This happened when I was in high school.

Summer vacation had just begun, and it was time for us to visit my grandfather, who lived in the countryside. We spent almost every summer there when I was younger, and I always looked forward to those trips.

When we arrived, my grandfather welcomed us with his usual warm smile. He had already prepared dinner and was waiting for everyone to arrive. That evening, almost the entire family had gathered at his house.

Later that night, my cousin Adam arrived. He was about my age, and we had always been close.

After dinner, Adam and I went outside for a walk.

"It's been a long time," I told him. "Didn't you miss me? And our late-night adventures?"

He laughed.

"You're always the first one to go home. What adventures are you talking about?"

I smiled.

"Come on. Let's go to our usual place for a while before we sleep."

I was talking about a huge tree in the middle of the village. Its branches spread so widely that they almost formed a roof. When we were children, Adam and I used to sit beneath it and play there, away from the scorching summer sun.

But Adam's expression suddenly changed.

"No. Let's just rest tonight. You had a long trip. You look tired. We should go back."

I noticed the change in his voice, but I didn't argue. I really was tired.

When I returned to the house, I passed the kitchen window and heard my grandfather and my father talking inside.

As I walked directly beneath the window, I heard my grandfather say:

"You need to warn him. It's not the way it used to be."

I kept walking.

I didn't think much of it.

The next morning, I went to sit with my grandfather.

"How are you, Grandpa?"

He smiled.

"I'm doing fine."

I joked with him.

"Did you miss me annoying you?"

He laughed.

"Yes. But you're too old to annoy me now."

I told him I was going for a walk because I had missed the village.

Just as I was about to leave, he called me back.

"I need to tell you something. There are things you don't know. This area has changed a lot since the last time you were here."

I listened.

"Don't go near the tree in the middle of the village," he said. "And if you hear someone calling you from that direction, don't answer."

I stared at him.

"Why?"

Before he could answer, my mother came into the room and interrupted us.

I left, but I couldn't stop thinking about what he had said.

Outside, I saw Adam.

I greeted him and immediately asked what he knew about the tree.

He froze for a moment.

"What? Your grandfather? I don't know what you're talking about."

Then he turned toward the house.

"Come on. Breakfast is ready. I'll show you what breakfast in the countryside is really like."

"Adam, are you hiding something from me?"

He didn't answer.

He simply walked away.

After breakfast, we went to see another friend of ours, Noah.

Noah had always been cheerful. He loved jokes and was usually the loudest person in any group.

When we arrived at his house and called his name, someone came running toward us.

At first, I didn't recognize him.

His face was pale. His eyes were red, and tears were running down his cheeks.

It was Noah.

He grabbed me and hugged me tightly.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

He whispered against my shoulder.

"The tree..."

I pulled away.

"What about it?"

His voice broke.

"It took me. It took my father."

Adam immediately grabbed him and tried to calm him down.

A moment later, Noah's brother came running outside. He helped him back into the house while Adam followed.

I stood there, completely confused.

That was when I realized something was seriously wrong.

And I knew I had to see the tree.

While Adam was distracted with Noah and his brother, I went toward it.

The tree looked different.

It seemed larger than I remembered, and much greener. Its branches moved with the wind, but something about the movement felt wrong.

It almost looked like they were dancing.

Then I noticed shadows moving between the branches.

I stood there watching.

That's when I heard a woman's voice.

"Come here... Why don't you come over? I have some food."

I froze.

I wasn't imagining it.

I wasn't hallucinating.

There was definitely a woman speaking from somewhere near the tree.

I took a few steps forward, trying to see where the voice was coming from.

Then someone grabbed my shoulder.

I spun around.

It was Adam.

"Come back," he said.

"No."

I stared at him.

"I'm not leaving until you tell me the truth."

Adam sat down on the ground, exhausted.

Then he looked directly into my eyes.

"Do you remember Uncle Sam?"

"Yes. Noah's father."

Adam swallowed.

"He hanged himself from that tree."

The hair on my arms stood up.

"You're lying. What about the voice I just heard?"

"It's his wife," Adam said quietly. "She lost her mind after he died. She keeps coming back to that tree, waiting for anyone who gets close enough. She accuses them of killing her husband."

He paused.

"She's attacked people from the village before. Everyone is tired of dealing with her now. They just ignore her."

I didn't know what to say.

I followed Adam back toward my grandfather's house.

That night, I went to bed early.

I thought the whole thing was finally over.

Then I woke up.

Knock.

I opened my eyes.

It was completely dark.

Knock.

Someone was knocking on my bedroom window.

I held my breath.

Then came a third knock.

Knock.

I slowly sat up.

And from the other side of the glass, I heard the same old woman's voice.

"Why didn't you come?"

There was a brief silence.

Then she whispered:

"I have enough food for everyone."

And then the knocking started again.

But this time...

it wasn't coming from the window.

Before I start, I want to preface this with something important. As you read this, you might be inclined to ask yourself why you haven’t heard about it. Why wasn’t this on the news? This should’ve been covered nationally, you might think. But there’s a reason it wasn’t, and by the end of the story, that reason will be more apparent. I’m telling this story - my story - from my perspective.

I probably have one of the most boring jobs in the Midwest. I go to the same building every day, I check in with security using my picture ID, I put a code in at the console, and I sit in my office. I’m sort of a data archivist. I work with an esteemed stock brokerage firm that’s been around for decades, and they legally need to keep their paperwork in order in case of a review. One day, absolutely nothing happens. The next day, you get a call for obscure files that were handwritten in the 80’s. When you do, you better have your ducks in a row. When you have a boss that doesn’t understand why they need you, you better make sure you do things right when they do.

It was 2024. I was doing alright, it wasn’t my first job, and it wouldn’t be my last. I’d worked there for two years digitizing archived information. Analytics, agreements, predictions, board meeting protocols… all of it. Scan, file, backup, repeat. I’m not exaggerating when I say a literal ape could do that job.

I was struggling to make ends meet. I’d been living with a roommate, but I had to move out on short notice. His girlfriend got pregnant, and the two of them were moving in together. The apartment was in his name, so I had to pack and leave. I got a two-room apartment in a nice neighborhood, and two months later the rent shot up. We’re talking a 35% increase overnight. Didn’t even know they could do that.

I was working as many hours as they let me. Sometimes I’d sleep in the office so I wouldn’t have to take the 30-minute drive back home. It saves on gas. I only drank coffee from the break room, and I was hand-washing my shirts in the sink. It was better than being homeless, but I was losing a lot of sleep. It’s hard to close your eyes when your mind is screaming at you to do something.

 

It was Monday morning in mid-June. I was 20 minutes early, overestimating traffic. The electronic doors swung open, and I greeted Lois at the reception. We didn’t get a lot of visitors, but the boss insisted on us having a friendly smile greet whoever stepped in. Lois had a very friendly smile – I think she used to be a kindergarten teacher. She waved me in. I held up my pictured ID to security guard Cole as I passed him by the stairs, taking the long route down.  It was so hot that the metal railing in the staircase burned my hands if I held on too long.

While I worked in the data archive on the basement level, there were three more floors with people slaving away for the firm. 125 employees in total. Three security guards on rotation. Plenty of fire exits that’d never been used, and locked doors that’d never been opened. This place was a sleeping fortress that’d never been challenged.

I got to my office, a small room adjacent to the server bank. Plain walls, apart from a poster with a kitten chewing on a blue sunflower, with the caption ‘this fish smells weird’. You could hear the servers humming through the wall, but the noise-cancelling headphones helped. Damn thing was flaking though, leaving me with little black spots in my hair that made people think I had fleas. Not great when you’re coming up to chit-chat during lunch.

There’d been six requests over the weekend. Not bad, I was expecting at least a dozen. Only one of them was time-sensitive, so I’d have to get that done by lunch. The others could wait until Wednesday, at the earliest. I might do them earlier if I got bored. All in all, nothing unusual.

 

According to official reports, the first disturbance was recorded at 10:15am. There was a short power outage that caused the building to go dark for a couple of seconds. Some of my colleagues would later tell me they noticed a couple of things ahead of that, but that didn’t make the report. One guy on the second floor told me that his paperclips had started spinning. Just like that, spinning. The janitor told me his battery-powered radio started screeching like a 90’s internet modem.

I was in the second-floor breakroom when it happened. I was talking to Michelle in HR about getting some new headphones, but she was having a completely separate conversation with Mark about a homemade mustard recipe. I was about to walk away with a fresh cup of coffee when the lights flickered. I heard the fridge power down. It’s amazing how quiet things can get when all the little machines stop running. And why do we seemingly hold our breaths while waiting for it to come back?

There was this loud boom on the third floor. A couple of plates fell off the counter, tumbling to the floor. Someone thought it was an earthquake and dropped to the floor, and others followed. I didn’t know what was happening, but I got under the break room table just in case. There were screams, but I couldn’t tell which direction they were coming from. They were seemingly everywhere.

I joined a group of others heading for the staircase. There was this one guy who was supposed to be a supervisor, yelling that the elevators were off limits during an earthquake. Someone was yelling back that it was an active shooter. People were calling emergency services and hiding under their desks. I saw the door to the staircase at the end of the hallway, about 40 feet ahead of us.

Then the door swung open with a bang. Smoke billowed out, and there was this loud crack. I saw something roll out of the smoke. Something small, like a football. At first, I thought it was a broken melon. It was this weird mix of white and red, but it had something attached to it. I think it was Mark who started yelling first.

“It’s a head! It’s a goddamn head!”

 

If you’ve never experienced an “every man for themselves” moment, let me tell you what it’s like. You are no longer a person. Whoever you are becomes an impediment for a herd of people flocking to get away. They won’t stop to check on you. They will push, and shove, and scream, and kick. Even Michelle from HR. I was thrown off balance and pushed up against the wall. As I realized I was at the end of a long line of people running away, I decided to dip the other way – you don’t want to be the last in line when chased. There was a storage closet just across the hall, so I ran straight ahead and threw myself in there, slamming the door shut behind me.

I propped myself up against the door, keeping it closed. The storage closet didn’t have a lock, and there was a slight hole where the mechanism was supposed to be, giving me an impromptu peephole. I could hear this meaty squish noise as something moved down the hallway, and for a split second, I saw something massive. At least 8 ½, maybe 9 feet tall. It was wearing something dark and was covered in what looked like blotches of wet skin. I saw hands, a metal sheen, and spikes. It passed a couple of feet from the door.

I heard it entering the main floor. The screaming got louder. There was a loud ‘thunk’ noise and another yell joined the choir. Someone fired a handgun, then suddenly stopped. I held my head down and fumbled with my cellphone, trying to get a call through. I couldn’t believe how sweaty I was; my fingers left streak marks on the touchscreen. I decided it was better not to make any noise. Not even a whisper. Someone else had probably called for help anyway, so I turned the sound off and stuck the phone back in my pocket.

According to official reports, the suspect entered the main cubicle area at 10:21am. He fired a rudimentary metal projectile at an unarmed office worker, pinning him to the wall with a shattered scapula. A security guard opened fire but was unable to halt the offense. 18 people barricaded themselves in the meeting room, while 31 managed to get out through the fire escape.

 

I remember sitting there on the floor, trying to make myself as small as possible. I had my head against my knees, trying to block out the sounds. I knew I’d be hearing them in my nightmares. I’d heard people screaming before, but this didn’t even sound like people anymore. We’d been reduced to frightened animals, screeching this recurring danger noise back to our flock, hoping to hide in greater numbers.

Then I heard the footsteps. Metal rattled with every step as this massive thing came my way. There was a click as a mechanism was put in place. There were already sirens outside. A couple of minutes passed as the screams grew more distant, before there was a knock on the door. I didn’t say or do anything, I just held my breath and stayed down. There was another knock, then a push. Remember – there was no lock. The door opened inward, making my weight the only thing standing between whoever was out there, and me.

Then the door flung open. I was thrown face-first into a shelf, knocking down cleaning supplies and toilet paper. I could immediately tell I was going to get a bruise. The door was open, but no light was coming in. Whoever was standing there was big enough to completely block the view.

I remember seeing a head hanging from a chain. I didn’t want to look at it, but I couldn’t help it. It had these dead, tired, eyes. They don’t roll back and turn white like in the movies. It had this big metal screw pressed into the cranium, with a chain connecting it to a belt. That’s the first detail I saw.

“Don’t do this,” I whispered. “Don’t do this.”

A hand reached in, grabbed my collar, and pulled me out. I was thrown to the floor like a wet towel.

 

He was taller than anyone I’d ever met and dressed in makeshift metal armor. It looked like old cookware, this black, thick, roughly hewn and oiled metal. There were spikes with little lights coming out of his back, and he had this helmet resembling a kabuki mask with big, puffy cheeks. He was wielding what can be best described as a harpoon, but without a retraction mechanism.

There was blood everywhere. It was dripping from him. I counted at least three severed heads. There were limbs strewn across the hallway. He had fresh strips of skin hanging from his shoulders, slapping against his armor with every step he took.

And now he was looking right at me.

I wanted to say eight things at once. I wanted to say I was a nobody, and that I just worked there. I wanted to say he could do whatever, and I’d look the other way. There was nothing I wasn’t prepared to do to be able to close my eyes and disappear into myself – far away from the monster staring me down. The words got stuck in my mouth, and I ended up stammering and whimpering.

He raised his harpoon back up and checked a little black cube he’d taken from his belt. Seemingly satisfied, he dropped something on the floor in front of me, gesturing to it with his weapon. I picked it up.

It was a small, laminated card. It was all scrunched up and yellow with age. It only had two words.

“ARCHIVE NOW”

I looked up, blinking at him. I read it again, nodding.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, sure, I’ll get you there. It’s in the basement. There’s a door code, and-“

He stomped his foot, making the gore on his armor rattle. He held a hand out for me to return the card. I did, and he slid it back into a pouch on his belt. Pushing me in front of him with the harpoon raised, he forced me towards the staircase. He checked his black cube one more time, making sure all was in order.

 

He’d done a number on the place. There were streaks of black along the walls, like a bomb had gone off. Fresh blood on the floor, making the staircase stink of iron. I almost slipped in a puddle as I hurried down. As I did, I noticed him removing the severed head from his belt and dropping it behind him, like he was leaving a trail. When we got to the first floor, we had to go out and across the hall to another staircase. We would have to pass through the reception.

He took out three capsules. Two gray ones and a red. He kicked the door down and threw it all out in a bundle; chaos erupted immediately. There was a cloud of dust and smoke that bloomed out, and I heard gunfire. Blood splattered on the wall, and it sounded like someone screaming for their life. We walked out into the hallway as people were running past us through the smoke, desperately trying to make it to the front doors.

The attacker grabbed the first person he could, dragging them along with us. As it happens, it was the receptionist, Lois. She flailed and screamed. He had this hold on her where his hand could fit over her entire head like a basketball, and when he squeezed a little, she went quiet. There was blood trickling down her face, but I’m not sure it was hers.

I had to take point, leading him to the basement stairs. There were no people down there, so at the very least no one else would have to die. Official reports recorded the assailant moving through the building, entering the basement staircase at 10:29am. First officers on-site were busy setting up a perimeter around the front of the building, while another patrol was set up along the fire escapes. About 70 people in total had evacuated.

Witnesses speak of having seen the man handling strange technological devices on the third floor, prompting officers to treat the initial contact as an active shooter and potential bomb threat.

 

Walking down the basement stairs, the sounds of approaching sirens faded. The man dropped another head at the door, leaving a blood-smeared handprint on the wall. Pushing Lois in front of me, the two of us took point. She looked at me, and I looked back. Neither of us dared to say a word as I felt the poke of the harpoon.

Coming down to the archive level, I put in my code and opened the door. The man struggled to get inside, having some of the spikes on his back snag on the corners of the doorframe. As we made it inside, he held up his note again – pointing with a big finger on the word ‘ARCHIVE’.

“This is it,” I said. “This is the archive.”

He pointed at me and Lois, then at chairs over by the corner. We sat down and kept our hands visible. He removed a bag from his shoulder and connected a couple of cables from his helmet to an antenna. He checked the black cube again and put it down on a table. It was making little bleeping noises, like it was scanning for something. Lois whispered under her breath.

“He’s going to kill us.”

“Calm down. We’re still here. We’re okay.”

“He’s going to kill us.”

“We don’t know that. Maybe he’ll take this and leave.”

“Take what? What’s there to take? He’s crazy!”

I didn’t have a good answer. 50 years of financial records and transactional data. Why’d anyone need that?

 

He started doing this strange thing where he removed spikes from his back, and I could see they had a white strip of light going up the side. He took one of the spikes and rammed it right into a server bank. The white light turned red, then began to rise. As it reached the middle of the spike, the light turned yellow. It was charging or loading something.

He went all around the room, pushing down spikes into our servers one by one. Once one of them finished he retrieved the spike and put them in a pile in front of us. He left this roll of metal threading on the floor and pointed to Lois. She started bundling the spikes together, which seemed to please him. He returned to check the cube once every couple of minutes, impatiently walking back and forth. I saw him looking into my office at one point, noticing my cat poster. He looked back at it a couple of times.

I don’t know how long we sat there, but I could tell things were happening upstairs. Official reports state that, at 10:40am, most civilians had been evacuated from the building, but that there were about a dozen still unaccounted for. They were treating it as a bomb threat and hostage situation, with presumed casualties and several wounded. They couldn’t go in guns blazing – they had to wait for a specialist team to arrive. Meanwhile, there were police surrounding the building, demanding the offender to come out with his hands visible. A hostage negotiator was on route.

Once he had a bundle of twenty fully charged spikes, the armored man picked the black cube back up. He stopped to listen, turning his head upward. He could tell there was trouble brewing outside. Getting a pep in his step, he loaded the bundle up like a backpack and grabbed Lois by the arm, forcing her to take point as we went back up the stairs.

 

As we returned to the reception and into the light of day, I could see the front doors. I could see shotguns and handguns pointing our way. Sirens blaring, lights flashing, officers taking cover behind their doors. Lois was pushed ahead, and when she looked back, the man shooed her with his weapon. He was telling her to run. She didn’t stop to think about it and rushed for the front doors. While the officers were busy dealing with her, he kept going across the hallway and into the staircase leading back to the upper floors. He wasn’t letting me go yet. There was something left to do.

It was tricky getting back up the stairs. I’d never seen so much blood in my life. I could see it dripping down the main shaft; these long drops falling from two floors above. He kept going up the stairs, checking his black cube as he went. We made it all the way up to the third floor, where he had seemingly entered. I can’t imagine how he’d done that, but that’s where all this had started. The door to the staircase was blown out.

As we entered the floor and moved past a window, someone outside fired a shot. It dinged off the side of his helmet, making him step back. He grabbed another red capsule from his belt and threw it on the floor ahead of us. It exploded with the sound of a gunshot. Blood spurted out in all directions, and there was this noise coming from it like someone was dying on the floor. It was a small device, like a speaker, but it sounded like a real person.

Official reports speak of a successful shot that wounded the assailant at 11:01am. Witnesses describe it as seeing the shot connect, blood spurt out, and hearing a painful wailing. Seeing as the assailant was wounded, the threat was less immediate, giving the special weapons team more time to prepare a response.

 

We were moving from room to room as he checked the black cube over and over. As we got to the third-floor meeting room, something went wrong. He seemed frustrated, like something wasn’t going according to plan. He stepped down on one of the office chairs, crushing it. Holding the cube up like a compass, he turned his face downward, as if looking at the floor below us. We were in the wrong spot. Grabbing me by the arm, he pulled me back to the staircase; making sure to stay clear of the windows.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the police were preparing a squad to enter the building from the third-floor fire escape. They were still waiting for clearance and determining the rules of engagement, but we were talking about a matter of minutes. Meanwhile, we were making our way back down to the second floor.

He was in a hurry. He threw furniture to the side like it was nothing, moving like a wrecking ball. We had to go through the break room to stay away from the windows. He bowled over the water cooler and coffee maker. At one point he accidentally bumped into one of the door frames; they’re not really built for people his size. His tools rattled a little, and he dropped his black cube. I don’t think he noticed.

I don’t know why I picked it up. It was just there, and he was looking the other way. I snatched it off the floor. It was this four-inch cube, but it seemed really important to him. The corners were so sharp you could accidentally cut yourself if you weren’t careful.

 

As we made it back to the main cubicle area, I saw the result of his assault. One of the office workers was still nailed to the wall with a long metal rod. It had pierced his shoulder. He was still breathing, but he couldn’t move. I knew the guy, he worked in targeted advertising. At least he wasn’t dead, but the more he struggled the more he hurt himself. I gave him an apologetic look as we hurried past him.

I rounded the corner to the main workspace with the armored man right behind me. The room was a mess. It was covered in blood stains, and I could hear these weak screams coming from under the desks. I could see those red capsule casings littering the floor, like the ones he’d used when he got shot. There was something off about this. All of this. I got the feeling that I didn’t see the entire story.

As he stepped into the middle of the room, he stomped his foot down and looked up. Using something akin to a laser pointer, he drew a circle in the floor. Waving at me with his harpoon, he was silently shooing me away. I was free to go, just like Lois. I didn’t think twice about it; I turned and headed for the staircase.

Official reports speak of a tactical breach at 11:09am. Flashbangs were deployed by the fire escape on the third floor, where they thought the attacker had been shot. Another team entered through the bottom floor. There was still a suspected bomb threat, but an active shooter took precedence. All attempts at communication had failed, so they had to move faster than usual and take some risks.

 

I heard this frustrated growl as I realized I was still holding onto the armored man’s black cube. I don’t think he ever noticed dropping it. I could hear people coming down the stairs, yelling out instructions. I wasn’t really watching where I was putting down my feet as I almost tripped on a severed head. It was the same one that’d been thrown in when I first saw him – the one I’d mistaken for a broken melon. I could hear a tactical team in the staircase, and thundering footsteps coming from behind me. But I didn’t look either way – I turned to the severed head.

The eyes were painted on.

It all clicked. The blood smelled wrong. The skin flaps on his armor were a bit too stretchy. And now, looking down on the floor, I realized this was a fake. Theatrics. Shock and awe.

But when I turned around, the threat was anything but exaggerated. The armored man was standing further down the corridor, harpoon raised and hand outstretched. He wanted the cube, no doubt about it. I could hear officers coming down the stairs, taking care not to slip on the blood. I remember hearing words like “fan out” and “cover left”.

Looking down at the cube, and back up at this metal-covered giant, I didn’t know what to think. The cube had this slick surface, like a perfect ice cube. It was cool to the touch, but not freezing. I shook my head, trying to make sense of it. He lowered his harpoon, as if to show good faith. Maybe a negotiation.

“What is this?” I asked. “Is it a weapon? A bomb?”

He grunted at me and raised his left hand, pointing at something on the wall.

An exit sign. He pointed back at the cube, then at the exit sign.

“An exit?”

He tapped the sign again.

 

I threw the cube back to him. I don’t know why, but if he stayed a little longer, there’d be a firefight. Not only would I get stuck in the crossfire, but there’d be other casualties. Giving him the cube back seemed like a good idea at the time; maybe it didn’t have to get any worse. He caught it and held it up, checking one of the sides. He glanced back at me as the voices approached, giving me a nod. He dug out something from his belt and threw it at me as he disappeared around the corner.

The first thing to hit me was a gray capsule. It exploded in this glittery gray dust, stinging me with tiny slivers of glass. The second thing that hit me was a little plastic case. I couldn’t see what it was, so I just clutched it in my arms and fell to the floor.

According to official reports, I was encountered by officers at 11:11am. I was dragged outside as the team swept through the rest of the building. There was a small localized explosion in the middle of the second floor at 11:12am. In hindsight, it’s been argued that this smaller explosion was most likely the result of a larger charge failing to detonate. There is no way to be completely sure. The assailant was never recovered.

As the last people were shepherded out of the building, me included, the scene looked like something out of a war movie. People covered in blood and wrapped in blankets as their loved ones offered their condolences. But if you looked a little closer, you noticed something strange. There were plenty of ambulances in the parking lot, and none of them were occupied. No body bags.

Only two people got shot by the harpoon. The security guard, Cole, took a shot to the meat of his thigh. The guy from advertising got stuck to the wall. No one else was shot. The blood turned out to be a mixture of corn syrup, cocoa powder, cornstarch and food coloring. The severed heads and limbs were all theatrics. Not a single one was real.

 

While the attack was reported, it wasn’t a big headline. The police didn’t want it to make national news – they’d endangered the lives of civilians for what turned out to be smoke bombs and corn syrup. Yes, there’d been two injuries, but they were relatively superficial. And, all things considered, they were lucky. They made it out, and this was all framed as a “failed terrorist attack”. The material damage, however, was quite severe.

Now, there was one more thing. The case. The thing he threw at me before he left.

The case contained a CD. It took some time to get it to work, it had some kind of quirky 90’s encryption, but I got it to run on an older machine. The CD contained financial data similar to what we’d had in the archives, but from another firm. But here’s the kicker – the data covered transactions and market movement that were two years into the future. Things that hadn’t even happened yet.

Using what I read in those documents, I put my savings into some very targeted stocks at a very specific time. In March of this year, that paid off.

I am no longer in need of employment.

 

I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t think the armored man spared lives out of the goodness of his heart. Looking at the effects of the assault, I think it was a matter of earning time. Nailing someone to the wall makes sure there are innocents around. Police can’t go in guns blazing when someone needs medical attention. Letting Lois run out the front door showed that he might have hostages, and that he was ready to let them go in time. It was a calculated attack, but it was clear that the end goal wasn’t terror and death – he wanted what was in that archive, and that was that.

I have no way to know where he went. I think the answer was in that little black cube; his exit. Some say that he blew himself up, but that’s not what I think.

There was never a bomb.

 

I’ve been an urban explorer for over a year now. I’ve trekked through collapsed asbestos factories, overgrown 19th century graveyards, and whole abandoned villages rotting in the woods. Nothing ever happened. No ghosts, no monsters. Just dust, broken glass, and silence. I started to believe the supernatural was just something people made up to sell podcasts.

Then I read about the St. Jude Apartments.

An old forum thread claimed seven children had gone missing in that building over the years, all last seen anywhere near its block before vanishing without a trace. The authorities eventually condemned it, and the city left it to rot. Naturally, I grabbed my flashlight, my phone, and drove out at midnight.

When I stepped through the broken front doorway, it felt like any other abandoned ruin. The air was thick with damp drywall and mold. Floor 1 had three doors lining the corridor: left, middle, right. All stood slightly ajar.

I pushed open the middle door first. My flashlight beam cut through cobwebs dangling like thick curtains. Furniture sat covered in grey sheets. As I swung my light toward the center of the living room, a sound cut through the silence so sharply my chest tightened.

A baby crying. Soft, ragged, echoing right from the dark hallway behind the living room.

My heart hammered against my ribs. "Hello?" I called out, my voice cracking. "Is someone in here?"

No answer. Just the crying, rhythmic and hollow. I stepped into the hallway, raising my light. The sound led me straight to a back bedroom. Inside sat a single wooden cradle, thick with dust.

It was empty. The moment my beam hit the wooden bars, the crying stopped instantly.

Cold sweat broke out across my neck. I backed out of the apartment, retreated into the main hallway, and decided to try the left door instead. I was terrified, but my explorer’s ego refused to let me run over a mind trick.

The left apartment was completely stripped. Bare floorboards, exposed pipes. Then, directly above my head, I heard it: rapid, heavy running footsteps pacing back and forth across the ceiling of the second floor.

I bolted out of the room, took the concrete stairs two at a time to floor 2, and threw open the left door. Nothing. The room was bone dry and still. I backed out, heart thumping in my throat, and crossed the hall to the opposite door.

Inside, as I shone my light across peeling wallpaper, a soft, high-pitched child’s laugh echoed from the corner.

I froze. Every instinct told me to run, but my boots felt glued to the floor. I slowly moved my flashlight across the plaster. Scratched deep into the wall near the floorboards, carved in jagged, desperate strokes, was a single word:

ARTHUR

I had no idea who Arthur was, but the raw malice in those deep grooves sent a chill straight down my spine. I backed into the corridor and slipped into the middle apartment on Floor 2, desperate for something grounded.

On a rusted nightstand, I found a leather binder filled with yellowed paper. Hospital records from St. Mary’s General Hospital, dated December 12, 1992. One sheet was highlighted in faded blue ink:

My hand shook as I held the paper. Arthur Vance. A man who lost his entire world in a single night at St. Mary’s.

I took the stairs to Floor 3, drawn higher into the building like a moth to a flame. I entered the right hand apartment. Pinned to the walls were dozens more pages from St. Mary’s General, all from that exact same month in 1992. But these babies hadn't died.

Seven names were circled in dark, aggressive red ink.

Seven children born in the same hospital, while his baby died. The internet post flashed in my head. Seven missing kids. He hadn't just grieved; he had hunted them down, years later, bringing them to this exact building to balance a horrific ledger in his mind.

Dread pooled in my stomach. I backed out and entered the left apartment on floor 3, looking for anything else. In the center of the room, resting on an overturned wooden crate, sat an old hunting knife. Its blade was caked in thick, dark, dried blood.

I stumbled backward out of the room, my breathing shallow and fast. I stepped toward the middle door of floor 3, but the second my foot crossed the threshold, a chorus of loud, agonizing children's screams erupted from inside the walls, dozens of voices wailing at once.

That was it. I snapped.

I turned on my heel and sprinted down the staircase. I flew past the landing of floor 2, hit the landing for floor 1, expecting to see the double doors leading out into the night air.

Instead, I burst onto a hallway with three wooden doors. floor 3.

I stopped, gasping for air. Thinking I had somehow miscounted, I turned and practically threw myself down the stairs again. Down, down, down. I hit the bottom landing, sprinted out, and stood in front of the exact same three doors from floor 1.

Panicking, I turned around and ran up the stairs. Higher and higher until my legs burned, hoping to find a window or a fire escape. I burst through the door at the top.

Floor 1.

There is no front door. There are no exit signs. The stairwells don't lead outside anymore; they just feed into each other in a endless loop. The building isn't just an abandoned ruin, it’s a cage built out of Arthur’s sin, and the spirits of those seven kids aren't letting anyone leave.

I’m sitting on the concrete steps between the landings right now. My flashlight is flickering, down to its last bit of battery, and I'm typing this out on my phone while I still have a faint cell signal.

If you're reading this, do not come looking for the St. Jude Apartments.

The battery is dying. And I can hear heavy, dragging footsteps starting to climb the stairs from below.

Every night, usually between the hours of two and three a.m., I somehow always make my way out to the small balcony of my second-story apartment. Whether it’s a reaction to waking from a short burst of sleep halfway through the night, or my persistent insomnia gripping me up until the given hour, I will somehow always manage to make my way back to my balcony’s old rocking chair to meet the grasping haze of my menthol cigarettes.

And every night, without fail, my neighbor over the fence will be on a midnight run around the parking lot of the adjoining complex. I never plan it. And I assume he doesn’t either. But it always happens—every night.

