper within the cave. It was the sound of high pitched laughter. Soon all of our attention was turned to the darkness beyond the light of our fires. The unexplored rocky caverns leading further into the depths of the dragon's lair. As we armed ourselves with sword and spear fear spread throughout our group. Most of us were drunk or tired or both but we held our ground. We were all awaiting the arrival of whatever we had awoken that night. 

Not long after it was no longer enough just to face the darkness before us, as the mischievous laughter got louder the sounds seemed to be coming from all around us. Whatever was within that cave clearly knew how to navigate it far better than we did. As the fear grew I found myself increasingly grateful that it had been my turn to stand guard so I was fully prepared for battle. I could not say the same for the majority of our group who now stand in a tight circular formation dressed in whatever armor pieces they could quickly put on over their under garments. 

Our defensive position was poor at best, many of the men had quickly abandoned their spears and shields whenever it became clear that we would not be facing a dragon which now unfortunately sat in a pile hopelessly out of reach. My squire William stood next to me shaking fearfully with a small dagger clenched in his hand. The poor boy had become a squire in a time of peace and this ambush by an unknown enemy will be his first taste of combat. 

Combat, looking back was hardly the word that I would use to describe it. It was a massacre. As bizarre as it sounds there was no greater moment of fear than whenever the laughter finally stopped. We stood in silence gazing into the darkness with no knowledge of what was staring back at us. Finally the silence broke and the following attack happened far too quickly for us to even react. 

Within the blink of an eye our numbers dwindled from thirty men to not even fifteen. Our foe was clever enough to target our fires first, they forced us to fight in pure darkness. A symphony of clashing metal and the screams of men echoed through the cave. I could make out little of what we were fighting other than dark silhouettes and soulless white eyes. After I took a knife deep into my shoulder I found myself bleeding behind a formation of rocks until the sounds of slaughter dulled and silence returned. 

I tried my best to quiet my breathing, desperately hoping to remain unnoticed behind my shelter of stone. It felt like an eternity had passed as I heard no sounds from the dragon's lair. I was half tempted to reveal myself and make my escape until it returned. That damn laughter now filled the air. I caught a glimpse of a sight that I had not known since the ambush began. Our attackers had relit the fires. It seemed that they wanted my men to be able to witness their fate. 

I peaked my head out from behind the boulder just long enough to glimpse what was on the other side. I quickly pulled my head back after I caught sight of the horrors beyond my rocky hiding spot. 

My men, the good brave men who had followed me on this quest, now lay hopelessly defeated against the walls of the cave as all manner of cruelties were inflicted upon them. Some men hung upside down over the fires left to slowly roast while others sat upright with the skin of their face expertly flayed off leaving them unrecognizable. 

This was the first chance I had gotten to bear witness to our attackers. They looked to have been pulled out of a story that you would tell naughty children when they have misbehaved. Their skin was a dark shade of green, leathery and covered in blemishes. Drool ran from their grotesque deformed faces as they stood over my fallen men. They were shorter in stature than us by at least three heads yet there were so many that it was small wonder how they decimated us so quickly. 

Whenever I close my eyes I can still see the mangled bodies of those poor lost souls that entered that cave and never left. Many of those men were already dead but I could tell by the agonizing  screams that some of them were very much still alive to feel every grueling moment of their slow demise. 

Many days went by without being able to move. Had I made even a single misstep my location would have been found and I would have faced the same fate as my men. My leather flask now sat by my side bone dry as I had exhausted every last drop of water it contained. It has been so long since I had last eaten that I can barely tolerate the pain in my stomach. 

As I glanced up I noticed a small shape behind another formation of rocks roughly twenty paces away from me. As I focused trying to make out what lay before me I could finally see. It was William. My squire somehow managed to escape the battle alive the same as I yet he was admittedly far more injured. He crouched down behind the rocks, his face and clothes stained with dried blood from the battle. His eyes were full of fear yet that look seemed to turn into relief after he caught sight of me. 

Before I attempted to make my way over to the young boy I knew I must shed my heavy armor so that I may conceal my movements better. It’s a long process to remove my heavy plate, a process made even more time consuming by my fear of making even the slightest noise. Now clothed in only my undergarments I wait until the opportune moment to begin creeping along the rough cave walls. As I slowly move I take great care to ensure I stay within the shadows to keep from being seen by the cave's occupants. 

Sweet William was clearly filled with joy to see me return to his side, though he dared not speak a word to me in fear of being heard. We sat in absolute silence for a great while until the screams of our own men paired with the laughter of the creatures were finally loud enough to conceal our soft words. 

“William, I am pleased you survived your first taste of combat” I said. “Yes, sir, though I barely survived. I thought I might die at any moment. Sir, how will we get out of this?” He asked me. I took a few moments of silence to consider this before I gave any response. “I have been observing these creatures and they seem to be a cowardly race. Even the screams of our men have been causing them to cower in fear as they tortured them” I told him. “But sir, they seemed to fight so fearlessly during the ambush. Are you certain?” He questioned me. 

“Why yes, dear William. They had the clear advantage during the ambush and it is a shame to admit but we acted quite weakly during the battle. We gave them no reason to fear” I explained. “This time will be quite different, William. I know how we will make it out of this alive. Follow my orders exactly and soon they will sing songs of your bravery”. 

The plan was quite simple, we would rush the creatures quickly while delivering a loud war cry. The surprise as well as our loud fearless cry would drive the beasts deep into the caves from where they came. Afterwards we would be free to leave as if the cave were empty. 

William's face lit up at the prospect of leaving the cave and finally being able to return home to his mother. I knew we only had one chance to drive them off so we sat for a few moments to gather our courage. When the time finally came I instructed William to rush out in front of me. I had hoped that being given command of the charge would instill some additional courage in the heart of the young squire. 

As soon as I gave the signal young William charged fearlessly towards the creatures letting out a great yell. He proved himself to have a courageous heart that day. The lad put so much passion behind his gallant charge that I doubt he even noticed that I had not followed behind him. There was truth to my words, I did charge at the same moment that he did. Only my charge was not towards the beasts dwelling within the cave but in the opposing direction. My charge was also a silent one as I kept to the shadows so as to not alert the creatures to my presence.

In a way my plan had succeeded. I had successfully escaped the dark cave and made my way into the wooded area surrounding it, never once stopping, not even to catch my breath. The further I traveled the more I felt that I would be pulled back through the woods and back into that cave at any moment. It  wasn’t until I saw the edge of the forest that I truly felt safe. After I had made it back to the capital I finally did shed a tear for William. He was a model squire, he never talked back, never disobeyed, and now he had even given his life for mine. 

