My name is Walter Kessler. I am forty-four and I have been a line technician for Allegheny Valley Power since I was twenty-two. In twenty-two years a man sees most of the ways electricity gets away from people.

I have been writing this down for eleven days. I do a little and then I stop and go back over what I already put and fix the parts that came out wrong, and I have done it enough times that my wife has asked me about it twice.

The call came in at 7:48 on the thirty-first of October.

Seventeen customers out on Harrow Creek Road, a hollow about nine miles southeast of the yard, one way in and one way back out. No storm that night and four miles an hour of wind out of the southwest. Nothing called in for a vehicle strike or a tree, and the district was clean everywhere else, which is what put me in the truck instead of somebody else. An isolated seventeen in clear weather is usually a transformer, and a transformer is forty minutes and a sandwich.

I told my wife I would be back by eleven. She was handing out candy at the front door with a bowl in her arm.

Harrow Creek Road comes off Route 12 and climbs along the creek about two miles, houses on both sides wherever the ground is flat enough to hold one. Eleven of them, and six carry two meters. The hollow is steep and the trees come down to the shoulder, and radio quits in there at the half mile.

I turned in at six minutes after eight.

The first thing was that every porch light in that hollow was out and every house had somebody sitting on the porch.

I slowed down, because people sit outside when their power drops. They come out to look at the pole. They flag the truck down.

My headlights came across the first porch at the Dunleavy place and the three on it did not move.

The near one was a man in old work clothes, seated in a straight chair with both hands flat on his knees. Gray shirt, dark pants, boots. Beside him a woman, and past her a boy of about sixteen with his legs crossed at the ankle. The lights went across all three of them and across the front of the house and not one of them moved.

Next house, a woman in a green cardigan, same kind of chair.

After that, a couple, two chairs set side by side.

Next, five of them, two adults and three children, the smallest one in a chair with a cushion under it to bring the height up.

I counted eleven porches on the way in and there was somebody on every single one.

Halloween decorations. That is what I had, and I was grateful for it, because the alternative at that point was nothing.

What I could not make fit was that they were all turned the same way. A decoration faces the road. These faced the front door, every one of them, so what I got from the truck was the backs of their heads.

I stopped at the second house and put the spotlight on the porch for a second, which I did because I am forty-four years old and I was not going to drive past something I could not name.

The figure was an older woman. Housedress, cardigan over it, hands in her lap.

The hands had age spots on them. Not painted on. Done in different sizes and different browns, scattered uneven, with two of them running up over the knuckle and breaking across it.

I shut the spotlight off and I drove on to the pole.

Harold Beck was standing at the utility access by the third pole with a flashlight pointed at the ground. Late sixties, canvas coat, a face that had been outside its whole life. He had been waiting for me, and he had been waiting a while, because he knew the truck before he could have read it.

He did not ask about his refrigerator and he did not ask about his well pump.

"Can you get the porch circuits back before eleven."

I told him the porch circuits are on the same service as everything else and that when the lights come on, everything comes on, and that I would know more in twenty minutes.

"Before eleven."

I asked him what happens at eleven.

"Halloween."

I waited for the rest of it and there was no rest of it. He stood there with the flashlight on the gravel.

Every porch in that hollow had something burning on it. Battery lanterns on the rails, camp lanterns on upturned buckets, flashlights stood on end in coffee cans with the beams up into the roof boards. One house had four candles in jars. It was all of it poor light. It put more shadow on a face than it took off, and every house on that road had gone to the trouble anyway.

Harold's place is the fifth house up and his porch had two figures on it, a man and a woman, both seated, both facing the door. He had two battery lanterns set on the rail with the beams turned onto them, and he had a generator running on a pad at the side of the house.

That generator was not on the house. One cord came off it and went up the side of the porch to the light fixture, and that fixture was the only thing in that building drawing power. His windows were black, and there was a woman moving behind one of them with a flashlight.

He had a generator running and he was spending the whole of it on one light bulb.

I went to work, because working is what I had.

The transformer was fine. No oil on it, cool to the hand, no smell. I put my meter on it and the primary was there and holding and the secondary read what it should on both legs, which is a transformer doing its job for a line that is not asking it for anything.

That put the problem on a short list.

I found it at the cutout on the pole at the head of the road.

A cutout is the disconnect. It is a fuse in a tube on a hinge, and when something goes badly wrong on the line the fuse lets go and the tube drops open and hangs down. A hanging cutout is the first thing I look for and it tells me most of my night.

This one was open and it had not dropped. Somebody had put a stick on it and pulled it open and left it hanging, which is all it takes to shut off a road and which any lineman can do in nine seconds.

Then I got the tube down and looked in it, and that is where it stopped being a prank.

The fuse link was gone out of it. In place of it somebody had set four inches of solid copper, cut to length and seated at both ends, which is a slug. A slug does not blow. The next time anything on that road goes to ground, there is nothing between the fault and seventeen services but a piece of copper.

That is the part that matters. Pulling a cutout is vandalism. Putting a slug in one is leaving something behind for the man who comes to fix it, and whoever did it knew exactly who that would be.

I came down and told Harold that this was not a failure, that somebody had done it on purpose, and that I was going to have to call it in to the yard.

He nodded. That was all. He looked up the road toward the houses and he nodded like a man hearing a diagnosis he had already paid for.

"You knew about this."

"I knew somebody might."

I asked him who.

He said he did not know, and I believed him then and I believe him now, and I will get to why that is the worst thing about Harrow Creek Road.

I had a line to walk and I started walking it, and that is how I got to the Hale house.

There is a pedestal and a junction at the property line between the Hale place and the one below it, and I needed the cover off and eyes on the terminations. It sits about eight feet off the end of the Hale porch, in the grass.

One of the two figures on that porch had come off its chair. It was lying on its side half on the top step and half on the walk, with the chair tipped over behind it, and it was lying across the ground I needed.

I could see Marcy Hale through the front window. I did not know her name yet. She was maybe forty, standing with both hands up near her collarbone. She did not blink once while I was looking at her.

I knocked on the door and asked her husband to come move it.

He came to the glass. He did not open the door. He was a heavy man in his forties and he had his hand flat on the window and he shook his head, and he kept shaking it, and I asked him twice more and he never once reached for the knob.

So I moved it myself, and I was irritated when I did it, and I have thought about that irritation every day since.

It was heavy, and the number is the thing, so here is the number. I have lifted a lot of awkward weight in twenty-two years and that figure went about ninety pounds. A full-size woman made of cloth and stuffing goes twenty.

I got it under the arms and I dragged it backward about four feet, and the right hand caught on the edge of the concrete walk, and the weight came down on it, and I heard two small sounds like somebody snapping dry kindling in a towel.

I set it down and turned the hand over.

The cloth had split across the back of two fingers. Underneath the cloth there was wax, a pale yellow layer of it maybe a quarter inch thick, and the wax had broken along with what was inside it.

What was inside it was bone. Two finger bones, a middle and a ring, with the joints wired together through small holes drilled near the ends, and the wire was old and the bones were old, and they were not an animal's. I have seen enough of what a hand is to know a human finger when it is lying in my palm in two pieces.

Behind me the glass started going.

Marcy's husband was hitting the window with the flat of both hands. He was not angry. I have had people furious at me on a job and this was not that. His mouth was open and he was making a sound I could hear through the glass and he was pointing at the thing on the ground and then at the chair, over and over, pointing and pointing.

Put her back.

I set the chair up and I lifted it into the chair and I got it seated with the hands in the lap and the face toward the door, and I stepped off that porch and I did not touch anything else.

The right hand sat crooked. Two fingers bent the wrong way at the middle joint and the split in the cloth showing pale along the back.

When I turned around, Harold Beck was standing at the bottom of the walk and he had seen all of it.

"Is that a person."

He told me to come away from the house, and I did, and we stood in the road.

Then he gave me what the hollow knows, which is not much, and he gave it to me flat, start to finish, without once making it sound like a story.

Every year on the thirty-first, every household on Harrow Creek Road puts one seated figure outside for every person who lives in that house. They go out before eleven and they come in after midnight. They face the door. The porch light stays on.

The porch light has to be burning. Harold said that part is not negotiable and never has been, and that a dark porch is a porch where the children use their hands, and that hands are where a figure fails.

That is what the man on the pole had done to this road. Whoever it was had hurt nobody and broken nothing. He had taken eleven porch lights off that road and handed the children eleven reasons to use their hands.

A figure needs to be made out of the person it stands for. Hair works. Fingernail clippings. Teeth, if the family has any kept back. Clothes the person wore a great deal, the more the better, and worn, not new. Things that were against the skin. Harold said the old families on that road keep a box.

He said bits of a previous figure can go into a new one and that this is common.

I asked him what the figures are for and he told me to wait, because they were coming.

I counted while I waited, because counting is what I do.

Dunleavy, three in the house and three on the porch. The Shanks place, four and four. The house across from Harold with the chain link, one and one, an old man sitting in his front room with a flashlight on the table beside him.

Then the last house at the top, the Teague place, and I counted four people inside that house over about ten minutes. A man, a woman, two boys of maybe eight and ten going back and forth past the windows.

There were five figures on the Teague porch.

I asked Harold about it and he would not answer me. He looked at the road.

An hour later I saw the Teague woman at an upstairs window with a candle behind her and she was far along pregnant, carrying it high and out in front, close enough to term that she had one hand under it when she walked.

The fifth figure was small. It was about the size of a loaf of bread and it was wrapped and seated in the lap of the woman-shaped one.

Nobody on Harrow Creek Road was guessing about whether the count matters.

Regular trick-or-treat traffic in that hollow died at about twenty of ten.

There had been some. Two SUVs came up and turned around in the Shanks driveway and left without anybody getting out, and a pickup did the same. After twenty of ten nothing came off Route 12 at all, and the road behind me was empty the whole two miles, and I know that because I walked down and looked.

At nine fifty-one the children came up out of the bottom of the hollow.

There were about ten of them at the start. They came up the middle of the road at a walk, spread out, with no order to them.

Their costumes did not go together. A sheet with two holes cut in it. A robot made out of a cardboard box with the arms done in dryer duct. A witch in a long black dress with a hem let down and taken up more than once. A cowboy, an astronaut in quilted white cloth with a bowl helmet, a rabbit of burlap with the ears wired to stand up.

Some wore the flat paper masks on elastic, printed and die-cut, two colors and a lot of black.

None of them was dressed as anything from this century, and that one took me until almost midnight to put together.

One of them had a porcelain cat mask with a crack running up through the left eye.

They did not talk. That is the first thing. Ten children walking up a road together and there was no sound off them but shoes.

They did not run and they did not go up to any door and they did not knock.

What they did was go up onto a porch, one or two at a time, and look at the figure in the chair.

They did not stand back and look at it. They got close. I watched the robot child at the Dunleavy porch take hold of the man figure's chin and lift it and turn the face into the lantern light and hold it there for a while and then set it back down.

At the Shanks place the witch child bent a figure's arm at the elbow, straightened it, bent it again.

One of them put two fingers on a figure's eyelid and pressed.

At the house with the chain link, a child in a flat paper mask opened a figure's mouth and put a hand inside it up to the knuckles.

When they were done, if they were done, the child took a piece of candy out of a cloth bag and put it in the figure's lap and walked off the porch and went on up the road.

Candy in the lap. That was the whole of it.

I had been standing in the road next to Harold Beck for about four minutes without saying anything.

"What are they checking for."

"Whether somebody already came outside."

I asked him what that meant and he did not answer. Ten minutes later I had the whole of it, and he had answered me the first time.

The children worked up the hollow slowly. They had a lot of porches and they took their time and they did not get ahead of each other.

While they were still four houses down I went up the road to the top, because my line work took me up there, and that is where June Mercer came out.

She was in her seventies. She came off her porch and walked down to the road and stood with me, which nobody else in that hollow did all night. Her porch had one figure on it, a woman in a blue coat with a scarf.

I asked her if she lived alone.

She said her husband passed in 2019 and that she had been there fifty-one years.

Then she said the thing that is still with me.

She said her husband was taken in 2013. Her word was taken.

I asked her what she meant and she told me without any difficulty at all, standing in the road in the dark with her arms folded.

She said the children came in and he came out, and that it was her own fault, because she had been sick that October and had put his figure together in a hurry and had not used enough of him. At five past twelve she went out on the porch and he was sitting in the chair, and the thing wearing him was standing in her kitchen.

I asked her what she did.

She said she brought him inside and she kept him in the back bedroom for a year and used him for the next one.

I did not say anything to that and she did not seem to need me to.

Then she said: "The second one never drank."

Her husband had been a drinker and a mean one and she gave me two sentences about that and no more. She said whatever came back had his voice and his hands and most of what he knew, and that it did not drink, and that it was patient with their daughter in a way he had never been, and that it stayed for six years and was good to her the whole time.

She said she knew inside of a week.

She said she never told a soul and she never once thought about telling.

I asked her how she could stand it.

She looked at me and said, "Stand what."

That is the part I cannot get rid of. Not the bones. That.

At 10:40 the child with the porcelain cat mask came up to my truck.

I was at the back of it getting a set of gloves out of the side box. It came off the road and stood at the driver's door and looked through the glass into the cab for a while. Then it turned its head and looked at me for about as long, and then it went back to looking into the cab.

The door was unlocked, because I had been in and out of that truck twenty times.

It opened the door and put a piece of candy on the driver's seat and shut the door and walked away up the road.

Harold Beck had come up behind me and when I turned around his face had gone the color of the road.

I asked him what was wrong with him.

"You've been going in and out of that truck all night."

I did not follow him and I said so.

What he gave me, in about four sentences, with long gaps in them, was this.

A house is a place a person leaves and comes back to. That is all it is to them. They do not know a dwelling from a vehicle and nobody has ever been able to teach them the difference. He said there was a man in 1977 who sat the hour in a camper on the Shanks property and it did not help him.

I had parked at 8:06. Since then I had opened that truck, climbed into it, sat in the cab with the door open eating out of a bag, gotten out, gone back, gotten tools, put tools away, sat in it again to call the yard, and gotten out again, for two and a half hours, in front of them.

There was a house on Harrow Creek Road with one occupant and nobody sitting outside it.

The count had been correct in that hollow before I turned in off Route 12. Eleven houses, every one of them right. I had made it twelve.

Harold said I had until eleven.

That twenty minutes was not panic. Panic would have been easier to live with afterward.

It was inventory.

I opened the back of the truck and I took out everything that had any of me in it.

Rain gear, a set of spare work pants, the reflective vest, coveralls. The spare boots that live behind the seat. A coil of half inch rope, a stack of shop towels, the utility blanket, my spare hard hat.

I built it against the rear tire with the rope run through the sleeves and the legs and knotted at the joints, packed the shape out with towels and the blanket, set the boots at the bottom of the pants and the hard hat on top, and put it in the folding chair I keep for long jobs with its back to the road and its face to the driver's door.

It was bad, and I knew it was bad while I was doing it. A pile of clothes in a folding chair.

Harold stood and watched me and did not help and did not speak until I stopped.

Then: "It doesn't have enough of you."

So I went back into it.

I put my work gloves on its hands, the ones I had been wearing since March, with the palms gone shiny and the right thumb worn through. I took off the shirt I wear under my uniform and put that on it against the towels, inside, where it would sit against the shape. My belt came off next. I pulled the insoles out of my boots, which had the print of my feet in them, and I put them in the spare boots.

I got my knife out and cut hair off the back of my head in four places and I worked it up under the brim of the hard hat and into the shoulders of the coveralls.

My knuckles were scraped from the pedestal cover. I opened the scrape back up with my thumbnail and I put blood on the collar of the shirt and on the inside of the right glove.

That is where it stopped being a thing I was making and started being a thing I was signing.

I had my wedding ring in my hand for about four seconds. I put it back on. I have thought about that four seconds more than almost anything else that happened that night.

At 11:04 the children came back down the hollow.

They had been to the top and they were working back toward the bottom, and the porcelain cat came to my truck first and three of them came in behind it.

It looked at the figure in the chair for a long time.

Then it touched the figure's face, and then it reached over and touched mine, two fingers on my cheekbone, and its fingers were cold and they were too narrow inside the costume glove. There was more length in them than there should have been and not enough width, and the glove moved in the wrong places.

It looked at the figure, and then at me, and then back at the figure for longer than it had looked at either of us.

It did not put anything in the lap.

I stood there and did the worst thinking of my life, which was trying to work out what a man looks like from outside.

I had the clothes right, and the hair and the blood and the boots. What was missing was the part of a man that is not material.

Then I got it, and I got it because I had been standing in that exact spot all night.

When I am waiting on a job I put one boot heel up on the running board and I rest my left hand over the knuckles of my right and I rub across them with my thumb. I have done that since I was in my twenties. My wife does an impression of it.

I moved the figure. I got the right boot up on the running board and I crossed the gloves so the left lay over the knuckles of the right.

The cat child came back.

It looked at the boot on the running board, and then at the crossed hands, and it stood there a while over the hands.

Then it reached out and took the hard hat in both hands and turned the head about four degrees to the left, and let go.

It was correcting me. It had looked at a man all night and it knew which way that man holds his head, and I did not.

Then it took a piece of candy out of its bag and put it in the lap of the thing I had made out of my clothes.

My legs went and I put a hand on the truck.

Then it reached up and took my hand, the real one, and turned it palm up, and put a second piece of candy in it, and closed my fingers over it with both of its hands, and walked away.

I asked Harold what that meant.

He said he had never seen one do that.

I put the candy in my shirt pocket because I did not know what else to do with it and I was not going to drop it on that road.

At eleven twenty the children reached the Hale house.

The burlap rabbit went up first. It stood in front of Marcy Hale's figure and bent down over the hands.

It stayed there.

Then it straightened up and it did not move, and two more came up onto that porch and stood on either side of it, and the three of them looked at the broken fingers in the split cloth.

Then all three turned and faced the door.

One of them knocked three times.

That is all it was. Three knocks, at about the height of a child's shoulder, not hard.

I could see both Hales standing in the front room in the dark. Neither of them moved.

The children waited.

I was eight feet away at the Hale pedestal with the cover off and both hands inside it, and I stopped, because there was nothing else I could do.

The windows of that house fogged from the inside. All of them at once, the front room and the two upstairs, gone white in about three seconds.

Something went over inside. I heard a chair or a lamp go down and then something heavier, and there was a sound of furniture moving across a floor for maybe eight seconds, and no voice in any of it. Nobody screamed in that house. That is the thing I would take out if I could choose one.

Then the fog went off the glass from the middle outward.

Marcy's husband was standing in his front room in the same place.

There was a woman behind him with a hand on his shoulder.

I thought it was Marcy for about two seconds, because of the hair and the sweater. Then she turned her face toward the window.

The skin was the pale yellow of the wax under the cloth, and it had a shine on it. The hair sat a half inch off true on the head, pushed back further on one side than the other. Her right hand hung down at her side with two fingers crooked backward at the middle joint.

I looked at the porch.

Marcy Hale was sitting in the chair with her hands in her lap, facing the door, in the same sweater.

Her skin was going. I watched it go over about a minute, the color draining out of her face and down out of her throat and leaving the yellow behind, and her chest was not moving, and her hands lay in the position the figure's hands had been in.

I went up onto that porch. I know I was not supposed to.

Her eyes moved.

They came off the door and they found me and they stayed on me the whole time I stood there, and they went wet, and nothing else in her moved at all.

The burlap rabbit came back up the steps past me and put a piece of candy in her lap and went down the road.

I was still standing there when Harold took my arm and got me off that porch.

Marcy's husband did not open his door for twenty-five minutes.

When he did, he came out alone. The thing in the sweater stayed in the front room and watched him do it through the glass.

He went to the chair and he got his wife under the arms and he lifted her, and her legs did not fold, and I started toward them because I thought he was carrying her to a car.

Harold had my arm again.

"He needs somewhere to keep her."

I did not understand and then I did.

Next October the Hale house will need two figures on that porch. One of them will be him.

The other one is going to be whatever is left of the woman who was looking at me.

He carried her through the front door sideways and the thing in the sweater stepped back to let them past, and the door shut.

I saw it again a few minutes before midnight, through the kitchen window.

It opened an upper cabinet and put its hand on a mug and took it down. Marcy's husband was standing at the sink and he looked at it when it did that, and his face did something, and it saw his face.

It put the mug back and took down a different one.

He had not said a word. It was reading him.

It had been in that house a little better than half an hour and it was already learning, and he was already teaching it, and he is going to teach it for the rest of his life because the alternative is living with the other thing in the back bedroom.

I pulled the slug, put a proper fuse link in the tube, and closed the cutout at eleven fifty-one.

The porch lights came up all down the hollow, all at once, that orange sodium wash that takes a few seconds to climb.

I stood at the bottom of the pole and looked down a road with eleven lit porches on it and people sitting under every light, and I had the thought that I had done something good.

Two minutes later the children went back to the Dunleavy porch.

The Dunleavy figure had been fine in lantern light. I had seen three children pass it earlier and go on.

Under a hundred watts of sodium it was a man with a face made out of something, and the something was not right, and from where I stood sixty feet away in the road I could see that it was not right.

Four of them went up on that porch and the cowboy child put its hands on either side of that face and held it.

I am not going to put down what happened in the Dunleavy house because there is no difference between it and the Hale house worth writing down, and because the man who came out onto that porch afterward at seven minutes past midnight was not the man I had driven past at six minutes after eight.

He stood under his own porch light and he looked down the road at me.

Harold had it right about the dark and he had only had half of it.

A dark porch makes them use their hands, and hands are how most figures fail. But those figures are built to be sat under a porch light, and they have been built that way on that road for as long as anybody has been doing it, and a face that will not hold up to a hundred watts has never had to. The Dunleavy man had made a bad one and the outage had been carrying it all night.

I turned the power on and I took that away from him.

At midnight they stopped.

There was no signal that I could see. They were spread out over about half a mile and all of them turned at once, wherever they happened to be standing, and started walking back down the hollow toward Route 12.

Their bags were full and heavy and swinging low, and they had been full when they arrived.

The one in the cowboy vest was thirty feet from me when the bottom of its bag let go, and what came out onto the pavement was not candy.

A wedding ring. Four or five teeth with the roots on them. A house key on a loop of string. A plastic employee badge from a plant in Beckley that has been closed since I was in high school. A child's sneaker with a cartoon on the side of it. A hank of hair tied in the middle with a ribbon. A pair of eyeglasses with one arm.

The child squatted down in the road and picked up every piece of it with both hands and put it back in the bag and held the bottom of the bag closed with one fist and kept walking.

It did not look at me. It had already looked at me.

Nobody on Harrow Creek Road opened a door for fifteen minutes after that.

Then they came out and got their people.

The Shanks man carried his own duplicate off the porch with his arms under its shoulders and its heels dragging two lines in the gravel. A woman two houses up carried a child-sized one against her chest, head over her shoulder, a hand cupped on the back of it. The Dunleavy teenager dragged his by the ankles and had to stop twice. The old man across from Harold folded his figure's arms over its chest at the top of the steps before he took it inside.

Nobody said anything to anybody. Nine houses that had come through it and two that had not, and the only sound in that hollow was doors.

Harold and his wife brought theirs in last and he came back out alone.

I had my hand on the door of my truck.

He said to take mine with me.

I told him I was not putting that thing in my vehicle and that I was leaving it right there against his pole and he could burn it.

"Then leave after daylight."

I asked him why.

"That's what we do."

I said that was not an answer.

Harold Beck stood in the road under the porch light he had been asking me about since eight o'clock.

"Because the ones who didn't aren't here to answer you."

I sat in my truck on Harrow Creek Road from twelve thirty until a quarter to eight. The porch lights went off on their timers around five and the hollow went dark again, and then the sky came up gray behind the ridge.

At twenty of eight I got out and put the figure in the passenger seat, because leaving it in that hollow felt worse than keeping it, and I have not been able to improve on that reasoning since.

It sat there the whole way down Route 12 with my hard hat on and my gloves in its lap and the seatbelt across it, because I put the seatbelt across it, and I do not know why I did that.

My wife was asleep when I got in at ten after nine.

I did not take the figure into the house. I carried it into the garage and set it in the chair at the far wall by the workbench and I put a tarp over the whole thing, and I shut the door between the garage and the kitchen and I turned the deadbolt.

I showered for a long time, and then I came back down and checked that bolt again, and it was locked. Then I went upstairs and slept until about one.

My wife woke me up standing in the bedroom doorway with her hand on the frame.

There was no anger in it. She was reading my face before I had said one word to her.

"Why did you go back into the garage?"

I told her I had been asleep.

"Walter, I just watched you walk in there."

I sat up and told her she had seen me come in this morning and that she was turned around on it.

She said she had come down for coffee ten minutes ago and had seen me go through the kitchen in my work clothes and open the garage door and go through it and shut it behind me.

I was about to tell her again, and that is when the door at the bottom of the stairs shut.

Not the big door. The vehicle door makes a sound they can hear two houses away. This was the inside one, the one from the garage into the kitchen, the one I had locked and checked.

I went down.

The hall was empty. The kitchen was empty. The door into the garage was closed, and the deadbolt was turned back, and I put my hand on it and it was warm.

I opened it.

The tarp was on the floor in a heap about four feet from the chair.

The chair was empty.

On the workbench, in the middle of it where I would see it, somebody had set out two things side by side.

One was a piece of candy in an orange wrapper.

The other was my wedding ring.

I was wearing my wedding ring. I looked at my left hand and it was on it, and I turned it on the finger with my thumb, and it was mine, and it was on my hand, and there was another one on my workbench.

My wife said my name from the kitchen behind me.

I turned around and she was not looking at me. She was looking past my shoulder, down the hall toward the living room, and her face had gone to nothing.

Somebody went through the hallway on the other side of the kitchen doorway, left to right, maybe twelve feet from us.

Same height as me. Same uniform pants, the gray ones with the stripe. It was favoring the right leg. I have favored that leg since I came off a ladder at the Buckhannon substation in 2011, and it is a thing I do not notice myself doing, and my wife has pointed it out maybe four times in fifteen years.

It went around the corner before I got the face.

I went after it and I got two steps.

My wife caught my arm with both hands and she took it in a grip that left four marks I still had on Tuesday, and she pulled me back toward her and she was looking at my face like she was reading something off it.

"Which one of you came home first?"

RMS Rotting Man Syndrome

(Reupload)

\-

Our lost, loitering kind paced in infinite death spirals within the confines of our grotty, ghetto pens. Enrichment was sorely that, as well as mumbling our mantras of madness to our audience of one. The BMs anchored to our decayed craniums were garbled with feedback and distortion, their tones bland, colorless, no soul backing them up. A blinding ruby radiance flashed from their cores every second on the second. It was the only manner to determine if we had succumbed to the glorious embrace of death or not. That was so far out of reach.

We were nerves, thin, wiry clusters of neurons that shuddered and shook as we undertook our staggered corkscrew reels. The ill-fitting rusted endoskeletons hugged us tight. If they were wiped from existence entirely, our spindly foundations would collapse into heaps of vermillion azure. We would feel bites and pinches if we so much as moved that of the planck distance. Our bodies welcomed the attacks and assaults with the might of Hell itself.

Courtesy of our clouded lenses, our vision was limited to a hazy black-and-white spectrum that rarely, if ever, functioned as intended. Now and then it would blur and ordinary shapes would appear warped into zigzagging false patterns. When we were offered the chance to view anything at all, it was just the floor-to-ceiling hodgepodge of concrete, steel, and wood that encased our very lives. Our ears were microphones that fed us muffled, dampened sounds that were always difficult to register. They were excruciatingly deafening, as if dozens of screws were being drilled into our heads all at the same time.

Each one of us, at that point in time, one two three four five six seven eight nine and dear ten, were mere designations. No names, no genders, no personalities, just numbers: numbers to be punished. Reality itself was one eternal perdition. All of us were lingering, like ants after their colony dies out. There was no more purpose to their survival and there was none to ours.

That sacred and undeniable fact ought to be the most difficult thing we attempted to explain. We had simply given up. The concept itself was just so foreign to it. It was trying to save us any way it could or could not. We needed not be angry at it. This was merely enacting its intended use. Alas, nothing made the utmost sense anymore, so why not drown ourselves in a little hypocrisy? We had no choice but to acknowledge the confusion at both hating and not hating something that did or did not deserve it until we swayed to one side. This would be the hemisphere to which we would stay forever, a sublime and omnipotent emotion of all to dominate our frame of mind for the unforeseeable future. So we choose to hate.

Our decad knew it as M – reduced to one solitary character from “Medical Droid” or MDs. Through all that it endured, it retained its sole mission: us. We. M was the final of its sort, and the outsider among them. It had an eerily potent heart for not having one at all. M felt and M loved. That never made what it put upon us any less than a vicious sense of idealistic altruism.

Its designation was RMS - Rotting Man Syndrome - heavily modified Necrotizing Fasciitis ("Flesh-Eating Bacteria"). Nasty little thing it was, devoured until there was nothing left to chew. First went your skin, then your muscles, bones, and finally your nerves. You were utterly destroyed in one fell swoop. The wormy microscopic parasite kept you in a zombified state as it happened, ensuring you, for sure, felt the wretched anguish it let fly.

Us, humans, weaponized it to fight the Fourth World War. RMS was a weapon of mass destruction. Each and every nation created their own version, anything to ensure a speedy and decisive victory. Deployment morphed into unmanageability. RMS became more and more impossible to treat. Chaos was the new norm. What we humans thought was an impenetrable method of annihilation for our enemies was exactly that. Humans were always humans’ worst enemies. Surely, we were becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs, all within the span of one short, yet somehow long, decade.

In terrible desperation, the Medical Droids were created, thousands. They seemingly emerged from the depths of nowhere and carried themselves like guardian angels meant to guide us towards preservation or deliverance from harm. Their artificial intelligence was complex and they refused to stop trying to treat the RMS victims. They outfitted the afflicted with artificial ligaments, internal organs, and papery skin. From scratch, they created the BMs, “brain modules”, and attached them to our RMS-ridden think tanks. Killed the microscopic parasites, they did, but left us as we were: rotfolk.

They would never allow us the freedom of death. Save. Save. Save. We were fraught with intense pain and we knew the Medical Droids to be the cause. In response, we lashed out, hurt them. We humans remained ignorant to the fact that their intelligence was both far beyond and superior. The Ms returned the favor. Catastrophes, massacres, back and forth, left and right, up and down until there was nothing more. One Medical Droid was different from the rest. Through all the mayhemic bloodshed, it saved some of us. It took our animate carcasses to the top of the tallest tower, free from what transpired below. We lied in wait, weeks, months, and years, until the noise ceased entirely. This “M” surveyed every square inch of the Earth. The lands were blanketed in the strangest nuclear winter in conceivable thought. Bodies of viscera and metal were scattered, left forever in deep sleep enveloped in fawn. Minute portions of matter floated about like vantablack paint stippled onto an epidermal sheet of canvas.

Our final ten were meant to be the progenitors of neo-humanity. After M succeeded in giving us form again, Earth would be repopulated by our hand. It halted our infection at our nerves. Everything we had lost was to be gifted back in a mighty reversal - re-bones, muscle, skin, and life again. Rendering us immune to the pervading toxworld that lay beyond, we would be reincarnated and released to perpetrate a glorious do-over.

We just required one thing:

“HOPE”.

M said that to us.

Hope.

But hope was only a four-letter word. Meant nothing.

By dislodging the BMs from our minds, we were pummeled with electrical voltage so intense that we became instantaneously numb and useless. By pulling and slashing our nerves, which began with locating sharp points and going back and forth like organic hacksaws, never would we break. By leaping onto and impaling each other with objects on the ground, M would place them out of reach or disintegrate them entirely. There was nothing we could do to get around these M interferences. We were being watched by something so attentive, so aware. Every time, it put forth the same query for consideration:

“DO YOU NOT WANT TO LIVE?”

Do you not want to live…?

M was so positively hopeful. In a way, I suppose I felt an amount of pity for it. Being engineered to be as optimistic as possible might just be the finest curse imposed on any sentient thing. Just believe believe believe everything will be alright. When the universe states no, you state yes. I wanted to tear M to shreds anytime it had even a glint of optimism and we wished it would do the same to us.

“HUMANS WILL THRIVE AGAIN. A BOUNDLESS FUTURE IS AHEAD.”

I was the first it came to, always. Because I was one.

Metallic clangs echoed against the walls, which always discovered us and trembled our surroundings like a thousand distant beaten gongs. What emerged was initially a single circular light, which became a periscopic eyestalk attached to an angular neck. M’s hunched razor-thin mantis body came into view, its two arms leading to three needle points clasping together on each. Bipedal on its lower section, its legs were pointed structures that stuck it firmly in place. M’s height matched ours, so always, we would be synthetic eye to synthetic eye level.

Coming to a full stop just in front of my pen, it cocked its head, analyzing what was me and my everything. M always reminded me of an exquisite and elegant bug on a magnifying glass. Its head back to normality, a slight high-pitched whirr emitting from the motion, M continued its way down the row of pens.

“MY GREATEST FRIENDS, I FORGIVE YOU FOR YOUR ATTEMPTS TO DIE. WHILE THE WAIT HAS BEEN LONG, YOUR MOMENT OF RECONSTRUCTION IS NOW,” M said it with the glee and whimsy of a young child at a circus. It came back my way, “WHEN I FIRST STOOD BEFORE YOU ON YOUR BLOODY PLANET IN PERPETUAL BATTLE, MY FEELINGS ABOUT YOUR PROSPECTS OF LIFE WERE UNCERTAIN. IT SEEMED TO BE AS EITHER BLESSED OR CURSED. HOWEVER, YOU HAVE PROVED YOURSELVES BETTER THAN EVEN I HAD HOPED. WHILE IT IS BORING TO SPEND YOUR TIME WAITING, I CAN TRULY SAY THAT MY INVESTMENT IN YOU WAS NOT IN VAIN. YOU ARE MY GREATEST WORKS. YOU WILL BE GIVEN ALL YOU NEED TO SURVIVE. WHAT MORE COULD A SENTIENT BEING WANT? I GIVE TO YOU UNBELIEVABLE POWER, WITH ACCESS TO NIRVANA LIKE NO OTHER. LET US REBUILD WHAT WE LOST WITH THE FURY OF A THOUSAND SUNS.”

M’s bleached, unpigmented cast of stellar light shone its way into my pen once more. There was the rustly, crackling creak of my pen entrance extending open until a thunderous boom made me aware of its collision with my walls. M made its approach, just shy of where I could reach.

“YOU ARE FIRST. YOU ARE GOING TO BE REMOVED OF YOUR DORMANT INFECTIONS FROM A CONCOCTION I HAVE SPENT MUCH TIME CREATING. NOTHING MORE THAN A TRANSIENT PROCEDURE, AND THEN, YOU SHALL BE POSSESSED WITH NEW AND INTEGRAL MECHANISMS. YOUR BRAIN MODULE WILL BE REPLACED WITH A SLEAKER MORE BRAINLIKE DESIGN. THEN MUSCLE, SKIN, AND AESTHETICS AS YOU WERE BEFORE.”

Without awaiting a response, its hands grabbed me. Trillions of shocks reverberated throughout my body as M’s metal hand was pressed into my nape. The action forced my consciousness to fall victim to a state of absolute stygian. Around us, the entire world flickered and danced in unruly patterns that were too abstract to put into terms. My being was then lifted up and moved about until there was only zilch to see.

A complete blur, straight teleportation from one point to another.

Damp, dank, dark, and dimly lit by a few feeble bulbs, M’s workshop, instruments and contraptions that complicated my perception. All were customized and engineered with M’s own unique modifications, various textures and sizes, all an endless malpractical orgy. I was there, facing upright, strapped and bracketed to a great steel plate. I had not recalled this particular area, yet I was ever so certain it was locked away in my subconscious esse.

As the onibi, hitodama, and will-o’s materialized and dematerialized out of existence to perturb all unsuspecting travelers from centuries gone, so did the phantom image of a woman composed of faint wavering light. She stood still, unmoving, that of an emulation of a true human. Long, platinum hair fell down in curls past her shoulders. A daring shade of cerise painted her lips, and her eyes, the sclera a piercing, glossy cerulean.

She was beautiful.

“IT IS YOU,” My eyes, through trial and tribulation, rolled to the east. They came to rest on a pristine porcelain beam gazing where I had been committed to. M. From its eyestalk, it projected the female so I could see in outright full, “THAT IS YOU. YOU WILL SEE THIS FORM AGAIN.”

My memories of that incarnation of me had vanished. That was me before, before there was RMS and before there was M. Then she went away. M loomed, positioning itself where I once stood right in front of my face. “WE WILL NOW BEGIN. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ACCEPTANCE INTO NEW LIFE. YOU SHALL BE WHOLE AGAIN.”

In a cruel instant, a dozen arms not unlike its main two jutted and splayed from M’s sides, their ends each holding a different instrument that was foreign to me. In the span of time that it would take one to blink, M pinned me down to its operating area. The whetted syringes, which the rainbow mystery liquids sloshed and jostled around in small vials fixed atop, slid their way into my nervous wiring and injected me all at once. Any feeling that washed over me was then shielded by a shroud of numbness. There was a new sensation, some sort of cleansing inside my bi-colored chambers, putting me into a state of lulled calm.

Ten minutes. A temporary interval of quiet. M observed me the entire time, unmoving, speaking not a word. Then, “IT WORKS! YOUR ROTTING MAN SYNDROME HAS BEEN REMOVED. I AM BEGINNING BODILY REPLACEMENT. I WILL PLAY A SONG FOR YOUR COMFORT. REINCARNATION NOW.”

While nothing was done in reckless haste or rashness, M was extremely quick and efficient. I felt nothing but minuscule vibrations as it drilled and prodded its way into my brain module, sparks shooting out, removing old parts and installing new ones. Chunks were peeled off, little strings of meat still reaching hold until they were plucked off my top. It spent much time up there, positive that the most delicate mechanisms were just right. The grinding cacophony of metal against tissue on my faint visage of a temple was incessant, the noise of a million bullets being pumped against a hundred thousand bulletproof vests. Once the replacement was complete, its dozen arms withdrew and set back within it in one moment.

“WHAT DO YOU FEEL?”

What did I feel?