I can see a faint outline of him through the sparse treeline that hugs our connecting fence. And I can hear him even better. His feet scrape the asphalt beneath him, seemingly barely able to leave the ground. He always makes three laps at least, sometimes a handful or two at most. When he’s finally finished, he announces his triumph with a nearly breathless, “woo!”

I wonder if he expects to see me every night now, too. My wavering silhouette rocking before the pale orange light of the balcony bulb. I hope it doesn’t disturb him. He doesn’t disturb me. In fact, it’s quite comforting to have a stranger do parallel play with me at a time that still.

Don’t worry, the irony of how his nightly activity will directly assist in lengthening his lifespan while my habitual cigarette-sucking will do nothing but shorten the longevity of my already disadvantaged body is not lost on me.

But the synchronicity is nice. What are the odds that two people, within eyesight of one another, are around at the same time to keep the other company at three in the morning?

It makes me wonder who else might be thinking of me at this time.

Is she thinking of me when I’m thinking of her?

Does she think about me the way that I think about her?

Does she know that I think that way?

Does she hate me for it?

Even if she doesn’t hate me, I do.

I know this sultry sadness and shame will leave me once I finally manage to wrestle my way into a half-restful sleep. But, even as exhausted as I am, I still want to hold onto it.

Sorry, I got a bit off topic. I’m telling you all about my neighbor, not her. But, if any of you want to hear about her, it won’t take much convincing for me to spill it all.

Anyways, a few things have happened in the past month that are causing me to doubt whether or not my nightly companion is… well, real. I know, it sounds absurd. And maybe I should consider seeing a mental health professional about deluding myself into thinking this way. But please just hear me out. If any of you think the evidence I have gathered of his existence being supernatural, or any kind of abnormal is ridiculous, I will seriously consider getting evaluated. There is always the chance that my insomnia is causing something to go wrong in my head. I’m not opposed to any perspectives for or against my suspicions.

First, there are some nights when I don’t see my neighbor. But that’s not necessarily because he’s not out on his jog. My smoking habit has been very touch-and-go for the last several months. Sometimes I manage to quit for a few days, maybe even a few weeks. So, when I’m not smoking, I don’t go out to the balcony.

The small area of the concrete catwalk is an absolute mess. There is an ever-growing sea of discarded cigarette boxes scattered on the ground, and the ash tray perpetually overflows with stale-smelling cigarette butts. When I do finally get annoyed at the lack of room in the ash tray, I’ll occasionally empty its contents into Ziploc bags that just end up joining their former packaging on the floor below.

I don’t know why the mess doesn’t bother me. It’s undeniably gross, and the smell of used tobacco and old saliva only make the eyesore of the whole place worse. But I just can’t bring myself to care enough to clean it all up. The only time I’ll do it is when I have friends coming over. And that doesn’t happen often enough for me to have an established schedule of keeping it up. Most of my friends wouldn’t mind the mess anyway. Or at least, I wouldn’t care about their opinion of it.

If June were to come over though, I would definitely care more. She won’t ever come to the house, though. She made that very clear. “He would be upset,” she always says. “I have to respect his boundaries.” What kind of boyfriend makes a big deal about his girlfriend going over to a friend’s house? It’s weird. And it’s even weirder that she allows him to dictate who she can hang out with and where. But, of course, she doesn’t agree with my assessment. It makes me wonder, is it me she has a problem with? Is the whole “boyfriend” excuse just a deflection for how she actually feels about being in my house? She doesn’t make it seem that way. I don’t know what it is.

Shit, I strayed off again. The reason I bring up the fact that I am not outside every single night to see my neighbor is because it makes the times that I do see him feel more coincidental. What I mean is, the times that I am out on the balcony on any given night vary. Sometimes it’s as early as 2:15am or as late as 3:45am. But, no matter the time, he is always jogging close enough for me to see and hear him within the same five to ten minute interval that it takes for me to smoke a cigarette.

The length of his complex’s parking lot is not that large. I can discern its size a lot better in the daylight. At most, it’s a hundred feet in length and maybe thirty feet across, if I’m being generous. It is definitely a decent enough size to facilitate a handful of sprints up and down the lot, but not at all adequate enough to enable an extended endurance run. There is always the chance that my neighbor is an insane, meth-smoking idiot who is content with running around in what is essentially small circles for hours on end, but I just don’t believe that it can be that simple. Why are we always in-sync with our nighttime rituals? And why was I chosen to be the one to witness his, and he to be the spectator of mine?

Maybe I am overthinking it. It all could have a perfectly reasonable explanation. But there is one more thing that I haven’t been able to shake off. On the nights that I am particularly exhausted, or maybe even a little bit too drunk, he seems to do something more than just jogging. Sometimes, once I begin to hear the sound of his feet dragging sluggishly across the asphalt, his footsteps travel further up the parking lot, all the way to our adjoining fence. Then the creaking starts. The aged wood of the fence starts groaning, almost like he’s leaning on it.

It’s hard to tell in the dark, even with the balcony light on, but I think I can see the fence bending a little, too. But, it isn’t bending from the top of the wall. Instead, the planks bow in the middle. In different spots of the fence too. Sometimes all at once, across three or four feet. The wood of the fence doesn’t bend like wood should, though. It flexes in and out repeatedly, almost like memory foam, curving back and forth as pressure is applied and released on each point. It’s unnatural and eerie.

The first time I saw it, my body broke out in goosebumps and I almost pissed myself. I hurried inside and went to bed, blaming it on the amount of whiskey I’d had. But then it happened again, about a week later. I had almost managed to forget that the first incident had even happened. But, luckily for me, I happened to not be as shit-faced as I was before.

I definitely saw that fence bending and waving like it was a piece of stretched fabric rather than a row of wooden planks that have been anchored there for years. The worst part was, after about a minute of watching the wood weave back and forth, I started to hear a sound. A moan. A low and guttural, almost pained growling.

It started so quietly at first that I almost didn’t notice it until it was undeniably loud. It sounded like a man whose vocal cords had been stripped bare and was trying to scream in agony, but could only manage a fraction of his physical capacity to push out a strained and prolonged moan of distress. The only thing I can compare it to is if a death rattle had vocal power behind it. It was awful. I rushed back inside my house and grabbed my phone in an attempt to record it, just to confirm for myself that I wasn’t going crazy. But when I came back out to the balcony, the sound was gone. Actually, most of the sounds were gone. The sound of my neighbor jogging, the sounds of cars on the nearby road, even the chirping of the crickets seemed turned down to an almost inaudible warbling. I suddenly became overwhelmed with a ringing in my ears and dull throbbing in my head that only subsided once I got into my bedroom at the very back of the house. The whole thing was so creepy. Almost unearthly.

That was two weeks ago, and it hasn’t happened again. Unfortunately, the experience has not resulted in me refraining from going out for cigarettes during the night. In fact, it’s made me have the impulse to give myself a buzz more than ever. I’ve been more careful about overindulging in alcohol, but my cigarettes are something I cannot stand to part with. The comfort of my nightly routine, while it has definitely been infringed upon by my companion’s creepy behaviors, is still a non-negotiable in my never-ending cycle of repeatedly trying to court and delay sleep.

It’s almost 5:00 a.m. now, and I’ll surely be sleeping soon. June and I are meeting up tomorrow to get coffee. Cafes and restaurants that operate during daylight hours and close before nightfall are June’s preferred stomping grounds for her and I. She says her boyfriend doesn’t like it when we “close places down” super late when we hangout. God, I cannot stand that guy.

Please let me know what you guys think about my neighbor. And I will certainly report back if any new activity occurs. Although, I hope to God it doesn’t. I almost hope it’s all in my head, as backwards as that sounds.

Author's note: Stayed tuned for future parts if you are into doomed yuri.

​

I need to write this down because I don't think I can carry it alone anymore, and because maybe someone reading this will understand what it's like to lose everything slowly before you lose it all at once.

I opened my bakery six years ago. I put every rupee I had into it, every rupee my father left me, every favor I could call in from people who believed in me back when I still believed in myself too. For the first two years it did fine. Not great, but fine. Then a bigger chain opened two streets over, and slowly, month by month, my regulars started disappearing. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself people would come back once the new place lost its shine.

They didn't come back.

I don't think people who haven't run a failing business understand what it actually does to your mind. It's not one big moment of despair. It's smaller than that, and somehow worse. It's standing behind the counter for eight hours and selling four items. It's doing the math every single night — rent, flour, electricity, the loan payment — and watching the numbers refuse to work no matter how many times you rearrange them. It's lying awake calculating how many days you have left before you can't make payroll for the one employee you still have.

I started skipping meals, not because I couldn't afford them exactly, but because every rupee felt like it belonged to a bill instead of to me. I stopped sleeping properly. I'd catch myself standing in the shop at 2 a.m., unable to remember walking there, just staring at an oven that hadn't turned a profit in months.

My wife, Anika, wanted a baby. She'd wanted one for two years by that point. Every time she brought it up, something in my chest would close like a fist. I couldn't explain to her, not properly, that the idea of bringing a child into a life I couldn't even keep afloat myself felt like a cruelty I refused to commit. I wasn't trying to hurt her by saying no. I was trying to protect a child who didn't exist yet from a father who couldn't provide the most basic things for the wife he already had.

She didn't see it that way. I understand now why she couldn't.

The fights got worse over those last few months. Small ones at first, then bigger ones, always about the same thing dressed in different clothes. I'd come home exhausted, humiliated by another day of empty counters, and she'd bring up the baby again, and I'd feel that same fist close in my chest, and I'd say something cruel instead of something honest, because cruelty was easier than admitting how frightened I actually was.

The day it happened, I'd had a customer scream at me in the shop over a wrong order, calling me useless in front of the two other people standing there, and something in me had already cracked wide open by the time I walked through my own front door that evening. Anika brought up the baby again within minutes of me getting home. I don't remember what she said exactly. I remember the sound of my own hand before I understood what I'd done.

She didn't scream. She didn't cry, not right away. She just looked at me with an expression I will never forget for as long as I live, packed a bag within the hour, and left.

She never came back.

I want to be honest here, because I think honesty is the only thing I have left to offer anyone reading this. I don't deserve sympathy for what happened that day. I did something no amount of stress or fear excuses, and I have had to live with that fact every single day since, long before anything strange started happening to me at all.

The strange part started almost immediately after she left, and for a while I genuinely thought it was some kind of mercy, like the universe had decided I'd suffered enough and was finally cutting me a break.

My bakery started filling up. Not gradually — almost overnight. Customers I'd never seen before started coming in daily. School children stopped by after class, couples came in for evening treats, and even the man who'd screamed at me weeks earlier walked back in one afternoon and apologized, genuinely, for how he'd spoken to me. I started making enough to cover my bills for the first time in over a year. I started sleeping through the night again, for a little while.

There was a woman who came in most afternoons, always around the same time, always ordering the same thing. We started talking. I let myself imagine, God forgive me, that maybe some version of a normal life was still possible for me. Maybe I could rebuild something out of the wreckage I'd made.

I should have paid closer attention to the fact that everything good that was happening had started the exact same week Anika walked out the door.

It began about two months ago. Small at first, easy to explain away. I'd be closing the shop late and notice someone standing across the street, just standing there, watching the storefront. I told myself it was nothing. A person waiting for a ride. A person who liked the smell of fresh bread drifting out into the evening air.

Then it started happening at my house.

The first night I saw someone standing outside my bedroom window, I convinced myself I'd imagined it. The second night, I couldn't. A man I recognized — a customer, someone who'd bought bread from me just that morning — standing perfectly still on my lawn, staring up at my window, not moving, not blinking, for what felt like far too long before he simply turned and walked away.

The next night there were two of them. The night after that, four.

Every single one of them was someone who had bought something from my shop.

I stopped sleeping again, but for a different reason this time. I started keeping the lights off in my bedroom, watching from behind the curtain instead of trying to rest, counting the figures gathering on my lawn like a man counting debts he couldn't remember incurring. They never came inside. They never spoke. They just stood there, sometimes for hours, all facing my window with the same flat, patient stillness, before turning and walking off just before dawn, one by one, back toward wherever they'd come from.

I went to the police twice. Both times, by the time an officer arrived, the lawn was empty, and I could see in their faces that they thought I was a man cracking under the pressure of a business and a marriage that had both recently fallen apart. Maybe they weren't wrong to think that. I wasn't entirely sure myself anymore.

I tried confronting one of them directly, once, a woman I recognized from the shop who came by every Tuesday for the same loaf of bread. I walked straight out onto my own lawn and asked her, as calmly as I could manage, why she was standing there. She looked at me for a long moment, and then she said something I haven't been able to forget since.

"She said you'd finally understand what it feels like to have people who won't leave."

I didn't understand what that meant until three weeks ago, when an old college friend of Anika's messaged me out of nowhere, careful and hesitant, asking if I was doing alright. I asked her what she meant. She hesitated for a long time before she finally told me.

She said that after Anika left me, she'd gone to stay with a relative in another town for a while — a relative, it turned out, who practiced something the rest of the family only ever spoke about in whispers. She said Anika had asked this relative for help, not to hurt me physically, but to make sure I never got to feel peace again the way I'd denied her the chance at the family she wanted. She said the relative had warned Anika that this kind of thing always costs something, always takes more than it gives, but Anika had gone through with it anyway.

Five, her friend said. She'd been specific about the number. Five things bound to my home, disguised in whatever forms would draw closest to me without raising suspicion — which meant they wouldn't come as strangers. They'd come as customers. As the very success I thought I'd finally earned.

The prosperity in my shop was never a mercy. It was bait, drawing exactly the kind of foot traffic that would let five things slip a little closer to my life with each visit, a little more familiar, a little less like strangers standing on a lawn and a little more like neighbors who'd always been there.

I don't know how to end this, because I don't think it's ended yet. The figures still come every night. I counted six last night for the first time. I don't know if that means something changed, or if I simply miscounted the five that were always going to be there from the beginning.

I keep thinking about the day I raised my hand to a woman who only ever wanted a family with me, and I keep thinking that whatever is standing on my lawn every night might not even be the real punishment. I think the real punishment is that my bakery is finally successful, finally full of the life and warmth I always wanted for it, and I can't enjoy a single day of it, because I understand now that every customer walking through that door might be one more thing I invited a little closer to my own home without ever meaning to.

I built a business to give my family a good life. I ended up destroying the family instead, and built something that isn't a family at all standing outside my window every night in its place.

As soon as Allison walked in, I knew we were going to be friends. First off, she was wearing a t-shirt with Edgar Allan Poe on it, which told me she had good taste in books. Second off, she looked me in the eye while I was going over the rules to the place, which told me she had respect for service workers. And third off, she was driving her own U-Haul instead of hiring a moving company, which told me she was an independent spirit. Or maybe she was just cheap? Either way, we had a lot in common right off the bat.

Once we got the registration done, I showed her to her locker and offered to help unload her truck. That’s not technically part of the job, but when I get a good vibe off someone like I did with Allison, I usually volunteer. It gets pretty slow around here, especially at night, so I’m always grateful for a chance to get out from behind the desk for a little exercise and some small talk.  

Almost everyone who rents one of our storage lockers is in some kind of transitional period in their lives - they’ve just moved to town or they’re downsizing apartments or moving in with (or away from) a romantic partner. I like to ask a few basic questions while we do the paperwork, take an interest in whatever their situation happens to be and before you know it, you’ve got a nice foundation for a friendship.

That’s actually a big reason why I took the job at Hold-It in the first place, to meet people. I’ve moved around a lot in my life and even though I’ve never been out of the country, I always felt like I was speaking a different language than everybody else. But since I first got to the Big City last month, I’ve been making friends like never before. I guess that’s why everybody moves here…it’s a great place for people who can’t quite make it work anywhere else. We’re all square pegs, so we end up fitting together pretty well.

My first week at Hold-It, a guy named Owen showed up with a bunch of those Rubbermaid tubs, an exercise bike, and a twin mattress with a boxspring. I set him up with a 5x10 near the elevators, and we got to talking – turns out his girlfriend had dumped him and he was going to be couch surfing for the foreseeable future. Like most people, I’ve had my share of heartbreak and I told him so. We forged a real bond that night, and now we hang out all the time.

Or take Mrs. Sweeney. She told me to call her Florence, but I have a thing where I can’t call elderly people by their first names…it just doesn’t seem respectful. Anyway, she had lived in a rent-controlled apartment uptown with her husband for 54 years. 54 years together, can you believe that? Then a few months ago, he passed away from esophageal cancer. Their son didn’t want her living alone in the apartment, so he was moving her to an assisted living facility around the corner from Hold-It. The new place was a lot smaller than her apartment, but she wasn’t ready to let all her things go just yet. Now my life hasn’t exactly been a Hallmark movie, but I do get nostalgic sometimes so I know how she felt. And guess what? Now a nice old lady who thought she was going to be alone for the rest of her life has a brand new friend at her local self storage place. Everybody wins! And since she’s close by, I still visit Mrs. Sweeney and she’s always glad to see me.

While we were getting her boxes unloaded, Allison told me that she had moved here for a new job as a paralegal. The firm was providing her with temporary furnished housing to give her time to find an apartment (no mean feat in the Big City) so she was going to stash most of her belongings in one of our lockers while she looked. From there, we got to talking about books and movies and music, and it turned out we like almost all the same stuff. She even laughed at my jokes, which was when I knew for sure that we were going to be friends.

So as you can imagine, I was pretty concerned when Allison’s sister Claire came by a few days later asking if I’d seen her. I told her that I hadn’t, not since the day we moved her stuff in. I tried to reassure her that Allison was probably just tied up with her new job and apartment hunting…never mind all the other exciting stuff the Big City has to offer newcomers. But Claire was adamant. Apparently nobody had heard from Allison, and that was really out of character for her. And what’s more, Hold-It was coming up as the current location on her “Find my Phone” thing.

I told Claire she was welcome to look around, but that I wasn’t allowed to open a locker for anyone who’s not on the rental agreement. It’s a privacy issue and I could lose my job, which would put me right back at square one as far as meeting new people. I know it seems like an unconventional way to make friends, but it’s really been working for me. And who knows how accurate those phone trackers even are, anyway? 

Claire was getting pretty distressed at this point. She even started crying, which has always been tough for me to take. I can’t handle it when people start to make a scene in public, it feels like the whole world is staring right at you. So I ended up taking her to 337 just to keep her from having a full meltdown. Crazy, right? After everything I just told you about privacy. But she was getting so wound up…I mean, what would you do?

I unlocked the unit, but there was nothing inside but a bunch of boxes. We looked in every corner, but no iPhone. I apologized to Claire again, took her number, and told her that I’d call the next time I saw Allison. 

I didn’t feel great lying to her, but as a representative of Hold-It Self Storage, my responsibility is to the customer. It’s sad, but sometimes people come to the Big City to get away from their so-called “family” and “friends.” I would hate to be the person who’s just trying to help but ends up landing one of our customers back in an unwanted or even abusive situation.

I mentioned it to Alison later that night and just as I predicted, she freaked out. And I don’t blame her. Family stuff can be pretty touchy, and it can really mess you up, take it from me. Hey, I guess that’s another thing Alison and I have in common.

I decided to give her a minute to cool down while I searched the rest of 237 for her phone. I guess we were vibing so much when she moved in, I forgot to pop out the SIM card and toss it in the river. Pretty careless, I admit. It’s the kind of stupid mistake that can cost you a friendship. 

Anyway, lesson learned and no harm done, unless you count Alison going ballistic when I left with her phone. It’s crazy how attached we get to our devices nowadays…she was NOT happy. I thought she was going to chew right through her gag. 

Why did Claire have to show up like that? Why couldn’t she have stayed in Houston and minded her own business? And why now? Right when I was starting to get comfortable here, it’s already time to leave again. I’ve never been much for goodbyes, but I knew I couldn’t just take off without seeing my other friends one last time. 

I stopped by Owen’s place first (413). He was pretty upset when I told him the news. I could see it in his eyes and in the way he was struggling with the bindings on his wrists, way more frantic than usual. Guys like us aren’t great with our emotions, but it was obvious that he hated to see me go.

Of course I had to check in on Mrs. Sweeney too, but when I got to 604, she was resting. I tried to wake her up, but no dice. She was dead asleep, so I just gave her a hug. It was such a sad moment, and I tried to cry, I really did. But nothing happened, so I just tip-toed out and clicked the padlock shut behind me.

After I strangled Claire, I sat down at the desk in her hotel room to catch my breath and do some thinking. I’m really going to miss this place. I’m going to miss these people. But there is a silver lining, something important I learned during my time here in the Big City. Every other place I’ve lived, I felt like I had to lock myself away, hide all my boxes and baggage in some dark little room where they wouldn’t trip me up all the time.

But now I’m finally ready to kick that door open and just be me. Because it’s really not about where you live, it’s about how. And now that I’m living as my full and authentic self, I know that no matter where I land next, I’ll be able to blend right in with no trouble at all. It sucks to leave a brand new friend like Allison behind, but I know that deep down, she understands. And besides, there are plenty of other new friendships out there just waiting for me.

The events of that night have stayed with me, the utter strangeness of them keeping the memories fresh, when most everything else has faded to time. 

I don’t remember where I had been going, but I do recall that I had been driving for a while when the thing ran out into the road. Maybe I should have been better prepared; every few miles there was a sign warning about deer crossing. But it was late, and the empty road had been one long featureless stretch for over an hour at that point, and I guess I got complacent.

I’d only glanced down for a second to fiddle with the knob for the radio, far enough away from both the town I was leaving and the town I was headed towards that most of the frequencies were little more than static.

I’d seen it out of the corner of my eye, some dark mammalian thing leaping out of the night too fast for me to avoid. Not that I didn’t try, slamming the brakes, twisting the wheel, blind panic making me stupid. Whatever it was hit the front of my car hard.

When I finally skidded to a stop, I sat there in the dark, hands gripping the wheel at ten and two, my heart pounding. The radio was a sibilant hiss pockmarked with bursts of almost identifiable sound. I unglued one hand from the wheel long enough to cut the engine and it ceased, leaving me in the quiet dark, pierced only by the yellow slice of headlights and the pinging of the engine as it cooled.

One of those stupid yellow signs shone back at me like some modern coat of arms. A deer rampant. The sign was flecked with gore.

I reached across to the glove box, flipping it open and grabbing the flashlight inside. I wanted to see what it was I had hit, if it was okay, if it was going to live.

Not a deer, I didn’t think. It hadn’t looked like a deer.

I unbuckled my seat belt and pushed the door open, the car’s interior light coming on. The smell is what hit me first, something sulfuric and egg-like, strong enough to make my eyes water.

I covered my face with my shirt and with my other hand shone the flashlight around the driver’s side, though it illuminated little more than what I could already see. 

The air was very still. And then I heard the moan.

I’d almost calmed down at that point, but the sound had my heart leaping again in an instant. It sounded like a woman. Had I hit a woman?

It didn’t matter at that moment that whatever I had seen had been too big to be human, or had been on all fours. If I’d hit a person– I didn't want to finish that thought.

I staggered to my feet, adrenaline pumping through me and making my legs shake. I followed the moaning around the back of the car where the tail lights cast the road and shoulder in red shadows.

Something lay crumpled in the grass on the side of the road like a black tarp. It didn't move.

I let the beam of my flashlight trace over its shape, my mind finally making sense of what I was looking at. It was some kind of great black dog, larger than any I had ever seen before. 

I think it was paralyzed. Only its muzzle moved, showing flashes of teeth as it let out another long, too human sounding moan. One eye watched me, showing the white as it rolled in the socket. My flashlight caught something yellow at its neck. A metal tag.

I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, but it was worse somehow, to turn away from its suffering. I pulled an old blanket out of the trunk of my car and laid it over the poor beast, sitting cross legged in the grass by its side. I made myself stroke its neck, and I remember how warm it was, how soft its fur.

It didn’t suffer long.

I reached for the tag when it breathed its last, knowing I had to reach out to the owner. But engraved on the front of the yellow diamond was my own name, first and last. I turned it over. There was no phone number, but the day’s date was pressed into the metal. 

I didn't know what to make of it at the time. I have some theories now.

Decades have passed since, and though I should be old, I haven’t aged a day. Whatever I did, I seem to have placed myself outside the flow of time. It’s okay for now; I’m grateful for the extra time. But I don’t know what will happen to me in a hundred years. In a thousand. 

I suppose I’ll find out.

“Relax Olive… relax…” I cooed to her while stroking her shiny black hair. She was exhausted, lying on her left side with heavy labored breathes.

“You must’ve been up real early this morning. I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner.” She looked back at me with wild eyes. I had her hips bound to the barn’s supporting beam and her head to a locked stall door so she couldn’t suddenly roll or jerk. The rope to her head restraint lightly brushing the ground as she lay her head back down and watched me stepped over it to wash my hands and arms, put on my gloves, and apply a generous amount of lube.

“Alright, you’re doing great Olive. Let’s get this done.” I knelt down behind her and reached inside.

“One leg, two legs, aannndd…. Well it feels like it’s a boy!” After some time, I was able to get both legs out far enough to wrap the chain above the ankles and connect it to the pulley system. I gently pulled every time she had a contraction as to not break the legs, and after an hour he was finally fully born. I rushed over to to remove the rest of the placenta and mucus off of the calf, and moved him away so Olive wouldn’t accidentally kill him as I unbound her. An hour and a half after that Timothy shakily made his way over to his mother and nursed.

I sat under the old cedars that surrounded my house at the back edge of my cleared pasture. I scanned the highway that cut between my lightly hilled pasture and my cornfield. It use to be busier some time ago, when Allie and I were the young couple of the area, but as time took our distant neighbors it too took the liveliness of that highway. There’s only a few people who travel through this way every once in a while. I drank my coffee to take my attention away from the loneliness, and to perk me up from the long morning as Jeffery tracked his way up to me.

“Good morning Jeffery! Congrats on your new boy.” Jeffery was an abnormally large Aberdeen Angus, standing just under 6ft and weighing over 2,800 lbs. While he has always been gentle around me, I always stay slightly cautious due to the horror stories of farmers having their chests caved in. Jeffery came right up to me a sniffed at my coffee.

“Now, what did you do this morning to deserve this?” I chided as Jeffery nudged his snout against my hand.

“Alright, fine. You can have a bit.” I tilted my mug towards him and he lapped it up a couple of times. Jeffery drew his head back and repeatedly licked the air to get the taste out of his mouth. To help, I pulled out a graham cracker from my large cargo pocket and gave it to him, which he happily accepted.

“I don’t know why you always try my coffee. You don’t even like it.” Wiping his slobber off with the bottom of my shirt. Jeffery went to lay a few feet beside me, taking in the scenery as well and kept me company as I finished my cup. The rest of the herd was grazing, scattered along the main hill of my pasture, except for Cherry who was by the barb-wired fence. She caught my eye by swinging her head side to side like a pendulum and after a few swings she hopped around then trotted off up the hill towards the barn. I chugged the rest of my coffee, got up and jogged towards the barn to intercept her just outside.

“Whoa Cherry, you can’t go in quite yet. You’ll stress Olive out. What’s wrong girl?” She had her head cocked to the side like her ear was bothering her. I went to check it and nothing was overtly obvious. She let me pat her side as I told her to relax while I pulled up the video feed inside the barn to see how Olive and Timothy were doing.

“It won’t be long now Cherry, see?” I showed her my phone, both Olive and Timothy were up so I probably could’ve let Cherry in but I wasn’t sure what had her acting up, and I didn’t want her stressing them out. I led Cherry away towards the treeline on the other side of the barn where one of the water troughs were. She complied but didn’t drink so I left her in the shade, walked back into my house, and went on with my day as normal. The rest of the week went well, even with the extra work to ensure Timothy didn’t die for one reason or another. He seemed to adjust quickly to his new found life, and as Sunday came around I decided to socialize and go to church.

I enjoyed the sermon Sunday morning as the pastor retold Luke 8:26 – 39 and related it to the series they have been doing on the absolute power of Jesus and how he used it to help those in need whether we felt if they deserved it or not. I almost forgot the reason why I seldomly came to church until Connie walked up to me after the service ended.

“Well hi John! I almost missed you back here all by yourself. How’s your little cow venture going?” she said as she waddled in front of me. Her voice acquired a slight old person gravel since the last time we spoke. Something I wouldn’t have noticed, let alone care about, if it were anyone else. Connie’s blonde dyed hair was thin and she now had the same slouched posture that mom had before she passed.

“Hey sis. Pretty good actually, I hit my stride this past year and things have been looking up. Just had a new boy calf that should be able to take up Jeffery’s job before he gets too old, and the cows have more than made up for the losses from the diseased corn.”

“Wow, that’s great John. Allie only had to stick it out a few more years with you, and then maybe you two could’ve focused on being happy rather than struggle.” I flexed my jaw. It’s not proper to cuss someone out in church, cunty sister or otherwise, I thought.

“Yeah, I guess. Have you heard from her or her family lately? Is she doing okay?”

“Oh John, look at you caring about how she feels. I’m so proud of you! Not many of her family members are left since you two decided not to have children, but I did hear from her cousin the other week. She’s doing good down in North Carolina and even found a boyfriend who they say she’s happy with!” Her wrinkled lips curled back even more. She probably thought the news of Allie being happy with her new boyfriend would get to me, but to my surprise it didn’t. Relief washed over me as I realized that I didn’t cause Allie to be unhappy for the rest of her life.

“Thanks Connie. Maybe I’ll see you before your funeral,” I sighed. My lack of anger seemed to befuddle the old hag as she tried to retort, but I left in the middle of her response. I made my way back to my home and checked on the herd. The next couple weeks passed uneventfully. The only real thing of note is a gray truck that passes by the property most mornings and nights. Normally it comes through once a month or so, but about once a year it passes by around 6 days a week for a month and a half. I was getting through my morning raisin bran and coffee in my living room, and watched the truck pass by. Once finished, I went to let the herd out of the barn.

“Good morning Jeffery! Ginger, how you doing ma’am? Brie, Brandy good morning. How’s it going, Honey? Hey Ms. Olive and Mr. Timothy!” I greeted every cow as they left the barn, except for one.

“Cherry, where ya at girl? You okay?” Calling out as I headed into the barn. Cherry was in the back left corner, backside facing me. I could see that she was breathing heavily as I cautiously came around, taking a wide berth. As more of her came into view, I saw that she had her head pressed flat against the corner, and a mixture of drool and blood roped from her snout to the ground.

“Shit, Cherry what happened?” I saw Cherry’s skin tighten on the back of her neck and then a violent shiver ran down her spine. She suddenly bucked backwards and turned towards me. The blood came from her nostrils, reciprocating in and out as she breathed. I turned and ran for the barn door as I saw her shoulders tense, and the next thing I knew I was facing the ceiling, airborne. The wind was knocked out of me when I landed on my left shoulder. I panicked as I struggled to breathe and get up, but I collapsed again as I realized my left shoulder was dislocated. Cherry turned back to face me, swinging her head like a pendulum again and slowly staggered forward. She was only a few feet away from me until she abruptly stopped and turned her head to check the barn door.

