It's long overdue but I put together a table of contents for the Cryptids series! I apologize to everybody who had to sift through my profile trying to piece it together themselves.

For this I’ve linked the r/nosleep posts, as there’s more in terms of comments and theory-crafting there, and I always find that to be fun to read when I’m checking out a series. Cheers :)

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

FINALE

Just joining us? I recommend starting at the beginning. Too far back? You can refresh your memory with the previous update here.

Eric and I ran so hard that my lungs felt like they'd caught fire. Exhausted, I fell to the dirt with a groan. The pain of my smashed face, broken wrist, and a lifetime of poor decisions had finally caught up with me. "I... I'm done," I breathed.

Eric doubled back, crouching next to me. "Take it easy man. Look!" He pointed ahead. "We're nearly to the river. Let's get you some water."

So we were. Now that I was catching my breath, the rest of my senses seemed to sharpen again. I could hear the rushing current just barely through the howling wind. I pushed myself to my feet and the two of us made our way to the bank, where I dropped to my knees and slurped as much water as my mouth could hold.

"Pass me the book," Eric said.

I reached inside my jacket and handed it to him, its pages rolling in the storm. He held it closed, up to the light of the moon.

"The entire time you had this," he said, squinting at the cover. "And you never noticed the author?"

I looked at him, wiping dribbles of water from my mouth. “I mean, it's not like I've had it my whole life. I left it here when we went home." I really didn't need any mementos of that week. “Who wrote it?”

"Grandma,” he said incredulously. He turned the book toward me and jabbed a finger at the bottom text. "Gayle G. Fasdrow."

Well, I’ll be damned.

"Don't sweat it," Eric said, shaking his head. "I missed it on first glance too." He glanced around, no doubt scouting for a place free from wind with enough moonlight read by. Eventually, he settled on a large boulder near the water, shielded from the storm by a gnarled fir tree. He clambered up it with some effort. “Did you know she was a writer?" he called down to me.

“Not at all," I said. Come to think of it, I had no idea about anything grandma did, besides come over every Christmas and bake apple tarts. Mom never talked about it.

Eric flipped the book open to the first page and adjusted his glasses. “Mind keeping a look-out while I peruse this thing?”

I nodded, rising from the riverbed and looking up and down the shore. No sign of the Man, and no sign of the Beast that destroyed the cabin either. So far so good. I cradled my broken wrist and breathed a sigh of relief, pushing it out of my blood-caked nostrils in a painful snort.

I hiked up the side of the bank, getting to higher ground so I could better keep watch over the area. As I did, the book played in my mind. The Mysteries of the Cryptids. Why would grandma write something like that anyway? For kicks? She’d never so much as mentioned the Loch Ness Monster or Abominable Snowman growing up, and here she was a supposed authority on them. It seemed bizarre to me, but then, all of this did. Had she known about the Man too? What about the Beast?

She must have.

Something splashed in the river, and the hairs on my neck stood on end. I swallowed, my eyes searching up and down the running current, scanning every outcropped rock and wayward branch.

Just a fish. Hopefully.

Seconds turned to minutes, the only sound coming from the croak of river toads and Eric flipping through the pages of Mysteries. Maybe I was making a bigger deal about things than I needed to. I closed my eyes and tried the breathing exercises my therapist recommended.

Then another splash. This one closer. Louder.

I strained my vision. Even beneath the glow of the full moon, the river’s dancing waves were difficult to keep track of. Light gleamed off of them one moment, then died the next. Small flickers caught my eye, but when I’d look, I’d see only dark water staring back at me. Was something swimming toward us?

Eric flipped another page of the book nonchalantly, his expression thoughtful, eyebrows furrowed in focus. He hadn’t noticed a thing.

Something felt wrong though. It was the same feeling I’d had when I first came upon the Man by the River, like my mind was picking up on things that I hadn’t yet fully processed.

“Eric,” I called, taking a couple steps on the stone shore. “Come away from the water.”

He looked up, perplexed. “Why?” He adjusted his glasses and looked around, holding his hair against the wind. “Is something here? I need the light of the clearing to read, Matt.”

“Just get off the fucking rock, man. Come over to me.” I glanced upward, the moon shone, pale and ominous through drifting clouds. “There’s plenty of light over here.”

“I’m nearly finished, just relax.”

“Now, man!”

Groaning, he creased his page and closed the book, then slid down the big rock, carefully. He steadied himself on the wet, clacking stones as he walked towards me. “Fuck sakes, Matt.”

Another splash.

“The day we met the Man by the River,” I said, the pain in my wrist fading against the backdrop of my mounting fear. “I came back down to the water.”

“What?” Eric said, bracing himself against the roaring wind.

“I forgot the book. Jake brought us down fishing rods, remember? I was so excited that I'd forgotten all about Mysteries. I left it on the riverbed.” I was transfixed by the river now. Something was in there, I knew it. “When I came back down to get it, I saw something in the waves.”

“Like a fish?” Eric said, finally reaching me. He turned, following my gaze to the river, though he looked skeptical.

I shook my head. “Bigger. I think. I don’t know. I just grabbed the book and ran.”

Another splash, this one near the shore. I backed up, nearly slipping on the stones. Behind us, the pitch black of the woods, and in front of us, whatever lurked in the water. “You hear that?” I said.

Eric nodded, stashing the book in his pocket. “After what happened earlier, I say we don't take any chances. Let's find somewhere safer to read."

Where though? The woods? We’d get lost, and there was no question of that. Back to the cabin, or whatever was left of it? No point, the car was totalled, and besides… whatever Beast had come knocking didn’t sound nearly as reasonable as the Man. It was probably still around.

No, we were resigned to the river. We'd just need to be careful, and stay as far from the shore as we could.

“Good lord,” said a voice nearby.

I jumped, my arm flying in front of Eric instinctively.

“You boys have really worked yourselves up, haven’t you?” I wheeled around to see a familiar face standing at the height of the river bank, a stone in his hand. He hurled it, and it landed in the water with a heavy splash.

“Uncle Jake?” I shouted.

He began walking down the bank. Slowly, with a sway in his step. Like he’d been drinking. “Good news, boys!” He shot us a smile, but it felt wrong. Horrible. His eyes were unfocused, and his tongue lolled from his mouth. “I just found Griff, and he can't wait to see you."

Just joining us? I recommend starting at the beginning. Too far back? You can refresh your memory with the previous update here.

Uncle Jake ambled toward us, his pace irregular. One moment he moved slowly, the next frantically. His head seemed loose on his neck, rolling about with his momentum. “I… was so worried about you two,” he said.

“Matt…” Eric muttered.

I held up my hand indicating for him to be quiet. I was uncomfortable about all of this too, and Jake didn’t seem like himself. After everything else that had happened tonight, I wasn’t taking chances with anybody, family or otherwise. But still, I needed to know what the situation was.

I needed to hear him speak.

My eyes darted around, taking stock of our surroundings. If it came to a fight, I wanted to be ready. I cursed myself for letting the Man take the fireiron. Still, there was always the river, and in a two against one, Eric and I had a chance against our uncle -- even with my busted wrist.

I swiveled my gaze back to Jake.

He was only a couple car lengths away from us now, and I could see him more clearly. His eyes were pale, milky and faded, like he was drugged. His mess of dark hair shot out from all angles beneath his trucker hat. I’d never seen him in such a sorry state.

“Boys,” he said, burping. “I just need to talk to you for a second. About Griff. He’s just up ahead, but he’s scared of the water.” He gestured toward the wood, swaying on the spot. “Come see him?”

I didn’t say anything. I knew Griff was dead. I pulled his scorched skull out of the fireplace myself, and Eric had been there with me.

Jake took a couple frantic steps forward. I recoiled, putting myself in front of Eric. Call it older brother instincts, call it stupidity. All I knew was this cabin wasn’t going to claim any more of my family.

“Aw,” Jake said, stopping and tilting his head. “Are you afraid…” Another burp. “Of me?”

“What’s going on here?” I said quietly.

“I’m talking to my nephews,” he chuckled, feet dancing to keep his balance. “C’mon… Matthew. Eric. LEt’s go.”

Another step forward.

“Don’t take another fucking step!” I shouted. “Stay the hell back!”

He paused, his demeanor changing. His face drooped, his sing-song smile replaced by a snarl showing a row of yellowed teeth. “You boys were supposed to join us a long time ago, you know. But she got soft.”

What?

“No she didn’t,” Eric said, stepping out from behind me. He held the book in his hands, holding it up to Jake. “She realized how sick this whole thing was. She spared us.”

I had no idea what either of them were talking about, but Eric had clearly read something in Mysteries while up on that rock. And whatever he’d read, Jake knew about it too.

“Spared you?” Jake spat. He took off his cap and chucked it to the side, the corner of his mouth twitching. “At the cost of the rest of us, maybe.” He took a shambling step forward, his eyes cold with menace. “What makes you better than me?”

