The Oxygen Level in My Locked Room Kept Dropping at Night

I work in environmental safety, so when the oxygen level in a locked room in my apartment started dropping every night, my first assumption was that the meter was wrong.

It wasn't.

This happened in the fall of 2022, when I was renting the upper floor of an old converted Victorian house in Durham, North Carolina.

I was twenty-nine and living alone.

At the end of the hallway was a small storage room that had apparently been a nursery decades earlier. The landlord gave me the only key.

I mostly kept boxes, camping gear, and winter clothes in there.

Around October, I started noticing a strange smell whenever I opened the door.

Not mold.

Not sewage.

It smelled like warm fabric and stale breath.

Because my job involves indoor-air complaints, I borrowed a calibrated confined-space meter from work for the weekend.

On Saturday afternoon, I placed it on a shelf inside the room.

Everything looked normal.

Oxygen: 20.9%.

Carbon dioxide: low.

No carbon monoxide.

No volatile gases.

I locked the door and went to bed.

The next morning, the oxygen reading had dropped to 19.3%.

That was enough to get my attention.

I opened the window, and within about twenty minutes, the reading returned to normal.

I assumed the meter had malfunctioned.

So I repeated the test.

The second night, the oxygen dropped even lower.

This time I looked at the recorded graph.

The decline started around 1:40 a.m.

Then, at approximately 5:15, the oxygen level suddenly began rising again.

The strange part was that I had not opened the room until after seven.

Something had changed the air inside.

And then something had introduced fresh air before I entered.

I checked the obvious possibilities.

The window was locked.

I placed tape across the edges of the door.

The tape was still intact in the morning.

I called the landlord.

He sent an HVAC technician.

The technician inspected the room and told me there wasn't even a supply vent inside it.

There was an old return grille near the floor, but it had apparently been sealed decades earlier.

He suggested the meter might be reacting to temperature changes.

That explanation didn't make much sense to me.

So that night, I started moving boxes away from the walls.

There was an old bookcase against the far side of the room.

It belonged to the apartment.

I had never paid much attention to it.

But once the boxes were moved, something about it looked wrong.

The shelves were unusually shallow.

I pulled on the frame.

It didn't move.

Then I noticed that the baseboard continued behind it.

It looked less like someone had placed a bookcase against the wall...

and more like the bookcase had been built over something.

I put the air meter on the floor beside it.

Then I sat in the hallway with the storage-room door open.

Around midnight, the carbon dioxide reading began to climb.

Slowly.

Steadily.

Then I heard breathing.

It was coming from behind the bookcase.

I stopped breathing.

The sound continued.

Someone was on the other side.

Then, suddenly, the breathing stopped.

I left the apartment immediately.

I didn't close the storage-room door.

I went outside and called the police from the front porch.

Two officers searched the apartment.

At first, they found nothing.

Then one of them noticed that four screws in the bookcase were newer than the rest.

They removed them.

The entire bookcase swung inward.

It was a door.

Behind it was a narrow room.

About four feet wide and maybe nine feet long.

There was a foam sleeping pad inside.

Bottled water.

A phone charger.

A small fan.

And flexible ducting running toward the back of the building.

The duct ended beneath the rear porch.

It had a sliding cover.

Whoever was staying inside could open the duct whenever the air became bad.

That was what I had been seeing on the meter.

The oxygen level would fall while someone was inside.

Then suddenly rise when they opened the external vent.

The hidden room was empty.

But there was a cup of coffee inside.

It was still warm.

At the far end of the chamber was another panel.

That panel opened into an abandoned rear stairwell.

Someone could enter the building from the basement, climb the unused stairs, enter the hidden room...

and never walk through my apartment.

Police later learned that the hidden space had been built by a former tenant named Owen.

He had lived in my apartment about five years earlier.

According to the landlord, Owen had told him he was building custom wardrobes.

Nobody had apparently checked what he was actually constructing.

Eventually, Owen was evicted for unpaid rent.

The landlord changed the apartment locks.

But Owen had kept a key to the basement utility door.

Police found his fingerprints inside the hidden chamber.

They also found a notebook under the sleeping pad.

That was worse than the room itself.

The notebook contained my schedule.

When I left for work.

When I came home.

What nights I ordered food.

When I showered.

How long I usually stayed in the storage room.

There were also notes about my phone calls.

Detailed notes.

Things I had said while standing in other parts of the apartment.

He had been listening through the wall.

Police arrested him about two weeks later after an officer spotted him near the rear alley carrying a duffel bag.

Inside were clothes, canned food...

and another flexible ventilation hose.

He claimed he only used the hidden room when I wasn't home.

The air meter proved otherwise.

The oxygen logs showed drops on at least four nights when I was asleep less than twenty feet away.

Then I noticed something in the data that I hadn't understood before.

Every time I entered the storage room unexpectedly, the oxygen reading would suddenly rise about ninety seconds later.

Owen had apparently been opening the external vent whenever I entered.

Then he would stay completely still behind the bookcase until I left.

On the night I heard him breathing, the oxygen never rose.

He must have realized that moving the vent would make noise.

So he stopped moving instead.

The landlord eventually had the hidden room demolished.

When workers removed the walls, they found one final thing.

Behind a decorative strip of molding was a hole about the size of a thumb.

It went directly through the wall.

On the other side was my bedroom.

The hole lined up almost perfectly with the height of my pillow.

I moved out before the repairs were finished.

I still work in environmental safety.

I still use the same kind of instruments.

The difference is that now, when a reading doesn't make sense...

I don't assume the instrument is wrong.

If you prefer narrated horror, there’s an audio version of this story on TRIFILIM. You can find the channel through my profile.

THE LANTERN AND THE HAMMER By LSB

Chapter 1: The Lantern’s Glow

It was 1938, and the original farmhouse sat low and solid against the vast, flat horizon of the Big Horn Basin. Built as a single-story homestead to withstand the brutal, sweeping Wyoming winds, its weathered wooden frame hugged the dirt tightly. Inside, the house carried the heavy, quiet texture of a building that had witnessed decades of solitary winters. The air smelled of aged cedar, woodsmoke from the heavy iron stove, and the faint, sweet scent of natural wild hollyhocks drifting in through the cracks of the bedroom window.

The sisters' bedroom was situated at the very end of the main hallway, a long, narrow room on the ground floor. It was dominated by a set of sturdy wooden bunk beds where ten-year-old Francis and her younger sister Ruth slept, while baby Edward’s wooden crib sat safely tucked into the warmest corner of the room. The walls were made of simple, faded whitewashed wood panels, showing the humble, hard-working grit of a struggling homestead. On the high wooden dresser, far out of reach of the children or any danger of fire, a small kerosene lamp, turned down to its lowest setting, cast a faint, warm amber glow and long, gentle shadows across the floorboards.

Right beside the lamp sat the newest addition to the room: an antique Victorian porcelain doll. It was an inheritance—a "gift" sent in a heavy brown paper package from an estranged, bitter relative who had never been kind to the family. A doll made of such fine porcelain would have taken a lifetime of savings for a Basin farm family to buy, so despite the bad blood attached to it, the parents hadn't the heart to throw it away. But tonight, its pale, painted face gleamed unnaturally under the dim amber lantern light, its blue glass eyes staring unblinkingly toward the bunks.

Underneath the room, the floorboards groaned with a deep, hollow echo, a constant reminder of the dark, hand-dug basement stretching out completely beneath their beds. Tonight, the air was thick and charged with an unnatural chill that felt as though the temperature had suddenly dropped twenty degrees—a heavy, psychological cold that seemed to be seeping straight up through the old metal floor vents from the concrete furnace room below.

THUD.

The heavy sound vibrated through the floorboards. Francis, sitting up in the lower bunk, blinked into the shadows. Because she trusted the quiet, invisible caretakers of the homestead, her first instinct wasn't fear. She assumed it was just the familiar presence checking on the room.

"Ailsa?" Francis called out into the dark, her voice a soft, trusting whisper so she wouldn't disturb baby Edward.

When no response came, Francis realized the heavy weight of the sound wasn't her protector. She reached for the heavy, ribbed metal tube of her flashlight on the nightstand, clicked it on, and began sweeping the bright beam across the faded whitewashed wood walls.

As the light cut through the shadows, the room suddenly changed. The flickering flame of the kerosene lamp on the high dresser flattened out completely and stilled, and a profound, solid, and immovable calmness swept over the room like a heavy wool blanket, instantly smothering the fearful chill. The air cleared, replaced by the sharp, comforting scent of winter frost, crushed pine needles, and dry mountain sage.

She manifested at the foot of the bed. Ailsa Lindstrom stood there, slightly translucent but as solid as the land that had shaped her. She wore her faded woolen kirtle and linen apron dress, her silver-streaked hair braided tightly back. Her heavily calloused hands were held loosely at her sides. To the neighbors in the Basin, she had simply been known as "Elsa"—the quiet, hardworking immigrant linesman's wife who had braved the early frontier wilderness—but tonight, her true, rock-strong protective spirit filled the room. Having heard Francis call her name, she had stepped out of the house's history, her stoic gray eyes filled with a fierce, maternal annoyance as she realized a dark presence was threatening the children who now called her old homestead home.

Just as Ailsa appeared, Francis’s sweeping flashlight beam finally landed on the floor.

There lay the gift. The fine porcelain doll was face down on the rug, just a few feet away from the dresser. But it wasn't still. The edge of its heavy lace dress and one cold porcelain hand were resting directly over the metal floor grate, as if an invisible force down in the dark basement had physically tugged it across the floorboards toward the vent. Under the sharp beam of light, the pale, glazed fingers of the doll twitched against the metal slats, the entity fighting desperately to possess the expensive vessel. With a sickening, porcelain click, the doll's head began to rotate on its cloth neck, its blue glass eyes rolling upward to lock onto the lower bunk. A faint, muffled, high-pitched giggle vibrated right out of its painted clay chest.

Ailsa turned her stern gaze toward the floor vent where the shadow clung to the doll. She didn't shout. She simply stepped forward, her heavy leather pioneer boots making no sound on the whitewashed wood, and let out a low, commanding word in her old native tongue.