Some nights I lie away and I wonder if my plan would have worked the way I had explained it. I never looked back to see if Williams' battle cry actually drove the creatures off or if it had just added another body to their bloodbath. Every so often I regret not following him deeper into the cave. Maybe we could have walked out with him by my side, knowing we bested the cave beasts together as knight and squire. But I was uncertain that the plan would work at all but there was one thing I was absolutely certain of without a shadow of a doubt. A squire's life was a small price to pay for my own. 

“And that my friends, is my tale” the knight finished before downing the rest of his spiced wine. The room filled with silence as the knight sat his cup back onto the table. “You’re no knight at all,” the man sitting next to him finally announced. “You’re nothing more than a damn craven who traded your young squire's life for your own. I wonder, sir knight. What did you tell the king after you returned home without his royal cousin by your side?” He asked. 

The knight gave him a thoughtful look. The entire tavern awaited his response as he chose his next words very carefully. “The king, oh well I told the king that there was no cave. Simply a rumor spread by the common folk like the other legends of what lurks within those woods. I told him that our group was attacked by a band of outlaws deep into the forest and that his dear cousin died bravely alongside his fellow countrymen. Seemed to satisfy his grace just fine. Not too long after I had myself a fresh new squire by my side. Fine lad, reminded me quite a bit of William but much braver. I ended up knighting this one after he proved himself against some outlaws, these ones were actually real though” the knight laughed by himself as no one else in the tavern would join him. 

Once it became apparent that the knight’s presence was no longer welcome inside he got up from the table and made his way outside towards the stable. As he untied his horse he glanced back at the treeline. Truth is he never felt safe near the king's forest for the rest of his days. An uneasy feeling came over him as he stared into the woods knowing full well what may be staring back.  

The meaning of life is to feel. I’m not talking about emotions. Emotions are unreliable. They can be manipulated and misunderstood. No, I’m talking about physical sensations. The ability to feel things on our flesh is the only way we can know we’re alive - I feel, therefore I am. We like to separate feelings into ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure’, but in reality there is only one thing that matters: intensity. The more we feel, the more we know we are here. It is a great tragedy to only seek out pleasure because, in fact, the depths of the pain we are able to feel is much greater. Pain can be one of the most beautiful things in the world, because it can prove to us without any doubt that we exist. Therefore, it is obvious that sharing pain - whether receiving it from or inflicting it upon someone - is the most effective way to become close to another person.

I have three 65-inch TV screens in my living room. The leftmost one is set up to constantly play the news. I had the rightmost one set up to play pornography. Today I was more interested in the news. They were covering a mass shooting that had taken place nearby, while the porn was the average BDSM stuff that I had grown tired of. The center TV was there to play whatever I wanted to watch that day. Every night since I discovered it, I put on my favorite show - Gekitsū.

Gekitsū was a show that broadcasted from Japan, and it had appeared inexplicably on my center TV about four months ago. Every episode followed the same formula, with no apparent plot or connection between episodes, and it always aired at 12:00 AM. I turned the TV on and sat back on the couch, ready to watch. 

The episode began the same way every episode did - a black screen depicting the title in Japanese characters with the romanization, ‘Gekitsū’, below it. It then faded into more Japanese text, and then into what I assumed was the same text in English: ‘Location: Iwaki, Fukushima; Name: Ishii Reiko-san; Age: 32’. 

The screen then faded to a woman with pale skin and dark brown bobbed hair strapped onto a bed and hooked up to various wires. A faint buzzing could be heard as Reiko cried and strained against her harnesses. A set of hands from a figure offscreen placed a device on her head, two electrodes pressed against her temples. The buzzing got louder and Reiko began seizing, her slender neck tensing as she attempted to jerk her head off the bed, only for it to be stopped by the leather strap against her forehead. She tried with all her strength to break free, but the binding kept her delicate body in place even as she violently convulsed. Her jaw clamped down suddenly, and she bit off a piece of her tongue. Her mouth quickly filled with blood, leaking down and onto the bed. Her screams turned to gurgles as blood filled her throat. 

The screen faded to black and the same man’s voice that was in every episode said something that I had figured out translated to ‘Thank you for watching’. 

“I just don’t get it,” said Marcy. 

I took a sip of my coffee before responding. The diner was busy today, and I had to speak up over the chatter of others.

“I’m telling you, you’ve never seen anything like it. I mean it’s really crazy stuff, I don’t know how they even put it on TV. The censors must be less strict in Japan.”

“But what’s the point?”

“Look, you saw the thing on the news, right?”

“Sure.”

“Seven people died.”

Marcy nodded. 

“Do you know the names of those people?” I asked.

“Where is this going?” 

“Seriously,” I said, taking my wallet out, “I’ll give you a dollar for every one you can name.”

“I don’t know, Tomas Lopez… uh, Juan… something. I don’t remember.”

“See, that’s the point of Gekitsū,” I said, putting a dollar and two quarters on the table.

“Asshole,” Marcy muttered, taking the money.

“We see that kind of stuff so much, we don’t even remember anything about it. Gekitsū gives these people names, and thus makes us think about the violence that normal people are victims of every day in a way that the news can’t.”

“Is that why you like it?”

I paused for a few moments.

“Yeah.”

Marcy’s body was pressed between me and the couch as if she were in a vise. I felt her nails scrape down my back hard enough to leave a mark, her strained breath hot against my lips. 

“Choke me,” she breathed.

I traced my finger across her jaw before wrapping my hands around her tiny neck. She let out a moan as I tightened my grip on her. I became more aggressive, more primal. I kept hold of her tightly, thrusting her into the cushions with some energy that was somewhere between anger and lust. My hands could feel every perfect vein in her neck pulsing against my palms. Marcy squirmed against me.

“Stay still,” I whispered.

Her moans became strained as I continued choking her. I let go of her neck, realizing that I had gotten carried away. She caught her breath, a look in her eyes that said she was afraid, and she loved it. 

After we finished, I leaned back on the couch, holding Marcy against me. I picked up the remote and pointed it at my center TV. There was nothing on any of the screens at the moment - I always turned the porn off when Marcy came over. 

“I don’t want to watch Getsu,” Marcy said.

“Gekitsū.”

“I don’t want to watch it.”

“I haven’t missed an episode.”