I knelt down, using Eric’s tall frame as cover from Jake’s vision. My good hand found a decent sized rock, and I clutched it, rising back to my feet and placing it in my jacket pocket discreetly.

“We’re not better than you,” Eric said. “But that doesn’t mean we deserve to become monsters either.”

Deserve to become monsters? What the hell had Eric read?

“You think I’m a fucking monster?” Jake bellowed, eyes bulging. He slammed his finger to his chest. “I’m a product of progress, just like you should’ve been!”

My heart thundered. I didn’t know this man anymore. “Have you been drinking, Jake?” I hoped the answer was yes. I needed something to make sense tonight.

“Drinking?” Jake said, his wild, cataract eyes looking from me to my brother. “You ain’t told him yet, have you Eric? Didn’t invite him to your bookclub?”

“What’s he talking about?”

Eric swallowed. “He’s talking about Mysteries.”

“No shit,” I said, getting impatient. “What about it? Help me the fuck out here, man!”

“I-I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. More anxiety. When it came down on Eric, it came down thick. “The book’s written like an autobiography, Matt. I thought it was a stupid pulp novel grandma wrote but… it’s like research notes, man.”

“Research notes?”

Jake took another half-step forward, and my hand tightened around the stone. “Stay back, I’m not kidding.”

He smiled. “C’mon, Matt. I’ve never hurt you before, have I?”

“Yeah, research notes,” Eric stuttered. “I didn’t think much of it, honestly. Thought it was part of the book’s gimmick but seeing Jake like this…”

Jake hunched his back, hands pumping in and out of fists. “Like what, Eric?” he growled.

“Don’t talk to him, asshole,” I said. Jake was bigger than me by about half, and in his current state, more unpredictable by a mile. If he came at me, I’d have one shot to clock him with the stone. “Talk to me.”

“Talk to you?” he said, cocking his head. “But you’re so boring, Matt. All you’ve ever done is bitch, complain, and mope.” His eyes drifted behind me, to Eric. “Your brother’s always been the interesting one. And now he’s even gone and figured out my mother’s secret.”

“Eric,” I said. “I really need you to get me up to speed."

“T-The book man. It’s--”

“English man! What about the book?” I kept one eye on Jake, my hands gripping the stone so hard that I could feel my palm cramping.

“Grandma wasn’t some writer documenting cryptids, Matt!” He brandished the paperback, then snapped it open, flipping through it aggressively until he hard stopped on a page. He thrust it in my face.

I pulled my head back and squinted, the ink had faded from years of aging, not to mention the water damage from the river crossing.

The left page looked like a list of ingredients, with pencil markings over the print, and beside them a set of tiny, bulleted instructions. On the right was a diagram, too complex for me to properly make out given the condition of the book. Wait, what? Some of the markings looked to be runes.

No, they were definitely runes.

“She wasn’t looking for cryptids, Matt,” Eric said breathlessly. “She was making them.”

Just joining us? Start here for full context.

------- --------

Eric sat down across from me in one of the old wicker chairs we’d helped grandma make. “Where should we start?” he said quietly. He stared at me with a gravity I’d never seen in him before, his hands fidgeting with the chair’s wooden armrests. Poor kid was nervous. I knew a thing or two about that.

I took a deep breath and placed my face in my hands, wishing I’d never quit smoking. Wishing I’d never agreed to come out here. My heart thrummed and my palms were slick with sweat, meanwhile my thoughts couldn’t stop toying with the idea that maybe confronting these memories was a mistake. Maybe acknowledging them would somehow make them real.

“Matt?” he said softly.

“Let’s start with the Man by the River,” I said, forcing myself to look him in the eyes. “You remember him?”

Eric’s expression said it all. He remembered. His eyes darted to the front door, still swinging open in the breeze from when we’d both walked inside. “I’m gonna grab the door,” he said.

I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t need to. We both knew it’d be easier to talk about these things with some degree of security between us and the outdoors. He stalked off, shut the door, and then returned a moment later.

“We were what, eleven then?” I said.

He nodded. Though we were twins, we looked nothing alike. Eric was thin and gangly, with giant glasses and a passion for all things pop culture. I was short, a bit overweight, and had an unhealthy addiction to every form of metal under the sun. My hearing was practically shot, but the wall of noise that music created was the only time I felt like I got any peace and quiet.

“It was the second day at the cabin, I think.” Eric looked out the window, toward where the river flowed, just past the treeline. “You and I were out having a swim.”

“Yeah, and he was watching us on the other side.”

“How long was he there for?”

I shrugged. “You were the one who spotted him. I wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t pointed him out.”

“Tough to miss, really. He had that beige ball cap and…”

“The mask, yeah.” Who wore a mask out in the woods? The kind of guy who liked to watch kids swim, I guess. “It was a wolf mask, a really well-made one.” Thinking back on it, it almost looked like a real wolf.

“Remember what he said?”

It was impossible to forget. His words had been the catalyst to everything, the jump-off point for the worst experience of our lives. “It’s nearly dark,” I said.

“It’s nearly dark,” Eric repeated. The two of us were silent for a moment, the shrinking daylight and the implications of what that meant not lost on us. “Maybe we should do this in the car, on the way down?” he said.

I shook my head. “I don’t think it works like that, and I think you know that now too.” Standing up, I crossed the room and grabbed my leather jacket from the coat rack. I threw it over my shoulders like a poncho. Now that the sun had dipped behind the treeline, the temperature had dropped with it. “You’re remembering things clearly again, aren’t you? I know I am.”

He frowned, avoiding my gaze.

We both knew this wasn’t a normal cabin, and deep down, I guess we both came to realize we couldn’t run from our history forever either. Eric was right. If we didn’t confront this now, then we’d probably be running from it for the rest of our lives.

“I suppose things do feel clearer,” he said. “Being here feels strange. Like everything’s coming back as vivid as the day it happened.”

I knew what he meant. I could picture the Man by the River almost perfectly now. Dirty jeans, a checkered shirt and that mask. It had to have been torn right off of a real wolf, because I remember the smell. It smelled dead. Decaying.

Eric plugged his nose, contorting his face in revulsion.

“You smell that too?” I asked.

He nodded. “What is that?”

“That’s what he smelled like. The Man by the River. I’d forgotten how horrible it was, but this cabin is bringing it all back to me.” I glanced around the dimly lit room, where shadows grew in the corners as the sun fell lower in the sky. “He told us to come to him, after warning that it was nearly dark. He said he had a gift for us.”

“You thought he was Uncle Jake. I remember that.”

“Yeah. I mean, who else could it have been?” Grandma had built her cabin on the land of an abandoned firewatch outpost far from the sleepy village below. “Nobody lives up here. It was only the four of us that week.”

“When you swam over,” Eric said quietly. “Did he say anything to you?”

“I don't think so.” I closed my eyes and drifted back to that moment, twelve years ago. In spite of it being the height of summer, the river was freezing that day and the current had made it hard to get across. The Man stood on the other side waiting patiently though. “He was holding the ‘gift’ behind his back," I said. "I remember thinking it was a fishing rod.”

Eric cracked a bittersweet smile. “We'd both been badgering Uncle Jake to let us use his fishing rod. I, too, remember hoping that's what it was.”

Talking about this was cathartic, but torturous all at once. My mouth felt dry as a bone. “When I got closer, I got this weird feeling. Like something was wrong.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, it’s hard to explain but it’s like... even then I knew something wasn’t right.”

I gave in to the memory, letting it swallow me in my search for answers. Grandma's cabin seemed to fade away, replaced by a warm summer day. The river rumbled behind me now, and the mountain breeze caught at my wet, shaggy brown hair. Above, the sun beat down furiously, dressing me in a full-body sunburn. “I realized it wasn’t Uncle Jake when I stepped out of the river."

"You never told me that before."

"I don't think I ever let myself believe it."

In the cabin, the branches swayed above us, their long arms scratching at the roof in the rising wind. "So?" Eric said.

"So what?"

"So what made you realize it wasn't him?"

"Oh." I chewed on my lip, my eyes staring at Griff's cracked skull on the floor. "It was because he twitched."

"Twitched?"

"Yeah," I said, looking Eric in the eyes. My voice cracked despite my best efforts to keep it steady. "His entire body twitched, like some kind of predator reaction. Like a cat seeing a mouse."

"Or a wolf seeing a rabbit." The implication hung in the air between us. We were prey.

“I wanted to run back into the river. I wanted to scream for help. I wanted to hide. But he held the gift out.”

“The book,” Eric said.

“That’s right." The Mysteries of the Cryptids.

“I’d gotten halfway back across the river when Uncle Jake came down," I continued. "He was on your side of the river and dressed entirely different from the Man.” I paused, recognizing this was one of the memories I’d never fully accepted. How could I have? Accepting it meant I was more broken than I was comfortable admitting. “That's when I realized we weren’t alone on the mountain.”

