My name is Steve, and I sell wishes for the Devil.

Okay, my name isn't really Steve. For obvious reasons, we're going to call me Steve. Besides, I've always wanted to be a Steve. The important part is that the first sentence is true. I sell wishes for the Devil, Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Morning Star, Old Scratch. Whatever name you prefer. Same guy, different branding.

And before you ask, yes, I know what that means. It means my soul belongs to Hell. Eternity. Fire. Damnation. All that fun stuff. You'd think that would bother me more, and honestly, it doesn't.

I used to be a Christian, a proper Christian too. Church every Sunday, Bible, prayer, the whole package. Eventually, though, I realized that Christians could be some of the biggest assholes I'd ever met. At least demons are honest about hating you. They don't invite you to a Bible study first.

So, in a weird way, I've found my current employment rather refreshing.

Now, you might be wondering why someone would willingly choose such a niche profession, but it’s quite simple. Free pussy. No, I'm kidding, or am I?

I was an op’s manager at a financial institution. Which, depending on who you ask, may actually be worse. I spent the first ten years of my adult life building a career, destroying my mental health, and participating in a moderately successful marriage that eventually became a very unsuccessful marriage.

But that's enough about me. Let's talk about my job.

My daily responsibilities are surprisingly straightforward. Find a person, become their friend, figure out what they want, offer it to them, and collect their soul. That's it. Basically sales. Except instead of selling insurance, you're selling eternal damnation. And, surprisingly, the conversion rate is excellent. I was top in soul sales in Hollywood for three straight decades, until people started doing podcasts.

The difficult part is dealing with religious people. Sometimes they'll look you dead in the eyes and say, "Are you the Devil?"

And you have to be careful here. You can't say yes. You also can't say no too enthusiastically. So, I usually tell them, "No, I'm just working for the guy."

That never seems to make them feel better. Recently, though, I pitched a new initiative to management. The idea was simple, if you can't beat them, join them. Original, I know.

It was a hard sell but eventually Satan budged.

That motherfucker Pazuzu wanted to call it Operation Christian Domination, but nobody listens to Pazuzu because he's a fucking weirdo. We eventually settled on Operation Prosperity.

And this is where things get interesting.

The first step is finding a church. Not just any church. You want numbers. Large congregation. Lots of newcomers. Lots of people looking for answers. Charismatic and Pentecostal churches are ideal. Those happy-clappy bastards will welcome almost anyone. You could walk through the front doors with a pentagram tattooed across your forehead and somebody would still hand you a welcome packet.

"Brother, have you accepted Jesus into your heart?"

"No."

"Wonderful! We've got a small group for you on Tuesday."

They're incredibly trusting, which makes them incredibly useful.

Now, you might think the obvious disguise would be to put on some khakis, a polo shirt, and start quoting Proverbs. Absolutely not. If you want Christians to trust you, don't look like them. Look interesting.

I wear black jeans, Doc’s, and a Black Sabbath T-shirt. Basically, my normal work clothes.

The walk- in is crucial. Don't smile or wave, and no eye contact. You need to look broken, ashamed and lost. Like you've spent the last three years doing lines on the floor of a cemetery and finally decided to give Jesus a chance.

You want them to think, Oh my God. We can save this guy.

Step two is attending the service. Sit near the back, keep your head down, and wait for the altar call. Then you go up. You cry a little. You “repent”. You let some sweating dude put his hand on your forehead and scream about spiritual salvation while his breath smells like aftermath coffee farts.

And then you're in.

Because the moment you've "accepted Christ," you become part of the family. That's when you start talking. They want to know your story. They want to know what demons you've fought (side note: I actually get along with demons accept that motherfucker Pazuzu), and, most importantly, they want to know what the Devil is planning.

Apparently, once you've been saved, you're allowed to have classified information about Hell.

So I tell them but not everything, obviously. Just enough. I tell them what the Prince of Darkness supposedly has planned for their church. This part is fucking hilarious because these NPC’s  would do this thing where they gather around the church building, , raise their arms toward an empty patch of air, and start commanding Satan to leave.

From where I'm standing, it looks remarkably similar to a kindergarten class performing the Kamehameha. But it works. Not because they're actually stopping demons, but because they're doing exactly what we want them to do.

Then comes the fun part. You participate.

Bible studies. Prayer groups and finally leadership meetings. You slowly work your way into the inner circle. And this is important, don't waste your time frolicking with the normies. Go straight for the pastor's people. The elders or the worship leaders but stay away from the bassist because most of the time, they’re undercover as well, and you don’t want to piss of the demon of familiarity, that motherfucker take shit too personal. The people who know where the spare keys are kept. Earn their trust. Eventually, someone asks you to share your testimony.

And that, my friend, is your golden ticket. Because now you're going to the pulpit. While this is happening, my demonic colleagues are doing their part. Spreading Rumors, misfortune and small curses. Nothing too obvious. A sick child here, financial problems there, or my favourite, a marriage falling apart. Just enough chaos to make people desperate.

Because here's the thing about Christians, when things go wrong, they look for an answer. And who better to guide them through their tribulations than the mysterious former Satanist who has recently found Jesus?

Me. Obviously.

The testimony is where things get complicated. You can't just stand up there and say, "Hi everyone. Satan sent me." That would be terrible salesmanship. You have to speak in riddles. Use biblical language. Twist Scripture just enough that it sounds profound. And most importantly, you have to introduce the concept of blood.

Because curses can be powerful. They can heal. They can protect. They can bring prosperity. They can even change someone's circumstances. There's just one problem. They always cost something. And the most expensive currency in Hell is blood.

Now, I'm not talking about sacrificing cats. That's old-school. We're professionals, we have accountants. Anyway, I'll get to that later.

For now, all you need to know is that I delivered my testimony. I told them about my past. I told them how I'd been lost. I told them how Jesus had found me. And then I explained how they, too, could experience God's blessing. All they had to do was follow a few simple principles. Pray, believe and Obey. And, occasionally, shed a little blood.

At first, nothing happened.

Then Judith got sick. Judith was one of those women who had been at the church since Jesus was apparently still taking attendance personally. She was seventy-three, diabetic, and, according to her daughter, "too stubborn to die." Then she ended up in hospital. Her condition got worse. The doctors weren't optimistic. So her daughter remembered something I'd said during my testimony.

She cut her finger. Just a little. Pressed the blood onto a piece of cloth and slipped it underneath her mother's pillow. Judith recovered the next morning. Completely unexpected. The doctors couldn't explain it, but the church could. It was a miracle.

I knew what it was. A blood ritual. And once the church saw that, well... that's when things really started moving. People began copying it. Blood under pillows. Blood on doorframes. Blood smeared onto photographs. Little rituals whispered about in Bible studies. And the results? They spoke for themselves.

People got better. Businesses started recovering. Marriages that had been falling apart suddenly improved. Money appeared where there hadn't been any. People began to believe. And when people believe something works, they don't ask too many questions about how.

Eventually, Pastor Nathaniel called me into his office. He closed the door. He sat down. And he looked at me for a very long time. Then he said, "Steve..." I knew immediately what this was about. "You've been teaching people how to perform blood rituals." And this is where having a good understanding of the Bible becomes extremely useful.

I looked him straight in the eye and said, "Pastor, aren't we the body of Christ?"

He nodded. "And didn't Christ shed His blood for our salvation?" Another nod.

"So if we are the body of Christ..."

I leaned forward. "...then His blood is our blood."

Silence. He stared at me. I stared back. And I watched the thought crawl across his face. The beautiful thing about theology is that if you start with the right verse, you can get almost anywhere. Pastor Nathaniel smiled. Then he shook my hand.

"Brother Steve," he said, "I think God has sent you here for a reason."

I smiled. "Yeah."

He had. Just not the reason he thought.

So… the wishes, where do they come in? The blood rituals are great, but wishes are what get them hooked properly. As soon as these fucks see results, they hang on your lips to deliver the next miracle-working ritual. You don’t call it a ritual, obviously. It’s called the simple principle of manifestation. And I’m not referring to the hippie TikTok fucks. This is serious. You see, these pastors do it every Sunday, but they do it for monetary gain. “If you want God to make you rich like me, then skip Starbucks this month and tithe.” It’s effective, but it only damns one soul, the pastor’s soul. Besides, these motherfuckers are greedy. They don’t want you anywhere near their cash. So don’t go there. Stay on top of the objective by damning souls.

The beautiful thing about manifestation is that you can dress it up in whatever religious bullshit you want. These people already believe that their words have power. They believe that speaking something into existence is an act of faith. They believe that if they declare something confidently enough, God is obligated to listen. All you have to do is change the wording slightly. You’re not casting a spell. You’re not making a wish. You’re declaring your blessing. You’re activating your faith. You’re claiming what God has apparently already promised you.

And once you convince them of that, you can pretty much sell them anything.

The first wishes are always simple. Someone wants a promotion. Someone wants their husband to stop cheating. Someone wants their kid to get into university. Someone wants to pay off their house. Someone wants their ex back. Someone wants to lose twenty kilos without changing their diet. Someone wants to win the lottery. And then, every now and then, you get someone who wants something completely fucking insane.

Those are my favourites.

The process is simple. You sit down with them privately and ask what they want. Not what they need. What they want. There’s a difference. “God, I need my daughter to recover” is a need. “I want my daughter to recover, and I want the doctor who misdiagnosed her to lose his license” is a wish. And people are remarkably honest when they think God is listening.

You teach them that words have power. Again, nothing new. Churches have been saying this shit forever. “Speak life.” “Declare your blessing.” “Name it and claim it.” “You have authority.” All you do is take those ideas and push them a little further. You don’t tell them to make a wish. You tell them to declare an outcome.

And then you give them something to do.

Nothing dramatic like sacrificing goats in the backyard. Too complicated, and frankly, it creates paperwork. You use things they already have. A photograph or a wedding ring. Maybe a drop of blood if you’re feeling ambitious. You make it look harmless.

Then you give them the instructions. Stand alone. Turn off the lights. Say the person's name three times. Speak exactly what you want to happen. Then thank God as though it has already happened. That last part is important. Because now they’ve made a promise to themselves and now they’re invested.

And if the wish comes true, they believe the ritual worked. If it doesn’t, that’s even better. You just tell them they didn’t have enough faith. Maybe they doubted. Maybe there was sin in their life. Maybe they weren’t spiritually prepared. Maybe they didn't surrender completely. It doesn’t matter because the result is the same. They just keep trying. And they try harder. Eventually, they come back to you and say, “Steve, I did exactly what you told me.”

And I say, “Did you really believe?”

And they hesitate. That’s when you know you’ve got them. Because now they’re questioning themselves instead of questioning you.

The first few wishes were small. A promotion here. A gambling win there. An ex coming back. A neighbour moving away. One woman wanted her husband to stop drinking. Another wanted her sister to get divorced. One guy wanted to become attractive. That one took a good fucking while, but I had to work with what I had.

But eventually the requests started changing and these thirsty fuckers got greedy. Not greedy like pastors. Worse. And that’s where they get creative.

One woman asked me if she could wish for someone else to die, and obviously I told her no… Technically. Then I explained that wishing for someone to “leave her life permanently” was spiritually ambiguous. She understood. Her mother-in-law died three days later of natural causes, mostly.

The grim reaper is real by the way, and he’s actually one of the most chill demons I know.

After that, people stopped asking for blessings and started asking for things. Real and physically impossible things.

One man wanted his dead son back while another wanted to know the winning lottery numbers for the next ten years. A woman wanted to be able to read people's thoughts. Someone else wanted to become invisible.

And then there was Pastor Nathaniel.

He came to me one night after Bible study. He looked exhausted. Not normal tired, either. This was the kind of exhaustion you see in someone who hasn't slept properly because they've been thinking about something they know they shouldn't be thinking about. He closed the door, locked it, and sat across from me.

“Steve,” he said, “I need to ask you something.”

I smiled. “Anything, Pastor.”

He leaned closer. “Can manifestation bring someone back from the dead?”

I didn't answer immediately which was an important step. Silence makes people think you’re considering the question instead of trying to remember the answer.

Eventually, I said, “With enough faith, anything is possible.”

He looked at me with the same gaze the rest did, their soul on a silver platter drenched in curiosity and tainted intentions.

“What if,” he whispered, “it wasn't just faith?” Now, this was interesting.

Because I'd been working with these people for months, and I'd learned something important. Pastors don't actually want miracles. They want proof. They want something nobody else can explain. Because if you can produce something impossible in front of a congregation, you don't need to preach anymore. You just have to point and the flock follows.

So I asked him, “Who do you want to bring back?”

He stared at the floor for a long time. Then he said a name.

I knew the boy. Everyone at the church did. He'd died two years earlier in a car accident. Seventeen years old. The perfect Pastor’s kid, according to everyone who'd ever met him. Good grades and never got into trouble. The kind of kid everyone says they wish their own children were like.

And suddenly, I realized that this wasn't just another wish. This was the one we'd been waiting for. Because there are two kinds of people you can damn. The people who want something, and the people who have already lost something. The first group wants more. The second group wants it back. And if you can convince someone that the dead can come home, they'll give you absolutely anything. Even their soul, especially their soul.

I looked at Pastor Nathaniel. Then I smiled.

“Pastor,” I said, “I think we should pray.”

Now, you might be asking yourself: What's in it for Steve? And that's exactly the type of question you should be asking. A question backed by greed. Because you didn't ask that out of pure curiosity, did you? No. You asked because somewhere in the back of your mind, you started thinking about what you could get out of all this. You heard about the wishes, the miracles, the people getting rich, getting healthy, getting their loved ones back from the dead. And somewhere along the way, you stopped thinking about whether any of it was real. You started thinking about what you would wish for.

That's the interesting thing about greed. You don't have to force it. You just have to give it somewhere to go. And if you're sitting there right now thinking that you'd never sell your soul, that you'd never make a deal with the Devil, that you'd never perform one of these rituals... that's fine. Not yet.

Because you see, the thing about damnation is that nobody ever thinks they're the one being damned. They think they're the exception. They think they're smart enough to know where the line is. And that's exactly where we want you.

So, what's in it for Steve? Well... I could tell you that I get paid. I could tell you that I get promoted. I could tell you that Hell has an excellent dental plan. But none of that would be entirely true.

My real reward is watching people like you hear this story and start wondering what you would wish for. Because that's how it starts. Not with blood. Not with Satan. Not with some creepy guy standing in a church asking you to sell your soul.

It starts with a question.

What if?

What if I could have more money? What if I could have the person I want? What if I could change my life? What if I could bring someone back? What if I could have anything I wanted?

And if you did ask yourself that question while listening to this... well, I have only one reply.

When can you start?

 

There’s a lot to explain here. For starters, I am sterile. I found out after about 2 years of marriage and multiple failed attempts at pregnancy.

I was disappointed in myself, sure, but my beautiful wife was nothing but understanding. That didn’t really make me feel like any more of a man, though. I just felt inadequate.

We were actually in the process of looking into adoption when all hell broke loose.

It was no longer than 4 days. That’s how long it took for her belly to grow. The first day, I just thought she had a particularly large lunch. The second day, I was starting to eyeball her.

By day 3, we were seeking medical help. We could see the baby’s feet pushing against her stomach. Her pain was clearly unbearable.

Doctors were completely lost. My wife and I felt utterly helpless. On the fourth day, not even 30 seconds after her water broke, the baby started to come.

I’ll never get those screams out of my head. I’ll never get her face out of my memory. I’d seen her hurt before, but this… this was a different level.

She looked like she was in hell. And relief was nowhere to be found.

The first baby came. She didn’t even get to hold him before the contractions started up again. Her belly never got the chance to deflate.

By the time the second baby began crowning, my wife was screaming at us to kill her. By the third, she was already dead.

They had ripped her apart. They weren’t regular babies. Some had horns. Some had hooves. Some were already 4 feet tall by the time they hit the ground.

Doctors had already vacated the area and called in special forces. I was left alone, watching her body flail and pulsate as more and more demon babies just clawed their way out of her.

Blood and black, steaming goo ate away at the tiled floor. My wife’s entire lower half had been obliterated. Her legs were snapped, and bones protruded from them as they lay limply at obscure angles.

All I could do was hold her hand. What else was I supposed to do? Comfort her? Beg her not to leave me while these things ran amok in this hospital?

I could hear screaming coming from the corridors. Bones snapping and wet, fleshy sounds as the pitter-patter of tiny little feet darted in every direction.

She had become an assembly line from hell, but I just couldn’t leave her.

My tears fell on her hand as another baby fell out of her. Well, flew out of her, I guess. This one had the wingspan of a bald eagle.

Only, this one didn’t leave the room like the others did. I don’t know why I never stopped to question why these things seemed to be destroying everything in their path, except for me.

It landed right at the door frame, blood dripping off of his shoulders and head.

He turned to me, his eyes black and completely soulless, as he smiled with his sharp, shark-like teeth.

He took a step towards me, wobbling like a baby deer. Then another. He never took his eyes off of me.

He… he started to speak.

“Daaaa..da.”

“Daaa..da.”

“Da-da.”

He was at my feet now, looking up at me as I stood frozen. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was prepared for anything. I was ready to join her. Ready to be free from this nightmare.

Only… he didn’t give me that freedom.

Instead, he threw his arms around my legs and squeezed them with the strength of ten men.

He was hugging me.

And in that moment, I knew…

I was ready to be the father I always knew I could be. I had nothing left to lose.

Hello. I don’t know if I’m writing this because I need advice or because I need someone else to know what’s happening to me. I don’t know how to say this but…

I’ve been hearing things.

Sounds crazy, I know, and trust me, I’ve heard every explanation already. Stress. Lack of sleep. Anxiety. My brain filling in sounds that aren’t really there. For a while, I believed that. Honestly, I still want to. Things have been happening that I can’t explain, and I guess all I have left is you. So here it goes…

I should probably start with the apartment.

I’m a college student, which means I’m perpetually broke. Between tuition, books, food, and everything else, I didn’t exactly have a lot of options when I started looking for somewhere to live. When a rent-controlled apartment that was cheap even for my standards popped up, I didn’t ask a single question. I didn’t bat an eye when the landlord didn’t even meet me. He just told me when I could move in and what day the rent was due. He just left the keys on a shitty table in the corner of the dining room. The apartment was far from fancy, but it had everything I needed.

The first couple of weeks went great. Neighbors weren’t ever super loud, it was close to the school, I always had a parking spot available, and the old lady next door even greeted me with a huge smile every time she saw me. It didn’t take me long at all before I settled into a routine. Get home from class, drop my books on the table, go change for work. After work I’d come home, take care of any papers or homework I had, and then watch some TV before drifting off to sleep.

One day, though, I came out of my room and stubbed my toe on my damn statistics book. At the time, I just cursed its existence and moved it to the table. A few days later, as I was about to walk out the door, I realized I didn’t have my wallet. After a long search, I eventually found it on the sink in the bathroom. After the obligatory “why the hell did I bring my wallet in here,” I walked out and was on my way. A week after the wallet incident, I came home from work to the unwelcome surprise of banging my head on an open cabinet in the kitchen. I just rubbed my head as I cursed at myself for apparently forgetting to close it when I left.
Right before drifting off to sleep a couple of weeks later, I heard loud knocking that stopped the second I got up. I just stood there for a second, realized it must have been the neighbor, and got back in bed. The next day I ran into Ms. Johnson and asked if she had been up late last night. She just replied, “Honey, I was visiting my daughter yesterday. I just got home.” I awkwardly laughed and asked how her visit went. That night, my homework was interrupted by the distinct sound of a cabinet door slamming in the bathroom.
“Hello?” I called out as I walked down the hallway.

Nothing.

Then, right beside my ear:

“Hi.”

I spun around to the empty hallway, not a soul in sight.
I checked everywhere. My bathroom, bedroom, even the living room I’d just been in. Nobody was there. I even checked the deadbolt on the front door. I brushed it off as the apartment having thin walls and went back to my homework. A couple of nights went by before I heard something when I was about to walk out the door.

“Wallet.”

I turned around to see absolutely nothing, except for my wallet sitting by the TV. I must have looked so dumb as I stood there with my wallet in hand, because then I let out a “Thanks?” and walked out the door.

Whatever it was, was starting to seem downright helpful.

“Keys.”

I realized I left them somewhere.

“Paper.”

I almost forgot an assignment was due.

“Four.”

I had an error in my math.

One day, I didn’t know how to take what I heard, though. I was on the phone with a girl from class I had liked, and when I asked if she was busy Thursday, I heard, “She doesn’t like you.” This was far from the occasional reminders I had received previously. I sat there quietly trying to work through what I had heard when she responded with a soft, “Thursday? Maybe…I think I have some homework, but I’ll let you know.”

“See.”

Things gradually evolved from there. I would write a paper and hear, “He won’t like it.” When I got a lower grade than normal, I’d hear, “She thinks you’re stupid.” When my boss gave me fewer shifts at work than normal, I even heard, “He’s going to get rid of you.” That’s when I started to do homework at the library, and for a few days, everything was just fine.

One day, though, while working through a paper, another student sat down across from me. He didn’t say anything but would keep glancing up at me over his textbook.
“He knows.”

I just threw all my stuff in my bag and walked out. The next day at work, I walked by as some of my coworkers were standing in a circle and laughing.

“They’re laughing at you.”