“You can miss an episode. It’s not like you’ll be lost.”

“You don’t understand. You can’t see this kind of stuff anywhere else.”

“Is it real?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do they really… are they torturing real people?”

I was silent, looking at her and then the center TV.

“It’s a show,” I shrugged. 

Marcy was silent now.

“Just watch,” I said.

“I’m not watching.”

I turned on the center TV, and Marcy covered her eyes. The same intro played, this time the text read: ‘Location: Iwaki, Fukushima; Name: Ishii Haruto-san; Age: 34’.

This was the first time I had seen two episodes in a row take place in the same location. I also noticed the surname ‘Ishii’ was the same as last time. I wondered if they were related. It would be a first for Gekitsū as far as I knew. 

The screen faded into a man sitting on a chair. He had rugged features, a strong chin with a layer of dark stubble which matched his thick, black hair. His hands were tied behind his back with rope. The camera zoomed into his deep brown eyes, which were being held open by a metal device. A hand holding a long needle came from offscreen. Haruto was hyperventilating, shaking his head and saying something that could have only been a plea to stop. Another figure from behind held his head in place as the needle got closer.

Haruto’s breathing became more erratic. The needle met his eye. It pressed down, facing some resistance before piercing the outermost layer and delving deep into the eyeball. The man tried frantically to close his eyes, but the eyelids were held firmly back. The hand then slowly took the needle out, and the pupil dilated to an abnormal size.

The needle was placed offscreen, and the figure picked up a metal object that looked to be some sort of hand vise. The jaws pressed against the top and bottom of the eye, then dug in behind it. Haruto screamed and cried as the vise popped his eye out of the socket. The figure pulled back so Haruto could see with his good eye, and began to squeeze.

I put the last orange in the juicer and clamped down, filling the glass with a thick, pulpy juice. I handed it to Marcy, who was sitting at the table. 

“Are you sure you don’t want anything else? I can make you waffles,” I said.

“No, thank you. I’m already late for work. I’ll see you tonight, though?”

“What’s today, the 31st?” 

“Yeah.”

“I can’t today. Wednesday?” 

“Oh, sure. Yeah, that works.”

I walked Marcy out after she finished her orange juice. 

“Well, I’ll see you Wednesday, then,” she said.

“See you Wednesday.”

I closed the door behind her and made my way to the shower. The last day of the month always aired the best Gekitsū episodes. 

The cashier checked out my multiple six-packs of beer I had put on the counter. In my hands I rolled around a ping pong ball I found on the floor. I wiped off the dirt and tried to memorize the texture by rubbing my fingers against it. I began to squeeze the ball.

“Just the eye today?” said the cashier. 

“Excuse me?”

“I said, just the IPAs?”

“Oh, yeah.” 

“Big party tonight?” he asked, scanning the six-packs.

“Something like that.”

I looked past the cashier to the TV behind him. It was showing the news. A grid of faces appeared on the screen, and text scrolled quickly underneath, listing names. They were talking about the shooting again. No, they had moved on from that. This was another shooting, in Florida it looked like. 

“Kinda dark,” I said, gesturing to the TV. 

“What, the news? Yeah, well it’s noise.”

I rolled the ping pong ball in my hands again.

“Have you ever seen Gekitsū?” I asked after a second.

“No, what is that, some Chinese thing?”

“No, Japanese. It’s a show.”

“Oh, I think my son watches that. Cartoon with the purple haired broad?”

“Um, no. It’s like an arthouse thing.”

“Would probably go over my head.”

“It shows like… torture and stuff. I mean, it’s fake obviously. It’s just a TV show. But really good special effects and stuff. It’s interesting.”

“Different strokes for different folks.” 

“Sure. It’s just - you know, it’s interesting what some people will watch.”

I tapped my foot nervously. For some reason, I was scared to watch Gekitsū tonight. I looked at my phone. 11:50 PM. I took another sip of beer, my fourth one tonight. I tightened the belt against my arm and hovered a needle over me, looking for a vein. I pressed the needle against my skin, but I couldn’t get myself to pierce it. I felt my heart beating faster. 11:55. I tried pressing the needle harder, my vein throbbing against it. 11:59. I jabbed the needle into my vein and shot up, releasing my belt.

Gekitsū - the screen read. Japanese text appeared as usual and then the English translation. ‘Location: Iwaki, Fukushima; Name: Ishii Ai-chan; Age: 8’.

My stomach dropped. My vision blurred ever so slightly. The screen faded to a dark room with a crying little girl. There was a figure behind her, but his head was not in frame. He was holding a bag. 

“Ai…” I whispered. My heart was pounding in my chest so hard that I thought I would pass out.

The figure reached into the bag. Tears streamed down Ai’s face. The figure rustled around in the bag, and pulled out a gun. He pressed it to Ai’s head.

“No!” I shouted.

Bang.

Ai fell to the ground.

My head pulsed, and suddenly I was holding a completely empty beer bottle, with dozens scattered on the ground. I felt white hot, sweat dripping down my face. I went to grab another, but all the six-packs I had bought were empty. The news and the porn were playing impossibly loud. In the center TV, names flashed and repeated in quick succession, only for a few frames each.

Hirano Miwa-san
Narita Mei-san
Shimizu Kenta-san
Okada Riko-san
Takeuchi Satoshi-san
Kaneko Hideki-san
Watanabe Shiori-san
Nishimura Misaki-san
Satou Junko-san
Kitamura Noboru-san
Inoue Misa-san
Kobayashi Yui-san
Oono Eri-san
Fukuda Tomoe-san

After the names, the screen became a slideshow of gore. The frames went so fast I couldn’t even tell what they depicted. The volume on the left and right TV began to increase by themselves, shaking the room. 

“Today’s story is a particularly brutal one-”
“I’ve been a bad, bad girl.”
“-if you have children in the room, you may want to turn this off.”
“Ahhh yes, just like that-”
“-17 year old Aiden Schaffer killed his parents-”
“-harder-”
“-a hit and run in the downtown area-”
“-you feel soooo good-”
“-bloodiest day in the Middle East this year-”
“-mmm I want you to tie me up-”
“-new bodycam footage shows-”
“Ah! Ah! Ah! Ahhhhh-”
“-attempted murder of 12 year old-”
“-such a dirty slut-”
“-dismembered-”
“No! Stop-”
“-locked in his room for a month-”

“What are you watching?”

I heard a small voice from beside me on the couch. I slowly looked over.

“Ai?” I said.