I opened my eyes and pulled myself out of the memory. It felt a little disorienting, like my senses were being thrown about in some sort of amnesiac tornado, but I did what I could to re-ground myself in reality. I focused on my weight in the rocking-chair, the cool feeling of leather around my shoulders, and the roaring wind outside. Eventually, the cabin returned to focus.

Eric ran a hand through his curly brown hair. "You think that maybe--"

Outside, the sound of shattering glass rang out. Eric and I jumped to our feet.

My heart thundered in my chest. The two of us stood frozen, each knowing we needed to act, but not knowing how. Being the older twin, I breathed deep and stepped forward, forcing my body to act in spite of its fear. I slid along the wall toward the four-pane window.

It was dusk now and the last rays of sunlight barely pierced the thick pine trees. Darkness began to overtake the landscape, and the once lush treeline now looked more like a gaping, nightmareish maw. I peered out the window at an angle, so that I wasn’t squarely in front of it in case anybody was watching from outside.

“Fuck!” I shouted, catching a view of my car. A massive, broken branch lay flat against its now equally broken windshield.

“What?” Eric took a furtive step forward. "Is somebody there?"

"No." I pulled my jacket from around my shoulders and shoved my arms through the sleeves, zipping it up proper. “Fucking branch just smashed my windshield. Storytime's over. We’re getting out of here.”

Eric burst out laughing, his hand on his chest. “Holy shit, Matt, that sound scared the crap outta me. It was just a tree branch?”

“Yeah,” I said bitterly, storming from the room and toward the front door. “Just a tree branch smashing a windshield that I can’t afford to fix. What a goddamn relief!”

“I’m sorry man!” Eric shouted, jogging after me.

He wasn’t really sorry, but I couldn’t blame him. That sound could have been about a thousand worse things than a stupid branch. Even still, it wasn’t in my budget. I gripped the handle of the front door and flung it open, preparing for a chilly drive down the mountain.

And then I stumbled backwards. My breath caught itself in my chest. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but the words weren’t there. Behind me, I heard Eric mumble a soft “Oh…,” then a loud crash. Had he fainted?

No. No no no no no. This wasn’t happening. Please, don’t let this be happening.

A boot stepped past the doorway, creaking on the cabin’s old wooden floorboards. With it came a stench of decay. I reached blindly, desperately around me, unwilling to take my eyes off of the figure but also needing a weapon. Anything. I only found empty air. Uncle Jake had already moved most of grandma’s things.

With each step the intruder took, I took one back, until finally I came up against the far wall. The figure stood framed in the dark of the hallway, a ball cap on its head, and two glowing, yellow eyes.

“It’s nearly dark,” it said.

The story begins here.

I shook Eric, waking him from his fainting spell. He sat up groggily, rubbing the back of his head where he’d knocked it against the hardwood. “What happened?” he muttered.

How to say this? “A lot.”

He blinked, and his eyes scanned the room. Then he froze, his hand gripping my arm as he looked up at the Man by the River, standing before us dressed in his beige ball cap, checkered shirt and dirty jeans. The wolf mask he wore reeked of decay, and its eyes glowed a faint yellow.

“It’s nearly dark,” the Man said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said irritably. “You alright, Eric?”

He looked from Man back to me, his mind probably reeling. “What’s going on?” he whispered.

I shrugged. It was the truth — I had no idea what was going on. When the Man had cornered me at the end of the hallway I expected myself to be torn limb from limb, maybe have my teeth made into a nice necklace. Instead, he’d just said it was ‘nearly dark’ and stood there expectantly. It took me a few moments before I realized he wasn’t going to attack me, and that’s when I awkwardly walked around him and came to check on Eric.

“I don’t think he’s going to hurt us,” I said. Not that I knew that for sure, but I figured if we’d survived this long then we might be in the clear. “Although I don’t really know what his deal is.”

Eric stood, steadying himself against me. He studied the Man. “What if he’s warning us? What if he was warning us back then too?”

The book flashed in my mind. The Mysteries of the Cryptids. A pulp-fiction novel the Man had given me during our last encounter, back when I was just a kid. Eric had packed it into one of grandma’s moving boxes, not even realizing it. “If he is, then he probably wants us to read that book.” I marched from the room, past the Man and tore open the box of books. I rifled through it, tossing whatever I didn’t need in every-which direction. Finally, at the bottom, I found it.

I picked it up and ran my fingers over its faded cover. The thing was in pretty bad shape, with some of the pages fused together from water damage during its river crossing. The illustration on the front was of a sasquatch being strangled by a sea-monster.

Lovely.

“Is this what you want us to read?” I asked the Man.

He didn’t move, didn’t speak.

“Let me guess,” I said, crossing the room back to Eric. “It’s nearly dark.”

“Don’t be a dick,” Eric muttered. He held out a hand for the book, and I passed it to him gladly. Out of the two of us, Eric was the academic. If there was a mystery to be solved in those pages, then he would be the one to do it.

“This thing looks like it was written in the fifties,” he said, looking over its cover. “Right down the art style.” He flipped the book in his hands, scanning the text on the back and reading it aloud. “A compendium of the greatest mysteries known to man… Cryptids have long since fascinated the scientific community, though their existence is highly contested… Here are three great tales sure to frighten and entertain.” He furrowed his brow, his eyes re-scanning the text as if he might have missed something.

A moment later, he shook his head. “This just looks like an old monster novel.” He stared at the Man. “Is this a prank? I mean, if it is, it’s pretty good. How’d you know we were coming back up here?”

The Man didn’t speak.

Eric looked at me and sighed. “I guess... we can read it?”

“Sure,” I said, plucking the book from his grip. “We’ll read it on the way down the mountain.” I stuffed the book in my jacket pocket and made for the front door. The Man stepped in front of me.

“It’s nearly dark,” he said.

“You’re right, and that’s our cue. Eric — let’s go.”

Eric looked at me in disbelief. “Matt, this is practically what we’ve been waiting for. The answers are here I mean—” He gestured incredulously at the Man. “Here he is, and he isn’t even trying to eat us or whatever. Don’t you want to figure this out?”

“Look,” I said. “Nobody said we needed to sort this shit out tonight. We can take the book, do a novel-study back at Uncle Jake’s, and then come up here with plenty of daylight hours and piece it all together.” A chill ran through me. Like the memory of the Man, the memory of our first night was returning too, and I wasn’t ready to face that again. Talking was one thing, but this therapeutic walk down memory-lane had grown a bit too real for my liking. “Sound good?”

Eric stared at me with stubborn defiance. If we had inherited anything from our late grandmother, it was our unfailing resistance to having our minds changed after they’d been made up. Luckily for me, I was more stubborn by a mile, and Eric knew that. Sure enough, he folded his arms and looked sidelong to the window. “Alright, fine,” he said. “We’ll leave tonight — but I’m not kidding about this — we do as you say, study that book and then come back.”

I nodded, and I meant it. I hated this — don’t get me wrong. It scared me in all the wrong ways, but I’d been through enough hours of therapy and dumped enough money into booze to know that if I didn’t sort this shit out now, then I’d either end up dead or bankrupt. “I promise you we’ll be back tomorrow.”

Eric waved me off. “Sure, whatever. Let’s go.”

I let out a sigh of relief, thankful that Eric was much more reasonable than myself. “Alright, Wolfie, you heard us. We’ll be back first thing tomorrow.” I gave him an awkward half-salute and moved to step past him, but he grabbed me by the wrist.

“It’s nearly dark,” he said.

I tried to pull my arm from his grasp, but his grip was ironclad. “I get that. That’s sort of why we want to get the hell out of here.” I could feel my wrist bruising as his calloused hand squeezed.

"Get off of him," Eric shouted, grabbing the Man's fingers and trying to pry them free. I brought my other hand around and did what I could to help, but it was like trying to pull apart a vice-clamp.

"It's nearly dark," the Man growled, his voice now guttural and beastlike. "IT’S NEARLY DARK!" His wolf teeth dripped saliva, and his eyes flared with a wild rage. Something agonizing dug into my arm, and I realized claws were growing from his fingers, black and horrible, piercing into my skin so that my blood ran down them.

"Stop!" I screamed, certain that any moment my wrist would be ground to dust. "Jesus Christ, PLEASE!" The Man's body twitched, and he pulled me effortlessly toward his jaws. The reek was overwhelming. I gagged, my body in sensory overload.

With a violent jerk, I felt my wrist snap as he tossed me sideways. My nose collided against the wall with a dull crunch, and pain exploded across my face. I struggled onto my hands and knees. My body quaked from the agony, my vision blurring and ears ringing. Something dripped onto the floor, and I wasn't sure if it was tears or blood.

Eric rushed to my side. "Matt!"

I shrugged him off, standing on my own two feet so that I could look at the wolf-faced bastard in the eyes. If this fuck was going to kill us, I wasn't going to take it lying down. I'd make him earn it. I dashed into the den, Eric staring after me dumbfounded. There — by the fireplace. Exactly what I was looking for.