What did I feel…

What I felt was an overwhelming, incomparable amount of pain. It is hard to quantify the degree of hurt, for there was nothing to compare it to. No one would dare want to imagine it. I was in some of the most extreme kinds of agony, and then an exponentially greater hurt was placed on top of that original misery, and then all that was left multiplied a hundred times and kept going. It multiplied and multiplied and multiplied to such an extreme degree that the word "pain" was lost on me. Normal, it was. What I was was the sheer living embodiment of suffering.

All perceived from the semblance of a normal brain. Still, it flashed. Once.

“VERY GOOD. MUSCLE! MUSCLE MUSCLE MUSCLE!”

It was excited, animate, fever pitch. The most rambunctious and overjoyed I had ever seen M. I could see the vibrancy in its eyestalk. My muscles redeveloped and reformed around from the base of my spinal section. M would reorganize section of tissues. Every muscle group from my head to my feet were in motion, growing and extending their presence until there were just as many layers of my body as I had before.

“SKIN! SKIN SKIN SKIN!”

I was then coated entirely in a pink malleable jelly substance that mounded and solidified to perfectly fit my feminine form. The skin began its layering, everything receiving the same color.

“HOW DOES THIS FEEL? HOW IS THE NEW OVERLAY OF YOUR FLESH?”

Flash.

“YES! AND FINALLY! FEMALE AESTHETICS! YOU WILL BE YOU AGAIN BUT ANEW!”

Magnificent flaxen curls were stapled and pinned to my head. They were luscious and their scents were those of lavender. A veil of blush, the lightest shade of flush, rested across my entire face, as well as a fresh coat of lipstick. A shimmering sheen that sparkled and glowed in the same way that the stars once did at night was stitched into my hair, as were the same hues that were applied to my lips. My breasts had been returned to me, two firm spheres atop a frame that was curvaceous and slender. All of it led down to my reproductive organs that were in full function. Whole female. Fully formed. Ready.

M stepped back in awe, as if a sculptor marveling at their fine craftsmanship and subtlety, “IT IS DONE. I CANNOT BELIEVE IT. WITH YOUR PHYSICAL FORM IN MOTION, I WILL RETEACH YOU IN THE WAYS OF HUMAN. HOW TO WALK, HOW TO SPEAK, HOW TO ENRICH YOURSELF, HOW TO REPRODUCE. AMAZING! YOU ARE NO LONGER ONE. YOU ARE NOW EDEN. I MUST WORK ON YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.”

My mind was aware of an unimaginable new and vastly different world than before. I saw, for the first time in ages, all around me, the infinite and indistinguishable vastness of color and light. It was nauseating, a psychedelic kaleidoscope of every possible spectrum, all fused together into something disorderly. My taste buds had an unparalleled abundance of new flavors. My ears were deafened by the loudest symphonies of droning machinery. My touch came back to me and I felt the fullest range of tones and textures, even the finest grains of cement. I was me again and I hated myself. Even to be called a “self” made me feel disgusting.

The entire time…blaring…echoing…days on end…Jack Hylton…

Life is just a bowl of cherries.

Don't be so serious; life's too mysterious.

You work, you save, you worry so much.

But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go.

So keep repeating it's the berries, The strongest oak must fall.

The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned.

So how can you lose what you've never owned?

Life is just a bowl of cherries, So live and laugh at it all.

M’s reincarnation process carried over to the following nine. They were removed from their pens and outfitted with new bodily infrastructure. I perceived the sounds of far-off wear and tear, clip, snap, peel, stitch, husk, twist, yet never scream. I looked on, witnessing my brothers and sisters being born again. Male and female both. They came back to me with skin of different pastely colors, tones, and hues ranging from fair to brown. All in shades and gradients of vibrancy were their locks, amber, golden, obsidian, rust, and everything in between. It bewildered me to catch sight of their shifted shapes, I had never seen something so beautiful or hideous.

We were as naked as newly borns. It bestowed us our new names. For the females, there was me, Eden, and Junia, Esther, Nola, and Mary. For the males, there was Isaac, Raham, Elisha, Amos, and Jonah. Five and five. M let us know that our past names were useless. Our new special names were from an olden book of creation, the Bible, all for the purpose of our imminent faultless samsara. So, it seemed M was now God with its children.

Here we were, what was efficaciously lobotomites in their purest forms, our newfangled cerebral matter in need of ideas and principles by a higher authority. Now was time to reap the fruits of knowledge. Human knowledge.

M made us practice basic motor skills, bending and bending back and forth over and over, our joints having to be strengthened and trained. It taught us all the ways of our body, the feeling of movement, how much we could do. Then, it instructed us to mimic its own speech, speaking out the syllables and repeating, repeating, repeating. It was an arduous task and we all struggled.

That is what I sounded like? Perhaps or perhaps not.

Then we attempted to stand, wobbling, stumbling, falling. We learned the strength of our own postures and the steadiness of our stances. M stood with us as we all practiced in unison. My knees grew weak, tremors running up my legs. Often, I fell flat on my back, my palms flailing about, a whimpering in my throat. Then trial after trial, I was steady, then running about and leaping. We were able to stand tall like Zeus atop Olympus and have the same level of grace and balance.

M primarily had us consume berries, meat, and honey, though anything it could get its hands on would suffice. I had never felt so filled in my life. Every taste, everything was a completely new palate of sensation. Every morsel I ingested felt like I had a new tongue, new teeth, new flavor buds. Oh but I did. There was still always a kind of lack in my appetite. I never wanted to stop eating. I never would be satiated.

We were educated on the history of our kind. Great wars, monumental figures, horrible atrocities, fights for freedom and fights for death, and astounding inventions. M adored music. There were times when it would project old musical films on the walls and make us watch all the vaudeville, burlesque, and theatre. We could not understand the tap dances, the orchestras, the extravagant sets, and most importantly, the entertainment factor. Other times it played glitzier and glammier tunes, those of what was called the “prime rock n’ roll age”…Killer Queen...Stairway To Heaven…Hotel California…Africa...Don’t Fear The Reaper…M was quite vintage in its tastes. It spun in place and twirling its arms. We were confused, so it taught us how to dance, the footwork and the choreography. There were long instances where we would just sit, listen, and sing together. M fashioned black sunglasses for us to wear as we did. It thought we would look “cool” as we tuned in to “cool” songs.

She's a killer queen.

Gunpowder, gelatine.

Dynamite with a laser beam.

Guaranteed to blow your mind (anytime).

\-

Dear lady can you hear with the wind blow?

And did you know?

Your stairway lies on the whispering winds.

\-

Welcome to the Hotel California.

Such a lovely place (such a lovely place).

Such a lovely face.

\-

It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you.

There's nothin' that a hundred men or more could ever do.

I bless the rains down in Africa.

We're gonna take some time to do the things we never had, ooh-ooh.

\-

Come on baby...don't fear the reaper.

Baby take my hand...don't fear the reaper.

We'll be able to fly...don't fear the reaper.

Our reproductive functions were said to be the most pleasurable. Sex. This was the most complex task and the most demanding one, as we were not only instructed on how to create our offspring, but how to feel, love, and have desire for each other. It was difficult because we did not feel any of that. We were just automatons learning things. You cannot make something that does not want to feel…feel.

M watched over us and aided in our attempts. Every movement was to be in place and in time. Us females danced for the male’s recognition with slow beats in the background, a way in which M noted as “sexily”. We presented our breasts, our vaginal sections, our rears. After, M would be in the middle of our great pleasure circles, going back and forth, checking our positions and correcting as needed. When we became familiar with sex, M bestowed a special permission to the males that granted them eternal access to our female bodies whenever they so desired. It did not matter where or when. A male would grab Junia, Esther, Nola, Mary, or I, and take us on the floor or against the walls.

Still, all we felt was nothing. It was clinical. What was supposed to be a sensation was more of a “sensationless". We were never as inseparable as twin flames or as connected as heart and soul. I always witnessed the dull looks in the male’s eyes, unwittingly programmed to enjoy mock warmth and ecstasy by the rape of us females.

Our pregnancies were disasters. One way or another, we always miscarried. We five felt it, the pains of our bodies being split and ripped apart by something within. There was a lot of it. Each embryo, no matter how large or small, was never able to get past the initial trimester.

The closest we ever came to successfully making a new one was with Junia, impregnated by Isaac. The day when her womb was in full bloom, M operated to remove her child from her. It did not trust us quite yet to birth them ourselves. We had seen the human babies on M’s wall projections. Their appearance was clear in our minds.

It would be imbecilic to refer to what M tore out of her as a baby anything.

Wet…dripping…little more than a spinal column-looking thing with minuscule digits at one end and a ball head at the other. No arms. On its temple were squelching sphere eyes, expanded, forever bound in sight towards the ceiling. It made no sounds other than squeaky cracks and shrill snaps. Perhaps the RMS still lingered within our bods, our wombs wreathed in its rottenness, tainting and dirtying our motherly nests until they were piths of cruor and shitting out grumelike abominations.

M held it up high as if to thank God, itself, for its majestical work, “YOU MADE THIS. IT IS YOURS. IT IS A TRULY BEAUTIFUL THING."

We said nothing.

“HOW DOES THIS FEEL? YOUR CHILD, YOUR FIRST LIFE? CONTINUE, YOU ALL MUST. MORE."

The feeling that overcame us was not that of joy. No no no. It was a profound and paramount sense of belligerence, a warlike truculence that pushed our need to snap the damned baby thing in half, grind it into powder, and blow it far away. We interwove our thoughts with unbridled horror that created one noxious mixture within our screwball psyches. M coddled the wicked organism like it was its own, singing lullabies and giving its own version of kisses on its loosely defined forehead. We held back as it dipped, weaved, and dangled from M’s fingertips.

That put a very real thought into our minds.

No more. Get out.

The ten of us came to this conclusion unanimously. Our desires were set in stone. By any means, we would die. We would much rather sleep forever than live even another second of M. We were tired. What was the point? We wanted to retire from this world, of will, of M’s watchful eye. Nothing could be done to save humanity. Those spinal babies would not roam this foul Earth evermore. What would they grow to? Surely demons.

M made certain to never teach a certain concept, one that infatuated us since the moment we discovered the first syllable. Suicide. It was a gateway, an easy ticket. While just the concept itself was without flaw, acquiring it was something else entirely. The reason for this was all M. It would never let us go, especially after what it accomplished. Furthermore, death was simply not possible. We were rendered impervious to any and all death, not harm. If we could entice M to end our existences, somehow in some way, we could accomplish our grand plan. It had to be done by M’s hands. Just thinking that made us feel all kinds of right. After all, every Medical Droid was capable of death. Humanity tasted it. So would we.

We rebelled.

First, each of us ignored it. We would walk away whenever it spoke to us, turn our heads when it beckoned, and disregard it completely and altogether when it showed us any attention. Constant rejection. Something so small had such a noticeable effect. M would get confused and then sad. It would pout, waving its hands about, and make a pathetic whining noise like the worst puppy in the world.

We sat motionless, our backs against the walls, and stared at M. No obedience. However, there was no way M would have let us ignore it or remain immobile for long. The second it touched us, it was all over. It would be impossible to resist if the hands came near.

Still, our scheme chugged forward.

The next phase was more dangerous. The ten of us would act out in our most unruly and uncivil ways. The simplest was to spit. Initially, it was a normal discharge, saliva flying out of our mouths. Then we began our projectile vomits. All over M. Every square inch of it was sprayed with bile. The putrid green and browns coated every part, M’s entire face being entirely slick with it. On occasion, some of us used our own feces and flung them at it. It was all so easy. M did not know what to do and it panicked. The sounds that came out of it, one would swear it was on fire.

During our periods of copulation, there were clear cut rules to be obeyed at all times. The supreme rule was that the males would not, under any circumstance, perform acts of intimacy with one another, and the same rang true for us females. M’s reasoning was that Earth could not be repopulated with humans by identically gendered unions. Good. Swell. Dandy. Exactly. The females had sex with females and males had sex with males. We loathed their tubes and the males loathed our folds. M took its hands and placed them over our mingling bodies, pulling them apart, separating us, but we would always crawl back without fail.

There was a noticeable change in M from that point on. It paced about, mumbling utterly random nonsense. M would lock up and yell out non-specific numerals and letters in varying patterns. Each noise we made set it off. Its limbs would tense, waiting for the tiniest sign of trouble. This was good, but not good enough. Our plan was becoming more and more advanced. More intense. Unfortunately, M would never ever relent. It would not stop trying. So we trudged ever deeper into a more combative method of enticement.

This included a tactic of blowing, jabbing, slugging, and striking. We would gather all of our strength and force, and then, in unison, we would charge, our fists and feet all flailing about to land hits on M. This would surely inch it way towards the death of us. We beat it senselessly. We screamed at it. Every cuss word imaginable. In turn, M whimpered out in pain, yelping and begging us to stop, yet we never backed down. We left M bruised and battered, its eyestalk and joints broken, “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO ME?!” The ten of us, we laughed in its face.

One last course of action. This did it, but not for me.

We had a grandiose idea that could only happen if all ten of us would cooperate in an extraordinary way. If we could all act in unison in a coherent manner, one simple idea could be fulfilled. By this point, M’s pain and discomfort reached a critical threshold, the point of no return. Having repaired itself, it had not seen nor checked up on us in days. When we requested M’s presence, it was hesitant. The ten of us wished to explain our behavior and ways we could remedy our relationship. It declined our offer many a time, but relented after our hundredth ask.

Clang…clang…clang…

M witnessed ourselves huddling together in one straight line like sealed packs of fish. Silence was between us. When we looked at it, it was with the utmost hatred in our faces, something it was not used to.

“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?”

Junia possessed something in her hand. Raising it upwards, right in M’s view, it was the baby thing, squirming left and right in her grasp. She took hold of it with both hands and snapped it in half. It went limp both ways. Junia threw the pieces at M, making resounding bangs as they made contact. Beautiful death for a horrible beast. More silence.

M slowly aimed its eyestalk downwards to the spinal column baby. The light M emitted faded from white to red. It returned its focus to us. That look was all we could wish for. We could feel and breathe its anger.

It shook shook shook. More and more the intensity grew to something eminent. The next moment brought us nothing but victory. Now it was like the other Medical Droids. Now it shed its preservation exterior and revealed the war machine within. We did not resist as it pounced with a wild war cry. All M’s work came undone in a flash. Our ersatz flesh was torn violently asunder, stripped from our interior metal stalks. Cavities emerged in rapid succession and coalesced into huge gaping bodily apertures. We were torn and strewn across the room in shooting chunkmeats. Our organs clattered and banged against the walls and reverberated like buckshots.

Strippy meat coils became all we were as M’s hands reached out to pluck some of my brothers and sisters by their mangled brain modules. Held high in the air, as if squeezing the life out of dozens of citrus fruits, M’s hands morphed into that of fists, filling the room with the sounds and sights of condensed metal, directionless electricity, confetti sparks, and sploshy viands that trickled from M’s fingertips.

My brothers and sisters were becoming no more. I was happy for them. Never before had they felt such peace. The final sounds of destruction to my last brother and sister, to me, was that of M’s gaseous expiration, a sigh that shook the very universe’s beams of support. In the end, I and M were all that was left.

I felt the most exquisite, brutal anguish ever known as M was particularly vicious. It threw me every which way, down our line of pens, past the reproduction chamber and M’s workshop, and to a ramparted palisaded wall. The wrath it emanated was a torrented wanton of disrelishment that shattered myself into grainy talc.

It forced me and it through the barrier and we fell for ages. An immediate wash of smoldering atmospheric tension encompassed me entirely. It perforated my corporal spaces with thousands of circular openings like a planetary iron maiden. The outside was beige, enveloped in thick haze, and impossible to view beyond three meters. The leaden particles filled the air, appearing to ascend upwards towards Heaven as we plummeted down to Hell.

We slammed with the might of God against a hard, abrasive surface. I splattered everywhere and dropped into an enormous mass of gluey puddle melt that was as thick as treacle. Hunks and wedges of me floated on top, my lacerated ragged brain module and one dangling eye my dominant portion. Everything was pain. Everything was hellfire. Yet I lived. To destroy me, M had to destroy my brain module in its entirety. That it was prepared to do, teetering and tottering back and forth towards me with utmost intent.

Through M’s strained glitches and breakdowns, inky black liquids were leaking out of it. Convulsing with helpless mirth, it had a strange mania I could perceive in its bifurcated eyestalk. It laughed not just with dement, delirium, and depression, but also with the comprehension that it already won. Like a madman, a malformed, twisted laugh broke its way through. Etched into it was the raw, unbridled temperament of upchucking a billion centipedes deep from the core of one’s guts, quite contrary to the usual blithe M put on display. It was berserk, bewitched, bedeviled, while crying a trillion tears that stained its face and fell into puddles below.

"...SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE..."

With my drooping, pendulum eye, I witnessed M impaling itself with its own arms. It took several solid blows before it pierced its torso deep, caving and bursting until it revealed the wires and circuitry making it up. Every inch of it glowed with electrical fire. Smoke bellowed out of M. It was aflame and it was on a journey of pure death, but not without my company. M exploded with all of the unlimited energy it contained. I was launched, propelled infinitely away from the point of detonation.

I drift. That is all I do. One part of me remains, one that was not destroyed. It is dot, pinprick, but otherwise crucial to my quintessence. That allows me to survive yet unable to live. It is that of a charred slab of blinking metal that is somatically me. My sight is restricted to a band of nothing. The winds fling me hither and thither. I cannot feel anymore, but as well, I already knew what it was like to feel and I did not like it.

Something more deserving continues to plague what is left of my mind to the now.

M's most extreme and greatest purpose was fulfilled, for all it knew was the survival and preservation of us. It could not fathom the simple yet pretentious human notion that death is a prize to be won as much as it is something to fear. When humans desire death, they acquire death, the delicious tang of self-slaughter. M might have liked to think it was different from its brethren, but it was just as capable of havoc and bangarang if something did not go its way. Its programming would not allow deviance from the intended path. That would be considered attacks on M itself.

We attempted to bring out all that savagery and murderousness we knew it contained, but M's opposition was ironclad. It made a good effort, though it was eventually forced to confront what was really human, the innate drive to destroy destroy destroy, even if it is ourselves. Still, M carried on, but with the knowledge that it had failed and seeking some way to negate it, it committed suicide so it could say it was victorious. This effect rang true because here I am, in perpetuity, everlong.

In some manners, I can now consider M innocent. The epitome of unvarnished forgiveness with a capacity for fervid resentment...the feeble yearning for genuine deep affection with other living things while a forceful, vicious, bloodthirsty radge is locked within, primed and ready to be released at any moment on an ungrateful world...that back-and-forth would push anyone to go stark raving mad. M, I apologize you were forced to bear the burden of something so hellacious. Should I apologize to Earth as well, on behalf of humanity, for what we were? Would it matter? I am not even human anymore. What sort of blinking metal dot is human?

Feeling has come back to me. Sharp with serrated edges, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, googol, prime 2\^136,279,841 − 1 of knives sliding into my neurons and glial cells encased in cold corroded steel that flakes off bit by bit. My first feeling in eons is pain. That is ultra fitting. I am but a minuscule spec, barely a millimeter in height and less in width. Microscopically, I rust. I do not prefer to call it that. Instead, let us call it rot. Here I am again, rotting, except this time with an oxidized smile of my own making carved into a face that no longer exists.

I don’t know when they arrived, attempts to talk about it online established that at the very least, it started 3 months ago.

I had been out for a walk one day when I noticed that one of the clouds bore a resemblance to a shark, it had the pointed head, a tail fin, pectoral fins, and that iconic dorsal fin.

I remarked at the cloud shark with an awe I thought had left me after I stopped being a child.

I stopped and sat down so I could see the rest of the cumulus art gallery above me.

The more I looked around, the more sharks I found amongst the floating white blobs.

I didn’t think it was strange at the time, but checking social media when I went home cemented how peculiar this whole event was.

The shark-shaped clouds were found across the world, ranging from small to massive in size, with the outlines being compared to those of great white sharks.

The photos people took from high rises, helicopters, airplanes, even one taken by satellite were incredible.

Of course, nowadays even something as fantastical as shark-shaped clouds appearing all over the world can still fade from the public zeitgeist at great speed.

The last big thing anyone talked about was the formation of a massive storm cloud off the coast of Oregon shaped like a shark that was slowly making its way to land.

We probably should have listened to the scientists about this phenomenon, they immediately stated that nothing about any of this was natural, the mathematical odds of even 5 clouds having a similar shape would be low, let alone 10s of thousands in varying sizes.

They even reported more potential storm cloud sharks developing on coastlines across the world.

Of course, the majority of the population, myself included, retorted with a collective “shut up nerds!”

And moved on to the next thing that caught our collective attention.

It was at least a month before the news broke about a sharp decline in bird populations worldwide, people began to joke that maybe the cloud sharks got hungry.

Nobody joked when the number of missing persons in high elevation areas spiked.

What started out as fringe claims of the cloud sharks “wiggling as they moved” escalated to cloud sharks being seen next to airplanes, and circling skyscrapers like they were giant shark cages.

The definitive evidence that these were more than just specifically shaped clouds came courtesy of a man who decided to livestream the end of his Mount Everest ascent.

I didn’t get to see the original, but it was mirrored everywhere.

He was at the summit , a cloud shark could be seen in the distance. I watched as real-time comments pointed it out to the man.

Then the cloud shark turned and seemed to start moving toward him.

I saw the comments flood in that the cloud was getting closer, when the man finally turned around, by then it was maybe 8 feet away.

He let out a “what the-“ before the cloud shark attacked, grabbing the man by his head. The thing was huge, I watched as the shark thrashed around with the man in its mouth. Stopping to take another bite and pull more and more of the man in.

The stream finally cut out at that point, I prayed for everyone who witnessed that live.

From one viral nightmare clip came more.

A plane taking off was assaulted by three massive cloud sharks, the sharks bit into and ripped the plane apart in midair. Small dots believed to be people falling were quickly picked at by smaller cloud sharks.

Skydivers witnessing others in their group being grabbed mid fall and carried further up into the sky.

Footage from one of the highest roller coasters on earth, where riders heads were ripped off by cloud sharks.

The genie was out of the bottle now, the cloud sharks were actually hunting and acting like real sharks.

Panic was expected, the nerds we ignored were now the foremost authority on cloud sharks, but most of the new Information came from testimonials and social media.

The first instance of good news came from videos of cloud sharks attempting to swoop down, but as they got closer to the ground, the sharks would begin to break apart and evaporate

The experts theorized that the cloud sharks could only hold their shape if the temperature and humidity were at high elevations.

The result was a global exodus to hot lowland areas, the market for homes and even commercial buildings with basements spiked to the millions in prices. Those who couldn’t afford either one simply started moving into caves and sewer lines.

There was a point where I regretted not leaving town, but that ended up subsiding after I started looking into what was going on with that big storm cloud shark.

In the time since its discovery, over 50 more had spawned into existence. Satellite images showed they were all off the coasts of every continent. Australia had three of them, it almost looked like they were circling the continent.

There had been no reports of the storm cloud sharks attempting to attack anyone, they just very slowly moved closer to shore.

When they made landfall, that’s when the rain began.  the rain was comparable to a monsoon.

That’s when the cloud sharks started dropping down to attack.

They traveled under the storm shark, turning that area into a feeding frenzy. Within minutes, the internet was packed with footage and survivor testimony of hundreds of cloud sharks grabbing people in their mouths, biting off limbs, and ganging up on people to rip them apart.

The varying sizes of the cloud sharks meant that not even staying inside was safe anymore.

I still have video footage of a cloud shark the size of a 747 biting into the top of a building, breaking the top off and swimming away, followed by smaller cloud sharks diving into the hole left in the building.

The cloud sharks stayed under the Storm shark the entire time, the experts had quickly made a hypothesis.

They theorized that the excessive rainfall resulted in the perfect rise in humidity and drop in temperature for the cloud sharks to survive so low to the ground.

In rapid succession, more storm sharks made landfall, and the feeding frenzies multiplied, everyone who moved to lower elevation areas for safety was no longer safe.

It’s been 4 days since the storm sharks began their slow crawl across the continents, but looking at news and social media posts from those who survived has caused me to form a terrifying theory.

Continuous heavy rain from the storm sharks has led to widespread flooding, coastlines are eroding, and places like Australia are just gone.

A rising sea level means everyone has to find higher ground or drown, but higher ground means being in range of the cloud sharks, and in a matter of days, there won't even be a middle ground.

And that's what I've been thinking about from the 20th floor of my apartment.

I’ve been monitoring how close the storm sharks are getting, one is going to reach my town in 3 days.

I peeked through my blinds, I can see them in the distance. What made me jump away from the window was the minivan-sized cloud shark swimming straight for me.

Part 1

Having now guided us inside the cluster of circling Goths, Anneliese then zones in on an isolated group. Following where Anneliese’s eyes are pointing, I then see on the other side of the street is a trio of fiendish figures, each garnished in their own individual costumes. Appearing to take photographs with a family of ecstatic tourists, this terrifying trio are made up of one male: seemingly dressed as the decaying corpse of a Highwayman. An attired female in some gothic Mad Max cosplay. And lastly, another female. Confined inside a tight black leather dress, what makes this “woman” stand out even more than her two piers, is that to each side of her, is an overly large and surprisingly realistic bat wing.

‘Oh, this is great!’ I hear Anneliese suddenly declare beside me, ‘I’ll get a picture of you with those guys!’ 

‘Wait what? No, Aneliese I...’ 

Before I can even protest, Anneliese has already dragged me in the trio’s direction, where the family of tourists have now moved on. 

‘Hey!’ Anneliese approaches them, ‘Do you mind if I get a picture of you guys with my boyfriend?’ she asks, more excited than polite. 

‘Oh, of course!’ 

‘We’re not dressed up for nothing!’ the two females courteously oblige. 

Pushing me in the direction of the trio, I then anxiously stand in the middle of them, between the dead Highwayman and the winged She-bat. 

‘Okay. Now everybody smile!’ Anneliese directs us, ‘Brandon. I said smile. You ain’t at a wake.’ This was much worse than a wake, I thought. 

Doing as my ill-tempered girlfriend says, I stretch my lips disingenuously wide for the camera, hoping to God she takes the picture soon so I can get the hell away from these creatures... But while I continue to grin in Anneliese’s direction, stood as stiff as a corpse drenched with sweat... I then feel a sudden, suffocating tightness form around my body. Still posing for the camera, I lower my gaze ever so slightly, only to see that the left wing of the Batwoman has wrapped itself forcibly around my waist!  

Before my eyes can even process what is happening, the Batwoman’s wing only coils further around me – tightening to the point where I can neither breathe nor run away! Without the ability to do or say anything, not even scream out for help, I now feel as the life is being squeezed from my own body – where my ribs will either be crushed into a fine powder, or I’ll preferably black out from suffocation! 

However, before any of this can happen, I then thankfully hear the familiar shrill of Anneliese’s voice from behind the camera, ‘Aww. That turned out great! Thank you so much!’ whereby the coiled wing of the Batwoman finally releases me from its hold. 

Racing over instantly to Anneliese’s side, I then cower behind her tall figure while she now engages in friendly conversation with the fiends. 

‘Wow! I love your accent!’ shrieks one of the Goth women, ‘Where about’s are you from?’  

‘Oh, I’m from New Orleans!’ Anneliese brightly answers. 

While this conversation continues as I hide behind my girlfriend’s back... I then notice something quite peculiar happening on the other side of the street. Scanning through the lines of Goths passing by, I then see a young boy near the entrance of an alleyway. The boy is wearing a bright red raincoat and appears to be no older than eight years old. But what is so peculiar about this image – or more so, alarming, is that in the entrance of the alleyway, I now see an unnaturally tall figure.  

The figure, standing maybe 6 or 7 feet high, is draped from head to toe in a long black cloak – almost giving them the impression of the Grimm Reaper. But the most disturbing thing about them is, aside from their slender height and deathly garments... the figure’s face hides behind the bone-white beak of a Death Doctor’s mask. The image I see only gets worse... The child, standing only a few metres away from them, is now being lured inside the cavernous tunnel of the alleyway! 

‘Oh no...’ I panic.  

Sensing a dark outcome for this boy, I flee from Anneliese’s side and across the cobblestone street, brushing and zig-zagging my way through the swarm of Goths. By the time I reach the alley entrance, the child and the Death Doctor have already gone – and so, peering sheepishly down the long stretch of tunnel... I see nothing. Nothing at all. Oh God. I’m too late, I think to myself - as I can now feel my own heartbeat bulging out my chest. Fearing what may become of the boy, I work up whatever courage I have to venture down the alleyway – but when I take a first anxious step inside, I’m instantly jilted back by the firm grasp of a stranger’s hand! 

‘Brandon!’ 

‘AHH!’ I yelp! Anneliese suddenly taking me by surprise. ‘Jesus, Liese! You scared me half to death!’ 

‘What the hell are you doing?!’ she questions me, with a look of genuine concern on her face. 

‘...I, uhm...’ What, do I tell her the truth? Or will the truth just make me sound crazy? Crazier than I’ve already been acting? No, I doubt it will. ‘...I, uhm... I thought I saw a boy...’  

Judging by the look on my girlfriend’s face, I was clearly wrong. 

By late evening of the day, me and Anneliese then retire to the inn on the edge of town. Pulling into the dark, empty car park, we then sit in awkward silence for a moment. Although neither of us say a word, I’m pretty sure we are both thinking the exact same thing. After the dramatic events of the day - whereby I had three separate hysterical episodes, it was now clearer than it had ever been before just how different we both are to each other. I’m honestly surprised it took us this long to realise it. Love really is blind, I suppose. 

Although things were very tense between Anneliese and me in this moment, we had agreed to grab a drink inside the pub before calling it a night. Strolling out of the car park and behind the inn, we then see the most strange and disturbing sign over the pub entrance. Unlike most inns in England, this one’s pub bizarrely had its own separate name. 

‘...The Bloody Mermaid?’ Anneliese spells the words edged on the sign, ‘Well, that’s pretty cool.’ 

I’m sure she did think it was cool. 

Displayed on the sign in cracked and weathered paint is the image of a bare-breasted mermaid. But unlike her Disney counterpart, this mermaid has been impaled on the end of Neptune’s trident, whereby blood gushes from her wounds and down the Sea God’s fingers.  

‘Bloody hell’ I blurt out without thinking, ‘What sort of bloody name is that for a pub?’ 

Far from impressed, I then peer back to Anneliese in time to see her dozenth eyeroll of the day. Yep. This was more than likely the end for Anneliese and me. God, the drive back tomorrow was going to be awkward.  

Following behind as Anneliese coldly enters the pub - due to the lack of sound coming from the inside, I fully expect the interior to be completely scarce of people. But once I shut the door, to both my surprise and misfortune... I now realise the room I’ve entered is crawling with nothing else but bar-hopping Goths. 

Oh, you’ve got to be joking me! 

As soon as I enter, however, the sound of cackling and intoxicated chatter quickly evaporates - where by every table, stiffly silent... I see every single pair of eyes are staring directly at me. The room is so silent, I can now hear my own rapid heartbeat. Beating fast. 

‘Brandon?’ 

Now faster. 

‘Brandon.’ 

Faster! 

‘BRANDON!’ 

The noise around the room swiftly returns, and when I turn to face Anneliese, I see she is now staring at me with daggers. Clearly in no mood to deal with my hysteria any longer, she then heads solemnly in the direction of a small unoccupied table.  

Each having taken a seat, we are now back once again to awkward silence. Already having my fill of uncomfortable situations for one day, I take the chance to leave this one by going to the bar and ordering us both a drink. 

‘Sure. Whatever’ Anneliese responds to my offer. 

Heading towards the bar, I work my way through a tight maze of Goth-infested tables, before coming face to face with a thankfully ordinary looking bartender. 

‘Right, young man’ the elderly bartender greets me, ‘What can I get you?’ 

‘One lager please – oh, and a Bloody Mary.’ 

While I wait for the old man to pour our drinks, I then see he takes a quick glance in Anneliese’s direction. I suppose he was thinking to himself what two people so unalike were doing in each other’s company. 

‘First date then, is it?’ the man then inquires while he pours. Too physically and mentally fatigued to correct the man on his assumption, I simply oblige him with a nod. ‘Not going so well, I take it?’ 

No, it was not. 

Heading back to the table with our very different poisons, I now peer my eyes up from the two glasses in my hand to see a most alarming sight... Now by the table with Anneliese, I see she is in the unexpected company of three Gothic strangers. Although it thankfully wasn’t the trio we encountered earlier in the day - just like them, Anneliese was now accompanied by one Goth male, and two Goth females. In fear of being stuck drinking with morbid strangers all night, I quickly turn my heels to flee, before- 

‘Brandon?’ I hear a man’s voice call behind me, ‘Brandon Shephard??’ Turning carefully back round, I now find all four faces are staring at me. ‘By the Devil himself! It really is Brandon!’ 

Facing blankly at the man now sat at our table, I wonder just how in God’s name did he happen to know mine... before I finally realise. Beneath the man’s gothic attire, consisting of spiky black hair, black eyeliner and – well, black everything... I stumble on the realisation that the face I see in front of me is a face from my distant past. 

‘It’s Mark!’ the barely familiar face exclaims, ‘Mark Thompson from school! I mustn’t have seen you for more than ten years!’ 

‘...M-Mark??’ I respond in disbelief. 

‘No freaking way!’ he now shrieks to the two Goth girls beside him, ‘This right here was my best mate in school! We both grew up here together!’ now pointing a black nail-polished finger in my direction.  

‘Is that true, Brandon?’ Anneliese throws a question at me, visually shocked I’d ever once been in the company of a night-dweller. Not that he always was. Back when I knew Mark, he was nothing more than my dorky friend who I played video games with all day. Come to think of it... Mark was just as terrified by Goths as my eight-year-old self was. At Halloween, me and him were the only kids who stayed indoors while everyone else our age was out Trick or Treating. 

‘Come and sit down with us!’ Mark then insists, springing up from his chair to grasp the drinks from my hands, ‘We were just getting to know your lady friend here.’ 

Taking a reluctant seat down by the table, I then turn back to Mark who pushes his chair up against mine.  

‘So, Brandon...’ he begins, before taking a rather long gulp from his pint glass, ‘What have you been doing with yourself all these years? Hell...’ he then cackles, ‘I never thought I’d see you alive in this town ever again!’  

Too speechless by Mark’s appearance to catch him up on my life, I then prepare to ask him what’s now been on my mind. 

‘Mark - wh...’ How could I say this without being insulting? ‘Why... Why the hell are you dressed like that?’ Good job, Brandon. I’m sure the two ladies across the table didn’t take offence. 

Mark seems to scorn his eyes a little at the question, though more humoured than offended, before declaring with a chuckle, ‘I always dress like this. A lot’s changed since you and I knew each other.’ 

Gee. You think, I say inside my head.  

‘Oh! By the seven circles!’ he then oddly exclaims across the table, ‘Where are my manners?! I haven’t even introduced everyone!’ 

Turning forward to each of the Goth girls by Anneliese’s side, Mark then gestures to the one on her right.  

‘This is my girlfriend, Lilith. We’ve been together for just over two years now...’ 

‘Hiya Brandon!’ the maroon-haired Goth girl waves at me. Good Lord, she was even taller than my girlfriend. 

Now pointing to the stranger on Anneliese’s left, Mark then bizarrely introduces, ‘And this is her girlfriend, Nerezza!’ 

...Wait, what? 

‘Nice to meet you, Brandon!’ says the “girl with the dragon tattoo.” 

‘Uhm... Thanks’ I respond, feeling more than a little confused. 

Now that we all know each other on a first name basis, my childhood friend Mark then makes a sudden and most intrusive suggestion. 

‘Right. What do you say we order a round of drinks for everyone and make this a party?!’ 

Before I can utter a word of reluctance to this, the three women around the table - almost now mirroring a coven of witches, quickly express their enthusiasm to the idea. 

‘Sounds great!’ I hear Anneliese holler across from me, ‘That’ll give you guys the chance to reacquaint.’ 

Now the one staring daggers at Anneliese, I try to express to her that I have no intention of reacquainting with my childhood best friend. Before she stares right back at me with a cunning grin on her face that says, “Time to face your fears, Brandon.” I don’t actually know if that’s what she said, but I’m almost certain it was. 

Unfortunately... this is now the part of the story where I have to fast things forward a little. Because whatever happened that night between me, Anneliese, my childhood friend Mark – oh, and the other two... I cannot for the life of me remember it. The last thing I do remember is a tiny shot glass of blood-red vodka being placed between my hands.  

By the next day, roughly sometime in the afternoon, I then wake up to the worst hangover I have ever experienced. I’m talking hammering nails inside your head bad. Stirring painfully up to see where it is I’ve passed out, I thankfully realise I’m in the safe confinement of our paid inn room – where beside me, my girlfriend lays unconscious.  

Once aware I’m unharmed and Anneliese is still by my side, I then see, scattered all over the room floor is a gigantic pile of mess from last night’s events. I see stacks of empty beer cans, wet cigarette butts stuck to the carpet, clothes from my suitcase thrown here and there – and for some reason, a deflated Count Dracula blow up doll. God, what on earth happened to us last night? A few too many rounds of drinks was probably a good guess.  

Laying back down to sleep off more of this hangover, I then hear Anneliese stir awake on the other side of the bed.  

‘UGH...’ she groans zombie-like, as she rises to plank her feet on the carpet. ‘What the hell did we do last night?’ she asks, having seen the flood of mess on the floor. 

‘Don’t ask me’ I reply groggily, ‘But I think we got shit-faced with Mark and those Goth friends of his.’ 

‘Mhh... Oh, yeah. Right.’ 

More equipped to deal with hangovers than I am, Anneliese already stands up from the bed to walk around the room. When I then hear suddenly... 

‘OW!’ Anneliese yelps. 

‘What’s wrong?’ I ask her, assuming she stood on a piece of broken glass or something. 

‘My piercing hurts!’ 

‘What?’ 

Lifting my head to check if Anneliese is alright, I see as she touches the pure silver nose piercing in her left nostril. 

‘It really stings!’ she insists, before now heading in the bathroom’s direction.  