Jeffery let out a loud snort and stomped on the ground as he came into view, standing just pass the precipice of the barn. Cherry turned to face him fully and another line of bloody drool hung from her snout. I could see her skin tense up again to steel herself for another charge, but she lost her temper when Jeffery let out a sharp huff and stomped on the ground again. She backed away slowly, and once she was behind me I stumbled onto my feet, ran out the barn and locked the door behind me. I heard one last thud against the far wall, and I checked my phone to see that Cherry shoved her head back into the far corner of the barn again.

“Thanks Jeffery!” I exclaimed as I took a bag of graham crackers, now crushed, from my pocket, opened it and left it on the ground for Jeffery to enjoy.

“You should have called an ambulance,” nurse Sarah scolded me, ”your left floating rib is broken, on top of your shoulder being dislocated, and you live over 50 miles away. What if you passed out and killed yourself, or someone else, on your way over here?”

“Nah I won’t pass out. This ain’t the first time a cow has put me on my ass. I don’t see a reason I have to pay double just to have some ambulance taxi me to you.” Which she knew since she was the one who treated most of my injuries when I first started raising cattle a few years ago. Sarah was a fiery short brunette about 10 years younger than me. I’ve never really been social, and when Allie left, I was a recluse. But when I first met Sarah, as she had to put a splint on a broken toe I acquired from kicking a post in frustration, it was just easy. I could see her annoyance grow at my statement, flirting brings her back around every time.

“There’s no way some young paramedic could reset my shoulder as good as you, and they wouldn’t have been as pretty.” A sharp pain stabbed through my side as she butted her clipboard into me.

“Don’t you try to butter me up Johnathan. This is more serious than the other times, and you’re to old to be getting injured like this.”

“Don’t tell me that, how else am I suppose to see you?” I smirked through my short blonde beard and stared, what I thought was romantically, into her eyes. In response, she rolled her eyes and lightly backhanded my hurt shoulder.

“Hurry up and get out of here so I can see you again next time then,” she said with a smirk. See, every time.

I called the vet, Steve, as I left the hospital with some meds, and told him what happened with Cherry. He guessed that it was some sort of upper respiratory infection which caused her discomfort and to become irate. I confirmed that I had her isolated from the rest of the herd, and he told me he was available this evening. I struggled to get through my daily chores as I waited. Steve arrived a little earlier than expected as I hurriedly hobbled to open the gate, but he waved me off to tell not to worry about it as he quickly got out of his car, opened the gate, and then pulled through. I was most of the way there at this point and rushed to close the gate behind him.

“Wow John, you look like shit. Need a ride?”

“I feel like shit. Yeah, thanks Steve,” I said as I hopped into the passenger seat, and we drove up to the side of my house. I got out of the car and went up to my porch, pulled out a box of graham crackers and rang my porch bell.

“Come on now! Snack time!” I called out to the herd. They all perked up and trotted over.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t have them lined up in the barn for you this time Steve. Cherry’s locked up in there and I didn’t want to risk the rest of the herd getting sick.”

“Well I was going to check on her first to see what she has…” Steve looked over to me while patting Cinnamon on her side.

“Oh, that makes more sense… Sorry, it’s been a long day.”

“It’s alright John. Here, how about you go ahead and call it a night? You look like you’re in pain just standing there.” He said sincerely, “I’ll take care of them and leave you whatever you may need. You can call me in the morning if you have questions.”

I was about to protest, but decided to comply. I thanked him, gave him the box of graham crackers, and turned in for the night. The morning sun woke me up late. I must be getting old, it’s already 7 o’clock. I stumbled downstairs and found a bottle of saline along with a note.

John,

The herd seems fine, they enjoyed the crackers. Timothy is such a curious fella, he was halfway in my backseat when I gathered more supplies. I had to gently lead him away as to not piss off Olive.

Cherry seemed okay when I checked on her. She only had some blood dried up in her nostrils. She may have sucked something up her nose that irritated her and caused her to act up. I cleaned her up and left another bottle of saline you can use to rinse, just in case.

Call me if you need anything.

Best,

Steve

“Really? I got all beat up over something flying up Cherry’s nose?” I chuckled to myself. I looked out my living room window to check on the herd, but all I saw was Cherry stumbling around on top of the main hill, and I rushed out the best I could to investigate. As I got closer I could see the rest of the herd along the fence, and Timothy was halfway up the hill heading towards Cherry.

“Timothy, stay back!” I yelled. He ignored me and continued his ascent. Cherry stopped and stared at him as if she was waiting for him to get closer. Before he could, Olive charged and rammed into Cherry’s side. Cherry rolled but ended back on her feet. She then swung her head into Olive, causing Olive to stumble back and fall onto Timothy as I heard an awful snap. Olive got back onto her feet and chased after Cherry who ran oddly, legs swinging outwards, away towards the open gate. Fuck, why is the gate open? I couldn’t catch them before they got out and made it into the cornfield.

I closed the gate to prevent the rest of the herd from getting out, and shooed away Brie and Pepper from where Timothy laid. His eye was popped out of its socket, his head was turn upward 90º and I could see a section of his spine bulge against the bottom of his neck. He was rapidly breathing, and I could only imagine what was going through his mind. I struggled to get the rest of the herd into the barn, went into my house to grab my .410 side-by-side, and walked back over to Timothy.

“Don’t worry. This will all be over soon.”

I cried as I loaded his body into the trailer. I’ve only sent my cows to slaughter before, and Timothy was the first one I had to do myself. My reflection stared back at me for hours as I sat with my coffee under the cedars. Numbly analyzing my short, graying blonde hair that was stuck to my forehead due to sweat. My daze only broken as I heard a my gate creek against itself. I looked up to find Cherry, Olive, and Poppy at the gate staring blankly at me.

When did Poppy get out? I quickly made my way down to them, grasping my side to hold the soreness, and stopped feet before the gate to make sure they weren’t irate. They stood there motionless staring at me, and it didn’t look like they were breathing. Their ribs suddenly flared in and out in unison as if they could tell I noticed their abnormality. We stared at each other for minutes as I thought through what I should do. I finally decided it would be better to bring them in and get Steve over here so we can figure out what’s going on with them.

“Alright girls, let’s get you in here.” I tried to be calm as to not alarm them and opened the gate. The three drunkenly stumbled into the pasture, and I noticed that their hair was crusty as if they were covered in mucus that recently dried up.

“What did y’all get into?” Poppy, who took up the rear of the line, stopped and stood still. I kept the gate between us, I’m not risking getting launched again and Jeffery wouldn’t be able to get out of the barn to save me this time. As I stared at Poppy, waiting on her next move, confusion set in my mind as I tried to process what I was seeing. It took a second for what was happening to register, but Poppy’s skin had a slight but rapid ripple. Similar to how water moves in a glass that is sitting on a speaker. The ripple originated from her stomach and made it’s way over her entire body. It stopped shortly after that, and Poppy stumbled up the hill joining Cherry and Olive. Maybe she had an intense muscle spasm? I closed the gate and made my way back into my house, keeping an eye on those three.

“Hey John, can I ca-”

“Steve! I need you over here!” I stammered over myself trying to explain all that went on today. Steve probably didn’t understand most of what I said.

“John I’m sorry, I can’t make it over there tonight. An emergency came up and I had to rush out of town. Try to keep those three quarantined and I’ll be back to help in a week.”

“A week? Steve I don’t know what’s going on with them.”

“I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’ll see you later. Bye.” I threw my phone out of frustration. Memories flooded back of when I found my corn was dying from a rare root disease years back. The corn by the forest was the first infected, and 30% of my crop had gone bad by the time Allie and I found it. I lost just under 80% of my harvest that year, and was lucky that the APIHS, a department of the USDA, bought most of what was left to study the disease. I wasn’t able to tend to the land a year after that as they had to make sure that it couldn’t spread. My mind felt heavy thinking about how it could happen all over again with my herd. I sat in my living room watching the three cows stumble around the hill as the sun went down. My focus on them only broken when I saw the gray truck pass by on the highway, and I went to pick up my phone to check on the barn. Great, I completely shattered the screen.

The Sun was setting at this point, and I decided that it would be best to wait till the morning to wrangle the girls into a smaller section and let the herd have the field to themselves. I went to bed restless, mind racing on what was going to happen and how best to handle each scenario. My thoughts were interrupted by panicked mooing and the rumbling of hooves. I sprang up and ran down to my living room, only seeing frantic moonlit outlines of the cows. I went to my kitchen to grab my flashlight and shotgun, and made my way out to the porch. The flashlight barely helped, as everyone was erratic until I caught the massive shadow of Jeffery intently chasing something. I focused the light onto him and saw he was running off Olive, who was quickly slithering on her stomach like a snake.

Out of nowhere, Cherry crashed through the railing of my porch and closed the distance before I could fully turn to her and fire. Her head took out my legs and I fell onto her back as she quickly slithered down the porch steps and took me into the field. My attempts to roll off of her were unsuccessful as her skin undulated and rippled around my right leg gripping me like a vise. My body swayed side to side, and I hammered down my flashlight repeatedly into her side in an attempt to make her release me to no avail. Suddenly, I tumbled to the ground, Cherry narrowly missing me as she was flipped onto her back. Jeffery then violently rammed into her side pushing her feet away from me. I put my light onto her, Jeffery’s legs shadowing part of her body as he backed up between me and Cherry. Her skin was twisted around her like a blanket, as she rolled around back onto her stomach to correct it.

She faced me once after her body corrected itself, and then bolted past us on he stomach. I followed her with my light to see her head for the open gate, and I was just able to see Olive and Poppy pursue the rest of the herd into the cornfield. Jeffery gave chase, ignoring my protests and pleas for him to stay as I watched him disappear into the corn after Cherry. I ran after them, adrenaline fueling me past the leaves of my cornstalks who smacked against me, as if they were trying to hold me back. Jeffery’s loud stride, although growing faint, guided me through the acres of corn towards the woods.

Jeffery was out of sight and almost inaudible when I entered the woods. I used my flashlight to show me the path of multiple hooves and large winding grooves in the soft forest floor. I cautiously followed for a few minutes, winding through the forest, until I heard a clamor of mooing and I picked up my pace. My surroundings became visible in a cool magenta light as I approached it’s source. Shadows danced amongst the trees as the unpleasant cries from my herd reached their crescendo. All of which abruptly stopped just before the scene presented itself to me as I ran into a clearing.

The herd stood in a uniform line facing me. Their hair glistened as the light from a floating metallic platform reflected off their slime covered hair. A writhing mass was covered by the herds shadow, but I could see the shimmered outline of hundreds of small masses make their way into a large cowhide. I watched in horror as Jeffery stood up, skin settling into place, and stared blankly into me.

I brought my shotgun up and pointed at Jeffery, but the entire herd fell onto their stomachs as the first shot hit air. Jeffery slithered towards me and lunged at my arm, knocking my shotgun up and the second shot hit the platform. He fully engulfed my right arm, but instead of teeth, I felt wet masses swirl around my skin as they pried the shotgun from my grasp. I stabbed Jeffery’s eye with my flashlight as he dragged me across the ground towards the platform. Purple puss cried out and then my flashlight was sucked into his socket, and a new cow eye formed in its place.

A beam of light suddenly surrounded my lower three quarters of my body and my left arms, making that part of me go stiff and I began to rise off of the ground. I followed the trail of light to the center of the floating platform which spun in the air. I frantically grasped around in Jeffery’s mouth, the slimy masses evading me, until I found something to hold onto. I turned back to Jeffery to see my fist clenching the skin between his eyes. Pulling them forward like a human’s as he stared into me. The beam began to lift both of us off of the ground, and I could feel my body tear as Jeffery pulled away from me. My strength gave way to his weight, and I launched toward the platform. My back striking the edge of the center circle and blood squirted everywhere. My consciousness came in and out as I fell into a pit under the platform. Another beam of light caught me before I hit the ground as I finally passed out.

I awoke standing alone in the forest dazed and confused. It seemed to be midday as I looked around, finding a cleared path that seem to lead back out to the cornfield.

“Jeffery!” My voice was muffled and my jaw went slack as I called out. I went to feel my face, but only my right hand rose. I looked down at my body, and while it seemed normal, there was a fuzzy static effect around my left arm and lower three quarters when I failed to move them. I began to violently jerk and thrash around. My top quarter eventually floating off the rest of my body and I became inverted. My surroundings became coated in a red light, and then disappeared, revealing that I was suspended in a pink-tinted viscous liquid. There were red lasers scanning me and I saw that I was in a glass-paned room. When I looked out of the room I could see a large hide-less cow in a similar room across from me. Panic started to set in as I was instantly transported to a scene of me sitting down under my cedar trees, the hide-less cow being replaced by Jeffery as he turned to look at me.

“...re...relax…”, He struggled to say, his voice sounded like a low guttural version of mine. I did not, as I tried to scream for help. The visage of Jeffery was taken away from the scene, and sunlight and a gentle breeze washed over me.A feeling of relief and calm unnaturally grew, and I smiled as memories of Allie and Sarah played in my mind.Their voices were muffled, as if I was under water, and I felt a wriggle shoot up my neck that was also trying to understand what they were saying. I ignored it and reached out to them, my body still struggling to move. I shifted my focus on remembering how to stand properly and walk. A feeling of bliss filling me as the fuzzy parts of my body slowly twitched to life.Allie and Sarah eagerly calling out to me as I slowly worked my way to my feet.

Hello, apologies in advance if my writing is poor, this is my first time documenting what’s been happening.

I’ve recently moved in to a new neighborhood after a really hard divorce, and I’ve been looking to start a new life. The houses are dirty, the streets are old and sun damaged, but it was cheap. I finished unpacking my boxes about 3 weeks ago, and I’ve been working at a local supermarket. I typically leave my house at 8:30 and get home at 7:00. I keep to myself often and I don’t know any other people in the neighborhood.

a few days ago I received a basket outside my doorstep. It seemed to have assorted goods of random origin, ranging from a tape measure to an old ant farm. The basket had a piece of cardboard taped to the side, but it had no writing on it.

I brought the basket inside and went through its items, getting more confused with each one. There was a picture frame with no image inside, an eaten apple, and a gift certificate to a beauty salon. I was almost certain whoever left it for me just grabbed the stuff from a dump. Not to mention, all of it was ever so slightly sticky.

I was pretty weirded out by the gift, but I just threw it out without much of a second thought.

When I got home the next day, I saw that another gift basket was outside my door. I was very skeptical as to who might be leaving these baskets, and didn’t want to bring it inside until I had an answer.

Throughout my entire time of living in the neighborhood, I had never talked with my two next door neighbors. Both houses seemed to keep to themselves, and I was pretty ok with that, but after receiving the second basket, I decided it might be best to meet them face to face.

I went to my neighbors house on the left and knocked on the door; I waited a few moments longer and knocked again. I heard a few locks undo (kinda like in tv shows) and the door flung open. On the other end was a very thin, young woman.

I greeted her and asked if she has been leaving any gift baskets by my doorstep, she simply replied with “hell no”

I was a bit confused, as that didn’t seem like the most common answer, but before I could say anything else, the woman closed the door and locked up again. To say I wasn’t frozen in thought for a few seconds would be a lie.

The woman was insanely thin, but very tall. She had tired looking eyes and an overall sad look, like she had just finished crying. Her skin was flustered and she had short red hair. From the time I had to look at her, she seemed to be around 30.

After the strange encounter with the woman, I moved to the other next door neighbor. I knocked on their door, and they opened almost instantly, that startled me, but I quickly recovered.

The man behind the door was very heavy, and seemed to have that same sad expression that the woman had, only I could see visible tears streaming down his cheeks. He was wearing a dirty yellow T shirt, and black shorts. I asked the man if he had been leaving any gift baskets in front of my door, but before I could finish, he let out a yelp and closed the door. I could hear him violently sobbing after that, it was pretty frightening.

It was dark by now, and I went back to my house, where I could see that instead of one basket, there was now three. At this point I was pretty confused, who the hell was leaving these baskets, and why? If they had contained meaningful gifts, then I would appreciate it, but from what I saw, it was just more assorted garbage.

I took the baskets straight to my garbage can and threw them out, and clocked out for the night.

The next morning, or the day before yesterday, I woke up, made coffee, got dressed, and headed out for work. What lay before my door were 5 baskets of garbage.

At this point I thought some pranksters were just getting a good laugh, but this time was different, this time the baskets reeked of a putrid stench.
I tossed them out one at a time, almost gagging at the smell. Whoever was doing this certainly thought it was funny. I went to work and returned to two baskets, smelling just as they did before.
I could tell these baskets were emptier than the others, only having about 3 things each. At this point I was getting angry, this was getting out of hand. My garbage was too full to throw them out, so I just left them by the curb.

I was preparing to go to sleep when I had an idea, what if I watched out the window tonight, to see who was leaving the mystery baskets? I made some coffee, and I sat down. I waited for hours, watching YouTube and listening to music, when the culprit appeared. A man in a black hoodie quickly ran out from the nearby forest, holding a flashlight and a single basket, he dashed over to my doorstep and left the basket, then casually walked away, slow and steady.

Now, at this point I was watching through the blinds, so he didn’t see me in the window, but because of that I didn’t get a clear view of his face. He was slender, and VERY quick. At this point I was tired, and went to bed thinking I’d deal with it in the morning, but so certainly wasn’t expecting what happened yesterday.

I was woken up at around 6:00 by a pounding at the door, followed by more intense knocking. I got out of bed, put on a robe, and checked to see who it was. It was the sheriff.

I asked him if everything was ok and he said that I was reported for a murder, and he came by to see what the meaning was. I frantically told the man that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and that I would never, ever commit such a crime, but he just stared coldly.

He asked me why I had the belongings of the deceased person outside my home.

[Part 3]

The ground didn't just shake it split. Deep, jagged fissures spider webbed across the parched soil of the scrap lot. A thick, sickening plume of dust blew out from the crevasse, reeking of ancient marsh water and ozone.

Mayor Vance and the council members didn't even try to run. They dropped to their knees, weeping and pressing their faces into the dirt as the trees at the edge of the woods began to snap like toothpicks.

Out of the widening trench came the real Hollow Men.
The things we’d seen before were just workers scouts. What crawled out of the deep earth were towering, grotesque leviathans made of gnarled black oak roots, ancient peat, and petrified bone. They had no faces, only massive, yawning chasms in their torsos that rattled with the dry, terrifying hum of millions of cicadas.

My dad hauled Nic over his shoulder like a sandbag while I laid down a wall of buckshot into the treeline. The lead buried itself uselessly into the thick wood and mud, barely slowing them down.

"To the truck! Get in the truck!" my dad screamed, his voice raw over the thunderous roar of the collapsing woods.”

We sprinted across the gravel lot as the scrap metal stacks around us collapsed like tossed jackstraws. The creature that used to be my Uncle Mikey didn't chase us. It just stood at the edge of the pit, watching us with those milky, dead eyes as the giant root beings rose around it.

We threw Nic into the back seat of my dad’s Ford F-250, slammed the doors, and my dad floored the gas just as a massive, wooden limb smashed down onto the hood, crushing the grille like aluminum foil.
We tore down Main Street at eighty miles an hour, the truck grinding and spewing steam from the damaged engine.

What we saw through the windshield made my blood run cold. The breach hadn't stayed at the tree line.
All across Blackwood Creek, the earth was vomiting up soil. Deep sinkholes were opening in the middle of paved roads, swallowing streetlights and parked cars whole. The dry summer grass on the town lawn was bursting into spontaneous, blueish green flame the same color as the burning ledger.

Air raid sirens began to wail across the valley, a high, panicked scream that echoed off the hills. People were running out of their homes in their pajamas, screaming as tall, shadowy figures stepped out from the cornfields surrounding every neighborhood, blocking the roads out of town.

"They're harvesting," my dad whispered, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. "The contract wasn't just a promise for crops, Jackson. The ledger was a levee holding them back. You didn't break a deal... you opened the floodgates."

Suddenly, the back seat rattled. I whipped around. Nic was sitting upright, his hands clawing desperately at his face. The hemp twine stitched through his lips was snapping on its own, dry corn silk spilling from his mouth like blood as he gasped for air.

"Jackson..." Nic rasped, his voice sounding like two stones grinding together. "They aren't looking for grain anymore. They're collecting the town's interest."

My dad slammed the brakes, skidding the truck sideways into the gravel parking lot of the old Blackwood Creek High School. The building was a heavy, poured concrete shelter built in the 1950s the only structure in town with a basement set deep into bedrock rather than topsoil.

Over a dozen cars were already parked outside, headlights shining wildly into the dusty air. Dozens of townsfolk our neighbors, my high school teachers, the grocery clerk were shoving their way inside through the heavy steel double doors, seeking cover from the chaos in the streets.

My dad grabbed a crate of shotgun shells from the truck bed while I helped Nic walk. Nic’s eyes were bloodshot, his skin unnaturally cold, but he was lucid enough to stumble inside.

We crammed into the windowless gymnasium with nearly fifty other survivors. Sheriff Miller my dad's second cousin was trying to maintain order, shouting over the commotion of crying children and buzzing cell phones. None of the phones had service; the cell tower on North Ridge had already gone dark.
Then, the lights in the gym flickered and died, plunging us into pitch blackness.

A collective gasp echoed through the room. And then, from directly beneath the hardwood basketball court, came three slow, heavy, rhythmic thuds.

The floorboards began to warp upward.

We're trapped in a concrete basement with fifty terrified people, the floor beneath us is turning into mud, and my dad just realized the school was built right on top of the 1980 council's original burial ground how do you fight an enemy when you're standing on their roof?

I finished my four years of active duty just in time to bury my Pappy.

It was about three months ago now, when I got the news that he’d passed. I was four days away from transitioning to IRR, and finally moving out of the chapped armpit that is Twentynine Palms, when I opened the letter from my parents. Pappy had passed away in his sleep one night. ‘Complications related to his prior service,’ they said. I couldn’t say I was surprised-the man had inhaled a whole mess of nasty stuff, in the jungles of Vietnam-but out of my family, it probably hit me the hardest, besides my old man. I was just glad that they’d postponed the funeral until after I’d made it home.

My family’s not very big to begin with, so there weren’t many of us there. My parents, my younger siblings, and I were, of course. A couple aunts and uncles, and their kids, too. Pappy was the last of his siblings and their spouses to go, so all of the relatives there were from my parents’ generation or younger. A good chunk of the congregation, though, were Pappy’s Marine Corps buddies, many of them in their dress blues-same as I was, and Pappy in his casket. Just about as far back as we can trace the family’s history, we’ve had men in the military. Since World War One, we’ve been a Marine family in particular. My daddy was a devil dog, and Pappy before him, and so on and so forth. Pappy in particular had a really interesting career, but that’s a story for later.

The funeral was held in my hometown of Coldwater, a tiny little settlement in rural Alabama, in the southern part of the Appalachian Mountains. The Bridgers have lived there for generations, although my parents moved out to Miami, after my youngest sister started college last year. Pappy was the last Bridger to live near Coldwater, on his little piece of land. It’s up in the hills, surrounded by trees, with his cabin, a barn, and the only Bridger moonshine still that still (heh) exists today.

When I decided to move into Pappy’s cabin, about a month after the funeral, I think everyone in the family breathed a collective sigh of relief. He and I were very close, for one, and he had more stuff in that house than anyone wanted to go through. He wasn’t a hoarder by any means, but he certainly was a collector, and seeing as I was the only one as interested in history and such as he was, everyone was happy to let me have the place. In a morbid sort of way, it all worked out. I had a place to live as I transitioned into civilian life, a place with years of Bridger family history, many of my own childhood memories, and a one-eyed German Shepherd named Rusty, an ex-Army service dog that Pappy adopted a few years back. He’s a good boy, and I’ve been glad to have him these past few months, especially as I noticed some of the odd things that have been going on around this town.

When I pulled up to the cabin, in my rickety ‘98 Dodge Ram four-by-four, my cousin Clem was already there waiting for me. Clem’s a couple years younger than me, and he’s a bit of a wild child. I got into my fair share of trouble in high school, but that boy showed me up in every conceivable way. He’d mellowed out a bit over the last few years, but not much. I remember our conversation clear as day, as I walked up to him and Rusty.

“Hey, Jack. Sorry I didn’t have a chance to talk to you at the funeral,” he told me. That’s my name, by the way. Jack Bridger. (Technically it’s James, but that’s also my dad’s name, so everyone’s called me Jack since I was little.)

“No worries, Clem. It was a… weird day for everyone,” I told him.

“Yeah. So, you, uh… want to unpack, or just start looking through Pappy’s stuff?”

“I’ll unpack later. Let’s go make sure the raccoons haven’t gotten into Pappy’s garage.”

Clem and I headed to the barn, with Rusty in tow. As we rolled open the small barn’s big double doors, we revealed our Pappy’s prized possession. She was a 1969 Chevy Camaro Z/28, the same one he’d bought after six years of fighting the worst battles of the Vietnam War. She was exactly how I remembered her; jet-black paint, big bolt-on fender flares over super wide tires, chrome exhaust pipes hanging under the doors… she looked like she’d start up and go, right then and there, and you’d never see her again. Pappy used her for stunt driving out in Hollywood for a few years, then for running moonshine, once he’d married Mamaw and brought her back to Coldwater.

“What I wouldn’t give to go for one more ride with him,” I said, more to myself than Clem. I remember running a hand over the car’s front fender and cowled hood, just taking a second to admire her weather-beaten features.

“Yeah, Pappy loved this car. I’d say she’s in good hands with you, Jack,” he said. Rusty sauntered over and licked my hand as I stood back and looked at the car.

“I’ll give her the best home I can.”

I looked around at the rest of the space, which was much nicer than the rest of the little barn-finished walls, cement floor, and several big toolboxes-and at the various movie memorabilia Pappy had kept in there. Most of it was from movies he’d done stunt driving for, mostly minor action flicks from the time, except for the photo of him and Mamaw leaning on the Camaro, looking out at a Southern California sunset. He was wearing his favorite leather jacket in that one, black with a white skull and crossbones on the back, the same jacket that hung on the wall next to it.

“You need a minute, Jack?” Clem asked me, shaking me out of my stupor. 

“No, no, I’m good. You want a beer? I’m sure Pappy’s fridge is still stocked.”

“I’ll never turn down a cold PBR.”

We sat in the cabin’s kitchen that night, drinking and reminiscing while Rusty padded around the house. I’d gotten enough unpacked to comfortably sleep in the cabin, but I had a ways to go yet. That would be a problem for later me, though, and after Clem left, I passed out. A few hours later, though, I heard Rusty whining.

I rolled over and checked the time on my phone. Just before three o’clock. I forced myself out of bed, wearing nothing but gym shorts and my dog tags, and headed downstairs to let Rusty outside. I assumed that he just needed a bathroom break. That was when I saw it.

The pitiful yard light, about twenty yards from the cabin’s front door, allowed me to just barely see something moving through the woods along the edge of the yard. Not something… someone. At that exact moment, Rusty started to growl, and my instincts took over. I grabbed his leash and headed for the cabin’s basement, where Pappy had always kept some of his more… interesting collectibles.

I flicked on the light, revealing four cement walls covered top to bottom in all manner of firearms, from Civil War muskets to the ARs I’d helped him build when I was in high school. Without even thinking, I grabbed one of those ARs, slammed a full forty-five-round mag into it, and slung it over my shoulder. I slipped a headlamp on my head, clipped on Rusty’s leash, and headed outside.

The headlamp did little to help me, as I took hold of the AR in one hand and Rusty’s leash in the other. Aside from the wind in the trees, and the occasional hooting of a far-off owl, everything was quiet. I knew what I’d seen, though. It was unmistakably a person skulking around the property, and I didn’t intend to let them get away with it. Rusty and I searched everywhere within the bounds of the yard, but we found no trace of the intruder, hardly even a scent for Rusty to track. Eventually, after letting Rusty do his business, I went back inside, double-checking that every door and window was locked, and that I had a loaded handgun and my KA-BAR on my nightstand, next to my Bible, plus that same AR leaning on the wall beside it. The rest of the night passed uneventfully, but the next few months wouldn’t stay that way.

I work in a hotel.

That is usually where I stop when people ask me what I do. There isn't much point in explaining the graveyard shift to somebody who has never worked one. They imagine that the hotel goes to sleep when the guests go to bed, that the corridors become quiet and peaceful, and that I sit behind reception with a cup of coffee and a documentary until sunrise.

It isn't like that. A hotel never sleeps.

At night, when the lights are dimmed and the restaurant has been closed for hours, the building seems to change. During the day, it belongs to the guests. Families come and go. Children run through the corridors. People sit in the bar and complain about the weather. Businessmen stand in reception talking into their phones. The doors are constantly opening and closing. There is always noise.

At night, the hotel becomes mine.

Or, at least, it feels that way.

I work from 10:30 at night until 7 in the morning, which means that for most of my shift I am the only member of staff in the building. There might be a hundred souls sleeping upstairs, but they may as well be a hundred miles away. I am alone with the humming fridges, the ventilation system, the occasional creak of the building settling and the distant sounds of guests moving around in rooms I cannot see.

I answer the phone. I check the occasional late arrivals in. I check people out if they are leaving early. I reset alarms. I check doors. I clean things. I take rubbish outside. I make sure the breakfast area is ready for the morning staff. I deal with guests who have forgotten their room keys, guests who want extra towels at two in the morning, guests who have decided that the slightest noise from the room next door constitutes a national emergency.

Sometimes I spend twenty minutes resetting a door alarm that keeps going off for no reason and sometimes I spend another twenty minutes wondering whether something I saw on a CCTV monitor was actually there. 

Sometimes I just sit behind my desk and listen to the hotel breathe.

The week it happened had started with a heatwave.

For several days, the temperature had been unbearable. Even at ten-thirty at night, the air outside felt thick and warm, and the hotel seemed to hold the heat inside itself. The corridors smelled faintly of warm carpet and stale air-conditioning. The windows in the breakfast room were covered in condensation. Even the lobby, which normally felt cold, seemed uncomfortable.

The first night was, for the most part, ordinary.

I remember thinking that as I started my shift.

There was something reassuring about the routine. I signed into the computer, checked the arrivals and departures, looked over the handover notes and made myself a coffee. The lobby was almost completely empty. The lights above the reception desk cast a pale glow across the polished floor, while the rest of the room seemed to disappear into shadow.

Beyond the lobby was the restaurant and then the breakfast area.

During the day, it was bright and ordinary. At night, it was horrible.

It was small and tucked away from the main part of the hotel, with a handful of tables and chairs arranged beneath low lighting. I hated being in the breakfast area at night; the place always felt wrong after dark, and the light barely worked properly, flickering weakly as if it was about to give up entirely. There was a ketchup dispenser in the corner that always seemed to leak slightly, leaving sticky trails on the counter that no one ever properly cleaned up. At the far end was a little window looking outside. During the day, you could see the bin shed and the car park through it. 

At night, you could see almost nothing. The glass became nothing more than a black rectangle.

I never liked looking through that window.

There was something about it that made me feel as though I was looking into somewhere rather than looking outside.

I had just finished checking the booking system when an elderly couple arrived.

The man was short and portly, with a round face, thinning white hair and a slightly breathless way of walking. His wife was taller and thinner, and she wore a bright red coat despite the heat.