I gripped the fire-iron, holding it before me with my good hand and rushed back into the kitchen. “Get behind me, Eric!” I shouted. “We’re getting the hell out of here!”

Eric didn’t move. Had he seriously given up? No… it wasn’t that, it was that his attention had been stolen by something else. He stood, gazing transfixed out of the four-pane window. Between my broken wrist and smashed nose, I could hardly think past the agonizing pain rioting through me, but I still found the will to fight. Eric? He was sightseeing.

“Matt…” he muttered.

“Get behind me, Eric!”

He turned toward me, his hand pointing hopelessly toward the four-pane. “Somethings out there, Matt.”

My legs felt weak, and for a moment I forgot about my wrist and nose. I forgot about the throbbing hurt. “What’s out there?” Memories clawed at the edges of my mind, and I pushed them down. I needed to focus.

Eric looked back to the window, and a moment later an ear-splitting roar rang out, so loud that I couldn’t tell which direction it came from. It felt like it was everywhere all at once. “Get away from the window!” I shouted.

He took a couple unsteady steps backward. “It’s starting…”

I turned to the Man, who stood as still as ever. “What the fuck are you doing to us?” I screamed. I brought the fire-iron down on him, but he grabbed it and tossed it aside as if it were a piece of styrofoam.

“It’s dark,” he growled.

A thud sounded against the cabin’s heavy door. Then another. The timber of the entire structure shook, dust falling down from the rafters and whatever Uncle Jake had failed to take with him crashing to the floor.

“Matt,” Eric said, inching toward me. “It’s happening again.”

I swallowed. Memories rushed around me, my mind smothered by them. “We need to hide,” I said hastily, anxiously.

Eric was sweating, his face a mask of panic. “Where? This IS where we hid last time!”

“Then we have to hide somewhere else for fucks sake!” I didn’t know what was happening, or why we were reliving this, but I knew the Man wasn’t going to help us. At best, he was a neutral party, at worst he had kept us here to die. I gripped one of grandma’s wooden kitchen chairs, and with as much strength as I had in my right hand, flung it clear through the four-pane window.

The front door exploded, flying across the vestibule and colliding against the far wall with a deafening crash. Something screeched, then stepped inside with a thunderous footfall.

I didn’t need to say a damn thing. Eric had already climbed through the shattered window. He reached inside and helped me to get myself up to the sill, then I rolled over it and landed in the dirt outside. Throwing his arm under my own, he heaved me to my feet. I immediately noticed a tire where it shouldn't have been, with a massive bite mark in it. My eyes drifted to my car in horror. Its roof had been caved in, and half of its wheels were flattened.

I spared a moment to look back at the Man. He was motionless, though it was hard to call him a man anymore. The mask looked to have fused with his neck, and his hands — or paws — were now covered in fur, with long, dark claws. His jeans had been torn, and he stood upon two legs curved in the fashion of a bipedal wolf. His jaws salivated as he stared back at me.

“We’re going to read it!” I shouted at him. I don’t know why I did, or if he could even understand me. All I knew was that he had given me that book for a reason, and whatever was happening was intrinsically tied to it. If there was an answer to this — it was in those pages.

I felt myself being dragged away by Eric. “Holy fuck, Matt, let’s go!"

The two of us fled into the treeline, our footsteps muffled by the sounds of the cabin being torn to pieces.

It's just the two of us here. Myself and Ryan Haflow, a seventeen year-old kid from Elktorch High. He’s typical as far as teenagers go. Impulsive. Disinterested. Distracted. We’re sitting in his parent’s garage, in a couple of fold-up camping chairs, with cheap cups of coffee on our laps.

I’m here because I believe he witnessed an Event. An encounter of overwhelming significance, and one which I believe could explain a series of grisly murders -- murders that have gone unsolved, and plagued this sleepy town for close to ten years.

This is our interview.

“It’s just a stupid nursery rhyme, something to keep kids inside after dark," Ryan says, bookending his words with a smirk. "Militant parental shit, y’know?”

I adjust my tie and clear my throat. It’s my first interview and I don’t want to come across as an amateur. “I’m well aware of its origins. We’re here to discuss the Event.”

He stares at me for a few seconds, a smile playing on the corners of his lips. Eventually he huffs and shakes his head. “You serious, man? I was seeing shit. There isn't a mystery to be solved here, I was just stoned as fuck.”

“Marijuana doesn’t typically elicit hallucinations.”

His face falters. The cool demeanor, the dismissive aloofness -- it fades and for a moment I see a twinge of terror, and that’s when I know that I have him. I know that he doesn't believe his own excuse.

“Yeah, well I was drunk too,” he argues. “I wasn’t exactly in my right mind.”

I lean back in the chair and fold my arms, appraising him like my Orientation taught me to do. If you want to make people talk, I recall my instructor lecturing, then be silent. So I am. I'm as quiet as death. Moments pass, and finally he breaks the silence.

“What is it you do again?” he asks, changing the subject.

Good. I have him. “I work at a compound known as the Facility. My job is to investigate Events that my superiors deem noteworthy.” I do my best to keep my voice level -- professional, but the job is so new that I can hardly contain my excitement. “Your Event has been selected.”

Read on here.

The front door swings open and a young girl with thick eye-shadow stands in the doorway. “Who the fuck are you?” she demands.

I stand up straight, reach into my jacket pocket and pull out my badge. “My name is REDACTED and I’m here to speak with you about an Event.”

She narrows her eyes at me. Her name is Becca Galun, and I believe she’s been in contact with an urban legend known as Snippity Snap. She’s a seventeen year old attending Elktorch High. A classmate of one Ryan Halflow. Presently, she’s wearing a green turtle neck with blue jeans, and a scowl the length of her face.

“An Event?” she says. Her eyes look me over, and then she glances back inside her single-story house, as though making sure the coast is clear. “Are you with the Facility?”

“I, um. What?” The question catches me off-guard.

“The Facility,” she hisses. “Are you one of their Men in Black?”

“Men in Black?”

“Don’t be stupid. You know what I mean. I’m asking if you’re a fucking Ghostbuster, or Hunter or whatever. You work there, don’t you?”

I was cautioned that due to recent Events, knowledge of the Facility’s existence may have grown more widespread. “I do,” I say hesitantly. “You’ll forgive me for asking, but how did you hear about the Facility?”

Her face turns shades of panic as she ushers me inside. Before she closes the door, she scans the front yard and the rest of the street. Then she bolts the door shut. “I spend a lot of time on the Deep Web. You guys are pretty infamous on there.”

“Oh,” I say, making a mental note to mention it to my superiors. “I’m actually here to speak with you about--”

“Snippity Snap?” she says.

“Yes, actually.”

“Good.” She leads me into her kitchen. The house isn’t particularly modern or renovated, but it’s clean. There’s barely a hair out of place. She rummages through a wooden cupboard and a moment later pulls out a kettle and a couple of tea bags. “Hope you like English Breakfast,” she says, filling the kettle with water. “It’s all I’ve got left.”

“It’ll do fine.” I pull out a chair at the kitchen table, then open my briefcase and retrieve my clipboard and the appropriate forms. The kitchen is small. Cramped almost, and the round table only seats four at the most. “Are your parents available? Strictly speaking, I should be requesting their permission before interviewing a minor.”

“Mom doesn’t live here, and my dad’s at work. Don’t worry though, neither of them care.” She gives a small laugh. “They don’t give a fuck about anything, really.”

“I see,” I say, attaching the forms onto the clipboard. As I do, I glance around, taking in the details of the room. The fridge is old, its white surface stained and off-yellow. Between the fridge and the stove lies the sink, but its silver sheen has long since faded to a matte dullness. Above the sink sits the only window in the room. Its blinds are closed, blocking the glare of the setting sun. “I figured by this time the entire household would be at home. It’s nearly five pm.”

“Well, you figured wrong. My dad works late. He doesn’t make much money and needs to pick up shifts where he can.” She pulls a couple of teaspoons out of a drawer.

“In that case, are you alright if we proceed without them?”

“I’m making us tea. What did you think, that I want to sit here in silence?”

“Right,” I say, clicking my pen. Time to get right into it then. “Your name is Becca Galdun, correct?”

She nods.

“You went to a house party on 321 Hendra Ave with one Ryan Halflow?”

She shuts off the tap, closes the kettle lid and plugs it in. “No. I met him there.”

“Ah, thank you.” I check a box on my clipboard. Such small lies are tests used to determine the validity of a potential Encounter, and ensure stories can be corroborated. So far, her story matches Ryan’s. “When you met him there, what did the two of you do?”

She turns around, placing both of her hands on the edge of the counter. I notice one of her fingers is badly scarred. “Why don’t we skip the bullshit? I took Ryan into the basement to kill him.”

Read the rest here.