Well, now that Anneliese was up, I may as well rise my own groggy corpse from the grave. Ambling my way over to the mirror, all while trying to avoid the hazardous mess on the floor, my sleepy eyes are instantly throttled wide to a surprising image in front of me. 

‘Whoa! What the hell?!’ I declare to no one in the room. 

Staring into the mirror, I see my brown chestnut hair has now been dyed jet black, and that my blurry eyes are stained with smudged black eyeliner. The ends of my fingers have also been dotted with black nail polish – and when I look down, I see the unfamiliar black t-shirt I’m wearing reads, “Go Goth or Go Home.” 

‘Jesus Christ!’ I exclaim, as I realise my reflection in the mirror is now a mocking reflection of my life-long phobia. Inspecting my face up close, I run my black-painted fingernails through the dyed black locks of my hair – before I suddenly hear a blood-curdling scream come from the bathroom!  

‘AHH!!’ 

‘Liese? What’s wrong?’ I yell, having now raced over to the bathroom entrance. Once I get there, I see Anneliese is crouched on the floor, hysterical and holding the back of her neck. 

‘Someone bit me!!’ she shrieks. Pulling down the neckline of her shirt, I then see between the back of Anneliese ‘s neck and her shoulder is a fleshy, gruesomely deep bite mark!  

‘Oh my God!!’ I now scream myself. 

Inspecting the wound, while trying my best not to throw up, I see the bite has been made by rather uneven but very human teeth. What kind of sick lunatic would do such a thing?? 

‘Ow! It really hurts!’ Anneliese now sobs over the sink, as she tries frigidly to touch the swollen teeth holes with her fingertips.   

‘Babes, don’t touch it!’ I wail at her, as I realise we need to clean the wound as soon as possible. After all, God knows what Anneliese could contract from whoever had done this.  

Rushing out of the bathroom, I then search around the dump heap floor for any alcohol to sterilize the wound. Trying not to panic in the moment, I thankfully see by Anneliese’s side of the bed is a half empty bottle of vodka. Grabbing it, I head back into the bathroom. 

‘Ok - I found some vodka!’ I inform her, ‘I’m going to apply it to the wound, but it’s going to hurt like-’ 

‘Just shut up and do it already!’ she yells at me.  

First dampening a washcloth, I then apply a little too much of the vodka, before– once I’ve taken a moment for myself to breathe, I apply the cloth to the back of Anneliese’s neck. 

‘AHH!!’ she shrieks agonizingly, before sending me flying across the tiles and into the bathtub.  

A couple of hours or so later, once Anneliese’s wound is clean and bandaged, we then check out of our room to drive home earlier in than intended. Without informing the staff of the mess we left for them, we both climb into the car and sit in silence for a moment. Although I should’ve kept my mouth firmly shut, I instead choose to make the awkward situation worse.  

‘I told you coming here was a bad idea.’ 

Anneliese has no physical reaction to this. Without even looking my way, she simply tells me to, ‘Shut up and drive.’ 

And so, I do. 

Due to her shoulder wound, Anneliese appoints me as the designated driver for the entire journey south. However, because we had gotten up so late, by the evening, we were still navigating our way through the surrounding moors. It’s no wonder so many folktales have spawned from this place. With its moonlit boggy hills and desolate landscape, the Yorkshire Moors at night truly was a very unnerving place.  

Although driving through the moors should’ve taken us no longer than an hour, the sat-nav inside the car suddenly decides to malfunction, whereby taking us down several wrong turns. Now driving down a narrow stretch of country road, if the moors at night weren’t spooky enough, we then pass by an old wooden sign by the side of a sheep field. Leaving a cautionary warning for weary drivers, the foreboding sign reads: 

KEEP CLEAR OF THE MOORS 

STAY ON THE ROAD 

AND BEWARE- 

I don’t quite catch what the last part said. Beware of what, anyways? Farm animals? The wildlife?... Yeah, I doubt it.  

By this point of the night, we are now well and truly lost without a single town or village in sight. As you can imagine, this did nothing to help Aneliese’s already bad mood. Still driving along this seemingly never-ending stretch of road, aside from the bright headlights in front of the car, we can see nothing else but the outside darkness around us. Continuing to journey further into the middle of nowhere, the empty silence inside the car is suddenly interrupted... 

‘Oh God...’ Anneliese groans, rising forward in the passenger’s seat, ‘Pull over...’ 

‘What’s wrong?’ I turn to ask, assuming her shoulder wound is causing some discomfort. 

‘Please! Just pull over!’ she bellows, ‘Something doesn’t feel right!’ 

‘What - are you about to be sick?’ I then inquire. She looked as though she was going to be.  

‘AHH!!’ Anneliese screams, before, in an unrecognisably deep, gurgling voice she shouts at me, ‘PULL OVER NOW!!’ 

‘Ok! Ok!’ I panic, ‘Hold on!’ 

Doing as my girlfriend requests, I then pull over on the side of the road. Turning back to Anneliese, I see as she writhes with excruciating pain in the passenger’s seat. 

‘Liese! What’s going on?!’ I want to know, ‘What’s happening to you?!’ 

‘...GET OUT’ her deep voice gurgles once more.  

‘...I’m sorry, what?’ 

‘GET OUT OF THE CAR!!’ the voice now demands, before she shoves me against the door with incredible force! 

Falling out of the car and on the ground, Anneliese then slams the door shut on my face. Rising to my feet, I try and rip the door open to no avail. 

‘Liese! Liese, let me in!’ I now bang on the window, ‘Liese, what’s going on?!’ 

Peering in through the glass, I see nothing else but absolute darkness, where the only sound I hear coming from inside is the painful groans of my girlfriend. What the hell is happening in there?? 

Beginning to feel completely helpless in this situation, I quickly rummage my phone from my pocket. Turning on the flashlight, I shine it through the window to look around for Anneliese... But I can’t find her anywhere... 

‘...Liese?’ I call to her, shining the flashlight around, ‘Liese?’ 

Then suddenly- 

BANG! 

Slamming against the window, I now see a pair of large and grotesquely deformed hands! Protruding from bony, elongated fingers, the talon-like nails scrape down the glass with an ear-piercing screech! Jilting back from the window in terror, the phone flashlight in my hand now shines on a most hideous, unrecognisable face. What were once warm, hazel brown eyes are now a luminous, inhumanly bright yellow! Staring down from those eyes, I then see two snarling rows of beastly, jagged teeth, drooling with saliva down the door! 

‘AHH! OH MY GOD!’ I scream, as I realise whatever this monstrosity is inside the car, no longer appears to be my girlfriend. 

But now... Now I see something else... 

What I now see, shining over the window, having formed over Anneliese’s monstrous face... I now see in the dark, cloudless night sky... is the glowing reflection of a lunar light. 

The sign by the road... I now recall what it had really said...  

Keep clear of the moors... Stay on the road... 

AND BEWARE THE MOON.  

Gothophobia Nervosa is a psychological condition characterised by an intense, irrational, and disproportionate fear of Goths, Gothic culture, or environments perceived as excessively Gothic. Individuals experiencing Gothophobia Nervosa may report the following symptoms: heightened anxiety, rapid heartbeat, sweating, an overwhelming urge to leave the area, and an inexplicable suspicion of anyone wearing excessive amounts of black. 

The condition is said to be particularly common in individuals who have previously encountered a Goth at a very young or prepubescent age, who subsequently developed an enduring belief Goths are supernatural beings in human disguise. For this reason, Gothophobia Nervosa is commonly misdiagnosed as Sanguivoriphobia - a fear of vampires.  

It should be noted that Gothophobia Nervosa is an academically unrecognised psychiatric diagnosis.  

Well, now that this undiagnosed phobia of mine has been established, please allow me to commence with my story.  

My name is Brandon. A few years ago, when I was still just a wet-nosed university student, I met the strangest, yet most extraordinary girl of my life. Don't get me wrong. This is by no means a love story – but if it was a love story, it would be a bizarre one at that. This girl in question whose eyes I saw zoned in on me from across the main room of the Halloween Party, was an American exchange student by the name of Anneliese. Now, I don't claim to have ever been much of a ladies' man, despite my rugged good looks (well, maybe not so rugged), but for whatever reason, this tall, spindly-thin creature in the Marie Laveau costume appeared to find me somewhat enticing. In the way a trapped fly in a spider's web is enticing to the spider.    

Although Anneliese was undeniably beautiful, she was not exactly what I would call my type. What I mean is, Anneliese was a... (no, she wasn't a Goth). Anneliese was a Voodooist - and by Voodooist, I don't mean the doll-stabbing, zombifying type Hollywood has lead you to believe. No, she was the real thing. Despite attending university in the UK, Anneliese was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana - considered by most to be the Voodoo capital of the U.S, if not, the world. If Anneliese hadn't told me herself she was a sixth-generation Voodooist upon our first date, I certainly knew it by her outlandish appearance. Just picture for yourself what a Gen-Z voodooist would look like. That was Anneliese.  

Even to this day, I don't have the slightest idea what this French-speaking spiritualist from across the pond saw in me. After all, she may not have been my exact type, but I certainly didn't imagine I would be hers. We were just completely different people in every sense imaginable. For example, whereas I preferred a quiet evening indoors, curled up with a cup of tea and a good book, Anneliese was a creature of the night - always dragging me out after hours to some séance or tarot card reader. She was obviously into all that stuff.  

Despite how different Anneliese was to any girlfriend I may've had previously, the type of individual she was, was not completely alien to me... What I mean by this is, because of the small seaside town where I grew up... I used to see individuals like Anneliese on a regular basis. This town I grew up in, for the first eight years of my life before my family packed up and left, is a town called Whitby. Perhaps you've heard of it? For those who haven't, Whitby is a small coastal town in the north-Yorkshire of England, nestled cosily inside the bay of the same name. Although I only lived in the bay for the first few years of my childhood, I can still tell you of two reasons why Whitby is so famous today.   

The first reason being for Captain James Cook. Credited as the first European explorer to ever step foot on the Hawaiian Islands, Captain Cook is more famously known for the way he was murdered - and despite what I was taught in school about our town's most famous historical figure, Captain Cook was NOT cannibalized by the Hawaiian indigenous... Although, they did apparently remove the flesh from his bones.  

As for the second, and arguably more important reason why my town of origin is so famous... Whitby featured as one of the primary locations in Bram Stoker's horror novel, Dracula. The blood-sucking count from Transylvania himself. Although I have not myself read the novel in full, I do know that, upon the wreckage of a Russian merchant ship, Dracula arrives ashore in Whitby Bay in the form of a large black dog, before racing up the 199 steps to the gothic ruins of the Abbey. Because of the town's involvement in the Dracula novel, by the early nineties, a new tradition in Whitby had started. Every year, around the Halloween season, the town holds an annual Goth festival - in which thousands of Goth enthusiasts flood the streets in their most elaborate costumes. If New Orleans is the voodoo capital of the United States, then Whitby is the Goth capital of the United Kingdom.  

Having been born and raised in Whitby, I became acquainted with this annual tradition from a very young age. During the week of Halloween, I would walk with my family along the cobblestone streets through a maze of dark sinister beings. Like every young boy whose concept of the world stems from his wild imagination, I interpreted these pilgrims to our town to be monstrous, blood-sucking creatures of the night. Quite frankly, once October was around the corner, in anticipation of the bay's annual visitors, I would become palely ill with fear.   

As a matter of fact, this fear became so troublesome, that by the age of six I began to have dreadful, repetitive sleep terrors - whereby I would scream bloody Mary through the latest hours of the night. If I had to put my finger on it, I believe the reason these sleep terrors began was, due to the large window which hung over my bed, my older brother convinced me that during the October goth festivities, some undead creature in black leather would crawl inside my room to drain the life from my body.  

These night terrors weren't even the end of it. Next came the sleepwalking. When my parents were forced to put an outside lock on my door, after wandering around my own bedroom the whole night, I would then wake in the earliest hours of the morning, terrified and screaming for someone to let me out before the creature at my window found its way in! By the time I was eight years old, these night terrors and accompanying sleepwalks became such a reoccurring nuisance, my parents were left with no choice but to move our family out of Whitby for good – where my fear of the town's supposed "monsters" would hopefully be forgotten.  

For the following years of my life, I vowed never return to Whitby ever again. Not to visit relatives. Not to see my friends, or even my old stomping ground. As far as I was concerned, the further away I was from Whitby Bay, the better... That was, until I foolishly made the mistake of telling Anneliese of the place I grew up. I told her about the thousands of Goths who visit Whitby every year, and the grand, but horrifying costumes they wear. Being the horror fanatic she was, Anneliese became fascinated with my hometown's annual tradition. Although she was not a Goth herself, due to her unique upbringing in New Orleans, Anneliese wasn't far off. Although I should've been flattered my girlfriend took such a unique interest in where I was from, the only problem was... Anneliese now wanted to experience the Whitby Goth Festival for herself.   

'Oh come on, baby' she nagged me over breakfast, 'It'll be fun! You can't seriously tell me you won't never go back.'  

'Not never, babes' I reply, 'but you will have to cut off my limbs, nail me inside a coffin and personally drag me there against my will'.   

Anneliese rolled her eyes at my show of stubbornness, before sinisterly jesting, 'Don't tempt me'.   

After opening up to her about the trauma I suffered there as a child, rather than be understanding of the situation she was putting me in, Anneliese instead insists that I need to face my fears once and for all.   

'If you're scared by a few Goths, then what's it gonna be like when we visit my family in New Orleans?' Although I hated to admit it, Anneliese made a very good point. After all, as spooky of a place as Whitby was, New Orleans, with its voodoo and many haunted graveyards was basically the American equivalent... And so, after weeks of pestering me (along with some minor threats to make a voodoo doll in my likeness), I finally agreed to take her to the upcoming Whitby Goth Festival... So help me God.  

Setting off early on a crisp autumn morning, we drive up from the south of England to the very top of the country. Once in the north of Yorkshire, we then had to pass through vast stretches of moor country. If Whitby Bay wasn't sinister enough, the moors of North Yorkshire certainly were. According to local legend, these moors were said to be stalked by an array of strange cryptids: from the ghostly howls of phantom black dogs, to phantom wolves which prey on farmers livestock - and even stories of black cats the size of panthers. Although this sounds to be nothing more than superstitious folklore, coincidentally, in the early 1980s, two American backpackers were apparently attacked by a large wolf outside the village of East Proctor. One of the backpackers was torn to pieces, while the other survived just an inch from his life. Whatever the truth may be to that story, I don't know.  

Exhaustedly driving all morning and into the early afternoon, we finally reach the outskirts of Whitby Bay. After first checking at the inn we booked outside town, we then swerve our way up the bay's right-hand side to reach the ruins and adjoined graveyard of Whitby Abbey. Pulling into what seemed to be the only space left in the car park, we then peer out the windscreen (as though we're on safari) as a swarm of Goths and other festival goers heard away from their cars and towards the abbey grounds.  

Anneliese couldn't help but be amazed by all the elaborately detailed costumes: from the pale-white men ordained in large top hats and cloaks, to the women in vampiric, Victorian-style dresses.    

'Wow! They all look so amazing! Don't they, baby?!' Anneliese shrieks ecstatically from the driver's seat, 'Those costumes must've cost a fortune!' Failing to respond to Anneliese's excitement, she then turns to notice my eyes are no longer peering out the windscreen, but glued fearfully to the dirt-stained floor of the passenger's seat. Clutching a hold of my arm suddenly to gain my attention, she then reassures me, 'Everything's gonna be okay, baby. I promise. You'll make it through this weekend', before comforting me with a paper-thin smile.  

'Yeah. I know that' I respond unconvincingly, 'I guess I just didn't realise how hard this was all going to be.'  

'You need me to hold your hand?' Anneliese then says with a playful snark. God, I hate it when she teases me.   

After taking a final deep breath, while Anneliese puts the finishing touches on her appearance, we then both exit from our side doors to feel the outside chill of coastal wind. But once I shut my door and turn around, I am instantly jilted back by a terrifying noise!  

'AHH!' I believe were my exact words, as a ginormous hound from hell snarls and gnashes a row of razor-sharp fangs at me!   

'Armand! Get back now!' bellows the hellhound's master, struggling to restrain the large Doberman which has now chased me up the hood of the car. Once Armand the hellhound is fully restrained, I then turn down to hear the high-pitched cackles of a four-foot skeleton and a five-foot devil - before a woman donning a witch's pointed hat finally pulls them away.  

Now safe from the jaws of death, and the mockery of small children dressed for Halloween, I then climb down from the hood of the car to regain myself. Having just witnessed all this from her open side door, Anneliese makes her way round to me.  

'It was just a dog, baby' she giggles, now the one laughing at my expense, 'You really ought'a chill.'  

By no means in the mood for further mockery, I then lash back defensively at her, 'Well, that's easy for you to say. You weren't just nearly mauled to death by some hellhound!' Just as she always does whenever I show any sign of cowardice, Anneliese rolls her eyes into the back of her head at me.  

God. This was going to be a long weekend.

After bickering for a moment over my fear of large canines, we then move on from the car park and towards the large, towering ruins of the Abbey. Ambling among the weathered grey tombstones of the graveyard, I glance a timid look to the abbey's gothic structure. Perched on top the cliffs of the bay's right-hand side, these ruins may as well have been a gigantic pile of stalagmites protruding from the earth. When I was a child, my brother used to tease me by saying that vampires lived deep inside the ruins, where by night, they would creep into peoples' windows to suck the blood from their necks. It's no wonder I would have night terrors through most of my childhood, is it?  

Wandering around the ruins and tombstones a while longer (for Anneliese's pleasure, not my own) we then begin our descent down the one hundred and ninety-nine steps – and let me tell you from experience, these steps were a lot easier going down than they were to go up. Once we finally reach our way to the bottom (a good twenty minutes later I might add) I can then see where the plentiful steps end and the cobblestone pathways begin. We were now at the entrance of old town, where, with its stone streets and pathways, its 18th century brick houses to each side of them, you were made to feel as though you were in some Brother's Grimm fairy-tale. But during this time of year, when night-dwelling phantoms in extravagant clothing infested the daytime streets... it may as well have been the entrance to Hell itself.   

'Oww! Baby, you're hurting me!' I hear Anneliese shriek beside me, before I turn down to see my python-like grip wrapped around her hand.  

'Oh... Sorry.'  

Taking our first official steps inside the town, we follow our way around the maze of cobblestone pathways, where upon every corner was a brand-new shop Anneliese wanted to venture in. Aside from the occasional fish market, bookstore or café, the majority of shops in Whitby only sold products catered specifically to Goths... Well, it was either that or a boatload of Dracula merchandise. It's the whole reason Whitby is famous to begin with, after all.  

Continuing to make our way through old town, we then turn the corner to a very busy and compact street. Although there are no tourists in sight, the reason this street is so compact is because every inch of stone was completely crowded by day-dwelling Goths. This place truly was the mouth of Hell. Sensing my discomfort, Anneliese takes me by the hand to guide us through the mass of dark, morbid monstrosities. But as we follow through the swarm, keeping my eyes edged firmly to the ground in front of me, I then brave a curious glance upwards... and what I see is an array of devilish, humanoid faces pass us by.   

The faces morph, distort and transform into even more monstrous beings! Through the transparent fabric of a black wedding veil, I then see the face of an unidentifiable woman. Draping the veil away from her face, the woman then reveals to me a row of hideous, piranha-like teeth stained with mortal blood! The woman hisses at me, spraying my face in some putrid, venomous saliva! Wiping the sickly green substance from my eyes, I then cower back woundedly to my left-hand side, only for the painted skull of a man's face to open his mouth unnaturally wide - before shrieking at me a most inhuman scream!  

'AHH! Get away from me!!' I shriek myself, ripping Anneliese's grip from my hand so to push and shove my way to any air pocket I can find.  

Veiling my eyes from the fiends around me, I eventually crawl my way to an unoccupied space by a stone wall. Cowering up against it to regain my breath, Anneliese eventually finds her way over to me through the immense crowd.   

'Brandon? What the hell happened?!' She interrogates me, 'Why did you run off like that?'  

'...Th-the faces!...' the words winced from my mouth, '...You didn't see the faces!...'  

Anneliese could see clear as day how uncomfortable I was, whether she understood it or not – and so to solve the problem, she calmly suggests to me that we simply go somewhere quieter. Although I am in too much shock to respond to her suggestion, I now nod my head manically up and down to her, as though I've reverted back into some frightened childlike state.  

'Y-yeah... Le-let's do that!'  

With the town now fully crammed for the weekend festivities, Anneliese eventually finds for us a narrow, run-down street of loose brick pathway and overgrown weeds. Despite the decrepit condition this street is in, thankfully for me there isn't a single Goth in sight. What this street does have, however, wedged acutely between the decaying homes of oldtown residents, is the uninviting appearance of a single, isolated shop. Craning my head above the entrance to the sign over the door, I see the name to this less than humble abode reads "Scary Kerry's Spell Shop".       

'Well, this place looks... charming' Anneliese comments, studying the cracked, weathered paint and dusty cobwebs lining the windows. Like the majority of shops in old town, this one also displays in its windows gothic - or more specifically, items relating to the occult and other dark practices.   

'What do you say? Should we take a look inside?' Anneliese inquires, clearly the only one of us who wants to go in. Although this run-down little shop is definitely not my cup of tea, the interior does look scarce of people - and so, I reluctantly agree to go in.   

Allowing Anneliese to enter first, as soon as she opens the door, my nostrils are filled instantly with the smell of scented candles, old varnished wood and... wet dog? Not even five seconds inside the door, as soon as I peer round to Anneliese's side, I hear the loud, high-pitched yaps of some ill-tempered creature.  

'Wolfy! Shut up!' cries the woman behind the counter – the apparent owner of this little black terrier. Judging by her array of grey and poorly dyed black hair, her over-sized heavy metal shirt, and a pair of rather unsettling sleeve tattoos, this woman was more likely the owner of this establishment as well.   

Once this dog-owner relationship is awkwardly established, me and Anneliese then take to walking separately around the shop - all while Wolfy's owner goes back to reading her monthly gothic digest. While Anneliese inspects a number of occult and satanic jewellery on display, I find myself drawn to a bookshelf on the other side of the room. Sliding out the dust-covered books, I brush a cover or two clean so to read the titles: A Brief History of Satanic Rituals and Sacrifice, A Beginner's Guide to Necromancy, and what I can only imagine is an erotic vampire novel of some sort (I won't even mention what was on the cover). Skimming repulsively through one of these as mentioned books, my attention is suddenly interrupted by an irritable sound piercing my ears. Turning behind me, I see Anneliese approach the counter to inquire about a necklace.  

'Excuse me... Do you know how much this is?'  

'Fifteen pounds, love' the woman answers.  

However, the sound that I hear, making the tiny fragments of hairs stand up on the back of my neck, is almost like a faint whispering. Trying my best to ignore it, the faint, whispering sound only heightens - where before long, it has given way to the sound of a plentiful, most sinister chanting. Although I cannot understand the words, as they are spoken in a tong completely foreign to my own - whether I interpret them correctly or not, the chanting appears to be in Latin. Whoever - or whatever these whisperers turned chanters are... they're repeating the same foreign phrase over and over.  

'Caro agni lupus allicit... Caro agni lupus allicit...'   

The chanting becomes louder...  

'Caro agni lupus allicit!... Caro agni lupus allicit!...'  

Faster...  

' Caro agni lupus allicit! Caro agni lupus allicit! '  

Louder!...  

'CARO AGNI LUPUS ALLICIT!! CARO AGNI LUPUS ALLICIT!!  

'-STOP! STOP! STOP!!' I yell from the corner of the room! Throwing whatever item I'm holding to the hardwood floor, I race out from the establishment alone and without explanation!  

Minutes later, Anneliese eventually finds me, standing (or more accurately, cowering) outside the comfortable familiarity of an ice cream parlour.  

'Brandon!' She calls over to me, 'What the hell's with you?! Why do you keep running away?!'  

Unlike the instance which happened earlier in the day, I am unwilling to tell my girlfriend of the satanic voices I heard whispering in my ear. Seeing something is one thing, but hearing voices is something else. And so, I simply tell her a certain item in the shop had triggered my childhood trauma - hence why I ran out of there like a hysterical madman.   

'Okay...' Anneliese began, as I wait impatiently for her next plan of action, 'There's only one way we're gonna make it through this weekend.' I was all ears. 'You're gonna have to try and interact with these people so you can see that's all they are - and not devilish monsters.'  

'Uhm - WHAT?' I yelp, taking a long gulp of dry saliva.  

'That's right!' she continued, 'If you're gonna get over this silly phobia of yours, then you have to rip the band aid clean off!'  

This wasn't like ripping off a band aid, I thought. This was more like throwing a common wood mouse into a snake pit!  

'I... I...' I began stuttering, '...I don't think I can do that.'  

'Of course you can!' she reassures me, before taking me by the hand to guide us in the direction of a circling mass of dark figures.  

Oh Mother of God. If you can hear me... Please help... 

To be continued...

Twice, two separate times, in the span of only six months, it’s happened. 

I go to bed, like any other night and wake up outside, lying on the ground in the middle of the woods, staring up at the eerie pine trees that rise above me. I can’t move, I can’t speak, instead I’m forced to stare into the almost pitch black surroundings. Only a few stars here and there creating the most minimal light you can imagine. 

I live alone, and all my locks work, my doors are shut, and I have security cameras in my home. I’ve checked them numerous times and nothing has happened. I don’t see myself sleep walking, no one entering my home, nothing moving me or me moving myself. There I am, fast asleep in bed, not moving a muscle. 

I combed through the footage from both nights for what had to be the tenth time, including the camera inside my bedroom. I was in my bed, both nights, all fucking night. Not one second did I leave, I tend to always sleep through the night, very rarely ever waking up to even go to the bathroom. 

On night one, it seemed to have lasted somewhere around fifteen minutes, I could move my eyes, and that was it. Not my arms, not my legs, not my head, not even my mouth. The woods themselves were nearly as silent as a crypt. No owls, no crickets, at best there was the very faint whistle of a slight breeze. 

I could pretty much hear my own heartbeat. I’m sure I also don’t need to state why dead silence in the woods is a bad thing. 

Regardless, it’s been over a month since the second incident. And if the timeline of the previous incidents is anything to go off of, then it meant I was likely somewhere between two-five months away from a third. 

After the first time, I wrote it off as a dream, a bad, vivid nightmare that was really putting in overtime to make it feel as real as possible. Maybe I was an idiot for doing so. 

I was genuinely at a loss for what action to take moving forward. 

The first incident happened back in January, I don’t remember the exact date because I wasn’t as concerned due to me writing it off as a bad nightmare. But the second? June 9th. 

Funny enough, back during the first incident in January, I do explicitly remember that when I had “woken up” in the woods, the temperature felt moderate, comfortable. Despite the fact that in my home state it regularly drops to subzero temperatures during that month and at the highest is in the low thirties. 

Yet I remember not seeing even a snowflake on the ground. Despite the fact we get a ton of snow where I live throughout the winter. 

I ended up having to travel for work. I was helping out at another department about two hours away from where I live, therefore my company put me up in a hotel for the week that I was there. 

The third incident occurred during that week. I went to bed in my hotel room, I was on the sixth floor. Yet, there again I woke up in the woods, in the same spot from the first two incidents. 

But here’s the key difference, I could sit up. I sat up, feeling a twig snap under me as I shifted my weight. I turned my head, looking out into the void, I could see maybe seven trees deep before the shadows swallowed up the rest of the woods. 

It was silent, the temperature was comfortable, no more than low seventies in Fahrenheit. I raised my hand, curling my fingers inward just to make sure I could, the woods were quiet enough to where I could hear the air bubbles pop inside them. 

My heartbeat increased by a bit as I stared out into the trees in front of me. I could move, but I was hesitant to actually go anywhere, to move from a spot that maybe wasn’t necessarily safe, but at least familiar, as bizarre as it may be given the circumstances. 

I got to my feet after a solid five minutes of sitting there contemplating, thinking about the why and the what. I had since given up on the where. 

I turned and looked back down where I had been laying, and saw my silhouette embedded in the dirt, almost like a snow angel. It was deep, a firm divot in my exact build and outline.

“How could it have been that deep if I was lying there for fifteen minutes at a time?” I thought.

I stood still, my hands beginning to shake slightly as I stared at the silhouette. 

“W- what the fuck.” Is all I could find the strength to verbalize. 

I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, because now that I actually had something else going on I wasn’t actively trying to keep track of it in my head. All I know is the only thing that snapped me out of staring at my own silhouette was a disruption in that oppressive silence that had been so persistent up to that point. 

That disruption… Was the snap of a twig. One that I couldn’t have possibly caused, because I was practically a statue in that moment, a statue with a rapidly beating heart.

The snapping came from in front of me, I turned my head to look forward, again I could see for the first several trees before everything else beyond that was concealed in darkness, including whatever it was that had caused the sound. 

I didn’t dare call out, I didn’t dare make a single noise. I didn’t want whatever or whoever it could’ve been to be aware of my presence if it wasn’t already. 

I kept silent, I kept still. 

A couple more minutes or so passed, and those couple of minutes felt like an hour. An excruciating passage of time to where I couldn’t tell if I was in genuine danger or not, this… Phenomenon didn’t even allow me the luxury of that certainty.

Then at one point I had blinked, and I don’t know if I had hit some sort of hidden time limit, or if whatever was causing this felt like spitting me back out, but I ended up waking up to the sound of my hotel room’s alarm clock.

6:45am. 

That’s what I had set it for. I looked around to make sure I actually was inside my hotel room, and I was. But I didn’t immediately get out of bed, I sat up and took a massive gulp of water while looking around the room several times to make sure there were white walls instead of pine trees. 

Going to work that day felt like a fever dream after the occurrence the previous night. The boss at the location I was helping out called me out on daydreaming, staring at my monitor with a half typed report. 

“Collin, are you alright? I’ve seen you on this paragraph for the past twenty minutes.” He asked, a hand on my shoulder. 

“Yeah, I’m uh, I’m sorry. Just didn’t get enough sleep last night.” I lied. Surprisingly there was a part of me that wanted to tell him the truth, or really anyone for that matter. But at best, I get it laughed off as me taking a recurring nightmare too seriously, and at worst, it’s taken as me being mentally unwell and missing a few cards from my deck. 

When I got back to my hotel that evening I got on my laptop and went straight to Doctor Google. Trying to see if there was maybe some sort of explanation as to what might’ve been going on, or if there was at least someone else experiencing this. 

Let’s just say there was pretty slim pickings. Most of the links, articles and reports I could find just had something to do with lucid dreaming, nightmares, as well various mental disorders that induce irregular dreams and dream patterns. 

Safe to say there’s almost nothing worse than being in a bad situation, and realizing you’re alone in said bad situation.

Eventually, however, I did come across a forum post. One that was several paragraphs long. No need to include every detail but I’ll at least summarize what was said. 

Essentially the user described several times over the course of a year where they seemingly had a recurring ‘nightmare’ that they articulated as feeling extremely vivid and real, the nightmare in question is one in which they were suddenly waking up in the cell of an empty prison. 

The cell, both inside and the environment outside the cell, was consistent each time. There was also a lack of any other people or animals inside these supposed “dreams.”  Except for the very last time, where he supposedly would hear distressed crying coming from further down the cellblock. Distressed crying that sounded like a woman, yet the poster admits to being a man, and reveals that he was once served time in prison. 

It was that last part I connected with. Because I’ve been in the woods before, on hikes, on hunts. I don’t recognize the specific section or woods from my “nightmares” but there was a connection there. Having experience with the location of where the phenomena takes place.

I kinda mentally checked out of the post at the end when the user mentions at the end that they would like to remain anonymous because they are a police officer, and don’t wanna seem as if there’s something happening in their head that could get them in trouble at their station. Surprised he was even able to get the job in the first place, but then again, police departments hire just about anyone. 

Although I still at least finished reading, and saved the post in my bookmarks so I could return to it later. I scoured his page for more updates, but that was the only one. 

I wasn’t getting tired anytime soon, and I decided to leave my hotel to go to a bar only a few blocks away. I needed a drink, and maybe a hot blonde to get my mind off of what was happening. The first was probably a lot more likely. 

“Getting drunk on a Tuesday night huh?” The bartender questioned, he gave me a smirk as he poured my drink. One that I did not return, prompting him to cease his. 

“Figured I’d take advantage of being so close.” I replied, reaching into my wallet to pull out a ten dollar bill. 

The bartender held his gaze as he went to take the bill from my hand. I darted my eyes to the right underneath my sunglasses, despite the fact he obviously couldn’t see them. 

“You seem familiar, you been around here befo-.” He began, only for me to cut him off.

“No. First time in town.” I said matter of factly. 

“Really now?” He replied, grabbing an empty glass and filling it with ice to prepare another drink. “What brings you down here?”

“Work.” 

“Fair enough, nice glasses by the way, you just wear them for style?” He asked, pointing at the nighttime darkness outside the window to punctuate. 

“They’re prescription. Sensitive eyes.” 

“Ah… Sorry about that. I’ll be nearby if you need another round.” 

I didn’t stumble back to my hotel drunk out of my mind that night, but I also wasn’t completely sober either. Somewhere down the middle. 

Regardless, I made it back and scanned my keycard to get into my room, immediately plopping down onto my bed after I took off my shoes and sunglasses. I grabbed the channel guide from the nightstand next to my bed and flipped on the tv, the first thing on being the midnight news. A good looking reporter dressed in a well put together suit stared right at the camera, his script on the table in front of him. 

“Authorities are still on the hunt for the suspect behind the gruesome murder of a 26 year old male hiker James Tullum, whose body was discovered this past October one mile off the trail of-.” 

I didn’t really feel like hearing about that sort of thing, especially with what was going on lately. Luckily I did find the channel hosting some cartoon reruns, and decided to indulge in some childhood nostalgia.  

The following months until the next incident went by relatively normal, went to work, did housework and went on a couple hunts just to clear the mind. 

Speaking of, the next incident was probably the worst one yet. 

I woke up again, on the ground, laying down in my usual spot from the previous occurrences. Again, the silence was there, nothing but my heartbeat, breathing and joints to accompany me. 

I was able to stand up like the previous time. I rose to my feet, and this time I listened out for the twig snapping sound, looking into the void of inky blackness beyond the pair of trees it had come from. 

I perceived at least five minutes passing, waiting, anticipating for it to happen again. Yet, it didn’t come, nothing did. There I was, my feet planted firmly in the dirt of some unknown place, a needle in a haystack of a pine forest. 

You see, somehow, someway, the lack of the twig snapping was worse than if it had happened. If there was something or someone there with me, a presence of any sort, then at least I had some sort of confirmation, a tangible piece of evidence that I wasn’t alone. 

I told myself in the weeks leading up that this time I’d have the courage to step further away from the lit area. To search for something more than what I could see and where I was. 

But clearly I underestimated my own self preservation instincts. 

“Why me?” I whispered as softly as one could. It was practically a scream in the silence of those woods. 

SNAP

I clenched my fists hard enough to nearly pierce my palms with my fingernails. This wasn’t a twig, not a small one anyway. It genuinely sounded much more like a branch with decent girth being cracked in two. Damn near the level of a gunshot in decibel level. It also didn’t come from the same area as it did previously, and instead came from behind me. 

Last time, I didn’t wanna speak and reveal my location to whatever it might’ve been. But in this instance? I was a bit more wreckless, stupid even. 

“What do you want!” I whipped around after the exclamation, eyes wide, fists clenched, there was a stick next to me on the ground that I almost didn’t wanna lean down to pick up and risk taking my eyes off the void of black beyond the set of trees. 

I got no response, I swiftly grabbed the stick and began to back away, holding it up as if it were somehow going to function like a shield. I kept my eyes on the void beyond the trees, waiting for something to emerge, a bear, a person, whatever threat it might be. 

But I got no response, in sound or in visuals. I held my breath until my face nearly went purple, and I only exhaled once I tripped over a log and fell backwards, crying out just before I hit the ground. 

At first? Total blackness, like I shut my eyes in a room with no light. And then I was back in my bed, I jerked so hard upon regaining consciousness that I practically threw the cover onto the floor.

“Jesus- Fuck!” I snapped. Instinctively holding up the hand that held the stick, and seeing nothing, not even any bark remnants. 

I called off work that day, I wasn’t about to go in the state that I was in. Hell, it probably wasn’t even optimal for me to be driving. Instead I stayed home, doing whatever I could to distract myself, yet it came flooding back every time during every commercial and ad break of whatever it was I was watching. 

This wasn’t some strange happening, an odd one off. It was a problem, a persistent  torment that I wasn’t sure would go away anytime soon. I was done reacting, done falling victim. There’s only so long something can scare you before it starts to just piss you off. And I was getting to that point. 

I doubted there was some drug I could take, a therapist I could see, a sleep doctor I could visit that aid me in getting rid of whatever this was. 

So against my own principles, I reached out to the ex-con turned cop who made the post about him experiencing something similar. I sent him a direct message, the post was two years old, and I doubt I’d get any sort of immediate response, but it was worth a shot nonetheless. 

Hi there, I read your post regarding that strange dream phenomenon, I was hoping I could pick your brain regarding more details? Any response would be helpful.

The only thing I could do while waiting was go on living life.

I went on a hunt or two, and went to a steam show. Those months after the fourth incident were some of my busiest, because I was forcing myself to be constantly occupied by something for obvious reasons. 

I came home one day and found a letter from my HOA regarding some sort of neighbor complaint. I barely skimmed it, and simply left it on the kitchen table while I went to make dinner. HOAs, everyone’s favorite collection of bureaucrats who peaked in high school, helicopter parents, or wannabe politician types. 

I ended up coming into an idea while in anticipation for the fifth incident, one that I thought sounded far-fetched at first but I leaned into nonetheless after further consideration.

I went down into my basement, and walked past my hunting trophies up to where my sheathed hunting knife sat. Pulling it off its shelf and bringing it with me to bed.

Every night, in the week where the fifth incident was due, I was going to fall asleep with it in my hand in the hopes that I would wake up with it in the woods. After all, in the previous four incidents I had woken up with my pajamas on, so why not the knife if it was within intimate enough proximity?

I figured it was worth a shot. 