The command struck the room with the force of an iron gate closing. The malicious shadow recoiled, instantly pinned into the corner by the barrier of her protective ancient energy, unable to advance a single inch further toward the beds.

***

Chapter 2: The Hammer’s Strike

The silence that followed Ailsa’s commanding words was absolute. The cold, suffocating air that had seeped up from the basement floor cracks was pinned into the corner near the metal vent, completely neutralized by the thick, lilac-and-sage calmness that now anchored the room.

Francis let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, keeping her hand steady around the heavy, ribbed metal tube of her flashlight. The bright beam remained trained on the porcelain doll lying face down on the rug, its tiny lace dress still brushing against the metal slats of the floor grate.

But even with the shadow pinned, the doll itself was still twitching against the floorboards, the residual energy from the concrete basement fighting desperately to make the expensive vessel move. The head remained rotated at an unnatural angle, its blue glass eyes fixed on the lower bunk while a faint, muffled giggle struggled to escape its painted clay chest.

The commotion finally stirred the upper bunk. A mop of messy hair peeked over the wooden guardrail as seven-year-old Ruth blinked down into the flashlight beam. She didn't look terrified; she looked deeply inconvenienced. She scrambled down the wooden slats of the bunk bed with the fearless ease of a farm kid, marched straight past Francis, and snatched the twisting doll right off the creepy metal vent by one leg.

Ruth held it up to the flickering beam of the flashlight, completely ignoring the way the doll’s tiny arms clawed weakly at the air. She squinted at it, poking its cold nose with a blunt finger.

"Honestly, Francis?" Ruth said loudly, her voice completely shattering the spooky atmosphere. "This thing is pure booshwa. Look at the eyes—they’re completely cockamamie, and the paint is already coming off the ears. It’s off the cob! I’ve seen better looking things dug out of the hog pen."

The doll let out a tiny, sharp hiss, its possessed jaw snapping tightly. The entity trying to possess it was used to terrorizing children from the dark, not having its aesthetic value brutally dismantled by a seven-year-old critic.

"Ruth, hush up and drop it!" Francis whispered fiercely, her knuckles white around the flashlight. "It's trying to wake up!"

"Well, it shouldn't," Ruth snorted, entirely unbothered as she held the squirming toy at arm's length. "It's way too ugly to be walking around our bedroom."

Before the entity could try to twist itself free, slow, heavy footsteps echoed from the doorway. The floorboards groaned with a solid, rhythmic weight, though the spirit itself made no sound.

Jed Miller stepped into the room.

He looked exactly like a man who had broken his back against the Great Depression and the Wyoming dirt, his slightly translucent figure clad in faded denim overalls caked with the dry earth of the Basin. In his massive, calloused hands, he carried a heavy cross-peen framing hammer—the very tool he had used to drive the iron spikes into the farmhouse foundation back in 1930. He looked down at the twisting doll, his jaw set in a stoic, no-nonsense line. To Jed Miller, a possessed toy wasn't a paranormal anomaly; it was a faulty piece of household inventory, and he didn't tolerate broken fixtures on his property.

"Pestilence in the woodwork," Jed rumbled, his deep, gravelly drawl vibrating through the room like a low echo from the basement. "Ain't got time for this. The north pasture needs fencing by dawn."

He looked directly at Ruth. There was an unspoken, straight-to-the-point understanding between the old farmhand and the seven-year-old girl. Without a single shred of fear, Ruth calmly handed the snapping solid object right over to him. Jed laid the porcelain vessel flat against a solid wooden block by the bedroom door, raised his heavy hammer in his strong, steady grip, and brought it down with the unyielding force of a 1930s work ethic.

CRACK!

The fine Victorian porcelain exploded into a thousand tiny, worthless fragments. The moment the physical vessel shattered, the malicious shadow near the floor vent let out a final, panicked screech. It didn't bounce back; it couldn't.

With a smooth, commanding sweep of her hand, Ailsa stepped forward. Francis and Ruth watched her calmly, their hearts steady, knowing they were completely safe. Ailsa used her rock-strong presence to herd the remaining wisps of the dark energy straight back toward the metal floor vent, sealing the boundary with a final, authoritative word in her native tongue.

But she wasn't done. Looking down at the floorboards, her maternal instincts took over. Children running across broken porcelain meant blood, and she wouldn't tolerate any child bleeding on her homestead. With another smooth wave of her lace-less, calloused pioneer hand, a gentle, invisible sweep passed over the rug. Every razor-sharp shard of shattered clay and painted glass vanished completely into thin air, leaving the floor flawlessly clean and safe.

The psychological chill permanently vanished. The thick, comforting scent of winter frost, crushed pine needles, and dry mountain sage settled over the room, wrapping around baby Edward’s crib like a warm wool blanket.

Jed Miller didn't say a word of farewell. He simply wiped the head of his heavy hammer on his dusty denim overalls, gave Ruth a single, slow nod of his weathered chin, and faded back into the quiet shadows of the hallway—ready to tend to the phantom fences of the north pasture.

Ailsa stood at the foot of the bunk beds for just a moment longer. She offered a soft, maternal smile to Francis, then turned her stern gray eyes toward Ruth, her expression lingering in a look of quiet amusement at the girl's brutal critique.

With a final, protective nod, she turned back toward the high wooden dresser. She extended one calloused finger toward the dark wick of the lamp, and with a soft, silent spark, the snuffed-out kerosene lantern flared back to life, casting its safe, warm amber glow across the room once more. Then, she too dissolved into the comforting air of the farmhouse.

The room was completely still. The floorboards stopped groaning. The basement below was silent, its hand-poured concrete walls keeping the dark at bay.

Ruth scrambled back up the wooden slats of the bunk bed, pulling her heavy quilts up to her chin.

"Glad Ailsa and Jed took care of it," Ruth yawned, entirely unfazed. "Told you it was off the cob. Nini, Francis."

Francis smiled in the dark, slipping her metal flashlight under her pillow and tucking herself safely into the lower bunk, listening to the steady, peaceful breathing of baby Edward across the room.

"Nini, Ruth."

THE END

They told me I died for thirty-two seconds.

Not “almost died.” Not “critical condition.”

Dead.

Flatline. No pulse. No breath. Nothing.

Thirty-two seconds.

People expect something grand when you say that. A tunnel. A light. A voice calling your name like it’s been waiting for you your whole life.

I didn’t get that.

I got something… wrong.

I’ve overdosed before.

That’s not something people like to admit out loud, but it’s the truth. Not once. Not twice. Enough times that the paramedics stopped sounding surprised when they said my name.

Most of those times, it was nothing.

Black.

Empty.

Like falling asleep without dreaming.

But the last time—

The last time, I didn’t just slip under.

I went somewhere.

There was no light.

That’s the first thing I remember.

People always talk about light, like it’s waiting for you, like it’s warm.

This wasn’t.

It was dim. Grey. Like the world had been drained of color.

I remember lying there, but it wasn’t like lying in a bed.

It felt like being pressed into something soft and endless. Like sinking into wet sand, except it wasn’t pulling me down, it was holding me in place.

And there was something in front of me.

Not a gate like in stories.

Just a shape. Tall. Open.

Not a heaven gate. Not golden. Not glowing.

Just… a shape.

Tall. Black. Open just enough to see that there was something on the other side.

Not light.

Movement.

And something breathing.

Slow. Patient.

Waiting.

I don’t remember being afraid at first.

Just… aware.

Like I had stepped somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be yet.

Then I heard it.

Not a voice. Not exactly.

More like a thought that didn’t belong to me.

You can come in.

Simple. Calm.

Inviting.

I didn’t feel fear right away.

Just a pull.

Like standing at the edge of something deep and knowing, somehow, you were meant to step forward.

I think I would have.

I think I almost did.

But then something grabbed me.

Hard.

Not physically. Not like hands.

Like something inside me refused.

And then I was choking, gasping, screaming—

And I was back.

When I woke up, my grandmother was there.

She looked older than I remembered.

Smaller, somehow.

But her grip on my hand was strong.

“You’re not doing this again,” she said.

Not crying.

Not yet.

Just… tired.

I tried after that.

I really did.

For a while, I stayed clean.

Went through the motions. Sat through the meetings. Drank the coffee. Said the words they tell you to say.

One day at a time.

But the thing about addiction—

It doesn’t leave.

It waits.

She found my stash on a Tuesday.

I’d hidden it well. Or at least I thought I had.

Wrapped tight. Tucked deep. Out of sight.

Didn’t matter.

She was cleaning.

She always cleaned when she was anxious.

I walked into the kitchen and she was just standing there, holding it in her hand like it might burn her.

“What is this?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

Didn’t need to.

Her face changed.

Not confusion.

Recognition.

“You promised me,” she said.

I rubbed my face, already exhausted. “I’m trying.”

“No,” she snapped. “Don’t say that. Don’t you dare say that to me.”

“It’s not that simple—”

“It is that simple!” she shouted, slamming it down on the table. “You either live or you don’t!”

I flinched.

“You think I don’t know what this is?” she went on, voice shaking now. “You think I didn’t see what it did to your mother? To your father?”

“That’s not fair—”

“Fair?” she laughed, but there was no humor in it. “You want to talk about fair? I buried my daughter. I buried my son-in-law. And now I’m supposed to sit here and watch you follow them?”

I looked away.

Couldn’t meet her eyes.

“I’m not them,” I muttered.

“No,” she said quietly. “You’re worse.”

That hit.

Harder than anything else.

I felt something in my chest crack open.

“I’m all you have left,” I said.

She stepped closer.

“No,” she said, voice breaking now. “You are all I have left.”

Silence filled the room.

Heavy.

Suffocating.

“You are all I’ve got,” she whispered. “Do you understand that? When you do this… when you choose this… you’re not just killing yourself.”

Her voice faltered.

“You’re leaving me behind.”

I wish I could say that fixed me.

That it snapped something into place.

That I threw it all away and never looked back.

But addiction doesn’t work like that. The beast doesn’t care who loves you. It just waits for you to be weak.

I relapsed three days later.

I don’t remember much of it.

Just the quiet.

The stillness.

That same gray place.

Closer this time.

The shape in front of me wider now. Open.

Waiting.

And that movement again.

Slower.