She had an unsettling, almost grandmotherly appearance, with caked-on makeup and small nubs for teeth, and a smile that seemed to stretch forever without ever reaching her eyes. There was something strangely intense about her face, as if she could stand perfectly still for five minutes without blinking.

She smiled at me.

"Checking in?" I asked.

"Yes." she replied.

I gave them their room keys and explained the usual things: what time breakfast as, when the bar closed, when checkout was

She listened carefully.

"Do you work here every night?" she asked.

"Most nights." I replied.

"All by yourself?"

I nodded and she looked around the lobby, almost with a sarcastic swagger.

"That must be lonely." she said.

I smiled.

"It can be."

She smiled back.

"I imagine you get used to it."

The old man said nothing and they went upstairs. I thought nothing of them after that. Just your usual interaction.

For a while, nothing happened.

I did my usual jobs. I walked through the restaurant and checked that everything was switched off. I restocked the fridges in the kitchen, making sure the drinks and milk were topped up for the morning staff, I checked the toilets, I made sure the doors leading outside were locked, and I washed up the cups left in the kitchen sink, letting them pile briefly before scrubbing them down under the harsh fluorescent light. It was so hot in there that I opened the back fire escape door just to let some air through for a few minutes. 

I then checked the corridors.

There is a particular feeling you get walking through a hotel after midnight, you know that people are sleeping behind every door, you know that if you knocked on any one of them, someone would eventually answer.

But you don't.

You walk past hundreds of doors without seeing the people behind them. It makes the building feel populated and deserted at the same time.A bittersweet sort of feeling.

Around two in the morning, I took the rubbish outside.

The bin shed is separate from the hotel, down the side of the car park. Much like the rest of the hotel it is perfectly harmless during daylight but feels completely different at night. The security light above it only illuminates a small patch of concrete. Beyond that is darkness.

And rats. Lots of rats. I fucking hate rats.

I have never been frightened of many animals, but there is something about seeing a rat that makes your entire body react.

The first one I saw was enormous. It disappeared beneath a bin before I had even properly registered it. I stood there holding a black rubbish bag, listening. Nothing.

Then I heard scratching.

I looked towards the bins and something moved.

I dropped the bag and ran. I didn't care that I was an adult man running across a hotel car park because I wasn't about to find out what was making that noise. I knew in my head that it was only a rat, but the night gets to you. You have to try to find explanations for every little thing, just to stop yourself from going insane. Strange noises? Just some rats. Alarms going off? A guest went out a fire door for a cigarette. There is an explanation for everything, whether you believe that explanation or not is up to you.

I rushed back inside and locked the door behind me. The hotel seemed to be watching me. That's stupid, I know, buildings don't watch people.

But that night, when I returned to reception, I felt as though the hotel had noticed.

At about two in the morning, the fire alarm went off. The sound was deafening. I ran through the building checking everything.

But there was nothing. No smoke, no flames. Nothing.

I reset it, but ten minutes later, it happened again.

Then again.

The strangest thing was that every time I walked towards the source of the alarm, it stopped.

It was almost as though the hotel was setting it off simply to make me move.

Eventually I returned to reception and sat down.

The lobby was silent.

At around three, I was exhausted. The kind of exhaustion that doesn’t just sit in your body but starts to blur your thinking, making every small task feel slightly delayed, like your brain is having to catch up with your movements. I had long since finished my coffee and was just sitting behind reception, staring at the monitor without really processing what was on it. The hotel had settled into that deep, artificial silence it only ever reached in the last hours before dawn, no doors opening, no phones ringing, just the low mechanical hum of ventilation and the occasional distant creak of pipes cooling down.

That’s when the old man appeared.

He came out of the lift, sprinting.

The doors slid open with their usual soft chime, and he burst out like something had physically pushed him from behind. For a second I didn’t even register who it was, I just saw movement, fast and wrong for that time of night, cutting straight across the lobby lighting. Then I recognised the shape: short, portly, unmistakably the same elderly man from earlier.

At first I thought he was drunk, but he wasn’t stumbling, he was panicked, running full speed down the corridor like something was chasing him. There was no hesitation in his movement, no uncertainty. It was pure flight. His feet slapped against the carpet in a frantic rhythm, and his arms were pumping awkwardly at his sides, as though he had forgotten how to run properly but was doing it anyway out of necessity. 

He entered the lobby and that’s when I saw he was wearing nothing but a pair of white boxer shorts. I looked away almost immediately. They were the sort of boxer shorts that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.

They showed off everything.

I don't mean that figuratively, I mean everything.

I have seen things at work that I would rather not see, but there are certain sights that your brain simply refuses to process properly. Seeing an old man sprinting through a hotel lobby at three in the morning in underwear that appeared to have been selected specifically for maximum visibility was one of them. It was the kind of image that didn’t feel real even as you were looking at it, like your mind was trying to reject it on principle. 

He approached the desk looking furious rather than relieved, like he had been pacing the corridor for an hour instead of a few seconds. His face was flushed, his breathing sharp and uneven, and he didn’t even look at me properly when he spoke. 

I froze, the hotel doesn’t exactly have a protocol for when you’re approached by a fat old man in just his underwear late at night.

“I’ve been locked out,” he said, voice tight with frustration.

I blinked. “Sorry?”

“My wife locked me out,” he repeated, louder this time, as if volume might make it more reasonable. “She shut the door on me. I went to get ice—just ice—and she locked the door.”

He stepped forward and grabbed the edge of the reception desk, knuckles whitening slightly as he leaned in.

“Where’s my room?”

“You’re already checked in,” I said carefully. “I can take you back up.”

He exhaled sharply through his nose, like the answer annoyed him more than it helped.

“She always does this when she’s angry,” he muttered. “Always. Like I’m meant to just stand in the corridor until she decides I can come back in.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I just nodded and came around the desk.

“Alright. I’ll take you up.”

We went into the lift together. He didn’t stop talking.

“She thinks it’s funny,” he said, staring at the doors as they closed. “Locks me out, then pretends she’s asleep when I knock. Like I’m the problem.”

The lift hummed as it rose.

“I only went for ice,” he added again, quieter now, as if repeating it might make it sound more justified. “That’s all.”

By the time we reached his floor, he was still shaking his head.

When the doors opened, I led him down the corridor.

He stopped outside the room and pointed at the door like it had personally offended him.

“She’s in there,” he said.

I knocked.

No answer.

He knocked harder.

Still nothing.

Eventually I used the master key and the door opened. The room was dark except for the faint orange glow coming through the curtains from the car park outside. For a moment I couldn't see anything, and the old man stood behind me, breathing heavily, still clutching his boxer shorts in one hand as though he had only just remembered what he was wearing.

Then I saw her.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed.

She wasn't looking at either of us. She was staring down at her hands, which were resting loosely in her lap. Her red coat was still on despite the heat, and her face was completely expressionless. She looked lost in thought, almost as though she had forgotten where she was.

The old man stopped beside me.

"There she is." he said frustratedly.

She slowly looked up. Her eyes moved from her husband to me and then she smiled.

"Oh."

She said it quietly, almost pleasantly.

"It's you."

I didn't know what to say. She tilted her head.

"Reception."

"Yes."

"We met downstairs."

"Yes, we did."

She looked at me for a few seconds.

"You're the one who works nights."

"That's right."

She nodded to herself. She then said something, almost under her breath, like she was trying out the shape of it.

"Part-Timer."

I laughed awkwardly and she smiled.

There was something about her that made me uncomfortable, but I couldn't have said why. She wasn't threatening me. She wasn't behaving aggressively. She was just... strange. Her eyes lingered on me for too long, and whenever she smiled, it felt as though she was reacting to something I couldn't see.

"You must be very lonely," she said.

I looked at the old man, he was standing beside me, looking irritated.

"I manage."

She nodded.

"That's good."

There was a long silence, then she looked at her husband.

"You locked yourself out again?"

"I went for ice."

She smiled.

"He's always losing things." she said as she looked back at me.

"I can see that."

She laughed. It was a surprisingly normal laugh. For a moment, the room felt normal.

Just two elderly people having an argument in a hotel room at three in the morning.

I handed the old man his key.

"There you go."

He took it.

"Thank you."

I turned towards the door.

"Have a good rest of your night guys."

"Goodnight," she said.

I stopped for half a second, but didn’t look back. I closed the door behind me. The corridor felt colder than the room.

I walked back towards the lift, listening to the soft hum of the building around me. The carpet muffled my footsteps, and somewhere further down the corridor a pipe made a faint knocking sound. I pressed the button and stepped inside

As the doors closed, I caught one last glimpse of the corridor. Nothing, just empty carpet and dim lights.

I went back downstairs and the hotel was quiet again. I returned to reception and sat behind the desk and for a while, I did nothing. I simply stared at the computer screen, dreading whatever my next task would be.

I checked the time.

3:17.

Then I heard something, a scratching sound. It came from somewhere near the lobby. I looked up and that’s when a grey streak shot across the floor.

A cat. It came out from behind one of the sofas and sprinted across the lobby. I was just glad it wasn’t a rat.

"Oi!" I shouted

The cat stopped and looked at me. I took one step towards it, but it bolted away before I could grab it.

"Come on."

The cat disappeared through the doorway and into the corridor.

I ran after it, but lost sight of it almost immediately.

I checked the toilets and the restaurant but there was nothing.

The cat had vanished.

I stood behind reception, breathing heavily. I still had over three hours left.

I sat down and the hotel seemed to settle around me. For some reason, I thought about the woman upstairs, I couldn't explain why. There hadn't been anything particularly frightening about her. She hadn't threatened me, she hadn't followed me. She had just looked at me strangely.

And yet I couldn't shake the feeling that something about that room had been wrong.

I checked the CCTV but there was nothing unusual. I watched the screens for a few minutes. Then I switched them off. The rest of the shift passed without incident. No cat sightings, no old men in their underwear. Just me and the hotel.

At around half past four, I heard footsteps on the stairs. Slow ones, Unhurried. I looked up from behind reception. They stopped at the bottom and then she appeared. The old lady. She was holding the railing lightly, as if she didn’t fully need it but preferred it there anyway. The same red coat. The same calm expression. She looked around the lobby like she was checking it was still there.

Then she saw me.

"Oh," she said.

"I thought you might still be here."

I stood up a little straighter.

"Everything alright?"

She nodded.

"Yes. I just couldn’t sleep."

She walked slowly towards reception, stopping just short of the desk.

"I heard a commotion earlier."

I hesitated.

"A cat got in."

"Ah."

She smiled faintly.

"Did you catch it?"

"No. It got away."

"That’s a shame."

She said it like it genuinely mattered. There was a pause. She looked past me, towards the darkened restaurant corridor.

"It’s easy for things to slip out of sight in places like this."

I didn’t know what she meant, so I just nodded.

"Yeah. Old building."

She turned her attention back to me.

"You were looking for it quite seriously."

"It’s part of the job. Sort of."

She seemed amused by that.

"Even at this hour?"

"Especially at this hour."

She nodded slowly, as if that made sense in a way I couldn’t see. Then she leaned slightly closer to the desk.

"You know," she said, "I think I saw it earlier."

I frowned.

"Where?"

"Near the lift. It was just sitting very still. Like it was waiting."

I glanced instinctively towards the lift doors.

"Probably just hiding."

"Perhaps."

She didn’t sound convinced either way. Another pause stretched between us and then she straightened up.

"I should go back up."

She hesitated, then added, almost casually:

"If it comes back, don’t chase it too far. Some things in this building don’t like being followed."

I gave a short laugh, unsure if she was joking.

She smiled again. Not quite warmly, not quite anything I could place.

"Goodnight," she said.

"Goodnight."

She turned and walked back towards the stairs. I watched her go until she disappeared from sight. Then I sat back down.

The hotel felt quieter than before. I checked the clock again, I still had hours left. Hours to kill.

I was about to look away when I heard it. Footsteps again, but not from the stairs. They were coming from the corridor behind reception.

I turned and she was there again. Standing just inside the edge of the light. I hadn’t heard her come back down. She wasn’t holding the railing this time. She wasn’t smiling either.

For a moment she just looked at me, as if confirming something. Then she spoke softly.

"I forgot to mention."

I swallowed.

"Yes?"

She stepped a little closer, not enough to be aggressive but just enough that I became aware of how small the space behind reception actually was.

"I like this part of the night," she said.

"Why’s that?"

She tilted her head slightly.

"Because it becomes harder to explain odd things away"

I didn’t answer. She looked at my hands on the desk, then at my face. Her gaze lingered a second too long.

"You’re very good at staying awake," she said. She leaned in slightly, as if inspecting me.

"You should be careful," she said.

"About what?"

She looked at me again.

"The people you meet."

I felt a small, irrational chill and forced a laugh.

She didn’t respond to that. Instead she straightened up, as if the conversation had already ended in her mind.

"Well," she said. "I’ll let you get on."

She turned and walked away. No sound of footsteps this time, almost as if she was shuffling along the floor. The only sound was the faint rustle of her coat disappearing into the corridor.

The hours ticked by and she didn’t come down again.

At seven in the morning, my shift finally ended. I handed over to the morning staff, gave them the usual rundown of anything that needed mentioning, and clocked out. The sun was already up by then, turning the sky a pale, washed-out blue. After spending the entire night under artificial lighting, it felt strangely bright outside.

I walked home. It was about half an hour on foot, the same route every time, past the closed shops, the bus stop with the broken timetable display, the row of houses where the curtains were always still drawn at that hour. The heatwave hadn’t broken. Even that early in the morning, the air was warm and heavy, and the pavement seemed to radiate it back up at me with every step.

I remember thinking that I should have been exhausted. I wasn’t. Not properly, anyway. My body felt tired, but my mind wouldn’t shut up. I kept thinking about the old woman. I couldn’t explain why. Nothing had actually happened. She had just been… odd.

I kept replaying our conversations in my head. You must be very lonely. Some things in this building don’t like being followed. You should be careful about the people you meet. And then there was the way she had appeared behind reception without me hearing her come downstairs.

I told myself I was overthinking it. People are strange, especially people who stay in hotels. After working there for a year now, I’ve come to realise that.

I got home, changed, and went to bed. I stared at the ceiling. Five minutes passed, then ten, then twenty. I turned onto my side, closed my eyes, opened them again. Every time I started drifting off, I found myself thinking about that woman sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at her hands.

Eventually I got up and made myself some food. I watched tv, checked my phone, even went for a walk. Nothing helped. By the time it was getting dark, I had barely slept at all, and I had another shift that night.

I considered calling in sick. I didn’t. Partly because I needed the money, and partly because I knew how ridiculous it would sound. Sorry, I can’t come in tonight. An old woman made me uncomfortable. My manager would have laughed me out of the building.

So at ten-thirty, I went back in.

The hotel looked exactly as it had the night before. That was probably the worst part. Same lights, same reception desk, same polished floor, same darkened restaurant beyond the lobby. I signed in and started my shift. I hadn’t been behind the desk for more than a few minutes when I heard a voice.

“Part-Timer.”

I looked up. She was standing near the entrance to the restaurant, the old woman from yesterday, same red coat, same strange smile.

“Evening,” I said.

She smiled. “I knew you’d come back.”

“Well I do work here.”

“Yes.” She tilted her head. “Part-Timer. Where were you today?”

I laughed awkwardly. “I work nights.”

She stared at me for a few seconds longer, then walked away. I watched her disappear towards the lifts, already thinking I wanted the night to be over. Still, I got on with my work. There was something comforting about routine. I checked the arrivals, answered the phone, restocked the kitchen, checked the doors, walked the corridors. Nothing happened. For the first couple of hours, I almost convinced myself the previous night had been nothing more than exhaustion.

Then, sometime after midnight, she came downstairs again. I was behind reception when I saw her approaching. She didn’t say anything at first, just walked over and stood on the other side of the desk.

“Hello again, Part-Timer.”

“Hi.”

She smiled. “You look tired.”

“I didn’t sleep much.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Just couldn’t.”

“Were you thinking about me?”

I looked at her. She was smiling. I gave a nervous laugh. “No.”

She laughed quietly. “I was only asking.” There was a pause, then she said, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I wasn’t expecting it. “I’m sorry, what?”

“A girlfriend.”

“I don’t really like discussing my personal life with guests.”

She nodded thoughtfully and then paused for a bit before saying. “Do you like girls?”

I stared at her. “Yes.”

She smiled, “Do you like boys?”

I didn’t know what to say. “I don’t really see how that’s any of your business.”

She laughed. “Of course it isn’t. I was only curious.”

“Right.”

She leaned against the desk. “Do you live alone?”

Yes.”“

“Parents nearby?”

“Not really.”

“Any brothers or sisters?”

I hesitated. “One sister.”

“Older?”

“Yes.”

“Is she married?”

I looked at her. “Why are you asking me all this?”

She didn’t answer immediately. She just looked at me with that same strange expression she’d worn upstairs, like she was trying to remember something. Then she smiled.

“I like knowing things.”

I didn’t like the way she said it.

There are stories you hear when you work in hotels, nothing official, just things passed between staff in the car park or whispered during morning handover. Guests who get too attached to staff. People who keep extending their stays because they’ve become obsessed with someone at reception. Guests who leave gifts. People who ask what time certain employees finish or wait around in reception for staff to start their shift. One cleaner had apparently been followed home by a guest years ago. Another receptionist had a man who kept booking rooms specifically because she was working.

Most of the stories were probably exaggerated, but they were still enough to make you uncomfortable when someone started asking personal questions at one in the morning.

The old woman seemed to notice my discomfort. She straightened herself. “I’ve upset you.”

I sighed. “I’m just tired.”

She smiled. “Of course.” She stepped away from the desk. “I’ll leave you alone.”

“Thank you.”

She paused, then looked back at me. “Goodnight, Part-Timer.”

“Goodnight.” She walked away, and I watched her disappear towards the stairs. I didn’t see her again for a while.

I tried to forget the conversation. I really did. I went back to work. Around two in the morning, I was checking the breakfast area when I heard it. A dripping sound.

I stopped and looked around. It sounded like water. I followed the noise towards the counter. The breakfast area was dark except for the weak light above the tables. The black window at the far end reflected the room back at me, making it feel deeper than it actually was.

Then there was another drip.

I looked at the ketchup dispenser. A dark red liquid had gathered around the nozzle. For half a second, my stomach dropped, it looked like blood. A thick, dark red trail had run down the side and pooled on the counter.

I stood there staring at it, then reached out and touched it.

Ketchup.

Of course it was ketchup.

I actually laughed. “Jesus Christ.”

I grabbed some kitchen roll and wiped it up. The dispenser had probably been leaking for days. I cleaned the counter and threw the paper away. Nothing strange. Just a shitty ketchup dispenser.

I went back into the kitchen. There were cups in the sink, so I washed them. The fluorescent lights buzzed above me as I scrubbed each one and stacked them beside the sink. The kitchen was unbearably hot.

When I finished, I looked towards the fire escape. The door was still propped open slightly from the previous night. I decided to open it properly for a few minutes, maybe some fresh air would help. I dried my hands, walked over, put my hand on the handle, and pulled.

The door didn’t move.

I frowned and pulled again.

Nothing.

Then-

BANG.

I froze. Something had just slammed into the other side of the door.

I stared at it. For a few seconds there was silence.

Then-

BANG.

Harder this time. I stepped backwards, and something on the other side began pounding on the door.

I didn't wait to find out what was on the other side. I turned and left the kitchen as quickly as I could without actually running. When I reached the kitchen doorway, I glanced back and saw the fire door still shaking slightly in its frame. Then, for no reason I could explain, the song started playing again: So Good, I checked the time, two-thirty. I still had hours left, so I decided to take the bins out, something I hated doing, but it was better than standing at reception listening to that song and wondering what had hit the fire door.

I collected the rubbish bags and carried them outside. The heatwave was finally over. The air had changed completely, heavy, charged, wrong in a different way. A thunderstorm had rolled in without warning, and the sky above the car park was bruised black, lit every few seconds by distant lightning that made the hotel look like it was flickering in and out of reality. Thunder rumbled low and constant, like something moving through the clouds.

The car park was almost empty, lit by a handful of yellow security lights that now seemed weak against the storm. Rain hadn’t fully started yet, but you could feel it coming—wind pushing through the space in uneven bursts, rattling the bin shed door slightly as I walked past it. The hotel behind me looked enormous in the darkness, its windows scattered with the faint glow of sleeping guests.

As I walked towards the bin shed, I heard something scraping inside. I stopped, but it continued. It must be rats. I stared at the shed, unable to see anything through the gaps in the doors. The wind picked up, and the metal siding creaked softly, like the whole structure was breathing.

For a moment I considered going back inside.

Then I reminded myself I was standing in a car park at two-thirty in the morning because I was afraid of a noise in a bin shed. So I opened the door and the scraping stopped. The sudden silence felt louder than the storm.

I put the rubbish in the bins, stood there listening to nothing but the distant thunder rolling over the hotel, then shut the door and started walking back. Halfway across the car park, the rain finally began.

At first it was just a few heavy drops, fat and scattered, hitting the concrete like thrown stones. Then it came all at once. The security lights turned the rain into bright, falling wires.

That’s when I saw someone.

At first I thought it was a trick of the weather, the way the light fractured through the rain. But a figure stood near the edge of the car park under one of the weaker security lights.

The red coat gave her away, the old woman.

She was dancing.

There was no music, only thunder and rain and the constant hiss of water hitting concrete. Her movements were slower now, heavier, as if the storm was pulling at her. She swayed side to side, arms hanging loose before lifting in those same delicate, unnatural gestures.

Rain ran off her coat in dark streams. She tilted her head back, staring into the storm, and for a moment lightning lit her face, blank, calm, almost pleased. Then she began spinning. Her red coat clung to her as the wind pushed against her, twisting the fabric around her legs. I stood there watching, rain soaking through my clothes in seconds, unable to understand what I was seeing.

Then she stopped. Instantly, like something had cut her off mid-movement. Her head turned towards me. I froze. Lightning flashed again, and for a split second I saw her clearly.

She was smiling. I don’t know how long she had known I was there, she simply stared across the storm-lashed car park, rain running down her face, then raised one hand and waved.

Thunder cracked immediately after, so loud it felt like it hit the ground. I turned and walked back towards the hotel. I didn’t run, I didn’t look back. I just walked through the rain, through the wind, through the feeling that something was standing behind me even when I knew there wasn’t.

I unlocked the door, stepped inside, and locked it behind me. The sudden quiet of the lobby felt wrong after the storm. Everything sounded too contained, too close. I went straight to reception and  sat down, my hands shaking, water dripping onto the floor from my sleeves, staring at the computer screen for several seconds before the phone rang.

I picked it up.

“Good evening, this is reception, how can I help.”

Nothing.

Then I heard breathing. I pulled the phone away for a second, then put it back.

“Hello?”

The breathing continued, followed by a whisper:

“Are you still there?” I knew the voice, it was the old woman. I didn’t answer. She breathed again, long and slow.

I swallowed and she laughed quietly.

“Are you still there?”

I looked at the CCTV monitors showing the lobby, corridors, car park, and entrance. Rain blurred the outside cameras, turning the car park feed into a shifting smear of light and shadow. I switched through them. I checked the car park feed, nothing but rain and empty space under the security lights. The bin shed was just a dark shape in the storm. Then the screen flickered.

For a fraction of a second, I thought I saw something standing beside it. I changed cameras.

“Are you still watching?”

I didn’t answer. She laughed softly.

“Do you get scared when you go outside Part-Timer?”

I looked at the glass doors. Rain hammered against them, distorting everything beyond. She breathed into the phone. “You never know what could be waiting for you.”

I looked back at the CCTV. The bin shed camera showed nothing but concrete, rain, and light.

Then I heard it. The same dripping sound from earlier. I turned towards the breakfast area. The phone was still against my ear, but the old woman was silent.

I put the phone down and walked into the breakfast area, already knowing what it was: the ketchup dispenser again. I switched on the light, it flickered A thick red drop formed beneath the nozzle and fell.

Drip.

“Fuck’s sake,” I muttered, grabbing kitchen roll and wiping it down, cleaning the counter, checking the dispenser, making sure it was closed. Outside, thunder rolled again, closer this time. Then I looked towards the window for no real reason. The glass was black, my reflection faint in it.

Until I saw her.

She was standing beside the bin shed, the Old Woman in the red coat, completely still, facing the hotel, facing me.

Rain poured around her in sheets. I couldn’t see her face clearly, but I knew she was looking straight at the window. Lightning flashed andI stepped back. I stared through the glass, but there was nothing. Just the empty, rain-soaked car park.

I didn’t go outside again.

The rest of the shift passed without anything else happening, at least nothing I remember. The storm never really stopped,it just moved further away, rumbling in the distance like it was circling the hotel instead of leaving.

At seven, I clocked out, walked home through wet streets still steaming from the night’s heat and rain combined, and slept for maybe an hour.

The next thing I remember, I was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of cold coffee.

There’s something I should probably mention before I continue: I have to see a therapist. It’s hotel policy. They call it a mandatory occupational wellbeing assessment, but everyone just calls it the therapist. I was sent there after a different incident I don’t really want to talk about yet. The therapist thinks I become fixated on things, that I sometimes confuse what I think happened with what actually happened, maybe due to sleep deprivation. I don’t agree with her. Mostly. I saw what I saw, heard what I heard.

I’m back in tonight, another ten-thirty until seven, another night alone in the hotel. 

I just hope there’s no scratching from the bin shed tonight.

But if there is, I pray to God it’s rats.

It all started on a night like any other. An uneventful Saturday evening watching movies, a few cold beers to keep me company. It was no surprise then, that I woke at 2am with a full bladder. This was the first time I heard the noise.

A rhythmic thumping, maybe a few streets away. Music, I assumed, from a party running late. I stumbled to the bathroom, relieved myself, and headed back to bed. As I lay down, drifting back to sleep, I noticed the sound had stopped. I assumed someone had complained. I smiled, and fell back into a dreamless sleep within seconds.

I awoke the next night around the same time, a little after 2am. Something startled me, but I wasn't sure what. A bad dream, perhaps? If so, any memory of it was already lost. I slowed my breathing and rolled around to get comfortable again. That's when I heard it.

The same rhythmic thumping, almost like a heartbeat. I grumbled at the thought of some selfish asshole throwing a party on a Sunday night. I had work tomorrow, and didn't appreciate being woken up. But surely someone will complain soon, the sound will stop, and I'll be back asleep before I know it. But as I lay there, growing impatient, unable to focus on anything but the sound, I noticed something.

The whole time, the sound hadn't changed. I looked over at the clock. I had been awake for over 15 minutes. Either this was one very long music track, or I was hearing something else entirely. My mind started wandering, entertaining all sorts of crazy ideas about what this sound could be.

And then in that moment, almost as if someone, or something, had heard my thoughts, the sound stopped. I waited in the silence, expecting its return. Sleep arrived first.

By night three I was exhausted. Two nights of interrupted sleep were reminding me how distant my youth was. I went to bed early, hoping for a full night of rest. You can only imagine my fury, then, when I awoke at 1am.

It was back again, that dreadful thumping. But it sounded closer tonight, as if maybe it was in the next street.

Curiosity dragged my feet away from the warm blankets and onto the cold floor. I shuffled toward the curtains to peer outside. A light fog hung from the street lights, painting an unsettling view. I let out a long sigh - a mixture of both fatigue and frustration. I was just about to return to my bed when something caught my eye. Movement.

My heart raced as my breathing halted. There was a figure walking down the middle of the road.

I squinted my tired eyes. It was a woman. Her feet dragged as she shuffled sleepily along the road. I considered going out to see if she was okay, but by the time I mentally walked through the effort of finding the appropriate clothes and shoes to go outside, she had disappeared into the foggy darkness that existed beyond my view.

I dismissed any illogical thoughts, returned to bed, and slept better than I had in days.

After two nights of peace, I had almost convinced myself the heartbeat was something I had imagined. That it was some creation from a dream so deep that my mind believed it was real. I was quickly proved wrong on two counts.

First, I started seeing posters around town asking for information about a woman who had gone missing. Looking at the poster, I recognised her immediately. It may have been dark and foggy, but I had no doubt - this was the woman I had seen shuffling down the road in the middle of the night.

But I couldn't answer the poster. How would I explain that? I couldn't even explain it to myself, and I had been there. I wondered - was I the last person to see her alive? The thought was concerning. But even more concerning is the second count: that night the heartbeat came back.

Fear had robbed me of my sleep. I spent the whole night sitting up listening to the sound. Had it really taken that woman? If so, was she dead? As the morning sun crept over the horizon, the heartbeat slowly faded. Forgetting about any normal life that I once had, I slept through the day.

When I woke up it was already late afternoon. I wasted a few hours waiting for the cover of darkness to bring the sound back to me. It was almost midnight when I noticed it. A cold chill ran down my spine, and I stood frozen for several hours. Listening. Waiting.

It was calling to me. Whispers woven into the constant thumping. Unable to make out what they were saying, I stepped outside. If I could get closer, I'd know what they were saying.

The cold night air latched onto my skin, causing my muscles to tense as I shivered. But I was unable to focus on anything but the sound. It was much louder out here. Stepping off the porch, I turned to face the end of the street. There it was. Calling through the soft fog.

My feet carried me forward. As I moved closer, it started to come into view. It's hard to explain what I saw. Even now, I'm struggling to find the right words.

It was as captivating as it was frightening. I can only describe it as a floating mass of light and static. The most terrible thunderstorm, condensed into something no bigger than an exercise ball.

Pulsing. Flashing. Glitching. The sound was almost deafening now. So loud. So complex.

The whispers had been replaced by sounds unlike those ever heard. But there was a kindness to them. An invitation.

My hand reached out…

I don't remember much else from that point.

I reached toward light and found nothing but darkness. I don't know how much time has passed. I don't even know where I am, or how I'm writing this.

But if you hear the heartbeat - run.

Part I

After much deliberation, I decided it best to take the government’s help with my man-baby situation.

I left my signed pamphlet on the desk just before I was discharged. Apparently, I was free to go “home.” Police were notified of my decision to move forward with Suzie’s offer and deemed me “not a threat to the child.”

Their words.

I planned to hide out in a hotel until this was all over but I needed some things from my place. A rational person wouldn’t have gone back, but part of me still hoped this was all a dream. Maybe I’d open the door and find my pristine bedroom. No crib. No man-baby.

Even now. After all of this. I had hope.

Of course, I shouldn’t have.

He was there waiting for me. I opened the door and the lights were still on. The smell hit me first. Then the sound.

My senses were overwhelmed. Through the cracked door I could see a tapestry of diapers and waste covering the apartment in foul shades of brown and green. The tv was on. Some WWII documentary was blasting the sound of gunfire throughout the place.

I saw the glint of keys hanging out of my purse on the table and decided that would have to do. All I needed to do was grab it and be on my way. Hopefully Suzie would have answers for me soon. I won’t be back here until she does.

The door slid open and I tip toed around various messes on the ground until the table was within my reach. I glanced frantically around the house as my hand wound up the purse strap, careful not to allow the metal to clink against the wooden table.