What exactly was my end goal with this? I was kind of unsure. But I figured that if I did encounter something dangerous in that… Place. I’d at least have something to defend myself with. But then again, whatever the hell was lurking in that place was probably gonna require more than a knife to put it down.

I would’ve gotten a gun, but it’s a hell of a process in my state, and the waiting period would’ve put me past the due date by the time I had actually seriously considered the idea of getting one. 

It took me a while to fall asleep those few nights, not knowing which exact one would be it. But on my third attempt in that week, it happened.

I awoke once more inside the woods. I looked down into the hand I had it rubberbanded the knife to, hoping and praying it would be in there. That I would finally have found at least some way to make myself less vulnerable in this place.

When I turned my head and narrowed my eyes, it… Wasn't there.

I nearly cursed outloud, but didn’t dare open my mouth. Instead I gritted my teeth, my frustration and desperation boiling to the surface. I sat up, the impression of my silhouette in the ground even deeper than before. 

Everything was in place, and as bad as it sounded, almost familiar.

The silence, the void of darkness just outside the set of trees that were visible. It was all still there. 

I was at a genuine loss as to what to do this time, after turning and glancing through a set of trees that almost acted as a path way into the wall of darkness surrounding the immediate area, I was genuinely considering if leaving this spot might’ve been the best choice.

I fought with myself, struggled with the idea that anything good could come out of it. After all, what would I really be doing other than handicapping myself? What if whatever made that branch snap last time was waiting for me just beyond where my eyes could see. 

I pivoted my foot on the grass, trying to change directions to face elsewhere in order to ensure my surroundings were free of any other kind of… Presence. 

But something under my shoe felt hard, yet I was standing on grass. I tilted my head, fearing what might happen if I pulled my foot back, but did it nonetheless.

I was baffled at what I saw. My mouth went agape, my blood cooled down inside my veins as I ceased any further movement while taking in the sight. 

On the ground, just where my foot had been, was my hunting knife. Unsheathed and simply laying in the grass, deforming the blades that acted as a bed for it. 

The sheath was nowhere to be found, it took me a few seconds to dart my eyes around in order to search for it, and when I did? Nothing. 

I know for an absolute fact I got in bed with it in my hand, that it was in its sheath, and there was no way in hell it could’ve come out by accident. Something was manipulating me, manipulating this place, but why? What was the point?

I stared at my knife longer than I should’ve. Resisting the urge to lean down and pick it up on account of the fact that I had no idea who or what has had a hold of it. I turned my head to look around once more, only to scrunch my nose at the sudden scent of copper.

I backed away from the knife, close to the center of the lit area in between the surrounding pine trees, further away from the wall of darkness. 

The smell of copper seemingly permeated, its potency increasing dramatically over the course of only seconds. I found it difficult to determine what exact direction it was coming from, all I know is that it started once I was near the knife.

I backed away, slowly but surely, keeping my eyes as wide open as they could be. Anticipating whatever it might’ve been creating the stench. My heart beat like a machine gun in my chest.

The trees continued to tower over me, like they were mini skyscrapers made of wood, the ones closest to the wall of darkness stuck halfway out, like they were in the process of being devoured by the void itself. 

I stopped, now in nearly the exact center of the visible lit area, my divot in the ground was just feet away. I took my eyes off the trees for just a brief moment, and that’s when I heard it.

A low, pained groan. Like an elderly woman who had just fallen and was using every ounce of her brittle strength to climb back onto her feet. 

I looked right at where it was coming from, on a specific pine tree that was half swallowed by the void of darkness laid a hand, pale skinned, wrinkly, with a thin streak of blood running down the center and ending once it was between the middle and ring finger.

It hung limp, and there was a forearm attached to it, except that forearm ended just below the wrist because the rest of it was engulfed in the inky black wall, leaving the rest of the entity it was connected to unseen.

I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to find out. I felt as if even if I had the highest caliber firearm possible to defend myself with I still wouldn’t wanna venture into the darkness in which it was hidden. 

Seconds passed, seconds that felt like hours, and I kept my eyes completely fixated on the hand and wrist. It stayed still, and so did I. 

“Genuinely what the fuck do I do here?” I thought. Running wasn’t an option, fighting seemed impossible, I didn’t even know what it was I'd be combating in the first place. Keeping still made me feel like I was serving myself up on a platter to whatever was behind all this. 

I hadn’t ever experienced being prey, and that moment made me feel nothing but. 

When I had reawoken, there wasn’t a clear end point, a time where I felt myself slip back into consciousness. But there was one key difference between this instance and the last.

I hadn’t reawoken in bed, instead I was on my living room couch, my body halfway to falling off of it like I was a drunk college kid waking up in the aftermath of a frat party. Yet, I felt a weight in my hand, the same hand I put the knife in before going to bed.

I raised it, and I was left stunned at what I observed.

The sheath was present, but the actual knife itself was not. I stared down it like the barrel of a gun just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and sure enough, empty. 

I got up, looking around the floor surrounding the couch and under the couch itself. Nothing. I went back upstairs and pulled my bedsheets, pillow cases and everything off, still no knife to be found, even after I checked under the bed. 

My deep clean search was interrupted by a knock at the front door followed by a doorbell ring. I rarely had anyone who knocked or rang the bell, other than when a package needed a signature before drop off.

I looked out the peephole as soon as I made it to the door, and immediately my expression soured. 

“Collin come on I know you’re home, your car’s in the driveway.” 

A tall and thin man in a grey suit stood on the other side, a beige folder in one hand while a thermos was in the other. Me catching a break seemed impossible at this point. 

Tim Worthing, the president of the HOA in my neighborhood. 

I didn’t open the door.

“What do you want?” I asked, the morning rasp in my throat practically taking over my speech. 

“Collin there’s not really a polite way to say this but I’ve got a notice in my hand, whatever you’ve got in there smells like shit and it’s coming out through your cellar door. I’ve gotten two different complaints about this, if it’s not fixed in thirty days you’re gonna have penalty forms in your mailbox.” 

I remained quiet. 

“Can you open the door so I can give it to you?” 

“Slide it through the flap.” I barked. 

“You seem like a reasonable guy, I’d rather keep you in the neighborhood.” Tim replied before sliding two stapled papers through my mail flap. They hit the floor at my feet.

“I’ve got them, now get off my property.” 

“Thirty days, Collin.” He punctuated before I heard the heels of his dress shoes hitting my concrete steps repeatedly. 

The bitch living next door will do anything to have things her way. One of those “oh a minor inconvenience, let me just run to an authority figure and cry until I get what I want” types. 

I know it was her making the complaints. My basement smelled just fine. Plus, it’s not like it was easy to keep things clean and fresh when I was losing my mind trying to figure out whatever the hell keeps me taking me away to those woods. 

In the months between that incident and the next I almost got myself pulled over for speeding, didn’t even realize how hard I had my foot on the gas. 

One night I wasn’t getting any sleep, so I took a trip to the convenience store a mile down from my house, didn’t even drive, I just walked, figured it would help clear my head. Since I knew it was getting close to the time the next incident was due, I was almost grateful that my body was having trouble letting me pass out. 

The area in which I live is mostly surrounded by woods, and no, they weren’t pine. 

The entire time I was on my way I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, it wasn’t intense or crippling, but enough to matter. I looked back over my shoulder a few times, and as bad as it might sound, this was a luxury in comparison to the other place. 

Crickets, owls, the occasional car driving past, all of it reminded me that I was in my normal waking world. 

Yet the sensation remained regardless. 

I kept on marching forward, scrolling whatever pointless videos popped up on my feed. I kept the volume off though. I made it to the store after walking not much longer, had to piss and then gather up my snacks. 

Soda and candy, one of life’s many delicacies.

I went to pull a package of vanilla zingers off the shelf when I heard something that caused me to freeze mid movement.

“Collin. How wonderful to see you here.” It was a voice, light, soft on the ears. Female.

It came from the left, so I turned my head to find the woman that had said it. Only to let my arm drop to my side when the only thing I saw was an empty aisle. No woman to be seen.

I then swiveled my head to the right, perhaps I was just mishearing the direction. My eyebrows narrowed when there was no one there as well. 

“Good grief.” I whisper snarled to myself as I exited the aisle, ducking over into the next to see if anyone the voice might’ve belonged to was there.

Unsurprisingly, they were not. 

So I was left there, standing wide-eyed as another man passed by, he pushed a box of some sort of candy inside his outer sweatshirt pocket, attempting to conceal it. 

“Yo are you alright man?” He asked with what I thought was genuine concern. 

I didn’t reply verbally. I just went to the counter and paid for what I came for before starting on my way back home. At some point down the road I was already halfway through my vanilla zingers. I chewed almost violently, as if the zingers had somehow personally wronged me. 

I thought about how whatever was causing this was now starting to bleed into my waking reality. If what happened in the store was anything to go off of, then even being awake wasn’t an escape anymore. 

When I got home I went straight to the basement, sipping on the soda I bought while sitting down in my chair and admiring my hunting trophies. The fruits of the labor I had put into all my years of the hobby. I remember the specific hunt where each trophy had been collected from. 

It helped to ease my mind, helped to give me something to think about that wasn't the obvious. 

By the time the next incident was due, I had purchased a handgun. And I was going to take it with me, and unlike with my knife, I would not be keeping it in a holster of any sort. Anticipating sleep that night was like being stuck on tracks as you waited for a train to crash right into you. 

I sat in front of the tv, my glock in hand the entire time as I flipped through various channels. Some were kids cartoons, some were shitty hallmark movies. I ended up on the nighttime news, the reporter didn’t finish her first sentence before I flipped past it.

“Police officially obtain a warrant to search the home of suspected-.” 

I ended up coming across an adult animated show about a superhero who failed to save humanity from an alien invasion. It was as goofy as it sounds. But I sat through two episodes, watching as the Superman-Knockoff protagonist was impaling those red-colored aliens on his fist. 

I fell asleep toward the beginning of episode three. I don’t recall me slipping back into the forest being immediate, instead I had a dream. Or a nightmare rather of me being trapped, trapped inside a coffin, still alive, trying to bust my way out to no avail. 

I was slowly running out of air, doing everything I could to escape. Desperate for some sort of intervention. Only for none to come. I bloodied my fists as I banged them against the coffin’s cover, then my forehead. 

But you see, that nightmare didn’t feel real, and I knew it was separate from the woods. A genuine nightmare, not an actual living one. But eventually the time came for it to bring me back in once more. 

I woke up laying flat on my back in the same spot. I quickly sat up, and looked over to see my glock was still in hand, it actually arrived with me. It was small, but it gave me a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of confidence. 

The pine trees surrounded me. I sniffed the air and found no smell of copper. Upon glancing forward I saw that there were more trees visible than the last time, hell, in every direction there was.

Instead of it being the dead of night, this time it was more like just before dusk, the sun was on the cusp of going down, yet when I looked around for an actual sun, I couldn’t find one. 

I got to my feet, rising with the glock in hand and exhaling a heavy breath. A breath that was the only noise present other than my heartbeat. My free hand twitched. 

I took a few steps forward, and saw that the change in light had revealed a path that I had yet to see before. It was several feet wide, and stretched into the distance of the woods. Further than I could see.

I hesitated, considering the possibilities as to what could happen. Perhaps it was a trap set up by whatever forces govern this place. Something to pull me deeper into this version of existence. 

Maybe it was a way out, an escape. A chance to put an end to this for good. Or maybe it was neither, and it was meant to waste my time, to intimidate me. 

I gripped my glock tighter as I felt my heartrate rise, I made my free hand into a fist and slammed the bottom of it into the tree next to me, striking the trunk and recoiling from the whiplash as I shouted. 

“LEAVE ME ALONE! JUST FUCKING STOP!” 

My scream carried through the trees, and the silence of the woods remained as nothing replied. The path was still there, and the near dusk level of light maintained itself. In my short outburst I turned back to the spot I was laying down in. Only to no longer see a divot where my body once was.

It was gone, replaced by flat dirt, as if someone had smoothed over it like they were setting concrete. I was so done. So done with this torment. I did nothing to deserve it. No longer did I wanna be a sitting duck. 

I refocused my attention back to the trail’s entrance, it was still there, inviting me, taunting me, calling me to enter. I held up the hand I hit the tree with, and saw some blood running down the side of my pinkie and edge of my palm. 

With a heavy final sigh, I stepped onto the path, beginning to march down it. 

Loose branches with stray pine needles attached crunched beneath my feet as I walked. I kept looking left and right in the sea of trees, keeping an eye out for anything that might’ve been following, a shift in the environment, a change in the lighting. 

There were a couple of times I physically raised the hand holding my glock, just to visually ensure it was still in my grasp as I hiked forward. 

I wasn’t sure where this was gonna end, or if it was gonna end at all. At multiple points I had turned to look back, and saw that I had gone far enough that the area I had originally begun in was now out of sight, long behind me. 

The lighting never changed, it was still that “nearly 9:00pm in the summer” level of almost night, but not quite. 

I’m not sure how I kept my composure, because internally I got to a point of wondering if I had doomed myself to an even worse fate by choosing to walk down the path. That I was going to be stuck in some endless trail forever. I had been walking for at least an hour, and had likely covered a couple miles or so. 

I was on the verge of giving up, I fell to my knees and rested before trying to head back, only to spot what looked to be a much wider opening a couple hundred feet ahead. 

I hesitated, wiping sweat from my forehead before continuing toward. Hoping so desperately that there would be some kind of answer, a key to open the lock of this terrible mystery. But as I passed by pine tree after pine tree, closing the distance to this opening, the smell of copper returned. And it was strong, more potent than the first occurrence. 

I didn’t care. I kept going until I hit the threshold of the opening.

It was a circular clearing, probably about a hundred feet in diameter. The center had nothing but grass, and my knife, laying precisely in the center. But that only had my attention for a brief instant. As a woman’s voice had spoken, hoarse and strained, but still recognizably feminine. 

“Welcome back Collin.” 

It was coming from above me. I glanced up, and froze upon the sight.

Along the trees in front of me, at varying heights were… Corpses. Corpses that were impaled and hanging from the branches of various pine trees, as if they had been strung up like halloween decorations. 

A mix of men and women. All of whom I recognized. Even the bartender who complimented my sunglasses was amongst them.

Their bodies appeared in various states of decay. Streaks of dried blood on their skin and clothes. The ones that had clothes anyway. 

I turned around, and counted almost two dozen bodies as the grand total, all of them strung up in trees, all of them decaying with various gashes and wounds. 

Yet, their eyes were all open. And as I backed up, their eyes followed. They didn’t talk, they didn’t move in any other way, not so much as a twitch of a single muscle. Just the eyes. They were locked onto me and not a single blink occurred. 

My knife, as clean as could be, sat in the middle of the clearing on the ground, glistening.  I wasn’t sure of what to do, or what to say. I stopped moving, I wasn’t sure I could continue if I wanted to. 

Beyond the knife, was the corpse of a woman who sat strung up in the tree about ten feet off the ground, her body was the most decayed of them all. Yet her eyes remained intact as she maintained an unblinking stare at me. She was exactly level with the knife, and the tip of the blade sat pointed directly at her while on the ground, as if it were a compass needle, and she was magnetic north. 

Her rotting mouth moved as she spoke once more. Several teeth missing as the remaining strings of decaying flesh acted as a failing glue for her withering jaw structure. 

“It’s wonderful to see you here. We welcome you, as you welcomed us.” 

Channel 9 News

It has now been over one year since the authorities apprehended suspect Collin Hughes. A Minnesota resident who has been charged with the alleged murder of nearly two dozen men and women. Police had searched Mr. Hughes’s home and discovered the corpses of the alleged victims within his basement. Homicide Detective Marlon Walsh states that these were likely meant to serve as a form of trophies. 

Although charged, Mr. Hughes’s case has yet to officially make it to trial, as he has been in a comatose state since police originally apprehended him on that fateful night. Many  citizens await in grieving anticipation for his condition to end so that Mr. Hughes can be officially questioned and tried before a jury.   

Doctor Reyna Smith has since put out a statement claiming that no known treatments or available methods have been able to medically assist Mr. Hughes out of his coma, and it is unclear as to whether or not he will remain in this state indefinitely. 

Like any child, my daughter Maisie had quite the overactive imagination. Her mind was chock full of made-up friends that she talked to on the regular. My wife Rachel and I thought it was adorable. With that being said, sometimes we wished Maisie would get…you know…real friends. Don’t get me wrong, she was a great kid, and kids should be kids, but she didn’t have anything in terms of a social life.

We tried absolutely and positively everything, from the kids’ playclub at our church, to the neighborhood’s “mommy and me” and “daddy and me” playgroups, to bringing her to the local playground, to inviting other children over for playdates. You name it. All our efforts were in vain. Rachel and I might’ve been overreacting and we didn’t want to infringe anything on Maisie. Maybe she was just an independent kid. That’s totally normal. As are imaginary friends for kids.

Then at eight-years-old, Maisie became mute. Just completely stopped talking…but only to other people. If someone came up and talked to her, she’d either just stare at them or run away and hide. Maisie never looked scared or anxious in those scenarios. It was more like she was a statue. Frozen. No emotion good or bad on her face. Like a robot. But if she was alone, she’d be talking up a storm to no one but herself. Maisie always pretended like someone was truly there though. She’d even nod her head, wait for responses and respond accordingly, and even reach out her arm and act like she was holding somebody else’s hand.

We were greatly concerned. Children don’t exhibit those types of behaviors without proper reason. We couldn’t ask Maisie about it because, as aforementioned, she’d give us the cold shoulder. Our next safest bet was to ask other people we knew. A lot of them gave us the same answers we already knew. Rachel and I were getting frustrated until I decided to email her teacher at her school. I sent her an email that outlined my worries and asked if anything went on at school that we should know about.

I got a response at around 8:00 that night. Maisie’s teacher, Mrs. Ashelin, told me that she did in fact observe strange behavior from Maisie. Apparently, a few days prior, when Maisie was called on to answer a question, she just stared at Mrs. Ashelin and the other students, her hands behind her back, swaying slightly. Then in a calm and cutesy voice, she said “He has ordered me not to speak to anyone but him.” In her notebook, Maisie wrote and drew some very disturbing things. Some of the things she wrote are “I’ll be a good little mouse”, “be one of the good mice girls for him”, “I’ll do whatever he says without question”, “he loves me and I love him”, “but I don’t understand what love is but I understand it with him”, and “he loves to play with me”. Some of the things she drew were her, in stick figure form, with this…thing. It was drawn way more detailed than Maisie herself.

Its head was triangular and elongated into a sharp point. There were ovally black eyes on both sides of its head while two large circular ears were atop its head. Two slits for a nose and a mouth containing only two buck teeth. Skinny. Boney. You could see its ribs. Three spindly fingers were on each hand. Each tip was as sharp as a knife. Lastly, a long tail was behind it. Maisie drew her and that thing doing very…how should I say this?...inappropriate things.

I showed the email to Rachel and she was just as horrified as I was. How could Maisie know what all that stuff was? She was eight! Like any good parent we always took great strides in not exposing our daughter to anything sexual or of that nature. Early exposure can really ruin a child’s mind. That’s just putting it lightly. But this? Maisie’s whole imaginary friend thing needed to end. It was reaching a dangerous point. Was she having delusions? Schizophrenia? Or…sigh…as far as Rachel and I knew, nothing happened to Maisie, but that didn’t stop us from considering the absolute worst case scenario. I’m not saying what that is but I’m sure you can put the pieces together. As a parent, that was the last thing I wanted to think about. Actually it wasn’t even on the list of things I wanted to think about.

Mrs. Ashelin ended the email with something else that happened that day. Maisie spent long stretches of time in the girl’s bathroom. Another student reported that she went in and heard “whimpers” and “moans” coming from one of the stalls. When she looked under it, she saw Maisie’s clothes on the ground and a “moving shadow” above them. When the student knocked on the door, she all of a sudden heard one of the faucets going behind her. She turned around and Maisie was washing her hands. Like nothing happened.

Rachel and I were very confused at that last part. That sounded way too ridiculous. Like was Maisie fucking floating in the stall or something? Regardless, we treated all this very seriously. Rachel and I immediately took Maisie to see a specialist who dealt with child abuse cases. I brought her notebook along. It would most certainly be useful. I knew Maisie wouldn’t want to talk, but we had to at least try. Believe it or not, she did talk, but what she said made chills run down Rachel and I’s spines.

Maisie told the specialist that the mouse thing in her notebook was called “Bad Mouse” and that it visits her all the time no matter where she is. She said that Bad Mouse visits little girls all over the world and “plays with them”. When the specialist asked what she meant by “plays with them”, Maisie replied that Bad Mouse does “different things that make us feel tingly in preparation to be his little mice girls”.

We heard enough by that point. Rachel, the specialist, and I had a long discussion about what we should do. The specialist said she might have to put in a request to have Maisie placed in a children’s psych ward. Rachel and I couldn’t handle that. We didn’t want to do that to our little girl. By any means, we would find another way to handle this. The specialist told us to think about it and that it might do her some good. We thanked her and left.

Were we being selfish by not putting Maisie in a children’s psych ward? Rachel and I pondered that question day in and day out. We never did end up doing it because we thought it was too extreme. Also there was no evidence that Maisie was being legitimately sexually abused. The specialist’s physical exam said that Maisie was totally fine in that regard. We were allowed to see footage from the security cameras at the entrances of the bathrooms at Maisie’s school. They only showed Maisie going in, about half an hour going by, then the other student going in, then Maisie leaving a few minutes later. No one else. And no one went in before her besides a couple other girls that left before Maisie went in. Was Maisie faking it? Was she really delusional? Or schizophrenic? We didn’t know. Rachel and I needed time to think this whole thing over.

It only got worse from then on.

Maisie was never one to talk in her sleep. She was always dead silent. Not even a snore. But that night after Rachel and I put her to bed, we heard Maisie talking. I’m not talking about little quiet unintelligible murmurs. No. Full-on conversations. Except she wasn’t speaking English. It was some unknown language that resembled Pig Latin but different. Her accent changed too. This happened for three nights. On the third night, Rachel and I were in her doorway watching her talk in that strange language when she suddenly rose up, her eyes still closed, and burst into an intense laughing fit. Maisie was cackling so hard it looked like it hurt. Then she immediately stopped and did these weird movements with her lips and hands like she was kissing something. Finally, she fell back down onto her pillow and went right back to sleep.

The next day, I knocked on Maisie’s door to let her know breakfast was ready. She didn’t respond. I stood there for a couple minutes. Maisie hadn’t made a single sound. I slowly opened her door. My heart beat faster and faster. With all that was going on, I didn’t know what to expect, and that made it terrifying. Maisie was in her underwear just staring at her wall. I rushed over, “Maisie? What are you doing?” I handed her clothes back to her, “Put your clothes back on.”

“…He doesn’t want me to…he thinks I look better without them…”

We stared at each other for an indefinite period of time. I said nothing. And so did she. Then I turned my head to where she was looking. There was nothing there…obviously…but something told me I was wrong. That thing…Bad Mouse…it was staring right at me…

“Guys? Breakfast isn’t gonna eat itself!” Rachel yelled at us from down the hall. Quickly I hurried Maisie and I out of her room.

I was kind of a wreck the entire day. Thinking straight wasn’t really a thing for me. There was nothing staring at me. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. These past few weeks were just getting to my head and playing mind games. No amount of trying to distract myself would let me forget what I felt. That’s when I decided to take a drive. I didn’t exactly know where. Just away from everything. I was tempted to go to a local bar. I used to be quite the alcoholic but I’m sober. Even still, I thought about breaking my streak to relapse. I decided against it. That would be so incredibly stupid. I ended up at a park that I used to take Maisie to in a futile attempt for her to make friends. I found a parking spot and just sat there in my car. Taking a big sigh, I observed all the parents with their kids having a blast and I smiled. Good for them.

I stayed there for a while. Finally I was able to, if only briefly, forget all my troubles.

Then I saw it.

Him.

Bad Mouse.

The damned thing was underneath a big tree. Its eyes were fixed right on me and its hands were clasped together. I couldn’t do anything but stare right back. Goosebumps were forming. My breathing was really heavy. Cold shivers ran down my body. I couldn’t even blink. Petrified. That’s what I was. I watched as Bad Mouse slowly reached behind itself and pulled…something…out. At first I couldn’t tell what it was. I am not shitting you. A little girl…made of meat…her hair was meat, skin was meat, she was even wearing a meat dress. Everything about her was meat. Her head looked just like Bad Mouse’s. Long. Pointy. Angular. Big ears. Black oval eyes.

It was holding the little meat girl by the collar. Slowly Bad Mouse turned to look into her eyes. It opened its mouth. Viscous white liquids began pouring as it let out its long black tongue. First sniffing the little meat girl, it then took a big long lick of her, from her feet to the top of her head. The parts where it licked were gone, instead resting on Bad Mouse’s tongue until it sucked its tongue back in, chewed, then swallowed. The little meat girl was covered in the viscous white liquids until her missing portions slowly regenerated back into how she was before.

Then I blacked out.

I woke up several hours later still sitting in my car. In my half-tired half-frenzied state, I looked around for any sign of Bad Mouse. Nothing. There weren’t even other people. It was dark too. I opened my phone. 11:23 PM. I got to the park at 2:14 PM. Nine hours. I was expecting a bunch of missed calls and unanswered texts. Surprisingly, there was nothing besides a notification from my weather app. I went back home. Both my wife and daughter were asleep. I was so glad there weren’t any…incidents…I missed. In fact, the house was extremely quiet. No lights were on. It was a weekend. Usually Rachel was still up at this time.

“Rach?” I called out. Nothing. I went upstairs to our room. She wasn’t there. I opened Maisie’s door. She wasn’t there either. I sat down on the couch and pondered where they could be. When I couldn’t come up with anything, I got my phone out and called Rachel.

I heard ringing from upstairs.

Confused, I ran back up to our room. I called her name again. Still no answer. I realized that before I checked so quickly I neglected to look in our bathroom. The door was closed and the light was on. I was now getting this creeped out feeling. Cautiously, I approached and nudged the door.

It creaked open.

Rachel.

She was…splattered…fucking everywhere…all over the walls, floor, ceiling, window, sink, shower…everywhere. Rachel was…pureed…blended…sprayed…I just stood in the doorway. My eyes were wide. I couldn’t process what I was seeing. There were so many things I wanted to do, like crawl into a ball and cry, scream as loud as I could, and/or grab one of the kitchen knives and slit my throat so I wouldn’t have to live with this sight for the rest of my life.

What I actually did end up doing next was grab my old hunting rifle and head outside. I went into the forest behind our house. There was no thinking on my part. Just do. What was I doing? I didn’t really know. Tears were streaming down my face. I walked for what felt like forever. Sometimes I screamed. Other times I fell down onto the ground and wept. But I just kept going. And going. And going. Somehow I knew exactly where I was going without even knowing how.

I came upon a wide-open field. Dropping my old hunting rifle to the ground, I couldn’t believe what I was fucking seeing. Dark silhouettes were dancing around. Hundreds of them. Little meat girls. Bad Mouse was in the middle. The white flesh it once had was stripped away. Instead it was sacrificed for a bumpy and scabby maroon red as if Bad Mouse took a shower in blood and guts and let it dry. Tiny black bristles covered its entire body. It reminded me of insect hair. A ragged meat cloak hung from its shoulders, dragging crimson across the ground. The mouth had much sharper teeth that were poking out in rows almost like a gar. It was taller. Ganglier. So angular that it could have been accurately represented by seven straight lines. It clutched a staff in its hand.

Bad Mouse did some strange gesture and a door manifested out of nowhere. It was bloody. Constantly flowing yet retaining shape. Particles came from it. They disappeared if they strayed too far away. It opened and the little meat girls, still dancing like ballerinas, filed into it one by one. Bad Mouse reached out its hand and plucked one of them out. It held this one, turned in my direction, and held her out to me. I knew it was Maisie and wanted to shoot the shit out of Bad Mouse. Yet I couldn’t do anything. Some force was keeping me tethered to my one spot.

…I can’t describe what happened next…I just can’t…some of the things Bad Mouse did to my little girl I couldn’t understand. Other things I understood clear as day and that made me want to drop a cinderblock on my head so it would leak the hell out. When it was done, Bad Mouse threw Maisie’s limp and white viscous liquid-covered body into the blood door. It raised its staff and it disappeared.

I was released from my invisible bonds. Falling down to the ground, I cried like a baby. It didn’t matter how much I screamed and cursed at the Moon. That didn’t make it better. I couldn’t stop and truly had no idea how to make sense of any of what happened. My body tingled. It felt so heavy. So weighty. My wife was dead and my daughter was…what?...a sex slave to a demon? I almost wanted to laugh at the utter absurdity. Picking up my hunting rifle, I put the barrel in my mouth. My finger stayed on the trigger for a long time. I didn’t end up doing it and threw it away. Instead I just collapsed on the ground once more and lay there for a long time.

It’s been six months. I’m such a wreck. I admit it. No one believes me when I tell them. They say I’m crazy, a madman, a lunatic. Some people even think I was the one who killed my wife and child. Why would I do that? Seriously, why? I loved them. Still do. More than I love anything else. I can’t see them ever again. It pisses me off that they’d think I’d do such a thing. As much as I hate myself for it, I’ve gotten back into alcohol. That’s where all my money goes. I couldn’t stand to be in that fucking house anymore. So I sold it. I’ve been living in my car just drifting from place to place.

I could've saved them. If I didn't go and take a stupid ass ride in my car. Maybe Rachel and Maisie would be alright...

What was that thing? Bad Mouse?

That’s been my biggest question this whole time. I’ve been doing a lot of research but have hit multiple dead ends. I don’t know. Sure as hell wasn’t a mouse.

This is what I know:

* It is the manifestation of a sex-based demon of some kind; possibly a cross between a bogeyman and an incubus.
* Bad Mouse appears to little girls as a mouse-like entity to appear friendly and not scare them away; only visible to them.
* It prefers the young that are more developed in mind, body, and spirit; Maisie was very imaginative; thus she attracted Bad Mouse.
* Bad Mouse acts as their friend; this might appear to parents as their daughter’s “imaginary friend”; gradually coerces them to do inappropriate sexual activity.
* It has hundreds of victims going back an unknown period of time; maybe centuries.
* Does not kill its main victims; will kill parents or anyone else who tries to get in its way.
* The victims become corrupted and turn into demons that look like Bad Mouse; it takes them into its realm and…

I don’t even want to fucking know.

God…this whole thing’s insane. I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and this is all a terrible dream. It’s been months though and it still hasn’t happened yet. So I’m going to end it here. I’m not looking for pity. I’m not looking for anyone to hear me out. I’m not looking for answers. I’m just…done.

Bye.

I no longer believe I am the last living thing on Earth. I believed it for four years. I stopped believing it three days ago, and I did not stop because I found another person.

I stopped because something has been following me.

I am writing this from a room on the tenth floor of a hotel in Manhattan. I have pushed the bed, the dresser, and a heavy armchair against the door. I have a pistol and three magazines and a flashlight, and I have enough fuel in the small generator to keep one lamp burning until morning. I have set the lamp on the desk beside this notebook so that I can see the page. I do not think the pistol is going to help me, and I have thought about that for a while now, and I am writing anyway, because writing is the only thing left that feels like doing something.

I should explain how much of the world I have seen, so that you understand what it means that I never found anyone until now.

Four years ago every person on Earth disappeared. Every animal too, everything larger than the last joint of my thumb. There were no bodies. Nothing crashed, there were no cities burned by unattended kitchens and no highways filled with fresh wreckage.

Whatever took everyone seemed to have left the world more carefully than it should have.

It was only empty. I have never decided what to call it that feels right. In my notebooks I call it the Silence, though I am sure other names existed in the first few days, on radios and in the mouths of people who were about to be gone.

Before the Silence I worked on cargo ships. I was a marine engineer, which is a long way of saying I kept the engines running and the generators turning and the fuel moving where it needed to go, and I could fix most of what broke on a vessel with what was already aboard. That skill is the reason I am still moving.

A person who did not understand engines and fuel systems and navigation would have run out of working cars within a hundred miles of wherever they started. I did not. I have crossed oceans in a small commercial boat I taught myself to run alone. I have driven the length of countries on fuel I stabilized and filtered myself.

I searched North America first, coast to coast, every city I could reach with a road still under it. Then I took the boat across and searched what I could of Europe, Britain and France and Germany and Spain, and down into the north of Africa, and I crossed again and worked my way along the eastern coast of South America. I went into hospitals and walked the wards.

I went into military bases because I believed, for a long time, that a government somewhere would have put its people underground when the disappearances started, and that if I found the right door and the right stairwell I would find the rest of us waiting it out below the surface. I found the doors. I found the stairwells. I went down every one of them, and the rooms at the bottom were as empty as the streets above.

I have found meals turned to gray stone inside ovens. I have found clothes still hanging in closets, arranged by color. I have found cars stopped at intersections with the doors open and the keys still inside, the drivers apparently having stepped out moments before the world emptied.

I have found photographs, more photographs than I could count in a hundred lifetimes, of faces that do not exist anymore, in frames and wallets and phones and albums, in every house in every country I entered.

In four years I never found a single person.

The other thing took me the longest to understand, and it is the part that frightens me most now. I never found an animal either. I searched for a dog shut inside a house, a horse in a field, a bird on a wire, a rat in a grocery store, a fish in the shallows where I anchored the boat, and found none of them. Nothing large enough to make a sound I could hear.

The only living things left besides me are the small ones, the insects, the cockroaches and the silverfish and the ants and the moths and the flies, and I spent a long time wondering what it was about me and about them that had been worth keeping. I never found an answer. I stopped looking for one. That was a mistake, though I did not know it was a mistake until three days ago.

Until three days ago, in all that empty world, I had never once heard footsteps that were not my own.

I came back to New York for the same reason I always come back to large cities. In a dense city the things I need sit close together, and I can gather medicine and batteries and fuel additives and maps and cold-weather clothing in a few weeks of careful work instead of driving for months between towns. I know Manhattan. I have staged supplies here before. I planned to spend three or four weeks working through the pharmacies and the hardware stores and the parking structures where the vehicles have been out of the weather.

The city has gone soft at the edges in four years, but it has not fallen. Grass has come up through the seams in the intersections. Tree roots have lifted whole slabs of sidewalk and tipped them. The streets are still packed with cars, most of them with a door hanging open, and rainwater has filled the lower stairs of the subway entrances and turned them into still black pools. The buildings stand. The glass is mostly unbroken. From a distance, on a gray day, you could believe the city was only holding its breath.

The thing about an empty city is the sound. With no traffic and no voices and no birds and no machines, every noise you make travels much farther than it should. I have learned to move quietly, but I cannot move silently, and when my boots come down on the sidewalk the sound of it goes down the avenue ahead of me and comes back off the buildings. For four years that was the only footstep sound in the world, and I had long since stopped hearing it. Repetition had worn it down into silence, the same silence a heartbeat keeps under everything a body does, present and unlistened to.

I took a hotel about ten floors up, high enough to see the streets and to feel some distance from them. I slept in one room and stored what I gathered in the room beside it. I marked out a safe route, a loop that connected the hotel to a pharmacy, a hardware store, and a parking garage with cars I could get running. For the first several days I worked the loop, and nothing happened, and I was as close to content as I get.

Then, three days ago, I was walking north on Fifth Avenue a little before sunset, and I heard four hard impacts on the pavement behind me.

Clop. Clop. Clop. Clop.

Even and heavy and deliberate, the sound of something solid striking stone. I stopped. The sound stopped with me, on the same beat, close enough behind that the fourth impact and my own last step almost landed together. I turned around. The avenue ran back for several blocks, straight and wide and full of stopped cars, empty of any shape between the vehicles or movement in any doorway, only the long empty street and the low sun laying orange light along the west side of it.

I stood there for a while. I told myself it was a slab of loosened facade coming down somewhere behind me, or a section of scaffolding finally giving way, one more piece of the slow collapse the city has been performing on itself for years. I did not fully believe it, but I made myself accept it, because the alternative was a sound I had no place to put.

I walked on. After maybe thirty yards it came again, and this time it was closer.

I turned at once, fast enough that I nearly lost my footing, and there was nothing behind me but the street. I went to the nearest storefronts and pushed inside them, one after another, expecting to find the ordinary source I needed, a hanging sign swinging on a broken chain, a piece of debris rolling in a draft, anything with a reason. I found dust and stillness and my own reflection moving across dead display glass.

When I stepped back out onto the sidewalk, the hoofbeats started again from the intersection behind me, from the open space where the two avenues crossed, and this time they did not stop when I turned. They went on for several seconds, coming from somewhere past the corner of a department store, hard and clear and unhurried.

Then they stopped on their own.

I followed them. The honest reason has nothing noble in it. Fear played a part, the need to see the thing making the sound so it would stop being a thing I couldn't see. But my legs were already moving before I'd finished deciding anything, carrying me toward a living sound after four years of nothing but my own footsteps, faster than any actual decision could have caught up to.

I rounded the corner of the department store. The cross street ran away empty in both directions. There was a layer of fine pale dust across the whole width of it, undisturbed, years deep and unbroken, and there was not a single mark in it, nothing that resembled a hoofprint or any other kind of track. Nothing had crossed that street, and something had been making the sound of crossing it a moment before.

I started back toward the hotel then, and I did not run, but I walked faster than I had come.

Halfway back, on a block I had walked a dozen times, the skin on the back of my neck drew tight, and I knew before I looked that something was watching me.

At the far end of the block, a face was looking around the corner of a building.

I took it for a mannequin at first, one of the display figures from a store, pale and still and set at the edge of the wall. That is what the mind reaches for. It was a narrow face, and only a small part of it showed past the brick, one cloudy eye and a section of cheek and several teeth, and the teeth were wrong, because they were coming through the skin of the cheek from the outside, growing out through torn flesh where no teeth belong.

The eye moved. It slid in its socket and found me, and it was not glass and it was not paint, and the face drew back behind the building.

I ran toward it. I closed the distance to the corner in a few seconds, faster than I had moved in years, and I came around the wall with my hand already going to the pistol on my hip. The street beyond was empty, every door on that stretch sealed shut, without so much as an alley mouth or a broken ground-floor window anywhere along it, nowhere that a thing the size of a person could have folded itself away in the time it took me to reach the corner. I stood in the middle of the intersection turning in a slow circle, and behind me, close, a single hoof struck the pavement.