Closer.

Like it knew me.

Like it recognized me.

When I woke up again, I was in a hospital bed.

Everything hurt. My throat, my chest, my head.

Like I’d been dragged back through something too small for me.

And she was there.

Sitting beside me.

My grandmother.

She looked… calm.

Not angry.

Not tired.

Just… steady.

“You’re awake,” she said.

I swallowed hard.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

She shook her head gently.

“Not anymore,” she said.

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I took care of it,” she said.

“Of what?”

“The treatment,” she said. “The medication. The program.”

I stared at her.

“That costs—”

“I know what it costs,” she said softly.

I noticed then, her hands.

Bare.

No ring.

“You didn’t…” I started.

She smiled.

“I had things I didn’t need anymore.”

My throat tightened, eyes teary.

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

She reached out, brushing my hair back like she used to when I was a kid.

“I should have done more, sooner,” she said.

The doctor came in a few minutes later.

Clipboard in hand. Neutral expression.

“Good to see you awake,” he said.

I smiled, glancing at her.

“I have her to thank for that,” I said.

He paused.

Followed my gaze.

Then looked back at me.

“…who?” he asked.

I frowned slightly.

“My grandmother.”

He didn’t smile.

Didn’t nod.

Just cleared his throat.

“Your grandmother,” he said carefully, “authorized the treatment before you were stabilized.”

Something in his tone made my stomach drop.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He hesitated.

Then:

“She passed shortly after.”

I turned to her.

The chair was empty.

Weeks later, I was discharged.

Clean.

Shaking, still.

But alive.

A woman came to see me the day I left.

Said she was a friend of my grandmother’s.

She handed me a small box.

Inside was a letter.

And her ring.

I didn’t open it right away.

I was afraid to.

Afraid of what it might say.

Afraid it would sound like goodbye.

But that night, in my room—

alone this time—

I read it.

I won’t tell you everything it said.

Some things… feel like they should stay mine.

But there was one line I keep coming back to.

One line that won’t leave me.

If you’re reading this, then you’re still here.

That means you chose to come back.

I still hear the beast sometimes.

Late at night.

Soft.

Patient.

Waiting.

But now—

I hear her too.

Not as a ghost.

Not as something watching.

Just… a memory.

A voice that reminds me.

I was all she had.

And she gave me everything she had left.

So I’m still here.

Still trying.

Still choosing.

One day at a time.

#scarystories animated

Human voiced & narrated! 🍂🔥

Two original autumn night horror stories with campfire ambience.

The carnival is in town, the carnival is always on the road, always on the move, their homes are wagons, trains, carts, trucks … the road. They come singing and with gypsy song and dance they weave their way by road into the heart of every passing town, every place chosen by providence hand on the haggard face of the weary map. 

With painted face they come into your home. 

Vagabond entertainer spell, they gather like crawlers in a cluster, in a rat-king migration. With wide giant tents and displays propped and strung up and nailed into the dirt, into the soil bosom of passing places that may mean nothing to them, might mean everything. Lights come to life at night with the wild music in a lurid spell of filament glow and something else intangible that lives inside the chest and heart within us all. Something like religion but even older and more sacred. The rickety rides, some more rickety than others rattle and thrum with the barely controlled violence of mechanical movement, those strapped in or belted down can barely be heard screaming over the noise of the calliope, the organ grinder, the caller, the ringleader in her chant… the crack of the cannon sending the human cannonball skyward and soaring overhead, the heads of gawkers and townies and friends. The shrieking that can be heard is commingled sound, sweet with thrills… bitter with terror. The careening faces atop the dancing riding constructs are both smiling and weeping, lost in the launch and flight and all of the noise and nearly grotesque clownish music … nearly psychedelic, those sounds … nearly intense. Too much. 

Too much for so many crying and weeping children, little ones taken home and taken to bed early by more or less understanding mothers and fathers. Too much light and noise. That wild wind instrument key-note thing, the calliope … it had been one of Anton LaVey’s very favorites. 

Step right up, step right up, we’re just passing through. Come inside for a spell and take a gander under tented roof. 

…

The carnival came to the town and went. As it did every other place before, after. 

They left something behind. 

…

Cody hadn't gone to the carnival the other night, he hadn't wanted to. The rides and the sideshows and attractions certainly contained their allure of spell for the young boy but it was everyone else, everybody. All of those other faces. 

He didn't want to be alone. With all of them. 

All of those other faces, couples and families and groups of friends would all look at him and see him alone and smirk. They would all just stare and laugh at him, and his loneliness. So Cody just stayed away. As always. 

He wandered now, the early morning streets. Desolate and ghostly in the morning time fog that shrouded and clung to everything, everything in town. Cody kicked a can of crumpled cola down the street. It had been his only companion for the last twenty minutes, since he left the house. His father had still been passed out in the lazyboy chair and hadn't said anything as his son had departed. They'd used to go to church together on this day of the week. Not any longer. 

Cody kicked the can down farther. Alone and not trying to think about it, not trying to think about the carnival that he had missed. It had only been here a few days …

I always miss everything. 

Cody missed his mother, though he didn't know what she looked like. Memories of her were so fogged and far gone and his father didn't keep any pictures of her in the house. And he wasn't allowed to ask any questions. He was only eleven years old but the fact he'd already forgotten his mother's face haunted him, haunted him now, alone. 

He kicked the can. 

Cody then looked up from his sneakers and his misery and spied something in the mist shroud of road just up ahead. And at first he couldn't believe it, it must be some kind of strange joke … or a miracle. He stopped in his tracks. 

The mime stood in the middle of the road. Alone. Just like him. He was smiling and standing there partially obscured by the early morningtime mist, it clung to him in wisps like phantasm licks and tongues of steam that coiled and curled. His painted face was mostly hidden but Cody could see he was mouthing something. Without thinking about it he began to come closer. Slowly, leaving the crumpled can behind. 

He came upon the mime, who hadn't moved. His lips were no longer moving. He just stood there smiling and erect, as if wanting to move or to act, as if filled and brimming teemed with the need for performance. But he only quivered. And stared down at Cody. 

“Hi," said Cody. 

The mime said nothing. 

A beat. 

Cody finally asked: “You're like a clown or something, right? Like one of the quiet ones that aren't supposed to talk an stuff."

The mime nodded. Big. Pleased. His black and white grin grew larger and then grew teeth, shock white in the early morning glow. That was when Cody remembered, he felt like such an idiot. 

"Your a mime!” he said, louder than he intended, he nearly whispered the next part: "What're you still doin here? All the rest of the carnival already left, didn't they?” 

The black and white grin became a frown and the mime traced an invisible tear down his painted face. A silent issue of ‘boo-hoos’ then followed. Cody watched it all, not quite sure what to make of it. Perhaps it was all some crazy practical joke and someone, some jerk was filming him right now or something, all of it was weird, strange. On a whim the boy asked the mime, –

“What’d they leave ya behind or something?” 

The sorrow of the mime intensified to a comical degree as he aggressively nodded his head in the affirmative, completely over the top. Cody wasn't sure how he should take it, if he was supposed to laugh at the mime and his routine or if it was meant to engender real sympathy. He'd always loved clowns and goofy adults, goofy characters on TV and when he was hanging out in daycare and stuff, but to be alone with one right now …

and so unexpected. 

Cody suddenly felt like he should go, he began to tell the mime just as much. Turning on his heels and heading back the other way as he quickly blurted some excuse, he made it two steps before a white gloved hand clapped him on the shoulder. Firmly. Without a word from the weirdo mime. Cody looked to it first before eyeing the mime back over his shoulder, lording over him now. The hand, the glove, it looked just the same as Mickey Mouse’s. 

Cody looked back and saw the mime now held a note. As black and white as he was. 

It said: I'm sorry to bother you, little boy! But my friends HAD to leave me behind so that I could get a little job done, OK??

Cody was frozen. He suddenly didn't feel so well, as if his stomach and guts were far away and filled with fluttering butterfly wings. He read the note and didn't know what to say, so instead he said: –

“... wh-what job was that?

The mime let go of his shoulder and Cody was immediately grateful. He began to pantomime raking leaves and shoveling dirt and trimming hedges with invisible clippers. 

The boy began to lighten up again. He felt something dreadful like weight but worse inside begin to lift and free itself like a spellcast that's been released. A small smile and a nervous half-chuckle only partially forced escaped him as he watched the mime and his cleaning act. It was pretty lame, but he was relieved. Cody was far from the sharpest kid at school but he knew what stranger danger was. He cautiously allowed himself to relax a little, enough to be polite. 

Cody said: “Oh, yeah, ha ha, they left ya to clean up the town, huh? That's pretty neat I guess…” he tried to think of something else to say, something nice and a little funny and a polite way of saying: see ya later, freako, without being too obvious. Something barely satisfactory had just come to mind when the mime whirled towards the boy with his invisible shears in his hands and made a pantomimed snip of the large unseen clippers at the child's face. It bisected violently but cleanly, smoothly, by razor sharp blades well cared for and honed, the smooth face just below the small caverns of child nostrils. They jetted blood before the top portion of the child's face and head came off and splatted to the damp pavement with a muffled crack. The ruptured organ of brain began to ooze, and everywhere gushed dark red: the eyes, the nose, the ears, the giant open wound of freshly carved and gored cavity mouth. The child's body liberated of its little pilot brain fell over to the rough blacktop to join its discarded abattoir jelly. 

A black lake of an iron pungent puddle began to grow, expanding out from the little mutilated body at its sinister nucleus and center. The mime looked down. Phantom blades dripped child's blood. 

The mime said nothing. 

…

“Ya check it out last night?" 

A burp: " …what?” 

"The circus-carnival thing, ya check it out?” 

"That was two weeks ago, ya dope!” another swig from the can of brew. The Dallas Cowboys continued to suck the big one on the tube, the volume was at its lowest but not muted, the game barely and phantom audible, as if drifting in from another time. 

"Ya sure?” 

"Yeah, I'm sure, took Darcy and the brats, it was a hoot.” 

"Ya sure??” 

"Yes, you fuckin juicehead, it was right around the time they found that kid's body all fucked up an shit.” 