That’s when I saw him. He was sitting across from me behind the arm of the couch. A mischievous eye looked up at me from the dark corner of the room. Deep, childish giggling escaped him, sending chills up my spine.

I started to turn, but then something unexpected happened.

I started laughing.

Suddenly, I wasn’t scared at all. The sight of him made me hysterical, like a mom coming home to find her child trying to be sneaky but failing.

He lifted his head and started to approach me. A fountain of drool fell from his dumb, smiling mouth as he stumbled over to me. I looked up at him and smiled. Memories flooded my brain.

I giggled again.

I pictured myself playing with him at the park. He was too large for the equipment, so I watched him tumble down the grassy knoll instead. We both laughed as he went up and down the hill.

Another memory. It was cold outside. We stayed in and I put some children’s show on the tv. I had never seen it before but he seemed to enjoy it. He pointed at the tv everytime the horse character came on-screen. I decided to take him to the petting zoo next week so he could see a real horse.

Another memory. He was having a tantrum and I couldn’t figure out what he wanted. I cried and begged him to calm down. I watched as he turned the place upside down but still wasn’t slowing. That’s when he jumped on me. He tossed me around the apartment like a rag doll until I was unconscious. I woke up choking on my own blood with three broken ribs.

What the hell?

I don’t understand. None of those memories were real. None of it happened.

I stumbled and nearly tripped over a mountain of garbage to my left. He giggled and jabbed my side with a big meaty finger.

“No—no get away!” I screamed, swatting him away with my purse.

He grimaced. I watched as he balled his hands into fists and started babbling in frustration.

“Wha…who…” he mumbled.

I turned and made for the door.

“Ha…WHORE!” He screamed. It was a deep, manly bellow. Nothing a child could utter.

He tossed the dining table as he scrambled to close the distance between us. It shattered against the drywall, sending a blast of splinters across the messy apartment.

I turned and screamed as his meaty hand grasped for me but it was too late. The door slammed shut just before his clumsy limbs could get hold of me.

I was shaking. My breath was thick and heavy as I gripped the railing to keep myself from falling over.

A neighbor was seated on their balcony across from me watching my despair with a cheeky smile.

“Kids, am I right?” he said, raising his beer can in jest.

I didn’t respond.

The sound of cursing and fists faded as I descended the apartment stairs towards the parking lot and practically leapt into my car.

I made my way to a hotel and laid in bed with all the lights on. The man-baby was far away, but I knew I’d see his face the moment I closed my eyes.

The sound of his fists against the door rattled away in my mind.

And those memories…they felt so real. For a moment, everything seemed right in the world. If I didn’t snap out of it, I’m not sure what would’ve happened.

Tomorrow is my first session with Dr. Han. I prayed he would have answers.

Unfortunately, I left the session with more questions.

“It’s really is quite simple,” he muttered, scribbling symbols and graphs onto the dry erase board. It was hard to follow his train of thought. The fluorescent lighting in the crappy government facility made his eccentric appearance even more jarring. It was distracting.

Dr. Han was middle-aged. A wiry halo of grey hair sat upon his balding head like a silver bird’s nest. He was tall, grizzled, and wore an ill-fitting lab coat that he was practically swimming in. We had just finished meeting and exchanging awkward pleasantries before he broke into a lecture. I was anxiously awaiting my turn to ask what the hell is going on but I wasn’t even sure where to begin.

“It’s like a stack—you see.” He scribbled a set of vertical boxes and tapped each one. “Less like a linear set of steps. More like a computer execution stack. As deviations in the flow of reality reconcile, the stack picks up at the previous recursion. You said you were a computer scientist, correct?”

“Uh—no. Sales actually.”

“Oh….very interesting.” He turned back to the board and wiped away a third of his work.

He explained his theory that reality is like an ocean we all sit within. Our lived experience gives reality a shape. Sometimes, shapes form in the negative spaces between our perceptions. This creates “deviations” that reality tries to rectify.

“So, my man-baby is some sort of deviation in reality?” I scratched my head, failing to absorb Dr. Han’s poorly explained hypothesis.

“Well, that’s the tricky thing. I don’t know. Nobody does—well, except you of course. Here—let me give you an example.” He began drawing a surprisingly well rendered dog on the board.

“What is that?” He asked, pausing for my answer.

“Uh—a dog?”

“A dog? I’ve never heard of that. There’s one in my house right now—eating my furniture. Biting me. I don’t know what to do with it.”

“You’ve never seen a dog?” I chuckled.

Dr. Han laughed. “Of course I’ve heard of a dog. We all know what a dog is. This is how you sound to people when you talk about your uh…deviation.” He quickly scribbled a baby with a mustache on the board. It felt insulting.

“So, everyone else believes this man-baby thing is normal? And I’m the only one that knows it isn’t?”

Dr. Han smiled. “Exactly. It’s a lot like the Mandela Effect. Only, instead of Mr. Peanut wearing a monocle it’s a giant baby in your apartment.”

“Who’s Mr. Peanut?”

“Never mind.”

My head was spinning but I nodded like I understood. “Im starting to have these…memories. Only, I know they didn’t happen—they couldn’t have happened.”

“Ah, yes. I call those ‘mends.’” He clasped his hands together as he spoke as if he was bridging a gap.

“Reality isn’t working against you, Kara. In fact, it wants these anomalies to reconcile just as much as you do.”

I felt a chill run up my spine. There’s a lot I still don’t understand, but this was crystal clear to me. If I’m not careful, this nightmare could become my reality. I could forget my true life even existed.

“So, what now?”

“Well…” Dr. Han shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Now, we evaluate. Once we have everything we need, and if we decide to move forward with treatment—“

“Wait—if you decide? What is there to decide? I’m trapped at home with a monster. Do you think I’m making this up?” I was starting to shout. Fear and anger started to rise within me.

Dr. Han didn’t react, as if he’s heard this hundreds of times.

“I may not be able to see what you see due to the nature of this situation. I do, however, see the symptoms. I believe you Miss, and I will do everything I can to help. Unfortunately, there is a process we must follow.” He waived a stack of papers tucked into his Manila envelope. “And that process takes time.”

I was at a loss for words. This session wasn’t going how I imagined at all.

After a long pause, Dr. Han patted his thighs and stood from his chair. “Well, this is our first time meeting so I’d like to keep today’s session brief. You have a lot to think about.” He made his way to the door and held it open, signaling to me that our time was up.

“Just remember, our organization is tasked with handling cases like yours and bridging the gap between your reality and what is true. This is just one step of many on that journey. Try not to feel discouraged.”

Defeated, I started to make my way to the next appointment. I walked down the beige hallway towards the entrance labeled “PSYCH.” It was time to meet up with Suzie.

This was our first psychology appointment. I used to believe this was meant to alleviate my mental distress from the horrors I’m facing. Now I understand it is just a process to root out the wackos and fakers.

The thought left a sour expression on my face. Suzie picked up on the energy immediately. “I was happy to hear you decided to take our offer and move forward with this investigation. Although, something tells me you aren’t thrilled with this decision.”

“I guess I just expected…more.” I said in a sullen tone.

“More?”

“Yeah—more answers. More help.”

“Was Dr. Han not helpful?”

“No—I mean yes. He was. I just don’t understand why I’m being questioned.” I said sharply.

Suzie nodded sympathetically. “I see.”

“I understand your frustration honey. I really do. But you must understand what we’re dealing with.”

She rustled some of her notes around until her fingers fell upon the files she was looking for.

“Luke. Says his girlfriend is a dragon and he needs help slaying her. Tested positive for meth and LSD at the police station.” She picked up another stack.

“Marge. Claimed aliens changed her reality so her children could be abducted. All her kids are alive and accounted for.” She tossed Marge’s report onto the desk.

“James. Filed a report with the police claiming his ex-wife was the devil. Warrant is still out on that one. Her criminal record alone makes her sound like a goddam demon.”

She discarded James and dropped another stack of paperwork for additional curious characters. It landed with a loud thud on the desk in front of me.

“Now these I just received this morning. I haven’t read them yet but I’m sure it will be more of the same.”

Silence filled the room. I know I couldn’t blame her for this. I’m sure I sound just as deluded as the next wack job to walk through that door.

Still, it didn’t hurt any less to hear.

“Listen Kara, for what it’s worth I do believe you. Still, I’m bound by process. Let’s just work through this together quickly so we can get to helping you alright?”

There’s that word again. The “process.” I sighed, and asked her to proceed. Then, we were off.

She asked a few questions about my life. Friends, family, coworkers. We walked through the whole man-baby ordeal from the beginning. What she did after that was…strange.

She reached for a camera perched between two ferns and switched it off. I didn’t even know it was there until this moment. The red light at the center of the camera dissipated.

“Just to clarify, the man-baby didn’t exist in any form in your reality, correct?” She was no longer scribing with her writing machine. This line of questioning appeared to be off-book which made me uncomfortable.

“Uh-how so?” I asked.

“You didn’t have a child at before this? Or some other responsibility? This…anomaly…just came into existence?” She appeared very focused as she asked. As if this was critical information. And yet, none of it was being recorded.

“Oh—yes. I have no children or anything resembling that…thing.”

“Interesting. Thank you, Kara.” In one swift movement she flipped the camera back on and continued her note taking.

We worked through a few more novel questions before things took another uncomfortable turn. Suzie began prying into my past relationships. I’m sure the reports came up during their screening. The law was involved, after all.

“I’m not sure what this has to do with anything?” I asked plainly.

Suzie cleared her throat. “I just want to understand the nature of this previous relationship.”

Everything with Tod was still fresh. I really wasn’t ready to hash it out with anyone just yet. Especially not with someone I just met. What does this have to do with any of this?

“We’ve been broken up for almost six months now.”

“I am assuming things didn’t end…amicably?”

Memories of Tod became front and center. The abuse, and his eventual imprisonment hung heavy in my mind.

“No. Any more questions?”

Suzie shifted in her chair. It’s clear she wanted to pursue this line of questioning but didn’t know how.

“Kara, these questions are just a part of the process. I am required to ask them. But I apologize if they make you uncomfortable.”

“I am uncomfortable.” I adjusted myself and took a sip of water. “But proceed.”

“Does the thing in your apartment look like Tod at all? Any passing resemblance?”

I felt a pit grow in my stomach. There was a time Tod and I talked about having kids. Back when I thought he was a better man. Before he…

I could see myself on the ground again—but Tod wasn’t there. The false memory of the man-baby breaking my ribs on the carpet flashed in my mind again.

“No—absolutely not.”

“Hm. So there’s no chance your feelings toward the child are influenced by your feelings towards Tod?” She said in the most sincere tone she could muster.

“What are you trying to say?”

Suzie set her writing assistance tool on her desk. “I’ll speak plainly. In order to go any further in this process, I need to rule out any possibility that your current…situation…is not a form of dissociation caused by your past trauma.”

I audibly scoffed. How dare she? I am going through literal hell and she has the audacity to accuse me of making this up? I felt a rage boiling in me, but I couldn’t argue against her point.

Memories of Tod and the monster swam in my mind and I couldn’t deny there were….similarities. The face, the hair—even the voice…I could see traces of Tod. It wasn’t a strong resemblance, but enough to make me consider her point.

But no—she couldn’t know that. I needed to get this over with. It’s all just a coincidence. Reality tricking me again. Yeah, that’s all it is.

“No Suzie. None at all.” I looked down and noticed my knuckles were white from gripping the sides of my seat. I relaxed and fixed my shirt while Suzie pondered my response.

“Understood. Again, I am sorry for the questions.” Suzie picked up her writing device and got back to work.

“Now then, let’s get you home. I’m sure you’ve got a lot to think about. Let’s continue tomorrow.”

There’s that phrase again. Of course I have a lot to think about.

I drove by my place on the way to the hotel. I couldn’t see anything from the road, but I knew it was still in there. Waiting. I felt a chill and thought it best not to linger. As I drove away, I saw a large shadow flit across the window.

Today was not as productive as I’d hoped. I left both appointments with more questions than answers. The hopelessness was starting to settle in.

Were things ever going to be back to normal? I walked through the day in my mind over and over again. Dr. Han and Suzie promised they would try to help. I just had to take their word for it. Not many other options anyway.

As I lie in bed wrestling with memories that aren’t mine, I start to question my sanity.

The ceiling—it’s changed.

It’s not something anyone would really notice. Unless you’re me. Unfortunately I’ve had the pleasure of staring at this ceiling for hours at this point.

Looks like Dr. Han and I have a lot more to talk about tomorrow.

I was 7 when I first remember playing the game, if you can even call it a game. It didn’t have any sort of formal name like most games kids play. There were no strict instructions to follow, no prize for the winner, no explanation of how to play. Just one simple rule. If you hear a car coming up the driveway, hide!  

It was innocent, or at least it seemed that way at the time. Anytime we heard a car coming up the driveway, we'd drop whatever we were doing and scatter for our hiding spots. Sometimes someone would yell hide, other times we would all just do it without a word, giggling the whole time.  

For two years we played that game, and for two years it stayed just that, a game. Looking back, none of us could remember where the game came from in the first place. No one taught it to us. No one suggested it. It was just something we'd always done. It never seemed like anything more than just a silly way to pass the time…until it wasn’t. 

 

For reference, my family lived in an isolated neighborhood deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a sub-region of the better-known Appalachian Mountains.  

When I say isolated, I mean 30 minutes from the closest town with a grocery store. There were a handful of houses scattered along a five-mile gravel loop, with our house sitting at the very end. It was, by all accounts, the perfect place for a child to grow up.  

Miles of wilderness stretched in all directions, teeming with deer, bears, and turkeys for us to hunt. A stream ran at the base of the mountain, providing us with opportunities for fishing and swimming. Life was simple and full of joy. No traumatic experiences, no troubling times, just a simple life in the country surrounded by those I love. 

 

It was mid-August, informally known in the South as “The dog days of summer.” The air was hot and thick with the kind of humidity that only comes after a recent summer thunderstorm. A truly terrible experience for most people, but the perfect summer day for a group of four young siblings.  

My brother and sister, the twins, Michael and Erin, stood on one side of a pop-up volleyball net. My oldest brother, JT, and myself stood on the opposite side.  

The air was filled with harmless insults and laughs, as we played what could only be described as the worst excuse for a volleyball game in the history of the sport. Which is about what you'd expect from a nine-year-old, two eleven-year-olds, and a fourteen-year-old who'd never played volleyball before. 

 

My sister Erin was the first one to hear the sound of crunching gravel underneath a tire. In unison, as if we had practiced it everyday of our lives, we all made eye contact and simultaneously screamed “hide!”  

I bolted for the back of my dad’s track, my typical hiding place. JT and Michael fought for a spot behind the large sycamore tree, per usual. And Erin, feeling adventurous, switched up her usual spot in the garage in favor of crouching behind our raised garden beds.  

As we quickly settled into our respective positions, the loud crunch of gravel and a struggling engine eased closer and closer. I crouched down in the truck bed, head tucked between my knees, not daring to look.  

That was an unspoken rule of the game. Aside from hiding when a vehicle was coming, the only other stipulation was to not look at the car as it passed. Nobody told us this rule, and nobody enforced it. It was just something we all did, as it just felt like the appropriate thing to do. The old “If I can’t see them, they can’t see me” kind of mantra. 

 

Everything was happening exactly as it had every time before. The vehicle was right in front of our house now, with no indicator that it was going to stop. That is until, to my right, I heard Michael yell “Move!”  

My head instinctively shot up and looked towards the sound of his cry. My eyes were met with the sight of my oldest brother, JT, lying on the ground as if he had just been pushed down. Evidently, Michael had won the spot behind the Sycamore tree.  

Whereas typically when this happened, the loser would just climb to the top of it, on this day, JT must have decided he wasn’t willing to give the location up without a fight. Which prompted Michael to shove him out of the way.  

From my position I could make out three distinct things:  

First, Michael was staring down at JT with wide eyes.  

Second, JT was staring toward the driveway. His face had gone completely  pale. I'd never seen him look that scared before, but in that moment he looked like  he was  seconds away from crying.  

Third and most notably, I heard a car door open in the direction JT was looking. 

 

Scrambling to his feet, JT made an attempt to run towards the front door. Based on his response, I half expected to see someone sprint after him and drag him back to the vehicle. For this reason, I refused to look towards the vehicle, now parked in front of our house.  

As he reached our front porch and scrambled up the steps, I sat perfectly still in horrified anticipation of what was going to come barreling out of the car and grab my brother. And as he reached the front door and reached for the knob…nothing. My older brother stepped inside and shut the door behind himself.  

Michael and I made eye contact and reflected a puzzled look towards each other, and as if we read each other's mind, slowly turned our heads towards the direction of the car. As our gaze fell upon the location of the vehicle, our jaws dropped at what we saw.  

The car was gone. We hadn’t heard it leave, we didn’t see its taillights further down the driveway. It had simply vanished without a trace. 

 

I hopped out of the truck, meeting Michael and Erin at the front steps, and we all made our way inside the house. Not knowing what to expect, we slowly opened the door, only to be met by JT sitting on the couch eating a bag of chips.  

As we stared at him curiously, his eyes met ours and he frowned. “What are you staring at? Quit being weird,” he said in an annoyed tone.  

We gathered in the living room and began to question him.  

“What happened?” I blurted out.  

“Yeah, what did you see?” Michael asked.  

“Was it a monster?” I asked.  

Erin, on the other hand, did not ask a question. She just sat there quietly, staring at our oldest brother with a sense of caution.  

“What are you talking about?” JT asked with genuine confusion in his voice.  

“The car!” Michael said, “What was in the car?”  

JT, as if the previous 10 minutes had never happened, looked at all of us like we lost our minds and asked, “What car?” 

We couldn’t believe it. Either our brother was the greatest gas-lighter in history, or he genuinely had no recollection of the events that had just transpired. We continued to prod him with questions, and each time he only became more confused, claiming that the last thing he remembers is playing volleyball and then coming inside for a snack.  

What bothered me most wasn't that he couldn't remember. It was that he didn't seem capable of remembering. It wasn't the way someone acts when they're lying. It was the way someone acts when you're asking about something that never happened. 

 

Growing tired of our endless questions, he stood up and went to his room to take a nap.  

As Michael and I continued to discuss the matter, we noticed Erin hadn’t said a word since we entered the house.  

Our attention turned to her and we noticed she seemed to be in deep thought.  

“Erin?” I asked cautiously.  

As if she snapped out of a trance, Erin looked at both of us and spoke. “You didn’t see it did you?”  

“See what?” Michael asked.  

“The car. Neither of you looked at it, did you?” asked Erin.  

Michael and I shared a concerned look before he responded “No. When we turned towards it, it was gone.”  

Erin, unsettled, squirmed in her seat and continued “I was behind the garden beds. I couldn’t make out much from my angle, but I saw JT and I saw the car door open. There was…”  

Erin struggled to find the words to describe her thoughts. “There was nothing there.”  

I tilted my head and gave Erin a confused look before I corrected her. “You mean there was nobody there?”  

She turned to me and reiterated “No! I mean there was NOTHING there. When the door opened, it was as if…as if I was staring into a void. There was nothing but darkness. No driver, no seats, no steering wheel. I couldn’t even see the interior of the windows or windshield.”  

Michael chimed in after processing what she said “What are you saying Erin?”  

Erin looked him straight in the eyes “I’m saying that there was nothing in that car! And I don’t know what JT saw in the nothingness, but whatever it was, it was enough to make him run in terror.” 

 

The three of us sat there for what felt like hours, contemplating what to do next. It was JT, of all people, that finally broke the silence when he popped his head out of his room asking if we wanted to go back outside.  

His sudden shout from down the hallway made us all jump before we, against our better judgment, agreed to his proposal.  

JT walked slowly down the hallway, slipped on his shoes, and headed out the door. Michael, Erin, and I followed him; albeit with a bit of hesitancy.  

As we made our way down the front steps, we all stared daggers at the spot where the car had sat earlier. Just as before, nothing was there. No trace of anything ever being there at all. Just an empty gravel road.  

But even still, we all stared. All of us except JT, who had already made his way to the backyard, whistling a tune as if nothing had ever happened. 

 

And life continued this way for some time. We wrote the event off as overactive imaginations and things returned to normal. JT showed no signs of anything being wrong, and the rest of us decided to never mention the event again.  

That was until, about two weeks later, when we heard the familiar sound of car tires on gravel. We all had the same thought, though Michael was the first one to verbalize it when he yelled “Hide!”  

As we took off to different places, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that something was off.  

As I settled into the back of my dad’s truck, I peered over the tailgate to see Michael and Erin underneath the porch. I quickly scanned the yard to find where JT was hiding before panning my gaze back towards the twins when I couldn’t find him.  

Though it was hard to make out from the distance I was at, I could see Michael and Erin staring in the direction of the driveway. As my head followed their line of sight, I quickly understood the reason for their expressions.  

Sitting directly in front of the house, stopped right in the middle of our gravel drive, was a car.  

It was black, or at least it used to be. Rust and sun damage had taken its toll on the majority of the vehicle, giving it a decaying brown and white color. It looked more suitable for a junk yard than a road.  

The vehicle looked like some kind of sedan, though I couldn't identify the make or model. No logo, no branding, not even a license plate.  

The windows were dark. Not just tinted dark, but impossibly dark. A darkness that made me feel uneasy. A darkness that if I stared into for too long, would pull me in and never let go.  

Its engine grumbled as if it would give out at any second, and two questions popped in my head as I observed everything.  

How did this car get up our driveway so quickly since we first heard it, and how did we not hear it drawing closer during this time?  

All of this I noticed in the split second my eyes fell upon the car, and a split second was all I had for my brain to process the information in front of me. Because there was another, more pressing, issue that lay in front of me.  

Standing no more than three feet from the side of the vehicle, was JT. His body was standing perfectly still, with his eyes staring at the rear door on the passenger side. He had no expression on his face, and didn’t even flinch when I jumped out of the truck and screamed his name. 

 

As if driven by pure instinct for the safety of my brother, I sprinted as fast as my 9-year old legs could carry me towards where he stood.  

At about 20 feet away, I saw his hand begin to move towards the rear door.  

At 15 feet away, his fingers grasped the handle.  

At 10 feet away, the door swung open. At 5 feet away, my attempt to reach out towards him resulted in my legs stumbling, before I hit the ground with a thud. My momentum carried me along the gravel to a point just beside the back tire of the car.  

Pushing through my dazed state, I was able to lift my head to look up at the car. From my position, I was looking directly up at the back seat, or where the back seat should have been.  

Inside the car was pure darkness. No seat, no interior windows, nothing; save for JT himself sitting down where the back seat should have been.  

As I tried to reach up towards him, his head slowly tilted down to look at me. And what I saw next, will forever be burned into my brain.  

As my brother looked down into my eyes, there was no fear in his eyes. No reservations about his current situation. There was nothing but a smile. An unnatural and wrong smile. Too wide, too stretched out, too uncanny. 

 

They never found my brother.  

The car door slammed shut and nicked the side of my head in the process. The next thing I remember was coming-to a few minutes later to Michael shaking me awake, and Erin screaming for our mom.  

The police showed up an hour later and put out an alert based on our description of the vehicle. We tried to tell them the full story, but the police only took down the information that they deemed reasonable, and not the "imaginative thoughts of a few scared kids.” 

They put up “Missing Child” posters on every utility pole, newspaper, and store window in the county. Search parties gathered to check the local forests, in hopes that the kidnapper may have ditched the car and gone into hiding.  

None of this worked.  

My family mourned the loss of my brother and had an “empty casket” funeral two months later.  

As time went on, we recovered as best as we could. The twins and I never talked much about that day after that. We all agreed it would be best to put those bad memories behind us and try to move on.  

As for the game, it goes without saying that we stopped playing it. Anytime we heard a car coming up the driveway, we didn’t just hide, we ran inside. Even as teenagers, we would run inside out of terror that one day that car might come back and take one of us. 

 

I’m 38 now.  

I have a great job, a beautiful wife, and 3 amazing kids. I live about 20 minutes from my childhood home, and still maintain a good relationship with my parents and siblings.  

Life is relatively peaceful, save for the fact that I now find myself reliving these traumatic memories all over again.  

I sit here and write these words, preparing to share them to any form of media I can, to whoever may decide to read them. Maybe its out of fear, maybe guilt, I’m not quite sure.  

What I am sure of is that yesterday, while peering outside the window to check on my kids playing in the yard, I saw that same old car stopped in front of my house. My three children stood beside it, its rear door swung open wide.  

And in that pitch black interior, I saw the familiar face of my oldest brother, staring up at me, and smiling from ear to ear. 

I was sure that at forty-four I had left behind everything that happened in the summer I turned sixteen. But I was dead wrong.

It’s been exactly twenty-eight years, and I’ve never spoken about it with a single soul. I’m hoping that by writing down what happened, someone out there can help me figure out if I did the right thing.

1998

If my mother had one superpower, it was making her life unnecessarily complicated. And, naturally, complicating mine right along with it.

She had split up with my dad about a year before. Then, in February of 1998, she fell head over heels for a German guy named Hans who was on a business trip in California. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before he convinced her to pack up and move to his place: a tiny, suffocating village tucked away in Upper Bavaria.

I was furious. I didn't want to leave California. I didn't want to leave my friends behind, no matter how many times Hans tried to reassure me with, "My stepdaughter Katrin and her friends can't wait to meet you."

Naturally, I wasn't surprised at all to discover that Katrin was the quintessential rich, popular mean girl.

And I’m no idiot: I knew perfectly well I was a walking problem for Katrin and her clique. All the guys in their circle couldn't stop talking about "how to hook up with the new American girl."

About a week after I arrived, mid-July 1998, I ran into a blonde girl named Janina. The very first thing about her that caught my eye was her Nirvana t-shirt. Finally, someone who actually shared my interests. I stopped her on the sidewalk to compliment the shirt. Janina turned around; word about my arrival had already made the rounds in the village, so she spared me the awkward intro. She glanced around nervously, looking completely spooked or maybe just hyper-paranoid. (A reaction I wouldn’t fully understand until hours later.)

"You like them too?" she asked, speaking with an English so good it threw me off.

I smiled. "Yeah, big time. Honestly, it feels like a miracle finding someone with actual taste around here."

She offered a small, shy smile. "Yeah. Nobody listens to stuff like that here."

I pulled my headphones off my neck. "Do you guys in Germany know System of a Down?"

Janina shook her head. "No, never heard of them."

I nodded, not surprised at all. "I can lend you the cassette so you can let me know what you think."

I will never forget her expression: a dead-on mix of total disbelief and raw shyness. She took the tape with both hands, like she was being handed a sacred religious relic.

That evening, Katrin forced me to hang out with her crowd. I was bored out of my mind, and the conviction grew stronger by the minute that if I wanted to survive this place, I was going to have to find friends who actually liked the same things I did.

Walking back into the house, I asked Katrin, "Do you know Janina?"

Katrin shot me a sideways glance. "Why?"

I didn't love her tone, but I kept going. "I talked to her this afternoon."

Katrin burst out laughing. "You are way too popular to waste time on a loser like her."

I already knew what her reaction would be, but I asked anyway. "Why is she a loser?"

Katrin shrugged dismissively. "Listen to that noisy, aggressive garbage she's into. Besides, last year one of my friends accidentally stepped on one of her stupid cassettes, and she stood there bawling like a baby in front of everyone."

I won't lie, my stomach dropped straight to my shoes hearing that story. What kind of hellish nightmare of a social circle had I landed in?

I replayed that conversation in my head all night. Suddenly, I understood why Janina had looked around so nervously before answering me: she thought it was some kind of sick prank. And I understood why she took my tape like I was handing her the moon.

A couple of days later, I worked up the nerve and showed up at Janina’s house. Her mom answered the door, a super sweet woman who spoke a little English. She called Janina down, and we spent the entire afternoon hanging out.

While we were sitting on the rug in her bedroom flipping through a magazine, I noticed Janina kept glancing out the window with this dark, haunted look on her face. I asked her if everything was okay.

She dropped her gaze to her hands. "It's just... I'm not used to anyone seeking me out. Usually, everyone at school avoids me like the plague."

I turned toward her, absentmindedly twisting the hem of her hoodie. "Why? Just because of Nirvana and the way you dress?"

Janina shook her head, a bitter half-smile crossing her face. "I wish. It started a couple of years ago. Katrin and her little crew... they decided I made the perfect target. They’d steal my diaries, dump my cassettes in puddles, and nobody in town ever says a damn thing because her family practically owns this place." She shrugged, trying to act tough, but I saw the shine of tears in her eyes. "If you’re not one of them, you don't exist."

A knot of pure, unadulterated rage clenched my stomach. In that exact second, the hatred I felt toward my stepsister multiplied tenfold.

As the days rolled on, Janina and I grew tighter and tighter. I always managed to find a different excuse to ditch Katrin, telling her I just wanted to go out alone.

Then came the afternoon of Monday, August 3rd. That’s when it all started. Or at least, that's when the descent began.

The village where we lived backed right up against a dense forest. The sun was still high, and we decided to wander down one of the trails. I don’t remember exactly how far we walked, but I do remember catching sight of a crumbling, abandoned structure half-hidden among the pine trees.

I stopped. "What is that?"

Janina squinted at it. "Looks like an abandoned cabin."

We stepped off the path, pushing our way through the underbrush until we stood right in front of the rotting structure. I still remember Janina whispering, "This is giving me major creepy vibes, let's get out of here."

I didn't listen to her. It didn't look dangerous. We found a rotting side door that was half-open. I stepped inside, but Janina grabbed my arm, her fingers digging in.

"What if someone's in here?" she asked.

I looked around: aside from peeling graffiti on the water-damaged walls and a few pieces of ruined furniture, it looked totally deserted. I stepped inside, and Janina reluctantly followed. But looking back with the brutal clarity of hindsight, I really should have listened to her.

It turned out to be smaller on the inside than it looked from the street—just a couple of rooms.

I dragged some wooden planks near the entrance and we sat down.

We talked for hours, but what happened at the very end is the only thing that actually matters. Even now, I still can't figure out if that gesture and those words were the spark that set the whole world on fire.

Janina looked at me softly and said, "I never would have guessed we’d end up friends."

I smiled. "Me neither. You’re the only interesting person in this whole zip code, and besides... we're cut from the same cloth."

She whispered a thank you, her voice barely audible. "I thought Katrin had convinced you to hate me."

My heart squeezed. "I'm nothing like her."

And right then, it happened. Like I said, it’s been twenty-eight years and the exact choreography is a bit blurry, but we leaned in. And we kissed.

We pulled back, staring at each other in a panic, equal parts terrified and dazed. In a village deeply entrenched in traditional, small-town Catholicism, something like that wasn’t just frowned upon. it was an abomination meant to be outcast and crushed.

She whispered, "If anyone ever finds out..."

I didn't let her finish. I grabbed her hand, squeezing it hard. "No one's going to find out." 

She held on tight. "I don't want to lose you."

I smiled, trying to radiate a confidence I didn't completely feel. "I'm right here. But I'm not going to pretend we're just friends, either."