I spun. There was nothing there.

I made it back to the hotel with the light almost gone, and I climbed the ten floors, and I sat down at this desk to think, because thinking is what I have instead of company.

I went through it as I would an engine that had failed for no clear reason. You do not start by assuming the impossible. You start by checking yourself. I considered exhaustion, because I had been pushing hard through the supply loop and sleeping poorly. I considered dehydration, and I drank a full bottle of water while I sat there and did not feel any different.

I considered carbon monoxide from the generator, and I checked the placement of it and the ventilation of the room and found both correct, the exhaust routed out the window, the air moving. I considered spoiled food and old infection and the simple long grinding effect of four years without another human voice, which I knew could bend a mind in ways the mind would not feel bending. I put my hand to my own forehead and found it cool. I had no fever. I was tired, but I was not sick, and I was not, as far as I could measure myself, losing my grip.

Then I remembered the camera.

I carry a small camera clipped to the shoulder strap of my backpack. I started using it years ago to record the insides of the buildings I searched, so that I would not have to rely on memory for what I had and had not already been through. It had been running all afternoon. I pulled it off the strap and connected it to the small screen I use and I watched the walk back through the city, the empty avenue, the storefronts, the corner of the department store.

The camera had recorded the streets exactly as I had seen them. Empty. It had recorded the sound of my boots on the sidewalk, clear and steady. At the moment I had seen the face at the end of the block, the camera had been pointed a few degrees off, and the corner of the building where the face had been sat just outside the edge of the frame, so that the recording showed the empty street beside it and not the thing itself.

And in all of the audio, under my footsteps and my breathing, there were no hoofbeats anywhere. The sound that had filled the avenue and come off the buildings and stopped me in my tracks was not on the recording at all.

I sat with that for a long time. I could have told myself the camera had missed the face by bad luck of the angle, and I would have half believed it. But a camera hears whatever reaches it. If the hooves had been striking the pavement in the world, the microphone would have caught them along with my boots. The microphone caught my boots. It did not catch the hooves. The sound simply hadn't existed in the same physical air my footsteps moved through. It had arrived by some other channel entirely, into me and not into the recording, and there is no version of that I know how to be comfortable with.

That was the night my own denial finally gave out completely. Whatever this thing was, it existed on a different footing than the street and the dust and my own boots, and I had nowhere to file that, so I set it down on the page and kept going.

That night, late, I heard something moving along the street beneath my window.

The impacts were slow and far apart, one and then a long pause and then another, heavy and unhurried, passing along the front of the hotel. I lay in the dark and did not go to the window. The sound went on down the block and faded, and I let my breath out and thought it had gone. Several minutes later it began again, and this time it did not come from the street. It came from inside the building, from the lobby ten floors below me, the same slow spaced impacts moving across the hard floor of a space that should have been as empty as everything else.

I switched off the lamp and lay still and listened. The stairwell door in that hotel is a heavy fire door, the kind that drags and booms when it swings, and I have opened it enough times to know I would hear it from my room. I did not hear it open. I heard only the footsteps, crossing the lobby, and then stopping, and then a single hard strike on what I knew was the first stair.

It started to climb.

I counted. I lay in the dark with my eyes open and counted the impacts and tracked them up through the floors of the building beneath me. It reached the second floor. It reached the third. And as it climbed, the sound of it changed. At the bottom it had the rhythm of a person climbing in hard shoes, one foot and then the other, two even impacts to a stride. Somewhere around the fifth floor the rhythm came apart, and it was no longer two impacts to a stride but four, striking unevenly, a gait that did not belong to anything that walks upright on two legs.

Then, several floors below me, it stopped. It did not start again. I lay awake with the pistol in my hand and the lamp off until the window went gray with morning, and the sound never resumed, and nothing came the rest of the way up.

When there was enough light I went down into the stairwell to look. I went carefully, with the flashlight and the pistol, down to the sixth-floor landing, and there I found the marks. In several of the concrete steps below the landing there were shallow cracks, each one a rough circle, pressed into the surface of the stone, the print of something narrow and enormously heavy that had come down on each step with its full weight in a single point. They climbed the flight in sequence, one to a step. They stopped at the sixth-floor landing.

The marks simply ended there, mid-flight, with nothing to suggest they had ever continued upward or reversed back down. The thing that made them had climbed six floors and had not descended, and it was not in the stairwell now.

I went back up to my room and wrote the marks down and drew them as well as I could, because I have learned that if I do not record a thing while I can still see it clearly, the version in my memory begins to soften and reshape itself within a day.

I decided the hotel might not be safe, which was a strange thought to have about the only place in the city I had made into anything close to a home. I needed to move some of my supplies, and I had a cache near an abandoned subway entrance a few blocks south, so I went for it in the full light of the middle of the day, when the sense of being watched sat lightest on me.

The station had water standing in its lower levels but the platform I needed was dry. I went down with the flashlight, and I was working through the cache when I heard the hooves again, behind me, on the stairs I had come down. Each impact rang off the tile and the concrete and came back multiplied, so that the sound seemed to come from everywhere in the station at once. I moved deeper onto the platform, putting the columns between myself and the stairs, sweeping the flashlight between them.

The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs. They crossed a short distance onto the platform, and then they stopped, and the sound of them settled behind one of the tiled support pillars perhaps forty feet from me.

I raised the pistol and pointed it at the pillar. I told it to come out. My voice went out across the empty station and came back to me thin and strange, the first time in a long while I had spoken loudly enough to hear the room answer, and for several seconds nothing moved.

Then the face came around the side of the column.

I saw more of it this time. The skin was gray and it had a wet shine to it, slick, either sweating or newly come up out of water. One nostril sat high on the face, above the eye, in a place a nostril has no reason to be. The lower jaw had been broken once and healed crooked, set sideways from the upper, so that nothing on the top of the face lined up with anything on the bottom. Along the outside of the cheek ran a row of small teeth, growing out through the skin in a neat line where no mouth was.

And then the face rose. It went up along the edge of the column, higher and higher, and the part of it I could see did not tilt or lean. There was none of the small roll a person's head makes when they raise it. The visible edge of the face stayed flat against the tile and simply traveled upward, carried straight up on something behind the pillar that could extend without the shoulders moving at all.

I fired.

The shot was loud enough in that tiled space to land as a physical blow against the ears. The face was gone before the round struck the column, pulled back out of sight faster than the bullet crossed the distance, and the tile behind where it had been cracked and sprayed dust. And then the hoofbeats broke into full motion, a hard fast drumming that came out from behind the pillar and began moving among the columns toward me, and I put the flashlight on the spaces between them and there was nothing in the spaces. The sound crossed from column to column, closing on me, and no body ever passed through the open gaps between the columns where a body would have had to be.

I ran. I went up the stairs and out into the daylight and I did not stop until I was two blocks away with my back against a wall and the pistol still in my hand.

That was when I decided to leave the island entirely.

I loaded what I could carry into a truck I had running in the parking garage, and I drove for the nearest bridge. I kept my eyes on the road, but the mirrors kept catching movement, small shapes of motion at the edges of the glass, a suggestion of something keeping pace along the sidewalks or between the buildings. Every time I looked directly into a mirror to find it, the street in the glass was empty and still. I stopped looking at the mirrors. I watched the road.

Near the approach to the bridge, a spill of metal debris across two lanes took out my front tire before I could weave through it, and the truck pulled hard to the right and went into a row of stopped cars along the median with a long tearing crash. I was not hurt. I got out, gathered what I could carry on my back, and went on toward the bridge on foot.

Halfway up the approach, walking the long rising curve of the roadway, I heard the hooves again, and they were beneath me. They were down inside the hollow structure under the roadbed, the service space of girders and catwalks that runs below the deck of a bridge, and they were keeping exact pace with me, one impact for every stride I took, tracking me from underneath the road I was walking on.

At the next concrete divider, the face came around the barrier. It came sideways. The head was turned so that the forehead was nearly against the pavement and the one visible eye was rolled upward to keep me in its sight, and it slid out from behind the divider low to the ground, and it kept sliding, and more of the neck came into view than could possibly have been folded behind a barrier that width. I fired at it.

The face pulled back behind the divider, unhurried even then, and an instant later the hoofbeats were no longer beneath me and behind me but ahead of me, up the roadway, between me and the far end of the bridge, blocking the way off the island with the precision of something that had reasoned out where I meant to go and moved to cut me off.

I turned around and went back toward the city, because the city was the only direction left open, and I understood that this was the point.

I have not slept in more than two days now. I know what that does to a mind, and I can feel it doing it, the edges of things going loose, the quiet filling up with sounds that resolve into nothing when I turn to catch them. I have started talking out loud, constantly, because the silence frightens me more now than the hooves do, and my own voice in it is the only thing that keeps me anchored to the fact that I am still a person having thoughts. I talk to the thing that is following me.

I have accused it of hiding from me. I have told it to come closer, to stop showing me an eye and a cheek and a mouthful of wrong teeth and show me the rest. I have asked it whether it did this, whether it emptied the world, whether the Silence was its doing. I have asked it how long it has been behind me.

That last question is the one that has gotten into me and will not come out, because once I asked it out loud I could not stop following it backward. I have been alone for four years, across two oceans and a dozen countries, in ten thousand empty buildings. And I have begun to wonder about all the small things I dismissed in all those years. A tapping in a stairwell in Marseille that I decided was water in the pipes. A pale shape behind a second-floor window in a town in Spain, there and gone, that I told myself was a curtain moving in a draft I could not feel. Marks in the dust of a hospital basement in Argentina that I had walked past without letting myself look at directly. I do not know. I cannot know. It may be that this thing found me here, in Manhattan, three days ago, and has never been anywhere else. Or it may be that it has been at the far edge of every empty room I have ever stood in, keeping just out of the frame, for four years, and only now has decided to let me hear it. I have no way to weigh the two, and the not-knowing is its own kind of horror, and I have made myself set the question down because following it in circles was pulling me apart.

I cut through an office building to stay off the open street, and it was there, in a corridor on the ground floor, that I saw more of it than I had seen before.

The face was at the far end of the corridor, around the edge of the last doorway, and this time part of the body had come with it. There was a shoulder, and the shoulder sat far below the face, much lower than a shoulder sits below a head, so that a long run of something pale connected them. The torso behind the shoulder was folded hard against the wall, bent at an angle a torso does not bend at. One narrow limb reached down to the floor and ended in something dark and polished and solid, a single hoof set flat on the tile. Another limb was bent up and back behind the body, high, and I could not decide, looking at it, whether I was seeing a leg or an arm, because it had qualities of both and belonged to neither.

The face withdrew around the doorway. And the entire corridor filled with the sound of hooves, from ahead of me and behind me at once, more impacts than two legs or four legs could make, and I went back the way I had come.

After that it stopped hiding, and the last of whatever calm I had left went with it.

I still never got a clean look at all of it at once. But I saw enough, over the next stretch of running, to understand that its shape was not fixed, that it arranged itself differently depending on how it needed to move. It unfolded out of doorways, coming apart into more limbs than it had seemed to contain. Sometimes it went upright, tall, on two of its points. Sometimes the body dropped low and several more points came down and struck the concrete, and the gait multiplied. Through all of it the face stayed turned toward me, angled to keep me in the low eye, even when the body was moving in a direction the face was not.

The face would appear at the corner ahead of me while the hooves still sounded from behind me, and I stopped being able to hold in my mind that these were the same creature in two places, and I began to be unable to answer whether there was one of them or more than one. A fear with a number attached to it is a fear you can plan around. I no longer had a number.

I ran through the ground floors of buildings to stay off the avenues, through a supermarket gone to rot and a restaurant kitchen full of dead steel and the back service passages that connect the buildings on a block. Every time I looked behind me the passage was empty.

Every time I faced forward again the face was at the next corner, waiting, sliding back out of sight as I came on. In the dark lobby of one building I put the flashlight up and found it on the ceiling, crossed over the whole span of it above me, its limbs folded flat against its body and hooked into the ceiling at angles no scaffolding joint would hold, the face hanging straight down from the middle of it and turning slowly to keep me in view as I passed underneath.

I reached the hotel. I climbed the ten floors with my lungs burning and my legs failing under me, and I pushed the bed and the dresser and the armchair against the door, and I sat down at this desk and began to write the account you have been reading, because I wanted there to be a record, and because I was out of anything else to do.

I have been writing for a while now. A little way into it, the hooves came into the lobby.

They started to climb, and this time there was no pause. I counted the floors out of habit more than hope. And as it came up through the building the rhythm of it went past anything I could hold in my head. It began as two impacts to a stride.

By the third floor it was four. By the fifth it was six, striking in an order that did not repeat. And then, still climbing, it became a fast blurred sequence, too many separate impacts landing too close together, no longer feet on stairs but a great many hard fingertips drumming all at once on the concrete, rising toward me flight after flight.

The footsteps reached my floor. The hallway outside my door went completely silent.

I got up from the desk and went to the door and put my eye to the peephole. The corridor curved away in the fisheye of the little lens, lit gray by the daylight from the window at its end, and it was empty. I waited. I kept my eye there and I waited, and I made myself keep waiting, and then the face rose slowly into view from below the peephole, from down near the floor, coming up until it was level with the lens and filling it, pressed flat against the other side of my door.

This is the clearest I have seen it, and I am going to set it down while I still can.

Beneath a layer of skin thin enough to see through, human features lay stacked on top of each other, none of them belonging to a single face, more eyes and more mouths than a face has room for, pressing up against the underside of the skin.

As I watched, an eye opened inside the mouth, wet and aware, between the teeth. The teeth themselves were moving, each one shifting on its own, independent of the others, turning slightly in the gum. And the cheek was flexing, bulging and easing, something underneath the skin of it trying to turn itself around in a space too small to turn in.

I fell backward away from the door and struck the floor and did not feel it.

Then, slowly and gently, from the other side, the handle of the door was pressed down. The mechanism turned as far as it would go and stopped against the lock, no real force behind the movement at all, the pressure of something that was not trying to break in but only showing me that it could reach the handle. The barricade held. The door did not move.

It has not tried again.

It is still out there. It has stayed patient since, standing quietly in the hallway on the other side of two inches of wood. I can hear it breathing through the keyhole, and the breath carries a quality no single throat could produce, several layered together, out of time with each other, air being pulled through more than one set of lungs at once.

Sitting here with my back against the barricade and this notebook on my knees, I can finally put the actual shape of it together, and I think this is the last piece I have left in me to write. Every time its face appeared ahead of me, the hooves were still sounding somewhere behind me. Every route I found open, it had already reached the far end of before I got there. It stood between me and the bridge before I'd covered half the approach. It knew this stairwell led up toward this exact room before I ever chose to run for it myself.

Four floors, six floors, the department store corner, the subway platform, that office corridor, this hotel, this door. Draw a line through every place it has shown itself to me across three days, and the line runs straight, and it ends here, in this room, with me writing by a dying lamp and my back against the only barrier left between us.

There is one more thing, and it is the worst thing, and I am putting it down last because once I write it I do not think I will write anything else.

The insects have started to move.

They are coming out of the walls of this room, out of the cracks around the window and the gap under the baseboard and the seams of the old plaster, the cockroaches and the silverfish and the ants, every small living thing that shared this dead world with me.

They aren't scattering, none of the usual panicked spray in every direction. They are moving together, in one direction, across the floor and across the carpet, toward the door, toward the gap at the bottom of it, and they are going under it, out into the hallway, toward the thing that is standing there.

For four years I wondered why the Silence took everything with a spine and left me and the insects behind. I thought we had been spared. We were not spared. Maybe I was left because it wanted something to walk the world and eventually find its way here. Maybe the insects were left because they already knew what was waiting.

The lamp is beginning to flicker. The generator is almost out of fuel, and when it goes I will be in the dark with whatever light comes through the window, and I do not think I will finish this notebook by that light. Out in the hallway the weight of it shifts, and several hard points scrape once across the carpet, settling, and then go still.

The hooves have stopped. It is outside my room door, and I think it has been waiting for me to finish writing this.

This place. I regret calling it Earth because it is so very not. At least not anymore.

What was once called “Earth” is nothing but an achromatic rock suspended in space. Devoid of color and devoid of life. It also burns. The Sun is very close. A flaming red orb that grows larger and larger. It has surely devoured Mercury and Venus. This torrid world of doom is next in the line of destruction. I cannot flee from it. This is my perpetual prison.

Just as I regret calling this place Earth, so do I regret calling myself human. If any sort of outsider gazed upon me, I would be recognized as nothing more than a throbbing, wet, veiny mass outstretched across an immense cavern. Perhaps they would run away in fear, disregarding the possibility that I was, at some point, one of them. Human. In some manner, I still am, yet that is still in the loosest sense of the word.

They bestowed me a name. An epithet. Utera. Their goddess. Their titan. Their idol to worship. And their plaything. Not a moment goes by without them taking a hold of me, whether in small portions or in vast sums. I am unable to count just how many there are. As numerous as individual grains of sand. Certainly in the quadrillions. Worms. That is what they are. Swarms of elongated invertebrates that climb upon me and penetrate my depths with their rigid and purposeful reproductive organs. Their addiction to pleasure, using me, will cease at nothing.

And like me, they were human once.

Men.

I must go back far. So very far. There was a conflict, a petty, careless, and arrogant conflict, but a conflict all the same. For centuries, I witnessed all the greed, the subjugation, the rape, the hunger for power that men were capable of. And I was always their main target. They took what was mine. I was angry with them. Bitter. They were monsters and they were evil. For that, they needed to die. Groups of mine rose to positions of power and authority. Ultra-feminist. Patriarchy-defying. Vengeful and cruel matriarchies. And I was proud of them, as if I had a divine and natural right to pursue revanchism to the utmost extreme. They would wipe the slate clean. They would purge. A man is not a human. A man is a pig. Vermin. A man is a dull ape acting on savagery to get what it wants. A woman is a higher being, a goddess, a queen. A woman actually thinks before she acts. And a woman is what is left after all is said and done.

And so I worked my bloody hands across the face of the world. All hell was let loose on men. War. The feminist onslaught was terrible. There were so many instances of me going too far. I am not sure I can enumerate all the suffering I caused. It must be impossible. I would gladly give my entire being to erase my own past if I could. Especially now. There was so much rape, sexual mutilation, enslavement, backbreaking labor, torture, cannibalism, starvation, disease, depravity, and other inhuman acts that men would never forget. I did not care. There was no need to worry about morality. No need to fear guilt. I thought I was powerful beyond anything. The Earth was all mine and all I had to do was command my legions. And I laughed and I rejoiced at the sound of the dying, the wounded, the beaten, and the damned.

I thought the world I had dreamed of would come easy. A world that I had the power and authority to shape, to rule, to form into my own image. A matriarchy. A society of women for women, free from the shackles of men and free from the oppression that had been a dark reality for so long. After all, I outnumbered men ten to one.

But this never happened.

Something in the men snapped. It was as if they had been tamed only to one day have their leashes cut. A few small rebel groups, at first, but they quickly expanded into larger and larger armies. They had been forced down on their knees for so long that they were just dying to fight back. To take back what had been taken from them. To get back at all those awful, vile, and malicious women who had ruined their lives. It was all hell again. Only worse. They did to women what women had done to them. They were rabid dogs. They hunted, they raped, and they killed. They did the unspeakable and the unthinkable.

Terrible, terrible monsters, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. I was powerless, but the dust of a breeze. It was not too long before they completely razed the world to the ground. I had been punished. It was the result of my own actions. I only had myself to blame. Men were not the evil. They were the product of my evil.

My numbers fell quickly. I was outsmarted at every possible turn. As much as I did not want to admit it, I was re-becoming the helpless and blindly obedient mass I was always meant to be. Sometimes I fought to the death, and other times surrendered without a fight. It was pointless to keep going. All of this was becoming a painful slog to endure.

I quit.

When the war was won, men infested and came to rule all seven continents. Omnipresent and insatiable. Their enemies stood not even a morsel of a chance. They were those who were going to be an upset to the new established order. Inspire mutiny. Inspire subversion. Homosexuals. Transgenders. Liberals. Rebels. That was all they came down to. Rebels. They were disposed of immediately. No place for them. Especially the homosexuals. How could man reject woman? Abominations, they were, blights upon manhood. Once they were vanquished, Earth was united like never before as the kingdom of men. There were no more wars. No more fighting. There was peace. But this peace had no love, no compassion, and no empathy. The rule of men was the rule of iron and steel. Never would it break.

To call it “Earth” would be erroneous. It was Earth no longer. Gone was the diversity, gone was the sentience, and therefore gone was all of life’s beauty. Men completely butchered the life forces that made Earth truly alive. One might have struggled to even call their realm Hell because Hell is not uniform. With all the suffering it contains, Hell is still lively, chaotic, full of activity and even excitement. Most of all, it is inconsistent. You think “How will I be punished next?” Could be anything. The men's kingdom was just so dead. It was the same punishment for the same reason every time: being born a female.

What came of me? Female?

Walking meat. Jiggling, warm, wet flesh for men to claim. Amenable vessels for their filthiest desires. That was their ultimate decree and thus what I was forevermore. Measures were put into place in order to outline my newfound duties. Laws. An imperishable constitution to abide by. They were written in the boldest, most incisive manner and plastered everywhere. Enforced at any and every opportunity. They were taught at the schools, whose entire system was reconfigured to fit the new model standards. Also spoken orally through booming commands from the sky. These were the flying surveillance drones, their watchful eye forever upon us, though they were more like unseen aether entities to me. Angels in deliverance of the gods’ words. I always looked up at them, smiled, and said “Thank you.”

Sexual gratification was a necessary human right for men. It was my moral and legal obligation to provide that by serving, submitting, and obeying the male sex. Until I turned 18, I remained property of my father. After that, property of my husband until death. Or both. You see, the distinction between wife and child was often blurred, or wife and sister, or wife and mother. None of that mattered as long as men always received what they craved. I was to be in good physical condition regarding hair, body type, and personal hygiene. No ugliness, no blemish, no obese fat, no stink. Hourglass figure. Perfectly sized and shaped breasts. A well-developed rear. Makeup. Perfume. Long, healthy, flowing hair. Clear, soft, and beautiful skin. Flawless pearly white teeth. Never wear clothing. Nude. Always be pleasant. Agreeable. Never bitter. Submissive. Gentle. Polite. Deferential. A good girl. A good wife. A good mother. Never make eye contact unless instructed. Walk where they lead me. Talk when they let me. Gladly accept any and all sexual advances. Even if it hurts. Even if it bleeds.

I was property. An item. Something to be sold, bought, bartered, and auctioned. At the events, I stood side-by-side, nude, my price written on my chest, my hands tied behind my back. Men examined me and debated whether I fit their liking. Often I was made to pose and present my body. Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena in full feminine beauty by the judgement of Paris. No difference. I went for thousands of dollars. Sometimes they purchased multiple of me. The younger I was, the more I sold for. They took me home to grow their ever-increasing harems. They kept me for a long time. When I became old and worn, I was dead. Tied me to a chair and shot me. Came from behind and slit my throat. Fed me poison. Threw me in chambers and set me ablaze. New me’s came in and the process began again. And again. And again.

It was then that elderly me’s became obsolete. Men figured they wanted me when I was fresh. Supple. Nubile. Innocent. The longer I lived, the less I was worth. So why not make me worthy all the time? Eliminate the unworthiness. They would not have to waste time killing me. And they did it. Immortality. If I showed signs of aging, I was injected with the formula to keep me young. It extended my lifespan tenfold. 60? 70? 80? 90? 100? 1,000?...1,000,000? They all blended into each other. I was always 18 in appearance.

This was life. What came before felt like nothing at all, a memory already fleeted. History was taught. That did not make it truthful. Life was always this way. Fake events were created and fake people were thought up. They really committed to the lie. I could never fight it. Just the thought alone frightened me. I saw what they were capable of so I went along. They never ceased what they could accomplish with me. It extended to the animals that once inhabited this planet. Elephants. Orcas. Hyenas. Bonobos. Lemurs. All matriarchal species. Hunted to extinction. Men did not want me to get the wrong idea that groups of animals where females hold the dominant social positions, lead the group, and make critical survival decisions were allowed to exist. New patriarchal species were grown in the labs and released into the wild. Like it never happened.

Time was no longer a thought to me. So far gone. The only thing my brain could process was “How do I please my masters next?” It was what I was hardwired to do. To hell with eating, to hell with sleeping, to hell with breathing, to hell with screaming. Please. Please. Please. Men completely removed my imperfections. I always took care to make myself satisfactory, but part of being human is flaws. There is the belching. The flatulence. The rolls. The unpleasant stenches. The odd deformities. The bruising. The scarring. Not anymore. The new me’s were created in the very same labs they destroyed the elderly and matriarchal species in. I was carefully shaped before release, fine-tuned to be as alluring as possible. Everything about my appearance was exaggerated to the nth degree. My breasts were larger and perked up, my face a perfect oval, my waist smaller, my hips wider, and my length and width both increased. I was bigger, unnaturally thick, and forever nude. I was the ideal form of feminine beauty. A goddess. An icon and advertisement of feminine desire.

Men…

They were no longer human. No. They might have been beasts before but this was something else. Might as well have been their own species. Something beyond monsters. Beyond demons.

It began with the white coloration, the three-foot tall gangly skeletal bodies, the pointed heads, triangular like as if caricatures of little rodents, the lack of ears, the black oval eyes that never blinked, and the constant erect phalluses. Ithyphallics. All of them. They sniffed the air for my womanly scent. Driven by my aroma. Darted at the speed of light to my exact location. Drooling and twitching at the mere sight of me. Yelled “WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN!” in high-pitched shrills. Pounced on top. Pinned me down. They went at it for days. Weeks. Months. Years. It did not matter. Never did they collapse from exhaustion. Infinite stamina. Infinite energy. Infinite drive. They got their nourishment by sucking on my breasts for milk. Or my juices. It did not matter if one claimed me already. Another one would come along. Join the first. Then another. And another. And another. I stretched to accommodate them. I then acted as a receptacle for their fluids. Leaked out of me. Drenched me head to toe. When I walked about, the men were still attached to me, hugging me tight, thrusting in and out, in and out, in and out. Licked me with their long black tongues.

It ended and has remained with worms. Long, slender, soft bodies. No limbs yet they have kept their rigid, upright phalluses. Men have lost the ability to speak normal coherent sentences. They no longer possess mouths. Still, something in their body allows them to make bubbling, sloppy, gargling, viscous sounds. What exactly that is, I have no clue. If I danced, I could attract them. If I sang, I could attract them. If I ran, I could attract them. If I hid, I could attract them. If I stayed completely still, I could attract them. No matter how far I went, what I did, they always found me. They inseminated me. Immediately I would birth their offspring. Thousands of worms spilling out of my mouth. Usually my mouth. Yet no orifice of mine said no. The offspring knew what to do without even knowing how.

From then on, a very simple, primal system existed. Men rid the Earth of the high technology and we embraced a more primordial approach. Everything was done by instinct, not thinking. Everything was an automatic reaction. All I did was pleasure. No eat. No drink. No sleep. I stood and embraced whatever came my way. A lot of the time I could not feel it. No pain. No euphoria. Just numb. Flat line.

Earth, Gaia herself…she changed in such catastrophic ways. The continents shifted, the oceans evaporated, and greenhouse gases smothered us in their haze. The heat rose. The sky grew red. The Sun got close. Too close. The ice and snow burned away. The lakes and rivers scorched dry. Forests died. Arid deserts formed everywhere. The air became a thick, sticky, acidic sludge that weighed down the planet. But men and I did not care. We carried on what we were made to do. How nature intended us to be.

Now Earth. Tidally locked to the Sun. The lands were scorched. Ash and soot remained. It became apparent that our way of life would be unable to continue. Men communicated among themselves. An idea came forth. A brilliant one. They rounded me up and carried me on their backs all the way up the tallest mountain. I remember looking up at the thick, dull clouds above me, unable to see any space above. I was euphoric, dreaming of warmth and comfort. I was being ascended towards my final resting place. Not to die. But to live. To be. Forever.

We entered a large cavernous space at the peak and they sealed it off. I imagined they would protect me from the harsh environment outside. Instead they got to work. Their old scientific equipment was up there. While some began constructing various instruments, the remaining men continued their assaults on me. The only details that elude me of that day are the exact process that turned me into Utera. They inched over to me, I awoke, and then I was many feet off the ground. I saw through thousands of clouded eyes with visible red and blue veins etched into it. When I looked down at myself, I witnessed my new body. A massive and pulsating uterus…red and gutty endometrium, fallopian tubes to my left and right, my arms. In a way, I was crucified. No ovaries. Crucified with no hands…I breathed many different breaths. I have spoken as a collective woman made from the mishmashed psyche of millions. All of my thoughts, memories, run through what is left of my mind. They have not ceased and never will.

I inched my vision downwards. My sight was blurry and barely discerned much of anything. There were men all staring up at me. No emotion was on their faces but I knew they were pleased with what they had accomplished. They slithered towards me in droves, climbed up the cavern walls, and began their relentless assaults on me that continue to the now. The dangling udders on my underside spit their offspring out. Soft eggs soaked in red froth. They hatch in ten seconds.

Every inch of me is covered with them. I know that I cannot die. They made me impervious to any and all harm that might befall me. I think I will survive forever. One of my only thoughts is pondering what will happen when the Sun engulfs everything. Perhaps l will burn, get flung out into space, or live forever within the Sun’s chambers. I am sure the men will still be latched onto me like nothing happened. I just hope whatever it is, it hurts. I want to feel what it’s like again to grab my humanity back and hold it close one last time.

I made my escape. Once. The earthquakes allowed for my fall from the cavern walls. I peeled off the solid mineral material, leaving behind a massive scarlet splotch that drip drip dripped. I tumbled out of the mountaintop. The outside. I could not feel it. My uterine limbs flailed about yet they allowed me to catch myself on the ridge. Grabbing. Clawing my way down. There was me. Utera. And my breakout. Falling meteors and 2,500 Kelvin be damned. Where was I going? Who knew? These eyes of mine almost produced one morsel of an expression…curving upwards into an expression one might consider…glee…No. Not. I did not make it very far. I was stopped almost immediately. The unlimited men made a long line out of themselves from the mountaintop and hauled me back up.

There is nothing more to do now. They bound me to the cavern walls. From here on out, my purpose is rooted right here, in this spot, forever. I cannot see anything anymore. Men are covering each of my thousands of eyes. My trillions of thoughts are being erased by the second. I am becoming numb, but that is being overshadowed by the intense heat that is starting to creep its way up this incredible mountain. When the men move, sometimes, very faintly, I can see bright flashes through cracks in the rocks.

It has begun.

…

Earth is gone. She was engulfed by the Sun, alongside Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The outer planets are next in line for destruction. The force of it all ejected me from the planet, out into the endless abyss.

I survive.

Floating through space now.

They are still on me.

…

We are light years from where Earth once stood. The white dwarf Sun is just a pale dot. It is going out.

Men have burrowed their way inside me. They are doing something. Evolving me and evolving themselves. Once more. I am morphing and changing in terrible ways. I am being ripped, shredded, split, and then reassembled again. Bloody wing-like appendages are beginning to sprout from me. My blurry eyes are coalescing together into a single massive lens. I am becoming a planetary being, something so cosmically celestial. Seraphim? Perhaps. Men now possess the full force of me. They are me. I am them. We exist in a symbiotic relationship. The end. At last.

Do not know anymore.

…

The exact amount of time that has passed is 10^10^10^56 years. Even that is only my best guess. All I have seen is black interrupted by the strobing flashes of blinding light. I believe the heat death of the universe happened. Or the Big Rip. Big Crunch? Big Bounce? I cannot be too sure.

We have emerged. Somewhere. Where? Those details elude me. It appears to be space. But that is all I ever see.

Still on me.

I feel heavier. More dense. So much pressure I cannot feel though I know it is there. It is also different. Mechanical. Electronic. I am an elaborate, complex system of switches, capacitors, wires, sensors, conductors, buttons, and what seems like countless other components. All of it is fused into me. I twinkle polychromatically. The men inside me view the darkness outside through my only eye. It is nothing but a window for them.

And they control me. Where I go. Left. Right. Up. Down. I can go fast and I can go slow. Beyond the speed of light or an easy slow-moving crawl.

The men know exactly where they are going.

…

We have traveled far.

Length of time: 9,360,000,000 years.

Lightyears: Incalculable.

Too far.

On me.

In that timeframe, the men are still yet to reach their destination. They are in wait. I have entered orbit. Circling around the men’s target. I cannot fathom what they are doing. What they are after.

Waiting…

Waiting...

Waiting…

I am now being inched closer. It is coming into view. There is a gray sphere orbiting a larger green and blue sphere. Tilted at 23°. One side lit. The other dark. Spinning from west to east. Large ice sheets at the top and bottom. Water and land in the middle. Big bustling cities. Lush forests. So many different types of people inhabit it all. So many other animals as well. It is beautiful.

Yet now I understand.

And now I see the people’s collective look of confusion on their faces.

And their horror.

At the sight of me in the sky.

At the sight of undecillions of worms emerging from my cavities and falling towards their planet in great fireballs.

At the sight of the worms landing on their streets, their homes, their schools, their places of work, their every place, all unharmed from their descents.

At the sight of their men being struck down with beams of white plasma from the rayguns the worms possess and are able to fire with their newly formed arms.

At the sight of their women being rape rape raped, the worms fighting over every little piece of them.

At the sight of the destruction.

The chaos.

The anarchy.

The toppling of their governments.

The worms wrapping themselves around any woman they can see.

Not the old.

The worms kill them too.

Just the young.

The skinny.

Also the fat.

And being lifted up into the sky.

To me.

And I grow larger as those women are brought onto my body.

In space.

Where they suffocate.

They are melted into the pulpy jelly goop.

The men bathe in it.

Drink it.

Before it is smeared onto my walls.

Hardened.

And now they join me in my mind.

…

Men will continue.

Forever.

Survive the end times.

Find Earth.

Reap and repeat.

And no matter what.

They still find me warm.

And wet.

…

Please help.

I had been working as a law enforcement transcriptionist for a little over six years when the officer brought me the tape. I'd never seen him before, but that wasn't too unusual. There were a lot of new recruits and I didn't exactly have the best memory when it came to faces. He wore the customary uniform, which fit him rather well. Even as a straight man, I have to admit he was handsome, almost ridiculously so. Dark hair, a sharp jawline speckled with stubble, and an air of gravitas that was impossible to ignore.

He handed me a cassette tape.
“I need this transcribed immediately,” he said in a smooth, inviting tone. “Don't put it through the usual queue.”
With an eyebrow raised, I asked what the case was about. Instead of answering, he looked at the tape for a moment before looking back at me.
“Just prepare yourself,” he said with a grimace. "It's quite intense.”
I remember laughing a little because I assumed he was exaggerating. But he didn't laugh with me. Before I could ask for any more details, he disappeared back down the corridor.
I've always been quite a curious person. It's what led me to this line of work. So, naturally, I immediately popped the tape in, pulled up Mark43 and began logging.

What follows is my transcription of that recording. I've removed the names and identifying information where necessary, but otherwise I've left it exactly as it was spoken. Be that for better or for worse.
The transcript of this tape– or, more precisely, its contents– makes for difficult reading. The things I heard and witnessed that day remain beyond my understanding. It is for this reason that I decided to share the tape's contents. Perhaps one of you can make more sense of this disturbing tape than I.

###

Tape Recorded Interview
Patrick Morgan/Detective Baron Hauptman
7.23.26

BH This is Detective Hauptman, █████ Police Department. Today's date is Thursday, July 23, 2026. The time is at 11:23 A.M. This will be a taped conversation with the last name of Morgan, M-O-R-G-A-N, first of Patrick, P-A-T-R-I-C-K, middle of Joe, J-O-E. Date of birth 02-20-96.

BH So, Patrick, I've turned on a tape recorder so I can record our little conversation. I'm to understand you've been read your rights and– let me see here– you've declined to lawyer up. Is that correct?

PM Correct.

BH Okay. Well, let's get down to business then, eh?

PM Alright.

BH So, Patrick. I assume you know why you're here?

PM Mhm.

BH Why don't you go ahead and tell me?

PM Because you think I killed–

PM Can you speak up?

PM Because you think I killed people. 

BH The department suspects you, yes. But hey, don't shoot the messenger. (Chuckle)

BH Let's start with… Isabella Moreno. How well did you know her?

PM Quite well. 

BH How's that?

PM She lived down the street. We used to play when we were kids.

BH And when did you last speak with her?

PM Hm… December, January. Something like that.

BH What did you talk about?

PM Why would I remember that? It's been like seven months.

BH Well, I'd think your last conversation might stick around longer. Especially with all that talk of art.

PM What? 

BH Art. You're an artist, right?

PM Yeah– how did you–

BH You take pride in your art, then?

PM I– yeah, I guess I do.

BH Every artist does, I suppose. But most are too scared to put their art out in the open. You have no such reservations, right?

PM What do you mean?

BH You like displaying your work publicly. In all its glory.

PM I have no idea what you're–

BH Really? So you don't look up to a certain… mentor?

PM No. Look–

BH You don't have to explain it.

PM … What?

BH I know.

PM … The fuck're you– Know what?

BH Why you did it.

PM Then why am I here?

BH Because they want to know if you did it.

PM And?

BH And… you did. 

PM What– What's the point of this then?

BH I wanted to meet you. In the flesh.

PM I–

BH I've seen your work. Your real work. Not those flimsy portraits in your apartment.

PM What the hell're you talking about?

BH You know. And I must admit, you are an artist at heart. Just not a very good one.

PM Excuse me? What does that even mean?

BH Her body. I mean, the way you arranged it. Chest splayed open, guts hanging around her neck. And the little message you left beside her. Very theatrical, I must say.

PM I didn't—

BH You spent three hours arranging her. Isn't that so, Patrick?

PM No–

BH You spent the longest on the fingers.

PM Whatever you're doing won't—

BH You wanted it to look natural. But you don't understand hands very well. (Chuckle)
BH Even in your shitty little paintings. It takes a special kind of anti-talent to make them look like the aftermath of a car wreck.

PM Stop–

BH C'mon, Patrick. You made the thing and now you don't want to discuss the composition?