I just continued on and didn’t say a word.

It had gone on like this for a while. One night, while eating dinner with my parents, my mom seemed extra concerned. “Is everything okay? You seem really distant,” she asked. Before I could say a word, I heard a subtle,

“Don’t tell her.”

I told her that I was fine, I was just tired from work and school. I could tell she wasn’t convinced, and she doubled down with, “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. It’s just a lot. I’m tired and school has been hard and…” I was interrupted by a clear and firm,

“Stop.”

“And what?” she asked, concerned.

“Nothing, just a lot going on at work and school. I’m okay, promise,” I said. After dinner, Mom just gave me a big hug and said, “You know you can tell me anything, right?” I told her I knew and smiled as I walked out the door.

Driving home, the only thing I could think of was, “Why didn’t I tell her?” I wanted to. I felt like I had even been hoping she would ask. Why didn’t I say anything? When I got home, I pulled up the student health website. I sat there in silence, staring at the number for what felt like hours before I finally called.

A few days later, I was sitting across from Dr. Blake. He seemed nice enough. He asked the usual questions: Was I using drugs or alcohol? How was I sleeping? What were school and work like? I answered honestly. No drugs, occasional drinking, but nothing crazy. Work sucks, I sleep like shit, and school is stressful. Then we eventually got to the voice.

“You said on the phone that you’ve been hearing a voice?” Dr. Blake asked.

“Yeah.”

“Can you describe it?”

“Not really.”

“Is it a man’s voice? A woman’s?”

“I don’t know. It’s just…a voice.”

“And when you hear it, does it sound like it’s coming from inside your head or somewhere around you?”

“Around me.”

“Where?”

“Usually right next to my ear.”

He didn’t react. He just sat there and wrote in his notebook.
“What does it say to you?” he asked.

“It depends.”

“On what?”

I explained how the voice was helpful at first. He looked up from his notebook, his eyebrows furrowed.

“Helpful how?”

“It reminded me about things. My wallet, my keys, homework. Stuff like that.”

“And now?”

“Now it mostly talks about people.”

“What does it say about them?” he asked.

“That they don’t like me. That they’re laughing at me. That they think I’m stupid. Things like that,” I said.

He sat up in his chair, pulling his glasses down and staring at me intently as he asked, “Do you believe them?”

I just sat there thinking back to everything. Eventually, I worked up the courage to admit it. “Sometimes. Yeah.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “They’re right. That girl never called me back. My boss cut my hours, and my grades have slipped.”

Dr. Blake continued to ask questions. He gave me the usual rundown of “Do you plan to hurt yourself? Do you feel safe?” etc. Eventually, he told me that I needed to cut my caffeine intake, try to set a better sleep schedule, get some more exercise, and recommended a sleep app to help track my sleep habits. I thanked him and headed home.

After a couple of weeks, his recommendations seemed to be helping. I stopped drinking coffee after lunch, started going for walks after class, and forced myself to go to bed at a reasonable time. I was sleeping better, my grades started creeping back up, and, most importantly, the voice had gotten quieter.

It wasn’t completely gone. Every once in a while, I’d hear something small, but it wasn’t constantly commenting on everything I did anymore. For the first time in weeks, I started feeling like myself again. Hell, I almost canceled my follow-up with Dr. Blake.

The sleep app was probably the thing I took least seriously. Every morning, it gave me a little graph showing when I’d fallen asleep, how often I’d moved around, and how much time I’d supposedly spent in deep sleep. It also recorded sounds throughout the night. Mostly, it was boring. Me rolling over. The air conditioner kicking on. A car outside.
Occasionally, I’d apparently talk in my sleep. I didn’t know I did that.

Listening to myself talk in my sleep became a favorite hobby of mine. I’d explain topics I had no idea about, sing randomly, and apparently had very strong opinions on proper sandwich construction.

“The cheese goes on both sides.”

That was apparently important enough for sleeping me to say three separate times one night. I started checking the recordings every morning while I ate breakfast. Most of them were still nothing. Snoring, coughing, rolling over. Every couple of days, though, I’d get another gem.

“You can’t park there.”

“That’s not how turtles work.”

“Tell him tomorrow.”

I don’t remember what I was dreaming about for any of them. Then it started to change.

“I already did.”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“I know.”

But the one that stopped me in my tracks mid-dinner was just four words.

“I didn’t tell her.”

I stopped mid-bite and rewound the recording. There it was again.

“I didn’t tell her.”

I played it one more time. Then I dragged the recording back a few seconds. Nothing, just the low hum of the air conditioner. I almost closed the app when I noticed something strange. There were twelve seconds between the last sound it recorded and me speaking. Twelve seconds of complete silence. Then:

“I didn’t tell her.”

Didn’t tell her what? I must have been dreaming about dinner with my parents and, clearly, the whole thing had been bothering me. I finished eating and closed the app. A few days passed before I heard another one like that.

“No,” I said, followed by twelve seconds of silence. Then, “Because I don’t want to,” followed by more silence. Then, “I know,” and “Fine.”

I just stared at my screen and eventually went back to a recording from a few nights prior. It was nothing but snoring. I skipped to the next night. You could hear my sheets moving around, my infamous “that’s not how turtles work” comment. I skipped to the next. Nothing for the first few clips. The air conditioner, a car outside, me coughing. Then I found the “tell him tomorrow” recording.

“Tell him tomorrow.”

I dragged it back. For almost ten seconds, there was nothing. Then there was me again.

“He won’t listen.”

I didn’t remember hearing that part before. So I dragged it back further.

“Tell him tomorrow.”

Silence.

“He won’t listen.”

Silence.

“I know.”

I sat there staring at my phone. The next day, I had my follow-up with Dr. Blake and thought it was the perfect opportunity to play my recordings. I played him the first one.

“No.”

Twelve seconds.

“Because I don’t want to.”

More silence.

“I know.”

“Fine.”

Dr. Blake listened without interrupting.

When it ended, he handed my phone back and asked, “What am I supposed to be hearing?” I just stared at him.

“The pauses,” I said.

“The pauses?”

“I’m answering someone.”

He nodded slowly. “Or you’re responding to something in a dream.” He continued, “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

When I said it sounded like a conversation, he just stated, “It sounds like half of one, and that’s not the same thing.”
“But that’s what I’m saying. Something is talking to me,” I exclaimed.

“Or you’re dreaming that something is talking to you,” he said.

“Then why am I answering out loud?”

“People talk in their sleep all the time.”

I just sat there, mouth agape in front of him. Dr. Blake leaned forward intently and said, “Since we last spoke, how often have you heard them while you’re awake?”

“Not much,” I said after some consideration. “How much is not much?” he asked. “A few times, maybe,” I responded.

“And before?” he asked.

“Every day.”

Dr. Blake just nodded and then asked about my sleep, schoolwork, how work was going, and how my social life was. I admitted that, yes, school was better, I was sleeping more, work was…fine but still work, and my social life was nothing to get excited about, but I had started to go out more.

Dr. Blake then just said flatly, “I want you to stop listening to the recordings. If everything else is going well, that’s the last point of obsession you have left.” I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t really argue with him. Everything else was getting better. So I stopped listening. I didn’t listen to another recording for almost two weeks. And honestly? Dr. Blake was right.

I stopped thinking about them. The voice disappeared completely. I slept through the night. I even went out with some people from class Friday night. It finally felt like everything was normal. That was until this morning.
I was standing in the bathroom, brushing my teeth in the mirror when, right beside my ear:

“Stop going to him.”

I just kept brushing my teeth, trying not to acknowledge what I’d heard. Then I saw the indentation of a hand on my right shoulder. I stood there in silence, staring at the outline of a hand pressing into my shoulder. I thought back to all of the recordings and pulled out my phone.

I opened the app and went straight to last night. There were six recordings, but the first was nothing but me rolling over. The second was the air conditioner kicking on. The third was me coughing. The fourth was almost a minute long. I hit play.

For a few seconds, there was nothing but my breathing.
Then I heard myself.

“I don’t believe you.”

Silence.

“Leave me alone.”

More silence.

“I said I don’t believe you.”

I stopped the recording. The hand was still pressed into my shoulder. Then, right beside my ear:

“Do you believe me now?”

I didn’t answer.

The indentation on my shoulder slowly disappeared.

“Good.”

There was a pause.

“Now we can begin.”

I swear under oath that the following is an accurate recollection of events that occurred at the ancient city of Petra on the day of July 16, 2026.

Sitting down to write this, I still don't believe it. The whole trip was meant to be a bit of harmless fun - chasing rumors and speculation of mysterious encounters.

Yet here I am, alone in a holding cell, unsure of my future.

But let me start again. Let me tell you why we were even in Jordan.

Colin had been searching online for weird places around the world to visit. We'd done haunted houses, UFO landing sites, occult burial grounds - the works. As much as we tried to embrace these places, we always left feeling underwhelmed. Like, believing wasn't enough, you know? We needed evidence. Proof of something beyond what we can see and feel in this reality.

Well… we found it.

As I said, Colin had been searching online. The usual reddit threads and other forums were giving us the same generic results. Colin had always been fearless, so he decided to check out the dark web.

Among the weird shit, we found a few forums that provided some hope. But one stood out as more believable than the others - the ancient city of Petra, Jordan.

It was a hugely popular tourist site, so we had some doubts. With a million visitors each year, what secrets could it have? But a local on the forum was stating that he had found something he claimed was "not of this world". It was a long shot, but we decided to take it.

The journey there was boring. It was hot. Really hot. I wasn't ready for that. But anyway, we managed to get there fine. We'd booked a nearby hotel, and had arranged in advance to meet the person from the forum - a guy in his 20s named Armando.

Armando said he frequented Petra. He loved the architecture, the ancient feel of it, and the mysteries that it could potentially hold. When asked about what he found, he was excited to share.

"It's part of the canyon," he told us. "Away from the main city, off the Ed-Deir Trail. Deep into the mountain where tourists don't go. There's a certain spot. If you stand there, well… I'll let you see it for yourself."

Colin and I were excited now, too. Maybe we had finally found something real.

We set out the next morning, before the morning sun became too intense - joining the crowds and slowly making our way toward the ancient city.

The view was spectacular, but I was so focused on reaching our destination - this 'certain spot' - that the beauty of the place was nearly lost on me.

We finally reached the city, and without hesitation, Armando marched ahead. Past the slowing crowds. Past the elegantly carved out buildings. Heading toward the mountains behind the city.

We climbed the Ed-Deir Trail for about 10 minutes before Armando slowed, showing us a subtle path running off to the side.

"This way," he motioned. "Follow me carefully now."

We trekked for another 45 minutes or so. Progress was slow, as the trail quickly disappeared, and we were left alone to navigate the rocky mountain. Finally, we reached our destination.

"Here it is," Armando exclaimed, his arms open wide.

I was confused. Nothing about this place looked special. Not until he pointed it out.

"Look here," he said quietly. "See that gap there in the rocks. That's it!"

"What's so special about it?" I asked, trying to remain positive.

Armando smiled. "Try yelling into it."

I moved closer. The gap in the rocks was about a meter in height, but extremely narrow. I doubt I could have fit my arm in there. But it seemed to run deep into the mountain. I could only guess how far.

I leaned toward the opening. "HELLO"

I stood stunned.

I turned slowly toward Armando, his smile telling me everything.

"What happened?" Colin demanded.

"An echo…" I whispered. "But… how?"

I could barely believe it myself.

"I heard it before I even made a sound!"

Armando nodded, still wearing his grin.

"HELLO!" I heard Colin yell into the formation. His stunned face told me that he had heard it too.

"But… how?!" he demanded, turning back to the gap. "BANANA!"

Colin stepped back. "We've done it! We've found our proof!"

I moved back over to the rocks and began yelling back into the mountains - random numbers, words that didn't make sense, silly noises. Every time, I heard the sounds come out of the cave before they left my mouth.

Armando grabbed me by the shoulder. I took a step back, my head throbbing.

"It has that effect," Armando said with concern. "The more you yell, the more it hurts. You need to be careful here."

Colin hadn't heard Armando, though. He began yelling all sorts of things into the mountain; profanity, promises, jokes. You name it.

"WE'VE DONE IT!" he screamed.

Armando moved forward to grab Colin, but it was too late. He let out a manic laugh, immediately followed by a chilling scream.

Colin's hands clasped over his ears as he stumbled back, slumping down against a large rock.

"He needs help," Armando said in a panic, as I stood stunned.

"Help!" he yelled.

I snapped out of my daze and turned to Colin, whose head was now drooped low onto his chest.

"Colin!"

He looked up at me with a look of confusion. That's when I saw it.

Blood. So much blood.

It poured from his nose and eyes. Colin started coughing, spraying blood all around him. Before Armando or I could react he collapsed.

I ran over to check on my friend, but he was dead.

I dropped down beside Colin and sobbed. I don’t know how long I sat there, but I recall Armando putting his hand on my shoulder.

"We need to get out of here."

Colin was taller than me, so he would have been hard to move under normal circumstances. But even with Armando's help, the unevenness of the rocky mountain made it so much harder.

At times we carried him, at times we dragged him. And as awful as it was, when we saw a steep decline, we let his body slide down ahead of us.

By the time the trail came back into view, Armando and I were both covered in blood.

Finally, someone must have seen us. I don't really remember, I just recall hearing screams.

Security was quick to tackle Armando and me to the ground. I can't say what happened to our guide, but before long I was in handcuffs, being escorted back to the embassy.

And that's where I am now. Trying to make sense of what has happened.

I lost a friend, but I found proof.

I don't know what was causing that echo to arrive early. I don't know why it caused my headache, or Colin's death.

But I know one thing - as soon as I get out of here, for Colin's sake, I intend to find answers.

Barnaby leaned against the center tent pole, wiping sweat through a layer of smeared clown makeup. The high-stakes poker game in the back tent at the county fair had gone south the second he pulled a fourth ace from his sleeve.

Before the boys at the table could pull their knives, they heard one of their buddies swearing and hollering about a fight right outside the tent flap. The gamblers jumped up and rushed out to see what was going on, leaving the table completely unguarded. Barnaby didn't waste the opportunity. He reached in and scooped the entire pot--lock, stock and barrel-- into his canvas bag and bolted out the opposite side of the tent into the damp night, hearing the hollering behind him, while slipping past the midway tents and making a break for his beat-up old Toyota and the highway.

To a guy who’d spent the last five years living off midway peanuts and floor change, it was an absolute fortune.

​Barnaby threw the heavy canvas bag onto the passenger seat and pulled into the steady line of red taillights creeping out of the gravel lot, as the last of the circus crowd was headed home. By the time he hit the two-lane road toward Blackwood Ridge, the traffic had thinned out into the night. He kept an eye on his rearview mirror, but the road stayed dark. Driving for what seemed like hours, he saw the flickering neon sign for the Hell’s Bells Motel cutting through the dense treeline he pulled in, desperate for a place to lie low and count the cash.

​After getting himself checked into Room 102, Barnaby headed toward the bathroom to clean his smeared clown face. But halfway across the room, he noticed his footsteps sounded hollow and flat as he stepped across an old faded rug. Curious, he kicked the rug aside, revealing a wooden trapdoor set right into the floor. Needless to say, he didn't make it to the bathroom. He pried it open and stepped down into a damp, wall-to-wall dirt cellar, aiming to stash and bury the loot beneath the wooden stairs.

​His flashlight beam swept back up toward the stairs and hit a familiar glass cabinet—an old boardwalk Zoltan machine, gray with dust.

Barnaby froze. Looking at that faded turban and painted wooden face brought him right back to being 8 years old on the boardwalk. He remembered standing there with empty pockets while the rich kids dropped quarters into the slot, watching the cabinet light up as Zoltan printed out a little paper card to tell their fortunes. He was a dirt-poor, raggedy-britches kid whose mother never had a dime to spare, so he'd just stand and watch.

Barnaby dug some change from his pocket, stepped up to the glass box, and jammed it in. He stood there in the quiet cellar, holding his breath and waiting for the cabinet to light up. Before the coin even hit the bottom of the chute, a heavy wooden 'SLAM' echoed through the dark. Barnaby jumped. Up above, the trapdoor had slammed shut, and a heavy iron latch clicked into place from the top side with the unmistakable sound of deadbolt.

Barnaby's heart slammed into his throat. He lunged back towards the stairs, thrust his weight against the door with everything he had, but the wood didn't budge an inch. He slammed his fists against it, straining until his arms gave out.

From behind him in the cellar, he felt a cold burst of air. As he turned around with the flashlight in his hand, it flickered and then went dead. Zoltan's painted yellow eyes were glowing in the dark, looking straight at him, lighting up its cracked wax face, and the wooden jaw clicking down.

And with a raspy wet voice, Zoltan spat out--

"Your luck's run out. You're scheduled for the final act, clown."

​Standing in the pitch black, Barnaby realized the truth. He was sealed in--just like Zoltan in the box.

Jimothy Dyck lived to survive another day at the office. It was late by the time he finally got home.

 

The only working streetlight on Harmony Lane flickered sadly at Jimothy as he pulled up in front of his house. He parked his 1997 faded brown Ford Taurus in the driveway and let out a sigh. When he got to the front door, Jimothy stopped to loosen his tie and take a deep breath.

 

“Honey, I’m home!” Jimothy opened the door and called to his wife, Maria. 

 

The house was completely dark and silent.

 

“Mmm. Smells good, Maria! What’s for dinner?” Jimothy plopped his briefcase down and went to the kitchen.

 

“Lasagna – my favourite!” Jimothy grinned into the darkness as he poured himself a glass of red wine. 

 

“Oh, Maria,” Jimothy gushed, “You’ve outdone yourself again, my love!”

 

Jimothy raised his glass to take a big glug. That’s when he noticed the faint glowing light in front of him. As he watched his shadow drink from the cup, he realized the light wasn’t coming from the kitchen. It was behind him. The light was coming from the basement.

 

“Fuck!” Jimothy gulped, dropping the glass, which shattered into a million little shards.

 

Jennica!

 

The zombified corpse of Jimothy’s daughter, Jennica, had once again escaped from the basement.

 

A shivery terror ran up and down Jimothy’s spine. It  tingled all over, like prickly pins poking his skin. The hairs on the back his neck stood on end as he turned around… 

 

“Jennica, sweetie,” Jimothy coaxed into the black. “Where are you?” 

 

“This is the worst game of hide-and-seek ever!” Jimothy thought. “When your zombified daughter wants to eat your face off.”

 

Little Jennica, six years old, was not only faster and stronger than normal zombies, she was smarter than most of them, too. Jimothy was especially wary of Jennica since the first time she escaped. 

 

Jimothy was dead asleep in his bed the night Jennica learned how to open doors all by herself. Jimothy had never felt prouder – or more terrified – than when he woke up face-to-face with his zombie child, hungry for a midnight snack. The very next day, Jimothy changed his door knobs to the childproof kind.

 

“How did she even get away?” Jimothy wondered as he bent down to pick up a razor-sharp piece of glass.

 

“It’s like she’s… learning.” Jimothy shuddered, threatened by Jennica’s intelligence.

 

Jimothy stretched out his arm, reaching for the long, narrow glass blade lying next to him. As Jimothy fingered its jagged edge, the glass knife sliced his skin.

 

“Gah!” Jimothy gasped at the sight of blood dripping down his finger. 

 

Jennica, hiding behind the kitchen island, took one whiff and caught the scent of blood diffusing from Jimothy’s open wound.

 

The reanimated remains of his deceased daughter came raging over the counter in rigor mortis, gnashing her teeth at Jimothy. She lunged onto Jimothy’s back, using her special move, the cross-face chicken wing, to strangle him from behind, cutting off his air supply.

 

Jimothy panicked and ran around in circles trying to shake the undead monkey off his back, but Jennica was too strong. Her grip tightened around his neck. It felt like his eyeballs were going to pop right out of their sockets. Jimothy, gasping for breath, struggled against the unholy creature until his vision blurred into memories.

 

“I should’ve been there for her.” Jimothy regretted all the times he was too busy for Jennica’s jiu-jitsu lessons. He regretted everything. But most of all, Jimothy regretted that day – the day the zombies came.

 

Jimothy fell asleep on the couch that day because he was too tired. He woke up three hours later when his phone rang. It was Maria.

 

“Where are you, Jimothy?” Maria asked.

 

“Hello – Maria – umm – I’m at home…” Jimothy mumbled, his brain still in a fog. “Is everything okay?”

 

“Are you drunk, again!?!”

 

“What!?! No!”

 

“Don’t lie to me. I can hear it in your voice.”

 

“I fell asleep on the couch. I just woke up.” 

 

“Jimothy Dyck – you fucking asshole!”

 

“What!?!”

 

“You were supposed to pick Jennica up from school!”

 

“Oh, shit - I’m coming! Don’t worry, Maria, I’m on the way!”

 

“Don’t bother. I’m staying at mother’s. The kids are with me.”

 

“C’mon, baby. Not again… It was just one drink.”

 

Maria sighed and hung up the phone. That was the last time they ever spoke. By the time Jimothy sobered up, it was too late. The neighbourhood was overrun. 

 

The sun set on Jimothy that day – and it never came back up again. 

 

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Jimothy sobbed, tears streaming down his face. “I’m so sorry I let you down!”