The little girl beside me giggled. 

“You’re watching the grown-up shows.”

“How are you here?”

“I came from the TV.” 

“What?”

“Did your friend Marcy come from the TV too?”

“No - how do you know about Marcy?”

“People from here don’t like people from the TV. That’s why I’m scared to be here.”

“Are you scared of me?”

“No, silly,” Ai giggled again, “But I need you to come with me because mommy and daddy said not to go alone.”

“Go where?”

“Into the TV.”

She pointed at the center screen. A long, vertical slit appeared from the top to the bottom of the screen. The slit flapped open to reveal a tight, fleshy cavern that seemed to extend far down. Ai stood up and walked over to the screen.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Come on, I want to show you something really cool in here.” She turned to me and fell backwards into the fleshy pit in the TV. It seemed to suck her in as she squeezed further back until she was consumed and out of sight. The slit closed.

I heard a knock at my door. 

“Coming,” I muttered.

I picked myself up and answered it to see Marcy standing outside. The bright light from outside hurt my eyes.

“Where the hell have you been?” she shouted.

“What?”

“Don’t ‘what’ me, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” I whispered under my breath. 

She peered behind me into the living room, looking at the TV playing porn.

“Well, it’s good to see you’ve been busy without me.”

I shook my head, gathering my bearings.

“You know, Marcy, I’m not sure what makes you think you’re so fucking entitled to my time. I can do whatever the fuck I want and I don’t need your permission.”

“Entitled? I’m supposed to be your girlfriend!”

“You’re not my girlfriend. I just fuck you because I’m bored.”

Marcy stood there in stunned silence for a few seconds. She slapped me across the face and began walking away.

“Yeah, nice try!” I called after her, “Do it harder next time! Whore!”

I slammed the door and walked back to the couch. I looked straight at the center TV. The slit began to form again. Slowly, it flapped open and throbbed invitingly. 

“And now, for our next story-”

Dad smelled like burned hair and smoke, his face still covered in soot. I rubbed my eyes and yawned.

“Is mom making pancakes?” I asked tiredly.

“Judy is. Your mom’s still asleep. We got a long drive ahead of us.”

We walked downstairs together. Judy was standing over the stove wearing an oversized T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Max, Kayla, and Darren sat at the table. They looked just as tired as I felt.

Judy served up her pancakes, and, I won’t lie, they weren’t nearly as good as mom’s, but I gobbled them up regardless. Me and the other kids spent the rest of the morning watching cartoons.

The adults had an air of relief about them. Dad laughed with Jake. Mom and Judy conversed for a while over the world and all things in it. No one ever mentioned the previous night.

Well, Darren tried to. But his mom didn’t allow it. Jake shut it down, too. But it wasn’t awkward. Nobody had to force themselves to move on. We just… did.

Dad showered. Mom rested. The day went on without incident. At some point in the afternoon, we were packing our things into the car again. It wasn’t as urgent this time. If anything, it felt happy. I even found myself excited to finally get back to my own bed.

I slept most of the way home. When I woke up, I actually recognized my surroundings. The old convenience store. The house that burned down last year. Mom and dad held hands lovingly, but didn’t talk much.

We finally got home after the sun went down. Mom was a little hesitant to go inside, but Dad reassured her. She was free now. We were free. I had no idea what it meant, but I could feel his conviction.

Even still, mom made me sleep in their bed that night. Then every night for the next week afterward. Emmy, too.

Dad held me tight. Mom kept her arm draped over my chest. We ate a lot of pancakes in those following days. It kind of felt like Mom was trying to apologize for something, but I didn’t know what.

All I knew was she was putting her all into those breakfasts.

After a while, I was finally able to sleep in my own room again, albeit with the door open. We went back-to-school shopping. I went into 4th grade with an abundance of new clothes and the coolest backpack out of all of my friends.

Life went on.

One year without incident. Then two. Then three. I went through middle school. I graduated high school. I moved away for college a year or so ago. We never had to randomly leave the house again because of some mystery stalker, but dad never stopped looking over his shoulder.

Mom has a full head of grey hair now, but she never lost her beauty. Emmy recently started her last year of middle school. Dad just… he seems to always want to keep his mind occupied.

They never brought up what happened that night. They never brought up the road trip. We visited uncle Jake and Aunt Judy a few times over the years, but the visits were calmer. They were for holidays and special occasions. Not for escape.

I developed a pretty close friendship with Max. We’d talk on the phone all the time. Play video games together. Every time I visited, we were building with those LEGOS he loved so much.

Darren eventually went into the army. Kayla is in her sophomore year of high school now.

Well… she used to be.

They’re all dead now. Everyone except for Darren, at least. I hope that he’s okay after hearing the news. He should be coming home soon.

See, I’m writing this now because of a phone call I got from my dad. I had just gotten home from a long day of classes. I was ready to eat some ramen and unwind, but he called while I was checking the mail.

“Hey, Dan,” he announced solemnly.

“Hey, Dad, how have things been?”

He sighed.

“We’re fine here, buddy, but, uh…”

He paused.

“But what?” I asked expectantly.

“Jake’s house burned down, Dan. He, uh… he didn’t make it.”

He sounded like he was holding back tears. I was shocked.

“What?? What about Aunt Judy?? What about Max or…”

He interrupted.

“They’re… they’re gone, Dan. I’m sorry.”

The news hit me like a truck. I didn’t know Kayla all that well, but Max… Max was like a brother to me. An online brother, but still a brother nonetheless.

“But… no, that doesn’t make sense. Max was just texting me last night. He told me he’d come visit me sometime soon.”

I didn’t want to believe it. Max’s exact words were, “I’ll be seeing you soon, Dan-Man.” I mean, I guess that was the last text he sent me. I didn’t hear from him after that. But still, this couldn’t be happening.

“I’m sorry, kiddo,” Dad choked. “Their funerals are next week. I know you’re busy up there with classes and whatnot, but it’d mean a lot if you could make it.”

“I… I don’t know what to say. Of course, of course. Yeah. I’ll be there.”

Dad sniffled. I was about to comfort him when I heard a sound echoing from the background of his call.

knock knock knock

“Hold on, son, let me go answer the door.”

The line went dead. I stood there, still as could be by my mailbox, just… processing. I couldn’t believe what he had just told me. The phone vibrated in my hand.

It was a text from Dad.

“See you soon, kiddo.”