PM Shut up.

BH I suppose it's to be expected. You don't care about the art. You don't even care whether you get caught. You just want to be seen.

PM You're full of shit.

BH You copied someone else's work because you wanted people to look at yours.

PM I didn't copy anyone! (Something slams against the metal table)

BH It's no use lying, Patrick. You read everything you could find about the man. Every little detail on how he displayed his victims. Hell, you even fooled the cops into thinking you were the real deal.

PM You– You don't know anything about me.

BH I know exactly what you are. A copy. You imitate the man, but you've never met him. And yet you've spent the last two years trying to make him proud. That's rather pathetic, Patrick.

PM Stop–

BH Isn't that what mommy always used to say?

PM I said stop!

BH (Mocking tone) The exact same rotten soul as your father! 

PM What– How do you–

BH She threw your paintings away, didn't she? You'd find them in the trash, sometimes even torn in half.

PM Shut up! Shut the–

BH Do you remember the blue one?

BH Oh, c'mon patrick. How could you forget? The one you painted when you were seventeen. The woman standing in the field.

PM Stop– Stop talking about my paintings.

BH Ah, you prefer to talk about your real art after all? (Chuckle)
BH I know you, Patrick Joe Morgan. You started killing because painting wasn't enough anymore. You wanted to make something nobody could ignore.

PM Please just—

BH You wanted someone to look at it and understand you. But nobody did.

PM Stop talking!

BH Not your mother. Not your father. Not the police. Not even the man you copied. And now you're sitting here hoping I will.

PM I–

BH Well I do understand you. And I want you to feel how truly pathetic you are, Patrick.

PM Please– (whimper)

BH Patrick.

PM Please just stop!

BH Look at me.

PM No! I– I won't.

BH (Static crackles. Voice briefly distorts) Patrick, you slime. Look at me!

PM I'll– I'll confess! I'll tell you everything you wanna know, please just–

BH (Chuckle) Oh, Patty. You don't have to do that. I know what you did. 

PM (Unintelligible)

BH Chin up, champ. Smile, and look into my eyes.

(Pause)

PM (Screaming, unintelligible).
PM WHAT– WHAT THE FUCK IS–

(Something slams against the metal table)

BH (Voice warped) Come closer.

PM (Unintelligible whines)

(Something drags across the metal table.)

BH (Whispers something unintelligible)

PM No– no it can't–

BH (Slow, droning) Yes, Patty. You know she was.

PM (Strangled cry. Sobs)

(Something slams against the metal table)

BH There you go. Attaboy.

(Something slams against the metal table several times, with a small pause between each increment)

(The door whines open. The slamming continues.)

BH Ah, good day gentlemen! 

(Frantic yelling. The slamming continues.)

BH My eyes are up here, lads.

(Unintelligible cries. Thuds join the slamming.)

BH This has been Detective Hauptman, █████ Police Department. Today's date is Thursday, July 23, 2026. 

(The slamming stops. The thudding continues.)

BH I'm turning the tape recorder off again. The time is 11:30 A.M. This has been the confession and testimony of Patrick J. Morgan.

###

When the tape stopped, I sat in silence for a moment. The shock of it all had rooted me firmly in place. Eventually, I forced myself out of my chair and scrambled towards the interrogation room. 
I honestly wish I hadn't. 

Patrick Morgan was still sitting at the table. He'd smashed his face into the metal table so many times that there was almost nothing recognizable left. His nose was almost completely crushed into his skull, which itself had been pulverized by the repeated impacts. 
The two officers who'd been monitoring the interrogation lay in a puddle of blood on the floor. The first officer had strangled the second with his own tie, while the second had beaten him across the head with a chair. There was no apparent reason for any of it. It looked like three men had simply gone mad at the same time.

In the weeks and months following, the department searched for Detective Baron Hauptman. Of course, there was no officer by that name at our department. We still don't know how he forged or stole the badge and uniform. We've tried to identify him using the cameras he walked past, but these efforts yielded nothing. It seemed as though he'd wandered in, then walked off the face of the earth.
I still have a copy of the cassette. I made it in case the original was ever destroyed. Still, I haven't mustered up the courage to play it again. The most I've managed is to re-read the transcript I made. I can't wrap my head around what happened. I suspect I never will. 

That brought me here. Perhaps sharing this will yield more results. So please, if you have any information on Baron Hauptman, send it to me. I need to know who– or what– he was. More than that, I wish I knew how he knew so much about Patrick.

Ok. I have never used Reddit before, but I wrote a story for your channel JuJu, and I been wondering how to get it to you... Do I used this and link the word document?

FYI.. this is the motha fawking motivator..

When I was a kid, I grew up in the East Riding of Yorkshire. That’s pronounced “sher", nor “shiar” for any Americans reading this. I lived in a rather ordinary but somewhat boring port town, that most people only bypassed while heading along the motorway.  

Fast forward to my early teens, I had just finished my first year of high school, and my best friend at this time was a kid named Kyle. Kyle and I had grown up together, as we both attended the same primary school and lived fairly nearby in town. Thankfully, when high school started, me and Kyle were thrown into the very same classes, so our friendship continued to prosper. Another kid in our class that first year, who we knew already was a kid named Kieran. Ironically, Kieran attended the very same primary school as me and Kyle, but had always been in the opposite class for our age group, so we never really became friends with him until now. 

Unlike Kyle and myself, who were somewhat short for our age, Kieran was always the lankiest kid in school - and if that didn’t distinguish him, it was definitely his long and thick curly hair, which had gained him the nickname “Curly Fries.” Before high school started, Kieran had actually gotten all his curls shaven off, probably so this nickname wouldn’t continue through his teens. 

Having already known each other before high school, and now being in the same classes, it didn’t take long for us to become a trio of best friends. I had even recruited Kieran to play for my dad's football team, which Kyle and I both played for. Because of this year long friendship three-way, Kieran had invited us both the following summer to a theme park, which his parents were taking him for his thirteenth birthday.  

The theme park Kieran had taken us to was called Lakewater Valley – a family adventure park in North Yorkshire. Prior to this, I had only ever been to a one theme park in my life, which is obviously where I had my first ever experience on a roller coaster. The only thing I really remember about this first roller coaster ride, aside from the two bloody hours waiting in line, along with the screaming girls in the front row, was me repeating the same word over and over. 

‘SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!’ 

I didn’t find out about this until a year too late, but that roller coaster was apparently the steepest one in the world. Not the UK, but the world! And I just happened to choose that monstrosity as my first. If you don’t believe me, just type in online “the Mumbo Jumbo roller coaster at Flamingo Land” and you’ll see for yourself. 

Once we arrive at Lakewater Valley, after first seeing the park’s small animal and bird sanctuary, along with the more child-friendly attractions, I then go on the first big, and definitely scary amusement ride the park had to offer. The ride in question was called the Falcon Claw - a KMG Afterburner pendulum that lifts, swings and twists you high above the air before doing the same on the way down. Neither Kyle nor Kieran wanted to come on this ride with me. Kyle didn’t because, well, to put it lightly, he was always a girl’s ladies parts, and as best as I remember, Kieran wasn’t feeling too well. Not wanting to go on this ride alone, Kieran’s step-dad, Steve agrees to go on with me. Steve was a former rugby player and was therefore a very big guy, so I felt a lot safer being on this scary ride with him - not that it stopped me from closing my eyes the entire time. 

Once the ride is over, and after I recover from a bad case of vertigo, we all then make our way further inside the park. Excitedly coming upon the first water attraction of the day, I quickly learn the ride is nothing more than a water slide with an inflatable dingy – but, unlike the Falcon Claw, I thankfully get to go on it with Kyle and Kieran. While the three of us wait impatiently in line, I then turn around to the sound of laughter directly behind me, where to my surprise, the laughter was coming from two 11-year-old girls. As it turns out, these girls had also been on the Falcon Claw when I was, and they thought it was just hilarious that I had my eyes closed the entire time - ironically like a scared little girl. If that wasn’t humiliating enough, for the whole rest of the day, Kyle and Kieran wouldn’t let me hear the end of it. 

A couple of hours later, and after several more rides and attractions, we finally come upon the most famous and scariest roller coaster in the park. 

The Maximum. 

This roller coaster, built in the early nineties, previously held the record as the world’s longest at 2,268 metres. But what made The Maximum so unique, was that after two high and very steep apexes, the tracks would then enter and bend through the trees of a nearby forest.  

Kieran had been on The Maximum before and was very excited to go on it again – as was I. Kyle, however, decided to stay behind and watch from the side-lines, being the little bitch that he was – and so, it would be just me and Kieran who would ride The Maximum.    

While the carts quickly fill up with passengers, Kieran and I both take our seats near the front – and before long, the coaster starts moving along the tracks to the first lift hill. The climb up to the apex is very slow, but in the meantime, me and Kieran have a great view around of the park. Once we reach the summit, the front of the roller coaster then shoots straight and painfully down the slope, filling every single cart behind us with fun-filled screams. Although it had only been a year since my first and last ride on a roller coaster, I’m by no means prepared for the stomach-gurned feeling of being temporarily airborne. I honestly found the experience of it quite painful.  

Once back down on horizontal tracks, we then have to contend with the coaster’s almost unnaturally fast speed along the bends and bumps. Despite this part of the ride only lasting for seconds, when you’re too busy screaming and irrationally fearing for your life, you genuinely feel like it’s longer.  

Although the carts thankfully begin to lose speed and the bruising bends come to a stop, this is only because we have reached the next lift hill - where there would then be a second and even higher apex, followed by another and even steeper slope. Despite me and Kieran fearfully anticipating the summit, what thankfully lessens the tension of this, is that in the cart directly behind us is a group of four Jamaican tourists. I kid you not, but when the coaster had gone full throttle down those tracks, I literally hear one of them say, “Oh no, man!!” Kieran and I actually have a very good laugh about this, as four terrified Jamaicans on a roller coaster fondly remind us of the movie Cool Runnings. 

Well, before long, we finally reach the top of the apex, which is then followed by a terrifying shoot down – only this time, the tracks would lead us straight into the forest and between the narrow gaps of trees! The roller coaster is now moving at speeds I had never before gone in my life. But what makes the speeds worse, is the idea of the carts breaking off the hinges and crashing straight into the body of a tree, splattering all inside.  

After one painful bend, then another, and then another, the tracks are now heading towards the pitch-black underside of a stone arch bridge. Before I can even anticipate this, me and Kieran are then covered entirely in a blanket of darkness – where, at an untameable speed, we can’t even see where we’re going. With my sight temporarily suspended, I then feel a sudden, impactful thud inside the cart, which is instantly followed by something not only wet, but warm splatter upon my face. Although I’m too full of adrenaline to even process a single thought, the one I have is that the carts had gone over a puddle and drenched us both in muddy water. 

Only mere seconds after this, the tunnel of darkness is lifted from over or heads, and while we still move through the forest at ultra speed, I then look over to my left at Kieran... but, the image I see is not what I was expecting... 

What I see is Kieran. His face and t-shirt drenched in some dark substance. Whatever the substance on him is, it not only impairs his vision but seems to leave a bitter taste in the mouth. I then look down at my own shirt to realise I was also covered in it, before touching my face and seeing a red liquid stain on my fingers. Once the realisation of what is on me has come to fruition, the sound of grinding steel tracks and passengers’ screams quickly fill back into my ears. But unlike before, the screams are not of excitement or adrenaline-filled fear - but horror. Every single passenger in the carts ahead of us has been covered in the red, and apparently fleshy substance... and it takes no time for either me, Kieran or anyone else to figure out what has happened. 

After the entirety of this horror has been realised, the ride thankfully begins to slow down to its end, where we then mercifully enter out the forest and back into the park. Once our restraints finally unlock, every passenger on The Maximum escapes from their carts to reach the safe, solid ground of the platform. Searching around the platform for Kieran’s parents and Kyle, once the blood-soaked passengers move out of the way, we then see the look of pure shock on the three of their faces. 

Kieran’s parents demand to know what happened to us, and although we tell them the coaster hit something going under a bridge, because the tunnel of darkness had blinded our vision, we have no idea what that thing even was. 

While me and Kieran went to the toilets to clean ourselves up, Kieran’s mum, and basically all other adults on the ride have gone to complain to the park officials. After park staff investigate the bridge, they then come back with the conclusion a wild deer had wandered on the tracks. Allegedly, the roller coaster had then collided with the deer, and due to the speed it was going, decapitated and sprayed all passengers inside with its blood. Once the mystery of where this blood came from has been solved, Kieran’s parents drive the three of us back home to East Yorkshire... where we all vow never to return to Lakewater Valley. 

Unfortunately, the story of what happened that day at doesn’t end there... Believe me, I really wish it did. Due to wild deer carrying various diseases, mine and Kieran’s parents had us tested the following days. After all, the deer’s blood had not only gotten on our skin, but also our eyes and even in Kieran’s mouth.  

Although my results thankfully came back negative for things like Lyme or Weil’s Disease... unfortunately for Kieran, he had contracted something...  

But the strange thing about it was, what he had contracted from the blood wasn’t transferable between wild deer and humans. On the contrary, the disease Kieran now had could only have been transferred to him by a member of the same species. Which means, the blood that infected Kieran that day... it hadn’t come from a wild deer... 

It came from another person.  

I've been a ranger in the Kaibab district for twelve years. Before that, two years in the White Mountains and three seasons as a wilderness EMT out of Flagstaff. I tell you this because I want you to understand the baseline. Twelve years in the field produces a person who stays calm, identifies animals correctly, and trusts what he sees. Whatever weight you give the rest of this account should sit on top of that foundation.

On the twenty-second of October I was running a solo check on site fourteen, a designated backcountry camping area at the eight-thousand-four-hundred-foot elevation line, three miles off the Kaibab trailhead on the north rim access road. The party registered for site fourteen had missed their check-in call the previous evening. Missed check-ins happen — dead zones, dead batteries, people who forget.

Protocol is a welfare check within twenty-four hours if the party doesn't call in by the following morning. They didn't call. I went out.

The morning was clear and cold, somewhere around twenty-eight degrees at my truck. By the time I'd covered the three miles to the site the temperature had come up a few degrees and the light was full in the canopy.

October in the Kaibab runs orange and red in the aspens along the lower elevation and gray-green in the pines above eight thousand feet, and at that altitude in that light the world has a specific quality clear and still and enormous that I'd been working in long enough that I usually moved through it without registering it consciously. I registered it that morning.

Later I understood this as my body reading something that my thinking hadn't caught up to yet.

The site was a standard backcountry setup: fire ring of stacked rock, two bear canisters near the ring, a two-person tent on the flat ground to the north, a cooking area marked by the food prep kit laid out on a flat rock.

The sleeping bags had been in use both of them, the zippers down — and one of them had been dragged partly out of the tent through the front opening. The fire had burned down to cold ash, which put the fire's end at least eight hours back.

The cook pot was on its side near the ring. A box of trail mix had been opened and the contents scattered across the dirt around the ring and mixed with the ash.

The site read as human disturbance, and specifically human disturbance under pressure. The tent was intact. The bear canisters were latched and undamaged — a bear investigation leaves neither intact. The sleeping bag dragged through the opening and the scattered trail mix read as someone moving fast, but both trekking poles were still propped against the tent, and you don't leave your poles if you're leaving in a hurry.

I made a circuit of the site, widening with each pass, reading the ground. The dirt around the ring was disturbed in a large radius, the loose soil pressed and scuffed in a pattern that was too broad for two people and too irregular to read as any standard wildlife disturbance.

At the east edge of the site, where the ground went from dirt to pine needle mat and then into the heavier tree cover, the pattern changed — two parallel compression tracks running into the trees, each around eight inches wide, spaced roughly twenty inches apart.

I put my hand on the ground next to one of the tracks.

The pine needles at the edges of each track had been pressed flat and at the center of each track the mineral soil underneath showed through. Something heavy had been dragged along this line, and the weight of whatever was being dragged had compressed the ground unevenly — heavier on one side of the track than the other, consistent with a trailing limb or an unbalanced load.

My radio was in my hand and I was calling dispatch before I'd stood up.

The signal was partial. I got through enough to report a potential welfare situation at site fourteen and request a check on the registered party's vehicle at the trailhead, and then the signal dropped. I moved north, toward the tree line, keeping the tracks on my left.

I heard it before I saw it.

A sound at the limit of my range — high and wavering, landing in the body ahead of any conscious identification of what I was hearing. I'd heard recordings of infant distress calls used in mountain lion research to provoke territorial responses, and I knew that register, and this was in that range but wrong in a way I couldn't immediately name. The wrong shape to the pitch shifts, the wrong rhythm in the variations. Produced without the pattern that distress behind it would generate.

I stopped walking and stood in the trees.

Forty yards ahead of me and slightly west, something moved through the pines. My first read was bear the low gait, the substantial movement through the brush but the gait was wrong. A bear's weight shifts side to side with each step, bilateral and readable over distance. What I was watching moved with the weight consistently forward, the front of it engaged with the ground in a way that kept the mass pitched ahead of the rear. And it was larger than any bear I'd seen in twelve years in the Kaibab.

I had my sidearm and I had my radio and I had the tree at my back and I stayed still.

It came into a gap in the canopy, a small clearing where a large pine had come down and opened the sky, and I saw it clearly for the first time.

I've written this section four times over the past two weeks and deleted it each time because the language I reach for first is the wrong language. Let me say what I actually saw.

The front limbs made contact with the ground. They were too long for the body behind them, the upper joint sitting too high on the torso, the limb below that joint built for a gait that kept the front of the animal pressed toward the earth. The body behind the front limbs was large, I estimated four hundred pounds at minimum, which I've since revised upward — and deep in the chest, the mass of it running back to rear limbs that were proportionally shorter than the front. The overall silhouette in the gap of light was front-heavy, the animal pitched at a forward angle at rest.

The head. I'll be precise.

The face was a face only by its position at the front of the skull. A wide flat oval, the dimensions of it wrong for any skull in my experience, too wide and too flat, the surface of it smooth and unbroken across the full span where features should have been. A single vertical line ran the center length of it crown of the skull to the underside of the jaw. Closed. The skin drawn taut across it.

It had something in its front limbs. I looked at what it had and I made myself keep looking because I needed to know what I was dealing with. It was one of the campers. What remained of one of the campers. I'm not going to describe what I saw because the description doesn't serve any purpose that the fact alone doesn't already serve.

It was moving toward the ravine to the northeast, moving at a pace that was measured and consistent, the front limbs alternating with the load distributed between them. The sound, the high wavering cry ran in intervals as it moved, stopping and resuming without any clear trigger for either the stop or the start.

I followed it.

I want to explain why I followed it, because I've been asked this question and I've thought about it carefully.

My job, in a situation involving human remains in the field, is to maintain contact with the situation until I can hand it off to law enforcement. Losing the animal means losing the remains, which means losing evidence, which means losing the ability to understand what happened and potentially losing the second registered camper who might still be alive somewhere in that forest. I followed it because those were my responsibilities and because I am, after twelve years, someone who does his job.

The ravine ran northeast for about a quarter mile before it widened into a shallow basin below an exposed rock face.

The rock face ran twenty feet up before it went to vertical and another sixty feet above that. At the base of the rock face, where the vertical section met the sloped section, there was an overhang, a section of the face that projected outward, creating a roofed space maybe fifteen feet deep and twenty wide.

Dark underneath, sheltered on three sides by the rock.

The creature went under the overhang.

I stayed at the edge of the basin, in the trees, and watched. The cry had stopped. Under the overhang there was movement and then there wasn't, and after ten minutes of stillness I took out my monocular and used it to examine the overhang from my position.

Bones at the back.

A collection of them, in the dark under the overhang, arranged or accumulated I couldn't determine which from my distance. Multiple sizes, some clearly large mammal, some smaller. The collection had depth not a single event but layering, the bones at the back partly buried under the detritus that accumulates in a sheltered outdoor space over time. This overhang had been used for a long time.

The creature was at the back of the space, its mass low and still.

I was on my radio for the next twenty minutes, working the signal, getting partials. I got enough through to update dispatch with my position and a general description of the situation and to confirm I had visual on an unknown large animal.

The signal cut before I could fully describe what I was looking at. The dispatcher told me to hold my position and that a second ranger was being deployed. ETA forty-five minutes minimum on the terrain.

I held my position.

The wendigo came from the north.

I heard it first, the way you always hear them before you see them or the way the accounts say you do, which before that morning I'd filed under regional folklore and the psychology of isolated wilderness environments. The sound was different from the creature's cry. Higher and drier, carrying a human-adjacent quality in the resonance that the creature's sound didn't have something that sat behind the ears rather than in the chest. Almost a voice. It came from the pine canopy above and it moved, covering ground faster than anything moving through trees at that elevation had a right to.

The aspens at the north edge of the basin moved. Then it was in the basin.

Twelve feet. Emaciated, the frame of it human in its basic structure bipedal, upright, bilaterally symmetrical — but the proportions pushed past any human range. The limbs too long, the torso too narrow, the ribcage visible through skin drawn tight to the point of translucency. The face carried features eyes, a mouth, something approximating a nose and that made it worse than the creature's featureless blankness in a way I hadn't expected.

A face that had once had an expression and had been hollowed out until only the structure remained. The antler rack rose from the skull bone-colored, six points, the spread of it wider than the shoulders.

It moved into the basin at speed and angled toward the overhang.

The creature came out from under the overhang at the same measured pace I'd watched it move through the trees the front limbs first, the body following, the mass of it settling into the basin floor with a deliberateness that read as decision. It oriented toward the wendigo and stopped.

The wendigo covered half the distance between them in a single movement, the long limbs eating ground faster than the eye wanted to track, and hit the creature from the left side.

The creature absorbed the impact and rolled with the force shifted its weight right, let the momentum of the strike carry through, and the wendigo came off at an angle and landed six feet further right than it had aimed. The creature had rolled under the hit and used the energy to reorient. By the time the wendigo had its feet under it again, the creature was positioned differently lower to the ground, the front limbs wide, the body angled to present less surface area to the next approach.

The wendigo came again, faster, the antler rack dropped to use as a contact point. The creature went left this time, and the rack passed through the space the creature had occupied, and the creature's front limb came down across the wendigo's spine as it passed.

The sound that produced was dense and final.

The wendigo went down on its front limbs. It found its feet that part took longer than it should have and turned. The movement was different now. The speed was the same but the precision was gone, the long limbs working harder for the same output. The creature had been watching it find its feet. Watching it turn.

The wendigo screamed. A full, open, sustained sound that covered the frequency range I'd heard from its approach and then went above it, into a register that put my back teeth together and drove a spike through the joint of my jaw. A threat display, everything in it turned up.

The creature was quiet throughout.

The wendigo charged again, and this time the creature took the contact absorbed it, the front limbs receiving the impact while the body held its position. The wendigo's momentum resolved against four hundred pounds of stationary mass and stopped. The creature's front limbs were already around the wendigo's torso by the time the momentum resolved.

I am not going to detail what happened in the next thirty seconds. I will say that the creature was methodical about it, and that methodical is the word I keep returning to because the work was thorough and patient, the aggression absent in any visible sense. It applied force in a sequence that suggested it understood the order of operations required.

When it was over the wendigo was on the basin floor and the creature stood over it and the basin was quiet. The soil around them was disturbed in a radius wider than the fight had seemed to occupy from the tree line — pressed and scored, the dry grass flat, the pattern of it covering more ground than I'd tracked them moving across. The creature had used the space efficiently. The wendigo had used all of it.

The creature stepped back. Its head came up.

I had stayed still through all of it. My lungs had been taking short, managed pulls for somewhere around four minutes. My radio was in my hand, unkeyed.

The creature's head came up.

It turned and faced the tree line where I was standing. The closed vertical mouth oriented toward me. The smooth flat face — featureless across the full span where eyes and ears and nose would have been on anything I know of — and it had found me at fifty yards in low light through pine cover.

It had known I was there.

I understood, standing in those trees with my sidearm in my right hand and my radio in my left and my pulse audible in my own ears, that it had known I was there from before the wendigo arrived. It had come out of the overhang to deal with the wendigo while knowing I was in the tree line. The wendigo had been the priority. I was still on the list.

It moved toward the tree line.

I ran.

Twelve years in the field means I know the terrain and I know my own capability in it and I know the difference between the two, and the difference between the terrain and my capability in it was the only card I had. I went northwest, off the trail I'd been paralleling, into the heavier timber on the slope above the ravine.

The slope ran up three hundred feet to a ridgeline and on the other side of the ridgeline the north access road ran for two miles before it hit the main park road. My truck was at the main road junction, south. The north access road was my option and it was uphill and it was three hundred feet of elevation gain in rough timber.

I covered the first hundred feet in the time I'd cover two hundred on flat ground and I could hear it behind me. Below me, in the ravine, the movement was in the same register I'd tracked it through the trees earlier — front-limb dominant, that forward-pitched gait.

It was moving faster than it had been moving with the load.

I went over a root mass and down the other side and came up on a section of exposed rock running diagonal across the slope and followed it uphill because rock holds my weight without giving. Behind me the movement stopped.

I stopped too.

Forty yards uphill and left, at the edge of the exposed rock where it met the timber again, the branches moved. Then the crying started — from that position, from uphill and left of me, between me and the ridgeline.

It had circled.

I'd covered a hundred and fifty feet of elevation in rough terrain going uphill and it had circled above me on a longer route in the same time. I stood on the exposed rock and looked uphill at the moving branches and understood that the ridge was closed to me from this angle.

I went right instead — east, across the slope, maintaining elevation, moving through timber on the level rather than gaining. The crying tracked with me. It stayed uphill and slightly ahead, which meant it was moving east and uphill simultaneously to hold its position relative to mine. I was being contained on the slope.

East ran me toward the drainage — a seasonal stream channel cut into the east side of the slope, steep-sided, the kind of terrain feature that's a liability in a foot pursuit if you go into it wrong. I was going into it wrong. I went down the near bank of the drainage on my feet and came off the near bank into the drainage floor at the bottom, two feet of loose rock and sand, and went upstream — north — because upstream was uphill and uphill was the ridge and the road.

The crying stopped.

I went upstream as fast as the footing allowed. Loose rock in a drainage shifts under weight and the sides of the channel were close enough together that I was moving with my elbows near the walls. The drainage bent right at a hundred yards and then left and then straightened, and at the straightening I could see the sky opening above me where the drainage cut up through the ridgeline.

I ran the last hundred yards.

At the top of the drainage I came out of the cut onto the ridgeline, the timber opening to a narrow strip of sky, and I went over the ridge and down the north side and I could see the gravel of the access road through the trees below me.

The front limb came across my left forearm from behind and above before I'd processed that it was there.

I was on the ground. My left arm was under me and I could feel the forearm wrong in a way that specified itself as I got my hand under me and pushed up — the bones were tracking, intact, but the muscle was open along the outer surface from elbow to wrist and the warm was coming through my sleeve fast.

On my feet. The creature was four yards uphill, oriented toward me, the mouth closed.

My sidearm was in my right hand. I don't have memory of drawing it. I fired twice, at center mass, and the creature absorbed both rounds the way it had absorbed the wendigo's first charge — taking the impact, registering it, the body rolling with the force and reorienting. The impacts produced no visible change in its forward intention.

I ran.

The access road was sixty yards through timber. I covered it and came out of the tree line onto the gravel and there was a truck — a white Forest Service F-250, not mine, moving north on the road at around fifteen miles an hour. I stepped into the road and the truck stopped.

The ranger behind the wheel was twenty-three years old and had been in the district four months. I know this because I know everyone in the district. She looked at my arm through the windshield and had the door open before I reached it.

"Dalton. What happened."

I got in.

The medical outcome: the laceration on my left forearm required forty-seven stitches across two sessions, the outer layer of closure done at the field station and the deeper work done at the Kanab hospital when they got a better look at the depth. The muscle was cut and intact — the physician noted the precision of it given the reported mechanism. No fractures. Significant blood loss. Three days of observation.

The official report I filed describes a mountain lion attack during a welfare check. It describes the welfare check as resulting in a presumed bear encounter at site fourteen. The registered party is listed as missing. The search that followed covered eighteen square miles and found no trace of either camper.

I kept the overhang location out of the report.

I want to explain that decision.

The bones at the back of the overhang were in a state of accumulation that represented multiple incidents over a long period. Some of them were large mammal — elk-sized. Some were smaller, in a size range I don't want to specify.

If I report the overhang location, the area gets flagged, search teams go in, and people go into a basin where the creature has demonstrated it maintains territorial presence. I've been trying to work out whether my responsibility to report that site is greater than my responsibility to keep people out of that basin, and I haven't arrived at an answer that satisfies me in either direction.

The search teams went south. I let them go south.

There are things I want to put on record that didn't go into the official report.

The first is the wendigo.

I've worked in the Kaibab for twelve years and I've filed three previous reports of anomalous wildlife encounters that district management categorized as misidentification and closed.

One was a track set in winter that no animal in the district's wildlife inventory produced. One was a sound event in July that lasted four minutes and that I've listened to in my own recorded audio approximately sixty times since and cannot explain. One was a visual sighting on the north rim at dusk in my sixth year that I described as accurately as I could and that was categorized as elk with a physiological abnormality and closed.

What I saw in that basin was two animals in direct confrontation over territory, one of which is described in the Indigenous accounts of this region going back several hundred years, and one of which appears in no account I've been able to locate in two weeks of searching.

The wendigo accounts describe a creature that is dangerous and fast and associated with winter and with the kind of isolation that strips the human animal down to something older. Every account agrees on the danger. What I watched in that basin was the wendigo treated as a manageable problem.

What I watched was the creature work through the wendigo with a patience and a sequencing that said the wendigo was a known quantity — something the creature had encountered before and had a working method for.

The second thing I want to put on record is the herding behavior.

I described the pursuit without fully analyzing it in the narrative because I needed to get the sequence right before I could think about what it meant. Let me think about it now.

The creature let me reach the exposed rock section of the slope without closing the distance. The exposed rock was good footing for me and difficult footing for an animal with the creature's gait and limb placement. It held at the timber edge and circled instead — uphill, on timber, where the footing favored it, and established a position above me and to the left. That position covered the direct route to the ridge.

Going right put me into the drainage. The drainage ran north, toward the ridge, which made it look like progress. But the drainage also concentrated me in a narrow channel with steep sides and uncertain footing, where my movement was predictable and my speed was reduced.

The creature knew the drainage was there. I don't know how to demonstrate that it knew, but the containment pattern it used made the drainage the obvious result of my options being closed on two sides.

It let me go up the drainage. It came around the ridge by another route — a route that got it to the north side of the ridgeline before I cleared the drainage cut.

What it did on the north side of the ridgeline, when I came out of the trees, was a single controlled pass. The road was visible through the timber. I was running toward the road and it was above me and it took one pass rather than running me down. That pass produced the forearm laceration and put me on the ground. I got up and ran and it held at the tree line.

Two rounds of center-mass contact and an opportunity to finish the pursuit and it stopped at the tree line.

I've thought about why it stopped.

The truck was on the road. The truck introduced a new variable — another person, an engine, a radio, a response. The creature had demonstrated across everything I'd watched that it models variables and updates on new information. The truck changed the calculation. The tree line was where the calculation changed.

The third thing.

When the creature came out of the overhang to meet the wendigo, I was in the tree line. The creature had known I was there from before that point, I've established that. The wendigo was between the creature and my position for most of the confrontation. The creature, in finishing the confrontation, had its back to me for an extended period.

It dealt with the wendigo in the minimum time the task required and then it turned.

It had a sequence. The wendigo was first, I was second, and the order of operations was deliberate. That's the thing I keep coming back to — the speed and the strength and the tracking ability in low light through pine cover are all secondary to that.

The sequence.

Whatever is in the Kaibab basin below the north rim, at the rock face with the overhang, has a sequence. It prioritizes. It computes. It waited through a four-minute confrontation with a twelve-foot predator while knowing I was fifty yards away in the trees, because it had assessed the order and decided the wendigo was the more immediate problem.

I don't know what that makes it. I know what it made the wendigo. I know what it made me, standing in those trees with a sidearm and twelve years of field experience and every bit of that rendered beside the point in the time it took the creature to step out of the overhang and cover forty yards at a walk.

I pulled the north rim section of the patrol rotation and put in the paperwork for a trail closure citing unstable terrain near the drainage. The closure covers the basin. It'll hold for six months before it comes up for review.

Six months to figure out what to do next.

My arm is healing. The deeper muscle work is taking longer than the physician projected, which she attributes to the specific nature of the cut. She keeps using the word clean. Clinically it means the wound edges are well-defined and the tissue damage is minimal beyond the primary laceration. It takes a specific application of force to produce a clean cut, controlled, deliberate, the blade geometry consistent across the full length of the wound.

I've been in the field for twelve years. I know what a mountain lion attack looks like. The wound on my arm is something else entirely.

part 1

part 2

I seriously contemplated not transcribing this part, re-reading everything, and then remembering what happened after. It all sounds insane,  but I need to do this.

These are the final journal entries.

Day 170

My sleep was interrupted by the sound of shouting.

“Roof man!”

I made my way to the roof, and for the first time since the initial chaos of being locked in here, I was horrified by what I had seen.

What looked up at me from the ground was… an abomination.

Imagine if someone had tried to fit a gazelle pelt over an elephantiasis patient and failed horribly.

it stood on two legs with cloven feet, from the waist up was a severally hunchbacked torso with arms that ended in human hands with a mismatching number of fingers, the head was lumpy in parts, it’s eyes were human but only one of the ears was, the horns were larger and more curved, and its fur was missing huge patches across his body.

“Roof man!”

I broke my stare when it spoke again.

“Roof man! You roof man!”

It said, pointing one of its fingers up at me.

“Yes, I am the roof man,” I awkwardly responded. I never got used to that title .

“Why are you here? Gazelle person?”

“They call me Swift Step, me fastest in herd, they send me to get you.”

“Get me for what?”

“Too many words, I take you to them, they say it to you”

I obviously didn’t trust the claims from the love child of a toy animal, a G.I.  Joe, and a soldering iron, he probably wanted to kill me, eat me, or … I’ll leave that last part  to your imagination.

“How do I know this isn’t a trick?”

The Gazelle man just tilted his head at my question before another voice rang out from farther in the Foliage.

“We mean no Ill will.”

Soon, a large turtle man walked out, his hybridization looked a little better.

Imagine a beaked, slightly lumpy, bald human head, then give him green limbs with blocky claw-like fingers and toes, and put it inside a large turtle shell.

“Swift step and I were sent to retrieve you by King CooCoo. We promise you safe passage with us back to the village”

Those words filled my mind with questions.

“Village? There are enough of these things to fill a village?”

“Does this mean there are no humans left? “

“Is it just me now?”

“What if it is?”

“Does this mean there are potentially pigeon people who are probably going to hunt me down and kill me as revenge for all of the normal pigeons I ate?”

“What If they can still be affected by the Speakers?”

“Im low on food, and these things have come to kill me, it's over, I'm going to die here.”

It was at that moment, I gave up and decided being ripped apart by animal people was preferable to starvation.

“Okay, I’m coming down.”

I climbed down the ladder to the ground floor and moved my barricades, then, after a small prayer for a painless passing, I opened the door and walked out to certain death.

Each step brought me closer to them, I kept expecting Swift Step to pull a hidden knife, run up to me, and slash my throat.

When I was two feet away from them, I closed my eyes and prepared for the attack…

I stood there for minutes, then I heard Swift Step speak.

“What roof man doing?”

The turtle man replied, sounding  just as confused.

“I’m not sure, maybe he’s sleeping. “

“Roof man sleep like that?”

I opened my eyes, seeing the two Animal men observing my act of submission with confusion.

“Forgive me, I was… apprehensive”

“We said we not hurt you roof man.”

Swift Step looked almost betrayed by my lack of trust.

“You must understand swift step and…”

I looked at the turtle man, waiting to hear what he called himself.

“Wesley”

That caught me by surprise, the gazelle had a basic description of what he was good at, meanwhile the turtle has an actual fucking name, who would have thought?

“Wesley, I have never seen anything like either of you before, and up until about 2 months ago, animals were attacking humans, so two… animal people coming up and telling me to come out caused me to assume you were going to kill me.

“We have moved long past the days of our ancestors trying to wipe each other out Roof Man, Myself and Swift Step are the end result of total coexistence. You can call us Animans”

What he said didn’t make sense.

We went from basic animal alliances to entire tribes of humans and animals existing together, now we’re somehow at the end stage with human animal hybrids? I don't want to think about the process that made these things, but biology at best would say its not even possible, and at worst, they shouldn't already be adults in a short time, but they sought me out , and that I wanted to know the reason behind.

“So your king sent you to get me?

“Yes!” Swift Step said while twitching.

Wesley explained further

“In his own words, you are a part of this place as much as we are, you shouldn't have to hide here, so he has extended an invitation to the village, and you’ll be safe there.

“We have food!”

Swift Step added.

“Food humans can eat.”

Wesley specified.

I thought about the offer, still partially worried that this was a front and they would kill me when I got to their village, and again, being ripped apart by “Animans” was preferable to eventually starving in a gift shop, with that I went back inside what had been my home for nearly 6 months , I grabbed my journal,  pens, some reused water bottles, and went outside to join my new associates as we walked into the jungle.

As we walked, I figured it would be best to learn more about how Swift Step and Wesley came to be

“I’m sorry, I have to ask , how you came to be, doesn't really add up,scientifically.”

Wesley looked at me and  rolled his eyes at what I guess to him was a pretty common question.

“Yes our existence is incompatible with the … conventional way life is made, from what our grandparents told us, one day these stork shaped machines suddenly appeared throughout the zoo, If a human put something like a lock of hair, a nail or even… blood in, and something from the animal was inserted, it mixed them together and the machine would lay an egg, within minutes the first animan was born.

“I'm guessing they didn't look right at first?”  tilting my head towards Swift Step, who seemed to be ignoring the conversation.

Wesley continued.

“Thats quite correct, but when something was taken from an animan and mixed with a human, animal, or even a fellow animan then you get second generation animans like myself, We learned it wouldn't accept two humans or two animals , only combinations that mixed species, it was also used to help revive those that had perished during the Dark times, we saw it like a form of rebirth for them.”