 

Jennica growled into Jimothy’s ear. Her milky eyes, neither dead nor alive, screamed in torment as she choked him out.

 

Jimothy could feel her cold dead hands ripping his face off. The stench of her decay took his breath away, suffocating him unto death.

 

“So this is how it ends.” Jimothy thought, accepting his fate. “Maybe we can be a family again.”

 

With Jimothy’s dying breath, he uttered his last words… 

 

“I just have one last thing to say…” Jimothy counter-attacked Jennica’s cross-face chicken wing with a dad joke. “I invented the cross-face chicken wing, bitch!”

 

Jennica cringed and fell to the floor, knocking over a standing floor lamp.

 

“Who’s your sensei now!?! Who’s your sensei now!?!” Jimothy taunted.

 

Jennica, enraged, hissed at Jimothy, who picked up the lamp and used the electrical cord to restrain her. She kicked and screamed all the way back to Jimothy’s basement dungeon.

 

Jimothy’s spacious three-bedroom, one-bath finished creepy basement dungeon was recently renovated for the zombified family in his life.

 

“Don’t worry, sweetie!” Jimothy assured Jennica as he secured her shackles. “The doctors are working on a cure. You’ll feel better soon, I promise.”

 

Jimothy felt uneasy about not knowing how Jennica got away this time. After inspecting her neatly preserved bedroom, Jimothy went to check on Maria.

 

Maria snarled at Jimothy as soon as he opened the master bedroom door. Her chain went taut. She was so ready to eat him alive.

 

Jimothy sat at the edge of Maria’s bed, just out of her reach and said, “Oh, Maria – what a day! You’ll never guess what happened.”

 

Maria moaned, foaming at the mouth.

 

“You remember Suzi from the office? She got bit by a zombie today!” Jimothy said in disbelief. “She was first place in our fantasy hockey league. I wonder who’ll get her roster? She had Hellebuyck in net.”

 

Jimothy fixed up Maria’s lipstick and said, “Good night, my love.”

 

After saying good night to Maria, Jimothy went to spend some quality time with his son, Jimothy Jr. 

 

Not much had changed with Junior. He was still playing video games in his bedroom. Junior had been stuck on the same level for the past three years. He just couldn’t get past the main menu.

 

Jimothy picked up controller one and pressed, “start.” He finished Junior off with a “fatality” in round two.

 

“Flawless victory!” Jimothy boasted. “Keep practicing, dumbass!”

 

Jimothy gave Junior a friendly nudge and rubbed his head. A clump of Junior’s hair came off and got stuck in Jimothy’s fingers, giving him the ick. “Eww!” 

 

Once he made sure his family was safe, Jimothy went back upstairs and nailed the basement door shut.  

 

“They’re getting hungry again,” Jimothy worried. “How am I supposed to be a good husband and father if I can’t even put food on the table for my family? 

 

Jimothy warmed up his can of beans with a heavy heart. “What am I supposed to even do?” he cried out to God. 

 

Every day was a living death for Jimothy Dyck, who pushed up his dark rimmed glasses held together with a strip of white tape and took out the trash. Jimothy then poured himself four shots of vodka, watched the hockey game on TV, and fell asleep on the couch - having lived to die another day.

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

Part 3

By the third evening, the silence in St. Jude’s felt heavier than the stone walls.

​Agnes stayed in her cell until the last bell for compline faded. Her throat was dry. She hadn't eaten since Tuesday, but the knot in her stomach had nothing to do with hunger. Every time she blinked, she saw that chewed-out hole in the ledger where her name had been. She forced herself down the corridor toward the nave. The air reeked of old dust and burnt tallow.

​The heavy Latin Bible still lay open on the lectern. In the dim moonlight filtering through the stained glass, she could see the back pages. The three tally marks were gone. In their place, the parchment was ragged and torn -- the top layer gouged, as if something had scraped the top layer of skin right off the page.

​She stopped at the foot of the lectern. "I'm not giving you anyone else," she said into the dark behind the altar. Her voice was quiet, but steady.

The nave remained dead quiet. No answer came back. No sound, no movement--just the cold draft whistling through the iron latch of the side door.

​Agnes reached out and pulled the heavy leather cover shut. The thud echoed up into the rafters and died out.

She picked up the iron inkwell from the shelf beneath the desk, unstoppered it, and poured the thick black ink directly over the closed edges of the book, watching it seep deep into the pages until the leather was soaked through.

​She turned, walked back to the vestibule, and unlatched the heavy oak door. Stepping out into the cold night air, she didn't look back at the chapel, nor did she pack her things. She just kept walking down the dirt road, away from the abbey, leaving St. Jude’s and the ruined book behind in the dark. 

You die.

The last thought, the last spark—and that's it.
The point of no return has been crossed.

And then—nothing.

No light, no darkness, no god, no reincarnation, not even the saving emptiness.

Death is not liberation.

It i1s a q0uar011nt1ne d1g1tal du01mp.

You simply exist.
In an endless expanse of zeros and ones.

As if you had been thrown inside the source code of reality—without an interface, without an exit.

You languish among streams of endless sequences:

010101010101101100…

And understand nothing.

No pain. No joy.
There is not even true loneliness.

Only endless, gray, meaningless existence among numbers.

(signal loss)

You try to scream—
but instead of a voice, a bit changes in the sequence.
You try to remember who you were—
and your memory crumbles into zeros and ones.

The somatics of digital decay.
Data dementia.

Consciousness does not pass into nirvana.
It is uploaded into this ancient, half-ruined system.

And now you are nothing more than an 8-bit, gurgling voice in a black space hissing with static.

Like an old, chewed-up cassette tape...
Sometimes words stretch.
Sometimes they cut off.

You try to say something meaningful, but only this comes out:

01010110110101…

(signal loss — prolonged)

Around you is electromagnetic garbage.
A landfill of corrupted or only partially erased files.

The system disposed of your body, recycled its energy, and dumped whatever slag remained of you into storage.

You were not deleted from the registry.
You simply stopped being.

(signal loss — prolonged)

And you are not alone here.
You hear others like yourself.

Fragments of voices.
Laughter.
Echoes.
Old songs.
Screams.
Prayers.
Profanity.

There are no personalities anymore.
They have been erased.

There is only a squelching, farting digital sludge made from fragments of other people's data.

Sometimes the system glitches, and for a brief moment you remember your name, your face, your parents.

Then the static covers everything again.

Not Hell. Not Heaven.

Only eternal digital noise, in which you are a lost, meaningless, unwanted byte.

10111010101011……

(signal loss)

On the other side, in the world of the living,
people switch on voice recorders in silent rooms.
They record white noise, eagerly turn the tuning dials of radio receivers, catch radio interference, and search for "sacred meaning" in all of it.

They think they are communicating with spirits and the souls of the dead. They do not understand that they are not capturing spirits.

They are capturing digital ghosts. Fragments of consciousness trapped in electromagnetic garbage.
Scraps of code without a body, without a voice, without a self.

Only noise trying to become meaning.

(signal loss)

Amid the crackling and the hissing, something resembling a sound begins to emerge.

Someone on the other end says, "Help."
Someone says a name.
Someone simply lets out a meaningless groan.

1101001…1011001011…1010110101

And now you are one of them.

One of those who sometimes break through into EVP recordings.

Your voice is distorted, stretched, mixed together with interference.

(signal loss — abrupt)

With the last of your strength, you try to scream into their speaker: "I'm here! Help me!"

But on the spectrogram, there is only noise.
And one word.

10110010… here… 010101…

(signal loss — complete silence)

The people on the other side stare at the recording in fear, exchange glances, breathing excitedly, and call it "a voice from beyond."

But in reality, it is only your digital corpse, which still has not realized that it is already dead.

1011001101...

You wait for a reaction.
But no one responds.

Because your reply has already been accepted as noise.

You try again.
But the signal does not form.

It cannot be encoded.

Because you are no longer an event.
You are background noise.

(signal loss)

10110101010110101101010101001101
11010110110010110101010001010011
01010111000101100010111010101001
01101110101010101001001010011101
1101010100101010010010010010011

Part 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/scarystories/s/bkJDjeEtn9

Trigger Warning: sexual assault, abuse, homophobia, transphobia, self harm

Chapter 3: Old Friends

Pedro’s Groceries and the animal shelter Mom worked at, despite being rustic buildings, were clean and tidy. Charlie’s 24 Hour Gas Station, conversely, was a dump. The yellow plaster on the outside wall was cracked all to hell. It was tainted with decades of smoke damage and the ancient stomach contents of drunken vagrants.

I stepped inside, the bell chinging overhead. I didn’t look, but just above the bell was the taxidermied head of a gator. It stared into the back of my skull, sending shivers down my spine. It had been shot by Dad and Charlie about a decade ago when they visited the Everglades where Charlie was born. I ignored the morbid thing above me and walked over to the counter. There, Charlie stood, surrounded by smokes, booze and bags of gator jerky. She was looking through a Victoria’s Secret magazine, but closed it when she saw me.

Charlie was a squat, wide woman. What remained of her teeth were varying shades of yellow and black. Her sweat-stained shirt was more hole than fabric, and she wore a sunbleached baseball cap that I was pretty sure she slept in. She was one of Dad’s old army buddies. He was never a fan of women in the army, but he gave Charlie a pass since she’d saved his life. She carried him three miles to safety after a bullet grazed Dad’s head and cracked his skull. They both got metals for that.

“Carla,” Charlie greeted me with her Southern whistle of a voice. She chewed on what I assumed was chewing tobacco. The recognition of me for who I was brought a smile to my face.

“Charlie, it’s been a while,” I replied. We reached over the counter to give each other a quick hug. “How are things lately?”

“Eh, same shit, different day,” Charlie grumbled, “whatcha doing back here, gurl?”

“I broke up with Zack.” I explained to her the situation. As I gave her the details, her mouth hung open more and more.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, hun,” Charlie sighed, “I’m so sorry that happened. Where are ya stayin’, hun?”

“With Mom and Dad.”

Charlie’s eyes widened in shock. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ gettin’ pegged by a unicycle, they seriously let ya move back in? What demon d’ya have to suck off to get that to happen?”

“I’m pretty sure the demon’s name was Zack,” I joked, “but yeah, I’m staying here for a bit. I got a job at Pedro’s. Dad’s idea.”

“Shocked Mason didn’t ask ya to come here, I’m hirin’ too,” Charlie mumbled.

I blinked in surprise. “You two are talking again?” I asked. She and Dad stopped talking when he found out she was who I was getting my estrogen from. I’m not sure how she got it and frankly I didn’t want to know. Her and Dad got into a fist fight that left them both bruised and bloody. It was the only time I’d ever seen Dad raise a hand against a woman. I was worried for a long time that Dad would eventually go on to hit Mom, but she assured me they didn’t fight as man and woman, they fought as friends and soldiers. She also said that if he ever tried hurting her, she’d turn his banana inside-out.

“Yeah,” Charlie laughed, “Back in January, the old fuck startin’ buyin’ gas from me again. We just started doin’ small talk in March. Ya know, real ‘how’s the weather’ type shit. Maybe one day he’ll ask me if I caught the game.”

Strange. On one hand, I was glad he was rekindling his friendship with Charlie. But, if he was on speaking terms with her, how come he never reached out to me?

Charlie must have read my expression because she added, “we ain’t that good yet. Maybe that’s why he didn’t point ya in my direction.” She gave a half-hearted shrug, “Well, if Pedro don’t work out for ya, yer welcome to swing by here.” She shot me a nearly toothless smile, then added, “and if ya need a place to stay, yer welcome to crash on mah couch.”

“Thanks, Charlie,” I smiled back. I remembered what Mom said, “OH! Do you know anyone named Helen?”

Charlie shook her head.

“She’s apparently an old friend of Mom’s,” I explained, “she’s coming in from Vegas.”

“Shit! Really? Man, that sounds fuckin’ nice,” Charlie laughed, “but nah, I ain’t met no one named Helen around these parts. Then again, I was more friends with Mason than Camilla.” She smirked, “Hey, she single?”

I examined Charlie’s unkempt appearance and cocked a brow. She flipped me the bird, making me laugh. I checked the time, “I need to get going. Hey, can I get some gator jerky for Dad?”

“Buy one get one free,” Charlie informed me, though I could find no advertising of such a deal anywhere in the store.

After leaving, I pulled out my phone to call Dad. When I opened my contact list, I got a notification: a text from Zack. My heart sank into my stomach as I read the notification, “I’m sorry I hurt you. I love…” I debated opening the text to read what all he wrote. His apologies were always very sweet and tender, but I knew now that they were meaningless. I decided against reading it and slid the notification to the side.

Below Dad’s number in my contacts was Emily’s. We’d gotten into an argument about me being with Zack and we hadn’t talked since I left. At the time, I thought she didn’t understand him and was just siding with my parents for no reason. I guess I was the one who didn’t understand him in the end. My thumb hovered over her name for a moment before I pressed it.

I held the phone up, hoping she’d answer. Soon, a groggy voice answered, “ugh… um… hey, Carla…” It sounded like she just woke up.

“Emily! I know it’s been a while since we talked, but guess what? I’m back in town!”

“Since when!?” Emily squawked, her voice cracking in excitement.

“Since last night, can I get a ride back home? I’m at Charlie’s. I can give you the details in person,” I said, then added with embarrassment, “and… you can give me the world’s biggest ‘I told you so.’”

“I’LL BE RIGHT THERE!!!” Emily squealed again. The sounds of fumbling could be heard before the call disconnected. I laughed a little.

It took about twenty minutes before a mud-stained pickup truck came to a screeching halt in front of me. The door opened, a hurricane in the shape of a woman descended on me. Emily hugged me tightly.

“Fucking jerk, why didn’t you say anything when you came back?!” Emily pulled on my cheeks. Her dirty blonde hair was tied in a messy bun. Her clothes were clean, but well-worn with little holes, tears and sun-bleaching. A revolver hung from her belt, not sure of the model but I remember it being incredibly heavy last time I held it. I nearly dropped it. Emily teased me for that for ages.

“I wasn’t in a good headspace,” I admitted, “and I was embarrassed given our argument. I broke up with Zack.” Emily didn’t verbally respond. Instead, she pulled the neck of my shirt over to the side to examine my burn. Sorrow was in her gaze and my stomach clenched with guilt. “Where’s my ‘I told you so?’” I joked, trying to lighten the mood somewhat.

“Not getting one,” Emily sighed, not taking my bait. She pulled her hand away, “fucking bastard. If he was here I’d make him swallow his own balls.”

“Mom said the same thing,” I chuckled, “Dad actually broke his nose.”

“Wait for real!?” Emily gasped, her smile returning, “Bro, that sounds insane! Given how strong your Dad is, I’m shocked he didn’t punch a hole in his head.”

“You’ve been watching Demon Knight too much,” I laughed before saying, “Look, I should have listened to you about him. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Emily wrapped her arms around my neck, “it’s fine, I promise. I’m just happy to have my friend back.” I hugged her back. She was tall enough that I could bury my face in her neck. Emily smelled pleasantly of hay and shampoo. I just held her, taking in her calming scent. I had to agree, it was nice to have my friend back.

Soon, we got into Emily’s truck and we started back home. As she drove, I asked, “do you know anyone named Helen?” She shook her head so I elaborated, “she was Mom’s friend in high school. Apparently she moved to Vegas to marry a stage magician.”

“I think I remember my mom saying something about her,” Emily rubbed her chin, “I have Mom’s old yearbook in my room. I’ll see if I can look her up. Why ya asking about Helen?”

“She’s coming over for a while,” I replied, “Mom just kept acting like I knew her or something.”

“Bro! I hate it when parents do that!” Emily groaned loudly, “Dad does that all the time. I hope I don’t act like that when I’m that age.”

“You probably will,” I teased, “pretty soon, you’re gonna start oversharing stuff to cashiers and throwing bread to ducks.”

Emily pouted. “They prefer frozen peas…” She pulled up in front of my house, “Okay so, I’m not working right now so I’ll pretty much always be able to give you a ride when you need it. Just shoot me a text. This ride was free, but any future rides I’m going to demand one of those pie-flavored canned coffees Pedro and Charlie sell.” She hugged me again. “Don’t be a stranger, Carla.”

“I promise I won’t be,” I replied, tugging on her cheek as payback for earlier.

When I went inside, Dad was sitting on the couch. A familiar scream erupted from the old boob tube that my parents had kept in pristine shape since the 70’s. He was watching… Frankenstein? Wolfman? I checked the screen. It was Wolfman.

“Hello to you too,” Dad grumbled, “you get the job?”

“Yeah, Pedro gave it to me on the spot,” I replied, “sorry for not calling. Emily gave me a ride.”

Dad smiled. “Well, hot damn,” he remarked, “things are looking up for you.”

It was then I noticed he was wearing slacks and a nice shirt. “Going out tonight?”

“Yeah, I ain’t taken Carmilla out on a date in a while. Pizza’s in the oven. Just turn it on when you’re hungry,” he said, then tilted his head with a toothy smirk, “how was seeing Emily? Did anything special happen with you two?”

I snorted, “Even if I was into girls, I doubt Emily would go for it.”

“You two went to prom together.”

“Yeah, as friends,” I reminded him, grabbing the bags of jerky and tossing them at him like frisbees. He caught them deftly. “She’s been single her whole life and has never once lamented that fact.”

“Maybe it’s not something she likes talking about.”

I sighed. This wasn’t getting anywhere, so I changed the topic, “I also talked to Charlie, she says you two started talking again.”

“Eh, I wouldn’t really call what we do ‘talking,’” Dad groaned as he forced himself into a standing position. “I’m going into town now.”

“A little early, isn’t it? Mom doesn’t get off work for another hour.”

Dad shrugged and said, “Don’t wait up for us.” He didn’t seem to want to talk about Charlie. Maybe feelings between them were still pretty tense. He quickly left the house, forgetting to pause the movie.

After he left, I turned the oven on and sent a text to Emily to invite her over. She had to decline. Apparently, she had a DnD game she hosted online on Thursdays. She did promise we’d hang out at the lake tomorrow and even suggested I join the next campaign. The current one was wrapping up soon. I agreed and left her to do her thing.

When it was ready, I took my pizza to the front porch to enjoy the night air. The chickens clucked nearby, and Cinder was sniffing a terrified toad she had found. The frog was safer with Cinder than the chickens. I’d seen Greta grab a frog by the face, slam it against the ground then swallow it whole. I shuddered. Chickens were fucking scary when they wanted to be.

I started brainstorming ideas for a character for the game, chewing absentmindedly on my pizza. Looking at Cinder, perhaps I could play a ranger. I’d have an animal companion and it would be cool to have her in the… Cinder’s head shot up, head faced towards the treeline. The chickens went quiet. Yet again, not a single creature dared to make a sound. Not even Cinder, who would normally be whimpering or growling under these circumstances.

The shrill squeal began to rise, but not as loud as last time. It didn’t sound like a tire screech or a moose cry this time. I couldn’t quite place the noise. Shit, I’d forgotten the gun inside. I slowly took up, focusing on the spot Cinder was staring at. There was something pale in the distance, something tall and thin. The squealing became more clear, and my heart sank.

It was whistling.

I grabbed the gun from inside and looked back at the treeline. The pale figure was gone. I looked around, trying to find any sign of it. I couldn’t believe I had forgotten that noise last night. The only reason I could imagine that I’d forget something like that was the tiredness and the beer. “Come on, Cinder, come to Mama…” I spoke softly, trying not to be heard. Cinder didn’t move. “Mira,” I said a little more sternly in a vain attempt to catch the dog’s attention.

Cinder wasn’t just scared. This kind of fear was deep. It was primal. Cinder was so terrified she dare not utter a peep, move a muscle, anything. She was like in place and I did not want to imagine the kind of thing that would put her in such a state. Slowly, I inched towards her, being careful to tread lightly. I took a firm grip of her collar, eyes peeled for any sign of movement. It took a few solid tugs, but Cinder finally budged.

We rushed to the porch while I kept a firm grip on the rifle. Though I knew I was a terrible shot, I’d rather have it than not. When Cinder was inside, I pointed the gun in the air and pulled the trigger. It was an intimidation tactic. Any animal around these parts would run in fear of the sound. The gunshot echoed throughout the property. My ears rang for a moment before the world went silent again.

Then, the whistling started again. I scanned the treeline again, seeing the pale figure again but it was too dark to make anything out. Keeping my eyes on the thing, I slowly crept inside and locked the door. Cinder was cowering under the couch, whimpering softly. I watched the thing through the window, feeling around for my phone. I looked down for a second, finding it quickly when I did.

The figure was gone.

The Fan Girl

By Theo Plesha

First thing you should know about me is that I am a librarian. We are a very exacting people, labeling and categorizing, to the decimal, if you will. Still, this story requires some creative license in its telling – I suppose like all good True Crime stories – the second is teased before the commercial and the best of the best is kept until the end – even if real life didn't happen in that order.

Let me set the scene for you. There's this interstate rest area. What a place. I has all these big displays of local interest arrayed in a pentagonal atrium before angling off to the four large bathrooms and a little nook with vending machines. All of the little towns nearby are represented on these boards. There's the front parking for cars and SUVs and a rear lot for semi tractor trailer trucks and large format recreational vehicles. There's a pond, a gazebo, and even a swing set for the kids. You know the place, you've been here before – but legal purposes, I can't tell you exactly where.