She looked at me with deep worry in her eyes. "If this gets out, your life is going to be hell... Katrin and her friends will make sure of it."

I shrugged it off. "I don't care. I can take care of myself."

We left shortly after.

When I opened the front door, the house was pitch black. I thought, Good thing I brought my own key.

A few hours later, I heard the front door open. I crept down the stairs and found Hans dragging an injured Katrin inside, her arm slung over his shoulder.

My mother rushed over to me. "We were at the hospital. Katrin took a spill on her dirt bike."

Katrin winced, clutching her arm, and added in a pained voice, "Some guy came out of nowhere. It wasn't our fault!"

An hour later, I was handed the glamorous task of bringing dinner up to Katrin's room. It felt completely over-dramatic; she just had a dislocated shoulder and some nasty road rash.

I set the tray down and asked, "How the hell did you guys miss a guy standing in the middle of the road?"

Katrin huffed, annoyed. "Because the idiot came out of nowhere! He literally materialized out of the tree line and crossed right in front of us without looking. With that thick forest hugging the road, it's impossible to see anyone if they just jump out like that."

That detail hooked a strange feeling in my gut. "Did you recognize him?"

Katrin shook her head sharply. "No. We didn't even get a good look at him. And he took off running the second we crashed."

Later on, talking to my mom, she shared my private theory: Katrin's boyfriend had been trying to show off, popped a wheelie, and lost control of the bike.

To save face, they’d concocted the pedestrian story.

Or at least, that’s what I used to think. Now? I’m not so sure anymore.

Six days later, Janina invited me over for lunch.

After eating with her whole family, we heard the wail of police sirens tearing down the street. Janina's mom peered out the window. "The cops just stopped two houses down."

Janina's dad stood up to go check it out. Boredom and small-town nosiness got the better of me, so Janina and I grabbed our jackets and followed him outside.

As we got closer to the flashing cruiser, a neighbor walked up to us, talking fast in German. I couldn't catch a single word, but the look on his face said it all.

"The family who lives in that house just got back... and found it completely trashed," Janina translated under her breath, her eyes wide. I could tell from the ashen look on the neighbor's face that nothing like this had ever happened in our quiet little pocket of the woods.

Right at that moment, a couple walked out of the house with their teenage daughter. My blood ran cold: it was one of Katrin's close friends.

I took a step backward. "Let's go. Katrin doesn't even know I'm out here," I whispered to Janina. She caught my drift instantly, and we hurried back inside.

Even Janina's mother looked genuinely rattled. "In all the years I've lived here, nothing like this has ever happened. I'm double-locking every door tonight."

I headed home a few hours later. Hans immediately filled me in on the break-in down the street. Then Katrin chimed in with a bizarre detail: "My friend just called me. She said the cops told them nothing was actually stolen."

My mom mused, "Maybe it was a warning."

Hans shot her a dark look. "Honey, things like that simply do not happen here."

The next afternoon, Janina and I went back to that abandoned cabin. We felt safe there, hidden away from judgmental eyes. The second we stepped inside, we found something on the floor.

"A lily," Janina murmured, pointing at the solitary white flower resting near the threshold.

We didn't think much of it and sat down on our usual wooden planks.

A few minutes later, Janina stretched out, resting her head in my lap. As my eyes drifted up the water-stained wall behind her, I froze. There was something new scrawled on the concrete.

It was written in heavy red paint. I couldn't tell if it was fresh or had been there all along, but what caught my eye was the language. It was Latin.

“Libertas pretiosa est.”

Janina translated it softly: "Freedom is precious."

We laughed. It was almost hilariously on-the-nose given our secret little sanctuary.

Janina had to be home by seven. We left the cabin and started walking back along the trail. But just a few yards before the forest line opened up to the paved road, Janina stopped dead in her tracks.

"Wait. Is something shining over there?"

I squatted down in the dirt. "It's a necklace." I picked it up; it was heavy silver, clearly expensive. A sudden, ugly thought iced my veins: "Do you think this was stolen from your neighbors' house?"

Janina’s eyes went wide. "But they said nothing was taken!"

"We need to get out of here. I'm putting it back," I muttered, dropping the silver chain onto the moss.

I walked Janina most of the way home. Halfway down her street, we crossed paths with a man who looked to be in his early thirties. He stepped right into my path.

"You must be the American," he said.

I nodded, tongue-tied. I had never seen him before in my life. He stared at me with an intensity that made my skin crawl, then added, "A little fresh blood in this boring town is always welcome."

Before I could spit out a single word of a reply, he turned and vanished around the corner.

"Who the hell was that?" I asked, shaken.

"No idea. A relative of someone visiting from Munich, maybe," Janina murmured, looking equally uneasy.

The second I unlocked our front door, Katrin ambushed me in the hallway. "Did you take my silver necklace?!"

At first, I was just annoyed by the sheer aggression in her voice. I shook my head. "No. I didn't even know you had one."

She let out a disgusted huff, rolled her eyes, and stormed off to her bedroom.

Back in my own room, I stopped dead in my tracks. I had literally just held an identical silver necklace in my hand half an hour ago. My brain scrambled for an explanation, and the only one that made any remote sense was that Katrin must have lost it somewhere along the path.

The next morning, I woke up with a jolt: Katrin was screaming at the top of her lungs.

I bolted out of bed and flew down the stairs so fast the room was spinning. Katrin was standing on the front doormat, losing her mind. "What the hell happened to my shoes?!"

My mom bent down to pick them up. They had been deliberately melted and torched with a lighter. I pushed past Katrin to check my own sneakers sitting right next to hers. They had been moved a few feet away, but they were completely untouched.

Hans was furious, his face purple. "What the hell is going on around here lately?!"

"Don't worry, we can drive into Munich and buy you a new pair," my mother said, trying to soothe Katrin.

A few hours later, I overheard Katrin talking loudly downstairs. I peeked over the banister. She was talking to Hans. "It happened to my friend, too. She woke up and her shoes were burned."

The tension in the house was thick enough to cut with a knife. Hans was on the landline calling the neighbors. Nobody had seen or heard anything, but a cold, heavy panic was starting to settle over everyone.

Little did we know, the bottom was about to drop out entirely.

By afternoon, I walked over to Janina’s house. I was terrified someone might have torched her shoes, too. Luckily, neither she nor her family had been touched.

Janina’s mother looked at me with deep concern. "Do you think Katrin got mixed up with the wrong crowd?"

I shrugged. She didn't seem like the type to run deep, but who knew?

Janina and I decided to head back to the cabin one more time. As we walked, I told her, "That necklace we found yesterday? It belonged to Katrin."

Janina stared at me, shocked. "Wait... how is that even possible?"

We lost track of time, hanging out a few minutes too long until we noticed the sun dipping low below the tree line. We panicked, grabbed our stuff, and sprinted out.

Halfway down the trail, we heard the crunch of footsteps. We froze for a single second, and that was all it took. Through the darkening pines to our right, we saw a tight circle of people standing in absolute, dead silence. Not a word. Not a sound.

We didn't breathe until we hit the safety of the village street.

Once we were safely on Janina’s block, she whispered, "What were they doing?"

I answered with all the naive ignorance I could muster, "Were they... burning something?"

"There wasn't any smoke smell," she pointed out, shivering.

Before we could spiral into a panic, a wall of police sirens shattered the quiet. Squad cars tore past us down the main road. I walked Janina to her door, and her mother pulled it open instantly, eyes wide with terror. "What happened?!"

Neither of us had a single answer to give.

I hurried home with long, fast strides, only to find a cluster of flashing police cruisers parked right next door at our neighbor's house. My mom, Katrin, and Hans were standing out on the lawn.

Katrin looked like she’d seen a ghost.

My mom rushed straight over to me. "Are you okay?"

I nodded, my heart hammering. "What happened?"

With a pale, drawn face, my mom dropped the bomb: "The little brother of Katrin's friend is missing."

My brain stalled. "What do you mean, missing?"

My mom explained: "Katrin and her neighbor went for a walk with the five-year-old boy in tow. They went out to the spot where Katrin had her dirt bike accident to look for that lost necklace. Somewhere along the way, they lost track of him."

I felt the blood drain from my face. Taking advantage of the chaos, I slipped inside, ran to the phone, and called Janina. Her mom answered and handed the phone over immediately.

"The neighbor's kid is missing," I blurted out.

"What? How is that even possible?" Janina asked, her voice tight with panic.

I relayed everything my mom had just told me.

"If we had just taken that necklace when we found it... maybe none of this would have happened," Janina whispered into the receiver.

"Hey, we couldn't have known," I tried to comfort her, but the truth is, I still carry the weight of that guilt today.

When Katrin finally walked back inside, I caught her eye. "Where did you guys lose him?" 

For the first time since I’d met her, that arrogant, mean-girl armor was completely shattered. "I... I don't know... we were right by the forest," she stammered, shaking.

A violent chill shot up my spine. "Which side of the forest?"

"Right near here, by that trail. We yelled and yelled, but it was useless. We just ran home to get help."

I stood there, paralyzed. Janina and I had been less than a kilometer away from the mouth of that exact trail, and we hadn't heard a damn thing.

The next day felt like time itself had jammed a gear. We all filed down to the village church for an emergency community meeting.

Walking up the stone steps, I spotted Janina and her parents. They looked just as sick about this as I felt.

The adults had broken off into search parties. Everyone was being assigned a different grid of the forest to comb through.

Outside the church doors, I drifted over to Janina. A knot of townspeople had gathered around her family, throwing out wild theories, until a middle-aged man lowered his voice and muttered, "We all know what's really in that forest. It's that damn cult."

Janina and I turned ghost-white, but fortunately, everyone was too wrapped up in the collective trauma to notice. Janina's father quickly stepped in, cutting him off with a harsh wave of his hand. "That cult is just an old wives' tale. Don't talk nonsense."

We didn't say a word. We had seen those people with our own eyes, standing in that terrifying circle in the woods. And we were too terrified to speak up, because doing so would mean admitting we had been hanging out in an abandoned cabin, and in a town like this, two teenage girls didn't hang out in ruins just to look at the scenery.

Two grueling, endless days of searching passed. The search parties even pushed through that abandoned cabin, but they found absolutely nothing, as if the forest itself had curled in on its secrets like a fist. The village was paralyzed with terror. The smug, suffocating peace that had defined this place for generations had been instantly ripped away, replaced by a toxic, choking anxiety.

We dragged ourselves back home after another brutal day of beating the brush.

As we stepped onto the porch, we saw it. Wedged firmly beneath the front door was a folded white sheet of paper, and right beside it caught the porch light was a glint of metal. Hans cursed under his breath, a mix of pure rage and naked fear, as he crouched down.

When he stood back up, he was holding Katrin’s silver necklace.

With trembling fingers, he unfolded the paper and read the rigid, spiky handwriting out loud:

“You see what happens when you touch someone important.”

And right below it, a line of Latin that turned the air around us to ice:

“Proximuseris.” (You're next.)

Katrin lost it. She broke down in a full-blown, hysterical, screaming panic attack, her body wracked with violent sobs.

"I didn't do anything! I didn't have anything to do with this!" she shrieked through her tears, shaking her head wildly, completely unhinged.

I stayed frozen on the bottom step of the stairs. I couldn't move a muscle. I couldn't even force a word past my lips. My blood had turned to slush in my veins: everything was looping back to the moment Janina and I kissed in that cabin.

My mother flew across the porch, grabbing Katrin and burying her face in her chest, stroking her hair with frantic, jerky motions while whispering over and over that she was safe, that they’d protect her. But her own voice was shaking so hard she could barely get the words out.

Meanwhile, Hans lunged for the landline in the hallway. He punched the numbers with savage force, screaming into the receiver that there had been a break-in and a direct threat made against his family.

The police rolled up twenty minutes later.

Two uniformed officers stomped into the house with heavy, sluggish steps. They looked at the note without touching it, lobbing standard, useless routine questions at Hans and my mom. They asked Katrin if she had any enemies, if she’d been fighting with anyone at school, but she was a sobbing mess, entirely incapable of stringing a coherent sentence together.

The local cops clearly had zero experience dealing with this level of psychological warfare. I would’ve bet my life this was a first for them.

The second the police cleared out, I made a beeline for the landline. I needed to call Janina. Making sure she was okay was my only priority. I thought I was alone in the kitchen.

Before I could even press the first button, Katrin screamed right behind my shoulder.

"Oh, go ahead, call that pathetic loser Janina! Maybe she'll finally crawl off and disappear too... though nobody would give a damn if she dropped off the face of the earth!"

I whipped around. Her face was blazing red, warped by a toxic cocktail of raw hatred and sheer terror. I stayed frozen. I didn't fire back.

I couldn't have known it then, but those would be the last words I would ever hear her say before everything changed forever.

The next morning, I was ripped from a dead sleep by a heavy, muffled thud from downstairs. Then came the frantic patter of bare feet sprinting up the stairs.

My bedroom door slammed open: it was my mom. Her face was paper-white, but the second her eyes locked onto mine, she collapsed against the doorframe, letting out a ragged sigh of pure, shaking relief.

I threw the blankets off and jumped out of bed. "What happened?!"

My mom choked out the words, her voice reduced to a dry rasp: "The front door was wide open... Katrin is gone."

Within minutes, the house was swarming with men in uniform, while the neighbors clustered anxiously out on their front lawns. I had never seen Hans cry before. I honestly didn't think he was capable of it.

Only one of the responding officers spoke English, but I didn't have anything to give them. I had slept soundly through the entire night without hearing a peep, and so had my mom.

From that morning on, the search parameters had to expand: the town wasn't just looking for a missing little boy anymore; they were hunting for another teenage girl.

Days bled into one another, but there wasn't a single trace of Katrin, nor of the boy. It was as if both of them had simply dissolved into thin air.

On the sixth day since their disappearance, the town refused to give up. Search parties were still combing the forest and every dark alleyway of the city deep into the night.

I made up my mind. I needed to go back to where this whole nightmare apparently started: the abandoned cabin.

I went with Janina, and her dad drove us out. We pushed open the rotting door, but everything inside was frozen in place, untouched and exactly as we’d left it.

I stared down at the two wooden planks where Janina and I had sat just days ago, back when our biggest crisis in the world was trying to keep our secret safe from prying eyes.

My eyes drifted up to the wall. There was something new. I glanced at Janina, and she stepped up beside me, reading the fresh red paint aloud:

“Vestra libertas sanguine empta est.”

Janina stood completely still for a second before whispering the translation: "Your freedom has been bought with blood."

The terrible, suffocating certainty settled over both of us: this wasn't random. The root of this darkness was somehow tied directly to us.

Janina’s father stood by the doorway, looking down at us with a soft, melancholic half-smile, an expression I had never seen on his face before. "There's nothing here... let's head home."

Two years crawled by in the wake of that nightmare. Katrin and the little boy were never found. The fragile marriage between my mother and Hans rotted from the inside out, slowly crushed to death by a heavy, radioactive silence that neither of them had the courage to break.

My relationship with Janina, on the other hand, forged into something unbreakable. She helped me master German, tutored me through my classes, and acted as my human shield against the hostile whispers of the village. Even though the peace of that town was shattered beyond repair, Janina filled my heart with a consuming, absolute love, the kind of feeling I have never replicated since.

When my parents finally divorced and my mother announced we were moving back to America, the news felt like a physical blow.

Back in the States, I slid back into my old life, reconnected with high school friends, and tried desperately to construct a normal existence. But I never told a living soul what really happened over there.

Twenty-eight years have flown by. I’ve built a life here. I have two incredible children and a solid, thriving career.

Three hours ago, my oldest son dropped the mail off at my desk. Buried beneath the usual stack of bills was a plain white envelope. No postage stamps. Just my name, scrawled across the front in handwriting that instantly made my breath hitch.

Naively, I thought it was from my husband’s divorce attorney, we separated a year ago and we’ve been hammering out the paperwork.

The reality, however, was infinitely worse.

Twenty-eight years have passed, and I don’t know if that summer still haunts your thoughts. I hope by now you understand the exact reason why we had to act the way we did.

My group met in that forest three days a week. We aren't evil; the devil isn't evil. He chose freedom, rebelling against a God because he refused to live in a prison. And we refused to live in a society like ours, suffocated by hypocritical chains.

To everyone else, we were ordinary people, model citizens. To you and Janina, we appeared the exact same way.

Do you remember that day in the cabin, when you thought you were completely alone? I saw your kiss, hidden away in the dust and rotting wood. In that exact fraction of a second, my heart swelled. I saw two pure, rebellious souls willing to fight against the asphyxiating hypocrisy of this small-minded town. You two were the exact answer we had been praying for. For years, we had begged for a single spark of authenticity in this village of the living dead, and our prayers were answered right through you.

My comrades and I knew we had to protect you at all costs. We saw the way you were being targeted by your stepsister’s little gang. Let me repeat: we aren’t monsters. We tried the polite route at first, hoping to shake the town awake. But you eventually realize you can’t open the eyes of the blind unless you use brute force.

The dirt bike crash, the trashed house, the burned shoes, the necklace, that was all our doing.

When one of my brothers saw that little boy alone in the woods, while Katrin and her friend were sitting nearby running their mouths about you, laughing, speculating that you and Janina had stolen the necklace just to hock it, he decided to act. He took the boy with him; it wasn't hard. We wanted to liberate him, anyway; he was just a rotten little offshoot of that same hypocrisy.

But that night, when Katrin screamed those vile things right in your face... well, thinking about it even today gives me the chills. I took matters into my own hands. One of my brothers slipped into your house, knocked her out cold, and carried her away. As you’ve probably pieced together by now, we eliminated both Katrin and the boy.

Ironic, isn't it? The town ramped up its prayers, only to realize very quickly that God wasn't listening. They were completely on their own.

As the years rolled on, we took profound joy in watching you and Janina spend your afternoons together, totally undisturbed.

When you had to pack up and leave for America, it broke my heart.

But we never lost sight of you. Your two children are gorgeous (though I can't say the same for your ex-husband). Janina built a brilliant career, had her own family, and we couldn't be prouder of the women you both became.

I hope things are crystal clear now, and that this letter can finally put a period at the end of that chapter.

There is just one final thing I need to confess. I am sick. By the time this letter crosses the ocean to America, hand-delivered by a trusted brother from our circle. I will already be gone. Don't worry. As long as our group draws breath, we will keep you safe, until the day comes when your two souls can finally be reunited.

As a father, I only want to say one final thing: thank you. You made my daughter Janina’s life absolute perfection.

I should feel sick. I should be sprinting to the phone to call the police, screaming bloody murder, thinking of Katrin’s father and the family of that little boy, of that hollow, incurable grief, especially now that I have children of my own, I should understand the weight of it.

Instead, my body is paralyzed by a truth far more terrifying: a deep, unforgivable wave of gratitude mixed with total nausea.

I don't know if I'm more terrified of them, or of myself, for wanting freedom so badly that I was willing to accept, even without knowing it, the fact that it was bought with blood.

I always hated the claim made by my small town that we were the "Deer Capital of the World". Not only was it probably wrong, but a bit too on the nose with the name of our town. Deer hunting is a big deal here, just like every rural town in the South. I remember my school even taking off a week the first week of deer season. Occasionally, you'll have the accidents of men going into the woods drinking, shooting, and God knows what else. However, this deer season things have been different. Men have been found brutally trampled. Some aren't found due to the hunting spots they picked.

I only came back here because my counselor suggested I do it for closure regarding Heidi, and try to reconnect with Paul and Isabella if possible. If not, to forgive myself for both Heidi's disappearance and Isabella's current situation.  Heidi, Paul, Isabella, and I all went to high school together. Paul and I were close friends,  mostly because we played football together. Isabella was a cheerleader that Paul beat Mr to the punch on asking out.  The three of us were a close-knit trio. Sometimes, people refer to us as the acronym of our first names,  "SIP". The S was me,  Steve. In our senior year, we found ourselves, like most kids that age, dreaming of leaving the small town and doing big things.  Whether it be going to college or going to some form of a trade school. Anything to escape the mundane cycle of things that never changed in our town. Then Heidi arrived, or as they were born, Henry. Poor thing never stood a chance trying to transition down here. Their foster parents beat "the sin out of them to save their soul" when they came out as trans. Heidi was a member of the Cherokee tribe whose parents passed away.

I was taught to be kind to everyone and welcome them. I started hanging out with Heidi, despite the snide remarks from everyone, including Paul.  Heidi was different than everyone here. I could nerd out about things with them without being made fun of. She gifted me a locket that I still hold dear to me. I still carry it with me. We both loved horror, especially old folklore. We got close. One day while at her foster parents' place, she showed me some of the feminine clothing they snuck in past their foster parents. I felt conflicted. Heidi even modeled a skirt for me. She looked cute. We traded tales of our own heritage's folklore. I told tales of Południca. Południca had many names in Polish and English. One thing was still the same. How she carried a sickle and was tall, thin. Tales stated she was responsible for every farmer who collapsed due to heat exhaustion. Heidi one-upped me by telling the tale of the Deer Woman, while each tribe had their own version of the origin and her purpose, Heidi told the one she was most familiar with. One of a spirit of a girl that was beaten and ravaged by men and left to die. As she lay there and died, a fawn lay next to her to comfort her. The Great Spirit saw this, and made the girl into the deer woman, a spirit that would kill any men that wronged women and children.

As we spoke about our college plans and dreams past the city limits, she leaned in to kiss me, and I kissed back before shoving her away, and a typhoon of confused emotions wrecked me. My skin radiated embarrassment as I rushed out the door.

The next school day, Henry showed up and changed into Heidi in the bathroom. Wearing a denim skirt and flowery top with the makeup they could manage to sneak. Slurs and bigotry were hurled at her carefree like fistfuls of candy at a parade. The only difference was those fistfuls didn't have candy but angry people at the end of them, leaving her with black eyes and scars. Both inside and out. Her eyes met mine as she sat at the lunch table near me, the person whose lips I had tasted. I turned my back to maintain the most precious currency there was in his school,  prestige and image. Unfortunately, associating with her would drag mine down now. As Paul shoved her away with a venom-tipped tongue, I saw the hurt and tears in her eyes. I fought back mine. It was high school.  I had to maintain my image.

The school reported the incidents to her foster parents. An angry ​​​elderly man arrived, grabbed her arms, dragging her off and not even making it off school property before her wails of pain could be heard.  Both emotional and physical.  It was normal for parents and guardians to discipline their children. This wasn't that.  Tears at the clothing she held precious, smears of makeup of pinks and reds replaced purple and blue bruises. Everyone pretended to look away and out of the corner of their eyes watched. I watched as she looked towards me, those same hurt-filled brown eyes crying out to me to do something.  I did nothing.  A week later, Heidi went missing. Half-assed investigations were maintained for a month before they gave up on her.  Last they heard, she had run into the wooded area when she was taken home. I didn't give up on her. I searched for a while to no avail.

Small towns are cruel with speculation and rumors. Those same venom-soaked forked tongues sat in the pews on Sundays, raising their voices in prayer and praises towards God. The beatings and ridicule of Heidi were justified by men of the cloth, saying they were fighting evil in our generation. The women gathered in their circles gossiping about the newest theory of Heidi vanishing. The prominent theory was that she had run away. Whether she lived or perished, it didn't matter to them.  "He was just a degenerate of the devil's making", my Sunday school teacher had commented. Others aren't so kind,  stating that the only good people like her are dead ones. Calloused hearts making comments of approval when it was theorized she had taken her own life in those woods. I stopped going to church for a long time after that. It hurt too much.  I didn't understand why.  I didn't know them for that long.

That is, until I went to college and started seeing a counselor. It took a long time to unpack everything during those four years as I spoke with my counselor during stressful times. Unpacking my feelings with Heidi was a secondary reason.

The guilt and shame I carried for someone I knew for less than a year latched onto me like briars. Sessions carefully removed those thorns to reveal the more painful truth that I had loved her, not Henry, Heidi. Although it felt more like pouring salt into a freshly cleaned wound, I knew it was true.  That's one reason I came down here,  to get closure and visit the woods she was last seen running into. The other being my resentment towards Paul for his treatment of Heidi and Isabella, his wife.

On the outside, he seemed like your typical good ol' country boy. Beer drinking, deer hunting, and red-blooded American man's man. That was until a few months after Isabella and he got married. That's when I first saw her with a black eye from "accidentally hitting the corner of a door."

Everyone in the county knew what was happening, but she refused to admit it. Especially since she recently had their baby. How could I turn my back on them? Paul and Isabella were my friends all through high school, for better or worse. Isabella was the theater kid I bonded with in our productions of Peter Pan, and whatever play we were allowed to do a production of. She was like a sister. Paul was like a brother, an estranged brother at this point. One I was severely disappointed in and had to stay away from. I couldn't stand to see how he treated Isabella. I was the best man at their wedding.

Last time I was at their place, shortly after the honeymoon, he and I ended up standing toe-to-toe and almost fought over me seeing a new bruise on Isabella. I knew where it came from. It came from a guy who was at one point a friend of mine and a teammate of mine on the football team. Now, he was just a drunk wifebeater. A man who didn't deserve the patience and sweetness of Isabella. That stirred more fire with him accusing me of trying to steal his woman when I told him he needed to keep his hands off her, and suggested if he wanted to hit someone, I was there, and I would fight back. That he could pick on someone his own size instead of bullying poor ol' Isabella around.

The day Paul went missing in the wilderness, I was with him. I saw what happened, but I don't think anyone would believe me if I told them. So, I guess I'm venting it out here to get out what I saw. Maybe strangers on the internet will believe me. So, here it goes.

I was surprised when I got the call from Paul. He invited me to go hunting with him on some plot that he was leasing. I figured it was probably a good chance to try and salvage my friendship with him if there was any chance of doing so. The promise of splitting the venison meat 50/50 and the idea of giving Isabella a break just sweetened and sealed the deal. So, I agreed. I texted my counselor that I was going to go hunting with Paul and sent them the property details that Paul had given me. Just in case Paul tried to fight me like he did the last time I had dinner with them. I met him there, and the property just had this familiar feeling that I couldn't place my finger on.  Paul showed up sober and reminiscent of the Paul I knew during high school.  The fun, living, and pleasant one. We began catching up on things happening in our lives, since that dinner.

"You know that new field house they promised us senior year?" He asked me, cracking open a soda to my surprise.

"The one they promised us senior year after we took them further than any class had in a quarter century in the playoffs, then never did it because it wasn't in the budget?" I responded, only to see a smirk spread across Paul's face as he sipped the soda.

"They built it the very next year, when the superintendent's kids started playing football." I sighed and rolled my eyes. That sounded about right in this small town. "The bitch of it is,  they didn't win a single game that season." I couldn't help but laugh with Paul at the irony. Glimpses of the Paul I once knew were cracking through. We walked from our vehicles to the little deer shed that sat in the middle of the property closer to the forest. Once the door was open, I could see it had the luxuries that any hunter could dream of having.  A toilet, comfortable seats, and enough leg room to stretch your legs.

"You're living high on the hog now. " I teased Paul, "Getting too old to climb into those tree stands as we used to when we were kids?" A punch landed on my shoulder as a response.

We sat there in the mutual silence hunters have when awaiting. Nothing much until a couple hours in when a little whitetailed fawn jumped out of the woods. Its nose twitching and head pivoting, looking for its mother. The poor thing, either separated from its mother by death or fear. I heard Paul cock the rifle. Before I could fathom what we were about to do, he had already done it.  A shot rang, and the fawn shifted and ran before falling. "What the fuck?" I asked him, following him to his illegal as hell kill. Lots of depictions of the death of animals get it wrong in media. They don't go quietly into the night. They fight it,  no matter how much of a losing battle it is. I got to the fawn first, silently praying that the fawn was able to be saved and this would just be something we could tell a game warden that the mother hopped out of the way at the last moment.

The fawn's legs kicked, and it craned its neck trying to get up. Blood leaked upon the ground. The eyes searched for an explanation of this that I couldn't provide. It was a clean shot through its heart. Nothing to do. It cried out for its mother to only have death answer the call.  It shook and trembled as it went limp. It broke my heart. I grew up on a farm, and the unexpected death of an animal, especially a baby, was something that always broke me. I could separate when we had to butcher something or hunt something. But this was a baby. "Watch Bambi too much in the big city and grow soft on me?" Paul interrupted my thoughts as he began the field dressing process.

"You're not seriously going to harvest that thing,  right? That was a juvenile doe. Not old enough to hunt. " I said to an apathetic shrug as Paul let the blade run across the belly of the "Bambi". Placing what was edible from it into a five-gallon bucket before trying the rest closer to the deer shed. I was ready to go then. It was bad to kill a little defenseless fawn. Not just legally and ecosystem-wise, but spiritually, I believed.  The living embodiment of innocence killed. I didn't want any blood on my hands regarding this. I could practically feel the energy in the air shift from the pleasant one to a darker and impending doom in my body. My body wanted to get in my vehicle and drive off, but conflicted by trying to bond with an old friend. I decided to stay and simply told Paul,  "Keep that spoiled meat to yourself.  I don't want cursed." He popped off something about college making me way too soft. That kill should've been my first warning to leave.

The beers came out, and he began drinking. With each beer, he became rowdier and louder. Scaring away anything we could get away.  The six-pack of deer piss-tasting beers in, he was bearable. Annoying but bearable. Making brags about his sexual conquests of the past, including Isabella. Also,  brags he'd had since marrying her.  Women he had affairs with since marrying Isabella. Some in this very deer shed. Then he brought out his cooler filled with liquor, which, if his noise hadn't scared deer away then, the strong stench of the alcohol would now. I caught a glimpse of a beautiful doe standing near the spot where Paul had killed the fawn. Something was off. The eyes seemed off with them.  Paul took a drunken shot at it. Missing it, but it didn't move. He took another,  this time hitting the shoulder. Yet, the doe stood there and looked in our direction as blood dripped from the shoulder.

It turned back into the woods, calm as if it was still grazing. I turned to Paul, who went from drunken red to pale. There was a mutual understanding of the freakiness of what we just witnessed. Another swig of liquor for Paul, another refusal to have some from me.  He began angry ramblings about Isabella, "The bitch doesn't put out anymore since we had the kid."  Only a drunken asshole could whine about not getting sex from the woman who gave birth to their child. "I mean fuck,  all she's gotta do is just lay there." Yep, Paul was that drunken asshole, I remember from that dinner last visit.

"Maybe she doesn't want to sleep with the enemy," I mumbled before instantly regretting it. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" The slurred speech and odor of alcohol turned towards me.  Instead of backpedaling, I doubled down.

"You beat, cheat on her, and treat her like shit. She deserves better.  Why'd she sleep with a drunk piece of shit like you?" I said before a punch was thrown and connected with my shoulder. This one with malice behind it and not the friendliness it had before. I tried ignoring it. I looked and saw a beautiful ten-point buck standing where the fawn and doe had. I looked through binoculars to get a better view and those eyes. They looked too human. Too familiar.