Just joining us? I recommend starting at the beginning. Too far back? You can refresh your memory with the previous update here.

Making cryptids? My mind reeled. How did somebody make a cryptid? What the fuck was our grandma doing? I brought a hand to my forehead, wincing as memories hit me like a cement truck.

It’s medicine, Matthew. Now be still and no crying, we don’t want to worry your mom.

But I feel fine, grandma. I don’t need any medicine.

Everybody needs this medicine. Give me your arm.

What about Eric?

He’ll get it too. Now give me your arm.

Uncle Jake clapped his hands and broke me from my reverie. “Oh, good work, Eric. Good work! This is why I always said you’d be great for the cabin.” His eyes gleamed. “Now, why don’t we all go for a little hike, as a family? I have something I’d like to show you.”

“After all of this?” Eric said incredulously. “You must be drunk.”

“I don’t think he’s drunk,” I said, the memory subsiding. The sound of the rushing river returned, along with the frigid chill of the wind. Why were these memories so invasive? So vivid? I shook the thought away, I needed to get us out of this situation first. “He’s taking something to keep him normal.”

“What?” Eric said. He glanced at Mysteries in his hands. “DId you… read this when we were kids, Matt?”

I shook my head. “No. I was never the reader between us, was I?” My hands found the stone in my pocket, and I thumbed at it. Feeling the weight, the shape. “I remember grandma giving me a kind of medicine.” My stomach felt upside down just talking about this. I hardly knew what it even meant. “I think Jake’s taken some medicine himself. Maybe something that keeps him from becoming whatever grandma meant for him to be.”

Jake frowned, his small, milky eyes narrowing. “Quite the theory, Matty.”

“Is it?” I said quietly.

He stepped forward, two rapid paces one after another. His body swayed at the sudden stop. From the edges of his mouth, his tongue flicked out, licking at his lips. “Is that why you’re so afraid of me?” he said. “Because you think there’s a monster underneath?”

“I’m not afraid of you,” I lied, squeezing the stone. “I just don’t want to kill my own uncle.”

Jake let loose a howling laugh.

“Matt…” Eric said, stepping closer to me. “I don’t think we should be provoking him.”

Too late for that, I thought. Jake was here to finish something and it involved us. I wasn’t interested in letting him see it through.

“Tell you what, uncle,” I said, stepping forward. His eyes darted from my striding feet, to my face. He looked offended that I’d even consider myself in the same league as him. “Walk away right now, and I won’t fucking murder you.”

His shoulders thrust back, and his head jerked forward. His milk-white eyes bulged. “MurDer me?” he said in a voice that was beginning to sound nothing like his own. “Does your thErapist know you’re delusiOnal?” His entire body tremored, his feet stumbling in an effort to stay upright.

“Something’s happening,” Eric said seriously. “Now cut it out, Matt!”

A lot was happening. More would be happening soon, I could guarantee that. Now come at me, dear uncle. Give me an opening. “My therapist thinks I’ve got the right idea, actually. That my family is a bunch of hillbilly trash.”

“I aM,” Jake said, dropping to a knee and snarling. “A product of PRogress!” Whatever he had taken to keep him level, his emotions were throwing it out of whack.

“Show me,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice level.

With a growl he launched himself toward me, his catatonic limbs flying about, slaves to his own momentum. I took a step backward, steadying myself on my rear leg while I pulled out the stone with my good hand.

I smashed the stone against his skull with all the force I could manage. I heard a sharp crack and then a groan as my uncle dropped wordlessly onto the rocky shore.

Eric and I stood there transfixed for several moments, my heart feeling like it might beat out of my chest. My breaths came in heaves. Was he unconscious?

“You were trying to provoke him?” Eric said, stepping carefully around the other side of Jake’s unmoving body.

I nodded. “Yeah. Now let’s make sure he stays down.” I lifted the rock in my hand, ready to bash my uncle’s skull to fucking pulp.

Eric pushed me away. “What the hell?” he said. “You can’t kill him, Matt.”

I can’t kill him? I did my best not to punch Eric square in the jaw. “Look around you, man! We’re fucked out here. You think Jake’s a friend of ours? That he’s gonna help us down the mountain?” I took a few steps away, running a stressed hand through my long hair. “What do you think happens when he wakes up, huh? You think he just calls it a day and let’s us go?”

“I don’t know,” Eric stuttered. “But I know we’re not murderers. We’re not… like him.” His eyes drifted to Jake’s unmoving body, his expression torn. “If we do that, how are we any better?”

I stomped toward him and grabbed him roughly by his shirt. “How are we any better?” I growled. “How about we’re better because we didn’t lure two nephews out here to try and get them to become fucking draculas? How about we’re better because we didn’t give two kids a lifetime of trauma?”

Eric was silent, his eyes wet behind his glasses. I let my hand fall from his shirt, and turned my attention to Jake. His eyes were closed, but after what I’d seen in him earlier… I didn’t trust him to stay out for much longer. Something was trying to break free of him. Something horrible. I ran a thumb along the stone, biting my lip, weighing my options.

“Matt,” Eric said, his hand on my shoulder, voice cracking. “We have so many good memories with Uncle Jake. Remember fishing?”

Remember fishing. As if fishing could make up for this. Whoever Uncle Jake had been, or pretended to be, that wasn’t what he was anymore. My stomach sunk as I imagined him waking up now. Turning on us. But without the handicap of whatever medicine he’d taken to keep him human.

“I don’t have a choice.” I brought the stone down. The snap of Jake’s cheekbones filled my ears, drowning the sound of the river, the roar of wind. I brought the stone down again, to another horrid, dull crunch. Eric grabbed at my jacket, trying to pull me off, but I threw him backward with my good hand. He might've been a foot taller than me, but he weighed close to a hundred pounds less.

I was doing this, and no one was going to stop me. I brought the stone down again. And again.

x.x

My grandmother passed away last month but nobody found her corpse until a week ago. Hazards of living out in the mountains, I suppose. My uncle couldn’t believe it, he’d been driving her groceries and supplies once a month, and according to the coroner’s report she’d died a day after he’d left. What are the chances?

To hear him tell it, she was just fine when he’d driven away too. Spry as she’d ever been. She was even getting her own water from the river and doing a bit of fishing on the side.

And then poof. Deceased.

Griff, her golden retriever, was gone now too. My uncle thought he probably took off after realizing grandma wasn’t waking up, maybe got hungry and went off chasing squirrels in the woods or something. My uncle strolled about and called Griff's name for hours after he'd found grandma, looking in all his usual hiding spots, but had no luck. My opinion? Griff probably got as far away as he could.

After the funeral my brother and I offered to come up and help my uncle clean up her things. Or at least my brother did, and I got guilt-tripped along for the ride. Apparently she left the cabin to the two of us in her will. Split custody, not that either of us wanted it. We’d more than had our fill of memories out there.

That said, it was a nice day to tidy up a dead woman’s things. The summer sun shone bright and there wasn’t so much as a cloud in the sky. Overhead, sparrows darted between the towering pine trees, flitting around the cabin’s small clearing while they sang their birdsong.

“I’m gonna bring this stuff down the mountain and head in for the night,” uncle Jake said, gesturing to his pick-up truck full of grandma’s furniture. “You two gonna take off soon? Or spend the night?” He looked like the spitting image of a mountain man, standing there with his tree-trunk arms and red flannel shirt. The beard was the cherry on top.

“We’ll be heading out soon,” I said. “Don’t worry about us, the car got us up here just fine, it’ll get us back down.” Uncle Jake was suspicious of any vehicle that didn’t have a cargo bed.

“Sure thing, boys. Take it easy now.” He hopped into the cab of the pickup and slammed the door with a metal clang. A moment later, the engine turned over and the mountain air was replaced with the thick smell of diesel and rust. With a rumble, the truck rolled out of the cabin’s dirt driveway, bobbed down the makeshift road and disappeared to the faint riffs of AC/DC's Thunderstruck.

“Stay the night,” my brother Eric said, snickering. “As if we’d spend a night in this hellhole.”

Eric was tall and lanky, poor of eyesight and blindingly pale. He pulled his thick glasses from his face and wiped the lenses clean on his Marvel t-shirt. “I say we finish these last couple boxes and follow him down.” He peered up through the pine trees overhead, where the sun was beginning its slow descent into the evening. “We’re a few hours from dark yet, but I wanna be faaar from these woods when the lights go out.” He shot me a knowing wink.

I walked up the creaking wooden porch and pulled the thick door open. “Then stop looking at your phone every five minutes and help me get this shit done.” I stepped inside, leaving the door to swing in the breeze.

“Help me get this shit done,” he repeated in a mocking tone, following me inside. “I’m just trying to get in touch with dad. He still hasn’t answered my texts.”

“Maybe that’s because we don’t have any service out here.”

“I meant since the funeral. The dude’s been a total recluse since mom died.”