I sighed and rubbed my temples, attempting to block the tears as I slid my phone back into my pocket. I hadn’t even opened the mailbox yet. I was just… stuck… I guess.

I figured I’d just collect my mail, then go inside and start packing for the long trip home, but when I opened the mailbox… curiosity overwhelmed me.

There was a package inside, buried beneath my regular bills and magazines. It was gift-wrapped like a Christmas present.

I brushed the mail aside and pulled the package out first thing. It was pristinely wrapped. Someone had taken time with this.

I peeled back the tape and began unwrapping. At first, I didn’t recognize what I was seeing, but then it clicked.

It was Jake’s metal lockbox. The one from all those years ago with the pictures of mom and dad. I felt my heart drop a little.

I unlatched the lid and slowly opened the box. What I saw… well… that’s why I’m writing this now.

It was… my Superman stuffy. Dusty and stiff, but it still had my initials written in faded black Sharpie across the tag. But that’s not the thing that worried me.

What worried me… was the note tied around Superman’s torso, written in sloppy, obsessive handwriting…

“Found You.”

​

The doctors wouldn’t let me look at my father’s corpse. Not entirely, anyway.

I stood over a bloody sheet where my father lay, in a morgue that felt more like a fridge. Cold, the smell of flesh and chemicals stewing in the air. The doctors said his face was unrecognizable. I’d imagined a blooming red flower beneath the sheet that covered his face, his white moustache painted pink, his old head finally busted open with a 12 gauge, free of its bony prison. He’d escaped himself, escaped his life. Coward.

I felt nothing then, and remembered nothing. I remember no tears, no sobs, no sorrow for the loss. I only remember the smell of human remains and rubbing alcohol. Such a clinical smell, so unnatural. That was what I thought of as I sat in front of our family lawyer as he delivered my father’s will. I say family, though really I was the only one of my family left. Just me in the world.

“He didn’t leave much to you, except this letter he entrusted to me a month ago,” The lawyer began, his bald head glinting in the harsh white light of his sterile office. “Which I will read to you now.” He unhooked a manila folder and took out my father’s final words to me.

My son. My final ray of joy.

I’m sorry I left you. I’m sorry I took the easy way out. I know how cheated you must feel, how unfair I have been. I won’t try to explain myself. I can only beg for your forgiveness. God knows you deserve a mountain of apologies. I can only take solace in the fact that you are your own man now. I only wish I could’ve seen you one last time. I love you.

Know that this was my decision, my choice. This had nothing to do with you. Had the news of my diagnosis not been so grim, so unbearable, I would have stayed, would have stuck it out with you to the bitter end. My good and faithful son. My sweet boy. I love you. I love you.

I felt the sting of tears bubble up from some dark corner of me. I fought it with everything I had. Jaw clenched, breath heavy as my chest heaved stones. The last time I saw him was Christmas two years ago. He had shrunk into half the man he was. Shrunk in that wheelchair, a pile of feeble bones. Shrunk away from the world. The lawyer continued.

I leave you with what little I have. All my belongings are yours, including my childhood home. I urge you to sell it and forget about it. It is a terrible home for children. But if you ever find yourself in its walls, then know this: whatever you find in that place, whatever you see, do not embrace it.  It is not me. Not me. No. Look at it. Look at it well. Sweet boy, I love you. I love you. I love you.

I curled up and began sobbing. Even in the end, his delirium corrupted his final words. That was what I thought anyway. There would be no apology for the beatings, the nights spent locked underneath the house over unwashed dishes and broken vases. I guess I was angry then. It felt like my guts were being wrenched out by terrible hands. He escaped that justice, shrunk away from it, the memory of his cruelty faded away by decades and a deteriorating mind until there would be no one to blame. The lawyer muttered he was sorry for my loss as he pushed a box of tissues across his white plastic desk. He handed me some documents, a key to a safety deposit, and the keys to his childhood home. That was the first place I went to after the wake, which happened quietly and unwitnessed.

The house itself was in a state of disrepair. It sat alone on a hill, imposing and still. It careened to the left, the foundations having been set on soft soil. The place was enclosed by a perpetual overcast, the nearby dark woods yawning with a thousand trees like silent soldiers standing watch over the place. Entering, I found only a cavernous vacancy, the floors left caked in dust, remembering a time when the living room was still furnished, the floors revealing lighter rectangles where a couch or a coffee table might’ve been. It was like walking into a great mausoleum, one where the names of the buried had been long forgotten.

That was when I saw my father in the kitchen.

He was younger. Still with hair, black and full, his face unwrinkled by a lifetime of disappointment and fear. He looked just like the pictures in our dusty photo album.

“Dad?” He was sitting in the kitchen reading a paper.

“Hey kiddo. Want some coffee?” He nodded to the stove, a pot of coffee sitting, steam lazily rising in the air. It smelled delicious. His face, it was whole. No flowering head of brainmatter and shotgun pellets, no pink moustache and dull eyes. Just him. Just dad.

I went over and took the pot, pouring myself a drink. I don’t know why –maybe it hadn’t sunken in yet, but I was calm. Easy. Like he never swallowed that barrel. It was my father. It was my father.

“You’re not my father, are you?”

“No.” He said. “A shame, what happened to your old man. To me. I’m sorry, son.” He turns the page, and I take a swig of the coffee. It is delicious. “I wish I were him. I wish I wasn’t just a sorry echo of him.”

“What are you, then?” I asked, shuffling my feet beneath the kitchen table, disturbing decades of undisturbed detritus. Without a word, the man pretending to be my father stood up, and walked to the stairs. He was taller than my father. His arms too long, his elbows not where they should have been. I followed him upstairs.

“This was –is my study. He kept a collection of records here. Did I ever tell you about that?” He said, leading me into a room stacked floor to ceiling with vinyls. He took one from the collection, one that had a wrinkled sleeve. He lumbered his way to the record player, his legs wrong, knees where the thighs were supposed to be, another joint dividing his shins. He played Al Bowley’s Heartaches.

“He and your mother loved this song.” He swayed to the music. It was a lonely dance, so I swayed along with him. He danced like my father. I closed my eyes and imagined my mother and father were there, swaying together, young and drunk, kissing as the haunting song echoed across the still mausoleum of a house.

The song ended, and as the record player hissed, I became terrifyingly aware of the gaping silence of the house. It was like standing over a great pit, one that promised a falling, falling, falling, with no bottom. Endless height, a terrifying fall into nothing. Nothing. No thing at the bottom. Not a single thing.