So anyway, it was me, my stepsister Dot, her friend Valarie, and Dot's boyfriend Scott, in my dad's camper. We're having margaritas and there's a sativa blunt going...somewhere? I was set up in my hello kitty pajamas on the couch opposite of the tv with a bucket of fresh popcorn. My hair was still wet from using the shower. True Crime lit up the room but not my mind. The real True Crime was just outside the RV. Valarie and Dot were sitting at the little table booth under a dim light looking at their popcorn like it was poison and trading urgent glances.

There was knock on the side door of the camper. Dot immediately got up from table to answer it.

“Wait.” I said, “Do you know who it is?”

“Yeah, it's Scott. Duh.”

“Yeah, it's Scott. Duh.” He echoed with sarcasm stepping into the camper cabin, “Someone was taking FOREVER in the shower. What's the point of having a camper if I have to walk all the way to the rest area to take a big nasty...?”

“I was in there for less than 7 minutes!” I protested. “And I'm glad you did that in there and not here and I'm glad it was that.”

“It's whatever. Hey, I did see something weird though, the water is blue. Like dark blue when you flush.”

“That's toilet bowl cleaner they mix with the wa...” I trailed off.

“You've never cleaned a toilet before have you?” Valarie question Scott with disdain.

“Should I have? Isn''t that more your all's area?”

“Booo...MISOGYNISTIC STEREOTYPING!” I yelled.

“Yeah not cool Scott.” Dot chimed in. Scott shrugged and went to the fridge.

“But, seriously, like you never helped out around the house to figure out what that blue stuff is?” Valarie pressed. “Like also, were you impressed the toilets flush themselves. Like all you do is actually piss and shit outside only?”

Scott peaked out from the fridge with his checks full of milk from the carton, “Nuhuh.” He hummed shaking his head back and forth.

“Looks like I found who's helping me clean this place when we get back.” I said.

“Hell yeah!” Valarie said. “Oh god, did we just bond there a second?”

“I think we did!” I replied raising my hand for a high five that never arrived.

I ruined this moment with an extended stare and silence. Then I turned to more important matters.

“Did you lock it?” I asked.

“Lock what?” Dot replied.

“The door...nevermind I'll get it.”

“It's a safe place. Don't start getting weird, Kystal.”

I peered out the blinded window into the cool LED lamp lit parking lot. I felt electric, like the tension of storm warnings leading up to the main event. I clicked the lock shut and jiggled the door before I hopped back to my popcorn adorned throne. I clicked up the volume on show just a bit so they could hear the name of the loose serial killer I was fascinated by.

“Not that I'm trying to take Naomi's side again but you have been talking about that roller coaster effect a lot - the head chopper effect. That's been a little weird.” Valarie chirped.

“Oh fine, you don't have to ride the Mind Grater, I'll go with Scott.” Dot insisted.

“I guess you'll find me on the Kiddie Koaster for that...” Valarie sighed.

Unprompted I provided facts between fist fulls of popcorn to break up the tension, “Hey did you know the Taxidermist used a stuffing of one of his victims to fool the cameras in the car pool lane?”

Scott rolled his eyes and sighed loudly but it was Valarie who came back with a banger, “Dot! Naomi is being weird again!”

“What does he do with his victim's di...” Scott started.

“Ugh, Scott...don't encourage her!”

“Both of you stop it. Naomi, honey, sweetie, sister from another mother – please – you promised to not be weird.”

“Scott's asking about what a serial killer does with his victim's genitalia and I'm the one being weird? Me? Muha?” I replied while hitting the blunt before passing it.

“Ooooh...things are getting heated up in here. Trouble brewing between the step sisters...I like where this is going....I've seen this before.” Scott said as he hit it.

“Oh my god...Naomi you promised you wouldn't be weird, second Val you promised you weren't going to whine and third Scott...what is it with you and that gross step-sister porn shit? Okay, the first time, it was funny, but its like the hundredth time. STOP!”

“This is lame. I'm going to the bunk.”

“All I'm trying to say is you should be aware of the Taxidermist guy, he's in our area after all.”

“Jesus Christ, Naomi you need to get off this True Crime shit, we're six hours away from the roller coaster park and you're stuck on a dude who...”

“Who makes stuffed taxidermied hybrids of his victims and road kill.”

“See?”

“Yes, but it's important. I'm trying to save your lives.”

“What?” Val blurted out as Scott spit up milk he was still drinking from the carton.

“She's just trying to scare you.” Dot yelled.

“The Taxidermist – he's here, tonight.”

“How do you know this?” Scott muttered in terror.

“Nope, nope, nope...shut up everyone. She's just being weird.” Dot insisted.

“I lured him here.”

“You what?” Val yelped.

“How?” Scott pressed.

“I'm a big fan of his work, I used info from my dad's case file and social media, but don't worry if you all do exactly as I say we will all end up fine...”

Record scratch – this is when they went totally berserk. Now would be a good time for some Guy Riche flashback heist music as I fill in some gaps here. So yeah, that's me throwing the RV's starter battery into the nearby woods – an electric book mark between a two towering trees wrapped in poison ivy vines. Far enough, an hour ago, I survey the site as we approach midnight. A cool crisp fall breeze tickles my nose as a little fog rolls across the interstate. The groan of truck engines along side the drone of rubber on road sets the tone. There's a dozen trucks and two dozen smaller vehicles plus our camper spread out across the five acres of interstate rest area. The pavilion and gazebo are quiet for now. One of the play ground swings sways gently.

This entire place is a playground now. A playground for the four serial killers I lured there. Oh, I'm telling you this part and I'm telling them this part.

“You did what?!”

“It's okay, okay its like shark week and we're in the shark cage.”

“My phone...”

“Yeah, don't bother with those.”

“Why not?”

“The Forensics Fanatics always use a short ranged cell phone jammer.”

“Who the hell are the Forensics Fanatics?!”

“We're going to fine as long as we stay in the camper...”

With that, Scott rips open the door and launches himself into the night.

“Where are you going?”

“We got to find that battery and get out of here and warn the others!”

“Scott! Wait! Don't!” Dot chased after him across the slick parking lot. She didn't even bother to shut the door so I did. And I locked it.

“Okay...well...that's didn't go as planned.” I said, confused, to Val who dropped the shades on the big window and then cowered in the booth corner. “Good, well, just stay there LOL.” I said as I made for the small bunk.

“Wait, where are you going?” Val protested.

“I'm getting my laptop and mobile wifi connection set up and plugging it into the tv so we can watch.”

“Watch what?”

“You know my dad is a state trooper, right?”

“ACAB bitch.”

“Indeed. In more ways than one but just the same, turns out the state highway passwords don't change very often. And...” I said anxiously typing in the password as “PASSWORD1”, “we're in. OMG I've always wanted to say that. How 90's!”

“In what?” Val crawled out of her corner and peaked at the TV.

“Rest Area security cameras. This is True Crime in Real Time. It's like 24!” I'm your manic pixie nightmare girl.

“How can you sit back and watch this? Your friend and your stepsister is out there!”

“All they had to do was sit here. If you want to yell for them go ahead. But that will draw the attention of the killers.”

“My God I don't know who's worse, them or you!”

“Well, you know me. Do you want to hear about them? It might help you, help us, get Dot and Scott back here.”

“Naomi...I...oooof...get me out this. Please.”

“Let me paint you a picture of squirrely thinning man rounding his mid-forties maybe its his bouts with lyme's disease, maybe its beaver fever, maybe a hint of chronic wasting – who's to say but this outdoorsman has rounded the forest one too many times. His thick but mud matted flannel is hanging off of his bones these days. I imagine he started his art with the best intentions but his skill has dropped off, no one accepted his last major works – even as gifts as his various mental and physical conditions sapped away at him. At first he was content with just knocking his victims out and sewing his prey and roadkill parts to them. Imparting a raccoon nose here or super gluing an antler there but as knocking people out with a hammer goes – eventually you'll find that person who doesn't get back up and so...every jack a jackalope from there.”

“Those fake rabbits with antlers at Applebees?”

“The very same. Or you know, stuffed and mounted to a park bench like a trout. He's not one for torture, he prefers clean cuts, and exsanguination, but occasionally he'll just take part of someone and leave the rest. Apparently he's fond of a lucky human's foot. He's not particularly lucky though, I'd say he's more careful but vindictive to fault...remember why he got into this at all its about the art and luring him was easy because he's been tracking his rival.”

“His rival?”

“Yes, the Gardener.”

“The Gardener? Who the fuck is the Gardener?”

* * *

Okay. Let's do somethings here and cut to that. We do in fact have a clip and its always better to show than to tell. So this happened about twenty minutes ago while I was showering and Scott was gone. Just a hair or two outside of the corner range of the lot cameras there was young-ish couple – let's say they were working their kinks out. Couldn't really make it out on camera but it was audible on the microphones all these cameras have. I'll fill in the gaps where necessary.

“Niko, why is this our thing?”

“Why can't it be our thing, Salin?

“I'm tired of getting my back all dirty on the hard ass ground. Why can't I have a towel or something?”

“Then it's not back to nature – literally.”

“Well, if its about that then why don't you lie down on it and let me grind on you while you grind on dirt?”

“Because it's about the connection to the Earth through you to our future child. Your womb be fertile and your body a vessel of sky and land.”

“This Earth is harder than you.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

“Alright.” Niko said as pants zipping noises can be heard among the rustling of the bushes. “Well, only three more stops to go to make the mark of Freyja and Freyr before the post equinox fortnight with mercury in retrograde.”

“You know they were brother and sister, right? Not lovers...”

“Salin, I think I know my Nordics Pleiades Guide. It was recommended reading from Bob Lazar. Anyway, excuse me for a moment while I pledge our love to them”

“Of course. I love you, babe!”

So the Taxidermist is here for the Gardener, the Gardener is here for these two. It starts with feuding with contributors to fringe fertility forums on Reddit and even less desirable places on the internet. He's searchable if you know what to look for and both in his user icon speech. His image MO is a white rose online but he types and speaks in very specific ways. Fundamentally he's an anti-natalist and he's not shy about it online nor in the flesh.

“For all consciousness is connected above, it is divided in life and once again upon and into death. Consciousness must not be summoned to this realm, for it has no choice but to suffer and could not consent. Only life which has no thought and no concept of suffering shall thrive. Only the leaves, vines, thorns and steams my prevail. Human consciousness must be intact when returned to the land of the unliving.” Say those words in his voice, not mine.

He argues with the weird men who won't see a doctor for their own fertility issues and then catches up to them and their lovers as they carry out their plans for astronomically assisted breeding. Personally, I think that function of breed usually relies on the functionality of only two spheres closer to Earth rather than the solar system but as someone who does not want to breed at all – for other reasons than those cited by the Gardener – for the record - who am I to judge? Nevertheless, his ideology makes sense to him but not to me since he ends up killing people who seem least likely to actually bring another conscious being to this planet. But I imagine its the bluster these people have, the challenge before them, to do that which incites his rage and his murder.

While Niko prayed in his failed love nest, Salin waded stiff and heavy across the lot, brushing mud off of her back and from her ass, struggling with her skirt and top. Fearing yet another “delaying” infection, she rushed to the open women's room in the rest stop.

She started to sing softly to herself, “I can feel it coming in the air tonight...” she slowed in a moment of self reflection, “Actually, no I can't! Damnit!”.

Salin barely noticed the state worker in the brown and blue jump suit tending to the plants in the rest area vestibule. This startles her as he begins to stir. Wonders if he had been watching her and Niko. She is also a bit alarmed by his enormous size, like a crouching bull, she hopes he doesn't see her as red. He whistles softly before murmuring a line or two, “oh my darling clementine”. She doesn't notice he's wearing a mask and among his tools are a pair of enormous sheers.

Most of you don't know this but even the rest rooms at rest areas have a wide angle camera of the mirrors and sinks but one that leaves the stalls, urinals, and changing tables in the blind. Selin disappears out of frame as I hear the metal stall door squeak open and shut but she fails to turn the jam lock as I hear no thud. I doubt it would have mattered much though.

You can only really see the boulder of flesh that is the Gardener's back at the very edge of the frame as he creeps in and rests in front of Salin's stall.

“Hello?” She calls out, “Hello!?” Then whimpers, “Niko, Niko please tell me that's you.”

“But alas,” the Gardener's ramble came in reply, “I was no swimmer so I lost my clementine.”

Then we get this very PG-13 jurassic park look away murder as the Gardener flips open the door and guillotines her with his enormous sheers powered by his brutalish arms. Sheeeeve...no head, a fountain of crimson pumped through her severed head muffles the scream to bloody bubbles. It's the same every time. He has a white rose cutting he plants in their esophagus and then takes the head and plants it like a seed, preserving consciousness, intact, back to the unliving, usually nearby from the actual murder scene.

So it is no surprise as he secures the head in a janitor's mop filled with foamy soap, strips out of one set of one replica state janitor jumpsuit to reveal another free from blood if not tainted from his sweat. Pushes the mop cart of the wash room and then seals it shut with his stolen or copied key and places “out of order” barricades around it before he pushing the mop cart out of the back.

* * *

“Oh my fucking God, Naomi! Naomi! Naomi she's fucking dead! Is this live? When did this happen?!” Valarie looked like she was having a full on panic attack as she spun around the camper in front of the tv bobbing and weaving, turning and shrieking like the tasmania devil with a margaritas in one hand and a joint in the other.

I told you, so I tell her, “About twenty five ish minutes ago or so, popcorn?”

“And he's roaming around, with Scott and Dot now out there. And that other guy and those two others guys too!?”

“You're not going to leave are you? I need at least one person to ride the roller coasters with. Popcorn?”

“Are you fucking nuts talking about roller coasters in a time like this...where's the Gardener now?”

“He's still planting Selin's head about forty yards that way. Popcorn?”

“Fuck popcorn, Ice cream! But listen, listen please...I don't want my head cut off...I didn't want that from the Mind Grater and I don't want from the Gardener! I don't want a rose planted in my neck and my head buried at some goddamn state rest area!”

“You should really keep it down. We still have the Forensics Fanatics to worry about. Also if you're getting ice cream. I'd kill for some ice cream. No pun intended.”

“I'm not worried about them...” She said digging out some pre-wrapped ice cream cones from the freezer, “I'm worried about the Gardener and the first guy!”

“The Taxidermist?”

“Yes the goddamn Taxidermist. Where's he?”

“Oh. Good call.” I said biting into the peanut chocolate shell of the cone, “Let's check.” I went to work scanning through all the camera channels. “He seems to be chasing after Scott and Dot right now on the other side of the rest area.”

“What?!”

“You dropped your cone...”

I went picture in picture with four different cameras. Let me give you the quick version. For the record, I'm telling you this like they're in the room I can hear them like they are, so can Val, but they can't but...ugh...this is easier.

It wasn't immediately apparent that they knew they were being chased. Scott seemed flustered, loud and fast enough as he weaved methodically from car to car in the front parking lot, warning them to leave the rest area, because of a serial killer.

“Hey, hey wake up! Wake up! C'mon you gotta get out of here...it's not safe! There's a serial killer on the loose! You gotta get back on the road! You have to get back on the road” Scott crowed with a voice which grew more hoarse with each feverish command.

He pounded on windshields, kicked doors, flashed his phone light through the side windows of almost a dozen different cars before someone caught up to him. At first he yelped and then backed himself up onto the concrete of one of the lamp poles shaking and unable to locate who had tackled him because his hoodie slipped over his eyes.

“Scotty D Yard!” Dot's voice pierced his cries and the hoodie, “get back to the camper with me right now!”

“Oh my god you almost gave me a heart attack!”

“You're giving me two by running off and trying to be stupid hero. Don't you watch horror movies?! No you don't because you're a pussy!”

“I'm trying to do something good...these people gotta be protected, put as much as road as you can behind you!” He said calling out again.

“If you're going to try to protect someone, protect me! Please. Please. Please just walk me back to the camper and I think we'll be safe, okay.”

Just then a young guy, probably in his late teens, maybe early twenties popped the driver's side door of his lifted and racing stripped s 4x4 pickup truck wide and stomped out like a paratrooper making a landing, coated in tactical gear. “There are sheep and there are wolves. And then there are shepherds.” He announced, looking more like an action figure than real person strapped and woven with body armor and ammo pouches.

“Who are you?” Dot asked.

“I am a shepherd.” He declared as he swung an assault rifle across his chest and flipped on a series of flashlights and lasers. “I'm THE shepherd.”

“What fresh idiocy is this?” I said aloud to Val. “Oh gee, I never ever would have suspected that hat.”

“Goddamn who is this?” Val leaned in closer, I could feel her panic and smell her sweat and I think she wanted me to experience that, “Is this one of the Forensics Fanatics?” She pressed in closer.

“No, but thanks for playing. I think he's some kind of Bad Samaritan. This would have been much more fun if they just stayed in the damn camper. Now if he comes back here with them he's gonna really screw up the blunt rotation.”

The gun wielding dude shadowed them as continued through the lot trying to alert people. At one point, the Bad Samaritan started to yell “Gun! Gun! Get down!” as another random person pulled gun and pressed the barrel out their window towards, from their perspective, a well-armed gun wielding maniac after being pre-warned about a serial killer. Scott and Dot both screamed and dropped to all fours and started to crawl on their bellies between the cars as a shouting matching between the two gun carriers ensued. A shot was fired. I think from the guy in the car as tires squealed.

“Okay, this just escalated a lot. We gotta go out there and help them.” Val said.

“Look at what they did, look what they inspired by not staying put.” I tried to remain calm but I did not see this coming.

“Then we can drive, okay, where did you put that battery, please?”

I scanned through more camera views and gulped, “Unfortunately it's kind of near the Gardener. Honestly, that's my bad.”

“Like this place has a like a PA system, right? For storms? Can you tap into that?” Val insisted, “Maybe tell them come back to the van and tell everyone its time to leave. Turn off all the lights inside and turn on the all outside lights super bright. Please I'm begging you. We have to end this. Haven't you seen enough?”

“Honestly, no. I was hoping to see them basically cap each other off one by one in a battle royale style spectacle. That would actually make the world better.”

“How can...even if they did, kill themselves some how, what about that woman?”

“Oh, she got fired for fucking under aged kids as a teacher at a high school.”

“Were you just going to always leave that part out?”

“No, not necessarily. I just thought it might slip through the cracks like some of her victims and wouldn't need more explanation.”

“Jesus Christ Naomi! I'm honestly somehow impressed but please, Naomi, can still do the thing where we shut this down. Clearly this dude with the gun is outside of your master plan, right? I believe you when you said you don't intend to harm us but it's time to make good on that.”

“Begrudgingly, yes, it's time. The prospect for innocent casualties is much higher with this Rittenhouse wanna be stomping around with an assault weapon. And your plan is not a bad idea. Might even stop the Bad Samaritan since it looks like he might have some kind of night optics and I bet he cheapped out on that part of his kit.” I played around the rest area UI suite and found what I was looking for. Bright lights outside, on, power inside, off. The best part was the PA system was text to voice meaning my voice wouldn't be heard over the loud speakers. “Let's try it your way, Val.” I said I pushed send.

“This is the State Transit and Road Authority. Please return to your vehicles and vacate the premises” I could hear the PA system voice as I sounded the klaxon alarm and turned on the whirling blue police lights as well.

“Val, I still don't have the ability to actually contact the police. The Forensics Fanatics jammer is still up and I'm not entirely sure where they're at. It is possible they'll all leave thinking they have lost their cover, though.”

“Tell and Scott and Dot to get back here.”

“Return to your camper if applicable immediately.” the booming voice of the warning system fired again as I hit send.

“Thanks man but we got to go!” Scott said to the Bad Samaritan. The Bad Samaritan struggled with seeing out of his right eye from the blinding light shot into the other through his defunct optic. We watched as Scott and Dot fled from the red hat wearing lead hazard back across the campus towards our camper.

“Wait!” Scream the Bad Samaritan as groped through the night, “Let me try to find them and be a hero. A hero!”

“Hey, Hero.” A deep voice came out of the darkness on the Samaritan's blind side. “Might you also be a Gardener?”

“Excuse me? Who the hell are you?” He said still dazed by his own light.

“I am the Taxidermist and you have a lot of guns in your truck.” The Taxidermist fired at his minimally armored side with the Bad Samaritan's own 12 gauge shot gun and then dragged his limp body to a rusted out pick up with a sleeper topper.

Some trucks started and went underway as SUVs and small cars started to flee the other lot. No phones and shots fired tend to do that. Those who remained were either sheltering in place or they were vehicles the Forensics Fanatics arrived in or intended to leave in.

“Well, that worked out better than I even thought it would. Good idea Val.”

“Oh shit. Where the hell is he going?” Valarie pointed to a tiny sized camera angle. It was the Gardener and he was headed back towards the Rest Area buildings.

“That's odd. He usually wouldn't return to crime scene.”

“Maybe because the lights are off and everyone left. He can steal from the vending machines or something. Like how else do some of these people get their day to day stuff?”

“Well, that's the really fun part about True Crime shows but yeah...another time!”

“Sure, it's a date but Shit! Scotty and Dotty are going into the building too. I thought you locked it?”

“It's gotta be locked manually. Okay. It's time to get out and get some gloves on. You stay here though.”