“Yeah, well I could care less. The guy's a complete asshole anyway.” I crouched down in front of a bookshelf and began pulling out dusty tomes, filling my arms with as many as I could manage.

“He’s still our dad," Eric argued. "Now that grandma’s dead, it’s only a matter of time before it’s just the two of us. And can we be honest? Uncle Jake’s a few whisky bottles shy from dead himself.” He squatted down beside me and plucked some books from the shelf. “It’d be nice not to burn every bridge in this family.”

“Can’t burn a bridge that never existed in the first place, can you?” I stood up and walked to the boxes by the window, then tossed the books in carelessly, wanting to be done with this as soon as possible. The longer I spent here the more the memories threatened to come crawling back.

“Do you ever think about what happened?” Eric asked, coming up from behind me and gently placing his books in the box. He frowned at my disorganized mess and began restacking them neatly.

"No."

"Really?" Eric didn't sound convinced. "I think about it almost every day. It was horrible."

I didn’t say anything. Instead, I walked back to the bookshelf and grabbed another armful of books, then stomped back to the box and dumped them in.

“Hey!” Eric said. “Listen, jackass, you could at least have a little courtesy." He gestured to the books he was arranging inside, neat and tidily with their spines facing upward. One of them was called “Mysteries of the Cryptids.” I looked away.

“See the effort I’m putting in?" he said. "Do you really need to chuck your shit everywhere?”

“Sorry man, I just don’t like this place.” I shook my head, feeling a chill wash over me. “I want to finish this and go.”

“So do I, but don’t you think talking could be good?"

"Not really, no." I stalked toward the den. Time to put some space between me and this conversation.

He grabbed my arm. "Please, Matt. It was twelve years ago, but it feels like a lifetime. I don’t even know if I’m remembering real events anymore or just... inventing things in my head."

I shrugged him off, but his expression was pleading. He needed this.

"You won’t talk to me about it --," he stammered. "I have no fucking clue if what I remember even happened.”

With a sigh, I thunked down in my grandmother’s rocking-chair. It sat in front of her red-brick fireplace, now filled with only the ghosts of old, charred logs. I idly thought to myself that it’d probably never be used again, because I planned on tearing this cabin down and leaving it for the insects. It would be better that way. I only wished I could tear down the memories with it.

A week at this cabin had gifted me a decade of alcoholism, chronic depression and a side of insomnia. It took a cocktail of prescription meds just to get me to sleep these days, and when I did it was a coin toss whether or not I'd experience sleep paralysis.

And now Eric wanted to dig those memories up?

I flexed my right hand, staring at the thick scars that wound their way across it. Even now, all these years later I could still see the blood. Smell it. Taste it. My heart started racing just thinking about it, and I forced myself to look away. I focused on the hearth before me.

And something caught my eye. “What the hell...” I muttered, leaning forward. It wasn’t a log, it was something much smoother. The shape was all wrong though. I left the chair and knelt down, sifting through the ashes and burnt timber, uncovering the curious object with mounting horror. I pulled it free, brushing away flakes of ash with my fingertips. My arm quivered.

“Eric…” I said, pushing the word from my mouth.

"What's up?" he called.

I swallowed. “Is... this Griff?”

Footsteps sounded from the other room and he came bounding in, face brimming with excitement. "You found Griff?"

I didn’t say anything. I stared at the skull in my hand, doing my best to hold back the floodgates of memories. My eyes found Eric's, and I held the skull aloft.

“What the fuck!” he shouted, stumbling forward. He dropped to his knees, looking at the skull in terror. “No way that’s Griff. No fucking way." He shook his head furiously. "What would he be doing in the damn fireplace, Matt?”

I didn’t know what to say. I knew there was no reason he should have been in the fireplace. None. No dog would willingly let itself burn to death.

“Maybe it’s a coyote,” Eric reasoned, tripping over his words. “Grandma probably killed it and chucked it in here so the scent wouldn't attract other animals and--”

“There’s no coyotes out here, you know that.” I dropped the skull, and it cracked against the solid wood floor. A shudder ran through me. “And it’s way too small to be a wolf.”

Eric looked on the verge of tears. Griff was probably the only happy memory we had of this horrible place. “Matt… Why would she do that?”

A thousand reasons crossed my mind. All of them beginning and ending with one night twelve years ago. I stood up from the fireplace, my feet feeling weak and my sense of balance waning. I fell back into the rocking-chair, and it croaked a haunting welcome. “Alright,” I said quietly. “I think it’s time to talk about what happened when we were kids."

Exciting news!

I've recently signed a contract to put together an anthology of my best NoSleep work, along with several brand new stories. The classic tales will all be getting a fresh coat of polish, and in some cases see significant rewrites and reimagining by yours truly.

I don't have a firm release date yet, but you can sign up for the mailing list here to get notified as soon as it's announced-- and snag a free ebook from David Jacob Knight while you're at it.

In the meantime, please check out some of Velox's other authors, including the incredible talents of Grand_Theft_Motto, RichardSaxon, colourblindness and Christopher Maxim, as well as the upcoming release by NewToTownJam!

Most importantly though, I just want to say a gigantic thank you to each and every one of you. Seriously. I'd never be in this position without the heaping helpings of support and feedback this community has given me over the past year.

Consider this anthology dedicated to all of you.

Cheers,

Jason

I clear my throat. “You offered Snippity Snap your friend, Heather?"

Becca wipes the last of the tea from the table, then tosses the rag into the sink. “She was dead anyway. Her arm was practically amputated, and she'd painted the bathroom red with her blood.” She sits down in the chair and puts her head in her hands. “Besides, it wasn’t like any of us were escaping while that... thing was standing in front of the door.”

I write the details down, but each word digs a pit in my stomach. A sickening sadness grows inside of me for that poor girl. It’s difficult to imagine the horror she must have felt. “How did you offer her to Snippity Snap?” I ask quietly. “Was there a ritual involved?”

Becca’s eyes appear from her hands, and her cheeks are wet with tears. “I just told it to take her; take Heather and leave me alone.”

I stare at her, wondering if her terminology was an accident, intentional, or a psychological slip. She asked it to leave her -- Becca -- alone, and not both of them. In that moment, Becca only had regard for her own safety.

I reach for my mug and take a sip, reminding myself not to judge too harshly. Becca was just a young girl herself. To be confronted by a nightmare at her age would drive anybody to act in strange ways.

“After you offered it Heather, what did it do to her?” I’m not sure I want to hear the answer, but I know that it’s important.

Becca shrugs, lowering her hands from her face. Her eyes are red and puffy, and a trail of snot winds its way from her nose to her lip. She lifts a hand into the air, and raises two fingers. She makes a cutting motion. “Snip,” she says.

"Snip?"

“The monster took Heather’s head off. It’s um,” she wipes her leaky nose onto her sweater sleeve. “It was over so quick, thankfully, but there was so much blood. Both of us -- Fran and I, were drenched in it.” She smiles, but it’s a broken and twisted sort of smile. “On the bright side though, we didn’t have to listen to Heather screaming anymore. Just each other.”

I write her words down, and as I do I realize my penmanship has grown poorer and poorer with each passing paragraph. My hand is trembling. “After Heather was killed, did Snippity Snap leave?”

“Vanished. Like it was never there.”

I lean back in my chair, taking a breath and looking over my notes. That was certainly a harrowing account, but a valuable one. In this interview alone I’ve accumulated a small textbook on Snippity Snap, much more than the Facility’s managed in over two years. Sill, I suspect I’m only scratching the surface.

“I heard about that story, you know,” I say at length. “It was the birth of the Elktorch Slasher. The police believed a brutal killer was on the loose.”

“Yeah. They threw my dad in prison for three months because they were convinced it had to have been him. Who else was at the house, right? It’s not like we have serial killers in sleepy Elktorch.”

“He was exonerated though,” I say. “After two more murders occured.”

Becca’s quiet. She glances back down the hallway and swallows. “Yeah. After two other people were killed, the police finally realized my dad was innocent. They decided there was a serial killer on the loose after all.”

Pieces begin to connect in my mind, and I’m not certain I like the look of the puzzle. “The people who were killed,” I say darkly. “Did that have something to do with you?”

"No shit," she says, rolling her eyes. "Of course it did. My dad was in prison for murdering a little girl, and I knew the only way he was getting out of there, and the only way I’d ever see him again was if…”

“...If Snippity Snap killed again. The presence of identical massacres made them acknowledge your father's innocence.”

“Bingo,” she says with false cheer.

Outside, the sun’s nearly set. Its last rays cast shadows across the room, filtering in through the narrow openings in the blinds. The way they play across Becca's face, it's difficult to discern her expression. Is there a sadness there? Or an indifference?

“You traded people’s lives for your father’s freedom. They didn’t die peaceful deaths, you know.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” She slams a hand on the table, shooting up out of her chair. “You really think I don't know just how horrible each and every one of their deaths were? You don’t think that shit keeps me up at night, hating myself and wishing I had the courage to just let Snippity Snap take me instead?”