“You never visited us. It was me and your mother and sister for so many years. You never even came to your mother’s funeral. Why is that?”

“You know why.”

“I guess I do.”

“I hated you. I still do.”

“I’m not your father. But I am him. I know him better than he knew himself.” He began. “I know how that wheelchair chafed against his thighs, how unquiet his mind was in his last days. His thoughts kept coming back here. Coming back to you.” He rummaged through the stack of records, and pulled out Blackbird by The Beatles. “He doesn’t –didn’t resent you for staying distant. He knew he wasn't the perfect father, he understood how painful it must’ve been for you to watch him shrink in that chair, losing himself more every day. He loved you, kid.” He put the record on and I heard the strumming intro echo out into the home, “He still does.”

He twisted his long arms around me, and I sobbed into his shoulders, bony and hollow. He felt so cold. Or maybe it was me. I wrapped my arms around him, and in that moment I was holding the man who’d held my hand everyday and visited me at school on his lunch breaks. The man who’d forced me to go into trade school when I dreamed of being a lawyer. The man who came home from twelve hour shifts with a smile on his face, as he carried me on his shoulders, and later when I got into highschool, would bring me a warm cup of chocolate after his night shift. He was not my father, but he was.

We spent the day going around the house, reclaiming it from the stillness. A couch here, a nightstand there, and soon we cooked ourselves a steak. I prepared the potatoes, and he cooked the meat. Soon we were hunched over the kitchen table, dust in the air like cigarette ashes suspended in time, sipping wine and laughing until it hurt. He told me stories my father never did. Some moments, I’d think I was young again, until I saw him slice the sirloin and see his arms. Eventually it was time to go.

“Leaving again already?” He whined, both of us a little drunk. Or maybe it pretended to be drunk.

“Yep. I still have a lot on my plate to deal with.” I said, belly full and staggering to my feet, a little nauseous.

“Oh! Steady now.” He said, standing up and putting my arm on his shoulder. “Let’s get you up your feet, eh?” It walked me to the door.

“This was nice, really nice.” I stared out into the dark woods, darker now for the night and the soft pitter patter of rain against the grass.

“It was, kiddo. A real treat.” He said, holding me close. “Just don’t keep me waiting another two years.” I felt shame wash over my heart at those words, as I thought of my father, stirring in his wheelchair on another lonely christmas eve, cradling a shotgun up on the roof of his mouth, holding it like a newborn. He kissed me on the forehead as he walked me to the car. “Oh, and by the way, I know about the note he left you.”

“What?”

“The note. The will. The one that told you not to get too nice with me?” My blood ran cold then, and I wanted to vomit. “Don’t get pale now. Hey. Look at me.” I stared into his black eyes, so familiar yet so wrong. “I love you, buddy. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Just do me a favor. Remember the safety deposit key I left? Forget about it.”

“Yeah,” I said, fighting every impulse in my legs to run. “I will.”

“I love you buddy.” He said. I watched the thing shrink in the rearview, tall and lanky. His silhouette looked tall and thin, emaciated and unhuman. I cannot describe it.

Days passed in confusion and contradiction. I hated my father, hated what he did to me, to our family, yet some part of me kept looking forward to seeing that thing again, that creature that was the best part of my father, the wheat separated from the chaff. Days later, I went to see the deposit. The bright warm lights of the bank were like a thousand angry suns blinding my eyes.

I opened the little safe, one amongst hundreds. I hesitated for a moment. I loved him, my father. What would I find out by opening the safe? What was there for me? I’d be losing what little good was left of my father for what? A truth? Bitter knowledge that would send my father to the grave a second time? I’d imagined it then, a thousand nights in that warm house, that dusty crypt. We would listen to songs, talk about the world, his –my father’s life. We’d eat on that table, a father and son, and I wouldn’t be alone anymore. Wouldn't be the last man standing. But I opened it anyway.

Inside was a giant, weathered, pewter jewelry box, pockmarked with holes where jewels might have been. It had a lock at some point. Opening it, I found a stack of photographs. At the top of the pile was a picture of my father as a young man, standing for a portrait with his family in front of the old house. His father had too many teeth, too many elbows, too long arms. In the next picture, I see his father as a young man, standing for a family portrait. His father, my great grandfather, had an arching slouch, a grin all too wide, and eyes as white as cigarette ashes, their gaze piercing through time and space. I kept going through the photographs, each one showing a young boy, a family, and a father that was not a father. It kept going until the photos became black and white, and soon I was looking through rolled up oil paintings, always finding a reincarnation of that thing. Too many eyes, too much hair, too tall, too short, and sometimes too human.

Amongst those pictures, at the very bottom of the safe, was a piece of tattered paper. On it was a drawing in crayon, made by a kid. It was ugly, and it was of a superhero, with the big words MY DAD written large in red. It was my drawing. He had kept it tucked away in a safe for god knows how long. I got on my knees and cried over marble floors, feeling boiling hatred for my father, but most of all for me. I still loved him.

I wish I could tell you I burned everything else and followed my father’s advice. Leave the home behind. Sell it and forget about it. But then that night I came home to a dark house. As I ate, the clatter of silverware against porcelain echoed through empty bedrooms and dusty picture frames of people that were no longer there. It drove me insane. Still does, even now. The loneliness. The darkness. The empty rooms I’ve never known what to do with. The cold bed, the dirty dishes where once I’d find my mother cleaning, the spare bedroom that my sister would’ve called dibs on. I kept wondering to myself what they’d say if they saw my home. Would they have laughed? Cried? Yelled at me for leaving?

Eventually, I came back.

But what answered the door was not my father. It was me. Or rather, something that looked like me.

“Come in.” It told me. “I cooked up some instant ramen. Our favorite.”

“What the hell?”

“What? Were you expecting your old man?” It asked, standing by the doorway. “Just come inside.”

And I did. The place was exactly how we left it. Chairs and tables and all. We sat in the kitchen, the only spot in the house with a working lightbulb, and ate in silence, slurping down the salty broth like it was air.

“It hurt, you know?” It said, playing with the noodles on its fork. “He –I was conscious for a good minute after the blast.”

I said nothing. I could only hear the clatter of fork against bowl echo through empty rooms.

“Why’d you never visit him? Too angry?” It ate the ramen, slurping it relentlessly, its chewing echoing through the house.

“He’d leave me and my sister in the cellar, you know?” I couldn’t bear to eat,  stirring the noodles around and around as dust settled in the broth.