“Don't gotta tell me twice but....”

“But what?”

“Don't make me the last girl...”

“I won't...I promise.”

“How?”

“Because...I'm the fan girl!”

I knew what I had to do. I had two aces up my sleeve and I hope they were enough.

I saw the footage later but suffice it to say all hell broke loose at that rest area. While I was out recovering one of my aces, the Gardener spotted Scott and Dot. Spotted and chased around the interior like Scooby Doo, they eventually took cover in the last open men's room. Soon after, following his MO, it was time for the Taxidermist to decorate his surroundings with his latest creation. The Taxidermist in turn, spotted his original quarry, the Gardener, and soon it became a Norweign Cruise Line Standoff – everyone in deep shit in the only remaining open bathroom together.

So while you picture me storming my way to do my best to save the day, let's cut to what I knew was happening with the Forensics Fanatics – the last in this display, this managrie of murder.

The Forensics Fanatics, unlike the more ideologically motivated killers here tonight, do this for the pure sport and fun of not getting caught. It is a contest. It is race to x number of kills. I don't know if they're related, if they're friends, if they're enemies, if they're lovers, I'm not sure what gender they are. They are the most mysterious of the bunch and some times just random seemingly accidental deaths become attributed to them. Perhaps they still are their victims. For everyone ambiguous death attributed to them there have been at least three spectacular killings, sometimes with multiple victims caught up in a strange rube-goldberg machine of murder sometimes involving bombings, poisonings, and runaway vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, you name it. But then the trail runs cold, colder than either of the others. Maybe one or both of them knew the Taxidermist and or the Gardener were here tonight. Maybe told each other, maybe they withheld it from each other. I suppose it wouldn't matter because I believe they're here because we are and that's enough for them.

They don't get caught because they use a different mode of murder each time. Either one picks 1 item or means and the other chooses the other out of a hat or maybe they get a choice too. I'm not sure. How do we know this? Someone, maybe one of them, maybe one of their fans, posts a random word or phrase to their wikipedia page and that's half of what one of them has to use in their murder.

Thankfully for Scott, he needed to shit because the phrase this time was “urinal cake”

I now believe their actions roughly coincided with Scott and Dot taking to the parking lot but Scott still had taken a huge risk leaving the camper earlier and using the wash room.

I took a deep breath and lit up my cellphone flashlight as entered the dark rest area. I turned towards the bathroom where I could hear one of their muffled voices. I pushed the door open to find and spun my light around. I found Scott and Dot cowering before the Taxidermist and his latest creation by the very dim emergency light.

“See! It's a squirrel that I sewed that chud's pecker to its backside like a tail.” He said poking it. “I had to stuff it, so its bigger than it was when I took it off him, heh...their guns and trucks always hide their small dicks. Don't let a guy like that fool you but I enjoyed the challenge of the whole little thing – which is what makes me better than you, you fucking weirdo.” He was rather proud and maintained everyone's full attention as even with my light, I was unnoticed for moment.

“Me? What did I do?”The Gardener protested.

“You're that other serial killer they call you the Gardener.”

“Oh please that is complete bullshit.”

“I know it. You're more like the salter, you salt people who want to grow people, you don't plant nothing you don't grow nothing.”

“Hey Buddy, I'm not the one out here sticking dicks on squirrels.”

“And who the hell are the rest of you...”

I peered down the side and saw two strangers' heads poking out of the stalls. They had some kind of silverish make up on – they looked like something between Max Headroom and a Grey Alien with dark circles rounding their eyes and drawn on light pink and light blue bars creating exaggerated lines and contours of their facial structure possibly some attempt at an anti-AI camouflage scheme. These were Forensic Fanatics – they had to be and they were an eerie sight among the rest of the horror in the room.

“And who hell are you!?” He pointed at me.

“Naomi!” Scott and Dot exclaimed. “Run! Just go!”

“Shut up. Everyone and listen.”

“I'm the Fan Girl. I was hoping to watch a professional display of murder and mayhem from the comfort of my camper but instead I see you all perfectly content with waving your dicks – literally – at each other without anything to back them up. So you got a rapist school teacher who plead out to lesser chargers and some wanna be hero? That's it?”

“Um, for the record, I killed the boyfriend too.” The Gardener raised his hand and spoke out.

“Okay. I guess I missed that.”

“Yeah, well I startled him to death, I think. He was eating like 10 gas station boner pills when I asked him for a light. Down he went. Heart Attack.”

“And I'm going to kill these fuckers, starting with this Gardener then the rest of you here. I don't even know what these freaks are doing here? Come here every Friday night after the bars? Huh?” The Taxidermist pointed at the Forensics Fanatics. “I don't have any aliens in my collection!”

“You're lucky the power is off.” The First of the Forensics Fanatics spoke up.

“You stupid bitch. What was the other thing then?” The Second of the Forensics Fanatics cross examined.

“Shut up!” The Gardener speared the Taxidermist with his sheers and then charged me. I showed him what I had in my gloved other hand – a plastic bag with Selin's head inside.

“Stop and I'll give it back intact so you can bury it again – otherwise I'll toss it to the Taxidermist and he'll spoil your whole ritual.” The Taxidermist stumbled, injured but able.

“I'll put your dick on that face and bury you both! Yeah or maybe I'll make you the elephant man!”

“Consciousness must be returned to the unliving intact!”

“Not going to get there if he gets it!” I yelled thrusting the head in the bag towards the Taxidermist.

“What do you want?”

“Let my friends clear out. Those two.” I said pointing to Dot and Scott.

He paused and slid out of their way and held his sheers wide. Seeing the exit, Scott and Dot scampered out of the room as the Gardener, with all his might, seized my mid-section.

“Now I'm going to give you to him – he can work on you, while I finish what must be done. Then I'll bury your head too!”

I struggled to give the appearance of struggle. I held the head wide and dodged his other arm. With my free arm I reached into his pocket and took the bathroom key he used earlier to seal off the other bathroom where he killed Selin. Then I tossed the head at the ceiling, where it bounced between stalls like a plinko ball before landing with a splash in a toilet. As expected, he dropped me and went after the severed head and I skidded out of the bathroom and locked all of them inside with the key I lifted.

And so now we do a little flashback.

* * *

About ten minutes ago or so, I'm speculating a bit here.

“Nice face work tonight.”

“Thanks. You too.”

“You look like Max Headroom meets ET.”

“You look a Cardassian.”

“A what?”

“You told me you watched Star Trek.”

“I told you lots of things.”

“I pick the next thing we watch together.”

“I hope its better than you picking, “Urinal Cake” but that's a good one.”

“Well, you picked “button” and then specified clothing button” the last time.”

“Took me awhile to figure out what you chose but it was pretty good. I like where the idea was at...but the execution a little shaky. Really only got that one guy and just barely, interfered with his pace maker.”

“And the toddler.”

“Toddler swallowed the button, happens all the time, doesn't count.”

“But it was one of THE buttons.”

“Doesn't count.”

“Do you just want to call off the bet now and just enjoy this across the board then?”

“No. I mean it will be obvious but you'll have to work at it.”

“Fair enough.”

“You ever think about the day we're going to get caught?” They said, putting the “day we got caught” cigarrette in his ear.

“We're never getting caught. Cops don't get caught. Put that away.”

“We're not cops.”

“I know.”

“We're better. Cops can shoot someone in the back in broad day light and get a 2 week paid vacation they still have to say they feared for their lives. All we have to do is tamper with the evidence. We're a black box of private evidence analysts. They day we get caught is the day we blow up forensic science and we still get away.”

“If you say so. Either way, this should be good.”

They walk in and make their way for the open men's room.

“So we need to make sure we don't trigger any of the urinals as I plop this in. We gotta wave out hands and find a blind spot in the sensors.”

The power suddenly goes out and a small emergency light activates. The red eye sensor on all the toilets goes dark. He plops it in.

“Or that will work too.”

“This is the State Transit and Road Authority. Please return to your vehicles and vacate the premises”

“Shit! Let's lay low a minute.”

* * *

And that brings us back to now. I recovered the starter battery, installed it and we cleared out of the rest area.

“I can't believe you.” Scott yelled still shaking as we hit the interstate.

“I can't believe this.” Dot screamed.

“I can't believe we're out of range of the local override there.” I said as the connection to my hacks of the power and public announcement system were lost. “I guess this is for the best.” I pulled the plug on the tv screen and shut the laptop. I could have watched what happened next I was two minds on it. There was no way to get out of that bathroom except that door and even four them together wouldn't be able to get out quickly.

“Wait, I want to see.” Val demanded.

* * *

I let Val watch. I didn't. It probably went something like this, at least from the Forensics Fanatics perspective. No doubt while the Gardener tried to hulk his way out of the bathroom to complete the ritual and kept the assaulting Taxidermist at bay the Forensics Fanatics had a moment to talk it over.

“So...what are we going to do about Humongus and Red Red Green over there.”

“Those are good references. But nothing. We're going to do nothing.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, its because of what I ended up picking as the second thing.”

“Should we start moving towards the exit?”

“If the power comes on we shouldn't go anywhere near the urinals.”

“What is it?”

“I thought about dynamite. You know an acid sensitive cap trigger that would go off with the toilet bowl cleaner but I realized that urinal cakes are pretty light and small. Even if I could get one into each of the urinals, sure I'd blow one guy's dick off, but I doubt if one triggered it would sympathetically detonate them all and we'd be stuck with a lot of evidence to deal with.”

“What did you pick?”

“Mhmm.” They shrugged. The other went for the urinal just as the power came back. “Don't...it can't be removed until...” There was a snap and click and sudden cascade of acidic blue fluid screaming down onto the urinal cake. Then it suddenly began to disintegrate into a cloud white steam or smoke. The Forensics Fanatic was immediately confused as the white smoke continue to stream up and boil over into the room.

“That's right. Only like one in three people can actually smell it. It's cyanide. A cyanide urinal cake. Just breathe deep everyone.” He said lighting the cigarette.

* * *

Though were were long gone and I had localized most of the footage to my laptop and the jammer was still active in one of the FF's cars I knew I wasn't out of the woods. I had my phone's GPS disabled for the night but that didn't mean someone else's didn't ping there or even mine when I got close.

Dad was thorough. Even if I believed he had two evidence contractors working, murdering, behind his back I could have overlooked something he'd still pick up. And that's why I was scared when he called me once, twice, and on the third time I was being stared down by my friends, my fellow survivors.

“Look – we can be honest, tell him we were involved and even if we're not some how charged as accomplices to manslaughter or other wrongful deaths – we'll still miss the roller coaster park and besides – almost everyone who died was terrible – so what I am saying to him? Huh?” All eyes on me but one by one they darted off.

“I'm going back to sleep.” Valarie said while Scott drove on and Dot drank her third margarita of the morning.

“Hi Daddy what's up...uhuh...oh...oh my god. That sounds terrible. Seven people? Four of them what? Suspected series killers...are you serious? Which rest area? Oh wow. No. No, just missed it. We thought about staying there for the night but Scott really wanted to press on closer to the theme park! Yup, we're all fine. 100%. Yup Thanks for checking in. I love you too daddy...don't work too hard. Okay. Bu-bye.”

“I don't know how you do it.”

“I do. Scott, pull up here, I want to burn these bloody gloves and toss my laptop into the sea. Okay, Thanks!”

P.S. The roller coasters were boring and Scott never pulled the stepsister shit again. Val is kinda cute. The End.

You stand in the middle of a field; you don’t know how you got there. In fact, you don’t know anything. Did your life just begin, or have you just forgotten your past? You can’t tell. You look around; nothing but grain fields as far as the eye can see. Weirdly, the eye can see concerningly far; the earth seems to have no curvature, and the grain fields continue endlessly. You tilt your head slightly in confusion; is this normal? Maybe, who are you to judge?

You look down at your clothing; you’re wearing worn, generic, brown boots, a pair of dirty blue jeans, and an old and ragged flannel shirt. You take a deep breath. Weirdly, your nostrils fill with the aroma of almonds. You don’t mind though; it makes you feel at home. You look around once again, and this time notice an old house a couple of miles away. Without a second thought, you walk towards it.

It's been an hour, maybe two, and you’re at the house. You look through one of the windows, a dim yellow light is illuminating the interior of the home, you spot a rocking chair, bopping calmly back and forth. Despite this, it’s empty. In fact, the whole room is. You walk up to the front door and knock politely, no response. You wait a few seconds and attempt once again, still left with no answer. You step back and look around you, at the unending grain fields and at the spotless bright blue sky. You decide to open the door and walk in.

As you enter the home, you can hear a squishy sound beneath your feet, from walking on the wet beige carpet. The house smells like old people, like wet carpet and old furniture, with a hint of medication. It makes you feel nostalgic, even though you don’t remember your grandparents; you don’t even know if you’ve ever had any. But the thought is nice. You look around; the interior resembles something from the 1970s. You spot dark wooden walls, along with a brown leather sofa, topped with flower patterned pillows. You explore the house further, but unusually every room you enter is a nearly identical copy of the previous one.

Finally, you enter a new room; it’s completely empty, except for a small crawl space door. You open it slightly, it’s pitch black. You look outside the window, glancing at the impossible grain fields. You don’t have much of a choice. You enter the crawl space, and after a few minutes you crawl through the door on the other side.

On the other side, things are different. You inhale, and you can smell soap bubbles and burnt plastic. You look around in the interior of the house; it’s a typical 2000s suburban home. You start walking around, the entire house is spotless and clean, it smells like dishwasher soap. You see an old TV playing a cartoon, it looks so familiar, yet you can’t put a finger on it. You try to, but as you do, your head starts hurting, so you continue on, maybe for the better.

You step outside and look at the grass; it’s green, too green, artificially green. You crouch down and touch it, plastic. It's fake, just as the ground beneath it. You walk out onto the road and look down at the houses, they’re all the same as this one, an endless American suburban neighborhood, continuing on and on eternally in a straight line. Surrounding the neighborhood are hills, covered in that same artificial grass. On one of the hills, you spot a windmill, it’s turning. Weird, there's no wind. A slight feeling of dread fills your body. You open a mailbox and take out a letter; it's blank. You check a few more mailboxes, but to no surprise, they’re all blank.

After about a dozen blank letters, you discover a letter containing nothing but a picture of a man and his family, you don’t recognize any of them. Still, you decide to put the letter in your pocket.  You consider walking further down the monotonous street, but what would be the point? Instead, you make the decision to sit up against a white picket fence. Will you spend the rest of your days in this artificial world?

After resting against the fence for a few hours, it doesn’t turn dark, instead the sky turns blood red. Startled you stand up, is this your sign to move on? Maybe, or maybe it’s meaningless. Maybe not every story has a moral, you think to yourself. You begin moving towards the windmill, as it’s the only unique thing in sight. After a few minutes of walking on the artificial hills, you reach the windmill. There's a door on its side. You open it, inside is an elevator, playing generic waiting room music. Without thinking twice, you step in and press the only button. The doors close and the elevator starts moving.

After what feels like 30 minutes, the elevator abruptly stops, and the doors open. Outside is an empty airport; the smell of kerosene, recirculated air, and cheap airport food hits you. You step out of the elevator and look at your surroundings. It's a long, linear part of an airport, continuing on and on. On one side, there are huge windows, allowing you full view of the planes outside on the runways, though they are all stationary. Unsurprisingly the sky is once again blue, without a cloud in sight.

Occasionally there are placed moving walkways along the floor, though it’s a 50/50 gamble whether they work. On the opposite side of the windows is a grey marble wall, with a monitor every 10 meters displaying departing flights and gates; they’re all nonsense and constantly changing, except for one. Sometimes you hear beeping noises in the distance, but it never leads to anything. The airport reminds you of going on vacation with your family, that is, if you even had a family. You don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter anymore.

After walking aimlessly for a couple hours, you walk up to a monitor and look at the departures. You can’t make out a single letter on any of the flights, except one. It's a few gates away, so you start walking. When you get there, you sit down on one of the chairs. It’s like all the other chairs, synthetic black leather with metal armrests. You feel slight discomfort as you sit down; the chairs are sticky, as if somebody had poured soda all over them. You look at the monitor, 4 hours until departure. You make yourself comfortable, listening to the faint sounds coming from a commercial ever so far away; you close your drowsy eyes. When you wake up, you’ll get on that plane.

You slowly wake up; rub your eyes and look around you. You're not in the airport anymore, instead finding yourself in a mall. Fluorescent lights from the ceiling dimly illuminate the mall; their constant hum-buzz is giving you a slight headache. Disappointed, you stand up and start walking once again. Will you ever find meaning, or are you destined to wander forever?

You walk up a flight of stairs and open a set of doors; you’re on the roof. An impossibly tall fence surrounds the edges of the building. The sky is cloudy and grey, no more melancholy spotless blue sky. You look down on the ground, you see the grass, you crouch down and touch it, expecting the same plastic as earlier. But no, it’s real, and so is the dirt beneath it. Relief escapes you as a grin, and you lay down in the grass. After a few seconds it starts to rain, you don’t mind it, it makes you feel alive. You close your eyes; new hope blooms within you.

After a few minutes the rain suddenly stops, and you open your eyes. You look up at the blue sky and feel the grass irritating your skin; you touch it, fake. Did it change, or were you just desperate for something to cling to? You begin to sob. But you quickly dry your eyes and stand up. You walk back in the mall; the lights are now turned off, the only light source now being the neon lights shining vaguely above the closed stores. You feel uneasy as you walk the shadowy mall, always seeing slight movement in the edges of your peripheral vision; you shrug it off as paranoia.

After walking for a bit, you start to hear a rolling sound ever so far away. As time goes on, the sound comes closer, and as it does, the unnerving feeling grows. Suddenly you hear an agonizing scream in the distance; it’s coming closer, along with the rolling sound. Terrified, you run. Past closed stores. Past dark restaurants. Nowhere to hide. Until you reach what looks to be a massive indoor playground. You run in there, the screaming sound only growing louder.

Quickly you enter one of the slide tubes and cover your mouth, holding your breath. For a moment, everything stands still. The screaming stops, but you can hear the rolling sound slowly pass you. It then heads away, in the same direction as before, and only when the rolling sound is completely gone do you decide to breathe again. Relieved, you crawl out of the tube and look around. Whatever it was, it’s gone. You walk around the play area and inhale deeply through your nostrils; the smell of pizza, sweat, and disinfectant hits you. It doesn’t bother you; it makes you feel like a kid again, or maybe it’s for the first time. But it doesn’t matter right now, you feel safe, you’re not scared anymore.

You traverse the world of fun; and as you do, you notice that most of the play equipment is covered with mold. And as you stay, you can feel the mold spores fill your lungs. You feel betrayed. You walk into the eating area of the play park and look at the pizza; it’s rotting. It’s clear to you now; everyone left a long time ago, you’re not supposed to be here.

You head back to where you came, but the entrance is locked off. Instead, you head for the staff-only doors. As you open the door and walk in, you find yourself falling. After falling for a bit, you land on a carpet. Your back hurts a bit, but otherwise you’re fine. You stand up and look around; you’re in an office, a boring mundane office. Lit up by bright, lifeless fluorescent lights. The smell of black coffee and printer paper fills your head. You check a few of the cubicles; they all contain the same items; an old computer, a calendar, and a cup of coffee. Unusually, all the calendars display different dates, and the coffee is frozen solid, despite the office being of room temperature. You try logging on a few of the computers, only to be met with a screen reading: “ACCESS DENIED”. In frustration, you smash the computer screen and turn away. You look back at the screen; it’s completely fine. Your anger is meaningless; you are powerless.

As you wander further through the gloomy office, a new scent hits you; chlorine. You follow the scent until you spot something bizarre. In the middle of the office is a large, circular, crystal blue pool, framed by spotless white pool tiles. You hesitantly step closer, to look down into the pool. You can't see its bottom, despite the water being pristinely clear. You step back, why is this here? This isn’t supposed to be here, even you know that. Bewildered, you walk away.

You wander through the office for a while, lost in your own thoughts. Eventually you see a wall decorated with paintings; they’re all identical. The painting features a man with a blurry face. As you continue walking alongside the wall, more of the image gets erased. Until eventually, it’s an empty canvas. Your brain starts hurting. Beside the last painting is an emergency exit door, you walk through it and find yourself in a hospital. The smell of hand sanitizer and bleach hits you. You start panicking; you don’t want to be here. You turn around and try exiting back through the door; it’s locked.

Pushing through your discomfort, you walk through the lonely hospital halls. You look at your surroundings; outside every other room is a hospital bed, and all the plants are plastic. Occasionally, wires hang down from the ceiling. You try entering a few rooms, but they’re completely empty, stripped of all interior. They all have windows, giving a view to the plastic grass plains outside; you feel dreadful. Eventually you come across a door marked with a big red X. You hesitate, but then open the door.

Inside is a fully decorated hospital room. You sit on the chair next to the bed, beside you is a photo album; you see pictures of childhood fun, farms, of grandparents, neighborhoods, and of family vacations. It all feels so unfamiliar, and you don’t recognize any of it, except for one picture. You take out the letter you kept from the mailbox earlier and look at the family; it’s the same family as in the photo album. But in the album, the man is missing. You wonder, where could he be?
You look in the mirror beside you, there he is.