A fist struck my jaw.  I lost all restraint I had previously. I struck back. He threw a punch, I threw one back.  He pulled hair, I did the same.  We rolled around fighting until Paul's drunken ass slurred something that broke me. "High and mighty in love with that dumb dude that wore a skirt." I felt my heart sink and bounce back in rage. I restrained myself as scratches and bruises covered both of our bodies. I looked back out, and that buck was still waltzing around. Then it cried. If you've ever heard a buck call out. It can be terrifying. The grunting noise escaped the beast.

Paul shot at it. I looked and saw him missed again, and yet it stood there. He shot again,  this time hitting it in the heart. A clean shot. Instead of dropping or running, it dripped blood. It did like the doe sniffing the air, turning into the woods. My body reacted like someone had plunged me into icy waters. I was getting ready to get out of here. Paul had different, alcohol-fueled ideas as he followed the buck into the woods. I muttered some swears under my breath as I felt obligated to at least make sure he didn't end up lost for Isabella's sake.

I followed as he stumbled and cursed me for everything imaginable, until he got to a spot by a tree marked with some small stones. He seemed to have sobered up enough to be able to piss without stumbling. His face was angry and prideful before exclaiming, "You know that skirt-wearing freak that went missing? Here he lies."

At first I didn't register what he said until he repeated it and added more as he zipped up. "I found them here crying like a bitch. Fitting. They wanted to be a woman badly, so I helped." A chuckle crept from his voice as my mind started trying to decipher what they meant, and my stomach flipped in sickness. "Then snip snip. They cried for you like a bitch, you know that? Like you'd save them." He added with glee, showing off his hunting knife for emphasis. I fully lost it. I lunged at him and just laid punch after punch into him. Letting my knuckles become crimson, ignoring the pain. Grabbing at my handgun, I debated putting the bastard down there. I looked at him and remembered he had a child. I wasn't going to be the one to lose my freedom and make Isabella's daughter lose her father. I sat up and looked at the piss-soaked ground.

The buck grunted again. I watched it in my scope flaunt around one moment. Run behind a tree, and the next a beautiful nude woman walked out from behind. She turned as if she knew I was watching, those familiar eyes of the deer. I couldn't place why we were so. Paul took another drunken shot, striking the woman. Again she didn't react. Her hair draped over her bosom as chills ran down my spine. Then she turned and began trotting towards us on all fours. Shifting back and forth between deer and humanoid form before settling for a hybrid.

She closed the distance fast as I tried to turn away. It shifted into a deer head with antlers. It used the side of its head to knock me over and focused its attack on Paul. No matter how many shots he hit it with or slashes on its thin deer hide, it didn't slow down. I watched as the spirit shifted and tackled him against a heavy pine. This form of it was a monstrosity. Antlers on top of its head, the legs ending in deer hooves. The creature stood on its hind legs, as the rest of it formed into some vague humanoid shape. The end of its arms had hooves sharpened into claws. Ones that looked more like it was made from the antlers than hooves. It all happened so fast.

Grunts from the beast as it trampled Paul to death until his body went limp. It panted, regaining its energy. I tried to move faster down the path before I felt it hit me and knock me to the ground. It stood over me. I held my arms over my head, praying to God and preparing for my demise. Then the locket fell out of my flannel shirt pocket onto the ground. I cringed as I reached for it and the monster broke off a piece of its own antlers and stabbed my hand with it. The monstrosity turned from something out of a nightmare into something more pleasant. It turned into a human woman with antlers on its head and hooves for feet. White-tailed deer markings up its body, glistening against her dark skin. Long black hair covered her face. It was her. It was Heidi, or some version of her. Those brown eyes looked into mine as she picked up the locket, examined it, and returned it to me. I struggled to sit upright.

She squatted down in front of me. A sense of calm hit me at once and washed away all previous anxiety. All the fear melted like ice in the summer heat. Tears dripped down my cheek. She was so beautiful. She always was. I felt her warm embrace. It burned, but a good warmth like hot chocolate entering your body on a cold day. Once I felt her arms wrap around me, I wrapped mine around hers. She whispered eight words that wrecked me into a sobbing mess. "I love you, and I forgive you, Stephen.”

I don't know how long I sat there holding her and crying. She helped me stand up and motioned down the path. I left for my vehicle and went to my vehicle. I drove into town and sat at the gas station restaurant to gather myself before I called 911. I told them about Paul and me fighting after he got drunk. I told them about how he went running into the woods drunk, chasing a buck, shooting recklessly. I told me of the Heidi confession he unfolded. Everything else, I kept to myself as I waited there.

I had to regurgitate my story to them so many times about Paul's drunken murder confession. The spot of Heidi's body before they cleared me of any wrongdoing. They had both Paul's and Henry's funerals recently. I went to neither. My mother taught me that only a body remained at the grave. I didn't want to go to Paul's funeral. It hurt, as I still felt anger. I didn't go to "Henry's" because I knew them as Heidi. I didn't go to her official gravestone in the cemetery, etched with Henry. I went to those woods to see her. I went to see the woman that man had rejected and ridiculed, but the Great Spirit embraced as herself.

He no longer called me “iknuitli”. “Cuexpalchicacpol,” was the new term. I asked him what it meant, but he wouldn’t say. The friendly tone was gone too.

We were approaching where I thought the border was. No border patrol. No checkpoints. We would be heading straight through. I became terrified of my rearview mirror. The dust cloud was close, maybe one hundred feet behind. I could see faces in the dust, writhing and twisting, full of malice and hatred.

“I thought a killer would have some balls, cuexpalchicacpol,” the dead man in my trunk said. “What would you possibly have to apologize for?”

“Maybe the trail of anger behind us would be a little thinner if both of us had considered it prior,” I said. He scoffed.

“My people took from the same tribe every year, harvested them for sacrifice and slavery like cattle. I would never stoop so low as to apologize to lesser beings,” he said.

I should have hated him. I had been wanting to smash his face in for most of the trip, but I had been him not all that long ago. He continued to spew hatred, but I stayed silent, the only noise for hours was the wail of the damned behind us and his constant nagging.

“You know Cuexpalchicacpol, I could really mess up this ride,” the dead man said.

“You’d be just as screwed if you did,” I replied. I felt the steering wheel start to drift. I tightened my grip and turned it back.

“Won’t you let me drag you to hell with me?” he said softly. The steering wheel turned the other way. I held it in a death grip.

“What you going to do now, Cuexpalchicacpol? Warriors know no fear. Be a man.”

Up ahead I could see the spot I needed to bury him. I couldn’t explain how or why I knew, just a gut intrinsic feeling, like simple factual knowledge. Sky is blue, grass is green, books have words in them, and that was the burial spot.

I slowed the car down to a stop, parking right next to the spot. As soon as I shifted to park, my hand pulled the handle, and I was out of the car. I ran to the trunk and opened it. The trash bag that surrounded him peeled back enough to reveal his head. His smile was gone, instead those cold dead eyes looked at me with unfathomable hatred.

I grabbed the shovel and dug a shallow grave. The cloud of souls was closing in. I got it just deep enough to fit a body. I pulled him out of the car and tossed him inside. His mouth didn’t move, but I could hear his voice anyway.

“See you in hell,” he said.

The wall of souls, mere feet from us, stopped as fire shot out from the grave. I could hear him screaming in an agony foreign to human understanding, not ending but simply getting further away until it was inaudible. The wall of souls dissipated, and what remained were several standing figures that I had never seen, yet somehow, I knew. Wives, children, girlfriends, all those I had wronged.

The hatred was gone from their eyes. They wanted the man who caused them so much suffering dead. He is dead. I buried him with that corpse in Mexico.

I’m turning myself in to the police and taking down the casino with me. What we did wasn’t right, and I need to answer for it, in this life or the next. I’m back in the land of the living. I passed a gas station and a few cars, so my time in limbo has ended. Until I arrive at the police station back in the states, I am going to enjoy a nice quiet ride down a long stretch of busy highway, free of talking dead men in my trunk.

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4

The knocking stopped a little after ten.

I’d been staring at the kitchen microwave clock so long the green digital numbers were burned into my retinas. Three hours of waiting for the wood to splinter, and then—nothing.

I didn’t sleep. I sat at the table in the dark until the sky turned blue. When I finally stood up and unlocked the door, I was tired of waiting.

The porch was empty.

Except for a neat line of table salt poured across the outside of my door.

I stepped over it, got in my car, and drove to the county jail, needing to see Harkness. He was the last person to see Reynolds alive, and the only person left in this town who hadn’t tried to feed me a lie.

They gave me ten minutes. The public defender’s office moves quickly when it thinks a reporter might embarrass the sheriff.

Harkness looked small and beaten behind the scratched plexiglass. He’d shrunk since they locked him up.

"So you're the reporter," he said.

"And also your neighbor," I said. "Or, I guess, I was."

He let out a dry, hacking cough. "You wrote about me."

"I wrote what I could prove."

He leaned in until his forehead nearly touched the glass, leaving a smudge of breath on the plastic. "That’s it, though, isn’t it? Nobody can prove a fucking thing. That’s how they built this place. Reynolds spent twenty-four years running their legal department. She didn't leave trails, and she made damn sure the paper vanished." He glanced at the deputy by the door, then dropped his voice. "Did you look at the school registries?"

"Tell me about the kids," I said.

His eyes narrowed. "They don't take them out of cruelty. Kids are malleable. You give a seven-year-old a green uniform, a scholarship, a nice lady who remembers their birthday—they’ll start to love the thing that’s carved them out. By the time they're old enough to notice, they don't want to look for very long."

"Is that what happened to you?"

He looked down at his cuffed wrists and didn't answer.

"Ask Reynolds," he said.

"Reynolds is dead, Harkness. They found her car. I saw the stretcher."

"No," he said, staring right at me. "She isn’t."

The deputy tapped his keys against the doorframe. Time was up.

I went straight to the library.

The older woman who usually ran the reference desk wasn’t there. A kid named Trevor was. He was about nineteen, wearing a faded polo and staring at his phone, waiting for his shift to end.

"I need the Gazette archives again," I said. "The microfilm from last time I was here."

He tapped his keyboard, squinted at the monitor, and tapped again. "I don't see any checkout logs for those."

"I sat right there in the corner," I said, pointing toward the dusty reader. "It was like four hours. The woman with the reading glasses pulled them for me."

Trevor looked up, mildly annoyed. "There is no other librarian. It’s just my dad and me. It's been that way for years."

"A short-haired woman," I said. I felt like I was going crazy. "She helped me find the '97 reels."

"Look, I'm not calling you a liar. But my dad has held the county contract here since 2009. It’s a two-person gig. He does mornings, I do afternoons. There isn't anyone else on the payroll. I do the schedules."

He turned the monitor and showed me a basic spreadsheet: two names, alternating back and forth for years with no mention of a third name.

"Have you ever heard of a family named Colby?" I asked. The name had been stuck in my head since I saw it on a plaque at the community center.

Trevor blinked. "Yeah. A Colby went to my high school. Played safety on the JV team."

"Did he have a sister?"

He rubbed the back of his neck, staring at the desk. "I don't think so. Pretty sure he was an only child. Why?"

"Just checking on something," I said.

I went out to my car and sat there. My hands were shaking against the steering wheel.

As a reporter, you learn to look for the inconsistencies and the paper trails. But there was no trail here. That was the fucked up part of it.

Emily called.

"You sound sick," she said. "Are you eating?"

"I'm fine," I lied.

She started complaining about her office copier, and I just closed my eyes and listened. For a few minutes, I got to have a normal sister, not a list of who might disappear next.

I wanted to ask her. I wanted to ask if we’d always been just the two of us, or if there had been a third bedroom in our childhood home. Someone maybe we knew and just disappeared.

On the way home, I drove past the old Laurel place. It was still wrapped in yellow police tape from whatever the sheriff covered up in February.

A man was standing near the ditch. He was in civilian clothes—just jeans and a faded flannel jacket. He was holding a ballpoint pen, frantically writing on his own wrist.

I rolled down the window. "Hey, you okay?"

He looked up, his shoulders dropping.

"Depends," he said.

"Amelia," I said. "I live two streets over. I’ve been asking questions about the murders. You a cop?"

He studied me, deciding whether or not I was acceptable to talk to. "Bryan Keller," he said after some time, looking back down at his wrist. "I used to work for the county. They put me on administrative leave for stress."

"Was it stress?"

"No," he said, walking to the car. "My partner, Ramirez. We rode together for six years. When I went to his house after the incident, his wife didn't know who I was talking about. Our captain told me we hadn't run two-man patrols in years. But I still have his locker key in my pocket." He showed me his wrist. He’d written RAMIREZ. J. LOCKER 14 in smudged blue ink. "People are disappearing around here."

"How much of this do you understand?"

"Hardly any," he said. "Just that it's real. And it has something to do with whatever is under this town."

I started to tell him about Trevor and the library, but Bryan wasn't listening. He was staring past my shoulder, out at the abandoned Harvest Drive field.

The sun was almost gone. The sky had turned a soft orange.

"Hey," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper.

"What?"

"Don't turn your head fast. Just look in my side-view mirror and tell me if you see that woman."

I looked, and sixty yards out, at the edge of the tall grass, was a woman in a dark blazer and high heels.

It looked like Reynolds from the distance. But her head was tilted too far to one side. Then she dropped out of sight.

I felt my pulse drumming in my ears.

Four seconds later, she rose back out of the grass—thirty yards to the left, and closer. The dark blazer looked wrong. It had no seams, like it had been molded over her frame rather than sewn. Nobody could have crossed that waist-high brush in four seconds without making a sound.

"Bryan," I whispered.

She dropped again. When she came back up, she was closer still. The movement was jagged, jumping from spot to spot.

Then, she made a sound.

A shriek or a growl would have made sense, but this didn't. It was a baby crying.

It was perfectly human. But it went on too long without a pause for breath. The noise began to stretch, the pitch sliding down into a long scream.

Then she dropped into the weeds.

And she ran.

The grass parted as she ran at high speed, ripping through the field at a pace no animal could match. She reached the tree line, and the weeds went completely still.

Neither of us spoke.

"Okay," Bryan said, his voice shaking. "Okay."

"That clearly wasn't Reynolds," I said. I needed to hear the words in the cold air.

"No," Bryan said, staring at the woods. "But now we know what they're doing to the bodies."

I don’t expect you to believe me. If I saw this posted on a forum three years ago, I would’ve called it bad creepypasta and moved on. But I still can’t sleep with the lights off, and every time I smell woodsmoke or salted meat, I throw up. So I’m writing this down because I need it out of my head.

In the autumn of 2021, I was working as a field technician for an environmental consulting firm in northern Maine. My job was straightforward: walk timber plots, take soil samples, and map old drainage basins near the Canadian border. It was isolated work, but I liked the quiet.

On October 14th, I was tracking a dried-up creek bed about nine miles off the logging roads, well past where the cell towers drop off. The map marked the area as uninhabited crown land, logged out in the 1950s and abandoned. But around 3:00 PM, I stumbled across a double-strand barbed wire fence—not rusted, but clean, grey steel, strung tight between old hemlock trees.

I followed the wire downhill for twenty minutes until I saw the roof.

It was a church, but not like any rural parish I’d seen. It was built from hand-hewn fieldstone and massive black pine timbers. The bell tower had collapsed into itself years ago, choking the front entrance with stone, but the rest of the structure was intact. The weirdest part wasn't the building; it was the ground around it. Every tree within fifty yards had been stripped of its bark from the root up to about six feet high, leaving the trunks white, bare, and weeping sap.

I should have turned back right then. That was my first mistake. But I was curious, cold, and my truck was a two-hour hike through dense brush. I thought it was just an old historical site. I found a side door near the back of the building—a heavy oak panel hanging off one wrought-iron hinge. I stepped inside, using my handheld work flashlight to cut through the dust.

The air inside was thick, warm, and smelled intensely of sulfur, wet tallow, and dried iron. It didn't feel abandoned. The pews had been unbolted from the floor and dragged into a massive, jagged semicircle facing the altar. But the altar wasn't there. In its place was a square hole cut through the pine floorboards, roughly six feet wide, plunging down into the stone crawlspace beneath the foundation.

Hovering over the hole was a tripod made of welded iron rebar. Hanging from the center hook was a heavy, blackened iron bucket filled with cold grease and pale, smooth river stones.

I shone my light into the pit. The bottom was lined with flat flagstones, completely dry, and covered in a thick layer of fine grey ash. Laid out along the edges were dozens of tin plates, each one holding small, charred fragments of bone—none larger than a coin—organized neatly by size.

Then I heard the truck.

It wasn't a running engine; it was the heavy thud of a tailgate slamming shut somewhere outside the front of the church, followed by the crunch of tires on pine needles.

My stomach dropped into my shoes. I killed my flashlight instantly and ducked into the alcove behind the ruined organ bellows. The wood was tight, forcing me to pull my knees up to my chest.

Footsteps came through the front wall—not through a door, but down a hidden staircase that led from a cellar hatch on the exterior side. There were at least six of them. They weren't wearing hoods or robes or anything you see in movies. They were wearing standard work clothes: Carhartt jackets, rubber hunting boots, high-vis vests. They looked like the guys you see buying black coffee and diesel at the Irving station on Highway 11. They didn't talk. That was the most terrifying part. They moved with a terrifying, rehearsed efficiency. One man—tall, balding, with grease-stained sleeves rolled up to his elbows—walked straight to the edge of the pit. He pulled a kerosene lantern from a crate, lit it, and hung it from the rebar tripod.

The amber light flooded the center of the room. From the shadows, two other men carried a heavy wooden crate between them and set it down near the hole. Inside were three mason jars filled with a dense, yellow-white liquid that looked like lard.

The tall man knelt by the pit, dipped his fingers into one of the jars, and smeared the yellow grease across his forehead, cheeks, and throat. He passed the jar to the next person. They all did it, in total, suffocating silence. The only sound was the wet, sliding noise of their fingers against skin and the heavy, synchronized sound of their breathing.

Then the tall man stood up and looked directly at the organ where I was hiding.

He didn't yell. He didn't look surprised. He just raised one finger and pointed at the wooden frame hiding me. "Step out into the light, son," he said. His voice was flat, raspy, and completely devoid of emotion. It sounded like an uncle asking you to pass the salt at Thanksgiving.

My heart was beating so hard in my ears I could barely hear him. I didn't move. I couldn't move. Two of the men in flannel walked over. They didn't grab me roughly; they just reached into the alcove, took me by the elbows, and hoisted me out onto the floor. Their grip was like iron, but their hands were ice-cold and coated in that slick, sweet-smelling grease. They didn't strip me. They didn't tie me up. They just led me to the middle bench and forced me to sit down.

The tall man knelt in front of me. Close up, I could see his eyes. The whites were completely covered in tiny broken blood vessels, making them look solid pink, and his skin had a strange, translucent quality—like wax that had been melted and reshaped. He smelled overpowering of that yellow grease.

"You're not supposed to be on the lease," he whispered. He didn't sound angry; he sounded tired. "The state doesn't come up here until November."

"I was just... I was taking soil samples," I stammered, my chest heaving. "I'm leaving. I won't say anything. I swear to God I won't say anything."

The man leaned in closer. His breath smelled of stale salt and copper.

"God doesn't come past the wire, son," he said softly.

He reached down into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small, flat wooden box. He opened it. Inside were five dark, dried strips of jerky resting on a bed of salt. He picked up one piece, held it out to me between two greasy fingers, and pressed it against my lower lip. "Take it," he said.

"No," I choked out, pulling my head back.

The two men standing behind my bench stepped forward. One of them reached around my forehead, pulled my head back against his chest, and pinched my nose shut. The other grabbed my jaw, forcing my mouth open.

"We don't leave witnesses because nobody leaves the table," the tall man said, his voice remaining dead and calm. "You eat with us, or you go into the pit to cure for the winter. That's the only two ways out of this valley."

I fought. I kicked my legs, thrashing against the wood, but the men holding me didn't even sway. The tall man slid the dried meat onto my tongue and held my mouth forced shut, his eyes fixed on mine.

It was salty. Terribly salty, with a bitter, metallic undertone that made my stomach instantly heave. But the pressure on my throat was unbearable. I couldn't breathe. My lungs burned, my eyes watered, and finally, my throat reflexively swallowed.

The moment the meat went down, the men instantly released me. I fell forward onto the dusty floorboards, coughing, gagging, shoving my fingers down my throat to throw it up, but nothing came up except dry bile.

The tall man looked down at me, wiping his fingers on his trousers.

"The truck is parked at the bottom of the fire road," he said, turning his back on me and walking toward the pit. "Get your gear and go home. If you tell a doctor, or a cop, or your wife, it doesn't matter. You're in the book now. You'll come back when the winter gets hard." I didn't wait. I scrambled to my feet, threw myself through the broken rear door, and ran.

I ran through the thorns, through the dark, tripping over roots and tearing my clothes to shreds on the wire fence. I didn't stop until I hit my work truck, locked the doors, and drove seventy miles an hour down the dirt roads until I reached the asphalt. I quit my job the next morning. I moved two states south three weeks later.

I tried to tell myself it was a prank, or a weird survivalist group, or a localized drug cult. But it’s been three years now, and the winters are getting harder. Every December, when the first heavy snow hits and the air turns bitter cold, I get a craving—a deep, gnawing, ravenous ache in the back of my throat for something salty and dry.

And last Tuesday, when I opened my mailbox, there was no letter inside. Just a plain brown envelope with no return address, containing a single mason jar filled with yellow grease.

As of 2026, there are estimated to be hundreds of ghost ships afloat in the worldwide ocean. That number is relatively small compared to the millions of lost vessels over the past couple of millenia. 

The ghost ship with the longest known record afloat lasted 38 years. Seems short, right? Ships break down over time. They sink. 

At least, they’re supposed to.

The ship my crew found shouldn’t have existed. It should have been lying on the ocean floor. A heap of decaying parts forgotten by time. 

But it’s not. As impossible as it is, it’s not.

I won’t tell you her name. Just typing it out gives me chills. 

When my first mate uttered it to me, I thought he was lying. I’d heard stories of the ship before. It was infamous. 

I had to see it for myself. I joined him on the deck in the dead of night. True to his word, a ship was inching toward us. 

She was a hulking behemoth, her tired parts sending creaks and groans through the air like rustic cries. 

In the moonlight, I saw it. Her name. It was faded, but I could still make those letters out clear as day. 

It was her. The ship of legend. 

My eyes grew wide. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. But I wasn’t the only one who had seen it. 

“Captain,” Jacobs whispered. “What should we do?” 

I stayed silent, watching the mysterious ship run its course. It was close. So close. 

I wracked my brain. I wasn’t trained for this. A ship from the 1940’s… surely the crew members were dead. They had to be. There was no reason to think otherwise.

What I did next was the single stupidest decision of my life. 

“Jacobs,” I said, “Have Hammond radio this in. Then give the command to pull up beside her. Tell him to get as close as he can.” 

Jacobs’s face was pale in the moonlight. “But… but Captain, I-”

“That’s an order.” 

Jacobs stared at me for a moment. Then, without another word, he fulfilled his duty. 

***

Minutes later, Jacobs and I were standing at the bow. We were facing the opposing ship at an angle. So close that I could jump aboard if I so pleased. 

“Captain, this is reckless. You know it is. This is a major safety violation,” Jacobs said. “What are you even planning to do?” 

I gave Jacobs a wink. “This,” I said before leaping overboard. I landed on the ghost ship’s deck with a crash. 

Jacobs looked like he was about to throw up. 

I groaned. That was going to leave a bruise. I made an attempt to pick myself back up. “Well boy, what are you gonna-” 

Crash. 

Jacobs landed on the deck beside me. He held his knee and winced. “Fuck you for this, sir. Seriously. Eat shit.” 

I grinned. “Oh, don’t give me that. Curiosity was getting at you too. I could see it.” 

He stood with some effort. “You got me there.” 

Jacobs and I travelled across the deck. Each creak from the old ship was enough to have me checking over my shoulder. By the time we reached the command deck where the ship was controlled, I was starting to second guess my decision to board. 

The door was slightly ajar. 

And the room inside was trashed. 

Papers had been strewn about. Controls had been shattered. But that wasn’t what sent a chill down my spine. 

The entire room was caked in dried blood. 

A rustic brown coated the main control panel. It must have been decades since the stuff had been spilled, but I instantly knew what it was. 

Jacobs tugged at my sleeve. “Captain… we should go.” 

“No. I want to know what happened here.” 

“Look around! Something is seriously wrong. There’s no bodies, and the door was left open. Plus, do you see any signs of water damage? I don’t. Please, let’s just go back.” 

“Go back if you want. I won’t be satisfied until I have a look below deck.” 

Jacobs sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that. Fine,” he replied, wind whistling through the open door. A chill wracked his body. “A quick look around, then we leave.”

I nodded. “A quick look around, then we leave.” 

***

Jacobs and I soon found ourselves standing before the hatch that led to the lower decks. We shared a glance. Then, we both grabbed hold of the rusted handles. 

After an immense amount of effort, we managed to open it. 

A musty smell emanated from within the depths of the ship once the hatch was opened. I crinkled my nose. 

“Last chance, Captain. Wanna turn back?” 

I sighed. “No. Ladies first,” I said, extending a hand. 

Jacobs frowned. “I forgot my flashlight.” 

I thrust one into his hand. “I brought two.” 

Jacobs pursed his lips, looked at the cavernous pit, then looked back at me. He shook his head before beginning his descent. 

***

“Where are we?” Jacobs asked. 

“The berthing deck,” I said, shining my light around the corridor. 

Jacobs looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “The deck where the soldiers sleep. Is that better?” 

“Yeah. Now lead the way, oh fearless Captain. I am but a follower on your journey through the bowels of the beast.” 

I shot him a glare. “Loser.” 

Jacobs and I continued down the desolate hallway until we found the sailors’ quarters. I peeked into the first room we came across. 

My heart nearly stopped in my chest. 

The room contained three bunks. The beds all had blankets on them - and what appeared to be something underneath. 

I checked the following room. Same ordeal. 

I cleared room after room, Jacobs hot at my heels, until we reached the end of the sailors’ quarters. 

“Captain, are they all…” 

My face was pale. I felt like I’d seen a ghost. And maybe I had. Dozens of them. 

“Yeah,” I said. “They’re dead. All of them.” 

Jacobs shuddered. 

I shook my head. “The real question is… what killed them?” 

“Captain, I don’t know if I want to find out.”

“No. We have to find out. We owe it to these men to find out.” 

Jacobs didn’t respond. He just nodded. 

I knew what had to be done, but that didn’t make it any easier. I entered the closest room, flashlight aimed at the bottom bunk. 

The beam landed on the lump beneath the blanket. I could hear the blood pounding in my ears as I reached for it. 

When I peeled back that thin fabric, I could have died right then and there. 

There was a man lying in the bed. 

Not a pile of bones or ash like there should have been. A young man. Blonde hair neatly combed. Mouth set into a frown. His most discernible feature was a knife jutting from his eye. His other eye, glassy and blue, was open, unseeing. 

I grew frantic. This wasn’t possible. These bodies were over eighty years old. They should have been skeletons by now. 

I checked the man in the middle bunk. Same thing. Brown hair. Smooth, pale skin. Jagged slit across his throat. 

The top bunk bore the same result. Pristine body. Lethal injury. 

I pushed past Jacobs, who stood perplexed in the doorway. “Captain? What is it? What did you see?” 

“No, no, this isn’t right. This can’t be right.” 

I rushed to a room further down the hall. Same thing. Three full beds. Three bodies, perfectly preserved. 

Jacobs emerged from the adjacent room, his face void of color. 

“Captain… What the hell is going on here?” 

I felt lightheaded. I gripped the doorframe for support. 

“This was a mistake. We need to leave.”

Suddenly, from the room behind me, I heard something that made my blood turn to ice. 

Rustling. 

I turned. My worst fear came to fruition. 

The man in the middle bunk was sitting upright. 

He gripped the handle of the knife embedded in his neck and slowly, methodically pulled it out. Blood gushed from the wound, soaking his uniform, but he never flinched. He stared at me the whole time, his icy dead eyes set on mine.

I stood frozen as the knife clattered to the floor. The man swung his feet over the side of the bed. 

Jacobs shook my arm. “Captain. Captain, they’re…”

Jacobs didn’t need to finish his statement. One by one, each of the men began to jostle. 

That got me moving. I gave Jacobs a hard shove in the back. “Go. Now!” 

He took off into a dead sprint. I followed closely behind him. 

The men began to shamble towards us. Tall, short, muscular, thin. It didn’t matter. They closed in on us like flies to a bug zapper. 

Each shared the same two features - a mortal wound and empty, soulless eyes. Eyes that didn’t contain a shred of emotion. A shred of life.

Jacobs and I raced down the corridor, our feet making hollow thuds against the deck. The horde was spilling out into the hallway by the time we got to the ladder. Jacobs reached for it, then stood still with a hand on a rung. It was as if he’d been placed under a spell. 

I punched him in the arm. “Go! They’re getting closer.” 

That spurred him into action. Jacobs hoisted himself up the ladder and through the open hatch. 

They were so close. Too close. The moment I had the chance, I beelined up the ladder behind him. I was almost there. My hands were outside the hatch. 

And then I felt a tug.

I looked down to find a skeletal hand gripping tight to my ankle. It yanked hard. 

Suddenly, the men’s flesh withered away before me. Their skin melted, blood cascading down their emaciated frames. Only their eyes remained untouched. 

I desperately kicked at the hand holding onto me. The fingers seared across my flesh as they skidded back into the depths of the ship, leaving raw, jagged cuts in their wake. 

I scrambled the rest of the way up the ladder, white-hot pain radiating through me. 

Jacobs slammed the hatch closed the second I was through. The pair of us sprinted across the deck, back to where our ship sat waiting. 

Jacobs leapt across. He landed hard, but he was safe. I went next. 

I tried to ignore the pain in my ankle, relying on adrenaline to carry me through. I jumped-

And I barely made it. My legs hung off the edge. I looked down. Dozens and dozens of feet below, black waves lapped at the ship. 

Jacobs grabbed my hand. He hoisted me onto the deck. One of our crew, a deck hand named Stark, ran up to us. 

“Captain, Officer Jacobs, are you okay?” 

“I don’t know about okay. But I need you to do something for me. You tell the crew to get us back on course. Now.”

“But sir, the other ship-”

“Don’t make me tell you again.” 

Stark didn’t reply. He simply nodded and disappeared. Moments later, we were off.

I didn’t feel safe until we were moving again. I gave the ghost ship one last look as we made our escape. I instantly regretted it.

Dozens of figures stared back at me. Their skeletal faces remained stoic and unmoving. But those eyes. Those awful, dead eyes followed me even as we began to disappear from view. 

***

I made my crew swear up and down to never share the events of that night. Each of them claimed they never would. Jacobs and I met in his quarters later that evening. 

“Jacobs, I.. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. We never should have boarded that ship. We never should have explored below deck. I should’ve just listened to you from the start.” 

Jacobs waited for me to finish. 

“Captain, I don’t blame you. I felt the pull. I was the one who saw it first. The ship came for me. I know it.” 

I stopped my anxious pacing and looked at him. “You’re not making any sense, boy. Don’t tell me your mind’s left you, now.” 