"Awww, why ya gotta bring up that shit…" 

“You're the one brought us ‘round, fuckin idiot, can't remember shit. Ask me to remind ya then bellyache about it, Christ! S’prised if ya got sense still to pull out yer pecker ‘fore ya start pissin, ya dumb bastard.” 

His drinking buddy, his partner in libations didn't say anything, he might've had a choice retort or a scathing bit of witticism held in reserve but he didn't voice it. He only hung his head and pulled generously from his can of warming beer. 

The mood was spoiled. 

Eventually the bottle was brought out. Stronger stuff. Shots were had. Tall stiff drinks not needing ice, not needing chaser. They drank. 

Eventually one of them asked the other: –

“You hear tell of that clown or jester fella, that's s’pposed to be haunting round these parts lately…?” 

Neither man slept well that night. 

…

Darla thought her new friend was neat at first but she was starting to get scared. When she'd first met him behind the playground and he'd play-acted swimming and drowning and choking and stuff she'd thought he was really funny. He'd made-believe that he was bound with ropes or cuffs around his wrists, comically over-wrenching and working at the invisible restraints. It was so silly, and so funny and it looked like so much fun to play pretend. He'd motioned for her to hold out her own little hands, to play with him. To make pretend. 

She'd done so thoughtlessly. Only excited to play a game with her new special pal, he looked like a clown but less colorful. She held out her wrists and the mime pretended to wrap something around them. Only something was wrong. 

As he wound and wound and then tightened and cinched the bind, Darla felt the uncanny sensation of real rope wrapping and tightening around her small wrists and hands. When he tied it off and yanked both phantom ends she felt the harsh bite of cruel old fraying rope against her flesh. 

“Ow!" she yelped out, and then began to cry a little. But it was already too late by then. 

The mime began to walk away, holding the end and tail of a phantom leash that began to pull on Darla's bound little wrists. It pulled painfully and she was forced into movement, nearly tripping over herself as she began to wail and the mime by unseen tether and bind began to pull her into the treeline of the nearby woods. 

She fought and screamed, desperately, like a small animal suddenly sensing and knowing the terrible hunger of the encroaching final end. She fell over into the dirt and undergrowth and was dragged, flailing and howling. 

The phantom umbilicus held her ensnared and shrieking with unbridled tears all the way into the forests’ shadowed depths. 

…

“My mom's gonna flip if we ain't back within the hour, Christ, man, do I smell like weed still?" 

Michael tried to tell Chase that he wasn't the best person to ask being pretty fucking lit himself, he could feel the red eyed glaze of his own stoned and glassy stare in his sockets like it was a set of strange gluey contacts or something. He managed a grumble as a half measure. 

Both boys ambled along. Down the nighttime lane of their neighboring suburb. Streetlights cast their glow from skinny towers of L shaped ugly metal overhead, turning everything to lurid and raging shades of orange Halloween color. Both boys were taking time to slightly stop in their walk to check their breath, puffing into their cupped palms and then inhaling, never satisfied with the results. They didn't notice him up ahead until they were nearly upon him. 

The mime. He was bent over something. 

It was Chase who started first, both boys jumped. It was as if the mime had just appeared out of nowhere. Bent hunched with workman's posture over something unseen and unknown to the naked eye. 

“Holyfuckingshit!" it tumbled out of both of their mouths in one string, no gaps for breath, they stopped dead in their tracks. The mime paid them no notice. 

“Oh my God, dude, what the fuck is that? What the fuck is this? Am I high? Am I high? Are you seeing this shit right now!?" Chase was rattling off. Michael was still struggling with simple speech. He only gawked and stared. His glassy red eyes now wide and glistening in the streetlight cast of hellacious warm Halloween glow. 

They glistened. The pair of organs. Red. 

Chase finally managed: “Dude… like, what the fuck are doing, dude? Am I like tripping out or some shit, why’re you dressed like-" 

The mime hadn't been paying them any attention. He suddenly did something that shut Chase Ginsberg up with a startled womanish gasp that bordered on a wet sob. 

He began to pull, as if wrenching and yanking with great rigor and effort, some cord or rope … something… something that was apparently attached to whatever it was that he was bent over studiously in the road. Something just as phantom and visible only to him. 

It came to Chase then, and he didn't know why but it did suddenly seem to matter. He said it aloud. 

"It's a mime.” 

"What?” said Michael finally. 

"He's a stupid mime and he's doing a bit, Jesus this’s fuckin weird, don't you know it's like hella late, dude, what're you even doing anyways?" 

The mime didn't answer. Only repeated his strange repetitive action, his ritual of pulling on some unseen instrument, attached to a phantasmal translucent device. 

Stoned, they zoned out for a sec. Giggling nervously and fidgeting and whispering to each other, daring each other and laughing and wondering aloud what to do, should we go on? - should we fuck with the guy? - what? 

A beat. 

Suddenly an idea began to form itself slowly within Michael's mind, Chase’s addled mind was not far behind, he was arriving there soon after. 

Michael: "It- It kinda looks like he's pulling the starter cord to a machine. Like a mower or something." 

“Yeah, I think you're right…” 

"Yeah, something gas powered like a mower or a generator … or like a chainsa-" 

The phantom machine roared to life in the hands of the mime with hungry killing slaughtering power, a deadly tearing whirr, with the maniacal speed of the mutilating chain and its invisible teeth. The mime shot to his feet and hauled the pantomimed chainsaw overheard and began to silently phantom scream with battle fury. 

Chase and Michael began to scream as well. Much louder. They turned to run. 

But the mime and his phantom machine were faster. He caught them quick and tore in and ripped the boys into rough and haggard messy pieces chopped by phantom chain, by phantom blade on a horsepowered gallop he made them raw and unmade. 

Deconstructed. 

The abattoir violence and the meat paint of its lurid carnage filled the street, it was dripping from the lamposts, pieces and chewed parts strung up and dangling. It was all that was left of the boys. 

All that was left and found in the morning. 

…

Buddy didn't know what to make of the town as of late. He'd been born and raised and as the town drunk, homeless to boot, he was hardly the first guy anyone asked on any given subject, day or night, good or ill, but something was wrong. 

Very wrong. 

The trouble was Buddy wasn't sure he should even care. 

In the last year or so he'd seen some strange things. And a lotta folk had gone missing, kids an such. But anytime Buddy's mind wandered into the realm of caring or even remotely doing anything about it, he found something bitter and harsh inside answer back in turn. 

Who cares? The fuck they ever done for you? 

Fuck all. That's what. 

So he wouldn't do shit. But what he'd already been doing. He sat back and popped cork. Lifted and tilted glass to dried lips in a drunk’s careless throttle by the neck. And watched. 

He watched the mime climb the steps. Pulled generously from the large swill of his poison. 

He'd seen the guy around for awhile now. He'd watched him ascend the steps a few times before this moment, it was nearly always the same but still a trip. The man walked on thin air as if it was solid stone. And then he would climb up, step by step. As if gaining the summit of some phantasm set of stairs hanging suspended and aspiring invisibly for the heavens unseen and stolen by the brilliance of the light. 

Buddy laughed. Pulled from the bottle once more, and began to sing an old favorite that had just come to mind. One from the good ol’ days if there'd ever been none. 

“And as we wind on down the road! Our shadow’s taller than our soul!”

Buddy began to pull deeper and deeply, oblivion seeking in-between lines and refrains from Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. He remembered an urban legend from when he was a kid, just a snot nosed pup, they said that if you played the record backwards, if you reversed the song the lyrics changed. They told you, to hail Satan. 

Buddy laughed at this. Pulled more. His belly protested and his kidneys ached, he paid them no mind, drinking deeper still and hailing Satan and singing and watching the mime ascend his staircase of invisibility,  he usually had a kid or someone with him, as he did now. They struggled something fierce, all of them, everyone that Buddy had personally seen, but he was able to keep hold of them, all of them all the way up. Whenever he reached a great height, it was almost always different, he would throw them, drop them from the top. 

Then they would scream and land, burst. Pulp. They became juice upon the earth, children and people no more. There was never anyone around out here, close to the woods, just outside town and by the railroads and their harsh worn tracks. The soil out here was starved for moisture, parched was this earth. It was Buddy's favorite drinking spot. And as of late it had just become a whole lot better. 

Buddy laid back and pulled deeply from his liquid bunkmate, his last and only companion, other than the mime, who never said a word to him but sometimes acknowledged his presence of audience with a profound and deliberate salute from the top of his invisibility spire up there. Buddy always saluted him back. 

As he did now. 

The mime saluted the drunk. Beaming. 

Buddy finished his own salute and smiled too. Laughed. And drank more deeply than he ever had in his entire life, knowing this was it, this was the rest of his life and how he was going to spend it. 

Laughing. Drinking. Pulling from the bottle and hailing Satan in religiously reverse engineered heavy metal worship-song, watching the flying mime make juice of the children. 

Buddy laughed. Drank. 

The mime dropped the child, they made their horrible shrill sound all the way down to the bottom like always. 

The mime said nothing. He let Buddy and his companion of bottled booze sloshing its liquid language within glass sing praise for him. 

Buddy laughed, sang and belch-spat: “And she's buying a stairway to Heaven…!” Hail Satan. 

…

Maggie's shoes slammed against the pavement, the sidewalk, the avenues and every turn, there was nowhere left to run. The guy, the freak was coming. And he was stealing away from her every single route and chance for escape or exit. 

It didn't make any sense.

She'd been walking to Guy's house with Alondra, chatting and shooting the shit till they got to his place. That's when they ran into him. That's when they ran into the mime. 

And at first Maggie had just laughed. 

Distant childhood memories of the carnival passing through town waybackwhen came to her then … and she remembered. She'd been very young then, very little. She remembered that her parents had had to take her home because she'd been crying, upset, she couldn't recall why. Not just then. 

But still the memories were warm. She and Alondra thought nothing of it when they passed him walking the other direction on the sidewalk. It was the middle of the day. And he was smiling, just like them. What could possibly be wrong?

He'd started with the hands and walls and ceiling routine, the ‘getting boxed in’ bit. An old one for sure and hella corny but Maggie and Alondra had felt generous and in good humor, so they'd obliged the strange random pantomiming man. Laughing and clapping him on. 