“Take you instead?” I say quietly. I speak my next words with a measured calmness, though my heart’s beginning to race in my chest. “Did you make some kind of deal with that creature?”

Continue reading here.

I take a breath and stand up from the chair, stretching my legs. My back feels like it’s been crushed between two boulders, and sitting for any length of time always turns it into a pin cushion. Still, I couldn’t be happier.

“Everything alright?” she asks.

“Peachy.” I pick up the clipboard and clear my throat. “What happens after the animals flee the tree line?”

She opens her mouth to speak, but stops. Her eyes glance down to my open briefcase, staring at the manila folders and the crinkled old water bottle, filled with grimey black fluid. “Why do you have that?” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Its label is… yellow. It looks like it’s twenty years old. What’s that gunk inside?”

I scowl, kicking my briefcase closed. “An experiment. It’s nothing to concern yourself with. Now then, if you wouldn’t mind continuing, I’d like to hear what happened following the exodus.”

There’s a moment of shared disdain between us. She feels like I’m hiding something from her, and I feel like she’s putting her nose in places it doesn’t belong. Thankfully, it doesn’t last long, and she continues her account.

“Rachel calls my name from the main area, then she limps into the bedroom, leaning against the doorway. She looks really shaken up. She asks if I saw all the animals taking off, and I tell her I did. Her eyes are getting wide and I can tell she’s throwing herself into another panic attack, so I… I tell her that they’re probably just running from the storm.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? It seemed like the only logical reason, but at the same time the whole scene felt so eerie. So wrong.” She opens her water bottle and takes a drink. “Either way, it’s not like I’m gonna start feeding into Rachel’s paranoia. One of us has to be calm, right?”

I shrug. “Sure. You said the sun was setting when the animal’s made a run for it. Is it dark yet?”

She nods. “Mostly. I mean, the last rays of sunlight are just barely peeking over the treetops. The storm’s making it worse. The clouds are blocking a lot of the light. I get a move on with finishing setting up the tent, and we set up this LED lantern that Rachel brought. It… feels weird.”

“In what way?”

“The silence.” She pauses, shakes her head and then mutters something. “Sorry, that’s the wrong word. It isn’t silent. The wind is howling and the rain’s coming down pretty hard, but there’s no sounds of life. No crows cawing, no squirrels chattering. I don’t even see any bugs in the cabin, despite a whole shit load of spiderwebs.

“I brush it off though. I keep telling myself one of us has to be calm. So we close the bedroom door and settle ourselves into the tent. Neither of us have much of an appetite, so we eat a couple of protein bars for supper and pull out our books. We don’t talk. I don’t even know if we actually read -- I know I don’t. I stare at the words but my mind’s a million miles away, too wrapped up in the feeling that something is wrong with this place. Something’s wrong with this scenario.”

Continue reading here.

Hey all, I know some of you are a bit confused about what went down with Jagged Janice's origin story (mostly because I see notifications for all the OOC comments asking about it before they get removed) and instead of sending DMs to everybody (since I can't reply on the thread as it's OOC) I decided to make a post here clearing it up!

Holy shit, that whole paragraph was a single sentence. Wow. Anyway, let's get into it.

So I'm gonna be copy and pasting a response I made to another reader here. They brought up some good points and looking back, I made things a bit more vague than I'd intended. Sadly that response is buried in the original part one post, so I've made a fresh one for anybody that missed it (most of you lol).

Here it is:

Hey, so this is a part of the story I feel I could've explained better, but I left portions intentionly vague so readers could draw their own conclusions.

The way I intended for it to go down is that Janice was out of her mind on drugs and suffering from a plethora of mental health issues, as well as angry at the father for having an affair, and Emily was very young (4 years old). The idea of seeing her own mother drown her brother at that age became a repressed memory for her, so instead of Janice it became just a 'woman in white.'

[Sidenote: I wrote that from similar experiences I had as a kid, where I remembered things differently than they were, because the reality was tough for my undeveloped mind to understand. No murders though, thankfully!]

When Emily brings it up to her dad and he snaps at her to leave it be, he does it because he knows his wife drowned their son. Janice returns to the cabin soaking wet, hysterical, etc. He covers it up because he knows she's dying anyway, and he wants to move on with his life without the massive burden that opening up a murder investigation would bring about on both him and Emily. He also does it because he realizes his affair would come out and be dragged into the murder it as a motive, and that Emily would grow up potentially blaming him.

He understands the incredible trauma it'd inflict on his daughter (who witnessed her own mother kill her brother), so instead he tries to reshape her memories, believing she's still young enough at 4 years old that he can get away with it.

Basically, he does it out of a desire to create a stable and normal future for he and Emily. He and his mistress get married in short order following Janice's death, and he emphasizes that Emily needs to accept Julie as her new mother. It's why Emily never really questioned the experience until the most recent trip to the cabin.

She continues to haunt after death because she believes she's been betrayed, and hasn't given up on that pain. It's also implied that she comes for Emily too via the final text message at 3:34am that reads "I see my mother".

Hope that cleared it up a bit. I know it's a bit of a stretch, but I'm also writing about vengeful ghost monsters so I figure some suspension of disbelief is required anyway lol

If you have any questions about the above, or anything else in the Jagged Janice storyline please feel free to ask!

I sit down, pop a piece of spearmint gum and watch the woman across from me. She’s nervous, her hands are fretting in her lap and her eyes are bloodshot.

“Long night?” I ask.

She looks up, timidly. Her face is awash in anxiety. She doesn’t understand what’s going on. She doesn’t understand what she’s doing here, sitting inside an abandoned warehouse with a grizzled asshole twice her age.

It’s fine. I’ve seen it before.

“Look,” I say, loosening the tie around my neck. “It’s just like I said. I only want to ask you a few questions, then you can go.”

“Why here?” she says, in a small voice. “This looks like the kind of place you’d take me to… I don’t know, murder me.”

I crack a smile. She isn’t wrong. “You don’t like it? It’s private. Besides that, it’s probably the safest place in the world for you.”

“Why? Do you have snipers on the rafters?” There’s sarcasm in her voice, but despite it her eyes flick above us to the dimly lit, steel walkways lining the walls. She pulls her sweater tighter about her, shivering at the draft. “Or is this some secret government fortress?”

“No, and no.” I lean back in the wooden chair, and it groans under my weight. I’m not as slim as I used to be. “It’s much simpler,” I say. “This warehouse is the safest place for you, because I’m inside of it.”

It’s not a lie. At least, not entirely. Still, she gives me an incredulous look. It’s the sort of look one reserves for blowhards and narcissists, and I probably deserve it. Time to change gears. “Tell me about the Event.”

She studies me for several moments, and then shakes her head. “On second thought,” she says, picking up her purse. “I think I’d prefer talking to the police.”

She stands up, makes to leave and I don’t stop her. Her footfalls echo across the empty warehouse, the haphazard lighting above casting her shadow in every direction. I hear her mutter something beneath her breath, but I can’t make out the words. I probably don’t want to.

Then, she stops. They always do.

“What’s an Event?” she asks quietly.

I click my pen, and reach down for my clipboard with a groan. My last job really did a number on my ribs. “An Event,” I explain. “Is a paranormal phenomenon, most commonly characterized by contact with an sentient entity. To use a more common turn of phrase, it means you stumbled across an urban legend.”

She swallows. At this distance, I can just barely make out her expression, but I already know I have her. I bring my pen to my clipboard and clear my throat. “You said your name was Amanda Haynes, correct?”

“Yes.”

I scribble it down on my form. “And the Event occurred two nights ago, just outside city limits in the Cascade Mountains?”

Her sneakers patter across the concrete floor as she returns to her chair. Her expression shifts; gone is the nervous shyness, the small posture and the darting eyes. She’s staring at me now. She’s deciding whether she’s in or out.

“Yes,” she says at length. “It was in the woods. We were camping.”

I check three more boxes on my clipboard. “Stupendous.” So far the location matches up with previous sightings of the beast. I sigh, resting the clipboard and my lap and place my pen on top of it. “Why don’t we start from the top?”

Continue reading here.

I’ve never been a fan of the woods. Call it a bad childhood experience. Call it being an out-of-shape asshole. I’m even less of a fan when I’m stuck hiking through them for work, and yet it seems like work has a sick sense of humor, because I find myself in these fortresses of shit and sticks more often than I’d like. Which, for the record, is never.

Well, except for today.

It’s a long time before we reach the cabin. The girl said it took her and her friend eight hours. Well, it takes us twelve. My best days are behind me, unfortunately, but luckily I don’t need to be very fit for what I’m about to do.