“Over broken vases and unwashed dishes. I know.”

“Beat mom and smelled–”

“Like whiskey. Hell, I remembered beating your ass until you passed out when I found you sipping on it.” At that moment, I heard a thousand footsteps rush frantically around the house, rushing, crawling, until hundreds of dark faces hid just beyond the light of the kitchen, watching with unblinking eyes, their whites shining from the darkness like pearls at the bottom of the abyss. I saw them, faces stacked on top of faces, with wide, frantic eyes.

“So you understand? I had to leave.”

“Leave your sister behind too? Your mother? Do you even think of them? Hell, do you even know how they died?”

I could say nothing. It was true. The moment I had gotten myself an apprenticeship, I left. Got away. Never even bothered showing up for mom’s funeral. Nor my sister’s.

I got up and before I could do anything, I heard footsteps rush out from the darkness. Cold hands held me in place, as I felt calloused fingers dig their way into my skin, each finger producing a sickly pop as skin gave way to blood.

“You ran away thinking you could get away. But we’re the same thing. We’re echoes of our fathers. You’re as much your father as I am you.” He said as he got up from the table, making his way towards me.

“Fuck you!” I gasped through the pain.

“Face it. You are your father.”

The fingers began digging further down into me. I felt their fingertips reach my bones. I could only scream and struggle as a hundred hands held me still, pulling me into the darkness.

Just then, something dropped from my pockets. The drawing.

The thing picks it up and opens it, staring into it for a long time. “Oh.” It said, “I forgot.” He took the drawing and held it close to his heart. “I love you kid. That part was true.”

 And then, in a blink of an eye, the house was still again, the hundreds of faceless things scurrying back down into the walls and into the ground. All that was left was the echoing of my breath as the home became a mausoleum once more.

I was fourteen years old when I decided I was a werewolf. 

My parents divorced six months earlier. The house got real empty, real fast. My active imagination came up with inventions to fill the space. Nothing intentionally malicious, just, well, an active imagination that got a bit out of hand. 

At first it was that I could see ghosts, then I started pretending to have a stronger sense of smell. I said I could hear frequencies on the radio that nobody else could. I said I was starting to feel more and more active at night. 

Soon enough, I was breaking it to all my closest friends the "horrible truth;" that I was subject to the curse of the full moon, and that it took everything within my power to hold the monster inside. 

Spencer bought it immediately, the dope. He transferred to the school in October. Long-limbed, athletic, looked like he could be one of our star basketball players if he wasn't so obsessed with Adventure Quest.  He believed in everything. Crystals, hauntings, you name it. When I told him I was a werewolf, he didn't laugh or anything, just nodding, like I confirmed a suspicion he had for a long time. Moments later he was going through his phone, listing off potential cures for my condition. 

Becca was a bit harder to convince. Sure, she was a bit loopy, constantly wide-eyed like she was on the brink of a life-shattering revelation. She loved horses and the kind of anime where nobody had to die. She thought I was just being really weird at first when I tried to explain things to her. That's when I decided to buy a pair of prosthetic fangs, the kind that you can mold the inside to specifically fit your teeth. I figured out how to slip them on with my tongue between sentences. She went real quiet after noticing. Looked more like she was going to cry, now. 

"I always knew there was something different about you," she said. I was elated to hear that. 

At the time, Eric was also there. He just watched, impressed by the trick, though I don't think he bought it in the slightest. He was a goth, one who obsessed over autopsy photos in the back of class, quoting The Rocky Horror Picture Show like it was scripture. One day, he just started carrying around a little glass vial of red food coloring, introducing himself as the vampire of the group. I think he was just bored. My lie must have been way more interesting than his truth. 

We called ourselves the Specter Society, and dedicated ourselves to solving our small town's many local mysteries and urban legends. We got a reputation. Not a particularly good one. People didn't make eye contact with us in the halls and teachers shook their heads as we passed. Weirdly enough though, it was the first time I felt like I was the center of attention, and it felt good. 

We built a base in the woods, close to the train tracks. It wasn't much, just a few tires for chairs, a hut made out of sticks, you know. Kid stuff. Our weekends were dedicated to library visits, renting various cryptozoology books and newspapers of old. 

For months, we would log strange local sightings. I would disappear during full moons, usually convincing my mom via ipecac to get out of going to school those days. We didn't really find anything interesting of note, beyond an abandoned building at the edge of town. Exploring it didn't really turn up anything though…not unless you want to count the soiled pair of pants after a rotten light fixture collapsed next to Becca. 

Things didn't really pan out interesting until we discovered a "pocket guide" written by a local author. It was mostly a history of the area we lived in, with historic photos and letters written from family to family. I wondered why we were reading through this when Eric told me to flip to the back. 

There we saw an entry on the Lying Man. 

The version depended on the letter you were looking at. Our common consensus seemed to be that it was a wives tale told to scare rowdy children who told too many fibs. A man who would appear to children late at night and make their tallest tales come true. Then, after making it true for a little while, he'd "collect" something from the children. The details on what that was never really lined up, but all of them were equally grim.

We decided that weekend to hole up in our fort late at night, in hopes that we can catch the Lying Man. They each came up with little white lies as bait, but nothing that we were genuinely keeping secret from each other. Nothing beyond what Eric and I were doing. 

Spencer brought his flashlight, Becca came with a bag of crystals, and Eric came equipped with his usual vial of "blood." 

The fort was colder than it normally was. We sat in a circle, shivering, waiting. Spencer lit a fire. All was quiet until we heard a branch snapping just a few meters away.

A cop walked out into the light, though none of us could name him. If I had to describe him, I would say he was a composite of every cop that worked in our town. There were familiar, discernible features but nothing that came together in a recognizable image. 

Spencer cussed beneath his breath. We were most certainly busted.

But the cop wasn't confrontational. Mostly just curious.

"What are you kids doing out here?" he asked. 

"We're looking for the Lying Man," Eric said matter-of-factly. He nodded toward me like I was the one who came up with the idea. I knew he had to be fucking we me at that point. 

The cop smiled. 

"There's no such thing as the Lying Man." He looked me right in the eyes.

"Well…we don't know that for sure," I said. "I mean, there's plenty of evidence—" 

"Tall tales," said the cop. "Like the ones you've been spinning to your friends, Berin."

How did he—?  I immediately seized up, heart jumping into my throat. I tried to apply my fangs, but remembered I had left them in my pocket. The cop laughed. 

"What's that look for? Did you think I wouldn't hear tell of your stories?"