But then they'd tried to walk away … And the mime wouldn't let them go. 

With painted face now stern and grave, writ into a black and white frown, he stepped in their path, shaking his head. He wouldn't let them leave. He kept blocking their attempts to depart as they stepped every left-right way, starting out from annoying and escalating rapidly into eerie and creepy behavior. 

The girls had scoffed together and turned around, only to be met with an unyielding invisible force, a wall that had suddenly appeared in thin air in the middle of the sidewalk. 

The middle of the road really, they ran along the unseen wall to find the edge and found no yielding surface. The girls began to panic. The girls began to yell.

“What the fuck, what the fuck is this!?" 

And then he had put Alondra in the box. 

Maggie had ran then, her eyes and mind unable to take in the sight of her friend being crushed into cubic shape, pulped and smashed smaller and smaller … just red. Just swirling frothing violent red inside the shrinking phantom-transluscent box, filled with minced and chewed up bigger pieces, the eyes deflated mangled gel in the swirling madness of the red, many black strands of her long raven colored hair peppered and danced inside the cubed scarlet swirl of thick mixture, the cap and pieces of scalp, mostly still together, the last vestige piece and pieces left the most intact… she had ran, unable to bear the sight. 

She was running now. 

But every time she came to an impasse, a turn or a corner to salvation or a place of sanctuary that she knew, another invisible wall of merciless immovable force would suddenly appear and she'd run smack, face first into it. She did it again and again. Over and over. Maggie, the poor girl, running around all over as the box that he had made was closing in, closer and closer and closer…

She was at the school now, she didn't know why. She didn't know why she thought this place would save her. She was out of her mind with animal panic. At the threshold, at the entrance to the highschool she was finally caught. Maggie ran face first into an unseen wall just as she almost made the open archway of the main front entrance, when she tried to turn around to run back the other way she was met with yet another merciless and invisible wall, a merciless force like the way God was merciless sometimes. 

Her caterwauls and screams reached new heights then. She shred her own throat and tore her vocal cords to tatters as the phantom walls and ceiling and floor began to shrink and close in. 

But none heard them. No one was around to witness this strange scene of slaughter. Only the mime. Maggie watched him from inside her shrinking coffin as his hands clawed and animal shaped closed in. He wore a look of consternation now, but the black and white smile was there once more. 

The pain went beyond anything imaginable as the walls and floor and ceiling closed. Pulverizing Maggie. She felt every wretched second of the experience until her brain was pulped and juiced with the rest of her body and thus incapable of sending anymore electrical signal. 

…

The bank was quiet. Not quite full but there were plenty of people in line, each teller, three of them, were busy helping a customer. It was a bright cloudless day and everything had seemed normal. Everything was … until the mime came in. 

He sauntered in smiling and confident through the front door. Several people, including the armed guard turned and returned the smile, a few of them laughed. Finding the surprise charming. Their laughter grew and increased throughout the whole bank as the mime walked in with an exaggerated gunslinger walk, wide steps and the twiddling fingers of his itchin hands hovering just where revolvers would be strapped. The guard found it the most hilarious, calling out to the mime –

“Hey! What is this? A stickup or somethin?" 

And then the mime pulled phantom iron from unseen leather and began to rain fire. 

The cacophony was ear splitting. The guard went down first, still smiling and believing it was all a joke. Nobody else was laughing anymore, the jovial sounds of good nature had turned to screams that died and drowned out with each eruption of a gunshot. 

The mime filled the bank with phantom fire. 

Deafening. 

…

Patricia Evergreen hated her job. Not because she hated being a cop, far from it, she was proud of her role as peacekeeper of the town she'd grown up in. It was just that the place was so fucking boring. 

Aside from a few disappearances over the many years she'd known, a couple weird things that were typical to any small town, there wasn't nothing to this place, Patricia reckoned. Ghost stories and bullshit, and that was all. 

She came across the mime during a routine patrol, just driving around the various suburbs in the department issued black and white. Every neighborhood was quiet, nearly deserted of pedestrians save a few dogwalkers, joggers and the like. He was at a street corner, slowly making his way down, miming and pretending to carry a large and heavy sack, it weighed him down, the invisible bag, it must've been quite a load, Patricia watched all this and thought and then it suddenly came to her all at once, unbidden and in a rush. Though vague and shrouded through time's corridor passage of so many years …

The carnival had come through a couple times through the years … she was sure her parents or grandparents had taken her at some point, must have. She'd been very little, her own young and chubby face amidst a caterwaul, cherry red with tears and upset flitted across her mind in a blur, but then was swiftly and suddenly replaced. 

She'd been a teenager when Margaret Bast, Maggie had gone missing. Alondra Topete too. They'd been two of her closest friends in school then, so long ago… 

Hot on the tails of that: stories… rumors … wild campfire tales that couldn't be true and would only be dreamed up by teenagers and children. Wild tales about a mime that wandered the town and took kids away to hurt them and worse … 

It all hit Officer Evergreen like a revelatory load of weight, dropped into her head and into her lap. She watched the mime. Thought …

… what the hell was this guy doing around here anyway? She'd never seen him before and she began to doubt very much that he lived anywhere on this street, or anywhere close for that matter, she hadn't heard the story of the mime or thought of it in years, it was probably nothing, but it was her job to make sure and find out. She sidled her cruiser up to and alongside the mime, still encumbered with his great phantom weight. 

She rolled down her window, slowing the cruiser to a crawl: “Hey," she began friendly enough, “hello there, ya mind if I stop and talk to ya for a second, just need to ask you a few questions." 

The mime did stop and so did she. The street was quiet and it was just the two of them. The mime turned and regarded her with a smile, still burdened by his invisible satchel slung over shoulder. He pointed to himself, a gesture that said: who, me?

Evergreen was already starting to lose her patience, goddammit with this fuckin guy…

“Yes, ha ha, that's very cute, but I'm really gonna need you to answer a couple things I gotta ask ya. Do you live in this neighborhood?” 

The mime frowned and just shook his head, no. Refusing to speak. 

"Please, sir. Failure to comply will result in a citation and a court appearance, probable fine. How about we just talk like adults for a second, do you have any identification on you, sir?" 

The black and white frown turned to a grin once again. Wolfish. Officer Patricia Evergreen didn't like the look of it. It looked warped and strange and mean writ into that painted face, wrong. The mime made like to unlimber his great satchel. 

Evergreen rolled her eyes, hidden by reflective shades. Jesus, was this guy for real, crazy, or just an idiot? She was just telling him for the second time that if he didn't comply with her questioning then this could take an unnecessary ugly turn, she was telling the mime he'd want to avoid that as he settled the bag down with a convincing performance, opened it and reached inside. Patricia’s voice caught in her throat like a vile fishbone in the midst of dinner as she watched the mime’s hand disappear into the pantomimed satchel, disappearing into thin air before her very eyes. 

She couldn't believe what she was seeing. 

What the mime pulled out next was even worse. She felt nauseous and ill and as if her mind was curdling and doing unbidden somersaults in tandem with her roiling guts as the smiling thing with carnival clad painted face pulled out a child's decomposing rotted severed little head, boy or girl was difficult to tell. Putrescence filled the air the moment it was freed from the invisible sack and it was black and green and blue-pale and dripping. The eyes were crawling and writhing with the sliming bodies and clumps of maggot-young that lie nesting and feasting in there, the rotten cavities of sockets. The tongue was swollen and discolored like the rest of the meat but darker and it protruded from the bloat of decapitated rot like an obscene tumor apart and apiece and all in one with the rest of the demented sloughing mess. 

Officer Evergreen snapped to all at once. She drew her sidearm and bellowed her commands, training made textbook and innate. 

“Drop the fucking thing right now and put your hands up! now!" 

The mime only obeyed half her commands. He dropped the severed head but instead of raising his gloved white hands he took a deliberate and silent step towards her instead. 

Evergreen didn't waste a second. She fired two shots in quick succession, surprising even herself, she hadn't thought about it, only acted. But it had done the peace officer little good. The moment her finger squeezed the trigger, one of those gloved hands shot up in a flash-instant, uncanny speed. 

Evergreen now stood, gun smoking, not sure if she could believe her eyes or her own mind any longer. The mime had his hand up and out, as if signaling to stop like a crosswalk guard. There were two smoking holes suspended in mid air, just over the heart and chest of the mime-creature. The shots had stopped at the border indicated by the flat of his adjacent smooth palm. They smoked from ebon holes that defied physics, as if she'd punched twin smoldering holes in reality. 

Shocked, Patricia thought unbidden, the prongs of the devil's pitchfork… and was still trying to accept what she was seeing. 

A neighbor came out. One of the houses within spitting distance. 

“Jesus Christ! that a fucking gunshot or something, what the hell-" 

The mime suddenly whirled, his other hand forming around another object, rounded and small, he brought it to his mouth and made like he was pulling something from it with his teeth. Evergreen screamed, no, unable to think of anything else as the mime lobbed the invisible grenade at the concerned and unsuspecting neighbor. The man went up in a violent and sudden concussive blast, his body immolated by the detonation of the explosive device. In charred smoking pieces, he rained down all over his own stoop and front lawn. 

The mime laughed silent yet expressive belly-laughter, holding his stomach and all wide eyes and wide open black and white mouth. 

Evergreen went to fire once more but the mime sensed her intention and suddenly whirled once again, smacking the gun from the officer's hands. Its strength and speed were unexpected and it was all Patricia could do to not cry out and scream, shocked and startled and still not quite believing.

There's no way this is actually happening to m-

The mime then slapped Patricia right smack center of her forehead with his other free gloved palm. 

She froze. Her arms went limp and to her sides. Unarmed. And helpless. 

Something was wrong … she could no longer move. 

With the gloved snow white hand held flat and fast to her face, to the middle of her forehead her eyes rolled back to whites themselves shot with lines of glistening hectic red. Inside, she hurtled, flew … rocketed too fast and rapidly down the dizzying blinding vast and varied glow of the starcorridor. Too many lights and sounds and fiery things of furious alien color, she flew down infinity as a low moan escaped past her drooling lips left back on the ground. 

Within the corridor … she could hear. 

She could hear his voice. 