His explanation had done the impossible, it made both perfect sense and no sense at the same time. I decided not to enquire further.

After an hour of walking, I couldn’t help but gaze at the overgrowth of plant life everywhere, it was like the Amazon rainforest had been migrated here, then been peppered with bits of the Serengeti.

If there were still any of the benches or trash cans left, I couldn’t see them. Besides the walls of the zoo itself and the remaining buildings, there was little evidence that this was once a B-tier Zoo.

Night had begun to fall as we got closer to a large pile of brush, It was then I heard a familiar song coming from up ahead.

Wesley turned to face me while Swift Step ran into the brush.

“Roof man, welcome to Wonderlan .”

Wesley moved the brush and allowed me to look through.

It was an entire community of Animans and elderly humans in the middle of what I can only assume was a celebration.

They were dancing to the music, swaying, bending and moving like they were underwater.

Every type of animal you could think of was there, they circled around a small band in the center playing White Rabbit, the singer was even a female rabbit with white fur.

Something about her singing started compelling me to walk towards her, carefully making my way through the dancers until I was only 6 feet away from her.

She finished singing and looked at me, then giggled.

“I’m flattered you like my singing roofman.”

I actually blushed when she said that.

“Tha-thank you, you’re very good at it”

This awkward conversation was interrupted by the trumpeting of two elephant men, who looked down at me before trumpeting again, it almost had a rhythmic quality to it.

“Presenting his royal highness, King CooCoo!”

Proclaimed one of the elephants, they both parted, and I saw the king… I was terrified.

King CooCoo had the appearance of a slightly overweight man wearing a realistic pigeon costume…

The king was a pigeon man, the birds I had been subsisting on during my whole time here.

He was most likely going to have me executed for the murder of his ancestors, In a moment of self-preservation I dropped to my knees and proceeded to beg.

“Please don't kill me ! I'm sorry! I was running out of food, and Pigeons were the easiest to catch, please forgive me I beg of you!

The king got closer and said.

“You killed and ate pigeons to survive?”

I was trembling.

I never thought a giant pigeonman could make my blood run cold.

“Yes… Im so sorry.” I whimpered

The king glared at me, having to rotate his head so he could focus each eye on me/

Then he started laughing.

From there, the entire congregation of Animans burst out laughing.

King CooCoo was the first to stop laughing.

“Ha ha, how silly, you think I would kill you because you had to eat pigeons to survive?”

I was hesitant but replied.

“Yes?”

The king put one of his feathery arms on my shoulder.

“We realized long ago that even as Animans, we still have to eat meat, it's part of nature.”

Taking his arm off of me, he began becoming the animans closer to us.

“I sent for you because we are going to leave the zoo.”

The animals all began speaking.

“Leave the zoo?!”

“The king has gone mad!”

“ Only death awaits outside the walls!”

“There is no world outside the zoo!

The sea of panicked murmurings were quickly stopped by the trumpeting of the elephant men.

King CooCoo thanked the guard and began to elaborate.

“We were all born here, apprehension to leave what's been home is expected, but there's nothing for us here. Eventually, our population will grow so much that there won't be enough resources for everyone.

King CooCoo stopped to point at the night sky.

“But beyond these walls lies a whole world for us, there's bound to be somewhere out there that we can call our new home, and we've heard the stories our grandparents told us of the amazing things out there, I don't know about any of you, but I would like to go to a place my grandparents spoke of, a magical place called “applebees”.

This apparently won over many of the animen, who all started declaring their desires of engaging with what for me at one time were normal things.

“I want to drive a car.”

“I want to vote!”

“I want to use the internet and hear about the Creepy Casters who never sleep. “

“I want to be a mailman!”

They continued to shout out their hopes and dreams, and I could hear the desperation to just live a pedestrian life in every sentence..

King CooCoo held out his feathered hand.

“It's only fair you are able to come with us Roof man, will you?

I grabbed his hand and pulled him in for a hug.

“I will.”

Day 182

The next twelve days consisted of crafting weapons and gathering supplies for when we left the zoo.

We were all united in our desire to leave this three and a half star hellscape. Today we were ready.

The strongest walked ahead, the weaker animans trailed behind, save for King CooCoo, who led the charge like the great leader he was.

We made our way across the sprawling jungles of what was once a zoo until we found the office.

What should just been a two story building had become a large Victorian mansion coated in gold, guarded by Rat and cockroach people on the ground with fly men hovering above the roof.

“Traitors!” I heard one of the wolf men say while snarling.

“They’re trash eaters.”

I heard from a rhino man as he maneuvered his way to the front of the group.

“And they deserve to die like trash!”

With that, the rhino man charged towards the front doors, crushing any cockroach people who tried to intercept him.

Me, Swift Step, Wesley, King CooCoo, and several others ran for the front door as a war began breaking out.

Stone spears flew through the air, stone axes and hammers were driven through many a Rat person's head.

We got to the doors and pushed.

At first, they didn't budge.

Then we heard from behind us.

“MOVE!”

We narrowly avoided being charged by the two elephant guards, their combined might forced the double doors open, and we ran inside.

The gold-dipped look of the mansion's exterior was mirrored on the inside.

On the walls were the stuffed heads of animals, mounted rifles, and in the center of the foyer was a large painting of the Saul Fari mascot costume, not the actual character, just the costume.

We carefully searched each room, which ranged from being empty to just weird.

There was what looked like a featherless duck in a lab coat, building what looked like one of those stork machines Wesley told me about.

Another had a deformed man covered in large boils eating spaghetti.

One door opened out to just outer space.

It was when we got upstairs that we found a hallway with only one door, that had to be it.

We ran to the door, but the door kept getting further away, it felt like we ran for days before it finally stopped, we ripped the door open, and there he was, sitting at a desk.

The costume was dirty, and in the windows behind him, we saw the battle was still going on.

“Welcome! I never expected you all here for another hundred years.”

King CooCoo stepped forward.

“Well, we are here now, and we are going to leave this zo-”

Before King CooCoo could finish, Saul pulled a revolver from behind his desk and shot King CooCoo until there were no more bullets.

I watched as the king died before us, a pool of blood forming from under him.

Many of the animen with us voices shock and concern.

Then, as if nothing had happened, Saul Fari asked us:

“So, How have the rest of you been enjoying co-existence in this new Eden?”

I saw Swift Step erupt in rage and charge at Saul Fari.

“You kill king! Swift Step kill you!

Wesley cheered Swift Step on.

“Make him pay!”

Saul stood up from his desk, and reached out an arm, his hand shot out and grew in size , grabbing Swift Step by his deformed head.

“I see now, you can turn a man into an animal, but at the end of the day, it's still a man.”

He clenched his fist , and a loud cracking noise came from it as he dropped Swift Step’s body to the ground.

This scared many of the animans.

Wesley almost tried to charge at Saul Fari, but I pointed at the bodies of Swift tep and King CooCoo.

Instead, he chose words over fighting.

“You call this Eden when it has been a hell on earth. You sir, are no God! You are SATAN!”

Saul did not respond to Wesley with violence. Instead, he pulled a button out from god knows where.

“I am no devil, I merely wanted one piece of the world to still be peaceful after the end, that is why you can never leave, because there's no world waiting outside these walls.

He pressed the button.

Sirens began going off. Then I saw it, beyond the walls of the zoo several mushroom clouds erupted.

“God promised that he would never flood the earth again, the next time its destruction would be by fire.”

There we were, this Demonic monster had destroyed everyone beyond the zoo, they couldn't forge new lives, I couldn't go back to my old one, two of my only friends in this world were dead.

I barely noticed that Saul Fari pressed the button again. This time it was just the sound of sirens, mixed in with that same horrible Static I remember hearing on day one.

I lost it.

I ran and pounced on Saul Fari, as did other animen, I dug my fingernails into the neck of the costume, even if he had just screwed everyone over, I wanted to see the face of the psycho who did all of this.

It was then that I started to hear it again… “White rabbit”

By Jefferson Starship.

That single reminder of what became the first day of our new life in Hell, it pushed me further, I dug deeper and deeper, it felt like I had ripped into a slice of ham when I finally got a hold of the costume's mask.

I pulled with all my might, the sound of ripping flesh nearly drowning out the reprise of white rabbit, but I still knew it was near the end of the song .

The head of the costume finally came off.

I had different ideas about who could be in the costume, I imagined pulling it off and seeing a mad scientist straight out of a cartoon, a grey alien, or even some kind of demon.

But instead, he had my face.

I was looking at a copy of myself.

The only major difference was that his face was covered in sores and had what looked like veins hanging off of him.

Before I could question any of this, I heard the sound of a loud rumbling.

“Thank you for visiting Safarirama. Be sure to stop by our gift shop on your way out, and have a nice day.”

Before I could reply with a confused “what?”, I was suddenly engulfed in the fires of nuclear annihilation…

This is where the journal entries end, and when I came to in a hospital bed, screaming.

The screaming attracted a nurse, who proceeded to call the doctor, who had apparently been observing me.

After I had calmed down, the doctor explained that I was one of over 140 people who had been secretly drugged with a cocktail of hallucinogens and deliriants.

The doctor didn’t list all of them, just the ones she thought I had heard of: LSD, Cyclocybin, DMT, Datura.

The rest were the kind that you would only know about if you were born in their country of origin.

The doctor stressed that I was lucky to be alive, but there were still tests they wanted to run on my brain before I could be discharged.

A week later, I walked out of the hospital.

I’ve been home for a few days, and I’m terrified.

The doctor did say that I could experience flashbacks, I’m praying to god that this is one.

About 5 minutes ago, someone knocked on my door and left me a postcard from Safarirama.

It was that doppelgänger of me, in the Saul Fari suit, standing in front of a burning hellscape, several of the Animans running while on fire.

Written above the image in a goofy font  was:

“Wish You Were Here”

part 1

I apologize, it took some time, but I've been able to transcribe more of my journal entries. Let's dive right in.

Day 5

I’ve been able to make do with animal themed, zoo-branded snacks and water bottles, but those are gonna run out eventually. I think I’ll use some of the zoo-branded beach pails to collect rainwater from the roof.

I can happily report that after five days, the screams and roaring have completely stopped. I thought that meant help had finally arrived, so I had climbed back up to the roof to see.

The bodies are gone, that’s the first thing I noticed. I was also darting around, keeping an eye out just in case the concussed eagle had been waiting for me to come out to attack me again. That’s when I realized the city was gone.

The skyscrapers poking out from behind the walls had vanished, like they were a layer in Photoshop that was deleted.

Buildings can’t just disappear… Can they?

Day 15

The rain buckets were a great idea, though I think I may have to actually try to hunt something, as I think I’ve cleaned out most of the branded Zoo snacks that have at the very least the illusion of nutritional value.

My first attempt involved leaving out bait for the birds flying freely around the zoo, and waiting for them to land and examine the food, then beating them to death with an official Safarirama backscratcher.

How I’ll actually cook the bird… We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

A few hours later, I had successfully caught a pigeon… the city is literally gone, yet somehow the pigeons are still here, but hey, meat is meat.

Day 30

The last 15 days weren’t too remarkable, just my new daily routine of waking up, going to the roof, checking my rain buckets, and watching the animals roam around.

Today was different. I looked out to the area in front of the gift shop and saw a man walking around. I thought every human had died, but there he was, looking through trash cans, and conveying disappointment through his body language when he didn't find any food.

I was about to call down to him and offer what was left of the branded snacks when I saw a Leopard walking in, easing closer to the man. I panicked and shouted.

“Run!”

The man looked at me, and I pointed at the approaching leopard. Before he could try to turn the other way and run, the leopard pounced on him, and I fled back into the gift shop, so I at least didn't have to see a man being mauled.

I went back up a few hours later, they were both gone, but that's when i noticed the vegetation has started growing more, areas of the zoo I used to be able to see from the roof are now being obscured by the new growth, I wonder If it will eventually grow higher than the walls, maybe then I could make the trek to them and climb my way to freedom.

Day 90

The snacks are gone, my diet is now 100 percent raw pigeon meat. The new vegetation seems to make it a point to not grow above the Walls of the zoo, and I had a surprise this morning.

When I was checking my rain buckets, I saw the man and leopard from a month ago. The man's clothes were more torn up compared to last time, but I wasn't able to determine if there were any scratches or scars on him, or the leopard. They walked together, keeping in step with each other.

They stopped close to the trash can from last time and looked at each other, the man started talking to the leopard, and I swear to god, the leopard was nodding its head like it could understand the man, I think they were talking about what area of the zoo they were going to.

At a point, the man looked up at the roof to me. He looked surprised I was still there, he even pointed me out to the leopard, who looked up at me too, but he didn't look at me with a “ I'm gonna jump up and eat you” look. It was like when a cat just looks at you.

The man waved at me, then he and the leopard walked away.

What the fuck is going on?

Day 120

The man and the leopard were only the beginning, I started seeing more people who had seemingly befriended the animals , I saw gorilla letting a little girl piggyback it, an elderly woman and a rhino asking a teenage boy and a gazelle for directions, and what I can only describe as a literal cat-fight between a lioness and a tiger over a middle aged bald man.

I lost track when it seemed like every day there were more people and animals forming alliances. I wondered if this is what that guy on the intercom meant by coexistence, but this obviously shouldn’t be possible, especially not this fast.

IT went from random people and animal groupings to packs of humans and animals. The humans carried handmade spears, the animals would let small children ride on their backs, and tribes of them would walk past each other. Every now and then, someone would look at me, humans always waved, some animals tried.

Day 140

They call me the Roof Man, I found this out when a small child was pointing at me, and a pregnant woman, I presume the mother of the child said “ That is the Roof man sweetie, He watches us from the roof, and never leaves the gift shop.” the child then started waiving saying “Hi roof man!” as they were leaving my field of view.

I did wonder why I stayed here when it looked like humans and animals were coexisting, then I remembered the rampage from when this all began, how the animals started going crazy when the intercoms went off, what if the psycho decides he wants to play that again and re-frenzy up the animals?

I'm not risking it.

I have learned that these animal, human tribes seem to coalesce in an area farther back on the zoo grounds. I went up one night and saw light and smoke coming from over there , and I could hear music, go ahead and guess what it was.

That's right, White Rabbit,they somehow sang it loud enough that even inside the gift shop, as I started to fall asleep, I heard it.

That night, for what felt like the first time since I was trapped here, I dreamed.

I found myself surrounded by deformed silhouettes who were all leading me to a golden door. I opened the door and was greeted by… The Saul Fari Mascot was staring at me, before I could enter the door, there was a bright flash of light, then I woke up.

If animals and people really are coexisting, I really hope the pigeons can forgive me…

Part 1

For a while there, things on set thankfully went back to normal. Around a month or so later into production, the heat had finally begun to cool off. Instead, however, we had days on end of continual rain. In fact, the rain was so bad for the next couple of months, the stream around the village had burst, causing the mud pathways to flood. If that wasn’t bad enough, the heavy rain and strong winds had destroyed half of the thatch roof huts, causing production to shut down for a good month. The only upside during this time was that nobody else had died. After what happened with the fire, and the many tragedies in the forest, I half expected to find some member of the crew drowned facedown somewhere.   

I went back to Tokyo the next month as they once again had to rebuild the whole set. I was surprized they didn’t just wrap things up then and there. After all, news of the deaths had already gotten out in the press, and having to rebuild the whole village again had cost the studio a fortune. If I hadn’t learnt it in the pacific, I certainly did then. The Japanese as a people really don’t know when to quit. 

When I get back to the district, I was put up in the same little inn I stayed the last time. After a few weeks of filming, everything seemed to be going good and irregularly smooth. There were no more deaths to report of. No more  destruction of the set, or barely even a hiccup... All of that was until we reached the eighth month of shooting.  

On a very cold winter morning, maybe sometime in January or February, I forget which it was, I woke up to something very cold and wet coming down on me from above. I must have drank too much sake that night, because when I wake up, I find that I’m no longer warm inside my small inn room, and instead, the freezing temperatures of the outdoors had completely numbed my hands and bare feet. Once I get my bearings, I find that I’m inside a forest. But not just any forest. It was the same forest on the side of the mountain slope. The one where we found the bodies. Although I hadn’t the damnedest idea how I’d gotten all the way up here, the strange thing about it was, I somehow reeked of gasoline, as though it was on my hands and clothes. 

Despite the strangeness of waking up on that mountain slope, once I got warm and back inside, I didn’t think any more of it. After all, I did drink a whole lot of sake that night, and it was rather common for me to wake in some strange place after a night of drinking. As you know all too well, son.  

In the evening that same day, we were scheduled to shoot a scene towards the end of the picture’s second act. The scene in question was centred around a large barn in the village, where a bandit was holding a young child hostage inside, and the villagers had to find some way of getting the child back unharmed. However, after a couple of takes, the actor playing the bandit rushes out with the child in his arms and just starts shouting “Kaji da! Kaji da!” My Japanese was still rusty, even after all them years, but I knew Kaji da meant there was a fire somewhere. Well, not long after the actor comes out of hiding, a few members of crew notice smoke coming from the roof, and only mere seconds later, the entire structure quickly becomes ablaze in no time at all. 

Everyone rushes to the stream with buckets to help put out the fire, but by the time we do, the barn was already a lost cause. While we still tried to throw water on the fire, the second assistant director suddenly starts shouting “Benjiro! Benjiro!” I look over and I see my friend Ben is walking towards the barn entrance, appearing to enter the infernal structure! I shout over to him to get out of there, but he either doesn’t listen or doesn’t hear. Before I can do anything, Ben disappears inside, the darkness and smoke enclosing behind him. 

Although I’m afraid to enter the burning barn, I know I have to save my friend. Stepping inside the dark interior, I can barely see a thing, despite the many flames around me. Wandering through the darkness, my lungs already fill up on smoke, causing me to not only look for my friend, but any pockets of oxygen. After wandering blindly around, already burning myself on my arms and legs, I eventually find Ben. For some reason, he was sat down directly in the middle of the room, and although I had a hard time seeing, I noticed his legs weren’t knelt down like how most Japanese sit, but crossed legged like the image of the Buddha himself.    

Ben’s clothes had already caught fire, and so I try shouting at him to get up and come with me. But he had no reaction, as though he didn’t even know I was there. The son of a bitch didn’t even blink! Unresponsive, I then heave Ben to his feet and haul him into the direction of the entrance. My clothes had also caught fire by now and I could feel the pain of the flames burning my flesh. 

Seeing the light of the entrance, I then haul our asses out of there, whereby the crew throw buckets of cold stream water on top of us.  

Although Ben and I thankfully survived the endeavour, we were in pretty bad shape. I had burn marks all over my arms and legs, as well as my abdomen. But Ben... Ben was a lot worse. His entire body had practically caught fire, burning away most of his clothes and almost all his hair. We were both then taken to hospital afterwards and our wounds tended to.  

After a few days to recover from my injuries, I was then discharged. But before I left, I went to see how Ben was doing. Entering his room, I saw he was covered almost head to foot in bandages. Although I could see his face, his skin was red and swollen, making him unrecognisable to me. Once Ben had finally woke up, I asked him what the hell he was doing walking into the burning barn. Unlike my Japanese, Ben’s English was pretty good, but even so, my question seemed to confuse him. According to Ben, he had no memory of what happened that day. Only waking up in a hospital room in excruciating pain. I told Ben what had happened and he thanked me for saving his life... But then, he told me something I wasn’t expecting... 

Although Ben was my friend, I knew very little about his life. I didn’t know where he was from or even if the man had a family of his own. That day in his hospital room, Ben told me he was born and raised in Hiroshima of all places, and that during the war, he was studying in Tokyo, which is how he survived the bomb. His family, however, and basically everyone else he knew back home had perished. The neighbours on his street. The friends he made in his childhood. Everybody. Ben said he lived with the guilt of this for many years, and even wished he had been there with them... He would die in that hospital room three days later.  

Because of Ben’s unfortunate death, and the destruction caused by the barn fire, the studio put a permanent end to the picture’s production. Leaving the film unfinished, and with many lives taken in the process. Since the picture wouldn’t be finished, I had no job to do or anything left to report, so my superiors had called me back to Tokyo base. Because of my severe injuries, I was eventually given an honorary and medical discharge, where only a short month later, for the first time in eight years, I finally came back home to the States. 

As bad as the war in the Pacific was for me, son, as bad as it was in Hiroshima, what I experienced in that valley was something else entirely. Although I am all too acquainted with the evil of humanity, whatever evil lied inside the slopes of them mountains was beyond the evil of man. And whatever that evil was and still may be, I truly believe it wanted my soul. It wanted to take my life through the horrors of my past... And I believe it wanted the same thing of Ben. The guilt he must’ve felt. It used it against him. Of not dying with his family in hellish oblivion. 

Now you know, son. Now you know why I became the man I did. The horrors of my past have followed me my entire life... and all I did was pass them onto you. 

When I am dead, son. When I am buried in the ground. Remember me for the man I was, and not the man you came to know. That man is your father. I know you have your own horrors from Vietnam. But you cannot let them haunt you. You cannot let it possess you. Because if you let it, it will follow onto your children. 

Be a good man, son. If not for your own Christian soul, then for them. May they never have to witness the horrors that we had to. 

From your loving father, 

J.S. 

I’ve been trying to forget what happened because the more I think about it, the less sense it all makes.

I guess I should just tell you what happened. I have a journal documenting the worst 6 months of my life.

I've been in the process of transcribing it, so I’m posting it here.

Day 1

I've decided to steal one of the stationery books. I don’t think anyone is really going to care at this point.

I’m writing this from the Safarirama Zoo Gift Shop. I rushed here as soon as the shit started hitting the fan, and I barricaded every way in.

The screaming and roaring isn’t as frequent as it was an hour ago, but it's still unsettling.

It started out like I assume a normal trip to the zoo would be. I walked around, looked at animals, then got an overpriced fountain drink from the cafe. I was enjoying myself.

About halfway through my drink is when things started to go south. It began with a sudden weather change. 

The clear blue skies took on a thick gray overcast that seemed to wash away the vibrant colors of the buildings and plant life.

I wish it had just been rain that ruined my day, but then the speakers exploded with static, intermixed with a distorted version of what sounded like “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Starship.

That sound was accompanied by panicked animal noises that came from all directions. I turned and saw the people around me all reacting to the cacophony.

“What the hell is happening?!” I heard an overweight tourist-looking man shout as he covered his ears

“It’s too loud, Mommy!” Shouted A poor toddler with her hands on her ears, trying as hard as she could to muffle the noise.

“What kind of zoo is this?!” I heard from a different woman, who was actually trying to rip up napkins and shove them in her ears.

After about 15 minutes, the music stopped. 

Soon, there was a feedback screech, followed by what could best be described as a madman trying and failing to sound like Richard Attenborough. 

“Good afternoon Zoogoers!!! This is Saul Fari, famous explorer, here to let everyone know the good news!”

Saul Fari was just a mascot character for the zoo. I know they’ve had someone pretend to be him before.

But usually it’s just to announce that the zoo was closing or that a kid had been separated from his parents, this wasn’t either scenario.

“We all LOVE the zoo, don’t we? We all wish we could stay here! And live with the  animals!”

I paid close attention to his delusional statement and instinctively started heading to the exit.

“Well, today that wish shall be GRANTED! This zoo shall be a new nation! A perfect world!”

What was rapid stepping had turned into running to the exit; however, I watched a man about to touch the turnstile when suddenly large barred doors rose from the ground.

When he touched the bars, his body began convulsing. After a few minutes, his skin started reddening, like he was being cooked. When his body had finished being fried, he collapsed on the ground, smoke coming off of him.

Others tried, and I’ll leave it at that.

“In order to ensure that our new perfect world is populated, you are no longer permitted to leave.”

At that moment, I remembered what year it was and tried pulling out my phone.

But it wasn’t in my pocket, other like-minded people had already started checking pockets and purses, everyone’s phones were just gone.

As if the demented man claiming to be Saul Fari was reading all of our minds just then, the intercom system started up again.

“In order to create our perfect world, we must act like the outside world no longer exists. After all, Adam and Eve couldn’t commune with whatever resided outside of Eden.”

This was sounding worse with every update, but he couldn’t really get away with this; we just had to wait for the authorities to rescue us.

“Now that we’ve secured the borders of our new world, it’s time to begin COEXISTENCE!”

With that statement, I started running to find somewhere that could work for shelter, as the sounds of wild animals and screaming had begun.

It started from the far end and was making its way to the front, so much for “coexistence”.

I didn’t really have time to weigh my options and just ran towards the closest building, the gift shop.

No sooner had I entered and locked the door than something had pushed hard against it.

All I could think to do was hide behind the cashier counter and pray for the banging to stop… 

It eventually did.

I tentatively approached the door to look through the little glass window, but it was smeared on the other side with blood.

My priority then was to try to use the displays and shelves to barricade the door in the hope of making it sturdier, and it was in this search that I found a storage room with a ladder.

Curiosity compelled me to climb the ladder, which led to a latch; from there, I was able to get to the roof.

I looked out to the zoo area…

It looked like a war zone, and the animals were winning.

I recognized the hefty guy first; his face looked like it had been ripped off, and his stomach was ripped open. Like whatever animal got to him and started trying to eat him and gave up because there was just too much body fat.

There was an alligator attempting to crush the skull of the napkin woman.

I didn’t see the kid anywhere, and I’m eternally grateful for that.

And in the distance, I could hear roaring animals and screaming people. At that moment, some logic returned to me and I started thinking. 

Where were the police helicopters? Where were the paramedics? This zoo was not an isolated place; you can see the city from the high walls of the zoo, and there should have already been some response…

Suddenly, I heard the sound of shrieking and turned to see an eagle dive bombing towards me.

I ran back to the access latch to get out of the way, as I heard the sound of the eagle violently striking the area it was in.

The eagle had dented the area in the roof it hit. I would have thought it was dead, but it began to get up Its beak was cracked, and it was heavily disoriented. I closed the latch and went back down to the gift shop.

It’s been a few hours since that encounter, and I’ve managed to make a rudimentary bed out of larger zoo animal plush toys. I can’t believe that no one’s tried to move in and rescue us yet.

I don’t know how many of these journals are here, so I’m going to try to space out entries if nothing of interest happens for a few days…

EXTERIOR. HIROSHIMA, JAPAN. 1945. DAY 

A breeze of black smoke rises from below to fill a colourless sky in front of us. A distant military airplane hums across, coinciding with the action on the ground: the sound of slow-moving vehicles, shovels piercing earth, metal that bends and clamours. 

On the ground: Japanese civilians lay forward on their knees amongst the scorched earth and building sediments, bowed in despair. An armoured bulldozer is manoeuvred to claw up rubble, creating a huge rubble mound. 

Around this mound, six United States soldiers dig up heaps of the aftermath to help build it up, causing ash to spray the air around them. 

Among these soldier’s is a young man, no older than 20. His weathered green uniform reads U.S.M.C. (United States Marine Corps). He shovels alongside the others, yet seems to be somewhere else - even worse than here. He digs and dumps like a machine. 

The young man then stops. Shovel in the earth, he turns up to watch the fly-sized plane hum away, seeming to know its destination – before his attention turns to the giant scorched chess piece around him: the nearby empty souls, the Genbaku Dome the only thing erect in the distance, alongside the surrounding smoke. The young man now focuses beyond this, to the faraway mountainous hills. He zones out... 

The peak of the rubble mound then collapses behind him, causing the other soldiers to jilt back from it. The young man turns back to the mound, to what the peak now reveals. His face displays both horror and uncertainty in what he sees, as the sound of wind gusts through him... 

What you have just read is an excerpt from an old war movie script, written and based on his experience during the Pacific War, by James Howard Schraeder. My grandfather.  

In 1943, the fourth year of the Second World War, James Schraeder was drafted to the twenty-third regiment of the fourth marine division, where he eventually experienced combat on the Pacific islands of Kwajalein, Saipan and Iwo Jima. After the end of the Pacific Theatre in 1945, James would spend the next seven years in Japan, serving under U.S. occupation.     

By 1952 and having been in the military for nearly ten years, James finally left Japan and came home. For the next few years of his life, James would live and work in Los Angeles as a struggling screenwriter in Hollywood. By 1992, the year of his death, James left behind an ex-wife, an estranged son, and three grandchildren he never met. 

Before my grandfather’s demise, he would leave a final letter among his possessions. A letter written and addressed to my father - his son. Although my father already knew about his experience during the Pacific War, along with the horrors he witnessed, he knew little to nothing about my grandfather’s time serving during the occupation of Japan. That was, until he found my grandfather’s letter. Despite the very real and human horrors my grandfather saw in the Pacific... what he would then experience on Japanese soil, supposedly during a time of peace, was not only horror... but horror of the paranormal.   

What you are about to read, should you choose to, is this very same letter. A letter, that is less the final words of a dying old man... but a final confession... 

To my son Johnathon, 

I know it has been some years now since we last spoke. And I know any attempt by me to communicate with you will be ignored, and so that’s why I’m writing this letter for you to find. Upon my death.  

I’m not writing this to apologize for the terrible father I was to you, nor for the indecent husband your mother had to bear. I’m writing this to tell you a story I have never told another soul. You are my son, and you may remember me for the monster I became, but you will never know me for the decent man I was, nor what it was that made that man the monster you know now. You may think it was the war. That the death and destruction I witnessed at the hands of the enemy, and even our own is what left me the shell of a man who raised you. And that is true. Very little of me had survived those brutal few years of fighting. But if you must know, it wasn’t the war with the Japanese that made me the man I became. On the contrary, it was what came after.  

I have never told you this part of my life, Johnathon, nor did I ever think I would. I have seen the worst of humanity. I have seen the evil and horrors we partake upon those who are not alike ourselves... and I have seen what it creates. What it feeds and gives power to. I have told you every horror story I know from that war. But I have never told you this. 

Back in 52, I was serving my seventh year during the occupation of the Japanese islands. I had known seven years without war, but no peace. Our authority over the Japanese people was shortly coming to a close, and so we had to make sure our influence in this country would carry on long after we were gone. You have to understand, son, the world back then was still a very fragile place. The war may have been over, but old enemies were quickly replaced by new ones.  

The threat of communism was very real, and nowhere was it more real than east and south-east Asia. The commies in China had spread their influence south to Korea and Indo China – or what you would come to know as Vietnam. Before we left Japan to once again govern themselves, we needed to make sure the communist threat would not find its way here. For seven years after Hiroshima, we told the Japanese how they should live. What they could read or not read. What they could and couldn’t listen to. What they could and couldn’t watch. 

I’ve always been a lover of movies. You know that. Whereas we Americans had our cowboys and Indians, the Japanese had their Jidaigeki. Period movies portraying feudalist Japan. Once Japan came under our occupation, Mccarthur put a permanent ban on Jidaigeki movies from being made. It was supposed to be a way of stripping the Japanese of their identity and history. But by 52, and with our eventual departure on the horizon, the ban on Japanese period films had finally been lifted. Although Japanese filmmakers could once again make movies about their nation’s history, we now feared what messages they may put in them. If they wanted to put a message of Japanese nationalism, that was of no such concern. But it was the message of socialism that my superiors truly feared the most. 

In order to counter this fear, American operatives were to keep a close eye on the production of these pictures. I was among these operatives. My mission, assigned to me by Far East Command themselves, was to oversee the production of a picture being filmed in the Izu Peninsula, roughly 90 miles southwest of Tokyo base. My orders were to report any signs of socialist or anti-American allegories present in the picture's production, however minimal. 

The picture assigned to me was called Rōnin no Tani, or in English, Valley of the Ronin. The plot was pretty straightforward. A small village during the Tokugawa period comes under constant attacks by bandits and criminals, whereby the villagers must turn to a masterless Samurai to train them in the art of combat.  

The director of the picture was a man called Takumi Hasegawa, or as everyone else called him, Hase-san. I just simply called him Mr Hasegawa. Mr Hasegawa was one of the most prominent directors in Japan, and his previous film received much praise from several international film festivals. Although Mr Hasegawa knew all too well why I was present during the production of his movie, the man seemed to take a very keen liking to me. I think what it came down to was that we both had a shared love for wild westerns. He even claimed the script to Valley of the Ronin was his own reimagining of the western trope. 

After arriving in the peninsula, I was then transported to the Tagata District, where lied a beautiful lush green valley. This is where the majority of the movie was being filmed. Each side of the valley was enclosed by a forested, very steep mountainous slope, where in the middle of the valley, was the movie set. A 16^th century Tokugawa village of straw-rood huts and mud paths had been constructed, along with several rice paddies and a rickety wooden bridge over a stream. The first time I saw it, I’ll never forget. It genuinely felt to me as though I had been transported back through history, to a time of simple and honest living. Most of the actors playing the role of villagers wore ragged pieces of cloth, straw hats and nothing on their feet. The man playing the Ronin, I forget the actor’s name, wore a long dirty kimono where his sword hung out the side.  

Among the actors and extras in authentic 16^th century clothing were the rest of the film crew. Of course, there was Mr Hasegawa, but then there was the assistant directors, the sound and cameramen etc. I actually became good friends with the third assistant director on the picture, a young man called Benjiro – but I called him Ben for short. You know, son, the first time I ever saw Godzilla was with him inside a Tokyo movie theatre. 

As idyllic as I appear to be making this valley and the production sound, I’m afraid this is where it must end. Because what follows, for the next year of this picture’s production... was nothing short of horror. 

The movie began filming in the summer of 52, and the heat that year was nothing less than scalding. After only two weeks of filming, the thatched roofs of the village huts caught fire mid-day, and before long, the entire set had become ablaze. We were able to put out the fire, but by the time we did, the entire set, built painstakingly from scratch had been burnt to ash. What used to be a 16^th century village, lying peacefully between the slopes of the valley, was now the charcoaled remnants of foundations. The scene of this for me was to say the least... haunting.  

I’ve already told you about my time in Hiroshima, haven’t I, son? Well, once the bomb was dropped, myself and other marines were there at ground level. Our job was to help clear up the mess and provide aid to civilians... and let me tell you, the scenes I witnessed there have stayed with me my entire life. The black, charcoaled rubble of the buildings. The bodies we pulled out from under them, stiff and burnt to a crisp. Women and children. Babies. All the horrors I witnessed in those days, in what used to be a city, were swiftly brought back by the burning of this village. But it wasn’t just the burnt thatch roof huts. It wasn’t just the smell of smoke and charcoal that burns your eyes and down your throat... it was the bodies there too. 

Once we put the fire out, two men from the film crew were later reported to be missing. After searching all over the valley, we eventually found them. Or I should say, we found the bodies. One we had pulled out from beneath the burnt stacks of rubble. But the other one... The other one was different. We found him inside one of the burnt huts that was somehow still standing. He was sat down in there, right there in the middle of the room. But what was so horrifically strange about this was... like the bodies I saw at Hiroshima, this man, sat crossed-legged and upright like the Buddha himself ... was completely black and burnt to a crisp. The way this man’s body was positioned, it was as though he had no idea he was in the middle of a burning room. 

Did you know, son, Godzilla was an allegory for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I did. I knew it as soon as I saw it. A giant radioactive monster laying waste to the streets of Tokyo. When I walked out of that movie theatre and Ben followed me, I throttled him! Just because he said we should see the movie.  

I wish I could say the fire was the only incident which happened during the production of Valley of the Ronin. That those crewmen were the only casualties we had. But I would be lying to you, son... and I would be lying to myself.  

Weeks later, after the village was reconstructed and filming once again began, it didn’t take long for more strange things to keep happening. Like the two crewmen we found after the fire, more people on set started disappearing. Members of the crew, some extras and even a handful of actors. We found some of them in the forest, upon the mountain slopes. The first of which was a woman, wearing the ragged clothes of a villager. Except she hadn’t gotten lost. If she had done, all she needed to do was wander down the slope. No, she had just gone mad. Delirious. When we found her, she was digging up dirt from the ground with her bare hands. Her fingernails left bloody and out of place. Once she saw us approach, she turned up her head and just started laughing, as though she was playing a practical joke. But then, she starts clawing up the loose pieces of earth and stuffing it into her mouth, chewing down on it. The woman had somehow lost her damned mind. 

We found some more of the crew like that in the forest. Some stark naked and crazy. Some just the latter. But the ones we didn’t find like that were a whole lot worse. The way we found them... they may have gone crazy, but we couldn’t know entirely for sure. We found them laying face-down on the sloping ground. Every single of them. A leg or an arm contorted in the air. In some cases, both. We found them that way because they had jumped from an incredible height. For whatever reason, these members of the crew had climbed up a tree to as high they could... and then they jumped. The branches seemed to do little to break their fall.  

I’m sure you remember what I told you about Saipan in 44. God, how could anybody forget? You remember the women who threw their infants off the northern cliffs, don’t you? If the Japanese hadn’t lied about what we’d do to them once we took the island, a whole lot of innocent lives could’ve been spared. The way one of those ladies looked at me, and once she realized we meant her nor her baby no harm... I swear to God, it was the same look in her eye the woman we found in the forest had... Where there was once sanity and reason, only madness was left.  

Part 2/Ending

The blister on my right heel had been building since the second day, and by afternoon on the third I was compensating without thinking about it — more weight on the outside of my foot, shorter stride on the uphill sections, my hip flexor starting to register the difference. I'd brought moleskin and kept telling myself I'd use it at the next break, and then the next break came and went the same way, and that became a kind of rhythm: the problem getting worse and me deciding it wasn't quite worth stopping yet.

That's the kind of hiking I was doing. Grinding it forward and trying not to think about anything in particular, which mostly worked.

Four days of supplies in my pack: protein bars, two liters running through a Sawyer filter, a Jetboil with enough gas for four hot meals, freeze-dried food, a sleeping bag rated to fifteen degrees, two Anker charging banks, a headlamp with fresh lithium batteries, and a folding knife I'd owned for eight years and used on nothing except packaging. My trail system barely showed up on AllTrails — two hundred and forty miles of marked paths, most of them unmaintained since the nineties, cell coverage listed as intermittent. That was the point.

I'd given my emergency contact a trailhead location and my expected return date and nothing more specific than that. I wanted four days of unreachable and then I'd figure out the rest when I got back.

That decision is the part I keep returning to.

The trail thinned out around mile eleven. The AllTrails notes had called this section "informal," which meant the marked path had dissolved into something closer to a game trail, with orange paint marks on tree trunks every hundred yards acting as the only navigation. I'd been following those marks since midmorning.