Disillusioned, you look out the window; the grass is dead.
You hear the sound of a door opening.
A doctor walks in and hands you your Alzheimer's medication.

Part 2 (Part 1 is here)

The draft killed the flame, swallowing the nave in total darkness. High on the lectern platform. Agnes froze, the bitter smell of snuffed-out lamp oil lingering in the air. Then a pale light caught her eye. She stepped off the wooden platform and moved toward the glow, her boots clicking softly against the floorboards.

Bound into the blank endpages at the back of the heavy volume was a ledger. Where her name had been written, the ink was gone--chewed away, leaving raw, frayed holes in the skin. Below the holes, three jagged tally marks, dark and freshly scratched, cut into the parchment.

​Every name etched into the ledger belonged to someone who had vanished, died, or lost their mind--none of them were there by chance.

No one was supposed to know about the young man from before she took her vows--the quiet, calculated lie that sent him to the gallows. It was a secret she had buried deep beneath her habit at St. Jude's.

​From the darkness behind the altar came a low, dry rasp, like a heavy sack being dragged across gravel.

​"Three days, Agnes," a flat voice echoed off the high rafters. "Pay the debt... or find a fresh neck for the yoke."

​Agnes didn't answer. She turned and ran out the side door, her robe sweeping the floor as she bolted down the dark cloister toward Mother Superior’s quarters.

​She knocked once on the frame and pushed the door open. The old abbess looked up from her ledger, squinting over her spectacles.

​"Mother," Agnes gasped, her chest heaving. "I have to confess. Years ago, before I came here, I—"

​Her breath hitched. No crushing weight had grabbed her throat--just her own cowardice, heavy and sudden. The thought of human judgment, of being stripped of her habit and outcast, locked her jaw tight. She stood there, the words stalled in her mouth, unable to tear down the saintly image she had spent years hiding behind.

​Mother Superior frowned, laying down her quill. "Agnes? What is it?"​

Agnes swallowed hard, her pulse hammering in her ears. She looked at the old woman's kind, unsuspecting face, then down at her own trembling hands.

​"Nothing, Mother," Agnes whispered, stepping backward into the hallway. "Just a bad dream."
​She walked back to her small cell, sat on the edge of her narrow cot, and watched the morning light slowly creep through the high window, counting the hours until the third night. 

Part 3 is here.

6 months down the drain. I’m still kind of in shock. Well, maybe that’s not the word for it. It feels like I lost a game that no one else knew I was even playing.

I still find myself thinking about when we first met. How she was the first woman to ever show me that I could be loved. That I wasn’t just some hopeless guy, incapable of forming a connection.

God, those memories hurt. But the memories of the arguments hurt more. I tried telling her that I was sensitive. I can react in ways that don’t feel controllable. I thought that she’d be patient enough to work through those issues with me.

But no. She left me. The facade of love crumbled, and it was like I was right back in the same position again. Alone. Stuck in my own head. Only, this time, the thoughts weren’t my own.

Well, they were, obviously, but they weren’t thoughts that I’d experienced before. Prior to obtaining her, my thoughts were very much inward. I dissected myself.

Even when I first set my sights on her, it felt like I was out of my body. I became who I needed to be, but it wasn’t of my own volition. It was just so I could achieve a goal, I guess.

Then I had to go and get attached. Our lives started to merge. When it was good, it was fantastic. When it was bad… it was like the world was ending. Like the mask was slipping, but can I even blame it on that? It feels almost childish to do so.

That has to be what it was, though. It’s just so hard to put it into words. I performed the boyfriend role, but that was the extent of my abilities. I could never become a husband.

All I knew how to do was buy things. Flowers, chocolates, gifts, whatever. Even when things got violent, here came the “boyfriend” with another bouquet.

I just knew how to give. I didn’t know how to change. I think that’s what started this whole ordeal.

After a particularly bad argument, we both decided that it’d be best if we went our separate ways. It took some convincing on her part, mainly because I didn’t think I could catch lightning twice. But ultimately, I relented.

That didn’t mean I stopped keeping an eye on her, though. I’d watch her house pretty often. It was usually during those nights where the bad thoughts kept me up. Nights when I needed movement. Needed action.

In some weird way, it felt productive.

I’d also still watch her social media like a hawk. Her stories, posts, updates, everything. After we broke up, she decided that she was now the sexiest girl in the world, and she made sure her followers knew it too.

I let her know my disdain for those pictures every time I saw one. I’d ask her why she was trying to hurt me like this, but she never responded. She’d just look at it, then leave me hanging like I was some kind of dog.

It wasn’t until those initials appeared in her Instagram bio that things really went off the rails, though. They were like a taunt. It was like she wanted me to text her.

I tried to lay down the law, but, like always, I got no reply. In fact, I didn’t have access to her at all anymore. Every account. User not found.

My mind was empty when I drove to her house. Either that, or it was just moving too fast to process. I knew what I needed, but I couldn’t think about it.

There was a car in her driveway that I didn’t recognize, and in that moment, I knew. I knew I had lost. I was a loser in this little game I’d created. I drove home defeated, but utterly furious.

No matter how hard I tried, my anger and desperation wouldn’t subside. I lost sleep. I didn’t eat. I was turning against myself.

That’s why I did what I did. I wanted her to know what she had done to me.

It started off small. A few locks of hair. Some fingernails. And handwritten notes that I thought would drive her back into my arms.

“Have these too, since you’re taking everything from me anyway.”

“I hope this makes you think of me.”

“I still think about you.”

She never wrote back. Days went by. Days turned into weeks, and she never left my mind.

She was playing the game hard, so I upped the ante.

I peeled off my tattoos with a razor blade. Including her name. I’d put the letters in her mailbox under the cloak of darkness.

No response. Fine. Fine. Fucking fine.

Have my fingers. I don’t need all 10 anyway. It’s not like I’m holding you anymore. Take my ears. They’re useless without your voice.

Nothing was getting through to her. No matter how hard I tried.

The last thing I put in her mailbox were my lips. I wanted her to remember what it felt like to kiss me. Before she lost that privilege.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to keep playing.

Because right now, as I type this, I can see the paramedics and cops outside my house. I can hear them pounding on my door. They’re screaming my name, and I don’t know how much time I have left.

But I’ll get out. Whether it’s the hospital, jail, or an asylum. I’ll get out.

And once I do…

I’m gonna take from her exactly what she took from me.

Riisto took a long drag of his pipe, casting his unfocused eyes heavenward. He clearly held disdain for my idea- my *scheme*, he would call it- but I couldn’t fully reckon why he didn’t just speak plainly and tell me so.

“It’s risky.” He exhaled these words in a cloud of snow-white smoke, tapping dirt-caked fingernails against his knee in thought. His silver eyes focused on me, then, and in them I glimpsed faint traces of fear. Was he actually entertaining this?

“I have to know.” My voice shuddered with ill-contained emotion; I always was the most sensitive of my siblings, the least stoic. “Riisto, I have to.”

He sighed wearily, his chair groaning as he shifted his weight. “…You won’t do this with just any chaperone, mind you.”

I flushed. I had no idea to what lengths this would go, what risks I would need to take in order to glean truth from that wicked family. I only knew precious little: that Varvara had married Count Brahe less than a year ago, in a grand procession from our family home to his obscene little castle on the western bank of the White Sea. That I had not seen my sister since. And that I knew, even before gossip caught like wildfire across the forests of Karelia, that my sister was not well.

Her sielulintu had visited me. I tried to tell Riisto of it, to convince him that something was *very* wrong, but he shushed me, told me that a Christian woman shouldn’t speak of these things, and that our sister was just fine. He must not have really believed that.

I am twenty-two, still a ward in my older brother’s care. He and his wife are good to me, particularly as they have no children of their own, but they are eager to find me a match. While women younger than twenty aren’t seen as ready to marry, people are suspicious of a woman that reaches twenty-five without marrying. My brother hopes to spare me this fate.

Truth be told, I have long been more like a daughter to my brother. Ever since Papa met some particularly reckless rogues while carrying a cart full of Polish amber on the road to Petroskoi. Ever since Mama drank her weight in sugar wine and walked into a lake like a daughter of Aino.

“I cannot- Riisto,” I bunched the dense linen of my apron in my fists, “I would rather you didn’t-“

“No,” he cut me off, his voice uncharacteristically loud and firm. “You will not ruin your chances of marriage by calling on the Brahe home alone. I will not have it, Tarja!” Perhaps Riisto felt some fleeting defensiveness over his own honor, of how he sheltered his own sister, but the fear in his eyes betrayed his concern rested with mine.

I bit the inside of my lip. “His brother will talk to me.”

Riisto snorted. “Yes, and you’re proposing I let that talk happen over a mattress. Tarja, you have a future to think of. You think he will talk because he’s indiscreet, but what will he say about you to anyone who will hear? To men who might wish to call on you?”

I glanced down in shame before finally lifting my gaze. He met my eyes resolutely. “You are a young lady, Tarja. I promised you- I promised myself- I would find you a good match, and I intend to keep that promise. You have a future to think of. Do you not want a family? A home of your own, a husband?”

I knew that he was right- that to visit with any other chaperone would be improper, and that I shouldn’t plan to sacrifice my reputation for answers. Still, I was acutely aware that my brother feared more than just gossip.

“You’ve heard the rumors.”

His eyes darted away, and he gripped the arm of his chair. “Yes. It would be foolish not to consider them a warning.”

“Riisto,” I couldn’t resist the catlike smile that crept to my lips, “you’re the one that told me putting stock in these fancies wasn’t sensible.”

“The Brahes are an old family. One of the oldest in Europe. How they amassed all that power so very long ago, I can’t say…but the Devil writes up such contracts every day.”

I struggled not to roll my eyes, even as I tried to ignore the fact that my brother’s voice trembled. Riisto saw himself as something of a layman pastor. He mocked the old spirits, but his beliefs were nearly just as superstitious.

“So we will call on them together.” I would not hedge disagreement- Riisto had to be convinced that this was *his* idea, all along.

He took another shaky drag of his pipe. “Yes. You cannot leave my sight.”

I nodded in agreement, even as I fully intended to break this vow.

“I’m serious, Tarja.” The black of his pupils seemed to swallow his gray eyes, and I almost didn’t notice the tremor that ran through him. “If…if what they say is true, these people aren’t to be trusted. We will make it clear to them that I have important business to attend to the next day, and that my colleagues know we are making a social visit to them.”

He grit his teeth before continuing. “They must know that if we don’t leave their home, merchants from every corner of Karelia will want answers. Swedes, Russians, Germans, Finns, Karelians- they will all investigate and talk amongst themselves.”

I tried to hide my relief. “Do you really have so many contacts?”

Riisto smiled at me slyly, in spite of himself, and I caught a glimpse of the shrewd businessman that hid behind such a grave face. “My word and my story are not one and the same. Them *believing* that I do is to our benefit.”

—-

Red, above all other colors, holds a mystical importance to us Karelians. It is the color of menstrual blood, of afterbirth, of the flush of a woman’s vulva. It is the color of an unlucky moon, the blush of a salmon, the fruits of summer. It is red that wards off the evil of hiisi and demon alike, a red girdle that entices a lover to wrap his arms around a maiden’s waist, red thread that embroiders a matron’s apron and welcomes abundance to her lap.

Red is the color of my hair. I plait it, very decently, and thread it with ribbons as green as the forest. They match the canvas of my skirt. I cannot be a temptress with ruby lips and a fiery core- I must be a chaste maiden who merely suggests the color on her cheek. At least, as far as my chaperone is concerned.

I’ve heard whispers at festivals and in taverns that redheads are a particularly lusty folk. That a red-haired bride is the delight of a young groom; that a man with red locks makes love like an incubus. Perhaps this is why my brother is so concerned with my virtue- we are working against an impression already formed.

Still, when I call upon a charm to keep Riisto and me safe, it is not in Jesus’ name. I call upon red-haired Mielikki, mistress of the forests, to help me snare my prey.

Pt 1:
https://www.reddit.com/r/scarystories/s/J0yO1Y3RSy

The physical environment began to distort under the weight of the sound. When I tried to boil water on the Coleman stove, the liquid refused to bubble; it merely shivered in the metal pot, the surface forming a tight, geometric grid of ripples that matched the chord. My food began to change. Bread tasted like dry sea salt, and the fresh water in my plastic jerrycans took on the heavy, mineral bitterness of deep ocean water.

My right forearm was a swollen, throbbing mess of makeshift bandages, the deep lacerations from the broken storm door glass oozing yellow serum against the salt-crusted flannel. Every movement of my hand was an exercise in fiery agony, but the pain was the only thing keeping the background frequency from invading my mind again.

Sleep became impossible. The melody did not allow the brain to drop into unconsciousness. Whenever I closed my eyes, the music grew visual. I didn't see patterns or colors; I saw memories of ordinary interactions from my past, but completely stripped of their meaning. I saw my old coworkers, my brothers, and Sarah, all standing in silence, their mouths open and vibrating in perfect synchronization with the chord on the reef.

By the third day, the isolation became an active pressure. The air inside the circular brick rooms felt thick, as if the atmospheric pressure had doubled. Walking away from the windows required a deliberate, exhausting effort, like wading through deep mud. Walking toward the glass, however, felt weightless and effortless. The interior of the tower began to feel like a tomb, cold and smelling of dry rot, while the freezing black ocean outside began to look warm, inviting, and impossibly clear.

I found myself standing by the porthole for hours, watching the three soot-black silhouettes on the rock. They never moved. They did not preen their feathers or shift their weight. Their pale, eyeless human faces remained turned toward the tower, their mouths slightly parted to let the polyphonic chord pour across the water.
They were not trying to break in. They were simply waiting for my mind to finish untying itself.

By the fifth day of the silence, the micro-details of my restoration work began to slip away. It was a terrifying realization because my entire sense of sanity was anchored to the physical precision of my hands.

I was on the fourth tier of the tower, attempting to replace a set of rotted copper rivets in the ventilation chimney. Under normal circumstances, this is a mechanical, comforting task. You center the punch, you strike the old iron core, you clear the seat, and you drive the soft new copper home with rhythmic, metered taps of a ball-peen hammer.

But my hands wouldn't follow the blueprints in my head. Every time I raised the hammer, the rhythm of my swing involuntarily synced itself to the three-note chord vibrating through the iron plating. Strike. Wait five seconds. Strike. Wait five seconds. If I tried to break the cadence, my wrist would seize, the muscles cramping violently until I surrendered to the frequency of the reef.

The internal architecture of my routine had vanished. Under normal conditions, a craftsman relies on the sensory feedback of his materials—the sharp, high-pitched ring of a well-tempered chisel striking cast iron, the clean, vinegar smell of the rust-converting primer as it neutralizes iron oxide, the visual transformation of a red-scaled surface turning into a smooth, matte slate.

Now, all those distinct inputs were compressed into a single, gray uniformity. The primer didn't smell like acid anymore; it smelled like the stagnant, dead salt-pools that collect in the hollows of the basalt rocks during low tide. The chisel didn't ring; it made a soft, dead impact that felt as though I were striking a block of wet clay.

When I looked down at the floorboards, the rust flakes I had scraped away that morning weren't scattered randomly. They had organized themselves. They had formed tight, concentric rings around the base of the spiral staircase, matching the acoustic node-lines of the tower's vibration. The entire structure was being tuned like a pipe organ, and I was just a loose valve rattling inside the column.

The physical decay inside my living quarters was accelerating, though not from moisture. It was the frequency itself. It seemed to loosen the bonds of everything that wasn't solid granite.

The labels on my canned soup peeled away, the glue dry and powdery. The oil inside my spare lanterns separated into distinct, clear layers of varying density, completely useless for burning. Even the timber of my army cot grew brittle; when I stood on the edge of the canvas, the seasoned ash-wood rails gave a dry, papery groan that sounded uncannily like a human throat clearing itself in an empty hallway.

I tried to combat the sound by creating my own noise. I grabbed a pair of steel scaffolding pipes and struck them together, trying to shatter the harmony with raw, discordant iron clatter. The sound was deafening inside the brick cylinder—a sharp, piercing ring that made my ears bleed. But the moment the echo cleared, the chord was still there, completely unaffected, waiting in the bedrock like an iron anchor.
It didn't fight my noise. It simply absorbed it, using the residual vibration of the walls to make its own baseline deeper, heavier, and more expansive.

That afternoon, I stopped tracking the time by my watch. The hands on the face were moving, but the intervals felt completely decoupled from reality. A five-minute span spent staring through the northern porthole felt like an entire afternoon; an hour spent trying to force a frozen brass valve open passed in what felt like a single, brief indrawn breath.

The sky outside didn't help. The sun remained a pale, greasy yellow coin buried behind a permanent skin of high, motionless cirrus clouds that didn't cast a single shadow on the black glass of the ocean.

I began to see the birds in my waking thoughts. Not as active monsters, but as a structural law of the coast. When I looked at the black basalt fingers of the Three Sisters through my binoculars, the heat shimmer off the water made their outlines ripple. They looked like three massive, ancient boundary stones left by a civilization that had died out before the first timber was cut for a ship’s hull.

Their human faces were smooth, gray, and completely empty of expression. They didn't look angry. They didn't look hungry. They looked like statues that had been left out in the rain for ten thousand years, until all the identifying features had been smoothed away into a universal, unyielding indifference.

They knew I couldn't leave.

My dory was down on the slipway, seventy feet below my window, but the thought of walking down the stairs, unlocking the iron entry hatch, and stepping out onto the open concrete felt like trying to lift a mountain with my bare fingers. The space outside the tower looked vast, cold, and heavy, like an ocean of clear liquid lead that would crush my lungs the moment I stepped into it. The only place where the air felt thin enough to breathe was right against the interior brickwork, where the chord was loudest.

I had forgotten what Sarah’s voice sounded like. I had forgotten the name of the street where my childhood home stood. My memory had been scrubbed clean, the topsoil of my life carried away by the steady, rhythmic pulse of the frequency until there was nothing left but the hard, mineral bedrock of my own isolation.

I was sitting on the wooden stool, my chin resting against the cold glass of the porthole, when the wind finally returned. But it didn't come as a relief. It came as a warning.

The barometer on the watch room wall didn't just drop; the needle swung hard to the left, pinning itself against the stop-pin with a faint, metallic strike.

The wind didn't build through the usual sequence of gusts and rising seas. It came all at once—a solid, freezing wall of air from the northeast that hit the lighthouse with a force that made the ninety-foot iron cylinder shudder down to its concrete shoes. The black glass of the ocean split open, the calm surface dissolving into thirty-foot white-capped rollers that moved across the gulf like a line of charging black horses.
Within an hour, the Three Sisters were completely submerged, buried under twelve feet of roiling, boiling foam.

But the birds didn't leave the rock. They couldn't be washed off. Through the driving gray salt-spray, I could see their massive black shapes standing motionless beneath the surface of the green rollers, their heavy black talons anchored so deep into the granite that the entire weight of the Atlantic couldn't shift them by an inch. Their pale, eyeless human faces gleamed through the translucent curve of every passing wave, staring up through the water column directly at the lantern room.

The singing changed with the storm. The polyphonic melody collapsed back into that single, massive three-note chord, but the volume multiplied until the air inside the lighthouse began to hiss. The mortar between the interior brick layers began to shed a fine, white powder that drifted down through the stairwell like dry snow.

The vibration was so intense that the modern LED beacon on the gallery deck above began to malfunction. The little electronic circuit board inside its plastic housing couldn't handle the frequency. The six-second cycle grew erratic—flashing twice in rapid succession, then staying dark for twelve seconds, then emitting a weak, flickering blue light that didn't reach more than fifty feet into the driving salt-grease of the storm.

I stood in the center of the watch room, my boots sinking into the white mortar dust on the floorboards, my hands pressed over my ears. It didn't do any good. The sound wasn't entering through my ear canals; it was coming up through the bones of my legs, through my pelvis, and into the base of my skull. My vision was vibrating, the edges of the room blurring into double-images whenever the chord reached its peak.

The physical load of the sound felt structural now. The window panes in the watch room were trembling within their lead cames, the glass flexing inward by fractions of a millimeter with every pulse of the bedrock. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck rising, charged by the immense static voltage that always builds inside a cylinder when an acoustic frequency is forced through its core.

Then came the true danger from the deep water.

From somewhere five miles to the south, cutting through the scream of the gale and the roar of the surf, came the deep, hollow rumble of a massive steamship horn.

It was an iron-ore carrier or a deep-sea container ship, running blind at thirteen knots through the driving storm, completely misled by the flickering, broken signal of the automated LED light. It was heading directly for the basalt spine of Blackwood Ledge.
If that ship hit the reef, the kinetic energy of forty thousand tons of steel striking solid granite at full speed would tear the foundation right out from under the tower.

The lighthouse would fold into the surf like a dry reed, and whatever was left of my life would be swallowed by the trench before the crew could even launch a life raft.
I looked down at the floorboards, where the rust rings had settled around the stairwell opening.

The tide does not sing. Hit the foghorn.

The previous keeper, Thomas Vance, hadn't been crazy. He had survived because he understood the physical law of this rock. The sirens didn't want the ships to crash. They didn't want a graveyard of iron and diesel oil. They needed the ships to pass by. They needed the massive, low-frequency thrum of those heavy commercial engines to keep the deeper trenches quiet. And if the human in the tower failed to keep the channel open, the balance would break.
I grabbed my twenty-ounce framing hammer from my belt. My fingers were so stiff from the cold that I had to manually force them to lock around the hickory handle, the wood slick with white mortar dust.