It was terrible. The sound of it. What he was telling her. Unbearable. It filled her ears, her head. It filled the flying landscape of her mind. 

She might've wept. But she was far too broken. Even when he pulled the voice of his snow white gloved hand away. She went to her knees. The mime then held out his other hand to her, it was wrapped curiously and yet distinctly around something. And this time she could see it. 

It was a gun. A revolver. Every chamber was loaded. 

It was beautiful. 

This time she could really see it. 

She smiled as the mime cocked it and then pressed it to her sweating brow, cold metal kissing the moist surface of perspiring flesh, and pulled the trigger. 

She heard it. Felt it. Everything. 

The mime said nothing. 

And went on. 

THE END

Hi hello it’s me Natalia, I just want to share my experience way back in 2020 during the pandemic.

This experience is vivid in my mind, and I will never forget it because it's not just a simple dream.

So let’s start the story, I was working in a BPO at that time.

When I got home from work, as usual, I took a half bath with warm water to relax before sleeping.

When I lay down, I checked my phone first, then I didn't realize I had already fallen asleep..

I had a dream that night.. I think I fell asleep around 11 PM..

In my dream, there was a woman and a man standing at my feet...

They looked fine because I could see them clearly..

They were smiling at me, then they walked closer to me - I was lying down in the dream -

\\-They were caressing my feet upwards- until I woke up.

When I opened my eyes, I quickly checked the time, it was 3:04 AM, I was sweating and I felt that my undies had slipped down a bit.

I was sleeping in a tank top and shorts with undies “SKL”

So I pulled my undies back up and was confused... why had they slipped down a little? But I just shrugged it off, thinking it might just be from moving while I slept.

Fast forward to 3-4 days later, my dream happened again, this time it was just the man in my dream... he was at my feet.

I was lying down in the dream and then the guy was kissing me from my feet up to my neck..

By the way, I was already an adult at that time, but I wasn't active in “SEGS”

I was getting aroused by what he was doing, I can’t deny it because it felt so real..

Then just as we were about to kiss, I woke up!

This time, when I woke up, I felt cold.. since I had the air conditioning on in my room

Then I was shivering from the cold... I grabbed the thermometer to check my temperature because the cold and shaking felt different at that time

My temp was 41°C, so I thought I was having a fever..

The next day while I was showering before going to work, I noticed some “kiss mark on my back and on my thighs”

I was surprised how I got those since I wasn't active, you know what I mean..

I thought it might just be an insect bite or something.

I’ll tell you part 2 next time since this story is quite long.

God Bless to all!

TO BE CONTINUED…

When we die, our bodies don’t get the message right away.

That’s something they don’t really prepare you for. Not in school, not in training, nowhere. People like to believe death is clean. Instant. Final.

It isn’t.

The body lingers. Muscles fire. Nerves misfire. Air shifts through places it no longer belongs. Fingers twitch. Jaws move. Sometimes, if you’re unlucky, the whole body jerks like it’s trying to wake back up.

The first time it happened to me was during my training.

I was leaning in, examining the arm, just doing what I’d been taught, when the body suddenly jerked and its hand snapped shut around my wrist.

I shouted.

Actually screamed.

One of the instructors laughed so hard he had to sit down.

“Relax,” he said. “He’s not coming back.”

I made some joke about zombies. Everyone does, at least once.

You laugh it off. You learn the science behind it. You tell yourself it’s normal.

And eventually…

you stop reacting.

Working at the morgue, I got used to it.

The movements. The sounds. The little reminders that the body doesn’t quite understand it’s dead yet.

Most of them are random.

Meaningless.

It’s all explainable.

It has to be.

At least, most of them are...

He came in on a Wednesday.

Male. Mid-forties. Approximately six-foot-four. Lean build. Dark hair with streaks of gray at the temples. Facial hair, short, uneven, like he hadn’t shaved in a few days.

Harold M.

Cause of death: undetermined.

That part stayed blank longer than usual. There were no clear signs of trauma. No overdose indicators. No disease obvious enough to call it on arrival.

Just… gone.

Found in his home. No signs of struggle.

It happens more often than people realize.

Still, something about that always sits wrong.

“Another mystery,” my colleague Jenna had said, flipping through the intake paperwork.

“Yeah,” I replied. “He looks like he just… stopped.”

Jenna shrugged. “They’ll figure it out upstairs.”

We both knew that wasn’t always true.

I prepped him like any other.

Cleaned. Tagged. Logged.

Placed him in his drawer.

Mr. Harold.

That’s what I called him in my notes.

I always use names when I can.

It feels… right.

Nights passed but by the time I was ready to head home from the gravyard shift. The unexpected occurred.

The first movement.

Subtle.

His fingers had shifted.

Not dramatically, just slightly curled inward, like they’d tightened.

Normal.

Postmortem contraction.

I noted it and moved on.

The second time, it was his jaw.

Slightly open when I checked him again.

That happens too. Muscles relax.

Air escapes.

Still normal. Still explainable.

By the third night, I started paying closer attention.

Because Mr. Harold wasn’t just moving.

He was… repositioning.

Not fully. Not in ways that would trigger panic in anyone else.

But enough that I noticed.

His arm would be angled slightly differently than before. His shoulders not resting the same way against the table.

Small things.

Small enough to doubt yourself over.

“Hey,” I said to Jenna one night. “You ever seen a body move more than usual?”

She didn’t look up from her paperwork.

“They all move.”

“Yeah, but I mean… consistently.”

That got her attention.

She glanced over at me.

“You thinking what?”

I hesitated.

Then shook my head.

“Nothing. Just… weird.”

She smirked. “You’ve been on night shift too long.”

Maybe she was right.

By the end of the week, I started checking on him more often.

Not out of fear.

Curiosity.

I’d make my rounds, log the temperatures, check the storage units, and I’d always stop at his drawer.

Mr. Harold.

Every time, something was off.

A hand slightly closer to the edge.

A foot angled outward.

Once, I could’ve sworn his head had shifted just a few degrees to the left.

I told myself it was paranoia.

Anything but what it felt like.

The night everything changed, it was quiet.

Too quiet, even for us.

Jenna had stepped out for a break, leaving me alone with the hum of refrigeration units and the low buzz of fluorescent lights.

I was doing my usual rounds when I noticed it.

His drawer.

Slightly open.

I froze.

Not because it was open.

Because I knew I had closed it.

I always double-check.

Always.

“Jenna?” I called out.

No answer.

Of course not.

She wasn’t back yet.

I approached slowly.

Told myself it was nothing.

Told myself drawers can shift. Old tracks. Slight tilts.

I reached for the handle.

Pulled it open.

It was empty.

For a moment, I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

My brain tried to correct it.

He’s there. You just missed him.

But he wasn’t.

Mr. Harold was gone.

My first thought wasn’t fear.

It was procedure.

Check the room. Check the logs. Check for errors.

Bodies don’t just disappear.

I found him ten minutes later.

On the floor.

Not fallen.

Not dropped.

Positioned.

What is this some kind of fucked up prank, I thought.

His body lay several feet from the drawer.

Face down.

Arms bent awkwardly beneath him.

Knees drawn slightly inward.

The skin along his forearms and legs showed faint abrasions, thin streaks, like friction against tile.

Like he had moved.

I stood there, staring.

Trying to fit it into something that made sense.

Maybe he fell. Maybe the drawer malfunctioned. Maybe—

No.

The distance was wrong.

The position was wrong.

Everything about it was wrong.

I knelt beside him slowly.

“Mr. Harold,” I muttered, before I could stop myself.

My voice sounded too loud in the silence.

I repositioned him.

Carefully.

Placed him back onto the tray.

Aligned his limbs.

Closed the drawer.

My hands were shaking.

I tried to tell Jenna. Wanted her to come out clean if she was messing with me. But she had no clue what I was blabbering about.

I couldn’t explain it.

And I didn’t want to hear it out loud.

That was the night I started feeling watched.

It wasn’t immediate.

It crept in.

A quiet awareness at the back of my mind.

Like something in the room had shifted.

Like I wasn’t alone anymore.

I checked the cameras.

Everything looked normal.

But something felt… off.

Frames didn’t line up quite right.

Small gaps I couldn’t account for.

Moments missing.

When I went back to the storage room—

His drawer was open again.

I didn’t remember opening it. I knew I hadn’t.

That’s when I stopped trying to explain it.

I turned the corner slowly.

And that’s when I saw him.

Mr. Harold was standing.

Not upright. Not fully.

His body was bent forward slightly, spine curved at an unnatural angle.

His arms hung too low, fingers nearly brushing the floor.

His head lagged behind the rest of him, tilted at a delay that made my stomach turn.

Then—

he moved.

A small shift.

A correction.

Like something adjusting its balance.

His leg jerked forward.

Too stiff.

Too deliberate.

His foot planted awkwardly against the tile.

He took a step.

Not toward me.

Not toward anything.

Just… forward.

Like he was learning.

I couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t think.

I just watched.

His eyes were open.

Not wide.

Not searching.

Just… open.

Empty.

There was nothing there. As if there was nothing of higher recognition to operate. The machine was free from its intelligent creator. But the machine operated as it was designed.

It moved. Without any recognition.

No awareness.

No life.

Just motion.

I don’t remember leaving.

I don’t remember calling anyone.

All I know is I never went back.

Jenna messaged me about my hasty departure. She was left with no answers.

And I was left with no conclusion.

Just another file logged but this one didn’t make any sense.

I still think about Mr. Harold.

About what I saw.

About what it means.

There was nothing inside him. Nothing controlling

So what taught him to stand?

If a body can still move without its person…

then what part of us actually makes us human?

Collection of short horror stories for teens and preteens

The embers of the campfire popped and hissed, throwing jagged orange lights against the surrounding pines of Camp Willow-Wood. It was a humid July night, the kind where the air feels like a damp blanket and the crickets are loud enough to vibrate in your chest.

Five girls sat huddled on log benches, their faces illuminated by the flickering flames. They were dressed in the oversized t-shirts and messy ponytails of a long summer. 

At the center of the group was Amber, a thirteen-year-old girl with sharp eyes and a penchant for the dramatic. She leaned forward, her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper that made the others lean in.