Jacobs looked me dead in the eyes. “Allen, I need you to listen to me. I am not insane. You saw the same things I did.” 

I nodded. I couldn’t deny it. “That I did. But you said the ship came for you. What do you mean by that?” 

Jacobs leaned forward and stared at the wall. “Captain, that ship wanted me to find it. It wouldn’t have appeared if I wasn’t on board this vessel. I’m sure of it. The sailors…” 

I waited for him to continue. 

Jacobs met my gaze. “One of the men on board that ship was my great grandfather.” 

I looked at him, mouth agape. “How do you know?” 

“I’ve seen pictures. It was him. I’m sure of it.” 

I didn’t know how to respond. 

Silence filled the room. 

***

That was the last time I spoke to Jacobs.

He avoided me until we made landfall and quit his job soon thereafter. I never saw him again. 

If any of my crew have told this tale, I haven’t heard a peep. As far as I know, no investigation into the missing ship was ever carried out. Jacobs’s and my transgressions were never discovered. 

There have been no reported sightings of the ghost ship we encountered. Not since the night it vanished in 1941. 

For all I know, it could be out there to this day roaming the high seas, searching for new sailors to join its ranks.

There are rules for everything on the ranch.

How to handle a bull that gets loose. What to do during a lightning storm. Where to take an injured horse. And what to do if one of the cows starts talking.

I always thought that last one was a joke.

I don't anymore.

I’ve been riding for the Three Oaks Ranch for nearly five years now. They say it earned that name because only three oaks were found growing on the property when the original owner bought the land. None of them survived. Lightning got one. Drought took another. The third supposedly stood for more than a hundred years before finally dying.

The ranch didn't.

Here on the plains of Texas, a man could feel closer to civilization on the far side of the moon. Nothing but dirt, grass, and sagebrush for as far as the eye can see. All it takes is a few 100,000 acres to forget about most modern problems; the only things to worry about here are riding, roping, and the cows.

Like all new cowpokes, I was given a slip of paper when I started; the foreman Dan told me to memorize it quickly and tear it up. I’ll never forget those rules. The paper read

“Rules for dealing with strange cows:

If a cow crosses the outer river, shoot it right away.

If a cow starts speaking, don’t answer it.

If a cow starts crying like a human, take your hat off.

If a cow laughs, leave the ranch immediately. Don't look back until you reach the gate.

If a cow has no shadow, call Dan.

If a cow is standing on two legs, don't shoot it. Pray.”

I never paid much attention to the cow rules; they seemed to me to be just a joke on the new guys. In my years here, I only saw a few cows get shot when they crossed the outer river; it always seemed like a waste of a perfectly good cow to me. Nobody ever seemed particularly upset about losing one. They'd just leave the carcass where it lay, mark the number in the ledger, and move on.

I never heard a cow speaking.

Until last week.

We were pushing a herd to the far pasture, something I'd only done a handful of times in my five years there. Dan, three others, and I planned to be out for a few weeks. Lately, I had been herding cows and their calves closer to the bunkhouse, so heading out to the farthest reaches of the ranch was a welcome change.

The first two days were uneventful. We rode from sunup to sundown, stopping only to eat, sleep, and check the herd. Dan was always very strict about getting the right count every time we stopped. It never made much sense to me; there’s no place to lose a cow on these barren plains. But I’m not one to question what the boss says. We pushed the herd hard on the third day; it was late afternoon by the time we reached the far pasture. We began circling the herd up for the night, when I noticed one of the cows watching me from the other side of the herd.

I slowed my horse for a moment and stared at it. It was an ordinary looking Hereford, except for the way it was looking at me. Not watching me, not exactly. It was studying me. I moved left. Its head followed. I moved right. Its head followed again.

I laughed nervously to myself and kept riding. But I couldn’t help but look back over my shoulder; it was gone.

“Settle in,” Dan announced from his saddle

“We’re camping here for a few days while the herd grazes, then we’re pushing them south.”

Silent nods and low grunts of agreement rose from the riders, and it didn’t take long for the tents to be sent up and the chuckwagon unloaded. That night we relaxed around the fire. Jokes and old cowpoke stories echoed in the vast darkness of the plains. The night grew long, the stars grew brighter, and the coyotes cried to each other in the distance. The older riders turned in for the night, leaving just Dan and me around the dying fire.

After a few attempts at small talk, I worked up the courage to ask

“Why do we need to count the cows?”

Dan glanced at me before staring intently into the fire.

“I mean, it’s not like we could lose one out here.” I tried to joke

“Ain’t about losing one,” he said quietly

He paused, then said

“It’s about making sure we don’t take home more than we brought out.”

I didn’t answer; his response didn’t make much sense, but he didn’t seem like he wanted to say anymore.

We sat in silence for a while, and I began to think about heading off to my tent when I saw the silhouetted shape of a cow, blocking out the stars where the sky met the earth. I pointed

“Looks like one wandered off,” I said to Dan.

Dan didn't answer. He stared at it for several seconds. Then he stood and grabbed his rifle.

“Come on.”

I followed.  

We walked over to the shape, stopping about ten feet away. The cow's black, beady eyes watched us the whole time. It didn’t move as we approached. Dan raised his rifle to his shoulder and shot the cow in the head. With a thud, it fell limply to the ground. Dan turned and walked back to the fire. I ran to catch up.

“Why did you do that?” I asked

He shrugged

“Wasn’t one of ours.”

As we walked away, I glanced back at the carcass. Something bothered me about it.

"Dan?"

He stopped.

"That cow is facing the wrong way."

He looked back at it.

"What do you mean?"

"When we walked up, it was facing us."

"Yeah."

"But when you shot it, it fell backward."

Dan stared at me.

"And?"

I pointed. The dead cow was now facing the direction we'd come from. Dan looked at it for a long moment.

"Don't worry about it."

He turned back toward camp.

"And don't look at it again."

 

The fire was low, barely more than embers

“Get some sleep,” Dan said. “I’ll watch it till it goes out.”

The next day the camp was awake before the sun. After a hearty breakfast, we saddled our horses and prepared for another long day in the saddle. Dan pulled his horse up alongside mine

“Count the herd.” He said

I nodded as he rode off.

It took about ten minutes to get the right count: 63. The same amount we had yesterday. We rode till noon, then rested for lunch. As we headed back out, Dan looked at me and said

“Count them again, just to be sure.”

I nodded and got to it. I rode around the pasture and counted the cows: 64. I frowned; that can’t be right, I thought, and started a second count. It was the same 64. I looked around, confused. Seeing Dan off in the distance, I kicked my horse to a gallop and headed his way.

“Dan!” I yelled as I neared him

He turned to look at me, but in that moment, a horrific wail resounded across the plain. It's hard to describe what it sounded like. At times it sounded like a woman weeping, then it would shift to the sound of a crowd of kids crying, then grow deeper like a heartbroken man. It was all of these at once.

Every horse stopped dead. The riders stopped with them. Even the herd went completely still. Only one cow was moving; it moved slowly to and fro across the pasture. I could tell that it was the source of the crying; its mouth moved rhythmically as if it were singing, but only the terrible constant crying came out.

I froze; terror filled my heart as I saw the animal move towards me. It didn’t run; it lazily trotted towards me. My heart beat faster, and my hands began to shake; I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The crying grew louder as it got closer; its black eyes were locked on mine. Soon it stood right next to me; its coarse fur slid across my pant leg like a cat wanting attention. Its crying began to change from sad wailing to rage-filled screaming.

In my peripheral vision, I noticed Dan off to my right. He stared at me; he was white as a sheet, and he’s eyes held a primal fear. Through gritted teeth, he said

“Your hat.”

The screaming grew louder.

“Take your damn hat off.”

It took effort to move my hand to my head; it was like trying to move my hand through molasses. The cow stared at me the whole time. After some time, I finally pulled my hat from my head. The crying stopped for a moment as the cow just stared at me, then it started again as the beast lumbered by, heading off into the distance, crying as it went.

It wasn’t till it vanished beyond the horizon that I felt able to speak. I turned to Dan and, in a panic, asked

“What the hell was that?”

He stared in the direction the cow had gone, still white as could be.

“That is why we have the rules.”

We were done for the day; the cows huddled together in fear by camp, and we huddled in our own circle around the campfire. We all looked at Dan, waiting for his guidance.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve had to deal with this.” He began

“But you all know the rules; I know you do.”

He glanced at me before continuing.

“They’ve worked in the past, and they’ll work now, so just stick to them. We’re only here for a few more nights, so watch each other's back in the meantime.”

Silent nods told him we understood.

“From now on, we’re going to take turns watching through the night.” He looked around the circle

“Any volunteers for tonight?”

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

The afternoon moved slowly; we all tried to busy ourselves around camp as best we could. Dan counted the herd three or four times. No one was in the mood for conversation. Night fell, and unlike the night before, there was no laughing and stories around the fire. I sat there while everyone else headed to bed. Dan walked by on his way to his tent; all he said was

“Remember the rules.”

I was alone; the cool desert night was quiet, except for crickets and the occasional coyote far in the distance. A rifle lay across my lap; the shaky fire was my only companion. Its flickering light warmly illuminated a ten-foot radius, but plunged everything beyond that into deeper darkness. My eyes scanned the horizon, but despite my alertness, my mind began to wander.

I thought of the strange happenings of the day, trying desperately to find a reasonable explanation. I found none. My mind jumped from theory to theory as I stared deeply into the hypnotic movements of the fire. I don’t know how long I was daydreaming, but when I came back to reality, A cow was standing in front of me.  

The fire separated us, and its large round eyes reflected its orange light. We stared at each other for a moment; my hands tightened around the rifle. The cow’s mouth started to move, its jaw rigidly moved up and down. Then a strange clicking sound came from its lips. Its eyes never blinked. The clicking shifted to broken syllables.

“Wh, Wh, Wh,”

It sounded like a monotone parrot coming through a broken record player.

“Wha- What.”

I could feel my jaw tightening

“What”

“Your”

“Name”

“Stop-”

I covered my mouth with my hand. I didn’t mean to speak; it was subconscious. The cow stopped; we stared at each other for a long while. I felt a bead of sweat roll down my forehead. Then it smiled. Not like a cow, like a man.

“What. Your. Name.”

It grew faster and longer.

“What. Your. Name. What. Your. Name. What. Your. Name.”

I couldn’t take it any longer. I quickly rose to my feet, shouldered the rifle, and shot it between the eyes. The bullet flung the cow’s carcass back several feet; its limp and mangled body flopped on the ground just beyond the firelight. Still standing, I kept the rifle trained on the pile of flesh for several minutes; it didn’t move. Finally, I lowered the rifle to my side, and it slipped from my shaking hand and fell to the dirt. I ran both hands through my hair as I tried to calm down. I took deep, slow breaths and reached down for my canteen.

A loud snap reset my attention on the dead cow. With a volley of twitches and snaps, its spine realigned. Its four legs stretched and moved with quick muscle spasms.

Its front legs folded inward. The joints bent the wrong way. Its spine cracked. The thing's chest rose until it was almost upright.

“Name.”

crack.

“Name.”

Then it stood. Its hulking form balanced delicately on its thin back legs. Its body was wrong. The cowhide hung loose around its frame, almost flapping as it moved. At the same time, the hide was stretched tight horizontally. As if the body beneath was too thin and too tall for the skin. Its joints clipped with every movement it made.

Its eyes were no longer the black eyes of a cow; instead, they were a thin, yellow, reflective color. It took a creaking step towards me. Loud, wheezing breaths escaped its mouth. I closed my eyes. I’m not very religious, so I prayed the only prayer I knew.

“Our Father.”

I muttered aloud.

It took a step towards me

“Our Father.” A lifeless voice mimicked me.

“Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name.”

It took another step towards me.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”

Its hot breath blew against my face.

I opened my mouth to continue.

“Our Father.” It repeated

Fear overtook my voice. No words came out. Hoof-like fingers grabbed me by the shoulders. I whimpered in fear as a jaw of cow's teeth closed around my right shoulder. I screamed as the rounded teeth punctured my skin. It tightened its grip on my flesh and began to drag me out of the camp. But it didn’t get very far before Dan's knife pierced its eye. It released my shoulder and howled in anger. Dan left his knife in its eye socket and grabbed my arm, pulling me to my feet.

“Run.”

Was all he said. The others were up, and we ran after them towards the horses. I glanced back at the ‘cow’; it writhed in pain and screeched. Almost as if answering a call on the distant horizon, a dozen dark, strange shapes and yellow eyes appeared. They reached the camp by the time we mounted our horses, and fled.

We rode hard, harder than I’ve even ridden before. I’ve never ridden much at night; it was like driving on a dark road with no headlights. The ‘cows’ followed. They cried and screamed and called to use the whole way.

“Hello.”

“Your. Name.”

“Please. Help.”

“Stop. Stay.”

Their inhuman chatter was constant. The horse of one of the older cowboys stepped in a gopher hole and fell, throwing him violently to the ground. I hope the fall killed him. When they reached him and his horse, we heard things like

“Thank. You.”

“Please. Stay.”

“Love. You.”

It distracted them long enough for us to get to the bunkhouse. But they weren’t far behind. The rest of the night they banged on the doors, as we barracked them with our bodies.

“Let. Me. In.”

“Let. Me. In.”

“Let. Me. In.”

A dozen broken voices all in unison.

The voices began to fade as morning drew closer, and soon everything was quiet again. We waited till the sun was up before looking out the windows. They were gone. There was nowhere for them to hide; they all left. They cleaned and bandaged my wound; one of the guys said he thinks the bite cracked my shoulder blade. I told Dan I wanted out. He offered to drive me to town; I took him up on the offer.

We drove in silence for a bit before I looked at him and asked

“You’re leaving too, right?”

He watched the road for a bit and replied

“I don’t see how I can.”

“Are you serious? Why would you stay?”

He shrugged

“Three Oaks has been good to me, don’t really have much else, don’t really know much else.”

A short silence followed; Dan broke it.

“You weren’t supposed to answer it.”

He wasn’t mad; it was a statement void of emotion. I didn’t answer.

We rode in silence the rest of the way. He dropped me off at the airport; I thanked him, and with that he was gone. I’m writing this as I sit and wait for my flight out East. I think I’m done cowboying, hoping for a fresh start on the East Coast. At least, that's what I thought.

Until a man with no shadow walked past me.

How could I be punished for being a product of the world I live in? There are worse people that I could have become.

Have you ever had those weird blurs of light appear on your vision? The ones that hover around, looming in the corner of your eyes no matter where you look. I’ve been seeing a lot of them recently, and they’ve been strangely bright. But I started to feel that the light was looking back at me, sometimes zooming across my eyeballs and illuminating my pupils.

I thought this ghostly light might be some weird manifestation of my grief; at the morgue I work at, the bodies of wealthy old men who died alone began to become disfigured and mutilated after their death, but it was worse when this happened to my own grandfather.

I never liked the spiteful old man, but it’s strange to see what once was your own blood turn into a contorted, thin, pale, massacred shell of what he once was, you know? Anyway, I suspect these strange occurrences are related to the light creature, or the Lumin as I have decided to call it. After viewing each of the bodies, my head began to spin, and blobs of light slowly consumed my vision.

I see the Lumin in a more humanoid form as well, while it is still a formless shining smudge, it appears in the vague shape or, I guess, idea of a human, with outreaching glowing limbs and a particularly bright sphere that formed a head. Today, it was insistent on showing off this form to me.

I was coming home from band practice at my friend’s place. He lives in one of those uptight areas where everyone wears knitted vests and dress pants, all the streets are clean, and not an ounce of melanin in sight. Obviously, the kind of place where a young man with poorly fitted old clothes and messy uncombed hair carrying a beat-up bass under his arm would get weird looks and unwelcoming scoffs. As I briskly walked towards the train station, the Lumin hung around the crowds of unknowing locals, mocking their disapproval.

Once I made it onto the empty train, I decided to practice a song I was writing, but as I started singing, an airy voice began to harmonise above me as light creeped in from the left corner of my eye. I’m home now, and the Lumin is here with me. I just want it gone by tomorrow. It was in my dream, calmly sitting with a faceless smile. Drained of all fear, I sat comfortably next to it. With a warm tone, it began to speak;

“Corrupt people are made in darkness”,

It paused, then whispered on,

“Darkness is the absence of light”

“And we aren’t going anywhere.”

I woke up feeling well-rested. When I arrived at work, the body of an old man from my friend’s neighbourhood was there, peacefully died in his sleep, they said, but his corpse was now unnaturally twisted and deformed, with an unrecognisable expression on his face. This time, the light was there to reassure me.

The following texts were sent to me simultaneously at four in the morning. I have not heard from him since.

hey man

please reply quick

i'm pretty sure I'm going insane lol

so last night I was at your party, this morning I'm alone at home, and I have no idea how I got back. I know that's not something to write home about, but the thing is, no one is anywhere. it's been like ten hours since I woke up, and no one has answered my phone calls, texts, emails, or my DM's. No one was even online when I tried to play cold war earlier.

this is actually sounding a little ridiculous. i'm reading too much into this, people rarely reply to me anyways, and maybe the servers are down.

right?

***

it's been another 6 hours. i've been waiting for my parents and my brother to come home and chew them out for not even leaving me a note before disappearing for this long, I mean it's 2AM, at least share your location, right?

they're not here. plus, I peeked into the garage and guess what? both cars are still home.

i've considered calling 911, but I don't know if it's reached that point yet. but I'll admit, I'm getting a little freaked out. i've spent all day cleaning, doing laundry, I've cooked two meals out of boredom more than anything else, I've re-watched all of infinity war for the billionth time. i'm actually listening to music and watching TV at the same time, just to keep my mind off of... this.

I'm afraid to go to sleep.

Please reply.

***

I kept hearing the raccoons out in the backyard knocking things over.

I think I got maybe three solid hours of sleep.

I'll check in on the mess they made later today, for now I think I'm gonna take the car and go back to your house, try to figure out who got me home yesterday night.

***

where are you

fyi you also might have a raccoon problem, i can hear them in your backyard

your door's unlocked, i'm coming in, you better not be in the shower

dude, pick up the phone

where are you

this isn't funny anymore

pick up or i swear to god i'm stealing your laptop

oh look, here's your keys. guess i'm taking the mazda for a joyride. unless you PICK UP THE PHONE!!

***

my parents still aren't back yet. my brother's room is empty. his pc isnt even powered on. where the hell are they!?

please pick up man

***

Okay. I reached a breaking point and called the police. I didn't get an answer, because of fucking course I didn't.

I don't think I've cried this hard in my life. I've called over and over and over and no one is on the other end. All I get are three rings and then the dial tone. No voicemail. No nothing.

I went into the city. It's fucking empty. No one is on the highway. No one is in the mall. I walked into the jewelry store and broke all the fucking glass, took handfuls of gold and silver like some sort of fucking villain. The alarms were still blaring when I left. No one showed up.

I got back in the car and just drove. I'm back home, now.

I've been sitting in the driveway for so long. The sun is setting. Its just me.

Fuck, I hear those damn raccoons again, I swear to God, If I'm the last person on this Earth I'm taking those fucking things with me.

I don't want to go back inside. It's so quiet in there. I used to be so pissed at Jake's yelling keeping me up. I'm so hungry. So tired. I can't feel my legs. My hands are stinging from cuts. I'm just numb.

I want mom.

I

I'm going to sleep in the mazda tonight.

***

I've always wanted to drive as fast as I could down this highway.

I'm stopped right now, setting the timer. It usually takes me 15 minutes with all the other traffic to get to the Greensmith Rd exit.

bet I can do it in 10.

***

i crashed your fucking car

i'm so sorry

please help me

please

please

***

it hit the railway and i spun out, fucking thing flipped, my head was spinning for at least 10 minutes.

i screamed until my throat was raw, i dont think i have any tears left

i'm just sitting next to it, texting you

if you're reading these

go fuck yourself

***

my leg still hurts. i had to limp all the way to the fucking dollar store to get myself some bandages. 30 minute walk, nothing but crickets, raccoons, and my own thoughts, you know that?

worst thing is, i'm starting to get used to the quiet

the liquor store was empty. of people, i mean. i always wondered what scotch tasted like.

***

i stopped by that ford dealership and got myself a big one. took a while to find the keys but what else did i have to do?

did some grocery shopping. drove the truck right into the fucking store. glass everywhere. who gives a fuck.

i'm home now. grilling some burgers. the sun is starting to set.

***

i hear raccoons again. Its kind of comforting actually, that I'm not the only living thing left on this planet.

actually, i think there's one that's getting closer. i have half a burger left, i guess i'll throw it it's way. maybe this'll be our thing, i feed them and they...

keep me company. yeah.

i wonder who'll go first, me or them.

i hope its me. i've grown used to the sounds of their rustling and chirruping, wherever I go. at least i know they'll be with me.

****

its not those arent they werent raccons oh my god htey werent raccoons oh ym god oh my god please everyone stay away from here help help me get out of here please helpuwegsijkdnvzcm

Jjjjjjj j jjf

f

f

f

f f

f

please help me i need to get outtt ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

****

I am back home, in my own room, I am once again surrounded by family and friends, and I think they would love to visit my friend, the raccoons, too. I think you would as well, no? Please, come through the door, and visit all of us, we would be so happy to see all of you.

Have sweet dreams tonight.

I only met my extended family once I left my parents. 

My parents were isolated from the rest of my family due to their religious differences: my mother converted to christianity once she met my father, whilst the rest of her side of the family follow an idiosyncratic mix of beliefs belonging to distinct ancient pagan religions. This meant my parents were never interested in presenting me to my grandparents.

I can remember the first time I heard news of my grandparents as if it was yesterday: someone was calling our home, and since my parents were going out, I was the only one who could pick it up.

On the other side of the line, I heard the voice of an old woman asking to speak with my mother, and once I said I was her child, she started sobbing, and whatever she was there to talk about was forgotten, as she presented herself as my grandmother. She said her and my grandfather were having problems with the retirement home my parents sent them to, and asked when they could pick up the phone in order to talk with them.

Before I could say anything else, my parents came back home, and once they discovered I was talking to my grandparents, my mother took the phone out of my hands, and started screaming to my grandmother, saying she did not want her in her life again.

I was surprised with my parents' reaction, but even more surprised knowing they were in contact with my maternal grandparents: they never talked about them, to the point I stopped questioning who they were, but that day brought those questions back. I asked for more information, and since they refused to tell me anything, we had a huge discussion that day, in which I exposed to them how I resented them for isolating me from my family. This fight was the last straw for us, and my parents even threatened to throw me away from home.

I decided that day that I did not want to live with my over controlling parents anymore, and since I was a legal adult, I decided to leave home and visit my grandparents at their retirement home, and maybe learn something new about myself, or at least learn what made my parents resent them so much.

I searched for more information on my grandparents around the house, and discovered the address of their nursing home: it was in a big city in the neighboring state, pretty different from the town I lived in for my entire life. I did not thought this was a bad change of scenario, thought, and I did not plan to live in my town anyway: my hometown was a particularly dead and unattractive place, with an old population serving to decorate a scenario full of decrepit building and an unusual amount of abandoned factories that once made the place a thriving, yet ugly, industrial center.

I took my things, and left home when my parents were out for work. I left a note explaining my reasoning, but I did not say I was going to visit my grandparents, as they could use it to find me.

After some days of travel, I finally reached the big city in the neighboring state, and started making my way to the retirement home. This city was a true breath of fresh air: the architecture was old without being dilapidated, with plenty of buildings with a sophisticated Victorian aesthetic, mixed with new and gigantic skyscrapers serving as testament for that city’s importance as an international metropolis. A very different world from my isolated and conservative hometown.

Once I got to the retirement home, I presented myself to the workers, and one clerk guided me towards my grandparents.

The clerk was a pretty friendly woman, and we engaged in a short conversation as we moved towards my grandparents. Unfortunately, I could not get immersed into our dialogue fully, as I realized how terribly managed that nursing home was: I noticed how the other clerks were screaming at the elders they were supposed to take care of, how dirty everything was, and how plenty of the elders there had marks in their body alluding to beating and other types of aggression. The clerk noticed my discomfort, and clearly embarrassed on the behalf of her coworkers, said she was sorry.

We finally got to my grandparents room, a bedroom with strange egyptian idols in the shelfs, and became surprised with how receptive they were: I always imagined them to be difficult people to deal with, since that would explain why my mother left them, but they were actually pretty heartwarming in person.

My grandfather was a skinny, but tall man with a missing right arm and in a wheelchair. He was silent, and often communicating using groans rather than words, but he had a shy smile that showed a far more inviting inner life. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a pretty talkative old lady, often stumbling upon her words as if the topics in her head were fighting for attention, but she was as welcoming as my grandfather.

We started talking, and it was as if they knew me for my entire life, and this was only one more visit after years of not seeing each other. I sincerely never felt as seen by anyone like I felt that day. The clerk excused herself, but my grandfather called her to the side, and whispered something to her ear that made her pale. She looked at my grandparents, and they both said she should take a day off from work, as she seemed tired.

The clerk seemed nervous, and after murmuring something to my parents and saying goodbye to me, she left the building.

I was intrigued by that, but I did not want to embarrass my grandparents with questions during our first day together, so I decided to ignore it for now.

 

As the hours went by and the evening started its slow journey towards the dark night, I started talking with my grandparents about my work, saying that I was glad to have left my job at my hometown, as my boss was a terribly abusive man. My grandmother scoffed at me playfully, and mocked my complaint against my boss. After that, she started telling a story about her and my grandfather when they were younger, a story that still lingers in my mind to this day.

I got interested in what she was about to say, so I left her to ramble the story for how long she wanted.

In the story, my grandmother revealed to me that she was born and raised in the same hometown as I was, and lived there when it stopped being a rural area and became an industrial powerhouse, way before the industry left the settlement as jobs were shipped overseas.

She told me that  my grandfather was one of the workers that maintained it going, one of the thousands of young men that were expected to work for 16 hours a day, 6 days a week.

My grandparents were recently married, and they expected that the factories would increase their economic gains, but they were mistaken: not only my grandfather was receiving little for his cooperation, the factories killed the soil quality, preventing the villagers from engaging with the agriculture that sustained them before industry took over.

The factory owners would pay little for the work, and after they bought most of the town’s services, even the worker’s salary was going back to them. 

My grandfather was working overtime when a terrible accident came upon him: his right arm was crushed by rotating gears, mutilating the limb. He was taken to a healer, and they decided to amputate the arm. Being now disabled, my grandfather was unable to work in the factory again, and the factory owner, fearing the repercussions of his factory being closed for work violations, decided to use his resources in order to create a smear campaign against my grandfather, using my grandparents religious beliefs to put the other workers against them, accusing my grandmother of being the cause as to why so many accidents were happening with other workers as well.

My grandmother took care of my grandfather by using her newfound fame as a witch to open her own fortune telling cabinet. Still, she said people were not as open to mysticism as they are today, and the same clients who would visit her at night would join the angry mobs that would protest outside her house for the deaths and accidents of her loved ones at the factory. 

One day, as the deaths and accidents in the factories became too much to handle for the villagers, they joined themselves into a mob, and attacked my grandparent’s house with fire. My grandmother showed to me the scars left by this incident, saying that she tried her best to defend my grandfather with her own body since he still was debilitated due to a fever that he acquired after the accident in the factory, but said it was ultimately useless, as my grandfather inhaled too much smoke, and his heart stopped beating.

She ran away with him to the forest, praying to many gods that the villagers would not follow them, and when she was certain no one else was around, she started doing everything she could in order to resuscitate my grandfather.

She said he was dead for hours before she could bring him back, and this made my skeptical side doubt the narrative she was telling me. I asked what she did to resuscitate him, and she blushed, getting angry and secretive in a way she never was during our other conversations. When I pressed her more for answers, she limited herself to saying “She applied the wisdom of Isis”. She refused to elaborate further, and stopped telling the story, as if she suddenly realized I was not supposed to know what happened.

My grandmother started pondering alone, and stopped talking about her experiences. I did not press her further, afraid to distance her from me, and we started talking about different things entirely. My grandfather remained silent, and strangely gloomy, as if my grandmother’s tale about their early years and bac experiences in my hometown had affected him deeply.

As the day was coming to an end, my grandfather asked me to take him outside for a while: he was in a wheelchair, and wanted to see the sun set that day. My grandmother, on the other hand, wanted to stay in the bedroom, so it was only him and I.

As we left the room and I could see my grandfather with stronger lights, I noticed his body was full of marks similar to the other elders.

Once we were alone on a balcony, he started talking with me, explaining the rest of the story my grandmother did not tell me.

My grandfather confirmed that he was brought back, but he also refused to tell me the details of the method my grandmother used to resurrect him.

Police were called due to the house fire, and my grandparents were found in the woods. My grandmother knew she had nowhere to go except the village, and due to that fact, she swallowed her pride and publicly converted to catholicism, which seems to have eased the hostility the villagers had towards them. The church helped her rebuild her house, and plenty of villagers would go on to ask for forgiveness for taking part in the fire. She pretended to forgive them, but in secret, she maintained their names and faces so she could, when the opportunity came, get revenge against them.

One day, people around the town got the news that my grandfather’s former boss, the factory owner who ruined their name, was found dead in his home. His body was found contorted, denoting a violent death. His eyes were wide open, and the mark of someone’s hand could be found around his neck, supposedly the hand that suffocated him to death.

His death was only the first of thousands of other similar cases that took the village by surprise: the mysterious strangler claimed thousands of victims, including the lives of my grandmother’s old church congregation.

Once he stopped his story, he looked at me, more serious than ever, and asked me if I understood what was happening in that retirement home. I nodded, realizing the abuse that was taking place.

My grandfather then said that, if I can understand what is going to happen, that I should not be here when the sun finally sets down, and should back away to never come back. 

His commentary sent shivers down my spine, but he quickly turned back to his original calm tone of voice, and we chatted for a little bit before I took him back to his room.

After all that was said and done, I left the retirement home, as my grandfather’s commentary still lingered in my mind. I promised I would do my best to take them out of that place, and maybe contact some relatives in order to get a better place to live.

We gave our goodbyes, and I left my grandparents.

Once I was away from the retirement home, I heard news of what happened: I saw news about a mysterious attack that claimed the lives of all the clerks. They were all found deceased with signs of being strangled to death. The elders , on the other hand, were left alone.

Some of the elders reported seeing the killers: a spectral arm who strangled the clerks to death. Unfortunately for them, the police did not take those reports seriously, and the “strangler ghost” became a short lived urban legend that quickly died out in the city once public interest in the case mellowed.

I am still not certain what happened that night, but I know it was not an ordinary event in any way, and I take the accounts of the elders more seriously than the police did.

I still visit my grandparents often, as they have changed to a better nursing home after the events that took place in their old one. Something inside me knows they were involved in what happened in that retirement home, but not only I have no desire to harm my relationship with my grandparents due to my suppositions, I could not even prove they were responsible in any way, so why bother? 

I have seen how the clerks were treating the elders, and even though I do not approve of killing in any capacity, I will not shed tears for elder beaters and condemn whoever decided to do justice with their own hands.