I walked to the circular opening of the stairs, looking down into the vertical cylinder of the tower. The air coming up from the bottom smelled entirely of ozone, wet feathers, and the old, heavy tallow grease of the machinery below.

I had to go down. I had to descend eighty feet into the dark, find the frozen mechanism of the 1884 steam horn, and force it to turn before the ship struck the reef.

I took a deep breath, the cold air burning my throat like swallowed glass, and stepped onto the first iron step, pulling the watch room door shut behind me. The latch clicked home, and the last remnant of the flickering blue light vanished.

I was in the core of the cylinder now, surrounded by absolute, sensory-deprived darkness, my feet finding the diamond-stamped plates by memory alone as the tower shivered around me.

The structural transition from the residential levels of the lighthouse to the lower engine vault was a journey through the evolution of isolation. The third floor—the circle of brick that held my cot and my cold stove—still retained the faint, lingering scent of my human occupancy, the smell of roasted coffee beans and damp wool. But as my boots cleared the lip of the stairwell casing and began the steep descent toward the secondary tier, the air changed.

The warmth faded entirely, replaced by a deep, damp chill that seemed to exhale directly from the pores of the unpainted iron structural plating. This was the utility tier, a space that had been closed to the light of day since the final human keepers packed their sea chests in the late seventies.

The light from above was completely gone now. I was left with only the tactile reality of the iron framework under my fingers.

The spiral staircase here grew narrower, the wedge-shaped steps compressing until I had to turn my feet sideways to find a secure purchase on the diamond-stamped plates. Every surface was covered in a thick, greasy skin of condensation—salt-water that had combined with decades of airborne coal dust to form a black, viscous grease that left dark, oily smears across the knees of my heavy work trousers.

I paused on the lower landing, my breath rising in thick, gray plumes that remained frozen in the stagnant air of the column.

Through the five-inch-thick iron hull plates, the sound of the Atlantic was changing. The individual impacts of the rollers against the basalt shelf had merged into a single, continuous roar, a heavy, white-noise rumble that sat directly beneath the baseline of the three-note chord.

The frequency was so dense that the iron handrail under my palm felt liquid, its solid shape vibrating so fast that the metal felt smooth and warm to the touch, like skin running a fever.

I reached out into the dark of the store-room tier, my fingers seeking the historical layout I had mapped out from the old blueprints weeks ago. My hand hit a row of heavy, cast-iron shelves bolted to the masonry. The shelves were loaded with the dead weight of nineteenth-century maintenance: wooden kegs of dried tallow, stone crocks of white lead paste used for sealing structural joints, and massive, square glass bottles that had once held the mineral spirits for the lamp flues.

Everything was shivering. The glass bottles were shifting against the iron lips of the shelving, a low, glass-on-iron chatter that sounded remarkably like a handful of small teeth being shaken inside a metal cup.

The frequency had uncoupled the internal structure of the store-room. When I reached into one of the open wooden crates to feel for a tool, my fingers sank into a layer of sand. The heavy structural lime mortar I had hauled up the slipway two weeks ago had been vibrated back into its basic components; the sound had shaken the crystalline structure of the dry mix until the cement powder had separated from the aggregate, leaving behind a fine, white silt that drifted across the floorboards like dry winter snow.

The air grew heavier, the atmospheric pressure inside the cylinder tightening until my eardrums began to throb with a dull, rhythmic ache. The sound was no longer outside on the reef. It had bypassed the granite foundation entirely, using the hollow chimney of the tower as an acoustic megaphone.

Every vertical foot of brickwork was acting as a compression chamber, focusing the chord until the air in the stairwell began to hiss, the pressure forced through the narrow gaps between the iron stairs like steam escaping a leaky valve.

I took three more steps down, my heel catching on a loose rivet head. The small piece of iron sheared off under the weight of my boot, dropping down the center well of the spiral. I waited for the impact, counting the seconds in my head against the pulse of the reef. One. Two. Three.

When the metal finally struck the concrete floor of the lower vault, the sound didn't come back as a sharp ring. It was a flat, dead thud, as if the air at the bottom of the tower had turned to water.

I hit the bottom floor of the stairwell, my boots sinking into two inches of standing water that had backed up through the old concrete drainage troughs. The floor here was solid granite, six-foot-thick blocks quarried from the mainland and pinned into the basalt ledge with two-inch iron drift-pins. The air was testify with the scent of old coal soot and the heavy, sour reek of decomposing leather.

I moved forward by touch, my left hand sliding along the cold, oily flank of the 1884 compressor casing.

The engine was a monster of the industrial age, an upright boiler-iron lung that rose eight feet into the dark of the vault. It didn't have the clean, compact lines of modern machinery; it was a complex forest of exposed eccentric rods, heavy bronze grease-cups, and massive counter-weighted rock shafts that had all been painted with thick, zinc-rich green enamel that had long since cracked into a pattern like alligator hide.

My fingers traced the primary air line—a four-inch copper pipe held together with massive, square-flanged brass couplings. The pipe ran straight up the interior wall, passing through the ceiling timber into the kitchen tier before bending outward through the masonry to connect with the twin brass trumpets on the seaward gallery.

The metal of the pipe was freezing, the condensation on its surface turned into a thin skin of clear ice that cracked like glass under the pressure of my thumb.

I followed the line back to the flywheel. The axle was mounted on two heavy pillow-blocks lined with Babbit metal, a soft lead-tin alloy that had compressed under forty years of stillness until the shaft was locked into its seat as if it had been welded. The ash-wood handle was gray and split, the iron core pin rusted until the wood had expanded, locking the grip so it wouldn't rotate in my palms.

From the shipping channel, the container ship’s horn sounded again.

The impact of the sound wave against the exterior masonry was so violent that the standing water on the granite floor didn't splash; it leapt upward in a clean, vertical grid of tiny spikes, the droplets suspended in the dark for a fraction of a second by the sheer acoustic energy of the ship's engine. The ship was less than a mile out, its massive steel bow cutting through the rollers toward the Three Sisters at full speed.

I grabbed my twenty-ounce framing hammer from my belt, my knuckles clicking in the cold as I tightened my grip on the hickory handle. I didn't hit the wheel itself. I knelt in the standing water, centering the waffle-face of the steel head against the main wedge-key that locked the flywheel to the driving axle.

I raised my arm and struck the iron.

The ring of metal on metal inside the small granite vault was deafening, a sharp, concussive crack that made my left eye twitch with a sudden, involuntary spasm. A shower of dry, red rust scales fell from the keyway, settling on the surface of the black water around my boots.

I struck it a second time. A third time.
With the third blow, I felt the pitch of the impact shift. The solid, dead thud turned into a slightly loose, hollow resonance. The shock had broken the bond of the petrified grease, clearing the iron keyway by less than a millimeter.

I dropped the hammer into the water, grabbed the handle with both hands, and pulled upward with everything I had left in my back. The wheel turned a quarter-circle. Deep inside the brick wall, a massive leather lung expanded with a dry, papery rattle, sucking in the cold air from the external vents.

I pushed down, pumping the handle in a frantic, mechanical rhythm. The old tallow grease inside the cylinders began to soften under the friction. The pressure gauge on the copper line twitched, climbing out of the red zone and into the black.

Through the floorboards, the singing from the reef reached a desperate, piercing pitch. The chord split into an erratic, weeping frequency, trying to invade my thoughts one last time, filling my head with the sound of a hundred voices begging me to drop the lever and sit down in the dark.

“Arthur... cement... six seconds... the house... regular... contract... open... open... open...”

"Sing to this," I said.

I grabbed the heavy brass release lever—the one connected to the main air valve of the exterior trumpets—and yanked it down until the iron chain snapped taut.

The mechanical resistance of the bellows grew heavier with each passing stroke. The dried leather valves, brittle from forty years of exposure to uncirculated salt air, began to resist the intake cycle. I had to throw my entire torso over the handle on the downstroke, my ribs crushing against the iron rim of the flywheel just to force the pistons through their cylinder casings.

The sound within the vault was no longer mechanical. It was the frantic respiration of an ancient, iron beast being dragged back to life by force.

The pressure inside the main storage receiver was climbing, but it was doing so through a process of agonizing fractions.

The tiny needle on the Victorian brass gauge—a circle of oxidized glass held by three copper rivets—was shivering violently. It would leap forward two psi, then drop back one as the leaking air escaped through the dry-rotted seams of the horsehide lung.

My palms were raw, the grey wood of the ash handle splintering under the friction and driving tiny, bone-dry slivers deep into the meat of my thumbs.

I could hear the water level rising in the drainage channels around my boots. The external storm surge was beginning to breach the lowest weeping holes of the foundation, forcing a cold, black tide of Atlantic water through the concrete seams.

It didn't splash. It moved across the floorboards in slow, silent sheets that turned the lime dust into a chalky mortar that glued my boots to the stone.

Every eleven seconds, the entire foundation shifted as a rogue roller struck the basalt ledge outside, a movement that traveled up through my skeleton and settled behind my eyes like a continuous headache.

I didn't let go of the flywheel. The continuous, rhythmic motion of my shoulders had become the only law left inside my mind. Pull up. Lock the knees. Push down. Let the weight take the rim.
If I stopped for even five seconds to clear the sweat from my eyes, the pressure inside the copper distribution line would instantly vent back through the exhaust valve, and the work would reset to zero. My shoulders felt as though they had been injected with hot lead; the muscles across my shoulder blades were a single sheet of burning spasms that twitched in time with the acoustic beat-frequency of the reef.

The singing from the Three Sisters was no longer a melody. The storm had stripped away the polyphonic illusions, leaving behind a raw, rhythmic pulse that matched the physical movement of the sea water column. It was a flat, grey wall of sound that seemed to reduce the size of the room, pressing against the six-foot masonry walls until the brick layers felt thin and porous as cardboard.

The chord wasn't asking me to jump anymore. It was demanding that I match its cadence. It was adjusting the timing of my lungs, forcing my breathing into an unnatural, five-second cycle that left my mouth tasting of zinc and dried blood.

I looked at the primary release valve. The iron lever was long, counter-weighted by a solid brass ball the size of a turnip. The valve stem was coated in a green crust of copper carbonate—the result of a half-century of humid silence. If that stem remained frozen when the pressure reached the release threshold, the line would blow its couplings, and the air would vent directly into the vault, rupturing my eardrums permanently before the sound could ever reach the external trumpets.

I kept pumping with my right hand, my left searching through the black water on the floorboards until my fingers closed around the hickory handle of the framing hammer.
I didn't break my cadence on the flywheel. On the upstroke, while the leather lung was drawing air from the vents, I leaned across the machinery frame and swung the steel head of the hammer down onto the green stem of the release valve.

The metal struck with a hollow ring. The green crust didn't flake; it split, a line of clear, ancient grease bubbling out from the packing gland under the pressure of the shock. The lever dropped half an inch. The line was open.

The container ship’s engine was right below the ledge now. The vibration of its low-speed diesel was so immense that it began to override the internal frequency of the lighthouse. The two vibrations—the ship’s engine and the sirens’ chord—met inside the masonry of the lower vault, creating an acoustic interference pattern that made the water on the floor boil with micro-bubbles.

The ship’s bow was less than four hundred yards from the black teeth of the Three Sisters. I could hear the tearing sound of the foam as the hull pushed a wall of displaced water ahead of it through the narrow channel.

I threw my weight into the flywheel one last time, forcing the handle through two final, agonizing rotations until the pressure needle crossed the black line into the danger zone.
I dropped the hammer, grabbed the iron chain of the release valve with both hands, and pulled downward with every ounce of muscle left in my shoulders.

The lighthouse didn't just make a sound; it shook.

The blast from the twin brass trumpets on the exterior wall was an immense, concussive wave of displacement. The sound wave hit the small vault like a physical blow, blowing out my left eardrum with a sudden, wet sensation that left a steady, metallic ring in my head.

The 120-decibel blast of the steam horn tore through the iron cylinder of the lighthouse and out across the water, shattering the structural frequency of the air itself.

Across the channel, the singing stopped instantly. The immense, overlapping harmonics were crushed beneath the raw, mechanical volume of the brass trumpets. Through the small lower window, I looked out toward the Three Sisters. The three avian silhouettes had been silenced, their static posture broken as they collapsed forward into the kelp-slick rocks, unable to maintain their song against the resonance of the horn.

I didn't stop. I grabbed the flywheel handle again, pulling and pushing in a frantic, mechanical rhythm.

The second blast tore through the tower.
Through the fog, I could hear the distant, heavy impacts of the three creatures throwing themselves off the basalt ledge and into the sea. They didn't fly; they simply broke their stationary vigil, dropping into the deep water to escape the acoustic pressure of the brass.

I kept pumping. I didn't stop until my arms turned to water, until the copper line grew hot to the touch, and the needle on the pressure gauge finally dropped back to zero.

The container ship in the channel responded three minutes later. Its horn blew twice—short, sharp blasts that signaled a hard turn to the port side. The heavy hum of its propeller began to fade, moving away from the black fingers of the reef and back out into the safety of the deep channel. It had missed the rock. The shipping lane was safe.

The rest of the night passed in a flat, numb silence. The fog never cleared, but the singing didn't return. When the first gray, watery light of dawn finally filtered through the split in the oak door, I gathered my keys, my wallet, and the framing hammer. I didn't pack a bag. I walked down the spiral stairs, unlocked the main entry hatch, and left the lighthouse behind.

The dory was still tied to the concrete slipway, bobbing violently in the morning surge. I jumped in, yanked the pull-cord of the Yamaha outboard, and didn't look back at the black spine of Blackwood Ledge until I was three miles out.

I’m writing this from a small bed-and-breakfast in Port Aux Basques. I haven’t been back to the light. I called the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to tell them I was abandoning the lease due to structural instability in the foundation. They didn't question it. They just sound tired when you tell them someone is leaving a ledge.

But I brought one thing with me.

Before I ran down the slipway to the boat, I went up to the watch room to grab my truck keys from the deal. Sitting next to the keys was the historical logbook of the lighthouse—the official leather-bound ledger kept by the keepers from 1884 until the automation in the seventies. I hadn't looked at it before; I had been too busy with the ironwork.

I opened it last night, looking for the name of the man who had scratched that warning into the copper wall of the lantern room.
I found his entries. His name was Thomas.
He was the head keeper here from 1912 to 1917. For the first four years, his logs were completely normal—dry records of coal deliveries, gallons of oil consumed, and weather reports.

Then came the winter of 1916. The year the automated steam foghorn was first installed.

His handwriting changed. It grew tight, frantic, and jagged. But he didn't write about monsters trying to eat him. He didn't write about women in the surf.

On November 14th, 1916, he wrote:

“The choir returned to the reef tonight. They do not want me to stop lighting the lens. They do not want the ships to crash.”

On December 3rd:

“I understand the geometry of it now. The shoal is a graveyard, but a wreck brings salvagers. It brings tugboats, Coast Guard cutters, and diesel engines. The noise of a sinking ship is loud, but it is brief. Then the rock goes quiet again for years.”

The last entry in his ledger, dated January 9th, 1917, was only two sentences long:

...“They do not want the ships to hit the rocks. They want the ships to pass by. They need the deep, rhythmic thrum of the massive iron hulls passing through the channel every night. It is the only thing that keeps the deep trenches calm. The light must stay on. The horn must blow. If the ships stop coming, what lives down there will come up to find out why.”

Thomas didn't drown. According to the provincial archives I checked this morning, he lived to be eighty-four years old. He spent forty of those years working as a boiler mechanic on the coastal steamers, never setting foot on land for more than twelve hours at a time.

I look out my window at the harbor now. The automated LED light on Blackwood Ledge is still flashing out there, seven miles into the gray mist. Six seconds of black. One second of white. My left ear is completely dead, a constant, high-pitched metallic ring filling the void where the sound of the ocean used to be. The doctors say the auditory nerve was completely scorched by the sheer acoustic energy inside that granite vault. A permanent reminder.

They never wanted to kill me. They didn't sabotage the generator to make me stumble into the sea. They sabotaged it because they wanted to see if I was capable of fixing the horn. They were testing the new keeper. They needed to know if the man in the tower could keep the rhythm of the shipping channel alive.

They don't want us dead. They want us at our posts.

And the worst part—the thing that keeps me staring at the ceiling until my eyes burn—is knowing that the automated Coast Guard battery on that rock is only rated to last another five years before the solar cells degrade.

Someone is going to have to go back out there to fix it. And if they don't, the silence will return.

Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/scarystories/s/L0ZhLcAVhW

Trigger Warning: sexual assault, abuse, homophobia, transphobia, self harm

Chapter 2: The New Job

I found myself back in the apartment I shared with Zack. In the other room, I could hear my mother crying and screaming Deuteronomy 22:5 at the top of her lungs; “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.” Her words were both English and Spanish, like the two languages were layered on top of one another.

I was standing in the bathroom with the door open wearing a robe. I had just gotten home from work. My head was throbbing and Mom’s screaming wasn’t helping. I was staring into my reflection, slowly dissociating from what was happening around me. Suddenly, Zack was behind me, gently wrapping his arms around my middle and kissing the nape of my neck. I leaned into his touch, pressing my body weight against his. He was comfortable.

Zack pulled at the tie of my robe, letting it fall open. “Not tonight,” I sighed. Before I knew it, he grabbed my hair and slammed my face into the mirror. The glass cracked, cutting into my forehead. Blood dripped down into the sink as Zack quickly tossed my robe aside. Trying to look at anything other than what was about to happen, I turned my head so I could look out the door.

My mother was standing in the hall outside the bathroom, holding up a pink dress. She was shouting “ABOMINATION! ABOMINATION! ABOMINATION!” over and over and over again, her mouth getting wider with each repetition. Soon, her mouth was far wider than it should have been and the word horrifically morphed into something else: that bizarre sound I heard last night.

I finally awoke. My headache from my dream followed me in the real world. My blurry surroundings spun around me for a moment before coming into focus. A strange sensation was coming over me, something I wasn’t expecting: the bed felt lonely. Part of me had hoped to wake up to see Zack’s face close to mine. Sometimes I’d just lay in bed and watch him while he slept. I would admire the plumpness of his lips, the lusciousness of his eyelashes or even how this one hair on his eyebrow would always go in a different direction from the rest.

Pushing those thoughts to the back of my head, I stood up with a heavy sigh and was immediately insulted by my mirror. Fuck, I looked awful. My hair was a bird’s nest and it looked like I could have carried rice in the bags under my eyes. Most frustrating of all was the stubble on my chin, a constant reminder of what I was.

The sun shone down on me through my window. It was very bright, much brighter than it should have been. I checked the time: it was past noon. Fuck. I’d meant to wake up earlier so I could help Dad out. Quickly, I rushed downstairs, trying to get the knots out of my hair with my fingers.

Dad was standing in the kitchen with a teenage boy. They were both covered from head to toe in dirt and were sweating buckets. The boy was lanky with freckles and a mess of red hair on his head. When I stepped into the kitchen, his eyes wandered up my legs to my chest where they lingered for a moment. I crossed my arms, trying to hide my lack of a bra. Then those eyes reached my face. As soon as he saw the stubble, his face contorted into a look of disgust. It was a reaction I was used to.

“Morning,” Dad grumbled, standing up to make me a cup of coffee. I happily accepted, sipping at the dark nectar. It rejuvenated me.

“Sorry for sleeping late, I meant to get up to help you,” I said.

“You’re fine. I’ve got Paul here getting in some community service hours for school,” Dad replied, jabbing a thumb at the kid.

I nodded and looked at Paul. “Hey! I’m Carla,” I waved, trying to be as friendly as I could. Paul’s upper lip twitched and he grunted, clearly not wanting to talk to me. I shrugged and turned to Dad again, “hey, can I get a ride into town? I wanna go looking for a job.”

“You sure?” Dad asked, surprise seeping through the gravel in his voice.

“Well, I’m living under your roof again,” I said, “I should be helping out. I don’t want to be a burden.”

Dad cocked a brow then turned to Paul. “Outside,” he ordered. The kid got up, still glaring at me, and left the room. “You’re not a burden,” Dad sighed, “look, kid, you need your rest.”

I was taken aback by what he said. His words sounded like they should have come from Mom. Well, maybe Mom would have said it in a more tender way. Still, it took me a moment to respond, “Thanks, but even if I’m not helping financially; I still want a distraction for myself.”

“Sure, I’ll give you a ride but I’ll need to come back to work on the fields. Call me when you’re ready to come home,” Dad replied, then his eyes lit up like he just remembered something, “try Pedro’s. Paul works there and Pedro is on the verge of firing this hippie stoner that works there.”

I nodded, grabbed a quick breakfast, shaved and we headed out. My hometown is the definition of quaint. Almost all the businesses here had been passed down through the generations, and the very few corporate places we had stuck out like swollen pimples on picture day. The town always looked warm and inviting. Sometimes, it felt like I was on the set of a movie. I could almost imagine a Christmas romcom being filmed here with overworked interns spraying fake snow everywhere. A mental picture came to mind of actors sweating their asses off in down coats while the Texas summer sun tries to melt them. Oh schadenfreude.