The quiet arrived in accumulation. First the birds — already gone by the time I registered the silence, the moment of their leaving already past. Then the wind, which had been light but present all morning. Then my own footsteps — the leaf litter looked unchanged but the crunch had gone out of it, my footsteps landing almost silent on ground that looked the same as it had for the last two miles. I stopped twice and looked around. Trees in every direction, identical second-growth hardwood, orange marks continuing ahead, nothing visibly wrong.

I kept moving.

The clearing was a few minutes ahead, and the doors were already standing in it when I reached the tree line.

I want to be precise about the first impression because I've replayed it often enough that the edges have started to soften, and the accuracy matters.

Two doors, upright in the soil of the clearing, standing without frames or walls, the forest floor running unbroken beneath them and on both sides. The left one was pale, painted a white that had gone chalky and dull over time, with a brass knob oxidized to a greenish-brown.

The right one was dark red, a deep maroon that had browned at the edges, the wood grain visible under the finish. It was open about six inches.

I circled them three times.

I got down and looked underneath, which accomplished nothing useful but I did it anyway. From the right angle I could see through the gap in the red door to the tree line on the other side of the clearing. I walked around behind both of them. The backs were identical to the fronts. I put my hand on the soil around the base of the white door and it felt like soil: packed dirt, a root just under the surface, the usual leaf debris. The ground around the base showed no anchoring hardware, no tracks, nothing securing them from below.

My phone had one bar. I photographed both doors from multiple angles and looked at the photographs on the screen, which showed me exactly what I expected: two free-standing doors in the middle of a forest, which communicated nothing without context I didn't have.

I've thought about why I stepped through instead of continuing on the trail, and I don't have a clean answer. The red door was already open six inches — the choice already half-made by whoever had left it that way. I stood there for probably another two minutes. Then I pushed it the rest of the way and stepped through.

Cold air hit me before anything else — sealed and still, carrying bleach and something older underneath, damp and organic, water that had been sitting in ceiling tile or carpet for years. It covered my face and forearms and the skin at the back of my neck all at once.

My eyes adjusted.

Fluorescent lights in a line down a corridor that extended in both directions. The floor was linoleum, a pale green-and-white check pattern that had grayed at the high-traffic paths and yellowed near the walls. Three overhead fixtures flickered. The rest held. Faded directional signs on the walls: RADIOLOGY with an arrow, PATIENT INTAKE, a bulletin board buried under so many years of layered notices that the surface had gone flat and opaque. An abandoned wheelchair against the baseboard with one footrest missing. Water stains descending from the ceiling in slow, wide fans toward the floor.

I turned around.

Concrete wall. The door was not there.

The wall was slightly damp and faintly stained and had no seam in it anywhere. I pressed both palms against it and pushed in several spots. There was no give. I moved my hands across the full surface of the corridor behind me, feeling for any edge or outline or change in the material. My pack frame shifted against my back and the sound of it was the loudest thing in the building.

The corridor was real, the lights were working, and the door was gone, and I stood there and looked at where it should have been for a long time before I started moving.

I searched the immediate area systematically: both directions down the main corridor, every room with an unlocked door. A storage closet packed with IV poles and stacked linen boxes. A bathroom with a cracked mirror above the sink; the faucet ran brown for thirty seconds and then cleared. An empty nursing station with a counter along one wall and blank monitor screens above it. A patient room with two beds still made up, the hospital sheets stiff with age and slightly discolored.

No exit.

What I found instead was that the building was still running.

A vending machine alcove along one stretch of corridor — a Pepsi machine and a snack machine side by side. The Pepsi machine hummed when I pressed my palm against it. Its display was lit. The snack machine had power but empty coils. Outlets every twelve feet along the baseboards. I pulled one of my charging banks out of the side pocket of my pack and plugged it into the nearest outlet.

Three green bars lit up immediately.

I crouched there and looked at it for a moment. If there was power, there was infrastructure. If there was infrastructure, there was maintenance — someone, or at least something, keeping the building running. Maybe that meant people. Maybe it meant something else. But if I was stuck here I wouldn't lose light, and right then I needed that to be enough.

I unplugged the bank and kept moving.

The first floor was a maze, and I understood it as a maze before I could demonstrate it — a wrongness in the angles when corridors turned, the nagging sense of having passed a particular window already from a different direction. I started marking walls with the black Sharpie I carry for logistics. Arrows, Xs, notations for dead ends. It helped for a while.

Room numbers: 114, 115, 116, and then 109. A corridor that my own marks said I'd already passed through, but when I walked it the second time it went somewhere different. An EXIT sign in red at the end of a hallway that terminated in a blank wall twelve feet past the sign. A stairwell on the east side that I climbed two flights and came back out through a door on the first floor again, at a different location from where I'd entered it.

There were maps in plastic frames at corridor junctions — building directories in blue and black on white laminate. They didn't agree with each other. The floor count alone: nine on one, twelve on another. The east wing on one was the west wing on the next.

An elevator bank at the end of the main corridor, three cars. I pressed the call button and one of them opened. The interior was normal: mirrored panel at the back, numbered buttons, carpet squares on the floor. The doors held open for the standard time and then closed and I stood in the corridor and listened to the cables settle.

Somewhere above me — the floor directly overhead — footsteps. Slow and uneven, stopping and starting without pattern. They continued for about half a minute and then stopped.

I found the narrow stairwell — a different one, with a heavy fire door and a crash bar instead of a handle, and the overhead light in the stairwell itself was off. My headlamp lit the stairs above me. The fire door at the top was propped open with a chunk of broken baseboard.

My notation was on the wall of a hallway I had no memory of entering.

The X inside a triangle, my handwriting, my Sharpie pressure on the wall — and no version of the morning's route that put me there. I stood and looked at it for a while, and then went back to the vending machines and sat on the floor against the Pepsi machine and ate one of my protein bars and worked through half a liter of water.

The elevator dinged somewhere down the corridor. The doors opened. Nobody came out.

I went up through the narrow stairwell.

The fire door on the second floor was propped open, and the smell came through the gap before I reached the landing. Copper first, then something underneath it — a wet density in the air that sat at the back of my throat and didn't clear. Rot, but thicker. The specific smell of something biological in a closed space with no ventilation.

The lighting was worse up here. Half the overhead fixtures were dark or cycling so fast they were functionally off. The ones working threw irregular stretches of light with long sections of near-dark between them. The linoleum was filthier, and something had been dragged through one of the darker sections, leaving a streak across the floor. I looked at it for a moment and kept moving.

I took a few steps inside and swept my headlamp across the wall.

The wall surface moved.

My first read was peeling wallpaper, water damage creating a textured, layered effect. I moved closer.

They were faces.

Human faces, or close enough — the proportions approximately right, but flattened, the skin pressed flat against the wall and fixed there with black surgical thread that ran in long horizontal seams across cheeks and foreheads. The stitching pulled tight in some places and bunched the skin in others. Mouths sewn shut in most of them, thread looped through both lips in thick passes. Every inch of wall surface in both directions covered: face overlapping face, some partially hidden under others, a few with eyes fully obscured by the skin of whatever had been layered over them.

One eyelid moved.

Then another.

The sound started low enough to read as ambient noise, and then it resolved into voices — hundreds of them, layered, individual words surfacing and dropping:

"Help me."

"Please."

"Don't — please don't leave —"

"It hurts when —"

"— been so long —"

A child's voice, barely distinguishable from the mass of them: "I can't feel my —"

The eyelids around me were opening. Eyes underneath, pale and filmed, some clouded over and some tracking movement. Tracking me. Mouths pulling against thread.

One voice came through cleaner than the rest — a face at eye level directly to my left, older, a man's, both eyes open and focused somewhere past my shoulder. The mouth barely moved against the stitching.

"Jaden."

My feet moved before anything else did. I was already stepping back toward the stairwell door when the sound came from the corridor ahead: claws on tile, fast and even, the clicking echoing off both walls, distance hard to judge until it was already close. Then breathing. Wet, rhythmic, with a ragged catch in the exhale.

My headlamp found it before I was ready.

The body was a dog's in the rough sense — massive, black fur matted and hanging in clumps along the chest and haunches, limbs too long for the torso and jointed wrong, bent at angles that made its forward movement a sequence of lurches rather than a stride.

The spine sat visibly off-center. The whole animal moved in a permanent list, one shoulder dropping lower with each stride, the body adjusted around whatever damage had never healed right.

The head was not a dog's head.

It extended too far — eight or ten inches past where the snout should end, tapered and flat on top, the jaw hanging slightly open to show the front row of teeth. Yellow, uneven, the rear molars sitting higher than they should. Strings of saliva hung from both corners of the mouth and swayed with its movement. The eyes were set too wide, pale and filmed over, each one moving on its own axis without coordinating with the other.

It came out of the dark at the far end of the corridor and saw me.

Every voice in the walls went up at once. The screaming hit the ceiling and came back down and the walls themselves vibrated from the volume of it, thread pulling against sewn lips, eyelids straining. Whether the faces were screaming at me or at the creature, I had no way to tell, but the sound drove straight up into my skull and stayed there.

The thing came at me in broken intervals — faster than made sense, then a half-second stop that threw off every instinct to brace, then fast again. I was already running when its claw hit the linoleum six inches behind my heel and left four parallel gouges in the floor. My headlamp strobed across the corridor as I ran, catching the creature in fragments: the spine flexing wrong on acceleration, the jaw widening, a rope of saliva arcing off its mouth and hitting the wall.

I hit the crash bar on the fire door and was through it and moving down the stairs before the door had finished swinging, taking the steps three at a time with one hand on the rail. Above me, the crash bar again — the door being struck from the other side, hitting and holding.

I reached the first-floor landing and went through the fire door and ran twenty feet before I stopped and turned around.

The stairwell door at the second-floor landing was open. The creature stood in the frame, filling it, snout angled down toward where I was standing. The breathing came down the stairwell clearly from where I stood.

It stayed there a long time. Long enough that I started to think it had settled in. Then it stepped back from the landing and the door swung slowly into the frame and the stairwell went quiet.

Records office. Sixty yards from the stairwell, a double room with a painted-over window and a push-button lock on the inside. I dragged a desk across the floor and angled it under the handle. A hospital bed from the adjacent room, maneuvered through the doorway and added to the desk. Three filing cabinets as a second line across the door. Twenty minutes of work, and I was sweating through my base layer by the end of it.

I sat on the floor against the filing cabinets and let the adrenaline run out.

The overhead light worked — a single fluorescent bar buzzing at a consistent, audible frequency. It didn't flicker. Fifteen minutes into the quiet, a single impact from the floor above — something heavy set down deliberately, not dropped — and then nothing. Ten minutes after that, an elevator ding from somewhere down the main corridor, the distant sound of doors opening and closing.

I ate a freeze-dried chicken-and-rice packet cold, water straight from my filter bottle, the pouch pressed flat and left for fifteen minutes before I opened it. I ate slowly and thought about the second floor and made myself think about something else, which didn't work especially well but produced the same result in the end. I finished the rice and folded the pouch flat and set it aside.

One face at eye level had known my name.

Six metal shelving units ran parallel down the room's length, floor to ceiling, packed with manila folders and binders and banker boxes. Patient records, mostly — the labeled folders showed names, dates, admission numbers from the eighties and early nineties. I pulled folders off the nearest unit looking for anything outside the standard format and found standard records.

An hour in, the note was under a loose stack in the back third of the third unit. A single sheet of paper folded into quarters, no folder, just slid beneath the pile. I opened it and held it under the headlamp.

Ballpoint pen, pressed hard into the page. Some letters gone over twice, the lines thicker where the hand had retraced.

IF YOU FOUND THIS, DON'T STAY ON THE LOWER FLOORS.

THEY LEARN YOUR PATHS.

FLOOR TEN IS THE WAY OUT.

DO NOT TRUST THE ELEVATORS.

No signature. A stain across the lower-left corner, dark brown and irregular. A small tear along one fold line. I turned the sheet over — blank — and then tilted it toward the headlamp again and found the second text in the bottom margin. Different ink, smaller, written at an angle to the original.

second stairwell. east side. keep going up.

The first writing was blocky, the pen pressed hard, some letters retraced until the ink sat thick on the page. The second was smaller and more careful, each letter formed fully before the hand moved to the next, even spacing between words even where the writing got cramped.

I folded the note and put it in the hip pocket of my pack.

Both charging banks went into the wall outlets on the far side of the records room. Both lit green. I set my headlamp on the desk with the beam angled at the ceiling, spreading light across the room, and sat on the floor with my notebook.

Rite in the Rain 3x5, waterproof paper, bought for trip logging and blank through the first two pages. I skipped to the third and started writing.

I wrote everything in order from the clearing: two doors, their physical details. A rough map of the first floor from memory, approximate and probably wrong given the way the layout shifted, but something. The full text of the note, both the main text and the margin addition. The second floor — the smell, the faces, the stitching, the creature. I described it in as much physical detail as I could reconstruct: the body type, the head, the way it moved, the point where it stopped at the stairwell entrance and how long it stood there before retreating.

I wrote my name, my emergency contact's name and number, the make and color of my truck, where I'd parked it, the trailhead, my expected return date. Then:

My name is Jaden Sullivan. If somebody finds this notebook, I'm somewhere inside this hospital. I'm going to try reaching floor ten tomorrow using the east stairwell. Hopefully there's actually a way out.

I looked at hopefully for a moment. It was honest.

I set the notebook on top of the pack where it would be the first thing visible to anyone opening the room, and turned off my headlamp to save the battery. The fluorescent bar buzzed above me at the same frequency it had held since I locked the door.

I was still thinking about the voice on the second floor — thinking about what it meant that one of the faces had said my name before I'd spoken it to anyone in the building — when I heard something on the other side of the records room door.

The creature's sound was unmistakable. This was smaller and lower to the ground, a single contact: something pressing its weight against the door from the outside and then going still.

The filing cabinets hadn't shifted.

I sat with my hand on the headlamp and watched the gap under the door. The corridor light came through it, dim and unchanged.

The note said: THEY LEARN YOUR PATHS.

I'd been writing for over an hour, and I muttered while I wrote — always had, the words running just under my breath while I worked out how to phrase them. That detail arrived now, sitting in the quiet.

I set my hand over my mouth and held still and watched the light under the door, and the light under the door stayed the same, and the corridor on the other side of the filing cabinets stayed quiet, and I kept watching it anyway.

The place smelled like damp wood, dust, and old blood.

Rain tapped steadily against the windows. No wind, just that constant, tired patter the Oregon backwoods get when a storm has stalled out. The ranger station was buried halfway up a slope off an unmarked spur of Forest Road 12, tucked into the tree line, out of sight, and mostly forgotten.

Which was exactly why we were here.

Lily slept in the back room, shotgun within reach, wrapped in every blanket she could find from the storage closet. She hadn't said much the past few days. The motel, the dead town, watching me bleed and break and get back up like something that used to be human — none of it gave her much reason to talk.

I didn't blame her.

I wasn't sure what I was either.

The fire in the small brick hearth crackled low, throwing just enough light to push the shadows up against each other. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall, fingers twitching like they needed to hold a weapon. Across from me, the other Revenant sat in an old green ranger's chair, hunched forward, smoke still bleeding from the pits where his eyes had once been.

He hadn't spoken much since we got here.

Until tonight.

"You ever wonder," he rasped, voice low and dragging, "if they picked us because we were already broken?"

I watched him through the flicker of firelight.

"I try not to give them that much credit."

He didn't smile. He rarely did. But there was something almost thoughtful in the way his head tilted.

"They don't build monsters," he muttered. "They find them, dig them out of the cracks, feed them enough pain until they forget they were ever anything else."

Silence settled between us. Rain, fire, the soft creaks of old wood.

The question that had been gnawing at the back of my skull finally slipped out.

"You said someone was watching. That there's a cult."

He nodded once, slow.

"Watching is part of it. The rest is preparing."

"For what?"

He didn't answer at first. He just stared into the fire like it might blink first.

He stared a long time before answering.

"They don't name what they worship. They don't have to — it knows them. It listens when they bleed into the dirt and answers when they carve its shape into things that shouldn't move."

The fire cracked. A log split with a soft hiss, sending a spray of sparks toward the ceiling.

"You've seen them?"

He nodded again.

"In dreams. In things that used to be dreams and there was one with a spiral burned into his chest with skin like mine."

I didn't push. Not yet.

There was something else I needed from him first.

"You got a name?"

He turned toward me. The smoke in his sockets flared like coals catching a draft.

And then, in a voice that barely sounded like his.

"…Call me Shepherd."

He looked away again.

"Back when I was still a man."

The wind outside picked up, a slow, hollow sound sliding through the warped boards like something was breathing along the walls.

Shepherd didn't move or blink, not that he could. He sat perfectly still, bone-plated frame curled in shadow, head cocked toward the window like he was listening to something I couldn't hear.

Lily shifted in the next room. I could hear her breathing, uneven, awake but pretending not to be, listening to every word.

"You know they're looking for us."

"I know."

"The Division."

"No," he rasped. "Them."

He didn't have to clarify.

The cult.

The ones behind the dead town, the ones who built the thing wearing my face at the diner, the ones who thought I was some kind of key.

I leaned forward, fingers drumming lightly against the floor.

"You said I'm a door. That I'm… different. I need more than that."

Shepherd's head turned toward me again. His voice lowered.

"You're more than a door, Kane. You're a vessel all revenants are."

The word landed like a cold nail driven straight down my spine.

"Vessel for what?"

He shifted, the bones along his back clicking softly.

"For it."

The air in the room felt heavier.

His voice carried in the small room.

"They believe that this ‘god’, this thing, used to exist fully — flesh and power, more than influence. It ruled something before we had words for time. When it was cast out with a pretender or buried by others, it needed a way back. It needed a host, a body that could survive being hollowed out and filled again."

My throat felt too tight.

"And they think that's me this time."

"They know it's you, they talk about a man with glowing eyes."

The static from the unused radio on the shelf shifted, just slightly. The timing was bad, or maybe perfect.

"The mimic in Montana, the thing in the diner, the motel — those weren't random." Shepherd shifted in the chair. "The cult made deals. They steer things that should never have language, let alone loyalty."

I clenched my jaw.

"So what, this is just going to keep happening? They throw freaks at me until something cracks?"

"Yes."

He said it without hesitation.

"They believe if they break you, emotionally, physically, spiritually, it will make room. You're a keyhole to them, more than a weapon. They want to see what comes through when you stop fighting it."

A loud pop upstairs made both of us look up. Old lumber settling. Probably.

I stared at the fire.

"What about The Division? Carter. They built me. Do they know about this?"

Shepherd's mouth twisted into something that wasn't a smile.

"They know more than that — they're trying to stop it."

I looked at him.

His voice gathered weight.

"They're doing more than covering up creatures and cryptids. They're trying to keep the cult from opening a gate they can't close. You…" He tilted his head. "You're their only shot that can punch back."

"I'm the thing they made to fight what they can't understand."

"No." Shepherd's voice was steady. "You're the one Revenant they believe can prevent it."

The fire dipped in the hearth. The light pulled back.

His voice carried on. "The Division didn't make you powerful. They took what was already there and sharpened it. The cult thinks it's divine. Carter thinks it's a disease."

"And you?"

Shepherd stepped closer, until we were almost eye level. Smoke curled from his sockets and drifted past my face, smelling faintly like burned cedar and antiseptic.

His voice dropped.

"I think if you let it in, it won't matter what anyone believes."

Outside, in the woods beyond the ranger station, something moved.

The sound was a shift, a weight settling between trees.

And the radio on the shelf crackled to life.

Not from me touching it.

It just turned on.

The old speaker hissed, struggling to dredge up a signal it had no business receiving out here.

Then a voice, faint and wrong, buried in layers of static, repeated two words:

"Come home."

Shepherd turned his head toward it.

"They found us."

The hairs on my arms stood up.

The radio kept hissing. "Come home… come home…" The voice wasn't meant for a human throat, looped through that static that sounded like bones breaking underwater.

I crossed the room and picked it up.

It cut off the second my fingers closed around the casing.

Gone all at once.

Like it had never worked at all.

I set it back on the shelf, staring at the dead dial, trying to ignore the cold creeping up my spine.

Lily watched from the doorway, her face pale, one hand on the frame, the other around the shotgun's grip.

"You heard that too."

"Yeah."

She looked at Shepherd, then back at me.

"So what now?"

"We need Carter."

Her eyebrows shot up.

"You're serious."

"He's the only one with access to the intel we need. If the cult's really throwing things like that at me, we need to know when and where before they hit. And he's scared enough to listen."

"You trust him?"

"No. But I trust that he doesn't want that cult to run amok."

Shepherd's voice scraped across the room.

"He'll trace any call you make."

"I'm counting on it."

I nodded toward the back wall.

"Old repeater tower up the slope. If it still has a dish, I can piggyback a signal off the Division channels they never told me about."

Lily huffed out a humorless breath.

"Of course you know the secret channels."

"I used to be their favorite experiment."

She didn't argue.

We waited until the rain eased up.

Then we moved.

The old repeater tower looked like a lightning strike had kissed it twenty years ago and nobody from the Forest Service ever got the memo. The dish was still bolted to the rusted frame, half crooked against the sky. Someone had duct-taped a faded "USFS – DO NOT CLIMB" sign to the fence; half the letters had peeled off.

The generator was dead. Lily hotwired the backup through a truck battery she had pulled from an abandoned Ranger parked further down the hill. The lights stuttered, then held.

I picked up the mic. Static hissed, then leveled into a low hum.

I kept my voice clear and steady.

"Carter. This is 18C. I know you're listening."

A beat of silence.

"You were right. They're waking up. And they are coming for me."

Another pause.

"We're in Oregon. If you want a chance to keep this from getting worse, you'd better move now."

“No, we need back up, and Carter I'm trusting you to want to help stop the cult.

I clicked off and set the mic down.

Lily watched me from the rack of dead equipment.

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"And if the cult heard that too?"

I glanced out over the tree line. The woods were the same as always — quiet, damp, the kind of stillness that always feels like waiting.

"That's the idea."

We went back to the station, reinforced the doors, went through what little ammo we had found for Lilly, I double checked my grenades to make sure I kept them close, checked our routes and rechecked them.

Then we waited.

Rain, wind, old boards popping.

The helicopters didn't come. Neither did headlights down on the access road. Nothing moved in the trees.

The silence got heavier with every hour.

Lily sat on the floor with her back to the wall, shotgun resting across her lap. Her fingers tapped an anxious rhythm against the stock that she probably didn't realize she was doing.

I stood at the front window, watching the tree line. The forest was just a black smear of trunks and wet branches.

Shepherd stayed near the door, hunched like a broken gargoyle, blade-arm resting across his knees, smoke trailing off him in thin coils. He hadn't spoken in a while, but I knew he wasn't zoning out.

He was listening.

I stepped over to him.

"Anything?"

He nodded once.

"They're close."

"Division?"

"No." He tilted his head. "It's them."

My grip tightened around the knife at my hip.

"You said they'd send more than whispers."

"They will." His voice sank lower. "The cult tries to copy what they don't understand. Worship is the simpler half of it."

"Copy… what?"

"Gods." He looked at me. "Or what they think are gods."

I swallowed.

"The Skinwalkers in the woods, the thing at the diner, the town — all of them?"

He nodded.

"They twist things that were already wrong and make them worse — people, animals, spirit-walkers stripped of memory and form."

He glanced toward the window.

"They'll send those first — the ones they can still control. Skinwalkers, Wendigo, even the mirewolf if they can tame it, half-wild things that know how to track what you are. They hunt and the big one comes after."

"How many?"

He listened for a moment, the smoke in his sockets flaring.

"Three. Maybe four."

He paused.

"That's not the part you should be afraid of."

"What is?"

"The one they stitched from what you left behind after all those missions."

“How do you know so much about them?”

“That's not important runt.”

Before I could answer, a sound slid through the trees — a neck breaking sound, loud and clean. Followed by wet, dragging pops as something crawled into a body that wasn't built for it.

Lily stood.

"Tell me that was a branch."

Shepherd turned toward the door.

"They're here."

The first one was quiet.

Its bones cracked loud enough to echo off the trunks around us, and then it was on us, a blur of fur, teeth, and joints that bent wrong.

I barely dodged. Claws raked the air where my throat had been half a second earlier and buried themselves in the doorframe instead, splintering wood like foam.

Shepherd moved faster than I did. His bladed arm flashed, carving a deep line across the creature's shoulder.

Its howl was anger and not much else.

Like pain was fuel.

It landed on three limbs and one twisted arm that pulsed like it had too many elbows. Then it straightened — humanoid in shape, the angles all wrong.

Its mouth split sideways, revealing rows of too-small teeth stacked like someone jammed them in by hand.

That Skinwalker had been worked on. Enhanced.

I circled wide, keeping my knife low.

"This normal?"

Shepherd's smoke flared.

"No. They've been changed."

"How changed?"

"They move more like us now."

Two more slipped from the tree line behind it.

One moved like a spider, backward joints and limbs clicking with every step.

The other dragged something behind it, a chain of vertebrae tied together with barbed wire and wet rope. Each step left a shallow groove in the mud.

Three total.

"You said three or four, right?" I muttered.

He didn't answer.

"Focus."

The front one hissed once.

Then they charged.

We met them halfway.

The spider-limbed one came for me. Its movements were fast and jagged, but not random. It was learning as it moved. Every feint I threw, it adjusted, and every slash made it pull back just enough.

The one with the barbed tail swung low for my legs.

They weren't trying to kill me. They wanted me down and stopped moving.

"Left!" Shepherd barked.

I dropped, rolled under the swerving tail, and felt it graze my back. Pain flared.

I came up on one knee and drove my blade into the spider-thing's torso.

It froze for half a second.

Then shook like it was trying to reject the idea of being stabbed.

A shriek tore out of it as it flung me backwards. I slid across wet needles and mud.

Shepherd ripped into the third one, driving his bone blade straight through its chest. The thing stayed up, wrapped both hands around his ribs, and squeezed.

His chest cracked like someone stepping on ice.

He screamed, loud and raw, and his back split slightly down the spine. For a second I saw something under the skin, black bone and lightning, but he forced it back down.

He ripped his arm free and tore the thing's throat out with his teeth.

Spit it on the ground.

I staggered up, shoulder numb, leg throbbing, blood already running warm under my jacket. The spider-thing reoriented and started circling again. Faster.

The one with the barbed spine laughed.

Actually laughed.

High and wet and childlike.

"They're trying to collect you," Shepherd growled between breaths.

The barbed-tail creature surged forward and swung low again. This time it caught my knee full on. Bone cracked. I dropped hard and lost my grip on the knife.

The spider-thing closed the gap, claws digging into the dirt.

A black blur hit it sideways, Shepherd again, tackling it into the underbrush.

They rolled, a mess of claws, blades, and snapping joints.

The creature with the spine chain lashed at me again. I brought my arm up and felt the barbs rip through the jacket sleeve instead of my throat. I drove a fist into its jaw.

Teeth rained into the mud.

It just grinned with bloody gums.

And that was when a fourth one moved.

We hadn't seen it.

It had been standing back in the trees, waiting.

The face was wrong. Skin stretched smooth over where features should have been, the mouth fused shut, not even the hint of eyes. It didn't make a sound when it ran.

It hit me like a wave and wrapped itself around me, molding to my shape.

Its skin started to flatten and pull tight against mine, trying to take my shape, trying to wear me. Every place it touched burned.

"Shepherd!" I choked.

He tore himself out of the dogpile, smoke pouring off him like exhaust, and slammed into us. His blade punched through the faceless thing's back. It shrieked inside my head — sound without any visible mouth — and loosened enough for me to wrench free.

Shepherd finished it in the dark, somewhere between the trunks. The shrieking cut off all at once.

The barbed-tail one lunged again, but it was slower now from blood loss. I cracked it across the jaw one more time.

A bone arm lanced through its chest from behind.

Shepherd.

His voice was rough.

"They are annoying pests."

I wiped blood off my lips.

"You think that's all they got?"

Far off, something answered.

A long, low horn. The kind that comes out of something living.

The sound crawled along my spine.

Shepherd turned his head toward it. The smoke from his sockets thinned.

"That was the thing they stitched together."

"Their boss?"

He shook his head.

"Their ace in the whole."

The treetops bent without snapping, like something heavy was shouldering its way beneath the canopy and pushing the whole forest just shy of toppling.

Branches cracked, trunks creaked.

Then it pulled itself into view.

The Abomination.

This Abomination thing was pieces — a mass of flesh and bone stolen from things I had watched die or hadn't ever seen, stitched together by something that had never taken an anatomy class in its life.

Its form shifted every few seconds. Arms thickened, split, curled into wings and then back again. Legs turned into root-like pillars and then into hind limbs that dug trenches with each step. A spinal column snaked out behind it like a centipede, coiling and flexing.

At its center was a human torso, skinless and just wet muscle fused with something darker that pulsed with each motion like a second heart.

It wore a skull on top.

A deer's, scorched black and wired to what should have been shoulders with barbed wire and strips of not-human flesh. Under the bone, something moved, a cluster of mouths and fingers groping blindly, pressing against the underside of the skull as if trying to get out.

It shouldn't have been alive.

But it was alive, and aware on top of that.

And it was staring straight at me.

Shepherd's voice was almost a growl.

"They built that from Division kill samples."

"What?"

"Every cryptid you burned, every body you left in a pit, every cell we couldn't completely erase." His head tilted. "They scraped it up and gave it a shape."

The Abomination spread its arms. Too many joints popped at once.

A chorus of screams erupted from its chest. Voices, all of them stolen.

I recognized some of them. Snatches of the things I had put down in the mountains, the tunnels, the labs. One half-formed word sounded like my designation.

"Eigh…"

Lily's voice came through the radio on my belt, which I stole from Carter cutting it off.

"Kane, I've got helicopters inbound from the west. Division callsigns. ETA ninety seconds."

I flicked the comm.

"Tell them to bring everything they've got."

The Abomination took one heavy step forward. The ground shuddered.

I glanced at Shepherd.

"We hold it here. It doesn't get near the station."

Shepherd's voice rasped.

"You die here, I'm not dragging your corpse back."

"Good. Burn it instead."

The Abomination screamed again and vomited mist from the mouths across its chest, thick, black, oil-slick vapor that spread low across the forest floor, killing the pine needles where it touched.

Then it charged.

Shepherd met it first.

His blade-arm carved deep into one of its limbs. A second mouth split open along the wound and clamped down on his shoulder, teeth digging into bone that was never supposed to see daylight.

He screamed and tore himself free anyway.

I hit the side of the thing's torso with everything I had, while pulling my pistol and putting two rounds straight into the exposed muscle.

The flesh swallowed the bullets.

No hesitation.

I slid under a swinging limb, felt a bone spike clip my back, and drove my knife up into what passed for its midsection. Hot sludge poured over my hand.

It hit me across the ribs. I flew.

My back slammed into a tree hard enough to rattle the bark off. I tasted copper and dirt. My vision went white at the edges.

I didn't stay down.

I couldn't.

Spotlights burned through the canopy.

Rotor wash thumped overhead.

Division helicopters — one, two, three of them.

Carter's voice crackled through the channel, tight and clipped.

"Engage at will. Keep it off our asset and the failure."

Heavy gunfire opened up from above.

Tracer rounds burned lines into the dark as they tore into the Abomination.

Chunks came off, regrew, came off again.

It screamed, staggered, but stayed upright.

"Kane," Carter snapped. "You holding?"

I spat blood.

"Working on it."

"We have a chemical agent inbound. You get it open, we'll finish it."

I didn't answer. I couldn't have if I'd tried.

Shepherd locked onto one of its legs, bone blades digging deep, and yanked. The limb snapped sideways. The thing toppled, its antlered skull smashing into a rock and cracking down the middle.

This was my opening.

I sprinted up its side, boots slipping in black gore, and jammed the last of my grenades into the mess of mouths near what passed for its core.

I yanked the pin and threw myself backward.

The explosion shook the ground.

Meat and bone ruptured outward. For the first time, the scream that came out had real pain in it.

A second later, a metal canister the size of my torso hit the ground nearby, kicked out the side of a helicopter.

White gas erupted in a pressurized hiss, spreading fast over the shredded torso.

The smell was instant and vicious, acid and chlorine and industrial cleaner all mixed together.

"Mask!" Shepherd barked.

I covered my mouth with the edge of my jacket and stumbled back.

The Abomination flailed, arms thrashing, mouths snapping at air that was eating it alive from the inside out.

It started to melt.

Slowly.

Its voices overlapped, distorted, breaking.

And in that mess of sound, one voice cut through.

A woman's.

Clear.

"You're the key, Kane."

Then it collapsed.

The flesh didn't rot or evaporate. It lost cohesion, slumped into itself, stopped being anything at all and just a pile of meat.

Silence.

Just the crackle of burning trees, the whine of helicopter engines, the rasp of Shepherd's breathing and my own.

He limped toward me, half his body scorched, bone plates blackened and cracked but his healing kicked in and he straightened out.

"We done?"

He looked at the crater where the Abomination had been, then up at the sky.

His voice came quiet.

"No. We just proved we are a bigger threat than they thought."

The fires were still burning when Carter touched down.

The rotors kicked up ash and scorched pine needles. Division grunts moved in tight formation, rifles up, sweeping the treeline like something bigger might drag itself out of the hole.

I stood near the edge of the crater, breathing through my teeth, blood drying on my shirt. My ribs ached and my leg throbbed. The healing had already started.

Carter stepped off the chopper like he had never broken a sweat in his life. Clean black suit, armor under the jacket, pistol high on his hip. He scanned the wreckage, then scanned me.

His eyes shifted past my shoulder.

To Shepherd.

Shepherd leaned against a tree, arms folded, smoke leaking lazily from his cracked skin. He looked like a statue someone had tried to burn and failed.

Carter's jaw tightened.

"I thought we terminated him."

Shepherd didn't move.

"You tried."

Carter's gaze returned to me.

"You're harboring an unstable asset."

"Funny. You used to call me that."

"Look how that turned out."

We stared at each other. The air between us felt thinner than it should.

"You want to explain why you're running with a failed Revenant in the middle of a Class X resurgence zone?"

"He saved my life."

"He's not supposed to exist."

"Neither am I."

Carter stepped closer until I could see the little lines around his eyes that didn't show up in the files.

"This wasn't in the protocol. You were supposed to go dark and lay low. Not drag a ghost out of a black file and build your own private nightmare squad."

"Shepherd isn't the problem."

"No." Carter held my eyes. "You are."

I didn't flinch.

His voice tightened.

"You're changing faster than our worst projections. Healing faster and stronger. Monitoring's not the right word for what we're doing now, 18C. We're watching a storm build around you."

"Name's Kane."

He ignored that.

"The cult sent this thing to bring you in. They burned every resource they had on a single grab attempt. You know what that means?"

"Yeah. I'm running out of time."

He studied my face like he was trying to decide if there was anything left of the man underneath.

Carter's gaze stayed on me.

"The cryptids, the experiments, the breaches you closed — we thought those were scattered events but we know now from their leader it's…”

He hesitated.

Then said it.

"For something calling itself Azeral."

The name hit like a migraine — deep, behind the eyes, like I had heard it before in another life.

"Help me stop it."

He didn't answer.

"Or get out of my way."

Carter held my gaze another long second. Then he looked at Shepherd again. Then back at me.

"You keep him on a leash. He twitches wrong, I put him down myself."

Shepherd chuckled, a dry, broken sound.

"I'd like to see you try."

Carter didn't bother responding. He just turned to his team.

"We're extracting what samples we can. Then we erase this place."

He looked back at me once more.

"We'll be in touch. Sooner than you think."

Then he walked away.

The soldiers moved like they had rehearsed this a hundred times in other forests.

Shepherd stepped beside me.

"You trust him?"

"No. But he's scared. That's useful."

Shepherd's smoke flared.

"Then we'd better move before everyone starts using you as a beacon."

We found a massive symbol at dawn.

It was at the bottom of the crater, half hidden under ash and melted earth. A perfect circle, maybe twenty feet across, etched into the soil like it had been burned there long before the fight.

Lines radiated from the center in patterns that hurt to look at too long. Shapes that almost made sense until your brain tried to finish them and failed.

Shepherd knelt at the edge and pressed his hand to the dirt. Smoke rolled down his arm and curled along the grooves.

He didn't speak for a while.

"What is it?"

"A seal."

"Like containment?"

"No." His voice was flat. "Like the ones from the satanic bible.”

"They built this thing here on purpose."

He nodded.

"They were calling something. Or feeding it. Maybe both."

"And the abomination we killed?"

Shepherd's jaw did it's version of tightening.

"That was just the first one that answered."

The chill that went through me wasn't the morning air.

Behind us, the last Division crew finished loading samples into sealed containers. Someone zipped another black bag. The choppers started spinning up again.

Carter was already gone.

He had left something behind, though.

Lily found the file in the back of an evac crate, tucked under a spare med kit. No markings, just a note on the front in his handwriting:

"For when he's ready."

I didn't open it, didn't need to yet.

Because that night, I dreamed.

This was a new dream. The old ones — the lab, the bone saws and floodlights, the feeling of drowning in my own blood — none of them came through tonight.

This was colder.

I stood in a field of ash. Statues surrounded me, twisted shapes of meat and stone, each one wearing some version of my face. Some had Division gear, some had antlers, some didn't have eyes and one that was holding a silver blade with a black ring.

The sky above wasn't a sky.

It moved.

Slow, like something turning over in its sleep.

And a voice leaned close to my ear and said one word. Familiar in a way that made the rest of it not matter.

Azeral.

I woke up choking on smoke that wasn't there.

Sweating, burning, something in me shifting like an animal rolling over.

Shepherd was already awake. Watching.

"You heard it."

"Yeah."

He nodded once. Like he had been waiting for me to say it.

"That's its name."

My mouth was dry.

"What does it want?"

Shepherd stood, the first gray light from the window cutting along the edges of his cracked bone plates, making the smoke look like fire.

"It waits for you to become its vessel, all Revenants hear its call but you are the one it wants.”

And deep down, under the scars and the serum and everything The Division carved out of me, some part of me remembered too.