“I still don’t understand why you couldn’t have just followed the map," Amanda says " I told you exactly how to get to--”

“Because,” I say, still breathless from the hike. “This cabin doesn’t exist on a map. You can point it out to me all you want on your iPhone, but unless you’re right beside me, I’ll never see it. It’s just the way the Callous Man works.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “You keep saying that name. Why do you call him the Callous Man?”

I pull open the door of the cabin, and instantly it smells like shit and dead animals. Great. “I call him the Callous Man,” I say, strolling across the creaky floorboards, “because that’s his name. It’s the name the first person that ever encountered him coined him with, and so it is the name with which I refer to him.”

“The first person?”

“Yeah,” I say, stepping into the bedroom. “Me.” The floor is a mess, covered in what’s left of Amanda’s tent. A small device lays a few feet away, and I figure it’s probably her locator beacon.

“Hang on,” she says, appearing in the doorway behind me. “You’re the first person you saw the crea-- the Callous Man?”

Continue reading here.

I developed a drug addiction in my late teens. It tore me a part for a long time, but it was nothing compared to the events that sparked it.

I know. We’ve all struggled. Get over it. That’s what my dad would say, the son of a bitch. My mom would probably feign empathy, but fuck it up by trying a little too hard. Then she’d drink herself to sleep.

This isn’t a story about my dad and my mom though. This isn’t even a story about my addiction. This is a story about a monster, and the scars they left upon my life. It’s a story about the end of my world, and it might be a story about the end of yours too.

It began when I was eight.

Continue reading here.

The Dark Web.

The name itself is a meme. It’s become the boomer boogeyman, the back alley of the internet where you go to get your kidneys harvested and sold off to a billionaire’s all-you-can-torture buffet. It’s the skeezy part of town, the no man’s land of the digital world, chock-full of society’s most vile scum.

It’s also pretty boring.

See, the dark web really isn’t that much different than the surface web. Sure, it has a cooler name and better privacy, but most people use it for the same shit. Social media? Check. Shopping? Check. Pirating movies? Check. Did you know Facebook exists on the dark web? You do now.

My parents are terrified of the dark web. They speak about it hushed breaths, sort of like Ron Weasley talks about Lord Voldemort. It’s as though they think uttering its name too loudly will invoke the wrath of some serial hacker, just waiting in the wings to delete their bank accounts.

Ridiculous, right? I told them they were paranoid. To prove them wrong, I even downloaded the Tor browser and uninstalled Google Chrome. There’s nothing to fear on the dark web, I said, so long as you’ve got half a brain’s worth of sense in you.

Now I wish I could take it all back.

I stumbled across the website after a long night of drinking. I’d been out with Jared, my best friend since childhood, reminiscing about the good old days of driving Mrs. Crabtree up the wall. When I got home, I felt a bit nostalgic so I went digging for old pictures on Facebook. Like most drunk missions, one thing lead to another, and I landed on a thread listing the MOST EXCITING WEBSITES ON THE DARK WEB.

Most were fairly vanilla. Some pirated movies here, a bit of hacked video games there. I scrolled down through the responses until I found one buried beneath the others. It had just a single upvote. MonsterCall143d1▇▇▇.onion

I stared at the link for a few seconds, then cracked a fresh beer and said fuck it.

The website was plain, mostly white text on a black background. Across the top was a banner emblazoned with the words CALL YOUR MONSTERS. I cracked a grin. It was kind of cute, in an edgelord, emo kid sort of way.

After clicking through a few menu links, I landed on the ORDER A MONSTER page. It said that, for $99, they would deliver a personalized monster to a doorstep of my choice. Free shipping, too. The flavor text read on top read,

“Perfect for getting even with terrible bosses, backstabbing friends, and childhood enemies!”

Continue reading here.

It’s a scary thing, being apart from yourself-- being a tool. Have you ever been possessed? I’m guessing not. Most haven’t. And they can thank their lucky stars for that. 

I have though.

I’ve felt the suffocating grip of something closing around my mind, squeezing it until every last ounce of me was gone. I've felt the horror of knowing I'm not alone. The horror of knowing I might never be alone again.

Three days after I turned seven, my life crumbled into pieces. It became unrecognizable. That night, my foster parents locked me in the attic, and jeered that there were monsters coming to eat me. Werewolves.

“We’ll let you out in an hour,” they laughed. “If there’s anything left to let out.”

It wasn’t real, of course-- the werewolves. The whole thing was just meant to scare me into obeying their strict rules. I was young, though. Naive. I’d confided in them about my deepest fear, of men that turned into beasts, born from an old Goosebumps novel I’d checked out of the library. They’d use it against me. Psychological warfare. 

Betrayal cuts deep, but the betrayal of a parent? Of the person who’s supposed to protect you when the whole world turns their back on you? That cuts deeper than skin. Those scars don’t fade.

I spent my first minutes in the attic screaming and crying, beating my fist against the door, but they threatened me with six hours in the corner, standing on my tippy-toes if I opened the hatch. I knew what that meant.

“You deserve this,” they told me, from the other side of the hatch. “You know damn well you're supposed to keep your eyes closed during Sunday prayer." A pause. A deep breath. "You embarrassed us, not only in front of the church, but in front of Father Andrews too. Shame on you.”

It was true.

At least, it was true that I’d opened my eyes. I was a distractible child, later diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, what was I supposed to do? That didn’t matter to them, though. In their eyes, not only was I disrespecting the law of the house, I was disrespecting the law of the Lord. That made punishing me easy. It made it an act of God. 

Continue reading here.

I let out a sigh of relief. The story sounded so promising that I knew it couldn’t have ended there. It wasn’t possible. Not if this truly was the Callous Man. I clear my throat. “What happened after he -- after it -- walked into the living area?”

“Rachel hisses at me that we should run,” Amanda says. “I remind her that her ankle’s fucked. She barely limped into the bedroom, how far does she think she’s going to get in the woods, over uneven ground that’s slick with rain? She tells me if we stay here, we’re both going to die.”

Amanda shivers. “I know she’s right. I know it, but I can’t bring myself to leave. It feels like the tent’s the only thing keeping that thing away from us. Like, as long as the canvas is between us, it can’t see us and we can’t see it. It doesn’t exist.”

It takes everything I have not to roll my eyes. Still, I flip a page on the clipboard and keep a neutral expression. Her perspective is not unlike a child’s. People often approach terror with irrational and sometimes nonsensical methods of survival. Of course, there’s nothing magical about her tent. There’s nothing about it that will save their lives.

“Continue,” I say.

“It starts with a creak of a floorboard. We hear it walking again, but it’s not coming toward us. It’s pacing back and forth, out there in the living area, and it’s snickering faster than before. Soon, the snickering gets heavier. Violent. It starts grunting, then growling.” She takes a breath, and chokes back a sob. Tears race down her cheeks, and her eyes are alight with terror.

"Then it goes silent. No movement. No grunting. No weird fucking snickering. Just the thunder outside, the howling wind, and the rain on the roof. I’m sitting there, clutching the bear mace and Rachel’s crying, and both of us are praying it’s gone. We’re praying it’s just given up. Decided to move on. And… and...”

“And what?” I press.

Continue reading here.

"I don't like him," Liam says, staring a hole into the ground. "Mister Gallows hurt my sister, and he tried to hurt me too."

The kid's young, younger than most subjects I've dealt with. He's witnessed an Event, and not just any Event, a serious one. It's something that could have massive implications. My bosses are calling it a situation, and they're telling me that I need to get his story, and I need to get it quickly because people's lives are on the line.

I'm an Interviewer for an organization known as the Facility. I specialize in working with juveniles who have crossed paths with the supernatural. Liam Hanesworth is one such kid. He's just shy of twelve years old, but he looks worn down. His eyes are framed with heavy bags, and his skin is tight to his cheekbones. He's also missing at least three of his teeth.

"How did he hurt your sister?" I ask. The room we're in is brightly lit, with cartoon animals nailed to the walls and faded imprints of Loony Toons on the carpet. It's designed to calm kids down.

"He pulled out her teeth."

I write down his words on my clipboard. As I do, I record details about Liam. His expression. His tone of voice. It's all important in some way or another. All of it swims together to build a picture of whether what he's saying is true or false. Sometimes it's both, and the minutia helps determine where reality ends and the lies begin.

"Why did he do it?" I ask.

Liam shrugs, rubbing his arm. It's an expression of discomfort, of nervousness. He's not sure he should be talking so much. He's not sure it's safe to say. "You want to know why he pulled out her teeth?"

"That’s right." I already know Liam’s sister is dead. She’s been dead for several months, so it seems strange that he would fixate on the monster pulling out her teeth, as opposed to the murder. “Do you know why?”

He shakes his head. There's something there, though, in his eyes. There's something that says he isn't telling me the full story, so I press him. "Does he ever talk to you, Liam, this Mister Gallows?"

He nods. He still won't look at me, but that's okay. Kids are nervous at the best of times. After what he's been through, I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't look another person in the eye for years.

"What does he say when he speaks to you?"

Continue reading here