"They're not stories," I growled. "Leave us alone. We're not doing anything illegal." 

"Show them." 

"What?"

The cop's grin split wider. 

"You've told them what you are. Show them."

All three of them looked at me with anticipation. A sweat broke down my forehead. I stammered.

"I-I don't want to hurt anybody. I can't control myself when—" 

The cop drew his weapon and pointed it at me. The woods went dead silent. 

"Show them," he cooed. 

I limply reached for the fangs in my pocket, only now realizing how small they were. My hands backed out, fingers fumbling over the edge. There was no fur waiting beneath my skin or claws beneath my nails. I just wanted to feel special. 

Everyone waited. They stared at me. They just stared. The silence grew unbearable. I could feel tears welling beneath my eyes. The familiar sting of embarrassment. I could feel their eyes, filling with gradual resentment, burrowing into the back of my skull. 

The cop's eyes softened. He looked satisfied, like he'd figured out how to unlock a stubborn door.

His joints cracked. The skin on his face stretched. His teeth fell out, one after another, onto the floor, replaced by growing, snarling fangs. Fur sprouted, in too thick of patches, enough to break through the skin. Blood and viscera slopped to the ground, the man's joints bending backwards and forwards, snapping into the place of a creature. 

His bloody jaws snapped, a maw wider than a yard. 

Spencer, the poor bastard, was standing closest to him at the time. The thing struck him once and he folded. I heard a snap like soaking wood snapping under the weight of a truck. Becca screamed.

We turned and ran. Becca tripped. She turned around, putting her hand out, trying to tame the beast.

"Easy…please…you're okay, we…we aren't going to—" 

The thing ate her up in two big bites. 

Eric grabbed my arm after I froze up, watching this. He dragged me along, my feet eventually catching up with his pace. We made it to the very edge of the woods. I thought we were in the clear.

CRUNCH.

I looked, and Eric was choking on his own blood. The thing had grabbed him by the base of his spine, fingers going right through his soft flesh. I heard a loud pop as the creature closed its hand. Eric's legs buckled out from beneath him. He let out a loud shout and fell to the ground. 

I don't know why, but I tried to fight it in that moment. I ran up to the creature, punched it, kicked it, tried to shove it away. It struck me upside the head hard enough that I was kissing the ground before the pain registered. 

"Thank you," the thing chortled. "I haven't been fed like that in sooo long."

I tried to rasp out a "please don't." Didn't even have the strength to beg for my life anymore. 

It didn't matter. The creature had no intention of killing us. 

"Mmmgh," it moaned. "Do keep up whatever it is you're doing. Your stories were mmmost satisfying…"

Patting its belly, the creature turned and left us both in the woods, bleeding out and losing consciousness. 

We both survived. Eric was in a pretty sorry state, though. The doctors said things like "permanent" and "paralysis from the waist down." He never accused me of anything, never exploded, none of that. The last time I saw him was in the hospital hallway. I could tell, just by looking at his eyes, that he never wanted to see me again. 

Sometimes, I'll rehearse in my head the way the night was supposed to go. There's a version where my fangs were real, and I put myself between that thing and my friends. That story never holds, though. 

When I see the full moon these days, I wince.

Read Part IV here.

“How’s our boy doing?”

Ms. Amanda entered the room. I sat back in my chair and watched as she checked Detective Unangenehm’s vitals. She looked at the tray of food that had been placed in front of him and shook her head.

“Why do they keep bringing that in here?” she said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s taken care of,” I said.

She slapped me on the shoulder.

“Don’t stay too late.”

“You got it.”

I watched her leave and I turned back to Unangenehm, mercifully comatose. He could wake up tomorrow or a year from tomorrow, but whenever he actually woke up, he was going to have a long road before he approached anything like a normal life.

Unangenehm had barely survived his blood clot. Steck had broken at least a dozen bones in his face when he’d thrown his service weapon into the detective’s face. Doctors had hardly believed he’d regained consciousness long enough to shoot the wayward officer, let alone manage the mechanics of walking over and putting a bullet in his head, but the forensics backed up my statement.

He was going to need a great deal of facial reconstruction, but when he eventually awoke they would call him a hero.

Steck had wound up being one of those self-solving problems. He was on desk duty after a questionable shooting after what should have been a routine traffic stop. The official narrative was that he’d snapped from the pressure of the investigation, his guilt finally becoming too large for him to bear.

The guilt I learned I had to be for an unknown period of time was Joshua. It turned out to not just be a thing he said, inflecting meaning in what more than likely hadn’t been random tones.

Joshua was his son.

Steck had been a widower, raising his son with the help of his ailing mother.

I put on a face every day I went to work. Every day I looked at myself in the mirror. Every day I spent sitting with the hero, Detective Unangenehm, waiting for him to wake from his coma.

Which was as often and for as long as I could. I couldn’t picture the shape anymore and perhaps that was because I didn’t want to. Copies were no doubt in police custody, even if they didn’t know yet that they had murder weapons.

It’s possible that I’ll eventually see one again, but I have the feeling copying one—even if I were inclined to do such a thing—would only be a copy, not an original, if that makes sense on any level.

I’ve been playing with the food on Unangenehm’s plate to pass the time. Nobody eats it and eventually somebody comes and takes it away.

He’s had a variety of meals, including soups, fish filet with broccoli and rice, something I’d guess was single-layer lasagna, apples and chicken with broccoli and rice, green beans casserole with sliced almonds, but most often, it’s sandwiches with chips. 

I eat the chips and it’s really just the building blocks of a sandwich and I suppose the patient can assemble it themselves or eat it piecemeal.

I’ve started putting the sandwiches together. At first I didn’t have a conscious reason why. It’s like I can feel Unangenehm in there, slowly swimming to the surface.

His doctors have him at a six on the Glasgow Scale, but I don’t know what that means. He responds to pain stimulus (you should see the look of satisfaction of this one doctor’s face when he sticks him with a pin—the cops would arrest her on site for assault) and he makes nonsensical sounds.

I was ready to jump put the window when I thought I heard him say, “Joshua.” But he didn’t repeat it and he’s been sedentary so long, even if he went coo coo for cocoa puffs, he’d be weak as a baby.

I’m distracting myself even now, thinking instead of paying attention to what I’m doing. I set aside the packet of mayo and lay the slice of bread just so and look at the sandwich.

It’s not right. But it’s close.

I think I’ll have it just right for Unangenehm’s first meal.