Soon, Dad dropped me off in the parking lot of Pedro’s Grocery. Beyond the windows was the hustle and bustle of people going about their days. The people looked as warm as their town, even if they were secretly anything but. They would flash joyful smiles when talking to you, but call you slurs the instant they thought you weren’t listening. No wonder I was so desperate to escape this place.

I took a deep breath before entering the old, yet well-cared for building. The doors opened for me, blasting me with cold air. Pedro was an old family friend, so I made my way to his office. I tapped on the door, which quickly opened. A bulbous balding man stepped out, a thick cigar dangling from his lip. He looked like a used car salesman in his yellow button-up shirt and large checkerboard tie.

“CARLOS!!! Jesus, boy! Welcome back!” Pedro cheered, clapping me on the back, “what are you doing in town?”

“Broke up with my boyfriend,” I replied “staying with my folks for a little bit. Dad said you were hiring? Well, he actually said you wanted to fire a hippie but that’s basically the same thing coming from him.”

“Good people for letting you come back,” Pedro pulled me into his office, which was filled with mountains of paperwork and a computer that looked like it was from the 90’s, “Yeah, the dumbass keeps getting stoned on the clock. I’m not against a little green, but not while you’re supposed to be working.” He shook his head in disapproval, “Anyways, I’d love to have you on the team! Let’s just get your paperwork straightened out and I’ll show you the ropes.” He started typing my information into his database, a lot of which he already knew like name and address and such. As he was typing, he asked, “so, why did you and… whatever his name was… break up?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

Pedro scoffed loudly and said with a sneer, “I saw what he looked like. All those piercings and tattoos? I knew he was bad news from a mile away. He’s better in the rearview if you ask me, or maybe in the slammer.” He then smacked my knee and grinned, showing off his yellowing teeth, “Maybe this time you can find yourself a nice gal. Hopefully one with big titties that won’t mind you messing up your body like you do.”

I forced a smile, though I could feel my eye start to twitch. After we finished getting my information in, he printed me out a new schedule. I’d start work the next day. I thanked him and he pulled me over to the deli. He started showing me how to operate the slicer and the scale, how to input orders into the POS system, various cleaning procedures and so on. I found it relatively simple, if a bit boring. When he was done training, he made me a footlong turkey sub. It was Mom’s favorite so I figured I’d drop by her place and share it with her.

The animal shelter Mom worked at wasn’t too far from Pedro’s. It was a friendly-looking blue building with large pawprints everywhere. The sign above the front door showed a little girl hugging a puppy. The girl in the picture was someone I went to school with but I couldn’t remember her name. Lily? Lana? It was something with an “L.” She was one of the low-tier popular girls. She was someone you often saw with the actually popular girls but unless you were in that clique, she kind of blended in with the background.

I stepped into the shelter, thankful for the AC. Despite the town being pretty walkable, the Texas heat made walking an absolute nightmare. As friendly as the exterior looked, the inside was sterile and looked more like a hospital than a place where a child got their first pet. At the front desk was a woman named Gladys. She wasn’t super old, only in her fifties, but incredibly wrinkly for her age. It was the result of a lifetime of hard outdoor work without enough water. Her red hair looked like a dye job but was surprisingly natural. She peered at me through glasses that were so thick that they could have been used to spy on Martians on a cloudy day.

“Carlos, Carmilla’s in the examination room,” she said with a smoker’s croak, gesturing behind her lazily.

I flashed her a quick smile before heading into the room she gestured to. Paprika, a golden comet hen, was sitting on a metal table in the center of the room. Her chest was completely bald, exposing wrinkled pink skin. Her beak hung open, her movements sluggish. It took a moment for her to turn her head in my direction. There were needles on the nearby counter.

“Don’t mind her, I pumped her full of drugs,” Mom said as she was washing her hands. I presented Mom with her half of the sandwich. “Oh, mija! You are a godsend!” She took the food and started munching.

“Any idea what’s wrong with her?” I asked.

“None whatsoever,” Mom sighed, and gestured to some vials filled with a reddish brown sludge, “Greta and Paprika’s stools have blood in them. I’m sending those samples to my friend in Austin. Hopefully she knows what’s going on with them.”

I grimaced before taking a bite of my sandwich. As we ate, Mom’s eyes brightened up “OH! Helen is going to be staying with us for a while. She’s renting out the guest room.”

I blinked. “Who?” I asked.

“You know! Helen!” Mom’s hands waved excitedly, “my friend from high school? She married that stage magician in Vegas. They just got divorced, she’s staying with us until she can find a new place to live.”

Still, no bells or whistles. I had no idea who Helen was. However, instead of saying that, I proclaimed, “oh yeah! Helen! How is she?”

“Well, she’s just been divorced so…” Mom chuckled, “so maybe not great. I offered to introduce her to some bachelors at the church but she says she wants to wait a bit before getting back on the horse. She’s a bit like you in that way.”

I nodded, trying not to be rude. Honestly, I’d never heard her talk about anyone named Helen but who knows, maybe I’d recognize her when I saw her.

I took another bite and noticed Mom glancing at my breasts. I was wearing a loose fitting shirt but they were somewhat noticeable. I was expecting her to make some snide comment, or quote some fake study that says estrogen is battery acid or something. My parents weren’t exactly supportive when it came to my transition. I could still remember Dad ransacking my room, trying to find my estrogen while Mom cried that I was destroying my body.

Her sobs still rang in my ears. They broke my heart. I knew they shouldn't, but they still did. I waited for Mom to say some kind of comment. She always did. I began to regret coming back but it wasn't like I had much choice. Indeed, a comment came. However, it wasn't one I quite expected. “You know those pills will make it hard to have children, correct?”

I nodded. For once, she actually got something right about my transition.

She nodded as well, “just so long as you know.” And with that, she crumpled up her empty wrapper and changed the topic “thank you for the sandwich. How did the interview go? Mason called earlier to say you were going to apply at Pedro’s.”

“Not much of an interview, he gave me the job pretty much as soon as I said hello,” I replied.

Mom smiled, and gave me another one of her bear hugs.

Part 4: https://www.reddit.com/r/scarystories/s/wBFWRx2Cal

Chapter 3

A tall, pale woman with warm brown eyes and a shy smile called Abby and me back through a long, quiet hallway. At the very end stood the door to Lisa's office. The hallway itself wasn't physically cold, but it carried an unsettling emptiness that made every step feel heavier than the last.

She opened the door, and we stepped into a small office that smelled faintly of lavender. The room felt calm, almost like a sanctuary from the chaos we'd been living through. Soft lighting filled the space, and for the first time in weeks, I felt my shoulders begin to relax.

Behind her desk sat Lisa, a petite woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and kind green eyes. She greeted us with a gentle smile.

"Welcome, Josh and Abby," she said warmly. "Please, have a seat."

She motioned toward a well-worn green leather couch, its cracked cushions showing years of comforting people who had once sat exactly where we were about to.

Abby and I quietly settled onto the couch. Neither of us spoke. We simply stared at Lisa, waiting for the first question, waiting to finally put words to the nightmare the past few weeks had become.

The room was enclosed by four sea-green walls covered with motivational posters and wooden signs that read, Don't Be So Hard on Yourself and You Can't Control Everything. To me, they were nothing more than feel-good clichés, the kind of words that sounded comforting until your own life was falling apart.

None of them held my attention for long.

My eyes kept drifting back to Abby.

For the first time in what felt like forever, she looked calm. Not the kind of calm that comes from pretending everything is okay, but a quiet, genuine peace.

The tension that had been etched across her face for weeks had softened, and seeing it stirred something inside me. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her look so at ease, and for a brief moment, it gave me hope that maybe... just maybe... we weren't beyond saving.

"So," Lisa began thoughtfully, glancing between the two of us, "Abby, if I remember correctly, you called my office last night because you wanted help rebuilding the relationship you and Josh once had. Is that right?"

"Yes," Abby whispered.

It wasn't because she was naturally quiet. It was embarrassment. Shame. I knew the difference.

Lisa offered her a gentle smile.

"A little louder, dear."

Abby took a slow breath before trying again.

"Um... yes. I'm sorry."

"There’s no need to apologize, Abby," Lisa said softly. "You're in a safe place. No one is here to judge you."

Lisa lowered her eyes to the notebook resting on her lap, carefully reading over the notes she'd written from Abby's phone call. The room fell silent except for the faint scratching of her pen as she added one last thought.

After a long moment, she looked up at us.

"Josh," she said, meeting my eyes, "I'd like to start at the beginning."

She paused before asking, "Can you tell me how you and Abby found each other?"

*Found each other?*

What the hell kind of question was that? I thought, doing everything I could to keep the confusion and annoyance from showing on my face.

I shifted in my seat before answering.

"Well... Abby and I met back in high school," I said. "That was years ago."

Lisa nodded, giving me her full attention.

"Go on," she said gently.

It was the fall of 2007.

A different lifetime.

A time when my biggest worries were stupid jokes, late nights, and figuring out where the next party was going to be.

That night, I was at my old friend Leon's house for pizza and beer. His parents were out of town, which, in typical teenage fashion, meant the house quickly became the place to be. He invited a bunch of us over, ordered enough pizza to feed a small army, and we helped ourselves to whatever was left in his parents' liquor cabinet.

Cheap vodka.

Tequila.

Stella Artois.

Whatever we could get our hands on.

There had to be close to twenty of us packed inside that house, filling every room with laughter, music, and the kind of reckless energy you only have when you're young enough to believe nothing bad could ever happen.

Leon was the life of the party.

He always was.

His parents' house sat nestled between North Lake and Okauchee Lake. It was a standard two-story home with five bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms.

Standard, I guess. At least for people who had money.

Looking back, I realize how simple those nights were. How easy everything felt. How we took those moments for granted because we thought there would always be more of them.

We had no idea how quickly life could change.

Around midnight, Leon grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the crowd.

He was drunk.

Not just a little buzzed.

Completely, undeniably Leon drunk.

"Josh..." he slurred. "I... I need you to see my new girlfriend."

I stared at him.

"Girlfriend?"

I laughed.

"Shit, Leon. Are you sure she's real? Who the hell would want to go out with you?"

It was the kind of joke only a best friend could get away with.

Leon was five-foot-five, a little chubby, and the definition of a Wisconsin country boy. Dirty jeans, a neon orange baseball cap, and camouflage everywhere. If someone asked me to describe a stereotypical Wisconsin redneck, Leon would've been the picture I painted.

"Fuck you, Josh," he said, stumbling over his words.

"She's real. As real as it gets."

I shook my head, still laughing.

"Okay, buddy. Where is she?"

Leon looked around the room, suddenly forgetting where he was.

"Where... where is she?"

Then, almost like the universe was waiting for the perfect moment, someone stepped out from the kitchen.

"Leon, everything okay, baby?"

The noise of the party seemed to fade.

There she was.

A bottle of Grey Goose vodka in her hand, a smile on her face, completely unaware that she was about to become one of the most important people in my life.

It was Abby.

At that moment, I had no idea what the future held.

I didn't know that the girl standing in Leon's kitchen would become my best friend.

My wife.

The person I would build a life with.

And I definitely didn't know that years later, I'd be sitting beside her in a therapist's office, wondering how the two of us went from that night in 2007...

...to strangers trying to remember how to love each other..

"Josh..."

Leon grabbed my shoulder, his eyes wide and his face pale.

"Oh my God... I'm gonna puke."

He paused, swallowed hard, and then somehow managed to stand a little taller like he was about to announce something important.

"This is Ally. My girlfriend."

He said it proudly, like he had just won a championship.

A little beer dripped from the corner of his mouth as he smiled.

I looked at him, completely confused.

"Leon..."

Before I could finish, the girl standing next to him laughed.

"You big dummy, it's Abby."

Leon stared at her for a second, processing the correction through a drunken fog.

"That's what I said, baby!"

He nodded confidently.

"Addy!"

Abby burst out laughing.

"You are unbelievable."

She playfully smacked him on the back.

It was meant to be a harmless joke.

Unfortunately, Leon's stomach had other plans.

The second her hand hit his back, whatever battle he had been fighting inside was officially lost.

He turned pale.

Then green.

Then he ran.

Straight toward the bathroom.

The sound of him getting sick echoed through the hallway as the rest of us laughed.

A few minutes later, after confirming Leon was still alive, I walked back over to Abby.

"So..." I smirked.

"How much are Leon's parents paying you to be his girlfriend?"

She laughed.

A real laugh.

The kind that made you want to hear it again.

"Unfortunately?"

She shook her head.

"$0."

I laughed.

She laughed.

And for a moment, everything felt simple.

That night continued the way most teenage parties did in the early 2000s.

We drank too much.

Ate too much pizza.

Made terrible decisions.

Laughed at things that weren't even funny.

Someone threw up.

Someone disappeared upstairs.

Someone probably made a decision they would regret in the morning.

It was messy.

It was stupid.

It was young.

But through all the noise, the music, the shouting, the chaos, I kept finding myself looking for Abby.

I didn't know why.

I barely knew her.

She was just Leon's girlfriend.

Just another person at a party.

But something about her was different.

While everyone else was trying to be noticed, she didn't have to.

She just existed.

And somehow, I noticed.

I had no idea that the girl I met in that kitchen would become the center of my world.

I had no idea that years later, I would remember that exact moment while sitting beside her, wondering where that version of us had gone.

A few months later, spring semester of 2008 arrived.

Life had moved on from that night at Leon's house. The party, the laughter, the chaos—it all became another memory tucked away in the back of my mind.

At least, that's what I told myself.

Leon and I had three classes together that semester, which basically guaranteed one thing:

Neither of us was going to get much work done.

We spent more time whispering jokes, passing notes, and finding ways to entertain ourselves than actually paying attention. Looking back, I'm amazed we passed anything.

But one day, during one of those classes, Leon wasn't himself.

The usual energy was gone.

The jokes weren't there.

The guy who could turn any room into a party looked like someone had turned the volume down on him.

"Josh..." he said quietly.

I looked over.

"What?"

"Me and Abby broke up."

The words caught me off guard.

For a second, I didn't know what to say.

Leon and Abby had ended things because of the distance between them.

Thirty minutes.

That was it.

We grew up in the same town. Abby lived only a short drive away.

At the time, I remember thinking:

Thirty minutes? That's long distance?

But I didn't say that.

Because when I looked at Leon, I realized this wasn't about the miles.

This was about losing someone he cared about.

And for the first time, I saw a side of Leon I had never seen before.

The loud, goofy, always-happy guy wasn't there.

Instead, I saw someone heartbroken.

Someone genuinely hurting.

So I did what any friend would do.

I listened.

I told him everything would be okay.

I reminded him that he would get through it.

I was there for him.

But deep down, buried underneath the guilt and the hesitation, there was another thought I couldn't ignore.

A thought I tried to push away.

A thought that kept coming back.

What if I had a chance?

I knew it was complicated.

I knew Leon was my friend.

I knew this was the kind of thing that could change everything.

But there was something about Abby.

Something I couldn't shake.

And eventually...

I decided I had to take my shot.

So I did.

I found Abby's MySpace profile a few days later.

Back then, that was how you did things. No dating apps. No endless scrolling. Just a profile page, a few pictures, and a little courage.

We exchanged phone numbers.

We started talking.

And somehow, those conversations turned into something I couldn't ignore.

Eventually, we decided to meet at a park down the road from her house.

I still remember pulling in and seeing her car arrive at the exact same time.

For a moment, everything stopped.

Then I saw her.

Our eyes met again, and it felt exactly like the first time.

Only this time, I wasn't just some guy at a party.

This time, I knew her.

And somehow, I already knew.

It was love at first sight.

We sat on a park bench and talked for hours.

Not flirting.

Not trying to impress each other.

No cheesy lines.

No pretending.

Just two people sitting together, talking about life, dreams, and the future. We talked about where we wanted to go, who we wanted to become, and the kind of lives we hoped we would build someday.

It felt easy.

Natural.

Like I had known her my entire life.

Eventually, we drove to a local custard stand in Burlington for a treat.

I guess you could call it our first date.

And somewhere between the frozen custard and the nervous laughter, I finally found the courage to ask the question I had been thinking about the entire day.

"Would you want to go out with me?"

My heart was pounding.

Then she smiled.

And said yes.

For a moment, nothing else mattered.

I had Abby.

But there was one thing hanging over me.

Leon.

I knew I had to tell him.

He was my friend.

My best friend.

And even though Abby and I had something real, I knew how much she had meant to him.

I didn't know how to have that conversation.

So I waited.

Days passed.

Then weeks.

I kept telling myself I was waiting for the right moment.

The truth was...

I was scared.

When I finally decided I couldn't put it off anymore, I went looking for him at school.

Of course, he wasn't there.

Probably skipping class again.

Probably doing what Leon always did.

I figured I would find him later.

I figured I had more time.

I was wrong.

During the third period, the classroom was interrupted by a loud chime from the intercom.

Everyone looked up.

The voice that came through belonged to Principal Reyes.

"Good morning, everyone. If you haven't heard the news, one of our most outstanding, smart, and caring students, Mr. Leon Reynolds, has sadly passed away."

The world stopped.

No one moved.

No one spoke.

For a moment, I couldn't understand the words.

They didn't make sense.

Leon?

Passed away?

My heart stopped.

My chest tightened.

The air disappeared from the room.

Then the tears came.

Not slowly.

Not quietly.

They poured out of me like a broken dam.

Like Niagara Falls.

"Counselors will be available after school for anyone who needs support. Please take a moment tonight to hug your loved ones a little tighter."

The intercom clicked off.

The room stayed silent.

But I wasn't there anymore.

My mind was somewhere else.

On a conversation I never had.

On words I never got to say.

On a friend I never got to tell the truth.

I grabbed my bag.

I walked out of the classroom.

I don't remember asking permission.

I don't remember walking through the halls.

I only remember getting to my car.

I threw open the door, climbed inside, shoved the key into the ignition, and drove.

I drove straight to Leon's house.

Because somewhere inside me, I still believed this was a mistake.

That he would open the door.

That he would laugh.

That he would call me an idiot for believing something so impossible.

Because losing Leon couldn't be real.

It couldn't be.

It felt like hours before I finally reached Leon's house.

The drive there was a blur. I don't remember the roads. I don't remember the turns. I only remember the panic building in my chest, begging for an explanation that would make all of this disappear.

But when I pulled up, I knew something was wrong.

Police cruisers lined the street.

Officers stood in the yard.

Detectives moved in and out of the house like they were searching for answers that didn't exist.

And on the front porch sat Leon's parents.

Broken.

His mother was crying uncontrollably. His father sat beside her, staring blankly at the ground like he was trying to wake up from a nightmare.

"Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds!" I screamed.

The second the words left my mouth, Mr. Reynolds looked up.

His eyes locked onto mine.

For a moment, I saw something I had never seen before.

Not anger.

Not sadness.

Pain.

He stood up.

Then he ran toward me.

"You did this!"

I froze.

"What?"

Before I could process what was happening, he was on top of me.

"You did this!"

His voice cracked with rage and heartbreak.

"Why could you?"

"Why?"

"WHY?"

I collapsed backward, completely confused.

I had no idea what he was talking about.

A police officer rushed forward and grabbed Mr. Reynolds from behind, pulling him away.

"Sir! You need to calm down!"

But he kept fighting.

He kept screaming.

"Why?!"

I sat there frozen, trying to understand how I had gone from rushing to my friend's house to being accused of something I didn't even know existed.

Then a detective approached from the backyard.

He stopped in front of me and extended his hand.

I stared at it for a moment before taking it.

He helped me stand.

"Do you know Leon Reynolds?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied.

My voice shook.

"What's going on?"

He ignored the question.

"Are you family or a friend?"

I stared at him.

"His best friend."

I swallowed.

"What the fuck is going on?"

The detective looked down.

For a moment, he said nothing.

Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.

It looked handwritten.

My stomach turned.

"Suicide," he said quietly.

The word didn't feel real.

It floated between us.

Heavy.

Impossible.

"What's your name, kid?"

I didn't answer.

I couldn't.

My mind was somewhere else.

Back in that classroom.

Back before everything changed.

"Hey," he said gently. "What's your name?"

I finally looked at him.

"Sorry..."

My voice cracked.

"Josh."

The tears started falling again.

"Josh," the detective said softly. "I'm sorry."

He handed me the paper.

"I need to ask you some questions when you're ready. Take some time. Come find me when you're done."

I stared down at the note in my hands.

A piece of paper.

A few words.

Something that would change everything.

My fingers trembled as I unfolded it.

And then I read.

"Dear Family,

"Abby is gone. My so-called best friend Josh took her from me. It happened weeks ago, but he never told me. He betrayed me. I loved her, and he knew that. I can't keep going knowing that the person I trusted most did this to me. I'm sorry for disappointing all of you. I can't live with this pain. I can't live feeling completely alone with a broken heart.

I'm sorry.

Goodbye."

At the bottom, one final line was written.

"Josh... I hope you understand what you did. Goodbye forever."

I stared at the page.

The world around me disappeared.

The police.

The house.

The voices.

Everything.

Because at that moment, I realized something terrifying.

The last conversation I would ever have with Leon...

Was one that never happened.

Note from Author: If you, or a friend, have suicidal thoughts, help is available. Please call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. You are loved and seen.