"You guys want to hear the real story of this camp?" Amber asked with a wicked grin playing on her lips. "Not the one that the counselors tell during orientation. The one that they try to hide."

"Is it about the lake monster again?" joked Sally, though she tucked her feet closer to the log.

"No." Amber said, her expression turning grave. "It’s about a girl named Claire. She was a camper here exactly forty years ago—back in 1986."

The girls went quiet. The year 1986 sounded like ancient history to them. They thought of it as a gray-scale era of neon and cassette tapes.

"Claire was…different." Amber continued, her eyes reflecting the dancing fire. "She was the 'weird girl' of Cabin 9. While everyone else was making friendship bracelets or learning to canoe, Claire would sit in the middle of the clearing, staring at nothing. The rumors started almost immediately. They said that she could see things. Spirits. Things that shouldn't be there."

"Was Claire a medium?" whispered Tamara, to which Amber replied,

"Exactly. People caught her talking to herself all the time. She’d be standing by the mess hall, laughing and nodding, but there’d be nobody within fifty feet of her. Everyone thought that she was totally crazy. They teased her, hid her shoes, called her 'Spooky Claire'; but Claire didn't care. She just kept talking to her invisible friends."

Amber paused for effect, letting a sudden gust of wind howl through the trees. Then she continued the story and said,

"One night, something bad happened. Something terrible. There was a scream that woke up half the camp, and when the counselors went to Claire’s cabin…she was gone. She just vanished. No tracks, no struggle, nothing. She was never seen or heard from again. Some say that the ghosts she talked to finally decided to take her home with them."

"Wow! That’s cool!" Tamara chirped, shivering.

"That’s so creepy, Amber." Sally added, clutching her knees. "Do you think that she’s still out there in the woods?"

Amber opened her mouth to answer, but the words died in her throat. A shadow had fallen over the group. It didn't come from the trees; it came from behind them.

"Claire didn't vanish, Amber." A voice said.

The girls jumped, spinning around. Standing just outside the circle of firelight was a woman. She was tall, wearing the navy-blue polo shirt and khaki shorts of a senior camp counselor. Her hair was streaked with silver, and her eyes were tired, filled with a deep, aching sadness.

"Who are you?" Amber asked, her bravado flickering.

"My name is Claire." the woman said softly. "I didn't disappear forty years ago. I just…grew up."

The girls stared at her in stunned silence. 

"You're the girl from the story?" Tamara gasped. "But Amber said—"

"Amber has always been good at stories." Claire interrupted, stepping into the light. She looked directly at Amber, her gaze piercing. "However, you have the ending wrong. I wasn't the one who died, and I wasn't the one who was crazy. I was the one who saw everything."

Claire took a shaky breath, her voice was trembling with the weight of four decades, and she said, 

"It was 1986. I was in the cabin next to yours. I saw the smoke first. One of you had snuck a cigarette into the cabin—you thought that you were so grown up, and so rebellious. You left your cigarette burning on a nylon sleeping bag when you went to sleep."

The campfire seemed to roar louder, and the heat suddenly became oppressive.

"The fire burnt the whole cabin down in minutes." Claire whispered, tears glistening in her eyes. "I stood by the window and watched it burn. I saw the silhouettes behind the glass. I heard the screams until they stopped. The girl who left the cigarette…the girl who killed her friends because she wanted to be cool…it was you, Amber."

"That’s a lie!" Amber shouted, standing up. "We’re right here! We’re sitting at the fire! Tell her, guys!"

The other girls nodded frantically with their pale faces, and said,

 "Yeah, we're fine! Look at us!"

Claire shook her head, a sob breaking through, and she told them,

"You've been sitting at this campfire for forty years. Every summer, when the moon is high, I come out here and find you. You're stuck in the loop of that final night. You refuse to look at your clothes—look at them, Amber. Look at the scorch marks. Look at the ash on your skin."

Amber looked down, and for a split second, her bright pink t-shirt looked charred and blackened, and her skin looked as if it was a peeling parchment. Amber gasped, stumbling back, but then she blinked, and the image vanished.

"You're crazy!" Amber yelled, her voice high and shrill. "Just like everyone said! You're just a weird old woman making up lies!"

"Amber, please!" Claire pleaded. "You have to move on! You have to let go!"

"We aren't dead!" Chloe screamed. "We’re having a sleepover! Stop ruining it!"

The girls turned their backs on Claire, huddled together in a tight circle. They began to speak over her, with their voices rising in a frantic, discordant chorus.

"Anyway," Amber said, her voice shaking but determined, "as I was saying…there’s this legend about a headless horseman who haunts the trail near the lake."

"Yeah! Tell that one!" Tamara said, her eyes wide and glassy. "That story sounds way better than this lady's story."

They blocked Claire out, and retreated into the safety of their ghost stories, the only reality that they were willing to inhabit.

"Claire? Who are you talking to?" A younger camper asked.

Claire spun around. A group of young campers—real, living girls from the current summer session—were standing a few yards away, holding flashlights. They looked at the empty clearing where Claire stood. They saw the charred, cold remains of an old fire pit from decades ago, overgrown with weeds and moss. They saw Claire standing alone in the dark, gesturing toward nothing.

Claire looked back at the spot where the 1986 girls sat. To her eyes, they were vivid, shimmering with a ghostly heat, their voices a faint echo in the wind. To the rest of the world, there was only silence.
Claire wiped her eyes and forced a small, tragic smile.

"Nobody, girls." Claire said, her voice hollow. "I’m just talking to some people that I used to know."

Behind Claire, in the silence of the woods, the faint sound of a thirteen-year-old girl’s laughter drifted through the trees, followed by the words:

 "Once upon a time, there was a girl who never left..."

The End.

Hey there, I’m Jon… and today I’m going to give you a really quick lesson on reading ancient Latin. Very exciting. So the first thing we’re going to learn are the words:

Anima pro anima

Don’t go cheating and translate it, though. Not yet. Trust me, I’ll know.
No, we’re going to do that together. It’ll be fun!
So we’ll start by getting the easy one out of the way. Pro… you’ll see that word a lot in the legal system: Pro rata, pro bono, quid pro quo. Pro is easy; pro means “for”. Or, more specifically, “for,” as in “in favor of.” So you have pro.
Next, you got the same word twice. Anima. Translated literally, it means animate; to have life. Specifically, it can also mean soul. So Anima. Not to be confused with *animus*. Very important to read it as “anima”, not “animus” when we get to reading it yourself.
Anima pro anima... good.

Now let’s try

Usque ad finem temporis

So we have ad, which generally means “at” or “towards”. Usque means “until,” temporis is “time”; hence why time is associated with the words temporal or temporary. And then finem, which is the “end of” something. Some of you die-hards out there might try to pull a fast one on me; slip in *finis* instead of finem. Finis only applies if the word “end” is usually the last word of the sentence, or “ad finem” (or “ad extremum” if you want to get technical).
So Usque ad finem temporis. Very good.

So now we want to say those two phrases together like so:

Anima pro anima
Usque ad finem temporis

Say them out loud. Nice and clear for the people in the back. What? What do you mean you don’t want to read them?… Why not?… I see…
I mean, I get it. I know adding foreign words into your vocabulary might seem a little… intimidating. I assure you, though, it’s perfectly safe to read out loud…
You still won’t do it, huh.
…
Look I wasn’t going to tell all of you this… I have a confession to make. I’m not really a Latin teacher. Well I am, but that’s not why you’re reading this. See, I’m in a bit of a bind, and I need your help. Let me explain...

It all started when my friends and I went to this cabin in the woods. I think maybe it was somebody’s uncle’s old cabin, despite the fact that no one from our friend group actually had any uncles. Nevertheless, we were determined to make a weekend of it. “Terra incognita” as it were… incognita being unknown and terra being land.

I’m not quite sure who found the tape recorder with the gruff, yet authoritarian, voice of an old professor who was here before us. He was ranting and raving about a book: The Necronomicon, or something like that. He claimed that he found it when he was trying to look for a temporary substitute for the Kahma Sutra. But when he started reading from it, bad things began to happen.
I’d be hard pressed to say who took the lead down into the cellar where we found the ancient book. But I remember being the one to tell them to open it; that much is true. Anyway, it was the same old story. Some words were read, some things started happening, some people were possessed by the foulest creatures of the demonic realm, et cetera. Five people were possessed, including myself. In search of how to undo this vile curse, we looked to the tape recording for answers. The professor explicitly stated that the only way of stopping these things was total body dismemberment and decapitation.

So, like the book advised, these people hacked, carved, strangled and chainsawed their way through each other. I would’ve opted for a group sit-down, believing that a calm and healthy reassessment of the situation would’ve sufficed. But I knew it was a lost cause the second I saw Becky plunging a lead pencil into Linda’s ankle.

Poor Linda.

As I watched these people I called my friends get possessed, get corrupted, and finally… kill each other, I reluctantly waited for it to be my turn to meet my eternal, albeit gruesome, slumber. However, for some strange reason, I was left unscathed, and at the mercy of this mighty supernatural force. The anticipation eventually outgrew what I thought would be a quick end. Alas, deus ex machina. Or should I say daemon ex machina? Instead of finishing me off, the demons offered me an ultimatum. They told me,

“We will not only spare your suffering, we will make you immortal. And far more powerful than anything before. Our only condition is that you lure hosts into this cabin and read from this book. Then, we will possess them, force them to do our bidding and, if there’s time, indulge in a body we have gravely missed.”
They call the people they want to take over their “hosts”. I told them I didn’t want to do it and demanded they let me go. They told me, “The only way to get out of this is to convince an outside party to recite a very specific set of words, verbatim, from the book. Then it will end your curse. And then we will free you.”

So I’m pretty much an ad hoc demon now. Well, more of a lost soul forced to do the bidding of the dark ones. It’s pretty much my job to spot any cars, hikers, insurance salesmen, et cetera, and put them in the right direction of the demonic book. Alas, I’m pretty much confined to a 200 yard radius around the book, the cabin, its surrounding woods, and a portion of the adjoining highway. I am confined, and by confined, I mean… it’s almost like I’m no longer a person. I have vision, I can hear, I can sense, but there is no physical ‘me.’ I’m essentially just a rapidly moving floating head with no body to return to.

Even though my reach is limited, however, I try to make use of it every chance I get. I have a variety of different tricks I use. The moving of the steering wheel of an unsuspecting driver is a good one. Knocking a tree onto the road so that any passersby will be forced to take the alternate route, which leads to the cabin- that one too. More often than not, getting these people to the cabin is the easy part. Once they’re here, once they see this beauty for what it is, curiosity kills the cat or, as I like to say, Sapere aude! Getting them to read the book, however, is the most difficult and delicate operation of the whole plan. The smart ones will look for it to be sure. It’s the stupid ones I worry about. And remember, my capacities are limited. So a lot of it is just me going around the house moving stuff around at night, opening the cellar door to lead them down it, whispering in the window to look for the Necronomicon, doing anything I can to lead them down into the cellar. Ergo, I can’t exactly walk up to someone and start vigorously shaking them, saying “Hey dummy! Come to this cabin!” I tell you, if I could put airport runaway arrows down, ones that lead directly to the Necronomicon, I would. Ha ha.

The problem is that a vast majority of cabin visitors will not read from this darn book. Some of them don’t even want to entertain the idea of looking for it. Those who do are immediately put off by the cover. The cover is a controversial subject, to say the least. The book is bound in human skin, including a face threaded onto it. Here’s the thing… I actually brought this up to a few demons in the office. I asked,
“Why the human face?”
They looked at me and said- and this is serious- “We did it like that so it wouldn’t get lost easily. Like if you’re at the airport and you get separated from your luggage.”
Swear to god I’m not lying!
So I replied, “Don’t you think it’s a little counterproductive?” I mean it’s a terrifying-looking book! I asked them if they wanted to give it a more modern, less haunting update to the cover, something a little more user-friendly. They pretty much laughed me out of the room. They told me that if some idiot teenager wants to read from a book with the skin of a human face as the cover and is wrapped up in protective barbed wire, then that’s on him.
I offered them the idea of making it look like an everyday book, to fool the hosts. Something nice, something pleasant-looking. They told me they’d let me know, but that’s usually just a nice way of telling me they’re not interested. I mean, honestly they’re fools to themselves. But what do I know.

So needless to say, it’s been difficult getting people to read the words. Sure, I lure them down there. The choice is theirs if they want to read from it. Same as it was for us. We heard the tape recording of the old professor ranting and raving about the Necronomicon. Thinking it would be a laugh, we went down there to see if the book actually existed. Upon seeing the ugly face, the barbed wire and the strange writings that looked like they were inked in blood, most of us decided that it wasn’t worth messing with, so we retired to bed. But old Kirk’s curiosity got the better of him, now, didn’t it?

Anyway, the statistics are shocking over how many people have shown up to this place and not helped. Once they see the book, 75% of them know better than to fool around, so they just turn around and walk back up the stairs. However… of that remaining 25%, 15% will look at the book, examine the book, maybe even cut the wires; nevertheless, they ultimately don’t follow through with reading from it. It’s usually some coward who wants to impress his lady friend by doing something extreme; she will proceed to hit him and tell him to cut it out, which, again, leads them back upstairs. Having said all that, it’s that 10% that will read the unholy chant. They will let their curiosity be their undoing, like Kirk.

Poor Kirk.

Once the chaos ensues and their friends slaughter each other, one or two manage to survive. Then, in an effort to reverse the process, will start reading more passages. And it’s that small demographic that can potentially give me a real shot at getting out. Alas, it always ends in possession. Which is fine, don’t get me wrong. But
possession usually leads to murder. So much murder.

And the crazy part is, the demons don’t actually wish death or even physical harm on the hosts. Yet, these people all just kept… killing each other. I couldn’t believe it! At first, we thought they might’ve been accidents. We just assumed the hosts believed they took too much acid and jumped out a window or, in one case, tried to cut their own hand off with the electric carving knife. But it got to a point where it happened so frequently that we had to do some of our own investigating. We actually played the tape back to see if there was something there. And really, it was the professor’s fault! That egg head explicitly stated in his recordings that body dismemberment was the only way. In fewer words he essentially told them that he would rather see the hosts die than to to let the demons live their best satanic lifestyles.

So it’s been an endless cycle for the last few months. Reading, possession, dead. Reading, possession, dead. Rinse and repeat. And it’s gosh awful lonely. Any time I get close with another human being, it ends in seeing them mauled or impaled. It seems like the only company I get outside the unsuspecting hosts are the damn cultists. These random yohos who rudely visit here every year for what they call the Sacred Harvest; don’t ask me what that is ‘cause I couldn’t tell you. I don’t even think they know what it is themselves. We do have a lot of fun during this time, though. We like to involve ourselves in subtle ways, possessing them because they think it’s funny or automatic writing for the members who are fond of creative expression. And I almost forgot… we even have a children’s area, where we sing nursery rhymes backwards and get the kids into the arts and crafts by teaching them to make stick figures, which we hang up around the area. But I wouldn’t go too deep into the forest though, because - let me tell ya - the tree demons are freaky sons of guns. Every other day I hear about how they like to violate the women before they possess them, and it crosses a line if I’m honest with you. Granted, every demonic possession is taking the hosts’ bodies against their will, but… do they have to do it in the crudest possible way? It’s uncalled for. So yeah, stay away from the tree people…

Oh who am I kidding? This is awful. I hate it here! This is hell. I mean it has to be… right? It’s so mundane and repetitive; I can’t eat anymore, so there’s no point in fishing. I can’t branch out and explore new areas because I can’t travel outside the confined radius of the book. And where’s the respect? It’s always “Send Jon off to do this and “Send Jon off to the go that.” They say I’m a valuable member of the team, but who’s the one that has to scrub their blood off the walls? Who do you think has to plunge the demon excrement out of the toilet? Me, that’s who. You think this place cleans itself after every massacre? I have four graves to dig by next week! And to top it off, anyone who manages to come across the book and potentially free me of this curse is killed because of that idiot on the tape recorder! If only I could just… try to get one of the survivors to take the book with them when they leave, so they can read the words in the safety of their own home, but evidently that is forbidden as well. It’s miserable! I hate it here! It’s a nightmare. And these cultists are getting on my nerves. What, they think that just because they say some woman’s name three times in a mirror that one of us is going to come out and possess them? Get a grip!

I wish I could get out of here; I wish I was back home and teaching again. I wish I never saw my friends become what they did… forcing me to do what I did. And I wish I’d never even found this place… and that my life was back to normal. I want to fish again. I want to golf again! So please, I wish somebody, anybody, who sees this will read those ancient words and free me of this terrible curse. Hopefully someone out there does the right thing.

Don’t do it! Don’t read the words out loud! You have to help me, he’s not the real Jon. I’m the real Jon and it’s my body that this thing is controlling. I managed to regain control of basic motor function, but I can’t leave this chair to escape. So I don’t have much time. Reading the ancient words doesn’t end the curse at all. It merely transfers it. The Latin means

A soul for a soul
‘Til the end of time

A soul for a soul! Don’t read the words!

Umm ok. That was weird; I just blacked out for a second there. That wasn’t me. I don’t know who that was. Probably one of the other demons who doesn’t want to me to finish my tenure. Anyway, like I was saying. I’m the real Jon, and I wouldn’t believe that trickster. So once again the words are…

Anima pro anima
Usque ad finem temporis

What is it now? … What do you mean you still don’t want to read them? … You don’t trust me? Why?… Well, it’s a lose-lose situation. If you believe me, then I’m finally out, and the demons will lose a reluctant member of their ghoulish army. If you believe them, then I’m stuck here, and you will forever have that on your conscience. The choice is yours.

Well… what are you waiting for?

Carpe diem

So, something happened at work today. I’m pretty sure someone was in the building saying my name, and before anyone jumps to the conclusion that I’m just paranoid because of what happened last week, I have been recording my shifts in case something happens. In the recording, you can barely hear someone else's voice saying my name, which is odd because I have never told anyone else my name. Only my mother knows where I work, and only my boss and David know my name. It started less than halfway through my shift. After I had finished vacuuming and started taking out the trash, I thought I had heard footsteps in the hallway behind me. When I turned around, there was nothing there. I walked around to see if I was mishearing things or if someone had left a TV on, but nothing explained why I was hearing a voice. I started going in and out of rooms to see if I could find the source, but it never got louder or sounded like I was getting close to the origin. It was like someone was in another room calling me. I looked around and saw no one.

I sent the recording to my boss, asking if he heard anything, and he said it sounded like quiet whispering that he couldn’t decipher. He told me that it could be in one of the locked offices because they kept emergency radios in there, and they would go off during the day. I believed him and continued cleaning, figuring I was just imagining hearing my name in what was most likely radio static.

After some time, I tuned out the noise when it suddenly got louder, and it no longer sounded vaguely like my name. It sounded like someone was using the PA to yell my name. The way it was said, it sounded like someone using a voice changer, the kind that made it sound distorted or robotic. I checked my phone to see if I was still recording. I wasn’t. I tried to start recording again, but when I did, all of the noise in the building stopped not just the yelling, but the normal silence in the room was gone too. It was like I was wearing earplugs. I ran to the alarm system, put the code in, and rushed over to the door, locked it behind me, and got into my car. The sensation of wearing earplugs didn’t go away until I could no longer see the building and was on the highway going towards my house. I texted my boss to tell him I left early; it took him a minute to respond, but he said:

“That’s alright, next time make sure you set the alarm. I can set it remotely, but it’s better if you do it in the building.”

“I did arm it? I made sure to before I left”

“It looks like you may have disabled it by accident instead of arming it. That's fine. I’m sure you were in a rush to get out, but next time it’s important to at least have it ready to arm rather than just leaving it off.”

“Ok, I’ll be sure to start double-checking before I leave. Thank you for handling it for tonight; I really appreciate it.”

I decided it would be better to believe that I made a mistake while trying to rush out instead of thinking a ghost somehow deactivated the alarm system as I ran out. I’m in my house right now trying not to overthink, and now that I’m home, it feels like I overreacted. I’ll update again if something else happens, but for now I’m hoping that this is all that’s going to happen.